The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: Volume 1: 800-1558 019958723X, 9780199587230

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The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature general editors DAVID HOPKINS and CHARLES MARTINDALE

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The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have been responded to and refashioned by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the 5 volumes. 1. 800–1558 2. 1558–1660 3. 1660–1790 4. 1790–1880 5.  after 1880 For a statement of the general principles informing OHCREL, and of the coverage and scope of the History as a whole, readers are referred to the editors’ Preface to Volume 3.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Volume 1 (800–1558) edited by RITA COPELAND

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3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2016 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2015938218 ISBN 978–0–19–958723–0 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents List of Figures List of Abbreviations List of Contributors Note to Readers on the Conventions Followed in this Volume 1. Introduction: England and the Classics from the Early Middle Ages to Early Humanism rita copeland

viii ix x xi 1

2. The Curricular Classics in the Middle Ages rita copeland

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3. Experiencing the Classics in Medieval Education marjorie curry woods

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4. The Trivium and the Classics rita copeland

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5. The Quadrivium and Natural Sciences winston black

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6. The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature: Libraries and Florilegia james willoughby

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7. Mythography and Mythographical Collections nicolette zeeman

121

8. Academic Prologues to Authors rita copeland

151

9. Virgil jan m. ziolkowski

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10. Ovid and Ovidianism suzanne conklin akbari

187

11. Lucan alfred hiatt

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Contents 12. Statius winthrop wetherbee

227

13. Trojan Itineraries and the Matter of Troy marilynn desmond

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14. Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae269 ian cornelius 15. Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature charles f. briggs

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16. Historiography and Biography from the Period of Gildas to Gerald of Wales cam grey

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17. Prudentius and the Late Classical Biblical Epics of Juvencus, Proba, Sedulius, Arator, and Avitus ad putter

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18. John of Salisbury, Academic Scepticism, and Ciceronian Rhetoric dallas g. denery ii

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19. Alliterative Poetry and the Time of Antiquity emily steiner

391

20. Other Worlds: Chaucer’s Classicism alastair minnis

413

21. Gower’s Ovids andrew galloway

435

22. John Lydgate and the Remaking of Classical Epic robert r. edwards

465

23. Early Humanism in England daniel wakelin

487

24. Survey of Henrician Humanism james p. carley and ágnes juhász-ormsby

515

25. John Skelton david r. carlson

541

26. Gavin Douglas’s Eneados561 nicola royan

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Contents 27. Finding a Vernacular Voice: The Classical Translations of Sir Thomas Wyatt cathy shrank

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28. The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: The Exiled Reader’s Presence james simpson

601

Select Bibliography of Ancient Sources (including late antiquity and early Christian writings) General Reference Works for Reception: Libraries, Textual Transmission, Historical Sources Studies on Ancient Authors and Classical Reception Medieval: Primary Sources Medieval: Secondary Sources Early Humanism: Primary Sources Early Humanism: Secondary Sources Index

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625 633 637 645 659 699 705 719

List of Figures 1. The Trojans drag the wooden horse into Troy. London, British Library, MS Royal 20 D I, Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (second redaction), fol. 167v. © British Library Board. 2. Gavin Douglas, The ·xiii. bukes of Eneados of the famose poete Virgill translatet out of Latyne verses into Scottish metir (London, 1553), p. 90, folio Niii. EEBO image 89, recto. Reproduced by permission of the Henry Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino, Calif. 3. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, The fourth boke of Virgill, intreating of the loue betweene Aeneas and Dido (London, 1554), folio Dii recto and Diii verso, EEBO images 14–15. Reproduced by permission of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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608

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List of Abbreviations AHDLMA CBMLC CCCM CCSL CLA CSEL EETS EETS es EETS ss EHR ELH MGH PG PL PMLA STC/RSTC

Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire au moyen âge Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues Corpus Christianorum continuatio medievalis Corpus Christianorum series latina Codices latini antiquiores Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum Early English Text Society Early English Text Society extra series Early English Text Society supplementary series English Historical Review English Literary History Monumenta Germaniae historica J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus series graeca, 161 vols, Paris, 1857–66 J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus series latina, 221 vols Paris, 1844–64 Publications of the Modern Language Association of America A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, eds A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd edn rev. W. A. Jackson et al., 3 vols (London, 1976–91)

List of Contributors Suzanne Conklin Akbari University of Toronto

Alastair Minnis Yale University

Winston Black Assumption College

Ágnes Juhász-Ormsby Memorial University of Newfoundland

Charles F. Briggs University of Vermont

Ad Putter University of Bristol

James P. Carley York University and University of Kent

Nicola Royan University of Nottingham

David R. Carlson University of Ottawa Rita Copeland University of Pennsylvania Ian Cornelius Yale University Dallas G. Denery II Bowdoin College Marilynn Desmond Binghamton University Robert R. Edwards Pennsylvania State University

Cathy Shrank University of Sheffield James Simpson Harvard University Emily Steiner University of Pennsylvania Daniel Wakelin University of Oxford Winthrop Wetherbee Cornell University James Willoughby University of Oxford

Andrew Galloway Cornell University

Marjorie Curry Woods The University of Texas at Austin

Cam Grey University of Pennsylvania

Nicolette Zeeman University of Cambridge

Alfred Hiatt Queen Mary University of London

Jan M. Ziolkowski Harvard University

Note to Readers on the Conventions Followed in this Volume Here, as in the other volumes of the OHCREL series, quotations and translations from classical texts are normally taken from the Loeb edition, where possible. In quotations from Old English, Middle English, Older Scots, and some early modern English, spelling and language have not been modernized; but translations of the whole passage or glosses to individual words and phrases have been provided. However, archaic alphabetical forms such as ‘thorn’ and ‘yogh’ have been modernized unless the quoted passage is accompanied by a complete translation. In the notes and bibliographies, the convention of the OHCREL series is that where London is the place of publication only the publication date is given.

Chapter 1

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Introduction England and the Classics from the Early Middle Ages to Early Humanism Rita Copeland

To study classical reception in the English Middle Ages is to encounter the pervasive presence of the ancient past in medieval thought. This pervasiveness in turn laid the foundations for the expanded labours of early humanists, who embraced antiquity in some new ways but also in some older ways, through the mediation of their English predecessors. The medieval reception of antiquity is a history of continuous and enlarging engagement; the classicism of the early English humanists was a late and profoundly generative moment emerging out of many centuries of such continuity and increase. Yet as persistent and powerful as medieval and early humanist engagement with the classical world was, the period 800 to 1558 does not fully conform to the general principles of a ‘history of classical reception in English literature’ as they apply to later periods. A literary ‘reception history’ does not purport, in positivist terms, to record ‘true’ recoveries of the past as recognized, somehow, ‘on its own terms’; however, it does assume a continual record of encounters with a past literary legacy. But in Old English and Middle English vernacular literatures, the actual presence of classical authors—through translation, quotation, or direct imitation—is relatively limited. In medieval Latin culture in England and the Continent, the vast and often deep knowledge of classical Latin authors is a given. Such knowledge was available to English vernacular authors through their own schooling, through learned compilations, through encyclopedic, historical, and scientific writing, and through other vernacular ­writings—mainly in French, and at later points in Italian—which were read and imitated. However, while this knowledge informs much medieval English literary production, the vernacular English authors whose works express an immediate connection with classical sources are few. With the period of early humanism we begin to see a broader English reception of Latin as well as Greek, although the strongest impact was not to be felt until the Elizabethan period and beyond.

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Thus this first volume of the OHCREL casts its nets both wide and deep to assess the pervasiveness of classical knowledge in the medieval period and to understand the abiding force of medieval classicisms among the early humanists, who were also  the beneficiaries of new kinds of knowledge. The chapters here explore the currents of ‘classicism’ that flow beneath the surface of vernacular literary history as well as the most manifest expressions of that classicism. The model of ‘reception history’ allows us to take a large optique on the continual reinventions of classical antiquity through the more than seven centuries covered in this volume.1 Our concerns include but also range far beyond philological and textual transmission, beyond historicist principles of ‘recovery’ and establishment of correct text, to view, from a wide angle, the dense experience of antiquity across literary and intellectual cultures in these periods. That experience was not only one of ideas about the past or literary reconceptions of it: it was also, crucially, a material encounter with texts that had been copied and conserved, handled and annotated, and a cognitive encounter with ancient educational systems that were to shape many generations of post-classical readers. On the cover of this volume there is an image that is immediately recognizable as a link to the classical past: the wooden horse being led through the gates into the city of Troy. The history of the illuminated manuscript from which this striking detail is taken emblematizes the intricate itineraries of classical reception traced in OHCREL 1. The manuscript, London, British Library, MS Royal 20 D I, contains a lavishly illustrated text of the second redaction of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, an early thirteenth-century French prose compilation of stories of antiquity incorporating both classical and biblical narratives. The first redaction of the Histoire ancienne was written in Flanders, but was copied throughout francophone Europe and had a wide readership extending to England, proving a popular source of information about ancient mythology and history. The recension of the work in MS Royal 20 D I was produced and illustrated in Naples in the 1330s most likely for Robert of Anjou, King of Naples; the manuscript then came into the possession of a series of royal and aristocratic owners in France over the fourteenth and early  fifteenth centuries, and ultimately entered the collection of Henry VIII.2 The migrations of this manuscript parallel the continental to English movements of texts and manuscripts over the course of the Middle Ages that the chapters in this volume trace, and this brings us to Henry VIII, with whose period and influence our volume ends. The Histoire ancienne itself offered a continental and vernacular mediation of classical narratives, especially the non-Homeric ‘matter of Troy’ (prominently featured in Royal 20 D I), which found their ways into many English works, as shown in various chapters here.3 Royal 20 D I, produced outside England, is not specific to any one period in English literary history, but embodies the complex international and multi-temporal reception movements that enabled medieval and early modern English classicisms. It witnesses the linguistic,

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Introduction g­ eographical, and historical matrices out of which early English receptions of antiquity took shape. While the period of early English humanism cannot readily be disentangled from what we call the late Middle Ages, and while the humanist enterprise in England built on the foundations of medieval tradition, the differences between medieval and humanist learning are nevertheless significant, and it will be helpful to introduce these two sections of the volume separately.

Medieval Classicism, from the Old English Period to the Later Middle Ages There are a number of assumptions that guide later volumes of the OHCREL. One is that the linguistic and philological pathways between English and both Greek and Latin are wide open. Another is that the boundaries of the ‘classical’ period can be firmly established.4 A corollary assumption is that what we understand as ‘classicism’ can be a recognizable principle even if its emphases shift. But such post-humanist categories, for all the clarity of their perspectives on the classical world, paradoxically obscure the most authentic medieval engagements with the ancient past. First, the western Middle Ages understood its connections with antiquity as a chain of learning deriving from the Latin empire, where the decline in knowledge of Greek was already in progress by the fourth century. Thus for the western Middle Ages, knowledge of Greek antiquity was overwhelmingly, if not entirely, a Latinized knowledge. Second, the boundaries of the ‘classical’ period and the principles of ‘classicism’ both depend on the term ‘classical’, which is not a medieval term.5 Medieval Latin used the term antiqui to refer to ‘the ancients’ in a way that overlaps with what we call ‘classical antiquity’; but its semantic field was similar to veteres (from vetus), that is, anything distinct from moderni, whether by a few generations or a millennium. Antiquitas had enormous prestige, but it was the prestige of the old and established, not specifically of what we now consider the ‘classical’. The corollary here is that the boundaries of classical antiquity were far more porous than post-humanist categories, as slippery as they may be, would allow, admitting later Jewish, pagan, and Christian historians, poets, philosophers, grammarians, rhetoricians, and encyclopedists into the privileged space of the antiqui. One further guiding principle of a history of reception in English literature is that we can trace the formation of a literary canon through a single linguistic tradition. But the multilingualism of medieval England—not only its unbroken Latinity from the early Anglo-Saxon period onwards, but the dominance of Anglo-French as the literary vernacular in the two centuries after the Conquest, and the enduring continental outlook of its elite learned and

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature l­iterary cultures—unfixes any straightforward narrative of classical reception as an English-language phenomenon.6 To the extent that narratives of ‘literary history’ proceed by sequences of major authors and the contextualizing interstices between them, the story of classicism in English literary history from c.800 to the mid-fifteenth century would be concentrated around a few figures at the end of this period. As already noted, a ‘pure’ or transparent classicism hardly exists in medieval English literature apart from the later canonical authors whose works overshadow almost all other literary production. When we leave the admittedly large precincts of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, the corpus of important and canonical Middle English writings (religious prose, romance, alliterative writing, religious and secular lyric) rarely seems to yield unmediated connections with antiquity. Something similar could be said of the corpus of Old English vernacular writing, where what stand out are the Old English Boethius, the Old English Bible epics, and the translation of Orosius’ providential Historiae adversus paganos (early fifth century).7 But these relatively few authors and works by themselves hardly represent the intensity of early and later medieval engagement with classical antiquity. A case in point is vernacular translation. Surprisingly, the proportion of vernacular translations of classical texts to the number of classical works known and studied in the Middle Ages is small. This obtains across the European vernaculars, and the number remains small even when we enlarge the definition of ‘translation’ to include adaptations and samplings of classical sources. Jacques Monfrin, who catalogued the translations in French, Italian, and Spanish, acknowledges how limited the corpus is.8 In the variety and number of works translated, France (and the French of England) overpowers England and English, Italy and Italian vernaculars, and the other European vernaculars from Spanish to German, Dutch, Old Irish, and Old Norse. But on the whole, compared to the wealth and variety of readings from classical antiquity witnessed in curricular guides and indicated by library holdings from the early to the later Middle Ages, the works that found their ways directly into vernacular transmission are concentrated in a few genres: epic poetry (Virgil, Lucan, Statius), Ovidian love poetry (but not all of Ovid), some historical and moral writings, and some practical or scientific texts (Vegetius, excerpts or adaptations of Pliny, and some late medieval vernacular Ciceronianism).9 In England that corpus of classical translation is even smaller. If we were to judge from the record of translations even broadly defined, we would have to admit that, by way of direct appropriation of the ‘classics’, medieval English literature gives us little beyond the triumvirate of Chaucer–Gower–Lydgate in Middle English, the Boethius tradition in Old and Middle English, and the adaptation of the classicizing Bible epics of later antiquity. We could amass various reasons for the relative limitation of classical translation. Some explanations would take us into the familiar territory of debates about periodization: the absence of the kind of reading public that would support such

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Introduction t­ranslations and that began to appear with the age of print; or the absence of an autonomous intellectual class that might turn its attention to such interesting matters as large-scale classical translations, although we certainly have some examples of similar activity in the later Middle Ages (in fourteenth-century France, Nicole Oresme, Raoul de Presles, and Laurent de Premierfait; in Italy in the same period, Andrea Lancia; in fourteenth-century England, John Trevisa). Enthusiasm for translation as an appreciative stylistic remaking of the classical text is often cited as a hallmark of post-medieval classical reception, and the chapters on early humanism in this volume affirm the beginnings of a change in poetic practice as we see Douglas, Skelton, and especially Wyatt and Surrey assuming eagerly competitive stances towards their classical models, reckoning not only with content but (to varying degrees) with Latin style. But tallying up reasons for the limited dossier of medieval vernacular translation misses the larger point that we must pursue in this volume. How did medieval publics engage seriously and often profoundly with antiquity in ways that exceed the record of translation and other visible forms of literary reception such as imitation? Thus literary history in its accepted form cannot wholly determine the structure of our investigation. For this reason, traditions of education and textual transmission play a crucial role in this volume, not as backgrounds to a primary literary culture, but as the sites where a classical antiquity was vitally imagined, embraced, and reinvented—in other words, where antiquity was made ‘literary’ in medieval terms. The first of these is the density of classical and late antique Latinity in medieval education. The classical auctores and the key genres of epic, satire, pastoral, mythography, prose history, and comedy shaped literary outlooks and expectations for learned audiences, and found their way into medieval Latin writing, even though they did not all achieve an obvious presence in vernacular literary production.10 That density of classical Latinity incorporated much of Greek antiquity too, because Greek was part of the literary and learned fabric of the Roman bequest.11 The classical works studied in the schools formed literary taste (and informed—whether directly or indirectly—new literary production in all languages) not only because they were staples of the schoolroom, but because they represented the first experience of literature for boys learning Latin. Schoolmasters valued them for their emotional effects, and boys absorbed them as entertainment and as inspiration. Medieval education followed much the same pattern as the teaching of the late empire in the West: an introduction to Latin grammar, introductory and then more advanced reading of the auctores, and some exposure to the elements of the trivium and the quadrivium. As in late antiquity, so in the Middle Ages, dedicated study of the language arts of the trivium, the mathematical arts of the quadrivium, and the natural sciences would take place at fairly advanced levels. This education was not unique to England, and continental traditions often supply the picture that the vagaries of English history and book preservation have occluded. Throughout much of western Europe, and certainly in England, educated literacy was Latinity, at least

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature until the thirteenth century and to a large extent even later. The pathway to medi­ eval and Christian forms of Latinity was through inculcation in the learned and scientific legacy of classical Latin. Of equal importance are the material histories of literary and learned transmission, that is, the copying, collecting, and conserving of books. Even if the collecting of classical texts—philosophy, science, literature—was less important for monastic and cathedral libraries than furnishing them with bibles, theological writings, and prayer books, the Latin auctores were still a reliable presence, largely for the reasons given above: they were the instruments of Latin teaching, preparing students for reading and writing in the language of the western Church. Thus the records of library holdings can reveal much about the state of the curriculum in the schools that were maintained by religious and later civic foundations. Monastic and cathedral libraries would have served their internal student and scholarly communities, but such learning ‘in house’ also generated wider knowledge through the literary and teaching careers of former students, many of whom would go on to serve in public or civic professions. While the libraries of religious institutions do not provide all of our knowledge about the transmission of classical works, they are a major source, especially for the earlier Middle Ages, owing to the power of cathedrals, abbeys, and religious houses to buy, copy, and lend books, and to attract donations of personal collections. The college libraries of the two universities in England offer another dimension of medieval ‘classicism’, for the literary auctores tend to have less of a presence in those lists than the logic, technical grammar, philosophy, and mathematical and natural science that were relevant to university study. The transmission of classical knowledge also took distinctive textual forms that ordered and organized the access to ancient ideas. Such textual forms of transmission could be highly synthetic, none more so than the florilegium and the mythographic collection. These learned ‘genres’ were established in antiquity, but were regenerated to serve new functions in the Middle Ages, especially from the twelfth century onwards. They might best be defined by their ubiquity, and thus also their instability as infinitely flexible instruments of learning, their contents and shapes subject to continual change. The florilegium is a collection of excerpts (flores or flowers bound together), often combining classical with later texts along the principle of auctoritates (authoritative pronouncements) either of literary or philosophical value. The florilegium can purvey a broad knowledge, not necessarily deep, but often arresting: some florilegia are the sources of some truly recondite knowledge about classical authors, for example, the poetry of Tibullus, witnessed in the Florilegium Gallicum, a French compilation from the mid-twelfth century. Jean de Meun’s reference to Tibullus as love poet par excellence in the Roman de la rose echoes Ovid’s citation in Amores 1.15.28, but if Jean had ever gone beyond Ovid’s reference to read Tibullus’ poems, he would have found them in a compilation like the Florilegium Gallicum.12 The mythographic collection takes many forms. Mythological poetry

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Introduction such as the Aeneid and Thebaid can certainly serve in this capacity, and the Metamorphoses would have been read as both poetic and encyclopedic resource. But mythography can also take the form of authoritative commentary on a work, such as Servius’ long-influential commentary on the Aeneid or the twelfth- and thirteenth-­ century allegorizing commentaries on the Metamorphoses. It may also take the form of epitome (a digest or compendium) such as the well-disseminated Mythologiae of Fulgentius (fifth century), or the works of the so-called Vatican Mythographers, produced between the Carolingian period and the twelfth century.13 And mythological lore may be transmitted as spiritual moralization, as in the Ovidius moralizatus of the fourteenth-century French Benedictine Pierre Bersuire, or the Fulgentius metaforalis by the fourteenth-century English Franciscan John Ridewall. Mythographic commentaries and epitomes, like florilegia, resist translation because they are subject to revision and interpolation, and because they are the lesser tools of learning, part of the invisible background of classical knowledge. But the mythographies can purvey a deep philosophical knowledge of antiquity, sedimenting and synthesizing earlier systems of thought. Their impact on vernacular literature was immediate and extensive, as poets plundered these resources to reinvent poetic anthologies of myth (Gower’s Confessio amantis, Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women). Such tools were of use not only to poets but to sermon writers: moralized mythographies such as those by Bersuire and Ridewall were partly or wholly intended as convenient aids to preachers, and the occasional classical references found in the sermon literature of England are as likely to have come from these sources as from direct reading of classical mythology.14 Thus the fruits of mythographies extend far beyond their ostensible subjects, nourishing a broader literary and intellectual history. The reception histories of the classical authors also show us the extent of medieval saturation in antiquity. While we can trace continuous lines of descent to the Middle Ages for most of the major authors (with the interesting exception of Ovid, whose momentum really begins in the twelfth century), for none of them is there an unmediated reception. The medieval genre of prologues to the auctores (with its roots in ancient vitae) was often the first port of call for readers embarking on a revered text. The prologue placed the work inside of a formulaic system of questions about the author’s intention, the style or form, and the ethical or practical value of the work. Because these introductory questions were to be asked of any authoritative text, they asserted the text’s canonical status. But they also framed the work with the kinds of theoretical reflections that might emerge from enquiries into intention, form, and ethics.15 Thus classical texts were the occasions for teaching how to be a good reader: the lessons about reading that were to be found in the auctor were as important and enduring as the pleasure of the text itself. The individual auctores also generated cultural phenomena that became part of their traditions of reception. The receptions of Virgil and Ovid are test cases for the

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature principle of a medieval saturation in antiquity. The ideas of Virgil as laureate poet, political prophet, philosopher, and object of veneration may have their origins in antiquity, but they are reprised and augmented in medieval responses. If Virgilian themes of empire as the closure to cycles of political violence inform medieval narratives of imperial progression from Troy to Britain, the erotic theme of Dido and her self-destruction elicited emotional responses from readers, rendering the Aeneid as much romance as heroic epic in the medieval literary imagination. And in the learned imagination, Virgil, together with Ovid and Boethius, gave narrative shape to philosophical arguments about how knowledge and wisdom are to be apprehended. Medieval Ovidianism, a product of the resurgence of Ovid in the twelfth century, became virtually a genre unto itself, so powerfully did the Metamorphoses, Heroides, Ars amatoria, and Remedia amoris capture Latin and vernacular literary cultures, extending their force through pedagogical, learned, courtly, and popular forms. Ovidian love poetry was assimilated into the medieval ethics and erotics of love. The medieval Ovid also came to be inextricable from the informational genre of mythography: Ovid as literary source helped to create the very genre of mythography, which further increased the popularity of Ovid’s poetry itself and which disseminated wider knowledge of classical literary themes. Beyond the obvious test cases, medieval cultural saturation in antiquity manifests itself in thematic patterns. Lucan and Statius, however different their epic projects, could both be invoked as the poets of civil war. Lucan’s Bellum civile did not achieve the large vernacular presence that Statius’ Thebaid did, but Lucan was a fixture of the classroom, both for his moral teaching about the dangers of civil strife and for the emotional appeal of his narrative. Through that channel Lucan, with all of his ambivalences, was established in medieval historical thought about Rome and contemporary reflection about war and peace, even as the rich reference of his Bellum civile was a source of more arcane knowledges about ancient places and peoples. Statius’ Achilleid, piquant and abbreviated, was a work valued by schoolmasters for its thematizing of adolescence. The Thebaid found its natural audience with vernacular poets, who absorbed its patterns of cyclical violence and destruction, its mysterious etiologies and deferred endings, and the dark shame of its family saga. Thebes is the admonitory shadow behind the illuminated foreground of Troy or ancient Rome (or, as medieval writers saw it, their successors London and Paris), and Statius himself the only ancient pagan auctor singled out for Christian redemption by Dante. One significant absence in medieval western ‘classicism’ is of course the Homeric epics. Greek was not unavailable to the Latin West, as the translation work from the Carolingian era ( John Scotus Eriugena) to the scholastic period (Grosseteste, William of Moerbeke) amply testifies. And of course Arabic was an important conduit for the passage of Greek learning into Latin. But such translation labours were reserved for philosophical, scientific, and theological texts. For the story of Troy contained in the inaccessible Homeric poems, literary culture found its own

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Introduction p­ roductive way forward. Medieval readers built on the Troy narratives in Virgil and Ovid, augmenting them with a group of classical and late antique Latin texts: the Ilias latina (also known as Homerus latinus and a favourite of the medieval classroom), the De excidio Troiae historia, attributed to Dares Phrygius, and the Ephemeris belli Troiani, attributed to Dictys Cretensis. Rather than being a vacuum, the very absence of the Homeric texts themselves invited an inexhaustibly fertile elaboration of Trojan narratives that could be incorporated into universal histories such as the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, regnal genealogies and stories of mythic origins, quasi-­ epic, romance, and ultimately, in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Henryson’s Testament of Cressid, the ‘tragedie’ of human desire. Such traditions of epic reference and revision were, moreover, not limited to the legendary Troy materials. The classical genre of epic also offered a template for structuring and elaborating historical knowledge about antiquity. The ‘matter’ of Alexander the Great, which traces its sources back to the encomiastic history by Quintus Curtius Rufus, found its decisive expression in twelfth-century France, in Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis, a self-­ consciously classicizing Latin ‘epic’ that was quickly absorbed into the literary ­curriculum. From there as well as from other sources, the ‘matter’ of Alexander also expanded through vernacular literary networks.16 If medieval audiences, both Latin and vernacular, consumed the story of Troy despite having no access to the original Homeric poems, how do we account for the inverse of this, well-known classical texts that made almost no impact on vernacular literature? Horace and the Latin satirical poets Persius and Juvenal, as well as the epigrammatist Martial, were much read in medieval classrooms and admired by the mature scholars who first encountered them in school; but they left little if any direct marks on medieval vernacular literature. It is not easy to say why these authors, ubiquitous in literary curricula and woven into the fabric of medieval Latin writing, left so little trace outside of Latinity. Perhaps it was a function of the short form poem itself: lyric poetry in the vernacular developed its own thematic trajectories (such as love, religious devotion, and polemic or complaint on contemporary political topics). Catullus was unknown, Propertius was not widely known, and so we would not expect to find their imprint on vernacular poetry, even when they are relevant to medieval themes. But the universal presence of the Latin satirists, along with Horace, makes their absence from medieval vernacular literature the more surprising. We may find occasional invocations of Horace in learned vernacular poetry, such as allusions to the Ars poetica in Dante’s Commedia (Inferno 32, Paradiso 26), a Chaucerian echo of Persius’ Satires in the Franklin’s Prologue, or a fleeting invocation of Juvenal on the vanity of human wishes at a critical moment in Troilus and Criseyde (4. 197–200, from Satires 10. 2–4). But the real force of the satirists is felt in the biting social commentary of such writers as John of Salisbury and Walter Map, and in later Anglo-Latin writers such as Ranulf Higden. Because the Latin satirists do not have a distinctive presence in vernacular literary culture, we have not devoted a

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature chapter to them in this volume; but their effect will be felt wherever institutional histories of learning are considered. Literary reception of the Latin satirists in English must await the early Tudor period and the experimentations of Skelton, Wyatt, and Surrey.17 As noted above, antiquity was a porous category for the Middle Ages, its boundaries neither temporally nor ideologically fixed. Thus when assessing what the Middle Ages recognized and valued in antiquity, we may find the words ‘classical’ and ‘classicism’ to be rather vexed terms. But they can also be useful if they can signify a certain quality of thought or style that was handed down and in that process transformed and assimilated. This can help us to understand the importance of Boethius as a key transitional figure: not a medieval in the eyes of the Middle Ages, but nevertheless a Christian; an idealized embodiment of Romanitas; the transmitter and synthesizer of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists; and the elegant exponent of Latin verse forms. For medieval audiences, Boethius’ chronological lateness made him no less a revered ‘ancient’; yet De consolatione philosophiae remained a text of the most immediate currency throughout the medieval period. It was mined by Latin stylists for its exemplifications of different metres; its use of myth demonstrated the inner philosophical truth of pagan fabulae; its illustrations of knotty dialectical arguments made it a textbook for logical training; but at the same time it was the most popular literary text for vernacular translation across Europe, from Old English and Old High German to nearly every other regional language in the later Middle Ages. One could say that the Consolatio was so widely diffused because its authority and wisdom could be appreciated without reference to its overtly classical forms; or one could say that the Consolatio provided the familiar face of an otherwise more recondite ‘classicism’. Chaucer’s relationship to the Consolatio seems to have been a compromise between these two positions: Chaucer responded formally to the truths contained in the Consolatio, but not on the Consolatio’s own formal terms. The Middle Ages not only reshaped the writings of classical authors, but inhabited certain classical genres, rebuilding them from within. This is the case with moral philo­ sophy, historiography, and epic, ancient genres that could be reverently repurposed to accommodate the outlook of the Christian imperium. The transmission of classical moral philosophy played out in medieval justifications of literature itself as an ethical enterprise and in the incorporation of moral philosophy into poetic discourse. From the Latin auctores Cicero and Seneca came interpretations of Stoic thought on personal virtue and public duty. This tradition joined forces in the later Middle Ages with the receptions of a Latinized Aristotle and of Latinized Arabic collections of moral thought. The hunger for ancient pagan teaching on ethics created a medieval subtradition of Latin and vernacular intermediary texts that could serve writers such as Chaucer and Gower for essential teaching on private and public ethics. Medieval historiographers undertook their tasks with a firm sense of classical precedent for explaining the emergence of peoples, nations, and empires. The

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Introduction p­ rimary classical models were Sallust, Livy, and Suetonius (the influence of Tacitus, not well known in the Middle Ages, would have to await the Tudor period in England in Thomas More’s History of Richard III). But those classical sources had already been recast for Christian history by Eusebius, Augustine, and Orosius, for whom historical time was less cyclical than teleological. The Christian filtering of classical forms was to produce a continuing dialectic between secular and sacred temporalities in medieval historiography. In England this finds particular expression in the pre-Conquest period, with the Latin writers Gildas, Bede, and Nennius. But another element of the classical inheritance is the link between ethnography and ‘national’ history. It was the multicultural environment of the post-Conquest period that gave rise to the most hybrid experiments in historiographical form, especially in the Anglo-Latin writings of William of Malmesbury and Gerald of Wales. Classical Latin epic, the quintessential genre of political history and imperial foundations, had also found its new literary purpose in late antiquity as the genre of biblical history. The late classical Bible epics by Juvencus, Proba, Sedulius, Arator, and Avitus borrowed the forms of Latin epic, thus accomplishing another kind of conversion of imperial Romanitas, this one for literary history. The allegorical and hagiographical poetry by Prudentius achieved a similar formal conversion. In early and later medieval schools, the Christian Latin poets were read alongside Virgil and Lucan as components of an expanded ‘Roman’ literary canon, and as conduits for an appreciation of classical style. This avenue of reception had a broad impact on vernacular writing in England: it shaped versified biblical narrative and hagiography in both Old and Middle English, as well as shorter forms such as hymns and miracle stories. The porousness of antiquity as a category allowed medieval writers to remake ‘classicism’ along lines that were respectfully imitative or explosively theological. The reverential appropriation of a ‘classical’ outlook as a cultural and intellectual modus vivendi is a signature feature of the so-called ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ and the philosophical thought of one of its greatest exemplars, the Anglo-Latin polymath John of Salisbury. For John, the wisdom of the ancient pagan philosophers was seen as a familiar and immediate resource; he understood the learning of his own age to be a product of unbroken continuity with ancient authority. From his perspective the rupture from the world of pagan knowledge was only of the most recent origin, a penchant among twelfth-century students for a quick, streamlined curriculum that made them indifferent to the learning of the past. It is against these arrogant ‘new men’ who do not want to learn virtue that he levels his bitterest criticism, not (as we might imagine) against Christian polemicists who had been dismissing the value of pagan learning for the last millennium. Antiquity was also seen as part of medieval Christianity in more radical ways that require substantial redrawing of modern conceptions of the ‘classical’. Antiquity was not only the mytho-historical time of Thebes and Troy, or the historical progression

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature from Athens (remembered for its wise men and rulers) to Rome and then to the foundations of early Christianity, but also of Judaism and the destruction of the Second Temple. Jewish temporality figured powerfully in the medieval genre of universal history, which looked back to the Judaeo-Roman historiographical authority of Josephus. In Middle English, the literary vehicle for such vast historicizing ambitions was alliterative poetry. Moreover, the very paganism of classical antiquity could be absorbed in the expansive salvation theology of vernacular historicism. Thus Langland’s Piers Plowman elaborates the theological possibility that good pagans could be saved and urges modern Christians to pray for the souls of wise pagan philosophers and poets such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Porphyry. At the end of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, the dying Arcite asks a question with profound ontological resonance: ‘What is this world, what asketh men to have, | Now with his love, now in his colde grave, | Allone, withouten any compaignye?’ (I. 2777–9).18 This question, voiced by a noble pagan, reverberates against the Christian eschatology of the Canterbury Tales. Through this act of ventriloquism, Chaucer has a pagan hero articulate the limits of understanding that a medieval Christian might want to ascribe to an ancient pagan, while at the same time permitting the ancient figure to glimpse outside his pagan box and view his own limits of understanding from a modern perspective. The shock of Arcite’s question is that he is suddenly made alien, revealed at the moment of his death as a figure from the past who cannot answer to Chaucer’s audience about the meaning of his death. But this is no condemnatory gesture on Chaucer’s part. It is a sympathetic and imaginative opening to a temporally distant world view, born paradoxically of both intimacy with, and estrangement from, classical antiquity. Medieval Christians used the pagan imperium as a foreign element by which to measure themselves and quantify their own ontological certainties and uncertainties; yet they also perceived their time in an ideological and historical continuity with antiquity, bound to that former age through universal histories and imperial genealogies. Antiquity’s proximity and yet also difference gave medieval poets a way of thinking otherwise, imagining something outside their ideological envelope. For Chaucer, imagining the past opened an avenue for thinking, curiously or sympathetically, about more contemporary other worlds: the non-Christian East and its store of scientific knowledge as well as its mysteries of wealth and power; or the magical promise of new scientific discoveries; or the just lives of contemporary ‘pagans’. Gower, rather narrower in his range than Chaucer, still could embrace the fantastic, philosophically alien, and often aleatory world of Ovidian myth, deploying it in his Confessio amantis to explore those aspects of human desire that conventional morality can hardly fathom. At first glance, Lydgate, the dominant figure of the fifteenth century and the most prolific reinterpreter of the classical legacy, is not an author who is invested in imagining other worlds. But in ways that are equally challenging, he uses the matters of Thebes and Troy, as well as the Aeneid and Lucan’s Bellum

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Introduction civile, as vehicles for thinking otherwise about his own political milieu. Lydgate projects the turmoils of Lancastrian England back into classical myth, discovering in those ancient narratives of war and dynastic struggle a hermeneutic for the internal and extra-mural conflicts in the era of the Hundred Years War.

Early Humanists and the Classics Lydgate is a transitional figure, and although here he concludes the medieval section as an author who sums up the historical perspectives of the Middle Ages, recent re-evaluations of the ‘moment’ of an English vernacular humanism would also justify treating him as a predictor of later outlooks. Most prominently, he found a literary patron in Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, whose material as well as political interests in the products of the newest continental classical scholarship are now seen to signal a shift in English culture. Through Duke Humfrey’s collection, Lydgate had access to some of the newer works of Italian classical scholarship. While Lydgate’s classicism was often mediated through more contemporary sources, making him seem on first glance a decidedly medieval figure, he was hardly the last English poet to find his classics in modern (Latin and vernacular) literary dress. And some of the continental sources that he mined, including Boccaccio’s Latin work De casibus virorum illustrium and Boccaccio’s French translator Laurent de Premierfait, betokened in their own approaches the more acute classicism that has come to be associated with humanist sensibilities. The narrative of early English humanism is well known, from Roberto Weiss’s considered pessimism about the emergence in England of a genuinely home-grown studia humanitatis any earlier than the end of the fifteenth century, to important revisions of Weiss’s historical narrative.19 The humanism of the earlier fifteenth century has been aptly characterized as both diffused and diluted: present in the culture without yet having the conscious and concerted force of a learned agenda.20 Of course what is meant by ‘humanism’ has long been a contested notion, even after Kristeller’s now-classic demystification of the term.21 As Kristeller showed, whatever ‘humanism’ has come to mean (as a kind of self-sufficient world view), the term should be traced back to what truly defined the Italian umanista of the late fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries: an overriding concern with the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, poetics, and to some extent moral philosophy. In this respect the role of the umanista was continuous with that of his medieval predecessors, the grammarians and dictatores or practical rhetoricians, that is, the teachers and students of Latin literature, style, and rhetoric who anchored the classical pedagogy of the Middle Ages. The very word umanista is modelled on such medieval university terms as artista, meaning a member of the arts faculty. If, during the fifteenth century, there was a shift to what we would recognize as a ‘humanist’ enterprise, that shift

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature would be registered, not by a change in subject matter, but by a gradually increasing intellectual and social prestige accorded the teaching and study of that subject matter, accompanied and encouraged by the availability of more classical texts. The continuities between the classicisms of the late Middle Ages and the early English humanists are reflected in this volume by certain structural parallels between the two sections. Thus we begin again with institutional contexts: the structures and patterns of classical transmission, the libraries and their collections, and the schools and their curricula. Here, even if the scope of the classical pedagogical and literary canon expands over the course of the fifteenth century, the systems and even materials of learning follow on from medieval foundations. Although there are more Latin texts and, by the end of the century, a strong presence of Greek, and although the arts course at Oxford and Cambridge begins to assume more importance, there is still much that the Middle Ages would recognize in terms of pedagogical practice and even appropriation of classical sources. Well into the age of print, English scholars exploited the wealth of earlier libraries, using medieval monastic copies (whether of English or continental origin) of classical texts and annotating them in their now-humanist hands. They also availed themselves of medieval commentaries on classical texts, even as they also embraced the newer work of Italian scholars such as Salutati and Bruni. These combinations of old and new naturally joined with recent additions to the classical corpus, such as Latin translations from Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch. English scholars also expanded the scope of English in their classical studies, a practice also continuous with some medieval grammatical teaching. Yet even as we note such continuities, by the late fifteenth century the differences in English learning from medieval norms have become striking. Under the impress of continental classicism, the boundaries of the ‘classical’ have become, by contrast with earlier historical sensibilities, clear and firm. The culture of print, of course, accelerated the uptake of scholarly innovations from the Continent. Responding to Italian scholar-teachers, English pedagogues (and continental scholars working in England) produced new manuals of grammar and rhetoric with a view to ‘reforming’ Latinity along more classical lines. By the early decades of the sixteenth century, the curricular framework of English schools had undergone radical revision, not only with increasingly systematic attention to classical style, but with the disappearance of medieval Latin authors from the curriculum. The medieval authors were replaced by more classical texts and by contemporary humanist writers. Erasmus himself, representing the very front rank of European humanism, was working in England after 1509, where he produced the Encomium moriae, a happy result of his encounters with Thomas More. The impact of Erasmus’ pedagogical methods, imported to England by John Colet and promoted by More and his circle, so transformed the curriculum of St Paul’s school that it would have been substantially unrecognizable to a medieval student. Added to these changes was the introduction of Greek study into the higher curriculum, of which More was also a strong

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Introduction a­ dvocate, and the concomitant expansion of the classical corpus among available printed books. The embrace of Greek enlarged not only the classical curriculum but also pedagogical thought, as exemplified in Sir Thomas Elyot’s influential translation of Plutarch’s The Education of Children (1535). If the boundaries of the ‘classical’ also extended to include Hebrew, it was now in the demystified sense of an object of historical philology on the order of Latin and Greek. During the same decades the studia humanitatis was extending its reach beyond the schools to form the standard of private education for the nobility and royal family. Here, the early moment of English humanism with the great library of Duke Humfrey finds its incremental repetitions in the even greater showpiece ­libraries of Henry VII and Henry VIII, of which the latter boasted fine examples of continental and especially French classicism. The Henrician period fostered a self-consciousness of new learning, exemplified in the career of the scholar and antiquarian John Leland (c.1503–1552), whose retrospective assessments of monastic book holdings set the terms for a historicizing codicology of British letters. The period from the late fifteenth century to the first half of the sixteenth century affords an opportunity to think about classical reception along new lines. Here it is not the classical canon that dominates in our history, but rather a new canon of English and Scottish authors whose works constitute the distinctive channels of reception in literary culture. In other words, medieval receptions of classical antiquity were diffused among many different kinds of writing and cultural effects, making it in many ways more profitable to think about the collective receptions and transformations of individual classical authors and genres. But with the period of the early humanists, from the later fifteenth century up to the Tudor era, it is the canon of individual English authors that begins to define our conception of the period’s response to antiquity. The authors whose work can be taken as most representative of this new, formative phase of English literary reception of classical antiquity are Skelton, Douglas, Wyatt, and Surrey. Like Lydgate in the first half of the fifteenth century, John Skelton is a transitional figure, although hardly in the same ways as his forerunner. Skelton consciously inhabited two temporalities: he modelled his English poetry on a deep engagement with an unusual range of Latin poets, including Catullus, Propertius, and the satirists, and rendered Latin and Greek prose into English; but he crafted a poetic style that deliberately conjured an archaic English idiom in its rough alliterative sounds and native lexicon. His own classical learning was unusually broad; most interestingly it registers in his poetry through his grasp and refashioning of the sophisticated and elusive satirical voice. It is in Skelton that we first see a clear imprint of the Latin satirists in English vernacular verse. Gavin Douglas’s Eneados (completed 1513, printed 1553) has also been received as a work that straddles medieval and humanist worlds. In some respects it appears a thoroughly modern work: it is the first complete and close translation of the Aeneid

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature into any form of English, and among the earliest European vernacular translations (as opposed to adaptations or paraphrases) of Virgil’s epic. The commitment to Virgil’s ipsissima verba inevitably registers as humanist in its philological precision. Douglas also disdains the medieval (Chaucerian) affective transformation of Dido into love’s martyr, and excoriates the printer William Caxton for making his English prose translation from a French intermediary. Yet Douglas’s equipping of the text with explanatory prologues for each book seems to betoken a medieval textual approach, recalling with its visible pedagogical framework the medieval genre of academic prologues to the auctores. But even Douglas’s base text, the 1501 edition of the Aeneid by the Flemish printer Jodocus Badius Ascensius, reproduces the kind of densely commentative layout that would be familiar from medieval manuscripts of the work. Douglas’s act of adding a thirteenth book also cuts two ways. Douglas’s source was the Supplementum by the early fifteenth-century humanist Maffeo Vegio, which had achieved a modern canonical status in its own right. Yet the impulse to tidy up the unfinished business of a narrative is a familiar move of the medieval continuator or corrector, for whom the boundaries of the authorial text remain invitingly open. With Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, we arrive at the sense of something genuinely new. Wyatt seems to take his classical erudition for granted, underplaying it even as it pervades his poetry. In terms of explicit reference, Wyatt wears his classicism lightly, stripping the classical allusions in his Petrarchan sources to their quotidian core. Wyatt’s is an absorbed classicism: he has internalized the Stoic values of self-reliance and fully naturalized the detached perspective of the Latin satirists. Wyatt filters his classical tradition through a layered cultural heritage, for example, echoing Juvenal indirectly through an Italian intertext. Yet he also translates a chorus from Seneca’s Thyestes with a brevity in English that closely rivals the Stoic restraint of the Latin. In Surrey, a new direction in translating that was anticipated in Douglas’s textual fidelity to Virgil culminates in a decisively humanist conception of translation: the illusion of transparent access to the original text. If in Wyatt we see a hybrid and naturalized classicism, in Surrey we see the very effacement of the translator’s interpretive presence and voice. In Surrey’s translation of Aeneid Books 2 and 4, even English style must conform as transparently as possible to the form of Virgilian verse: to achieve some proximity to Latin hexameters, Surrey produced blank verse in English for the first time, and in so doing also opened the lines of verse to rhetorical effects comparable to those of the Virgilian text. Yet in so suppressing his translator’s voice to achieve that disinterested historicism that was the signature goal of humanist philology, Surrey paradoxically lets us see the fragility of his own historical predicament. The perils of service in the paranoid Henrician court required a public persona that could retreat quickly into compliant anonymity. Wyatt’s poetic voice too is elusive, understating its own erudite claims as if to mirror the self-preserving tactics of the English courtier who must evade d­ anger

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Introduction while yet sustaining a public life. Where Wyatt only just succeeded in such complex manoeuvres, Surrey failed miserably. In Surrey’s efficient, supple, and impersonal renderings of Books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid, the cautionary classical tales of those who lost out to political intrigue and imperial ambition find their first truly modern English voice. If humanist philology sought to recover the classical past on its own terms, the early English humanists also found in it the images of their own political fates. As reception histories of the classics in medieval and early Tudor England, the chapters in this volume reveal how antiquity could be transformed and assimilated across the centuries. What this volume also witnesses are the deep continuities between those periods of reception, from the legacies of late antiquity to the early and late Middle Ages and through the first half of the sixteenth century. In the early Tudor period, classical reception was no less mediated than in the later Middle Ages, whether filtered vertically through the scholarship and thought of earlier centuries or channelled horizontally through the constant flow of continental influences. Seen in this way, reception history can highlight the conceptual limitations of traditional models of periodization in literary history: while heuristically useful, the standard divisions of late antique, medieval, and early modern are less meaningful when we think of the passage of ancient textual artefacts through medieval scholarship and pedagogical systems which themselves survived, materially and ideologically, well into the Renaissance. The ground rarely shifts suddenly, although there are some watersheds: the impact of the complete Aristotelian corpus in Latin over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the new prominence of the language arts in higher education from the later fifteenth century onward; and the efficient technology of the printed book, which did not necessarily displace old manuscript copies of ancient works, but which made it redundant to recopy them. But for the most part the developments are gradual and cumulative. A reception history of classical antiquity does not aim to give a triumphant teleology of the emergence of classical scholarship or the formation of a classical tradition. Rather, as exemplified by the chapters in this volume, it acknowledges the seriousness and depth of earlier engagements with the ancient world, and enlarges our understanding of what was seen to constitute antiquity itself. Medieval and early modern readers, scholars, students, historians, and poets structured and remade antiquity in textual and cultural terms, imagining its distance and alterity, or its proximity and sameness, to themselves.

Notes 1   Reception ‘theory’ and more broadly reception studies have undergone their own mutations and receptions since the early 1970s. A useful re-evaluation of reception history and

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature hermeneutics from the perspective of medieval appropriation of classical materials is by Ralph J. Hexter, ‘Literary History as a Provocation to Reception Studies’, in Classics and the Uses of Reception, eds Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (Oxford, 2006), pp. 23–31. 2   On the manuscript see François Avril, ‘Trois manuscrits napolitains des collections de Charles V et de Jean de Berry’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 127 (1969), 291–328. On the probable identification of this among the books of Henry VIII at Richmond Palace in 1535, see The Libraries of King Henry VIII, ed. James P. Carley, CBMLC 7 (2000), H1.94. 3   See in this volume especially Chapters 10, 13, 22, and 24 by Akbari, Desmond (with further discussion and references), Edwards, and Carley and Ormsby. 4   However, these boundaries are not without contest in classical studies: see James I. Porter, ‘Introduction: What is “Classical” about Classical Antiquity’, in Classical Pasts, ed. James I. Porter (Princeton, 2005), pp. 1–65. 5   The term derives from a passage in Aulus Gellius, ‘a first-class tax-paying author’ (Attic Nights 19.8,15). Thus its original designation was not to historical period but to quality, ‘the best’; this was also the meaning of its modern coinage in the sixteenth century, informing its application to ancient authors by the eighteenth century. 6  Recent histories of multilingualism in early medieval Britain include The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Clare A. Lees (Cambridge, 2013), which, along with chapters on Old English and Insular Latin, covers Welsh, Gaelic, and Anglo-Danish; Elaine Treharne, Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020–1220 (Oxford, 2012); and Conceptualizing Multilingualism in England, c.800–c.1250, ed. Elizabeth M. Tyler (Turnhout, 2011). For later periods see Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c.1066–1520): Sources and Analysis, eds Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter (Turnhout, 2012), Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100–c.1500, and D. A. Trotter, ed., Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain (Cambridge, 2000). 7  On Trojan and other classical themes in Old English historiographical writing, see Elizabeth M. Tyler, England in Europe: English Royal Women and Literary Patronage, c.1000–c.1150 (Toronto, 2016), chapter 1, ‘Vernacular Foundations’. 8  Jacques Monfrin, ‘Humanisme et traductions au moyen âge’, Journal des savants 148 (1963), 161–90; ‘Les Traducteurs et leur public in France au moyen âge’, Journal des savants 149 (1964), 5–20. Also useful is Robert Lucas, ‘Mediaeval French Translations of the Latin Classics to 1500’, Speculum 45 (1970), 225–53. On Italian translations from classical sources, see Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge, 2011), especially pp. 16–43. 9   We find translations or adaptations into various European vernaculars of the Aeneid, Bellum civile, Thebaid, the Heroides, Ars amatoria, and Metamorphoses, Sallust’s histories, Cicero’s De amicitia, De senectute, his De inventione and the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, Suetonius’ Vitae, some books of Livy’s Ab urbe condita, Quintus Curtius’ vita of Alexander (adapted through Walter of Châtillon’s twelfth-century Latin poem); Seneca’s Moralia, Caesar’s De bello Gallico, Valerius Maximus, Vegetius’ Epitoma rei militaris, and translations or adaptations of late antique Apollonius of Tyre narratives. We might also include the French

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Introduction adaptations by Nicole Oresme in the fourteenth century of the Latinized Politics and Ethics of Aristotle (and the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics); and there is also vernacular sampling of some scientific works such as Pliny’s Naturalis historia. Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae and other late antique works such as Orosius’ Historiae adversus paganos and the early Christian Bible epics (all classicizing sources; see the following discussion) were among the most significant translated texts in Old and Middle English. The absence of a translation or adaptation into English does not necessarily signify its absence from medieval English literary culture: for example, the multiple French translations of Ovid’s Ars amatoria would have been available to the same kinds of elite groups in England as those that enjoyed them in France. 10   Studies that offer wide-ranging scholarship on the classical auctores in medieval learning include the following: Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics: Production and Use, eds Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel and Margaret M. Smith (Los Altos Hills, Calif., 1996), which includes chapters on Terence, Livy, Lucretius, and Horace; Medieval and Renaissance Scholarship, eds Nicholas Mann and Birger Munk Olsen (Leiden, 1997), especially Karsten Friis-Jensen, Birger Munk Olsen, and Ole L. Smith, ‘Bibliography of Classical Scholarship in the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance (9th to 15th Centuries)’, pp. 197–251; and volume 4.1 of Birger Munk Olsen, L’Étude des auteurs classiques latins aux Xie et XIIe siècles (Paris, 2009). Readers should also consult the chapters on individual authors in the series Catalogus translationum et commentariorum. Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries: Annotated Lists and Guides, eds Paul Oskar Kristeller et al., 10 vols to date (Washington, DC and Toronto, 1960–). 11   Michel Lemoine points out how the substance of as many as eighteen Platonic dialogues was mediated through the works of pagan and Christian Latin authors of antiquity: Michel Lemoine, ‘La Tradition indirecte du Platon latin’, in The Medieval Translator vol. 5, Traduire au moyen âge, eds Roger Ellis and René Tixier (Turnhout, 1996), pp. 337–46. 12   On Jean de Meun’s reference to Tibullus, see the discussion and bibliography in Daniel Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore, 2003), p. 160 n. 68. On the Florilegium Gallicum see Beatriz Fernández de la Cuesta González, En la senda del ‘Florilegium Gallicum’: Edición y estudio del florilegio del manuscrito Córdoba, Archivo Capitular 150 (Louvain-la-Neuve, 2008). 13   For examples from Fulgentius and the Vatican Mythographers, see Chapter  7 in this volume by Zeeman, ‘Mythography and Mythographical Collections’. 14   The standard reference on the classical culture of exegesis and preaching in England is Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960); see her chapter on Ridewall and his milieu, pp. 109–32. For the uses of such moralized mythographies in preaching, see Siegfried Wenzel, ‘The Classics in Late-Medieval Preaching’, in Mediaeval Antiquity, eds Andries Welkenhuysen et al. (Leuven, 1995), pp. 127–43. 15   See Chapter 8 in this volume by Copeland, ‘Academic Prologues to Authors’. 16   On Alexander literature, see A Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. Z.  David Zuwiyya (Leiden, 2011). On their importance for Old English historiography, see Tyler, England in Europe, ch. 1. On aspects of the Middle English Alexander tradition, see Chapter 19 in this volume by Steiner. A complex vernacular literary tradition also concerns

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Apollonius of Tyre, deriving from late antique legendary materials: see Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre: Mediaeval and Renaissance Themes and Variations (Cambridge, 1991). 17   On Juvenal in the Middle Ages, see Eva M. Sanford, ‘Juvenal’, in Catalogus translationum 1, ed. Kristeller (1960), pp. 175–238; on Persius, see Dorothy Robathan et al., ‘Persius’, in Catalogus translationum 3, ed. F. Edward Krantz (1976), pp. 201–312. On Horace, see Karsten Friis-Jensen, ‘The Reception of Horace in the Middle Ages’, in The Cambridge Companion to Horace, ed. Stephen Harrison (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 291–304. On the central role of Horace’s Satires in the medieval grammatical curriculum, see Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Classical Text (Cambridge, 1996). 18   Text from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987). 19  Roberto Weiss, Humanism in England During the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1941). Influential revisions about the earlier fifteenth century include: David Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants: Aspects of Quattrocento Humanist Writings and their Reception in England, c.1400–c.1460’, D. Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 1997, and ‘Humanism before the Tudors’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Woolfson (London, 2002), pp. 22–42; Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature 1430–1530 (Oxford, 2007); Alessandra Petrina, Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (Leiden, 2004); and James G. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle, c.1350–1440 (Oxford, 2004). 20   Daniel Wakelin, ‘England: Humanism Beyond Weiss’, in Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe, ed. David Rundle (Oxford, 2012), pp. 265–306 (at p. 302). 21   Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance’, Byzantion 17 (1944–5), 346–74.

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Chapter 2

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW The Curricular Classics in the Middle Ages Rita Copeland

Throughout the Middle Ages, the teaching of the liberal arts ensured contact with the classical auctores. To be sure such contact varied in quality and degree in different eras, and from place to place or even from school to school. But what we can know with certainty is that in the West there was a continuity in the development of Latin classical teaching from the early to the later Middle Ages. This continuity was one with late classical scholarship on Latin and Latinized Greek materials. The copying of classical verse and prose, of literature, history, science, and philosophy, never ceased, and it flourished especially in the Carolingian period and in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. These eras produced some of the best exemplars of classical texts used in modern scholarship. Throughout western Europe in the earlier periods these texts were copied for monastic and in some cases royal libraries, and for teaching and study, whether at elementary or more advanced levels. From the eleventh century onwards they were also copied for cathedral libraries and for new urban schools, both in England and on the Continent. We cannot trace a history of English learning in isolation from the larger European picture, because of the internationalism of medieval Latinity and the movement of texts, teachers, and students across geographical and political space, especially from the eleventh century onwards. Learning Latin involved literary study, and the scope of grammar included knowledge of a literary canon inherited from the classical period. This was continuous with the remit of grammar in Greek and Latin antiquity, where the grammarians were also the arbiters and teachers of the literary canon, especially poetry.1 This traditional, inclusive curriculum remained intact through the early modern period, with literature remaining fundamental to the grammatical curriculum. Almost anyone pursuing higher education would have encountered some kind of classical literary culture during at least the early phases of academic training. Literacy was thus

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature as pervasively shaped by the classical Latin curriculum as by scriptural and liturgical Latinity, so that writers might be hardwired to use a certain turn of phrase, figure, or even adapted quotation to express an idea. Literacy was not simply a general capacity for reading, but a knowledge determined by what was most commonly read in early education. The technical grammatical teaching of Latin (discussed in Chapter 3) was bound up with classical literary culture, even where interest in or access to classical pagan genres might have been limited, because the essential grammatical textbooks from late antiquity and the later Middle Ages were also repositories of classical literary knowledge.2 A young student being trained into Latin literacy would first learn the parts of speech from the Ars minor, the ubiquitous Latin primer by the fourth-­century grammarian Aelius Donatus. But from there, if the student advanced, he would most likely encounter the abundant quotations from classical prose and verse that Donatus provided in his larger Ars maior to exemplify correct usage. The later medieval textbooks that superseded Donatus’ Ars maior, the versified grammars by Alexander of Villa Dei (1199) and Eberhard of Béthune (c.1212), similarly provided ample quotations from classical literary sources. Even at the highest, most theoretical levels of grammatical study, the classical authors were inescapable: the Institutiones grammaticae by the sixth-century grammarian Priscian of Caesarea, a work that served the philosophical interests of advanced scholars, is replete with classical quotations exemplifying grammatical rules as well as principles of syntax and morphology.3 The auctores were woven into the pedagogical fabric of medieval Latinity. Beyond the teaching of the elements of grammar, the literary curriculum of grammar opened out in various directions, some definitively classical, others more broadly classicizing. Our understanding of the extent and depth of classical literary curricula depends, of course, on the kind of evidence that survives from different periods and places. From later periods we have some direct reflections from schoolmasters themselves on what might be ideal curricula. Where we lack such direct evidence for earl­ ier periods, library holdings or booklists can yield up information, and we can also learn a great deal from the presence or visible influence of the classics on authors of the period. In considering classical culture in England we must also look to the sources available from continental learning, which can provide suggestive models for pedagogical practice when we have no comparable information from English sources.4 One fascinating example of a classical ‘reading list’ in an early medieval grammatical curriculum comes to us from the Continent and is later than some of our evidence from Anglo-Saxon England; but it provides a valuable point of reference for reconstructing a more general educational ideal. It is a poetic reminiscence of youthful learning by Walter of Speyer. In the opening section of his vita of St Christopher written in 984, Walter narrates—in quasi-autobiographical terms—the progress of a young student through the liberal arts. Walter was educated at the cathedral school at Speyer, but his teacher Balderich was a product of the monastic school at St Gall.

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The Curricular Classics in the Middle Ages Thus in Walter’s account of his ‘syllabus’ we are most likely seeing a continuity from the monastic to the cathedral school curriculum. Walter lists his school authors in what is apparently an ascending order of intellectual difficulty, from the Ilias latina (a Latin abbreviation of the Iliad into 1,070 hexameters) to Horace, Persius, Juvenal, Boethius, Statius, Terence, Lucan, and finally Virgil.5 The grading of a literary canon from introductory to advanced authors is also a distinctive feature of the monastic curriculum described by Conrad of Hirsau in his Dialogus super auctores (discussed later in this chapter). We can assume a similar kind of curricular approach in Anglo-Saxon England. Aldhelm’s account of the monastic curriculum that he studied at Canterbury in the seventh century does not mention specific classical authors, but it does describe learning metre and poetics, Roman law, computation, and astronomy, in other words, a course that encompasses the traditional liberal arts and more.6 A different kind of evidence about the reading of the classics comes from manuscripts that were owned or copied in Anglo-Saxon England. Their presence in manuscripts suggests that these works could be studied at least under some circumstances and at some points in time.7 Both Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge have surveyed the manuscripts produced or located in England up to 1100, which provide an index of the range of authors whose works were available for study.8 Even with the difficulties of ascertaining the origin and provenance of Anglo-Saxon books, and the problem of reconstructing Anglo-Saxon libraries from the ‘chance survival of about twelve hundred books and fragments of books when thousands of them must once have existed’,9 the classical authors and works represented in extant books up to 1100 give us a remarkable picture of what were most likely the elements of the literary curriculum in grammar. Of the poets, the manuscripts give us the school staples Virgil, Horace, Persius, Juvenal, Statius, and the fabulist Avianus; along with these are the lesser poets Nemesianus (pastoral poet of the third century ad), Quintus Serenus (late classical author of a versified medical textbook), and Ausonius (poet, teacher, and memorialist of the fourth century ad), as well as the ever popular Ilias latina and Disticha Catonis.10 Ovid and Martial are found in small excerpts.11 The dramatists figure only slightly, with one late manuscript of Plautus and a fragment of Terence (Seneca’s tragedies were not widely known until the thirteenth century).12 The prose writers whose works survive in early English manuscripts are Cicero, Sallust (in one fragment), Vitruvius, Frontinus, Valerius Maximus, Pliny the Elder, Hyginus, Justinus, Eutropius, Vegetius, Solinus, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and Boethius.13 Were we to include the Christian classics of late antiquity, works by Prudentius, Sedulius, Arator, Juvencus, and Prosper of Aquitaine, to say nothing of the early Latin Church Fathers, our list of surviving representations of classicism in AngloSaxon manuscripts would expand considerably. Where classical authors are not represented in surviving manuscripts of AngloSaxon England, they may still be present in booklists that come down to us in the

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature forms of wills, donations, and inventories of libraries, or in citations by writers. These sources suggest that the canon of elite study would have been large indeed.14 Alcuin’s famous poem about York triumphantly lists the ancient authors in York Minster’s library, moving between groups of Christian and pagan authorities: Victorinus and Boethius; the Roman historians Pompeius Trogus and Pliny; Aristotle (as philosopher) and Cicero (as rhetorician); the Christian poets Sedulius, Juvencus, Avitus, Prudentius, Prosper, Paulinus, and Arator; Fortunatus and Lactantius; the Roman auctores Virgil, Statius, and Lucan, grouped together as representatives of pagan epic; and finally the Latin grammarians, including Donatus, Priscian, and Servius. The presence of Lucan in Alcuin’s list is notable, since Lucan’s work does not survive in any early English manuscripts.15 But Lucan’s Bellum civile is often cited by Aldhelm and Bede, and a few times by Asser (late ninth century), Abbo of Fleury (in England 985–7), and Wulfstan of Winchester (late tenth century).16 Citations of other authors also give us clues about what was known in Anglo-Saxon England, or even of what manuscripts have been lost. Even though Terence has only a fragmentary manuscript presence, Aldhelm and Bede quote from his comedies, as do both Frithegod of Canterbury and Byrhtferth in the tenth century.17 Ovid, not well represented in surviving manuscripts of pre-Conquest England, also makes brief appearances in the writings of Aldhem, Bede, and Wulfstan.18 Manuscripts with glosses may take us closer into the immediate field of the curriculum, although glossing itself does not always indicate classroom use.19 But, as Scott Gwara has suggested, a few manuscripts may at least witness an elementary literary curriculum that stressed some classical foundations (Disticha Catonis, the fables of Avianus, the Ilias latina) comparable to continental models.20 Later centuries can yield more direct information about curricular classicism in England because of the greater survival of materials and the broadening and intensification of schooling.21 But at least for the eleventh and twelfth centuries, we still have to turn to the Continent for ideas about how the classical curriculum was shaped.22 We have an unusual ‘reading list’ from 1086 by the Frenchman Aimeric in his Ars lectoria, a didactic treatise on the quantity and accent of Latin words which depends extensively on classical authors. Towards the end of the treatise Aimeric lists twentythree pagan authors, ranking them according to metals: gold, silver, and tin. Into the category of gold he puts Terence, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Sallust, Lucan, Statius, Juvenal, and Persius. These ‘golden’ authors, mainly the poets, provide the bulk of Aimeric’s classical examples, probably on the model of the classical quotations in the grammars of Donatus and Priscian.23 But our most richly detailed picture of a reading programme based on the classical auctores comes from the Dialogus super auctores, written in the early twelfth century by the Benedictine monk Conrad from the abbey of Hirsau in the Black Forest. Most likely it also looks back to the previous century when Conrad himself was a pupil. The Dialogus treats twenty-one auctores in

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The Curricular Classics in the Middle Ages an order of curricular ascent (‘a minores . . . ad maiores’),24 from Donatus’ Ars minor to the Disticha Catonis, the Latinized Aesop (derived from the Latin versification by Phaedrus in the first century ad, or more likely from the fourth-century prose collection known as ‘Romulus’), and the fables of Avianus; from there to a group of early Christian authors (Sedulius, Iuvencus, Prosper) along with the pseudo-classical Eclogue of ‘Theodulus’ (actually a product of the tenth century, but as a Virgilian imitation treated as much earlier);25 and then to the final group: Arator, Prudentius, Cicero, Sallust, Boethius, Lucan, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, ‘Homer’,26 Persius, Statius, and Virgil. This is largely a poetic list, indicative of usefulness for teaching and memorizing. The Christian authors Arator and Prudentius are grouped with the ‘Roman’ authors presumably because their imitations of classical epic convey Romanitas.27 Conrad presents what is no doubt an idealized curriculum, but that idealism rests upon the firm assumption that the classical auctores provide edification for every stage of intellectual development. The literary culture of pagan antiquity may be joined to a later Christian literary canon, but it is not superseded. Conrad’s confidence in the value of the classical curriculum was something common to centres of learning across Europe, and we find it too among Anglo-Latin writers of the twelfth century. It is reflected in the conspicuous classicism that many of them displayed in their own writings, providing a wealth of allusions and quotations, and often imitating classical forms.28 But some of the major twelfth-century Latin writers of England also present their own inventories of classical authors who should be known and read. These are not curricular surveys on the order of Conrad’s, but they certainly point to the kind of learning that was available, perhaps in their own youths. William of Malmesbury (c.1090–c.1142), who was librarian at that abbey (where Aldhelm had been centuries earlier), is more famous for his Gesta regum Anglorum. But his Polyhistor gives a view of early twelfth-century reading, more from the perspective of a librarian than a schoolmaster.29 The Polyhistor is a compilation of stories from ancient, late antique, and patristic authors. One of William’s express purposes is to provide diversion.30 His sources are not obviously introductory school texts: nevertheless he finds amusing stories in Cicero’s De inventione, Pliny, Aulus Gellius, and Vitruvius, before moving to more edifying matter from patristic authors and from Isidore of Seville, Seneca, Macrobius, Julius Firmicus (the fourth-century author of an astrological treatise, Mathesis), and Cicero’s philosophical writings. More telling about curricular ideals is the range of classical citations and quotations in John of Salisbury’s Entheticus (written in England between 1155 and 1160), a satirical, didactic, and philosophical poem in elegiac distichs. In the course of 1,852 lines covering education, ancient philosophers, current affairs, and the value of phil­ osophy and learning, John manages to incorporate much of an elementary syllabus along with learned fare from the more advanced auctores. We find references to Donatus, the Disticha Catonis, and Avianus, and echoes of the Ilias latina; among the

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature advanced authors who might figure in literary study, John draws on Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Lucan, Macrobius, Martial, Martianus Capella, Ovid, Persius, Petronius, Plautus, Pliny, Prudentius, Sallust, both Senecas, Statius, Suetonius, Terence, Valerius Maximus, and especially Virgil.31 Like William of Malmesbury, John of Salisbury had his early education in England, and some of the sources that he cites may well have been part of his youthful reading; but unlike the librarian of Malmesbury, John was sent to study in northern France, where he remained into early maturity and where he encountered the greatest scholars of the age, among them Thierry of Chartres, Abelard, and Petrus Helias.32 Thus his broad classicism cannot be said to be a product of English learning; but within the English milieu in which it was written, the Entheticus imagines a high literary standard of curricular development. The satirists figure significantly in John’s range of auctores, a use that is in keeping with the increasing popularity of the satirists for the teaching of language as well as morals.33 John’s Entheticus also shows that the satirists had staying power as literary models. Here too we can note the presence of Roman comedy in John’s dossier of references. Terence was long a fixture of the continental curriculum, in part because of the authority of Donatus’ surviving commentary on the plays.34 From the ninth to the fifteenth century there are over 700 surviving manuscripts containing all or some of the Terentian corpus, most of these continental, although by the time of John of Salisbury English libraries could boast a few collections of Terence. Plautus had somewhat less circulation.35 Terence’s comedies were admired for their mellifluous style (he is one of Aimeric’s ‘golden’ authors), famously providing a resource for the Christianized imitations of the German nun Hrotsvitha in the tenth century.36 But the attitude to Terence was mixed: many, including Hrotsvitha herself and later Conrad of Hirsau, were quick to dismiss Terence’s comedies as mendacious fictions.37 The beginning of the thirteenth century gives us a new picture of English learning from the strategic perspective of a schoolmaster and scholar: the English polymath Alexander Neckam (1157–1217). Neckam was born and grew up in England, and lived part of his life in St Albans. He was also a schoolmaster at Dunstable, and then studied and taught in Paris. Around the turn of the century he joined the Augustinian canons at Cirencester, where he taught for some years before becoming abbot in 1213.38 In a work designed for the schoolroom, the Sacerdos ad altare (written while he was at Cirencester), Neckam lays out a course of study across the liberal arts and the specialized fields of medicine, law, and theology. He gives the authors and often titles of the essential texts that would produce competence in these various fields. His survey of literary texts begins with elementary learning, the rudimentary knowledge that any schoolboy must acquire, and then proceeds with what is presented as an entry into literary culture as part of the early grammatical curriculum, a list of authors whose works should be known.39 Here he mentions Donatus, ‘Cato’ (i.e. Disticha Catonis), Theodulus (i.e. the Eclogue of Theodulus), Statius, Virgil,

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The Curricular Classics in the Middle Ages Lucan, Juvenal, Horace, Ovid, Sallust,40 Cicero, Martial, Petronius, Symmachus, Solinus, Sidonius, Suetonius, Quintus Curtius, Pompeius Trogus, Livy, and Seneca. But his overview of the order of reading does not quite correspond to the order of the actual list. After the most elementary readings (such as Cato’s Distichs), the child should read satirists and historians for their moral teaching, and then move on to the epics and then to other poetry (including the Achilleid of Statius and the Eclogues of Virgil) and prose. For some authors such as Horace, Ovid, and Cicero, he cites and discusses multiple titles, indicating the central role that the authorial œuvres played in shaping literary taste. The list itself is remarkable on several counts: it is almost completely classical, and excludes the late classical Christian writers; it groups the classical authors according to what appear to be generic or formal considerations; and it is extensive in its idealized canonical aspirations.41 Neckam seems to be looking back to the world of his own mid-twelfth-century education, with its distinctively classical outlook. He includes not only predictable auctores whom we find mentioned and read elsewhere, but also a number of the obscurer historians. Neckam sees a knowledge of the auctores as preliminary to academic knowledge in a strict sense. Thus he gives the art of grammar its own entry which is focused on the study of language. Neckam’s school productions can also help us understand the uses to which certain elementary texts were put in teaching. In the last years of the twelfth century, probably while he was a schoolmaster at Dunstable, he reworked two of the introductory curricular works, the Latinized Aesop and the fables of Avianus. The Avianus reworkings are especially revealing about the classroom value of this standard. Because the fables are each short and self-contained, they are perfect candidates for exercises in amplifying and abbreviating. Thus for the fable of the Eagle and Tortoise (which comes down to us in sixteen lines), Neckam produced three paraphrases: copiose (thirty-two lines), compendiose (ten lines), and succincte (four lines).42 Of course Neckam’s is only one of various medieval school-text revisions of Avianus’ fables, in verse and in prose, and ultimately in vernaculars. What seems to account for the ubiquity of this text is the straightforward and always brief presentation of moralized stories involving animals, representative human types, and occasionally mythological figures, in elegiac distichs.43 During the same period that Neckam was imagining his idealized literary curriculum, a more basic and practical ‘classical’ textual grouping was taking standardized shape: this is the compilation known as Liber catonianus, the ‘Cato book’. This typically consisted of six works: Disticha Catonis, the pseudo-classical Eclogue of ‘Theodulus’, the fables of Avianus, the Elegies of Maximianus (sixth century), De raptu Proserpinae by Claudian (fourth century), and the Achilleid of Statius. Some of these texts are survivals from earlier groupings, as in the four elementary texts listed by Conrad of Hirsau, where the Disticha Catonis, Avianus, and ‘Theodulus’ are mentioned with the Ilias latina, or Oxford, Bodleian MSS Rawlinson G. 57 and G. 111

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (originally one codex), from around 1100, which contain Disticha Catonis, Avianus, and the Ilias latina with Old English glosses.44 The earliest manuscripts containing the Liber catonianus compilation are of the thirteenth century. A number of the manuscripts listed by Boas are of English provenance.45 This compilation was not unvarying, and the texts are often accompanied by other classical material favoured by teachers, such as the satirists Persius and Juvenal. The Liber catonianus was more an evolving practice than a fixed event, and attracted a good many other classical texts in its orbit. From the thirteenth century onwards the course of the classics in English schooling becomes easier to track because we have more pedagogical material and evidence of classroom use in the form of glosses and other apparatus.46 While A. G. Rigg has noted that Anglo-Latin writing of the thirteenth century sees a shift away from classical literature and towards the Bible as a source of allusion,47 the curricular evidence continues to point as much to classical as to biblical foundations. For example, grammar schools in the later centuries were the beneficiaries of bequests of books representing not only technical subjects (such as grammar and logic) or liturgical matters, but also the classical poets. According to fourteenth-century records, St Paul’s School in London was particularly well stocked with the classical auctores, not only the elements of the Liber catonianus, but also Juvenal, Persius, and Horace, and the advanced auctores.48 Such is the classical curriculum that students in Chaucer’s milieu would have encountered: from this perspective, the Chaucerian dreamer’s vision of auctores on pillars in the hall of Fame is a dramatic realization of an idealized curricular list. Chapter 3 in this volume will consider the teaching of technical grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, all of which contributed to the classical outlook.49 But to conclude this survey of the literary curriculum we can look to one product of rhetorical study that suggests the critical and allusive use to which schoolmasters might put the classical canon. This is the collection of ‘rhetorical’ poems in Glasgow, MS Hunterian V.8.14 (formerly 511), from the 1220s. This manuscript, produced in England, is famous for bringing together the artes poetriae by Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and Gervase of Melkley with Latin poems that were written to illustrate the rhetorical devices recommended in the poetic treatises. The poems were written by schoolmasters, some perhaps even by the authors of the treatises, and others possibly even by students, as exercises in applying the precepts of the artes poetriae and basic techniques of declamation such as ethopoeia (impersonation). Thus the occasion for the poems was practical, a set of texts that might accompany (or proceed from) the teaching of poetic treatises and progymnasmata (preliminary exercises in rhetoric). Of the fifty poems assembled in MS Hunterian V.8.11, twenty-five are classical in subject matter, drawing largely on Ovidian mythological themes and myths from other classical sources.50 There are poems on Paris of Troy, on Tiresias, various poems on Jupiter and his rapes, on Arachne, Myrrha, poems on the Trojan War, two

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The Curricular Classics in the Middle Ages poems on Niobe, two on Pyramus and Thisbe, two on Deucalion and Pyrrha, three on Apollo and Python and one on Apollo and Daphne, two on Lycaon, and three on Phaethon. The poems were not created to teach classical themes (and indeed the other half of the poems are on general subjects or contemporary topics), but the fact that the compiler or authors turned so often to classical material reveals how deeply embedded was classical culture even at the level of introductory and intermediate teaching. These were themes that the schoolmaster or compiler could assume would be familiar to students, and that could thus serve as convenient vehicles for teaching other things—stylistic devices, verbal ornamentation, and amplification and abbreviation. The survival of this school anthology in a unique English manuscript is certainly precious. But its very existence points to a wider practice in which the teaching of Latinity, that is, grammatical correctness, stylistic proficiency, and even commonplace forms of expression, was rooted in reading of the classical auctores.

Notes 1   See Robert Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), esp. chapters 1 and 2. 2   Cf. Rosalind Love, ‘Insular Latin Literature to 900’, in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Clare A. Lees (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 120–57 (at p. 123). 3   On these grammarians, see Chapter 4 in this volume by Copeland, ‘The Trivium and the Classics’. 4  The best survey of continental school curricula is Günter Glauche, Schullektüre im Mittelalter: Entstehung und Wandlungen des Lektürekanons bis 1200 nach den Quellen dargestellt (Munich, 1970). 5   Der Libellus Scolasticus des Walther von Speyer, ed. Peter Vossen (Berlin, 1962), lines 91–106. See also Glauche, Schullektüre im Mittelalter, pp. 75–83. On the Ilias latina, see Chapters 3 and 13 in this volume by Woods and Desmond. 6   Aldhelm, Letter 1 to Leuthere, Opera omnia, ed. R. Ehwald, MGH, Auctores antiquissimi 15 (Berlin, 1919), pp. 476–8; Aldhelm: The Prose Works, trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 152–3; see Love, ‘Insular Latin Literature to 900’, pp. 131–3. 7   Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006), p. 65. 8   Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Tempe, Ariz., 2001); Helmut Gneuss, ‘Addenda and Corrigenda to the Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts’, Anglo-Saxon England 32 (2003), 293–305; Helmut Gneuss, ‘Second Addenda and Corrigenda to the Handlist of AngloSaxon Manuscripts’, Anglo-Saxon England 40 (2011), 293–306; Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, esp. pp. 63–91, 275–342. The materials compiled by Gneuss and Lapidge in their respective studies have now been synthesized in Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature up to 1100 (Toronto, 2014), which appeared after our volume went to press. Richard Gameson, The Manuscripts of Anglo-Norman England (c.1066–1130) (Oxford, 1999) provides a longer perspective into the immediate post-Conquest period. 9  Gneuss, Handlist, p. 3. 10   See also Chapter 6 in this volume by Willoughby, ‘The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature: Libraries and Florilegia’. 11  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 66, with additions from Gneuss, Handlist (index). 12  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 66; on Seneca see Richard H. Rouse, ‘The A Text of Seneca’s Tragedies in the Thirteenth Century’, Revue d’histoire des textes 1 (1971), 93–121. On Terence, see the discussion later in this chapter. 13  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 66–7, with additions from Gneuss, Handlist (index). On the tradition of Boethius, see Chapter 14 in this volume by Cornelius. 14  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, appendix E, pp. 175–274; Michael Lapidge, ‘Surviving Booklists from Anglo-Saxon England’, in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, eds Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 33–89. 15   Alcuin: The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, ed. and trans. Peter Godman (Oxford, 1982), lines 1548–57. Godman points out (p. 125, at line 1549) that the mention of the historians Pompeius Trogus and Pliny may not indicate the presence of such volumes in the library, but rather a knowledge of these authors through an epitome or extracts. See also Mary Garrison, ‘The Library of Alcuin’s York’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain vol 1, c.400–11, ed. Richard Gameson (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 633–64. 16  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 319. 17  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 68, 175, 187, 225, 273. 18  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 323. 19   Michael Lapidge, ‘The Study of Latin Texts in Late Anglo-Saxon England: The Evidence of Latin Glosses’, in Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Early Medieval Britain, ed. Nicholas Brooks (Leicester, 1982), pp. 99–140; Gernot R. Wieland, ‘The Glossed Manuscript: Classbook or Library Book?’, Anglo-Saxon England 14 (1985), 153–73. 20   Scott Gwara, ‘Anglo-Saxon Schoolbooks’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 507–24 (at p. 515, citing Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson G. 57 [s. xi ex. or xi/xii], and London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian D VI [s. x], probably from St Augustine’s Canterbury. Patrizia Lendinara notes that no actual schoolbook has come down to us: see ‘Instruction Manuscripts in England: The Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Codices and the Early Norman Ones’, in Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the Light of Contemporary Manuscript Evidence, eds Patrizia Lendinara, Loredana Lazzari, and Maria Amalia D’Aronco (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 59–113 (at p. 71); see also her appendix of manuscripts with possible instructional use, pp. 105–13. 21   On classical texts copied in English centres of learning see Birger Munk Olsen, ‘The Production of the Classics in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics: Production and Use, eds Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel and Margaret M. Smith (Los Altos Hills, Calif., 1996), pp. 1–17.

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The Curricular Classics in the Middle Ages 22   On learned exchange between England and the Continent from the Anglo-Danish period of the early eleventh century to the Anglo-Norman period, see Elizabeth Tyler, England in Europe: English Royal Women and Literary Patronage, c.1000–c.1150 (Toronto, 2016). 23   Ed. Harry F. Reijnders, ‘Aimericus, Ars lectoria’, Vivarium 9 (1971), 71–107 and Vivarium 10 (1972), 41–101, 124–76 (citation at p. 170). Among his ‘silver’ and ‘tin’ authors are also curricular standards, including grammars and elementary works such as the Ilias latina which he perhaps considered less useful as stylistic models. On Aimeric see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953), pp. 464–5. 24   Accessus ad auctores, Bernard d’Utrecht, Conrad d’Hirsau, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden, 1970), p. 79, lines 236–7. 25   R. P. H. Green, ‘The Genesis of a Mediaeval Textbook: The Models and Sources of the Ecloga Theodoli’, Viator 13 (1982), 49–106. 26   ‘Homerus’ may refer to any of the late classical Latin verse redactions of the Troy story: on the Latin versions of the Troy narrative known in the Middle Ages, see in this volume Chapter 3 by Woods and Chapter 13 by Desmond. The Ilias latina was most common of these works in medieval schools, and the most likely reference intended here. 27   Leslie G. Whitbread, ‘Conrad of Hirsau as Literary Critic’, Speculum 47 (1972), 234–45 (at 244). On the Bible epics as conveyors of classical epic form, see Chapter 17 by Putter. 28   A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066–1422 (Cambridge, 1992), provides much information here; on writers of the first half of the twelfth century see, for example, pp. 17–18, 85–92, 99–102. For in-depth readings of individual poets, see Thomas C. Moser, Jr, A Cosmos of Desire: The Medieval Latin Erotic Lyric in English Manuscripts (Ann Arbor, 2004), especially on Serlo of Wilton, pp. 152–7. 29   On the wide range of William’s reading, showing his particular knowledge of the Latin classics, see Rodney M. Thomson, William of Malmesbury, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2003), especially pp. 40–75 and 202–14. 30  William of Malmesbury, Polyhistor: A Critical Edition, ed. Helen Testroet Ouellette (Binghamton, NY, 1982), p. 37, lines 17–18. 31   John of Salisbury’s Entheticus maior and minor, ed. Jan van Laarhoven, 3 vols (Leiden, 1987). This list does not cover the full range of classical reference in the learned display of the Entheticus. A similarly advanced list of classical prose writers appears in Policraticus 8. 18 (ed. Clemens C. I. Webb, 2 vols (Oxford, 1909), 2, 364), which was borrowed by Peter of Blois as an ideal template to represent his own education. See John D. Cotts, The Clerical Dilemma: Peter of Blois and Literate Culture in the Twelfth Century (Washington, DC, 2009), pp. 113–14. See Chapter 18 in this volume by Denery on John of Salisbury. 32   Cf. R. W. Southern, ‘The Place of England in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, in Medieval Humanism and Other Studies, ed. R. W. Southern (Oxford, 1970), pp. 158–80 (at p. 159). 33   On the pedagogical usefulness and popularity of the satirists, see Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Classical Text (Cambridge, 1996), p. 14 and Tony Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1991), 1, 60–3.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 34   Aeli Donati quod fertur commentum Terenti, ed. Paul Wessner, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1902–8). Text with French translation is now available on the website of the http://hyperdonat.huma-num. fr/editions/html/corpus.html. 35   See the list of manuscripts in Claudia Villa, La ‘lectura Terentii’, vol. 1, Da Ildemaro a Francesco Petrarca (Padua, 1984), pp. 295–454. For manuscripts of definite or possible English origin between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, see Birger Munk Olsen, L’Étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 4 vols (Paris, 1982–2014), 2, 583–653, nos 10, 11, 15, 48, 49, 59, and 62. This last item (no. 62), a manuscript of the eleventh century, is counted in Gneuss’s Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, no. 669.6 (p. 105). See also M. D. Reeve, ‘Terence’, in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford, 1983), pp. 412–20; on Plautus, see in the same volume, R. J. Tarrant, ‘Plautus’, pp. 302–7. 36   See the recent study by Marco Giovini, Rosvita e l’imitari dictando terenziano (Genoa, 2003); and see Carole E. Newlands, ‘Hrotswitha’s Debt to Terence’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 116 (1986), 369–91. The standard reference is still Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 55–83. 37   See Dronke, Women Writers, p. 69; for Conrad’s comment see Dialogus super auctores, ed. Huygens (n. 24), p. 85, line 400. 38   On Neckam’s life see R. W. Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam (1157–1217), ed. and rev. Margaret Gibson (Oxford, 1984), pp. 1–18. 39   Sacerdos ad altare, ed. Christopher J. McDonough, CCCM 227 (Turnhout, 2010), pp. 174–5. 40   He also gives the name ‘Crispus’, which Charles Homer Haskins takes as a name for Sallust; see ‘A List of Text Books from the Close of the Twelfth Century’, in Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science, ed. Haskins (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), pp. 356–76 (at p. 373). 41   Rita Copeland, ‘Producing the Lector’, in Medieval and Early Modern Authorship, eds Lukas Erne and Guillemette Boulens (Tübingen, 2011), pp. 231–48. 42   Text of Avianus in Minor Latin Poets, eds J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff (Cambridge, Mass.,1935; repr. 1968), pp. 667–749; for Neckam’s revisions see Les Fabulistes latins 3, Avianus et ses anciens imitateurs, ed. Léopold Hervieux (Paris, 1894), pp. 462–7. 43   The reception is studied in Armando Bisanti, Le favole di Aviano e la loro fortuna nel medioevo (Florence, 2010); and in Michael Baldzuhn, Schulbücher im Trivium des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit: die Verschriftlichung von Unterricht in der Text- und Überlieferungsgeschichte der ‘Fabulae’ Avians und der deutschen ‘Disticha Catonis’, 2 vols (Berlin, 2009). The long tradition of the Latinized and vernacular Aesop, which is not covered in this chapter, intersects with the Avianus tradition: see Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and his Followers (Gainesville, Fla, 2000). 44  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 292, 323, 339; Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, 1, 67. 45   Marcus Boas, ‘De librorum Catonianorum historia atque compositione’, Mnemosyne ns 42 (1914), 17–46. Examples of rich pedagogical manuscripts from England include Cambridge, Peterhouse MSS 2.1.0 (s. xiii–xiv) and 2.1.8 (s. xiii), London, British Library, Additional MS 21213 (s. xiii), Lincoln Cathedral MS C.5.8 (s. xiii), and Worcester Cathedral MS F 147 (s xiv).

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The Curricular Classics in the Middle Ages 46   See Chapter 8 in this volume by Copeland, ‘Academic Prologues to Authors’. For examples of pedagogical glossing of classical texts in English manuscripts see Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, 1, 28–35; see also the analysis in Suzanne Reynolds, ‘Glossing Horace: Using the Classics in the Medieval Schoolroom’, in Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics, eds Chavannes-Mazel and Smith, pp. 103–17. 47   A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066–1422 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 239. 48   Edith Rickert, ‘Chaucer at School’, Modern Philology 29 (1932), 257–74; see also Jan M. Ziolkowski, ‘Latin Learning and Latin Literature’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 2, 1100–1400, eds Nigel Morgan and Rodney M. Thomson (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 229–44, and Jill Mann, ‘“He Knew Nat Catoun”: Medieval School-Texts and Middle English Literature’, in The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers, eds Jill Mann and Maura Nolan (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 41–74. 49   See in this volume Chapter 3 by Copeland, ‘The Trivium’. 50   A Thirteenth-Century Anthology of Rhetorical Poems: Glasgow MS Hunterian V.8.14, ed. Bruce Harbert (Toronto, 1975).

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Chapter 3

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Experiencing the Classics in Medieval Education Marjorie Curry Woods

Classical texts were a constant in medieval schoolrooms for centuries, often in strange and wondrous ways. Individual works that to us seem far apart in levels of accomplishment and inherent interest were used without obvious distinction. It is well known that medieval teachers taught classical and Christian Latin texts together.1 Less well known is their positive assessment of classical texts that modern scholars value very differently. The most sophisticated medieval narrative school text was the Aeneid, universally praised then as now as the touchstone for Latin accomplishment in epic verse.2 Yet while during the Middle Ages and for several centuries thereafter Lucan’s Bellum civile (also called the Pharsalia) occupied a status equal to or only just below that of the Aeneid, for most of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries Lucan’s epic was much less widely taught and less highly valued.3 Virgil and Lucan were already important school authors by the late antique period, and manuscript evidence shows that they stayed that way.4 The two were constantly coupled together by medieval writers, not only vernacular poets like Dante and Chaucer,5 but also curricular authorities and intellectuals such as Walter of Speyer, Conrad of Hirsau, Alexander Neckam, and John of Salisbury.6 The Englishman Gervase of Melkley, author of an art of poetry called variously Ars poetica or Ars versificaria (c.1208–16), groups Lucan (and Statius) with Virgil as authors whose books can rudem animum informare (‘give form to a rough spirit’).7 Why were Lucan and Virgil accorded similar status in the schools during the Middle Ages? Constraints generated by the cost of writing materials in the European West before the widespread use of paper and other technical limitations forced medieval teachers to make practical and even ruthless textual choices.8 In order to turn so many boys into functioning users of Latin at all registers, teachers appear to have placed particular value on narrative poems containing rich troves of (1) historical,

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature mythological, and geographical data, (2) rhetorical tropes and figures as well as exempla and allusions useful for amplification and clarification, and (3) strong emotions, which helped in the retention and memory of texts. All of these characteristics are standard, if not comprehensive, aspects of modern appreciation of both the Aeneid and the Bellum civile. In medieval manuscripts attention to these components of the texts is well documented. With regard to the historical/mythological/geographical component, Christopher Baswell categorizes the approach to Virgil as follows: ‘Narrowly defined, the Virgilian exegesis offered by the lower schools—late classical, medieval, and renaissance—aimed to provide readers with sufficient information such as history, mythology, geography, and grammar, to understand Virgil’s works in something like the historical and social context of antiquity.’9 Lucan’s subject of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey obviously also offered endless opportunities for historical clarification and elaboration, as in the heavy glossing on beginnings of the books in even relatively early manuscripts of Bellum civile, such as London, British Library, MS Harley 2728, a German manuscript of the second third of the eleventh century.10 And a large proportion of the very lengthy twelfth-century accessus (introductions) to Lucan published by R. B. C. Huygens and the notes in numerous manuscripts—as in modern editions and translations—is taken up with explaining the intricacies of the participants in the war and the context(s) of the events.11 With regard to the rhetorical component, both Virgil and Lucan were praised and mined for examples and techniques. In Huygens’ edition of the twelfth-­ century accessus to Lucan, the characters of the participants are analysed according to the ‘attributes of persons’ in Cicero’s De inventione, and Conrad of Hirsau concludes his extended praise of the Bellum civile with Lucan’s rhetoric, his ­pulcra  verborum et sententiarum [ordinatio] ‘beautiful arrangement of words and thoughts’.12 Especially prized were epic similes (comparationes), the marginal identifications of which are legible and easy to find, and which can reach startling heights of complexity and decoration in later manuscripts. Modern scholars, too, consistently note the rhetorical emphasis of medieval glosses on the texts. According to Baswell, for example, a twelfth-century commentator on an important English manuscript of the Aeneid, Oxford, All Souls College, MS 82, demonstrates ‘a consistent interest in rhetorical aspects of the Aeneid, often identifying individual instances of figurative language, but also pointing out broader aspects of the structure of the epic’.13 Speaking generally in an early study of Lucan manuscripts, Eva Matthews Sanford notes, ‘the larger share of the conventional apparatus of [manuscripts of Lucan] is devoted to the purposes of rhetorical study . . . ’,14 and Winthrop Wetherbee concurs: ‘the emphasis of the scholia was largely on the rhetorical aspects of [Lucan’s] style’.15 Strong emotion, the third component and perhaps the most surprising, is closely connected with the rhetoric of speeches. This focus on emotion is especially clear in

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Experiencing the Classics in Medieval Education passages that received a kind of musical notation called neumes.16 Although the phenomenon is not recorded in classical manuscripts in England,17 during the tenth to the twelfth centuries neumes were added to specific passages in a significant number of continental copies of classical texts in order to aid in their performance in monastic schools.18 While neuming in copies of Horace’s Odes and Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae appears to have been added to help with the memorization of complex metres, in longer narrative poems like the Aeneid and the Bellum civile neuming is found most often on emotional passages, especially speeches.19 As Jan Ziolkowski notes, ‘the frenzy of Dido in the fourth book of the Aeneid, as it reveals itself in harangues to Aeneas and Anna as well as in a monologue, garnered more attention from neumators than any other episode in any classical Latin poem’.20 Her speeches are the major constituent of the overwhelming pathos present throughout the Aeneid, ‘nowhere more salient than in the fourth book’.21 According to Ziolkowski’s comprehensive study of the phenomenon, the speech of Dido most often neumed (in eleven manuscripts, mostly from Germany but also northern Italy and France, dating from the tenth to the twelfth centuries) is her address to her sister Anna in which she finally capitulates to the fact of her lover Aeneas’ departure and asks Anna to beg Aeneas for more time with him.22 Aeneas has become Dido’s enemy, and she highlights the injustice of an antagonistic relationship between them in the first lines of her speech: i, soror, atque hostem supplex adfare superbum. non ego dum Danais Troianam exscindere gentem Aulide iuravi classemve ad Pergama misi, nec patris Anchisae cineres Manisve revelli; cur mea dicta negat duras demittere in auris? (—go, sister, and humbly address our haughty foe. I never conspired with the Danaans at Aulis to root out the Trojan race; I never sent a fleet to Pergamus, nor tore up the ashes and disturbed the spirit of his father Anchises. Why does he refuse to admit my words to his stubborn ears?) (4. 424–8)23

Then she describes her present situation and the hurts of the immediate past, culminating in her pitiful plea for more time. In six manuscripts neuming continues through her final threat—promise?—of death: quo ruit? extremum hoc miserae det munus amanti: expectet facilemque fugam ventosque ferentis. non iam coniugium antiquum, quod prodidit, oro. nec pulchro ut Latio careat regnumque relinquat: tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori, dum mea me victam doceat fortuna dolere. extremam hanc oro veniam (miserere sororis) quam mihi cum dederit, cumulatam morte remittam.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Whither does he hasten? This, the last boon, let him grant his poor lover: let him await an easy flight and favouring winds. No more do I plead for the old marriage tie which he forswore, nor that he give up fair Latium and resign his realm: for empty time I ask, for peace and reprieve for my frenzy, till fortune teach my vanquished soul to grieve. This last grace I crave—pity your sister—which, when he has granted it, I will repay with full interest in my death.) (4. 429–36)

In rhetorical form Dido’s speech follows the standard past/present/future outline recommended by Cicero for creating a believable and convincing character (De inventione 1.36).24 But it has a rare (for Dido) consistency of tone and direction. A fifteenth-century Italian commentator who obsessively divides almost every other speech in the Aeneid into versions of five of the standard six partes orationis of official orations (Introduction, Narration/Statement of Facts, Proof, Refutation, Conclusion25) simply highlights with a marginal squiggle the lines from the beginning down to her acknowledgement that she is no longer asking him to recognize their relationship as a marriage.26 Another fifteenth-century Italian manuscript, in which the glosses are especially attuned to Dido’s emotional states, marks with a maniculum (pointing hand) the moving and painful penultimate two lines.27 In Lucan’s Bellum civile, too, it is a woman’s words that are neumed most often.28 Cornelia’s speech in Book 8 to her husband Pompey, after he returns from the disastrous battle with Caesar that is the centrepiece of the book and from which one version of its title (Pharsalia) is taken (8.88–108), is neumed in nine manuscripts, most German and dating from the second half of the tenth century to the end of the twelfth.29 Cornelia’s speech is layered and divisible in several ways, with the same past/present/future sequence as Dido’s: Cornelia’s wish that the past were different (if she had been married to Caesar, she could have brought disaster to him instead of to Pompey); her painful present (she feels responsible for Pompey’s defeat); and her vow for the future (she wants to be killed if it would mean that Pompey would live). She concludes with lines of direct address to Pompey’s dead ex-wife, Julia (who was Caesar’s daughter, and whose ghost has appeared to Pompey earlier).30 In only two of the nine neumed manuscripts does this type of musical highlighting stop at the same place, after her plea for punishment: O utinam in thalamos invisi Caesaris issem infelix coniunx et nulli laeta marito! bis nocui mundo: me pronuba ducit Erinys Crassorumque umbrae, devotaque manibus illis Assyrios in castra tuli civilia casus, praecipitesque dedi populos cunctosque fugavi a causa meliore deos. O maxime coniunx, o thalamis indigne meis, hoc iuris habebat in tantum fortuna caput? cur inpia nupsi, si miserum factura fui? nunc accipe poenas,

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Experiencing the Classics in Medieval Education sed quas sponte luam: quo sit tibi mollius aequor, certa fides regum totusque paratior orbis, sparge mari comitem. (Would that I had been wedded to hated Caesar; for disaster was my dower and I have brought happiness to no husband. Twice I have brought a curse on mankind; the Fury and the ghosts of the Crassi gave me in marriage; and I, devoted to those dead, have brought the disaster of Carrhae to the camp of civil war, and hurled nations to their doom, and driven all heaven away from the better side. O mighty husband, too good for such a wife, had Fortune more such power over one so great? Why was I guilty of marrying you, if I was to bring you sorrow? Now accept the penalty—a penalty which I will gladly pay: that the sea may be smoother for you, the winds steadfast in their loyalty, and the whole world more ready to serve you, scatter the limbs of your companion over the deep.) (Bellum civile, 8. 88–100)31

The lines where Cornelia says that she would willingly sacrifice herself for her husband (8.94–8) are familiar to medievalists from a different but equally memorable context: they were recited by Heloise when without religious vocation she took the veil in accordance with Abelard’s wishes.32 One of the manuscripts in which the part of the speech quoted above is neumed is a twelfth-century German copy of the Bellum civile in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, Clm 13091, here fol. 86r. The speech is identified as Planctus CORNELIE ‘Lament of Cornelia’33 in red letters squeezed in between the speech and a coloured drawing of a knight in armour to the right identified as MARS. On the facing page (fol. 85v) is a coloured drawing of the author, identified as LVCANUS, putting quill to parchment. These two drawings frame the neumed speech and create the most visually arresting folio opening, perhaps intentionally as an aid to locating this speech in the manuscript. Certainly this visual emphasis, along with the emotional participation of performing the speech according to the neumes, mark Cornelia’s words as a focal point of the experience of the text.34 In these poems by Virgil and Lucan we find historical allusions, rhetorical complexity, and heightened pathos and despair. The Aeneid and the Bellum civile functioned as common school texts, when students still needed help from their teachers in order to understand such historical facts, rhetorical principles, and emotional nuances. Yet both works demanded on the part of the students an advanced knowledge of Latin and the ability to comprehend longer narratives in verse form. Virgil’s Aeneid has remained in the forefront of classical scholarship, whereas until recently Lucan’s star had waned. Today Lucan’s Bellum civile commands the attention of scholars, if not of the numerous student audiences that it captivated during the Middle Ages. Not so another classical narrative also written, like Lucan’s epic, during the reign of Nero: the (in)famous Ilias latina, mostly ignored or even despised now, but perhaps also ready for more appreciative attention.35 It, too, was highlighted in medieval

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature curricular reading lists. For example, in his Libellus scolasticus (984) Walter of Speyer makes the Ilias latina, there called ‘Homerus’, the beginning of the ‘educational ascent’ of which Lucan and Virgil are the culmination.36 In schoolmaster Hugh of Trimberg’s Registrum multorum auctorum (c.1280), an easily memorized verse list of recommended school texts (with their incipits, or first words, to help students identify the texts in manuscripts), the section on Neronian authors concludes with the incipits from the works of Lucan, Statius, and ‘Homerus minor’, as the Ilias latina was also called.37 The Ilias latina is a verse abbreviation of 1,070 hexameters reducing the whole Iliad into about as many lines as a single long book of the original. The well-known twelfth-century accessus collection cited above contains a significant introduction to the Ilias latina in which the primary utilitas ‘usefulness’ of the text is defined as providing students with cognitio troiani belli ‘a knowledge of the Trojan War’.38 Medieval teachers’ embrace of this work—and others of extreme abbreviatio like the Eclogue attributed to Theodulus, with which it is sometimes found in manuscripts such as Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. F.2.14, an important early English collection of school texts39—demonstrates their recognition of the value of classical content tout court and the importance of abbreviation as a compositional technique.40 It is hard to imagine a more compact presentation of narrative data from the classical period than the Ilias latina.41 As a much shorter battle book than the Aeneid or Bellum civile, it was ‘ideal for inclusion in medieval school anthologies, where it appears most frequently’.42 The Ilias latina provides in an abbreviated format the combination of classical data, rhetorical techniques, and emotions like pathos that we have looked at above with regard to the Aeneid and the Bellum civile.43 In the introduction to his 1998 translation, George Kennedy notes that what the author, Baebius Italicus (identified relatively recently from manuscript acrostics44), ‘seems to have liked best are the battle scenes’.45 Kathryn McKinley, whose translation of the Ilias latina appeared in the same year, describes it as ‘an almost interminable series of clashes between individual Greek and Trojan heroes’.46 As Kennedy remarks, ‘Italicus’s similes are short and usually similes of violence’, such as when Hector is compared first to a wolf attacking a flock of sheep (489–93) and then almost immediately thereafter to a lion rushing into a herd of cows (500–3).47 The resulting text was tailor-made for medieval schoolboys who had no Greek, and the Ilias latina became a significant component of the medieval pedagogical tradition.48 Marco Scaffai has identified 140 manuscripts, including fragments and later copies, many of them placing the work in the context of the classroom.49 It is hard for us to read the Ilias latina as a medieval student would have, with no knowledge of Homer’s Greek text (and probably before having read Virgil, or even Ovid, both of whom influenced Baebius’ text50). The story is Homer’s, but the perspective is the Latin, that is Trojan, point of view: Ulysses is a thug, Helen dotes on Paris, and Agamemnon is a sexual predator. For example, after Agamemnon is forced to return

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Experiencing the Classics in Medieval Education Chryseis to her father, rapta magnum Briseide privat Achillem | solatur suos alienis ignibus ignes ‘he seized Briseis from great Achilles | and satisfied his lusts with another’s love’ (Ilias latina 72–3).51 To see what medieval teachers and their students gained from the Ilias latina, we have to put the Greek Homer aside. But as a review of the setting and beginning of the Homeric narrative, here is part of Plato’s intentionally flattened revision of Chryses’ unhappy visit to the Greek camp from the beginning of Book 1 of the Iliad: [T]he priest came and prayed that the gods would grant them the capture of Troy and a safe return home. He asked them to accept the ransom, respect the god and release his daughter to him. When he had said this everyone else paid their respects and approved his proposal, but Agamemnon grew angry and told him to go away immediately and never return; that his scepter and the wreaths he wore would not protect him; before his daughter was ransomed she would grow old with him in Argos. He told him to go away and not provoke him if he wanted to return home safely. (Republic 3. 393d–394a)52

Here is the same scene in the Ilias latina: castra petit Danaum genibusque affusus Atridae per superos regnique decus miserabilis orat, ut sibi causa suae reddatur nata salutis. Dona simul praefert. Vincuntur fletibus eius Myrmidones reddique patri Chryseida censent. Sed negat Atrides Chrysenque excedere castris despecta pietate iubet: ferus ossibus imis haeret amor spernitque preces damnosa libido. ([Chryses] sought the Danaan’s camp and prostrate at Agamemnon’s knees, wretched, he implored by the gods and the honor of the king, that his daughter be restored to him, the cause of his well-being, and offered gifts. The Myrmidons were won by his tears and approved Chryseis’ return to her father. But the son of Atreus refused, scorning piety and ordered that Chryses depart from camp: fierce love was fixed within his inmost bones and damnable lust rejected Chryses’ prayers.)

(Ilias latina 19–26)53 Plato’s version eliminates direct speech in order to make the scene less gripping. The author of the Ilias latina also often gets rid of speeches, but probably because of the constraints and aesthetic considerations of abbreviation; there is no evidence for ascribing to Baebius anything like Plato’s worry about mimicking others’ thoughts in direct speech. The version in the Ilias latina of this part of the Iliad

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature retains some of the emotional impact, albeit in much simpler form, that Plato deliberately removed. The scarcity of formal speechifying in the Ilias latina, a definite contrast to both the Aeneid and the Bellum civile, may have been an additional reason why it was included with easier texts in medieval manuscripts and graded lists of curricular recommendations. But speeches are not completely absent, and not all changes in the Ilias latina are abbreviations. Hector’s final, simple plea to Achilles as he is dying (Iliad 22.345–54) is elaborated in Ilias latina in a passage that, as Kennedy notes, also draws on both Priam’s visit to Achilles in Iliad 24 and the death of Turnus in Aeneid 12:54 En concede meos miseris genitoribus artus, quos pater infelix multo mercabitur auro: dona feres victor. Priami nunc filius orat, te Priamus, dux ille ducum, quem Graecia solum pertimuit: si, nec precibus nec munere victus, nec lacrimis miseri nec clara gente moveris, afflicti miserere patris: moveat tua Peleus pectora pro Priamo, pro nostro corpore Pyrrhus. (Grant my limbs to my wretched descendants, which my suffering father will pay for with much gold: victor, you will carry off gifts. Now Priam’s son begs you, now Priam himself, that leader of leaders, whom alone Greece has feared: if you are not won by my prayers, nor moved by the tears of a wretched man nor by an outstanding people, have pity on a grieving parent: let Peleus move your heart on Priam’s behalf, on behalf of my body, Pyrrhus.) (Ilias latina, 980–7)55

Alas, the speech has the same result as in the Iliad itself, underscored by the fact that in two eleventh-century manuscripts of the Ilias latina as well as some later copies and incunabula the work is followed immediately by the Epitaphium Hectoris (Hector’s Epitaph).56 Two late eleventh-century English manuscripts containing the Ilias latina form the basis of an important branch of the manuscript tradition of the text, and they are often identified as collections of school texts (both medieval and classical, which are listed below) as well as other works: MS O = Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson G.57 (Add. 14788). The Ilias latina is on folios 6r–27r. This manuscript was originally together with Rawl. G.111, but the two were separated and rebound by Rawlinson himself. In addition to the Ilias latina (called Liber Homeri ‘Book of Homer’) and Epitaphium Hectoris, the original manuscript contained the Disticha Catonis and Fables of Avianus. There are a few glosses on the Ilias latina in both Latin and Old English.57

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Experiencing the Classics in Medieval Education MS X = Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. F. 2. 14 (2657). The Ilias latina is on folios 90r–104v. This manuscript, from the Benedictine Abbey of Sherborne in Dorset, also contains the Eclogue of Theodulus, Fables of Avianus, Satires of Persius, and Achilleid of Statius.58

Both of these manuscripts divide the Ilias latina into ‘books’, a common phenomenon in early manuscripts of the text.59 The length of the books varies wildly, with the earliest the longest, and they do not correspond with the division into books of the original.60 For example, the long farewell scene between Hector and Andromache at the end of Book 6 of the Iliad is a short introduction to Book 7 in the Ilias latina, where it is devoid of speeches but does include the memorable visual scene with Hector’s son and his father’s helmet (564–74). Although the book divisions can seem capricious, they reflect an attention to mood and content. Beginning Book 7 with Hector, Andromache, and their child makes their scene together an introduction to the battles that follow, while the simplicity of the three-line Book 17 about Ajax protecting the body of Patroclus has an emblematic quality that is set off by the focus conferred on it by the breaks before and after: Vindicat exstincti corpus Telamonius Aiax oppositoque tegit clipeo. Priameia pubes laetitia exsultat, Danai sua vulnera maerent. (Telamonian Ajax laid claim to the body of the dead youth and covered it with a shield. Priam’s men exulted with happiness; the Greeks mourned over their wounds.) (Ilias latina 836–8)

The formatting of the Ilias latina in these two early manuscripts and the contents of the text itself reflect in much simpler form the valued aspects of school texts discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The historical background provided by the text is highlighted in MS O, for example, in which most of the marginal comments provide information about the characters, especially in the first half of the text (e.g. fols 7v–8r, 10r, and the long gloss on Paris [Alexander] on fol. 10v). And as we would suspect, similes are consistently identified in the margin (e.g. fols 11v, 13v, 15v, 17v, etc.). Female emotions are simplified and limited in the Ilias latina, but the pathos of male heroes, perhaps considered more appropriate for students younger than those struggling with Virgil and Lucan, is highlighted throughout. Pathos in general was a focus of ‘rhetorical practice of the Silver Age’ (as in Lucan, too),61 and a combination of pathos and violence was typical of texts aimed at and/or chosen for male adolescents during the Middle Ages.62 This emphasis on male pathos in the Ilias latina is heightened by the severely curtailed influence of gods on the motivations and actions of the characters in this radically shortened version of the Homeric narrative.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Thus, while the Ilias latina may be especially memorable to modern readers for the famous speeches and other well-known passages in the Iliad that it alters, abbreviates, or omits entirely, as well as the battle material that it not only retains but emphasizes, these very alterations may have strengthened its pedagogical utility in the early stages of the curriculum. A medieval student would have read the Ilias latina long before either the Bellum civile or the Aeneid, and any student, medieval or modern, would find the Ilias latina easier going than the longer, more sophisticated epics.63 From this short work students gained background information and a knowledge of techniques helpful for reading the longer, more sophisticated texts that they would encounter later.64 Looking at the Ilias latina as a text that provides in simpler form some of the same pedagogical foci valued in more sophisticated texts allows us to see it from one perspective as providing a similar kind of classroom experience to the Aeneid and the Bellum civile. The commonalities of this experience encourage us to question the humanist canonization of Virgil (and to a lesser extent Lucan) and concomitant dismissal of texts used at lower levels in medieval schools. In medieval pedagogical terms, the epic narratives of Virgil and Lucan are qualitatively different from the Ilias latina mainly for their more difficult language.65 Medieval students could read Virgil and Lucan for the same reasons that they had read the Ilias latina, and it was often through such elementary Latin poetry that they first entered and engaged with classical narrative.66 Examining from the perspective of shared pedagogical values other works—whether classical or not—that students read in between or in company with these three texts would broaden our own knowledge and understanding of the experience of the medieval classroom as well.67

Notes 1   See Ernst Robert Curtius’s typically pithy comment about the combining of classical and non-classical texts in medieval schools: ‘All authors are, as it were, authorities’ (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1953), with new introduction by Colin Burrow (2013, 49). He is seconded by later scholars such as Aldo Scaglione, who notes, ‘the Christian authors, including the poets . . . , were read together with the pagans, sometimes by contrasting their divergent validities but more often without any expressed feeling of inconsistency (‘The Classics in Medieval Education’, in The Classics in the Middle Ages, eds Aldo S. Bernardo and Saul Levin (Binghamton, NY, 1990), pp. 343–62 (at p. 353). Concerning important English manuscripts of school texts discussed below, Scott Gwara states, ‘One observes a combined “classical” and Christian focus’, and ‘The contents suggest that we should not overemphasize the Christian content of monastic learning’ (‘Anglo-Saxon Schoolbooks’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, c.400–1100, ed. Richard Gameson (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 507–24 (at pp. 520 and 515). See also Robert Black, ‘Teaching

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Experiencing the Classics in Medieval Education Techniques: The Evidence of Manuscript Schoolbooks Produced in Tuscany’, in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom: The Role of Ancient Texts in the Arts Curriculum as Revealed by Surviving Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, eds Juanita Feros Ruys, John O. Ward, and Melanie Heyworth (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 245–66 (at p. 247); other essays in this collection are also relevant to the theme of the present volume. 2   See Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 41–83; Gwara cautions, however, against assuming that the early English copies of the Aeneid are unequivocally school manuscripts (‘Anglo-Saxon Schoolbooks’, p. 521). 3   There is, however, some revival of interest in the Bellum civile today. On the status of Lucan see Chapter 11 on Lucan in this volume by Hiatt. 4   Eva Matthews Sanford, ‘Lucan and his Roman Critics’, Classical Philology 26 (1931), 233–57 (at pp. 235 and 240–4); and the editor’s remarks in Der Libellus Scolasticus des Walther von Speyer: Ein Schulbericht aus dem Jahre 984, ed. Peter Vossen (Berlin, 1962), p. 90, citing P. Wessner, ‘Lucan, Statius und Juvenal bei den römischen Grammatikern’, Philologische Wochenschrift 49 (1929), 296–303 and 328–35. Including fragments, more than 600 manuscripts of the Aeneid have survived (Gian Carlo Alessio, ‘Manoscritti’, Enciclopedia Virgiliana (Rome, 1991), 3.432b–442a), and there are extant ‘more than 400 complete and partial copies’ of Lucan (Richard J. Tarrant, ‘Lucan’, Texts and Transmission, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford, 1983), pp. 215–18 (at p. 215)). In general on Lucan in the Middle Ages see Peter von Moos, Entre histoire et littérature: communication et culture au moyen âge (Florence, 2005), pp. 89–202. 5   For a careful examination of vernacular references to Lucan, see Chapter  11 in this ­volume by Hiatt. 6   See Chapter 2 in this volume by Copeland, as well as Peter von Moos, ‘Lucans tragedia im Hochmittelalter. Pessimismus, contemptus mundi, und Gegenwartserfahrung’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 14 (1979), 127–86 (at pp. 127–8). 7   These classical authors are listed separately after a group of later texts; Gervais von Melkley, Ars poetica, ed. Hans-Jürgen Gräbener (Münster Westfalen, 1965), pp. 3.24–5 and 4.1; trans. Catherine Yodice Giles, ‘Gervais of Melkley’s Treatise on the Art of Versifying and the Method of Composing in Prose: Translation and Commentary’ (Ph.D. dissertation Rutgers University, 1973), p. 4. 8   ‘Ruthlessness’ is usually associated with medieval learning in terms of beating and other forms of corporal punishment, but on that topic see the revisionary approach of Irina Dumitrescu, ‘Violence, Performance and Pedagogy in Ælfric Bata’s Colloquies’, Exemplaria 23 (2011), 67–91. 9  Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, p. 49; the emphasis here on the basic continuity of focus in the lower schools is an important conclusion. Baswell qualifies his statement, noting that this focus sometimes led to a ‘flattening of the text by its twelfth-century apparatus’ in order to ‘fulfill the very different intentions of the twelfth-century schoolroom’ (p. 61), but I want to reinforce his concept of a more continuous, if varied, interest in historical background throughout the premodern periods. Cf. Marjorie Curry Woods, ‘What are the Real Differences

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature between Medieval and Renaissance Commentaries?’, in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom, pp. 329–41. 10   On another kind of glossing later in this manuscript, see Jan M. Ziolkowski, Nota bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Ages (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 258 and 259. 11   Accessus ad auctores, Bernard d’Utrecht, Conrad d’Hirsau, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden, 1970), ‘Accessus Lucani’, pp. 39–44. In a well-known medieval commonplace regarding Lucan’s work, Conrad of Hirsau (c.1070– c.1150) provides an instructive discussion of why the adjective ‘civil’ in the title is an inaccurate description of the ruthless, destructive warfare that the Bellum civile describes (‘Super Lucanum’, 1222–33 and 1235–50, pp. 110–11). The debate over whether Lucan was poet or historian emphasizes his status as a repository of historical information; see von Moos, ‘Poeta und Historicus im Mittelalter. Zum MimesisProblem am  Beispiel einiger Urteile über Lucan’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 98 (1976), 93–130; and Chapter 11 in this volume by Hiatt. 12   Accessus ad auctores, ed. Huygens, ‘Accessus Lucani’, pp. 39–44; and ‘Super Lucanum’, 1200–5, p. 110. See also Leslie G. Whitbread, ‘Conrad of Hirsau as Literary Critic’, Speculum 47 (1972), 234–45. 13  Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, p. 73; see also Jan M. Ziolkowski and Michael C. J. Putnam, The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years (New Haven, 2008), p. 172. 14   Eva Matthews Sanford, ‘Manuscripts of Lucan: Accessus and Marginalia’, Speculum 9:3 (1934), 278–95 (at p. 279). 15   Winthrop Wetherbee, ‘[The Study of Classical Authors] From Antiquity to the Twelfth Century’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages, eds Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 99–144 (at p. 126). For numerous examples of such rhetorical comments, see London, British Library, Additional MS 11990. 16   This section on neumes is based on Ziolkowski, Nota bene, portions of which are reproduced in altered and condensed form in Ziolkowski and Putnam, Virgilian Tradition, pp. 167–78; I have cited both sources where appropriate. 17   There is, however, a discussion of ‘Breton neumes’ added in the eleventh century to earlier Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of non-classical texts in Susan Rankin, ‘Music Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 482–506 (at pp. 489–93). 18  Ziolkowski, Nota bene, passim, e.g. pp. 143, 150–4. See plates of neumed manuscript passages of Lucan in Ziolkowski, Nota bene, illustrations 2 (p. 17) and 14 (p. 216), and the Aeneid in illustrations 1 (p. 4), 5 (p. 54), and 12 (p. 158). 19  On the focus of neumes on speeches see Ziolkowski, Nota bene, pp. 154–60; and Ziolkowski and Putnam, Virgilian Tradition, pp. 168–9. 20   Ziolkowski and Putnam, Virgilian Tradition, p. 171; and Ziolkowski, Nota bene, p. 162. 21  Ziolkowski, Nota bene, pp. 163–4, drawing on Richard Heinze, Virgil’s Epic Technique, trans. Hazel Harvey, David Harvey, and Fred Robertson, 2nd edn (Bristol, 1993). See also Rudolf Rieks, Affekte und Structuren. Pathos als ein Form- und Wirkprinzip von Vergil’s Aeneis (Munich, 1989). See also Marjorie Curry Woods, ‘Performing Dido’, Public Declamations:

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Experiencing the Classics in Medieval Education Essays on Medieval Rhetoric, Education, and Letters in Honour of Martin Camargo, eds Georgiana Donavin and Denise Stodola (Turnhout, 2015), pp. 253–65. 22   See Ziolkowski’s appendices, Nota bene, pp. 275–6 and 286–7, condensed in Ziolkowski and Putnam, Virgilian Tradition, pp. 174–8. On the interrelationship of neuming and other kinds of notation on Dido’s last words beginning at Aen. 4.651, see Ziolkowski and Putnam, Virgilian Tradition, pp. 171–2; and Ziolkowski, Nota bene, pp. 162–3. 23  Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). 24  Cf. Marjorie Curry Woods, ‘The Classroom as Courtroom: Cicero’s Attributes of Persons and the Interpretation of Classical Literary Characters in the Renaissance’, Ciceroniana. Atti del XIII Colloquium Tullianum. Milano, 27–9 marzo 2008, ns 13 (2009), 203–15 (at p. 207). This temporal sequence differs from that of ‘present/past/future’ outlined in the Greek ethopoeia tradition; e.g. ‘On Ethopoeia’, in ‘The Preliminary Exercises of Aphthonius the Sophist’, in Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric, trans. George A. Kennedy (Atlanta, 2003), pp. 115–17 (at p. 116). 25   The traditional third part, Division, is usually omitted in analyses of literary speeches. See Marjorie Curry Woods, ‘Rhetoric, Gender, and the Literary Arts: Classical Speeches in the Schoolroom’, New Medieval Literatures, Special Issue on Medieval Grammar and the Literary Arts, eds Chris Cannon, Rita Copeland, and Nicolette Zeeman (2009), 11, 113–32 (at pp. 123–31). 26   Rome, Biblioteca dell’Accademia dei Lincei e Corsiniana, MS 43 G 22 (Rossi 375), fol. 70v. 27   Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 685, fol. 62r. See the comparison of other Virgilian speeches in these manuscripts in Woods, ‘Rhetoric, Gender, and the Literary Arts’, pp. 124–31. 28  Ziolkowski, Nota bene, pp. 258–60 and 282. Recent studies of emotion in the Bellum civile focus on public emotion, such as Christine Walde, ‘Lucan’s Bellum civile: A Specimen of a Roman “Literature of Trauma”’, in Brill’s Companion to Lucan, ed. Paolo Asso (Leiden, 2011), pp. 283–302; see also Eduard Fraenkel, ‘Lucan as the Transmitter of Ancient Pathos’, trans. Leofranc Holford-Stevens, in Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Lucan, ed. Charles Tesoriero (Oxford, 2010); this essay was originally published in German in 1924. Relevant here is Richard T. Bruere, ‘Lucan’s Cornelia’, Classical Philology 46 (1961), 221–36. On women’s emotions in the premodern classroom in general see Manfred Kraus, ‘Rehearsing the Other Sex: Impersonation of Women in Ancient Classroom Ethopoeia’, in Escuela y literature en Grecia antigua, eds José Antonio Fernández Delgado et al. (Cassino, 2007), pp. 455–68; and Marjorie Curry Woods, ‘Weeping for Dido: Epilogue on a Premodern Rhetorical Exercise in the Postmodern Classroom’, in Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice, ed. Carol Dana Lanham (2002), pp. 284–94. 29   See Ziolkowski, Nota bene, p. 282, for a list of the manuscripts and lines neumed. On the neuming of an earlier speech by Cornelia that culminates in a swoon, with an accompanying gloss ‘offer[ing] a mini florilegium of fainting scenes from the Aeneid’, see Nota bene, p. 215.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 30   Glosses in an eleventh-century manuscript of Lucan’s Bellum civile in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14505 attempt to clarify the complex psychology at work in the speech. For example, when Cornelia begins by saying that she wishes she had married Caesar, the gloss over line 8.88 explains, ‘Non quod Pompeio Cesarem preferat sed idcirco uult Cesari nupsisse quia infelix ipsa Cesari posset talem fortunam afferre’ (‘Not that she would prefer Caesar to Pompey, but she wishes to have married Caesar for the reason that she, unhappy, might bring such [i.e. the same bad] fortune to Caesar’) (fol. 91v; cited in Adnotationes super Lucanum, ed. Johannes Endt (1909; repr. Stuttgart, 1969), p. 301). Cf. the glosses on this speech by Arnulf of Orléans, Arnulfi Aurelianensis Glosule super Lucanum, ed. Berthe M. Marti (Rome, 1958), p. 398. 31  Lucan, The Civil War (Pharsalia), trans. J. D. Duff (Cambridge, Mass., 1928; repr. 1977). 32  Abelard, Historia calamitatum, ed. Jacques Monfrin (Paris, 1978), lines 634–8. See also Peter van Moos, ‘Cornelia und Heloise’, Latomus 34 (1975), 1024–59; and Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 222–7. Abelard’s report of Heloise’s recitation of these lines is unusual in that the speaker performing the lines is female. Most information that we have on the performance of emotional speeches from classical texts, whether by men or women, is in the classroom and by boys; see above n. 28. 33   Clm 13091, fol. 86r; also identified in rubrics are, on fol. 62v, ‘SCEVE CALIDITAS’ and ‘VERBA SCEVAE’ [sic] (Bellum civile, 6.237 and 241), and, on fol. 98v, ‘Querela CORNELIE (9.55). 34   During the medieval period passages in manuscripts were identified by folio opening according to the folio number on the right rather than as the verso of the sheet on the left and recto of that on the right. Thus, a medieval reader would refer here to ‘folio 86’ rather than ‘folios 85v–86r’; see Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Columbus, Oh., 2010), p. 269. There are a few other drawings in the manuscript, but none facing each other across an opening as here. 35   For typically judgemental phrases from modern assessments, see Kathryn L. McKinley, ‘The Medieval Homer: The Ilias Latina’, Allegorica 19 (1998), 3–61 (at p. 3). McKinley’s article contains a short introduction with Latin text and facing translation. George Kennedy provides a much longer introduction with the text followed by a separate translation in The Latin Iliad: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Notes (Fort Collins, Colo., 1998; slightly revised, 2007). Both draw on Baebii Italici Ilias latina. Introduzione, edizione critica, traduzione italiana e commento, ed. Marco Scaffai (Bologna, 1982; rev. 1997). 36   Der Libellus, ed. Vossen, lines 91–106, p. 39. The term ‘educational ascent’ is Rita Copeland’s in ‘Producing the Lector’, Medieval and Early Modern Authorship, eds Guillamette Bolens and Lukas Erne (Tübingen, 2011), pp. 231–49 (at p. 235). In his Dialogus super auctores, Conrad of Hirsau discusses ‘Homerus’, but by relaying somewhat critical remarks of Latin writers about the author of the Iliad itself; Accessus ad auctores, ed. Huygens, p. 118, lines 1445–60, trans. Alastair Minnis, ‘Dialogue on the Authors’, in Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100–c.1375, eds A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, with David Wallace (Oxford, 1988; rev. edn 1991), p. 60.

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Experiencing the Classics in Medieval Education 37   Hugh of Trimberg, Das Registrum multorum auctorum, ed. Karl Langosch (Berlin, 1942), lines 161h–177c. This passage is summarized in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, ad 300–1475, eds Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter (Oxford, 2009), p. 661; other selections on pp. 657–69. 38   Accessus ad auctores, ed. Huygens, ‘Accessus Homeri’ 11, pp. 25–6; trans. Minnis, ‘Introductions to the Authors’, in Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 16–17; see also the title of the work in an English manuscript discussed on p. 42. This accessus to the Ilias latina develops a second framework for analysing the text in terms of learning not to offend the gods from the ‘illicit union’ that caused the war (12–17, p. 26). Thomas Walsingham’s accessus or, as he calls it, ‘prohemium’, to ‘Omerus’ mentions the Greek author’s lies (in contrast to the historical accounts of the prose writers on Troy, Dares and Dictys), a not uncommon attitude (Prohemia poetarum Fratris Thome de Walsingham, ed. Dianne Margaret Heriot (Ph.D. dissertation, Monash University, 1992), pp. 58 and 192–3). 39   On Oxford, Bodleian Library, Auct. F.2.14, see p. 43. For other manuscripts containing the two works, see Marco Scaffai, ‘Tradizione manoscritta dell’ Ilias Latina’, in In verbis verum amare. miscellanea dell’Istituto di filologia latina e medioevale, Università di Bologna (Florence, 1980), pp. 205–77, e.g. pp. 211, 215, 218, 220, 226, 229, 230, etc. 40   For a recent study that takes rhetorical abbreviation (and some amplification) in the Ilias latina seriously, see Christiane Reitz, ‘Verkürzen und Erweitern—Literarische Techniken für eilige Leser? Die “Ilias Latina” als poetische Epitome’, Hermes 135 (2007), 334–51. Cf. also Elizabeth Young, ‘Homer in a Nutshell: Vergilian Miniaturization and the Sublime’, PMLA 128 (2013), 57–72. 41   Eberhard the German, however, a medieval teacher of rhetoric, provided a further radical abbreviation of this epitome in the Laborintus (643–4), quoted and translated by McKinley, ‘Medieval Homer’, p. 4. 42   McKinley, ‘Medieval Homer’, p. 3. 43   Marilynn Desmond notes in Chapter 13 of this volume that the direct impact of the Ilias latina on medieval texts appears to have been minimal, and this may be especially true of works in the vernacular (p. 253). The Ilias latina is quoted in the ‘Vulgate’ commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (McKinley, ‘Medieval Homer’, p. 4) and by Thomas Walsingham in his Dites ditatus (A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature (Cambridge, 1992), p. 298); see also Thomas Gärtner, Klassische Vorbilder mittelalterlicher Trojaepen (Stuttgart, 1999), e.g. pp. 447–9 and 461–5. It is probable that other influences on medieval Latin literature will be discovered. 44   As early as the late antique period, the name of the author was lost (Giuseppe Broccia, Prolegomeni all’ ‘Omero latino’ (Macerata, 1992), p. 21). A little over a century ago the author was identified with near certainty as P. Baebius Italicus, ‘a young Roman’ who, it is hypothesized, wrote the text c. 60 ad (Kennedy, Latin Iliad, p. 8). A fifteenth-century manuscript in Vienna (Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS lat. 3509) identifies the author as Baebius Italicus, and scholars subsequently noted that the first initial of the first and last lines spell out I-T-A-LI-C-*-S S-C-R-I-P-S-I T; see Scaffai, Ilias latina, pp. 1–29, and Kennedy, Latin Iliad, pp. 7–9, on the history of this identification. In medieval manuscripts it is often simply referred to as

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature ‘Homerus’ or ‘Homerus latinus’. The author is also sometimes called ‘Pindar Thebanus’ as in Michael Baldzuhn, Schulbücher im Trivium des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, 2 vols (Berlin, 2009), passim; see also below, n. 59. 45   George Kennedy suggests that the author may have composed it as ‘a student exercise when he was in his teens’, and notes, ‘battle scenes with their simplified vocabulary and formulaic structures were easier to compose than were speeches or similes’ (Latin Iliad, pp. 8 and 10). 46   McKinley, ‘Medieval Homer’, p. 5. 47  Kennedy, Latin Iliad, p. 10. Cf. Alice Oswald, Memorial, an Excavation of the Iliad (2011), which retains and reworks only the similes and the deaths. 48  Scaffai, ‘Tradizione’, pp. 205–77; see also P. K. Marxhall, ‘Ilias latina’, in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford, 1983), pp. 191–4, which draws on Scaffai’s study. Two early English manuscripts of the text are discussed below, but, as McKinley notes, ‘most of the surviving manuscripts were copied in France and Germany’ (‘Medieval Homer’, p. 3, citing Scaffai, Ilias latina, pp. 36–44). 49   Scaffai makes a good case that the text was a regular part of the collection of school texts called the Liber catonianus, which is discussed in terms of a more limited list of contents in Marjorie Curry Woods and Rita Copeland, ‘Classroom and Confession’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace, rev. edn (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 376–406 (at pp. 380–4). 50   P. Venini, ‘Sull’imitatio virgiliana nell’Ilias Latina’, Vichiana 11 (1982), 311–17; R. Verdiere, ‘L’Authenticité ovidienne de l’Halieuticon et l’Ilias latina’, Les Études classiques 54 (1986), 85–7; and Ziolkowski and Putnam, Virgilian Tradition, pp. 705–7. 51   On Agamemnon’s sexual desire see Kennedy, Latin Iliad, p. 11 n. 10. 52  Plato, Republic I–V, eds and trans. Christopher Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy (Cambridge, Mass., 2013). 53   McKinley’s translation is cited here because it is more readily available, but Kennedy’s has an especially felicitous beginning that reproduces (and bolds) the first lines with the same letters that helped identify the author in the Latin version of the text. Kennedy’s much longer introduction offers a more sympathetic reading of the text. The Latin text is quoted from Scaffai’s edition unless otherwise noted. 54  Kennedy, Latin Iliad, p. 69 n. 119. 55   The numbering and line breaks in McKinley’s translation here are in error and have been silently corrected (cf. Kennedy, Latin Iliad, p. 69); none of the words has been changed, however. 56   Scaffai, ‘Tradizione’, pp. 219, 223, and 229; the early manuscripts are Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawl. G.57 (on this manuscript see more below), and Venice, Biblioteca nazionale Marciana, MS lat. Z.497 (1811). The Epitaphium Hectoris has been edited by Alexander Riese, Anthologia latina (Leipzig, 1893–7), vol. 2.1, no. 631. 57  Scaffai, ‘Tradizione’, pp. 218–19; Ilias latina, p. 37; Patrizia Lendinara, ‘Instructional Manuscripts in England: The Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Codices and the Early Norman Ones’, in Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the Light of Contemporary

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Experiencing the Classics in Medieval Education Manuscript Evidence, eds Patrizia Lendinara, Loredana Lazzari, and Maria Amalia D’Aronco (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 59–113 (at p. 84); Filippa Alcamesi, ‘Remigius’s Commentary to the Disticha Catonis in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts’, in Form and Content, pp. 143–85 (at 153–4); also Gwara, ‘Anglo-Saxon Schoolbooks’, p. 515. The author is identified as ‘Pindarus’. On the Epitaphium Hectoris see the preceding note. 58  Scaffai, ‘Tradizione’, pp. 226–9, and Ilias latina, pp. 37–8; Lendinara, ‘Instructional Manuscripts’, p. 84; and Gwara, ‘Anglo-Saxon Schoolbooks’, p. 520. 59   Scaffai lists the division into 24 books in ‘Tradizione’, p. 247. There is some confusion in MS X, exacerbated perhaps by the fact that Book 17 is only is only three lines long and the rubric identifies the beginning of Book 18 as Book 17 (836–8; fol. 102v); the beginning of Book 22 at line 944 is also missed completely, and the rubric at Book 23 identifies it as Book 22 (line 1004, fol. 103v) and is the last rubric in this manuscript of the text. Hesitation about book divisions is clear in a twelfth-century manuscript in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 19462, where after Book 7 the scribe indicates divisions only by larger, rubricated initials, whereas earlier books were marked by both a space between books and by rubrics. 60   For a chart of correspondences between the Iliad and the Ilias latina, see Gérard Fry, Récits inédits sur la guerre de Troie. Iliade latine. Éphéméride de la guerre de Troie. Histoire de la destruction de Troie (Paris, 1998), p. 19. 61  Kennedy, Latin Iliad, p. 9. Pathos was increasingly prized during the later Middle Ages and the early Renaissance; see María Violéta Pérez Custodio, ‘La expresión del ethos y el pathos en las etopeyas escolares del Renacimiento’, in Humanismo y pervivencia del mundo clásico. Homenaje al profesor Luis Gil, ed. José María Maestre Maestre, 2 vols (Cádiz, 1997), 2, 795–806. 62  See Susan Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, 2002), p. 181; Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and his Followers (Gainesville, Fla, 2000), pp. 91–6; and Woods, Classroom Commentaries, pp. 7–8. 63   George Kennedy suggests a pedagogical use for the Ilias latina in today’s Latin classes and formats his study of the text and translation accordingly (Latin Iliad, p. 2). 64   In the present chapter the three texts have been discussed in the opposite order from that in which a medieval student would have encountered them. 65   On ‘graduated linguistic complexity’ in other kinds of texts, here dialogues, see Gwara, ‘AngloSaxon Schoolbooks’, p. 510; also with regard to easier, ‘middle’, and ‘more difficult’ texts, see Karin Margareta Fredborg, ‘The Grammar and Rhetoric Offered to John of Salisbury’, in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom, eds Ruys et al., pp. 103–30 (at p. 113); and Black, ‘Teaching Techniques’, p. 247. For a later school exercise emphasizing a knowledge of grammar necessary before approaching Virgil, see Nicholas Orme, English School Exercises (Toronto, 2013), 12.88. 66   See the ‘very uncanonical canon’ of classical works (including the Ilias latina) based on medieval reception proposed by Ralph J. Hexter, ‘Canonicity’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, eds Ralph J. Hexter and David Townshend (Oxford, 2012), pp. 25–44 (at p. 35). 67   The author is happy to acknowledge the suggestions and corrections of Rebecca Beal, Rita Copeland, Frank Coulson, Irina Dumitrescu, Susanne Hafner, Justin Haynes, Alfred Hiatt, Peter Jelavich, Craig Kallendorf, James Patterson, and Stephen White.

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Chapter 4

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW The Trivium and the Classics Rita Copeland

The medieval notion of the ‘trivium’ (along with its counterpart the ‘quadrivium’) provided a heuristic paradigm for approaching the intellectual disciplines (known as ‘arts’, or ‘sciences’ from scientia, knowledge) inherited from antiquity. The scheme of seven liberal arts, comprising the trivium and quadrivium, was itself an inheritance from late antiquity. This scheme was not so fixed as to be determinative: the framework of the trivium did not constrain study, but rather reflected the pattern of a natural progression of knowledge, from learning about language to learning how to use language as an interpretative, persuasive, and analytical tool. The arts of the trivium were considered to be so basic that without them there could be no access to the mathematically based arts of the quadrivium. For this reason, the trivium was also often known as the ‘arts of language’ or the artes sermocinales: along with grammar and rhetoric, dialectic was understood as a field of language study by which one learned how to recognize plausible propositions and distinguish them from false statements. The arts of the trivium were important conduits for the reception and study of classical learning.

Grammar and Rhetoric The first chapter of this volume surveyed the presence and the uses of the classical auctores in the grammar curriculum, treating that subject separately from the formal teaching of grammar in order to provide a picture of the literary canon that would be familiar to many readers. But grammatical teaching was first a technical enterprise involving instruction in the components of Latin grammar, which was the road to literacy. In an etymology made commonplace by Isidore of Seville, grammar was the ‘reading road’ because the word littera (letter) is said to derive from leg-iter-a, a ‘path’ (iter) of ‘reading’ (legere).1

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The foundational texts for the teaching of the Latin language were the works of late antique grammarians of the Roman Empire who wrote for Latinate audiences, providing normative descriptions of the Latin language. Aelius Donatus, a fourth-­ century Roman grammarian whom Jerome claimed as his own teacher, was the author of the Ars minor, which is an elementary catechism on the parts of speech, and the Ars maior, an advanced grammar that deals with voice and the composition of the word, the parts of speech, and in Book 3 the stylistic faults and their obverse, figures and tropes. Together, the Ars minor and Ars maior were the most influential of the ancient grammars, with the elementary Ars minor achieving an unparalleled ubiquity in medieval teaching. Although comparatively few manuscripts of Donatus’ artes survive from before the twelfth century, their influence pervades early grammatical culture.2  Priscian of Caesarea’s Institutiones grammaticae, written in Constantinople during the early sixth century, became the advanced theoretical grammar of record. In eighteen books it combines grammatical rules (on the order of traditional grammatical textbooks) with the philosophical orientation of Greek grammatical thought on syntax and morphology. Its real impact on medieval grammatical thought stems from the ninth century, when Carolingian scholars began to appreciate its deep and detailed teaching. Along with Donatus and Priscian, other late antique compendia of grammar were known and used, especially the summaries of grammar in Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, Cassiodorus’ Institutiones, and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae. Other late antique grammarians known in Britain include Charisius and Diomedes (both fourth century) and Pompeius (fifth or sixth century).3 That continuous classical tradition of grammar found its early medieval expression in the grammatical enigmas of Virgilius Maro Grammaticus (c.650), probably an Irish writer whose parodic yet serious Schulgrammatiken take their doctrine from Donatus.4 In Anglo-Saxon England, the late antique grammars were supplemented by new works directed at the needs of those learning Latin from the vernacular. Vivien Law has characterized some of these native works, including those by Tatwine and Boniface, as ‘elementary grammars’.5 They are indebted to Donatus and the late antique compendia, but they make the material easier of access, focusing especially on paradigms of noun declensions, often adding many individual examples, and incorporating a Christian vocabulary into the teaching. Bede’s De metrica and De schematibus et tropis (c.710) constitute a unified grammatical treatise designed to help students recognize the stylistic devices they will encounter in sacred but also classical texts. This double treatise also derives its teaching from late antique sources, including Diomedes and Donatus, but it is endowed with a new purpose that gives it a focused completeness for its monastic audiences.6 The same may also be said of Bede’s De orthographia, a textbook not simply on spelling, but on emendation.7 With Alcuin’s Ars grammatica (c.790–800) we arrive at a confident pedagogy that sees grammar in a more theoretical framework, linked with dialectical thought and

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The Trivium and the Classics also located in the here and now of England and France. Alcuin stands at the beginning of the revival of Priscianic grammar, the first in a series of international Carolingian scholars (including John Scotus Eriugena and Sedulius Scotus) to embrace Priscian’s Institutiones for its philosophical approach to language, and to move towards linguistic considerations, inspired by the dialectical terminology (substance and accident, acting and being acted upon) that Priscian uses.8 Alcuin constructs the Ars along traditional lines as a catechism on grammar, but with a contemporary twist: the master is engaged by two students, Saxo (a Saxon) and Franco (a Frank), that is, non-Latinate learners of Latin whose names also suggest the English and Frankish realms within which Alcuin himself moved. Priscian continued to figure in the teaching of Latin grammar in Anglo-Saxon England, most importantly as the indirect source of the earliest grammar in a post-classical vernacular, the Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglice of Æelfric of Eynsham (‘Ælfric Grammaticus’), written in the decade between 992 and 1002, while Ælfric was teaching at Cerne Abbas in Dorset. The actual source that Ælfric used was the Excerptiones de Prisciano, a Carolingian compilation from Priscian’s Institutiones which sought to bring Priscianic doctrine into line with the more direct organization of Donatus’ Ars maior.9 Ælfric turned this abridgement from Priscian into a pedagogical grammar for native English speakers, incorporating paradigms for all the declensions, substituting biblical for pagan examples, and adding an interlingual glossary. But by the late Anglo-Saxon period, grammatical teaching also started to move away from strict dependence on classical sources, turning to more contemporary approaches to open the path not only to reading but to a more general cultural literacy in Latin. We see this in the Colloquy of Ælfric of Eynsham, a dialogue between master and pupil set in a monastic house, covering practical vocabulary and aiming towards oral comprehension, and in the Colloquies by Ælfric’s disciple Ælfric Bata (after c.1010), which expand the conversations to take account of many kinds of contemporary experience, including the schoolroom itself.10 This practical turn in grammatical teaching achieved one of its most popular forms in England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the Latin wordbooks of Adam of Balsham (Adam du Petit Pont or Parvipontanus), Alexander Neckam, and John of Garland. Adam of Balsham’s De utensilibus (c.1150?) was composed as a showy experiment in using rare Latin words. But by the thirteenth century it was firmly entrenched in elementary lexicographical teaching, joining Alexander Neckam’s De nominibus utensilium (c.1180), a work possibly written for Alexander’s pupils at Dunstable, and John of Garland’s Dictionarius (1220s), to form a triad of practical wordbooks copied for teaching in England and often glossed with AngloFrench equivalents.11 Another dimension of such practical lexicographical study was the medieval development of derivatio, which tracks word forms derived from the same base word, a technique especially valued for teaching Latin to non-native

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature speakers. One of the earliest and most influential of the derivationes was produced by Osbern, a monk of the Benedictine house of Gloucester, around the middle of the twelfth century.12 While Carolingian grammarians had recognized the theoretical interest of Priscian, the intensive, scientific study of the Institutiones grammaticae had its proper beginnings just before 1100 in the cathedral schools of northern France and the Rhineland, and possibly extending as far north as Durham Cathedral in England. The evidence for this lies with a series of glosses on Priscian known as the Glosulae which were first identified by R. W. Hunt in the early 1940s and have since become a  critical reference point for modern scholarship on medieval linguistic thought.13 This turn to a ‘grammatical logic’ had a tremendous impact on the study of dialectic, but it also permanently changed medieval approaches to grammar. Grammar was ultimately to became a double field: the traditional prescriptive or positive grammar, geared to oral and written proficiency in Latin and its literary heritage, and critical interest in the nature of language itself, where study of Priscian’s Institutiones led to explorations of morphology, semantics, and syntax. The greatest achievements of twelfth-century ‘grammatical logic’ were the commentary on Priscian by William of Conches (c.1125–35) and the influential Summa super Priscianum by Petrus Helias (c.1140–50), both of these Parisian productions.14 Spurring these theoretical advancements in grammar was the recovery, over the twelfth century, of the full corpus of Aristotelian logic (the Organon). This is the grammatical outlook represented in John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, his defence of the language arts. The combination of Priscianic speculative grammar, the semantic study of figurative language (Book 3 of Donatus’ Ars maior, known as the Barbarismus), and Aristotelian logic was to form the foundations of the arts faculty curricula at the medieval universities (see the discussion of dialectic pp. 63–70). This is the orientation even of Alexander Neckam’s curricular outline, which anticipates formal arts faculty curricula: in the section on the arts in his Sacerdos ad altare, he does not include grammar with the literary curriculum, but dedicates a separate section to it (the Barbarismus and Priscianic grammars), indicating that he considers technical grammar an advanced subject.15 What were the fortunes, then, of the traditional study of grammar as a reading road and of its investment in classical literature? Certainly this was not abandoned during the heady theoretical developments of the twelfth century: William of Conches, Petrus Helias, and especially Petrus’ disciple Ralph of Beauvais did not lose sight of the literary dimensions of grammar.16 But more importantly, the opportunities for Latinate professionals in church and state bureaucracies expanded rapidly over the twelfth century, and the classes of students following after such careers grew in proportion. So the traditional training in Latin grammar was never in danger of being superseded by philosophical interests at the highest scholarly levels. The traditional track, instruction in language and study

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The Trivium and the Classics of literature, came to be identified with lower schools and general or preparatory study. With increased student numbers came also innovative approaches to the teaching of grammar. By the first decade of the thirteenth century there were two new grammatical textbooks designed for modern, vernacular audiences: the Doctrinale by Alexander of Villa Dei (1199) and the Graecismus by Eberhard of Béthune (c.1212). Both are in verse, making their teaching easily memorable. Both assume a basic knowledge of the parts of speech (which students would get from Donatus’ Ars minor), and offer an accessible but thorough approach to morphology and syntax based on Priscian’s grammar. But both also foreground the teaching of the figures and tropes, taking their information from Donatus but giving this literary teaching a higher priority than it receives in the Ars maior. Because these new works each offered a complete grammar curriculum, they were quickly diffused, copied many times over, and soon became the objects of extensive glossing and commentary. Along with the Ars minor, the Doctrinale and the Graecismus became the standard grammars of the late Middle Ages, without serious competition. With their practical orientation to literary understanding, these two textbooks became the new foundations of grammatical access to the classical auctores in the schools of England and the Continent. But although the Doctrinale and Graecismus were universal standards, we also find, in England as in other European countries, new supplementary grammars by schoolmasters. The best known of these English masters may be John of Cornwall (fl. 1346), who is mentioned by John Trevisa as the first to have used English rather than Anglo-French as the language of instruction. Many of the later grammatical texts were written in English and targeted to specific grammatical subjects and exercises (e.g. declension and conjugation, or comparison). While these grammars in English have little obvious classical content apart from their reliance on Donatus’ rules, they show the transmission of a grammatical vocabulary (adjectif, conjugacion, datif, genetif, imperatif, substantif ) from Latin (often via Anglo-French) into English.17 Grammar is immanent to literary production, a tool rather than the product itself, and thus does not ordinarily express its presence in a text as directly as might a particular literary influence or even a philosophical doctrine. But grammatical theory is at times thematized explicitly, and to great effect, in literary reflections on language. The Eagle’s windy discourse on vox in Book 2 of Chaucer’s House of Fame is a ‘grammatical joke’ on sound, speech, and rational signification, recruiting Priscian’s purposeful account of vox for more fugitive purposes:18 ‘Soun ys noght but eyr ybroken; And every speche that ys spoken, Lowd or pryvee, foul or fair, In his substaunce ys but air . . . And ryght so breketh it when men speketh. Thus wost thou wel what thing is speche.’  

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[sound air broken] [speech] [loud private] [know ]  (765–8, 780–1)

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The Eagle deploys Priscian’s definitive precepts on the elements of speech to explain the ‘multiplicacioun’ of ‘every speche, or noyse, or soun’ that must fly to ‘Fames Hous’ (784–6), where articulate, rational speech—on which literary authority must rest—is lost in a confusion of evanescent sound. The obverse of this storm of grammatical learning is the absence of grammatical knowledge—and the absence even of articulate speech—used to claim an absolute moral certainty in the ‘Prioress’s Tale’. The Prioress likens her own inspired voice to that of ‘a child of twelf month oold, or lesse, | That kan unnethes any word expresse’ (VII. 484–5); and the ‘litel clergeon’, whose own ‘miracle’ of Marian song the Prioress recounts, dies in the innocence of his song school primer, never to reach the stage of actual grammatical learning. Indeed vernacular religious texts often value pre-grammatical innocence. In passus 7 of Piers Plowman, Piers, the unlettered labourer, surprises a priest by knowing how to gloss the text of Christian truth. The priest declares, ‘Thow art lettred a litel—who lerned thee on boke?’ (you are a little lettered—who gave you book learning?), to which Piers gives his famous reply, ‘Abstynence the Abbesse . . . myn a.b.c. me taughte, | And Conscience cam afterward and kenned [taught] me muche moore’ (7.  132–4).19 This of course prizes the spiritual sapientia that exceeds any kind of human learning, where what Piers has really ‘learned’ are the ABCs of humility and obedience in preparation for the higher spiritual lessons to be taught by conscience. But invoking ‘abstinence’ and ‘abbess’ also implies the very kind of ‘lettred’ (both as littera and ‘literate’) grammatical learning that Piers the Plowman disavows: abbatissa and abstinentia would be among the first entries in the alphabetically organized reference books, known as distinctiones, for preachers.20 Underwriting the epistemology of the poem is Anima’s famous claim that ‘grammer [is] the ground of al’ (15. 371), and at times Langland reaches deeply into the classical philosophical lore of grammar in order to capture, by metaphor or analogy, a moral or metaphysical truth. Such is his borrowing of a concept, the infinitive, from Priscian’s syntactic theory, to explain his coined terms ‘Dobet’ and ‘Dobest’, calling them the ‘two infinites’ (13.128), and thereby suggesting their non-temporal, non-circumstantial universality as essences of Christian action always leading to the positive (completed) term ‘Dobest’.21 As the ‘reading road’ or the ‘ground of al’, grammar made medieval literary culture in the image of classical linguistic thought. It is remarkable that through all of its developments, variations, and enlargements during the whole of the Middle Ages, grammatical study never separated from its classical roots, and often rediscovered them with new enthusiasm. Whether grammar was the humble means to literary engagement or itself the exalted object of philosophical or literary reflection, medieval culture wrote itself through and around its classical grammatical heritage. Medieval rhetoric is a paradox among the arts. Rhetorical study and practice in the Middle Ages was only tenuously connected with the original purposes of legal and political oratory that had given rhetoric its commanding prestige in antiquity. Yet in

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The Trivium and the Classics terms of the texts actually read and commented, rhetoric was the most directly ‘­classical’, in a strict sense, of all the trivium arts. Whereas grammatical teaching was based on late antique grammars, and dialectic on Latin translations of Aristotle and Boethius’ late antique handbooks, rhetorical theory and compositional teaching were grounded mainly in Ciceronian texts and Horace’s Ars poetica. Of course late antique compendia, encyclopedias, and commentaries also contributed to the medieval study of rhetoric, and sometimes substituted for the Ciceronian works when the latter were not readily accessible. But the key Ciceronian rhetorics were continually copied and saw a surge of new interest during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.22 Horace’s Ars poetica remained a staple throughout the early periods, only to be superseded (but never fully displaced) by medieval arts of poetry during the thirteenth century. The Ciceronian rhetorics that the Middle Ages had were not those that the humanists preferred and that are esteemed today. The Middle Ages hardly knew the Brutus, De oratore, or even Orator (this last was known in part through quotations in Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, reprised verbatim in the De institutione clericorum by the ninth-century scholar Hrabanus Maurus). Similarly, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria was not widely known, although its presence in partial form was arguably felt.23 Cicero’s speeches were known to a greater extent, to be mined for their political effects by some Latin writers; Brunetto Latini also translated a number of the speeches into his Tuscan dialect as examples of political oratory. But the influence of the speeches is far outweighed by the near universal presence of Cicero’s juvenile De inventione and the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium (both composed c.90 bc). The latter work was attributed to Cicero until the fifteenth century. The De inventione may have owed its broad medieval reception to the attention it received among late antique commentators and writers of technical treatises, for whom a work dedicated to inventional theory might have seemed more immediately useful for knowledge of types of legal cases than works offering a complete survey of rhetoric.24 The prestige of the De inventione was also boosted by the commentary of the fourth-century Neoplatonist philosopher Victorinus, whose courage in converting to Christianity was praised by no less an authority than Augustine in his Confessions Book 8.25 The Rhetorica ad Herennium had a different early history. It was not heralded by late antique commentaries, but seems to have been rediscovered by the fourth century (when it was ascribed to Cicero), from whence it descended to the Middle Ages. It was known to a few Carolingian writers, but by the late eleventh century it was becoming widely diffused in company with the De inventione.26 The continuing attractiveness of both of these texts lay in their systematic approaches: while the De inventione presents an exhaustive account of invention and the structure of argument, the Rhetorica ad Herennium thoroughly covers all five canons of rhetoric, providing some memorable imagery along the way.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The reception history of Horace’s Ars poetica is more direct. Extensively glossed in late antiquity along with Horace’s other works, the Ars poetica had a continuous pedagogical presence in early medieval and Carolingian monastic schools, where it served as a basic manual of composition. It was mostly valued, not for its statements about art in an elevated sense, but for its advice on such basic issues as how to choose one’s material, how to achieve stylistic consistency, and how to maintain narrative continuity. Even though it is about writing poetry, it could be—and was—used as an instructional reference for any kind of compositional exercise.27 Rhetoric shared with grammar the study of the figures and tropes. Book 4 of the Rhetorica ad Herennium gives a detailed list of exornationes (embellishments) of words and thought, but similar information on schemata (figures) and tropi was presented in Book 3 of Donatus’ Ars maior. For as long as the Rhetorica ad Herennium was relatively unknown, teaching of the figures and tropes relied on the list in Book 3 of the Ars maior.28 This is Bede’s main source for his De schematibus et tropis, which is a guide to reading Scripture rather than composing ornate discourse. Ultimately the resurgence of the Rhetorica ad Herennium in the eleventh century provided a strong alternative to grammatical sources, and the later medieval arts of poetry show a preference for the classical rhetorical approach. Yet the grammatical handbooks by Alexander of Villa Dei and Eberhard of Béthune reprised the teaching in Donatus’ Ars maior, and these texts were also ubiquitous. So a student in the later Middle Ages might have teaching on the figures and tropes from grammatical or rhetorical sources. Even in the middle of the twelfth century, John of Salisbury still reflects the grammatical tradition of the schemata et tropi, placing this knowledge under the control of grammatical teaching (Metalogicon Book 1, chapter 19). In Anglo-Saxon England, knowledge of the Ciceronian rhetorics has to be assumed, even if direct encounters cannot always be traced.29 Alcuin seems to have known the De inventione, not only citing a ‘rhetoric’ of ‘Tullius’ (i.e. Marcus Tullius Cicero) in his York poem, but using it as the basis of his Disputatio de rhetorica et de virtutibus (c.790), for which he also used the late antique compendium of Julius Victor. Since Julius Victor also makes considerable use of Cicero’s De oratore and Orator, Alcuin also had access, through that, to a larger Ciceronian dossier.30 But questions about its sources do not account for the striking originality of Alcuin’s treatise on rhetoric. Like Alcuin’s contributions to grammar and dialectic, his Disputatio is no mere compendium, but advances the subject by its imaginative handling of traditional material. It is a fictive dialogue on rhetoric between Alcuin himself and King Charles (later Charlemagne), in which Charles is given the role of discipulus to lead the teacher into introducing the art of rhetoric and answering pointed and awkward questions about its practical and moral value. Alcuin breaks one of the rules of traditional introductory catechisms on the arts by upending the power relations between master and pupil: here the ‘pupil’ seeking tutelage in

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The Trivium and the Classics r­ hetoric is the most powerful European ruler. This not only demands diplomacy on the part of the teacher who serves at the grace of the king, but it opens onto a new political pedagogy, as the king himself is shown making the connections between rhetorical theory and the political practice of statecraft. However, the influence of this work in Anglo-Saxon England is difficult to ascertain, since Alcuin wrote the work during his long sojourn on the Continent. Further explicit references to Ciceronian rhetorics are found only in the work of Abbo of Fleury, who taught at Ramsey Abbey for two years (985–7); it is assumed that Abbo brought his continental learning with him to England.31 The advanced study of Ciceronian rhetoric reached its zenith in the cathedral schools of the twelfth century, especially in northern France where the Englishman John of Salisbury received his education in the higher arts. This is the period of the great continuous commentaries on both the De inventione and Rhetorica ad Herennium by anonymous masters and known figures (left to us in over 100 manuscripts), including William of Champeaux, Thierry of Chartres, Petrus Helias, and a ‘Magister Alanus’ who has been tentatively identified with Alan of Lille. Some of these commentaries were copied and owned in English cathedral libraries.32 These masters found new purposes in studying technical rhetoric directly from classical sources. First, it expressed their own classicism, their reverence for an originary classical knowledge and a fascination with classical Latinity itself, manifested also in other parts of the curriculum and the expansion of their classical literary canon. Second, their expanding corpus of classical logic enabled them to appreciate the overlap between dialectical and rhetorical theories of topics, wherein rhetoric was useful as an aid to dialectic (see below). Rhetoric also fitted within the larger terms of their language study, with the increasingly philosophical approach to language that evolved out of their rediscovery of Priscianic grammar. Finally they had a moral understanding of rhetoric, whether they construed that in terms of an application to civic discourse and politics (as Cicero had defined the role of rhetoric), or in Neoplatonic terms as a conditioning in eloquence to discipline the mind and prepare it for higher knowledge.33 In Book 2, chapter  10 of his Metalogicon, John of Salisbury relates how he first heard the lectures of Thierry of Chartres on rhetoric, although at that time he did not learn very much; but later on he studied rhetoric with Petrus Helias (Thierry’s younger contemporary), and came away with a deeper knowledge of the subject. John does not tell us why he initially found the subject mystifying: perhaps Thierry’s actual teaching was not as clear as his magisterial written commentaries on the Ciceronian rhetorics. But his account emphasizes the route that brought the intensive study of classical rhetoric to England: from the intellectual centres of the Continent, particularly Paris, the rhetorical renaissance of the twelfth century travelled with scholarly exchanges and professional movements (like John of Salisbury’s own) to exert an important influence on Anglo-Latin literary culture.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The truly revolutionary developments in medieval rhetoric, however, were not theoretical in nature, but insistently practical, like rhetoric itself. The Roman teaching of rhetoric had to be fitted to new applications in medieval society—bureaucratic, pastoral, and pedagogical. These arenas of practice—the bureaucracy of church and state, the pulpit, and the classroom—gave birth to new medieval genres of preceptive rhetoric. The ars dictaminis or art of letter writing had its origins in eleventh-century Italy, from whence it saw several important stages of development in France, Italy, Germany, and England.34 Treatises on dictamen rely on Ciceronian rhetorics, finding the template for the structure of the letter in Ciceronian teaching about the structure (or parts) of a speech. The medieval ars praedicandi or art of preaching took its standard shape in the middle of the thirteenth century. Preaching arts are less reliant on Ciceronian precept than the other preceptive genres, although in their totality they represent the closest link with the classical oration, because their instruction is aimed at speaking rather than writing.35 The needs of the classroom gave rise to the most overtly classical of the new medieval rhetorical genres, the ars poetriae. The genre first appeared during the twelfth century, with Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria, and quickly reached its high point with the overwhelmingly popular Poetria nova by Geoffrey of Vinsauf (c.1208–13), an art in hexameters that survives in over 200 manuscripts.36 The artes poetriae were hybrid texts, using the teaching of the classical auctores in the grammar curriculum as a basis for student exercises in composition of poetry or prose. They combined the teaching of Horace’s Ars poetica on poetic form with the theoretical apparatus of Ciceronian rhetorics on invention and especially arrangement and style. Geoffrey of Vinsauf drew his influential account of the colores or stylistic embellishments from Book 4 of the Rhetorica ad Herennium. While the Poetria nova was by far the most successful of the artes poetriae, other treatises soon followed in its wake, including works by two Englishmen, Gervase of Melkley (Ars versificaria, c.1215) and the prolific John of Garland (Parisiana poetria, c.1229–35, which is a treatise on prose as well as verse, and includes dictaminal teaching). Although John’s Parisiana poetria was produced (as its title indicates) for Parisian students, it circulated in England, along with the Poetria nova and the treatises by Gervase and Matthew of Vendôme.37 The artes poetriae served a function beyond teaching the elements of composition or providing exercises for imitation. Many of them were also resources for general knowledge of classical texts and style, often quoting lines from classical Latin verse or adopting classical metres or themes for new illustrative verse. Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria is replete with classical quotations from the curricular authors, notably Horace’s Ars poetica, the epic poets Virgil, Lucan, and Statius, Ovid, Juvenal, and Claudian. Gervase of Melkley also gives classical examples along with  quotations from his own contemporaries, including such classicizing poets as  Bernardus Silvestris, Matthew of Vendôme (whose Piramus et Thisbe he often

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The Trivium and the Classics favours), Alan of Lille, and Jean de Hauteville. Geoffrey’s Poetria nova and John’s Parisiana poetria provide original poems to illustrate doctrine, although these exemplary passages often borrow classical themes, and the Parisiana poetria also generates new examples of classical quantitative metres. The artes poetriae thus either provided or presumed knowledge of classical poetry. In this way they affirmed the classical poetic canon as the standard of excellence for generations of medieval writers and readers.

Dialectic The trivium art of dialectic takes us into non-literary territory. Yet dialectic played a role in the cultivation and sharpening of literary sensibilities, and provided another basis for the transmission of classical texts. Like technical grammar, but unlike rhetoric or the study of pagan poetry, dialectic presented strong reasons for continuity with pagan learning, because argumentation was clearly a transferable skill. As higher education shaped itself more and more around logical analysis of language, the rationale for close study of classical sources in logic was obvious and automatic. But in vernacular literary culture, the more specialized dimensions of classical logic had a mediated reception.38 Before the twelfth century, the art of dialectic was represented by what was later called the ‘old logic’: several Latin versions of Aristotle’s Categories, Boethius’ translation of Aristotle’s De interpretatione, and his translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge or introduction to the Categories. Boethius also made commentaries on the De interpretatione and the Isagoge which were available to some extent during the early period. Aristotle’s Categories existed in three versions: one, a translation by Boethius that was hardly used before the eleventh century; a second, composite, Latin version, based partly on Boethius and partly on an unknown translator, also hardly used before the eleventh century; and a looser paraphrase, the Categoriae decem, which was attributed to St Augustine. This last was the version of the Categories that was used widely in Carolingian Europe through the efforts of Alcuin.39 From the time of Alcuin, the Boethian version of De interpretatione, along with Boethius’ two commentaries on this, came to be known. But these were not widely diffused until the end of the tenth century, when they achieved more visibility on the Continent (from whence they would have come to England with the migration of monastic teachers such as Abbo of Fleury).40 In addition to these ancient primary sources and the commentaries by Boethius there were the summaries of dialectic in late antique and early medieval encyclopedic works: De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of Martianus Capella, the Institutiones of Cassiodorus, and the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville. Alcuin’s De dialectica (late 780s) is itself a compendium of logic as it could be known through these texts, especially Isidore’s Etymologiae. Forty manuscripts of

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature the De dialectica survive, testifying to its own long influence.41 Other texts that were available to supplement the ‘old logic’ were a commentary on Porphyry by the fourth-century Neoplatonist Victorinus and the Peri hermeneias (a commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretatione) which was long attributed to Apuleius (second century ad). By the eleventh century, Cicero’s Topica and Boethius’ commentary on it, and Boethius’ own De topicis differentiis, came to be better known.42 The most important and abiding crossover from literature to logic, or from philosophy to literature, was of course Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. The Consolatio explores issues that range far beyond the instrumental scope of dialectic: free will, determinism, contingency. But underpinning these questions are the basic techniques that were learned from ancient dialectical enquiry, fundamentals that included: the analysis of individual terms (the Categories); how terms can be combined into propositions (the De interpretatione); the ‘topics’ or general propositions from which valid inferences can be drawn, and their species or differentiae (for example, generalizations that may involve definition or opposites); and syllogisms, which allow an argument to emerge. One of the aims of dialectic is to determine the truth or falsity of a statement. This aim has large consequences when applied to matters of great philosophical urgency. For example, in his treatment of Aristotle’s De interpretatione Boethius had considered future contingent statements: can they be judged true or false like statements about the past? Boethius returns to these issues in the Consolatio to lay out more powerful and rigorous answers than he had achieved in his commentary on Aristotle’s work. In the Consolatio he takes the question about God’s knowledge of future contingents to a new level by differentiating between human and divine kinds of knowledge.43 What humans perceive to be operating in time and thus subject to various temporal contingencies, God can perceive from a perspective outside of time, so that it is only to us as humans that God’s knowledge seems to be knowledge about the future. This careful argument involves many combinations of differentiae, including definition, genus, and opposites.44 In his Metalogicon, written in 1159, John of Salisbury could report triumphantly of the limitations of the ‘old logic’ opening up to the ‘new logic’ with its expanded Aristotelian corpus: Cum itaque tam euidens sit utilitas topicorum, miror quare cum aliis a maioribus tam diu intermissus sit Aristotilis liber, ut omnino aut fere in desuetudinem abierit, quando aetate nostra diligentis ingenii pulsante studio quasi a morte uel a somno excitatus est, ut reuocaret errantes, et uiam ueritatis quaerentibus aperiret.45 (Since the value of the Topics is so obvious, I wonder that this book of Aristotle was for so long overlooked by our predecessors that it had completely or nearly dropped into desuetude. In our time, however, it has been brought back, as if from death or sleep, through the persistent application of diligent scholarship, so that it may recall those who wander in error, and disclose the way of truth to those seeking it.)

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The Trivium and the Classics John gives a reasonably accurate historical picture of the development of logic over  the first half of the twelfth century. Boethius had translated the other texts of  Aristotle’s Organon, the Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. But his version of the Posterior Analytics did not even survive, and the other three translations had fallen out of use, their difficult contents effectively unknown to scholars before about 1100. During the first half of the twelfth century, indeed because of scholarly persistence, as John of Salisbury noted, these other three Boethian translations were retrieved from neglect and were joined to the Categories and De interpretatione to make up a nearly complete Aristotelian logic.46 The Posterior Analytics was not translated again until sometime between 1125 and 1150, by James of Venice, and thus had a slightly later entry into the standard curriculum of logic.47 Thierry of Chartres’ Heptateuchon, a comprehensive collection of primary texts in the liberal arts which he compiled around 1140, contains all of the extant Boethian translations from the Organon, but not the Posterior Analytics, suggesting that the work was not yet available by the early 1140s.48 But by the end of the next decade it had established its place in the curriculum of logic. In the Metalogicon, John of Salisbury covers the Posterior Analytics in his survey of the Organon as a complete course in logic (Metalogicon Book 4, chapters 6 and 8). Thus by the middle of the century, scholars had a full Aristotelian perspective on logical method, from terms and propositions (Categories and De interpretatione) to syllogisms in general (Prior Analytics), to demonstrative syllogisms based on necessary truths (Posterior Analytics), to probable (or ‘dialectical’) syllogisms developed through consideration of contraries (Topics), to fallacies (Sophistical Refutations). The increasing dossier of logic over the twelfth century also had a fortunate confluence with the grammatical theory of Priscian’s Institutiones. The academic audiences who were assimilating the full force of Boethius’ commentaries and treatises on dialectic towards the end of the eleventh century were also the earliest medieval scholars to use the Priscianic grammar to develop an independent line of linguistic enquiry. It is not surprising that the eleventh- and early twelfth-century glossators of Priscian (mainly from northern France, although there is evidence too of activity in Durham) were stimulated by Boethian dialectic to investigate the ‘logic’ of language. Priscian uses the terms ‘substance’, ‘accident’, and ‘quality’ to describe the noun and other parts of speech; these terms are of course recognizable, from Boethius’ treatises and also from Aristotle’s Categories, as the building blocks of dialectic (what inheres in something and what are the changeable attributes of it—hence ‘quality’ is one of the ‘accidents’). Although the grammatical valences of such terms were not the same as the logical valences (as the early glossators themselves intuited), the shared vocabulary motivated a deeper methodological overlap which led beyond strict grammar (combining words according to grammatical rules) to thought about signification and semantics and distinguishing between true and false statements.49 It was this last path especially that led twelfth-century theologians, most memorably

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Peter Abelard in the first half of the century, to combine grammatical and logical methods in exploring the signification of parts of speech or of divine names, or in analysing the syntactic implications of utterances or the precision of patristic arguments about the Trinity, or in revisiting the problem of ‘substance’ in relation to God’s own nature.50 The milieu of twelfth-century grammatical logic was fruitful for literature too, as it played a part in the emergence of the most innovative and influential vernacular narrative form, romance. Literary historians have recognized the distinctive dialectical character of twelfth-century French romance, its exploitation of the methods of reasoning through contraries and refuting false propositions, and its building of narrative ‘argument’ (Chrétien de Troyes’ notion of conjointure) through the meaningful sequencing of aventures.51 If twelfth-century literary culture was the watershed for a new Ovidian ars amatoria, the vernacular courtly literature of love took its cue from a ‘fusion of Aristotelianism and Ovidianism’.52 In the works of Chrétien de Troyes and in the Tristan poems, a dialectic of love and desiring subjectivity, and the associated negotiations between antithetical positions or between categorical possibilities, are played out against the backdrop of the ‘new logic’ in the twelfth-century schools. In Chrétien’s Yvain, when Yvain and his beloved friend Gawain are drawn into mortal combat without knowing each other’s identity, the narrator poses a logical question about contraries and confidently promises a solution: Et or donc ne s’antr’ainment il? Oïl, vos respong, et nenil; et l’un et l’autre proverai si que reison i troverai.53 (So do they not love each other now? I respond ‘yes’ and ‘no’. And I will prove the one side and the other, and will discover the reason for it.)

The narrator’s claim echoes the method of discovering arguments in topical reasoning as taught in Boethius and in Aristotle. Similarly, Laudine’s famous metamorphosis from grieving widow to willing lover of her husband’s killer embodies not only the emergence of a new psychology of love, but a poetic experiment with categorical reasoning about substance and accident: the quick-witted Lunete can offer ‘proof ’ (‘et si vos pruef par estovoir’, line 1708) that since valour is the most prized attribute in a knight and is also a quality that one knight can possess to a greater degree than another, therefore Yvain, whose valour in combat enabled him to defeat Laudine’s husband, is a more worthy object of her love (lines 1696–1713).54 Yet as fundamental as the methods of logic are to the shaping of poetic argument here, the vernacular text does not give a direct encounter with the classical sources. In general, vernacular literature was not destined for a close affinity with the technical developments in logic. Those new developments took shape over the thirteenth

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The Trivium and the Classics century, arising gradually out of established studies. The statutes of 1215 and 1255 for the arts curriculum at Paris and of 1268 for arts at Oxford present conservative foundations in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ logics, that is, in the traditional Aristotelian and Boethian texts.55 At Oxford, for example, students were required to hear the texts of the ‘old logic’ twice, and Books 1–3 of Boethius’ De topicis differentiis once; from the ‘new logic’ they were to hear Prior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations twice, but Posterior Analytics only once. Books 17 and 18 of Priscian’s Institutiones, that is, the books on syntax, were also to be heard twice, and the Barbarismus of Donatus once. The inclusion of Priscianic syntax as well as the Barbarismus is revealing, however, because these point to the newer interest in terminist logic, that is, contextual and semantic studies of terms: how their occurrences in different syntactic constructions can affect their meaning, and how figurative language (as in the material of the Barbarismus) tests the denotative function (impositio) of a term. Moreover, what this curricular list does not tell us directly is how important the theory of fallacies had become in the logica moderna at both Oxford and Paris, giving rise to an extensive literature of sophismata accruing around the Sophistical Refutations.56 Thus while the basic reading focused on the classical corpus, the attention of students and scholars was also gravitating to contemporary concerns that entailed not only new methods but an industry of modern textbooks.57 The prestige of logic as the premier science of the arts faculties and as the method underlying arguments in theology and canon law, ensured the immanence of logic in literary discourse, so that its patterns of thought are bound up everywhere with the essential process of distinguishing true from false. Techniques of reasoning derived from or recalling Aristotelian logic exerted a continuous force, from the secular romance of the twelfth century (as we have seen) to religious poetry of the later Middle Ages, where a spiritual truth can be refined through intensive debate.58 Within vernacular literature of the later Middle Ages there is also intriguing evidence for some impact of the logica moderna or terminist logic and its semantic theory of the properties of ‘terms’ or linguistic expressions that became central to philosophical thought during the thirteenth century.59 In English literary studies, the influence of terminist logic and its complex semantic theory has been richly explored and demonstrated, notably in relation to the paradoxes of naming and the force of negation in Langland’s Piers Plowman.60 And inevitably some vernacular writing in England that was strongly linked to university cultures, notably the great body of polemical writing produced in the heterodox milieu of the Oxford theologian John Wyclif, carried the imprint of the academic concerns that gained prominence over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for example, the focus on fallacies and sophismata that developed alongside of terminist semantics and the study of the Sophistical Refutations.61 But in terms of overall orientation, as noted above, vernacular literature maintained an indirect relationship with the curricular corpus of logic, tending to exploit

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature general principles of syllogistic reasoning. Moreover, invocations of logic in vernacular literature rarely lead directly back to the classical texts of the arts curriculum. One exception that can prove this rule is Henri d’Andeli’s Bataille des VII ars (c.1230), which is a satire directed at the Paris arts faculty, with its overwhelming attention to logic and consequent neglect of grammar and belles lettres.62 Inevitably this poem names and exploits some classical elements of the logic curriculum, although one would not come away from the text having learned a great deal about the actual content of the Organon. Even a ‘Parisian’ text as ‘scholastic’ in its echoes as Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose yields little direct reference to the arts course in logic. Jean de Meun has the slippery character Faux Semblant (False Seeming, a personification of hypocrisy in the form of a friar) condemn the insincerity of clerics whose arguments are so specious that they resist any refutation, even by one who shaves with the ‘rasoir d’elenches’ (the ‘razor’ of the Elenchus, i.e. Sophistical Refutations) that divides fallacies up into thirteen branches.63 This is a comically intricate reference, but it is also fleeting. Brunetto Latini’s treatments of dialectic in his influential encyclopedia Livres dou trésor (c.1260–6) are extremely terse and general.64 In Dante’s Convivio (c.1304–7), the brief account of dialectic as the art governed by the heaven of Mercury names the sources of the art as the ‘old’ and ‘new’ logics, but gives no further content.65 One late vernacular survey of learning, the Middle English treatise on the seven liberal arts contained in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 14. 52 (produced around 1475), dutifully attempts a summary of the subject matter of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ logics (using the handbooks of Boethius as its guide), but it too remains at a fair distance from the particulars of the curricular corpus.66 It is not surprising that vernacular authors would have little direct interest in that core curriculum. The training in university arts faculties was of a completely different order from what would be encountered in the secondary schools and in Latinate literary culture at large. The intensity of logical study was specific to universities and their milieux and personnel, even if it might be seen to provide skills transferable to other intellectual and professional fields. In Chaucer’s poetic fiction, the figure of the Clerk illustrates this largely mediated relationship to the classical corpus of logic. The Clerk, ‘that unto logyk hadde longe ygo’ (I. 286), certainly appears to be imbued with the spirit of the logic curriculum, but this is actually achieved by a few deft and suggestive brushstrokes. In characterizing the Clerk’s scholarly asceticism, the Narrator imagines him preferring ‘twenty bookes . . . of Aristotle and his philosophie’ over any frivolous luxuries (I. 294–5). The Host jokes about the Clerk’s silence: ‘I trowe ye studie aboute some sophyme’ (I think you are studying some sophism) (IV. 5). But this is the extent of overt references to the curriculum. ‘Twenty books of Aristotle’ is hyperbole, the Narrator’s fantasy of how clerical bibliophilia might manifest itself. Similarly, studying ‘aboute some sophyme’ is the Host’s sweeping stereotype of scholarly absorption in knotty problems impenetrable to laymen. The Clerk himself offers no

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The Trivium and the Classics insight into his ‘logyk’, and the tale he tells is hardly a vehicle for that curriculum, as Jerome Taylor pointed out many years ago.67 Seeing no evidence of dialectical disputation or abstract reasoning in the ‘Clerk’s Tale’, Taylor suggested that the ‘logyk’ that the Clerk represents is not the logic of the schools, but the logic of the Platonic-Stoic division of philosophy into logic, ethics, and physics. In this classification scheme, which had a great deal of traction in twelfth-century thought, ‘logic’ is understood as ‘logos’, that is, the arts of speech taken together, the trivium arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic.68 Taylor’s argument takes us even further from the fourteenth-century Oxford arts faculty by placing the Clerk on the side of Petrarch and the latter’s vehement anti-scholasticism.69 John Alford also entered this disputational arena with his argument that the Clerk is a figure of ‘logyk’ drawn from long traditions of allegorical personifications of the seven liberal arts, just as the Wife of Bath is a figure of rhetoric drawn from the same traditions: ‘the tales of the Wife and the Clerk are the formal expressions of the rival arts of discourse which these two figures personify’.70 But for Alford, the Clerk’s ‘logyk’ is no more that of fourteenth-century Oxford than of any other period before: the Clerk is a literary construction of a scholarly discourse, not the curricular discourse itself. In sum, and from whatever opposing critical positions, the Clerk’s ‘logyk’ is highly mediated by other literary interests. When we turn, however, to Chaucer’s own Boethianism, we have a different kind of access to dialectical thought, a wide-open reception of the classical tradition. Chaucer was a close reader, not of the Boethian curricular texts (the commentaries on the Isagoge or Cicero’s Topica or Boethius’ own De topicis differentiis), but of the De consolatione philosophiae. The Consolatio was the literary face of classical dialectic throughout the medieval and early modern periods and beyond. Vernacular translators of the Consolatio across Europe, and from the early Middle Ages forward, had to take on Boethius’ intricate structuring of dialectical argument that becomes increasingly demanding and austere as we progress through Books 4 and 5 of the work. Later medieval translators, notably Jean de Meun and Chaucer, made use of an expanding dossier of academic commentaries on the text that could help to unravel some of its syllogistic complexities.71 In Chaucer’s work these multiple engagements with the text of the Consolatio, its Latin commentaries, and Jean de Meun’s translation of it come to fruition in the Boethian sections of Troilus and Criseyde and ‘Knight’s Tale’. Troilus’ predestination speech (Book 4, 958–1078), which is a hinge for the psychological and emotional action of Troilus and Criseyde, takes its main arguments directly from Consolatio 5p3. In this section of the Consolatio, the character Boethius questions how God’s foreknowledge can be compatible with human free will. Boethius’ questions are themselves carefully developed dialectical arguments, although of course in the culminating sections of the Consolatio (5p4–p6) Philosophy will prove these to have been incomplete arguments. It is their precision as dialectical delibera-

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature tions, and their inadequacy as metaphysical arguments about God’s essence and the nature of eternity, that makes them appropriate for depicting Troilus’ struggle to conceive anything beyond the limits of his pagan reason. Chaucer himself had closely followed the path of this syllogistic reasoning in his translation of the Consolatio, internalizing the very language and syntax of this method. In the Troilus he draws on that earlier preparation in his own Boece to give voice and colour to Troilus’ agonizing reflections on necessity and foreknowledge: Etenim si quispiam sedeat, opinionem quae eum sedere coniectat veram esse necesse est; atque e converso rursus, si de quopiam vera sit opinio quoniam sedet, eum sedere necesse est. In utroque igitur necessitas inest, in hoc quidem sedendi, at vero in altero veritatis. Sed non idcirco quisque sedet quoniam vera est opinio, sed haec potius vera est quoniam quempiam sedere praecessit. Ita cum causa veritatis ex altera parte procedat, inest tamen communis in utraque necessitas. (5p3.31–41) (For indeed, if anyone sit, then the opinion that thinks that he sits must be true; and conversely also, if the opinion about any man be true, that he sits, then he must be sitting. There is thus a necessity in both cases: in the latter, he must be sitting, but in the former, the opinion must be true. But a man does not sit because the opinion about him is true, but rather that opinion is true because that someone is sitting happened first. So that although the cause of truth proceeds from the one part, yet there is in both a common necessity.)72 ‘For if ther sitte a man yond on a see, Than by necessite bihoveth it That, certes, thyn opynyoun sooth be That wenest or conjectest that he sit. And further over now ayeynward yit, Lo, right so is it of the part contrarie, As thus—now herkne, for I wol nat tarie:

[if a man sits over there on a seat] [it is fitting] [certainly your opinion be true] [believes conjectures] [yet again] [contrary side]

‘I sey that if the opynyoun of the Be soth, for that he sitte, than sey I this: That he mot sitten by necessite; And thus necessite in eyther is. For in hym, nede of sittynge is, ywys, And in the, nede of soth; and thus, forsothe, There mot necessite ben in yow bothe.’

[your opinion] [be true  that he sits] [by necessity he must be sitting] [either part] [it is surely needed that he be sitting] [for you  need of truthful opinion] (Troilus and Criseyde 4. 1023–36)

As the fortunes of this passage from Latin prose into English rhyme royal stanzas demonstrate, the Consolatio gave vernacular readers, not the precepts for how to construct an argument from terms, propositions, and dialectical syllogisms that reason through contraries, but an illustration of the finished product, which could make the transition into a new poetic setting.

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Notes   Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri xx, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford, 1911), 1.3.3 (unpaginated). The origin of this etymology is found in Priscian, Institiones grammaticae, ed. Martin Hertz, in Grammatici latini, ed. Heinrich Keil, 8 vols (Leipzig, 1855–80 (repr. Hildesheim, 1961)), 2, 6 (Book 1 ch. 2, De litera). 2   Louis Holtz, Donat et la tradition de l’enseignement grammatical: étude et édition critique (Paris, 1981), p. 337; on pre-1100 manuscripts, see pp. 354–423. 3   Vivien Law, The Insular Latin Grammarians (Woodbridge, 1982), pp. 11–29. 4   Vivien Law, Wisdom, Authority, and Grammar in the Seventh Century: Decoding Virgilius Maro Grammaticus (Cambridge, 1995). 5  Law, The Insular Grammarians, pp. 53–80. 6   See the section on Bede in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory ad 300–1475, eds Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter (Oxford, 2009), pp. 256–71. 7   Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: Grammatica and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 288–98. 8   Vivien Law, Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages (1997), pp. 136–40; Louis Holtz, ‘Priscien dans la pédagogie d’Alcuin’, in Manuscripts and Tradition of Grammatical Texts from Antiquity to the Renaissance, 2 vols, eds Mario de Nonno, Paolo de Paolis, and Louis Holtz (Cassino, 2000), 1, 289–326. 9   Aelfrics Grammatik und Glossar, ed. Julius Zupitza (Berlin, 1880); Law, Grammar and Grammarians, pp. 200–23; Excerptiones de Prisciano: The Source for Ælfric’s Latin–Old English Grammar, ed. David W. Porter (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 12–33. 10   For the Colloquy of Ælfric of Eynsham, see Early Scholastic Colloquies, ed. W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1929), pp. 75–102; for the Colloquies of Ælfric Bata, see Anglo-Saxon Conversations: The Colloquies of Ælfric Bata, ed. Scott Gwara, trans. David W. Porter (Woodbridge, 1997). 11   Tony Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1991), 1, 165–231; Rita Copeland, ‘Naming, Knowing, and the Object of Language in Alexander Neckam’s Grammar Curriculum’, Journal of Medieval Latin 11 (2010), 38–57. 12   Osbern Claudianus, Derivazioni, eds Paola Busdraghi et al., 2 vols (Spoleto, 1996). 13   R. W. Hunt, ‘Studies on Priscian in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. I: Petrus Helias and his Predecessors’, Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 1 (1941–3), 194–231; repr. in R. W. Hunt, The History of Grammar in the Middle Ages: Collected Papers, ed. G. L. Bursill Hall (Amsterdam, 1980), pp. 1–38; Anne Grondeux and Irène Rosier-Catach, ‘Les Glosulae super Priscianum et leur tradition’, in Arts du langage et théologie aux confins des XIe–XIIe siècles: textes, maîtres, débats, ed. Irène Rosier-Catach (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 107–79. 14   See selections and references in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, eds Copeland and Sluiter, pp. 376–89, 444–60. 15   Sacerdos ad altare, ed. Christopher J. McDonough, CCCM 227 (Turnhout, 2010), p. 189. 16   Ralph of Beauvais’s grammatical commentaries on Ovid and Lucan are exemplified in his Liber Tytan, ed. C. H. Kneepkens (Nijmegen, 1991). 1

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 17   An Edition of the Middle English Grammatical Texts, ed. David Thomson (New York, 1984), esp. pp. xi–xvi; cf. the materials in English School Exercises 1420–1530, ed. Nicholas Orme (Toronto, 2013). 18   This and following quotations from Chaucer use The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987). On grammatical theory in House of Fame see Martin Irvine, ‘Medieval Grammatical Theory and Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Speculum 60 (1985), 850–76. 19   William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd edn (1995). 20   Emily Steiner, Reading Piers Plowman (Cambridge, 2013), p. 96. 21  Anne Middleton, ‘Two Infinites: Grammatical Metaphor in Piers Plowman’, ELH 39 (1972), 169–88. 22   See the list of manuscripts through the twelfth century in Birger Munk Olsen, L’Étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 4 vols (Paris, 1982–2014), 1, 127–8. 23  See John O. Ward, ‘Quintilian and the Rhetorical Revolution of the Middle Ages’, Rhetorica 13 (1995), 231–84. 24   John O. Ward, Ciceronian Rhetoric in Treatise, Scholion, and Commentary (Turnhout, 1995), p. 78. 25  Ward, Ciceronian Rhetoric, p. 97. 26  Ward, Ciceronian Rhetoric, pp. 90–3. 27  Rita Copeland, ‘Horace’s Ars poetica in the Medieval Classroom and Beyond: The Horizons of Ancient Precept’, in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, eds Andrew Galloway and Frank Grady (Columbus, Oh., 2013), pp. 15–33. 28   The shift from Donatus to the Rhetorica ad Herennium is traced in Martin Camargo, ‘Latin Composition Textbooks and Ad Herennium Glossing: The Missing Link?’, in The Rhetoric of Cicero in its Medieval and Renaissance Commentary Tradition, eds Virginia Cox and John O. Ward (Leiden, 2006), pp. 267–88. 29   One eleventh-century manuscript, Dublin, Trinity College, MS 927, possibly copied in England, contains the De inventione; see Helmut Gneuss, A Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Tempe, Ariz., 2001), # 216.6. 30   For the poem in praise of York, see Alcuin, The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, ed. and trans. Peter Godman (Oxford, 1982), line 1550; on the sources of the Disputatio, see Lucia Calboli Montefusco, ‘Un catechismo retorico dell’alto Medioevo: la Disputatio de rhetorica et de virtutibus di Alcuino’, in Ars—Techne: Il manuale tecnico nelle civiltà greca e romana, ed. Maria Silvana Celentano (Chieti, 2003), pp. 127–44. 31   Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006), pp. 242, 244 (# 18). 32   For overview, see John O. Ward, ‘The Medieval and Early Renaissance Study of Cicero’s De inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium: Commentaries and Contexts’, in The Rhetoric of Cicero, eds Cox and Ward, pp. 3–75. 33   Rita Copeland, ‘Thierry of Chartres and the Causes of Rhetoric: From the Heptateuchon to Teaching the Ars rhetorica’, in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom, eds Juanita Ruys, John O. Ward and Melanie Heyworth (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 60–75.

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The Trivium and the Classics 34   For the ars dictaminis in England and for an overview see Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Compo­sition: Five English Artes dictandi and their Tradition, ed. Martin Camargo (Binghamton, NY, 1995). 35   For overview see Marianne G. Briscoe and Barbara H. Jaye, Artes praedicandi and Artes orandi (Turnhout, 1992). 36   For overview, see Douglas Kelly, The Arts of Poetry and Prose (Turnhout, 1991). On the reception of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, see Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Columbus, Oh., 2010). 37   On the circulation of these texts in England, see Martin Camargo, ‘Chaucer and the Oxford Renaissance of Anglo-Latin Rhetoric’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 34 (2012), 173–207. See also Rita Copeland, ‘Chaucer and Rhetoric’, in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven, 2005), pp. 122–44. 38   The terms dialectica and logica were essentially interchangeable. In the earlier Middle Ages, the three arts of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) were together known as logica, designating a category of knowledge that is distinct from ethics (moral philosophy) and physics (natural sciences). But that terminology was overturned in the later Middle Ages, when the whole of logica could be referred to as dialetica. Certain later terms, such as logica vetus and logica nova, are consistent. For overview, see Mariken Teeuwen, The Vocabulary of Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 376–8. 39   John Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre: Logic, Theology, and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 16–17, 31. 40   Jean Isaac, OP, Le Peri hermeneias en occident de Boèce à Saint Thomas: histoire littéraire d’un traité d’Aristote (Paris, 1953), pp. 35–44; Michael Lapidge, ‘The Library of Byrhtferth’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, c.400–1100, ed. Richard Gameson (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 685–93. 41   De dialectica, PL 101: 951C–976A. On influence see Donald A. Bullough, Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation (Leiden, 2004), p. 23. On the sources of the linguistic thought of De dialectica, see C. H. Kneepkens, ‘Some Notes on Alcuin’s Peri hermeneias with an Edition of the Text’, in Alcuin of York: Scholar at the Carolingian Court, eds L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald (Groningen, 1998), pp. 81–112. 42   Sten Ebbesen, ‘Ancient Scholastic Logic as the Source of Medieval Scholastic Logic’, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, eds Norman Kretzmann et al. (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 101–27 (at pp. 105–6); John Marenbon, Early Medieval Philosophy (480–1150): An Introduction (1983), pp. 45–52, 80–3; Jonathan Barnes, ‘Boethius and the Study of Logic’, in Boethius: His Life, Thought, and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson (Oxford, 1981), pp. 73–89. 43   Cf. the discussion by Marenbon, Early Medieval Philosophy, p. 41. 44  See Eleonore Stump’s outline of differentiae in Boethius’s De topicis differentiis, trans. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, NY, 1978), pp. 195–7. 45   John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall, CCCM 98 (Turnhout, 1991), Book 3, chapter 5 (p. 119).

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 46   An epitaph for Thierry of Chartres remembers him as the first one to grapple meaningfully with the Prior Analytics and the Sophistical Refutations. See André Vernet, ‘Une ­épitaphe inédite de Thierry de Chartres’, in André Vernet, Études médiévales (Paris, 1981), pp. 160–70. 47   See Martin M. Tweedale, ‘Logic (i): From the Late Eleventh Century to the Time of Abelard’, in A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 196–226. 48  On the Heptateuchon see Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, eds Copeland and Sluiter, pp. 439–43. 49   Hunt, ‘Studies on Priscian in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries I: Petrus Helias and his Predecessors’, pp. 215–20. 50   Jean Jolivet, Arts du langage et théologie chez Abélard (Paris, 1969), pp. 276–335. A good example of the syntactic aspect of semantics is traced by C. H. Kneepkens ‘“Mulier quae damnavit, salvavit”: A Note on the Early Development of the Relatio simplex’, Vivarium 14 (1976), 1–25. 51  Tony Hunt, ‘Aristotle, Dialectic, and Courtly Literature’, Viator 10 (1979), 95–129; Eugene Vance, From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 1987); Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford, Calif., 2001); Wesley Chihyung Yu, ‘Romance Logic: The Argument of Vernacular Verse in the Scholastic Middle Ages’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2009, especially chapters 3–5 on Wace and Chrétien de Troyes; Virginie Greene, Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy (Cambridge, 2014). 52   Hunt, ‘Aristotle, Dialectic, and Courtly Literature’, p. 125. 53   Le Chevalier au lion (Yvain), ed. Mario Roques (Paris, 1960), lines 5995–8. 54   The reading of these episodes draws from Vance, From Topic to Tale, pp. 25–7. 55   Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, eds H. Denifle and E. Chatelain, 4 vols (Paris, 1891–9; repr. Brussels, 1964) 1, 78, 278; Statuta antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis, ed. Strickland Gibson (Oxford, 1931), pp. 25–6; J. M. Fletcher, ‘The Faculty of Arts’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 1, The Early Oxford Schools, ed. J. I. Catto (Oxford, 1984), pp. 369–99 (at pp. 376, 383). 56   Among many sources, see P. Osmund Lewry, OP, ‘Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric 1220– 1320’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 1, ed. Catto, pp. 401–33 and Alfonso Maierù, University Training in Medieval Europe, ed. and trans. D. N. Pryds (Leiden, 1994), pp. 134–7. 57   The collection of sophismata by Richard Kilvington, an Oxford master of the first half of the fourteenth century, is typical. See The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington, eds Norman Kretzmann and Barbara Ensign Kretzmann (Oxford, 1990) and The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington, trans. Norman Kretzmann and Barbara Ensign Kretzmann (Cambridge, 1990). 58   I am grateful here to Nicolette Zeeman, who has shared insights from her research on religious allegorical poetry and its argumentative structures.

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The Trivium and the Classics 59   See L. M. de Rijk, ‘The Origins of the Theory of the Properties of Terms’, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, eds Kretzmann et al., pp. 161–73. 60   D. Vance Smith, ‘Negative Langland’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009), 33–59. 61   See Rita Copeland, ‘Sophistic, Spectrality, Iconoclasm’, in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, eds Jeremy Dimmick et al. (Oxford, 2002), pp. 112–30. 62   The Battle of the Seven Arts: A French Poem by Henri d’Andeli, Trouvère of the Thirteenth Century, ed. and trans. L. J. Paetow (Berkeley, 1914). Another kind of exception, vernacular translation from learned Latin poetry, is exemplified by the fourteenth-century French translation, by Jehan Lefevre, of the Liber lamentationum Matheoluli, written around 1295 by Mathieu of Boulogne, which retails the books of Aristotle’s logic in order to show how logic falls before the destructive energy of women: Les Lamentations de Matheolus, ed. A.-G. van Hamel, 2 vols (Paris, 1892–1905), book 1, lines 1080–92. On this passage see Helen Solterer, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 59–60. 63   Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Ernest Langlois, 5 vols (Paris, 1914–24), 5, 185 (line 11061). Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie, written in the first half of the fourteenth century, also contains a brief reference to the ‘fallacies’ of the Elenchus (lines 681–4), perhaps following on Jean de Meun’s citation; Lydgate’s expanded translation of the Pèlerinage is unusual among literary texts for supplying a good deal more information (lines 1669–95) about Aristotle’s treatment of the formation of fallacious arguments, perhaps also reflecting the popularity of the Elenchus in university milieux. See Deguileville, Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine de Guillaume de Deguileville, ed. J. J. Stürzinger (1893), and Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall, 3 vols EETS es 77, 83, 92 (1899–1904). I thank Nicolette Zeeman for bringing these sources to my attention. 64   Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou trésor, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1948), 1.4.8, 1.5.2, 3.50.3. The Trésor was the source for John Gower’s survey of the sciences in Book 7 of Confessio amantis, which can account for Gower’s even terser account of logic; but on Gower see Jonathan M. Newman, ‘The Rhetoric of Logic in Gower’s Confessio amantis Book 7’, Medievalia et humanistica 38 (2012), 37–58. 65   Il Convivio, eds G. Busnelli and G. Vandelli, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Florence, 1964), 1, 196–7 (Book 2, ch. 13, 11–12). 66   Edition in Linne Mooney, ‘A Middle English Text on the Seven Liberal Arts’, Speculum 68 (1993), 1027–52. 67   Jerome Taylor, ‘Fraunceys Petrak and the Logyk of Chaucer’s Clerk’, in Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium, ed. Aldo Scaglione (Durham, NC, 1975), pp. 364–83 (at p. 365). 68  On ancient and medieval classifications of the sciences, see Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, eds Copeland and Sluiter, pp. 3–14, and references there. 69   Taylor, ‘Fraunceys Petrak’, p. 368. 70   John A. Alford, ‘The Wife of Bath versus the Clerk of Oxford: What their Rivalry Means’, Chaucer Review 21 (1986), 108–32 (quotation at p. 122).

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 71   See Alastair Minnis, ‘Aspects of the Medieval French and English Traditions of the De consolatione philosophiae’, in Boethius, ed. Gibson, pp. 312–61. See also Chapter 14 by Cornelius on Boethius. 72   De consolatione philosophiae, in Boethius, The Theological Tractates; The Consolation of Philosophy, eds and trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 396–7.

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Chapter 5

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW The Quadrivium and Natural Sciences Winston Black

The arts of the trivium taught scholars how to express themselves properly. Those of the quadrivium taught them how the universe expresses itself. It was through the study of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy that those scholars could hear the cosmos speaking or singing its rational coherence to them. The story of the reception of the liberal arts in England is similar to that told of other regions in Europe, but England would play a particularly important role in the transmission of classical mathematics and natural sciences. English scholars would make advances in physical and mathematical theory through novel fusions of the quadrivial arts and Aristotelian natural philosophy. The study of nature in England was not confined to the quadrivium, but included ancillary disciplines not found in the artes liberales such as medicine, herbals and lapidaries, beast lore, architecture, military science, agriculture, and, after the twelfth century, the physics and natural philosophy of Aristotle.1 I will discuss in this chapter those authors, institutions, and manuscripts that are most indicative of the classical quadrivial and natural sciences available to English authors of the high and later Middle Ages. At the start of our exploration of the quadrivium in England, we should heed the warning of R. W. Hunt, concerning his research on the English abbot Alexander Neckam: ‘The discussion of the classical knowledge of any medieval author is beset with pitfalls.’2 The same idea applies to the knowledge of classical authors in the literature of a language or nation. Any discussion of classical scientific literature in England cannot be confined strictly to enumerating copies or quotations of ancient texts but must necessarily range broadly over the medieval Latin, Arabic, Greek, or Hebrew texts through which English scholars were introduced to the scientific ideas of the classical world, as well as the many medieval works in Anglo-Norman or Middle English that imitated or were inspired by classical models. The mathematical

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature and natural sciences discussed in this chapter are in some cases distinctly English, but for the most part belong to a European or an even larger, Mediterranean, sphere of intellectual activity.3 England is notable for the scope and vigour of its vernacular scientific corpus. Anglo-Saxon England produced the only substantial vernacular body of medical literature in the early Middle Ages, and later medieval England is also remarkable, if not singular, in the flowering of vernacular scientific and medical treatises coincident with the rapid rise in vernacular literary works. The quadrivium and other medical and scientific genres were included in English encyclopedias, such as English versions of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum and John Trevisa’s English translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum.4 While these works are known well in modern editions, most scientific and medical writings in Middle English are still in manuscript. Over 1,150 Old and Middle English scientific and medical manuscripts are extant, which contain more than 8,000 separate texts.5 Among the most impressive collections is Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.14.52, written 1458–85 and containing 111 distinct medical and scientific texts (ranging from single recipes to lengthy treatises), many translated from Latin originals into Middle English.6 These include medical texts by or attributed to Constantine the African (d. 1098) and Roger Bacon (c.1214–1294), treatises on the seven planets and the seven liberal arts, and works on plague, gynaecology, scientific instruments, and bloodletting. Important for the study of classical reception in England is a Middle English translation of a commentary on Hippocrates’ Prognostics, ‘what appears to be the first substantial instance of an actual Hippocratic text in the [English] language, accompanied by extensive excerpts from commentaries on that text by Galen and later writers’.7 Trinity R.14.52 is remarkable for its size and originality, but there are many similar collections from later medieval England.8

The Quadrivium in England Britain, like any Roman province after the dissolution of the Western Empire, preserved its share of classical culture primarily through educated clergy and monasteries. Significant elements of a Roman liberal education were preserved in early medieval England or reintroduced after the missions of the sixth and seventh centuries. With Christianity came books, a point Bede emphasizes in his account of the conversion of the English. Most such books, as accessories to conversion, were necessarily biblical, theological, or liturgical, but in the course of the seventh century other sorts of books were brought to England, especially with Theodore and Hadrian in 668 (Greek monks and scholars who became, respectively, Archbishop of Canterbury and Abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury), and were copied there as well.9 These included standard texts on the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic),

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The Quadrivium and Natural Sciences for a stronger emphasis was placed by clergy on the trivium than on the mathematical arts of the quadrivium; the former were more immediately useful for preaching, conversion, and administration. Even if the quadrivial arts were not obviously necessary to Anglo-Saxon clerics, they still held some small place in their education, for the vehicles by which England came to know the trivium also carried the quadrivium: late antique compendia such as Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae and Macrobius’ Commentum in somnium Scipionis, and encyclopedias such as Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae. Martianus’ De nuptiis was one of the most important introductions to the trivium and quadrivium in England, as it was throughout Europe,10 and was known in England and Ireland perhaps as early as St. Columbanus (c.543–615) and certainly by the time of Bede (672/3–735).11 All of these works provide summaries of the liberal arts, but more detailed examinations of quadrivial arts were available in Boethius’ De musica and De arithmetica (in which he coined the term ‘quadrivium’). Manuscripts of both survive from Anglo-Saxon England and were cited by Abbo of Fleury, abbot of Ramsey.12 Some elements of scientific knowledge were also extracted from literary works, in particular Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid, both of which were treated in medieval commentaries as compilations of universal lore hidden behind a veil of allegory.13 If authors like Martianus and Macrobius gave early medieval education a syllabus, Isidore gave it a vocabulary. His Etymologiae was popular in England and Ireland, where more of his works survive in manuscripts from before 800 than of any author except Augustine,14 and the text was excerpted and glossed as early as 700.15 AngloSaxon England holds a special place in the early medieval history of scientific texts: English scribes received from the Continent, copied, and then transmitted back to it copies of Isidore’s Etymologiae and De natura rerum, as well as Pliny’s Naturalis historia.16 Though only four copies of the Historia survive from Anglo-Saxon England, one is Northumbrian, from the early eighth century, and perhaps Bede’s very own. Bede shows a thorough familiarity with the Historia in his De natura rerum, De temporum ratione, and commentary on Genesis.17 Pliny still more popular in twelfth-­century England, when Robert of Cricklade, prior of St. Frideswide’s, Oxford, compiled for King Henry II a summary of Pliny’s Historia called the Defloratio Plinii (Deflowering of Pliny).18 Derivative of Pliny’s work, and also known from an early date in England, was Solinus’ Collectanea rerum memorabilium, a catalogue of natural marvels.19 Arithmetic. I will examine here each of the quadrivial arts in turn, pointing out significant English contributions and manuscripts. The art of arithmetic was not so much computation as the philosophy of number and quantity. This is how arithmetic is presented in Martianus’ chapter on arithmetic and in Boethius’ De arithmetica. The Arithmetica was known in England before the Conquest,20 and John of Salisbury shows a firm grasp of Boethian arithmetic in his Metalogicon (1159), a knowledge he may have gained as a young scholar in England or in the schools of Paris.21

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Cassiodorus’ De arithmetica in his Institutiones and Isidore’s chapter on arithmetic in his Etymologiae are summaries of the mathematical works of Martianus and Boethius. Few mathematical texts were composed in the early Middle Ages, since mathematics served primarily a liturgical function and numbers were understood more symbolically than as tools for computation. The rare examples of new arithmetical texts are dedicated primarily to the computus, the determination of the ecclesiastical calendar around the moveable date of Easter: these include Bede’s De temporibus and longer De temporum ratione, Alcuin’s De cursu et saltu lunae ac bissexto, and Rabanus Maurus’ Liber de computo. The presence of Bede and Alcuin in this list suggests that England was at the forefront of what little learning remained of mathematics in this period. Simplified forms of the computus were taught through the rest of the Middle Ages in  England, and Middle English computus manuals appear from the fourteenth century.22 Many of the significant developments in European mathematics after the turn of the first millennium do not represent reception of the classics, but were inspired rather by translations from Arabic texts and the introduction of Hindu-Arabic numerals. Mathematical calculations done with these new numerals was called algorismus, from the authority on the subject al-Khwārizmi ̄.23 Yet Boethian arithmetic continued to be taught, and could be reinterpreted in the light of newly translated texts or close readings of long-neglected ones. Arithmetic was further transformed in the twelfth century by the rediscovery of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian philosophy. Plato’s Timaeus, known through the fourth-century partial translation and commentary of Chalcidius, offered a bold view of mathematics as a science of pure reason that could lead the practitioner to the realm of intelligible ideas. The Timaeus was widely read from the twelfth century, and by English scholars such as Daniel Morley and Robert Grosseteste.24 But the mathematics of English schools in the later Middle Ages was predominantly Aristotelian: mathematics and geometry were treated essentially as tools for explaining the causes of natural phenomena by English scholars such as Grosseteste, Adam Marsh, and Roger Bacon, and later even more by Oxford masters such as Thomas Bradwardine and Richard of Wallingford.25 Geometry. The study of geometry in the Middle Ages can reasonably be measured by the extent to which its practitioners were familiar with the Elements of Euclid, written in Alexandria in the third century bc.26 Early medieval readers knew little of this work, but they had Boethius and Cassiodorus, who employed Euclid indirectly. The surveys of Martianus, Cassiodorus, and Isidore give definitions of lines and shapes without any geometric method. Some measure of practical geometry existed still in manuals for agrimensores (‘field-measurers’) and gromatici (those who use the groma, a surveying tool).27 A text called De geometria, compiled from early ‘gromatic’ manuals, was attributed to Boethius and reached England in the tenth century via Corbie, surviving in manuscripts from St Augustine’s, Canterbury, and St Swithun’s, Winchester.28 Cicero’s Aratea (a translation of the Greek poem Phaenomena of

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The Quadrivium and Natural Sciences Aratus) also taught some geometry. Although a Latin translation of Euclid’s Elements was made in the Carolingian period, it had limited circulation and Adelard of Bath, Hermann of Carinthia, and Gerard of Cremona all prepared new translations from the Arabic in the twelfth century,29 which ushered in a new age of geometric speculation, of which the best example in England is Thomas Bradwardine’s De geometria speculativa, written in the mid-fourteenth century.30 Music. The music of the liberal arts was not the music of the dance or the lord’s hall. It was the mathematical study of concordances, appealing more to the intellect than to the senses. As he did with arithmetic, Boethius also wrote the primary textbook on music, De institutione musica, which was copied and commented on in Canterbury by the tenth century.31 The shared lineage of mathematics and music is obvious in an English manuscript of the twelfth century, produced in Canterbury (now Cambridge, University Library MS Ii.3.12), which contains copies of Boethius’ De arithmetica and De musica together. A famous illumination in this manuscript (on fol. 61v) shows Boethius, Plato, Pythagoras, and Nicomachus, teaching the sciences of music theory and mathematics together.32 Boethius and other Christian Platonists understood music as the study of number manifested in sound, and most medieval musical theory is essentially Boethian until the thirteenth century. From that time on, those more inclined toward Aristotle than Plato interpreted music as the study of the physical laws of sound. Both the Boethian approach (Platonic and theoretical) and Aristotelian approach (admitting some musical practice) to music would be taught at Oxford and other English schools. In either case, earthly music was considered a feeble imitation of the music of the heavenly spheres, or the musical concordance between body and soul, the rational beauty of which could be understood through the liberal art of music. According to Robert Grosseteste, in his early tract De artibus liberalibus (c.1215), music is ‘the governing element (modificatrix) that brought bodily movements into concordance through proportions’.33 The English displayed some originality in the scientific analysis of music. One of the earliest such scholars was Theinred of Dover, who wrote his De legitimis ordinibus pentachordorum et tetrachordorum in the second third of the twelfth century. Approaching music as a truly speculative science, Theinred applied Aristotelian logic to his analysis of semitones in melodic chant.34 Yet Theinred is a rare sort of musical scholar for anywhere in Europe, and English masters of the liberal arts, including Adelard of Bath and John of Salisbury, confined their discussions of music essentially to quotations from Boethius. Astronomy. Astronomy and its alter ego astrology should be viewed as two sides of the same coin when studying medieval science. They served, respectively, as the theoretical and practical arts of the stars. Astronomy and astrology hold a rightly lofty place in the study of medieval English literature, for they are the sciences most evident, or at least most remarked upon, in the writings of John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer applied judicial astrology most famously to the Wife of Bath (who

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature named herself one of ‘The children of Mercurie and of Venus,’ Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 697), as well as in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ and ‘Man of Law’s Tale’.35 Chaucer likewise made explicit the link between training in astronomy and the skill of his Physician, grounding observation of the stars in the practical sphere of human affairs. Chaucer was no armchair astronomer for, as is well known to scholars of English literature, he composed a Treatise on the Astrolabe concerning its production and use. The astrolabe was an astronomical calculator used to measure the inclination of a star, planet, sun, moon, or even a building. Invented in the Hellenistic era and perfected by Muslim astronomers, astrolabes were introduced to Latin Europe in the eleventh century and were a well-known tool among mariners and mathematicians by the fourteenth century. No classical works specifically on astrolabes or other mathematical instruments were known in England, but classical quadrivial treatises informed medieval works on the construction of astronomical and mathematical devices. Chaucer was not the only author of such astronomical works in English: the compilation in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.14.52 includes portions of De spera solida, as translated into English by John of Harlebeke in the early fourteenth century,36 interpolated with passages from Chaucer’s own Treatise. The Middle English version of The Solid Sphere includes instructions for the construction and use of an astronomical sphere, several kinds of quadrant, an astrolabe, and measuring rods. Knowledge of astronomy in Anglo-Saxon England came through the summaries provided by Isidore, Martianus, and Macrobius. Bede displays an admirable knowledge of astronomy from these sources, possibly buttressed by his own observations. One manuscript can serve as an example of the astronomy available in later AngloSaxon England. London, British Library, MS Harley 647, contains Cicero’s Aratea, Hyginus’ Astronomica, and a collection of excerpts from Macrobius’ Commentum in somnium Scipionis, Pliny’s Historia, and Martianus’ De nuptiis. This latter collection served apparently as a supplement to the first two texts.37 Though compiled in Lotharingia in the ninth century, Harley 647 is to be found at Ramsey Abbey and then St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This manuscript was not an isolated collection, but probably served as exemplar for five other manuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries produced in England or at Fleury in an English hand.38 The link between England and Fleury was Abbo of Fleury, at Ramsey Abbey from 985–7 and an eager scholar of mathematics and astronomy. Abbo also knew the didactic poem Astronomica of ‘Hyginus astronomus’ ( Julius Hyginus, c.64 bc–ad 17). It survives in five Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman manuscripts and was cited by Abbo’s student Byrhtferth of Ramsey in his Enchiridion.39 The high Middle Ages would see the translation and introduction to England of  the astronomical works of Ptolemy (Tetrabiblos and Almagest), Aristotle (De caelo, De meteoris), and several Arab authors (Albumasar, Messahalla, Alfraganus). Adelard of Bath translated the Centiloquium attributed to Ptolemy (but probably

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The Quadrivium and Natural Sciences written in tenth-century Egypt).40 Bartholomaeus Anglicus names all of the aforesaid astronomical authors in Book 8 of his De proprietatibus rerum, on the planets. Popular in the universities was the Englishman (or Scot) John of Sacrobosco’s textbook De sphaera of c.1230, which summarized the astronomical ideas of Ptolemy and the key Arab authors. Al-Fargani (Alfraganus) wrote a compendium of Ptolemy’s teaching on astrology, which was translated into Latin in the twelfth century, and was read more than its Ptolemaic source.41 By the later twelfth century, Alexander Neckam apparently knew this work as well as the Canons of Ptolemy.42 Later medieval English astrology represents a fusion of these classical and Arabic sources. This is evident throughout the works of Chaucer, whose extensive knowledge of astronomy J. D. North has demonstrated as noteworthy but not exceptional in fourteenth-­ century England.43 This same fusion is seen in a fifteenth-century English astrological treatise on the ‘election’, or proper choosing, of times to act according to the stars; the author cites the Boke of Almagest of ‘Tholome’ (that is, Ptolemy), ‘Aristotill’ (here the pseudonymous Secretum secretorum), and ‘Holy Abenragel’ (ibn Rijal, a tenth-century Arab astrologer).44

Alexander Neckam in a Transitional Age A rudimentary knowledge of the quadrivium could be gathered in English monasteries and cathedrals, but from the twelfth century, many English students found it in the schools of Paris, many of which gathered in the thirteenth century as the University of Paris. English students and masters formed the largest group of nonFrench scholars in Paris.45 Among the earlier groups of students was Robert Cricklade, mentioned above, who attended lectures by Peter Lombard in the 1150s.46 A generation later one of England’s greatest names in science, Alexander Neckam, studied or at least advocated every possible field of study in Paris, from the trivium and Scripture, to Galen and Euclid.47 Neckam was a devotee of the quadrivium and natural philosophy. When he discusses the liberal arts, he means primarily the quadrivium. He is best known for his scientific works, De naturis rerum, Laus sapientie diuine, and the later verse supplement to these works, the Suppletio defectuum.48 Alexander’s syllabus for the quadrivium and sciences is mostly classical: Boethius for arithmetic and music, Euclid for arithmetic and geometry, Ptolemy and Alfraganus for astronomy, and a long list of Greek and Arabic authors for phisica, or philosophically-informed medicine. This was the essential learning Alexander took back to England and which informed his career as a master at Oxford and abbot of Cirencester until his death in 1217. Many of Alexander’s classical allusions surely came from florilegia and not from reading the original works, particularly when only one line from an author is quoted multiple times.49 Nonetheless, he knew his Ovid, Virgil, Lucan, and Juvenal well, and

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature quotes from these authors’ less well-known works, such as Ovid’s Medicamina faciei and Virgil’s Georgics. He was apparently drawn to their technical knowledge in medicine and agriculture, respectively.50 Neckam is among the first scholars in Europe to show knowledge of Aristotle as a natural philosopher. R. W. Hunt has demonstrated that Alexander probably had read only the old and new works on logic by Aristotle, but was nonetheless aware and appreciative of his Metaphysica, De generatione, and De anima.51 There may be a connection between Neckam and one of the earliest manuscripts of the Latin translations of Aristotle’s libri naturales, produced in France c.1180, but found at an early date at St Albans, where Neckam studied.52 Alexander was no Aristotelian, however. His philosophy of nature, apart from the quadrivium, comes rather from the Timaeus and a few Hermetic and Neoplatonic works, as was the case with many scholars in the twelfth century. Alexander’s devotion to Aristotle came most likely through his reading of the Salernitan physicians Urso and Maurus, who had actually read Aristotle’s natural works.53 Neckam’s contemporary Alfred of Sareshel, on the other hand, did read Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian natural works. He translated the De plantis of Pseudo-Aristotle, which received multiple glosses and commentaries in the English schools.54

Natural Philosophy and Aristotelian Science Alexander Neckam was among the last English scholars to belong almost entirely to  the older tradition of quadrivial science. But already before Neckam’s twelfth-­ century childhood, some English scholars were exploring a new, holistic approach to nature, separate from or subsuming the older quadrivium. This new philosophy of nature, practised most famously in the cathedral schools of northern France but with a significant influence on England, was founded first on Neoplatonic philosophy based on a Christian reading of the Timaeus of Plato. Later Anglo-Saxon authors, Lantfred and Abbo,55 knew of Plato’s Timaeus and it survives in one of the most famous English manuscripts, the ‘Oxford Roland’ (Oxford, Bodleian, MS Digby 23), a twelfth-century copy of the Timaeus with commentary and the Chanson de Roland. The Neoplatonic science of the twelfth century would be overshadowed in the following centuries by the libri naturales of the Latin Aristotle, but both traditions continued to have a strong influence on the study of nature in England. Many of the prominent twelfth-century practitioners of the new natural philosophy were English, but they were satisfied neither with the teaching at home nor in France, and sought new texts on mathematics and natural science in Iberia, Sicily, and the Near East. These include Adelard of Bath, Robert of Chester, Robert of Ketton, and Daniel of Morley. Daniel, in particular, recalled leaving Paris in disgust for Spain where he sought and found a more advanced Arabic learning.56 Though

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The Quadrivium and Natural Sciences Adelard gives credit primarily to Arab philosophers, his philosophical treatise Naturales quaestiones was inspired primarily by Seneca’s work of the same name. And while no manuscripts of Seneca survive from before the twelfth century, Michael Lapidge has argued persuasively that Seneca’s work informs the first of the Latin verse riddles by Aldhelm (c.639–709/10),57 and R. W. Southern suggests Anselm of Canterbury may have known it as well.58 It certainly was known in England by the thirteenth century, when Grosseteste and Bacon used it.59 The mathematical sciences of the quadrivium would be studied and appreciated for the rest of the Middle Ages, but in the course of the thirteenth century they were nearly supplanted by the libri naturales of Aristotle. Knowledge of Aristotelian natural philosophy had begun to reach England indirectly in the early twelfth century through translations of Arabic works, but by the end of the twelfth century Latin translations of Aristotle’s major libri naturales were widely available.60 The most popular of these among English scholars, judging by curricula at Oxford and Cambridge, were his Physica, De anima, De generatione, De caelo, and De meteoris.61 These books were the foundation for the study of natural philosophy, one of the three philosophies required of prospective masters of arts in most medieval universities. Students also read Aristotle’s works on animals (De partibus animalium, Historia animalium, De generatione animalium), and his parva naturalia (shorter works on nature), which included psychological works and pseudonymous texts like the Physiognomica and De plantis (the latter translated by the Englishman Alfred of Sareshel). A key portion of the arts curriculum in most universities was Aristotelian natural philosophy,62 and English schools, especially Merton College in Oxford, were famous for lectures on Aristotle’s Physica, which produced new enquiries into the causes and processes of motion and change.63 According to John North, ‘Oxford’s great success in the early fourteenth century was largely a result of the conscious mathematization of [physical] problems previously discussed only in qualitative terms.’64 English scholars began to apply mathematics systematically to Aristotelian physics, developing theoretical tools like coordinate geometry and graphs to explore and depict their conclusions. At the same time, Oxford masters like William Ockham and Thomas Bradwardine employed mathematical and geometric models and metaphors when teaching logic or even theology.65

Medicine One of the most prolific and original genres of scientific literature in medieval England is that of medicine, much of which was (or claimed to be) founded on the knowledge of classical physicians. Anglo-Saxon England had a vibrant medical culture and produced the only significant vernacular medical tradition in Europe before the later Middle Ages.66 Surviving Old English texts include the Old English Herbarium

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature based on the herbal of Pseudo-Apuleius, the Lacnunga, Bald’s Leechbook, and Peri ­didaxeon (‘Concerning the Schools of Medicine’, a partial translation of a collection of Galenic and pseudo-Galenic texts known as the Tereoperica).67 As with the quadrivium, some knowledge of medical theory, which meant primarily the classical doctrine of the four humours, could be gleaned from Cassiodorus and Isidore, both of whom knew Latin translations of some works by Hippocrates and Galen, as well as of Dioscorides’ De materia medica. Some classical medical authors vanish almost entirely during the Middle Ages, even when writing in the more accessible Latin; these include Caelius Aurelianus and Celsus. Neither is known in England until the fifteenth or sixteenth century.68 While some Anglo-Saxon medicine may be based indirectly on Galenic medical theory, immediate knowledge of classical medicine was rare. Only two manuscripts of authentic Galenic works survive from the Anglo-Saxon period (one copy each of the Therapeutica ad Glauconem and Epistula de febribus), but both of these date from the end of the eleventh century, and thus could be Norman imports.69 No Hippocratic works are known to survive, nor were they cited, in England before the Conquest. Bede is alone in making reference, but only once, to Cassius Felix’s De medicina.70 One Anglo-Saxon manuscript of Quintus Serenus’ medical poem, Liber medicinalis, survives,71 but three more copies are listed in post-Conquest library catalogues.72 Two copies were known (one is now destroyed) of Sextus Placitus’ Liber medicinae ex animalibus.73 The face of medical learning, if not practice, changed dramatically and quickly after the Conquest. Norman scholars brought with them medical knowledge and treatises from the Continent, especially ones associated with physicians from Salerno in southern Italy. There began an especially rapid transmission of medical texts between Italy and England, the causes of which still need to be determined,74 but the effects of which are clear: English scholars were at the forefront of copying and commenting on rediscovered classical medical texts. Moreover, some of the medical texts associated with the Anglo-Saxon medical tradition are now dated to after the Conquest in the late eleventh century. These include the surviving copy of Sextus Placitus, the two oldest copies of the Liber medicinae ex herbis femininis extracted from the herbal of Dioscorides, as well as the two oldest English copies of Galenic texts. St Anselm seems to have been familiar with the new corpus of theoretically inclined medical texts, collectively called the Articella or Ars medicine.75 The Articella was a collection of classical, Byzantine Greek, and Arabic medical texts, organized for teaching medical theory, and translated into Latin primarily by Constantinus Africanus in the later eleventh century at the Italian monastery of Montecassino. Philosophers and physicians, eager to understand this recent infusion of classical medical knowledge, soon composed glosses and commentaries on the elements of the Articella. Some of these were made or at least copied in England by the middle of the twelfth century.76 Around this same time (c.1140), Henry, archdeacon of

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The Quadrivium and Natural Sciences Huntingdon, was using classical, early medieval, and Arabic medical texts in the composition of his verse herbal Anglicanus ortus (The English Garden).77 The authorities known by Chaucer’s Physician give a good indication of the mix of old and new, Latin and Arab, or pagan, Christian, and Muslim that were available in later medieval England: Wel knew he the olde Esculapius, And Deyscorides, and eek Rufus, Olde Ypocras, Haly, and Galyen, Serapion, Razis, and Avycen, Averrois, Damascien, and Constantyn, Bernard, and Gatesden, an Gilbertyn. (I. 429–34)

Of the fifteen named medical authorities, five belong to antiquity (Aesculapius, Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Galen, Rufus of Ephesus), seven are Arabic or translators of Arabic (Haly Abbas, Serapion, Rhazes, Avicenna, Averroes, Mesue, Constantinus Africanus), and the remaining three are medieval, Latin Christians (Bernard de Gordon, Gilbertus Anglicus, John of Gaddesden).78 The appearance of any author in this list does not, of course, prove that Chaucer had read their works, but his near contemporary Master Simon Bredon (d. 1372) possessed a library with works by twelve of these authorities.79 The names, at least, of these medical authorities would be known to graduates of any studium generale and all (but for the last three) can be found in Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum maius.80 Gilbertus Anglicus’ Compendium medicinae and John of Gaddesden’s Rosa medicinae were both widely copied and influential works. Gilbertus’ work, in particular, provides evidence of the wide reading in classical science that an English student could obtain in the middle of the thirteenth century: he cites a range of Aristotle’s philosophical and natural works, including his Physica, De generatione, De meteoris, De anima, and De animalibus.81

Ancillary Sciences A variety of arts that did not fit the clearly defined categories of the quadrivium or three Aristotelian philosophies survived from the classical world in medieval England. These include architecture, agriculture, military science, and prognostication, among others. Space allows only a brief review of the major classical texts on these subjects that were known in England. Knowledge of architecture came primarily through Vitruvius’ De architectura, English copies of which survive from the eleventh century.82 Classical agriculture survived primarily through passages in Pliny’s Historia and Palladius’ Opus agriculturae. This latter work was especially popular in England; seven of the twelve extant copies from the twelfth century were produced in England.83

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Palladius’ ideas could also be learned through citations by Cassiodorus and Isidore.84 In the later Middle Ages, Nicholas Bollard wrote a Book of Planting and Grafting using Cato’s Liber de agricultura, Varro’s De re rustica, Columella’s De re rustica xii et liber de arboribus, as well as Palladius and Pliny.85 An English translation of Palladius was made about 1440.86 The name of Vegetius became synonymous in the Middle Ages with the military arts and his Epitome rei militaris was known early in England, if only by Bede.87 An important witness to Vegetius was written in England about 1125, perhaps by the famous monastic author William of Malmesbury. This manuscript also contains the Strategemata of Frontinus, a first-century ad catalogue of military stratagems for use by Roman generals.88 I will pass over the bestiary tradition here, as it is almost entirely dependent on the Physiologus, a Greek text composed between the second and fourth century ad, and thus not strictly classical in origin.89 Closely linked to astronomy, computus, and medicine were the various methods of prognostication, which have been looked on with some disfavour by historians as more akin to magic than science. However, the reliance of prognostics on ‘astronomical observation rather than explicitly pagan divinatory practices may account for their apparently easy transition into Christian culture’.90 Prognostics were popular in Latin antiquity, and were eagerly adopted into Anglo-Saxon clerical culture: over thirty Anglo-Saxon manuscripts preserve between forty and fifty distinct prognostic texts.91 Forms of prognostication include onomancy (name magic), chiromancy (palmistry), geomancy (the casting of stones), and lists of inauspicious days (the so-called Egyptian Days or Dog Days).92 Onomantic texts were known from Anglo-Saxon times, and often took the form of ‘spheres’ (usually inscribed circles) attributed to ancient magicians such as Pythagoras, Apuleius, or Petosiris. These were primarily written in Latin verse until the later Middle Ages, when they appear in Anglo-Norman and Middle English prose versions.93 Chiromancy (or palmistry) had a venerable pedigree, as Aristotle was believed to have written on the subject. The oldest chiromantic manual in the Latin West comes from England and Middle English translations were made of Latin texts on palmistry.94

Conclusion In 1409, the faculty of arts of the University of Oxford restated the minimum programme of study for the bachelor of arts, first given in 1268.95 There are few surprises in the requirements for quadrivial sciences, which are heavy in medieval works, built on a fusion of Greek and Arabic science: Sacrobosco’s Algorismus and De sphaera, the Compotus ecclesiasticus, Boethius’ De arithmetica and De musica, Euclid, Alhazen or Witelo on perspectiva, and Ptolemy’s Almagest. This was sufficient for the quadrivial aspects of the BA. Those pursuing an MA studied the three philosophies, of which natural philosophy continued to feature Aristotle, including

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The Quadrivium and Natural Sciences his Physics, De anima, De generatione, and other genuine and pseudonymous works on nature. This late medieval syllabus tells, in a nutshell, the story of the reception of classical mathematics and science in England. Pervasive for nearly a millennium were the quadrivial treatises of Boethius, and Euclid’s Elements joined those in the twelfth century to teach geometry. The greatest changes in mathematical arts were seen in astronomy and cosmology, which were transformed by the translation into Latin of Ptolemaic and Arabic works. Yet the English understanding of the physical universe was transformed most of all, as elsewhere in Europe, by the absorption of Aristotelian natural philosophy, which would come to influence or dominate every field which considered the physical or metaphysical world, from kinetics and medicine, to music and magic.

Notes 1   See Pearl Kibre, ‘The Quadrivium in the Thirteenth-Century Universities (with special reference to Paris)’, in Pearl Kibre, Studies in Medieval Science (1984), article I; Guy Beaujouan, ‘The Transformation of the Quadrivium’, in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, eds R. L. Benson, Giles Constable, and Carol Lanham (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 463–87. 2   R. W. Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam (1157–1217), ed. and rev. Margaret Gibson (Oxford, 1984), p. 42. 3   For introductions to many of the topics under discussion here, see Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, eds Thomas Glick, Steven J. Livesey, and Faith Wallis (New York, 2005). 4   Secretum secretorum: Nine English Versions, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, EETS 276 (Oxford, 1977); On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum, eds M. C. Seymour et al., 3 vols (Oxford, 1975–88). 5  See Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference, eds Linda Ehrsam Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz, CD-ROM (Ann Arbor, 2000), available on line through the University of Missouri at Kansas City at . See also Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, Medieval Texts and Studies 11, ed. Lister M. Matheson (East Lansing, Mich., 1994). 6   Sex, Aging, and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52, its Texts, Language, and Scribe, ed. M. Teresa Tavormina, 2 vols, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 292 (Tempe, Ariz., 2006). 7   M. Teresa Tavormina, ‘Commentary on the Hippocratic Prognostics, Part 1’, in Sex, Aging, and Death, ed. Tavormina, 2, 373–434 (at p. 374). 8   Patricia Deery Kurtz and Linda Ehrsam Voigts, ‘Contents, Unique Treatises, and Related Manuscripts’, in Sex, Aging, and Death, ed. Tavormina, 1, 19–54. 9   Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd edn, eds L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson (Oxford, 1991), pp. 86–9.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 10   W. H. Stahl, ‘To a Better Understanding of Martianus Capella’, Speculum 40 (1965), 102–15; W. H. Stahl, ‘The Quadrivium of Martianus Capella: Its Place in the Intellectual History of Western Europe’, in Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge (Montreal and Paris, 1969), pp. 959–67. 11  Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006), p. 321. See also Mariken Teeuwen, ‘Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis: A Pagan “Storehouse” First Discovered by the Irish?’, in Foundations of Learning: The Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages, eds Rolf H. Bremmer Jr and Kees Dekker (Leuven, 2007), pp. 51–62. 12  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 243–4, 294. 13   Ann W. Astell, Chaucer and the Universe of Learning (Ithaca, NY, 1996), pp. 12, 18. 14  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 311; J. N. Hillgarth, ‘Ireland and Spain in the Seventh Century’, Peritia 3 (1984), 1–16. 15   Loredana Lazzari, ‘Isidore’s Etymologiae in Anglo-Saxon Glossaries’, in Foundations of Learning, eds Bremmer and Dekker, pp. 63–93. Lapidge records nineteen English copies of the Etymologiae before the Conquest, and it was cited explicitly by Theodore, Aldhelm, Bede, Lantfred, Abbo, Ælfric, and Byrhtferth (Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 311). 16   Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Continental Mission and the Transfer of Encyclo­ paedic Knowledge’, in Foundations of Learning, eds Bremmer and Decker, pp. 19–50 (at pp. 36–7). 17  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 222–3, 325. 18   Roberti Crikeladensis Defloratio Naturalis historie Plinii Secundi, ed. Bodo Näf (Berlin, 2002); see the comments on the manuscripts of Pliny in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford, 1983), pp. 307–16. 19  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 225, 333. 20   Four Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman copies survive: Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 294. 21   Gillian R. Evans, ‘John of Salisbury and Boethius on Arithmetic’, in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford, 1984), pp. 161–7. 22   Laurel Means, ‘ “For as moche as yche man may not have the astrolabe”: Popular Middle English Variations on the Computus’, Speculum 67 (1992), 595–623. 23   Beaujouan, ‘The Transformation of the Quadrivium’, pp. 467–71. 24  Thomas Ricklin, ‘Plato im zwölften Jahrhundert: Einige Hinweise zu seinem Verschwinden’, in The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages: A Doxographic Approach, eds Stephen Gersh et al. (Berlin, 2002), pp. 139–64. 25   J. D. North, ‘Astronomy and Mathematics’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, Late Medieval Oxford, eds J. I. Catto and Ralph Evans (Oxford, 1992), pp. 103–74. 26   See M. Ullman, ‘Geometry in the Mediaeval Quadrivium’, in Studi di bibliografia e di storia in onore di T. de Marinis, 4 vols (Verona, 1964), 4, 263–85. 27   L. D. Reynolds, ‘Agrimensores’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 3–6. 28   Reynolds, ‘Agrimensores’, p. 5. 29   Marshall Clagett, ‘The Medieval Latin Translations from the Arabic of the Elements of Euclid, with Special Emphasis on the Versions of Adelard of Bath’, Isis 44 (1953), 16–42; H. L. L. Busard, The First Latin Translation of Euclid’s Elements Commonly Ascribed to Adelard of Bath (Toronto, 1983).

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The Quadrivium and Natural Sciences   North, ‘Astronomy and Mathematics’, pp. 140–2.   Patrizia Lendinara, ‘Instructional Manuscripts in England: Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Codices and the Early Norman Ones’, in Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the Light of Contemporary Manuscript Evidence, ed. Patrizia Lendinara (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 59–113 (at p. 89). 32   Elizabeth C. Teviotdale, ‘Music and Pictures in the Middle Ages’, in Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music, eds Tess Knighton and David Fallows (Berkeley, 1992), pp. ­179–88 (at pp. 186–8). 33   Quoted in F. L. Harrison, ‘Music at Oxford before 1500’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, eds Catto and Evans , pp. 347–71 (at p. 348). 34   John L. Snyder, ‘Reason and Original Thinking in English Intellectual Circles: Aristotle, Adelard, Auctoritas, and Theinred of Dover’s Musical Theory of Species’, in Teaching and Learning in Northern Europe, 1000–1200, eds Sally N. Vaughn and Jay Rubenstein (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 279–304. 35   Quotations from Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry Benson (Boston, 1987). See Peter Brown and Andrew Butcher, The Age of Saturn: Literature and History in the Canterbury Tales (Oxford, 1991), which contains further references. In Langland’s Piers Plowman there is a passing reference to the difficulty and danger of astronomy, along with geometry and geomancy: see B text pp. 194–5; the corresponding passage in C text omits even these references to the quadrivial sciences. 36  The text is described and edited by Edgar S. Laird, ‘Texts Concerning Scientific Instruments’, in Sex, Aging, and Death, ed. Tavormina, 2, 607–80. 37  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 170. 38   M. D. Reeve, ‘Aratea’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 18–24. 39  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 51, 271, 308; M. D. Reeve, ‘Hyginus’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 187–9. 40   Discussed by Charles Burnett, ‘Adelard, Ergaphalau and the Science of the Stars’, in Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century, ed. C. Burnett (1987), pp. 133–45, repr. in Burnett, Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages: Texts and Techniques in the Islamic and Christian Worlds (Aldershot, 1996), article II. 41   John D. North, ‘The Quadrivium’, in A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1. Universities in the Middle Ages, ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 337–59. 42  Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister, p. 76. 43   John D. North, Chaucer’s Universe (Oxford, 1988), especially pp. 7–37. 44   Lister M. Matheson and Ann Shannon, ‘Treatise on the Elections of Times’, in Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, ed. Matheson, pp. 23–59. 45   Astrik L. Gabriel, ‘English Masters and Students in Paris during the Twelfth Century’, Analecta Praemonstratensia 25 (1949), 51–94; repr. with updated bibliography in Astrik L. Gabriel, Garlandia: Studies in the History of the Mediaeval University (Notre Dame, Ind., 1969), pp. 1–37. 46   Gabriel, ‘English Masters and Students’ (1969), p. 14. 47   Alexander Neckam, Sacerdos ad altare cc. ix–xx, ed. Christopher J. McDonough, CCCM 227 (Turnhout, 2010), pp. 189–225. 30 31

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature   On Alexander ‘scientist’, see Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister, pp. 67–83.  Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister, pp. 43–8. 50  Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister, pp. 48–9. 51  Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister, pp. 67–8. 52   The manuscript is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden supra 24, noted by Rodney M. Thomson, ‘England and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, Past and Present No. 101 (1983), pp. 3–21 (at p. 7). 53  Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister, p. 71; see also Danielle Jacquart, ‘Aristotelian Thought in Salerno’, in A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 407–28. 54   R. James Long, ‘The Reception and Interpretation of the pseudo-Aristotelian De plantis at Oxford in the Thirteenth Century’, in Knowledge and the Sciences in Medieval Philosophy, eds R. Työrinoja, A. Lehtinen, and D. Føllesdal (Helsinki, 1990), pp. 111–23; R. James Long, ‘The Anonymous Peterhouse Master and the Natural Philosophy of Plants’, Traditio 46 (1991), 313–26. 55  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 240, 244. 56   Gabriel, ‘English Masters and Students’ (1969), p. 20; Roger French, ‘Astrology in Medical Practice’, in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, eds Luis García-Ballester, Roger French, et al. (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 30–59 (at pp. 30–3). 57   Michael Lapidge, ‘Stoic Cosmology and the Source of the First Old English Riddle’, Anglia 112 (1994), 1–25. See also H. M. Hine, ‘The Younger Seneca’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 376–8. 58   Richard W. Southern, Saint Anselm and his Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought, 1059–c.1130 (Cambridge, 1963), p. 59. 59   H. M. Hine, ‘The Younger Seneca’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, p. 378. 60   Richard Lemay, Abu Ma’Shar and Latin Aristotelianism in the Twelfth Century: The Recovery of Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy through Arabic Astrology (Beirut, 1962). 61   William J. Courtenay, Schools & Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1987), pp. 30–4. 62   Charles Burnett, ‘The Introduction of Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy into Great Britain: A Preliminary Survey of the Manuscript Evidence’, in Aristotle in Britain during the Middle Ages, ed. John Marenbon (Turnhout, 1996), pp. 21–50; Rodney M. Thomson, Catalogue of Medieval Manuscripts of Latin Commentaries on Aristotle in British Libraries, vol. 1, Oxford (Turnhout, 2011). 63   See Edith Sylla, ‘Medieval Quantifications of Qualities: the “Merton School”’, Archive for the History of Exact Sciences 8 (1971), 9–39; J. A. Weisheipl, ‘Ockham and the Mertonians’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 1, The Early Oxford Schools, ed. J. I. Catto (Oxford, 1984), pp. 607–58; and J. D. North, ‘Natural Philosophy in Late Medieval Oxford’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, eds Catto and Evans, pp. 65–102. 64   North, ‘Natural Philosophy in Late Medieval Oxford’, p. 69. 48

49

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The Quadrivium and Natural Sciences 65  Courtenay, School & Scholars, pp. 240–1, 262–4; John Murdoch, ‘Mathesis in Philosophiam scholasticam introducta: The Rise and Development of the Application of Mathematics in Fourteenth-Century Philosophy and Theology’, in Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge, pp. 215–54. 66   M. L. Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine (Cambridge, 1993); Maria Amalia D’Aronco, ‘The Transmission of Medical Knowledge in Anglo-Saxon England: The Voices of Manuscripts’, in Form and Content, ed. Lendinara, pp. 35–58. 67   These works and their social and intellectual contexts have been edited and abundantly studied; cf. The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de quadrupedibus, ed. Hubert Jan de Vriend, EETS 286 (1984); Anne Van Arsdall, Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine (New York, 2002). Anne Van Arsdall has argued that the Anglo-Saxon medical works provide evidence not only of interest but also of active training in medicine: ‘Medical Training in Anglo-Saxon England: An Evaluation of the Evidence’, in Form and Content, ed. Lendinara, pp. 415–34. On Peri didaxeon, see Danielle Maion, ‘The Fortune of the So-Called Practica Petrocelli Salernitani in England: New Evidence and Some Considerations’, in Form and Content, ed. Lendinara, pp. 495–512. 68   L. D. Reynolds and R. H. Rouse, ‘Caelius Aurelianus’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 32–5; M. D. Reeve, ‘Celsus’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 46–7. 69  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 303. 70  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 205, 297. 71   Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS lat. 4839 (s. x/xi), Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 332. 72   R. H. Rouse, ‘Q. Serenus’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 381–5. 73  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 333. 74   Monica H. Green, ‘Salerno on the Thames: The Genesis of Anglo-Norman Medical Literature’, in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c.1100–c.1500, eds Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (York, 2009), pp. 220–31. 75   Giles E. M. Gasper and Faith Wallis, ‘Anselm and the “Articella” ’, Traditio 59 (2004), 129–74. 76   See Faith Wallis, ‘Inventing Diagnosis: Theophilus’ De urinis in the Classroom’, Dynamis: Acta hispanica ad medicinae scientiarumque historiam illustrandam 20 (2000), 31–73, especially 41–8. 77   Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Anglicanus Ortus: A Verse Herbal of the Twelfth Century, ed. and trans. Winston Black, Studies and Texts 180, British Writers of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period 3 (Toronto and Oxford, 2012). 78   M. F. McBride, Chaucer’s Physician and Fourteenth Century Medicine: A Compendium for Students (Lima, Oh., 1985), pp. 43–9. 79  Huling E. Ussery, Chaucer’s Physician: Medicine and Literature in Fourteenth-Century England, Tulane Studies in English 19 (New Orleans, 1971), p. 104; see also K. V. Snedegar, ‘The Works and Days of Simon Bredon, a Fourteenth-Century Astronomer and Physician’, in Between Demonstration and Imagination: Essays in the History of Science and Philosophy Presented to John D. North, eds Lodi Nauta and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden, 1999), pp. 285–309.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature  McBride, Chaucer’s Physician and Fourteenth Century Medicine, p. 43.   See Michael McVaugh, ‘Who was Gilbert the Englishman?’, in The Study of Medieval Manuscripts of England: Festschrift in Honor of Richard W. Pfaff, eds George Hardin Brown and Linda Ehrsam Voigts (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 295–324. 82   Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, pp. 91–2; S. F. Weiskittel and L. D. Reynolds, ‘Vitruvius’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 440–5; Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 337. 83  Rodney Thomson, ‘Where Were the Latin Classics in Twelfth-Century England?’, English Manuscript Studies 7 (1995), 25–40 (at p. 25). 84   P. K. Marshall, ‘Palladius’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 287–8. 85  W. L. Braekman, ‘Bollard’s Middle English Book of Planting and Grafting and its Background’, Studia Neophilologica 57 (1985), 19–39. See also M. D. Reeve, ‘Columella’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 146–7. 86  David G. Cylkowski, ‘A Middle English Treatise on Horticulture: Godfridus super Palladium’, in Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, ed. Matheson, pp. 301–29. 87  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 225, 335 88   L. D. Reynolds, ‘Frontinus’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 171–2. 89   See Florence McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, rev. edn (Chapel Hill, NC, 1962); Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and its Legacy, eds. Willene B. Clark and Meradith T. McMunn (Philadelphia, 1989); and Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp, The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary (1991). 90  Roy Liuzza, Anglo-Saxon Prognostics: An Edition and Translation of Texts from London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.III (Cambridge, 2011), p. 2. 91  Liuzza, Anglo-Saxon Prognostics; see also László Sándor Chardonnens, Anglo-Saxon Prognostics, 900–1100: Study and Texts (Leiden, 2007). 92   On Egyptian days, see Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols (New York, 1923–58), 1, 685–96. 93   Linda Ehrsam Voigts, ‘The Latin Verse and Middle English Prose Texts on the Sphere of Life and Death in Harley 3719’, Chaucer Review 21 (1986), 291–305; Linda Ehrsam Voigts, ‘The Golden Table of Pythagoras’, in Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, ed. Matheson, pp. 123–39. 94  Roger A. Pack, ‘Pseudo-Aristoteles: Chiromantia’, AHDLMA 39 (1972), 289–320; Paul Acker and Eriko Amino, ‘The Book of Palmistry’, in Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, ed. Matheson, pp. 141–83; Charles Burnett, ‘The Earliest Chiromancy in the West’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 50 (1987), 189–95, repr. in Burnett, Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages, article X. 95   J. M. Fletcher, ‘The Faculty of Arts’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 1, ed. Catto, pp. 369–99 (at p. 376); J. M. Fletcher, ‘Developments in the Faculty of Arts 1370–1520’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, eds Catto and Evans, pp. 315–45 (at pp. 323–4). 80 81

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Chapter 6

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature Libraries and Florilegia James Willoughby

Of all the suits of study available to the reader in an institutional library in the Middle Ages, classical literature ranked low. The bedrock of the medieval library was the Bible, available for study in multi-volume copies accompanied, after the mid-twelfth century, by the scriptural commentary of the Glossa ordinaria. Some books of the Bible were more popular for study than others, and not every library would have held a complete set; but these biblical books generally form the first category of reading reported in medieval library catalogues, suggesting that their importance was understood to be foundational.1 In such booklists the Church Fathers ranked next, first Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, and Gregory, then other doctors and theologians such as Hilary, Bede, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Hugh of Saint-Victor. Regulatory and penitential literature, pastoral theology, and sermons follow in this hierarchy of learning, and, from the later twelfth century, also sententiae and summae deriving initially from the Paris schools, chief among them the four books of Sentences by Peter Lombard (d. 1160) and the Historia scholastica by Petrus Comestor (d. 1178). Philosophical texts are normally found next, a category in which texts of Aristotle and commentaries upon them are numerous, followed by texts of the laws, civil and canon, and perhaps some medicine, perhaps some history, and occasionally some topographical writing. School texts, including grammars and Latin poetry, are found at the end of the booklists and at the bottom of the learned hierarchy. This organization of the categories of learning reflects the standard cursus of scholarly reading in the Middle Ages. Setting his foot to the bottom rung of the ladder, and

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature having gained his first letters, a reader would proceed to the grammarians and the poets of the silver and golden age in order to finesse his capacities (as has been described in other chapters of the present volume). The intention was to make oneself fit to progress to the divine teaching at the higher rungs of the ladder. The ultimate truth that was obtainable in the Bible, recoverable through the four senses of interpretation—literal, typological, tropological, and anagogical—required a complete facility with the diverse literary modes of the Scriptures, gained by a thorough preparation in classical rhetorical techniques.2 One of the masters of the anagogical, or mystical, sense of biblical interpretation, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), did not despise his classical education and often cited the pagan poets, writing that knowledge of good letters ‘which adorn and refine the soul, make it possible to educate others’.3 William of Saint-Thierry, Bernard’s biographer, wrote admiringly of how, as a boy, Bernard had ‘so dedicated himself to the pursuit of letters that through them he soon came to discover and to know God in the scriptures’.4 It was normal that the novitiate was the chief time in an intelligent monk’s life when he was sufficiently free of administrative burdens to commit himself to an intensive course of reading, and it is normal too that one’s first masters should leave their impress, particularly when those classical texts were being read by the novice for linguistic purposes, more or less as a collection of grammatical examples. Scholarship would have been better placed to draw its inferences on the varieties of literature in medieval schools had the word grammaticus been treated more leniently. For example, Thomas of Marlborough, in his history of the abbey of Evesham, reported that Abbot Ælfweard (d. 1044) had sent home from London ‘libros plurimos tam diuinos quam gramaticos’.5 ‘Grammar books’ per se are one class of reading, but a small one in the eleventh century. While Priscian and Donatus never lost their lustre as diagnostic guides for the student of Latin, and after the end of the twelfth century they might be joined in book cupboards by the popular metrical grammars of Alexander de Villa Dei (Doctrinale) and Eberhard of Béthune (Graecismus), the class of such texts in any library was only ever small. Translating libros grammaticos instead as ‘school-books’ opens up a new reading, making clearer the distinction between spiritual reading for the monk and school-books for the novice, a category that would have included many familiar works of classical Latin literature. Abbot Ælfweard’s desiderata probably resembled the list of sixty school-books produced in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, probably at Worcester cathedral priory.6 This booklist, in common with others of its age and type, is not a synoptic library catalogue but rather a simple list of authors or titles written on to the blank back leaf of a library book, in this case a copy of Gregory’s Dialogues. Among the authors named are Terence, Lucan, Persius in two copies, the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, Martianus Capella, a work called ‘Glosarius’, and a group of three late antique authors whose status as skilful writers of verse epic had brought them into this fold, namely Arator and Sedulius in two copies apiece and Prudentius in one.

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The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature The studia litterarum and the needs of the schoolroom ensured that such authors maintained currency and that copies of their works were propagated. By the twelfth century certain auctores had come together for the tyro reader in groupings that were starting to appear standard. The so-called Liber catonianus was a collection for the teaching of grammar whose contents varied over time but most often included the Disticha Catonis, Avianus, Claudian, Statius, Maximianus, Ovid’s Remedia amoris, and ‘Pamphilius’.7 The Disticha Catonis was itself so popular that it called forth three Anglo-Norman translations.8 For the more advanced reader, Horace, Virgil, Persius, and Juvenal seem never to have lost their lustre. For Anglo-Saxon England, evidence for the status of such writers is harder to come by. There is only a small scatter of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of classical texts from the Insular period, none remaining in England: the Leiden fragment of Pliny’s Naturalis historia, copied in Northumbria in the first third of the eighth century; a leaf of Justinus of the same vintage and origin; the earliest manuscript of Servius, copied in West-Saxon minuscule probably in the early eighth century; and the volume of ancient commentaries on Donatus now at the monastery of St Paul in Carinthia, Austria, its texts copied in the eighth century by separate Anglo-Saxon scribes.9 It is significant that all these books have survived on the Continent, emblematic of a time when Anglo-Saxon and Irish schools on the continental mission-field shone very brightly in an obscure landscape. Other clues emerge from the writings of Anglo-Saxon authors. The scholarly range of resources that Archbishop Theodore (d. 690) and Abbot Hadrian (d. 709) brought with them to Canterbury is attested by the learning of their pupil Aldhelm (c.639–709/10), whose intricate ‘hermeneutic’ Latin style, distinguished by a love of neologisms deriving from Greek hermeneuta or glossaries, was the marvel of his age.10 A corpus of biblical commentaries and the ‘Leiden Glossary’, deriving from a Canterbury archetype, survive to represent the exceptional range of Theodore and Hadrian’s teaching at the cathedral school.11 No certain trace remains of the library that they brought with them, although one survivor may be Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 304, a copy of Juvencus written in Italian uncial around ad 700 and glossed in an English hand of the late ninth century or early tenth.12 It was certainly at Canterbury by the late twelfth century, when its script was described as ‘Roman’ by a local reader.13 At England’s other great eccesiastical centre of York, one may conjure with the famous testimony of Alcuin (d. 804), head of the cathedral school, as to the range of classical authors who had contributed to his own formation as a poet (Virgil, Statius, Lucan, Servius, Probus, Pliny).14 If York does not rank with the scriptoria of Italy or western France as a centre for the propagation of pagan literature, then its influence may yet have been as profound, in the contribution that Alcuin, having taken over the palace school at Aachen, made to the Carolingian renovatio. In attempting an assessment of the authors for whom there is evidence of knowledge in Anglo-Saxon England, we can deal only in fragments.15 There is good e­ vidence

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature for Boethius, particularly his De consolatione philosophiae (one of those books which King Alfred judged ‘most needful’ for men to know), surviving in seventeen late Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. There was some knowledge of Claudian and Lucan (Bede’s own diction was indebted to Lucan’s), of Virgil, some Terence, some Cicero and Seneca, and Persius’ Satires. Two surviving late eleventh-century English manuscripts communicate much of Horace (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 3. 57, with a provenance from Canterbury cathedral, and Oxford, Queen’s College, MS 202). One manuscript, at least, is philologically significant: Oxford, Bodleian, MS Auct. F. 4. 32, known as St Dunstan’s Classbook and usually assigned to Glastonbury abbey, contains a copy of Ovid’s Ars amatoria I made in Wales probably in the late ninth century, one of the text’s oldest witnesses. Too often, when considering the inheritance of Anglo-Saxon books in post-­ Conquest England, we can conjure only with laconic but tantalizing references to ‘libri vetustissimi’.16 Occasionally, there may be more suggestive hints that ancient books were still available to the reader. A fragment of a manuscript written at Peterborough abbey (Northants) between 1122 and 1135, London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius C I fols 2–42, contains Cicero’s Aratea (fols 21v–36r) with many illustrations and much use of Rustic capitals as a text script, which is an antique and Carolingian lettering style but is very unusual for this date of writing. It is a hint that the exemplar was an early one. Such an exemplar might have found its way there from the abbey of Fleury in the Loire Valley, the centre of classical studies in northern France: Fleury is known to have possessed ancient books and the refounder of the abbey at Peterborough, Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester (d. 984), was a friend of the house.17 There is other evidence from Peterborough for the survival in its library of an antique strain. A catalogue of the late fourteenth century, the so-called Matricularium, contains a probable reference to Boethius on the Trinity, named only as ‘Apotheosis’ with a following string of majuscule letters capped by marks of suspension. These can plausibly be made to fit the names of the author and his addressee in the traditional style: ‘B(oethii) M(anlii) ad Q(uintum) M(emmium) S(ymmachum) s(ocerum) p(a)t(ricium)’. The entry as it stands is sufficiently cryptic that we must assume that the cataloguer was content merely to copy the titulus from the manuscript without any comprehension of its meaning; nor was he able to construe the work from the contents alone.18 It would represent a textual strain for the titulus which is otherwise unknown and hints again that an early copy had come into the hands of the Peterborough cataloguer or else lay behind the copy that he saw. As is well known, the renewal of interest in the classics during the twelfth century was in origin a continental mainstream that quickly pulled English scholarship out of its backwater. The Normans who had taken over positions of prominence in the English Church were critical of the gaps they found when inspecting the institutional libraries they had come into, just as they questioned the status of obscure English saints and trumped the old buildings they found with massive new churches.19

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The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature The flow of books and scribes might have worked in both directions across the Channel—Anselm requested books from Canterbury as Lanfranc requested them from Bec—but the conversation was a ‘Norman’ one. Later, the flourishing of the Paris schools ensured that the intellectual dependency of England on France remained a constant of the twelfth century. At the abbey (as it then was) of Ely, an inventory of the library was taken around 1093, reporting 208 books.20 It is a considerable total for the time, and while it is a tantalizing question as to how much of it was a remnant from the pre-Conquest foundation, it is inconceivable that the four abbots between 1066 and 1093, all of them Normans, had not made a very great contribution. Such was demonstrably the case at Salisbury cathedral, where, shortly after the foundation of the see in 1075 and into the early twelfth century, the chapter was united in a campaign to copy books for its new library.21 The canons’ interests were sufficiently broad that several works of classical literature were copied that have no earlier witness from England: the comedies of Plautus and Cicero’s Disputationes Tusculanae (London, British Library, MS Royal 15 C XI, fols 113–94, 1–58), and Cicero’s enormously influential De officiis, extracts from Seneca’s De beneficiis, and a florilegium of extracts from Aulus Gellius and Valerius Maximus (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 16. 34).22 Exemplars were various and seem, in the case of these authors, to have derived from continental centres.23 The Plautus is significant, for England seems to have been the only place in twelfth-century Europe where Plautus was being read. This copy was textually affiliated to a lost copy of Terence and Plautus from Bury St Edmunds abbey, from which a florilegium was compiled in the thirteenth century; the archetype, which was probably French and not later than the tenth century, seems also to have been used by Osbern Pinnock ( fl. c.1160), monk of Gloucester, for his popular etymological dictionary, the Derivationes.24 In similar fashion, the Salisbury florilegium has particular importance for the text of Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, a huge compilation that has a split transmission, whereby Books I–VII circulated separately from IX–XX (Book VIII is lost). The excerpts in this Salisbury anthology derive from both halves of the transmission and form the earliest extant witness to Books I–VII. The historian William of Malmesbury (d. in or after 1142) shortly afterwards culled excerpts from both books (Oxford, Bodleian, MS Rawlinson G. 139), evidence that such a text was in circulation in the south-west.25 Monastic scriptoria, rather than those of the secular clergy, come to the fore in connection with other works that had reached England by the end of the eleventh century. Cicero’s Catilines has its earliest English witness in an attractive manuscript from Thorney abbey (another Æthelwoldian house) that also contains Sallust’s Invectiva in Ciceronem and a tract on Greek letters (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 18. 7. 8, s. xi/xii). Alongside that may be placed a beautiful copy of Persius’ Satires, Avianus, and the Disticha Catonis from the beginning of the twelfth century, also from Thorney (Advocates 18. 6. 12).26 Suetonius’

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature De vita Caesarum is first found in England in a late eleventh-century manuscript whose later medieval home was Durham cathedral priory (Durham Cathedral, MS C. III. 18). (The difficulty of locating a copy had led Herbert de Losinga (d. 1119), bishop of Norwich, to request one from the abbey of Fécamp, claiming that Suetonius ‘could not be found in England’.27) Vitruvius and Vegetius in two separate hands of the late tenth or early eleventh century are bound together in London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra D I fols 2–128 + II, a book with a certain later provenance from St Augustine’s abbey, Canterbury.28 This copy has been described as ‘the mainspring of the English tradition’ of Vitruvius, and it has English descendants from the first half of the twelfth century onwards.29 Macrobius’ commentary on the Somnium Scipionis, with the Somnium itself, is first found in a manuscript from the late eleventh century (Oxford, Bodleian, MS Auct. F. 2. 20, fols 17–65), while Solinus, the third-­century grammarian, is first detected in a copy from Bury St Edmunds abbey of the  late eleventh century or early twelfth (Cambridge, Clare College, s.n.). Orosius, Historia aduersum paganos, seems regularly to have been transmitted with Justinus in the scriptoria of Normandy and southern England between the Conquest and the end of the twelfth century. Indeed, five manuscripts transmit short prefatory verses stating that these two works were here to be found together. In that the burden of Orosius’ work was Roman history and that of Justinus was Greek and eastern history, it may be that the combination of the two authors was intended to supply something like a comprehensive history of the ancient world.30 One of the most impressive features of this period is the intensive way in which books were copied and circulated, as if a conception of ‘the library’ had arisen within the holding institutions, with a matching consensus, standardized across Europe, about what a library should properly contain.31 By the end of the twelfth century, a large monastic library might be possessed of a thousand books, of which around two thirds might be standard works of patristica but in which certain classical authors were also finding their corner. A century after the Norman Conquest, England’s pre-eminent library was already replete with classical auctoritates. The earliest catalogue from the cathedral priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, datable to around 1180, is a list largely of pagan and late antique authors some 223 items long.32 Like the Worcester booklist mentioned above, it is found at the back of a library book, in this case one containing the De arithmetica and De musica of Boethius, written in a hand typical of Christ Church in the first half of the twelfth century. Each entry in the list was assigned a distinctive symbol, which must have related to the physical copy. The list appears to be an excerpt from a much fuller catalogue of the book collection at Canterbury that had originally begun, in the customary way, with the Bible and patristics and which listed school authors only at the end. That suggestion on the document’s status is supported by the grouping at the end of the booklist of some other, miscellaneous texts: a copy of Justinian’s Institutiones, a ‘liber de lege uetus’ and a ‘liber de situ Ierusalem’,

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The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature this latter the work falsely attributed to Eucherius (d. 449), bishop of Lyon. But the witness it offers to the presence of classical texts at Canterbury is significant. It is digested into subject-classes, beginning with Grammar, and twelve copies of Priscian and seven commentaries or glosses on his works. The first item was a copy of the Institutiones grammaticae I–XVI that had been given by Archbishop Lanfranc, perhaps the copy referred to in a Priscian manuscript from the other great Canterbury house of St Augustine’s abbey, in which there is the note that a variant reading existed in ‘liber archiepiscopi’.33 A ‘Donatus Anglice’ was a copy of Ælfric’s Grammar while a ‘Donatus grece’ is valuable evidence that an elementary Greek grammar was known in northern Europe before 1200. The other categories by which the books were broadly arranged are Rhetoric, Music, Arithmetic, Latin poetry, Logic (the Logica uetus), and Astronomy. Copies were multiple. There were no fewer than eight copies of ‘Rhetorica’ (comprising Cicero’s De inventione and the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium), eleven copies of Macrobius, six of Chalcidius on Plato’s Timaeus, and seven of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. In the poetry class, Terence heads the list (five copies and a gloss), then Sallust (eight copies), Cicero (a copy of De senectute and two of De amicitia), three books described as ‘Vergilius totus’ and three containing his Eclogues, Horace (eight copies), Lucan (five copies), Persius (nine copies), Statius (Thebaid in four copies and Achilleid in two), and Juvenal (five copies, one a gloss). Ovid was rather less to the fore, although all of the works of the Ovidian corpus were present in composite volumes and there were four separate copies of ‘Ovidius magnus’, the common titulus for the collected works. One book contained Ibis, which had come into circulation in the mid-twelfth century but was a rarity in England at this date.34 Among a run of copies of Prudentius and Sedulius was the Juvencus ‘in Romana scriptura’ that has been mentioned above as a possible survivor from the days of Theodore and Hadrian. Shortly after this catalogue was drawn up, Christ Church would receive a handsome clutch of classical works from St Thomas Becket, including Quintilian, the elder Seneca’s Declamations, Vegetius, Livy in two volumes (one of which survives as Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 4. 4, an important manuscript of the work), and a copy of Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, of which manuscripts were few before the thirteenth century and not common in England until the fifteenth.35 While the quantity of copies at Christ Church was unusual, its holdings could be matched in kind by other large Benedictine houses of the day, such as Bury St Edmunds, Reading, Rochester, and Whitby.36 No such patrimony of old books could be claimed by the Cistercians, a vigorous, reforming monastic order founded in 1098, whose libraries had to be built up de novo and whose scriptoria in the second half of the twelfth century were particularly busy. English Cistercians seem to have favoured concentrations of patristics and other theological writings over all other branches of learning, including classical literature—­ an insight gained from a survey of surviving, provenanceable books and extant booklists.37 Cistercian monasteries did not run claustral schools, which must explain

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature why so few literary texts of the classical age are detectable there. But, following the example of Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian writers did not abjure pagan authors. Aelred (1109–67), abbot of Rievaulx in Yorkshire, wrote in the prologue of the most popular of all his works, his De spirituali amicitia, of how, as a boy, there had come into his hands ‘the treatise that Tully wrote on friendship’; the depth of Cicero’s ideas and the ‘charm of his eloquence’ had made an immediate impression on Aelred and given him a ‘formula for friendship’ that he worked out in his own treatise, borrowing freely from Cicero’s text.38 Although two library catalogues happen to survive from Rievaulx from the late twelfth century, the only copy of Cicero’s De amicitia that is attested for a Cistercian house is the one known to have been given to Newenham (Devon) around 1248.39 The libraries of the secular cathedrals differed from those of the monasteries and monastic cathedral priories to the same extent that the life of the canon differed from that of the monk.40 The canon was not avowed to his church as the monk was, but could receive an income and was free to own property. The quasi-monastic esprit de corps that is detectable in early post-Conquest cathedral communities such as Salisbury’s quickly evaporated as prebends became the reward and sources of income for high-ranking clerics in the service of royal or episcopal adminstration. Canons became absentees, holding their stalls in plurality and farming their liturgical obligations to vicars. Communal collections of books at cathedrals were therefore slow to form and were meagre in comparison to the accumulations of books at monasteries. This, in spite of the fact that secular cathedrals possessed the formal dignity of the chancellor, to whom was given the responsibility of teaching in the diocese; an advanced scholar, he would have taught from his own books. At Exeter an inventory of books of 1327 lists fewer than 300 items; of classical interest there was only a Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, a Prudentius (Bodleian MS Auct. F. 3. 6), a Persius (Bodleian MS Auct. F. 1. 15), and a copy of the Thebaid by Statius, all of which had been given to the church around 1072 by Bishop Leofric; there had been no subsequent enlargement of the holdings in classical literature.41 A similar story may be told for Lincoln, where a booklist of 104 entries was copied into the front of the magnificent Romanesque Bible that stood on the high altar, a donation-record extending from the mid-twelfth century into the early thirteenth and including the names of such luminaries as Gerald of Wales and St Hugh of Avalon.42 There are only two books of classical interest in the list, a Virgil and a copy of Vegetius that was bound with Paul the Deacon’s Historia romana (described as ‘Eutropius de rebus romanis’) and Boethius’ Consolatio. By the mid-fifteenth century, when an inventory of the books in the chained library was made—a list of only 109 entries—the Virgil had gone and the Vegetius remained as the only volume of a classical Latin text at Lincoln.43 It was still there when the shelves were inspected by a royal agent around 1530.44 In contrast to the secular cathedrals, the religious houses, which ran claustral schools, were better equipped with resources of classical literature. At Bury

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The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature St Edmunds in the first years of the thirteenth century the unlettered monks declared that their literate brethren ‘have declined Musa, Musae so often, that they are all accounted bemused’.45 By the thirteenth century certain auctores were empanelled in the curriculum and the category of school-book had become well established. At the great Benedictine abbey of Glastonbury, a catalogue made in 1247 has many headings for individual authors and classes of text, such as ‘Priscianus’ and ‘Donatus’, and a separate one of ‘Gramatica’, reminding us once again that ‘grammar books’ were not only diagnostic manuals.46 In this case, the books so categorized were grammatical commentaries, mainly on Donatus’ Ars maior, including a most recondite text described as ‘Pompeius de significacione uerborum’, probably to be identified as Epitoma Festi by Paul the Deacon (d. 799), based on De verborum significatu by the late second-century grammarian Pompeius Festus, which is known from only one fragmentary copy.47 Priscian and Donatus are often found paired in booklists, as they were in the list of authors ordained for determinants at the university of Oxford in 1268.48 The final section in the Glastonbury list, headed ‘Remigius’, does indeed begin with the commentaries on Donatus and Priscian by Remigius of Auxerre, and his commentaries on Juvenal and Martianus Capella. But there follows an unsifted rump of classical and late antique authors whose use in the schoolroom tied them to this end of the list: Virgil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid in two copies, one described as ‘fair’ and the other as ‘old’, the Ars de uerbo of Eutyches Grammaticus, in two copies described as ‘very old’ (uetustissimi), copies of Prudentius, Sedulius, Arator, and Venantius Fortunatus, as well as certain staples of the elementary cursus that were often united in the Liber catonianus, which is to say Persius’ Satires, the Disticha Catonis of Cato, the fables of Avianus, and also the so-called ‘Claudianus maior’, a common medieval expression for all of Claudian’s shorter poems except the Panegyricus dictus Probino et Olybrio consulibus and often including also the minor poems of doubtful authenticity. Among other headings are ‘Boecius’, ‘Phisica’, and ‘Logica’. This third category contained a typical selection of texts of its day for an institution that stood somewhat outside the Parisian mainstream: Plato’s Timaeus as translated by Chalcidius, the Logica uetus, separate copies of Aristotle’s De anima and his Prior Analytics, Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, a small book on astronomy, and a book on astrology described as ‘useless’. In the class of histories were three copies of Orosius, described as ‘old but legible’; one of these was the Old English translation. It is the case that without their witness of the activities of the schoolroom, the catalogues from the abbeys would more closely resemble those of the secular cathedrals. In a mid-fourteenth-century catalogue from Ramsey abbey arranged otherwise largely by donor, a discrete section was set aside for ‘libri diuersorum auctorum’, essentially a list of thirteen volumes of classical authors with the addition of a ‘compotus’, two copies of Donatus, and the later medieval grammatical poem by Eberhard of Béthune, Graecismus, all of which confirms that these books were kept

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature together as a discrete collection for school use.49 Without their presence in the list, the library at Ramsey would have shown only scant holdings in classical literature. The authors were those whose help in the schoolroom had become settled: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Horace (in two copies), Lucan, Terence’s comedies, Plato’s Timaeus in  the translation of Chalcidius, Prudentius (in two copies), Martianus Capella, Boethius’ Consolatio with an anonymous commentary alongside, Macrobius’ commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, and a volume containing Sallust and ‘Remigius super Therencium’, this last offering the only evidence that Remigius of Auxerre (841–908) commented on Priscian’s minor work on the metres of Terence. At Dover priory, where a remarkable tripartite catalogue was drawn up in 1389 by Brother John Whitfield, the books were listed in such a way that an unusually clear view of the library can be achieved.50 There were 450 volumes, a medium-sized collection for a monastery of its day, arranged by class over nine alphabetically named bookcases. The first bookcase, case A, was filled, in traditional fashion, with bibles and biblical literature; classical literature was shelved with the schoolbooks at the end, in case I. First among these were the originalia, composite volumes of the works of Horace, Ovid, Virgil, Persius, Claudian, Lucan, Cato, and Juvenal in the company of such medieval masters of the schoolroom as Geoffrey of Vinsauf (his Poetria nova), Walter of Châtillon (his Alexandreis, a popular twelfth-century epic on the life of Alexander), and John of Garland. Subsequent shelves held diagnostic material: Donatus and Priscian alongside Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, Alexander of Villa Dei, and Eberhard of Béthune. On the final shelf could be found two popular medieval dictionaries and grammars: John of Genoa’s Catholicon and, in no fewer than six copies, four of them from named monks, Hugutio of Pisa’s Liber derivationum.51 Claustral libraries had been transformed in the fourteenth century by the entry of the religious orders to the universities, a reflex of the reform movement that stimulated a more vigorous manuscript culture in the monasteries than is detectable for the previous century.52 The growth of monastic libraries by donation becomes visible particularly from the second half of the fourteenth century, as the books that a monk had once acquired or copied for his own use were absorbed by the community at his death. Some of these personal collections reveal the considerable interest that classical authors held for the individual monk. Several such collections must lie behind the extraordinary accumulation of books for study in the liberal arts at the Augustinian abbey of Waltham, as reported in a catalogue of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century: more than sixty volumes out of the reported 132 contained texts of classical literature.53 In the great catalogue of St Augustine’s abbey, first compiled in the final quarter of the fourteenth century, the names of the monks whose books the communal library had absorbed were assiduously recorded.54 The books of John of London (fl. 1290–1330) formed one of the very largest personal collections of books taken into the library, perhaps as many as eighty-five volumes, of which sixteen are extant. He held copies of the ancient authors—Euclid, Martianus Capella,

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The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature Boethius—who supplied his chief interests, which were mathematical and scientific, but held also composite volumes of Cicero and Seneca and also a Terence, the six comedies separately itemized in the catalogue where this lost copy travelled with Dioscorides, Martianus Capella, and Plato’s Timaeus (as mediated by Chalcidius).55 One of his surviving volumes is Cambridge, St John’s College, MS D. 22 (97), a rather workmanlike product commissioned directly by John, which contains the common pairing of Solinus and Frontinus, William of Malmesbury’s Polyhistor, Centones Vergilii by Proba, and a prose analysis of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.56 So far, we have drawn our conclusions on the availability of classical literature in institutional libraries from the evidence of, on the one hand, surviving medieval books that bear signs of provenance and, on the other, the evidence of surviving medieval library catalogues. A third approach would lie in examining the writings of a house author, for whom the presumption holds that those authors whom he laid under contribution in his own work must have been those available to him in his home library. But that simple equation must be handled delicately. While we might feel confident of it in the case of, say, Bede (672/3–735), who was given to his monastery as a child oblate and is not known to have travelled in search of books (nor needed to, such were the resources available to him), we should not be able to apply the same equation to, say, the inexhaustible classicist William of Malmesbury, another voracious Benedictine reader who was given dispensation by his abbot to travel in pursuit of unread books. Clearly, the insight has no value at all when applied to house authors who were also graduates of the universities. What further complicates the picture for the later Middle Ages is the growing difficulty in perceiving the source of a citation, for it cannot be presumed that the source was the work itself rather than a compilation of excerpts or a quotation at second hand. Compilations and works of précis are known from antiquity, and evidence for their use in England is found early. Bede himself made use of a computistical miscellany containing excerpts from Macrobius’ Saturnalia, 1.12–15—such as are found in Bodleian MS Bodley 309, copied around 1075—but he never saw the full work. Again, he seems to have had Book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as intermediated by Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, and Ovid’s Ars amatoria (two citations) from Charisius.57 A compiler, Peter of Cornwall (1140–1220), Augustinian prior of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, in London, quoted Virgil in his vast Book of Revelations. ‘O terque quaterque beatum’ goes back to Aeneid 1.94, but the context suggests rather that Sidonius Apollinaris, the fifth-century poet and bishop, was Peter’s filter, for Sidonius had used that same quotation in a letter to Gaudentius, tribune and notary at the court in Gaul; Peter’s letter was addressed to Godfrey de Lucy, bishop of London, sent at a time when Godfrey had had ten years’ experience of the court of Henry II.58 Such quotations and their embedded context are a reflex of the writer’s art, but they are a reflex too of reading and understanding the work of classical authorities as collections of exempla, be they grammatical or rhetorical, of which the compilation of

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature phrases from common authorities into textbooks was a natural consequence. That process had begun, of course, with the ancient grammarians themselves. Like them, the twelfth-century grammar by Hugutio of Pisa, Liber derivationum, is replete with classical poets, particularly Horace and Juvenal, Persius, Plautus, and Virgil; only the Bible accounts for a greater number of citations in the work.59 Florilegia proper, named after the flowers of literature they seek to gather, became very common in the twelfth century, particularly so in the second half of the century: some seventy different classical florilegia have been catalogued for this early period.60 A general typology is difficult to achieve: many have the character of personal commonplace books and survive in unique copies, while some had a wider circulation and were clearly intended for publication and schoolroom use. Invariably they are arranged by author, and when that author’s transmission history is recondite, then the citation can be philologically valuable. While the oldest complete extant witness of Tibullus, for example, is an Italian manuscript belonging to the second half of the fourteenth century (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS R. 26 sup.), expurgated selections from the author were cited extensively in the Florilegium Gallicum, a mid-twelfth-century compilation from Orléans.61 Again, among the excerpts in the Florilegium Gallicum from a total of thirty-six verse texts and thirty-­ four prose texts are over seventy lines of Valerius Flaccus, another author with almost no discernible medieval circulation.62 It preserves the only surviving text of the Laus Pisonis. The Florilegium Gallicum survives in thirteen copies, none of them English, but it was a chief source for the far better disseminated Moralium dogma philosophorum sometimes attributed to William of Conches, and also for two parts (the Speculum historiale and Speculum doctrinale) of the enormous Speculum maius by the Dominican encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais (d. c.1264). Vincent’s work, completed in 1244, absorbed the Florilegium Gallicum almost entirely. More than twenty complete English copies survive.63 Another, better disseminated, compilation from Orléans was the Florilegium Angelicum.64 Among the authorities cited therein are Cicero’s Verrines and the letters of the younger Pliny, both of which were recondite texts in twelfth-century France and England. The churchman and littérateur Gerald of Wales (c.1146–1220×23) made sparkling use of this florilegium in the later years of his life, probably from a copy he saw in Rome.65 Three of the twenty surviving copies of the Florilegium Angelicum were English. One of these, a copy from the early fourteenth century, had been compiled for John of London, the scholarly monk of St  Augustine’s abbey who has been mentioned already. His volume also contains the Polyhistor, which was William of Malmesbury’s own florilegium of stories from classical and patristic sources, alongside another florilegium, this time of proverbs from classical authors (apparently the unique copy), and Valerius Maximus, Solinus, Frontinus, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.66 A different, but revealing, context is suggested by another English copy from the other end of the fourteenth century, Oxford, Trinity College, MS 18.67 Alongside extracts from the Florilegium

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The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature Angelicum (Sidonius, Ennodius, Pliny, Seneca’s letters and De beneficiis, Proverbia ­philosophorum, Cicero’s Disputationes Tusculanae) are various other texts that combine to form the ideal pastoral handbook for a priest: not only William of Pagula’s Oculus sacerdotis, which was the principal manual of pastoral care in England, but also an extract on confession from the Pupilla oculi by Iohannes de Burgo, with the Flos decretorum and Liber pastoralis by Iohannes de Deo, Robert Grosseteste’s Templum Domini, describing the theology of confession and penance, and Pope Innocent III’s ascetic tract De miseria humanae conditionis. In this context, the volume speaks to a new constituency of user for the florilegium, that of the preacher. This later development of the florilegium, born of the demands of the magister and preacher for a searchable resource of edifying or elegant excerpta, was the florilegium arranged by subject matter under alphabetical headings, often indexed. It is a development first seen in the thirteenth century in the service of Cistercian preachers but was quickly taken up at the schools.68 One of the best disseminated examples was Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus florum, or ‘Handful of flowers’, compiled in Paris and completed in 1306.69 It survives in some 200 manuscripts, and copies were thick on the ground in England. The work contains some 6,000 Latin proverbs and excerpts gathered under 266 alphabetically arranged headings, from Abstinencia to Christus (‘xpc’), with each entry assigned a marginal reference-letter in recurring alphabets, as a means of facilitating cross-reference. Thomas listed his authorities at the end of his work, with the incipits and explicits of the texts and the authors’ names, so that they might be ‘known more easily and ascribed more accurately’. In his preface, Thomas also exhorted his readers not to despise ‘the fertile original field on account of these poor ears of grain, for the man is unwise who strives to warm himself with sparks and neglects the fire, as is he who tries to quench his thirst with droplets and ignores the fountain’.70 Perhaps there were readers who were stimulated to search out the originals; but for most, Thomas’s very extensive quarry was probably sufficient unto the day. He acknowledged his debt to the great donor of books to the Sorbonne, Robert de Fournival (d. 1260), whose library had supplied the material for his florilegium; but intermediate sources, such as two Cistercian anthologies, the Flores paradysi and the Liber exceptionum, as well as the Florilegium Angelicum, gave him many of his classical quotations.71 It may be that the Communiloquium by the Franciscan schoolman John of Wales—who had studied at the Sorbonne—was another source, for it would seem that Thomas relied on it for his nine citations from Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae.72 (The Communiloquium was itself another well-travelled compilation: written in the 1260s, it was found widely in England; there were no fewer than six copies at St Augustine’s abbey alone.) Of other classical authors in the Manipulus florum, Seneca has the place of honour: all his works then known contributed something, with fifty-seven extracts taken from De beneficiis, sixty-three from De moribus, and 503 from the Epistulae ad Lucilium dispersed under 124 topic-headings. Cicero was also well represented, alongside

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Valerius Maximus (fifty extracts under forty-two headings), and Vegetius (thirty-three extracts under six suitably pugnacious headings).73 Just as a classical citation in the hands of a writer cannot signal that he knew the complete work, it should not be assumed that a complete work was generally available because it was available somewhere. That point was well understood by the Franciscans in England, enthusiastic readers who yet lacked the great core collections of patristics and, indeed, classical literature that were the inheritance of the older monasteries. The new emphasis on originalia in biblical scholarship that had been inaugurated by Bishop Robert Grosseteste (c.1170–1253) created a pressing need for such materials, and it was the practical requirements of that revival that were answered by a remarkable union catalogue, the so-called Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum veterum.74 The aspiration for this document was, in effect, to be no less than a national union catalogue of works by selected authors, in which the locations of known copies were indicated by means of a numerical code. The Registrum is datable to the first years of the fourteenth century and was master-­ minded by the Oxford Greyfriars.75 The ambitious scheme for visiting 185 English and Scottish cathedral and monastic libraries was never entirely fulfilled, although reports were made for ninety libraries—the Registrum provides the only medieval evidence for the holdings of forty of that number. The works of ninety-nine authors were reported, including the following classical or late classical authors, both pagan and Christian: Cicero, Josephus, Orosius, Seneca, Quintilian, Pompeius, Vitruvius, Pliny, Palladius, Vegetius, and Boethius. In truth, these authors are not all well represented. The report for Cicero is strangely piecemeal and the recorded locations are sparse, likewise Pompeius Festus, whose De verborum significatu was reported only for Shrewsbury abbey.76 Since the unique eleventh-century manuscript of this latter text emerged only in the 1450s, this copy must have been the epitome by Paul the Deacon (the presence of which at Glastonbury in 1247 has been mentioned, p. 103). Quintilian was reported only for Bury St Edmunds abbey.77 The Institutio oratoria was never very widely disseminated in England, although copies were multiple at the universities in the later Middle Ages, answering to the requirements of the reformed curriculum. Vitruvius, De architectura was not well known in England, although the spelling in the Registrum of ‘Victruvius’ is distinctive of the English manuscripts, of which there are six of English provenance and the same number of attested lost copies. To these, the Registrum adds the Cistercian abbey of Woburn (which contributed a very large return overall) and an otherwise unrecorded copy at Exeter cathedral.78 Seneca, by contrast, was reported more fully, and it is ‘Seneca ethicus’ who was greatly to the fore.79 Nine houses were reported to have a copy of his De beneficiis (enormously popular in England), from the Cistercian abbey of Newminster in Northumberland to the Benedictine abbey of Muchelney in Somerset. Seneca’s Letters up to the late thirteenth century circulated in two halves (1–88, 89–124), but the

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The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature south-west Midlands appears to have been the only place in Europe where both halves were read together. British Library, MS Harley 2659 is a twelfth-century manuscript from Gloucester abbey containing both halves, and William of Malmesbury quoted from both halves in the Polyhistor.80 The Registrum noticed the Gloucester manuscript and adds knowledge of several others from houses in the south-west of England, reinforcing this transmission narrative. Seneca’s Tragedies were unknown north of the Alps until the third quarter of the twelfth century, after which time references begin to be found.81 The one copy located for the Registrum was at Bury St Edmunds abbey, a manuscript no longer known but which supplied the extracts in another Bury book, Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 225/240 (s. xiiiin). Later copies were not plentiful in England. Seneca’s dialogi were not reported in the Registrum, but the text was not known outside Italy until the mid-thirteenth century. The most popular text to travel under Seneca’s name seems not to have interested the friars: the Formula uitae honestae by Martin of Braga (d. 580), which had been adapted from a Senecan treatise now lost, is otherwise attested by nearly 100 copies in British booklists. The treatment the friars gave to classical authors in the Registrum, as compared to the Fathers and other theologians, was more or less proportionate to the size of their habitual corner of the library. But it is possible to imagine that a Registrum compiled, say, thirty years after the version that survives would have placed its classical desiderata rather more to the fore, reflecting the adventurous intellectual tendencies of groups of classicizing friars in the first half of the fourteenth century who started to import exempla, suitably moralized, from classical literature and history into their sermons and biblical commentaries.82 Although some of the provincial studia might have been significant venues, the activities of these friars centred chiefly on the two universities. The mendicants were also influential in the matter of library regulation and book provision. In 1230 the bull Quo elongati of Gregory IX established the principle that a Franciscan, devoted to apostolic poverty, could have the use of property but not the possession of it.83 Applied to the use of books, it meant that corporate enterprise could build a library collection from which books could be assigned to a friar according to his need. It was a custom of circulating tenure that inspired library practice at the university colleges, where collections came to be divided between a reference section, in which the core texts of the curriculum were kept centrally accessible chained to desks, and a circulating stock for personal loan, available to the fellowship on what was normally a year’s lease by a process called electio.84 It was more normal that a fellow would want to hold copies of the texts most needful for study in the higher faculties—commentaries on the legal corpora or spare copies of the Lombard’s Sentences—and so classical material in election was largely restricted to Aristotelian literature, for university education had, of course, been given its shape by the translations of Aristotle into Latin from the Greek and Arabic. These and the commentaries upon them were ubiquitous in collegiate collections.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The library of Peterhouse in Cambridge, which is witnessed by a catalogue begun in 1418 and also by many of the medieval books still in situ, was superbly well stocked with Aristotle and other quadrivial authors, and made a good showing in the natural sciences and medicine. While these books were sufficiently plentiful that considerable numbers had been taken into the electio stock, other works of classical learning are rather less visible. The class of ‘libri gramatice’ in the catalogue contained only Priscian (MS 256, s. xii), the commentaries on Priscian and Donatus attributed to Robert Kilwardby (MS 191, s. xiii/xiv), and then the usual triumvirate of later medieval helpmeets: John of Genoa’s Catholicon (MS 43), Hugutio of Pisa’s Liber derivationum (MS 94), and William Brito’s Expositiones vocabulorum Bibliae (MS 122).85 A later hand added a note of the chained ‘libri poetrie’. It is a brief list: Ovid’s Tristia, the Epigrams of Martial, and Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis; the Ovid and the Alexandreis had been taken in from the electio stock to help create this chained resource. The other chained book was a volume that had been bought at domus expense (‘emptus cum pecuniis collegii’) containing Virgil’s Eclogues and Aeneid, which is now MS 158, a small, rather narrow book of the early thirteenth century, heavily glossed and very typical of the type of second-hand book available to the market in the fifteenth century, as will be discussed further below.86 A separate listing of the ‘libri poetrie et gramatice’ that were on loan among the fellows of Peterhouse included a copy of Ovid’s Fasti, Statius and Lucan in one volume, and two Priscians, while a volume containing Valerius Maximus and Sallust was numbered among the chained ‘libri de cronicis’.87 While it may seem a poor haul, Peterhouse’s library was typical of collegiate collections at this date, untypical only for its size, since it was more than usually large: the catalogue, including some later accessions, has 456 entries. Contemporary with this evidence from Peterhouse, an inventory of 1433 of the fellows’ library at Winchester College also happens to list the chained and unchained collections. In the report of 199 entries, several copies of Priscian and one (Priscian minor) with Robert Kilwardby’s commentary were chained and unmovable; but there is no other classical literature in the list.88 Had a catalogue survived of the books belonging to the college’s famous school rather than this one of the fellows’ library, then we should doubtless have seen evidence of a collection that was better stocked with classical literature. It should have resembled in part the schoolmaster’s collection that was left to the fellows’ library at the collegiate church of St Mary and All Saints at Fotheringhay (Northants) sometime around 1445, which included, alongside some of the usual medieval Latin grammatical texts, copies of Priscian minor, Statius’ Thebaid, Virgil’s Eclogues, a book containing ‘nineteen poems’, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Statius’ Achilleid, and Virgil’s Aeneid (these last two, oddly, ascribed to Ovid).89 We tend to treat medieval libraries as if they were static collections, only ever growing by accession, planned or not. There is a reverse direction in every century as books were deaccessioned, because they were wanted elsewhere or because they

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The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature were unwanted, worn out, or had become unreadable, and were pulled apart for binding scrap. One of the more decisive moments for the removal of books from English monastic libraries, with some importance for the circulation of classical texts, followed upon the entry of the monastic orders into the universities. After 1281, when the Cistercian studium at Oxford was founded, and after the publication in 1336 of the papal bull Summi magistri, which required Benedictine abbeys to find lectors and support suitable monks at the universities, monk-scholars were sent away to the schools frequently carrying books for study from the collections of the mother-­ house.90 If we are to explain why it is that so many twelfth- and thirteenth-century monastic books came in the fifteenth century into the hands of new owners, often members of the secular clergy, then we have only to look to the pledge economy that operated at the universities. University chests were founded and endowed in a way that enabled the extension of cash loans upon receipt of a suitable pledge, with loan periods defined by each chest’s statutes but which were normally of one year, after which an unredeemed pledge would be sold on to the second-hand market.91 Monk-scholars seem not infrequently to have had to pawn their books in order to meet living costs, a fact that was usually deplored by senior brethren at the home institution, even if the responsibility for having sent the young away with low or unpaid stipends was a communal one.92 The monks’ loss was a gain to the new collegiate foundations of the fifteenth century, whose fellows were able to fill their libraries with ex-monastic books by recourse to the second-hand market. One such displaced book happens to be a volume containing Vegetius, Eutropius and Frontinus written under the supervision of William of Malmesbury: a fifteenth-century inscription states that it was among the books given to Lincoln College by the humanist scholar Robert Flemmyng (1416–83). Another man who invested heavily on the second-hand market was William Reed (d. 1385), bishop of Chichester, who left books to various institutional libraries, mostly in Oxford, his chief beneficiaries being Merton College and the recently founded New College. An indenture between Reed, while alive, and Merton records 100 volumes.93 Among them were copies of Lucan, Claudian, Horace, and Boethius’ Consolatio, with his Arithmetica and De institutione musica separately in another volume, Priscian in another, and Solinus and Terence’s comedies together in another. From this spread of classical literature only one book survives at Merton to attest to what might have been the quality of the others: Martianus Capella with the commentary of Remigius of Auxerre, now MS 291, a deluxe English copy dating from the mid-twelfth century. The monk-students studying at Oxford from the cathedral priories of Durham and Canterbury were probably best served with regard to books. Most of the books from each house that can be shown to have been displaced in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries went through Canterbury College or Durham College before being turned on to the market.94 The library at Canterbury College was notably large and would have been the envy of most secular colleges; an inventory of 1501 lists some

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 336 separate volumes, with a good suit of ‘libri poetrie’.95 This class included Martianus Capella (two copies), Orosius, Gesta Alexandri magni, Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis (two copies), along with the Troy story by ‘Dares Phrygius’, with Lucan (two copies), Plato’s Timaeus, Boethius (three copies), the letters of Seneca, copies of Cicero’s De amicitia, De officiis, and De inventione together with the pseudo-Ciceronian De Rhetorica ad  Herennium, Ovid’s Heroides, Vegetius, the Thebaid by Statius, and a number of medieval dictaminal texts, including a copy of the letters of Peter of Blois (d. 1211), which were read and mined as a source of belles lettres in the same way as were the classical auctores. A rarity for Oxford was a volume of Prudentius, which must have come from the mother-house and may even have been one of the two copies reported there c.1180. A significant book that leaked on to the market through Canterbury College was an important compendium of the works of Ovid, which had been catalogued as part of the library at Christ Church during the priorate of Henry Eastry (d. 1331).96 It is a thirteenth-century copy of French origin, collated for the Teubner editions of Amores, Ars amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto, Tristia, and Nux. The donor of the book to the cathedral was Prior Adam de Chillenden (d. 1274).97 Having come through Canterbury College on to the second-hand market, by the late fifteenth century it was part of the common collection at Winchester College, when it was given an ex-libris inscription. It was later owned by the royal librarian Patrick Young and was borrowed from him in 1639 by Johann Friedrich Gronovius for Nicolaus Heinsius. (The manuscript was the Junianus of Heinsius’ collation.) It came finally in 1695 to Eton College, where it remains as MS 91.98 As it had been in the twelfth century, institutional book provision in England at the end of the fifteenth century was in touch at every key point with continental currents. Until then, the needs of the schoolroom had stabilized a recognizable core of curriculum authors, more or less visible in different times and places. The new influences in classical studies, as is commonly understood, were communicated by English bishops and curialists called to Rome and to the councils of Constance and Basel: institutional libraries in England were the beneficiaries of men who had breathed the new atmosphere of Italy. And yet by the early sixteenth century the stupendous growth of printing had almost called into question the continuance of common libraries at the universities, so enthusiastically did the clerical classes embrace the new technology to build their personal collections.99 The electio stock came to be abandoned as college fellows found they could acquire for themselves the books they wanted to read. New texts, new editions, and the revivified life of the Renaissance schoolroom ensured that a widening circle of auctores could be plundered for grammatical and rhetorical paradigms; and yet while many formerly popular works of medieval dictamen sank into obscurity—such as the much-printed formulary of Carolus Manecken, which quickly lost its currency after 1500, sunk by humanists who noisily deprecated its unclassical Latin—the florilegium was a medieval effort that remained untarnished, grounded as it was in the actuality of classical

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The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature letters. Many additions were made to the corpus at the end of the fifteenth century and start of the sixteenth; some notable specimens were produced for English schools, such as Nicholas Udall’s Flouers for Latine Spekynge Selected and Gathered oute of Terence, and John Anwykyll’s Vulgaria quedam abs Terencio. Even Erasmus entered the market, at the behest of John Colet for St Paul’s School in London, with two small collections of phrases, his Familiarium colloquiorum formulae and De duplici copia rerum et verborum. In all of this, the chief influence acting on the humanist commonplace book was the Manipulus florum.100 The enjoyable, and long-lived, narrative put out first by the humanists that they alone had thrown a bridge across the breach of the Middle Ages to the shores of the classical past obscures the centuries of engagement with classical literature that had intervened. The humanists had, in fact, inherited unchanged from medieval schoolmen strategies that had made parcels of useful quotations from pagan orators and poets, either to serve the needs of grammatical instruction or, in moves derived from sermon rhetoric, to serve a discourse intended to argue and persuade. While new quarries might have been opened up and the language and approaches of the discourse changed, the underlying assumptions and practices belonged to an even continuum.

Notes 1   Surviving booklists from the institutional libraries of medieval Britain are published and annotated in the volumes of the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues (CBMLC). 2   Vincent Gillespie, ‘From the Twelfth Century to c.1450’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages, eds Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 145–235 (at pp. 150–1). 3   Sermones super Cantica canticorum, 37. 2; Sancti Bernardi Opera, eds J. Leclercq et al., 8 vols in 9 (Rome, 1957–77), 2, 9–10. 4   Vita prima Sancti Bernardi Claraevallis abbatis, I. 1. 3; eds Paul Verdeyen and Christine Vande Veire, CCCM 89B (2011), p. 35. 5   Leslie Watkiss (in the edition by Jane Sayers and Leslie Watkiss, Thomas of Marlborough, History of the Abbey of Evesham (Oxford, 2003), p. 153) translated as ‘not only sacred works but also grammars’. 6  Oxford, Bodleian, MS Tanner 3, fols 189v–190r; see English Benedictine Libraries: The Shorter Catalogues, eds Richard Sharpe et al., CBMLC 4 (1996), pp. 654–9 (B115). The evidence for a Worcester connection is a letter from Pope Alexander to Bishop Roger (1164 × 1179) copied on to a flyleaf in an early hand. 7   On the Liber catonianus, see Gillespie, ‘From the Twelfth Century to c.1450’, pp. 153–8. 8   Ruth J. Dean, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (1999), nos 254–6. 9   Codices latini antiquiores (CLA) 10. 1578, 9. 1370, Suppl. 1806, 10. 1451–3.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 10   On Aldhelm, see Andy Orchard, ‘Aldhelm’s Library’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, c.400–1100, ed. Richard Gameson (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 591–605; and Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006), pp. 34, 178–91. 11   Bernhard Bischoff and Michael Lapidge, Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian (Cambridge, 1994); Jane Stevenson, The ‘Laterculus Malalianus’ and the School of Archbishop Theodore (Cambridge, 1995); Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 31–3. 12   CLA 2. 127. 13   See p. 101. 14  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 40–2, 228–33; Mary Garrison, ‘The Library of Alcuin’s York’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 633–64. 15   The following notes are drawn from the catalogue of classical and patristic authors and works composed before ad 700 and known in Anglo-Saxon England, assiduously compiled by Michael Lapidge (Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 275–342; see also pp. 67–9). See also T. Julian Brown, ‘An Historical Introduction to the Use of Classical Latin Authors in the British Isles from the Fifth to the Eleventh Century’, La cultura antica nell’Occidente Latino dal VII all’XI secolo: settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo 22:1 (Spoleto, 1975), 237–99. 16   Words used, for example, at Glastonbury abbey in the booklist of 1247 (as n. 46). 17   On Fleury, see Marco Mostert, The Library of Fleury: A Provisional List of Manuscripts (Hilversum, 1989); and his ‘The Tradition of Classical Texts in the Manuscripts of Fleury’, in Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics: Production and Use, eds Claudine Chavannes-Mazel and Margaret Smith (1996), pp. 19–40. On Æthelwold, see Bishop Æthelwold: His Career and Influence, ed. Barbara Yorke (Woodbridge, 1988). Æthelwold himself was a considerable scholar, whose hermeneutic Latin style owed much to a study of Aldhelm. Among the books he gave to his new foundation was a text ‘de litteris grecorum’, perhaps a Greek–Latin glossary; see Peterborough Abbey, eds Karsten Friis-Jensen and James M. W. Willoughby, CBMLC 8 (2001), p. 6 (BP1. 19). 18  See Peterborough, eds Friis-Jensen and Willoughby, pp. 66 (BP21. 21), and 53 for evidence that the cataloguer was working from the tituli in the physical books. 19   Rodney Thomson, Books and Learning in Twelfth-Century England: The Ending of ‘Alter orbis’ (Walkern, 2006), pp. 5–10; see also his ‘Where were the Latin Classics in Twelfth-Century England?’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 7 (1997), 25–40, repr. in his England and the 12th-Century Renaissance (Aldershot, 1998), ch. XV. 20   The number of library books is achieved by subtracting the total of service books from the record in the Liber Eliensis: along with fourteen Gospel books there were ‘ccc libri xiii minus; ex his xix missales sunt et viii lectionales et ii benedictionales, xxii psalteria et vii breviaria, ix antiphonaria et xii gradalia’ (Liber Eliensis, II 139; ed. E. O. Blake, Camden Soc. 3rd ser. 92 (1962), pp. 223–4). 21   Teresa Webber, Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral c.1075–c.1125 (Oxford, 1992). 22   Birger Munk Olsen, ‘Les Classiques latins dans les florilèges médiévaux antérieurs au XIIIe siècle, part II’, Revue d’histoire des textes 10 (1980), 115–64 (at p. 116); Webber, Scribes and Scholars, pp. 41–2.

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The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature  Webber, Scribes and Scholars, pp. 63–8.   Rodney Thomson, ‘A Thirteenth-Century Plautus Florilegium from Bury St Edmunds Abbey’, Antichthon 8 (1974), 29–43; Thomson, Books and Learning, pp. 97–8. 25   Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford 1983), pp. 176–80; P. K. Marshall, Janet Martin, and Richard Rouse, ‘Clare College MS. 26 and the Circulation of Aulus Gellius 1–7 in Medieval England and France’, Mediaeval Studies 42 (1980), 353–94. 26   Both books are described by André Vernet, ‘Notice et extraits d’un manuscrit d’Édimbourg (Adv. MSS 18.6.12, 18.7.8, 18.7.7)’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 107 (1947), 33–51; also Ian Campbell Cunningham, ‘Latin Classical Manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland’, Scriptorium 27 (1973), 64–90 (at pp. 84–5, 88–9). 27   Ep. 5; ed. Robert Anstruther, Epistolae Herberti de Losinga, primi episcopi Norwicensis, Osberti de Clara et Elmeri, prioris Cantuariensis (Brussels, 1846), pp. 6–7. 28   St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, ed. B. C. Barker-Benfield, 3 vols, CBMLC 13 (2008), pp. 1117–18 (BA1. 1123). 29   Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 441, 443. 30   Lars Boje Mortensen, ‘Orosius and Justinus in One Volume: Post-Conquest Books across the Channel’, Cahiers de l’Institut du moyen-âge grec et latin 60 (1990), 389–99. The copy of Orosius in Oxford, New College, MS 151, dismissed by Mortensen for lacking the Justinus, has rather had this second portion removed. 31  Thomson, Books and Learning, pp. 21–3. 32   CUL MS Ii. 3. 12 fols 134r–137r, published in facsimile and transcribed by M. R. James, The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover (Cambridge, 1903), pp. 3–12; a new edition is forthcoming for CBMLC. 33   CUL MS Ii. 2. 1 (c.1100), fol. 38v; see St Augustine’s, ed. Barker-Benfield, pp. 1820–1. 34   The only earlier attestation is the witness of a booklist of shortly after 1150 from Durham cathedral, where the work appears with a full suit of the Ovidian canon (Durham Cathedral Library, MS B. IV. 24, fols 1r–2r); printed in Catalogi veteres librorum Ecclesiae cathedralis Dunelm., ed. [Beriah Botfield], Surtees Soc. 7 (1838), pp. 1–10; a new edition is forthcoming for CBMLC. 35  James, Ancient Libraries, pp. 82–5. 36  See Benedictine Libraries, ed. Sharpe, pp. 52–87 (B13), 421–47 (B71), 499–526 (B79), 634–42 (B109). 37   Christopher Cheney, ‘English Cistercian Libraries: The First Century’, in his Medieval Texts and Studies (Oxford, 1973), pp. 328–45; See David Bell’s introduction in his edition of The Libraries of the Cistercians, Gilbertines and Premonstratensians, CBMLC 3 (1992), pp. xxiii–xxv. 38   Aelred of Rievaulx, De spirituali amicitia, eds A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, CCCM 1 (1971), pp. 287–350 (at p. 287). 39   Cistercians, ed. Bell, pp. 83–4 (Z16. 11). Aelred’s own work, however, could be found in the library at Rievaulx around 1190, in a single copy; Cistercians, ed. Bell, p. 96 (Z19. 40). 40   The classic study is Kathleen Edwards, The English Secular Cathedrals in the Middle Ages (Manchester, 1949); see also David Lepine, A Brotherhood of Canons Serving God: English Secular 23 24

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Cathedrals in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1995); and Jerome Bertram, Vita communis: The Common Life of the Secular Clergy (Leominster, 2009). 41   Exeter, Cathedral Archive MS 3671, pp. 1–18; see The Libraries of the Secular Cathedrals, eds Nigel Ramsay and James M. W. Willoughby, forthcoming for CBMLC. 42   Lincoln Cathedral, MS 1, fol. 2r; see Giraldi Cambrensis opera, ed. James Dimock, Rolls Series 21/7 (1877), pp. 165–71; it was also printed by Reginald Woolley, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library (1927), pp. v–ix; Secular Cathedrals, eds Ramsay and Willoughby. Gerald of Wales donated copies of his Topographia Hiberniae, Vita S. Remigii episcopi, and Gemma ecclesiastica. One of St Hugh’s books, a collection of Lives of famous bishops, is still extant at Lincoln, MS 107. 43   Lincoln Cathedral, MS 295; see Catalogue, ed. Woolley, pp. x–xiv. 44   British Library, MS Royal App. 69, fol. 2r; see Catalogue, ed. Woolley, pp. xvi–xviii, and J. R. Liddell, ‘ “Leland’s” Lists of Manuscripts in Lincolnshire Monasteries’, EHR 54 (1939), 88–95 (at pp. 89–90). On the status of this royal booklist, see James P. Carley’s Introduction in his edition of The Libraries of King Henry VIII, CBMLC 7 (2000), pp. xxxiii–xxxix, and the Introduction to his edition of John Leland, De uiris illustribus: On Famous Men (Toronto, 2010), p. lxii n. 198. 45   The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, ed. H. E. Butler (1949), p. 130. 46   Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 5. 33, fols 102r–103v; see Benedictine Libraries, ed. Sharpe, pp. 169–215 (B39). 47   Benedictine Libraries, ed. Sharpe, p. 205 (B39. 308). 48   Statuta antiqua Universitatis oxoniensis, ed. Strickland Gibson (Oxford, 1931), p. 26. 49   British Library, MS Cotton Rolls II. 16; see Benedictine Libraries, ed. Sharpe, pp. 384–6 (B68. 310–30). 50   Oxford, Bodleian, MS Bodley 920, fols 48r–54r; see Dover Priory, ed. William Stoneman, CBMLC 5 (1999). 51   Dover Priory, ed. Stoneman, pp. 150–72 (BM1. 376–450). 52   Benedictines in Oxford, eds Henry Wansbrough and Anthony Marett-Crosby (1997); Joan Greatrex, The English Benedictine Cathedral Priories: Rule and Practice, c.1270–c.1420 (2011), pp. 99–159; James G. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle, c.1350–1440 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 79–123. 53   The Libraries of Augustinian Canons, eds Teresa Webber and Andrew Watson, CBMLC 6 (1998), pp. 429–42 (A38). In relation to the holding of old manuscript copies of a work, the suggestion by James Clark is not plausible that ‘the preference for early copies of certain texts and . . . the pursuit also of texts known to be scarce is suggestive not only of antiquarian sensibilities, but also perhaps of a degree of philological discrimination’ (‘Monastic Manuscripts and the Transmission of the Classics in Late Medieval England’, in Vehicles of Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture, eds Robert Wisnovsky et al. (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 335–52 (at p. 343)). Books had a long life in the Middle Ages and the second-hand trade was brisk; every category of learning, not merely classical literature, was represented by old books, bought when and where their availability coincided with the interests of a reader. 54   For the catalogue, see St Augustine’s, ed. Barker-Benfield. The fourteenth-century custumal of St Augustine’s assigns to the precentor the duty of writing into a newly received book the

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The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature name of its donor before it could be brought into the library; see Customary of the Benedictine Monasteries of St Augustine, Canterbury and St Peter, Westminster, ed. Edward Maunde Thompson, Henry Bradshaw Soc. 23 (1902), p. 362. 55   St Augustine’s, ed. Barker-Benfield, pp. 1841–4 (and BA1. 1015, 1165, 1261, 1613). 56   St Augustine’s, ed. Barker-Benfield, pp. 967–9 (BA1. 937, also 1453.1). 57  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 111–12; R. Love, ‘The Library of the Venerable Bede’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 606–32 (at p. 630). 58  Sidonius, Epistulae, 1.4. 1; see Robert Easting and Richard Sharpe, Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations (Toronto, 2013), p. 23 n. 73. 59   Liber deriuationum, eds Enzo Cecchini et al. (Florence, 2004), pp. 245*–64*. 60   Birger Munk Olsen, ‘Les Classiques latins dans les florilèges médiévaux antérieurs au XIIIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire des textes 9 (1979), 47–121; 10 (1980), 115–64. Work on florilegia builds on a series of pioneering articles by Berthold Ullman, which concluded with his ‘Classical Authors in Certain Mediaeval Florilegia’, Classical Philology 27 (1932), 1–42 (see for further references). 61   Rosemary Burton, Classical Poets in the ‘Florilegium Gallicum’, Lateinische Sprache und Literatur des Mittelalters 14 (Frankfurt am Main, 1983). Careful philological study allowed the Orléans origin to be argued by Richard Rouse, ‘Florilegia and Latin Classical Authors in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Orléans’, Viator 10 (1979), 131–60. The extant manuscript of Tibullus is judged to descend from a French exemplar and Petrarch may have been the conduit into Italy; see Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, p. 423. 62   Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 425–7. 63   The work is accessible in the Douai printing of 1624 (reprinted Graz, 1964–5), although for philological purposes it is practically worthless, since the citations were altered to fit the language of the vulgate editions of the respective authors. Extant manuscripts are listed by Thomas Kaeppeli, Scriptores ordinis Praedicatorum medii aevi, 4 vols (Rome, 1970–93), no. 3987. See also Serge Lusignan, Préface au Speculum maius de Vincent de Beauvais: réfraction et diffraction (Montreal, 1979); and Gillespie, ‘From the Twelfth Century to c.1450’, pp. 182–6. 64   Richard and Mary Rouse, ‘The Florilegium Angelicum: Its Origin, Content, and Influence’, in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, eds Jonathan Alexander and Margaret Gibson (Oxford, 1976), pp. 66–114 and 455. 65   Rouse and Rouse, ‘Florilegium Angelicum’, pp. 89–92. 66   See at n. 56. 67   In the fifteenth century the book belonged to the house of Bonhommes at Ashridge (Bucks). 68   Richard Rouse, ‘Cistercian Aids to Study in the Thirteenth Century’, Studies in Medieval Cistercian History 2 (1976), 123–34. 69   The fundamental study is still that by Richard Rouse and Mary Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia, and Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto, 1979). Chris Nighman has argued that the text was intended for university students, assembled to be a resource for self-formation rather than a preacher’s aid (‘Commonplaces on Preaching among

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Commonplaces for Preaching? The Topic Praedicacio in Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus florum’, Medieval Sermon Studies 49 (2005), 37–57). 70  The preface was edited by Rouse and Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia, and Sermons, pp. 236–8. 71   Rouse and Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia, and Sermons, pp. 126–56. 72   Jenny Swanson, John of Wales: A Study of the Ideas of a Thirteenth-Century Friar (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 27–8. 73   Rouse and Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia, and Sermons, pp. 408–36 (app. 8). 74  For the patristic revival encouraged by Grosseteste see Beryl Smalley, ‘The Biblical Scholar’, in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, ed. Daniel Callus (Oxford, 1955), pp. 70–97, esp. pp. 84–97; also Richard Southern, Robert Grossesteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1992), pp. 170–204. 75  The Registrum was edited by Richard Rouse and Mary Rouse, CBMLC 3 (1991). The Franciscan origin of the Registrum is established by the organization of the libraries according to the eight custodies of the English Franciscan province; the editors assigned the design and organization of the Registrum to the Oxford Greyfriars, as being the convent that could bring to such a project the manpower, connections, and practical experience that it demanded, also arguing for a date in the first decades of the fourteenth century (pp. cxxix–cxlviii); that date was readjusted, insofar as Scottish libraries are concerned, to the late thirteenth century by John Higgitt, in his edition of Scottish Libraries, CBMLC 12 (2006), pp. xxxvi–xxxix. 76   Registrum, eds Rouse and Rouse, pp. 222–4, 225. 77   Registrum, eds Rouse and Rouse, p. 224. 78   Registrum, eds Rouse and Rouse, p. 225. 79   Registrum, eds Rouse and Rouse, pp. 220–2. 80   Leighton Reynolds, The Medieval Tradition of Seneca’s Letters (Oxford, 1965), pp. 117, 120, 122–3. 81   Richard Rouse, ‘The A Text of Seneca’s Tragedies in the Thirteenth Century’, Revue d’histoire des textes 1 (1971), 93–121; Richard Rouse and Albinia de la Mare, ‘New Light on the Circulation of the A-Text of Seneca’s Tragedies’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977), 283–90. 82   The pioneering study is Beryl Smalley’s English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960). Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 136–67, explored their influence in the annotations on a copy of the Aeneid, British Library, Additional MS 27304. 83   Bullarium franciscanum, ed. J. H. Sbaralea, 4 vols (Rome, 1759–68), 1, 68–70. 84   Malcolm Parkes, ‘The Provision of Books’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, Late Medieval Oxford, eds J. I. Catto and Ralph Evans (Oxford, 1992), pp. 407–83 (at pp. 455–62) (repr. in his Pages From the Past: Medieval Writing Skills and Manuscript Books (Farnham, 2012), ch. 14); Neil Ker, ‘The Provision of Books’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3, The Collegiate University, ed. James McConica (Oxford, 1986), pp. 441–519; Roger Lovatt, ‘College and University Book Collections’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland,

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The Transmission and Circulation of Classical Literature vol. 1, To 1640, eds Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 152–77; Peter Lucas, ‘Borrowing and Reference: Access to Libraries in the Late Middle Ages’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 1, eds Leedham-Green and Webber, pp. 242–62. 85   The University and College Libraries of Cambridge, ed. Peter Clarke, CBMLC 10 (2002), pp. 503–4 (UC48. 225–9). It is not stated that the books were chained, but this seems likely since they have all survived in good order. On attribution to Kilwardby of the commentaries on Priscian and Donatus, see C. H. Kneepkens, ‘Robert Kilwardby on Grammar’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Robert Kilwardby, eds Henrik Lagerlund and Paul Thom (Leiden, 2013), pp. 17–64. 86   The University and College Libraries of Cambridge, ed. Clarke, pp. 504, 512 (UC48. 231–4, 274, 277). 87   The University and College Libraries of Cambridge, ed. Clarke, pp. 512–13, 505 (UC48. 274–86, 236). 88   The Libraries of Collegiate Churches, ed. James M. W. Willoughby, CBMLC 15 (2013), p. 758 (SC338. 43–4, 49–50). 89   The Libraries of Collegiate Churches, ed. Willoughby, pp. 228–30 (SC244. 176–90). 90  On the education of monks at the schools, see Benedictines in Oxford, eds Henry Wansborough and Anthony Marett-Crosby (1997). 91   Parkes, ‘Provision of Books’, pp. 409–12, 419. 92   Benedictine Libraries, ed. Sharpe, p. 593 (B95); also Greatrex, English Benedictine Cathedral Priories, p. 131. 93   H. W. Garrod [ed. J. R. L. Highfield], ‘An Indenture Between William Rede, Bishop of Chichester and John Bloxham and Henry Stapilton, Fellows of Merton College, Oxford. London, 22 October 1374’, Bodleian Library Record 10 (1978/82), 9–19; a new edition is forthcoming for CBMLC. On Reed and the sources of his books, see Rodney Thomson, ‘William Reed, Bishop of Chichester (d. 1385)—Bibliophile?’, in The Study of Medieval Manuscripts of England: Festschrift in Honor of Richard W. Pfaff, eds George Brown and Linda Voigts (Tempe, Ariz., 2010), pp. 281–93. 94   Christopher De Hamel, ‘The Dispersal of the Library of Christ Church, Canterbury, from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century’, in Books and Collectors 1200–1700: Essays Presented to Andrew Watson, eds James Carley and Colin Tite (1997), pp. 263–79; and Alan Piper, ‘The Libraries of the Monks of Durham’, in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, eds Malcolm Parkes and Andrew Watson (1978), pp. 213–49. 95   Canterbury Cathedral Archives, DCc/Ch. Ant. O. 137; see Canterbury College Oxford, vol. 1, ed. William Pantin, Oxford Historical Soc. new ser. 6 (Oxford, 1947), pp. 18–33 (at pp. 26–7); a new edition is forthcoming for CBMLC. On the libraries of these monastic colleges, see Greatrex, English Benedictine Cathedral Priories, pp. 143–5. 96  James, Ancient Libraries, p. 72. The coincidence between the book’s contents and the description in the Christ Church catalogue make it almost certain to be the same book; also, the entry begins ‘Omnes libri Ouidii’, words that are repeated inside the volume.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 97  Joan Greatrex, Biographical Register of the English Cathedral Priories of the Province of Canterbury c.1066 to 1540 (Oxford, 1997), p. 119. Adam acquired thirty-two other books for the cathedral. 98   Described by Neil Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 5 vols (Oxford, 1969–2002), 2, 705–7. 99   James Willoughby, ‘Universities, Colleges, and Chantries’, in A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476–1558, eds Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 207–24. 100   As has been shown by Anne Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996), pp. 39–50. See further Chapter 24 in this volume by Carley and Ormsby.

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Chapter 7

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Mythography and Mythographical Collections Nicolette Zeeman

The primary focus of this chapter is late antique and medieval mythographical collections containing Greek and Roman myth. These collections, which frequently include commentaries on the myths, are often referred to as ‘mythologies’. However, we will also need to keep in view the various literary and philosophical perspectives on classical myth that are to be found in classical and medieval poetry, and in medieval commentaries written on it, not to mention a number of more overtly philosophical writings on the topic. Throughout this period, the three genres of poem, commentary, and mythographical collection evolve in dialogue with each other (and in respect of this generic eclecticism, medieval mythography to some degree continues the practices of late antique mythography). At the end of this chapter there will be a brief opportunity to touch on specific vernacular literary uses of mythography and mythographical collections; however, the chapter as a whole will provide a wide range of evidence as to the kinds of material that mythographical writings offered the literary writer.1

Philosophical and Textual Perspectives on Classical Myth In the Middle Ages, classical myth is associated with the inheritance of antique knowledge to be found in poetry, commentary, and philosophy. Indeed, many early Christian writers choose to write about such ‘natural’ forms of understanding employing only the language and conceptual categories associated with these types of pre-Christian writing.2 Fulgentius (sixth-century ad), for example, seems to have been a North African grammarian or rhetor and a Christian,3 but in his Expositio Virgilianae continentiae, a dialogue between Virgil and a pupil, Fulgentius reads the

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature poetic and mythological Aeneid as an allegory of the acquisition of philosophical wisdom. When the pupil suggests that this wisdom is best exemplified in Christ, Virgil responds, ‘videris ipse quid te vera maiestas docuerit; nobis interim quid visum sit edicamus’ (‘you will have seen what true Majesty has taught you; let me announce what has appeared to me’). The text develops the paradox—later to be exploited by Dante—that Virgil and his poetic myths have all the authority of antique learning, but recognize nothing of the Christian revelation known by his younger interlocutor.4 Boethius (ad c.480–c.524/5), Fulgentius’ near contemporary and also a Christian, exemplifies his sense of this same divide by composing the De consolatione philosophiae in an exclusively pre-Christian language of philosophy, poetry, and myth. The divide is also reflected in much commentary on classical poetry written in the early to high medieval period, where myths are often seen as vehicles for the teachings of philosophy, natural philosophy, astrology, history, psychology, and ­ethics. And yet some Carolingian commentaries do occasionally read their texts in explicitly Christian terms.5 By the twelfth century, Neoplatonizing commentators such as William of Conches and another, who might be the French scholar and poet Bernardus Silvestris, but who might instead have been a scholar from England whose name is not known, are proposing that classical myths offer metaphorical descriptions of both the natural and the spiritual realms, suggesting that there is little difference between philosophical integumentum (the ‘covering’ of myth or fable) and Scriptural allegoria.6 In the same century, Arnulf of Orléans glosses Ovid’s Metamorphoses in primarily grammatical, moral, and mythological terms, but at the end of his commentary on each book of the poem he appends Allegoriae (‘allegories’) that occasionally mingle these kinds of reading with explicitly Christian ones.7 In the later Middle Ages the revealed/natural distinction becomes even more fluid, and texts such as the anonymous Franciscan Ovide moralisé, Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus, and Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea interpret classical myth in explicitly and often audaciously Christian ways. And yet other later medieval commentators and mythographers, such as Giovanni del Virgilio, Giovanni Boccaccio, Thomas Walsingham, and, in her gloses (‘glosses’), Christine de Pizan, continue to read classical myth primarily, though never exclusively, in terms of antique or secular thought and its various terminologies. In none of these contexts, I suggest, do classical poetry and its myths ever lose their association with the category of the ‘natural’. In recent years scholars have emphasized the Neoplatonism of many works written before 1200 that use, comment on, or imitate classical myth.8 In these Neoplatonizing works, myth is used to reflect the rich, but ultimately hierarchical and ordered vision of the cosmos that recalls Chalcidius’ fourth-century translation of and commentary on the universe myth of Plato’s Timaeus (c.360 bc): these works include such late antique texts as the Commentum in somnium Scipionis of Macrobius

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections (early fifth century); the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of Martianus Capella (late fifth century); and Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. In these texts, and in a number of important mythographical commentaries written on them, myth is understood to describe the soul’s place within a lower, mutable realm, but also to represent various psychological, epistemological, and cosmological ‘journeys’ that paradoxically invoke a narrative of movement and change but in order to access the unchanging origins of the universe. However, even the authors just mentioned are not exclusively Neoplatonic in their philosophical outlook: Chalcidius’ commentary on the Timaeus, for example, retails a number of Stoic views about the cosmos. The Stoics taught that the universe is a sentient being, a continuum of mind and matter that is constantly undergoing cyclical forms of change, destruction, and renewal.9 Stoic readings of myth, moreover, build on a tradition that goes back to early scholia on Homer, according to which the gods represent natural processes, versions of the one god and material ‘fiery spirit’ that animates the generation, flux, and decay of the universe.10 Virgil, drawing on Stoic and Pythagorean figures of thought, offers a version of this view in the hugely influential Book 6 of his Aeneid: Principio caelum ac terras camposque liquentis . . . spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet. (First, the heaven and earth, and the watery plains . . . a spirit within sustains, and mind, pervading its members, sways the whole mass and mingles with its mighty frame.)11

This passage, which occurs alongside a description of the Pythagorean theory of the transmigration of souls, points to a vision of the material cosmos as constantly in flux and threaded with animating ‘spirit’. Something of this can also be seen in the mythical compendium of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which concludes with a rehearsal of the theory of the transmigration of souls.12 Indeed, this philosophically ‘mingled’ view of the cosmos and its myths is paralleled in Cicero’s De natura deorum (45 bc).13 Here, three philosophers, an Epicurean, a Stoic, and a ‘New Academic’ (a sceptic), argue about the existence of the gods, their relation to nature, the world soul and poetry, and what, if anything, the gods do. We hear that nature teaches humans to believe in the gods and that the gods may be interpreted naturally, historically, from their attributes, or etymologically.14 The Epicurean Velleius mocks other philosophies, including Stoicism, with its active and labouring deity; he argues that, because all people share an idea of the gods, the gods must be true, happy, virtuous—and entirely indifferent to humans. The Stoic Balbus elaborately describes the natural flux of the world, the vicissitudo (‘transmutation’) of the four elements, constantly ‘sursus deorsus ultro citro commeant[es] (‘pass[ing] up and down, to and fro’). Cotta, the Academic, mocks the Stoics and the poets for their multiplying gods and their

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature ‘portenta . . . et flagitia’ (‘monstrous and outrageous tales’) about them, thus recounting even more of their views.15 This text, an important source for the critique of the pagan gods in Augustine’s De civitate Dei, is characteristic of the philosophically multi-perspectival late antique attitudes to myth that find expression in the mythologies.16 We see something of this again in the influential Stoicizing, but also philosophically eclectic, gloss on Virgil’s Aeneid by the grammarian Servius (late fourth century).17 On the one hand, there are moments where, as Wetherbee says, Servius’ Stoic alignment of ‘Virgil’s gods and goddesses . . . with natural forces . . . implies a  coherent cosmological reading of the traditional pantheon’. But elsewhere Wetherbee laments the lack of a ‘systematic’ perspective: Servius ‘is content to compile different views, and places euhemeristic, naturalistic and semi-mystical interpretations side-by-side without acknowledging their inconsistency or relative importance’ (for euhemerism, see p. 125). Paule Demats goes so far as to accuse Servius of myopia and atomism.18 But it is not clear to me that we need to take such a negative view. I suggest that what we are seeing here is the intellectual and heuristic richness of a multi-perspectival philosophical posture. Servius’ comments can be Neoplatonizing or Stoicizing, but also grammatical, rhetorical, psychological, historical, or simply interested in the problem of perspective; indeed, this diversity of vision is also for Servius what characterizes the mode of poetria itself: ‘sectis philosophorum poetae pro qualitate negotiorum semper utuntur’ (‘the poets use the philosophical sects according to the nature of the context’).19 This combination of philosophies in the antique treatment of myth also finds expression in antique and medieval mythographic collections. Jean Seznec long ago recognized their tendency not to reflect a single, systematic philosophical outlook, but to express many perspectives: their bias is, he said, ‘encyclopedic’.20 What is more, in these mythologies the dynamic and turbulent vision of the cosmos that is supported by the various philosophies is reinforced by the very structure of the mythologies, with their fast-paced sequences of mythical sex, procreation, death, and transformation. Their representation of the mythical cosmos as one that is in constant flux can only be enhanced by the fact that many of them (ultimately starting with Hesiod’s Theogony) have a genealogical emphasis, charting the emergence of a violent and destructive mythological world and its gods out of primordial Chaos. While such a perspective can, in theory, be recuperated from within Neoplatonism (as reflecting the unstable lower material realm), the effect of reading these tumultuous texts seems in fact to recall other antique philosophical positions. What are the main theories about the textual form of myth in this period? Scholars have made much of Macrobius’ influential description of myth as literally untrue, but as metaphorically or allegorically meaningful. Macrobius also legislates about the forms and the referents of these allegorizing myths: the ‘narratio fabulosa’

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections (‘narrative of fable’), he says, includes ‘cerimoniarum sacra . . . Hesiodi et Orphei quae de deorum progenie actuve narrantur . . . mystica Pythagoreorum’ (‘the performances of sacred rites, the stories of Hesiod and Orpheus that treat of the ancestry and deeds of the gods, and the mystic conceptions of the Pythagoreans’);21 philosophers repudiate myths that concern ‘turpia et indigna numinibus ac monstro simila . . . ut di adulteri, Saturnus pudenda Caeli patris abscidens’ (‘matters that are base and unworthy of divinities and are monstrosities of some sort . . . such as gods caught in adultery, Saturn cutting off the privy parts of his father Caelus’; 1. 2. 11; trans. p. 85). Despite his recuperative allegorizing agenda, in other words, Macrobius acknowledges that he is in dialogue with a mythological tradition that includes narratives of sexuality, brutality, and endless transmutation—often difficult to interpret in a systematically Neoplatonizing manner.22 Macrobius is also clear about the topics to which myth is supposed to refer, insisting that philosophers use fable to talk ‘de anima vel de aeriis aetheriisve potestatibus vel de ceteris dis’ (‘about the Soul, or . . . spirits having dominion in the lower and upper air, or . . . gods in general’), that is, the lower divinities and matters of cosmology and natural philosophy, but that they use ‘similitudines et exempla’ (‘likenesses and examples’), such as Plato’s use of the image of the sun when speaking ‘de τἀγαϑῷ’ (‘of the Good’). In making such claims, he corroborates the association of myth with the intellectual and poetic exploration of nature; indeed, in using myth, the philosophers are like Nature herself, who veils herself and her mysteries from ordinary people ‘vario rerum tegmine operimentoque’ (‘with a varied garment and covering of things’) and ‘figurarum cuniculis’ (‘secret devices of figures’).23 For Macrobius, then, myths are metaphors that describe the embodied world and lower spirits. However, other antique and medieval mythologies and poetic commentaries imply a more various theorization of the textual modes of myth. Many of them are, like Macrobius’ Commentum, explicitly founded on the proposition that myths are untrue (the early mythographer Hecataeus describes them as ‘many and laughable’24). But more important, the methods of recuperating these poetic ‘falsities’ are often highly eclectic; myth is read euhemeristically (as a mutated version of some historical event, in the manner of the antique mythographer Euhemerus25), naturally (in the Stoic manner, as relating to the elements, seasons, and stars), and morally.26 Such practices implicitly attribute a variety of structures to myths; they may be metaphorical, but they may also be exemplary, or even just ‘altered versions of the truth’. This last view, which owes much to euhemerism, is influentially formulated by the Christian theologian Lactantius (c.240–320), for whom ‘officium poetae in eo sit, ut ea quae uere gesta sunt in alias species obliquis figurationibus cum decore aliquo conuersa traducat’ (‘it should be the business of the poet to turn and transfer things that have really occurred into other representations, with elegance and with oblique figures’).27 This acceptance of the ‘licensed’ mutations of poetry is part of a fluid and inclusive view about how myth might signify. Allowing for varying degrees

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature of figurative remove and different types of referentiality, such a view contributes substantially to the great variety of later medieval theories about poetic figuration and fictionality.28 To sum up: classical myth was strongly associated with the poetic and philosophical materials and forms of pre-Christian understanding, teachings that Christian thinkers identified with the natural order. Neoplatonism, but also other philosophical perspectives, such as those of Stoicism, shaped the reading of myth, often encouraging its tendency to describe the world in terms of violent change—sexuality, procreation, death, and renewal. The philosophical multiplicity of antique attitudes to myth may also have encouraged hermeneutic variety and inclusiveness in  later medieval reading of myth, and a sense that myths can signify in many ­different ways.

Medieval Mythologies up to c.1300 One of the earliest of the Latin mythologies is Hyginus’ Fabulae, which dates from the first or second century ad, but exists only in a corrupt version, found in a single difficult manuscript of around ad 900, and in a fragmentary abridgement. The Fabulae were originally entitled Genealogiae, which no doubt explains why they begin with an account of the origin of the universe: Ex Caligine Chaos. ex Chao et Caligine Nox Dies Erebus Aether. ex Nocte et Erebo Fatum Senectus Mors Letum [Contentio] Somnus, id est Lysimeles, Somnia Epiphron Hedymeles Porphyrion Epaphus Discordia Miseria . . . (From Mist came Chaos. From Chaos and Mist came Night, Day, Darkness, and Ether. From Night and Darkness came Fate, Old Age, Death, Destruction, Strife, Sleep (ie, the Body Relaxer), Dreams, Thoughtfulness, Hedymeles, Porphyrion, Epaphus, Discord, Misery . . .)29

A bit further on appear Saturn and the Furies, and, quite a bit later, Jupiter and the rest of the Greek pantheon. Hyginus’ dark opening vision of flux and destruction segues into a mythology that interweaves narratives of sexual exploit and brutality, many of which end with a death. Although they contain the odd rationalization, Hyginus’ Fabulae stand in contrast to many other mythologies in that they are primarily a series of mythical narratives and explanations of the relationships or ‘genealogies’ of the mythical figures depicted. Fulgentius’ widely read Mitologiae are much more interpretative, and also more formally self-reflexive.30 They begin with an elaborate literary prologue in which Fulgentius repudiates lascivious verse in the mode of Ovid’s Heroides, announcing his retirement to the country; but then in a shady spot the epic muse Calliope

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections responds flirtatiously to his invocations.31 The narrator offers more disclaimers and, in a variant of both the Macrobian and Lactantian passages cited above, identifies himself not as poet, but as commentator: Mutatas itaque vanitates manifestare cupimus, non manifesta mutando fuscamus, ut senior deus [h]innitus exerceat…certos itaque nos rerum praestolamur effectus, quo sepulto mendacis Greciae fabuloso commento quid misticum in his sapere debeat cerebrum agnoscamus. (What I wish to do is to expose the fictions produced by alteration not to obscure what is clear by altering it myself, so that the senior deity may carry on with his neighings . . . I look for the true effects of things, so that, once the invented fiction of lying Greece has been disposed of, we may recognise the hidden meaning that the mind should discern.)32

But, whatever his claims, it is clear that Fulgentius is committed to poetry, writing the Mitologiae so that myth can be both elucidated and perpetuated: at the end of the prologue Calliope bursts inspirationally into his bedroom. In the body of the text, Fulgentius mixes euhemeristic, natural, moral, and etymological readings; Saturn, for example, ‘is imagined’ (fingitur) with accoutrements that refer to historical events but also to plants and seasons; Cerberus is three-headed ‘quod mortalium iurgiorum invidiae ternario conflentur statu’ (‘because the envies of human quarrels are brought about in a threefold fashion’) and ‘Admetum posuerunt in modum mentis, ideo et Admetus nuncupatus est quasi quem adire poterit metus’ (‘they have explained Admetus as an allegory of the mind, and he is named Admetus as one whom fear [metus] could “approach” [adire]’).33 In a number of cases, such as that of Venus, just like the scholiasts, Fulgentius offers multiple alternative readings for the reader to choose between.34 Isidore of Seville (c.560–636) includes a chapter-long interpretative mythology, ‘De diis gentium’ (‘On the gods of the pagans’), in his encyclopedic Etymologiae. This is an explicitly Christian work, and Isidore employs a wide range of natural, euhemeristic, and moral interpretations, periodically in a reductive manner, to debunk the myths. After some sections on the origins of gods, devils, and Old Testament idols, he begins, like Fulgentius, with Saturn, who ‘origo deorum et totius posteritatis a paganis designatur’ (‘is described by the pagans as the origin of the gods and all the succeeding generations’); the chapter is scattered with versions of ‘they say’ and ‘they feign’ (fingunt).35 Although some like to explain the names of the gods in terms of natural processes, hoc a poetis totum fictum est, ut deos suos ornarent aliquibus figuris, quos perditos ac dedecoris infamia plenos fuisse historiae confitentur. (this is all invented by the poets, so that they can ornament their gods with certain figurations, [gods] whom the myths acknowledge to be depraved and full of the infamy of dishonour.) (Etymologiae 8, 11, 29)

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Jupiter did not really seduce Europa as a bull, but sailing in a ship carrying the sign of a bull; similarly, the real meaning of Danae seduced in a shower of gold is that women’s modesty is corrupted by gold. ‘Non figurae istae sunt’, he concludes, ‘sed plane de veritate scelera; unde turpe erat tales deos credi, quales homines esse non debeant’ (‘these are not literary figures, but plainly, and with respect to the truth, crimes; whence it was base for the gods to be thought to be such as what men ought not to be’). Of the two-faced Janus, he comments sourly, ‘dum hoc fingunt, monstrum, non deum, faciunt’ (‘when they imagine this, they make a monster, not a god’; 8, 11, 35–7; see also 88–9). Nevertheless, such critical views do not prevent Isidore from repeating many myths with their traditional interpretations. Two of the three ‘Vatican Mythographers’ wrote in the Carolingian period, but the third was probably writing in the later twelfth century and is generally identified as ‘Alberic of London’, possibly a canon of St Paul’s. Over forty manuscripts of this richly sourced and massively influential text have been identified to date.36 Organized around the different gods, it includes extensive philosophical and sociological material on the cult of the gods in antiquity; there are discussions of the Stoic idea that the gods are all manifestations of one god, the transmigration of souls, the existence of the underworld, dreams, ghosts, idolatry, and magic. A discussion of guiding spirits, and whether gods shape our desires or whether we make our desires into our gods, implicitly invokes theology and psychology, but ends up with a discussion of ancient burial practices (6, 19; trans. Pepin, pp. 247–8). ‘Alberic’ furnishes an extraordinary variety of readings, often identified according to their specific generic or disciplinary perspective, whether etymological, poetical, ‘theological’, ‘philosophical’, natural-scientific, astrological, or medical.37 His range and fluidity of approach are comparable to those of the thirteenth-century ‘Vulgate’ commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He notes that philosophers such as Lucretius say that the underworld cannot exist and claims that he defers to the views of ‘veri theologi’ (‘true theologians’), but then concludes that his job is simply to render ‘poetarum figmenta ex aliqua parte minus obscura’ (‘the fictions of the poets in some measure less obscure’; 6, 1; trans. Pepin, p. 236, altered). Discussing the transmigration of souls, he notes the denials of ‘indubitata fides’ (‘undoubted faith’) and the uncertain views of the philosophers, who follow ‘rationem magis et opinionem, quam veritatem’ (‘reason and opinion more than truth’), and merely ‘poetice inquirunt et se deprehendere putant’ (‘inquire in the manner of the poets, thinking that they understand’); and yet he reports ‘poetica . . . philosophicaque’ (‘poetic and philosophic doctrines’) at length—as he says elsewhere, ‘nec nunc quidem catholicam in his veritatem, sed gentilitatis expono opiniones et figmenta’ (‘I am not setting forth Catholic truth in these matters, but the opinions and fictions of the pagans’).38 He is au fait with the language of the poetic commentaries: poetry retails various opiniones (‘opinions’) and ‘oppositissimae . . . traditiones’ (‘contradictory traditions’), of which ‘nullam pro certa asserendum’ (‘none should be affirmed for certain’).39 But, like Cicero’s De

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections ­natura deorum and Servius (from whom he could have acquired this knowledge of Cicero), he also connects this perspectival variety with the many ancient schools of philosophy: Tradit etiam in eodem volumine, triplicem de diis esse opinionem; deos non esse, cuius rei auctor apud Athenas exustus est; esse, et nullam curam rebus impendere, ut affirmant Epicurei…esse et omnia curare, ut Stoici . . . Sectis enim philosophorum poetae pro qualitate utuntur negotiorum, nec se ad unam umquam alligant, nisi quorum id maxime propositum est, ut Lucretius, qui Epicureos tantum secutus est. ([Cicero] teaches that there is a triple belief about the gods. The first is that gods do not exist. The author of this view was burned by the Athenians. The second is that the gods exist and have no concern for things, as the Epicureans affirm . . . The third theory is that the gods exist and care for all things, as the Stoics say . . . Poets use the sects of the philosophers according to the nature of their material, and they do not ever bind themselves to one sect, unless that is especially their purpose, as with Lucretius, who followed only the Epicureans.

If poets such as Virgil espouse different views (both Epicurean and Stoic, for example), this is not through ignorantia (‘ignorance’), but ‘ex varietate sectarum’ (‘due to the variety of sects’).40 Finally, there is the well-read, anonymous later twelfth-century author of the Liber de natura deorum, who introduces his ambitious work by announcing that he will not make a great show of producing just the Horatian ‘ridiculum murem’ (‘ridiculous mouse’).41 The text, preserved only in Oxford, Bodleian, MS Digby 221, contains almost no interpretation; instead, as Judson Allen points out, its author is preoccupied with the literal narrative and detail of myth, and supports his reading of other mythographical works with what seems to have been fresh reading in the classical poets. The only section interpreted is the labours of Hercules, a section that concludes, ‘haec duodecim facta Herculis…per involucra exposita sufficiant legentibus’ (‘these twelve deeds of Hercules . . . expounded as mythic figures may suffice for readers’).42 In its literalizing orientation, the Liber exemplifies a particular version of the continuing tradition of reading classical myth in its own terms, though it may also anticipate the renewed interest in literal retellings of myth that will characterize the literature of the later Middle Ages. The Liber is also another mythology that charts the origin of the gods, opening with Demogorgon, demons, Earth, the Furies, the Gorgons, and Titan: Allen says that the source here is a lost work by Theodontius, which Boccaccio also used in the Genealogia deorum gentilium.43 We might also note that, from chapter 22 onwards, this author, who says that his materials are ‘non solummodo in Ovidianis sed in quibuslibet auctoribus dispersae’ (‘scattered not only in Ovidian [texts] but in a number of other authors’, praef., p. 4) follows, very roughly, the narrative sequence of the Metamorphoses.

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Ovid’s Metamorphoses as Mythology The Metamorphoses are the medieval mythology par excellence.44 The history of their medieval reception, moreover, reveals the same inter-generic play of poetry, commentary, and mythographical collection that characterizes antique and medieval mythography more generally. Although the Metamorphoses lack an early commentary tradition, a substantial body of manuscripts of the text contain instead the ‘Lactantian’ tituli and narrationes/argumenta (prose summaries with some scholiastic material) inserted into Ovid’s text (though these also circulate as marginalia and as a separate, continuous text).45 These mythographical collection/commentary hybrids have been studied by Alan Cameron, who argues that they may be earlier than was once thought (in their original version possibly before ad 200) and also that they draw on Greek mythographical materials, including deriving their title from the Greek term διηγήσιϛ (‘diegesis’, meaning ‘narrative’ or ‘narration’). Sometimes the narrationes echo Ovid’s text, but sometimes they differ from it; their purpose seems to be that of an index and guide, and they read Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a mythography, albeit a rather long one, in need of a key. Only in the fifteenth century, and almost certainly erroneously, are they attributed to ‘Lactantius Placidus’.46 What is more, the narrationes shape the structure of subsequent Metamorphoses commentaries. Ralph Hexter has shown how Lactantian ‘segmentation’, for example, often determines the way that the twelfth-century commentator Arnulf of Orléans identifies individual ‘mutations’ and parcels them up for analysis. Arnulf ’s commentary, a ‘lemmatic’ commentary, that is, a free-standing one circulating separately from the text of the poem, glosses the detail of Ovid’s text, but at the end of each book also lists the book’s mutations and then allegorizes them. Like the narrationes, these concluding allegoriae take little notice of Ovid’s elaborate and interleaved narrative technique, but instead enable the ‘master and student to cast their minds back over the text they have so painstakingly read’, and focus more explicitly on the business of interpreting the stories.47 Here, as Arnulf announced in his prologue, the readings can be natural, magic, ‘spiritual’ (that is, psychological), moral, or, very occasionally, Christian, as when he says that the star that appeared at Julius Caesar’s funeral games, which Augustus had said was Caesar’s, was in fact the one followed by the Magi.48 Arnulf ’s lists and allegoriae, then, are summary mythologies. Unlike the many manuscript versions of the narrationes where these texts are actually inserted into the Metamorphoses, Arnulf ’s text nevertheless has much in common with those other manuscript versions of the narrationes that take the form of a continuous, free-standing commentary on Ovid’s text.49 Even more compressed multifunctionality is in evidence in John of Garland’s summary poetic mythology/commentary, the Integumenta Ovidii (c.1234). John describes himself as a ‘parvus . . . veloxque viator’ (‘small and speedy traveller’) who

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections goes before the dominus (‘master’), Ovid, and he instructs himself, ‘Omnes ficticii partes non discute, summam | Elige, quid sapiat, quid velit[,] illa vide’ (‘do not discuss all the parts of the fiction, go for the gist; what would give pleasure, what it would want to say—look for those things’, lines 1, 19–20). John does not recount the Ovidian stories at all.50 At the outset, he provides summary catalogues of the elements, the winds, and the various types of metamorphosis and textual genre, and then sets out on a high-speed traversal of the Metamorphoses; some of his glosses are entirely straightforward, while others are bizarrely elliptical. In Book 2 of the Metamorphoses, for example, the crow tells Phoebus about Coronis’ adultery, Phoebus kills Coronis and turns the crow black; Mercury steals cattle, bribing Battus (an old man who has seen him) not to tell, but when Mercury returns in disguise to check on him, the old man (who has claimed that a stone will speak sooner than he) does indeed betray Mercury and the god turns his heart to a stone; Mercury then falls in love with Herse and also turns the envious Aglauros to stone (2, 542–832). John summarizes as follows: Eloquio vincit quasi Phebus sepe disertus Et cum furatur, facta notando mala. Vir valet invictus et inexorabilis esse Saxum, nam lapidem pectore durus habet. Mens domus Invidie, Pallas sapientia, sermo Aliger, Aglauros invida facta lapis. (Often a man skilled in speaking, like Phoebus, triumphs by eloquence, and, when he steals, by drawing attention to his bad deeds. An undefeated and unmoved man is as good as a stone; firm, he has a stone in his breast. The house of envy is the mind, Pallas is wisdom, Mercury is speech, and the envious Aglauros was made into a stone.) (lines 145–50)

Such emphatically enigmatic lines suggest that this is indeed a school text, offering riddling references to Ovid’s poem and cues as to how to read it, but accessible only in the context of other commentaries and classroom explication. The same inter-generic combination of narrative summary and commentary can be seen in four later Metamorphoses texts: the Latin prose/verse commentary and Allegoriae of Giovanni del Virgilio (working c.1321–6);51 the French verse Ovide moralisé, by an anonymous Franciscan (composed c.1316–28);52 the Latin prose text usually entitled Ovidius moralizatus, Book 15 of the Reductorium morale, but also circulating separately, by the Benedictine monk Pierre Bersuire (c.1290–1362);53 and the Latin prose De archana deorum [sic] of Thomas Walsingham (c.1345–1422).54 The first three were well disseminated (though the many-times printed Bersuire was sometimes attributed to Thomas Waleys, and finally banned by the Catholic Church in 1559). Thomas Walsingham survives in two manuscripts.55 Following Arnulf of Orléans, Giovanni del Virgilio writes both a gloss and separate summary

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature of the myths, also entitled Allegoriae, though this last also includes inset verses.56 Giovanni and the Ovide moralisé also follow Arnulfian tradition by using the mutation as the organizing principle of the tale. Bersuire’s exegetical priorities, however, are revealed in his reversion to the category of fabula, expressed in his claim that in the Metamorphoses ‘recte videntur quasi per modum tabule omnes fabule congregate’ (‘all the fables seem to be gathered together in a sort of table’); some of his fabulae contain no metamorphosis at all.57 Like Bersuire, Thomas Walsingham divides the Metamorphoses into fabulae and begins with a treatise on the individual gods and their ‘pictures’, drawing on both ‘Alberic of London’ and the first chapter of Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus, usually known as ‘De formis figurisque deorum’; appended to this text is a genealogy of the gods that begins with Demogorgon and is accompanied by a series of annotated diagrams, though there is disagreement whether this is by Walsingham.58 These writers’ attitudes to the retelling or paraphrasing of the tales of the Metamorphoses also vary.59 While the Latin texts offer short, mythology-style summaries, the Ovide moralisé uses French romance narrative technique to develop the exotic mutations and complex affective impact of Ovid’s tales (though also to shape them for the interpretations to follow). In respect of this interest in narrative technique, the Ovide moralisé draws on and reflects the literalizing dimension of Old French treatments of myth from the twelfth century onwards.60 The other important distinctions between these four Metamorphoses texts are interpretative. Although Giovanni and Thomas are sporadically Christianizing, most of their readings are natural, euhemeristic, and moral (despite Thomas drawing on the Ovide moralisé and Bersuire). These two illustrate the continued tradition of reading antique texts in terms of antiquity’s own language and thought, a practice that vernacular writers will pursue with newly historicizing and philosophical attention in the later Middle Ages (see p. 136–9). In contrast to this, however, the Ovide moralisé and Bersuire systematically moralize and Christianize Ovid’s text, which results in some famously strange and counter-intuitive readings. This can be illustrated with the tale of Actaeon, who, while out hunting, discovers Diana naked by a pool, is transformed by the goddess into a deer, and destroyed by his own hounds. In the Allegoriae, Giovanni briefly summarizes the tale and explains that seeing Diana nude and being turned into a timid deer signify Actaeon’s recognition of the pointlessness of hunting and his flight from it; Giovanni then adds that being eaten by his hounds means that hunting had consumed all his wealth. Unlike Giovanni, Thomas does not insert his own verses into his commentary, instead elaborating his summary with a handful of affecting quotations directly from Ovid and other classical poets; nevertheless, his readings are much the same as those of Giovanni; there is here no hint of Christianization at all.61 The Ovide moralisé, in contrast, retells the tale at much greater length in an exquisitely Ovidian vernacular. First, it also allegorizes Actaeon as young men who, having wasted all their money

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections hunting, are financially ‘eaten up’ by their dogs. Second, it reads him as the incarnate Christ—with a witty pun on the words cerf/serf (‘deer’/‘servant’); in a characteristically bold interpretation, it says that Actaeon/Christ has seen Diana nue, ‘sans couverture’ (‘naked’, ‘without covering’) because she is ‘la Deïté | Qui regnoit en la Trinité, | Nue, sans humaine nature’ (‘the Deity, who reigns in the Trinity, naked, without human nature’). Bersuire in turn divides the tale up into two fabulae and provides four readings. The first is about rich people who bribe their servants not to reveal their indiscretions, the second about Diana as a personification of Avarice, who makes and unmakes men such as Actaeon, the third about Actaeon as the Son of God and Diana as the Virgin Mary, and the last about Diana as a representation of Fortune.62 This plethora of moral and outrightly theological readings is entirely typical of Bersuire, and perhaps what made him so useful to later writers and artists. For all of these commentators, whether Christianizing or not, Ovid’s poem is a sort of mythological counterpart to the order of nature. This is particularly explicit in Bersuire, whose Ovidius moralizatus is the fifteenth book of the Reductorium, whose preceding books are devoted to the allegorizable ‘properties’ of the natural world, following the encyclopedic De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus: ‘congruum mihi visum est post moralizatas rerum proprietates . . . ad moralizandum fabulas poetarum manum apponere’ (‘it seemed appropriate to me, after my moralization of the properties of things . . . to set my hand to moralizing the fables of the poets’).63 However, one of the reasons for the centrality of the Metamorphoses to the mythographical tradition—Bersuire’s reversion to fabula notwithstanding—is surely Ovid’s emphasis on metamorphosis, his interest in ‘generation, transformation [and] corruption’.64 It is this that allows Ovid’s medieval readers to respond in their own terms to the vision of natural flux that is so central to the mythological tradition. We see an acknowledgement of this in a teasingly erotic, philosophical twelfth-century Latin poem found in a Tegernsee manuscript, which advertises its relation to the Metamorphoses with the words, ‘Cum de mutatis formis metaphora vatis | Hec commentatur, opus et res magna paratur’ (‘when the poet contemplates these things under the metaphor of transformations, a great theme and work are at hand’). The poem then plays with various ways of reading myths of divine sexuality, concluding: Quidquit in hoc mundo   crudeli sive secundo Sidere versantur,   et quicquid in hec operantur, Ex quibus omne genus   rerum constare videmus, Quod sapis et sentis,   quod ab his fit et est elementis— Hoc opus istorum   coitum dixere deorum. (Whatever events come to pass in this world under a cruel or kindly star, whatever forces have influence on these, from which we see every created form established, whatever you know and feel, whatever is begotten and exists by virtue of these elements—all this men saw in the sexual unions of the gods!)65

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature In the fourteenth century, Giovanni del Virgilio also focuses on natural change in the Metamorphoses, but he uses the language of Aristotelian scholasticism: Ovid’s poetic materia (the Aristotelian ‘material cause’) is metamorphosis, and natural change takes place ‘altero de duobus modis, vel per generationem, scilicet quando de nihilo transmutatur aliquid, vel per corruptionem, scilicet quando de aliquo fit nihil’ (‘in one of two ways, either by generation, when something is transformed into being from nothing, or by corruption, when something is transformed into nothing’).66 Writing at much the same time, the author of the Ovide moralisé is also fascinated with metamorphosis: as he veers between the languages of Ovid, romance, pastoral teaching, and mysticism, it is all too clear that mythographical change is for him the vehicle in which to explore the endless transformations of the created world—­bodily, psychological, spiritual, and incarnational, but also, as he ‘translates’ Ovid’s poem into a Christian text, literary and exegetical: textual metamorphosis is perhaps his most crucial ‘completion’ of Ovid’s ‘matter’.67

Developments in the Mythographical Collection The various treatments of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that we have observed are symptomatic of the diversification of the later medieval mythographical collection. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, mythology can be dealt with in ways that are philosophical or historical, but also pastoral or instructional, or more loosely literary and imaginative; myths can be treated as allegories but also as exempla, as exercises in iconography and even as studies in pathos. Authors also make new efforts to organize this traditionally rather miscellaneous genre into some kind of pattern. Boccaccio was working on his highly researched, quotation-packed, and very influential Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods) for much of his life (he lived 1313–75); in this work of early Italian humanism, he draws on a huge range of sources, including Homer and other writers in Greek. Like ‘Alberic of London’, Boccaccio accepts the contradictoriness and loose ends of the philosophical and poetic tradition as he inherits it: ‘satis enim michi erit comperta rescribere et disputationes phylosophantibus linquere’ (‘it will be enough for me to recount what I have found and leave the disputes to the philosophers’). Indeed, David Lummus has argued that his self-conscious exploitation of different interpretative techniques amounts to ‘an anthropological understanding of myth as a cultural artefact that develops over time’.68 Although Boccaccio does make Christian references and occasionally allows himself moral comments, his interpretations tend towards the ‘philosophical’, that is, the historical and natural. The text is organized genealogically and each book is focused on the ‘tree’ of a god and his or her progeny. Boccaccio also recognizes the metamorphic turbulence of the tradition, suggesting that he will be another Aesculapius reconstituting Hippolytus as he ventures ‘inter confragosa

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections vetustatis aspreta et aculeos odiorum, membratim discerptum, attritum et in cineres fere redactum ingens olim corpus deorum procerumque gentilium nunc huc nunc illuc collecturus’ (‘over the rough terrain of antiquity and the barbs of its enmities, in order to gather now here and now there the huge corpus of gods and noble princes, torn limb from limb, beaten, and reduced nearly to ashes’).69 As signalled in the ‘genealogy’ of the title, the text opens with a transformational vision of the world, whose first book includes Eternity, Chaos, Strife, Darkness, Sleep, and Death, and opens with the foul originator of the gods, Demogorgon: ‘pallore quodam muscoso et neglecta humiditate amictus, terrestrem tetrum fetidumque evaporans odorem, seque miseri principatus patrem potius alieno sermone quam suo confessus verbo’ (‘enveloped in a certain slimy pallor and relentless humidity, exhaling an earthy, foul and fetid odour, acknowledging more in another’s voice than in his own that he was father of this wretched realm’; 1, preface 3; pp. 32–3). Only in Book 2 does Boccaccio reach the progeny of Jupiter, and by Book 4 he is back with the offspring of Titan, his generational progressions charting ‘a continual effect of transition and translation by which the new participates genetically in the old’.70 Boccaccio’ s learned antiquarianism means that he has much in common with the fourteenth-century English mythographers whom Beryl Smalley called the ‘classicizing friars’. The Dominicans Thomas Waleys and Robert Holcot and the Franciscan John Ridewall, for example, press their knowledge of antique philosophy, literature, cults, and mythology into the service of compilations and commentaries that are historicizing and encyclopedic, but also often pastoral, preacherly, and even theological. The intellectual predecessors of these friars are men such as the thirteenth-­ century encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais; the Franciscan John of Wales, whose Legiloquium (a treatise on the Ten Commandments) includes materials from Cicero’s De natura deorum and Augustine’s De civitate Dei; and the Dominican Nicholas Trevet (c.1260–c.1334), who comments on the plays of Seneca, Boethius’ De consolatione Philosophiae, and Augustine’s De civitate Dei. Two of the fourteenth-century ‘classicizing friars’, Waleys and Ridewall, themselves write commentaries on De civitate Dei.71 One of the most important products of this group was Holcot’s Wisdom commentary, a florilegium of classical and medieval verse and prose, containing much mythology and a number of ‘images’ of the gods; this is not entirely surprising, given the biblical book’s moral and political orientation, its personification of Wisdom and preoccupation with idolatry.72 One of the texts Holcot drew on was Ridewall’s Fulgentius metaforalis. The Fulgentius metaforalis, a ‘metaphorical Fulgentius’ organized around ‘images’ of gods, is not in fact a traditional mythology but a work of pastoralia. Surviving in nearly forty manuscripts, it has only been published in a short version, containing six ‘images’ of gods. Here, alongside citations from Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Juvenal, Seneca, Cicero, Hyginus, Claudian, Boethius, Remigius of Auxerre, John of Salisbury, the Archpoet, Walter of Châtillon, and ‘Alberic of London’ (here referred

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature to as Alexander Neckam), we find quotations from Augustine, Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelred of Rievaulx, Anselm of Canterbury, Hugh and Richard of St Victor. Although the ‘images’ around which the text is organized are indeed versified materials from Fulgentius, each turns out to be a ‘hook’ for a different moral or confessional virtue. With them, Ridewall leads the reader through various stages of self-knowledge, regret, and humility. Saturn is prudence, Jupiter love, Juno penitential memory, Neptune moral reason, and Pluto what Ridewall calls providentia— that is, the power of looking ahead (or behind). If, as so often in the mythologies, the realm of Pluto gets an extended discussion, here the commentary on Pluto is all moral warning, and concludes the short version of this text with a discussion of the virtues of a good death.73 Christine de Pizan’s French Epistre Othea (1399/1400), is differently organized again. It pivots on a mythological poem of Christine’s own composition, a ‘letter’ of advice from Othea (a feminized God, Theos) to the Trojan hero Hector. Christine divides most of her poem into rather elliptical quatrains, which she calls her ‘hundred authorities’ (‘cent auctoritez’), each containing a mythological reference.74 These are then commented on in two prose passages, in such a way as to foreground the two types of interpretation whose interplay we have been tracing over the course of this chapter: the glose is secular and philosophical, and the allegorie is Christian and theological. In the glose, Christine expands the story, cites an antique philosopher, and explains the tale, sometimes in natural and euhemeristic terms, but always in moral and chivalric ones, suitable both to an imagined Hector and to Christine’s own courtly audience. In the allegorie, Christine re-reads her myth as a metaphor for a Christian teaching, along with a theological quotation; her readings are often quite as audacious as those of the Ovide moralisé (one of her sources), and include Pyramus and Thisbe as a lesson in honouring your parents, Pasiphae as the soul returned to God, and Daphne and her laurel as the pursuit of paradise. The last section is overtly Christian and narrates how the Cumaean Sibyl showed Augustus a vision of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. With this last narrative, which ultimately derives from Jacob of Voragine’s Legenda aurea, Christine locates herself in a long medieval tradition of reading the Augustan age as marking the beginning of the Christian era, a tradition that culminates in the twentieth century with Hermann Broch’s epic and metamorphic The Death of Virgil.75 However, by the fourteenth century, the mythographical collection has taken on a new and transformed life in the literary story collection. In Boccaccio’s own  De claris mulieribus (Concerning Famous Women), or his De casibus virorum illustrium, translated (via Laurent de Premierfait’s French version) by the fifteenth-­century English poet Lydgate as The Fall of Princes, myths are compiled alongside other kinds of story.76 The same is true of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Gower’s Confessio amantis. These writers both continue to use mythology’s multiplicitous  powers of allusion, but also exemplify the way that the

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections reading and ­writing of myth in later medieval vernacular literature tends towards literalism and, if anything, a more moral hermeneutics.77 They are highly alert to the complex things that can be done with narrative mimesis itself. If some of their narratives are still accompanied by separate moral interpretations, in many of them diverse, even conflicted, exegetical drives are now embedded within the narrative diegesis itself. In Gower’s version of the story of Actaeon, for example, Genius interprets the story morally, though in a manner different from any of the Metamorphoses interpretations noted above: here the story illustrates the dangers of a man ‘cast[ing] his yhe amis’ (‘looking improperly’). However, Genius has told the tale in such a way as to illustrate something quite different again: the delights of aimless sensoriness and the meandering eye: He syh upon the grene gras The faire freisshe floures springe, He herde among the leves singe The Throstle with the nyhtingale: Thus er he wiste into a Dale He cam, wher was a litel plein, All round aboute wel besein With buisshes grene and Cedres hyhe; And ther withinne he caste his yhe. Amidd the plein he syh a welle, So fair ther myhte noman telle, In which Diana naked stod …78

[saw] [leaves] [thrush] [before he knew] [plain] [lovely looking] [green bushes  high cedars] [eye] [saw a fountain] [so fair that nobody could describe it]

Myth in Medieval Narrative Poetry Throughout the Middle Ages, the reading of antique myth has authorized medieval literary writers to compose their own narrative myths. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, a number of hugely influential poems and prosimetra (alternating prose and verse texts) make Neoplatonizing use of myths of creation or generation, and myths of philosophical ‘ascent’ to the sources of form and being: Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia, for example, and Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae and Anticlaudianus. However, in this essay I have emphasized the philosophically mixed nature of the mythological tradition, and in particular the continued life of Stoic preoccupations in the tradition (whether they are explicitly acknowledged or not). Even the ostensibly Neoplatonic texts mentioned—and especially the Cosmographia— in fact draw on mingled intellectual traditions and use myth to chart a labile and malleable nature that includes many forms of change and even decline.79 However, this restless cosmos may be in evidence not just in these overtly cosmographical texts, but also in other later medieval narratives and allegories that use the language

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature of myth to explore the processes of natural decay and death, the workings of contingency, mutability, and ‘fortune’.80 This is perhaps most cogently illustrated in Jean de Meun’s philosophical and pornographic continuation of the Roman de la rose (c.1270). Here procreation is again at issue, but now the injunction to heroic feats of sexual ‘labour’ has become something of a rearguard action, an attempt to perpetuate the world in the face of the instability of things, the dominance of Fortune, and the voracity of death. In a paradoxically nurturing and death-dealing image, the mythical Atropos is forever feeding the dead to Cerberus, the hound of hell: ‘Ses .iii. groinz en son saing li muce | Et les groignoie et tire et suce, | N’ainc ne fu ne ja n’iert sevrez’ (‘he buries his three snouts in her breasts, butting, tugging and sucking, and he has never been weaned, nor ever will be’).81 The world of Jean’s poem reflects later medieval scholastic and Aristotelian interest in natural process and contingency; but it also builds on the philosophically rich vision of endless change and metamorphosis that characterizes the mythographical tradition. Nature, for example, describes how ‘Li biau soleuls . . . Se tient . . . Ou milieu d’euls, en sa maison’ (‘the fair sun . . . has his house in the middle of the planets’) and dispenses light to the stars and moon, which Night uses for candles ‘Au soir, quant ele met sa table, | Pour estre mains espouentable | Devant Acheron son mari’ (‘when she lays her table in the evening, in order to appear less dreadful before her husband, Acheron’); these heavenly bodies are responsible for the harmony of the lower world and yet qui bien garder i savra, Ja si bone pais n’i avra Que la chaleur l’umeur ne suce Et sanz cesser gaste et menjuce De jour en jour, tant que venue Soit la mors . . . (‘if you look closely, you will see that, however good the peace, it will not prevent the heat from sucking up the fluid, endlessly destroying and eating it up from day to day until death comes’)82

It is true that the poem exemplifies the literalizing bias of many later vernacular medieval treatments of myth; and yet it is clear that its poet is intensely engaged with the mythological tradition, not least in the way he sees it as a powerful tool with which to think about the natural order.83 The famous discussion between the prissy narrator and Reason about whether Reason should or should not have mentioned coilles (‘testicles’) while telling of the castration of Saturn (the god and the myth that open so many mythographical collections) is not just raising Macrobian questions about the literal and the integumental, or about proper and improper myths.84 It is also about the possibility of speaking literally about the most

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections f­ undamental mechanics of both myth and the world: as Reason says of the lost parts of Saturn: N’encor ne faz je pas pechié Se je nomme les nobles choses Par plein texte sanz mettre gloses, Que mes peres en paradis Fist de ses propres mains jadis . . . Mist dieus en coilles et en viz Force de generacion Par merveilleuse entencion . . . (‘it is not sinful of me to name, in plain and unglossed language, the things that my heavenly father formerly made with his own hands . . . God in his wonderful purpose put the generative power into the testicles and the penis’)85

For Jean, as for so many later medieval vernacular poets, the myths of antiquity still provide a language capable of evoking, in all its vividness and violence, ‘the nature of things’.

Images and Idols This later medieval fascination with classical myth as a manifestation of transience and decay leads us back to another aspect of the mythographers’ treatment of the antique gods: their fascination with the pagan gods as images and ‘idols’, as objects of ritual worship but also as concrete visual and three-dimensional objects. In Cicero’s De natura deorum, for example, speakers return to the origin of the gods in objects, dead people, historical or natural events, while Cotta repeatedly blames ‘poëtae, pictores, opifices’ (‘poets, painters, and sculptors’) for their contribution to foolishly anthropomorphized and fictitious versions of the gods.86 Before he ever glosses a single myth, Fulgentius explains the origins of the ‘idols’ in statues (simulacra) made out of grief, fear, love, and ‘perverse credulity’ (‘sceva credulitas’). He cites an unknown musician, ‘Mintanor’, on ‘the god of grief whom the suffering of humanity first fashioned’.87 It is clear, moreover, that his descriptions of the gods refer both to texts and images: ‘Saturnus Polluris filius dicitur, Opis maritus, senior, velato capite, falcem ferens . . . Velato vero capite ideo fingitur . . . Filios vero suos comedisse fertur . . . ’ (‘The name of the son of Pollus, and the husband of Ops, is Saturn, an elderly man, with his head covered, carrying a scythe . . . He is imagined with his head covered . . . He is reported to have devoured his own sons . . . ’; I, 2, 626–8; trans. p. 49, altered). Isidore too explains the origin of the gods in human actions and historical inventors, heroes, founders of cities, and the dead. However, perhaps because this is an overtly Christian text, he also spends more time thinking

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature about idolatry—the demons that get into idols, the distinction between idolatry and the correct use of images (latria), and the actual making of images: he notes that Ismael and Prometheus made figures from clay and etymologizes simulacrum and idolum as references to the imitation of the human face or form that they involve. Three times in the course of his mythology he refers to a god as a ‘painted’ image (‘pingitur’).88 The Vatican Mythographers use the same language,89 and, in Vatican, MS Reg.lat.1290, ‘Alberic of London’ is entitled Liber ymaginum deorum and is juxtaposed with an illustrated version of a later mythology, the Libellus de imaginibus deorum.90 Ridewall’s Fulgentius metaforalis also opens with an extensive discussion of the sin of idolatry, the origins of idols, and the different disordered passions that excite idol worship, as well as the various types of god and how they were worshipped in anti­ quity. Intriguingly, he then invents a versified description of Idolatry, the first of the text’s ‘images’ of the gods, and claims that the ‘antiqua pictura poetica huius maximi peccati . . . concordat cum processu Fulgentii in serie istius mithologie’ (‘antique poetic picture of this greatest sin . . . agrees with Fulgentius’ discussion in the sequence of his Mythology’); Beryl Smalley is shocked at this apparent untruth. Idolatry, Ridewall goes on, is ‘painted’, in both verse and prose, as blind, deaf, tossed on a horn, deformed in face, and suffering from the disease of ‘amor hereos’, excessive love.91 It is scarcely surprising that in Vatican, MS Palat.lat.1066 the text is elaborately illustrated,92 or that the text was twice condensed into an even shorter ‘imagines’ text.93 Robert Holcot’s works also contain such figures; his Wisdom Commentary, for example, includes a ‘pantheon’ of images of the gods as part of a discussion of idolatry.94 Although scholars insist that these mythical ‘paintings’ are purely textual, this is a tradition that constantly reflects on its relation to the concrete artefact and, in the later Middle Ages, spills over into illustrated form.95 The Ovid tradition also has much to say on the topic of idolatry. In the twelfth century, Conrad of Hirsau actually claims that Ovid, with his metamorphoses of the human into ‘lapis et bestia . . . et avis’ (‘stone, animal . . . and bird’), is the source of idol worship.96 The first chapter of Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus, ‘De formis figurisque deorum’, is an extended description of the gods as they were ‘painted’ by the ancients.97 Here, in fact, Bersuire is closest to the older mythology tradition, in that while the interpretations of the Ovidius moralizatus as a whole are mostly moral and Christian, in ‘De formis’ they are natural and historical.98 Bersuire’s ‘De formis’ was very influential on later texts and the visual arts.99 It also exemplifies the cross-fertilization of writers and textual genres that so characterizes medieval mythography. Bersuire knew Petrarch (1304–74), who possessed both Fulgentius and the ‘Poetarius Albricus’, and spoke of the latter as the ‘vir illustris’ (‘illustrious man’) who described ‘idolorum ritus’ (‘the rites of the idols’) and explained ‘vetustas deorum antiquorum’ (‘the antiquity of the ancient gods’); Petrarch had drawn on these earlier texts for the images of gods painted in the house of Syphax, in Canto 3 of his epic poem Africa.100

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections It is these images that became the basis for Bersuire’s ‘De formis’, and this in turn was a source for Thomas Walsingham’s De archana and the anonymous prose Libellus de imaginibus deorum (itself eventually reworked in verse). Like the images of Petrarch’s Africa on which they are ultimately based, the images of the Libellus are pure icons, and, with the exception of the twelve labours of Hercules, they have almost no commentary at all. In Vatican, MS Reg. lat. 1290, moreover, they are illustrated.101 Out of this tradition there also emerges a series of later medieval English literary texts containing series or ‘compilations’ of ekphrases, or set-piece descriptions, of the gods. These gods may be framed in a temple, a procession, or tableau: they include the graphic vision of the three gods in their temples in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’, the deities of Dunbar’s Golden Targe, and the dark tableau of divinities in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid.102 They also include the procession of speaking ‘images’ who appear to Boccaccio in De casibus virorum illustrium and in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, each insisting on the distinctive horror of their particular misfortune: ‘“Bochas,” quod he, “fro the me list nat hide | My woful cas, nor in no wise spare | My pitous compleynt to the to declare!”’ (‘“Boccaccio,” he said, “I do not choose to hide my sad fortune from you, nor to avoid speaking my pitiful lament to you!”’).103 Such speakers and their tales testify once again to the self-renewal of the genre of the mythographical collection and its ‘images’; evidence that the classical pantheon still had a material presence for later medieval writers, they are a paradoxical sign of the dead hand and the continued life of antiquity.104

Notes 1  Illustrating the generic eclecticism of late antique mythography, see Alan Cameron, Greek Mythography in the Roman World (Oxford, 2004); and on the Roman poets’ use of mythographical materials, see Greek Mythography in the Roman World, pp. 253–303. 2   See Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York, 1952), pp. 8–9. 3  See Fulgentius the Mythographer, trans. Leslie George Whitbread (Columbus, Oh., 1971), pp. 3–7; also Paule Demats, Fabula. Trois études de mythographie antique et médiévale (Geneva, 1973), pp. 36–7. 4   Fabii Placiadis Fulgentii V.C. opera, ed. Rudolf Helm, addenda Jean Préaux (Stuttgart, 1970), pp. 81–107; see §144 (p. 87); trans. Whitbread, p. 122 (translation altered); see also §146, 161–2 (pp. 89, 102–3); trans. pp. 123, 132–3. 5   See Winthrop Wetherbee, ‘The Study of Classical Authors from Late Antiquity to the Twelfth Century’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages, eds Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 99–144 (at pp. 113–20). The Eclogue of Theodulus, a Carolingian school text, pairs pagan myths with scriptural stories: see Theoduli

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Ecloga, in Seven Versions of Carolingian Pastoral, ed. R. P. H. Green (Reading, 1980), pp. 26–35; Bernard of Utrecht’s commentary reflects the divide we have noticed by reading the biblical stories exegetically and the myths ‘in the spirit of Macrobius and Fulgentius’ (Wetherbee, ‘The Study of Classical Authors’, pp. 123–4); see also Vincent Gillespie, ‘The Study of Classical Authors from the Twelfth Century to c.1450’, in Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, eds Minnis and Johnson, pp. 145–235 (at pp. 155–6). 6   See Winthrop Wetherbee, ‘Learned Mythology: Plato and Martianus Capella’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, eds Ralph J. Hexter and David Townsend (Oxford, 2012), pp. 335–55 (at pp. 338–41); also ‘The Study of Classical Authors’, pp. 131–6 (on the possible English origin of the second commentator, p. 135); see also Édouard Jeauneau, ‘L’Usage de la notion d’integumentum à travers les gloses de Guillaume de Conches’, AHDLMA 24 (1957), 35–100; Peter Dronke, Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism (Leiden, 1974), pp. 13–78. 7   Fausto Ghisalberti, ‘Arnolfo d’Orléans. Un cultore di Ovidio nel secolo XII’, Memorie del Reale Istituto lombardo di scienze e lettere, Classe di lettere, scienze morali e storiche 24 (1939), ­155–234 (Allegoriae I, 1–2; 6; XV, 9, in appendix, pp. 201–2, 229); The ‘Vulgate’ Commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Creation Myth and the Story of Orpheus, ed. Frank T. Coulson (Toronto, 1991). For the history of Ovid commentary, see Gillespie, ‘Study of the Classical Authors’, pp.  186–206; Frank T. Coulson, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the School Tradition of France, ­1180–1400: Texts, Manuscript Traditions, Manuscript Settings’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 48–82. 8  See n. 5; also Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton, 1972); Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, 1972). 9   Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols (Leiden, 1985), pp. 22–7; Michael Lapidge, ‘The Stoic Inheritance’, in A History of Twelfth-Century Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 81–112 (pp. 99–112; on Chalcidius and Boethius, pp. 104–5); also Henry Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford, 1981), pp. 228–34. The argument for ‘mingled’ forms of Platonism and Stoicism in Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia is made by Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century. 10   See Wetherbee, ‘Learned Mythology’, p. 336; Jane Chance, ‘The Medieval “Apology for Poetry”: Fabulous Narrative and Stories of the Gods’, in The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville, Fla, 1990), pp. 3–44 (at pp. 19–20); also her Medieval Mythography, 2 vols (Gainesville, Fla, 1994, 2000), 1, 4; 65–82; 167; 176; 189–91; 242 (though the book is often highly speculative or obscure). 11   Aeneid 6. 724, 726–7, in Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, 2  vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1965). See Colish, Stoic Tradition, pp. 225–52; Susanna Morton Braund, ‘Virgil and the Cosmos: Religious and Philosophical Ideas’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 204–21 (on the passage cited, p. 210).

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections 12   For the transmigration of souls, see Virgil, Aeneid, 6. 703–885; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15. 60–478. For Ovid’s knowledge of, and scepticism about, various antique philosophical views of the cosmos, see Otis Brooks, Ovid as an Epic Poet, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 94, 262–3; Alessandro Schiesaro, ‘Ovid and the Professional Discourses of Scholarship, Religion, Rhetoric’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 62–75. 13   For Cicero’s own, ‘independent’ brand of Stoicism, see Colish, Stoic Tradition, pp. 61–158 (citation, p. 111); for his physics, pp. 109–26. 14  Cicero, De natura deorum, in De natura deorum. Academica, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 1. 16. 43; 1. 27. 77; 2. 4. 12–19. Various interpretations of the gods occur at 1. 15. 38–41; 1. 42. 118–19; 2. 23. 60–28. 72. 15  Citations, De natura, 2. 33. 84; 3. 38. 91; see also 2. 33. 83–53. 133; 3. 16. 40–24. 63. 16  The De natura deorum is known and copied on the Continent; see Lapidge, ‘Stoic Inheritance’, pp. 101, 107–9; and Dronke, Fabula, p. 176 n. 2. Evidence for Britain is more sporadic; the text occurs in Edinburgh, University Library, MS D.b.IV.6–III (twelfth century, English); Oxford, Merton College, MS 311–1 (twelfth century, English); Cambridge, St John’s College, MS D. 22 (fourteenth century, English); Oxford, Bodleian, MS e Mus.94 (c.1400, English, containing the excerpts of Richard Lavenham, fl. 1380); Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.13.2 (fifteenth century, ?English); St Andrews, University Library, MS PA.62295. A2.A00 (fifteenth century, French, but in Scotland in the late fifteenth century). Theodore Silverstein provides good evidence that Adelard of Bath knew it: ‘Adelard, Aristotle, and the De natura deorum’, Classical Philology 47 (1952), 82–6. 17  Servius, In Vergilii Aeneidos commentarii, in Servii grammatici in Vergilii carmina commentarii, eds George Thilo and Hermann Hagen, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1881–7), vols 1–2; on Servius’ Stoicism, see Colish, Stoic Tradition, pp. 316–19; Wetherbee, ‘Study of the Ancient Authors’, p. 103. 18   Wetherbee, ‘The Study of Classical Authors’, pp. 101–3; Demats, Fabula, pp. 27–36 (at p. 36). 19   Servius on Aeneid, 10. 467; see Nicolette Zeeman, ‘The Schools Give a License to Poets’, in Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 151–80. 20   Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (New York, 1961), pp. 122–47. 21   Ambrosii Theodosii Macrobii Commentarii in somnium Scipionis, ed. Jacob Willis (Leipzig, 1970), 1. 2. 9; Commentary, trans. Stahl, p. 85 (altered). 22   Demats contrasts Macrobius with the eclecticism of the poetic commentaries (Fabula, pp. 19–26, 31). 23   Commentarii, 1. 2. 13–18; trans. Stahl, pp. 85–7 (altered); on the ‘analogy between the natural world and the literary text’, Wetherbee, ‘The Study of Classical Authors’, pp. 104–5. 24   Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology, trans. R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma (Indianapolis, Ind., 2007), p. xxi. 25   See Seznec, The Survival, pp. 11–36. 26   On the scholia, see Seznec, The Survival, pp. 11–121; Demats, Fabula, pp. 7–16; D. C. Feeney, The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1991), pp. 5–56.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 27  Lactantius, Divinarum institutionum libri septem, eds Eberhard Heck and Antonie Wlosok, 5 vols (2005–11), 1, 46 (Book 1, ch. 11, 24–5); see Zeeman, ‘The Schools give a License to Poets’, pp. 153–7. 28  See Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, ad 300–1475, eds Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter (Oxford, 2009), pp. 28–50. 29   Hygini fabulae, ed. Peter K. Marshall (Stuttgart, 1993), p. 10 (emended as proposed by Smith and Trzaskoma); Apollodorus’ Library, and Hyginus’ Fabulae, trans. Smith and Trzaskoma, pp. 95–192 (at p. 95). I have followed Smith and Trzaskoma in accepting the emendation of the manuscript ‘Continentia’ to ‘Contentio’; they describe Epiphron, Hedymeles, and Epaphus as ‘early gods’, apparently only occurring in this text; the giant Porphyrion is also referred to in Apollodorus’ Library, 1, 35–6, translated here by Smith and Trzaskoma, pp. 1–93 (at pp. 5–6). On the manuscripts and text of the Fabulae, see Smith and Trzaskoma, pp. xlii–li. On the Fabulae, see also Cameron, Greek Mythography in the Roman World, pp. 33–51. 30   Fulgentius draws on Cicero and Hyginus, and he will influence in turn all three Vatican Mythographers, Petrarch, and Boccaccio (see Whitbread, Fulgentius the Mythographer, pp. 20–6). 31   Mitologiarum libri tres in Fabii Placiadis Fulgentii V.C. opera, ed. Helm, pp. 1–80 (I, 612; trans. Whitbread, p. 44). 32   I, 614; trans. Whitbread, p. 45, altered; Whitbread reads ‘senior deus’ as Jupiter, or possibly Apollo, with his chariot. 33   Mitologiarum libri tres, I, 2, 626–8; trans. Whitbread, p. 49, altered; I, 6, 632; trans. p. 51; I, 22, 660; trans. p. 63. On the Stoic associations of etymologizing, see Copeland and Sluiter, Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, pp. 489–90 n. 27. 34   See II, 1, 669–71; trans. Whitbread, pp. 66–7. An early example of Fulgentius’ huge influence is Baudri de Bourgueil (d. 1130): see Poèmes, ed. Jean-Yves Tilliette, 2 vols (Paris, 1998– 2002), no. 154; also see Whitbread, p. 26; Wetherbee, ‘Learned Mythology’, pp. 347–8. 35   Isidori Hispalensis . . . Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford, 1911); citation, 8, 11, 30; my translations; but see The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. (Cambridge, 2006). 36   Mythographi vaticani I et II, ed. Péter Kulcsár, CCSL 91c (Turnhout, 1987); Mythographus Tertius, in Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini tres Romae nuper reperti, ed. Georgius Henricus Bode (Celle, 1834), pp. 132–256; for their influence, see The Vatican Mythographers, trans. Ronald E. Pepin (New York, 2008), pp. 7–11; for the influence of Vatican Mythographer I on the Theoduli Ecloga, see Wetherbee, ‘Learned Mythology’, p. 341. In the nineteenth century Angelus Mai first used the title ‘Vatican Mythographers’ to designate the anonymous authors of these mythographical texts because they occur together in one Vatican manuscript, although two of the texts also occur elsewhere. 37   See, for instance, the plethora of readings at 1, 3–7; 8, 17–19; 9, 7; trans. Pepin, pp. 210–13, 278–80, 287. 38   6, 15–16; 9, 7; trans. Pepin, pp. 245, 287. On the transmigration of souls, 6, 7–27; trans. Pepin, pp. 239–55; also Vatican Mythographer I, 2, 198; trans Pepin, p. 84.

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections 39   6, 30; trans. Pepin, p. 257; on this vocabulary, see Zeeman, ‘The Schools give a License to Poets’. 40   9, 9; trans. Pepin, pp. 288–9; this is remarkably close to Servius on Aeneid 4. 379. Compare ‘Alberic’, 6, 26 (trans. Pepin, p. 254) on the Egyptians, with Servius on Aeneid 3. 68; and ‘Alberic’, 9, 8 (trans. Pepin, p. 288) with Servius on Aeneid 1. 297 and 4. 577. ‘Alberic’ also references De natura deorum more briefly at 1, 8; 2, 6; 4, 10; trans. Pepin, pp. 213, 218, 231. 41   Virginia Brown, ‘An Edition of an Anonymous Twelfth-Century Liber de natura deorum’, Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972), 1–70 (praef., p. 4, referring to Horace, Ars poetica, line 139). 42   Liber de natura deorum, caps 133–45 (citation, p. 54). The labours of Hercules were associated with Stoic ideas of labour (see Colish, Stoic Tradition, 1, 235–6); see the Libellus de imaginibus deorum, which also only allegorizes these (p. 141 and note 101). On the Liber de natura deorum, see Judson Boyce Allen, ‘An Anonymous Twelfth-Century De natura deorum in the Bodleian Library’, Traditio 26 (1970), 352–64; it was used by Nicholas Trevet, Robert Holcot, and by Thomas Walsingham (Allen, ‘An Anonymous Twelfth-Century De natura deorum’, pp. 361–4). 43   Allen, ‘An Anonymous Twelfth-Century De natura deorum’, pp. 360, 364. On the origins of Demogorgon, see also Seznec, The Survival, p. 222; and David Lummus, ‘Boccaccio’s Poetic Anthropology: Allegories of History in the Genealogie deorum gentilium libri’, Speculum 87 (2012), 724–65 (pp. 738–40, especially n. 61). 44   For the influence of antique mythography on Ovid’s Metamorphoses itself, see Cameron, Greek Mythography in the Roman World, pp. 268–303, 311; Joseph Farrell, ‘Complementarity and Contradiction in Ovidian Mythography’, in Writing Myth: Mythography in the Ancient World, eds Stephen M. Trzaskoma and R. Scott Smith (Louvain, 2013), pp. 223–51. 45   They are printed in D. A. Slater, Towards a Text of the Metamorphosis of Ovid (Oxford, 1927), under the name ‘Lactantius’ [no page numbers]; on the various forms of this text, see Cameron, Greek Mythography in the Roman World, p. 4, and passim. 46   On their date, see Cameron, Greek Mythography in the Roman World, pp. 14–24, on the narrationes as a mythographer’s guide to Ovid’s mythography, pp. 78–88, 311; on their Greek connections, see pp. 33–51, 83. See also Ralph J. Hexter, ‘Medieval Articulations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: From Lactantian Segmentation to Arnulfian Allegory’, Mediaevalia 13 (1989), 63–82. 47   Hexter, ‘Medieval Articulations’, pp. 69–70; see also Kathryn L. McKinley, ‘The Medieval Commentary Tradition 1100–1500 on Metamorphoses 10’, Viator 27 (1996), 117–49 (at p. 120). 48   ‘Arnolfo d’Orléans’, ed. Ghisalberti, appendix (on the star, see p. 229). On the Julian comet, see Braund, ‘Virgil and the Cosmos’, pp. 208–9. 49  See for example the version edited by Ursula D. Hunt, Le Sommaire en prose des Métamorphoses d’Ovide dans le manuscrit Burney 311 au Musée Britannique de Londres (Oxford, 1925). On the commentary of William of Orléans, another that contains mythological narrative summaries, see Hugues-V. Shooner, ‘Les Bursarii ovidianorum de Guillaume d’Orléans’, Mediaeval Studies 43 (1981), 405–24 (on the summaries, see p. 416). 50   John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii. Poemetto inedito del secolo XIII, ed. Fausto Ghisalberti (Messina, 1933); (unreliably) translated in The Integumenta on the Metamorphoses by John of

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Garland, ed. and trans. Lester Kruger Born (Chicago, 1929). The Integumenta are transmitted in twenty-two manuscripts; extracts appear in the margins of many later Metamorphoses manuscripts; their influence is apparent in later commentaries that use verse: see McKinley, ‘Medieval Commentary’, pp. 122–4; Coulson, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the School Tradition’, pp. 59–65. 51  Fausto Ghisalberti, ‘Giovanni del Virgilio espositore delle Metamorphosi’, Giornale Dantesco 34 (1933), 1–107; an extract from the prologue translated in Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100–c.1375, eds A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, with the assistance of David Wallace (Oxford, 1988), pp. 360–6. 52   Ovide moralisé. Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle, ed. C. de Boer, 5 vols, Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, 15 (1), 21, 30 (3), 37, 43 (Amsterdam, 1915–38). 53  Pierre Bersuire, Ovidius moralizatus, in The Philosophy of Images: Pierre Bersuire. Metamorphosis Ovidiana moraliter . . . explanata Paris 1509. ‘Albricus’ Libellus Basel 1543, introd. Stephen Orgel (New York, 1979); prologue and extracts trans. in Medieval Literary Theory, eds Minnis and Scott, pp. 366–72. 54   Thomae Walsingham de archana deorum, ed. Robert A. van Kluyve (Durham, NC, 1968). On the grammatically incorrect form of the title as it appears here, see A. G. Rigg’s review of this edition in Speculum 44 (1969), 501–4 (at p. 501). On this and other classicizing works by Walsingham, such as the Dites ditatus, which includes descriptions of the pagan gods and was later illustrated, see James G. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle c.1350–1440 (Oxford, 2004), chs 5 and 6. On two other unpublished prose summaries of the Metamorphoses, see Clark, Monastic Renaissance, p. 182 n. 79. 55   See Ernest H. Wilkins, ‘Descriptions of Pagan Divinities from Petrarch to Chaucer’, Speculum 32 (1957), 511–22; Medieval Literary Theory, eds Minnis and Scott, pp. 321–5; Ralph J. Hexter, ‘The Allegari of Pierre Bersuire: Interpretation and the Reductorium morale’, Allegorica 10 (1989), 51–84 (see especially p. 57); William D. Reynolds, ‘Sources, Nature, and Influence of the Ovidius moralizatus of Pierre Bersuire’, in The Mythographic Art, ed. Chance, pp. 83–99; McKinley, ‘Medieval Commentary’, pp. 133–43; Clark, Monastic Renaissance, pp. 169–76, 182–6, 196–208 (on the two slightly different versions of the Archana, p. 196); Gillespie, ‘Study of the Classical Authors’, pp. 202–6 (for the banning of Bersuire, p. 206); on Giovanni del Virgilio, Robert Black, ‘Ovid in Medieval Italy’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds. Clark, Coulson, and McKinley, pp. 123–42 (at pp. 127–8). 56   Allegorie librorum Ovidii Metamorphoseos a Magistro Johanne de Virgilio prosaice et metrice compilate, in Ghisalberti, ‘Giovanni del Virgilio’, pp. 43–107. 57  Bersuire, Ovidius moralizatus, prol., fol. 1v; trans. in Medieval Literary Theory, eds Minnis and Scott, pp. 366–8 (altered); see Hexter, ‘The Allegari’, pp. 57–62. 58   For the opening treatise, see De archana, 1, 1–31 and pp. xiii–xvi. On the genealogy (found in London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 728, fols 159r–175v, and Oxford, St John’s College, MS 124, fols 146v–154v; not edited by van Kluyve), see Clark, Monastic Renaissance, p. 176 and plate 18; on this and other genealogies in Walsingham’s works, see Monastic Renaissance, pp. 205–8.

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections 59   On paraphrase as part of commentary see Medieval Literary Theory, eds Minnis and Scott, p. 322; Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991), p. 122; and McKinley, ‘Medieval Commentary’, 138, 140. 60   On tales altered for interpretation, see Marylène Possamaï-Perez, L’Ovide moralisé: Essai d’interprétation (Paris, 2006), pp. 45–7, 187, 653–5; on narrative technique, passim; also Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and its Interpretations in Medieval French Literature (Stanford, Calif., 1997), pp. 15–51. 61   Ghisalberti, ‘Giovanni del Virgilio’, p. 52; Thomas, De archana, 3, 2 (p. 61). 62   Ovide moralisé, 3. 337–669 (citations 3. 629–30, 634–8); Bersuire, Ovidius moralizatus, fols 31b–32b. 63  Bersuire, Ovidius moralizatus, prol., fol. 1v; trans. Minnis, p. 367. See Hexter, ‘The Allegari’, pp. 54–5, 62, 65 (see also prologue of the Reductorium, cited in Hexter, p. 70). 64   Chance, ‘Medieval “Apology for Poetry”’, pp. 16, 19–20 (citation p. 20). 65   Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm 19488, pp. 128–30; edited in Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1968), pp. 452–63 (lines 102–3, 173–7); discussed pp. 232–8; also Wetherbee, ‘Learned Mythology’, pp. 348–9. 66   Giovanni del Virgilio, prologue, in Ghisalberti, ‘Giovanni del Virgilio’, p. 17; trans. in Medieval Literary Theory, eds Minnis and Scott, p. 363 (altered). For Arnulf of Orléans too, mutatio is Ovid’s ‘matter’ (Ghisalberti, ‘Arnolfo d’Orléans’, p. 181). 67  On phrases such as ‘pour mieux acomplir ma matire’ (Ovide moralisé, 2. 4583), see Possamaï-Perez, L’Ovide moralisé, pp. 635–7; on some of the poem’s other forms of metamorphosis, see pp. 156–61, 174, 596–7, 657–81, 871. 68   Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, ed. and trans. Jon Solomon, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), Book I, preface 1 (pp. 22–3); see also preface 2, a mini De natura deorum citing different ancient philosophical views on monotheism and the first god (pp. 24–31); see Lummus, ‘Boccaccio’s Poetic Anthropology’, p. 728. For Boccaccio’s sources, see Genealogy, pp. xiii–xvii; the work was influential well into the early modern period, and exists in many manuscripts and early printed editions (see Genealogy, pp. x–xi). 69  Boccaccio, Genealogy, Book I, preface 1 (pp. 22–3, translation altered). 70   Lummus, ‘Boccaccio’s Poetic Anthropology’, p. 743. 71   Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960), pp. 45–65, 75–201 (see especially pp. 51–2, 58–9). 72   Wisdom 6: 1–27; 12: 23–15, 19; also Smalley, English Friars, pp. 148–52. 73   Fulgentius metaforalis: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der antiken Mythologie im Mittelalter, ed. Hans Liebeschutz (Leipzig, 1926); see Judson B. Allen, ‘Commentary as Criticism: The Text, Influence, and Literary Theory of the Fulgentius Metaphored of John Ridewall’, in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Amstelodamensis, eds P. Tuynman, G. C. Kuiper, and E. Kessler (Munich, 1979), pp. 25–47 (at pp. 25–8). The longer versions include vices as well as virtues: Apollo/truth, Pheton/ambition, Mercury/eloquence, Dane/cupidity, Ganymede/sodomy, Perseus/fortitude and audacity, Alceste/continence, Paris/injustice, Minerva/contemplation, Juno/active life, Venus/voluptuousness (Allen, pp. 27–8).

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 74   Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. Gabriella Parussa (Geneva, 1999), 100, 2; on Othea, see pp. 20–1 n. 37; The Epistle of Othea translated from the French text of Christine de Pisan by Stephen Scrope, ed. Curt F. Bühler, EETS 264 (1970); see Judith L. Kellogg, ‘Christine de Pizan as Chivalric Mythographer’, in The Mythographic Art, ed. Chance, pp. 100–24. 75  See Epistre Othea sections 38, 45, 87, and 100. For Christine’s sources, see pp. 31–70; and for section 100, pp. 453–5. Giovanni del Virgilio comments both on the Julian star and the vision of the Cumaean Sibyl (see Ghisalberti, pp. 106–7); the Ovide moralisé comments on the star and reads the Emperor Augustus as Christ (15. 7010–253). 76   On Boccaccio’s interest in the natural knowledge of antique poetry, see his Concerning Famous Women, trans. Guido A. Guarino (1964), pp. xii–xvi; comparing Boccaccio’s use of exemplary tales to that of Holcot, see Smalley, English Friars, p. 156. 77   On the literalizing tendencies of the Classicizing Friars, see Smalley, English Friars, p.  82, and passim; for Chaucer see A. J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 15–17, 29, and passim. For a really nuanced sense of the relation of literalism to continued metaphoricity, allusion, mise-en-abyme, and ‘remythicization’ (new mythical narratives) in ­thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French use of myth, see Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth. 78   Confessio amantis in The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 2 vols, EETS es 81, 82 (1900–1), 1. 352–63 (citation above, 1. 380). But note too Gower’s mini-mythology and origin of the gods at 5. 747–1590. 79   See Wetherbee, Platonism, chs 4, 5, and 7. 80  See Daniel Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces: The ‘Roman de la rose’ and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore, 2003); J. Allen Mitchell, Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature (New York, 2009). 81   Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris, 1992), lines 19823–5; The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford, 1994), p. 305. 82   Roman de la rose, lines 16915–33, 16980–4; trans. Horgan, pp. 261–2. 83   See Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, pp. 52–89. 84   See Chance, ‘Medieval “Apology for Poetry”’, pp. 14–16; Minnis, Chaucer, pp. 16–17; also Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, pp. 68–71. 85   Roman de la rose, lines 6952–6, 6962–4; trans. Horgan, p. 106. 86   On divine origins, De natura deorum, 1.14.36–15.41; 1.42.118; on the poets, citation at 1.27.77, but see also 1.16.42–3; 1.38.105–8; 3.31.75–8. On the antique poetic tradition of referring to mythology in ‘paintings’, see Cameron, Greek Mythography in the Roman World, pp. 253–4. 87   Mitologiarum libri tres, I, 1, 622–5; trans. Whitbread, p. 48. Fulgentius cites Petronius, Fragment 27.1, on fear as the origin of the gods; compare Statius, Thebaid, 3. 661; Servius on Aeneid, 2.715 (see Whitbread, p. 49); and Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 4.1408. On idolatry as originating in the death of a son, see also Wisdom 14: 15–16. 88   Etymologiarum libri, 8.11.3–14; references to the painted gods occur at 8.11.54 and 80.

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Mythography and Mythographical Collections 89   Describing the gods as ‘painted’ and ‘imagined’ (fingitur), see Mythographer I: 2,124; trans. Pepin, p. 60; Mythographer II: chs 3, 53, 60, 66, 256; trans. Pepin, pp. 103, 122, 125, 127, 200; ‘Alberic of London’: 1, 1; 1, 3; 5, 7; 8, 4; trans. Pepin, pp. 210–11, 235, 268. 90   See Seznec, The Survival, pp. 176–7. The Libellus is discussed at p. 141 and in note 101. 91   Fulgentius metaforalis, ch.1 (pp. 70–1); see also his discussion of the prosopopoeia of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 in ch. 2 (p. 75). Smalley notes that he also invents personified images using antique mythical names and attributes in his Apocalypse commentary (English Friars, pp. 110–21; transcriptions, pp. 312–14). 92  See Fulgentius metaforalis, plates I–XV; also Seznec, The Survival, pp. 94–5, plate 30. 93   See Allen, ‘Commentary as Criticism’, pp. 30–2. 94   M. Roberti Holkoth in Librum sapientiae regis Salomonis praelectiones (Basle, 1586), lectio 155 (pp. 517–18). Smalley notes that the ‘images’ of Holcot’s commentaries and his Moralitates include figures (such as Cupido and Idolatria) taken from Ridewall; she notes too Holcot’s fascination with artefacts—inscriptions on tombs and shields, and even a talking place; from the fifteenth century onwards, his Moralitates begin to be illustrated: see Smalley, English Friars, pp. 160–83. 95  Smalley, English Friars, pp. 165–6, 182; Medieval Literary Theory, eds Minnis and Scott, pp. 323–4. 96   Conrad d’Hirsau, Dialogus super auctores, in Accessus ad auctores, Bernard d’Utrecht, Conrad D’Hirsau, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden, 1970), pp. 71–131 (p. 114); trans. in Medieval Literary Theory, eds Minnis and Scott, p. 56. 97   Ovidius moralizatus, fols 1r–17r. The Ovide moralisé also discusses the origin of idols at 1. 2475–508. 98   Bersuire comments, for example, on the slow path of the planet Saturn and his baleful impact on the earth: Saturn eating his children signifies that ‘quicquid in tempore nascitur tempus seu duratio attenuat seu consumit . . . vel . . . eius fructus et semina ad locum unde exierunt revertuntur, id est, ad terram’ (‘time and endurance weakens or consumes whatever is born in time . . . or that its fruits and seeds are returned to the place from which they came, that is, the earth’ (Ovidius moralizatus, fol. 2r–v). 99   See Seznec, The Survival, pp. 174–9; Reynolds, ‘Sources, Nature, and Influence’, pp. 88, 92–3. On the whole tradition of illustrated Metamorphoses manuscripts, see Carla Lord, ‘A Survey of Imagery in Medieval Manuscripts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Related Commentaries’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds Clark, Coulson, and McKinley, pp. 257–83. 100  See Francis Petrarch, L’Africa, ed. Nicola Festa, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca 1 (Florence, [1926]), Book 3, lines 136–262; for Petrarch’s description of ‘Alberic’, see Seznec, The Survival, p. 173. Late on, Bersuire also seems to have used Ridewall’s Fulgentius Metaforalis (see Allen, ‘Commentary as Criticism’, p. 18). 101   For the Libellus de imaginibus deorum, see Reynolds, ‘Sources, Nature, and Influence’, pp. 88, 93; Seznec, The Survival, pp. 170–9. Liebeschütz edits the prose text of the Libellus in Fulgentius metaforalis, pp. 117–28; for the images, see plates XVI–XXXII; a facsimile reprint of the text also appears in The Philosophy of Images, introd. Orgel (no page nos). The

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature interpretations of Hercules’ labours in the Libellus occasionally tally with those of the anonymous twelfth-century Liber de natura deorum (above, p. 129). For the illustrations of Thomas Walsingham’s Dites ditatus, see Clark, Monastic Renaissance, pp. 172–3, and plate 17; for the illustrations of Christine’s Epistre Othea, see Parussa’s edition, pp. 71–80, and references. 102   See also Nicolette Zeeman, ‘The Idol of the Text’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in the Late Middle Ages, eds Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford, 2001), pp. 43–62. 103   Thiestes in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS es 121–4 (1924–7), I. 3855–7; see also I. 2171–84; I. 6735–48; compare Giovanni Boccaccio, De casibus illustrium virorum, A Facsimile Reproduction of the Paris Edition of 1520, introd. Louis Brewer Hall (Gainesville, Fla, 1962), pp. 31, 34, 48. Boccaccio uses the same technique in the prefaces to his Genealogia: see Book 1, preface 2 (1, 26–31); preface 3 (1, 32–3); Book 3, preface (1, 312–17). 104   I thank Ingo Gildenhart for advice on Latin, and Rita Copeland and the general editors for their helpful suggestions as I wrote this chapter.

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Chapter 8

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Academic Prologues to Authors Rita Copeland

The formulaic prologue or introduction (accessus) to an author or text was a classical critical genre that descended to the Middle Ages, where it was used early on to apprehend classical texts, both literary and learned.1 Thus the handing down of an ancient system of analysis also fostered the reception of ancient texts. Medieval scriptural exegetes and commentators on philosophy, science, and law recruited the genre, revising and streamlining its characteristic terminology, and applying it to recent as well as ancient texts. From its later uses in theology and secular learning the genre migrated back into literary spheres as a newly powerful apparatus for interpretation of vernacular as well as Latin texts. The academic prologue became a strong vehicle for theoretical reflection on authorial intention and on the formal properties of texts, and gave expression to the critic’s role as agent of the interpretative process. In vernacular literary culture the academic prologue provided a template for authors to address the authority of established traditions while negotiating a place for the new. I will consider the medieval prologue in terms of its form and function, tracing the genre’s external history and internal changes, and ultimately its influence in ­vernacular literary culture, especially among English writers. This chapter is not devoted to the fortunes of any particular classical author in medieval prologues, but rather to the way that prologues shaped classical reception, especially of literary authors. Nevertheless, a few classical poets garnered such interest in medieval curricula that they figure prominently in many of our witnesses to the prologue as a critical genre. This is the case with the Ovid prologues, which will be among the central test cases here. Classical prolegomena2 or systematic introductions to philosophical, scientific, and literary works developed alongside of the genre of the author’s vita. The prolegomenon or vita (sometimes both) would accompany the teaching of a work in the ancient

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature schools.3 Evidence seems to point to the philosophical schools of late Greek antiquity as the origin of these schemata isagogica (schematic introductions) or didascalica (things to be taught, i.e. in advance); from the Greek philosophical schools the technology passed to other learned fields, including literary study.4 It also passed from Greek to Latin. The schematic prolegomena functioned to contextualize a work among an author’s other known works, in a disciplinary field, and in terms of the work’s own formal principles (for example, divisions of the text and ordering of its parts). The prolegomenon could be used to render legible a unifying principle behind a collection of texts. Thus in the Latin grammatical tradition, commentaries on Virgil’s Eclogues would offer an explanation of the latent principle that was assumed to give unity to the collection. So pervasive was the form, so fundamental to scholarly and literary training in antiquity, that even early patristic scriptural exegesis owes something to the introductions to authors used in the pagan schools: for example, Origen’s commentaries on the Psalms bear the imprint of the classical prolegomena.5 Influential for literary study in the grammar schools of the Latin Middle Ages were the various prefaces to Virgil that descended, with unequal consistency, from late antiquity.6 The life of Virgil by the fourth-century grammarian Donatus (based on a vita by the first-century historian Suetonius) is the oldest of the extant vitae of Virgil, and was transmitted along with Donatus’ preface to his commentary on the Eclogues. The preface, presented separately from the vita, contains a number of formulaic prologue elements: things to be considered ante opus (before the work), namely the title of the work, the causa (motivation) of the work, and the author’s intention; and things to be handled in ipso opere (in the course of studying the work itself ), namely the number of the parts, the order of the parts (or the narrative), and the explanation (i.e. the commentary itself ).7 In the commentary on the Aeneid by Servius, grammarian of the late fourth century, the life of the poet is incorporated directly into a prologue with formulaic elements: In exponendis auctoribus haec consideranda sunt: poetae vita, titulus operis, qualitas carminis, scribentis intentio, numerus librorum, ordo librorum, explanatio. (In explaining authors, the following elements must be taken into consideration: the poet’s life, the title of the work, the nature of the poem, the intention of the author, the number of books, the order of the books, the explanation.)8

What these late antique grammarians’ prologues (and their counterparts in other fields) bequeathed to the Middle Ages was a method, the idea that a set of formulaic topics could anticipate and cover all potential interpretative questions that might be raised about a text. Medieval commentators did not adhere strictly to the topics set forth by Donatus and Servius or by other authorities from the fields of philosophy and natural science.9 The medieval prologue was organic and malleable, adaptive

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Academic Prologues to Authors and synthetic. It was a product of actual classroom practices in which older forms might gradually give way to newer paradigms, but whose patterns of development, from conservatism to innovation, come down to us only in selective snapshots. This is the case with a prologue paradigm that seems to spring forth already fully formed in a ninth-century introduction to Virgil, and attributed there to John Scotus Eriugena.10 This is what is often called the ‘circumstantial’ prologue, because it consists of the seven circumstantiae or circumstances that comprised the main topics of rhetorical invention: who? what? why? in what manner? when? where? by what means? It is not known for sure when someone (perhaps Eriugena?) first substituted question forms (who? what? why?) for the subject headings (author, title of the book, cause).11 But it is clear that this list of questions to be asked derives from discussions of invention in late antique rhetorical texts: the compendia of the Pseudo-Augustine and C. Julius Victor (both fourth century),12 and most importantly, Book 4 of Boethius’ treatise on dialectical and rhetorical topics, De topicis differentiis.13 The circumstantial prologue (and variations on that paradigm) was for the most part a Carolingian fashion, used most prominently and effectively by Remigius of Auxerre (c.841–c.908), especially in his commentary on the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of Martianus Capella.14 Nevertheless, some vestiges of this paradigm can be found in the prologues of later periods, long after its high popularity had passed.15 Even though it was not long-lasting, the circumstantial prologue allows us to glimpse the formation of a critical outlook that was to find its fullest expression over the next 500 years: the prologue was the commentator’s own stage for generating a textual argument and asserting critical control over the work. In the case of the circumstantial prologue, the link to argumentation was quite concrete, as the topical headings came from systems of rhetorical invention. But other forms of the prologue also proved to embolden commentators, elevating and expanding their roles as mediators of classical literary culture. One prologue type that found wide use in the twelfth century among literary commentators has some vocabulary in common with the Servian model, but also introduces new headings deriving from philosophical models. The new headings allowed for a sharpened focus on literary form. Along with the already familiar headings of title, author, order of the parts, and intentio auctoris (all of which had also been used in prologues to philosophical writings), this newer prologue paradigm could include any or all of the following terms: materia (apparently deriving from Boethius’ introduction to the art of rhetoric in De topicis differentiis16), modus agendi or modus scribendi, covering the form or the style (the qualitas carminis) used in the work, such as the verse and prose of Martianus’ De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (this topic seems to derive from Boethius’ treatment of the expository method in Porphyry’s Isagoge), utilitas or the usefulness of the work, and cui parti philosophiae supponitur/to what branch of learning does the work belong. These last also derive from the introductory headings used by Boethius in his first commentary on

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Porphyry’s Isagoge.17 They point to the learned origin of this prologue type: in ­discussions of learned arts and philosophical texts, considerations about why the text is useful in gaining a certain knowledge and the branch of learning to which it applied were necessary and relevant.18 But this new prologue form emerged at the same time as the expansion of commentary on classical literary authors in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. While many of its applications were scholarly in the sense of providing an approach to philosophical and sacred writings and to the arts of the trivium, the elements of this prologue type could lend themselves to supple and adventurous literary analysis. We can see such flexible analysis exemplified in some prologues from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, where the commentators register their struggles with classical literary themes and forms. One twelfth-century collection of introductions to classical authors, connected with the Benedictine monastery of Tegernsee (thus probably reflecting teaching in the monastic school), includes three different prologues to Ovid’s Heroides. The longest version of these opens with some of the standard twelfth-century prologue headings: life of the poet, title of the work, intentio scribentis, materia, utilitas, and cui parti philosophiae supponitur.19 In this prologue the heading intentio elicits manifold answers. Ovid’s intention is to write about three kinds of love: foolish, unchaste, and mad (furiosus), all kinds exemplified in the individual letters. A further intention is that here Ovid compensates for scandalous and illicit teachings of his earlier writings by exemplifying the moral consequences of the different kinds of love. But this does not exhaust the possibilities, because the poems of the Heroides present further specialized intentions. After detailing many alternative intentiones, the prologue arrives at a comprehensive statement: the work has two intentions, one general, which is to be delightful and useful across the board, and a particular intention that inheres in the individual letters, which either praise chaste love or condemn unchaste love. Upon this structure of the diversity of intentions the prologue goes on to build its treatment of utilitas, asserting that the usefulness of the work is not separate from intention, but determined by the diversity of intentions. The usefulness of the work is necessarily going to be a moral one, and the possible benefits to readers will depend on the individual intentiones of the individual epistles. But here too there can be a general utilitas: by praising chaste love, the work prompts us (‘nos invitet’, line 60) to be chaste in our love, or to shun the unlawful or foolish love that the various poems illustrate. Here the treatments of intentio and utilitas also provide, implicitly, a formal assessment of the Heroides: the organizing principle of this collection of epistles is the tension between the multiplicity of intentions in the individual letters and the unity immanent in its general intention to offer poetic pleasure and profitable instruction.20 The prologue ends with a commonplace of twelfth-century approaches to the classics: the branch of learning to which the work pertains is ethics because it teaches

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Academic Prologues to Authors about proper love: ‘Ethicae subponitur, quia de iusto amore instruit.’ Ethics, construed broadly as moral teaching, was the category into which commentators could fit classical imaginative literature (even the most scurrilous), because, at the most general level, poetry illustrates good and bad behaviour. With a text like Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, the application to ethics was easy to make: an accessus to Boethius in the same Tegernsee collection states that the work pertains to ethics because ‘it teaches us good morals when it says that temporal things are not to be desired’.21 The Heroides poses something of a challenge for the author of the accessus to that work, though not for the reasons we might expect (modern readers would be sceptical about Ovid’s attachment to any moral vision), but because the Heroides is seen to offer so many diverse possibilities for moral instruction. A thirteenth-century prologue to the Metamorphoses also shows the plasticity of the genre’s elements. This prologue from the widely influential ‘Vulgate’ commentary (produced in France) uses headings that seem to evoke the older circumstantial prologue: de quo (equivalent to materia), ad quid (equivalent to intentio), and qualiter. Here the heading de quo (i.e. materia) invites a discussion of mutatio or change, the subject matter of the Metamorphoses: mutatio is fourfold: natural, moral, magical, and spiritual. While the anonymous Vulgate commentator draws on an older commentary by Arnulf of Orléans (twelfth century) for three of these categories of mutatio, he introduces a fourth, moralis, ‘a mutation that applies to morals, since obviously morals are changed; so it is said of Lycaon that he was changed from a man into a wolf (Met. 1.237), which is to say from one who is kind into a predator, and so with similar cases that apply to morals’. Under the heading qualiter the Vulgate prologue collects what its author sees as related issues: the formal unity of the Metamorphoses, the fields of knowledge to which the work belongs, and the work’s usefulness. Thus Ovid has brought together diverse mutationes from the first creation up to his own time, as shown in the invocation ‘primaque ab origine mundi’; Ovid is a master both of the physical sciences, because he treats the generation of the elements, and of ethics, because the mutationes concern morals; and the usefulness of the work for readers (‘Utilitas siquidem est magna . . . legencium’) lies either in the knowledge and exposition of the fabulae themselves, which Ovid has brought together in this compendium, or in the instruction gained from these examples of change in the temporal world.22 The last phase of the development of the prologue form is the Aristotelian or ‘causal’ prologue, a product of the rapid assimilation of Aristotle’s philosophical corpus at the Universities of Paris and Oxford in the first half of the thirteenth century. Initially popular among university arts masters commenting on logic and grammar, this new form of prologue was quickly embraced by theologians who used it to grasp further dimensions of scriptural authority.23 Deriving from Aristotle’s accounts of a fourfold causality (see Physics 194b1–195b1) and from medieval scholastic elaborations of these principles, the ‘causal’ prologue comprised four headings: causa

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature ­efficiens or efficient cause, the author of the work, replacing the older heading vita or nomen auctoris; causa materialis or material cause, equivalent to the older materia libri; causa formalis or formal cause, which was often treated as twofold: the forma tractandi (equivalent to the older modus agendi/scribendi), and eliciting some kind of discussion of style, and forma tractatus, the form of the treatise, the larger structural contours of a work; and causa finalis, final cause, equivalent to the older heading utilitas (and incorporating intentio as well). The impact of this new prologue form on scriptural exegesis has been analysed by Minnis, who shows how the heading causa efficiens encouraged a new emphasis on the productive role of the human authors of biblical books, and thus a greater attention to those aspects of the scriptural text that were within the human author’s control, especially style and form. In university contexts, the interaction between secular and sacred commentary was inevitable and beneficial for both fields.24 Under the aegis of the term causa formalis and its division into forma tractandi and forma tractatus, biblical criticism developed a sophisticated language for distinctions of genre (modus) and the dynamic mechanisms of form (e.g. divisio textus). Thus it is not surprising that this late form of academic prologue was disseminated in literary culture at large, promoting there a sophisticated and rigorous approach to the classics. Perhaps naturally enough, the paradigm found ingenious application to the Metamorphoses in Giovanni del Virgilio’s lectures on Ovid (and other classical authors) at Bologna in the early 1320s.25 But it found wider literary application in some of the classical commentaries of the prolific English Dominican Nicholas Trevet (c.1260–c.1334), who spent his career variously at Oxford, London, and Paris. Between about 1310 and 1320 Trevet was asked by Nicola da Prato, a fellow Dominican and dean of the college of cardinals at the papal court at Avignon, to compose a series of commentaries on the tragedies of Seneca.26 The dean already knew Trevet’s commentary on Boethius’ Consolatio, and he was now seeking the same kind of lucid explication for Seneca’s tragedies, the corpus of which had only become well known in the preceding generation.27 Trevet’s sequence of Seneca commentaries begins with a prologue to the Hercules furens which first describes the plot of the drama and then lays out a fourfold causation of the tragedy: the causa efficiens is Seneca; the causa materialis is the plot (the anger of Hercules just described); the causa formalis consists of the modus scribendi, which is dragmaticus (dramatic), and the order of the parts (i.e. the modus tractatus) to be shown in the exposition; and the causa finalis is either the audience’s delight or the correction of morals through the examples of praiseworthy and blameworthy action.28 From then on, in the prologues to the following commentaries on the other tragedies, Trevet has only to describe the causa materialis or plot of the new text because, as he implies in his prologue to the Thyestes, the other three causes (efficiens, formalis, finalis) have already been explained in the first prologue to the Hercules furens: ‘De aliis vero causis dicendum est sicut in prima tragedia dictum est.’29 Since Trevet

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Academic Prologues to Authors clearly produced the commentaries as a single corpus to circulate together (and the commentary is complete in many of the manuscripts), the first of the prologues was intended to supply a paradigm for the whole collection. Describing the materiae of the various tragedies allows Trevet to engage in the kind of close, literal reading of plot, factual knowledge, and argument that had become his signature method across his expository career. Trevet also brought this form to his commentaries on Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, Augustine’s De civitate Dei, the Psalter, and Virgil’s Eclogues. The rich prologue to the Eclogues, opening with a range of philosophical references justifying learning as a form of spiritual companionship and wisdom as a higher kind of social life, closes with the four causes to be sought in the work.30 Here the causal paradigm serves to bring the commentator back from the flights of philosophy to the text at hand, to focus on its genre, the various materiae of its ten parts (here quoting usefully from Donatus’ vita of Virgil31), its interpretative possibilities (this work can have moral and allegorical significance, not just literal), and its structural organization. The passage of academic prologue forms into vernacular texts was inevitable. Vernacular translators took advantage of the form as a way of shaping the expectations of new audiences for ancient texts. Not all translators of classical works sought the academic imprimatur of the formal prologue, but those who did either introduced new literary terms into their vernaculars or gave new inflection to existing terminology. For example, one of the French translations of the Ars amatoria, a conspicuously ‘clerkly’ production from the early decades of the thirteenth century, imports a hybrid of prologue topics into its own introduction. The translator gives a causa scribendi (a term common in Ovid commentaries of the schools): here ‘Trois choses . . . pour lesquelles Ovide fu esmeüs a faire ce livre’ (‘three reasons on account of which Ovid was moved to write this book’). He presents materia and intentio together: ‘Sa matiere si est hommes et femmes amoureux et ententis aus commande­ mens d’amours, dont il entent a introduire (‘his matter is amorous men and women interested in the commandments of love, which he intends to introduce’). There is also an ethical dimension here, archly echoing the academic topic cui parti philosophiae subponitur: one of the ‘reasons’ that moved Ovid to write the Ars amatoria, according to this translator, was to ensure that no young people in love be driven to despair and acts of suicide because they do not know how to attain the objects of  their love; thus by offering such advice to ‘lift such despair’, this ‘reason’ that prompted the writing is ‘necessaire, convenable et profitable’ (‘necessary, proper, and beneficial’). The translator also gives a causa finalis (which became a topic in the Aristotelian prologue): ‘La fin cause . . . si est que quant nous avrons ce livre parleü . . . que nous tenons ses commandemens’ (‘the final cause is that when we have thoroughly read this book, we will keep its commandments’).32 Examples of this sort could be multiplied, especially in the vernacular traditions of Ovid and Boethius, although among such texts the purpose of introducing the author is often overtaken

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature by (or combined with) another purpose, introducing the translation and the translator’s intention. The prologue of the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé, a highly influential allegorization of the Metamorphoses in French, is a substantial case in point.33 It is not far from vernacular adaptations of Latin academic prologues to more complex uses of the form by authors about their own new vernacular productions.34 There was precedent for this too in medieval Latin, where authors equipped their own didactic works with an academic prologue, thus borrowing for their new texts the prestige traditionally accorded to classical writers as well as to scriptural writings and more recent but authoritative theological works. The Englishman John of Garland, a grammarian, rhetorician, and commentator who was active in Paris, prefaced his Parisiana poetria (c.1231–5), a comprehensive manual of poetic and prose composition, with a prologue consisting of standard twelfth-century topics. Robert of Basevorn prefaces his Forma praedicandi, a preaching manual written perhaps in 1322, with the four topics of the Aristotelian causal prologue.35 Among literary authors using the academic prologue to represent their own works, probably the most famous example is Dante’s Epistula to Cangrande della Scala, an exposition (after the fact) of Dante’s Commedia and generally accepted as (at least in part) a genuine work of Dante.36 Of English authors who invoked the paradigms or associated terminology as a way of handling their new material, we can mention briefly Thomas Usk, who deploys the language of Aristotelian causality in the prologues to Books 1 and 2 of his Testament of Love (1384–7); Osbern Bokenham, who presents the old circumstantial questions ‘what’ and ‘why’ and glosses them with the Aristotelian causae to explain his authorial role and his hagiographical ‘matere’ in the rich prologue to his Legendys of Hooly Wommen (1443–7); and Thomas Hoccleve, who seems to have absorbed the prologue paradigm into the very matter of his Regiment of Princes, structuring the opening Dialogue as an exploration of his own ‘entente’.37 But when the paradigms of academic prologues, which had long served to introduce classical authors, are used by ‘modern’ vernacular authors about their own ‘classicizing’ works, the tradition of classical reception through the accessus ad auctores comes full circle. In Middle English, the most complex and sophisticated of these self-reflexive authorizing gestures are Chaucer’s Prologue to his Legend of Good Women and Gower’s Prologue to his Confessio amantis. Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women follows the track and often the text of the Heroides in much of its content, although the individual tales are narratives, not epistles. But its long Prologue offers something that only a medieval reader, accustomed to literary accessus on the Heroides, would have considered integral to such a collection of poems: a unifying cause for the collection, a background to be found in the author’s own biography. The twelfth-century prologue to the Heroides from the Tegernsee monastery (discussed p. 154) amply demonstrates the imposition of a unifying principle that is to be ‘found’ in the author’s own vita. But it was not only collections that benefited from recourse to information about an author’s life. Prologues to Boethius’

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Academic Prologues to Authors Consolatio linked the author’s life and the contemptus mundi theme of his literary work, finding a ready-made causa or motivation in the facts of Boethius’ misfortunes.38 This was the case also with Lucan, whose biography provided a violent backdrop for the violence depicted in the Bellum civile and whose unfortunate end could be used to explain his poem both as a veiled criticism of Nero and a warning against civil war.39 In these cases, the author’s biography provides a bulwark against any possible thematic ambiguity. The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women gives us a vita in the form of an authorial apologia describing his unworldly attachment to ‘olde bokes’. His service to old books is the source of the intentio of the present work: ‘For myn entent is, or I fro yow fare, | The naked text in English to declare | Of many a story, or elles of many a geste, |As autours seyn’ (G. 85–8).40 The Prologue then stages a direct causa for the present work, the author’s dream in which he encounters the god of Love. The god accuses Chaucer of having written books that violate the sacred commandments of Love, Troilus and Criseyde and his translation of the Roman de la rose (which is ‘an heresye’ [G 256] against the law of Love). The queen Alceste intervenes on Chaucer’s behalf and suggests that, as atonement, he write the present collection of legends about good women (G 473–4). The ‘biographical’ circumstance thus glosses the narrator’s earlier statement of his intentio with which he had inaugurated the narrative activity of the Prologue: under penance he turns to the classical texts (‘olde bokes’) as a resource for Love’s commandment to honour women. This certainly echoes the kind of structural unity that expositors found for literary collections like the Heroides. But it is hardly a safeguard against thematic ambiguity. It is, rather, the comic inversion of a serious argument about an intensively mediated relationship with classical antiquity. This Prologue is not, after all, introducing Ovid’s poetry, but Chaucer’s; its vocabulary of the academic prologue points in two directions, to the debt to the classical tradition and to the new poetry, with a new purpose, that is built on it. Gower also captures this tension, and perhaps more acutely. The Confessio amantis is also a collection, although largely drawn from the tales of the Metamorphoses, thus converting Ovid’s internally unified narrative into a compilation that must discover its thematic unity from without. Like Chaucer’s Legend and like the Latin prologues to the Heroides, Gower supplies a unifying argument for the Confessio amantis in the moral purpose of writings about love. He also discovers the properties of the work in commentary conventions: modus agendi (Pro. 1, 1.8–14), materia (15–16), intentio (72–7).41 Beyond this, however, Gower implants an interpretative guide in the text in the figure of Genius, who is a projection of the author. Genius is a voice of intentio auctoris whose role is to make sure that the text keeps to the purpose announced in the prologue. Thus when Genius expounds ‘what Ovid telleth in his bok’ (1.334) or explains how a tale accords to ‘this matiere’ (1.387–8), he is not expounding Ovid’s intentio, but Gower’s intention in transforming Ovid’s text. Thus in Confessio amantis the reception of the classics is doubly mediated, through Gower’s new purpose and

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature through the exegetical vehicle of Genius, a fictive invention of the modern author created in order to personify the mediated distance between the ancient and the modern. That mediation, a textual metamorphosis that takes place over time and across languages, is itself a subject of the poem, as if to reopen the question ‘how can we know this ancient work?’ which was presumably answered by the comprehensive system of the academic prologue. In school commentaries on auctores, the topical information supplied in academic prologues could often be overwhelmed by the linear exposition in the commentary itself, forgotten in the pragmatic, local detail of grammar and historical context that a teacher needed to provide. The prologue topics might promise an outlook that was not always carried through.42 By contrast, Chaucer and Gower underscore the directive confidence of the prologue topics by making their work of mediation the very subject of their poems. If that subject is also the failure of the promise to render antiquity knowable on its own terms, that failure is also necessarily part of the history of the prologue. The academic prologue offered to make the classical past accessible by ‘revealing’ the ‘true’ purposes of the auctores; it was up to readers and new authors to determine how direct or ambiguous that access really was.

Notes 1   The term accessus ad auctores, while commonplace in modern scholarship to designate medieval academic prologues, was not so widely used in the Middle Ages. See Edwin A. Quain, ‘The Medieval Accessus ad auctores’, Traditio 3 (1945), 215–54 (at 247); A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages 2nd edn (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 14–15 and n. 41; Alastair Minnis, ‘Latin to Vernacular: Academic Prologues and the Medieval French Art of Love’, in Medieval and Renaissance Scholarship, eds Nicholas Mann and Birger Munk Olsen (Leiden, 1997), p. 153 n. 1. In the present chapter I have usually used the more generic word ‘prologue’. 2   The term prolegomenon for a schematized introduction was used by later Greek commentators on Aristotle; see Jaap Mansfeld, Prolegomena: Questions to be Settled before the Study of an Author or a Text (Leiden, 1994), p. 10 note; Boethius adopted the term into Latin in his commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge (which itself means ‘introduction’). 3  Mansfeld, Prolegomena, pp. 6–7, 54–5. Mansfeld points out that a biographical collection like Diogenes Laertius’ Vitae philosophorum probably drew from vitae that circulated with authors’ works. 4   Quain, ‘Medieval Accessus ad auctores’, 263. Didascalica is the term that Boethius used as an equivalent of prolegomena: see Boethius, In Isagogen Porphyrii commenta (editio prima), ed. Samuel Brandt, CSEL 48 (Vienna, 1906), 4, line 14. 5  Mansfeld, Prolegomena, pp. 14–16; Origen, Selecta in Psalmos, PG 12: 1060C–76B.

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Academic Prologues to Authors 6   The transmission of these texts presents a complex history. For an overview see Fabio Stok, ‘Virgil Between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 1 (1994), 15–22. For the texts themselves and further commentary, see Vitae Vergilianae antiquae, eds Giorgio Brugnoli and Fabio Stok (Rome, 1997), and The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years, eds Michael C. J. Putnam and Jan M. Ziolkowski (New Haven, 2008), pp. 179–228 (English translations, commentary, and bibliography). 7   Vitae Vergilianae antiquae, pp. 41–56; The Virgilian Tradition, pp. 227–8. Donatus’ actual commentaries on Virgil’s poetry do not survive. 8   Text in Servii grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentarii, eds G. Thilo and H. Hagen, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1881), p. 1; translation in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory ad 300–1450, eds Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter (Oxford, 2009), p. 127. The Donatan and Servian prologues are also discussed by Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 15–16. 9   Minnis notes the relative rarity of actual uses of the Servian model (Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 16–17), though it did find use in the late eleventh century, notably by Bernard of Utrecht in his Commentum in Theodolum: see Accessus ad auctores, Bernard d’Utrecht, Conrad d’Hirsau, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden, 1970), p. 59. It can also be found in later texts, such as an anonymous prologue in a fifteenth-century manuscript (London, British Library, MS Harley 2769) which cites Servius as the authority on what is to be asked ‘in uniuscuiusque libri exordio’: edited in Frank T. Coulson, ‘Hitherto Unedited Medieval and Renaissance Lives of Ovid (I)’, Mediaeval Studies 49 (1987), 152–207 (at p. 188). 10   Vitae Vergilianae antiquae, eds Brugnoli and Stok, p. 216. 11   On this question see Jerold C. Frakes, ‘Remigius of Auxerre, Eriugena, and the GrecoLatin Circumstantiae-Formula of Accessus ad auctores’, in The Sacred Nectar of the Greeks: The Study of Greek in the West in the Early Middle Ages, eds Michael W. Herren and Shirley Ann Brown (1988), pp. 229–55. 12   Rhetores latini minores, ed. Karl Halm (Leipzig, 1863; repr. Frankfurt, 1964), p. 141, lines 20–1 (Pseudo-Augustine) and p. 374, line 24 (C. Julius Victor). 13   PL 64: 1212B–1214B; Boethius’s De topicis differentiis, trans. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, NY, 1978), pp. 89–92. On the rhetorical background, see Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 66–9. 14   Remigii Autissiodorensis commentum in Martianum Capellam, ed. Cora Lutz, 2 vols (Leiden, 1962–5), 1, 65. See Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, pp. 70–6; Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 16–17; R. W. Hunt, ‘The Introductions to the “Artes” in the Twelfth Century’, in R. W. Hunt, Collected Papers on the History of Grammar in the Middle Ages, ed. G. L. Bursill-Hall (Amsterdam, 1980), pp. 117–44. 15   See p. 155 on the Vulgate commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 16   PL 64, 1207A–B. 17  Boethius, In Isagogen Porphyrii commenta, ed. Brandt, p. 4. See Hunt, ‘The Introductions to the “Artes”’, p. 127. The fullest and clearest account of this twelfth-century prologue form is by Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 19–25.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 18   The ancient philosophical background of these introductory questions is studied in Quain, ‘The Medieval Accessus ad auctores’. For examples of learned applications, see Hunt, ‘The Introductions to the “Artes” ’, p. 128. On prologues to the arts and the roles of the extrinsic and intrinsic prologues, see Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, eds Copeland and Sluiter, pp. 12, 405–12, 470, and references there. 19   Ed. Huygens, Accessus ad auctores, pp. 31–3; translated in Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition, eds and trans. A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, with David Wallace (Oxford, 1988), pp. 21–4. 20   For a wide survey of these two prologue headings in literary prologues, see Heinz Meyer, ‘Intentio auctoris, utilitas libri: Wirkungsabsicht und Nutzen literarischer Werke nach AccessusPrologen des 11. bis 13. Jahrhunderts’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 31 (1997), 390–413. 21   Accessus ad auctores, ed. Huygens, p. 47. 22   Ed. Coulson, ‘Medieval Lives of Ovid (I)’, pp. 181–2, and see Coulson’s discussion, pp. 160–1. The influence of the Vulgate prologue can be seen in later elaborations, for example a fourteenth-century prologue edited by Fausto Ghisalberti, ‘Mediaeval Biographies of Ovid’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9 (1946), 10–59 (at pp. 53–4). 23   See Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 27–33, 75–84; the transfer of this scheme (as well as others) from arts to theology, and the impact on biblical commentary, are also considered at length in Gilbert Dahan, Lire la Bible au moyen âge (Geneva, 2009), pp. 57–101. 24  Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 118–59, and references there. 25   Fausto Ghisalberti, ‘Giovanni del Virgilio espositore delle Metamorfosi’, Giornale Dantesco 34 ns (1933), 3–110 (at pp. 13–19); trans. Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory, pp. 360–6. 26   For the letter of Nicola da Prato and Trevet’s response, see Il commento di Nicola Trevet al Tieste di Seneca, ed. Ezio Franceschini (Milan, 1938), pp. 1–4; trans. Minnis and Scott, pp. 340–3. 27   See R. H. Rouse, ‘The A Text of Seneca’s Tragedies in the Thirteenth Century’, Revue d’histoire des textes 1 (1971), 93–121; R. H. Rouse and A. de la Mare, ‘New Light on the Circulation of the A-Text of Seneca’s Tragedies’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977), 283–90. 28   Nicolai Treveti expositio Herculis furentis, ed. Vincenzo Ussani Jr (Rome, 1959), pp. 4–5; trans. Minnis and Scott, pp. 345–6. 29   Il commento di Nicola Trevet al Tieste di Seneca, ed. Franceschini, p. 9. 30   Comentario a las Bucolicas de Virgilio, eds Aires Augusto Nascimento and José Manuel Díaz de Bustamente (Santiago de Compostela, 1984), pp. 70–3. On Trevet’s Eclogues commentary see Mary Louise Lord, ‘Virgil’s Eclogues, Nicholas Trevet, and the Harmony of the Spheres’, Mediaeval Studies 54 (1992), 186–273. 31   Eds Brugnoli and Stock, pp. 51–2. 32   L’Art d’amours. Traduction et commentaire de l’‘Ars amatoria’ d’Ovide, ed. Bruno Roy (Leiden, 1974), pp. 63–4. See Alastair Minnis, Magister amoris: The Roman de la rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford, 2001), pp. 35–81.

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Academic Prologues to Authors 33   On this range of texts see Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, pp. 87–150. On the Ovide moralisé see further the discussion and references in Ana Pairet, ‘Recasting the Metamorphoses in Fourteenth-Century France: The Challenges of the Ovide moralisé’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds James G. Clark et al. (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 83–107. 34   A valuable survey is in A. J. Minnis, ‘The Influence of Academic Prologues on the Prologues and Literary Attitudes of Late-Medieval English Writers’, Mediaeval Studies 43 (1981), 342–83. 35   The Parisiana poetria of John of Garland, ed. and trans. Traugott Lawler (New Haven, 1974), p. 2; for Robert of Basevorn, see Artes praedicandi, ed. Th.-M. Charland (Paris, 1936), pp. 233–4. 36   Discussion, translation, and further references in Medieval Literary Theory, eds Minnis and Scott, pp. 439–45, 458–69. 37   For Usk’s Testament of Love, see The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, eds Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (University Park, Pa, 1999), pp. 28–34, and Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 133–4; for Bokenham see The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. Wogan-Browne, pp. 64–72; on Hoccleve’s Regiment see Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 80–4. 38   See the accessus Boetii in Accessus ad auctores, ed. Huygens, p. 47, and Conrad of Hirsau, Dialogus super auctores, ed. Huygens, pp. 105–10. 39   See the accessus Lucani in Huygens, p. 43, lines 105–28; Eva Matthews Sanford, ‘The Manuscripts of Lucan: Accessus and Marginalia’, Speculum 9 (1934), 278–95. 40   Quotations are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987). 41   Quotations from and references to Gower are from The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols (Oxford, 1899–1902). 42   Vincent Gillespie, ‘From the Twelfth Century to c.1450’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages, eds Alastair Minnis and Ian R. Johnson (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 145–235 (at p. 146).

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Chapter 9

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Virgil Jan M. Ziolkowski

In examining the classical tradition in the Middle Ages, to what extent does it make sense to isolate any one writer such as Virgil, no matter how highly reputed, for individual attention? The shortest answer would be that no other poet in any language has achieved a cultural impact of the length or strength the Mantuan (as he is sometimes called after his approximate birthplace) has exercised in England. Both before and after the battle of Hastings he occupied a unique place throughout the British Isles as the most broadly known, cited, and invoked of all classical Latin authors. Sporadic efforts to oust from the elementary curriculum any and all literature written by pagan Romans ultimately failed in England as elsewhere in western Europe. Consequently, Virgil remained a fixture, from Roman Britain of the first century bc, through the transition into the Anglo-Saxon era (c.450–1066), until the Norman Conquest, and many years beyond, long after the medieval shaded into the early modern period. At the same time, many fluctuations took place in how, and how much, he was studied, interpreted, translated, and adapted, and the modulations have much to tell us about the Middle Ages as well as about Virgil.1 The chief explanation for the longevity of this poet may lie less in the sheer ­quality of his œuvre or in the ambitious scope of what he attempted and achieved poetically than in the functions that his works served as textbooks for grammatical correctness and proper taste in Latinity. Although his stock rose and fell across the centuries and varied from locale to locale, he abided as the most familiar of all classical Latin writers. Virgil’s corpus is tripartite, comprising three major works in verse: the ten poems known collectively as the Eclogues (alternatively known as the Bucolics); the Georgics, a didactic poem in four books; and the Aeneid, an epic poem in twelve books. John of Garland (flourished 1220–58), English by origin though French by long residence, codified the idea that the three genres embodied in the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature correspond to an equal number of stylistic levels, professional or social groups (shepherd, farmer, soldier), and trappings of those classes. Beyond the three major works, a small number of other pieces circulated under the poet’s name in the Middle Ages. Despite having never attracted pseudonymous works as Ovid did, Virgil was accounted the author of the poems in the so-called Appendix Vergiliana, still bound up with his name, but generally regarded to be mostly or even totally spurious. One English manuscript of the late tenth century (Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk. 5.34, fols 84r–111r) contains not the whole Appendix but just the two poems from it known as the Aetna and Culex. The English teacher and scholar Alexander Neckam (1157–1217) embraces the biographical fallacy that Virgil was the shepherd in the last-mentioned item, an epyllion or short narrative poem set in the pastoral world.2 Virgil was extolled as a master of style, knowledge, wisdom, and power—but all the same he was still a pagan, despite the fact that he was often presented as having come close to anticipating Christian truths. Even when his works were not directly available or studied, his name and poetry remained far from forgotten. He was ubiqui­ tous, in writings by Augustine, Jerome, Isidore, and others who shaped culture powerfully even when the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid were not directly approachable. Even the denunciations of him by authors such as Augustine would have created an appetite for reading his poems. Wherever Latin was studied, Virgil stood pre-eminent at the head of the auctores (literary ‘authorities’)—and he retained this salience even during phases when the stature of non-Christian poets in the curriculum slipped, since like it or not, his poetry was embedded in the grammatical and rhetorical treatises that constituted the foundation of education. Sometimes his writings, especially his epic, became tantamount to grammar itself, even if contrarians occasionally contested the propriety of his diction, prosody, and other stylistic features. Thus to call Virgil canonical would be an understatement. While efforts were made to Christianize the grammars of Latin antiquity by substituting examples from the Bible for those from Virgil and other classical authors, such experiments failed to gain traction.3 At times the study of Virgil became strictly confined within Latin grammar, itself regarded as nothing more than the unavoidable preliminary to study of the Bible and its exegesis. Three Latin commentators, none of them English, are now especially credited for having allegorized parts of Virgil’s poems, especially the Aeneid: Fulgentius (sixth century, North Africa), Bernardus Silvestris (twelfth century), and Christopher Landino (1424–92). This allegorical tradition, which also manifested itself sporadically in less famous commentaries in England, brings us as close as we can approach to a moralized Virgil on the lines of what was accomplished for Ovid in the Ovidius moralizatus, a Latin mythographic work by Pierre Bersuire (c.1290– 1362), and the Ovide moralisé (early fourteenth century), a French poem distinct from Bersuire’s work.

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Virgil By etymology the nouns ‘grammar’ and ‘literature’ are built upon roots that refer to a letter of the alphabet, gramma in Greek and littera in Latin. In the Middle Ages the domains of grammar and literature, which we could differentiate as meaning on the one hand learning grammar, reading texts, and interpreting literature, and on the other writing prose and poetry, were tied together more tightly than they are today. For most of the period grammar was known mainly by the Latin word grammatica and meant ‘Latin grammar’, though encompassing far more than merely the rules of proper expression. Throughout western Europe literacy presumed a command of letters, in the sense of both alphabet and belles lettres: the ability to read (and even more so to write) was acquired through the learned tongue, and a working knowledge of Latin was gained alongside grounding in its literature. Mastery of the prestige language took on a lustre verging on the magical that is summed up aptly in the Scottish English word glamour, a direct derivative of the Latin grammatica by way of the French. Glamour is cognate with gramarye ‘magic, necromancy’ (a noun seldom heard nowadays) and grimoire ‘magician’s manual’ (a French word that never really took in English). The nexus between grammar and magic helps to explain why a tradition that Virgil had magical powers seized as many imaginations as it did between the twelfth century and early modern times. The most glamorous of authors in the Latin grammar school was the Roman poet Virgil, who in most places and times held a central position in schooling.4 Narrow and long-outdated conceptions of influence or imitation fall short of the mark in clarifying the nature and functions of Virgil’s poetry in post-classical Europe. From early on Latin literature was marked by intertextuality, the complex interrelationship between an individual text and those that preceded and succeeded it in the literary tradition, with Virgil eventually at the heart of the interaction as both a transmitter of earlier literary practices, including those typical of Greek literature that was not otherwise available in the West, and an object of subsequent attention and reuse. Sometimes the Aeneid was regarded as a historical record, a true story of an exile who transplanted the remnants of the city of Troy to lay the groundwork abroad for the establishment of the new and equally real Rome. Taken as truth—the secular equivalent of gospel truth—the Troy story most familiar through the Aeneid could be extended into a foundation myth for nations and empires other than the Roman. Claim was laid to Trojan origins by peoples and princes throughout Europe, chronologically from the Merovingians to the Habsburgs, geographically from Italy to Iceland. Among British writers a Trojan genealogy was attested already in the ninth century by the Welsh writer of Latin, Nennius, in the Historia Britonum, but it was given its most influential expression in 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia regum Britanniae. Geoffrey’s account of the founding of the British nation by British kings with an ancestry stretching back to Troy owes much to Virgil.5

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature At other times the epic was denigrated as sheer fiction, figments of a poet’s imagination. When held to be fictitious, the epic was contrasted to the supposedly veracious accounts of the alleged eyewitnesses to the Trojan War, Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan. Dares enjoyed a healthy afterlife in England, since his prose was adapted into hexameters by Joseph of Exeter in an oft-read work entitled Ilias Daretis Phrygii or De bello Troiano that nonetheless reveals debts to Virgil, as in the portrayal of the gods intervening in the events.6 Since antiquity, traditions counter to the Aeneid had existed. One held that the actual historical Dido was chaste, in contradistinction to Virgil’s fictitious, unchaste woman. The chaste Dido helps to avoid the dilemma of an Aeneas who lapsed into sloth, as highlighted by John Gower in his Confessio amantis (4.77–146), composed c.1386–90. Another negative counter-tradition maintained that Aeneas was inglorious and even traitorous. The latter view was given new life by vernacular adaptations of Dares, beginning in about 1165 with the Old French Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure. Picked up by Guido, this perspective is hinted at in the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and also made explicit in the Confessio amantis (1.1093–128).7 Whether purportedly fact or fiction, Virgil and his poetry were frequently enlisted to validate through their prestige this or that regime or policy, as they continue to be invoked even today. His poetry, especially the Aeneid but even the Eclogues, could be seen to uphold specific models of empire and power, types of relations between women and men, and kinds of interdependencies between poets and rulers. Whether or not Virgil was a compliant propagandist for Augustan imperialism, a subtle protester against it, or both simultaneously, his writings served for Romans as one stretch of the training ground on which the essence of Romanness was formed in the young as they were educated. Virgil’s poetry was dictated, parsed, scanned, and recited in grammar schools wherever the Roman Empire reached, which explains why a small brick unearthed near Seville in Spain has inscribed on it the opening of the Aeneid in a cursive majuscule that may date from the 50s ad, why a papyrus fragment with a quotation from the same epic (Aeneid 4.9) has been discovered at the citadel of Masada in Israel that was besieged and conquered in ad 73–4, why dozens of lines—at least one from all three poems—have been brought to light as graffiti in Pompeii from the moment of the eruption in ad 79, and why many papyri with traces of Virgil (sometimes difficult to pin down chronologically with precision) have been found in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East.8 These troves justify the conclusion that within a century of his death, Virgil had been exported wherever Romanization (an even more extensive process than Latinization) was under way. The stature attained by Virgil in antiquity, with modifications to reflect cultural and linguistic changes, prevailed throughout the millennium or so that is commonly called the Middle Ages. Beyond being available in many manuscripts, his poems,

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Virgil mainly but not solely the Aeneid, were embedded so deeply in literary culture that even when not read directly, they were often encountered indirectly through quotations and references in other texts. Consequently, not all of the testimonies in medieval literature that at first blush look Virgilian necessarily signal intimate or even passing acquaintance with his poetry, any more than the ability in English to pepper speech or writing with obiter dicta such as ‘All that glitters is not gold’, ‘All the world’s a stage’, or ‘All’s well that ends well’ guarantees that the speaker or writer has ever engaged directly with Shakespeare by seeing or reading even a single play. Many people would have been more familiar with bits and snatches of Virgil’s poems as tags than with them as wholes. Gauging the debt of medieval Latin authors to Virgil can be challenging, since many lines and turns of phrase of the Roman poet entered the common store upon which later writers drew without always necessarily meaning a specific allusion. What may appear to be the incorporation of words as a subtle allusion may be only an ultimate debt, when a poet is instead borrowing from a later poet or even not borrowing at all but rather coming forth with a catchphrase familiar from what has been termed the ‘hexameter lexicon’.9 In a poem entitled De triumphis ecclesiae (c.1245–52), John of Garland coordinates (and contrasts) the crusades with the deeds of Aeneas when he rings a change upon the first words of Virgil’s epic by announcing ‘Arma crucemque cano’ (‘I sing of arms and the cross’).10 Henry of Avranches (active second quarter of thirteenth century) likewise opens his verse life of St Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1200) with a quotation from the incipit of the Aeneid.11 Anxiety of Virgilian influence began early, even immediately after publication of the epic, perhaps even before it.12 In particular, Virgil has always stood for eloquence. In the very first canto of the Inferno the character Dante addresses the Roman poet, upon their initial meeting, as ‘that fount which pours forth so broad a stream of speech’ and as ‘he from whom I took the fair style that has done me honor’.13 The identification of Virgil as the Classic by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) held true until very recently, if in fact the Roman poet has surrendered that stature even now.14 We must be wary of exaggeration, as in the assertion of Anglo-Saxon England that ‘Practically every Englishman of whose work we have more than a page or two—and some who have left us only a few lines—shows some acquaintance with the Aeneid.’15 All the same, Virgil must be credited as by far and away the most prestigious classical author, and by extension authority, in the Middle Ages. A mention of ‘the poet’ (poeta or vates) without further ado referred unmistakably to none other than Virgil. Thus Gervase of Melkley, who wrote his ars poetica between 1208 and 1216, defined antonomasia (the figure of speech by which we may designate Shakespeare simply as ‘the Bard’) with the following two examples: ‘This usage must always signify a certain preeminence, as for example: The Apostle says, that is, Paul. The Poet, that is, Virgil.’16 Virgil became deeply entrenched in England already within decades of the definitive Roman conquest of the island, and he remained a fixture nearly continuously

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature from antiquity on. The long stretches of time in which he maintained a central ­position argue strongly against attempting to treat English literary history in isolation, since Virgil first came to England as a result of cultural contact and later remained and evolved there through constant exchange of peoples, books, learning, interpretations, and literature. An urban legend (or trite national stereotype) claims that a British newspaper headline once read, ‘Fog in Channel: Continent Cut Off ’. Whether or not the supposed headline was actually apocryphal, the insularity to which it adverts is at many points, in the Middle Ages as now, not borne out by the evidence: in the earliest centuries England seems to have exported to the Continent both manuscripts and knowledge of Virgil, while in turn the mainland repaid the favour through such phenomena as the traffic of Virgil codices (and Virgilianists) from Norman monasteries after the Conquest and the impact of Dante’s Virgilianism on Chaucer. In fact, it can be perplexing to decide what qualifies as English. Learned Englishmen travelled often on the Continent, as for example Anglo-Saxon missionaries in the Frankish Empire and scholars such as Alcuin (c.730–804) who transplanted themselves at the bidding of Charlemagne. Such wayfaring proselytizers would have been unlikely to tote with them codices of the classics: Boniface (d. 754) shielded himself with a Gospel book and not the Aeneid as he was on the verge of being martyred.17 To look at movement from the other direction, Abbo of Fleury (d. 1004), who was born and died in France, had a long stay at Ramsey in the late tenth century (985–7) during (or after?) which he produced his Quaestiones grammaticales.18 This text offers Abbo’s responses, saturated with references to Virgil, to the ‘Grammatical Questions’ posed to him by his Anglo-Saxon pupils. Whatever our decision about the merits of considering Abbo within a treatment of English literature, we can surmise that his Virgilianism affected the young Anglo-Saxons whom he instructed, such as Byrhtferth (c.970–c.1020) of Ramsey, whose writings reveal modest awareness of Virgil’s poems.19 The foundations for the hegemony of Virgil among classical poets whose works circulated in the British Isles were laid (and are attested) already during the Roman era. Writing tablets from around the year 100 have been excavated at a location south of Hadrian’s Wall (near Chesterholm, Northumbria) on the frontier of the Roman Empire in the north of Britain. A few of the ink-and-stylus tablets deciphered so far pay tribute to the broad diffusion of the Georgics as well as the Aeneid. On the slim basis of the Virgilian quotations, the inference has been drawn that the site, known as Vindolanda, was a centre of sorts for the study of Virgil and that the tablets have annotations apparently indicative of such scrutiny.20 The most telling circumstance is that although most of the testimonies are limited to a single line, one tablet has Aeneid 1.1 on its front and back in two different hands, apparently as a writing exercise.21 Not quite two centuries later, a coin minted by Carausius, a Roman naval commander who proclaimed himself emperor in Britain and northern Gaul and who held power for seven years (286–93), carries the legend ‘expectate veni’ (‘Come,

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Virgil Long-Awaited One’), adapted from Aeneid 2.282–3. Other coins by Carausius display beneath the emblem the initials RSR, which has been explained as referring to three successive words ‘redeunt Saturnia regna’ (Eclogues 4.6 ‘The Golden Ages have returned’) in the so-called Messianic Fourth Eclogue. This explanation is confirmed by the existence of two bronze medallions of Carausius, one with the same three letters and the others with INPCDA, nonsensical until one realizes that these happen to be the initials of the words in the following line: ‘iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto’ (Eclogues 4.7 ‘Now a new generation is dispatched from heaven on high’). The allusion to this passage signals the extraordinarily bold and Virgilian claim of this usurper that his regime would restore the good old days, specifically the Saturnian age of pastoral paradise, presumably earlier in the Roman rule of Britain and the rest of the Empire.22 From an uncertain date comes another written remain of Virgil from Roman Britain, in an inscription scratched upon a flue-tile in the town of Calleva Atrebatum in Silchester, Hampshire: ‘Pertacus perfidus, Campester Lucilianus, Campanus, conticuere omnes’ (‘Untrustworthy Pertacus, Campester, Lucilianus, Campanus, all fell silent’), which at the end incorporates the opening two words of Aeneid 2.1 that describe the reaction of the audience as Aeneas begins to recount the sack of Troy.23 So famous was this moment in the Aeneid that even the verb conticuere by itself sufficed to call to mind the scene. The late Roman period has left abundant evidence of Virgilianism in English art. The earliest narrative art of any kind in England is a mosaic pavement, probably from the mid-fourth century, in the bathhouse of the Low Ham villa in Somerset, with four panels of scenes from the Aeneid relating to the story of Dido and Aeneas. In the Otford villa in Kent a wall-painting, alas too fragmentary for the scene to be reconstructed, bears an inscription with a phrase from the Aeneid.24 Also in Kent, Lullingstone villa has a dining-room mosaic, dated c.330–60, with a non-Virgilian scene of Europa and the bull, but with a caption of a single elegiac couplet that alludes to the Aeneid (1.50–63).25 At Frampton villa in Dorset another mosaic pavement from the fourth century that has since perished had a representation, recorded first in watercolour drawings and then in engravings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, of Aeneas holding a spear and plucking the golden bough, most likely drawn from Aeneid 6.210–11.26 The first British-born author whose Latin writings survive is Pelagius (c.350–c.418), an ascetic Christian reformer who was eventually condemned as a heretic. Although his choice of a tag from the Aeneid in referring to the sack of Rome in 410 probably reflects his early education, his language divulges little colouring that hints at classical literary culture.27 This meagre trace does not support the conclusion (to which the coins, medallions, flue tile, and mosaics might incline us) that the literature of Roman Britain would have been through and through Virgilian—but at the same time no reason exists to doubt that the poet was well known there.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature When the Roman Empire crumbled in the West, the works of Virgil had been read, studied, committed to memory, commented upon, and copied already for half a millennium over immense stretches of territory. This success ensured that Virgil would endure through the disrupted centuries to follow, even if the poems were not written in fresh manuscripts from the sixth to the end of the eighth century. From the ample supplies that had been produced by the end of the fifth century, sufficient copies remained for the Virgilian tradition to persevere in the strongholds where the dwindling population of potential readers was concentrated. Tracing the history of Virgil’s reception in English literature after the disintegration of the Roman Empire requires piecing together clues of two sorts. First is what can be gleaned from the manuscripts of Virgil’s poetry, Virgilian commentators, and grammarians. Second is what the authors and texts of Old and Middle English literature themselves tell us. No Virgil manuscripts survive from the seventh century. What happened after the disruptions of those 100 years? Ludwig Traube (1861–1907), a palaeographer who held the first chair of Medieval Latin (at Munich), formulated a schema (often recapitulated by literary historians) according to which the Middle Ages was divided into three stretches of two centuries each: first the aetas Virgiliana in the eighth and ninth centuries, then the aetas Horatiana in the tenth and eleventh, and finally the aetas Ovidiana in the twelfth and thirteenth.28 During most of the time before the Norman Conquest the main vernacular tongue in England for literature that was recorded in writing (and the more abundant oral literature that was not) was Old English or Anglo-Saxon. Yet in the AngloSaxon period the story is more elaborate than just the interaction of Latin and English, since England had cultural contacts with various other peoples, among them Celts such as the Irish, who may have had their own heritage of Virgilianism, and emissaries from the Christian Mediterranean dispatched by the Church in Rome. Virgil had not disappeared entirely even from sixth-century Britain, since in De excidio et conquestu Britanniae the cleric Gildas quotes the Aeneid, the only poetic text we can be absolutely certain that he knew.29 Latin grammar schools would have been (re)established with new vigour after the arrival in 597 of the ‘apostle to the English’, Augustine of Canterbury (d. 604). With the schools came the best known of Roman poets. Much debate has raged over the extent of contacts with Ireland and the degree of indebtedness to a special Irish classical tradition in the poorly documented centuries between the collapse of Romanized Britain and the establishment of a clearly AngloSaxon England. Prudence argues for paying at least passing heed to the functions Virgil served in Ireland and in the Irish diaspora of the early Middle Ages. In so doing we must be cautious not to exaggerate the reach of Irish influence. On the other hand we must beware of taking the opposite stance of denying any credit to the Irish in the maintenance and reconstruction of what has been called the legacy of Rome.30

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Virgil Few insular scholars before the Carolingian period can be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to have studied Virgil.31 But later Irish masters such as John Scotus Eriugena taught the poet in ways that may reflect what they had learned as students in Ireland, through study of the poems themselves as well as through use of works such as Macrobius’ Saturnalia and Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae.32 A few indicators suggest that the British Isles may have played an outsized role in the maintenance of the Virgilian tradition through grammar and commentary during the seventh and eighth centuries. An ars grammatica, extant in two ninth-century manuscripts but composed in the seventh or eighth century, is ascribed to one Malsachanus, who appears to have been an Irish grammarian.33 Although he names Virgil explicitly only four times, 18 of Malsachanus’s 26 citations from classics come ultimately from the Roman poet. But the qualification ‘ultimately’ is essential, since most of these citations are drawn from the grammatical tradition rather than from Virgil directly.34 The Gallo-Roman grammarian called Philagrius (or Philargyrius, among more than a half dozen other spellings), probably active in the second half of the fifth century, wrote commentaries on Virgil that in turn influenced later commentators and that between the mid-eighth and ninth centuries were outfitted with Old Irish and Old Breton glosses.35 The Scholia Bernensia (Bern Scholia), which bear occasional glosses in Old Irish, are based on an archetype that emanated from a centre of Irish learning, either in Ireland or in a monastery with Irish monks.36 The glosses incorporate material that can be traced back to Adomnán (679–704), who was abbot (627/8–704) of the monastery on Iona, an island just off the north-west coast of Britain.37 Adomnán’s own knowledge of Virgil was predicated almost a century ago on the basis of allusions in his extant writings, the Vita Sanctae Columbae and the De locis sanctis (‘On Holy Places’).38 For these reasons the conclusion is reasonable that Virgil was studied at Iona during Adomnán’s abbacy.39 Such Irish learning surrounding Virgil may have arrived in Anglo-Saxon England through the cultural interactions of Anglo-Saxons such as Aldhelm (d. 709/10) with Irish clerics. Whatever the source, England appears to have accumulated learning relating to Virgil. The commentary tradition designated as Servius auctus (Servius Expanded) or Servius Danielis (also DServius), resulted from the augmentation—hence a­ uctus— of Servius on the basis of another ancient commentary which was either that of Aelius Donatus or another closely related to it. It is hypothesized to have taken shape in seventh-century England.40 By chance the earliest extant fragment of Servius is a bifolium with excerpts from a Servius auctus in Anglo-Saxon minuscule that was brought to light in Germany near Fulda. It is thought to have been written in southwest England, perhaps Malmesbury, in the first half of the eighth century,41 and has been ascribed to a member of Boniface’s circle.42 The excerpts, on Aeneid 3.651–5.638 and 7.710–8.713, contain Anglo-Saxon glosses.43 Of the three early manuscripts of the Virgilian commentary by Tiberius Claudius Donatus (fl. 430s?), one (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS 45.15, from Tours) was copied in the second

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature half of the eighth century by two scribes, one of whom wrote an early Carolingian minuscule and the other an Anglo-Saxon script. The attentiveness with which the commentators were copied shows that Virgil held a solid place in the schools and that readers sought enlightenment about both specific particularities and global interpretation of their cherished poet. Various Anglo-Latin authors, such as Aldhelm, Boniface (d. 754), Alcuin, and Byrhtferth, appear to evince familiarity with Servius;44 Aldhelm may have known Pseudo-Probus as well, since the commentator he cites as Valerius could well be Marcus Valerius Probus (c.35–c.100).45 Aldhelm’s immersion in Virgil is evident from words and phrases that reflect all three works in the œuvre (especially Aeneid 1, 4, 6, and 10), as well as from features of prosody and style.46 He also cites the opening of a poem attributed to Virgil, the Pedagogus.47 Aldhelm’s two metrical treatises and riddles were combined in a composite text called the Epistola ad Acircium, addressed to King Aldfrith of Northumbria (d. 704/5). The two treatises alone contain 130 citations, quotations, and tags from Virgil, while in an address at the close of the Epistola Aldhelm likens himself to Virgil and quotes Georgics 3.11–13 and 292–3.48 Aldhelm quotes Virgil four times in his prose De virginitate, and he embeds within his poetry seven entire lines from Virgil.49 The Anglo-Saxon scholar Bede (672/3–735) does not manifest the same devotion to Virgil as shown by Aldhelm—but even in drawing back from the Roman poet he reveals knowledge that transcends snippets culled from grammatical treatises.50 On the contrary, Bede demonstrates close knowledge of parts of the poems and of Virgil’s prosody and metrics.51 In an alphabetical and epanaleptic hymn to honour Queen Etheldreda (or Æthelthryth, c.636–678) in Historia ecclesiastica 4.20, he distances himself and his own poetic composition from Virgil and the Aeneid, because whereas he focuses on peace, chastity, and the gifts of God, his Roman predecessor trained his sights on war, lechery, and the earthly.52 Although Bede makes clear that he favours the metrical and prosodic practices of the Christian biblical poets over the outdated proclivity of Virgil for spondaic verses and hiatus, in the De arte metrica (which contains thirty-four recognizable quotations from the works of Virgil) he draws comparisons between the dramatic sections of the Bible and the Eclogues, as well as between the Book of Job and the Aeneid.53 Despite such protestations, Bede is far better acquainted with Virgil than with any other classical poets. In his quotations, he directs the reader to the Roman poet by name, refers simply to the poet as poeta (unde poeta dicit), or, perhaps most revealingly, quotes without any fanfare whatsoever.54 By extension a consensus has emerged that a copy of the Aeneid as well as (less certainly) of the Eclogues and Georgics existed at Wearmouth Jarrow.55 Among other Anglo-Latin authors, Boniface, whose original Anglo-Saxon name was Wynfrith, presumably picked up his familiarity with Virgil while studying at a monastery in Nursling, outside modern Southampton. His Ars grammatica cites all three of Virgil’s works, although often probably by way of the earlier grammatical

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Virgil tradition, and his Enigmata (‘Riddles’) are indebted in dozens of verses to all three of Virgil’s works, but in the Aeneid exclusively to the first six books.56 Although the citations of Virgil in the Ars by Tatwine (c.670–734) appear all to be drawn from other grammars, the Enigmata give sign that he knew all three of Virgil’s poems.57 If we redirect our lens from Anglo-Latin to Old English literature, we find Virgil identified explicitly (as ‘Frigilius’ and ‘Firgilies’) in only one work, namely, the Old English adaptation of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, where the Roman poet is said to have learned to compose verse from his friend Homer.58 The pickings are slim for passages in Old English poetry in which Virgil holds promise of being the likeliest source for either phraseology or scene-setting. The theory has been presented that Old English poets based their practice of postpositioning prepositions on what they learned from reading Virgil.59 Of Old English poems Beowulf is the one that interpreters have sought most often to couple with the Aeneid, but no consensus has developed that any of the contentions carry conviction.60 In Beowulf 1699 the unique phrasing ‘Swi ̄gedon ealle’ (‘All fell silent’) is identical in construction to the famous ‘Conticuere omnes’ in Aeneid 2.1,61 while in Christ and Satan 36a ‘eisegan stefne’ calls to mind ‘ferrea vox’ in Aeneid 6.626.62 To turn our gaze to the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, the form of French known as Anglo-Norman held sway as the most prestigious among the various living languages and dialects spoken in what is now England, before Middle English eventually became a legitimate vehicle for literature. Further complicating the situation is that in certain places and times ties to Wales and Scotland must not be overlooked or underestimated alongside those to Ireland. The Angevin courts of King Henry II (1154–89), his wife, and his sons provided patronage for much literature. Henry and other early members of the House of Plantagenet (1154–1485) established in England, much of France, and far beyond a realm that could be fairly described as multicultural. French sources exerted a powerful influence as mediators of classical material. This is not because they allude commonly to Virgil, beyond well-known passages in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes,63 but because they helped to provide a characteristically romance form of classical epics, in which twelfth-century aristocratic society and its chivalric values displaced Roman military and imperial values, just as French pushed aside Latin. Romans d’antiquité (romances of antiquity) such as the Roman de Brut (‘Romance of Brutus’, c.1155) of the Norman poet Wace and Roman de Troie (1155–60) of the French poet Benoît de Sainte-Maure (d. 1173) were dedicated to Henry, while Roman d’Enéas (‘Romance of Aeneas’) and Roman de Thèbes have often been associated with the Angevins as well. The Enéas conveyed radically different perspectives on Virgil from what the epic itself and the commentary tradition would have furnished, focusing on intimate portraits of Enéas and other heroes as aristocratic knights, sympathetically elaborating the figure of Dido, and developing a narrative of courtly love between Enéas and his destined bride, Lavine. The romance never even refers

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature ­ utright to Virgil. Together such materials projected what has been called a ‘romance o vision’.64 The Aeneid provided an account in which men dominated, and the epic was parsed by boys under the instruction of men. Aeneas lost his wife Creusa, obeyed duty by abandoning Dido, and forged a strategic marriage with Lavinia. The story was construed as the script for how a man—not a human being in general, but specifically the male of the species—should lead life. The torrid and tortured romance in the fourth book was reduced in allegorical treatments to being a depiction of what happens sexually to youthful men as a result of overindulgence in food and drink. Yet despite all efforts to dampen the appeal of Dido, this section of the Aeneid simultaneously exercised an outsized attraction, to judge by the frequency with which it was endowed with neums (an early form of musical notation) and became the topic of freestanding laments in Dido’s voice, in both Latin and vernacular languages.65 The twelfth century witnessed the next great explosion in copying after the Carolingian renewal of the ninth century.66 In England looking merely to tally locally produced manuscripts would be misleading, since books travelled across the Channel from Normandy and beyond. Whatever the provenance of the parchment and codices, Virgil was as widely available as ever. One touchstone of English Virgilianism in the twelfth century is John of Salisbury (c.1115–1180), perhaps the most exemplary of twelfth-century humanists from England.67 John presented Virgil as limitless in enhancing quality of thought: ‘Thoroughly shake Virgil or Lucan, and no matter the philosophy you profess, you will find in their works seasoning for it.’68 Calling a major text ‘divine’ may have sometimes been a cliché, but it may betoken the favour in which Virgil was held during the so-called twelfth-century ‘renaissance’ that Alexander Neckam (1157–1217) attached this epithet to the Aeneid.69 Although in Traube’s framework of three ages the twelfth and thirteenth century are predominantly the age of Ovid, Virgil was not thrust aside altogether. A case in point would be John of Salisbury. John’s reverence is manifest in his view that Virgil’s epic enshrines ‘the secrets of all philosophy’.70 In fact, he delivers in the Policraticus (c.1159) a compact allegorization in which he interprets the first six books of the Aeneid as dealing allegorically with all six ages in a man’s life (Policraticus 8.24–5 [819D]). But if John puts Virgil on a pedestal, it is a different one from earlier centuries: he also provides the earliest account of Virgil the magician, by describing a bronze fly in Naples that served as an apotropaic (Policraticus 1.4 [393c]). Neither before nor after 1066 did Latin lose its primacy in the schooling of the people—most often, especially in the early Middle Ages, the men—who with the help of such literacy became equipped for the composition and interpretation of English literature. Those who composed in Old and Middle English were often grounded educationally and culturally in Latin, and they drew frequently upon the literature to which they had been exposed in school.

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Virgil Among Middle English writers Chaucer stands out as being versed in the story of Aeneas as recounted by Virgil, but even he may have garnered his knowledge of classical antiquity in part indirectly, through Dante. Like many other medieval poets, Chaucer lavishes his attention upon Dido, but he displays awareness of other episodes as well.71 The plenitude of mosaics from the Roman period with scenes or inscriptions relating to Virgil’s Aeneid contrasts with the paucity of representations in English art from the Middle Ages that relate to Virgil or his poems. The closest to an illustrated Virgil from England is one illustration at the start of the Eclogues in a single twelfth-century manuscript, argued to be English.72 Notwithstanding the lack of evidence in extant codices, it is worth wondering if Chaucer might have seen illuminated manuscripts of the Aeneid or any of its descendants, since in three of his dream-visions he includes descriptions of murals which owe ultimately to Virgil’s description of the temple of Juno in Aeneid 1.446–93. At the opening of the first book of The House of Fame the narrator dreams of finding the Aeneid engraved in brass in a temple of Venus (143–8). In the extended summary of the epic that follows (151–467), he highlights the story of Dido. In the third book he has Virgil standing alone on a column, truly paramount among all the notabilities of past history (1481–5). He also includes descriptions of murals in The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls.73 Chaucer is exceptional in engaging explicitly with Virgil’s poem. When most other Middle English poets show a special interest in Virgil, it grows out of traditions relating to Virgil as a magician (often misleadingly styled Virgil the Necromancer) that circulated mostly outside the learned commentary tradition. One favourite story told how the poet became infatuated with the emperor’s daughter and pursued her until she agreed to an assignation. The plan was that she would hoist him one night in a basket to her chamber atop a tower, but instead she left him stranded halfway. To retaliate for the public ridicule he received, he worked magic to extinguish all the fires in Rome and enabled them to be rekindled only by placing the torches at the nether regions of the woman. Virgil appears as a character three times in Gower’s Confessio amantis, twice in this guise as an infatuated lover (6.98, 8.2714–25). William Langland’s Piers Plowman includes only one explicit reference (B 12.43–45) to Virgil, as meeting a wretched end like Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Alexander the Great. The origins of such traditions have been disputed, and various hypotheses have been advanced. Two elements possibly connected with the folklore are onomastic. One is the false etymological association of the name Virgil with the Latin for ‘wand’ (virga), while the other is the identity of Magus, a family name in Virgil’s biography, with a word for a magician in the learned language. Another possible explanation is that local folklore arose in Naples, in connection with Virgil’s supposed tomb.74 In the second half of the twelfth century and later, clerics who visited southern Italy related legends about Virgil’s application of his purportedly magical powers to

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature benefit the city and its environs. These non-Italian visitors included Englishmen of the twelfth century such as John of Salisbury and Gervase of Tilbury (c.1150–c.1228). At the end of the fifteenth or very beginning of the sixteenth century Robert Langton (archdeacon of Dorset 1486–1514), a supporter of Appleby Grammar School in Appleby, Westmoreland, visited the grotto where Virgil was buried.75 Many other English scholars who are not known to have visited Naples touched upon the legends in their writings. Two cases in point would be Alexander Neckam and Walter Burley (c.1275–after 1344). The Franciscan John of Wales (d. 1285), who resided in Oxford before spending the final two decades of his life in Paris, knits together tales about the magician with observations on Virgil as a poet. One of the so-called classicizing friars of the following century, John of Lathbury (d. 1362), cites a few peculiar traditions about Virgil from a text he thought to be by Fulgentius the mythographer. The interest expressed in Latin sources appears in English too, for instance in John Lydgate of Bury (c.1370–c.1451) and in the English Life of Virgilius (published in the early sixteenth century in Antwerp). The third of Virgil’s three appearances in Gower’s Confessio amantis is as the inventor of a magic mirror (5.2031–244). The motif of the magic mirror created to make visible any imminent dangers to Rome also appears in Chaucer, although without mention of Virgil as its maker.76 Not to be underestimated is the reputation Virgil acquired for having anticipated almost prophetically the birth of Christ. It was widely accepted that the so-called Messianic eclogue (Eclogue 4) foretold the birth of Christ.77 This tradition helps to account for the appearance of Virgil, along with the Sibyl and prophets, as a witness to the Incarnation in plays. This Messianism could have also encouraged a belief in stories in which the poet had magical powers and employed or fabricated magical devices that retained their effects until a virgin gave birth. Short of viewing Virgil as a sorcerer, it had been customary to laud his poetic perfection and seeming omniscience. The late antique author Macrobius, who devoted four of seven books in his Saturnalia to Virgil, ascribed universal knowledge to him, with command of rhetoric, literature, lore, and all else. Gervase of Melkley cites a Roger (of Devon or Dover?) who ‘says that in Virgil’s Aeneid are contained all vices and all figures, all rhetorical colors as well, in addition to the whole of philosophy and the whole of ethics’.78 In the Fall of Princes (1430) John Lydgate is more restrained, singling out the author of the Aeneid specifically for having excelled ‘In rethorik be souereynte of stile’.79 Later in the same poem he cites Virgil first in a short list of ancient poets, but his point in rehearsing their names is to proclaim ignorance of the classics.80 The commentators of late antiquity understood Virgil’s three works as covering a spread in their learning and style. In learning, Philagrius saw them as representing physics, ethics, and logic (Hagen 2bf ), while Servius detected a stylistic spectrum running from tenuis through moderatus to validus (Comm. 1–2). From such triads

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Virgil John of Garland developed the idea of the Rota Virgilii (Virgil’s Wheel), which arranged the low, middle, and high styles with specific social classes, characters, animals, implements, places, and trees. Another type of threesome is nowadays called the Virgilian career, a progression in which a writer moves generically from pastoral through didactic to epic. An anonymous poem in Latin hexameter couplets that was appended to a few manuscripts with poems of John Gower attempts to coordinate the Middle English poet with Virgil, since both wrote three major works.81 The Middle Scots poet Robert Henryson himself shows an awareness of the progression. The first book printed in English, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (‘Collection of the Stories of Troy’, 1474) by William Caxton (c.1422–c.1492), was based ultimately on the late thirteenth-century Latin prose account by the Italian Guido delle Colonne as translated into French. This version, independent of the Aeneid, perpetuates the notion of Aeneas as a traitor. The medieval custom of paraphrasing and adapting the Aeneid culminated (and terminated) in William Caxton’s Eneydos (1490), which is likewise not indebted to Virgil. Instead, it follows the French retelling in the Eneas. Roughly two decades after Caxton, Gavin Douglas (c.1475–1522) took on with stunning success the challenge of translating the Aeneid. His feat of adapting Virgil’s dactylic hexameters into the heroic couplets of his Eneados (completed in 1513) is impressive by itself, since it is the first translation into an English dialect of the complete Aeneid, including the continuation in Latin dactylic hexameters by the Italian poet Maphaeus Vegius (Maffeo Vegio, 1407–58).82 In this version Douglas denounces Caxton harshly for having handled the story in a way prejudicial to Aeneas, and he privileges Virgil’s version over both Chaucer and Caxton. He demonstrates at least some familiarity with the Eclogues and Georgics in his so-called seasonal prologues, in which he describes generally the season and circumstances in which he wrote the book.83 Douglas’s achievement is compounded by his effort to incorporate into his vernacular the essentials of the experience that a reader of his day would have had in reading the Aeneid in Latin, thanks to the commentary tradition that had burgeoned around the epic. Douglas’s approach to the poem reflects his knowledge of both the medieval and the humanistic commentary traditions. He supplies prologues to the individual books of the epic, verse summaries, chapter divisions, and (although only halfway through the translation of Aeneid 1) marginal prose commentary.84 In Prologue 6 he asserts that Virgil is universally esteemed, as borne out by Servius, Augustine, and Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462–1535). He explains how the first six books of the Aeneid deal with human life and death, the sixth with the afterlife. He ties this coverage to the foretelling of Christ and the golden age in the Eclogues. Many passages in Virgil are consonant with Christianity, although he was a pagan who made such errors as referring to multiple gods and transmigration of the

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature soul. He touches upon the interpretation of Virgil as a prophet. He translated ‘Mantua me genuit,’ a sign of his immersion in the commentary and biographical tradition. Beyond the Middle Scots translation of the Aeneid by Douglas, a translation into a Middle English quatrain survives of two lines from Virgil’s second eclogue (2.17–18).85 Douglas’s translation may have marked a great advance in its quality and in the comprehensiveness with which it codified the commentary tradition, but it did not mark an end to the characteristically medieval Virgil the magician. About five years after the first printing of Douglas’s translation, the printer Jan van Doesborch (d. 1536) published at Antwerp an English Life of Virgilius, translated from a Dutch text that was also the source of a French version. It offers a rich dossier of the legends about Virgil that had been associated strongly with England since the twelfth century. Virgil served as a constant in the literary culture of England, in the Middle Ages as before and after. His three poems, especially the Aeneid, were pored over as an essential component in the learning of Latin and in the acquisition of literary culture. Despite intermittent discomfort over his paganism, Virgil’s works were understood to transcend the spiritual limitations of ancient Rome. In the later Middle Ages Geoffrey Chaucer and Gavin Douglas stand out for the subtlety with which they engaged with Virgil. Other Middle English poets often evidence more awareness of Virgil’s folkloric doppelgänger, the magician Virgil, than of the poet.

Notes   Among key references on the Virgilian tradition in early and later medieval England, see Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995); on Chaucer see also Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca, NY, 1988), ch. 3 on Virgil and Ovid in the Troilus, pp. 87–110. On Lydgate’s apprehension of Virgil see in this volume Chapter 22 by Edwards and references there. More generally see The Virgil Encyclopedia, eds Richard F. Thomas and Jan M. Ziolkowski, 3 vols (Oxford, 2014). 2   De naturis rerum, 2.109, in Alexandri Neckam De naturis rerum libri duo. With the poem of the same author, De laudibus divinae sapientiae, ed. Thomas Wright (1863), pp. 190–2. 3   Vivien Law, The Insular Latin Grammarians (Woodbridge, 1982), p. 30. 4   Günter Glauche, Schullektüre im Mittelalter: Entstehung und Wandlungen des Lektürekanons bis 1200 nach den Quellen dargestellt (Munich, 1970), and Birger Munk Olsen, L’Étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 4 vols (Paris, 1982–2014). 5   Fiona Tolhurst Neuendorf, ‘Negotiating Feminist and Historicist Concerns: Guenevere in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae’, Quondam et futurus 3 (1993), 26–44. 6   On the Troy traditions, see Chapter 13 in this volume by Desmond. 7   Meyer Reinhold, ‘The Unhero Aeneas’, Classica et mediaevalia 27 (1966), 195–207, and Sharon Stevenson, ‘Aeneas in Fourteenth-Century England’, in The Classics in the 1

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Virgil Middle Ages: Papers of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, eds Aldo S. Bernardo and Saul Levin (Binghamton, NY, 1990), pp. 371–8. 8   For these items, see The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years, eds Jan M. Ziolkowski and Michael C. J. Putnam (New Haven, 2008), pp. 44–5, and Maria Chiara Scappaticcio, Papyri Vergilianae: l’apporto della papirologia alla storia della tradizione Virgiliana (I–VI D.C.) (Liège, 2013). 9   For the expression, see Lateinisches Hexameter-Lexikon: dichterisches Formelgut von Ennius bis zum Archipoeta, ed. Otto Schumann, MGH Hilfsmittel 4 (Munich, 1979–83). For poetry the most complete database at present is Poetria Nova 2: A CD-ROM of Latin Medieval Poetry (650–1250 a.d.), eds Paolo Mastrandrea and Luigi Tessarolo, 2nd edn (Florence, 2010). 10   Prologue 11, ed. Thomas Wright (1856), p. 1. 11   Henry of Avranches, The Metrical Life of Saint Hugh of Lincoln, ed. Charles Garton (Lincoln, 1986). 12   For the contemporary response, see Virgilian Tradition, eds Ziolkowski and Putnam, pp. 5–14. 13   Inferno, 1.79–80 and 86–7, ed. and trans. C. S. Singleton, The Divine Comedy, 3 vols (Princeton, 1971–5). 14   ‘What Is a Classic?’, in T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1957), pp. 52–74. 15   J. D. A. Ogilvy, Books Known to the English, 597–1066 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 258. 16   Ars poetica, ed. Hans-Jürgen Gräbener (Münster/Westfalen, 1965), p. 68, lines 4–5: ‘Apostulus dicit, id est Paulus. Poeta, id est Virgilius.’ 17   On the absence of the classics among manuscripts relating to the Anglo-Saxon mission in Germany, see Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006), pp. 77–81. 18   On Abbo’s sojourn in England, see Roger Wright, ‘Abbo of Fleury in Ramsey (985–987)’, in Elizabeth M. Tyler, Conceptualizing Multilingualism in England, c.800–c.1250 (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 105–20. 19  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 124 and 273–4. 20   See R. S. O. Tomlin, ‘The Book in Roman Britain’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, c.400–1100, ed. Richard Gameson (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 375–88, at p. 380, and Maria Chiara Scappaticcio, ‘Virgilio, allievi e maestri a Vindolanda: per un’edizione di nuovi documenti dal forte britannico’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 169 (2009), 59–70, especially pp. 61–3. 21  Alan K. Bowman and J. David Thomas, The Vindolanda Writing-Tablets = Tabulae Vindolandenses, vol. 3 (2003), p. 160, on Tabulae Vindolandenses 2: 452. ‘Vindolanda’, VE 1339–40. 22   Guy de la Bédoyère, ‘Carausius and the Marks RSR and INPDA’, Numismatic Chronicle 158 (1998), 79–88. 23   The Roman Inscriptions of Britain: II instrumentum domesticum, fascicules 1–8, eds S. S. Frere, M. W. C. Hassall, et al. (Gloucester, 1990–5), vol. 2, fascicule 5, p. 138: 2491 ‘Graffiti on Tiles’, no. 148. Both campester and Campanus could be adjectives rather than names: ‘Untrustworthy Pertacus, countryboy Lucilianus, the Campanian—all fell silent.’

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 24   Roman Inscriptions of Britain, vol. 2, fascicule 4, p. 67: 2447 ‘Wallplaster’, no. 9: ‘bina manu’ (Aeneid, 1.313, 7.688, or 12.165). 25   Roman Inscriptions of Britain, vol. 2, fascicule 4, p. 86: 2448 ‘Mosaics’, no. 6. 26   M. Henig, ‘James Engleheart’s Drawing of a Mosaic at Frampton, 1794’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 106 (1984), 143–6. Alternatively, the scene could have been inspired by Ovid (Metamorphoses, 14.113–15). 27   Georges de Plinval, Pélage, ses écrits, sa vie et sa réforme: étude d’histoire littéraire et religieuse (Lausanne, 1943), pp. 72–4. 28   Paul Lehmann, ‘Einleitung in die lateinische Philologie des Mittelalters’, in Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen 2, ed. Ludwig Traube (Munich, 1911), pp. 1–176, at p. 113. 29   Neil Wright, ‘Gildas’s Reading: A Survey’, Sacris erudiri 32 (1991), 121–62, at p. 129. 30   For a balanced view, see Michael Herren, ‘Scholarly Contacts between the Irish and the Southern English in the Seventh Century’, Peritia 12 (1998), 24–53. 31  Law, Insular Latin Grammarians, p. 9. 32   In the Vita Gudiana 1 Eriugena is credited with a particular explanatory schema for Virgil: see Virgilian Tradition, pp. 254 and 256. 33   Vivien Law, ‘Malsachanus Reconsidered: A Fresh Look at a Hiberno-Latin Grammarian’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1 (1981), 83–93. 34   Giuseppina Barabino, ‘Le citazioni virgiliane in Malsacano’, in Grammatici latini d’età imperiale: miscellanea filologica (Genoa, 1976), pp. 195–218, at pp. 197 and 218. 35   For a classic early expression of the case, see C. H. Beeson, ‘Insular Symptoms in the Commentaries on Vergil’, Studi medievali ns 5 (1932), 81–100. 36   Besides Beeson, ‘Insular Symptoms’, pp. 94–100 see David Daintree, ‘The Transmission of Virgil and Virgil Scholia in Medieval Ireland’, in Romanobarbarica 16 (1999), 33–47. 37   One gloss cites ‘Adamnanus’ in a way that confirms Adomnán’s activity in explicating Virgil: see Michael Lapidge, ‘The Career of Aldhelm’, Anglo-Saxon England 36 (2007), 15–69, at p. 30. 38   See Gertrud Brüning, ‘Adamnans Vita Columbae und ihre Ableitungen’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 11 (1917), 213–304, at p. 241. 39   See Lapidge, ‘The Career of Aldhelm’, at pp. 15–16 and 29–30. 40   See Charles Murgia, ‘Servius, Manuscripts of ’, in The Virgil Encyclopedia, eds Richard F. Thomas and Jan M. Ziolkowski, 3 vols (Oxford, 2014), pp. 1154–7. 41   Murgia, ‘Servius’, p. 1157. 42   Malcolm B. Parkes, ‘The Handwriting of St Boniface: A Reassessment of the Problems’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 98 (1976), 161–79. 43   Peter K. Marshall, ‘The Spangenberg Bifolium of Servius: The Manuscript and the Text’, Rivista di filología e di istruzione classica 128 (2000), 192–209. 44   For Aldhelm, see Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 186; for Alcuin, Ogilvy, Books Known to the English, pp. 241–2; for Byrhtferth, David Ganz, ‘When is a Library Not a Library?’, Early Medieval Europe 17 (2009), 444–53, at p. 452. 45  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 96–7.

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Virgil   Andy Orchard, The Poetic Art of Aldhelm (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 130–5.  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 178–91, especially pp. 188–90. See Variae collectiones aenigmatum Merovingicae aetatis (including Aldhelm’s Aenigmata), ed. Fr. Glorie, CCSL 133 (Turnhout, 1968), 375, line 135. 48   Andy Orchard, ‘Aldhelm’s Library’, in The Cambridge History of the Book, vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 591–605 (at pp. 596–8). 49  Orchard, Poetic Art, p. 132. 50   Neil Wright, ‘Bede and Vergil’, Romanobarbarica 6 (1981), 367–71. 51   Michael Lapidge, ‘Bede and the Poetic Diction of Vergil’, in Poesía latina medieval (siglos V–XV): actas del IV Congreso del ‘Internationales Mittellateinerkomitee’, Santiago de Compostela, 12–15 de septiembre de 2002, eds Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz and José Maria Díaz de Bustamante (Tavarnuzze [Firenze], 2005), pp. 739–48. 52   ‘Bella Maro resonet, nos pacis dona canamus; | munera nos Christi, bella Maro resonet. | Carmina casta mihi, foedae non raptus Helenae, | Luxus erit lubricis, carmina casta mihi. | Dona superna loquar, miserae non proelia Troiae, | Terra quibus gaudet: dona superna loquar’ (‘Let Virgil sing wars, let us sing the gifts of peace; let Virgil sing wars, us the gifts of Christ. My song is chaste, I sing not the rape of sinful Helen; that will be indulgence for the wanton, my song is chaste. I will sing of heavenly gifts, not the battles of piteous Troy; I will sing of heavenly gifts in which the earth rejoices’). Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, trans. J. E. King, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1976–9), 2, 112–13 (translation adapted). 53   Seppo Heikkinen, ‘Vergilian Quotations in Bede’s De arte metrica’, Journal of Medieval Latin 17 (2007), 101–9. 54   M. L. W. Laistner, ‘Bede as a Classical and Patristic Scholar’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Fourth Series 16 (1933), 69–94, at p. 73. 55   Rosalind Love, ‘The Library of the Venerable Bede’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britian, vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 606–32, at p. 629. 56  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 38 n. 44. 57  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 44. 58   The Old English Boethius, Meter 30.3, eds and trans. Susan Irvine and Malcolm R. Godden (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), pp. 380–1. 59   Michael Lapidge, ‘An Aspect of Old English Poetic Diction: The Postpositioning of Prepositions’, in Inside Old English: Essays in Honour of Bruce Mitchell, ed. John Walmsley (Oxford, 2006), pp. 153–80, at pp. 176–9. 60   From the substantial bibliography, the first and latest major studies give an idea of the spectrum that has developed: Friedrich Klaeber, ‘Aeneis und Beowulf ’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 126 (1911), 40–8, and Richard North, The Origins of Beowulf: From Vergil to Wiglaf (Oxford, 2006). The most useful survey of possibly related passages is provided in Tom Burns Haber, A Comparative Study of the Beowulf and the Aeneid (Princeton, 1931). 61  Haber, A Comparative Study, p. 80. Far from everyone is persuaded: see John D. Niles, Beowulf: The Poem and its Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 75–6 and 78, and Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 133. 46 47

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 62   Robert Hasenfratz, ‘Eisegan stefne (Christ and Satan 36a), the Visio Pauli, and ferrea vox (Aeneid 6, 626)’, Modern Philology 86 (1989), 398–403. 63   In the Folie Tristan d’Oxford, the fool claims to have had a whale for his mother, and proceeds then (where the Folie Tristan de Berne identifies his father as a walrus) to refer to a nursing tigress, recalling the Hyrcanian tigress mentioned in Aeneid 4. 367: see Early French Tristan Poems, ed. Norris J. Lacy, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1998). 64  Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 167–219. 65   On the musical notation of Dido laments, see Jan M. Ziolkowski, Nota bene: Reading Classics and Writing Songs in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 275–7 and 286–7, and Jan M. Ziolkowski, ‘Women’s Lament and the Neuming of the Classics’, in Music and Medieval Manuscripts, eds John Haines and Randall Rosenfeld (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 128–50, at pp. 128, 131, 133–5. See also Chapter 3 in this volume by Woods, ‘Experiencing the Classics in Medieval Education’. 66   Birger Munk Olsen, ‘Virgile et la renaissance du XII siècle’, in Lectures médiévales de Virgile: actes du colloque organisé par l’École française de Rome, ed. Jean-Yves Tilliette (Rome, 1985), pp. 31–48, at p. 36. 67   Seth Lerer, ‘John of Salisbury’s Virgil’, Vivarium 20 (1982), 24–39. 68   Metalogicon, 1.24, translated (and construed for the first time in this way) by Édouard Jeauneau, Rethinking the School of Chartres, trans. Claude Paul Desmarais (Toronto, 2009), pp. 84, and 122 n. 273. 69   Translated by Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter, Medieval Rhetoric and Grammar: Language Arts and Literary Theory, ad 300–1475 (Oxford, 2009), p. 536. 70   Policraticus, 6.11. 71  Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 220–69, and Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval ‘Aeneid’ (Minneapolis, 1994), pp. 128–62. 72  Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 22 and 296–7, on London, Lambeth Palace, MS 471. 73   Compare ‘Knight’s Tale’, 1914–2088. 74  Joseph Burney Trapp, ‘The Grave of Vergil’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984), 1–31. 75   The Pilgrimage of Robert Langton, ed. E. M. Blackie (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), transcribed from the unique copy in Lincoln Cathedral, dated 1523. 76   ‘Squire’s Tale’, 231. See Gerald Robert Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1961), p. 187 n. 3. 77   For a summary of the Christian reception of Eclogue 4, see The Virgilian Tradition, eds Ziolkowski and Putnam, pp. 487–8. Useful surveys of the tradition include J. W. Jones, Jr, ‘The Allegorical Traditions of the Aeneid’, in Virgil at 2000: Commemorative Essays on the Poet and his Influence, ed. J. D. Bernard (New York, 1986), pp. 107–32; Stephen Benko, ‘Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue in Christian Interpretation’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 31:1 (Berlin, 1980), 646–705; Pierre Courcelle, ‘Les Exégèses chrétiennes de la quatrième éclogue’, Revue des études anciennes 59 (1957), 294–319.

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Virgil   Ars poetica, ed. Gräbener, p. 7, lines 12–16.   Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS es 121–4 (1924–7), Book 4.71–7, at 73. 80   Fall of Princes, ed. Bergen, Book 9.3401–4: ‘I never was acqueynted with Virgyle, | Nor with sugryd dytees of Omer | Nor Dares Frygius with his goldene style, | Nor with Ovyde, in poetrye moost enteer.’ On Lydgate see also Chapter 22 in this volume by Edwards. 81   Michael P. Kuczynski, ‘Gower’s Virgil’, in On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2007), pp. 163–87. 82   On Douglas’s translation of the Aeneid see further Chapter  26 on Douglas in this ­volume by Royan. 83   Douglas Gray, Later Medieval English Literature (Oxford, 2008), p. 82. 84  Gray, Later Medieval English Literature, pp. 555–63. 85   Siegfried Wenzel, ‘Unrecorded Middle-English Verses’, Anglia 92 (1974), 55–78, at pp. 55–6 (discussion) and 67–8 (text), on Worcester, Cathedral Library, MS F. 126, fol. 12v. 78 79

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Chapter 10

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Ovid and Ovidianism Suzanne Conklin Akbari

This chapter addresses the medieval reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and his writings on love, especially the Ars amatoria and Heroides.1 Through the reception of the Metamorphoses (in commentary, translation, and adaptation) we can trace developments in medieval philosophical conceptions of change. Similarly, developments in the reception of Ovid’s works on love shed light on changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality, with responses to the Heroides providing especially poignant insights into the feminine voice in literature and the symbolic weight of the epistolary form. In the first part of this chapter, I will provide a brief overview of the Latin commentary tradition on Ovid’s Metamorphoses before turning to a closer examination of the vernacular circulation and adaptation of the text. I will focus particularly on the early fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé, which was tremendously important as a source not only within the French-speaking regions that would become the modern French nation but also throughout northern Europe more widely.2 I will give an account of the Middle English reception of Ovidian myth, especially as it was mediated through the Ovide moralisé, which was widely read in medieval England, used by both Gower and Chaucer, and finally translated by William Caxton for the printing press in the late fifteenth century. My account of the medieval English reception of the Metamorphoses as mediated through the Ovide moralisé includes an examination of the Prologue to Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, along with selected episodes from Troilus and Criseyde. While the medieval reception of Ovid was predominantly centred on the Metamorphoses, Ovidian writings on love were also popular, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This period witnessed the production of multiple vernacular French translations as well as a range of texts that adapted Ovid’s framework of the art of love, including the De arte honesti amandi of Andreas Capellanus and the widely influential Roman de la rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Several of Ovid’s writings on love were available to medieval readers, including the Ars amatoria, the Amores, the Remedia amoris, and the Heroides, though the Amores and

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Remedia amoris were less widely circulated than either of the other two. The Heroides circulated independently to some extent, but its constituent letters by unhappy lovers were often inserted as individual epistles within larger compendia. The second part of this chapter will provide an account of the Old French and Middle English reception of Ovidian works on love, especially as seen in the adaptation of individual narratives from the Heroides in the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César—a universal history widely read throughout northern Europe, including England—and in Chaucer’s episodic Legend of Good Women. Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women provides a particularly useful text through which to analyse the late medieval English response to Ovid, because it draws upon not only Ovidian texts on love (the Ars amatoria and, especially, the Heroides) but also the Metamorphoses, as mediated through the Ovide moralisé. By turning to a consideration of how sorrow is connected to the absence of speech, I will suggest that the silencing of voice engendered by loss can be read not only in the multiple medieval redactions of the Philomela myth, but specifically in Chaucer’s idiosyncratic—and much noted—omission of the payoff of Ovidian metamorphosis, that is, the final bodily transformation. I will argue that the lack of final metamorphosed forms, in all of Chaucer’s direct adaptations of Ovidian myth, is a manifestation of this silencing. In the multiple narratives of suffering women that comprise the Legend of Good Women, we find the dead letter of the epistle itself taking the place of the metamorphosed body. Just as in the original Ovidian text—and, in amplified form, in the Ovide moralisé—the metamorphosed form continues to express the fundamental essence of the one who has been transformed, in Chaucer’s writing the remainder of the letter/epistle is the analogue to the metamorphosed form.

Medieval Metamorphoses During the earlier Middle Ages, there is little evidence of the reception and circulation of Ovid before the late eleventh century. Commentaries on Ovid’s Metamorphoses were abundant, however, in the later Middle Ages, from the twelfth-century commentary of Arnulf of Orléans (c.1180), to the thirteenth-century Integumenta Ovidii of John of Garland (c.1234), the anonymous Vulgate prose commentary, the fourteenth-century commentary of Giovanni del Vergilio (c.1321-26), and the Ovidius moralizatus of Pierre Bersuire (c.1350).3 The revival of interest in Ovid’s myth went hand in hand with a broader investigation, particularly in the schools of northern France, of how the fabulous narratives of antiquity might be interpreted to reveal deeper truths—scientific, philosophical, and theological. Arnulf ’s commentary, in particular, can fruitfully be read in the context of the twelfth-century commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid attributed to Bernardus Silvestris, which expounds the first six books of the ancient Latin epic to unfold a range of allegorical interpretations.4

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Ovid and Ovidianism William of Conches’s commentaries on Plato’s Timaeus, Macrobius’ Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, composed during the midtwelfth century, show a similar eagerness to expound poetic language allegorically. William articulates this practice more explicitly than perhaps any other twelfth-­ century author in his account of how the ‘integumentum’ or ‘involucrum’—a veil, covering, or wrapping—hides within it deeper truths that can be expounded by the acute reader.5 What these Latin commentaries have in common is the level of learning that would have been required to read them. With the rise of vernacular adaptations of Ovid’s myths in the twelfth century, a wider audience became more familiar with the linked narratives contained in the Metamorphoses, and even with the moralizations that might be associated with individual myths. During the twelfth century, French verse translations began to appear of selected myths, including Narcissus, Pyramus and Thisbe, and Philomela (‘Philomena’). Like the roughly contemporary romans antiques—romance adaptations of the ancient epics of Rome, Troy, and Thebes—these French renditions of Ovidian myth brought the Latin texts of the schools to a more diverse set of readers. While these twelfth-century vernacular renditions of Ovid were probably read for the most part by a courtly audience, by the later Middle Ages an increasingly wide range of audiences had access to vernacular versions of Ovidian myth. The Ovide moralisé, an allegorical exposition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses written in the early fourteenth century and surviving in twenty-one manuscripts, is one of the main vehicles for the transmission of Ovidian myth during the later Middle Ages.6 Major writers of the period, including Chaucer, Gower, and Christine de Pizan, read the Ovide moralisé not just for its individual presentations of classical myths in a vernacular language, but for the broader perspectives it offered on the meaning of change. In addition, the Ovide moralisé is structured within a framework of categories that could be used to define the nature of distinctive states of being. This section of the essay will sketch out one framework for understanding the medieval reading of the Metamorphoses as philosophical allegory or integument: that is, the Aristotelian categories of being— animal, vegetable, and mineral. Though it is a commonplace to identify the three-part division of ‘animal, vegetable, and mineral’ as an Aristotelian construct, this distinction is more implicit than explicit in Aristotle’s own writings. In the Historia animalia, he describes a kind of hierarchy that structures living things, rising up from simpler to more complex forms; the life of plants is simpler than that of animals, while the material being of soulless matter—stone, water, wood—is simpler still. Man is at the top of the hierarchy, being part of the animal world but distinct from it, as Aristotle makes clear in his De anima (2.3): all living things, Aristotle writes, have souls. Plants have a vegetative soul, which enables them to grow and reproduce; animals have not only a vegetative soul but also a sensitive soul, which enables them to feel and move; human beings

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature have not only a vegetative soul and a sensitive soul but also a rational soul, which allows them to think and, importantly, to express their thoughts through language. To some extent this Aristotelian framework of being is at work in the Ovidian text, though it is intensely problematized by the Pythagorean philosophy of the transmigration of souls explored in Book 15 of the Metamorphoses. In the Ovide moralisé, however, the Aristotelian framework is made more explicit through the anonymous poet’s close attention to the role of sens (that is, sensation) and son (that is, sound) in bridging the gaps that separate the rational soul, the sensitive soul, and the vegetative soul. Here it is useful to summarize, on the terms of the Ovide moralisé, the consequences of metamorphosis with respect to the tripartite soul. Human beings who are transformed into matter (such as Niobe, whose pride causes her to be changed into stone) lose all three parts of the tripartite soul—vegetative, sensitive, and rational. Therefore, Niobe is said to lose the facility of motion that is essential to the sensitive soul (she ‘ne pot remouvoir Ça ne la’, ‘could move neither here nor there’, 6.1368) and, ultimately, life itself: ‘La vie et la parole pert’ (‘she loses both life and speech’, 6.1365).7 Human beings who become plants retain the vegetative soul that provides for growth and reproduction, but lose the sensitive and rational souls. For example, when Daphne flees from the erotic advances of Apollo and is transformed into the laurel, she is said to change from being ‘agile’ to being ‘firmly placed’: ‘Li piez isneaus de la meschine | Fu tenus a ferme racine’ (‘The agile feet of the maiden became firmly placed roots’, 1.3033–4). Human beings who are metamorphosed into animals, however, retain the quality of agility, as when Actaeon becomes a stag following his forbidden look at Diana, and flees ‘plus isnelement’ (‘more hastily’) than he had ever done before (3.473). Similarly, Alcione’s transformation takes place when the woman running ‘isnelement’ suddenly becomes the bird in flight (11.3758). An apparent violation of this phenomenon appears in the story of the sisters Leucothoë and Clytie, the former beloved by the sun god and the latter suffering the pains of unrequited love for Phoebus. After their metamorphoses into plants, the ‘encens’ and the heliotrope (or ‘flor d’amors’), both are ‘enracinee’, rooted to the ground (4.1449, 1482). Curiously, however, immediately after each is said to be ‘enracinee’, she seems to continue to display the quality of motion: the ‘vergete | D’encens’ that is Leucothoë ‘dou cors sort hautete’ (‘emerges upward out of the body’, 4.1450–1), while Clytie, as a flower, ‘Tous jours a sa face tournee | Vers le soleil, quel part qu’il aille’ (‘always has her face turned toward the sun, whichever way he goes’, 4.1483–4). Their movement is still intelligible within the definitions of the tripartite soul, for Leucothoë’s apparent motion is simply the motion of vegetable growth, while that of her sister Clytie is heliotropism, the involuntary movement generated in plant life by the vivifying power of the sun. Sens, in the French vernacular, denotes sense in both aspects of the modern English term. It refers both to the sensitive quality of the soul (what we perceive

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Ovid and Ovidianism through our senses) and the intellect (to be sensible, or have good sense). We see this term repeated throughout the Ovide moralisé, referring to the loss suffered by those who, through metamorphosis, have come to lack the sensitive soul. Niobe, when she is turned to stone, loses all qualities of soul, because she ‘la vie et la parole pert’ (‘loses both life and speech’, 6.1365). Even as stone, however, Niobe continues to weep: ‘plore et encor vait plorant | Li marbre et de lermes corant’ (‘the marble weeps and continues to weep, running with tears’, 13.77–8); cf. Ovid, ‘et lacrimas etiam nunc marmora manant’, 6.312).8 Those transformed into plants, however, specifically lose the quality of sens. For example, when the jealous Clytie is transformed into a heliotropic flower, she is said to lose her ‘sens’ (4.1476); similarly, when Myrrha is transformed into a myrrh tree, she loses ‘le sens’ (10.1955). In the story of Myrrha, however, the loss of sens in the transmuted plant appears as the culmination of a long meditation on the role of Myrrha’s concealed unnatural ‘sens’ (that is, her feelings of sexual desire for her father) and her fear that her father will discover Myrrha’s ‘sens’ through his own ‘sens’ (that is, his intellect). Myrrha says to herself: Ce m’esbahist et desconforte Que mes peres est sages hom. Tant a de sens et de raison . . . Mout m’est grief que tant le voi sage, Quar trop chier comperrai son sens. S’il sentist le mal que je sens Plus tost m’otroiast mon voloir. Trop me fet ses grans sens doloir. (It makes me abashed and ashamed that my father is a wise man. He has so much sense and reason . . . It is a great sorrow to me that I see well that he is wise, For I will pay for his sense all too dearly. If he were to perceive the ills that I feel He would very soon grant my desire. His great wisdom makes me all too sorrowful.) (10.1267–9, 1273–7)

Here, Myrrha’s father’s abundance of ‘sens’ and reason is precisely the problem: it threatens to reveal the forbidden passion that Myrrha feels (‘sens’) and that she wishes he would also feel. The father’s ‘sens’ makes his daughter sorrowful, because it is capable of unveiling the erotic longing of her senses. The wordplay on this term reappears later in the narrative, with Myrrha’s metamorphosis into the tree: ‘Li sans en seve se mua . . . Le cors et le sens a perdu’ (‘The blood changed into sap . . . She lost both body and intellect’, 10.1943, 1955). Here, Myrrha’s transformation results in her loss of ‘sens’, as in the case of others changed into vegetation, such as Clytie. In addition, however, the loss of ‘sens’ is mirrored in the language of bodily change, in

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature which ‘sans’ (blood) becomes ‘seve’ (sap). The loss of ‘sens’ is concomitant with the alteration of ‘sans’ into the precious drops of myrrh that flow from the tree. While those transformed into animals do not lose the sensitive soul they had as human beings, it does seem to be diminished. For example, as Alcione begins her transformation into a seabird following the loss of her beloved Ceyx, she is said to be lacking in ‘sens’: ‘Plus se deult et mains de sens a’ (‘The more she mourns, the less sense she has’, 11.3742). The loss suffered by those changed into animals is not sens, but son: that is, not sense but intelligible sound. We see this in the case of Actaeon, who—seeing his horned face reflected in the water—cries out in anguish: ‘Las mescheant’ se deïst, S’il ëust loisir de mot dire. D’angoisseuz cuer gient et souspire, C’autrement ne puet mot soner, N’il ne set autre son doner. Lermes li corent par le vis, Qui trop est changiez, ce m’est vis. (‘Alas, all is lost,’ he would have wished to say, If he had been able to say a word. With a heart full of anguish he whimpers and sighs, Because otherwise he cannot sound a word. Nor does he know how to make any other sound. Tears stream down his face, He who is very much changed, it seems to me.) (3.478–84)

Ovid merely says that Actaeon lacks ‘voice’ (‘vox’, 3.201–2). For the author of the Ovide moralisé, however, Actaeon’s reduction to the level of the sensitive soul results in enforced muteness. He literally does not know (‘ne set’) how to make intelligible sound. While Ovid emphasizes Actaeon’s retention of his rational faculty, stating that ‘only his mind remains unchanged’ (‘mens tantum pristina mansit’, line 203), the author of the Ovide moralisé instead conforms more closely to the Aristotelian framework. He renders Ovid’s line concerning Actaeon’s intact, pristine intellect as a reduction of thought to its most basic, primitive level: Actaeon is left with only ‘le corage | E la premeraine pensee’ (‘the heart/and the most basic thought’, 3.468–9).9 Like Myrrha, he is able to express himself only through the natural signs of tears. In the Ovide moralisé, as we have seen, the Aristotelian framework serves to firm up the boundaries separating the different forms of being—vegetable, animal, and human—intermingled throughout Ovid’s great poem. At the same time, however, even while the author of the Ovide moralisé emphasizes the restrictions upon communication experienced by those who are metamorphosed, he

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Ovid and Ovidianism reveals the paradoxical fecundity of language unleashed by the metamorphosis itself. To put it another way, in the Ovide moralisé, through the polysemous nature of the allegorical narrative, the muteness of the transformed being is rendered loquacious. This phenomenon appears, for example, in the Ovide moralisé’s account of Ceyx and Alcione. Alcione urges her husband not to make his ill-fated voyage across the sea, punning on the repeated terms ‘amie’ (beloved), ‘amer’ (to love), and ‘mer’ (the sea): Vous volez lessier votre amie, Moi, que tant soliez amer, Por vous metre em peril de mer? (You wish to leave your beloved, Me, whom you used to love so much, In order to place yourself in peril on the sea?) (11.3029–31)

Similar terms reappear near the end of the narrative, when Alcione is finally confronted with the image of her husband’s dead body and laments his failure to listen to her warnings. Here, however, the wordplay is centred not on the terms ‘mer’ and ‘amer’, but on the term ‘mors’ (death), which is coupled with ‘amoie’—that is, love in the past tense: Mors est Ceyx, que trop amoie. Mors est et je sui morte o soi. (Ceyx is dead, whom I loved too much. He is dead, and I am dead with him.) (11.3687–8)

Although their bodies cannot be laid to rest together, the lovers can be united through the power of the word. Ovid says simply that their names can be placed together on their funerary monument: ‘nomen nomine tangam’ (‘still shall I touch you, name with name’, 11.707). For the author of the Ovide moralisé, however, the union of the lovers takes place through the play of words, gathered together even though nature attempts to tear them apart: Nos nons ne seront mais disjoint, Ains seront ensamble assamblé. (Our names will never be separated But rather will be gathered together.) (11.3703–4)

Similar wordplay, often involving mors and amors, appears throughout the Ovide moralisé, as in the tale of Philomela and Procne, and the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe. Significantly, such wordplay already appears in the twelfth-century vernacular

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature renditions of these myths adapted by the author of the Ovide moralisé into his text, suggesting that he is elaborating a much older literary convention. The influence of the Ovide moralisé was felt in northern European literary tradition on two levels: in the dissemination of the Ovidian myths in vernacular form, often stripped of some or all of the allegorical signification; and in the dissemination of the system of thought we have observed in the text, which participates in the fundamentally Neoplatonic epistemology of the integument, or allegorical veil. Later writers of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries would both adapt the individual myths recounted in the Ovide moralisé and draw upon the systems of thought integrated in the text—but often not at the same textual moment.10 The adaptations of Ovidian myth by Gower and Chaucer are particularly interesting to read in tandem, because these two poets tend to refract the same myth in radically different ways.11 One striking difference that separates these two, however, is Chaucer’s often-noted habit of omitting the climax of the Ovidian narrative: that is, the metamorphosis itself. A close reading of the Ovide moralisé, such as that which we have carried out above, helps to illuminate the nature of Chaucer’s engagement with the Metamorphoses. While he frequently adapts the narrative thread of the individual Ovidian myth, he omits the transformative integumental moment that we have observed in the Ovide moralisé, the climactic shift that is marked by an outpouring of polysemy. Instead, he shifts this integumental moment to other contexts, which lack the straightforward recounting of the Ovidian narrative, but instead obliquely allude to the mythographic context. For example, the story of Ceyx and Alcione—recounted in hauntingly poetic terms in the Ovide moralisé, as we have seen—serves a very different purpose in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess. Recounted as part of the preface to the dream-vision that follows, the narrator offers a summary of his bedtime reading that stops short of the climactic transformation of Alcione’s weeping body into the seabird in flight. Instead, Alcione’s revelatory dream ends abruptly, with the prophetic sight of the Ovidian text replaced by blindness and death: With that hir eyen up she casteth [eyes] And saw noght. ‘Allas!’ quod she for sorwe, [nothing] And deyede within the thridde morwe. [third  morning] (212–14).12

Similarly abrupt refusals of the transformative moment appear throughout the stories of the Legend of Good Women, such as that of Philomela. Stopping short not just of the metamorphosis itself but also of the hideous feast that precipitates it, Chaucer’s Philomela remains eternally in her sister’s embrace: ‘In armes everych of hem other taketh, | And thus I late hem in here sorwe dwelle’ (2381–2). Here too,  the immersion into ‘sorwe’ halts the narrative, leaving the transformative

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Ovid and Ovidianism moment—undoubtedly familiar from the widely available Ovidian textual tradition of the late fourteenth century—to be supplied by the reader. Elsewhere, however, Chaucer gives full rein to the integumental moment of ­metamorphosis, adapting the Ovide moralisé’s eruption of polysemy into a different poetic register. We can see this illustrated in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, where the myth of Clytie and Leucothoë serves as an Ovidian intertext to the narrator’s triangulation between his own desire for the daisy, the daisy’s desire for the sun, and the intense gaze shared by the great ‘eye of day’ in the sky and the little ‘day’s eye’ on the grassy turf.13 Ovid’s narrative tells how ‘even the Sun’ falls in love, recounting the union of Phoebus Apollo with Leucothoë, the jealousy of Clytie, whose love for the Sun is unrequited, and Leucothoë’s death. Buried alive by her furious father, Leucothoë re-emerges from the soil as fragrant incense, as we saw recounted in the Ovide moralisé. Clytie is also metamorphosed into vegetable form, but in the form of the heliotrope, her gaze endlessly following the rays of the Sun. Appropriately, the narrator’s encounter with the daisy evokes a second Ovidian intertext, that of Jupiter clothed in the form of the bull. He arises early and goes: With dredful herte and glad devocioun, For to ben at the resureccioun Of this flour, whan that yt shulde unclose Agayn the sonne, that roos as red as rose, That in the brest was of the beste, that day, That Agenores doghtre ladde away.

[fearful] [be  resurrection] [flower  when it should open] [against  rose] [breast  beast] [daughter  led] (F Prol. 109–14)

This complex web of Ovidian intertextuality connects together the narrator, the daisy, and the sun in a three-part union that includes not only Clytie, Leucothoë, and Phoebus but also Europa and Jupiter, as the sun’s presence in the constellation Taurus (marking the May Day setting of the encounter, ‘the firste morwe [morrow] of May’, F 108) links multiple encounters of the divine and human. For the narrator to encounter the doubled object of desire found in the mutual gaze of the sun and the daisy is to enter the integumental moment as it unfolds across time, manifested not only in the myth of Clytie, Leucothoë, and Phoebus, but also in the myth of Europa and Jupiter. Similar integumental moments can be found in Troilus and Criseyde, where the myth of Philomela—while never recounted in full—appears twice in the poem. Philomela appears first allusively (and ominously) at the opening of Book 2, as Pandarus sets briskly about his amorous errand to his niece (2.64–70), and second in the ecstatic union of the lovers in Book 3, where Criseyde, assured of the ‘trouthe and clene entente’ [truth and honest intent] (3.1229) of Troilus’ love, ‘Opned hire herte’ to him just as the ‘newe abaysed [startled] nyghtyngale,’ reassured, lets

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature ‘hire  vois [voice] out rynge’ (3.1233–39). As in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, the integumental moment of Book 3 of Troilus and Criseyde adds an additional Ovidian intertext at this crucial moment: And as aboute a tree, with many a twiste, Bytrent and writh the swote wodebynde, [encircles wreathes sweet honeysuckle] Gan ech of hem in armes other wynde. [began] (3.1230–2)

This additional intertext, referring obliquely to the myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, but more generally evoking the multiple vegetable metamorphoses of Ovid’s poem, comes immediately prior to the allusion to the ‘nyghtyngale’. As with the multiplication of the Ovidian referent in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, the integumental moment is intensified; like the daisy that undergoes a daily ‘resurrecioun’ (Legend F 110), Troilus ‘from his deth is brought in sykernesse’ (3.1243). In each case, the fulfilment of desire results in a moment of stasis, linked across linear time by a whole series of comparable moments of bliss, conveyed through the veil of the Ovidian integument. The annihilation of hope and the frustration of desire, conversely, generates a moment of frantic motion—again expressed through Ovidian integument. When Troilus learns that Criseyde is to be exchanged, separated from him by the besieged walls of Troy, he undergoes a metaphorical metamorphosis: And as in winter leves ben biraft, Ech after other, til the tree be bare, So that ther nys but bark and braunche ilaft, Lith Troilus, byraft of ech welfare, Ibounden in the blake bark of care, Disposed wood out of his wit to breyde, So sore hym sat the chaungynge of Criseyde.

[stripped away]

He rist hym up, and every dore he shette And wyndow ek, and tho this sorwful man Upon his beddes syde adown hym sette, Ful lik a ded ymage, pale and wan; And in his brest the heped wo bygan Out breste, and he to werken in this wise In his woodnesse, as I shal yow devyse.

[arose shut] [also then]

Right as the wylde bole bygynneth sprynge, Now her, now ther, idarted to the herte, And of his deth roreth in compleynynge, Right so gan he aboute the chaumbre sterte, Smytyng his brest ay with his fistes smerte.

[wild bull begins to spring] [pierced] [roars] [began to leap up] [beating painfully] (4.225–43)

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[is nothing left] [stripped  good thing] [In a state to go mad out of his mind]

[heaped up] [to burst out  act in this way] [madness describe]

Ovid and Ovidianism Like Myrrha, who begs for transformation so that she will offend ‘neither the living nor the dead’ and willingly plunges her face to meet the rising bark, Troilus plunges into his state of ‘woodnesse’ (4.238), bound in the black bark of care. The woe ‘out breste’ from ‘his brest’ (236–7), in an effervescence of polysemy that recalls the integumental moments we noted in the Ovide moralisé. The metaphorical metamorphosis of Troilus shifts from the tree of Myrrha to the flesh of the bull, in which Jupiter clothes himself to encounter humankind. This moment, too, is ecstatic; Troilus stands outside himself, pushed to the extreme limit of human experience by sorrow just as he was, in the paradise chamber of Book 3, pushed to that limit by the experience of blissful union with Criseyde. But while in the earlier moment Troilus was ‘from his deth . . . brought in sykernesse’ (3.1243), here he is ‘ful lik a ded ymage, pale and wan’ (4.235). As we will see, the extremity of sorrow expressed through Troilus’ metaphorical metamorphosis is also Chaucer’s focus in the other Ovidian text that plays a key role in his works: that is, the letters written in the voices of women that comprise the Heroides.

Arts of Love and Dead Letters The Ovidian legacy to the Middle Ages included a range of texts on love: the Ars amatoria, the Amores, the Remedia amoris, and the Heroides. Of these, the Ars amatoria and the Heroides were the most widely circulated, both in Latin and, from the thirteenth century onward, in vernacular translations.14 Beyond the circulation of the Latin texts of these works and their vernacular translations, their influence was felt indirectly through the adaptation of Ovidian writing on love in some of the most widely disseminated texts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, including Andreas Capellanus’ De arte honesti amandi and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose, both of which draw explicitly upon the Ars amatoria. Ovid’s literary production concerning the art of love is often described in terms of an evolving sequence, although the actual dating of the works is less than certain: the elegiac metres of the Amores, declaring the poet’s love for Corinna, and the epistolary Heroides give way to the didactic field manual to love that is the Ars amatoria, which in turn inspired the production of a kind of anti-art of love in the form of the Remedia amoris, a book of counsel to the lover warning him on how best to avoid the negative effects of eros.15 There is ample evidence of the use of both the Ars amatoria and the Remedia amoris in school curricula during the twelfth century, though the Ars amatoria steadily gained in popularity as the period went on.16 Students were encouraged to learn Latin prose and verse composition through imitation of ancient authors, which was an important aspect of the use of these Ovidian texts on love.17

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The popularity of the Ars amatoria is attested both by the number of surviving Latin manuscripts (twenty-three from the thirteenth century)18 and by the proliferation of vernacular translations of the text: several Old French translations and adaptations were produced during the thirteenth century, including no less than four verse translations and one in prose.19 The four verse translations survive in fourteen manuscripts, while the prose translation survives in four, with evidence of five more copies found in library catalogues of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.20 There is evidence of still other translations that are now lost—most tantalizingly, in the prologue to Cligés, Chrétien de Troyes alludes to his own translation of Ovid’s Ars amatoria. What is striking here is not simply the number of surviving manuscripts of the translation, but the number of different versions of the text: clearly, the Ars amatoria inspired a range of responses, in verse as well as prose, loose adaptations as well as careful renditions. In addition, major literary works of the period explicitly allude to their engagement with or even appropriation of the Ars amatoria. In his opening portion of the Roman de la rose, Guillaume de Lorris identifies his work as ‘li roman de la rose | ou l’art d’amors est tote enclose’ [‘The Romance of the Rose | where the Art of Love is entirely enclosed’].21 The Ovidian art of love thus serves as the foundation of a court centred on service to the ‘dieu d’amors’ or ‘god of love’; for Guillaume, however, this Ovidian amatory framework is closely integrated with the Ovidian discourse of metamorphosis, particularly through the doomed figure of Narcissus.22 Jean de Meun’s continuation of the poem maintains both of these Ovidian frameworks, countering Guillaume’s mythic figure of Narcissus with that of Pygmalion, thus replacing an emblem of sterile, self-directed love with an emblem of exuberant fertility, and shifting the focus of the Ars amatoria intertext from the notion of a handbook of love practices to a central focus on the role of the go-between—Jean’s ‘Vielle’, the old nurse who is charged with guarding the vulnerable beloved, but who might be persuaded to serve as a valuable aid to the lover who follows the erotic handbook of the Ars amatoria.23 Chaucer’s reception of the Ars amatoria was both direct and mediated through his reading of the Roman de la rose, a text that he himself translated. The Canterbury pilgrim who is universally thought to be Chaucer’s most lifelike and original invention, the Wife of Bath, is paradoxically a literary construct arising from the Ovidian figure of the old nurse, as filtered through Jean de Meun’s Vielle.24 The Heroides can also be seen as part of the Ovidian constellation of works on love, but its impact on medieval literary history goes beyond the view of love conveyed in the letters. The epistolary format of the Heroides imbued the individual letters with a quasi-documentary status, so that an epistle extracted from Ovid’s text could be taken as testimony concerning historical events recounted in chronicle form. In addition, each individual letter—often written just prior to the writer’s violent death—has the status of an epitaph, or perhaps even a relic, providing mute witness to the intense emotions of love and loss that engendered the letter. The

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Ovid and Ovidianism Heroides have a rich tradition of reception; perhaps some of the most interesting manifestations of this reception appear in universal chronicles, in which these letters written in the voice of sorrowful women are interwoven within the Troy story. The letters serve two purposes in this setting: first, they provide a kind of feminized ‘mirror for princes’, counselling medieval women on what to do and—more often— what to avoid; second, they provide moments of punctuation marking the seemingly endless series of battles that lead inexorably, step by step, to the climactic destruction of Troy. Medieval manuscripts of the Latin text of the Heroides date from the eleventh century. Beginning in the thirteenth century, however, vernacular translations began to be produced, including the Castilian text included in the General estoria commissioned by Alfonso X, and the French text included in the second redaction of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’á César produced in the fourteenth century. (One letter, that of Penelope, also appears in the first redaction of the text.) In each case, the letters survive not as a compilation but rather as interleaved epistles that mark significant moments in a larger vision of history. As Javier Puerto Benito points out in his study of the General estoria, these ‘women’s’ letters’ are presented as part of the historical evidence, as ‘historical letters that were originally composed by actual noble women’.25 In part, this is in keeping with an effort to euhemerize myth, to assimilate materials associated with poetic fiction to the historian’s task, recounting the past in order to serve the moral imperatives of the present day. Helen, Paris, and the neglected shepherdess Oenone become part of the history of Troy, while women deceived by the gods (such as Semele, seduced by Jove and then tricked by Juno) demonstrate clearly that ‘one should not take advice from an enemy’.26 Something similar takes place in the Histoire ancienne, a universal chronicle that has its origins in the early thirteenth century but whose major second redaction, carried out in the latter half of the fourteenth century, demonstrates in the most vivid way the extent to which literature and historical chronicle can sometimes intersect.27 This universal history, whose basic structure is patterned on the early fifth-century chronicle of Orosius, orders the history of the world into a series of ages, beginning with the account of creation found in Genesis and moving sequentially through the various empires that have ruled the world—Babylon, Macedonia, Carthage, Troy, Rome—and ending with the northern European military expeditions of Julius Caesar. The second redaction, however, replaces the history of Troy included in the original text with a romance: namely, a prose redaction of Benoît de Saint-Maure’s Roman de Troie.28 Within this romance, itself embedded within the framework of the universal history, are further embedded a series of letters from the Heroides. The letters, thirteen in all, begin with two examples widely separated from the main cluster (Oenone [‘Cenona’] to Paris, fols 53–5, and Laodamia to Prothesilaus, fols 64–5); these two letters set the stage for the first battle in a long series of Trojan military engagements. After that, a series of five letters appear in quick succession

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (across twenty-three folios, fols 80–103), marking significant moments in the ongoing siege of the city: these letters, however fictional, are presented as though they were historical documents, missives sent out from a city under siege. They include letters sent to Greek warriors by wives waiting at home, such as those of Ariadne to Theseus and Phyllis to Demophon, as well as those exchanged within Troy, such as the letters that pass between Paris and Helen. After the ninth battle, another quasi-historical letter appears, this one sent to Achilles by his former lover Briseis after the Greek warrior falls in love with the Trojan princess Polyxena (fol. 118). From this point on, a series of three letters follow that are attached to the Trojan War only in the most superficial way, by means of a perfunctory fiction that associates one of those named in the letter with the events of the siege. The first two of these three letters, exchanged between Hero and Leander, comprise a male–female pairing that echoes the earlier exchange of letters in the Heroides between Paris and Helen. The third of these three letters is from Canace to her lover (and brother) Machaire (‘Machareus’). Like the letters of Hero and Leander, the letter of Canace is only superficially and artificially attached to the story of Troy; these three therefore serve a rather different function from the more specifically Trojan letters than precede them. The extracts from the Heroides embedded in the Histoire ancienne come to an end with two more letters that, like the two letters by Oenone and Laodamia that begin the group, are separated from the ­central sequence. Here, after a gap of more than forty folios, we find two letters marking the aftermath of the fall of Troy: one letter from Penelope to Ulysses, and another from Hermione to Horaste. It should be clear from this overview that the inserted letters serve a vital function within the account of Troy: in addition to providing moral precepts to govern women’s behaviour, as was also the case in the Castilian General estoria, they underpin the narrative of the siege of the city, providing a kind of affective punctuation to the inevitable fall of Troy. Siege poems such as the Roman de Thebes and the Roman de Troie include detailed accounts of funeral monuments whose elaborate ekphrastic descriptions serve to momentarily slow down the forward movement of the military conquest.29 The sequence of battles, punctuated by these ornamental tombs, marks an incremental movement toward the inevitable end of the city; concurrently, the forward movement of translatio imperii takes place, as imperial power moves from one metropolis to another—in this case, from Troy to Rome. These interpolated letters from the Heroides function in a way that is similar to the tomb ekphrases of the Roman de Thebes and the Roman de Troie: they too momentarily slow down the flow of narrative, causing the reader to pause over a kind of portrait or epitome of the human, affective engagement that is normally effaced by the tides of war. The function of the individual letter in the sequence can be usefully analysed through a close look at the sequence of three extracts from the Heroides that are, as noted above, only very superficially attached to the Troy narrative. It is easy to see

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Ovid and Ovidianism why we might find letters by Helen, Paris, and Briseis; it is less clear why we find letters from Hero, Leander, and Canace. As noted above, the interpolator briefly justifies his inclusion of these letters by associating one of the figures named in them with the siege of Troy: as Luca Barbieri puts it in his edition of the interpolated letters, the adaptation of Hero and Leander’s exchange is ‘totally generic and could be adapted to the description of any couple separated as a result of war’.30 The adaptation of Canace’s letter to her brother Machaire has a similarly superficial (and artificial) connection with Troy: the letter is introduced with the statement that Machaire was a warrior on the Greek side. The position of the letter, however, seems less gratuitous: Canace’s letter, which is the last of the main cluster of extracts from the Heroides, appears immediately before the death of Troilus—an event which, in the Histoire ancienne as in the Roman de Troie, marks the last barrier to the inevitable collapse of the Trojan defences. Canace’s letter thus marks a moment of despair that is at once an end and a beginning, a moment of closure that simultaneously signals an opening up to a new phase of imperial succession. This paradoxical quality, fundamental to the process of translatio imperii, is aptly epitomized in the plight of Canace, whose love relation is equally paradoxical—her brother is both father and uncle to the child she carries—and whose offspring endures a brief life span whose beginning is almost co-terminous with its ending. As Canace puts it, in the medieval French translation, speaking to her child, ‘This day is your first day, and your last’ (‘Ce jour t’est premier et derrenier’).31 The French translation of the letter of Canace included in the Histoire ancienne differs in several ways from the Latin original. From the opening lines of the letter, the French translation modifies the scenario to remove the looming prospect of suicide that is so conspicuous in Ovid’s text. Canace’s death, in the French text, is foreshadowed; but instead of facing the prospect of a self-inflicted death, she anticipates the time when she, like her infant child, will be devoured by the wild beasts of the forest. The term ‘bestes sauvages’ is repeated several times in the text, in an innovative departure from the Latin original, as Canace describes how she will go into the woods to look for ‘les os de mon enfant’, ‘the bones of my infant’: there, ‘the same beasts who devoured him, will devour me along with him’ (‘les bestes meïsmes qui l’ont devoré, qui me devoreront avec lui’).32 Canace goes on to request that her remains and those of her infant be housed in the same ‘sepulture’, in a detail that corresponds to the Latin original; the French text’s emphasis on the ‘bestes sauvages’, however, creates a sense of repetition, as Canace first anticipates being bodily reunited with her child within the belly of the beast, and then being reunited once again within the ‘sepulture’ that will remain as a permanent monument. Other changes arising in the course of the translation of the Canace letter include several elements that reinforce romance conventions, notably the role of the nurse: while in the original epistle, Canace describes conversations she had before childbirth with her brother, in the translation these conversations are instead carried on

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature with her nurse (‘nourrice’). This change not only conforms to romance conventions but also recalls the central role of the nurse as go-between in the Ovidian art of love text. In addition, the exchanges between Canace and her nurse consistently echo corresponding passages in the Metamorphoses concerning Myrrha and her father, who were similarly brought together by a helpful nurse, with similarly tragic results. More subtle but still significant alterations introduced in the French translation highlight the extent to which the letter of Canace might function as a moral guide. Nowhere is this cautionary aspect of the letter so conspicuous as in a moment of direct address in which Canace speaks to her female readers: ‘And for this reason’, she writes, ‘I beg you all, sisters and female friends, that you take an example from me, and that you take a husband before you do any kind of foolish act as I have done’ (‘Et pour ce vous prie je toutes, sorelles et amies, que vous aiés exemple de moy, et que vous praigniés mari avant que vous faciés semblable folie comme je ai fete’).33 As in the Castilian General estoria, the historical account has embedded within it moral counsels for women, creating what Javier Puerto Benito characterizes as a ‘speculum princeps for women’ along the lines of Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum or Alfonso X’s own Libro de los doze sabios.34 The French text of Canace’s letter makes it clear that she will be memorialized— not only in the material monument that she begs her brother to provide for her bones and those of their child, but also in the letter itself, which serves as a kind of relic that remains behind as a reminder or memorial. But a memorial of what? In the French text, there is no mistaking what is memorialized along with the bones of Canace: it is shame, ‘honte’ or ‘vergoigne’, roughly synonymous terms that are repeated several times in the French text. The emphasis on shame functions on two levels: in terms of the guide to feminine deportment conveyed through these vernacular Heroides, it reminds young women of the dangers of imprudent love; in terms of the historical account in which the letter is embedded, it accomplishes something rather different. In the context of the fall of Troy and the onward transmission of translatio imperii, from one metropolitan centre of power to another, shame serves as a transitional marker, revealing the flip side of desire. It is expressed not only on the level of the individual but on the level of the population, as the power of Troy wanes and imperium moves on to another national capital. Shame is rooted in loss, in the interplay of desire, fulfilment, and punishment. The importance of the medieval transmission of the Heroides extends far beyond the basic significance of the inclusion of letters from the Heroides in the universal chronicle of the Histoire ancienne. The circulation of the letter of Canace as an element in the Troy story provides a particularly important context for the general depiction of Canace in late medieval English literature. Chaucer alludes to the story in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, a text which also provides a series of ‘women’s’ voices—not in the form of letters, as in the Heroides, but in the form of ‘saints’ legends of Cupid’.35 In the Prologue, within the inset ballade ‘Hyd, Absolon,

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Ovid and Ovidianism thy gilte tresses clere’, which names many figures of the past—of the Bible, of history, of classical myth, and of medieval romance—who were unhappy in love, Chaucer mentions Canace in a Heroides grouping: Herro, Dido, Laudomia, alle yfere, And Phillis, hangyng for thy Demophoun, And Canace, espied by thy chere, Ysiphile, betrayed with Jasoun, Maketh of your trouthe neythir boost ne soun; Nor Ypermystre or Adriane, ye tweyne: My lady cometh, that al this may dysteyne.

[Hero  all together] [disclosed expression] [Hypsipyle] [boast nor sound] [Hypermestra  Ariadne you both] [who  may disdain] (F Prol., 263–9)

Here is a memorializing, not only of the ‘good women’ who will form Chaucer’s ‘saints’ legends of Cupid’, but of the desperation and savagery of love itself. Chaucer invokes Canace’s guilt, as revealed painfully in her expressive face (‘espied by thy chere’), with an obliqueness that is almost heavy-handed.36 Yet it also opens out to the transformative history of Canace, from Ovid to her vernacular incarnations, as a figure of the impossibility of resisting sexual desire which, paradoxically, must be resisted. Even as the narrator invokes Canace and her fellow tragic heroines in order to silence their claims to ‘trouthe’ in the presence of his own lady’s superior virtue, Canace’s image will haunt the Legend of Good Women as a sign of the self-destructiveness of love, her shame and punishment the inevitable obverse of desire. John Gower gives a strikingly powerful version of this story in Confessio amantis (3. 143–360), where he shows Canace, like the poet himself, writing with the ink of her own tears, an image that profoundly informs the Confessio amantis as a whole. Gower’s extraordinarily poignant version of the Canace story seems to have been a provocation to Chaucer. In the Introduction to the ‘Man of Law’s Tale’, the narrator praises ‘Chaucer’ for having carefully eschewed the story of Canace. But certainly no word ne writeth he Of thilke wikke ensample of Canacee, That loved hir owene brother sinfully— Of swiche cursed stories I sey fy!—

[this wicked] [her own] [such  say fie] (II.77–80)

The careful exclusion of the ‘ensample of Canacee’, used to such strong effect in the Confessio amantis, testifies to the ongoing intertextual resonance of the Ovidian writings on love at the close of the Middle Ages in England. Chaucer’s engagement with the Canace story from Ovid’s Heroides is mediated through his engagement with Gower, just as his engagement with the figure of the old nurse from Ovid’s Ars amatoria is mediated through his engagement with Jean de Meun and his memorable character of ‘La Vielle’.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The inclusion of letters from the Heroides in the Troy story presented in the Histoire ancienne also provides a stimulating context for the letters exchanged by the lovers—or ex-lovers—in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, especially the poignant last sequence of letters described in Book 5 (5.1317–421; 5.1590–631). In some ways, the letters in Chaucer’s poem conform specifically to the exchange of Paris and Helen in the Heroides; in other ways, the letters reflect more generally on the fall of the city and the inexorable forward march of translatio imperii as it is punctuated by the sequence of letters featured in the central cluster within the Histoire ancienne, at the height of the siege of Troy. The paired letters of Troilus and Criseyde, which mirror the paired letters of Helen and Paris, and Hero and Leander, in the Heroides (reproduced in the Histoire ancienne, as we have seen), serve as documentary witness to the history of Troy they narrate, as well as to the personal histories of their writers. They document the casualties of the siege of Troy, not just those who die in battle but those who are divided by the wall that separates Greek from Trojan. Ending as they do with an alphabetic letter—‘Le vostre T’ (5.1421), ‘La vostre C’ (5.1631)—these epistolary letters are signs of those who have sent them, the terminus of the intention that generated the letter. They serve, like the letters of the Heroides, as epitaphs that memorialize a time that is now irrevocably in the past. It is no wonder that Troilus, looking at the letter, sees it as a ‘kalendes of chaunge’ (5.1634). In the Legend of Good Women, we encounter a sequence of such epitaphs for women whose experience of love has not only ended; that experience of love has also ended them. Each ‘legend’ concludes with a woman embracing her death, from Cleopatra leaping into the pit filled with serpents (697), to Thisbe burying the knife, hot with her lover’s blood, in her own heart (915), and so on. Chaucer frequently draws attention to the abrupt withdrawal of his narrative, gesturing toward the Ovidian source: ‘who wol al this letter have in mynde, | Rede Ovyde’ (1366–7); ‘Wel can Ovyde hire letter in vers endyte’ (1678); ‘In hire Epistel Naso telleth al’ (2220). This move is very much like the abrupt withdrawal from the moment of transformation in Chaucer’s adaptations of individual myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (such as Ceyx and Alcione in the Book of the Duchess). In each case, the reader is obliged to supply the ecstatic moment, whether experienced as transformation or experienced as death, when the voice of the metamorphosed subject is stilled or when the epistolary voice of the letter writer goes silent. In Ovid’s Latin text, and perhaps even more emphatically in the Ovide moralisé, the metamorphosed form continues to express an enduring truth concerning the one who has been transformed and the circumstances that led to the event. Similarly, the remainder of the letter—itself transformed from epistle, in Ovid’s Heroides, to relic, in Chaucer’s Legend—survives as an enduring epitaph of blissful love and bitter death.

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Ovid and Ovidianism

Notes   There is a large bibliography on the medieval Ovid. On European reception in general, readers can consult Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley (Cambridge, 2011), which has comprehensive articles and bibliographies. See also Kathryn L. McKinley, Reading the Ovidian Heroine: Metamorphoses Commentaries 1100–1618 (Leiden, 2001). On Ovid in England, see Kathryn L. McKinley, ‘Gower and Chaucer: Readings of Ovid in Late Medieval England’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds Clark et al., pp. 197–230; Jamie C. Fumo, The Legacy of Apollo: Antiquity, Authority, and Chaucerian Poetics (Toronto, 2010); Marilynn Desmond, Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence (Ithaca, NY, 2006); Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca, NY, 1984), pp. 87–110; John Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven, 1979). On other Ovidian manifestations in England see Chapters 7, 8, 20, and 21 in this volume by Zeeman, Copeland (‘Academic Prologues to Authors’), Minnis, and Galloway. 2   On the reception of Ovid’s writings in Italy, see Robert Black, ‘Ovid in Medieval Italy’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds Clark et al., pp. 123–42. 3   For an overview of this tradition, see Chapter 7 on mythography by Zeeman in this volume. For a detailed account of the history of Latin commentaries on the Metamorphoses, from Arnulf to the anonymous Vatican commentary, see Frank T. Coulson, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the School Tradition of France, 1180–1400: Texts, Manuscript Traditions, Manuscript Settings’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds Clark et al., pp. 48–82. For studies of the Latin commentaries, see Frank T. Coulson and Bruno Roy, Incipitarum Ovidianum: A Finding Guide for Texts Related to the Study of Ovid in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout, 2000), on the Ovidius moralizatus; on the Vulgate commentary, see Frank T. Coulson, The ‘Vulgate’ Commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Creation Myth and the Story of Orpheus (Toronto, 1991). 4   See the discussions of medieval Virgilian commentary in Chapters 7 and 9 by Zeeman and Ziolkowski in this volume. 5   For an overview of the concept of the integument, see Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto, 2004), pp. 57–62. For the seminal study of the concept, see Édouard Jeauneau, ‘L’Usage de la notion d’integumentum à travers les gloses de Guillaume de Conches’, AHDLMA 24 (1957), 35–100. 6  A survey of the work’s circulation can be found in Ana Pairet, ‘Recasting the Metamorphoses in Fourteenth-Century France: The Challenges of the Ovide moralisé’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds Clark et al., pp. 83–107. Useful studies include Paule Demats, Fabula: Trois études de mythographie antique et médiévale (Geneva, 1973) and Renate BlumenfeldKosinski, Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and its Interpretations in Medieval French Literature (Stanford, Calif., 1997). The only monograph solely devoted to the text is Marylène PossamaïPerez, L’Ovide moralisé: essai d’interpretation (Paris, 2006). 7   All quotations from the Ovide moralisé are from the edition by C. Boer, Ovide moralisé. Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle, 5 vols, Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandsche 1

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, 15 (1) 21, 30 (3) 37, 43 (Amsterdam, 1915–38). 8   Quotations of Ovid’s text from Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols, 3rd edn (Cambridge, Mass., 1977; repr. 1994). 9   ‘Premeraine’ corresponds to ‘pristina’, but connotes ‘basic’, ‘early’, as opposed to ‘pure’. Cf. ‘matières premières’, ‘raw materials’, in the opening passages of the Ovide moralisé. 10   A very loose adaptation of the tale of Orpheus, extending only to the names of the poet and his beloved companion (‘Orfeo’ and ‘Heurodis’) and the theme of the underworld, can be found in the late medieval romance Sir Orfeo. The allusion is so general that it is impossible to tell if it was inspired by the Latin text of Ovid, the Ovide moralisé, or the retelling of the Orpheus myth in Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, 3m12. For an account of the mingling of romance conventions with elements of classical myth, see ‘Sir Orfeo: Introduction’, in The Middle English Breton Lays, eds Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1995), pp. 13–14. On the relationship of Sir Orfeo to late medieval Scottish versions of the narrative, see Joanna Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 (Farnham, 2013), pp. 79–102, especially pp. 84–5. 11   On Gower’s use of Ovid, see in this volume Chapter 21 by Galloway. 12   All quotations from Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987). 13   On the function of vision in this scene, both in terms of the gaze and in terms of medieval theories of optics, see Akbari, Seeing Through the Veil, pp. 179–85. 14   On the Latin textual reception of Ovid’s works on love, see Marie-Noëlle Toury, ‘La Métamorphose d’Ovide au XIIe siècle’, in Lectures d’Ovide publiées á la mémoire de Jean-Pierre Néraudau (Paris, 2003), pp. 175–87; Peter L. Allen, The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the Romance of the Rose (Philadelphia, 1992); John W. Baldwin, ‘L’Ars amatoria au XIIe siècle en France: Ovide, Abélard, André le Chapelain et Pierre le Chantre’, in Histoire et société: mélanges offerts à George Duby, 4 vols (Aix-en-Provence, 1992), 1, 19–29. A useful survey of the vernacular versions of the Ars amatoria and the Heroides can be found in Marilynn Desmond, ‘Gender and Desire in Medieval French Translations of Ovid’s Amatory Works’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds Clark et al., pp. 108–22. 15   On dating, see Niklas Holzberg, Ovid: The Poet and his Work, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca, NY, 2002), pp. 16–20. 16   On use in the schools, see E. H. Alton, ‘Ovid in the Medieval Schoolroom’, Hermathena 94 (1960), 21–38, esp. p. 22; Ralph J. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid’s Ars amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto, and Epistulae Heroidum (Munich, 1986), pp. 3–4, 14. 17  Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling, p. 23; Alton, ‘Ovid in the Medieval Schoolroom’, pp. 27–8. 18   On the number of Latin manuscripts, see E. J. Kenney, ‘The Manuscript Tradition of Ovid’s Amores, Ars amatoria, and Remedia amoris’, Classical Quarterly 12 (1962), 1–31, esp. pp. 1–5.

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Ovid and Ovidianism 19   An overview of the translations can be found in Desmond, Ovid’s Art, pp. 75–9. The verse adaptations of Jakes d’Amiens and Maître Elie can be found in Artes amandi: da Maître Elie ad Andrea Capellano, ed. A. M. Finoli (Milan, 1969), pp. 31–121 ( Jakes d’Amiens), and 3–30 (Maître Elie). The prose text can be found in L’Art d’amours, ed. Bruno Roy (Leiden, 1974); trans. Lawrence B. Blonquist, The Art of Love (New York, 1987). 20   L’Art d’amours, ed. Roy, pp. 17–18 and 25. 21   Lines 37–8, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols (Paris, 1965–70). On how the role of the ‘handmaid’ of the Ars amatoria is adapted to the masculine Bel Acueil in Guillaume’s Rose, see Akbari, Seeing Through the Veil, pp. 71–3. 22  On the figure of Narcissus in Guillaume’s Rose, see Daniel Poirion, ‘Narcisse et Pygmalion dans Le Roman de la rose’, in Essays in Honor of Louis Francis Solano, eds Raymond J. Cormier and Urban T. Holmes (Chapel Hill, NC, 1970), pp. 153–65; David F. Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Roman de la rose (Cambridge, 1986). 23   On Narcissus and Pygmalion, see Akbari, Seeing Through the Veil, pp. 83–8; on la Vielle, see Alastair Minnis, Magister amoris: The Roman de la rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford, 2001), esp. ch. 2: ‘Lifting the Veil: Sexual/Textual Nakedness in the Roman de la rose’, pp. 82–117. 24   On the intertextuality of Chaucer, Ovid, and Jean de Meun, see Desmond, Ovid’s Art, p. 127. 25   J. Javier Puerto Benito, ‘The Heroides in Alfonso X’s General estoria: Translation, Adaptation, Use, and Interpretation of a Classical Work in a Thirteenth-Century Iberian History of the World’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kentucky, 2008: p. 94. 26   ‘se deue guarder de sonseio de enemigo a enemigo’; GE II, 115v, quoted in Puerto Benito, ‘The Heroides in Alfonso X’s General estoria’, p. 94. 27   The second redaction of the Histoire ancienne dates from 1364–80, according to Paul Meyer, ‘Les Premières Compilations françaises d’histoire ancienne’, Romania 54 (1885), 1–81, at p. 75; Desmond gives a date of ‘the middle of the fourteenth century’ (‘Gender and Desire’, p. 111). At present there is no complete modern edition of the Histoire ancienne. 28   On Benoît de Saint-Maure, see Chapter 13 in this volume by Desmond on the medieval Troy tradition. 29   Suzanne Conklin Akbari, ‘Erasing the Body: History and Memory in Medieval Siege Poetry’, in Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity, eds Nicholas Paul and Suzanne Yeager (Baltimore, 2012), pp. 146–73. 30   Luca Barbieri, Le ‘epistole delle dame di Grecia’ nel Roman de Troie in prosa: la prima traduzione francese delle Eroidi di Ovidio (Tübingen, 2005), p. 174n. 31  Barbieri, Le ‘epistole’, p. 237. 32  Barbieri, Le ‘epistole’, p. 237. 33  Barbieri, Le ‘epistole’, pp. 236–7. 34   Puerto Benito, ‘The Heroides in Alfonso X’s General estoria’, p. 95.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 35   Chaucer also assigns the name ‘Canacee’ to the heroine of the ‘Squire’s Tale’, although without apparent connection with the name of the Ovidian figure. 36   On the figure of Canace in the Absolon balade and the Ovidian intertext, see the sensitive reading of Helen Phillips, ‘Literary Allusion in Chaucer’s Ballade, “Hyd, Absalon, Thy Gilte Tresses Clere”’, Chaucer Review 30 (1995), 134–49, esp. pp. 138–41. For a more general account of Chaucer’s practice of interpolating lyrics into his narrative poetry, see Bruce Holsinger, ‘Lyrics and Short Poems’, in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven, 2006), pp. 179–212, esp. pp. 179–93.

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Chapter 11

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Lucan Alfred Hiatt

The presence of Lucan in medieval European letters is sufficiently ubiquitous to defy precise definition.1 He was never quite accorded the same rank as Virgil; nor was he cited as often. He did not exert the same influence over literary composition as Ovid. And yet, Lucan’s Bellum civile (or Pharsalia)2 was read throughout the course of the Middle Ages: it seems to have formed an indispensable part of school curricula, it deeply influenced certain poets and some historians, and in terms of sheer quantity of manuscripts copied it bettered Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Statius’ Thebaid, and the works of Horace.3 Knowledge of Lucan is evident from late antiquity onwards, and was certainly widespread by the eleventh century: the vast number of quotations, allusions, and echoes of his work testify to his status as one of the foundational authors of the European Middle Ages. But key questions about his reception, in Britain and elsewhere, remain. How was the Bellum civile read? Whole or piecemeal? Politically or a-politically? And further: whose Lucan? The Lucan of anti-Caesarean (and anti-Neronean) opposition? Or the Lucan of imperial glorification? Of course, all of the above understandings of the Bellum civile were possible, sometimes at the same time. To investigate this variability it may be helpful to start from the proposition that in the Middle Ages Lucan’s poem was not read as a text with a coherent philosophy or political stance. The Bellum civile might be regarded more accurately as a resource embedded within a shared literary history, whose presence was called upon in inconsistent ways: at times quasi-automatically—at the mention of civil war, for instance—at others unexpectedly and as a means of constructing a critical voice.

Dissemination Over 400 medieval manuscripts of Lucan’s Bellum civile survive.4 The earliest complete extant manuscripts of the Bellum civile are ninth century, and continental, testifying

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature to the text’s vitality in key monastic centres.5 Yet in insular letters there is ample evidence of pre-ninth-century transmission of the Bellum civile. Dracontius and Corippus, authors of Vandal Africa whose works were known in Anglo-Saxon England, both used Lucan.6 Aldhelm even preserved verses from Lucan’s Orpheus, which text also served the author of the Liber monstrorum as an authority on fauns and panthers.7 The Bellum civile was cited by Bede, whose Vita Sancti Cudbercti shows the signs of a deep absorption in the poem.8 Subsequently, knowledge of Lucan seems reasonably extensive among learned circles in Anglo-Saxon England: verses from the Bellum civile were known to King Alfred’s biographer Asser,9 to the great scholar Abbo of Fleury,10 his disciple Byrhtferth of Ramsey,11 and the late tenth-century hagiographer Wulfstan of Winchester;12 the ealdorman Æthelweard quotes Lucan as an authority on barbaric tribes, and Lucanian echoes have even been detected in Beowulf  ’s monster mere.13 In eleventh-century Wales the learned family of the schoolmaster Rhigyfarch ap Sulien drew on Lucan in their poetry.14 Alcuin listed Lucan among the authors contained in the library at York,15 and a manuscript of the Bellum civile recorded at Worcester in the late eleventh century had probably been there for some time.16 Although surviving manuscripts actually produced in England are rare,17 at least by comparison with the numbers copied in Germany, France, and Italy, the records of library holdings in medieval England give intriguing hints of the post-Conquest dissemination and classification of the Bellum civile. Unsurprisingly, copies of Lucan could be found in cathedral priories with well-stocked classical libraries. As well as Worcester, by the end of the twelfth century there were five copies of Lucan in Christ Church, Canterbury, three in the Cathedral Priory, Rochester, and four plus a  commentary in Durham Cathedral library.18 Manuscripts of the Bellum civile of uncertain date are also attested at St Augustine’s, Canterbury (two copies, with another manuscript containing ‘glose super lucanum’), Hyde Abbey, Lanthony Abbey (Gloucestershire), and at Ramsey Abbey by the mid-fourteenth century, where Lucan kept company with an ‘Ovidius magnus’, Horace, Prudentius, Terence, a Timaeus, and a Macrobius.19 The emergence of universities may have helped to promote monastic classicism still further. A copy of Lucan entered the library at Evesham Abbey thanks to its prior Thomas of Marlborough (d. 1236), who donated books he had acquired while teaching at Oxford before 1200.20 Fifteenth-century records indicate copies of Lucan at Peterhouse, and in the University Library at Cambridge, as well as at Merton College, Oxford.21

Poet, Historian; Poet-Historian In the absence of an authoritative late antique commentator such as Servius,22 a fairly flexible approach to glossing Lucan pertained, in which sets of glosses might be combined, juxtaposed, supplemented, or abbreviated.23 Distinct bodies of commentary

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Lucan have been identified nevertheless, in the shape of two anonymous collections of notes on the Bellum civile from the ninth century, which contain late antique material. These are the ‘Commenta Bernensia’—a commentary so called because it is contained in the ninth-century manuscript Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS 370, which possibly originates from Reims—and the ‘Adnotationes super Lucanum’, perhaps compiled in Tegernsee, which also are present (in incomplete form) in Bern 370.24 The ‘Adnotationes’ in particular were subject to reduction and intermingling with independent glosses.25 There are several named commentators on Lucan from the twelfth century onwards, frequently masters teaching the poem. Perhaps the most prominent of these is Arnulf of Orléans, a late twelfth-century magister also responsible for commentaries on the works of Ovid.26 Later commentators include the fourteenth-century grammarian Zono of Magnali, the Dantista Benvenuto da Imola (d. 1387/8), and the fifteenth-century Italian humanists Giovanni Sulpizio of Veroli, Ognibene of Lonigo, and Pomponio Leto.27 It is difficult to know to what extent such commentaries circulated within the British Isles, although it is likely that versions of the ‘Commenta Bernensia’ and the ‘Adnotationes super Lucanum’ would have been contained in the ‘glose super Lucanum’ recorded in several medieval English libraries. One manuscript of Arnulf ’s commentary (London, British Library, MS Harley 6502) is of possible English provenance, and an early fifteenth-century copy of the lectures on Lucan given by Benvenuto da Imola at Ferrara was donated to Balliol College, Oxford, by William Gray, the bishop of Ely (1454–78).28 Servius famously excluded Lucan from the ranks of poets, ‘quia videtur historiam composuisse, non poema’ (‘because he seems to have composed a history, not a poem’),29 but from very early in the Middle Ages the Bellum civile was regarded as a model for poetic style. Bede cites its first six lines to illustrate the technique of postponing an adjective,30 while Aldhelm quotes thirteen lines of the poem in his metrical treatises. The lines from Orpheus are cited by Aldhelm to illustrate the trochee, and in the verse preface to the Aenigmata the Bellum civile exemplifies the use of elision twice in the same line.31 In the twelfth century, Lucan helped to inspire the revival of the epic poem as a genre. Walter of Châtillon was described as writing ‘by the light of Lucan’; if quantities of manuscripts are any guide, his Alexandreis quickly rivalled its model for popularity and extent of dissemination.32 The influence of the Bellum civile is evident, to a lesser degree, in the work of Walter’s contemporary and rival, Alan of Lille, as well as in Jean de Hauteville’s Architrenius, Joseph of Exeter’s Ilias, and the twenty-six surviving lines of his Antiocheis.33 It is as an epic poet, alongside Virgil and Statius, that Lucan is listed in Alexander Neckam’s account of a liberal arts education; in certain classifications, Lucan’s poem exemplified the genre of tragedy.34 Although the work could be classified as a history,35 the Bellum civile was grist to the mills of grammarians such as John of Garland and the English-born Ralph of Beauvais, and in the later medieval period it remained a schoolroom text, keeping company with grammars and dictionaries. It is in this category that a Lucan

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature and (in a separate manuscript) ‘glose Lucani’ appear in a catalogue of Dover Priory compiled in 1389, just as a booklist from 1396 recorded ‘glose super Lucanum’ alongside glosses on Priscian in a manuscript at the Cistercian abbey at Meaux, Yorkshire.36 Similarly, an addition to the Cambridge University Library booklist made after 1437 records a ‘liber lucanus scilicet de bellis romanis’ in among three Priscians and Petrus Elias’ Summa super Priscianum, while a list of the library at Peterhouse (larger than the University Library at the time) located the Bellum civile within a relatively small collection of ‘libri poetrie et gramatice’ that included Ovid’s Tristia and Fasti, Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis, Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria nova, and a copy of Petrarch’s Epistolae.37

‘Familiaris Noster’ Lucan’s influence on historians is particularly evident in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The anonymous Flemish monk who wrote the Encomium Emmae Reginae in the early 1040s used the exit of Pompey and (crucially) Cornelia from Lesbos (CW 8.147–58) as the basis for his description of Queen Emma’s lachrymose departure from exile in Flanders to return to England.38 But it was after the Conquest that Lucan became an indispensable reference point. The Norman adaptation of Lucan’s narrative was far from a formulaic equation of William with Caesar and Harold with Pompey. In William of Poitiers’ Gesta Guillelmi (written c.1071–7), both William and Harold are compared with Pompey. William’s triumph in Rouen brings back memories of Pompey’s reception in Rome: ‘ciuitas illa uniuersa applaudere putaretur, sicuti Roma quondam Pompeio suo applaudans tripudiauit’ (‘the entire city seemed to applaud, just as Rome once exulted, applauding its Pompey’).39 Harold, like Pompey, ends up lying in a ‘tumulus’ on the shore, ‘posthumae generationi tam Anglorum quam Normannorum abominabilis’ (‘hated by the next generation of English and Normans alike’).40 If there was a golden age of Lucan in medieval England, it was the twelfth century. The Bellum civile seems at times to sweat from the pores of works such as William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum and John of Salisbury’s Policraticus. It is a significant presence in chronicles such as Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, and Gervase of Tilbury’s quasi-encyclopedic Otia imperialia, while less extensive citations may be found in a range of histories from the first half of the  twelfth century—including Orderic Vitalis’ Historia ecclesiastica, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, and the Chronicle of John of Worcester—and from later in the century in Ralph de Diceto’s Ymagines historiarum and the works of Gerald of Wales. The Bellum civile informed works in praise of the cities of Chester (the monk Lucian’s De laude Cestrie) and London (in the description by William FitzStephen). From those foundations in Anglo-Norman historiography a more or

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Lucan less continuous thread of reference to the Bellum civile can be discerned in AngloLatin historical writing until the fifteenth century. Matthew Paris so much liked Bellum civile 1.92–3 (‘Nulla fides regni sociis, omnisque potestas | Impatiens consortis erit’: ‘no loyalty between companions in government, and all power will be impatient of a partner’) that he cited it eight times in the Chronica majora, where the mention of Cordoba reminds him that the Spanish city was Lucan’s birthplace.41 In  the Polychronicon Ranulf Higden occasionally drew on Lucan as a source for Roman history, though he used Suetonius, Eutropius, and Orosius as his sources for the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, and Seneca for the death of Cato.42 Late medieval histories as diverse as Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon (1440s), Pietro Carmeliano’s Suasoria laeticiae ad Angliam pro sublatis bellis civilibus (1486), and the Historia regis Henrici Septimi (c.1500–2) of the blind Augustinian friar Bernard André, all deployed Lucan in original ways.43 Yet these uses of Lucan in historical writing raise difficult questions about citation, authority, and the extent of knowledge of the Bellum civile. There were always ways of knowing the Bellum civile other than simply reading it. Servius’ commentary on the Aeneid incorporated reference to the Bellum civile and seems likely to have drawn on early commentaries on Lucan.44 The ‘vita Lucani’ in Suetonius’ De viris illustribus functioned as one of a large number of accessus and vitae that accompanied the Bellum civile in medieval manuscripts.45 References to Lucan could be found in the works of Augustine,46 Jerome, Orosius, Boethius (where Philosophia describes the poet as a member of her household, ‘familiaris noster’),47 and above all in Isidore’s Etymologiae, which was particularly indebted to the account of snakes in Book 9 of the Bellum civile.48 Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae cited Lucan directly on no less than 134 occasions, significantly more often than the works of Ovid, Sallust, and Statius, on a par with Plautus, though far less than Virgil and Cicero.49 Even those who were familiar with the Bellum civile in its entirety were prone to a form of citation that could be termed florilegic. Famous lines and scenes from the Bellum civile might be recalled, in part at least as a display of erudition.50 To take the most obvious example, Lucan’s opening lines—‘Bella per Emathios plus quam civilia campos, | Iusque datum sceleri canimus . . .’ (I sing of wars worse than civil, waged over Emathian plains, and of legality conferred on crime)—were cited on numerous occasions in medieval literature in relation to some kind of civil conflict. In twelfth-century English letters they were invoked to describe, variously, the fears that caused King Æthelwulf to yield to his son (by William of Malmesbury), Henry I’s siege of the castle of Tinchebray (Orderic Vitalis), Henry II’s warfare in England and Aquitaine (Gerald of Wales), the conflict between the Turkish rulers MalikGhazi and Kilij-Arslan (Orderic Vitalis), and wars between fellow Christians ( John of Salisbury).51 These authors, in other words, could not think of a ‘bellum civile’ (‘civil war’) without being tempted to add that it was in fact a bellum ‘plus quam civile’

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (‘worse than civil war’). Other Lucanian catchphrases could become similarly detached from their original contexts as they gained equal or nearly equal levels of familiarity: ‘tolle moras’ (Bellum civile 1.281; ‘make haste’); ‘nulla fides regni sociis’ (1.92–3); ‘stat magni nominis umbra’ (1.135: ‘he stands, the shadow of a great name’); ‘omnia Caesar erat’ (3.108: ‘Caesar was all things’; both a rhetorical flourish and illustration of the use of a singular verb to express a plural predicate); ‘umbras nusquam flectente Syene’ (2.587: ‘Syene not casting shadows to either side’; a staple of geographical description from Macrobius onwards). Famous episodes naturally began with Caesar crossing the Rubicon and the address of Roma—memorably transcribed by Henry of Huntingdon as Anglia addressing Henry, Duke of Normandy, on his arrival in England in 1153 during the reign of Stephen52—but also included the flight of Pompey from Brundisium, Caesar’s storm-tossed crossing of the Adriatic in Book 5, the witch Erictho’s reanimation of a corpse, and the battle of Pharsalia itself. Several characters beyond the poem’s two principal protagonists gained currency among medieval authors. Some of these figures—Alexander, Cato, Cleopatra—were obviously shared with other texts, but others owed their renown solely or primarily to the Bellum civile. Citations of Cornelia (perhaps the most famous of which is Abelard’s account of Heloise declaiming Bellum civile 8.94b–98a on being compelled to take the veil),53 Marcia, Amyclas, Erictho, and Scaeva inevitably invoked Lucan, and as always their application was far from predictable. In the Convivio Dante read Marcia’s return to her husband Cato as the noble soul’s return to God: ‘per la quale Marzia s’intende la nobile anima’.54 For Peter of Blois, begging the bishop of Paris, Odo de Sully, to allow him to return from exile, Lucan’s Marcia offered the perfect epigraph: Cui non licet in patria vivere, saltem liceat sepeliri, et, ut in versu Lucani claudatur epistola, ‘liceat tumulo scripsisse: Catonis— Marcia’, [Bellum civile 2.343–4] sic liceat michi scribere ‘Petrus Odonis’.55 (At least allow the one who may not live in his fatherland to be buried there and, to close this letter with a line of Lucan, as ‘Cato’s Marcia’ was written on the tomb, so let ‘Odo’s Peter’ be written about me.)

If a line from the Bellum civile often seems to have come to the minds of medieval authors and, decontextualized, carried little of its original significance, at other times, reference to Lucan seems to suggest that the Bellum civile was an instructive and perhaps even a liberating presence in medieval letters. Lucan’s Caesar and the ‘bella plus quam civilia’ provided crucial reference points for contemplating monarchical power and the utilization of military force. But also—as John of Salisbury displays in a remarkable chapter of the Policraticus (8.23)—the Bellum civile could serve as a framework for understanding the constitution of the Church and the role

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Lucan of schism. In somewhat unexpected ways, Lucan contributed to the articulation of a clerical voice in the twelfth century and thereafter: a learned voice at once witty and sharply critical, detached and passionate, disenchanted and idealistic.

Voice and Power One of the central preoccupations of recent Lucan criticism has been the nature of the poet’s stance towards Roman imperial power, as embodied in the persona of Julius Caesar.56 This question does not seem to have been asked, or at least not framed in the same terms, in the Middle Ages. That is not to say that Lucan did not inform considerations of political power, and the history of the forms of power. But it might be more accurate to say that Lucan offered medieval authors modes of describing and, crucially, addressing political power. This address to power derived from one of the notable features of the Bellum civile: Lucan’s frequent apostrophes, typically expressed in the voice of the poet and directed at one or other of the poem’s dramatis personae. Refashioned in diverse and unpredictable ways in the Middle Ages, that voice retains a certain elusive quality, defying easy interpretation. Take for example an episode concerning William Rufus and a siege of Le Mans described by William of Malmesbury in his Gesta regum Anglorum, ostensibly as an example of the king’s magnanimity of spirit. William tells us that when Rufus learned of the siege he rushed to the Channel to seek an immediate crossing: an allusion to Caesar’s crossing of the Adriatic in Bellum civile 5.577–88. Were we in any doubt, an explicit reference to Lucan follows. After successfully halting the siege, Rufus enjoys a fiery exchange with the defeated Norman baron Helias of SaintSaens, in which the victorious king utters the words ‘… nichil, si me uiceris, pro hac uenia tecum paciscar’ (‘if you beat me, I shall ask for nothing in exchange for doing you this favour’).57 The echo of Caesar’s words to the captured general Domitius in Bellum civile 2.515 is clear: ‘nihil hac venia, si viceris, ipse paciscor’ (‘if you triumph I will seek nothing for this favour’). Apparently Rufus has emulated Caesar’s generosity. But perhaps it is not so simple. Read in the context of Book 2, where Caesar’s magnanimity is a callous trap designed to shame Domitius, who seeks to avoid it through death, the act of sparing an opponent starts to seem ambiguous to say the least. And then there is the comment William makes immediately afterwards: Quis talia de illiterato homine crederet? Et fortassis erit aliquis qui, Lucanum legens, falso opinetur Willelmum haec exempla de Iulio Cesare mutuatum esse. Sed non erat ei tantum studii uel otii ut litteras umquam audiret; immo calor mentis ingenitus et conscia uirtus eum talia exprimere cogebant. Et profecto, si Christianitas nostra pateretur, sicut olim anima Euforbii transisse dicta est in Pitagoram Samium, ita posset dici quod anima Iulii Cesaris transierit in regem Willelmum.58

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Who would believe such behaviour in a man of no education? Some people, as they read their Lucan, might perhaps wrongly suppose that William borrowed the inspiration for these actions from Julius Caesar; but he had neither the interest nor the leisure to pay any attention to literature. Rather, it was his innate fire of mind, and conscious valour, that drove him to utterances such as these. Indeed, if our Christian faith admitted such a thing, it might be said that as the soul of Euphorbus is supposed to have passed into Pythagoras of Samos, so did the soul of Julius Caesar pass into King William.)

A powerful whiff of irony emanates from these lines. If the evident hyperbole of the comparison with the transferral of the soul of the Trojan Euphorbus into the body of Pythagoras were not enough, Rufus’ supposedly innate virtue and warmth is at odds with the examples of his venality and cruelty previously documented in the Gesta regum Anglorum.59 While it remains unclear how admirable the ‘anima Iulii Cesaris’ actually is, William certainly appears to think that the uncouth nature of Rufus leaves any comparison with Caesar bordering on the absurd. It does not seem a coincidence that such irony occurs under the sign of Lucan, the barbed nature of whose store of exempla may have been especially attractive to erudite authors.60 Lucan’s voices were legion; beyond Caesar and Pompey, a variety of minor characters allowed for the development of distinctive, angular reflections on power. Among the array of classical reference deployed liberally throughout John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, Lucan is given particular prominence as an authority on discord, one who may therefore be used to characterize schism. It is certainly striking that in a single chapter of the Policraticus devoted to this topic, Lucan is repeatedly invoked, far more than any Christian author.61 Book 8, chapter  23 deploys quotations from Bellum civile not only to enhance John’s condemnation of internecine conflict, but more originally to explore the role of the neutral. The fearful lament of Romans on the brink of civil war combines with Brutus’ dilemma about which side to favour to illustrate the predicaments of neutrality. The risks of taking sides emerge in Caesar’s words to his men on the eve of Pharsalia; in the famous dictum about Cato favouring the vanquished, while the victorious cause pleased God (1.128; Christianized by John: ‘deis’ becomes ‘Deo’); and in the concluding aphorism of the treacherous Egyptian Pothinus (8.535: ‘nulla fides umquam miseros elegit amicos’; ‘no loyalty ever chose the wretched as friends’).62 The poet’s rebuke of soldiers complicit in their general’s crimes from Book 4 serves as a warning to the Church to refuse to submit to the wicked, while the declaration of neutrality by the Greeks at Massilia in Book 3 enhances the critique of schismatics, those who take up arms when the sword of Peter should remain sheathed. All quotations from Lucan serve to offer sententiae, points of comparison, modes of reflecting, understanding, and addressing schism, which at one point is described as even worse than civil war.63 But why classicize schism in this

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Lucan way, and with what effect? In part, the passage pivots on the assimilation of imperial Rome to its papal successor, with the recent antipope Anacletus II (1130–8), and looming conflict after the papacy of Adrian IV, offering potent subtexts.64 Particularly striking is John’s attraction to those drawn into the conflict, rather than its main protagonists. Brutus, Cato, ordinary Romans, Massilians, Pothinus, as well as the voice of the poet seem to offer John a means of commentating on power struggles. Lucan himself and his cast of the outraged, embittered, yet compromised and at times complicit commentators on the moral ruins of discord help to shape John’s denunciation of schism. They also contribute to his recognition of schism as a deep-seated consequence of ecclesiastical power, from which he cannot exempt himself. Even ostensibly more straightforward uses of Lucan, such as Thomas Walsingham’s references to the Bellum civile in his account of the battle of Agincourt in the Chronica maiora, create curious effects of voicing. Walsingham’s description of the battle begins with a string of quotations from the Aeneid, but when it comes to Henry V’s speech to his troops on the eve of battle, he turns to Lucan. O fidissimi socii inquit, Ad magnum uirtutis opus summosque labores uadimus in campum (Bellum civile 9.381–2) En, ipsam diem quem flagitauit sepius uestra uirtus. Totas igitur uestras effundite uires. (Bellum civile 7.342–4) Experiamini quid lancea, quid securis, quid gladius, quid sagitta ualeat in manu potentis. Quisquis igitur census, honores aut premia cupit hic procul dubio promerebitur. Hec, nempe, Medio posuit Deus omnia campo. (Bellum civile 7.348) Sic fatus iussit conuelli signa.65 (‘My most loyal comrades,’ he says, ‘For a great act of courage and to face extreme difficulties We are moving into the field.’ (9.381–2) ‘Look now, the very day your courage has so often demanded has come. Therefore pour out all the strength you have.’ (7.342–4) ‘Let us prove what the lance, the battleaxe, the sword and the arrow can do in the hands of the powerful. Whoever desires reward, honours, or profit will earn these in this place without any doubt. Surely, God has placed all these good things in the centre of the field.’ (7.348) Having spoken thus, he commanded them to pluck up the standards . . .)

The voice of the king yokes together two voices of the Bellum civile: that of Cato, whose speech to the battered remnants of Pompey’s army in Book 9 precedes their tortuous entry to the African desert, and that of Pompey himself, immediately prior to the battle with Caesar at Pharsalia. In so doing Walsingham strips the quotations of their original context: ‘campos steriles exustaque mundi’ (‘barren plains and the furnace of the world’) of Book 9 become simply a field, while in the quotation from

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Book 7, the ‘finis civilibus armis’ (‘end to civil war’) promised by Pompey five lines  previously is necessarily excised, and the pagan ‘Deus’ neatly Christianized. Something of the Stoicism originally explicit in both speeches survives into the reworked version, with none of the profound ambivalence of a futile march into the  desert or the imminent defeat of Pharsalia. The Bellum civile, in other words, offered Walsingham no consistent frame for characterization. Earlier in the chronicle he flavoured his description of the fall of the Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, by quoting the reaction of Pompey’s army to the sight of their general’s decapitated head.66 A few pages later comes the splicing of Cato and Pompey in Henry V’s speech; a little later the king takes the role of Caesar, as the imagery of Pompey’s retreating cavalry is applied to the French.67 Such flexible application of the Bellum civile suggests a high level of familiarity with the text on Walsingham’s part, but also a willingness to draw upon it freely, to reassemble it in the construction of a contemporary voice.

Lucan Mediated In English letters of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the presence of Lucan was mediated through vernacular translations and adaptations. These versions of Lucan provide some indications of the different ways in which the Bellum civile could be understood by a medieval audience. The anonymous prose compilation Les Faits des Romains (1213–14) amplified and extended Lucan’s narrative, combining it with other antique sources such as Sallust, Suetonius, Orosius, and Isidore. The centrality of Caesar grew in such translations: unsatisfied with Lucan’s apparently incomplete text, the translator of Les Faits continued the story as far as the death of Caesar.68 Although entire episodes not present in Lucan entered Les Faits, by and large the moral compass of the Bellum civile remained intact: Caesar’s greed, ambition, and—in his encounter with Cleopatra—lust remained, and authorial condemnations were retained. But in the thirteenth-century Hystore de Julius Cesar by Jean de Thuin, Caesar is an unambiguously positive exemplar of chivalry. Negative authorial comments are excised, impure motivations omitted, and instead a model of chevallerie, droit, and mercy emerges. A lengthy love treatise inserted into the narrative accounts for the affair with Cleopatra as a high point of amour courtoise.69 Both readings—the more faithful amplification of Les Faits, and the radical pro-Caesarean reworking of Jean de Thuin—can be found in late medieval English literature. Chaucer knew Lucan, though quite how well is never—as often with Chaucer— clear. Lucan appears among a pantheon of classical poets in the House of Fame, after Ovid and before Claudian (‘The grete poete daun Lucan, | And on hys shuldres bar up than, | As high as that y myghte see, | The fame of Julius and Pompe’,

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Lucan HF 1499–1502), and Lucan is one of the five sovereign authors cited by Chaucer at the conclusion of his Troilus and Criseyde.70 Such citations are strongly reminiscent of Dante’s sighting of ‘l’ultimo Lucano’ after Homer, Horace, and Ovid in the first circle of hell (Inferno 4.90). And although Chaucer’s direct experience of the Bellum civile is plausible, such Lucanian colour as can be found in Chaucer always seems to be refracted. The final journey of Troilus’ ‘lighte goost’ to the eighth sphere, for example, derives primarily from Boccaccio’s description of the ascent of Arcita’s soul in the Teseida, which in turn drew on the ascent of Pompey’s shade at the beginning of Bellum civile 9, as well as several other classical and late antique influences, most notably Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis.71 In the ‘Man of Law’s Tale’ Custance is received in Surrye at an assembly to rival ‘the triumphe of Julius, | Of which that Lucan maketh swich a boost [noise]’, except that Lucan made no such ‘boost’, while in the ‘Monk’s Tale’ Pompey’s assassin is not Ptolemy’s general Achillas, but one of the Roman’s own men, ‘a fals traitour’, who delivers the head to Caesar.72 Significantly, perhaps, at the end of the Monk’s exemplum de Julio Cesare the reader is directed not only towards Lucan but also ‘to Swetoun, and to Valerius also’, i.e. Suetonius and Valerius Maximus.73 By comparison with Ovid, Virgil, and Statius, it must be said that Lucan’s influence on Chaucer, direct or indirect, was negligible: Lucan acts as a sign of classical verse, but perhaps for Chaucer more as the shadow of a great name. John Lydgate’s engagement with the Bellum civile presents a more complex set of problems. Lucan ostensibly serves as a direct source for Lydgate’s Serpent of Division, a moralized account of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey written in 1422, after the death of Henry V. The work’s modern editor and most commentators agree that Lydgate was in fact principally operating with French translations of the poem, though a case has been made for occasional use of the classical text without mediation.74 Apart from its first book, very little of the Bellum civile is actually represented in the Serpent of Division: certainly Books 3, 4, 6, and most of 7 to 10 are absent. Lydgate appears to have used both strands of French interpretation of the poem, but the Serpent adopts a moral posture closer to Les Faits than to Jean de Thuin, excoriating Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus too.75 In so doing Lydgate translates Lucan’s critique of the triumvirate into the genre of the speculum principis: wise governors are explicitly instructed to ‘make a merowre in here mynde’ when contemplating these Romans. But the ‘Lucan’ that enters vernacular English writing has not only been filtered; he is consumed as just one part of a cocktail of classical authority. Lydgate focuses on Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, ostensibly retelling Lucan’s account of the momentous encounter with ‘an olde Auncien lady triste and drery in a mantell of blake’.76 But after narrating Caesar’s entry to a city ‘of Lucan callid Arymynum’, to illustrate the value of unity over division Lydgate supplies an exemplum derived from Valerius Maximus, in which a horse’s tail is shown to be removable, but only one hair at a time.77 Lucan, translated, is mixed with other authorities: the cocktail remains a

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature beverage of some potency, but its differences from the Latinate traditions of direct quotations, however distorted in sense, are considerable. Still a chronicle of civil conflict, the boundaries of the vernacular Bellum civile are less easy to discern: the narrative now begins with Caesar’s Gallic wars (and could be expanded still further to include material derived from sources such as the Middle English Brut); it continues to Caesar’s death. Epic, romance, tragedy, and exemplum all operate under the sign of Lucan. It would be inaccurate to conclude that vernacular poets such as Chaucer and Lydgate did not know Lucan, or knew him only ‘by reputation’, for they were indeed working with the Bellum civile. Yet the form of the poem with which they primarily operated had undergone significant mutation. Seen in overview, Lucan offers an intriguing, and in some ways quite typical, case study of classical reception in the Middle Ages. A victim of its own success, the Bellum civile at times seems to have been so well known that people stopped thinking about it: the medieval Lucan can look less a text than an array of disiecta membra, a set of quotations unmoored from their context. Yet in other respects the Bellum civile retained its integrity: a work whose uncertain conclusion invited supplementation, it was in general copied whole rather than in excerpts. The accessus tradition drew attention to Lucan’s personal history as a means of grounding the text both spatially and politically, but also—given the poet’s familial relation to Seneca—in terms of moral authority. As the accessus indicate, modern critics are not the first to have identified Lucanian ambivalence. While some medieval commentators apparently thought that Lucan’s intention was to praise Nero ‘a laudibus parentum Iulii et Augusti’ (by praising his ancestors Julius and Augustus), others thought the poem sought to dissuade from civil war.78 Nor was it the case that medieval authors and commentators universally lauded Caesar; most, in fact, seem to have perceived clearly Lucan’s lack of endorsement of either of his protagonists. Instead, many medieval English followers of Lucan were drawn to the poem’s far from innocent bystanders, the flotsam and jetsam accompanying, and lamenting, the storm wreaked by Caesarean ambition and Pompey’s fugitive charisma. Two aspects of the British reception of Lucan are striking when viewed in contrast with the responses the Bellum civile generated in continental Europe. First, there is little evidence of the independent development of a commentary tradition in Britain: glosses were no doubt added locally to Lucan manuscripts, but the more extensive commentaries, and those that circulated semi-independently of the poem, seem to have been generated overwhelmingly outside the British Isles. Second, it is notable that translation into English did not occur until the end of the sixteenth century.79 It is true that French versions of Lucan circulated in England, sometimes in deluxe form,80 and perhaps rendered unnecessary the production of an English Lucan: but for other texts the existence of translations in other vernaculars positively encouraged English translation. Nevertheless, despite the absence of these crucial and intimate forms of engagement with the Bellum civile, the poem managed to exert

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Lucan a powerful influence on English letters. In the twelfth century, when the Bellum civile rivalled Virgil and bettered Ovid for influence, the uses of Lucan in the works of William of Malmesbury and John of Salisbury were of a level of flamboyance and thoroughness rarely matched elsewhere in Europe. The intense energy of Lucan’s verse took the Bellum civile in many directions during the Middle Ages. Lucan was a historian, a poet, a tragedian, an encyclopedia; he could be summarized, expanded, watered down, stripped back, or excerpted. For this reason the Middle Ages understood Lucan to be multiple: the expert on snakes, the ethnographer whose characterizations of peoples continued to be deployed in all sorts of contexts,81 the geographer,82 the doomed poet, the Spaniard, the Roman. Read in whole or in part, the very richness of the Bellum civile encouraged its diffusion. That diffusion—whether through particularization in the form of epigram, or through the expansion and mixing of vernacular translation—made the medieval Lucan at once a standard reference point and an alien, alienated commentator from another time.

Notes 1   The medieval reception of Lucan remains relatively under-explored. For overviews of particular aspects see Jessie Crosland, ‘Lucan in the Middle Ages: With Special References to the Old French Epic’, Modern Language Review 25 (1930), 32–51; Walter Fischli, Studien zum Fortleben der Pharsalia (Lucerne, 1949), pp. 18–44; G. M. Logan, Lucan in England: The Influence of the Pharsalia on English Letters from the Beginnings through the Sixteenth Century (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1967); Maria Assunta Vinchesi, ‘La fortuna di Lucano fra tarda antichità e medioevo’, Cultura e scuola 77 (1981), 62–72; and 78 (1981), 66–75; Edoardo D’Angelo, ‘La “Pharsalia” nell’epica latina medioevale’, in Interpretare Lucano. Miscellanea di Studi, eds. Paolo Esposito and Luciano Nicastri (Naples, 1999), pp. 389–454; Peter von Moos, ‘Lucain au moyen âge’, in Entre histoire et littérature: communication et culture au moyen âge (Florence, 2005), pp. 89–202; Lucans Bellum civile: Studien zum Spektrum seiner Rezeption von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Christine Walde (Trier, 2009); Edoardo D’Angelo, ‘Lucan in Medieval Latin: A Survey of the Bibliography’, in Brill’s Companion to Lucan, ed. Paolo Asso (Leiden, 2011), pp. 465–79. 2   The titles Bellum civile, De bello civile, or De ciuilibus bellis tended to be used more in the Middle Ages than Pharsalia, which may have arisen from a misunderstanding of 9.985 (‘Pharsalia nostra | vivet’). 3   See the entries on Ovid, Statius, and Horace in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford, 1983) for rough comparative figures. 4   R. J. Tarrant, ‘Lucan’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, pp. 215–18. Birger Munk Olsen counts over 200 surviving Lucan manuscripts from the ninth to twelfth centuries alone, including extracts and fragments: L’Étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 4 vols

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Paris, 1982–2014), 2, 17–83; 3.2, 91–6. See also Eva Matthews Sanford, ‘The Manuscripts of Lucan: Accessus and Marginalia’, Speculum 9 (1934), 278–95. 5   Harold C. Gotoff, The Transmission of the Text of Lucan in the Ninth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). Three fragments of the Bellum civile copied in the fourth or fifth centuries survive: Tarrant, ‘Lucan’, in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, p. 215 n. 3. 6  Dracontius’ De laudibus Dei and Corippus’ In laudem Iustini, both texts known to AngloSaxon authors, show the influence of Lucan. 7   Liber monstrorum, ed. Franco Porsia (Bari, 1976), pp. 144, 228, 264. 8   Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006), pp. 110–11, 219. 9  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 119, 239. 10   Abbo of Fleury, Quaestiones grammaticales, ed. A. Guerreau-Jalabert (Paris, 1982), pp. 229, 263. 11   Byrhtferth of Ramsey, The Lives of St Oswald and St Ecgwine, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge (Oxford, 2009), pp. 21, 98 for echoes. 12  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 248. 13   Chronicon Æthelwardi: The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. A. Campbell (1962), p. 9; Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Cambridge, 1995), p. 45 found the possibility of classical influence on the monster mere ‘remote’; Daniel Anlezark makes a stronger case for Lucan’s influence on the poem Solomon and Saturn II: ‘Poisoned Places: The Avernian Tradition in Old English Poetry’, Anglo-Saxon England 36 (2007), 103–26 (at pp. 113–26). 14   Pádraig P. Ó Néill, ‘Celtic Britain and Ireland in the Early Middle Ages’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 1, To 1640, eds Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 69–90 (at pp. 89–90). 15  Alcuin, The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, ed. Peter Godman (Oxford, 1982), line 1554 (p. 124). 16  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 54. 17   Such as the twelfth-century manuscripts Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, 365/728 (France or England) and Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.30 (Rochester Cathedral Priory). Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.8.4 (second half of the twelfth century), contains a commentary on the Bellum civile which may be of English provenance. London, British Library, MS Harley 6502 (twelfth or thirteenth century) is a copy of Arnulf of Orléans’s commentary, which may have been produced in England. Oxford, Bodleian, MS Laud. Lat. 67 (late twelfth century), fols 4v–5v, is a short commentary on Lucan from St Albans. See Munk Olsen, L’Étude des auteurs classiques latins, 2, 17–83 for an idea of the production centres of Lucan manuscripts prior to 1200. 18   For Christ Church, Canterbury see M. R. James, The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover (Cambridge, 1903), p. 10; for Rochester see English Benedictine Libraries: The Shorter Catalogues, eds R. Sharpe et al., CBMLC 4 (1996), p. 519; for Durham see Catalogues of the Library of Durham Cathedral, Surtees Society 7 (1838), pp. 5–6.

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Lucan 19   St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, ed. B. C. Barker-Benfield, 3 vols, CBMLC 13 (2008), 2, 1384–5. For Hyde and Ramsey see English Benedictine Libraries, eds Sharpe et al., pp. 258, 385. For Lanthony see The Libraries of the Augustinian Canons, eds T. Webber and A. G. Watson, (1998), p. 85. 20   English Benedictine Libraries, eds Sharpe et al., pp. 136–7. 21   The University and College Libraries of Cambridge, ed. Peter D. Clarke, CBMLC 10 (2002), pp. 27, 34, 78, 81, 512, 513. F. M. Powicke, The Medieval Books of Merton College (Oxford, 1931), pp. 197, 215. 22   ‘Vacca’, whose ‘vita Lucani’ precedes the ‘Commenta Bernensia’, and who was previously considered late antique, seems rather to have been a medieval commentator: Shirley Werner, ‘On the History of the Commenta Bernensia and the Adnotationes super Lucanum’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 96 (1994), 343–68. 23   See Paolo Esposito, ‘Early and Medieval Scholia and Commentaria on Lucan’, in Brill’s Companion to Lucan, ed. Asso, pp. 452–63; Shirley Werner, The Transmission and Scholia to Lucan’s Bellum civile (Hamburg, 1998). 24   M. Annaei Lucani commenta Bernensia, ed. Hermann Usener (Leipzig, 1869; repr. Hildesheim, 1967); Adnotationes super Lucanum, ed. Ioannes Endt (Leipzig, 1909). 25   Edited as the Supplementum Adnotationum super Lucanum, ed. G. A. Cavajoni, vol. 1 (Books 1–5) (Milan, 1979); vol. 2 (Books 6–7) (Milan, 1984); vol. 3 (Books 8–10) (Amsterdam, 1990). On the practice of neuming certain Lucan manuscripts see Chapter  3 in this volume by Marjorie Curry Woods. 26   Arnulfi Aurelianensis Glosule super Lucanum, ed. Berthe M. Marti (Rome, 1958). 27   Esposito, ‘Early and Medieval Scholia and Commentaria’, p. 461. 28   Now Oxford, Balliol College, MS 144. 29   Servianorum in Vergilii carmina commentariorum editio Harvardiana, eds E. K. Rand et al., 3 vols (Lancaster, Pa, 1946), 2, 187 (at Aeneid 1.382). The judgement was repeated in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae 8.7.10. 30   Bede, ‘De arte metrica’, in Opera didascalica, ed. C. W. Jones et al., CCSL 123A (Turnhout, 1975), pp. 115–16. 31   ‘De metris’, in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Rudolf Ehwald (Berlin, 1919), p. 159; Nancy Porter Stork, Through a Gloss Darkly: Aldhelm’s Riddles in the British Library MS Royal 12.C.xxiii (Toronto, 1990); Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 183. 32   Galteri de Castellione Alexandreis, ed. Marvin L. Colker (Padua, 1978), pp. xxxiii–xxxviii. ‘Lucet Alexander Lucani luce’: Eberhard of Béthune, Laborintus, ed. Edmond Faral, in Les Arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1924), ll. 637–8 (p. 359). 33  Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, ed. R. Bossuat (Paris, 1955), p. 40; Jean de Hauteville, Architrenius, ed. and trans. Winthrop Wetherbee (Cambridge, 1994); Joseph of Exeter—Joseph Iscanus, Werke und Briefe, ed. Ludwig Gompf (Leiden, 1970); Joseph of Exeter: Trojan War I–III, ed. and trans. A. K. Bate (Warminster, 1986). 34   Accessus ad auctores, Bernard d’Utrecht, Conrad d’Hirsau, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden, 1970), p. 40. On Lucan as tragic poet, see von Moos, ‘Lucain au moyen âge’, pp. 152–76.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 35   A copy of the Bellum civile, along with Sallust’s Catilina and Jugurtha, Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, and Macrobius’ Commentary thereon, was listed in the library of the Austin Friars, York, in 1372 under the title of ‘historie gencium’: The Friars’ Libraries, ed. K. W. Humphreys, CBMLC 1 (1990), p. 50. 36   For Meaux, The Libraries of the Cistercians, Gilbertines and Premonstratensians, ed. David N. Bell, CBMLC 3 (1992), p. 51; for Dover, Dover Priory, ed. William P. Stoneman, CBMLC 5 (1999), p. 164. 37   University and College Libraries of Cambridge, ed. Clarke, pp. 27; 512–13. By the mid-fifteenth century Peterhouse possessed two copies of the Bellum civile, one of which was accompanied by Statius’ Thebaid. 38   Encomium Emmae Reginae, ed. Alistair Campbell (1949; repr. Cambridge, 1998), 3.12. 39   William of Poitiers, The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, eds and trans. R. H. C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1998), p. 170. 40   Gesta Guillelmi, p. 140. 41   Chronica majora, ed. H. R. Luard, 7 vols (1872–83), 1, 75; 2, 355; 4, 651; 5, 77, 131, 280, 528, 603; 3, 384 for the reference to Cordoba. 42   Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, ed. J. R. Lumby, 9 vols (1865–86). 43   Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. D. E. R. Watt et al., 9 vols (Aberdeen and Edinburgh, 1987–98); London, British Library, Additional MS 33736, fols 2r, 8v; Bernard André, Historia regis Henrici Septimi, ed. James Gairdner (1858), pp. 27–9. 44   Paolo Esposito, ‘Virgilio e Servio nella scoliastica lucanea’, in Gli scolii a Lucano ed altra scoliastica latina, ed. Paolo Esposito (Pisa, 2004), pp. 25–77. 45   Three of these vitae are edited in Lucani Opera, ed. Renato Badalì (Rome, 1992), pp. 399–407. 46  Augustine, De civitate Dei, 3.27 (quoting Lucan’s lines on Sulla) (Bellum civile 2.142–4). 47  Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, 4p6. 48   Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri xx, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford, 1911), e.g. 12.4. 49   Prisciani institutionum grammaticalium librorum I–XVI: indices et concordantiae, eds Cirilo García Román and Marco A. Gutiérrez Galindo, 4 vols (Hildesheim, 2001), 1219–21. 50   Eva Matthews Sanford, ‘Quotations from Lucan in Medieval Latin Authors’, American Journal of Philology 55 (1934), 1–19. 51   William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, eds and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford, 1998), 1, 170; Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols (Oxford, 1969–80), 6, 84; 5, 360. Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica, eds and trans. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin, 1978), pp. 44, 168, 220. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. Clement C. J. Webb, 2 vols (Oxford, 1909), 2, 403. 52   Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford, 1996), pp. 760–2. On Henry’s use of Lucan see Catherine A. M. Clarke, ‘Writing Civil War in Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum’, Anglo-Norman Studies 31 (2009), 31–48. 53   Historia Calamitatum, ed. Jacques Monfrin, 2nd edn (Paris, 1962), p. 81.

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Lucan   Convivio, ed. Franca Brambilla Ageno (Florence, 1995), 4.28.13–15.   The Later Letters of Peter of Blois, ed. Elizabeth Revell (Oxford, 1993), p. 338. 56   Contrasting views on this topic can be found in Frederick M. Ahl, Lucan: An Introduction (Ithaca, NY, 1976); John Henderson, Fighting for Rome: Poets and Caesars, History and Civil War (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 164–211; Jamie Masters, Poetry and Civil War in Lucan’s Bellum civile (Cambridge, 1992); Emanuele Narducci, Lucano: un’epica contro l’impero (Rome, 2002). 57   Gesta regum Anglorum, p. 566. 58   Gesta regum Anglorum, pp. 566–7. 59  e.g. Gesta regum Anglorum 4.307 (bribery); 4.310 (hot temper); 4.312 (descent into vice); 4.313–14 (excessive spending and extortion); 4.317 (irreligion); 4.319 (cruelty). 60   Cf. Margaret Jennings, ‘Lucan’s Medieval Popularity: The Exemplum Tradition’, Rivista di cultura classica e medioevale 16 (1974), 215–33. On William’s use of Lucan in this scene see also von Moos, ‘Lucain au moyen âge’, pp. 129–30. 61   See von Moos, ‘Lucain au moyen âge’, pp. 176–89 for an acute analysis of this chapter of the Policraticus. 62   John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 2, 403. 63   John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 2, 403. 64   Von Moos, ‘Lucain au moyen âge’, pp. 184–5. 65   The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham, vol. 2, 1394–1422, ed. and trans. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs, and Leslie Watkiss (Oxford, 2011), pp. 676–7. 66   Chronica maiora, pp. 534–5. 67   Chronica maiora, p. 680. 68   Li Fet des Romains, eds L.-F. Flutre and K. Sneyders de Vogel, 2 vols (Paris, 1935–8). 69   For comparison of Les Faits to de Thuin, see Louis-Fernand Flutre, Li Fait des Romains dans les littératures française et italienne du XIIIe au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1932); Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), pp. 152–213. 70   Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1792; all quotations of Chaucer are from the Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry Benson (Boston, 1987). 71   Bellum civile, 9.1–18; Teseida, 11.3; Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1821–2. 72   ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, 2.400–1; ‘The Monk’s Tale’, 7.2690. 73   ‘The Monk’s Tale’, 7.2720; Riverside Chaucer, 251. 74   The Serpent of Division, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken (1911); for recent debate on Lydgate’s sources see Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, 2005), pp.  37–40, and Andrew Galloway, ‘John Lydgate and the Origins of Vernacular Humanism’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107 (2008), 445–71 (at pp. 450–8). On Lydgate and classical epic see Chapter 22 in this volume by Edwards. 75   Serpent of Division, p. 65. 76   Serpent of Division, p. 56. 77   Serpent of Division, pp. 58–9. Valerius Maximus, Dicta et facta memorabilia, 7.3, sect. 6. See also Lydgate’s handling of Lucan in the Fall of Princes, mediated through Laurent de 54 55

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Premierfait’s second French translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium: Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS es 121–4 (1924–7), vol. 3. 78   Accessus ad auctores, p. 43. See also Chapter 8 ‘Academic Prologues to Authors’ in this volume by Copeland. 79   By contrast, by the end of the thirteenth century there were translations or at least lengthy paraphrases of the Bellum civile into Middle Irish: In Cath Catharda: The Civil War of the Romans, ed. and trans. Whitley Stokes (Leipzig, 1909); Icelandic: Rómverja Saga, ed. Þorbjörg Helgadóttir, 2 vols (Reykjavik, 2010); and Castilian (in the General estoria of Alfonso X el Sabio); there were in addition Tuscan (thirteenth-century) and Pratese (fourteenth-century) translations of the Faits des Romains. A full translation of the Bellum civile into English, by Arthur Gorges, did not appear in print until 1614; the translation of Book 1 of Lucan’s poem by Christopher Marlowe was printed in 1600. 80   For example London, British Library, MS Royal 17.F.II, a manuscript of the Faits des Romains, was made in Bruges for Edward IV in 1479. 81   e.g. Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica, p. 174. 82   Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia, eds and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford, 2002), 1.10, 2.7, 3.2; and the surprising 1.15.

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Chapter 12

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Statius Winthrop Wetherbee

This chapter will trace the medieval fortunes of Statius, but its essential purpose is to frame the work of Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, the three medieval poets whose poetry engages Statius’ poetry with a full, sympathetic awareness of his tragic vision. The tradition of medieval commentary on Statius and the Roman de Thèbes play a role in shaping the response of these poets to Statius’ work, but more significant is their close and astute reading of Statius himself.1 For all three poets, and for the Middle Ages generally, Statius was primarily the poet of the Thebaid. The Achilleid circulated widely, but almost exclusively as a school text. The Silvae were apparently unknown between the ninth century and the fifteenth.2

The Thebaid Such is the unique character of the Thebaid that it could provide a basis both for Dante’s invention of Statius-the-Christian-convert, the most radically revisionist of medieval assimilations of classical epic, and for the sombre social critique of the ‘Knight’s Tale’. To read the Thebaid seriously is to be invited to choose between tragic realism and visionary transcendence, a choice Statius himself seems incapable of making. The poem’s subject is war, but at its centre it comes to a standstill, and the inevitable conflict of Thebes and Argos is deferred for more than two books. The Argive host encounter Hypsipyle, exiled princess of Lemnos, now a slave in the household of King Lycurgus of Nemea. After guiding the thirst-maddened army to the river Langia—her one contribution to the main plot—Hypsipyle tells her sad personal story, neglecting for a time her duty as nursemaid to the infant prince Opheltes. She recalls the Lemnian women’s slaughter of their men, who cared only for warfare; the subsequent invasion of the Argonauts; her seduction by Jason; her banishment and capture by slave-trading pirates. While she speaks, the infant Opheltes, left alone on the grass, is killed by a serpent, and instantly becomes the

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature object of a new religious cult. The Greek heroes suspend their campaign, perform an elaborate ceremonial mourning, and institute quadrennial games in his honour. Hypsipyle’s wanderings and hardships represent an unprecedented intrusion of distinctly feminine experience into epic, and she is only the most prominent of an array of female figures whose piety and sorrow arrest the inexorable movement of Statius’ narrative, setting off by contrast the savagery and confusion of the world of men. Purity, piety, and compassion are feminine attributes for Statius, and become the focus of what we might call the religion of humanity, more profound than, and frequently at odds with, the poem’s many examples of traditional religious observance. At times, as in the cult of the infant Opheltes, the old provides a vehicle for the new, but there is a hollowness in this new cult, which seems so largely an end in itself; through it Statius seems to suggest the spiritual needs of a world that is surely a version of the world of his own time—a world whose traditional gods have failed, where affirming that humanity has value, and that human loss must be mourned, is itself a religious act. There are moments when the poem’s gloom is pierced by religious intimations of a more positive kind, and hints that virtuous heroism may sometimes merit a divine reward: the augur Maeon, who takes his own life after defying the wrath of Eteocles, is promised Elysium (3. 108–11), and the vanished Amphiaraus is invoked as a deity. When Menoeceus, son of Creon, commits suicide in response to a prophecy that this alone can save Thebes, his transformation by the goddess Virtus and the ascent of his spirit to the seat of Jove are described in detail (10. 609–85, 756–82). But more often Statius’ alternative to singing of war is identification with the helpless feminine spectators of the ceaseless conflict. A focal point for this concern is the cult of compassion centred on the Athenian altar of Clementia. Here the widows of the Greek heroes petition Theseus to avenge the impiety of Creon in denying burial to their slain husbands. Unlike the ‘powerful gods’ of pagan tradition, Clementia offers a sort of amnesty, a release from the burden of history. In her presence the stigma of old crimes, poverty, and the effects of authoritarian power are rendered null and void (12. 481–511). At the poem’s end the poet, rather than celebrate Theseus’ overthrow of Creon, becomes absorbed in the communal mourning for the victims of the war, while professing himself unable to represent it. His final lines centre on the figure of Parthenopaeus, the Arcadian boy-warrior (Theb. 12. 805–7): Arcada quo planctu genetrix Erymanthia clamet, Arcada, consumpto servantem sanguine vultus, Arcada quem geminae pariter flevere cohortes. (The Arcadian, and how his mother cried out in her mourning; the Arcadian, his face still beautiful despite his loss of blood; the Arcadian, for whom the two armies felt equal grief.)

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Statius

The Achilleid We can never know what the completed Achilleid would have looked like; what we have is Thetis’ poem as much as Achilles’: the action begins with Thetis, the final word of the poem as it stands is mater, and as medieval commentators recognized, the plot is driven and overshadowed by Thetis’ futile but moving attempt to withhold her son from the destiny which will mean his death.3 But the opening lines speak only of the great-spirited hero: and the passage from youth to manhood we see is that of a hero. The qualities that make Achilles truly magnanimus are impossible to define in moral terms; he is at once godlike and bestial, a Homeric aristocrat in embryo and an Ovidian miles amoris. When we see him first he has robbed a lioness of her cubs (1. 168–70). At the sight of the arms displayed by Ulysses he becomes himself a lion, ferus, repudiating all restraint and former love (1. 852–64). He has been propelled to manhood by an act of rape remarkable in its conformity to Ovidian dictates,4 its force and pleasure intensified by his release from shaming confinement in the role of a maiden (1. 634–43). His own later account of the teaching of Chiron ends with music, medicine, and ‘the teachings of divine justice’ (2. 156– 67), but we know that these are now remote, like his last promises to Deidamia which the winds have carried away (1. 960). Medieval commentary will treat his heroism as modelling moral behaviour, but Statius’ Achilles, in the skilful hands of Ulysses and Diomede, will become a weapon.

Statius in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages Aside from Juvenal’s lines on the popularity of Statius’ recitations of the Thebaid and his meagre earnings from them,5 we know nothing about his reception in his lifetime. Despite his claim that the youth of Italy were studying his poem (Theb. 12. 815), he seems not to have been a canonical author under the Empire; it was evidently Servius’ citations of his poetry that raised him to the status of auctor idoneus, capable of serving as a model of correct Latinity.6 But the first known commentary on the Thebaid, attributed to Lactantius Placidus,7 which appeared between the fourth and the sixth century,8 is learned and sensitive, evidently intended for a sophisticated readership. In addition to explicating Statius’ dense mythological references and tracing allusions to other poets, it provides extensive discussion of religious rites: Adrastus’ prayer to Phoebus/Osiris/Mithras (1. 696–720); Tiresias’ invocation of the ‘supreme power of the threefold world’ (4. 516–17).9 It was a major source for the first and second of the Vatican Mythographers, and much later for Boccaccio’s Genealogie deorum gentilium. There are few traces of Statius in the early medieval period.10 Echoes of the Silvae occur in pre-Carolingian poetry;11 the poem to Lucan’s widow (Silvae 2. 7) appears in

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature a tenth-century manuscript; but the Silvae then vanish, not to reappear until the fifteenth century. A ninth-century manuscript of the Thebaid and Achilleid survives, written at Corbie and evidently copied from an exemplar written in the ‘insular minuscule’ script brought to the Continent from the British Isles; Alcuin indicates that Statius was known at York; and it is probable that Charlemagne’s court library possessed a text of the Thebaid.12 But the faint echoes in Carolingian poetry might have been gleaned from Isidore or the grammarians. The number of surviving manuscripts of both Thebaid and Achilleid increases steadily from the tenth century forward,13 and an eleventh-century poetry collection, the Cambridge Songs, includes portions of three laments excerpted from the Thebaid.14 These and other laments from the poem are part of a substantial body of speeches from classical poetry that appear in numerous tenth- to twelfth-century manuscripts accompanied with musical notation.15 It is clear, as Carole Newlands observes, that the Thebaid ‘was heard as passionate, beautiful song that delved into tragic female experience with great rhetorical and emotional power’.16 But evidence for study remains scant. The Ars lectoria of Aimericus (1086) names Statius as one of nine pagan authors whose works are libri authentici, id est aurei (‘authoritative, golden books’),17 but among hundreds of references to these ‘golden’ authors he is cited only once. The Dialogus super auctores of Conrad of Hirsau (early decades of the twelfth century) includes a brief accessus to Statius, but Conrad’s ‘magister’ misinforms his disciple that the Achilleid tells of Achilles’ education ‘in the court of Diomede’, and that at the end of the Thebaid ‘Adrastus, king of Greece . . . finally conquers and destroys Thebes’.18 After the eleventh century Thebaid and Achilleid rarely appear together in manuscripts, and the medieval fortune of the Achilleid as a school text is already taking shape. Though the Libri catoniani, collections of elementary teaching-texts in which the Achilleid would enjoy a long and wide circulation, assumed their standard forms only in the thirteenth century,19 the poem is found in similar compilations in eleventhand twelfth-century manuscripts.20 The Achilleid established Statius’ position as a curriculum author, and must have been studied exhaustively throughout the medieval period, but its literary value was largely ignored. The accessus dwell on Thetis’ folly in attempting to resist divine determination, and stress the exemplary value of Achilles’ education. A twelfth-century accessus provides a concise reading:21 Utilitas legentium in hoc opere est ad exemplum et imitationem tanti iuuenis uicium corporis abicere et effeminati cordis habitu conscisso in castris uirtutum fortiter militare . . . patet profecto quia sicut est milicia armorum, ita est milicia morum. (The benefit for readers in this work is to cast off bodily vice through imitation of the example of such a youth and, when the clothing of the effeminate heart has been torn away, to be brave soldiers in the camp of the virtues . . . for it is plain and certain that just as there is a soldiery of arms, so there is a soldiery of moral conduct.)

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Statius Versions of the main episodes of the Achilleid appear in a wide range of vernacular romance,22 and an eleventh-century verse epistle of Deidamia to Achilles, modelled on Ovid’s Heroides, echoes the poem at several points.23 The later eleventh century saw a marked increase of critical attention to the Thebaid. New manuscripts proliferate, many of them with new glosses and verse arguments to the individual books; passages from the poem appear regularly in florilegia and grammatical works, and in the twelfth century two new commentaries appear. One of these, attributed in the one known medieval manuscript to the sixth-century mythographer Fulgentius, is a brief allegorical interpretation of the poem in moral and spiritual terms.24 Though it provides the basis for a more or less Christian reading of the Thebaid, and has been seen as foreshadowing Dante’s Christianizing of Statius himself, it seems to have had little or no circulation or influence. More significant is a commentary which originated in central France toward the middle of the twelfth century, and has been attributed to a student of Anselm of Laon. Known from the opening words of its accessus as In principio, it circulated widely, and largely replaced the Lactantius Placidus commentary,25 though it treats that work with great respect. The author is a textual critic and grammarian as well as a sensitive reader, attuned to Statius’ complex allusions to Virgil, Ovid, and especially Horace.26 Boccaccio knew the commentary well, and it mediated a number of his borrowings from Statius in the Teseida as well as the vernacular glosses he added to his poem.27 In a late eleventh or early twelfth-century planctus, which accompanies the Thebaid in some manuscripts, Oedipus bemoans his cursed and tormented life.28 Charged with echoes of the appeal of Statius’ Oedipus to Tisiphone, which sets the plot of the Thebaid in motion (1. 56–87), and his lament over the bodies of his sons (11. 605–31), the poem offers the bitter lesson that for one who embodies the fate of Thebes, nonexistence would have been the better way.

The Roman de Thèbes The Roman de Thèbes (1150–5), first of the romans d’antiquité which are the earliest vernacular romances, represents the first large-scale engagement of a vernacular poet with the classical tradition. Its translation of the Thebaid is often acute and sensitive in its renderings of Statius’ Latin, though it reduces Statius’ 9,700 hexameters to less than 9,000 octosyllables, omitting much, interpolating supplementary information from the commentaries (notably the birth and early life of Oedipus), and adding new episodes which even in the shorter versions occupy a quarter or more of the poem.29

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Thèbes is a learned poem: the poet understands the larger issues raised by the narrative of the Thebaid; but his learning is presented in simplified form. A representative example is his treatment of the powers of ‘Amphyarax’, archbishop and spiritual leader (‘maistre de lour lei’), who knew all the secrets of heaven and understood the ‘Latin’ of birds (S 2119–25; C 2055–62).30 This first brief account, encapsulating powers described at length in the Thebaid,31 is augmented later, as Amphyarax prepares to enter his last, fatal battle. We learn then that his chariot, fashioned by Vulcan, is inscribed with images of the nine heavenly spheres, the planets, and the constellations, with the earth and its creatures at the centre; then the giants attempting to climb to heaven and drive out the gods, and the gods, led by Jupiter, battling against them; then the seven Liberal Arts, each with her distinguishing tools or powers (S 5042–175, C 4949–5016).32 This encyclopedic ekphrasis is a classic expression of twelfth-century clergie, the learned culture grounded in the Liberal Arts and the study of classical authors.33 The  gigantomachia at its centre stands for the elemental violence surrounding Amphiaraus’ disappearance, powerfully described by Statius (Theb. 7. 794–816), but reported by the Thèbes poet in a single line (S 5231, C 5072). It suggests what is at stake in a war which violates, not only every human law, but the laws of Nature herself. In a similar vein Bernardus Silvestris, describing the unfolding universe in his Cosmographia, had included the ‘fratrum discordia Thebae’ (‘the conflict of the Theban brothers’) among the archetypal threats to world order foretold in the newly created stars.34 The Liberal Arts, the weapons of clergie, teach the lessons of just and harmonious order, but like the art and vision of Amphyarax they cannot withstand the forces of war and foreordained disaster. A similar challenge to art and clergie, again with cosmic implications, emerges when Capaneüs scales the walls of Thebes.35 His attack occurs at a moment when the Thebans are engaged in a ceremony in their temple, and the poet interrupts his account of Capaneüs’ advance to describe the temple and the art within. This includes a fresco depicting the history of the founding of Thebes, from the arrival of Cadmus in search of Europa to his marriage with Hermionnë (Harmonia), daughter of Mars (C 9169–227). The order which emerged from the sowing of the dragon’s teeth and has somehow endured the violent fortunes of the house of Laius is now to be undone by an enging, an intelligence, that is the foe not only of Thebes but of order itself.36 Capaneüs’ defiant speech, mocking the gods and vowing to free the world from their power (C 9317–76), causes despair in heaven. Jupiter preaches stoical acceptance, declaring that what is taking place is destined: ‘it cannot now be otherwise’ (C 9416); but as the gods clamour around him, he too grows uncertain. Faced with a colossal impiety which leads him to recall the attack of the giants (C 9585–92), he is finally induced to hurl the fatal thunderbolt. This ‘Capaneid’ brings the poem very close to Statius. The gods of the Thebaid often seem to be in collaboration with, indeed at the mercy of, the furor and nefas

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Statius abroad on the earth below. Here they seem capable only of urging Jupiter to visit destruction on one faction or the other. The Capaneüs of Thèbes, like Statius’ hero, defies simple categorization: he is the arch-blasphemer, but he is also ‘amez de touz | car mout par est sages et prouz’ (C 9147–8) [‘loved by all, for he is very wise and valiant’], as his Statian counterpart, capable of ruthless violence, is also noble and large-hearted.37 The poet makes venerable the priestly role of Amphyarax, but as in the Thebaid, the fierce atheism of Capaneüs which is set against it is not wholly condemned. The religious element in Thèbes, as in the Thebaid, is sporadic and difficult to assess. The sacrifice of Menoeceus and the altar of Clementia are omitted,38 and the death of the infant Archemorus, which in the Thebaid gives rise to a new and elaborate cult, is a merely human event. Ysiphile first appears to the thirst-tormented Argive host in a locus amoenus which is perhaps intended to suggest her providential function,39 though the only overt religious note in her presentation is her cryptic assertion that God has sent down the terrible drought because angered ‘par noz orgoils, par nos pecchez’ (‘by our pride, by our sins’) (S 2305–7, C 2236–8). But as in the Thebaid, she embodies a humanity which stands out against the prevailing emphasis of the narrative. That she had refused to participate in the massacre on Lemnos identifies her as the foe of cruelty, and the relief she provides to the Argive army neutralizes the menace of the angry god who has punished the land with drought. But the interlude is brief. The death of the infant Archemorus leads Ysiphile to fear a terrible reprisal on the part of his father, King Lygurge. Tydeüs and Adrastus, moved by her history and the depth of her grief at the loss of the infant, constrain Lygurge to show mercy, but the serpent’s killing of Archemorus has the effect of a Theban curse, a price that must be paid for relief from the terrible drought.40 The most clearly religious moment in Thèbes corresponds to the passage in which Statius shows Thiodamas, newly consecrated successor to Amphiaraus as high priest, offering a prayer which first addresses Earth, Tellus, ‘hominum divumque aeterna creatrix’, and goes on to invoke Amphiaraus himself, imagined as now immortal and divine (Theb. 8. 303–8). In Thèbes Theodomas ordains a three-days’ fast; then the Argives, barefoot and in simple woollen garments, prostrate themselves before the great opening in the earth which has claimed Amphyarax. Miraculously, as heaven thunders and the earth trembles, the gulf is closed (S 5614–29, C 5379–89). In this moment of spiritual unity the Argives suggest a crusading army; elsewhere Tydeüs is compared to Roland (C 772), Amphyarax to Godfrey of Bouillon and the fighting bishop Turpin (C 5025–30).41 But the Argive campaign is finally an utter failure. In an extraordinary departure from Statius, the S version of Thèbes shows, not the Argive widows, but Adrastus, their king, throwing himself at the feet of Theseüs and appealling for merci (S 11781–825). Like the Thebaid, the poem ends in mourning. The final lines dwell on the fatal sins of the house of Oedipus and the danger of acting ‘contre nature’.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The stark simplicity of this final moral must be weighed against the potentially misleading effect of the Thèbes poet’s free indulgence in anachronism. Having transposed his story to the world of twelfth-century feudal society, he is bound to acknowledge the high culture of his own place and time.42 The two armies share the same cultural values, and the savagery of the Thebaid is for the most part suppressed; Tydeüs is far nobler and more gallant than his Statian counterpart, and even the arch-villain Ethioclés has moments of chivalry and courtoisie. This freedom of invention is the prerogative of poets writing in the vernacular.43 The Latin of works like Bernardus’ Cosmographia or the De bello Troiano of Joseph of Exeter is inescapably imbued with a history and knowledge carried forward from the classical past, and does not lend itself readily to such courtly inventions as the growth of love between Antigoné and Parthonopex, or the impulse that leads Polinicés to embrace and kiss his brother after inflicting his death wound (C 9773–82). But in the poet’s domesticating of his material we should also recognize a refusal to let awe of the epic past obscure his vision of what is at stake in purely human terms in ancient poetry. The poem has no true hero, comes to no satisfying resolution. The Argive warriors may suppose that they are meeting the demands of a sanctioned code of behaviour, but they are mere men, to be judged in terms of virtue and vice like all men. This disenchanted view of epic tradition will come to its fullest realization in the elaborate romans antiques of Boccaccio and Chaucer, where romance convention will be interwoven with a more authentically Statian vision of the world of heroic legend. In the meantime, while the legend of Oedipus assumes a life of its own and appears in many forms,44 the appropriation of Statius is mediated by Thèbes. The Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (1208–13) includes a prose redaction of one of the longer versions of the romance, though the redactor occasionally draws directly on Statius and the scholia.45 It follows its source until the disappearance of Amphyarax, then omits most of the other battles, along with most of the non-Statian episodes, before resuming the narrative with the duel of Polinicés and Ethioclés, and ending with a promise that the city will be rebuilt.46 The Ovide moralisé (c.1300) includes a summary account of the Theban war which the poet claims is based on Statius, though much of it is drawn from Thèbes.47

Statius in Dante In Dante’s Inferno the Thebaid is represented by the blaspheming Capaneus (Inf. 14. 43–72; 25. 15), and Pisa is condemned as ‘a new Thebes’ (Inf. 33. 89), but in the Purgatorio Statius appears as a newly purified soul. And it is Statius himself, Statius the poet, that we meet. Medieval commentary did much to define the Statius of the Commedia, and modern Dantisti have resisted the idea that Statius’ own poetry might

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Statius have influenced Dante’s conception.48 But the Dante who learned his bello stilo from Virgil was also a profound student of Statius, and for Dante Statius is first and last the poet of the Thebaid. From the first appearance of Statius’ shade in Purgatory, the Thebaid is very much in evidence. The shade’s first words—‘O my brothers, may God give you peace’ (Purg. 21. 13)—and the vision they imply of a kingdom where all will reign together are antithetical to the opening words of the Thebaid, which tell of a kingdom torn by ‘fraternas acies’, ‘fraternal strife’. In his new role Statius’ tendency to identify himself with the female figures in his poetry is underlined. As he ministers to Dante’s ‘thirst’ by explaining to him the climate and geography of Purgatory, Statius is plainly linked with his own Hypsipyle, whose tragic life schooled her in humanity and compassion, and it is notable that Virgil, reporting the presence of Statius’ ‘people’ in Limbo, mentions only female figures (Purg. 22. 109–14). Statius expresses a deep reverence for Virgil, and gives a vivid account of the inspiration he drew from Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, with its promise of a portentous birth and a new world order. But what this poem revealed to him remained hidden from Virgil himself; such spiritual significance as Virgil’s poetry is allowed in Dante’s poetic economy is imposed on it by Statius.49 Statius’ own poetry, on the other hand, is itself spiritually dynamic. His religious autobiography and discourse are informed by the isolated moments of sympathy and intuitive vision that punctuate the narrative of the Thebaid. His account of the evangelists who had ‘inseminated’ his world with the words of truth echoes the account of Clementia in the Thebaid, and his own compassion for the martyrs who bore witness to that truth evokes the communal lamentation that concludes the action of the Latin poem.50 His most striking contribution to the argument of the Commedia, his long discourse on the formation of the human embryo and the creation and afterlife of the soul (Purg. 25. 34–108), is largely a reworking of the transformation and apotheosis of the heroic suicide Menoeceus (Theb. 10. 632–77, 780–2).51 Dante’s invention has required withdrawing Statius from the tragic Theban world. His brilliantly transformative reading of the Thebaid does not fully redeem its human component, but his Statius has absorbed into himself the roles of those characters whose piety had briefly illumined the world of his own poem; his instincts and theirs become the vessels of an inspiration which gives them a transcendent significance.

Boccaccio and Chaucer: Theseus and the Teseida Boccaccio and Chaucer introduce a new emphasis in adapting Statius’ legendary history to the purposes of chivalric romance. In place of Dante’s isolation of the feminine, intuitive Statius, the Teseida and the ‘Knight’s Tale’ offer an extension of the masculine action of the Thebaid, founded on the heroism of Theseus, conqueror

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature of the Amazons and liberator of Thebes. There is some warrant for this in Statius’ account, where Theseus’ final attack on Thebes is an act of ira iusta, undertaken in the name of Nature and humanity (Theb. 12. 561–91). But Statius is aware of the implausibility of a ‘Theseid’, an epic devoted to a hero whose exploits include rape and betrayal, and whose family life is fraught with tensions hardly less grim than those that afflict the house of Oedipus. As Theseus’ troops parade through the final book, we are twice reminded of the offspring his Amazon bride Hippolyte will bear to her ‘hostile husband’ (‘hosti . . . marito’, 12. 539), and hence reminded as well of the tragic relations of Theseus, Phaedra, and Hippolytus. Theseus’ shield bears the image of the hero himself at the heart of the Labyrinth, in the act of overcoming the Minotaur, and to see it is to experience a double vision of the hero (12. 672–4). Theseus himself is curiously stirred (Theb. 12. 674–6): . . . veteres reminiscitur actus ipse tuens sociumque gregem metuendaque quondam limina, et absumpto pallentem Gnosida filo. (He too recalls his deeds of old, seeing the band of countrymen, the once dreaded threshold, and the Gnosian maiden growing pale as the thread is consumed.)

The placing of the hero in a Narcissistic attitude at the centre of the scene and the emphasis on the doubling of perspectives provide a warning, at a crucial stage in the destiny of Thebes, of the insidiously repetitive tendency of history, and the difficulty of recognizing the pattern of future danger in hardships once successfully withstood. The pale figure of Ariadne is a counterpart in Theseus’ own story to the many women whose lives have been blighted by the heroic enterprise of the Theban war.52 The narrative projects of both Boccaccio and Chaucer require the suppression of  this troublesome history, and a radically one-sided reading of Theseus. This is especially true of the Teseida. From the outset the Teseida is an exercise in refined machismo, a reading of Statius from which anti-epic anxiety has been expunged. The business of extolling chivalry, affirming the poet’s learning, and demonstrating perfect control of rhetoric and narrative takes precedence over any inclination to  reflect on the implications of the action. But if the Teseida is anti-Statian in this  respect, it simultaneously challenges Dante’s spiritual reading of Statius, for Boccaccio is at work beneath the façade of his narrator’s bland self-assurance, showing with carefully controlled irony the self-renewing power of Theban violence and the difficulty of transcending it.53 The result is very hard to characterize. The Teseida is intricately related to the Thebaid, and the power of Boccaccio’s evocations of Statius’ narrative is undeniable. But it is also, inescapably, a chivalric romance grafted to the epic tradition, and its romance qualities continually subvert its pretentions to epic seriousness. The Teseida ostensibly derives its inspiration from the challenge presented by Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, where Dante names the three subjects proper to high

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Statius poetry, ‘prowess in arms’, ‘the flames of love’, and ‘the direction of the will’, and observes that no poet in the Italian vernacular has yet sung of arms (Tes. 12. 84; De vulgari eloquentia 2. 2). Whether the Teseida meets Dante’s challenge may appear debatable; the cheerful assumption of Boccaccio’s narrator that he has done so is in keeping with his conduct throughout. But it coexists with a more profound engagement with Dante, and an ambition the surface decorum of the poem almost entirely conceals.54 The narrator of Boccaccio’s poem begins by recounting, with high good humour, the conquest of the Amazons that precedes Theseus’ entry into the world of the Thebaid, then the conquest of Thebes that concludes Statius’ poem, before embarking on the story of the rivalry of the Theban princes Palemone and Arcita for love of the Amazon princess Emilia, a conflict through which the pattern of Theban violence inscribes itself on the ostensibly more civilized life of Theseus’ Athens. Dante’s Statius identifies his time on earth with the reign of ‘the good Titus’ who, by destroying Jerusalem, avenged the shedding of the blood of Christ (Purg. 21. 82–6). The parallel to the role played by Theseus in the Thebaid as avenger of the impiety of Thebes is obvious, but Boccaccio, by treating Teseo’s campaigns as mere adventures, dispels any such suggestion, and he seems equally indifferent to the less admirable features of Teseo’s past. A war between male and female armies is hardly an occasion for celebrating heroism in the terms of either epic or romance: Teseo’s campaign moves quickly from violence to a besieging of the Amazon stronghold in which strategy replaces bloodshed, and this in turn is gradually refined into a rite of courtship. The decorum of romance becomes dominant, history fades from view, Ipolita and Teseo negotiate a truce, and the fact of his having slaughtered many women in open combat is no longer real. By the time the Theban campaign begins, Boccaccio has reduced his hero to an embodiment of individual chivalry, brave and gallant but with little sense of higher purpose. The speech in which Teseo later exhorts his men to the Theban campaign is charged with echoes of the orazion in which Dante’s Ulysses had induced his followers to undertake their folle volo into the western ocean (Tes. 2. 44–9; cf. Inf. 26. 90–142), and the victory occasions a ceremonial triumph identical with that which had followed the conquest of the Amazons. Once the action is centred in Teseo’s Athens, maintaining romance decorum becomes virtually an end in itself. Boccaccio introduces this new stage with the un-epic announcement that since the destruction of Thebes Juno is less angry, Mars has gone home to Thrace, and it is now possible to sing in gentler tones of a world dominated by love (3. 1). The story shows the patterns of Theban violence recreating themselves inexorably in Athenian life, and details that recall the tragic events of the Thebaid are omnipresent, but they are disguised by the trappings of chivalry and courtoisie. The characters themselves note the uncanny re-emergence of the patterns of Theban conflict in their lives, but seem incapable of reflecting on their significance.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature As Arcite and Palemone, alone in the forest, prepare to fight for the hand of Emilia, the story comes to a halt while Arcita reflects on the long chain of Theban history that has led to a moment when the last of the Thebans will attempt to kill one another (5. 55–9). Nonetheless, he concludes, ‘since it is your pleasure, it pleases me too that there be battle between us’ (2. 60). Boccaccio can speak of disasters visited by the gods as a matter of polite and sophisticated cooperation among them, though he will then blandly acknowledge in a footnote that the ‘masterly art’ these gods exhibit in arranging events to ensure that both Palemone and Arcita should attain their ends is a fiction of his own devising (9. 5). The effect of this fiction is to reduce all of the poem’s events to an equal significance. Even the posthumous flight of Arcite’s soul to heaven, the one moment in the poem that seems to recall Dante’s transcendent reading of Statius, is in context little more than an embellishment, a way of lending dignity to the occasion. The story reaches its true climax when Arcita is enshrined in a sumptuous tomb inscribed with a pictorial summary of the narrative of the Teseida up to this point (11. 69–88). For a moment the story becomes, like Statius’ narrative, a monument to the untimely sacrifice of youth and innocence, but one from which all suggestion of the horror of history has been carefully effaced. Boccaccio himself regards his creation with a certain urbane detachment, and is clearsighted in his demonstration of how readily the trappings of chivalry and court culture can be used to rationalize or disguise the tensions and contradictions in human life. In its genial way the Teseida has something serious to say about the irreducibility of history to the purposes of romance, and the impoverishment of a literary tradition in which resolution can be achieved only at the price of suppressing the sterner realities of classical poetry. The unrelenting orderliness of Boccaccio’s romance is in its way as inexorable and programmatic as any infestation of fate or Theban curse.

Chaucer and Thebes: Anelida and Arcite, Troilus and Criseyde, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ Chaucer’s interest in the matter of Thebes, and in Boccaccio’s ‘romancing’ of Statius, appears first in the fragment known as Anelida and Arcite, which begins with Theseus’ homecoming after his conquest of the Amazons (Theb. 12. 519–32; Tes. 2. 22), and a capsule account of the war at Thebes (Tes. 2. 10–12), before shifting with Boccaccian abruptness to the world of the French dits amoureux, courtly love tales, to tell the story of the betrayal of the lovelorn Armenian queen Anelida by the Theban knight Arcite, who owes only his name to Boccaccio. The work breaks off after a long lament by Anelida and a promise that the narrative will be continued, but we can

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Statius already see, in Anelida’s obsessive rehearsal of her grief, and Arcite’s hapless submission to the ‘daunger’ [power, control] of a cruel new lady (195), an inchoate version of the pattern of misfortune and tragic blindness that is Theban history, which will come to full realization in the ‘Knight’s Tale’.55 Troilus and Criseyde is charged with references to Thebes. The narrator’s appeal to Tisiphone to help him tell his tale (1. 6–7) recalls Oedipus’ summoning of the Fury to set in motion the plot of the Thebaid. Having made her his muse, the narrator must sustain his will to affirm the goodness and joy of the love of Troilus and Criseyde in the face of certain knowledge that it will end in tragedy. So too Statius retreats from war and suffering to celebrate youth and innocence, and both poets express a nostalgia for a simpler, less history-ridden world. Chaucer’s Trojans recall the Theban past with frequency and familiarity, but the cumulative effect of their allusions is to make clear that while there is evidently a meaningful correspondence between the destinies of Thebes and Troy, it is inaccessible to them.56 We are invited to compare the stories of the two cities when Pandarus comes upon Criseyde and her ladies listening to a ‘romaunce’ of Thebes that is clearly some form of Thèbes, since it refers to the ‘bishop’ Amphiorax. Pandarus, too, knows a version of the unhappy history of Thebes in ‘bookes twelve’ that is presumably the Thebaid. But having thus displayed his learning, he abruptly interrupts the reading, dispelling all thought of such large concerns as the fall of cities and the will of the gods to clear the way for advancing his own grand design (Troilus 2. 99–112).57 The momentary juxtaposition of epic and erotic courtoisie, a perfect illustration of how persistently the latter replaces the former in medieval court culture, has a special aptness to the situation of the Trojans of Chaucer’s poem: Statius’ Thebans are burdened by an almost paralysing awareness of the bearing of past events on their own lives, while the historical perceptions of Chaucer’s characters are mediated by courtly poetry as a form of civilized entertainment. Even the detailed summary of the Thebaid itself (Troilus 5. 1485–510) that forms the centrepiece of the long speech in which Cassandra seeks to explain the dream of her brother Troilus that signifies his betrayal fails to accomplish its vatic purpose.58 The powerful symbolism of the boar links Troilus’ displacement by Diomede in the affections of Criseyde with the larger historical process which, like Diomede himself, has ‘descended down from gestes [histories] olde’ and come to bear on Troy; but Cassandra’s speech is a mere catalogue of misfortunes, and serves only to infuriate Troilus, who repudiates all that she has told him, and remains, like Troy itself, wilfully blind to their common fate. Thebes is engaged directly in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, which advertises itself as an extension of the Thebaid. The fragmentary epigraph found in the best manuscripts is taken from the passage in the Thebaid that announces Theseus’ return from Scythia to Athens (Theb. 12. 519–20), and the occupatio that claims to express Statius’ inability to do justice to the communal mourning over the Argive and Theban dead (12. 797–809),

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature yet describes it poignantly, is inscribed into the ‘Knight’s Tale’, capping the brief account of Theseus’ Theban campaign before the Knight embarks on his own narrative (Kn. T. 994–7): But it were al to longe for to devyse The grete clamour and the waymentynge That the ladyes made at the brennynge Of the bodies . . .

[describe] [lamenting] [burning]

From beginning to end the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is also emphatically a poem of Thebes, an adaptation of the Teseida which follows Boccaccio’s poem in affirming the role of Theseus, but is increasingly pervaded by a very Statian anxiety about the character of Theseus’ authority and its inseparability from force. The Thebaid dramatizes a desperate attempt to sustain hope and belief in the face of the known realities of history, the ruthlessness of gods and rulers. The ‘Knight’s Tale’ substitutes the code and institutions of chivalry for Statius’ religious culture, but the tension between belief and fatalism is essentially the same. Chaucer radically dehistoricizes the classical gods, but in place of Boccaccio’s easily manipulated emblems of love and war he offers a cosmic pantheon of unalterable natural forces which exert a constant and conflicting pressure on the human world. Theseus is a well-intentioned ruler, benign in his authoritarian conduct of affairs, but the character of his authority and values is in its way as determinative of the finally disastrous outcome of the story as the Theban savagery of the sons of Oedipus. His initial conquest of the Amazons sets the stage for a tale in which the transformative power of courtoisie remains an illusion. The protagonists of the poem’s love-triangle remain trapped in the world of heroic legend, as incapable of communicating among themselves as if the primitive laws of conquest still governed their relations. Faced with two lovers reduced to hostile animals by their passion, Emily remains committed to the Amazonian independence that is her birthright, while Palamon and Arcite, brothers in blood and chivalry, persevere in a hostility which is both the legacy of Thebes and a consequence of the inseparability of chivalry from violence. In the end the Knight will involuntarily confront the limitations of his chivalric outlook, and reveal in himself the first stirrings of the capacity for a ‘feminine’, Statian response to his story, but he will never consciously abandon his commitment to chivalry. The spiritual and the feminine remain in a state of otherness relative to the world of Chaucer’s poem. Like the narrator of the Teseida, then, the Knight demonstrates a remarkable ability to ignore the implications of his story. From the outset the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is very much a ‘Theseid’. The Knight goes to elaborate lengths to portray Theseus as champion of order. He deals with the conquest of the Amazons in less than thirty lines, barely noting the great battle and subsequent wedding, but finds space for comments on Theseus’ wisdom, chivalry, glory, and nobility that have the effect of a running gloss (862–70). The still briefer account of the destruction of Thebes includes vivid

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Statius glimpses of Theseus’ banner and crest, shows him slaying Creon ‘manly as a knight’, and is reported from beginning to end as if Theseus had achieved it single-handed (985–92). Between these summaries: the narrative slows and dilates to show the appeal of the Greek widows whose warrior husbands lie unburied around Thebes, and the magnanimity of Theseus’ response. The effect is to make this episode an icon of knightly responsibility, set off by the flanking images of Theseus’ martial virtus as if by a triumphal arch. But Chaucer’s romance begins with a strong foreshadowing of how the story’s inherently Statian character will come to dominate its action. When Arcite and Palamon, who first appear in a liminal state, ‘nat fully quyke, ne fully dede’ (1015) (‘neither fully alive nor fully dead’), are recognized by their coats of arms as being of the blood royal, they are ‘torn’ from a pile of bloody flesh and in effect reborn into the world of Theseus in a manner worthy of their horrific origins. This sense of a strange new birth is reinforced later when the two Thebans, both now at large, meet in the woods outside Athens and act out the implications of their irreconcilable love of the same woman. The forest that surrounds the scene is the grove of later Theban legend, sacred to Diana and a source of peril to Actaeon, Narcissus, and other unwary Theban hunters, and the sense that a Theban pattern is shaping the action is very strong. Arcite, after a long and emotionally exhausting soliloquy on his woes, as Theban and lover, first swoons, then revives to find himself confronted by Palamon, emerging from the undergrowth ‘with face dead and pale’ as if enacting some chthonic mystery. The comparison of the lover-enemies to hunters, each awaiting the beast whom they must destroy or be destroyed by, is borrowed from Statius’ description of Eteocles’ awaiting the prophecy of his fate in the fratricidal conflict (1638–46; cf. Theb. 4. 494–9). When Theseus, pursuing the ‘grete hert’ (stag) as a servant of Diana (1679–82), emerges from the wood to encounter the fighting lovers, his intrusion will have consequences as devastating in their way as the unwitting discoveries of Actaeon and Narcissus, though their implications will be disguised by the chivalric context in which they unfold and the political rhetoric with which they are rationalized. The exercise of chivalric authority with which Theseus suspends the fight in the forest, deferring its immediate issue and attempting to forestall violence by imposing the form of the tournament, only leads to a new reconstitution of the classic Theban dilemma. Theseus will be forced to preside over an ultimately fatal conflict, as exalted as a god on his throne but powerless to intervene, while the Theban fortunes of the lovers work themselves out in the great theatre he has created for this sole purpose. So in Ovid’s account of Cadmus’ original colonization of Thebes, the warriors born of the dragon’s teeth are compared to the performers on a stage: Cadmus is forced to remain the idle viewer of a spectacle of his own making while his new subjects slaughter one another.59 When the elaborate ceremonial of the tournament has run its course, and the Knight must describe Arcite’s funeral, the ritual emphasis of his narration merges

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature naturally with a more authentic and timeless ritual. He himself experiences the complex therapy these rites provide, and reveals a new sense of horror and compassion in the face of death, emotions from which he has been cut off until now by his commitment to the affirmation of chivalry. But the funeral is preceded by the Knight’s depiction of Arcite’s final agony, when throat and bowels are choked by blood and ‘venym’, and ‘Nature’ is suspended. The Knight reports the crisis with stoical detachment, and when Arcite dies, refuses to consider his spiritual destiny (2812–15): Of soules fynde I nat in this registre, Ne me ne list thilke opinions to telle Of hem, though that they writen wher they dwelle. Arcite is coold, ther Mars his soule gye! (I find no mention of souls in this account, and I do not wish to report the opinions of those who write of where souls dwell. Arcite is cold, may Mars guide his soul!)

In the Teseida, after lamentations and farewells that occupy most of Boccaccio’s tenth book, a passage charged with echoes of the Paradiso describes the ascent of Arcite’s spirit through the spheres (Tes. 11. 1–3). But Boccaccio’s echoings of Dante in this passage are deceptively tough-minded: their evocation of the Commedia is parodic, and aims to remind us of the worldliness of the ideals that have shaped and circumscribed the fallen hero’s vision. The Knight’s refusal to follow Arcite’s soul into the afterlife is harsher, re-emphasizing his resolutely political purpose. Throughout his tale, pietas, horror, and spiritual yearning have been contained, transformed into occasions for a display of ‘mercy’ on the part of Theseus, or simply suppressed. In the blunt directness of the Knight’s refusal to ponder the religious significance of Arcite’s death the implications of this suppression come to a head: the possibility of a transcendent perspective is foreclosed, and lamentation is dismissed as a sort of women’s disorder, a ‘maladye’ hardly worth mentioning (2820–6); the sheer fact of death becomes central. Arcite’s body, ‘as black as any coal or crow’ (2692), relegated to a sort of limbo outside the domain of Nature but far from the shores of light, is Chaucer’s stark alternative to Statius’ nostalgic idealizing of the beauty of Parthenopaeus in death. And the utter suspension of natural virtus that leaves Arcite at the mercy of ‘corrupcioun’ (2745–58) is his counterpart to the story of the soul as told by Dante’s Christian Statius, for whom historical existence is a laboratory where organic and spiritual processes come together, an unreal instant in the progress from nurturing nature to eternity. The flight from worldly to transcendent life, the culmination of the yearning, feminine intuitions of Statius and Dante’s Statius, is rejected by the Knight with blunt, masculine impassivity. But this stoic posture gives way to a deeper response, conveyed through the climactic occupatio in which, though the Knight declines to describe Arcite’s cremation,

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Statius the power of the ritual forces its way into his consciousness. This constitutes the poem’s most striking response to the Theban pattern that underlies it. The rhetorical gesture is set in the form of Statius’ final lament for Parthenopaeus, but extends over some forty lines, and is different in quality from any other passage in the poem. Most of the details of the scene are present in Boccaccio, but the Teseida offers no equivalent to the compulsive urgency of the Knight’s description. Where Boccaccio tells us ‘everything’ in an orderly fashion, the Knight shows himself beginning to realize that there is more to say than can possibly be conveyed. As Arcite’s funeral pyre is strewn with jewels, arms, and sumptuous cloths, the pretensions of chivalry are laid aside: for a moment the Knight appears as a warrior doing homage to a fallen comrade in a spirit closer to the world of Beowulf or Homer than to the confections of courtly-chivalric romance. The funeral passage is a new departure in other ways as well. It is possible to read it as implicitly a gesture of sympathy with Emily, whose function it is to apply the torch to the pyre, and whose presence is all the more vivid for the restraint with which it is indicated. When a rubric in the Teseida announces ‘How Emily lit the funeral pyre, and what she said’ (Tes. 11. 41), we know we will hear something graceful and solemn, and we are neither disappointed nor stirred by what follows. When the Knight tells us that he will not describe how Emily swooned as the flames arose, ‘ne what she spak, ne what was hir desir’ (2943–4), we recognize, though we cannot enter, a realm of experience that cannot be dismissed as womanish ‘malady’, but provides a necessary complement to the experience of the warrior. The Knight gives no decisive sign of a new appreciation of Emily and her role: even the seeming tenderness with which he shows her being ‘led homeward’ as the fire dies (2956), a detail not present in Boccaccio, may be a symptom of officiousness rather than compassion. But if Emily cannot be said to come into her own, she has evolved from a mere necessity of the romance plot to an animate, haunting presence, and the Knight and Theseus together have perhaps attained a dawning sense of the spirit of Clementia.

Gower and the Achilleid John Gower’s Confessio amantis includes two tales drawn from Statius’ Achilleid which  address the relationship of love and chivalry. The first deals with Achilles’ education by the centaur Chiron. Told by Genius to demonstrate that ‘of knihthode the prouesse | Is grounded upon hardinesse’ (CA 4. 1965–6), it says nothing of music or medicine, and deals only with hunting. Every day when Achilles returned from the hunt, Chiron inspected his weapons for the trace of blood that would confirm that he had killed, or at least wounded his prey (Achilleid. 2. 127–8; CA 4.). The fearlessness Achilles acquired by this means, says Genius, would serve him well when it

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature came to ‘the grete nede’: but there lurks around the episode the aura of a primitive sexual rite,60 and it is disconcerting when Genius adds that the prowess Achilles learned in this way (CA 4. 2017–19) . . . is to love sufficant [sufficient] Aboven al the remenant [others] That unto loves court poursuie.   [attain  gain access]

Gower’s second tale describes Achilles’ sojourn at the court of Lycomedes. As Genius reminds us several times, he is still very young when he arrives on Scyros: his ‘smile’ at the spectacle of the maidenly dress and behaviour imposed on him is that of a sheepish boy (3011–13), very different from the sly smile which, in the Achilleid, is his private response to Thetis’ wish that he might someday be joined to one of the daughters of Lichomedes (Ach. 1.323–4). His union with Deidamia is a natural function of adolescence, provoked by circumstance: Unschooled in male courtoisie, he has been obliged by his new role to experience the intimacy normal among maidens, and the male nature which Chiron had taught only ‘corage’ inevitably reasserts itself. Genius responds with instinctive sympathy. In contrast to the rape frankly described by Statius (Ach. 1. 640–3), Genius describes a mutual innocent ‘stirring’ (Confessio amantis 4. 3064); not chivalric ‘hardiesce’, but the pressure of innocent nature in the absence of the tensions and constraints chivalric culture would have imposed. Gower’s use of these two stories is clearly designed to contrast the martial and the courtly phases of Achilles’ training, and he has altered them to emphasize this. His Achilles, once withdrawn from his schooling in male aggression, submits to life as a girl with uncanonical ease. Statius had shown Thetis straining to adapt the brawny adolescent to his feminine role, and his Achilles is quickly aware of the sexual opportunities his concealment will provide (Ach. 1. 270–331). Gower’s Achilles, a tabula rasa, is schooled first in the ‘hardiesce’ that will serve him in war, then completely reschooled in courtly grace and maidenly submissiveness—‘Honour, servise and reverence’ (Confessio amantis 4. 3001). In both situations Genius has responded frankly and directly to the ‘natural man’, discovering an essential sexuality in his wielding of his bloody spear, and an innocent flowering of the same sexuality in his union with Deidamia. In the end, of course, the impulse to chivalric enterprise will ‘overrun’ tender love. But Gower’s reworking of Statius to emphasize the distinctness and completeness of Achilles’ two educations allows us to imagine the possibility of a more fulfilling role for love if the pressure to meet the demands of chivalric prowess were less extreme.

Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes This poem, the only Middle English work devoted to the story of Thebes, is based on the prose redaction of an expanded version of the Roman de Thèbes, and is thus at

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Statius several removes from Statius. But Lydgate knew Statius well, and creates a context for his own poem that reveals a Statian pessimism about the ability of human beings to order their world, a pessimism grounded in a ‘dark and powerful sense of historical forces’ which he shares with the Chaucer of the ‘Knight’s Tale’.61 Coming to the end of his long and detailed treatment of the experience of the Argive army in the land of King Lygurgus, Lydgate digresses to briefly recall (or anticipate) Lygurgus’ role in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ (Siege 3523–7): He was the same myghty champioun To Athenes that kam with Palamoun Ageyne his brother that called was Arcyte, Lad in his chaar with foure boolys whyte,   Upon his hed a wreth of gold ful fyn.

[came] [against] [drawn in his chariot  white bulls] [head wreath]

In Lydgate’s narrative Adrastus the Argive king has played the role of Chaucer’s Theseus, consoling Lygurgus for the death of his infant son in a speech which, though in a more sombre vein, closely echoes Theseus’ ‘Firste Moevere’ speech, a philosophical consolation for the death of Arcite (Siege 3409–49; KnT 2987–3075). Lydgate’s reminder that Lygurgus, whom Chaucer will describe as the very embodiment of primordial martial force (KnT 2128–36),62 is to play a role in the conflict that will lead to Arcite’s death brings the two poems into a relation close to that which Chaucer had established between his own poem and the Thebaid, but with a fundamental difference. Chaucer’s Theseus ends the ‘Knight’s Tale’ by effecting a marriage between Palamon and Emelye framed by a treaty between Thebes and Athens, thus presuming to end the seemingly endless chain of violence that has been the history of Thebes. If the ‘Knight’s Tale’, more truly Statian than the Teseida, can be seen as a hard-won conclusion to Statius’ longa series of misfortune, Lydgate, whose poem is framed as a Canterbury Tale, and more specifically as the first tale of the return journey, is answering the Knight’s inaugural tale, reopening questions that tale had aimed to resolve. It re-enacts on the vast scale of open war events that Theseus had attempted to circumscribe within the laws of chivalry,63 and it ends by rendering futile the early attempts of Lydgate’s narrator to affirm the value of the eloquence of Amphyoun (Siege 194–292), the ‘trouthe’ affirmed by the first minister of Ethyocles (Siege 1721–73), and the wisdom of Amphiorax, whose defeat in council demonstrates the impotence of prudence in the face of youthful folly (ST 2887–988). The vision of peace which introduces Lydgate’s concluding prayer ends with ‘Pees and quyet, concord and unyté’ (Siege 4703), words which echo the Treaty of Troyes, with its promise of peace and perpetual alliance between England and France, and this has led critics to see the Siege of Thebes as ending on an affirmative note.64 But the peace Lydgate invokes is a promise to be realized only in the fullness of time, when nation shall no longer rise up against nation, a peace for which, ‘her in this lyf present’,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature he still must pray (ST 4709–13). I think Lydgate has chosen to retell the story of the Thebaid in order to make clear that the time of peace is not yet at hand.65

Notes 1   There is no comprehensive study of the Statius tradition, and the body of scholarship is not comparable to that devoted to the transmission and reception of Virgil or Ovid. I have tried to include in my notes references to the most important work on different aspects of the tradition. Particularly noteworthy are the studies of Aimé Petit on the Roman de Thèbes, Violetta de Angelis and David Anderson on the commentary tradition, and Lee Patterson on Chaucer. 2   Note on Texts: Statius, Thebaid and Achilleid, ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Dante, Commedia, ed. and trans. Charles Singleton, 6 vols (Princeton, 1970–5); Boccaccio, Teseida, ed. Alberto Limentani, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, 10 vols in 11 (Milan, 1964–98), vol. 2; Chaucer, ‘Knight’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987); Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2001). For the Roman de Thèbes, see n. 29. 3   Daniel Mendelsohn, ‘Empty Nest, Abandoned Cave: Maternal Anxiety in Achilleid 1’, Classical Antiquity 9 (1990), 295–308. 4   Lorenzo Sanna, ‘Achilles, the Wise Lover, and his Seductive Strategies (Statius, Achilleid 1. 560–92)’, Classical Quarterly 57 (2007), 207–15. 5  Juvenal, Satires, 7. 82–7. 6   Robert Kaster, ‘Servius and Idonei Auctores’, American Journal of Philology 99 (1978), 181–209. 7   The brief commentary on the Achilleid ascribed to Lactantius Placidus in early manuscripts is post-classical and unoriginal, a few paragraphs on myth interspersed with glosses on particular words and constructions. It is not found after the twelfth century. 8   On the possible date see Paul van de Woestijne, ‘Les Scolies à la “Thébaïde” de Stace: remarques et suggestions’, Antiquité classique 19 (1950), 149–63. 9   Lactantius Placidus, In Statii Thebaida commentum, ed. R. D. Sweeney (Leipzig, 1997), pp. 88–90, 293–5. 10  M. D. Reeve, ‘Statius’, in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L D. Reynolds (Oxford, 1983), pp. 394–6, provides a concise review of the evidence. 11   Silvae, ed. Friedrich Vollmer (Leipzig, 1898), p. 34. 12   Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, eds L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1991), pp. 95–6. 13   Birger Munk Olsen, ‘La Popularité des textes classiques entre le ixe et le xiie siècle’, Revue d’histoire des textes 14–15 (1984–5), 169–81 (at 177); Munk Olsen, L’Étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 4 vols (Paris, 1982–89), 2, 521–67.

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Statius 14   The Cambridge Songs, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski, 2nd edn (Tempe, Az., 1998), 98, 106, 108. The passages excerpted are Theb. 12.325–48 (Argia’s lament for Polynices); 5.608–16 (Hypsipyle’s lament for Archemorus); 12.325–35 (a shorter excerpt from Argia’s lament). 15   Jan M. Ziolkowski, ‘Between Text and Music: The Reception of Virgilian Speeches in Early Medieval Manuscripts’, Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 52 (2004), 107–26. Manuscripts containing excerpts from the Thebaid are listed in pp. 121–3. These include, in addition to those that appear in the Cambridge Songs, Theb. 2.351–4 (Argia’s farewell to Polynices); 8.736–41 (Tydeus’ death speech); 9.49–62 (Polynices’ lament for Tydeus). Manuscripts containing neumed passages from Statius are catalogued in Jan M. Ziolkowski, Nota bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2007), 264–9. 16   Carole Newlands, Statius, Poet between Rome and Naples (2012), at p. 126. 17  Aimeric, Ars lectoria, ed. Harry F. Reijnders, Vivarium 9 (1971), 119–37; 10 (1972), 41–101, 124–76; at Vivarium, 10, 170. 18   Conrad d’Hirsau, Dialogus super auctores. In Accessus ad auctores, Bernard d’Utrecht, Conrad d’Hirsau, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden, 1970), 1486–99, pp. 119–20. 19   M. Boas, ‘De librorum Catonianorum historia atque compositione’, Mnemosyne 42 (1914), 17–46; The Medieval Achilleid of Statius, ed. Paul M. Clogan (Leiden, 1968), pp. 1–9; Colette Jeudy and Yves-François Riou, ‘L’Achilleide de Stace au Moyen Âge: abrégés et arguments’, Revue d’histoire des textes 4 (1974), 143–80. In the libri Catoniani the Achilleid is commonly divided into five books. On the various divisions of the work in the manuscripts, Achilleid, ed. Jean Méheust (Paris, 1971), pp. xlvii–viii. 20   Munk Olsen, ‘La Réception de Stace au moyen âge (du ixe au xiie siècle)’, in Nova de veteribus. Mittel- und neulateinische Studien für Paul Gerhard Schmidt, eds A. Bihrer and E. Stein (Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2004), pp. 230–46 (here, p. 233). 21   Oxford, Bodleian, Lincoln College, MS Lat. 27, 62ra, in Harald Anderson, The Manuscripts of Statius, 3 vols (Arlington, Va, 2009), 3, 24. On accessus to the Achilleid see also Violetta de Angelis, ‘Lo Stazio di Dante: scuola e poesia’, Schede umanistiche 16 (2002), 38–46. 22   George L. Hamilton, ‘Gower’s Use of the Enlarged Roman de Troie’, PMLA 20 (1905), 179–96. 23   Jürgen Stohlmann, ‘“Deidamia Achilli”: Eine Ovid-Imitation aus dem 11. Jahrhundert’, in Literatur und Sprache im europäischen Mittelalter: Festschrift für Karl Langosch zum 70. Geburtstag, eds Alf Önnerfors, Johannes Rathofer, and Fritz Wagner (Darmstadt, 1973), pp. 195–231. 24   S. Fulgentii Episcopi super Thebaiden, in Lactantii Placidi in Statii Thebaida Commentum 1, Anonymi in Statii Achilleida commentum. Fulgentii ut fingitur Placiadis super Thebaiden commentariolum, ed. R. D. Sweeney (Leipzig, 1997), pp. 697–704. An older text with French translation in Sylviane Messerli, Oedipe enténébré: légendes d’Oedipe au XIIe siècle (Paris, 2002), pp. 298–305. 25   The Lactantius Placidus commentary enjoyed a revival in Italy in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; Violetta de Angelis, ‘I commenti medievali alla Tebaide di Stazio: Anselmo di Laon, Goffredo Babione, Ilario d’Orleans’, in Medieval and Renaissance Scholarship, eds Nicholas Mann and Birger Munk Olsen, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 21 (Leiden, 1997), pp. 75–136 (at 92–5).

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 26   de Angelis, ‘I commenti medievali’, pp. 94–111; David Anderson, ‘Boccaccio’s Glosses on Statius’, Studi sul Boccaccio 22 (1994), 32–66. 27   Anderson, ‘Boccaccio’s Glosses’, pp. 43–57. 28   Ed. Messerli, Oedipe, pp. 306–9, with French translation by Jean-Yves Tilliette. 29  The Thebaid and the Roman de Thèbes are compared at length by Aimé Petit, Naissance du roman, 2 vols (Paris and Geneva, 1985), 1, 28–137; L. G. Donovan, Recherches sur le Roman de Thebes (Paris, 1975), pp. 17–186. For episodes added or omitted in the several versions, Petit, Naissances, 2, 1096–104. 30   Le Roman de Thèbes, ed. Francine Mora-Lebrun (Paris, 1995), 2120–5; ed. Guy Raynaud de Lage, Classiques français du moyen âge 96 and 98, 2 vols (Paris, 1968–9), 2056–62. The MoraLebrun edition is based on MS S (London, British Library, Additional MS 34114), considered an earlier version of the text. MS C (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 784), used by Raynaud de Lage, is the oldest manuscript. See Petit, Naissances du roman, pp. 1088–187. Subsequent references to the poem will be by line to S and/or C. Names will be as given in S. 31   Aimé Petit, ‘“Monseigneur” Amphiaraüs?’, in Aimé Petit, Aux origines du roman: Le Roman de Thèbes (Paris, 2010), pp. 21–8. 32  The accessus to the ‘In principio’ commentary calls Statius ‘liberalium artium sciencie feliciter eruditus’; David Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s Teseida (Philadelphia, 1988), p. 230. 33   On this ‘literary encyclopedism’, see the introduction to Études sur le Roman de Thèbes, ed. Bernard Ribémont (Orléans, 2002), pp. 36–49. 34   Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, ed. Peter Dronke, Textus minores 53 (Leiden, 1978), 1.3.39, p. 105. 35   This long episode, arguably the climax of the poem in C (8877–9630), is absent in S, where Capaneüs survives until the final attack (S 11916–25). 36   As he seeks to tear down the walls built by Amphÿon, Capaneüs sees himself undoing magic and gramaire. This term can refer to incantation, but also suggests the arts of clergie, to which Capaneüs is equally hostile. 37   Capaneüs is called preuz twice elsewhere in Thèbes (C 8899, 8952). Statius’ praise is artfully ambiguous: ‘huic ampla quidem de sanguine prisco | nobilitas; sed enim ipse manu praegressus avorum | facta, diu tuto superum contemptor et aequi | impatiens largusque animae . . .’ (Theb. 3. 600–3). (‘nobility of ancient blood had he in full measure, but, surpassing the prowess of his sires, he had long despised the gods; impatient too was he of justice and lavish of his life . . .’) 38  The Clementia episode is perhaps recalled when Theseüs encounters the Argive widows, whose appeals for merci arouse the pitié of the noble warriors (C 10027–34). 39  Messerli, Oedipe, pp. 179–81, compares the hortus conclusus of Canticles 4: 12. 40   The episode clearly recalls Cadmus’ arrival at the future site of Thebes, the killing of his men by a dragon as they search for water, Cadmus’ killing of the dragon, and the sowing of the dragon’s teeth, from which spring warriors who wage the first Theban war. This episode is summarized in C 9193–218.

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Statius 41   On crusade themes in Thebes, Dominique Battles, The Medieval Tradition of Thebes: History and Narrative in the Old French Roman de Thèbes, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate (New York, 2004), pp. 23–38. 42   Aimé Petit, L’Anachronisme dans les romans antiques du XIIe siècle (Paris, 2002), pp. 23–4. 43  Petit, L’Anachronisme, pp. 26–7. 44  Messerli, Oedipe, includes an appendix of texts, pp. 269–333. 45   Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (Estoires Rogier), ed. Marijke de Visser-van Terwisga, 2 vols (Orléans, 1995), 2, 99–141, passim. Though this is an ‘édition partielle’, the portion devoted to Thebes is presented entire. 46   Raynaud de Lage, Premiers romans, pp. 57–63, provides an excellent analysis. 47   Marylène Possamaï-Perez, ‘La Légende thébaine dans l’Ovide moralisé: un example de contamination des sources’, in ‘Ce est li fruis selonc la letre’: mélanges offerts à Charles Méla, eds Olivier Collet, Yasmina Foehr-Janssens, and Sylviane Messerli (Paris, 2002), pp. 527–45; Ovide moralisé, 9. 1441–838. 48   An example is de Angelis, ‘Lo Stazio di Dante’, which demonstrates very well how specific loci in Dante can be explained by recourse to the commentary tradition, but in forty pages quotes only a few fragments of Statius’ poetry. 49   An extreme example is Statius’ wholly personal reading of the ‘cursed hunger for gold’ (Aeneid, 3.56–7) in Purg. 37–45. 50   Winthrop Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets (Notre Dame, Ind., 2008), pp. 182–3. 51  Wetherbee, Ancient Flame, pp. 188–90. 52   The pathos of Ariadne’s role is set off by the verbal pattern which links her description here (‘absumpto pallentem Gnosida filo’, 12. 676) with that of the dead Parthenopaeus (‘consumpto servantem sanguine vultus’, 12. 806). 53   In emphasizing the comic aspect of Boccaccio’s treatment of his Theban theme, I am of course ignoring other, more profound ways in which the Teseida is influenced by a Statius mediated by Dante. See Ronald L. Martinez, ‘Before the Teseida: Statius and Dante in Boccaccio’s Epic’, Studi sul Boccaccio 20 (1991–2), 205–18. 54   Martinez, ‘Before the Teseida’. 55   On Statian ‘Thebanism’ in Anelide and Arcite, see Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, 1991), pp. 61–83. A similar instance is the ‘Compleynt of Mars’, which includes an account of the ‘Brooch of Thebes’ fashioned by Vulcan as a wedding present for Harmonia, daughter of Venus and Mars (Complaint, 245–62; Theb. 2. 282–305). 56   On Statius and Thebes in Troilus and Criseyde, see Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, pp. 126–36. 57   Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the ‘Roman Antique’ (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 228–9. 58   Cassandra’s version of Statius’ narrative is constructed from the twelve-line Latin argumentum to the Thebaid found in most manuscripts and the argumenta to the individual books; F. P. Magoun, Jr, ‘Chaucer’s Summary of Statius’ Thebaid II–XII’, Traditio 11 (1955), 409–20; K. P. Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality (Oxford, 2011), pp. 64–8.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature   Metamorphoses, 3. 106–17.   Mary Frances Zambreno, ‘Gower’s Confessio amantis IV, 1963–2013: The Education of Achilles’, Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 3 (1986), 131–48. 61   James Simpson, ‘“Dysemol daies and fatal houres”: Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, eds Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford, 1997), pp. 15–34 (at p. 21). On Siege of Thebes see also Chapter 22 in this volume by Edwards on Lydgate. 62   Though Lycurgus of Nemea, father of Opheltes and ally of Palemon in the great tournament, is mentioned several times in the Teseida, Chaucer calls his Lygurge ‘the grete kyng of Trace [Thrace]’ (KnT 2129), perhaps recalling Statius’ references to Lycurgus of Thrace as having been hostile to Bacchus (Theb. 4. 385; 7. 180). Lydgate’s Lygurgus, like Chaucer’s, is king of Thrace (ST 3520–1), but also the bereaved father of the Hypsipyle episode in the Thebaid and Thèbes. 63   Simpson, ‘“Dysemol daies”’, pp. 23–5. 64   Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (Charlottesville, Va, 1970), p. 156; David Lawton, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, ELH 54 (1987), 761–99 (at pp. 778–9). 65   Lee Patterson, ‘Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and Lydgate’, in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, eds Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton, 1993), pp. 72–107 (at pp. 96–7). But compare Fiona Somerset, ‘“Hard is with seyntis for to make affray”: Lydgate and the Styles of Martyrdom’, in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, eds Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, Ind., 2006), pp. 258–78 (at p. 260). 59 60

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Chapter 13

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Trojan Itineraries and the Matter of Troy Marilynn Desmond

The relationship between the Homeric epics and medieval textual cultures represents one of the most paradoxical trajectories in the reception of classical texts in the Latin Middle Ages. Although the Homeric epics were unknown in the Latin West, the matter of Troy was foundational to medieval historiography and critical to the development of vernacular literary traditions.1 Between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, knowledge of the Greek language in western Europe was limited to an ecclesiastical elite: a small, scattered network of readers whose anomalous literacy in Greek resulted from an interest in philosophical and theological texts such as the works by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite or Aristotle. As non-religious narratives, the Homeric epics would hold no interest for Greek-literate churchmen such as John Sarracenus (c.1160s), Robert Grosseteste (c.1168–1253), Roger Bacon (c.1215–1292), or William of Moerbeke (c.1215–1286).2 In the absence of the Greek texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the matter of Troy was transmitted solely through Latin texts. Homer was nonetheless frequently named as the auctor responsible for the absent Homeric epics, for which he was both revered and reviled, while non-Homeric narratives of the siege and sack of Troy permeate medieval textual traditions, Latin as well as vernacular. Medieval readers thus possessed a Homeric auctor but no Homeric texts, as well as a vast, non-Homeric textual tradition on the Trojan War and its aftermath. In the absence of a canonical source text, the matter of Troy in the Latin West sustains a vision of the city of Troy as ever present yet always already destroyed. Virgil’s Aeneid, which seamlessly grafts the founding of Rome onto the fall of Troy, helped establish the cultural capital of the Trojan War for the Latin West, although the notion of a Trojan foundation for Rome pre-dates Virgil by several centuries.3 While the most famous Trojan to flee the burning city was Aeneas, whose settlement in Italy provided a foundation legend for Rome and its imperial project,

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Trojans were frequently invoked as founding figures for cities in the eastern Roman provinces in the Hellenistic period.4 The claim that a city’s founder had a Trojan pedigree enabled it to locate a precise place in a globalizing narrative in order to affiliate with the perceived ‘civilizing’ trajectory of east to west. Throughout ancient and medieval legend, the migration of the defeated Trojans from the fallen city enabled a temporal connection between various locations in the Mediterranean and beyond. Jonathan Barlow argues that the ubiquity of Trojan foundation myths among the early medieval Franks suggests that the notion of Trojan origins in Gaul originated during the Roman Empire.5 Trojan ancestry is a standard feature of medieval historiography; for example, in the seventh century, Fredegar’s Chronicle names the Trojan refugee Francio as the ancestor of the Franks. In the eighth century, the anonymous Liber historiae Francorum designates Priam and Antenor as founding figures for the Franks. Trojans found their way to England as well. While the AngloSaxon elite self-consciously rejected Trojan ancestry and categorized the matter of Troy as fictional,6 the ninth-century Latin chronicle composed in Wales—Nennius’ Historia Britonum—invokes Brutus, son of Ascanius and grandson of Aeneas, as the founder of Britain. Early in the twelfth century, Orderic Vitalis (c.1075–1142) claimed that the Danes were descended from Antenor, who ‘settled on the shore of the ocean in the north’.7 Because these Danes later become the Normans, both the invaders and the British ‘natives’ would have had Troy on their side at the time of the Norman Conquest. These Trojan foundation myths found throughout western Europe emphasized the dynastic significance of the matter of Troy and thereby assured its currency in medieval textual cultures.8 The medieval curriculum included classical Latin texts such as Virgil’s Aeneid as well as Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses, texts that provided the medieval schoolboy with anecdotal narratives of the Trojan War and its aftermath: the first person account of the destruction of Troy in the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, offered students a dramatic glimpse of the final, post-Iliad destruction of the city. The Ilias latina, a 1,070-line epitome of the Iliad in Latin hexameters, composed ad c.65 during the final years of Nero’s imperial rule, was also a medieval school text.9 While the Ilias latina frequently circulated under the authorial name of Homer, it does not render the Iliad into Latin but instead rehearses a sparse account of the Homeric plot in a Virgilian/Ovidian register. The text of the Ilias latina includes episodes selected from most of the twenty-four books of the Iliad, which are then stitched together with brief plot summaries. Although the basic sequence of battles survives from the Iliad, as do the heroes and even the deities, such schematic brevity lacks a heroic ethos. The Ilias latina does not retain the powerful narrativity of the Iliad, and thus it limits the reader’s grasp of the plot as a whole. For the first-century, bilingual Roman audience, the Ilias latina may have offered a recognizably Virgilian gloss on its canonical Homeric source, but for the medieval reader without access to the Greek text of the Iliad, the Ilias latina would remain an opaque witness to an

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Trojan Itineraries and the Matter of Troy absent text. The Ilias latina circulated widely from the ninth century onwards, as demonstrated by citations in Latin texts.10 Readership and literary influence, however, are two distinct forms of textual reception, and despite its readership, the Ilias latina does not appear to have shaped literary traditions on Troy—especially in the vernacular—beyond assuring the name recognition of the Homeric heroes as well as the identity of Homer as auctor.11 Most of the narrative of the Trojan War—its origins, its conduct, and its aftermath— was transmitted to western Europe in two Latin translations of non-Homeric, Greek texts which originated during the Hellenistic period, probably in the first century: De excidio Troiae historia, attributed to an author known as Dares Phrygius, and the Ephemeris belli Troiani, attributed to Dictys Cretensis.12 The Greek source texts for Dares and Dictys have not survived; both texts, however, explicitly present themselves as anonymous Latin translations from Greek authors who claim to have fought in the Trojan War and recorded eyewitness accounts—Dares on the Trojan side and Dictys on the Greek side. The discovery of a papyrus fragment from a Greek version of Dictys’ Ephemeris belli Troiani in 1900 verified its translator’s claim to have worked from a Greek source text.13 The existence of several fragments of a Greek source text for Dictys has been taken as indirect evidence that Dares’ De excidio Troiae is also a translation of a lost Greek text, although the narrative of Jason and the Golden Fleece that opens De excidio Troiae originates in a Latin rather than Greek tradition.14 These two Latin texts attributed to Dares and Dictys transmit Greek textual traditions known as the ‘Epic Cycle’ that had originally emerged and circulated more than a millennium earlier in the Archaic Age. While the Iliad depicted only four days of battles in the tenth year of the conflict, and the Odyssey provided only a partial account of the homecoming of the Greek heroes, the ‘Epic Cycle’ preserved an interlocking set of historical and mythological narratives that explain the causes of the Trojan War and recount its aftermath. Jonathan Burgess argues for a comprehensive view of ancient Greek traditions of the Trojan War: ‘It is enough to think of the texts within the Homeric and Cyclic traditions as generally resulting from the mythical tradition of the Trojan War as it was known in  the Archaic Age.’15 The lost Greek texts assigned to Dares and Dictys are late developments in this tradition; as texts that provide a comprehensive account of the Trojan War from its origins to its aftermath, these texts act as a conduit for the translatio not of the Homeric epics, but of the larger ancient Greek traditions of the matter of Troy, of which the Homeric epics formed only a single component. The Latin translations of Dictys in the fourth century and Dares in the fifth or sixth century assured that this extensive, non-Homeric tradition would be available in the medieval West during the centuries that the canon of Greek literature remained entirely inaccessible. Dares’ and Dictys’ Latin texts thus represent a survival of ancient textual traditions despite their non-Homeric plots and register. Both texts are composed in an

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature elementary prose, free of rhetorical ornamentation or stylistic flourishes so that the narrative itself appears to disavow aesthetic aspirations. Such a simple prose style implies a degree of narrative transparency and likewise guaranteed that the text would remain linguistically accessible and thereby legible for centuries of elementary Latin readers. Both texts eliminate the role of the gods in the unfolding of the plot so that military strategy and diplomacy become the ethical focus of the narrative. By contrast with the elliptical and sketchy plot of the Trojan War preserved in the Ilias latina, Dares’ De excidio Troiae and Dictys’ Ephemeris appear to offer unembellished accounts of human agency in an ancient war. De excidio Troiae depicts the siege of Troy as a consequence of an escalating set of conflicts that originate during Jason’s voyage in quest of the Golden Fleece. In the course of his journey, Jason and his retinue alight in Troy. Laomedon, the King of Troy and the father of Priam, fails to show the appropriate respect for Jason and his men when he inhospitably dismisses them. In order to avenge Jason, Hercules calls upon an alliance of Greeks who proceed to attack Troy. They kill King Laomedon and abduct his daughter Hesione, the sister of Priam. This introductory anecdote constitutes the first destruction of Troy; Laomedon’s son Priam rebuilds and fortifies the city and sends Antenor to Greece to negotiate the safe return of Hesione. When the Greeks refuse to release Hesione, Priam’s son Alexander (Paris) sails to Greece where he abducts Helen whom he brings back to Troy as his bride. The Greeks besiege Troy in order to reclaim Helen, and the city is eventually destroyed for the second time. Dares does not attribute the downfall of Troy to the stratagem of the wooden horse—this iconic anecdote is found only in Dictys’ Ephemeris which specifies that the horse had been suspended over wheels (‘rotis interpositis suspenderat’, 111).16 Dares’ text throughout privileges negotiation over military conflict so that De excidio Troiae does not valorize a heroic ethos as much as it explores the nature of conflict resolution. Dares’ text was extremely influential in the Latin Middle Ages: De excidio Troiae survives in more than one version and in almost 200 manuscripts.17 Dictys’ Ephemeris did not circulate as widely in the West as did Dares’ text, although Dictys’ Greek source (now lost except for fragments) appears to have been highly influential in the Byzantine East.18 The figure of Dares acquired considerable authority as a trustworthy historian. For instance, Dares is cited in a world chronicle compiled by Freculf, the bishop of Lisieux (d. c.852). Freculf composed his universal history in order to reconcile sacred and profane chronologies; he is the first chronicler to treat history as a series of stories rather than a list of dates and events. His world chronicle opens with Genesis and then synchronizes biblical and non-biblical time. Freculf locates the Trojan War at the time of the Assyrian kingdom, and he summarizes it: ‘Alexander Priami filius rapuit Helenam. Trojanum decennale oritur bellum, ac demum eversa capitur Troja. Quod ita contigisse in historia Daretis atque aliorum legimus’ (‘Alexander the son of Priam abducted Helen. And not until ten years after the Trojan War begins is ruined Troy captured. Thus we read what happened in the history of

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Trojan Itineraries and the Matter of Troy Dares and others’).19 Freculf relies on the version of Dares’ text known as the Pseudo-Fredegarius in order to relate the story of the Argonauts, the first destruction of Troy, and the Greek abduction of Hesione, which is followed by Paris’ abduction of Helen, the war itself, and the final Greek victory.20 He closes with the departure of Aeneas and his settlement in Italy which some think led to the founding of the Franks: ‘Haec quidem ita se habere de origine Francorum opinantur’ (‘Indeed, they think that such are the details of the origin of the Franks’).21 If Homer was an empty authorial sign in the medieval West, the name of Dares was attached to a narrative that—with some variations—gave western Europe the history of its non-biblical origins. In the 1180s, the poet known as Joseph of Exeter rewrote the Trojan narrative from Dares’ De excidio Troiae in order to compose a Latin verse epic of the Fall of Troy. The 3,645 hexameters of this text, which circulated under the title Ilias Daretis Phrygii, also known as De bello Troiano, are composed in an exceptionally fluid, classicizing Latin style that harks back to Silver Latin poets such as Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, and simultaneously exhibits a profound knowledge of Virgil and Ovid. Despite his opening assertions that he relies on Dares as a vates who witnessed the war, Joseph employs Virgilian and Ovidian texts to re-introduce the deities whom Dares had excluded from his text, although his deities are allegorical personifications more than agents. He otherwise follows the plot of De excidio Troiae. He nonetheless downplays the importance that Dares places on negotiation and the possibility of a peaceful settlement, so that the thematic focus of his epic is more heroic than diplomatic. In his epilogue, Joseph characterizes his contribution to the matter of Troy: ‘Confusa explicui veteris compendia veri’ (‘I have unravelled the confused abridgements of ancient truth’, 960).22 He juxtaposes this completed task to his next poetic enterprise, a verse chronicle of the crusades: ‘Plectro maiore canenda | Antiochi nunc bella vocant, nunc dicere votum | Christicolas acies’ (‘The wars of Antioch call, and I must sing of them in grander style. It is now my prayer to tell of Christian battle-­ lines’, 962–4). Though only a fragment of his crusade epic survives, Joseph of Exeter’s juxtaposition of the Trojan War to the crusading efforts in the Middle East suggestively overlays his contemporary world onto the ancient world and maps Antioch onto Troy. The six surviving manuscripts of Joseph of Exeter’s Trojan epic and two copies of a commentary on this poem point to an engaged readership, and Joseph of Exeter was certainly known to later poets, among them Geoffrey Chaucer.23 The accessibility of Dares’ Latin narrative clearly facilitated prose vernacular translations. The eleventh-century Irish Togail Troí marks the earliest vernacular rendition of Dares’ text.24 Norse and Welsh versions appeared in the fourteenth century.25 Dares’ text was repeatedly translated into French. In 1272, Jean de Flixecourt produced a faithful, verbum ex verbo translation of De excidio into French; Geoffrey of Waterford, a Dominican, also composed a verbatim translation at the end of the thirteenth century.26 A French prose version of Dares’ text was inserted into the

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature prose compilation of universal history known to scholars as the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. Compiled between 1208 and 1213 by Roger IV, the Chatelain of Lille, this narrative of world history was originally intended to assert aristocratic autonomy in the face of Philip Augustus’ encroaching power in Flanders.27 Like Freculf ’s world chronicle, the Histoire ancienne commences with biblical history, to which is appended the history of Thebes, Greece and the Amazons, the Trojan War and the Fall of Troy, the history of Alexander, and the founding of Rome. The Troy segment concludes with a reference to the Trojan diaspora in order to articulate the dynastic ideology promoted in the text.28 Dares and Dictys are both cited by name as ‘clerks’ who left eyewitness accounts of the war. Over the next few centuries, the Histoire ancienne found a wide and varied audience throughout francophone Europe; having originated in Flanders, this text was copied in scriptoria from Acre to Italy, Provence to Paris, thereby endorsing the historicity of the non-Homeric tradition of the matter of Troy. Dares’ De excidio Troiae also left a large footprint on the poetic reception of the matter of Troy in vernacular literary cultures. Medieval poets who relied on Dares often extolled his historical credentials and disparaged ‘Homer’s’ poetic unreliability—an implicit judgement of the authority of the Ilias latina which often circulated under Homer’s name.29 With the emergence of French literary cultures in the twelfth century, the matter of Troy begins a circuitous itinerary through medieval vernacular literary traditions. The Roman de Troie (c.1165) by Benoît de Sainte-Maure marks the initial translatio of the Latin texts of De excidio Troiae and the Ephemeris into medieval French. Produced in the court of Henry II (1133–89), the king of England, the Roman de Troie is one of the romans antiques—twelfth-century French verse narratives that adapt classical Latin source texts to a medieval ethos and ideology. In the prologue to the Roman de Troie, Benoît specifically identifies Dares as his source text, and he repeatedly authorizes his own poetic production by citing the authenticity of Dares’ account, given Dares’ professed, first-hand experience of the war. Benoît explicitly compares Dares’ account to Homer’s ostensibly belated and consequently fictional account: ‘Mais ne dist pas sis livres veir, | Quar bien savons senz nul espeir | Qu’il ne fu puis de cent anz nez | Que li granz oz fu assemblez’ (‘But his book does not speak the truth, for well we know without any conjecture that he was not born until one hundred years after the large host was assembled’, 51–4).30 While Benoît states that he is translating Dares’ text word for word (‘Le latin sivrai e la letre’, 139) (‘I will follow the Latin and the text’), the Roman de Troie actually treats the plot of De excidio Troiae as an outline for a highly poetic, expansive exploration of the ethics of siege warfare. The 30,000 lines of octosyllabic verse in the Roman de Troie narrate twenty-­ two battles fought in the course of the war, yet these battle scenes are interspersed with detailed accounts of truces, council scenes, and embassies between the Greeks and Trojans. This narrative emphasis on negotiation and the ongoing potential for a settlement between the two warring armies develops the thematics of diplomacy

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Trojan Itineraries and the Matter of Troy from Dares’ text. Benoît also inserts vignettes of court life and the cult of amor—topics that obviously do not appear in De excidio Troiae. The Roman de Troie is the locus classicus for the affair between Troilus and Briseïda, an amorous adventure contextualized by siege warfare that was to have an afterlife in the texts of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. Towards the end of the romance, Benoît picks up the narrative thread from Dictys’ Ephemeris to recount the treachery of two Trojan warriors—Antenor and Eneas—who enter into a pact with the Greeks to end the war. Following Dictys, Benoît details how the Greeks construct a wooden horse ‘on  solid wheels both large and strong’ (‘Sor roës forz e granz e dures,’ 25,897). Eneas and Antenor then insist that the horse be brought into the city of Troy; however, the walls protecting Troy from invasion have to be torn down in order to accommodate this contraption. The Trojans consequently destroy their own walls, which allows the Greeks to invade Troy, slaughter the Trojans, and ultimately destroy the city. The Roman de Troie closes with an account of the homecoming of the Greek heroes. In the Roman de Troie, Benoît has elaborated on the basic template of the Trojan War from Dares and Dictys to produce a vivid account of medieval siege warfare as well as amatory courtship. As the most widely read and imitated vernacular literary language, French functioned as the lingua franca—after Latin—of western Europe. If Dares’ Latin text was the conduit for the translatio of ancient Greek traditions on Troy to the medieval West, the French text of the Roman de Troie functioned as the conduit for the translation of Latin traditions into the vernacular. To judge from the provenance of the fifty-eight surviving manuscripts or fragments of the Roman de Troie, Benoît’s French text was widely disseminated.31 The Roman de Troie was translated and adapted into Dutch, Italian, and Spanish.32 A Demotic Greek translation of the Roman de Troie was produced in the late thirteenth century in the Frankish settlements in Greece; this medieval Greek text on the Trojan War exhibits no awareness of the Iliad.33 The Roman de Troie also had an extensive dissemination in French prose: five distinct versions of the Roman de Troie survive as ‘translated’ or ‘de-rhymed’ versions;34 one of the five French prose renditions of the Roman de Troie served as the source text for the 1322 Italian volgarizzamento of Binduccio dello Scelto.35 A second redaction of the Histoire ancienne was compiled in the 1330s in Naples in the francophone court of Robert of Anjou. In this manuscript, London, British Library, MS Royal 20 D I, the compiler incorporated several prose versions of Benoît’s Roman de Troie36 which replaced the earlier French translation of Dares’ De excidio Troiae that recounted the Trojan War in the first redaction. Given the length of the Roman de Troie, the Trojan War becomes the longest segment in this Angevin version of world history. A densely illustrated manuscript, Royal MS 20 D I preserved the visual programmes of the Roman de Troie alongside its textual traditions, as exemplified in the image of the wooden horse on wheels (see Figure 1). Illustrated manuscripts of the Roman de Troie frequently depicted the elaborate contraption of the wooden horse on wheels, thus

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f igu r e

1.  The Trojans drag the wooden horse into Troy.

© British Library Board. MS Royal 20 D I, Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (second redaction), fol. 167v.

visually transmitting a detail that was iconically prominent in Dictys’ text. A well-­ travelled and highly influential manuscript, Royal MS 20 D I became a critical node in the vernacular transmission of the matter of Troy. The Roman de Troie was also adapted into Latin prose. Guido delle Colonne, a Sicilian judge, completed a Latin prose version of Benoît’s text in 1287, soon after the popular uprising known as the Sicilian Vespers had overthrown Angevin rule on the island of Sicily. Although Guido asserts that he based his own narrative on the ‘trustworthy reporters’ (‘fidelissimi relatores’), Dares and Dictys—whom he cites as authorities throughout—his Historia destructionis Troiae is actually a Latin prose rendition of Benoît’s Roman de Troie, or one of its prose versions, although Guido never cites Benoît by name.37 The Historia transposes much of the plot of the Roman de Troie, though in a more sombre tone. Guido frequently attempts to rationalize details in the narrative that involve marvels or enchantment. He also digresses at length on the geographical identity of ‘magna Graecia’ in relation to contemporary Italy and Sicily and the possible roles played by the peoples of Italia in the ancient conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans, a digression that he likely borrowed from the earliest French prose rendition of the Roman de Troie, which was produced in Frankish Greece and opens with an extended discussion of Greek geography. He repeatedly laments the downfall of Troy, such as his comment at the end of Book 7 that if the Trojans had heeded Cassandra’s prophecies, ‘Troya forte minime defleuisset

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Trojan Itineraries and the Matter of Troy perpetuos casus suos, qui usque nunc hominum flebiliter demulcent auditus’ (ed. Griffin, p. 79) (‘Troy perhaps would not in the least have bewailed its eternal misfortunes, which even to the present time mournfully soothe the ears of men’, trans. Meek, p. 78). Despite the pathos to be found in the destruction of Troy, Guido takes comfort in the long view that Aeneas was able to flee after the war and consequently become the prince of the  city of Rome and the Roman republic (‘Romane urbis et Romanorum rei publice factus est princeps’, p. 109), which Aeneas ‘governed . . . imperially, as if with the imperial scepter’, p. 107) (‘imperiali quasi sceptor imperialiter gubernauit’, p. 110). Throughout his text, from prologue to epilogue, Guido insists on the veracity of his narrative, which he contrasts to the fables of Homer, Virgil, or Ovid, poets who had failed to impart the historical truth of the Trojan War. Guido’s narrative also borrows passages and details from the Ilias latina,38 as well as from Joseph of Exeter. More Latin manuscripts of the Historia destructionis Troiae survive than of Dares’ De excidio Troiae, and Guido’s text was translated into numerous vernacular languages, among them French,39 several dialects of Italian,40 German,41 Aragonese,42 Catalan,43 and English (see pp. 262–3). The circulation of the matter of Troy had initially moved beyond its Latin source texts with Benoît’s lengthy adaptation of De excidio Troiae and the Ephemeris, only to be reinscribed in Latin prose by Guido. To judge by the manuscript and translation history of the Historia, by the end of the fourteenth century, the auctoritas of Dares and Dictys had been supplanted by Guido’s Historia, itself silently mediated by Benoît’s French romance. Giovanni Boccaccio’s Filostrato (c.1335), an Italian verse narrative set in Troy, emerges from this multi-lingual, multi-textual tradition of the matter of Troy in the south of Italy. Composed during Boccaccio’s sojourn in Naples, the Filostrato represents a poetic synthesis of both Latin and vernacular textual traditions. If Boccaccio’s primary source text was Guido’s Historia, he also consulted a variety of vernacular texts such as the prose renditions of Benoît’s Roman de Troie, as well as Binduccio dello Scelto’s Italian version of one these prose texts, in addition to an Italian version of Guido’s text; however, Boccaccio also worked directly with the Roman de Troie itself.44 Boccaccio took the outline of the love-story from Books 19–21 of the Historia as a vehicle to explore his narrator’s own emotional state when his beloved—a woman whom he has loved from a distance—has left Naples. As the narrator explains in a prose prologue: ‘Meco adunque con sollicita cura cominciai a rivolgere l’antiche storie per trovare cui io potessi fare scudo verisimilmente del mio segreto e amoroso dolore’ (‘I began therefore to turn over in my mind, with solicitous care, old stories in order to find one which I could make into a likely shield for my secret and amorous suffering’, pp. 12–13).45 Boccaccio changes the name of his female protagonist to Criseida,46 and his love-struck narrator recounts Troilus’ sufferings after Criseida’s departure in order to develop a framework (‘forma alla mia intenzione’, p. 12) that would allow the narrator to poetically articulate in his native Tuscan (‘nel mio fiorentino idioma’, p. 12) a narrative of love gone astray. Into this plot he introduces

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature a new character, Criseida’s cousin Pandarus, who manipulates both lovers. He also makes Criseida a widow rather than the pucelle as Briseïda is characterized in the Roman de Troie. Though set in Troy during the siege, the Filostrato expands this lovestory—which is peripheral to the central plot of the Roman de Troie and the Historia— into a full-blown narrative. The emotional drama of Criseida’s decision to leave the Trojan prince Troilus for the Greek hero Diomede becomes the focus of the Filostrato, and the more ‘historical’ concerns of military strategy and combat fade away. The iconic couple of the ancient war—Paris and Helen—is displaced by the triangular romance of Troilus, Criseida, and Diomede, a romance conducted between the two warring groups and ineffectively manipulated by Pandarus. The matter of Troy has now become the backdrop for an exclusive exploration of amor. Decades later, having returned to Florence and absorbed a new paradigm of Hellenism as well as Latinity, Boccaccio turned from the multi-lingual textual traditions on Troy he knew in his Neapolitan youth to a more direct engagement with the Greek texts of the Homeric epics. In 1360, Boccaccio invited the Calabrian monk Leontius Pilatus into his home in Florence and worked collaboratively with him over the space of three years to transcribe an interlinear verbum ex verbo Latin translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey.47 In Book 14 of De genealogia deorum, Boccaccio describes how he and Pilatus laboured together to select a Latin equivalent for each Greek word in the Homeric texts. Such an interlinear verbum ex verbo rendition follows the translation practice employed for Greek medical and scientific texts in Angevin Naples; as such, it implicitly treats the Homeric source text as a scientific tract rather than a literary text. The resulting translation was not designed to be read in place of the Greek source text but to provide the Latin reader access to the Greek hexameters of the Homeric epics. Pilatus’ rendition of the Homeric epics enabled Boccaccio to quote the Iliad and Odyssey in the original Greek in his encyclopedic treatise on classical mythology, De genealogia deorum.48 Francesca Petrarch, by contrast, read and quoted Pilatus’ text only in Latin and found it wanting as a literary epic. By the end of his life, Boccaccio’s literary corpus in both Latin and vernacular had encompassed all of the linguistic diversity and textual richness of the matter of Troy in Greek, Latin, French, and Italian as it circulated on the Italian peninsula in the ­fourteenth century. Boccaccio’s Filostrato was the primary source text for Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c.1380s); as such, it transmitted the complex textual traditions of Troy from Boccaccio’s Naples to Chaucer’s London. As the most canonical Troy text composed in Middle English, the Troilus represents the apex of the non-Homeric traditions on the Trojan War. Chaucer worked closely with the Filostrato, often transposing lines and stanzas from Italian into English, yet he never cites Boccaccio or his text by name, pretending instead to be translating from a fictional Latin auctor he calls Lollius.49 The invented Latin auctoritas of the Troilus—like Guido’s claims to be following the Latin texts of Dares rather than Benoît’s French rendition of Dares—suggests that the

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Trojan Itineraries and the Matter of Troy matter of Troy required a Latin source text in order to claim a textual lineage that would accord the authority of antiquity to the medieval text. Despite his homage to the notion of a Latin auctoritas, Chaucer’s Troilus is a translatio of Boccaccio’s text; as Barry Windeatt notes, ‘the distribution of narrative and dialogue into stanzas is identical in the two poems for substantial stretches: over and over again, the first line of Chaucer’s stanzas is very closely rendered from the parallel Italian line, stanza by stanza’.50 However closely Chaucer worked with the Filostrato, the Troilus is not a translation of Boccaccio’s text in the modern sense of that term; rather, the Troilus situates itself as a narrative filter that negotiates the complex textuality of the matter of Troy in the Latin West. Chaucer also consulted Guido delle Colonne’s Historia, as well as Benoît’s Roman de Troie or one of the prose remaniements of the Roman de Troie, such as the version found in the second redaction of the Histoire ancienne. The Troilus-narrator, who—unlike Boccaccio’s narrator—has no experience with love, inserts a series of intrusive comments about the difficulty of following his source text with its heart-breaking drama of Criseyde’s shift in allegiance from Troilus to Diomede after she has been traded to the Greeks. The narrator explicitly invokes the various textual traditions on Troy, at one point directing the implied reader who would like more background to the other traditions on Troy: ‘But the Troian gestes, as they felle, | In Omer, or in Dares, or in Dite, | Whoso that kan may rede hem as they write’ (1.145–7).51 The reference to Homer could be a reference to the Ilias latina or to the author of the Homeric texts, known in name only to Chaucer. This line-up of ‘Trojan gestes’—Homer, Dares, and Dictys—acknowledges that the Troilus omits most of the heroic deeds associated with epic or with history, and that the ‘tragedye’ depicted in the Troilus is only a small segment of a much larger textual tradition. Indeed, the narrator at times assumes that the audience knows the outline of the larger plot, such as when he refers to—but does not recount—Antenor’s eventual betrayal of Troy at the end of the war (4.203–5). The Troilus-narrator is an ever-present mediator between the implied reader and the ostensible authority of the fictional Latin source text. In the course of the five books of the Troilus, the narrator becomes increasingly anxious about the tragic direction of the story, and he repeatedly laments the pathos of the plot that he claims he is bound to follow. In these ‘authorial’ intrusions, the narrator emphasizes his role as ‘translator’ with asides such as ‘as writen wel I fynde’ (4.1415), ‘in storye it is yfounde’ (5.834), and ‘the storie telleth us’ (5.1037, 1051). Such comments impart the sense that the Troilus-narrator is at the mercy of his ‘matere’ (1.53, 144) and that he lacks the authority to re-write the narrative, when in fact Chaucer has made extensive changes to Boccaccio’s plot and has introduced material from other sources. At one point, the Troilus-narrator explains—and excuses—his narrative craft with the suggestion that his role is to reproduce but not revise the textual traditions on Troy: ‘And if that ich [I], at Loves reverence, | Have any word in eched for the beste’ (3.1328–9). The term in eched, meaning ‘added in’, suggests the layering effect

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature that results from a self-conscious negotiation of a textual tradition; it also implies a readership aware of the textual complexities of the matter of Troy. More than any earlier text on Troy, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde self-consciously situates itself as the recipient of a vast, interlocked and often contradictory tradition on the Trojan War. Along with the narrator, the reader of the Troilus is confronted with the narrative implications of textual plenitude. Chaucer, however, was not the first poet to compose an English rendition of the matter of Troy; the Middle English metrical romance, the anonymous Seege or Batayle of Troye, originated early in the fourteenth century on the Welsh marshes. The narrator of the Seege attributes the text to a clerk who translated Dares’ text into English. The Seege, however, was also mediated by the French textual traditions on Troy, as the narrative in places depends on Benoît’s Roman de Troie. The Latin text of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia was adapted into three distinct Middle English verse romances in the course of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.52 The anonymous Laud Troy Book, composed c.1400, shortens and focuses Guido’s narrative into a tightly organized tale of Trojan heroism in defeat. Much of the narrative revolves around Hector, who becomes a recognizable romance hero: ‘A better knyght of chivalrie | Was nevere born In Asye!’ (10995–6).53 The anonymous ‘Gest Hystoriale’ of the Destruction of Troy (c.1350–1400) faithfully transforms Guido’s Latin prose into supple, alliterative verse that vividly depicts the violence on the battlefield as well as the drama of the counsel scenes.54 John Lydgate’s Troy Book (1412–20) was commissioned by Prince Henry who became Henry V, King of England, before Lydgate could complete the Troy Book. As his prologue argues, Henry V wished for a narrative of the Troy matter in English, ‘And y-writen as wel in oure langage | As in latyn and in frensche it is’ (114–15).55 Lydgate’s Troy Book thus presents itself as the English version of the matter of Troy that would promote an English identity—and by implication, the English cause—in the context of the Hundred Years War with France, a kingdom that also claimed Trojan ancestry and the historical legitimacy that such ancestry conferred. The only French text on Troy cited by Lydgate is Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea (composed in 1400; translated into English by Stephen Scrope in 1440) when Lydgate invokes the deity Othea: ‘And Othea, goddesse of prudence, | This wirke t’exsplyte that ye nat refuse (38–9) (‘And Othea, goddess of prudence | do not refuse to explain this work’). Christine had invented the figure of Othea, a goddess who addresses a letter of instruction on chivalric matters to Hector, Prince of Troy; the Epistre Othea synthesizes the complex textual traditions of Troy into a lapidary sequence of verses briefly glossed in prose. Originally composed for the dauphin, Louis of Orléans, and later presented to the Duke of Berry as well as the Queen of France, Christine’s Othea epitomized the ideological use of the matter of Troy for the royal house of France in Lydgate’s day. Lydgate’s invocation of Othea in his self-conscious enterprise of translating Guido’s Latin Historia for an English prince explicitly claims the cultural capital of

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Trojan Itineraries and the Matter of Troy the matter of Troy for the kingdom of England rather than France. Lydgate carefully preserves an awareness of the historicity of the Trojan War as an English concern. Throughout the Middle Ages, the matter of Troy was repeatedly implicated in dynastic, royal, and even imperial ideologies. Benoît’s Roman de Troie was produced in the court of Henry II, the Plantagenet King of England whose patronage of vernacular clerks was intended to support his claims to the re-conquered throne. In his Historia, Guido delle Colonne invokes the figure of Frederick II. If the first redaction of the Histoire ancienne articulated Flemish aristocratic resistance to Philip Augustus’ plans to unite the kingdom of France, a later copy of this text belonged to the library of Charles of Anjou, the founder of the Angevin kingdom in Italy. Charles’s grandson Robert of Anjou, King of Naples, possessed a second redaction of the Histoire ancienne—with a greatly expanded treatment of the Trojan War—designed to represent his imperial designs in the eastern Mediterranean. Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea was initially dedicated to Louis of Orléans, and Lydgate’s Troy Book was commissioned by Henry V. That many of these texts, such as Benoît’s, Guido’s, Christine’s, and Lydgate’s—as well as both redactions of the Histoire ancienne—survive in luxury manuscripts that are densely illustrated testifies to the centrality of the matter of Troy to medieval visual as well as textual and political cultures.56 With the exception of the Ilias latina and Boccaccio’s and Pilatus’ collaborative project of translating the Homeric epics into Latin, none of the texts circulating in the medieval Latin West was directly, or even indirectly, related to the Homeric epics. If the auctoritas for the Trojan War was to be found in Latin texts such as Dares’ De excidio Troiae or Guido’s Historia, it was the extensive vernacular translatio of these texts that retrospectively conferred and reiterated that Latinate auctoritas. With the emergence of Italian humanism and its emphasis on classicizing models for Latin, the medieval Latin prose styles of Dares, Dictys, and Guido slowly fell out of favour. The influx of Byzantine manuscripts of the Homeric epics into Italy in the fifteenth century brought a renewed interest in the Greek texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey; in such a context, the medieval matter of Troy was easily dismissed as non-Homeric. As Robin Sowerby has shown, however, despite their ideology, the humanists had considerable difficulty embracing the Greek language of the Homeric epics, and it is not until the 1440s—eighty years after Pilatus’ death—that a second Latin translation of the complete Homeric epics appears, and this translation still betrays a silent inheritance from Pilatus’ rendition.57 While modern scholarship frequently repeats the humanist cliché that the Latin West lacked Homer and therefore lacked a sophisticated understanding of ancient textualities, the same could also be said of early humanism itself. Indeed, despite the humanist cult of the poet Homer, Dares’ and Dictys’ texts retained their authority as eyewitness accounts well into the early modern period, and the non-Homeric versions of the matter of Troy, such as Caxton’s 1475 ‘Englished’ version of Raoul Lefèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troyes (itself a French translation of Guido’s Historia), the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (the first

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature book to be printed in English), circulated at the same time as the editio princeps of the Homeric texts produced in Florence in 1488. In 1602, when Shakespeare produced Troilus and Cressida, he had access to a significant portion of the Iliad in George Chapman’s English translation, which was just then being written and published in stages. Shakespeare’s dramatic focus on the love affair of Troilus and Cressida nonetheless testifies to the vitality of non-Homeric matter of Troy that is the legacy of the medieval Latin West.

Notes 1   For an overview of the reception and circulation of the matter of Troy, see Jonathan S. Burgess, The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore, 2001); Marc-René Jung, La Légende de Troie en France au moyen âge: analyse des versions françaises et bibliographie raisonnée des manuscrits (Basle, 1996); Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France, trans. Susan Ross Huston (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 226–44; Hugo Buchthal, Historia Troiana: Studies in the History of Mediaeval Secular Illustration (1971); for surveys of the Troy matter, see also Leslie Diane Myrick, From the De excidio Troiae historia to the Togail Troí: Literary-Cultural Synthesis in a Medieval Irish Adaption of Dares’ Troy Tale (Heidelberg, 1993), pp. 8–52; on the Greek rendition, see Ho Polemos tēs Trōados=The War of Troy, eds Manolēs Papathomopoulos and Elizabeth M. Jeffreys (Athens, 1996), pp. xli–li. 2   Walter Berschin, Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages: From Jerome to Nicholas of Cusa, trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Washington, DC, 1988); Kenneth M. Setton, ‘The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renaissance’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 100 (1956), 1–76. 3   The role of the Virgilian narrative in establishing the historical value of the Trojan War for the history of Rome is evident in a late antique Latin prose text, the anonymous Excidium Troiae, that survives in a handful of medieval manuscripts; see Excidium Troiae, eds Elmer Bagby Atwood and Virgil K. Whitaker (Cambridge, Mass., 1944). The first section of this text follows the Trojan War from its origins to the fall of the city; the text then moves through a summary of the Aeneid and briefly concludes with the founding of Rome. 4   Andrew Erskine, Troy between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power (Oxford, 2001), pp. 93–127. 5   Jonathan Barlow, ‘Gregory of Tours and the Myth of the Trojan Origins of the Franks’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 29 (1995), 86–95. 6  Elizabeth M. Tyler, ‘Trojans in Anglo-Saxon England: Precedent without Descent’, Review of English Studies 64 (2013), 1–20. 7   The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, vol. 5 (Oxford, 1975), p. 25. 8   For an overview of the Trojan foundation legend in French culture, see Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology, pp. 226–44.

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Trojan Itineraries and the Matter of Troy 9   Peter K. Marshall, ‘Ilias latina’, in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford, 1983), pp. 191–4; Baebii Italici Ilias Latina, ed. Marco Scaffai (Bologna, 1982). 10   On the Ilias latina see also Chapter 3 in this volume by Majorie Woods, ‘Experiencing the Classics in Medieval Education’. 11   A handful of Latin poets drew on the Ilias latina in composing texts on Troy, and the author of the thirteenth-century Spanish narrative the Libro de Alexandre used the Ilias latina along with Dares’ De excidio Troiae. See Katherine Callen King, Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 143–58. 12   Daretis Phrygii, De excidio Troiae historia, ed. Ferdinand Meister (Leipzig, 1873); Dictys Cretensis, Ephemeridos Belli Troiani libri, ed. Werner Eisenhut (Leipzig, 1973). 13   Nathaniel Edward Griffin, ‘The Greek Dictys’, American Journal of Philology 29 (1908), 329–35; for more recent discoveries of papyrus fragments of the Greek Dictys, see Peter Gainsford, ‘Diktys of Crete’, Cambridge Classical Journal 58 (2012), 58–87 (at p. 67). 14   On the discovery of a possible analogue to the Greek source text of Dares, see Annamaria Pavano, ‘Le redazioni latine e il presunto originale greco dell’opera di Darete Frigio’, Sileno 24 (1998), 207–18. 15  Burgess, The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle, p. 5. 16  In Aeneid, 2.235–6, Virgil specifies that it is the Trojans who put the wheels under the horse. 17   On the manuscript tradition of Dares, see Louis Faivre d’Arcier, Histoire et géographie d’un mythe: la circulation des manuscrits du De excidio Troiae de Darès le Phrygien (VIIIe–XVe siècles) (Paris, 2006). 18   Gainsford, ‘Diktys of Crete’. 19   PL 106: 1.2.17 20   On the Pseudo-Fredegarius, see Marc-René Jung, ‘L’Histoire grecque: Darès et les suites’, in Entre fiction et histoire: Troie et Rome au moyen âge, eds Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Laurence Harf-Lancner (Paris, 1997), pp. 185–206. 21   PL 106: 1.2.17 22   Joseph Iscanus, Werke und Briefe, ed. Ludwig Gompf (Leiden, 1970): Joseph of Exeter, The Iliad of Dares Phrygius, trans. Gildas O. Roberts (Cape Town, 1970). 23   On Troy and the Crusades, see Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology, pp. 238–9. Several other Latin verse narratives on Troy were based on Dares, such as the thirteenth-century Troilus of Albertus Stadensis, a text that survives in a single manuscript; see Troilus Alberti Stadensis, ed. Theodor Merzdorf (Leipzig, 1875). 24   The Togail Troí: The Destruction of Troy from the Facsimile of the Book of Leinster, ed. and trans. Whitley Stokes (Calcutta, 1882). See also Myrick, From the De excidio Troiae Historia to the Togail Troí, pp. 81–106. 25   For the Norse version, see Trójumanna Saga: The Dares Phrygius Version, ed. Jonna LouisJensen (Copenhagen, 1981). Helen Fulton is preparing an edition of the Welsh version of Dares, which has never been edited.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature  Jung, La Légende, pp. 436–9.   See Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 107–17. 28  Jung, La Légende, pp. 334–430. 29  The Ilias latina was at times assigned to Pindar; see Marshall, Ilias latina, p. 191 n. 1. 30  Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie, ed. Léopold Constans, 6 vols (Paris, 1904–12). 31  Jung, La Légende, pp. 16–330. 32   For Spanish translations, see Antonio G. Solalinde, ‘Las versiones españolas del Roman de Troie’, Revista de filología española 3 (1916), 121–65; for Galician, see Historia Troyana, ed. Kelvin M. Parker (Santiago de Compostela, 1975); for the Dutch translation, see J. Verdam, Episodes uit Maerlant’s Historie van Troyen (Groningen, 1873). 33   On the Greek rendition, see Ho Polemos tēs Trōados=The War of Troy, eds Papathomopoulos and Jeffreys. 34   See Jung, La Légende, pp. 440–562. 35   Binduccio dello Scelto, La storia di Troia, ed. Maria Gozzi (Milan, 2000). 36   See Luca Barbieri, Le ‘epistole delle dame di Grecia’ nel Roman de Troie en prosa: La prima traduzione francese delle Eroidi di Ovidio (Tübingen, 2005), pp. 22–8. 37  Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, ed. Nathaniel Edward Griffin (Cambridge, Mass. 1936), p. 4; Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Bloomington, Ind., 1974), p. 2. 38   For instance, at the end of the ninth book of the Historia destructionis Troiae, Guido cites Homer’s catalogue of the ships: ‘Homer in his time said there were one thousand one hundred and eighty-six ships’ (trans. Meek, p. 88) (‘Homerus uero dixit in temporibus suis fuisse naues mclxxxvi’) (ed. Griffin, p. 90), a number that tallies exactly with the ships enumerated in the Ilias latina: ‘The Greek ships with these leaders to the Trojan shores, | fourteen minus twelve hundred’ (‘His ducibus Graiae Troiana ad litora puppes | bis septem venere minus quam mille ducentae’) (ed. Scaffai, pp. 220–1). 39   See Jung, La Légende, pp. 563–613. 40   Filippo Ceffi produced a Tuscan volgarizzamento of the Historia; see Ovidio/Heroides: volgarizzamento fiorentino trecentesco di Filippo Ceffi, ed. Massimo Zaggia (Florence, 2009), pp. 28–30; for the Neapolitan volgarizzamento, see Libro de la destructione de Troya: volgarizzamento napoletano trecentesco da Guido delle Colonne, ed. Nicola De Blasi (Rome, 1986); see also Egidio Gorra, Testi inediti di storia trojana preceduti da uno studio sulla leggenda trojana in Italia (Turin, 1887). 41   Das ‘Buch von Troja’ von Hans Mair. Kritische Textausgabe und Untersuchung, ed. Hans-Josef Dreckmann (Munich, 1970). 42   Evangeline Viola Parker, The Aragonese Version of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae: A Critical Text and Classified Vocabulary (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1971). 43   Les Histories troyanes de Guiu de Columpnes, traduides al catalá en el XIVèn segle per en Jacme Conesa, ed. R. Miquel y Planas (Barcelona, 1916). 26 27

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Trojan Itineraries and the Matter of Troy 44   Maria Gozzi, ‘Sulle fonti del Filostrato: le narrazioni di argomento Troiano’, Studi sul Boccaccio 5 (1969), 123–209. 45   Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filostrato, ed. Vincenzo Pernicone; trans. Robert P. apRoberts and Anna Bruni Seldis (New York, 1986). 46   The patronymic names, Criseida (daughter of Chrises) and Briseida (daughter of Brises), both appear in the first book of the Iliad; the story of Briseida from the Homeric tradition was transmitted to the Latin reader in Ovid’s Heroides 3 so that the Ovidian version of Briseida’s love affair with Achilles contradicted the love affair later developed by Benoît between Briseida and Troilus. The story of the Homeric Criseida was included in Dictys, but only under the name Astynome. The substitution of Criseida for Briseida first appeared in 1325 in the Fiorita of Armannino. Scholars have surmised that Armannino, followed by Boccaccio, misread Ovid’s Remedia amoris 467–74 as identifying Criseida as the daughter of Calcas, a mistake that made it possible to change Briseida’s name to Criseida in the Filostrato. See the introduction by apRoberts and Seldis in their translation of Boccaccio, Il Filostrato, pp. xii–xiii, and E. H. Wilkins, ‘Criseida’, Modern Language Notes 24 (1909), 65–7. 47   Marilynn Desmond, ‘On Not Knowing Greek: Leonzio Pilatus’s Rendition of the Iliad and the Translatio of Mediterranean Identities’, in Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory, eds Emma Campbell and Robert Mills (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 21–40. 48   See Cornelia C. Coulter, ‘Boccaccio’s Acquaintance with Homer’, Philological Quarterly 5 (1926), 44–53. 49   On the possible classical and medieval sources (including Horace, Epist. 1.2) of Chaucer’s fictional author ‘Lollius’ and the history of scholarship on this vexed issue, see The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987), p. 1022. 50   Barry Windeatt, ‘Chaucer and the Filostrato’, in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 163–83 (at p. 164). For an edition of the Italian and English texts side by side, see Barry A. Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of ‘The Book of Troilus’ (1984). Although scholars have occasionally proposed that Chaucer worked from a French translation of the Filostrato, the recent editors of that translation argue that the French version is too late to have been available to Chaucer. See Gabriel Bianciotto, Le Roman de Troyle, 2 vols (Rouen, 1994), pp. 44–93. 51   Text from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson. 52   See C. David Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae in Medieval England (Woodbridge, 1980). 53   The Laud Troy Book, ed. J. Ernst Wülfing, 2 vols, EETS 121–2 (1902–3, repr. 1973 ). 54   The `Gest Hystoriale’ of the Destruction of Troy, eds G. A. Panton and D. Donaldson, 2 vols, EETS 39, 56 (1869 and 1874; repr. 1968). 55   Text from Lydgate’s Troy Book a.d. 1412–20, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS es 126 (1906–35) (spelling modernized). On Lydgate’s transformation of classical epic, see Chapter  22 by Robert Edwards in this volume. 56   On the matter of Troy in medieval visual cultures, see Buchthal, Historia Troiana; Doris Oltrogge, Die Illustrationszyklen zur ‘Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César’ (1250–1400) (Frankfurt, 1989);

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn, Myth, Montage, and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea (Ann Arbor, 2003); Elizabeth Morrison, ‘Linking Ancient Troy and Medieval France: Illuminations of an Early Copy of the Roman de Troie’, in Medieval Manuscripts, their Makers and Users: A Special Issue of Viator in Honor of Richard and Mary Rouse, ed. Christopher Baswell (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 77–102. 57   Robin Sowerby, ‘Early Humanist Failure with Homer’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 4 (1997), 37–63; 165–94.

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Chapter 14

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae Ian Cornelius

‘Boethius on consolation: The greatest misfortune is to have been happy.’ Thus runs the first marginal Latin gloss in Thomas Hoccleve’s narrative prologue to The Regiment of Princes (1410–11).1 The Latin gloss, which almost certainly derives from Hoccleve’s holograph, corresponds closely to a line uttered by Boethius’ fictional persona in the De consolatione philosophiae (2p4.4–6).2 It appears in the Regiment of Princes beside the Hoccleve-persona’s expression of the same woeful aphorism. Placed so close to the head of the poem, the citation serves a programmatic function. Henceforth, ‘Hoccleve’s’ complaint will channel the Consolatio’s grand pathos; likewise, ‘Hoccleve’s’ dialogue with the Old Man will evoke the dialogue of ‘Boethius’ with Lady Philosophy. However, though keyed to the Consolatio in this way, the Regiment could not be more different from it. In the Consolatio, Lady Philosophy deploys the techniques of Stoic and Platonic ascesis—that is, philosophical exercise—in an effort to free her protégé from his attachments to both past fortune and present misfortune.3 As reworked by Hoccleve, the Boethian apparatus of dialogic counsel has precisely the opposite trajectory: the Old Man seeks to equip ‘Hoccleve’ with new strategies for success in the world of Fortune. His message is ‘Try harder. Try better. Maybe this time will be different’. By invoking Boethius’ ethical project only to mark a distance from it, Hoccleve’s poem exploits a possibility always present in literary reception, but also dramatizes the textual forms—gloss, adaptation, and translation—by which the literature of classical antiquity was projected through the literature of medieval England. The Consolatio, whose medieval reception was thoroughly mediated by Latin glossing and commentary, appears here as a gloss on an independent English poem. The poem thus glossed is itself a distant adaptation of the Consolatio. And this adaptation

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature includes, at the point corresponding to the gloss, a fairly precise translation, consisting of a single verse couplet: The werste kinde of wrecchednesse is A man to han ben weleful er this [for a man to have been prosperous formerly]  (Regiment, 55–6; Blyth, p. 40)4

The Regiment’s narrator-protagonist introduces his despondent thought as something he has found ‘in bookes thus writen’ (54); however, it is only outside the fictive frame—that is, through the gloss’s emphatic citation—that the Consolatio itself becomes present as a privileged interpretative intertext. In short, the Consolatio enters Hoccleve’s poem in several different states of mediation, while Hoccleve’s poem relates to the Consolatio in a dialectic of affinity and dislocation. In all these respects, it is emblematic of the wider Boethian tradition in medieval England. The present essay makes a sequential account of this reception history—a history in which the gloss–adaptation–translation triad recurred and recombined in several languages over several centuries, swinging between proximity to and distance from Boethius’ text. Boethius’ Consolatio was a Carolingian discovery. Though composed in 524–5, it was evidently unknown until the end of the eighth century. Knowledge of the text is first discernible in Alcuin of York’s short treatise De vera philosophia, an introduction to his programme of teaching in the arts.5 There one finds snatches of Boethius’ language recast in a dialogue between a master and his students. Alcuin probably encountered Boethius’ text on the Continent, perhaps in a manuscript derived from the well-stocked library at Fleury.6 The earliest surviving manuscripts date from the following century. The Consolatio’s early transmission remains a matter of debate and conjecture, but its delayed emergence into European literary culture had the important consequence that it was never read as the work of a contemporary. From the start, the Consolatio was received as a work of antiquity, in the medieval sense of that designation (see Introduction to this volume). It answered to the Carolingian programme of cultural renovatio and established itself as an authoritative and foundational text of the Latin Middle Ages: a compendium of poetry in classical metres; a compelling narrative of embattled virtue; an authoritative synthesis of ancient philosophy; a model of dialectical method applied to intractable problems in ethics, theology, and metaphysics; and an artfully crafted first-person testament from a philosopher whose translations, commentaries, and treatises would become standard texts in the medieval schools.7 Interest spread quickly. The text began accruing glosses and scholia at the earliest stages of its visible transmission. In subsequent centuries these scholia grew into compilations whose textual form defies modern notions of authorship, being instead the deposit of teaching traditions in which ‘ideas accumulated and were variously recast and recombined . . . by many individuals, and in many centres of learning’.8 From the end

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae of the ninth century, copies of the Consolatio are often also supplied with vitae of Boethius.9 The book’s opening Ovidian complaint (1m1), its central Platonic hymn (3m9), and its allusive mythological poems (3m12, 4m3, and 4m7) were the sections that received the heaviest glossing. No doubt, 1m1 owed this attention partially to its position as the first text that readers would encounter, but close reading was certainly justified: this poem broaches the Consolatio’s central themes of affectivity and human vulnerability, establishes its first-person voice, and frames its literary project. Meanwhile, the mythological metres invited commentators to supply fuller accounts of pagan myth and challenged them to separate the true from the false. But the most potent challenge was posed by 3m9, Boethius’ tightly coiled précis of Plato’s Timaeus. In the glosses on this metre, successive generations of medieval readers struggled to explain or accommodate pronouncements that are directly contrary to the church’s teaching on the creation of the world and the origin of human souls. Although these thematic foci are clearly developed only in slightly later manuscripts, the accretive character of the early glossing tradition is illustrated very well by one of the earliest copies of the Consolatio, MS lat. 3363 in the Vatican Library.10 Copied somewhere in the Loire valley in the first half of the ninth century, this manuscript bears a small number of glosses contemporary with writing of the main text. By the end of the century, the manuscript had evidently travelled to the British Isles, where it was heavily glossed in a Welsh hand. Glosses in the hand of Dunstan, who was monk and then abbot of Glastonbury in the middle of the tenth century, indicate that the manuscript was at the abbey during that period. Moreover, these several layers of glosses are paralleled in—and were perhaps a source for—commentary material in several later Consolatio manuscripts of British origin. Thus the Vatican manuscript, an important witness to the Consolatio’s early reception, also stands near the beginning of its reception in Britain. Of eighty surviving manuscripts written before 1100, fifteen are of English origin.11 The first English rendition of the Consolatio, produced sometime between about 880 and 950, draws on this Latin tradition while also creating a strikingly independent and confident reworking of Boethius’ classic. There are alterations to the dramatis personae: Lady Philosophy becomes, in the Old English version, a masculine figure named Wisdom or Reason; and the Consolatio’s first-person protagonist is introduced in the third person, as Boethius’ Mind (Mod). (The text later reverts to first-person pronouns for Boethius.) As an initial illustration of the Old English author’s more substantial alterations, one can point to his treatment of Fortuna’s speech in Consolatio 2p2–2m2. In Boethius’ text, Philosophy ventriloquizes Fortune: ‘Vellem autem pauca tecum fortunae ipsius verbis agitare’, she begins, ‘Tu igitur an ius postulet, animadverte’ (‘But I would like to prod you a little with Fortune’s own words. Consider whether or not they are just’) (2p2.1–2). The Old English author responded to this text with two distinct compositions. First, he overhauled the speech; the new version is spoken by Wisdom in propria persona: ‘Ic wolde nu giet’,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Wisdom begins, ‘ðæt wit ma spræcen emb ða woruldsælða’ (‘I would like us now to speak further about worldly felicities’) (OEBo, Prose 5.8; DOML pp. 38–9).12 He followed this with a briefer second version of the same passage, this time ventriloquized like Consolatio 2p2 but no closer to Boethius’ wording or argument (OEBo, Prose 5.13–14; DOML pp. 42–5). I will return to this double translation at the end of this chapter. As the work’s recent editors observe, ‘It is clear from the more radical transformations, from Book 1 onwards, that the author did not intend anything like a literal or even a free translation. Even where, as in much of Books 2 to 4, a general correspondence can be traced between the progress of the argument in Latin and that in English, there are often quite substantial differences of thought and formulation’.13 Given these complex procedures, an account of the Old English text must begin with an inventory of its structural transformations. Books 1 and 5 were reorganized and sharply compressed. Boethius’ spirited self-defence in Consolatio 1p4 was dropped entirely, replaced by a biographical sketch based on a Latin vita and located in a new section at the head of the text. In his treatment of the Consolatio’s final book, the Old English author straightened Philosophy’s labyrinthine argumentation into a sequence of brief and pointed determinations on questions of necessity, free will, and divine foreknowledge. Boethius and the Old English author may raise the same questions and may come to rest on the same bedrock truth, God’s retributive justice (Consolatio 5p6.172–6; OEBo, Prose 33.5; DOML pp. 400–1).14 However, there is a profound difference in the pacing of argument. The Old English author is much quicker to affirm that speculative thought has turned its spade against bedrock; what matters is just that one does good. This compression to the Consolatio’s opening and closing was, however, fully offset by the Old English author’s treatment of the three middle books. There he expanded greatly. Much of this expansion results from Wisdom’s tendency to reiterate arguments and illustrate them with an analogy or example (bisen, bispell). In one famous addition, the concentric circles of fate (Consolatio 4p6.65–82) are analogized to a cartwheel with its axle, hub, spokes, and wheel rim (OEBo, Prose 29.8–11; DOML pp. 348–53). The two texts share a concern to distinguish divine providence (providencia; Godes foreþonc) from fate (fatum; wyrd). However, they differ in the sourcing of their metaphors (Philosophy’s language is characteristically astronomical); in their treatment of them (Philosophy is characteristically allusive); and in the significance they assign to their respective models. Philosophy’s model expresses a cosmological intention; Wisdom’s points instead towards a moral and social meaning. People are arrayed along the wheel’s spokes according to their moral condition: the best people enjoy the secure and stable condition of providence near the wheel’s hub, the weakest are exposed to the unmitigated battering of fate along its rim, and those of middling status are arrayed in between, connecting the weaker ones to the better ones and thence to God. Together they form a functioning whole:

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae Þeah þa mætestan ealle hiora lufe wenden to ðisse weorulde, hi ne magon þæron wunigan ne to nauhte ne weorðað, gif hi be nanum dæle ne beoð gefæstnode to Gode, þon ma þe þæs hweoles felga magon bion on ðæm færelte gif hi ne bioð fæste on þæm spacum and þa spacan on þære eaxe. (Though the weakest turn all their affection to this world, they cannot remain in it nor come to anything if they are in no way fastened to God, any more than the wheel’s rim pieces can be in that movement if they are not fixed to the spokes and the spokes to the axle.) (OEBo, Prose 29.9; DOML pp. 350–1)

As a model of society, Wisdom’s wagon wheel joins an earlier interpolation, in which Mind names gebedmen, ferdmen, and weorcmen—that is, ‘prayer-men’, ‘armymen’, and ‘work-men’—as the three essential tools used by a king in his art of ruling (OEBo, Prose 9.2; DOML pp. 98–9). This is the earliest statement of the ‘three orders’ or ‘three estates’ model of European society.15 It belongs to a sub-current of political and social thought that runs intermittently through the full length of the Old English text. Much later, Wisdom affirms the basic rightness of human freedom by means of an analogy between a king’s subjects and divine creation: ‘Hu wolde þe nu lician’, Wisdom asks, ‘gif hwilc swiðe rice cyning wære and næfde nænne freone mon on eallum his rice, ac wæren ealle þiowe?’ (‘How would you like it now if there were some very powerful king and he had no free person in his whole kingdom, but they were all slaves?’) (OEBo, Prose 32.1; DOML pp. 382–3). God, says Wisdom, is like that king, properly served by both free and unfree beings. Such analogies illustrate and dilate the Consolatio’s argument, but also shift its direction, emphasis, and implication. The text thus described exists in two closely corresponding recensions, one entirely in prose and the other alternating prose and verse in the manner of Boethius’ Latin text. These two recensions survived into modern times in just one complete manuscript each: the prose version in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 180 and the prosimetrical version in London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho A VI. (The latter was badly damaged in the 1731 Cotton fire.) It is an indication of the Old English author’s independence that neither of these recensions is coordinated with the Latin Consolatio, beyond reproducing its basic division into five books.16 The all-prose version is segmented into chapters that sometimes correspond to divisions in the Latin text but often do not. It renders thirty-three of the Consolatio’s thirty-nine metra, treating them with the same freeness as the prosae. There is no cause for surprise at the six missing metra; five of them occur in the opening and closing books, where compression and reorganization extended far beyond the omission of these poems. Three of the translated metra—1m6, 2m2, and 4m7—were absorbed into the dialogic movement of adjacent prosae. Most, however, are signalled metadiscursively, by formulaic clauses that announce a shift from speech to song and back to speech again. Several were greatly amplified, among them the famous cosmological hymns 2m8 and 3m9, the Orpheus story of

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 3m12, and the story of Ulysses and Circe in 4m3.17 Crucially, the verse sections of the prosimetrical recension correspond not to the metra of the Consolatio itself, but instead to the free and selective renditions of them in the prose recension: despite its formal echo of the Consolatio, the prosimetrical recension is no nearer the Latin text than the prose recension is. Details of wording, a few misunderstandings in the verse, and the global correspondence between prose and verse renditions of the metra all indicate that the prose version was made first and formed the basis for the versification.18 The resulting verse is Janus-faced, beholden on the one hand to the metrical norms of Old English poetry and on the other to the text of the prose recension; it supplies unique insight into the mechanics of Old English poetic composition.19 For a sample of this procedure, we can examine the poet’s rendering of Consolatio 1m1. In the Old English Boethius this is Metre 2. (The first poem, a versified historical prologue, is the only one that does not correspond to a poem in the Consolatio.) My quotation of the opening lines employs a complex typography: this aims to register the poem’s verbal relation to the Old English prose, and also some of its prosodic features. I use double underline for words and phrases added by the Old English poet, single underline for rewording of the prose source, and no underline for words derived directly from the prose. Syllables that supply strong metrical positions are marked in bold. This includes syllables having primary, secondary, or tertiary stress, and also syllables in resolution.20 (A syllable in resolution is one that forms a strong position in combination with an immediately preceding stressed open syllable with a short vowel, as in fela). Long vowels are marked with a macron. Hwæt, ic līoða fela  lustlīce geō sanc on sæˉlum; nū sceal siofigende wōpe gewæˉged,  wreccea giōmor, singan sār-cwidas. (Formerly I sang many songs joyfully in happy times; now, sighing, exhausted by weeping, I, a sad outcast, must sing laments.) (OEBo, Metre 2.1–4a; DOML pp. 10–11)

The poet rewrote to fit his form. His first addition, Hwæt, is the characteristic opening word in Old English poetry. He then employed a common poetic formula to fill out the first verse, expanding lioð to lioða fela (‘many songs’).21 In the second verse, the poet had the opposite problem: the prose phrase geo lustbærlice (lit. ‘formerly joy-bringingly’) is too long. He dropped an unnecessary morpheme from it; reversal of word order yielded correct alliterative pattern. In the next clause, the poet replaced the prose version’s heofiende (‘weeping’) with the alliterating synonym siofigende. The following verse contains another participial phrase, an appositive variation on siofigende. This clause’s subject noun, wreccea (‘outcast’), derives directly from the prose,

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae but is postposed (an example of the poet’s extensive adjustments to the prose version’s sentence structure and word order in these lines) and modified by the new adjective giomor, a word attested almost exclusively in poetry. Another characteristic feature of Old English poetry is represented in these lines by the poetic compound sar-cwidas (lit. ‘pain-speeches’) in line 4, replacing the prose ungeradum wordum (‘discordant words’). Studies of the Metres of Boethius rightly concentrate on irregularities and divergences from traditional poetic practice; however, the poems remain ‘prosodically conventional in certain central respects’.22 Moreover, the poet’s verbal surgery in the lines just analysed results in a successful re-creation of the first-person voice, binary temporal contrast, and traditional poetic diction in the first couplet of Boethius’ poem: Carmina qui quondam studio florente peregi, Flebilis heu maestos cogor inire modos. (I who formerly accomplished poems in a time of flourishing enterprise—I am, alas, compelled, tearful, to take up mournful measures.) (1m1.1–2)

The effects constructed by Boethius in the traditional idiom of Latin poetry were reinvented within the different but equally conventional poetic idiom of English. In subsequent lines of 1m1, the Old English versions continue to track Boethius’ Latin, but on an epicyclical path. In place of Boethius’ reference to the muses (camenae), the Old English versions put an independent reflection on poetic craft. Mind says his grief impairs his poetic ability and causes him to mishandle cuðe spræce (‘known words’); he contrasts this present ineptitude with his former ability to create ‘fela . . . soð-cwide’ (‘many a true discourse’) from words less familiar than the ones he now abuses (OEBo, Metre 2.4b–9). This idea, a deviation from the Latin, is already present in the Old English prose but was amplified in the verse. Both English versions then express the complaint of ‘Boethius’ at fortune’s deceptive favours (OEBo, Metre 2.10-–15; cf. Consolatio, 1m1.17–20). However, there are again differences: where the speaker of the Latin poem complains of old age hastened on by grief and hardship, the Old English versions omit all reference to age. They specify instead that worldly felicities (woruld-sælða) enticed Boethius into a dungeon (dimme hol: OEBo, Metre 2.11) and left him locked up there. In this detail, they were channelling the biography of Boethius, as related in their prologues (OEBo, Metre 1.72b–73). A subtler but perhaps more suggestive swerve occurs in the rendering of Boethius’ epigrammatic final couplet: Quid me felicem totiens iactastis amici? Qui cecidit, stabili non erat ille gradu (Why, friends, did you so often pronounce me happy? He who fell was not securely positioned) (1m1.21–2)

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The couplet’s first line was rendered very closely in both of the Old English versions, but its second line was progressively rewritten: Forhwām wolde gē,  weoruld-fry¯nd mīne, secgan oððe singan  þæt ic gesæ ¯ llic mon wæˉre on weorulde?  Ne synt þā word sōð23 nū þā gesæˉlða ne magon  simle gewunigan. (Why, my friends, would you say or sing that I was a fortunate man in the world? Those words are not true since the joys cannot last forever.) (OEBo, Metre 2.16–19; DOML pp. 12–13)

In the first two-and-a-half lines of this passage, the poet followed the prose version very closely, even preserving its word order. His additions here are all metri causa; the result, however, is that the verse emphasizes the worldliness (and, by implication, falsity) of both the speaker’s happiness and his friends. This shift becomes more pronounced in the rendering of the couplet’s second line, the last line of the Latin poem. ‘Qui cecidit, stabili non erat ille gradu’ is a statement that bears upon the philosophical subject and his spiritual preparation for adversity. The language is military, referring to the tactical positioning of troops or fortifications.24 The Old English prose version retained the grammatical subject of Boethius’ sentence, but dropped his allusive language. Instead, he emphasized the theme of (worldly) happiness, carried over from the previous sentence: ‘Hu mæg se beon gesælig se þe on þam gesælþum þurhwunian ne mot?’ (‘How can he be happy who is not allowed to continue in those felicities?’).25 In the verse version, the transformation is complete: the ‘joyful things’ or ‘felicities’ (gesælða) have now become the grammatical subject. Where Boethius’ poem had closed with a conditional verdict on spiritual stabilitas, the Old English poem closes with an absolute verdict on woruld-sælða. Ideational adjustments like this one at the end of 1m1 may prove to be as significant as the two themes that have received the fullest attention to date: the Old English author’s political and social thought, and his handling of the Consolatio’s Platonic cosmology and pagan mythology. Both versions—the one all in prose and the one with versified metres—have prefaces claiming King Alfred (849–99) as their author, attributions echoed in Æthelweard’s Chronicle late in the tenth century and by William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century. These attributions have long been accepted; however, Malcolm Godden argues persuasively that they ought to be treated with scepticism.26 As Godden notes, there is precedent at the court of Charlemagne for attributing literary compositions to medieval kings; such attributions extend the standard medieval practice of circulating legal, administrative, and diplomatic texts in the king’s name. More narrowly, King Alfred’s interest in promoting learning among English bishops and their households sparked a precocious, highly generative, and long-lasting tradition of spurious attributions to him. The evidence of the texts themselves also belies the

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae Alfredian attribution. The Old English Boethius’ wide-ranging familiarity with classical learning, combined with its confident and original handling of Boethius’ Latin text, tally neither with the king’s late acquisition of Latin (as reported by his biographer Asser) nor with the Alfredian programme of translation as it is instanced in the translations of Gregory’s Dialogues and Pastoral Care, the two works securely attributed to that initiative. By contrast with these two works, the Old English Boethius and Old English Soliloquies were produced by someone widely read and freely interventionist, knowingly exploring ideas at variance with church teaching.27 As possible contexts for these engagements with Boethius and Augustine, Godden proposes the monastic establishments at Glastonbury and Canterbury.28 These were among the greatest centres of learning in tenth-century England. Glastonbury was connected to study of the Consolatio through the Vatican manuscript, which was glossed there by Dunstan and others; Canterbury produced copies of the Consolatio later in the tenth century and also owned a copy of the Old English Boethius. A terminus ad quem for composition is set by the Cotton manuscript, which dates from the mid-tenth century. Godden’s reassessment of the authorship question will certainly remain controversial.29 For the present, attributions to Alfred are probably best understood as a salient and persistent feature of this text’s reception history. Other aspects of the text’s reception cast a sharper light on its character and intention. At the end of the tenth century, Ælfric drew on the Old English Boethius for discussions of temporality, creation, the human soul, moral responsibility, and free will.30 He selected and reworked with some care, and he did not name his source. The result is that the borrowed language and borrowed ideas are not particularly Boethian. Indeed, while Ælfric evidently found that the Old English Boethius held material suitable to his purpose, he could not have admired everything in the book. For in fact, the Old English author transmitted and endorsed Boethian positions— notably the reality of fate and the pre-existence of the soul—that Ælfric vigorously opposed elsewhere in his writings.31 Thus, rather than demonstrating the penetration of Boethian philosophy into the vernacular, Ælfric’s borrowings accentuate the rarity—that is, exceptionality—of the philosophical intention expressed in the Old English Boethius. The most substantial record of the continuing use and circulation of this text in the late Old English period is perhaps MS Bodley 180 itself, written in the late eleventh or early twelfth century. The foregoing account will be augmented in the course of this chapter, through targeted comparisons with later episodes of the Consolatio’s reception. Sustained English-language attention to the Consolatio resumed only at the end of the fourteenth century; however, intervening developments in the Latin and French traditions have a place in this narrative both as comparative counterpoints to the English reception and because aspects of these Latin and French traditions would contribute in essential ways to the later English reception. During the intervening centuries, continued high demand for copies of the Consolatio produced a distinctive late

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature medieval textual tradition of it, distinguished from ninth- and tenth-century copies by numerous textual variants.32 Meanwhile, the Latin text was fitted with increasingly sophisticated commentaries. The new commentators continued to gloss hard words and expand mythological and historical allusions, often carrying such material over from their predecessors. However, commentators also made themselves responsible for a much more comprehensive exposition of their texts. To this end, they developed a powerful surface/depth model of textual meaning, a model that enabled them to pursue two divergent projects. On the one hand, they devoted more exacting attention to the surface or literal sense of the Consolatio. They paraphrased at length, but also sought to identify and discuss major divisions of and turns in Boethius’ argument. Simultaneously, their model of textual meaning licensed ambitious departures from this literal sense. Although always representing itself as exposition of its text, commentary became a locus for original philosophical speculation on topics ranging from cosmology to anatomy to ethics. The new commentaries typically circulated as independent texts, keyed by lemmata to the text commented upon, rather than written into the margins of it as earlier commentaries were. They developed on the basis of those older commentaries and from long-standing practices of classroom instruction. However, if the individual techniques of commentary were not new, their coordinated use and cumulative effect was. The first of the Consolatio commentaries in this new phase was that of William of Conches, probably composed around 1120–5; it circulated widely.33 Influence of the commentaries is evident in the next vernacular rendition of the Consolatio to be produced in England. This was the Roman de philosophie, composed, probably at the end of the twelfth century, by Simund de Frein, canon at Hereford and friend of Gerald of Wales.34 Consisting of 1,658 lines in heptasyllabic couplets, Simund’s Anglo-Norman poem is a very free adaptation and abridgement. The interlocutors are philosophie and a clerc who has lost his former wealth and office. Their dialogue has two themes, based loosely in Consolatio Books 2 and 3: the evils of Fortune and the discrimination between true and false goods. Although this poem might never have been read together with the Old English Boethius during the Middle Ages, comparison of the two is instructive. The Old English author had subjected the Consolatio to manifold alterations, yet he continued to represent both the text’s classical alterity and Boethius’ historical particularity. Simund dropped these things, and also dropped the Consolatio’s searching explorations of fate, providence, and free will. Meanwhile, Fortune—who had been written out of the Old English Boethius—begins in the Roman de philosophie to take on the inflated proportions that she will have in the Consolatio’s subsequent reception history. Simund’s engagement with Boethius’ text might therefore be said to coincide with that of the Old English author at two points: a strongly developed interest in Philosophy’s analysis of false goods, and a predilection for interpolation. Some of Simund’s additions are paralleled in commentaries.35 Others hone Philosophy’s argument on the historical form of disappointment that

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae organizes Simund’s adaptation of the Consolatio: the career disappointments of clerics denied or removed from ecclesiastical office. The Roman de philosophie survives in three manuscripts of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, testifying to some continued interest in this work a century after its composition. There would be at least eight further translations into French before the second phase of the Consolatio’s English-language reception got under way.36 All the French translations except the Roman de philosophie were continental productions. They survive today in over 150 manuscripts, again dwarfing the English corpus; perhaps surprisingly, this robust manuscript circulation was evidently also restricted to the Continent.37 For the fulcrum of the Consolatio’s medieval English reception, we must turn back to Latin, to a commentary composed around 1300 by the English Dominican Nicholas Trevet.38 A considerable number of Latin commentaries on the Consolatio were produced during the period from the late thirteenth century to the late fifteenth.39 Trevet’s was by far the most successful, surviving in over 100 manuscript copies. Many of the later commentators were dependent on Trevet, but Trevet himself drew on a wide range of earlier scholarship, most importantly the Consolatio commentary of William of Conches. Among Trevet’s more recondite sources, the most surprising is the Old English Boethius.40 Trevet cites this source as Alvredus rex in Anglico; although the first two of his citations correspond to nothing in the Old English text, the others are precise and accurate. On two occasions he cites Alfred to support a de-Platonized interpretation of the Consolatio’s teaching on souls, but his fullest borrowings are the two extended analogies noticed above in discussion of the Old English text. Trevet paraphrases—in detail and at length—the analogy between fate’s operations and a wagon wheel; he also reports the comparison of God to an earthly king properly served by both free and unfree subjects. Read in the context of Trevet’s commentary, these few references to the Old English Boethius perhaps only confirm this commentator’s extraordinary learning: Trevet read texts that remained closed to most of his contemporaries. Placed in the context of the Consolatio’s medieval English reception, Trevet’s citations have another significance: they constitute a unique and limited reversal in the direction of cultural transmission, a re-injection of the Consolatio’s English reception back into Latin letters. Trevet would, in turn, become a source for each of the major English renderings to follow in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: those of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Walton, and Robert Henryson. Chaucer engaged the Consolatio in two ways.41 He made a complete and faithful translation into English prose; and he made ‘piecemeal translations’ in verse.42 He developed Boethian themes in several short free-standing poems, termed the ‘Boethian lyrics’ in modern scholarship: ‘The Former Age’, ‘Fortune’, ‘Truth’, ‘Gentilesse’, and ‘Lak of Stedfastnesse’. He also inserted Boethian set-pieces into his narrative poetry, most notably in Troilus and Criseyde, the ‘Knight’s Tale’, and the

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’. These poems have complicated and ambivalent relations to their Boethian source; Troilus and Criseyde will allow us to broach the central interpretative problems. At the height of his bliss, Troilus sings a hymn to the unifying force of cosmic love, based on Consolatio 2m8 (Troilus, 3.1744–71; Riverside Chaucer pp. 536–7). Later, after the Trojan parliament determines to trade Criseyde to the enemy camp, Troilus gives himself over to meditations on predestination, free will, and divine prescience, based on Consolatio 5p2 and 5p3 (Troilus, 4.958–1078; Riverside Chaucer pp. 550–2).43 The meaning of the second passage comes into focus if we recall that Lady Philosophy led her patient into these dark regions late in the Consolatio, after she had brought him safely back to his former recognition of the one true good. By contrast, Troilus enters Philosophy’s labyrinth (the word occurs at Consolatio 3p12.83) in a state of despair akin to that in which we first meet the Consolatio’s ‘Boethius’, and with no physician or instructor other than the worldly Pandarus. Philosophy’s austere cosmic perspective is available to Troilus only in death, and then with a signal difference in modality: his subjective reformation occurs not incrementally—not through discourse—but uno intuitu, in a backward glance at earth as his liberated soul ascends into the heavens (Troilus, 5.1807–27; Riverside Chaucer p. 584). By these changes, Chaucer relocated the Consolatio’s knowledge into a sphere and a modal dispensation quite literally inaccessible to ordinary human beings during life. Theseus’ speech on the ‘faire cheine of love’, concluding the ‘Knight’s Tale’ (Canterbury Tales, I.2987–3040; Riverside Chaucer p. 65), is similarly pessimistic. The war-mongering duke’s vision of serene cosmic unity—drawn from Consolatio 2m8, 3p10, and 4p6—is flatly contradicted by the ‘experience’ of life (I.3001) to which he refers in support of it. And yet this is not parody. If Chaucer dramatized the chasm that separates Boethian philosophy from uninstructed human experience, that chasm is internal to Boethian philosophy itself, as one of its core postulates. Lady Philosophy’s whole purpose is to reconstitute the Boethian subject on the far side of that gaping distance. She does so through a controlled exercise of disciplinary reason—that is, through precisely the ‘auctorite’ disavowed by Theseus at the end of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ (I.3000). It is clear that Chaucer was deeply attracted to this philosophical project. If his narrative fictions test Boethian philosophy, it is perhaps a test of essence rather than accuracy: the question asked is less ‘Is it true?’ than ‘What is it?’ This attitude of testing is present in the ‘Boethian lyrics’ as well, though what is tested there is, in part, the suitability of Boethian topoi for verse composition.44 In ‘Truth’, Chaucer assumed the imperative voice of ‘bon conseyl’ (Riverside Chaucer, p. 653) and explored its effects. In ‘Fortune’, he drew from Consolatio Book 2 in a general way and from affiliated materials in the Roman de la rose; he reshaped these materials into a dialogue between a Pleintif and Fortune, in the form of a triple ballad. By its abstraction from Boethius’ text, this poem places itself along the same axis of reception charted out in Simund de Frein’s Roman de philosophie: type-cast characters

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae rehearse Boethian teachings on fortune and worldly good. The envoy, however, recasts this whole discourse as a courtier’s begging poem. Fortune asks the ‘princes’ to remove the pleintif’s cause for his complaints against her: ‘releve him of his peine’, she implores, or else help him attain ‘som beter estat’ (‘Fortune’, 73–9; Riverside Chaucer, p. 653). Hoccleve would subvert Philosophy’s message in similar terms, as would several other writers in the Chaucerian tradition. In each case, the basic move is to make Boethius’ language re-cross the chasm dramatized in the Troilus, bending that language back to the side where people experience hope, fear, joy, and anger. Another exemplary instance of this deflection, already mentioned, is Troilus’ version of 2m8, Philosophy’s hymn to celestial love. The body of this inset lyric is very close to Boethius’ metre, but Troilus transposes Philosophy’s closing words into a courtly jest. Where Philosophy wishes that love, which rules heaven, would also rule the souls of humans (2m8.28–30), Troilus prays that Love would ensnare all people in his bonds and cause ‘hertes colde’ to learn the pangs of lovesickness (Troilus, 3.1765–71; Riverside Chaucer, p. 537). Other lyrics exhibit other strategies of poetic invention. ‘The Former Age’ is the only lyric (other than the one assigned to Troilus) in which Chaucer made a sustained translation of a single Boethian locus; for much of its length it represents Consolatio 2m5 almost as closely as Troilus’ song represents 2m8. As the poem progresses, however, Chaucer increasingly intercalates material from the Roman de la rose, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and other sources. The result is that Boethius’ metre has become a sort of scaffold, supporting a syncretic exposition of its theme, the mythical golden age. This compositional procedure is paralleled in the Old English Boethius’ rendering of certain mythological metres; it could have been suggested to both authors by the way that glossators routinely supplement the Consolatio with fuller and alternative versions of classical myths. Chaucer’s prose translation of the entire Consolatio was probably a product of the early 1380s, hence approximately contemporary with Troilus.45 The dates and sequence of compositions are a matter of conjecture. If Chaucer undertook the Boece after his first piecemeal translations of the Consolatio, then he would have been following the compositional sequence of Jean de Meun, who made his own prose translation of this text about 1300, after drawing liberally from it (and announcing the need for a translation of it) in his continuation of the Roman de la rose. Indeed, one could imagine that Jean’s translation led Chaucer back to Boethius’ Latin and also inspired him to translate it in prose. Whatever its genesis, the Boece itself shows how Chaucer interpreted his task: to make a faithful and minute representation of the Consolatio’s meaning, taken a sentence at a time. Here again, comparison with the Old English Boethius is instructive. The author of that text was certainly capable of translating closely.46 However, he routinely veered from close translation into an independent idea, a looser summary of the Latin, or another locus within the Latin text. By contrast, Chaucer’s closeness is pervasive and consistent. He neither omits passages nor dilates them out of proportion. Nevertheless,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature his fidelity is of a very particular kind, dependent on four distinct sources: a late medieval (‘vulgate’) Latin text of the Consolatio, Jean de Meun’s translation in French prose, Nicholas Trevet’s commentary, and additional glosses deriving ultimately from the early medieval scholia noted at the beginning of this chapter (these glosses might have been entered into the margins or between the lines of Chaucer’s copy of the Consolatio).47 All but Jean de Meun’s translation are well represented in surviving English manuscripts. Chaucer was not fully consistent in his use of this textual array.48 Nevertheless, generalizations are possible. ‘In setting the Consolation into French’, write Ralph Hanna and Traugott Lawler, ‘Jean had, as it were, parsed it for Chaucer, identifying the antecedents of pronouns, arranging Boethius’ artful word order into the analytic syntax of French, clarifying the relationships of clauses in lengthy sentences, resolving absolute phrases.’49 From Trevet, Chaucer drew alternative translations and brief glosses; meanwhile, the Consolatio itself often supplied Chaucer with individual vocabulary items, even at points where his translation reflects the syntax of the French. Thus, if Jean’s French pointed Chaucer towards idiomatic English, he nevertheless produced something rather different from that: a text heavy in Latinate vocabulary and syntax, periphrastic recursions, doublet constructions, and exegetical asides.50 These stylistic features show Chaucer experimenting with language, confronting and working around technical problems in the translation of Latin. They also suggest that the Boece, as transmitted, remains in the state of an unrevised draft.51 In these two respects, Boece is justly described in terms of what it is not: it is not polished prose and Chaucer worked without the benefit of standardized modern solutions to problems of translation. However, the Boece’s accretive style and its incorporation of glosses also point towards a positive genre designation: late medieval academic translation.52 For this genre, meaning was something to be constructed through and by means of the glosses that normally accompanied authoritative texts. Translation was less a new beginning than the extension of a continuous interpretative endeavour into a new language. Contemporary English instances of this genre include Richard Rolle’s English Psalter (1340s), the Wycliffite Bibles (1390s), and Trevisa’s translations under the patronage of Sir Thomas Berkeley (1370s–1402).53 Trevisa’s translations are cleaner, more polished than the others, but they demonstrate the genre’s eligibility for lay aristocratic patronage. Jean de Meun’s French Consolatio was also a creature of the patronage economy: the prologue bears a dedication to the French king Philippe le Bel (1285–1314). By contrast, Chaucer’s Boece lacks a prologue or dedication of any kind. Perhaps—though this can only be speculation—Chaucer began the Boece with a view towards aristocratic presentation, but thought better of this plan once the London political scene devolved into dangerous factionalism in the first half of the 1380s. Chaucer’s decision to withhold his most eligible literary project from the

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae patronage economy would fit well with his cautious political manoeuvring and efforts to distance himself from court during those turbulent years.54 Whatever their circumstances of composition, Chaucer’s works marked a new beginning to the English Boethian tradition. They were soon followed by others. Hoccleve’s citation of Boethius in the prologue to the Regiment of Princes, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, may have been mediated by Troilus, which explores the same proposition that the memory of lost happiness adds to present sorrow (Troilus, 3.1625–8 and 4.477–83). The first of Chaucer’s followers was Thomas Usk, whose allegorical dialogue The Testament of Love derives its concept, dramatic circumstance, and tranches of its argument from the Consolatio, perhaps all via Chaucer’s Boece, to which it is indebted for details of wording.55 Probably written between December 1384 and June 1385, the Testament survives only in an early modern print, William Thynne’s 1532 Workes of Geffray Chaucer (STC 5068).56 The nature of Usk’s dependence on the Boece throws light on both works. Where Usk is closest to Chaucer’s translation, he smoothed its sentences into the kind of prose that Chaucer himself might have produced, had he revised. Philosophy’s discourse on the separability of false goods provides an example: Huic census exuberat, sed est pudori degener sanguis; hunc nobilitas notum facit, sed angustia rei familiaris inclusus esse mallet ignotus. Ille utroque circumfluus vitam caelibem deflet. (Consolatio 2p4.46–9)57 For som man hath gret richesse, but he is ashamed of his ungentil linage. And som man is renouned of noblesse of kinrede, but he is enclosed in so gret angwisshe of nede of thinges that him were lever [he would prefer] that he were unknowe. And som man aboundeth bothe in richesse and noblesse, but yet he biwaileth his chaste lif, for he ne hath no wif. (Boece, 2p4.78–86) He that plente hath in riches, of his kin is ashamed. Another of linage right noble and wel knowe, but povert him hondleth [afflicts]; he were lever unknowe. Another hath these, but renoun of peples preising may he nought have; over-al he is hated and defamed of thinges right foule. (TL 2.10.61–5; Shawver, p. 112)

The Latin text’s balanced hypotaxis and dignified circumlocutions became diffuse and shapeless in Chaucer’s second sentence above. Usk’s stylistic surgery pulled the passage away from Boethius, but completed its translation into idiomatic and effective English: noun phrases were simplified; subordinate clauses were recast as short, stinging sentences. Usk, however, rarely followed the Boece so closely. In this respect, the movement of the last sentence above is characteristic. Where Lady Philosophy asks ‘Boethius’ to consider the plight of a rich and well-born man who is unhappily wifeless, Usk turns pointedly towards the false good that tops his list throughout the Testament of Love—fama, or renoun. This alteration is the more striking if one steps back to consider Usk’s large-scale reworking of the Consolatio. The words above are

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature spoken by Lady Love, to a prisoner who bewails his unreturned affections for his absent beloved. One might think a reference to unchosen bachelordom quite apt within this context, but it is absolutely characteristic of Usk that he refuses such an obvious connection. Usk’s beloved has a name, Margarite. However, her name serves less to individuate her than to enter her into a chain of symbolic substitutions. ‘Margarite’ names the assemblage of Usk’s desires; what stands between him and the accomplishment of these desires is, he believes, the defamation and bad renoun to which Love refers in the passage above. In an extended autobiographical exposition earlier in the Testament, the Usk-persona revealed the cause of his ruined reputation (TL 1.6–7; Shawver, pp. 64–71). Deeply involved in civic power struggles, he acted as the state’s chief witness against his former political patrons; accused of opportunism and perjury, he is now treated as a political liability even by his new allies. In reply to these revelations, Love assures ‘Usk’ that he has done the right thing; she testifies to his present moral rectitude and promises her assistance in his pious and honourable pursuit of Margarite. Usk has therefore welded together at least three genres in the Testament of Love: philosophical dialogue, erotic allegory, and political petition. Each of these is rooted in the Consolatio: Boethius’ political apologia (Consolatio 1p4) provided a template for Usk’s political petition, and Chaucer’s rewriting of 2m8 in Troilus showed how one could translate the Consolatio’s doctrine of cosmological love into the idiom of late medieval romance. Still, the particular ways in which Usk reworked his source created a fair amount of discursive turbulence. As Paul Strohm observes, the discursive line projected from any one of these genres is checked by ‘crosscurrents’ emanating from the other two.58 As an avatar of Lady Philosophy, Love ought to teach her pupil to withdraw from the world of fortune—and, indeed, she reproduces Philosophy’s analysis of false goods at some length (TL 2.4–10; Shawver p. 89–113). Yet no sooner has she concluded this demonstration, than she urges Usk to take ‘comfort in hope of  . . . geting again the double of thy lesing [losses]’ (TL 2.10.105–6; Shawver, p. 113). Usk’s moral reformation, Love affirms, has entitled him to future worldly success ‘with encresing love of thy Margarite perl ther-to’ (TL 2.10.106–7, Shawver, p. 113). At such moments, one sees that Usk has turned the Consolatio’s moral content into a means of staking a righteous claim to worldly good. If this is a wilful misreading of the Consolatio, it is not a unique one. There are comparable statements in the Old English Boethius.59 What sets the Testament apart is rather the scale and comprehensiveness of Usk’s appropriation. Other adapters and translators confronted Boethius’ political apologia with one of two textual strategies: suppress it as irrelevant to the work’s timeless moral message; or reproduce it, perhaps with annotation, in an act of fidelity to distant historical particulars. Rejecting both these strategies, Usk replaced Boethius’ self-vindicating story of political misadventure with his own. In the final book of the Testament, Usk left the Consolatio behind, in favour of Anselm’s treatise De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae dei cum libero arbitrio.60

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae Nevertheless, it was the Consolatio that showed Usk how to scale up from historically embedded first-person experience to universalizing philosophical speculation. The Boece would soon receive a different kind of finishing from the one Usk gave it. Around 1410, the Augustinian canon John Walton produced an English verse Consolatio, based principally though not exclusively on Chaucer’s Boece.61 He wrote Chaucerian alternating decasyllabic lines.62 For the first three books of the Consolatio he used the eight-line stanza of Chaucer’s ‘Monk’s Tale’; Books 4 and 5 switch to the seven-line rhyme royal stanza of Chaucer’s Troilus and the religious Canterbury Tales. Within these formal constraints, Walton shared Chaucer’s aim of representing the sense of the Latin author. His handling of Consolatio 2p4.43–8 provides an example. I use double underline for Walton’s additions, single underline for rewording, and no underline for words derived directly from the prose. Ful angwisshous they ben, as for the nones, The kinde of worldly wele, I seie for-why, For either they ne comen noght at ones, Or they ne stondeth never stabily. For this hath riches lo aboundauntly, Him shameth that his linage is so lowe; And this lo is renouned noblely, Yet had he lever for povert ben unknowe. (stanza 214; Science, p. 83) (They are very distressing indeed, these worldly goods. I’ll tell you why. For, either they do not come all at once, or else they never stand firm. This man has abundant riches, but he is ashamed of his low lineage. And this man is nobly celebrated, but would rather be unknown, on account of his poverty.)

We have already seen Chaucer’s and Usk’s renderings of 2p4.46–8, corresponding to the second half of this stanza. Walton’s versification has much to recommend it. He reduced Chaucer’s awkward ‘enclosed in so grete angwisshe of nede of thinges’ down to its basic idea, ‘poverty’. It is an obvious solution; Usk had done the same. Moreover, Walton’s verse form enabled him to represent the chiastic shape of this passage even more sharply than Usk had: he displays the symmetrical sufferings of rich commoners and poor aristocrats in a quatrain whose lines (and rhymes) alternate between possession and deprivation. As one would expect, rhyming requirements drive a wedge between Walton’s text and Chaucer’s. Among the rhyme words in the passage above, only ‘unknowe’ is supplied in that form by the Boece. Two other rhyme words are easy derivations from Chaucer’s vocabulary, accomplished by transforming a noun or verb into an adverb: ‘noblely’ from Chaucer’s ‘noblesse’ and ‘aboundauntly’ from Chaucer’s ‘aboundeth’. For the remainder of his rhymes, Walton had to invent synonyms and alternative expressions (‘at ones’ for Chaucer’s ‘al togeder’; ‘lowe’ for Chaucer’s ‘ungentil’), or else resort to empty tags, as in the stanza’s first two lines. It is impossible, without further study, to say how well this

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature stanza represents Walton’s verse practice; his use of Chaucer’s prose translation has yet to receive anything resembling Mark Griffith’s meticulous study of the Old English Boethius’ versified metres.63 Yet the analogy between these two versifications is only approximate: Walton’s project is distinguished not only by its greater scope, but also by the fact that he returned to some of the same Latin sources that Chaucer had used in producing the original prose translation. Although the stanza above does not show it, Walton’s translation elsewhere reveals that he consulted both the Latin Consolatio and Trevet’s commentary on it.64 A prologue, versified like the translation, places Boethius firmly in a tradition of truth-speaking Christian opposition to imperial tyranny. In the historiographical tradition Walton follows here, Boethius was first imprisoned for his principled opposition to the Gothic king Theodoric’s abuses of power, then executed in the course of a high-stakes diplomatic stand-off between Theodoric (an Arian) and the Christian emperor Justinian. Walton draws a direct line from these events back to Nero’s execution of the apostles Peter and Paul. One manuscript of Walton’s translation, Copenhagen, Køngelige Bibliotek, MS Thott 304 2o, supplies further interpretative directions, in the form of carefully disposed tranches of English prose commentary.65 This manuscript—perhaps the very copy presented to Walton’s patron Elizabeth Berkeley—is now significantly incomplete, but while still entire it served as copy text for the editio princeps of Walton’s translation (STC 3200), printed at Tavistock Abbey (Devon) in 1525.66 This printed edition reproduced the Copenhagen manuscript’s prose commentary and is now the sole witness to significant portions of it. The commentary was evidently never more than sporadic. A clutch of notes in Book 1 tracks the cognitive state of ‘Boethius’, generalizing about the capacities of human reason to apprehend truth when it remains true to its nature, or fall into error when it succumbs to the temptations of embodied existence. Shorter notes supply geographical identifications, mythological lore, a definition of tragedy, and an exposition of Plato’s theory of anamnesis. The longest notes, comprising the great bulk of the commentary, are to the cosmological hymn 3m9 and the mythological metres 3m12 and 4m7. Like the versified historical prologue, much of this commentary derives from Trevet, though not all of it; Walton (assuming the commentary is his work) exhibits a good deal of independence, as well as a more persistent interest in moralization. Among the moralizations of Hercules’ labours in 4m7, two are noteworthy: Diomedes (who fed his carnivorous horse human flesh) is moralized as a ‘wastour that pileth [robs] and despoileth the peple, for to maintene his gret array [to support his expensive lifestyle] which passeth the suffisaunce of his estat’, while the harpies are moralized as ‘renners [i.e. travellers] or riders over the contre, covered under [protected by] lordship as minstrales and joculers and such other that cometh into hous-holdes of worthy men and eteth and devoureth their vitailes [food and drink]’.67 Perhaps Walton’s patron smiled to read contemporary problems of aristocratic household management reframed as Herculean labour.

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae The commentary in the Copenhagen manuscript is the earliest surviving Englishlanguage commentary on the Consolatio. There is only one other from the Middle Ages. Sometime in the early or mid-fifteenth century, an anonymous cleric redacted Chaucer’s Boece (Book 1 only), interpolating small and large explanatory notes. The resulting text survives in one manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. F.3.5.68 It begins with a standard academic headnote: this states the author’s name and his other works, then supplies a sketch of Boethius’ life, a summary of the Consolatio’s doctrinal content, an explanation of its fictional technique, and a summary of the argument of each book. The content of this headnote is quite rudimentary, but its form mirrors the prologues routine in Latin commentaries on authoritative texts, including commentaries on the Consolatio.69 The commentator’s first substantial note to the text itself is a character sketch of Lady Fortune, triggered by Boethius’ glancing reference to fortuna in his opening complaint (1m1.17). This note establishes Fortune as a central character from the beginning of the Consolatio and illustrates once again her prominence in late medieval reception of this work. In his next note, the commentator explains why Boethius represents philosophy as a woman. Both these topics were addressed as well in the Copenhagen commentary, but the Auct. commentator is at once more voluble and more pedestrian. Subsequent interpolations in 1p1 (eighteen in all) explain and moralize each detail of Philosophy’s appearance. Later in Book 1 there are notes on astronomy, meteorology, ancient philosophy, elemental cosmology, and faculty psychology, alongside much moralization and paraphrase. Source studies indicate that this material does not derive from any single Latin commentary on the Consolatio; instead, it seems that the English commentator supplemented Latin commentaries with material drawn from a variety of encyclopedic texts and reference works.70 This procedure evidently proved too onerous to be continued, for the amount of commentary drops off sharply after the middle of 1p4. After this point the translation also follows Chaucer’s Boece more closely than it had earlier, though it continues to have a much higher density of variants than any other manuscript witness to Chaucer’s translation. The two English commentaries are exceptional, but the remaining manuscripts of Chaucer’s and Walton’s translations supply corroborating evidence for the reception of the Consolatio in English at the end of the Middle Ages. No doubt as a consequence of its greater readability, Walton’s version circulated more widely than Chaucer’s did: it survives in twenty-three manuscript copies (excluding additional brief excerpts), as against ten of Chaucer’s Boece (eleven if one counts the redaction in Auct. F.3.5).71 As Daniel Wakelin has recently observed, a number of these manuscripts show that readers of English translations continued to be interested in Boethius’ Latin: ‘Two manuscripts of Chaucer’s version gave the whole Latin in alternation with the English, section by section. Three manuscripts of Walton’s version have the Latin text in parallel with the English, and in one of Chaucer’s a reader started adding the Latin but, forgivably, gave up.’72 Another seven manuscripts are

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature outfitted with a far less laborious means to the same end: each section of the translation is keyed to the opening words of the corresponding Latin metrum or prosa.73 The Latin incipits presumably enabled readers to construct ad hoc parallel text editions, without the labour or expense of writing out another full copy of the Consolatio. The editio princeps of Chaucer’s translation (printed by William Caxton in 1478, STC 3199) likewise supplies varying amounts of Latin text at the head of each section.74 As I noted above, Walton’s translation was first printed in 1525, in an edition that also reproduced the authoritative Copenhagen manuscript’s prose commentary. Thus, manuscript and early printed copies of the two Middle English translations express a continuing nexus with academic and Latinate traditions of this text. The only remotely comparable provisions in manuscripts of the Old English Boethius are several annotations entered into the margins of the Bodley manuscript in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, evidently ‘to mark certain points of correspondence with the Latin text’.75 Continuing attention to the Latin tradition of the Consolatio is evident in a different way in the Tale of Orpheus, composed, perhaps in the 1460s or 1470s, by the Scots poet Robert Henryson.76 The poem has two parts. The first part is narrative, based loosely on the Orpheus story told in Consolatio 3m12. The second part offers a moralization of this story, drawn from Trevet’s commentary on the same metre. Henryson acknowledges this source admiringly, as ‘maister Trewit, doctour Nicholas | . . . a noble theolog’ (‘Orpheus’, 421–2; Fox, p. 146). According to Trevet and Henryson, Orpheus represents ‘the part intellectiue | Of mannis saule’ while Eurydice represents man’s inconstant and heteroclite ‘affection’, now affiliated to reason and virtue, now to sensual appetite (‘Orpheus’, 427–34; Fox, p. 146–7). Eurydice’s flight from the rapist Aristaeus represents affection’s neglect of virtue; the serpent’s sting represents mortal sin; and Eurydice’s raptus into the underworld represents the lapse of human affection into the living death of worldly pleasure. (The androcentric perspective and normalization of sexual violence exhibited here was endemic to the medieval arts curriculum.77) The moralization concludes by relating how Reason justly attempted to rescue Affection from the state into which she had fallen, but failed when he cast his mind’s eye backward, ‘gevand consent and dilectation | Off wardly lust for the affection’ (‘giving consent and attention to worldly desire for the affection’) (‘Orpheus’, 622–3; Fox, p. 152–3). Henryson, Trevet, and William of Conches (who was Trevet’s source) filled out this interpretative edifice with moral glosses on each of the denizens of Hades mentioned in Boethius’s metre. By dilating in this way, the Latin commentators and Henryson were perhaps only answering, in their own way, an invitation Boethius had inscribed into the metre’s closing lines: ‘Vos haec fabula respicit/quicumque in superum diem/mentem ducere quaeritis’ (‘This tale is about all of you who seek to lead your mind into the upper day’) (3m12.52–4). In his rendering of the metre itself, Henryson expanded very freely. Boethius’ poem is just 200 words in length; it begins in medias res, with Eurydice already dead.

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae Henryson took a long approach to his subject, rehearsing Orpheus’ illustrious ancestry and glossing each of the nine muses before even introducing Eurydice. Later, where Boethius’ Orpheus had only complained that the gods were cruel (‘immites superos querens’; 3m12.18), Henryson’s Orpheus visits each of them in their designated celestial sphere. Perhaps he read querens (‘complaining’, from queror) as quaerens (‘seeking’, from quaero). The forms are prosodically distinct—the first syllable of querens scans short—but they were written identically in medieval Latin. Trevet had read Boethius’ line correctly, but his gloss implies that he, too, heard undertones of seeking, which he happily accommodated to his interpretation of the metre. The gloss says Orpheus complained because heavenly things are  difficult to achieve (‘CONQUERENS SUPEROS IMMITES, scilicet propter difficultatem scandendi celestia’; printed in Fox, ed., p. 387). Whatever the genesis of Orpheus’ celestial journey, it occasions more expansion. Once Orpheus is in the spheres, Henryson must comment on their music; this, in turn, occasions a cursory exposition of musical proportion. The poem is steeped in the medieval arts curriculum. Among the previous English versions of this metre, the only one to approach Henryson’s independence is the Old English Boethius (OEBo, Prose 23; DOML pp. 270–5). Like Henryson, the Old English author had also supplied a backstory, introduced characters, located them in space, and added narrative and mythological detail. The details added were, of course, different. In the Old English version, three-headed Cerberus greets Orpheus with a wagging tail, but Orpheus must then confront and placate a three-headed Charon as well: the Old English author evidently saw the possibility of identifying the triple door-keeper (tergeminus . . . ianitor) of Boethius’ poem (3p12.29–30) as both Cerberus and Charon. By contrast with both the Old English Boethius and Henryson’s Orpheus, Walton’s version of 3m12 stays very close to his source, as usual for him; most of his expansions are motivated by English syntax and stanza form. Henryson’s poem survives in a print copy probably of 1508 and in two later manuscript copies. It joins a number of other fifteenth-century English and Scots adaptations of the Consolatio.78 I close by examining two of these, The Kingis Quair and A Prisoner’s Reflections. These two poems are distinguished from Henryson’s Orpheus by their comparatively greater distance from the Latin tradition of the Consolatio and by their greater distance from the arts curriculum more generally. The Kingis Quair is a Chaucerian dream-vision with innovations characteristic of that genre.79 At the beginning of the poem the insomniac narrator takes up a book called ‘Boece . . . | Schewing the counsele of Philosophye’ (16–17; Norton-Smith, p. 1). Rather than sending the narrator to sleep, the book intensifies his insomnia: it provokes anxious thoughts about the cruel variability of Fortune, then insistent memories of his own treatment by this goddess, ‘how sche was first my fo | And eft [afterward] my frende’ (66–7; NortonSmith, p. 3). At the end of this sleepless night, the narrator resolves to set his life story down in writing: captured at sea in youth, he endured a long and love-sick confinement; suddenly liberated, he enjoyed blissful erotic union with the beautiful woman

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature whom he had previously admired from his prison window. The author, James I of Scotland (1394–1437), acknowledges Boethius’ austere solution to adversity (38–42; Norton-Smith, p. 2), but has no interest in the thesis that good fortune is bad and bad, good. On the contrary, his poem is a celebration of worldly felicity, ending in an eruption of praise for ‘Fortunys exiltree | And quhele, that thus so wele has quhirlit me’ (‘Fortune’s axle and wheel, which has given me such a good turn’) (1322–3; NortonSmith, p. 48). It is a clever and irreverent détournement of Boethian Stoicism. A different kind of re-routing occurs in A Prisoner’s Reflections, a brief poem composed by George Ashby in 1463.80 Like James I and Usk as well, Ashby develops the Boethian theme of prison writing. Ashby’s autobiographical speaker identifies himself as a long-term royal servant and former signet clerk who has suffered a sudden fall from fortune: stripped of his position and possessions, abandoned by his former friends and supporters, he has been languishing in Fleet prison for a year. The poem’s message is patience in the face of adversity. To this end, Ashby incorporates familiar motifs from Consolatio Book 2: ‘Never welthy, but som maner distresse, | Never so mery but som hevinesse’ (‘Prisoner’, 186–7; Bateson, p. 7). He introduces these Boethian borrowings with the question, ‘Who may have more hevinesse and sorwe | Then to be welthy and after nedeful?’ (‘Prisoner’, 155–6; Bateson, p. 6)—that sentiment which had previously attracted the attentions of both Chaucer and Hoccleve. However, the salient feature of Ashby’s poem is his way of blending this Boethian language into a discursive matrix emphatically penitential and homiletic. The speaker offers himself to readers as a moral exemplum and urges readers to comprehend worldly adversity within an economy of sin and penitence: ‘wite [i.e. impute] it thyn offense’ (‘Prisoner’, 125; Bateson, p. 5), he counsels. This blending of philosophical ascesis and Christian penitence must have been very common in the Consolatio’s medieval reception. It is already evident in the Old English Boethius, an observation that occasions one final look at that remarkable text. For illustration of its penitential language, we can examine a passage to which I alluded at the beginning of this chapter. It concerns the reproaches that the personified woruldsælþa (‘worldly felicities’) speak against Mind: Hwæt witst ðu la Mod us? . . . Nu þu eart scyldigra þonne we ægþer ge for þinum agnum unrihtlustum ge eac forðæm þe we ne moton for ðe fulgan ures sceppendes willan; forðæm ðe he ure ðe onlænde æfter his bebodum to brucanne, nalas þinre unrihtgitsunga gewill to fulfremmanne. (Why do you reproach us, Mind? . . . Now you are guiltier than we are, because of your own wrongful desires and also because we are not permitted on account of you to perform our maker’s will. He lent us to you to use according to his directions, not to satisfy the appetite of your wrongful desires.) (OEBo, Prose 5.13; DOML pp. 42–5)

This is the second of two passages created by the Old English author from Fortune’s ventriloquized discourse at Consolatio 2p2. It is one of several instances in which the

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae author innovated through double translation, taking a single passage first in one direction then in another. Unlike either his source passage or his first version of it, this second take is framed in expressly penitential and homiletic language. The words unrihtlust and unrihtgitsung (both meaning ‘wrongful desire’) occur only here in this text and are attested elsewhere in Old English only in homilies, Psalmtranslation, and instructions for confessors.81 Mind/Boethius reads these cues correctly. In reply to the speech of the woruldsælþa, he acknowledges himself ‘æghwonan scyldigne’ (‘in every way guilty’: OEBo, Prose 5.14; DOML pp. 44–5). Wisdom then distinguishes between despair and penitence (hreowsung) as responses to sin. None of this is in the Consolatio, where the problem is framed instead in terms of legal right (jus). However, if the Old English author introduced penitential and homiletic themes into his text, those new themes remain subordinate and intermittent. In A Prisoner’s Reflections they are dominant. His purpose for writing, Ashby’s speaker says, is to counsel patient sufferance of ‘deserved penaunce’ (‘Prisoner’, 322; Bateson, p. 11). He cites Christ, Mary, Job, and martyrs of the Church as examples of the correct attitude towards the vicissitudes of fortune’s wheel (‘Prisoner’, 218–59; Bateson, pp. 8–9). Taken together, the Boethian poems of Henryson, James I, and Ashby stake out the range of the Consolatio’s reception in English and Scots at the end of the Middle Ages. Though the Tale of Orpheus is faithful to Boethius in a way that The Kingis Quair and A Prisoner’s Reflections are not, all three fold Boethian thought into new discursive and generic configurations. In this respect they continue the modes of reception exemplified by earlier and more substantial contributions to this tradition. Of course, the penumbra of Boethius’ reception and influence extended well beyond the texts examined here: the present survey has prioritized those texts in which literary adaptation occurred in close proximity to the kindred textual forms of translation and gloss. By remaining within the bounds of the gloss–translation–adaptation triangle, I have sought to show how successive generations of medieval English writers reorganized the Consolatio and redirected its meaning. Another version of this history would follow the Consolatio’s reception outwards, to the point where reception of this text merged into the great medieval genres of visionary literature and didactic dialogue.82

Notes 1  ‘Boicius de consolatione: Maximum genus infortunii est fuisse felicem’, in Thomas Hoccleve: The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1999), p. 202. 2  Boethius, Theological Tractates; The Consolation of Philosophy, eds H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand, trans. S. J. Tester (Cambridge, Mass., 1973). Citations are to this edition; I have silently reworked Tester’s translations.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 3   Joachim Gruber, Kommentar zu Boethius, ‘De consolatione philosophiae’, 2nd edn (Berlin, 2006), pp. 24–35. 4   I present Middle English quotations in normalized south-east Midland forms of c.1400, corresponding approximately to the orthographic conventions of the Middle English Dictionary, as described in Robert E. Lewis, Middle English Dictionary: Plan and Bibliography, 2nd edn (Ann Arbor, 2007), pp. 10–12. 5   PL 101, 849–54. See Pierre Courcelle, La Consolation de philosophie dans la tradition littéraire: antécédents et postérité de Boèce (Paris, 1967), pp. 33–47. 6  Adrian Papahagi, ‘The Transmission of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae in the Carolingian Age’, Medium Ævum 78 (2009), 1–15. 7   The principal studies are Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson (Oxford, 1981); The Medieval Boethius: Studies in the Vernacular Translations of ‘De consolatione philosophiae’, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1987); Chaucer’s ‘Boece’ and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1993); Boethius in the Middle Ages: Latin and Vernacular Traditions of the ‘Consolatio philosophiae’, eds Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen and Lodi Nauta (Leiden, 1997); The Cambridge Companion to Boethius, ed. John Marenbon (Cambridge, 2009); and A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages, eds Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr and Philip Edward Phillips (Leiden, 2012). 8  Joseph S. Wittig, ‘The “Remigian” Glosses on Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae in Context’, in Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill, eds Charles Darwin Wright, Frederick M. Biggs, and Thomas N. Hall (Toronto, 2007), pp. 168–200 (at p. 183). Wittig’s assessment receives confirmation from the Oxford project on Boethius in Early Medieval Europe, which promises to make this mass of scholia accessible in extenso for the first time. See now Malcolm Godden and Rohini Jayatilaka, ‘Counting the Heads of the Hydra: The Development of the Early Medieval Commentary on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy’, in Carolingian Scholarship and Martianus Capella, eds Mariken Teeuwen and Sinéad O’Sullivan (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 363–76; and Rosalind C. Love, ‘The Latin Commentaries on Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae from the 9th to the 11th Centuries’, in A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages, eds Kaylor and Phillips, pp. 75–133. 9   The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s ‘De consolatione philosophiae’, eds Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, 2 vols (Oxford, 2009), 2, 248–9. 10   See Malcolm Godden, ‘Alfred, Asser, and Boethius’, in Latin Learning and English Lore : Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, eds Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and Andy Orchard, 2 vols (Toronto, 2005), 1, 326–48; Codices Boethiani: A Conspectus of Manuscripts of the Works of Boethius, eds Margaret T. Gibson, Marina Passalacqua, and Lesley Smith, 4 vols (1995–2009), 3, 554–6; and Fabio Troncarelli, Tradizioni perdute: la ‘Consolatio philosophiae’ nell’alto medioevo (Padua, 1981), pp. 137–96. 11   The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 1, 5. 12   Citations of the Old English Boethius are to the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library ­edition: The Old English Boethius, with Verse Prologues and Epilogues Associated with King Alfred, eds and trans. Susan Irvine and Malcolm Godden (Cambridge, Mass., 2012). Translations are

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae also from this edition. In parenthetical citations I abbreviate this work as ‘OEBo’ and the edition as ‘DOML’. This edition is of the prosimetrical recension (see discussion of recensions below); prose and verse sections are numbered sequentially over the entire work. Citations of verse are further specified by line number; prose by paragraph number, following DOML. 13   The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 1, 50. 14   The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 1, 63–8, offers a fine assessment of these issues. 15   Timothy E. Powell, ‘The “Three Orders” of Society in Anglo-Saxon England’, AngloSaxon England 23 (1994), 103–32; and The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 2, 316–18. 16   The division between Books 1 and 2 is misplaced in the Cotton manuscript and missing from Bodley, but the remaining divisions are correct. 17   Susan Irvine, ‘Ulysses and Circe in King Alfred’s Boethius: A Classical Myth Transformed’, in Studies in English Language and Literature: ‘Doubt Wisely’: Papers in Honour of E. G. Stanley, eds M. J. Toswell and E. M. Tyler (1996), pp. 387–401, discusses the Old English author’s treatment of mythological material. 18   The three metres 1m6, 2m2, and 4m7 were retained in their prose form; only the opening of 3m12 was versified. For discussion see The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 1, 146–50; and Paul E. Szarmach, ‘Thirty-One Meters’, in Un tuo serto di fiori in man recando: scritti in onore di Maria Amalia D’Aronco, eds Patrizia Lendinara and Silvana Serafin, 2 vols (Udine, 2008), 2, 409–25. 19   See Mark Griffith’s chapter, ‘The Composition of the Metres’, in The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 1, 80–134; and Daniel Donoghue, ‘Word Order and Poetic Style: Auxiliary and Verbal in The Metres of Boethius’, Anglo-Saxon England 15 (1986), 167–96. 20   My scansion differs slightly from the Sievers–Bliss system employed by Griffith and Donoghue, in that I do not distinguish between primary, secondary, and tertiary grades of stress. See Nicolay Yakovlev, ‘The Development of the Alliterative Metre from Old to Middle English’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 2008), pp. 42–92. 21   Quotations of the prose version in this paragraph are from The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 1, 244. 22   The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 1, 134. 23   Presumably representing a late, disyllabic form soðu or soðe, as suggested by Sievers. The  verse is deficient otherwise. See Eduard Sievers, ‘Zur Rhythmik des germanischen Alliterationsverses’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 10 (1885), 208–314, 451–545 (at p. 518). 24  Gruber, Kommentar, p. 61. 25   The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 1, 244; 2, 5. 26   Malcolm Godden, ‘Did King Alfred Write Anything?’, Medium Ævum 76 (2007), 1–23. 27   Malcolm Godden, ‘The Alfredian Project and its Aftermath: Rethinking the Literary History of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries’, Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009), 93–122 (at pp. 114–19).

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature   Godden, ‘The Alfredian Project’, p. 118.   For dissent, reaffirming the royal attribution, see Paul E. Szarmach, ‘Boethius’s Influence in Anglo-Saxon England: The Vernacular and the De consolatione philosophiae’, in A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages, eds Kaylor and Phillips, pp. 221–54. 30  There are two recent accounts of this material: Szarmach, ‘Boethius’s Influence’, pp. 236–43; and Malcolm Godden, ‘Ælfric and the Alfredian Precedents’, in A Companion to Ælfric, eds Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan (Leiden, 2009), pp. 139–63. 31   Godden, ‘Ælfric and the Alfredian Precedents’, pp. 154–8. 32   Sources of the ‘Boece’, ed. Tim William Machan (Athens, Ga, 2005); and Barnet Kottler, ‘The Vulgate Tradition of the Consolatio philosophiae in the Fourteenth Century’, Mediaeval Studies 17 (1955), 209–14. 33   Guillelmi de Conchis opera omnia, vol. 2, Glosae super Boetium, ed. Lodi Nauta, CCCM 158 (Turnhout, 1999). For discussion, see Édouard Jeauneau, ‘L’Usage de la notion d’integumentum à travers les gloses de Guillaume de Conches’, AHDLMA 24 (1957), 35–100; and Lodi Nauta, ‘The Glosa as Instrument of the Development of Natural Philosophy: William of Conches’ Commentary on Boethius’, in Boethius in the Middle Ages, eds Hoenen and Nauta, pp. 3–39. 34   Les Œuvres de Simund de Freine, ed. John E. Matzke (Paris, 1909). For discussion see Glynnis Cropp, ‘Boethius in Medieval France: Translations of the De consolatione philosophiae and Literary Influence’, in A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages, eds Kaylor and Phillips, pp. 319–55 (p. 321, with references). 35   For example, ll. 29–32 (Philosophie’s seven daughters, the seven liberal arts) and ll. 873–900 (the four affective reactions to fortune: hope, fear, joy, and anger). The latter appears at Consolatio 1m7.25–8, but Simund’s elaboration of it is paralleled in the commentary tradition. Compare William of Conches’s Glosae super Boetium, ed. Nauta, p. 39. 36   Cropp, ‘Boethius in Medieval France’, pp. 322–36. 37  See the provenance records in Glynnis Cropp, ‘Les Manuscrits du Livre de Boece de Consolacion’, Revue d’histoire des textes 12–13 (1982–3), 263–352; Beatrice Atherton and J. Keith Atkinson, ‘Les Manuscrits du Roman de Fortune et de Felicité’, Revue d’histoire des textes 22 (1992), 169–251; and Codices Boethiani, eds Gibson et al., 1, 211–12. Where provenance is traceable, manuscripts now in British libraries were in France during the Middle Ages. 38   The commentary remains unpublished; it is best consulted in the typescript edition that E. T. Silk was working on at the time of his death, now available online at . For orientation, see A. J. Minnis and Lodi Nauta, ‘More Platonico Loquitur: What Nicholas Trevet Really Did to William of Conches’, in Chaucer’s Boece, ed. Minnis, pp. 1–33; and Lodi Nauta, ‘The Scholastic Context of the Boethius Commentary by Nicholas Trevet’, in Boethius in the Middle Ages, eds Hoenen and Nauta, pp. 41–67. 39  Lodi Nauta, ‘The Consolation: The Latin Commentary Tradition, 800–1700’, in The Cambridge Companion to Boethius, ed. Marenbon, pp. 255–78 (at pp. 266–70) offers an overview and bibliography. 28 29

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae 40   Brian Donaghey, ‘Nicholas Trevet’s Use of King Alfred’s Translation of Boethius, and the Dating of his Commentary’, in The Medieval Boethius, ed. Minnis, pp. 1–31; The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 1, 212–13. 41  Citations of Chaucer’s works are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987). 42   I borrow this term from Stephen Medcalf, ‘Classical Authors’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 1, To 1550, ed. Roger Ellis (Oxford, 2008), pp. 364–89 (at p. 381). 43   On this passage see also Chapter 4 in this volume by Copeland, pp. 69–70. 44   On these poems, see V. J. Scattergood, ‘The Short Poems’, in A. J. Minnis, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford, 1995), pp. 455–512. 45   Edited by Ralph Hanna and Traugott Lawler in The Riverside Chaucer. See also Chaucer’s ‘Boece’: A Critical Edition Based on Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.3.21,ff. 9r–180v, ed. Tim William Machan (Heidelberg, 2008). 46   An example is the translation of Consolatio 2p4.38–101; see the commentary at The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 2, 292–6. Below I compare Chaucer’s, Usk’s, and Walton’s handling of a few sentences from this section. 47  Machan, Sources of the ‘Boece’, collects the results of his and Alastair Minnis’s monumental studies of these materials. 48   A. J. Minnis, ‘Chaucer’s Commentator: Nicholas Trevet and the Boece’, in Chaucer’s ‘Boece’, ed. Minnis, pp. 83–166 (at pp. 91–3); and A. J. Minnis and Tim William Machan, ‘The Boece as Late-Medieval Translation’, in Chaucer’s ‘Boece’, ed. Minnis, pp. 167–88 (at pp. 175–7). 49   Hanna and Lawler, in the Riverside Chaucer, p. 397. 50   Tim William Machan, Techniques of Translation: Chaucer’s ‘Boece’ (Norman, Okla., 1985). 51  Machan, Techniques of Translation, ch. 5. Stephen Medcalf ’s dissent misrepresents the evidence and argument: Medcalf, ‘Classical Authors’, pp. 376–7. 52  See Minnis and Machan, ‘Boece as Late-Medieval Translation’; and Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 87–150. 53   Ralph Hanna, ‘Vae octuplex, Lollard Socio-Textual Ideology, and Ricardian-Lancastrian Prose Translation’, in Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 244–63; and A. B. Kraebel, ‘Middle English Gospel Glosses and the Translation of Exegetical Authority’, Traditio 69 (2014), 87–123 address central issues in the genre of academic translation. 54   Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto, 1980), pp. 145–7, emphasizes the Boece’s generic suitability for aristocratic patronage. On Chaucer’s negotiations of court and city factionalism, see Paul Strohm, ‘Politics and Poetics: Usk and Chaucer in the 1380s’, in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 83–112.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 55   Thomas Usk: Testament of Love, ed. Gary W. Shawver (Toronto, 2002). Shawver’s account of the sources is not adequate. On Usk’s use of Boece compare David R. Carlson, ‘Chaucer’s Boethius and Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love: Politics and Love in the Chaucerian Tradition’, in The Centre and its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle, eds Robert A. Taylor et al. (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1993), pp. 29–70 (at pp. 41–6). 56   Anne Middleton, ‘Thomas Usk’s “Perdurable Letters”: The Testament of Love from Script to Print’, Studies in Bibliography 51 (1998), 63–116, presents a thorough bibliographic analysis and interpretation. 57   As elsewhere, I quote from the Loeb edition. The late medieval vulgate text that Chaucer would have used has no substantive variants in this passage. See Machan, Sources of the ‘Boece’, p. 64. 58   Strohm, ‘Politics and Poetics’, p. 104. 59   For example: wisdom brings power (OEBo, Prose 8.4; DOML pp. 84–5) and good deeds prolong life (OEBo, Prose 32.2; DOML 382–5). 60   See Stephen Medcalf, ‘Transposition: Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love’, in The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. Roger Ellis (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 181–95. 61   The only modern edition, badly out of date, is Boethius: De consolatione philosophiae, Translated by John Walton, Canon of Oseney, ed. Mark Science, EETS 170 (Oxford, 1927). 62  Nicholas Myklebust, ‘Misreading English Meter: 1400–1514’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2012), pp. 504–6, 532–43, offers a nuanced description. 63   The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 1, 80–105. Ian Johnson comments briefly but aptly on Walton’s syntax: Ian Johnson, ‘Walton’s Sapient Orpheus’, in The Medieval Boethius, ed. Minnis, pp. 139–68 (at pp. 148–9). 64  Science, Boethius, pp. lviii–lix, lists passages in which Walton is closer than Chaucer to Boethius’ Latin. For Walton’s use of Trevet, see A. J. Minnis, ‘Aspects of the Medieval French and English Traditions of the De consolatione philosophiae’, in Boethius, ed. Gibson, pp. 312–61 (at pp. 343–7, 350–1); and Johnson, ‘Walton’s Sapient Orpheus’, pp. 144–53, 165–8. ( Johnson’s strongest evidence is Walton’s treatment of 3m12.22–3 and 3m12.57, discussed on pp. 151 and 147, respectively.) 65  Digital images of the full manuscript are available on line: . For discussion see Brian Donaghey, Irma Taavitsainen, and Erik Miller, ‘Walton’s Boethius: From Manuscript to Print’, English Studies 80 (1999), 398–407 (at pp. 403–5); and ‘Absent Glosses: The Trouble with Middle English Hermeneutics’, in A. J. Minnis, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 17–37 (at p. 24). 66   On Walton’s patronage, see Ian Johnson, ‘New Evidence for the Authorship of Walton’s Boethius’, Notes and Queries ns 43 (1996), 19–21; and Ralph Hanna, ‘Sir Thomas Berkeley and his Patronage’, Speculum 64 (1989), 878–916 (at pp. 899–902). On the Tavistock print, see Donaghey et al., ‘Walton’s Boethius’; and Lucy Lewis, ‘The Tavistock Boethius: One of the Earliest Examples of Provincial Printing’, in Printing Places: Locations of Book Production and

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Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae Distribution since 1500, eds John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong (New Castle, Del., 2005), pp. 1–14. 67   I quote from the Tavistock print, sig. O7r; the Copenhagen manuscript ends in 4p6. 68   This is a composite volume, consisting of seven booklets. The Boece text, which occupies the last booklet, is the only item not in Latin. See the transcription: Noel Harold Kaylor Jr, Jason Edward Streed, and William H. Watts, ‘The Boke of Coumfort of Bois’, Carmina Philosophiae: Journal of the International Boethius Society 2 (1993), 55–104; repr. in New Directions in Boethian Studies, eds Noel Harold Kaylor Jr and Philip Edward Phillips (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2007), pp. 223–79. 69   For this genre, see A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 9–39. 70   I owe this point to Dr Brian Donaghey, who is preparing an edition of the text (e-mail; 1 August 2013). Dr Donaghey also informs me that Auct.’s text of Boece forms a  variational group with London, British Library, Additional MS 10340 and Salisbury, Cathedral Library, MS 113. I register my gratitude here for his generous communication of these findings. 71   For manuscripts of Boece, see M. C. Seymour, A Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts. Vol. 1: Works Before the ‘Canterbury Tales’ (Aldershot, 1995), 43–53. The manuscripts of Walton’s translation are listed in Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse (2005), under nos 1597 and 2820. The Schøyen MS is now New Haven, Beinecke Library, MS Osborn fa43. 72   Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 12–13. 73   My count adds the Beinecke manuscript to Wakelin’s list. 74   See Brian Donaghey, ‘Caxton’s Printing of Chaucer’s Boece’, in Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, ed. Geoffrey Lester (Sheffield, 1999), pp. 73–99, arguing that variation in the amount of Latin printed was a function of uncertainties in casting off. 75   The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 1, 14. 76   The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford, 1981). I present Henryson’s Scots language as it is printed in this edition, without normalization. 77   See Marjorie Curry Woods, ‘Rape and the Pedagogical Rhetoric of Sexual Violence’, in Criticism and Dissent, ed. Copeland, pp. 56–86. 78   For a list, see Robert R. Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, vol. 7, ed. Albert E. Hartung (New Haven, 1986), 2374–5, 2580–1. 79   James I of Scotland: The Kingis Quair, ed. John Norton-Smith (Oxford, 1971). The poem is recorded in a complexly mixed language, which I do not normalize. 80   George Ashby’s Poems, ed. Mary Bateson, EETS es 76 (1899). For comment see John Scattergood, ‘George Ashby’s Prisoner’s Reflections and the Virtue of Patience’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 37 (1993), 102–9.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 81   See the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, compiled by Antonette diPaolo Healey with John Price Wilkin and Xin Xiang (Toronto, 2009). The distribution of the phrase unrihta lust is somewhat wider. 82   I thank Rita Copeland and the series editors for suggestions that improved this essay and Glynnis Cropp, Brian Donaghey, Ian McDougal, and Eric Weiskott for advice on various points. Opinions expressed are mine, as are any errors.

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Chapter 15

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature Charles F. Briggs

Lamenting the demise of Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve in his Regiment of Princes likens ‘my worthi maister’ to two of antiquity’s most important moral philosophers, Cicero and Aristotle: ‘Deth, by thi deth, hath harme irreparable | Vnto vs doon; hir vengeable duresse | Depoilèd hath this land of thi swetnesse | Of rethorik; for vn-to Tullius| Was neuer man so lyk a-mongës vs. | Also, who was hiër [higher] in philosophie | To Aristotle, in our tonge, but thow?’1 Such comparisons did not originate with Hoccleve, however, since already in 1385, Eustache Deschamps addressed his fellow poet as ‘Socratès plains de philosophie, | Seneque en meurs’ (‘Socrates, full of philosophy, Seneca for morality’).2 John Gower also had the reputation of a moral philosopher, being hailed by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde with the words ‘O moral Gower, this book I directe | to the’ (5.1856–7), a characterization repeated by Lydgate in the Fall of Princes.3 Such comparisons were not without basis, as both writers repeatedly invoke moral philosophical precepts and principles. Aspects of classical, and classicizing, moral philosophy also permeate Hoccleve’s Regiment, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, and, albeit to a lesser extent, Langland’s Piers Plowman. In 1979 and 1980 respectively, J. D. Burnley and Alastair Minnis initiated an approach that highlighted the moral philosophical content of these authors’ works and their ethical and political import. Burnley, in Chaucer’s Language and the Philosophers’ Tradition, elucidated the impact of classical moral philosophical language and concepts in Chaucer’s works, while Minnis in his article ‘John Gower, Sapiens in Ethics and Politics’, showed Gower’s use of the Aristotelian categories of moral philosophy in the Confessio amantis.4 But Minnis also revealed that Gower received his ‘Aristotle’ either through the intermediary of Brunetto Latini’s Livres dou tresor or via the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum, a work of Arabic origin that claimed (and was at the time believed) to be by Aristotle.5 He also made a plausible

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature case for Gower’s reliance on the ‘classicizing’ Dominican friar Robert Holcot’s commentary on the Book of Wisdom, a text which promoted the fashion of reading Solomon (since medieval readers ascribed biblical wisdom literature to him) as a sage of ethical and political wisdom, on a par with pagan Greek and Roman moral philosophers.6 Several points should be reiterated here. First, Gower and Chaucer were quite well versed in classical moral philosophy. Second, they rarely, if ever, consulted the original classical sources (called at the time originalia) for their material but rather relied upon intermediaries. Third, these intermediary sources might be written in Latin but very often they were accessed in vernacular translations. Fourth, medieval writers and readers mistakenly attributed to classical authors certain works of moral philosophy which were in fact of Arabic origin. And fifth, medieval English poets, and their sources, tended to blend not only different ancient moral philosophical traditions but also pagan and Christian traditions. This chapter will explore these five aspects of later medieval English literary writers’ reception of classical moral philosophy. In so doing it will take account of more recent studies, which have tended to reinforce and enrich Burnley’s and Minnis’s findings and arguments. However, its first order of business is to survey the many and varied sources utilized and appropriated by these authors. Next it will consider the different institutions, milieus, and occasions through which these sources were transmitted. Then it will return to some examples of literary use and appropriation—and not only in the standard ‘canonical’ works—and compare English and continental developments. According to the twelfth-century author of the Moralium dogma philosophorum (‘Teaching of the Moral Philosophers’), moral philosophy is concerned, first and foremost, with living according to virtue.7 It seeks to discover what virtue is and to weigh and compare the different kinds of virtue; it also concerns itself with defining and comparing useful goods, and in knowing how to choose the virtuous over the useful, when these come into conflict.8 Thus moral philosophy cultivates virtue and discourages vice in both public and private life.9 And what is virtue? It is, quoting Cicero in De inventione, ‘A habit of mind in harmony with reason and the order of nature’; and virtue itself can be divided into the four principal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.10 The chief teachers of this philosophy are Cicero and Seneca, but they receive copious support from the sententious and elegant examples provided by the Roman poets and historians. The Moralium dogma philosophorum exemplifies what might be called the Roman/ Stoic tradition of moral philosophy inherited by medieval Latin Christendom. The key classical source texts of this tradition’s philosophical doctrine were Cicero’s De officiis, De inventione, and Disputationes Tusculanae, several of Seneca’s writings, chief among them being the Epistulae morales, De clementia, De beneficiis, De ira, De constantia, and De remediis fortuitorum (attributed to Seneca), and Macrobius’ Commentum in somnium Scipionis. These Roman authors’ stress on the need for personal virtue as well as

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Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature public responsibility accorded well with such early Christian writers as Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great; Ambrose, indeed, coined the term ‘cardinal virtues’ for the Stoic civic virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.11 The profound impact of the cardinal virtues on Latin Christendom resulted in large part from the popularity of a work almost universally attributed to Seneca but in fact written by a sixth-century Spanish bishop, Martin of Braga. Originally entitled Formula vitae honestae but normally circulating under the name De quatuor virtutibus cardinalibus, this brief treatise survives today in hundreds of copies and was subject to multiple adaptations and translations.12 Medieval readers included three further works in this Roman tradition of moral philosophy. Most familiar to them was the Disticha Catonis, a collection of brief maxims in verse which, though ascribed to Cato the Censor (234–149 bc), was in fact a product of the late Roman Empire. During the Middle Ages it became a standard text of elementary Latin grammar instruction, so that anyone with a grammar school education in Latin had had to commit its verses to memory. Teachers also invested the Disticha Catonis with moral meaning, using its proverbs as an introduction to the cardinal virtues.13 Also well known were the deeds and sayings of virtuous Romans found in the De factis et dictis memorabilibus of the first-century moralist Valerius Maximus. The De factis is a reader-friendly compilation of examples drawn mostly from Livy and Cicero. Derivative and judged ‘shallow, sententious, and bombastic’ by one modern scholar, its enlistment of history in the interests of moral didacticism appealed mightily to medieval readers.14 Roman virtue was also on display in the late fourth-century military manual of Flavius (or Publius) Vegetius Renatus, Epitoma rei militaris. Whereas to our eyes the connection between moral philosophy and this book’s subject is hardly obvious, it was to its medieval audience. Certainly Epitoma rei militaris contains a good bit of technical information regarding military equipment, recruitment, training, tactics, and strategy; but Vegetius’ larger message is that the army is an essential arm of the state, which, prudently led, properly disciplined, and vigorously trained, protects the common good. According to Vegetius, successful military commanders are prudent, in the sense of mastering the knowledge of their profession, and exercising proper judgement and foresight. Soldiers, for their part, can be habituated to courage through the rigours of training and the experience of campaigning. Both commanders and soldiers, moreover, must take and uphold a sacred oath to serve and protect the state and its citizens. Armed with knowledge, prudence, experience, and courage, and dedicated to its protective function, the army serves the dictates of justice (since it only engages in just wars). It also is a stabilizing force, since it tends to keep in check the perverse workings of fortune.15 Regarded in this light, then, Epitoma rei militaris has a decidedly moral philosophical message, and its author merits the title ‘philosophe de Rome’ given him in the Anglo-Norman translation of the work made for Edward I.16

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature As often as not, scholarly readers approached Roman moral philosophy indirectly through compilations rather than originalia. One of the most influential of these was the Moralium dogma philosophorum, which may have been dedicated to King Henry II, and which circulated in England in the Latin original and in an Old French version.17 John of Salisbury’s Policraticus was another much-frequented source of classical moral doctrine. John also directed moral philosophy toward political ends, arguing that regimes fail owing to vice, whereas those which embody the four cardinal virtues endure.18 Far less widely disseminated but very likely of English origin is the so-called Florilegium morale Oxoniense, a late twelfth-century compilation now uniquely preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 633.19 It is made up of  two parts. The first is a flores philosophorum, which counsels the cultivation of wisdom and a virtuous habitus, built on the four cardinal virtues. For sources it principally relies on the De Platone et eius dogmate of Apuleius, but also includes material from the Rhetorica ad Herennium, De inventione, Formula vitae honestae, and Macrobius’ Commentum in Somnium Scipionis.20 The second part, a flores auctorum, reinforces the message in the first with copious extracts from the Roman poets (chiefly Horace, Juvenal, and Ovid), and from the Disticha Catonis, Publilius Syrus, Seneca, Martin of Braga, and Valerius Maximus.21 The thirst for moral philosophical compilations only grew in the thirteenth century. This was due in part to the cardinal virtues being harnessed to the three ‘theological’ virtues of faith, hope, and charity. This schema, first proposed by Alan of Lille in around 1170, was taken up by Simon of Tournai (late 1100s) and William of Auxerre (c.1220), who both proposed that the cardinal virtues, although admittedly worldly, provided a path to salvation when perfected by the theological virtues.22 They even had a biblical pedigree, since Solomon in the Book of Wisdom (8.7) counselled, ‘And if anyone loves righteousness, his labours have great virtues; for it [Wisdom] teaches temperance, prudence, justice, and strength, than which nothing is more useful to men in this life.’ Easily memorizable and assimilated to other groups of seven (beatitudes, gifts of the Holy Spirit), the seven virtues became proof against the seven deadly sins. Instruction in the cardinal virtues thus became one of the requirements of the pastoral reforms prescribed by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and promoted with the help of the new mendicant orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans. During the 1260s, the Franciscan lector at Oxford, John of Wales, compiled his Breviloquium de virtutibus antiquorum principum et philosophorum and Communiloquium. Both works are collections of exempla with which to adorn sermons. The Breviloquium, which is organized according to the cardinal virtues, and the longer Communiloquium take most of their examples from Valerius Maximus, Augustine, Seneca, Cicero, Vegetius, John of Salisbury, and Aristotle’s Ethics. Each work clearly was enormously successful, as the Breviloquium is extant in 151 copies and the Communiloquium in 144. Their impact on English vernacular writing is visible in

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Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature Gower’s Confessio amantis, which used the Breviloquium, and in Chaucer’s reliance on  the Communiloquium for material in the ‘Wife of Bath’s’, ‘Summoner’s’, and ‘Pardoner’s’ tales.23 In 1422, James Yonge made an English translation of the Breviloquium and Secretum secretorum for the Earl of Ormond. His exemplars, however, were not the original Latin texts but rather the late thirteenth-century French translation of these works by the Dominican Geoffrey of Waterford.24 The Breviloquium also had an impact on English readers through the intermediary of the Italian Dominican Jacobus de Cessolis’ early fourteenth-century De ludo scaccorum (‘Game of Chess’), a work which has recently been shown to have used the Breviloquium as its chief source; Hoccleve, in turn, used the De ludo scaccorum as one of his main sources for the Regiment of Princes.25 Sometime in the first three decades of the fourteenth century, Roger of Waltham, a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral and chancellor to Bishop Anthony Bek of Durham, wrote his Compendium morale. Described by Waltham as a work ‘de virtuosis dictis et factis exemplaribus antiquorum’ and arranged in thirteen sections related to governance and the civic virtues, the Compendium morale evinces a particularly heavy reliance on Seneca. Waltham’s admiration for the ancient moral philosophers is also revealed in Glasgow, Hunterian Library, MS Hunter 231 (U.3.4). This miscellany, which includes a number of Seneca’s writings as well as the Formula vitae honestae, opens with a full-page miniature depicting Seneca flanked by Plato and Aristotle, and bearing the inscription (partially erased): ‘Philosophia est assimilatio operibus creatoris secundum virtutem humanitatis’ (‘Philosophy is an assimilation to the works of the Creator according to human virtue’).26 Roger of Waltham’s contemporary, the Oxford Dominican Robert Holcot, wrote commentaries on two of the sapiential books of the Bible, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus (the latter unfinished). His Wisdom commentary, which gained a substantial following and was used by Chaucer, brings to bear several classical works. In preparing it he hunted down several of the harder to find Epistulae morales of Seneca, as well as numerous passages from Aristotle’s Ethics, Politics, and Poetics.27 He also derived a good bit of material at second hand, relying on the Policraticus, Breviloquium, and Communiloquium, as well as Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum maius and the Liber philosophorum moralium antiquorum, a book of Arabic origin that purported to be a collection of moral sayings of philosophers. This last work had circulated in England in its Latin translation during the fourteenth century, and then found a broader audience in the fifteenth century, thanks to the  French translation by Guillaume de Tignonville (1402).28 During the third quarter of the fifteenth century the work enjoyed a particular vogue, being translated by Stephen Scrope (and revised by his colleague in the service of Sir John Fastolf, William Worcester), an anonymous translator, George Ashby, and Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers. Woodville’s translation was subsequently printed by Caxton.29

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature In around 1250 the Paris arts master Arnulf of Provence, evincing the influence of the recent translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and its Greek commentators, defined moral philosophy as Moralis autem, cum sit de rebus que sunt a uoluntate consiliata ratione et de rebus que consistunt in ordine bene uiuendi, diuiditur secundum modos bene uiuendi et conuersandi. Est autem triplex modus bene uiuendi et conuersandi. Vnus cum subditis, militibus et ciuibus, qui consistit in regimine populi, regionis uel ciuitatis, et de illo est una pars moralis que dicitur politica, dicta a polis, quod est ‘pluralitas’, et ycos, ‘scientia’ . . . Alius est modus conuersandi cum propria familia, de quo est alia pars moralis que dicitur yconomica, dicta, ut exponunt quidam, ab yconomos, quod est ‘dispensare’, et ycos, ‘scientia’ . . . Tertius est modus uiuendi et conuersandi secum propriam animam gubernando, de quo est pars moralis que dicitur monostica, dicta a monos, quod est ‘unum’, et ycos, ‘scientia’ . . . ([treating] of matters that [arise] from a will governed by reason and things that consist in the order of living well, which is divided according to the modes of living and dwelling well with others. And there are three of these modes: one with subjects, soldiers, and citizens, which consists in the rule of a people, region, or city, and on account of that it is the part of moral [philosophy] called ‘politics’, namely from polis, i.e. ‘plurality’, and ycos, i.e. ‘knowledge’ . . . Another is the mode of dwelling with one’s own household, whence this other part of moral [philosophy] is called ‘economics’, named, as some explain, from yconomos, i.e. ‘to dispense’, and ycos, i.e. ‘knowledge . . . The third is the mode of living and dwelling with oneself by governing one’s own spirit, whence this is the part of moral [philosophy] that is called ‘singular’, namely from monos, i.e. ‘one’, and ycos, i.e. ‘knowledge’ . . .)30

This tripartite division of moral philosophy became enshrined in the arts curriculum of the universities thanks in large part to the incorporation of the Latin translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (translated in England by Robert Grosseteste, 1247) and Politics (c.1260), and the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics (1295).31 Of these three works, the Ethics received the most attention by far in the English universities, as it was required reading for all arts bachelors proceeding to the MA.32 And if the English universities expended less energy on the study of the Ethics and moral philosophy more generally than did Paris and some of the central European universities, there is nonetheless plenty of evidence of sustained interest and study at Oxford and Cambridge. Several English scholars lectured or disputed questions on the Ethics, the most notable of these being Walter Burley, whose commentary on the Politics was even more frequently copied than his Ethics commentary.33 The Oxford statutes also required advanced arts students to hear six weeks of lectures on the Politics (compared with four months for the Ethics); and although not stipulated in any of the English universities’ statutes, surviving manuscripts and the evidence of lost or unidentified manuscripts in medieval library catalogues strongly suggest that arts and theology students and masters were also familiar with the Economics and

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Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature that they tended to study another of Aristotle’s works, the Rhetoric, as a text of moral philosophy.34 These sources also show the character of these clerics’ moral philosophical learning. To start, they often got their Aristotle at second or third hand, via commentaries and quaestiones to be sure, but also by means of such derivative study aids as compilations, abbreviations, and indexes. Moreover they were likely to turn to mirrors of princes, especially Giles of Rome’s heavily Aristotelian De regimine principum, or, less frequently, the Secretum secretorum.35 Thirdly, they frequently blended material from the Aristotelian and Roman traditions. Here a few examples will suffice to illustrate these characteristics. Cambridge, St John’s College, MS 120, a manuscript from the second half of the thirteenth century, contains an abbreviation of the Ethics preceded by a brief Tractatulus de virtutibus cardinalibus—which takes material from Cicero’s De inventione and the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium—and followed by extracts from John of Salisbury’s Policraticus.36 In a roughly contemporary manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 55, extracts from the Rhetoric and Ethics accompany a copy of Martin of Braga’s Formula vitae honestae and some extracts from Seneca’s Epistulae morales.37 The compiler of an Extraccio compendiosa dictorum in Politica Aristotelis in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 292, from the second half of the fourteenth century, appended extracts from Cicero’s De officiis, Seneca, and Vegetius to his chapter summaries of the Politics, while another Politics compendium in Oxford, Balliol College, MS 146a (early fifteenth century), is bound with Vegetius, the Secretum secretorum, and the De regimine principum.38 Lost manuscripts tell a similar story. In 1372, the Augustinian friars of York recorded a Tabula super philosophiam moralem Aristotelis (‘Index of Aristotle’s Moral Philosophy’) and a Tabula super 5 libros Boecii de consolacione philosophie et super 8 libros poleticorum. In or shortly before 1435, one of the friars, John Bukwode, left a book of moral philosophy containing the following works of his confrere John Kervyle, who had been the Augustinian’s regent master at Oxford in 1388: Super libros politicorum Aristotelis cum duabus tabulis Egidii de regimine principum and Abbreviatio . . . super libros politicorum sancti Thome.39 Among the books bequeathed in 1439 to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge by one of its fellows, Thomas Markaunt, was a massive ‘Liber moralis philosophie’ packed with all of Aristotle’s moral philosophical texts (including the Rhetoric) and their standard commentaries as well as the pseudo-Aristotelian De vita Aristotelis, De pomo, and Secretum secretorum, and Roger Bacon’s Tractatus ad declarandum quaedam obscure dicta in libro Secreti secretorum.40 Moral philosophy was not the exclusive preserve of learned friars and university educated clerks, however. A strong case can be made for a sophisticated lay vernacular culture of philosophical learning in Europe, including the British Isles, by the fourteenth century. Clerics often served as the conduits through which this learning was disseminated. Knowledge of the cardinal virtues and of many principles of Stoic

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature and Aristotelian ethics arrived via the pulpit and confessional. Already in the early thirteenth century, Thomas Chobham, dean of Salisbury, in his Summa confessorum, and Richard of Wetheringsett, in his popular Summa qui bene presunt, enjoined priests to know the cardinal virtues and preach them to their flock.41 When Robert Grosseteste translated the Ethics in the 1240s, there is good reason to believe he did so with pastoral ends in mind, as he found Aristotle’s application of the principle of the mean to virtues and vices especially apposite to the kinds of judgements which confessors had to make.42 That English confessors did indeed turn to Aristotle, as well as to Cicero and Seneca, is made apparent in a work produced in England shortly after Grosseteste completed his Ethics translation, the Summa virtutum de remediis anime, a manual for confessors which makes repeated use of the Ethics, and of Cicero’s De inventione and De officiis (mostly by way of the Moralium dogma philosophorum), and several statements ascribed to Seneca (either genuine or by way of the Sententiae of Publilius Syrus).43 The influence of the Summa virtutum on English literature is quite direct, as Chaucer used it when writing the ‘Parson’s Tale’. Aristotelian and Roman moral philosophy, including material on the cardinal virtues, also abounds in the Fasciculus morum, a fourteenth-century collection of sermon exempla by an unnamed English Franciscan.44 Many examples are available of actual English sermons that contained moral philosophical material. Siegfried Wenzel in his study of Latin sermon collections from later medieval England has found numerous sermons containing citations of Aristotle’s works of moral philosophy, as well as of Cicero, Seneca, Valerius Maximus, and Vegetius.45 A few other, specific examples are, first, a sermon of John Wyclif for the nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, on Ephesians 4: 23: ‘And be renewed in the spirit of your minds.’46 Here Wyclif prescribes the cardinal virtues as necessary for those wishing to put off their old, sinful nature and put on the new, ‘created after the likeness of God’. Following Aristotle in Ethics 5.1, Wyclif asserts that all four cardinal virtues can be reduced to justice, since ‘iusticia est omnis virtus, quia reddens unicui­ que sibi debitum, quantum est in potestate hominis . . .’ (‘justice is all the virtues, since it renders unto each one what is due him, in so far as humans are capable of this’).47 In 1417 at the Council of Constance, Richard Fleming, the Oxford theologian, and later bishop of Lincoln, delivered two sermons with significant moral philosophical content. In one, on the text from Hebrews 9: 15, ‘So that those who are called may receive . . .’, he uses the Ethics, three letters of Seneca, and Cicero’s De officiis; in the other, a eulogy of Cardinal Francesco Zabarella, he demonstrated how the recently deceased champion of church reform had exemplified each of the cardinal virtues.48 In a sermon preached on the anniversary of the death of Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (d. 1401), John Paunteley, an Oxford theologian and monk of St Peter’s, Gloucester, gave a macaronic sermon on the earl’s virtues that quotes from Valerius Maximus and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian

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Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature Ethics.49 The following quotation gives a sense of how Paunteley and other later medieval preachers deployed classical authorities: Et quomodo creditis schal he be crowned? Righth as the worthy knyghthus of Rome som tyme were ycrowned. Lego in Valerio De Dictis et Factis Memorabilibus, Libro 2, quia olim imperator Romanus hadde growynge afore ys palis quercum et laurum ad istum finem, quod illi qui bene pugnauerant in campo martiale et cum manu valida rescowed ennye of here feloues and delyuered hem from here enemys, imperator mitteret pro eis et in signum of her myghth and of here strenth coronaret ipsos with the branch of the ok quae in fortitudine excedit omnes alios arbores. Et illi qui triumphabant de inimicis suis et taken hem prisonerus, illos coronaret cum frondibus lauri in signum quod, sicut laurus est semper viridis, sic gloriosum nomen sue victorie numquam moreretur set semper esse viridis et recens in mentibus humanis. Eodem modo omnes illi qui cum illorum cotearmur, tunica pellicia, videlicet memoria mortis, superauerunt inimicos suos spirituales in campo huius mundi, Deus coronabit illos cum duobus coronis: primo, cum branchis lauri, quod nichil aliud est quam gloriosa visio Deitatis. Et ista corona pertinet principalilter ad animam. Et postea in die iudicii quando corpus et anima sunt simul coniuncta, coronabit ipsum cum frondibus querci, hoc est beatifica visione humanitatis sue. Sicut dicit Sacra Scriptura, ‘Erit tibi Dominus corona glorie et sertum exultacionis’, Ysaye xxviii. Magna remuneracio! (And how do you think he shall be crowned? Just as the worthy knights of Rome used to be crowned. I read in Valerius, On the Memorable Sayings and Deeds, Book 2 [2. 8. 7], that once upon a time the Roman Emperor had growing before his palace an oak and a laurel, and for this reason, that those who had fought well on the battlefield and with their mighty hand had rescued any of their fellows and delivered them from their enemies, the emperor would send for them and as a sign of their might and their strength he would crown them with the branch of the oak, which surpassed all other trees in fortitude. And those who had triumphed over their enemies and taken them prisoner, these he would crown with laurel branches as a sign that, just as the laurel is forever green, so too the glorious name of their victory would never die but instead remain forever green and fresh in the minds of men. In  the same way, those who with their coat of armour, the ‘garments of skins’ [Gen.  3: 21], by which is meant the mindfulness of death, have overcome their spiritual enemies on the field of this world, these God will crown with two crowns: firstly, with laurel branches, which are nothing other than the glorious vision of his Godhead. And this same crown belongs mainly to the soul. And later, on the Day of Judgement, when the body and soul are reunited, he will crown them with oak branches, that is, with the Beatific Vision of his Humanity. Thus says Holy Scripture, ‘The Lord will be for you a crown of glory and a wreath of exultation’, Isaiah 28.5. What a great reward!)50

In a later sermon, delivered on the occasion of Henry V’s departure to France in 1421, Paunteley repeatedly praises the king’s cardinal virtues and also warns his

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature audience that they too must eschew sin and repair the ship of state per incrementum virtutis.51 By the fifteenth century reference to the cardinal virtues had become a kind of shorthand for the political principles of the common good and public utility. This can be seen in various political contexts. In the parliament of 1442, John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells, preached a sermon on the moral virtues which were the  steps to the ‘bonum regimen per quod bonum publicum cujuslibet regni crescere . . . valeat’ (‘the good rule by means of which the public good of whatever kingdom is able to flourish’).52 Again, at the start of Richard III’s troubled reign, parliament accorded him the legitimacy of rule based, in part, on his ‘grate Wytte [wisdom], Prudence, Justice, Princely Courage . . .’53 Bishop John Russell of Lincoln wrote a speech for the same parliament which relied heavily on Cicero’s De officiis to make the case that the welfare of the republic rests on the moral and political virtue of the citizenry.54 Similar ideals were expressed in three public performances in London early in the reign of Henry VI. The first was John Lydgate’s ‘Disguising at London’, which seems to have been performed for the opening of parliament in 1427. It portrayed the cardinal virtues as proof against the viscissitudes of fortune: Four ladyes shall come heer anoon [soon] Which shal hir power overgoone [her i.e. Fortune’s  overcome], And this blynde, fals goddesse, [blind  false] Yif sheo beo hardy in this place [If she be bold] Oonys for to shew hir double face.55 [once   to show]

Again, in Lydgate’s ‘Mumming for the Goldsmiths’, performed in honour of London’s mayor, William Eastfield, in 1429, Eastfield is likened to the biblical King David, who descends to bring ‘gyfftes that beon bothe hevenly and moral | Apperteyning vn-to good gouuernaunce’. Lydgate and his audience most likely meant by these gifts, the theological and cardinal virtues.56 In 1432, to celebrate the boy king Henry VI’s return from his coronation in France, the city of London staged an elaborate entry, designed by the city’s common clerk, John Carpenter. Included in the celebration was one pageant in which personifications of the Virtues offered to the king the gifts of Wisdom and Fortitude. A few years earlier this same John Carpenter was responsible for the decision to place statues of the four cardinal virtues on the façade of London’s Guildhall. One is tempted to think that Carpenter acquired his appreciation of the political value of the cardinal virtues by way of his personal copies of the Formula vitae honestae and a De corpore pollecie which was most likely Christine de Pizan’s Livre du corps de policie.57 Other public performances of the cardinal virtues include their depiction at the wedding pageants of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon in 1501 and of King James IV of Scotland and Margaret Tudor in 1503.58

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Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature By the fifteenth century, then, the clerical appropriation of classical moral philosophy for pastoral ends had helped encourage a more secular lay culture in which moral philosophy had taken on a greater practical and political tone. Whereas some studies have noted the particularly Roman character of this lay culture and others its Aristotelianism, all agree that lay readers and learned clerics alike shared a taste for mediatory texts rather than the classical originalia.59 Recent scholarship has also argued that the public for these texts was quite broad, and broadening, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and that it preferred to access moral philosophical lore through the medium of vernacular translations and adaptations, whether in English or French.60 Here it might be instructive to consider the works of moral philosophy that seem to have had the greatest influence on Langland, Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate. Langland can hardly be characterized as a classicizing poet, and yet even he discusses the cardinal virtues and makes frequent reference to the Disticha Catonis and to biblical wisdom literature and Seneca.61 As for Gower, each of the four parts (specula) of his Mirour de l’homme seem to present the perspective of one of the cardinal virtues, while several of the exempla can be traced back to John of Wales’s Breviloquium.62 However, it is in the seventh book of Confessio amantis that ‘Moral Gower’ most displays his knowledge of moral philosophy. In addition to the sources identified by Minnis in 1980 (namely the Secretum secretorum, Brunetto Latini’s Tresor, and Holcot’s Wisdom commentary), he also relied heavily on the De regimine principum of Giles of Rome and the Breviloquium.63 Chaucer drank deeply of classical moral philosophy, though like his contemporaries his knowledge was almost invariably filtered through intermediaries. He certainly drew directly from the Disticha Catonis (‘Manciple’s Tale’ and ‘Franklin’s Tale’), and shows a  particular fondness for Seneca, meaning more often than not the Formula vitae honestae (perhaps in the translation of Jean de Courtecuisse) and John of Wales’s Communiloquium, from whence he might also have got his material from Cicero and Valerius Maximus.64 Other intermediaries include the Summa virtutum and, for much of Chaucer’s knowledge of Aristotle’s Ethics and Rhetoric, very likely Giles of Rome. Further complicating matters with Chaucer, however, are his borrowings and reworkings of Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Albertano da Brescia. Thus two of the richest examples of classical moral philosophical learning in the Canterbury Tales, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ and ‘Tale of Melibee’, are adaptations respectively of Boccaccio’s Teseida and Albertano’s Liber consolationis et consilii (1246), the latter via Reynaud de Louen’s French translation (c.1336).65 Hoccleve named Giles of Rome as one of his major sources for the Regiment of Princes, along with the Secretum secretorum and Jacobus de Cessolis’ De ludo scaccorum. He also occasionally names Seneca and Valerius Maximus as sources, though he probably derived most of, if not all, these through the intermediary of the De ludo scaccorum, which, it should be recalled, mostly relied on John of Wales’s Breviloquium.66

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Lydgate’s performances of the cardinal virtues have already been mentioned. It is, however, in The Fall of Princes that the monk of Bury presents his most developed appropriation of classical moral philosophical principles. A recasting of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, through the medium of Laurent de Premierfait’s French Des cas des nobles, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes musters classical rhetoric and the cardinal virtues in the service of princely power.67 Lydgate also left unfinished a translation of the Secretum secretorum, the Secrees of Old Philisoffres, which was subsequently finished by the secular clerk and Oxford MA Benedict Burgh.68 Of these authors, only Lydgate appears to have attended university, though there is no record of him taking a degree.69 All, however, demonstrate knowledge and sophisticated understanding of many of the standard works of moral philosophy that circulated in later medieval England. And since it is likely their audiences also recognized and comprehended this material, this suggests a common stock of knowledge above and beyond that obtained via sermons, the confessional, and grammar school: one transmitted through higher education and books. For Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and many of their readers that common education was obtained while studying to be a lawyer or clerk, whether at the Inns of Chancery and Inns of Court in London or in the schools of dictamen in Oxford. As rhetoric was an essential aspect of both legal and dictaminal education, and both Aristotle and Cicero designated rhetoric as the appropriate mode of discourse in ethics and politics, it could be that students in these schools got much of their exposure to moral philosophy while studying rhetoric. According to Giles of Rome, moral philosophy was the branch of learning especially appropriate for those who govern.70 Giles put this principle into action when he dedicated De regimine principum to Philip the Fair, who almost immediately after receiving Giles’s Latin original commissioned a French version by the secular clerk Henri de Gauchy (1282). The fashion for mirrors of princes was especially marked in France, where another six independent translations of De regimine principum were made in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.71 Charles V, who already owned several copies of both the Latin and de Gauchy’s French version, commissioned one of these independent translations in 1372.72 He also had two copies of a French translation of Seneca’s Epistulae morales (translated c.1309 by Bartolomeo Siginulfo for Robert of Naples), and was the recipient of Simon de Hesdin’s partial translation of Valerius Maximus.73 Not satisfied with getting his Aristotle at second hand through Giles, Charles V commissioned the Paris theologian Nicole Oresme to make French translations of Aristotle’s Ethics, Economics, and Politics (1370–2).74 The French royal court and its satellites patronized or inspired several other translations of works of moral philosophy (as well as of many other learned Latin works not discussed here).75 At first sight, England’s lay engagement with moral philosophy seems rather lacklustre and delayed compared with that of its neighbour across the Channel. Yet while

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Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature there is some truth in this perception, a closer look reveals a more lively interest. First, several English lay readers owned copies of either Latin works or French translations. Edward I, it will be recalled, was the recipient of the Anglo-Norman Vegetius. Edward II’s queen Isabella owned a copy of Brunetto’s Tresor, and either she or her daughter-in-law Philippa of Hainault commissioned a book containing several works, including the Tresor, a French Secretum secretorum, and Henri de Gauchy’s translation of Giles of Rome (now lost) as a wedding gift for the future Edward III.76 Edward later gave this manuscript to Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster.77 In 1327, the royal clerk Walter de Milemete commissioned two deluxe illuminated manuscripts as coronation gifts for the same young king. One is a copy of the Secretum secretorum and the other, titled De nobilitatibus, sapientiis et prudentiis regum, is Milemete’s own composition, and borrows material from Martin of Braga on the cardinal virtues and Vegetius on military affairs.78 Later he acquired a copy of Vegetius.79 Edward’s son Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, owned ‘j viel livre appellez Egidius de regimine Principum’ and a Vegetius in French; his wife Eleanor de Bohun included what appears to have been a second copy of Giles of Rome in her will, though this one may well have been in French.80 Although we know very little about Richard II’s books, one extant manuscript that belonged to him opens with a work, dedicated to Richard, on royal largesse and the cardinal virtues called De quadripartita regis specie (‘On the Four Kinds of King’).81 It seems likely to have been composed in 1391 by the royal clerk John Thorpe, who in 1393 was awarded the post of Treasurer of Ireland. One of Richard’s most trusted councillors, the ill-fated Sir Simon Burley, owned a French De regimine principum, and the Latin copy in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 234 belonged to their contemporary, the parliamentary peer William Lord Thorp of Northampton.82 In the Regiment of Princes, Hoccleve tells the future King Henry V that he assumes the prince has already read ‘Aréstotle, most famous Philosofre, | His Epistles to Alisaundre sent [i.e. the Secretum secretorum]’, ‘Gyles of regyment | Of princes’, and ‘Iacob de Cessoles . . . “the Chesse moralisèd”’.83 Whereas this may be no more than flattery, Henry had had an excellent education and did belong to a notably bookish family, so his knowledge of these works is plausible.84 Moreover, there are several other contemporary attestations of Henry having read De regimine principum and Vegetius for advice on military matters.85 Among the works collected by Henry’s younger brother Humfrey Duke of Gloucester for his magnificent library were two copies of De regimine principum, one in Latin and the other in French and bound with a French translation of Vegetius. This French manuscript was a gift to Humfrey from Sir Robert Roos, who most likely obtained it while on a diplomatic mission to France.86 Later in the century this same book came into the possession of either the elder or younger Sir James Strangways. Duke Humfrey’s interest in Italian humanism inspired him to seek out classical originalia as well; he owned copies of Leonardo

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Bruni’s new Latin translations of the Ethics and Politics, and Pier Candido Decembrio’s Latin translation of Plato’s Republic.87 Although Henry VI is credited with having read Vegetius after the battle of Blore Heath in 1459, there is no doubt he owned a copy of Christine de Pizan’s adaptation as well as an abbreviated French translation, both contained in a manuscript commissioned in France by John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, in 1445, and presented to Henry’s queen, Margaret of Anjou.88 At about the same time, or a few years before, Henry was the recipient of a mirror of princes entitled Tractatus de regimine principum ad Regem Henricum Sextum. The unknown author, perhaps one of Henry’s chaplains, frequently quotes Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Ethics, and Politics as well as Cicero and Seneca. It turns out, however, that these quotations are almost always derived at second hand from Giles of Rome, John of Wales, and Augustine.89 Another writer close to Henry’s, and later Edward IV’s, court, Sir John Fortescue, Chief Justice of King’s Bench, also relied on intermediaries when writing his De laudibus legum Anglie (1468) and Governance of England (after 1471); these included the popular florilegium of Aristotelian and Roman philosophy, the Auctoritates Aristotelis, Thomas Aquinas and Ptolemy of Lucca’s De regimine principum, Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, and Roger of Waltham’s Compendium morale.90 Henry V’s and Henry VI’s reigns coincided with the period of English conquest and occupation of Normandy and some other parts of northern France, and during these years several copies of De regimine principum, in Latin and French, made their way across the Channel to England. Robert Roos’s book has already been mentioned. Also Henry, fifth Lord Percy (Hotspur’s son), who fought in France, owned a Latin De regimine that had been copied in France during the first half of the fourteenth century while another Latin copy, once in Charles V’s library in the Louvre, seems to have been among the large number of books from that library purchased by John Duke of Bedford; it ended up belonging to a member of an Essex gentry family named Pert.91 Two other French copies from France belonged to fifteenth-­ century Englishmen, one a member of a gentry family named Garshall and the other to the merchant of Calais William Sonnyng.92 One other French copy was bequeathed by Sir Peter Arderne, chief baron of the Exchequer, to his daughter Mary in 1467.93 Henry VI’s arch-rival Richard Duke of York owned a Latin De regimine principum, as did his younger son, the future Richard III.94 But both also possessed English translations of texts containing moral philosophical material. The elder Richard was the recipient of an English version of the late Roman poet Claudian’s De consulatu Stiliconis, a work which repeatedly stresses the importance of the cardinal virtues, and Richard III ordered a copy of John Walton’s English translation of Vegetius.95 Claudian’s Englished poem survives in a single copy, but Walton’s Vegetius, originally translated in 1408 for Thomas, fourth Lord Berkeley, proliferated. Extant today in twelve copies, this translation belonged to several fifteenth-century laymen,

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Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature including Sir John Fastolf, Sir John Paston II, Sir Robert Chalons, Sir Nicholas de Saint Lo, Sir John Astley, William Bruges, and John Smert.96 An independent verse translation/adaptation, Knyghthode and Bataile, appeared in 1460. This version, written in the early years of the Wars of the Roses, betrays a particularly strong concern for England’s common weal, a sentiment shared by its early owners William Lord Hastings and William Hatteclyff, respectively Edward IV’s chamberlain and secretary.97 The oldest copy of Walton’s Vegetius is bound with another translation made for Thomas Berkeley, this being the sole extant exemplar of John Trevisa’s English version of De regimine principum. This book most likely passed at Thomas’s death in 1417 to his daughter Elizabeth and her husband Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick.98 In 1489, William Caxton printed his translation of Christine de Pizan’s adaptation of Vegetius, The Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyvalrye.99 By the time Henry VII ascended the throne in 1485, several other English translations of moral philosophical texts had appeared. Christine de Pizan’s Livre du corps de policie was translated in the 1470s, perhaps by Anthony Woodville.100 The Secretum secretorum and Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers both circulated in numerous English versions. Caxton printed Anthony Woodville’s version of the latter in 1477.101 He also printed Benedict Burgh’s Disticha Catonis translation (1476) and an English translation of Jacobus de Cessolis’ De ludo scaccorum (1475).102 Caxton’s editions signal a new age of much broader circulation of these texts, but they also are evidence of the reading public’s demand. Another of Caxton’s editions, of William Worcester’s version of Cicero’s De senectute, suggests incipient humanist sensibilities, a development also reflected in John Paston’s owning an English version of De amicitia.103 This chapter has argued for a broadly shared culture of moral philosophical literature and learning in later medieval England. The edifice of this culture was built upon the foundation of works by the Roman auctores and Aristotle, on biblical wisdom books, and on Arabic works of political and ethical advice that clothed themselves in the mantle of classical philosophical wisdom. Yet access to this edifice was rarely direct, but was gained rather through a complex network of mediatory texts written in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. Many of these texts were the work of learned clerics, written either for their own use or to instruct lay audiences, but many others were composed by lay writers. Some of these works originated in England but many of the most popular came from France and Italy. Viewed from this perspective, the moral philosophy of Langland, Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate is part of a larger narrative of classical reception that includes other mediatory texts. Viewed from this perspective as well, these canonical literary works are but the tip of an iceberg of English textual production that includes such writings as, for example, Roger of Waltham’s Compendium morale, the Tractatus de regimine principum ad Regem Henricum Sextum, and the translations of Stephen Scrope, William Worcester, and Anthony Woodville. Textual reception is, of course,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature never passive but invariably involves creative strategies of appropriation, interpretation, and redeployment for current ends. Brunetto’s Tresor and Gower’s Confessio amantis are not simply two latter-day iterations of Aristotle’s Ethics, Cicero’s De inventione, and Seneca’s Epistulae morales, nor is Gower a mere borrower from Brunetto. Each author wrote a literary work in its own right, and each did so for specific reasons and in a particular historical context. In the history of textual reception it is ever thus.

Notes   Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 3, The Regement of Princes, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS es 72 (1897), p. 76, lines 2082–8. The orthography in this and other passages of Middle English has been partially modernized. 2   Ann W. Astell, Chaucer and the Universe of Learning (Ithaca, NY, 1996), pp. 8–9. 3   Quotations from Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry Benson (Boston, 1987). In Fall of Princes 9. 3410, Lydgate states: ‘In moral mateer ful notable was Goweer’, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, pt. 3 of 4, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS es 123 (1924), p. 1015. 4   J. D. Burnley, Chaucer’s Language and the Philosophers’ Tradition (Cambridge, 1979); Alastair J. Minnis, ‘John Gower, Sapiens in Ethics and Politics’, Medium Ævum 49 (1980), 207–29. 5   Minnis, ‘John Gower’, pp. 215–17. 6   Minnis, ‘John Gower’, pp. 218–21. 7   For the controversy over this work’s authorship, see John R. Williams, ‘The Quest for the Author of the Moralium dogma philosophorum, 1931–1956’, Speculum 32 (1957), 736–47. 8   ‘Sunt itaque quinque consultationes: prima quid honestum, secunda de comparatione honestorum, tercia quid utile, quarta de comparatione utilium, quinta consultacio est quando uidentur utile et honestum sibi aduersari’: Das ‘Moralium dogma philosophorum’ des Guillaume de Conches: lateinisch, altfranzösisch und mittelniederfränkisch, ed. John Holmberg (Uppsala, 1929), p. 7. 9   ‘Nulla enim uite pars, neque publicis neque priuatis, neque forensibus neque domesticis in rebus, morali philosophia uacare potest. In hac excolenda sita est uite honestas et in negligenda turpitudo’: Das ‘Moralium dogma philosophorum’ des Guillaume de Conches, ed. Holmberg, p. 6. 10   ‘Virtus vero est habitus animi in modum nature rationi consentaneus . . . Diuiditur itaque honestum in prudentiam, iusticiam, fortitudinem, temperanciam’: Das ‘Moralium dogma philosophorum’ des Guillaume de Conches, ed. Holmberg, p. 7; cf. Cicero, De inventione 2. 53. 159. 11   István P. Bejczy, ‘The Concept of Political Virtue in the Thirteenth Century’, in Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages, 1200–1500, eds István P. Bejczy and Cary J. Nederman (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 9–32 (at pp. 13–14). 12   Martinus Bracarensis (Martin of Braga): Martini Episcopi Bracarensis opera omnia, ed. C. W. Barlow, Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome 12 (New Haven, 1950), 1

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Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature pp. 204–50 (at pp. 204–9, 231–2); Richard Newhauser, The Treatise of the Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular (Turnhout, 1993), pp. 111–13; Seneque des IIII Vertus: la ‘Formula honestae vitae’ de Martin de Braga (pseudo-Sénèque), traduite et glosée par Jean Courtecuisse (1403), ed. Hans Haselbach, Publications Universitaires Européennes, Séries XIII, no. 30 (Bern and Frankfurt am Main, 1975), pp. 14–15, 25. 13   Richard Hazelton, ‘The Christianization of Cato: The Disticha Catonis in the Light of Medieval Commentaries’, Mediaeval Studies 19 (1957), 157–73; Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991), p. 78. 14   This assessment is George Clement Whittick’s, in his contribution on Valerius in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1970), p. 1106. More recent scholarship has been kinder to Valerius, recognizing the utility of his work for imperial Roman aristocrats, as well as for medieval and Renaissance readers: W. Martin Bloomer, Valerius Maximus and the Rhetoric of the New Nobility (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992); Clive Skidmore, Practical Ethics for Roman Gentlemen: The Work of Valerius Maximus (Exeter, 1996). 15  Christopher Allmand, The ‘De re militari’ of Vegetius: The Reception, Transmission and Legacy of a Roman Text in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 23–53, 189–92. 16  Allmand, The ‘De re militari’, p. 155. 17   Das ‘Moralium dogma philosophorum’ des Guillaume de Conches, ed. Holmberg, pp. 14–15, 40; Alcuin Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender (Oxford, 2006), p. 10. 18   John of Salisbury, Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, ed. and trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 61–3. 19   Birger Munk Olsen, ‘Les Florilèges d’auteurs classiques’, in Les Genres littéraires dans les sources théologiques et philosophiques médiévales: définition, critique et exploitation (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1982), pp. 151–64. 20   Florilegium morale Oxoniense, Ms. Bodl. 633: Prima pars, Flores philosophorum, ed. Philippe Delhaye, Analecta Mediaevalia Namurcensia 5 (Louvain and Lille, 1955). 21   Florilegium morale Oxoniense, Ms. Bodl. 633: Secunda pars, Flores auctorum, ed. C. H. Talbot, Analecta Mediaevalia Namurcensia 6 (Louvain and Lille, 1956). 22   Bejczy, ‘Concept of Political Virtue’, pp. 13–16; Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics, 1250–1600 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 19–20. 23   Jenny Swanson, John of Wales: A Study of the Works and Ideas of a Thirteenth-Century Friar (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 201–4. On the influence of John of Wales in Iberia, see Roberto Lambertini, ‘Lost in Translation: About the Castilian Gloss on Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum’, in Thinking Politics in the Vernacular, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, eds Gianluca Briguglia and Thomas Ricklin (Fribourg, 2011), pp. 93–102. 24  Swanson, John of Wales, p. 205; Steven J. Williams, The ‘Secret of Secrets’: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor, 2003), p. 298; Three Prose Versions of the ‘Secreta secretorum’, ed. Robert Steele, EETS es 74 (1898); ‘Secretum secretorum’: Nine English Versions, vol. 1, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, EETS no. 276 (1977), p. xx.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 25   Pamela Kalning, ‘Virtues and Exempla in John of Wales and Jacobus de Cessolis’, in Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages, 1200–1500, eds István P. Bejczy and Cary J. Nederman (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 139–76. 26   Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960), p. xv. In the mid-fifteenth century, the Oxford theologian Thomas Graunt compiled an alphabetical index of the Compendium morale: Jean-Philippe Genet, ‘New Politics or New Language? The Words of Politics in Yorkist and Early Tudor England’, in The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. John L. Watts (Stroud, 1998), pp. 23–64 (at p. 33). 27   Beryl Smalley, ‘Some Latin Commentaries on the Sapiential Books in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries’, AHDLMA 18 (1950–1), 103–28 (at pp. 116–22); Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity, pp. 148–60. 28   On the history of vitae philosophorum literature in medieval Latin Christendom, including its uses by John of Salisbury, Roger Bacon,Vincent of Beauvais, John of Wales, and the Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum of pseudo-Burley, see Gregorio Piaia, ‘Vestigia philosophorum’: il medioevo e la storiografia filosofica (Rimini, 1983). He discusses the origin and fortunes of the Liber philosophorum moralium antiquorum on pp. 120–2. 29   The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers: The Translations Made by Stephen Scrope, William Worcester and an Anonymous Translator, ed. Curt F. Bühler, EETS 211 (1941). 30   Quatre introductions à la philosophie au XIIIe siècle, ed. Claude Lafleur (Montreal and Paris, 1988), pp. 333–5. 31   Bernard G. Dod, ‘Aristoteles latinus’, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, eds Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 45–79 (at pp. 74–8). 32   James A. Weisheipl, ‘Curriculum of the Faculty of Arts at Oxford in the Early Fourteenth Century’, Mediaeval Studies 26 (1964), 143–85. 33   There are 18 extant copies of the Ethics commentary and 36 of the Politics: Charles F. Briggs, ‘Moral Philosophy in England after Grosseteste: An “Underground” History’, in The Study of Medieval Manuscripts of England: Festschrift in Honor of Richard W. Pfaff, eds George H. Brown and Linda Ehrsam Voigts (Tempe, Ariz., 2010), pp. 359–88 (at pp. 359–63). See also David Luscombe, ‘The Ethics and Politics in Britain in the Middle Ages’, in Aristotle in Britain during the Middle Ages, ed. John Marenbon (Turnhout, 1996), pp. 337–49. 34   J. M. Fletcher, ‘The Faculty of Arts’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 1, The Early Oxford Schools, ed. Jeremy I. Catto (Oxford, 1984), pp. 369–99 (at pp. 384–5); Briggs, ‘Moral Philosophy in England’; and Charles F. Briggs, ‘Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the Later Medieval Universities: A Reassessment’, Rhetorica 25 (2007), 243–68. 35   Charles F. Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University c.1275–c.1525 (Cambridge, 1999); Williams, The ‘Secret of Secrets’. 36   Briggs, ‘Moral Philosophy in England’, pp. 365–6, 377. 37   Briggs, ‘Moral Philosophy in England’, pp. 365–6, 378.

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Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature   Briggs, ‘Moral Philosophy in England’, pp. 367–8, 372, 378–9.   Briggs, ‘Moral Philosophy in England’, pp. 364, 370, 388. 40   Briggs, ‘Moral Philosophy in England’, pp. 371, 382. 41   Joseph Goering, William de Montibus (c.1140–1213): The Schools and the Literature of Pastoral Care (Toronto, 1992), pp. 82–92. 42   Alexander Murray, ‘Confession as a Historical Source in the Thirteenth Century’, in The  Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, eds R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford, 1981), pp. 275–322 (at pp. 305–20). 43   Summa virtutum de remediis animae, ed. and trans. Siegfried Wenzel (Athens, Ga, 1984), pp. 52–9, 64–5, 90–1, 136–9, 148–9, 158–9, 234–5, 242–3, 246–7, 256–9, 270–1, 278–9. 44   Fasciculus morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, ed. and trans. Siegfried Wenzel(Philadelphia, 1989): these are Aristotle, Ethics (pp. 128–9, 258–9, 498–9, 592–3, 618–19, 658–9, 702–3); Cicero, pp. 111, 391, 599, 603, 621, 623; John of Wales, pp. 93, 397, 505, 593, 603, 623, 625, 713; Policraticus, pp. 393, 499, 501, 505, 589, 603, 661, 677, 713, 723; Seneca, pp. 305, 329, 391, 455, 599, 619, 621, 623, 641, 651, 675, 689, 705, 711, 723; and Valerius Maximus, pp. 253, 341, 389, 391, 393, 501, 503, 593, 599, 601, 621, 623, 655, 677, 711, 713. 45   Siegfried Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Late Medieval England: Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif (Cambridge, 2005). 46   Iohannis Wyclif Sermones, eds J. Loserth and F. D. Matthew, 4 vols (1887–90), 3, 455–64. 47   Iohannis Wyclif Sermones, eds Loserth and Matthew, 3, 460–1; Nicomachean Ethics 1129b30. 48   Chris L. Nighman, ‘ “Accipiant Qui Vocati Sunt”: Richard Fleming’s Reform Sermon at the Council of Constance’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51 (2000), 1–36 (at pp. 13–16); István P. Bejczy, ‘A Genealogy of Morals: The Cardinal Virtues in Medieval Discourse’, Medieval Sermon Studies Newsletter alt. no. 46 (2002), 95–6. 49   Patrick J. Horner, ‘A Sermon on the Anniversary of the Death of Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick’, Traditio 34 (1978), 381–401 (at pp. 388–92). 50   Horner, ‘Sermon’, pp. 388–9. The import of the actual passage in Valerius is quite different from that given in Paunteley’s sermon. He most likely got the exemplum at second hand from some compilation or florilegium. 51  Roy Martin Haines, ‘ “Our Master Mariner, our Sovereign Lord”: A Contemporary Preacher’s View of Henry V’, Mediaeval Studies 38 (1996), 85–96 (at p. 96). 52   John L. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge, 1996), p. 57. 53   Quoted in Jean-Philippe Genet, ‘La Monarchie anglaise: une image brouillée’, in Représentation, pouvoir et royauté à la fin du moyen âge, ed. Joël Blanchard (Paris, 1995), pp. 93–107 (at p. 105). 54   John L. Watts, ‘The Policie in Christen Remes: Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons of 1483–84’, in Authority and Consent in Tudor England: Essays Presented to C. S. L. Davies, eds G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 33–59 (at p. 51). 38 39

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 55   Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, 2005), p. 143; Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame, Ind., 2005), pp. 100–2. 56   C. David Benson, ‘Civic Lydgate: The Poet and London’, in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, eds Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, Ind., 2006), pp. 147–68 (at p. 162). 57   Carpenter also owned two copies of the Secretum secretorum: Caroline Barron, ‘The Political Culture of Medieval London’, in The Fifteenth Century IV: Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain, eds Linda Clark and Christine Carpenter (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 111–33 (at pp. 118–20). 58  Nolan, John Lydgate, p. 144. 59   The Roman tradition is stressed by Janet Coleman, ‘English Culture in the Fourteenth Century’, in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitano (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 33–63; Strohm, Politique; and John L. Watts in an unpublished paper presented in 2010 at the University of Bergen, Norway. The Aristotelian tradition is noted by Alastair J. Minnis, ‘ “I speke of folk in seculer estaat”: Vernacularity and Secularity in the Age of Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005), 25–58; Stephen H. Rigby, Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ and Medieval Political Theory (Leiden, 2009); and Stephen H. Rigby, ‘Aristotle for Aristocrats and Poets: Giles of Rome’s “De regimine principum” as Theodicy of Privilege’, Chaucer Review 46 (2012), 259–313. 60  In addition to the studies mentioned in n. 59, see also Richard F. Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto, 1980), pp. 135–67; Ulrike Grassnick, Ratgeber des Königs: Fürstenspiegel und Herrscherideal im spätmittelalterlichen England (Cologne, 2004), pp. 59–65. 61   On Cato, see Andrew Galloway, ‘Piers Plowman and the Schools’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 6 (1992), 89–107. References to Seneca can be found in Piers Plowman, B-Text, XI.107, XIV.309, XX.275: William Langland: Piers Plowman, eds Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York, 2006). 62   Kurt Olsson, ‘The Cardinal Virtues and the Structure of John Gower’s Speculum meditantis’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1977), 113–48. 63  Swanson, John of Wales, p. 204. 64  Jill Mann, ‘“He Knew Nat Catoun”: Medieval School-Texts and Middle English Literature’, in The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers, eds Jill Mann and Maura Nolan (Notre Dame, Ind., 2006), pp. 41–74; Swanson, John of Wales, p. 204. 65   David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, Calif., 1997), pp. 104–24, 212–46. 66  Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment of Princes’: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 85–93, 122–5.

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Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature 67  Strohm, Politique, pp. 89–104; Rita Copeland, ‘Lydgate, Hawes, and the Science of Rhetoric in the Late Middle Ages’, in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, eds Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 232–57. 68   Lydgate and Burgh’s Secrees of Old Philisoffres, ed. Robert Steele, EETS es 66 (1894). 69   James Simpson, ‘John Lydgate’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature 1100–1500, ed. Larry Scanlon (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 205–16 (at p. 205). 70   De regimine principum, 2. 2. 8: The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the ‘De regimine principum’ of Aegidius Romanus, eds David C. Fowler, Charles F. Briggs, and Paul G. Remley (New York, 1997), pp. 222–5; see also Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’, pp. 146–7. 71   Jacques Krynen, L’Empire du roi: idées et croyance politiques en France, XIIIe–XVe siècle (Paris, 1993), pp. 167–239. See also Daisy Delogu, Theorizing the Ideal Sovereign: The Rise of the French Vernacular Royal Biography (Toronto, 2008). 72   Noëlle-Laetitia Perret, Les Traductions françaises du ‘De regimine principum’ de Gilles de Rome: parcours matériel, culturel et intellectuel d’un discours sur l’éducation (Leiden, 2011), pp. 61–91. 73   Jacques Monfrin, ‘Les Traducteurs et leur public en France au moyen âge’, Journal des savants 149 (1964), 5–20. Nicolas de Gonesse completed Hesdin’s translation in 1404. 74   Claire Richter Sherman, Imaging Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representation in FourteenthCentury France (Berkeley, 1995). 75   In addition to Guillaume de Tignonville’s already mentioned version for Charles VI of the Liber philosophorum moralium antiquorum, there were Denis Foulchat’s translation of the Policraticus, Jacques Bauchant’s of Seneca’s De remediis fortuitorum, Laurent de Premierfait’s of Cicero’s De senectute, Jean de Vignai’s of De ludo scaccorum, as well as the several versions of Vegetius (by Jean de Meun, Jean Priorat, and Jean de Vignai) and Christine de Pizan’s adaptation of the same, the Livre des fais d’armes et de chevalerie (1410): Monfrin, ‘Les Traducteurs’; Peter F. Dembowski, ‘Learned Latin Treatises in French: Inspiration, Plagiarism, and Translation’, Viator 17 (1986), 255–69; Allmand, The ‘De re militari’, pp. 121–7, 156–68. Also, between 1404 and 1407 Christine de Pizan wrote for the instruction of Louis of Guyenne her Livre du corps de policie, a mirror of princes which drew heavily from the Policraticus, Giles of Rome, and Valerius Maximus: Christine de Pizan: The Book of the Body Politic, ed. and trans. Kate Langdon Forhan (Cambridge, 1994). 76   Now Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 571: Susan H. Cavanaugh, ‘Royal Books: King John to Richard II’, The Library 6th ser., 10 (1988), 304–16 (at pp. 309–10); Michael A. Michael, ‘A Manuscript Wedding Gift from Philippa of Hainault to Edward III’, Burlington Magazine 127 (1985), 582–99; Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’, pp. 55–6. 77   Michael, ‘Manuscript Wedding Gift’, pp. 582–8. 78   The manuscripts are London, British Library, Additional MS 47680 and Oxford, Christ Church, MS 82. Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-Century England: Treatises by Walter of Milemete, William of Pagula, and William of Ockham, ed. and trans. Cary J. Nederman (Tempe, Ariz., 2002), pp. 13–61.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 79   Juliet Vale, Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and its Context, 1270–1350 (Woodbridge, 1982), p. 50. 80  Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’, pp. 60–1; V. J. Scattergood, ‘Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, eds V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (1983), pp. 29–43 (at p. 34). 81   Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 581: Four English Political Tracts of the Late Middle Ages, ed. Jean-Phillipe Genet, Camden Fourth Series 18 (1977), pp. 22–39. 82  Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’, pp. 60–2. 83  Hoccleve, Regement of Princes, lines 2038–9, 2052–3, 2109–11 (Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 3, The Regement of Princes, ed. Furnivall, 74–7). 84   On the books of Henry’s mother Mary de Bohun, and his brothers John Duke of Bedford and Humfrey Duke of Gloucester, see Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’, pp. 62–3; on Henry’s education, see K. B. McFarlane, ‘The Education of the Nobility in Later Medieval England’, in The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), pp. 228–47 (at pp. 243–4). 85  Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’, pp. 64–5. 86   The French works are found in Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.2.17: Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum, pp. 65–6. 87   Roberto Weiss, Humanism in England During the Fifteenth Century, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1967), pp. 47–8, 54–8, 64. For further discussion of Duke Humfrey and humanism, see Chapter 23 in this volume by Wakelin on early English humanism. 88   London, British Library, MS Royal 15 E VI: Allmand, The ‘De re militari’, p. 71; Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’, p. 66. 89  Genet, Four English Political Tracts, pp.40–173 (at pp. 40–5, 170). 90   The Governance of England, ed. Charles Plummer (Oxford, 1885), pp. 169–78; Sir John Fortescue: De laudibus legum Anglie, ed. and trans. S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge, 1949), pp. lxxxix–xcv. 91   The manuscripts are Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 702 and Cambridge, Jesus College, MS Q.B.9. On the latter, see Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’, pp. 175–9. 92   Chicago, University of Chicago Library, MS 533-v and New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 122: Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’, pp. 66–8. 93  Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’, p. 67. 94  Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’, pp. 68–70. 95  Ewald Flügel, ‘Eine mittelenglische Claudian-Übersetzung (1445)’, Anglia 28 (1905), 255–99, 421–38; John Watts, ‘De consulatu Stiliconis: Texts and Politics in the Reign of Henry VI’, Journal of Medieval History 16 (1990), 251–66; Allmand, The ‘De re militari’, p. 71. 96  Allmand, The ‘De re militari’, pp. 72, 79, 308–9, 365. 97  Allmand, The ‘De re militari’, pp. 187–93. 98   The book is now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 233: Briggs, Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’, pp. 74–90.

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Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature 99   Christine de Pizan: The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry, ed. Charity Canon Willard and trans. Sumner Willard (University Park, Pa, 1999), p. 1. 100   The Middle English Translation of Christine de Pisan’s ‘Livre du corps de policie’: Ed. from MS C.U.L. Kk.1.5, ed. Diane Bornstein (Heidelberg, 1977). 101   Dicts and Sayings, ed. Bühler, p. ix. 102   Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, 2001), p. 296. 103   This translation was either the work of John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, or of William Worcester: Dicts and Sayings, ed. Bühler, pp. xlv–xlvi.

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Chapter 16

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Historiography and Biography from the Period of Gildas to Gerald of Wales Cam Grey

When writers of the English Middle Ages tackled the ancient and contemporary history of their nation or celebrated the lives of their rulers, they did so using literary strategies and topoi that look very familiar to scholars of classical historiography and biography. However, it would be simplistic to suggest that these writers merely imitated or copied their classical predecessors, for to do so is to ignore native, AngloSaxon traditions of historiography which interacted dialectically with enduring classical models, particularly from the twelfth century onwards. Further, when medieval authors encountered their past, they did so within the context of an explicitly Christian construction of time. In essence, the story of the medieval reception of classical historiography may be told as a story of negotiation: between ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’ subject matter; between ‘cyclic’ and ‘salvific’ notions of temporality; between appropriation of a particular form or forms and the acceptance or rejection of the substantive principles that classical authors employed or exploited when they wrote in those forms. In this essay, I explore these negotiations of form and subject matter as they appear in the writings of English authors from the mid-sixth century to the twelfth century. I do so self-consciously, if not necessarily apologetically, as a scholar of classical and late antique historiography looking forward into the medieval period. It is my hope that this somewhat unconventional point of view will throw up points for debate and argument and offer suggestive connections and links. Nevertheless, I remain as deeply conscious of the vast gulf that separated these worlds as I am convinced that there are fundamental underlying connectivities that may be profitably explored.1

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature I begin with a brief excursus on the conventions and expectations that classical historians and biographers worked within, illustrating these comments with reference to a collection of fourth-century authors who exemplify both the diversity and the cohesion of classical historiography and biography in the period. I then explore in more detail the ways in which writers of the pre-Conquest period encountered and engaged with the models for historiography and biography available to them from the classical period.2 Finally, I outline the rather more sophisticated and dynamic expressions of historiographical and biographical forms that are evident in the writings of authors from the twelfth century, examining these authors’ exploitation of themes and topoi along the same analytical lines as I used when exploring the works of the fourth century.3 I will suggest that medieval English authors always appreciated the opportunities and obligations that attended the writing of history and biography, but it was not until the post-Conquest period that authors exploited the tension between the form and the substance of those genres in a manner comparable to their classical and late antique predecessors.

Models of Classical Historiography and Biography Historians and biographers of the Roman period were acutely aware of the characteristics, expectations, and opportunities of the genres within which they chose to write. History was the study of great events and the great men who enacted them. Those events should be recorded honestly and accurately by writers of appropriate character and ability. The language and tone of that account should befit the gravity of the events, and serve to educate the audience of the work. The sentiment is well  captured by the Syrian-born Roman historiographer Ammianus Marcellinus (325/330–after 391), who finished his (now somewhat fragmentary) account of the history of the Roman Empire from the second century up to his own time with the following words (Res gestae, 31.16.9):4 Haec ut miles quondam et Graecus, a principatu Caesaris Nervae exorsus ad usque Valentis interitum pro virium explicavi mensura: opus veritatem professum numquam, ut arbitror, sciens silentio ausus corrumpere vel mendacio. Scribant reliqua potiores, aetate doctrinisque florentes. Quos id, si libuerit, adgressuros, procudere linguas ad maiores moneo stilos. (These dangers, from the principate of the emperor Nerva to the death of Valens, I, a former soldier and a Greek, have set forth to the measure of my ability, without ever (I  believe) consciously venturing to debase through silence or through falsehood a work whose aim was the truth. The rest may be written by abler men, who are in the prime of life and learning. But if they chose to undertake such a task, I advise them to forge their tongues to the loftier style.)

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Historiography and Biography History differed from mere chronicling or cataloguing of events primarily in that it combined recording of those events with exposition of them in an aesthetically pleasing style. Thus, the career bureaucrat and courtier Eutropius (fl. second half of the fourth century), observed of his own ten-book compendium of Roman history that (Breviarium, 10.18):5 nam reliqua stilo maiore dicenda sunt. quae nunc non tam praetermittimus quam ad maiorem scribendi diligentiam reservamus. (the things that remain must be told in a more elevated style; and we do not, for the present, so much omit them, as reserve them for higher efforts in writing.)

These qualities of elevated style, veracity, and gravity afforded the historian the right—perhaps even the obligation—to offer moral judgements upon the individuals whose actions he recorded. As a consequence, his work could function as a condemnation of present laxness, an exhortation to greater efforts by the members of his audience, or a source of comfort in times of particular stress. Whichever way an audience chose to read the text, it is clear that the historian’s writing about the past could not but reflect his view of his present, and might in addition be explicitly shaped in order to justify, explain, or challenge aspects of his contemporary world.6 For Romans, this often meant that one of the historian’s responsibilities was to recount the nation’s history. This expectation can be traced back as far as the acknowledged originator of Roman historiography, Fabius Pictor, and finds its most eloquent expression in Livy’s monumental Ab urbe condita.7 Closely connected to this task of affirming, explaining, or tracing the story of Rome’s present circumstances was the complementary project of outlining the characteristics of other nations through ethnography. In addition to the ethnographic asides attested in historiographical writing since Herodotus, the ethnographic treatise could be used as part of a justification for actions taken by Rome and its representatives against those nations, as in Caesar’s self-conscious work of self-representation, De bello Gallico. Alternatively, it could function as a mirror of sorts, against which the author intended his audience to evaluate their own society, as, arguably, in Tacitus’ quintessential work of ethnography, the Germania. The Historia ecclesiastica of Eusebius of Caesarea represents a further expression of this relationship between national history and ethnography, for, in a manner analogous to the treatment of the Jews by Eusebius’ predecessor Josephus, it treats the Christian community as simultaneously an ethnic community and a nation.8 However, as we shall see, ethnography as both a stand-alone genre and a component of historiography is conspicuous by its absence in the period prior to  the Conquest, and takes on a rather different form when it re-emerges in the twelfth century.9 Eusebius’ text was translated into Latin in the early fifth century by Rufinus of Aquileia, and would influence subsequent ‘national histories’ from Jordanes’ Getica

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (his history of the Goths) through Gregory of Tours’ Historia Francorum to the works of British and English history by Bede, Nennius, and their successors. Eusebius’ text is generally taken to represent a point of transformation from reliance upon the broadly cyclical vision of history that tended to characterize the writings of classical historiographers to the more explicitly salvific or millenarian approach of Christian historiographers. In truth, this distinction is probably overstated, for recent scholarship has demonstrated that Roman historians of the imperial period, at least, were aware of the manifest tension between the cyclical elements of annalistic and calendrical temporal systems, on the one hand, and a linear vision of imperial reigns, on the other—and both existed uneasily alongside bold or hopeful claims such as Virgil’s vision of imperium sine fine (Aeneid 1.279), with its explicit evocation of timelessness.10 Nevertheless, this ongoing tension between cyclical and salvific visions of temporality would serve both to unite and to sequester ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’ histories for the next millennium or more, and I return to its implications for the historiography of the English Middle Ages below. Eusebius’ influence upon medieval English writers is discernible also in the field of biography, through his account of the life of the first Christian Roman emperor. Eusebius’ Vita Constantini may be taken as a point of confluence between two connected but complementary streams of biographical writing: first, biographical accounts of the lives of influential political figures which was most fully realized in De vita Caesarum by the second-century imperial biographer Suetonius; and, second, hagiographical writings, which, through Sulpicius Severus’ Vita Martini (early fifth century), also bear traces of Suetonius’ influence, as well as drawing upon the encomiastic tradition of the late Republic and early Empire.11 These exemplary accounts of the lives of great men—and, occasionally, women—were explicitly aimed at the edification of the reader. In Suetonius’ hands, as well as in the biographical vignettes of emperors found in the text of Ammianus Marcellinus, an emperor’s life, morals, and deeds encapsulated and defined the condition of the state that he ruled. Eusebius’ text attests to the close relationship between ‘secular’ biography and ‘sacred’ hagiography, as well as to the connections between these two genres and the panegyrical writings of the Roman imperial period, which simultaneously responded to and emphasized the central place occupied by the emperor.12 Together, the foregoing series of explicit statements about the nature of historiography and biography reveal a collection of common themes and tropes that were deeply embedded in Latin literary culture. Just how embedded they were may be gleaned from the work known as the Scriptores historiae augustae, by an anonymous near-contemporary of Ammianus who, writing under the guise of six separate named biographers, produced a vibrant, complex work of ‘mythohistory’, replete with falsified documentary evidence, invented authors, and texts—all masquerading as a compilation of imperial biographies that picked up the task begun by Suetonius.13 In typical fashion, the anonymous author concludes his work with a refracted,

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Historiography and Biography f­ragmented version of the claims, judgements, and justifications that a historian or biographer might be expected to make in such circumstances (Scriptores historiae augustae: Carus, Carinus, Numerianus, 21.2–3):14 2. Habe, mi amice, meum munus, quod ego, ut saepe dixi, non eloquentiae causa sed curiositatis in lumen edidi, id praecipue agens ut, si quis eloquens vellet facta principum reserare, materiam non requireret, habiturus meos libellos ministros eloquii. 3 te quaeso, sis contentus nosque sic voluisse scribere melius quam potuisse contendas. (2. And now, my friend, accept this gift of mine, which, as I have often said, I have brought out to the light of day, not because of its elegance of style but because of its learned research, chiefly with this purpose in view, that if any gifted stylist should wish to reveal the deeds of the emperors, he might not lack the material, having, as he will, my little books as ministers to his eloquence. 3 I pray you, then, to be content and to contend that in this work I had the wish to write better than I had the power.)

The explicitness, care, and skill with which this author accesses tropes of classical biography and historiography is striking testimony to the continuing currency of these themes and techniques, even if the form they take here owes as much to the satirical and novelistic traditions of the classical period as it does to the genre of imperial biography.15 The choice to quote from authors of the fourth century to illustrate these introductory remarks about the nature of classical historiography and biography is far from accidental. The fourth century serves as a bridge between the classical and medieval worlds, both revealing fundamental continuities and signalling telling divergences between the two. These authors and their texts bear witness to a world that was multicultural and multilingual, a world in these respects comparable to post-Conquest England. Like the literary and intellectual efflorescence of the twelfth century, these fourth-century texts display practitioners consciously accessing, adopting, and adapting the conventions of history and biography with a clear-eyed and competitive, rather than a nostalgic, eye to the past.16 Presaging subsequent historiographical writing, they also attest to a moment where the twin inheritance of Christianity and Rome became explicitly articulated in a variety of contexts, and in both explicit and implicit ways.17 Nevertheless, these texts display a more or less shared vision of what history and biography were supposed to do: both should provide morally instructive models of behaviour for both emulation and opprobrium, and their authors should offer judgements of events, rather than simply recording them. Consequently, in their various expressions and combinations of their form, subject matter, themes, and ambitions, these authors illustrate both the cohesion and the breadth of the two genres in the period. Further, the flexibility with which these authors accessed the themes and tropes of classical historiography and biography reminds us that these genres were far from fossilized in late antiquity. Rather, they encouraged innovation and dynamism, albeit

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature that innovation took place within the context of certain generic limitations and expectations. Arguably, it is precisely this dynamism that encouraged the development of self-consciously Christian forms of historiography and biography, and allowed those forms to both compete and combine with existing ‘pagan’ texts. Certainly, we should not be mesmerized by the self-conscious calls of our Christian authors to reject those texts and replace them with models drawn from JudaeoChristian traditions, for classical texts continued to form the bedrock upon which medieval practices and structures of education were built. Classical forms continued to imbue medieval historiographical texts, whether their authors were aware of those forms or not. While the notion of a classical ‘canon’ is relevant for the medieval period—indeed, it is precisely in the fourth century that those notions of canonicity first take hold—we should not view that canon as a rigid, prescriptive body of literature, against which all subsequent writings must be judged and found wanting. Rather, we should view the texts contained within this canon—including those fourth-century authors and texts with which we began18—as presenting a set of models and possibilities for later authors to access, adopt, and adapt. In what follows, I do not attempt a detailed account of the history of the textual transmission of classical historiography and biography into the English Middle Ages, an undertaking which has been the subject of a number of excellent studies.19 Instead, I seek to complement these studies by focusing upon the ways in which the themes and topoi of classical historiographical and biographical writing influenced, infiltrated, and informed the writings of English historians and biographers in the period up to the end of the twelfth century. I will suggest that in the early medieval period we observe no little diversity in the techniques employed by authors when accessing the tropes and models of classical historiography, in spite of the fact that explicit attestations of individual authors are relatively sparse. A hiatus follows, both in explicit attestations of classical texts and in exploitation of the forms of historiography and biography, before there is an efflorescence following the Norman Conquest. In this period, we observe both self-conscious engagement with texts of the ‘classical historiographical tradition’ and self-confident manipulation of those texts and that tradition. Throughout the period, the influence of classical historiography and biography is more diffuse than might be evinced from a simple count of the attested presence of individual authors in libraries, or explicit references to them in our extant works.20

Memories of Classical Historiography and Biography For medieval writers, as for their classical and late antique predecessors, the historiographical project was fundamentally about negotiating the relationship between simple recording of events, the shaping of those events for narrative, illustrative, or 328

Historiography and Biography other purposes, and the expression of judgements upon those events. In modern scholarship, this tension has often been explored in terms of the distinction between the chronicle and narrative historiography, although in reality the relationship between the two was complex and dialectical throughout the period.21 We observe the conscious decision to continue narrative historiographies in chronicle form—as, for example, in the tenth-century Northumbrian continuations of Bede22 or, after the Conquest, the embrace of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae by Layamon and his successors when they wrote, continued, and adapted the Brut, the first historiographical account of England to be written in the vernacular English language.23 We witness also chroniclers incorporating components in their works that might otherwise be expected to be found in a work of historiography—such as the ethnographic aspects contained in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, to which we will return. We should therefore both acknowledge the possibility of generic heterogeneity and hybridity and be wary of the assumption that English writers wrote chronicles because they could not write narrative historiography. Many of the extant chronicles demonstrably drew from a vast and linguistically heterogeneous collection of sources. Further, while such evidence as exists for the survival and circulation of Latin texts and authors in the period reveals only fleeting glimpses of historiography and biography, nevertheless medieval education practices embraced the principles of classical Latin rhetoric and prose.24 It is also important to stress that the models provided by Christian authors such as Augustine and Orosius were themselves characterized by techniques drawn from classical historiography and biography. It is therefore possible that the relative dearth of historiography between Bede and his self-appointed successor William of Malmesbury must be ascribed to factors other than literary inferiority. Be that as it may, it is certainly the case that a number of models for recording the past both existed and were employed by historical writers of the English Middle Ages. Undoubtedly the most influential work of English historiography written in the early Middle Ages is the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum or Ecclesiastical History of Bede. Certainly, the form that his text takes betrays the strong influence of the classical historiographical tradition, even though this is filtered through a distinctly Christian lens. While Bede appears self-consciously to have avoided citing pagan authors in favour of Christian texts, he had great familiarity with a significant number of classical texts, whether in full or excerpted form.25 Bede’s text reveals a detailed and sustained engagement with the Christian historiographer Orosius, who functions as a crucial bridge between the competing, potentially contradictory visions of the role of Christianity in the secular world provided by Eusebius and Augustine.26 Bede’s explicit claims for the utility and subject matter of his text echo those of our fourth-century authors cited above (Historia ecclesiastica, Praef.1):27 Siue enim historia de bonis bona referat, ad imitandum bonum auditor sollicitus instigatur; seu mala commemoret de prauis, nihilominus religiosus ac pius auditor siue

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature lector deuitando quod noxium est ac peruersum, ipse sollertius ad exsequenda ea quae bona ac Deo digna esse cognouerit, accenditur. (Should history tell of good men and their good estate, the thoughtful listener is spurred on to imitate the good; should it record the evil ends of wicked men, no less effectually the devout and earnest listener or reader is kindled to eschew what is harmful and perverse and himself with greater care pursue those things which he has learned to be good and worthy of God.)

But for Bede, exemplarity is a distinctively Christian phenomenon. Above all, he privileges examples of religious piety and morality. Further, while it is true that Bede envisaged his work as a national history, for him this was primarily a ‘sacred’ rather than a ‘secular’ undertaking. As a consequence, while there are arguably resonances of the projects of Fabius Pictor and Livy, Bede embraced a subtly different model of national history, namely the one provided by Eusebius and filtered through Gregory of Tours, who in his Historia Francorum sought to subsume the ‘national-secular’ model within a ‘Christian-ecclesiastical’ vision of history.28 This impulse builds upon Eusebius’ Historia ecclesiastica, which traced the experience of the Christian Church from marginalized outsider to privileged insider, and thereby simultaneously embraced and rejected the model of ‘national history’ provided by Latin and Greek writers of the Roman republican and imperial periods. Before Bede, of course, there was Gildas, whose narrative of the fall of Britain reveals a combination of classical and religious, historiographical and theological influences and motivations. Gildas betrays a familiarity with a range of Latin classical poets, in particular the monumental account of the origins of Rome contained in Virgil’s Aeneid.29 His engagement with numerous Christian Latin authors has been established in a number of studies, although it is more difficult to determine whether he had access to Latin historiographers. Most pertinent to our present purposes is the scholarly controversy that continues to surround Gildas’ knowledge and use of Orosius.30 Seeming gaps and inconsistencies in his engagement with the information contained in the Historia adversus paganos suggest that his purpose was not, like Bede’s, to obtain factual information from this text, but rather to capture its moralizing message. Indeed, Gildas’ work is far more a moral diatribe than it is a history, as he himself makes clear in his preface (De excidio et conquestu Britanniae, translated as The Ruin of Britain, 1.1):31 in hac epistola quicquid deflendo potius quam declamando, vili licet stilo, tamen benigno, fuero prosecutus, ne quis me affectu cunctos spernentis omnibusve melioris, quippe qui commune bonorum dispendium malorumque cumulum lacrimosis querelis defleam, sed condolentis patriae incommoditatibus miseriisque eius ac remediis condelectantis edicturum putet. (In this letter I shall deplore rather than denounce; my style may be worthless, but my intentions are kindly. What I have to deplore with mournful complaint is a general loss

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Historiography and Biography of good, a heaping up of bad. But no one should think that anything I say is said out of scorn for humanity or from a conviction that I am superior to all men. No, I sympathise with my country’s difficulties and troubles, and rejoice in remedies to relieve them.)

Gildas’ motivation for engaging with classical and late antique models, therefore, was principally moral and rhetorical. Indeed, he self-consciously establishes himself as a modern-day Jeremiah in his work, drawing explicitly on models from both the Old and New Testaments, as well as the moralizing diatribe of the fifth-century Gallic presbyter Salvian of Marseilles.32 In the case of both Gildas and Bede, then, we observe a blending of forms and influences, from both ‘classical-secular’ and ‘Christian-religious’ milieux. While their preference seems to have been for Christian rather than pagan models, nevertheless classical historiography is implicated in their projects in both direct and indirect ways. Crucially, however, their strategies of reception and the purposes for which they accessed classical and late antique authors differed considerably. A complementary pattern of reception is visible in a third early medieval work of historiography, the ninth-century Historia Britonum conventionally attributed to Nennius.33 In the ‘Prologue’ to this work, Nennius offers a set of traditional tropes of classical historiography, emphasizing the daunting nature of his task and his lack of the necessary skill to accomplish it. He then explicitly names some, at least, of his sources. These include ‘native’ British sources and monuments as well as the writings of Christian authors such as Jerome, Eusebius, Prosper of Aquitaine, and Isidore of Seville. He also mentions ‘the annals of the Romans’, before laying out something of his philosophy of history (Historia Britonum, Pref. 2):34 Nec ergo te pigeat, diligens lector, excussis verborum paleis, historiae grana horreo memoriae condere; quoniam non quis dicat, aut qualiter dicatur, sed quid dictum sit, veritatis testimonio magis attendendum esse probatur; nam nec contemtibilem aestimat gemmam, postquam de coeno, in quo jacuerat, extersit, quod suo thesauro dignatus est postmodum adjicere. Cedo namque majoribus et eloquentioribus, quicumque benigno ardore accensi erratam rixantis linguae materiam Romanae verriculo eloquentiae planare studuerint, si inconcussam reliquerint historiae columnellam, quam statui permanere. (And do not be reluctant, diligent reader, to winnow the chaff of my words, and to preserve the grain of my history in the storehouse of your memory; for it is to be considered, not who says it, or how it is said, but what may have been said, stretching more the mind for evidence of the truth; for a jewel which is thrown away is not scorned, it is valued and recovered, and afterwards is worthy to take into the treasure house. For I yield to those greater and more eloquent, who inflamed with generous ardour have sought by Roman eloquence to smooth the difficulties of their language, if they have left unchanged any pillar of history which I have wished to preserve.)

Nennius’ explicit interest in eloquence and truth, as well as his elaborate explication of his sources, chimes with the classical historiographical tradition that he claims

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature here to be only imperfectly and haltingly accessing. Further, in its concern to establish an origin story for the British nation, Nennius’ work can justifiably be regarded as a ‘national’ history. But it is a national history of a rather different character from that of his slightly earlier contemporary Bede. This heterogeneity is significant, for it speaks to a set of processes whereby Roman understandings of what constituted ‘national historiography’ were appropriated and transformed in the late and post-­ imperial period. Most particularly, it speaks to the twin inheritance of classical and Christian models that confronted writers of history in the English Middle Ages. However, rather than the antagonistic relationship between the two that underlies Bede’s text, Nennius follows the example of Paul the Deacon, who in his Historia Langobardorum (his history of the Lombards) explicitly embraced the coexistence of both salvific and cyclical visions of temporality, and secular and sacred subject matters.35 However it is not simply the coexistence of the secular and the sacred in historiography of the medieval period that must be addressed, for Eusebius’ treatment of his subject matter reveals also a close connection between ‘national history’ and ethnography. This connection is evident as much in Livy’s loving exposition of the Roman national character in his Ab urbe condita as it is in Caesar’s self-serving portrait of the uncivilized nature of the Gauls in his De bello Gallico or the extended meditation upon the relationship between civilization, luxury, and immorality contained in Tacitus’ Germania and Agricola. This ethnographic element is evident in both Latin and Greek historiography of the Roman period, and it is an important component of the works of Cassiodorus, Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, and Paul the Deacon as well. The same impulse is evident in Nennius, who establishes a firm physical and cultural context for his history in the manner of Caesar and Tacitus. Nennius’ ethnographic interest encourages him to explore a range of aetiologies for the British nation, and to place the Britons’ contradictory and ultimately unsatisfactory relationship with Rome within the context of cultural differences—rather than embracing the moralizing discourse derived from Orosius and Salvian that is so evident in Gildas.36 By contrast, Bede’s ethnographic interest seems restricted to providing a brief ethnogenesis of the English people with reference their Anglian, Saxon, and Jutish roots (Historia ecclesiastica, 1.15). Bede’s rejection of the ethnographic aspect of national historiography may, perhaps, be ascribed to two factors, both of which function as corollaries to his technique of subsuming secular national history under the auspices of his religious project.37 The first is a transformation of national history from a project aimed at situating the nation under discussion within its broader geographical and cultural context—as was the case in the national histories of the Roman period—to a project which explored the nation under discussion as the natural end-point of a series of convergent processes, and therefore a stand-alone subject in its own right, an understanding that informs Gregory of Tours’ Historia Francorum.38 The second is Bede’s embrace of Christianity and the Church as a universalizing,

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Historiography and Biography unifying element in British history.39 For Bede, Christianity provided an umbrella underneath which the British nation could develop, with the result that, in his narrative at least, tribal, ethnic, and cultural differences became inconsequential. As a consequence of these two factors, his narrative is simultaneously all-encompassing and extremely narrow in its focus. This apparently contradictory pair of attributes may also be observed in the bulk of narrative history in the pre-Conquest period, which was focused upon the explication of local history and the contextualization of that local history within the ecclesiastical or personal disputes of its author and his monastery. There was little room either for the contemplation of groups that were culturally different from the inhabitants of the island of Britain, or for ascribing differences between the various local monasteries to ethnic factors. There was, in addition, little interest in highlighting, for example, the ‘foreign-ness’ of successive monarchs and their spouses—indeed, these individuals were subsumed within the confines of British historiography and biography, as is most explicitly evidenced by the anonymously authored Encomium Emmae Reginae, which was commissioned by a ‘Norman’ queen in order to celebrate the deeds of her ‘Danish’ husband and father-in-law for the benefit of her ‘English’ children—and, if that is not enough, most likely written by a Flemish author!40 Rather than focus upon issues of identity or ethnicity, historians’ attention contracted to the local, embraced the ecclesiastical, or (frequently) both.41 Indeed, it is not until the Conquest that ethnography re-emerges as an interest for Anglo-Saxon and AngloNorman historians alike, in a context where the inhabitants of Britain were once again forced to confront and negotiate cultural difference.42 Notably, this tendency to avoid ethnography among narrative historians can be contrasted with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as well as its Latin translation and continuation by the historian Æthelweard, both of which focus considerable attention upon providing brief ethnographic exegeses on the peoples they introduce in their narrative as well as establishing origin stories for the Anglo-Saxon people.43 In this instance, then, we observe a fragmentation during the medieval period of elements which had in classical historiography existed in a complementary relationship. It seems reasonable to suggest that, just as it was in the classical and late antique period, historiography in the pre-Conquest period was a flexible and heterogeneous genre—albeit a relatively sparsely attested one. However, some formal elements of classical historiography turn up in other texts in the period. Most striking in this regard is the generic development observable in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which, as time progresses, moves well beyond mere recording of events. This trend arguably finds its most complete expression in the death notice for William II (ann. 1100) which resembles the short biographical sketches of rulers together with accompanying judgements that characterized the work of Ammianus Marcellinus and, before him, Sallust. It is true that this is not biography in the mode of Suetonius—and, as already noted, secular biography is, on the whole, rather poorly attested in the early

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature medieval period, at least.44 But neither is it mere chronicle. We are hampered by an almost complete absence of information about the individuals whose collective efforts resulted in this chronicle, although it is likely that they were writing in an educational, literary, and cultural context which was experiencing a widening availability of classical sources up to and beyond the Conquest.45 The rarity of stand-alone secular biography in the period is, perhaps, cause for some comment. One of the most striking features of the Roman imperial period, particularly from the fourth century onwards, was the centrality of the monarch and the fundamental role that written texts played in the construction of his power. This can be demonstrated by the abundance of biographical and panegyrical works aimed at celebrating and offering judgement upon the life and deeds of emperors.46 Just as in the case of historiography, the judgements contained in biographies of the late Empire comprised a combination of familiar themes from Roman imperial contexts and new, more explicitly Christian expectations of rulers.47 Eusebius’ Vita Constantini provides the most explicit model, and the practice of combining ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’ elements within the same biographical work can be observed in a range of early medieval texts. The influence of Eusebius can be discerned in Einhard’s early ninth-century life of Charlemagne (Vita Karoli Magni), for example, which also provided a pattern for Asser’s Vita Ælfredi (893). Einhard’s text also bears strong structural resemblances to Suetonius’ De vita Caesarum, as well as betraying resonances of the exemplary portraits contained in the histories of Sallust.48 A comparable mix of influences and styles can be found in the Encomium Emmae Reginae, a text which appears to have been envisaged by its commissioner Queen Emma of Normandy as providing a model of kingship for her two sons to follow. We observe a similar mix of styles and structures also in the hagiographical portraits provided by  Eadmer of St Anselm in the late tenth century and by Ælfric of his teacher, Æthelwold, some time between 1005 and his death in 1010.49 The purpose of these texts—both ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’—was not to construct or judge the power and performance of an individual, but, rather, to explore his life as an exemplary model. This objective is consonant with a concern for exemplarity that is more broadly evident in the medieval period, and can be found in the encomiastic portraits of Bede and, later, William of Malmesbury. Arguably, it can also be traced back to classical models provided by Valerius Maximus’ De factis et dictis memorabilibus, Tacitus’ Agricola, and Suetonius’ De viris illustribus.50 For later writers, however, the utility of exemplarity as a strategy for instruction was tempered by self-imposed limitations upon the examples deemed appropriate to that instruction. In the main, late antique and early medieval authors eschewed pagan models in favour of figures drawn from the Old Testament.51 Similarly, medieval historical writers seem, on the whole, more comfortable with religious exemplars, in the form of hagiographical portraits of religious figures from the recent past, than they are with the secular figures of the classical past. This may, in part, be attributed to a realignment of the

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Historiography and Biography balance between secular and ecclesiastical power structures, or, perhaps better, to a shift in the emphasis of educational practices and structures, away from the more secular patterns of the classical and even late antique periods, and towards the focus upon monastic structures and patristic texts in the Middle Ages. At any rate, we observe medieval English authors once again adapting models provided by secular texts of the classical past to fit their own, quite different, purposes in the period. Moreover, the generic diversity of authors such as Bede and Asser—who wrote not only ‘national histories’ but also encomiastic biographical or hagiographical portraits—suggests that they did so with an awareness of the different opportunities and restrictions that those models presented. In the period up to the Conquest, then, English writers can be observed accessing, adopting, and adapting both thematic and structural elements drawn from classical historiography and biography. Their attempts to engage with the rich textual traditions of these genres may seem clumsy, but it is, perhaps, better to attribute their apparent lack of sophistication to the fact that authors of the period were hampered by a relative dearth of examples upon which to draw, and a rather inflexible attitude towards the relationship between pagan and Christian texts, authors, and examples. Bede’s explicit (if, in actuality, incomplete) eschewal of pagan authors and examples in favour of biblical and Christian ones served to perpetuate a tension between the two that was not to be fully resolved until the works of William of Malmesbury. He subsumed the history of the British nation within a history of Christianity in Britain, and in the process produced a form of historiography that was simultaneously expansive and limited in its focus. He embraced a salvific vision of temporality, which rendered it difficult to embrace classical patterns of exemplarity, which had been formulated within the context of cyclical views of the passage of time. Bede’s reputation, example, and influence were to dominate the centuries that followed. But, unlike the more expansive, heterogeneous model provided by Nennius’ Historia Britonum or the secular, reflective, multivariate structure of the vernacular Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the principles established by Bede were also to restrict narrative historiography of the pre-Conquest period to a rather limited collection of themes, subjects, and textual models. This is not to fault Bede, or to offer any sort of rebuttal to William of Malmesbury’s famous opinion of his predecessor as the only Latin historiographer to have written anything worthy of attention concerning the history of Britain prior to William’s own time. It is, however, to argue that in the period between the sixth and the eleventh centuries, those English authors who wrote history acknowledged and even accepted the model of generic heterogeneity provided by the fourth-century proponents of historiography and biography with whom we began. They also possessed a multitude of approaches to the subject of history, and a diversity of attitudes and opinions about its utility and worth, although those notions of history and the past did not necessarily resemble those of classical writers.52 On the other hand, these authors did not embrace the formal

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature heterogeneity of the genres in a manner analogous to their fourth-century predecessors. Indeed, it is not until the second half of the twelfth century that we observe practitioners manipulating genre boundaries, techniques of writing, and formal characteristics with a confidence that can be compared to writers of the classical and late antique periods.53 Post-Conquest authors lived and wrote in a world that was self-­ consciously multilingual and newly multicultural. They encountered and embraced newly available classical texts from continental monasteries and libraries, and employed the writing of history and biography in the projects of both justifying and  challenging existing social, economic, and political structures. It is to these authors and their world that we now turn.

Manipulations of Classical Historiography and Biography It is well beyond the scope of this essay to explore the effects upon English social, economic, cultural, and political structures of the series of political perturbations and military defeats of the eleventh century that culminated in the battle of Hastings.54 However, for our present purposes, it is certainly true that, in the century following the Conquest, there was an efflorescence of historiographical writing, an expansion in the number of texts available to authors wishing to draw inspiration from classical models, and a re-emergence of genres of writing that had seemingly lain dormant. It is in this period that we catch glimpses of authors accessing texts that had long been unavailable in Britain, such as the Scriptores historiae augustae which clearly informs the writings of John of Salisbury.55 We observe historians explicitly and self-consciously reshaping the past in order to reflect their visions of the present. Henry of Huntingdon, for example, a man of mixed Saxon and Norman blood, wrote a Historia Anglorum which, in its various versions and reworkings, exhibits both a certain ambivalence about the relationship between the two groups and a determined effort to forge a new, collaborative vision of that relationship.56 We see writers experimenting with genre boundaries and combining different elements of historiography in innovative and unexpected ways. Scholars have long noted, for example, the strange paradox that the most popular historical work of the period was not, strictly speaking, a historical work at all—namely, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, a text which moves freely between the genres of narrative history and romance. The most proximate historiographical influences for these developments are works by Norman historians such as William of Jumièges, William of Poitiers, and Orderic Vitalis.57 These authors reinvigorated and reinterpreted the role and value of secular national historiography and biography, particularly as vehicles for advancing the claims of specific rulers and their families. In the process, they reconnected

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Historiography and Biography biography, history, and panegyric in ways that are strongly redolent of late antique literature, ascribing to the monarch a centrality that he had not enjoyed in the ensuing centuries.58 This re-embrace of the contemporary, political function of historiography must be placed alongside the enduring model provided by Bede of sacred national history as a vehicle for furthering the Christian ethic. Moreover, both models were also filtered through a newly heightened consciousness of the potential for ethnic diversity to have very real political and cultural implications. The new social and cultural reality had as a further corollary a burgeoning interest in elaborating upon both the complex processes that went in to the ethnogenesis of the English nation and the diverse characteristics of those groups who interacted with that nation, but were not, strictly speaking, a part of it. In literary terms, these cultural and ideological processes took place within the context of a renewed engagement with the techniques, themes, and topoi of classical historiography. As a consequence, authors of the period exhibit a much richer and more complex array of classical influences than their pre-Conquest predecessors. Historians of the period reveal a keen awareness of the role and responsibilities of the historian. Their statements in this regard are refreshingly polyphonous, and draw equally upon themes familiar from classical historiography and expectations derived from Christian writing of the intervening centuries. In the ‘Prologue’ to his Historia Anglorum, for example, Henry of Huntingdon provides a full—if, perhaps, somewhat rote-seeming—catalogue of the virtues of history (Historia Anglorum, pr. 1):59 Cum in omni fere literarum studio dulce laboris lenimen et summum doloris solamen, dum vivitur, insitum considerem, tum delectabilius et majoris praerogativa claritatis historiarum splendorem amplectendum crediderim. Nihil namque magis in vita egregium, quam vitae calles egregie indagare et frequentare. Ubi autem floridius nitescit virorum fortium magnificentia, prudentium sapientia, justorum judicia, temperatorum modestia, quam in rerum contextu gestarum? (As the pursuit of learning in all its branches affords, according to my way of thinking, the sweetest earthly mitigation of trouble and consolation in grief, so I consider that precedence must be assigned to History, as both the most delightful of studies and the one which is invested with the noblest and brightest prerogatives. Indeed, there is nothing in this world more excellent than accurately to investigate and trace out the course of worldly affairs. For where is exhibited in a more lively manner the grandeur of heroic men, the wisdom of the prudent, the uprightness of the just, and the moderation of the temperate, than in the series of actions which history records?)

Henry goes on to adduce a series of exemplary figures, grouping them into ‘profane’ and ‘sacred’. There is nothing unusual or noteworthy about his list, and we can well imagine that it was drawn from a florilegium, epitome, or exemplary handbook of some sort. But the impulse to combine classical and Christian traditions is clear, and signals the re-emergence of a more broadly focused approach to

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature exemplarity, which would move well beyond the Old and New Testament examples which had been the focus of authors such as Gildas and Bede. The polyphony of Henry’s inheritance from his predecessors, and his rather loose application of the erstwhile distinction between ‘Christian-ecclesiastical’ and ‘pagan-secular’ approaches, is evident elsewhere in his work as well—as, for example, where he adopts a view of the various invasions of England as representing a series of plagues upon the English people, and in the process both accesses themes from the Old Testament and evokes the moralizing discourse that characterized the work of Salvian and Orosius, but in a project that follows a somewhat different narrative trajectory from those authors.60 More elegant and elaborate than Henry’s catalogue of benefits is John of Salisbury’s Historia pontificalis, with its combination of an explicitly Christian interest in moral exemplarity with a clear-eyed appreciation of the contemporary relevance of his work:61 Idem habens propositum, coetaneis et posteris proficiendi, quod cronici scriptores alii/ ante me noscuntur habuisse. Horum uero omnium uniformis intentio est, scitu digna referre, ut per ea que facta sunt conspiciantur inuisibilia Dei, et quasi propositis exemplis premii uel pene, reddant homines in timore Domini et cultu iustitie cautiores… Valet etiam noticia cronicorum ad statuendas uel euacuandas prescriptiones et priuilegia roboranda uel infirmanda . . . (My aim, like that of other chroniclers before me, shall be to profit my contemporaries and future generations. For all these chronicles have had a single purpose: to relate noteworthy matters, so that the invisible things of God may be clearly seen by the things that are done, and men may by examples of reward or punishment be made more zealous in the fear of God and the pursuit of justice . . . Besides, the records of the chronicles are valuable for establishing or abolishing customs, for strengthening or destroying privileges . . .)

John’s emphasis upon the use to which written accounts of the past could be put in contemporary disputes over privileges is echoed in other works of the period, and it is surely not a coincidence that histories of the twelfth century exhibit a new interest in enumerating the textual foundations upon which their accounts rest. This impulse is part of a broader concern for documentation in the years following the Norman Conquest, and can be traced, at least in part, to the desire to ensure that property and other rights were recognized and preserved in the period.62 However, John’s decision to label his work a chronicle should give us pause. His text bears much more resemblance to a work of narrative historiography than it does to the earlier phases, at least, of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. As a consequence, his  explicit claim about the genre of his work threatens to collapse the barrier between the two—a barrier that a slightly later contemporary of John’s, Gervase of Canterbury, sought to bolster when he deprecated his own chronicle as a mere work of scissors and paste, comparing it unfavourably with the elegant language and 338

Historiography and Biography noble subject of the historian. In making this distinction, Gervase quotes Virgil and Horace, and also cites Lucan’s Bellum civile, so we should not necessarily take his self-effacing claims at face value.63 Indeed, the contrast between his style and his claims as well as the rather different situation painted by John of Salisbury remind us of the somewhat fluid and unsystematic relationship between narrative history and the chronicle throughout the medieval period. Moreover, both authors also reveal a greater degree of comfort than was present among their pre-Conquest predecessors with the idea of deliberately manipulating the conventions of a particular genre, and of transcending the boundaries that it was understood to entail. For William of Malmesbury, the relationship between the past and the present needed to be carefully negotiated, particularly in light of the historian’s ultimate aim of serving as a witness for generations to come (Gesta regum Anglorum, I. prol. 7–8):64 [N]ichil de retro actis preter coherentiam annorum pro uero pacisci; fides dictorum penes auctores erit. Quicquid uero de recentioribus aetatibus apposui, uel ipse uidi, uel a uiris fide dignis audiui. Ceterum, in utrumvis partem, presentium non magnipendo iuditium; habiturus, ut spero, apud posteros, post decessum amoris et liuoris, si non eloquentiae titulum, saltem industriae testimonium. (I guarantee the truth of nothing in past time except the sequence of events; the credit of my narrative must rest with my authorities. But whatsoever I have added out of recent history, I have either seen myself or heard from men who can be trusted. In any case, I do not greatly value the judgment of my contemporaries either way; posterity, I trust, when love and envy are no more, if it cannot praise my eloquence, at least will pay a tribute to my diligence.)

William’s approach to his sources, the way that he chooses to explain it, and his attitude towards the present and future reception of his work all rest upon classical models and precedents. In addition, we catch glimpses of both our fourth-century historiographers and Bede in his (somewhat disingenuous) concluding contrast between diligence and eloquence. Elsewhere in William’s writings, we witness the re-emergence of a willingness to hold the ruler up to judgement in a manner comparable to authors of the Roman period.65 Most particularly, in the comments he offers as part of his character portrait of King Stephen in his Historia novella, there appear to be strong resemblances with comparable observations of emperors made by Ammianus Marcellinus, which themselves appear to be distillations of the more elaborate notices of Suetonius (Historia novella, c. 15):66 Vir quidem impiger sed imprudens, armis strenuus, immodici animi ad quelibet ardua inchoanda, lenis et exorabilis hostibus, affabilis omnibus: cuius cum dulcedinem in promissis suspiceres, ueritatem tamen dictorum et promissorum efficatiam desiderares. (He was a man of energy but little judgement, active in war, of extraordinary spirit in undertaking any difficult tasks, lenient to his enemies and easily appeased, courteous

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature to all: though you admired his kindness in promising, still you felt his words lacked truth and his promises fulfilment.)

This impulse towards the biographical finds renewed vigour in the period also in the writings of Gerald of Wales. Gerald effectively combined the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred’ elements of biographical writing in the project he undertook for the cathedral of Lincoln. This project entailed the confection of a Life of the cathedral’s first bishop, Remigius de Fécamp (1072–92), to which he appended accounts of the lives of subsequent bishops up to St Hugh of Avalon (1186–1200). Consequently, the text fits with other contemporary historical undertakings, for it marries the historiographical project with the urge towards documentation in a contemporary context. But it is also tempting to interpret this as a piece of exemplary biography in the mode of the Second Sophistic author, Plutarch, for to his list of bishops’ lives Gerald added a further section on six contemporary churchmen, arranged in three sets of pairs.67 This paired structure is clearly intentional, and speaks to Gerald’s boldness in simultaneously combining and appreciating the generic opportunities provided by a number of complementary biographical forms. Of course, Gerald was not the only writer of the period who successfully manipulated and exploited tropes of classical prose writing. The authority of written sources, the complementary relationship between eloquence and diligence, and the proper subject matter for history are all familiar themes in both ancient and medieval historiography. In the hands of Geoffrey of Monmouth, these themes receive a deliberately mischievous treatment. In the dedicatory letter to his Historia regum Britanniae, Geoffrey pays lip-service to the authority of texts when he speaks of a ‘certain ancient book’ given to him by William, archdeacon of Oxford. This book, he claims, was the genesis of the present project, which he describes in the following terms (Historia regum Britanniae 1.1):68 Falerata uerba non collegerim agresti tamen stilo proprio propriisque calamis contentus. Codicem illum in latinum sermonem trasferre curaui. Nam si ampullosis dictionibus paginam illinissem tedium legentibus ingererem dum magis in exponendis uerbis quam in hystoria intelligenda ipsos commorari oportet. (Though I had not made fine language my study, by collecting florid expressions from other authors, yet contented with my own homely style, I undertook the translation of that book into Latin. For if I had swelled the pages with rhetorical flourishes, I must have tired my readers, by employing their attention more upon my words than upon the history.)

Geoffrey’s professed concern for style and truthfulness echoes Bede’s preference for plain language over rhetorical excess, and offers an illuminating counterpoint to the classical concern with rhetorical elegance. However, underneath these claims merely to be completing a mechanical task in a straightforward way lurks a methodologically sophisticated and intellectually playful project.69 Geoffrey incorporated thematic

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Historiography and Biography and stylistic elements from a range of different genres, freely invented sources, and self-confidently created a work that was equal parts careful scholarship and fabulous fiction. In its generic hybridity, then, Geoffrey’s text can be compared with Lucan’s work of poetic historiography, the Bellum civile, which enjoyed a revival in popularity in the period. But parallels with the anonymous author of the Scriptores historiae augustae are also suggestive, and while it would be speculative to aver that Geoffrey is involved in a comparable project, it is certainly the case that the text was known in England in the period. At any rate, Geoffrey’s work does at least stand as a work of national historiography, and in this it can be placed alongside the works of his fellow historical writers in the period. It is not difficult to explain this heightened interest in re-establishing or reconstituting the story of England’s history, but it is nonetheless interesting to note in passing the ways in which classical techniques were reimported in the project of  reformulating the model provided by Bede. Most particularly, we observe the re-emergence of an interest in ethnography in the period. The most comprehensive exponent of the genre is Gerald of Wales, who can justifiably be credited with rebuilding ethnographic writing as a literary form out of scraps and fragments from classical writers, as well as the more explicit comments and observations contained, for example, in the various versions and continuations of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.70 Once again, just as in the case of his biographical works, Gerald’s boldness and creativity is remarkable. Once again, too, we witness hybridity and mixing, this time between what are generally understood to be ‘classical’ and ‘native’ historiographical forms. This hybridity was matched by a mixing of ethnic groups and languages in contemporary English society, a phenomenon exemplified by the family background of William of Malmesbury, or the consciousness of ethnic diversity and hybridity that underpin the writings of John of Salisbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. As a consequence of this textual, thematic, and cultural hybridity, the national histories of these writers take on a more synthetic character than is present in the model provided by Bede. It would therefore seem that the opinions of twelfth-century authors on the purpose of history and the expectations placed upon historians echo those of their English predecessors, but are less self-consciously concerned about negotiating the relationship between pagan and Christian examples, and between secular and sacred themes. It is this comfort with thematic heterogeneity, and their technical proficiency at manipulating it, that separates the historians of the twelfth century from their pre-Conquest fellows. It would, of course, be a gross oversimplification to suggest that the renewed embrace of classical historiography in the post-Conquest period, and the reinvigorated engagement with the topoi and tropes of the genre can be ascribed solely to the Norman Conquest. But it is certainly the case that a congeries of factors combined in the period, with the result that historians and biographers can be observed accessing and manipulating familiar themes of classical historiography

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature in innovative ways. It can further be argued that those manipulations may be interpreted as responses to a collection of cultural, social, and political factors which accompanied the reformulation of English society in the wake of the battle of Hastings. It is not surprising that classical texts were exploited in these projects, for they continued to sit at the heart of medieval educational structures (at least until the thirteenth century, when a stronger influence in legal and administrative texts emerged) and the examples that they provided could be used to support or illustrate a whole range of complementary—or even contradictory—claims.

Conclusions The reception of classical historiography and biography in the English Middle Ages is a rather richer and more complex phenomenon than the enumeration of known texts and authors, or the identification of explicit references or quotations from particular sources might suggest. While there can be no doubt that there were both subtle and profound differences between the aims and intentions of medieval historians and those of the Roman period,71 it is also clear that the forms, techniques, and themes of classical historiography and biography were ever present in the historical writings of the English Middle Ages. In some contexts, those techniques and themes can be discerned as much by their deliberate omission as by their implicit presence—as, for example, in the citation strategies of Bede or the decision by chroniclers to eschew narrative historiography in spite of their apparent familiarity with the form. In others, they occur as a result of indirect inheritance through Christian writers of the late antique period—as the ever-present influence of the fourth-century biographer, historian, and chronographer Eusebius reveals. Components of classical historiography pop up in genres that, at first glance, do not seem to resemble classical forms at all—the ethnographic exegeses of the chronicles, for example, or the infiltration of structures and strategies drawn from secular biography into hagiographical texts. Finally, while writers of the period between Bede and the Norman Conquest are less comfortable than their late antique predecessors with the opportunities that the genres of historiography and biography offered, in the twelfth century authors begin again to manipulate themes, forms, and generic expectations in a manner comparable to the ablest and  most sophisticated practitioners of the classical and late antique periods. It is  true that the ‘classicizing’ elements of medieval English works of history did not  render those texts ‘classical’. But, when authors of the period accessed the writings of antiquity in their own works, their intention was not necessarily to imitate or adopt a pure, idealized, and unchanging form. It was, rather to adapt a dynamic, flexible set of principles and practices for their own purposes, and in their own contexts.

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Notes   Essential reading for this topic would include Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York, 1966); Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England: c.550 to c.1307 (Ithaca, NY, 1974); Andrew Galloway, ‘Writing History in England’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 255–83; Geoffrey Martin and Rodney M. Thomson, ‘History and History Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book, vol. 2, 1100–1400, eds Nigel J. Morgan and Rodney M. Thomson (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 397–415; Matthew Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History 400–1500 (Manchester, 2011). 2   For the deep and enduring enmeshment of Christian thinking, writing, and scholarship with pagan predecessors, see, for example, Winthrop Wetherbee, ‘From Late Antiquity to the Twelfth Century’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages, eds Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 97–144. 3  A fine entry point into this topic is John O. Ward, ‘Some Principles of Rhetorical Historiography in the Twelfth Century’, in Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, ed. Ernst Breisach (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1985), pp. 103–65. 4   The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus, trans. J. C. Rolfe, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1939–50). 5  Eutropius, Breviarium ab urbe condita, ed. C. Santini (Leipzig, 1979); translation from Abridgment of Roman History, in Justin Cornelius Nepos, and Eutropius: Literally Translated, trans. John Selby Watson (1886), p. 535. 6  The locus classicus is probably Livy Ab urbe condita praef. There exist many excellent surveys of the nature and characteristics of Roman historiography. For comprehensive surveys of issues, themes, and the state of the question, see A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography, ed. John Marincola, 2 vols (Malden, Mass., 2007); The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians, ed. Andrew Feldherr (Cambridge, 2009). 7   See the stimulating essay of Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Fabius Pictor and the Origins of National Historiography’, in his The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, ed. Anne Marie Meyer (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), pp. 80–108. 8   Momigliano, ‘Origins of National Historiography’, pp. 84–7. 9  Robert R. Bartlett, ‘Gerald’s Ethnographic Achievement’, in Medieval Ethnographies: European Perceptions of the World Beyond, ed. Joan-Pau Rubiés (Aldershot and Burlington, 2009), pp. 231–72; see also Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, pp. 305–14. 10   See, in particular, Denis Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History. (Berkeley, 2007); Denis Feeney, ‘Time’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians, ed. Feldherr, pp. 139–51. 11   Ruth Morse, ‘Medieval Biography: History as a Branch of Literature’, Modern Language Review 80 (1985), 257–68. 12   Marco Formisano, ‘Late Antiquity, New Departures’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, eds Ralph J. Hexter and David Townsend (Oxford, 2012), pp. 509–34 (at p. 520). 1

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 13   The literature on the Scriptores historiae augustae is vast. For brief, pertinent comments, see Alan Cameron, ‘The Historia Augusta’, in his The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford, 2011), pp.  743–82 (at p. 771). For the influence of this text upon the historiography of medieval Europe, see Jean-Pierre Callu, Olivier Desbordes, and Cécile Bertrand-Dagenbach, ‘L’Histoire auguste et l’historiographie médiévale’, Revue d’histoire des textes 14–15 (1984–5), 97–130. 14   Scriptores historiae augustae, trans. David Magie, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1921–32; repr. 2006). 15   For the mutual interactions between history and fiction in the Roman period more generally, see, for example, G. W. Bowersock, Fiction as History: Nero to Julian (Berkeley, 1994). With specific reference to the Scriptores historiae augustae, R. Syme, ‘Fictional History Old and New: Hadrian’, in his Roman Papers 6, ed. A. R. Birley (Oxford, 1991), pp. 157–81. For satirical elements in the Scriptores historiae augustae, see, among others, the comments of Jean-Pierre Callu in the introduction to his edition of the text: Histoire auguste, 1.1, Introduction générale, vies d’Hadrien, Aelius, Antonin, ed. Jean-Pierre Callu (Paris, 1992). 16   Averil Cameron, ‘Remaking the Past’, in Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, eds G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), pp. 1–20. 17   Still relevant is Hanning, Vision of History, particularly pp. 5–29, where he emphasizes Eusebius’ vision of the place of the Roman Empire in God’s scheme. 18   For notions of a canon in an educational context, see Rita Copeland, ‘Producing the Lector’, in Medieval and Early Modern Authorship, eds Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne (Tübingen, 2011), pp. 231–49. 19   The indispensable work on transmission of classical texts in the medieval period remains Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford, 1983). For an excellent synthetic treatment of the influence and survival of classical texts in medieval historiography, see Birger Munk Olsen, ‘La Diffusion et l’étude des historiens antiques au xiie siècle’, in Mediaeval Antiquity, eds Andries Welkenhuysen, Herman Braet, and Werner Verbere (Leuven, 1995), pp. 21–43, which includes references to earlier scholarship. Also, focusing upon a slightly earlier period, Arnaud Knaepen, ‘L’Histoire gréco-romaine dans les sources littéraires latines de la première moitié du IXe siècle: quelques conclusions provisoires’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 79 (2001), 341–72. With specific reference to the British Isles, T.  Julian Brown, ‘An Historical Introduction to the Use of Classical Latin Authors in the British Isles from the Fifth to the Eleventh Century’, in La cultura antica nell’Occidente Latino dal VII all’XI secolo: 18–24 aprile 1974. Atti delle Settimane 22 (Spoleto, 1975), 237–99 (republished in A Paleographer’s View: The Selected Writings of Julian Brown, eds Janet Bately, Michelle P. Brown, and Jane Roberts (1993), pp. 141–77 and 276–84). The broad contours in the development of British historiographical writing can be gleaned from Hanning, Vision of History; Gransden, Historical Writing; Galloway, ‘Writing History’; Martin and Thomson, ‘History and History Books’. 20   Cf. the more broadly focused comments of Munk Olsen, ‘La Diffusion et l’étude des historiens’, p. 22.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 31   Latin text and translation taken from Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, ed. and trans. M. Winterbottom (1978). 32   Rex Gardner, ‘Gildas’ New Testament Models’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 30 (1995), 1–12; Hanning, Vision of History, pp. 46–8. 33   The attribution of this text to Nennius and the authenticity of the ‘Prologue’—which is known from five manuscripts, the earliest of which is dated to the eleventh century—has long been a subject of debate. For a clear statement of the terms in which that debate has been transacted and a cogent argument in favour of attributing the ‘Prologue’ to Nennius and dating both it and the text that it precedes to a period before 916, see P. J. C. Field, ‘Nennius and his History’, Studia Celtica 30 (1996), 159–65. For our current purposes, the sources mentioned in the ‘Prologue’ seem to reflect fairly accurately those used throughout the work, and, in any case, what is most important is the explicit expression of a particular historiographical method. 34   Latin text and translation from Nennius, Historia Britonum: The History of the Britons Attributed to Nennius, trans. Richard Rowley (Lampeter, 2005). For consistency we have used the spelling ‘Britonum’ as in Rowley’s edition, although ‘Brittonum’ is also an accepted form. 35  Hanning, Vision of History, pp. 96–102. For a contextualization of ninth-century reception and understandings of classical history and historiography, cf. Knaepen, ‘L’Histoire gréco-­ romaine’. Also Lars Boje Mortensen, ‘Working with Ancient Roman History: A Comparison of Carolingian and Twelfth-Century Scholarly Endeavours’, in Gli umanesimi medievali: atti del II Congresso dell’‘Internationales Mittellateinerkomitee’ Firenze, Certosa del Galluzzo, 11–15 settembre 1993, ed. Claudio Leonardi (Firenze, 1998), pp. 411–20. 36  Hanning, Vision of History, pp. 108–10. 37   On the intimate intermingling of ‘national’ and ‘ecclesiastical’ histories, see Johnson and Wogan-Browne, ‘National, World, and Women’s History’, pp. 104–5. Also Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 248. 38   For Gregory of Tours, his claimed predecessors, and projected model, see Cameron, ‘Remaking the Past’, p. 14. Gregory’s influence on subsequent historiographical and other writing has been elegantly explored by John J. Contreni, ‘Reading Gregory of Tours in the Middle Ages’, in The World of Gregory of Tours, eds Kathleen Mitchell and Ian Wood (Leiden, 2002), pp. 419–34. 39   Cf. Gransden, Historical Writing, pp. 22; 154–6. For the Christians as a ‘nation’ in late antique and early medieval historiography, Momigliano, ‘Origins of National Historiography’, p. 87. Also Momigliano, ‘The Origins of Ecclesiastical Historiography’, in Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, ed. Meyer, pp. 132–52. 40   Cf. the comments of Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Historical Writing’, in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, eds Christopher Harper-Bill and Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge and Rochester, 2003), pp. 103–21 (at p. 109); and Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, pp. 208–15. Also, for much fuller explorations of this curious text, see Andy Orchard, ‘The Literary Background to the Encomium Emmae Reginae’, Journal of Medieval Latin 11 (2001), 156–83; Elizabeth Tyler, ‘Fictions of Family: The Encomium Emmae Reginae and Virgil’s Aeneid’, Viator 36 (2005), 149–79.

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Historiography and Biography 41  Gransden, Historical Writing, pp. 41, 62, 114–15; Galloway, ‘Writing History’, p. 260; van Houts, ‘Historical Writing’, pp. 108–9. 42  Hanning, Vision of History, p. 48. 43   Barbara Yorke, ‘Anglo-Saxon Origin Legends’, in Myth, Rulership, Church, and Charters: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks, eds Julia Barrow and Andrew Wareham (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 15–29. Also Hanning, Vision of History, pp. 102–8. For the lack of ethnographic writing in  narrative historiography in this period, Bartlett, ‘Gerald’s Ethnographic Achievement’, pp. 179–80. Cf. also Galloway, ‘Writing History’, p. 260. 44   See Morse, ‘Medieval Biography’ for the complex origin and transmission of the themes and conventions of classical biography into the medieval period. Still, the influence of Sallust in medieval contexts should not be underestimated: see Beryl Smalley, ‘Sallust in the Middle Ages’, in Classical Influences on European Culture a.d. 500–1500, ed. R. R. Bolger (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 165–75; Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, pp. 42–7. Also, for Sallust’s enduring influence into the high medieval period, and his enlistment in debates over intensely contemporary concerns, see Andrew Galloway, ‘Communities, Crowd-Theory, and MobTheory in Late-Fourteenth Century English History Writing and Poetry’, in Mobs: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry, eds Nancy van Deusen and Leonard Michael Koff (Leiden, 2012), pp. 141–64. 45   There has been much written on the classical texts available in the British Isles over this period. Still fundamental is Reynolds, Scribes and Scholars, pp. 70–100. For soundings into the  relationship between Latin and vernacular language and literature see, for example, R. L. Thomson, ‘British Latin and English History: Nennius and Asser’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society: Literary and Historical Section 18 (1982), 38–53. More recently, attention has begun to focus upon the use of classical texts in education in the period. Cf., for a detailed explication of one particular set of recommendations, Copeland, ‘Producing the Lector’. Also, more broadly, Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library; Scott Gwara, ‘Anglo-Saxon Schoolbooks’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain 1, c.400–1100, ed. Richard Gameson (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 507–24. 46   For the intimate connection between ruler and state, and the role of textuality in the construction of imperial power, see Formisano, ‘Late Antiquity, New Departures’, p. 520. 47   Cameron, ‘Remaking the Past’, p. 14. 48   Cf. W. S. M. Nicoll, ‘Some Passages in Einhard’s Vita Karoli in Relation to Suetonius’, Medium Ævum 44 (1975), 117–20; Rosamund McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004), p. 41. 49  Gransden, Historical Writing, pp. 129–32. 50   Cf. Morse, ‘Medieval Biography’, p. 258 on the need to abandon a strict dichotomy between ‘Suetonian’ and ‘Plutarchian’ models of biography for medieval writers. Morse’s argument can be taken further still, and the fulcrum point at which the two models meet identified as Eusebius’ Vita Constantini, which is also likely to be a key text for later writers to emulate. On exemplarity in ancient historiography, see now the brief orienting discussion of  Matthew Roller, ‘The Exemplary Past in Roman Historiography and Culture’, in The

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians, ed. Feldherr, pp. 214–30. On the influence of classical rhetoric in the construction of exemplarity in this period, see Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, pp. 154–71. 51  Hanning, Vision of History, pp. 13–14, 47–8, 55–9. 52  Hanning, Vision of History, pp. 1–43 continues to be a cogent account. For a detailed case study of the transformation in the medieval period of thematic paradigms of classical and late antique historiography, see Malcolm Godden, ‘The Anglo-Saxons and the Goths: Rewriting the Sack of Rome’, Anglo-Saxon England 31 (2002), 47–68. 53  Reynolds, Scribes and Scholars, pp. 98–9 overstates his argument only slightly when he identifies the twelfth century as the period when the techniques of historiographical writing become important again. For a fuller exposition of practices of history writing in Europe during the so-called ‘long twelfth century’, see Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, pp. 429–41. 54   Brief comments in van Houts, ‘Historical Writing’, pp. 120–1. 55  Reynolds, Scribes and Scholars, p. 99. 56   John Gillingham, ‘Henry of Huntingdon and the Twelfth-Century Revival of the English Nation’, in Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, eds Simon Forde et al. (Leeds, 1995), pp. 75–101 offers a full discussion of this thorny subject, and Henry’s role in asserting a shared notion of Englishness in the period. 57  Gransden, Historical Writing, pp. 136, 198; van Houts, ‘Historical Writing’, pp. 105–6. 58   Cf. Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 206. Also, recently, James Plumtree, ‘Stories of the Death of Kings: Retelling the Demise and Burial of William I, William II and Henry I’, Southern African Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21 (2012), 1–30. 59   Text and translation from Henry of Huntingdon, The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon, ed. and trans. Thomas Forester (1853). 60   Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford, 1996), pp. 14–15, 338–41, with Galloway, ‘Writing History’, p. 263. 61   Text and translation in John of Salisbury’s Memoirs of the Papal Court (Historia pontificalis), ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall (Edinburgh and New York, 1956), p. 3. 62   Martin and Thomson, ‘History and History Books’, p. 398; Galloway, ‘Writing History’, p. 260. 63   Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols (1879–80), 1, 87–8, with Galloway, ‘Writing History’, p. 256. 64   Text and translation from William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings 1, eds and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford, 1998–9), with very slight modifications. Cf. the sentiments William expresses about the role of the historian in the preface to his Polyhistor (William of Malmesbury, Polyhistor: A Critical Edition, ed. H. Testroet-Ouellete (Binghamton, NY, 1982), p. 37), with the gloss and further comments of Munk Olsen, ‘La Diffusion et l’étude des historiens’, p. 28. 65  Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 170; Joan Haahr, ‘William of Malmesbury’s Roman Models: Suetonius and Lucan’, in The Classics in the Middle Ages: Papers of the Twentieth Annual Conference

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Historiography and Biography of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, eds Aldo S. Bernardo and Saul Levin (Binghamton, NY, 1990), pp. 165–73. Galloway, ‘Writing History’, p. 265 notes the care with which William’s character portraits are drawn in the Historia novella. Also Björn Weiler, ‘William of Malmesbury, King Henry I, and the Gesta regum Anglorum’, in Anglo-Norman Studies XXXI: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2008, ed. C. P. Lewis (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 157–76; Plumtree, ‘Death of Kings’. 66  Latin text and translation taken from William of Malmesbury, Historia novella: The Contemporary History, ed. Edmund King, trans. K. R. Potter (Oxford, 1998). 67   Gerald of Wales, Vita Sancti Remigii, in Giraldi Cambrensis opera 7, eds J. S. Brewer et al., 8 vols (1861–91), with Gransden, Historical Writing, pp. 310–11. It is true that the predominance of Latin over Greek in the English Middle Ages tended to diminish the influence of Plutarch upon writers of the period, but it seems plausible that the structure was preserved through some other means. For general comments, Morse, ‘Medieval Biography’, p. 258. 68   Latin text and translation from Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of the De gestis Britonum [Historia regum Britanniae], eds and trans. Neil Wright and Michael D. Reeve (Woodbridge, 2007). 69   A detailed exploration of Geoffrey’s aims and purpose may be found in John Gillingham, ‘The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain’, in  Anglo-Norman Studies XIII: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1990, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 99–118. Cf. the briefer remarks of Johnson and Wogan-Browne, ‘National, World, and Women’s History’, p. 101. 70   Bartlett, ‘Gerald’s Ethnographic Achievement’. 71  Hanning, Vision of History; Richard Godden, ‘The Medieval Sense of History’, in Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, eds Stephen Harris and Bryon Grigsby (New York, 2008), pp. 204–12; R. W. Southern, ‘The Place of England in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, History 155 (1960), 201–16.

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Chapter 17

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Prudentius and the Late Classical Biblical Epics of Juvencus, Proba, Sedulius, Arator, and Avitus Ad Putter

This chapter examines a group of early Christian-Latin poets who cast the Bible into epic form, and so initiated a long tradition of biblical verse paraphrase which continued uninterrupted through the Middle Ages and right up to Milton. Prudentius stands apart from this group, since he did not produce a biblical epic; but he incorporated Bible stories across the full range of his poems and exerted considerable influence on later biblical versifiers and other writers.1 To anyone interested in the reception of classical literature in the Middle Ages, these poets have a double significance, since they straddled two literary worlds: the world of Latin antiquity and classical poetry and that of Christianity and Scripture. On the one hand, they were Christian poets who had to decide what to do with the pagan literary heritage absorbed by every schoolboy in the period. The reception of the classics into a Christian world really begins with these writers. On the other hand, because they, too, wrote works that were widely read in the Middle Ages, we shall also need to consider their own reception. I shall therefore approach these writers from both angles of reception history: as early Christian recipients of the classics and as late antique poets, who, as we shall see, quickly acquired canonical status in their own right.

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature

Juvencus Very little is known about Juvencus except that he was a Spanish priest and probably lived in Elliberi, where he may have been bishop.2 His Evangelia is the earliest Christian-Latin poem that can be securely dated. The epilogue mentions the Pax Christi that afforded him scope to write his Gospel poem: Haec mihi pax Christi tribuit, pax haec mihi saecli, Quam fovet indulgens terrae regnator apertae Constantinus, adest cui gratia digna merenti . . . (4.806–8)3 (The Peace of Christ has afforded me this, the peace of our time which Constantine as  beneficent ruler of the whole earth fosters who is worthy of the grace that is with him.)

St Jerome in his Chronicle entered Juvencus’ Evangelia under the year 329—which makes sense, for these lines must have been written after Constantine ended the persecution of Christians (313) and became sole ruler of the Roman Empire after the battle of Chrysopolis in 324 (see line 807), but before his death in 337.4 Juvencus’ envoy, in which he situates himself against the backdrop of world history, recalls Virgil’s Georgics, which similarly turns in its epilogue (IV, 559–61) to the personal situation of the poet himself, again seen in relation to the historic victory of an emperor (in Virgil’s case, the Emperor Octavian’s victory at the battle of Actium). Juvencus’ admiration for Virgil is more openly acknowledged in the Preface, where he declares that his goal is not (or not just) the fame achievable by poets in this world, but the immortal glory available in the life to come. God has ordained that everything worldly must end, even the Roman Empire: Immortale nihil mundi conpage tenetur, Non orbis, non regna hominum, non aurea Roma . . . Nam statuit genitor rerum inrevocabile tempus, Quo cunctum torrens rapiat flamma ultima mundum. (1–5) (Nothing contained in the structure of our world is immortal, not our planet, not men’s dominions, not even golden Rome . . . For the Father of all things has decreed an irrevocable end, when a raging final fire will devour the whole earth.)

Rome is aurea, not aeterna, and Juvencus quietly contradicts Virgil who has his Father of all men and gods, Jupiter, prophesy that Rome will not be subject to tempora but enjoy imperium sine fine (Aeneid, 1.278–9). However, while registering the fundamental disagreement between Christian and pagan philosophies, Juvencus did not repudiate the classical heritage as did so many other Christians of the period. Worldly things may be transient, but thanks to the praises of poets (laudesque poetae, 8) we remember the deeds of famous men: ‘Hos celsi cantus, Smyrnae de fonte fluentes, | illos Minciadae celebrat dulcedo Maronis’ (‘Some are praised by the elevated poems

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Prudentius and Late Classical Biblical Epics flowing from the fount of Smyrna, others by the sweetness of Minciad Maro,’ 9–10). Smyrna was reputedly Homer’s birthplace, and ‘Minciad’ alludes to the river which (as Juvencus would have known from Georgics 3.12–15) flows through the plains of Mantua, Virgil’s birthplace. If Homer and Virgil were able to bestow and acquire glory despite mixing historical legend with lies, Juvencus continues (15–21), then the Christian poet who sings of the true deeds of Christ must have a much better prospect of achieving glory both in this world and the next. Juvencus’ muse, the true author of the poem (carminis auctor), will therefore be the Holy Spirit, Juvencus being merely the singer: Ergo, age! sanctificus adsit mihi carminis auctor Spiritus, et puro mentem riget amne canentis Dulcis Iordanis, ut Christo digna loquamur. (25–8) (Therefore proceed! And let the sanctifying spirit be to me the author of this poem; and may the sweet Jordan with its pure stream water my mind as I sing this, so that I may speak worthily of Christ.)

Jordan here substitutes for Virgil’s Mincius, as Juvencus seeks to identify himself not by birthplace but rather by religion (the Jordan representing baptism). There is another pointed verbal echo of Virgil in ‘ut Christo digna loquamur’, which recalls Aeneas’ vision in the underworld of priests and upright poets who gained entrance to Elysium because they sang worthily of Phoebus (‘et Phoebo digna locuti’, Aeneid, 6.662).5 The priest and upright poet that was Juvencus hoped to gain entrance to heaven by singing worthily of Christ. Juvencus’ imitation of Virgil thus sometimes amounts to what German scholars call a Kontrastimitation,6 an imitation that highlights the differences between old and new. But as his praise of Virgil’s ‘sweetness’ suggests, his appropriation of Virgil’s style and diction more often represents an accommodating rapprochement between Scripture and classical epic. Juvencus’ account of the Massacre of the Innocents (1.224–70) illustrates his blending of the two. Juvencus’ main source for this, Matthew 2, is characteristically terse in the face of Herod’s outrage. ‘Tunc herodes . . . iratus est valde’ (‘Then Herod became very angry’) briefly hints at emotion, but matter-­offactness is promptly restored: ‘et misit et occidit omnes pueros’ (‘and he sent out men to kill all children’, Matt. 2: 16).7 Juvencus follows the biblical events closely—St Jerome, one of his earliest admirers, praised him for rendering the Bible almost word by word (‘poene ad verbum’)8—but, while there is comparatively little exegesis and digression, this faithfulness to Scripture certainly does not extend to style and diction, which in Juvencus’ case owe much more to the pagan poets than they do to the Bible. The medium of the heroic hexameter inevitably brought with it an epic mode of representation. Thus Herod is characterized as the demonic ruler: ‘wild’ (ferus, 1.257), a ‘cruel tyrant’ (saevum tyrannum, 1.252), and rex cruentus (1.1), where the high-style poeticism cruentus (blood-stained, delighting in blood; cf. Aeneid, 1.471,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 9.341) hints ominously at the blood-bath to come. His victims, tender babes, are guilty of no crime (1.262) yet ruthlessly scythed down sub ubere (cf. Aeneid, 5.285), at their mothers’ breast. The magi follow the star which ‘ploughs’ the ether with its flames (‘sulcantem flammis auras’, 1.244), in imitation of the ‘holy star’ sent by Jupiter as a good omen (Aeneid, 2.692–9), which likewise leaves a long ‘furrow’ (sulcus) of light.9 They present to the little boy—he, too, sub ubere matris—their gifts of incense, gold, and myrrh, which symbolize the triune nature of God, king, and man. This allegorical interpretation is not original with Juvencus,10 but his pithy one-liner (‘tus, aurum, murram regique hominique Deoque’, 250) made it so memorable that many later commentators on Matthew made the same exegetical point by quoting this line.11 In Michael Lapidge’s words, Juvencus ‘created, at a stroke, the diction of ChristianLatin poetry’.12 Later writers were well aware of his pioneering work. Venantius Fortunatus in his Life of St Martin (c.580) lauds Juvencus as the first to ‘sing the work of divine majesty in the art of metre’ (‘primus . . . maiestatis opus metri canit arte Iuvencus’),13 and almost all Latin biblical poets after him fell under his influence. The art of the Christian prologue, too, was one they learned from him. Not only had Juvencus made the Bible more beautiful by heightening its style, he also made the work of composing verse respectable by giving it a Christian justification: the Christian poet writes to gain eternal salvation for the soul, the point of Juvencus’ opus being that it ‘may perhaps snatch me from the fire’ (‘etenim forsan me subtrahet igni’, 22). Numerous later prologues echo this sentiment—sometimes these very words.14 Juvencus might have been able to foresee these uses of his work, but for generations of medieval students it acquired functions he could never have anticipated. His poem was adopted for use at school. Various lists of medieval school authors survive: until the early thirteenth century, they almost always include Juvencus, along with Sedulius, Arator, and Prudentius; Avitus is also often included.15 The association of these writers has a long history. Isidore of Seville (560–636) not only includes Juvencus in his list of famous writers, De viris illustribus,16 but also mentions him in his Versus in bibliotheca, a poem describing his own library. There he writes that readers tired of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Persius, and bored with Lucan, will find variety and refreshment in Prudentius. To the serious reader he offers this advice: Perlege facundi studiosum carmen Aviti. Ecce Iuvencus adest Seduliusque tibi: Ambo lingua pares, florentes versibus ambo Fonte evangelico pocula larga ferunt.17 (Study the learned poem by the eloquent Avitus; here is Juvencus for you and also Sedulius: both equal in language, and both sophisticated in their verses, they carry large cups from the fount of the Gospels.)

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Prudentius and Late Classical Biblical Epics The ‘set texts’ of the medieval school were already grouped together in Isidore’s library, where they were apparently stored together in the same book-chest (armarium).18 In the schools, Juvencus and his associates were used for teaching grammar (i.e. Latin language and literature), for which purpose poetry, and Virgil in particular, had traditionally been used. The work expected of the schoolboy was surprisingly technical. Priscian’s influential fifth-century Partitiones provides some insight into the dire uses to which great poetry was put. Priscian’s method is to go through Virgil’s Aeneid line by line, providing model questions-and-answers for teacher and pupil. Students are first required to scan the lines, dividing them into metrical feet, naming these correctly, and so on.19 Medieval schoolboys continued to be drilled in prosody, though, of course, as Latin was no longer their mother tongue, more elementary instruction in Latin had now to come first. Glossed manuscripts of Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator, and Prudentius allow us to reconstruct how these poems were used in the classroom.20 In addition to providing lexical glosses, the manuscripts offer aids to construal: often a system of dots and strokes was used to mark up words that syntactically belong together, and sometimes letters of the alphabet were written above or below words to indicate the order in which they should be translated. Glossed Juvencus manuscripts in all kinds of vernaculars (English, German, French, Irish, etc.) survive. A remarkable ninth-century manuscript, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.4.42, contains not only glosses but also the earliest surviving written records of Welsh poetry.21 Two Welsh lyrics are written in the margins. The first, beginning ‘Niguorcosam nemheunaur henoid’ (‘I shall not boast of vain things tonight’), has nothing to do with Juvencus’ Evangelia: it is an elegiac warrior’s lament. The second, however, is a religious poem in praise of God’s creation, rather like Caedmon’s hymn, except that it is closely tied to the surrounding Latin verse. It even begins in Latin: ‘Omnipotens auctor tidicones’ (‘Almighty author, you have made . . .’).22 The Latin phrase is not from Juvencus, but the person who wrote it was still tuned into the rhythms of Latin hexameter verse, where the phrase is commonly found in initial position to provide the opening dactyl and the following spondee.23 This metrical point brings me to another important function which Juvencus performed in the medieval classroom. Throughout the Middle Ages, advanced students of grammar were also expected to be able to compose Latin verse in a variety of quantitative metres.24 Medieval readers could no longer hear the quantities of Latin vowels and syllables—at least not without training—but this made the works of Juvencus and his associates more rather than less influential. The early Christian poets still knew what they were doing, and so came to be regarded as models of metrical competence. Aldhelm in his metrical treatise De pedum regulis mines Juvencus for examples to illustrate the finer points of Latin metre. For example, he points out that dicare (dedicate) has a short i, but dicere (say) has a long i—a point he establishes with reference to the opening dactyl in Juvencus (‘dicitis, agricolis nautisque venire fragosam’).25

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Especially revealing is Bede’s treatment of Juvencus in his De arte metrica. Bede considered Juvencus and the other early Christian poets to be the ‘modern poets’, as distinct from poets of the pagan past, and in his view the former offered superior models of metrical correctness.26 Bede thus extrapolated his rules of metre, not from the classics, but from Juvencus and others. When, for instance, he writes that a vowel preceding z may be either short or long (adducing Juvencus’ Evangelia 3.522 and 3.499 as evidence), he disregarded the rules of classical metre (where z was always a double consonant and the syllable ending in z consequently always long), in favour of the practice of the ‘modern poets’.27 For Bede, the early Christian poets had greater authority than Virgil.

Proba Juvencus’ Evangelia is profoundly Virgilian in its diction: according to a recent estimate, 92 per cent of the vocabulary is Virgilian.28 The next poet to be considered took this dependence on Virgil even further by retelling the Bible in verses taken entirely from Virgil’s poems. Proba was a noblewoman of high status (she belonged to the famous Petronii and married into the Anicii family), and probably converted to Christianity later in life.29 In the Preface to her Cento she says that she had earlier written an epic poem about battles (now lost) and conceived her Cento as penance for a misguided past. The work, which covers the highlights of Scripture (e.g. the Flood, the Crossing of the Red Sea, the Life of Christ), was probably composed around 360, when Julian the Apostate tried to check the rise of Christianity by banning Christian teachers from Roman schools: Virgil or Homer, he decreed, should not be taught by people who did not believe in the old gods. By making Virgil’s verses vehicles for biblical truth, Proba equipped Christians to read and teach Virgil in good faith.30 The word cento means patchwork, and is sometimes used loosely for works saturated by phrases from other poems, but Proba’s work is a cento in the strict sense. The rules of the genre were expounded by the poet Ausonius, who himself produced a cento as a funny (ridenda) wedding gift to a friend; in the accompanying letter he explains how a cento should be constructed: Variis de locis sensibusque diversis quaedam carminis structura solidatur, in unum versum ut coeant aut caesi duo aut unus et sequens medius cum medio. Nam duos iunctim locare ineptum est, et tres una serie merae nugae. (It is a poem built out of a variety of passages and different senses, in such a way that either two half-lines are joined together to form one, or one line and the following half with another half line. For taking two whole lines side-by-side is weak, and three is mere trifling.)31

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Prudentius and Late Classical Biblical Epics Ausonius goes on to say that any half-line should be a proper metrical unit: metrical caesuras in the original should be respected. The ingenuity involved in rewriting the Bible à la Virgil by these rules is considerable. To mention but one difficulty, proper names—which make characters identifiable— cannot be used since, of course, the required names (Noah, Mary, Jesus, etc.) are not in Virgil. Finding approximations to biblical verses in lines from Virgil also requires a comprehensive and elastic memory of his poetry. Although Proba has these qualities, official reviews of her Cento were critical. St Jerome was not amused: in a letter to Paulinus of Nola, he castigates puerile Homerocentones (i.e. centos based on Homer) and Vergiliocentones.32 Proba is not mentioned by name, but he must have had her in mind since he cites lines from her work (e.g. Cento 624). A work referred to as Centimetrum de Christo vergilianis compaginatum versibus (‘metrical cento of Christ compiled from Virgilian verses’) also features on the list of banned books in De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis, also known as the Gelasian Decree after the fifth-century pope Gelasius, but probably from the sixth century.33 One reason for this hostility may have been the playful associations of the genre: many centos, like Ausonius’, were artful caprices, but the Bible was no laughing ­matter. Another possible reason is that, for readers who knew their Virgil, his lines inevitably carried with them the flavours of their original context. Sometimes Proba turns these connotations to her advantage. For example, when she says (of Christ’s crib) ‘hic tibi prima, puer, fundent cunabula flores’ (‘Your cradle will be the first to pour out blossoms in profusion, just for you’, 377), she pertinently reuses two halflines from Virgil’s prophecy of a child who will usher in a new Golden Age (Eclogues 4.18, 23). By the fourth century the interpretation of the Fourth Eclogue as a prophecy of Christ’s coming was already well established, and retelling Christ’s nativity in words from it makes good sense.34 But when Proba says of Christ and the Apostles ‘tam victu revocant vires fusique per herbam | et dapibus mensas onerant et pocula ponunt’ (‘The men called back their strength with food, and, lounging on the grass, they piled the tables high and served the cups in feasting’, pp. 581–2, Aeneid, 1.214 and 1.706), the Last Supper and Dido’s banquet for Aeneas make a very odd couple. A final factor that may have counted against Proba was her gender. Jerome caricatures her as a ‘garrulous old wife’ (‘garrulosa anus’),35 and although Isidore of Seville included her in his list of famous great writers, De viris illustribus, as ‘the only woman placed between men’ (‘femina inter viros posita sola’), he ended with a donnish putdown—‘We do not admire the endeavour, though we praise the cleverness’ (‘non miramur studium, sed laudamus ingenium’)—and with a reminder that the work had been declared apocryphal in the Gelasian Decree.36 But the Church Fathers did not have the final word. Proba’s experiment with a biblical cento soon acquired a following. An example is Pomponius, whose short Virgilian cento, Versus ad Gratiam Domini, was clearly influenced by Proba. Entire passages come from Proba (e.g. Versus 86-97, cf. Cento 61–72).37 Proba’s Cento was

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature also transmitted to the Middle Ages, despite the Gelasian Decree. In medieval manuscripts her work is found alongside other serious school authors. A table of contents from one such manuscript, from the monastery of Corbie, groups it with enigmata, presumably because, like riddles, Virgil’s verses carry a double meaning in Proba’s Cento: ‘Est prior Aldelmus, Simphosius estque secundus | Ultima Vergilium cecinisse docet Proba Christum’38 (‘First comes Aldhelm, Symphosius is second, and finally Proba teaches us that Virgil has sung of Christ’). The last line echoes Proba’s own mission statement (Cento 23–4)—which shows that the table of contents was written by someone who actually knew her work. How well Proba was known in Anglo-Saxon England is hard to say. Aldhelm in De pedum regulis called her ‘most famous amongst all poets’, citing the first line of her prologue,39 but the breadth of Aldhelm’s reading was exceptional, and the evidence of the surviving manuscripts suggests that Proba was more widely read on the Continent than in Britain in this period.40 It was paradoxically her gender that contributed to her comeback in the later medieval period. Petrarch had mentioned her as an example of a learned woman in  his Epistolae familiares;41 and when Giovanni Boccaccio in the 1360s decided to counterbalance the many catalogues of famous men with an encyclopedia of famous women, De claris mulieribus, he devoted a substantial chapter (no. 97) to Proba. He praises her skill and intellect, and commends her as an example to all women who spend their time frivolously.42 The Cento and its metrical rules are described so well by Boccaccio that his claim that he had often read it seems entirely credible. Boccaccio’s book of famous women was influential and made the example of Proba readily available to those who chose the side of women in the late medieval Querelle des femmes. In Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cite des dames, Proba exemplifies what women are capable of and how erudite they can be, even if they are married (a ­consideration that interested Christine, who had also been married).43 Male writers who took up the good cause also marvelled at Proba’s intellect, rating it higher than Virgil’s, who had got his religion wrong,44 and who (according to apocryphal legend) had been outwitted by a young lady with whom he was besotted.45 Proba’s comeback was complete when her Cento was printed in Venice in 1472: she may well be the earliest known woman writer in print.46

Sedulius Sedulius was Italian-born, a teacher of philosophy and grammar. His magnum opus, Carmen paschale,47 was written sometime in the first half of the fifth century. Juvencus provided Sedulius with a model; but Sedulius was more liberal in his borrowings of Virgil, taking over not just words but sometimes entire lines. He was also more expansive in his biblical paraphrase, where he mixed emotive story-telling with exegetical

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Prudentius and Late Classical Biblical Epics exposition. Figurative interpretation comes to the fore in Book I, the only one devoted to the Old Testament, which is placed in typological relation to events in the life of Christ, who is the true protagonist of the poem: a miracle-working and epic hero who triumphs in death. In all five books, moral lessons are extracted which teach us how to apply biblical wisdom in our daily life. Sedulius’ distinctive qualities can be illustrated in his version of the Massacre of the Innocents. The characterization of Herod shows his debt to Juvencus. Herod is a saevus tyrranus (2.74), ferus and rex cruentus (2.119), but he now also features as an exemplum in malo for any king: Ergo ubi delusum se conperit, impius iram Rex aperit (si iure queat rex ille vocari, Qui pietate caret, propriam qui non regit iram). (2.107–9) (When the evil ruler realized he had been deceived, he became furious—if one may rightly call someone a ruler who lacks goodness and cannot rule his own temper.)

Sedulius’ affective engagement also runs deeper than Juvencus’. Herod’s indiscriminate murder is given a perverse animal logic in an extended epic simile inspired by Virgil.48 In Virgil, Euryales, who butchers his victims in their sleep, is likened to a lion (ceu leo) in a sheep pen, which ‘mangles and rends the feeble flock that is dumb with fear, and growls with blood-stained mouth’ (‘mandit trahitque|molle pecus mutumque metu, fremit ore cruento’, Aeneid, 9.340–1); in Sedulius the rampaging lion is Herod, who has been cheated out of his prey ( Jesus) and so vents his fury on anything that moves: . . . ceu leo frendens Cuius ab ore tener subito cum labitur agnus In totum movet arma gregrem manditque trahitque Molle pecus, trepidaeque vocant sua pignora fetae Nequiquam, et vacuas implent balatibus auras. (2.110–14) (just as a roaring lion, which suddenly drops a tender lamb from its mouth, moves his attack to the whole flock, gnawing and dragging the feeble animals, and the fearful mothers call after their children in vain and fill the air with their bleating.)

This graphic simile is followed by a volley of rhetorical questions for readers. What crime could justify such cruelty? How can it be right that those who had only just been born should have to die so soon (‘cur qui vixdum potuere creari iam meruere mori’, 2.119)? Then the mothers’ grief is exhibited in dramatic gestures: one tears her hair, another scratches her cheeks, one beats her breast with bare hands, another clutches the lifeless body of her baby to her bosom. Finally, Herod himself is interrogated: Quis tibi tunc, lanio, cernenti talia sensus? Quosve dabas fremitus, cum vulnera fervere late Prospiceres arce ex summa . . . (2.127–9)

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (What thoughts did you have, you butcher, when you saw these things? And what groans did you utter when from your citadel you saw the slaughter raging far and near?)

Sedulius here taps into the emotional current generated by Virgil’s apostrophe to Dido, as she watches Aeneas sail away forever (‘quis tibi tum, Dido, cernenti talia sensus, | quosve dabas gemitus, cum litora fervere late | prospiceres arce ex summa . . . !’, Aeneid, 4.408–10), but Virgil’s pathos is transformed into righteous indignation: the height from which Herod looks down now signals his indifference to suffering, and the rhetorical questions have very different implications: in Dido’s case, they point to an excess of thought and feeling; in Herod’s, to their chilling absence. Sedulius’ emotionally charged retelling became the most widely disseminated Gospel epic in the Middle Ages, surviving in over 400 manuscripts.49 Like Juvencus, he became a school author and a model of metrical correctness and poetic style. Aldhelm cites him frequently, and refers to him simply as ‘the poet’ or ‘the excellent poet’,50 expecting his readers to recognize his poetry without assistance. Bede also quotes him frequently, perhaps most significantly in his chapter on ‘The best kind of dactylic verse’ (De arte metrica, ch. 11). Centuries later, in a rhymed treatise on authors recommended for students of grammar, the thirteenth-century German schoolmaster Hugh of Trimberg still ranked him first among Christian poets: ‘Inter quos precipue Sedulius ponatur. | Sibi quidem merito sedes prima datur’ (‘Amidst these, let Sedulius be rated as pre-eminent, for he deservedly has first place’, 2.376–7).51 Sedulius was known in the Middle Ages not only for his Carmen paschale. He also produced a version of his biblical epic in highly wrought prose. In a dedicatory letter, he says he did so in response to a request for a biblical rendering in a freer style, unhampered by metrical constraints. The practice of converting stories from verse to prose or vice versa (or from one metrical form into another) had its roots in the school exercise of paraphrasis or conversio,52 but Sedulius’ example in particular caught the imagination of Anglo-Latin writers.53 Bede wrote a Life of St Cuthbert in prose and in verse, and Aldhelm did the same for his De virginitate. The literary term for such paired works, one in prose and one in verse, opus geminatum (twinned work), was coined by Bede who specifically identified Sedulius’ Carmen paschale and Opus paschale as the inspiration for Aldhelm’s own opus geminatum. Sedulius also acquired fame as an author of hymns. The Liber hymnorum, a textbook on hymns which circulated widely in medieval England, gives an indication of his stature. The five principal hymn writers, according to the prologue, are Gregory, Ambrose, Hilary, Prudentius, and Sedulius.54 Sedulius’ hymn ‘Cantemus socii Domini’ is specifically mentioned, and must indeed have been famous, for when St Dunstan (909–88) dreamed of a choir of angels, this was the song he heard them sing.55 Since Sedulius is known to have written only one other hymn, ‘A solis ortus cardine’ (an

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Prudentius and Late Classical Biblical Epics abecedarium, that is, a poem in which the first letters of each verse spell out the letters of the alphabet), his status in the top five hymn writers is remarkable. The key to his success was that not only ‘A solis ortus cardine’ but also verses from Carmen paschale were adapted for use in the liturgical cycle. Lines from the exultant eulogy of the Virgin Mary in Carmen paschale, beginning ‘Salve, sancta parens, enixa puerpera regem’ (‘Hail, holy mother, who in childbed gave birth to the king’, II.63), were used for the Introit of the Mass of the Holy Virgin, and they became so well known that in the Middle English analogue of Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’ from the Vernon manuscript (c.1380), the little boy sings Salve, sancta parens when he is miraculously restored to life.56 The hymn ‘A solis ortus cardine’ became even more popular because it was used to celebrate the Christmas season. In Latin we have several parodies of the poem,57 including a Goliardic drinking song, but lines from it are also to be found in numerous Middle English macaronic carols.58 Stanzas from the second half of this same hymn, beginning ‘Hostis Herodis impie’, were used for Epiphany, and are the source of William Herebert’s lyric ‘Herodes, thou wykked fo’ (c.1330).59 Of course, Friar Herebert may not have known that he was translating Sedulius, and the Middle English author of the miracle story probably did not know that ‘Salve, sancta parens’ came from Sedulius’ Carmen paschale, but it is when lines of poetry leave their authors behind and enter the cultural mainstream independently that we can truly speak of influence in the etymological sense of the word (from influere, to ‘flow in’).

Arator Arator created a niche for himself in part because of his unusual choice of biblical matter—neither the Old Testament nor the life of Christ, but the Acts of the Apostles—and in part because of his fondness for ingenious exegesis. His Historia apostolica was an instant hit. According to Arator, it was presented to Pope Vigilius in 544, and read out to a large congregation in the Church of St Peter of Vincula in Rome. Arator’s procedure in Historia apostolica is to follow narrative passages of verse paraphrase with passages of exposition, in which the hidden mysteries of the Acts are revealed. As he put it in his dedicatory epistle to Vigilius: ‘Alternis reserabo modis quod littera pandit | Et res si quia mihi mystica corde datur’ (‘I will unlock in alternate passages what the letter reveals and any mystical sense that is vouchsafed to me in my heart’, 21–2).60 Arator was very interested in this ‘mystical’ sense, particularly the ‘mystical power’ (mystica vis, 1.210) of numbers.61 For instance, Peter’s baptism at Pentecost of 3,000 new converts—merely an estimate in the Vulgate, which reads circiter [around] ter millia (Acts 2: 4)—prompts Arator to reflect on the arcane significance of the number: three, he points out, is the number of the Trinity, and thousand is the number of perfection (Historia apostolica 1.202–8).

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Arator, too, became a school author. Over 100 manuscripts of his work survive, not counting excerpts from his poem in florilegia,62 and although there is no English manuscript before the ninth century, he must have been read in English schools before then, since Aldhelm and Bede, amongst others, cite verses from his work in their handbooks on metre (and elsewhere).63 Arator’s strong exegetical bent also made him useful to biblical commentators on the Acts of Apostles,64 and Aldhelm was encouraged by Arator into numerological speculation of his own: Aldhelm’s letter to Acircius expounds the significance of the number seven, making good use of Arator along the way.65

Avitus Avitus (d. 518) composed his biblical epic, Carmina de spiritalis historiae gestis, on the basis of well-chosen episodes from the Old Testament: Creation (Book 1), Original Sin and the Expulsion from Paradise (2 and 3), the Flood (4), and the Crossing of the Red Sea (5). There is good deal of exegetical material alongside narrative, but Avitus’ claim to fame rests less on his exegesis than on his imaginative power. He was (and deserves to be) admired for the dramatic energy of his scenes of terror and destruction and for the psychological realism with which he animates his biblical characters. Avitus is the Milton of the Christian-Latin poets, and the similarities between the two writers are probably more than a coincidence. Milton’s characterization of Satan, in particular, is very similar to Avitus’: in both Carmina and Paradise Lost, Satan transforms himself into a snake, proceeds to win Eve over by flattery, and shows a disturbingly impressive appetite for revenge. Although cast out of heaven and humiliated by God, Avitus’ Satan has not lost heart. Speaking of his power (potestas), he declares: ‘Non tamen in totum periit; per magna retentat Vim propriam summaque cluit virtute nocendi’ (2.95–6)66 (‘It has not wholly perished, but in large part retains its own force and chiefly acquires glory in the power to hurt.’)

This same heroic determination, perversely directed towards evil, drives Milton’s Satan: ‘All is not lost; the unconquerable will, | And study of revenge, immortal hate, |And courage never to submit or yield’ (Paradise Lost 1.106–8).67 Since Avitus was printed many times in the Renaissance, and since the early Christian poets were set texts at Milton’s school, St Paul’s in London, it is not improbable that he had read Avitus.68 The evidence for his popularity in medieval England is not clear-cut. No medieval manuscripts of English provenance have survived,69 but texts must have circulated in 362

Prudentius and Late Classical Biblical Epics England at an early date. Possibly the work was imported into England by Benedict Biscop, abbot of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow (d. 689), who brought back from his travels many continental books, including ones purchased at Vienne, where Avitus had been bishop.70 Thanks to Alcuin (c.780), who described the contents of the archbishop of York’s library in a poem, we know there was a copy of Avitus in York. Avitus also appears in a surviving inventory of books donated to the monastery of Peterborough.71 Anglo-Latin poets seem to have made only slight use of Avitus,72 but, as we shall see in the next section, parallels between Avitus’ Carmina and various biblical poems in both Old and Middle English suggest that he found a responsive readership among English writers.

Latin and Vernacular Versifications of the Bible Around 870, Otfrid von Weissenburg produced a Gospel epic of over 7,000 lines in Old High German. Unusually for a vernacular poet, Otfrid also wrote a substantial letter in Latin in which he explains how he came to write his poem. Friends had asked him for a poem (cantus) on the Gospels in the vernacular: they knew of various vernacular poems inspired by pagan myths, but not of any vernacular biblical poetry—despite the fact that many Christian-Latin poets had shown the way. Otfrid agreed, and began his Evangelienbuch, encouraged by the examples of ‘Juvenci, Aratoris, Prudentii | caeterumque multorum’ (17–18).73 Otfrid’s statement should not be taken to mean that he worked on the early Christian-Latin poets rather than on the Bible, but he was certainly aware of the former, who guided him in his own attempt at biblical paraphrase. For example, we find him expanding the episode of the Massacre of the Innocents in ways that clearly recall the Latin poets: So Herod ther kunig tho bifand, thaz er fon in bidrogen ward, inbran her sar zi noti in mihil heizmuati; Er santa man manage mit wafanon garawe, joh datun se ana fehta mihila slahta, Thiu kind gistuatun stechan, thiu wiht ni mohtun sprechan, jo wurtun al fillorinu mithont giborinu; So sih thaz altar druag in war thanan unz in zuei jar. . . . Thie muater thie ruzun, joh zahari uzfluzen, thaz weinon was in lengi himilo gizengi; Thie brusti sie in ougtun, thaz fahs tana rouftun; nist ther io in gahi then jamar gisahi. (I.20.1–12) (But when Herod the king noticed that he had been betrayed by them [i.e. the magi], he was quickly inflamed with great rage. He sent many men arrayed in arms and,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature encountering no resistance, they inflicted great slaughter. They began to kill the children who could not even speak, and precisely those who had recently been born had to perish in this way, up to the age of two . . . The mothers cried, tears flowed, and their crying rose all the way up to heaven. They bared their breasts and tore their hair: there is no one who ever witnessed such grief.)

In this vein Otfrid continues for another twenty-five lines. There is obviously some connection with Sedulius, though whether his influence is direct or indirect is hard to tell, partly because Sedulius’ version of this episode had already been closely imitated by other writers,74 and partly because Otfrid’s retelling also shows similarities with other poetic treatments, particularly Prudentius’ Cathemerinon (12.93–140) and the earlier Saxon Gospel poem Heliand (727–54).75 The same problem of tangled lines of influence besets the source study of other Germanic biblical poems. Since the early Christian-Latin poets were school authors, connections between them and vernacular biblical versifiers seem likely, and Avitus, in particular, has been identified as a likely source for some of the more colourful elaborations of Scripture in Old English.76 The poem known as Genesis B (based on a Saxon original, of which only fragments have survived) does indeed have much in common with Avitus’ Carmina. In both poems, the Fall of the Angels—which is not really a biblical story all but a construction by early commentators based on scattered biblical hints (e.g. Isaiah 14: 12–15, Ezekiel 28: 14–19, Revelation 12: 7–9)—has become a fully developed narrative that is imagined as having unfolded after the creation of the earthly paradise and of Adam and Eve. The usual understanding was that the angels had fallen before that,77 but Avitus’ imaginative reordering enabled him to make Satan’s temptation of Eve psychologically persuasive. Satan, humiliated by God, wants revenge, and is envious of Adam and Eve whose happiness reminds him painfully of the superior status he once enjoyed: ‘Pro dolor hoc nobis subitum consurgere plasma invisumque genus nostra crevisse ruina!’ (2.89–90) (‘O what misery that there suddenly arises before us this moulded creature and that this odious race has aggrandized itself through our downfall!’)

So it is in Genesis B, whose vivid touches of direct speech are at times startlingly similar. Here, for example, is Satan, driven by contempt and jealousy: ‘þæt is me sorga mæst þaet Adam sceal, þe wæs of eorþan geworht, mine stronglican stol behealdan, wesan him on wynne, and we þis wite þolien.’ (364b–7)78 (‘The greatest grief to me is that Adam, who was created from earth, shall hold my mighty throne, live in pleasure, while we suffer this distress.’)

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Prudentius and Late Classical Biblical Epics It is true that there are also important differences between Avitus and Genesis B, but ‘the tantalizing echoes throughout Genesis B’79 of Avitus are unlikely to be coincidental. As with Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch, the situation is complicated by the existence of other analogues. Behind Avitus lies an earlier poetic retelling of Satan’s fall and revenge by Prudentius in his Hamartigenia (see especially lines 227–77), which psychologizes Satan’s actions in the same way and which was also widely read in AngloSaxon England. The Old English poet of Exodus was also conscious of a received tradition of biblical verse paraphrase. Like Avitus before him, he pulled out the stops for the exciting pursuit of the Israelites by Pharaoh’s troops and the Crossing of the Red Sea. Below is an extract from the destruction of the Egyptian army: Folc wæs afæred, flodegsa becwom gastas geomre, geafon deaðe hweop. Wæron beorhhliðu blode bestemed, holm heolfre spaw, hream wæs on yðum, wæter wæpna ful, wælmist astah . . . Laðe cyrmdon—lyft up geswearc— fægnum stæfnum. Flod blod gewod. (447–63)80 (The people were afraid, flood-terror overcame the wretched souls, the sea threatened death. The sea-shore was bedewed with blood, the water spewed gore; there was uproar on the waves, the water full of weapons, a slaughters-mist arose . . . The hateful ones cried out, darkness ascended, with doomed voices. Blood mingled with water.)

Compare this with Avitus’ imaginative reconstruction of the same scene: Hinc subitus crepitare fragor; tonat undique circum lympha ruens primumque illic committitur unda qua monstrabat iter Phario sors ultima regi . . . [phalanx] pondere telorum premitur, fundoque tenaci indutum revehunt morienta corpora ferrum.  . . . Ast alii, lassata diu dum brachia iactant, incurrunt enses iaculisque natantibus haerent, concolor et rubro miscetur sanguine pontus. (5.662–93) (Then a clamour resounds; the water thunders all around, and raging streams converge at the first point where the final destiny [i.e. death] showed the way to Pharaoh the king . . . The phalanx is pressed down by the weight of the arms, the dying bodies carrying back to the tenacious depths the iron in which the bodies are clad. Others thrash their exhausted arms for as long as possible, stab themselves with swords or cling to floating lances: the sea water mingles with red blood and becomes the same colour.)

The similarities between the Latin and the Old English are obvious. They may well indicate direct dependence, as Lapidge believes,81 but in this case, too, a comparable rendition can be found elsewhere, in Prudentius’ Cathemerinon, 5 (see lines 41–80),82

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature which was very well known to many (Avitus included). The detail that Lapidge thinks is decisive (‘Flod blod gewod’, cf. Avitus 5.693) is also not without precedent: Avitus took it from earlier epics (cf. especially Lucan, Bellum civile, 3.577), where it is a common motif.83 The influence of the early Christian biblical epics did not end in the Anglo-Saxon period. The Early Middle English poem Genesis and Exodus (c.1230) shows the continuing influence of the Latin tradition.84 The main source for Genesis and Exodus (apart from the Bible itself ) was a late twelfth-century biblical prose paraphrase, Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica. Following Comestor, Genesis and Exodus begins by placing the fall of the angels before the Creation of the world (lines 65–74). However, in dealing with the Fall of Man, the English poet felt drawn to the poetic order in which Satan’s seduction of Eve follows immediately after his fall and so becomes explicable as an act of envy and vengeance. As a consequence, Genesis and Exodus actually recounts Lucifer’s fall twice: once in its ‘proper place’ (before the creation of the world) and a second time as the prequel to Satan’s malicious revenge on humankind. In this second narrative, Olof Arngart has detected numerous echoes of Avitus,85 and, although not all of these are convincing,86 the poet does indeed seem to have used Avitus. The Gawain poet was also writing with the support of biblical epics behind him. Patience and Cleanness (c.1370) are usually referred to as verse homilies, but for the most part they are poetic retellings of the Bible, and the tradition of biblical paraphrase provided the Gawain poet with expert knowledge of what and how to elaborate. Events such as a storm at sea (in Patience) and Noah’s Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra (in Cleanness) trigger set pieces just as they did in earlier biblical versifications. It is no wonder, then, that many sources have been suggested: for Cleanness, suggestions include Avitus, Carmen de Sodoma (formerly attributed to Cyprianus Gallus, who in the fifth century composed another biblical epic on Old Testament history87) and the Middle English Cursor mundi (a thirteenth-century rhyming universal history); and for Patience, Carmen de Jona (also formerly ascribed to Cyprianus Gallus), Prudentius’ Cathemerinon, 7 (which recounts the story of Jonah in lines 81–175), Marbod of Rennes’ Naufragium Jonae prophetae, and Cursor mundi.88 As this list indicates, the stumbling block for source hunters is not that we lack evidence to link Patience and Cleanness with earlier biblical epics, but that we have too much: striking parallels that have been thought to clinch the Gawain poet’s literary dependence on any specific source usually turn out to be widely diffused. For instance, the Gawain poet’s description of the Flood, for which Cursor mundi (1765–1800) has been claimed as the model,89 needs to be put alongside comparable descriptions by Henri de Valenciennes in his twelfth-century Roman de dieu et sa mere (208–21) and Avitus (4.429–87), who offers the closest parallels.90 Similarly, while Cursor mundi (2855–6) offers one possible source for the Gawain poet’s statement that Lot’s wife still stands near the Dead Sea, licked by animals of the land (Cleanness, 1000), that very same

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Prudentius and Late Classical Biblical Epics idea is also to be found in Bible de Jehan de Malkaraume (c.1300)91 and in Prudentius’ Hamartigenia (749–53). From the earliest times, biblical poets were in conversation not only with the Bible but also with their predecessors in the genre. This explains why questions of literary origin are so complicated and why we can justly speak of a living tradition of biblical versification which connected the vernacular biblical poets of the later Middle Ages with the Latin poets who had gone before them.

Prudentius Prudentius’ name has already come up in the context of biblical epics, since Bible stories are incorporated in many of his poems, and since later biblical poets like Sedulius and Avitus knew where to find them and how to make use of them. Prudentius’ Cathemerinon is a sequence of twelve lyrical poems with embedded narratives. Horace’s inclusion of narratives in his Odes provided Prudentius with a model for the blending of lyric and narrative,92 though Prudentius’ narratives are resolutely biblical. Prudentius’ Hamartigenia (on the origin of sin) also includes biblical narratives, most notably the story of Satan’s fall and revenge.93 Prudentius was born in Spain in 348 and probably died sometime in the first decade of the fifth century. We know from his Praefatio—a confessional preface which precedes his poems in a number of early opera omnia manuscripts—that he enjoyed a successful career as a civil servant before deciding to withdraw from public life and to devote himself to Christian poetry. Steeped in classical literature, he was a great admirer and imitator of its poetic forms, but doctrinally intolerant of paganism and other heretical beliefs. For example, his verse invective Contra Symmachum stridently rejects the idea that paganism and Christianity might live peacefully alongside each other. Prudentius thus developed a well-deserved reputation for hard-line orthodoxy, which was admired by medieval churchmen and gave him the status of an authoritative arbiter of doctrine. During the Carolingian Renaissance, when many heresies were at large, anyone with eccentric views on such matters as the devotional value of images or the status of the Holy Ghost was liable to be battered into submission with verses of Prudentius.94 The poem for which Prudentius is best known is Psychomachia, the first sustained personification allegory in western literature. The subject of the poem is a battle in (and for) the human soul, in which a series of personified vices (all female, since abstract nouns in Latin were feminine) combat their opposing virtues, who defeat them. The first contestants are Faith and her opponent, Worship of the Old Gods (‘Veterum cultura deorum’, 29). The name signals Prudentius’ uncompromising attitude to pagans, who dignified their piety as reverence for the ‘old gods’ (cf. Aeneid, 8.188). Further battles, such as Pudicitia versus Libido, and Patientia versus Ira, ensue. The body of the poem is in dactylic hexameter, as befits the ‘heroic’ theme of battle,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature but the vices characteristically meet their end in preposterously un-heroic manner.95 For instance, Superbia (Pride), who is given all the accessories of the epic hero (including a rousing battle speech addressed to men, despite the fact that she and all combatants are women), dies by falling headlong into a pit (257). The action of the poem thus becomes allegorically meaningful, for ‘pride comes before the fall’. In Psychomachia, Prudentius invented a framework for Christian allegory—a fight between vices and virtues—that became an established conceit for centuries to come. Some of his solutions to problems inherent in personification allegory were also justly admired. One problem is that allegory risks being false to experience when it makes vices innocuously transparent: in reality we do not usually see evil for what it is, and vicious people rarely see themselves as such. Prudentius found a way around this through the motif of disguise. Avarice, for instance, disguises herself as Frugality (554); her motive, she tells us (and perhaps herself ), is not selfish greed but altruistic concern for others: she wants the best for her children (563). Countless later allegorists made use of this allegorical trick. For example, in Tudor morality plays vices adopt disguises: Avarice thus similarly poses as Frugality in the morality play New Custom.96 The debt owed to Prudentius is clear, though we may wonder whether these later allegorists were still conscious of it. The ending of Prudentius’ allegory, too, recognizes and avoids an allegorical problem: how do you end a battle poem without suggesting that the fight against vices is over (when in reality it is always ongoing)? In Psychomachia, after the vices have been vanquished, the virtues retreat to the barracks only to discover that their ranks have been infiltrated by Discord, disguised as a friend. She, too, is eventually killed, and on a hilltop the city of Concord is built (modelled on the heavenly Jerusalem from the Book of Revelation). Prudentius ends, however, by warning us to remain vigilant: in our bodies the soul’s struggle continues. The greatest allegorical poet in Middle English, William Langland, likewise moves from the battle of vices and virtues in Piers Plowman to the building of the ‘barn of Unity’, which seems to offer the virtues a safe retreat until a friar, posing as a surgeon, wheedles his way in. Since by Langland’s day Prudentius’ key conceits—the allegorical fight between vices and virtues, the stronghold infiltrated by deceit, the city under siege— had become firmly established in allegorical writings,97 the influence of Psychomachia is here probably indirect. Over three hundred Prudentius manuscripts survive, many of them glossed (in English, French, German, etc.), for Prudentius too became a school author. Students encountered him as soon as they had finished elementary Latin. In his biography of Bruno of Cologne (925–61), Ruotger tells us that ‘as soon as Bruno understood the basic rudiments of the art of grammar, he began to read the poet Prudentius with the help of his teacher’, and came to love him for the orthodoxy of his beliefs and the rich variety of his metres.98 In England, the earliest evidence of his reception comes from Aldhelm’s Carmen de virginitate, which ends with an allegorized battle of vices

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Prudentius and Late Classical Biblical Epics and virtues that contains verbal echoes of Psychomachia.99 The series of vices and virtues in Aldhelm’s allegory does not follow Prudentius, being based rather on John Cassian’s sequence of eight principal vices (Collationes 5),100 but this is not altogether surprising. Medieval writers of psychomachian allegory were heirs not only to Prudentius but also to various theological attempts to systematize vices and virtues: Aldhelm followed Cassian’s scheme of eight, while the use of Prudentius by later writers is often complicated by their use of a scheme of seven.101 While Prudentius, too, was a curricular author, his profile differs in one important respect from that of other school authors. At a very early stage of their textual history, manuscripts of Psychomachia were illustrated, and the influence of Prudentius thus reaches beyond the sphere of literature into the history of art. There are, it is true, some beautifully illustrated manuscripts of Sedulius, too, but the sequence of illustrations to Psychomachia became so familiar that they began to circulate independently of the text. For instance, the splendid Gospel book owned by Henry the Lion (c.1188) contains a finely decorated set of vices and virtues modelled on illustrated Psychomachia manuscripts.102 From manuscripts, psychomachian iconography moved to sculpture. Over time, its origin in Prudentius’ verbal imagination becomes difficult to discern, but sometimes traces remain. A twelfth-century font at St Leonard’s in Stanton Fitzwarren (Wiltshire) is illustrated with personified vices and virtues; in one of the niches, Largesse pierces Avarice with a sword; in her left hand she holds a garment taken from her victim. The detail goes back to the despoiling of Avaritia by Operatio (also called Largitas), which completes her moral victory in Prudentius’ Psychomachia (see line 591) and which is shown in manuscript illustrations of this scene.103 Psychomachia may have been Prudentius’ best-known poem, but all his poems were transmitted to the Middle Ages, admired, and imitated. Prudentius’ Peristephanon is the earliest poetic collection of saints’ lives, and is especially important in the history of French literature, since the third poem in the collection inspired one of the earliest known poems in the French language, Séquence de Sainte Eulalie (late ninth century).104 Like Prudentius’ hymn of St Eulalia, the French poem manages to be both lyrical and narrative, climaxing in the saint’s escape from the clutches of her pagan oppressor, as her soul flies to heaven in the figure of a white dove (25, cf. Peristephanon 3.161). Cathemerinon exerted an immediate influence on the early Christian biblical epics, as we have seen. In both Cathemerinon and Peristephanon Prudentius writes in a rich variety of metres, to which he repeatedly draws attention and which did not escape medieval notice. Writers attempting poems in more unusual metres imitated Prudentius’ verse, and were advised to do in metrical handbooks.105 Prudentius’ canonical status as a school author did not last, however. After the twelfth century, the entire diet of early Christian poets, Juvencus, Avitus, Sedulius, Arator, and Prudentius, began to fall out of favour. The thirteenth-century schoolmaster Hugh of Trimberg still recommended them to students, as we have seen (p. 360),

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature but he was militantly old school and preferred the vetus studium (Preface, line 30) to the study of dialectic, which was becoming fashionable in Germany and elsewhere. In France, Henri d’Andeli spoke up for the vetus studium in his Bataille des sept ars (c.1230): the poem stages an allegorical battle between the forces of Grammar and Logic. The old poets, ‘Sedule, Propre [i.e. Prosper of Aquitaine], Prudence, Arator’ (210–11), aid Grammar, but Logic is assisted by Aristotle and his gang, who now hold sway at the University of Paris.106 In England, Prudentius also went into decline: Roger Bacon still refers to him, but, in Eugene Vest’s words, we ‘must treasure these English references to Prudentius at this period, for they are very rare’.107 However, the history of reception is not a history of name-dropping, and the later Middle Ages continued to imbibe Prudentius, even without knowing it. As far as Psychomachia is concerned, this is simply because Prudentius created the genre of personification allegory. Latin allegorists up to and including Alan of Lille were still consciously recollecting Prudentius,108 and although later vernacular writers like Langland were not, they are nevertheless his followers. Peristephanon and Cathemerinon also lived on, like Sedulius’ poems, in the liturgy. Prudentius did not write his poems as hymns to be sung,109 but they (or extracts from them) were set to music and adapted as hymns in the early Latin Church.110 Stanzas from most poems of Cathemerinon (1–2, 6–7, 9–12) and from Peristephanon 2 (on St Lawrence) thus became part of the everyday life of the western Church and remain so today.111 Everywhere in late medieval Europe, then, people were singing Prudentius’ words, even those who no longer knew his name.

Notes 1   Fundamental studies of the genre of Latin biblical epic and its influence on medieval poetry are Dieter Kartschoke, Bibeldichtung: Studien zur Geschichte der epischen Bibelparaphrase von Juvencus bis Otfrid von Weißenburg (Munich, 1975) and Roger Green, Latin Epics of the New Testament: Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator (Oxford, 2006). Treatments of the reception of individual poets are listed in notes below. Quotations from Virgil are from Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough and G. P. Goold, rev. edn, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). 2   Roger Green, ‘Approaching Christian Epic: The Preface of Juvencus’, in Latin Epic and Didactic Poetry: Genre, Tradition and Individuality, ed. Monica Gale (Swansea, 2004), pp. 203–22 (at p. 203). 3  Juvencus, Evangelorium libri quattuor, ed. Johann Huemer, CSEL 24 (Vienna, 1891). I have regularized u and v in this and all subsequent Latin quotations. The first English translation of Juvencus, to be published by Routledge, is being prepared by Scott McGill. 4  Green, Latin Epics, pp. 3–4. 5   See Green, Latin Epics, p. 22. 6   K. Thraede, ‘Epos’, in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 5 (Stuttgart, 1962), pp. 983–1042 (at p. 1039).

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Prudentius and Late Classical Biblical Epics 7   Juvencus wrote before Jerome’s Vulgate Bible, so my citation is from the earliest manuscript of the Vetus Latina (codex Vercillensis), roughly contemporary with Juvencus, Vetus Latina Matthaeum, ed. Pasquale Amicarelli, accessible at . 8   These and other early responses to Juvencus are assembled in Huemer’s edition, pp. vi–xii (p. vi for Jerome). 9   See Michael Roberts, ‘Vergil and the Gospels: The Evangeliorum libri IV of Juvencus’, in Romane memento: Vergil in the Fourth Century, ed. Roger Rees (2004), pp. 47–61. 10   For precedents in Greek and Latin Church Fathers see Emanuela Colombi, ‘Paene ad verbum: gli Evangelorium libri del Giovenco tra parafrasi e commentaro’, Cassiodorus 3 (1997), 9–36 (at pp. 15–16). 11   e.g., Jerome, Commentarium in Evangelium Matthaei, PL 26, col. 26, and Alcuin in De divinis officiis, ch. 5, both cited by Huemer, pp. vii and xv. 12   Michael Lapidge, ‘Versifying the Bible in the Middle Ages’, in The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers, eds Jill Mann and Maura Nolan (Notre Dame, Ind., 2006), pp. 11–40 (at p. 13). 13   Venantius Fortunatus, Vita Sancti Martini (PL 88, 1.14–15), cited by Huemer, p. ix. 14   E.g. Braulio of Saragossa, Vita Sancti Aemiliani (PL 80, col. 702), Eulogius of Toledo, Memoriale (PL 115, col. 741), and (centuries later) Desiderius Erasmus, Poem 88, in Erasmus, Poems, ed. Harry Vredeveld, trans. Clarence H. Miller, Collected Works of Erasmus 85–6 (Toronto, 1993). 15   See Günter Glauche, Schullektüre im Mittelalter: Entstehung und Wandlungen des Lektürekanons bis 1200 nach den Quellen dargestellt (Munich, 1970). 16   PL 83, col. 1094. 17   PL 83, col. 1110. 18   Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006), p. 21. 19   H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in the Medieval West, trans. George Lamb, 2nd edn (1977), pp. 279–80. 20  See The Latin Glosses on Arator and Prudentius in Cambridge University Library MS Gg.5.35, ed. Gernot Rudolf Wieland (Toronto, 1983) and The Cambridge Juvencus Manuscript Glossed in Latin, Old Welsh and Old Irish: Text and Commentary, ed. Helen McKee (Aberystwyth, 2000). 21  Facsimile edition by Helen McKee, Juvencus: Codex Cantabrigiensis: A Ninth-Century Manuscript Glossed in Welsh, Irish, and Latin (Aberystwyth, 2000). 22   [Juvencus], ‘The Juvencus Poems’, ed. and trans. Sir Ifor Williams, in The Beginnings of Welsh Poetry, ed. Rachel Bromwich (Cardiff, 1980), pp. 89–121. 23   Two examples pre-dating the Juvencus poems are the opening line of Aldhelm’s Riddle 91 (Aldhelm, Aldhelmi Opera omnia, ed. Rudolf Ehwald, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 15 (Berlin, 1919), 139)—Omnipotens auctor, nutu qui cuncta creavit—and the beginning of Adam’s prayer in another late classical biblical epic, Claudius Marius Victor’s Alethia— Omnipotens auctor, mundi rerumque creator (2.42), ed. P. F. Hovingh, CCSL 128 (Turnhout, 1960). Roughly contemporary with the Juvencus manuscript is Walafrid Strabo’s metrical  paraphrase of the Pater Noster Prayer, Omnipotens auctor, caeli regnator in aula (ed.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Ernst Dümmler, MGH, Poetae Latini II (1884), pp. 396–7), which incidentally draws heavily on the hexameter paraphrases of the Pater Noster by Juvencus (Evangelia I, 590–603) and Sedulius (Carmen paschale, II, 244–300). 24   Evidence for the entire period is collected by Traugott Lawler, ‘Langland Versificator’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 25 (2011), 27–76. 25  Aldhelm, De pedum regulis, ed. Ehwald, Aldhelmi Opera omnia, p. 215, trans. Neil Wright, in Aldhelm: The Poetic Works, trans. Michael Lapidge and James L. Rosier, with an appendix by Neil Wright (Cambridge, 1985), p. 215. The line concerned is Evangelia, 3.229, not 3.299 (Wright). 26  Bede, Libri II de arte metrica et de schematibus et tropis: The Art of Poetry and Rhetoric, ed. and trans. Calvin B. Kendall (Saarbrücken, 1991), pp. 50, 53. The translation is reprinted in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, ad 300–1475, eds Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter (Oxford, 2009), pp. 256–71. 27  Bede, De arte metrica, pp. 44–5, 59, and Bede, Libri II de arte metrica et de schematibus et tropis: The Art of Poetry and Rhetoric, ed. and trans. Calvin B. Kendall, p. 45. 28   Roberts, ‘Vergil and the Gospels’, p. 50. 29   The most up-to-date discussion of Proba’s Cento and the reception of her work in the Middle Ages and beyond is Sigfrid Schottenius Cullhed, Proba the Prophet: Studies in the Virgilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba (Leiden, 2015). I am grateful to the author for sending me a copy of the Ph.D. dissertation on which this book is based. 30  Roger Green, ‘Proba’s Cento: Its Date, Purpose, and Reception’, Classical Quarterly 45 (1995), 551–63. 31  Ausonius, Cento nuptialis, in Ausonius, eds E. Capps, T. E. Page, and W. H. D. Rouse, trans. H. G. Evelyn White, 2  vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1919), 1, 313. 32  Jerome, Epistola 53, PL 22, col. 544. 33   PL 59, col. 162. 34   See Stephen Benko, ‘Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue in Christian Interpretation’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 31.1 (1980), 646–705. Juvencus similarly alludes to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue in his retelling of Christ’s nativity (cf., for example, Evangelia, 1.155–7 with Eclogues, 4.6–7, 23). 35   Jerome may also have had Proba in mind when he ridiculed female teachers: see Scott McGill, ‘Virgil, Christianity, and the Cento Probae’, in Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity, ed. J. H. D. Scourfield (Swansea, 2007), pp. 173–96 (at p. 180). 36   Cited and discussed by Filippo Ermini, Il Centone di Proba e la poesie Centonaria latina (Rome, 1909), pp. 62–3. 37   Scott McGill, ‘Pomponius’s Cento Versus Ad Gratiam Domini’, Traditio 56 (2001), 15–26. 38   Léopold Deslisle, ‘Recherches sur l’ancienne bibliothèque de Corbie’, Bibliothèque de l’école de Chartres 21 (1860), 339–439 (at p. 399). 39   De pedum regulis, p. 188. 40  According to Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 327, only one manuscript, Evreux, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 43 (tenth century), is of Anglo-Saxon provenance. One further

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Prudentius and Late Classical Biblical Epics manuscript, Vatican, MS Pal. Lat. 1753, from the abbey of Lorsch in Germany, probably goes back to an Anglo-Saxon original (Cullhed, Proba, pp. 87–8). There is later evidence that shows she was read at Canterbury in the fourteenth century. For instance, a library catalogue from St Augustine’s Abbey describes her Cento as a ‘liber de prophetii[s] prophetantibus de christo’ (‘book of prophecies prophesying of Christ’): Cullhed, Proba, p. 93. 41  Cullhed, Proba, p. 25. 42   Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 411–16. 43  Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (Harmondsworth, 1999), ch. 29. 44   This view can be traced back to a letter (c.395) which precedes the Cento in many manuscripts, and calls it Maronem mutatum in melius (‘Virgil changed for the better’): McGill, ‘Virgil’, pp. 174–5. 45   Helen Swift, Gender, Writing and Performance: Defending Women in Late Medieval France (1440–1538) (Oxford, 2008), pp. 75–8. 46   For the history of Proba in print, see Ermini, Centone, p. 68. 47  Sedulius, Opera, ed. Johann Huemer, CSEL 10 (Vienna, 1885). There is now a complete English translation: Sedulius: The Paschal Song and Hymns, trans. Carl P. E. Springer (Atlanta, 2013). 48   These and other echoes of Virgil are discussed by Green, Latin Epics, p. 217. 49   Catalogued by Carl P. E. Springer, The Manuscripts of Sedulius: A Provisional Handlist (Philadelphia, 1995). On Sedulius’ standing in the Middle Ages, see also Springer, The Gospel as Epic in Late Antiquity: The Carmen Paschale of Sedulius (Leiden, 1988), pp. 128–50. 50   See e.g. Enigmata, 63; Carmen de virginitate, 134. 51   Das Registrum multorum auctorum des Hugo von Trimberg, ed. Karl Langosch, Germanische Studien 235 (Berlin, 1942), lines 344–5. Selections trans. in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, eds Copeland and Sluiter, pp. 657–69. 52   Michael Roberts, Biblical Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase in Late Antiquity (Liverpool, 1985), pp. 37–60. 53   See Peter Godman, ‘The Anglo-Latin Opus Geminatum: From Aldhelm to Alcuin’, Medium Ævum 50 (1981), 215–19. 54   The prologue is edited by Tony Hunt, in Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1991), 1, 40–1. 55  Springer, Manuscripts, p. 13. 56   Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, eds Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2003–5), 2, 600–1. 57  Springer, Manuscripts, p. 14. 58   The Early English Carols, 2nd edn, ed. Richard Leighton Greene (Oxford, 1977), nos 21 A, B, C, D, 31, 39, 52, 122 A, B. 59   Religious Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century, 2nd edn, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford, 1965), no. 12.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 60  Arator, De Actibus Apostolorum, ed. Arthur Patch McKinlay, CSEL 72 (Vienna, 1961). The translation and interpretation of these lines are by Green, Latin Epics, p. 262. 61   On this aspect of the poem see Richard Hillier, Arator on the Acts of the Apostles (Oxford, 1993), pp. 41–50. 62   Arthur Patch McKinlay, Arator: The Codices (Cambridge, Mass., 1942). 63   On Aldhelm’s use of Arator see Andy Orchard, The Poetic Art of Aldhelm (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 167–70; Bede cites Arator in De arte metrica (pp. 42, 52, etc.). 64   E.g. Bede cites Arator in his Expositio Actuum Apostolorum (citations in Lapidge, AngloSaxon Library, pp. 195–6). 65  Aldhelm, Epistola ad Adcircium, p. 70, trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren in Aldhelm: The Prose Works (Cambridge, 1979), p. 41 (and see also n. 22, p. 189). 66   Avit de Vienne: Histoire spirituelle, ed. Nicole Hequet-Noti, 2 vols (Paris, 1999, 2005). 67   John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (1998). For discussion of Milton’s possible use of Avitus see W. Kirkconnell, The Celestial Cycle (Toronto, 1952), pp. 501–6, J. M. Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford, 1968), esp. pp. 262–5, and Daniel J. Nodes, Avitus: The Fall of Man (Toronto, 1985), pp. 7–10. See also Carl P. E. Springer, ‘The Biblical Epic in Late Antiquity and the Early Modern Period: The Poetics of Tradition’, in Antiquity Renewed: Late Classical and Early Modern Texts, eds Zweder von Martels and Victor M. Schmidt (Leuven, 2004), pp. 103–27. 68   Early printed Avitus editions are listed in Nodes, Avitus, p. 5. The Statutes of St Paul’s school (A Concise Description of the Endowed Grammar Schools in England and Wales, ed. Nicholas Carlisle, 2 vols (1818), 2, 71–83) recommend the Christian-Latin poets: Juvencus, Sedulius, Prudentius, and Proba are specifically mentioned; Avitus is not. 69   None are mentioned by Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 69, or by Nicole Hequet-Noti (ed.), Avit, 2, 93–105. 70   See Bede, Historia abbatum, c. 4, Venerabilis Baedae Opera historica, ed. Charles Plummer, 2 vols (Oxford, 1896), 1, 368. 71  Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 134 and 230. 72  Orchard, Aldhelm, pp. 216–17, and Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 179, 204. 73   Otfrids Evangelienbuch, ed. Oskar Erdmann (Tübingen, 1973). Diacritics have been omitted. 74   Especially relevant is Hymn 3, Carmina psallere voce lyra (PL 112, cols 1653–4), by Rabanus Maurus (Otfrid’s teacher at Fulda): its content is clearly based on Sedulius. The unusual form (dactylic trimeter hypercatalectic) was probably modelled on Prudentius (Cathemerinon, 3 and Peristephanon, 3). 75   Parallels are listed by Kartschoke, Bibeldichtung, pp. 322–4. 76   J. R. Hall surveys the scholarship in ‘Avitus’, Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture, at . 77   Genesis 1: 4 (‘God divided the light from the darkness’) was traditionally understood as referring to God’s punishment of the bad angels (see e.g. Augustine, De civitate dei, XI.xxxiv). 78   Genesis, ed. George Philip Krapp, in The Junius Manuscript: The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 1 (New York, 1964).

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Prudentius and Late Classical Biblical Epics   Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry (1977), pp. 33–4.   Exodus, ed. Krapp, Junius Manuscript. 81   Lapidge, ‘Versifying’, p. 26. 82   See Patrick McBrine, ‘The English Inheritance of Biblical Verse’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2008), pp. 177–80. 83   Examples in Alexander Arweiler, Die Imitation Antiker und Spätantiker Literatur in der Dichtung ‘De spiritalis historiae gestis’ des Alcimus Avitus (Berlin, 1988), p. 339. 84   The Middle English Genesis and Exodus, ed. Olof Arngart (Lund, 1968). 85   Olof Arngart, ‘St. Avitus and the Genesis and Exodus Poet’, English Studies 50 (1969), 487–95. 86   E.g., the source for Genesis and Exodus, pp. 275–82 is probably not Avitus, 2.42–4, as Arngart argues, but Isiaiah 14: 13–14. 87   R. Peiper, Cypriani Galli Heptatevchos, CSEL 23 (Vienna, 1881). On Carmen de Sodoma see also Ralph J. Hexter, ‘The Metamorphosis of Sodom: The Ps-Cyprian “De Sodoma” as an Ovidian Episode’, Traditio 44 (1988), 1–35. 88   References in Ad Putter, An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet (1996), pp. 8–11. See further B. S. Lee, ‘Jonah in Patience and Prudentius’, Florilegium 4 (1982), 194–209, and Jane Lecklider, Cleanness: Structure and Meaning (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 78, 104–6, 109, 125, 142. 89   Sarah Horrall, ‘Cleanness and Cursor mundi’, English Language Notes 22 (1985), 6–11. 90   Ad Putter, ‘Descriptions of the Flood in Medieval and Renaissance Literature’, Studies in Philology 94 (1997), 137–59, and ‘Cleanness and the Tradition of Biblical Versification’, in Medieval Alliterative Poetry: Essays in Honour of Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds John A. Burrow and Hoyt N. Duggan (Dublin, 2010), pp. 166–84. 91   Ed. M. C. Joslin, The Heard Word: A Moralized History. The Genesis Section of the Histoire ancienne in a Text from Saint-Jean d’Acre (University, Miss., 1986), lines 475–7. 92   Days Linked By Song: Prudentius’ Cathemerinon, ed. Gerard O’Daly (Oxford, 2012), p. 21. 93   References are to Prudentius, eds T. E. Page et al., trans. H. J. Thomson, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1949). 94   Theodulf of Orléans, in defence of orthodoxy, compiled a concordance of all lines from Cathemerinon and Hamartigenia which invoke the Holy Spirit (see Libellus de processione Spiritus Sancti, ed. Harald Wiljungs, in Daz Konzil von Aachen, MGH, Concilia 2, Suppl. 2 (1998), pp. 313–82 (at pp. 381–2)), while Dungal defended images from iconoclastic attack by citing Prudentius’ Psychomachia, 347 (Soberness armed with the standard of the cross) in Liber adversus Claudium, PL 105, col. 492. For these and other examples see Sinéad O’Sullivan, Early Medieval Glosses on Prudentius’ Psychomachia: The Weitz Tradition (Leiden, 2004), pp. 17–20. 95   On this aspect of the poem see Macklin Smith, Prudentius’ Psychomachia: A Re-examination (Princeton, 1976), esp. ch. 4. 96   Peter Hyland, Disguise on the Early Modern Stage (Farnham, 2001), discusses this example in connection with Prudentius (pp. 118–19). 97   See Stephen A. Barney, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, 5: C Passus 20–22, B Passus 18–20 (Philadelphia, 2006), pp. 159–60 for discussion and references. 79 80

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature   For the anecdote see O’Sullivan, Early Manuscript Glosses, pp. 10–11.   Gernot Wieland, ‘Prudentius’, in Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture: A Trial Version, eds Frederick M. Biggs, Thomas D. Hill, and Paul E. Szarmach (Binghamton, NY, 1990), pp. 150–6. 100   Gernot Wieland, ‘Aldhelm’s De octo vitiis principalibus and Prudentius’ Psychomachia’, Medium Ævum 55 (1986), 85–92. 101  In Hortus deliciarum (1185), for example, Prudentius is combined with Gregory’s list of the seven deadly sins along with seven virtues (the four cardinal and the three theological virtues): Joanne Norman, Metamorphoses of an Allegory: The Iconography of the Psychomachia in Medieval Art (New York, 1988), pp. 92–3. 102  Norman, Metamorphoses, pp. 22–3. There is a facsimile edition: Das Evangeliar Heinrich des Löwen, introd. Dietrich Kötsche (Frankfurt am Main, 1989). 103  Norman, Metamorphoses, p. 107. The sculpture in question is illustrated in fig. 41 (p. 332). 104   Edition and discussion by Clifford W. Aspland, A Medieval French Reader (Oxford, 1979). 105   See n. 74. For the iambic senarius, Bede recommends the prologue to Psychomachia as a model (Bede, De arte metrica, p. 152). 106   Les Dits d’Henri d’Andeli, ed. Alain Corbellari (Paris, 2003). 107  Eugene Bartlett Vest, ‘Prudentius in the Middle Ages’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1932, published on microfiche, Chicago, 1956), p. 121. 108   There are echoes of Psychomachia in Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus, e.g. calcaribus urget | cornipedem (9.21–2, based on Psychomachia, 253–4). Vest, ‘Prudentius in the Middle Ages’, brings together this and other borrowings from Prudentius in medieval texts. 109   See Anne-Marie Palmer, Prudentius on the Martyrs (Oxford, 1989), pp. 67–8. 110   The hymns are collected in A. S. Walpole, Early Latin Hymns (Cambridge, 1922), pp. 115–48. 111   Today Prudentius’ best-known hymn is Of the Father’s Love Begotten (from Cathemerinon 9). 98 99

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Chapter 18

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW John of Salisbury, Academic Scepticism, and Ciceronian Rhetoric Dallas G. Denery II

The culture of Anglo-Latin learning in the twelfth century was one of the richest fields of classical reception. No career better illustrates the learned classical outlook of English intellectuals than that of John of Salisbury, for whom ancient philosophy was a living source of humanae litterae.1 For twelfth-century intellectuals, the ancient tradition of philosophy was not a dead, inert body of knowledge to be acquired as a badge of education. As John’s extensive writings affirm, ancient philosophy found itself transformed into modern philosophy as it was put to work in the world of English court politics. John absorbed classical philosophy through whatever sources he could find, in literary, rhetorical and scientific treatises, and even in the writings of the Church Fathers. Thus philosophy also became a stage for literary transmission, especially for Ciceronian ideas of eloquence. We know quite a bit about John of Salisbury because he wrote quite a bit and much of what he wrote concerned himself, his life, his work, and his friends. He was born sometime between 1115 and 1120 in what is now known as Old Sarum, a hilltop settlement about two miles north of Salisbury, England. He travelled to Paris in 1136 to undertake ‘advanced studies’ and remained there for about twelve years, studying with Abelard, the most famous scholar of the entire twelfth century, as well as with other notables like Gilbert of Poitiers and William of Conches. He returned to England in 1148, where he began a distinguished, not to mention, tumultuous, career ‘as a diplomat, a secretary, a legal expert, and a trusted adviser—a sort of jack of all trades’ in service to the archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald.2 While John was working for Theobald, King Stephen exiled him from the royal court between 1156 and 1157,

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature and  throughout the 1160s John found himself embroiled to varying degrees in the controversies surrounding Thomas Becket. He died in 1180 in Chartres, having served there as bishop since 1176. From scholarship to service, a simple chronological recounting of John’s life suggests that whatever role his early philosophical studies played in his later life, they were studies he left behind when he left Paris for the busy life that would greet him in England. John certainly suggests as much. As a ranking official in the archbishop of Canterbury’s court, John writes that ‘the whole of Britain, as far as ecclesiastical matters are concerned’ rests as a burden on his shoulders. His loyalty and duty to the bishop, his ‘administrative concerns and the trifles of court life’, not to mention ‘the interruptions of friends’, consume his every waking moment, leaving him with no time to study the classic works of philosophy that he had learned to love in his youth.3 But John is not simply busy, he is hounded and harried, slandered and set upon. In the Metalogicon, his defence of the liberal arts, John bemoans his inability ‘to evade the snapping teeth of [his] fellow members of the court’, who call obedience servility, and modesty sycophancy. Worse, they mock, deride, and reject both him and the philosophical works he so reveres. John picks out the otherwise unidentified Cornificius as the worst of these characters, a man whose ‘inflated arrogance is marked by an overweening proclivity both to magnify its own good points, if it has any, and to belittle those of others’.4 Cornificius rejects the wisdom of the ancient philosophers and ‘boasts that he has a shortcut whereby he will make his disciples eloquent without the benefit of any art, and philosophers without the need of any work’.5 John had already voiced these complaints in the Entheticus, a verse-treatise in which he described his Parisian peers as a yammering and confused horde of petty self-satisfied semi-literates. ‘Unless you speak words pleasing to children, the chattering crowd will spit in your face,’ he exclaims. Should you refer to ancient authors, your audience will shout, ‘What’s this old ass aiming at? . . . We do not accept this burden of following the words of those whom Greece and Rome venerates.’6 Perhaps John never found the time in his crowded curial calendar to study philosophy, but he somehow managed to write about it and defend it, to castigate his critics and, hopefully, educate his friends. He took up this task first in the Entheticus (composed in parts between 1141 and 1155), and then in the two works for which he is best known, the Policraticus (composed between 1156 and 1159) and the Metalogicon (which he composed between 1157 and 1159).7 For all their philosophical content, these are unmistakably works of a man deeply immersed in the politics and intrigue of the medieval court. Rather than separate the two parts of his life, the philosophical and the political, John everywhere combines them, repeatedly arguing and demonstrating that his youthful philosophical studies have made it possible for him to succeed as a church bureaucrat, that his life in England must be understood as the application of the training, habits, and ideas he received in France. As John writes in the prologue to the Metalogicon:

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John of Salisbury, Academic Scepticism De moribus uero non nulla scienter inserui, ratus omnia quae leguntur aut scribuntur inutilia esse nisi quatenus afferunt aliquod adminiculum uitae. Est enim quaelibet professio philosophandi inutilis et falsa, quae se ipsam in cultu uirtutis et uitae exhibitione non aperit. (I have purposely incorporated into this treatise some observations concerning morals, since I am convinced that all things read or written are useless except so far as they have a good influence on one’s manner of life. Any pretext of philosophy that does not bear fruit in the cultivation of virtue and the guidance of one’s conduct is futile and false.)8

And there is no philosophy John finds more useful than the scepticism of the later Academy. John may well be the only medieval intellectual—he is certainly the only one we know about—to have had anything good to say about scepticism, much less to endorse such views as his own. Throughout the Middle Ages, especially as the thirteenth century rolled into the fourteenth, there was no surer way for one theologian to refute another’s epistemological theories than to reveal its sceptical consequences. General assumptions concerning the teleological structure of nature, the common course of nature and the fittingness of our cognitive capacities to the world, rendered moot the possibility of any real sceptical philosophies.9 John, of course, was not a university-trained theologian. In fact, he wasn’t really a theologian at all. Rather, he was an exceptionally well-educated cleric, a bureaucrat and sometime diplomat in the ecclesiastical and secular courts of twelfth-century Europe, and, as his biography suggests, this professional identity and institutional location plays a central role in John’s adoption and adaptation of Academic scepticism. John’s clearest endorsement of scepticism appears near the very beginning of the Policraticus.10 He writes: Nec Academicorum erubesco professionem, qui in his quae sunt dubitabilia sapienti ab eorum uestigiis non recedo. Licet enim secta haec tenebras rebus omnibus uideatur inducere, nulla ueritati examinandae fidelior et, auctore Cicerone qui ad eam in senectute diuertit, nulla profectui familiarior est. (I feel no shame in proclaiming myself a member of the Academic school, and I am faithful to their rule in all matters that appear doubtful to the sage. For although the sect is supposed to introduce an element of obscurity in all discussions, none is more devoted to the critical examination of truth, and we have it on the authority of Cicero, who in old age took refuge in this school, that none is more friendly to progress.)11

Later in the Policraticus, in the midst of a lengthy discussion concerning the seemingly irresolvable debates about providence, fate, and free will, John returns to the value of a sceptical attitude. ‘I prefer with the disciples of the Academy, if there be no other way out, to express doubt with regard to statements rather than to make false claims to knowledge and be so rash as to define what is unknown or obscure,’ he writes, adding that Academic scepticism has the decided merit of rendering him

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature ‘cautious’.12 John had already praised this aspect of Academic scepticism in the Entheticus, when he distinguished between the sceptical teachings of Arcesilaus and Antisthenes. Arcesilaus, John warns, failed ‘to have moderation in his studies’, could not find truth anywhere, and ‘in the end [taught] his disciples to be ignorant of all truths’.13 By contrast, Antisthenes propounded a moderate form of Academic scepticism in which we accept the truths of reason, reserving a degree of doubt for things known from experience, things that often, but are not always, the case. When making assertions about such contingent matters, Antisthenes advises people to use such careful qualifying expressions as ‘I believe’ or ‘I think that it is’. As John explains: Mensque modesta solet sic castigare loquelam, ut falsi nullus arguat esse ream; sic adiectivis sermonem temperat omnem, debeat ut merito semper habere fidem. (A modest mind is used to chastise speech that no one might accuse it of being guilty of falsehood; it thus tempers all its discourse with adjectives so that it should always be rightly credible.)14

John consistently links scepticism and language: cautious and moderate judgements should lead to cautious and moderate speech. This linkage is hardly surprising given that he repeatedly cites Cicero as both a key exponent of Academic scepticism and a model of eloquence that all should strive to follow. Still, it is not entirely clear if John learned much of his scepticism from direct acquaintance with Cicero’s works. While he no doubt had first-hand knowledge of such important Ciceronian rhetorical and ethical works as De inventione, De oratore, De officiis, De amicitia, De senectute, as well as parts of the Disputationes Tusculanae, it seems unlikely that he had similar direct access to other works, like the Academica or even De natura deorum (his own reference to it in the Policraticus notwithstanding), in which Cicero explicitly discussed his fondness for the Academics. As with his infamously copious citations from classical literature, much of what John knows about Academic scepticism he learned at second hand, from collections of excerpts and anthologies, and from Latin patristic works like Augustine’s Contra academicos and De civitate Dei and Lactantius’ Divinae institutiones.15 Wherever he learned it, John argues that Academic scepticism is useful because it trains us to avoid making rash assertions about things we cannot know with certainty. As it turns out, there is quite a lot John thinks we cannot fully know because we are inherently flawed and broken beings. In the Metalogicon, John warns that ‘the human heart is so seduced that it but rarely succeeds in attaining knowledge of the truth’. Not only are many of the truths of faith beyond our compass, but our fallen and finite condition makes it well nigh impossible for us to discover the truths of more mundane things. ‘The frailty of man’s condition, the brevity of human life’, not to mention the probable conflict of opinions and vast range of topics and

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John of Salisbury, Academic Scepticism subjects to investigate, render human attempts at knowledge difficult at best and often impossible. But the worst of all these hindrances to human knowledge, John writes, is sin, which ‘separates us from God, and bars us from the fountain of truth, for which nevertheless, our reason does not cease to thirst’.16 In the Policraticus, John describes the consequences of these impediments to knowledge. ‘Those things are of doubtful validity’, John writes, ‘which are supported by authority of neither faith, sense or apparent reasons and which in their main points lean towards either side.’ What are those things? ‘Such things’, he goes on to describe in a lengthy and defiantly meandering list, include ‘questions concerning providence, the substance, quantity, power, efficacy and origin of the soul; fate and adaptability of nature; chance and free-will.’ We know little about the nature and motions of bodies, the status of universals, and ‘whether everyone who possesses one virtue possesses all’. We are left uncertain about the gravity and due punishment for different kinds of sins, and an entire array of questions about the earth, its geography, and the hidden properties of its many plants and animals. Likewise, we can never be fully confident about our ‘duties and the various kinds of situations that arise in reference to agreements and quasi-agreements, to misdemeanors and quasi-­ misdemeanors or to other matters’. And so his list continues until it ends and John concludes: In his itaque facile crediderim Achademicos tanto modestius dubitasse quanto eos temeritatis praecipitium diligentius praecauisse repperio. Adeo quidem ut, cum apud scriptores in locis non passim dubiis uerba quodammodo ambigua, qualia sunt haec: si forte fortasse et forsitan, proferuntur, Achademico dicantur usi temperamento. (Consequently in such matters I am ready to believe that Academics express doubt with a forbearance proportionate to the pains I find they have taken to avoid the pitfall of rashness. So true is this indeed that when writers in passages not ordinarily subject to doubt use words that express it such as ‘probably’ or ‘perhaps’, they are said to make them with Academic moderation.)17

For John, scepticism is not the first step into the maw of an all-devouring radical doubt, the nascent stirrings of a despairing fear that if we cannot know things with necessity and certitude, we cannot know them at all. As John makes clear in the Entheticus, the Policraticus, and the Metalogicon, given our diminished cognitive capacities and the complicated world in which we live, we have no choice but to be cautious with our judgements, and he is more than happy to exchange certainty for probability, the necessary for the persuasive. As he puts it at the beginning of the Policraticus, ‘[I]n philosophicis Academice disputans pro rationis modulo quae occurebant probabilia sectatus sim’ (‘In philosophy, accepting as I do the Academic system, I have admitted that which seems to the best of my judgment likely or probable’).18 In the Metalogicon, John offers his most thorough account of probability, distinguishing it from both demonstration and sophistry. Whereas demonstration

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature focuses on principles and ‘rejoices in necessity’, and sophistry, which has ‘no care at all for facts’, seeks only ‘to lose its adversary in a fog of delusions’, probability concerns itself ‘with propositions which, to all or to many men, or at least to the wise, seem to be valid’. Unlike demonstration, whose value is limited because it requires necessary propositions (and necessary propositions are almost always inaccessible to us), probability can help us make sense of all those complicated problems in natural and moral philosophy where such necessity and certainty is lacking. Probability itself consists of two parts, dialectic and rhetoric. Dialectical proofs begin with propositions or ‘theses’ that ‘are well known to all, or to the leaders in each field’.19 A dialectical proposition is probable if it ‘holds true in several cases’, if it can counter most, even if not all, objections. By contrast, rhetoric analyses particular cases. The orator will construct a persuasive speech based upon hypotheses that derive from the circumstances. ‘Such circumstances’, John adds, citing Boethius’ Topics, ‘are: “Who, what, where, by what means, why, how and when”.’20 John’s discussion of probability makes clear why, even if dialectic is more useful than demonstration, rhetoric will always be more useful than dialectic. Dialectic considers probable theses in the abstract, for example, ‘Whether is it better to obey one’s parents or the laws when they disagree?’21 By contrast, rhetoric considers what ought to be judged and decided, spoken and done, right here, right now, in this situation, at this moment. As Boethius notes just before offering the list of circumstances that John quotes in the Metalogicon: ‘The dialectical discipline examines the thesis only; a thesis is a question not involved in circumstances. The rhetorical discipline, on the other hand, investigates and discusses hypotheses, that is, questions hedged in by a multitude of circumstances.’22 And John was never in any doubt that the deceptions and challenges of court life hedged in and endlessly entangled the good man, leaving him with little to be sure of and all too much to be confused about. Summarizing the reasons for the Academics’ wariness of accepting things as they seem, John writes: Regnat in excelsis verum; viget error in imis, et fallit populos, quos vaga luna premit. Clara super lunam superos veri tenet aula; inferius mundum nubilus error agit. (Truth reigns in the heights, error flourishes in the depths and deceives the people whom the wandering moon oppresses. The bright court of truth above the moon holds the upper beings, further down cloudy error stirs the world.)23

John’s experiences in England confirmed for him that down here, below the moon, the court teems with errors in ‘which the foolish are deceived by an appearance of truth’. Liars lie, backstabbers betray, and every friendly face conceals the possibility of cruel cunning. John repeatedly warns his readers that they must be ever vigilant in the court, must constantly keep in mind the dangerous divide between what appears and what lurks behind. Much of the Entheticus’ third part consists in a survey

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John of Salisbury, Academic Scepticism of courtly deceivers and their deceptions and most of the Policraticus’ third book is given over to a sordid blow-by-blow description of every sort of flatterer. John warns his readers: Quid uero infidelius est quam eum cui fidem debeas circumuenire uerborum blanditiis, ludibrio habitus, gestus transfiguratione, et totius uanitatis lenocinio excaecatum in sordes uitiorum impellere et praecipitationis abyssum? (What more treacherous than to hoodwink by verbal flattery, beguiling manners, and deceptive gestures him to whom you owe allegiance, and to plunge him blinded by all the deceptions of vanity into degrading vice and down into the bottomless abyss?)24

Academic scepticism provides John with the tools to counter these all too real threats, to apply the methods of dialectic and, especially, rhetoric, in order to question and doubt what one hears and sees, to weigh one’s options and guide one’s actions. Scepticism, in other words, is practical because John conceives of it and its ultimate reliance on rhetoric and probability as essential to regulating one’s conduct. Unlike all the Cornificians who run their mouths non-stop, uttering one inanity after the next, the sceptic, John notes, keeps careful watch over his words. A modest mind is an ordered and orderly mind and John makes clear that the cautious speech of the sceptic is essential to the courtier. John warns: Est indocta loqui, quae nescit lingua tacere, floccida, quae verbi nescit habere modum. Sunt nugatores inimici, suntque tiranni falsus philosophus . . . (The tongue which does not know to be silent, is untaught in speaking, the one which does not know to have measure in speaking is weak. Triflers are enemies, and tyrants are for you false philosophers.)25

Selecting the right philosophical doctrines to guide our conduct is crucial if we hope to distinguish friend from foe, virtue from vice. Scepticism is not only practical, it is also essentially ethical. In this, more than anything else, John shows the depth and fullness of his debt to Cicero. ‘The universal rule in oratory, as in life’, Cicero notes in De oratore, ‘is to consider propriety. This depends on the subject matter under discussion, and on the character of both the speaker and the audience.’26 Cicero deepened the connection between rhetoric, oratory, and ethics in De officiis, arguing that the honourable man, just like the noble orator, must adapt his words, his gestures, and his actions to the demands of the moment so that he will behave with propriety, decorum, and ‘due measure in all things’. Accomplishing this fit between person and moment requires work and it requires knowledge. We must know who we are so that we know what is expected of us. Cicero argues that this self-knowledge is twofold because our duties spring from two different sources. The first source ‘is common’, he explains, ‘arising from

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature the fact that we all have a share in reason and in the superiority by which we surpass the brute creatures’. The other derives from our individual character, our unique skills and personal temperament—are we strong or weak, intelligent or merely clever, stern or affable?27 We must match our actions to the kind of people we are, but we must also fit our character to the unique circumstances that confront us. ‘Occasions often arise’, Cicero explains, ‘when the actions that seem most worthy of a just man, of him whom we call good, undergo a change, and the opposite becomes the case.’28 For example, though it is a generally accepted thesis that a just man fulfils his promises, there are occasions when justice requires that he breaks those promises—when, for example, carrying out the promise might cause real harm to one or both of the involved parties, or to the common good of the state. These sorts of adjudications can be difficult, never more than probable, and this is why, Cicero notes, the noble man, the perfect orator, must become ‘good calculators of their duties’.29 Even if John did not have direct access to Cicero’s sceptical writings, he certainly understood how Academic scepticism animates Cicero’s conception of rhetoric, duty, and ethical behaviour. John adapts Cicero’s distinction between general and specific duties, between those duties that apply to us in virtue of our humanity and those that apply to us individually in light of the kind of people we are and the positions we hold.30 Likewise, the first three books of the Policraticus read like case studies in rhetorical ethics, as John runs through examples in which commonly accepted moral theses might be reasonably rejected in favour of their opposites. Hunting and gambling, for example, are most often base and degrading activities that should be avoided, John argues, but ‘there are times when, viewed from some aspect [they] are permissible. They might be permissible, for example, if without evil consequence they alleviate the strain of heavy responsibilities and if without harming character they introduce an agreeable period of relaxation.’ Generalizing from these examples, John offers a decidedly Ciceronian-inspired rule for calculating our duties and conduct: Totius uero licentiae moderatrix est loci, temporis, modi, personae et causae praemissa inspectio, quae omnium negotiorum faciem decora uenustate commendat aut turpitudinis condemnat obprobrio. Est ergo in singulis plurium habenda ratio personarum, cum natura, conditio, fortuna, suis singulae hominem induant personis ex quibus quid se deceat erit uniuscuiusque colligere. (The circumstances that regulate all freedom from restraint, are dependent upon a preceding consideration of place, time, individual, and cause. It is this consideration which makes all transactions appear beautiful or condemns them as morally ugly. In each case, many roles are to be considered, since nature, situation, and fortune invests a man with its own garb and from these he must choose that which in his own case is becoming.)31

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John of Salisbury, Academic Scepticism The consequence of this sceptically inspired approach to ethical behaviour shows up most famously during John’s well-known diatribe against flattery in Book 3 of the Policraticus. John leaves little room for his readers to doubt that flattery is the scourge and plague of court life. ‘The flatterer is the enemy of all virtue’, John writes, ‘and forms as it were a cataract over the eye of him whom he engages in conversation.’ With seemingly kind and encouraging words, pledges of love and fidelity, fine manners and concerned gestures, the flatterer blinds his victim, fills his ears with lies, and stokes his vanity. ‘Men of this type’, John continues, ‘always speak to give pleasure, never to tell the truth. The words in their mouths are wicked guile which, even when friends are in error, bellows Bravo! Bravo! to their undoing.’ And so it goes at great length as John rages against flattery with a seemingly monomaniacal and unrelenting vitriol until, suddenly and unexpectedly, he relents and asks a surprising question, ‘But on whom ought this oil of the sinner be bestowed which the predecessors of the Kings of the faith reprove and for the purchase of which the words of the Gospel send the foolish virgins who were excluded?’ Having posed the question, he responds, ‘It is lawful to flatter him whom it is lawful to slay. Further it is not merely lawful to slay a tyrant but even right and just.’32 Even some of the foulest of behaviours can find themselves redeemed, made useful and virtuous given the right circumstances. According to John, only a sceptical attitude makes it possible to perform these complex moral calculations, to determine when necessities become probabilities, when theses become hypotheses. This is why, of all the philosophical schools John studied in Paris, he finds the ideas of the Academics the most useful in the secular and ecclesiastical courts of England. Only scepticism teaches us to be wary and cautious, to recognize that much of what we claim to know we don’t know at all. Scepticism offers its adherents the tools to judge the difference between the necessary and probable and, in so doing, the tools to make the sort of difficult moral choices that courtiers regularly faced in the performance of their duties. In both the Entheticus and the Policraticus, John offers a running commentary on any number of ancient philosophical schools and thinkers–Aristotle and the Stoics, Plato and Pythagoras, Socrates and Zeno. He writes approvingly of some of their ideas, while rejecting others as false and pernicious. He accepts Stoic doctrine concerning the fear of death, for example, but rejects their belief in a determinism that frees us from moral responsibility over our actions.33 Whatever his final assessment of each school, whether some offer more valid doctrines than others, each school ultimately sinks itself on the shoals of dogmatism, on poorly conceived or irrational beliefs. Having praised Pythagoras as the man in whom ‘Sophia was complete’, John concludes that ‘reason demonstrates that very many fallacies follow’ from his ill-conceived ideas about the soul.34 These schools might have much to offer, but in the end they mistake the merely probable, perhaps even the unlikely, for the necessary, and these are

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature p­ recisely the mistakes the honourable man, the good courtier, the faithful Christian cannot afford to make. John certainly believed that evaluating the truth, probability, or falsity of various philosophical doctrines mattered, but he also believed that philosophy was more than doctrine and doctrinal dispute. Philosophy involves habits of mind and body that develop over time through routine and practice, inculcating inclinations and predispositions to think and act in certain ways, not others.35 Throughout the Entheticus, John stresses the importance of a structured education rooted in fundamental precepts and teachings that serve as a foundation for everything that follows.36 Education must focus and foster our natural abilities. ‘Art’, John explains, ‘is a system that reason has devised in order to expedite, by its own short cut, our ability to do things within our natural abilities.’37 Of course, it is precisely this ordered and orderly education that John’s peers, men like Cornificius, mock, and it is their mocking and caustic jibes that inspire John to write the Entheticus, the Policraticus, and the Metalogicon. Cornificius rejects the wisdom and training of the ancient philosophers and the result, John observes, is nothing but foolish inanity, ‘a hodgepodge of verbiage, revelled in by a foolish old man, who rails at those who respect the founders of the arts, since he himself could see nothing useful in these arts when he was pretending to study them’.38 Cornificius’ disdain for philosophy rests in his belief that natural talents entirely determine a person’s prospects in life. ‘In the judgment of Cornificius (if a false opinion may be called a judgment), there is no point in studying the rules of eloquence,’ John reports, ‘which is a gift that is either conceded or denied to each individual by nature.’ We are either eloquent or we are not, Cornificius claims, and there is really nothing that can be done about it. Moreover, Cornificius contends, eloquence has absolutely nothing to do with philosophy and, for that reason alone, even if our natures did not securely fix our characters, there is no need for a person to study the writings of the ancients. Cornificius, describing this alleged divide between eloquence and philosophy, writes: Postremo quid est eloquentiae cum philosophia? Altera enim consistit in uerbo, altera sapientiae uias affectat, inuestigat et circuit, et interdum pro studio efficaciter apprehendit. Plane eloquentiae praecepta sapientiam non conferunt sed nec amorem eius, et saepissime quidem ei optinendae non conferunt. Res enim philosophia, aut finis eius quae est sapientia quaerit non verba. (What can eloquence and philosophy have in common? The former relates to language, the latter seeks after, investigates, and applies itself to learning wisdom, which it sometimes efficaciously apprehends by its study. Clearly the rules of eloquence confer neither wisdom nor love of wisdom. More often than otherwise, they are not even helpful for the acquisition of wisdom. Philosophy (or wisdom its object) is concerned not with words, but with facts.)39

Cornificius and his cronies reduce eloquence to natural ability and philosophy to mere doctrine. They effectively sever the link between philosophy and ethics, never 386

John of Salisbury, Academic Scepticism recognizing the role that philosophical training plays in the formation of our character. As a result, John argues, they flit from one thing to the next, as they are ‘borne along headlong’, having abandoned every rule of moderation. John writes in the Entheticus: Non est apta loqui, sed sordes lingere nata lingua loquax, semper ad maledicta procax. Euforbi rabies hac peste laborat, agitque, gratia ne vigeat sive fidelis amor, ne qua domus pacem teneat, ne claustra quietem, curia ne quaevis tuta manere queat. Lingua nocens planos incrustat, sancta prophanat semper, et in cunctos toxica saeva iacit. (A loquacious tongue is not fit to speak, but born to lick filth, always inclined to slanderous language. The frenzy of Euphorbus suffers from this pestilence and acts so that neither grave nor faithful love may flourish, that no house may have peace, nor monasteries quiet, that no court can remain safe. A harmful tongue crusts over what is clear, always profanes holy things and shoots grim venoms into everyone.)40

If language exists to reveal one man’s heart and thoughts to another, as John suggests earlier in the Entheticus, then the words that pour out of the mouths of men like Cornificius are like so much empty chatter, the babble of babies and the barking of dogs. Worse, looking out only for themselves, constantly mistaking the false for the true while looking out only for their own pleasures, they happily lie to others, playing the role of friend only to leave their so-called friend in the lurch when better offerings appear, when danger looms. Perhaps John left his philosophical studies behind when he left Paris for England, but he didn’t leave philosophy behind, and certainly not the scepticism of the Academy and Cicero’s rhetoric. The sordid and selfish lives of his fellow courtiers made manifest the dangers of a life lived without philosophy, unformed by philosophy. The history of philosophy itself made clear the dangers of dogmatism and the need for caution, moderation, and doubt. To be a human being, John suggests, is to be a student, and at the end of every life, just as at the end of every class, we will be graded.

Notes   This chapter focuses on John of Salisbury as a representative of the ‘twelfth-­century renaissance’ in Anglo-Latin intellectual and literary culture. For further treatments of classical reception in Anglo-Latin writing in the high Middle Ages, see Chapter 15 in this volume by Briggs on moral philosophy and Chapter 16 by Grey on historiography. The most valuable survey of Anglo-Latin writing is A.  G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066–1422 1

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Cambridge, 1992). On the twelfth century in particular and classical outlooks and learning in Anglo-Latin writing, see Thomas Moser, Jr, A Cosmos of Desire: The Medieval Latin Erotic Lyric in English Manuscripts (Ann Arbor, 2004), and John D. Cotts, The Clerical Dilemma: Peter of Blois and Literate Culture in the Twelfth Century (Washington, DC, 2009). 2   Cary Nederman, John of Salisbury (Tempe, Ariz., 2005), p. 14, and more generally, pp. 1–39, for a brief overview of John’s life and career. Pierre Riché, ‘Jean de Salisbury et le monde scolaire du XIIe siècle’, in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford, 1984), pp. 39–61, discusses the scholarly world of the mid-twelfth century. On John’s studies, see Olga Weijers, ‘The Chronology of John of Salisbury’s Studies in France (Metalogicon, II.10)’, in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Wilks, pp. 109–16. 3   John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, trans. Daniel D. McGarry (Berkeley, 1955), prol., p. 5. For the original Latin, see Ioannis Saresberiensis, Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall, CCCM 98 (Turnhout, 1991), prol., p. 10. I will rely on McGarry’s translation. 4   John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, Bk I, ch. 1, p. 9 (ed. Hall, p. 12). 5   John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, Bk I, ch. 3, p. 14 (ed. Hall, p. 15). 6   John of Salisbury, Entheticus maior and minor, ed. and trans. Jan van Laarhoven, 3 vols (Leiden, 1987), 1, pt I, 106–7, lines 39–48. 7   Cary J. Nederman, John of Salisbury, offers the best overview for the dating of these works, pp. 17–19 and p. 27. On the Entheticus in particular, see Cary J. Nederman and Arlene Feldwick, ‘To the Court and Back Again: The Origins and Dating of the Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum of John of Salisbury’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21 (1991), 129–45. 8   John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, prologue, p. 11, trans. p. 6. 9  Dominik Perler, ‘Does God Deceive Us? Skeptical Hypotheses in Late Medieval Epistemology’, in Rethinking the History of Skepticism: The Missing Medieval Background, ed. Henrik Lagerlund (Leiden, 2010), pp.171–92, here, pp. 189–90. For the variety of ways doubt manifested itself in medieval Europe, see Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativisms and Doubt in the Middle Ages, eds Dallas G. Denery II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman (Turnhout, 2014). 10   There are two critical editions of the Policraticus. The most recent, Ioannis Sareberiensis, Policraticus I–IV, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, CCCM 118 (Turnhout, 1993), only encompasses the work’s first four books, while the earlier edition, Policraticus, 2 vols, ed. Clement C. J. Webb (Oxford, 1909), encompasses the entire work. Where possible, I draw the Latin from KeatsRohan’s edition. In any event, whenever necessary all citations to the Policraticus will contain references to both editions and be prefaced with ‘K-R’ or ‘W’. Translations are from Policraticus, trans. Joseph B. Pike (Minneapolis, 1938). 11   John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Bk I, introduction, K–R, p. 25/W, p. 17; trans. Pike, p. 10. 12   John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Bk II, ch. 22, K–R, pp. 126–7/W, p. 122; trans. Pike, p. 107. 13   John of Salisbury, Entheticus, pt II, lines 727–31, p. 152. 14   John of Salisbury, Entheticus, pt II, lines 1141–58, pp. 180–1 (quotation at lines 1155–8). 15   See Christophe Grellard, Jean de Salisbury et la Renaissance médiévale du scepticisme (Paris, 2013), pp. 32–5, from whom this paragraph borrows liberally. On John’s selective use of the classics, see two essays by Janet Martin, ‘John of Salisbury’s Manuscripts of Frontinus and of

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John of Salisbury, Academic Scepticism Gellius’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977), 1–26, and ‘Uses of Tradition: Gellius, Petronius and John of Salisbury’, Viator 10 (1979), 57–70; and, more generally, A. C. Krey, ‘John of Salisbury’s Knowledge of the Classics’, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Science and Letters 14 (1909/10), pp. 948–87. 16   Metalogicon, Bk IV, ch. 40, trans. McGarry, pp. 268–9 (ed. Hall, pp. 179–80). 17   John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Bk VII, ch. 2, W p. 99, trans. Pike, pp. 221–2. 18   John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Bk I, prol., K–R p. 25/W p. 17, trans. Pike, p. 10. 19   John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, Bk II, ch. 13, trans. McGarry, p. 105 (ed. Hall, p. 76). 20   John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, Bk II, ch. 12, trans. McGarry, pp. 101–2 (ed. Hall, p. 74). 21   John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, Bk II, ch. 13, trans. McGarry, p. 103 (ed. Hall, p. 75). 22  Boethius, De topicis differentiis, trans. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, NY,1978), bk. iv, 1205C. 23   John of Salisbury, Entheticus, pt II [74], lines 1133–6, p. 178–9. 24   John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Bk III, ch. 4, K–R p. 179/W pp. 177–8, trans. Pike, p. 159. 25   John of Salisbury, Entheticus maior, pt III, lines 1497–500, pp. 202–3. The tradition of medieval humanism that John advocates, in which philosophy and a philosophical education shape a person’s character and conduct, suggests that Pierre Hadot’s thesis, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford, 1995), pp. 264–76, that ancient traditions of philosophy as a way of life ended abruptly under the dual pressures of medieval monasticism and the university, needs at least some minor corrections. 26  Cicero, Orator, 21, 70–1, cited in Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence and Scepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY,1985), pp. 33–5, and from whom I draw heavily for this Ciceronian overview. 27  Cicero, On Duties, Bk I, ch. 107, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Adams, trans. Margaret Atkins, (Cambridge, 1991), 42. 28  Cicero, On Duties, Bk I, ch. 31, 13. 29  Cicero, On Duties, Bk I, ch. 59, 24. Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 75–88, offer a concise summary of what these calculations would look like. On prudence and decorum in Cicero, Robert W. Cape, Jr, ‘Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome’, in Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice, ed. Robert Harriman (University Park, Pa, 2003), pp. 35–65. Cary Nederman, ‘Nature, Sin and the Origins of Society: The Ciceronian Tradition in Medieval Political Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988), 3–26, surveys Cicero’s influence from the twelfth through to the fourteenth centuries. 30   John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Bk I, ch. 2, p. 12 (K–R p. 28/W pp. 19–20). 31   John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Bk I, ch. 5, K–R pp. 44–5/W p. 37, trans. Pike, p. 28. 32   John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Bk III, ch. 15, trans. Pike, p. 211 (K–R pp. 229–30/W pp. 232). 33   John of Salisbury, Entheticus maior, pt II, lines 451–526, pp. 134–9. 34   John of Salisbury, Entheticus maior, pt II, lines 739–72, pp. 152–4. 35   Cary Nederman. ‘Nature, Ethics, and the Doctrine of “Habitus”: Aristotelian Moral Psychology in the Twelfth Century’, Traditio 45 (1989–90), 87–110, discusses the role of habit and habitus in John’s writings.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 36   John of Salisbury, Entheticus maior, pt I, lines 63–6, p. 108. Daniel D. McGarry, ‘Educational Theory in the Metalogicon of John of Salisbury’, Speculum 23:4 (October 1948), 659–75, provides a useful overview of John’s ideas about education, but entirely neglects the practical applications that John thought so essential to any real philosophical study. On John’s own education in the trivium, see Karin Margareta Fredborg, ‘The Grammar and Rhetoric Offered to John of Salisbury’, in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom: The Role of Ancient Texts in the Arts Curriculum as Revealed by Surviving Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, eds Juanita Feros Ruys, John O. Wards, and Melanie Heyworth (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 103–30. 37   John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, Bk I, ch. 12, p. 36 (ed. Hall, p. 31). 38   John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, Bk I, ch. 3, p. 16 (ed. Hall, p. 17). On the dangers of Cornificius and his ilk, see Michael Wilks, ‘John of Salisbury and the Tyranny of Nonsense’, in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Wilks, pp. 263–86 (at pp. 272–8). 39   John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, Bk I, ch. 6, ed. Hall, p. 23, trans. McGarry, pp. 24–5. 40   John of Salisbury, Entheticus maior, pt III, lines 1729–36, pp. 216–19.

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Chapter 19

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Alliterative Poetry and the Time of Antiquity Emily Steiner

Introduction This essay discusses the time of classical antiquity in English alliterative poetry, c.1360–1420, a period of intense literary creativity. Alliterative poets in this period were attracted to what we now call Greek, Roman, and Judaeo-Roman antiquity, which they explored within the context of alliterative verse. In the process, they helped make English poetry a vehicle for deep and deliberate historicizing. This encounter with antiquity is particularly striking in Piers Plowman, the alliterative corpus’ most ambitious poem, but it also animates other long alliterative poems, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, St. Erkenwald, the Siege of Jerusalem, and the Wars of Alexander. What is truly intellectual about medieval alliterative poetry is its commitments to history, and, as we will see, the time of classical antiquity posed challenging historiographical, formal, and theological problems with which alliterative poetry proved especially equipped to deal. English alliterative poets engaged so creatively with classical antiquity in part because of the success of the universal chronicle, which reached its apogee in the fourteenth century both in Latin and in vernacular translation.1 Universal histories include Vincent of Beauvais’ massive Speculum historiale, ‘historical’ bibles such as the Bible historiale, and the many genealogical chronicles which synthesize biblical, Trojan, and national histories.2 For alliterative poets in medieval England the most stimulating of these was Ranulf Higden’s Latin Polychronicon, which, though compiled from already well-known histories, became itself a major content provider. The Polychronicon was assembled between 1325 and 1355 at St Werburgh’s, Chester, and, by 1387 had been translated into a lightly alliterated English prose by John Trevisa.3 Following the example of late antique universal histories, the Polychronicon

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature begins with a geographical description of the world (Book 1), and then turns to historical narrative (Books 2–7), collating biblical, Roman, papal, and early European history, and culminating with the history of England to the reign of Edward III.4 Both Higden and Trevisa have strong opinions about historical writing: for example, about the credibility of sources, the reckoning of time, the truthfulness of marvels, and the salvation of non-Christians. Roman and Judaeo-Roman figures, such as Julius Caesar, Vespasian, Titus, Trajan, and Josephus, play important parts in Higden’s and Trevisa’s ruminations on history, as do several Greek figures, most notably Aristotle and Alexander. Higden’s portraits of classical figures resonate with alliterative poets’ approach to the classical past. For one thing, the alliterative corpus and the Polychronicon share a robust sense of Englishness: Higden draws classical materials from continental sources, such as Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica (c.1170) and the ubiquitous saints’ lives collection, the Legenda aurea (‘Golden Legend’, c.1260), but for him, all history converges on the English present and the British Isles; similarly, alliterative poets confidently assume that insular verse is suited to historical narrative of all kinds. Alliterative poetry also shares with the Polychronicon a universal perspective on the past, a perspective that includes strong, if conflicted feelings towards classical figures. Early Roman-Christian apologetics, such as Augustine’s De civitate Dei (c.410–18) and its companion piece, Orosius’ Historia adversus paganos (c.415), capitalized on the success of the Roman Empire in order to posit a superior Christian one which extended beyond Rome to the heavenly Jerusalem, and before Rome to superseded nations (of the Persians, Greeks, Jews, and others). Alliterative poetry is likewise invested in Christian empire, both worldly and spiritual, and especially in the peculiar temporalities that Christian empire grants to different peoples. Several of the long alliterative poems, such as the Morte Darthure and the Wars of Alexander, also boast big geographical imaginaries.5 Importantly, this universal perspective has to do not only with the general medieval interest in salvation history, but also with the particular form of insular verse. One of the outstanding characteristics of the alliterative long line is its ability to accommodate, often quite splashily, archaic diction, foreign names and places, panoply, and procession. The narrator of the Wars of Alexander, for example, having promised to relate Alexander the Great’s conquests as far as the ‘Red East’, proceeds to describe the Egyptians’ wondrous knowledge of the world. One king, Anectanabus, for instance, was rumoured to be so wise that his knowledge of the seven arts exceeded that of the best classical scholars: þe iapis of all gemetri gentilli he couth, And [as] wele as Aristotill, the artis all seuyn. þare preued neuir nane his prik, forpassing of witt, Plato nor Pitagaras ne Prektane himseluen.6

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Alliterative Poetry and the Time of Antiquity (He knew all the twists and turns of geometry, And of all seven arts, as well as Aristotle did. No one came close to him, surpassing his intelligence, Not Plato, nor Pythagoras, nor Priscian themselves.)

The Latin source for this passage, the J3 recension of the Historia de preliis (c.1200), says only that the king was famous ‘quia fuit homo ingeniosus et in astrologia et mathematica eruditus’ (‘because he was a clever man and learned in astrology and mathematics’).7 By contrast, the English poet compares the king’s erudition to that of Aristotle (philosophy), Plato (logic), Pythagoras (arithmetic), and Priscian (grammar); in the process he shows off the ability of alliterative verse to record the great hits of classical antiquity. Medieval alliterative poetry makes room for classical antiquity, both the immensity of its achievement and the reach of its empires.8

‘Old Livers’ In medieval English literature, allusions to classical antiquity sometimes seem superficial or decorative, either hijacked by theology or co-opted for romance. The latter would seem to be true of the best-known alliterative poem, the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c.1390), which begins and ends with a brief synopsis of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1139), the post-classical continuation of Trojan history that was supposed to explain Britain’s origins. In the first lines of the poem, the bellicose descendants of Aeneas (the legendary ancestor of the Romans) founded European territories to which they gave their own names: Romulus—Rome, Ticius— Tuscany, Langobard—Lombardy, and Brutus—Britain. In this passage, Brutus serves as Britain’s eponymous founder and the violent progenitor of Arthurian romance: Ticius to Tuskan and teldes bigynnes, Langaberde in Lumbardie lyftes vp homes, And fer ouer þe French flod, Felix Brutus On mony bonkkes ful brode Bretayn he settez With wynne, Where werre and wrake and wonder Bi syþez hatz wont þerinne, And oft boþe blysse and blunder Ful skete hatz skyfted synne.9 (Ticius [goes] to Tuscany and begins to build forts Langaberd to Lombardy, erects homes, And far over the French sea, Felix Brutus On many broad banks, founds Britain With joy; Where war, revenge, and wonder,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Has appeared there, each in its turn, And often woe and gaiety Have alternated since that time.)

In this passage, the classical past in its post-classical incarnation supports aristocratic values and pastimes: the knights of the Round Table are young and untried, but they have ancestral reserves on which to draw. This passage also presents Trojan history as a luxury good, setting the scene for Arthur’s sumptuous New Year’s feast portrayed a few lines later. In the January illustration of the famous book of hours, Les Très riches heures (c.1415), the Duke de Berry, celebrating the New Year with his household, presides at a table groaning with golden vessels. Behind him hangs a tapestry decorated with the battles of the Trojan War, with captions describing them.10 Like the duke’s tapestry, the opening to Gawain serves as a backdrop to a culture of magnificence and barely restrained violence. But importantly, in Gawain classical antiquity is more than simply decorative: it also showcases the creativity of alliterative verse by fashioning a temporality for the classical past. In these opening lines, the poet highlights the temporal disjunction between post-Trojan conquest and the expansive present of Arthurian Britain (i.e. ‘And oft bothe blysse and blunder | Ful skete hatz skyfted synne’, 8–9). The two alliterative forms displayed here—the long line and the bob-and-wheel (a short end-rhymed line)—at once invent these temporalities and suture them together, incorporating Trojan time into Arthurian romance. Gawain’s Trojan frame distinguishes it sharply from the literary sensation of the late fourteenth century, Piers Plowman, an allegorical dream-vision of over 7,000 lines attributed by modern critics to William Langland, extant in over 55 manuscripts, and released by the poet in at least three versions (A–B–C) between the 1360s and 1380s. The most copied alliterative text in late medieval England, Piers Plowman often behaves like an outlier in the corpus, if the corpus is defined by romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or metrically more regular poems such as Wars of Alexander, which survive in just one and two manuscripts respectively. Unlike these poems, moreover, Piers Plowman appears to be completely uninterested in classicizing or in classical history. In contrast to Chaucer, for example, Langland never invokes Ovidian mythology, even to moralize it, although in several places he comes within striking range.11 Moreover, in the last third of the text (B.15–19, C.17–21), where the poem is steeped in salvation history, Langland entirely skips over Greek, Trojan, and Roman antiquity—a staple of universal chronicles—confining himself to the apostles, desert Fathers, the donation of Constantine, St Augustine of Canterbury’s mission to the English, Muhammad, Anglo-Saxon martyr kings, Saints Francis and Dominick, the Knights Templar, and (in some manuscripts), the martyred English archbishop Thomas Becket.12 Classical antiquity would seem to be a curious omission on the part of a very learned poet.

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Alliterative Poetry and the Time of Antiquity And yet, if Langland excludes classical antiquity from his universal history, it may be because Greek and Roman figures actually play disproportionately large roles in his salvation theology. Indeed, earlier in the poem (B.11–12), two of these figures, Aristotle and Trajan, come to represent a salvific time that Langland associates with classical antiquity. In B.12, a character named Imaginatif, a penitential faculty, lectures the dreamer on the price of worldly things. He explains that many famous people came to nothing, however much they spoke of virtue, because they relied on earthly goods—power, wisdom, strength, and beauty—rather than on Christian faith. Reliance on earthly goods implicates all of world history, and thus becomes a lens through which everyone can be viewed: the fallen and the damned, biblical, classical, and romance figures, men and women: For what made Lucifer to lese the heighe hevene, Or Salomon his sapience or Sampson his strengthe? Job the Jewe his joye deere he it aboughte, Aristotle and othere mo, Ypocras and Virgile; Alisaundre that al wan, elengeliche ended. Catel and kynde wit was combraunce to hem alle. Felice hir fairnesse fel hire al to sclaundre, And Rosamounde right so reufulliche bisette The beaute of hir body; in baddenesse she despended. Of manye swiche may I rede – of men and of wommen – That wise wordes wolde shewe and werche the contrarie: Sunt homines nequam bene de virtute loquentes.13 (For what made Lucifer lose the high heaven, Or Solomon his wisdom, or Samson his strength? Job the Jew paid a high price for joy, As did Aristotle, Hippocrates, Virgil, and others. Alexander, who conquered all, ended wretchedly; Possession and worldly knowledge encumbered them all. Felice’s fairness cost her her reputation, And Rosamond likewise put herself in a bad situation: She sinfully squandered the beauty of her body. I have read many examples of such men and women, Who speak wise words but act otherwise: ‘There are wicked men who speak of virtue’.14)

From one perspective, the figures in this catalogue are cultural detritus: classical scholars such as Aristotle (philosophy), Hippocrates (medicine), and Virgil (poetry) give way to Felice, the heroine of the romance Guy of Warwick, and Rosamund (Clifford), the ill-fated mistress of King Henry II.15 The demands of alliterative metre make these de casibus figures, easily exchanged for other names, seem even more random.16 However, from another perspective, this sort of catalogue, precisely

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature because it shows off the reach of alliterative verse, is particularly adept at including classical figures, as we saw with the example of the Egyptian king from the Wars of Alexander. To take another example, from the Piers Plowman C-text, the narrator (or possibly Recklessness) brags that he knows many holy proverbs about patient poverty, and can recite examples from the ‘poets’ (i.e. classical pagan authors) too numerous to name (1,100!). In this speech, the speaker lists several classical authors—Porphyry and Plato, Aristotle and Ovid, Tullius (Cicero) and Ptolemy—although he doesn’t bother to quote them: Mo prouerbes y myhte haue of mony holy seyntes, To testifie for treuthe þe tale þat y shewe; And poetes to preuen hit: Porfirie and Plato, Aristotel, [Ouidius], enleuene hundred, Tullius, Tolomeus [Ptolemy]—y can nat telle here names, Preuth pacient pouerte pryns of alle vertues (C.12. 172–7) (I could give more citations from many holy saints, To validate the point that I am making here, And poets to prove it: Porphyry and Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, eleven hundred, Tullius, Ptolemy—I can’t list all their names— Prove patient poverty to be the prince of all virtues.)

Manuscript transmission can wreak havoc on lists such as these: in some C manuscripts, for example, ‘Ouidius’ becomes ‘Ennedy’ (perhaps Ennius, the well-known poet from the Roman Republic), and in a certain sense it doesn’t matter which authors are cited as long as they are recognizable as authorities. What the passage offers is citation itself, or the way that the vernacular erudition is signalled by alliterated lists of authorities.17 But additionally, this capacious list, like Imaginatif ’s, gives classical figures a role to play in salvation history, in which Aristotle turns out to be the big, if probably fallen, star. In B.12, the poet cautiously admires those pagan (nearly all classical) writers who bequeathed worldly knowledge to Christian scholars, but he frets about their salvation. Those worth quoting, those ‘old livers’ whose writings inform Christian ethics and hermeneutics, did not always live model lives, nor did they have access to the revelation that some biblical characters such as Abraham and Isaiah were thought, proleptically, to have had. Here the poet quotes the relevant verse, 1 Corinthians 3: 19 (‘the wisdom of the world is a folly before God’), used by many writers to stress the limitations of natural wisdom, while, at the same time, acknowledging the greatness of classical achievement. [Olde] lyveris toforn us useden to marke The selkouthes that thei seighen, hir sones for to teche,

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Alliterative Poetry and the Time of Antiquity And helden it an heigh science hir wittes to knowe. Ac thorugh hir science soothly was nevere no soule ysaved, Ne broght by hir bokes to blisse ne to joye; For alle hir kynde knowyng com but of diverse sightes. Patriarkes and prophetes repreveden hir science, And seiden hir wordes ne hir wisdomes was but a folye; As to the clergie of Crist, counted it but a trufle: Sapiencia huius mundi stultitia est apud Deum. (B. 12.131–8a) (Old livers [who came] before us used to record The wonders they saw, so that they might teach their sons, And [they] considered this information higher knowledge. But truly, through their knowledge, no soul was ever saved, Or, through their books, brought to bliss or joy, Because their wisdom came only from various experiences. Patriarchs and prophets disparaged their knowledge, And said that their words and wisdom was nothing but a folly; A trifle compared to the knowledge of Christ: ‘The wisdom of the world is a folly before God.’)

However, for Langland, the old livers’ huge contribution to ‘science’ meant that they occupied a peculiar temporality, what I call a ‘time of achievement’, in which classical figures have a tiny chance of being saved, no matter what their circumstances. This temporality is meaningful to the poet because it complicates a history of salvation in which pagans yield ineluctably to Christians, the unbaptized to baptized, and sinners to saints; in other words, the accomplishments of classical figures, rather than excluding them from salvation altogether, give all people a chance to be saved. Aristotle, a heart-wrenching figure for Langland, exemplifies this temporality. Although his vast knowledge simultaneously damns and commends him, it may just tip the balance in his favour. After all, as the poet exclaims about Aristotle (and Solomon), ‘Aristotle and he, ho [who] tauhte men bettere?’ (C.11.214). The poet observes that Aristotle amassed information about the natural world that was critical to Christian moralizing, and the very completeness of which was indispensable to scholarship. As Imaginatif explains to the dreamer: ‘Ac of briddes and of beestes men by olde tyme | Ensamples token and termes, as telleth thise poetes . . . Aristotle the grete clerk swiche tales he telleth, | Thus he likneth in his logik the leeste fowel oute’ (B.12.235–6, 265–6) (‘Of birds and beasts, the ancients | Drew lessons and figures . . . The great clerk, Aristotle, such tales he tells, | In which he compares in his wisdom the least little bird’). Thanks to classical pagan authors like Aristotle, for example, we know about the properties of birds and can convert them into moral instruction: for instance, the peacock with its lovely feathers, raucous voice, and revolting flesh can be likened to the rich man, who looks good to men but sounds shrill to God (B.12.235ff.). Imaginatif admits that these classical scholars lacked the one thing they needed: Christian faith. Still, he says, it is imperative that we pray for Aristotle’s and others’ 397

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature salvation, because they were important to Christian learning, and surely if God made us ‘better for their bokes’ he might have granted them—or may still grant them—a place in heaven. In the passage quoted below the poet revises the corresponding B-text passage beginning ‘Aristotle the grete clerk swiche tales he telleth …’ to include more classical authors (Porphyry, Plato, and ‘many poets’), while keeping Aristotle as the central figure: Thus Porfirie and Plato and poetes monye Likneth in here logik þe leste foul outen. And wher he be saef or nat saef þe sothe woet no clergie, Ne of Sortes ne of Salamon no scripture can telle Wher þat þey ben in hell or in heuene, or Aristotel þe wyse. Ac god is so gode, y hope that seth he gaf hem wittis To wissen vs weyes þerwith þat wenen to be saued— And þe bettere for here bokes to bidden we ben yholde— That god for his grace gyue her soules reste, For letrede men were as lewede men ʒut ne were þe lore of tho clerkes. (C.14.189–98, corresponding to B.12.265–72) (Thus Porphyry, and Plato, and many poets Compared in their wisdom the least little bird. And whether [they] be safe or not safe, no cleric knows for sure; No text can tell [the fates] of Socrates or Solomon— Where they are, in hell or in heaven—or of Aristotle the wise. But God is so good, I hope that, since he gave them the wits With which to teach us men who intend to be saved— And the better for their books—we ought to pray for them, That God in his grace give their souls rest, For educated men would still be ignorant without the lore of those clerks.)

The extraordinary reach of alliterative verse, revised here to include more classical authors, helps the poet zero in on the main issue: antique thinkers contributed so valuably to collected wisdom, and yet, lacking faith, they were supposedly damned. (As one medieval reader wrote in the margin of a B-text, London, British Library, Additional MS 35287, at line 12.269, Aristotle is notable precisely because his salvation is in doubt: ‘nota quia de Aristotile dubitatum utrum salvatur’18). At the same time, their prodigious achievement creates a time in which their wished-for salvation is a real possibility. By the end of B.12, the poet will consider the radical idea that, however much worldly knowledge is folly before God, the difficulty of anyone being saved though individual merit means that salvation is also possible for anyone—even Aristotle (following 1 Peter 4: 18 ‘Si iustus vix salvabitur . . .’). Aristotle was the centrepiece of later medieval higher learning, and thus someone whose salvation was desired however doubted. By the end of this period, he would become a figure in lay education as well. Take, for example, the later fifteenth-century

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Alliterative Poetry and the Time of Antiquity poem ‘Aristotle’s a.b.c’, an alliterative self-help manual for lay readers, now surviving in fourteen copies:19 Who-so wilneþ to be wijs, & worschip desiriþ, Lerne he oo lettir, & looke on anothir Of þe a. b. c. of aristotil: argue not aʒen þat: It is councel for riʒt manye clerkis & knyʒtis a þousand. And eek it myʒte ameende a man ful ofte For to leerne lore of oo lettir, & his lijf saue; (He who is willing to be wise, and desires honour, Let him learn one letter, then the next, Of the ABC of Aristotle: you can’t argue with that! It is good advice for many clerics and knights a thousand, And might frequently help someone Learn the lore pertaining to each letter, and, in doing so, save his life.)

This passage makes Imaginatif ’s claim more forcefully: Aristotle alliterated is not only the foundation of higher education, but also, as a basic form of lay learning, the very path to salvation. In the decades separating Piers Plowman from ‘Aristotle’s a.b.c.’, vernacular literacy would expand rapidly, giving English readers access to scholarly learning in simplified forms; notably, however, the later poem picks up the earlier one’s view of Aristotle as a source of vital information. If Langland is willing to pray for Aristotle and other ‘old livers’, and if the salvation of classical pagans can be imagined by way of alliterative verse, this attitude toward antiquity has already been modelled for Piers Plowman by Higden’s Polychronicon. Higden, too, is deeply ambivalent about the fates of classical authors and especially Aristotle’s. He uses the verse from Corinthians both as a condemnation of paganism (i.e. worldly knowledge minus faith) and as a pretext to rehearse the achievements of antiquity. In the Polychronicon, for example, Higden compiles every detail he can find about Aristotle’s life. Aristotle taught eloquence, composed a commentary on Homer, conversed with Socrates and Plato, tutored Alexander the Great, wrote many books on various topics in different genres and even in poor conditions (for instance, writing the Politics in the midst of battle); and was praised by luminaries of all faiths, including Avicenna, Maimonides, and John of Salisbury. Like Alexander, he mastered the world, and at Alexander’s command, he collected animals, so that he would have total knowledge of species. Higden sums it up as follows: Aristotle is the ultimate philosopher, just as Virgil is the ultimate poet and Rome the ultimate city (3.22).20 Indeed, when details are piled up from various sources, the lives of classical thinkers start to look like special lives worthy of being saved.21 For example, Higden applauds Pliny the Elder, who, despite his obligations as a gentleman, wrote seven books on the Roman wars and thirty-seven books of natural history, in which he

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature described the whole world. A model servant to the Empire, he restrained his master the Emperor Trajan from harming Christians, as Higden notes approvingly (4.13).22 Yet, however much classical figures like Pliny or Aristotle, so astonishingly productive, might be paramount to Christian learning, and however much their richly detailed lives might start to look like special ones, nevertheless, taken together, they illustrate 1 Corinthians 3: 19, ‘The wisdom of this world is folly before God.’ Classical scholars, says Higden, applied themselves to the study of the natural world and the nature of the divine, yet claiming to be wise they became fools (‘[dicentes enim] se esse sapientes stulti facti sunt’, from Romans 1: 22): either they knew nothing of God, or they failed to glorify him, or they introduced errors into Holy Church, which had to be rectified later (3.22). Higden concedes that some people take such condemnation too far: he very much doubts the story, for example, that Aristotle had his books buried with him in a grave that will be discovered in the days of Antichrist. Higden adds further that classical writers deserve some credit for deducing God’s incorporeality through the incorporeality of the soul (i.e. from Aristotle’s De anima) (3.24).23 In this packed and convoluted biography of Aristotle, ‘stultitia’ becomes a way of including classical thinkers in universal history—assigning them a peculiar temporality—while at the same time learning from their ‘folly’. For Higden, as for Langland, Aristotle is a sympathetic figure who straddles the border between universal knowledge and individual salvation, and, for that reason, a figure on which he could hang his mixed feelings about classical antiquity. It is not so surprising, then, that Higden’s translator, John Trevisa, an Oxford scholar, found a way for Aristotle to cross over. Higden cites one of his favourite Christian authors, Gregory Nazianzus (c.350), who illustrated ‘Sapientia huius mundi stultitia est apud Deum’ with Aristotle’s suicide by drowning.24 According to Nazianzus (and Higden), Aristotle’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge brought him to the brink: he jumped off a bridge in despair, because he could not explain the tides (‘Because I cannot take [i.e. understand] you, you’ll take me!’ (‘Quia non possum capere te capies me’), cries Aristotle to the water, Polychronicon, 3.24).25 In his translation of this passage from Higden, Trevisa vehemently interjects, defending Aristotle by offering a competing story about his death. How, Trevisa demands, could Gregory Nazianzus tell such an ‘ungoodly tale’ about ‘so worthy a prince of philosofres’ as Aristotle was?! Why not tell instead the story from the Book of the Apple, in which Aristotle, on his deathbed and sustaining himself with the smell of an apple, ‘taughte his scoleres how they schulde lyve and come to God, and be with God with outen ende’, at the end of which his hand trembles, the apple falls, and Aristotle gives up the ghost? Trevisa takes this alternative vita from the De pomo sive De morte Aristotelis (Book of the Apple or Death of Aristotle), which, from the tenth century, circulated in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin, often popping up in Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian collections.26 This fascinating text must have appealed to many medieval scholars for whom Aristotle was the centre of a learned life: it confutes the idea that Aristotle and other

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Alliterative Poetry and the Time of Antiquity pagans illustrate the limits of human understanding and the mortal despair that confounds those with knowledge but no faith. Like Langland, Trevisa is hoping for Aristotle’s salvation and, by extension, for that of other classical authorities.

Trajan In Piers Plowman B.11, the Emperor Trajan bursts into the scene with a cheeky ‘baw for bokes!’ (B.11.140). In the next passus, the dreamer contends that no one, neither Saracen nor Jew, can be saved without baptism. Imaginatif refutes this opinion with Trajan apparently in mind, exclaiming, ‘Salvabitur vix iustus in die iudicii . . . Ergo salvabitur’ (‘scarcely shall a just man be saved on the day of judgment . . . Therefore, he will be saved’, adapted from Peter 4: 18), and reminding the dreamer of the different but complementary idea that, throughout time, there have been exceptions that prove the rule of baptism. After all, he says, pagan Trajan found an escape hatch: ‘Troianus was a trewe knyght and took nevere Cristendom, | And he is saaf, so seith the book, and his soule in hevene’ (‘Trajan was a true knight and never baptized/And he is safe, says the book, and his soul in heaven’, B.12.280–1). Imaginatif is referring to the story from the life of Pope Gregory the Great, in which the pope, hearing of Trajan’s kindness to a bereaved widow, tearfully prays for the dead emperor, a story made famous by Dante in the Commedia. Trajan is effectively baptized through Gregory’s tears, and his soul flies to heaven.27 This tale provoked much debate in the Middle Ages, mainly regarding the technicalities of Trajan’s miraculous salvation (e.g. did he escape from hell, or was he only in Purgatory? Did he come back to life before converting? Did the tears actually baptize him, or did they merely get God’s attention?), and it generated more far-fetched stories. For example, in the Polychronicon, Higden reports in a separate note that Trajan not only sought justice for a widow whose son had been murdered, but also gave his own son as compensation to another widow, whose son had been trampled to death by Trajan’s son. Thanks to the emperor’s two deeds, Gregory was able to release him from hell. Higden’s translator, Trevisa, is incredulous: ‘So it myghte seme to a man that were worse than wood, and out of right bileve’! (‘So it would seem to someone who was totally crazy and out of his mind’, 4.13.) Langland takes the story of Trajan and Gregory at face value, but he extracts from it a different point about Trajan’s salvation: Trajan proves that integrity and love sometimes have the power to overcome law, i.e., what we think we know about the workings of salvation: Ac thus leel love and lyvyng in truthe Pulte out of pyne a paynym of Rome. Yblissed be truthe that so brak helle yates And saved the Sarsyn from Sathanas and his power, Ther no clergie ne kouthe, ne konnyng of lawes! (B.11.161–5)

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (And thus faithful love and living in truth Pulled out of pain a pagan of Rome. Blessed be the truth that thus broke hell’s gates And saved the Saracen from Satan and his power, About which no (Christian) learning can explain, nor knowledge of laws!)

God normally works through his ordinate power (i.e. according to what he has decreed), but through his absolute power he makes exceptions for good deeds, that is, the deeds of Greek and Roman emperors and scholars. In this way, the Emperor Trajan’s certain salvation deepens the ‘time of achievement’ through which scholars like Aristotle might be saved. Christians, even baptized ones, can hardly be saved themselves (because most people’s good deeds are insufficient to merit heaven), patriarchs and prophets were Christian avant la lettre, converted Jews and Muslims might be saved in extremis, Aristotle is surely damned but might just be saved through prayer, but Trajan was actually hauled out of hell though he lived post-Christ. Trajan benefited from a pope’s compassion and from his own deeds, but also from the fact that he belonged to special time in Christian history created by and for classical achievement. A similar example of how classical temporality functions in medieval alliterative verse is St Erkenwald (c.1390), which appropriates this temporality for a story about Christianity in Britain. In this poem, the seventh-century Saxon bishop Erkenwald is shown a miraculously preserved corpse, which has been excavated during renovations of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral. Induced to speak, the corpse reveals that he was a judge from the Romanized Celtic period, revered for his wisdom and now languishing in limbo between heaven and hell. Like Gregory, Erkenwald cries, and the judge’s soul ascends to heaven, his body crumbling to dust.28 The poet’s goal is to translate the Gregory/Trajan story—a miracle of Rome—to Anglo-Saxon England; in doing so, he shows how England, through the continuous use of sites like St Paul’s, is a place of exceptional salvations. Interestingly, in the Polychronicon (5.22), Higden presents Trajan’s salvation both as an event outside historical norms and a way of showcasing his own historical method. In a feat of historiographical acrobatics, Higden explains in a separate note that his beloved author Gregory Nazianzus did not report Trajan’s miraculous story in his Miracles of Rome because he never managed to get to Rome.29 Instead, the story of Trajan, the widow, and the pope’s intercession originated with John of Damascus (eighth century), who lived after Gregory the Great, a writer not to be confused, says Higden, as he often is, with John the Hermit, who lived long before the pope. And yet, says Higden, the miracle of Trajan’s salvation is absolutely true and continues to be celebrated by the Church. As Trevisa explains in a comment on his translation of this passage, Trajan’s story is truly a lifesaver, because it clarifies historical method at the same time that it ‘helpeth hem that beeth dede’, i.e. those classical figures most likely to have been saved. Together, classical figures like

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Alliterative Poetry and the Time of Antiquity Aristotle and Trajan lay the groundwork for thinking through the relationship between knowledge, history, and time.

Judaea capta After Piers Plowman, and compiled with Piers in two manuscripts, the best-attested alliterative narrative is The Siege of Jerusalem (c.1400). An action-packed tale, Siege relates the story of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem (70 ce), and the slaughter and captivity of Jews inside. These events were first reported in excruciating detail in The Jewish Wars, written by an eyewitness, Flavius Josephus (c.37–100 ce), a GraecoJewish historian well known to medieval writers and to the author of Siege.30 The Siege-poet drew his account mainly from a French prose text, La Vengeance de nostre Seigneur, as Hanna and Lawton discuss in relation to Bolton Priory (where Siege was most likely written),31 and, as Andrew Galloway has recently discovered, from a Yorkshire universal history, the Historia aurea of John of Tynemouth, which compiles material from Higden’s Polychronicon, the Legenda aurea, and Pseudo-Hegisippus (the latter a Latin digest of Josephus from the fourth century).32 In Siege, future emperors Vespasian and Titus convert to Christianity, attack the Jews in Judaea, whom they hold responsible for Christ’s death, besiege Jerusalem, whose inhabitants resort to eating leather, and finally take the city, selling the surviving Jews into captivity. Like many siege narratives, Siege contains gruesome details which tend to repel modern readers: Vespasian’s twelve messengers, whom the Jews disfigure with bleach (365–6ff.); the 700 Jews who jump to their death after hearing about the grisly end of their leader, Caiphas (713–16); a pregnant woman struck by a Roman catapult, which projects her unborn child over the ramparts; and a Jewish mother named Mary who roasts and eats her own baby. Josephus himself frequently appears in this narrative as a trickster, sage, diplomat, and writer, with plenty of ‘Christian potential’:33 originally on the side of the Jews, he leaves with the Romans to become their trophy historian: ‘Iosophus þe gentile clerke + aiorned was to Rome/þere of this mater and mo he made fayre bokes’ (1325–6).34 We saw that Christian universal history granted a special temporality to classical writers, which, in alliterative poetry, had the potential to resolve historical and theological problems (for example, how could Aristotle be saved if he didn’t know about Christ? How could Trajan be saved if he was already consigned to hell?). This is in part because the rise and fall of the Roman Empire coincided with the origins and spread of Christianity, and medieval historians relied on Roman, patristic, and late antique sources to document this period. The time of antiquity also helped resolve certain kinds of problems, because it was founded on the achievements of Greek and Roman figures: both emperors and scholars were credited with mastering the whole world, and their mastery set the stage for Christian dominion. For example, according to Luke 2: 1–7, Augustus Caesar ordered a census of the Empire in the same year that Christ was born, thus ushering in a post-Christian era through his

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature scheme for unifying the Empire. In Orosius’ influential account, the year that Christ was born was a special year of peace in the Empire: toto terrarum orbe una pax omnium non cessatione sed abolitione bellorum . . . census ille primus et maximus, cum in hoc unum Caesaris nomen uniuersa magnarum gentium creatura iurauit simulque per communionem census unius societatis effecta est . . . Postquam redemptor mundi, Dominus Iesus Christus, uenit in terras et Caesaris censu ciuis Romanus adscriptus est, dum per duodecim, ut dixi, annos clausae belli portae beatissima pacis tranquillitate cohibentur. (an all-embracing peace came to all the lands of the globe, there was a not a cessation but an abolition of all wars . . . this was when the first and greatest census was held, when all God’s creation of great nations unanimously swore loyalty to Caesar alone, and, at the same time, by partaking of the census were made into one community . . . After the Lord Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of the World, came down to earth and was enrolled as a Roman citizen in Caesar’s census, the gates of war were kept closed, as I have mentioned, for twelve years in the blessed calm of peace.)35

Here the Roman census enables the imperial reach of Christianity, with Christ himself serving as the ultimate Roman citizen and Caesar’s double. Caesar’s census became an integral part of Christian historiography and cartography: for instance, on the famous Hereford mappa mundi (c.1200), Christ’s head crowns the earth in majesty, while Caesar (Augustus), to the left of the map, orders his messengers to traverse the world.36 The destruction of Jerusalem (70 ce) is especially important to the medieval reception of classical antiquity because it is the moment at which Jewish history and the Roman Empire sensationally collide. It is also the geographical place where the Jews’ defeat maps on to Christ’s life and its aftermath: the radiation of the apostles from Judaea, and the persecution of Christians in Rome.37 The survival of Jewish communities was a constant provocation to medieval Christian writers: whereas the Roman empire in the West transitioned to a Christian empire, the conversion of the Jews lingered, not to be realized, it seemed, before the reign of Antichrist (when, as the fantasy travel-writer John Mandeville tells it, the Ten Lost Tribes—which he calls Gog and Magog—will escape from the Caspian Hills in which Alexander the Great shut them up).38 Roman Judaea, where Jews continued to live and fight after Christ’s death, highlighted the problem of Jewish resistance, at the same time that it offered a means to counter it. On the one hand, the destruction of Jerusalem, occurring decades after the Crucifixion, called attention to the awkward delay between Christian revelation and the conversion of Jews (and Romans); on the other hand, Josephus’ history of the period up to and including the Jewish Wars provided—and continues to provide—a crucial witness to Jesus’ life and the ministry of his apostles. If the power of the Empire lays the groundwork for Christian dominion, Judaeo-Roman history is the pivot on which universal Christian history turns. It is not surprising, then, that the Siege-poet thought it a fitting subject for alliterative verse.

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Alliterative Poetry and the Time of Antiquity The Siege of Jerusalem is a historical romance based directly and indirectly on the ‘Josephus Latinus’, as well as on various sources that use Josephus.39 Many of these sources, in their turn, draw on late antique and early medieval apocrypha, such as the Gospel of Nicodemus and the Life of Pilate,40 which are often convoluted and digressive. The genius of Siege lies in its elegant reordering of disordered materials, as its modern editors have shown.41 More specifically, as with Mandeville’s Ten Lost Tribes, the poem streamlines its materials by bringing classical empire to bear on the Jewish ‘problem’. Like other medieval narratives about Christians and Jews, Siege narrates a story about supersession (i.e. of Jewish loss and Christian gain); in this version, the Roman army does the dirty work of Christian vengeance, acting as a divine scourge upon obstinate foes. Siege further frames the struggle between Christians and Jews within the time of antiquity, the time in which the miraculous salvation of Roman emperors promises to resolve larger cultural problems, such as the Jews’ refusal to accept Christ. Despite the poet’s insistence that Siege is not a story about Rome’s subjugation of its provinces (in which a foolhardy Judaea withholds tribute from Rome), classical empire lends the narrative a coherent structure and a crucial rationale for the Jews’ defeat. The narrator, addressing Judaea, explains that it is payback time for the Jews, who both killed Christ and also rebelled against their Roman overlord: Suree, Cesaris londe, þou may seken euer; Ful mychel wo m[ou]n be wroʒt in þy [w]lonk tounnes. Cytees under S[yo]ne, now is your sorow uppe: þe deþ of + dereworth Crist dere schal be ʒolden (297–300) (Syria, Caesar’s land, may you ever mourn; So much woe shall be wrought in your proud towns. Cities of Zion, now your sorrow is increased: The death of beloved Christ will be repaid severely.)

Later, Vespasian tells his troops that he has renounced Nero’s quarrel over tribute in favour of holy war and will offer the Jews no parley; and yet he justifies his crusade in terms of Roman dominion.42 He predicts that the Jews will lose because they are ‘rebel to Rome’ (508), which claims all mastery: ‘by resoun to Rome þe rea[lt]e fallyth, | Boþe þe myʒt and þe mayn, maistre [and oþer]’ (‘for the royalty belongs to Rome, | Both the might and the main, the mastery, and the rest’, 510–11). Nor are the poem’s Romans incidentally Roman; their Roman identity is key to their success, as in the line describing the Romans’ wonderful freshness after a fierce battle with the Jews: ‘ʒit were þe Romayns as rest as þey fram Rome come’ (‘Yet the Romans were as fresh as if they had just come from Rome’, 609). Rome is the beginning and end of action in Judaea. The poem’s very first lines blame the Crucifixion on glitches in central administration, at the time when Tiberius ‘þe trewe emperour, | Sire Sesar hymsulf seysed in Rome’ (‘The true emperor, | Sir Caesar himself, ruled in Rome’,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 1–2, when Pilate was appointed procurator of Judaea, and Herod was King of Galilee. Though ‘Sesar sakles were þat oft synne hatide’ (‘[Tiberius] Caesar was blameless, he who generally hated sin’, 7), he bears some responsibility for the crimes of his subordinates. Siege fast-forwards to Nero’s reign, when Titus and Vespasian were generals, both suffering strange maladies (a facial tumour and bees in the nose, respectively). When Titus is cured by hearing about Christ, he blames Rome for dispatching Pilate to Judaea in the first place: ‘“[A] Rome re[nay]e[d] . . . [a] riche [emperour] Caesar, synful wrecche, þat sent hym fram Rome”’ (‘Oh cursed Rome . . . Oh powerful emperor, Caesar, sinful wretch, who sent him from Rome’, 174). Finally, Rome provides deep structure to the alliterative line, as with the line about the ‘vernicle’, the healing cloth with which Veronica wiped the sweat from Christ’s brow, and which, decades later, cures Vespasian’s bee-filled nose: ‘þe Romaynes hit [te]ldeth + a rome, and for + relyk + holden’ (‘The Romans kept it at Rome and considered it a relic’, 264); or the line in which the Romans strip the Temple of its treasures: ‘þe Romayns renten hem doun and to Rome ledyn’ (1272), or the very last line of the poem, in which the Romans ride home to Rome, and the narrator invokes God: ‘And hom riden to Rome; now rede ous oure Lord’ (1340). If Rome brings classical empire to bear on an unruly tale, it also addresses big chronological difficulties. The most serious of these is the forty-year lapse between the Crucifixion and the Jewish Wars, a period which gave medieval Christian writers much anxiety: why the wait? According to the Siege-poet these decades should be understood as a period of deliberate tarrying: Christ bided his time in the hopes that the Jews would, like Titus and Vespasian, be swayed by miracles and the testimony of the apostles, but the Jews remained stubborn and brought disaster on themselves:43 Bot ay taried on þe tyme ʒif þey tourne wolde; ʒaf hem space þat hym spilide, they hit spedde lyte, xl. winter + as Y fynde and no fewere ʒyrys + Or princes presed in hem þat hym to pyne wroʒt. (21–4) (But he continued to tarry, to give them a chance to turn around; He gave space to those who killed him, although they didn’t benefit from it, Forty winters, as I find, and no fewer years, Before they were attacked by princes, who brought them to grief.)

Siege fills this time the way a good romance should, by weaving disparate stories together, by alternating between places—the fighting in Judaea and political intrigue in Rome44—and by drawing out processions, speeches, and battles. As a character named Nathan points out in Siege, miracles sometimes make historians irrelevant: Christ ‘dide myracles + mo than Y in mynde have— | Nis no clerk with countours couþe alvendel rekene’ (‘Performed miracles, and more than I know— | No clerk with counters could reckon the half of them’, 131–2), evoking

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Alliterative Poetry and the Time of Antiquity Trajan’s speech on love and law in Piers Plowman. But ideally, the time of history and the time of miracle will confirm one another, and in Siege, Josephus, as a Judaeo-Roman figure, helps to yoke these temporalities together. In Siege Josephus is a prominent figure, at once a romance trickster (the ‘gynful’), popping up like a Daedalus or Merlin, and a potential pseudo-saint, who engineers the Roman victory and records it for posterity. Attempting to defend Jerusalem, Josephus performs a ‘wool’ trick, hanging dripping cloths over the walls to fool the Romans into thinking the Jews have water (789ff.); he pins stuffed sacks to the city walls to thwart the enemy’s arrows, and designs hot oil machines (805ff.). He also cleverly heals Titus of a sudden illness (says the poet, ‘þat surgyan was noble’, 1039), and bears a message from Titus to the Jews urging them to yield the city and save themselves (1157–8). Josephus, as a major character in the narrative, as well as the source behind it, embodies the problems of writing history in the Middle Ages: rationalizing different traditions and sources (Roman, Jewish, Christian), squaring historical events with Christian faith, and finding a place for antiquity in universal history. For Higden, too, both Josephus and his Jewish Wars addressed serious historiographical problems. Josephus is a crucial author in the Polychronicon, the first in a long list of auctores in Higden’s second prologue,45 because he confirmed the life of Christ. Book 1 of the Polychronicon, the geography, begins with Caesar’s census (as on the Hereford map), a project that was supposed to have spanned several centuries. Higden adds in a special note that Pilate, in his day, had sent word to Tiberius about the miracles performed by Christ in Judaea, but the Roman senators rejected the report because they had nothing with which to corroborate it.46 According to Higden, Josephus gives this crucial corroboration in the eighth book of the Antiquities, asserting that John the Baptist was a real person; that Jerusalem was destroyed in retaliation for the martyrdom of St James; that Christ was a wise man, the perpetrator of wondrous works (‘mirabilium operum’), and a popular teacher, who appeared to his disciples on the third day after his death; and that from that day forth the Christian people and Christian name did not fail (‘ac usque tunc genus et nomen Christianorum non defecisse’, Polychronicon 4.10, and see Antiquities, 8.3.3, 8.5.2; also 18.5.2). To Higden, Josephus is nearly as important for his account of the siege of Jerusalem, which irons out wrinkles in chronology at the same time that it extends Christian narrative. Higden complains, in his prologue to the Polychronicon, that ‘common chronicles’ (‘vulgares chronicae’) differ widely in their dating of Christ’s birth (no thanks to Dionysius Exiguus, c.500, who invented ‘ad’), and all of which lack ten crucial years between Christ’s Passion and Vespasian’s reign (1.2).47 For Higden, Josephus makes up those ten years, not by solving the problem of when Christ was born and died, but rather by providing a detailed narrative of the siege of Jerusalem, thus syncretizing Roman and Judaean history in ways that benefited Christian historiography (4.10).48

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Finally, Josephus is critical to medieval historiography not only because he confirms the historicity of Christ, but also, and relatedly, because he was unusually accomplished. The consummate historian, he wrote a universal history of the Jews (the Antiquities) as well as the book about their destruction (The Jewish Wars). An honoured servant of empire, he wrote for Roman princes and was, in turn, commemorated by the Romans in statuary, his many books collected in a special public library (Polychronicon, 4.10). Like Aristotle and Trajan, Josephus belongs to a time of achievement in which he almost has the possibility of being spiritually saved; indeed, in medieval manuscripts, Josephus is often depicted with all the tools of writing, writing which literally helped save his life at the same time that it corroborated Christ’s.49 In conclusion, alliterative poets adopted stories about classical antiquity but they also made innovative English poetry out of the past. That they could do so had to do not only with the enormous reach of English verse in this period but also with the sophisticated and complex thinking about the pagan past in which they were able to participate.

Notes 1   For further background, see John Taylor, The Universal Chronicle of Ranulf Higden (Oxford, 1966); Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, c.500–c.1307, Part 1 (Ithaca, NY, 1974); Andrew Galloway, ‘Writing History in England’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 255–83; and Christopher Given Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (2007). 2  A wonderful source for history in this period is Elizabeth Morrison and Anne D. Hedeman, Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500 (Los Angeles, 2010). On earlier historiography see Chapter 16 in this volume by Grey. 3  For overviews of Trevisa’s translations, see Jane Beal, John Trevisa and the English ‘Polychronicon’ (Phoenix, Ariz., 2013), and David Fowler, The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar (Seattle, 1995). See also Andrew Galloway, ‘Latin England’, in Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. Kathryn Lavezzo (Minneapolis, 2003), pp. 41–95. 4   As I discuss in ‘Radical Historiography: Langland, Trevisa, and the Polychronicon’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005), 171–211, the Latin Polychronicon, which survives in over 100 manuscripts, influenced not only alliterative poets, but also English dramatists, and reformers such as John Wyclif. 5   In fact, medieval readers associated alliterative poems as much with travel, historical, and orientalist literatures as with other alliterative works. For instance, the Siege of Jerusalem manuscript copied by Robert Thornton in the mid-fifteenth century (London, British Library, Additional MS 31042) contains the Saracen romances the Siege of Milan and Richard Coeur de Lion. The gargantuan Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd. 1.17 contains, along with Piers Plowman, Marco Polo’s travels, Mandeville’s Travels, Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, a

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Alliterative Poetry and the Time of Antiquity number of English histories including the Polychronicon, a prose history of Alexander the Great, and several treatises on Islam. See Michael Johnston, ‘Robert Thornton and the Siege of Jerusalem’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009), 125–62, and Stephen Shepherd’s essay cited in n. 31. 6   Wars of Alexander, eds Hoyt N. Duggan and Thorlac Turville-Petre, EETS ss 10 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 43–6. 7   Die Historia de preliis Alexandri Magni: Rezension J3, lines 8–9, ed. Karl Steffens (Meisenheim am Glan, 1975), p. 4. 8   See Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia, 2002), esp. ch. 4. 9   The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet, eds Malcolm Andrew, Ronald Waldron, and Clifford Peterson (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), lines 11–19. 10   See Brigitte Buettner, ‘Past Presents: New Year’s Gifts at the Valois Court, ca.1400’, Art Bulletin 83 (2001), 598–625. On Troy see also Chapter 13 in this volume by Desmond. 11   See Emily Steiner, Reading ‘Piers Plowman’ (Cambridge, 2013), ch. 2, pp. 36–8, for my discussion of moralizations of Ovid, and the relationship between Christ and Orpheus in Piers Plowman B.1. 12   On this tradition, see Lawrence Warner, ‘Becket and the Hopping Bishops’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 17 (2003), 107–34. 13   B.12.40–50a. Citations of Piers Plowman are A. V. C. Schmidt’s edition of the B-text, The Vision of Piers Plowman (1995); and Derek Pearsall’s edition of the C-text, ‘Piers Plowman’: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text (Exeter; repr. 2008). Translations are my own. 14   Langland has taken this line from the Latin epigrams of Godfrey of Winchester (twelfth century) written in the style of Martial. See John Alford, ‘Piers Plowman’: A Guide to the Quotations (Binghamton, NY, 1992), p. 79. 15   For a similar example in alliterative poetry, see the Parlement of the Thre Ages, ed. Warren Ginsberg (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1992), ll. 614–30. 16   Notably, there is surprisingly little textual variation in the transmission of this passage. 17   See Pearsall’s note on this passage in his edition , p. 224. 18   See C. David Benson and Lynne S. Blanchfield, The Manuscripts of ‘Piers Plowman’: The B-Version (Cambridge, 1997), p. 180. 19   Citation from the EETS edition, The Babees Book, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS 32 (1869; repr. 1969). See Martha Rust, Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix (New York, 2007), ch. 2. 20  Quotations from the Polychronicon and from Trevisa’s translation are taken from Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis: together with the English translations of John Trevisa and of an unknown writer of the fifteenth century, eds Churchill Babington and Joseph Rawson Lumby, 9 vols (1865–86). 21   I would like to thank Rita Copeland for sharing her unpublished work on the PseudoBurley De vita et moribus philosophorum, a medieval compilation of narrative-driven biographies of Greek philosophers. 22   Higden seems to have confused the Plinies: Pliny the Younger exchanged letters with Trajan about the Christians; Pliny the Elder served under Nero, a famous persecutor of Christians.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 23   Trevisa is very engaged with Higden’s life of Aristotle, and he intervenes frequently to offer more specific details about the Philosopher. For example, Higden recites Aristotle’s accomplishments in a general way, so Trevisa adds a specific note about De caelo et mundo. Higden records that Aristotle composed problems (‘problemata’) pertaining to medicine and physics, perspective, and metaphysics. Trevisa adds notes defining ‘problem’ and ‘perspective’. Higden describes Aristotle’s zoo and his fifty books on beasts (De historia animalium); Trevisa defines ‘beast’ (animal): ‘al thing that hath lif and felynge is i-cleped a beste’, 3.24. 24   Gregory Nazianzus seems to have specialized in stories about classical philosophers and their untimely deaths, which supposedly occurred when they failed to explain natural phenomena: Pliny was stymied by sand; Plato killed himself because he couldn’t solve a riddle about fish. Higden thinks this last story should have been attributed to Homer instead. For Gregory’s biography of Aristotle, see Ingemar Düring, Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition (Stockholm, 1957), p. 347. 25   Oleg Voskoboynikov, ‘Idle and Useful Curiosity from Peter Damiani to Dante’, a working paper from National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow (14 May 2013). 26   Polychronicon, 3.24; Liber de pomo, The Apple or Aristotle’s Death, trans with introd. by Mary F. Rousseau (MA thesis, Marquette University, 1968). 27  For Langland’s Trajan see Frank Grady, Representing Righteous Heathens in Medieval England (New York, 2005), esp. ch. 1. 28   St Erkenwald, ed. Clifford Peterson, in The Complete Works of the ‘Pearl’-Poet, eds Andrew et al. 29   Unbeknownst to Higden, this is not Gregorius Nazianzus but rather a Master Gregorius from twelfth-century Oxford, who wrote De mirabilibus urbis Romae, which Higden uses for his geography of Rome in Book 1. 30   Josephus’ major works in Greek were translated and adapted into Latin in late antiquity, making them extremely accessible to early and later medieval writers. Over twenty manuscripts of the ‘Josephus Latinus’ survive from medieval England alone. Unfortunately, there is no complete modern edition of the Latin translations, so readers must consult manuscripts or the 1582 Basle edition of Josephus’ collected works (Flavius Josephus, Opera omnia ad Graecorum exemplarium fidem recognita emendataq[ue] (Basle 1582)). The ‘Latin Josephus Project’ aims to generate a complete Latin text. Readers may consult many modern English translations of the Greek text, starting with the Penguin edition, The Jewish War, rev. edn, trans. Betty Radice et al. (Harmondsworth, 1984). William Winston’s edition can be consulted on line at . A definitive English translation is in progress: Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary, general editor Steve Mason, 7 vols to date (Leiden, 2000–). This chapter uses ‘ce’ to designate the Common Era. 31   Siege of Jerusalem, eds. Ralph Hanna and David Lawton, EETS os 320 (Oxford, 2003), Introduction. For a brief overview of Josephus and Pseudo-Hegisippus in England see Nicholas Vincent, ‘William of Newburgh, Josephus, and the New Titus’, in Christians and

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Alliterative Poetry and the Time of Antiquity Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts, eds Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Claire Watson (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 57–90, esp. 63–8. 32  Galloway, ‘Alliterative Poetry in Old Jerusalem’, in Medieval Alliterative Poetry: Essays in  Honour of Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds J. A. Burrow and Hoyt N. Duggan (Dublin, 2010), pp. 85–106. 33  See Stephen H. A. Shepherd, ‘Langland’s Romances’, in William Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’: A Book of Essays, ed. Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith (New York, 2001), pp. 69–82. 34   All quotations from the Siege of Jerusalem are from the edition by Hanna and Lawton (cited above, note 31). 35   7.2.16, 7.3.4. Latin from Historiae adversus paganos, libri VII, ed. C. Zangemeister, CSEL 5 (Leipzig, 1882). Translation from Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, ed. and trans. E. T. Fear (Liverpool, 2010). 36   For an interesting recent discussion, see David Lawton, ‘The Surveying Subject and the “Whole World” of Belief: Three Case Studies’, New Medieval Literatures 4 (2000), 9–37. A wonderful resource is P. D. A. Harvey, Mappa mundi: The Hereford World Map (London, 2002). 37   Randy Schiff takes a more generous view of the poem’s anti-Semitism, arguing that the Jews in Siege are ‘broken victims of unrestrained militarism’ (p. 145), provoking both revulsion and admiration. ‘The Instructive Other Within: Secularized Jews in the Siege of Jerusalem’, in Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York, 2008), pp. 135–51. A very different approach is taken by Cord Whitaker, ‘Ambivalent Violence: Josephus, Rationalist Evangelism, and Defining the Human in the Siege of Jerusalem’, The Yearbook of Langland Studies 28 (2014), 137–72. 38   The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts, ed. and trans. Iain Macleod Higgins (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 2011), pp. 157–8. See Suzanne Akbari’s fine chapter, ‘The Place of the Jews’ Siege’, in Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1000–1400 (Ithaca, NY, 2009). As Akbari observes, Siege is a narrative of enclosure and dispersal, not so unlike the Gog and Magog story from tales of Alexander the Great. 39   The EETS editors show that many of Siege’s materials derive from Higden as well as from the Latin translation of Josephus. As they point out, Josephus, like the Siege-poet, deliberately alternates between events at Rome and in Judaea (Siege, eds Hanna and Lawton, p. xlviiii). See Bonnie Millar on sources for Siege in The Siege of Jerusalem in its Physical, Literary, and Historical Contexts (Dublin, 2000). But see also Andrew Galloway’s recent discovery that John of Tynemouth’s universal history may have been the mediating text between the Siege and the Higden and Josephus materials (see n. 32). 40   Suzanne Yeager and other critics have argued that Jews are figures for those contemporary Christians not wholly devoted to God, with the Romans playing the opposite role, as the divine scourge. See Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge, 2008), and ‘The Siege of Jerusalem and Biblical Exegesis: Writing About Romans in Fourteenth-Century England’, Chaucer Review 39 (2004), 70–102. 41   See Hanna and Lawton’s introduction.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 42   Suzanne Akbari persuasively argues for William of Tyre’s crusader chronicle, the Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (Historia Ierosolimitana), as a shadow-text for Siege, from which the Siege-author borrows the language of crusader violence. See Idols in the East, ch. 3. 43   These stories are in other medieval renditions of the Jewish Wars, but in very convoluted form. 44   For example, passus 5 of Siege recounts the brief history of Nero, in which the mad emperor persecutes popes and apostles, burns down the city, murders his wife and mother, and finally, pursued by the Romans, drives a stake through his own heart. 45   ‘Josephus Judaeorum historicus insignis, qui ab initio sæculi usque ad xivm annum Domitiani libros Antiquitatum xx, necnon et de subversione urbis Hierosolymæ, gentisque suæ captivitate vii libros conscripsit’ (‘Josephus, noted historian of the Jews, who from the beginning of the world until the 14th year of Domitian compiled 20 books of Antiquities, as well as 7 books about the overthrow of the city of Jerusalem and the captivity of its people’, Book 1.2). 46  Higden, Polychronicon, Book 1.5. ‘De orbis dimensione’, on Caesar and the senators: ‘Hoc attestatur Hieronymus in transferendo historiam Eusebii, libro secundo, capitulo secundo, ubi dicit quod Pilatus praeses Judaeae nunciavit Tiberio Caesari de mirabilibus quae fecit Jesus in terra Judaeae, et Tiberius nunciavit senatui, verum quia talia non fuerant senatui prius nunciata, illa respuerunt’ (‘This is recorded by Jerome in translating Eusebius’ history, Book 2, chapter 2, where he says that Pilate, provost of Judaea, reported to Caesar’s tribunal about the miracles which Jesus performed in the land of Judaea; and Tiberius reported [them] to the Senate, but they rejected them because they had not previously been reported to the Senate’). 47   As Jerome points out in his translation of Eusebius. According to Higden (following William of Malmesbury), Marianus Scotus, in his universal chronicle, had recalculated the year of the Passion in ways that made better sense, but nevertheless many chronicles continued to follow Dionysius’ system. 48   Higden defers to Josephus’ computations in many places throughout the Polychronicon. 49  See Jewish Historiography and Iconography in Early and Medieval Christianity, eds Heinz Schreckenberg and K. Schubert (Assen, 1992). A famous illustration of Josephus in the Codex Gigas (Stockholm, National Library, MS A.148, 118r, c.1204–23), a manuscript containing the Wars and Antiquities, shows how Josephus looms large in his own narrative.

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Chapter 20

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Other Worlds Chaucer’s Classicism Alastair Minnis

Chaucer’s world was open to the possibility of other worlds—whether within the present earth or beyond, whether within the prevailing belief-system or beyond. This attitude is, I believe, the key to understanding the poet’s ‘classicism’, his compelling depictions of a classical and late antique past which is at once alien and open to Christian commentary and appropriation, tantalizingly different from the present yet crucially formative of the contemporary.1 Medieval intellectuals were acutely aware of the vast debt which their age owed to pagan arts of languages and learning of many kinds, including military expertise (Vegetius’ Epitoma rei militaris was read as a textbook of chivalry), the psychology of love (Ovid being the ubiquitous praeceptor amoris), and philosophy whether ‘practical, poetical or theoretical’,2 wherein Aristotle reigned supreme, lauded as the philosopher who ‘alone’ was ‘stamped with the approval of all wise men’.3 The desire to improve on Aristotle was, of course, irresistible; the move to subordinate his thought to the superior wisdom of Christianity, a necessity. ‘The philosopher’ (as he was called honorifically) had argued for the existence of a single unique world (formed by all the matter in existence) and rejected the idea that others might exist.4 To the thirteenth-century schoolmen who sought to curtail his extraordinary influence, such a belief placed undue limits on the power of God; from 1277 onwards it was an excommunicable offence to deny that God could create more worlds. Whether God had actually done so was another matter; it was widely held that he had not. The formidable logician Jean Buridan (d. 1358/61) was of the opinion that, if God decided to create a large number of additional creatures, in order to make room for them he would simply expand this present world to double, or even one hundred times, its present size, rather than creating a whole new world. But, if God had opted for another world, what would it have been like? An earth within our

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature earth, existing concentrically? A plurality of worlds existing simultaneously yet separate and distinct from each other (though identical in their composition)? Such ideas were solemnly debated. In the fifteenth century, Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464) discussed the possibility that forms of life existed beyond the earth, in the sun and the stars,5 while his contemporary William Vorilong (d. 1464) wondered if, were another world to be created, Christ would have to visit it and die a second time, in order to redeem its inhabitants.6 Coming back down to earth: it was also believed that the present world accommodated many different peoples and races, some of whom followed creeds that were quite different from Christianity. For Chaucer the past was indeed a foreign country, but that foreignness seemed to share characteristics with the cultures of certain countries depicted on the fourteenth-century mappa mundi. Such a spirit permeates the poet’s many and various iterations of classicism, including The House of Fame (a radical confrontation of the differing versions of the Dido story by Virgil and Ovid), the ‘romance of antiquity’ Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women (in part modelled on Ovid’s Heroides), and those Canterbury tales recounted by the Knight, the Squire, the Franklin, the Physician, and the Monk. For instance, the ‘Knight’s Tale’, which tells of love and war in ancient Athens and Thebes, is attributed to a man who has fought ‘for oure feith’ (I. 62) against present-day heathen (i.e. ‘Saracens’ or Muslims), having participated in various crusades during a long military career (a career which, I believe, is meant to be regarded as distinguished). Furthermore, the Knight seems to have fought alongside heathen against other heathen—as is indicated by the statement that This ilke worthy knyght hadde been also [same] Somtyme with the lord of Palatye [at one time  Palatia] Agayn another hethen in Turkeye . . . (I. 65–6)7 [against]

Palatia, now Balat in Anatolia, was a possession of the Muslim emir of Menteshe, for whom the Knight seems to have done some service. ‘Being employed as a mercenary, or even fighting for a non-Christian lord, were perfectly acceptable forms of service for a knight, provided . . . that he did not fight against his own lord or on the side of Muslims against Christians.’8 Perhaps we are meant to think of this character as having experienced Muslim prowess from both sides. It seems certain that some of his real-life equivalents gained a healthy respect for warriors who were motivated by a world-view quite different from their own. Among Christian writers the formidable Kurdish warlord Saladin (Ṣalāḥ ad-Di n̄ Yūsuf Ibn Ayyūb) was frequently praised for his chivalry, particularly for the relative leniency which he had shown following his capture of Jerusalem—in stark contrast to the bloodbath which ensued when a Christian army took the town in 1099, thus ending the First Crusade. The Knight’s admiring account of pagan noblemen who live up to the highest standards of militaristic honour and moral virtue could be

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Other Worlds: Chaucer’s Classicism seen  as a reflex of his personal experiences of contemporary virtuous heathens. ‘Pitee renneth soone in gentil herte’ (I. 1761), whether in ancient Athens or present-­ day Palatia. As Chaucer eloquently puts it in Troilus and Criseyde, the ‘forme of speche’ has changed over ‘a thousand yeer’, and certain words which once had ‘pris’ (currency) now seem foolish and strange (II. 22–4). Yet, in times past, people ‘spedde [prospered] as wel in love as men do now’ (II. 26), and the lasting ‘pris’ of other civilizing forms of behaviour may also be acknowledged. In Troilus, as in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, certain aspects of the heathen Other are being idealized—from a safe distance, as it were. Chaucer’s classicism accommodates, indeed enables, a remarkable degree of cultural relativism, which is respectful of cultural difference and reluctant to resort to simplistic forms of Christian triumphalism. These attitudes may be illustrated with reference to the hero of the Knight’s narrative, and the character who may be termed the most virtuous of all Chaucer’s virtuous heathen, Duke Theseus. He inherited this commanding figure from his tale’s primary source, Boccaccio’s Teseida (c.1340). In his turn, Boccaccio had been inspired by Statius’ Thebaid (written ad c.80–c.92), particularly its final book, in which, returning from a war against the Scythians, Theseus is importuned by Argive widows whose dead relatives have been denied burial by the tyrannical Creon. Theseus leads his army to victory against the Thebans; Creon falls victim to his spear, and the widows rush to find and cremate their dead. At which point the narrative ends, followed by an epilogue in which Statius prays for the success of his work and modestly proclaims its inferiority to the Aeneid. Of the divisive and deadly love of Arcita and Palemone there is no trace; Boccaccio invented that, by way of continuation of the classical story. Chaucer brought many things to the tale, including an emphasis on Theseus’ ‘magnificence’, which is defined in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as the virtue relating to the appropriate expenditure of large amounts of wealth, involving splendour of lifestyle, and greatness and generosity of action.9 (Chaucer may well have been influenced by the account of this noble attribute in Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, which sought to make Aristotle’s practical philosophy available to aristocrats.10) Whereas Boccaccio had the final battle take place in an already-existing amphitheatre, Chaucer’s Theseus commands that a new structure be built for this special occasion. We should not suspect here a misinterpretation of the text of Boccaccio (an Italian writer who, of course, had personal experience of actual Roman structures); the point is rather that Chaucer wants to present Theseus as a builder-king. For this vast new structure the duke chooses the very site where he had discovered the young lovers secretly fighting over Emily (I. 1862). What was illegally hidden has been brought into a public forum of judgement; the young men’s passions are to be contained within socially acceptable channels. Thus Theseus seeks to bring order out of chaos, civilization out of strife, and to substitute actual construction for

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature potential destruction. Furthermore, the ‘oratories’ of Venus, Diana, and Mars, in which Palamon, Emily, and Arcite pray to their respective deities, are all new constructions, richly adorned with ‘noble kervyng’ and ‘portreitures’ (I. 1915, cf. 1938, 1968, etc.) which the Knight describes and commends at some length. The duke’s decorous ‘big spending’ does not end when those buildings have been completed. For he provides lavish hospitality for all the knights who have gathered ‘for love and for encrees of chivalrye’ (I. 2184). They are honourably housed and fed (I. 2192–3; cf. 2483), and entertained with much ‘mynstralcye’ and dancing. When the battle’s lost and won, the combatants enjoy a further feast of three days’ duration (I. 2736), and Theseus, ever the maker, casts his mind to how Arcite’s sepulchre ‘may best ymaked be’ (I. 2855). The description of the elaborate ‘funeral servyse’ which follows leaves us in no doubt that he has spent a pretty penny on this exceptional event which is worthy of exceptional expenditure. The amount of power and control Theseus wields through the narrative is impressive indeed. If he wants something done, it gets done. (Unless, of course, the pagan gods decide to intervene. But then Theseus can offer an adept philosophical rationalization, replete with decorous praise for ‘Juppiter, the kyng, | That is prince and cause of alle thyng’, I. 3035–6.) If he issues a command, it is obeyed. (Unless, of course, the power of love disrupts the rule of law and the dictates of reason. But Theseus can quickly turn that to his advantage.) About to enjoy his triumphal entry into Athens, following his victory over the Amazons, the duke turns his whole army around, leading them to another victory, this time over the tyrant Creon—whom he kills in mano-a-mano combat, thereby demonstrating his manly prowess and his bravery in leading from the front. It is tempting to read this narrative as the Knight’s reaction against—maybe even as an escape from—the vicious chaos of the campaigns in which he was involved, with the ever-successful warlord Theseus as the perfect military commander, an idealization which can easily be read as overreaching but which is comprehensible given the lack of leadership and general ineptitude which characterized so much waging of war in the later Middle Ages, including the campaigns on which he fought (as listed in the General Prologue, I. 51–67). Great success always gains attention and often prompts the desire to emulate, to learn its secrets—which probably explains why Honoré Bonet allowed a Saracen sage a long hearing in his L’Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun (1398), written barely eighteen months after the battle of Nicopolis, when a Christian army drawn from many European countries was roundly defeated by an Ottoman force commanded by Sultan Bayezid I (who ruled from 1389 until 1402), thus bringing to an ignominious end, from Christendom’s perspective, the last large-scale crusade of the Middle Ages. In a dream-vision Bonet imagines Jean de Meun (author of the Roman de la rose)11 interrogating a series of speakers, including an Ottoman nobleman with skin ‘as black as coal’—an exoticizing move comparable with the dark complexion bestowed (with much less respect) on Saladin in one of the

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Other Worlds: Chaucer’s Classicism Luttrell Psalter’s illuminations.12 This imposing figure swears ‘by Muhammad’ that he will speak the truth, however painful it may be for Christians to hear. ‘ . . . I am the most noble emissary That there is in all of Islam; For I know all languages; I am of high birth, And I am a good cleric in our law [‘bon clerc en nostre loy’ i.e. our religion]; I understand something about everything, And I can write poems, as well, And can turn the law inside out.’ (303–10)13

Recognizing that he is in the presence of a ‘brave’ and ‘wise orator’ (335), Jean invites this paragon of virtue to recount everything he has seen ‘and learned among Christians’ (335–8). There follows a thoroughgoing critique of the vanities and divisions of Christianity—which, one may infer, have contributed to the recent spread of Islam. Here, then, is a non-believer from whom Christian believers have a lot to learn; indeed, a figure who shows up the failings of all too many Christians. That kind of exhortatory contrast was often aired, as for example in the interpretation of Isaiah 23: 4, ‘Be thou ashamed, Zidon, for the sea hath spoken’, which the ‘classicizing friar’ John of Wales (d. 1285) offers in his laudatory Compendiloquium de vitis illustrium philosophorum.14 ‘Zidon’ signifies the secure New Law under which Christians live, while the ‘sea’ signifies the life of the Gentiles. The premise here is that the heathen lacked, or lack, the stability which comes from Christian truth—and so their superlative words and deeds often put us to shame. For we who know better should do better, yet we fail to excel. Arrogance on our part is quite inappropriate given the extraordinary achievements of pagans who adhered to a different belief system, a faith which they followed with great devotion, performing great deeds in its name. Such attitudes underlie Chaucer’s classicism—which, I believe, is ideologically indistinguishable from, and arguably the driving force behind, what may be termed his Orientalism, as a consideration of the wider cultural context of the ‘Squire’s Tale’ may make clear. In 1243–5, approximately two decades before Marco Polo began his travels in Asia, Persia, China, and Indonesia, William of Rubruck, a Franciscan friar, had made an arduous journey to meet the fourth Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, Möngke (1209–59). At Möngke’s court William encountered many competitors for the emperor’s support—Muslims and Nestorian Christians (both sects had been in the region since the seventh century) together with Buddhists. In May 1254, Möngke ordered a great debate between the rival factions to determine which faith contained ‘more truth’ (p. 229).15 According to William’s (self-aggrandizing) account, he himself persuaded the Christians to debate with the Buddhists first, ‘since the Saracens agree with us in saying that there is one God and therefore provide allies for us

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature against the tuins [Buddhists]’ (p. 231): a fascinating assertion of shared beliefs. This indeed turned out to be a major bone of contention, with William, as the orthodox Christian spokesman, affirming that ‘there is only one God’ and his Buddhist opponent replying that only ‘fools’ make such a claim. The Buddhists are ‘amazed’ at William’s assertion that ‘everything that exists is good’, given their own belief that ‘He made half of things evil’ (p. 233). (William explains that the Buddhists follow the Manichean heresy, ‘to the effect that one half of things is evil and the other half good’, p. 232.) When the Buddhist representative asserts that no single god is all-­ powerful he is laughed to scorn by the Muslims, who then decline the opportunity to engage with the Christians, on the grounds that the Christian faith ‘is true’ and they themselves eagerly pray for ‘a Christian death’. Perhaps, as Peter Jackson suggests, here we have ‘a garbled expression’ of the Muslim belief ‘in Jesus as a prophet of Islam’ (p. 234 n. 3). In any case, the occasion seems to have concluded in a quite convivial way, with everyone drinking heavily. But for William there was no happy ending. A few days later Möngke Khan granted the friar an audience, wherein he was ordered to prepare for his homeward journey (despite William’s express wish to pursue his missionary work). Though Christianity came out of the debate very well, ‘no one said, “I believe, and wish to become a Christian”’, as William ruefully remarks (p. 235). Möngke himself was unmoved, apparently preferring to stay with whatever belief-system he already had. Möngke’s grandfather Genghis Khan (d. 1227), the founder and first Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, was similarly loyal to the ‘secte’ which prevailed in his day, at least according to Chaucer.16 At the beginning of the ‘Squire’s Tale’, the ‘Tartre Cambyuskan’, ‘noble kyng’ of Tzarev (in south-eastern Russia), is praised for having kept the ‘lay’ (law) of the religion into which he was born to such a superlative extent that he exemplifies all the virtues appropriate to the ideal ruler and knight. (One may compare the statement which Honoré Bonet put in the mouth of his outspoken Saracen, that he is a bon clerc en nostre loy). Cambyuskan is ‘So excellent a lord in alle thyng’, Hym lakked noght that longeth to a kyng. As of the secte of which that he was born He kepte his lay, to which that he was sworn; And therto he was hardy, wys, and riche, And pitous and just, alwey yliche; Sooth of his word, benigne, and honurable; Of his corage as any centre stable; Yong, fressh, and strong, in armes desirous As any bacheler of al his hous. A fair persone he was and fortunat, And kept alwey so wel roial estat That ther was nowher swich another man.

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[he lacked nothing that belongs] [lawful observance] [wise] [compassionate  constant] [truthful] [filled with desire for arms] [maintained  royal status] [such] (V. 15–27)

Other Worlds: Chaucer’s Classicism Here we may detect an echo of a controversial theological doctrine of the later Middle Ages—that ‘by doing what is in him’ (the facere quod in se est principle) a righteous non-Christian, i.e. a person who has not been baptized into the Church, may nevertheless have done enough to receive God’s grace.17 On this argument, salvation can be attained by a virtuous pagan—someone born in the wrong place and/ or at the wrong time and hence unaware of the supreme religion (not having been blessed by a visit from the likes of William of Rubruck). To make this claim is not to attribute to Chaucer the layman (however learned) privileged knowledge of doctrine so recherché that it was the prerogative of professional theologians. The doctrine in question had escaped over the walls of the schools,18 enjoying sufficient currency to trouble the Augustinian canon Walter Hilton (d. 1396), who—writing in the vernacular—attacks certain men who ‘gretli and grevousli erren’ by saying that ‘Jewis and Sarcenys and paynemes [pagans]’, who lack the Christian faith, may nevertheless be saved.19 Hilton summarizes the dangerous argument as follows. ‘Bi kepynge of hire owen lawe’, convinced that their own ‘trouth is good and siker [certain] and sufficient to here savacion [their salvation]’, infidels may ‘in that trouthe’ perform many good and righteous deeds, and perhaps if they knew that the faith of Christ was better than theirs they would leave their own faith and follow it, to ensure their salvation. But this is not sufficient, Hilton retorts, because Christ is the sole mediator between God and man, and no one can be reconciled with God or come to heavenly bliss except through him. Chaucer’s classicism, in both its oriental and occidental iterations, does not stray far into that contested territory. The poet is silent on Cambyuskan’s prospects for salvation, even as he withholds comment on the final destination of the soul of Troilus. We are simply told that, after being killed by Achilles, Troilus went forth ‘Ther as Mercurye sorted hym to dwelle’ (Troilus and Criseyde, 5. 1826–7), without any specification of where that actually was. A similar reticence marks Chaucer’s reference, near the end of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, to the ultimate destination of the soul of Arcite: His spirit chaunged hous and wente ther, [dwelling] As I cam nevere, I kan nat tellen wher. Therfore I stynte, I nam no divinistre . . .  [stop speaking  theologian/prophet] (I. 2809–11)

This is consonant with the way in which Chaucer’s pagan characters disclaim expert knowledge of matters relating to fate, providence, and ultimate destiny. Dorigen leaves to ‘clerkes’ all ‘disputison’ (disputation) concerning why God should make such an ‘ydel’ (useless) thing as the black rocks that she imagines will destroy her husband’s homecoming ship (‘Franklin’s Tale’, V. 890). In similar vein, Palamon leaves to ‘dyvynys’ (theologians) the problem of what sort of governance could possibly exist in a divine foreknowledge that seems to torment the guiltless (‘Knight’s

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Tale’, I. 1323). And Troilus declares that ‘Almyghty Jove’ alone knows the true answer to a question which has long perplexed many ‘grete clerkes’: what is the relationship between the ‘forsight of divine purveyaunce [providence]’ and ‘fre chois’ (Troilus and Criseyde, 4. 961, 968–71, 1079–82)? Moreover, while the extent of Chaucer’s cultural relativism is truly remarkable, it is carefully delimited, as may be illustrated with reference to the speech by Theseus with which the ‘Knight’s Tale’ culminates. Chaucer elaborated the corresponding passage in the Teseida with much material from Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae concerning the divine love which binds the ‘series of things’ in order that the world moves through its changes in regular concord, everything being ‘held by mutual love’ (2m8 and 4m6; cf. ‘Knight’s Tale’, I. 2987–99).20 This amounts to an extraordinary profession of enlightened monotheism, on a par with (and from the same source as) the eloquent praise of ‘Love, that of erthe and se hath governaunce’ which Troilus utters at the end of the third book of Troilus (3. 1744–71). But there is one crucial, and quite un-Boethian, difference—marked by the duke’s confidence in the value of earthly fame. ‘ . . . certeinly a man hath moost honour To dyen in his excellence and flour, [die  at his peak] Whan he is siker of his goode name . . . ’ [certain] (I. 3047–9)

Boethius had provided an extensive critique of undue concern with public reputation and mundane glory in 2p7 of the Consolatio, and it was a commonplace of late medieval classicism that even the best of the virtuous heathen could be blinkered by it.21 On the one hand, the desire to earn a good name prompted virtuous heathen to perform extraordinary feats of virtue, feats which should bring a blush to Christian cheeks (as already noted). On the other, that motivation was dubious inasmuch as it diverted attention away from the summum bonum, the ultimate source of goodness and virtue. Hence the classicizing monk Pierre Bersuire (d. 1362), whose Ovidius moralizatus was a source for Chaucer’s portraits of the pagan gods in the ‘Knight’s Tale’,22 could state that ‘fame, indeed, is the thing that the noble heart seeks most eagerly; and for that reason the ancients performed all their lofty deeds for the sake of acquiring fame, and they longed for glory and fame as the final reward of their deeds; and this they did because they were ignorant of the true glory of heaven and the true, everlasting reward’.23 Such is the situation of Chaucer’s Theseus. This philosopher-king manages to identify Jupiter, supposedly the most powerful of the pagan gods, with the ‘Firste Moevere’ (I. 2987–3010), in an anticipation of the Christian Aristotelianism current in Chaucer’s day. But his perfection remains ‘shadowy’, to borrow another phrase from John of Wales, who praised the achievements of the pagan philosophers while emphasizing that true perfection is impossible ‘without the grace of the [Christian] faith’.24

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Other Worlds: Chaucer’s Classicism Bersuire’s remarks are heavily indebted to the fifth book of Augustine’s De civitate Dei, where the ‘two things’ that made the Romans great are identified as ‘love of liberty’ and ‘the desire for human praise’. Here the superiority of Christianity is affirmed by many means, including the argument that its triumph does not require acts of extreme suppression of familial values, of the type often performed by virtuous heathen.25 Torquatus killed his son for disobeying his order not to engage the enemy, even though a victory was won on that occasion, and Marcus Pulvillus continued to dedicate a temple in honour of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva despite a report that his son had died. Augustine’s prime example, however, is Brutus, who had his own sons put to death because they had plotted a restoration of the Tarquinian monarchy and hence conspired against Roman freedom. ‘Love of country drove him, and the immense love of praise’, but ‘what an unhappy man this is, no matter how much his deed may be celebrated in days to come!’ (cf. Aeneid, 6. 820ff.). A comparable case of spectacular infanticide features in the ‘Physician’s Tale’, a story attributed to ‘Titus Livius’ (VI. 1), though the Roman de la rose was Chaucer’s immediate source. Faced with a travesty of justice which brings his daughter Virginia into the power of the judge who lusts after her, Virginius decides she must die rather than suffer the shame of sexual defilement. He carries his daughter’s head to where Apius (Appius) is holding court, a shocking spectacle which incites the populace to rise up against a magistrate whom they distrusted in any case. Thrown into prison, Apius commits suicide. However, the sentence against Claudius, the servant who had been forced to bring a false charge against Virginia, is commuted to exile, thanks to Virginius’ plea. His ‘pitee’ for that man saves his life (VI. 270–4): a rather grotesque contrast with the ‘pitous hand’ with which he killed his own daughter (VI.226). All the actions of Virginius seem to be performed in the name of absolute justice, which exists above and beyond the decadent version embodied in Apius. Virginius may be the least appealing of Chaucer’s virtuous heathen, but in line with the poet’s classicism it could be argued that the highest values of that character’s time and social situation at once necessitate and justify such a feat. Similarly, Chaucer’s Arveragus believes that ‘Trouthe is the hyeste thyng’ which a man (or woman) ‘may kepe’ (‘Franklin’s Tale’, V. 1479), even if this means sending his wife, Dorigen, whose emotional turmoil has led her to make a rash promise, to sleep with another man. (Here, in intriguing contrast with the ‘Physician’s Tale’, the avoidance of sexual defilement is not the ruling moral imperative.) In a close analogue of the Franklin’s narrative (perhaps even its source), which forms part of Boccaccio’s Filocolo, the corresponding character is said to have acted with unnecessary generosity, because his marriage contract with the lady rendered her subsequent promise to another man invalid. That is to say, a firm distinction is made there between generosity and wisdom: the husband-figure was certainly generous with his wife, but maybe he was foolish to do what he did, and thereby lost honour of a kind which cannot be recovered. By contrast, there is no such distinction in ‘the Franklin’s

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Tale’. Arveragus’ behaviour may be read as rigorous but commendable—and certainly as extreme. How much simpler it would have been had he ordered Dorigen not to go, perhaps declaring (in the manner of the Filocolo) that her promise was not legally binding. But the most noble of the ‘good pagans’ were absolute for sacrifice and even death, being not numbered in the roll of common men. In Arveragus’ mind a woman’s gossamer-thin promise obligates two people in love to act in ways quite at variance with their true desires. He is driven by moral conviction of an intensity which far transcends the specifics of the contrived and barely credible love-triangle which serves as its occasion. Here, as with the ‘Physician’s Tale’, Christian readers may look back and wonder at an extraordinary performance of virtue, relieved that they are under no pressure to emulate it—on the authority of no less a theologian than Augustine. ‘Chaucer took much pains to put’ the Franklin’s narrative ‘back in Roman times’, as J. S. P. Tatlock once remarked.26 Set in heathen Brittany (here termed ‘Armorik’, Armorica), this tale features characters called ‘Arveragus’ and ‘Aurelius’, which are Latin names with ancient British associations. Aurelius prays to Apollo and vows to go on pilgrimage to his ‘temple in Delphos’ in a speech which also petitions Lucina, Neptune, and Pluto (V. 1031–79). ‘Swiche illusiouns and swiche meschaunces [evil practices] | As hethen folk useden in thilke dayes [those days]’ are nervously condemned by the Franklin (V. 1292–3). He seems to lack the aristocratic insouciance with which the Squire and Knight tell their classicist tales. However, his anxiety well exemplifies the suspicion with which ancient lore was sometimes regarded. Greece and Rome had produced many brilliant thinkers; that was not in question. But those same thinkers had worshipped deities who were (according to the Christian commonplace) devils in disguise, to be identified with the disobedient angels who had been cast out of heaven by God. Therefore some pagan sources of knowledge could be dangerously unreliable and indeed entrapping, the stuff of fiendish plots designed to mislead the credulous and capture their souls. The Franklin’s narrative seems to offer a prime instance of such an ‘illusioun and meschaunce’: the apparent removal by a ‘magicien’ (V. 1184) of the rocks from the coast of Brittany. Yet this shocking incident is presented primarily as a natural marvel with a rational explanation, and definitely not as the outcome of a daemonic pact. It is true that Aurelius builds up an expectation of some cataclysmic event by praying to the gods for a ‘miracle’ (V. 1056, 1065; cf. 1299) in the form of a high tide of abnormal duration, which would require interference with the moon’s natural course for two whole years—a quite terrifying prospect, evocative of the young man’s reckless desires (V. 1066–70). Or, Aurelius continues, the Moon/Lucina/Diana/ Proserpina should sink every rock down into her own dark region, i.e. the underworld (V. 1073–5). But neither of these processes is shown as actually occurring during the Franklin’s description of the Breton clerk’s expert procedure (V. 1261–6), which is curiously unthreatening. The possibility that the rocks may be forcefully

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Other Worlds: Chaucer’s Classicism ‘sonken under grounde’ (VI. 1269) is mentioned here, but not pursued. Instead the emphasis falls on what seems to have happened, on how things look: ‘for a wyke or tweye [a week or two], | It semed that alle the rokkes were aweye’ (VI. 1295–6; my emphasis). The Franklin’s references here to ‘illusioun’, ‘apparence’ and ‘jogelrye’ (VI. 1264–5) tend to reduce the magician’s activity to the level of sleight of hand, a mere conjuring trick, which may be devious but is by no means devilish. There is no meschaunce here, no evidence of evil practice, but rather ‘magyk natureel’, involving knowledge of the wonders of nature (V. 1125, 1155). When the magician goes about his work he uses nothing more disquieting than a set of accurate astrological tables (‘tables Tolletanes . . . , | Ful wel corrected’; V. 1273–9). These enable him to predict, but certainly not to control, the future. Further, a strong emphasis is placed on the subtlety of his calculations, ‘hise equacions in every thyng’ (V. 1279). It seems that the magician is something of a scientist (here I have in mind the late medieval understanding of scientia as a body of authoritative knowledge and reliable information). The implication is that, thanks to his knowledge of planetary motions, the magician learns that a high tide is coming, which will cover all the coastal rocks. An unusual event perhaps (at least in terms of its scale) but not unnatural; it may last for ‘a wyke or tweye’ but certainly not for the two years that Aurelius had imagined in his ‘ravyng’ (V. 1026). Chaucer’s attribution of astronomical/astrological lore to the magician cannot be taken as prima facie evidence that his character is dubious, any more than we should stigmatize the Physician for his use of ‘magik natureel’ in diagnosing his patients (‘General Prologue’, I. 416). It should be noted that ‘general’ predictions of such great terrestrial events as plagues, famines, floods, great wars, and the falls of empires were deemed both possible and permissible (though some warned of the difficulty of obtaining precise results). Another branch of the science sought to learn what the weather had in store, with regard to winds, storms, and the like. All of this was in sharp contrast to ‘particular’ predictions concerning the destinies of individuals, as deduced from the configuration of the stars and planets at their births, which implied that human beings lacked free will and began life with fixed characteristics which determined their behaviour. (It was one thing to say that the stars influenced behaviour—hence the usefulness of astrology in medical diagnosis—but quite another to claim that they predetermined it.27) When Chaucer raises this matter in his Treatise on the Astrolabe, he distances himself from a pagan practice which, as a Christian, he must roundly reject: ‘Natheles these ben observaunces of judicial matere and rytes of payens, in whiche my spirit hath no feith, ne knowing of her [their] horoscopum.’28 In ‘the Squire’s Tale’ there is not a pagan rite in sight. Which is all the more surprising since, even more than the ‘Franklin’s Tale’, this tale prominently features marvellous events and devices—strange phenomena which could easily have been explained with reference to the duplicitous involvement of devils, those false gods

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature mistakenly worshipped by the heathen. Instead we have matter-of-fact accounts, quite lacking in spiritual health warnings, of a bronze flying horse which can transport a person to every place he wants to visit in the entire world within a mere twenty-four hours; a ‘brood mirour of glas’ in which a king can see any misfortunes that will befall his kingdom and a woman can see the future infidelity of the man she loves; a golden ring which gives its wearer the power to understand the language of birds; and an armour-piercing sword which will heal any wound it inflicts if the ‘plat’ (blunt side) is laid upon it (V. 75–67). All of these are gifts from the ‘kyng of Arabe and of Inde’ to Cambyuskan on the occasion of his celebration of twenty years of rule. And all of them are presented as human inventions susceptible of rational analysis and ‘scientific’ explanation. For instance, the Squire seems in no doubt that the bronze horse is a mere machine, albeit a highly sophisticated one, which was ‘wroghte’ during a long period of time by an ingenious craftsman (V. 128–31). It works through the turning of a system of ‘pins’ or pegs and manipulation of its reins (V. 312–34), easy to operate if one knows the requisite ‘craft’ (V. 185, cf. 317). Here is an object of admiration, but no cause for fear or suspicion. Pagan scientia can be trusted. Would that we understood it better! In general, says the Squire, ‘lewed peple’ think the worst about things ‘that been maad moore subtilly | Than they kan [can] in hir [their] lewedness comprehende’ (V.  222–3). That should not be read as a blanket condemnation of Cambyuskan’s puzzled courtiers as being uneducated and ignorant people. Rather the point is that, if a person does not have sufficient knowledge of how something works, he may deem it threatening, and judge ‘to the badder ende’, i.e. think the worst (V. 224). Moreover, if no explanation for a mysterious effect is forthcoming, this is not because one does not exist, but simply because one has not yet been discovered. It is well known that glass is made from ashes of fern (according to actual medieval practice). Which may seem strange, given that glass looks nothing like ashes of fern. But that is the fact of the matter, and therefore there is neither cause for debate nor need for wonder concerning this particular artefact. . . . somme seiden that it was [said] Wonder to maken of fern-asshen glas, And yet nys glas nat lyk asshen of fern; But, for they han yknowen it so fern, [so long] Therfore cesseth hir janglyng and hir wonder. [chattering] (V. 253–7)

In contrast, room for debate remains concerning the origins of thunder, of the ebb and flow of the tides, of spiders’ webs, and of mist (V. 258–9)—and indeed, ‘of alle thing, til that the cause is wyst [known]’ (V. 260). In that category may be included some of those gifts bestowed upon Cambyuskan. But the narrative is remarkably confident in the existence of ways of making sense of all such wonders.

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Other Worlds: Chaucer’s Classicism Even more tantalizingly, Chaucer holds out the possibility of future comprehension of the secrets of the ‘slidynge science’ of alchemy (VIII. 732). the ‘Canon Yeoman’s Tale’ castigates the charlatans and tricksters who, quite spuriously, claim expertise in this craft. As things stand this ‘lore’ is fruitless, no successful ‘conclusioun’ having been achieved; here is a ‘science’ so ‘fer us biforn [far ahead of us]’ that it is impossible to ‘overtake’ (VIII. 672, 680–2). But what of ‘futur temps’ (VIII. 875), will it continue to slide away from our grasp then? The Yeoman ends his tale with an anecdote about how Plato refused to name the secret Philosopher’s Stone; indeed, all the philosophers swore themselves to silence on this matter. Even more decisively, Jesus Christ himself holds it so dear that he wills it should not be explained, except when it pleases his deity that certain men should be enlightened. But here, it may be argued, is no categorical prohibition of alchemical enquiry but rather the possibility that, one day, Christ may reveal its secrets to the right people. (The converse is that anyone who makes God his opponent will be unable to achieve anything in the pursuit of this knowledge.) We are not dealing with impossibilities of nature, pseudo-­ knowledge that can never be true, but rather with a body of genuine knowledge so significant that it is ‘lief and deere’ to Christ himself (an extraordinarily specific claim unparalleled in any known source of Chaucer’s tale). Assuming, of course, that we are hearing the voice of Chaucer here, rather than that of a narrator who is  harbouring false hopes, despite all the disappointments and deprivations he has endured on account of this ‘elvysshe nyce [foolish] loore’(VIII. 842). If we can indeed make that assumption, and regard alchemy as ‘a site where modernizing values could take root’, then the Canon’s Yeoman may be seen as a representing a version of ‘Chaucerian modernity’.29 Alternatively, it may be regarded as yet another reflex of Chaucerian classicism—here is a corpus of past knowledge which, once lost, may be recovered again, made accessible in ‘futur temps’. Clearly, then, in the sphere of scientific enquiry, we have much still to learn from the pagans (particularly from Plato, in the case of alchemy), and Christ may fully approve of such secular revelation. Chaucer’s respect for the moral and scientific achievements of the pagans is, it may be concluded, a major constituent of his classicism. But, hardly surprisingly, his tolerance does not extend to the gods they worshipped. Lo here, of payens corsed olde rites! [cursed] Lo here, what alle hire godes may availle! [their gods] Lo here, thise wrecched worlds appetites! [worldly desires] Lo here, the fyn and guerdoun for travaille [the end and reward] Of Jove, Appollo, of Mars, of swich rascaille! [rabble] (Troilus and Criseyde, 5. 1849–53)

This assertion goes far beyond what was said in the Astrolabe treatise. Here Chaucer is condemning the pagan pantheon tout court, identifying its worship as an expression of

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature base human appetites, and claiming that virtuous heathen were ill rewarded for their ardent piety (and, one may infer, their rigorous ethical code) by rascally gods. Elsewhere the poet indicates his belief that, on occasion, those same gods subverted pagan learning and led potentially wise men astray with false promises and prophecies. (So, then, the Franklin was right to harbour suspicions, even though the particular tale he told failed to substantiate them.) Calkas, Criseyde’s father and a priest of Apollo, is an obvious case in point. Although credited with expertise in ‘calkulynge’ and ‘astronomye’ (Troilus, 1. 71, 5. 115), these sources of knowledge are described in ways which inextricably link them with Calkas’ religious practices, the predictions which he solicits and receives from his god, a deity infamous for his ambiguous answers. Evidently Criseyde has Apollo and his Delphic oracles in mind when she declares that ‘goddes speken in amphibologies, | And, for o soth [one truth], they tellen twenty lyes’ (4. 1406–7). Later, Diomede suggests that the priest is as duplicitous as his god; Calkas may be misleading the Greeks ‘with ambages— | That is to seyn, with double wordes slye’ (5. 897–8).30 Most revealing of all is Criseyde’s claim that the worship of the pagan gods originated in fear (‘drede fond first goddes [fear first invented gods], I suppose’), a point she plans to make to her father when arguing that fear made him misunderstand ‘the goddes text’ (4. 1408–11). This may be an echo of Statius, Thebaid, 3. 661, where the remark ‘Primus in orbe deos fecit timor’ (‘fear first made gods in the world’) is uttered by Capaneus, a madman and blasphemer, who doubts if prayers can ‘really draw causes and hidden impulses of things from the open sky’ (3. 558–9).31 In Chaucer’s reiteration the words become a more substantial castigation of paganism; for a moment Criseyde talks in a way that takes her far beyond her historical location, even anticipating the poem’s final condemnation of ‘payens corsed olde rites’. Chaucer introduced an ambiguous oracle into the story which became the ‘Knight’s Tale’ (there being no parallel in the Teseida), in a passage which describes how the exiled Arcite dreams of Mercury appearing to him, ‘Arrayed . . . | As he was whan that Argus took his sleep’ (I. 1389–90). This alludes to an incident described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Jupiter sends Mercury to kill ‘Argus of the hundred eyes’. Mercury first soothes Argus by playing music on his reed pipes, then lulls him to sleep with a story. Whereupon the god strikes ‘off the nodding head and from the rock’ throws ‘it all bloody, spattering the cliff with gore’ (Metamorphoses, 1. 714–21). For Mercury to appear looking as he did on this murderous occasion hardly bodes well for Arcite’s future. That impression is immediately reinforced. Mercury urges Arcite to return to Athens: ‘To Atthenes shaltou wende [shall you go], | Ther is thee shapen [destined] of thy wo an ende’ (I. 1391–2).This statement is dangerously ambig­ uous, for it can mean either that in Athens Arcite shall find an end to his present woe and be joyful (which seems to be how he takes it) or that in Athens he shall find an end to his present woe, indeed to all his woes, since he will meet his death there. Which is, of course, what happens. Mercury’s oracle is, at the very least, seriously

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Other Worlds: Chaucer’s Classicism misleading, and probably (in Chaucer’s view) an indication of divine malevolence, or at least of a careless indifference to human suffering. Little wonder, then, that Palamon should cry out against the cruelty of the pagan gods in a way which eerily anticipates the exclamation of Shakespeare’s Gloucester, ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, | They kill us for their sport’ (King Lear, act 4, scene 1, 36–7). . . . ‘O crueel Goddes that governe This world with byndyng of youre word eterne, And writen in the table of atthamaunt Youre parlement and youre eterne graunt, What is mankynde moore unto you holde Than is the sheep that rouketh in the folde?’

[adamant i.e. hardest of stones] [cowers] (I. 1303–8)

A man may be killed like some helpless beast cowering in a pen, or imprisoned, or suffer sickness and great misfortune, even though he is quite guiltless. Where’s the justice in that? Even worse, Palamon continues, it seems that beasts fare better than men. A beast, while alive, may act on all its impulses, and does not suffer punishment after death, whereas men are subject to firm constraints in their lives and they must ‘wepe and pleyne’ in their afterlives (I. 1313–21) Palamon locates the source of his own pain and imprisonment in the intervention of two jealous and angry gods, Saturn and Juno, who, because they bear a grudge against the royal ‘blood | Of Thebes’, have destroyed almost all of it (I. 1328–31). Arcite agrees with him on this at least: ‘Som wikke [harmful] aspect or disposicioun | Of Saturne, by som constellacioun, | Hath yeven us this . . . ’ (I. 1087–90). Contrary to the classical tradition of the Golden Age when Saturn ruled and justice prevailed throughout the world (until he was supplanted by his son Jupiter), Chaucer gives priority to the astronomical/astrological aspect of this planet-god, which was highly negative. According to the account in the De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomew the Englishman (d. 1272) Saturn is a malevolent planet, cold, leaden, and dry, ‘and therefore by fables he is painted as an old man’.32 Similarly, Alan of Lille (d. 1202/3) writes that in the abode of Saturn, grief, groans, tears, discord, terror, sadness, wanness, mourning, and injustice hold sway.33 All of this squares with the description which ‘pale Saturnus the colde’ (I. 2443) offers of himself: ‘Myn is the drenchyng [drowning] in the see so wan; | Myn is the prison in the derke cote [dark hovel] . . . ’ (I. 2456–7.). It would seem, then, that any course of action proposed by this terrifying power can be expected to be deadly and unjust. ‘In elde [old age] is bothe wysdom and usage’ (I. 2448), and old Saturn finds ‘in his olde experience an art’ (a trick) whereby ‘he ful soone hath plesed every part’—that is, he devises a way of satisfying the warring gods Mars and Venus, but without caring about the impact that his action will have on the world of men (I. 2445–6). Mars asked for victory,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Palamon asked for the woman. Saturn seizes on this. As soon as Arcite emerges ­victorious from the tournament, he asks Pluto to send the infernal fury which causes Arcite’s horse to throw, and mortally wound, his rider, thereby ensuring that Palamon gets the girl (I. 2684–91). The opportunism, and self-serving legalism, of Saturn’s ‘art’ are manifest. The substantial role Saturn plays in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is wholly of Chaucer’s invention. It has no precedent in the Teseida, where the deities make up their collective mind without needing to call upon the cold god’s problematic ‘wisdom and usage’, and Venus (quite appropriately, given her patronage of Palamone) instructs Pluto to intervene at the crucial moment. In Chaucer’s version of the story, the benevolent ‘Juppiter, the kyng’ (I. 3035) so lauded by Theseus is an ineffectual figure, hardly able to control division and strife in the pantheon; instead the malevolent Saturn rules the roost. Should we, then, ridicule Theseus’ speculations as being sadly, almost laughably, inaccurate, the result of wishful thinking on a grandiose philosophical scale? Or rather regard them as precocious insight into something better, which will be revealed in the future, with the advent of Christ? To pursue the second of those arguments would be to prioritize the extent of the pagan enlightenment in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, and indeed elsewhere in Chaucer’s classicist narratives. Theseus’ perfection may be ‘shadowy’ (to return to John of Wales’s phrase) but nevertheless it is perfection of a kind. The fact that the virtuous heathen worship rascally gods is no reason for condemning the men themselves out of hand; such condemnation may well be reserved for the gods—and Chaucer ostentatiously lays it at their door. It could, indeed, be said that the virtuous heathen deserved better gods than the ones they worshipped. Their well-nigh superhuman moral, intellectual, and militaristic feats deserved praise. ‘Glory and honour and peace’ are merited by ‘every one that worketh good’, in the words of St Paul (Romans 2: 10), who went on to say, When the Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature those things that are of the law; these, having not the law, are a law to themselves. Who shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them . . . (Romans 2: 14–15)

Those sentiments were frequently applied to virtuous heathen by the classicizing scholars of Chaucer’s day, who praised such high achievers for walking by the best light they had and striving to ensure that their light was not darkness.34 Hence Cambyuskan is commended for keeping the ‘lay, to which that he was sworn’, in a way which resulted in behaviour of the highest moral standards. Similarly, Honoré Bonet portrays the ‘most noble emissary | That there is in all of Islam’ as a bon clerc en nostre loy, a man learned in the tenets of his faith. Here is a much tougher case, for this man’s many accomplishments are interwoven with his devotion to a belief-system which denies major Christians truths—although Muslims at least agree that ‘there is only one God’, and perhaps even can admire ‘a Christian death’, according to William of Rubruck’s momentary statement of interfaith agreement. Therefore it was

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Other Worlds: Chaucer’s Classicism impossible to argue that, like pagans who lived long ago, the Muslims could not possibly have known better, no superior religion having been available to them–for Christianity was right before them, a major cultural presence in their lives and times.35 However, this distinction was eroded by claims that certain forms of revelation had given some Old Testament and Gentile sages at least an inkling of things to come, a measure of insight which they were free to accept or reject. (The concomitant being that they could be commended for accepting it or criticized for rejecting it.36) Such theological considerations brought past and present non-believers together. But of even greater importance, I suspect, was the weight of evidence deriving from contemporary experience of actual Muslims, particularly by the military men whom English knights fought both against and for, whether the mighty and merciful Saladin or the heathen ‘lord of Palatye’ whom Chaucer’s Knight had no qualms about serving—a fact which features prominently in the General Prologue’s account of this character’s campaigns, and adumbrates the tales told by the Knight and his son the Squire, both of whom are mentally at home in other worlds of exciting martial adventures and scientific wonders. Furthermore, many of those wonders were grounded in scientia to which (it was widely acknowledged) Muslim philosophers had made major contributions, one of the most eminent being the Andalusian polymath ’Abū l-Wali ̄d Muḥammad Ibn ’Aḥmad Ibn Rušd. Or, as he was named in Latin, Averroes. If Aristotle was the philosopher, Averroes was the commentator. Different embodiments of heathen authority, then, travelled together, contributing to a vast corpus of knowledge which commanded the utmost respect, even as worries were expressed concerning its consonance with Christian orthodoxy.37 Hence Aristotle had to be challenged for claiming that no other world could exist—and his belief in the eternity of the one and only world also required rejection. When it came to heathen religion, no compromises were possible, except when enlightened pagans were credited with having anticipated Christian monotheism, or when devout Muslims were credited (as in William of Rubruck’s testimony) with ‘saying that there is one God’, and therefore rejecting the polytheism of present-day Buddhists—along with that of ancient Greeks and Romans. The sins of such non-Christians may have been scarlet (according to anxious moralists of the type fictionalized in Chaucer’s Franklin), but their books were read.38 . . . how one can imagine oneself among them I do not know; It was all so unimaginably different And all so long ago.39

So says Louis MacNeice (1907–63), Anglo-Irish poet and one-time lecturer in classics at the University of Birmingham. Having had the ‘privilege’ at ‘Marlborough and Merton’ of learning ‘a language | That is incontrovertibly dead’,40 here MacNeice expresses his sense of the impossibility of imagining the glory that was Greece.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature When he should be remembering ‘the paragons of Hellas’ he thinks instead of such quotidian figures as ‘the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists’, ‘the demagogues and the quacks’, ‘the women pouring | Libations over graves’, ‘the trimmers at Delphi’, and, of course, ‘the slaves’. ‘These dead are dead . . .’41 For Chaucer the classical world was very much alive. He had little difficulty in imagining himself among men and women of pagan antiquity, not just ‘the paragons’ of virtue but also people like the lamenting women and ‘the trimmers at Delphi’. To be sure, he lacked the burden of modern scholarship which weighed heavily on MacNeice. (Though it may be suggested that the reductive late medieval practice of allegorizing pagan gods and narratives in a way which severed them from their roots in historical time and place42 was an equally onerous burden, which Chaucer managed to shrug off.) William Faulkner’s dictum ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’43 sums up well many of the poet’s attitudes to antiquity. That suggestion is supported, I believe, by all the reasons I have put forward above—the continued validity of moral codes of the past for present behaviour, the continued importance of pagan scientia for present learning (with the tantalizing thought that, in the case of alchemy for instance, it may have yet more secrets to disclose in the future), and the continued presence of heathen values (however newly manifest) in present society and politics. On occasion, however, Chaucer seems to offer the past as a protective, and no doubt welcome, barrier to his readers, who may gasp at the ways in which Virginius and Arveragus apply their extreme interpretations of the requirements of justice and truth (confident in the knowledge that they do not have to try such things at home, so to speak), or relieved that a god far superior to the scary Saturn is now known to rule the stars. Yet, even as Chaucer’s fictions of antiquity recognize the force of major cultural differences, they consistently assume, indeed affirm, the belief that common human values can triumph over the contingencies of time and place. Et antiquorum scripta, fidelia conseruatricia premissorum, preterita uelud presentia representant, et viris strenuis quos longa mundi etas iam dudum per mortem absorbuit per librorum uigiles lectiones, ac si viuerent, spiritum ymaginarie uirtutis infundunt. (Writings of the ancients, faithful preservers of tradition, depict the past as if it were the present, and, by the attentive readings of books, endow valiant heroes with the courageous spirit they are imagined to have had, just as if they were alive—heroes whom the extensive age of the world long ago swallowed up by death.)44

Thus Guido delle Colonne introduces his Historia destructionis Troiae (1287), a book Chaucer knew well. He was not content to read passively of the ways in which ancient writers had rendered the past as present. Rather Chaucer wished to participate in the process himself, preserving tradition as it appealed to him while producing fresh imaginations which would endow the dead with new textual life. Here is the very essence of his classicism.

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Notes   There is a large bibliography on Chaucer and the classical poets. Among representative studies, see John M. Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven, 1979); Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (Minneapolis, 1994), pp. 128–62; Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 220–69; and Jamie C. Fumo, The Legacy of Apollo: Antiquity, Authority, and Chaucerian Poetics (Toronto, 2010); together with the relevant material in Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991), and Kathryn L. McKinley, Reading the Ovidian Heroine: Metamorphoses Commentaries, 1100–1618 (Leiden, 2001). For the ‘set texts’ studied in medieval grammar schools, and their significance for Chaucer, see Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and his Followers (Gainesville, Fla, 2000), and Jill Mann, ‘“He knew nat Catoun”: Medieval School-Texts and Middle English Literature’, in The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors and Readers, eds Jill Mann and Maura Nolan (Notre Dame, Ind., 2006), pp. 41–74. On Chaucer and medieval knowledge (and ignorance) of classical ideas of tragedy, see H. A. Kelly, Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1993), and Chaucerian Tragedy (Cambridge, 1997). See also Chapter 10 in this volume by Akbari (on Ovid receptions), Chapter 11 by Hiatt (on Lucan receptions), and Chapter 12 by Wetherbee (on Statius). 2   Here I allude to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 6. 1 (1025b25). 3   According to the English friar Roger Bacon (d. 1294); Opus maius, prima pars, ch. 4, trans. Robert Belle Burke, 2 vols (Philadelphia, 1928), 1. 10. 4  Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 150–68. 5  Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 40–2. 6   Grant McColley and H. W. Miller, ‘Saint Bonaventure, Francis Mayron, William Vorilong, and the Doctrine of a Plurality of Worlds’, Speculum 12:3 (1937), 386–9 (at p. 388). 7   All Chaucer references are to The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987). 8   Stephen H. Rigby, ‘The Knight’, in Historians on Chaucer: The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, ed. Stephen H. Rigby with the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis (Oxford, 2014), pp. 42–62 (at p. 58, cf. pp. 50–2). 9   Nicomachean Ethics, 4. 2 (1122a). 10   See Alastair Minnis, ‘I speke of folk in seculer estaat: Vernacularity and Secularity in the Age of Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005), 25–58 (at pp. 33–5), and Stephen H. Rigby, ‘Aristotle for Aristocrats and Poets: Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum as Theodicy of Privilege’, Chaucer Review 46:3 (2012), 259–313. 11   Presumably Bonet chose Jean de Meun as interlocutor because of his reputation as a satirist. 1

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 12   London, British Library, Additional MS 42130, fol. 82r. On this specific image see especially Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2003), pp. 82, 179, and 188–9. See further Michael Camille, ‘Idols of the Saracens’, in The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 129–64; and  Geraldine Heng, ‘Jews, Saracens, “Black Men”, Tartars: England in a World of Racial Difference’, in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350–c.1500, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford, 2007), pp. 247–70; and Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca, NY, 2009). 13   Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Dialogue: The Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun of Honorat Bovet, ed. Michael Hanly (Tempe, Ariz., 2005), pp. 82–3. I have made a few minor changes to Hanly’s translation. 14   John of Wales, Compendiloquium de vitis illustrium philosophorum, prologus, in Florilegium de vita et dictis philosophorum et Breviloquium de sapientia sanctorum, ed. Luke Wadding (Rome, 1655), pp. 19–28; cf. Alastair Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 62–3. The most comprehensive study of the classicizing commentators and compilers of fourteenth-century England remains Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford and New York, 1960). 15   This and the following quotations are from The Mission of Friar William of Rubrick: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255, trans. Peter Jackson with David Morgan (1990). 16  However, there is some debate concerning the identification of Cambyuskan with Genghis Khan. An alternative candidate is Genghis’ grandson Batu Khan (1207–55), founder of the Kipchak Khanate, which invaded Kievan Rus’ in 1237/8; hence Batu could well be said to have ‘werreyed [waged war on] Russye’ (V.10). Whoever this heathen ruler may be, he is certainly virtuous, in line with Chaucer’s classicizing tendencies, which is the point of my argument here. For more on Chaucer’s possible knowledge of Mongul history see Vincent J. DiMarco, ‘The Historical Basis of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale’, Edebiyat 1:2 (1989), 1–22. 17   The bibliography on these issues is substantial; for references see the notes to the chapter ‘Looking for a Sign: The Quest for Nominalism in Ricardian Poetry’, in Alastair Minnis, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge, 2009), on pp. 183–94. 18   In addition to what was happening in the schools (though occasionally some awareness of relevant academic developments is in evidence), a ‘vernacular virtuous heathen scene’ flourished in the later Middle Ages; see Frank Grady, Representing Righteous Heathens in LateMedieval England (New York, 2005). This is well exemplified by such ‘romances of antiquity’ as the Roman d’Eneas and the Roman de Thebes, a genre well discussed by Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the ‘Roman Antique’ (Cambridge, 1992). See further the essays edited under the direction of Danielle Buschinger, Le Roman antique au moyen âge: Actes du Colloque du Centre d’études médiévales de l’Université de Picardie, Amiens, 14–15 janvier 1989 (Göppingen, 1992). 19  The Scale of Perfection, 2.3, ed. Thomas H. Bestul (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2000), p. 139. The tolerance sometimes afforded to pagans past and present was rarely extended to Jews, who

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Other Worlds: Chaucer’s Classicism generally got the worst of any comparison of faiths, as in Bonet’s Apparicion. For a particularly interesting and nuanced example, see Peter Abelard’s Dialogus inter philosophum, Iudaeum et Christianum, included in Abelard: Ethical Writings: His Ethics or ‘Know yourself ’ and his Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian, trans. Paul Vincent Spade with an introduction by Marilyn McCord Adams (Indianapolis, 1995). For a real-life enactment of such a rigged debate see The Trial of the Talmud: Paris, 1240, Hebrew texts translated by John Friedman, Latin texts translated by Jean Connell Hoff, with a historical essay by Robert Chazzan (Toronto, 2012). Contemporary readings of Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’ tend to split between those who see its anti-Semitism as a sad but inescapable sign of the times and those who detach the narrator from the author, the Prioress being seen as an unsophisticated and provincial bigot. 20   All translations of passages from Boethius are from De consolatione philosophiae, ed. and trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (Cambridge, Mass., 1973). 21   Of course, the value of fame as a spur to great achievement was generally recognized, and often commended. Thus Geoffroi de Charny (d. 1356) urged ‘all knights and all men-at arms’ to aim ‘to attain those heights of valor whereby so many good deeds are performed and win recognition during the lifetime’ of great men and for so long after their death. The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny, ed and trans. Richard W. Kaeuper and Elspeth Kennedy (Philadelphia, 1996), p. 163. But Charnay emphasizes that such men should not be concerned with the ‘great deeds’ themselves but rather with ‘thanking God, that Lord by whose grace these deeds can be achieved’ (p. 161). ‘There are indeed many, who can achieve such renown for physical achievements, whose souls are afterward lost’ (p. 163). Virtuous heathen were supposed to be particularly prone to such dangers. 22   On Christian depictions of ‘idols of the pagans’ see, in addition to Smalley’s English Friars and Antiquity, Camille, The Gothic Idol, pp. 73–128. 23  Bersuire, Dictionarius seu Repertorium morale, s.v. fama (Venice, 1583), p. 100; cf. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, p. 131. 24   Compendiloquium, pars 5, cap. 2, ed. Wadding, pp. 292–3; cf. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, p. 31. 25   De civitate Dei, v. 18; trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 218–21. 26   J. S. P. Tatlock, The Scene of the Franklin’s Tale Visited, Chaucer Society Publications, 2nd series, 51 (1914), p. 20, cf. pp. 18–19. 27  In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer eloquently speaks of ‘the influences of thise hevenes hye’, together with Fortune as the ‘executrice of wyrdes [fates, destinies]’, as being ‘our hierdes’ (shepherds, guides), while emphasizing that they operate ‘under God’, i.e. they are mere secondary causes subject to the all-controlling first cause (III. 617–20). 28   Treatise on the Astrolabe, II. 4, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, p. 671. 29   Lee Patterson, Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales (New York, 2006), pp. 171, 176. 30   Amphibologia, explains Vincent of Beauvais (c.1190–1264?) in his Speculum doctrinale, means ‘dubious meaning’. As an example he cites Apollo’s response to Pyrrhus, ‘Aio te . . . Romanos vincere posse’. Here it is unclear as to who will be defeated and who will win—the Romans

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature or Pyrrhus. Speculum doctrinale, iii.92, in Speculum quadruplex, sive Speculum maius (Douai, 1624, repr. Graz, Akademische Druck- u. Verlaganstalt, 1964–5), ii, col. 276. Cf. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, I.xxxiv.13–16; the source is Ennius, Annales, 179. Charles V’s most impressive scholar-translator, Nicole Oresme (d. 1382), warns that ‘the words of the diviners are sometimes of double meaning, amphibolic, two-faced’: Oresme, Livre de divinacions, ed. G. W. Coopland, Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers (Liverpool, 1952), pp. 94–7. Oresme proceeds to quote Cicero’s declaration, ‘Apollo, thy responses are sometimes true, sometimes false, according to chance, in part doubtful and obscure, so much so that the expositor has need of another expositor’ (De divinatione, ii.56). 31   Thebaid, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). On the uses and attributions of the phrase ‘primus in orbe deos fecit timor’ among medieval commentators, see Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, p. 84. 32   De proprietatibus rerum, 8.12, in On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum, eds M. C. Seymour et al. (Oxford, 1975–88), 1.479. 33   Anticlaudianus, 4.482–3, ed. R. Bossuat (Paris, 1955), p. 121. 34   Cf. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, pp. 56–7. 35   Occasionally English writers indulged in fantasies of Saracen conversion, as for instance in Middle English retellings of the Charlemagne romances which featured Fierambras and Otuel, both of whom came to see the errors of their pagan ways. There is a substantial bibliography on these narratives; for a good start, see Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven, 1977), and Siobhain Bly Calkin, Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript (New York, 2005). 36   See Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, pp. 47–50, 56–9 (esp. pp. 58–9). 37   A convenient list of those worries may be found in Giles of Rome’s Errores philosophorum, ed. Josef Koch with an English translation by John O. Riedl (Milwaukee, 1944). 38   To rework Hilaire Belloc’s words, ‘When I am dead, I hope it may be said: | “His sins were scarlet, but his books were read”.’ Hilaire Belloc: Complete Verse, ed. W. N. Roughead (1970), p. 112. 39   Autumn Journal, IX; in Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (2007), p. 122. 40   Autumn Journal, XIII; Collected Poems, ed. McDonald, p. 130. 41   Autumn Journal, IX; Collected Poems, ed. McDonald, pp. 121–2. 42   See for example the technique employed in Pierre Bersuire’s aptly named Reductorium morale, summarized in Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition, rev. edn, eds Alastair Minnis and A. B. Scott with David Wallace (Oxford, 1991), pp. 323–4, and Ralph J. Hexter, ‘The Allegari of Pierre Bersuire: Interpretation and the Reductorium Morale’, Allegorica 10 (1989), 51–84. 43  Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, act 1, sc. 3 (Harmondsworth, 1960), p. 81. 44  Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, ed. Nathaniel Edward Griffin (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 3; trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (1974), p. 1.

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Chapter 21

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Gower’s Ovids Andrew Galloway

The works of John Gower (c.1335–1408), London poet, Southwark denizen, Westminster courtier, and legal professional (of some kind) in all these environs, show few of the markers of ‘humanism’, insofar as that word or its Latin antecedents, which began to appear in Italy in Gower’s time, refers to self-conscious imitation of and dedicated attention to ancient Greek and Latin literature and culture. By 1345, Petrarch had found and copied in Verona Cicero’s almost unknown letters to Atticus, and marvelled at the vista these opened on the great man’s political anxieties and machinations.1 Between 1432 and 1439, when he gave it to Oxford University along with 127 other books, Humfrey, royal prince and Duke of Gloucester, was given a fine copy of those letters made in Florence (1415) in ‘humanist’ script, the elegant columnar imitation of the old Carolingian imitations of Roman style (and the antecedent of today’s Times Roman). Humfrey’s French ex libris appears on the title page, ‘Cest livre est A moy Homfrey duc de gloucestre’, in ‘secretary’ hand, the looser cursive script by then commonly used in England for French and English writing, including most copies of Gower’s works, over eighty of which survive from the half-century that seems to have been the high-water mark of Gower’s literary popularity.2 The two contrasting scripts of Humfrey’s precious Florentine copy of Cicero’s most politically conniving letters from a few years after Gower’s death proclaim the elite novelty of the new antiquarianism, as well as the period’s rapid innovations in prestigious interpretative and textual communities, which had recently included the slightly older ‘secretary’ handwriting itself, sent also from Italy to England by way of France into the circles of administrators and civil servants of Westminster a few decades before. ‘Humanism’ appeared in England after many other intellectual and literary transformations had already begun, especially the establishment of high-­ prestige secular poetry in English, a more momentous change than the recovery of antiquity. Accordingly, Humfrey patronized the monumental, intermittently classicizing poetry of John Lydgate while gathering bounties of directly ancient materials,

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature many from Italy but others from England, such as the Latin translations of Plato’s Phaedo and Meno that he acquired from John Whethamstede, abbot of St Albans, where classical studies had been pursued since the fourteenth century (and where Humfrey would eventually be buried).3 Gower, whose contribution to high-prestige poetry in English, French, and Latin was massive, and who had made his own strenuous if not Ciceronian efforts for political favour from Humfrey’s father, Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV), seems a fitting forerunner for this taste in antiquity. He quotes Ovid heavily in some works, and rephrases Ovidian stories throughout others. In the splashes of red Latin across the leaves of his English poetry he insists on showing even English-only readers the importance of Latin verse and the gravitas of Latin glossing, thus the antique lineage of all he does. Yet in many elements of substance he missed this take-off of the studia humanitatis almost entirely. Like most Englishmen of his generation, he shows no contact with Plato’s writings. His works make no reference even to many ancient authors very familiar to medieval learned culture, and are remarkably negligent in attending to those he does seem at least partly to know. Virgil is glimpsed only as the sage and necromancer found in medieval story collections like the Story of the Seven Sages, where Virgil is said to have made a miraculous bronze horseman who, when Rome’s enemies are stirring, points to the names of those preparing an attack, or features as an old man tricked in love by the emperor’s daughter; the only quotation from Virgil’s actual works in Gower’s copious Latin is one line from the set-piece ‘fame flies forth’, found in the schoolboy favourite, the story of Dido.4 Unlike the widening European intellectual horizons that Gower’s London associate and literary rival at court, Geoffrey Chaucer, is often lauded for glimpsing, Gower’s classical world seems narrowly and traditionally insular. Chaucer recycles Virgil, claims to quote Plato, continually draws on Statius, and was sufficiently interested in the new Italian focus on ancient originalia to turn to Boccaccio’s works, including the Teseida (c.1340), most of whose copies have Boccaccio’s peculiar footnotes on ancient literature and customs; using Boccaccio’s work to compose the ‘Knight’s Tale’ (c.1386), Chaucer opened it with lines from the end of Boccaccio’s own ancient prompt, Statius.5 Gower, in contrast, seems never to cite Statius directly. The one possible exception is the brief narrative of the hubristic Capaneus, punished for mocking belief in the gods as ‘ydel speche . . . Which caused was of pure drede’ (CA 1.1987–8; cf. Thebaid 3.661, ‘Primus in orbe deos fecit timor!’ [‘fear first created gods in the world’]). G. C. Macaulay thought Statius ‘probably’ Gower’s source there, and critics have generally accepted that since none other has been identified. But Gower explicitly attributes this anecdote to ‘the Croniqes’ (1.1994), his term elsewhere for Benoît de Saint-Maure’s Roman de Troie, Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum historiale, and other prose compendia (where indeed the story appears, although none so far identified have all the details that Gower offers). His use of the Thebaid must be considered as tenuous and uncertain as his use of the Aeneid. Centuries of medieval Christian

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Gower’s Ovids scholars had known Cicero as a sapiens (via the De officiis and other works), and Gower paraphrases, relatively accurately, a few sententiae from Book 1 (but no further) of De officiis. But he offers only vague mentions of Cicero’s role in providing rules of ‘Rethorike’: ‘hou that men schal the wordes pike | After the forme of eloquence, | Which is, men sein, a gret prudence’ (CA 4.2647–9).6 Chaucer is able wittily to show his Franklin using the form of Persius’ opening to his Satires (1.1) in denying any training in classical letters: I sleep nevere on the Mount of Pernaso Ne lerned Marcus Tulius Scithero. Colours ne knowe I none, withouten drede, But swiche colours as growen in the mede, Or elles siche as men dye or peynte. Colours of rethoryk been to me queynte; My spirit feeleth noght of swich mateere.

[Mount Parnasus] [Cicero] [(rhetorical) colors  fear not] [such  meadow] [such] [are strange to me] (‘Franklin’s Prologue’, 721–7)

It is hard not to imagine that Chaucer’s portrait there includes a joke at his friend’s expense. Like the earnest, ‘trouthe’-obsessed Franklin, Gower is overtly dismissive of rhetorical ways to communicate though elegantly rhetorical in how he says so, ‘For trowthe hise wordes wol noght peinte’ (CA 1.281–4), he states. Gower elsewhere mentions Jerome’s dream of being whipped by God for being a closet Ciceronianus rather than a Christianus, noting approvingly that God chastised him ‘when he wanted to study the philosophy of Cicero in order to talk beautifully’.7 What C. S. Lewis, Christopher Ricks, and others have praised as Gower’s uncalculating simplicity of style that grows eloquent only naturally (‘when something songful is to be said, Gower finds himself singing’, as Lewis says), Chaucer therefore parodies as inattentive absorption of classical models, or duplicitous denial of the bookish learning that Gower everywhere demonstrates.8 But it is not certain that Gower would have fully shared the joke. Gower even indicates that ‘Cithero’ and ‘Tullius’ were two separate authors: ‘thilke time at Rome also | Was Tullius with Cithero’ (CA 4.2651–2). Yet what Gower achieved through the narrow path to antiquity that he did follow, or at least acknowledged he was following, in some ways drew him closer to the Italian humanists than most of those around him, including Chaucer. His approach to antiquity was almost exclusively focused on an author who had long held court in the medieval schoolroom and monastic libraries (with both of which Gower shows many signs of contact): Ovid. For Gower, Ovid was uniquely ‘the Poete’, as he is called throughout Gower’s masterpiece, the Confessio amantis, where Ovidian stories are heavily mined. Gower summarized his own literary profession—with the clerical sense of the word almost intact—most clearly at the end of the Confessio amantis, when Venus tells the disillusioned Amans, now John Gower, to ‘go ther vertu moral

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature duelleth, | Wher ben thi bokes, as men tellethi, | Whiche of long time thou hast write’ (CA 8.2925–7). Those ‘moral books’ for Gower included not only Ovid’s own works in full but also the anonymous, early fourteenth-century French Ovide moralisé (OM), three times the length of the Metamorphoses, the recent Latin prose allegories of the monk Pierre Bersuire (c.1340, revised, including Bersuire’s consultation with Petrarch, c.1362), the Ovidius moralizatus, a third the size of Ovid’s original, as well as possibly various smaller Latin reprises of Ovid such as Matthew of Vendôme’s late thirteenth-century version of Pyramus and Thisbe, some of whose unique details are shared by Gower’s version of the story.9 In writing his greatest poem, the Confessio amantis, Ovid and Ovidiana have far greater prominence than the long medieval works he regularly used, such as Peter Riga’s versified and expanded Bible, the Aurora, Nigel Wireker’s satirical Speculum stultorum, and probably Guillaume de Machaut’s Voir dit. As the instance of Bersuire shows, Gower’s Ovidian guides are not all old moral books. The title of Bersuire’s work is no modern invention but found in many of its copies, and the French Ovide moralisé throughout declares the same ‘izing’ in its repeated disclosures of ‘la veritez . . . qui souz les fables gist couvert’ (‘the truth . . . that lies hidden under the fables’: 1.45–6). In the unlikely and often unheralded company of these ingenious pre-‘humanist’ interpreters, Gower appropriated Ovid with unusual fidelity yet extraordinary imaginative freedom. At his most productive, he shows himself steeped in Ovid and up-to-date Ovidian commentators to a degree hard to parallel before the Renaissance, and rare thereafter. It is possible to make this claim because of a lineage of keen critical attention, in which, nonetheless, there remain large questions. Even with an increasing proliferation of astute critical interest, there are few comprehensive accounts of, much less explanations for, Gower’s overall uses (or not) of Ovid.10 Since the 1960s, whole books about Chaucer’s uses of Ovid appeared;11 in contrast, studies of Gower’s uses of Ovid and Ovidiana have typically focused on particular works or phrases of his career then taken those as his unvarying norm. Critics do not usually address both what Gower did with Ovid in the Latin writings and in the English Confessio or the French Balades, and how we might explain that pattern as a whole, much less why Ovid, so pervasive and important for many of Gower’s works, disappears entirely from other spans of his poetic production. There are signs that Gower strove, and critics sometimes labour with him, to make his copious poetry in three languages seem like a single, unified book; his Ovids disrupt that unity.12 They come and they go, changing form across Gower’s career. This chapter seeks to suggest some ways in which those Ovids were important for Gower’s poetry as well as situate the results more broadly. An initial outline of occurrences is possible. He begins with virtually no direct signs of Ovid in his French Mirour de l’omme (c.1377), he proceeds to increasingly heavy uses of Ovid as he composes his Latin Vox clamantis (c.1380–2), especially its added first book describing the metamorphoses of rebellious peasants in 1381, a work notable for its

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Gower’s Ovids verbatim recycling of lines from a wide range of Ovid’s poetry; then, after a flowering of Ovidiana in the Confessio, he retreats again to almost no mention or use of The Poet in his final political poetry directed to the new king, Henry IV. A small cluster of Ovidiana and classical allusion appears in Gower’s French Balades, preserved in only a single copy from c.1402 that was dedicated to Henry IV. But those poems could have been written at any point or along many points of his long literary career. We could explain this trajectory partly as response to what Chaucer, his friend and rival, was doing—something like the dialogic way in which John Hurt Fisher mapped Gower’s and Chaucer’s major works.13 There is no doubt this provided prompting on both sides.14 But I leave Chaucer aside, for the most part, in order to explain Gower’s trajectory in its own terms, by attending to his legendary interest in ethics and ‘morality’—‘o moral Gower’, as Chaucer calls him at the end of Troilus and Criseyde (5.1856). This interest is most developed but most challenged in his uses of Ovidian materials. Those materials provided explicit moral topics but also opportunities for reopening the meanings of those moral concepts, yielding narrative density and character-driven emotional empathy generally lacking from his non-Ovidian writing. Whereas the evidence of Chaucer’s role in prompting Gower’s Ovidianism is circumstantial, there is clear textual evidence that Gower’s elaborations and framing were stimulated by the moralized, redacted, and summarized medieval Ovids he consulted. This set of responses and apparatus approaching Gower’s own time plays a far larger role than is usually acknowledged in making Ovid such a significant figure for him. Perhaps even more unexpectedly, the results show Gower responsible for a major transition in the intellectual as well as poetic uses of Ovid, a departure from using Ovid simply as a matrix for Christian allegory. Along with Ovid himself, the Ovidian commentators lead Gower not only into his best poetry, but also into his fullest participation in moral, social, literary, and political dialogue, though not always with the interlocutors and topics we might expect.

Gower’s Ovidian Debut Gower’s first known work, the French Mirour de l’omme, which survives in a single, inelegant copy and seems likely to have been written in the later 1370s, offers an exposition of the sins and the virtues keyed to a map of social estates and shows no trace of Ovid, at least in lexical detail.15 This is one among several reasons to think that the Mirour was written not for a courtly world, Gower’s overtly addressed audience for all his later works, but for a civic, even mercantile audience.16 Yet some features of the Mirour merit attention for their consistency with Gower’s slightly later uses of Ovid and Ovidiana. First, the Mirour draws heavily but with independent synthetic power on a number of books, witnessing the same ‘mateire’, in its case especially the popular late thirteenth-century prose confessor’s guide, the Somme le

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature roi of Frère Laurent, to which, however, its ‘plot’ bears no direct resemblance.17 Second, the Mirour, for all of its direct moralizations, elaborates dramatic action and debate rather than simple assertion as the means of defining the moral points of the Somme le roi. Whereas the Somme le roi methodically defines sins as the seven ‘heads’ (and for each the several ‘horns’) of the beast of hell, and virtues as ‘branches’ from the tree in the garden of the heart, the Mirour follows the production of the sins as the daughters of the incestuous union of Satan’s daughter Sin with her son Death. Called to a parliament to plan Mankind’s downfall, the Sins determine on polygamous marriages to the World, whose offspring are their own further ‘daughters’ or sub-types. Briefly held off by the arrival of the Virtues and their daughters, the sins reappear as more abstract principles in the narrator’s final quasi-legal survey of the social estates and professions, indicting each class and profession for its embodiment of sins, including a (generic) penitential indictment of the narrator (27,301–480), which leads to a final prayer to the Virgin, amid which the unique copy of the Mirour breaks off. Although often contrasted to the greater ‘realism’ of Chaucer’s estate types and characters in the General Prologue, Gower’s moral allegory offers a form of ‘character-driven’ and socially interactive ethics, even in the work’s most allegorical sections: Then came Envy in her turn [to the marriage with the World], mounted on a dog and carrying on her right fist a sparrow-hawk that was moulting; her face was much discolored and pale from the evils she was thinking about, and the mantle she wore was of proper purple, well embroidered with burning hearts, and amidst them, well-placed, were serpent tongues scattered daintily everywhere.18

Classical influence may play some role in this vivid and socially situated morality. Like Juvenal and Horace (who do not seem directly used), Gower’s narrator’s commonest rhetorical posture is apostrophe, denunciation, and—the sacred parallel to these—prayer. Gower’s voice in the Mirour is exhortatory and oratorical, performatively creating community even before his focus turns in its second half directly to contemporary society. Few though its explicit paraphrases of Cicero’s De officiis are, the Mirour throughout emphasizes social ‘duties’ and social standards of a kind like those found in Cicero’s best-known work of the Middle Ages, in contrast to the emphases on Last Judgement, paradise, heaven, and hell that saturate the Somme le roi. The Mirour’s vagueness in its references to Ciceronian ‘rhetorique’ has been mentioned above, but its gleanings from Cicero’s treatise on social ethics are precise. ‘To suffer death, sorrow, or external injury is not so contrary to our nature as is to make another lose and ourselves gain by trickery’ (3361); ‘lechery is vile in any case, but particularly vile in old people’ (9614); ‘all worldly goods of a man are community goods, according to nature and to divine law’ (15,997); ‘to be generous to your friend but not to plunder others in order to accomplish your largess’ (15,955): these passages

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Gower’s Ovids from Book 1 of the De officiis, unmentioned in the Somme le roi, span the Mirour, indicating that some form of Cicero’s work must have been at hand throughout the Mirour’s composition.19 Although Ovid does not appear overtly in the Mirour, Gower’s later heavy usage justifies seeking parallels there as well. The Mirour begins with Satan calling a parliament to plan how to ‘drag Mankind down in some way from earth into hell’ (‘si en enfern de la terrere | Le porray trere en tieu maniere’; 358–9), just as the Metamorphoses commences its individual stories with Jupiter calling the gods together in the council to decide how to proceed on his view that ‘wherever old Ocean roars around the earth, I must destroy the race of men’ (‘nunc mihi qua totum Nereus circumsonat orbem, | perdendum est mortale genus’; 1.187–8).20 The Somme le roi’s Envie is briefly called ‘li serpenz qui envenime tout . . . mere a la mort, car par l’envie au deable vint la mort ou monde’ (‘the serpent that poisons everything . . . the mother of death, since through the devil’s envy death came into the world’; ch. 33.2–6), but nothing in the Somme le roi’s prosaic chapter approaches Gower’s pale and menacingly cloaked personification. To be sure, iconography of Envy was widespread, including the popular thirteenth-century Roman de la rose (lines 239–90), but Ovid offered an instance that contributed substantially to the tradition (including the passage in the Roman de la rose) and perhaps directly to Gower’s verse. Invidia appears in Ovid’s story of Aglauros, to whom Minerva sends Invidia as punishment for breaking a goddess’s prohibition. Roused from her cavern, Invidia leaves the snake-meat she was eating (the necessary ‘vitiorum alimenta suorum’; ‘food of her venom’; 2.769) and, as pallor spreads over her face (‘pallor in ore sedet’; 775) and ‘wrapped in a mantle of dark cloud’ (‘adopertaque nubibus atris’; 790), she journeys to breathe her pestilential vapours on Aglauros and ‘spread black venom through her very heart and bones’ (‘et medio spargit pulmone venenum’; 801). None of these details appears in the portrait in the Roman de la rose. Gower’s Envye, with her hawk and purple mantle, is too elegantly noble to claim Ovid’s wild-eyed, mouldy-toothed hag as its sole antecedent, but glossed copies of the Metamorphoses direct attention to the personified sin in Aglauros’ story. The ‘vulgate’ or standard commentary on this passage includes a common definition of the sin as ‘anguish of the soul arising from the good fortune of another’. This is the name Gower gives the second daughter of Envy (after Detraction, and before Joy for Others’ Grief ).21 When Gower’s works display Ovid more demonstrably, they also provide a fuller glimpse of the glosses and scholarly resources he could bring to bear. Moving between a full, evidently glossed collection of Ovid’s Latin poetry, the even bulkier early fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé, and Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus (often found printed around the margins of Renaissance Ovids but usually a stand-alone codex in the Middle Ages),22 as well as the three or four other substantial works noted above, Gower gives evidence of a well-stocked library, a large desk, and a keen  sense of what is most current in the learned and thus—apart from a few ­chameleon-like lay writers like himself—clerical fourteenth-century world. Up to date

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature though these particular treatments and expansions of Ovid were, this glossator’s and moralizer’s approach to an ancient author comes from well-established methods. Unlike many other classical authors, Ovid’s works did not arrive in medieval culture with scholiae from late antiquity; this meant Ovid’s poetry was glossed and assimilated anew by medieval culture.23 Especially after the thirteenth-century standard or ‘vulgate’ gloss to the Metamorphoses developed, Ovid was presented to his readers pre-digested into Christian ethics and cosmology, complete with brief verse allegories at the heads of each story in many manuscripts (from John of Garland’s Integumenta).24 Other works by Ovid were accompanied by introductions (accessus) and summaries often in small sidebar glosses like the Latin moralizing glosses to Gower’s own Confessio amantis that emphasized moral utility which again squared with Christian values. One common accessus to the Heroides states that Ovid’s ‘intention is to commend lawful marriage and love . . . he uses the example of Penelope to discuss lawful love, the example of Canace to discuss unlawful love, and the example of Phyllis to discuss foolish love. He includes . . . foolish and unlawful love, not for their own sake, but in order to commend . . . lawful love.’25 At the same time, Ovid’s poetry offered obvious challenges to that Christian world. Ovid’s universe is divinely shaped, amenable even to Christian physics (as the vulgate gloss on the opening passages of the Metamorphoses shows),26 but that world was also metempsychotic, atomistic, and driven by starkly cruel divine and human appetites, all features resisting Christian cosmology. The portrayal of pagan gods as vindictive and arrogant might make it all the easier for Christians to gloss away such gods as implausible objects of belief, but the nature of desire itself—human and divine—displayed in Ovid seems a burr in the thought of medieval commentators. An abundance of moralizations, translations, and historical investigations particularly appeared in the fourteenth century, not only the moralizing allegories to which Gower regularly turned but also the commentaries on Greek and Roman antiquity produced earlier in the century by the ‘classicizing friars’ such as Thomas Waleys and Nicholas Trevet, and the substantial sections on the pre-Christian centuries in the Latin ‘universal history’ of the monk Ranulf Higden (c.1340–52), whose many readers increased still further with the English translation by the chaplain of Sir Thomas Berkeley, John Trevisa (1387), which Chaucer evidently consulted for his account of the rape of Lucretia.27 It is possible to treat, as Lynn Arner does, the entire effort of classicizing in Gower (and Chaucer) as merely a way to impose on the ‘non-ruling classes’ a sense of the conglutinated ‘European, Latin, Greco-Roman’ tradition that they did not know, serving merely to condition ‘less experienced readers’ of English in the generation of the Rising of 1381 and the birth of Lollardy to an awareness of their own intellectual inadequacy. Classicizing could mark nobility and educational privilege, as Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester and his bevy of fifteenth-century Italian writers surely recognized.28 Yet to extend this view monolithically is misleading, both in narrowing

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Gower’s Ovids classicizing to a simple attribute of a (single) ‘ruling class’ in the fourteenth century, and in thinking of Gower’s interests in antiquity as repetitive and complacent recitations of that social elitism. Generations of male students, clerical and lay, recited, parsed, and redacted Ovid, from grammar school to the ‘arts’ curriculum in university. This was not always to the liking of authorities. In the 1370s, the Oxford chancellor forbade any grammar master or other ‘public grammar instructor’ (gramatice publicus informator) from teaching the Ars amatoria, requiring them instead to drill their little clergeons only with ‘moral things, or respectable metaphors or poems’ (moralia uel metaphoras siue poesias honestas). The injunction merely confirms the regular practice of what it denounces.29 We know from Montaigne’s 1572 essay ‘On Education’ that Montaigne’s zeal for reading began with the ‘fables de la Métamorphose’, which he read (in Latin) from around the age of 7, when ‘je me dérobais de tout autre plaisir pour les lire’ (‘I pulled myself away from every other pleasure to read them’).30 Youthful readers in earlier centuries evidently responded similarly.31 Writing in the 1380s, while Gower was composing his major works, the Italian scholar Coluccio Salutati looked back on his boyhood discovery of Ovid, who had served ‘like a door and a teacher’. When in late adolescence Salutati began burning with passion for such studies, once Ovid came into his hands he was able, with no teacher and no one to discuss it with, to read all the other poets and, as if divinely inspired, understand them all.32 Gifted Latinists like him may have often absorbed Ovid’s lines too deeply to recognize their debts at all times. Petrarch, in a letter to Boccaccio in the 1350s, berates himself upon discovering that he had thoughtlessly reused a line from Virgil in one of his own eclogues, a discovery capped by Petrarch’s realization that in another eclogue appeared also a line ‘not mine’. ‘For a while I did not recognize whose it was for the simple reason that . . . I had already made it my own,’ but he adds, ‘at length I discovered it in Naso’s Metamorphoses.’ Artful imitations, he avers, must be self-conscious: ‘I am one who delights in imitation and not in sameness, in a resemblance that is not servile.’33 We can overhear Gower’s most deeply memorized passages of Ovid, and also witness Gower’s vigorous efforts to make what Petrarch would consider non-servile use of them, if we look at the Latin Vox clamantis, especially the last-written book added to head the work. This is an allegorical dream-vision describing the assault on London by the rebels of 1381, in which Gower matched their attacks on the learned and on lawyers with an adroitly, even archly, literate response.34 The rebels’ attack was less costly in many ways to London authorities than, for instance, Richard II’s efforts in 1392 to humble the City, but it brought to many chroniclers’ and others’ minds nightmarish possibilities of social disorder. Gower’s response was an eruption of Ovidian learning into nearly journalistic poetry. David Carlson’s and A. G. Rigg’s table of sources used in Gower’s dream-vision of the rebellion is of inestimable help in seeing the passages in Ovid to which Gower turned.35 Most are rhetorical set-pieces, and he may have noted and absorbed them

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature as such. Thus he twice quotes from or closely follows Fasti 1.147–56, in two entirely separate contexts: Omnia tunc florent, tunc est noua temporis etas, Ludit et in pratis luxuriando pecus . . . (VC 1.33–4) (Then everything flourishes, then there is a new epoch of time, and the cattle frolicked, rejoicing, in the fields.) Verbaque sum spectans pauca locutus humum . . . (VC I.1506) (Looking upon the ground, I spoke a few words . . .)

With its parallels to French reverdie forms, the first part of such a passage—in which Ovid’s narrator is asking the god Janus why the new year does not come in spring— would be readily amenable to a late medieval courtly English poet. Chaucer might also have heard that tune when composing the opening of the Canterbury Tales. Gower used it as a placid overture for the horrific dream of the rebellion. Gower’s second citation, adapting Ovid’s narrator’s hesitant approach to Janus to describe Gower’s narrator’s speechlessness before the murderous rebels, more jarringly instances the novel reapplication that Gower’s uses of Ovid in the Vox regularly display. The rebellion allowed Gower, though not the rebels (who were crushed), a new authority and freedom. Using Ovid, Gower can pause for reverdie (Fasti 3.235–42, 4.429–30, 5.213–14; see VC 1.36–47, variously arranged); he can utter a love-vow (Fasti 3.509–10; see VC 1.1219–20); he can pray like a seaman in a storm (Fasti 3.593–4; see VC I.1729–30); he can lament: poor me, lucky you (Fasti 4.520, 5.315–16; see VC 1.1534, 1401–2); he can sketch a night-scene (Fasti 6.673; see VC 1.951); he can declare Fire! (Fasti 6.439–42; see VC I.933–6). These examples are just from his uses of the Fasti, whose control to that degree by a layman is a major sign of how far the category of ‘intellectual’ had broadened beyond ‘clerical’. Not even Chaucer shows a remotely comparable use of the Fasti. As for Gower’s use of the Metamorphoses when crafting the Vox, his eye and memory ranged widely. Every book of Ovid’s ‘great work’ offers lines and scenes. Not surprisingly, so did Ovid’s poetry of exile, the Tristia and Ex Ponto, amplify Gower’s own laments of anguished isolation. Gower’s citations constitute a daring version of classical imitation to reach originality, offering a kind of cold and indirect sympathy with the rebels’ impulse for social innovation and new identity. Not that Gower always indicates or could expect double awareness of the original and later contexts.36 But in some cases a dialogue between his present situation and ambitions and the subtext of Ovid and Ovidiana becomes audible, and there some of the deeper possibilities Ovid held for him beyond rhetorical ‘colours’ become visible. Striking, for instance, is Gower’s use of Fasti 1.479–85, an ostentatiously ‘pagan’

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Gower’s Ovids view of arbitrary divine cruelty, when Carmentis, mother of Evander, urges him to fortitude against the misfortunes imposed by (a) god: Cui genetrix flenti ‘fortuna viriliter’ inquit ‘(siste, precor, lacrimas) ista ferenda tibi est. sic erat in fatis; nec te tua culpa fugavit, sed deus; offenso pulsus es urbe deo. non meriti poenam pateris, sed numinis iram: est aliquid magnis crimen abesse malis . . .’. (He wept, but she, his mother, said, ‘Cease, I pray, your tears; bear like a man your fortune. It was fated so; no fault of yours has banished you, the deed is a god’s; an offended god has driven you here from the city. What you endure is not the punishment of sin but heaven’s ire: in great misfortunes it is something to be unstained by crime . . .’.)37 (Fasti 1.479–83)

Describing the horrors of the rebellion, Gower grants this passage to Sophia, addressing himself. Since Ovid’s passage extols the courage of Evander who would go on to found a city on the site of the future Rome, it seems meaningful that in Gower’s adaptation, the consoling female voice of Wisdom arrives to reassure Gower amid the fearful time when, Gower says, he and others learned in the law were hunted by rebels who are figured not only as barnyard animals, as their ‘true’ nature, but further metamorphosed into lethally monstrous versions of those, flies with fangs and cows with razor horns: Ecce Sophia meis compassa doloribus inquit, ‘Siste, precor, lacrimas et pacienter age. Sic tibi fata volunt non crimina; crede sed illud Quo deus offensus te reparando vocat. Non merito penam pateris, set numinis iram. Ne timeas, finem nam dolor omnis habet’. (VC 1.1543–49) (Behold, Wisdom sympathized with my sorrows and said, ‘Cease your tears, I pray, and be patient. Fate does not want your reproaches. Instead, trust that because God is displeased he is calling on you for revival. You are not suffering a merited torment, but the wrath of divinity. Fear not, for every sorrow has an end.’)

The transposition boldly positions Gower as an alter Evander, single-handedly (re-) founding his own City out of the ruins of the rebellion.38 That role is strengthened by Gower’s later use of other lines from that same Ovidian story of foundations to open his English Confessio, explicitly announcing his foundational ambitions: Qua tamen Engisti lingua canit Insula Bruti Anglica Carmente metra iuuante loquar. (CA Prol. headverse)

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (In that tongue of Hengist’s in which the isle of Brutus sings will I speak, with Carmen’s help, English verses.)

As R. F. Yeager argues, the extraordinary adaptation of Ovid in the Vox 1 more resembles a unique instance, for its time, of the ancient and later genre of cento than it does simple ‘schoolboy plagiarism’ (as Gower’s great editor Macaulay called it).39 But whatever name we give it, it was no simple rhetorical crutch; having already written six other books of the Vox Gower had proven he did not need that. Instead, Gower’s uses of Ovid in Vox 1 perform a kind of ‘debate’ with and redemption of the Roman poet to provide new principles for social identity and order, based not on the standard ‘estates’ model, or even mutual economic need (two available alternatives, which Gower acknowledges elsewhere), but Ovidian archetypes: Evander as the founder of pre-Roman Rome, the Ovidian cosmos as a key to universal order and disorder. The rebels themselves are certainly not treated as interlocutors in this debate. Although their cogency and planning are elsewhere evident behind many of the horrified official accounts of the rebellion, they are given few voices in Gower’s work other than bestial roaring, rustic thundering (‘Rusticus intonuit’; 1.840), and raving peasant-like law-giving (‘rusticitas furiens statuebat’; 1.843). This dehumanizing of the 1381 rebels has been well traversed by critics.40 What can be emphasized here, however, is that even those mentions of rebel voices specifically reforge their historical reality via an Ovidian cosmos and its Christian commentary tradition. The result of their monstrous metamorphoses, Gower says, is that ‘the nature of the old world is denatured’ (‘O denaturans orbis natura prioris’; 1.979): in so saying, he uses the language of the thirteenth-century ‘vulgate’ gloss on Ovid’s account of the original making of the world: vnus erat toto nature id est una uoluntas nature naturantis, scilicet dei. Duplex est enim natura: natura naturans et natura naturata. Natura naturans est ipse deus; natura naturata est quedam uis rebus insita ex similibus procreans similia, sicut de uacca creatur taurus et huiusmodi. (there was one face of nature [in the entire world ] [Met. 1.6]: that is, one will of naturing [engendering] nature, namely, God. For nature is double: naturing [engendering] nature, and natured [engendered] nature. Engendering nature is God himself; engendered nature is a certain inherent force in things procreating similar things from similar things, just as a cow is created from a bull and so forth.)41

Turning from oxen into fire-breathing monsters with bears’ feet and dragon tails— ‘Sic transformatas formas natura reliquit, | Et monstris similes fecerat esse boues’ (‘thus nature forsook their transformed forms and caused the oxen to become like monsters’; 1.253–4)—the rebels reverse the fundamental process of creating order from chaos that Ovid’s Metamorphoses describes, and that the ‘vulgate’ gloss presents as a cryptically Christian creation.

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Gower’s Ovids Gower’s probable use of the vulgate commentary on Ovid’s opening lines here shows how deeply he entered the long medieval debate with and recuperation of the ancient world. Yet it also indicates how innovatively Gower wrung from that ancient world substantive models of society and the cosmos. Doubtless this ambition was prompted by contact with the profoundly alien rebel Others. For them, Gower had no time-honoured conventions or language, and he made every effort to disallow them discursive and intellectual novelty while making rapid strides to pursue his own. Yet by emphasizing the monstrous novelty of their innovations he seems to be acknowledging their stimulus for his Ovidian experimentation. The dark time of the rebellion was the shining moment of Gower’s rise as a cosmological poet.

Dialogues Among the Ruins of Antiquity: The Confessio amantis Something even more experimental unfolds in the Confessio amantis. Whereas the Vox Book 1 uses Ovid and its full scholarly gloss to redefine and push away a populace gone mad, the Confessio amantis seeks to coax less clerical and more courtly audiences to join in acknowledging the usefulness of antiquity (for the Confessio is almost wholly in the realm of Venus and her priest Genius) for redefining social roles and ethics beyond the three-estate model with which it opens, and also for providing a new kind of language for psychological delusion beyond simply the language of sin and virtue. There seems no one version of either kind of model or language in the Confessio, but instead a principle of innovation in and dialogue between a number of social and spiritual or psychological models or languages into which his stories lead. If the rebels spurred Gower’s initial Ovidian experiments in poetry, Ovid himself seems thereafter to have drawn him into further poetic innovation. Throughout the later fourteenth century, antiquity was slowly gaining this role of fostering new social and psychic models in civic and courtly London and Westminster. To be sure, such interest in London’s ‘civic’ culture lagged behind clerical and courtly venues, and both were far from Italian classicizing. The Boethian treatise and political self-defence called The Testament of Love, for instance, written in the mid-1380s by the London sheriff ’s clerk, partisan rabble-rouser, and later undersheriff of Middlesex and London, Thomas Usk, who was executed by the Lords Appellant in 1388 in their attack on Richard II and their sweep of the king’s minions, is saturated with Chaucerian allusions, but it includes only a few classical allusions, which Usk’s most recent editor calls ‘inept’. To instance the idea that someone might rise to power from unpromising origins, Usk mentions that Jupiter was ‘drawen up’ from his role as a bull ‘to ben Europes fere’ (companion), and Aeneas was raised up ‘from hel, to be king of the countre there Rome is nowe stondyng’.42 These applications are indeed strained. Yet their deliberate disjunctions are not unlike Gower’s Ovidianism

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature in the Vox clamantis, drawing similar attention to some aspects of the originals. English civic classicizing would become more visible by the early fifteenth century, when in rebuilding the Guildhall porch statues were added of the female Cardinal Virtues: Justice, Prudence, Fortitude, and Temperance.43 Such figures were traditional, but it seems no coincidence that John Lydgate’s mid-fifteenth-century Mumming at London, presented to the London mayor, features speaking personifications of precisely those virtues.44 Lydgate’s talkative maidens suggest that dialogues with and about antiquity were becoming important to a wider audience, as much as antiquity considered inertly in itself. In this sense public uses of classical culture in London were as meaningful as learned commentaries and allegories. Among Gower’s many local readers, however, clerks and scholars were the likeliest to appreciate Gower’s appropriations (however skewed) of Ovid’s Latin into his own. Thus Gower dedicated one copy of his Vox to Archbishop Thomas Arundel, who was regularly present at Westminster.45 Gower himself retired to a house in the grounds of the Augustinian priory of St Mary Overie in Southwark, and perhaps some of his books came from this source.46 Gower’s special interest in Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus, completed only in the 1360s, whose influence is evident in Gower’s Confessio amantis, may also have come to him via monastic vectors. Bersuire, himself a Benedictine monk, was read earliest in the monasteries. Bersuire’s commentary was eventually copied in many clerical contexts, but it was not a common work in secular settings until the Renaissance, when it became widely printed and even parodied.47 Increasingly, however, secular courtiers read Latin as well as English and French, and might appreciate a classicizing posture (at least) in all three. Malcolm Parkes has argued that Gower’s Vox clamantis was updated and disseminated by a cluster of supporters that included nobility.48 Vernacular classicizing would be of even more interest to this group, whose courtly worlds featured many adaptations of Ovidian materials in French poetry from the twelfth century on, flourishing especially in fourteenth-century French poetry in the wake of the Roman de la rose.49 Judging by Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, with its scene from Ovid’s Ceyx and Alcione and dedicated to John of Gaunt (c.1370), Chaucer responded earlier than Gower to this courtly fashion for passionate stories from antiquity. The inventory of goods taken after the death of Richard’s uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, Earl of Gloucester, in  1397 (reputedly murdered on Richard’s order), includes a French translation of Livy in ‘two large volumes’ (presumably Bersuire’s translation), along with a ‘Vie d’Alexandre’ and romances on Hector and Troy.50 Even Duke Humfrey’s courtly Latin humanism had mid-fourteenth-century antecedents. In 1366, Walter of Peterborough, monk of Revesby (Lincolnshire), presented a Latin poem to John of Gaunt revealing ‘Christ’s truth enclosed in poetry’, showing how the first three books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses constitute an allegory of history from Adam to Julian.51 The work is lost, and no trace of Walter appears in Gaunt’s Register. The

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Gower’s Ovids attempt to engage Gaunt in such remakings of antiquity, however, is noteworthy, indicating an effort to establish classicizing as grounds for proposing new historical and social interpretative schemes, in which nobility as well as clergy were invited to participate, and in which English poetry might fashion its own more accessible yet also more unpredictable experiments. We may see in coyly ‘natural’ if not Franklin-like terms Gower’s inducement to his non-clerical readers to enter into this kind of new social and psychological ‘language’ from old books in the Confessio, which opens with its general praise of using books to ‘wryte of newe som matiere, | Essampled of these olde wyse’ (CA Prol. 6–7), then tells of Gower accidentally meeting the royal barge while rowing on the Thames and receiving a major, though vague, literary commission from a languid and cultured king: And so befel, as I cam nyh, Out of my bot, whan he my syh, He bad me come in to his barge. And whan I was with him at large, Amonges othre thinges seid He hath this charge upon me leid, And bad me doo my besynesse To his hihe worthinesse Som newe thing I scholde boke, That he himself it mihte loke After the forme of my writynge . . . .

[it befell  near] [saw]

[demand  laid] [carry out my labours] [high] [write] [So that  consider] (Prol.43*–53*)

Though apparently straightforward, Gower’s royal commission scene is as Augustan a moment as any in English literature. Richard himself introduced new terms for kingship into England, such as ‘your highness’ (echoed here perhaps in ‘his high worthinesse’). At his deposition he was criticized for claiming ‘not human but divine honours’. This has been seen to draw on French monarchical style, but like the French regime itself, it looked back to imperial Rome.52 In all these contexts, Gower’s depiction of Richard’s curiosity for artistic novelty, ‘som newe thing’, restating and retroactively explaining the narrator’s initial promise to offer ‘of newe som matiere’, echoes the opening words of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ‘In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora’ (‘the mind turns to tell of forms changed into new bodies’). Both slyly endorse the novel kinds of Ovidianism that Gower had already begun carrying out, as well as setting the stage for others. These possibilities are set stirring by transplanting the scheme of the deadly sins into the structure of a lover’s confession, and further destabilized and made a means of exploration by making even that pose explicitly ‘fictional’, subject to the final, consummately Ovidian transformation of the narrator Amans (‘the lover’) visibly into the withered features of old John Gower.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Such vivid poetic effects are not simply veils for predictable Christian doctrine but, more boldly, married throughout the Confessio to specific themes and ideas that are also based on Ovidianism. It is this intellectual Ovidianism that shows the depth of innovation in this part of Gower’s career. The first book of the Confessio opens with Latin verses claiming that ‘natured love subdues the world of nature to its laws’ (‘Naturatus amor nature legibus orbem | Subdit’), and when we recall the ‘vulgate’ gloss on Ovid used in the Vox clamantis on ‘natura naturata’, this is a clear sign that not only Ovid’s text but also the glosses on it, which Gower evidently closely consulted in describing the rebels’ ‘denaturing’ of the world, continued to inform Gower’s new venture. As Winthrop Wetherbee points out, the idea of ‘natured love’, however, rather than ‘natured nature’, is, as often in Gower’s reuses of Ovidiana, highly original.53 Such love may be an ordered and ordering force, or it may be creaturely love: a principle of further unravelling and chaos. This is only the beginning of how Ovid in tandem with Ovidiana performs a kind of heuristic function in the Confessio. Conrad Mainzer noted Gower’s use of Bersuire for several of Gower’s Latin glosses in the Confessio, but the practice extends much further than Mainzer suggests.54 Bersuire treats only selected tales, but diction and narrative details show that in almost every case when Gower uses one of those, he consults Bersuire’s summaries, even when he does not follow Bersuire’s moralizations. The effect is not to narrow the stories but open them further. This constant consultation is of interest for several reasons. For one thing, it should lead us to consider Bersuire’s prose work in its own right, its contemporary voice of moral satire, allegory, and even character development a model for other medieval writers. Gower’s regular use of Bersuire allows us to see in the Confessio Gower’s continued ties to the Latin satirical-homiletic tradition that his other writing more directly represents. Moreover, the signs of Gower’s continual consultation of Bersuire allow us to consider Gower’s process of composition of the Confessio in a new way. Where Gower makes a change or error, that is reflected both in Gower’s Latin gloss and in his English verse. Although critics have usually seen the Latin glosses and the English verse as occupying separate interpretative realms,55 sometimes even from widely separated moments of composition,56 those layers of the Confessio may reveal Gower’s simultaneous literary production. Both verse and gloss are responses to the range of contemporary digests of Ovid as well as a close reading of the Ovidian poetry itself. A small example is the tale of Leucothoë, raped by Phoebus Apollo (the sun) whom Venus smote with lust in revenge for Phoebus’ disclosure of Venus’ own adultery with Mars (CA 5.6713–83). Meant to illustrate avarice—in the ‘amorous’ register that most of Gower’s sins and virtues represent in the Confessio—Gower’s English presentation shows a small but clear variation or error: the flower into which Leucothoë is transformed, after she is buried alive by her father once he has been told about her unwilling intercourse with Phoebus, is altered in Gower’s account from Ovid’s

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Gower’s Ovids frankincense, tus, into ‘a flour was named golde | Which stant governed of the Sonne’ (5.6780–1). Gower’s Latin sidebar summary on the story calls this the ‘flower they call the “sun-follower”’, that is, the sunflower (‘florem, quem Solsequium vocant’). But in Ovid, the sunflower is the form into which the gods changed a jilted lover of Phoebus’, Clytie, who told Leucothoë’s father about Leucothoë’s rape. Clytie is not mentioned by Gower. Ovid’s Clytie, finding Phoebus still uninterested in her after Leucothoë’s death, pines away in longing for Phoebus; the gods’ transformation of Clytie into the flower that ‘turns ever towards the sun’ (Met. 4.270) is an irony lost in Gower’s conflation of the two flowers. In Gower, this becomes Leucothoë’s fate. Perhaps Gower conflated the flowers because he thought Leucothoë’s change into the sunflower more aptly demonstrated his moral of this story. Phoebus’ use of ‘Stelthe’ in avariciousness is confirmed by how fully he has stolen the heart of Leucothoë. Whereas his Latin gloss says that ‘they call the flower the sun-follower’ (solsequium), the English verse says that the ‘flour was named golde, | Which stant governed of the Sonne’, emphasizing the avarice of Phoebus seeking Leucothoë’s ‘tresor’, her virginity. But where did he find it ‘named golde’, so apt for this moral? The answer lies in the glossaries and medicinals. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, solsequium is regularly defined not only as the sunflower but also as the ‘marygoldye’.57 The English verse was developed from the same Latin nexus as the Latin gloss, both elaborating a word not in Ovid. And whence that word? Both Gower’s English and Latin here derive from Bersuire’s moralizing, which includes the phrase (applied correctly, to Clytie’s transformation), ‘Vnde prae dolore contabescens atque deficiens in florem qui heliotropium vel solsequium dicitur’ (‘wherefore for sorrow pining away and dying [she turns] into the flower that is called the “heliotrope” or “sun-follower”’).58 So too, where Ovid mentions Leucothoë’s ‘pater Orchamus’ (Met. 4.212), Bersuire describes her as ‘Leucotho orchami et eurimenes filia’ (p. 78); Gower introduces her as ‘Leuchotoe Orchami filia’ (CA. 5.6720 gloss). In observing the relation of the source texts as well as the relation of Gower’s own two forms for presenting the story—Latin prose and English poetry—it is not surprising that, to write a moralizing Latin gloss, Gower used Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus. Yet the fact that the English version of the story conveys both a fainter imprint of Bersuire’s word solsequium, and the error that the gloss makes in conflating the two flowers, strongly suggests that the gloss, deriving more immediately from Bersuire, was written at the same time as or even before the English version of the story. Can Gower’s English Ovid be, in part, expanding what his Latin takes from Bersuire?59 If Gower wrote the Confessio and its glosses at the same time, or even some stretches from the outside in, from moralizing gloss to the English ‘thing itself ’, this shows again how closely tied to the medieval Latin ‘satirical’ and homiletic tradition his compositional practice remained. But it also shows how productive that

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature tradition was for him both poetically and intellectually, allowing Gower to unleash both an affective and philosophical potency in his recastings of Ovid that we might not have assumed the ‘moralizing’ late medieval Ovidiana in combination with renewed attention directly to Ovid would spark. The very vividness of Gower’s English redoings of Ovid supports the impression that his Englishing of Ovid was the later stage of his composition, the signs of his more independent poetic blooming. The tale of Actaeon, changed into a stag to be killed by his own hounds after he has gazed upon Diana naked in the woods, can be seen to have developed this way. Meant to illustrate a species of amorous pride by the sin of ‘mislooking’, the Latin gloss starts as often by taking phrases from Bersuire (not noted by Mainzer): Gower introduces Actaeon as ‘Cadmi Regis Thebarum nepos, dum in quadam Foresta venacionis causa spaciaretur . . .’ (‘the nephew of King Cadmus of Thebes, while he was walking in a certain forest for the sake of hunting . . .’). Ovid does not use ‘spatior’ (walk), but Bersuire does: ‘Ouidius dicit quod Acteon fuit quidam nobilis venator de genere regis Agenoris qui dum quadam fessus venatione spaciaretur in sylua . . .’ (‘Ovid says that Actaeon was a certain noble hunter from the lineage of King Agenor who, while exhausted by hunting walked in a certain woods . . .’, p. 64). Gower’s English presentation then elaborates Actaeon as a medieval nobleman taking his pleasure in hunting, in a register that has no parallel in Ovid but is close to Bersuire’s ‘nobilis venator’ (another non-Ovidian phrase): So bifell upon a tide On his hunting as he cam ride, In a Forest al one he was: He syh upon the grene gras The faire freisshe floures springe, He herde among the leves singe The Throstle with the nyhtingale . . .

[time] [as he went riding] [all alone] [saw] [leaves] (CA 1.333–55)

If Bersuire was the trigger for the image of Actaeon as a contemporary nobleman hunting in the forest, then Gower has redacted Ovid by way of Bersuire in a way that is in harmony with the medieval scholar, but led from there to find new inspiration in the ancient poet. Bersuire’s utility for this imaginative kindling should not be wholly surprising. For Bersuire is not dryly reductive, in spite of his work’s title, Reductorium morale. Bersuire’s reading of Ovid’s tales in the Metamorphoses brings out ‘satire’ in the medieval sense of a criticism of various estates, whereby, for instance, the goddess Diana bathing naked in the forest can be understood to represent ‘many fine ladies who are accustomed to bathe in pleasures in secret, with their servants protecting them, not wanting to have their nakedness exposed: that is, the truth to be known’. Modern

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Gower’s Ovids explanations for late medieval elaborations of literary ‘character’ have shown little interest in such moral, allegorical traditions, but Gower’s heavy uses of these resources should challenge this. Depictions of the subtle emergence of sin, keyed to the usual social estates, often feature in Bersuire’s allegorical moralizations of Ovid, though always at the oblique angle of allegorical side-texts. For example, having established an allegorical contemporary application of Ovid’s tale of Pygmalion, as representing a preacher ‘who knows how to sculpt and paint the soul with improvements and virtues’ and the ivory statue he falls in love with as ‘a holy nun, who is called ivory since she is called chaste, cold, heavy, and honorable’, Bersuire goes on to describe how, just as for Ovid’s Pygmalion the statue (by Venus’ miracle) is brought to life and erotic fulfilment, so a preacher can unintentionally fall in love with an honourably ‘cold’ nun whom he takes as his special disciple, and with all good intentions lead them both into carnal sin: Some good Pygmalion, that is, a certain good religious man, promises to desire neither woman nor carnal embraces, and such a one converts himself to making ivory images, that is, to informing benign holy nuns and matrons in chastity and sanctity, and to sculpting them in spiritual mores. And it happens that sometimes he chooses for himself a certain one out of all the others whom he calls ‘sister’ or ‘daughter’, and he associates with and touches her in chaste spirit and love. But for sure it happens in the end that Venus, goddess of lust, that is of carnal concupiscence, intrudes herself and converts the dead image into a living one, and makes the chaste woman feel carnal prickling and changes her from a good woman to a foolish one. For this preacher Pygmalion sought this from Venus, and he desired this transformation. Thus, therefore, when they return to conversation in the usual fashion, he finds that they are both at once transformed, such that she who had been ivory is made flesh, and he who spurned women began to desire the filth of the flesh. These carnal ones therefore mutually possess each other, and sometimes procreate sons.60

As Bersuire unfolds realistic psychology in his allegorical side-texts, so Gower finds opportunities for that in Ovid’s own text, as if one bold appropriation of Ovid inspired another. For Bersuire, the typical estates of nobility and clergy are the obvious organizing categories of his social satire; the sins of the clergy at one point, the sins of the wealthy seculars at another. But for Gower, that constraint disappears. Gower allows the Ovidian figures to be ‘archetypes’ of new kinds of social and psychological patterns, sometimes simply their own. Thus Gower’s retelling of Ovid’s Thisbe’s brief lament becomes an address to Venus and Cupid, reflecting on the pointlessness of sexual passion at once stirred and frustrated by forces beyond rational control. The declamation unfolds her psychological steps in a way like Bersuire’s depiction of growing sin: This Piramus, which hiere I se   [here  see] Bledende, what hath he deserved?    [bleeding]

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature For he youre heste hath kept and served, And was yong and I bothe also: Helas, why do ye with ous so? Ye sette oure herte bothe afyre, And maden ous such thing desire Wherof that we no skile cowthe.

[request] [alas  us] [both our hearts afire] [made us desire such a thing] [plan  knew how to achieve] (CA 3.1468–75)

In this Senecan controversia, reflecting on such helplessness in the face of passion and events leads Thisbe to affirm that the only control she retains is suicide. Yet she slips into the act itself only after she becomes again emotionally overwhelmed, a pawn of passion to the end: Now sche wepte and nou sche kiste, Til ate laste, er sche it wiste, So gret a sorwe is to hire falle, Which overgoth here wittes alle, As sche which mihte it noght asterte, The swerdes point ayein here herte Sche sette, and fell doun therupon, Wherof that sche was ded anon . . .

[before she knew it] [overwhelms] [so that she  not dispel it] [against] (CA 3.1485–92)

Gower’s verse subtly follows Thisbe’s swelling grief, and the consequent wavering then submersion of reason, which leads inexorably to the sins of despair and suicide. Gower may here have used the Ovide moralisé, which like his version puts Thisbe in a tree rather than Ovid’s cave, or a version by Matthew of Vendôme, which unlike Ovid but like Gower has Thisbe find Pyramus already dead, thus supplying the opportunity for her dramatic lament. Or he may have drawn on a still wider range of medieval reinterpretations and re-compositions of this story, whose elaboration seems to have been a regular school exercise at least at an earlier date and on the Continent.61 Elsewhere Gower turned to the Ovide moralisé to adjust plot details that might heighten psychological immediacy and realism. Telling the story of Minos, for instance, who goes to war with the Athenians because they killed his son Androgeus, Gower takes from the Ovide moralisé the story of Androgeus traveling to Athens for an education (OM 7.2246–63). In the Ovide moralisé, the Athenians kill Androgeus because they become jealous of his learning and other successes; in Gower, however, Minos’ son dies because he becomes too proud to continue pursuing his studies among them: ‘Such pride he tok in his corage, | that he foryeten hath the Scoles’ (CA 5.5238–9). Pride is the sin under which Gower categorizes the story, and it thereby becomes a key to how he has briefly but subtly sketched the psychological and dramatic reasons for what happens. Just as Bersuire allegorizing Ovid can add a para-narrative of a preacher’s and nun’s falling in love, so Gower develops finely

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Gower’s Ovids drawn para-narratives of Ovid’s own characters. In this way Gower is led by Bersuire to participate more deeply in the literal level of Ovid’s poetry.62 Perhaps the fullest instance of such a para-narrative emerging in the Confessio is Gower’s creation out of whole cloth of a long prayer by Cephalus, as he lies with Aurora, begging Phoebus the sun to delay (4.3187–252). The genre of aubade or ‘dawn song’, of lovers abed wishing for the day not to come, is commonplace; Gower, however, produces an exquisite example from a single couplet in the Amores (I.13.39–40), itself a mere simile amid Ovid’s own aubade: at si, quem mavis, Cephalum conplexa teneres, clamares: ‘lente currite, noctis equi!’ (But if you (Aurora) had your favoured Cephalus in your embrace, you would cry: ‘Run slowly, steeds of night!’)63

Gower’s expansion, imagining just how Cephalus would pray for the sun to come slowly when he is in bed with Aurora, is original even down to its translation of the Ovidian core: . . . that the like forto stiere Thi fyri Carte, and so ordeigne, That thou thi swifte hors restreigne Lowe under Erthe in Ocident, That thei towardes Orient Be Cercle go the longe weie.

[(I pray) that it might please you to steer] [fiery chariot  arrange things] [might restrain] [in the west] [so that they  east] [circling (the earth)  way] (CA 4.3232–37)

As all these instances suggest, Gower uses Bersuire’s and the Ovide moralisé’s focuses precisely not to dismiss sinful Ovidian figures, but to create new ethical, psychic, and social spaces for them. Gower is notoriously forgiving of the incest of Canace, who, instead of representing ‘unlawful love’ (as in the common accessus for her narrative), is in Gower the victim of another’s sin, wrath, leading to her own suicide, thus allowing her to remain almost uncategorized except by her own social and psychic torment, all the more archetypally memorable (as mockingly noted by Chaucer’s Man of Law, Prologue, 77–8). She becomes in Gower (and in Chaucer’s mocking confirmation of Gower’s unusual interest) her own ‘type’, almost in the Freudian uses of Ovid. This achievement did not emerge full-born in Gower’s poetry. The tendency of Gower’s Ovidian figures in the Confessio to become types unto themselves means that their points of view, their stages of surrender to tragedy and sin, matter in a way that the dehumanizing use of Ovidianism to interpret the 1381 rebellion cannot allow. The Ovid of the Vox, however, shares with the Ovid of the Confessio a power to redefine the very terms of social and psychic order: a fundamental innovation in the philosophical poet’s role, even a general shift in intellectual and literary history. But the differences between those Ovids best show the force of linked intellectual

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature and  poetic innovation that Gower generated during his non-humanist, coyly non-scholarly, nova aetas ovidiana.

An End to Conversations with Antiquity? In such forms, Gower’s handlings of Ovid were both predicated on dialogue, a rhetorical and political principle that, paradoxically, he most fully enacted under the regime and command of the notoriously despotic Richard II. The commitment to social and spiritual redefinition instanced in Gower’s Ovids undoubtedly helps explain his willingness to be used for blunter Lancastrian political propaganda, after the ‘revolution’ of 1399 deposed Richard and installed as king the very patron, Henry of Derby, whose favours Gower had long sought. Yet after 1399, Gower turned his scholarly and literary talents to another way of redefining the present via the past: as a redemption of the more recent sins of England.64 This new emphasis was far from Ovid’s never wholly veiled satire against Augustan Rome, and perhaps for that reason among others, Gower’s late poetry is almost denuded of Ovidian or any classical allusion. With the concerted effort to declare a decisive political outcome, the very spirit of moral and historical dialogue seems swept away in a politically tense moment, and with it Gower’s inclinations for interacting with Ovid and his modern commentators. Not least of those was Gower’s associate Chaucer, who died just as the new regime began. Increasingly blind, thus deprived of his ability to browse big books, politically favoured but inhabiting a world where no one was politically secure, Gower turned away from Ovid and Ovidians in all his writing and towards a simpler, sententious verse, in Latin and English (‘In Praise of Peace’). In such late works, he once recalls Augustan Rome: ‘As the public criers did of old for Augustus in Rome, | Let a joyful England sing your deeds in one voice.’65 But drawing that parallel did not now lead him to offer himself as alter Evander or, still more dangerous, alter Naso, who had, after all, been exiled for ‘error’ by that very Augustus. Suddenly there were obstacles and risks on every side of the conversations he had been having. One manuscript, however, shows that Gower did not turn entirely away from antiquity. Very soon after Henry IV’s accession, Gower composed a brief new dedication to the king framing a collection of fifty-one French balades, preserved only there though probably written across decades. These constitute at several points a valediction of Gower’s lifetime of classicizing. Balade 20, addressed to Fortune, for instance, includes a return to ancient Troy: Celle infortune dont Palamedes Chaoit, fist tan q’Agamenon chosi Fuist a l’empire: auci Diomedes,

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Gower’s Ovids Par ceo qe Troilus estoit guerpi, De ses amours la fortune ad saisi, Du fille au Calcas mensna sa leesce: Mais endroit mil la fortune est failli, Ma dolour monte et ma joie descresce. (20.17–24) (That misfortune that Palamedes endured was so that Agamemnon might be chosen emperor; Diomedes too, on whose account Troilus was deserted—Fortune had control of his love affair—was cause of joy for the daughter of Calchas [Criseyde]. But in my case, fortune has failed me; my sadness mounts and my joy falls.)66

As the recollection of Troilus and Criseyde suggests, Gower was likely in part paying respects to Chaucer’s developments of an English courtly fashion for classicizing. But other classical gestures in the Balades were bolder. Gower, for example, again took imitation but adaptation of Ovid further than Chaucer had. In Balade 43, Gower speaks in the voice of the woman who is wooed through the Balades, to declare that a man he once loved is more treacherous than any of the other men from the Heroides who have deceived women. This makes his own poem a new ‘letter’ by a jilted woman to be added to Ovid’s collection: Plus tricherous qe Jason a Medée, A Deianire ou q’Ercules estoit, Plus q’Eneas, q’avoit Dido lessée, Plus qe Theseus, q’Adraigne amoit, Ou Demephon, quant Phillis oublioit, Je trieus, helas, q’amer jadis soloie: Dont chanterai desore en mon endroit, C’est ma dolour, qe fuist ançois ma joie. (43.1–8) (More treacherous than Jason was to Medea, or Hercules to Deianira, more than Aeneas, who left Dido, more than Theseus, who loved Ariadne, or Demophon, when he forgot Phillis, do I find him, alas, whom I was wont to love. Thus henceforth for my part I shall sing: ‘That which once was my joy is now my grief ’.)

Metamorphoses in authorial gender are rare for Gower. Once again, Gower’s response to Ovid combines bold originality with scholarly exactness. Merely making reference to Ovid’s tales, he adopted and extended Ovid’s strategy of the Heroides. The unique instance of Gower using a woman’s voice for an entire poem shows perhaps the last space in which he might allow debate with antiquity to foster radical experimentation. Emerging a winner in the largest political transformation of his lifetime, a transformation Gower may have increasingly sought during Richard’s reign and certainly one he retrospectively cast as a supreme moral victory, mostly put an end to such

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature heuristic dialogues with antiquity. But the dialogue itself was fostered by Gower’s moral books—those large volumes that he constantly opened and checked as he wrote the bulk of his poetry, until age, political circumstances, blindness, and the absence of his poetic rival and friend Chaucer left him mostly silent on antiquity. With his late triumphalist political poetry, Gower closed his literary career with as few signs of classicizing as when he had opened it. But whenever the individual balades were written, and whether they were actually given to the new king (as now seems doubtful), Gower’s planned presentation of them to King Henry suggests he yet harboured hopes to bring back to mind that previous phase. In 1402 Henry’s son Humfrey was 12 years old, the age when Montaigne and Salutati first felt their passions for ancient poetry stir. Humfrey’s tutor was Henry Scogan, Chaucer’s old friend, who around 1407, a year before Gower’s death, sent to Humfrey and his three brothers a ‘moral balade’ quoting within it one of Chaucer’s lyrics in its entirety. Scogan’s ‘Moral Balade’ closes by praising as models Tullius Hostilius, the charitable Roman king, and Julius Caesar, and warns against following Nero.67 The antique flame was already passing to new generations and new purposes.

Notes 1   Res familiares, 24.3, trans. Aldo Bernardo: Francesco Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, 3 vols (New York, 2005). 2   Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS Latin 8537; see A. C. de la Mare, ‘Manuscripts Given to the University of Oxford by Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester’, Bodleian Library Record 13 (1988), 32–4; Duke Humfrey’s Library and the Divinity School, 1488–1988: An Exhibition at the Bodleian Library, June–August 1988 (Oxford, 1988), frontispiece and plate 26. For manuscripts of Gower’s works, see Derek Pearsall, ‘The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Works’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siân Echard (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 73–97, esp. p. 80. 3   James G. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St. Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle (Oxford, 2004). For the translations of Plato (now Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 243), not mentioned by Clark among the books given to Duke Humfrey by Whethamstede (cf. p. 97), see de la Mare, ‘Manuscripts Given to the University of Oxford’, pp. 35–40. 4   Aeneid 4.173; Vox clamantis [VC] 1.1231; for the stories of Virgil’s brass knight and mirror, see Mirour de l’omme [MO], lines 14725–48, Confessio amantis [CA] 5.2031–224; for Virgil as an old lover, CA 8.2714–17. Except where noted quotations from Gower are from The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols (Oxford, 1899–1902). Translations of Gower’s longer Latin works are based on The Major Latin Works of John Gower, trans. Eric W. Stockton (Seattle, 1962); translations of the shorter Latin works are based on John Gower: The Minor Latin Works with In Praise of Peace, ed. and trans. R. F. Yeager (ed. Michael Livingstone) (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2005). Translations of the MO are from John Gower: Mirour de l’omme, trans. William Burton Wilson, rev. Nancy Wilson Van Baak (East Lansing, Mich., 1992). David

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Gower’s Ovids Carlson suggests that Virgil’s passage ‘it Fama per urbes’ informs three other verses in Gower, but by concept not wording: see ‘The Parliamentary Source of Gower’s Cronica tripertita and Incommensurable Styles’, in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, eds Elisabeth Dutton with John Hines and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 98–111 (at p. 109). For the long-standing tradition of schoolboy interest in this book of the Aeneid, see Augustine, Confessiones, 1.13. Carlson and A. G. Rigg suggest that Aeneid 6.727 is used in another line in VC 1.1403, but only a few words match: see their edition and translation, John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events: The Visio Angliae (1381) and Cronica tripertita (1400) (Toronto, 2011). The likeliest place for Virgil to appear, Gower’s account of Dido (CA 4.77–146, under ‘tardiness in love’), seems based entirely on Ovid’s Heroides 7; surprisingly, there are no signs that this passage uses The Aeneid, much less Servius’ commentary (cf. The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years, eds Jan M. Ziolkowski and Michael C. J. Putnam (New Haven, 2008), p. 542). For this reason among others, I doubt Gower himself wrote the laudatory verses beginning ‘Aeneidos, Bucolis’, composed ‘in memoriam Johannis Gower’, which compare Gower’s three major poems to the three Virgil wrote (see Yeager, Minor Latin Works, pp. 84–5). Arguing for the aptness of the parallel to Virgil, however, is Robert R. Edwards, ‘Gower’s Second Cursus’, in John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception, eds Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 141–52. 5   See Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca, NY, 1984); K. P. Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality (Oxford, 2011). Citations of Chaucer are to The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987). 6   For Macaulay’s comment on Gower’s single direct use of Statius’ Thebaid rather than the many other possible sources, see Complete Works, vol. 2, p. 474. No other instances of his use of the Thebaid have been suggested. Gower more likely used Statius’ short Achilleid, a common school text, for his story of Achilles, but even that use is debatable, since a lost French version may have circulated: see George Hamilton, ‘Gower’s Use of the Enlarged Roman de Troie’, PMLA 20 (1905), 179–96. For paraphrases of passages from De officiis see MO 3361 (De off. 3.21), 9614 (De off. 1.123), 15,935 (De off. 1.43), 15,997 (De off. 1.21), 22,982 (De off. 1.68, partly). For contrastingly vague uses of Cicero’s name (in both cases ‘Tullius’ or ‘Tulles’) as a promoter of ‘rhetorique’, see MO 3505, 8677, 14,674. 7   ‘De saint jerom bon essampler | Porrons, qant il estudier | Voloit en la philosopie | Du Tulle pour le beau parler; | Mais dieus l’en fesoit chastier, | Pour ce que vain fuist sa clergie’; MO 14,671–6. For Jerome, see letter 22, in Select Letters, ed. and trans. F. A. Wright (1933), pp. 126–7. 8   C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford, 1936, 1972), p. 202; Christopher Ricks, ‘Metamorphosis in Other Words’, in Gower’s Confessio amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A. J. Minnis (Woodbridge, 1983), pp. 25–49. 9   See J. B. Dwyer, ‘Gower’s Mirour and its French Sources: A Reexamination of Evidence’, Studies in Philology 48 (1951), 482–505, esp. pp. 491–3, and see in this chapter n. 61. For the Ovidiana: Ovide moralisé, poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle, ed. C. de Boer, 5 vols (Amsterdam, 1915–38), cited by book and line number; an early printed version of Ovid

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature includes Bersuire’s final revision, available in Ovidius moralizatus, ed. J. Engels (Reductorium morale liber XV, cap. ii–xv) (Utrecht, 1962), cited by page number from this edition. 10  See especially Conrad Mainzer, ‘John Gower’s Use of the Mediaeval Ovid in the ‘Confessio amantis’, Medium Ævum 41 (1972), 215–29; A. J. Minnis, ‘John Gower, Sapiens in Ethics and Politics’, Medium Ævum 49 (1980), 207–29, repr. in Gowers Confessio Amantis: A Critical Anthology, ed. Peter Nicholson (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 158–80 (Heroides in the Confessio amantis); Bruce Harbert, ‘Lessons from the Great Clerk: Ovid and John Gower’, in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 83–98; R. F. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Woodbridge, 1990), esp. pp. 53–60; Andrew Galloway, ‘Gower in his Most Learned Role and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381’, Mediaevalia 16 (1993 for 1990), 329–47; James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio amantis (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 134–66 (Amores in the Confessio amantis); Winthrop Wetherbee, ‘Classical and Boethian Tradition in the Confessio amantis’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. Echard, pp. 181–96, reprising some earlier essays; and ‘Gower Teaching Ovid and the Classics’, in Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager and Brian W. Gastle (New York, 2011), pp. 172–9; Yoshiko Kobayashi, ‘The Voice of an Exile: From Ovidian Lament to Prophecy in Book 1 of John Gower’s Vox clamantis’, in Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee, eds Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager (Toronto, 2009), pp. 339–62; T. Matthew N. McCabe, Gower’s Vulgar Tongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the Confessio amantis (Woodbridge, 2011); Maura Nolan, ‘The Poetics of Catastrophe’, in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature, eds Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 113–33; Kathryn L. McKinley, ‘Gower and Chaucer: Readings of Ovid in Late Medieval England’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 197–230; Annika Farber, ‘Genius and the Practice of Ethical Reading’, ES, Revista de filología inglesa 33 (2012), 137–53; Matthew W. Irvin, The Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae in the Confessio amantis (Woodbridge, 2014). Gower’s great editor G. C. Macaulay belongs in any roll-call of honour for Gower scholarship, but his dismissive comments on Gower’s uses of Ovid in the Vox are notorious (see n. 39). 11  Richard L. Hoffman, Ovid and the Canterbury Tales (Philadelphia, 1966); John Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven, 1979). 12   An influential example of this ‘unifying’ view is John Hurt Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (1965). 13  Fisher, John Gower, pp. x, 204–302. 14   I propose some connections in ‘Ovid in Chaucer and Gower’, in A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, eds John Miller and Carole Newlands (Chichester, 2014), pp. 187–201. 15  Irvin, Poetic Voices of John Gower, p. 31, suggests one ‘similarity’ between one phrase in Gower, ‘I will sing another song’, and a passage in Ovid’s Tristia: ‘Unhurt and happy with themes of happiness and youth I played (yet now I regret that I composed that verse); since

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Gower’s Ovids I have fallen I act as herald of my sudden fall’ (Tristia 1.5.7–10), but the parallel seems general. Translations of Ovid are throughout from the Loeb editions, occasionally modified. 16   Roger A. Ladd, Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature (New York, 2010), pp. 49–75. 17   Dwyer, ‘Gower’s Mirour’. For a recent edition of the Somme, see La Somme le roi par Frère Laurent, eds Édith Brayer and Anne-Françoise Leurquin-Labie (Paris and Abbeville, 2008). 18   ‘Puis vent Envye on son degré | Q’estoit dessur un chien monté | Et sur son destre poign portoit | Un espervier q’estoit mué: | La face ot moult descolouré | Et pale des mals qe pensoit, | Et son manteil don’t s’afffoubloit | Du purpre au droit devis estoit | Ove cuers ardans bien enbroudé, | Et entre d’eux, qui bien seoit, | Du serpent langues y avoit | Par tout menuement poudré’ (865–76). 19   See n. 6. 20  Text and translation from Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 3rd edn rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1977; repr. 1994); some translations from this work are adjusted for clarity. 21   MO 3025–156. Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas, MS 34 (no fol.), shows a manicule here pointing to a gloss defining Invidia as ‘egritudo animi ex felicitate alterius proveniens, naturaliter nocens invidenti’ (‘anguish of the soul proceeding from the good fortune of another, and naturally hurting the one who envies’). A fifteenth-century reader has prominently marked ‘De Invidia’ at the top of the leaf. For a scan of the manuscript see . 22   E.g. the late fourteenth-century copy in Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 115, made by the monk Adam Stockton at Fountains Abbey and including the satire against marriage Valerius ad Rufinum and a treatise by Wycliff (featuring Stockton’s changed colophon epithet on Wyclif, from ‘venerabilis doctor’ to ‘execrabilis seductor’); or a second copy made by Stockton, now in London, British Library, Additional MS 62132 A; or the late fourteenth-century copy in London, British Library, Royal MS 15 C XVI, which also contains Alan of Lille’s De planctu naturae, Richard of Bury’s Philobiblon, and Guido della Colonne’s Historia de excidio Troiae, the first and third of which Gower certainly knew. 23   As noted in Accessus Ovidiani, ed. Gustavus Przychocki (Krakow, 1911), p. 8. 24   See Wetherbee, ‘Gower Teaching Ovid and the Classics’. 25  From Accessus ad auctores, Bernard d’Utrecht, Conrad d’Hirsau, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden, 1970), p. 30; translation from Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c.1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition, rev. edn, eds A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, with David Wallace (Oxford, 1991), p. 21. See further Minnis, ‘John Gower, Sapiens in Ethics and Politics’. 26   The ‘Vulgate’ Commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Creation Story and the Story of  Orpheus, ed. Frank T. Coulson, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts 20 (Toronto, 1991), e.g. pp. 39–41. 27   Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (New York, 1960); John Taylor, The ‘Universal Chronicle’ of Ranulf Higden (Oxford, 1966). For late medieval versions of the rape of Lucretia, including Chaucer’s likely use of Higden, see Andrew Galloway,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Lucrece and the Critique of Ideology in Fourteenth-Century England’, ELH 60 (1993), 813–32, esp. p. 832 n. 47. 28   Lynn Arner, Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace After 1381 (University Park, Pa, 2013), pp. 46–72. See also Robert Black: ‘like a fashion, [humanism] succeeded by giving its adherents a sense of superiority’: ‘Humanism’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 7, c.1415–c.1500, ed. Christopher Allmand (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 243–77 (at p. 273). 29   Statuta antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis, Strickland Gibson (Oxford, 1931), p. 173. 30   ‘De l’institution des enfants’, Essais 1,26; Montaigne: Œuvres complètes, ed. Robert Barral (Paris, 1967), p. 84. 31   See E. H. Alton and D. E. W. Wormell, ‘Ovid in the Mediaeval Schoolroom’, Hermathena 94 (1960), 21–38, and Hermathena 95 (1961), 67–82. 32   ‘Multu quidem sibi debeo, quem habui, cum primum hoc studio in fine mee adolescentie quasi divinitus excandui et accensus sum, veluti ianuam et doctorem. Etenim nullo monitore previo nullumque penitus audiens a memet ipso cunctos poetas legi et, sicut a deo datum est, intellexi, postquam noster Sulmonensis michi venit in manus’: Colucii salutati de laboribus Herculis, ed. B. L. Ullman (Zurich, 1947), III.11, p. 215. 33   Res familiares, 22.2; trans. Bernardo, 3, 214. 34   See Galloway, ‘Gower in his Most Learned Role’. 35   Carlson and Rigg, Visio Angliae (1381) and Cronica tripertita (1400), pp. 406–10. 36   I would not therefore go as far as Nolan’s otherwise convincing reading of the parallels between the poet and the rebels, ‘Poetics of Catastrophe’, when she states that all the transplanted Ovidian passages would convey ‘the sensory experiences realized by the Metamorphoses’ (p. 124). 37  Text and translation from Fasti, trans. James G. Frazer, 2nd edn rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); translation slightly modernized. 38   Irvin also notes that both works invoke Carmentis as a ‘muse’, and thus a ‘bridging figure’ between Gower’s two works (Poetic Voices of John Gower, p. 43); see also Kobayashi, ‘Voice of an Exile’, p. 352, and Nolan, ‘Poetics of Catastrophe’, pp. 121–2, who sees a Boethian moment. None of these focuses on Evander’s role of a nation’s founder. 39  Macaulay, Complete Works of John Gower, 1, xxxii. For the comparison with cento, see R.  F.  Yeager, ‘Did Gower write Cento?’, in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1989), pp. 113–32; elaborated in Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic, pp. 53–60. Further enquiry into cento in late medieval schoolrooms, and even with vernacular poetry, appears in Wendy Scase, ‘Latin Composition Lessons, Piers Plowman, and the Piers Plowman Tradition’, in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, eds Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (Columbus, Oh., 2013), pp. 34–53. 40   Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 208–14; David Carlson, ‘Gower’s Beast Allegories in the 1391 Visio Anglie’, Philological Quarterly 87 (2008), 257–75. 41  Coulson, ‘Vulgate’ Commentary, pp. 38–9 (trans. mine).

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Gower’s Ovids 42   Thomas Usk: Testament of Love, ed. Gary W. Shawver (Toronto, 2002), 1.5.112; p. 231. For Usk’s London career, see Andrew Galloway, ‘The Account-Book and the Treasure: Gilbert Maghfeld’s Textual Economy and the Poetics of Mercantile Accounting in Ricardian Literature’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011), 65–124 (at pp. 114–23). 43  David Bowsher, Tony Dyson, Nick Holder, and Isca Howell, The London Guildhall: An Archaeological History of a Neighbourhood from Early Medieval to Modern Times, 2 parts (2007), 2, 363. 44   The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part II: Secular Poems, ed. Henry MacCracken, EETS 192 (1934; repr. Oxford, 1961), 682–91. For the claim that Lydgate possesses some classical interests and learning, otherwise dismissed as mostly gained via Chaucer, see Andrew Galloway, ‘John Lydgate and the Origins of Vernacular Humanism’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107 (2008), 445–71. 45   The dedication to Arundel is in Macaulay, Complete Works, 4, 1–2. 46   John Hines, Nathalie Cohen, and Simon Roffey, ‘Iohannes gower, Armiger, Poeta: Records and Memorials of his Life and Death’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. Echard, pp. 23–42. 47   Clark, ‘Ovid in the Monasteries’, pp. 187–8; note the copies of Bersuire made by the monk Adam Stockton (n. 22). On Bersuire in the Renaissance, see Ann Moss, Latin Commentaries on Ovid from the Renaissance (Signal Mountain, Tenn., 1998), pp. 61–8. Some remarks by Moss (e.g. on the Council of Trent) should be used with caution. 48   M. B. Parkes, ‘Patterns of Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower’, in New Science Out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A. I. Doyle, eds R. Beadle and A. J. Piper (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 81–121. 49   See e.g. Les Translations d’Ovide au moyen âge, Textes, Études, Congrès 26, eds An Faems, Viginie Minet-Mahy, and Colette van Coolput-Storms (Louvain-la-neuve, 2011). 50   Viscount Dillon and W. S. St. John Hope, ‘Inventory of the Goods and Chattel belonging to Thomas, Duke of Gloucester . . .’, Archaeological Journal 54 second series 4 (1897), 275–308 (at pp. 300–3). For Bersuire’s Livy see Robert Lucas, ‘Mediaeval French Translations of the Latin Classics to 1500’, Speculum 45 (1970), 225–53 (at pp. 239–40); for books at court, see A. I. Doyle, ‘English Books In and Out of Court from Edward III to Henry VII’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, eds V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (New York, 1983), pp. 163–82. 51   A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066–1422 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 277. 52   Thomas Walsingham’s report on what was said about Sir John Bushy in 1399; see Nigel Saul, ‘Richard II and the Vocabulary of Kingship’, English Historical Review 110 (1995), 854–77. 53   Wetherbee, ‘Classical and Boethian Tradition’. 54   Mainzer, ‘John Gower’s Use of the Mediaeval Ovid’. 55   Derek Pearsall, ‘Gower’s Latin in the Confessio amantis’, in Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 13–25. 56   Wim Lindeboom, ‘Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio amantis’, Viator 40 (2009), 319–48. The evidence in the following discussion shows these conclusions to be untenable.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature   Middle English Dictionary, s.v. mari-gold(e (n.); OED, s.v. marigold (n.), A.1.1.a.  Bersuire, Ovidius moralizatus, p. 78; my trans. 59  I briefly suggest this on other grounds in ‘Gower’s Confessio amantis, the Prick of Conscience, and the History of the Latin Gloss in Early English Literature’, in John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts, ed. Malte Urban (Turnhout, 2009), pp. 39–70. 60  Engels, Ovidius moralizatus, pp. 151–2. My translation. 61   Dwyer, ‘Gower’s Mirour’, pp. 491–3; Matthew of Vendôme, Piramus et Tisbe, in Mathei Vindocinensis opera 2, ed. Franco Munari (Rome, 1982); Robert Glendinning, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe in the Medieval Classroom’, Speculum 61 (1986), 51–78. 62   Compare Farber’s astute observation that Gower pursues ‘ethics’ rather than allegory in his uses of Bersuire and other kinds of Ovidiana (‘Genius and the Practice of Ethical Reading’). 63   Text and translation from Heroides; Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, 2nd edn rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); translation slightly adapted. 64   For Gower’s late pro-Lancastrian writing, see David R. Carlson, John Gower: Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2012). 65   ‘Rex celi Deus’, lines 39–40 (Yeager, Minor Latin Poems, pp. 42–4). 66   Text from John Gower, The French Balades, ed. and trans. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2011). I have recast into prose and otherwise modified Yeager’s translation. Yeager offers good circumstantial evidence for dating the composition of the Balades to 1390–93, with the surviving copy of c.1402 designed simply to present them to the newly crowned Henry IV (French Balades, pp. 51–3). 67   Henry Scogan, ‘Moral Balade’, in The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Selection, ed. Kathleen Forni (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2005), pp. 148–54. For important evidence that the copy containing the Balades remained at Gower’s last residence at St. Mary Overeys, thus was never in fact presented to the king, see Sebastian Sobecki, ‘Ecce patet tensus: The Trentham Manuscript, In Praise of Peace, and John Gower’s Autograph Hand’, Speculum 90 (2015), 925–59. 57 58

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Chapter 22

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW John Lydgate and the Remaking of Classical Epic Robert R. Edwards

John Lydgate (1371–1449), the most prolific poet in the English literary canon and the dominant figure of fifteenth-century English literary culture, is a conscripted, if largely willing, writer of epic.1 In the prologue to Troy Book, his first major poem, Lydgate reports his commission in 1412 from Henry, Prince of Wales to undertake an English version of the Troy story. The commission begins a decade of remaking classical epic through translation, amplification, and recontextualization. During this period, Lydgate produces not just Troy Book (1412–20) but also a companion poem on the Theban story—the Siege of Thebes (1422)—and a prose tract on the Roman civil war, The Serpent of Division (1422). In the 1430s, after his ‘laureate period’ (1422–33) in the minority of Henry VI, Lydgate returns to the epics of Thebes, Troy, and Rome among the numerous de casibus tragedies of his Fall of Princes (1431–8).2 Lydgate’s influence as a writer and reviser of epic extends, however, beyond his compositions. The material presentation of Lydgate’s work frames epic in the layout, paratexts, and bibliographical codes of manuscript and print cultures. The impact of his work among differing communities of readers is visible as well in the ways that English Renaissance authors understand and adapt the heroic narratives of classical antiquity.3 Lydgate’s remaking of epic occurs within an extensive practice of writing. Though a monk of Bury St Edmunds virtually all his life, Lydgate is ‘a thoroughly public writer’.4 While composing Troy Book, he writes occasional and religious verse as well as a Life of Our Lady, the last perhaps inspired by Henry V. The composition of Fall of Princes, undertaken at the behest of Henry’s brother, Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, is interrupted by commissions to write a triumph on Henry VI’s entry into London in 1432 and to compose the Lives of St Edmund and St Fremund (1434–6) and the Lives of St Albon and Amphibalus (1439) for the abbeys of Bury St Edmunds and St Albans,

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature respectively. Unlike John Gower, who retrospectively measures his corpus against Virgil’s poems and the poetic cursus honorum derived from them, Lydgate does not see genre as a structuring principle for his writings.5 Epic is not the endpoint of a progression through lower genres or the culmination of a literary career, as it had been for Latin poets from Ennius onwards.6 Rather, Lydgate’s career is shaped practically by the authorizing power of commissions and ideologically by the political stakes of literary topics for his patrons. His remaking of epic occurs in a medieval literary context significantly different from the canonical sources evoked to lend that context poetic and cultural authority.

Epic Traditions To fashion Lydgate as any kind of epic writer challenges well-established views of him as a poet and of epic as a prestige genre—indeed, of epic as a consummate form of literary expression. Derek Pearsall gives a trenchant formulation of these issues in his remarks on Troy Book. Lydgate’s poem, he says, is ‘a homily first, an encyclopedia second, and an epic nowhere’.7 This appraisal doubtless extends to the other works, for Lydgate’s signature habits of moralizing, digression, and amplification accord only partly with standard descriptions of epic as a long narrative poem about heroic action.8 The defining feature of this description is that epic is a mimetic work with an informing symbolic order. In primary or folk epic, the order is shared and immediate for its original audience, displaced and finally aesthetic for later readers.9 In secondary or literary epic, the symbolic order forecloses the possibility that any other perspective might be imagined or entertained outside the one offered by the poem’s own political formulations and ideological investments.10 Lydgate’s excursions into moral commentary, didacticism, archaeology, and literary tradition tacitly reject the informing power of the symbolic order in epic. Heroic narrative is, for him, not self-sustaining but subject to reflection, deliberation, judgement, and conscious application. Exegesis follows necessarily from mimesis because heroic action operates in a moral, public, and religious sphere that reaches beyond the original conditions of writing and reception. Moreover, the epic tradition that Lydgate seeks to remake is one whose materials and form were always contested. Epic was stabilized into heroic (Homer) and didactic (Hesiod) narrative at the start of the Greek classical period, and it was codified in the curriculum in the Roman Empire during the Second Sophistic (ad 60–230), yet the matter of epic had long been open to debate. The archaic Epic Cycle includes a history of the gods, two instalments of the Theban War, an account of the Trojan War, and the stories of heroes’ returns, ending with the Ulysses story. Xenophon questions Homer and Hesiod’s portrayal of the gods as moral agents, and Stesichoros

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John Lydgate and the Remaking of Classical Epic challenges whether Helen was present at Troy.11 Flavius Philostratus’On Heroes constructs an elaborate narrative fiction in which Protesilaus, the first Greek to die at Troy, adds materials that Homer and the other poets do not know. Among later poets, Apollonius of Rhodes introduces erotic themes to the matter of epic.12 Catullus experiments with the epyllion to develop the background episodes of heroic narrative (Carmen 64). Virgil invokes the basic topics of the hero and heroic action in the Eclogues (‘reges et proelia’, 6.3) and at the beginning of the Aeneid, where the opening terms (‘arma virumque’) identify his genre and signal his debts to the Iliad and the Odyssey.13 Yet he takes a decisive step by introducing ethical considerations to the expectations surrounding heroes and heroism, particularly in Anchises’ speech on Roman power and Aeneas’ killing of Turnus.14 From late antiquity onwards, Christian poets reinvent epic by replacing heroes with Christ, the saints and apostles, or personified virtues and by centring heroic action on the paradoxical triumph of martyrdom and suffering. In the same way, epic functions as a genre with multiple forms and registers of discourse. Modern scholars view it as an omnibus or master genre and even one that transcends ideas of genre.15 For Plato, Homer is the greatest of the tragic poets (Republic, 607a; cf. 605c, 595b–c). Aristotle’s account of tragedy in the Poetics cannot separate itself from epic as a source for dramatic action and as a parallel genre, differing in its mode of presentation. In Latin poetry, Naevius and Ennius bring history into epic. Lucan combines history and epic in his treatment of the Roman civil wars. Quintilian consequently finds him a better model for orators than poets (Institutio oratoria, 10.1.90). The author of a twelfth-century school introduction treats him as both a historical writer and satirist.16 Servius’commentary on Virgil notes the difficulties of distinguishing history and epic in episodes like the story of Dido and Aeneas, and it identifies the use of comic style (at Aeneid 4.1) appropriate to love. In Chaucer’s House of Fame, the auctores bear up history, myth, but mostly epic on pillars that symbolize their works. The ‘gret Omer’ (1466)—the pattern of an epic poet—shares his iron pillar contentiously with Dares, Dictys, and Guido delle Colonne, who transmit the Troy story, as well as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Lollius, Chaucer’s ‘auctour’ for Troilus and Criseyde.17 The features that seem to disqualify Lydgate’s work as epic locate it within and not outside a multiform epic tradition. Lydgate’s moralizing stands as a Christian counterpart to the historical and philosophical reflections of secondary epic. His narrative amplifications to the Theban, Trojan, and Roman stories match the efforts of classical writers to give an expanded framing and contextualization to heroic action and heroes. For medieval writers, epic poetry (carmen heroicum) is read and understood within textual practices of glossing, commentary, and pedagogical introductions. Remaking epic means resituating a work already translated in its subject matter, genre, and interpretative frames.

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Lydgate’s Epic Project The three epic works that Lydgate composed in the period 1412–22 repeatedly evoke classical poets and exploit the fiction of authoritative literary sources. The texts they actually engage, however, are literary intermediaries and surrogates for classical antiquity—translations, epitomes, redactions, reworkings, most in Latin but some in the European vernaculars. The textual foundation for Lydgate’s remaking of epic is thus a secondary literature devised to produce the pseudo-antique, a belated classicism that replaces and re-engineers antiquity for contemporary readers. The Siege of Thebes presents the story in Statius’ Thebaid, cited by Lydgate in both Troy Book (Prol. 230 and 240, 4.3014) and the Siege (1272), but recounts an expanded version, beginning the story with Oedipus, as told in the Old French Roman de Thèbes and its prose redactions, including those incorporated in medieval chronicle and universal histories. Troy Book translates and amplifies Guido delle Colonne’s prose Historia destructionis Troiae (composed in 1287), which describes the Trojan War from its remote origins in Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece to the death of Ulysses.18 Guido relies, without acknowledgement, on Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Old French Roman de Troie but invokes the authority of two supposed eyewitnesses to the war, Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan. The Serpent of Division tracks Lucan’s Bellum civile in its account of Julius Caesar’s military and political exploits, but its immediate sources are vernacular and Latin intermediaries such as Jean de Thuin’s thirteenth-century Li Hystore de Julius Cesar and the anonymous Les Faits des Romains, supplemented by other authorities.19 Lydgate’s epic project follows two narrative arcs. In the universal history produced by medieval chroniclers and historians, the story of Thebes precedes and underlies the Troy story. The most influential criticism of recent years has read the two as intimately related. On this view, Troy serves as an idealized point of origin for medieval institutions and forms of identity; it is a mirror for aristocratic self-governance and statecraft; it provides the mythological ground of European nations and peoples; its history moves forward in royal, aristocratic, and political genealogies. Thebes is the dark and malevolent underside of Troy, where division begins at the start in the internecine battle at Cadmus’ founding and continues in Amphion’s second founding of the city, Oedipus’ parricide, and the fraternal rivalry of his sons, Eteocles and Polynices.20 Theban history is recursive, repeating itself in a will to power that has no object except power itself—what Statius identifies as nuda potestas (Thebaid, 1.150). Rome, as classical and medieval writers assert, is the endpoint of the fall of Troy and Aeneas’ wanderings; the medieval translatio imperii carries Troy forward through Rome to other European nations, including Britain. Lucan’s poem focuses on the violent collapse of the Roman political sphere, familial bonds, and universal law. In  Lydgate’s epic writings, the story of classical antiquity is a synoptic version of

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John Lydgate and the Remaking of Classical Epic what the trouvère Jean Bodel (d. 1210) classified as ‘the Matter of Rome’ (La Chanson des Saisnes, line 7). Plotted as a master narrative, it runs from the familial-dynastic catastrophe of Thebes, to the rise and destruction of Troy successively under Laomedon and then Priam, thence to the political crisis of Caesar’s rivalry with Pompey and the Roman civil war. Weaving in and out of this master narrative is an accompanying narrative of  composition whose framework is topical and political. Lydgate is frequently described as a Lancastrian propagandist and unofficial court poet. Recent appraisals emphasize, however, the complexity and institutional resistance he introduces to the epideictic and didactic functions of his works.21 Lydgate was commissioned to write Troy Book by Prince Henry in October 1412, at a low point in Henry’s political fortunes. From December 1409 to November 1411, Henry effectively governed the kingdom through the royal council. His father reasserted his regality at the end of November 1411 and ruled until his death in March 1413. Troy Book is arguably envisioned as part of Prince Henry’s political return. The end of Troy Book, in which a stable political order emerges from the war in the complex political arrangements of the Greek heroes’ wanderings and returns, corresponds to Henry V’s political triumph in uniting England and France by war and diplomacy. Lydgate specifically evokes the language of the Treaty of Troyes, under which Henry married Katherine of Valois, daughter of Charles VI of France, became regent of France, and was formally recognized as Charles’s heir and successor. The images of kingship that Lydgate describes in his envoy present Henry as holding sword and sceptre, the first to subdue rebellion in England and his ‘dual monarchy’ and the second to rule ‘thi pore liges, that wolde live at reste’ (Envoy 56) under his military and political settlement.22 The Siege, composed without an acknowledged patron but perhaps written for Duke Humfrey or even Henry himself, is usually dated before Henry’s death in August 1422.23 At one level, a loose parable of English claims to the French throne, it contains in the contested kingship between Eteocles and Polynices a monitory example for the fraternal rivalry between Humfrey and John, Duke of Bedford, that quickly followed Henry’s death. The Serpent of Division, dated to December 1422 and probably commissioned by Humfrey, addresses the political dangers of Henry VI’s minority. Those dangers were fuelled by the competing ambitions of his uncles, among others. Humfrey was now the Lord Protector of the kingdom and Henry’s guardian; John was firmly established as regent of France but vested with power to rule on his infrequent returns to England. The unsteady politics of  conciliar government and the dual monarchy of England and France inform the  Serpent, and Lydgate’s tract mirrors these concerns back to his patron and other readers of the literature of princely governance. The master narrative of antiquity and the political narrative of composition follow the same trajectory,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature which is the tragic pattern of heroic adventure that Chaucer maps at the beginning of Troilus and Criseyde: ‘Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie’ (1. 4).

Authorial Fictions Lydgate’s remaking of epic shares a number of important features across these three works. First and foremost, Lydgate appropriates and recontextualizes the fictions of authorship. In the prologue to Troy Book, he connects the language of literary composition to a context of reception shaped by chivalric ideology, Lancastrian dynastic interests, and English nationalism. The literary task involves three authorial functions: to translate ‘the drery pitus fate | Of hem of Troye in englysche . . . | The sege also and the destruccioun’ (Prol. 105–7), to ‘compyle’, and to ‘make’ his work after Guido’s standard Latin prose account of Troy. Each term that Lydgate reports here has a wide resonance. To translate the Troy story into English means both to render the materials from Latin to English and to give them a place within vernacular literary tradition. To compile the work requires a gathering of sources structured and subordinated within a larger compositional frame envisioned by a secondary, belated author. To ‘make’ after Guido is to write technically competent verse that tracks its source text; making produces an imitation at once faithful to the original contours yet distinctive in its own right. This writerly text navigates deference and revision to its literary predecessor in the same way that the commissioned poet undertakes to fulfil ‘My lordes byddyng fully and plesaunce’ (Prol. 74). Such a work, Lydgate makes clear, reflects Henry’s commitment to practising a form of chivalry preserved in the ‘bokys of antiquite’ (Prol. 80). Shaped textually by ‘the doctrine of Vygecius’ (Vegetius, author of the Epitoma rei militaris) (Prol. 89), Henry’s chivalry and his inherent ‘manhood’ (Prol. 93) lay claim to a genealogy of martial virtue that descends from royal father to eldest son. This moral genealogy in turn mirrors an intended political ‘successioun’ (Prol. 103) with legitimizing claims to govern ‘Brutys Albyoun’ so that, in theory, the nation can be seen as stabilized by generations of lineal descent since its disruptive founding in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Descent, conquest, and election formed the chief claims of Lancastrian legitimacy after the deposition of Richard II. Chaucer rehearsed them, for example, in his apostrophe to Henry IV: ‘O conquerour of Brutes Albyon, | Which that by lyne [lineage] and free eleccion | Been verray kyng’ (‘The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse’, 22–4). ‘Successioun’ naturalizes the path to monarchy in a dynasty profoundly anxious over its legitimacy and troubled by rebellion and discord during its own consolidation of power. Commissioning Lydgate’s poem shrewdly positions Henry as the source of authority for the national myth of translation and for the ideals of aristocratic conduct represented by it. Henry’s version of the Troy story is to be known ‘openly’ by all social strata ‘hyghe and lowe’ (Prol. 111) so that a chivalric

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John Lydgate and the Remaking of Classical Epic social vision informs national identity and motivates all social strata. Written ‘In oure tonge’ (Prol. 113), it presents a unified national mythology authorized by a royal patron, who has appropriated the backstories of historical foundation and self hood. Moreover, it confers dignity and cultural standing. Lydgate’s poem is ‘y-writen as wel in oure langage | As in latyn and in frensche it is’ (Prol. 114–15), and so takes its place with two prestige languages, one classical and the other a pan-European medium for transmitting classical works. Like other medieval writers on classical antiquity, Lydgate privileges chronicle history at the expense of poetry, particularly epic poetry. Clerks rather than poets emerge as the guardians of truth and fame against the corrosive effects of time.24 Homer, Ovid, and Virgil, says Lydgate, introduce fables and transform the truth by prejudice, ‘false transumpcioun’ (copying) (Prol. 264), and ‘mysty speche so hard . . . to vnfolde’ (Prol. 302). By contrast, the supposed eyewitness accounts of Dares and Dictys provide contemporary witness to the events of the Trojan War: ‘They were present and seyen euerydel [everything], | And as it fel they write trewe and wel’ (Prol. 313–14). For Lydgate, the truth claims of chronicles are transmitted through an authorial mise en abyme of fiction and textual romance. Dares is a counterfeit history accompanied by a fictitious letter describing its translation from Greek to Latin by Cornelius Nepos. Dictys gives two different versions of its composition, rediscovery, transliteration, and translations.25 Guido, says Lydgate, follows these sources in substance while inserting rhetorical colours and adding eloquence. The lines of narrative transmission in this fiction are parallel to the lines of authorial descent. First Cornelius, then Guido follows the ‘tracys’ of the story, and Lydgate resolves to ‘folwe as nyghe as euer I may’ (Prol. 375). He repeats the strategies of amplification and compilation that Guido employs because Cornelius ‘lefte moche be-hynde’ (Prol. 325) regarding the background story and details of the fall of Troy. In point of fact, it is Benoît and the prose redactors of his Roman de Troie who furnish the materials that Guido says he adds to Cornelius’ fictitious translation of the ancient sources. Guido elides his vernacular sources in favour of a confected Latin source that subsequently lends authority and textual succession to Lydgate’s English equivalent. Lydgate’s inauguration as a writer of epic occurs, then, not simply in his taking over the materials of the Troy story but specifically by his re-enacting the fictions of authorship through which classical and pseudo-classical materials move from one writer to another. What makes late classical writers ‘modern’ is their use of fiction as an authenticating device to claim historical standing for the invented materials they add to the epic tradition.26 Lydgate’s account of epic authorship takes the process a step further. His poem is suffused with English vernacular authority in the presence of ‘My maister Chaucer’ (2.4679, 3.4197, 5.3521). Chaucer is fashioned as the rhetorical poet whom Lydgate presents as a model of decorum and the origin of English eloquence. Lydgate in effect translates Chaucer into Latin in Troy Book—that

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature is, he makes Chaucer an auctor within an imagined classical canon.27 In his disposition of the Troy story, Lydgate reshapes Guido’s prose account according to the five-book structure of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer’s language, though not always the narrative contexts containing it, is mobilized to describe the grounds of Lydgate’s remaking of epic. Clerks preserve truth in their books with ‘remembraunce the keye’, the image for textual knowledge whose value against time and oblivion Chaucer asserts in the Legend of Good Women (F Prol. 26, G Prol. 26). Writing allows us ‘To make a merour only to oure mynde, | To seen eche thing trewly as it was’ (Prol. 168–9), even if Troilus, the source for Lydgate’s figure, makes a mirror of his mind to possess the image rather than the reality of Criseyde (1.365). Guido and the chronicle writers have ‘ymped in’ (inserted) rhetoric and eloquence (Prol. 366), just as the narrator of the Troilus has ‘in eched’ (added) (3.1329) supplements to his author. Lydgate counts Lollius, the supposed source for Troilus and Criseyde, among the canonical writers on Troy: ‘And of this sege wrot eke Lollius’ (Prol. 309). Chaucer’s Lollius is a fictitious author who conceals Boccaccio, Chaucer’s poetic source. Lydgate positions him ambiguously in Troy Book between the supposedly mendacious classical poets imitating Homer and the genealogy of reliable forgers of chronicles. Lollius thus becomes a double fiction—an invented authority known only by attestation and by stories of narrative transmission. The fiction of authorship underlies Lydgate’s other remakings of epic. In the prologue to the Siege of Thebes, Lydgate writes himself imaginatively into the Canterbury Tales, creating a role equivalent to that of Chaucer the pilgrim-narrator. By telling the first tale of an imaginary return journey, Lydgate takes over not just Chaucer’s poem but the future of his poem—namely, its context of reception and reading. The tale he rehearses from his newly invented position recounts the narrative events that lead up to Theseus’ triumphal entrance at the beginning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’. All these gestures, as scholars have come to recognize, amount to simultaneous homage and rivalry, subjection and self-assertion.28 Lydgate names Chaucer and the ‘Knight’s Tale’ only at the end of his poem. Unlike contemporary writers of Chaucerian apocrypha such as the poet of the Tale of Beryn, he focuses on authorship rather than narrative elements of a Chaucerian imitatio.29 The Serpent of Division opens with an echo of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ that makes clear the textual and readerly basis for invented heroic narrative: ‘Whilome [Once], as olde bookis maken mencion’.30 Lydgate elsewhere invokes ‘myne auctowre’ (p. 61), ‘the stori’ (pp. 51, 52), ‘Autours’ (pp. 56, 62), ‘Clerkis’ (pp. 56, 58, 61), and writers such as Suetonius (p. 63), and Vincent of Beauvais (p. 64) for matters of detail. He cites Lucan for the denial of Caesar’s triumph by Pompey and the Senate (p. 54) and for the causes of the civil war (pp. 55–6). The authorial ‘I’ appears only when recounting the prophecies (p. 61) and description (p. 65) of Caesar’s death. In the first instance, Lydgate styles himself a reader, probably of a redaction of Lucan listing the portents of disaster.31 In the second, he describes Caesar’s murder ostensibly following

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John Lydgate and the Remaking of Classical Epic Chaucer: ‘I may conclude with hym that was flowre of poetis in owre englisshe tonge & the firste that euer enluminede [adorned] owre langage with flowres of Rethorike and of elloquence, I mene my maistere Chaucere whiche compendiously wrote the dethe of this myghti Emperour’ (65). Lydgate echoes himself here while praising Chaucer, for he rehearses the commonplaces from the passages of devotion scattered throughout Troy Book (2.4677–719, 3.4234–63). The half-stanza he then quotes as Chaucer’s is a poetic cento that conflates the relevant passage on Caesar’s death in the ‘Monk’s Tale’ with the moralization applied to Hercules.

Doubleness A second feature of Lydgate’s remaking of epic is his instrumental approach to antiquity. This takes an explicit form in exemplarity and moralizing based on Christian doctrine and ethics—what Pearsall rightly signals as the didactic character of Lydgate’s narratives. In the Siege of Thebes, morality gives thematic unity and narrative structure to the poem.32 Lydgate may commit his worst hermeneutic gaffe by concluding that the Oedipus story teaches the moral lesson of ‘honur and due reuerence’ (1022) to one’s parents.33 But elsewhere he points the moral of kingly humility and goodwill in Amphion (244–61) and Adrastus (2688–736), and demonstrates its absence in Eteocles (1774–91). He adds the requirement for a king to observe ‘trouthe’ (1721–73) and frames Tydeus’ victory against the fifty Thebans sent to ambush him as an example of truth conquering falsehood (2237). Removed from the horrific act of fury and vengeance at his death in Statius, Tydeus is presented as a model of chivalry, whose historical counterpart is commonly taken to be Henry V. Troy Book, on one reading, presents itself as a historical work teaching moral and political lessons.34 Priam’s rebuilding of Troy, amplified from Guido and Benoît, sets out an ideal of statecraft. His pursuit of vengeance for the destruction of Laomedon’s Troy and the abduction of Hesione serves as an example of royal wilfulness, heedless of what it sets in motion. Worthy Hector is the ‘example of gent[e]rie’ (2.2179) seen in contrast to Achilles’ murderousness, guile, and self-deception. At the end of the poem, Lydgate says that his book provides the monitory example of worldly lust (5.3563). In the Serpent, Lydgate invokes Lucan to anatomize necessity, custom, and volition as the three causes of division in a kingdom.35 He inserts a historical anecdote from Valerius Maximus on the strength of unity and the vulnerability of division (pp. 58–9). At the end, he embeds the particular threats of English civil strife in the universal lessons of statecraft, addressing ‘the wise gouernours of euery londe and region’ to imagine and remember the consequences of Caesar’s pride, Pompey’s envy, and Crassus’ covetousness (p. 65). Beyond exemplification and moralization, there lies a deeper shift in the uses of epic. In medieval historiography, classical antiquity reaches its endpoint at Christian

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature history and so remains beyond redemption and grace; its boundary limit is moral and political virtue.36 This separation from providence allows Lydgate to treat antiquity not just as a source for lessons from the past but as a working model or thought experiment for the medieval secular world. He remakes the actions of epic as an analysis and critique of the chivalric culture inhabited by his patrons and aristocratic readers. The signature of the secular, chivalric world is ‘doubleness’. Doubleness haunts the epic enterprise from its mythic origins in the Myrmidons (a people first destroyed by the gods and then restored by ants transformed into men), to the double founding of Thebes, the competing claims of Eteocles and Polynices, the twin grievance of carrying off Hesione and Helen, the twofold destruction of Troy, and the rival claims of Caesar and Pompey as Roman heroes. Women exemplify doubleness in Lydgate’s epic world. Jocasta is wife and mother to the same man; Adrastus’ daughters bring him two male heirs by marriage. Medea betrays father and family for Jason, the male figure of doubleness. Guido (Historia, bk 3) chides her for duplicity in a passage that Lydgate reproduces (1.2072–96) and then affects to disavow (1.2097–135). Lydgate ventriloquizes Guido’s misogyny again in recounting Chaucer’s Troilus: ‘thei [women] ben sure in doubilnes, | And alwey double in her sikernes [faithfulness], | Semynge oon whan thei best can varie’ (3.4297–9). In the Siege, Hypsipyle offers a more complicated example of divided loyalties to men, saving her father but allowing husbands to die on Lemnos and leaving Opheltes, the infant son of Lycurgus, unguarded as she aids Adrastus and the Greek army. Misogyny serves to displace the anxieties within epic heroism onto the supposed mutability of women, for doubleness inheres, too, in the ethos that Lydgate imagines for epic heroes. Hector’s advice at the Trojan parliament, amplified by Lydgate, is to work ‘by dissymulacioun’ (2.2294) to conceal the woe caused by the loss of Hesione. Agamemnon’s counsel to Menelaus at the loss of Helen argues the same point to maintain aristocratic self hood and composure against enemies: ‘Ye schulde slighly dissymble youre offence’ (2.4344). Doubleness is a recurring political crisis in the divided realms of Thessaly, Thebes, the Greek camp, and the Roman state (the last of these poised between the contending interests of republican oligarchy and the unifying power of empire and dictatorship). The sovereign’s duplicity repeatedly outruns its immediate aims and purposes, just as indwelling malice escapes his control and self-possession. King Peleus sends Jason to risk catastrophe by securing the Golden Fleece but has to restore the kingship he usurped from Jason’s father. Eteocles cynically agrees to an alternating kingship that unexpectedly leaves Polynices in possession of a heritage in Argos with powerful allies to back his claim to rule Thebes. Pompey and the Senate conspire to deny Caesar the honour of a triumph and thereby spark civil war. The Senate’s miscalculation here reflects the corresponding vulnerability of aristocratic counsel to unforeseen motives and consequences.37 The Theban parliament ratifies the marriage of Oedipus and Jocasta ‘By ful assent’ (777). The citizens, knights, and barons

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John Lydgate and the Remaking of Classical Epic of Thebes work out the ‘accord’ between Eteocles and Polynices ‘to set hem in quyete and in pees’ (1083) but later cannot decide between waging war and holding to the ‘couenaunt’ (3642) when Polynices advances with his Greek allies. Priam’s parliamentary and family deliberations over pursuing war fail to conceal his unaccommodated anger and malice. Lydgate may find an optimistic and provisional ­resolution to doubleness at the end of Troy Book, where Ulysses ‘made his sones [Telemachus and Telegonus] for to be al oon’ [united] (5.3276), just as England and France ‘May be al oon, with-oute variaunce’ (5.3412). But he sets out an impossible formula for contested power in the Siege and Serpent: the concentration of power yields tyranny, while the circulation of power generates rivalry.

Epic Contingency The large forces that shape heroic action are another distinctive feature of Lydgate’s remaking of classical epic. In vernacular writers like Benoît, the classical machinery of fate and destiny serves as a rhetorical colouring.38 Clear prophecies of catastrophe for Thebes, Troy, and Rome prove ineffective and are ignored. Guido offers a deeply pessimistic vision of the epic world.39 By contrast, Lydgate treats Fortune in multiple aspects—it is by turns an allegorical figure, a source for explanation and moralization, and a principle of mutability. Medieval concepts of Fortune are a composite of theories derived from Boethius and Aristotle. Boethius describes Fortune as an unforeseen event arising from a confluence of causes. Aristotle adds chance to his analysis of material, formal, efficient, and final causes.40 Lydgate does not offer a theory that reconciles fate, destiny, and fortune in a comprehensive system. Rather, he uses these elements pragmatically and rhetorically to guide contemporary political culture.41 At the same time, he develops them to present a view of a secular chivalric world radically shaped by contingency. He traces ‘the dissolution of providential or teleological history into a chaos of bloody extirpations, usurpations, and dismemberments’.42 Perhaps the strongest denial of contingency in Lydgate’s epic project is the presentation of Hector’s corpse, preserved by an elaborate system of gold tubes and replenishing fluids. The scene is significantly revised from Guido, and it occupies the centre of Troy Book. The lifelike corpse is a figure of Lydgate’s enshrinement of the Trojan past.43 It is also chivalry’s monument to itself and to the fantasy that it can escape the death and ruin it calls into being. Lydgate’s epic heroes continually negotiate violence in which motives are hidden, decisions and plans entail consequences beyond their original scope, and historical alternatives are recognized fully only in retrospect. Lydgate applies the image of Fortune’s wheel to the plan of alternating Theban kingship: ‘Thus entrechaunge euery yere they shal: | The ton [the one] ascendeth that other hath a fal’ (1131–2). After showing the remote, unintended causes of the Trojan War in Book 1, he opens

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Book 2 of Troy Book with a rhetorical account of ‘The envious ordre of Fortunas meving, | In worldly thing, fals and flekeryng’ (2.1–2). At the end of the poem, he offers a political reading of Fortune and contingency, focused on the agents of power in the secular world: Lordes, princes from her royalte Sodeinly brought in aduersite, And kynges eke plounged in pouert, And for drede darynge in desert,— Vnwar slaughter compassed of envie, Mordre execut by conspirasie, Await[e] liggyng, falshede and tresoun, And of kyngdammys sodeyn euersioun,— Rauysshyng of wommen for delyt, Rote of the werre & of mortal despit Fals mayntenaunce of avout[e]rye Many worthi causyng for to dye . . . 

[plunged into poverty] [lurking in wild regions] [devised] [murder] [lying in ambush] [hatred] [adultery] [nobles] (5.3549–60)

Lydgate’s intertext here is the portrait of civic chaos adorning the walls of Mars’ temple in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ (I.1995–2040), where Arcite unwittingly guarantees his downfall by speaking the motto of heroism: ‘Yif [Give] me victorie’ (1.2420).44 In the Serpent, Caesar commits himself fully to contingency at the Rubicon: ‘here I leve all the frendschip of olde antiquite and onely folowe the tracis of fortune’ (p. 58).

Prudence The remedy Lydgate offers against contingency is prudence. Medieval theories of prudence have biblical, philosophical, and political sources. Aristotle and medieval commentators treat prudence as a practical rather than theoretical virtue; it deals with human goods and particular cases rather than first principles. Prudence is directed towards means, not ends, and so is subject to deliberation. It involves taking counsel, forming judgement, and commanding action. Aquinas treats it as a principle of doing: ‘recta ratio agibilium’ (‘right reason about what can be done’).45 Its spheres include individual conduct, domestic governance, and statecraft. In Guido (Historia, bk 5), Hector maps kingly prudence onto the extension of time, as he advises Priam to consider not just the beginnings of war but also what happens in the middle and follows in the end. Lydgate opens Troy Book with an invocation to both Mars and Othea, the figure whom Christine de Pizan makes the goddess of prudence and the author of a letter of instruction to the young Hector. Across his works, Lydgate develops a semantics of prudence in terms such as advert, avys, caste, discrecioun, purueyaunce, and prouidence. 476

John Lydgate and the Remaking of Classical Epic In the Theban story, ‘prudent Amphyoun’ (201) aligns musical harmony and statecraft to represent an ideal of kingship. Adrastus exercises prudence in making Tydeus and Eteocles allies and sending Tydeus to Thebes to prosecute Polynices’ claims to rule. Prudence is the chief lesson of Troy Book.46 Hector exercises its various forms as a governor, military tactician, and commander. Most notably, he deliberates the alternatives of war and restraint in the Trojan parliament (2.2183–303). Achilles serves as his foil, reducing prudence to calculation, stealth, and self-interested counsel. Agamemnon and Priam offer qualified examples of kingly prudence, though Priam’s practical judgement is often undermined by his reckless moral disposition. In the Serpent, Caesar provides a notable example of foresight and calculation when Pompey and the Senate conspire to recall him from his string of conquests: ‘But this manly man Cesar, aduertynge [noticing] full prudently and aperceyuynge the fraudulent meouyng of Pompeye on that one side, and the compassid [maliciously contrived] sleighte of the Senat on that other side, full avisely gafe answere ageyne, that he wolde accomplissche and performe his conqueste, whiche he hadde bigonne, and than mekely and humbely at theire requeste repeire home ageyne’ (p. 52). Lydgate’s epic narratives also reveal the limits of prudence for managing contingency.47 The practical calculations of Theban kings from Laius to Creon eventually miscarry. Amphiaraus’ considered advice to the Greeks finds no support in deliberation. The Trojan Wars begin with Laomedon’s prudent blunder of denying hospitality to Jason, Hercules, and their men. Hector, in a central illustration, falls when he ‘Reklesly’ (3.5375) moves his shield to despoil the body of a dead Greek king and so leaves himself vulnerable to Achilles. Caesar ignores the prodigies and ‘wondirfull signes’ that warn of his death (Serpent, p. 64) and so becomes an example of ‘the mutabilite and the sodeyne change of this false worlde’ (p. 65). The double lesson of prudence reflects the vulnerability of chivalric culture. Lydgate’s Theban story ends with Adrastus’ melancholy and a recognition of the enormous social cost of chivalry: ‘in the werre is non excepcioun | Of hegh estat nor lowh condicioun’ (4645–6). The example of Troy teaches that there is no escape from contingency: ‘ther is nouther prince, lord, nor kyng, | Be exaumple of Troye, like as ye may se, | That in this lif may have ful surete’ (5.3576–8). Civil war leaves Rome barren of its treasure and its knighthood—a cautionary lesson on political violence, expansionary wars, and sovereign power.48 The chivalric culture figured darkly by classical epic is always potentially the victim of heroes and heroic action and thus of epic ambitions in politics and poetry.

Epic Reprised In Fall of Princes, Lydgate revisits materials from his epic project in the framework of de casibus tragedy. His immediate source is the second, amplified version of Laurent 477

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature de Premierfait’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, a translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium completed in 1409 for Jean de France, Duc de Berry and accompanied by a rich program of visual illustration.49 Lydgate acknowledges Laurent as an accomplished translator. Adding and omitting materials, he follows Laurent’s precept that ‘Artificeres’ (Prol. 1.9) have the right to reshape works through imagination and invention in order to produce ‘Deuises newe’ (Prol. 1.18) that change their originals ‘Fro good to bettir’ (Prol. 1.20).50 Lydgate’s ‘auctour’ is Boccaccio, who provides the exempla, lessons, and even the discursive strategy: the Fall operates within the fiction of describing what Boccaccio has written in his De casibus. (Richard Pynson’s 1494 print makes the device explicit in its title: Here begynnethe the boke calledde Iohn bochas descriuinge the falle of princis princessis [and] other nobles.) Lydgate’s inspiration comes not from the epic muse Calliope but from ‘My maistir Chaucer’ (Prol. 1.246), Seneca, Cicero, and Petrarch—authorities on tragedy, eloquence, and Fortune who define the prime coordinates for Lydgate’s treatment. For the Theban and Troy stories, Lydgate cites his own works as authorities. At Duke Humfrey’s insistence, he adds envoys to propose remedies to tragedy. The poetic and political dimensions of the Fall converge in the parallels that Lydgate draws between Caesar and Humfrey as princes given to the study of books and open to instruction by learned men—Cicero for Caesar and, implicitly, Lydgate for Humfrey. The mode of tragic complaint adopted in the Fall opens revisionary perspectives on Lydgate’s epic materials. Lydgate retains Boccaccio’s emphasis on moral correction and self-governance over heroic deeds. He develops a prophetic voice to address ‘worldli pryncis’ (Prol. 1.66) and, through them, to join ‘hih and louh estat’ (Prol. 1.223) in a common moral discipline. In the Theban story, Jocasta is the figure around whom Fortune works change. Oedipus’ exposure and rescue as a child begin a sequence of ‘Sodeyn chaung off euery maner thyng’ (1.3278). Lydgate amplifies Oedipus’ curse on his sons to a political crisis by making it a wish not just for catastrophe but for ‘dyuysioun’ (1.3651) between them. Later, he adds the Statian detail, not mentioned in the Siege of Thebes, of the divided flame shared by Eteocles and Polynices in their funeral pyre. Theseus’ intervention in the story is omitted altogether. The final witness to Thebes is Jocasta, who weighs the loss of her sons, the blindness of Oedipus, and the destruction of Thebes before killing herself with the sword that Oedipus used to slay Laius. As in the Siege, Lydgate calculates the social cost of chivalry, and lays blame on ‘fals alliaunce and fraternal envie’ (1.3750) and ‘onkyndli [unnatural] mariage’ (1.3752). In the refrain of the envoy, the moral lesson is insistently political: ‘Kyngdamys deuyded may no while endure’ (1.3822, 3829, 3836, and 3843). Lydgate centres the Troy story on Priam. He describes Priam initially as a just ruler, who ‘Gouerned his cite in pes and rihtwisnesse’ (1.5923). Priam’s defining feature and what makes him vulnerable to Fortune is wealth, which includes ‘off al Asie

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John Lydgate and the Remaking of Classical Epic the tresour and richesse’ (1.5925) and his many children. Lydgate presents a portrait of Fortune that carries mutability and reversal into active malice: ‘For whan ye wene [think] sitte hiest atte fulle, | Than will she rathest your briht[e] fethres pulle’ (1.6089–90). In Lydgate’s treatment of the Roman civil war, Pompey and Caesar share the narrative as doubles and antagonists who, respectively, serve the ‘comoun proffit’ (6.2074, 2205) and achieve ‘many gret victorie | In dyuers contres doon for the cite’ (6.2255–6). As in the Serpent, Caesar’s demand for a triumph to commemorate his conquests provokes ‘the contrauersie’, which Lydgate describes in a congeries of political breakdown: ‘Cyuile discordes, froward [hostile] dyuysioun, | Whan eueri man drouh to his partie | Of old hatreede to kyndle newe envie’ (6.2263–6). Caesar is an ambiguous figure for medieval writers and commentators who balance his natural virtue against his ambition and transgression of positive law and custom.51 But in refocusing his earlier account of the civil war on the sequence of Pompey and Caesar, Lydgate returns to the issues of the world-historical prince and dynastic succession, which oppressed his royal patrons. Pompey’s alignment with the Senate asserts an older, oligarchic political order that gives way to empire directed by a single will. Caesar establishes his claim to power by conquest over Pompey and his rivals, and from his conquest follows the logic of Lancastrian succession with its promise of violent conquest stabilized henceforth by orderly succession: ‘And afftir hym thestat shal foort[h] proceede | Be eleccioun or lyneal kynreede’ (6.2407–8). At the endpoint of antiquity, Lydgate returns to the ideological fantasy that orders of succession can obscure and erase their violent origins. What stands against the persuasive force of this normalized succession is the mutability of Fortune. Lydgate expresses the lesson directly in the envoy to Caesar’s fall: ‘Lordship abit [lingers] nat’ (6.2918).

Remaking and Reception Lydgate’s remaking of classical epic is transmitted in manuscript and print traditions that reflect multiple contexts of reception. The presentation copy of Troy Book that must have been made for Henry V does not survive, but the imagined scene of Lydgate’s presenting his book to his sovereign appears in five manuscripts and the 1513 editio princeps published by Richard Pynson and suggests the authority attached to the work. Most early manuscripts of Troy Book are ‘deluxe volumes’ with a ­double-column format, illuminated borders and initials, rubrics, and a standard sequence of miniatures, including one that depicts the embalmed Hector.52 Fortune’s Wheel is a prominent topic in other programmes of illustration. The layout associates Troy Book with the most prestigious vernacular works produced for royal, aristocratic, and noble readers. Marginal glosses and other devices highlight the text, notably the misogynistic passages that originate with Guido and find an ambivalent

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature expression in Lydgate. The earliest manuscripts of the Siege are likewise directed to an aristocratic audience, including William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, and his wife Alice Chaucer, the poet’s granddaughter. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the poem circulates among provincial gentry, such as the Paston family, as well as Benedictine and Bridgettine nuns. Troy Book and the Siege appear together as an ensemble in three manuscripts, one of which adds the romance Generides at a later date. Troy Book is bound with Generides in another composite manuscript from the mid-fifteenth century. The Siege appears in still other manuscripts with Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes and Vegetius’ Epitoma rei militaris to form books of princely governance. It is also listed in the inventory of Richard III’s library. Though preserved in fewer witnesses, the Serpent is linked in various manuscript contexts with instructive works on governance such as Lydgate’s Secrees of Old Philisoffres (a translation of the  pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum), Hoccleve’s Regiment, and Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Melibee’. In the early modern period, Troy Book has a strong connection to Henry VIII, who is thereby linked to Henry V as a patron. One later manuscript of the poem (London, British Library, MS Royal 18 D VI) contains dedicatory verse by John Audley to Henry VIII. Pynson’s 1513 edition was printed ‘at the co[m]mau[n]dement of oure Soueraygne Lorde the kynge Henry the .viii.’ Thomas Marshe’s 1555 reprint of Pynson adds a genealogical chart with roots in John, Duke of Lancaster, and Edmund, Duke of York, and the figure of Henry VIII on top; the accompanying title in the centre of the page traces the poem’s authorial descent from Dares and Dictys through Guido to Lydgate. The modernized stanzaic paraphrase of Troy Book published by Thomas Purfoot in 1614 as The Life and Death of Hector updates earlier woodcuts and manuscript miniatures that show Lydgate at his writing table. Purfoot’s title page places the scene of poetic composition within a monumental, classicizing frame in which the pillars of Wisdom and Science flank Lydgate and insignia for Europe and Africa stand above the pillars. Wynkyn de Worde’s edition of the Siege (c.1497) illustrates the message of chivalric triumph and doubleness with two woodcuts on a single page: one side depicts Tydeus as a mounted knight in armour, and the other portrays the dual founding of Thebes by affirming harmonious kingship and governance with Amphion in the foreground and displacing Cadmus’ violent founding to the background.53 John Stow’s edition of the Siege appears as a supplement in the final section of his 1561 Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer and thereby makes visible Lydgate’s authorial fiction of composing a Canterbury tale by balancing out the ‘Knight’s Tale’ at the beginning of the volume. Stow’s addition of the Siege remained in place in Thomas Speght’s revision of the Works (1598) and in reprintings throughout the seventeenth century. Early modern editions of the Serpent foreground the dangers of internal strife at the historical moment of the English Reformation and in the continuing tensions of the Elizabethan settlement. Robert Redman’s printing of the Serpent (c.1535)

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John Lydgate and the Remaking of Classical Epic features a woodcut of a city under attack on the title page and places the message of the treatise before its title: This lytell treatyse compendiously declareth the damage and Destruction in Realmes caused by the Serpente of Diuision. Stow’s edition and reissue of the Serpent, allegedly ‘set forth after the Auctours old copy’, appeared in 1559 with the title The serpent of diuision. Whych hathe euer bene yet the chefest vndoer of any Region or Citie. Perhaps the most striking feature of the textual tradition and reception is the pairing of the Serpent with Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Tragedy of Gorboduc in a volume printed by Edward Allde in 1590. Norton and Sackville’s play about a divided kingdom, the deadly strife between the brothers Ferrex and Porrex, rebellion, and uncertain succession had been performed by the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple for Queen Elizabeth at Whitehall on 18 January 1561 and subsequently printed in 1565 as The tragedie of Gorboduc and 1570 as The tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex. Lydgate disappears as an author in Allde’s modernized version of the Serpent, as does the Chaucerian echo of his original opening. The volume fashions the Serpent as conveying ‘the true History or Mappe of Romes ouerthrowe’. Its prefatory letter to gentlemen readers resituates Lydgate’s work within a humanist’s reflective civic reading of the lessons of antiquity: ‘thou sit thee downe and patientlye with a Mer-maides eye peruse this small volume, or rather Mappe of Romes ouerthrowe, and thou wilt finde if thou compare our state with Romes, to be no lesse in danger and dread’ (sig. A2v). The pairing of the Serpent with Gorboduc joins Rome’s division to crises deep within English history. Lydgate’s warning that Rome ends destitute of its treasure and knighthood is repeated in the play’s argument: ‘they fell to Ciuill warre, in which both they and many of their Issues were slaine, and the lande for a long time almost desolate and miserably wasted’ (sig. A.2r). The first dumbshow in the play re-enacts the proverb from Valerius Maximus that Lydgate earlier included in the Serpent, as six wildmen try futilely to break a bundle of small sticks but succeed when they separate parts from the whole. The dumbshow for Act 5 repeats the lesson of Rome’s double loss and remarks that the civil war begun by Gorboduc’s division is not resolved until the time of Dunwallo Molmutius ‘who reduced the Land to Monarchie’ (sig. F.2v). Lydgate’s influence on English Renaissance writers shows most visibly in the continuation of his Fall of Princes by William Baldwin in the Mirror for Magistrates. Baldwin adds the theme of punishing vices to Lydgate’s original focus on the mutability of Fortune, introduces English examples from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and imaginatively places himself in Boccaccio’s fictive role as the witness to princely complaints. His gentlemen patrons, says Baldwin, ‘al agreed that I shoulde vsurpe Bochas rowme, and the wretched princes complayne vnto me’ (sig. A1v). Lydgate’s Fall continues to circulate in the early modern period not just as  a complete work but also in fragments and excerpts. The most frequently excerpted parts are the envoys and sententious passages that sometimes appear as independent poems or enter collections such as Peter Idley’s Instructions to his son.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Gavin Douglas, David Lindesay, Thomas Sackville, and George Cavendish follow a literary tradition in which Boccaccio and his collection of tragedies are known only by Lydgate’s poem.54 Lydgate’s works from his decade of remaking epic carry a mark of authority even as they are absorbed by other writers. In the epilogue to Book 2 of his Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473 or 1474), Caxton recognizes the priority of Lydgate’s translation of Troy materials and uses language that echoes Lydgate’s expression of deference to Chaucer: ‘that worshifull & religyo[us] man dan Iohn lidgate monke of Burye dide translate hit but late | after whos werke I fere to take vpon me that am not worthy to bere his penner & ynke horne after hym. to medle me in that werke’ (fol. 251v). John Pickeryng’s Horestes (1567) draws on Troy Book as its source, probably from the 1555 edition with Robert Braham’s denunciation of Caxton’s ‘longe tedious and brayneles bablyng’ (sig. A1r).55 In the Induction (1.49–50) to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1585), the ghost of Andrea evokes Lydgate’s scene of Hector’s death by ambush.56 Marlowe’s view of kingship and tyranny in Tamburlaine may reflect Lydgate’s Serpent as an intermediate source.57 The abandoned women evoked in Dido, Queen of Carthage share the fates that Lydgate describes for Cassandra and Polyxena in Troy Book as well as those that Ovid portrays through elegy.58 Marlowe’s broad undermining of Virgilian authority draws on Lydgate’s account of Aeneas as a traitor to Troy to present a ‘false Aeneas’—‘an actor within the play who is imitating Virgil’s hero’ while displaying the contradictions and inconsistencies between what he is and what epic representation makes him to be.59 The Troy story as recounted through Lydgate and Caxton is foundational to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1602). Shakespeare’s play was preceded by one acted by the Admiral’s Company in 1596 and two Troy plays written by Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle in 1599. His adaptation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid situates tragic romance and betrayal in a disenchanted chivalric culture, one that amplifies Lydgate’s lessons of mutability to the point of cancelling chivalric heroism and epic dignity. Lydgate provides details of heroic combat, notably the sequence in which Hector leaves himself vulnerable and dies at the hands of Achilles and the Myrmidons (5.6–8).60 He furnishes a narrative and a moral critique that represent a ‘divisive tradition’ of Trojan history in Renaissance England challenged by George Chapman’s celebration of epic heroism in The Seaven Bookes of Homers Iliads (1598).61 From its beginnings in Lancastrian patronage through the recontextualizations of Renaissance print culture, poetry, and drama, Lydgate’s remaking of classical epic negotiates the literary and political uses of antiquity. Lydgate does not revive an authentic past in the Siege of Thebes, Troy Book, and Serpent of Division or in the epic biographies of Fall of Princes. The stories of Thebes, Troy, and Rome are sites of invention for narrative and for the explanatory and legitimizing power that narrative confers. Working within literary and cultural translation, Lydgate devises a functional

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John Lydgate and the Remaking of Classical Epic analogue to the heroic past that claims the authority of epic, retells its stories, and provides models of conduct and governance to patrons, imagined readers, and later historical audiences. At the same time, his epic narratives and the lessons derived from them uncover the contradictions and contingency of a chivalric secular world.

Notes 1   Lydgate’s production runs to 145,000 lines, as compared to 118,406 for Shakespeare (Folger count); Spenser’s Faerie Queene runs to 36,000, a bit more than only one of Lydgate’s major works, Troy Book, while Browning’s blockbusters are Sordello (40,000) and The Ring and the Book (21,000). 2   Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (Charlottesville, Va, 1970), pp. 160–91. 3   For Lydgate scholarship, Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. Ann E. Keep (1961) remains valuable, but Pearsall’s John Lydgate is the decisive critical work. Contemporary approaches can be seen in Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford, 2005); Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, 2005); Robert Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, 2007); and the essays in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, eds Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, Ind., 2006). 4   James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547, The Oxford English Literary History 2 (Oxford, 2002), p. 38. 5   John Gower, ‘Eneidos Bucolis’, in The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols (Oxford, 1899–1902), 4, 361. 6   Joseph Farrell, ‘The Origins and Essence of Roman Epic’, in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. John Miles Foley (Oxford, 2005), pp. 417–28; and Farrell, ‘Greek Lives and Roman Careers in the Classical Vita Tradition’, in European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, eds Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas (Toronto, 2002), pp. 24–46. 7  Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 129. 8   T. B. Gregory, J. K. Newman, and T. Meyers, ‘Epic’, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edn (Princeton, 2012), pp. 439–48. 9   The power of the symbolic order and not just heroes and stories underlies formative accounts such as W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (1897); M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex., 1981); and Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (New York, 1965). 10   David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, 1993), pp. 3–18. 11   Robert Lamberton, ‘Ancient Reception’, in A Companion to Epic, ed. Foley, pp. 164–73 (at p. 166). 12   Michael C. J. Putnam, ‘Virgil’s Aeneid’, in A Companion to Epic, ed. Foley, pp. 452–75 (at p. 454).

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 13   Texts quoted from Virgil, ed. and trans. G. P. Goold and H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. edn, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). 14   Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1953), pp. 173–4; and Putnam, ‘Virgil’s Aeneid’, p. 455. 15  Richard P. Martin, ‘Epic as Genre’, in A Companion to Epic, ed. Foley, pp. 9–19 (at pp. 9–10). 16   Accessus ad auctores, Bernard d’Utrecht, Conrad d’Hirsau, ed. R.  B.  C. Huygens (Leiden, 1970), p. 44. 17   Text quoted from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987). 18   On the long medieval tradition of the Trojan War story, see Chapter 13 in this volume by Desmond. 19  Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, pp. 33–70, examines Lydgate’s layering of sources. On the medieval tradition of Lucan, see Chapter 11 in this volume by Hiatt. 20  Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, 1991), pp. 75–8, 154; Patterson, ‘Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate’, in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, eds Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton, 1993), pp. 72–107 (at p. 97); Dominique Battles, The Medieval Tradition of Thebes: History and Narrative in the Old French Roman de Thèbes, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate (New York, 2004), pp. 45–9. See Chapter 12 in this volume by Wetherbee; Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca, NY, 1984), pp. 111–44; and Winthrop Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets (Notre Dame, Ind., 2008), pp. 159–202. 21   Scott-Morgan Straker, ‘Propaganda, Intentionality, and the Lancastrian Lydgate’, in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, eds Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 98–128. 22   Text quoted from Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols, EETS es 97, 103, 106, 126 (1906–35). In all quotations from Middle English texts, the letters thorn and yogh have been normalized to ‘th’ and ‘g/gh/y’ respectively. 23   Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-Bibliography (Victoria, BC, 1997), p. 22. James Simpson, ‘“Dysemol daies and fatal houres”: Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, eds Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford, 1997), pp. 15–33 (at pp. 15–16) argues that the poem was composed after Henry’s death. 24   Mary C. Flannery, John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame (Cambridge, 2012) argues that Lydgate asserts stronger control of fame and Fortune than his predecessors. 25   For the non-Homeric tradition of the Troy story, see Chapter  13 in this volume by Desmond. David Rollo, ‘Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie: Historiography, Forgery, and Fiction’, Comparative Literature Studies 32 (1995), 191–225, examines Dares and Dictys as sources for a poetics of counterfeit in medieval vernacular writers. 26   Casey Dué and Gregory Nagy, ‘Preliminaries to Philostratus’s On Heroes’, in Flavius Philostratus: On Heroes, eds J. K. B. Maclean and E. B. Aitken (Atlanta, 2001/2), pp. xv–xli.

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John Lydgate and the Remaking of Classical Epic 27  Christopher Baswell, ‘Troy Book: How Lydgate Translates Chaucer into Latin’, in Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeanette M. A. Beer (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1997), pp. 225–34. 28   A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985); Seth Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, 1993). 29   Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis, 2002), pp. 91–7. 30   Text quoted from The Serpent of Division, ed. Henry MacCracken (1911), p. 49. 31   Serpent of Division, ed. MacCracken, p. 34. 32   Robert W. Ayers, ‘Medieval History, Moral Purpose, and the Structure of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes’, PMLA 73 (1958), 463–74 (at p. 469). 33   Text quoted from Siege of Thebes, eds Axel Erdmann and Eilert Ekwall, 2 vols, EETS es 108 and 125 (1911, 1930). 34  Schirmer, John Lydgate, p. 40. 35   Andrew Galloway, ‘John Lydgate and the Origins of Vernacular Humanism’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107 (2008), 445–71 (at pp. 451–8) identifies Lydgate’s sources as Arnulf of Orléans’s commentaries on Lucan and Seneca. 36   Nicholas Birns, ‘The Trojan Myth: Postmodern Reverberations’, Exemplaria 5 (1993), 45–78 offers a critique of the standard account of medieval historiography. On medieval historiography, see the essays in this volume by Grey, Hiatt (on Lucan), and Steiner. 37  The Roman de Thèbes gives a special prominence to aristocratic councils and introduces episodes like the betrayal of Eteocles by Daire le Roux to assert the interests of magnates. 38  Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 117. 39   C. David Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae in Medieval England (Woodbridge, 1980), p. 23. 40   Pierre Michaud-Quantin and Michel Lemoine, Études sur le vocabulaire philosophique du moyen âge (Rome, 1971). 41   Galloway, ‘John Lydgate and the Origins of Vernacular Humanism’, pp. 470–1. 42   Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, 1998), p. 188. 43   Nicholas Watson, ‘Outdoing Chaucer: Lydgate’s Troy Book and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid as Competitive Imitations of Troilus and Criseyde’, in Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Dr Elspeth Kennedy, ed. Karen Pratt (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 89–108 (at p. 96 n. 18). 44   Chaucer’s own source is Boccaccio, Teseida, 7.33–5, amplifying Statius, Thebaid, 7.48–53 (The Riverside Chaucer, p. 835). 45   Summa theologiae, 2a2ae.47.2; cf. Aristotle, Ethics, 6.5 (1140b20). 46  Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature, p. 125. 47   Robert R. Edwards, ‘Lydgate’s Troy Book and the Confusion of Prudence’, in The North Sea World in the Middle Ages: Studies in the Cultural History of North-Western Europe, eds Thomas Liszka and Lorna Walker (Dublin, 2001), pp. 52–69 (at pp. 64–5).

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 48   Alfred Hiatt, ‘Historical Writing’, in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 171–94 (at p. 186); Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, p. 62. 49   Anne D. Hedeman, Translating the Past: Laurent de Premierfait and Boccaccio’s De Casibus (Los Angeles, 2008). 50   Text quoted from Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols., EETS es 121–4 (Oxford, 1924–7); Laurent de Premierfait’s ‘Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes’, ed. Patricia May Gathercole (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), pp. 88–9. For the accompanying expansion of Laurent’s aristocratic audience, see Guyda Armstrong, The English Boccaccio: A History in Books (Toronto, 2013), pp. 57–60. 51  Mortimer, John Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’, pp. 90–4. 52   Lesley Lawton, ‘The Illustration of Late Medieval Secular Texts, with Special Reference to Lydgate’s Troy Book’, in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 41–71 (at pp. 52–4). 53   Robert R. Edwards, ‘Translating Thebes: Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes and Stow’s Chaucer’, ELH 70 (2003), 319–41. 54   A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Influence of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes c.1440–1559: A Survey’, Mediaeval Studies 39 (1977), 424–39. 55  Karen Maxwell Merritt, ‘The Source of John Pikeryng’s Horestes’, Review of English Studies 23 (1972), 255–66. 56   Andrew Cairncross, ‘Thomas Kyd and the Myrmidons’, Arlington Quarterly 1:4 (Summer 1968), 40–5. 57   Allyna E. Ward, ‘Lucanic Irony in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine’, Modern Language Review 103 (2008), 311–29 (at pp. 327–9). 58   William Leigh Godshalk, ‘Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage’, ELH 38 (1971), 1–18 (at p. 5). 59   Emma Buckley, ‘“Live false Aeneas!” Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage and the Limits of Translation’, Classical Receptions Journal 3 (2011), 129–47 (at p. 136). 60   Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols (1957–75), vol. 6, pp. 89, 93, 107–8; Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (New Haven, 1977), pp. 145–8. 61   Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 88–9; cf. Narrative and Dramatic Sources, ed. Bullough, vol. 6, p. 87.

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Chapter 23

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Early Humanism in England Daniel Wakelin

Fifteenth-century humanist scholars tended to claim that their understanding of antiquity offered an improvement on previous scholars’ in breadth, depth, and accuracy; the ancients could speak without distortion or mediation—or at least with only the invisible conjuring of the humanists who brought them to life again. For example, Leonardo Bruni, dedicating his Latin translation of Aristotle’s Politics to Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester (1393–1447), boasted that his translation was somehow the original philosopher’s words, in a way that William of Moerbeke’s thirteenth-­ century translation was not. ‘So don’t doubt’, Bruni said, protesting too much about his unlikely claim, ‘that you’re reading Aristotle when you read this. The same could not, though, have happened when you or anybody else read the former translation— of which I’ll talk only sparingly, though, in case by carping about another’s work I seem to be boasting about my own’ (‘Itaque, ne dubita te Aristotilem legere dum ista legis. Hoc autem nec tibi nec alteri legenti antiquam translacionem contingere potuisset. De qua tamen parce loquar ne aliena carpendo, mea nimis extollere videar’).1 Fifteenth-century Italian scholars were dissatisfied with the Latin style and the accuracy of earlier translations from Greek, and English readers were receptive to their innovations: when Bruni’s translation circulated in England beyond Duke Humfrey, various owners described it in notes on flyleaves as the ‘New translation of Politics’ (‘Noua translacio libri politicorum’, ‘Textus politicorum de noua translacione’, or ‘Liber Politicorum de Novo translatus’). Had they picked up this sense of novelty from Bruni’s dedicatory epistle, or was there a widespread sense of the novelty of classical scholarship at the time?2 From the 1430s, Italian humanists writing to Duke Humfrey often stress that the ‘studia humanitatis’ are something new; John Anwykyll, a teacher in Oxford, was praised in the 1480s for his ‘new and very useful form of teaching’ (‘novam et perutilem formam docendi’) in teaching ‘humanitates’. In English, ‘humanyte’ has a new sense first recorded in 1473 for the secular humanities.3 People were identifying something new and calling it the studia humanitatis.

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The commonest translation for studia humanitatis has been humanism, making it sound more like a coherent school of thought, whereas humanism was in fact a grouping of related subjects, as the humanities are today. In the fifteenth century the humanities included grammar, poetry, rhetoric, history, secular moral philosophy, and political thought and were generally extended to the languages, literatures, history, and thought of classical Latin and Greek. The men who pursued such study in England were for the most part humanists not by profession but as a pastime (and so the term humanist in this chapter refers only to somebody’s intellectual preferences, not his occupation). Their classical reception went on alongside other reading and activities, often in the Church or the universities that served it, or as bureaucrats in royal or aristocratic service. Unsurprisingly, we find all these men also reading non-classical works and doing things other than studying. Nor is the influence of humanism limited to classical reception: humanist-trained men also undertook new endeavours in fields as diverse as education, theology, law, medicine, and government (most of which do not fall within the focus of this chapter). That wider history was most influentially told by Roberto Weiss and has been recently extended and modified by David Rundle.4 In one view, humanism exercised the deepest and subtlest influence on English literature, culture, and society in the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth, when it was most widely dispersed but thereby most diffuse.5 Nonetheless, at the centre of that dispersing circle of influence is the reception of classical antiquity within the studia humanitatis. Because classical reception involves receiving physical copies of texts and reading them, much important evidence for humanism in England comes from the history of the book and the history of reading.6 Copying—merely copying—or reading or collecting books could be deliberate acts of reception, active rather than passive processes. Although the random circulation of exemplars could limit the contents of a library, as one prior exemplar could limit the contents of a miscellany, there are often signs of deliberateness. Some evidence comes in lists—documents which order experience and record actions taken. Duke Humfrey, Bruni’s dedicatee, was collecting books deliberately by the 1430s, when he asked Piercandido Decembrio, a Milanese humanist, to send him a list of the books he should have. Then between 1439 and 1444 Humfrey donated over 300 books to the University of Oxford, including at least 81 classical or humanist works, and lists of what the university received (‘recepit’) were entered in its Register. These inventories surely had practical purposes, keeping track of a valuable gift, but they also recorded Humfrey’s collection ‘for perpetual memory of it’ (‘ad perpetuam re[i] memoriam’). The keyword is ad or ‘for the purpose of ’: this listing was a purposed effort to tell a story about scholarship.7 There were also large collections made around the same time by William Gray, bishop of Ely (c.1414–1478), and Robert Flemmyng (1416–83),8 and later by John Russell (c.1430–1494), bishop of Lincoln and chancellor under Edward IV, James Goldwell (d. 1499), ultimately bishop of Norwich, and John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester. These men often donated parts

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Early Humanism in England of  their collections to Oxford.9 The deliberation behind their large gathering and gifting of classical texts is characterized, in the case of Gray and Tiptoft, in a few surviving letters between these patrons and those who pandered to them. Shrewdly those clients often define the patrons’ humanitas as kindness, figured as material generosity. For instance, Vespasiano da Bisticci had Donato Acciaiuoli write to Gray and his companion Nicholas Saxton, praising Gray’s humanitas in buying numerous books including Plutarch’s lives.10 And patrons too shape their own story: Tiptoft on 26 January 1460 wrote from Padua to the chancellor of Oxford, then the humanist scholar Thomas Chaundler, to ‘send a list of books’, apparently enclosed but unfortunately not surviving; he ‘wanted the books to remain in their keeping as a monument and pledge of his love’ (‘hos libros, quorum indices vobis mitto, in monumentum et pignus amoris nostri perpetuo penes vos residere volo’) and to help the scholars to ‘revive the glory of long-neglected Latin, if they continually devote themselves to such study’ (‘Si iugiter impendatis operam, amisse latine lingue dignitatem . . . recuperabitis’).11 The giving, the listing, and the letter-writing suggest a self-conscious campaign of reviving antiquity by gathering books—and of thereby letting ancient, silenced tongues (‘amisse latine lingue’) speak again, as Bruni boasted. Yet was the reputation for doing this deserved by the humanists?12 Were they presenting anything new? What of the claims of novelty in the access to Aristotle’s and other writers’ voices—when ventriloquized by humanist scribes, translators into Latin, commentators, and translators into English? Was the work of the earliest humanists in England as new, and as close to antiquity, as Bruni claimed his to be?

Classical Inheritances While fifteenth-century English collectors and scholars did pursue reception in the material sense of ‘taking possession’ of books, English libraries included a large number of classical texts before their interventions (as the previous chapters have shown), and the humanists used those older copies. They continued to read manuscripts of classical literature made during the great efflorescence of monastic copying in the twelfth century.13 It is important not to overlook such second-hand book trade in this field as in others. For instance, John Tiptoft owned a copy of Caesar’s De bello Gallico made in the twelfth century in France.14 These books were not always left unadorned; the classical text could be read through a humanist lens. Robert Flemmyng owned Horace’s verse in a late eleventh-century French copy which had already been provided with glosses in earlier centuries, but Flemmyng annotated it copiously in his humanist handwriting, with extra historical details and comparisons with Greek in places.15 As humanist script was modelled largely on manuscripts in caroline minuscule, the predominant form of script from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, Flemmyng’s handwriting has similarities to the twelfth-century manuscript’s.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature It would be interesting to know how he would have dated the book and what historical distance he felt from it; but he did absorb the book into new forms of humanist scholarship. Similarly, a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid made in Italy around 1400 in a gothic script ended up owned by a canon of Salisbury, William Brygon (d. 1469), and then by John Russell. At some point, two English scribes added fifteenth-century materials: Thomas Candour added Maffeo Veggio’s new thirteenth book of the Aeneid and another added a different work by Veggio.16 These additions were made in handwriting modelled, again, on humanist script, suggesting that this older manuscript had met the humanist taste of later users. Older forms of classical scholarship were also of continued use. For example, a commentary on Valerius Maximus’ De factis et dictis memorabilibus by Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro (d. 1342) was acquired, along with the text itself, in a few copies. Both text and commentary were known before the humanists were working; they are cited, for instance, in two English sermons datable 1389–1404 in a collection alongside one by Hugh Legat of St Albans.17 But the older commentary remained in  the collections of scholars of humanist taste from Duke Humfrey to John Gunthorpe.18 For instance, a new copy was made at St Albans for the use of monks who went to study in Oxford, in handwriting modelled on that of twelfth-century English manuscripts. Just as Italian scholars formed humanist script on continental caroline minuscule, this English scribe aped the late caroline minuscule or proto­ gothic script of twelfth-century English monasteries.19 The same text and commentary were then also copied for William Gray in handwriting modelled on gothic textualis, the script preferred between the late twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, in a variety typical of Italian scribes, but with Dionigi’s commentary in handwriting modelled on humanist script—again presenting long-known classical scholarship anew within a self-consciously humanist frame. That was not quite fitting, given the age of Dionigi’s work.20 Moreover, the commentary here alternates with the classical text, interrupting it, and the commentary frequently quotes post-classical sources for information, such as Isidore of Seville or Hugutio of Pisa, alongside Livy or other, more classical ones, and the scribe of Gray’s copy picks out references to them in the margins, just as he does references to classical authors.21 Humanist attention to the classics built on pre-humanist scholarship that mediated the classical author’s voice. This could be taken to extreme lengths in filleting non-classical texts for information about antiquity. Even scholars familiar with humanist classical learning could be interested in the classicism of previous generations. For example, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fabricated history of Britain founded by Brutus the Trojan was read by John Russell in a thirteenth-century manuscript of various chronicles of British history. His annotations show his interest in history beyond the classics; like most English humanist readers, his reading material was more diverse than the label ‘humanist’ suggests. But he also picked out pseudo-classical material: at the front of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history, he sketched a genealogy from Priam, Anchises,

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Early Humanism in England and Latinus, showing their progeny in parallel lines and parallel wording, to Brutus ‘whose descendants ruled Britain’ (‘huius posterij dominati sunt in britannia’) and Silvius Postumus ‘whose descendants ruled Italy’ (‘huius posterij dominati sunt in italia’). And as if to legitimize this nonsense, he highlighted in the margin Geoffrey’s supporting evidence: ‘note that Homer speaks of this Brutus’ (‘nota quod homerus loquitur de isto bruto’).22 Despite the fact that he also owned Virgil’s Aeneid in both manuscript and print, Russell picks out approvingly this spurious story of the Trojan exodus.23 The broad taste of other humanists is evident in the use of humanist script in England as the model for copies of twelfth- to fourteenth-century texts, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, Guido della Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, or Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus, the latter owned both by William Gray and his chaplain, Nicholas Saxton.24 Humanists continued to read older copies of classical texts, older forms of classical scholarship—and indeed things other than the classics.

New Acquisitions Yet such inherited books and ideas seemingly did not satisfy English humanists, for texts which had long been to hand in manuscripts were also then acquired in further copies. For instance, the twelfth-century copy of Caesar’s De bello Gallico owned by Tiptoft (above) was the exemplar for two transcriptions in humanist handwriting by English scribes.25 Scholars such as John Gunthorpe might own twelfth-century copies of some works, as he did of Suetonius’ history of the Caesars, but make their own copies of others, even of works such as Horace’s satires which had been widely circulated for centuries.26 These acquisitions were not necessarily always presented in the obvious guise of humanist handwriting. Yet such copies could be framed by notes of ownership or annotations revealing connections to keen classical scholars, displaying humanist kinds of philological or rhetorical scholarship, or in handwriting based on humanist script. For instance a copy of Livy’s history in fifteenth-­century handwriting modelled on English fere-textura was annotated with cross-references in humanist handwriting, to Servius’ commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid and to Pliny.27 It does not at first look like a humanist book but its writing and reading might be inspired by it. Moreover, as well as acquiring long-known works, English owners and readers acquired new works, and there was an increase in the range of the classical corpus available in England. In particular, they acquired several works newly discovered and numerous new translations of Greek works. These activities of reception—of getting new materials—changed the classical canon in England. As Rodney Thomson has noted, bibliophiles in England were quick to get their hands on works rediscovered by Italian scholars.28 For instance, even the well-known Cicero became better

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature known after the discovery of his letters in the fourteenth century, in which Petrarch and Collucio Salutati played important parts, and of his speech Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino, discovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1415. Some of the letters and the speech feature in Duke Humfrey’s first gift to the University of Oxford in 1439, quite novel donations; they then remained in Oxford, often annotated, allowing an ancient to speak in new ways.29 English owners even laid hands on what has since become one of the most mythic humanist rediscoveries, Lucretius’ poem De rerum natura, rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini. It was not brought to England by Poggio himself on his stay with Cardinal Henry Beaufort in 1418–22, for he had loaned it to Niccolò Niccoli; but it was copied, in the line of descent from Niccoli’s copy, for John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, during his visit to Italy in 1459–61.30 In Padua, Tiptoft collected several new discoveries—Manilius’ Astronomica, Silius Italicus’ Punica, and part of Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, other poems rediscovered by Poggio—and it is tempting to wonder whether he collected them specifically as novelties.31 Some were annotated by Tiptoft and by his secretary John Free.32 Alongside these rediscoveries, scholars in England acquired numerous, often short, new translations of Greek texts. Several men knew enough Greek to use it in glossaries or annotations or to add a colophon, but only a few actually owned Greek books—notably John Free, who owned a miscellany of tragedies and odes, and who translated works, as did William Sellyng.33 In fact such translations of Greek works into Latin were far more common. Some of these works had been known for centuries, as had Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, available since the thirteenth century in the Latin of William of Moerbeke.34 Indeed, it has been argued that English readers responded to translations of Aristotle, among the range of works that humanists offered, because of their continuity with earlier scholarship.35 Bruni’s translations were presented as novelties (as noted at the start of this chapter) but there are signs that they were soon assimilated into familiar reading-practices. Aristotle’s Ethics had a long academic career behind it, and so it is no surprise that many copies of Bruni’s translation were handled by people who were studying or had studied in Oxford, to judge by names in colophons and styles of binding.36 Bruni’s translation of the Ethics was printed in Oxford in 1479, by a printer with connections to the university’s stationer, Thomas Hunt, and copies of that, too, survive with annotations and notes of ownership that suggest use in the university.37 For instance, one printed copy, with jottings recording payments from a prior of Osney outside Oxford, has a detailed commentary in the first few pages of Books I, IV, and VI. There is little of the explication of language or form more typical of humanist annotations; there are explications instead of the purpose of human life or parts of the human soul and, later, haphazard reflections on moral topics such as avarice and magnificence. The commentator felt no qualms in supplementing Aristotle’s words and Bruni’s translation with his own paraphrase of what ‘here the Philosopher proposes’ (‘hic philosophus proponit’) and ‘here explains’ (‘hic narrat’)—referring to Aristotle as ‘the philosopher’,

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Early Humanism in England as if he were the only philosopher worth citing, just as scholars had done for centuries before humanism expanded their canon of Greek philosophy.38 Although Aristotle himself was supposed to speak anew through Bruni, his work was assimilated into established practices of academic reading.

Political Reading Three of the surviving manuscripts and one of the printed copies of Aristotle’s Ethics were bound with his Politics in Bruni’s translation.39 Some manuscripts of this work, too, from the third quarter of the fifteenth century have provenances in or bindings from Oxford.40 This work might have fitted less easily into the curriculum of the fifteenth-century university, with its focus on ecclesiastical careers. It was typical, though, of many of the translations from Greek read in fifteenth-century England in its political focus. Duke Humfrey commissioned the version of Politics and there have been proposed quite practical motives for that.41 Academic readers might have had more abstract interests. One reader of Aristotle’s Politics, for instance, made few annotations but those few picked out the different structures for government, the role of law, and the limits of liberty, for instance identifying the dangers of rule for the benefit of few or one: what a tyrant is (‘Nota quid sit Tyrannis’) or what freedom there would be under popular rule (‘libertas in populari statu’).42 Such topics were not unthinkable with Aristotle’s works in hand. Other translated Greek works newly available in mid- and late fifteenth-century England could also have invited thoughts about the best systems of government. Most obviously, Plato’s Republic was translated into Latin by Piercandido Decembrio and dedicated to Duke Humfrey in stages until its completion in 1440–1; Duke Humfrey gave a copy of the finished work to Oxford in 1443/44, and at least three other copies circulated in England.43 Also widely circulated was Xenophon’s Hiero, translated into Latin by Bruni, another work which, more obliquely, considers the nature of government. Hiero explains why he is unhappy to be an autocratic ruler— what tirannos in Greek technically means—and the poet Simonides then imagines how to reform such a system of government—say, by a separation of powers of the judiciary and police from the monarch, encouragement of competition, management of an army, public finances—in a way that would not feel out of place in eighteenth-­ century America. When first written in Florence at the start of the fifteenth century, Bruni’s translation had been an intervention in a local debate about the nature of monarchical rule.44 Its relevance to differing systems of government was marked in many copies in England, which entitled it not Hiero but ‘tirannus’.45 In one copy it is followed by excerpts from a fourteenth-century attack on royal overreach and ends with a warning to kings to listen and learn (‘Audite reges et intelligite’).46 Four miscellanies place Hiero alongside Athenian orations on political behaviour by Isocrates

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature and neo-Latin discussions of hypocrisy and false friends, favourite topics of courtly critique and counsel.47 Of course, for centuries educated scholars had criticized and satirized the court; they did not need to read classical or neo-Latin works to do so. But, just as for Bruni himself, Xenophon’s Hiero might have been important for legitimizing—under the cover of scholarly translation—thinking about such constitutional questions. Yet politics were not the only topic of translations from the Greek. The same miscellanies also gathered up Greek learning on ethical questions and, in the works of the Church Fathers, religious questions too. Indeed, one could imagine interpreting the first half of Xenophon’s Hiero as a rebuke to worldly things in general— the limited pleasures of food, sex, friendship—as well as a lament about the misery of tyranny. Sure enough, it was also copied alongside works such as Plutarch’s moral essays in some anthologies from England. One such miscellany owned by Edmund Norton was bound with devotional writings including Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vitae.48 Also commonly found alongside Bruni’s version of Hiero was his version of  St Basil’s letter to young men entering the religious life, Ad iuvenes, explaining why they should read the pagan classics nonetheless. The conjunction is first found in the  manuscript which Bruni himself sent to Duke Humfrey but it persists, diluting the political focus of the other translation.49 In one miscellany, made in Italy but owned by James Goldwell, Xenophon and St Basil’s works are accompanied also by works of Lactantius, the early Christian apologist especially popular with humanists, and Pierpaolo Vergerio’s De ingenuis moribus, another defence of a humanist education.50

Grammatical Reading As David Rundle has noted, in some anthologies which gather up many translations from Greek, an interest in ancient political ideas coexists with an interest in the grammar and style of their modern translations.51 Xenophon’s and Isocrates’ works were copied with scribal paratexts and readers’ annotations, notably a shared glossary of obscure words. There is one English synonym given in the glossary, ‘fleshoke’ for ‘fustula’ (sic),52 but this is not a glossary for basic comprehension, say, to ease access to the ideas in the works; it seems instead designed to help readers to acquire the more classicizing Latin of Italian authors and translators. It could also suggest an interest not in classical Greek but in contemporary Latin, not in receiving old texts but composing new ones. Yet, of course, the kinds of contemporary Latin on show for imitation in these miscellanies were classicizing, if not classical, in their grammar and rhetoric. Many of the entries are distinctly philological. It explains etymological roots in other Latin words, for instance noting that ‘Patrius, -a, -um, diriuatur a patre’ (‘Fatherly is derived from father’), and in four cases in Greek words.53 Others explain

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Early Humanism in England classical knowledge needed to understand proper nouns or to give colour to them, for instance explaining that Eurotas is a river in Arcadia and that Doricus comes from Dorus, the name of Neptune’s son.54 The derivation of etymologies to improve one’s Latin had a long tradition before the humanists in the work of men such as Osbern of Gloucester,55 but it remains in such a glossary consonant with the humanist interest in understanding the classical inheritance of the language of Bruni and other recent scholars. Other manuscripts also contained tools, provided in advance while copying or added later while reading, which improve the linguistic and historical knowledge needed to read classical literature. Those paratexts included linguistic glosses; notes identifying topics, especially proper nouns; notes identifying exempla and sententiae; notes identifying authors cited; glossaries of vocabulary, with varying degrees of philological detail; full commentaries; and tables of contents and indexes. They are scattered widely in various people’s collections, as in the books owned by Richard Bole (d. 1477), an associate of William Gray. For instance, Bole too copied a glossary of difficult words, like that in the miscellanies including Xenophon’s Hiero, which gives etymologies in Latin for several words. It notes, say, that ‘The ground comes from grinding because it is ground down by feet’ (‘Terra dicitur a terendo, eo quod pedibus atteritur’) and that ‘The sole of the foot or bottommost part is so called after solidity, because the earth is continuous and not divided at all’ (‘Solum a soliditate vocatur, eo quod terra continua sit et nulla diuisione diuiditur’).56 With these basic words, there is an interest in the surface of language—in the visual and sonic form of words and in the likenesses of ideas that might suggest. There is a fleeting sense of classical literature as a coherent corpus, when a very few of the glosses cite uses of the word in other authors’ work, as for the rarely attested singular forms of verbus and viscus, used only, the gloss says, in lines quoted from Virgil and Ovid. (This entry in the glossary seems to be taken from Bede’s De orthographia, though the source is not named.57) And there is an interest in classical history, in which genre many of the glossed words would be found, and snippets of which are cited to explain technical terms: for instance, under legio or cohors the glossary lists the subdivisions or numbers of soldiers in these units of the army.58 Similarly, an early fifteenth-century Italian copy of Valerius Maximus’ De factis et dictis memorabilibus acquired by Bole has on its back parchment flyleaves an index and a glossary of technical terms relating to Roman military and civic offices: ‘Here are noted the names of the offices and dignities of the city of Rome, as they appear below’ (‘Hic annotata sunt nomina officiorum et dignitatum vrbis rome vt patebit infra’).59 There is an interest here in historicizing Latin vocabulary within the culture which informs it. Bole often bought books with, or modified his books with, apparatus such as these which render classical texts more reader-friendly.60 Some he devised himself, some he seems to have inherited. The former glossary’s rough, unhelpful layout, out of alphabetical order and with several entries run together in the second half, might

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature suggest that Bole is composing it here in a first draft; but a few slips of the pen could suggest that he is copying it.61 The latter glossary for Valerius Maximus looks as though it were copied from another source, rather than composed by this reader, as the layout is consistent. Also, the ink changes mid-sentence at one point, as though he could readily pick up where he left off one stint, because he was copying from an exemplar.62 This book then accrued, from further readers, copious new annotations throughout its margins and between the lines, offering more information, commentary, glossing of vocabulary, or highlighting of names and authorities. Some are short linguistic glosses placed between the lines; some identify rhetorical or structural features in the margins; other long marginalia explain historical references or provide cross-references to other classical works.63 The text of Valerius Maximus’ work, then, is placed in its historical context. Bole, who made a copy of Sallust’s two histories, also copied two commentaries on each of them in a separate volume.64 Presumably, as there are two on each, he was gathering them up rather than composing them himself. Bole inherited glosses on Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, perhaps copied from a manuscript owned by Gray.65 But that earlier manuscript of works by or ascribed to Seneca, Bole annotated copiously for himself, in places marking every other line or so or even filling the margin, as on a few pages of Seneca’s Quaestiones naturales.66 In this book, as in Gray’s copy of Valerius Maximus (discussed p. 490), the humanists happily acquire classical texts with commentaries interrupting them—the original authors, but accompanied by non-classical writing and reading which framed, mediated, and even physically displaced the original. Bole is unafraid to interpret and gloss the classical text—to intervene between it and any future reader of this book when it circulates to others, say, in Gray’s household or his former college. For instance, in his annotations on Seneca’s works, Bole is happy to interpret Pseudo-Seneca’s vague reference to a tormentor as a reference to Nero in the spurious correspondence between Seneca and St Paul—‘de nerone intelligit’—telling us how to understand. And he might well take this information, if it is not general knowledge, from a commentary which accompanies the correspondence between Pseudo-Seneca and Pseudo-St Paul in this book.67 Incidentally, Bole thereby historicizes the Christian Church within the Roman Empire; he also, though, Christianizes antiquity: he notes with delight that St Paul clearly (‘manifeste’) states that Seneca was Christian.68 That said, Bole tends not to annotate the commentaries on works as he does the works themselves.69 He might still have read them, but the only acts of attention he records for posterity are directed to the original classical texts. And he studies those texts with loving attention to their meaning, picking out their referents or clarifying with synonyms, and to their rhetorical structure. Even noting references to Seneca’s tormentor, Nero, is not only a solipsistic Christianizing (and what else could it be given the spurious text Bole had received?) but also a responsible attempt to understand meaning in context, like the historical information about Latin words in the glossaries.70 Other annotations by Bole direct the reader

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Early Humanism in England away from one classical work but back to another one in cross-references, say to Valerius Maximus’ De factis et dictis memorabilibus, Cicero’s Disputationes Tusculanae, and Sallust’s histories, all of which Bole at some point owned.71 He also collates copies of the same work (‘Aliqui libri habent’, ‘Alius liber sic habet’), as though seeking to reconstruct the author’s words despite the mediation of scribal copies.72 This collation is not unique to humanist editing: of course it had a long prior tradition in biblical scholarship.73 But it exemplifies the special care for mastering classical languages and texts evident in other paratexts in humanist books from England.

New Writing As well as these commentaries and glosses, English scholars also acquired, read, and eventually wrote longer works which introduced classical languages, literature, history, and ideas afresh. There were manuals of grammar and rhetoric, reforming fifteenth-century Latinity into classical form for educational use: a grammar composed by John Anwykyll, a master at Magdalen College School in Oxford (d. 1487), declaredly under the influence of Niccolò Perotti and Lorenzo Valla,74 and Lorenzo Traversagni’s Nova rhetorica, a follow-up to his own lectures on the pseudo-­Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium in Cambridge in the 1470s.75 The Latin correspondence and oratory of various English scholars, such as John Free, John Gunthorpe, William Sellyng, and those who wrote on behalf of the University of Oxford, adopted tics of  classical style.76 Other writers in England composed works which newly interpreted the ideas of antiquity: Pietro del Monte, while serving as papal protonotary in England, composed part of his correspondence with Guarino about the respective merits of Caesar and Cicero—again reflecting debates about the best sort of government through the lens of classical history.77 Between 1473 and 1486 John Doget, a scholar of King’s College in Cambridge, composed a commentary on Plato’s Phaedo in Bruni’s translation.78 New works, following classical models, were also composed by Italian scholars in England and by English scholars. The closest and most amusing influence is in a copy of Giovanni Aurispa’s Latin translation of Lucian’s Greek dialogues of the dead; into a dialogue between Alexander, Hannibal, and Scipio, boasting who is best, somebody added a further speech by Henry V, who of course wins.79 Others pursued imitation of classical genres and styles: Henry V was praised again in a Vita Henrici Quinti by Tito Livio Frulovisi, employed as ‘orator’ by Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, Henry’s brother, and that Vita adopted grammatical idioms and structures from Sallust.80 Thomas Chaundler wrote dialogues, perhaps in imitation of Cicero’s or of Italian neo-Latin ones, from which he plagiarizes passages wholesale.81 Scholars in England were finding new responses to classical literature in Latin. Others began to translate and respond in English. The vernacular was never entirely isolated from humanist scholarship. Even accomplished scholars did intermittently

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature gloss their classical and neo-Latin texts in English.82 A few writers went further to translate classical texts into English from the 1430s on. There were also translations of pseudo-classical neo-Latin texts by Petrarch, Boccaccio, Collucio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, and Buonaccorso da Montemagno.83 The uses of the vernacular for classical studies, though, are not too easy to map onto the studia humanitatis, for the works translated into English between c.1440 and 1490 were not the sole preserve of the humanists nor did they duplicate closely the preferences evident in the Latin manuscripts collected by humanists in England. While humanists collected many Latin translations of Greek works, there were only two translations from a neo-Latin version of a Greek text, John Skelton’s translation of Diodorus Siculus’ Greek Bibliotheca historica (before 1490),84 from the humanist Latin translation by Poggio Bracciolini, as well as William Caxton’s translation and printing of the same work’s prologue. John Skelton also translated Cicero’s letters into prose, but the translation unfortunately does not survive.85 And while political and moral essays were frequently read in Greek and in Latin, there were only two pieces of moral prose translated: Cicero’s moral essays De senectute translated by William Worcester (before 1472) and of De amicitia (certainly before 1481, most likely before 1471) by William Worcester or by John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester. There are two translations from classical verse before 1500, both shaped by their uses in particular situations. A version of part of Claudian’s De consulatu Stiliconis (1445), almost certainly by Osbern Bokenham (b. 1392/3, d. in or after 1464), was offered as a panegyric for its dedicatee, Richard, Duke of York. Snippets of Terence’s plays, in dramatic verse, were translated for use in a conversational phrasebook of Vulgaria quedam abs Terencio (1483), compiled for Magdalen College School in Oxford by Anwykyll.86 Both make sense within practices of epideictic rhetoric or of grammatical education which the humanists pursued, though they were not new or limited to humanism. Whether humanist studies were a necessary inspiration looks debatable when we consider the sources of two translations from late classical practical prose, an agricultural manual and a military one: On Husbondrie (between 1439 and 1443) from Palladius’ De re rustica and Knyghthode and Bataile (1460–1) from Vegetius’ Epitoma rei militaris.87 The possible practical value of these works meant that they had remained of interest long before humanists influenced people’s responses to antiquity; the decision to translate them did not need a humanist inspiration. The humanists did improve the knowledge of Palladius’ work: Florentine scholars discovered a lost section of Palladius’ work, on grafting vines;88 but that new discovery did not make it into On Husbondrie. And, anyway, people had read Palladius’ De re rustica as well as agricultural works by Cato and Varro widely throughout the previous millennium.89 A few notes in extant copies trace the usefulness of Palladius’ work to readers in England.90 Yet English scholars of humanist taste did continue to show an interest in classical agricultural works. Piercandido Decembrio put the other agricultural authors, Columella, Varro, and Cato, on his list of desiderata for the library of Duke

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Early Humanism in England Humfrey, and Humfrey gave a copy of Palladius’ work in Latin to the library of the university in Oxford.91 The choice of content to translate this work could have been traditional or innovative. Likewise, the decision to translate Vegetius’ Epitoma rei militaris need not have owed anything to humanism; interest in Vegetius’ work had been steady for centuries, in England since copies were made there in the eleventh century.92 At least ­forty-three manuscripts of Vegetius’ work were in circulation in England before 1500. As well as numerous copies of the Latin text, there were at least four copies of thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century French translations in England before 1500, and eleven of the translation into English made in 1408.93 Vegetius’ work had often been cited in political writing, for warfare was a component of governance; the work often circulated, in Latin as in English, alongside Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, and its practical advice on war continued to be read by military men in the earlier French translations and English prose translation.94 Yet Vegetius’ work was sought out by humanists in Italy such as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini.95 In England humanists shared this interest: Robert Flemmyng gave a twelfth-century copy to Lincoln College in Oxford,96 and a fifteenth-century copy, alongside Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum and extracts of Pliny, was accessible to Thomas Gascoigne, associate of humanists in Oxford.97 And even the long-standing vernacular traditions could please humanist patrons. Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, was given a copy of a French translation of Vegetius’ Epitoma and of Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, although the gift might have met his chivalric taste rather than his classicizing one, for notes about feats of arms in Paris are written in one margin.98 The earlier English prose translation was owned by Thomas Rotherham, the chancellor of Cambridge and chancellor to Edward IV, who owned many other classical texts.99 The new translation Knyghthode and Bataile seems unexceptional within such traditions. Yet both On Husbondrie and Knyghthode and Bataile present themselves as novelties. The poet of On Husbondrie claims that he is striving to find ‘Oon nouelte’ or literary novelty to offer to Duke Humfrey, the dedicatee of his translation; and he claims that he serves Humfrey alongside the Italian humanist scholars Pietro del Monte, Tito Livio Frulovisi, and Antonio Beccaria.100 Knyghthode and Bataile is obviously an imitation of the style, structure, and page-layout of On Husbondrie—though it differs subtly in its method of translation—and it presents the recovery of Vegetius’ lore as a way of reviving ancient military glory to aid Henry VI, its dedicatee.101

Grammatical Translation What is distinctive about their classicism emerges less from the choice of content than from the method and style of translating. These English translations reveal an

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature interest in the authentic classical text—despite the mediation of translation—similar in spirit to Bruni’s claims about his translation of Aristotle. On Husbondrie illustrates this attention to the method and style of capturing the ancient author’s voice. First, unlike the looser interpretative translations of the preceding centuries, it hews very closely to Palladius’ De re rustica, omitting only a couple of lines and reordering just one passage.102 The translator seems to have worked methodically starting each of Palladius’ short chapters with a new stanza. That could have felt clunky, as indeed Palladius’ Latin prose does, but the English poet uses phrases that shift the focus to close one stanza and lead into another, and uses different cohesive phrases in varying positions, instead of Palladius’ repetitive ‘hoc mense’.103 And his closeness is not crabbedness: unlike fifteenth-century prose translators who used a ‘stencil’ method of close calquing, the poet shows skill at the local level in modifying the phrasing to create the lively rhythms of speech, for instance favouring rhetorical questions, where none appears in the Latin.104 A few such tiny modifications of phrasing are marked ‘interpositio’ with interlinear notes.105 Moreover, the poem preserves Palladius’ words not only in substance but in a style which seems designed to sound classical. There are a few needless additions of classical deities such as Phoebus as a paraphrase for sol or the sun and Phoebe for luna or the moon; such are typical of fifteenth-century post-Chaucerian verse.106 More strikingly, the poem has a remarkably Latinate diction, with many words lifted straight from the Latin and others Latinate without precedent in the source. For instance, in Books IX and X (436 lines in total), there are perhaps thirty-six words used for the first time in English, including some calqued straight from Latin and recorded seldom or never again, such as ador, complose, librament, obnumbration, pampine, pastine, and uliginous.107 These borrowings are so frequent that they give the translation a distinctive style; and that stylistic exercise seems to be the point. A couple of times the poet remarks on the odd vocabulary he is transferring into English: This opium Quirinaik (the Greek So nameth it, so doth myn auctor eek)   [my author also]

While such comments could create a distance from the classical language, the concession is itself a classical gesture, taken from Palladius’ own comment when he transfers vocabulary from Greek into Latin (‘quirenaicon, as the Greeks call it’, ‘Quirenaicon, quod Graeci sic appellant’); there are other passages of self-conscious comment on exotic ‘namys’ taken by the English poet direct from Palladius, just as he takes the exotic names themselves.108 There is a real interest in the Latin vocabulary which underlies this English poem. Even comments on Latin etymology are transferred despite not working in English: Palladius tells us about the etymology of latuca or lettuce from lac or milk (‘it is called lactuca because it is full of milk’, ‘lactuca dicta est quod abundantia lactis exuberet’) and the poet explains the same in English, even though the Latin thereby needs translating:

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Early Humanism in England Letuce of lac derived is perchaunce ffor mylk hit hath or yeueth aboundaunce.  [it has or gives]

Incidentally, this might be the first recorded use in English of derive to describe etymology, echoing Latin diriuatur, as in one of the Latin glossaries (quoted above).109 Finally, the layout of the presentation manuscript for Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, would seem to encourage such study, as it includes hundreds of interlinear glosses which give the Latin for various English words. Only a few of these notes gloss unfamiliar Latinate idioms such as ablative absolutes or borrowed words such as psilotre.110 Rather, most gloss monosyllabic words used in everyday English for centuries, most not even ambiguous homonyms, say. It is not Latin that needs explaining, but plain English that needs to be turned into Latin, almost as though teaching basic vocabulary such as farm animals or farming equipment, as vocabulary lists long had (though there’s no evidence for such use of this poem).111 The interest in learning, borrowing, etymologizing, and authorizing Latin vocabulary sits well alongside the linguistic interests of the annotations and glossaries to classical texts compiled or copied by English humanist scribes and readers. Just as they studied classical Latin, with glossaries and notes, so readers might study Latin in this English poem. That project, and perhaps the prestige of its association with Duke Humfrey, evidently inspired Knyghthode and Bataile. There is a slight difference: Knyghthode and Bataile is in fact an extremely free translation, often abridging or adapting Vegetius’ Epitoma for new political purposes. But it at least professes fidelity, more volubly than does On Husbondrie. And while its vocabulary is not quite as astonishing in its Latinity, it does involve calquing a lot of Latin military jargon and words used in English for the first time; its syntax is just as Latinate. It also imitates On Husbondrie in having an alphabetical index, keyed to numbered folios and lettered stanzas, which digests, and directs the reader to, military terminology.112 The presentation of Vegetius’ Epitoma with an index is traditional, in that several older manuscripts in England had indexes, tables of contents, or summaries, often in English.113 One copy of the French translation of Frontinus’ Stratagems, a similar work, had an alphabetical list of ‘certain terms in this book which cannot be translated well word for word without some obscurity’ (‘daucuns noms qui sont en ce liure lesquelx ne se pououient bonnement translater de mot a mot sans aucune obscurete’), in practice many technical terms from the Roman military life such as ‘Centurion’, ‘Centeme’, and ‘Cohorte’.114 A copy of the 1408 translation into English included marginal notes which picked out technical vocabulary such as ‘What a cohors is’ or ‘what a testitudo is’ (‘Quid est cohors’, ‘testitudo quid est’, and so on).115 The elaborate apparatus in Knyghthode and Bataile continues this interest in learning the complex Latin vocabulary of Vegetius which the poem calques. It also evokes the paratexts of books owned by English humanists, such as the glossaries copied by Richard Bole of classical military terms found in the works of Sallust (noted above).

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The page-layout of other verse translations makes the connection of English translation to classical scholarship even closer: the translation of Claudian’s De consulatu Stiliconis by Bokenham is presented on pages facing Claudian’s Latin poem, as though one might want to practice double translation from this book, or at least check the closeness of the translation to the source.116 John Anwykyll’s Vulgaria quedam abs Terencio, printed in Oxford in 1483 and much reprinted thereafter, is explicitly designed to allow the reader to study classical Latin.117 By contrast, the fifteenth-century English translations of classical texts into prose are not presented in page-layouts which would encourage the reader to learn Latin. They could in theory have been: Laurent de Premierfait’s French version of De senectute, William Worcester’s source, was presented in two early copies along with the Latin.118 Alternating layouts had been used by William Caxton already for Cato’s Distichs, a schoolroom favourite still used by humanist teachers, now printed alongside Benedict Burgh’s English verse translation, and would be used only two years later for Vulgaria quedam abs Terencio.119 Yet such a parallel or alternating text was not used for Caxton’s printed edition of 1481, the only form in which the prose translations from Cicero, Worcester’s De senectute and Tiptoft’s De amicitia, survive, nor in the manuscript of Skelton’s translation of Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliotheca historica. But then nor are the prose translations very close to their classical source. William Worcester’s version of De senectute follows not Cicero’s Latin but a previous French translation by Laurent de Premierfait. Skelton rewords his Bibliotheca historica very freely, pursuing a mode of amplifying which, Jane Griffiths has argued, taps into vernacular traditions of the poet as embellisher or adorner, as a display of Skelton’s skill.120 That amplified style is, however, often Latinate and so perhaps classicizing in its diction, and a little more like the verse translations—perhaps reflecting Skelton’s poetic inheritance and aspirations.121 The rendering of On Friendship by John Tiptoft is very close to its Latin source but in ways different from On Husbondrie and Knyghthode and Bataile. It is in fact much closer to its source than they are in its syntax and sentence-structure, on occasion to the point of gibberish in handling conjunctions and relative pronouns. This translator does not avail himself of the freedom to make his own phrases that the translator of On Husbondrie does, whether because it is not in verse which could force him so to do, because he is simply less skilled, or because he seeks a very close translation—perhaps as a crib to the Latin. While he does sometimes reproduce the Latin vocabulary closely, he eschews the more elaborate calques and borrowings of the verse translations; some Latinate words are avoided for ones recorded in English for a long time: for instance, Latin ‘eruditi’ becomes ‘the wel vndirstondyng men’, presumably because erudite is not yet known as an adjective or noun.122 And where there are Latinate words, whereas the verse translations let them sit on the page untranslated or unglossed, the prose translation of On Friendship presents some of them in doublets which clarify them.123 Is this less erudite? Or is it to ensure that they are understood in sense and not just admired for

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Early Humanism in England their style? A real recourse to the ideas of the original works and not an effort to learn Latin?

Political Transferral After all, the Ciceronian works translated into English in full—whether through French or directly—fit into a widespread interest in Ciceronian ideas in England in the second half of the fifteenth century. Those ideas circulated not only in the original works and these two translations but also in new political writing, often of a practical everyday sort, such as exhortatory treatises and speeches, and sometimes in English.124 Most extensively suffused with Ciceronian ideas was William Worcester’s political treatise The Boke of Noblesse, which he completed in 1475. His translation of De senectute fed it; indeed, parts of The Boke of Noblesse are a translation—perhaps a fresh one, perhaps a variant or revision of his full translation—from Premierfait’s French version. And Worcester’s Ciceronianism went further: he consulted other works too, including trying to reconstruct the lost De re publica from the excerpts cited by Nonius Marcellus.125 Nor is The Boke of Noblesse unique in this recourse to Cicero’s works and Ciceronian ideas. Worcester, who had read De amicitia too, he reports in letters, could refer to its ideas off hand in his correspondence: he wrote to Richard Calle, ‘A very frende at nede experience will schewe be deede, as wele as be autorité of Aristotle in the Etiques that he made of maralité; also by the famous Reamayn Tullius in his litell booke de Amicicia.’126 He is alluding presumably to such passages of De amicitia as the claim that ‘a certayn frende is knowen in vncertayn seasons’. This is not a loose allusion but a precise quotation; this is Cicero’s real voice—or in fact Cicero is quoting Ennius’ verse, which Tiptoft’s translation captured by preserving much of the wordplay on the sound in the Latin (‘amicus certus in re incerto cernitur’), and which Worcester recreates in his letter by turning Ennius’ line of verse into an English rhyming couplet (on ‘nede’ and ‘deede’).127 This is only a fleeting allusion in a letter, but Cicero’s ideas are thereby in circulation and the form of his or Ennius’ words is evoked too. Worcester also cites Aristotle’s Ethics here, and as he knew Leonardo Bruni’s work, this could conceivably have been Bruni’s new-ish translation.128 But there is not as much or not as visible influence from Aristotle in his or others’ works in English in the late fifteenth century. Nor is there the abstract interest in the organization of political systems—tyranny, monarchy, liberty—that is just about visible in some works translated from Greek, a few annotations on them, and a few new works by Italian humanists which reached England. Rather, from Cicero’s moral essays— the two translated, as well as De officiis read in numerous printed copies from 1467 onwards, and Disputationes Tusculanae—there was an input of ideas about political ethics. As John Watts and others have traced, educated men in fifteenth-century

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature England developed an interest in public responsibility—both for royalty but also for the aristocracy, laymen, and churchmen who served in parliament and local office-holding—the monarchical republic. But the sort of classical reception these ideas entail is difficult to espy, for it is dispersed and diluted. It might be glimpsed in three sermons composed by John Russell for the opening of parliaments under Edward V and Richard III. The sermons do draw on classical reading, partly for showy allusions to befit the occasion, like all manner of occasional political writing from the mid-fifteenth century on, but not only for that. Only one of Russell’s quotations sounds like a memory of a scattered commonplace: a line from Terence’s Brothers which is cited anonymously as ‘hyt ys . . . sayd’.129 Otherwise, Russell cites works of which the copies he owned still survive, such as those of Plutarch and Pliny, both favourites with other humanists in England.130 More importantly, Russell not only cites single lines but reflects on classical history at length. He makes astonishingly direct comparisons between ancient and modern government, comparing the House of Lords to the senate where power really lies, and the Commons to the tribunes called in for consultation; he sees the Roman and English systems ‘grettly correspondente’ so that ‘all is oo thynge, that that the Romaynes did in ther tyme, and that we do nowe’.131 He supports his ideas by details of classical history recalled from Valerius Maximus and, to a lesser extent, Sallust, both read closely by other scholars in England (as noted above). On the one hand, Russell’s sermons are less attentive to the details of these authors’ language and to the alterity of the world behind that language than were interpretative genres such as the glossaries or annotations in Latin manuscripts. On the other hand, Russell is thoughtful about Roman political ideas, rather than merely about political vocabulary. He is less interested in the classical authors’ own voices than in the contemporary resonance of what they have to say.132 Similarly, the thinking of the sermons is Ciceronian in its conceptions of political behaviour: it rebukes ‘singular’ selfishness and exhorts us to serve ‘the comon and public body’.133 Russell’s two copies of De officiis survive, in the printed edition of 1466, one filled with numerous interlinear glosses in English, so the influence is entirely explicable.134 Yet John Watts has rightly noted that Cicero’s ‘is the greatest influence’ on Russell’s writing but also ‘the least acknowledged’.135 Cicero’s ideas are everywhere and yet now nowhere—his voice silenced just as it is heard most internally. Likewise, Russell does cite Aristotle too, citing ‘the defunicion that Aristotle maketh 4o Politicorum quod Ingenuitas est virtus et diuitie antique, Noblesse is vertu and auncienne Richesse’—which is why inheritance obliges the aristocracy to good governance.136 We are indeed reading Aristotle, word for word. But what we are reading is not Bruni’s translation, by the 1480s widely circulated and printed at Oxford, but William of Moerbeke’s. Also, Russell’s quotation of what ‘the phylosopher seythe’ about hearing being the best sense through which to teach people (‘Sermo, inquit, audibilis causa est discipline, Speche that ys audible and wele herd ys

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Early Humanism in England the cause of lernynge’) comes from Aristotle but was widely known from scholastic commentaries.137 Bruni might be appalled by the use of these old translations. But Aristotle’s voice is here, and these lines support ideas which Aristotle might have found congenial: the idea of magnificence, important in his Ethics, or living up to one’s social station, and the idea that ‘speche’ or language is what makes humankind ‘Animal ciuile’ or zoon politikon, an idea Russell ascribes to Cicero in another of his speeches.138 We cannot doubt Russell’s zeal for classical texts. While, as often in fifteenth-century England, the humanist passion for antiquity involves mediating those texts in glosses, commentaries, and translations, it matters that these are ­classical voices we hear. Some, such as the students of rare vocabulary or the poet of On Husbondrie, sought to ventriloquize the sound of those voices; others such as the annotators on Aristotle’s Politics or Russell sought to hear what those voices had to say.

Notes 1   Oxford, Bodleian Library (hereafter BodL), MS Auct. F.6.2, fol. 1v, ed. Alfonso Sammut, Unfredo duca di Gloucester e gli umanisti italiani, Medioevo e Umanesimo 40 (Padua, 1980), 149 (III.2.21–4), and described by [A. C. de la Mare and Stanley Gillam], Duke Humfrey’s Library and the Divinity School 1488–1988 (Oxford, 1988), hereafter DHL, no. 83. BodL, MS Auct. F.5.27 (DHL, no. 82), fol. 1r, omits ‘dum ista legis’. Susanne Saygin, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390–1447) and the Italian Humanists (Leiden, 2002), pp. 60, 64–6, and Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Gianozzo Manetti and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 5–62, trace Bruni’s attitude to translation. All quotations from MSS expand abbreviations silently and modernize the punctuation. 2   BodL, MS Auct. F.5.27, flyleaf fol. vv (handwriting similar to the scribe’s), fol. 131r (a second hand); Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (hereafter CCCC), MS 398, flyleaf fol. iv. The dedicatory epistle itself calls Bruni’s work a ‘noua traduccione’ (BodL, MS Auct. F.5.27, fol. 1r). 3   Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading and English Literature 1430–1530 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 25, 49, 53, 134, 145. 4   R. Weiss, Humanism in England During the Fifteenth Century, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1967), best read in a fourth edition, ed. David Rundle and Anthony John Lappin (Oxford, 2010), available online at , with an excellent editorial introduction by David Rundle, critiquing Weiss’s approach. As well as Weiss’s work, the essential study is David Rundle’s doctoral thesis: ‘Of Republics and Tyrants: Aspects of Quattrocento Humanist Writings and their Reception in England, c.1400–c.1460’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1997), and the catalogues cited in n. 6. 5   Daniel Wakelin, ‘England: Humanism beyond Weiss’, in Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe, ed. David Rundle (Oxford, 2012), pp. 265–306.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 6   As a result, humanism in England has been most studied by palaeographers, notably in two exhibition catalogues DHL and [A.C. de la Mare and R. W. Hunt], Duke Humfrey and English Humanism in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1970), hereafter DH&EH. For vernacular reading, see Wakelin, Humanism. 7   Printed by Sammut, Unfredo, pp. 37–8, 60–84 (quoting p. 80). 8   On Flemmyng, see also Chapter 6 in this volume by Willoughby. 9   All have discussion in Weiss, Humanism, chapters in DH&EH, and entries in A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to a.d. 1500, 3 vols (Oxford, 1957–9), hereafter BRUO. See also R. A. B. Mynors, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Balliol College Oxford (Oxford, 1963), pp. xxiv–xlv (Gray); R. Weiss, ‘The Earliest Catalogues of the Library of Lincoln College’, Bodleian Library Record 8 (1937), 342–59 (Flemmyng); R. J. Mitchell, John Tiptoft (1427–1470) (1938). 10   A. C. de la Mare, ‘Vespasiano da Bisticci and Gray’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957), 174–6 (p. 175). On Free’s letters to Gray, see Wakelin, ‘England’, pp. 278, 280. Gray also received far more theological texts, as stressed by Joni Henry, ‘Capgrave’s Dedications: Reassessing an English Flunkey’, Studies in Philology 10 (2013), 731–61 (pp. 736–44). 11  CCCC, MS 423, p. 64, printed in ‘Letters of John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, and Archbishop Neville to the University of Oxford’, ed. James Tait, EHR 35 (1920), 570–4 (at p. 572). On Chaundler, see BRUO 1, 397–400. The university in response recognized the ‘distinctive elegance’ of Tiptoft’s Latin (‘ea singularis eloquencia’) and compared him to Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester: Epistolae Academicae Oxon., ed. Henry Anstey, Oxford Historical Society 35–6, 2 vols (Oxford, 1898), 2, 355. 12   David Rundle, ‘Humanism before the Tudors: On Nobility and the Reception of the Studia Humanitatis in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Woolfson (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 22–42, assesses their attainments. 13   See also Chapter 6 in this volume by Willoughby. 14   DHL, no. 65. For a full list of Tiptoft’s surviving MSS, see . 15   DHL, no. 57, and for an online description and images of Oxford, Queen’s College, MS 202. I thank James Willoughby for discussion of the dating of this MS. 16   DH&EH, no. 59, discussed by David Rundle, ‘The Scribe Thomas Candour and the Making of Poggio Bracciolini’s English Reputation’, English Manuscript Studies 12 (2005), 1–25 (at pp. 16–17). 17   Three Middle English Sermons from the Worcester Chapter Manuscript F.10, ed. D. M. Grisdale (Leeds, 1939), pp. 34, 51 (which the editor cannot trace: p. 94), 72. On the date and origin, see pp. ix–x, xxiii–xxiv, and BRUO 2, 1125–6. 18   DHL, no. 88, and Sammut, Unfredo, p. 70, no. 129; and the printed copy owned by John Gunthorpe on 7 Feb. 1475 (Dionigi [da Borgo San Sepolcro], Commentarius super Valerium Maximum (Strasbourg, before 7 Feb. 1474/5), now BodL, printed book Auct. N.4.4). 19   DH&EH, no. 19; M. B. Parkes, Their Hands Before our Eyes (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 142–3.

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Early Humanism in England   Oxford, Balliol College (hereafter OBC), MS 122 (mentioned under DH&EH, no. 40).   e.g. OBC, MS 122, fol. 11v, fol. 14r, fol. 24v, fol. 25v, fol. 80r–v (Isidore, Hugutio). 22   Exeter, Cathedral Archive, MS 3514, p. 94, p. 103. Russell makes other genealogical notes on blank leaves at the back (pp. 532–3). 23   See n. 22 and Russell’s’ copy of Virgil’s Opera in Cambridge University Library (hereafter CUL), printed book Inc. 2.B.3.21 [1445], described by J. C. T. Oates, A Catalogue of the FifteenthCentury Printed Books in the Cambridge University Library (Cambridge, 1954), no. 1733. 24  Respectively, DH&EH, no. 38; DH&EH, no. 87; Margaret T. Gibson and Nigel F. Palmer, ‘Manuscripts of Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus in the British Isles’, Studi medievali 3rd ser. 28:2 (1987), 905–1001 (pp. 967–9, 987–90). For other non-humanist texts in humanist script, see e.g. DH&EH, no. 91, and Rundle, ‘The Scribe Thomas Candour’, p. 9. 25   Manuscripts at Oxford: An Exhibition in Memory of Richard William Hunt (1908–1979), eds A. C. de la Mare and B. C. Barker-Benfield (Oxford, 1980). 26   Respectively, BodL, MS Lat. class. d. 39, (with a note of ownership on fol. 160v), and e.g. London, Lambeth Palace Library (hereafter LPL), MS 425, fols 74r–116v (DH&EH, no. 93). 27   BodL, MS Auct. F.1.11, fol. 16r, fol. 22r. 28   Rodney M. Thomson, ‘The Reception of the Italian Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Oxford: The Evidence of Books and Book-Lists’, Italia medioevale e umanistica 47 (2007), 59–75 (at p. 68). 29   Thomson, ‘The Reception of the Italian Renaissance’, pp. 66, 68; DH&EH, no. 3; DHL, no. 102; Sammut, Unfredo, p. 119. Saygin, Humphrey, pp. 157–61, introduces Zanone da Castiglione, bishop of Bayeux, who helped Humfrey obtain these books. 30   Thomson, ‘The Reception of the Italian Renaissance’, p. 70, discussing BodL, MS Auct. F.1.13 (DH&EH, no. 72; DHL, no. 55). 31   DH&EH, no. 78; DH&EH, p. 65; DHL, no. 57. 32   See (on Oxford, Queen’s College, MS 314). 33   BodL, MS Auct. F.3.25 (DH&EH, no. 85). See also DH&EH, nos 63, 99. 34   Charles Briggs’s Chapter 15 in this volume sketches this tradition. 35   R. Weiss, ‘Leonardo Bruni and Early English Humanism’, Modern Language Review 36 (1941), 443–8, an interpretation carefully disputed by David Rundle, ‘On the Difference between Virtue and Weiss: Humanist Texts in England during the Fifteenth Century’, in Courts, Counties and the Capital in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Diana E. S. Dunn, Fifteenth Century Series 4 (Stroud, 1996), 181–203 (at pp. 192–4). 36   DH&EH, no. 37; DHL, no. 81; and DHL, no. 110, Parkes, Their Hands Before our Eyes, pp. 140–1, and BRUO 2, 78–81. 37   BodL, printed books Arch G.d.33 (DH&EH, p. 64, section XIII) and S.Seld. e.2 (DHL, no. 116), on which see Alan Coates et al., A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century Now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Oxford, 2005), no. A-400. 38   BodL, printed book S.Seld e.2 (which has both leaf signatures and a later librarian’s foliation). sig. hb6v/f.14v, sig. b7v/f.15v. See also sigs b1r–b8r/ff.9r–16r, d3r–v/ff.27r-v, 20 21

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature d5v/29v, h2v–i1v/ff.58v–65v, m2r–m5r/ff.90r–93r, q1r–q2r/ff.121r–22r. Kristian Jensen, ‘TextBooks in the Universities: The Evidence from the Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, 1400–1557, eds Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 354–79 (at p. 355), suggests that the notes were used by an Oxford MA to lecture from. 39   London, British Library (hereafter BL), printed book, C.2.a.7 (DHL, p. 82); OBC, MS 242, made in Italy but donated to Balliol College in Oxford (Mynors, Catalogue, no. 242); Oxford, Magdalen College (hereafter OMC), MS Lat. 46 (DHL, no. 81). 40   See the pairing with Ethics in OMC, MS Lat. 46 (DHL, no. 81), and copies of Aristotle’s Politics on its own in BodL, MS Auct. F.5.27 (DHL, no. 82), BodL, MS Barlow 42 (DHL, no. 84) and CCCC, MS 398 (DHL, no. 85). In BodL, MS Auct. F.6.2 (DHL, no. 83), Aristotle’s Politics appears alongside Bruni’s translation of Plato’s Apology (fols 63r–92r) and, more surprisingly, Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus (fols 92v–203r). 41  Saygin, Humphrey, pp. 62–3, 66. Another rationale might be that Humfrey had seen Bruni’s earlier translation of Ethics (Sammut, Unfredo, p. 147: III.1.28–9; Rundle, ‘Virtue and Weiss’, p. 193). 42   CCCC, MS 398, fol. 73r, fol. 105v; see also fol. 46r–v, fols 72v–73r (Book II), fol. 96v (end of Book III), fol. 105v–6r (Book IV). The other frequent annotations in this MS are unerased prompts for corrections. 43   Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 188–229, discusses Decembrio’s translation in detail, and deduces that at least one copy has been lost. See also DHL, no. 87. 44   Brian Jeffrey Maxson, ‘Kings and Tyrants: Leonardo Bruni’s Translation of Xenophon’s Hiero’, Renaissance Studies 24 (2009), 188–206 (esp. pp. 192–4, 205). 45   CCCC, MS 472, p. 378 (DHL, no. 74); BL, MS Harley 3426, fol. 177v (DHL, page 43; Rundle, ‘Virtue and Weiss’, p. 193); BL, MS Royal 10 B IX, fol. 64v, fol. 67r (DH&EH, no. 22; DHL, no. 76). For a complete list of MSS, see Catalogus translationum et commentariorum 7, eds Virginia Brown et al. (Washington, DC, 1992), pp. 149–55. 46   BL, MS Royal 10 B IX, fol. 67v; BRUO 1, 509; Joan Greatrex, Biographical Register of the English Cathedral Priories of the Province of Canterbury, c.1066–1540 (Oxford, 1997), p. 132. 47   BodL, MS Auct. F.5.26 (DH&EH, no. 20; DHL, no. 78); LPL, MS 341 (DHL, no. 79); CUL, MS Ll.1.7 (DHL, no. 80); Dublin, Trinity College, MS D.4.24 (DH&EH, no. 21; DHL, no. 72D; William O’Sullivan, ‘John Manyngham: An Early Oxford Humanist’, Bodleian Library Record 7 (1962), 28–39). 48   DHL, no. 77; Leonard E. Boyle and Richard H. Rouse, ‘A Fifteenth-Century List of the Books of Edmund Norton’, Speculum 50 (1975), 284–8. See also DH&EH, no. 21 and DHL, no. 72D. 49   BL, MS Harley 3426 (Bruni’s copy) as well as BL, MS Royal 10 B IX, fols 68r–70v; CCCC, MS 472 (DHL, no. 74); BodL, MS Auct. F.5.26 (DH&EH, no. 20; DHL, no. 78); LPL, MS 341 (DHL, no. 79); CUL, MS Ll.1.7 (DHL, no. 80). 50   BodL, MS Rawlinson G.47 (DH&EH, no. 105). 51  David Rundle, ‘Humanist Eloquence among the Barbarians in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Britannia Latina: Latin in the Culture of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the

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Early Humanism in England Twentieth Century, eds Charles Burnett and Nicholas Mann, Warburg Institute Colloquia 8 (2005), pp. 68–85 (at pp. 76–7); Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 255–9. 52   BodL, MS Auct. F.5.26, p. 226. 53   BodL, MS Auct. F.5.26, p. 230, as well as p. 221 (‘Anapestus’, ‘Argive’), p. 223 (‘Doricus’), p. 230 (‘Orme’). 54   e.g. BodL, MS Auct. F.5.26, p. 223 (‘Doricus’), p. 225 (‘Evrotas’). 55   Illustrated by Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, ad 300–1475, eds Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter (Oxford, 2009), pp. 339–66 (e.g. p. 353 on improving one’s Latinity). 56   OBC, MS 123, fols 159v–64v, quoting fol. 159v (DH&EH, no. 50). There is little Greek, although some words glossed are described as Greek: e.g. fol. 16r (‘Philargia’). 57   OBC, MS 123, fol. 164v (subcategories under ‘Vecordia’), and also Virgil cited on fol. 166v. 58   OBC, MS 123, fol. 159v. 59   OBC, MS 121, respectively fols vr–viir, fols ivr–ivv. 60  Mynors, Catalogue, pp. xlvi–xlix; DH&EH, section IV, especially on nos 41, 43, 51–2. 61   OBC, MS 123, fols 161v–5r (layout), and e.g. fol. 164v (correcting ‘Vegetus’ to ‘Vege⌐ta¬tus’). 62   OBC, MS 121, fol. ivr. 63   e.g. OBC, MS 121, fol. 2r (referring to Horace’s odes), fol. 2v (St Augustine), fol. 95v (Cicero, De officiis, citing folio ‘41’ of some copy), fol. 112r (Cicero, De officiis, citing folio ‘44’). One offers collation of other copies (fol. 71r). 64   OBC, MS 123, fols 108r–59r; OBC, MS 258, fol. 148r. Bole’s associate, Gray, also owned Sallust’s histories (Mynors, Catalogue, p. 379). 65   OBC, MS 136, with notes copied from OBC, MS 130 (DH&EH, no. 41). 66   OBC, MS 130, fol. 94r, fols 109v–10r, fol. 111v, fol. 135v. 67   OBC, MS 130, fol. 70r. 68   OBC, MS 130, fol. 72v. 69   OBC, MS 130, fols 9v–64r, fols 64v–75v. 70   OBC, MS 130, fol. 69v (glossing referents of pronouns and glossing ‘subinde’ as ‘frequenter’), fol. 70r, fol. 90v (Nero). 71   OBC, MS 130, fol. 14v, fol. 17v, fol. 53r. See OBC, MS 121 and MS 258 (discussed later in this chapter) and MS 136 (DH&EH, no. 49). Bole’s interests are Christian too: he also cites St Augustine’s The City of God (fol. 14v, alongside Valerius Maximus; fol. 25v), e.g. on the stories of Virginia and Lucretia, on whom St Augustine had long been an authority. 72   OBC, MS 130, fol. 9v, fol. 106r, fol. 125r. 73   See Cornelia Linde, How to Correct the Sacra Scriptura? Textual Criticism of the Latin Bible between the Twelfth and Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 2012), e.g. pp. 125–43. 74  John [Anwykyll], Compendium totius grammatice (Deventer: Pafraet, 4/5/1489; STC 696.1; BL, classmark IA.47600), on which see Constance Blackwell, ‘Niccolò Perotti in England, 1: John Anwykyll, Bernard André, John Colet and Luis Vives’, Studi umanistici Piceni 2 (1982), 13–28 (at p. 14).

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 75  Lorenzo Guglielmo Traversagni, Margarita eloquentiae castigatae, ed. Giovanni Farris (Savona, 1978), discussed by Wakelin, Humanism, pp. 132, 140–3, and James J. Murphy, ‘Laurentius Guglielmus Traversagnus and the Genesis of Vaticana Codex Lat. 11441, with Remarks on Bodleian MS Laud. Lat. 61’, in Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on his 70th Birthday, eds Simon Horobin and Linne Mooney (York, 2014), pp. 241–9. 76   Andrew Cole, ‘The Style of Humanist Latin Letters at the University of Oxford: On Thomas Chaundler and the Epistolae Academicae Oxon. (Registrum F)’, in Form and Reform: Reading the Fifteenth Century, eds Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus, Oh., 2011), pp. 40–65. 77   David Rundle, ‘Carneades’ Legacy: The Morality of Eloquence in the Humanist and Papalist Writings of Pietro del Monte’, EHR 117 (2002), 284–305 (at pp. 287–92). 78   BL, Add. MS 10344; Weiss, Humanism, pp. 164–7; Daniel Wakelin, ‘Religion, Humanism and Humanity: Chaundler’s Dialogues and the Winchester Secretum’, in After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth Century England, eds Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 225–44 (at pp. 228–30). 79   Printed by O’Sullivan, ‘John Manyngham’, pp. 37–9. 80   Constance W. T. Blackwell, ‘Humanism and Politics in English Royal Biography: The Use of Cicero, Plutarch and Sallust in the Vita Henrici Quinti (1438) by Titus Livius de Frulovisi and the Vita Henrici Septimi (1500–3) by Bernard André’, in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandreani: Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, ed. I. D. McFarlane (Binghamton, NY, 1986), pp. 431–40; David Rundle, ‘The Unoriginality of Tito Livio Frulovisi’s Vita Henrici Quinti’, English Historical Review 123 (2008), 1109–31. 81  Wakelin, Humanism, pp. 163–5; Wakelin, ‘Religion’, p. 232. 82   e.g. Wakelin, Humanism, pp. 8, 144–7; Daniel Wakelin, ‘Humanism and Printing’, in A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476–1558, eds Vincent and Susan Powell (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 227–47 (at pp. 234, 236 n. 39). 83  Discussed by Wakelin, Humanism, pp. 34–5, 68–73; Wakelin, ‘Religion’, pp. 236–42; Daniel Wakelin, ‘Classical and Humanist Translations’, in A Companion to Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, eds Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 171–85 (at pp. 171, 176, 179–83). 84   On Skelton see Chapter 25 in this volume by Carlson. 85   Caxton also translated French adaptations of works by Ovid and Virgil: The Booke of Ovyde Named Methamorphose, ed. Richard J. Moll, trans. William Caxton (Toronto, 2013), and Caxton’s Eneydos, eds M.T. Culley and F. J. Furnivall, trans. William Caxton, EETS es 57 (1890). 86  Wakelin, Humanism, pp. 134–40. 87   On their origins, see Daniel Wakelin, ‘The Occasion, Author and Readers of Knyghthode and Bataile’, Medium Ævum 73 (2004), 260–72. 88   R. H. Rodgers, An Introduction to Palladius, Bulletin Supplement 35 (1975), 10, 15–52, 59–63; Texts and Transmission: A Survey of Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford, 1983), pp. 287–8.

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Early Humanism in England 89   Karl Brunner, ‘Continuity and Discontinuity of Roman Agricultural Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages’, in Agriculture in the Middle Ages: Technology, Practice, and Representation, ed. Del Sweeney (Philadelphia, 1995), pp. 21–40; Catalogus translationum et commentariorum 3, eds F. E. Cranz and P. O. Kristeller (1986), p. 174. 90   e.g. BL, Add. MS 44922, with notes in English (fol. 2r, fol. 17r) and perhaps the start of an index (fol. 76r). 91  Sammut, Unfredo, pp. 37, 81. 92   Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, p. xxxv. 93   According to the descriptions in Charles R. Shrader, ‘A Handlist of Extant Manuscripts Containing the De re militari of Flavius Vegetius Renatus’, Scriptorium 33 (1979), 280–305. 94  Catherine Nall, Reading and War in Fifteenth-Century England from Lydgate to Malory (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 14–47; Charles F. Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University, c.1275–c.1525 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 45, 64–5. See also Christopher Allmand, The De re militari of Vegetius: The Reception, Transmission and Legacy of a Roman Text in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2011). 95   Catalogus translationum et commentariorum 6, eds F. E. Cranz and P. O. Kristeller (1986), pp. 176–7. 96   On Flemmyng’s book see also Chapter 6 in this volume by Willoughby. 97   Oxford, Lincoln College, MS 100, fol. 3r (Flemmyng, on whom see notes 8, 15, and 96); OBC, MS 146A (Mynors, Catalogue, pp. 123–5). 98   CUL, MS Ee.2.17, fol. 12r. Another copy of a French translation was included alongside Vasque de Lucène’s translation of Poggio’s version of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, in BL, MS Royal 17 E V, fols 205r–74r. 99  CUL, MS Add. 8706, with notes of ownership on fol. 33r, fol. 71r, fol. 102v. On Rotherham, including a book given to him by Flemmyng, see BRUO 3, 1593–6. 100   The Middle-English Translation of Palladius De re rustica, ed. Mark Liddell (Berlin, 1896), prol. 101–4. 101  Wakelin, Humanism, pp. 83–6. 102  Respectively, Palladius, ed. Liddell, 1.239–40 (skipping a clause from I.vi.14), I.490 (skipping from I.xix.3); and 11.491–504 (XI.xix.1–2). 103  e.g. Palladius, ed. Liddell, 2.105 (smoothing over II.xi.1), and 3.604, 3.610, 3.653 (varying from III.xxiii.5–9). 104  Respectively, Palladius, ed. Liddell, 3.13 (III.iv.1), 3.275 (III.xii.4), 3.1101 (III.xxviii.2). 105   Palladius, ed. Liddell, e.g. 1.163, 1.732, 1.836, 1.971, 1.987. 106   Palladius, ed. Liddell, 1.957 (I.xxxv.13), 6.28 (VI.ii.2), 13.50 (XIII.vii.1), and so on. 107   Palladius, ed. Liddell, 9.18, 9.117, 9.131, 10.29, 10.41, 10.142, 10.198. These suggestions are based on entries in OED and MED. 108   Palladius, ed. Liddell, 3.1140–41 (III.xxix.3). See also e.g. 1.489 (I.xix.3), 3.456–60 (III. xviii.4). 109   Palladius, ed. Liddell, 2.216–27 (II.xiv.4); OED, derive, v., senses II.11, II.13; MED, deriven (v.), sense (b). Cf. n. 53.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 110   For instance, only about a dozen of 350 in Book I do: Palladius, ed. Liddell, e.g. 1.8, 1.256, 1.260, 1.314, 1.353, 1.785, 1.891, 1.892 (but cf. 1.898), 1.913, 1.918, 1.942, 1.964, 1.1016. 111  e.g. Palladius, ed. Liddell, 1.754–55, 1.837. 112  Wakelin, Humanism, pp. 83–6. 113   e.g. BL, MS Royal 20 B I, fol. 31v (English summary on a French MS); OBC, MS 146, fols 2r–19v (tables per book); OMC, MS Lat. 30, fol. 115r–v (English abridgement after 1408 English translation). BodL, MS Auct. F.3.2, fols 117r–24v, has an index for Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, so, as this MS has lost the end of Vegetius’ Epitoma, that work conceivably had an index too. 114  BL, Add. MS 12028, fol. 170v. This MS contains (fols 173r–85v) French translated excerpts of Vegetius: Leena Löfstedt, ‘Aucuns notables extraitz du livre de Vegèce’, Neuphilologishe Mitteilungen 83 (1982), 297–312. 115   OMC, MS Lat. 30, fol. 35v (I.14.5), fol. 37r (II.15.3), fol. 45r (II.xxiv.9), fol. 47r (III.1.5). The first note recurs in CUL, MS Add. 8706, fol. 30v, as do a few others from OMC, MS Lat. 30. 116   BL, Add. MS 11814, both printed in ‘Eine Mittelenglische Claudian-Übersetzung (1445)’, ed. Ewald Flügel, Anglia 28 (1905), 255–99, 421–38, and discussed by A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Middle English Translation of Claudian’s De consulatu Stilichonis’, in Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. Alastair Minnis (York, 2001), pp. 267–78. 117   Wakelin, ‘Humanism and Printing’, p. 239; Wakelin, Humanism, pp. 134–40. 118   Ann D. Hedeman, Translating the Past: Laurent de Premierfait and Boccaccio’s De casibus (Los Angeles, 2008), pp. 24–34. 119  Daniel Wakelin, ‘Possibilities for Reading: Classical Translations in Parallel Texts ca.1520–1558’, Studies in Philology 105 (2008), 463–86. 120   Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford, 2006), p. 54, and in general pp. 47–54. 121   The Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus Siculus, eds F. M. Salter and H. L. R. Edwards, trans. John Skelton, EETS 233, 239, 2 vols (1956–7), pp. xxx–xxxii. 122  Cicero, De amicitia, 2.7; Tullius de Amicicia, trans. anon., printed in Tullius de senectute, trans. [William Worcester] (Westminster, 1481; STC 5293), separately signed, sig. a2v. Cf. MED, erudit (ppl.), and OED, erudite, possibly recorded in one MS dated c.1475 but otherwise not till the sixteenth century. 123  e.g. ‘familiaritate’ (Cicero, De amicitia, 1.4) becoming ‘familyarite and frendship’ (Tullius de amicicia, trans. anon., sig. a2r); ‘de amicitia’ (1.5) becoming ‘of amytee or frendship’ (sig. a2r). 124   John Watts, ‘“Common weal” and “common wealth”: England’s Monarchical Republic in the Making, c.1450–c.1530’, in The Languages of Political Society: Western Europe, 14th–17th Century, eds Andrea Gamberini et al. (Rome, 2011), pp. 147–63 (at pp. 150, 153–4). 125  Wakelin, Humanism, pp. 101–4, 110–16, 125. 126   Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth-Century, eds Norman Davis, Richard Beadle, and Colin Richmond, EETS ss 20–2 (Oxford, 2004–5), no. 604. For Worcester’s reading, see Paston Letters, no. 316; BL, MS Cotton Julius F VII, fols 74r–78r (autograph notes from both works).

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Early Humanism in England   Tullius, trans. anon., sig. c2v (De amicitia, 17.64).   William Worcestre (sic), Itineraries, ed. John H. Harvey (Oxford, 1969), pp. 262–3. 129   ‘Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons in 1483’, printed in S. B. Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1936), pp. 167–91 (at p. 182); Terence, Adelphi, 2.2.226. 130   Martin Lowry, ‘The Arrival and Use of Continental Printed Books in Yorkist England’, in Le Livre dans l’Europe de la Renaissance, eds Pierre Aquilon and Henri-Jean Martin (Paris, 1988), pp. 449–59 (at pp. 456–7, on Plutarch). See also ‘Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons’, ed. Chrimes, p. 170; BRUO 3, 1609–11. 131   ‘Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons’, ed. Chrimes, p. 174. 132   ‘Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons’, ed. Chrimes, pp. 172, 174. 133   ‘Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons’, ed. Chrimes, p. 180. 134  Wakelin, Humanism, pp. 146–7, 160–1. 135  John Watts, ‘The Policie in Christen Remes: Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons of 1483–84’, in Authority and Consent in Tudor England: Essays Presented to C. S. L. Davies, eds G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 33–59 (at p. 51). 136  ‘Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons’, p. 170. The editor suggests a source in Aristotle, Politics, 7.1, but it is 4.8.9. 137   ‘Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons’, p. 171, with an untraced quotation from Aristotle’s De sensu et sensato. 138   ‘Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons’, pp. 170–1; English Medieval Diplomatic Practice, ed. Pierre Chaplais, 2 vols (1982), 2, 253–5. 127 128

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Chapter 24

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Survey of Henrician Humanism James P. Carley and Ágnes Juhász-Ormsby

Introduction By the second quarter of the sixteenth century English scholars assumed that ‘bonae literae’ had well and truly taken root in Britain: Cana bonas passim cantavit fama Camaenas Alpinas nunquam transiliisse nives, Ut Pandionias facundia liquit Athenas, Venit ad Italicos Musa polita lares. Fronte tamen salva dicam nunc, audiat ipsa Roma licet, Musas transiliisse nives. Nam penitus toto divisis orbe Britannis Tersa Camaena dedit verba rotunda loqui. Illa vetus linguis florebat Roma duabus, At linguis gaudet terra Britanna tribus. (Everywhere ancient report has it that the goodly Muses have never crossed over the Alpine snows, that when eloquence abandoned Pandion’s Athens the polished Muse found an Italian home. But, even if Rome herself is listening, I can solemnly swear that the Muses did cross those snows. For the pure Muse has taught the Britons, though separated from the rest of the world, to speak elegant words. Ancient Rome flourished with two languages, whereas Britain rejoices in three.)1

John Leland, author of these revealing assertions, considered himself the voice of humane letters for his generation: in his verse as well as in his prose he articulated contemporary responses to the new learning with its emphasis on the recovery and imitation of the literary remains of the ancient world. In many ways his writings thus stand as a mirror of the reception by learned Englishmen of the classics during the Henrician regime and these, the poetry in particular (in which all the buzz words of the humanist enterprise are embedded), will form the backdrop to this essay, dictating many of our examples.2

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Leland’s life also provides a case study of the trajectory of a successful and productive humanist career in England during the first half of the sixteenth century.3 Born around 1503, towards the end of the reign of Henry VII, he was sent to St Paul’s School, refounded by John Colet, and studied under the first high master William Lily, who, as he would observe, ‘Eloquio iuvenes . . . polivit’ (‘put a polish on young men’s eloquence’, Carmen LXIV). From St Paul’s he went on to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he was admitted BA in 1522. It was to Cambridge, so he proudly vaunted as a young man, that the muses had migrated from their Italian home: ‘Recta ad Grantanas, tecta diserta, scholas’ (‘Straight to the Schools of Cambridge, those learned halls’, Carmen XXI). And it was at Cambridge that he pursued the academic programme that would shape his subsequent life and that of many of his contemporaries, statesmen, scholars, theologians alike: ‘Artes me septem docuit celeberrima Granta’ (‘The most famous Cambridge taught me the seven liberal arts’, Carmen XXVIII).4 After Cambridge and a stint as tutor to Lord Thomas Howard in the Lambeth household of his father, the Duke of Norfolk, ‘studio eloquentiae et bonarum literarum totus conflagrans’ (‘totally consumed by zeal for eloquence and bonae literae’),5 he spent a brief and unhappy period at Oxford, possibly associated with All Souls College, where he found the curriculum old-fashioned and stultifying (Carmen CCLVI). As at Cambridge, however, he made contacts with those who would later come to prominence in the Tudor world and he acknowledged the impact that Oxford had on them and on himself too. Like many of the up-and-coming, such as his friend John Mason, a fellow of All Souls, Leland was made a King’s Scholar, and went off to pursue his studies in Paris, meeting and cultivating the great scholars of the court and of the University of Paris, naming in particular Guillaume Budé, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Paolo Emilio, and Jean Ruel.6 In Paris he learned, so he stated, to compose poetry in the Horatian style; he also spent considerable time rooting around in libraries for ancient manuscripts. François Du Bois (d. 1536), professor of rhetoric and principal of the Collège de Tournai, introduced him to humanist editing principles, and he came to realize the necessity of comparing manuscripts and evaluating variants in order to get back ad fontes.7 Writing from Paris, moreover, he assured his friend ‘Craifordus’ (who has not been identified) that he planned to restore the eloquence of the ancient world to English letters when he returned home (Carmen CIV).8 Back in England, probably in 1529, he soon found himself drawn into the orbit of Thomas Cromwell and in 1533 began the visitations of monastic libraries that resulted in his booklists and ultimately in his (incomplete) history of British letters, De uiris illustribus. Although Leland’s primary mission when he searched for manuscripts in the English monasteries was to bring to light neglected British writers, he was also concerned with classical and patristic writings. In this effort his model may well have been Jean de Gagny (d. 1549), rector of the University of Paris and almoner to Francis I, who had also received ‘letres patentes’ for his researches and who took

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Survey of Henrician Humanism possession of monastic manuscripts both to build up the royal library and to see in print the most important in commune philologiae bonum.9 At Malmesbury Abbey in 1533, for example, Leland came across and appropriated an early and important witness to Tertullian’s writings that contained works not found in the editions put forth by Beatus Rhenanus. In 1539, just after Rhenanus’ third edition appeared, he wrote to the printers in Basle to tell them that he had a more authoritative manuscript (‘longe auctiori’) which in his opinion might have been brought to Britain from Italy by Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury and bishop of Sherborne (d. 709/10). Although he was not keen to part with ‘tantus et tam rarus thesaurus’, he was finally persuaded to send it to Rhenanus and it ultimately formed the basis of the 1550 edition that appeared after Rhenanus’ death. Insane by this time, Leland did not play a role in the actual preparation of the new edition but, as Rhenanus would acknowledge in another context, his discoveries could be crucial. This was no small praise since, as John D’Amico has shown, Rhenanus was one of the pioneers in using palaeographical and codicological techniques to restore corrupt texts.10 Unlike Rhenanus, of course, Leland never produced any scholarly editions nor any comprehensive histories either. Nevertheless, he understood and articulated the method: his was one of the loudest theoretical (if not practical) voices of textual criticism of his generation in England. Fittingly, in 1543 when the majority of his travels were over and when he was attempting to bring his masses of notes into some sort of order, Leland was appointed a canon and prebendary of King Henry VIII College in Oxford, the successor to Thomas Wolsey’s Cardinal College, conceived on humanist principles, and was one of the signatories of its surrender on 20 May 1545. It was an exemplary career, the trajectory of which reflected the full flowering of the new learning in England. Leland was not alone in his endeavours, but what does make him unique was his fully articulated response to and analysis of each stage of his life as well as his critical assessment of those who accompanied him on this journey into the English Renaissance as we know it.

The New Learning: Revised Models for Teaching the Classics At the most fundamental level the grammar schools and universities provided the channel through which the writings of the ancient world came to be received and understood by Leland and his contemporaries. As a result of a systematic adoption of humanist principles, which had begun in the fifteenth century, the whole institutional and curricular framework was radically revised both at the lower and upper levels in English schools by the first decades of the sixteenth century. The innovations manifested themselves in the growing emphasis on grammar and rhetoric as well as the removal of medieval authors from the curriculum.11 What were viewed

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature as the best ancient models were offered as a means of extending linguistic skills by providing a storehouse of phrases and examples for oral and written composition, as well as conveying detailed information about antiquity. Even more importantly, the systematic study of the classics came to be considered a prerequisite for the moral development of the young and this, in turn, was intricately aligned with Christian piety. A leading role was initially played by Magdalen College, Oxford, through the grammar school founded in 1480 by William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester.12 John Anwykyll and John Stanbridge, its first masters, set about integrating the works of the Roman grammarian Servius as well as the writings of the fifteenth-century Italian humanists into the curriculum. They also adapted classical Latin authors as models in their own textbooks. Although there were some references to medieval authors in Anwykyll’s concise elementary grammar Compendium totius grammaticae (Oxford, 1483), the correct application of grammatical rules and syntactical precepts was normally illustrated through recourse to Terence, Cicero, and, occasionally, to Sallust and Virgil. Anwykyll’s English–Latin collection of Terentian phrases, Vulgaria quedam abs Terencio in Anglicam linguam traducta (Oxford, 1483), was, in turn, the first phrasebook to take a classical author as the literary standard.13 Anwykyll’s methods were further developed by Stanbridge, who equated correct usage and style with classical Latin authors, citing these to demonstrate particular grammatical and syntactical points.14 The influence of people associated with Magdalen College School was far reaching not only because of their teaching and publications but also as a result of their personal connections. John Holt, Stanbridge’s usher from 1494 to 1496, continued, for example, to cultivate a humanist agenda in his later positions, first in Cardinal Morton’s household at Lambeth palace, and then at court as one of Prince Henry’s tutors.15 Holt’s innovative Lac puerorum, subtitled in English Mylke for Chyldren (Antwerp, c.1505), contained prefatory and concluding verses by Thomas More. In the book’s final epigram, More endorsed Holt’s programme of reading, commending the same Italian grammarians as were favoured by the Magdalen masters. The correspondence between the two men, moreover, attests to Holt’s interest in Greek studies, a discipline which would later be introduced in English grammar schools by another of Stanbridge’s students at Magdalen, William Lily, who may have been tutored in Greek by his godfather, William Grocyn, himself an eminent Hellenist and friend of Erasmus. These sorts of networks among Englishmen and increasingly extending to continental scholars were instrumental in the foundation of St Paul’s School. When Colet re-established the school in 1512, he organized it according to Erasmus’ educational agenda. Although Colet himself was far more conservative than Erasmus and restricted his approved readings to patristic and Christian authors, the incorporation of some Greek writers, nevertheless, made St Paul’s a pioneering institution.16 Erasmus’

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Survey of Henrician Humanism own pedagogical methods in turn evolved as a result of his association with Colet, and he prepared a number of seminal texts for use at St Paul’s, including the revised version of De copia, published as De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo (‘Two commentaries on the dual aspects of an abundant style: words and subject-matter’) (Paris, 1512) and a homily on the Child Jesus Concio de puero Iesu, published together with a treatise on the method of study, De ratione studii (Paris, 1511–12).17 In this latter work, Erasmus charted his principal method, placing the reading and imitation of the classics as the basis of instruction. Apart from the standard school authors, he stressed the inclusion of works by Pliny the Elder, Aulus Gellius, Macrobius, Ptolemy, Strabo, and Athenaeus, which, in his view, were essential to the study of poetry and to the development of varietas in composition. In the following decades Erasmus’ own educational tracts and editions would form an integral part of the curriculum for lower (Disticha Catonis) and upper (Adagia, Similia, Apophthegmata, Colloquies, Epitome Vallae) levels in most schools modelled on St Paul’s. Erasmus’ English circle of friends, most of whom were also More’s associates, spread his ideas through the publication of their own textbooks and treatises.18 At St Paul’s, Lily composed a grammar on the construction of the eight parts of speech under the supervision of Erasmus, the Absolutissimus de octo orationis partium constructione libellus (London, 1513), and a short elementary syntax, Rudimenta grammatices (London, c.1509), which was later published in conjunction with Colet’s introductory Aeditio (Antwerp, 1527).19 His De generibus nominum, written around 1520, was revised in 1528 by his successor as headmaster, John Rightwise, who also directed and staged Latin plays performed by the boys of St Paul’s under Wolsey’s patronage between 1522 and 1530.20 Thomas Linacre, another member of the network around Erasmus and More, was involved in the dissemination of humanist textbooks, although his vernacular Latin grammar, Progymnasmata grammatices vulgaria, or preliminary grammatical exercises (London, c.1515), proved to be too advanced for St Paul’s and was rejected by Colet.21 Designed as a praelectio, or lecture, in upper forms, the treatise by Richard Pace on the fruits of education, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur (Basle, 1518), was one of the earliest works on the method and theories of humanist education by an English author.22 It encouraged Greek studies as well as recommending Hebrew for biblical exegesis and advocated the Italian practice of double translation in Greek and Latin. It is probable, moreover, that Pace’s appointment as Dean of St Paul’s in 1518 made possible the full modernization of the school, which had not been accomplished in Colet’s lifetime. This was achieved by Thomas Lupset, who had studied Greek and Latin under Lily.23 Lupset’s humanist training is revealed in his An exhortacion to younge men (London, 1529) in which, like his master Colet, he lists the New Testament and Church Fathers Chrysostom and Jerome as essential texts along with classical moral philosophical works by Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Seneca, as well as Erasmus’ Enchiridion.24

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The growing interest in Greek is indicated by translations into Latin (and also into English). On completion of his studies at Padua, Bologna, and Ferrara, Pace published a collection of Latin translations of Plutarch and Lucian in Rome in 1514–15, followed by Plutarch’s De garrulitate and De avaritia in 1522.25 The Lucian translations were undoubtedly inspired by the collaborative edition by Erasmus and More, Luciani compluria opuscula longe festiuissima (Paris, 1506).26 Linacre, who had studied Greek with Angelo Poliziano and Demetrius Chalcondylas in the company of Grocyn and William Latimer, published a Latin translation of Proclus’ astronomical work De sphaera mundi, during the reign of Henry VII. An accomplished physician, Linacre then embarked on translations of Galen’s works. Next came the Greek editio princeps of the omnia opera brought out by Aldo Manuzio’s press in Venice in 1525.27 In the latter edition Linacre was assisted by Edward Wotton, a graduate of Magdalen College School, by Lupset, and by John Clement, Lily’s pupil at St Paul’s and former tutor in More’s household.28 The most direct influence on the classroom, however, was exerted by More’s Epigrammata clarissimi (Basle, 1518), in which both More and Lily translated a collection of Greek epigrams into Latin to provide models for imitation, emulation, and copia in the form of rhetorical exercises or progymnasmata.29 As at St Paul’s, Erasmian models were followed with some modifications at Winchester, Eton, and at Wolsey’s short-lived college at Ipswich. The list of Latin authors in Wolsey’s curriculum of 1528, for example, follows almost exactly the order set forth by Erasmus, starting with Terence in the third form, followed by Virgil, Cicero, Sallust, Caesar, Horace, and Ovid in subsequent forms.30 In these schools, rhetorical training was provided by the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, supplemented by Erasmus’ De copia, by Petrus Mosellanus’ Tabulae de schematibus et tropis, and by Philipp Melanchthon’s Institutiones rhetoricae, which was popularized in England in The Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke (London, 1532) by Leonard Cox, Melanchthon’s disciple in Tübingen.31 The main letter-writing manuals were Erasmus’ De conscribendis epistolis and the Ars epistolica of the Flemish grammarian Johannes Despauterius.32 The institutionalization of the humanist programme and the gradual shift in the teaching of Latin grammar is exemplified by school notebooks that circulated both in manuscript for internal use at schools and in print as English–Latin (or Latin) phrasebooks or vulgaria.33 The transformation of the overall curriculum is apparent in the presentation and conceptual arrangement of these English–Latin phrases, compiled to provide conversational and compositional exercises and to supplement the study of grammar in the lower schools. Early vulgaria, such as those of Anwykyll and Stanbridge, were written to illustrate their manuals, which were still fundamentally akin to traditional normative grammars. Slightly later, Stanbridge’s pupil Robert Whittinton emphasized the priority of rules over illustrative examples in elementary instruction.34 Whittinton’s Vulgaria (1520) was designed, moreover, as a refutation of the

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Survey of Henrician Humanism Vulgaria published by the headmaster and later provost of Eton College, William Horman, in the previous year. In this peculiar confrontation between precepta and exempla, enacted as a bellum grammaticale, the defenders of preceptive pedagogy clashed with the representatives of the ostensibly imitative method.35 Whittinton stood for the more traditional approach of the Magdalen College School grammarians, whereas Horman and his allies Rightwise and Robert Aldrich promoted themselves as innovators with a mission to revive the Latin of the age of Cicero through a Latin instruction that set forth purely classical examples without explicit grammatical analysis.36 The Floures for Latine Spekynge, written by Nicholas Udall in 1534, represents a crucial transition from late medieval practices of literary flower-gathering to a new method which made reading the fundamental basis for both grammatical and rhetorical training.37 Udall was Horman’s successor at Eton College. The examples he gives in the Floures cover a long list of the standard school authors whom the students would be expected to encounter in their future readings (Cicero, Ovid, Caesar, Livy, Plautus, Virgil, Catullus, Horace, Quintilian, and Aulus Gellius), as well as more recent humanistic commentaries on classical texts, and grammatical and lexicographical works (including those by Lily and Linacre). In fact, many of the practical handbooks mentioned in the Floures were specifically recommended by Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives, Udall’s tutor at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.38 Udall invites his students to be active readers and interrogate every aspect of the text. Reflecting upon the historicized perception of Latin as a language in flux, he makes distinctions not only within usages of the classical period but also between the language of ancient authors and contemporary Latin. Likewise, he introduces basic concepts and methods of humanist philology to the classroom at a relatively early stage, explicitly discussing the notions of collation and emendation, even raising the question of problematic authorship. Not surprisingly, then, it was the humanist curriculum at Eton under Udall’s headmastership which became a model for other grammar schools during the Henrician reforms of 1538–1540. These aimed primarily at the elimination of the confusing diversity of school texts and promoted uniformity across the educational system. They culminated in the introduction of Colet’s and Lily’s grammars as authorized texts in 1540–2.39 The grammar schools that played a pioneering role in the introduction of the classics drew heavily on the resources of the new university foundations. Waynflete’s statutes for Magdalen College, Oxford, which followed closely those of William of Wykeham for New College, Oxford, and were intended for the advancement of secular priests, made special provisions for demies, or foundation scholars, who were to devote themselves to the study of grammar, poetry, and other subjects in the humanities with the express purpose that they would continue their careers as teachers. The studia humanitatis were, however, brought to full fruition at Corpus Christi

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature College, Oxford, the foundation of which in 1517 was facilitated by the warden of New College and John Claymond, Erasmus’ friend and later dedicatee of the Dutch humanist’s Greek edition of Chrysostom’s De fato et providentia Dei (1526).40 Having resigned the presidency of Magdalen College, Claymond became the first president of Corpus.41 The actual founder, however, was Richard Fox, successor to Wykeham and Waynflete to the see of Winchester, and his statutes provided for a syllabus based on a wide-ranging reading list of Greek and Latin authors.42 Although it is difficult to ascertain from the scant surviving evidence the extent to which statutes were implemented in Oxford colleges, the close correlation between the glosses found in books owned and annotated by scholars at Corpus and the classical texts prescribed by Fox implies that the readings must have been integrated into the curriculum. For example, Udall’s annotations in the Floures and in his personal copy of Linacre’s De emendata structura, inscribed during his tenure at Corpus under the tutorships of Lupset and Vives, parallel Claymond’s meticulousness and encyclopaedic breadth of knowledge, revealed in his commentary on Pliny’s Naturalis historia. Fair copies of the drafts of the commentary—which was based on Claymond’s lecture notes—were likely copied in turn by a large group of students, revealing not only their participation in the preparation of the text but also their active use of their master’s book collection in the college’s library.43 In a letter to Claymond, Erasmus hailed Fox’s foundation ‘set up at his [Fox’s] own expense expressly to the three chief tongues, to humane literature, and to classical studies’ and praised in particular the trilingual library which according to Erasmus would ‘be reckoned all over the world to be one of the chief glories of Britain and that more men will be drawn to Oxford by the spectacle of that library rich in the three tongues, where no good author is lacking and no bad one finds a place’.44 Notwithstanding Erasmus’ excessive praise, however, Corpus Christi was technically not a trilingual college, since it did not have an established Hebrew reader. It was, in fact, Fox’s friend John Fisher, bishop of Rochester and chancellor of Cambridge, who transplanted to English soil the continental model of the collegium trilingue. Fisher fostered Greek studies at Cambridge by inviting Erasmus to come to lecture in Greek and theology.45 He was also behind the foundation of Christ’s, Leland’s college, and of St John’s.46 At St. John’s his statutes dictated specifically that only the ‘sacred languages’ (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) were to be used. As a result St John’s soon became a flourishing centre for the study of Greek and produced a line of eminent scholars including Richard Croke, John Redman, John Cheke, Roger Ascham, and Thomas Smith, all (apart from Croke, with whom he fell out) men to be praised by Leland for their linguistic prowess. In two important orations published in 1520, Croke exhorted his students at St John’s to embrace Greek studies, emphasizing their centrality to theology, politics, sciences, and moral philosophy. These orations, published in the same year as his introductory Greek grammar, Introductiones in rudimenta Graeca, echo More’s propagation of Greek scholarship,

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Survey of Henrician Humanism famously advertised to the Utopians and defended in his letter addressed to the University of Oxford in 1518. In his criticism of the ‘Trojans’, the conservative critics of Greek at Oxford, More argued that the liberal arts are the very foundation of theology. Highlighting the interdependency of secular and sacred disciplines, he urged the revitalization of theology along humanist lines, regarding the study of the Greek language as essential to students’ moral and philosophical development.47 One of Fisher’s early protégés was Robert Wakefield, who was appointed lecturer in Hebrew at Cambridge in 1524.48 By the late 1520s he had moved into the orbit of those advising the king on his ‘Great Matter’ and used his knowledge of the Hebrew Old Testament to lend weight to the arguments challenging the validity of the royal marriage. In 1529, he became praelector of Hebrew at Oxford and in 1532 was appointed a canon and prebendary of Henry VIII’s college.49 Although he died before the regius professorships in Hebrew were established, his younger brother, Thomas, would be the first to occupy the Cambridge chair.50 The educational changes at the colleges are reflected in book ownership in academic circles. As the accounts of the Oxford bookseller John Dorne and the Cambridge-based Garrett Godfrey attest, many writings by the authors cited in the statutes of the colleges were readily available in the Oxford and Cambridge book markets in the 1520s, imported predominantly from continental scholarly presses.51 The curricular reforms are also reflected in the growing number of undergraduate and graduate book collections recorded in probate lists. While earlier book lists show a persistence of traditional textbooks, later lists indicate a growing interest in specifically literary and humanistic studies. Apart from basic collections of Roman authors, less popular writers appear, such as Mela, Macrobius, Columella, Catullus, Martial, Lactantius, and Apuleius, often with contemporary commentaries. There is also an increase of editions in Greek, covering a wide range of poets and dramatists, including Homer, Theophrastus, Hesiod, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides, as well as historians and philosophers, such as Plutarch, Herodotus, Plato, and Aristotle, and the encyclopedist Diodorus Siculus. The texts themselves are often supplemented by updated Greek and Latin grammars, dictionaries, literary and scriptural commentaries by continental humanists as well as Erasmus’ work.52 Similarly, popular Hebrew alphabets, grammars, and dictionaries, along with a wide range of books from the Hebrew Old Testament, started to appear, especially in Cambridge, from the 1530s onwards.53 Writings by classical authors were not only read but also staged, particularly in Cambridge. The first production of a play by Terence is recorded at King’s Hall in 1510–11, while Plautus was first staged at Queens’ College in 1522–3. This may well have been the same performance of Miles gloriosus in which three members of Trinity Hall, including Stephen Gardiner, participated.54 From 1530–1 onwards, if not earlier, there were annual productions, including a Latin translation of Sophocles’ Ajax at Christ’s College. At Oxford plays were performed regularly at Magdalen

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature College from at least 1531–2 as well as at Lincoln and Merton Colleges (1512–13), New College (1524–5), and Cardinal College in 1529–30.55 As in the case of book ownership, these initiatives were not restricted to scholars associated with new foundations, and were spread more widely across both universities by the 1540s. The curricular reforms taking place at Oxford and Cambridge were codified by the royal injunctions of 1535 as part of the sweeping political decisions associated with the Royal Supremacy. Canon law and the use of Sentences as well as any theologians who commented on them were abolished, and a list of acceptable authors, such as Aristotle, Rudolph Agricola, Melanchthon, and Trapezuntius, was prescribed for philosophy. The injunctions, furthermore, provided for the establishment of professorships in Greek and Hebrew, and ratified earlier initiatives in college lectureships in Greek and Latin, thus officially sanctifying the changes started by an interconnected network of reform-minded individuals at the turn of the century.56

Education of the Nobility The introduction of the studia humanitatis was not restricted to the schools and universities but also permeated the world of the nobility. Initially, the household of Henry VII stood as a model for emulation. Here a group of tutors, including professional educators like Holt, John Rede, and William Hone, as well as the poet-orators Bernard André and John Skelton, provided the young princes with the elements of a classical education.57 Later, considerable efforts were made both by Henry VIII and by Catherine of Aragon to educate Princess Mary appropriately. Linacre briefly acted as her tutor and composed his Rudimenta grammatices (London, c.1523) with her in mind. Succeeding Linacre was Vives, Catherine’s fellow countryman, whose De institutione foeminae Christianae provided a full educational programme for the young princess.58 Vives’ approach to the teaching of grammar and his rigorous list of approved authors echo Colet’s earlier provisions for St Paul’s, particularly his concern to show the sound moral content of pagan writings. Accordingly, Mary was advised to draw lessons from authors frequently used in grammar schools: Cicero, Seneca, Justin, Florus, Valerius Maximus, and from Latin translations of Plutarch and Plato. Unlike the schoolboys, however, she was advised to avoid Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Terence, and Plautus because of their ambiguous morality. Vives recommended intead the writings of Augustine, Erasmus, More, and the Christian poets Prudentius, Sidonius, Paulinus, Arator, Prosper, and Juvencus.59 The first part of De ratione studii puerilis (1523), dedicated to Catherine—as De institutione foeminae Christianae would be in the following year—was also composed for Mary. In the second part, dedicated to Charles Blount, son of Lord Mountjoy, there was a considerably expanded list of approved authors for boys. Both, however, were modelled with minor modifications on the curricula of the grammar schools, as would be the

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Survey of Henrician Humanism more fully elaborated pedagogical treatise De tradendis disciplinis (1531), Vives placing the reading of ancient authors at the centre of instruction and promoting the Erasmian method of ‘flower-gathering’. Prince Edward and Princess Elizabeth would, in turn, follow a programme as comprehensive as that of their sister with a distinguished group of tutors: Richard Cox, former headmaster of Eton College, and then a group of graduates of St John’s, Cambridge, Cheke, Ascham, and William Grindal.60 The studia humanitatis as an appropriate form of education for young gentlemen and future members of the governing classes was popularized by Sir Thomas Elyot, another member of More’s circle and friend of Leland, who fulsomely praised the immortal books he had written (Carmen CCXXI). In The Boke Named the Governour, first published in 1531 and dedicated to Henry VIII, Elyot integrates his pedagogical precepts into a monarchical political theory. Unlike the gradual progression through the authors employed in the grammar schools, moreover, Elyot ambitiously parallels more advanced Latin texts with Greek writings throughout the course of study, broadly covering rhetoric, political and military history, geography, and moral philosophy. Like the majority of English educators, Elyot was preoccupied with the moral and political lessons to be derived from classical texts as a means of perfecting the character of the Christian prince. Classical learning was thus meant to be applied to contemporary issues in order to offer counsel, and to protect effectively the public weal from the ills of the current government.61

Reception: A Case Study. Henry VIII and the French Connection Pace observed tellingly in De fructu that it was Henry’s sympathy for the humanist agenda that would foster its progress in his kingdom: ‘Englishmen have been given a great opportunity in our own time to apply themselves entirely to the finest of studies. Obviously, since we have a most noble King who far surpasses all other Christian princes in learning as well as in power. He’s so disposed to all learned men that he hears nothing more willingly than conversations about learned men and books.’62 As a result of his sophisticated education combined with his natural abilities Henry would show himself to be at least a competent scholar (as well as self-­ proclaimed theologian), proficient in Latin and apparently able to read elementary Greek.63 Fortunately, moreover, we have relatively full records of his chief libraries as well as copious marginalia in books he owned—many dealing with the theological issues (such as consanguinity in marriage) that were concerning him at any given time—and these can be used to give some insight into his reading practices and those of the circle round him.64 Not surprisingly, contemporary editions of the works of the Fathers, many by Erasmus, formed a principal component of the book rooms in the majority of the

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature lesser houses. These were supplemented by standard writings from the classical world, many part of the school curriculum described above. According to the post-mortem inventories of Henry’s possessions, for example, the collection at Newhall (Mary’s chief residence for several years) contained works by Cyprian, Gregory, Bernard of Clairvaux, Jerome, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Tertullian, and Augustine, as well as writings by Sallust, Cicero, Seneca, and Livy. Likewise there were copies of Ambrogio Calepino’s Cornucopia, Marcantonio Sabellico’s Enneades seu Rhapsodiae historiarum, and Erasmus’ Adagia. It was a typical aristocratic library of the period.65 Were, however, the books read? No survivor from Newhall can be traced, but in the Bodleian Library there is a closely similar collection of patristic works, most of which have been ornately bound for Henry and Catherine Howard.66 These books, probably selected for Nonsuch Palace, show virtually no sign of use and their function was almost certainly for display. Ownership, in other words, is not the same as consultation, and in the case of the nobility library catalogues may tell us more about what was fashionable to own than what was owned to be read. Reception can be a word with multiple meanings, especially outside university circles. In Henry VII’s day, the chief royal library was at Richmond Palace and it remained a showpiece throughout the Tudor period. In February 1535, an unidentified Frenchman, possibly Palamède Gontier, secretary of the French embassy to England, compiled a list of almost 125 manuscripts and printed books at Richmond, concentrating primarily on those written in French.67 The majority were beautifully illuminated manuscripts acquired by Edward IV after his brief exile at the court of Louis de Gruuthuse, governor of Holland and Zeeland, in 1470–1. Most were translations of the sorts of classical texts or general histories that were popular in the late Middle Ages or of equally commonplace theology. The bulkiest was a French translation by Laurent de Premierfait of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium and it was, like many of the others, meant to be read aloud from a lectern.68 Henry VII supplemented the Edwardian collection with further deluxe manuscripts but his main contribution consisted of a large number of printed books, some on vellum, from the shop of the Parisian printer Anthoine Vérard, whose publications reflected the interests of the French royal family and the nobility at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century.69 None of the books in the Richmond list can be associated with Henry VIII, however, and one has the sense of a slightly old-fashioned collection, retained for magnificence rather than utility. If the list was prepared to be consulted by Francis I, who prided himself on his libraries and devoted considerable resources to the acquisition of rare and valuable ancient texts, then he would have felt no lust for its contents.70 Is Richmond, however, an anomaly, a kind of museum to a former age? Or did Gontier, if it were he, leave out the modern humanistic material? What do Henry’s other principal libraries tell us? Do they, in fact, reflect the contemporary portrayal

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Survey of Henrician Humanism of Henry as deeply learned himself and great patron of aristocratic writers and professional scholars? An examination of the contents of ‘the Kinges Upper Library’ at Westminster Palace—it was a working library and much consulted—provides little evidence that Henry was particularly engaged with the sorts of materials the studia humanitatis promoted.71 Although writings by Erasmus and editions by him and others of the Fathers are represented, there are no significant modern editions of Latin writers from antiquity and only one surviving classical text in Greek, a copy on vellum of Ptolemy’s Almagest (Basle, 1538), dedicated to Henry and no doubt a presentation copy by the editor Simon Grynaeus.72 Greek writings are normally found in French translations taken from Latin adaptations: Claude de Seyssel’s translations of Xenophon’s Anabasis (Paris, 1529) and of Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliotheca historica (17–20) (Paris, 1530) from the versions by Leland’s acquaintance Jan Lascaris, and of Thucydides’ Historia belli Peloponnesiaci from the version of Lorenzo Valla (Paris, 1527). There were also translations from Latin into French: Caesar’s De bello Gallico by Étienne de Laigues (Paris, 1531), for example, and Sallust’s Catilina by Jean Parmentier (Paris, 1528). Significantly, all these examples were printed in Paris and they bear witness to a programme of vernacular translation initiated by Francis I, himself not fluent in Latin and without any Greek. This initiative was announced by Jacques Colin, who would become lecteur du roi, in his dedication of the Anabasis to the king: ‘de son propre mouuement a esté content d’en faire part aux princes, seigneurs et gentil hommes de son Royaulme’ (sig. a ~5). Henry VIII did not encourage readership of the classics in this way and English translations, such as Sir Richard Morison’s rendering of Frontinus’ Strategemata (1539)—of which the presentation copy was kept at Westminster—were almost inevitably bids on the part of the translators for royal favour rather than commissioned pieces. Although the libraries at Hampton Court and Greenwich, for which no surviving inventories survive, were somewhat smaller than that at Westminster, their contents were no doubt similar, made up in large part by manuscripts removed from the monasteries.73 The best indication of the sorts of printed books that may have been found in these libraries comes from a group that later passed to Sir Thomas Pope, founder of Trinity College, Oxford.74 As at Newhall, many are humanist editions of the Latin Fathers but there are also writings by the Greek Fathers. In the case of the most interesting of the books in Greek, the 1532 editio princeps of the Expositiones antiquae misattributed to Oecumenius, tenth-century bishop of Trikkala, there is at least some evidence, based on binding, that the volume was considered worthy of consultation by the evangelical circle of advisers surrounding Henry during Anne Boleyn’s ascendancy.75 It was during the years when her influence was strongest that the political advantages of biblical scholarship based on the humanist tradition began fully to be exploited.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature No doubt the most personal of the monarch’s goods were carried with him in coffers as he travelled from place to place. Given Henry’s education and his reputation for scholarship one would have expected a rich assortment of classical texts. In fact, the only book that might be described as humanistic in its orientation, at least at the time of his death, is a copy of Erasmus’ Epicureus in its English translation by Philip Gerrard (1545), and dedicated to Prince Edward.76 The contrasts with the travelling chests of Francis I could not be more revealing: in 1536 two of Francis’s chests were devoted to books and they contained inter alia works (in French translation) by Justinus, Thucydides, Appian, and Diodorus Siculus.77 Henry was the most desirable of the patrons in his realm and one of the routes to  his favour was through book presentations.78 Like his fellow monarchs on the Continent he functioned to some extent as the early modern equivalent of a government granting agency and thus influenced the direction of scholarly endeavours. Not surprisingly, a number of the books in his library derived from humanists aspiring to his favour or seeking to retain it.79 Among these were translations into English of the Plutarchan Lives of Scipio and Hannibal, of Aemilius Paullus, and of Theseus, all New Year’s gifts to the king from Henry Parker, Lord Morley, a former protégé of Lady Margaret Beaufort and father of Jane Rochford, wife of Anne Boleyn’s brother George.80 These were drawn ‘in to ouer maternall tongue’ from the Latin translations found in the Plutarchi vitae first printed c.1470–1.81 Their chief function, apart from the display of Morley’s own literary pretentions, was one of good counsel (as was the case of Elyot’s writings).82 Were they successful in this endeavour? How enthusiastically were they received and with what result? Early in Mary’s reign Morley put into print the English translation of Petrarch’s Trionfi, which he had presented to her father as a (now lost) manuscript in the 1520s. Morley explained that he had originally been inspired in this endeavour by seeing the manuscript of a French translation of the Trionfi much beloved by Francis, written by one of Francis’s grooms of the chamber whose name Morley could no longer remember, but who can in fact be identified as Simon Bourgouyn: ‘wheresoever he [Francis] wente amonge hys precyous jewelles, that booke was alwayes caryed with hym for his pastyme to loke upon.’83 Morley thus indicates that Bourgouyn’s translation was one of the books contained in Francis’s travelling coffers. Likewise, he maintained that the French king took this translation, ‘so thankefully, that he gave to hym for his paynes an hundred crounes, to hym and to his heyres of inheritaunce to enjoye to that value in lande for ever’. It was an impressive quid pro quo and showed Francis’s commitment to the humanist enterprise. Surviving gift rolls indicate that Morley, on the other hand, was normally given a piece of gilt for his efforts and nothing else. The contrast between the rewards received by the two translators and the value placed on their gifts thus stands as a strong indication of the relative importance placed on translations of the classics and related materials in the two courts.84 Nor was there any policy in England, as there was in France, of putting royal presentation

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Survey of Henrician Humanism manuscripts of this sort of material into print for wider consumption.85 And, although Leland was granted a ‘diploma’ to search through the monastic libraries in the manner of Jean de Gagny’s efforts in France, it is not at all clear that he had any encouragement to search out witnesses to writings from the ancient world. Rather, his patrons’ aims seem to have been much more pragmatic, that is, finding precedents for the evolving religious policies of the emerging English Church.86 The creation of the five regius professorships at Oxford and Cambridge after the Dissolutions, of course, helped consolidate the new trends that were occurring within the educational system, but nevertheless England lagged behind France and the Continent in general during Henry’s reign.87 It was not until the time of Patrick Young and John Selden that England could compete on the international level.

Conclusion: The Role of English In the poem quoted at the beginning of this chapter Leland observed that whereas two languages were used in classical Rome Britain had added a third. Elsewhere he waxed lyrical about the revival of learning in his country, listing the names of the great men who were responsible (many of whose names have appeared in our discussion), and once again he acknowledged the role of Hebrew: Ecce renascentis doctrinae gloria floret, Linguarum floret cognitioque trium. Migrat in Italiam Graecus thesaurus, et artes Se reparaturum praedicat usque bonas. Excoluit eloquii vivos Hispania fontes, Gallia nunc studiis tota dicata nitet. Nutrit honorifice doctos Germania multos, Quorum sunt orbi nomina nota probe. Ingeniorum altrix et nostra Britannia, Phraeum, Tiptotum, Viduum, Flaminiumque tulit. Lumina doctrinae Grocinus deinde secutus, Sellingus, Linacer, Latimarusque pius, Dunstallus, Phaenix, Stocleius atque Coletus, Lilius et Paceus, festa corona virum. Omnes Italiam petierunt sidere fausto, Et nituit Latiis Musa Britanna scholis. Omnes inque suam patriam rediere diserti, Secum thesauros et retulere suos, Nempe antiquorum scripta exemplaria passim Graecorum, aeternas quae meruere cedros. Vivat doctorum faelix industria, per quam Lux pulsis tenebris reddita clara nitet.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (See how the glory of learning revived flourishes, as does the knowledge of the three languages. The Greek treasure migrates to Italy and proclaims it will restore the liberal arts. Spain cultivates the living fountains of eloquence, and nowadays France shines, being wholly dedicated to studies. Germany nourishes in honour many learned men whose names are well known to the world. And our Britain is a fosterer of the talented: she produced Free, Tiptoft, Widow, and Flemyng. Then Grocyn followed these lights of learning; and Selling, Linacre, pious Latimer, Tunstall, ‘Phoenix’ (who remains unidentified), Stokesley and Colet, Lily and Pace, a festive group of men. All of them went to Italy under a lucky star, and the British Muse shone forth in the Italian schools. And all of them returned to their homeland as erudite men, bringing their treasures with them, namely manuscript copies of the ancient Greeks, which deserve eternal preservation. Long live the happy industry of the learned, thanks to which the light restored to us shines bright, with darkness banished.)88

What, then, was the status of English in this cultural hierarchy? J. W. Binns suggests that it may have been his native tongue rather than Hebrew that Leland was vaunting as England’s third language in these poems.89 Given his interest in the retrieval of Hebrew manuscripts and his praises for scholars who cultivated ‘the tongue of the Holy Scriptures’ (as he described it) this seems unlikely.90 After all, he would salute what must have been the inaugural lecture of Thomas Harding, regius professor of Hebrew at Oxford in 1542, as one that ‘Excoluit linguae quae decus omne sacrae’ (‘cultivated all the elegance of the sacred language’, Carmen CXCVI).91 Likewise he considered Harding’s successor Richard Bruerne as ‘Hebraei radius chori’ (‘the centre of the Hebrew band’).92 Nevertheless, as a friend of Wyatt and an admirer of Surrey, he was convinced that English had possibilities as a complement to the three ancient languages and that these were beginning to be realized. As with so much else, Leland articulated clearly what almost certainly was the opinion of many of his contemporaries on the subject. Although Leland believed that English, like the Latin used by his countrymen, had lacked polish and grace in earlier centuries, he did consider that the substance was there. Chaucer and Gower may have been practically the only poets writing in English to be celebrated in his accounts of illustrious writers of the past; both, nevertheless, receive enthusiastic praise. The chapter on Chaucer, for example, asserts that Chaucer ‘linguam nostram ad eam puritatem, ad eam eloquentiam, ad eam denique breuitatem ac gratiam perduxerat, ut inter expolitas gentium linguas posset recte quidem connumerari’ (‘raised our language to such purity, such eloquence, such concision and grace that it could justly be ranked among the cultured languages of the nations’).93 In his verse encomia, moreover, Leland compared Chaucer to Dante and Petrarch, and observed that as Homer was the most renowned poet of ancient Greece and Virgil of Rome, so too Chaucer was England’s fairest ornament. Leland did, however, feel compelled to qualify his praises: ‘Hunc talem ac tantum protulit hora rudis. | Tempora uidisset quod si florentia musis | Aequasset celebres,

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Survey of Henrician Humanism uel superasset auos’ (‘great as he was, he was born at a barbarous hour. If he had lived when the muses flourished, he would have equalled or surpassed his famous predecessors [presumably those writing in Latin before the Saxon and Danish invasions]’).94 Likewise, although he judged John Gower to have been industrious rather than felicitous in his Latin imitations of Ovid, he did consider him the first to polish the ‘uncultivated’ and more or less ‘completly unformed’ English language, to such an extent that ‘pro carduo et paliuro mollis uiola et purpureus surgeret narcissus’ (‘for thorns and thistles arose dainty violets and the bright narcissus’).95 Leland’s first published work was his Naeniae in mortem Thomae Viati Equitis Incomparabilis (1542). Included among Wyatt’s praises are allusions to his status as an English poet: ‘Bella suum merito iactet Florentia Dantem, | Regia Petrarchae carmina Roma probet. | His non inferior patrio sermone Viatus | Eloquii secum qui decus omne tulit’ (‘Handsome Florence may rightly boast of its Dante, Rome may approve of Petrarch’s royal verse. Wyatt, who took all elegance of speech with him when he went to the grave, was not their inferior in his native tongue’).96 The Naeniae were dedicated to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, whom Leland (somewhat obsequiously) considered to be the phoenix which would arise from Wyatt’s ashes (ll. 78–81). In the end it was knowledge and imitation of the classical languages that brought about the perfection of English: ‘Anglica lingua fuit rudis et sine nomine rhythmus: Nunc limam agnoscit, docte Viate, tuam’ (‘The English language was crude, its rhythm unnamed. Now, learned Wyatt, it has felt your polishing file’, ll. 108–9).97 Thanks to the rigorous training in humanae literae offered at St Paul’s, at Cambridge and at Oxford, and by learned tutors for the aristocracy, new voices would, moreover, emerge who would continue Wyatt’s transformation of literary English into a language worthy of its classical predecessors.98 By Leland’s reckoning, then, it required much Latin and some Greek to achieve the process and that is what he had seen occur in his lifetime.

Notes 1   The bulk of Leland’s occasional verse was printed posthumously by Thomas Newton in 1589: see John Leland, De uiris illustribus/On Famous Men, ed. and trans. James P. Carley with the assistance of Caroline Brett (Toronto and Oxford, 2010), pp. xlvi–xlviii. In this chapter we cite the online collection edited and translated by Dana F. Sutton by poem number, . Normally we follow Sutton’s translations but we do make some modifications. For this quotation, see Carmen VI. We thank David Rundle for his useful comments on a draft of this chapter. 2   See J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990), p. 26: ‘His works are a mine of information about the rise of humanism in sixteenth-century England, and much more could be learned from a further study of his literary friendships.’

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature   On his life see De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. xxi–xxvi.  See Carmen CXXV for his evocation of the history of scholarship at Cambridge, concluding with a triumphant ‘Salve linguarum reparatrix Granta venusta, | Eximium cuius scandit ad alta decus’ (‘Hail Cambridge, graceful restorer of languages, whose excellent fame mounts on high’); also Carmen LXXIII. 5   See the commentary to his Κύκνειον ᾆσμα: Cygnea cantio printed in 1545. We quote from the edition by Thomas Hearne in his The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary, 3rd edn, 9 vols (Oxford, 1768–9), 9, 1–108 (at p. 83). 6   On these individuals and other French humanists he admired, see James P. Carley, ‘John Leland in Paris: The Evidence of his Poetry’, Studies in Philology 83 (1986), 1–50. 7   On Du Bois see Carley, ‘Leland in Paris’, pp. 14–15, 37–8; De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, p. xxii. While in Du Bois’s orbit Leland informed his Cambridge acquaintance Robert Severs that ‘veterum multa exemplaria quaero, | Exploro, crassis eruo de tenebris’ (‘I hunt down many copies of ancient works; I search for them and rescue them from deep shadows’) (Carmen CXLVI; ‘Leland in Paris’, pp. 12, 34–5). Concerning an edition of De viribus herbarum attributed to Macer Floridus, he observed: ‘Delituere nigris tenebris ut tempore longo | Squallida non meritis corpora sparsa notis | Quae bene collatis nunc exemplaribus omnem | Reddita splendori deposuere situm’ (‘for a long time they [Macer’s verses] have been hidden in deep darkness, their bodies disfigured by undeserved blemishes. And now all their copies have been collated, they have lost all their filth and have been returned to their splendor’) (Carmen CLIII). 8   See also Carley, ‘Leland in Paris’, pp. 11–12, 33–4. 9   On Gagny, see James P. Carley and Pierre Petitmengin, ‘Pre-Conquest Manuscripts from Malmesbury Abbey and John Leland’s Letter to Beatus Rhenanus Concerning a Lost Copy of Tertullian’s Works’, Anglo-Saxon England 33 (2004), 195–223 (at pp. 199–201); also De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. liii–lv. 10   See John D’Amico, Theory and Practice in Renaissance Textual Criticism: Beatus Rhenanus Between Conjecture and History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988). 11  For an overview of humanist education in England, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana, Ill., 1944), 1, 134–63; Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 59–101; Maria Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (1986), pp. 112–39; Denys Hay, ‘England and the Humanities in the Fifteenth Century’, in Denys Hay, Renaissance Essays (1988), pp. 168–231; Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools from Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven, 2006), pp.  118–27; Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature 1430–1530 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 194–9. 12   See Nicholas Orme, Education in Early Tudor England: Magdalen College Oxford and its School 1480–1540 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 1–50. 13  The Vulgaria was edited by Orme in English School Exercises 1420–1530 (Toronto, 2013), pp. 292–345. See also Alexander H. Brodie, ‘Anwykyll’s Vulgaria: A Pre-Erasmian Textbook’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 75 (1974), 416–27; Wakelin, Humanism, pp. 134–40. On vulgaria or phrasebooks, see the discussion on pp. 520–1. 3 4

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Survey of Henrician Humanism 14  See The Vulgaria of John Stanbridge and the Vulgaria of Robert Whittinton, ed. Beatrice White (1932), pp. xi–lxi; also Eloise Pafort, ‘A Group of Early Tudor School-Books’, The Library 4:26 (1946), 227–61. 15   See Orme, ‘John Holt (d. 1504), Tudor Schoolmaster and Grammarian’, The Library 6th ser. 18 (1996), 283–305. On the education of the royal princes see pp. 524–5. 16   Erasmus’ influence on Colet is treated in detail by J. B. Trapp, ‘From Guarino of Verona to John Colet’, in Italy and the English Renaissance, eds Sergio Rossi and Dianella Savoia (Milan, 1989), pp. 45–53; J. B. Trapp, Erasmus, Colet, and More: The Early Tudor Humanists and their Books (1991), pp. 79–141. 17   For a modern edition of De copia and De ratione, see Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 24, ed. and trans. Craig R. Thompson, Literary and Educational Writings 2 (Toronto, 1978). For Concio, see ‘Homily on the Child Jesus. Concio de puero Iesu’, ed. and trans. Emily Kearn, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 29, eds Elaine Fantham and Erika Rummel (Toronto, 1989), pp. 1–70. 18   On the publication of schooltexts in England, see Daniel Wakelin, ‘Humanism and Printing’, in A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476–1558, eds Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 227–47; and on the book culture of English schools in the period, see Orme, ‘Schools and School-Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, 1400–1557, eds Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 449–69, and ‘Schools and Schoolmasters (to c.1550)’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 1, To 1640, eds Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 420–34. Despite the initial reliance on continental imports, London-based printers and booksellers became the main suppliers of grammars and other textbooks by English scholars by the 1530s. 19   On the English version of Lily’s Latin grammar, see Lily’s Grammar of Latin in English. An Introduction of the Eyght Partes of Speche, and the Construction of the Same, ed. Hedwig Gwosdek (Oxford, 2013); C. G. Allen, ‘The Sources of “Lily’s Latin Grammar”: A Review of the Facts and Some Further Suggestions’, The Library 5:9 (1954), 85–100; also Vincent Joseph Flynn, ‘The Grammatical Writings of William Lily, ?1468–?1523’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 37 (1943), 85–113. Henry VIII himself owned a copy of Lily’s De generibus nominum ac uerborum praeteritis et supinis regulae: see The Libraries of King Henry VIII, ed. James P. Carley, CBMLC 7 (2000), H2.318. 20   On Rightwise, see, apart from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Dowling, Humanism, p. 116. Terence’s Phormio was delivered by the students of St Paul’s under Rightwise’s direction at Hampton Court in 1528 to celebrate Pope Clement’s escape from imperial captivity. The latter event was memorialized in a politico-religious play (probably composed by Rightwise) accompanying the classical production: see Sidney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1997), pp. 235–7, and ‘The Evolution of the Early Tudor Disguising, Pageant, and Mask’, Renaissance Drama new ser. 1 (1968), 3–44; W. R. Streitberger, Court Revels, 1485–1559 (Toronto, 1994), pp. 129–35. 21   See D. F. S. Thomson, ‘Linacre’s Latin Grammars’, in Essays on the Life and Work of Thomas Linacre c.1460–1524, eds Francis Maddison, Margaret Pelling, and Charles Webster

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Oxford, 1977), pp. 24–35; Kristian Jensen, ‘De emendata structura Latini sermonis: The Latin Grammar of Thomas Linacre’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes 49 (1986), 106–25. Leland celebrated the De emendata structura: ‘Quicquid ab antiquis selegit et ipse Latinis | Seu Graecis, recitat fertilitate sua. | Illeque cornicum tentabit figere ocellis, | Aedere qui tentat scripta polita magis’ (‘Whatever he has taken from the ancient Greeks or Romans he repeats with his own inventiveness. He who attempts to publish something more polished will be trying to shoot the eyes of crows’) (Carmen CIX; see also Carmen CX). 22   See Cathy Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’s De fructu and Early Tudor Pedagogy’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Woolfson (Houndmills, 2002), pp. 43–77. Pace’s text was edited by Frank Manley and Richard S. Sylvester, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur (The Benefit of a Liberal Education) (New York, 1967). 23   In a poem written in the late 1520s (Carmen XXXIV), Leland praised Lupset as a model humanist scholar, fulfilling all the roles associated with the revival of bonae literae: ‘Artes in patriam bonas reducis, | Linguas restituis politiores, | Thesauros ueterum inuehis librorum | Doctos, et recolis chorum disertum. | Interpres facilis Latina formas | Ex Graecis monumenta, et ex Latinis | Rursus Graeca quidem labore grato, | Nec certe minus utili pioque’ (‘You introduce the goodly Arts into our nation, you restore the polite languages, you import treasures of ancient books and restore the learned choir. As a translator you readily fashion Latin monuments out of Greek ones, and, again, you produce Greek books from Latin ones by a welcome effort that is no less useful than pious’). 24   For an overview of Lupset’s Exhortacion, see Wakelin, Humanism, pp. 199–205. 25   On Pace’s activities in Italy, see Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Toronto, 1998), pp. 107–8. 26   See Erika Rummel, Erasmus as a Translator of the Classics (Toronto, 1985), pp. 49–69. 27   Linacre also published parts of Aristotle’s Meteorology and De victus ratione by Paul of Aegina (Cologne, 1526). For presentation copies to Henry and Wolsey see The Libraries of King Henry VIII, ed. Carley, p. l. 28  In Carmen CLXXX Leland described how Wotton expounded Theocritus, Homer, and Cicero at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He also wrote verses on Clement’s marriage to Margaret Gibbs: see John Leland, ‘Two Latin Masques’, ed. Dana Sutton, . 29  See The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 3, part 2, Latin Poems, eds Clarence H. Miller, Leicester Bradner, Charles A. Lynch, and R. P. Oliver (New Haven, 1984), pp. 78–95. 30  Baldwin, Small Latine, p. 131. On the reception of Terence, see Ursula Potter, ‘ “No Terence phrase: his tyme and myne are twaine”; Erasmus, Terence, and Censorship in the Tudor Classroom’, in Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom: The Role of Ancient Texts in the Arts Curriculum as Revealed by Surviving Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, eds Juanita Feros Ruys, John O. Ward, and Melanie Heyworth (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 365–89. 31   For an edition of Cox’s text, see Leonard Cox: The Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke, ed. Frederic Ives Carpenter (Chicago, 1899).

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Survey of Henrician Humanism 32   For a modern edition of De conscribendis, see ‘On the Writing of Letters: De conscribendis epistolis’, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 25, Literary and Educational Writings 3, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto, 1985), pp. 1–254. See also Judith Rice Henderson, ‘Despauterius’ Syntaxis (1509): The Earliest Publication of Erasmus’ De conscribendis epistolis’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 37 (1988), 175–210. 33   For a discussion of vulgaria as a means of social self-advancement, see Paul Sullivan, ‘Playing the Lord: Tudor Vulgaria and the Rehearsal of Ambition’, ELH 75 (2008), 179–96, and Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1992), pp. 53–115. For a general overview on the tradition of vulgaria and for surviving early collections, see Orme, English School Exercises 1420–1530, pp. 3–43. 34  Whittinton’s Vulgaria (1520) was edited by White in Vulgaria, pp. 32–128, 134–44. See also H. S. Bennett, ‘A Check-List of Robert Whittinton’s Grammars’, The Library 5:7 (1952), 1–14. 35   David. R. Carlson points out that the controversy was also fuelled by an ongoing struggle to secure patronage: see David R. Carlson, ‘The “Grammarians War” 1519–1521, Humanist Careerism in Early Tudor England, and Printing’, Medievalia et humanistica 18 (1992), 157–81. 36   On a series of Latin verse-letters between Whittinton, Lily, Aldrich, and Horman, see Jane Griffiths, ‘The Grammarian as “Poeta” and “Vates”: Self-Presentation in the AntiBossicon’, in Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter-Writing in Early Modern Times, eds Toon van Houdt, Jan Papy, and Gilbert Tournoy (Leuven, 2002), pp. 317–35. Leland extolled Rightwise’s accomplishments in teaching the ancient languages (Carmen LII) and observed that Aldrich studied with Erasmus at Cambridge, watching the great man as he collated Latin texts (Carmen CXCI). 37   Leland, who had collaborated with Udall in producing verses for Anne Boleyn’s coronation, wrote commendatory verse to the Floures (Carmen CLXXIV). 38   For a general discussion of the methods of Erasmus and Vives, see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996), pp. 101–19. For an overview of the educational programme of the Floures, see Ágnes Juhász-Ormsby, ‘Nicholas Udall’s Floures for Latine Spekynge: An Erasmian Textbook’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 52 (2003), 137–58. 39   See Baldwin, Small Latine, pp. 164–84. 40  On the foundation of Corpus Christi, see James McConica, ‘The Rise of the Undergraduate College’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3, The Collegiate University, ed. James McConica (Oxford, 1986), pp. 17–29. 41   See Mark Vessey, ‘Ad memoriam Claymundi: An English Humanist, His College, and His Books’, in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bariensis, eds J. F. Alcina et al. (Tempe, Ariz., 1998), pp. 581–9. 42  See The Foundation Statutes of Bishop Fox for Corpus Christi College in the University of Oxford, A.D. 1517, ed. G. R. M. Ward (1843), pp. 99–101; also Jonathan Woolfson, ‘Bishop Fox’s Bees and the Early English Renaissance’, Renaissance and Reformation Review 5 (2003), 7–26.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 43  See Ágnes Juhász-Ormsby, ‘Reading Practices of a Tudor Educator: Nicholas Udall’s Annotated Copy of Thomas Linacre’s De emendate structura Latini sermonis libri sex’, Journal of the Early Book Society 12 (2009), 133–60; Jonathan Woolfson, ‘John Claymond, Pliny the Elder, and the Early History of Corpus Christi College, Oxford’, English Historical Review 112 (1997), 882–903. On the library of Corpus Christi and its early donors, among them Claymond and Fox, see J. R. Liddell, ‘The Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in the Sixteenth Century’, The Library 18 (1938), 385–416; J. G. Milne, The Early History of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (Oxford, 1946), pp. 37–53. See also N. G. Wilson, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Greek Manuscripts of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (Cambridge, 2011), and Rodney M. Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts of Corpus Christi College, Oxford: Western Manuscripts (Cambridge, 2011). 44   See Erasmus, ‘Letter to John Claymond’ [Ep. 990], dated 27 June 1519. We quote from the translation by R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson in Collected Works of Erasmus: The Correspondence of Erasmus, vol. 6, Letters 842 to 992, 1518 to 1519 (Toronto, 1982), pp. 405–6. 45  See H. W. Garrod, ‘Erasmus and his English Patrons’, The Library 5:4 (1949), 1–13. Erasmus stayed at Queens’ College from 1511 to 1514. 46   See Malcolm Underwood, ‘John Fisher and the Promotion of Learning’, in Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher, eds Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 25–46; Arthur Tilley, ‘Greek Studies in Early Sixteenth-Century England’, English Historical Review 53 (1938), 221–39, 438–56. For Cambridge in general, see Damian R. Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. 1, The University to 1546 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 264–319. Leader discusses Fisher’s involvement in the refoundation of Christ’s on pp. 281–4. See also Damian R. Leader, ‘Professorship and Academic Reform at Cambridge: 1480–1520’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 14 (1983), 215–27. 47   See More’s letter in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 15, In Defense of Humanism, ed. Daniel Kinney (New Haven, 1986), pp. 129–49. On the political aspect of the debate, see Craig W. D’Alton, ‘The Trojan War of 1518: Melodrama, Politics, and the Rise of Humanism’, Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997), 727–38. 48   The best general survey of the introduction of Hebrew into the English curriculum and its wider political impact is Richard Rex, ‘Humanism and Reformation in England and Scotland’, in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of its Interpretation, vol. 2, From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Magne Saebø, with Michael Fishbane and Jean Louis Ska (Göttingen, 2008), pp. 512–35. See also G. Lloyd Jones, The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language (Manchester, 1983); Stephen G. Burnett, Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500–1660) (Leiden, 2012). On Wakefield, see James P. Carley, ‘Religious Controversy and Marginalia: Pierfrancesco di Piero Bardi, Thomas Wakefield, and their Books’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 12/3 (2002), 206–45, and Dictionnaire hébreu–latin–français de la Bible hébraïque de l’abbaye de Ramsey (xiiie s.), eds Judith OlszowySchlanger et al. (Turnhout, 2008), pp. xvii–xix; Olszowy-Schlanger, ‘Robert Wakefield and his Hebrew Manuscripts’, Zutot 6 (2009), 25–33. 49   Wakefield’s definition of the three languages—he took Latin and Greek for granted—was even more demanding than that of Erasmus, as his Oratio de laudibus & utilitate trium linguarum

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Survey of Henrician Humanism Arabicae, Chaldaicae & Hebraicae (printed in 1528/9) made clear. See Robert Wakefield, On the Three Languages [1524], ed. and trans. G. Lloyd Jones (Binghamton, NY, 1989). 50   On the murky question of the foundation of these chairs and the dates of their implementation, see F. Donald Logan, ‘The Origins of the So-Called Regius Professorships: An Aspect of the Renaissance in Oxford and Cambridge’, Studies in Church History 14 (1977), 271–8. 51   Dorne’s accounts were edited by Falconer Madan, ‘Day-Book of John Dorne, Bookseller in Oxford, a.d. 1520’, in Collectanea 1 (1885), 68–177, and ‘Supplementary Notes to Collectanea I, Part 3, Day-Book of John Dorne, Bookseller in Oxford, a.d. 1520’, in Collectanea 2 (1890), 453–78. For Godfrey, see Garrett Godfrey’s Accounts, c.1527–1533, eds Elisabeth S. LeedhamGreen, D. E. Rhodes, and F. H. Stubbings (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 1–85. For an overview of book culture at Oxford and Cambridge, see J. B. Trapp, ‘The Humanist Book’, Elisabeth Leedham-Green, ‘University Libraries and Book-Sellers’, and Kristian Jensen, ‘Text-Books in the Universities: The Evidence from the Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book, vol. 3, eds Hellinga and Trapp, pp. 285–315, 316–53, 354–79; also N. R. Ker, ‘The Provision of Books’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3, ed. McConica, pp. 441–77. 52   Margaret Lane Ford provides a general overview in ‘Private Ownership of Printed Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book, vol. 3, eds Hellinga and Trapp, pp. 205–28. See also Elisabeth S. Leedham-Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book-Lists from Vice-Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1986); Margery H. Smith, ‘Some Humanist Libraries in Early Tudor Cambridge’, Sixteenth Century Journal 5 (1974), 15–34. 53  On the ownership of Hebrew books in Oxford and Cambridge inventories in the Henrician period, see Jones, Discovery of Hebrew, pp. 248–65, 278–82. 54   On the performance see Leland, Carmen CXXVI. 55  See Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge, ed. Alan H. Nelson, 2 vols (Toronto, 1989), 2, 710–12, and Records of Early English Drama: Oxford, eds John R. Elliott and Alan H. Nelson (Toronto, 2004), p. 602. 56   The royal injunctions are cited in Leader, History of the University of Cambridge, pp. 332–3. See also F. Donald Logan, ‘The First Royal Visitation of the English Universities, 1535’, English Historical Review 106 (1991), 861–88. 57   See David R. Carlson, ‘Royal Tutors in the Reign of Henry VII’, Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991), 253–79; David R. Carlson, ‘King Arthur and Court Poems for the Birth of Arthur Tudor in 1486’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 36 (1987), 147–83; also King Henry’s Prayer Book. BL Royal MS 2 A XVI, commentary by James P. Carley (2009), pp. 13–15. Henry’s copy of the Commentum Familiare in Ciceronis Officia (Lyon, 1502), now Washington, Folger Shakespeare Library, PA6295 A3 1502, contains notes in his hand as well as others by Skelton, who would characterize him as a brilliant pupil. 58   On the copy on vellum found in the royal library at Westminster in 1542, perhaps a presentation copy to Catherine, see The Libraries of King Henry VIII, ed. Carley, H2.252. 59   For Mary’s skill in Latin as a young girl, see the comments of Henry Parker, Lord Morley, who writes to her that ‘skante ye were cum to xij yeres of age, but that ye were so rype in the Laten tonge, that rathe dothe happen to the women sex, that youer Grace not only coulde

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature perfectly rede, wright and constrewe Laten, but farthermore translate eny harde thinge of the Latin in to ouer Inglysshe tonge’: quoted in James P. Carley, ‘The Writings of Henry Parker, Lord Morley: A Bibliographical Survey’, in ‘Triumphs of English’: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court: New Essays in Interpretation, eds Marie Axton and James P. Carley (2000), pp. 27–68 (at p. 50) See also Leland’s comments in his ‘Exhortatio ad musas ut Mariam Henrici Octavi regis incomparabilis filiam incomparabilem invisant’: ed. Sutton, in ‘Two Latin Masques’, . 60   When Cheke brought Leland to Ampthill to meet the royal children, Elizabeth greeted him in Latin and French (Carmen CLXV). Books associated with Edward also give a good idea of his prowess in the classics: see James P. Carley, ‘Henry VIII’s Library and Humanist Donors: Gian Matteo Giberti as a Case Study’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Woolfson, pp. 99–128 (at pp. 106–7), and the references cited therein. 61   On the political context of The Boke Named the Governour, see Greg Walker, Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford, 2005), pp. 141–80; on its educational programme see Baldwin, Small Latine, pp. 197–9. 62   We quote from the translation by Dowling, Humanism, p. 15. 63   He was also introduced to Greek texts in Latin versions as a young man, including a translation of Plutarch’s De discrimine adulatoris et amici, now Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Additional MS 6858, dedicated to him in 1513 by Erasmus. Slightly earlier, around 1507, Giovanni Battista Boerio, physician to his father, presented him with his translation of Isocrates’ Ad Nicolem de regno and Lucian’s De calumnia, now London, British Library, Additional MS 19553. (In 1534 or so Elyot may have persuaded Cromwell to convey to him a copy of his English translation of Ad Nicolem de regno as The Doctrinal of Princes, a translation which Greg Walker argues (Writing under Tyranny, pp. 217–24) was prepared with Henry in mind.) 64   The royal libraries were consulted by the king’s advisers, courtiers, and scholars, as well as by the royal family. Most famously Elyot describes in the preface to his Dictionary (1538) how Henry allowed him access when he was working on this work: Elyot was so overwhelmed by the books he examined that he had the presses stopped so he could carry out revisions. He also added an appendix for the first part of the alphabet, which had already been set. 65  See The Libraries of King Henry VIII, ed. Carley, H5.148–85. 66   See James P. Carley, ‘Sir Thomas Bodley’s Library and its Acquisitions: An Edition of the Nottingham Benefaction of 1604’, in Books and Collectors 1200–1700, eds James P. Carley and Colin G. C. Tite (1997), pp. 357–86. 67  See The Libraries of King Henry VIII, ed. Carley, H1; also Carley, The Books of King Henry VIII and his Wives (2004), pp. 25–6, 37–52. 68   The proliferation of smaller and cheaper books printed in the Tudor era for private consultation greatly encouraged wider reading and increased knowledge of classical writers. 69   These included classical texts in French translation by prominent humanists such as Robert Gaguin (1433–1501) and Octavien de Saint-Gelais (1468–1502). There were also writings by Claude de Seyssel (d. 1520), whose works appeared in more than one of the English royal libraries. On Vérard, see Mary Beth Winn, Anthoine Vérard: Parisian Publisher, 1485–1512 (Geneva, 1997).

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Survey of Henrician Humanism 70   On Francis’s books see in particular R. J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 471–7. In the introduction to her French Renaissance Manuscripts: The Sixteenth Century (forthcoming), Myra D. Orth provides a fine overview of the evolution of the French royal collection in the sixteenth century and the catalogue itself describes some of the most impressive examples. 71  See The Libraries of King Henry VIII, H2. 72   There was also a presentation copy of Maximus the Confessor’s Liber asceticus, with a Latin translation by Cheke (now London, British Library, MS Royal 16 C IX). 73  See The Libraries of King Henry VIII, ed. Carley, pp. lxxiv–lxxvi. In his unpublished Antiphilarchia, now Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.5.15, pp. 335–6, Leland stated specifically that Henry refitted three libraries, one at Westminster, one at Hampton Court, and the third at Greenwich, for the reception of ancient manuscripts from the monastic houses. More than the others, however, the library at Greenwich functioned as a repository for books Henry received from supplicant scholars. 74  See The Libraries of King Henry VIII, ed. Carley, pp. lxxv–lxxvi. 75   See Carley, ‘Henry VIII’s Library and Humanist Donors’, pp. 104–6. 76  See The Libraries of King Henry VIII, ed. Carley, H5.15. 77   See Knecht, Renaissance Warrier, p. 473. This list is similar to those found in an inventory of Francis’s travelling books at Blois taken in 1518: see H. Omont, Anciens inventaires et catalogues de la bibliothèque nationale, vol. 1 (Paris, 1908), pp. 56–7. As Knecht shows, Francis clearly read his books as well as owned them. 78   Book giving was a complex business. On a botched presentation to Henry’s father of a translation into Latin by Filippo Alberici of the Tabula Cebetis, for example, and its repackaging for another potential patron, see David Rundle, ‘Filippo Alberici, Henry VII and Richard Fox: The English Fortunes of a Little-Known Italian Humanist’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 68 (2005), 137–55. 79   For examples see Carley, The Books of King Henry VIII and his Wives, c. 3, and ‘Henry VIII’s Library and Humanist Donors’, pp. 107–12. In English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto, 1993), David R. Carlson addresses the issue of patronage in a wider context. One of the most assiduous donors of books to the king was John Leland. Apart from his own writings he gave printed books, with inscriptions in verse, of Quintus Septimus’ Dictys Cretensis Ephemeris bellis Trojani (Carmen CCLII) and of Sedulius Scotus’ In omnes Epistolas Pauli collectaneum (Basle, 1528). 80   On Morley’s gifts, including the Life of Agesilaus prepared for Thomas Cromwell, see Carley, ‘The Writings of Henry Parker, Lord Morley’, pp. 27–68. 81   On the Latin lives that form the basis for Morley’s translations, see Jeremy Maule, ‘What Did Morley Give When He Gave a “Plutarch” Life?’, in ‘Triumphs of English’, eds Axton and Carley, pp. 107–30. 82   Maule, ‘What Did Morley Give’, pp. 111–16. 83  See Lord Morley’s ‘Triumphes’ of Fraunces Petrarcke: The First English Translation of the Trionfi, ed. D. D. Carnicelli (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 78.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 84   Granted the manuscripts presented to Henry by Morley were of a considerably lower order than those produced by Bourgouyn; but there is no evidence that those which have survived were ever consulted: they contain neither Henrician marginalia nor signs of wear. 85   See pp. 516–17. 86  See Carley and Petitmengin, ‘Pre-Conquest Manuscripts from Malmesbury Abbey’, pp. 196–8. 87  See, for example, Arthur Tilley’s observation in ‘Greek Studies in Early SixteenthCentury England’ that ‘Even Cheke cannot be mentioned in the same breath as Turnèbe, or Dorat, or Henri Estienne, or Scaliger in France, or as Victorius in Italy, or as Camerarius in Germany’, p. 454. 88   Carmen CXCVIII. On this poem and the individuals named in it, see Hoyt H. Hudson, ‘John Leland’s List of Early English Humanists’, Huntington Library Quarterly 2 (1939), 301–4. As Hudson observes, many of the figures still associated with the establishment of humanism in England are included here. It thus constitutes an important list, making clear that educated Englishmen believed that something revolutionary had happened and that they could pinpoint when and through whose agency. Nor is it any coincidence that it prefaces Roberto Weiss’s Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century: see the online version edited by David Rundle and Anthony John Lappin, . 89  Binns, Intellectual Culture, pp. 21–2. 90   He was, moreover, an admirer of Erasmus, whose opinions on the topic we have discussed. 91   See also Cygnea cantio, ed. Hearne, p. 24; Binns, Intellectual Culture, p. 25. 92   Cygnea cantio, ed. Hearne, p. 23; Binns, Intellectual Culture, p. 25. Bruerne’s Hebrew rendering for Henry VIII of the Epistle to Hebrews is now Cincinnati, HUC, Klau Library, MS 24.1. 93   De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 704–7. 94   De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 706–7. This is not the place to discuss Leland’s role in early editions of Chaucer, but it is worth observing that his sentiments were similar to those of his friend Sir Brian Tuke who stated in his preface to the Thynne edition of 1532 that ‘it is moche to be marveyled howe in his tyme, whan doutlesse all good letters [which must be an English equivalent for “bonae literae”] were layde a slepe . . . suche an excellent poete in our tonge shulde, as it were nature repugnyng, spryng and aryse’. 95   De uiris illustribus, ed. Carley, pp. 694–5. 96   We quote from the online edition and translation by Sutton, http://www.philological. bham.ac.uk/naeniae/(ll. 70–4). The echoes to his (rather commonplace) comments about Chaucer must be intentional. 97   Ascham had raised the possibility with Cheke and Thomas Watson that classical metre might be adapted to English verse. Leland seems to be hinting at the same thing when he observes that ‘Nobilitas didicit te praeceptore Britanna | Carmina per varios scribere posse modos’ (‘with you its schoolmaster, the English nobility has learned that poetry can be written in varied meters’, ll. 110–11). 98   Rather oddly, Leland names William Parr, brother of Henry’s last consort, as one of the rising stars (Carmen CCLIII).

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Chapter 25

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW John Skelton David R. Carlson

‘Friscajoly yonkerkyns’ is the phrase John Skelton (c.1460–1529) used for describing a pair of junior Cambridge scholars who found themselves on the wrong side of some doctrinal squabble or other in the 1520s, ‘moche better bayned than brayned, basked and baththed in their wylde burblyng and boyling blode, feruently reboyled with the infatuate flames of their rechelesse youthe and wytlesse wontonnese, enbrased and enterlased with a moche fantasticall frenesy of their insensate sensualyte, surmysed unsurely in their perihermeniall principles’.1 Nor was Skelton’s invective reserved for such inferiors (or for prose or for English): his nation’s northern neighbour (‘Ye puaunt pyspottes’) had a king ‘not worth thre skyppes of a pye’, even as a corpse, with other like aristocratic leadership: ‘mendaxquae bilinguis, | Scabidus, horribilis, quem | vermes sexquae pedales | Corrodunt misere’ (‘Two-facedly false, filth-encrusted, shuddering, whom worms gnaw miserably in the grave’).2 Skelton threatened to knock teeth from the mouth of the royal grammarian William Lily (c.1468–1522), though in a classically elegant hexameter—‘Vrgeor impulsus tibi, Lille, retundere dentes’—rendering Lily’s provocation, to have said to Skelton ‘nec doctrinam habes nec es poeta’ (‘you are neither learned nor a poet’), untrue on both counts at a single stroke.3 And Skelton described the royal-court householder Christopher Garnesche (d. 1534) and his literary second, possibly Stephen Hawes (c.1474–1525) or Alexander Barclay (c.1484–1552)—‘twaine whypslovens’, in Skelton’s representation, a ‘blynkerd blowboll’ and ‘A bawdy dyscheclowte’—as so foul (‘At bothe endes ye stynke’) that their proximity ‘wyl cause yow caste your crawes’. ‘A reme of papyr wyll nat holde | Of thi lewdenes that may be tolde’, so Skelton restricts himself: ‘Thou tode, thow scorpyon, | Thow bawdy babyone, | Thow bere, thow brystlyd bore, | Thou Moryshe mantycore’, and so on and on, for a dozen more lines.4 Even the revered dead were not safe—‘It is dyffuse to fynde | The ­sentence of his mynde’ is Skelton’s remark on John Lydgate, amongst the English poets who promote his admission to the court of Fame, with John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, though they too are disparaged as not proper laureates like

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Skelton5—nor others for whom Skelton evidently felt affection: ‘Be Gad, ye be a praty pode (= toad), | And I loue you an hole cart lode’, where the reference is to a sizeable shit-heap; ‘The best chepe flessh that evyr I bought.’6 Skelton reserved special vituperation for his contemporary Thomas Wolsey (1471–1530), the cardinal archbishop—‘So fatte a magott, bred of a flesshe-flye’— whom Skelton’s king Henry VIII favoured with the chancellorship and other high state office, whose adherents the poet then characterized as ‘nodypollys and gramatolys of smalle intellygens’: ‘Suche malyncoly mastyvys and mangye curre dogges’, he put it, ‘Ar mete for a swyne herde to hunte after hogges.’7 The many castigated Wolsey in like though less inventive terms after his fall in October 1529, when he was succeeded in the chancellorship by the sainted Thomas More (1478– 1535). With characteristic contrariety, Skelton had excoriated the priest-chancellor’s person and policies long before, especially when Wolsey was at his most powerful and the other poets were praising him,8 and then reconciled with him once Wolsey’s grasp had already begun to fail. In the 1480s, both Wolsey and Skelton had worked at teaching grammar, in the schools; both went thence on to public service, though differently: the butcher’s son to his Caesarian prelacy, and Skelton to some royal oratorship possibly lacking the dignity that the Petrarchan laureation arrogated to itself but no less potent for that. Like Wolsey’s, Skelton’s career represents the moment at which classicism—knowledge of Graeco-Roman antiquity (per se, rather than as an ecclesiological adjunct) and the use of such knowledge for recreation of the secular-civic sphere—changed from being a specialism of the schools and a few prince-pleasers to being a central component of English literary culture. Castigation is what poetry was for, in Skelton’s peculiar practice, which he perfected by means of study and emulation of the classical auctores; for Skelton’s classicism, the key figure is Gaius Lucilius (c.180–103 bc), the original Old Latin satirist and a deeply negative commentator on humans’ doings: ‘O quantum est in rebus inane!’ (‘In humans’ affairs, O, how much emptiness there is!’).9 For Lucilius, it appeared to be the case that ‘tristis, difficiles sumus, fastidimus bonorum’ (‘We are miserable and difficult, even contemptuous of good things’), and he wrote ‘ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes’ (‘as though all persons were enemies of all others’).10 For the most part, the writings of Lucilius were lost soon after Christianity’s imposition throughout the Roman Empire, though about 1,300 fragmentary lines of the sort just cited survive, in quotations. Consequently, in some measure, the nature of his work has needed to be inferred from others’ comments on it, which are partial, not disinterested. In the first place come those of Lucilius’ immediate literary heir, Q. Horatius Flaccus (65–8 bc), whose own Sermones differed. For his part, Horace felt that gentle good humour suited, better than vitriol (‘ridiculum acri/ fortius et melius’); the other way would bring in but fear of poetry and hatred for poets (‘omnes hi metuunt versus, odere poetas’).11 By contrast with his own, Horace characterized

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John Skelton Lucilius’ writing as rather peeling the skin off his victims (‘detrahere et pellem’), then salting the wounds (‘sale multo/urbem defricuit’).12 Lucilius rips into his betters even, literally, by rapist-like violation in Horace’s phrase, ‘primores populi arripuit populumque’; his Lucilius was casually, generally sadistic: ‘ “laedere gaudes” | inquit “et hoc studio pravus facis”’ (‘“you enjoy inflicting pain”, someone says; “just a sadist is what you are, when you write like that”’).13 The other Roman satirists, Aulus Persius Flaccus (34–62) and Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis (c.60–c.140), found the same though they judged differently. Juvenal depicts Lucilius as a dire archaic battle-­ demon, thumos-possessed, coursing over the slaughter-place to seek out more victims for his vibrant sword, ‘inde ira et lacrimae’ (‘anger and tears being the result’).14 And Persius, less emotion-laden, still has it that ‘secuit Lucilius urbem— | te Lupe, te Muci—et genuinum fregit in illis’ (‘Lucilius slashed the whole city to shreds—you, Lupus, personally, and you too Mucius—biting into people so hard he broke his own teeth’).15 Despite the losses, Lucilius was long remembered in this way as a poet of the most violent abuse (‘Lucilius acer et violentus poeta’),16 which, remarkably, he addressed directly to his victims, by personal name. Though he is not attributed any of the fatal verbal attacks in circulation in antiquity—the snuff-iambics of Archilochus (c.680–c.645 bc), for example, by consequence of which people were said to have died17—Lucilius repeatedly likened his own writing to the snarl of a mad dog.18 Skelton uses the same Lucilian terms—‘Thus boldly for to barke’—to characterize his own writing; moreover, he names Lucilius and otherwise manifests a mindfulness of the tradition of Roman satire that followed from Lucilius’ example, setting his own work in the same antique tradition, whence Skelton claims to have derived his lavish invective propensities.19 He only emulates these particular ancients, the ‘famous poettes saturicall’, impersonating them and ventriloquizing, speaking with their voices to his own present circumstance: If thow war aquentyd with alle The famous poettes saturicall, As Persius and Juvynall, Horace and noble Marciall, If they wer lyveyng thys day, Of the wote I what they wolde say; They wolde the wryght, all with one stevyn, The follest sloven ondyr heven Prowde, peviche, lyddyr and lewde, Malapert, medyllar, nothyng well thewde, Besy, braynles, to bralle and brage, Wytles, wayward, Syr Wrag-wrag, Dysdaynous, dowble, ful of dyseyte, Liing, spying by suttelte and slyght,

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[false] [educated]

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Fleriing, flatyryng, fals and fykkelle, Scornefull and mokkyng over to mykkylle.20

[obsequious]

The key component of the key figure’s work, the infamous Lucilianus character, is verbal libertas—a freeness with language, to say what needed saying, by whatever means, that amounted to an obligation for the poet—which Skelton adopted and made his own, despite possible costs: ‘Juvenall was thret, parde, for to kyll | For certayne envectyfys’, Skelton believed; ‘yet wrote he none ill, | Savynge he rubbid sum on the gall.’21 Whatever the risk, nonetheless ‘Libertas veneranda piis concessa poetis | Dicendi est . . . | Vel quaecunque valent stolidos mordere petulcos’ (‘To poets of respect has been decreed a liberty, venerable in itself, to noise abroad . . . whatever might do even physical harm to abrasive idiots’); ‘For thought hath lyberte; | Thought is franke and fre.’22 Truth was at stake, Skelton believed: ‘I write trewly’; ‘What though my stile be rude? | With trouthe it is ennewde (= renewed)’ and ‘Trouthe should nat be subdude.’23 In the circumstance, all Skelton could do was follow the example of the Roman satirists, no matter the unclassical mutations of language to which often he had to resort. ‘Facit indignatio uersum’ (‘Outrage is what engenders my verse’), wrote Juvenal; ‘I am forcebly constrayned | At Juvynals request’, Skelton himself put it, though again he is quoting, ‘Quia difficile est | Satiram non scribere’ (‘because it is a difficult thing to avoid writing satire’): ‘Blame Juvinall.’24 The incorporation of Juvenal’s Latin line into the English Skeltonic rhyme-scheme is only a concrete instance of Skelton’s thoroughgoing impersonation of Roman satire. Skelton developed his own calendar, as if he lived in a temporal realm as out of joint with the times as the poetic one he came to inhabit; its inaugural year is equivalent only to 1488, when Skelton entered royal service.25 Consequently, his earlier life—the implication of his dating system being that he had not had one—and origin are not well understood. On the other hand, Skelton’s knowledge of antiquities was extensive, as measured by his demonstrable usage: he knew the poets Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan as well as various somewhat more obscure figures, including Catullus, Propertius, and the Senecan verse-tragedies, besides the satirists and Martial; Cicero figures prominently, and the historians too, from Sallust to Valerius Maximus; finally, he had some working knowledge of Greek, as well as an awareness of the Greek poetic tradition beyond the Homeric poems.26 The implication is that Skelton’s education was extensive, probably unusually so. Most likely, some part of it came from Cambridge University, possibly at Peterhouse; subsequent to some training, the university granted Skelton its privileges of laureation in 1493, after Oxford University had already done so at some point before 1490. These laureations would appear to have been teaching certificates in effect, granted persons who had a decade of experience or so giving lessons in school.27 Skelton began as a working grammarian, in other words, teaching the poets to inchoate Latinists. It is likely, or possible, that,

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John Skelton after school, he continued in pedagogy in service with an aristocratic household;28 somewhat later, in the year of his life’s proper beginning, Skelton entered the same kind of service in the royal household, as a tutor to Prince Henry, subsequently Henry VIII but at the time only Henry VII’s minor heir. The first Tudor was also the first of England’s monarchs to professionalize the royal household’s educational apparatus, in the way implied by Skelton’s employment; in place of polite but amateurish inbreeds, the Tudor royal household employed half a dozen trained and accomplished specialists during the decade or so Skelton remained in place, until c.1500.29 From this period, two books survive in which Skelton may be observed at work with his princely charge directly, also showing something of Skelton’s own inclinations and professional currency. The one is a copy from a printed edition of some of the more princely and practically ethical of the opera philosophica of M. Tullius Cicero (106–43 bc)—De officiis, De amicitia, De senectute, and the Paradoxa Stoicorum— accompanied by modish modern commentaries.30 The other is a manuscript copy of a more nearly modern history of the crusades, in French, featuring ‘gessit que maximus heros | Anglorum’, the martial feats of the prince’s forebear, the lion-hearted English warrior-king Richard I (1157–99). Skelton inscribed verses on the manuscript’s cover and admonitory annotations throughout; in fact, both books, manuscript and print, have annotations in the hands of the prince and his tutor: Quamvis annosa est, apice et sulcata vetusto, Pagina trita tamen fremit horrida prelia Martis Digna legi. (Although it is old and inscribed in an ancient hand, this well worn page yet bristles with Mars’ fierce wars, worthy to be studied.)31

Skelton also made English translations in both such historical areas of classical studies. His translations of some of the Ciceronian epistolography—‘Of Tullis Familiars’, Skelton himself says, probably the 1389 discovery of Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406)— do not now survive, though the work was known, or known of, by the printer-­ publisher William Caxton (c.1415–1492), who has it that Skelton, ‘late created poete laureate in the vnyuersite of Oxenforde’, had ‘translated the Epystlys of Tulle’ (‘I suppose he hath dronken of Elycons well,’ he adds), ‘not in rude and olde langage, but in polysshed and ornate termes, crafetly, as he that hath redde Vyrgyle, Ouyde, Tullye, and all the other noble poetes and oratours.’32 There does remain, however, Skelton’s translation of the world-historical Greek writer Diodorus (fl. 60–30 bc), a native of the original Roman province of Sicilia and older contemporary of Titus Livius (59 bc–ad 19). Caxton mentions this work too in the same 1490 Eneydos prologue, as does Skelton himself in the Garland of Laurel, and the surviving manuscript copy belonged to a royal-court householder of Henry VII and Henry VIII.33

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature What Livy (whom Skelton used too) was to do for Rome itself, Diodorus Siculus attempted in universal history, most notably for regions remote from the imperial metropole.34 Of the forty books of Diodorus’ Library of History—its title implies what turns out to be the case, that it is often a reassembly of information from other sources, like Livy’s early books and as massive—only fifteen survived the Middle Ages (the last complete copy was destroyed in the sack of the last Roman imperial capital by crusading western Christians in 1204); ten of the surviving books (11–20) narrate eastern Mediterranean history from the Persian wars to the establishment of the Alexandrian successor-states about the former Macedonian empire; the other five (1–5) are discontinuous introductory books, mythological and ethnographic in nature rather than narrative, in which Diodorus describes the legends and atavistic customs of non-Roman peoples—‘Recountyng commoditis of many a straunge nacyon’, says Skelton:35 Africans, South Asians, West Asians, Egyptians, and the various Greeks of Diodorus’ own Magna Grecia—the less remote of which were being brought into Roman hegemony at the moment of his work, in the last years of the republic: the Library of History probably ended with the Gallic campaigns of C. Julius Caesar, which brought the dictator to Britain in 55 and 54 bc. It may seem poor judgement that, in the fifteenth century, when so many more fundamental, original contributions to ancient historiography were still wanting attention, Diodorus attracted as much as he did; there is otherwise in evidence some preference for sources that transmit information in bulk though at second hand, as Diodorus does; in any case, c.1449, the first five books of Diodorus were translated from Greek into Latin by the international scholar-eminence Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), who resided in England (where piles impeded his researches) in 1418–22, also husbanding his connections there long after;36 and Poggio’s translation was put from Latin into English by Skelton, most likely from some copy of a printed edition that had made its way from Italy to the remotest former imperial province. Aside from the detailed linguistic knowledges implied in these undertakings, and the fine-grained philological intelligence he would have gained by them, together these scholarly works of classical translation attest to Skelton’s grasp of principles of humanism only just becoming current, and at a distance: first, from the Ciceronian correspondence, the notion that eloquence is a tool for serving political ends, eventually to be associated with the name of Nicolò Machiavelli (1469–1527); second, from Diodorus, the Herodotean notion of custom, later most influentially propagated by More’s Utopia (1516): historical study could be a means for appreciating that things need not be the way they were, since other peoples, at other times, in other places, had in fact done things differently. From Diodorus’ compilation, Skelton Englished the ‘utopic’ voyaging of the Greek Iambulus (c.250–225 bc), whom four months’ sailing south-east from Aden conveyed to ‘the Wealthy Island’—identifiably Sri Lanka— where women were not men’s wives ‘and so their children be brought up in like wise

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John Skelton and every man cherisheth them and loveth them in general’, and properties all were held in common ownership, ‘with all such thing as is among them in common’.37 Young More knew Skelton already in this late fifteenth-century period of his classical studies and teaching. The future Utopia-author introduced the poet to More’s collaborator Desiderius Erasmus (c.1467–1536) in the royal household at Eltham in 1499, when Erasmus wrote a poem in praise of Skelton’s erudition and probity, elsewhere too naming Skelton the ‘Britannicarum litterarum lumen ac decus’—no doubt a more accurate assessment than William Lily’s later assassination, though no less self-interested.38 In other more immediately consequential ways, Skelton’s pedagogic office in the household brought him into direct participation in the literary activities of the Tudor court, which were at the moment predominantly of two kinds. First, a considerable international grex poetarum gathered there, attracting even the attentions of Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), the Il cortegiano-author, who visited in the early sixteenth century.39 Excepting Skelton, all involved were itinerant aliens, who had trained on the Continent: in the first place, Bernard André (c.1450–1522), the blind bard of Toulouse, with the Italian-trained Pietro Carmeliano (c.1451–1527) and Giovanni Gigli (1434–98) in the earliest period; also Cornelio Vitelli (fl. 1473–1525), Filippo Alberici (d. 1526), and a series of others, including Johannes Michael Nagonius (c.1460–1510), who worked also in far Bohemia.40 More’s noteworthy earliest Latin verse imitated the classicizing dynastic encomiums produced by this group of humanist poets;41 and the earliest verse that can be attributed to Skelton is likewise implicated. The introduction of pastoral to England is often imputed to Skelton’s antagonistic contemporary Barclay—also English trans­ lator of the contemporary Latin Ship of Fools and Sallust’s Jugurtha—though in fact Barclay’s contribution was anticipated by André, Giovanni Opizio, and Andrea Ammonio, as well as by Skelton, possibly in the fifteenth century.42 It is likely that Skelton would have used the conventions of pastoral as the ancient poets did, for castigating the urban, courtly sophistication of his own contemporaries; it is the case that Skelton’s anti-court writings of this early period—from the Bowge of Courte to Magnificence, dream-vision and morality, not yet Lucilian—are extensive. However, Skelton’s pastorals (if ever there were any) have been lost, and the earliest surviving verse securely attributable to him—a eulogy occasioned by the rebellious murder of a Percy ‘cousin’ of King Henry in 1489, ‘Upon the Doulourus Dethe and Muche Lamentable Chaunce of the Most Honorable Erle Of Northumberlande’, beginning I wayle, I wepe, I sobbe, I sigh ful sore The dedely fate, the dolefulle destenny Of hym that is gone, alas, withoute restore, Of the blode royall descendinge nobelly; Whos lordshepe doutles was slayne lamentably

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Thorow treson, agayn hym compassyd and wrought, Trew to his prince in word, in dede, and thought.

—is an English-language repetition of the rebarbatively classicizing Latin poem, written in a Greek lyric metre (Sapphic stanzas), for the same occasion by Bernard André: Nunquid es ludo satur, O Quirine? Tam gravi quanto, furibunde, pulsu Cogis humanos animos furenti Currere motu! Desinas, tandem, superate nostro Septimo Henrico totiens minari, Qui tuo campo triplici reportans Pila triumphat, Lauriger princeps, placidusque, mitis; Hosticos omnes reprimit furores, Ut diuturna liceat Britannis Vivere pace. (Never sated, are you, o Sabine spear-wielder, with the funerary games? How great is that fierce impulsion, so grave, by which you (fury-bound yourself ) impel human souls to race headlong down your course of fury! Cease ye—now that you are at long last overcome—so often to threaten our king, the seventh Henry, who returns his javelins back from your three-fold field in triumph, a prince decked with laurels, serene and mild; he represses all his enemies’ rages, so that his Britons be enabled ever to live in peace.)43

The alternative to such humanist encomium-mongering at court was the entertainments to be associated with Hawes and the other contemporary makers of court-ballets: Skelton was a considerable lyricist already at this time, and continued.44 He was involved in the production of theatrical and other entertainments, especially with the early revels-master William Cornysh (d. 1523). In addition to court plays— only Magnificence survives, though others are attested—Skelton wrote lyrics that were set to music by Cornysh and performed in court, as were also lyrics of Henry VIII himself.45 Skelton’s contributions can be characteristically and portentously odd, however. His poem beginning, The auncient acquaintance, madam, betwen us twayn, The famylyaryte, the formar dalyaunce, Causyth me that I can not myself refrayne, But that I must wryte for my plesaunt pastaunce Remembryng your passying goodly countenaunce, Your goodly port, your bewteous visage, Ye may be countyd comfort of all corage.

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John Skelton at first invokes the same circumstance of romantic estrangement or alienation amongst former intimates used too in the poem of Thomas Wyatt (1503–42), They fle from me that sometiyme did me seek With naked fote stalking in my chambre. I have sene theim gentill, tame, and meke, That nowe are wyld, and do not remembre That sometyme they put theimself in daunger To take bred at my hand; and nowe they raunge, Besely seking with a continuell chaunge.46

In Skelton’s version, it emerges that, instead of ‘your old trew louyng knyght’, the admired dame has turned her attentions to other persons: ‘in good horsmen ye set your hole delyght’; and so, in place of Wyatt’s metrically subtle final enquiry, ‘But syns that I so kyndely ame serued | I would fain knowe what she hath deserued’, Skelton ends with an iambic-style threat to do the woman harm, Archilochus-like: ‘Play fayre play, madame, and loke ye play clene, | Or ells with gret shame your game wylbe sene.’ The better part of the Skelton lyric, in the middle—‘Have in, sergeaunt ferrour! Myne horse behynd is bare’—is a series of unpleasantly graphic evocations of sporting-competitive bestiality, anal-wise, with heavy alliteration, as well as rhyme, and rhythmically emphatic: Ware, ware, the mare wynsyth wyth her wanton hele! [kicks] She kykyth with her kalkyns and keylyth with a clench; [horseshoes kills/cools] She goyth wyde behynde and hewyth never a dele: Ware gallyng in the widders, ware of that wrenche! It is perlous for a horseman to dyg in the trenche.

It might be that Skelton had learned from the leering late Roman elegist Maximianus (fl. c.525), whom Skelton cites in his own verse and would have taught his charges, for this late antique master of the obscene paronomasia (beyond Ovid even) was a standard curricular author.47 In any case, some lines of such early lyric offerings as ‘The auncient acquaintance’ will seem to anticipate what was to become Skelton’s distinctive and hence characteristic contribution to the English poetic tradition, the ‘Skeltonic’. He only began to work with the form in full measure in the sixteenth century, after he was put out of court c.1500.48 The earliest instance is the horrifying Christian-devotional lyric ‘Uppon a dedmans hede’—a human skull, ‘that was sent to hym from an honorable jentyllwoman for a token’—‘in sentence comendable, lamentable, lacrymable, profytable for the soule’, goes its prose introduction: Youre ugly tokyn My mynd hath brokyn From worldly lust; For I have dyscust

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature We ar but dust, And dy we must. It is generall To be mortall: I have well espyde No man may hym hyde From deth holow-eyed, With synnews wyderyd, With bonys shyderyd, With hys worme-etyn maw And his gastly jaw Gaspyng asyde, Nakyd of hyde, Neyther flesh nor fell.

The verse-form is immediately recognizable, though also hard to describe in prosodic terms: short lines, of two or three or four beats (five begin to seem like something else, by virtue of the prevalence of iambic pentameter, though there might be five-beat Skeltonics: ‘Wyll, Wyll, Wyll, Wyll, Wyll’), the unstressed syllables unstably, unevenly distributed; also, rhymed at least in couplets though most often in series of three or four or more lines; often insistently anaphoric too, with a great deal of alliteration as well as the rhymes. Skelton’s writing is often satiric also by virtue of its participation in the other tradition of satire, besides that represented in the work of ‘the famous poettes saturicall’ from Lucilius to Juvenal, the mixed-dish Menippeans of Varro, Petronius, and Seneca in Latin.49 In other words, his greater works often compound different forms: mixtures of languages, and mixtures of differing prosodies; also, mixtures of prose and verse, as in ‘Uppon a dedmans hede’ but especially in the late Replycacioun. The tendency is towards a greater proportion of Skeltonic lines, however; the culminating satires of the period 1519–23, attacking the Henrician regime run by Wolsey, are all but exclusively in Skeltonics: Speke Parotte, Collyn Clout, and Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? Skelton’s answer to the question of this last title is that attendance at the court of Henry VIII entails intolerable varieties of self-soiling abasement: Where trouth is abhorde, It is a playne recorde That there wantys grace In whose place Dothe occupy, Full ungracyously, Fals flatery, Fals trechery, Fals brybery,

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John Skelton Subtyle Sym Sly With madde foly. For who can best lye, He is best set by.50

The stylistic contrast of this poem with the substantively often overlapping verse epistle of Wyatt, ‘Myn own John Pointz’—addressing the same question, supplying the same answer, about the same king’s court—is striking. Wyatt’s satire may appear the more classical, though only because it is cool, emulating Horace at his most Augustan, rather than the vituperative satirists; also, because its metre—Romancederived, the pentameter line from Chaucer’s French importation and its terza rima rhyme-scheme from Italian moderns—lies along the main line of English prosody’s devolutions. ‘My wit is nought; I cannot lerne the waye,’ Wyatt asserts, The frendly ffoo with his dowble face Say he is gentill and courtois therewithall; And say that Favell hath a goodly grace In eloquence; and crueltie to name Zele of justice and chaunge in tyme and place; And he that sufferth offence withoute blame Call him pitefull; and him true and playn That raileth rekles to every man’s shame; Say he is rude that cannot lye and fayn; The letcher, a lover; and tirannye To be the right of a prynce’s reigne. I cannot, I; no! No, it will not be.51

By contrast, the Skeltonic is strictly an English-indigenous invention, unsettlingly demotic in its colloquial verbal tools and demagogic oratorical effects; nevertheless, this apparently least classical verse of Skelton is also most classical. For the language of the Roman satirists too was self-avowedly unbuttoned—toga-wearing, in the phrase of Persius—relatively informal, even vulgar, and characterized by the shock of unexpected juxtaposition: uerba togae sequeris, iunctura callidus acri, ore teres modico, pallentis radere mores doctus et ingenuo culpam defigere ludo. (You use everyday language, clever in its pointed juxtapositions, well-shaped in few words, skilled as you are at laying bare people’s sick habits and putting the nail in their faults.)52

And their satire too was of peculiarly local development, the Romans told themselves, beyond anything anyone else ever had: ‘Satura quidem tota nostra est.’53 With the Skeltonic, in his distinctive latest satiric writings, Skelton was doing for his own

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature living English poetic tradition what the Roman satirists from Lucilius to Juvenal had done for Latin verse, inventing something new for it by transferred re-application of something ancient; in this way, the Skeltonics, as unclassical as they may seem in  language usage, in fact instantiate the classicism that characterizes English Renaissance literature in general. For his invention of an indigenous English satire, in the historic circumstance he faced, Skelton’s attention happens to have fastened on only the most impolite of the ancients for his emulation, and he has been punished for his choice ever after by the English tradition: ‘omnes hi metuunt versus, odere poetas.’54 For imitators, Skelton had only Luke Shepherd; for admirers, none or few. Some afterlife as a notorious clown came to him, as if he mocked contemporary mores in his own conduct as well as in his writing; pointedly, however, Skelton was excluded from the high-cultural polite canon of English poetry established in subsequent generations, by George Puttenham, for example, for whom the direct line of descent, from Chaucer (not Langland) to the Elizabethan greats, ran through Wyatt. Skelton has not been a beloved poet, placed in the Poets’ Corner; like Lucilius, whose writings had immediate impact but then were lost to lack of interest when the topicality went out of them, so Skelton’s poetry was to be heard and felt at the time and then forgotten. At the time, however, the forceful contributions of this English Lucilius to classicizing English writing—as a scholar-teacher and public poet—were extensive.

Notes   Citations of Skelton are from the following editions: John Skelton, The Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus, eds F. M. Salter and H. L. R. Edwards, EETS 233 and 239 (1956–7); John Skelton, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven, 1983); and The Latin Writings of John Skelton, ed. David R. Carlson, Studies in Philology Texts and Studies Series 88, 4 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), by short title (usually the first word only, though occasionally something more explicit) and line number. Ancient authors are usually cited by means of the abbreviated forms of the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The translations into Modern English are the doing of the present writer; and, except as indicated otherwise, historical information is taken from the various biographies in the online edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, most importantly Scattergood’s of Skelton. In the present instance, the reference is Replycacion prose post 18; on the episode, see esp. Vincent Gillespie, ‘Justification by Faith in Skelton’s Replycacion’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, eds Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford, 1997), pp. 273–311, incorporating significant analysis too of Skelton’s views of a poet’s truth-telling obligations. 2   Douty, 120, Ballade, 10, and Dundas, 6–10. 3   Latin Writings, fr. 1. 1

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John Skelton 4   Garnesche, 2.38, 3.37, 3.81, 3.155, 5.174–5, and 3.162–5; ‘blynkerd blowboll’ is brought in from Lullay, 24. 5   Phyllyp, 806–7; cf. Garland, 386–448. 6   Manerly, 8–9 and 24. 7   Speke, 509 and 317–21. 8  For the c.1519 verse panegyric of Skelton’s collaborator the poet-grammarian Robert Whittinton (c.1480–1553), see David R. Carlson, English Humanist Books (Toronto, 1993), pp. 109– 18, and pl. 19–22; another, the poem Ianus (after a dedicatory verse prologue, beginning ‘Forte relinquentes celsi iuga festa Cytheri’), in London, British Library, MS Royal 12 A LXII, is discussed and illustrated in James P. Carley, The Books of Henry VIII and his Wives (2004), pp. 80–2 and pl. 76. 9   The fragments of Lucilius are cited from (M) the edition of Friedrich Marx, C. Lucilii carminum reliquiae, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1904–5), with reference also to (W) the edition of E. H. Warmington, in Remains of Old Latin, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938); here, fr. 9 M = 2 W (also Pers., 1.1). On Lucilius and the tradition, see Kirk Freudenburg, Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses from Lucilius to Juvenal (Cambridge, 2001), though on Lucilius also esp. Wendy J. Raschke, ‘Arma pro amico—Lucilian Satire at the Crisis of the Roman Republic’, Hermes 115 (1987), 299–318, and Erich S. Gruen, ‘Lucilius and the Contemporary Scene’, in Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca, NY, 1992), pp. 272–317. 10   Fr. 293 M = 313 W, and fr. 1234 M = 1151 W. 11  Hor., Serm. 1.10.14–15 and 1.4.33–4, in Satires, Epistles, and Ars poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass., 1929). On the partiality of such a view of Horace, for example, see Charles Martindale, ‘Introduction’, in Horace Made New: Horatian Influences on British Writing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, eds Charles Martindale and David Hopkins (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 1–26. 12  Hor., Serm. 2.1.64 and 1.10.3–4. 13  Hor., Serm. 2.1.68–9 and 1.4.78–9; cf. Garland, 100 ‘A poete somtyme may for his pleasure taunt.’ 14   Iuv., 1.19–20, in Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), ‘libeat decurrere campo | per quem magnus equos Auruncae flexit alumnus’; and 1.165–8 ‘ense velut stricto quotiens Lucilius ardens | infremuit, rubet auditor cui frigida mens est | criminibus, tacita sudant praecordia culpa. | inde ira et lacrimae.’ 15   Pers., 1.114–15, which he follows immediately with an insinuation that Horace, by contrast, was a complacent tool, 1.116–17 ‘omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico | tangit et admissus circum praecordia ludit’ (in Juvenal and Persius, ed. Braund); cf. I. M. Le M. DuQuesnay, ‘Horace and Maecenas: The Propaganda Value of Sermones I’, in Poetry and Politics in the Age of Augustus, eds Tony Woodman and David West (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 19–58. 16  Macrobius, Saturnalia, 3.16.17. 17   Confirmed in the publication of a substantial new fragment, in R. Merkelbach and M.  L.  West, ‘Ein Archilochos-Papyrus’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 14 (1974), 97–113, where Merkelbach, p. 113, calls Archilochus ‘ein schwerer Psychopath’. Skelton does seem to have known something of the Greek orator Aeschines (389–314 bc), on the other

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature hand, who was believed to have made a fatal verbal assault on his prosecutor Timarchus, e.g. in the (pseudo-) Plutarchan Vitae decem oratorum, 6 (Moralia, 840f.): Aeschines ‘indicted Timarchus for profligacy’—specifically, he supplied particulars of Timarchus’ work as a ­prostitute-pathic amongst sailors on the docks of Piraeus—‘who, fearing the issue, deserted his cause and hanged himself ’; see Garland,130–2 and 148–68. The kind of speech at issue was criminal in Rome, where, in the quasi-legendary Leges Duodecim Tabularum (c.450 bc), execution was the remedy prescribed si quis occentauisset siue carmen condidisset quod infamiam faceret flagitiumue alteri: see R. E. Smith, ‘The Law of Libel at Rome’, Classical Quarterly ns 1 (1951), 169–79; also, more generally, on the problem of personal names in the Roman satires, see Richard A. Lafleur, ‘Horace and Onomasti Komodein: The Law of Satire’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 2.31.3 (Berlin, 1981), pp. 1790–826. 18   Fr. 2 M = 3–4 W and 377–8 M = 389–90 W; cf. fr. 1095–6 M = 1000–1 W ‘inde canino rito oculisque | inuolem’ (‘Let me fly at (her or him or it or them) in consequence, with canine grin and glare’), with 1281 M = 1192 W ‘quid tibi ego ambages † ambiu scribere coner?’ (‘Why should I try writing you but circumlocutions?’). 19   Why, 1205 and Garland, 380. 20   Garnesche, 5.139–53. 21   Garland, 95–7, where Skelton’s reference would be to one or another of the more or less ancient lives that generally circulated with copies of the satires; the evidence is scrutinized in Gilbert Highet, ‘The Life of Juvenal’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 68 (1937), 490–9. On the Varronian descriptive phrase, see John Svarlien, ‘Lucilianus Character’, American Journal of Philology 115 (1994), 253–67, having also much of significance on the style of Lucilian satire. 22   Ware, 2 envoy 1–2 and Phyllyp, 1200–1. Skelton invokes the satirists’ libertas elsewhere as well (e.g. Calliope envoy ‘Haec Pierius omni Spartano liberior’ (‘a fosterling of the Muses, these lines I write freer than any Spartan’); Scottes, 2 envoy (a hexameter) ‘Si veritatem dico, quare non credidis mihi?’ (‘Why is it that you credit not what I am saying if I tell the truth?’)); but not in Magnificence, where the personification represents rather excess of money-spending and Skelton’s solution for it—‘measure is treasure’ (125; also, Speke, 62)—is expressly imputed to Horace: ‘Oracius to recorde in his volumys olde, | With every condycyon measure must be sought. | Welthe without measure wolde bere hymselfe to bolde; | Lyberte without measure prove a thynge of nought’ (Magnificence, 114–17). 23   Collyn,1116, Douty, 419–20 and 422; cf. Collyn, 1079–94 and Douty, 516–20: ‘Though your Englishe be rude, | Barreyne of eloquence, | Yet, brevely to conclude, | Grounded is your sentence | On trouthe.’ 24   Iuv., 1.79; Skelton, Why, 1210–11, 1216–17 (incorporating Iuv., 1.30), and Why, envoy 8. 25   The particulars were worked out in exchanges between H. L. R. Edwards and William Nelson, ‘The Dating of Skelton’s Later Poems’, PMLA 53 (1938), 601–22; cf. William Nelson, John Skelton Laureate (New York, 1939), pp. 161–5, and, especially for the consequences, F. W. Brownlow, ‘Eschatological Form in Skelton’s Poetry’, in Renaissance Historicisms: Essays in Honor of Arthur F. Kinney, eds James M. Dutcher and Anne Lake Prescott (Newark, Del., 2008), pp. 18–35.

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John Skelton 26   Skelton’s uses of the classical writers—i.e. instances in which he quotes or identifiably paraphrases specific authorial loci, as opposed to simply naming or referring to them—are listed in Salter and Edwards, Bibliotheca historica, 2, 419–22, with some supplement in David R. Carlson, ‘John Skelton and Ancient Authors: Two Notes’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 38 (1989), 100–9. On Skelton’s Catullan knowledge, see J. A. S. McPeek, Catullus in Strange and Distant Britain (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), pp. 44–5, 57–61, and 95–7, or, for a more positive view, Juan Manuel Castro Carracedo, ‘Pium Vestrum Catullum Britannum: The Influence of Catullus’ Poetry on John Skelton’, Sederi 14 (2004), 3–16; most light is shed by Julian Ward Jones, Jr, ‘Catullus’ “Passer” as “Passer” ’, Greece & Rome 2nd ser. 45 (1998), 188–94, esp. p. 191. Skelton’s knowledge of Roman verse obscurities even is indicated by his informed discussion (Phyllyp, 147–58) of the late republican–early imperial woman-elegist Sulpicia, whose work survives in the corpus Tibullianum, as well as by his references to lost poets, not only Lucilius and Quintus Ennius (239–169 bc), ‘that wrate of mercyall war at lengthe’ (Garland, 347), but even the prosodic adventurer Septimius Serenus (?) (‘solempne Serenus, for all his armony | In metrical muses’ Replycacyon, 337–8); on the figure, whom Skelton would have known from the grammarians, see Edward Courtney, The Fragmentary Latin Poets, rev. edn (Oxford, 2003), pp. 406–20. For Skelton’s specific Greek usage—relatively advanced, it seems, even in view of the evidence in Walter Berschin, Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Washington DC, 1988), that some knowledge of Greek remained widely in circulation in western Europe in the dark Middle Ages—there is brief comment in Carlson, Latin Writings, p. 11; esp. see Salter and Edwards, Bibliotheca historica, 2, xxv–xxvii and 410–18. 27   For particulars, see Nelson, John Skelton, pp. 40–7. 28   The household of the Catholic-reactionary Howard family is suggested in Arthur F. Kinney, John Skelton, Priest as Poet (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987), pp. 191–4; on the connections with the family that have been imputed to Skelton, however, see Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge, 1988), esp. pp. 3–34. 29   David R. Carlson, ‘Royal Tutors in the Reign of Henry VII’, Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991), 253–79. 30   The printed book is Commentum familiare in Ciceronis Officia cum Petri Marsi exactissima explanatione, ab ipso recognita et diligenter annotata cumque de Amicitia, Senectute, et Paradoxis eiusdem Ciceronis non penitendis commentarijs et omnium tum rerum, tum verborum indice (Lyon, 1502), in the copy Washington, DC, USA, Folger Shakespeare Library, Shelfmark PA6295 A3 1502 Cage; some of the evidence of it is published in Arthur L. Schwarz, Vivat Rex! An Exhibition Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Accession of Henry VIII (New York, 2009), pp. 46 pl. and 62. It might be pointed out that, despite Schwarz’s indication, the dates all but preclude the non-Henrician annotations in the copy being by Skelton. 31  The verses are Latin Writings, 13 and 14.4–5; the manuscript is Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 432, discussed and illustrated in Henry VIII: Man and Monarch, ed. Susan Doran (2009), pp. 30–1 and pl. 19. On it, see also Danielle Quéruel, ‘La Chronique d’un ménestrel de Reims (MS 432)’, in Les Manuscrits français de la bibliothèque Parker: Parker Library,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Actes du colloque, 24–27 Mars 1993, ed. Nigel E. Wilkins (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 39–64. 32   Garland, 1185, and Caxton, Eneydos prologue, in William Caxton, The Prologues and Epilogues, ed. William J. B. Crotch, EETS 176 (1928), 109. It may not be that reference is to the Ciceronian collection now known as ad familiares, as opposed to the other ancient collections of his letters Ad Atticum, Ad Quintum fratrem, and Ad Brutum, brought to light more famously by Francis Petrarch in 1345: see Remigio Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne’ secoli XIV e XV (1905–14), ed. Eugenio Garin, 2 vols (Florence, 1967), 1, 23–8 and 34–5. The entitulature took time to settle down, and, in the absence of Skelton’s work itself, the two testimonia are not adequately specific. 33   Garland, 1498–502. On the manuscript and its ownership, see Salter and Edwards, Bibliotheca historica, 1, ix–xv. It may be noted that the same body of minor household officers that incorporated the owner of the Diodorus-manuscript also held the chief clerk William Thynne (d. 1546), the Chaucer editor, in whose Kentish residence Skelton is said to have stayed while writing Collyn Clout. On the translation, see Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford, 2006), pp. 38–55; on it and the literary-cultural context, see Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530 (Oxford, 2007), esp. pp. 147–50. 34   I rely on the revisionary analysis of Peter Green, Diodorus Siculus, Books 11–12.37.1: Greek History 480–431 b.c.—The Alternative Version (Austin, Tex., 2006), pp. 1–47. 35   Garland, 1500. 36   David Rundle, ‘The Scribe Thomas Candour and the Making of Poggio Bracciolini’s English Reputation’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 12 (2005), 3–7. 37   Diod., 2.55.1–2.60.1, trans. Skelton in Bibliotheca historica, ed. Salter and Edwards, 1, 215–22. On Iambulus, see Marek Winiarczyk, ‘Das Werk des Jambulos: Forschungsgeschichte (1550–1988) und Interpretationsversuch’, Rheinisches Museum ns 140 (1997), 128–53. 38   Erasmus’ poem in Skelton’s praise (‘Carmen extemporale’) is in Poems, trans. Clarence H. Miller, ed. Harry Vredeveld, Collected Works of Erasmus, 85–6, 2 vols (Toronto, 1993), 1, no. 115; the other, ‘De laudibus Britanniae regisque Henrici septimi ac regiorum liberorum’, later called ‘Prosopopoeia Britanniae’, with a prefatory letter applying the ‘lumen ac decus’ phrase to Skelton, is in Poems, 1, no. 4; for their circulation, see David R. Carlson, ‘Erasmus, Revision, and the British Library Manuscript Egerton 1651’, Renaissance and Reformation ns 15 (1991), 199–232. 39   Cecil H. Clough, ‘Federigo Veterani, Polydore Vergil’s “Anglica Historia” and Baldassare Castiglione’s “Epistola . . . ad Henricum Angliae regem”’, English Historical Review 82 (1967), 778–83, and ‘Baldassare Castiglione’s Presentation Manuscript to King Henry VII’, Liverpool Classical Monthly 3 (1978), 269–72. 40   The best single guide to the activities of this group may still be William Nelson, John Skelton Laureate (New York, 1939), pp. 4–39, and the information in Roberto Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1967), remains fundamental. There is

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John Skelton now also the more broadly based analysis of David Rundle, ‘Humanist Eloquence among the Barbarians in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Britannia Latina: Latin in the Culture of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, eds Charles Burnett and Nicholas Mann (2005), pp. 68–85, as well as a series of studies of individual figures: on André, Daniel Hobbins, ‘Arsenal MS 360 as a Witness to the Career and Writings of Bernard André’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 50 (2001), 161–98; on Gigli, Cecil H. Clough, ‘Three Gigli of Lucca in England during the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries: Diversification in a Family of Mercery Merchants’, The Ricardian: Journal of the Richard III Society 13 (2003), 121–47; on Carmeliano, Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘Pietro Carmeliano’s Early Publications’, The Ricardian: Journal of the Richard III Society 10 (1996), 346–86; on Vitelli, Cecil H. Clough, ‘New Light on Cornelio Vitelli and Humanistic Studies at Oxford University in the Late Fifteenth Century’, The Ricardian: Journal of the Richard III Society 12 (2000), 94–119; on Alberici, David Rundle, ‘Filippo Alberici, Henry VII and Richard Fox: The English Fortunes of a Little-Known Italian Humanist’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 68 (2005), 137–55; and on Nagonius, Paul Gwynne, ‘ “Tu alter Caesar eris”: Maximilian I, Vladislav II, Johannes Michael Nagonius and the renovatio Imperii’, Renaissance Studies 10 (1996), 56–71. 41   David Rundle, ‘A New Golden Age? More, Skelton and the Accession Verses of 1509’, Renaissance Studies 9 (1995), 58–76. 42   David R. Carlson, ‘The “Opicius” Poems (British Library, Cotton Vespasian B.IV) and the Humanist Anti-Literature in Early Tudor England’, Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002), 891–2. For the earliest of these pastorals, see Lena Wahlgren-Smith, ‘Heraldry in Arcadia: The Court Eclogue of Johannes Opicius’, Renaissance Studies 14 (2000), 210–34. On Barclay’s translations, see Daniel Wakelin, ‘Possibilities for Reading: Classical Translations in Parallel Texts ca.1520– 1558’, Studies in Philology 105 (2008), 474–9. 43   De Nortumbrorum comitis nece, in Memorials of King Henry the Seventh, ed. James Gairdner, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores [= Rolls Series] 10 (1858), 48; for the Quirinus mentioned here (who is not the deified Romulus), see Carl Koch, s.v., in Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, eds Georg Wissowa, Wilhelm Kroll, et al. 24 (Stuttgart, 1963), esp. cols 1306–12. On André’s metrical trials (including a verse saint’s life in the Boethian metres in reverse order and imitations of Horace), see David R. Carlson, ‘Bernard André, De sancta Katharina carmen ‘Cum Maxentius imperator’ and De Sancto Andrea Apostolo ‘Si meritis dignas’ (c.1509–1517)’, Sacris erudiri 46 (2007), 450–1. 44   There are important recent evaluations of the work of the three early Tudor vernacular makers, Skelton, Hawes, and Barclay, in Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 174–219, and Antony J. Hasler, Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland: Allegories of Authority (Cambridge, 2011). 45   On Skelton’s collaborations with Cornysh, see W. R. Streitberger, ‘John Skelton: The Revels, Entertainments, and Plays at Court’, in John Skelton and Early Modern Culture, ed. David R. Carlson (Tempe, Ariz., 2008), pp. 22–7; on the lyrics of Henry VIII, see Peter C. Herman and Ray G. Siemens, ‘Henry VIII and the Poetry of Politics’, in Reading Monarch’s Writing: The

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I, ed. Peter C. Herman (Tempe, Ariz., 2002), pp. 11–34. 46   ‘They Flee from Me’ 1–7, quoted (though in a simplified, strictly alphabetic representation, expanding abbreviations, etc., and adding punctuation) from the edition in Richard C. Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1975). 47  The Remedia amoris alone has advice about multiple simultaneous sexual partners, the prophylactic use of prostitutes and other casual sex, the pleasures of voyeurism—peeping in toilets, as well as watching others’ sexual performance—precise descriptions of varying positions of embrace, and fond description of the male orgasm (respectively, Rem. 441–2, 401–4 and 520–2, 437–40, 406–7, and 413–14); Maximianus has all the same and more. The writing may be most accessible by means of Wolfgang Christian Schneider, Die elegischen Verse von Maximian: Ein letzte Widerrede gegen die neue christliche Zeit (Stuttgart, 2003), though there is also Richard Webster, The Elegies of Maximianus (Princeton, 1900); on it, see especially Franca Ela Consolino, ‘Massimiano e le sorti dell’elegia latina’, in Mutatio rerum: letteratura, filosofia, scienza tra tardo antico e altomedioevo, eds Maria Luisa Silvestre and Marisa Squillante (Naples, 1997), pp. 363–400. Comment on the peculiarity of Maximianus’ curricular position is in Jill Mann, ‘“He Knew Nat Catoun”: Medieval School-Texts and Middle English Literature’, in The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers, eds Jill Mann and Maura Nolan (Notre Dame, Ind., 2006), p. 48; and Ralph Hanna, ‘Literacy, Schooling, Universities’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Culture, ed. Andrew Galloway (Cambridge, 2011), p. 177. See also, more generally, Christopher Cannon, ‘The Middle English Writer’s Schoolroom: Fourteenth-Century English Schoolbooks and their Contents’, New Medieval Literatures 11 (2009), esp. pp. 34–5 and 23–7, and Chapter 2 by Copeland in this volume on the curricular authors. Skelton’s familiarity with these sex (or octo) auctores of the grammarians—he describes Maximianus: ‘And Maxymyane, with his madde ditiis, | How dotynge ag wolde jape with yonge foly’ (Garland, 360–1)—is confirmed also by his repeated resort to the Disticha Catonis, detailed in Salter and Edwards, Bibliotheca historica, 2, 423–4. 48   Robert S. Kinsman, ‘Skelton’s “Uppon a Deedmans Hed”: New Light on the Origin of the Skeltonic’, Studies in Philology 50 (1953), 101–9. On the Skeltonic, see esp. Griffiths, ‘“An Ende of an Olde Song”: Middle English Lyric and the Skeltonic’, Review of English Studies 60 (2009), 705–22; also, the remarks in Mishtooni Bose, ‘Useless Mouths: Reformist Poetics in Audelay and Skelton’, in Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century, eds Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus, Oh., 2011), pp. 162–5. 49   On the contemporary development of this kind of writing, see W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Bucknell, Pa, 1995); the best guide to earlier contributions seems to me to be Bernhard Pabst, Prosimetrum: Tradition und Wandel einer Literaturform zwischen Spätantike und Spätmittelalter, 2 vols (Cologne, 1994). 50   Why, 844–56. 51   ‘[Mine own John Poins]’, 57, 65–76, ed. Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry; on Wyatt’s influences, see Colin Burrow, ‘Horace at Home and Abroad: Wyatt and SixteenthCentury Horatianism’, in Horace Made New, eds Martindale and Hopkins, pp. 27–49.

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John Skelton 52   Pers., 5.14–16. Simple toga is used for referring to usual common streetwear, as opposed to the varieties of special distinction, like the regal toga purpurea, the triumphator’s picta, the candida of candidates for the magistracies, or the praetexta of persons whose candidacies had been successful; also, toga was the costume of actors in comedy, who were notoriously foulmouthed and abusive, as opposed to the praetexta associated with the elevated genre of tragedy. 53  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 10.1.93. 54   These remarks rely on Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority, pp. 158–84.

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Chapter 26

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Gavin Douglas’s Eneados Nicola Royan

The Eneados is, by any reckoning, an astonishing piece of work. It is the first complete translation of Virgil’s Aeneid into any form of English; in his attempt to transmit Virgil’s greatness, Gavin Douglas uses five-stress couplets and wrestles to produce close and comprehensible meaning, and to stay as faithful to his base text as possible. Attached to the translation are twelve prologues, in which Douglas seeks to provide guides to reading and a gloss on the difficulties of each book, as well as explanations of his own approach. To some readers, these prologues and the inclusion of a thirteenth book with its own prologue have been evidence for Douglas’s ‘medieval’ outlook, an outlook where pagan gods need still to be justified and where Virgil’s text was often considered unfinished.1 Yet, the whole work also seems to embody humanist endeavour in its asserted desire to make Virgil accessible to those unlearned in Latin. It is a key text in classical reception in Britain, and deserves to be better known.

Life and Historical Contexts Even had he not been a poet of distinction, Gavin Douglas would still have had his place in Scottish history. His father, Archibald, the fifth Earl of Angus, was an important magnate in the reigns of James III and James IV, supporting James IV in deposing his father, but arguing against war with England in 1512–13.2 The poet’s nephew, another Archibald, married James IV’s widow, Margaret Tudor, and was intermittently and unsuccessfully regent for the young James V during the 1520s. The poet himself sought a career in the church, becoming Provost of St Giles in Edinburgh by 11 March 1503, and finally confirmed bishop of Dunkeld in 1516.3 As a prominent churchman, Gavin Douglas would have had some influence in his own right; however, his aristocratic and powerful background both propelled his promotion

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature and determined his particular contribution to Scottish politics. The Douglas name had been prominent in Scottish affairs since the Wars of Independence in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; while Gavin Douglas sprang from the Red Douglas kin rather than the Black, his family name remained closely associated with political power, sometimes in opposition to the crown, throughout the sixteenth century.4 Legal and epistolary records indicate that the poet was much concerned with family and political affairs; his first poem, The Palice of Honoure (c.1501), is dedicated to James IV, and has been read as both a quest for patronage and a work of advice. Although the precise nature of the politics of the Eneados is much debated, there is at least some agreement that Douglas’s particular circumstances and aristocratic milieu are significant in its interpretation.5 Gavin Douglas was born c.1476, the third son of the Earl of Angus and his wife Elizabeth Boyd, most probably at the family’s stronghold at Tantallon; the scholastic philosopher John Mair refers to him as a fellow inhabitant of East Lothian (Mair was born in Haddington).6 Records indicate that he matriculated at the University of St Andrews in 1490, and that he became a licentiate or master of arts in 1494. As a younger son, he was probably destined early for a career in the  church and his preferment in the church was assisted by his birth and by royal favour. In the 1490s, he was associated with two benefices, the deanery of Dunkeld and the parsonage of Glenholm: the first of these was contested, the second provisional, and it is not until 1503 that Douglas became provost of St Giles, and 1504 that he became parson of Linton, near Tantallon, and a canon of the collegiate church at Dunbar. As provost, he appears to have engaged with a common round of refurbishment and enlargement, and also in work both ecclesiastical and secular, whether binding himself to celebrate the mass of the holy blood, or being present at the lords of council, or being appointed to counsel the rector of St Andrews University. He translated the Aeneid during his provostship, and in the text he dates its completion to ‘the fest of Mary Magdalen | Fra Crystis byrth, the dait quha lyst to heir | A thousand fyve hundreth and thretteyn yeir’.7 Already at the end of the Eneados, there is some evidence that Douglas is moving away from verse into ‘grave materis’. Such a move was doubtless driven faster in  the aftermath of Flodden on 9 September 1513, for not only did Douglas lose his older brothers in that battle, but also his king. Douglas’s father died in November 1513, leaving Douglas’s nephew Archibald as Earl. The last seven years of Douglas’s life, his difficulties in seeking further advancement and his eventual appointment as bishop of Dunkeld, his support of his nephew’s various political endeavours and his eventual exile and death in England in 1522 (from plague), clearly do not influence the composition of the Eneados; they may, however, raise questions about its reception and circulation, discussed at the very end of this chapter.

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Education and Intellectual Circles Although there is clear evidence of Douglas’s study at the University of St Andrews, no records survive to prove that he followed the path of many of his countrymen to the Continent for further study and a higher degree. However, John Mair describes him as having shared his studies in both Scotland and France, and he might either have spent time in Paris in the later 1490s, or in the first decade of the sixteenth century, after he achieved his benefices.8 He would have been in good company: as  well as Mair, other Scots in Paris in the 1490s included Hector Boece, whose humanist account of Scottish history is a key source for ‘Holinshed’, and John Vaus, a distinguished Latin grammarian, while students of Mair’s in the 1500s included David Cranstoun, Douglas’s interlocutor in one of Mair’s dialogues.9 While none of these men had anything approaching Douglas’s social status, nor indeed the international reputation of Mair, nevertheless, their surviving work demonstrates the interaction between scholastic and humanist practice then current in Paris, and  brought back to Scotland. Despite the evident connection between Douglas and Mair, Douglas’s associations with other Scots in Paris, or indeed in Scottish universities other than St Andrews, are only circumstantial, such as the prominence of the Flemish printer Jodocus Badius Ascensius in Scottish circles, in Douglas’s use of his 1501 edition of the Aeneid as a base text, and in his printing of various Scottish-authored material including histories by both Mair and Boece. Nevertheless, it seems safe to assume that Douglas was comfortable in scholarly circles, aware of current intellectual debates in Paris, and familiar with humanist concerns about the accuracy of the text. Without doubt, Douglas was well read. His competence in Latin, and his familiarity with the Aeneid and ability in interpreting the Virgilian commentary tradition that accompanied it, are both evident in the Eneados. In The Palice of Honoure, he lists a variety of writers and texts visible in Calliope’s court. Despite the element of self-aggrandizement in this list, Douglas would have been familiar with classical writers such as Juvenal, Martial, Ovid, Quintilian, and Lucan, as well as Donatus, Servius, and Boethius, and he would also have read works by Lorenzo Valla, Boccaccio, and Fausto Andrelini. A manuscript of Valla’s Elegantiae linguae Latinae appears in the library of William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen, while Archibald Whitelaw, archdeacon of Lothian, owned print copies of Lucan, Horace, and Sallust: both these men were senior government officers, Elphinstone as chancellor to James IV, and Whitelaw as secretary to James III, and would have been well known to Douglas’s father, and quite probably to Douglas himself.10 Douglas was also deeply familiar with the vernacular tradition, both in Older Scots and English: in The Palice of Honoure he lists distinguished practitioners (Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Dunbar, and Walter Kennedy) together with the Latin writers, and mentions Robert Henryson

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature in one of his marginal notes to the Eneados as well as evoking his Moral Fabillis and The  Testament of Cresseid in the Eneados prologues. Although Douglas rails against Chaucer in the prologues, he nevertheless adopts Chaucerian metre (five-stress couplets) for the translation, and is acutely aware of the authorial questions that Chaucer raises. Douglas’s engagement with Older Scots writing is most obvious in the prologues as well: verse forms, style, and vocabulary are also absorbed from poetic predecessors. The dedicatee of the translation, Henry, Lord Sinclair, belonged to a notably bookish family, and Sinclair himself owned a significant manuscript miscellany of English and Scottish verse. Although Douglas might have hoped for some reward from Sinclair for the translation, the relationship is not quite articulated as one of patronage, but more one of common interest. Unfortunately, Sinclair was also killed at Flodden, so we have no sense of how the dedication was received: the kind of patronage he offered did not reappear in Scotland for several decades. These overlapping intellectual circles matter in assessing Douglas’s putative audience for the Eneados and the effect that has on the translation. Unlike his contemporaries Mair and Boece, and indeed his predecessors like Whitelaw, Douglas’s literary works are all in the vernacular, and in current scholarship he is most commonly approached and discussed as a vernacular poet rather than as a humanist scholar or even as a translator. That is perhaps attributable to the relative inaccessibility of the translation, both physically and intellectually: fewer people are now familiar with Virgil’s Latin text, and the last full edition of the poem in its original language was printed by the Scottish Text Society in the 1960s. But approaching him as a vernacular poet gives the impression, on the one hand, that Douglas is exceptional as a mediator of classical literature to a less learned audience, and on the other hand, that his work is unoriginal. Yet, at the point of composition, the divide between Latin culture and vernacular culture would have looked entirely different. Despite Mair’s condemnation of aristocratic illiteracy, a man like Sinclair, for instance, might well have been literate in Latin and able to read the Aeneid: it is likely that the Sinclair boys at least were taught to read by a household chaplain. An interest in vernacular verse does not preclude the reading of classical texts. Douglas’s reading in one language and writing in another might also apply to Henryson, among others; earlier Scots translations tended to be from French. Inverting this model, scholars writing primarily or exclusively in Latin might nevertheless read vernacular verse and prose, and be expected to critique Douglas’s translation, particularly given his claims towards accuracy. Consequently, the Eneados arises in a culture where some (and some invisibly) read freely across languages and disciplines, and others (including those with other linguistic competencies) read their own literatures with sophistication. Although whether as a scholar or as a humanist, Douglas himself does not compare to John Mair, or indeed to George Buchanan, yet in his translation and its prologues, Douglas engages with both those cultural types, drawing on all kinds of material to interpret Virgil for his current age.

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Nature of the Text In form, Douglas’s work is distinctive. As well as Virgil’s text, Douglas translates a thirteenth book, by the humanist Maffeo Vegio (1407–58).11 Douglas’s decision to translate Vegio’s supplementary book is often seen as an aberration. Yet the incomplete nature of the Aeneid, particularly its abrupt end with the slaughter of Turnus by Aeneas as an act of passionate revenge, was clearly troubling to many medieval and early modern readers. Vegio was not the only person to undertake to complete the Aeneid, and to provide the nation-building conclusion implied by some of its earlier books by presenting the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia. His composition, however, was particularly successful, circulating widely throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it was, moreover, included in Badius’ 1501 edition of the Aeneid, even though Badius (as repeated and translated by Douglas) describes it as ‘a fift queill’ (‘fifth wheel’).12 Douglas, therefore, did not have to seek it out, but rather had it included in an authoritative Virgilian text. That he was not entirely comfortable in including it is evident from the prologue, but nonetheless, he did, and needed to negotiate a relationship to it. Each book, including the thirteenth, has its own prologue: these act as commentaries on the books that follow, or the progression of the translation, and demonstrate Douglas’s competence in a variety of poetic forms and metres. Douglas imposes chapter divisions on the translation. While these are arguably equivalent to the paragraphing undertaken by modern editors, nevertheless they make the text look and read quite differently, particularly as each chapter has a summary heading. As Bawcutt suggests, such an imposition ‘makes sharp and discrete what is continuous and interwoven’ in Virgil’s Latin.13 That such a practice was seen as a legitimate means of providing navigation in long texts might be indicated by John Bellenden’s translations of the first books of Livy’s Ab urbe condita and the Scotorum historia a generation later;14 nevertheless, here they are an important indication of Douglas’s willingness to assert control over his text, with the aim of determining an accurate reading of the overall themes of the Aeneid, even when that involves rearranging the text itself.

The Prologues The prologues are key to Douglas’s reading of the Aeneid and his approaches when translating. They are now probably the best-known parts of the work, and some are regularly anthologized, such as the ‘nature prologues’ (Prologues VII and XII) and the prologue to Book I.15 The ‘nature’ prologues are particularly attractive because of Douglas’s correlation of the seasons with the act of translation and with the progress

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature of work. Prologue VII marks the halfway point in the project, and its winter setting reflects both the serious events of Book VI that precede it, and the effort involved in continuing the work. Douglas’s evocation of ‘schowris snell’ and ‘snypand snaw’ (‘bitter showers, sniping snow’, Prol. VII. 43, 50) and ‘euery hie way | Full of floschis, dubbis, myre and clay’ (‘every highway, full of watery swamps, puddles, mire and dirt’, Prol. VII. 53–4) is conventionally close to Scottish winters. Such descriptions are made more pointed by the pathos of human endeavour, in such lines as ‘The silly scheip and thar litil hyrd gromys | lurkis vndre le of bankis, woddis and bromys’ (‘The silly sheep and their little herd boys lurk under lea of banks, woods and bushes’, Prol. VII. 77–8). Douglas portrays himself as driven to bed by the cold and reluctant to rise, but forced to return to work by the sight of the Aeneid on his lectern. He concludes the prologue by comparing his endeavour to ploughing and himself as ‘[f]ull laith to leif our wark swa in the myre | or yit to stynt for bitter storm or rane’ (‘Reluctant to leave our work thus in the mud | or yet to stop for bitter storm or rain’, Prol. VII. 156–7). Implicitly such a comparison marks Douglas’s work as essential and productive; it also marks it as hard. Prologue XII in contrast marks the beginning of the end of the translation of Virgil’s text, and features the poet in spring. There are elements of direct response to  Prologue VII. Both, for instance, deploy classical references to set their landscapes: Prologue XII begins with Dyonea, while Prologue VII begins with Phoebus. However, Dyonea, the ‘nycht hyrd and wach of day’ (‘night guardian and watch for day’), is chased away by the stars, opening the poem at dawn, while Prologue VII’s Phoebus was setting. Such a pattern of opposition is continued in references to temperature, weather, and colour: the ground is ‘fadyt’ (‘faded’) in Prol VII. 37, while in Prologue XII it is ‘enbrovd with selcouth hewys’ (‘Embroidered with several colours’, Prol. XII. 65). The landscape is more comfortably populated by both people and animals, and Douglas too is a more enthusiastic riser, getting up before mass to begin the twelfth book. Together, the prologues form a pair, not simply of different seasons, but also as mirrors of one another, in the ways in which Douglas intermeshes classical trope with apparently local detail, and the ways of the outside world with the experiences of writing and translating. The practice of anthologizing the prologues began early, with George Bannatyne selecting Prologues IV, IX, and X for his miscellany,16 and has been a consistent feature of the reception of the Eneados. However, more recent criticism has emphasized their significance for understanding the translation.17 Discussions have pointed out the seasonal patterns brought out to describe the progress of the translation, and also the ways in which the prologues engage with particular issues. For instance, Prologue VI negotiates a Christian reading for the account of the pagan underworld that follows, while Prologue IV examines love and its effects on Dido, emphasizing her appetites and the destructive power of love.18 More salient here, however, are the

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Gavin Douglas’s Eneados discussions of literary authority and the responsibilities of translation presented in the prologues to Books 1 and 13. The prologue to Book I is probably best known for its assertion that the Eneados is ‘[w]rittin in the langage of Scottis natioun’ (Prol. I. 103), one of the first points at which this northern variety of English is given a national identity. Douglas further develops this in his attack on Caxton, where Caxton’s crime of translating the Eneydos from French is compounded by his Englishness (Prol. I. 138–43). Chaucer also comes under Douglas’s attack, less for his Englishness and more for his misinterpretation of Aeneas’ treatment of Dido. Douglas rates himself with reference to Chaucer, but also Chaucer with reference to Virgil: ‘as he [Chaucer] standis beneth Virgill in gre, | Vndir hym alsfer I grant my self to be’ (‘as he stands beneath Virgil in degree, so I  grant myself to be under him’, Prol. I. 407–8). Nevertheless, in Douglas’s view, Chaucer’s vindication of Dido ‘gretly Virgill offendit’ (Prol. I. 410), because it implies that Aeneas was forsworn, something which Virgil is at pains to deny. Douglas’s assertions here are of course open to challenge, especially because of Chaucer’s own complicated and conscious syntheses of classical material, especially Virgil and Ovid, but the representation of Dido can be seen as Douglas’s marker for the difference and accuracy of his translation. Douglas primarily uses lexis as a metonym for the practical difficulties of translation, particularly from Latin, with its high status, into Scots: Bot yit twyching our tungis penuryte I meyn into compar of fair Latyn That knawyn is maste perfite langage fyne I mycht also percace cum lyddir speid For ‘arbor’ and ‘lignum’ intill our leid To fynd different proper termys twane And tharto put circumlocutioun nane.

[yet touching  tongues’ poverty] [mean in comparison with] [known  most perfect language fine] [might perchance  making slow progress] [into our language] [two proper terms] [none] (Prol I. 380–6)

This is partly figured as an issue for Scots, as Douglas has to borrow words from English, or from ‘bastard Latyn’ (Prol I. 117) or French. However, it is also an endemic problem in translation, since being bound to a text is ‘far strater’ (‘far more limiting’, Prol I. 290) than being free to write whatever you like, and Douglas is keen to ensure that he remains as close to Virgil’s text as possible: Quha is attachit ontill a staik, we se, May go na ferthir bot wreil about that tre: Rycht so am I to Virgillis text ybund.

[who  to a stake] [cannot further   turn about that tree] [bound] (Prol. I. 297–302)

In outlining the problems with particular words, Douglas draws attention to the need to construe meaning rather than simply words. Such a task is for the learned,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature even though the avowed audience is composed of those of much simpler education. To convey such meaning to such an audience, Douglas reserves the right to explain, to incorporate other interpretations. In theory, it allows Douglas to claim multiple authorities, and himself as a conduit for the greater meaning of this essential yet difficult text. In practice, in the earliest witness, there are marginal notes, explaining points in the passage:19 for instance, an explanation of Achates from I.vi.15, ‘Mony expondis Achates for thochtfull cuyr or solicitud, quhilk all tymys is feyr and companyeon to princis and gret men’ (‘Many explain Achates as thoughtful care or solicitude, which at all times is friend and companion to princes and great men’). These appear to be Douglas’s own comments, although the note to Prol I. 437, ‘Heir he argouis better than befoir’ (‘Here he argues better than before’) might suggest that the scribe, Douglas’s secretary Matthew Geddes, also had opinions. However, these notes cease in Book I. There remains, however, Douglas’s other practice, of including explanatory material in his translation. For instance, in Book VII, Douglas classifies for his readers exactly the bird into which Picus is changed: ‘a byrd . . .| With sprutlyt weyngis, clepit a Speicht with ws, | Quhilk in Latyn hait Pycus Marcyus’ (‘a bird . . . with speckled wings, called a Speicht with us | which in Latin is called Picus Marcius’, VII. iii. 90–2). This interpretation loses Virgil’s image of Circe sprinkling the wings (Aeneid 7. 191), so here Douglas has chosen clarity over poetic closeness. Not all of the glosses are quite so striking, but Douglas does present what Douglas Gray describes as ‘commentator’s twitch’, perhaps appropriate at least to the schoolmasters he envisages as part of his audience.20 If the prologue to Book I introduces the difficulties of translating the Aeneid, the  prologue to Book XIII has to make a different sort of case. Given Douglas’s insistence on the primacy of Virgil’s text and meaning in the prologue to Book I, to transfer that authority to another writer whose work supplements the Aeneid and, as has been argued, potentially displaces it, is challenging.21 From its opening, Prologue XIII advertises its difference from Prologue I. Where Douglas argues directly in his own voice in the opening account, identifying himself as distinct in nation and in aspiration, in Prologue XIII he returns to self-projection, initially repeating the approach in Prologues VII and XII. As in Prologues VII and XII, Douglas locates the prologue in a season, here summer. While Prologues VII and XII present the narrator in his chamber, with one eye on Virgil’s book (for instance, Prol. VII. 155–8 and Prol. XII. 267–72), Prologue XIII takes him out into the landscape to experience a dream-vision. In this vision, he encounters Vegius (i.e. the humanist Vegio), ‘[l]yke to sum poet of the ald fasson [fashion]’(Prol. XIII. 88); Vegius forces him by threat of violence to undertake the translation (Prol. XIII. 146–52). Douglas’s attitude to Vegius’ text is thus presented very differently: Virgil is not imagined beyond his text, and Douglas cannot approach him except through the book, while Vegius can be given as much substance as Douglas gives his dream

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Gavin Douglas’s Eneados self—in short, his talent is comprehensible where Virgil’s is so much greater.22 We can therefore imagine Douglas as acutely conscious of his choices and of the nature of the texts, but nevertheless aiming for completeness.

The Translation of Virgil Priscilla Bawcutt first argued that Douglas used Badius’ 1501 edition of the Aeneid as his base text, and subsequent work on the translation and its detail has confirmed this discovery.23 This relationship is significant to any readings of the Eneados: at various points, some of Douglas’s apparent mistranslations arise directly from Badius’ text, such as the mispresentation of names in Book 2, 261–2, where Douglas has ‘Thersander’ and ‘Athamas’ following the 1501 text’s rendition, rather than the more common modern readings of Thessandrus and Acamas.24 At others, Douglas incorporates parts from the accompanying commentary to elucidate particular aspects of Virgil’s poem: for instance, at the very beginning of Book I, Douglas describes ‘Samos’ as Juno’s ‘native land’ (I.i.27); not present in Virgil’s text, this appears to derive from Ascensius’ commentary note, Samo in qua nata dicitur.25 Douglas’s choice of Badius’ edition fits well with his presence around the Scots community in Paris; moreover, Badius’ avowed intention, to provide a commentary for students, with appropriate weighting on lexis and syntax, chimes with Douglas’s own.26 Badius’ edition remained influential throughout the sixteenth century, perhaps because of its sheer wealth of helpful material.27 Virgil’s text was hemmed in on the page by commentary, Servius’ below, beginning in the same column, and Badius’ adjacent. Although indebted to Badius for his text and for particular interpretations, Douglas is not constrained by Badius’ division of the text. Most obviously, his chapters do not correlate with Badius’ sections in the 1501 text. More disruptive yet are the four occasions where Douglas alters the book divisions: Eneados II starts with Aeneid 2.10, VI starts with Aeneid 6.9, VII with Aeneid 7.25, VIII with Aeneid 8.18. Taking the first as an example, Douglas’s division breaks a line. The Latin text reads: sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros et breviter Troiae supremum audire laborem, quamquam animus meminisse horret luctuque refugit, incipiam. Fracti bello fatisque repulsi ductores Danaum, tot iam labentibus annis, instar montis equum divina Palladis arte aedificant sectaque intexunt abiete costas. (Yet if such is your desire to learn of our disasters, and in few words to hear of Troy’s last agony, though my mind shudders to remember and has recoiled in pain, I will

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature begin. Broken in war and thwarted by the fates, the Danaan chiefs, now that so many years were gliding by, build by Pallas’ divine art a horse of mountainous bulk, and interweave its ribs with planks of fir.) (Aeneid 2. 10–17)28

Douglas finishes Book I with: Bot sen thou hast sic plesour and delyte To knaw our chancis and fal of Troy in weyr And schortly the last end tharof wald heir, Albeit my spreit abhorris and doth gryss Tharon forto remember and oftsyss Murnand eschewis tharfra with gret dyseyss Yit than I sal begyn yow forto pleyss.

[but since  such pleasure and delight] [know fates  fall  war] [briefly  the final end  would hear] [although spirit shudders] [remember it and often] [mourning avoids with great disease] [yet I will begin to do your bidding] (I. xii. 18–24)

He begins Book II thus: The Grekis chiftanys, irkit of the weir Bypast or than samony langsum yeir, And oft rebutyt by fatale destany Ane huge horss, lyke ane gret hil, in hy Craftely thai wrocht in wirschip of Pallas.

[Greek chieftains weary of the war] [lasting so many long tedious years] [often repulsed by fateful destiny] [a horse like a great hill in haste] [craftily they made in honour] (II.i.1–5)

Virgil’s arrangement ends Book I with Dido’s request and opens Book II with Aeneas reclaiming the narrative, both of the poem itself, but also of the account of the fall of Troy. Douglas’s redivision spreads Aeneas across both books: arguably, this increases Aeneas’ authority, especially in opposition to Dido, as her amor becomes somehow downgraded to ‘pleasour and delyte’, but also as Aeneas’ reluctance to speak is set against her request, rather than introducing Aeneas’ account. This change in book division, like the others, occurs in all the manuscripts (although it is altered in the first surviving print, William Copland’s in 1553), suggesting strongly that it is an authorial action. In this case, the change may be connected to Douglas’s critique in the first prologue of the favourable treatments of Dido offered by Chaucer and Caxton, and his expressed determination to rebalance that depiction towards Aeneas, as presented in the Aeneid. If this is the case, to make that point, Douglas favours faithfulness to Virgil’s meaning over his other claim, to be faithful to the text as he finds it. Critical opinion generally perceives Douglas to be a faithful translator, often to the words of Virgil’s text, but also to the spirit of it. What that spirit might be, both of Virgil’s text, as well as Douglas’s interpretation of it, can be more various. The mid-twentieth-century view is well exemplified by C. S. Lewis and R. G. Austin;29 more recent consideration by James Simpson in particular has proposed a different understanding, although his view, that Douglas reads above all politically, and has no sympathy for Dido at all, has been challenged.30 The 570

Gavin Douglas’s Eneados presentation of Dido, therefore, is an appropriate place to consider Douglas’s techniques. talibus Aeneas ardentem et torva tuentem lenibat dictis animum lacrimasque ciebat. illa solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat nec magis incepto vultum sermone movetur, quam si dura silex aut stet Marpesia cautes. tandem corripuit sese atque inimica refugit in nemus umbriferum, coniunx ubi pristinus illi respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem. nec minus Aeneas, casu percussus iniquo, prosequitur lacrimis longe et miseratur euntem. (With these words amid springing tears Aeneas strove to soothe the wrath of the fiery, fierce-eyed queen. She, turning away, kept her looks fixed on the ground and no more changes her countenance as he essays to speak than if she were set in hard flint or Marpesian rock. At length she flung herself away and, still his foe, fled back to the shady grove, where Sychaeus, her lord of former days, responds to her sorrows and gives her love for love. Yet, nonetheless, dazed by her unjust doom, Aeneas attends her with tears afar and pities her as she goes.) (Aeneid 6. 467–76) With sik wordis Eneas, full of wo, Set hym to meyss the sprete of Queyn Dido, Quhilk, all inflambit, ful of wreth and ire, With acquart luke glowand hait as fyre Maid him to weip and sched furth teris wak. All fremmytly frawart hym, as he spak, Hir eyn fixit apon the grond held sche, Moving na mair hir curage, face nor bre, Than scho had bene a statu of marbil stane, Or a ferm rolk of Mont Marpesyane. Bot finaly, full swyft scho wiskis away, Aggrevit fled into the darn woddis gray, Quhar as Sycheus, hir first spowss, ful suyr, Corespondis to hir desyre and cuyr, Rendring in lufe amouris equiualent. And, netheless, fast eftir hir furth sprent, Ene, perplexit of hir sory cace, And weping gan hir follow a weil lang space, Regratand in his mynd, and had piete Of the distress that movit hir so to fle.

[such] [appease  spirit] [which  enflamed wrath] [awkward look  glowing hot as fire] [Made him weep and shed forth weak tears] [with animosity  against him  spoke] [eyes  upon the ground] [no more  mind face brow] [she  been] [hard  rock] [swiftly  she whisks] [distressed  secret grey woods] [where  spouse  entirely faithful] [matches her desire and care] [giving equal love] [nevertheless  ran quickly after her] [Aeneas,  bewildered by her sorry case] [weeping  followed her  a very long way] [regretting  pity] [Distress  flee] (Eneados VI. vii. 90–108)

Even at first glance, Douglas’s prolixity is evident. The first two lines, summarizing Aeneas’ action, become five: such are the differing natures of Older Scots and Latin.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Sometimes, of course, Douglas adds detail, although that is not a particular feature here. For all his championing of Aeneas, Dido is not reduced. In the extract here, in fact, the two are parallel: Eneas is ‘full of wo’ while Dido is full of ‘wreth and ire’. Although wrath is a sin, and Dido’s anger is problematic, nevertheless she is granted at least the same measure of emotion. The Latin syntax makes her into an object of emotion (ardentem et torva tuentem) while Douglas grants her name and rank (Queyn Dido) and draws out the description with a simile (‘With acquart luke glowand hait as fyre’) Moreover, that ‘acquart luke’ is enough to bring Aeneas to tears and thus Douglas gives Dido an agency not granted to her by Virgil directly. Nevertheless, immediately prior to this extract, Douglas also extends Aeneas’ speech, and introduces a punctuating ‘quod he’ to separate Aeneas’ assertion of faith to Dido from his instruction by the gods. As a result, Aeneas’ motives for leaving are given appropriate weight and attention, so that the accusation, hanging over from Chaucer and others, that Aeneas abandons Dido, is refuted firmly if indirectly. Indeed, at the end of the passage here, Douglas even uses that prime Virgilian word—‘piete’ (107)—to describe Aeneas’ feelings: in his response to Dido here, Douglas suggests that Aeneas is being most himself, compassionate, but not contrite, ‘regratand’ her distress but not repenting his actions. The third figure in this encounter, Sychaeus, also receives significant attention from Douglas: he is ‘ful suyr’, a description that might contrast with both Dido and Aeneas, but he is a match for Dido, for he ‘corespondis’ to her, and is equal to her in emotion. That equality identifies him clearly as Dido’s true mate, and possibly distinguishes him from Aeneas, a better match even in the afterlife. Sychaeus also remains still in this passage, in contrast to the others. In Douglas’s expansion, Dido, in particular, moves from absolute stillness, like the Marpesian rock, to speedy departure, inherent in the ‘wiskis’ as well as the ‘fled’. Like the reader, Aeneas is a witness to the stillness, but then runs in pursuit—responsive rather than proactive. The overall effect of Douglas’s translation here is that the reader acknowledges the rightness of Aeneas’ actions while viewing sympathetically Dido’s legitimate fury. While Dido is a touchstone for his reading of the Aeneid, Douglas also responds to other narratives. His redaction of Nisus and Euryalus in Book 9 retains tension and pathos. This extract is taken from the end of their raid, when they are trapped by a Rutulian party in the forest. nihil illi tendere contra, sed celerare fugam in silvas et fidere nocti. obiciunt equites sese ad divortia nota hinc atque hinc, omnemque abitum custode coronant. silva fuit late dumis atque ilice nigra horrida, quam densi complerant undique sentes; rara per occultos lucebat semita callis. Euryalum tenebrae ramorum onerosaque praeda impediunt, fallitque timor regione viarum.

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Gavin Douglas’s Eneados (They offer no response, but speed their flight to the wood and trust to night. On this side and that the horsemen bar the well-known crossways, and with sentinels surround every outlet. The forest spread wide with thickets and dark ilex; dense briers filled it on every side; here and there glimmered the path through the hidden glades. Euryalus is hampered by the shadowy branches and the burden of his spoil, and fear misleads him in the line of the paths.) (Aeneid 9. 377–85) The tother twa maid nane ansuer agane, [the other two did not reply] Bot in the woddis hyis at the flicht [but fled into the woods] Assurit gretly in the dirknes of the nycht. [trusting] The horsmen than prekis, and fast furth sprentis [spurred on and sprang forward] To weil beknawin pethis, and turnys wentis [well-known paths  change direction] Baith heir and thar; sone ombeset haue thai [soon they have covered] The owtgatis all, thai suld nocht wyn away. [all escape routes—they should not get away] The wod was large, and rowch of buskis ronk, [rough with dense bushes] And of the blak ayk schaddowis dym and donk, [black oak  damp] Of breris ful, and thyk thorn ronnys stent— [briars  thick bushes spread out] Scarsly a strait rod or dern narow went [straight road  narrow hiding place Tharin mycht fundyn be that men mycht pass [that might be found to let men pass] Quharthrou Eurialus gretly cummyrrit was; [as a result  distressed] Quhat for myrknes, thik buskis, branch and breir, [darkness  bushes] And weght also of the new spulyeit geir, [weight  stolen gear] Tharto the hasty onset and affray [fast attack] Maid hym gang will in the onknawin way. [made him go in the unknown] (Eneados IX. vii. 22–38)

Again, Douglas’s rendition is longer than his source text. In stating ‘thai suld nocht wyn away’, he makes explicit what is implied in Virgil’s text, and might thus be argued to render the narrative pedestrian. At the same time, however, his extension of the burdens pressing Euryalus enhances the tension. Euryalus’ burdens, ‘myrknes, thik buskis, branch and breir | and weght also of the new spulyeit geir’, grow in their seriousness. At root, this has to do with the amplification of space, first a word, then a short phrase, then an entire line, so each becomes more influential. Arguably, Douglas does this twice in the passage, first with the attacking soldiers, largely evident by the expanding clauses dependent on the verbs, ‘prekis’, ‘sprentis’, and ‘turnis’. However, the full effect is not felt until the focus is on Euryalus. The alliteration of ‘buskis, branch and breir’, as well as being characteristic of Older Scots verse, also implies the tangled nature of woodland, and further distinguishes between the dark and the spoil as handicaps. That the ‘geir’ has a line to itself changes the weighting of ‘-que’, but in so doing, Douglas forces its significance. He also foregrounds knowledge and the problems facing the interlopers: the ‘onknawin way’ (38) contrasts with the ‘weil beknawin pethis’ (26). While Douglas is not able to reproduce Virgil’s dense tension in

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The Thirteenth Book Having accepted Vegio’s violent command to translate Virgil’s poem (Prol. XIII. 146–52; see discussion pp. 568–9), Douglas then presents his translation of Vegio’s own Latin text. He suggests that his own poetic skill will render distinctions between his source texts indistinct (‘I speke na wers than I haue doyn befor’, Prol. XIII. 194). Cummings argues that Douglas is largely faithful to Vegio’s text, in much the same way as he is engaged with Virgil’s. Given that Vegio reuses Virgilian language and tropes to recast Aeneas as a lover and Lavinia as a plausible replacement for Dido, there is less difference in the texture of the additional book from what might be expected.31 To illustrate this, here are extracts from the conversation between Jove and Venus from Eneados I and Eneados XIII: Smylyng sum deil, the fader of goddis and men With that ilk sweit vissage, as we ken, That mesys tempestis and makis the hevynnis cleir, First kyssit his child, syne said on this maneir: ‘Away sik dreid, Cytherea, be nocht efferd For thi lynage onchangit remanys the werd. As thou desyris, the cite salt thou se, And of Lavyne the promyst wallis hie. Eik thou salt rayss abuf the sterrit sky The manfull Eneas and hym deify.

[smiling a little bit] [sweet face  as we know] [calms] [kissed then  manner] [dread  not afraid] [lineage unchanged fate] [desires city shall you see] [Lavinium promised high] [also  shall raise above  starry] (Eneados I. v. 47–56)

Olli hominum sator atque deum dedit oscula ab alto pectore verba ferens: ‘Quantum, Cytherea, potentem Aeneam Aeneadasque omnes infessus amavi et terra et pelago et per tanta pericula vectos, nosti, et saepe equidem indolui commotus amore, nata, tuo. (The father of men and gods kissed her and from his inmost heart spoke: ‘From my very words, goddess of Cythera, you knew how much I have always loved stalwart Aeneas and all his followers, as they fared though such great perils whether on land or on sea, and, touched by your love, my child, indeed I grieved for them time and again.’)32 (Vegio, Aeneidos XIII. 606–11) The fader tho of men and goddis all Gan kyss Venus hys child, and tharwithall

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[kiss]

Gavin Douglas’s Eneados Thir profound wordis from hys breist furth braid: ‘My deir douchtir Citherea,’ he said, ‘Thou knawys quhou strangely the mychty Ene And the Eneadanys all of hys menye Ithandly and onyrkyt luffyt haue I, On se and landis catchit by and by In perrellis seir, and quhou that ofttyme eik, Havand piete of the my douchtir meik, For lufe of the, for thar dyseyss was wo;’

[these  broke forth from his breast] [dear daughter] [knows how strongly the mighty Aeneas] [company] [constantly  untiringly  loved] [sea  caught] [great perils  how often each] [having pity on you] [their disease was grief] (Eneados XIII. xi. 29–39)

In these short excerpts, there are repeating phrases, such as ‘fader of goddis and men’ and ‘fader . . . of men and goddis all’, ‘kyssit his child’ and ‘gan kyss his child’. Douglas’s use of ‘douchtir’ twice in Jupiter’s speech in the second extract, further emphasizes the family relationship, and implicitly Aeneas’ relationship to the gods. It slightly overplays Vegio’s nata; no such insertion appears in the translation from Virgil. Overall, of course, the similarity in tone and presentation of these sections owes much to Vegio’s respectful pastiche of Virgil. For that reason, it is not surprising that Douglas does not noticeably modify his lexical choices or his style for his treatment of Vegio’s material. Vegio, rather, is Douglas’s challenger in representing Virgilian style and themes.

Circulation and Transmission The Eneados found an audience of careful vernacular readers soon after its completion. Five complete manuscripts survive, with fragments of a sixth, all of which date from between 1513 and 1553, when the first printed edition appeared in London.33 A study of the variants suggests that there were more copies than this: Bennett estimates that there must have been at least ten manuscripts, not a bad record over forty years of a very lengthy text.34 The most significant witness is the manuscript written by Douglas’s secretary, Matthew Geddes, containing commentary notes discussed above.35 This manuscript (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.3.12) was probably completed no later than 1515. Another copy is also early: now Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Library, MS Dk.7.49, the Elphynstone manuscript was written before 1527. The others are later: one is dated by its scribe John Mudy to 1545 (London, Lambeth Palace, MS 117), another to 1547 by its scribe Henry Aytoun, notary public (the Bath MS: Warminster, Longleat House, MS IX.D.54), and the last is undated (the Ruthven MS: Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Library, MS Dc.1.43). All five manuscripts have an originally Scottish provenance: either the scribes are identified as Scottish or the first recorded owners are. It is possible to imagine family transmission: Cambridge,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Trinity College, MS O.3.12 is obviously closely associated with Douglas himself, while Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Library, MS Dc.1.43 may have passed through the hands of Douglas’s niece, an illegitimate daughter of the 6th Earl of Angus. John Mudy associates himself with Master Thomas Bellenden, Justice Clerk (d. 1546), the elder brother of the poet John Bellenden, who had close Douglas connections. The Bath MS and the Elphynstone MS do not have obvious links to the Douglases; instead, they demonstrate the breadth of the text’s circulation, for the Elphynstone MS has ownership marks from Aberdeenshire (William Hay, parson of Turriff, Aberdeenshire (1527), and David Anderson, burgess of Aberdeen (1563)), while the Bath MS has been at the other end of the island from the mid-sixteenth century. While the Scottish provenance of the surviving manuscripts in itself is not surprising, the text’s circulation, namely when and in what form did it travel south to England, prior to the first print, is less clear. In one way, the answer is obvious if not demonstrable: Douglas asserts that he wishes his work to be read throughout ‘Albion’ and we might easily presume that he took a copy of the poem with him to England and that it might have circulated around his acquaintances and associates there. It should be noted, however, that when he went to England in 1521, he would have expected his stay to be temporary, possibly not even as long as nine months, so that direct and obvious route may not in fact have operated. While the border between Scotland and England was porous, even in the midst of hostilities, and there were numerous people who could have carried Douglas’s work south, there is no evidence of Douglas’s active engagement in its circulation, notwithstanding Douglas’s stated hopes for his work. As a scholar and a translator, he was entirely familiar and comfortable with using printed texts himself; his friend John Mair had many printed books to his name. Douglas identifies at least part of his audience as schoolmasters, and grammar books were a key part of early print culture.36 Yet there is no evidence that Douglas sought to have the Eneados printed. There are deducible practical reasons why not. First, although there had been vernacular printing in Scotland in the early years of the sixteenth century, Chepman and Myllar had ceased their operations by 1513. Secondly, continental printers, including Badius Ascensius, did not in general print material in insular vernaculars. This was very much the preserve of printers in England, and also indeed Scotland, for Chepman and Myllar’s only surviving Latin endeavour is the Aberdeen Breviary, a patriotic project if ever there was one. So Douglas’s connections with Paris would have been of no use in bringing the Eneados to a wider audience. As a result, therefore, Douglas would have had to put forward his work to be printed in England, had he so wished. It remains possible that he was hostile to the idea of his own work in print, but that seems at odds with his identification of schoolmasters as a particular audience. Had Douglas desired to see his work in print, however, his circumstances probably meant that it was not a priority for him to make it happen.

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Gavin Douglas’s Eneados Nevertheless, the Eneados did circulate south of the border, and was accessible to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, around 1539–40, the likeliest date for his own translation.37 It is interesting to note that there survive fragments of a print of Douglas’s other work, The Palice of Honoure, by the Scots printer Thomas Davidson, dating c.1530–40.38 While it would not have been beyond Davidson’s capabilities to have produced a volume as large as the Eneados, and his productions did circulate in England, the idea that he might also have printed the Eneados must remain a tantalizing speculation.39 However Surrey received the Eneados (Ridley succinctly traces a possible line of transmission), he certainly used it and referred to it while making his own translation.40 Although he is not a slavish imitator, substituting his innovative blank verse for the couplets, and maintaining the standard book division at the beginning of Book II, his debt to Douglas is visible in word choice and phrasing. For instance, describing Dido’s first sight of the Trojans leaving Carthage, Douglas has: Be this Aurora, leifand the purpour bed Of hir lord Titan, heth the erd ourspred With new days licht, and quhen the queyn The first grekyng of the day hes seyn And fra hir hie wyndoys gan espy, With bent sail furth caryand, the navy, The costis and the schor al desolate Behaldis eik but owthir schip or bate, Hir fayr quhite breist, thar as scho dyd stand, Feil tymys smate scho with hir awyn hand And ryvand hir bricht haris petuusly, ‘Iupiter’, quod scho, ‘sal he depart, ha, fy! And leful tyll a vavengeour stranger Me and my realm betrump on this maner?’

[leaving  purple] [had the earth overspread] [light  when  queen] [break  has seen] [from  high windows  saw] [carried forth with bent sail] [coasts  shore] [each without either ship or boat] [white breast] [many times she smote  own] [tearing her bright hair  piteously] [said  shall] [and (is he) ready, a vagabond foreigner,] [to abandon me and my realm in this manner?] (Eneados IV. xi. 1–14)

Surrey’s equivalent is: Aurora now from Titans purple bed With new day light hath ouerspred the earth When by her windowes the Quene the pepingday Espyed, and nauie with splaid sailes depart The shore, and eke the porte of vessels voide: Her comly brest thrise or foure times she smote With her own hand, and tore her golden tresse. Oh Iove (quoth she) shall he then thus depart A straunger thus, and scorne our kingdome so?41

As Ridley points out, there are various verbal echoes (‘ouerspred the erd’, ‘her own hand’) that are not traceable to Virgil’s text.42 This passage is typical, indicative of a

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature debt rather than a dependence: Surrey’s verse is notably more concise, and his rendition makes Dido less angry and less identified with her realm. Nevertheless, the recurring evidence of this debt makes it significant both in considering Surrey’s work, and also Douglas’s continuing reputation. Just as Douglas would have wished, the Eneados remained a well-known text in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After its 1553 printing in London, its first Scottish printing was in Edinburgh in 1710 under the guidance of Thomas Ruddiman;43 the prologues, together with Douglas’s other work, The Palice of Honoure, were printed in 1787–8, under the imprint of booksellers in Edinburgh and London.44 The interest in Older Scots verse and Douglas in particular can be seen in Allan Ramsay’s choice of ‘Gavin Douglas’ as his literary pseudonym. While Ramsay was well known as a writer, editor and publisher of Older Scots, the choice of pseudonym might also  refer to Ramsay’s engagement with and reworking of classical Latin poetry, even if for Ramsay it was more Horace than Virgil.45 That the Eneados—or at least the prologues—continued to circulate in the eighteenth century can be seen in the epigraph to Robert Burns’s mock-epic Tam o’ Shanter ‘Of Brownies and Bogills full is this book’, a description of Eneados Book VI that Douglas derides.46 Burns’s use of the line is suggestive both in readings of Tam o’ Shanter and in readings of the Eneados. Douglas goes to some lengths to offer allegorical readings of Book 6 that fit with Christian theology; this phrase, albeit misapplied in Douglas’s view, also domesticates and undermines the grandeur of Virgil’s vision. While Burns of course is famous for undermining Christian visions of grandeur, that he uses a phrase intended to demonstrate careless reading might suggest that he is hoping for something better for his poem. Both these evocations suggest that the Eneados was read with sophistication, certainly in Scotland, but quite possibly in the rest of the British Isles too. The first scholarly editions appeared in the nineteenth century, beginning with the Bannatyne Club edition in 1839, and then John Small’s four-volume edition in 1874.47 Small’s edition has been long-lasting, but despite its relative accessibility, it is not as robust as Coldwell’s edition for the Scottish Text Society. That too is under revision: so much work has been done recently on Douglas and his poetry, especially by Priscilla Bawcutt, but also on the larger culture to which he belonged, in areas such as Virgilian reception, book history, and interplay between different literatures. That work is complemented by the consideration of the work through theories of translation. Despite all the additional information, however, the Eneados remains an extraordinary piece of work; as a ‘vernacular humanist’ Douglas was an important conduit between the classical world and his own. The wealth of recent textual and contextual discussion of the Eneados, as well as debates about periodizing medieval and renaissance, has encouraged a re-engagement with theories of translation and Douglas’s self-projection as an author, and as a translator. Although such examination

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Gavin Douglas’s Eneados is more advanced in discussion of later translations, the refiguring of the Eneados in the light of such theories is only just beginning.48 So far, such work has brought out the continuities between Douglas’s practices and Older Scots traditions, both formal and also in authorial attitudes. As it progresses, our understanding of the Eneados will become richer, but also more complex and more nuanced, and its position as a significant piece of writing in British literature will be upheld.49

Notes   See, for example, C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1973), pp. 76–90, esp. pp. 86–8; Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 276–9. 2   For the 5th Earl’s career under James III and James IV, see Norman Macdougall, James III: A Political Study (Edinburgh, 1981) and Norman Macdougall, James IV (East Linton, 1997). 3   See Priscilla Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas: A Critical Study (Edinburgh, 1976), pp. 1–23; also Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘New Light on Gavin Douglas’, in The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture, eds A. A. MacDonald, M. Lynch, and I. B. Cowan (Leiden, 1994), pp. 95–106. Together with Professor Bawcutt’s Dictionary of National Biography article, these are the fullest accounts of Douglas’s life. 4   See Michael Brown, The Black Douglases (East Linton, 2004) for details of the Black Douglas rise and fall; for the Red Douglases in the sixteenth century, see Jane E. A. Dawson, Scotland Reformed 1488–1587 (Edinburgh, 2007). 5   Robert Cummings, ‘“To the cart the fift quheill”: Gavin Douglas’ Humanist Supplement to the Eneados’, Translation and Literature 4:2 (1995), 133–56, esp. 139–41; James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547, The Oxford English Literary History 2 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 68–72. 6  Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas, p. 4. 7  Gavin Douglas, Virgil’s Aeneid, ed. D. F. C. Coldwell, Scottish Text Society, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1957–64), 4, 194, ‘Heir followys the tyme, space and dait of the translatioun of this buke’, ll. 2–4. All references are taken from this edition, and are embedded in the text, in this form: book or prologue number (roman): chapter number (roman): line numbers (arabic). In all quotations from Douglas, archaic letters have been modernized. The Scottish Text Society is currently sponsoring a revision of this edition, undertaken by Ian Cunningham and Priscilla Bawcutt, forthcoming. There is also an alternative edition: Gavin Douglas, The Aeneid (1513), ed. Gordon Kendal, 2 vols (2011). This edition has some significant idiosyncrasies: see Sheldon Brammall’s review in Translation and Literature 21(2012), 235–41. 8   Bawcutt believes that Douglas’s absence from Scottish records between 1505 and 1509 may be an indication of his presence in Paris. Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas, p. 28. 9  Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas, pp. 27–9. 10   John Durkan and Anthony Ross, Early Scottish Libraries, Special Issue of Innes Review 9:1 (1958), under ‘Bishops: William Elphinstone’, 31–4 and ‘Individuals: Archibald Whitelaw’, 159. 1

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 11   For modern editions of Vegio, see Maffeo Vegio, Mapheus Vegius and his Thirteenth Book of the Aeneid, ed. Anna Cox Brinton, (Stanford, Calif., 1930; repr. 2002) and Maffeo Vegio, Short Epics, eds and trans. Michael C. J. Putnam with James Hankins (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). 12  See Douglas, Prol. XIII, 118; David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2010), p. 249. 13  Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas, p. 139. 14   John Bellenden, Livy’s History of Rome—The First Five Books, ed. W. A. Craigie, Scottish Text Society, 2 vols, 1st ser. 47, 51 (Edinburgh, 1901–3). Comparatively little has been published about this work, but these are useful: R. J. Lyall, ‘Vernacular Prose before the Reformation’, in The History of Scottish Literature 1: Origins to 1660, ed. R. D. S. Jack (Aberdeen, 1987–8), pp. 163–82; John MacQueen, ‘Aspects of Humanism in Sixteenth- and SeventeenthCentury Literature’, in Humanism in Renaissance Scotland, ed. John MacQueen (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 10–31, esp. pp. 11–19; Thomas Rutledge, ‘Gavin Douglas and John Bellenden: Poetic Relations and Political Affiliations’, in Langage Cleir Illumynate: Scottish Poetry from Barbour to Drummond, 1375–1630, ed. Nicola Royan, Scottish Cultural Review of Literature and Language 10 (Amsterdam, 2007), pp. 93–116. 15   For example, Longer Scottish Poems, vol. 1, 1375–1650, eds Priscilla Bawcutt and Felicity Riddy (Edinburgh, 1987), has Prologues VII and XIII; The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots and English, ed. Roderick Watson (Edinburgh 1995) has Prologues I, VII and XII, with two extracts relating to Dido; and The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, eds Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah (Harmondsworth, 2000), has Prologues VII and XII. 16   The Bannatyne Miscellany, first compiled by the Edinburgh merchant George Bannatyne in the mid-sixteenth century, is one of the major manuscript witnesses to Older Scots poetry. For more details, see Theo van Heijnsbergen, ‘Bannatyne, George (1545–1607/8)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online edn, Oct. 2006 (, accessed 28 June 2013), and Bannatyne Manuscript: National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS.1.1.6, eds Denton Fox and William A. Ringler (1980). 17   See, among others, Daniel J. Pinti, ‘Alter Maro, alter Mapheus: Gavin Douglas’ Negotiation of Authority in Eneados 13’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993), 323–44; Cummings, ‘Gavin Douglas’ Humanist Supplement’, and A. E. C. Canitz, ‘The Prologue to the Eneados: Gavin Douglas’ Directions for Reading’, Studies in Scottish Literature 25 (1990), 1–22. 18   See Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, pp. 176–8. 19   This is Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.3.12. See p. 576 for further discussion. 20   Douglas Gray, ‘Gavin Douglas’, in A Companion to Older Scots Poetry, eds P. Bawcutt and J. Hadley Williams (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 149–64 (at pp. 160–1). 21  See Pinti, ‘Gavin Douglas’ Negotiation of Authority’, Cummings, ‘Gavin Douglas’ Humanist Supplement’, and Kantik Ghosh, ‘“The Fift Quheill”: Gavin Douglas’ Maffeo Vegio’, Scottish Literary Journal 22:1 (1995), 5–21. 22   Prologue XIII evokes Henryson’s encounter with Aesop in the Prologue to The Lion and the Mouse, and the description of Vegius is very close to Henryson’s description of Mercury in The Testament of Cresseid, also an unreliable recorder of events.

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Gavin Douglas’s Eneados 23   Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘Gavin Douglas and the Text of Virgil’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 4 (1996–8), 213–31. For more information on Badius, see Paul White, Jodocus Badius Ascensius: Commentary, Commerce and Print in the Renaissance (Oxford, 2013). 24   These notes are taken from the notes to Coldwell’s Scottish Text Society edition, revised by Ian Cunningham. I am grateful to Mr Cunningham for allowing me to use the material before publication. 25   This again is taken from Ian Cunningham’s revisions to Coldwell’s notes. 26  White, Jodocus Badius Ascensius, pp. 207–33. 27  Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, pp. 36–7. 28   All quotations from and translations of the Aeneid are taken from Virgil, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.,1999). 29   R. G. Austin, Some English Translations of Virgil: An Inaugural Lecture (Liverpool, 1956), pp. 16–17; Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 76–90. 30  Simpson, Reform and Cultural Reformation, pp. 89–92. For critique of this view, see Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘Writing about Love in Late Medieval Scotland’, in Writing on Love in the English Middle Ages, ed. Helen Cooney (Gordonsville, Va, 2006), pp. 179–96, esp. pp. 192–3. On Surrey as translator of Virgil, see also Chapter 28 in this volume by Simpson. 31  Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, pp. 235–47. 32   Text and translation from Maffeo Vegio, Short Epics, ed. and trans. Putnam, pp. 38–9. 33   For a full account of the witnesses of the Eneados, see Coldwell I, pp. 118–27. 34   J. A. W. Bennett, ‘The Early Fame of Gavin Douglas’ Eneados’, Modern Language Notes 61:2 (1946), 83–8, esp. p. 84. 35   See pp. 575–6. Some editors of the poem have stated that these commentary notes are in Douglas’s own hand, but Bawcutt believes that they are in the same hand as the rest of the manuscript, although composed by Douglas. See Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas, p. 108. 36   The Scottish grammarian John Vaus is a case in point: he published Rudimenta puerorum in artem grammaticam with Badius in 1523. 37  See The Aeneid of Henry Howard, Early of Surrey, ed. Florence H. Ridley (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963), Introduction, pp. 13–30. 38  See The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, rev. edn, Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh, 2003), pp. xv–xvi. The fragments are now Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Library, De.6.123. 39   Thomas Davidson printed John Bellenden’s Chronicles of Scotland (c.1535), a translation of Hector Boece, Scotorum historia (Paris, 1527): that text was a major source for the Scottish narrative in ‘Holinshed’s’ Chronicles. For the suggestion that Davidson’s print of The Palice of Honoure may lie behind Copland’s 1553 print, see William Beattie, ‘Fragments of the Palyce of Honour’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 3 (1951), 33–46. Professor Bawcutt is my authority for this speculation, in private correspondence and discussion. Her full account will appear in the revised Scottish Text Society edition of the Eneados, currently in preparation.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 40  Ridley, The Aeneid of Henry Howard, pp. 28–30, says that although none of the surviving prints is Surrey’s crib, it seems most likely that he used one closely related to Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.3.12. On Surrey see also Chapter 28 in this volume by Simpson. 41   The Aeneid of Henry Howard, IV, 780–8, ed. Ridley, pp. 149–50. 42   The Aeneid of Henry Howard, ed. Ridley, p. 29. The text of her edition highlights all points of similarity between Douglas’s translation and Surrey’s. 43   Virgil’s Æneis: translated into Scottish verse, by . . . Gawin Douglas . . . A new edition. Wherein the many errors of the former are corrected, . . . To which is added a large glossary, . . . And to the whole is prefix’d an exact account of the author’s life and writings (Edinburgh, 1710). 44   The full title is this: Gavin Douglas, Select works of Gawin Douglass: . . . Containing Memoirs of the author, The palice [sic] of honour, Prologues to the Æneid, and a glossary of obsolete words; To which is added, an old poem, author unknown (Perth, 1787). The work was reprinted the following year. 45   See Michael Murphy, ‘Allan Ramsay as an Imitator of Horace’, Études écossaises 2 (1993), 123–9. 46   See Robert Burns, Tam o’Shanter: A Tale in Robert Burns, Poems and Songs, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford, 1969), number 321, p. 443. 47   Gavin Douglas, Aeneid of Virgil Translated into Scottish verse by Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, ed. George Dundas, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1839) and Gavin Douglas, The Poetical Works of Gavin Douglas, ed. J. Small, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1874). 48  For seminal discussion of texts slightly later than the Eneados, see David Hopkins, Conversing with Antiquity: English Poets and the Classics, from Shakespeare to Pope (Oxford, 2010); for preliminary discussion of Douglas in this context, see Antony J. Hasler, Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland: Allegories of Authority (Cambridge, 2011), esp. pp. 87–8, and Thomas Rutledge, ‘Gavin Douglas and John Bellenden: Poetic Relations and Political Affiliations’, in Langage Cleir Illumynate, ed. Royan, pp. 93–116. 49   I would like to thank Priscilla Bawcutt, Rita Copeland, Charles Martindale, and David Hopkins for their detailed and very helpful reading of this chapter.

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Chapter 27

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Finding a Vernacular Voice The Classical Translations of Sir Thomas Wyatt Cathy Shrank

Sir Thomas Wyatt was an erudite man. That is how he is remembered by his contemporaries and successors. For the Henrician antiquarian John Leland, he is ‘learned Wyatt’ (‘docte Viate’); William Camden later celebrates him as ‘brilliantly learned’ (‘splendide doctus’).1 These compliments, rendered in Latin by educated men for the consumption of others similarly lettered in Latin and—in Leland’s case, accompanied by a copy of Hans Holbein’s roundel (sig. A1r), depicting Wyatt with his shoulders covered in what Roy Strong calls ‘an à l’antique drape’—assume that the learnedness celebrated is a classical one: to be ‘doctus’ is to have been taught, and teaching in this period was conducted almost exclusively in Latin.2 Wyatt, however, is here being remembered, and revered, for his vernacular poetry. John Parkhurst’s epitaph commemorates Wyatt as ‘that worshipful priest of the Muses’ (‘musarum venerandus ille mystes’, line 1); Thomas Chaloner mourns the loss of ‘a golden vein of writing poetry becomingly and fitly in our native tongue’ (‘carminis aurea vena | scribendi in patrio sermone decenter, & aptè’, ll. 5–6).3 This chapter brings together these two facets—the classically educated man and the English poet—and examines the ways in which Wyatt utilizes his Latin learning in his vernacular writings, reconstructing not only what Wyatt read but also how he read it. Very little is known about Wyatt’s actual schooling. Certainly, he acquired a level of education exceeding that of his father, Sir Henry Wyatt, the younger son of a Yorkshire gentleman who rose to wealth and prominence under Henry VII. Indeed, the rapidity and recency of this social rise probably explains why Sir Henry should have invested so much in his son’s education. Unlike their Kentish neighbours, such as the Brookes, the Wyatt family was not yet deeply rooted into the higher echelons of society; their position still depended on government service, for which—by the

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature early sixteenth century—a humanist training was a definite asset, and Thomas Wyatt’s education consequently seems to have included a spell at Cambridge University. He does not appear in any of the institutional records, but there is little reason to disbelieve Leland’s claim that he befriended Wyatt there. ‘Most pleasant Granta joined me to you in fellowship,’ he writes in his funereal verses on his former companion (‘Me tibi coniunxit comitem gratissima Granta’).4 Tradition makes Wyatt a student at St John’s, but his most recent biographer, Susan Brigden, convincingly argues that it is more probable that he attended Christ’s, Leland’s own college from 1519 to 1522, where Wyatt’s uncle, Richard Wyatt, had been master 1507–10, and where another relative, John Wyatt, was fellow from 1519.5 Both Christ’s and St John’s owed their refounding to Margaret Beaufort on the instigation of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and whether at St John’s or (more likely) at Christ’s, Wyatt would therefore have experienced the cutting-edge humanist education that Fisher planned for ‘his’ colleges, with the onus on grammar and rhetoric.6 Wyatt’s time at Cambridge possibly led directly to one of the few precise references that we have to his classical reading, when he tells his then teenage son in 1537 that he ‘wold Senek were your studye and Epictetus, bicaus it is litel, to be evir in your bosome’.7 The ‘litel’ book of Epictetus is undoubtedly the Enchiridion, translated into Latin by Angelo Poliziano and first printed in 1493. Its philosophy, which was of a Stoic bent, is handily summarized by Desiderius Erasmus: Susteyne and absteyne. . . . The author of it is Epictetus a noble Philosopher, by whych two wordis, he hath comprised all that perteyne to the felicitie of mans lyfe . . . By the fyrst worde we be taught, strongly to beare adversitie, & by the seconde to absteyne from unlefull [unlawful] pleasures and pastymyes.8

Epictetus was hardly a household name in Henrician England: a keyword search on Early English Books Online for references to the philosopher throws up just four instances in the years up to and including 1542 (the year of Wyatt’s death).9 All four of these allusions are connected to the circles around Erasmus in which Fisher himself moved.10 Three occur in translations of Erasmus’ works (An exhortation to the diligent study of scripture, 1529; The Enchiridion militia christiani, 1533; and Proverbes or adagies, 1539); the fourth is in Thomas Lupset’s An exhortation to yonge men perswading them to walke in the pathe way that leadeth to honeste and goodness (1535), which— like Wyatt’s letters to his son—is framed as an epistle offering moral instruction to a younger charge (Lupset’s former pupil, Edmund Withypoll).11 ‘I wolde you redde the lytell boke of Epictetus, intitled the Enchiridion, well translated into latyne by Angelus Politiane,’ Lupset tells his ‘harty beloued Edmonde.’12 An awareness of this otherwise obscure Greek philosopher aside, it is nonetheless striking that, in his own writing, Wyatt should wear his learning so lightly. He does not pepper his texts with arcane references. When translating, he generally strips away such allusions from his originals in favour of a more quotidian register. In ‘My

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Wyatt: Finding a Vernacular Voice galy charged with forgetfulnes’, a translation of Petrarch’s rima 189, for example, he transforms ‘Scilla et Charibdi’ (line 3) into ‘twene rock and rock’, an alteration that is typical of Wyatt’s method, in both its retreat from the self-evidently learned and its substitution of a detail that is at the same time more mundane and more threatening: the monstrous Scylla and whirlpool Charybdis belong to the pages of epic; rocks are a hazard found near any shoreline.13 Those classical references that Wyatt does deploy tend to be well known, present in the vernacular (usually Italian) sources he is translating, and ones to which he returns, in particular the Carthaginian general Hannibal, or the story of Troy.14 If Wyatt holds back when it comes to classical allusions, he shows similar restraint in his use of classical sources. Of Wyatt’s known works, only nine have more than a glancing allusion to a Greek or Latin original.15 This compares with the twenty-four identified translations from Petrarch’s Rime sparse or the eleven probable debts to Serafino Aquilano that can be found in Wyatt’s own manuscript, London, British Library, MS Egerton 2711, which contains most— but not all—of the poems generally accepted into Wyatt’s canon. Tracing Wyatt’s engagement with the classical tradition is further hampered by the fact that, by the early sixteenth century, writers operated in an echo chamber, so that it can be tricky to ascertain the exact origins of various influences: whether they are coming direct from a classical source, whether they are filtered through one of the European vernaculars, or indeed a combination of the two. A neat example of this is provided by the opening lines of Wyatt’s ‘The wandering gadlyng’: The wandering gadlyng in the sommer tyde that fyndes the Adder with his recheles fote, startes not dismayd so soudenly a side as jalous dispite did, tho there ware no bote.

[wayfarer] [reckless] [advantage] (ll. 1–4)

As the note in Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson’s edition tells us, ‘the image of the man who starts back is a classical one, which became a commonplace.’16 It is found (amongst other places) in Virgil’s Aeneid, Lodovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (twice), and Serafino’s strambotti.17 Any one of these—or none—could be the source behind Wyatt’s lyric. The complexity of this web of influence is further demonstrated by the way in which Surrey’s translation of the ‘ur’ passage in the Aeneid contains strong echoes of Wyatt’s intertext, as Hyder E. Rollins notes:18 Like him that, wandring in the bushes thick, Tredes on the adder with his rechlesse foote, Rered for wrath, swelling her speckled neck, Dismayed gives back al sodenly for fere.19 (improvisum aspris veluti qui sentibus anguem pressit humi nitens, trepidusque repente refugit attollentem iras et caerula colla tumentem.)

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (As one who has crushed a serpent unseen amid the rough briars, when stepping firmly on the ground, and in sudden terror shrinks back as it rises in wrath and puffs out its purple neck.)20

Surrey had undoubtedly read Wyatt’s poetry. What Wyatt had read is here much less certain. Wyatt tends to turn to classical sources when the text being produced signals some kind of resistance to, or distance from, normative behaviour which is depicted as ethically questionable and ultimately futile, as in ‘For shamefast harm’, where worldly wealth is so over-valued that, having lost his treasure, the miser hangs himself: ‘he that hidde the golde and founde it not, | Of that [corde] he founde he shapte his neck a knot’ (ll. 7–8). The mode that Wyatt is most drawn to in his classical inheritance, in other words, is one that might loosely be called a Stoical self-reliance, which cultivated indifference to external markers of success, such as possessions, glory, power, and thus rendered the holder of Stoic values immune to the fickleness of worldly fortunes. This is the type of stance associated with Seneca and Epictetus, both of whom, as we saw above, Wyatt recommends to his son, in another text which expresses disgust at social norms (in that case, ‘the comen reputation of honestye’, which, in Wyatt’s eyes, has led to it being treated as a synonym for the external trappings of honour).21 While study of Epictetus was somewhat rarefied, ‘morall Senec’ was much more familiar. He features as a purveyor of de casibus tragedies or anti-court sentiment in the works of that triumvirate of medieval poets (Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate) who were acclaimed in early English print; he is present in the assembly of poets in the ‘tent’ of Dame Pallas in John Skelton’s Garland of Laurel; and he appears as an authority in early sixteenth-century bestsellers, such as Jacques Legrand’s Book of Good Manners, which went through seven editions between 1487 and 1534.22 The evocation of Seneca by the ‘olde wyff ’ in Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’ is a useful indication of both his standing and the associations that he held: This wole Senec and othere clerkes seyn. Whoso that halt hym payd of his poverte, I holde hym riche, al hadde he not a sherte. [although] He that coveiteth is a povre wight, [poor person] For he wolde han that is nat in his myght.23 [power]

Seneca is thus firmly connected with a Stoic indifference to worldly prosperity; further to that, as Seneca is bundled together with ‘other clerkes’, Chaucer’s lines also point towards the generic nature of this advice. In his own treatment of the courtly life and concomitant response to the mutability of worldly fortunes, Wyatt therefore adopts almost commonplace poses. The views he represents are ‘common to classical philosophers and satirists—common, for example, to Seneca, Horace, and Persius, to name a few whom Wyatt seems to have read’, Thomson observes, her

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Wyatt: Finding a Vernacular Voice choice of the modal verb seems further highlighting the problematic nature of unravelling the thread of influence.24 Not only that: as John Kerrigan notes, ‘something like’ Wyatt’s ‘vision of sublunary uncertainty . . . can be found in the work of  many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century authors’.25 Wyatt’s use of the classical tradition, in other words, is one rooted in, and drawing on, a shared—and hybrid—­ cultural heritage. The mongrel nature of this inheritance is illustrated through a closer examination of that handful of Wyatt’s works which owe more than a passing debt to a classical source. Of those nine texts, only two can be securely and directly traced to a precise classical original: ‘Stond who so list upon the Slipper [slippery] toppe’, a translation of the second chorus from Seneca’s Thyestes, and the first ten lines of ‘Who list his welth and ease retyane’, which constitute a very loose paraphrase of the final chorus in Seneca’s Phaedra. A third work, The Quyete of Mynde, Wyatt’s 1528 translation of a section of Plutarch’s Moralia, derives not from the Greek, but from Guillaume Budé’s Latin version, De tranquillitate et securitate animi (1505). The relationship that the remaining six texts bear to their sources is much freer or more complex. ‘My mothers maydes’ and ‘A spending hand’ stand in some relation to a variety of classical authors, including Horace, Ovid, Persius, and Aesop,26 while ‘For shamfast harm’ is a version of an epigram which can be traced back to Plato, via the Gallo-Roman poet Ausonius, although other unidentified, vernacular intertexts may well have intervened.27 This is certainly the case with ‘Myne owne John Poyntz’ (where Juvenal’s Satire 3—Umbricius’ disenchanted farewell to Rome—is filtered through Luigi Alamanni’s tenth satire, an intertext which may well have influenced Wyatt’s adoption of the Italian terza rima for all three of his longer satirical poems28) and ‘In dowtfull brest’, which gives a voice to ‘thebrew moder’ who ate her own child during the siege of Jerusalem. This grim story comes ultimately from Josephus’ first-century Jewish Wars (6. 2. 4), but Wyatt’s poem derives more immediately from an anonymous Italian strambotto, first identified by J. G. Fucilla.29 Wyatt’s classicism, in other words, is—on closer examination—decidedly hybrid, a hybridity that is captured in Holbein’s roundel. Wyatt might be draped in a toga-like garb, but he sports a generous and most unRoman beard. Wyatt also creates his own fusions, most notably in the unfinished ‘Iopas Song’. Cuttingly described as ‘Wyatt’s worst poem’ in one of the few pieces of criticism it has received, the work reimagines the song about the movement of the heavens performed ‘when Dido festid first the wandryng Trojan knyght’ (line 1). The springboard for this poem is the end of the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid, as Dido—already starting to burn with passion (‘ardescit’, 1. 713)—prolongs the feasting and ‘drank deep draughts of love’ (‘longum . . . bibebat amorem’, 1. 749). Wyatt takes what Charles Segal describes as ‘a point of heightened intensity’ and fuses it with material from Joannes de Sacrobosco’s decidedly unpoetic treatise De sphaera, read in an early sixteenth-century edition with commentary by Johannes Stapulensis.30

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature ‘Iopas Song’ is atypical of both Wyatt’s use of classical material and his work in general. It displays none of the moral disapprobation that is more usually voiced through his recourse to classical sources. Further to that, it lacks his habitual construction—through devices such as recurrent use of personal pronouns, imperatives, and colloquialisms—of a sense of a direct address from an intense poetic ‘I’. The verse is, of course, presented as being sung by Iopas; however, ventriloquizing another does not necessarily denude that voice of a powerful impression of individual expression, as can be seen in Wyatt’s ‘In dowtfull brest’, where much of the poem is spoken by the mother, on the verge of consuming the child that she has engendered and nurtured. Like many of Wyatt’s poems, ‘Iopas Song’ deals with change, but it operates on a larger, more impersonal canvas than his other works. The celestial spheres rotate, but their effects on the individual are never felt or described, aside from a momentary glimmer of a more characteristically confessional (or pseudo-confessional) voice, when Iopas describes the third sphere (that of Venus) being ‘governd . . . by that that governeth me’ (line 55). For the most part the only first-person pronouns that intrude are contained in phrases of poetic signposting (‘I name it not for now’, ‘as I afore have sayd’, ll. 40, 68) or in generalized statements about human knowledge and experience (‘And so we say’, ‘But mark we well’, ll. 30, 75), which do much to lend the poem an air of gravitas, but do little for those readers attracted to Wyatt’s verse for its evocation of a pained and introspective sense of self. More characteristic of both Wyatt’s œuvre in general and his reception of the classical inheritance is his Quyete of Mynde, Wyatt’s only work to be printed within his own lifetime. According to its dedicatory epistle, Wyatt had been commissioned by Catherine of Aragon to translate Petrarch’s ‘remedy of yll fortune’ (De remediis utriusque fortunae), but after [he] had made a profe of nyne or ten Dialogues | the labour began to seme tedious | by superfluous often rehersing of one thyng. which tho paraventure in the latyn shall be la[u]dable | by plentuous diversite of the spekyng of it . . . yet for lacke of such diversyte in our tong | it shulde want a great dele of the grace. (sig. a1v)

Wyatt thus substitutes a translation of Plutarch’s much more succinct essay, ‘handsomly gadred togyder | without tedyousnesse of length | contayning all that your hyghnes desyred of Petrarch’ (sigs a1v–a2r). Wyatt’s praise of concision is notable here. ‘Handsomely’ had not yet acquired connotations of aesthetic beauty, but connotes ‘conveniently’, a meaning much closer to its primary sense, of something that is ‘easy to handle’, as was the small octavo book that Wyatt composed.31 Eschewing ‘delicacy of sayeng | and the piked [ornate] delight of spech’ (sig. a3r), Wyatt’s treatise consequently aims for brevitas, a style for which the printer Richard Pynson had praised Chaucer a few years earlier in his preface to The Canterbury Tales (his ‘shorte | quicke and hye [lofty] sentences | eschewyng | prolixyte | castynge awaye

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Wyatt: Finding a Vernacular Voice the chaffe of superfluyte’, sig. A1v), and for which Jacques Amyot later commended Plutarch, describing his ‘peculiar maner of inditing [composition], which is rather sharpe, learned, and short, than plaine, polished and easie’.32 Wyatt’s resistance to ornament—as he strives for succinctness—is evident from the outset in his treatment of Budé’s Latin title, De tranquillitate et securitate animi. Wyatt forbears from translating Budé’s doublet, his choice of noun, ‘quyet’, doing the work of both ‘tranquillitate’ and ‘securitate’. Wyatt’s temperance when it comes to doublings is at odds with Tudor prose style, which is—to some extent—characterized by  this linguistic trope. The standard explanation for doubling in the Henrician period is that it performs an interpretative function, ensuring that (in Thomas Elyot’s words) any term ‘new made . . . of a latine or frenche worde . . . is there declared so playnly by one mene or other to a diligent reder that no sentence is therby made derke or harde to be underst[oo]de’.33 However, this explanatory purpose quickly tips into a stylistic tic, as in Elyot’s own prose, which recurrently yokes together well-established synonyms (‘honorable or worshypfull’, ‘harlottes and concubynes’, ‘apt and redy’), rarely using one word where three will do.34 Wyatt’s endeavours to achieve a concise English style in The Quyete of Mynde were not wholly successful. As Thomson points out, although his prose ‘avoids flowery redundancy, it tends to ramble’, its ‘clumsiness and obscurity . . . increased further by the literalness of parts of his translation’.35 Yet while Wyatt follows Budé’s syntax and—more occasionally—vocabulary, he is already starting to display habits evident in his later works. Not least of these is Wyatt’s obvious attraction to the sort of Stoic self-reliance promoted by The Quyete of Mynde. This interest is apparent not only in his choice of source material, but also his treatment of it. As noted earlier, Wyatt habitually utilizes classical sources to voice moral disgust and a desire to retreat from worldly affairs and to buttress oneself against their transience. The solution to such mutability is, however, to be found in oneself, in the here and now: the message that ‘the well and surete of the minde | spring[s] in our self ’ is one that resonates across his works.36 Wyatt’s philosophy thus remains grounded in an earthly sphere and this wider impulse can be found reflected in the local details of Wyatt’s individual word choices. In Latin, as in Italian, the word anima can be translated as ‘soul’,37 a semantic option that Wyatt resists throughout his secular works; instead, it becomes (as here, in his translation of Budé) ‘mind’ or, occasionally, ‘heart’, a process similarly found in the ways in which he Englishes the Italian word alma (soul).38 Wyatt’s translation of Budé’s Plutarch also reveals traces of Wyatt’s mode of reading, and his tendency to read, not in a purely linear fashion, but moving around a page. At times, he draws in material from marginal commentary, as with ‘Whoso list to hount’ (a translation of Petrarch’s rima 190), where ‘noli me tangere’ (line 13) appears not in the Italian sonnet, but in Alessandro Vellutello’s surrounding glosses, or in ‘Iopas Song’ where an error in the duration of the revolution of the sphere of Saturn derives from a misprint in Stapulensis’ commentary.39 At other times—as we shall

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature see—he makes use of different parts of the text itself. In the opening of The Quyete of Mynde, for example, Wyatt translates the Latin ‘accuratione’ (‘with accuracy, exactness’) as ‘exquisite declaration’ (sig. a2v). The then unusual loan word ‘exquisite’ is clearly not suggested by Budé’s Latin.40 Nor, since Plutarch’s correspondent, Timeus, ‘sekes nat the piked delight of spech’ (sigs a2v–a3r), can ‘exquisite’ here mean ‘dainty’.41 Rather, Wyatt uses the word to mean ‘carefully selected’, a reading closely related to its etymological roots in the Latin verb exquīrĕre (‘to search out’) and which would therefore seem to be prompted by the appearance of the participial adjective ‘exquisitum’ just over sixty words (and some seven lines) further on, where it appears in the section describing the very ‘delicacy of sayeng’ that Timeus scorns. Wyatt’s adoption of Latinate terms, in other words, is not designed to embellish his work, but shows him striving to choose the appropriate term. The next section of this essay explores Wyatt’s word choice in ‘Stond who so list upon the Slipper toppe’, another text that articulates yearning for a Stoic quiet of mind: Stond who so list vpon the Slipper toppe of courtes estates | and lett me heare rejoyce and use me quyet without lett or stoppe unknowe[n] in courte, that hath suche brackishe ioyes in hidden place, so lett my dayes forthe passe, that when my yeares be done withouten noyse I may dye aged after the common trace [For] hym death greep’th right hard by the croppe that is moche knowen of other | and of him self alas Doth dye unknowen | dazed with dreadfull face42 (stet quicumque volet potens aulae culmine lubrico; me dulcis saturet quies; obscuro positus loco leni perfruar otio, nullis nota Quiritibus aetas per tacitum fluat. sic cum transierint mei nullo cum strepitu dies, plebeius moriar senex. illi mors gravis incubat, qui, notus nimis omnibus, ignotus moritur sibi.)43 (Let anyone who wishes stand powerful on the slippery peak of a palace: let sweet rest satisfy me. Set in obscure place, let me enjoy calm leisure. Not known to law courts, let my age flow quietly on; when my days have passed in this way, without noise, let me die old, a common man. Death lies heavy upon that man who, known too much to all, dies unknown to himself.)

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Wyatt: Finding a Vernacular Voice Wyatt’s epigram, here cited in the version found in Arundel, Arundel Castle, Harington MS Temp. Eliz. (henceforth the Arundel Castle manuscript), can be seen as a rather more successful example of the concise style for which Wyatt was reaching in his rendition of Budé’s Plutarch. The Senecan original comprises just forty-six words; since English is not an inflected language, it requires more words to convey the same sense, but Wyatt manages to translate Seneca’s chorus in eighty-two words,44 a figure comparable to Andrew Marvell’s eighty-word version printed in 1681, and considerably briefer than either Jasper Heywood’s Elizabethan translation (128 words), or Abraham Cowley’s mid-seventeenth-century effort (196 words).45 As we saw earlier, Thomson critiqued Wyatt’s propensity for literalness in The Quyete of Mynde.46 That same inclination can be found in ‘Stond whoso list’, but used to much greater effect. The very opening phrase, ‘Stond who so list’, echoes the Latin (‘Stet quicumque volet’, line 1) in terms not only of syntax, but also its sonic qualities. Wyatt also leans towards using what might be called ‘dictionary definitions’ of the Latin words. Since the dating of most of Wyatt’s works is at best speculative, the first Latin–English lexicon—Elyot’s Dictionary (1538)—was possibly not yet printed when Wyatt was composing this poem. Nonetheless, progress on that dictionary would have been contemporaneous with that activity and occurring in similar circles, since work on the Dictionary was actively promoted by Thomas Cromwell, Wyatt’s own patron.47 Moreover, when compiling his definitions, Elyot would have been drawing on, and reflecting, a common stock of knowledge. Hence Wyatt’s rendering of words such as lubrico as ‘slipper’ (line 1) is entirely congruent with received and dominant early sixteenth-century meanings.48 However, this is not to suggest that Wyatt’s translation is slavish or mechanical. He translates more freely at strategic moments, and departs increasingly from the source text as his poem gains momentum, a trajectory that can also be found in his Italian translations, many of which begin faithfully and then progressively move away from their source as Wyatt makes the poems his own.49 In ‘Stond whoso list’, for example, he strips away from the Senecan source any positive adjectives. There is no need to describe ‘quyet’ as ‘sweet’ (dulcis), for example (line 3); the noun alone—the peace and stillness recurrently hankered after in Wyatt’s works—would seem to speak for itself, just as, in his translation of Budé’s title, ‘quyet’ alone stood for both ‘tranquillitate’ (‘rest’) and ‘securitate’ (‘lack of care, surety’). Wyatt’s poem also makes the possibility of achieving that longed-for ‘quyet’ much more beleaguered than the Latin original, at least in the Arundel version, as he adds in the notion of the ‘lett or stoppe’ that might impede it. This use of doubling is—as we saw earlier—quite rare for Wyatt, but one which here lends emphasis. Inserting the phrase, with its end-stopped monosyllables, also lends a fitting abruptness to the line, particularly as—when reciting aloud— the reader is required to get their mouth around three consecutive words ending in the dental consonant ‘t’ (quyet, without, let), in contrast to the much more euphonic

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (but less arresting) alternative posthumously printed by Richard Tottel in Songes and Sonettes (1557): ‘And use my life in quietnesse ech dele [entirely]’.50 Wyatt also innovates by moving material around, for instance inverting the order of ‘obscuro positus locus’ (which he translates, fairly literally, as ‘in hidden place’, line 5) and ‘nullis nota quiritibus’ (‘known to none of my fellow Roman citizens’), here rendered ‘Unknowe[n] in courte’ (line 4). As Wyatt uses the same English word (court) to translate both aulae and quiritibus, he makes the poem a much more pointed rejection of court life in particular, rather than public life more generally (as it is in Seneca’s chorus).51 Furthermore, by compressing the two domains of court and public life, Wyatt makes more obvious the contrast between the ‘quyet’ to which his poem aspires and the court that is detrimental to it. He also expands on the Latin, by introducing—in the Arundel version—the image of ‘brackish joyes’ (line 4; Tottel here reads ‘wanton toys’). The word ‘brackish’ would appear to be suggested by a combination of elements taken from elsewhere in the poem. First, having removed the positive adjective ‘sweet’ from ‘quyet’, Wyatt deploys a near-antonym to describe the environment of the court which is posited as its antithesis. However, ‘brackish’ does more than convey a sense of foul taste: it also responds to the idea of flowing that can be found a few lines later in the Latin verb fluat (line 7). Wyatt removes that sense of fluid movement, transmuting it instead into its negative opposite: the stale brackishness that is the counterpoint to sweet, flowing water. Brackish water is, moreover, unwholesome as well as unpleasant, unlike running water which was recommended as being both safe and also agreeable to drink.52 This type of imagistic transference can likewise be found in Wyatt’s Italian translations. In ‘The piller pearisht’, for example (a translation of Petrarch’s rima 269), the image of the tree suggested by the ‘green laurel’ (‘’l verde lauro’, line 1) in the first quatrain is effaced from Wyatt’s opening lines, which reference only the broken pillar, to resurface in the second quatrain, where Wyatt describes his lost ‘joy’ (line 6) not as a ‘double treasure’ (‘doppio thesauro’, line 5) but in arboreal terms, as something from which the ‘very bark and rind’ has been ‘rent’ away (ll. 6, 5). The way that Wyatt uses his source material to prompt ideas can be seen in another linguistic tic, namely the way in which it is often the sound of a word in the original which seems to evoke an English alternative. We can see this happening most easily in those moments when Wyatt is translating closely. Take, for example, the opening of ‘Iopas Song’, where the description of the bard ‘with cryspid lokkes’ (line 4) surely owes much to the Latin adjective crinitus (‘long-haired’).53 Wyatt’s translation here follows the sound of the Latin rather than its literal sense, and we can see this same method in Wyatt’s looser paraphrases. In ‘Who list his wealth and ease retain’, the rendering of Seneca’s ‘praebet’ as ‘presse . . . in’ (line 3), a verb of motion, may be due to a misreading, as Wyatt mistakes praebet (from the verb ‘to give, to show’), for a part of a putative verb praebitere, which appears as the previous entry in Elyot’s Dictionary, where it is translated as ‘to pass by’.54 Nevertheless, even allowing for the

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Wyatt: Finding a Vernacular Voice possibility of error here, we can see how Wyatt is drawn—as he was with the opening of ‘Stond who so list’—to try to capture some of the sound quality of his original, a technique that is also characteristic of Wyatt’s Italian translations, as traced by Brigden, who shows how in ‘The long love’ the rhyming pair ‘core/fore’ (‘heart/ outside’) from Petrarch’s rima 140 (ll. 9, 11) is morphosed into the metaphor of ‘the hertes forrest’ (line 9), which Wyatt memorably introduces into his otherwise mainly faithful translation.55 That same sensitivity towards the aural quality of the source text is apparent in the last three lines of ‘Stond who so list’, even as Wyatt moves off into a much freer translation. The potentially oppressive nature of the verb incubat (‘lies upon’, line 11) is hardened into a visceral image of suffocation as—prompted by the initial consonantal sound in the adjective gravis (‘heavy’, line 13)—Wyatt reimagines the line as one in which death ‘greep’th’ its victims ‘right hard by the croppe’ (line 8). The recurrent alliteration of the final two lines of the Latin (‘notus nimis omnibus | ignotus’, ll. 12–13) also resurfaces, more forcefully, in the thudding ‘d’s of Wyatt’s final line: ‘Doth’, ‘dye’, ‘dazed’, ‘dreadfull’ (line 10), a line which is more alliterative in the Arundel than the Tottel version (where ‘Doth dye’ appears as ‘He dyeth’). Kerrigan posits that the Tottel text derives from an earlier draft than Arundel.56 It certainly seems unlikely that a poet, having hit upon the phrase ‘hym death greep’the right hard by the croppe’, would substitute ‘For gripes of death doth he to[o] hardly passe’, a line that is much less lucid as well as much less vivid. The differences between Tottel and Arundel would thus appear to stem from a process of revision. That many of these changes, as discussed above, revisit the Latin original (be it by transferring an image, or emulating its aural quality) suggests that, as he refined his composition, Wyatt was concerned to increase, rather than dilute, its relationship to its source, even where his version moves away from direct translation. Yet that connection to the original is not sought by adopting a more Latinate register but through resolutely vernacular diction. Only one word in the poem (‘brackish’) is of seemingly recent coinage, and that from a probable Dutch and nautical origin rather than a Latinate one.57 Wyatt, in other words, gives even one of his most faithful classical translations an English voice. This process of domestication is strikingly apparent in Wyatt’s longer, satirical pieces. Alamanni’s Provençal exile becomes ‘Kent and Christendome’ in ‘Myne owne John Poyntz’ (line 100), lent a concreteness through the details that Wyatt inserts into his Italian source (for example, the ‘fowle weder’ that finds the poetic speaker at home, with his ‘booke’, line 81).58 The fable of the town and country mouse, told (amongst others) by Aesop and Horace, is given a thoroughly homely setting, a song sung ‘sometyme’ by ‘My mothers maydes when they did sowe and spynne’ (ll. 2, 1). Yet, as Kerrigan and Colin Burrow have observed, for all their Horatian potential, as they contrast country and court/city, these two poems move in a strikingly different direction from the Augustan poet. In neither is withdrawal

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature to the country offered as ‘the final solution to the problem of unhap’, and ‘when he came to write his third and last Satire [“A spending hand”], Wyatt did not even entertain the idea that retirement might provide consolation for the virtuous public man’.59 ‘My mothers maydes’, in particular, takes a much bleaker turn than either Horace’s or Aesop’s versions. The country in the standard fable offers simple but adequate fare. Horace’s mouse has a large enough ‘hoard of vetch or long oats, . . . a dried raisin and nibbled bits of bacon’ to offer hospitality to his city visitor (‘sepositi ciceris . . . longae avenae | aridum . . . acinum semesaque lardi | frusta’).60 Aesop’s country rodent (a rat in William Caxton’s version) similarly welcomes his urban relative ‘and gaf [gave] hym of suche mete [food] as he had’.61 In Wyatt’s retelling, however, the country offers no sustenance whatsoever, and the mouse is forced off the land not by a desire for an easy life, but because her entire ‘stoore was stroyed [destroyed] with the flodd’ (line 14). The end of Wyatt’s fable is similarly dark. In Horace’s satire, the mice are disturbed by ‘Molossian hounds’, which interrupt their feast (‘Molossis | . . . canibus’, ll. 114–15); in Aesop, the country rat is terrified by the appearance of a butler, who does not even notice the two rodents (‘the bouteler torned ageyne and sawe hym not’, sig. e4r). In ‘My mothers maydes’, in contrast, the danger is ever-present, unseen. It does not burst in; it is always there: a cat lurking under a stool while the two mice feast. Further to that, while both Horace’s and Aesop’s rodents live to learn from their mistaken foray into an unfamiliar, albeit luxurious, domain, Wyatt’s does not escape. The tale ends with the mouse pinioned under the cat’s paw: ‘The traytour Catt had caught her by her hipp, | And made her there against her will remain’ (ll. 66–7). Wyatt’s manipulation of this well-known story, and his subsequent moralizing of it, transform a paean to rural retirement into an exemplum advocating Stoic self-­ reliance: ‘Then seke no more owt of thy selfe to fynde | the thing that thou haist sought so long before, | for thou shalt fele it sitting in thy mynde,’ it counsels (ll.  97–9). The poem offers no other sanctuary: even the comfortable domesticity signalled by ‘my mothers maydes’ singing as ‘they did sowe and spynne’ is placed, in Wyatt’s Egerton manuscript, firmly in the past tense, evoking a place, time, and security now lost.62 It is telling, however, that the adoption of Stoic values is presented as being as yet incomplete. The poetic speaker yearns for ‘queyete liff ’ (line 74), but its attainment depends on fulfilling a resolve that is only expressed in the future tense: ‘Hens forth, my Poynz, this shalbe all and some: | These wretched fooles shall have nought els of me’ (ll. 103–4). Moreover, as these lines threaten a withdrawal from the public domain, the solution they seem to offer is hardly one of Stoic indifference: the poetic speaker slips into thinking that a change of external circumstances will achieve the desired ‘quyet’, the very mistake against which he has been warning. Nor can the speaker sustain even a veneer of Stoic disinterest. The end of the poem constitutes a decidedly unStoic desire for revenge, that the ‘wretched fooles’ who have used and plagued him might suffer inner torment:

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Wyatt: Finding a Vernacular Voice None othre pain pray I for theim to be But when the rage doeth led them from the right That lowking backward vertue they may se Evyn as she is so goddly fayre and bright And whilst they claspe their lustes in armes acrosse, Graunt theim, goode lorde, as thou maist of thy myght To frete inward for losing suche a losse. (ll. 106–12)

These final lines owe much to Persius’ Satire 3: magne pater divum, saevos punire tyrannos haut alia ratione velis, cum dira libido moverit ingenium ferventi tincta veneno: virtutem videant intabescantque relicta. (Mighty father of the gods, may you punish cruel tyrants whose minds have been stirred by the deadly poison of evil lust in exactly this way: may they see virtue, and pine because they have lost it.)63

Persius’ writings were well known in late medieval Europe. He features as an authority in works such as Ranulf Higden’s fourteenth-century Polychronicon (printed 1482) and John of Garland’s thirteenth-century Multorum vocabularum equivocorum interpretatio (printed 1495), but it is his appearance in Elyot’s Dictionary which, in light of its connection to Cromwell’s patronage, is most intriguing. The Dictionary often notes ‘propre’ names, but only once is such an entry accompanied by a reference to its source: ‘Craterus, the propre name of a manne, of whom Persius speaketh in his .iii. Saty’, an appearance that comes just over thirty lines after the section of the satire borrowed by Wyatt in ‘My mothers maydes’, and an entry which cites Persius rather than two of the other, earlier sources that would have been available, and known, to Elyot: Cicero’s letters to Atticus (12.13, 14) and Horace’s Satires (2.3.161). Persius’ third satire alternately ventriloquizes and berates its self-pitying subject: a well-born youth, who (like Wyatt) is trained in Stoic thought.64 In Persius, the tongue-lashing above is delivered by a critic who—however stern—has the youth’s best interests at heart, anxious as he is to prevent him frittering away his talents and opportunities. Wyatt turns that well-intended admonishment into a curse, directed against unspecified enemies. In doing so, he both wrests Persius’ critique out of context and (probably prudently) suppresses any allusion to tyranny. The Egerton manuscript certainly bears evidence of such caution, where the word tyranny is removed from two other poems, in corrections made in Wyatt’s own hand.65 As Wyatt here refashions his sources, the resulting work epitomizes his use of the classical tradition. ‘My mothers maydes’, like most of Wyatt’s forays into classical material, is notably hybrid, blending together different sources. In addition, it displays a characteristic longing for a ‘quyete of mynde’, the achievement of which is always postponed, ever—tantalizingly—out of reach. ‘Lett me heare

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature rejoice,’ begs the voice of ‘Stond who so list’, almost as if dependent on the whim of another (line 2). The attainment of peace and stasis remains prospective: ‘that . . . | I may dye aged after the common trace’ (ll. 7–8, emphasis added). Wyatt also recurrently problematizes the stances of moral certitude that his speakers adopt: the poetic voice of ‘Mine owne John Poyntz’ reveals, two-thirds of the way through his verse epistle, that his rural residence owes little to ideological choice (‘a clogg [impediment] doeth hang yet at my hele’, line 86);66 that of ‘My mothers maydes’, as we have seen, fails to move beyond the mind-set of the public domain that he allegedly repudiates. Rather, he ends the poem still trapped in the world of court politics that he seeks to escape, just like the mouse ‘caught . . . by the hipp’ (line 66). ‘My mothers maydes’ further displays the evasiveness that typifies Wyatt’s poetry, as it sets itself up in a seemingly autobiographical mode (‘my mothers maydes’, line 1, emphasis added), but—at the same time—reveals little, as the confessional voice transpires to be a bricolage of other people’s words and (as we have seen) almost generic poses. This tendency towards opacity is, moreover, enhanced by another recurrent aspect of Wyatt’s translations from both classical and vernacular texts: namely, the way they are—like that section from Persius’ third satire— often plucked out of context. The effect of extracting in this way is evident in ‘The piller pearisht’, found in the same Arundel Castle manuscript as ‘Stond who so list’. In Petrarch’s sequence, it is clear to whom the green laurel (‘’l verde lauro’) and the high column (‘l’alta colonna’) refer (line 1): namely, Petrarch’s Muse, Laura, and his patron, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, whose family are periodically celebrated and commemorated through the Rime sparse.67 Wyatt’s ‘piller’, however, comes with no such elucidating narrative. And here we are confronted by the ultimate paradox of Wyatt’s writings: that his voice is conversely at its most opaque when it seems most plain, and most distinctive when it is most commonplace, a defensive strategy to which he himself draws attention in his Defence, written in extremis in 1541, when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, facing charges of high treason. ‘By cawse I am wonte some tyme to rappe owte an othe in an erneste tawlke, looke how craftylie theie have put in an othe to the matter to mayke the matter seme myne,’ he protests: ‘But what is there here in this artycle of my fasshyon? Marke yt, I pray you, that here agayne they have garded [decorated] my tale with an othe by cawse yt shulde seme myne.’68 Required to argue for his life, Wyatt refutes the charges against him through close attention to diction and parts of speech. ‘Is yt now lyke that . . . I wode use the future tens in that was paste? and “shall”? “Ye shall see”? And then “yf he be so, by goddys bloude he is well servyd”, and then “I wolde he were”,’ he demands, highlighting apparent inconsistencies in the syntax of his alleged words.69 It was, in short, not merely knowledge of Epictetus and a penchant for Seneca that Wyatt acquired from his humanist education: it was also a deep knowledge of rhetoric and grammar. If anything binds together Wyatt’s works, it is the idea of searching: searching for quiet of mind; and

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Wyatt: Finding a Vernacular Voice searching (exquisitely) for the right words, words which—in turn—will prevent ­others from searching him out.

Notes 1  John Leland, ‘Lima Viati’, Naeniae in mortem Thomae Viati (1542), sig. A4v; William Camden, cited by Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (1662), p. 81. 2   Roy Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, 2 vols (1980), 1, 339; the image is plate 673, vol. 2. 3   John Parkhurst, ‘Clarissimi viri D. Thomae Viati’, Ludicra (1573), sigs F1r–v; Thomas Chaloner, ‘Epitaphium Nobilissimi Equitis D. Tho. Viati, Senioris’, De rep. Anglorum instauranda (1579), sigs Z3v–Z4v. 4  Leland, Naeniae, sig. A2v. 5   Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (2012), p. 88. 6  Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, p. 89; see also Richard Rex, ‘Fisher’s College’, in St John’s College Cambridge: A History, ed. Peter Lineham (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 5–29. 7   Thomas Wyatt to his son, summer 1537, London, British Library, MS Egerton 2711, fols 72v–73r (at p. 73r); the letter appears in Kenneth Muir, The Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool, 1963), pp. 41–3. Note: quotations from sixteenth-century printed texts and manuscripts follow the original punctuation and spelling, although u/v and i/j have been regularized. 8   Desiderius Erasmus, Proverbes or adagies, trans. Richard Taverner (1539). 9   (12 Nov. 2012); work on the Text Creation Partnership, which creates readable texts for EEBO, is still ongoing at the time of writing. However, an indication of the rarefied nature of Epictetus’ works during Wyatt’s lifetime is provided by comparison with results for ‘Tully’ (93 hits in 27 records) and ‘Cicero’ (629 hits in 66 records), and ‘Seneca’ (377 hits in 63 records), for 1473–1542. 10   See Rex, ‘Fisher’s College’, p. 19; Pearl Hogrefe, The Sir Thomas More Circle (Champaign, Ill., 1959), esp. pp. 157–62. 11   Lupset was closely acquainted with Erasmus, having worked with him on the edition of the New Testament in Cambridge in the mid-1510s. See T. F. Mayer, ‘Lupset, Thomas’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (20 Dec. 2012). 12   Thomas Lupset, An exhortation to yonge men perswading them to walke in the pathe way that leadeth to honeste and goodness (1535), fol. 48r, sig. A2r. 13   All quotations from Petrarch’s poetry are from Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. Robert Durling (Cambridge, Mass., 1976). 14   See Thomas Wyatt, ‘Myne old dere en’mye’ (ll. 85–7), ‘Perdy I sayd it not’ (line 22), ‘Of Carthage he’, ‘The Song of Iopas’ (ll. 1–4); the first three of these are translations from Petrarch (rime 360, 206, 103), and the allusion is present in the original, except in ‘Perdy I sayd it not’ (where he substitutes an allusion to Troy, line 22, for Petrarch’s allusion, line 27, to Pharaoh’s pursuit of the Israelites in Exodus 14–15). Unless otherwise stated, Wyatt’s poems are cited from BL Egerton MS 2711.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 15   These are: The Quyet of Mynde, ‘Iopas Song’, ‘For shamefast harm’, ‘In dowtful brest’, ‘Myne owne John Poyntz’, ‘My mothers maydes’, ‘A spending hand’, ‘Stond who so list upon the Slipper toppe’, and ‘Who list his welth and ease retayne’. In addition, there are three works based on post-classical Latin sources: the Penitential Psalms, which—amongst other sources— make use of the Latin Vulgate and Campensis’ Latin paraphrases, and two shorter poems: ‘If thou wilt mighty be’ (from Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, m3, with Chaucer’s ‘Truth’ as an intertext) and ‘Vulcan begat me’, a translation of an epigram by the fifteenth-­century humanist Pandolfo Collenutio. 16   The Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, eds Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool, 1969), p. 304n. 17  Virgil, The Aeneid, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. edn (1946), 2.379–81 (all quotations from Virgil will be from this edition); Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. Gioacchino Paparelli, 4th edn (Milan, 2001), I.xi.5–8, XXXIX.xxxii.1–8. 18   Tottel’s Miscellany (1557–1587), rev. edn, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 2, 172n. 19   Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Certain bokes of Virgiles Aeneis turned into English meter (1557), sigs B3v–B4r. 20  Virgil, Aeneid, 2.379–81. 21   Wyatt to his son, summer 1537, BL MS Egerton 2711, fols 72v–73r (at 72v); Muir, Life and Letters, p. 41. 22   See, for example, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (printed by William Caxton, 1477, 1483; by Richard Pynson, ?1492, 1526; by Wynkyn de Worde, 1498); John Gower, Confessio amantis (printed by William Caxton, 1483; by Thomas Berthelet, 1532); John Lydgate, Fall of Princes (printed by Richard Pynson, 1494, 1527); John Skelton, Garlande or Chaplett of Laurell (1523), sig. B1v. Editions of Jacques Legrand appeared in 1487, 1494, 1498, 1500, 1507, 1526, c.1531–4. 23  Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987), III. 1184–8. The Riverside edition is cited for ease of reference, but the quotation has been checked against early editions of Chaucer to ensure that there are no substantive differences. 24   Patricia Thomson, ‘Sir Thomas Wyatt: Classical Philosophy and English Humanism’, Huntington Library Quarterly 25:2 (1962), 79–96 (at p. 90). 25   John Kerrigan, ‘Wyatt’s Selfish Style’, Essays and Studies 34 (1981), 1–18 (at p. 1). 26   ‘My mothers maydes’ is discussed later in this section. 27   Collected Poems, eds Muir and Thomson, p. 435n. 28   Along with ‘Myne owne John Poyntz’, these are ‘My mothers maydes’ and ‘A spending hand’. 29   J. G. Fucilla, ‘The Direct Source of Wyatt’s Epigram: In Dowtfull Brest’, Research News 9 (1956), 187–8; the source is cited in full in Collected Poems, eds Muir and Thomson, p. 319n. 30   Charles Segal, ‘The Song of Iopas in the Aeneid’, Hermes 99 (1971), 336–49 (at p. 336); for Wyatt’s use of Stapulensis’ Sacrobosco, see David Scott, ‘Wyatt’s Worst Poem’, Times Literary Supplement 3 September 1963, 696.

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Wyatt: Finding a Vernacular Voice  ‘handsomely, adv’, (20 Dec. 2012).   ‘Amiot to the reders’, in Plutarch, The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Thomas North (1579), sig. *8r. 33   Thomas Elyot, Of the knowledeg[sic] whiche maketh a wise man (1533), sig. A3v. 34   Examples taken from the first chapter of Thomas Elyot’s The education or bringinge up of children, translated oute of Plutarche (1532), sigs A3r–v. 35   Patricia Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Background (1964), pp. 102, 105. See also Ian Robinson: ‘as a writer of prose [Wyatt] was downright incompetent, . . . just a primeval wanderer’, The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 108–9. 36   Thomas Wyatt, The Quyete of Mynde (1528), sig. a6v; compare Wyatt, ‘My mothers maydes’ (ll. 97–9), discussed later in this section. 37   See Thomas Elyot, The dictionary (1538), sig. B1r; William Thomas, Principal rules of the Italian grammer with a dictionarie for the better understandyng of Boccace, Petrarcha, and Dante (1550), sig. B4r. 38  Thomas, Principal rules, sig. B2r; see, for example, Thomas Wyatt, ‘Such vayn thought’ (a translation of Petrarch, rima 169), line 6; ‘The piller pearisht is’ (a translation of Petrarch, rima 269), line 10; ‘So feble is the thred’ (a translation of Petrarch, rima 37), line 7. 39   Patricia Thomson, ‘Wyatt and the Petrarchan Commentators’, Review of English Studies ns 10 (1959), 255–33; Scott, ‘Wyatt’s Worst Poem’, p. 696. 40   Wyatt’s is possibly the first usage of exquisite, since the first OED citation, from John Fortescue’s Governance of England (c.1460), may result from a misreading of ‘requisite’. No earlier usage than Wyatt’s Quyete of Mynde shows up using EEBO keyword search (search conducted 20 Dec , 2012). 41  ‘exquisite, adj. and n.’, OED 1c. 42  Cited from the Arundel MS; I am grateful to Jason Powell for providing the transcription. 43  Seneca, Thyestes, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, in Seneca: Tragedies 2 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), ll. 391–402; my translation alters the Loeb. 44   ‘who so’ and ‘him self ’ have been counted as single words, as they are in modern English. 45  Jasper Heywood, The seconde tragedie of Seneca entituled Thyestes (1560), sig. B5v; Abraham Cowley, ‘Upon the slippery tops of human state’, cited in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (2008), pp. 190–1n. 46  Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Background, p. 106. 47   Elyot’s dedicatory epistle to Henry VIII records how his project came to the king’s attention ‘by the reportes of gentyll maister Antony Denny, . . . and of Wyllyam Tildisley, keper of your gracis Lybrarie, and after mooste specially by the recommendation of the most honourable lorde Crumwell, lorde privie seale’; Elyot, Dictionary, sig. A3r. 48  Elyot, Dictionary, sig. M4v. 49   See, for example, Wyatt, ‘My pillar pearisht’. 50   Tottel’s Miscellany, ed. Rollins, I.80. 31 32

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 51   This focus is most apparent in the Arundel version, with its translation of aulae as ‘courtes estates’ (line 2) and quiritibus as ‘in courte’ (line 4), as opposed to the Tottel text, which avoids repetition by rendering the former phrase ‘hye estates’. 52   Andrew Borde, A compendyous regyment or a dyetary of healthe (1547), sig. D1r; Thomas Elyot, The Castel of helth (1539), sig. E2r. 53  Virgil, Aeneid, 2.470. 54  Seneca, Phaedra, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, Seneca: Tragedies 1 (Cambridge Mass., 2002), line 1127; Elyot, Dictionary, sig. S3v. Note: there is no Latin verb praebitere; this seeming error is not corrected in Elyot’s 1542 revised and expanded edition of the Dictionary (his Biblioteca); the word also appears in Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus (1578), where it is translated as ‘perish’ (sig. 5F4r). 55  Brigden, The Heart’s Forest, p. 18. 56   Kerrigan, ‘Wyatt’s Selfish Style’, p. 5. 57   Wyatt’s usage pre-dates the first citation in OED, although OED is also wrong about the dating of that source, John Leland’s Itinerary, to ‘a[round] 1552’: Leland’s journeys were undertaken 1539–45, and he was incapacitated by insanity from c.1546 ( James P. Carley, ‘Leland, John’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 4 Jan. 2013). The only other pre-1542 instance of ‘brackish’ found using the full-text search on EEBO is Wyatt’s Quyete of Mynde, where the ‘draught of our lyfe’ is described as ‘brackish & sower’ (sig. C4v). 58   See Colin Burrow, ‘Wyatt and Sixteenth-Century Horatianism’, in Horace Made New, eds Charles Martindale and David Hopkins (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 27–49 (at p. 37). 59   Kerrigan, ‘Wyatt’s Selfish Style’, p. 4. 60  Horace, Satires, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. edn (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), 2.6. 84–6. 61   The subtyl historyes and fables of Esope (Westminster, 1484), sig. e3v. 62   The version in Tottel is in the present tense: ‘do sowe and spin’; ‘sing a song’ (ed. Rollins, I.82). 63  Persius, Satires, in Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 3.35–8; my translation alters the Loeb. 64   Line 53 of Persius’ third satire clearly references the Painted Porch, where Zeno— founder of Stoicism—taught: ‘docet sapiens bracatis illita Medis Porticus’. 65   Wyatt substitutes ‘crueltye’ for ‘tyrannny’ in the first line of ‘Who hath herd of such cruelty before’ (BL Egerton MS 2711, fol. 29v), and changes line 5 of ‘Desire alas’ from ‘tyrane it is to rewle thy subjectes so’ to ‘What reson is to rewle thy subjectes so’ (fol. 50r). 66   See Burrow, ‘Wyatt and Sixteenth-Century Horatianism’, p. 37. 67   See Petrarch, Rime sparse, 10.5, 123.72, 266.12. 68  Muir, Life and Letters, pp. 199, 201. 69  Muir, Life and Letters, p. 198. Quotation marks added for clarity.

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Chapter 28

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey The Exiled Reader’s Presence James Simpson

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47), translated Books 2 and 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid. The precise date of these texts is unknown; they were, however, composed between 1538 and 1544;1 most recently, William Sessions dates them to 1543.2 They are of major significance for the history of classicism in England, in good part because they exhibit a broader humanist understanding of the act of translating itself. Whereas medieval translation of classical poetry is unashamedly an act of re-reading, Surrey’s Aeneid translations appear, on the face of it, to efface the presence of the reading translator altogether. The translator is exiled from his translation as a presence. The fundamental difference, that is, between the late medieval and the sixteenth-century humanist philological translator does not consist, as is usually asserted, of divergent understandings of historical difference. The essential divergence rather consists of different conceptions of how a translation is delivered to, and made to speak to, a new audience; and, therefore, of how the translator figures, or does not figure, as reader, in the newly produced text. The medieval reception explicitly recognizes its own historicity in the process of transmission; the humanist, philological reception would efface that historicity. Largely because they seem to banish the present reader, Surrey’s Virgilian translations are also of major significance for the history of English poetry. As is often stated, these translations introduce blank verse to English poetry for the first time, as Surrey settles on a metre that plausibly captures the resonance of Virgil’s dactylic hexameters. This is by no means simply a matter of major metrical interest, however, since the more supple form of blank verse, in tandem with the banishment of  the reading translator, permits the transposition of entirely new imaginative,

Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Virgilian poetic possibilities. Those new possibilities consist principally of new ways of exploiting syntax so as to express the following: the enargeia of narrative (particularly the modulation of human passion, light effects, and sound effects); and perspective (both temporal and geographical). Surrey’s specifically poetic achievement, then, at once a matter of translational conception, poetic technique, and of the striking set of effects of that technique, directs our attention away from Surrey himself. The translator poet is apparently banished altogether from his text, as we are turned towards a new, freshly recovered Virgil, in English. Such a momentous change of focus might seem to activate the fundamental paradox of humanist philology. Philology promises to replicate historical worlds ‘in their own terms’. The more one pursues a world ‘in its own terms’, however, the more, of course, does it lose interest for the present, since the very premise of such historical enquiry is that one should be suspicious of interpretation that serves present interests. If one’s premise is that worlds can only be understood in their own terms, then present interest is by definition unlike the terms of the world we reconstruct. Thoroughgoing philology, that is, activates the painful paradox of historicism: the more precisely the scholar, or the poet, historicizes the lost object, the less relevant does the object become. In the very act of pursuing its object as wholly different, philology activates its flight into irrelevance.3 In this essay I explicate and sustain the claims so far made in this introduction for Surrey’s significance as both translator and as poet. I will, however, go on to mount an argument that Surrey’s self-effacement through exile is only apparent. His translation, like all translations, and especially like all Surrey’s own other translations from both classical and biblical literature, is saturated with the translator’s own presence and intensely painful, solitary predicaments. The very appearance of absence from the text itself vividly underlines Surrey’s implicit presence in these narratives of exile and suicide, since the absence is more a case of exile and banishment. As the biographical Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, faced banishment from history, his translations are all the more extraordinary for bearing the visible traces of that exile.

Late Medieval English Reception of Virgil’s Aeneid: Chaucer, Caxton, Douglas The history of Virgil reception prior to the advent of Italian humanism is obviously vast.4 Setting aside the wilder traditions of Virgil as magician, scholarship can identify the main strands of reception within the following medieval disciplines: philology; historiography; ethics; and philosophy. These different reading traditions can be found separately,5 but they are by no means exclusive. Indeed, one major tradition allegorizes the Aeneid precisely as the movement of the soul through the primary

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The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey disciplines of grammar and ethics before broaching the higher philosophic disciplines, figured by Aeneas’ arduous descent to the underworld in Book 6.6 Despite their internal differences, however, all traditions of medieval reception of Virgil share one crucial feature: the presence of the interpreting reader. Regardless of whether the form of reception is exegetical commentary or literary remaking, the  reader’s presence is by no means banished from the text. On the contrary, in purely exegetical texts—the product of the schools—the reader’s presence is visually marked either in interlinear glosses and/or in marginal commentary.7 In literary receptions of Virgil, the reader’s presence is heavily marked from within the narrative: a narrator of the story responds to the narrative as he reads and narrates his own story. The narrator’s translated story, that is, is in good part less the story of the Aeneid than the story of the narrator reading the Aeneid. Surrey’s text, by contrast, is Virgil’s text, shorn of the visible presence of the translator as reader.8 This phenomenon is easily exemplified by rapid comparison of Surrey’s translation with three significant Virgilian ‘translations’ in English preceding Surrey’s, those of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Caxton, and Gavin Douglas. In each of these, despite the different traditions of reception within which each works, we have no trouble identifying the presence of the reader. Chaucer’s House of Fame (1373–8) and Legend of Good Women (first composed c.1385) both claim to narrate either Virgil’s Aeneid or a section thereof. Thus the narrator of the House of Fame, finding his dreaming self in a Temple of Venus, makes unmistakable quotation of the Aeneid. Even as he makes it, though, he alters it by inserting the dreamer’s own presence: I wol now synge, yif I kan, The armes and also the man That first cam, thurgh his destinee, Fugityf of Troy countree.9

However much these lines are engraved in a table of brass, evoking Horace’s claim to poetic eternity and stability,10 they inscribe the fluidity of the reading experience with the qualification ‘yif I kan’. That qualification opens the way for a massively derailed retelling of Virgil’s poem. The form of this rehearsal is based on school exercises of summarization,11 but decisively inflected by an Ovidian tradition of reading counter to the Aeneid. Summary might seem like the most dutiful and subservient of school exercises, but this summary subversively targets its ostensible master text. For Geoffrey’s summarizing ‘translation’ of the Aeneid quickly becomes a critical reading of the Aeneid, taking us in to the privileged psychological space of reading, which is the space of seeing the images of the narrative. Geoffrey not only sees images of the narrative (‘Than saugh I . . .’), but responds so powerfully to his narrative’s doubly moving images that the Aeneid is shipwrecked on the rock of Dido, the poem’s new focus.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature So completely does the dreaming Geoffrey enter into Dido’s plight that he displaces Virgil’s mighty authority altogether: ‘Non other auctour alegge I’ (line 314), he exclaims as he imagines and cites Dido’s appeal to pity, and her blame of male deception (lines 315–60).12 To say that the reader is visible in the text is in fact a large understatement with regard to the House of Fame: it’s we as readers who are in the psyche of Chaucer’s narrator/reader. The reading translator absorbs the text entirely. When Geoffrey abjures appeal to any other author, he is, of course, in fact evoking, if not quoting, another auctor, and another, competing tradition of Virgil reception. This is the Ovidian, Heroides tradition of betrayed women speaking in their own voice. Chaucer underlines the irreconcilable opposition between the masculinist, Virgilian tradition and the feminist, Ovidian tradition in both the House of Fame and the later Legend of Good Women. In Fame’s palace, he juxtaposes Virgil, who has long borne up the ‘fame of Pius Eneas’ (line 1485), and ‘Venus clerk Ovide, | That hath ysowen wonder wide | The grete god of Loves name’ (House of Fame, lines 1487–9). And in the Legend, Chaucer as narrator begins by praising Virgil, but, once again, with the same qualification (‘as I can’) immediately recasts the Virgilian narrative by suggesting that Aeneas betrayed Dido, and immediately inserts reference to the Ovidian counter-tradition: Glorye and honour, Virgil Mantoan, Be to thy name! and I shal, as I can, Folwe thy lanterne, as thow gost byforn, [follow before] How Eneas to Dido was forsworn. In thyn Eneyde and Naso wol I take [Aeneid Ovid] The tenor, and the grete effectes make. [essential narrative] (lines 924–9)

However extreme the Chaucerian case of the reader’s response forcefully reshaping Virgil’s narrative, it exhibits the standard feature—the reader’s acknowledged presence—of pre-humanist readings of Virgil. Caxton, writing a century after Chaucer, is equally unembarrassed, if much less sophisticated, about his presence as reader as he relates the story of the Aeneid in his Eneydos (c.1490). Caxton (translating from a French original) tells the story told by Virgil, though in natural, not Virgilian, artificial order. When he arrives at Book 4, however, the story is redirected, even if the redirection takes us to a different destination from that of Chaucer’s Ovidian reading. In his prologue, Caxton had recounted how he happened to come across a French translation of the Aeneid in his study; after reading it with pleasure, ‘I delybered [deliberated] and concluded to translate it into Englysshe, and forthwyth toke a penne and ynke and wrote a leef or tweyne [two] whyche I oversawe [re-read] agayn to corecte it.’13 After some very amusing discussion of the correct style in which to present the translation (a discussion about stylistic choice governed wholly by the

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The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey needs of the audience rather than the style of his source), Caxton proceeds to tell the story, in prose, and in natural order, starting with the Fall of Troy. On the way, he will stop off to make a comparison with Aeneas’ actions and contemporary English practice: as Aeneas sacrifices for the slain Polydorus, for example, Caxton relaxedly breaks the narrative to explicate it by reference to contemporary English practice: . . . lyke as we englysshe men doo whan we halowe ony solempnyte in the tyme of somer, in strowynge [strewing] wyth herbes and settynge up of grene trees and bowes, in the chirches and chappellis for to refresshe the people there assembled, by cause of the fest & solempnyte there to be halowed.14

Once Aeneas approaches Carthage, however, the entire Virgilian story is not so much momentarily interrupted as altogether postponed. Just as Caxton started his translation after coming across a book, so too does he stop the translation by coming across another book, this time Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (c.1355–74). Caxton happened across this book also, apparently, by chance: ‘That other daye in passyng tyme I redde the fall of noblys, of whom Ihon Bochace hath spoken.’ Reading innocently along, Caxton chances on the falle of Dydo, somtyme quene and foundresse of the noble cyte of Cartage; the whiche in redynge, I was abasshed, and had grete merveylle, how Bochace, whiche is an auctour so gretly renommed, hath transposed, or atte leste dyversifyed the falle and caas otherwyse than Vyrgyle hath in his fourth booke of Eneydos.15

Caxton says he is confused by the version of the Dido story he finds in Boccaccio, which presents a wholly positive account of the queen, and a narrative in which Aeneas does not appear at all. This is the narrative of the ‘historical Dido’, with a long ancestry deriving from late antiquity,16 and which powerfully resurfaced in fourteenth-century Italy.17 Caxton raises a reason why Boccaccio might have divagated so widely from Virgil (i.e. that Boccaccio wished to protect the reputation of women), only to dismiss it (there are plenty of narratives of infamous women in the De casibus). Without any regard to the coherence of the story or the artefact he is recounting, then, Caxton takes time off from the Virgilian narrative to recount in detail the totally divergent Boccaccian, wholly pro-Dido version. Caxton, in sum, positions himself squarely in the middle of the narrative, sitting in his study coming across books, and repackaging those books for consumption by his noble and mercantile readers. That jobbing, unliterary, commercial, and candid positioning arouses the splendid anger of our next example of Virgilian translation, that of Gavin Douglas, who published his Eneados, in Scots, in 1513. In the prologue to this extraordinary work, Douglas positions his translation with respect to earlier, vernacular Virgilian enterprises that had come to grief, by Douglas’s account, on their representation of Dido.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The first target of his acrimony is Caxton’s Eneados (1490), which, as we have seen, presents wholly different and incompatible versions of the Dido story. Douglas indignantly exclaims that Caxton, ‘of Inglis natioun, | in proyss [prose] hes prent [printed] ane buke of Inglis gross, | clepand it Virgill in Eneadoss’. Caxton’s book is, however, no more like Virgil’s than the devil resembles St Augustine.18 Douglas, fuming, rightly points out that Caxton’s treatment of Dido occupies half the book, and is entirely divergent from Virgil’s Dido: I red his wark with harmys at my hart, That syk a buke but sentens or engyne [such a book without wisdom or imaginative inspiration] Suldbe intitillit eftir the poet dyvyne. [entitled] (1, Prologue, 146–8)

Caxton is not Douglas’s only historical obstacle, however. Chaucer’s presentation of Dido in the Legend of Good Women is another. Despite his reverence for Chaucer, Douglas effectively lays charges against Chaucer for having ‘gretly the prynce of poetis grevit’ in the finally Ovidian account of Dido in the Legend (though Douglas’s attack could just as accurately have been aimed at the House of Fame). For, Douglas says, in the Legend Chaucer simultaneously claims to follow Virgil, and yet calls Aeneas a traitor. The Scottish poet stands incredulous at the charge of treachery against Aeneas, since ‘Virgill dyd diligens | But [without] spot of cryme, reproch or ony offens | Eneas for to loif [praise] and magnyfy’ (1, Prologue, 419–21), and he goes on to excuse Aeneas before excusing Chaucer’s weakness, ‘For he was evir, God wait [knows], all womanis frend’ (1, Prologue, 449). In these joint attacks on Caxton and Chaucer, Douglas shows himself the ‘renaissance’ author for whom the text is what an author wrote, rather than what a reader makes of it. Douglas follows ‘maist reverend Virgil, of Latyn poetis prynce, | gem of ingyne [imagination] and flude [flood] of eloquens, | thow peirless perle, patroun [lord] of poetry’ (Prologue, 1.5). No less than Aeneas as a man, Virgil, ‘Thys maist renownyt prynce of poetry’ (Prologue, 9.75), is exemplary as a poet. Writing for an emperor, Virgil provides the model for ‘The ryall style, clepyt heroycall, | Full of wirschip and nobilnes our [over] all . . . Observand bewte, sentens and grauyte’ (Prologue, 9.21–6). Douglas’s awareness of the profundity of ‘sentence’, no less than the rhetorical beauty and gravitas of Virgil’s text, compels him to fidelity of translation, for all his disclaimers about rhetorical inadequacy. And so Douglas attempts a remarkably faithful and full translation of the entire text, where he tries to preserve the integrity of the classical work by fidelity to a philological model of translation.19 Douglas takes his cue from a conception of Virgil as poet unconstrained by the verities of history, an authorial model freshly available through Italian proto-humanist texts such as Boccaccio’s De genealogia deorum (c.1340–71), whose final books (14 and 15) Douglas certainly knew.20

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The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey Despite his stated observance of humanist protocols, Douglas’s determination not to leave the text of Virgil alone to do its work in solitary, princely solitude is everywhere apparent, for the most part, beside the text. He provides glosses up to half way through Book 1;21 he divides the narrative up into chapters, each supplied with plot summaries; he makes small marginal glosses, pointing both to plot and to ethical interpretation; he incorporates material from the explanatory apparatus of the Latin editions he was using into the body of his text; he will also, rarely, insert remarks into the body of his translation that serve to distance him from the pagan practices represented in the Aeneid; he added the extra, thirteenth book, translated by Maffeo Vegio (1428);22 and above all, he offers prologues to each book.23 Douglas’s prologues are sometimes astonishing works of literary criticism, which chafe against the classical model, as they nervously veer around the inviolate text of Virgil. They move from panegyric of Virgil’s poetry (Prologues 1, 9), and his theology (6), to utter dismissal of the divine pantheon of Virgil’s ‘mawmetis’ (‘idols’, 10). The most extraordinary of the prologues, however, is that to Book 8, written in alliterative metre, in which a satirical Conscience figure who appears to Douglas in a dream dismisses the Aeneid translation as ‘bot brybry’ (‘nothing but triviality’), after a long and powerful satirical description of the world as upsidedown. Douglas, in his turn, wakes to dismiss this figure. That dismissal also implies dismissal of a large tradition of unrhymed, alliterative vernacular satirical writing, as ‘faynt [idle] fantasy’.24 In addition to the Prologue to Book 8, Douglas’s presence is, perhaps, most forcefully felt in the Prologue to Book 4. There he follows a long attack on the ‘furyus flambe of sensualite’ (Prologue 4.108) with a long apostrophe to both Dido and a personified Lust, with whom Dido is nearly identified. Douglas begins by declaring his own tears for Dido, and those of St Augustine (d. 430) (a reference to Book 1.13 of the Confessions); he goes on, however, to attack Dido as exemplary of uncontrolled passion, ‘In hir faynt lust sa mait [mad], within schort quhile [while], | That honeste [virtue] baith and gude fame war adew [neglected]’ (Prologue 4.254–5). Aeneas and his imperial mission remain unmentioned here, and Dido has become an ethically reduced exemplum, detached from the historical process that destroys her. Douglas might excuse Chaucer, but he certainly does not extend the same clemency to Dido.25 Douglas as reader is, one way and another, forcefully present beside the text, wanting to govern it from the margins.

The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey The sequence of Virgil receptions I have just narrated (Chaucer, Caxton, Douglas) is normally described in scholarship as a sequence of improvement, moving gradually

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature and falteringly to a ‘truly’ historical consciousness. The title of a chapter in Thomas Greene’s celebrated Light in Troy marking this shift to truly philological understanding of classical literature’s otherness is, for example, ‘Erosion and Stabilization’. The pre-humanist examples exemplify the ‘erosion’, before the sixteenth-century stabilization.26 I see no reason to evaluate the process in this way: the pre-humanist examples speak to their contemporary audiences, largely innocent as they are of the philological ideal of leaving texts inviolate, or, more broadly, of the painful ideal of ‘historical solitude’ (Greene’s term).27 For these readers, the primary act of receiving a canonical classical text is an act of representing that text for a new readership. The textual mediator’s task is to translate, measure style to audience need, and to guide audience interpretation. As I have shown, these acts of choice and guidance are not only perceptible within the narrative, but part of the narrative. All that said, with Surrey we have something entirely different. The difference is both visual, and, much more profoundly, metrical. Once the metrical decision has been made, the differences also consist in all that follows from that metrical decision. For the visual difference of the mise-en-page, compare the two printed editions of small passages of Aeneid 4.522–7, first Douglas (1553) and then Surrey (1557) in Figures 2 and 3.28 The differences are small but significant: Surrey’s text faces us on the page with no apparatus whatsoever. It’s true that the first, 1554 free-standing edition of Book 4 is prefaced by two frames. The title reads thus: ‘The fourth boke of Virgill, intreating of the loue betweene Aeneas and Dido, translated into English, and drawne into a straunge metre by

f igu r e 2.  Gavin Douglas, The ·xiii. bukes of Eneados of the famose poete Virgill translatet out of Latyne verses into Scottish metir (London, 1553), p. 90, folio Niii. EEBO image 89, recto.

Reproduced by permission of the Henry Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino, Calif.

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f igu r e 3.  Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, The fourth boke of Virgill, intreating of the loue betweene Aeneas and Dido (London, 1554), folio Dii recto and Diii verso, EEBO images 14–15.

Reproduced by permission of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Henrye late Earle of Surrey, worthy to be embraced’. The 1.5-page preface, by William Awen (Owen), is addressed to the son of the poet Surrey (after the poet’s execution in 1547). Owen restricts himself to commenting on the book itself: he was keen to print the copy that had come into his possession, since he regarded it as a great treasure (having heard it once), and because the gentlemen whom he knew to have possessed copies were jealous of its circulation. Owen then goes on to discuss editorial matters: his copy was written in Surrey’s hand, but could not, apparently for Surrey’s want of time, be regarded as authoritatively corrected. So Owen himself acted as editor, comparing his copy with two others, in other hands, choosing those readings ‘as most worthy to be allowed, which was to the Latin both agreeable, and also best standing with the dignity of that kind of meter’.29 Then a two-page summary of the narrative to date follows, up to Book 4, but focusing only on the Dido– Aeneas thread of that narrative, so as to present Book 4 as a self-standing package. The reader, then, is given no hermeneutic or historical guide to the narrative. The 1557 Tottel edition is shorn even of these frames. The reader is guided only thus: ‘Certain bokes of Virgiles Aeneis turned into English meter by the right honorable lorde, Henry Earle of Surrey’.30 In sum, Surrey’s translations present themselves to the reader’s ethical judgement or readerly pleasure (there is no direction which) without any guide, and certainly with no visible trace of Surrey’s own translating presence or hand. Instead of being directed to any hermeneutic application, the reader’s attention is instead directed to the metre of the text he or she is about to read. For the 1554 printer, this is a ‘straunge metre’; for the text’s editor, it is a metre turned less to readerly need in the present,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature than to translational fidelity to the past. The metre is ‘agreeable’ to the Latin, and somehow fit, or what rhetoricians might call ‘convenient’, with Virgil’s metre: Surrey’s metre is ‘best standing with the dignity of that kind of meter [i.e. Virgil’s dactylic hexameters, used for epic poetry]’. Let us now look more closely at this metre, in order to appreciate the extraordinary possibilities it opens. I compare the translation of Aeneid 4.522–9, citing first Douglas, then Surrey: Quhat sorow dreys Queyn Dydo all the nycht, And how Mercur bad Ene tak the flycht. The nycht followys, and every wery wight Throu owt the erth hath caucht, onon rycht, The sownd plesand sleip thame lykit best. Woodis and rageand seys war at rest; As the starnys thar myd cours rollys doun, All feildis still, but othir noyss or sown, All beistis and byrdis of divers cullouris seir, And quhatsumever in the braid lowys weir, Or, amang buskis harsk, leyndis undir the spray, Throu nychtis sylence slepit quhar thai lay, Mesyng thar bissy thocht and curis smart, All irksum laubour forget and owt of hart. Bot the onrestles fey spreit dyd nocht so Of this onhappy Phenyssane Dydo.

[follows creature] [throughout the world straight away] [pleasurable sleep they most desire] [forests  raging seas] [stars roll] [distinct] [lake’s weir] [prickly bushes lying  branches] [soothing  painful cares] [doomed] [unlucky Phoenician] (Eneados, 4.10.1–13)

It was then night; the sounde and quiet slepe Had through the earth the weried bodyes caught; The woodes, the ragyng seas were falne to rest, When that the starres had halfe their course declined; The feldes whist; beastes and fowles of divers hue, [were silent] And what so that in the brode lakes remainde Or yet among the bushy thickes of bryar Laide downe to slepe by silence of the night, Gan swage their cares, mindlesse of travels past. [sufferings] Not so the spirite of this Phenician. (Surrey, Aeneid 4, lines 702–12)31

The concept behind each passage is identical: both Douglas and Surrey convey the idea of deep night having fallen in both countryside and its adjacent littoral, permitting blissful, curative rest to each creature of both land and water, except one, waking human. There are other deep similarities of the two passages. Surrey has clearly consulted Douglas’s translation in detail: the coincidence of the following lexical choices cannot be coincidental in the space of six lines: ‘throu owt the erth’/‘through the

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The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey earth’; ‘wery’/’weried’; ‘caucht’/‘caught’; ‘woodis and rageand seys’/‘The woodes, the ragyng seas’; ‘rest’/‘rest’; ‘and quhatsumever in the braid lowys’/‘And what so that in the brode lakes’.32 Up to a point, Surrey also models his syntactic decisions on Douglas’s translation, as both poets release a long sentence to suggest the deep sleep of natural creatures (7 lines in Douglas, 4.5 lines for Surrey). These similarities of concept, lexis, and syntax cannot efface a more forceful recognition: we have something quite different with Surrey’s text.33 Not only do we receive the passage with no translator’s introduction (Douglas’s ‘Quhat sorow dreys Queyn Dydo all the nycht, | And how Mercur bad Ene tak the flycht’); and not only is Surrey’s version much shorter than Douglas’s (10 lines versus 14);34 much more significantly, the effect of the passage is very different. Unlike Douglas, Surrey is able to convey the emotional effect of that movement from activity to utter stillness, and silence, across the expanse of a vast rural landscape. Epic verse needs to be able to create vistas of landscape as seen from the heavens; this is the default perspective of epic poetry’s presentation of both place and time, a wide angle perspective that must not be overborne by the narrower, more intense, individual perspective of a single figure, in this case Dido. In such poetry, peace and beauty is found in the natural, not the human realm. Individual human pain, and the chaos of war, is always set within a larger, more stable frame governed by epic simile, and by perspectival and temporal control. This double effect, of control and instability, is a fundamental characteristic of Virgilian epic. Virgil is the great master of these often melancholy, always moving, grand chronological and topographical effects, counterpointed as they often are with individual human solitude and pain. We recognize the Virgilian effect in Surrey, the effect of lacrimae rerum (Aeneid 1.462), but not in Douglas. How does Surrey produce the Virgilian effect? The key decision is not to use rhyme. Surrey’s verse form permits the verse to imitate, or re-enact, the falling of night across that large land- and seascape, and so to create a distinctively Virgilian topographia. Consider the first four lines of each passage, for example: because Surrey is not laying so much emphasis on the final word of the line in order to rhyme, he is at liberty gently to end each line with a word that quietly emphasizes calm, arrested stillness: ‘slepe’, ‘caught’, ‘rest’, ‘declined’. Douglas, by contrast, is obliged by his choice of iambic pentameter couplets to provide the background music of rhyme (wicht/richt, best/rest), but that music hardly contributes to the prevailing concept of peace. Both the rhyming and the non-rhyming poet can use enjambment, but enjambment thus liberated from rhyme is more at liberty to exploit the purpose of enjambment, which is to create the effect of a larger current, unstoppable by the metrical barrier. Thus Douglas enjambs lines 2 and 3, but his rhymes offer resistance to the desired effect of deep, sinking, unresisted silence. Compare those lines (‘and every wery wight | throu owt the erth hath caucht, anon rycht, | the sownd pleasand’) with these by Surrey: ‘the sounde and quiet slepe | Had through the earth the weried

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature bodyes caught’. Or consider these lines: ‘And what so that in the brode lakes remainde | Or yet among the bushy thickes of bryar | Laide downe to slepe by silence of the night’. Douglas’s equivalent passage reverts to its habitual default position of endstopped lines, where the rhymes do only sporadic work of contributing conceptually to the desired effect: And quhatsumever in the braid lowys weir, Or, amang buskis harsk, leyndis undir the spray, Throu nychtis sylence slepit quhar thai lay.

Not dominated by directing lines to final rhymes, Surrey can fashion each line as a more plastic entity. His two examples in this passage of full sentences in half-lines, each with their mini-effect of beauty suddenly perceived (‘It was then night’; ‘The feldes whist’) find no equivalent in Douglas, where each complete line of the entire passage is a syntactic unit. Not least, Surrey is, quite simply, able to be more efficient. That his passage (and entire translation) is much shorter than Douglas’s derives from the fact that he needs no fillers to arrive at a rhyme. Thus Douglas’s final couplet (‘Bot the onrestles fey spreit dyd nocht so | Of this onhappy Phenyssane Dydo.’) is rendered in a single line by Surrey without, in the larger context, any loss of sense: ‘Not so the spirite of this Phenician.’ The cumulative essence of these observations is as follows: that Surrey’s key units are the sentence rather than the line, the verse paragraph rather than the couplet. Syntax will inevitably occupy a much higher profile in such poetry, and words will resonate within larger units. The culminating lines of each description are beautiful lines: ‘Gan swage their cares, mindlesse of travels past’; ‘Mesyng thar bissy thocht and curis smart, | All irksum laubour forget and owt of hart’, but Surrey’s single line is musically open to, and resonates with, the entire preceding verse paragraph, whereas Douglas’s couplet, by contrast, crisply encloses a picture of animal peace.35 Surrey had both theoretical and practical models for a mode of translation designed to transmit both sense and style. He could have derived the theory of such a holistic poetic practice, as William Sessions argues, from John Clerke, possibly Surrey’s own tutor, and certainly the author who dedicated a work to Surrey’s own son in 1543.36 In the prologue to that translated text, Clerke explains his theory of translation. He does not, he says, respect the word order of his target text, as other translators do, who merely ‘publysshe theyr owne folye’, and who, ‘in the place of lybertie’ submit themselves to servitude. His translation, by contrast, is based on an ‘understandynge that every tonge hath his properties, maner of Locucyons, perticuler vehemencies, dignyties, and rychesses’. He has, accordingly ‘arrested my self onely upon the sentences & maiesties therof so curyously as I fyrmely trust th’intencion of thauthor is truely expressed’.37 More precisely, Surrey could easily have read justifications of versi sciolti in the works of Giovanni Giorgio Trissino. In his Sophonisba (1524), Trissino praises the

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The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey power of blank verse to express overpowering emotion, since, as he declares to his patron Leo X, you will find it [verso sciolto] not only very useful in the narratives and speeches, but essential for moving to pity; for a speech which moves to pity is one born of suffering, and suffering seeks spontaneous expression, and therefore rhyme, which shows deliberation, is an obstacle to pity.38

Surrey also had practical examples of metrical solutions to the challenge of transmitting the full effect of Virgil’s style. He seems quite certainly to have modelled his English invention on Italian models of hendecasyllabic versi sciolti, which appeared in Italy from the beginning of the sixteenth century, and which he could easily have encountered at the court of Francis I.39 Defences of the specific practice of versi sciolti that Surrey could have known are rare, but examples many. Surrey seems certainly to have depended on the translation of Aeneid 2 by Ippolito di Medici (published in 1539).40 The passage chosen here is Aeneid 2.201–8, the moment where the one figure who does forewarn his Trojan co-citizens of the dangers of accepting the Greek ‘gift’ is himself caught in serpentine toils: Lacoonte sacerdote eletto A sorte di Nettuno ai sant’altari Fea sacrificio d’un superbo toro. Ecco due gran serpenti in gir’avvolti Da Tenedo venir per l’onde quete (Tremo in parlarne), che solcand’il mare Vengonsi dritto ai nostri lidi insieme Tra l’onde, alzando i lor’superbi petti Stando alte sopra il mar l’ardenti creste Tinte d’horribil sangue, lungo il tergo Scorre per l’acqua.41 Whiles Laocon, that chosen was by lot Neptunus priest, did sacrifice a bull Before the holy altar, soddenly From Tenedon, behold, in circles great By the calme seas come fletyng adders twaine   [floating  two serpents] Whiche plied towards the shore (I lothe to tell) With rered brest lift up above the seas, Whose bloody crestes aloft the waves were seen. (Surrey, lines 254–61)

This passage might share lexical parallelisms with the Italian (i.e. ‘sant’altari’/‘holy altar’; ‘per l’onde quete’/‘By the calme seas’), though these could just as easily come from Douglas (‘haly alteir’; ‘the still sea’, 2.4.7). The real dependence here is not, however, lexical and minor, but metrical and major: the extraordinary effect of

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature s­ erpentine movement (so much more expressively captured through enjambment) obviously derives from a model of this kind. Only two of the lines in the Italian are definitely end-stopped; in Surrey the count is three. Douglas has no enjambed lines in the equivalent passage. We need not belabour the point: both Douglas and Surrey produce great translations, but Surrey also produces great poetry. His invention of iambic pentameter blank verse would become the default form, in many genres, in the history of English poetry. That is a very extraordinary contribution to the future. In Surrey’s particular environment, his blank verse is extraordinary for allowing Surrey to transmit not only Virgil’s sense, but also his style.42

Surrey’s Aeneid Translations: Absence as Exile We began by observing the gradual departure of the translating author from his translation, in a sequence moving from Chaucer to Surrey. Discussion of Surrey’s verse form and its effects has taken us even further from Surrey as translator. That blank verse was adopted for drama is unsurprising, since, as we have seen, it permits a represented voice to take over a narrative, so dissolving the presence of the playwright altogether. That dramatic possibility is exploited in Surrey’s translations of Books 2 and 4 themselves, since Aeneas is the narrator of Book 2, and Dido’s voice dominates Book 4.43 We seem, that is, not only to have confirmed our initial finding about Surrey’s absence from his text, but to have underlined it: the formal decision to adopt blank verse, in Surrey’s case at least, contributes to the diminution, if not total effacement, of the poet’s presence. Most discussions of Surrey’s blank verse implicitly accept this absence as non-negotiable, since most discussions of Surrey’s Virgilian translations restrict analysis to the verse form, with no discussion of Surrey’s personal investment in them.44 With two sustained exceptions, those who do connect the life with the translations see the literary effort as part of a cultural project of introducing classical norms to English culture, ‘a conscious attempt to introduce the nobility and elevation of Virgil . . . into English, and that this effort was closely related to the belief of civic humanists that a great culture is impossible without greatness in the use of language’.45 Although not focused very specifically on the two translated books, one essay poses the counter-case: that Surrey chose these books not because they contribute to an imperial project; on the contrary, he chose them for the very reverse reason, because ‘each is concerned with the end of a civilization’.46 In this, the final section of the present chapter, I will pursue that case. Maybe, I suggest, Surrey’s absence from his text is not so much absence as exile. I begin by sketching Surrey’s biography by way of underlining the fragility a figure like Surrey could

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The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey have felt in the context of newly imperial claims being made and executed by Henry VIII. Sixteenth-century aristocrats of ancient families were under lethal threat, as monarchs of nascent, centralized states gained in power at the expense of feudal barons. Surrey’s own biography exemplifies these threats with a certain terrifying clarity. Born in 1517 as the eldest son of Thomas Howard, later 3rd Duke of Norfolk, in 1530–2 Surrey was the companion at Windsor of Henry Fitzroy, illegitimate son of Henry VIII. He married in 1531–2, and in 1532 spent eleven months at the French court. He accompanied his father to suppress the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. He was imprisoned for minor disturbances in 1537, 1542, and 1543. In 1536 and again in 1542 a first cousin of his was beheaded as a putatively unfaithful queen (respectively Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard). In 1536 his uncle Thomas Howard was imprisoned in the Tower, there to die, for having secretly married a potential heir to the throne. In 1544 Surrey began building a magnificent home, Surrey House, just outside Norwich. This was first ransacked by Surrey’s enemies after his final imprisonment, and then destroyed soon after Surrey’s death. In 1545 Surrey was appointed commander of Boulogne. He was defeated in a battle of 1546, after which he was replaced in his post by his enemy Edward Seymour. In late 1546 he faced charges of implicitly claiming to succeed Henry VIII, and in January 1547 was formally indicted of high treason. He was beheaded at Tower Hill on 21 January 1547, one week before Henry VIII died.47 Richard Southwell, Surrey’s childhood friend who had been raised in the Howard household, was the main accuser in the final trial. In preparation for this trial, depositions were taken from at least twenty-two witnesses.48 Gawain Carew and Edward Rogers had, like Southwell, served with Surrey in France; both testified against him. George Blage had been a friend; he also testified against Surrey. To Edward Warner, who testified against him, Surrey had dedicated a poem. Edmund Knyvett his cousin offered testimony against him. His sister testified most actively to damn Surrey.49 The heraldic charges against Surrey were, as Peter Moore has recently argued, wholly spurious; Moore surmises that the plot against the Howards was generated by fear of a Council dominated by anti-evangelicals after the death of the king, and argues that Surrey was ‘killed as a precaution’.50 Susan Brigden further suggests that the Howard lands provided powerful incentive for the campaign against Surrey and his father.51 Surrey is plausibly reputed to have been outmanoeuvred by new men (e.g. the Seymours) throughout his adult life. However much that would seem to be the case, let me cite just one example of how anyone in Surrey’s position had to efface himself in extremely precarious and treacherous situations. In the trial of Queen Catherine Howard in December 1541, the French ambassador Marillac not only notes with astonishment the particular posture of the Duke of Norfolk towards his condemned niece, but also goes on to elevate his observations into a general rule of English

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature parental cruelty. He notes, as ‘une . . . chose assez estrange’ (‘a rather strange phenomenon’), that the Duke of Norfolk, set in judgement over a matter of dishonour to his own blood, ‘examinant ces prisonniers, ne se gardoit de rire comme s’il eust cause de s’en resjouyr’ (‘examining those prisoners, did not hold back from laughing, as if he had cause to rejoice about the matter’). Surrey (Norfolk’s son), and the brothers of the queen, Marillac goes on, ‘se promenoient à cheval par la ville’ (‘passed through the city on horseback’). And so he concludes with a general rule to his recipient: Telle est la coustume de ce pays, Sire, qu’il convient ceulx de mesme sang se mainctenir ainsi et faire force à nature pour donner à congnoistre qu’ilz ne particippent aux délictz de leurs parens et d’aultant plus son fidelles au roy leur souverain. (Such is the custom of this country, Sir, that those of the same family must present a face to the world, and repress their nature so as to make it known that they do not in any way condone the failings of their relations, and that they remain as faithful as ever to their sovereign.)52

Such a political culture might, I suggest, inflect philological culture: the author exiles himself from the text by way of covering himself. The text becomes instead a performance of total, anonymized obedience. This is of course little more than an intuition; Douglas’s way of putting the matter would, however, suggest that imperial and textual authority are self-reinforcing. Thus he says that just as Octavian ‘but [without] rebellioun, al quhar [everywhere] obeit was he’ (Prologue, 9.62), so too must the authority of Virgil be unswervingly obeyed in the attempt to follow his ‘sentence’: Douglas is fixed as to a stake—‘Rycht so am I to Virgillis text ybund’ (Prologue, 1.297–9). Philological obedience to imperial, Henrician demand is elsewhere apparent in the very context of Surrey’s Howard cousin queen being executed.53 Thus Henry Parker, Lord Morley, dedicated a translation of Boccaccio’s De claribus mulieribus to Henry in (?)1543, in the wake of the execution of Morley’s own daughter, lady-inwaiting to Catherine Howard and executed along with the queen. Morley hails Henry as the new Augustus, the ‘Pater Patriae’, even in the matter of his own daughter’s execution. Morley’s whole sense of literary tradition, indeed, is intimately linked with Henry as imperial patron. In the Preface he accordingly links his source text with Roman imperial power. The height of Latin writing was achieved ‘in the greate Augustus days’, and continued to decline from that point on, until ‘the greate empyre of Rome decayde’ over six or seven hundred years, by which time the Romans were ‘as barbarouse as the best’. The renovation of letters occurred in Italy, he goes on, in the time of Edward III, who held ‘the septre of thys imperiall realme, as your Grace nowe doth’; in this time three Italian writers, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, restored letters, so that, in the case of Petrarch at least, there is hardly any ‘noble prynce in Italy, nor gentle man’ who is without a copy of his vernacular

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The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey works.54 This standard recitation of humanist literary ideology quietly insinuates (as it usually does) that Henry is the new Augustus; that cultivation of literature and imperial power are mutually sustaining; and that the renovation of imperial letters is about to begin in England. Morley adds barely a sentence to his translation; in the face of his daughter’s execution, Morley’s is a model of philological obedience and parental cruelty, as he presents a text outlining proper behaviour for women. Was Surrey, like sycophantic Morley, aiming to contribute to a new imperial self-projection for Henry VIII? I think not. On the contrary, Surrey’s translational choices enter decisively into one powerful strand of Virgil reception, that of the Aeneid as tragedy. It is true that Surrey had recent Italian precedent for translations of single books, and of Book 2 and of 4,55 and we will never be sure of why Surrey chose these over other books. Both Books 2 and 4 represent the utter defeat, or (in Book 2) what looks and feels like the utter defeat, of aristocratic heroes or heroines against more cunning and/or more powerful forces. In both cases the aristocratic loser is either the narrator of the story (Book 2), or the predominant voice in it (Book 4). In Book 2, Aeneas bears the grief of a fallen city, relating the still fresh experience of ‘how the Grekes did spoile and overthrow | The Phrygian wealth and wailful realm of Troy’ (lines 4.5–6). Book 2 is surely the copy text for the catastrophic experience of having to pack quickly as one’s city is invaded and sacked at night from within; Book 4 the copy text for all elegiac literature, of the usually feminine figure unjustly abandoned by history. In these narratives we can see exemplars of courtly life that would have resonated with Surrey’s. In Book 2 (entirely narrated by the suffering prince himself ), the beguiling rhetoric of Sinon, who manipulates logic, pathos, and ethos with consummate skill to deceive the Trojans; the fate of Laocoon, swallowed even as he tries to dissuade the Trojans from self-destruction; Priam and Aeneas witnessing the destruction of their own city; the deceptive dream of family unity amid the chaos: all these episodes would resonate with a courtier on the losing side in Henrician England. In Book 4, the alluring danger of a love affair; that affair manipulated by those even higher placed than the noble, secret lovers; the destructive power of Fama; and the secret marriage that turns to disaster: each of these has a parallel in Surrey’s own life and family. Evidence of this kind is necessarily elusive and speculative. For equally speculative evidence, we might turn to the circulation of these texts. Unlike Morley’s, for example, Surrey’s texts were not published in his lifetime, and those who did have copies were, by Owen’s account, unwilling that they should circulate.56 This is the publication pattern of private circulation. For still speculative but slightly more persuasive evidence, we might turn to every one of Surrey’s other translations, each one of which bears significantly on Surrey’s personal life, even if he must bury his own voice and predicament in almost every one. All Surrey’s psalm translations,57 written in the Tower while awaiting execution,

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature bespeak and yet repress Surrey’s fearful predicament. Evangelically inflected psalms offered no deliverance from the frightening social world of the Tudor court. Translated in the political conditions of late Henrician England, and under the conditions of evangelical hermeneutics more generally, the psalms turn out to replicate the experience of paranoia. They lead inexorably to the stake or, in Surrey’s case, the block. The Protestant God, like the Tudor king, turns out to operate in wholly unpredictable and opaque ways, and never answers the suppliant, who is himself restricted to the literal sense alone of the biblical address. That narrow textual space turns out to guarantee his utter powerlessness. The evangelical Tudor courtier, that is, adopts the very theology whose power relations bear the most striking similarities to the practice of Henrician politics. Both the Protestant God and the Tudor king distribute, or refuse to distribute, their grace in ways wholly unconstrained by the effort, or estimated self-worth, of their suppliants. That, after all, is the very nature of grace in the first place. Furthermore, when the courtier speaks against the king to God, God’s word has already been claimed by the king.58 We might also look to the other biblical and classical translations: the Ecclesiastes translations bespeak the grief of the aristocratic life, and prophesy the destruction of  the house Surrey was building for himself. ‘With broken slepes enduryd I, to compasse my desire! | To buylde my howses faier then I set all my cure: | By princely acts thus strave I still to make my fame indure’, to which one might answer from another Ecclesiastes translation: ‘But this I found an endlesse wourke of payne and losse of tyme.’59 The biblical translations give perfect, expressive voice to the tragic, defeated experience of the noble life. And two other classical translations, from Horace and Martial, express desire for retirement rather than imperial projects; Surrey wants, like Horace, a moderate life, ‘Not palacelyke wherat disdayn may glome’.60 By way of ending, let me turn to Surrey’s elegiac verse, and to two Virgilian, or at  least Trojan references. In his 1537 imprisonment in Windsor Castle, Surrey remembers his earlier period at Windsor with Henry Fitzroy, who had died the previous year, in 1536. In his imprisonment, Surrey remembers that earlier time the boys enjoyed ‘In greater feast then Priams sonnes of Troye’. Troy has now become a place of grief and loss, where ‘each stone, alas, that doth my sorowe rewe, | Retournes therto a hollowe sound of playnt’.61 My final example is drawn from a sonnet by Surrey, translated, to be sure, from Petrarch, but unmistakably voiced by Dido: Alas, so all thinges nowe doe holde their peace, Heaven and earth disturbed in nothing; The beastes, the ayer, the birdes their song do cease; The nights chare the starres about dothe bring. Calme is the sea, the waves worke lesse and lesse; So am not I, whom love alas doth wring.62

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The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey Surrey chose the Virgilian losers to voice his own, unsayable pain. Surrey is not merely absent from his philological, classical translations, but rather exiled from them. Traces of his exile are everywhere visible.63

Notes 1   For the date, see The Aeneid of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, ed. Florence H. Ridley (Berkeley, 1963), pp. 1–5. 2   William A. Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford, 1999), p. 267. 3   For a larger discussion and further references, see James Simpson, ‘Diachronic History and the Shortcomings of Medieval Studies’, in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, eds David Matthews and Gordon McMullan (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 17–30, from which the present paragraph is drawn. 4  The classic study is Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E. F. M. Benecke (Princeton, 1997; first published 1872 in Italian); more recently, see the excellent study by Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995). 5   For which see Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, chs 1–4. 6   See, for example, Commentum super sex libros Eneidos Virgilii, eds Julian Jones and Elizabeth Jones (Lincoln, Nebr., 1977), p. 28. 7   See the examples in Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, illustrations. 8   For the broader history of this practice, see Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991), esp. chs 6 and 7. 9   Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford, 1987), lines 143–6. All further citations of works by Chaucer will be drawn from this edition. 10   ‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius’ (‘I have constructed a monument more enduring than bronze’) (Horace, Odes, 3.30.1). 11   For a convenient set of school exercises (e.g. translation, paraphrase, epitome, and imitation), each of which Chaucer practises in The House of Fame, see Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, in Roger Ascham, English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge, 1904), pp. 243–302. 12   For discussion of Chaucer’s reception of Virgil in the House of Fame, and of this passage, see Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, ch. 6, and Marilyn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality and the Medieval ‘Aeneid’ (Minneapolis, 1994). 13   William Caxton, Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. Norman Blake (1973), p. 79. 14   William Caxton, Caxton’s Eneydos, eds M. T. Culley and F. J. Furnivall, EETS es 57 (1890), ch. 3, p. 17. The orthography has been slightly modernized. 15  Caxton, Caxton’s Eneydos, eds Culley and Furnivall, ch. 6, pp. 22–3.

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 16   See Craig Kallendorf, ‘Boccaccio’s Dido and the Rhetorical Criticism of Virgil’s Aeneid’, Studies in Philology 82 (1985), 401–15, and Jerome E. Singerman, Under Clouds of Poesy: Poetry and Truth in French and English Reworkings of the ‘Aeneid’, 1160–1513 (New York, 1986), pp. 233–4. 17   For suggested reasons for its resurfacing, see James Simpson, ‘Subjects of Triumph and Literary History: Dido and Petrarch in Petrarch’s Trionfi and Africa’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005), 489–508. 18   Gavin Douglas, Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’, translated into Scottish Verse, ed. David F. C. Coldwell, 4 vols, Scottish Text Society, 3rd ser. 25, 27, 28, 30 (Edinburgh, 1957–64), p. 4. All further citations of this work will be from this edition, cited by book and chapter number. 19   For Douglas’s posture as a translator, poised between possibilities of either a textually faithful, disinterested translation or one fitted to the needs of the receiving audience, see Kantik Ghosh, ‘“The fift Queill”: Gavin Douglas’s Maffeo Vegio’, Scottish Literary Journal 22 (1995). See also Chapter 26 in this volume by Nicola Royan. 20  See Giovanni Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium in an English Version, ed. and trans. Charles Grosvenor Osgood (Princeton, 1930). For Douglas’s certain knowledge of this text, see Singerman, Under Clouds of Poesy, pp. 240–2. 21  Singerman, Under Clouds of Poesy, pp. 240–2. 22   See Ghosh, ‘The fift Queill’, pp. 5–21. 23   For all of which, see Priscilla Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas: A Critical Study (Edinburgh, 1976), pp. 110–24, and p. 132. The visual effect of Douglas’s apparatus can now be easily seen in digital facsimile of the William Copeland edition of 1553. See Early English Books Online (EEBO), The ·xiii. bukes of Eneados of the famose poete Virgill translatet out of Latyne verses into Scottish metir, bi the Reuerend Father in God, Mayster Gawin Douglas Bishop of Dunkel (1553), STC 24797. 24   For further discussion, see A. E. C. Canitz, ‘The Prologue to the Eneados: Gavin Douglas’s Directions for Reading’, Studies in Scottish Literature 25 (1990), 1–22. For comparison of Douglas’s Troy narrative with the medieval tradition of Troy, see James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547, The Oxford English Literary History 2 (Oxford, 2002), ch. 3. 25   See also Desmond, Reading Dido, ch. 5. 26   Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982), ch. 12. For a swift and non-judgemental survey of the same territory, see Colin Burrow, ‘Virgil in English Translation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 21–37. 27  Greene, The Light in Troy, ch. 1. 28   Only one version of the translation of Book 2 survives. Book 4, by contrast, survives in three versions. Book 4 was published in 1554. In 1557 Tottel published the two books. The text survives in one manuscript. See Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems, ed. Emrys Jones (Oxford, 1964), p. 132, and further references. See also The Aeneid of Henry Howard, ed. Ridley, p. 7, whose dating is more confident: Day 1554; Tottel 1557; London, British Library, MS Hargrave 205, c.1568.

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The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey   The fourth boke of Virgill, EEBO image 3.   Certain bokes of Virgiles Aeneis turned into English meter by the right honorable lorde, Henry Earle of Surrey (1557), STC 24798, EEBO image 1. 31   All citations from Surrey’s poetry are drawn from Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems, ed. Jones. 32   For which see Florence H. Ridley, ‘Surrey’s Debt to Gawin Douglas’, PMLA 76 (1961), 25–33, and The Aeneid of Henry Howard, ed. Ridley, pp. 13–29. 33  For an extended comparison of Douglas and Surrey, see O. B. Hardison, ‘Tudor Humanism and Surrey’s Translation of the Aeneid’, Studies in Philology 83 (1986), 237–60. 34   For Book 2 as a whole, Douglas has c.1,326 lines versus Surrey’s 1,068 (where Surrey’s translation is, therefore, 80.5% as long). For Book 4 the figures are as follows: Douglas, c.1,404; Surrey 943 (67.1% as long). 35   See further The Aeneid of Henry Howard, ed. Ridley, pp. 33–4. 36   See further Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life, pp. 266–7. 37   John Clerke, A certayn treatye moste wyttely deuysed orygynally wrytten in the spaynysshe, lately traducted in to frenche entytled, Lamant mal traicte de samye (1543), STC 546, EEBO image 2. 38  Giovanni Giorgio Trissino, Trissino’s Sophonisba and Aretino’s Horatia: Two Italian Renaissance Tragedies, eds Michael Lettieri and Michael Ukas (Lewistown, NY, 1997), Dedication, p. 48. Although Surrey could not have known it, Trissino’s further discussion, in Italia liberata dai Goti (1547), of the enargeia produced by blank verse is also deeply illuminating, implicitly defending as it does enjambment: ‘Si fa col dire diligentemente ogni particularitá de le azioni, e non vi lasciare nulla, e non troncare, ne diminuire i periodi, che si dicono.’ Cited in O. B. Hardison, ‘Blank Verse before Milton’, Studies in Philology 81 (1984), 253–74 (at p. 260). 39   For a summary of previous discussions and further contribution, see Hardison, ‘Blank Verse before Milton’, p. 259. 40  See The Poems of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, ed. Frederick Morgan Padelford, rev. edn (Seattle, 1928), pp. 233–4. 41   I sei primi libri de l’Eneide di Virgilio, ed. Luciana Borsetto (Sala Bolognese, 2002), A.7r and v. This is a facsimile of the 1540 edition. The punctuation is mine. 42  For the broader conditions and nature of this recovery of classical style, see Erich Auerbach’s classic essay ‘Camilla, or the Rebirth of the Sublime’, in his Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (1965; first published in German in 1958), pp. 183–233. 43   For Virgil’s own indebtedness to classical dramatic tragedy, see Philip Hardie, ‘Virgil and Tragedy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Martindale, pp. 312–26. 44   Thus Stephen Merriam Foley, ‘Not-Blank-Verse: Surrey’s Aeneid Translations and the Pre-History of a Form’, in Poets and Critics Read Virgil, ed. Sarah Spence (New Haven, 2001), pp. 153–66, and Hardison, ‘Tudor Humanism and Surrey’s Translation of the Aeneid’. 45   Hardison, ‘Tudor Humanism and Surrey’s Translation of the Aeneid’, p. 258. This is an afterthought to Hardison’s excellent discussion of Surrey’s formal inventions; for an 29 30

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Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature implausibly extreme statement of the case that Surrey seeks to contribute to a humanist, Ciceronian, and republican project with his translations of Virgil, see José María Pérez Fernández, ‘ “Wyatt resteth here”: Surrey’s Republican Elegy’, Renaissance Studies 18 (2004), 208–38. 46   See Stephen Guy-Bray, ‘Embracing Troy: Surrey’s Aeneid’, in Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Alan Shepherd and Stephen D. Powell (Toronto, 2004), pp. 177–92 (at p. 182). See also the extraordinary biography by Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life, which also suggests that Surrey chose these books to translate for their tragic emphases. 47   For a brief biography, see William A. Sessions, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (Boston, 1986), ch. 1. For a subtle, extended biography, see Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey. 48   Peter R. Moore, ‘The Heraldic Charge Against the Earl of Surrey, 1546–47’, English Historical Review 116 (2001), 557–83 (at p. 562). 49   Susan Brigden, ‘Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and the “Conjured League” ’, Historical Journal 37 (1994), 507–37 (at p. 536). 50   Moore, ‘The Heraldic Charge’, p. 581. 51   Brigden, ‘Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’, pp. 536–7. 52   Quoted in Correspondance politique de MM. de Castillon et de Marillac, ambassadeurs de France en Angleterre, 1537–42, ed. J. Kaulek (Paris, 1885), no. 380 (December 1541), p. 371 (my translation). In another letter to Francis I, Marillac wrote that the Duke of Norfolk hoped to gain from the confiscations arising from Catherine Howard’s execution, ‘yet the times are such that he dare not show that the affair touches him, but approves of all that is done’. Quoted in L&P Henry VIII: Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII . . . calendared by J. S. Brewer et al., 21 vols in 33 (1862–1910), 16.100 (p. 44). For Morley’s text and presentation, see James Simpson, ‘The Sacrifice of Lady Rochford: Henry Parker’s Translation of De claris mulieribus’, in ‘Triumphs of English’: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court. New Essays in Interpretation, eds Marie Axton and James P. Carley (2000), pp. 153–69. 53   For the broader context of writing under Henry VIII, see Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford, 2005). 54   Henry Parker, Forty-six Lives, translated from Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, ed. Herbert G. Wright, EETS 214 (Oxford, 1943), 1–3. 55   The Poems of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, ed. Padelford, pp. 233–4. 56   The fourth boke of Virgill, EEBO image 3. 57   Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems, ed. Jones, numbers 47–50. 58   For which see James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), ch. 5, from which this paragraph is drawn. 59   Ecclesiastes, chapter one, and Ecclesiastes, chapter two, in Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems, ed. Jones, numbers 43 and 44.

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The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey 60   Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems, ed. Jones, numbers 39 and 40 (citation from 39.10). For the intensely painful predicament of Surrey’s elegiac poetry, see Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, ch. 4. 61   Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems, ed. Jones, number 27 (citation from 27.4 and 49–50). 62   Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems, ed. Jones, number 7.1–6. 63   I warmly thank Rita Copeland for her expert editing of this volume, Richard Thomas for bibliographical help, and Nicola Royan for help with the text of Douglas.

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Select Bibliography of Ancient Sources (including late antiquity and early Christian writings) Where possible, ancient authors are cited in the edition of the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press). Most of the original Loeb editions have gone through multiple reprintings; unless the edition has been revised since first publication, the date of the original printing will be given. Bibliography is not provided for every ancient author or text mentioned in this ­volume. Normally those that are cited or quoted directly, discussed in some detail, or mentioned more than once, are listed here with bibliographical information. Ammianus Marcellinus, The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus, trans. J. C. Rolfe, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1939–50) Aphthonius, Progymnasmata, see Kennedy, George Arator, De Actibus Apostolorum, ed. Arthur Patch McKinlay, CSEL 72 (Vienna, 1961) Arator, The Codices, ed. Arthur Patch McKinlay (Cambridge, Mass., 1942) Aristotle, see Aristoteles latinus in Medieval Primary Sources Augustine, Confessions, trans. William Watts (Cambridge, Mass., 1912) Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. George E. McCracken, William M. Green, et al., 7 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1957–72) Ausonius, Cento nuptialis, in Ausonius, eds E. Capps et al., trans. H. G. Evelyn White, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1919) Avianus, Fabulae, in Duff and Duff, trans., Minor Latin Poets 2 Avitus of Vienne, Avit de Vienne: Histoire spirituelle, ed. Nicole Hequet-Noti, 2 vols (Paris, 1999, 2005) Avitus, The Fall of Man, ed. Daniel J. Nodes (Toronto, 1985) Boethius, De arithmetica, eds H. Oosthout and J. Schilling, CCSL 94a (Turnhout, 1999) Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, in Boethius, The Theological Tractates; The Consolation of Philosophy, eds and trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (Cambridge, Mass., 1973) Boethius, De institutione musica, ed. G. Friedlein (Leipzig, 1867) Boethius, In Isagogen Porphyrii commenta (editio prima), ed. Samuel Brandt, CSEL 48 (Vienna and Leipzig, 1906) Boethius, De topicis differentiis, PL 64, 1173C–1216D

Select Bibliography of Ancient Sources Boethius, De topicis differentiis, trans. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, NY, 1978) Braulio of Saragossa, Vita Sancti Aemiliani, PL 80, 639–720 Caesar, The Gallic War, trans. H. J. Edwards (Cambridge, Mass., 1917) Cassiodorus Institutiones, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1937) Cassiodorus, Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning; On the Soul, trans. James W. Halporn, with introduction by Mark Vessey (Liverpool, 2004) Cassiodorus, De orthographia, ed. Patrizia Stoppacci (Florence, 2010) Chalcidius, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus, commentarioque instructus, ed. J. H. Waszink with P. J. Jensen (1962) Cicero, In Catilinam 1–4, trans. C. Macdonald (Cambridge, Mass., 1976) Cicero, On Duties, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, Mass., 1913) Cicero, De inventione, De optimo genere oratorum, Topica, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, Mass., 1949) Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, Academics, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., 1933) Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Cambridge, Mass., 1927) Cicero, On Old Age, On Friendship, On Divination, trans. W. A. Falconer (Cambridge, Mass., 1923) Cicero, Verrine Orations, trans. L. H. G. Greenwood, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1928–35) [Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, Mass., 1954) Claudian, De raptu Proserpinae, in Claudian 2, trans. Maurice Platnauer (Cambridge, Mass., 1922) Claudius Marius Victor, Alethia, ed. P. F. Hovingh, CCSL 128 (Turnhout, 1960) Courtney, Edward, The Fragmentary Latin Poets, rev. edn (Oxford, 2003) Curtius, Quintus, History of Alexander, trans. John C. Rolfe, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1946) Cyprian, Heptateuchos, ed. R. Peiper, CSEL 23 (Vienna, 1881) Dares the Phrygian, Daretis Phrygii De excidio Troiae historia, ed. Ferdinand Meister (Leipzig, 1873) Dictys Cretensis, Ephemeridos belli Troiani libri, ed. Werner Eisenhut, 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1973) Dictys and Dares, The Trojan War: The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian, trans. R. M. Frazer, Jr (Bloomington, Ind., 1966) Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, ed. and trans. Charles Henry Oldfather, Charles Lawton Sherman, et al., 12 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1933–67) Diodorus Siculus, Diodorus Siculus, Books 11–12.37.1: Greek History 480–431 b.c.—The Alternative Version, ed. Peter Green (Austin, Tex., 2006) Disticha Catonis, eds Marcus Boas and H. J. Botschuyver (Amsterdam, 1952) Distichs of Cato, in Duff and Duff, trans., Minor Latin Poets, vol. 2 Donatus, Aeli Donati quod fertur commentum Terenti, ed. Paul Wessner, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1902–8)

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Select Bibliography of Ancient Sources Donatus, Aeli Donati quod fertur commentum Terenti, text with French translation at the Hyper Donat project: Donatus, Donat et la tradition de l’enseignement grammatical: étude et édition critique, ed. Louis Holtz (Paris, 1981) [definitive study of the transmission of grammatical theory from early to late antiquity, with editions of Donatus’ Ars minor and Ars maior] Duff, J. Wight, and Arnold M. Duff, trans., Minor Latin Poets, 2 vols, rev. edn (Cambridge, Mass., 1935) Eulogius of Toledo (Cordoba), Memoriale, PL 115, 704–966 Eusebius, [Vita Constantini], Vie de Constantin, eds and trans. F. Winkelmann, Luce Pietri, and Marie-Joseph Rondeau, Sources chrétiennes 559 (Paris, 2013) Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, trans. Kirsopp Lake and J. E. L. Oulton, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1965–73) Eutropius, Breviarium ab urbe condita, ed. C. Santini (Leipzig, 1979) Eutropius, The Breviarium ab urbe condita of Eutropius, trans. H. W. Bird (Liverpool, 1993) Eutropius, Abridgment of Roman History, in Justin Cornelius Nepos, and Eutropius: Literally Translated, trans. John Selby Watson (1886) Festus, Sextus Pompeius, De verborum significatu, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Leipzig, 1913; repr. Hildesheim, 1965) Fortunatus, Venantius Honorius, Poèmes (Latin with French translations), ed. and trans. Marc Reydellet, 3 vols (Paris, 1994–2004) Fortunatus, Venantius Honorius, Vita Sancti Martini, in Œuvres 4, ed. Solange Quesnel (Paris, 1996) Frontinus, The Stratagems; The Aqueducts of Rome, trans. Charles E. Bennett, ed. Mary B. McElwain (Cambridge, Mass., 1925) Fulgentius, Fabii Placiadis Fulgentii V.C. opera, ed. Rudolf Helm, addenda Jean Préaux (Stuttgart, 1970) Fulgentius, Fulgentius the Mythographer, trans. Leslie George Whitbread (Columbus, Oh., 1971) Gellius, Aulus, Attic Nights, trans. John C. Rolfe, 3 vols, rev. edn (Cambridge, Mass., 1946) Halm, Karl, ed., Rhetores latini minores (Leipzig, 1863; repr. Frankfurt, 1964) Historia augusta, Histoire Auguste, ed. Jean-Pierre Callu (Paris, 1992) Historia augusta, Scriptores historiae augustae, trans. David Magie, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1921–32) Horace, Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. Niall Rudd (Cambridge, Mass., 2004) Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. edn (Cambridge, Mass., 1929) Hyginus, Hygini fabulae, ed. Peter K. Marshall (Stuttgart, 1993) Hyginus, Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae. Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology, trans. R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma (Indianapolis, 2007)

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Select Bibliography of Ancient Sources [Ilias latina] Baebii Italici Ilias latina, ed. Marco Scaffai (Bologna, 1982) [see also Troy histories in Medieval: Secondary Sources] Ilias latina, The Latin Iliad: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Notes, ed. and trans. George A. Kennedy (Fort Collins, Colo., 1998; slightly revised, 2007) Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford, 1911) Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, Oliver Berghof, with Muriel Hall (Cambridge, 2006) Jerome, Select Letters, ed. and trans. F. A. Wright (1933) Josephus (Latin trans.), Antiquities, ed. R. Pollard and J. Timmermann, 2013– [The Latin Josephus Project] Josephus (Latin trans.), The Latin Josephus, ed. Franz Blatt (Aarhus, 1958) [contains Antiquities I–V] Josephus, [Jewish War], Hegesippi qui dicitur historiae libri V, ed. V. Ussani, 2 vols, CSEL 66 (Vienna and Leipzig, 1932) [Latin revision of Josephus’ Greek Jewish War from the late fourth century] Josephus (Latin trans.), Opera omnia ad Graecorum exemplarium fidem recognita emendataq[ue], (Basle, 1582) Josephus, The Jewish War, rev. edn, trans. Betty Radice et al. (Harmondsworth, 1984) Josephus, Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary, general editor Steve Mason, 7 vols to date (Leiden, 2000–) Juvenal Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge, Mass., 2004) Juvencus, Evangelorium libri quattuor, ed. Johann Huemer, CSEL 24 (Vienna, 1891) Kennedy, George A., ed. and trans., Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric (Atlanta, 2003) [examples of ethopoiea, e.g. ‘The Preliminary Exercises of Aphthonius the Sophist’] Lactantius Placidus, Lactantii Placidi in Statii Thebaida Commentum 1, Anonymi in Statii Achilleida commentum. Fulgentii ut fingitur Placiadis super Thebaiden commentariolum, ed. Robert Dale Sweeney (Leipzig, 1997) Lactantius, Lucius Caecilius Firmianus, Divinarum institutionum libri septem, eds Eberhard Heck and Antonie Wlosok, 4 vols (Leipzig and Berlin, 2005–11) Livy, History of Rome, trans. B. O. Foster, Evan T. Sage, et al., 14 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1919–59) Lucan, Lucani opera, ed. Renato Badalì (Rome, 1992) Lucan, The Civil War (Pharsalia), trans. J. D. Duff (Cambridge, Mass., 1928) Lucilius, C. Lucilii carminum reliquiae, ed. Friedrich Marx, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1904–5) Macrobius, Commentarii in somnium Scipionis, ed. Jacob Willis (Leipzig, 1970) Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York, 1952) Macrobius, Saturnalia, ed. and trans. Robert A. Kaster, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 2011) Martial, Epigrams, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1993)

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Select Bibliography of Ancient Sources Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, ed. James Willis (Leipzig, 1983) Martianus Capella, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, trans. William Harris Stahl, Richard Johnson, and E. L. Burge, 2 vols (New York, 1971–7) Maximianus, Die elegischen Verse von Maximian: Eine letzte Widerrede gegen die neue christliche Zeit, ed. W. Schneider (Stuttgart, 2003) Orosius, Historiae adversus paganos, libri VII, ed. C. Zangemeister, CSEL 5 (Leipzig, 1882) Orosius, Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, ed. and trans. E. T. Fear (Liverpool, 2010) Ovid, Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris, in The Art of Love, and Other Poems, trans. J. H. Mozley, 2nd edn rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) Fasti, trans. James G. Frazer, 2nd edn rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass., 1989) Ovid, Heroides; Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, 2nd edn rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass., 1977) Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 3rd edn rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1977) Palladius, Opus agriculturae, ed. Robert H. Rogers (Leipzig, 1975) Persius, Satires, ed. and trans. G. G. Ramsay (1918) Persius (in revised Loeb), see above, Juvenal Petronius, Satyricon, Fragmenta, trans. Michael Heseltine, rev. E. H. Warmington, with Apocolocyntosis of Seneca, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (Cambridge, Mass., 1969) Philostratus, Lucius Flavius, On Heroes, ed. J. K. B. Maclean and E. B. Aitken (Atlanta, 2003) Plautus, [complete plays], ed. and trans. Wolfgang de Melo, 5 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 2011–13) Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, W. H. S. Jones, et al., 10 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1938–63) Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae, ed. M. Hertz, in vols 2–3 of Grammatici latini, ed. H. Keil, 8 vols (Leipzig, 1855–80; repr.. Hildesheim, 1961) Priscian, Prisciani institutionum grammaticalium librorum I–XVI: Indices et Concordantiae, eds Cirilo García Román and Marco A. Gutiérrez Galindo, 4 vols (Hildesheim, 2001) Priscian, Prisciani institutionum grammaticalium librorum XVII et XVIII, indices et concordantiae, eds Cirilo Garcia Roman, Marco A. Gutierrez Galindo, and Maria del Carmen Diaz de Alda Carlos (Hildesheim, 1999) Prudentius, Days Linked By Song: Prudentius’ Cathemerinon, ed. Gerard O’Daly (Oxford:, 2012) Prudentius, Prudentius, eds T. E. Page et al., trans. H. J. Thomson, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1949) Quintilian, The Orator’s Education [Institutio oratoria], ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 2001) Sallust, The War with Catiline. The War with Jugurtha, ed. and trans. J. C. Rolfe, rev. John T. Ramsey (Cambridge, Mass., 2013)

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Select Bibliography of Ancient Sources Sallust, Fragments of the Histories. Letters to Caesar, ed. and trans. John T. Ramsey (Cambridge, Mass., 2015) Sedulius, Opera, ed. Johann Huemer, CSEL 10 (Vienna, 1885) Sedulius, Sedulius: The Paschal Song and Hymns, trans. Carl P. E. Springer (Atlanta, 2013) Seneca the Elder, Controversiae, Suasoriae, trans. Michael Winterbottom, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1974) Seneca, Epistles, trans. Richard M. Gummere, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1917–25) Seneca, Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1928–35) Seneca, Tragedies, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 2002–4) Servius, Servii grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentarii, eds George Thilo and Hermann Hagen, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1881–7) Servius, Servianorum in Vergilii carmina commentariorum editio Harvardiana, eds E. K. Rand, A. F. Stocker, et al, 3 vols (Lancaster, Pa, 1946–65) Severus, Sulpicius, Vita S. Martini episcopi, ed. and trans. Jacques Fontaine, 3 vols, Sources chrétiennes 133–5 (Paris, 1967–9) Sidonius Apollinaris, Poems and Letters, trans. W. B. Anderson, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1936–65) Solinus, C. Julius, Collectanea rerum memorabilium, ed. T. Mommsen, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1958) Statius, Achilleid, ed. Jean Méheust (Paris, 1971) Statius, Thebaid and Achilleid, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 2004) Statius, Silvae, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, rev. Christopher A. Parrot (Cambridge, Mass., 2015) Statius, Silvae, ed. Friedrich Vollmer (Leipzig, 1898) Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, Lives of Illustrious Men, trans. J. C. Rolfe, rev. K. R. Bradley, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1998) Terence, The Woman of Andros. The Self-Tormentor. The Eunuch. Phormio. The Mother-inLaw. The Brothers, ed. and trans. John Barsby, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 2001) Tertullian, Opera, eds E. Dekkers, A. Gerlo, et al., 2 vols, CCSL 1–2 (Turnhout, 1954, repr. 1996) Tertullian, Apology. De spectaculis, trans. T. R. Glover (Cambridge, Mass., 1931) Trogus, Gnaeus Pompeius, P. Trogi Fragmenta, ed. O. Seel (Leipzig, 1956) Trogus, Gnaeus Pompeius Epitoma Historiarum Philippicarum Pompei Trogi: accedunt prologi in Pompeium Trogum, ed. O. Seel (Leipzig, 1972) Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings, 2 vols, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Mass., 2000) Vegetius, Epitoma rei militaris, ed. Michael D. Reeve (Oxford, 2004) Vegetius, Epitome of Military Science, trans. N. P. Milner (Liverpool, 1993) Vetus Latina Matthaeum, ed. Pasquale Amicarelli,

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Select Bibliography of Ancient Sources Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, eds and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough and G. P. Goold, rev. edn, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1999) [Virgil] Vitae Vergilianae antiquae, ed. Giorgio Brugnoli and Fabio Stok (Rome, 1997) Vitruvius, On Architecture, trans. Frank S. Granger (Cambridge, Mass., 1931–4) Warmington, E. H., ed., Remains of Old Latin, 4 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1935–40)

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General Reference Works for Reception: Libraries, Textual Transmission, Historical Sources The general references listed here are relevant to periods across the coverage of this volume; reference works pertaining to one period are listed in the secondary sources bibliography for that period. This is a selective bibliography of reception references reflecting citations in the chapters of this volume. Barker-Benfield, B. C., St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, 3 vols, CBMLC 13 (2008) Bell, David N., ed., The Libraries of the Cistercians, Gilbertines and Premonstratensians, CBMLC 3 (1992) Botfield, Beriah, ed., Catalogi veteres librorum Ecclesiae cathedralis Dunelm, Surtees Soc. 7 (1838) Bowsher, David, et al., The London Guildhall: An Archaeological History of a Neighbourhood from Early Medieval to Modern Times (2007) Carley, James P., ed., The Libraries of King Henry VIII, CBMLC 7 (2000) Carlisle, Nicholas, ed., A Concise Description of the Endowed Grammar Schools in England and Wales, 2 vols (1818) Clarke, Peter, The University and College Libraries of Cambridge, CBMLC 10 (2002) Coates, Alan, et al., A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century Now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Oxford, 2005) De la Mare, A. C., and B. C. Barker-Benfield, eds, Manuscripts at Oxford: An Exhibition in Memory of Richard William Hunt (1908–1979) (Oxford, 1980) Elliot, John R., and Alan H. Nelson, eds, Records of Early English Drama: Oxford (Toronto, 2004) Ellis, Roger, ed., The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 1, To 1550 (Oxford, 2005) Emden, A. B., A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford: a.d. 1501–1540 (Oxford, 1974) Emden, A. B., A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to a.d. 1500, 3 vols (Oxford, 1957–9) Friis-Jensen, Karsten, and James M. W. Willoughby, Peterborough Abbey, CBMLC 8 (2001) Gameson, Richard, ed., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, c.400–1100 (Cambridge, 2012)

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General Reference Works for Reception Gillespie, Vincent, and Susan Powell, eds, Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476–1558 (Cambridge, 2014) Gillespie, Vincent, ed., Syon Abbey, with The Libraries of the Carthusians, ed. A. I. Doyle, CBMLC 9 (2001) Greatrex, Joan, Biographical Register of the English Cathedral Priories of the Province of Canterbury c.1066 to 1540 (Oxford, 1997) Hellinga, Lotte, and J. B. Trapp, eds, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, 1400–1557 (Cambridge, 1999) Higgett, J. C., ed., Scottish Libraries, CBMLC 12 (2006) Humphreys, K. W., ed., The Friars’ Libraries, CBMLC 1 (1990) James, M. R., The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover (Cambridge, 1903) Ker, Neil, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 5 vols (Oxford, 1969–2002) Kristeller, Paul Oskar, F. Edward Cranz, Virginia Brown, and Greti Dinkova-Bruun, eds, Catalogus translationum et commentariorum. Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries: Annotated Lists and Guides, 10 vols to date (Washington, DC and Toronto, 1960–) [when complete, this will be the most important resource for the reception history of classical authors through the Renaissance] Leedham-Green, Elisabeth, and Teresa Webber, eds, The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 1, To 1640 (Cambridge, 2006) Leedham-Green, Elisabeth S., Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book-Lists from Vice-Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1986) Morgan, Nigel J., and Rodney M. Thomson, eds, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 2, 1100–1400 (Cambridge, 2008) Munk Olsen, Birger, L’Étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 4 vols (Paris, 1982–2014) [an essential resource for medieval reception of the classical authors, showing transmission and dissemination of the Latin classics in the medieval West] Mynors, R. A. B., Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Balliol College Oxford (Oxford, 1963) Mynors, R. A. B., and R. M. Thomson, eds, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Hereford Cathedral Library (Cambridge, 1993) Nelson, Alan H., ed., Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge, 2 vols (Toronto, 1989) Oates, J.C.T., A Catalogue of the Fifteenth-Century Printed Books in the Cambridge University Library (Cambridge, 1954) Ramsay, Nigel, and James M. W. Willoughby, eds, Hospitals, Towns, and the Professions, CBMLC 14 (2009) Ramsay, Nigel, and James M. W. Willoughby, eds, The Libraries of the Secular Cathedrals, forthcoming for CBMLC Reynolds, L. D., and N. G. Wilson, eds, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1991) [along with Reynolds, ed., Texts and Transmission, a key reference for transmission and reception of classical writings in the early and later Middle Ages and the Renaissance]

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General Reference Works for Reception Reynolds, L. D., ed., Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983) [this contains the detail of textual histories upon which Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, is based; a fundamental resource] de Ridder-Symoens, Hilde, ed., A History of the University in Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1992–6) Rouse, Richard H., and Mary A. Rouse, eds, with R. A. B. Mynors, Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum veterum, CBMLC 2 (1991) Rouse, Richard H., and Mary A. Rouse, eds, Henry of Kirkestede. Catalogus de libris autenticis et apocrifis, CBMLC 11 (2004) Sharpe, Richard, et al., English Benedictine Libraries: The Shorter Catalogues, CBMLC 4 (1996) Stoneman, William P., ed., Dover Priory, CBMLC 5 (1999) Thomson, Rodney M., ed., A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (Cambridge, 2011) Thomson, Rodney M., ed., Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library (Cambridge, 1989) Webber, Teresa, and Andrew G. Watson, The Libraries of Augustinian Canons, CBMLC 6 (1998) Willoughby, James M. W. The Libraries of Collegiate Churches, CBMLC 15 (2013) Woolley, Reginald M., ed., Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library (1927)

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Studies on Ancient Authors and Classical Reception The items listed here are relevant to periods across the coverage of this volume. Included here are scholarship on the major classical texts treated throughout the volume and studies of reception history and theory. This selective list is based mainly on citations in the chapters of this volume. Ahl, Frederick M., Lucan: An Introduction (Ithaca, NY, 1976) Asso, Paolo, ed., Brill’s Companion to Lucan (Leiden, 2011) Auerbach, Erich, Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (1965; first published in German in 1958) Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex., 1981) Benko, Stephen, ‘Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue in Christian Interpretation’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 31:1 (Berlin, 1980), 646–705 Bloomer, W. Martin, Valerius Maximus and the Rhetoric of the New Nobility (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992) Bowersock, G. W., Fiction as History: Nero to Julian (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994) Bowersock, G. W., Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar, eds, Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, Mass., 1999) Braund, Susanna Morton, ‘Virgil and the Cosmos: Religious and Philosophical Ideas’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Martindale, pp. 204–21 Brooks, Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1970) Bruere, Richard T., ‘Lucan’s Cornelia’, Classical Philology 46 (1961), 221–36 Burgess, Jonathan S., The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore, 2001) Cameron, Alan, ‘The Historia Augusta’, in Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome, pp. 743–82 Cameron, Alan, Greek Mythography in the Roman World (Oxford, 2004) Cameron, Alan, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford, 2011) Cameron, Averil, ‘Remaking the Past’, in Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, eds Bowersock et al., pp. 1–20 Chadwick, Henry, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford, 1981) Colish, Marcia L., The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols (Leiden, 1985)

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Studies on Ancient Authors and Classical Reception Colombi, Emanuela, ‘Paene ad verbum: gli Evangelorium libri del Giovenco tra parafrasi e commentaro’, Cassiodorus 3 (1997), 9–36 Courcelle, Pierre, La Consolation de philosophie dans la tradition littéraire: antécédents et postérité de Boèce (Paris, 1967) Courcelle, Pierre, ‘Les Exégèses chrétiennes de la quatrième éclogue’, Revue des études anciennes 59 (1957), 294–319 Cox, Virginia, and John O. Ward, eds, The Rhetoric of Cicero in its Medieval and Renaissance Commentary Tradition (Leiden, 2006) Cullhed, Sigfrid Schottenius, Proba the Prophet: Studies in the Virgilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba (Leiden, 2005) Dick, Steven J., Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge, 1982) Erskine, Andrew, Troy between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power (Oxford, 2001) Esposito, Paolo, ‘Early and Medieval Scholia and Commentaria on Lucan’, in Brill’s Companion to Lucan, ed. Asso, pp. 452–63 Esposito, Paolo, ‘Virgilio e Servio nella scoliastica lucanea’, in Gli scolii a Lucano ed altra scoliastica latina, ed. Paolo Esposito (Pisa, 2004), pp. 25–77 Farrell, Joseph, ‘The Origins and Essence of Roman Epic’, in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. Foley, pp. 417–28 Farrell, Joseph, ‘Complementarity and Contradiction in Ovidian Mythography’, in Writing Myth: Mythography in the Ancient World, eds Stephen M. Trzaskoma and R. Scott Smith (Louvain, 2013), pp. 223–51 Farrell, Joseph, ‘Greek Lives and Roman Careers in the Classical Vita Tradition’, in European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, eds Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas (Toronto, 2002), pp. 24–46 Feeney, Denis, ‘Time’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians, ed. Feldherr, pp. 139–51 Feeney, Dennis, The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1991) Feldherr, Andrew, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians (Cambridge, 2009) Foley, John Miles, ed., A Companion to Ancient Epic (Oxford, 2005) Formisano, Marco, ‘Late Antiquity, New Departures’, in Hexter and Townsend, The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, pp. 509–34 [full reference in Medieval: Secondary Sources] Fraenkel, Eduard, ‘Lucan as the Transmitter of Ancient Pathos’, trans. Leofranc HolfordStevens, in Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Lucan, ed. Charles Tesoriero (Oxford, 2010) Frere, S. S., M. W. C. Hassall, et al., eds, The Roman Inscriptions of Britain 2 Instrumentum Domesticum, Fascicules 1–8 (Gloucester, 1990–5) Freudenburg, Kirk, Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses from Lucilius to Juvenal (Cambridge, 2001) Gainsford, Peter, ‘Diktys of Crete’, Cambridge Classical Journal 58 (2012), 58–87

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Studies on Ancient Authors and Classical Reception Gibson, Margaret, ed., Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence (Oxford, 1981) Green, Roger, ‘Approaching Christian Epic: The Preface of Juvencus’, in Latin Epic and Didactic Poetry: Genre, Tradition and Individuality, ed. Monica Gale (Swansea, 2004), pp. 203–22 Green, Roger, ‘Proba’s Cento: Its Date, Purpose, and Reception’, Classical Quarterly 45 (1995), 551–63 Green, Roger, Latin Epics of the New Testament: Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator (Oxford, 2006) [fundamental study of Bible epics] Griffin, Nathaniel Edward, ‘The Greek Dictys’, American Journal of Philology 29 (1908), 329–35 Gruber, Joachim, Kommentar zu Boethius, ‘De consolatione philosophiae’, 2nd edn (Berlin, 2006) Gruen, Erich S., Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca, NY, 1992) Hadot, Pierre, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford, 1995) Hardie, Philip, ‘Virgil and Tragedy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Martindale, pp. 312–26 Hardie, Philip, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge, 2002) Harrison, Stephen, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Horace (Cambridge, 2007) Henderson, John, Fighting for Rome: Poets and Caesars, History and Civil War (Cambridge, 1998) Henig, M., ‘James Engleheart’s Drawing of a Mosaic at Frampton, 1794’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 106 (1984), 143–6 Hexter, Ralph J., ‘Literary History as a Provocation to Reception Studies’, in Classics and the Uses of Reception, eds Martindale and Thomas, pp. 23–31 Highet, Gilbert, ‘The Life of Juvenal’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 68 (1937), 480–506 Hillier, Richard, Arator on the Acts of the Apostles (Oxford, 1993) Holtz, Louis, Jean-Claude Fredouille, and Marie-Hélène Jullien, eds, De Tertullien aux Mozarabes: Mélanges offerts à Jacques Fontaine, Membre de l'Institut, à l’occasion de son 70° anniversaire, par ses élèves, amis et collègues, Antiquité tardive et christianisme ancien (III°–VI° siècles) (Paris, 1992) Holzberg, Niklas, Ovid: The Poet and his Work, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca, NY, 2002) Hopkins, David, Conversing with Antiquity: English Poets and the Classics, from Shakespeare to Pope (Oxford, 2010) Jones, Julian Ward, Jr, ‘Catullus’ “Passer” as “Passer”’, Greece & Rome Second Series 45 (1998), 188–94 Jones, Julian Ward, Jr, ‘The Allegorical Traditions of the Aeneid’, in Virgil at 2000: Commem­ orative Essays on the Poet and his Influence, ed. J. D. Bernard (New York, 1986), pp. 107–32 Kartschoke, Dieter, Bibeldichtung: Studien zur Geschichte der epischen Bibelparaphrase von Juvencus bis Otfrid von Weißenburg (Munich 1975) [fundamental study of Bible epics] Kaster, Robert, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988)

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Studies on Ancient Authors and Classical Reception Kaster, Robert, ‘Servius and Idonei Auctores’, American Journal of Philology 99 (1978), 181–209 Kempshall, Matthew, Rhetoric and the Writing of History 400–1500 (Manchester, 2011) Kraus, Manfred. ‘Rehearsing the Other Sex: Impersonation of Women in Ancient Classroom Ethopoeia’, in Escuela y literatura en Grecia antigua, ed. José Antonio Fernández Delgado et al.(Cassino, 2007), pp. 455–68 Kwakkel, Erik, ed., Manuscripts of the Latin Classics 800–1200 (Leiden, 2015) Lamberton, Robert, ‘Ancient Reception’, in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. Foley, pp. 164–73 McGill, Scott, ‘Pomponius’s Cento Versus Ad Gratiam Domini’, Traditio 56 (2001), 15–26 McGill, Scott, ‘Virgil, Christianity, and the Cento Probae’, in Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity, ed. J. H. D. Scourfield (Swansea, 2007), pp. 173–96 McKinlay, Arthur Patch, Arator: The Codices (Cambridge, Mass., 1942) Mansfeld, Jaap, Prolegomena: Questions to be Settled before the Study of an Author or a Text (Leiden, 1994) Marenbon, John, The Cambridge Companion to Boethius (Cambridge, 2009) Marincola, John, ed., A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography, 2 vols (Malden, Mass., 2007) Marshall, Peter K., ‘The Spangenberg Bifolium of Servius: The Manuscript and the Text’, Rivista di filología e di istruzione classica 128 (2000), 192–209 Martin, Richard P., ‘Epic as Genre’, in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. Foley, pp. 9–19 Martindale, Charles, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge, 1997) Martindale, Charles, ‘Introduction’, in Horace Made New, eds Martindale and Hopkins, pp. 1–26 Martindale, Charles, ed., Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1988) Martindale, Charles, and Richard F. Thomas, eds, Classics and the Uses of Reception (Oxford, 2006) Martindale, Charles, and David Hopkins, eds, Horace Made New: Horatian Influences on British Writing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1993) Masters, Jamie, Poetry and Civil War in Lucan’s Bellum civile (Cambridge, 1992) Mendelsohn, Daniel, ‘Empty Nest, Abandoned Cave: Maternal Anxiety in Achilleid 1’, Classical Antiquity 9 (1990), 295–308 Merkelbach, R., and M. L. West. ‘Ein Archilochos-Papyrus’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 14 (1974), 97–113 Miller, John, and Carole Newlands, eds, A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid (Chichester, 2014) Momigliano, Arnaldo, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, ed. Anne Marie Meyer (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990) Munk Olsen, Birger, ‘La Réception de Stace au moyen âge (du ixe au xiie siècle)’, in Nova de veteribus, Mittel- und neulateinische Studien für Paul Gerhard Schmidt, eds A. Bihrer and E. Stein (Munich and Leipzig, 2004), pp. 230–46

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Studies on Ancient Authors and Classical Reception Murgia, Charles, ‘Servius, Manuscripts of ’, in The Virgil Encyclopedia, eds Thomas and Ziolkowski, pp. 1154–7 Narducci, Emanuele, Lucano: un’epica contro l’impero (Rome, 2002) Nauta, Lodi, ‘The Consolation: The Latin Commentary Tradition, 800–1700’, in The Cambridge Companion to Boethius, ed. Marenbon, pp. 255–78 Newlands, Carole E., Statius, Poet between Rome and Naples (2012) Nuffelen, Peter van, Orosius and the Rhetoric of History (Oxford, 2012) Pabst, Bernhard, Prosimetrum: Tradition und Wandel einer Literaturform zwischen Spätantike und Spätmittelalter, 2 vols (Cologne, 1994) Palmer, Anne-Marie, Prudentius on the Martyrs (Oxford, 1989) Pavano, Annamaria, ‘Le redazioni latine e il presunto originale greco dell’opera di Darete Frigio’, Sileno 23 (1997), 207–18 Plinval, Georges, Pélage, ses écrits, sa vie et sa réforme: étude d’histoire littéraire et religieuse (Lausanne, 1943) Porter, James I., ‘Introduction: What is “Classical” about Classical Antiquity’, in Classical Pasts, ed. James I. Porter (Princeton, 2005), pp. 1–65 Putnam, Michael C. J., ‘Virgil’s Aeneid’, in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. Foley, pp. 452–75 Quint, David, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, 1993) Raschke, Wendy J., ‘Arma pro amico—Lucilian Satire at the Crisis of the Roman Republic’, Hermes 115 (1987), 299–318 Reinhold, Meyer, ‘The Unhero Aeneas’, Classica et mediaevalia 27 (1966), 195–207 Reitz, Christiane, ‘Verkürzen und Erweitern—Literarische Techniken für eilige Leser? Die “Ilias latina” als poetische Epitome’, Hermes 135 (2007), 334–51 Robathan, Dorothy, et al., ‘Persius’, in Catalogus translationum, eds Kristeller et al., 3 (1976), 201–312 Roberts, Michael, ‘Vergil and the Gospels: The Evangeliorum libri IV of Juvencus’, in Romane memento: Vergil in the Fourth Century, ed. Roger Rees (2004), pp. 47–61 Roberts, Michael, Biblical Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase in Late Antiquity (Liverpool, 1985) Rodgers, R. H., An Introduction to Palladius (1975) Roller, Matthew, ‘The Exemplary Past in Roman Historiography and Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians, ed. Feldherr, pp. 214–30 Ruys, Juanita Feros, John O. Ward, and Melanie Heyworth, eds, The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom: The Role of Ancient Texts in the Arts Curriculum as Revealed by Surviving Manuscripts and Early Printed Books (Turnhout, 2013) [informative collection, includes chapters on Aristotle, Virgil, and Terence] Sanford, Eva M., ‘Juvenal’, in Catalogus translationum, eds Kristeller et al., 1 (1960), pp. 175–238 Sanford, Eva Matthews, ‘Lucan and his Roman Critics’, Classical Philology 26 (1931), 233–57

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Studies on Ancient Authors and Classical Reception Sanna, Lorenzo, ‘Achilles, the Wise Lover, and his Seductive Strategies (Statius, Achilleid 1. 560–92)’, Classical Quarterly 57 (2007), 207–15 Scappaticcio, Maria Chiara, Papyri Vergilianae: l’apporto della papirologia alla storia della tradizione Virgiliana (I–VI D.C.) (Liège, 2013) Schiesaro, Alessandro, ‘Ovid and the Professional Discourses of Scholarship, Religion, Rhetoric’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Hardie, pp. 62–75 Segal, Charles, ‘The Song of Iopas in the Aeneid’, Hermes 99 (1971), 336–49 Skidmore, Clive, Practical Ethics for Roman Gentlemen: The Work of Valerius Maximus (Exeter, 1996) Slater, D. A., Towards a Text of the Metamorphosis of Ovid (Oxford, 1927) Smith, Macklin, Prudentius’ Psychomachia: A Re-examination (Princeton, 1976) Springer, Carl P. E., ‘The Biblical Epic in Late Antiquity and the Early Modern Period: The Poetics of Tradition’, in Antiquity Renewed: Late Classical and Early Modern Texts, eds Zweder von Martels and Victor M. Schmidt (Leuven, 2004), pp. 103–27 Springer, Carl P. E., The Gospel as Epic in Late Antiquity: The Carmen paschale of Sedulius (Leiden, 1988) Springer, Carl P. E., The Manuscripts of Sedulius: A Provisional Handlist (Philadelphia, 1995) Stahl, W. H., ‘The Quadrivium of Martianus Capella: Its Place in the Intellectual History of Western Europe’, in Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge, pp. 959–67 [full reference in Medieval Secondary Sources, under Congrès international de philosophie médiévale] Stahl, W. H., ‘To a Better Understanding of Martianus Capella’, Speculum 40 (1965), 102–15 Syme, R., ‘Fictional History Old and New: Hadrian’, in R. Syme, Roman Papers vol. 6, ed. A. R. Birley (Oxford, 1991), pp. 157–81 Thraede, K., ‘Epos’, in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 5 (Stuttgart, 1962), 983–1042 Thomas, Richard F., and Jan M. Ziolkowski, eds, The Virgil Encyclopedia, 3 vols (Oxford, 2014) Trapp, J. B., ‘The Grave of Vergil’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984), 1–31 Venini, P., ‘Sull’imitatio virgiliana nell’Ilias latina’, Vichiana 11 (1982), 311–17 Verdiere, R., ‘L’Authenticité ovidienne l’Halieuticon et l’Ilias latina’, Les Études classiques 54 (1986), 85–7 Walde, Christine, ‘Lucan’s Bellum civile: A Specimen of a Roman “Literature of Trauma” ’, in Brill’s Companion to Lucan, ed. Asso, pp. 283–302 Walde, Christine, ed., Lucans Bellum civile: Studien zum Spektrum seiner Rezeption von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Trier, 2009) Ward, John O., ‘The Medieval and Early Renaissance Study of Cicero’s De inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium: Commentaries and Contexts’, in The Rhetoric of Cicero, eds Cox and Ward, pp. 3–75

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Studies on Ancient Authors and Classical Reception Ward, John O., Ciceronian Rhetoric in Treatise, Scholion, and Commentary (Turnhout, 1995) Wessner, P., ‘Lucan, Statius und Juvenal bei den römischen Grammatikern’, Philologische Wochenschrift 49 (1929), 296–303 and 328–35 Wetherbee, Winthrop, ‘Learned Mythology: Plato and Martianus Capella’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, eds Hexter and Townsend, pp. 335–55 [full ­reference in Medieval: Secondary Sources] Whitman, Cedric H., Homer and the Heroic Tradition (New York, 1965) van de Woestijne, Paul, ‘Les Scolies à la “Thébaïde” de Stace: remarques et suggestions’, Antiquité classique 19 (1950), 149–63 Ziolkowski, Jan M., and Michael C. J. Putnam, eds, The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years (New Haven, 2008)

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Medieval: Primary Sources Abbo of Fleury, Quaestiones grammaticales, ed. A. Guerreau-Jalabert (Paris, 1982) Abelard, Historia calamitatum, ed. Jacques Monfrin, 2nd edn (Paris, 1962) Abelard, Peter, Abelard: Ethical Writings, trans. Paul Vincent Spade with Marilyn McCord Adams (Indianapolis, 1995) Adelard of Bath, The First Latin Translation of Euclid’s Elements Commonly Ascribed to Adelard of Bath, ed. H. L. L. Busard (Toronto, 1983) Ælfric, Aelfrics Grammatik und Glossar, ed. Julius Zupitza (Berlin, 1880) Ælfric, Colloquy, in Early Scholastic Colloquies, ed. W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1929), pp. 75–102 [Ælfric], Excerptiones de Prisciano: The Source for Ælfric’s Latin–Old English Grammar, ed. David W. Porter (Cambridge, 2002) Ælfric Bata, Colloquies, in Anglo-Saxon Conversations: The Colloquies of Ælfric Bata, ed. Scott Gwara, trans. David W. Porter (Woodbridge, 1997) Aelred of Rievaulx, De spirituali amicitia, in Opera ascetica, eds A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, CCCM 1 (Turnhout, 1971) Æthelweard, Chronicon Æthelwardi: The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. A. Campbell (1962) Aimeric, Ars lectoria, ed. Harry F. Reijnders, Vivarium 9 (1971), 119–37; 10 (1972), 41–101, 124–76 Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, ed. R. Bossuat (Paris, 1955) Albertus Stadensis, Troilus Alberti Stadensis, ed. Theodor Merzdorf (Leipzig, 1875) [a thirteenth-century Latin Troy narrative; see also Troy histories] Alcuin, The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, ed. and trans. Peter Godman (Oxford, 1982) Alcuin, De dialectica, PL 101, 951C–976A Aldhelm, Aenigmata, see Tatwine Aldhelm, The Prose Works, trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren (Cambridge, 1979) Aldhelm, Aldhelmi Opera omnia, ed. Rudolf Ehwald, MGH Auctores antiquissimi 15 (Berlin, 1919) Aldhelm, Aldhelm: The Poetic Works, trans. Michael Lapidge and James L. Rosier (Cambridge, 1985) Aldhelm, Through a Gloss Darkly: Aldhelm’s Riddles in the British Library MS Royal 12.C.XXIII, ed. Nancy Porter Stork (Toronto, 1990) Alexander of Villa Dei, Das Doctrinale des Alexander de Villa-Dei: kritisch-exegetische Ausgabe, ed. D. Reichling (Berlin, 1893; repr. New York, 1974) [Arator], The Latin Glosses on Arator and Prudentius in Cambridge University Library MS Gg.5.35, ed. Gernot Rudolf Wieland (Toronto, 1983)

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Medieval: Primary Sources [Aristotle], Aristoteles latinus, general editors L. Minio-Paluello et al. (Bruges, Paris, Brussels, Leiden, 1951– ) Arngart, Olof, ed., The Middle English Genesis and Exodus (Lund, 1968) Arnulf of Orléans, Arnulfi Aurelianensis Glosule super Lucanum, ed. Berthe M. Marti (Rome, 1958) Ashby, George, George Ashby’s Poems, ed. Mary Bateson, EETS es 76 (1899) Asser, Life of Alfred, in Old English Chronicles, ed. J. A. Giles (1906) Asser, Life of Alfred, in Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (Harmondsworth, 1983) Bacon, Roger, Opus maius, trans. Robert Belle Burke, 2 vols (Philadelphia, 1928) Baudri of Bourgueil, Poèmes, ed. Jean-Yves Tilliette, 2 vols (Paris, 1998–2002) Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, eds and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1992) Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, trans. J. E. King, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1976–9) Bede, Libri II De arte metrica et De schematibus et tropis: The Art of Poetry and Rhetoric, ed. and trans. Calvin B. Kendall (Saarbrücken, 1991) Bede, Opera didascalica, eds C. W. Jones and Calvin Kendall, CCSL 123A (Turnhout, 1975) Bede, Opera historica, ed. Charles Plummer, 2 vols (Oxford, 1896) Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie, ed. Léopold Constans, 6 vols (Paris, 1904–12) [see also Troy histories] Bernard of Utrecht, see Huygens, Accessus ad auctores Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, ed. Peter Dronke (Leiden, 1978) Bernardus Silvestris, Commentum quod dicitur Bernardi Silvestris super sex libros Eneidos Virgilii, eds Julian Jones and Elizabeth Jones (Lincoln, Nebr., 1977) Bersuire, Pierre, Dictionarius seu Repertorium morale (Venice, 1583) Bersuire, Pierre, Ovidius moralizatus (reductorium morale liber XV, cap. ii–xv), ed. Joseph Engels (Utrecht, 1962) Bersuire, Pierre, Ovidius moralizatus, in The Philosophy of Images. Pierre Bersuire: Metamorphosis Ovidiana moraliter . . . explanata Paris 1509. ‘Albricus’ Libellus Basel 1543, introd. Stephen Orgel (New York, 1979) Bestul, Thomas, ed., The Scale of Perfection (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2000) Binduccio dello Scelto, La storia di Troia, ed. Maria Gozzi (Milan, 2000) [see also Troy histories] Boccaccio, Giovanni, Famous Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, Mass., 2001) Boccaccio, Giovanni, Concerning Famous Women, trans. Guido A. Guarino (1964) Boccaccio, Giovanni, De casibus illustrium virorum, A Facsimile Reproduction of the Paris Edition of 1520, introd. Louis Brewer Hall (Gainesville, Fla., 1962) Boccaccio, Giovanni, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Jon Solomon, (Cambridge, Mass., 2011–)

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Medieval: Primary Sources Boccaccio, Giovanni, Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium in an English Version, ed. and trans. Charles Grosvenor Osgood (Princeton, 1930) Boccaccio, Giovanni, Il Filostrato, ed. Vincenzo Pernicone, trans. Robert P. apRoberts and Anna Bruni Seldis (New York, 1986) Boccaccio, Giovanni, Teseida, ed. Alberto Limentani, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, 10 vols in 11 (Milan, 1964–98) [Boethius], ‘The Boke of Coumfort of Bois’, eds Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr, et al., Carmina Philosophiae: Journal of the International Boethius Society, 2 (1993), 55–104 [Boethius], The Old English Boethius, with Verse Prologues and Epilogues Associated with King Alfred, eds and trans. Susan Irvine and Malcolm Godden (Cambridge, Mass., 2012) [Boethius], The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s ‘De consolatione philosophiae’, eds Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, 2 vols (Oxford, 2009) Bovet, Honoré, Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Dialogue: The Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun of Honorat Bovet, ed. and trans. Michael Hanly (Tempe, Ariz., 2005) Bower, Walter, Scotichronicon, ed. D. E. R. Watt et al., 9 vols (Aberdeen, 1987–98) Brown, Carleton, ed., Religious Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1965) Brown, Virginia, ‘An Edition of an Anonymous Twelfth-Century Liber de natura deorum’, Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972), 1–70 Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou trésor, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1948) Byrhtferth of Ramsey, The Lives of St Oswald and St Ecgwine, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge (Oxford, 2009) Camargo, Martin, ed., Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Composition: Five English Artes dictandi and Their Tradition (Binghamton, NY, 1995) Campbell, Alistair, ed., Encomium Emmae Reginae (1949; repr. Cambridge, 1998) Ceffi, Filippo, Ovidio/Heroides: Volgarizzamento fiorentino trecentesco di Filippo Ceffi, ed. Massimo Zaggia (Florence, 2009) [see also [Ovid]] Charland, Th.-M., ed., Artes praedicandi (Paris and Ottawa, 1936) Chaucer, Geoffrey, Chaucer’s ‘Boece’: A Critical Edition Based on Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.3.21,ff. 9r–180v, ed. Tim William Machan (Heidelberg, 2008) Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987) [Chaucer, Geoffrey], The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Selection, ed. Kathleen Forni (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2005) [Chaucer, Geoffrey], Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, eds Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2003–5) Chaucer, Geoffrey, Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of ‘The Book of Troilus’, ed. Barry A. Windeatt (1984) Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier au lion (Yvain), ed. Mario Roques (Paris, 1960)

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Medieval: Primary Sources Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. Gabriella Parussa (Geneva, 1999) Christine de Pizan, The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry, ed. Charity Canon Willard, trans. Sumner Willard (University Park, Pa, 1999) Christine de Pizan, The Book of the Body Politic, ed. and trans. Kate Langdon Forhan (Cambridge, 1994) Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (Harmondsworth, 1999) [Christine de Pizan], The Epistle of Othea translated from the French text of Christine de Pisan by Stephen Scrope, ed. Curt F. Bühler, EETS 264 (1970) [Christine de Pizan], The Middle English Translation of Christine de Pisan’s ‘Livre du corps de policie’: Ed. from MS C.U.L. Kk.1.5, ed. Diane Bornstein (Heidelberg, 1977) [Claudian], ‘Eine mittelenglische Claudian-Übersetzung (1445)’, ed. Ewald Flügel, Anglia 28 (1905), 255–99, 421–38 Conrad of Hirsau, see Huygens, Accessus ad auctores Copeland, Rita, and Ineke Sluiter, eds, Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, ad 300–1475 (Oxford, 2009) Coulson, Frank T., ed., The ‘Vulgate’ Commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Creation Myth and the Story of Orpheus (Toronto, 1991) [See also [Ovid]] Caxton, William, The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. William J. B. Crotch, EETS 176 (1928) (see also Humanism: Primary Sources) Dante Alighieri, Commedia, ed. and trans. Charles Singleton, 6 vols (Princeton, 1970–5) Dante Alighieri, Convivio, ed. Franca Brambilla Ageno (Florence, 1995) Dante Alighieri, Il convivio, 2nd edn, eds G. Busnelli and G. Vandelli, 2 vols (Florence, 1964) Deguileville, Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine de Guillaume de Deguileville, ed. J. J. Stürzinger (1893) Delhaye, Philippe, ed., Florilegium morale Oxoniense, Ms. Bodl. 633: Prima pars, Flores philo­ sophorum (Louvain and Lille, 1955) Denifle, H., and E. Chatelain, eds, Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, 4 vols (Paris, 1891–9; repr. Brussels, 1964) Duggan, Hoyt N., and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds, Wars of Alexander, EETS ss 10 (Oxford, 1989) Dümmler, Ernst, et al., eds, Poetae latini aevi Carolini (MGH), 4 vols (Berlin, 1881–1923) Eberhard of Béthune, Graecismus, ed. J. Wrobel (Breslau, 1887) Eberhard the German, Laborintus, in Les Arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, ed. Faral, pp. 336–77 Encomium Emmae Reginae, see under Campbell [Faits des Romains] Li Fet des Romains, eds L.-F. Flutre and K. Sneyders de Vogel, 2 vols (Paris, 1935–8) Faral, Edmond, ed., Les Arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1924) [Florilegium Gallicum], En la senda del ‘Florilegium Gallicum’: Edición y estudio del florilegio del manuscrito Córdoba, Archivo Capitular 150, ed. Beatriz Fernández de la Cuesta González (Louvain-la-Neuve, 2008)

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Medieval: Primary Sources Fortescue, Sir John, De laudibus legum Anglie, ed. and trans S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge, 1949) Fortescue, Sir John, The Governance of England, ed. Charles Plummer (Oxford, 1885) Frère Laurent, La Somme le roi par Frère Laurent, eds Édith Brayer and Anne-Françoise Leurquin-Labie (Paris, 2008) Friedman, John, and Jean Connel Hoff, trans., with Robert Chazzan, The Trial of the Talmud: Paris, 1240 (Toronto, 2012) Furnivall, F. J., ed., The Babees Book, EETS 32 (1869; repr. 1969) Garrod, H. W. [ed. J. R. L. Highfield], ‘An Indenture Between William Rede, Bishop of Chichester and John Bloxham and Henry Stapilton, Fellows of Merton College, Oxford. London, 22 October 1374’, Bodleian Library Record 10 (1978/82), 9–19 Genet, Jean-Philippe, ed., Four English Political Tracts of the Late Middle Ages (1977) Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of the De gestis Britonum [Historia regum Britanniae], ed. Michael D. Reeve and trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007) Geoffrey of Vinsauf, The Poetria nova and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine, ed. and trans. E. Gallo (The Hague and Paris, 1971) Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, in Les Arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, ed. Faral, pp. 194–262 Geoffroi de Charny, The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny, eds and trans. Richard W. Kaeuper and Elspeth Kennedy (Philadelphia, 1996) Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica, eds and trans. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin, 1978) Gerald of Wales, Giraldi Cambrensis opera, eds J. S. Brewer, James F. Dimock, et al., 8 vols (1861–91) Gervase of Canterbury, The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols (1879–80) Gervase of Melkley, Ars poetica, ed. Hans-Jürgen Gräbener (Münster/Westfalen, 1965) Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia, eds and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford, 2002) Gibson, Strickland, ed., Statuta antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis (Oxford, 1931) Gildas, The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, ed. and trans. M. Winterbottom (1978) Giles of Rome, De regimine principum (Rome, 1607; repr. Darmstadt, 1967) Ginsberg, Warren, ed., Parlement of the Thre Ages (Kalamazoo, Mich, 1992) Giovanni del Virgilio, Allegorie librorum Ovidii Metamorphoseos, ed. Fausto Ghisalberti, ‘Giovanni del Virgilio espositore delle Metamorphosi’, Giornale Dantesco 34 (1933), 1–110 Gower, John, The French Balades, ed. and trans. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2011) Gower, John, The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols (Oxford, 1899–1902)

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Medieval: Primary Sources Gower, John, Confessio amantis, in The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 2 vols, EETS es 81, 82 (1900–1) Gower, John, The Major Latin Works of John Gower, trans. Eric W. Stockton (Seattle, 1962) Gower, John, The Minor Latin Works with In Praise of Peace, ed. and trans. R. F. Yeager with Michael Livingstone (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2005) Gower, John, Mirour de l’omme, trans. William Burton Wilson, rev. Nancy Wilson Van Baak (East Lansing, Mich., 1992) Gower, John, John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events: The Visio Angliae (1381) and Cronica tripertita (1400), ed. David Carlson and trans. A. G. Rigg (Toronto, 2011) Green, R. P. H., ed., Seven Versions of Carolingian Pastoral (Reading, 1980) [contains Theoduli Ecloga pp. 26–35; see also Theodulus] Greene, Richard Leighton, ed., The Early English Carols, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1977) Grisdale, D. M., ed., Three Middle English Sermons from the Worcester Chapter Manuscript F.10 (Leeds, 1939) Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, ed. Nathaniel Edward Griffin (Cambridge, Mass., 1936) [see also Troy histories] Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Bloomington, Ind., 1974) [Guido delle Colonne], The Aragonese Version of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae: Critical Text and Classified Vocabulary, ed. Evangeline Viola Parker (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1971) [see also Troy histories] Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris, 1992) Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Ernest Langlois, 5 vols (Paris, 1914–24) Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford, 1994) Hanna, Ralph, and David Lawton, eds, The Siege of Jerusalem, EETS 320 (Oxford, 2003) Harbert, Bruce, ed., A Thirteenth-Century Anthology of Rhetorical Poems: Glasgow MS Hunterian V.8.14 (Toronto, 1975) Henri d’Andeli, Les Dits d’Henri d’Andeli, ed. Alain Corbellari (Paris, 2003) Henri d’Andeli, The Battle of the Seven Arts: A French Poem by Henri d’Andeli, Trouvère of the Thirteenth Century, ed. and trans. L. J. Paetow (Berkeley, 1914) Henry of Huntingdon, Anglicanus ortus: A Verse Herbal of the Twelfth Century, ed. and trans. Winston Black (Toronto and Oxford, 2012) Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford, 1996) Henry of Huntingdon, The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon, ed. and trans. Thomas Forester (1853) Henryson, Robert, The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford, 1981)

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Medieval: Primary Sources Herbert de Losinga, Epistolae Herberti de Losinga, primi episcopi Norwicensis, Osberti Clara et Elmeri, prioris Cantuariensis, ed. Robert Anstruther (1846) Higden, Ranulf, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis: together with the English translations of John Trevisa and of an unknown writer of the fifteenth century, 9 vols, eds Churchill Babington and Joseph Rawson Lumby (1865–86) [Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César] Joslin, Mary Coker, ed., The Heard Word: A Moralized History. The Genesis Section of the Histoire ancienne in a Text from Saint-Jean d’Acre (University, Miss., 1986) [Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César] Lynde-Recchia, Molly, ed., Prose, Verse, and Truth-Telling in the Thirteenth Century: An Essay on Form and Function in Selected Texts, Accompanied by an Edition of the Prose Thèbes as Found in the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (Lexington, Ky, 2000) Hoccleve, Thomas, Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 3, The Regement of Princes, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS es 72 (1897) Hoccleve, Thomas, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1999) Holcot, Robert, M. Roberti Holkoth in Librum sapientiae regis Salomonis praelectiones (Basle, 1586) Hugh of Trimberg, Das Registrum multorum auctorum des Hugo von Trimberg, ed. Karl Langosch (Berlin, 1942) Hugutio of Pisa, Liber derivationum, eds Enzo Cecchini et al. (Florence, 2004) Huygens, R. B. C., ed., Accessus ad auctores, Bernard d’Utrecht, Conrad d’Hirsau (Leiden, 1970) James I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair, ed. John Norton-Smith (Oxford, 1971) Jean de Hauteville, Architrenius, ed. and trans. Winthrop Wetherbee (Cambridge, 1994) Jocelin of Brakelond, The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, ed. H. E. Butler (1949) John of Garland, De triumphis ecclesiae, ed. Thomas Wright (1856) John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii. Poemetto inedito del secolo XIII, ed. Fausto Ghisalberti (Messina, 1933) John of Garland, The Integumenta on the Metamorphoses by John of Garland, ed. and trans. Lester Kruger Born, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1929 John of Garland, The Parisiana poetria of John of Garland, ed. and trans. Traugott Lawler (New Haven, 1974) John of Salisbury, Entheticus maior and minor, ed. and trans. Jan van Laarhoven, 3 vols (Leiden, 1987) John of Salisbury, John of Salisbury’s Memoirs of the Papal Court (Historia pontificalis), ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall (Edinburgh and New York, 1956) John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall, CCCM 98 (Turnhout, 1991) John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, trans. Daniel D. McGarry (Berkeley, 1955)

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Medieval: Primary Sources John of Salisbury, Policraticus I–IV, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, CCCM 118 (Turnhout, 1993) John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. Clement C. J. Webb, 2 vols (Oxford, 1909) John of Salisbury, Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, ed. and trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge, 1990) John of Salisbury, Policraticus, trans. Joseph B. Pike (Minneapolis, 1938) John of Wales, Compendiloquium de vitis illustrium philosophorum, in Florilegium de vita et dictis philosophorum et Breviloquium de sapientia sanctorum, ed. Luke Wadding (Rome, 1655) Joseph of Exeter, The Iliad of Dares Phrygius, ed. and trans. Gildas O. Roberts (Cape Town, 1970) [see also Troy histories] Joseph of Exeter, Trojan War I–III, ed. and trans. A. K. Bate (Warminster, 1986) Joseph of Exeter, Werke und Briefe, ed. Ludwig Gompf (Leiden, 1970) [Juvencus], ‘The Juvencus Poems’, ed. and trans. Sir Ifor Williams, in The Beginnings of Welsh Poetry, ed. Rachel Bromwich (Cardiff, 1980), pp. 89–121 [Juvencus], Juvencus: Codex Cantabrigiensis Ff.4.42, ed. Helen McKee (Aberystwyth, 2000) [Juvencus], The Cambridge Juvencus Manuscript Glossed in Latin, Old Welsh and Old Irish: Text and Commentary, ed. Helen McKee (Aberystwyth, 2000) Kaeppeli, Thomas, ed., Scriptores Ordinis praedicatorum medii aevi, 4 vols (Rome, 1970–93) Kilvington, Richard, The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington, eds Norman Kretzmann and Barbara Ensign Kretzmann (Oxford, 1990) [exemplifies reception of Aristotle’s logic in university teaching] Kilvington, Richard, The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington, trans. Norman Kretzmann and Barbara Ensign Kretzmann (Cambridge, 1990) Krapp, G. P., and E. V. K. Dobbie, eds, The Anglo Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vols (New York, 1931–53) Lacy, Norris J., ed., Early French Tristan Poems, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1998) Lafleur, Claude, ed., Quatre introductions à la philosophie au XIIIe siècle (Montreal and Paris, 1988) Langland, William, ‘Piers Plowman’: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter, 2008) Langland, William, Piers Plowman, eds Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York, 2006) Langland, William, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd edn (1995) Langland, William, Piers Plowman: The B Version, eds George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (Berkeley, 1975) Langton, Robert, The Pilgrimage of Robert Langton, ed. E. M. Blackie (Cambridge, Mass., 1924) Laskaya, Anne, and Eve Salisbury, eds, The Middle English Breton Lays (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1995)

Laud Troy Book, see Troy histories

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Medieval: Primary Sources Lefevre, Jehan, Les Lamentations de Matheolus, ed. A.-G. van Hamel, 2 vols (Paris, 1892–1905) Liber de Pomo, The Apple or Aristotle’s Death, trans with introd. by Mary F. Rousseau, MA thesis (Milwaukee, Wis., 1968) Liber Eliensis, ed. E. O. Blake (1962) Liuzza, Roy, ed., Anglo-Saxon Prognostics: An Edition and Translation of Texts from London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.III (Cambridge, 2011) [Lucan], Adnotationes super Lucanum, ed. Johannes Endt (Leipzig, 1909; repr. Stuttgart, 1969) [Carolingian commentary] [Lucan], Supplementum Adnotationum super Lucanum, 3 vols, ed. G. A. Cavajoni (Milan and Amsterdam, 1979–90) [Lucan], M. Annaei Lucani commenta Bernensia, ed. Hermann Usener (Leipzig, 1869; repr. Hildesheim, 1967) [Carolingian commentary] [Lucan], In Cath Catharda: The Civil War of the Romans, ed. and trans. Whitley Stokes (Leipzig, 1909) [Middle Irish version of Lucan’s Civil War] [Lucan], Rómverja Saga, ed. Þorbjörg Helgadóttir, 2 vols (Reykjavík, 2010) [Old Icelandic version of Civil War] Lydgate, John, Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols, EETS es 121–4 (1924–7) Lydgate, John, Lydgate and Burgh’s Secrees of Old Philisoffres, ed. Robert Steele, EETS es 66 (1894) Lydgate, John, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part II: Secular Poems, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS 192 (1934; repr. Oxford, 1961) Lydgate, John, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall, 3 vols, EETS es 77, 83, 92 (1899–1904) Lydgate, John, The Serpent of Division, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken (1911) Lydgate, John, Siege of Thebes, eds Axel Erdmann and Eilert Ekwall, 2 vols, EETS es 108 and 125 (1911, 1930) Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2001) Lydgate, John, Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols, EETS es 97, 103, 106, 126 (1906–35) [see also Troy histories] Machan, Tim William, ed., Sources of the ‘Boece’ (Athens, Ga, 2005) Maidstone, Richard., Richard Maidstone: Concordia (The Reconciliation of Richard II with London), ed. David Carlson, with trans. by A. G. Rigg (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2003) Mair, Hans, Das ‘Buch von Troja’ von Hans Mair. Kritische Textausgabe und Untersuchung, ed. Hans-Josef Dreckmann (Munich, 1970) [see also Troy histories] Mandeville, John, The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts, ed. and trans. Iain Macleod Higgins (Indianapolis, 2011) Martin of Braga, Martinus Bracarensis: Martini Episcopi Bracarensis opera omnia, ed. C. W. Barlow (New Haven, 1950) Martin of Braga, Seneque des IIII Vertus: la ‘Formula honestae vitae’ de Martin Braga (pseudo-Sénèque) traduite et glosée par Jean Courtecuisse (1403), ed. Hans Haselbach (Bern and Frankfurt am Main, 1975)

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Medieval: Primary Sources Matthew of Vendôme, ‘Il Piramus et Tisbe di Matteo di Vendôme’, ed. Franco Munari, Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica ns 31 (1959), 65–78 Matthew of Vendôme, Opera, ed. Franco Munari, 3 vols (Rome, 1977–88) Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. H. R. Luard, 7 vols (1872–83) Minnis, A. J., A. B. Scott, with David Wallace, eds and trans., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100–c.1375 (Oxford, 1988) Mooney, Linne, ed., ‘A Middle English Text on the Seven Liberal Arts’, Speculum 68 (1993), 1027–52 Neckam, Alexander, Alexandri Neckam De naturis rerum libri duo. With the poem of the same author, De laudibus divinae sapientiae, ed. Thomas Wright (1863) Neckam, Alexander, Les Fabulistes latins, vol. 3, Avianus et ses anciens imitateurs, ed. Léopold Hervieux (Paris, 1894) [contains Alexander Neckam’s rewritings of Avianus, pp. 462–7] Neckam, Alexander, Sacerdos ad altare, ed. Christopher J. McDonough, CCCM 227 (Turnhout, 2010) Nederman, Cary J., ed. and trans., Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-Century England: Treatises by Walter of Milemete, William of Pagula, and William of Ockham (Tempe, Ariz., 2002) Nennius, Historia Britonum: The History of the Britons Attributed to Nennius, trans. Richard Rowley (Lampeter, 2005) Olszowy-Schlanger, Judith, and Anne Grondeux, eds, Dictionnaire hébreu–latin–français de la Bible hébraïque de l’abbaye de Ramsey (XIIIe s.) (Turnhout, 2008) Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols (Oxford, 1969–80) Oresme, Nicole, Livre de divinacions, ed. G. W. Coopland, Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers (Liverpool, 1952) Orme, Nicholas, ed., English School Exercises (Toronto, 2013) Osbern of Gloucester, Derivazioni, eds Paola Busdraghi et al., 2 vols (Spoleto, 1996) Otfrid, Evangelienbuch, ed. Oskar Erdmann (Tübingen, 1973) [Ovid], Le ‘epistole delle dame di Grecia’ nel Roman de Troie in prosa: La prima traduzione francese delle Eroidi di Ovidio, ed. Luca Barbieri (Tübingen, 2005) [Ovid], L’Art d’amours. Traduction et commentaire de l’‘Ars amatoria’ d’Ovide, ed. Bruno Roy (Leiden, 1974) [Old French prose version of Ars amatoria] [Ovid], The Art of Love, trans. Lawrence B. Blonquist (New York, 1987) [modern translation of the Old French prose version of Ars amatoria] [Ovid], Artes amandi: da Maître Elie ad Andrea Capellano, ed. A. M. Finoli (Milan, 1969) [version of Jakes d’Amiens, pp. 31–121; of Maître Elie, pp. 3–30] [Ovid], Ovide moralisé. Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle, ed. C. Boer, 5 vols, Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks 15, 21, 30, 37, 43 (Amsterdam, 1915–38)

Paston Letters, see under Early English Humanism, primary sources

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Medieval: Primary Sources Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum, ed. G. Waitz (Hannover, 1878) Pearl-Poet, The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet, eds Malcolm Andrew, Ronald Waldron, et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993) Peter of Blois, The Later Letters of Peter of Blois, ed. Elizabeth Revell (Oxford, 1993) Peter of Cornwall, Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations, eds Robert Easting and Richard Sharpe (Toronto, 2013)

Petrarch, Francis, see under Early Humanism, primary sources Poetria Nova 2: A CD-ROM of Latin Medieval Poetry (650–1250 a.d.), eds Paolo Mastrandrea and Luigi Tessarolo, 2nd edn (Florence, 2010) [the best database of medieval Latin poetry] Premierfait, Laurent de, Laurent de Premierfait’s ‘Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes’, ed. Patricia May Gathercole (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968) Przychocki, Gustavus, ed., Accessus Ovidiani (Krakow, 1911) Ralph of Beauvais, Liber Tytan, ed. C. H. Kneepkens (Nijmegen, 1991) [grammatical commentaries on Ovid and Lucan] Remigius of Auxerre, Remigii Autissiodorensis commentum in Martianum Capellam, ed. Cora Lutz, 2 vols (Leiden, 1962–5) Ridewall, John, Fulgentius metaforalis. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der antiken Mythologie im Mittelalter, ed. Hans Liebeschutz (Leipzig, 1926) Robert of Cricklade, Roberti Crikeladensis Defloratio naturalis historie Plinii Secundi, ed. Bodo Näf (Berlin, 2002) Roman de Thèbes, ed. Francine Mora-Lebrun (Paris, 1995) Roman de Thèbes, ed. Guy Raynaud de Lage, 2 vols (Paris, 1968–9) Saint Erkenwald, see entry for Pearl-Poet, Complete Works Schumann, Otto, ed., Lateinisches Hexameter-Lexikon: dichterisches Formelgut von Ennius bis zum Archipoeta, MGH Hilfsmittel 4, 6 vols (Munich, 1979–83) Scrope, Stephen, The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers: The Translations Made by Stephen Scrope, William Worcester and an Anonymous Translator, ed. Curt F. Bühler, EETS 211 (1941) [Secretum secretorum], Secretum secretorum: Nine English Versions, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, EETS 276 (Oxford, 1977) [Secretum secretorum], Three Prose Versions of the ‘Secreta secretorum’, ed. Robert Steele, EETS es 74 (1898) Simund de Freine, Les Œuvres de Simund de Freine, ed. John E. Matzke (Paris, 1909) [Statius], The Medieval Achilleid of Statius, ed. Paul M. Clogan (Leiden, 1968) Steffens, Karl, ed., Die Historia preliis Alexandri Magni: Rezension J3 (Meisenheim am Glan, 1975) Talbot, C. H., ed., Florilegium morale Oxoniense, Ms. Bodl. 633: Secunda pars, Flores auctorum (Louvain and Lille, 1956) Tatwine, Tatuini opera omnia, ed. Maria de Marco, Variae collectiones aenigmatum Merovingicae aetatis [including Aldhelm’s Aenigmata], ed. Fr. Glorie, CCSL 133 (Turnhout, 1965–8)

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Medieval: Primary Sources Theodulus, Ecloga: il canto della verità e della menzogna, ed. and trans. Francesco Mosetti Casaretto (Florence, 1997) Thomas of Marlborough, Thomas of Marlborough, History of the Abbey of Evesham, eds Jane Sayers and Leslie Watkiss (Oxford, 2003) Thompson, Edward Maunde, ed., Customary of the Benedictine Monasteries of St Augustine, Canterbury and St Peter, Westminster, 2 vols (1902–4) Thomson, David, ed., An Edition of the Middle English Grammatical Texts (New York, 1984) Trevet, Nicholas, Comentario a las Bucolicas de Virgilio, eds Aires Augusto Nascimento and José Manuel Díaz de Bustamente (Santiago de Compostela, 1984) Trevet, Nicholas, Il Commento di Nicola Trevet al Tieste di Seneca, ed. Ezio Franceschini (Milan, 1938) Trevet, Nicholas, Nicolai Treveti expositio Herculis furentis, ed. Vincenzo Ussani Jr (Rome, 1959) Trevisa, John, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum, ed. M. C. Seymour, et al., 3 vols (Oxford, 1975–88) Trevisa, John, The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the ‘De regimine principum’ of Aegidius Romanus, eds David C. Fowler, Charles F. Briggs, et al. (New York, 1997) [Troy histories], The ‘Gest hystoriale’ of the Destruction of Troy, eds G. A. Panton and D. Donaldson, eds, 2 vols, EETS 39, 56 (1869–75) [Troy histories], Episodes uit Maerlant’s Historie van Troyen, ed. J. Verdam (Groningen, 1873) [Middle Dutch version of Troy narrative] [Troy histories], Le ‘epistole delle dame di Grecia’ nel Roman de Troie in prosa: la prima traduzione francese delle Eroidi di Ovidio, ed. Luca Barbieri (Tübingen, 2005) [Troy histories], Excidium Troiae, eds. Elmer Bagby Atwood and Virgil K. Whitaker (Cambridge, Mass.A, 1944) [follows the Trojan War from its origins through the fall of the city; then a summary of the Aeneid and the founding of Rome] [Troy histories], Historia Troyana, ed. Kelvin M. Parker (Santiago de Compostela, 1975) [Galician version of Troy narrative] [Troy histories] Les Histories troyanes de Guiu de Columpnes, traduides al català en el XIVèn segle per en Jacme Conesa, ed. R. Miquel y Planas (Barcelona, 1916) [Troy histories] The Laud Troy Book. ed. J. Ernst Wülfing, 2 vols, EETS 121–2 (1902–3, repr. 1973) [Troy histories], Libro de la destructione de Troye: volgarizzamento napoletano trecentesco da Guido delle Colonne, ed. Nicola De Blasi (Rome, 1986) [Troy histories], Ho Polemos tēs Trōados=The War of Troy, eds Manoles Papathomopoulos and Elizabeth M. Jeffreys (Athens, 1996) [post-classical Greek tradition of Troy] [Troy histories], Le Roman de Troyle, ed. Gabriel Bianciotto, 2 vols (Rouen, 1994) [Troy histories], Testi inediti di storia trojana preceduti da uno studio sulla leggenda trojana in Italia, ed. Egidio Gorra (Turin, 1887)

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Medieval: Primary Sources [Troy histories], The Togail Troí: The Destruction of Troy from the Facsimile of the Book of Leinster, ed. Whitley Stokes (Calcutta, 1882) [Irish version] [Troy histories], Trójumanna Saga: The Dares Phrygius version, ed. Jonna Louis-Jensen (Copenhagen, 1981) [Old Icelandic version] Usk, Thomas, Thomas Usk: Testament of Love, ed. Gary W. Shawver (Toronto, 2002) Vatican Mythographers, Mythographi vaticani I et II, ed. Péter Kulcsár, CCSL 91c (Turnhout, 1987) Vatican Mythographers, Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini tres Romae nuper reperti, ed. Georgius Henricus Bode (Celle, 1834) Vatican Mythographers, The Vatican Mythographers, trans. Ronald E. Pepin (New York, 2008) Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum quadruplex, sive Speculum maius (Douai, 1624, repr. Graz, 1964–5) de Visser-van Terwisga, Marijke, ed., Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (Estoires Rogier), edition partielle, 2 vols (Orléans, 1995) [contains edition of Thebes section] de Vriend, Hubert Jan, ed., The Old English Herbarium and Medicina quadrupedibus, EETS 286 (1984) Walpole, A. S., ed., Early Latin Hymns (Cambridge, 1922) Walsingham, Thomas, The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham, eds and trans. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs, and Leslie Watkiss, 2 vols (Oxford, 2003, 2011) Walsingham, Thomas, Thomae Walsingham, De archana deorum, ed. Robert A. van Kluyve (Durham, NC, 1968) Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis, ed. Marvin L. Colker (Padua, 1978) Walter of Speyer, Der Libellus scolasticus des Walther von Speyer: Ein Schulbericht aus dem Jahre 984, ed. Peter Vossen (Berlin, 1962) Walton, John, Boethius: De consolatione philosophiae, Translated by John Walton, Canon of Oseney, ed. Mark Science, EETS 170 (Oxford, 1927) Wenzel, Siegfried, Latin Sermon Collections from Late Medieval England: Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif (Cambridge, 2005) Wenzel, Siegfried, ed. and trans., Fasciculus morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook (Philadelphia, 1989) Wenzel, Siegfried, ed. and trans., Summa virtutum de remediis animae (Athens, Ga, 1984) William of Conches, Guillelmi de Conchis opera omnia 2, Glosae super Boetium, ed. Lodi Nauta, CCCM 158 (Turnhout, 1997) [William of Conches, attributed], Das ‘Moralium dogma philosophorum’ des Guillaume Conches: lateinisch, altfranzösisch und mittelniederfränkisch, ed. John Holmberg (Uppsala, 1929) William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, eds and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford, 1998–9)

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Medieval: Primary Sources William of Malmesbury, Historia novella: The Contemporary History, ed. Edmund King, trans. K. R. Potter (Oxford, 1998) William of Malmesbury, Polyhistor: A Critical Edition, ed. Helen Testroet Ouellette (Binghamton, NY, 1982) William of Orléans, Bursarii ovidianorum, ed. Hugues-V. Shooner, ‘Les Bursarii ovidianorum de Guillaume d’Orléans’, Mediaeval Studies 43 (1981), 405–24 William of Poitiers, The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, eds and trans. R. H. C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1998) William of Rubrick, The Mission of Friar William of Rubrick: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255, trans. Peter Jackson with David Morgan (1990) William of Tyre, Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, CCCM 63–63a (Turnhout, 1986) Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, Nicholas Watson, et al., eds, The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park, Pa, 1999) Wyclif, John, Iohannis Wyclif Sermones, eds J. Loserth and F. D. Matthew, 4 vols (1887–90) Ziolkowski, Jan M., ed. and trans., The Cambridge Songs, 2nd edn (Tempe, Ariz., 1998)

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, ‘Erasing the Body: History and Memory in Medieval Siege Poetry’, in Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity, eds Nicholas Paul and Suzanne Yeager (Baltimore, 2012), pp. 146–73 Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca, NY, 2009) Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto, 2004) Alcamesi, Filippa, ‘Remigius’s Commentary to the Disticha Catonis in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts’, in Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England, eds Lendinara et al., pp. 143–85 Alford, John A., ‘Piers Plowman’: A Guide to the Quotations (Binghamton, NY, 1992) Alford, John A., ‘The Wife of Bath versus the Clerk of Oxford: What their Rivalry Means’, Chaucer Review 21 (1986), 108–32 Allen, Judson Boyce, ‘Commentary as Criticism: The Text, Influence, and Literary Theory of the Fulgentius Metaphored of John Ridewall’, in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Amstelodamensis, eds P. Tuynman et al. (Munich, 1979), pp. 25–47 Allen, Judson Boyce, ‘An Anonymous Twelfth-Century De natura deorum in the Bodleian Library’, Traditio 26 (1970), 352–64 [studies a work used by the ‘classicizing friars’, including Trevet and Robert Holcot] Allen, Peter L., The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the Romance of the Rose (Philadelphia, 1992) Allmand, Christopher, The De re militari of Vegetius: The Reception, Transmission and Legacy of a Roman Text in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2011) Alton, E. H., and D. E. W. Wormell, ‘Ovid in the Mediaeval Schoolroom’, Hermathena 94 (1960), 21–38, and Hermathena 95 (1961), 67–82 Anderson, David, ‘Boccaccio’s Glosses on Statius’, Studi sul Boccaccio 22 (1994), 32–66 Anderson, David, Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s Teseida (Philadelphia, 1988) Anderson, Harald, The Manuscripts of Statius, 3 vols (Arlington, Va, 2009) de Angelis, Violetta, ‘Lo Stazio di Dante: scuola e poesia’, Schede umanistiche 16 (2002), 38–46 de Angelis, Violetta, ‘I commenti medievali alla Tebaide di Stazio: Anselmo di Laon, Goffredo Babione, Ilario d’Orleans’, in Medieval and Renaissance Scholarship, eds Mann and Munk Olsen, pp. 75–136 Anlezark, Daniel, ‘Poisoned Places: The Avernian Tradition in Old English Poetry’, Anglo-Saxon England 36 (2007), 103–26 [Lucan’s influence on the poem Solomon and Saturn II]

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Archibald, Elizabeth, Apollonius of Tyre: Mediaeval and Renaissance Themes and Variations (Cambridge, 1991) [a key study of this complex literary tradition] d’Arcier, Louis Faivre, Histoire et géographie d’un mythe: la circulation des manuscrits du De excidio Troiae de Darèsè le Phrygien (XVIIIe–XVe siècles) (Paris, 2006) Armstrong, Guyda, The English Boccaccio: A History in Books (Toronto, 2013) Arner, Lynn, Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381 (University Park, Pa, 2013) Arngart, Olof, ‘St. Avitus and the Genesis and Exodus Poet’, English Studies 50 (1969), 487–95 Arweiler, Alexander, Die Imitation Antiker und Spätantiker Literatur in der Dichtung ‘De Spiritalis Historiae Gestis’ des Alcimus Avitus (Berlin, 1988) Astell, Ann W., Chaucer and the Universe of Learning (Ithaca, NY, 1996) Avril, François, ‘Trois manuscrits napolitains des collections de Charles V et de Jean de Berry’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 127 (1969), 291–328 Ayers, Robert W., ‘Medieval History, Moral Purpose, and the Structure of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes’, PMLA 73 (1958), 463–74 Baldwin, John W., ‘L’Ars amatoria au XIIe siècle en France: Ovide, Abélard, André le Chapelain et Pierre le Chantre’, in Histoire et société: Mélanges offerts à George Duby, 4 vols (Aix-en-Provence, 1992), 1, 19–29 Baldzuhn, Michael, Schulbücher im Trivium des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit: Die Verschriftlichung von Unterricht in der Text- und Überlieferungsgeschichte der ‘Fabulae’ Avianus und der deutschen ‘Disticha Catonis’, 2 vols (Berlin, 2009) [exhaustive study of the uses of Avianus and the Latin fabulists in medieval schools] Barabino, Giuseppina, ‘Le citazioni virgiliane in Malsacano’, in Grammatici latini d’età imperiale: miscellanea filologica (Genoa, 1976), pp. 195–218 [on the Hiberno-Latin grammarian Malsachanus] Barlow, Jonathan, ‘Gregory of Tours and the Myth of the Trojan Origins of the Franks’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 29 (1995), 86–95 Barnes, Jonathan, ‘Boethius and the Study of Logic’, in Boethius, ed. Gibson, pp. 73–89 Barney, Stephen A., The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman Volume 5, C Passus 20–22, B Passus 18–20 (Philadelphia, 2006) Barron, Caroline, ‘The Political Culture of Medieval London’, in The Fifteenth Century IV: Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain, eds Linda Clark and Christine Carpenter (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 111–33 Bartlett, Robert R., ‘Gerald’s Ethnographic Achievement’, in Medieval Ethnographies: European Perceptions of the World Beyond, ed. Joan-Pau Rubiés (Aldershot and Burlington, 2009), pp. 231–72 Baswell, Christopher, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995) [wide-ranging study of the medieval Virgil, with emphasis on England and vernacular literary cultures of the poet]

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Baswell, Christopher, ‘Troy Book: How Lydgate Translates Chaucer into Latin’, in Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeanette M. A. Beer (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1997), pp. 225–34 Battles, Dominique, The Medieval Tradition of Thebes: History and Narrative in the Old French Roman Thèbes, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate (New York, 2004) Beal, Jane, John Trevisa and the English ‘Polychronicon’ (Tempe, Ariz., 2013) Beaujouan, Guy, ‘The Transformation of the Quadrivium’, in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, eds Benson et al., pp. 463–87 de la Bédoyère, Guy, ‘Carausius and the Marks RSR and INPDA’, The Numismatic Chronicle 158 (1998), 79–88 Beeson, C. H., ‘Insular Symptoms in the Commentaries on Vergil’, Studi medievali ns 5 (1932), 81–100 Bejczy, István P., ‘The Concept of Political Virtue in the Thirteenth Century’, in Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages, 1200–1500, eds István P. Bejczy and Cary J. Nederman (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 9–32 Bejczy, István P., ‘A Genealogy of Morals: The Cardinal Virtues in Medieval Discourse’, Medieval Sermon Studies Newsletter alt. no. 46 (2002), 95–6 Benson, C. David, ‘Civic Lydgate: The Poet and London’, in John Lydgate, eds Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 147–68 Benson, C. David, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae in Medieval England (Woodbridge, 1980) Benson, C. David, and Lynne S. Blanchfield, The Manuscripts of ‘Piers Plowman’: The B-Version (Cambridge, 1997) Benson, R. L., Giles Constable, and Carol Lanham, eds, Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1982) Bernardo, Aldo S., and Saul Levin, eds, The Classics in the Middle Ages (Binghamton, NY, 1990) Berschin, Walter, Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages: From Jerome to Nicholas of Cusa, trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Washington, DC, 1988) Bertram, Jerome, Vita communis: The Common Life of the Secular Clergy (Leominster, 2009) Biggs, Frederick M., Thomas D. Hill and Paul E. Szarmach, eds, Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture: A Trial Version (Binghamton, NY, 1990) Birns, Nicholas, ‘The Trojan Myth: Postmodern Reverberations’, Exemplaria 5 (1993), 45–78 [critiques the standard modern account of medieval historiography] Bisanti, Armando, Le favole di Aviano e la loro fortuna nel medioevo (Florence, 2010) Bischoff, Bernhard, and Michael Lapidge, Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian (Cambridge, 1994) Black, Robert, ‘Teaching Techniques: The Evidence of Manuscript Schoolbooks Produced in Tuscany’, in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom, eds Ruys et al., pp. 245–66

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Black, Robert, ‘Ovid in Medieval Italy’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds Clark et al., pp. 123–42 Blamires, Alcuin, Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender (Oxford, 2006) Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and its Interpretations in Medieval French Literature (Stanford, Calif., 1997) Boas, Marcus, ‘De librorum Catonianorum historia atque compositione’, Mnemosyne ns 42 (1914), 17–46 Boffey, Julia, and A. S. G. Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse (2005) Boitani, Piero, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge, 1983) Bowman, Alan K., and J. David Thomas, The Vindolanda Writing-Tablets [Tabulae Vindolandenses 3] (2003) Braekman, W. L., ‘Bollard’s Middle English Book of Planting and Grafting and its Background’, Studia Neophilologica 57 (1985), 19–39 Bremmer, Rolf H., Jr, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Continental Mission and the Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge’, in Foundations of Learning, eds Bremmer and Dekker, pp. 19–50 Bremmer, Rolf H., Jr, and Kees Dekker, eds, Foundations of Learning: The Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages (Leuven, 2007) Briggs, Charles F., ‘Moral Philosophy in England after Grosseteste: An “Underground” History’, in The Study of Medieval Manuscripts of England, eds Brown and Voigts, pp. 359–88 Briggs, Charles F., ‘Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the Later Medieval Universities: A Reassessment’, Rhetorica 25 (2007), 243–68 Briggs, Charles F., Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University c. 1275–c. 1525 (Cambridge, 1999) Briscoe, Marianne G., and Barbara H. Jaye, Artes praedicandi and Artes orandi (Turnhout, 1992) Brooks, Nicholas, ed., Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Early Medieval Britain (Leicester, 1982) Brown, George, and Linda Ehrsam Voigts, eds, The Study of Medieval Manuscripts of England: Festschrift in Honor of Richard W. Pfaff (Turnhout and Tempe, Ariz., 2010) Brown, Peter, and Andrew Butcher, The Age of Saturn: Literature and History in the Canterbury Tales (Oxford, 1991) Brown, T. Julian, A Paleographer’s View: The Selected Writings of Julian Brown, eds Janet Bately, Michelle P. Brown, and Jane Roberts (1993) Brown, T. Julian, ‘An Historical Introduction to the Use of Classical Latin Authors in the British Isles from the Fifth to the Eleventh Century’, in La cultura antica nell’Occidente Latino dal VII all’XI secolo. Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo 22.1 (Spoleto, 1975), pp. 237–99 Brüning, Gertrud, ‘Adamnans Vita Columbae und ihre Ableitungen’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 11 (1917), 213–304 [Virgilianism in early Irish learning]

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Buchthal, Hugo, Historia Troiana: Studies in the History of Mediaeval Secular Illustration (1971) Buettner, Brigitte, ‘Past Presents: New Year’s Gifts at the Valois Court, ca.1400’, Art Bulletin 83 (2001), 598–625 Bullough, Donald A., Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation (Leiden, 2004) Burnett, Charles, ‘The Introduction of Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy into Great Britain: A Preliminary Survey of the Manuscript Evidence’, in Aristotle in Britain during the Middle Ages, ed. Marenbon, pp. 21–50 Burnett, Charles, Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages: Texts and Techniques in the Islamic and Christian Worlds (Aldershot, 1996) Burnett, Charles, ‘Adelard, Ergaphalau and the Science of the Stars’, in Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century, ed. C. Burnett (1987), 133–45 Burnley, J. D., Chaucer’s Language and Philosophers’ Tradition (Cambridge, 1979) Burton, Rosemary, Classical Poets in the ‘Florilegium Gallicum’ (Frankfurt am Main, 1983) Buschinger, Danielle, ed., Le Roman antique au moyen âge: actes du colloque du Centre d’études médiévales de l’Université de Picardie, Amiens, 14–15 janvier 1989 (Göppingen, 1992) Calkin, Siobhain Bly, Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript (New York, 2005) Callu, Jean-Pierre et al., ‘L’Histoire Auguste et l’historiographie médiévale’, Revue d’histoire des textes 14–15 (1984–5), 97–130 Camargo, Martin, ‘Chaucer and the Oxford Renaissance of Anglo-Latin Rhetoric’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 34 (2012), 173–207 [revisionist account of rhetorical study in England during the early and later parts of Chaucer’s career] Camargo, Martin, ‘Latin Composition Textbooks and Ad Herennium Glossing: The Missing Link?’, in The Rhetoric of Cicero, eds Cox and Ward, pp. 267–88 Cameron, M. L., Anglo-Saxon Medicine (Cambridge, 1993) Camille, Michael, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989) Cannon, Christopher, ‘The Middle English Writer’s Schoolroom: Fourteenth-Century English Schoolbooks and their Contents’, in Medieval Grammar and the Literary Arts, eds Cannon et al., 19–38 Cannon, Christopher, Rita Copeland, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds, Medieval Grammar and the Literary Arts, Special Issue of New Medieval Literatures 11 (2009) Carlson, David R., John Gower: Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2012) Carlson, David R., ‘The Parliamentary Source of Gower’s Cronica Tripertita and Incommensurable Styles’, in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, eds Elisabeth Dutton et al. (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 98–111 Carlson, David R., ‘Gower’s Beast Allegories in the 1391 Visio Anglie’, Philological Quarterly 87 (2008), 257–75 Carlson, David R. ‘Chaucer’s Boethius and Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love: Politics and Love in the Chaucerian Tradition’, in The Centre and its Compass: Studies in Medieval

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle, eds Robert A. Taylor et al. (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1993), pp. 29–70 Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2008) Catto, J. I., ed., The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 1, The Early Oxford Schools (Oxford, 1984) Catto, J. I., and Ralph Evans, eds, The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, Late Medieval Oxford (Oxford, 1992) Cavanaugh, Susan H., ‘Royal Books: King John to Richard II’, The Library 6th ser., 10 (1988), 304–16 Chance, Jane, Medieval Mythography, 2 vols (Gainesville, Fla, 1994, 2000) Chance, Jane, ‘The Medieval “Apology for Poetry”: Fabulous Narrative and Stories of the Gods’, in The Mythographic Art, ed. Chance, pp. 3–44 Chance, Jane, ed., The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England, (Gainesville, Fla, 1990) Chavannes-Mazel, Claudine A., and Margaret M. Smith, eds, Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics: Production and Use (Los Altos Hills, Calif.,1996) [chapters on Terence, Livy, Lucretius, and Horace] Cheney, Christopher, ‘English Cistercian Libraries: the First Century’, in Christopher Cheney, Medieval Texts and Studies (Oxford, 1973), pp. 328–45 Chism, Christine, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia, 2002) Clagett, Marshall, ‘The Medieval Latin Translations from the Arabic of the Elements of Euclid, with Special Emphasis on the Versions of Adelard of Bath’, Isis 44 (1953), 16–42 Clark, Willene B., and Meredith T. McMunn, eds, Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and its Legacy (Philadelphia, 1989) Clark, James G., ‘Monastic Manuscripts and the Transmission of the Classics in Late Medieval England’, in Vehicles of Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture, eds Robert Wisnovsky et al. (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 335–52 Clark, James G., A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle, c.1350–1440 (Oxford, 2004) Clark, James G., Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley, eds, Ovid in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2011) Clarke, Catherine A. M., ‘Writing Civil War in Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum’, Anglo-Norman Studies 31 (2009), 31–48 [use of Lucan in Anglo-Latin historiography] Clarke, K. P., Chaucer and Italian Textuality (Oxford, 2011) Coleman, Janet, ‘English Culture in the Fourteenth Century’, in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Boitani, pp. 33–63 Comparetti, Domenico, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E. F. M. Benecke (Princeton, 1997; first published 1872 in Italian)

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Medieval: Secondary Sources [Congrès international de philosophie médiévale], Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge (Montreal–Paris, 1969) Contreni, John J., ‘Reading Gregory of Tours in the Middle Ages’, in The World of Gregory of Tours, eds Kathleen Mitchell and Ian Wood (Leiden, 2002), pp. 419–34 Copeland, Rita, ‘Horace’s Ars poetica in the Medieval Classroom and Beyond: The Horizons of Ancient Precept’, in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, eds Grady and Galloway, pp. 15–33 Copeland, Rita, ‘Thierry of Chartres and the Causes of Rhetoric: From the Heptateuchon to Teaching the ars rhetorica’, in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom, eds Ruys et al., pp. 60–75 Copeland, Rita, ‘Producing the Lector’, in Medieval and Early Modern Authorship, eds Lukas Erne and Guillemette Boulens (Tübingen, 2011), pp. 231–48 Copeland, Rita, ‘Naming, Knowing, and the Object of Language in Alexander Neckam’s Grammar Curriculum’, Journal of Medieval Latin 11 (2010), 38–57 Copeland, Rita, ‘Lydgate, Hawes, and the Science of Rhetoric in the Late Middle Ages’, in John Lydgate, eds Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 232–57 Copeland, Rita, ‘Chaucer and Rhetoric’, in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Lerer, pp. 122–44 Copeland, Rita, ‘Sophistic, Spectrality, Iconoclasm’, in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, eds Jeremy Dimmick et al. (Oxford, 2002), pp. 112–30 [Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations in heresy polemics] Copeland, Rita, ed., Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1996) Copeland, Rita, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Trad­ itions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991) Copeland, Rita, and Ineke Sluiter, Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric 300–1475 [see Medieval: Primary Sources] Cornish, Alison, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge, 2011) Cotts, John D., The Clerical Dilemma: Peter of Blois and Literate Culture in the Twelfth Century (Washington, DC, 2009) Coulson, Frank T., ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the School Tradition of France, 1180–1400: Texts, Manuscript Traditions, Manuscript Settings’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds Clark et al., pp. 48–82 Coulson, Frank T., ‘Hitherto Unedited Medieval and Renaissance Lives of Ovid (I)’, Mediaeval Studies 49 (1987), 152–207 Coulson, Frank T., and Bruno Roy, Incipitarum Ovidianum: A Finding Guide for Texts Related to the Study of Ovid in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout, 2000) Coulter, Cornelia C., ‘Boccaccio’s Acquaintance with Homer’, Philological Quarterly 5 (1926), 44–53 Courtenay, William J., Schools & Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1987)

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Cropp, Glynnis, ‘Boethius in Medieval France: Translations of the De consolatione philosophiae and Literary Influence’, in A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages, eds Kaylor and Phillips, pp. 319–55 Cropp, Glynnis, ‘Les Manuscrits du Livre de Boece de consolacion’, Revue d’histoire des textes 12–13 (1982–3), 263–352 Crosland, Jessie, ‘Lucan in the Middle Ages: With Special Reference to the Old French Epic’, Modern Language Review 25 (1930), 32–51 Cunningham, Ian Campbell, ‘Latin Classical Manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland’, Scriptorium 27 (1973), 64–90 Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1953; repr. with new introduction by Colin Burrow, New York, 2013) [a masterpiece of reception scholarship, unsurpassed in its scope and pan-European perspective] Cylkowski, David G. ‘A Middle English Treatise on Horticulture: Godfridus super Palladium’, in Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, ed. Matheson, pp. 301–29 Dahan, Gilbert, Lire la Bible au moyen âge (Geneva, 2009) Daintree, David, ‘The Transmission of Virgil and Virgil Scholia in Medieval Ireland’, Romanobarbarica 16 (1999), 33–47 D’Angelo, Edoardo, ‘Lucan in Medieval Latin: A Survey of the Bibliography’, in Brill’s Companion to Lucan, ed. Asso, pp. 465–79 D’Angelo, Edoardo, ‘La “Pharsalia” nell’epica latina medioevale’, in Interpretare Lucano. Miscellanea di studi, eds Paolo Esposito and Luciano Nicastri (Naples, 1999), pp. 389–454 D’Aronco, Maria Amalia, ‘The Transmission of Medical Knowledge in Anglo-Saxon England: The Voices of Manuscripts’, in Form and Content, eds Lendinara et al., pp. 35–58 Dean, Ruth J., Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (1999) De Hamel, Christopher, ‘The Dispersal of the Library of Christ Church, Canterbury, from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century’, in Books and Collectors 1200–1700: Essays Presented to Andrew Watson, eds James Carley and Colin Tite (1997), pp. 263–79 Delogu, Daisy, Theorizing the Ideal Sovereign: The Rise of the French Vernacular Royal Biography (Toronto, 2008) Demats, Paule, Fabula. Trois études de mythographie antique et médiévale (Geneva, 1973) Dembowski, Peter F., ‘Learned Latin Treatises in French: Inspiration, Plagiarism, and Translation’, Viator 17 (1986), 255–69 Denery, Dallas G. II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds, Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativisms and Doubt in the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2014) Deslisle, Léopold, ‘Recherches sur l’ancienne bibliothèque de Corbie’, Bibliothèque de l’École de Chartres 21 (1860), 339–439 Desmond, Marilynn, ‘On Not Knowing Greek: Leonizio Pilatus’s Rendition of the Iliad  and the Translatio of Mediterranean Identities’, in Rethinking Medieval

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory, eds Robert Mills and Emma Campbell (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 21–40 Desmond, Marilynn, ‘Gender and Desire in Medieval French Translations of Ovid’s Amatory Works’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds Clark et al., pp. 108–22 Desmond, Marilynn, Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence (Ithaca, NY, 2006) Desmond, Marilynn, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval ‘Aeneid’ (Minneapolis, 1994) Desmond, Marilynn, and Pamela Sheingorn, Myth, Montage, and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea (Ann Arbor, 2003) Dillon, H. A. (Viscount), and W. S. St. John Hope, ‘Inventory of the Goods and Chattels Belonging to Thomas, Duke of Gloucester’, Archaeological Journal 54 second series 4 (1897), 275–308 DiMarco, Vincent J., ‘The Historical Basis of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale’, Edebiyat 1:2 (1989), 1–22 Dod, Bernard G., ‘Aristoteles latinus’, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, eds Kretzmann et al., pp. 45–79 Donaghey, Brian, ‘Caxton’s Printing of Chaucer’s Boece’, in Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, ed. Geoffrey Lester (Sheffield, 1999), pp. 73–99 Donaghey, Brian, ‘Nicholas Trevet’s Use of King Alfred’s Translation of Boethius, and the Dating of his Commentary’, in The Medieval Boethius, ed. Minnis, pp. 1–31 Donaghey, Brian, et al., ‘Walton’s Boethius: From Manuscript to Print’, English Studies 80 (1999), 398–407 Donoghue, Daniel, ‘Word Order and Poetic Style: Auxiliary and Verbal in The Metres of Boethius’, Anglo-Saxon England 15 (1986), 167–96 Donovan, L. G., Recherches sur le Roman de Thebes (Paris, 1975) Dowling, Maria, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (Beckenham, 1986) Doyle, A. I., ‘English Books In and Out of Court from Edward III to Henry VII’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, eds V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (New York, 1983), pp. 163–82 Dronke, Peter, ed., A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988) Dronke, Peter, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1984) [chapter on the German nun Hrotsvitha’s uses of Terence; on Terence and Hrotsvitha see also Giovini below] Dronke, Peter, Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism (Leiden, 1974) Dronke, Peter, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1968) Dronke, Ursula, ‘Classical Influence on Early Norse Literature’, in Classical Influences on European Culture ad 500–1500, ed. R. R. Bolgar (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 143–9

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Dumitrescu, Irina, ‘Violence, Performance and Pedagogy in Ælfric Bata’s Colloquies’, Exemplaria 23:1 (2011), 67–91 Düring, Ingemar, Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition (Stockholm, 1957) Dwyer, J. B., ‘Gower’s “Mirour” and its French Sources: A Reexamination of Evidence’, Studies in Philology 48 (1951), 482–505 Ebbesen, Sten, ‘Ancient Scholastic Logic as the Source of Medieval Scholastic Logic’, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, eds Kretzmann et al., pp. 101–27 Echard, Siân, ed., A Companion to Gower (Woodbridge, 2004) Edwards, A. S. G., ‘The Middle English Translation of Claudian’s De consulatu Stilichonis’, in Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. Alastair Minnis (York, 2001), pp. 267–78 Edwards, A. S. G., ‘The Influence of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes c.1440–1559: A Survey’, Mediaeval Studies 39 (1977), 424–39 Edwards, Kathleen, The English Secular Cathedrals in the Middle Ages (Manchester, 1949) Edwards, Robert R., ‘Gower’s Second Cursus’, in John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception, eds Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 141–52 Edwards, Robert R., ‘Translating Thebes: Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes and Stow’s Chaucer’, ELH 70 (2003), 319–41 Edwards, Robert R., ‘Lydgate’s Troy Book and the Confusion of Prudence’, in The North Sea World in the Middle Ages, eds Thomas Liszka and Lorna Walker (Dublin, 2001), pp. 52–69 Einbinder, Susan, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, 2002) Ermini, Filippo, Li Centone di Proba e la poesie Centonaria latina (Rome, 1909) Evans, Gillian R., ‘John of Salisbury and Boethius on Arithmetic’, in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Wilks, pp. 161–7 Faems, An, et al., eds, Les Translations d’Ovide au moyen âge (Louvain-la-neuve, 2011) Farber, Annika, ‘Genius and the Practice of Ethical Reading’, ES, Revista de filología inglesa 33 (2012), 137–53 Field, P. J. C., ‘Nennius and his History’, Studia Celtica 30 (1996), 159–65 Fischli, Walter, Studien zum Fortleben der Pharsalia (Lucerne, 1949) Fisher, John Hurt, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (1965) Flannery, Mary C., John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame (Cambridge, 2012) Fletcher, J. M., ‘The Faculty of Arts’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 1, ed. Catto, pp. 369–99 Fletcher, J. M., ‘Developments in the Faculty of Arts 1370–1520’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, eds Catto and Evans, pp. 315–45 Flutre, Louis-Fernand, Li Fait des Romains dans les littératures française et italienne du XIIIe au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1932) Formisano, Marco, ‘Late Antiquity, New Departures’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, eds Hexter and Townsend, pp. 509–34

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Fowler, David, The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar (Seattle, 1995) Fox, Alistair, ‘Facts and Fallacies: Interpreting English Humanism’, in Reassessing the Henrician Age, eds Fox and Guy, pp. 9–33 Fox, Alistair, and John Guy, eds, Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500–1550 (Oxford, 1986) Frakes, Jerold C., ‘Remigius of Auxerre, Eriugena, and the Greco-Latin CircumstantiaeFormula of Accessus ad auctores’, in The Sacred Nectar of the Greeks: The Study of Greek in the West in the Early Middle Ages, eds Michael W. Herren and Shirley Ann Brown (1988), pp. 229–55 Fredborg, Karin Margareta, ‘The Grammar and Rhetoric Offered to John of Salisbury’, in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom, eds Ruys et al., pp. 103–30 French, Roger, ‘Astrology in Medical Practice’, in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, eds Luis García-Ballester et al. (Cambridge, 1994), 30–59 Friis-Jensen, Karsten, ‘The Reception of Horace in the Middle Ages’, in The Cambridge Companion to Horace, ed. Harrison, pp. 291–304 Friis-Jensen, Karsten, et al., ‘Bibliography of Classical Scholarship in the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance (9th to 15th Centuries)’, in Medieval and Renaissance Scholarship, eds Mann and Munk Olsen, pp. 197–251 Fumo, Jamie C., The Legacy of Apollo: Antiquity, Authority, and Chaucerian Poetics (Toronto, 2010) Fyler, John M., Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven, 1979) Gabriel, Astrik L., Garlandia: Studies in the History of the Mediaeval University (Notre Dame, Ind., 1969) Gabriel, Astrik L., ‘English Masters and Students in Paris during the Twelfth Century’, Analecta Praemonstratensia 25 (1949), 51–94 Galloway, Andrew, ‘Ovid in Chaucer and Gower’, in A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, eds Miller and Newlands, pp. 187–201 Galloway, Andrew, ‘Communities, Crowd-Theory, and Mob-Theory in Late-Fourteenth Century English History Writing and Poetry’, in Mobs: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry, eds Nancy van Deusen and Leonard Michael Koff (Leiden, 2012), pp. 141–64 Galloway, Andrew, ‘The Account-Book and the Treasure: Gilbert Maghfeld’s Textual Economy and the Poetics of Mercantile Accounting in Ricardian Literature’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011), 65–124 Galloway, Andrew, ‘Alliterative Poetry in Old Jerusalem’, in Medieval Alliterative Poetry: Essays in Honour of Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds J. A. Burrow and Hoyt N. Duggan (Dublin, 2010), pp. 85–106 Galloway, Andrew, ‘Whethamsted, John’, in The Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle, ed. R. G. Dunphy (Leiden, 2010), p. 1503 Galloway, Andrew, ‘Gower’s Confessio amantis, the Prick of Conscience, and the History of the Latin Gloss in Early English Literature’, in John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts, ed. Malte Urban (Turnhout, 2009), pp. 39–70

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Galloway, Andrew, ‘John Lydgate and the Origins of Vernacular Humanism’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107 (2008), 445–71 Galloway, Andrew, ‘Latin England’, in Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. Kathryn Lavezzo (Minneapolis, 2003), pp. 41–95 Galloway, Andrew, ‘Writing History in England’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, ed. Wallace, pp. 255–83 Galloway, Andrew, ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Lucrece and the Critique of Ideology in Fourteenth-Century England’, ELH 60 (1993), 813–32 Galloway, Andrew, ‘Piers Plowman and the Schools’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 6 (1992), 89–107 Galloway, Andrew, ‘Gower in his Most Learned Role and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381’, Mediaevalia 16 (1993 for 1990), 329–47 Galloway, Andrew, and R. F. Yeager, eds, Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee (Toronto, 2009) Gameson, Richard, The Manuscripts of Anglo-Norman England (c.1066–1130) (Oxford, 1999) [provides a longer perspective into the immediate post-Conquest period] Ganz, David, ‘When is a Library Not a Library?’, Early Medieval Europe 17 (2009), 444–53 [Servius in Anglo-Saxon England] Gardner, Rex, ‘Gildas’ New Testament Models’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 30 (1995), 1–12 Garrison, Mary, ‘The Library of Alcuin’s York’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 633–4 [the literary and intellectual culture of York in the eighth century] Gasper, Giles E. M., and Faith Wallis, ‘Anselm and the “Articella” ’, Traditio 59 (2004), 129–74 Genet, Jean-Philippe, ‘New Politics or New Language? The Words of Politics in Yorkist and Early Tudor England’, in The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. John L. Watts (Stroud, 1998), pp. 23–64 Genet, Jean-Philippe, ‘La Monarchie anglaise: une image brouillée’, in Représentation, pouvoir et royauté à la fin du moyen âge, ed. Joël Blanchard (Paris, 1995), pp. 93–107 George, Wilma, and Brunsdon Yapp, The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary (1991) Ghisalberti, Fausto, ‘Mediaeval Biographies of Ovid’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9 (1946), 10–59 Ghisalberti, Fausto, ‘Arnolfo d’Orléans. Un cultore di Ovidio nel secolo XII’, Memorie del reale istituto lombardo di scienze e lettere. Classe di lettere, scienze morali e storiche 24 (1939), 155–234 [contains a partial edition of Arnulf ’s allegorical commentary on Ovid] Gibson, Margaret T., and Lesley Smith, eds, Codices Boethiani: A Conspectus of Manuscripts of the Works of Boethius, 4 vols (1995–2009)

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Gibson, Margaret T., and Nigel F. Palmer, ‘Manuscripts of Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus in the British Isles’, Studi medievali 3rd ser. 28 (1987), 905–1001 Gillespie, Vincent, ‘From the Twelfth Century to c.1450’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages, eds Minnis and Johnson, 145–235 Gillingham, John, ‘Henry of Huntingdon and the Twelfth-Century Revival of the English Nation’, in Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, eds Simon Forde et al. (Leeds, 1995), pp. 75–101 Gillingham, John, ‘The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain’, in Anglo-Norman Studies, XIII: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1990, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 99–118 Giovini, Marco, Rosvita e l’imitari dictando terenziano (Genoa, 2003) Given-Wilson, Christopher, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (2007) Glauche, Günter, Schullektüre im Mittelalter: Entstehung und Wandlungen des Lektürekanons bis 1200 nach den Quellen dargestellt (Munich, 1970) Glendinning, Robert, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe in the Medieval Classroom’, Speculum 61 (1986), 51–78 Glick, Thomas, et al., eds, Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia (New York, 2005) Gneuss, Helmut, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Tempe, Ariz., 2001) [together with Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library, constitutes the fullest resource for evidence of reading and learning in England through the eleventh century] Gneuss, Helmut, ‘Addenda and Corrigenda to the Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts’, Anglo-Saxon England 32 (2003), 293–305 Gneuss, Helmut, ‘Second Addenda and Corrigenda to the Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts’, Anglo-Saxon England 40 (2011), 293–306 Gneuss, Helmut, and Michael Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Toronto, 2014) [this synthesizes the material in Gneuss’s Handlist and Lapidge’s The Anglo-Saxon Library to form an essential guide to learning in England through the eleventh century] Godden, Malcolm, ‘Ælfric and the Alfredian Precedents’, in A Companion to Ælfric, eds Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan (Leiden, 2009), pp. 139–63 Godden, Malcolm, ‘The Alfredian Project and its Aftermath: Rethinking the Literary History of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries’, Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009), 93–122 Godden, Malcolm, ‘Did King Alfred Write Anything?’ Medium Ævum 76 (2007), 1–23 Godden, Malcolm ‘Alfred, Asser, and Boethius’, in Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, eds O’Keefe and Orchard, 1, 326–48 Godden, Malcolm, ‘The Anglo-Saxons and the Goths: Rewriting the Sack of Rome’, Anglo-Saxon England 31 (2002), 47–68

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Godden, Malcolm, and Rohini Jayatilaka, ‘Counting the Heads of the Hydra: The Development of the Early Medieval Commentary on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy’, in Carolingian Scholarship and Martianus Capella, eds Mariken Teeuwen and Sinéad O’Sullivan (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 363–76 Godden, Richard, ‘The Medieval Sense of History’, in Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, eds Stephen Harris and Bryon Grigsby (New York, 2008), pp. 204–12 Godman, Peter, ‘The Anglo-Latin Opus Geminatum: From Aldhelm to Alcuin’, Medium Ævum 50 (1981), 215–19 Goering, Joseph, William de Montibus (c.1140–1213): The Schools and the Literature of Pastoral Care (Toronto, 1992) Gotoff, Harold C., The Transmission of the Text of Lucan in the Ninth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) Gozzi, Maria, ‘Sulle Fonti del Filostrato: le narrazioni di Argomento Troiano’, Studi sul Boccaccio 5 (1969), 123–209 Grady, Frank, Representing Righteous Heathens in Late-Medieval England (New York, 2005) Grady, Frank, and Andrew Galloway, eds, Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England (Columbus, Oh., 2013) Gransden, Antonia, Historical Writing in England, c.500–c.1307 (Ithaca, NY, 1974) Grant, Edward, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge, 1994) Grassnick, Ulrike, Ratgeber des Königs: Fürstenspiegel und Herrscherideal im spätmittelalterlichen England (Cologne, 2004) Gray, Douglas, Later Medieval English Literature (Oxford, 2008) Greatrex, Joan, The English Benedictine Cathedral Priories: Rule and Practice, c.1270–c.1420 (Oxford, 2011) Green, Monica H., ‘Salerno on the Thames: The Genesis of Anglo-Norman Medical Literature’, in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c.1100–c.1500, eds Wogan-Browne et al., pp. 220–31 Green, R. P. H., ‘The Genesis of a Mediaeval Textbook: The Models and Sources of the Ecloga Theodoli’, Viator 13 (1982), 49–106 Green, Richard Firth, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto, 1980) Greene, Virginie, Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy (Cambridge, 2014) Grellard, Christophe, Jean de Salisbury et la renaissance médiévale du scepticisme (Paris, 2013) Griffith, Mark, ‘The Composition of the Metres’, in The Old English Boethius, eds Godden and Irvine, 1, 80–134 [see Medieval: Primary Sources] Grondeux, Anne, and Irène Rosier-Catach, ‘Les Glosulae super Priscianum et leur tradition’, in Arts du langage et théologie aux confins des XIe–XIIe siècles: textes, maîtres, débats, ed. Irène Rosier-Catach (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 107–79 Gwara, Scott, ‘Anglo-Saxon Schoolbooks’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 507–24

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Haahr, Joan, ‘William of Malmesbury’s Roman Models: Suetonius and Lucan’, in The Classics in the Middle Ages, eds Bernardo and Levin, pp. 165–73 Haber, Tom Burns, A Comparative Study of the Beowulf and the Aeneid (Princeton, 1931) [fullest account of possible Virgilian influences on Beowulf; such links have been contested by later scholars, including Niles and Orchard] Haines, Roy Martin, ‘“Our Master Mariner, our Sovereign Lord”: A Contemporary Preacher’s View of Henry V’, Mediaeval Studies 38 (1996), 85–96 Hamilton, George L., ‘Gower’s Use of the Enlarged Roman de Troie’, PMLA 20 (1905), 179–96 Hanna, Ralph, ‘Literacy, Schooling, Universities’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Culture, ed. Andrew Galloway (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 172–94 Hanna, Ralph, ‘Vae Octuplex, Lollard Socio-Textual Ideology, and Ricardian-Lancastrian Prose Translation’, in Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Copeland, pp. 244–63 Hanna, Ralph, ‘Sir Thomas Berkeley and his Patronage’, Speculum 64 (1989), 878–916 Hanning, Robert W., The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York, 1966) Harbert, Bruce, ‘Lessons from the Great Clerk: Ovid and John Gower’, in Ovid Renewed, ed. Martindale, pp. 83–98 Harrison, F. L. ‘Music at Oxford before 1500’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, eds Catto and Evans, pp. 347–71 Harvey, P. D. A., Mappa mundi: The Hereford World Map (2002) [excellent resource on the medieval mappamundi, including its uses of ancient geographies] Hasenfratz, Robert, ‘Eisegan stefne (Christ and Satan 36a) the Visio Pauli, and ferrea vox (Aeneid 6, 626)’, Modern Philology 86 (1989), 398–403 Haskins, Charles Homer, ‘A List of Text Books from the Close of the Twelfth Century’, in Charles Homer Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), pp. 356–76 Hazelton, Richard, ‘The Christianization of Cato: The Disticha Catonis in the Light of Medieval Commentaries’, Mediaeval Studies 19 (1957), 157–73 Hedeman, Anne D., Translating the Past: Laurent de Premierfait and Boccaccio’s De Casibus (Los Angeles, 2008) Heikkinen, Seppo, ‘Vergilian Quotations in Bede’s De arte metrica’, Journal of Medieval Latin 17 (2007), 101–9 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore, 2003) Heng, Geraldine, ‘Jews, Saracens, “Black Men”, Tartars: England in a World of Racial Difference’, in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350–c.1500, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford, 2007), pp. 247–70 Herren, Michael, ‘Scholarly Contacts between the Irish and the Southern English in the Seventh Century’, Peritia 12 (1998), 24–53

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Hexter, Ralph J., and David Townsend, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature (Oxford, 2012) Hexter, Ralph J., ‘Medieval Articulations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: From Lactantian Segmentation to Arnulfian Allegory’, Mediaevalia 13 (1989), 63–82 Hexter, Ralph J., ‘The Allegari of Pierre Bersuire: Interpretation and the Reductorium morale’, Allegorica 10 (1989), 51–84 Hexter, Ralph J., Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid’s Ars amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto, and Epistulae Heroidum (Munich, 1986) Hiatt, Alfred, ‘Historical Writing’, in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 171–94 Hillgarth, Jocelyn, ‘The Historiae of Orosius in the Early Middle Ages’, in De Tertullian aux Mozarabes: mélanges offerts à Jacques Fontaine, eds Louis Holtz et al. (Paris, 1992), pp. 157–70 Hillgarth, Jocelyn, ‘Ireland and Spain in the Seventh Century’, Peritia 3 (1984), 1–16 Hines, John, et al., ‘Iohannes gower, Armiger, Poeta: Records and Memorials of his Life and Death’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. Echard, pp. 23–42 Hoenen, Maarten J. F. M., and Lodi Nauta, eds, Boethius in the Middle Ages: Latin and Vernacular Traditions of the ‘Consolatio philosophiae’ (Leiden, 1997) Hoffman, Richard L., Ovid and the Canterbury Tales (Philadelphia, 1966) Holsinger, Bruce, ‘Lyrics and Short Poems’, in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Lerer, pp. 179–212 Holtz, Louis, ‘Priscien dans la pédagogie d’Alcuin’, in Manuscripts and Tradition of Grammatical Texts from Antiquity to the Renaissance, eds Louis Holtz et al., 2 vols (Cassino, 2000), 1, 289–326 Horner, Patrick J., ‘A Sermon on the Anniversary of the Death of Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick’, Traditio 34 (1978), 381–401 Horrall, Sarah, ‘Cleanness and Cursor mundi’, English Language Notes 22 (1985), 6–11 Hult, David F., Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Roman de la Rose (Cambridge, 1986) Hunt, R. W., The History of Grammar in the Middle Ages: Collected Papers, ed. G. L. Bursill Hall (Amsterdam, 1980) Hunt, R. W. ‘The Introductions to the “Artes” in the Twelfth Century’, first published in 1948, repr. in Hunt, Collected Papers on the History of Grammar in the Middle Ages, pp. 117–44 Hunt, R. W., ‘Studies on Priscian in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. I: Petrus Helias and his Predecessors’, first published 1941–43, repr. in Hunt, The History of Grammar in the Middle Ages, ed. Bursill Hall, pp. 1–38 Hunt, R. W., The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam (1157–1217), ed. and rev. Margaret Gibson (Oxford, 1984) [an essential study of the career and writings of this important Anglo-Latin figure in his historical context]

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Hunt, Tony, Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1991) [valuable study of pedagogical glossing in English manuscripts of classical and medieval Latin authors; includes many useful texts] Hunt, Tony, ‘Aristotle, Dialectic, and Courtly Literature’, Viator 10 (1979), 95–129 Irvin, Matthew W., The Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae in the Confessio amantis (Woodbridge, 2014) Irvine, Martin, The Making of Textual Culture: Grammatica and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge, 1994) Irvine, Martin, ‘Medieval Grammatical Theory and Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Speculum 60 (1985), 850–76 Irvine, Susan, ‘Ulysses and Circe in King Alfred’s Boethius: A Classical Myth Transformed’, in Studies in English Language and Literature: ‘Doubt Wisely’: Papers in Honour of E. G. Stanley, eds M. J. Toswell and E. M. Tyler (1996), pp. 387–401 Isaac, Jean, O. P., Le Peri hermeneias en occident Boèce à Saint Thomas: histoire littéraire d’un traité d’Aristote (Paris, 1953) Jacquart, Danielle, ‘Aristotelian Thought in Salerno’, in A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, ed. Dronke, pp. 407–28 Jeauneau, Édouard, Rethinking the School of Chartres, trans. Claude Paul Desmarais (Toronto, 2009) Jeauneau, Édouard, ‘Lectio philosophorum’: recherches sur l’École Chartres (Amsterdam, 1973) Jeauneau, Édouard, ‘L’Usage de la notion d’integumentum à travers les gloses de Guillaume de Conches’, AHDLMA 24 (1957), 35–100 Jefferson, Judith, and Ad Putter, eds, Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c.1066–1520): Sources and Analysis (Turnhout, 2012) Jennings, Margaret, ‘Lucan’s Medieval Popularity: The Exemplum Tradition’, Rivista di cultura classica e medioevale 16 (1974), 215–33 Jeudy, Colette, and Yves-François Riou, ‘L’Achilleide de Stace au Moyen Âge: abrégés et arguments’, Revue d’histoire des textes 4 (1974), 143–80 Johnson, Ian, ‘New Evidence for the Authorship of Walton’s Boethius’, Notes and Queries ns 43 (1996), 19–21 Johnson, Ian, ‘Walton’s Sapient Orpheus’, in The Medieval Boethius, ed. Minnis, pp. 139–68 Johnson, Lesley, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘National, World, and Women’s History: Writers and Readers of English in Post-Conquest England’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, ed. Wallace, pp. 92–121 Johnston, Michael, ‘Robert Thornton and the Siege of Jerusalem’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009), 125–62 Jolivet, Jean, Arts du langage et théologie chez Abélard (Paris, 1969) Jonsen, Albert R., and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley, 1988) [discussions of Ciceronian scepticism]

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Jung, Marc-René, ‘L’Histoire grecque: Darès et les suites’, in Entre fiction et histoire: Troie et Rome au moyen âge, eds Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Laurence Harf-Lancner (Paris, 1997), pp. 185–206 Jung, Marc-René, La Légende de Troie en France au moyen âge: analyse des versions françaises et bibliographie raisonnée des manuscrits (Basle, 1996) Justice, Steven, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994 Kalning, Pamela, ‘Virtues and Exempla in John of Wales and Jacobus Cessolis’, in Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages, 1200–1500, eds István P. Bejczy and Cary J. Nederman (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 139–76 Kay, Sarah, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford, Calif., 2001) Kaylor, Noel Harold, Jr, and Philip Edward Phillips, eds, A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2012) Kellogg, Judith L., ‘Christine de Pizan as Chivalric Mythographer’, in The Mythographic Art, ed. Chance, pp. 100–24 Kelly, Douglas, The Conspiracy of Allusion: Description, Rewriting, and Authorship from Macrobius to Medieval Romance (Leiden, 1999) Kelly, Douglas, The Arts of Poetry and Prose (Turnhout, 1991) [the single best overview of the medieval arts of composition, focusing on the works of Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland] Kelly, H. A., Chaucerian Tragedy (Cambridge, 1997) Kelly, H. A., Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1993) Kelly, Joseph, ‘On the Brink: Bede’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 5 (1997), 85–103 Kenney, E. J., ‘The Manuscript Tradition of Ovid’s Amores, Ars amatoria, and Remedia amoris’, Classical Quarterly 12 (1962), 1–31 Ker, W. P., Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (1897) Kibre, Pearl, ‘The Quadrivium in the Thirteenth-Century Universities (with special reference to Paris)’, repr. in Pearl Kibre, Studies in Medieval Science (1984), article I King, Katherine Callen, Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1987) Klaeber, Friedrich, ‘Aeneis und Beowulf ’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 126 (1911), 40–8 Knaepen, Arnaud, ‘L’Histoire gréco-romaine dans les sources littéraires latines de la première moitié du IXe siècle: quelques conclusions provisoires’, Revue belge de philo­ logie et d’histoire 79 (2001), 341–72 Kneepkens, C. H., ‘Robert Kilwardby on Grammar’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Robert Kilwardby, eds Henrik Lagerlund and Paul Thom (Leiden, 2013), pp. 17–64 Kneepkens, C. H., ‘Some Notes on Alcuin’s Peri hermeneias with an Edition of the Text’, in Alcuin of York: Scholar at the Carolingian Court, eds L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald (Groningen, 1998), pp. 81–112 [sources of Alcuin’s linguistic thought]

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Kneepkens, C. H. ‘“Mulier quae damnavit, salvavit”: A Note on the Early Development of the Relatio simplex’, Vivarium 14 (1976), 1–25 [on medieval syntax and semantics as linguistic enquiry] Kobayashi, Yoshiko, ‘The Voice of an Exile: From Ovidian Lament to Prophecy in Book 1 of John Gower’s Vox clamantis’, in Through a Classical Eye, eds Galloway and Yeager, pp. 339–62 Kottler, Barnet, ‘The Vulgate Tradition of the Consolatio philosophiae in the Fourteenth Century’, Mediaeval Studies 17 (1955), 209–14 Kraebel, Andrew, ‘Middle English Gospel Glosses and the Translation of Exegetical Authority’, Traditio 69 (2014), 87–123 Kretzmann, Norman, et al., eds, The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1982) Krey, A. C., ‘John of Salisbury’s Knowledge of the Classics’, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Science and Letters 14 (1909/10), 948–87 Krynen, Jacques, L’Empire du roi: idées et croyance politiques en France, XIIIe–XVe siècle (Paris, 1993) Kuczynski, Michael P., ‘Gower’s Virgil’, in On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2007), pp. 163–87 Kurtz, Patricia Deery, and Linda Ehrsam Voigts, ‘Contents, Unique Treatises, and Related Manuscripts’, in Sex, Aging, and Death, ed. Tavormina, 1, 19–54 Ladd, Roger A., Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature (New York, 2010) Laird, Edgar S., ‘Texts Concerning Scientific Instruments’, in Sex, Aging, and Death, ed. Tavormina, 2, 607–80 Laistner, M. L. W., ‘Bede as a Classical and Patristic Scholar’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society fourth series 16 (1933), 69–94 Lambertini, Roberto, ‘Lost in Translation: About the Castilian Gloss on Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum’, in Thinking Politics in the Vernacular, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, eds Gianluca Briguglia and Thomas Ricklin (Fribourg, 2011), pp. 93–102 Lapidge, Michael, ‘The Library of Byrhtferth’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 685–93 Lapidge, Michael, ‘Versifying the Bible in the Middle Ages’, in The Text in the Community, eds Mann and Nolan, pp. 11–40 Lapidge, Michael, ‘The Career of Aldhelm’, Anglo-Saxon England 36 (2007), 15–69 [evidence of early English Virgilianism] Lapidge, Michael, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006) [together with Gneuss, A Handlist, constitutes the fullest resource for evidence of reading and learning in England through the eleventh century] Lapidge, Michael, ‘An Aspect of Old English Poetic Diction: The Postpositioning of Prepositions’, in Inside Old English: Essays in Honour of Bruce Mitchell, ed. John Walmsley (Oxford, 2006), pp. 153–80 Lapidge, Michael, ‘Bede and the Poetic Diction of Vergil’, in Poesía latina medieval (siglos V–XV): actas del IV Congreso del ‘Internationales Mittellateinerkomitee’, Santiago de

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Compostela, 12–15 septiembre 2002, eds Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz and José Maria Díaz Bustamante (Florence, 2005), pp. 739–48 Lapidge, Michael, ‘Stoic Cosmology and the Source of the First Old English Riddle’, Anglia 112 (1994), 1–25 Lapidge, Michael, ‘The Stoic Inheritance’, in A History of Twelfth-Century Philosophy, ed. Dronke, pp. 81–112 Lapidge, Michael, ‘Surviving Booklists from Anglo-Saxon England’, in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, eds Lapidge and Gneuss, pp. 33–89 Lapidge, Michael, ‘The Study of Latin Texts in Late Anglo-Saxon England: The Evidence of Latin Glosses’, in Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Early Medieval Britain, ed. Brooks, pp. 99–140 Lapidge, Michael, and Helmut Gneuss, eds, Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1985) Law, Vivien, Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages (1997) Law, Vivien, Wisdom, Authority, and Grammar in the Seventh Century: Decoding Virgilius Maro Grammaticus (Cambridge, 1995) Law, Vivien, The Insular Latin Grammarians (Woodbridge, 1982) Law, Vivien, ‘Malsachanus Reconsidered: A Fresh Look at a Hiberno-Latin Grammarian’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1 (1981), 83–93 Lawler, Traugott, ‘Langland Versificator’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 25 (2011), 27–76 Lawton, David, ‘The Surveying Subject and the “Whole World” of Belief: Three Case Studies’, New Medieval Literatures 4 (2000), 9–37 Lawton, David, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, ELH 54 (1987), 761–99 Lawton, Lesley, ‘The Illustration of Late Medieval Secular Texts, with Special Reference to Lydgate’s Troy Book’, in Manuscripts and Readings in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 41–71 Lazzari, Loredana, ‘Isidore’s Etymologiae in Anglo-Saxon Glossaries’, in Foundations of Learning, eds Bremmer and Dekker, pp. 63–93 Lecklider, Jane, Cleanness: Structure and Meaning (Cambridge, 1987) Lee, B. S., ‘Jonah in Patience and Prudentius’, Florilegium 4 (1982), 194–209 Lees, Clare A., ed., The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 2013) Lehmann, Paul, ‘Einleitung in die lateinische Philologie des Mittelalters’, Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen 2, ed. Ludwig Traube (Munich, 1911), pp. 1–176 Lemoine, Michel, ‘La Tradition indirecte du Platon latin’, in The Medieval Translator, vol. 5, Traduire au moyen âge, eds Roger Ellis and René Tixier (Turnhout, 1996), pp. 337–46 Lendinara, Patrizia, ‘Instructional Manuscripts in England: The Tenth- and EleventhCentury Codices and the Early Norman Ones’, in Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England, eds Lendinara et al., pp. 59–113 [see also Lendinara’s appendix of manuscripts with possible instructional use, pp. 105–13] Lendinara, Patrizia, et al., eds, Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the Light of Contemporary Manuscript Evidence (Turnhout, 2007)

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Lepine, David, A Brotherhood of Canons Serving God: English Secular Cathedrals in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1995) Lerer, Seth, ed., The Yale Companion to Chaucer (New Haven, 2006) Lerer, Seth, Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England (Princeton, 1993) Lerer, Seth, ‘John of Salisbury’s Virgil’, Vivarium 20 (1982), 24–39 Lewis, C. S., The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford, 1936; repr. 1972) Lewis, Lucy, ‘The Tavistock Boethius: One of the Earliest Examples of Provincial Printing’, in Printing Places: Locations of Book Production and Distribution since 1500, eds John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong (2005), pp. 1–14 Lewry, P. Osmund, OP, ‘Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric 1220–1320’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 1, ed. Catto, pp. 401–33 Liddell, J. R., ‘ “Leland’s” Lists of Manuscripts in Lincolnshire Monasteries’, EHR 54 (1939), 88–95 Linde, Cornelia, How to Correct the Sacra scriptura? Textual Criticism of the Latin Bible between the Twelfth and Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 2012) Lindeboom, Wim, ‘Rethinking the Recensions of the Confessio amantis’, Viator 40 (2009), 319–48 Logan, G. M., Lucan in England: The Influence of the Pharsalia on English Letters from the Beginnings through the Sixteenth Century (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1967) Long, R. James, ‘The Anonymous Peterhouse Master and the Natural Philosophy of Plants’, Traditio 46 (1991), 313–26 Long, R. James, ‘The Reception and Interpretation of the Pseudo-Aristotelian De plantis at Oxford in the Thirteenth Century’, in Knowledge and the Sciences in Medieval Philosophy, eds R. Työrinoja et al. (Helsinki, 1990), 111–23 Lord, Carla, ‘A Survey of Imagery in Medieval Manuscripts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Related Commentaries’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds Clark et al., pp. 257–83 Lord, Mary Louise, ‘Virgil’s Eclogues, Nicholas Trevet, and the Harmony of the Spheres’, Mediaeval Studies 54 (1992), 186–273 Lovatt, Roger, ‘College and University Book Collections’, in The Cambridge History of  Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 1, eds Leedham-Green and Webber, pp. 152–77 Love, Rosalind, ‘Insular Latin Literature to 900’, in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Lees, pp. 120–57 Love, Rosalind, ‘The Library of the Venerable Bede’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 606–32 Love, Rosalind, ‘The Latin Commentaries on Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae from the 9th to the 11th Centuries’, in A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages, eds Kaylor and Phillips, pp. 75–133

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Lucas, Peter, ‘Borrowing and Reference: Access to Libraries in the Late Middle Ages’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol.1, eds Leedham-Green and Webber, pp. 242–62 Lucas, Robert, ‘Mediaeval French Translations of the Latin Classics to 1500’, Speculum 45 (1970), 225–53 Lummus, David, ‘Boccaccio’s Poetic Anthropology: Allegories of History in the Genealogie deorum gentilium libri’, Speculum 87 (2012), 724–65 Luscombe, David, ‘The Ethics and Politics in Britain in the Middle Ages’, in Aristotle in Britain during the Middle Ages, ed. Marenbon, pp. 337–49 Lusignan, Serge, ‘Translatio studii and the Emergence of French as a Language of Letters in the Middle Ages’, New Medieval Literatures 14 (2012), 1–20 Lusignan, Serge, Préface au Speculum maius Vincent Beauvais: réfraction et diffraction (Montreal, 1979) McBride, M. F., Chaucer’s Physician and Fourteenth Century Medicine: A Compendium for Students (Lima, Oh., 1985) McBrine, Patrick, ‘The English Inheritance of Biblical Verse’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2008 McCabe, T. Matthew N., Gower’s Vulgar Tongue: Ovid, Lay Religion, and English Poetry in the Confessio amantis (Woodbridge, 2011) McColley, Grant, and H. W. Miller, ‘Saint Bonaventure, Francis Mayron, William Vorilong, and the Doctrine of a Plurality of Worlds’, Speculum 12 (1937), 386–9 McCulloch, Florence, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, rev. edn (Chapel Hill, NC, 1962) McFarlane, K. B., ‘The Education of the Nobility in Later Medieval England’, in K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), pp. 228–47 McGarry, Daniel D., ‘Educational Theory in the Metalogicon of John of Salisbury’, Speculum 23 (1948), 659–75 McKinley, Kathryn L., ‘Gower and Chaucer: Readings of Ovid in Late Medieval England’, in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds Clark et al, pp. 197–230 McKinley, Kathryn L., Reading the Ovidian Heroine: Metamorphoses Commentaries, 1100–1618 (Leiden, 2001) McKinley, Kathryn L., ‘The Medieval Homer: The Ilias latina’, Allegorica 19 (1998), 3–61 McKinley, Kathryn L., ‘The Medieval Commentary Tradition 1100–1500 on Metamorphoses 10’, Viator 27 (1996), 117–49 McKitterick, Rosamund, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004) Machan, Tim William, Techniques of Translation: Chaucer’s ‘Boece’ (Norman, Okla., 1985) Magoun, F. P., Jr, ‘Chaucer’s Summary of Statius’ Thebaid II–XII’, Traditio 11 (1955), 409–20 Maierù, Alfonso, University Training in Medieval Europe, ed. and trans. D. N. Pryds (Leiden, 1994) Mainzer, Conrad, ‘John Gower’s Use of the Mediaeval Ovid in the “Confessio amantis”’, Medium Ævum 41 (1972), 215–29

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Maion, Danielle, ‘The Fortune of the So-Called Practica Petrocelli Salernitani in England: New Evidence and Some Considerations’, in Form and Content, eds Lendinara et al., 495–512 Mann, Jill, ‘“He Knew Nat Catoun”: Medieval School-Texts and Middle English Literature’, in The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers, eds Mann and Nolan, pp. 41–74 Mann, Jill, and Maura Nolan, eds, The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers (Notre Dame, Ind., 2006) Mann, Nicholas and Birger Munk Olsen, eds, Medieval and Renaissance Scholarship (Leiden, 1997) Marenbon, John, ed., Aristotle in Britain during the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 1996) Marenbon, John, Early Medieval Philosophy (480–1150): An Introduction (1983) Marenbon, John, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre: Logic, Theology, and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1981) Marrou, H. I., A History of Education in the Medieval West, trans. George Lamb, 2nd edn (1977) Marshall, Peter K., Janet Martin, and Richard Rouse, ‘Clare College MS. 26 and the Circulation of Aulus Gellius 1–7 in Medieval England and France’, Mediaeval Studies 42 (1980), 353–94 Martin, Geoffrey, and Rodney M. Thomson, ‘History and History Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book, vol. 2, eds Morgan and Thomson, pp. 397–415 Martin, Janet, ‘Uses of Tradition: Gellius, Petronius and John of Salisbury’, Viator 10 (1979), 57–70 Martin, Janet, ‘John of Salisbury’s Manuscripts of Frontinus and of Gellius’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977), 1–26 Martin, Joanna, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 (Farnham, 2013) [comparisons of the English ‘classical’ romance Sir Orfeo with Scottish versions of the narrative] Martinez, Ronald L., ‘Before the Teseida: Statius and Dante in Boccaccio’s Epic’, Studi sul Boccaccio 20 (1991–2), 205–18 Matheson, Lister M., ed., Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England (East Lansing, Mich., 1994) Matheson, Lister M., and Ann Shannon, ‘A Treatise on the Elections of Times’, in Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, ed. Matheson, 23–59 Means, Laurel, ‘ “Ffor as moche as yche man may not have the astrolabe”: Popular Middle English Variations on the Computus’, Speculum 67 (1992), 595–623 Medcalf, Stephen, ‘Classical Authors’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 1, ed. Ellis, pp. 364–89 [see General References] Medcalf, Stephen, ‘Transposition: Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love’, in The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. Roger Ellis (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 181–95

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Merritt, Karen Maxwell, ‘The Source of John Pikeryng’s Horestes’, Review of English Studies 23 (1972), 255–66 Messerli, Sylviane, Oedipe enténébré: légendes d’Oedipe au XIIe siècle (Paris, 2002) Metlitzki, Dorothee, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven, 1977) Meyer, Heinz, ‘Intentio auctoris, utilitas libri: Wirkungsabsicht und Nutzen literarischer Werke nach Accessus-Prologen des 11. bis 13. Jahrhunderts’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 31 (1997), 390–413 Meyer, Paul, ‘Les Premières Compilations françaises d’histoire ancienne’, Romania 54 (1885), 1–81 Meyer-Lee, Robert, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, 2007) Michael, Michael A., ‘A Manuscript Wedding Gift from Philippa of Hainault to Edward III’, Burlington Magazine 127 (1985), 582–99 Michaud-Quantin, Pierre, and Michel Lemoine, Études sur le vocabulaire philosophique du moyen âge (Rome, 1971) Middleton, Anne, ‘Thomas Usk’s “Perdurable Letters”: The Testament of Love from Script to Print’, Studies in Bibliography 51 (1998), 63–116 Middleton, Anne ‘Two Infinites: Grammatical Metaphor in Piers Plowman’, ELH 39 (1972), 169–88 Millar, Bonnie, The Siege of Jerusalem in its Physical, Literary, and Historical Contexts (Dublin, 2000) Minnis, Alastair, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge, 2009) Minnis, Alastair, ‘“I speke of folk in seculer estaat”: Vernacularity and Secularity in the Age of Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005), 25–58 Minnis, Alastair, Magister amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford, 2001) Minnis, Alastair, ‘Latin to Vernacular: Academic Prologues and the Medieval French Art  of Love’, in Medieval and Renaissance Scholarship, eds Mann and Munk Olsen, pp. 153–86 Minnis, Alastair, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford, 1995) Minnis, Alastair, ed., Chaucer’s ‘Boece’ and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius (Cambridge, 1993) Minnis, Alastair, ‘Chaucer’s Commentator: Nicholas Trevet and the Boece’, in Chaucer’s ‘Boece’, ed. Minnis, pp. 83–166 Minnis, Alastair, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, 1988) Minnis, Alastair, ed., The Medieval Boethius: Studies in the Vernacular Translations of ‘De consolatione philosophiae’ (Cambridge, 1987) Minnis, Alastair, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge, 1982) Minnis, Alastair, ‘The Influence of Academic Prologues on the Prologues and Literary Attitudes of Late-Medieval English Writers’, Mediaeval Studies 43 (1981), 342–83

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Minnis, Alastair, ‘Aspects of the Medieval French and English Traditions of the De consolatione philosophiae’, in Boethius, ed. Gibson, pp. 312–61 Minnis, Alastair, ‘John Gower, Sapiens in Ethics and Politics’, Medium Ævum 49 (1980), 207–29 Minnis, Alastair, and Ian Johnson, eds., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2005) Minnis, Alastair, and Tim William Machan, ‘The Boece as Late-Medieval Translation’, in Chaucer’s ‘Boece’, ed. Minnis, pp. 167–88 Minnis, Alastair, and Lodi Nauta, ‘More Platonico Loquitur: What Nicholas Trevet really did to William of Conches’, in Chaucer’s Boece, ed. Minnis, pp. 1–33 Minnis, A. J., and A. B. Scott, Medieval Literary Theory [see Medieval: Primary Sources] Mitchell, J. Allen, Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature (New York, 2009) Monfrin, Jacques, ‘Les Traducteurs et leur public in France au moyen âge’, Journal des savants 149 (1964), 5–20 Monfrin, Jacques, ‘Humanisme et traductions au moyen âge’, Journal des savants 148 (1963), 161–90 Montefusco, Lucia Calboli, ‘Un catechismo retorico dell’ alto Medioevo: la Disputatio rhetorica et virtutibus di Alcuino’, in Ars – Techne: Il manuale tecnico nelle civiltà greca e romana, ed. Maria Silvana Celentano (Chieti, 2003), pp. 127–44 von Moos, Peter, Entre histoire et littérature. Communication et culture au moyen âge (Florence, 2005) von Moos, Peter, ‘Lucain au moyen âge’, in von Moos, Entre histoire et littérature, pp. 89–202 von Moos, Peter, ‘Cornelia und Heloise’, Latomus 34 (1975), 1024–59 Morrison, Elizabeth, ‘Linking Ancient Troy and Medieval France : Illuminations of an Early Copy of the Roman de Troie’, in Medieval Manuscripts, their Makers and Users: A Special Issue of Viator in Honor of Richard and Mary Rouse, ed. Christopher Baswell (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 77–102 Morrison, Elizabeth, and Anne D. Hedeman, Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500 (Los Angeles, 2010) [excellent source for medieval historiography] Morse, Ruth, ‘Medieval Biography: History as a Branch of Literature’, Modern Language Review 80 (1985), 257–68 Mortensen, Lars Boje, ‘Working with Ancient Roman History: A Comparison of Carolingian and Twelfth-Century Scholarly Endeavours’, in Gli umanesimi medievali: atti del II Congresso dell’ Internationales Mittellateinerkomitee Firenze, ed. Claudio Leonardi (Firenze, 1998), pp. 411–20 Mortensen, Lars Boje, ‘Orosius and Justinus in One Volume: Post-Conquest Books across the Channel’, Cahiers de l’Institut du moyen-âge grec et latin 60 (1990), 389–99 Mortimer, Nigel, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford, 2005)

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Moser, Thomas C., Jr, A Cosmos of Desire: The Medieval Latin Erotic Lyric in English Manuscripts (Ann Arbor, 2004) [especially on Serlo of Wilton and other Anglo-Latin poets] Mostert, Marco, ‘The Tradition of Classical Texts in the Manuscripts of Fleury’, in  Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics, eds Chavannes-Mazel and Smith, pp. 19–40 Mostert, Marco, The Library of Fleury: A Provisional List of Manuscripts (Hilversum, 1989) Munk Olsen, Birger, ‘The Production of the Classics in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics, eds Chavannes-Mazel and Smith, pp. 1–17 Munk Olsen, Birger, ‘La Diffusion et l’étude des historiens antiques au xiie siècle’, in Mediaeval Antiquity, eds Welkenhuysen et al., pp. 21–43 Munk Olsen, Birger, ‘Virgile et la renaissance du XII siècle’, in Lectures médiévales Virgile: actes du colloque organisé par l’École française Rome, ed. Jean-Yves Tilliette (Rome, 1985), pp. 31–48 Munk Olsen, Birger, ‘La Popularité des textes classiques entre le ixe et le xiie siècle’, Revue d’histoire des textes 14–15 (1984–5), 169–81 Munk Olsen, Birger, ‘Les Florilèges d’auteurs classiques’, in Les Genres littéraires dans les  sources théologiques et philosophiques médiévales: définition, critique et exploitation (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1982), pp. 151–64 Munk Olsen, Birger, ‘Les Classiques latins dans les florilèges médiévaux antérieurs au XIIIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire des textes 9 (1979), 47–121; 10 (1980), 115–64 Murdoch, John, ‘Mathesis in Philosophiam scholasticam introducta: The Rise and Development of the Application of Mathematics in Fourteenth-Century Philosophy and Theology’, in [Congrès international de philosophie médiévale], Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge, pp. 215–54 Murray, Alexander, ‘Confession as a Historical Source in the Thirteenth Century’, in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, eds R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford, 1981), pp. 275–322 Myklebust, Nicholas, ‘Misreading English Meter: 1400–1514’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2012 Myrick, Leslie Diane, From the De excidio Troiae Historia to the Togail Troí: LiteraryCultural Synthesis in a Medieval Irish Adaption of Dares’ Troy Tale (Heidelberg, 1993), pp. 8–52 Nauta, Lodi, ‘The Glosa as Instrument of the Development of Natural Philosophy: William of Conches’ Commentary on Boethius’, in Boethius in the Middle Ages, eds Hoenen and Nauta, pp. 3–39 Nauta, Lodi, ‘The Scholastic Context of the Boethius Commentary by Nicholas Trevet’, in Boethius in the Middle Ages, eds Hoenen and Nauta, pp. 41–67

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Nederman, Cary J., John of Salisbury (Tempe, Ariz., 2005) Nederman, Cary J., ‘Nature, Ethics, and the Doctrine of “Habitus”: Aristotelian Moral Psychology in the Twelfth Century’, Traditio 45 (1989–90), 87–110 Nederman, Cary J., ‘Nature, Sin and the Origins of Society: The Ciceronian Tradition in Medieval Political Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988), 3–26 Nederman, Cary J., and Arlene Feldwick, ‘To the Court and Back Again: The Origins and Dating of the Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum of John of Salisbury’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21 (1991), 129–45 Neuendorf, Fiona Tolhurst, ‘Negotiating Feminist and Historicist Concerns: Guenevere in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae’, Quondam et futurus 3 (1993), 26–44 Newhauser, Richard, The Treatise of the Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular (Turnhout, 1993) Newlands, Carole E., ‘Hrotswitha’s Debt to Terence’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 116 (1986), 369–91 Newman, Jonathan M., ‘The Rhetoric of Logic in Gower’s Confessio amantis Book 7’, Medievalia et humanistica 38 (2012), 37–58 Nicholson, Peter, ed., Gower’s Confessio Amantis: A Critical Anthology (Woodbridge, 1991) Nicoll, W. S. M., ‘Some Passages in Einhard’s Vita Karoli in Relation to Suetonius’, Medium Ævum 44 (1975), 117–20 Nighman, Chris L., ‘“Accipiant Qui Vocati Sunt”: Richard Fleming’s Reform Sermon at the Council of Counstance’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51 (2000), 1–36 Nighman, Chris L., ‘Commonplaces on Preaching among Commonplaces for Preaching? The Topic Praedicacio in Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus florum’, Medieval Sermon Studies 49 (2005), 37–57 Niles, John D., Beowulf: The Poem and its Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1983) Nolan, Barbara, Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique (Cambridge, 1992) Nolan, Maura, ‘The Poetics of Catastrophe’, in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann, eds Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 113–33 Nolan, Maura, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, 2005) Norman, Joanne, Metamorphoses of an Allegory: The Iconography of the Psychomachia in Medieval Art (New York, 1988) North, John D., ‘Astronomy and Mathematics’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, eds Catto and Evans, pp. 103–74 North, John D., ‘Natural Philosophy in Late Medieval Oxford’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, eds Catto and Evans, pp. 65–102 North, John D., Chaucer’s Universe (Oxford, 1988) North, John D., ‘The Quadrivium’, in A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1, ed. de Ridder-Symoens, pp. 337–59 North, Richard, The Origins of Beowulf: From Vergil to Wiglaf (Oxford, 2006)

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Ogilvy, J. D. A., Books known to the English, 597–1066, Mediaeval Academy of America. Publication no. 76 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967) [now superseded by Gneuss, Handlist, and Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library] O’Keeffe, Katherine O’Brien, and Andy Orchard, eds, Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, 2 vols (Toronto, 2005) Olsson, Kurt, ‘The Cardinal Virtues and the Structure of John Gower’s Speculum meditantis’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1977), 113–48 Oltrogge, Doris, Die Illustrationszyklen zur ‘Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César’ (1250–1400) (Frankfurt, 1989) Ó Néill, Pádraig P., ‘Celtic Britain and Ireland in the Early Middle Ages’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 1, eds Leedham-Green and Webber, pp. 69–90 Orchard, Andy, ‘Aldhelm’s Library’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 591–605 Orchard, Andy, ‘The Literary Background to the Encomium Emmae Reginae’, Journal of Medieval Latin 11 (2001), 156–83 Orchard, Andy, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Woodbridge, 2003) Orchard, Andy, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Cambridge, 1995) Orchard, Andy, The Poetic Art of Aldhelm (Cambridge, 1994) [use of late classical Christian poets] Orme, Nicholas, Medieval Children (New Haven, 2001) O’Sullivan, Sinéad, Early Medieval Glosses on Prudentius’ Psychomachia: The Weitz Tradition (Leiden, 2004) Owst, Gerald Robert, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1961) Pack, Roger A., ‘Pseudo-Aristoteles: Chiromantia’, AHDLMA 39 (1972), 289–320 Pairet, Ana, ‘Recasting the Metamorphoses in Fourteenth-Century France: The Challenges of the Ovide moralisé’ in Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds Clark et al., pp. 83–107 Pantin, W. A., Canterbury College Oxford I, 4 vols (Oxford, 1947–85) Papahagi, Adrian, ‘The Transmission of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae in the Carolingian Age’, Medium Ævum 78 (2009), 1–15 Parkes, M. B., ‘Patterns of Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower’, in New Science Out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A. I. Doyle, eds R. Beadle and A. J. Piper (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 81–121 Parkes, Malcolm B., ‘The Handwriting of St Boniface: A Reassessment of the Problems’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 98 (1976), 161–79 Parkes, Malcolm, ‘The Provision of Books’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, eds Catto and Evans, pp. 407–83

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Possamaï-Perez, Marylène, ‘La Légende thébaine dans l’Ovide moralisé: un example de contamination des sources’, in ‘Ce est li fruis selonc la letre’: mélanges offerts à Charles Méla, eds Olivier Collet et al. (Paris, 2002), pp. 527–45 Powell, Timothy E., ‘The “Three Orders” of Society in Anglo-Saxon England’, AngloSaxon England 23 (1994),103–32 Powicke, F. M., The Medieval Books of Merton College (Oxford, 1931) Puerto Benito, J. Javier, ‘The Heroides in Alfonso X’s General estoria: Translation, Adaptation, Use, and Interpretation of a Classical Work in a Thirteenth-Century Iberian History of the World’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kentucky, 2008 Putter, Ad, ‘Cleanness and the Tradition of Biblical Versification’, in Medieval Alliterative Poetry: Essays in Honour of Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds John A. Burrow and Hoyt N. Duggan (Dublin, 2010), pp. 166–84 Putter, Ad, ‘Descriptions of the Flood in Medieval and Renaissance Literature’, Studies in Philology 94 (1997), 137–59 Putter, Ad, An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet (1996) Quain, Edwin A., ‘The Medieval Accessus ad auctores’, Traditio 3 (1945), 215–64 Rankin, Susan, ‘Music Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 482–506 Raymo, Robert R., ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, eds Severs and Hartung, 7, 2255–378, 2467–582 Reynolds, Leighton, The Medieval Tradition of Seneca’s Letters (Oxford, 1965) Reynolds, Suzanne, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Classical Text (Cambridge, 1996) [the central role of Horace’s Satires and other Latin poets in medieval teaching of grammar] Reynolds, William D., ‘Sources, Nature, and Influence of the Ovidius moralizatus of Pierre Bersuire’, in The Mythographic Art, ed. Chance, pp. 83–99 Ribémont, Bernard, ed., Études sur le Roman de Thèbes (Orléans, 2002) Riché, Pierre, ‘Jean de Salisbury et le monde scholaire du XIIe siècle’, in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Wilks, pp. 39–61 Rickert, Edith, ‘Chaucer at School’, Modern Philology 29 (1932), 257–74 Ricklin, Thomas, ‘Plato im zwölften Jahrhundert: Einige Hinweise zu seinem Verschwinden’, in The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages: A Doxographic Approach, eds Stephen Gersh et al. (Berlin, 2002), pp. 139–64 Ricks, Christopher, ‘Metamorphosis in Other Words’, in Gower’s Confessio amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. Alastair Minnis (Woodbridge, 1983), pp. 25–49 Rigby, Stephen H., ‘The Knight’, in Historians on Chaucer: The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, ed. Stephen H. Rigby with Alastair J. Minnis (Oxford, 2014), pp. 42–62 Rigby, Stephen H., ‘Aristotle for Aristocrats and Poets: Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum as Theodicy of Privilege’, Chaucer Review 46:3 (2012), 259–313 Rigby, Stephen H., Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ and Medieval Political Theory (Leiden, 2009)

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Medieval: Secondary Sources line through the University of Missouri at Kansas City at Wakelin, Daniel, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530 (Oxford, 2007) Wallace, David, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, Calif., 1997) Wallace, David, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 1999; rev. edn 2002) Wallis, Faith, ‘Inventing Diagnosis: Theophilus’ De urinis in the Classroom’, Dynamis. Acta hispanica ad medicinae scientiarumque historiam illustrandam 20 (2000), 31–73 Wansbrough, Henry, and Anthony Marett-Crosby, eds, Benedictines in Oxford (1997) Warner, Lawrence, ‘Becket and the Hopping Bishops’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 17 (2003), 107–34 Watson, Nicholas, ‘Outdoing Chaucer: Lydgate’s Troy Book and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid as Competitive Imitations of Troilus and Criseyde’, in Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Dr. Elspeth Kennedy, ed. Karen Pratt (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 89–108 Watts, John L., ‘The Policie in Christen Remes: Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons of 1483–84’, in Authority and Consent in Tudor England: Essays Presented to C. S. L. Davies, eds G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 33–59 Watts, John L., Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge, 1996) Watts, John L., ‘De consulatu Stiliconis: Texts and Politics in the Reign of Henry VI’, Journal of Medieval History 16 (1990) 251–66 Webber, Teresa, Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral c.1075–c.1125 (Oxford, 1992). Weijers, Olga, ‘The Chronology of John of Salisbury’s Studies in France (Metalogicon, II.10)’, in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Wilks, pp. 109–16 Weiler, Björn, ‘William of Malmesbury, King Henry I, and the Gesta regum Anglorum’, in Anglo-Norman Studies, XXXI: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2008, ed. C. P. Lewis (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 157–76 Weisheipl, James A., ‘Ockham and the Mertonians’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 1, ed. Catto, pp. 607–58 Weisheipl, James A., ‘Curriculum of the Faculty of Arts at Oxford in the Early Fourteenth Century’, Mediaeval Studies 26 (1964), 143–85 Welkenhuysen, Andries, et al., eds, Mediaeval Antiquity (Leuven, 1995) Wenzel, Siegfried, ‘The Classics in Late-Medieval Preaching’, in Mediaeval Antiquity, ed. Welkenhuysen, pp. 127–43 Wenzel, Siegfried, ‘Unrecorded Middle-English Verses’, Anglia 92 (1974), 55–78 Werner, Shirley, ‘On the History of the Commenta Bernensia and the Adnotationes super Lucanum’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 96 (1994), 343–68 Werner, Shirley, The Transmission and Scholia to Lucan’s Bellum civile (Hamburg, 1998)

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Wetherbee, Winthrop, ‘Gower Teaching Ovid and the Classics’, in Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower, eds R. F. Yeager and Brian W. Gastle (New York, 2011), pp. 172–9 Wetherbee, Winthrop, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets (Notre Dame, Ind., 2008) Wetherbee, Winthrop, ‘From Antiquity to the Twelfth Century’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages, eds Minnis and Johnson, pp. 99–144 Wetherbee, Winthrop, ‘Classical and Boethian Tradition in the Confessio amantis’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. Echard, pp. 181–96 Wetherbee, Winthrop, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca, NY, 1984) Wetherbee, Winthrop, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton, 1972) Wheatley, Edward, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and his Followers. (Gainesville, Fla, 2000) [traditions of Latinized Aesop and of Avianus] Whitbread, Leslie G., ‘Conrad of Hirsau as Literary Critic’, Speculum 47 (1972), 234–45 Whitaker, Cord, ‘Ambivalent Violence: Josephus, Rationalist Evangelism, and Defining the  Human in the Siege of Jerusalem’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 28 (2014), 137–72 Wieland, Gernot R., ‘Aldhelm’s De Octo Vitiis Principalibus and Prudentius’ Psychomachia’, Medium Ævum 55 (1986), 85–92 Wieland, Gernot R., ‘The Glossed Manuscript: Classbook or Library Book?’, Anglo-Saxon England 14 (1985), 153–73 Wilkins, E. H., ‘Criseida’, Modern Language Notes 24 (1909), 65–7 Wilkins, Ernest H., ‘Descriptions of Pagan Divinities from Petrarch to Chaucer’, Speculum 32 (1957), 511–22 Wilks, Michael, ed., The World of John of Salisbury (Oxford, 1984) Wilks, Michael, ‘John of Salisbury and the Tyranny of Nonsense’, in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Wilks, pp. 263–86 Williams, John R., ‘The Quest for the Author of the Moralium dogma philosophorum, 1931–1956’, Speculum 32 (1957), 736–47 Williams, Steven J., The ‘Secret of Secrets’: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor, 2003) Windeatt, Barry, ‘Chaucer and the Filostrato’, in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Boitani, pp. 163–83 Wittig, Joseph S., ‘The “Remigian” Glosses on Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae in Context’, in Source of Wisdom, eds Wright et al., pp. 168–200 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, et al., eds, Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100–c. 1500 (York, 2009) Woods, Marjorie Curry, ‘Performing Dido’, Public Declamations: Essays on Medieval Rhetoric, Education, and Letters in Honour of Martin Camargo, eds Georgiana Donavin and Denise Stodola (Turnhout, 2015), pp. 253–65

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Woods, Marjorie Curry, ‘What are the Real Differences between Medieval and Renaissance Commentaries?’, in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom, eds Ruys and Ward, pp. 329–41 Woods, Marjorie Curry, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Columbus, Oh., 2010) [essential study, Europe-wide, of the teaching of Latin rhetoric based on the ancient tradition] Woods, Marjorie Curry, ‘Rhetoric, Gender, and the Literary Arts: Classical Speeches in the Schoolroom’, in Grammar and the Medieval Classroom, eds Cannon et al., 113–32 Woods, Marjorie Curry, ‘The Classroom as Courtroom: Cicero’s Attributes of Persons and the Interpretation of Classical Literary Characters in the Renaissance’, Ciceroniana. Atti del XIII Colloquium Tullianum. Milano, 27–29 marzo 2008 ns 13 (2009), 203–15 Woods, Marjorie Curry, ‘Weeping for Dido: Epilogue on a Premodern Rhetorical Exercise in the Postmodern Classroom’, in Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice, ed. Carol Dana Lanham (2002), pp. 284–94 Woods, Marjorie Curry, ‘Rape and the Pedagogical Rhetoric of Sexual Violence’, in Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Copeland, pp. 56–86 Woods, Marjorie Curry, and Rita Copeland, ‘Classroom and Confession’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. Wallace, pp. 376–406 Wright, Charles D., et al., eds, Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill (Toronto, 2007) Wright, Neil, ‘Gildas’ Reading: A Survey’, Sacris erudiri 32 (1991), 121–62 Wright, Neil, ‘Did Gildas Read Orosius?’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 9 (1985), 31–42 Wright, Neil, ‘Bede and Vergil’, Romanobarbarica 6 (1981), 367–71 Wright, Roger, ‘Abbo of Fleury in Ramsey (985–987)’, in Conceptualizing Multilingualism in England, ed. Tyler, pp. 105–20 Wurth, Stephanie, Der Antikenroman in der islandischen Literatur des Mittelalters (Basle, 1998) Yakovlev, Nicolay, ‘The Development of the Alliterative Metre from Old to Middle English’, D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 2008 Yeager, R. F., John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Woodbridge, 1990) Yeager, R. F., ‘Did Gower Write Cento?’, in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1989), pp. 113–32 Yeager, Suzanne, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge, 2008) Yeager, Suzanne, ‘The Siege of Jerusalem and Biblical Exegesis: Writing About Romans in Fourteenth-Century England’, Chaucer Review 39 (2004), 70–102 Yorke, Barbara, ‘Anglo-Saxon Origin Legends’, in Myth, Rulership, Church, and Charters: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks, eds Julia Barrow and Andrew Wareham (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 15–29 Yorke, Barbara, ed., Bishop Æthelwold: His Career and Influence (Woodbridge, 1988) Yu, Wesley Chihyung, ‘Romance Logic: The Argument of Vernacular Verse in the Scholastic Middle Ages’, Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2009

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Medieval: Secondary Sources Zambreno, Mary Frances, ‘Gower’s Confessio amantis IV, 1963–2013: The Education of Achilles’, Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 3 (1986), 131–48 Zeeman, Nicolette, ‘The Idol of the Text’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in the Late Middle Ages, eds Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford, 2001), pp. 43–62 Zeeman, Nicolette, ‘The Schools Give a License to Poets’, in Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Copeland, pp. 151–80 Ziolkowski, Jan M., Nota bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Ages (Turnhout, 2007) Ziolkowski, Jan M., ‘Latin Learning and Latin Literature’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 2, eds Morgan and Thomson, pp. 229–44 Ziolkowski, Jan M., ‘Women’s Lament and the Neuming of the Classics’, in Music and Medieval Manuscripts: Paleography and Performance. Essays Dedicated to Andrew Hughes, eds John Haines and Randall Rosenfeld (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 128–50 Ziolkowski, Jan M., ‘Between Text and Music: The Reception of Virgilian Speeches in Early Medieval Manuscripts’, Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 52 (2004), 107–26 Zuwiyya, Z. David, ed., A Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2011)

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Early Humanism: Primary Sources André, Bernard, Historia regis Henrici Septimi: a Bernardo Andrea tholosate conscripta, necnon alia quædam ad eundem regem spectantia, ed. James Gairdner (1858) Anstey, Henry, ed., Epistolae academicae Oxon., 2 vols (Oxford, 1898) Anwykyll, John, Compendium totius grammaticae (Oxford, 1483) Anwykyll, John, Vulgaria quedam abs Terencio in Anglicam linguam traducta (Oxford, 1483) Ariosto, Lodovico, Orlando furioso, ed. Gioacchino Paparelli, 4th edn (Milan, 2001) Ascham, Roger, The Schoolmaster, in Roger Ascham, English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge, 1904) [pp. 243–302] Bawcutt, Priscilla, and Felicity Riddy, eds, Longer Scottish Poems, vol. 1, 1375–1650 (Edinburgh, 1987) Bellenden, John, Livy’s History of Rome—The First Five Books, ed. W. A. Craigie, 2 vols, Scottish Text Society, 1st ser. 47, 51 (Edinburgh, 1901–3) Borde, Andrew, A compendyous regyment or a dyetary of healthe (1547) Brewer, J. S., et al., eds, L&P Henry VIII: Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 21 vols in 33 (1862–1910) Bullough, Geoffrey, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (1957–75) Carley, James P., ed., ‘Sir Thomas Bodley’s Library and its Acquisitions: An Edition of the Nottingham Benefaction of 1604’, in Books and Collectors 1200–1700, eds James P. Carley and Colin G. C. Tite (1997), pp. 357–86 Carley, James P., ed., King Henry’s Prayer Book. BL Royal MS 2 A XVI (2009) Caxton, William (printer), The subtyl historyes and fables of Esope (Westminster, 1484) Caxton, William, Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. N. F. Blake (1973) Caxton, William, Caxton’s Eneydos, eds M. T. Culley and F. J. Furnivall, EETS es 57 (1890) Caxton, William, The Booke of Ovyde Named Methamorphose, ed. Richard J. Moll (Toronto, 2013) Caxton, William, The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. William J. B. Crotch, EETS 176 (1928) Chaloner, Thomas, De rep. Anglorum instauranda (1579) Clerke, John, A certayn treatye moste wyttely deuysed orygynally wrytten in the spaynysshe, lately traducted in to frenche entytled, Lamant mal traicte de samye (1543) Colet, John, Aeditio (Antwerp, 1527) Cooper, Thomas, Thesaurus (1578)

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Early Humanism: Primary Sources Cox, Leonard, The Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke (c.1532), repr. with introduction, notes, and index by Frederic Ives Carpenter (Chicago, 1899) Crawford, Robert and Mick Imlah, eds, The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (Harmondsworth, 2000) Dorne, John, ‘Day-Book of John Dorne, Bookseller in Oxford, a.d. 1520’, ed. Falconer Madan, Collectanea 1 (1885), 68–177, and Madan, ed., ‘Supplementary Notes to Collectanea I, Part 3, Day-Book of John Dorne, Bookseller in Oxford, a.d. 1520’, Collectanea 2 (1890), 453–78 Douglas, Gavin, The Aeneid (1513), ed. Gordon Kendal, 2 vols (2011) Douglas, Gavin, Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’, translated into Scottish Verse, ed. David F. C. Coldwell, 4 vols, Scottish Text Society, 3rd ser. 25, 27, 28, 30 (Edinburgh, 1957–64) Douglas, Gavin, Aeneid of Virgil Translated into Scottish verse by Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, ed. George Dundas, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1839) Douglas, Gavin, Virgil’s Æneis: translated into Scottish verse, by . . . Gawin Douglas . . . A new edition. Wherein the many errors of the former are corrected, . . . To which is added a large glossary, . . . And to the whole is prefix’d an exact account of the author’s life and writings (Edinburgh, 1710) Douglas, Gavin, The ·xiii. bukes of Eneados of the famose poete Virgill translatet out of Latyne verses into Scottish metir, bi the Reuerend Father in God, Mayster Gawin Douglas Bishop of Dunkel (1553) Douglas, Gavin, Select works of Gawin Douglass: . . . Containing Memoirs of the author, The palice [sic] of honour, Prologues to the Æneid, and a glossary of obsolete words; To which is added, an old poem, author unknown (Perth, 1787) Douglas, Gavin, The Poetical Works of Gavin Douglas, ed. J. Small, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1874) Douglas, Gavin, The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, rev. edn (Edinburgh, 2003) Elyot, Thomas, The education or bringinge up of children, translated oute of Plutarche (1530) Elyot, Thomas, The Boke Named the Governour (1531) Elyot, Thomas, Of the knowledeg[sic] whiche maketh a wise man (1533) Elyot, Thomas, The dictionary (1538) Elyot, Thomas, The Castel of helth (1539) Erasmus, Desiderius, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 6, The Correspondence of Erasmus, Letters 842 to 992, 1518 to 1519, trans. R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson (Toronto, 1982) Erasmus, De copia, De ratione studii, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 24, Literary and Educational Writings 2, ed. and trans. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto, 1978) Erasmus, De conscribendis epistolis, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 25, Literary and Educational Writings 3, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto, 1985) Erasmus, ‘Homily on the Child Jesus. Concio de puero Iesu’, trans. Emily Kearn, in Collected Works of Erasmus vol. 29, eds Elaine Fantham and Erika Rummel (Toronto, 1989)

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Early Humanism: Primary Sources Erasmus, Desiderius, The Handbook of the Christian Soldier. Enchiridion milites christiani, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 66, Enchiridion, De contemptu mundi, De vidua christiana, ed. John. W. O’Malley (Toronto, 1988) Erasmus, Desiderius, Poems, ed. Harry Vredeveld, trans. Clarence H. Miller, Collected Works of Erasmus, vols 85–6 (Toronto, 1993) Erasmus, Desiderius, and Thomas More, Luciani compluria opuscula longe festiuissima (Paris, 1506) Erasmus, Familiarium colloquiorum formulae (Basle, 1518) Erasmus, Desiderius, Proverbes or adagies, trans. Richard Taverner (1539) Fox, Denton, and William A. Ringler, eds, The Bannatyne Manuscript: National Library of Scotland Advocates MS.1.1.6 (1980) Fox, Richard (Bishop), The Foundation Statutes of Bishop Fox for Corpus Christi College in the University of Oxford, ed. G. R. M. Ward (1843) Fuller, Thomas, The history of the worthies of England (1662) Godfrey, Garrett, Garrett Godfrey’s Accounts, c.1527–1533, eds Elisabeth S. Leedham-Green et al. (Cambridge, 1992) Heywood, Jasper, The seconde tragedie of Seneca entituled Thyestes (1560) Holt, John, Lac puerorum (Mylke for Chyldren) (Antwerp, c.1505) Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, Certain bokes of Virgiles Aeneis turned into English meter by the right honorable lorde, Henry Earle of Surrey (1557) Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems, ed. Emrys Jones (Oxford, 1964) Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, The Aeneid of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, ed. Florence H. Ridley (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963) Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, The Poems of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, ed. Frederick Morgan Padelford, rev. edn (Seattle, 1928) Ippolito di Medici, I sei primi libri l’Eneide di Virgilio, ed. Luciana Borsetto (Bologna, 2002) [facsimile of the 1540 edition] Kaulek, J., ed., Correspondance politique MM. Castillon et Marillac, ambassadeurs de France en Angleterre, 1537–42 (Paris, 1885) Leland, John, De uiris illustribus. On Famous Men, eds and trans. James P. Carley with the assistance of Caroline Brett (Toronto and Oxford, 2010) Leland, John, Epigrammata: A Hypertext Critical Edition, ed. Dana F. Sutton (accessed August 2014) Leland, John, Naeniae in mortem Thomae Viati (1542) Leland, John, The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary by Thomas Hearne, 3rd edn, 9 vols (Oxford, 1768–9) Liddell, Mark, ed., The Middle-English Translation of Palladius De re rustica (Berlin, 1896) Lily, William, Absolutissimus de octo orationis partium constructione libellus (1513) Lily, William, Grammatices rudimenta [Rudimenta paruulorum] (York, ?1516)

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Early Humanism: Primary Sources Lily, William, Lily’s Grammar of Latin in English. An Introduction of the Eyght Partes of Speche, and the Construction of the Same, ed. Hedwig Gwosdek (Oxford, 2013) Linacre, Thomas, Progymnasmata grammatices vulgaria (c.1515) Linacre, Thomas, Rudimenta grammatices (c.1523) Linacre, Thomas, De emendata structura Latini sermonis libri sex (1524) Lupset, Thomas, An exhortation to yonge men perswading them to walke in the pathe way that leadeth to honeste and goodness (1529, 1535) Marvell, Andrew, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (2008) Montaigne, Michel de, Œuvres complètes, ed. Robert Barral (Paris, 1967) More, Thomas, Epigrammata clarissimi (Basle, 1518) [translations of Greek epigrams into Latin as models for imitation and copia] More, Thomas, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 3, part II, Latin Poems, eds Clarence H. Miller et al. (New Haven, 1984) More, Thomas, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 15, In Defense of Humanism, ed. Daniel Kinney (New Haven, 1986) Orme, Nicholas, ed., English School Exercises 1420–1530 (Toronto, 2013) [contains a modern edition of Anwykyll’s Vulgaria] Pace, Richard, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, eds Frank Manley and Richard S. Sylvester (New York, 1967) Pace, Richard, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur (Basle, 1518) Parker, Henry, Forty-six Lives, translated from Boccaccio’s De Claris mulieribus by Henry Parker, ed. Herbert G. Wright, EETS 214 (Oxford, 1943) Parker, Henry, Lord Morley, Lord Morley’s ‘Triumphes’ of Fraunces Petrarcke. The First English Translation of the Trionfi, ed. D. D. Carnicelli (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) Parkhurst, John, Ludicra (1573) [Pastons] Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth-Century, eds Norman Davis et al., EETS ss 20–2 (Oxford, 2004–5) Petrarch, Francis, L’Africa, ed. Nicola Festa, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca 1 (Florence, 1926) Petrarch, Francis, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. Robert Durling (Cambridge, Mass., 1976) Petrarch, Francis, Rerum familiarum libri/Letters on Familiar Matters, ed. and trans. Aldo Bernardo, 3 vols (New York, 2005) Plutarch, The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Thomas North (1579) Russell, John, ‘Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons’, in English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century, ed. S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge, 1936), pp. 167–91 Salutati, Coluccio, Colucii Salutati de Laboribus Herculis, ed. B. L. Ullman (Zurich, [1947]) Sammut, Alfonso, ed., Unfredo duca di Gloucester e gli umanisti italiani, Medioevo e Umanesimo 40 (Padua, 1980)

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Early Humanism: Primary Sources Skelton, John, The Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus, ed. F. M. Salter and H. L. R. Edwards, EETS 233, 239 (1956–7) Skelton, John, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven, 1983) Skelton, John, The Latin Writings of John Skelton, ed. David R. Carlson (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991) Stanbridge, John, The Vulgaria of John Stanbridge and the Vulgaria of Robert Whittinton, ed. Beatrice White (1932) Tait, James, ed., ‘Letters of John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, and Archbishop Neville to the University of Oxford’, EHR 35 (1920), 570–4 Thomas, William, Principal rules of the Italian grammer with a dictionarie for the better understandyng of Boccace, Petrarcha, and Dante (1550) Tottell, Richard, Tottel’s Miscellany (1557–1587), ed. Hyder E. Rollins, rev. edn, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1966) Traversagni, Lorenzo Guglielmo, Margarita eloquentiae castigatae, ed. Giovanni Farris (Savona, 1978) Trissino, Giovanni Giorgio, and Pietro Aretino, Trissino’s Sophonisba and Aretino’s Horatia: Two Italian Renaissance Tragedies, eds Michael Lettieri and Michael Ukas (Lewistown, NY, 1997 Udall, Nicholas Floures for Latine Spekynge Selected and Gathered oute of Terence (1534) Vegio, Maffeo, Mapheus Vegius and his Thirteenth Book of the Aeneid, ed. Anna Cox Brinton (Stanford, Calif., 1930, repr. 2002) Vegio, Maffeo, Short Epics, ed. and trans. Michael C. J. Putnam with James Hankins (Cambridge, Mass., 2004) Vives, Juan Luis, De ratione studii puerilis (Oxford, 1523) Vives, Juan Luis, De institutione foeminae Christianae (Antwerp, 1524) Vives, Juan Luis, De tradendis disciplinis (part 2 of De disciplinis) (Antwerp, 1531) Wakefield, Robert, On the Three Languages [1524], ed. and trans. G. Lloyd Jones (Binghamton, NY, 1989) Watson, Roderick, ed., The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots and English (Edinburgh, 1995) Whittinton, Robert, see Stanbridge, John Worcester, William, trans., printed Caxton, Tullius de Amicicia, printed in Tullius de senectute (Westminster, 1481) Worcester, William, Itineraries, ed. John H. Harvey (Oxford, 1969) Worcester, William, The Boke of Noblesse, ed. J. G. Nichols (1860) Wyatt, Thomas, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry, ed. Richard C. Harrier, (Cambridge, 1975) Wyatt, Thomas, The Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, eds Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool, 1969) Wyatt, Thomas, The Quyete of Mynde (1528)

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Early Humanism: Secondary Sources Allen, C. G., ‘The Sources of “Lily’s Latin Grammar”: A Review of the Facts and Some Further Suggestions’, The Library 5/9 (1954), 85–100 Anglo, Sidney, ‘The Evolution of the Early Tudor Disguising, Pageant, and Mask’, Renaissance Drama new ser. 1 (1968), 3–44 Anglo, Sidney, Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1997) Austin, R. G., Some English Translations of Virgil: An Inaugural Lecture (Liverpool, 1956) Axton, Marie, and James P. Carley, eds, ‘Triumphs of English’: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court: New Essays in Interpretation (2000) Baldwin, T. W., William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana, Ill., 1944) [overview of humanist education in England] Bawcutt, Priscilla, ‘Writing about Love in Late Medieval Scotland’, in Writing on Love in the English Middle Ages, ed. Helen Cooney (Gordonsville, Va, 2006), pp. 179–96 Bawcutt, Priscilla, ‘Gavin Douglas and the Text of Virgil’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 4 (1996–8), 213–31 Bawcutt, Priscilla, ‘New Light on Gavin Douglas’, in The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture, eds A. A. MacDonald et al. (Leiden, 1994), pp. 95–106 Bawcutt, Priscilla, Gavin Douglas: A Critical Study (Edinburgh, 1976) [the definitive study of Douglas] Beattie, William, ‘Fragments of the Palyce of Honour’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 3 (1951), 33–46 Bennett, H. S., ‘A Check-List of Robert Whittinton’s Grammars’, The Library 5/7 (1952), 1–14 Bennett, J. A. W., ‘The Early Fame of Gavin Douglas’s Eneados’, Modern Language Notes 61 (1946), 83–8 Binns, J. W., Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990) Black, Robert, ‘Humanism’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 7, c.1415–c.1500, ed. Christopher Allmand (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 243–77 Blackwell, Constance W. T., ‘Humanism and Politics in English Royal Biography: The Use of Cicero, Plutarch and Sallust in the Vita Henrici Quinti (1438) by Titus Livius Frulovisi and the Vita Henrici Septimi (1500–3) by Bernard André’, in Acta Conventus

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Early Humanism: Secondary Sources Neo-Latini Sanctandreani: Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, ed. I. D. McFarlane (Binghamton, NY, 1986), pp. 431–40 Blackwell, Constance, ‘Niccolò Perotti in England, 1: John Anwykyll, Bernard André, John Colet and Luis Vives’, Studi umanistici Piceni 2 (1982), 13–28 Blanchard, W. Scott, Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Bucknell, Pa, 1995) [Bodleian Library], Duke Humfrey’s Library and the Divinity School, 1488–1988: An Exhibition at the Bodleian Library, June–August 1988 (Oxford, 1988) Bose, Mishtooni, ‘Useless Mouths: Reformist Poetics in Audelay and Skelton’, in Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century, eds Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus, Oh., 2011), pp. 159–79 Botley, Paul, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Gianozzo Manetti and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge, 2004) Boyle, Leonard E., and Richard H. Rouse, ‘A Fifteenth-Century List of the Books of Edmund Norton’, Speculum 50 (1975), 284–8 Brigden, Susan, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (2012) Brigden, Susan, ‘Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and the “Conjured League” ’, Historical Journal 37 (1994), 507–37 Brodie, Alexander H., ‘Anwykyll’s Vulgaria: A Pre-Erasmian Textbook’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 75 (1974), 416–27 Brown, Michael, The Black Douglases (East Linton, 2004) Brownlow, F. W., ‘Eschatological Form in Skelton’s Poetry’, in Renaissance Historicisms: Essays in Honor of Arthur F. Kinney, eds James M. Dutcher and Anne Lake Prescott (Newark, Del., 2008), pp. 18–35 Buckley, Emma, ‘ “Live False Aneas!” Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage and the Limits of Translation’, Classical Reception Journal 3 (2011), 129–47 Burnett, Stephen G., Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500–1660) (Leiden, 2012) Burrow, Colin, ‘Virgil in English Translation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Martindale, pp. 21–37 Burrow, Colin, ‘Horace at Home and Abroad: Wyatt and Sixteenth-Century Horatianism’, in, Horace Made New, eds Martindale and Hopkins, pp. 27–49 Cairncross, Andrew, ‘Thomas Kyd and the Myrmidons’, Arlington Quarterly 1.4 (1968), 40–5 Canitz, A. E. C., ‘The Prologue to the Eneados: Gavin Douglas’s Directions for Reading’, Studies in Scottish Literature 25 (1990), 1–22 Carley, James P., The Books of King Henry VIII and his Wives (2004) Carley, James P., ‘Religious Controversy and Marginalia: Pierfrancesco di Piero Bardi, Thomas Wakefield, and their Books’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 12:3 (2002), 206–45

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Early Humanism: Secondary Sources Carley, James P., ‘Henry VIII’s Library and Humanist Donors: W. Matteo Giberti as a Case Study’, in Woolfson, Reassessing Tudor Humanism, pp. 99–128 Carley, James P., ‘The Writings of Henry Parker, Lord Morley’, in ‘Triumphs of English’, eds Axton and Carley, pp. 27–68 Carley, James P., ‘John Leland in Paris: The Evidence of his Poetry’, Studies in Philology 83 (1986), 1–50 Carley, James P., and Pierre Petitmengin, ‘Pre-Conquest Manuscripts from Malmesbury Abbey and John Leland’s Letter to Beatus Rhenanus Concerning a Lost Copy of Tertullian’s Works’, Anglo-Saxon England 33 (2004), 195–223 Carlson, David R., ‘Bernard André, De sancta Katharina carmen “Cum Maxentius imperator” and De Sancto Andrea Apostolo “Si meritis digna” (c.1509–1517)’, Sacris erudiri 46 (2007), 433–74 Carlson, David R., ‘The “Opicius” Poems (British Library, Cotton Vespasian B.IV) and the Humanist Anti-Literature in Early Tudor England’, Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002), 869–903 Carlson, David R., English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto, 1993) [addresses the broad contexts of patronage] Carlson, David R., ‘The “Grammarians War” 1519–1521, Humanist Careerism in Early Tudor England, and Printing’, Medievalia et humanistica 18 (1992), 157–81 Carlson, David R., ‘Erasmus, Revision, and the British Library Manuscript Egerton 1651’, Renaissance and Reformation ns 15 (1991), 199–232 Carlson, David R., ‘Royal Tutors in the Reign of Henry VII’, Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991), 253–79 Carlson, David R., ‘John Skelton and Ancient Authors: Two Notes’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 38 (1989), 100–9 Carlson, David R., ‘King Arthur and Court Poems for the Birth of Arthur Tudor in 1486’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 36 (1987), 147–83 Castro Carracedo, Juan Manuel. ‘Pium Vestrum Catullum Britannum: The Influence of Catullus’ Poetry on John Skelton’, Sederi 14 (2004), 3–16 Clough, Cecil H., ‘Three Gigli of Lucca in England during the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries: Diversification in a Family of Mercery Merchants’, The Ricardian: Journal of the Richard III Society 13 (2003), 121–47 Clough, Cecil H., ‘New Light on Cornelio Vitelli and Humanistic Studies at Oxford University in the Late Fifteenth Century’, The Ricardian: Journal of the Richard III Society 12 (2000), 94–119 Clough, Cecil H., ‘Baldassare Castiglione’s Presentation Manuscript to King Henry VII’, Liverpool Classical Monthly 3 (1978), 269–72 Clough, Cecil H., ‘Federigo Veterani, Polydore Vergil’s “Anglica Historia” and Baldassare Castiglione’s “Epistola . . . ad Henricum Angliae regem”’, English Historical Review 82 (1967), 772–83

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Early Humanism: Secondary Sources Cole, Andrew, ‘The Style of Humanist Latin Letters at the University of Oxford: On Thomas Chaundler and the Epistolae Academicae Oxon. (Registrum F)’, in Form and Reform: Reading the Fifteenth Century, eds Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus, Oh., 2011), pp. 40–65 Consolino, Franca Ela, ‘Massimiano e le sorti dell’elegia latina’, in Mutatio rerum: letteratura, filosofia, scienza tra tardo antico e altomedioevo, eds Maria Luisa Silvestre and Marisa Squillante (Naples, 1997), pp. 363–400 Cooper, Helen, and Sally Mapstone, eds, The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford, 1997) Crane, Mary Thomas, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1992) Cummings, Robert, ‘ “To the cart the fift quheill”; Gavin Douglas’s Humanist Supplement to the Eneados’, Translation and Literature 4 (1995), 133–56 Curtis, Cathy, ‘Richard Pace’s De fructu and Early Tudor Pedagogy’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Woolfson, pp. 43–77. D’Alton, Craig W., ‘The Trojan War of 1518: Melodrama, Politics, and the Rise of Humanism’, Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997), 727–38 D’Amico, John F., Theory and Practice in Renaissance Textual Criticism: Beatus Rhenanus Between Conjecture and History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988) Dawson, Jane E. A., Scotland Reformed 1488–1587 (Edinburgh, 2007) De la Mare, A. C., ‘Manuscripts Given to the University of Oxford by Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester’, Bodleian Library Record 13 (1988), 30–51 De la Mare, A. C., ‘Vespasiano da Bisticci and Gray’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957), 174–6 De la Mare, A. C., and R. W. Hunt, Duke Humfrey and English Humanism in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1970) Doran, Susan, ed., Henry VIII: Man and Monarch (2009) Dowling, Maria, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (1986) DuQuesnay, I. M. Le M., ‘Horace and Maecenas: The Propaganda Value of Sermones I’, in Poetry and Politics in the Age of Augustus, eds Tony Woodman and David West (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 19–58 Edwards, H. L. R., and William Nelson, ‘The Dating of Skelton’s Later Poems’, PMLA 53 (1938), 601–22 Elton, Geoffrey, ‘Humanism in England’, in The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, eds Anthony Goodman and Angus Mackay (1990), pp. 259–78 Flynn, Vincent Joseph, ‘The Grammatical Writings of William Lily, ?1468–?1523’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 37 (1943), 85–113 Foley, Stephen Merriam, ‘Not-Blank-Verse: Surrey’s Aeneid Translations and the Pre-History of a Form’, in Poets and Critics Read Virgil, ed. Sarah Spence (New Haven, 2001), pp. 153–66 Ford, Margaret Lane, ‘Private Ownership of Printed Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, eds Hellinga and Trapp, pp. 203–28

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Early Humanism: Secondary Sources Fox, Alistair, ‘Facts and Fallacies: Interpreting English Humanism’, in Reassessing the Henrician Age, eds Fox and Guy, pp. 9–33 Fox, Alistair, and John Guy, eds, Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500–1550 (Oxford, 1986) Fucilla, J. G., ‘The Direct Source of Wyatt’s Epigram: In Dowtfull Brest’, Research News 9 (1956), 187–8 Gairdner, James, Memorials of King Henry the Seventh (1858) Garrod, H. W., ‘Erasmus and his English Patrons’, The Library 5:4 (1949), 1–13 Ghosh, Kantik, ‘ “The Fift Quheill”: Gavin Douglas’s Maffeo Vegio’, Scottish Literary Journal 22 (1995), 5–21 Gillespie, Vincent, ‘Justification by Faith in Skelton’s Replycacion’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, eds Cooper and Mapstone, pp. 273–311 Godshalk, William Lee, ‘Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage’, ELH 38 (1971), 1–18 Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe (1986) [foundational study of the material and ideological environments in which early modern education took shape] Gray, Douglas, ‘Gavin Douglas’, in A Companion to Older Scots Poetry, eds Priscilla Bawcutt and J. Hadley Williams (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 149–64 Greene, Thomas M., The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982) Griffiths, Jane, ‘ “An Ende of an Olde Song”: Middle English Lyric and the Skeltonic’, Review of English Studies 60 (2009), 705–22 Griffiths, Jane, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford, 2006) Griffiths, Jane, ‘The Grammarian as “Poeta” and “Vates”: Self-Presentation in the AntiBossicon’, in Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter-Writing in Early Modern Times, eds Toon van Houdt, Jan Papy, and Gilbert Tournoy (Leuven, 2001), pp. 317–35 Guy-Bray, Stephen, ‘Embracing Troy: Surrey’s Aeneid’, in Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Alan Shepherd and Stephen D. Powell (Toronto, 2004) Gwynne, Paul. ‘ “Tu alter Caesar eris”: Maximilian I, Vladislav II, Johannes Michael Nagonius and the renovatio Imperii’, Renaissance Studies 10 (1996), 56–71 Hardison, O. B., ‘Blank Verse before Milton’, Studies in Philology 81 (1984), 253–74 Hardison, O. B., ‘Tudor Humanism and Surrey’s Translation of the Aeneid’, Studies in Philology 83 (1986), 237–60 Harrier, Richard C., The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1975) Hasler, Antony J., Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland: Allegories of Authority (Cambridge, 2011) Hay, Denys, Renaissance Essays (1988)

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Early Humanism: Secondary Sources Hay, Denys, ‘England and the Humanities in the Fifteenth Century’, in Hay, Renaissance Essays, pp. 168–231 van Heijnsbergen, Theo, ‘Bannatyne, George (1545–1607/8 )’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) online edn, Oct. 2006 Henderson, Judith Rice, ‘Despauterius’ Syntaxis (1509): The Earliest Publication of Erasmus’ De conscribendis epistolis’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 37 (1988), 175–210 Henry, Joni, ‘Capgrave’s Dedications: Reassessing an English Flunkey’, Studies in Philology 10 (2013), 731–61 Herman, Peter C., and Ray G. Siemens, ‘Henry VIII and the Poetry of Politics’, in Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I, ed. Peter C. Herman (Tempe, Ariz., 2002), pp. 11–34 Hobbins, Daniel, ‘Arsenal MS 360 as a Witness to the Career and Writings of Bernard André’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 50 (2001), 161–98 Hogrefe, Pearl, The Sir Thomas More Circle (Champaign, Ill., 1959) Hudson, Hoyt H., ‘John Leland’s List of Early English Humanists’, Huntington Library Quarterly 2 (1939), 301–4 Hyland, Peter, Disguise on the Early Modern Stage (Farnham, 2001) James, Heather, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge, 1997) Jensen, Kristian, ‘De emendata structura Latini sermonis: The Latin Grammar of Thomas Linacre’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes 49 (1986), 106–25 Jensen, Kristian, ‘Text-books in the Universities: The Evidence from the Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, eds Hellinga and Trapp, pp. 354–79 Jones, G. Lloyd, The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language (Manchester, 1983) Juhász-Ormsby, Ágnes, ‘Reading Practices of a Tudor Educator: Nicholas Udall’s Annotated Copy of Thomas Linacre’s De emendate structura Latini sermonis libri sex’, Journal of the Early Book Society 12 (2009), 133–60 Juhász-Ormsby, Ágnes, ‘Nicholas Udall’s Floures for Latine Spekynge: An Erasmian Textbook’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 52 (2003), 137–58 Kahn, Victoria, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Scepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1985) Kallendorf, Craig, ‘Boccaccio’s Dido and the Rhetorical Criticism of Virgil’s Aeneid’, Studies in Philology 82 (1985), 401–15 Ker, N. R., ‘The Provision of Books’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3, ed. McConica, pp. 441–77 Kerrigan, John, ‘Wyatt’s Selfish Style’, Essays and Studies 34 (1981), 1–18 Kinney, Arthur F., John Skelton, Priest as Poet: Seasons of Discovery (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987)

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Early Humanism: Secondary Sources Kinsman, Robert S., ‘Skelton’s “Uppon a Deedmans Hed”: New Light on the Origin of the Skeltonic’, Studies in Philology 50 (1953), 101–9 Knecht, R. J., Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge, 1994) Kraye, Jill, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996) Kristeller, Paul Oskar, ‘Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance’, Byzantion 17 (1944–5), 346–74 Leader, Damian R., A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. 1, The University to 1546 (Cambridge, 1989) Leader, Damian R., ‘Professorship and Academic Reform at Cambridge: 1480–1520’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 14 (1983), 215–27 Leedham-Green, Elisabeth, ‘University Libraries and Book-Sellers’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, eds Hellinga and Trapp, pp. 316–53 Lewis, C. S., English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1973) Liddell, J. R., ‘The Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in the Sixteenth Century’, The Library 18 (1938), 385–416 Löfstedt, Leena, ‘Aucuns notables extraitz du livre de Vegèce’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 83 (1982), 297–312 Logan, F. Donald, ‘The First Royal Visitation of the English Universities, 1535’, English Historical Review 106 (1991), 861–88 Logan, F. Donald, ‘The Origins of the So-Called Regius Professorships: An Aspect of the Renaissance in Oxford and Cambridge’, Studies in Church History 14 (1977), 271–8 Lowry, Martin, ‘The Arrival and Use of Continental Printed Books in Yorkist England’, in Le Livre dans l’Europe de la Renaissance, eds Pierre Aquilon and Henri-Jean Martin (Paris, 1988), pp. 449–59 Lyall, R. J., ‘Vernacular Prose before the Reformation’, in The History of Scottish Literature, vol. i, Origins to 1660, ed. R. D. S. Jack (Aberdeen, 1988), pp. 163–82 McConica, James, ed., The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3, The Collegiate University (Oxford, 1986) McConica, James, ‘The Rise of the Undergraduate College’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3, ed. McConica, pp. 17–29 McConica, James, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford, 1965) Macdougall, Norman, James IV (East Linton, 1997) Macdougall, Norman, James III: A Political Study (Edinburgh, 1981) Mack, Peter, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620 (Oxford, 2011) McPeek, J. A. S., Catullus in Strange and Distant Britain (Cambridge, Mass., 1939) MacQueen, John, ‘Aspects of Humanism in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Literature’, in Humanism in Renaissance Scotland, ed. John MacQueen (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 10–31

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Early Humanism: Secondary Sources Maule, Jeremy, ‘What Did Morley Give When He Gave a “Plutarch” Life?’, in ‘Triumphs of English’, eds Axton and Carley, pp. 107–30 Maxson, Brian Jeffrey, ‘Kings and Tyrants: Leonardo Bruni’s Translation of Xenophon’s Hiero’, Renaissance Studies 24 (2009), 188–206 Merritt, Karen Maxwell, ‘The Source of John Pikeryng’s Horestes’, Review of English Studies 23 (1972), 255–66 Meyer-Lee, Robert J., Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, 2007) Milne, J. G., The Early History of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (Oxford, 1946) Mitchell, R. J., John Tiptoft (1427–1470) (1938) Moore, Peter R., ‘The Heraldic Charge Against the Earl of Surrey, 1546–47’, English Historical Review 116 (2001), 557–83 Moss, Ann, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996) [pedagogical methods of Erasmus and Vives] Muir, Kenneth, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (New Haven, 1977) Muir, Kenneth, The Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool, 1963) Murphy, James J., ‘Laurentius Guglielmus Traversagnus and the Genesis of Vaticana Codex Lat. 11441, with Remarks on Bodleian MS Laud. Lat. 61’, in Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on his 70th Birthday, eds Simon Horobin and Linne Mooney (York, 2014), pp. 241–9 Murphy, Michael, ‘Allan Ramsay as an Imitator of Horace’, Études écossaises 2 (1993), 123–9 Nall, Catherine, Reading and War in Fifteenth-Century England from Lydgate to Malory (Cambridge, 2012) Nelson, William, John Skelton (New York, 1939) Olszowy-Schlanger, Judith, ‘Robert Wakefield and his Hebrew Manuscripts’, Zutot 6 (2009), 25–33 Omont, H., Anciens inventaires et catalogues de la bibliothèque nationale, 1 (Paris, 1908) Orme, Nicholas, Medieval Schools from Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven, 2006) Orme, Nicholas, ‘Schools and Schoolmasters (to c.1550)’, in The Cambridge History of  Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 1, eds Leedham-Green and Webber, pp. 420–34 Orme, Nicholas, ‘Schools and School-Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, eds Hellinga and Trapp, pp. 449–69 Orme, Nicholas, Education in Early Tudor England: Magdalen College Oxford and its School 1480–1540 (Oxford, 1998) Orme, Nicholas, ‘John Holt (d. 1504) Tudor Schoolmaster and Grammarian’, The Library 6th ser., 18 (1996), 283–305 Orth, Myra D., Renaissance Manuscripts: The Sixteenth Century (2013) O’Sullivan, William, ‘John Manyngham: An Early Oxford Humanist’, Bodleian Library Record 7 (1962), 28–39

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Early Humanism: Secondary Sources Pafort, Eloise, ‘A Group of Early Tudor School-Books’, The Library 4:26 (1946), 227–61 Parkes, Malcolm B., Their Hands Before our Eyes (Aldershot, 2008) Pérez Custodio, María Violéta, ‘La expresión del ethos y el pathos en las etopeyas escolares del Renacimiento’, in Humanismo y pervivencia del mundo clásico. Homenaje al profesor Luis Gil, ed. José María Maestre Maestre, 2 (Cádiz, 1997), pp. 795–806 Pérez Fernández, José María, ‘ “Wyatt resteth here”: Surrey’s Republican Elegy’, Renaissance Studies 18 (2004), 208–38 Petrina, Alessandra, Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (Leiden, 2004) Pinti, Daniel J., ‘Alter Maro, alter Mapheus: Gavin Douglas’s Negotiation of Authority in Eneados 13’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993), 323–44 Potter, Ursula, ‘ “No Terence Phrase: His Tyme and Myne are Twaine”; Erasmus, Terence, and Censorship in the Tudor Classroom’, in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom, eds Ruys and Ward, pp. 365–89 Quéruel, Danielle, ‘La Chronique d’un ménestrel de Reims (MS 432)’, in Les Manuscrits français de la bibliothèque Parker: Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Actes du colloque, 24–27 Mars 1993, ed. Nigel E. Wilkins (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 39–64 Rex, Richard, ‘Fisher’s College’, in St John’s College Cambridge: A History, ed. Peter Lineham (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 5–29 Rex, Richard, ‘Humanism and Reformation in England and Scotland’, in Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament: The History of its Interpretation, vol. 2, From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, eds Magne Saebø et al. (Göttingen, 2008), 512–35 [valuable survey of the entrance of Hebrew into the English curriculum] Rex, Richard, ‘The Role of English Humanists in the Reformation up to 1559’, in The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands, eds N. Scott Amos et al.(Aldershot, 1999) pp. 19–40 Ridley, Florence H., ‘Surrey’s Debt to Gawin Douglas’, PMLA 76 (1961), 25–33 Robinson, Ian, The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1998) Royan, Nicola, ed., ‘Langage Cleir Illumynate: Scottish Poetry from Barbour to Drummond, 1375–1630 (Amsterdam, 2007) Rummel, Erika, Erasmus as a Translator of the Classics (Toronto, 1985) Rundle, David, ed., Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 2012) Rundle, David, ‘The Unoriginality of Tito Livio Frulovisi’s Vita Henrici Quinti’, English Historical Review 123 (2008), 1109–31 Rundle, David, ‘Filippo Alberici, Henry VII and Richard Fox: The English Fortunes of a Little-Known Italian Humanist’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 68 (2005), 137–55 Rundle, David, ‘The Scribe Thomas Candour and the Making of Poggio Bracciolini’s English Reputation’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 12 (2005), 1–25

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Early Humanism: Secondary Sources Rundle, David, ‘Humanist Eloquence among the Barbarians in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Britannia Latina: Latin in the Culture of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, eds Charles Burnett and Nicholas Mann (2005), pp. 68–85 Rundle, David, ‘Humanism before the Tudors: On Nobility and the Reception of the Studia Humanitatis in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Woolfson, pp. 22–42 Rundle, David, ‘Carneades’ Legacy: The Morality of Eloquence in the Humanist and Papalist Writings of Pietro del Monte’, EHR 117 (2002), 284–305 Rundle, David, ‘ “Not so much praise as precept”: Erasmus, Panegyric and the Renaissance Art of Teaching Princes’, in Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, eds Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 148–69 Rundle, David, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants: Aspects of Quattrocento Humanist Writings and their Reception in England, c.1400–c.1460’, D. Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 1997 Rundle, David, ‘On the Difference between Virtue and Weiss: Humanist Texts in England during the Fifteenth Century’, in Courts, Counties and the Capital in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Diana E. S. Dunn (Stroud, 1996), pp. 181–203 [disputes the interpretation of early English humanism put forth by Roberto Weiss] Rundle, David, ‘A New Golden Age? More, Skelton and the Accession Verses of 1509’, Renaissance Studies 9 (1995), 58–76 Rutledge, Thomas, ‘Gavin Douglas and John Bellenden: Poetic Relations and Political Affiliations’, in Langage Cleir Illumynate: Scottish Poetry from Barbour to Drummond, 1375–1630, ed. Royan, pp. 93–116 Sabbadini, Remigio, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne’ secoli XIV e XV (1905–14), ed. Eugenio Garin, 2 vols (Florence, 1967) Saygin, Susanne, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390–1447) and the Italian Humanists (Leiden, 2002) [Bruni’s attitude to translation] Schneider, Wolfgang Christian, Die elegischen Verse von Maximian: Ein letzte Widerrede gegen die neue christliche Zeit (Stuttgart, 2003) Schwarz, Arthur L., Vivat Rex! An Exhibition Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Accession of Henry VIII (New York, 2009) Sessions, William A., Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford, 1999) Sessions, William A. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (Boston, 1986) Shrader, Charles R., ‘A Handlist of Extant Manuscripts Containing the De re militari of Flavius Vegetius Renatus’, Scriptorium 33 (1979), 280–305 Simon, Joan, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1966) Simpson, James, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, Mass., 2007) Simpson, James, ‘Diachronic History and the Shortcomings of Medieval Studies’, in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, eds David Matthews and Gordon McMullan (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 17–30

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Early Humanism: Secondary Sources Simpson, James, ‘Subjects of Triumph and Literary History: Dido and Petrarch in Petrarch’s Trionfi and Africa’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005), 489–508 Simpson, James, ‘The Sacrifice of Lady Rochford: Henry Parker’s Translation of De claris mulieribus’, in ‘Triumphs of English’: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court, eds Axton and Carley, pp. 153–69 Singerman, Jerome E., Under Clouds of Poesy: Poetry and Truth in French and English Reworkings of the ‘Aeneid’, 1160–1513 (New York, 1986) Smith, Margery H., ‘Some Humanist Libraries in Early Tudor Cambridge’, Sixteenth Century Journal 5 (1974), 15–34 Sowerby, Robin, ‘Early Humanist Failure with Homer’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 4 (1997), 37–63 Streitberger, W. R., ‘John Skelton: The Revels, Entertainments, and Plays at Court’, in John Skelton and Early Modern Culture, ed. David R. Carlson (Tempe, Ariz., 2008), pp. 19–43 Streitberger, W. R., Court Revels, 1485–1559 (Toronto, 1994) Strong, Roy, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, 2 vols (1980) Sullivan, Paul, ‘Playing the Lord: Tudor Vulgaria and the Rehearsal of Ambition’, ELH 75 (2008), 179–96 Sutton, Anne F., and Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘Pietro Carmeliano’s Early Publications’, The Ricardian: Journal of the Richard III Society 10 (1996), 346–86 Thomson, D. F. S. ,‘Linacre’s Latin Grammars’, in Essays on the Life and Work of Thomas Linacre c.1460–1524, eds Francis Maddison et al. (Oxford, 1977), pp. 24–35 Thomson, Patricia, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Background (1964) Thomson, Patricia, ‘Sir Thomas Wyatt: Classical Philosophy and English Humanism’, Huntington Library Quarterly 25 (1962), 79–96 Thomson, Patricia, ‘Wyatt and the Petrarchan Commentators’, Review of English Studies ns 10 (1959), 225–33 Thomson, Rodney M., ‘The Reception of the Italian Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Oxford: The Evidence of Books and Book-Lists’, Italia medioevale e umanistica 47 (2007), 59–75 Tilley, Arthur, ‘Greek Studies in Early Sixteenth-Century England’, English Historical Review 53 (1938), 438–56 Trapp, J. B. ‘The Humanist Book’, in The Cambridge History of the Book, vol. 3, eds Hellinga and Trapp, pp. 285–315 Trapp, J. B., Erasmus, Colet, and More: The Early Tudor Humanists and their Books (1991) Trapp, J. B., ‘From Guarino of Verona to John Colet’, in Italy and the English Renaissance, eds Sergio Rossi and Dianella Savoia (Milan, 1989), pp. 45–53 Underwood, Malcolm, ‘John Fisher and the Promotion of Learning’, in Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher, eds Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 25–46

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Early Humanism: Secondary Sources Vessey, Mark, ‘Ad memoriam Claymundi: An English Humanist, his College, and his Books’, in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bariensis, eds J. F. Alcina et al. (Tempe, Ariz., 1998), pp. 581–9 Wahlgren-Smith, Lena, ‘Heraldry in Arcadia: The Court Eclogue of Johannes Opicius’, Renaissance Studies 14 (2000), 210–34 Wakelin, Daniel, ‘Humanism and Printing’, in A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476–1558, eds Gillespie and Powell, pp. 227–47 Wakelin, Daniel, ‘Classical and Humanist Translations’, in A Companion to FifteenthCentury English Poetry, eds Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 171–85 Wakelin, Daniel, ‘England: Humanism Beyond Weiss’, in Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe, ed. Rundle, pp. 265–306 Wakelin, Daniel, ‘Religion, Humanism and Humanity: Chaundler’s Dialogues and the Winchester Secretum’, in After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth Century England, eds Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 225–44 Wakelin, Daniel, ‘Possibilities for Reading: Classical Translations in Parallel Texts ca.1520–1558’, Studies in Philology 105 (2008), 463–86 Wakelin, Daniel, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature 1430–1530 (Oxford, 2007) Wakelin, Daniel, ‘The Occasion, Author and Readers of Knyghthode and Bataile’, Medium Ævum 73 (2004), 260–72 Walker, Greg, Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford, 2005) Walker, Greg, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge, 1988) Ward, Allyna E., ‘Lucanic Irony in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine’, Modern Language Review 103 (2008), 311–29 Watts, John, ‘ “Common weal” and “Common wealth”: England’s Monarchical Republic in the Making, c.1450–c.1530’, in The Languages of Political Society: Western Europe, 14th–17th Century, eds Andrea Gamberini et al. (Rome, 2011), pp. 147–63 Watts, John, ‘The Policie in Christen Remes: Bishop Russell’s Parliamentary Sermons of 1483–84’, in Authority and Consent in Tudor England: Essays Presented to C. S. L. Davies, eds G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 33–59 Webster, Richard, The Elegies of Maximianus (Princeton, 1900) Weiss, Roberto, Humanism in England During the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1941; 3rd edn 1967; 4th edn (eds David Rundle and A. J. Lappin) 2010) [4th edn available online at with an excellent editorial introduction by David Rundle, critiquing Weiss’s approach] Weiss, Roberto, ‘Leonardo Bruni and Early English Humanism’, Modern Language Review 36 (1941), 443–8 Weiss, Roberto, ‘The Earliest Catalogues of the Library of Lincoln College’, Bodleian Library Record 8 (1937), 342–59

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Early Humanism: Secondary Sources White, Paul, Jodocus Badius Ascensius: Commentary, Commerce and Print in the Renaissance (Oxford, 2013) Willoughby, James, ‘Universities, Colleges, and Chantries’, in Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476–1558, eds Gillespie and Powell, pp. 207–24 Wilson-Okamura, David Scott, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2010) Wilson, N. G., A Descriptive Catalogue of the Greek Manuscripts of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (Cambridge, 2011) Winn, Mary Beth, Anthoine Vérard: Parisian Publisher, 1485–1512 (Geneva, 1997) Woolfson, Jonathan, ‘Bishop Fox’s Bees and the Early English Renaissance’, Renaissance and Reformation Review 5 (2003), 7–26 Woolfson, Jonathan, ed., Reassessing Tudor Humanism (2002) Woolfson, Jonathan, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Toronto, 1998) Woolfson, Jonathan, ‘John Claymond, Pliny the Elder, and the Early History of Corpus Christi College, Oxford’, English Historical Review 112 (1997), 882–903

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Index Notes: Page numbers in bold indicate detailed analysis. Those in italic refer to illustrations. Works receiving frequent or detailed mention are indexed by title (cross-referenced from the author). Works mentioned only briefly appear as sub-headings under the author’s name. Works of unknown or doubtful authorship are indexed by title. Monarchs are of England unless otherwise stated. n = endnote. Aeneid (Virgil)  6–7, 12–13, 42, 165–6, 326, 421, 467 allegorical interpretations  121–2, 124, 166, 176, 602–3 artistic representations  171, 177 commentaries on  152 166, 176, 188, 567–9 compared with Bible  174 compared with Ilias latina 40–4 early modern editions (in original)  563 as educational text  35–8, 39–40, 43, 44, 79, 252, 355 emotion in female speeches in  36–9 English/Scots translations/adaptations  15–16, 17, 18–19n9, 179–80, 510n85, 561–79, 587–8, 601–19 generic characteristics  8, 36, 175–6, 467 historical accuracy, differing views on  167–8, 471 influence in Anglo-Latin learning  25–7, 96–8, 102, 103, 104, 105–6, 110 influence in Anglo-Saxon England  23–4, 170, 172–5 influence on biblical epics  352–4, 356, 358–60, 367

Abbo of Fleury  24, 61, 63, 79, 82, 84, 210 Quaestiones grammaticales 170 Abelard, Peter  26, 39, 48n32, 65–6, 214, 377, 432–3n19 Acciaiuoli, Donato  489 Actaeon (mythological character)  132–3, 137, 190, 192, 241, 452 Adam of Balsham  55 Adam de Chillenden, Prior  112, 119n97 Adelard of Bath  81, 82–3, 85, 143n16 ‘Adnotationes super Lucanum’ (anon.) 211 Adomnán of Iona, Abbot  173 Adrian IV, Pope  217 Ælfric Bata  55 Ælfric of Eynsham  55, 101, 277, 334 Colloquy  55, 71n10 Ælfweard of Evesham, Abbot  96 Aelred of Rievaulx, Abbot  136 De spiritali amicitia  102, 115n39 Aemilius Paullus  528 Aeneas  37, 168, 169, 171, 175, 176, 179, 251–2, 255, 259, 353, 357, 360, 393, 457, 467, 468, 482, 565, 567, 570–2, 574–5, 603–6, 607, 609, 614, 617

719

Index Aeneid (cont.) influence on English historiography  167, 330 in Middle English poetry  177–9, 395, 399, 414, 431n1, 436, 458–9n4, 466, 471 late Roman commentaries  124, 152, 173–4 library copies  105, 110, 490, 491 neuming of female speeches  36–8 Norman reimaginings  175–6 as political model  168 quoted in Roman Britain  170–1 as source for ‘Matter of Troy’  251–2, 264n3 surviving manuscripts/transcriptions  36–7, 45n4, 168, 170–1 translations into European vernacular languages 18–19n9, 613–14 see also Certain bokes of Virgiles Aeneis turned into English meter; Eneados Aeschines 553–4n17 Aesculapius  87, 134–5 Aesop  25, 27, 32n43, 587, 593–4 Æthelweard, Ealdorman  210, 276, 333 Æthelwold of Winchester, Bishop  98, 99, 114n17, 334 Æthelwulf, King  213 Aetna (anon., attrib. Virgil)  166 Agricola, Rudolph  524 agriculture 87–8 Aimeric, Ars lectoria  24, 26, 230 al-Khwārizmī 80 Alamanni, Luigi  587, 593 Alan of Lille  61, 63, 211, 370, 427 Anticlaudianus  137, 376n108, 491 De planctu Naturae  137, 461n22 ‘Alberic of London’ (unidentified)  128–9, 134, 135–6, 140 Alberici, Filippo  539n78, 547

Albertano da Brescia, Liber consolationis et consilii 309 Albertus Stadensis, Troilus 265n23 Albumasar (Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī) 82 alchemy 425 Alcione (mythological character)  192, 193, 194–5 Alcuin of York  60–1, 63, 97, 170, 174, 210 Ars grammatica 54–5 De cursu et saltu lunae ac bissexto 80 De dialectica 63–4 Disputatio de rhetorica et de virtutibus 60 Poem in praise of York  24, 60, 72n30 De vera philosophia 270 Aldfrith of Northumbria, King  174 Aldhelm  23, 24, 25, 85, 97, 173, 174, 211, 517 comments on biblical epic poets  358, 360, 362 Aenigmata  174, 183n47, 211 Carmen de virginitate  174, 368–9 Epistola ad Acircium 174 De pedum regulis  174, 355 ‘Riddle 91’  371–2n23 Alexander III, Pope  113n6 Alexander of Villa Dei, Doctrinale  22, 57, 60, 96, 104 Alexander the Great  177, 214, 392–3, 399, 408–9n5, 497 Alexander romances  9, 19–20n16 see also Historia de preliis; Libro de Alexandre; Walter of Châtillon; Wars of Alexander Alfonso X of Castile  199 Libro de los doze sabios 202 Alfraganus (Al-Fargani)  82, 83 Alfred, King  98, 210, 276–7 Alfred of Sareshel  84 Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham)  88 Allde, Edward  481

720

Index alliterative poetry  391–408 approach to history  391–3 on possible salvation of pre-Christians 396–403 Ambrose  95, 300–1, 360, 526 Ammianus Marcellinus  324, 326, 333, 339 Ammonio, Andrea  547 Amyot, Jacques  588–9 Anacletus II (antipope)  217 André, Bernard  524, 547, 557n43 Historia regis Henrici Septimi  213, 548 Andrelini, Fausto  563 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  329, 333, 338, 341 Anglo-Saxon England availability of classical texts  23–4, 54–5, 60–1, 63, 78–82, 84–6, 97–8, 272–7, 347n45 education in  23–4, 54–5, 60–1, 97–8, 347n45 historiography 328–36 languages 172 surviving manuscripts  23–4, 97, 98 see also Abbo of Fleury; Ælfric Bata; Ælfric of Eynsham; Æthelweard of Evesham; Alcuin; Aldhelm; Alfred (King); Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Asser; Bede; Beowulf; biblical epics; Boethius; Byrhtferth of Ramsey; De consolatione philosophiae; Exodus; Genesis B; Tatwine; Wulfstan of Winchester Angus, Archibald Douglas, 5th Earl of   561, 562, 563 Angus, Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of   561, 562, 576 Angus, Elizabeth, Countess of (née Boyd) 562 Anselm of Canterbury  85, 86, 99, 136, 284 Anselm of Laon  231 Anwykyll, John  487, 497, 518

Compendium totius grammaticae 518 Vulgaria quedam abs Terencio  113, 498, 502, 518, 520, 532n13 Aphthonius of Antioch, Progymnasmata 520 Apollonius of Rhodes  467 Apollonius of Tyre legends  18–19n9, 19–20n16 Appendix Vergiliana (anon., attrib. Virgil) 166 Appian of Alexandria  528 Apuleius  88, 523 De Platone et eius dogmate 302 Peri hermeneias (attrib. to Apuleius) 64 see also Pseudo-Apuleius Aquilano, Serafino  585 Aquinas, Thomas  312 Arab world 402, 414–17, 428–9 scientific learning in  82–3, 84–5 see also names of individual philosophers and scientists Arator  11, 23, 24, 25, 96, 361–2, 369 glosses 355 surviving manuscripts  362 Historia apostolica 361–2 Aratus, Phaenomena 80–1 Archilochus  543, 553–4n17 architecture 87 Arderne, Sir Peter  312 Ariosto, Lodovico, Orlando furioso 585 Aristophanes 523 Aristotle  17, 24, 177, 385, 475, 523, 524 biography 399 categories of being  189–90 commentaries  304–5, 316n33 cosmography  413, 429 influence on humanist political thought 504–5 influence on prologue form  155–6 as logician  56, 75nn62–3, 81

721

Index Aristotle (cont.) (potential) Christian redemption  396–401, 402, 408 preeminence in medieval thought  109, 299–302, 396, 399, 413, 492–3 references in medieval alliterative verse  392, 393, 395, 396–401, 410n16 and study of moral philosophy  10, 299, 303, 304–6, 309, 311–12 and study of natural philosophy  77, 81, 85, 88–9 translations  109, 310, 311–12, 487, 492–3, 499–500 De anima  84, 85, 87, 88–9, 103, 189–90 De animalibus 87 De caelo  82, 85 Categories 65 Ethics 18–19n9, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 309, 310, 311–12, 314, 492–3, 503, 505, 508nn40–1 Eudemian Ethics 306–7 De generatione  84, 85, 87, 88–9 Historia animalia 189 De interpretatione  63, 64 Metaphysics  84, 431n2 De meteoris (Meteorology)  82, 85, 87 Nicomachean Ethics  304, 306–7, 415 Organon  56, 65 Physics  85, 87, 88–9, 155 Poetics  303, 309 Politics 18–19n9, 303, 304, 310, 311–12, 399, 487, 493, 508n40 Posterior Analytics  65, 67 Prior Analytics  65, 67, 103 Rhetoric  305, 312 Sophistical Refutations  65, 67, 68 Topics  65, 67 ‘Aristotle’s a.b.c’ (anon., C15)  398–9 arithmetic, study of   79–80 Armannino da Bologna, Fiorita 267n46

Arnulf of Orléans  122, 130, 131, 155, 188, 211, 485n35 Arnulf of Provence  304 Ars amatoria (Ovid)  8, 66, 197–8, 203 availability 187–8 banned from Oxford grammar schools in the 1370’s  443 English/French translations  18–19n9, 157–8, 198, 207n19 influence on medieval love poetry 197–8 library copies  98, 105, 112 surviving manuscripts  198 Arthur, Prince (son of Henry VII)  308, 524 Articella (medical collection)  86 Ascham, Roger  522, 525, 540n97, 619n11 Ashby, George  303 A Prisoner’s Reflections  289, 290, 291 Asser 335 Life of Alfred  210, 277, 334 Astley, Sir John  313 astrolabe, use of   82 astrology 81–2 astronomy, study of   81–3 Athenaeus 519 Auctoritates Aristotelis (anon.)  312 Audley, John  480 Augustine of Canterbury  30n20, 172, 394 Augustine of Hippo  63, 79, 95, 136, 166, 179, 213, 300–1, 302, 312, 329, 524, 526 De civitate Dei  124, 135, 157, 380, 392, 421, 509n71 Confessions 59 Contra academicos 380 De doctrina Christiana 59 Augustus, Emperor  220, 352, 403–4, 456, 616–17 Aurispa, Giovanni  497 Ausonius  23, 356–7

722

Index discussions of biblical epic poets  356, 360, 362, 376n105 preeminent position among historians 335 scientific knowledge  82, 86, 88 treatment of Christianity  78, 330, 331, 332–3, 337 De arte metrica  54, 174, 356 Historia ecclesiastica  174, 183n52, 329–30, 332–3 De natura rerum 79 De orthographia  54, 495 De schematibus et tropis  54, 60 De temporibus 80 De temporum ratione  79, 80 Vita Sancti Cudbercti 210 Bedford, John, 1st Duke of  312, 320n84, 469 Bek, Anthony, Bishop  303 Bellenden, John  565, 576 Chronicles of Scotland  565, 581–2n39 Bellenden, Thomas  576 Belloc, Hilaire  434n38 Bellum civile (Lucan)  46n11, 159, 366 depictions of power  215–18 as educational text  8, 35–7, 38–40, 43, 44 English translations  18–19n9, 220 florilegic citations  213–15 generic characteristics  211–12, 467 influence on medieval historiography  212–18, 220–1, 339, 341 influence on medieval literature  12–13, 209, 218–21, 468, 472–3 Irish translations  226n79 library copies  210, 224n35, 224n37 medieval approaches to reading  209 medieval commentaries  210–13 opening lines  213–14 surviving manuscripts  45n4, 48n30, 209–10, 222n17 title 221n2 treatment of emotion  36–7, 43, 47n28

Averroes (Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ’Aḥmad bin Rušd)  87, 429 Avianus  24, 27–8, 32n43, 97, 99, 103, 366 Avicenna (Abū ʿAlī ibn Sīnā)  87, 399 Avitus 11, 362–3, 367, 369 popularity/circulation of texts  362–3 Carmina de spiritalis historiae gestis 362, 364–5 Aytoun, Henry  575 Bacon, Roger  78, 80, 85, 251, 316n28, 370, 431n3 Tractatus ad declarandum quaedam obscure dicta in libro Secreti secretorum 305 Badius Ascensius, Jodocus  16, 179, 563, 565, 569, 576 Baebius Italicus, P.  40, 41–2, 49–50n44 Balderich of Speyer  22–3 Bald’s Leechbook (anon.)  86 Baldwin, William, A Mirror for Magistrates 481 Bannatyne, George  566, 580n16 Barclay, Alexander  541, 547 Bartholomaeus Anglicus (Bartholomew the Englishman), De proprietatibus rerum  78, 83, 133, 427 Basil 494 Batu Khan  432n16 Bauchant, Jacques  319n75 Bayezid I, Sultan  416 Beaufort, Henry, Cardinal  492 Beaufort, Lady Margaret  528, 584 Beccaria, Antonio  499 Becket, Thomas  101, 378 Bede  11, 78, 80, 95, 326, 334, 338, 341, 342, 345n25 biography 105 classical sources/influences  24, 60, 79, 98, 174, 210, 211, 329–30, 331

723

Index Benedict Biscop, Abbot  362–3 Benoît de Sainte-Maure see Roman de Troie Benvenuto da Imola  211 Beowulf (anon.)  175, 183n60, 210, 243 Berkeley, Elizabeth see Warwick, Countess of Berkeley, Thomas, 5th Baron Berkeley  282, 312, 313, 442 Bernard of Clairvaux  95, 96, 102, 136, 526 Bernard of Utrecht  141–2n5, 161n9 Bernardus Silvestris  122, commentary on Aeneid  166, 188 Cosmographia  62, 137, 142 nn 8–9, 232, 234 Berry, Jean de France, duc de  262, 394, 478 Bersuire, Pierre, Ovidius moralizatus (book 15 of Reductorium morale)  7, 122, 131–3, 140–1, 149n98, 166, 188, 420–1, 434n42, 438, 441, 459–60n9, 461n22, 463n47 bestiaries 88 Bible and alliterative poetry in English  391–2, 398–400, 405–6 and classical figures  203, 396–401 commentaries 303 compared with Virgil  174 copies of in libraries, compared with classical texts  6, 95–6, 100, 102, 104, 106 rewritten in Virgilian terms  356–8 study of   95, 108 and universal histories  391, 403 vernacular verse retellings  363–7, 438 Wycliffite Bible  282 see also biblical epics, Hebrew Bible de Jehan de Malkaraume 366–7 biblical epics  11, 351–70 educational use  354–5, 360, 362, 368–9

influence of classical epics  11, 351, 363–4 (see also Aeneid) see also names of specific writers/works Binduccio de Scelto  257, 259 biography  324, 336–7, 340, 347n44 classical models  326–8, 342 secular  333–4, 342 Blage, George  615 blank verse, development of   601–2, 611–14, 621n38 Blount, Charles (later 5th Baron Mountjoy) 524 Boccaccio, Giovanni  13, 122, 482, 498, 563 influence on Chaucer  238, 260–1, 267n50, 309, 421–2 translation of Homer  260, 263 De casibus virorum illustrium  136–7, 141, 225–6n77, 310, 477–8, 526, 605 De claris mulieribus  136–7, 148n76, 358, 616 Il Filocolo 421–2 Il Filostrato 257, 259–61, 267n46, 267n50 De genealogia deorum gentilium 129, 134–5, 147n68, 229, 260, 606 see also Teseida Bodel, Jean  468–9 Boece, Hector  563 Scotorum historia 581–2n39 Boece (Boethius, tr. Chaucer)  70, 279, 281–3 influence on later works  283, 285–6 surviving manuscripts  287–8 Boethius  4, 8, 10, 23, 25, 59, 69, 87–8, 89, 104–5, 112, 213, 382, 563 Anglo-Saxon knowledge of   23–4, 63–4, 97–8, 271–7 translations of Aristotle  63

724

Index Bruno of Cologne  368 Brutus, L. Junius  421 Brygon, William  490 Buchanan, George  564 Buddhism 417–18 Budé, Guillaume  516 De tranquillitate et securitate animi 587, 589–90 Bukwode, John  305 Buonaccorso da Montemagno  498 Burgh, Benedict  310, 313, 502 Buridan, Jean  413–14 Burley, Sir Simon  311 Burley, Walter  178, 304 Burns, Robert, Tam o’ Shanter 578 Bushy, Sir John  463n52 Byrhtferth of Ramsey  24, 82, 170, 174, 210

De arithmetica  79–80, 81, 88, 100, 111 De geometria (attrib.)  80 De institutione musica  79, 81, 88, 100, 111 In Isagogen Porphyrii  153, 160n2, 160n4 De topicis differentiis  64, 67, 69, 153–4, 382 see also De consolatione philosophiae Bokenham, Osbern  498, 502 Legendys of Hooly Wommen 158 Bole, Richard  495–7, 501, 509n71 Boleyn, Anne, Queen  527, 528, 535n37, 615 Boleyn, George  528 Bollard, Nicholas, Book of Planting and Grafting 88 Bonet, Honoré, L’Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun  416–17, 418, 431n11 Boniface  54, 170, 174 Ars grammatica 174–5 Bourgouyn, Simon  528 Bower, Walter, Scotichronicon 213 Bracciolini, Poggio  492, 498, 499, 511n98, 546 Bradwardine, Thomas  80, 85 De geometria speculativa 81 Braham, Robert  482 Braulio of Saragossa, Vita Sancti Aemiliani 371n14 Bredon, Simon  87 Britain, legends of founding  251–2, 330, 335, 393–4, 490–1 Brito, William, Expositiones vocabulorum Bibliae 110 Broch, Hermann, The Death of Virgil 136 Browning, Robert  483n1 Bruerne, Richard  530 Bruges, William  313 Bruni, Leonardo  14, 311–12, 487, 489, 492–4, 497, 498, 499–500, 504–5, 508nn40–1

Caedmon 355 Caelius Aurelianus  86 Caesar, C. Julius  130, 199, 213, 214, 215–16, 218–20, 392, 458, 472–3, 521, 546 De bello Gallico 18–19n9, 36, 220, 325, 332, 489, 491 Calepino, Ambrogio, Cornucopia 526 Cambridge Songs 230 Cambridge University  68, 516, 532n4, 544, 584 college libraries  110, 212, 224n37, 305, 408–9n5 curricular reforms  524 humanist studies  522–3 performances of classical drama  523 Camden, William  583 Canace (mythological character)  200, 201–3, 208nn35–6, 442, 455 Candour, Thomas  490 Canterbury (Kent) see Christ Church; St Augustine’s Abbey

725

Index Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)  413–30, 588–9 treatment of miracles/strange events  422–5 treatment of non-Christian characters  414–22, 432n16 ‘General Prologue’  68, 414, 416, 435, 440, 444 ‘Canon Yeoman’s Tale’  425 ‘Clerk’s Tale’  68–9 ‘Franklin’s Tale’  9, 309, 414, 419, 421–3, 429, 430, 437 ‘Man of Law’s Tale’  82, 203, 219 ‘Manciple’s Tale’  309 ‘Tale of Melibee’  309, 480 ‘Monk’s Tale’  219, 285, 414, 473 ‘Pardoner’s Tale’  303 ‘Parson’s Tale’  306 ‘Physician’s Tale’  82, 87, 414, 421, 430 ‘Prioress’s Tale’  58, 361, 432–3n19 ’Squire’s Tale’  208n35, 414, 417, 418–19, 422, 423–4, 432n16 ’Summoner’s Tale’  303 ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’  81–2, 198, 279–80, 303, 586 see also ‘Knight’s Tale’ Capellanus, Andreas, De arte honesti amandi  187, 197 Carausius, (self-proclaimed) Emperor  170–1 cardinal virtues, evocations of   301, 302, 305–6, 307–10 Carew, Gawain  615 Carmeliano, Pietro  547 Suasoria laeticiae ad Angliam pro sublatis bellis civilibus 213 Carmen de Jona (anon., attrib. Cyprianus Gallus) 366 Carmen de Sodoma (anon., attrib. Cyprianus Gallus)  366

Carmen paschale (Sedulius)  96, 358–60, 361 glosses 355 prose version  360 surviving manuscripts  369 Carpenter, John  308, 318n57 Cassandra (mythological figure)  239, 258, 482 Cassian, John  368–9 Cassiodorus 332 Institutiones  23, 54, 63, 80, 86, 88 Cassius Felix, De medicina 86 Castiglione, Baldassare  547 Categoriae decem (attrib. Augustine)  63 Catherine of Aragon, Queen  308, 524, 588 Cato (the Elder)  104, 301 Liber de agricultura  88, 498–9 see also ‘Disticha Catonis’; Liber catonianus Cato (the Younger)  214, 217 Catullus  9, 15, 467, 523, 544 Cavendish, George  482 Caxton, William  16, 179, 187, 263–4, 288, 303, 313, 482, 498, 502, 545, 594 The Booke of Ovyde Named Methamorphos 510n85 Eneydos  179, 510n85, 545, 567, 570, 604–5, 606 see also Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye Ceffi, Filippo  266n40 Celsus 86 cento, genre of   356–8, 462n39 hostility towards  357 ‘rules’ of   356–7 Cento (Proba)  105, 356–8, 372n29 contemporary criticisms  357 influence/later repute  357–8 publication 358 surviving manuscripts  358, 372–3n40, 373n44 table of contents  358

726

Index collected works, publication of (1561) 480 depictions of non-Christians  414–22, 425–6, 432n16 dynamic attitude to past  413, 414, 430 engagement with Boethius  10, 279–83, 420 engagement with Lucan  218–19 engagement with Ovid  187, 189, 194–7, 198, 202–3, 204, 394, 414, 567 engagement with Statius  235–6, 436 engagement with Virgil  177, 180, 414, 436, 567, 602–4 medical knowledge  87 and moral philosophy  280, 299–300, 303, 309 relationship with Gower  437, 439 scholarship  282, 436–7 treatment of pagan gods  425–8 Anelida and Arcite 238–9 Book of the Duchess  177, 194–5, 204 ‘Compleynt of Mars’  249n55 ‘The Former Age’  279, 281 ‘Fortune’  279, 280–1 ‘Gentilesse’ 279 House of Fame  57–8, 177, 218–19, 414, 467, 603–4, 619n11 ‘Lak of Steadfastnesse’  279 Parliament of Fowls 177 Treatise on the Astrolabe  82, 425 ‘Truth’  279, 280, 598n15 see also Boece; Canterbury Tales; Legend of Good Women; Troilus and Criseyde Chaundler, Thomas  489, 497 Cheke, John  522, 525, 538n60, 539n72, 540n97 Chepman, Walter  576 Chettle, Henry  482 chiromancy 88

Certain bokes of Virgiles Aeneis turned into English meter (Virgil, tr. Surrey)  16, 17, 582n40, 582n42, 601–19 compared with earlier versions  577–8, 607–14, 621n34 compared with Surrey’s other translations 617–18 development of blank verse form  601–2, 611–14 influence of Douglas  577–8, 610–11 influence of Wyatt  585–6 manuscripts 620n28 significance in history of English poetry 601–2 significance in development of English poetry  601–2, 613–14 as tragedy  617–18 translator’s self-effacement  601–2, 609, 614, 617–18 use of enjambment  611–12 versification 601–2, 609–14 visual appearance of text  608–9, 609 Chalcidius  80, 101, 103, 104, 105, 122–3 Chalcondylas, Demetrius  520 Chaloner, Thomas  583 Chalons, Sir Robert  313 Chapman, George  264 The Seaven Bookes of Homers Iliads 482 character, formation of   383–4 Charisius, Flavius Sosipater  54 Charlemagne  60–1, 170, 276, 334, 434n35 Charles of Anjou (Charles I of Sicily)  263 Charles V of France  310, 312, 433–4n30 Charles VI of France  469 Charny, Geoffroi de  433n21 Chaucer, Geoffrey  4, 28, 35, 68–70, 255, 413–30, 551, 552, 586 allusions by other poets  471–2, 530–1, 541–2, 563–4, 567 astronomical knowledge  81–2, 83, 423

727

Index Chobham, Thomas, Summa confessorum 306 Chrétien de Troyes  66, 175 Cligés 198 Yvain 66 Christ and Satan (anon.)  175 Christ Church, Canterbury, library catalogue  100–1, 119n96 Christianity allegorical treatments  367–8 Church Fathers, study of   95 classical texts reinterpreted through lens of   121–3, 127–9, 131–3, 139–40, 178, 179–80, 216–17 historiography founded in  332–3, 337, 341–2, 407–8 merging of ideas with pagan traditions  343n2, 351 (potential) redemption of non-Christians  396–403, 419, 428–9 and reimagining of epic  473–5 see also Bible; biblical epics; hymns; Jerusalem Christine de Pizan  189, 312 Epistre Othea  122, 136, 148n75, 262–3, 476 Livre de la cite des dames 358 Livre des fais d’armes et de chevalerie 313, 319n75 Livre du corps de policie  313, 319n75 mythographic glosses  122, 136 Chrysopolis, battle of (324 AD)  352 Chrysostom, John  526 Cicero  4, 10, 61–2, 98, 105, 107–8, 135, 213, 396, 491–2, 544 English translations  498, 502–3, 545 influence on humanist political thought  503–4, 505 and medieval philosophy  299, 300–1, 302, 306, 312, 379, 380, 383–4 in royal libraries  524, 526

in school/university curricula  23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 518, 520, 521 De amicitia 18–19n9, 101, 102, 112, 313, 380, 498, 502–3, 512nn122–3, 545 Aratea  80–1, 82, 98 In Catilinam (orationes) 99 Disputationes Tusculanae  99, 107, 300, 380, 497, 503 De divinatione 433–4n30 Epistulae  435, 498, 545, 556n32, 595 De inventione 18–19n9, 36, 59, 60, 72n29, 101, 112, 300, 302, 305, 306, 314, 380 De natura deorum  123–4, 128–9, 135, 139, 143n16, 380 De officiis  99, 112, 300, 305, 306, 380, 383–4, 436–7, 440–1, 459n6, 503, 545 De oratore  60, 380, 383 Paradoxa Stoicorum 545 Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino 492 De senectute 18–19n9, 101, 313, 380, 498, 502, 545 Somnium Scipionis  104, 219, 224n35 Topica  64, 69 In Verrem (orationes) 106 see also Rhetorica ad Herennium Cistercian monasteries, libraries of   101–2, 108, 111 civil war, as literary theme  8, 213–14 ‘classicizing friars’  109, 135–6, 148n77, 178, 299–300, 417, 442 Claudian  103, 104, 111, 135, 218, 255 De consulatu Stiliconis  312, 498, 502 De raptu Proserpinae  27, 62, 97, 98 Claymond, John  522 Cleanness (anon., C14)  366–7 Clement, John  520 Cleopatra  214, 218 Clerk, (literary) figure of   68–9 Clerke, John  612

728

Index Clifford, Rosamund  399 Clytie (mythological character)  190–1, 195, 451 coinage 170–1 Colet, John  14, 113, 516, 518–19, 521, 524 Aeditio 519 Colin, Jacques  527 Collenutio, Pandolfo  598n15 Colonna, Giovanni, Cardinal  596 Columbanus 79 Columella, L. Junius Moderatus  523 De re rustica xii et liber de arboribus 88, 498–9 Comestor, Peter, Historia scholastica 95, 366, 392 Commedia (Dante)  9, 158, 219, 237, 401 treatment of Statius  8, 227, 231, 234–5, 242 treatment of Virgil  122, 170 ‘Commenta Bernensia’ (anon.)  211 Commentum in somnium Scipionis (Macrobius)  79, 82, 122–3, 124–5, 127, 189, 300, 302 library copies  100, 104, 224n35 Compotus ecclesiasticus (anon.)  88 Confessio amantis (Gower)  7, 12, 75n64, 136–7 engagement with Ovid  203, 437–8, 439, 445–6, 447–56 engagement with Statius  243–4 engagement with Virgil  168, 177, 178 glosses 442 moral philosophical content  299, 302–3, 309, 314, 442 prologue 158, 159–60 Conrad of Hirsau, Dialogus super auctores  23, 24–5, 26, 27, 35, 36, 46n11, 48n36, 140, 230 Consolation of Philosophy see De consolatione philosophiae

De consolatione philosophiae (Boethius)  10, 18–19n9, 64, 69–70, 97–8, 123, 135, 206n10, 269–91, 598n15 French translations  278–9, 281–2 glosses/commentaries  156, 157, 189, 270–1, 278, 279, 282, 286–7, 288 influence on Chaucer  280–1, 420 library copies  101, 102, 104, 111, 155, 271, 277 medieval commentaries  156, 157, 189 Middle English translations/ adaptations 70, 279–91, 295n46 see also Boece; Walton, John Old English adaptation  175, 271–7, 281, 284, 289; authorial identification  276–7; influence on later works  277, 279; verse/prose forms  273–5, 293n18, 293n20; vocabulary  274–6, 290–1 Pre-Christian idiom  122, 271, 276, 277, 279, 291 prologues and vitae  155, 158–9, 271, 272, 282, 286, 287 surviving manuscripts  270, 271, 273–4, 277, 279 use of personification/imagery  271–3, 278, 280, 294n35 Constantine I ‘The Great,’ Emperor  326, 352 Constantinus Africanus  78, 86, 87 Copland, William  570, 581–2n39, 620n23 Corippus, Flavius Cresconius  210 Cornelius Nepos  471 ‘Cornificius’  378, 383, 386–7 Cornysh, William  548–9 Cowley, Abraham  591 Cox, Leonard, The Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke 520 Cox, Richard  525 Cranstoun, David  563

729

Index Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum 160n3 Diomedes Grammaticus  54 Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro  490 Dionysius Exiguus  407 Dioscorides  87, 105 Liber medicinae ex herbis femininis 86 De materia medica 86 Disticha Catonis (attrib. Cato the Elder)  23, 24, 25, 26, 27–8, 97, 99, 103, 301, 302, 309, 502 Doesborch, Jan van  180 Doget, John  497 Dominic (founder of Dominican Order) 394 Dominicans, literary endeavours  135, 156–7, 279, 303 Donatus, Aelius  24, 25, 26, 54, 72n28, 96, 97, 152, 157, 173, 563 library copies  101, 103–4, 110 Ars maior  22, 55, 56, 57, 60, 103 Ars minor  22, 25, 57 Barbarismus (book 3 of Ars maior)  56, 67 Donatus, Tiberius Claudius  173–4 Dorne, John  523 Douglas, Gavin  5, 482, 561–79 criticisms of other translators  179, 567, 570, 606, 607 ecclesiastical career  562 education/scholarship  562, 563–4 family background  561–2 The Palice of Honoure  562, 563–4, 577, 578 see also Eneados Douglas clan  561–2 see also Angus, Earls of Dracontius, Blossius Aemilius  210 Du Bois, François  516, 532n7 Dunbar, William  563 The Golden Targe 141

Criseida (protagonist’s name changed by Boccaccio) 259–60 patronymic name in Troy tradition 267n46 Croke, Richard  522 Cromwell, Thomas  516, 591 Crusades  233, 255, 411n42, 414–15, 545 Culex (anon., attrib. Virgil)  166 Cullhed, Sigfrid Schottenius  372n29 Cursor mundi (anon., C13)  366–7 Cyprianus Gallus  366, 526 Dante Alighieri  35, 177, 249n48, 530, 616 Convivio  68, 214 Epistula to Cangrande della Scala 158 De vulgari eloquentia 236–7 see also Commedia Dares Phrygius, De excidio Troiae historia  9, 112, 253–8, 467 as source for later writers  254–8, 260, 261, 265n11, 265n23, 468 (supposed) historical accuracy  168, 471 Davidson, Thomas  577, 581–2n39 Decembrio, Piercandido  312, 488, 493, 498–9, 508n43 Deguileville, Guillaume de  75n63 Dekker, Thomas  482 Deschamps, Eustache  299 Despauterius, Johannes, Ars epistolica 520 dialectic, teaching of   59, 63–70, 73n38 in literary culture and representations, 66, 67–70 Dictys Cretensis, Ephemeris belli Troiani 9, 168, 253–4, 256–8, 261, 467, 468, 471 Dido  8, 16, 37–8, 168, 171, 175–6, 177, 357, 372, 414, 436, 459n4, 467, 566–7, 570–2, 574, 577–8, 587, 603–6, 607, 609, 611, 614, 618 Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica 498, 502, 523, 527–8, 545–7, 556n33 and see Skelton, John

730

Index Edward, Prince (later Edward VI)  525, 528 Einhard, Life of Charlemagne 334 Eliot, T.S.  169 Elizabeth I  481, 525 (as princess) Elphinstone, William, Bishop  563, 575 Ely, library of   99 Elyot, Sir Thomas  15, 525, 528, 589 The Boke Named the Governour 525 Dictionary  591, 595, 599n47, 600n54 The education or bringinge up of children, translated oute of Plutarche  599n34 Emilio, Paolo  516 Emma, Queen (consort of Ethelred/ Cnut)  212, 334 emotion, in educational set texts  36–7, 43–4, 47n28 Encomium Emmae Reginae (anon., C11)  212, 333, 334 Eneados (Virgil, tr. Douglas)  15–16, 179–80, 562, 565–79, 605–7 (apparent) mistranslations  569 book/chapter divisions  569–70, 607 Book XIII  16, 565, 574–5, 607 compared with Surrey’s version  577–8, 608–9, 610–12, 613–14, 616, 621n34 fidelity of translation  567–8, 570–4, 607 manuscripts 575–6 nature of language  567–8 prologues  179–80, 561, 565–9, 607 source editions  569–70 target readership  564, 576–7, 578 translator’s commentary  563–4, 567–8, 581n35, 607 verse form/structure  561, 565 visual appearance of text  608, 620n23 enjambment 611–12 Ennius, Q.  396, 466, 467, 503, 555n26

Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury  271, 277, 360 Durham Cathedral  115n34 Dutch, translations of classical works into 4 Eadmer (biographer of Anselm)  334 Eastfield, William  308 Eastry, Henry  112 Eberhard of Béthune, Graecismus  22, 57, 60, 96, 103–4 Eberhard the German  49n41 Eclogues (Virgil)  27, 96, 165–6, 168, 171, 179, 443, 467 Christian reception/interpretation  178, 179, 184n77, 357 library copies  101, 103, 110 medieval prologues  152, 157 Economics (anon., attrib. Aristotle)  304, 310 education 5–6, 21–9, 35–44 biblical epics, as set texts  354–5 desirable qualities of set texts  35–7 emotion, in educational set texts  36–7, 43–4, 47n28 hierarchy of texts/order of reading  22–8, 95–6 humanist  14–15, 494–7, 499–502, 517–25, 583–4 monastic 103–4 of the nobility  524–5 reading lists  9, 22–8, 96–7, 103–4, 252, 521, 524 see also grammar; quadrivium; rhetoric; trivium; universities Edward I  226n80, 311 Edward II  311 Edward III  311, 616 Edward IV  226n80, 312, 313, 488, 499 Edward V  504

731

Index Eutyches Grammaticus  103 Evangelia ( Juvencus)  352–6 diction/characterization 353–4 as educational text  354–5, 360 glosses 355 influence on later works/metrical theory  354, 356, 358, 363 treatment of pre-Christian sources  352–3 versification 355–6 Excidium Troiae (anon.)  264n3 Exodus (Old English poem)  365–6 Extraccio compendiosa dictorum in Politica Aristotelis (anon., C14)  305

Ennodius, Magnus Felix  107 epic poetry  11, 465–83 English translations  4 generic characteristics  36–7, 175–6, 466–7, 470 reimagining by Lydgate  470–83 subgenres 466 see also biblical epics; Lydgate, John; titles of works especially Aeneid Epictetus  584, 586, 596 Erasmus, Desiderius  14–15, 113, 371n14, 518–19, 521, 522, 524, 525–6, 547, 584, 597n11 Adagia 526 ‘Carmen extemporale’  556n38 Concio de puero Iesu 519 De conscribendis 520 De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo (De copia )  519, 520 Luciani compluria opuscula longe festiuissima (with Thomas More) 520 ‘Prosopopoeia Britanniae’  556n38 De ratione studii 519 Eriugena, John Scotus  8, 55, 153, 173 Ethelreda, Queen  174 ethopoeia 47n24 Eton College  520, 521 Eucherius of Lyon  100–1 Euclid  83, 88, 104–5 Elements  80–1, 89 Euhemerus 125 Eulogius of Toledo, Memoriale 371n14 Euphorbus 216 Euripides 523 Eusebius of Caesarea  11, 329, 331, 332, 342, 412n47 Historia ecclesiastica  325–6, 330 Vita Constantini  326, 334, 347–8n50 Eutropius, Flavius  23, 111, 213, 325

Fabius Pictor  325, 330 Les Faits des Romains (anon.)  218, 468 The Fall of Princes (Lydgate)  136, 141, 178, 185n80, 225–6n77, 299, 310, 465, 477–8, 482–3 Fasciculus morum (anon., C14)  306, 317n44 Fastolf, Sir John  303, 313 Faulkner, William  430 Festus, Sextus Pompeius (C2) verborum significatu  103, 108 Fisher, John, Bishop  522, 523, 584 flattery, attacks on  385 Fleming, Richard, Bishop  306 Flemmyng, Robert  111, 488, 489–90, 499, 511n99 Flodden, battle of (1513)  562, 564 florilegia 99, 105–8, 112–13, 302, 312 alphabetical arrangement/ indexing 107 defined 6 for school use  113 Florilegium Angelicum 106–7 Florilegium Gallicum  6, 106 Florilegium morale Oxoniense 302 Florus, L. Annaeus  524 Folie Tristan poems  184n63

732

Index influence on medieval medical theory/practice 86 Gardiner, Stephen, Bishop  523 Garnesche, Christopher  541 Garshall family  312 Gascoigne, Thomas  499 Gaudentius 105 Geddes, Matthew  568, 575 Gelasius, Pope  357 Gellius, Aulus  18n5, 25, 99, 519, 521 Noctes Atticae  101, 107 genealogies 391 General estoria (commissioned by Alfonso X, Castile C13)  199, 200, 202 Generides (anon., C14)  480 Genesis and Exodus (anon., C13)  366, 375n86 ‘Genesis B’ (Old English poem)  364–5 Genghis Khan  418, 432n16 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae  167, 212, 329, 336, 349n69, 393, 467, 490–1 approach to sources  340–1 Geoffrey of Vinsauf   28, 62–3 Poetria nova  63, 104, 212 Geoffrey of Waterford  255, 303 geometry, study of   80–1 Georgics (Virgil)  84, 96, 103, 165–6, 170, 174, 179 influence on biblical epic  352 Gerald of Wales  11, 102, 212, 213, 278, 340, 341 Gerard of Cremona  81 German, poetry in  363–4 translation of classical works into  4 Gerrard, Philip  528 Gervase of Canterbury  338–9, 345n21 Gervase of Melkley  28, 35, 45n7, 62, 169, 178 Gervase of Tilbury  178 Otia imperialia 212

Fortescue, Sir John Governance of England  312, 599n40 De laudibus legum Anglie 312 Fortunatus, Venantius  24, 103 Life of St Martin 354 Foulchat, Denis  319n75 Fournival, Robert de  107 Fox, Richard, Bishop  522 France, education in see Paris University Francis (founder of Franciscan Order) 394 Francis I of France  516, 526, 527, 528, 539n77, 613, 622n52 Franciscans literary compilations/compositions  108–10, 135–6, 302–3 property ownership  109 Freculf of Lisieux, Bishop  254–5 Fredegar, Chronicle 252 Frederick II of Austria  263 Free, John  492, 497 French, translations into  4, 18–19n9, 75n62, 157–8, 187, 189, 201–2, 255–7, 278–9, 281–2 friars, book provision of   109, 224n35, 305 see also ‘classicizing friars’; Registrum Anglie Frithegod of Canterbury  24 Frontinus, S. Julius  23, 105, 106, 111 Stratagemata  88, 501, 527 Frulovisi, Tito Livio  499 Vita Henrici Quinti 497 Fulgentius, Fabius Planciades  19n13, 143n30, 231 Expositio Virgilianae continentiae  121–2, 166 Mitologiae  7, 126–7, 139–40 Gagny, Jean de  516–17, 529 Galen  78, 83, 87 English/Latin translations  86, 520

733

Index engagement with Virgil  458–9n4, 466 humanist leanings  436, 437–8 later years  456–8 as moral philosopher  299–300, 309, 310, 313 relationship with Chaucer  437, 439, 456, 458 translations of his non-English works  458–9n4 use of female voice  457 Balades  438, 439, 456–7, 464n67 see also Confessio amantis; Mirour de l’homme; Vox clamantis grammar  3, 5, 6, 13, 24, 28, 29, 36, 60, 61, 63, 65–6, 68, 69, 78, 101, 103, 104, 105–6, 110, 112, 113, 121, 122, 124, 152, 155, 158, 160, 165–7, 168, 170, 172–5, 211, 214, 230, 231, 276, 301, 310, 358, 360, 368, 370, 393, 443, 488, 494–503, 517–21, 523, 541, 563, 576, 596, 603 etymology 166–7 ‘grammatical logic’  56, 66 humanist interest in  494–7 literary explorations of theory  57–8, 152–3 teaching of   13, 21–3, 26–7, 53–8, 59, 62, 95–7, 355, 524–5, 542, 544, 584 Graunt, Thomas  316n26 Gray, William, Bishop  211, 488–9, 490, 491, 495, 506n10, 509n64 Greek, teaching of   14–15, 519, 522–3 Gregorius, Magister, De mirabilibus urbis Romae 410n29 Gregory the Great (Pope Gregory I)  95, 136, 300–1, 360, 401–2, 526 Dialogues  96, 277 Pastoral Care 277 Gregory IX, Pope  109 Gregory of Nazianzus  400, 410n24, 410n29

‘Gest Hystoriale’ of the Destruction of Troy (anon., C14)  262 Gigli, Giovanni  547 Gilbert of Poitiers  377 Gilbertus Anglicus, Compendium medicinae 87 Gildas, De excidio et conquestu Britanniae  11, 172, 338, 330–1 Giles of Rome, De regimine principum  202, 305, 309, 310, 312, 415, 499, 512n113 Giovanni del Virgilio  122, 131–2, 134, 156, 188 Glastonbury Abbey  103 glossaries  494–6, 509n56 Gloucester, Eleanor de Bohun, Duchess of  311 Gloucester, Humfrey, 1st Duke of   448, 458, 494 library  15, 311–12, 320n84, 435–6, 458n3, 488–9, 490, 492, 498–9, 507n29 literary patronage  13, 442, 465, 469, 478, 487, 493, 497 Gloucester, Thomas of Woodstock, 1st Duke of   311 Godfrey, Garrett  523 Godfrey of Winchester  409n14 gods (pagan), Christian depictions  425–8, 442 Goldwell, James, Bishop  488, 494 Gontier, Palamède  526 Gordon, Bernard de  87 Gorges, Arthur  226n79 Gower, John  4, 10, 81, 179, 435–58, 466, 586 allusions to by other poets  299, 437, 439, 458–9n4, 530–1, 541–2, 563 classical scholarship of   436–7, 441–2 classicizing impulse  442–3 engagement with Ovid  187, 189, 194, 203, 436, 437–58, 460–1n15

734

Index Henri d’Andeli, Bataille des VII ars  68, 370 Henri de Gauchy  310, 311 Henri de Valenciennes, Roman de dieu et sa mere 366 Henry I  213 Henry II  79, 105, 175, 213, 214, 256, 263, 302, 399 Henry IV  436, 439, 456–7, 469, 470–1 Henry V  217–18, 219, 262, 263, 307–8, 311, 312, 465, 469, 497 Henry VI  308, 312, 465, 499 Henry VII  15, 313, 516, 520, 524, 526, 539n78, 545, 547, 583 Henry VIII  2, 15, 16, 18n2, 480, 515, 523, 524, 542, 545, 548, 550–1, 599n47, 615 as literary patron  616–17 royal libraries  525–9, 539n73 Henry of Avranches  169 Henry of Huntingdon Anglicanus ortus 86–7 Historia Anglorum 31n31, 212, 214, 224n52, 336, 337–8, 341, 348n56 Henryson, Robert  179, 279, 563–4 The Lion and the Mouse 581n22 Moral Fabillis 564 Tale of Orpheus  288–90, 291 Testament of Cressid  9, 141, 482, 564, 581n22 Herebert, William  361 Hereford Cathedral, Mappa Mundi  404, 407 Hermann of Carinthia  81 Herod, representations of   353–4, 359–60, 363–4 Herodotus  325, 523, 546 Heroides (Ovid)  8, 112, 126, 197, 198–204, 252, 267n46, 604 availability 187–8 English translations  18–19n9

Gregory of Tours  346n38 Historia Francorum  326, 330, 332 Grindal, William  524 Grocyn, William  518 Gronovius, Johann Friedrich  112 Grosseteste, Robert  8, 80, 85, 108, 251, 304 De artibus liberalibus 81 translation of Aristotle’s Ethics 306 Templum Domini 107 Grynaeus, Simon  527 Guarino Guarini  497 Guido delle Colonne see Historia destructionis Troiae Guillaume de Lorris  198 see also Roman de la rose Gunthorpe, John  490, 491, 497 Guy of Warwick (Middle English romance) 399 Guyenne, Louis, Duke of (Dauphin) 319n75 Hadrian of Canterbury, Abbot  78, 97, 101 hagiography 326 Haly Abbas (‘Ali ibn al-‘Abbas al-Majusi) 87 handwriting 490 Hannibal Barca  497, 528, 585 Harding, Thomas  530 Harold Godwinson, King  212 Hastings, William, Lord  313 Hatteclyff, William  313 Hawes, Stephen  541, 548 Hay, William  576 Hebrew, knowledge/teaching of   15, 519, 522, 523, 529–30, 536n48 Hecataeus of Miletus  125 Heinsius, Nicolaus  112 Heliand (Saxon gospel poem, C8)  364 Helias of Saint- Saens, Baron  215–16 Heloise d‘Argenteuil  39, 48n32, 214

735

Index English translations  4 post-Conquest 336–41 role/responsibilities of historian  337–8 Roman-era 324–8 Hoccleve, Thomas, The Regiment of Princes  158, 269–70, 281, 283, 290, 480 moral philosophical content  299, 303, 309, 311, 313 Holbein, Hans  583, 587 Holcot, Robert  135, 140, 149n94, 299–300, 303, 309 Holinshed, Raphael  581–2n39 Holt, John  518, 524 Lac puerorum (Mylke for Chyldren) 518 Homeric epics  8–9, 175, 261, 353, 356, 399, 523, 530, 544 role in epic tradition  466–7 see also Iliad; Odyssey Hone, William  524 Horace  97, 135, 302, 339, 440, 524, 551, 553n15, 563, 587, 593–4, 603 approach to writing satire  542–3 library copies  101, 104, 111, 210, 489–90 medieval reception  9–10, 172, 209 in school/university curricula  23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 520, 521 surviving manuscripts  98 Ars poetica  59–60, 62 Odes 367 Satires  542–3, 595 Horman, William, Vulgaria 521 Hortus deliciarum (Herrad of Landsberg) 376n101 Howard, Catherine, Queen  526, 615–16, 622n52 Howard, Lord Thomas (d.1537)  615 Howard family  555n28 see also Norfolk, Dukes of Hrotsvitha 26

Heroides (cont.) incorporation into Histoire ancienne  199–202 medieval prologues  154–5, 158, 159, 442 references in Middle English poetry  202–4, 231, 458–9n4 surviving manuscripts  199 use of epistolary format  198–9 Hesiod  124–5, 466–7, 523 Theogony 124 Heywood, Jasper  591 Higden, Ranulf   9, 442, 461–2n27, 595 Polychronicon  213, 391–2, 399–401, 402–3, 407, 408n4, 409–10nn22–23, 411n39, 412nn46–7 Hilary of Poitiers, 95, 360 Hilton, Walter  419 Hippocrates  86, 87, 177 Prognostics 78 Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César first redaction, (Roger, France C13)  2–3, 9, 188, 199–202, 204, 207n27, 234, 249n45, 255–7, 263 second redaction (anon. Naples C14) 257–8, 258, 261 illustrations  2–3, 258 Historia Britonum (attrib. Nennius)  167, 252, 331–2, 346n33 Historia de preliis Alexandri Magni (anon. C10) 393 Historia destructionis Troiae (Guido delle Colonne)  179, 258–9, 260, 266n38, 408–9n5, 461n22, 467, 491 as source for later writers  260, 261, 262, 263, 430, 468, 470, 471–2, 476, 479–80 translations/adaptations  259, 266n40 historiography  10–11, 167, 323–42 Anglo-Saxon 328–36 Christian 407–8

736

Index authorship 49–50n44 compared with Iliad  40, 42, 44, 51n60 surviving manuscripts  42–3, 49n39 textual divisions  43, 51n59 treatment of emotion  43–4 Innocent II, Pope, De miseria humanae conditionis 107 Iohannes de Burgo, Pupilla oculi 107 Iohannes de Deo  107 Ipswich College  520 Ireland cultural contacts with Britain  172 role in Virgil scholarship  172–3 Irish, translations into  4, 226n79 Irvin, Matthew W.  462n38 Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France 262 Isabella, Queen (consort of Edward II) 311 Isidore of Seville  25, 53, 82, 86, 88, 166, 331, 490 Etymologiae  54, 63, 79, 80, 104, 105, 127–8, 139–40, 213 De natura rerum 79 De viris illustribus 354–5 Isocrates 494–5 Italian, translations into  4

Hugh of Lincoln (Hugh of Avalon)  102, 169, 340 Hugh of Saint-Victor  95, 136 Hugh of Trimberg  40, 360, 369–70 Hugutio of Pisa  490 Liber derivationum  104, 106, 110 humanism  13–17, 59, 263, 435–6, 437–8, 487–505, 515–31 book collections  488–91 claims to scholarly authenticity  487, 489, 499–500 definition/history  13–14, 488 education based on  14–15, 517–25, 583–4 grammatical reading  494–7 and literature  15–17 new acquisitions of ancient texts  491–3 palaeographical studies  506n6 political thought  493–4, 503–5 translation methods/styles  499–503, 601–2 vernacular scholarship/translations  497–9 Hundred Years War  262 Hunt, Thomas  492 Hyginus  23, 135, 143n29 Astronomica 82 Fabulae 126 hymns 360–1

Jacob of Voragine, Legenda aurea 136, 392, 403 Jacobus de Cessolis  303 De ludo scaccorum  309, 313 James I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair  289–90, 291 James III of Scotland  561, 563 James IV of Scotland  308, 561, 562, 563 James V of Scotland  561 Jean de Courtecuisse  309 Jean de Flixecourt  255 Jean de Hauteville, Architrenius  63, 211

Iambulus 546–7 ibn Rajal (Abenragel)  83 Idley, Peter  481 Iliad  23, 40–4, 51n60, 251, 252–3, 257, 260, 263–4, 266n38, 267n46, 467, translated by Chapman  264, 482 translated by Pilatus  260 Ilias latina (P. Baebius Italicus)  9, 23, 24, 25, 28, 31n23, 31n26, 39–44, 49nn38–40, 49n43, 252–3, 261, 265n11, 266n38

737

Index attacks on contemporary trends  378, 382–3, 385, 386–7 biography  377–8, 379, 388n2 (ideas on) education  378, 379, 387, 390n36 influence of Cicero  379, 380, 383–4 philosophical outlook  378–85, 386–7 Entheticus  25–6, 31n31, 378, 380, 381, 382–3, 386 Historia pontificalis 338–9 Metalogicon  56, 61, 64–5, 79–80, 378–9, 381–2, 386 Policraticus 31n31, 176, 212, 214–15, 216–17, 302, 303, 305, 379–80, 381, 382–3, 386, 388n10 John of Tynemouth, Historia aurea 403, 411n39 John of Wales  178, 312, 315n23, 316n28, 428 Breviloquium de virtutibus antiquorum principum et philosophorum  302–3, 309 Communiloquium  107, 302–3, 309 Compendiloquium de vitis illustrium philosophorum 417 Legiloquium 135 John of Worcester, Chronicle 212 John Sarracenus  251 Jordanes, Getica  325–6, 332 Joseph of Exeter Antiocheis 211 Ilias Daretis Phrygii (De bello Troiano)  168, 211, 234, 255, 259 Josephus, Flavius  108, 325, 392, 410n30, 412n49 fictionalised depictions  403, 405, 407–8 Antiquities of the Jews  408, 412n45 The Jewish Wars  403, 408, 587 Julian the Apostate  356 Julius Firmicus  25 Julius Victor, C.  60, 153 Justinian, Emperor  100–1

Jean de Meun  6, 19n12, 69, 198, 319n75, 416–17, 431n11 translation of Boethius  281, 282 see also Le Roman de la rose Jean de Thuin, Li Hystore de Julius Cesar  218, 468 Jean de Vignai  319n75 Jerome  54, 95, 166, 213, 331, 352, 357, 372n35, 412n47, 437, 526 Vulgate Bible  371n7 Jerusalem capture by Crusaders (1099)  414 destruction of the Second Temple (70 AD)  12, 403, 404–8, 587 importance in Christian imagination 404 Jews, in ancient and medieval histories  11, 402–8, 432–3n19 John of Cornwall  57 John of Gaddesden  87 Rosa medicinae 87 John of Garland  55, 104, 165–6, 179, 211 Dictionarius 55 Integumenta Ovidii  130–1, 145–6n50, 188, 442 Multorum vocabularum equivocorum interpretatio 595 Parisiana poetria  62–3, 158 De triumphis ecclesiae 169 John of Genoa ( Joannes Balbus), Catholicon  104, 110 John of Harlebeke  82 John of Lathbury  178 John of London  104–5, 106 John of Sacrobosco (Holywood)  83 Algorismus 88 De sphaera  88, 587 John of Salisbury  9, 11, 35, 60, 61, 81, 135, 178, 213, 221, 302, 316n28, 336, 341, 377–87, 399

738

Index Lactantius Placidus  130, 229, 231, 246n7, 247n25 Lancaster, Henry of Grosmont, 1st Duke of  311 Lancaster, John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of  480 Lancaster, Mary de Bohun, Duchess of  311 Lancia, Andrea  5 Landino, Christopher  166 Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury  99, 101 Langland, William, Piers Plowman 12, 58, 91n35, 177, 299, 309, 313, 368, 370, 391, 394–9, 406–7, 408–9n5, 409n14, 552 treatment of Aristotle/Christian redemption  396–9, 400, 401–2 Langton, Robert  178 Lantfred of Fleury  84 Lascaris, Jan  527 Latimer, William  520 Latini, Brunetto  59, 75n64 Livres dou tresor  68, 299, 309, 311, 314 Laurent, Dominican friar, Somme le roi 439–41 Laurent de Premierfait  502 Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes 5, 13, 136, 225–6n77, 310, 477–8, 526 Layamon 329 Brut 220 Lefevre, Jehan  75n62 Lefèvre, Raoul see Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques  516 Legat, Hugh  490 Legend of Good Women (Chaucer)  7, 136–7, 603, 604, 606 engagement with Ovid  188, 195, 202–3, 204, 414 prologue  158–9, 187, 195, 196, 202–3 ‘Legend of Lucrece’  442, 461–2n27

Justinus, M. Junianus  23, 97, 100, 524, 528 Juvenal  9, 20n17, 83, 97, 101, 103, 135, 229, 302, 440, 563 approach to writing satire  543–4, 551–2 limited impact on medieval English vernacular writing  9–10 in school/university curricula  23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 Satire  3, 587 Satire  10, 9 Juvencus  11, 23, 24, 97, 101, 352–6, 360, 369, 371n7 biography 352 see also Evangelia Katherine of Valois, Queen  469 Kennedy, Walter  563 Kervyle, John  305 Kilij-Arslan 213 Kilvington, Richard  74n57 Kilwardby, Robert  110 ‘Knight’s Tale’ (Chaucer)  82, 141, 422, 472, 476 influence of Boethius  69, 279–80 influence of Statius  227, 235–6, 239–43, 245, 250n62, 415 sources  415, 436 theological content  419–20 treatment of chivalry/non-Christian Other 12, 414–16, 429 treatment of pagan gods  426–8 Knyghthode and Bataile (Vegetius, tr. anon., C15)  313, 498–9, 501, 502 Knyvett, Edmund  615 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy 482 Lacnunga (anon.)  86 Lactantius, L. Caecilius Firmianus  24, 125, 127, 494, 523 Divinae institutiones 380

739

Index Legrand, Jacques, A Book of Good Manners 586 ‘Leiden Glossary’  97 Leland, John  15, 515–17, 522, 529–31, 532n7, 535n37, 540n94, 583, 584 biography  516, 517 Antiphilarchia (unpublished)  539n73 Itinerary 600n57 Naeniae in mortem Thomae Viati Equitis Incomparabilis  531, 540n97 De uiris illustribus  516, 531n1 Leo, Pope  613 Leofric, Bishop of Exeter  102 Lewis, C.S.  437, 570, 579n1 lexicography 55–6 Libellus de imaginibus deorum (anon.)  140, 141, 149–50n101 Liber catonianus (‘Cato book’)  27–8, 97, 103 Liber de natura deorum (anon., C12)  129 Liber historiae Francorum (anon., C8)  252 Liber philosophorum moralium antiquorum (anon.) 303–4 libraries  6, 24, 26, 95–113, 210 cathedral  102, 115n34 classification of texts  101, 103 loss of stocks  110–11 monastic  102–4, 108–9 personal collections  104–5, 489–90, 523 royal/noble  15, 311–13, 435–6, 488–9, 525–9 Libro de Alexandre (anon., C13 Spain) 265n11 Life of Virgilius (anon., C16)  178, 180 Lily, William  518, 520, 521, 541, 547 Absolutissimus de octo orationis partium constructione libellus 519 De generibus nominum 519 Rudimenta grammatices 519 Linacre, Thomas  519, 520, 524, 530 De emendata structura Latini 522

Progymnasmata grammatices vulgaria 519 Rudimenta grammatices 524 Lindesay, David  482 Livy  10–11, 18–19n9, 27, 101, 330, 491, 521, 526, 545–6 Ab urbe condita  325, 332, 343n6, 565 logic, study of see dialectic Lollius (Chaucer’s fictitious source)  260, 267n49, 467, 472 Lombard, Peter  83, 95, 109 Losinga, Herbert de, Bishop  100 Louis I, Duke of Orléans  262–3 Lucan  11, 83, 98, 176, 209–21, 229–30, 544, 563 attitude to power  215–18 biography  159, 213 influence on Chaucer  218–19 influence on medieval historiography  212–18 library copies  101, 104, 110, 111, 112, 210 medieval repute  209, 220–1 in school/university curricula  24, 25, 26, 27, 35–6, 96 Orpheus  210, 211 see also Bellum civile Lucian of Samosata  520 Lucilius, C.  542–3, 547, 550, 551–2, 553n9 Lucy, Godfrey de, Bishop  105 Lupset, Thomas  519, 520, 522, 534n23, 584, 597n11 An exhortacion to younge men 519 Lydgate, John  4, 12–13, 15, 75n63, 178, 313, 435–6, 463n44, 586 allusions by other poets  541–2, 563 authorial positioning  470–3 Christianizing of epic  473–5 engagement with Lucan  219–20 as epic poet  465–83 epic project  468–70 female characters  474

740

Index Austin, Tx Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas, 34  461n21 Bern Burgerbibliothek, 370  211 Cambridge Corpus Christi College, 304  97 Corpus Christi College, 398  505n2, 508n40, 508n42 Corpus Christi College, 423  506n11 Corpus Christi College, 432 555–6n31 Corpus Christi College, 472  508n45, 508n49 Gonville and Caius College, 225/240 109 Gonville and Caius College, 365/728 222n17 Jesus College, Q.B.9  320n91 Peterhouse, 2.1.0  32–3n45 Peterhouse, 2.1.8  32–3n45 Peterhouse, 43  110 Peterhouse, 94  110 Peterhouse, 122  110 Peterhouse, 158  110 Peterhouse, 191  110 Peterhouse, 256  110 St John’s College, D.22  105, 143n16 Trinity College, O.3.12  575, 580n19, 582n40 Trinity College, O.8.4  222n17 Trinity College, R.3.30  222n17 Trinity College, R.3.57  98 Trinity College, R.4.4  101 Trinity College, R.5.33  116n46 Trinity College, R.14.52  68, 78, 82, 89n6 Cambridge University Library, Add. 6858 550n63 CUL, Add. 8706  512n115 CUL, Dd. 1.17  408–9n5

influence of Chaucer  471–2, 478 influence on later writers  481–2 output 483n1 treatment of contingency  475–6 treatment of doubleness  473–5 ‘Disguising at London’  308 Life of Our Lady 465 Lives of St Albon and Amphibalus 465 Lives of St Edmund and St Fremund 465 ‘Mumming for the Goldsmiths’  308 Secrees of Old Philisoffres  310, 480 see also The Fall of Princes; The Serpent of Division; The Siege of Thebes; Troy Book Macaulay, G.C.  436, 446, 459n6, 460n10 Machaut, Guillaume de, Voir dit 438 Machiavelli, Niccolò  546 MacNeice, Louis  429–30 Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius  23, 25, 26, 101, 143n22, 210, 214, 519, 523 Saturnalia  105, 173, 178 see also Commentum in somnium Scipionis Magdalen College/School, Oxford  518, 521 Maimonides, Moses (Moshe ben Maimon) 399 Mair, John  562, 563, 564 Malik-Ghazi 213 Malsachanus 173 Mandeville, John  404, 405, 408–9n5 Manecken, Carolus  112 Manilius, M., Astronomica 492 manuscripts  35–44, 95–120, 487–97 pagination 48n34 manuscripts, list of Arundel Castle Harington Temp. Eliz.  590–2, 593, 596

741

Index Florence Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 45.15 173–4 Glasgow Hunterian, Hunter 231 (U.3.4)  303 Hunterian, V.8.14  28–9 Lincoln Cathedral Library, 1  116n42 Cathedral Library, 107  116n42 Cathedral Library, 295  116n43 Cathedral Library, C.5.8  32–3n45 London British Library, Add. 10340  297n70 BL, Add. 10344  510n78 BL, Add. 11814  512n116 BL, Add. 11990  46n15 BL, Add. 12028  512n114 BL, Add. 19553  538n63 BL, Add. 21213  32–3n45 BL, Add. 27304  118n82 BL, Add. 31042  408–9n5 BL, Add. 33736  224n43 BL, Add. 34114  248n30 BL, Add. 35287  398 BL, Add. 42130  432n12 BL, Add. 44922  511n90 BL, Add. 47680  319n78 BL, Add. 62132  461n22 BL, Cotton Cleopatra D I  100 BL, Cotton Julius F VII  512n126 BL, Cotton Otho A VI  273, 277, 293n16 BL, Cotton Rolls II.16  116n49 BL, Cotton Tiberius C I  98 BL, Cotton Vespasian D VI  30n20 BL, Egerton 2711  585, 594, 595, 597n7, 597n14, 598n21, 600n65 BL, Hargarve 205  620n28 BL, Harley 647  82 BL, Harley 2659  109 BL, Harley 2728  36

manuscripts, list of (cont.) CUL, Dd. I.17  408–9n5 CUL, Dd. 13.2  143n16 CUL, Ee.2.17  320n86, 511n98 CUL, Ee.5.15  539n73 CUL, Ff.4.42  355 CUL, Ii.2.1  115n33 CUL, Ii.3.12  115n32 CUL, Kk.5.34  166 CUL, Ll.1.7  508n47, 508n49 Chicago University of Chicago Library, 533-v 320n92 Cincinnati Hebrew Union College, Klau Library, 24.1  540n92 Copenhagen Køngelige Bibliotek, Thott 304 2o 286–7, 288, 297n67 Dublin Trinity College, 115  461n22 Trinity College, 927  72n29 Trinity College, D.4.24  508n47 Durham Cathedral Library, B.IV.24  115n34 Edinburgh National Library of Scotland, Advocates 1.1.6 (Bannatyne Miscellany) 580n16 National Library of Scotland, Advocates 18.6.12  99 National Library of Scotland, Advocates 18.7.8  99 University Library, D.b.IV.6  143n16 University Library, Dc.1.43  575–6 University Library, Dk.7.49  575 Eton Eton College, 91  112 Exeter Cathedral Archive, 3514  507n22 Cathedral Archive, 3671  116n41

742

Index Balliol College, 121  509n59, 509nn62–3, 509n71 Balliol College, 122  507nn20–1 Balliol College, 123  509nn56–8, 509n61, 509n64 Balliol College, 130  509nn66–72 Balliol College, 136  509n65 Balliol College, 144  223n28 Balliol College, 146  512n113 Balliol College, 146A  305, 511n97 Balliol College, 242  508n39 Balliol College, 258  509n71 Bodleian, Auct. F.1.11  507n27 Bodleian, Auct. F.1.13  507n30 Bodleian, Auct. F.1.15  102 Bodleian, Auct. F.2.14  40, 43, 49n39, 51n59 Bodleian, Auct. F.2.20  100 Bodleian, Auct. F.3.2  512n113 Bodleian, Auct. F.3.5  287 Bodleian, Auct. F.3.6  102 Bodleian, Auct. F.3.25  507n33 Bodleian, Auct. F.4.32  98 Bodleian, Auct. F.5.26  508n47, 508n49, 509nn52–4 Bodleian, Auct. F.5.27  505nn1–2, 508n40 Bodleian, Auct. F.6.2  505n1, 508n40 Bodleian, Barlow 42  508n40 Bodleian, Bodley 180  273, 277, 288, 293n16 Bodleian, Bodley 234  311 Bodleian, Bodley 292  305 Bodleian, Bodley 309  105 Bodleian, Bodley 581  320n81 Bodleian, Bodley 633  302 Bodleian, Bodley 920  116n50 Bodleian, Digby 23  84 Bodleian, Digby 55  305 Bodleian, Digby 221  129 Bodleian, Digby 233  320n98

BL, Harley 2769  161n9 BL, Harley 3426  508n45, 508n49 BL, Harley 6502  211, 222n17 BL, Lansdowne 728  146n58 BL, Royal 2 A XVI  537n57 BL, Royal 10 B IX  508nn45–6, 508n49 BL, Royal 15 C XI  99 BL, Royal 15 C XVI  461n22 BL, Royal 15 E VI  320n91 BL, Royal 16 C IX  539n72 BL, Royal 17 E V  511n98 BL, Royal 17 F II  226n80 BL, Royal 18 D VI  480 BL, Royal 20 B I  512n113 BL, Royal 20 D I  2–3, 257–8, 258 BL, Royal App. 69  116n44 Lambeth Palace, 117  575 Lambeth Palace, 341  508n47, 508n49 Lambeth Palace, 425  507n26 Lambeth Palace, 471  184n72 Milan Biblioteca Ambrosiana, R. 26 sup. 106 Munich Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 13091  39, 48n33 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14505 48n30 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 19462 51n59 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 19488 147n65 New Haven Beinecke Library, Osborn fa43 297n71, 297n73 New York Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 122 320n92 Oxford All Souls College, 82  36

743

Index Biblioteca dell’ Accademia dei Lincei e Corsiniana, 43 G22  47n26 Vatican, lat.3363  271, 277 Vatican, Palat.lat.1066  140 Vatican, Palat.lat.1753  372–3n40 Vatican, Reg.lat.1290  140, 141 Salisbury Cathedral Library, 113  297n70 St Andrews University Library, PA.62295.A2.A00  143n16 Stockholm National Library, A.148  412n49 Vienna Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek, lat. 3509  49n44 Venice Biblioteca nazionale Marciana, lat. Z.497 (1811)  50n56 Warminster Longleat House, IX.D.54  575 Worcester Cathedral Library, F. 126  185n85 Cathedral Library, F. 147  32–3n45 Manuzio, Aldo  520 Map, Walter  9 Marbod of Rennes, Naufragium Jonae prophetae 366 Margaret of Anjou, Queen  312 Margaret (Margaret Tudor), Queen of Scotland  308, 561 Marianus Scotus  412n47 Marillac, Charles de  615–16, 622n52 Markaunt, Thomas  305 Marlowe, Christopher  226n79 Dido, Queen of Carthage 482 Tamburlaine 482 Marsh, Adam  80 Marshe, Thomas  480 Martial  9, 523, 544, 563, 618

manuscripts, list of (cont.) Bodleian, e Mus.94  143n16 Bodleian, Lat. class. d. 39  507n26 Bodleian, Laud Lat. 61  510n75 Bodleian, Laud Lat. 67  222n17 Bodleian, Laud Misc. 702  320n91 Bodleian, Lincoln College, lat. 27  247n21 Bodleian, Rawlinson G. 47  508n50 Bodleian, Rawlinson G. 57  27–8, 30n20, 42, 43, 50n56 Bodleian, Rawlinson G. 111  27–8 Bodleian, Rawlinson G. 139  99 Bodleian, Selden supra 24  92n52 Bodleian, Tanner 3  113 Christ Church, 82  319n78 Corpus Christi College, 243  458n3 Lincoln College, 100  511n97 Magdalen College, Lat. 30  512n113, 512n115 Magdalen College, Lat. 46  508nn39–40 Merton College, 291  111 Merton College, 311  143n16 New College, 151  115n30 Queen’s College, 202  98, 506n15 Queen’s College, 314  507n32 St John’s College, 124  146n58 Trinity College, 18  106–7 Paris Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 571 319n76 Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 784 248n50 Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 4839  93n71 Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 8537  458n2 Rome Biblioteca Casanatense, 685  47n27

744

Index and the Ovide moralisé  122, 131–3, 187–94 treatment of bodily change  189–92 treatment of sense(s)  190–2 treatment of soul  189–90 and Vatican Mythographers  7, 128–9, 140–1, 205n3 ‘Vulgate’ commentary on  128 see also Arnulf of Orléans; Bersuire; Boccaccio (De genealogie deorum gentilium); Confessio amantis (Gower); Fulgentius; Giovanni del Virgilio; John of Garland (Integumenta Ovidii); Legend of Good Women (Chaucer); Ridewall metempsychosis (transmigration of souls)  123, 216 military science  88, 413 Milton, John  351, 362 Paradise Lost 362 Mirour de l’homme (Gower)  309, 438, 439–43 surviving manuscripts  461n21 monasteries libraries  101–4, 108–9, 110–12 loss of books  110–11 schooling in  103–4 Möngke, Great Khan  417–18 Mongols, Christian dealings with  417–18 Montaigne, Michel de  458 ‘On Education’  443 del Monte, Pietro  497, 499 moral philosophy  10, 13, 299–314 key texts  300–1 lay awareness of   305–6, 309, 310–11 literary influence  309–10, 313–14 relationship with government  310 royal/noble interest in  310–13 in sermons  306–8 tripartite division  304 university studies  302, 304–5, 310

in school/university curricula  23, 26, 27 Epigrams  110, 409n14 Martianus Capella  23, 26, 80, 96, 103, 104–5, 111, 112 De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii  54, 63, 79, 82, 103, 123, 153 Martin of Braga, Formula vitae honestae  109, 301, 302, 303, 309, 311 Marvell, Andrew  591 Mary I, Queen education of   524, 526 Mason, John  516 Mathieu of Boulogne, Liber lamentationum Matheoluli 75n62 Matthew of Vendôme  28, 62–3, 438 Maximianus  97, 549, 558n47 Elegies 27 Maximus the Confessor, Liber asceticus 539n72 Medici, Ippolito di  613–14 medicine, study of   85–7 Mela, Pomponius  523 Melanchthon, Philipp  524 Institutiones rhetoricae 520 Merton College, Oxford  85, 111, 524 Messahalla (Masha‘allah ibn Atharī) 82 Mesue (Yuhanna ibn Masawaih)  87 Metamorphoses (Ovid)  7, 8, 79, 202, 209, 252, 462n36 cosmography 123 English/French translations  18–19n9, 189, 510n85 influence on Middle English poetry  188, 194–7, 204, 281, 426–7, 441, 444, 446–7 library copies  104, 105, 106, 110 medieval commentaries/ reinterpretations  122, 128–34, 140–1, 155, 438, 441–2, 446–7 medieval/early modern popularity  443 medieval prologues  155, 156

745

Index Sacerdos ad altare  26–7, 56, 83 De nominibus utensilium 55 Nemesianus 23 Nennius  11, 326 see also Historia Britonum Neoplatonism  10, 80, 84, 122–3, 137 Nero, Emperor  39–40, 159, 252, 405–6, 409n22, 412n44, 458, 496 neumes (early method of musical notation)  36–7, 46nn17–19, 47n29 Newton, Thomas  531n1 Niccoli, Niccolò  492 Nicholas de Saint Lo  313 Nicholas of Cusa  414 Nicola da Prato  156, 162n26 Nicomachus 81 Nisus and Euryalus (episode in Aeneid) 572–3 Nonius Marcellus  503 Norfolk, Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of  516 Norfolk, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of   516, 615–16, 622n52 Norman Conquest impact on classical reading  98–9 impact on historiography  212, 329, 336–7, 341–2 impact on medical knowledge  86–7 Northumberland, Henry Percy, 1st Earl of  218 Northumberland, Henry Percy, 4th Earl of  547–8 Norton, Thomas, Gorboduc (with Thomas Sackville) 481

morality plays  368 Moralium dogma philosophorum (formerly attrib. William of Conches)  106, 117n63, 300, 314nn8–10 More, Sir Thomas  14–15, 518, 519, 522–3, 524, 525, 542, 547 Epigrammata clarissimi 520 History of Richard III 11 Luciani compluria opuscula longe festiuissima (with Erasmus)  520 Utopia 546 Morison, Sir Richard  527 Morley, Daniel  80, 84–5 Morley, Henry Parker, 10th Baron  528, 540n84, 616–17 Morte Darthure (Middle English alliterative poem) 392 Morton, John, Cardinal  518 mosaics  171, 176 Mountjoy, William Blount, 4th Baron 524 Mudy, John  575, 576 music, study of   81 Muslims, in literary texts  402, 414–15, 416–18, 419, 428–9, 434n35 Myllar, Andrew  576 mythography 6–7, 121–41, 441, 447 allegorized/Christianized interpretations  122, 127–9, 131–3, 446, 447 classical attitudes/definitions  121–6 late medieval developments  134–7 and medieval narrative poetry  136–9 Ovidian influences/commentaries  130–4, 140–1, 166

Octavian see Augustus, Emperor Odo de Sully, Bishop  214 Odyssey  251, 253, 260 translated by Pilatus  260 Oecumenius, Bishop of Trikkala, 527 Ognibene of Lonigo  211

Naevius, Cn.  467 Nagonius, Johannes Michael  547 natural philosophy  77, 84–5, 88–9 Neckam, Alexander  26–7, 35, 55, 56, 77, 83–4, 135–6, 166, 176, 178, 211

746

Index Ovide moralisé (anon., France C14)  122, 131–4, 136, 158, 163n33, 166, 187–94, 234, 438, 441 compared with source material  190–1, 192–4 influence on later writers  187, 188, 189, 195, 197 Owen, William  609, 617 Oxford University  67, 88–9, 103, 155, 506n11, 516 curricular reforms  443, 524 humanist studies  521–3 moral philosophy studies  302, 304–5 performances of classical drama  523–4 scientific learning  85 university/college libraries  111–12, 488, 492, 508n39 see also Magdalen College

Old English Herbarium (anon.)  85–6 Old Norse, translations of classical works into 4 On Husbondrie (Palladius, tr. anon, C15) 498–9, 500–1, 502, 505 Opizio, Giovanni  547 oracles, two-edged pronouncements  426–7, 433–4n30 Orderic Vitalis  336 Historia ecclesiastica  212, 213, 252 Oresme, Nicole  5, 18–19n9, 310, 433–4n30 Origen 152 Ormond, James Butler, 4th Earl of   303 Orosius, Paulus  11, 103, 108, 112, 199, 213, 329, 330, 332, 345n26 Historiae adversus paganos 18–19n9, 100, 392, 404 Osbern of Gloucester, Derivationes 56, 99, 495 Osney Abbey (nr. Oxford)  492–3 Otfrid von Weissenburg  363–4 Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso)  12, 83–4, 101, 135, 143n12, 187–204, 210, 213, 302, 394, 396, 524, 544, 563, 567, 587 English/French translations  4, 157–8 in school/university curricula  23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 197, 520, 521 influence on Gower  187, 189, 194, 203, 436, 437–58, 460–1n15 medieval reception  7–8, 172, 187–8, 413 Amores  6, 8, 112, 187, 197 Epistulae ex Ponto  112, 444 Fasti  110, 212, 444–5 Medicamina faciei femineae 84 Nux (attrib.) 112 Remedia amoris  97, 187, 197 Tristia  110, 112, 212, 444, 460–1n15 see also Ars amatoria; Heroides; Metamorphoses

Pace, Richard  519–20 De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur 519 Palladius 108 Opus agriculturae 87–8 De re rustica  498–9, 500–1 palmistry 88 Paris, Matthew, Chronica majora 213 Paris, University of   67, 83, 84, 99, 155, 377, 516 Parkhurst, John  583 Parlement of the Thre Ages (anon.)  409n15 Parr, William  540n98 Paston, Sir John II  313 Paston family  480 pathos  43–4, 51n61 Patience (anon., C14)  366 Paul, St  496 Paul the Deacon  108 Epitoma Festi 103 Historia Langobardorum 332 Historia romana 102 Paulinus of Nola  24, 357, 524

747

Index dynamic nature  377, 386, 389n25 study of   95, 377 see also dialectic, moral philosophy; natural philosophy; scepticism Philostratus, L. Flavius, On Heroes 467 Pickeryng, John, Horestes 482 Pilatus, Leontius  260, 263 Placitus, Sextus, Liber medicinae ex animalibus 86 De plantis (anon., attrib. Aristotle)  84 Plato  10, 19n11, 41–2, 81, 125, 271, 286, 303, 385, 393, 396, 398, 410n24, 425, 458n3, 523, 524, 587 Apology 508n40 Meno 436 Phaedo  436, 497 Republic  312, 467, 493 see also Neoplatonism; Timaeus Plautus  23, 26, 99, 213, 521, 524 early modern productions  523–4 Miles gloriosus 523 Pliny ‘the Elder’  23, 24, 26, 30n15, 108, 399–400, 409n22, 491, 499, 519 English translations  4, 18–19n9 Naturalis historia  79, 82, 87, 97, 522 Pliny ‘the Younger’  106, 107, 409n22 Plutarch  14, 340, 347–8n50, 349n67, 489, 494, 520, 523, 524, 528, 588–9 De avaritia 520 The Education of Children 15 De garrulitate 520 Moralia 587 Poliziano, Angelo  520, 584 Polo, Marco  408–9n5, 417 De pomo sive De morte Aristotelis (anon., C10) 400–1 Pompeius (grammarian, C5–6)  54 Pompey (Cn. Pompeius Magnus)  36, 212, 213, 217–18, 219 Pomponio Leto  211

Paunteley, John  306–8, 317n50 Peasants’ Revolt (1381)  438–9, 442, 443–7 Pedagogus (anon., attrib. Virgil)  174 Percy, Henry, 5th Lord  312 Peri didaxeon (anon.)  86 Perrotti, Niccolò  497 Persius  97, 551, 559n52, 587 library copies  101, 102, 104 on school/university curricula  23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 96 satirical approach  543 Satires  9–10, 98, 437, 595, 600n64 Pert family  312 Peter, St  361 Peter of Blois  31n31, 112, 214 Peter of Cornwall  105 Peterhouse College, Cambridge  110, 224n37 Petosiris 88 Petrarch, Francis  140, 260, 309, 435, 443, 492, 498, 499, 530, 556n32, 616–17 Africa 140–1 Epistulae  212, 358 Rime sparse  584–5, 589–90, 592, 596, 597n14, 599n38, 618–19 Trionfi 528 Petronius Arbiter, C.  26, 27 Petrus Comestor, Historia scholastica 95 Petrus Helias  26, 61 Summa super Priscianum  56, 212 Petrus Mosellanus, Tabulae de schematibus et tropis 520 Pharsalia (Lucan) see Bellum civile Philagrius (grammarian)  173, 178–9 Philip II of France (Philip Augustus)  256, 263 Philip IV of France (Philippe le Bel)  282, 310 Philippa of Hainault, Queen  311 philosophy  377–87 (alleged) denigration  378, 386

748

Index ‘circumstantial’ 153 classical models  151–2, 161n9 function 152 medieval forms/conventions  152–7 terminology 160n2 in vernacular texts  157–60 Propertius  9, 15, 135, 544 Prosper of Aquitaine  23, 24, 25, 331, 370, 524 prudence 476–7 Prudentius  11, 96, 351, 360, 363, 367–370, 524 biography 367 as hymn-writer  370, 376n111 influence on medieval literature  368, 369 library copies  101, 102, 103, 104, 210 posthumous reputation  369–70, 376n101 on school/university reading lists  23, 24, 25, 26, 368–9 surviving manuscripts  368–9 Cathemerinon  364, 365–6, 370, 375n94 Contra Symmachum 367 Hamartigenia  365, 366–7, 375n94 Peristephanon  369, 370 Praefatio 367 see also Psychomachia Pseudo-Apuleius 85–6 Pseudo-Augustine 153 Pseudo-Hegisippus 403 Psychomachia (Prudentius)  367–70, 376n108 allegorical significance  367–8 glosses 355 surviving manuscripts  368–9; illustrations 369 Ptolemy  82–3, 396, 519 Almagest  82, 83, 88, 527 Canons 83 Tetrabiblos 82

Pomponius (Christian poet), Versus ad Gratiam Domini 357 Pope, Sir Thomas  527 Porphyry  64, 396, 398 Isagoge  69, 153, 160n2 Printed book collections Cambridge, CUL, printed book INC. 2.B.3.21 507n23 London, BL, printed book C.2.a.7 508n39 Oxford, Bodleian, printed book Auct. N. 4.4  506n18 Oxford, Bodleian, printed book Arch. G. d.33  507n17 Oxford, Bodleian, printed book S.Seld. e.2 507n37 printing/printed books  5 14–17, 112–13, 131, 179–80, 187, 226n79, 263–4, 283, 286, 288, 289, 303, 313, 358, 362, 441, 448, 465, 479, 480–2, 491, 487–505, 517–29, 545–6, 563–4, 575–8, 584, 586, 588, 591–2, 595, 606, 608–9 Priorat, Jean  319n75 Priscian of Caesarea  24, 54–5, 57–8, 96, 212, 393 library copies  101, 103, 104, 110, 111 Institutiones grammaticae  22, 55, 56, 65, 173, 213 Partitiones xii. versuum Aeneidos principalium 355 Proba, Faltonia Betitia  11, 356–8 comments on gender  357, 358, 372n35 posthumous reputation  357–8 see also Cento Probus, M. Valerius  174 Proclus Lycaeus, De sphaera mundi 520 progymnasmata (rhetorical exercises)  520 prognostication 88 prologues  151–60 ‘causal’ (Aristotelian)  155–7, 158

749

Index Remigius de Fécamp  340 Remigius of Auxerre  103, 104, 111, 135, 153 Reynaud de Louen  309 Rhazes (Muhammad al-Rāzī) 87 Rhenanus, Beatus  517 rhetoric  3, 13–14, 16, 24, 28–9, 53, 69, 78, 96, 101, 105, 112, 113, 124, 153, 158, 166, 178, 214, 230, 236, 241, 254, 310, 329, 331, 340, 377, 380, 382–4, 387, 437, 440, 443–4, 456, 471–2, 488, 494, 496–7, 498, 516, 517, 520–1, 525, 584, 596, 606 in educational set texts  36–40, 43 practical application  62–3 teaching of   58–63, 310 Rhetorica ad Herennium (Pseudo-Cicero)  18–19n9, 59–60, 72n28, 101, 112, 302, 305, 497, 520 Rhigyfarch ap Sulien  210 Richard Coeur de Lion (anon.)  408–9n5 Richard I ‘Lionheart’ (historical character) 311 Richard II  311, 443, 470 Richard III  308, 312, 480, 504 Richard of Bury, Philobiblon 461n22 Richard of Saint-Victor  136 Richard of Wetheringsett, Summa qui bene presunt 306 Richmond, Henry Fitzroy, 1st Duke of   615, 618 Ridewall, John, Fulgentius metaforalis  7, 135–6, 140, 149nn94, 99 Rightwise, John  519 Rivers, Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl  303, 313 Robert of Anjou, King of Naples  2, 257, 263 Robert of Basevorn, Forma praedicandi 158

Ptolemy of Lucca  312 Publilius Syrus  302 Sententiae 306 Pulvillus, M.  421 Purfoot, Thomas  480 Puttenham, George  552 Pynson, Richard  478, 479, 480, 588–9 Pythagoras  81, 88, 123, 190, 216, 385, 393 quadrivium 5, 77–89 ancillary sciences  87–8 defined 77 relationship with medicine  85–7 relationship with natural philosophy  77, 84–5 syllabi  78–9, 83–4, 88–9 see also arithmetic; astronomy; geometry; music Quintilian, Institutio oratoria  59, 101, 108, 467, 520, 521, 563 Quintus Curtius Rufus (Alexander legends)  9, 18–19n9, 27 Rabanus Maurus  59, 84, 374n74 Liber de computo 80 Ralph de Diceto, Ymagines historiarum 212 Ralph of Beauvais  56, 71n16, 211 Ramsay, Allan  578 Raoul de Presles  5 Recueil des Histoires de Troyes (Lefèvre) 263–4 Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (Lefèvre, tr. Caxton)  179, 482 Rede, John  524 Redman, John  522 Redman, Robert  480–1 Reed, William, Bishop  111 Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum veterum (Oxford Greyfriars, early C14)  108–9, 118n75

750

Index Ruddiman, Thomas  578 Ruel, Jean  516 Rufinus of Aquileia  325 Rufus of Ephesus  87 Ruotger of Trier  368 Russell, John, Bishop  308, 488, 490–1, 504–5, 507n22

Robert of Chester  84 Robert of Cricklade  79, 83 Robert of Ketton  84 Robert of Wallingford  80 Rochford, Jane  528 Roger IV, Chatelain of Lille  256 Roger of Waltham, Compendium morale  303, 312, 313 Roger of Worcester, Bishop  113n6 Rogers, Edward  615 Rolle, Richard Emendatio vitae 494 English Psalter 282 Roman Britiain art/literature  170, 171–2 coinage 170–1 historiography 324–8 Roman de Brut (anon., C12)  175 Roman de la rose ( Jean de Meun/ Guillaume de Lorris)  68, 75n63, 416 engagement with Ovid  138–9, 187, 197, 198, 203, 441 influence on Chaucer  198, 203, 281 translated by Chaucer  159, 198 treatment of myth  138–9 Roman de Thèbes (anon., C12)  175, 200, 231–4, 244–5, 246n1, 248n30, 248nn35–40, 432n18, 468 Roman de Troie (Benoît de Sainte-Maure)  168, 175, 199, 200, 256–9, 436, 475 illustrations 257–8 as source for later writers  260, 261, 262, 468, 471 translations/adaptations  257, 258–9 Roman d‘Énéas (anon., C12)  175–6, 179, 432n18 Rome (Ancient), clothing conventions 559n52 Roos, Sir Robert  311, 312 Rotherham, Thomas  499, 511n99

Sabellico, Marcantonio, Enneades seu Rhapsodiae historiarum 526 Sackville, Thomas  482 Gorboduc (with Thomas Norton)  481 Saladin (Ṣalāh ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb)  414, 416–17 Sallust  10–11, 18–19n9, 32n40, 101, 110, 213, 333, 334, 347n44, 497, 504, 509n64, 526, 544, 563 in school/university curricula  23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 518, 520 Catilina 224n35 Invectiva in Ciceronem 99 Jugurtha 224n35, 547 Salutati, Coluccio  14, 443, 458, 492, 498, 545 Salvian of Marseilles  331, 332 satire  9–10, 541–3, 550–2 differing approaches to  542–3 Saxton, Nicholas  489, 491 Scala, Cangrande della  158 scepticism, philosophy of   378–87 arguments for  379–82, 383–5 general intolerance towards  379 Scholia Bernensia (anon.)  173 schools/schooling see education, grammar, humanism, rhetoric sciences, study of see quadrivium scientific texts, English translations  4 Scipio Africanus  497, 528 Scogan, Henry, ‘Moral Balade’  458, 464n67

751

Index De remediis fortuitorum (attributed to Seneca) 300 Thyestes  16, 156, 587, 590–1 Seneca (the Elder)  26, 454 Declamations 101 sense(s), Ovidian treaments of   190–1 Séquence de Sainte Eulalie (anon., C9)  369 Serapion of Alexandria  87 Serenus Sammonicus, Q.  23 Liber medicinalis 86 sermons 306–8 The Serpent of Division (Lydgate)  219–20, 465, 468, 469–70, 472–3, 475, 476, 477, 479, 482–3 manuscripts 480–1 Servius Honoratus, M.  24, 128–9, 161n9, 179, 210, 211, 229, 563 commentary on Virgil  124, 152, 173, 174, 178–9, 467, 491 Severs, Robert  532n7 Seymour, Edward  615 Seyssel, Claude de  527 Shakespeare, William  169, 483n1 King Lear 427 Troilus and Cressida  257, 264, 482 Shepherd, Luke  552 Shrewsbury, John Talbot, 1st Earl of   312 Sidonius Apollinaris  27, 105, 107, 524 The Siege of Jerusalem (anon.)  391, 403–8, 412n44 sources  403, 405, 407, 411n39 surviving manuscripts  408–9n5 theological framework  403–6, 411n37 treatment of miracles  406–7 Siege of Milan (anon.)  408–9n5 The Siege of Thebes (Lydgate)  244–6, 465, 468–70, 472, 473–5, 476–7, 478, 482–3 manuscripts 480 Siginulfo, Bartolomeo  310

Scriptores historiae augustae (anon., C4)  326–7, 336, 344n13 Scrope, Stephen  262, 303, 313 Secretum secretorum (anon., attrib. Aristotle)  78, 83, 299, 303, 309, 311, 318n57, 480 Sedulius  11, 23, 24, 25, 96, 101, 103, 356–61, 367 influence on later writers  363–4, 374n74 posthumous reputation  369–70 Liber hymnorum 360–1 see also Carmen paschale Sedulius Scotus  55 Seege or Batayle of Troye (anon., C14)  262 Selden, John  529 Sellyng, William  492, 497 Seneca  10, 98, 105, 135, 213, 496, 544, 586–7, 596 medieval commentaries  156–7 representation in florilegia  107, 108–9, 302 in royal education  524 in royal libraries  526 in school/university curricula  23, 25, 26, 27 and study of moral philosophy  300–1, 302, 303, 306, 309, 312 Apocolocyntosis 496 De beneficiis  107, 108, 300 De clementia 300 De constantia 300 Epistulae morales  107, 108–9, 112, 300, 305, 310, 314 Hercules furens 156 De ira 300 Moralia (or Dialogi) 18–19n9, 109 De moribus 107 Naturales quaestiones  85, 496 Phaedra 587

752

Index Silius Italicus, Punica 492 Simon of Hesdin  310 Simon of Tournai  302 Simund de Frein, Roman de philosophie  278–9, 280 Sinclair, Henry, Lord  564 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (anon., C14)  168, 366–7, 391, 393–4 Sir Orfeo (anon., C14)  206n10 Skelton, John  5, 10, 15, 498, 502, 524, 537n57, 541–52, 556n31 anti-establishment poetry  542, 547, 550–1 and Cicero  545 and Diodorus Siculus  545–7 education/scholarship 544–5, 553–4n17, 555n26 invective against contemporaries  541–2 links with humanism  546–8 posthumous reputation  552 relationship with classical models  543–4, 550, 551–2, 555n26 royal connections  545 sexual/scatological writings  549, 558n47 as song lyricist  548–9 as translator  545, 546–7 ‘The auncient acquaintance, madam…’ 548–9 The Bowge of Courte  547 Calliope 554n22 Collyn Clout  550, 556n33 The Garland of Laurel  545, 554n21, 586 Magnificence  547, 554n22 Remedia amoris 558n47 Speke Parrotte 550 ‘Upon a dedmans hede’  549–50 ‘Upon the Doulourus Dethe and Muche Lamentable Chaunce of the Most Honorable Erle Of Northumberlande’ 547–8

Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? 550–1 see also Diodorus Siculus Small, John  578 Smert, John  313 Smith, Thomas  522 Socrates  385, 399 Solinus, C. Julius  23, 27, 100, 105, 106, 111 Collectanea rerum memorabilium 79 Sonnyng, William  312 Sophocles 523 Ajax 523 soul, theories of   189–90 Southwell, Richard  615 Spanish, classical translations into  4 Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene 483n1 De spera solida (anon., tr. John of Harlebeke) 82 St Andrews, University of   562, 563 St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury  104, 106, 107, 116–17n54, 372–3n40 St Erkenwald (anon., C14)  391, 402 St Paul’s School  14, 28, 516, 518–19 Stafford, John, Bishop  308 Stanbridge, John  518, 520 Stapulensis, Johannes  587, 589 Statius  40, 97, 101, 110, 211, 213, 227–46, 248n32, 249n48, 436 Christianization  8, 227, 231, 234–5, 242 English translations  4 medieval reception  229–31 on school/university curricula  23, 24, 25, 26, 35, 227 Achilleid  8, 27, 101, 110, 227, 229, 230–1, 243–4, 246n7, 459n6 Silvae  227, 229–30 see also Thebaid Stephen, King  214, 339–40, 377–8 Stesichorus 466–7 Stockton, Adam  461n22, 463n47

753

Index in school/university curricula  23, 24, 26, 518 The Brothers 504 Tertullian  517, 526 Teseida (Boccaccio)  219, 231, 235–8, 249n53, 250n62 compared with Chaucer  240, 242, 243, 426, 428 influence of Dante  236–7, 242 influence of Statius  235–6, 237–8 as source for Chaucer  240, 415, 420, 436 Thebaid (Statius)  209 English translations  18–19n9 library copies  101, 102, 110, 112 medieval echoes/responses  8, 231–4, 235–42, 244–6, 415, 426, 436, 459n6, 468 narrative thread/themes  227–8, 231 religious elements  228, 233, 235 surviving manuscripts  230, 247n15 Theinred of Dover  81 Theobald, Archbishop  377 Theodontius 129 Theodore of Canterbury, Archbishop  78, 97, 101 Theodulf of Orléans  375n94 ‘Theodulus,’ Eclogue  25, 26, 27, 40, 141–2n5 Theophrastus 523 Thierry of Chartres  26, 61, 74n46 Heptateuchon 65 Thomas of Ireland, Manipulus florum  107–8, 113 Thomas of Marlborough  96, 210 Thornton, Robert  408–9n5 Thorp, William, Lord  311 Thorpe, John  311 Thucydides  527, 528 Thynne, William  540n94, 556n33 (ed.), Workes of Geffray Chaucer 283

Stoicism  123–6, 128–9, 137, 385, 594 Story of the Seven Sages (anon.)  436 Stow, John  480, 481 Strabo of Amaseia (Geographia) 519 Strangways, Sir James  311 Suetonius  10–11, 26, 152, 213, 219, 333, 339, 347–8n50 De viris illustribus 334 De vita Caesarum 18–19n9, 99–100, 326, 334, 491 Suffolk, Alice de la Pole, Countess of (née Chaucer) 480 Suffolk, William de la Pole, 4th Earl of  480 Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini 326 Sulpizio, Giovanni  211 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of   5, 10, 15, 16–17, 531, 601–19 biography  602, 614–19 psalm translations  617–18 reading of Douglas’ Eneados 577–8, 610–11 translations of Petrarch  618–19 trial/execution 615 see also Certain bokes of Virgiles Aeneis turned into English meter Symmachus, Q. Aurelius  27 Tacitus 11 Agricola  332, 334 Germania  325, 332 Tale of Beryn (anon., 14C)  472 Talmud, trial of in Paris  432–3n19 Tatwine 54 Ars Tatuini 175 Enigmata 175 Tegernsee monastery  133, 154, 155 Terence  96, 98, 524 early modern productions  523–4 English translations  113, 498, 502, 520 library copies  101, 104, 105, 111, 210

754

Index Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer)  9, 69–70, 159, 257, 260–2, 299, 414, 433n27, 439, 469–70 allusion to Juvenal  9 allusion to Lucan  219 engagement with Boethius  279–80, 281 engagement with Ovid  187, 195–7, 204 engagement with Statius  8, 238–9, 426 influence on Lydgate  472, 474 source material  260–1, 267n50, 467 structure 472 treatment of paganism  415, 419–20, 425–6 ‘Troy, Matter of ’  2, 8–9, 31n26, 251–64 related to contemporary royalty  262–3 Troy Book (Lydgate)  262–3, 465, 468, 471–2, 474, 475–7, 478–9, 482–3 manuscripts 479–80 Tuke, Sir Brian  540n94 Tullius Hostilius  458

Tiberius, Emperor  405–6 Tibullus, Albius  6, 19n12, 106, 117n61 Tignonville, Guillaume de  303, 319n75 Timaeus (Plato)  80, 84, 122–3, 271 library copies  101, 103, 104, 105, 112, 210 medieval commentaries  189 Timarchus 553–4n17 Tiptoft, John see Worcester, Earl of Titus, Emperor  392, 406 Togail Troí (anon., C11 Ireland)  255 Torquatus, T. Manlius  421 Tottel, Richard  620n28 (ed.), Songes and Sonettes (Tottel’s Miscellany)  591–2, 593, 600n62 Tractatus de regimine principum ad Regem Henricum Sextum (anon., C15)  312, 313 Trajan, Emperor  392, 395, 400, 401–3, 406–7, 408, 409n22 translation(s)  4–5, 18–19n9 humanist  497–503 methods/styles  499–503 see also under specific authors/works Trapezuntius (George of Trebizond)  524 Traube, Ludwig  172, 176 Traversagni, Lorenzo, Nova rhetorica 497 Les Très riches heures du duc de Berry (Book of Hours, C15)  394 Trevet, Nicholas  135, 156–7, 162n26, 279, 282, 286, 288, 289, 442 Trevisa, John  5, 57, 78, 282 translation of Polychronicon 391–2, 400–1, 402–3, 408n3, 410n23, 442 Trissino, Giovanni Giorgio Italia liberata dai Goti 621n38 Sophonisba 612–13 trivium 5, 53–70 defined 53 see also dialectic; grammar; rhetoric Trogus, Cn. Pompeius  24, 27, 30n15

Udall, Nicholas  521, 535n37 Flouers for Latine Spekynge Selected and Gathered oute of Terence  113, 521, 522 universities entry of religious orders  104–5, 111–12 libraries  6, 110, 111–12 see also names of universities Urso of Salerno  84 Usk, Thomas, Testament of Love 158, 283–5, 290, 296n55, 447–8 ‘Vacca’ 223n22 Valerius Flaccus  106 Argonautica 492 Valerius Maximus  18–19n9, 23, 26, 106, 107–8, 110, 219, 302, 306–7, 309, 315n14, 473, 481, 504, 509n71, 524, 544 De factis et dictis memorabilibus  301, 334, 490, 495–7

755

Index British role in early medieval transmission 173–5 career path  165–6, 178–9, 466 centos derived from  356–8 cited in biblical epics  352, 356–8 English translations  4, 601–24 see also under individual works by Virgil fictionalised depictions  121–2, 136, 177 influence in Ireland  172–3 influence/quotation in Roman Britain  170–2 preeminence in medieval culture  7–8, 165, 166, 167, 168–70, 176, 180, 399 quoted at second hand  169, 173 role in Norman culture  175–8 route to English awareness  170, 173 in school/university curricula  23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 35–6, 518, 520, 521 supposed prophetic/magical abilities  8, 166, 167, 176, 177–8, 180, 436 works (wrongly) attributed to  166, 174 see also Aeneid; Aetna; Appendix Vergiliana; Culex, Eclogues; Georgics, Pedagogus; Life of Virgilius Virgilius Maro Grammaticus  54 ‘virtuous heathen,’ figure of   414–22, 428–9, 432n18, 433n21 vita (life of author), genre of   151–2, 157, 158–9, 270–1 Vitelli, Cornelio  547 Vitruvius Pollio, M.  23, 25, 100, 108 De architectura 87–8 Vives, Juan Luis  521, 522, 535n38 De institutione foeminae Christianae 524 De ratione studii puerilis 524 De tradendis disciplinis 524 Vorilong, William  414 Vox clamantis (Gower)  438–9, 443–8

Valla, Lorenzo  497 Elegantiae linguae Latinae 563 Varro, M. Terentius, De re rustica 88, 498–9 Vasque de Lucène  511n98 ‘Vatican Mythographers’  7, 128–9, 134, 140, 143n34 Vaus, John  563 Vegetius Renatus, P. Flavius  23, 100, 101, 102, 107–8, 111, 112, 302, 305, 306, 311, 312 English/French translations  4, 18–19n9, 312–13, 319n75, 512n114 Epitome rei militaris  88, 301, 413, 470, 480, 498–9, 501, 512n113 Vegio, Maffeo (Maphaeus Vegius) as character in Douglas’s Eneados  568–9 continuation of Aeneid  16, 179, 490, 565, 574–5, 607 Velutello, Alessandro  589 La Vengeance de nostre Seigneur (anon.)  403 Vérard, Anthoine  526 Vergerio, Pierpaolo, De Ingenuis moribus 494 versi sciolti 612–13 Vespasian, Emperor  392, 403, 405–6, 407 Vespasiano da Bisticci  489 Victor, Claudius Marius, Alethia—Omnipotens auctor, mundi rerumque creator 371–2n23 Victorinus, G. Marius  24, 59, 64 Vigilius, Pope  361 Vincent of Beauvais  135, 316n28, 472 Speculum doctrinale 433–4n30 Speculum historiale  391, 436 Speculum maius  87, 106, 303, 391 Vindolanda 170 Virgil  9, 11, 83–4, 97, 98, 102, 104, 129, 135, 165–80, 211, 339, 524, 544 artistic representations of works  171

756

Index William II ‘Rufus’  215–16, 333 William of Auxerre  302 William of Champeaux  61 William of Conches  56, 106, 122, 189, 278, 279, 288, 294n35, 377 see also Moralium dogma philosophorum William of Jumièges  336 William of Malmesbury  11, 26, 31n29, 88, 99, 105, 111, 213, 221, 276, 329, 334, 412n47 historiographical approach  339–41, 348–9nn64–65 Gesta regum Anglorum  25, 212, 215–16, 339 Historia novella 339–40 Polyhistor  25, 105, 106–7, 109, 348n64 William of Moerbeke  8, 251, 487, 492, 504 William of Ockham  85 William of Pagula, Oculus sacerdotis 107 William of Poitiers  336 Gesta Guillelmi 212 William of Rubruck  417–18, 419, 428, 429 William of Saint-Thierry  96 William of Tyre, Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum 411n42 William of Wykeham, Bishop  521–2 Winchester College  110, 520 Wireker, Nigel, Speculum stultorum 438 Witelo 88 Withypoll, Edmund  584 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal  517, 519, 520, 542 Woodville, Anthony see Rivers, 2nd Earl Worcester, John Tiptoft, 1st Earl of  321n103, 488–9, 491, 492, 498, 503, 506n11 On Friendship 502–3 Worcester, William  303, 313, 321n103, 498, 502 The Boke of Noblesse 503

Wace 175 Wakefield, Robert  523 Wakefield, Thomas, Prof.  523 Walafrid Strabo  371–2n23 Waleys, Thomas  135, 442 Walsingham, Thomas  49n38, 122, 463n52 De archana deorum  131–2, 141, 146n54 Chronica maiora 217–18 Dites ditatus 149–50n101 Walter de Milemete  311 Walter of Châtillon  135, 211 Alexandreis  9, 18–19n9, 104, 110, 112, 211, 212 Walter of Speyer  22–3, 35, 40 Waltham Abbey  104 Walton, John translation of Boethius  279, 285–8, 296nn63–4, 297n71; prologue/ commentary  286–7; surviving manuscripts  286, 287–8 translation of Vegetius  312–13 Warner, Edward  615 The Wars of Alexander (anon.)  391, 392–3, 394, 396 Warwick, Thomas Beauchamp, 12th Earl of  306–7 Warwick, Richard Beauchamp, 13th Earl of  313 Warwick, Elizabeth, Countess of (née Berkeley)  286, 313 Watson, Thomas  540n97 Waynflete, William, Bishop  518, 521, 522 Welsh, poetry written in  355 Whethamstede, John, Abbot  436, 458n3 Whitelaw, Archibald  563, 564 Whitfield, John, Brother  104 Whittick, George Clement  315n14 Whittinton, Robert  553n8 Vulgaria  520–1, 535n34 William FitzStephen  212 William I ‘The Conqueror’  212

757

Index ‘A spending hand’  587, 598n15 ‘Stond who so list upon the Slipper toppe’  587, 590–2, 593, 596, 598n15, 600n51, 600n57 ‘Such vayn thought’  599n38 ‘They fle from me that sometiyme did me seek’  549 ‘Vulcan begat me’  598n15 ‘The wandering gadlyng’  585–6 ‘Who list his welth and ease retyane’  587, 598n15 Wyclif, John  67, 282, 306, 408n4, 461n22

de Worde, Wynkyn  480 Wotton, Edward  520 Wulfstan of Winchester  24, 210 Wyatt, Sir Henry  583–4 Wyatt, John  584 Wyatt, Richard  584 Wyatt, Sir Thomas  5, 10, 15, 16–17, 530, 552, 583–97 education/scholarship  583–5, 596–7 Defence 596–7 ‘For shamfast harm’  587, 598n15 ‘If thou wilt mighty be’  598n15 ‘In dowtful brest’  598n15 ‘Iopas Song’  587–8, 592–3, 598n15 ‘Mine Own John Poynz’  551, 587, 593, 596 ‘My galy charged with forgetfulnes’ 584–5 ‘My mothers maydes’  587, 593–6, 600n65 ‘Myne old dere en’mye’  597n14 ‘Of Carthage he’  597n14 Penitential Psalms  598n15 ‘Perdy I sayd it not’  597n14 ‘The piller pearisht is’  596, 599n38 The Quyete of Mynde  587, 588–90, 591–2, 598n15, 599n40, 600n57 ‘So feble is the thred’  599n38

Xenophon of Athens  14, 466–7, 494–5 Anabasis 527 Cyropaedia 511n98 Hiero  493–4, 495 Yonge, James  303 York, Edmund, 1st Duke of   480 York, Richard, 3rd Duke of   312, 498 Young, Patrick  112, 529 Zabarella, Francesco, Cardinal  306 Zanone da Castiglione, Bishop  507n29 Zeno of Citium  385, 600n64 Zono of Magnali  211

758