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THE ‘SWEET NEW STYLE’

ESSAYS ON BRUNETTO LATINO, DANTE ALIGHIERI,

GEOFFREY CHAUCER, AND GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO

JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY

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Table of Contents

Prologue: The 'Sweet New Style' 2

Brunetto Latino and Romanesque I Bankers and Their Books: Italian Manuscripts in French Exile 5 II Brown Ink, Red Blood: Brunetto Latino and the Sicilian Vespers 34 Dante Alighieri and ‘Gothic’ III The Vita nova's Pilgrimage Paradigms 55 IV ‘As Luke Writes’: Vita nova and Commedia 80 V Stealing Hercules' Club: Inferno XXV's Metamorphoses 101 VI Dante as Timotheus: The Music of the Commedia 125 VII Franciscan Comedy: Paradiso XI 145 Geoffrey Chaucer and ‘Gothic’ VIII Black and Red Letter Chaucer 168 IX Fact/Fiction: Women in Love 179 X Convents, Courts, Colleges 206 XI The Tomb of the Duchess Alice 229 Romanesqued ‘Gothic’ XII God's Plenty: Terence in Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer 241

Epilogue: Attica State Prison, Boethius the Exile, Dante the Pilgrim 272 Index

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PROLOGUE: THE ‘SWEET NEW STYLE’

he ‘Sweet New Style’ propounded in Florence by Brunetto Latino's students, Guido Cavalcanti and Dante Alighieri, was essentially the

‘Gothic’ style, a style that revolted against their teacher's beloved Romanizing and Romanesque manner. It was a style that had its origins not in the Ostrogoths and Visigoths that overran the Mediterranean world, the word an unreasonable Age of Reason misnomer, but instead its origins were in the French Crusaders' co-option of the delicacy of the Saracen world they encountered and subsumed and momentarily conquered. It was associated as well with the importation of forbidden learning from the Arab world, of Aristotle and of his Muslim commentators, Avicenna and Averroes, likewise co-opted by Thomas Aquinas, an Italian teaching theology in Paris. The sweetness of sugar in both the Muslim world and the Christian was an economy built on slave labour, inviting one's own 'instant gratification' out of the misery of the 'Other'. This newness played off oldness, Gothic with Romanesque, in paradigm shifts, that we can study in literary texts.

Dante, when he wrote the Commedia fashioned his Virgilian Inferno appropriately in his Master's Romanesque manner, though tempering it with Gothicizing Aquinas's Aristotle, while his Paradiso is most ‘Gothic’, like a great Rose Window. But Dante makes sure there is equality between men and women within that Rose, rejecting Brunetto's Aristotelian disparagment of women. Similarly Chaucer played games with the two styles and with Aristotelian learning, but at Oxford, rather than at Paris. The ‘Sweet New Style’ partly flowers in Italy from French seeds, sown by the ploughing barons of the Roman de la Rose. Those seeds next germinate in England from Chaucer's contamination with first France, then Italy, with the Roman de la Rose and with Boccaccio.

Much of the ‘Gothic’ style, in particular with the 'Sweet New Style' in Italian poetry, as in the Vita nova, is its game and play of love. There also had been a radical shift in behaviour. The ‘courting’ game enslaves, not liberates. We had

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noted in an earlier book, Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages, that women in the Romanesque period had been learned, forthright and powerful, while in the ‘Gothic’ they had become coy, simpering and uneducated. We traced that paradigm shift to the introduction to Christian Europe of the Greco-Arabic university which excluded women from its lecture halls. Therefore some of these essays will discuss the ‘Sweet New Style’ of the ‘Gothic’ and its implications concerning the new illiteracy of women.

Some of the material concerning Brunetto Latino has been published in Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, 1993. ‘Convents, Courts and Colleges‘ was originally published in Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages, edited by Julia Bolton Holloway, Joan Bechtold and Constance S. Wright, 1990. My knowledge concerning Ewelme I owe to my friend Diana Leap, the photographer of the Plates of the Tomb of the Duchess. To its Dante section I add further essays. The Attica State Prison lecture on Dante was given on the tenth anniversary of the Attica Uprising, thanks to Ron Herzman and Bill Cook. As a whole this collection of essays is an e-book. Originally placed on the Web in html in Times Roman in 1997 it is now reset in Palatino type in pdf format for Academia.edu in 2015.

Florence 15 August 2015

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BRUNETTO LATINO AND ROMANESQUE:

I ITALIAN MANUSCRIPTS IN FRENCH EXILE

BANKERS AND THEIR BOOKS

here has long been uncertainty and indeed controversy over Dante Alighieri's access to the encyclopaedic Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de

Lorris and Jean de Meun.1 It could be wise to look again at the political context and to see the connections between law and literature, banking and books in Italy and France, between the ledgers of black and red, the documents written in chancery script, and the books of alternating red and blue capitals, written in libraria, bookhand, with pages adorned with gold leaf and miniatures, produced in banking and notarial chambers and scriptoria. I will argue, in this essay, that there was a similar trafficking in poems as there was in loans in the Dugento period, especially between France and Italy, but which also spread its tentacles into other countries as well.2 I will discuss first the circle of bankers and poets involved in various ways with Charles of Anjou, then the encyclopaedic and lyric Franco-Italian manuscripts in connection with that circle.3

Laurentian Library, Brunetto Latino, Il Tesoretto, Brunetto Latino and Alfonso el Sabio

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Brunetto Latino had been sent to Spain in 1260 as ambassador to Alfonso el Sabio. On his return he learned of his exile caused by the Guelf Republic's defeat at the Battle of Montaperti. He was later - while in exile in France - to compose an encyclopedic dream vision poem in Italian, Il Tesoretto, which borrowed heavily from the materials available in Spain, such as Isidore of Seville's encyclopedic Etymologiarum4 and the translations into Latin of encyclopedic Aristotle and Alfraganus, and the Castilian and Gallegan works of Alfonso el Sabio,5 as well as the encyclopedic French Roman de la Rose,6 and which narrated the bitter tale of learning of his exile in the Valley of Roncesvalles in lines which echoed back to the French Chanson de Roland of crusades,7 and forward to the Italian Commedia of pilgrimage.8

Venendo per la valle Del piano di roncisvalle, Incontrai uno scolaio Sour un muletto baio, Che venia da bolongnia . . . E io'l pur domandai Novelle di toscana In dolçe lingua e piana; Ed e' cortesemente Mi disse immantenente Che guelfi di fiorença, Per mala provedença E per força di guerra, Eran fuori de la terra, E'l dannaggio era forte Di pregione e di morte. 143-162 9 [Going through the valley Of the plain of Roncesvalles I met a scholar Upon a bay mule, Who was coming from Bologna . . . And I also asked him For news of Tuscany In the sweet and clear tongue, And he courteously Told me immediately That the Guelfs of Florence Through ill fortune And through the force of war Were exiled from that land, And the penalty was great, Of imprisonment and death.]

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Brunetto had already become established as an important figure in the Primo Popolo, lending his legal skills to the drawing up of peace treaties between Siena and Florence and Arezzo and Florence, in documents still to be found in Sienese and Florentine archives, written in his clear and lovely hand.10 This embassy was to secure the aid of the King of Castile, Alfonso X el Sabio, promising to aid him in turn with securing the title and crown of Emperor of the Romans, were he to combat Manfred and defend Guelf Florence against Siena. The embassy did not succeed and Montaperti spelled disaster for the mercantile Guelfs, the Sienese and King Manfred driving them from the city. Florence for six years became aristocratically Ghibelline. Her mercantile Guelf bankers were scattered into exile to Lucca and in a diaspora across the map of Europe. The Ghibellines were not enamoured of education. The Guelfs enjoyed high literacy and were able not only to maintain these standards for themselves when in exile but also to use their exile as opportunity for pluralistic encyclopaedic cultural studies.11 Though many Florentines remained in Lucca, specifically in the San Frediano district, Brunetto himself tells us in the Tesoretto that he journeyed first to Montpellier (line 2541, ‘Intrai in monposlieri’). That city was rich, new and free, and had a flourishing university specializing in medicine and law. The archives in Montpellier demonstrate the importance of Italian merchants who linked that city with the great fair in Champagne at Bar-sur-Aube.12

Then we find legal and banking documents in the Vatican Secret Archives and in Westminster Abbey drawn up by Brunetto concerning loans made by Florentine bankers to English and the French ecclesiasts for the purpose of paying the papal decima or tithe for a ‘crusade’ against Manfred. In these Latino appears to have become established amongst Lombard bankers, centred in Arras, in northern France, but the documents demonstrate that he also frequented the great fair at Bar-sur-Aube and had dealings in Paris.13 From the documents that survive from this period it is clear that Latino was part of the Florentine Guelf shadow cabinet, of its government-in-exile, and that that government was becoming increasingly oligarchic, comprising the great banking families of Guelf Florence who now proceeded to win back their republican comune with florins and marks sterling and with the aid of popes and imperial candidates.

There are two documents penned and signed by Brunetto Latino from this period. They tell us much about the Guelf Florentines in exile. Though

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continuing under the papal interdict for the murder of the Abbot Tesoro of Vallombrosa, the Florentine Guelfs were paradoxically the allies of the Pope against King Manfred of Sicily. The Pope's response to Manfred's aggression against him was to declare him unthroned and uncrowned and to wage a mercenary crusade against him. With the aid of Lombard bankers, the Pope got churches in England and elsewhere to a tenth, a tithe, of their wealth, the decima, for this ‘holy’ war.14 The Florentine Guelfs in exile, in reprisal for Montaperti, had already been able to have the English crown expel Sienese merchants from that island.15

The first letter was written to the Roman Curia from Arras about notarized events on September 15 and 24, 1263, concerning these dealings, and promised the loyalty of the exiled Florentine bankers in Arras and in Paris to the Pope's cause against Manfred, ‘quondam principis Tarentini.’ It named major Lombard bankers like Aymeri Cose, Pietro and Lotterio Benincase, Cante or Cavalcante della Scala, Thomas Spigliati and Ricco Cambi (Rucco di Cambio), some of whom had been on embassy to the Roman Curia, many of these individuals having been mentioned also in Brunetto's document for the Siena/Florentine peace accord of 1254 and that at Orvieto ratifying it.16 Giovanni Villani in his Cronica di Firenze likewise explained that the exiled Guelfs joined Charles of Anjou and Pope Clement against Manfred.17 A sixteenth-century volume of archival records, titled Antiquités d'Arras (Bibliothèque Municipale 1110), mentions the presence of Lombards and usurers by the Abbey of St. Vaast (which today houses that library and owns several Aristotelian manuscripts with Latino associations as well as a magnificent Li Livres dou Tresor manuscript).18

Vatican Secret Archives

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The second letter, written from Bar-sur-Aube to England, April 17, 1264, directly concerned England's payment of the crusading decima.19 It contracted between the Bellindoti and Spinelli family members and other Florentine merchants and bankers to loan almost two thousand marks sterling for the Bishop of Hereford's payment to the Roman Curia. An extraordinary sentence in the document states that to borrow at interest from the Florentines had papal approval, and goes even further to state that such usury carried with it the crusading indulgence. There is a possibility that this was the amount, two thousand marks sterling, that the Roman Curia arranged to pay to Lucca for sheltering the exiled Florentine Guelfs in the parish of San Frediano.20 Similar documents name Cavalcante Cavalcanti, the father of Guido Cavalcanti, Brunetto's student and Dante's poet friend. Interestingly, one of the members of the Bellindoti family was Palamidesso di Bellindoti del Perfetto, listed in the Libro di Montaperti as ‘vessillifero dei balestrieri di Porta di Duomo.’ He likewise was a poet, he participated in the tenzoni written concerning Charles of Anjou, and Brunetto mentioned him in Il Favolello.21 Thus money and poetry are mixed with Florentine affairs.

I. Educating a Podestà

Looking at these documents and others like them generated by the Lombard bankers in France and England, and also examining Brunetto Latino's literary exilic output, the picture becomes clear of a Florentine strategem, in collusion with the Pope, to hire Charles d'Anjou, Charles of Anjou, the unsaintly brother of Saint Louis, King of France, as their champion against Manfred of Sicily. In the Tesoretto we learn of the earlier decision to have Alfonso el Sabio be courted as their champion with the reward of Florentine support for the imperial coronation. That encyclopaedic poetic text, written in Italian, which would be comprehensible to the Spanish monarch, was likely dedicated to him. But it is incomplete. The Florentine bankers had decided not to pursue his claim further. Latino's Rettorica is dedicated to a wealthy Florentine banker, named Manecto (perhaps Manecto Spine), likewise living abroad, who was Brunetto's patron and protector, his porto in time of storm.22 Then Brunetto set his hand at writing a prose work in Picard French, Li livres dou Tresor. This massive encyclopedia contains a history, a geography, a bestiary, an ethics, a rhetoric, and a politics, comprising the education of a king in right government, modelling itself upon Aristotle's education of Alexander and Cicero's education of the Roman Republic. It stresses Popes and Emperors.

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The text includes a chronicle account of the events following Montaperti and concerning Charles of Anjou, which are updated in later versions of the text. In the original version that account commenced with the Emperor Frederick's death.

Et quant il fu traspases de cist siecle, si com a deu plot. Lempire vaca longuement sens Roi et sens empereor. ia soit ce qe Manfrois. fils dou devant dit frederic. non mir de droit marriage tint le roiaume de puille et de cecilie contra dey et contre rason. si come celui qi del tot fu contrante a sancte yglise. perce si stil mainte guerre et diverses persecusions contre toz les ytaliens qi se tenoient devers scte yglise, meesmement. contra la guelfe partie de florence. tant qil furent chachies hors de la ville. et lor cosses furent misses a feu. et a flante et a destrucion. et avec els en fucachies maistre Brunet latin e si estoit parcelle guerre essillies en france. quant il fist ces livres por amor de son amis, selonc ce qil dist a prologues devant.23

It concludes with advice concerning how a podestà, hired by a republic, should uphold its people's laws, presenting an argument for both a constitutional monarch and a republican president - who swears to uphold the people's constitution.24 In that conclusion it gives the letter written to Charles of Anjou asking him to assume the Senatorship of Rome and presenting to him the contractual obligations of the position.25 That inauguration ceremony took place in June of 1265, with Charles of Anjou actually dressed in the Senatorial toga in the Franciscan church of Ara Coeli on the Capitoline.26 The Tresor was likely dedicated to Charles of Anjou in tandem with Arnolfo di Cambio's stern statue of that ruler in Roman senatorial garb, the capitoli or baton in his hand, a medieval crown upon his head, upheld by a lion throne, the statue sculpted to commemorate the event. Both the statue and the encyclopaedia were works by Florentines who were making use of Roman Republican history in order to educate a French noble in how Italian comuni should be governed. This explains why a Florentine wrote his magnum opus in French - so Charles d'Anjou could read it and perhaps pay heed to its message.27

Thus this text was written to educate Saint Louis' most unsaintly brother, chosen by the Pope and the Florentines to rule Italy later as Vicar of Tuscany and King of Sicily and Jerusalem, though not selected by them to be the Emperor of the Romans. This intent is borne out in the illuminations which frequently show the book as presented to a ruler. That the text is sarcastic

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about wealth, continuing an earlier pun upon ‘Tesoro’ of Vallombrosa, the murdered Pavian abbot, who was spoken of scathingly in a letter written by Brunetto as chancellor of Florence to the comune of Pavia, reflects back to problems Charles had already experienced when his subjects in Marseilles had revolted against his ponderous taxation,29 and which would recur in Palermo in the Sicilian Vespers, 30 indicating that the Florentine bankers were trying to curb their client's insatiable lust for money.

The text that influenced Il Tesoretto, Le Roman de la Rose, likewise had chronicled and gazetted Charles. In his encyclopaedic masterwork, Jean de Meun has Reason tell the Lover not of ancient stories but modern ones. He placed the tale not in the sordid context of bank loans and ledger books but in the chivalric one of a chess game played out upon the board of Europe using players of flesh and blood.

Et se les prueves riens ne prises d'ancienes estoires prises, tu les as de ton tens noveles, de batailles fresches et beles (de tel biauté, ce doiz savoir, conme il peut en bataille avoir), c'est de Mainfrai, roi de Secile, qui par force tint et par guile lonc tens em pez toute la terre, quant li bons Charles li mut guerre, contes d'Anjou et de Provance, qui par devine porveance est ore de Secile rais, qu'ainsinc le veut Dex le verais, qui tourjorz s'est tenus o li. Cist bons rais Challes l'en toli, non pas sanz plus la seigneurie, ainz li toli du cors la vie. Quant a l'espee qui bien taille, en la prumeraine bataille, l'assailli por lui desconfire, eschec et mat li ala dire desus son destrier aufferrant

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d'un tret de paonet errant ou mileu de son eschequier. De Corradin parler ne quier, son neveu, don l'exanple est preste, don li rais Challes prist la teste maugré les princes d'Alemaigne. Henri, frere le rai d'Espaigne, plein d'orgueill et de traïson mist il morir en sa prison. 6601-6632 31

[And if you take no proofs from ancient history, you can take them from modern news of battles fresh and fine, of as much beauty as one could say there could be in a battle. It is of Manfred, King of Sicily, who by force and by guile held for a long time all that land, when the good Charles, Count of Anjou and Provence made war against him, and by divine providence is now King of Sicily, as God truly willed it so is it always. This good king Charles took it, not without the rule in the course of his life. So well did he wield his sword in the first battle that he assaulted him to his discomfort, saying to him ‘Check,’ and ‘Mate’ through a mere pawn in the middle of the board. Now of Conradin his nephew we speak, of which the example is given, when King Charles took off his head, despite the princes of Germany. Henry, brother of the King of Spain, full of pride and treason, he imprisoned for life.]

Jean de Meun, like Guillaume de Lorris before him, was from the Champagne region, close to Bar-sur-Aube. Both Jean de Meun and Brunetto Latino spoke pointedly of Tullius' Rhetoric32 and there is a possibility the two men knew and influenced each other. Another region of France with close associations to Charles d'Anjou was the region of Artois and Picardy, and specifically of Arras. We likewise find a poet from Arras (Arras in this period was extraordinarily active in literary productivity33), Adam de la Halle, or Adam de Bossu or Boçu, as associated with Charles, even journeying with him down to Italy, being his Poet Laureate, participating in the events around the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, and who would die in Naples in 1288 in the employ of the Count of Artois. It was Adam de la Halle who first wrote of the almost fairy tale of the four daughters of Count Raymond of Berengar and of the Chamberlain-become-Pilgrim Romeo who married them to four kings, including Beatrice to King Charles and Margaret to Saint Louis, to be retold

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by Dante and by Villani, as a narration in their works.34 Thus there was a circle of French writers, some of whom remained in France, others being in Italy, who were interacting with Italian politics. Interestingly, there is the French work, titled Le comte d'Anjou, the plot of which is constructed using diplomatic letters and whose Count is villainously incestuous.35 (It is an analogue to Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale.)

Besides these quasi-chronicle accounts in the Roman de la Rose and the Tresor the Italian poets associated with the various exiled banking families were conversing with each other in the writing of political tenzoni in which they debated whether the choice of Charles of Anjou as ruler was desirable or no. Brunetto had concluded the Tesoretto with the Favolello, a verse treatise on friendship written to a Ghibelline poet, Rustico di Filippo, in which he mentioned the Guelf Palamidesse di Belindotti del Perfetto.

E ciò che scritto mando è cagione e dimando che ti piaccia dittare e me scritto mandare del tuo trovato adesso ch'e'l buon Palamidesso mi dice, ed ho creduto, che se''n cima saluto; ond'io me n'allegrai. Qui ti saluto ormai: e quel tuo di Latino tien per amico fino a tutte le carrate che voi oro pesate. 149-163

[And that which is written I send and the reason I ask that it please you to say and to send to me writing of what you have found of the good Palamidesso, speak to me, and I will greet you from the summit, of which I shall rejoice. Thus I now greet you, and that you hold your Latino for a fine friend of all the burdens that you could have weighed]

Rustico di Filippo wrote, perhaps in reply to this work, a tenzone.

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A! voi che ve ne andaste per paura Sichuramente potete tornare, da che ci é dirizata la ventura, ormai potete guerra inconinzare. E più non vi bisogna stare a dura, da che nonn é chi vi schomunicare, ma ben lo vi tenete n'ischiagluira, che non avete più casgion che dare. Ma so bene, se Carllo fosse mortto, che voi ci trovereste ancor casgione; però del Papa nonn ò gran confortto. Ma io non voglio con voi stare a tenzone ca llungo temp'e ch'io ne fui accorto Che'l ghibellino aveste per garzone.36

The series of tenzoni, which became increasingly virtuose in performance, included works by Guglielmo Beroardi, Brunetto's companion ambassador in 1260,37 and others.38 These poems served to dissipate the rage between the two parties while at the same time both sides discussed their anxieties concerning Charles of Anjou. They played upon Arthurian romance, including wittily discussing within that context the Arthurian name of this poet, Palamidesse di Bellindoti del Perfetto, whose family we remember to have been involved in exilic banking in England.39 Some of these tenzoni appear to have been written during the exile period, serving as communication at the same time as propaganda between the two sides - as it were a presidential media debate -, some, like this one, are written after this period. In them the paper war is turned into a poetic game; chronicles and chancery letters of state are metamorphosed into sonnetti.40 Yet both serious and playful documents are penned in the contexts of notarial, legal, banking, and chancery chambers.

II. Franco-Italian Manuscripts

At this point it could be wise to look at Franco-Italian manuscripts of this period and discuss their meshwork, their intertextuality, with the routes taken by Lombard bankers and notaries journeying with their account books and their letters of credit and debit throughout France and upon their return

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to Italy with Charles. Scholars have noted the kinship between the two languages and their literatures, Charles Le Grand d'Aussy having stated: ‘En effet, l'établisement des princes Normands en Italie y avoit singulièrement propagé l'usage de la langue française.’41 That was also true in reverse, Italian scribes functioning on French soil.42 But the Italians were more flexible, versatile and open than the French, being capable of bilingualism, while the French kept to the one language with which they were familiar. The Italians in exile adapted to their new surroundings, assiduously learning the langue d'oil and the langue d'oc and copying out the poetry of north and south France; the French as conquerors refused to mingle or learn Italian or employ Italians and these became the major reasons for the Sicilian Vespers uprising against them.

An especially famous manuscript is Montpellier Faculté de Medecine H 438 which was once joined to Laurentian Library, Ashburnham 1234, the first containing the Roman de la Rose, in French, and the Fiore, consisting of sonnets composed in Italian of the Roman, the second, the Detto d'amore. What is not generally noted is that this Roman de la Rose is clearly written by an Italian scribe who has carefully alternated the red and blue capitals not in French Gothic but in Bolognan libraria. The Fiore sonnets following43 are written in a chancery hand, like that of Francesco de Barberino, the scribe of the Trivulzian codex. That hand - or one very close to it - recurs in the Laurentian Detto d'amore where we see it mixed again with Bolognan libraria. It is of interest that the Trivulzian Commedia, acknowledged as the earliest manuscript we have of Dante's text, gives as its scribe a ‘Ser Franciscus Ser Nardi de barberino,’ who writes the text not in the expected Bolognan libraria but in the chancery script of notarial chambers. Another Dante codex in this hand is Laurentian Plut. 40.16. This hand is also similar to Yale's Etica, Marston 28, the latter being slightly more florid, but again in a manuscript that has associations with Brunetto Latino. Related to this Roman de la Rose is Modena's Biblioteca Estense's E.152=alpha.K.2.48, which gives four folios of the Roman de la Rose, likewise with capitals in Bolognan libraria. It was discovered in the archive at Monteferrate, given by Debenedetti to Giulio Bertoni, who deposited it in Modena's library.44 It is greatly similar to Poetarum Provinciali, E.45=alpha. R.4.4, dated August 12, 1254, of which more later.

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The Fiore was not always at Montpellier, being acquired by Etienne Bouhier when he was a student in 1611 at Padua and taken first to Dijon, then Troyes, before being housed at Montpellier.45 That it should have travelled to the Veneto region can be explained by the later presence of two of Brunetto's students there, Francesco da Barberino and Dante Alighieri. Francesco da Barberino had, in fact, taught at Padua after having served in the employ of Corso Donati, podestà of Treviso. He would conclude his career by working for the Curia in Avignon. The manuscript in its entirety is precisely the kind that could have been generated by Brunetto's teaching, first in his French exile, then upon his return to Italy. That it incorporates both scripts, chancery and libraria, indicates its genesis within legal chambers - and even the astronomical diagrams and the ornamental designs of the Laurentian Detto d'amore section are typical of Latino's scriptoria in France and Italy. His student, Francesco da Barberino, in a similar vein, was to write the Documenti d'amore.46 Hence I would argue that it is of importance that we look again at this cluster of manuscripts, placing them back into that context of notarial chambers, of lawyers and bankers, especially in connection with the cluster of students associated with Brunetto Latino, reputed to have been the teacher of Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri and Francesco da Barberino, in order to understand these texts and their probable authors.

The Tesoretto manuscripts, composed in exile in France, are today housed in the main in Italian libraries, eight being in Florence, others being in the Vatican, Brescia, and Venice. One manuscript today is in France, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. nouv. acq. 1745, and is a fragment within a later Florentine commonplace book. Another, bound with the Commedia, though in an earlier hand than it, was formerly in England and is today Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier, Brussels, 14614-14616. A third is in Krakòv, formerly in Berlin. A fourth is today Cornell University 4. There were rumours of another manuscript being in the Marques de Santillana collection in Madrid.47 It is clear that this Italian poem did not have great currency in Francophone areas. Until Dante, French texts could be current coin in Italy, but not the reverse, of Italian texts in France. This may well have been a major reason for Brunetto's decision not to complete the Tesoretto - which was likely a presentation work for the imperial candidate, Alfonso el Sabio of Castile, who would have been able to understand written Italian - and why Latino took up the task of writing - in French of the Arras region - Li Livres dou Tresor, as a presentation work for the Roman senatorial candidate, Charles of Provence and Anjou,

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whom Italians called Carlo d'Angiò or Carlon, and who could only tolerate his own French.

Of Latino's Tresor in French we have a multitude of manuscripts. I now know of 80 of these scattered across Europe, two even reaching America (in Columbia University's Butler Library's Plimpton Collection and in the Pierpont Morgan Collection, New York). These manuscripts are largely still to be found in situ, where they would have been placed in the mercantile banking centres controlled by the Spigliati-Mozzi company, in Arras, Lyon, Rouen, Brussels, Cambrai, Amiens, Rennes, Saint Omer, Saint Quentin, Dunkirk (this one certainly lost to fire and actually acquired from England), Paris, London, Cambridge, Oxford, Escorial, Rome, Turin, Milan, Naples, Verona, Bergamo, Ferrara, Modena, Udine (these last five cities likely as the result of Brunetto's students' travels, Dante Alighieri into exile, Francesco da Barberino into notarial employment with Corso Donati, podestà of Treviso, then his teaching at Padua48), Karlsruhe, Strasbourg, Munich, and only one in Florence.49 They exist in two redactions, the first giving the history of the world up through Brunetto's exile from Florence following the Battle of Montaperti, the second continuing that chronicle account through Charles' victory over Manfred at the Battle of Benevento and the defeat of Conradin and his execution following the Battle of Tagliacozzo.50

It is clear that these second redaction manuscripts in French emanated from scriptoria and workshops after Brunetto supposedly had returned to Florence. That they did so is evidence of the continuing interest of the Florentine bankers - and Brunetto's own family - in the dissemination of this important Franco-Florentine encyclopaedic book. They were propagated as well in Florentine (45 manuscripts), Sicilian, Bergamasco, Catalan and Castilian dialects and John Gower was to translate part of the Tresor even into English.51 I use for siglum those established by Chabaille and Carmody and add to these the Italian manuscripts Carmody did not find. Let me go through some of these manuscripts giving information concerning them that is relevant to this essay:

A1. Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, 179. Bolognan libraria, Maître Honoré workshop illuminations, Paris provenance. 13/14th centuries.52

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A3. Lyon, Bibliothèque Municipale, 781. French manuscript of Tresor in Italian hand, concluding with a French poem, likewise in Italian hand. Can be explained by presence of Italian scribes working in notarial/ banking chambers in France. Brunetto involved with Gregory X, who, in 1274, called the Council of Lyon to reconcile Eastern and Western Churches, at which were also present the future Popes Innocent V, John XXI, and Nicholas IV. The Tresor Chronicle section stresses Popes and Emperors.

A5. Lyon, Bibliothèque Municipale, 948. Internlinear corrections, Italian scribe. 13th century.

D2. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 319. Formerly owned by Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, to whom it was given by William Montague, Earl of Salisbury. It is thirteenth-century, in Picard French (of the Arras region), written in an Italian hand, in Bolognan libraria with some chancery characteristics. Its presence in England can be explained by the dealings of Lombard bankers with raising the decima to combat Manfred of Sicily and to pay Charles of Anjou to do so - as manifested in the Westminster Abbey Muniment 12843 document. It was thus likely a presentation volume to royalty or nobility. Its unique full page prefatory mappa mundi emphasizes the British Isles. Otto Pächt and J. J. G. Alexander had thought it was produced in Italy with French contamination.53 It can now be seen as a production by Florentines in exile in France seeking to influence England politically.

M2. Mentioned by Carlo Morbio, ‘Novissimi studi su Brunetto Latino, Dante e Petrarca e sul loro soggiorno in Francia,’ as having been owned by Prince Albani and now sold.54 It became New York, Columbia University, Plimpton 287. The manuscript is late, the article of interest concerning manuscripts of the Tresor, and of the Tesoro, its Italian translation.

M3. El Escorial, Biblioteca, ii.L.3. French text with Florentine illuminations written in Bolognan libraria, second redaction, likely presentation copy to Alfonso el Sabio, much annotated in Latin in margins to parts of particular interest to that monarch. Florence possesses, perhaps as a diplomatic exchange in connection with Alfonso's continued quest for support for the imperial crown, a splendid Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, Biblioteca Nazionale, Banco rari 20.55

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N. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Fr. 570. Italian scribe, Bolognan libraria, French illuminations.

P. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Fr. 571. Italian-like hand, beautiful French drawings, also illuminations with gold leaf. Fol. 122, colophon in code, Valenciennes; fol. 147v, Arras reference, Roman de Fauvel. Catalogue, Bibliothèque Nationale, dates as thirteenth century.

R. Bibliothèque Nationale, Fr. 726. French Faits des Romains, ‘Ici comencent li tests romains compile ensenble de Sallust, de Suetone de lucan. de Julius Cesar,’ and Tresor.56 Carmody noted scribes were Italian. The illumination for Caesar's murder ‘par les synnatores’ shows Caesar with a gold crown, his toga pulled up to his eyes, the senators like contemporary Italians with eared Dante caps, fol. cviij.

R3. Vatican Reg. lat. l320. Illuminations a mixture, some French, fols. 1 (border with rabbits, horned deer, similar to Fiore dei filosafi manuscript), 20, 28v, others Florentine, fols. 19v, 23, 24, 27v, 33, annotations in French and Italian, fol. 36. Concludes, fol. l34v, ‘Li dit iulius cesar,’ fol. 155, ‘des governeours des chites,’ then, fol. 176, methods for dating Easter, horoscope, added fourteenth-century notes on births of children into Italian family.

R5. Vatican lat. 3203. French manuscript, later Italian ownership, Cardinal Bembo annotating French text in Italian, noting he purchased it in Gascony in 1472, second redaction.

S. Bibliothèque Nationale, Fr. 1109. Italian hand, French illuminations. Fol. 311, reference to ‘Adam le Bocu d'Arras,’ Adam de la Halle, Charles of Anjou's court poet in material at end other than Tresor.

T2. Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale, L.II.18. Early, complete Tresor, damaged by fire, script between French Gothic and Bolognan libraria, illuminations clearly French, Provençal poem at end of manuscript.

Y. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, 2024. Italian scribe, thirteenth century, Italian poem at end of manuscript, fols. 293, 293v.

Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, II.280. First redaction, French text of Tresor, concluding with account of Jerusalem pilgrimage shrines, fly leaves,

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Italian poems, including tenzoni about kings of England, France, and Charles of Anjou, and Dante's ‘Guido, io vorra che tu e Lapo e io,’ fol. 1 and elsewhere.57

Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, I.G.17. French Tresor, first redaction, originally in Farnesian collection, Rome, then Biblioteca Palatina de Parma, before coming to Naples.58

Bergamo, Cassaforte 2.5. Tresor, Italian scribe, conclusion has tenzoni, Catalan/Provençal poetry.59

Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, DVIII. This later French manuscript was clearly obtained by Italians and used as a diplomatic presentation volume to a Venetian Doge's relative. Fine French illuminations, Italian binding.

Udine, Archivio di Stato. Tresor fragment of 31 folios found in chancery context in Veneto region. Northern French script.60

Modena, Biblioteca Estense E.5=alpha.P.G.l. Piccard extracts of Etica section of Tresor, in Bolognan libraria.61

An important work, which scholars have not tended very much to associate with Brunetto Latino, is the Franco-Italian manuscript containing the Fiori e vita di filosafi e d'altri savi e d'imperadori. Its editor, Alfonso d'Agostino, concluded that the text was later than Adam de Clermont's Flores historiarum, completed in 1267/1270.62 While he noted that siglum Na was one of the five complete manuscripts of the text, he was uncomfortable with its Tuscan dialect with echoes of Lucca and Pisa, Arezzo and Cortona. I believe he failed to examine the manuscript sufficiently. Na, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Conv. Soppr. F.4.776, from Santo Spirito, is an intriguing manuscript, produced in Paris in 1268, ‘traslato e volgarizzatto ne la città di parigi negli anni di dio .M./cc.lx.viii’63 by Andrea da Grosseto for Italian ownership, giving first Albertanus of Brescia's Consolation, including the chapter on the Tale of Melibee which would become Chaucer's Tale in the Canterbury Tales,64 then the Fiore dei filosafi, with the explicit of ‘Explicit liber filosoforum,’ and finally an excellent collection of Provençal poetry.65 The flyleaves of the manuscript list the various owners of the book, all of them descendants of the Latino household. It is clearly a teaching text, with a fine illumination of Grammar as schoolmistress and her pupil as a young child at folio 3.

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Brunetto likely ordered it from Paris for his sons, not necessarily writing it himself but giving instructions to have it so be written. Though some scholars had thought that Brunetto might have been the author of the Fiore dei filosafi, this had been questioned.66 Nor was it clear that this was the version from which Dante had acquired the tale of Pope Gregory, Emperor Trajan (in the manuscript spelled ‘Troiano,’ as would Langland also spell it) and the Widow, which Dante would use in Purgatorio X on the terrace of Pride. Another manuscript, Vatican Chigiano L.VII.267, folio xxxviij, states that Brunetto Latino was the author of the tenzone between Cicero and Sallust. That ‘tençione’ occurs here in the Fiore dei filosafi on folio 53. The manuscript concludes, from folio 60 on, with an anthology of Provençal poetry including such poets as Peire Cardenal and Folquet de Marseilha.67

Another fine collection of Provençal poetry is in the Modena, Biblioteca Estense, E.45=alpha.R.4.4, which, however, was written over a decade earlier, August 12, 1254, and which includes lyrics by Arnaut Daniel, Peire Vidal, La contessa de Dia, Sordels (Dante and Browning's Sordello), Bernart de Ventadorn, Fulquet de Marsella, Peire de Corbiac, Matthieu le Juif, and, surprizingly, includes a prose courtesy book by Moniez d'Arras. The script is Bolognan libraria. It attests to the presence, before Brunetto's exile, of an intense Italian awareness of French literature, of both the south and the north, the langue d'oil and the langue d'oc, perhaps as the means for communicating with Charles of Anjou and his bride, Beatrice of Provence. We should remember as well that the family of Simon de Montfort, so central to the infamous Provençal Albigensian Crusade, continued in the employ of Charles of Anjou in Italy, along with Adam de la Halle - though the evidence is that Brunetto Latino only worked for Charles for a brief while before returning to Florentine affairs. Like Brunetto, both Pierre de Corbiac and Sordello wrote works titled ‘Tresor’. The other favorite title for these clusters of works was ‘Fiore’. Yet further works belonging to this circle make use of the notarial and banking contexts of their production places and call themselves ‘Detto’ and ‘Documenti’, thus mixing up - as do these manuscripts - chancery and libraria scripts, ledgers and poetry, law and literature. Dante, of course, was to make use of Arnaut Daniel, Sordello, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Folquet of Marseilles, as well as the Roman de la Rose, within the pages of his Commedia.

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Thus it is likely that a study of the Franco-Italian encyclopaedic and lyric manuscripts connected with Florentine merchant bankers and especially their dealings concerning Saint Louis' brother, Charles of Provence and Anjou, can aid in explaining why so many contain elements of cultural pluralism, for instance, French illuminations and Italian script, and why they may include Provençal poetry or material connected with Arras or Champagne or all of these. The study can explain, further, why Dante Alighieri, whose teacher was Brunetto Latino,68 knew of French literary texts, both of the langue d'oil, such as the encyclopaedic Roman de la Rose, and the langue d'oc, such as the Provençal lyric poetry, and why he used these culturally pluralistic texts intertextually within his text, reflecting himself in their lead-backed crystalline imported pages like some new Narcissus/Amant - with novel-reading Francesca of Inferno V as his new Echo, mirroring and echoing through this Italian tale, a British one in French - down the corridors of time.69

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Notes

1 Il Fiore e Il Detto d'Amore, ed. Gianfranco Contini (Milan: Mondadori, 1984); Gianfranco Contini, ‘Un nodo della cultura medievale: la serie Roman de la Rose - Fiore - Divina Commedia,’ Lettere italiane, 25 (1973), 162-189; also in Un idea di Dante: saggi danteschi (Torino: Einaudi, 1976); Earl Jeffrey Richards, Dante and the ‘Roman de la Rose’: An Investigation into the Vernacular Narrative Context of the ‘Commedia’ (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1981), Beihefte sur Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, 184; ‘Dante's Commedia and its Vernacular Narrative Context,’ Ph.D. Thesis, Princeton University, 1978; Julia Bolton Holloway, Brunetto Latini: An Analytic Bibliography (London: Grant and Cutler, 1981), pp. 91-95, 110-112. I wish to acknowledge the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Association of University Women which funded travel to European libraries. 2 Studies in this area are Robert Davidsohn, Geschichte von Florenz (Berlin: Mittler, 1896-1927); Storia di Firenze, trans. Giovanni Battista Klein (Firenze: Sansoni, 1957); Giovanni Ferretti, ‘Banchieri fiorentini in Francia nel Dugento, Fanfulla della domenica, 31 (1909), n. 32, cited in Ferdinando Neri, Gli studi franco-italiani nel primo quarto del secolo XX (Roma: Leonardo, 1928), p. 36; Christian Bec, Les marchands écrivains: affaires et humanisme à Florence, 1375-1434 (Paris: Mouton, 1967). See also Joan Ferrante, ‘Exchange and Communications, Commerce and Language in the Comedy,’ The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 311-379; R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1983); The Poem as Green Girdle: Commercium in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Gainesville, Florida: University Presses of Florida, 1984). 3 Studies of this encyclopaedism include Michele Scherillo, Alcuni capitoli della biografia di Dante (Torino: Loescher, 1896), pp. 116-221; Charles Victor Langlois, La Connaissance de la nature et du monde au Moyen Age d'aprés quelques écrits français à l'usage des laics (Paris: Hachette, 1911); Aristide Marigo, ‘Lo Speculum ed il Tresor: cultura letteraria e preumanistica nelle maggiori enciclopedie del Dugento,’ GSLI, 68 (1916), 1-42, 289-326, esp. 315-316; Paul Renucci, L'aventure de l'humanisme européen au Moyen Age (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1953); L. Jenaro MacLennan, ‘Autocomentario en Dante y comentarismo latino,’ Vox romanica, 19 (1960), 102-117; Michelangelo Picone,

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‘Glosse ad `Detto d'Amore,’ Medioevo Romanzo, 3 (1976), 402; connected with this material is the argument concerning the ‘Vocabulary of Ideas,’ Paul Zumthor, ‘Pour une histoire du vocabulaire français des idées,’ ZRP, 72 (1956), 350; P.A. Messelaar, Le Vocabulaire des idées dans le 'Tresor' de Brunet Latin (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1963); Siegfried Heinimann, ‘Zum Wortschatz von Brunetto Latinis Tresor,’ Vox romanica, 27 (1968), 96-105. 4 Isidorus of Seville, Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 2 vols. 5 See Julia Bolton Holloway, ‘Alfonso el Sabio, Brunetto Latini and Dante Alighieri,’ Thought, 60 (1985), 468-483; ‘Road through Roncesvalles: Alfonso el Sabio, Brunetto Latini and Dante Aligheri,’ Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile: His Thirteenth-Century Renaissance, ed. Robert I Burns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ); ‘Arabesque,’ Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri (New York: Peter Lang, 1992). 6 Luigi F. Benedetto, Influssi del ‘Roman de la Rose’ sulla letteratura italiana (Halle: Niemeyer, 1910) Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, XX, pp. 89-100; Karl Vossler, Die Gottliche Komodie. Entwicklungsgeschichte und Erklarung [Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1908], 2 vols. trans. as Mediaeval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and his Times, by William C. Lawton [New York: Ungar, 1958], II, 76-77), loathed this use of encyclopedic allegory; Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Brunetto Latini als Allegorischer Dichter,’ in Formwandel: Festschrift zur 65. Geburtag von Paul Böckmann (Hamburg: Hoffmann, 1964), pp. 47-92, and ‘The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature,’ New Literary History, 10 (1979), 173-192, esp, 185-186, praises the allegory; Elio Costa, ‘Il Tesoretto di Brunetto Latini e la Tradizione allegorica medievale,’ in Dante e le forme dell'allegoresi, ed. Michelangelo Picone (Ravenna: Longo, 1987), pp. 43-58. 7 That work would undergo a translation into Italian, becoming the Sicilian Paladin puppet plays of today as well as being the subject matter of Boiardo and Ariosto's epics and of Calvino's trilogy. 8 It would be possible for Italian material finally to influence French literature with the Franco-Italian Christine de Pizan's revisioning of Dante in her

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Chemin de Long Estudes. 9 Brunetto Latini, Il Tesoretto, ed. and trans. Julia Bolton Holloway (New York: Garland, 1981), p. 10, transcribing Laurentian MS Strozziano 146. The encounter scene is illuminated, fol. 2. See also Il Tesoretto, ed. Giovanni Pozzi, in Poeti del Duecento, ed. Gianfranco Contini (Milan: Ricciardi, 1960, II.168-284, 869-874; ed. Francesco Mazzoni (Alpignana: Tallone, 1967); ed. Marcello Ciccuto (Milan: Rizzoli, 1985). 10 Archivio di Stato, Siena, April 20, 1254, Le Sale della Mostra, #6; transcribed in Caleffio Vecchio, #567, II.779; Archivio di Stato, Firenze, August 25, 1254, Capitoli di Firenze, Registri 29, fols. 189-191, clxxxviii-clxxxxi. 11Today we see Japanese students, though rarely American ones, avidly studying languages and the Humanities, knowing that this places them at a significant trade advantage on the world's markets. 12 Archives de la Ville de Montpellier: Inventaire et documents, III: Inventaire des Cartulaires de Montpellier (980-1789) (Montpellier: Serre et Roumégons, 1901-7), pp. 101-2, # 712, 715, 716. 13 Edward J.L. Scott, ‘Brunetto Latini's Home in France, A.D. 1260-6,’ Athenaeum, 3654 (Nov. 1897), 635; J. E. Harting, ‘Brunetto Latini in France’; Paget Toynbee, ‘Brunetto Latini in France,’ Athenaeum, 3655 (Nov. 1897), 674; ‘Brunetto Latini's Tresor,’ Athenaeum (Nov. 20, 1897), 710; J. F. Hogan, pp. 710-711; F. W. Bourdillon, p. 711, the latter four disagreeing with Scott's thesis that Brunetto was living in Bar-sur-Aube. See also Antonio Cippico, ‘Il Canto di Brunetto Latini,’ Florence, Orsanmichele, March 18, 1915 in Giornale dantesco, 23 (1915), 45-52. 14 Edouard Jordan, Les registres de Clement IV (Paris: Thorin, 1893), numbers 1456, 1469 (naming Thomas Spigliati, Manecto Spine and other Florentine bankers associated with Brunetto Latino), 1472 (12 September, 1265, Perugia: ‘Regis Sicilie et omnium contra Manfredum et Sarracenos Lucerie crucesignatorum terras sub sedis Apostilice protectione suscepit’), 1473, 1475, all of which concern the crusade against Manfred and the raising of the decima to carry this out and frequently involving the Parisian church, Ste.

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Geneviéve. 15 Letter of Andrea de Tolomei, Troyes, 4 September, 1262, in Lettere volgare del secolo XIII scritte da Senesi, ed. Cesare Paoli, E. Piccolomini (Bologna: Romagnoli, 1871), p. 41, cited, F. Donati, ‘Lettere politiche del secolo XIII sulla Guerra del 1260 fra Siena e Firenze,’ Bulletino senese di storia patria, 3 (1896), p. 259. 16 Vatican Secret Archives, Instr. Misc. 99, September 15 and 24, 1263; M. Armellini, ‘Documento autografo di Brunetto Latini relativo ai ghibellini di Firenze scoperto negli archivi della S. Sede,’ Rassegna italiana, V/I (March, 1885), p. 359-363; Hans Foerster, Mittalterliche Buch und Urkundenschriften auf 50 Tafeln mit Erlauterungen und Vollstÿaundinger Transkription (Berne: Haupt, 1946), Plate XXV, comments, transcription, pp. 64-5 (my thanks to David Anderson for this reference); Bruno Ketterbach and Carolus Silva-Tarouca, Epistolae et Instrumentum saeculi XIII, in Exempla scriptorum edita consilia et opera procuratorum bibliothecae et tabularii vaticane, Fasc. II (Roma, 1930), p. 20, Plate 21; Gino Arias, ‘Sottomissione dei banchieri fiorentine alla Chiesa, 9 dic., 1263,’ in Studi e documenti di storia del Diritto (Florence: Le Monnier, 1901), pp. 114-120, gives an important related document, again naming Thomas Spigliati, Ricco Cambi, Pietro Benincasa, Hugo Spine, Jacopo Lecci, Jacopo della Scala, Maynecto Spine, Diritto Cambi, Aymeri Cose, Lotterio Benincase, etc.; E. Jordan, De Mercatoribus camerae apostolicae saeculo XIII (Paris, 1909), p. 97, notes that Thomas Spigliati was associated with Arras, speaks also of Hugo Spine, pp. 25-30; see also Richard Kay, ‘Rucco di Cambio de' Mozzi in France and England,’ Studi danteschi, 47 (1970), 49-57; R. Bower, ‘Italian Merchants in the Reign of Henry III,’ Southern Quarterly, 6 (1968), 191-202, esp. 196, 201. 17 G. Villani, Cronica, ‘e mandarono loro ambasciadori a papa Clemente, accioché gli raccomandasse al conte Carlo eletto re di Cicilia, e profferendosi al servigio di santa Chiesa,’ (Florence, 1823; Rome: Multigrafica Editrice, 1980), VII.ii. 18 See Catalogue général des manuscrits des Bibliothèques des Départments, IV: Arras-Avranches- Boulogne (Paris: Imprimérie Nationale, 1872), p. 414. My

27

thanks to Charles J. Ermatinger for this reference. 19 Westminster Abbey Muniment 12843, April 17, 1264. 20 Robert Davidsohn, Geschichte von Florenz (Berlin: Mittler, 1896-1927); Storia di Firenze, trans. Giovanni Battista Klein (Florence: Sansoni, 1957), II.754; III.30 notes 1268 payment of 6000 marks sterling loaned by Lucca to Charles of Anjou, to be returned at fair of Bar-sur-Aube in Champagne from France's crusading decima; II.607-9, 701, 741, discusses Mozzi-Spini and Spigliati, Ardinghelli, Aymeri Cose, Curia and England. One Tesoretto manuscript, Riccardian 2908, is in Lucchese dialect, was generally used as base text for editions of that poem. 21 Davidsohn, II.681,III.43; Ruggero Palmieri, ‘Palamidesse Bellindote poeta fiorentina del secolo XIII,’ Giornale dantesco, 23 (1915), 132-140. 22 Kay, ‘Rucco di Cambio,’ notes, p. 200, that Manectus Spine in 1249 had experienced the ‘questionable hospitality of the king's prison’ in England at a time when the king had attempted to suppress usury. Then, in 1253, the king expelled all merchants except two Sienese and Manectus Spine and Rucco di Cambio. 23 I give here transcription of Naples I.G.17, fols. 8,8v. For this passage, see also Li Livres dou Tresor, I, part II, cap. xcix, ed. P. Chabaille (Paris: Imprimérie Impériale, 1863), p. 102. 24 One wonders, did Philip Mazzei convey these concepts to Thomas Jefferson? 25 Tresor, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), III.ii.v, pp. 396-7; Le Comte Alexis de Saint Priest, Histoire de la Conquête de Naples par Charles d'Anjou, frère de Saint Louis (Paris: Amyot, 1858), II. 95-96, gives similar letter; see also 1266 Vatican Secret Archives, Instr. Misc. 108. 26 Michele Amari, La guerra del Vespro siciliano (Paris: Baudry, 1845), I.46; Saint Priest, II.149.

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27 There are passages specifically directed at Carlo in the ‘Rettorica’ section of the Tresor, ed. Carmody: ‘Li tiers est sa vile: raison coment: nous devons croire que cis hom soit bons drapiers por ce k'il est de Provins. Li quars est de sa lignie: raison comment: bien doit estre Karles loiaus, car il fu fius le roi de France,’ III.lii, pp. 360-361; ‘sachies que nous somes in Franche . . . je ti pri ke tu soies prodom en ceste guerre,’ III.lxxi, p. 390. 28 1258, Vatican lat. 4957, fols. 79-80; Riccardiano 15438, fols. 199v-200v; Vatican Chigiano L.VIII.267, states letter is by Brunetto Latino, fol. 177v. 29 1257, Saint Priest, II.53. 30 1282, Vatican Chigiano L.VII.267, fols. cxxiii verso-cxxv, in Italian; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 4042, fols. 92v-95v, in Latin. 31 Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1976), 3 vols, I. 203-4. Henry was the traitor brother to Alfonso el Sabio who then also betrayed Carlo. 32 MacLennan, p. 104. 33 For further literary texts associated with Arras see Albert Pauphilet, Jeux et Sapience du Moyen Age (Paris: Gallimard, 1951, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 61), p. 42, noting Jean Bodel from Arras; pp. 109 ff, Courtois d'Arras; p. 159, Adam de la Halle or le Bossu. See also listing of Latino manuscripts with Arras associations. 34 Saint Priest, II.26, 304-6. 35 H.J. Chaytor, From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval Vernacular Literature (New York: October, 1967), pp. 86-87, 145-146, citing Paris, 1931, Classiques français du Moyen Age, edition. 36 Ernesto Monaci, Crestomazia italiana dei primi secoli (Roma: Albrighi, Segatie, 1912), pp. 290-1; Le Rime di Rustico di Filippo, ed. Vincenzo Federici (Bergamo, 1899), sonnetto xxxix, p. 22; Mario Marti, ‘La coscienza stilistica di Rustico di Filippo e la sua poesia,’ Cultura e stile nei poeti giocosi del tempo di

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Dante (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1953), pp. 41-58; Con Dante fra i poeti del suo tempo (Lecce: Milella, 1971), p. 117; Joan H. Levin, Rustico di Filippo and the Florentine Lyric Tradition (Berne: Peter Lang, 1986); see also political tenzoni in Poeti del Duecento: Poesia cortese toscana e settentrionale, ed. Gianfranco Contini (Torino: Einaudi, 1976), II.284-286, on imperial election problem between Alfonso el Sabio of Spain and Richard of Cornwall of England, and Charles of Anjou; Vatican MS 3793 contains canzoni and tençioni of Palamidesse Bellindoti, Guglielmo Beroardi, Rustico di Filippo, Brunetto Latino, etc. Rustico di Filippo is also spoken of by Francesco da Barberino in gloss to Documenti d'amore, ed. Francesco Egidi (Roma: Società Filologia Romana, 1905-1927), I.190-191. 37 Davidsohn, II.687 38 They are to be found in Vatican lat. 3793, where poetry by Brunetto Latino is at fols. 57v, 58, Rustico Fillippi, fols. 141 ff., Palamidesse, fol. 148v, Francesco da Barberino (Brunetto's coeval student with Dante Alighieri), fols. 159 ff., etc, as well as poems by Pier delle Vigne and Frederick II. Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, Reg. lat. l603, fols. 35v-45, and Biblioteca Casanatense 818, give further Latino lyrics in a later commonplace book. 39 Davidsohn II.681, III.43; Julia Bolton Holloway, ‘Brunetto Latini and England,’ Manuscripta, 31 (1987), 11-21, and Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri (New York: Peter Lang, 1992). 40 See Alessandro Barberò, ‘Il mito angioino nella cultura italiana e provenzale fra Ducento e Trecento,’ Bolletino storio-bibliografico subalpino, 1 (1981), 110-210. 41Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale et autres bibliothèques (Paris: Imprimérie de la République, An. VII), V, 276. 42 Mayer, p. 85, noted Arsenal MS 3645, as composed in French, written in Italian hand, of the thirteenth/fourteenth century. Several Brunetto Latino manuscripts, including Arsenal 2677, share these traits.

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43 Ed. Ferdinand Castets, ‘Il Fiore’: Poème italien du XIIIe siècle, en CCXXXII sonnets imité du ‘Roman de la Rose’ par Durante (Montpellier: La Société pour l'Etudes des Langues Romanes, 1881); ed. Gianfranco Contini; for fuller bibliography, see Gianfranco Contini, ‘Un nodo della cultura medievale: Roman de la Rose-Fiore-Divina Commedia,’ pp. 162-189, and his edition; also Holloway, Brunetto Latini: Bibliography, pp. 91-95, 110-112. 44 Jole Ruggieri, ‘Uno sconosciuto frammento del Roman de la Rose,’ Archivium romanicum, 15, fasc. 3, pp. 417-436, mistakenly gave it as #162, instead of #152, considered the script, erroneously, to be French. 45 Albert Ronsin, La Bibliothèque Bouhier: Histoire d'une collection formée du XIVe au XVIIe siècle par une famille de magistrats bourguignons (Dijon: Académie des Sciences, Arts et Belles Lettres, 1971). 46 Vatican MS Barberino 4076, 4077; ed. Francesco Ubaldini (Roma: Mascardi, 1640); ed. Francesco Egidi (Roma: Società Filologica Romana); Thomas Antoine, Francesco da Barberino et la litterature provençale en Italie au Moyen Age (Paris: Thorin, 1883). 47 Brunetto Latini, Il Tesoretto, ed. Holloway, xxx-xxxv and further research. 48 Gerolamo Biscaro, ‘Francesco da Barberino al seguito di Corso Donati,’ Nuovi studi medievali 1 (1923), 255-262. 49 I have carried out further research on these manuscripts since publishing Brunetto Latini: Bibliography, pp. 20-26. 50 Carmody, p. xxxvi. 51 James J. Murphy, ‘John Gower's Confessio Amantis and the First Discussion of Rhetoric in the English Language,’ Philological Quarterly, 41 (1962), 401-411; James R. East, ‘Book Three of Brunetto Latini's Tresor: An English Translation and Assessment of its Contribution to Rhetorical Theory,’ Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 1960.

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52 Sion Segre-Amar, ‘Su un codice parigino del Tresor,’ Studi francesi, 71 (1980), 256-261, who comments, p. 258, also, on Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 566, 567, 570, 571, 726, 1109, 1110, 1113, 2024, 12581 and Leningrad Tresor. 53 Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), II, # 154. My thanks to Albinia de la Mare and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 54 Archivio storico italiano, 3 ser, 17 (1873), 192. 55 Antonio G. Solalinde, ‘El Còdice florentino de la Cantigas y su relaciòn con los demàs manuscritos,’ Revista de Filologia Espanola, 5 (1918), 143-179; John E. Keller and Richard P. Kinkade, ‘Iconography and Literature: Alfonso Himself in Cantiga 209,’ Hispania, 66 (1983), 348-352, in which Alfonso is himself illuminated as cured from illness by the miracle of being presented a copy of his own Cantigas bound in red kermes dyed leather and sitting up in bed to receive it. 56 Paul Meyer, Romania, 14 (1885), 23-6, suggested Brunetto could have been the author/translator of Faits des Romains. This explains Dante's use of Catiline and Fiesole in Inferno XV. M.-J. Mincwitz, ‘Notice de quelques manuscrits du Tresor,’ Romania, 38 (1909), 112-119, discussed some Faits des Romains and Tresor fragments in Berne, Switzerland. It is of interest that these texts also exist in Italian in Italian manuscripts as Fatti dei Romani. Tresor tends to emphasize as well Berengar of the Lombards, as if in reference to Charles of Anjou's father-in-law, Raymond Berengar of Provence. 57 Picone, ‘Glosse al Detto d'Amore,’ p. 402, notes connection between this lyric and the 333 hendacasyllabic Mare amoroso, once attributed to Brunetto Latino; Il Mare amoroso di Brunetto Latini, ed. Giusto Grion (Bologna: Fava e Garagnani, 1869, and Il Propugnatore, I, pp. 3-30; Il Mare amoroso, ed. Emilio Vuolo, Cultura neolatina, 12 (1952), 103-30; 16 (1956), 147-77; gloss, 17 (1957), 74-174; notes, 18 (1958), 5-52, and Il Mare amoroso (Roma: Istituto di Filologia Modern, Università di Roma, 1962); Leo Spitzer, ‘A proposito del Mare amoroso,’ Romanische Literaturstudien, 1936-1956 (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1959, p. 508; and Cultura neolatina, 16, 179-199, 17, 175-6, who believed author was Richard di Fournival; Cesare Segre, ‘Per un' edizione del mare amoroso,’

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Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana, 140 (1963), 1-29; Joy M. Potter, ‘La struttura del Mare amoroso,’ Cultura neolatina, 23 (1963), 191-204. As with the Fiore, one can certainly say these poems are the product of a school, a textual community in exile, though exact authorship is difficult to ascertain. 58 Miola, Notizie di manoscritti neolatini della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, I (1895), 2-3. 59 O. Capasso, ‘Di un presunto originale del Livres dou Tresors,’ Bergamo, Civica Biblioteca, Bolletino, 2 (1908), 252-263. 60 Cesare Scalon, Libri scuole e cultura nel Friuli medioevale: ‘Membra Disiecta’ dell'Archivio di Stato di Udine (Padova: Antenore, 1987), pp. 209-213. My thanks to Professor Cesare Scalon for telling me of the manuscript. 61 Giulio Camus, ‘Alcuni frammenti in antico dialetto piccardo dell' Etica di Aristotele compendiata da Brunetto Latini,’ Memorie della Regia Accademia di Scienze, lettere ed arti in Modena, ser. 2, vol. 7 (Modena: Società tipografica, 1890), p. 8. 62Fiori e vita di filosafi e d'altri savi e d'imperadori, ed. Alfonso d'Agostino (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1979), pp. 29, 39. See also ‘Uber die Fiore e Vita di Filosofi ed Altri Savii ed Imperadori,’ ed. Harmann Varnhagen (Erlangen: Junge, 1893); further studies listed, footnote 65. 63 Fol. 26v. 64 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), pp. 217-239. Conv. Soppr. F.4.776, fol. 8, ‘Qui e compiuta lo primo libro de la dottrina del parlare e del tacere facto de albertano giudice & avogado di leggio de la cata di brescia del a contrada di santa agatha translatata in volgançata da andrea da grosseto ne la città di parigio. Qui si comincia il secondo libro di quegli huomini che non possono avere consolacione dellaversita.’ 65 D'Agostino says, p. 10, the manuscript was likely written in the Languedoc region of France, disregarding the manuscript's declaration of its Parisian origin. Again, as with Douce 319, scholars have not adequately taken into

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account the possibility of exiled book-producing enclaves of Italians on French soil. 66 Vincenzio Nannucci had noted that Brunetto Latino's authorship of the Fiore dei filosafi was attributed to him in a Venetian manuscript, Manuale della letteratura del primo secolo della lingua italiana, III (Florence: Barberà, 1837), pp. 223-76; Antonio Cappelli, Fiore di filosofi e di molti savi attribuito a Brunetto Latini: Testo in parte inedito, citato dalla Crusca e ridotto a miglio lezione (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1865, in Scelta di curiosità letterarie inedite o rare dal secolo XIII al XVI, vol. LXIII), p. vii, notes unascribed Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Magliabechiano and Biblioteca Laurenziana, Gaddiano manuscripts, and Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, Farsetti manuscript with ascription, ‘Detti . . . volgarizzati da Brunetto Latino’; D'Agostino, p. 95-6. 67 D'Agostino, p. 10, notes the following studies of the manuscript, E. Stengel, ‘Studi sopra i canzonieri provenzali di Firenze e di Roma,’ Rivista di Filologia Romanza, 1 (1872), 20-45; P. Savj-Lopez, ‘Il canzoniere provenzale J,’ Studi di Filologia Romanza, 9 (1903), 490-8; C. Brunel, Bibliographie des manuscrits littéraires en ancien provençal (Paris, 1935), p. 88. 68 Though this came to be questioned, it was asserted in near coeval materials and was typical practice for notaries to train their sons or take in apprentices, Pier delle Vigne, Brunetto's counter model, being Chancellor to the Emperor Frederick II, Professor of Law at the University of Naples and a poet: Armando Petrucchi, Notarii: Documenti per la storia del Notariatio italiano(Milan: Guiffré, 1958), p. 17 and passim. 69 Renato Poggioli, ‘Paolo and Francesca,’ Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Freccero (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1965), pp. 61-77. I am influenced here by my colleague, Edward Peter Nolan, Now Through a Glass Darkly: Specular Images of Being and Knowing from Virgil to Chaucer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), on mirrors and classical and medieval texts.

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II BROWN INK, RED BLOOD

BRUNETTO LATINO AND THE SICILIAN VESPERS1

I Livres dou Tresor, written by Brunetto Latino before June of 1265, as if a text written by a wise Aristotle to a youthful Alexander, is a presentation

volume, concluding with a careful account of the oath of office sworn by a podestà, in this instance, by Charles of Anjou at his inauguration as Senator of Rome.2

Arnolfo di Cambio, Charles of Anjou

Contemporary with this book is a statue by Arnolfo di Cambio, again presenting Charles of Anjou at his investiture as Senator. It shows him in a Roman toga clutching in his hand the capituli, the constitution, of Rome which he must swear to uphold.3 These two artifacts, a document and a monument which witness and record a legal speech act, are worthy of our study.

Of even greater interest and concern is that when Charles of Anjou failed to comply with his oath of office, further documents and monuments, in brown ink, and even red blood spilled in a Palermo square, record his downfall by means of the Sicilian Vespers, plotted against him by several Popes and an Emperor and by the Genoese, Pisans, Sienese, Aragonese, Sicilians, and

L

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Florentines. I will attempt to demonstrate Brunetto Latino's possible secret diplomacy and complicity in this affair, with documents in archives associated with and naming Brunetto, and with accounts of the Vespers plotting found in Latino manuscripts.

I. Diplomacy

The Primo Popolo, the Republic of Florence, had sent Brunetto, its then chancellor, as ambassador to Alfonso el Sabio in 1260.4 Though still young, Brunetto had already proved his worth in writing the peace treaty between Siena and Florence in 1254 and studying and emending the Volterran Constitution in that same year. Florence, in 1260, was on the brink of a disastrous war with Siena, her Guelf Republic supporting the Pope against the Ghibelline Manfred of Sicily.5 Already Pisa, Genoa and Siena had communicated with Alfonso el Sabio, offering to support him for Emperor if he would aid them, and Alfonso was always to be interested in this possibility, having been elected in a tie vote, in 1257, with a rival claimant, Richard of Cornwall, brother of the king of England.6 Now Florence dispatched two ambassadors, one to Alfonso, the other to Richard of Cornwall, in the hopes that one or the other would come to their aid. Giovanni Villani, who worked for the Latino family firm of the Bonaccursi, was to carefully chronicle these embassies in his History of Florence, giving to them an entire chapter.7 Brunetto Latino himself discussed his embassy in verse, in his Tesoretto, concerning his meeting with the wise king of Spain.8

The embassy occurred between July and September when Alfonso el Sabio was in Seville.9 It would have taken place in the Hall of the Ambassadors of the Alcazar, which the Castilian monarchy had taken by conquest from the Moors. At that court Brunetto would have witnessed the writing of books as well as of royal charters, chancery and scriptoria being of the utmost importance to this scholarly and legal king. Among the books upon which Alfonso was engaged were the legal tomes of Las Siete Partidas,10 the illuminated and musically notated Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, a chronicle history of the world, and various treatises on alchemy and astronomy. Brunetto would also have had access there to the important translations being carried out of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics and Alfraganus/ Ptolemy's Almagest and it is likely that he obtained these works from Alfonso, for he was to translate them into French while in exile. Brunetto was long after likely to have maintained contact with the almost-Emperor, the Tesoretto

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being possibly a charming ‘thank you’ note and the Sommetta of 1286 containing the notarial formula for the Pope to use in writing to Alfonso: ‘Al preclaro et amato figliuolo Anfoso, Re di Castella.’11 It is possible that the presence in Florence of one of the two most magnificent regal Cantigas de Santa Maria indicates its use as a diplomatic gift by the would-be emperor to a comune that was known to be deeply involved in papal politics.12

Florence, Las Cantigas, The Miracle of the Cantigas

But Latino's embassy was too late. On September 4, Guelf Florence was utterly routed at Montaperti, the Arbia river being stained with blood.13

Brunetto wrote that he learned of the sentence of exile while journeying back through the Pass of Roncesvalles, a student from Bologna telling him the news. We also have a floridly written, grief-stricken letter from his father which begins: ‘Bonaccursius latinus de florencia dilecto filio Bornecto notario, ad excellentissimum dominum Alfonsum romanorum et hyspanorum regem iamdudum pro comuni florentie destinato, salutem. . .’ and which goes on to narrate of the battle and the sentence of exile passed against their family.14 Brunetto's father, Bonaccursus Latinus, was likewise a notary.15 The father worked for the Guelf bishops of Fiesole; the son for the Guelf comune of Florence. Now both were driven into exile, the father perhaps only to Lucca's San Frediano district, the son first going to Montpellier,16 then Arras and Bar-sur-Aube, being associated in those places with Lombard banking houses whose tentacles reached out as far as the Baltic, the British Isles, and elsewhere.

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II. Documents

There are two letters penned and signed by Brunetto Latino from this period, the first in the Vatican Secret Archives, the second in Westminster Abbey. They tell us much about the Guelf Florentines in exile. They indicate, too, that Brunetto was an important member of the Florentine Guelf government-in-exile's shadow cabinet. Though under papal interdict for their murder of the Ghibelline Abbot Tesauro of Vallombrosa, the Florentine Guelfs were paradoxically the allies of the Pope against King Manfred.17 The Pope's response to Manfred's aggression against him was to dethrone him and to wage a crusade against him and, with the aid of the Lombard bankers, to get churches in England and elsewhere to pay a tenth of their wealth, the decima, towards this ‘holy’ war.

The first letter was written to the Roman Curia from Arras about notarized events on September 15 and 24 concerning these dealings and promised the loyalty of the exiled Florentine bankers in Arras and in Paris to the Pope's cause against Manfred, ‘quondam principis Tarentini.’18 It named major Florentine bankers.19 Villani likewise explained that the exiled Guelfs joined Charles of Anjou and Pope Clement against Manfred.20

The second letter, written from Bar-sur-Aube to England, and still at Westminster Abbey, directly concerned England's payment of the crusading decima. It contracted between the Bellindoti and Spinelli family members and

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other Florentine merchants and bankers to loan almost two thousand marks sterling for the Bishop of Hereford's payment to the Roman Curia.21 An extraordinary sentence in the document states that to borrow at interest from the Florentines had papal approval, that such usury even brought (or, rather, bought) the crusading indulgence. There is a possibility that this was the amount, two thousand marks sterling, that the Curia arranged to pay to Lucca for sheltering the exiled Florentine Guelfs in the parish of San Frediano.22 The Florentine Guelfs, in reprisal for Montaperti, had already been able to have the English crown expel Sienese merchants from England.23 Besides these legal, political and financial documents, Brunetto, when in political exile, shaped major literary works, the Tesoretto, the dream vision poem that was to be the prototype for Dante's Commedia, and the Rettorica in Italian, and Li livres dou Tresor, the great encyclopedic work, in Picard French, the dialect of the Arras region, of Artois and Picardy.24

The Tresor included within its text the information that it was partly compiled from Brunetto's own researches into curial, legal archives. When Latino discussed the historical relationship between Pope and Emperor, he carefully stated that his information came from studying the papal registers: ‘Or dist l'istore, et li registre de sainte eglise le temoignent . . . .’25 It continued with the presentation at the core of the section on ‘Politica’ of the seminal letter to Charles of Anjou, asking him to take up the office of Senator of Rome, being hired as a podestà to counter Ghibelline Manfred.

In the first redaction manuscripts Brunetto wrote that since Frederick there had been no real Emperor and that Frederick's son Manfred, born out of wedlock, had seized the kingdoms of Apulia and Sicily against God, Law, and Holy Church and that he had persecuted the Italians, especially the Florentine Guelfs, who were loyal to the Church. He added, within the text, that for this reason ‘Maistre Brunet Latin’ was in exile in France where he was writing this book for love of his patron, Charles of Anjou and Provence. Later, when that friend was to prove instead an enemy, Brunetto was to rewrite that sentence, in Italian, as ‘for love of his enemy,’ ‘per amore del suo nemico.’26 The exiled Florentine Guelf bankers needed a champion. They chose Charles, Count of Anjou and Provence, Senator of Rome, King of Sicily and Jerusalem and aspirant to the Greek Empire, over Alfonso el Sabio, King of Castile, aspirant to the Roman Empire, and Richard of Cornwall, likewise aspirant to the Roman Empire.27 All three men wished to be Emperors.

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Florentine bankers both tempted and foiled them. While the Tesoretto was likely written to Alfonso el Sabio, the Tresor was for Charles of Anjou. Therefore this work had to be written in French as Charles refused to learn Italian. But in the work Brunetto carefully attempted to teach his kingly reader about Italian forms of government, about republican comuni and of the hiring of a podestà, in this way telling Florence's new king how Florence should be governed, with as much republican freedom as possible. He was being an Aristotle to an Alexander.

The work contains a letter, written as if from the Roman Senate to Charles of Anjou and Provence, requesting him to be Senator of Rome, as podestà, for one year. The Tresor therefore can be dated as being written prior to June, 1265, when Charles did in fact become invested as Senator for life.28 This letter reversed the usual medieval and feudal stance of subject to ruler and instead was the ancient and modern citizen arranging for the employment of a podestà by a comune, a president who must take the oath of office to uphold the constitution and its laws. Into this letter Latino poured all of his political theory and ethical philosophy. In it he stated that men naturally desire freedom but that greed caused damage and destruction and that a just ruler was necessary to advance good men and to curb the malice of evil men. He went on to state that Charles should come to the Capitoline and there receive the books of the Constitution and likewise ten thousand livres in salary and that he should bring with him ten judges and twelve good and loyal notaries. He next stated that within three days Charles must make his decision whether to take or leave the seignory.

Arnolfo di Cambio, Charles of Anjou as Roman Senator, Campidoglio

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A companion work, not on parchment inscribed with a pen, but in marble, sculpted with chisels, is the statue by Arnolfo di Cambio, architect of both the Palazzo Vecchio and Poppi Castle, showing Charles of Anjou seated upon a red lion throne, in a white senatorial toga, the capitoli of Rome clasped in his hand.29 Saint Priest tells us that Charles was actually so dressed when he made his oath of office in the Franciscan church of Ara Coeli on the Capitoline in June, 1265.30 In this book of the Tresor, combining Cicero and Aristotle, and in this statue, shaped likewise by such perceptions derived from the political and legal practices of Rome, as well as in the dramatically staged inaugural itself, we can see the germs of the Florentine Renaissance. Florentine bankers and their lawyers, when in exile, were manipulating time and space to enact a drama of freedom to counteract their fear that it could be a representation and actuality, which it was, of power and oppression. Then, on January 6, Charles and his wife, Beatrice, the daughter of Raymond Berengar of Provence, were crowned King and Queen of Sicily and Apulia by the Pope in the Vatican.31 No one was going to let Charles of Anjou be Emperor of Rome.

III. Charles’ Reign

Though Brunetto Latino might have hoped, given his work of the Tresor and its sound advice, to be permanently in Charles' employ, documents give him as protonotario or chancellor in the Tuscan region only for the first few years of Charles' reign. These documents mainly show Brunetto drawing up legal contracts concerning constitutions of the various city states and their employment of podestà. Then he is on his own, first as involved with loans for family members in documents drawn up in Bologna, then as secretly negotiating with Siena, July 25, 1274, concerning the Guelf League.32 This secret treaty was twenty years after Brunetto's initial peace treaty between Florence and Siena and ten years before Latino was officially and overtly, at Charles' request, to preside over the League against Pisa.33 Next there is a curious silence, a strange absence of Brunetto from legal documents. He goes

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underground, and, after February of 1275, except for the 1280 Peace of Cardinal Latino, I believe, he goes underground into a world of secret diplomacy, until the Sicilian Vespers of 1282. Simultaneously with Brunetto's 1280 presence in Florence for the Peace of Cardinal Latino, is John of Procida's presence, according to the Sicilian Vespers legends, in Viterbo with Pope Nicholas III carrying out these delicate negotiations.34 Contextually, the political scene in connection with Brunetto's erstwhile patron, King Charles, was one of great harshness. Charles, as if to gain a sense of identity, was diametrically opposed in character to his brother, St. Louis IX of France. The one modelled his life on St. Francis and Christ. The other was spoken of as a Pharoah and a Nero by his contemporaries.35 Charles' insatiable financial greed had him tax his subjects beyond endurance. Even before the Florentine negotiations, his subjects in Marseilles, in 1257, had revolted against him.36 'Carlon', as the Italians called him, already victorious at Benevento, next, in 1268, defeated Conradin at Tagliacozzo, executing the youthful, blond-haired prince in Naples and brutally imprisoning and mutilating Ghibelline leaders, especially Count Jordan who had fought for Siena against Florence at Montaperti.37 Charles quickly abandoned the Tunisian Crusade upon his saintly brother's death and came to Viterbo, determined to exercise authority over the cardinals' conclave. There, his Vicar General, Guy de Montfort, and his brother, Simon de Montfort, murdered the English Prince Henry in church. Dante was to imply Charles even poisoned Thomas Aquinas in order to have his own French candidate become Martin IV.38

Charles oppressed the people whom he governed at the Popes' pleasure, drawing upon himself papal criticism for his harshness. Clement IV had written to Charles in 1268 protesting his cruelty to Conradin and to women and children and his refusal to heed advice, counsel, and parliament.39

Gregory X sought union with the Greeks, a policy that was not favorable to Charles who wished, personally, to regain the Emperor Baldwin's now lost domain through yet another Crusade against fellow Christians. The crusade, for which he raised the decima, especially from his Sicilian subjects, was intended not to regain Jerusalem but Constantinople, to conquer back that Greek Christian kingdom from Michael Paleologus which the Latin Baldwin had previously held. Nicholas III, like Gregory X, also sought union with the Greeks, sending a legation to them of Franciscans with letters concerning

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Charles, and openly attacked Charles, taking from him the title of Senator of Rome and the Vicariate of Tuscany, and he attempted to make peace between the Guelf and Ghibelline factions.40 Finally the Peace of Cardinal Latino, with the Florentine bankers' strong support, succeeded in bringing together and reconciling Guelf and Ghibelline in Florence, much against Charles' will, who had insisted on punishing with great severity Ghibelline leaders, removing from them their right feet and hands, gouging out their right eyes, and incarcerating them in perpetuity.41

IV. Sicilian Vespers

In 1281 the Florentines wrote to the Vicar of the Emperor Rudulph, stating in no uncertain terms that the comune recognized no emperor.42 Behind the scenes diplomacy was being carried out between the Emperor Michael Paleologus of Constantinople and King Peter of Aragon, to undermine Charles' crusade preparations.43 Then, on Easter Monday, 1282, the Sicilian Vespers broke out against Charles in Palermo. In the Latin diplomatic documents it is clear that the Sicilian Vespers revolt against Charles of Anjou was not spontaneous but deliberately planned, was not a revolution by oppressed subjects against a king, but instigated with care by popes and emperors and carried out by republicans and aristocrats. It is not generally considered that Florence was in any way involved in these plots.

In a third of the 36 Italian manuscript translations of the Tresor, the Tesoro, are careful accounts, in three different versions, edited by Michele Amari as I, II, and III,44 the more complete giving the diplomatic letters and first-hand accounts of secret conversations involving Gianni di Procita (Giovanni da Procida, John of Procida), the Neapolitan Knight, Physician, and Chancellor of Aragon, and an Accardo Latino who, disguised as Franciscans, journey between the Emperor Michael in Constantinople, the Pope, King Peter of Aragon, and the Sicilian noblemen in exile in Africa plotting the Vespers.45 One of these accounts gives the Giuseppe Verdi version concerning the French assault upon the Sicilian woman as provocation, the other two that the Sicilian Vespers occurred as a tax revolt against the decima payments for Charles' Crusade to conquer Constantinople. In the Crown Archives of Aragon we find documents from the Procidas to Alfonso el Sabio concerning this diplomacy.46 Brunetto's father, Bonaccursus Latinus, worked for Filippo Perusgio, the Bishop of Fiesole who had initially gone on embassy for the

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Pope to the Greek Emperor.47 In Villani's Cronica and in Dante's Commedia this knowledge is present and its account is further substantiated. See, for instance, where Dante chastises Pope Nicholas for accepting the money conveyed to him by these two agents from the Emperor Michael Paleologus to counter Charles of Anjou:

Però ti sta, chè tu se' ben punito; e guarda ben la mal tolta moneta ch'esser ti fece contra Carlo ardito.Inf. XIX.97-99

[But you are here, because you are well punished; and guard well the ill-taken money that made you bold against Charles.]

And where he describes the Sicilian Vespers uprising that money paid for:

E la bella Trinacria . . . attesi avrebbe li suoi regi ancora, nati per me di Carlo e di Ridolfo, se mala segnoria, che sempre accora li popoli suggetti, non avesse mosse Palermo a gridae: ‘Mora, mora!’ Par. VIII.67-75

[And the beautiful Trinacria . . . which would still await its kings, born from me of Charles and of Rudulph, if bad governing which always disturbs subjected peoples, had not moved Palermo to cry, ‘Death, Death!’]

http://www.regione.sicilia.it/beniculturali/bibliotecacentrale/tesori/immagini/t58a.jpg, gives a digital excerpt from the Sicilian account of the Sicilian Vespers, matched in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze's Brunetto Latino Tesoro manuscript in Tuscan Italian.

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Given this evidence, I believe that Accardo Latino could be Brunetto Latino, encouraged by his father and delegated by Cardinal Latino, to carry out this diplomacy by the Guelfs and the Popes opposing Charles.48 My reasons for this belief are Brunetto's participation with other poets in a series of tenzoni written against Charles,49 the Epistolaria manuscripts which include Pier delle Vigne's letters followed by those of Brunetto on the Abbot Tesauro of Vallombrosa, Popes fulminating against Charles for his injustice to his people, and the letter of the Comune of Palermo to that of Messina, written in the style of Primo Popolo letters also included in these collections,50 the Latino Sommetta which includes the notarial formula to be used by the Popes and the Emperor when writing to Charles of Anjou, Alfonso el Sabio, Archbishop Ruggieri of Pisa and others,51 the several accounts of the Sicilian Vespers' secret diplomacy which occur in so many of the Italian Tesoro manuscripts,52 the proliferation of Latino material, in one case bound with yet another account of the Vespers, in Catalan in the kingdom of Aragon,53 the continuing involvement of the Latino family with the houses of Aragon and Anjou,54 and Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Villani's knowledge of the complicity.55

Following immediately upon the Sicilian Vespers the new constitutional structure of Florentine government, the Priorate, was established - as if the one led to the other. This structure was based on the election of twelve Priors (reminiscent of the Latino letter in the Tresor concerning ten, or in the Italian version twelve, judges and twelve notaries), who were elected for a two month term of office, living, during that period, locked up in the Torre della Castagna, beyond the reach of corrupting influence. Dino Compagni, who as a young man had been involved in drawing up this restructuring of Florentine government, gave a careful account of it in his Cronica, Giovanni Villani noting that ‘Prior,’ as concept, came from Christ's ‘Vos estis Priores,’ to his disciples. Brunetto Latino was to be one such Prior and Dante Alighieri, another. From this date until his death Brunetto was to be mentioned again and again, forty-two times between 1285 and 1292, in the Consulte or Libri Fabarum as advising on constitutional matters and secret diplomacy and as giving ringing speeches concerning republican, comunal freedom, speeches echoing those of Cicero against Catilina, on liberty.56

From this material a picture emerges of Florentine skill at maintaining and regaining her comunal liberties through a balancing of power, playing one

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imperial candidate off against another while plotting secretly to negate such imperial pretensions. One solution was that of the constitutionality of the ruler, who had to swear contractually to uphold the comune's laws as podestà for a limited term of office, a pattern Jefferson, perhaps through his Tuscan friend Philip Mazzei, was to make use of for the United States' office of the President.57

Interestingly, Brunetto Latino, who played such a central role in this deceptive diplomacy and in this constitutional development, was to be the teacher of Dante Alighieri, who in the dialectic and bitterness of his later exile would become Ghibelline, rather than Guelf, and would see monarchy and Virgilian Empire as the answer, rather than the Ciceronian Roman Republic, the Res publica, reflected in the Florentine comune. The disciple was for peace; the master, for freedom, libertas.

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Notes

1 An initial version of this research appeared in ‘Chancery and Comedy: Brunetto Latini and Dante Alighieri,’ Lecture Dantis, 3 (1988), 73-94; this form of the paper was read at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, April 14, 1989, and critiqued by Richard Kay; a more complete version is published in Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). 2 Li Livres dou Tresor, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945), III.ii.v, pp. 396-6. 3 Robert Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, trans. Giovanni Battista Klein (Florence: Sansoni, 1957), from Geschichte von Florenz (Berlin: Mittler, 1896-1927), III, 586-7, II, Plate 33, Roma, Palazzo dei Conservatori; Le Comte Alexis de Saint-Priest, Histoire de la Conquete de Naples par Charles d'Anjou, frère de Saint Louis (Paris: Amyot, 1858), II, 149. 4 Demetrio Marzi, La Cancelleria della Repubblica Fiorentina (Rocca S. Casciano: Capelli, 1910), p. 35, claims Latino was first ‘Dettatore e Cancelliere della Republica’; Daniela De Rosa notes that this powerful office was not concentrated in any one individual's control but instead shared by the notaries during the Primo Popolo period. 5 Brunetto is both named and his handwriting appears in the Libro di Montaperti, published version, (Libro di Montaperti (An MCCLX), ed. Cesare Paoli (Florence: Vieusseux, 1889): 26 February, 1260, fol. 11, p. 34; 20 July, fol. 50v, p. 123; 22 July, fol. 65v, p. 148; 24 July, fol. 65v, p. 148; 23 July, fol. 74v, p. 172. 6 Davidsohn, II. 617-8, 687; Pisa had sought aid, proposing Alfonso for Emperor in their league with him against Lucca, Genova, Florence, 1256; Vatican Secret Archives, Instr. Misc. 87, 1257/1268, ‘Articuli propositi a procuratoribus Alphonsi regis Castellae coram Clem. IV. ad probandum eius electionem in Regem Romanorum a nonullis Electoribus Imperii facta an. 1257, contra Riccardum, fratrem Regis Angliae, qui ab aliis Electoribus inauguratus fuerat. Exemplar membr. 9 paginorum’; 1 February, 1264, Alfonso wrote to Pope requesting to be crowned Emperor, Vatican Secret Archives, A.A. Arm. 1-18, n. 167, published in Bruno Katterbach and Carolus

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Silva-Tarouca, Epistolae et Instrumentum saeculi XIII, in Exempla scriptorum edita consilio et opera procuratorum bibliothecae et tabularii vaticane, Fasc. II (Roma: 1930), Table 22a; the Spanish bishop, Garcìa Silves, sent to the Pope for this purpose, December, 1267, was murdered by the Pazzi, mentioned, Inferno XII. 137-8; Instr. Misc. 46, 23 March, 1276: ‘Innocentius PPV concedit Regi Castellae et Legionis ecclesiasticarum decimarum . . . pro subsidio contra Saracenos. Bullo orig. carens plumbo.’ 7 Villani, Istoria di Firenze (Florence, 1823; Rome: Multigrafica Editrice, 1980), VI. lxxiv; repeated in ASF MS 225, fol. 9; Lapo da Castiglionchio, Laurentian Library, LXI. 13, fols. 14v-15. 8 Brunetto Latini, Il Tesoretto, ed. and trans. Julia Bolton Holloway (New York: Garland, 1981), lines 113-162, Laurentian Strozziano 146, illumination, fol. 2. 9 Carmody, p. xvi, quoting Schirrmacher, Geschichte Castiliens im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Lembke (Gotha, 1881), 476, and Memorial Historico Espanol, I (Madrid, 1851), 134, on Alfonso's activities, who was in Toledo, 2 February, Soria, 12 April, Cordova, 3-6 June, Seville, 27 July, returning to Cordova, 20 September, while Brunetto Latino is present in the Florentine Libro di Montaperti through July 24 and the Battle of Montaperti took place on 4 September. 10 Las Siete Partidas del rey don Alfonso el Sabio (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1807); ‘Titulo XXIV: De los romeros et de los Peregrinos, Ley I,’ reads much like Dante's Vita Nuova definition of pilgrims, perhaps relayed through Latino. 11 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Magl. II.VIII.36, fol. 75. This Tesoro manuscript is possibly copied by Dante. 12 Biblioteca Nazionale, Banco rari 20. 13 Dell' Historia di Siena scritta da Orlando Malavolti (Venezia, 1599), end of first volume, ‘l'Arbia colorato in rossa.’

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14 F. Donati, ‘Lettere politiche del secolo XIII sulla Guerra del 1260 fra Siena e Firenze,’ Bulletino senese di storia patria, 3 (1896), 230-232, transcribing now war-destroyed Breslau Library MS 342, document 73. My thanks to Anthony Luttrell for this information. 15 Armando Petrucchi, Notarii: documenti per la storia del Notariato italiano (Milan: Guiffré, 1958), p. 17, notes that fathers trained sons as notaries. 16 Mentioned in Tesoretto, line 2451; the Archives de la Ville de Montpellier: Inventaires et Documents, III: Inventaires des Cartulaires de Montpellier, (980-1789) (Montpellier: Serre et Roumégons, 1901-7), pp. 101-2, #712, 715, 716, demonstrate importance of Italian merchants there who linked that city with the great fair in Champagne at Bar-sur-Aube. 17 Papal excommunication of the Florentine Guelfs for this crime, Vatican lat. 4957, fol. 80. That murder generated a vicious paper war, one magniloquent letter being sarcastically penned by Brunetto in the Ghibelline style of Pier delle Vigne, Vatican lat. 4957, fol. 79. Fol. 90, letter from Siena to Richard of Cornwall, using the murder of the Abbot Tesauro of Vallombrosa as pretext for Montaperti: ‘Et, quod est prohanum audire . . . in venerabilem patrem, vita sanctissimum Abbatem Vallis umbrose, impias intulerent manus, amputandum sibi caput in publica concione,’ Donati, ‘Lettere politiche,’ p. 264. 18 Vatican Secret Archives, Instr. Misc. 99; M. Armellini, ‘Documento autografo di Brunetto Latini relativo al ghibellini di Firenze scoperto negli archivi della S. Sede,’ Rassegna italiana, V/I (March, 1885), p. 359-363; Hans Foerster, Mittelalterliche Buch und Urkundenschriften auf 50 Taflen mit Erlauterungen und vollständinger Transkription (Berne: Haupt, 1946), Plate XXV, comments, transcription, pp. 64-5; Katterbach and Silva-Tarouca, Epistolae et Instrumenti saeculi XIII, p. 20, Plate 21. 19 Aymeri Cose, Pietro and Lotterio Benincase, Cavalcante della Scala, Tommaso Spigliati, Ricco Cambi and Hugo Spine, some of whom had been on embassy to the Roman Curia; many of these individuals named in Brunetto's document for the Siena/Florentine peace accord of 1254 and that at Orvieto ratifying it in halcyon years before Montaperti: Gino Arias,

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‘Sottomissione dei banchieri fiorentine alla Chiesa, 9 dic., 1263,’ in Studi e Documenti di storia del Diritto (Florence: Le Monnier, 1901), pp. 114-120; E. Jordan, De Mercatoribus camerae apostolicae saeculo XIII (Oberthur, 1909), notes that Thomas Spigliati was associated with Arras, p. 97, speaks also of Hugo Spine, pp. 25-30; Siena document, exhibited and listed in Le Sale della Mostra della Mostra e il Museo delle Tavolette dipinte, catalogo: Publicazione degli Archivi di Stato XXIII (Rome: Ministero dell'interno, 1956), #6, p. 117; transcribed in Il Caleffo Vecchio del Comune di Siena, ed. Giovanni Cecchini (Florence: Olschki, 1935), #567, II. 779. 20 ‘e mandarono loro ambasciadori a papa Clemente, acciochè gli racomandasse al conte Carlo eletto re di Cicilia, e profferendosi al servigio di santa Chiesa,’ VII.ii. 21 Westminster Abbey Muniment 12843, April 17, 1264. Peter de Egeblanke, Bishop of Hereford, worked with the Curia and the Florentines in exile after Montaperti, raising funds against Manfred, Davidsohn, II, 608-9. 22 Davidsohn, II.754; III.30, notes 1268 payment of 6000 marks sterling loaned by Lucca to Charles, to be returned at fair of Bar-sur-Aube in Champagne from France's crusading decima; II.607-9,701,741, also discuss Mozzi-Spini and Spigliati, Ardinghelli, Aymeri Cose, Curia and England relationship. 23 Letter of Andrea de Tolomei, Troyes, 4 September, 1262, in Lettere volgare del secolo XIII scritte da Senesi, ed. Cesare Paoli, E. Piccolomini (Bologna: Romagnoli, 1871), p. 41, cited in Donati, p. 259. 24 Christian Bec, Les marchands écrivains à Florence, 1375-1434 (Paris: Mouton, 1967) gives later context of such merchant bankers' literary milieu and production. My thanks to Judson Boyce Allen for this information. 25 Tresor, ed. Carmody, p. 73. 26 Tesoro (Treviso: Flandrino, 1474), caplo. lxxxxi. An important early Tesoro manuscript gives this reading, Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana 42.19, fol. 19, another, Bibl. Nazionale, Magl. II.VIII.36, suppresses Charles' name.

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27 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, MS 225, fol 10, ‘Nel medesimo anno [1265] Papa Urbano quarto per sodisfare à Guelfi di Toscana, fece in Roma un gran concilio, nel quale privò Manfredi di Regni di Sicilia, et di Puglia, et ne investa Carlo d'Angiò, et di Provenza Fratello del Re Luigi di Francia’; fol. 10v, ‘Nel detto tempo i Guelfi usciti di Firenze mandarono à Papa Clement à offeriva in servizio di s[anc]ta Chiesa per essere raccomandate . . . Conte Carlo nuovo Re di Sicilia.’ 28 Tresor, pp. 396-7. Carmody, p. xviii, doubted the importance of the letter, despite Davidsohn; perhaps because E. Jordan, Les origines de la domination angevine en Italie (Paris: Picard, 1909), p. 458, had discounted it: ‘Je ne tiens pas de compte de la lettre des Romains à Charles d'Anjou, inserée dans le Tresor de Brunetto Latino. Contrairement à l'opinion de Sternfeld, Karl von Anjou als Graf der Provence, 183, n. 2, elle me semble etre un simple exercise de style. La preuve en est qu'elle parle d'une élection pour un an, alors que nous savons que le comte fut élu à vie.’ 29 Davidsohn, III. 586-7; II, Plate 33, Rome, Palazzo dei Conservatori. 30 Saint Priest, II. 149. 31 Michele Amari, La guerra del Vespro siciliano (Paris: Baudry, 1845), I, 46-47. In his place Charles made Henry, the traitor exile brother to Alfonso X el Sabio of Castile, Senator of Rome. True to his treacherous nature, Henry was to welcome and recieve the young Conradin in Rome: Charles-Joseph Hefele, Histoires des Conciles, trans. H. Leclercq (Paris: Letouzey, 1914), VI, 57. 32 Davidsohn, III. 116, 149; ASS Cons. gener. 19, fol. 9v. My thanks to Daniela De Rosa who read the document in question and noted that the discussion continues through folios 4v, 24v, 42, 57v-58. 33 Amari, Vespro siciliano, II, 365-6, giving Naples Archives, segn. 1283, Reg. Carlo I, A, fol. 130, as source. The Archives in Naples were destroyed by fire, 1944. However, Palermo, Bibl. Com. Qq Gl and Rome, Bibl. Angelica D.VIII.17 transcribed documents relating to Sicily and Charles. The documents survive, Genova, Liber Iurum Reipublicae Genevensis II, in Historia Patriae Monumentum (Torino, 1836-84), II, cols. 60 ff, transcribing 13-21

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October, 1284; Codex A, fols. 437-441; ASG Codex C, fols. 126-131; #424, Busta 6/42; ASF Capitoli di Firenze, 43 (formerly XLIV/XLVI), fols. 29-39, Brunetto Latino named, fols. 34, 37v, 38. The deaths of Ugolino and his progeny by starvation as a result of Florentine plotting concerning Pisa will possibly cause the establishment of Orsanmichele as a granary for famine. 34 Runciman, pp. 206-7. 35 Phrases found in rhetoric associated with Gianni di Procita against Charles passim, in Palermo and Biblioteca Angelica manuscripts and in Tesoro Sicilian Vespers accounts. 36 Saint Priest, II. 28. 37 Amari, Vespro siciliano, p. 115; Tesoro account of Vespers ends with moving lament of Count Jordan, who desires death rather than his continuing misery and who addresses his severed hand which had dubbed so many fair knights. 38 Purgatorio XX. 61-69. 39 Palermo, Bibl. Com., Qq Gl, fols. 100v-102; Hefele, Histoire des Conciles, VI. 59. 40 Hefele, Histoires des Conciles, VI. 153-268; Vatican Secret Archives, Instr. Misc. 157, 158, 159, 160, 592; Gaetano Salvemini, Magnati e Popolani in Firenze dal 1280 al 1295 (Florence: Carnasecchi, 1899), p. 19; Latino's Sommetta gives the notarial formulae for Nicholas III to use when writing to Charles of Anjou and Alfonso el Sabio. 41 See Amari, Vespro siciliano, p. 115. 42 Richard Kay, Dante's Swift and Strong: Essays on 'Inferno' XV (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), p. 21, who states the letter is Brunetto's. 43 G. Villani, VII.lvii, p. 236, mentions letter sent from Pope to Aragon as sealed with his seal as Cardinal; Genoese pergamene for this period demonstrate that Genoa and the Florentines were in contact with the Greek

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Empire against Charles of Anjou; Pasquale Lisciandrelli, Trattati e negoziazione politiche della repubblica di Genova (958-1797) (Genova: Società ligure di storia patria, 1960), #338, Archivio di Stato di Genova, Busta 5/20, also 5/38,39,40, 1261, Genova with Manfred of Sicily, Michael Paleologus of Constantinople, 10 July, Alfonso el Sabio, 1262, 15 & 16 August, Charles of Anjou, 21 July; 1273, February 7, #383, Busta 6/2, on Genoese ambassadors making agreement with Pope at Orvieto and with Venice to oppose Charles on electing King of Bohemia Emperor; 1275, Genova and Greek Emperor ratified l26l accords (Busta 3/39) between the two states, #415, Busta 6/34, that agreement being made February 7, 1281, for five years or longer; Vatican Secret Archives and Crown Archives of Aragon similarly demonstrate friendly relations between these Latin states and the Greek Empire, countering Charles' ambitions. The Vatican material stresses need for Greek speakers to be present in the delegations, Instr. Misc. 160, 592, 30 November, 1276. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale lat. 4042, gives Pier delle Vigne, Brunetto Latino/Tesauro and Sicilian Vespers letters, fols. 92v-95v, colophon noting it was compiled as a ‘summa dictaminis’ by Thomas of Capua, notary of the Roman Curia, 1294. Meanwhile, Brunetto's texts proliferate in Catalonia and Aragon, as well as in Castile and Andalusia, demonstrating his access to both Alfonso el Sabio and to Peter of Aragon. See Deno Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Paleologus and the West, 1258-1282: A Study in Byzantine Latin Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). 44 Manuscripts, Siglum A, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, G 75 sup. Amari I; As, Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Ashburnham 540, Amari I, Br, London, British Library, Addit. 26105, Cronica to 1285; De Visiani, lost MS, Amari I; F4, Florence, BN, Magl. VIII.1375, Amari III, corresponding with Sicilian Lu Rebellamentu di Sichilia, ed. Sicardi; G1, Florence, Bibl. Laur. Gaddiano 26, Amari II; G2, Bibl. Laur. Gaddiano 83, Amari II; L1, Bibl. Laur. 42.20, Amari II; L4, Bibl. Laur. 42.23, Amari I; R1, Florence, Bibl. Riccardiana, 2221, Amari I; S, San Daniele del Friuli, Bibl. Communale, 238, Amari II; V1, Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, lat. 5908, Amari II; while 1286 Florence, BN, Magl. II.VIII.36, speaks of Tesoro written for love of his enemy. 45 The neo-Ghibelline Michele Amari edited these accounts in Altre narrazione del Vespro siciliano scritte nel buon secolo della lingua (Milano: Hoepli, 1887), disbelieving Brunetto's authorship. Enrico Sicardi also published them in

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their Sicilian versions, Due Chronache del Vespro in volgare siciliano del Secolo XIII, in L. A. Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores: Raccolta degli storici italiani (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1917) 39.91-126. Geanakoplos, Michaal Paleologus, cites De Michaele et Andronico Paleologis, ed. I. Dekker (Bonn, 1835), 2 vols, George Pachymeres' contemporary Byzantine history, speaking of use by these delegates of Franciscan disguises. A chronicle account of the Sicilian Vespers also occurs with a Catalan Tesoro manuscript, Biblioteca Seminar Conciliar de Barcelona, MS. 74. Professor Richard Kay does not believe in a Brunetto Latino, Accardo Latino, Sicilian Vespers connection. 46 Isidoro Carini, Gli Archivi e le Biblioteche di Spagna in rapporto alla storia d'Italia e di Sicilia in particolare (Palermo: Statuto, 1884), II, 45-46, giving February, 1280, 1 April, 1282, 19 May, 1282, apologies from Giovanni di Procita to Alfonso el Sabio. 47 Davidsohn, III, 210-211; Vatican Secret Archives, Instr. Misc. 157, 158, 159, 160, 592; Archivio vescovile della Diocesi di Fiesole MS II.B.4, Atti, prefaced by verses by ‘Bonaccursi di Lastra’ to ‘Phylippus Perugine’; Scipione Ammirato, Vescovi di Fiesole, di Volterra, et d'Arezzo (Florence, 1637), pp. 28-29. 48 Geanakoplos, p. 292, citing M. Laurent, Innocent V, 411, notes that a pass issued by Charles for one member of this delegation was for a mysterious ‘L.’ He also mentions the Greek documents as citing a ‘Calado’ or ‘Kladas’ as being involved. Bartholomeus de Neocastro, Historia Sicula, in Lodovico Antonius Muratorius, Rerum Italicum Scriptores (Milano, 1728), III, col. 1049, notes: ‘Et Carolus Rex . . . staret pedibus ante Ecclesiam . . . Magister Bonaccursus tenta balista terribili in eum projiciens.’ Is this a Latino relative taking pot shots at his king? 49 Vatican 3793 contains tenzoni of Palamidesse Bellindoti, Guglielmo Beroardi, Rustico di Filippo, Brunetto Latino, etc. Another appears on the flyleaf of a Ferrara Tresor manuscript, along with a Dante sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, II.280. 50 Paris, BN, lat 4042, fols. 92v-95v; Palermo, Biblioteca Comunale Qq G1.

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51 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Magl. II.VIII.36, fol. 75. 52 Published in Michele Amari, Altre narrazioni; Due Cronache del Vespro in volgare siciliano del Secolo XIII, ed. Enrico Sicardi, in L. A. Muratori, 39.91-126. 53 Biblioteca Episcopal del Seminar Conciliar de Barcelona, 74. 54 Two of Brunetto's sons, Bonaccursus and Perusgio (Perseo), were to be involved with the Angevin court of Robert of Naples, the first as Florence's ambassador, the second as courtier. The Bonaccursi family were bankers in Naples and elsehwere until their bank failed, 1312, Romolo Caggese, Roberto d'Angiò e i suoi tempi (Florence: Bemporad, 1922), I, 598. Perseo would be given the lilies of Anjou for his coat of arms to add to his father's of six roses. 55Inf. XIX.97-99; Par. VIII.67-75; G. Villani, VII.liv, p. 227. 56 Le Consulte della Repubblica Florentina dall'anno MCCLXXX al MCCXCVIII (Florence: Sansoni, 1898), publishing the ASF Libri Fabarum, and Documenti dell'Antica Costituzione del Comune di Firenze: Appendice: Parte Prima, 1251-1260, ed. Pietro Santini (Florence: Olschki, 1952), give many of the documents associated with Brunetto. 57 Another member of the Mazzei family erected the memorial tablet to Brunetto Latino in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore above his restored tomb:

BVRNETTO.LATINO.PATRITIO.FIORENTINO/ ELOQVENTIA.AC.POESEOS.RESTAVRATORI/ DANTIS.ALIGHERII.ET.GVIDONIS.CAVALCANTIS/ MAGISTRO.INCOMPARABILI.QVI.OBIT.AN.DOM.MCCLXXXXIV/ HANC.EIVS.SEPVLCHI.COLUMELLAM.DEPERDITAM/ HVIVS.COENOBI.PATRES/ ADNVENTE.P.M.IOSEPHO.MARIA.MAZZEIO.VIC.GENERALI/ RESTITVTO.FLORENTINIS.CIVIBVS.TANTO.SPLENDORE/ AD.P.R.M.PONENDAM.CVRARVNT.AN.D.MDCCCLI.’

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DANTE ALIGHIERI AND ‘GOTHIC’

III THE VITA NOVA: PARADIGMS OF PILGRIMAGE1

he Vita nova is, as translator Barbara Reynolds notes, a work by a poet for poets about poetry.2 It is also, as Charles Singleton in his Essay on the Vita

nova, has ably demonstrated, a book about the Book.3 It is thus self-conscious, self-referential, and self-reflective, at the same time that it is a Janus text, written with ambages, riddling ambiguities, deliberate doublenesses of meaning (Aeneid VI.29,9; De vulgari eloquentia I.10). It is a hermeneutic and cryptographic text and much of its encoding has to do with pilgrimage. It was written in a period when critical theory was theology, when sacred texts were mirrored in secular texts, and when reconciling ambages were mandated by cultural pluralism.

The hermeneutic of the Vita nova can be uncoded through an archeology of its text;4 of its intertextuality with a prior text which in turn describes a geography alien and foreign to Dante's, one being of Israel in Asia, the other of the Sinai in Africa, as well as being of his native Florence and of Rome in Europe. Dante creates upon the Old and New Testaments using Exodus and Emmaus paradigms a palimpsest, reshaping the Bible's Hebrew, Greek and Latin into Florentine Italian. I would argue also that the cultural context explains both the text and its method, its cryptography. This essay will attempt to unravel those parts of its riddle that have to do with pilgrimage and its paradigms.

The thirteenth century is the century of the ‘sweet new style,’ the dolce stil nuovo, of the Gothic, which borrowed motifs from the Saracen, observed in Spain, Sicily, and the Jerusalem Kingdom, where the Christian culture encountered through its crusades and its pilgrimages the rich pluralism of the other Peoples of the Book, and made that ultra-civilized material ultra-Christian in contradistinction to the Romanesque, which it now chose to interpret as Oldness, whether Roman or Judaic, Hellenic or Hebraic.

T

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Panofsky has shown how this period made use of these two styles in a coded language, conveying Oldness and Newness side by side, the one fulfilling the other, not destroying it.5 Auerbach and Jameson have shown how medieval theology brought together disparate modes for reading texts into a complementarity, a rich co-existence that continued until the system became too unwieldy, overloaded, and contradictory for readers in more modern times.6

Pilgrimage was seen by theologians, Philo Judaeus among them, as paideia, as education. The Vita nova is associated both with pilgrimage and with education, and is even said to have been given by Dante Alighieri to his teacher, Brunetto Latino, accompanied by a sonnet which speaks of its text as a Janus one.7 This text functions as epistemology, of both its writer and its reader; both are required to crack its code, its enigma.8 Related works through time are Augustine's Confessions, Boethius' Consolation, Wireker's Speculum Stultorum, Erasmus' Praise of Folly, More's Utopia, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Joyce's Portrait. These works use authorial personae and specula, masks and mirors, and are learnedly playful, childishly arcane. They pivot upon a fulcrum, upon conversions (‘Tolle, lege, tolle, lege’); they are bookish and about education; and they contain equal and opposite meanings in their dialectic mode.

The thirteenth century is the century of Aristotle, whom Brunetto Latino taught to Dante Alighieri, and whose works were likewise borrowed from the Arabs who had preserved the Greek texts when the Christians had not, and who was now made ultra-orthodox by Aquinas after a bitter, initial rejection of his writings as heretical. What is witnessed here is a paradigm shift of great importance to Western culture, albeit censored and disguised.9 Latino and Dante are master and disciple, each in turn conveying that new and initially suspect and controversial learning, and who both reconcile the Greco-Arabic mode to the Judeo-Christian one in a dialectic. This willingness to accept a doubleness of thought further encouraged the marriage of the Old and New Testaments as justification of the similar juxtaposition of philosophy and theology, the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian. Beryl Smalley has discussed this aspect of medieval Biblical study and Gabriel Astrick has demonstrated its presence in medieval universities' coats of arms.10

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This doubleness of the thirteenth century, this complementarity, is deeply embedded in the Vita nova which is a Gothic and Averroistic text that plays upon prior texts. In the Vita nova Dante is deconstructing his own earlier poetry, finding deeper layers of meanings to it than he at first suspected were there. He is playing with its doubleness, its intertextuality, to God's text and to Aristotle's. Its text will teach him God's Commandments given to Moses and Aaron and Aristotle's Ethics; theology and philosophy; Hebraism and Hellenism. The Vita nova is thus a work that presents a map of misreading, as a Janus text with another and opposite meaning behind its apparent surface text, both being of value, like some manuscript palimpsest where a Romanesque liturgical text has been overlaid by a Gothic Ovid or, as in the actual case of a Brunetto Latino manuscript, where a thirteenth-century legal text has been scraped clean and upon it placed Latino's translation of Aristotle's Ethics, acquired by him in Spain and copied out in France, where he was exiled following the Battle of Montaperti and before that of Benevento, as in Yale's Marston 28.

The thirteenth is the century of the university and all these reconciled texts, philosophical and theological, Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, are crucial for the medieval lecture hall and for those pedagogic establishments set up in legal chambers and chanceries in the cities lacking universities. We know that Brunetto Latino taught his students in Arras and in Florence in this manner, from texts acquired in quasi-Saracen Spain, and that one of his students was the young Dante Alighieri, another having been Guido Cavalcanti.11

The Vita nova can be taught in courses on medieval pilgrimage and poetry, and students in them shown a way of uncoding its text through the paradigms and even literal maps of pilgrimage. There are two major paradigms of Judeo-Christian pilgrimage which are used in medieval literary texts: the Emmaus and the Exodus patterns. It should be previously explained to students in such a course that the Hebraic world had required three pilgrimages annually to the Temple in Jerusalem of all Jewish males, at Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles, all of which ritually replicated the Exodus pilgrimaging and at which pilgrims laid palms on the horns of the Temple's altar. Then it can be shown how these Hebraic pilgrimages liturgically, archeologically, inform the later Christian ones, all of these shaping the Vita nova as well as other major pilgrimage texts.

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I. The Emmaus Paradigm

In Luke 24, originally written in Greek, we learn of two pilgrims who are joined by a third they do not at first recognize as they journey towards an inn at eventide. (This tale of pilgrim tales will also influence Chaucer, Joyce, and Eliot, its archeology not only influencing Dante but also reaching into the future beyond him, and largely through him.) The Gospel account was read in the Church's liturgy each Easter Monday and often acted out as a drama, with Psalm 113, In exitu Israel de Aegypto, originally the Hebrew psalm of the Hallel, chanted while bearing palms on the pilgrimage to the Temple, and now sung in Latin and Gregorian chant, but which had originally been sung in Hebrew with a similar musical tonus peregrinus.12

The Emmaus paradigm, of the teller of the tale who is at first foolish and who later comes to comprehend the presence of Jesus as the pilgrim, will be a pilgrimage device Dante will borrow from Luke. It is his authorial mantle for the self-conscious, self-referential, self-reflective telling of the Vita nova, its pilgrim narration. That garb will be donned again for the Commedia, Dante there being as Luke, Virgil, his Cleophas and likewise Aaron, in Dante's figural structuring.

The liturgical drama, the Officium Peregrinorum, based upon Luke 24, had powerfully presented the paradoxes of recognition and resurrection. Dante is to use that dramatic episode again, intertextually, in Purgatorio XXI.7-11,

Ed ecco, sì come ne scrive Luca che Cristo apparve a' due ch'erano in via, già surto de la sepulcral buca

[And, just as Luke had written of it, that Christ appeared to the two who were on the road, having already risen from the sepulchral cave],

where he has two poets, Virgil and Dante, be met by a third, Statius. The encounter of two pilgrims by a third is at last made overtly as the Emmaus paradigm; but previously, throughout Hell and Purgatory, each meeting of the two, Virgil and Dante, with others had covertly been in that Emmaus matrix of pilgrimage. For the Emmaus tale is explicitly about initial non-recognition through folly and sin; it is a Pilgrim's Progress.

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In the medieval tradition the second, unnamed disciple becomes a youthful, beardless Luke, himself the future author and Gospeler of that pilgrim tale, while the first was the older and bearded Cleophas. Luke's text speaks of these two whose ‘oculi autem illorum tenebantur, ne eum agnoscerunt’ [But their eyes were holden that they should not know him] (24.16), as they walked together telling pilgrim tales, ‘dum fabularentur’ [while fabling] (24.15). Cleophas says to the unrecognized Jesus: ‘Tu solus peregrinus es in Jerusalem, et non cognovisti quae facta sunt in illa his diebus?’ [Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days?] (24.18). Jesus, in pilgrim disguise in medieval depictions of this scene, answers: ‘O stulti et tardi corde ad credendum in omnibus quae locuti sunt prophetae?’ [O fools and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken] (25). And he begins by telling them of Exodus, the tale of Moses and his wilderness pilgrimage, as a prophecy concerning himself. Then the recognition scene occurs in the blessing and breaking of bread at the inn. This is dramatic irony; it is related to the riddle and the ambages. Perceptions are reversed. Tricks are played upon the personae and the readers.

The Emmaus tale is encountered twice in the Vita nova, and the first time it is presented it is misread, misunderstood, and unrecognized. It is presented in the ninth section of the work. The Vita nova calls great attention to numerology and above all to that number, nine. The title of the work, in Latin, and repeated in rubrication at the opening of the text, puns upon ‘new’ and ‘nine,’ in contra-distinction to the oldness of eight, the octagonal font, the pagan Emperor Octavian/Augustus who saw at Ara Coeli a vision of the Virgin and Child; these two numbers, eight and nine, then become, in medieval numerology, the numbers of conversion. Augustine similarly had had his conversion occur in the eighth book of the Confessions, his baptism into the new life in the ninth. Beatrice is equated with ‘nine’ (XXXVIII- XXXIX). Dante is here drawing attention to his code and to the means by which it can be cracked.

In that chapter Dante has gone away from Florence (just as Luke and Cleophas were journeying away from Jerusalem), when on the road he meets Amore disguised as a pilgrim: ‘E però lo dolcissimo segnore . . . ne la mia immaginazione apparve come peregrino leggeramente vestito e di vili drappi’ [And therefore the most sweet lord . . . in my mind appeared like a

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pilgrim lightly clad and with shabby garb]. Dante is, for a pilgrim, improperly on horseback: ‘Cavalcando l'altr'ier per un cammino’ [Riding out the other day along a road]; the pilgrim Amore is correctly on foot, and probably barefoot. (John Donne will play with that paradox in his ‘Good Friday Riding Westward’ four centuries after.)

There is a further relation to the Emmaus paradigm than might be apparent to a modern reader. The monastic liturgical dramas not only made use of Psalm 113 in the Easter Monday and Tuesday performances of the Officium Peregrinorum; they also prefaced that play with a hymn, ‘Jesu, Amor et Desiderium’ [Jesus, Love and Desire].13 Also, the pilgrimage to Rome, if ROMA was spelled backwards, was to AMOR, Love. For these reasons many uses of the Emmaus paradigm in medieval texts yoked the erotic to the Christological, including Tristan's encounter with two Venetian pilgrims on the shores of Tintagel, upon his pilgrimage not to Christ but to Isolde, and Petrarch's pilgrimage to Laura, Chaucer's Troilus' failed tryst to Criseyde, Shakespeare's Romeo's pilgrimage to Juliet.14 Partly what lies behind the medieval game with pilgrimage, which can and should be chaste, but which is mocked as being of lust, is the statement in I Peter 2.11: ‘Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.’ Prohibitions give rise to mocking misrule, to satirical saturnalia. Dante, in the razio to his poem, stresses the Emmaus-like sudden disappearance of Amore. But the appearance of his Amore, at this stage of the work, is more that of Cupid than that of Christ. The Christological references are deliberately kept cloudy and unclear at this stage of the pilgrimage of the Vita nova, both for its Luke-like persona, who is foolish and slow to believe, and for its reader who mirrors him.

The other half of this tally comes in Vita nova XL with the sonnet's lines:

Deh peregrini che pensosi andate, forse di cosa che non v'è presente, venite voi da sì lontana gente, com'a la vista voi ne dimostrate, che non piangete quando voi passate per lo suo mezzo la città dolente, come quelle persone che neente par che 'ntendesser la sua gravitate?

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[O pilgrims, meditating as you go, On matters it may be, not near at hand, Have you then journeyed from so far a land, As from your aspect one may plainly know, That in the sorrowing city's midst you show No sign of grief, but onward tearless wend, Like people who, it seems, can understand No part of all its grievous weight of woe?15]

Its commentary goes on to speak of pilgrims journeying from Florence to Rome to see ‘quella imagine benedetta la quale Iesu Cristo lasciò a noi per essemplo de la sua bellissima figura’ [that blessed image that Jesus Christ has left for us as a pattern of his most beautiful face]. It is generally assumed that this is the Veronica veil shown each Easter Friday to pilgrims at St. Peter's. But an investigation of pilgrimage practices in Rome in the thirteenth century indicates instead that this is the face of Christ in the apse mosaic of St. John Lateran which was said to have floated miraculously into the basilica through the golden door.16 To view this face, the Santo Volto, gave the pilgrim, even in the thirteenth century, a most valuable indulgence. The Lateran, then, was of far greater importance and sanctity than was the Vatican. In Vita nova IX that Christ imaging was obscure; in Vita nova XL it is revealed, the Pilgrim's Progress of the work deliberately being that of I Corinthians 13.12: ‘Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem; nunc cognosco ex parte, tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum’ [For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known].17

Coupled with this pilgrimage towards Rome Dante gives us a most careful definition of the various kinds of pilgrims according to their geographic goals:

. . . chiamansi palmieri in quanto vanno oltremare, là onde molte volte recano la palma; chiamansi peregrini in quanto vanno a la casa di Galizia, però che la sepultura di sa' Iacopo fue più lontana de la sua patria che c'alcuno altro apostolo; chiamansi romei in quanto vanno a Roma, là ove questi cu'io chiamo peregrini andavano.

[They are called Palmers who go overseas, where they often bring back the palm; they are called Pilgrims who go to the shrine in Galicia, for the tomb of St. James is the farthest from his homeland than is that of any other

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apostle; they are called Roamers who go to Rome, where those whom I call Pilgrims were going].

But Dante is implying that his own city, through which these pilgrims are traveling, is another pilgrim city. In quoting Jeremiah: ‘Quomodo sedet sola civitas’ [How doth the city sit solitary], he is drawing an analogy between Florence and Jerusalem; the one city for the loss of Beatrice mirroring that other city for the death of Christ, in the manner of Christ's seeing prophecies concerning himself in the Old Testament as fulfilled in the New. Dante is thus drawing Florence into the Emmaus paradigm twice over, the first time obscurely, the second time with clarity. E. H. Gombrich spoke, in Art and Illusion, of this capacity to substitute one city for another, in art, and in printing; so also did Emile Mâle.

II. The Exodus Paradigm

We recall that on the road to Emmaus, Christ, Luke, and Cleophas were telling tales. One tale Christ told was of Moses, which would have included that of the Exodus. We know that in the Officium Peregrinorum, the Easter Monday Vespers liturgical drama, that Psalm 113 (Psalm 114 and 115 in the King James Bible) was also sung, retelling the tale of the Exodus. The Exodus and the Emmaus tales were themselves seen as palimpsests of each other. What we shall find is that Dante is creating of those two intertwined tales yet a third; he shapes their analogies to his as carefully as would Bach have shaped a fugue and a passacaglia.18

Dante makes use of the Stations of the Exodus as a book of memory, a theatre of memory, a pilgrimage of memory, for the mnemonic cryptography of the Vita nova, a system of categories for his forty-two divisions to the work, having it become both a concealed Old Testament pilgrimage in the Wilderness and a to-be-revealed New Testament one, to both of which he gives a New Life, a Vita nova.19 I shall first discuss the general patterns and then the specific one of Numbers 33's Stations of the Exodus, which correspond, John V. Fleming once remarked, to Dante's divisions of the Vita nova.20 Medieval culture, we know, delighted in such numerological paradigms.21 There would also be some awareness of the names of the forty-two stations' Hebrew names and their meanings as words, as being as well

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letters as numbers, thus giving us Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, a pilgrimage consonance of the languages of the Book.

The Exodus is a story of liberation, of paideia, the Bildungsroman of Israel, and Dante will carefully define it as such in the Letter to Can Grande. It was a historical event, but it was also defined in literary terms by Augustine and others. We recall that Augustine had argued that it was permissible to use pagan poetry in Christian sermons because God had told the Israelites to borrow Egyptian gold and take it with them in the Wilderness (Exodus 12.35).22 That gold was first used to fashion the Golden Calf, when the Israelites came to Aaron, saying ‘Up, make us gods’ (32.1). In so doing, the Israelites had broken the commandment against idolatry, against graven images. In their dancing naked about the Golden Calf they were also breaking the commandment against adultery, against lust. They were most severely punished for these acts. The same Egyptian gold was then used for the adorning of the Ark which housed the Law with these Commandments against idolatry and adultery among the others. Paul had preached a sermon to the pagan Athenians on the Areopagus and had used in that Christian sermon quotations from Greek tragic poetry (Acts 17). The Church Fathers used these two episodes to argue that pagan material, like Egyptian gold, like Greek poetry, could be used for Christian purposes. Thus the Exodus was seen both as a historical liberation, and also as an allegory about poetry and its doubleness. Dante will thus make use of Beatrice as Golden Calf and as Tabernacle of the Ark. She represents both poetry and theology, lust and charity.

The Middle Ages and its cathedrals and summae took most seriously the scriptural statement that God had created the world in number, weight and measure: ‘omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti’ (Wisdom of Solomon 11.20). Christ's age at the Crucifixion was thirty-three. The book of Numbers, for its thirty-third chapter, proceeds to list the forty-two Stations of the Exodus. Those forty-two stations were of great importance both in the Hebraic world and in the Christian one. They were travelled by pilgrims. In imitation of them pilgrimage stations were established among the churches in Rome, including the seven major basilicae. In imitation of both of these, twelve pilgrimage stations were eventually established in Jerusalem, by the Franciscans, to mark the twelve events concerning the Crucifixion, the Stations of the Cross. The listing from Numbers 33 was discussed, with the

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meanings of the Hebrew names, from Jerome and Bede, in pilgrim guidebooks and in the Glossa Ordinaria.23 It functioned like gematria, where letters are numbers and vice versa, the numbers and names here, rather than just the letters, being consonant in an intertextuality of time and space upon the World as Book written by God. For Dante it may have become such a system as Umberto Eco was later to have his Name of the Rose library use, there based upon the Apocalypse: here, by Dante, for the Vita nova, upon Numbers 33.

It would be wise to discuss two of the pilgrim accounts side by side with Dante's cryptographic text. One such account, Anonymous Pilgrim VI (Pseudo-Beda), is of the twelfth century; the other, Fetellus, is of the thirteenth century and thus likely more corrupt. One is uncertain what account Dante actually may have himself used. Available to him could also have been Jerome's listing and translation, which is repeated in the Glossa Ordinaria. The Glossa text is especially interesting as it conflates Old and New Testament meanings together, seeing all the events in Numbers 33 in relation to Christ. John Demaray also notes Paolo Amaducci's La fonte della Divina commedia which sought to parallel Peter Damian's De Quadragesima, et quadraginta duabus Hebraeorum mansionibus to that text in its entirety in a far-fetched manner.24 To my knowledge no attempt has been made to apply the forty-two Stations of the Exodus carefully to the Vita nova as a map, a subtext, or palimpsest to it.

There is a certain amount of confusion between these pilgrimage accounts and those of Numbers 33 but they all make cryptographic, structural sense of the Vita nova, as if a version of one of them had been at Dante's elbow as he wrote that text. One should, perhaps, quest for likely manuscripts in Florentine libraries that Dante could have used. What we shall see is that in some cases there is a very exact parallel, in others not so; as if Dante had used the Exodus Stations as a rough outline for his own work, much as frescoes of pilgrimage at Tavant were first sketched in with sanguine, then covered over, that covering now being lost and revealing the original sanguine cartoons. Some editions of the Vita nova change the numbering from forty-two to forty-three chapters, but not many do so.

The Victorian editor of Fetellus, James Rose MacPherson, noted of that text: ‘At this point he introduces a long statement as to the route of the Exodus, in which he mentions some remarkable legends, and gives many strange

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interpretations of the names of the stations in the Desert of the Wanderings. These explanations are at times altogether ludicrous, but not more so than was general up to a comparatively recent period.’25 One must admit that the credulous tone of the accounts strikes a modern reader as odd. We, today, are nominalists. Umberto Eco's system is only accidentally consonant with the events that transpire in his medieval detective novel Il nome della rosa, though he designed them. But the early medieval mind believed that names, places, and their meanings, their etymologies, were designed, created, by God. It is that spirit which informs these accounts.

John Demaray, in order to write The Invention of Dante's Commedia, actually travelled the Exodus route, visiting the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai. He applies the Exodus Stations to the Commedia, but not to the Vita nova.26 He found that pilgrim guides were still repeating these formulae orally almost verbatim as they are also given in medieval pilgrim guidebooks.27 There is an intense retention and conservatism about a landscape upon which pilgrimages are performed, where the World and the Book, as Singleton has shown in his Essay on the Vita Nuova, become one. There is, in fact, a magnificent icon at St. Catherine's Monastery of Christ with the Book, in which one senses that he is analogously also Moses with the Law, and that the Book contains Numbers 33 as well as Luke 24.28 This is Dante's ‘libro de la mia memoria,’ his book of memory.

Let us turn to the Vita nova's text and examine it with the pilgrim palimpsests of Numbers 33 at our elbow, using that as a code book for the cryptography of the work and see what occurs. Dante begins by noting that his own palimpsest begins with ‘una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova’ [a rubricated line which states: ‘Here begins the New Life’]. In the Latin Vulgate the Red Sea is the ‘mare Rubrum.’ Psalm 113, used at the Easter baptism, mentions it. The Red Sea's crossing and baptism were seen as analogous by the Church. This first section of the Vita nova represents the beginning of Dante's Exodus-like pilgrimage from Egypt to Israel, from confusion to clarity, from birth through life to salvation, a pilgrimage he can make after first ‘spoiling the Egyptians.’ Pseudo-Beda gives us the date of the beginning of Numbers 33 as the second day after Easter, the liturgical date for the reading of the Gospel account of the Doubting of Thomas, an episode often included in the Easter Monday and also Tuesday Officium Peregrinorum. In

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that drama Christ tells Thomas that he has seen him but not believed. All these aspects can be found echoed in Dante's text.

The second station is that of Succoth, of the Tabernacle. In Exodus and elsewhere we are told that the predominant color of the Tabernacle of the Ark is red, crimson, scarlet. This is the garb of Beatrice: ‘Apparve vestita di nobilissimo colore, umile ed onesto, sanguigno.’ The Tabernacle of the Ark was to be housed in the Holy of Holies, the Sancta Sanctorum, within the Jerusalem Temple. Dante here says that ‘lo quale dimore ne la secretissima camera de lo cuore’ [which dwells in the inmost depths, the most secret room, of the heart]. What is interesting here is that Beatrice is associated with Miriam, Mary, and Christ; and the Exodus Vulgate account gives Miriam's name as Mary, and the Apocrypha tells the story of the Virgin spinning and weaving the red cloth for the Temple's curtains, being herself the Arca Dei, the Ark of God.29 Dante's roles here become that of Moses before the burning bush, that of Aaron permitted to enter the Holy of Holies but once a year. Thus the ‘Egyptian gold’ of Homer is particularly apt: ‘Ella non parea figliuola d'uomo mortale, ma di deo’ [She appeared not as the daughter of a mortal but of God]. Bernard had spoken of the Virgin Mary as the ‘daughter of her son,’ and Dante was to repeat that paradox (Paradiso XXXIII.1-36). In this system neither character nor gender need remain fixed; the palimpsest can vary the dramatis personae. Here Dante responds to the sight of Beatrice as did Moses to the sight of God. Medieval iconography associated Moses' sight of God in the burning bush as analogous to Augustus/Octavius' vision of the Virgin and Child. The icon at St. Catherine's Monastery may give us God and Moses mirroring each other. The Glossa Ordinaria emphatically relates Moses to Christ: ‘Moses, id est Christus.’

The third station, Etham, is that of the pillar of cloud and fire, of ‘bravery,’ ‘perfection,’ and ‘solitude.’ Here Dante meets the miraculous Beatrice first garbed in white. Then Love presents her to him in a vision of ‘una nebula di colore di fuoco’ [in a cloud the color of fire], wrapped in a crimson cloth, ‘uno drappo sanguigno.’ At first Dante is afraid, faint hearted, and so also is Beatrice timid and terrified, rather than either being brave. In order to achieve this vision, in which he is told ‘Ego dominus tuus’ [I am your lord], he has withdrawn to the solitude of his room. The correspondences to these sections are again quite clear.

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The fourth place is Phaihiroth, the place where reeds grow, and here Dante becomes so weak and frail, ‘di sì fraile e debole condizione,’ that his friends are greatly concerned. He is as ‘frail as a reed.’ The fifth station is of Marah, meaning ‘bitterness,’ but also associated punningly with ‘Mary.’ Dante here speaks of basking in the sight of the Queen of Glory, ‘la regina de la gloria,’ an epithet usually reserved for the Virgin Mary, but here, quite clearly, used of Beatrice. The sixth is the station of Helim, noted for its twelve fountains and seventy palm trees. I wonder if there are manuscripts that speak of ‘settanta,’ rather than of ‘sessanta’ ladies, seventy rather than sixty ladies to whom he writes his serventese. The seventh station is of the journey that the Israelites make passing by the windings of the Red Sea shore. Dante speaks of traveling twice here, in his vernacular sonnet, ‘O voi che per la via d'Amor passate,/ attendete e guardate/s'elli è dolore alcun, quanto'l mio, grave’ [O you who on the road of Love pass by, Attend and see If any grief there be as heavy as mine],30 which in turn is echoed in, or rather echoes, the words of Jeremiah given in ponderous Latin: ‘O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus’ [All ye that pass by, behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow]. These words are frequently engraved beneath Crucifixes. But Dante is employing religious language blasphemously, in a Bakhtinian manner, for the uses, here, of lust, rather than charity.

The eighth station, of the desert of Sim, means ‘bramble’ and ‘hatred.’ In this chapter, Dante mourns the death of a young and very beautiful lady, and reviles death as his enemy whom he curses: ‘Morte villana, di pietà nemica/ . . . di te blasmar la lingua s'affatica’ [Villanous death, the enemy of pity . . . Cursing you wearies my tongue]. The ninth station of Dephca, meaning ‘knocking’ or ‘pulsating,’ can only achieve that through the sound of the horse's hooves in ‘Cavalcando’ [Riding out the other day]. In other accounts it also has the meaning of ‘salus,’ ‘health,’ and ‘salvation.’ Amore appears to Dante as they both journey beside a beautiful river. Later we come to realize that Amore is also Christ, ‘salus noster.’ The next station, the tenth, is Alus, signifying ‘discontent,’ and it describes Dante's unhappiness at being denied Beatrice's salutation. It was here that the Israelites complained about their hunger and were given quail and manna.

The eleventh station, Raphidim, or ‘desolation of the brave,’ is where the Israelites falsely worship the idol of the Golden Calf. Dante, here, goes to pay

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homage to Beatrice and feels his heart burning within him (that Emmaus yoking of cupidity and charity) at seeing her. The text takes Dante's two different perceptions of Beatrice, with lust, with love, and has one and the same woman represent for him, first the Golden Calf, fashioned out of the spoils of the Egyptians, and then the Tabernacle of the Ark, fashioned from the same gold and silver borrowed from the Egyptians. She is the wife of another, he, an adulterer, desiring to break the Mosaic Commandments. We are used to reading the Vita nova in the context of ‘Courtly Love,’ not realizing that that was a nineteenth-century misreading of Andreas Capellanus' De arte honeste amandi, then read romantically, not with the irony its author presented. It is a question of perspective, of which parts of the texts to read, just one layer, or its doubleness. D. W. Robertson has demonstrated this quality in his ‘Doctrine of Charity in Medieval Literary Gardens,’ a work of literary criticism that examines the doubleness of medieval texts within their cultural contexts. We know, from Pietro Alighieri's commentary to his father's magnum opus that Dante owned a copy of Capellanus and read that text ironically.31 Dante here describes himself as ponderous and overborne, by Love, although he pretends to welcome this intolerable situation.

The twelfth station is the Wilderness of Sinai, where Moses returned from the mountain to his people with the tables of the Law, and where the Tabernacle was made after the Golden Calf was destroyed. Dante speaks of ‘returning’ to his subject in this chapter, and of withdrawing to a solitary place to weep because of Beatrice's denial to him of her salutation. A young man in the whitest of garments comes to him, telling him to cast aside all his idols: ‘Fili mi, tempus est ut pretermictantur simulacra nostra’ [My son, it is time to put away our graven images]. The word ‘simulacra’ is also stressed in Psalm 113. Dante has made of Beatrice, or of his poetry concerning her, such a simulacra, such an idol, such a Golden Calf, when she is actually an icon, an ark, an imago of blessedness. Dante-persona has confused signifier and signified and thus become an idolator. Love then tells Dante that he is suffering from a Boethian loss of perspective: ‘Ego tamquam centrum circuli, cui simili modo se habent circumferentiae partes: tu autem non sic.’ I shall deliberately leave that line untranslated in order to preserve its hermeneutic quality, its aspect of privilege, its closed circle intact and unbroken.

The thirteenth station, the ‘sepulchres of cupidity,’ where the Israelites yearned for the fleshpots of Egypt, has Dante writing love poetry, not

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knowing which direction to take and craving pity from his lady, whom he says he speaks of as if in a scornful way. Dante is making himself like one of those rebellious Egypt-loving Israelites, who resented Moses' lordship over them, the pilgrimage they had to make through the Wilderness, and the manna and quail with which they were fed. The fourteenth station, of Asseroth, is where Aaron and Miriam expressed disapproval of Moses' marriage. In this chapter Dante attends a wedding at which Beatrice is also present. At that marriage of Moses to the Ethiopian king's daughter, the Lord punishes Miriam with leprosy. The name of this station is said to mean ‘offense.’ In this scene we witness Dante suddenly afflicted with illness, as if playing the role of Miriam, while Beatrice assumes that of Moses towards him. Aaron in Numbers 12 then has to lead Miriam out of the camp and away from the Tabernacle for a space of time. Dante is led forth from the gathering at which Beatrice is present, a friend here functioning like Aaron.

Station fifteen, Rethma, does not correspond very exactly with Vita nova XV, though it does continue with references to Dante's nearly fatal illness, as if to relate this to Miriam's disease. The next station, Remonphares, means the ‘division of the pomegranate.’ Aaron's robe was embroidered with pomegranates and bells; Robert Browning picked up that allusion, as if to his own poems, in Bells and Pomegranates. Is Dante here referring to the divisions of his Aaron-like poems with which he celebrates and worships at the Ark that is Beatrice after an initial fabricating of her as his Golden Calf? If so, his role as Aaron the fabricator of Beatrice as a Golden Calf idol to be falsely worshiped, is as equally rudely shattered by God and by Beatrice, his Moses, who proceeds to write his tale in a reverse manner through her Christ-like death, thus shaping the Vita nova literally into the new life, into Newness rather than Oldness. The text usurps its poet.

In the seventeenth chapter, Dante writes of finding a new theme for his poetry, speaking no longer of himself (in that self-pitying manner Boethius had used, yet mocked, as after him had the writers of sonnets down the ages), but of more noble concerns. This station, Lebna, is interpreted as ‘whitening.’ The eighteenth station, Rechsa, means ‘bridle,’ which Dante shows us with his self-conscious, self-referential writing block bridling his craft: ‘Reflecting deeply on this, it seemed to me that I had undertaken too lofty a theme for my powers, so much so that I was afraid to enter upon it; and so I remained for several days desiring to write and afraid to begin.’32 The nineteenth

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station, Celata, means ‘assembly,’ or ‘church,’ and also ‘beginning’ in some sources. Dante speaks of beginning to write, and what he writes is a sonnet addressed to an assembly of ladies who know by insight what love is. The twentieth station, Mount Sepher, is of ‘beauty’ or ‘Christ.’ Three times Vita nova XX speaks of beauty and in its conclusion of an ‘omo valente,’ a man of worth.

Station twenty-one, Araba, means ‘miracle,’ and here we are told at the beginning of Beatrice miraculously working to bring the lover into existence from his potentiality, and it concludes by speaking of her miraculous smile, in the Italian, ‘mirabile.’ The twenty-second station, Maceloth, is, again, ‘assembly’ or ‘church’ and in Vita nova XXII we hear of ladies assembled to be with Beatrice while she mourns the death of her father. Station twenty-three, Taath, means ‘fear,’ and in Vita nova XXIII we witness Dante's terror at his illness and his belief that he is going to die, followed by his dream of Beatrice's Christ-like death at which the sun and stars are eclipsed and the birds flying through the air fall dead to the ground which is shaking with earthquakes. Another meaning for this station is ‘patience.’ Throughout this section references are made both to fear and to comfort, ‘paura’ and consolation.

The twenty-fourth station, Thare, means ‘pasture.’ The very beautiful twenty-fourth chapter of the Vita nova, in which Dante has Beatrice be preceded by his friend's lady, Guido Cavalcanti's Giovanna, does not seem to have much reference to the Exodus structuring, unless it be to the iconography of St. John the Baptist, ‘Ego vox clamantis in deserto: parate viam domini,’ as a shepherd pasturing sheep, ‘Ecce agnus dei.’ The twenty-fifth, Methca, is of sweetness, and here again we find ourselves in the world of Guido Cavalcanti and his poetic circle of the ‘sweet new style,’ the dolce stil nuovo. (Guido's teacher had likewise been Brunetto Latino.) The twenty-sixth station, Hesmona, is said to mean hastening, and in Vita nova XXVI we learn of people running to see Beatrice as she walked down the street, ‘le persone correano per vedere lei.’

The twenty-seventh station, Asseroch, means ‘bonds,’ ‘discipline.’ Here Dante speaks of being held in bondage to Love. The twenty-eighth is of the ‘children of need.’ Here we see a Florence widowed of her Beatrice, the city left orphaned and in need. Twenty-nine, Gadgad, means ‘messenger,’ ‘girding,’ ‘circumcision.’ In this chapter Dante relates the concept of Beatrice

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as a nine to astronomy according to both pagan Ptolemy and to Christian doctrine; an astronomy that makes use of spheres within spheres, wheels within wheels. Thirty, Gabatath, is of ‘goodness’ and ‘Christ.’ Dante once more quotes from Jeremiah on Jerusalem as left widowed without Christ and also speaks of his friendship with Cavalcanti and of their desire to write in the vernacular (the sweet new style, the dolce stil nuovo) rather than in Latin. For this reason, Dante says, he cannot give the other Latin prophecies concerning Christ.

The thirty-first station, Hebron, means ‘passing.’ Here Dante speaks of Beatrice's passing, ‘Ita n'è Beatrice,’ and of his sorrow. The thirty-second station, Asiongaber, means men's counsel. Here Beatrice's brother asks Dante to write a sonnet for them both, seeking consolation for her death from their friends. In thirty-three, Cades, Miriam dies and is buried, to be followed at the next station by her brother Aaron's death. In Vita nova XXXIII we learn of Dante speaking with his other great friend, Beatrice's brother, and composing a poem to be spoken by both her brother and by himself as her servant and worshiper. In the Glossa to Numbers 33 Aaron and in Vita nova XXXIII Beatrice's brother are spoken of as weeping. In thirty-four Aaron dies on Mount Hor and his tomb is not found, while God and his angels have charge over him. In Vita nova XXXIV Dante is drawing pictures of angels. (There is a splendid and most self-referential Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting of that scene in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum.) It is the anniversary of Beatrice's death.

The thirty-fifth station is Selmona in some accounts, Obeth in others, that latter having for meaning ‘prophetess.’ Here Dante sees the woman looking at him from a window who comprehends his state. The thirty-sixth is of Fynon, where the Israelites again complained about food and where serpents bit them. The thirty-seventh is again Obeth and is again about this lady. These stations, from the thirty-fifth to the thirty-eighth, no longer make sense. But with thirty-nine, once again, the consonance is clear, Dybongad meaning ‘temptation of eyes,’ ‘shutting up,’ and ‘confusion.’ Dante here speaks of his shame at his eyes and their diseased state. His previous vision of her first appearance to him is now, at the ninth hour, repeated and he is filled with shame at the ways in which he has misinterpreted her, misreading her Exodus map as it were into an Egyptian-backsliding direction rather than the one of the Jerusalem pilgrimage.

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The next station is of ‘shame in the streets.’ Here Dante sees the pilgrims who journey towards Rome walking down Florentine streets; the Exodus pattern here intersects with the Emmaus one in this fugue. The forty-first station is Mount Abarim, the ‘mount of those who pass away,’ where Moses died, without physically reaching the Promised Land. Here Dante speaks of Beatrice's spiritual pilgrimage into the heavens. The next station is Mount Moab, near Jericho by the Jordan river, meaning ‘cut off,’ and Galgala, meaning ‘revelation.’ This is where Dante ends his Vita nova, cutting it off with the revelation of Beatrice in heaven contemplating the Santo Volto, the holy face of God, in whose image she is, and whose icon now, rather than idol, can be reflected in Dante's own Book of Memory, the pilgrim map of both Exodus and Emmaus, given by analogues of Aaron and Moses, Luke and Christ, in both writer and reader.

III. Vita nova/Dolce stil nuovo

These Exodus and Emmaus paradigms, though they are by no means the whole of the Vita nova, are certainly part of Dante's crisscross blueprint for his work. Medieval texts often self-reflectively embedded within themselves their critical theory. Dante did this. Chaucer also did so. Modern critical theorists now often only discuss theory, without reference to literary texts. Dante, in the Vita nova, tells of his friendship for Guido Cavalcanti and of their intention of writing in the vernacular in the dolce stil nuovo. Those landscapes of pilgrimage, in Dante's days, were envisioned as being of the Saracens' culture. To map them into a Florentine text was to reconcile the Peoples of the Book, Judaism, Christendom, and Islam, to reconcile the Romanesque with the Gothic, the Hebrew Scriptures with the Gospel.

We know of the charming Eastertide sonnet which Dante probably wrote to Brunetto Latino, his teacher and Guido's, who had taught both of them Averroistic texts acquired in Spain, to accompany his gift of the Vita nova to Brunetto. Another sonnet, mourning Brunetto's death, speaks of a pilgrimage in the wilderness.33 Brunetto himself had written a pilgrimage work, Il Tesoretto, modeled on Boethius, Alanus ab Insulis, and the Roman de la Rose, in which Latino described himself learning of his exile from Florence in 1260 while in the pilgrimage Pass of Roncesvalles. Deeply sorrowing he then loses his way, taking his path through a different wood, and coming into a dream landscape in which he is taught morals and ethics by Ovid, Ptolemy, and a

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host of others. Latino, like his two famous students, insisted on writing in the vernacular, and translated Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Cicero into French and Italian for the benefit of his students. He had happened to be in the Pass of Roncesvalles because he was on his way home from the court of Alfonso el Sabio (whose father's title had been the King of the Three Religions). There Brunetto had acquired much knowledge and Arabic learning concerning Ptolemy and Aristotle. He already knew Cicero. He would have learned also of Alfonso's own writings. In Alfonso's legal treatise, Las Siete Partidas, is a definition of the pilgrim that will be echoed by that of Dante in the Vita nova; and then again by Cesare Ripa in the Nova Iconologia.

Dante is thus part of a world that knows of the cultures of all three Peoples of the Book, the Judeo-Christian and the Islamic, into which can also be interjected the learning of the Greco-Roman world. All these cultures prized education and they learned from each other pluralistically. All these cultures also prized pilgrimage, the Christian pilgrimage to St. James of Compostela answering that of the Muslims to Cordova and Mecca, mirroring that of Israelites journeying to Jerusalem.

Nor will the Vita nova be Dante's last attempt at a pilgrimage work. It is his schoolroom exercise, his apprentice work.34 Dante's Vita nova has about it as great a sense of Brunetto Latino's teaching presence as does Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man convey John Henry Newman's educational and pluralistic concepts. Both Dante and Joyce rebel against, yet make great use of, their pedagogues' teachings. Joyce in his work plays similar cryptographic and intertextual games, having his text refer to Augustine's Confessions (his middle name was Augustine, therefore the confession is at the middle of the book) and to Newman's Apologia pro vita sua (Stephen at the beginning must apologize, ordered to do so by his mother, with his aunt Dante then chanting a child's song about this.)

The Commedia, following upon the Vita nova, will also use the paradigm of Exodus and Emmaus. These are parts of the patterns in the carpet of Dante's work. In them Dante is as a new Aaron who becomes a Moses, a new Cleophas who becomes a Luke, journeying from an earthly Florence that is also an Egypt to a heavenly Rome that is also the Latin Jerusalem Kingdom lost the year following Beatrice’s death. Both the geography and allegory of pilgrimage underlie these books based upon the Book of God's Word and the

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Book of God's World. Dante creates in the secular and profane vernacular an intertextuality with the sacred and divine Latin, Greek, and Hebrew texts of the Bible, with both Luke 24's code to the Gospels and Numbers 33's code to the Exodus. (Those codes spoke more prophetically than he knew. He would literally become the exile of his pilgrim definition of Vita nova XI.) Dante employs both pilgrimage codes, of Exodus and of Emmaus, from which to construct the Janus hermeneutic, the ambages pulcerrima, of his New Life, written in the ‘sweet new style,’ the dolce stil nuovo, of Gothic Florentine at war with Rome and the Romanesque.

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Notes

1 Originally published in Dante Studies, 103 (1985), 103-124. 2 Dante Alighieri, La Vita nova, trans. Barbara Reynolds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 11. 3 Charles S. Singleton, An Essay on the Vita nova (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1949), pp 25-54. 4 Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Fredric Jameson, ‘Metacommentary,’ PMLA, 86 (1971), 9-17. 5 Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origin and Character (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), I.131-148. 6 Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura,’ in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 11-76; ‘Metacommentary,’ pp. 9-10. 7 Dante's sonnet to Brunetto Latino, accompanying his Easter gift to him of the manuscript of the Vita nova, as translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dante and his Circle with the Italian Poets Preceding Him (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1892), p. 96; discussed in Brunetto Latini, Il Tesoretto, ed. and trans. Julia Bolton Holloway (New York: Garland, 1987), p. xviii; Italian text in Raccolta di rime antiche toscane (Palermo: Assenzio, 1817), II.32:

Master Brunetto, this my little maid Is come to spend her Easter-tide with you; Not that she reckons feasting as her due,- Whose need is hardly to be fed, but read. Not in a hurry can her sense be weigh'd. Nor mid the jests of any noisy crew: Ah! and she wants a little coaxing too Before she'll get into another's head. But if you do not find her meaning clear,

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You've many Brother Alberts hard at hand, Whose wisdom will respond to any call. Consult with them and do not laugh at her; And if she still is hard to understand, Apply to Master Janus last of all.

8 Stanley E. Fish, ‘Progress in The Pilgrim's Progress,’ in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 224-64; Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 9 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford UP, 1967); Julia Bolton Holloway, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri (New York: Peter Lang, 1992). 10 Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964); Gabriel L. Astrik, ‘The Significance of the Book in Medieval University Coats of Arms,’ in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966). 11 Julia Bolton Holloway, ‘Alfonso el Sabio, Brunetto Latino, Dante Alighieri,’ Thought, 60 (1985), 471; further discussed, Twice Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). 12 John F. Mahoney, ‘The Role of Statius in the Structure of the Purgatorio,’ 79th Annual Report of the Dante Society (1961), 11-38, esp. 22; Eric Werner, The Sacred Bridge: The Interdependence of Liturgy and Music in Synagogue and Church During the First Millenium (London: Dobson, 1959), pp. 419-421. 13 Edmond de Coussemaker, Drames liturgiques du Moyen Age (Paris: Vatar, 1861); Giampiero Tintori, Sacre rappresentazioni del manoscritto 201 della Bibliothèque Municipale di Orléans (Cremona: Athenaeum Cremonense, 1958), p. lxxi.

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14 Roger Sherman Loomis, The Romance of Tristan and Ysolt (New York: Dutton, 1967), pp. 28-33; Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 1-58, 437-474; Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971), passim; Maria Corti, ‘Models and Antimodels in Medieval Culture,’ NLH, 10 (1979), 339-356. 15 Trans. Reynolds, p. 97. 16 Hartmann Grisar, History of Rome and the Popes in the Middle Ages, trans. Luigi Cappadelta (London: Herder, 1911), III.302-303. 17 Gerhart B. Ladner, Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (New York: Harper, 1967), brilliantly studies the importance of this concept in Christendom. 18 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Vintage, 1979); Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974), p. 42; Kathi Meyer, ‘The Eight Gregorian Modes on the Cluny Capitals,’ Art Bulletin, 34 (1952),81-82, discuss cloister capital sculpture as presenting musical harmonies. 19 Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), discusses the theatre and palace of memory used by a Jesuit missionary in China, who similarly employs the Emmaus Pilgrim story to do so, pp. 128-161. 20 E. Proto, Rassegna critica della letterature italiana, 17 (1912), p. 246. 21 Simson, pp. 21-50. 22 St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr., (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 75. 23 Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, 113.438-444.

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24 John G. Demaray, The Invention of Dante's Commedia (New Haven: Yale UP, 1974), pp. 155-156; Paolo Amaducci, La fonte della Divina Commedia (Rovigo, 1911), 2 vols. 25 Fetellus, Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society, ed. James Rose MacPherson (London, 1887-1897), V.14-22, p. vii. 26 P. 155. 27 Pp. 46-47. 28 Kurt Weitzmann, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976), I.13-15, Icon B.1. 29 Gail MacMurray Gibson, ‘The Thread of Life in the Hand of the Virgin,’ Duke University Art Museum, 1972, republished in Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Julia Bolton Holloway, Joan Bechtold, Constance S. Wright (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 144-63. 30 Reynolds, p. 35. 31 Petri Allegherii super Dantis ipsius genitoris Comoediam Commentarium (Florence, 1856). 32 Reynolds, p. 54. 33 The sonnet written to mourn Brunetto Latino's death begins by expressing the poet's great grief at the death of the joyous Brunetto, ‘Brunetto gajoso’ (Raccolta, I.105), then states:

I will arise and go now, manteled, As I journey, like a pilgrim, Until I find a forest wilderness. I wish to change wine into water, My delicate bread to acorns, and To weep evening, night, and morning.

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34 Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 20-34, who says similarly of

Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 18, that it ‘contains whole libraries . .

. a parody bible . . . it offers a complete sacred code in fiercely concentrated

form.’

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IV ‘AS LUKE WRITES’: VITA NOVA AND COMMEDIA

I. Luke’s Gospel

ante refers to Luke’s Gospel (24,13-15) in a simile, describing the encounter that Virgil and he have with Statius as being like that on the

road to Emmaus by Cleopas and another disciple, who is not named (‘due ex illis’) with the risen Christ.

Ed ecco - sì come ne scrive Luca che Cristo apparve ai due ch’erano in via, già surto fuor de la sepulcral buca - ci apparve un’ombra, e dietro a noi venìa, dal piè guardando la turba che giace; né ci addemmo di lei, sì parlò pria, dicendo: ‘O frati miei, Dio vi déa pace’. (XXI, 7-13, ed. A. Lanza) In a fine sculpture on the road to Santiago di Compostela, in the cloister of San Domingo de Silos, we see Christ as a pilgrim, beside him Cleopas pointing to the sun and Luke as author/pilgrim who carries the book of his Gospel – which he does not yet understand (Lc 24.16-27).1 This scene reflects the liturgical dramas in Latin (and in the Florentine vernacular), in which the two disciples are recognised by name; there they are not just the aged Cleopas, but with him also is the young author of the Gospel of Luke.2 The poem’s paradigm sees the two poets, Virgil and Dante, as shadowily, typologically, representing the two disciples, Cleopas and Luke, and the Third, the poet Statius, as enacting the role of Christ. In this way Dante reconciles the ‘Allegory of the Poets’ with the ‘Allegory of the Theologians’ in a liturgical drama he embeds in his text, he himself becoming the paradigm

D

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of the Evangelist Luke, who initially does not understand, but who becomes the disciple who will proclaim Christ’s Resurrection.

Professor Vincenzo Placella and the Magnificent Rector Monsignor Bishop Enrico dal Covolo, writing on anagogy in Dante, discuss the use in Luke’s Gospel where the risen Christ speaks to the disciples - Et incipiens a Moyse et omnibus prophetis interpretabatur illis in omnibus Scripturis, quae de ipso erant (Lc 24,27) – kindling their hearts with new hope, Christ himself being the true Magister of the fourfold exegesis of lectio divina, in Greek théia anágnosis, ‘Divine Recognition’.3 This essay will especially examine Dante’s use of Luke’s use of Emmaus and Exodus as the means for arriving at Dante’s concept of anagogy as ‘Divine Recognition’.

The medieval reading of the Scriptures (as distinct from the modern) was enriched by the fourfold exegesis, contemplating its literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical layers of meaning,. Homer called his hero, politropon4, many-turned, Dante finding the equivalent term with polisemos, many-meaninged. ‘Allegory’ (állos + agorá, agoreúo = other than + marketplace, speak), in classical Greek was abstracted, mythological, Platonized, as conveying the ideal truth, separated from the market places’ mercenary logographers, its forensic speechwriters who could make the lie seem the truth, the worse seem the better part. The Bible was read and interpreted according to the School of Antioch 1) literally (in black and white); but also according to the School of Alexandria: 2) with the typological allegory of Philo, Paul (Galatians 4.22-31) and Origen; 3) with the tropological allegory concerning morality, which is more attuned to our modern/classic sense of allegory; 4) and finally with anagogical allegory, in which one comes facie ad faciem with God (‘littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agat, quo tendas anagogia’)5, all these united in a rainbow, a prism, of scintillating colours (Paradiso XXX, 115-120). These fourfold readings, Angus Fletcher suggests, correspond to the four Aristotelian causes; material, formal, efficient and final.6 Frederic Jameson (in his essay Metacommentary7), and Erich Auerbach (in ‘Odysseus’ Scar’ in Mimeses and in the essay ‘Figura’8), explain that these modes of reading harmonized and compromised the different Mediterranean cultures: the Hebrew, which is left-brained, linear, literal; the Hellenic, which is right-brained, which hallucinates figures of the gods of war and wisdom, and which abolishes and collapses time and space; the Christian, based on the literal sense, and which reconciles and

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assimilates the other two. Sigmund Freud glimpsed this when in Civilization and its Discontent he spoke of the city of Rome and of all its archeological layers being visible at once as a metaphor for the mind. Then, being left-brained, he dismissed the image as absurd and irrational.9

The medieval allegorical and tropological modes become confused and misunderstood in the Renaissance and the modern era. The third, tropological, moral mode corresponds with the Greek, Roman and modern allegorical mode: ‘Allegoria est tropus quo aliud significant quiam dicitur’ being personified allegories of vices and virtues (Brunetto Latino in the Tesoretto is precursor to Dante in the Commedia; he travels as a pilgrim within his poem, being taught by personification allegories of Nature, Justice and other qualities, as well as by Ovid and by Ptolemy, resulting in his moral correction and conversion; Christine de Pizan will do the same in her Chemin de Long Estudes)10; while the second, medieval ‘allegory’, derives from the incarnation of the Judeao-Christian Word into the World, in which Isaac is the typos and figura of Christ, both being flesh and blood historical figures, Isaac carrying the wood up the mountain for his holocaust, Christ climbing Calvary while carrying the Cross, who thus refract, echo, mirror each other. For Dante, Boethius’ tropological personification of Philosophy and Brunetto’s tropological personification of Nature are incarnated in the historical, literal, flesh and blood figure of Beatrice Portinari as Theology, as théia anágnosis, in Florence, where she is literal, tropological, allegorical, and anagogical, in a combining not only of the two modes but all the fourfold exegesis (‘Et Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis’). We will see that it is not possible, for Dante, for there to be an allegorical sense without a literal historical base - or a literary one.

Similarly we are in error if we think of the anagogical mode in a modern linear way, as of the end of time, rather than in that eternity in which past, present and future co-exist at the centre of the circle, the paradox of the Kingdom of Heaven – parousia – in our midst (Luke 17,20-21). It is possible to see an analogy of the fourfold exegesis of lectio divina with the four stages of the contemplative life, as in Guigo II’s Scala Paradisi: ‘lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio’, in St Gregory’s description of St Benedict’s vision, which is repeated in Julian of Norwich’s vision, who in contemplation see the entire cosmos become a single ray of light, a hazelnut in the palm of the hand. The creation seems so because it is seen in the presence of the Creator (‘quia anima

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videnti Creatorem angusta est omnis creatura’), in a collapsing of time and space in the soul, already glimpsed in Auerbach on Odysseus’ Scar and in Freud on Rome as the mind, into the ‘centrum circuli’.11

Another aspect can usefully explain this fourfold exegesis of the Bible and its application in Dante’s Commedia. Recent research has come to understand how the two hemispheres of the brain work in parallel, while at the same time being distinct and specialized in their functions. The left hemisphere controls the right hand, that writes, and which is literal, logical and linear, is conscious of the past, plans the future, and is centred on the self. The right hemisphere collapses all time and space into the present moment, defies boundaries, joins with the energy of the cosmos, and universalizes. The left hemisphere is the literal, logical, rational, mind, while the right is the intuitive, imaginative, contemplative, anagogical soul.12 The more ancient ways of reading sacred texts is through the simultaneous involvement of the two hemispheres, while the more modern procedure and training excludes and rejects that of the archaic right hemisphere, as did Freud in discarding his brilliant metaphor for the mind. If we can come to understand this we can consciously return to Dante’s mode of writing that permits the play of the differences of the two hemispheres, right and left, mystical and scientific, universal and particular: (‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura’, Inferno I, 1-2, ‘Mi parve pinta della nostra effige’, Paradiso XXXIII, 131). This can allow for the rich and varied readings in the four modes 1) literal, 2) typological, 3) moral, 4) anagogical, woven together in a reciprocal harmony, in a splendid polyphony that is polysemous and polytropic. Between the warp and the woof of its alternate, virtual reality in terza rima, in its fourfold exegesis, we can almost glimpse the entire, mirroring universe created of molecules, atoms, charms, quarks and bosons, its gyring labyrinths, its reconciled oppositions, its squared circle. Boethius’ image, beloved by Dante, of the circle as of time, particularity, slavery, sin, of the centre as the collapsing into eternity, universality, liberating freedom, God, permits all these multiple readings and perspectives.13 In Vita nova XII Love said, ‘Ego tamquam centrum circuli, cui simili modi se habent circumferentiae partes: tu autem non sic’. The vision of God and of the freedom of the soul in his presence as Love, the right-brain sovrasenso of the Vita nova and the Commedia, comes after the renunciation and purging of all that is illusory, all that is idolatrous, all that is self-centred, all that is only left-brained,

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transcending even the poetry itself, ‘Fili mi, tempus est ut pretermictantur simulacra nostra’.

Dante describes this allegorical mode twice. The first in Convivio II, i, 6-8, in Italian:

Lo quarto senso si chiama anagogico, cioè sovrasenso; e questo è quando spiritualmente si spone una scrittura, la quale ancora [che sia vera] eziandio nel senso litterale, per le cose significate significa delle superne cose dell'etternal gloria: sì come vedere si può in quello canto del Profeta che dice che nell'uscita del popolo d'Israel d'Egitto Giudea è fatta santa e libera: Chè avegna essere vera secondo la lettera sia manifesto, non meno è vero quello che spiritualmente s'intende, cioè che nell'uscita dell'anima dal peccato, essa sia fatta santa e libera in sua potestate. E in dimostrare questo, sempre lo litterale dee andare innanzi, sì come quello nella cui sentenza li altri sono inchiusi, e sanza lo quale sarebbe impossibile ed inrazionale intendere alli altri, e massimamente allo allegorico.14

The second in the Epistula XIII a Can Grande della Scala VII, in Latin:

[20] Ad evidentiam itaque dicendorum, sciendum est quod istius operis non est simplex sensus, ymo dici potest polisemos, hoc est plurium sensuum; nam primus sensus est qui habetur per litteram, alius est qui habetur per significata per litteram. Et primus dicitur litteralis, secundus vero allegoricus sive moralis sive anagogicus. [21] Qui modus tractandi, ut melius pateat, potest considerari in hiis versibus: ‘In exitu Israel de Egypto, domus Iacob de populo barbaro, facta est Iudea sanctificatio eius, Israel potestas eius’. Nam si ad litteram solam inspiciamus, significatur nobis exitus filiorum Israel de Egypto, tempore Moysis; si ad allegoriam, significatur nobis nostra redemptio facta per Christum; si ad moralem sensum, significatur nobis conversio anime de luctu et miseria peccati ad statum gratie; si ad anagogicum, significatur exitus anime sancte ab huius corruptionis servitute ad eternam glorie libertatem. [22] Et quomodo isti sensus mistici variis appellantur nominibus, generaliter omnes dici possunt allegorici, cum sint a litterali sive historiali diversi. Nam allegoria dicitur ab ‘alleon’ grece, quod in latinum dicitur ‘alienum’, sive ‘diversum’.15

Dante’s use of the Exodus and Emmaus paradigms justifies, we will see, the combination of the ‘Allegory of the Poets’ and the ‘Allegory of the Theologians’ in his poetry. We recall Luke’s reporting of Paul’s combining

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pagan poetry with his Christian sermon on the Areopagus, Acts 17,22-31. In the Vita nova the Forty-Two Stations of Exodus of Numbers 33 are used as a memory system for its forty-two chapters. In Purgatorio II, 46-48, the Exodus allegory - after having been scattered throughout the pages of the Inferno as the ten Plagues of Egypt and the seven Plagues of the Apocalypse - is crystallized with the singing of Psalm 113, ‘In exitu Israel de Aegypto’, sung to its unique tonus peregrinus by a hundred-fold choir, and then again in Paradiso XXV. 55-56, ‘che d’Egitto vegna in Ierusalemme’. The Vita nova is the Commedia’s apprenticeship. In both works, the author/protagonist, who at first fails to understand, who sins, who betrays, comes to the théia anágnosis, the ‘Divine Recognition’, the knowledge of himself, and in each instance and by way of Beatrice (whom Pietro Alighieri affirms is Theology16), of God. Three times Dante uses the figura, the typos of the Emmaus paradigm, twice in the Vita nova (IX e XL), then once, explicitly, in Purgatorio XXI, 7-13, where he explains that each encounter of two pilgrims with a Third is drawn from Luke’s writing, from his Gospel. The other encounters, often with other authors and poets, are shadows, typoi, from Luke 24, at the same time that they are typoi hemon, shadows of ourselves (I Corinthians 10,6-11), as readers of this book - which shadows forth as well his profane/sacred library.17

II. Dante’s Library

In the Commedia’s miniatures and also in his portraits, Dante is often shown with a book. In Andrea del Castagna’s fresco, now in Florence’s Uffizi, he carries it under his arm, in Domenico di Michelino’s painting in Florence’s Duomo he reads from its opening page, in Luca Signorelli’s fresco in Orvieto’s Duomo he writes it while consulting other books in his library. In manuscript miniatures to the Commedia this book appears to be at first Virgil’s Aeneid, the tragic poem of the ‘degli dèi falsi e bugiardi’ (Inferno I.72), that ‘alta mia tragedia’ (XX, 112-113) over which Dante has fallen asleep while reading - if we take as his model the Roman de la Rose. In Virgil’s classical world and in Dante’s medieval one, authors and their books are conjoined as performative acts, as the word which is flesh, body, voice, filled with humanity, filled with music, filled with art, of Virgil reading the Aeneid to Caesar Augustus (within which Aeneas recounts the Fall of Troy to Dido), of Dante reading the Commedia to Can Grande della Scala, of Chaucer reading the Troilus and Criseyde to King Richard II. They lacked modernism’s abstraction of our silent pages printed in black and white. Even when books

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were read silently in a study there was still the sense of a conversation, of voices across centuries, of time being contracted, collapsed into eternity.

We know that the young orphaned Dante Alighieri had Brunetto Latino as his guardian. Brunetto at the beginning of his encyclopaedic Tresor/Tesoro in French and in Italian is shown as Magister and dressed in authoritative red. Similarly Virgil, Dante’s guardian and pedagogue in his poem, is dressed in magisterial, doctoral red. A text much used in the Middle Ages for teaching Latin was Terence’s Comedies, which, Pietro Alighieri tells us, Dante used for the title also of his Commedia (pp. 9-12). In Terence’s Comedies, instead of only one reciter we hear a polyphony of voices, a rack of masks, women, boys, slaves, masters, parents, an agora, a city come alive, an entire world. Among them the voices of the humble, the ‘sermo humilis’, like the voices in Luke’s Gospel, the voices of young and old, women and men (De vulgari eloquentia I, 1; Paradiso XV, 121-126). In his portraits outside of his text Dante is shown in the red toga, symbol of authority, as a teacher. But within the pages of the Commedia, under first Virgil’s tutelage, then Beatrice’s, he is instead like the young pilgrim Luke of the liturgical dramas, Domenico Comparetti’s Virgil as medieval magician necromancer being an aging Cleopas, on the road to Emmaus, leading him astray from Jerusalem, as will Mephistopheles lead astray Faust, Falstaff lead astray the young Prince Hal. Within these smiling pages Dante is always shown in the long blue gown of apprenticeship, a student. He is thus like Augustine who weeps for Dido in Virgil’s Aeneid at Carthage and who frequents the theatre where he becomes familiar with Terence’s Comedies. Dante is both himself, the particular Florentine, Dante Alighieri, and the universalized persona for Everyman, echoing Terence’s ‘Homo sum: humani nichil a me alienum puto’ (Heautontimorumenos 77), mirroring us.

We need to study the different levels of reality, Dante’s use of different realities, the inside and outside of his text, which reflects God’s Book, written intus et foris (Apocalypse 5,1). First of all, outside of the text which he writes, in the world of the marketplace, of reality, foris, agora, is Dante Alighieri, the author, in flesh and blood, who then at times intrudes upon the text, breaking its frame, attested to in the manuscript miniatures. Thomas G. Bergin in a letter to Theodore Bogdanos mentioned Erich Auerbach asking him if in the Commedia when Dante referred to ‘qui’ whether it indicated ‘here on earth’, rather than to the dream landscape of Dante as sorcerer’s apprentice/

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pilgrim.18 These interruptions, this breaking the frame, these rents in the veil, the integumentum, include his addresses to the reader, beyond his text, yet still embedded within his text – and also his dreams within his dreams.19 Dante interlaces his poem with material drawn from the lying poetry of the pagans – and also with his own vainglorious compositions – alongside parallels to Sacred Scripture, in this way combining the ‘Allegory of the Poets’ with the ‘Allegory of the Theologians’. To these he even brings very literal interruptions from the agora, from the law courts, where he encounters characters of his Commedia, who were before persons of flesh and blood, who figured in the brown-inked notarial acts penned by Brunetto Latino into the Capitoli of the Republic of Florence, and for whom Dante now constructs lying, real-seeming logographic speeches in a fictive landscape filled with chimaera of centaurs and griffons. Similarly the fabric seems filled with holes through which we glimpse, in epic similes, scenes of daily life, of lowly people, rather than nobles and heroes, again of the market place and the countryside and at sea, of craftsmen and peasants and shipmen. Both Dante and Pietro Alighieri affirm that this poem is a Comedy, and that its style is lowly, the style of the Gospel (p. 10). These literal levels thus often intrude upon the poetic level and force the ‘Allegory of the Poets’, whose literal level is textual only, not carnal, into the incarnational ‘Allegory of the Theologians’. All the while these levels serve a moral, tropological purpose, reforming both Dante persona, the young sorcerer’s apprentice/pilgrim, and with him, beyond the text, his reader. To do so Dante will even betray his reader and perjure himself, as does the double agent Sinon in the Aeneid (‘accipe nunc Danaum insidias et crimine ab uno/ disce omnis’ II. 65-66; Sinon next swearing by his now unmanacled hands, by the stars, when it is daylight, by the altar, the sword, the sacrificial garlands, that are untrue, 152-160), while in sin’s realm of lies, as for example when Dante swears by this, his Comedy, that fraudulent Geryon ‘rescues’ them by flying them down further into Hell’s chasm (Inferno XVI, 127-128). In Hell sinners blame others for the sins they themselves commit, and immature Dante, taken in, concurs. Then the text turns itself inside out, Inferno XXXIV, 76-139, Paradiso XXX, 62-132 (we recall the angels in Giotto’s Arena Chapel who roll the scroll of heaven up and inside out) to show us its opposite and, ultimately, inexpressible, aspect, its anagogy, the end for which it was created.

Dante for the third, tropological, moral, mode of allegory, as does Brunetto in the Tresor/Tesoro, turns to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which he knows well

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from his Master’s teachings. Other sections of the encyclopaedic Tresor/Tesoro text are also primary sources Dante quarries, sources his Master largely gained from embassy in 1260 to King Alfonso el Sabio in Spain, on history, geography, the Bestiary, astronomy, to shape his parallel fictional world of the Commedia, his ‘alta fantasia’ (Paradiso XXXIII.142), whose shadow is Virgil’s ‘alta mia tragedia’ (Inferno XX, 113), his alternate, virtual world, now meshed with that of the Bible.20 We participate, with Dante, with Augustine, ourselves also as sorcerer’s apprentices/students amongst their Faustian books in their libraries, in this training that leads us from lies to truth, teaching us to understand and choose between evil and good. At Carthage Augustine with his reading of Virgil’s Aeneid, his attendance at the theatre to see Terence’s Comedies, fell into sin. At Milan with the Pauline Epistle he opened his soul to God and to his conversion, his metánoia. We see Dante’s encounter with Paolo and Francesca in this same light. The story of their adultery from how they read together the chivalric Arthurian romance (‘ambages pulcerrime’, Aeneid VI, 98; De Vulgari eloquentia I, x, 2), makes use of Andreas Capellanus’ De arte honeste amandi that he wrote for his friend Walter; a book which we find from Pietro Alighieri was in his father’s library.21 Dante then meets Cato from Lucan’s Pharsalia who parallels, in figural allegory, Moses of the Exodus.22 Next we observe the meeting with Statius, the Thebaid’s author, who becomes the Christ of Luke’s Gospel. Virgil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s Pharsalia, Statius’ Thebaid, Dante’s Inferno, are pagan Romanesque tragedies, tragedies that make us weep (‘lacrimarum rerum’); but in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso Dante turns his pagan tragic poem inside out truly into the ‘dolce stil nuovo’ of a Christian comedy.

Let us call to mind the Provençal songbooks, rich with miniatures of troubador portraits, their vidas, their razos, their music, recalling as well Sicilian and Tuscan collections. Among these is the Canzoniere Palatino, a collection of the lyrics of Messer Piero della Vigna, Bonagiunta da Lucca, Guido Guinizzelli da Bologna, Fra Guidone d’Arezzo, Rex Fredericus, Saladino, and even, from an erroneous attribution, Dante Alighieri, given as author for a lyric by Guido Cavalcanti, who was also a student to Brunetto.23 The songs which Dante has be sung by pilgrim souls are, in reality, his own compositions. ‘He do the police in different voices’. In Purgatorio Virgil and Dante first encounter Cato (I, 22-208), then Casella (II, 76-119). Casella sings Dante’s canzone from Convivio III, and De Vulgari eloquentia II, vi, 6, ‘L’amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’, immediately after the hundredfold pilgrims had

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sung in unison Psalm 113. Dante has told us that the anagogical sense of this psalm is of the liberation of the souls from sin, being made holy and free in its power, ‘ne l'uscita de l'anima dal peccato, essa sia fatta santa e libera in sua potestate’. Psalm 113 is thus like the Ark of the Law of Moses, echoed by the just figure of Cato in the African desert. Casella/Dante’s ‘amoroso canto’ is instead permitted by Virgil, the type of Aaron, who had permitted the making and worshiping of the Golden Calf as idol. It is the Vita nova XII’s canto of the ‘simulacra nostra’, of illusions, of idols, of slavery, which need to be abandoned, ‘pretermictantur’, rather than indulged. Thus the allegory even functions musically, and we find ourselves in a Bakhtinian motet, where the contrafactum plays against the sacred Latin chant with profane poetry in the vernacular, juxtaposing allegory and ‘agora’24; the same game that we find in the Picardan miniatures of the Brunetto Latino manuscripts of Li Livres dou Tresor produced around Arras, this shifting of registers, from one level to another, of the juxtaposition of opposites.

Nor is this the only time that Dante plays with sacred music in Latin as the Ark of the Law and the profane music of the Golden Calf, in each case placing his own compositions in the mouths of other singers. In Purgatorio XXIV, 19-63, Bonagiunta Orbiciani da Lucca sings ‘Donne che avete intelletto d’amore’ from the Vita nova XIX, 2-3; in Purgatorio XXVI, 136-148, Arnaut Daniel sings in Provençal and not in Tuscan dialect, ‘Tan m’abellis vostre cortes deman’; in Paradiso VIII, 31-IX, 9, Carlo Martello sings ‘Voi che 'ntendendo il terzo ciel movete’ from Convivio I, 6. Thus Dante is both logographer and troubador. Along with these love songs in the vernacular, in Florence in this era were also the beautiful Laudari of the Compagnie dei Laudesi, devotional songs in the vernacular inspired by St Francis’s Laude. A splendid Lauda is Dante’s translation of the Pater Noster in Purgatorio XI, 1-24, ‘laudato sia ‘l tuo nome . . . da ogne creatura, com’è degno’. Ultimately all this tension is resolved. The sacred anagogical theology is scripted in the vernacular – the language sung by St Francis in Umbria, the Florentine spoken in Tuscany, understood even by women and children – in St Bernard’s Invocation to the Virgin in Paradiso XXXIII, 1-39 ‘Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio’. Dante becomes subsumed in St Bernard, his Commedia of three canticles of a hundred cantos, the Song of Songs of St Bernard’s lectio divina sermons. But this hymn is not amongst Bernard’s writings on the Canticum Canticorum Salomonis (Pietro Alighieri tell us ‘Et ideo fingit Bernardum pro ea orantem ita ed illam, quae est gratiarum nostrarum imperatrix,

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scilicet Virgo Maria’, p. 735.), for it is Dante who humbly composes it - no longer proudly and idolatrously vaunting his narcissistic talent - in an act of veneration and adoration (dulia e latria) to Mary carrying in her womb Christ: ‘Et Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis’ (John 1.14); or to the animicula of Mary as sculpted by Arnolfo di Cambio, who shows her as an anatomically perfectly observed baby girl whom her Son carries with great tenderness in his arms: ‘Figlia del tuo Figlio, umile ed alta . . . ‘

III. God’s Book

In Purgatorio XXIX, 82-134, we see twenty-four Elders who are joined by another four, and then more, who altogether are the entire Bible, before us in a sacred procession. These authors, crowned first with lilies, one of them the Solomon of the Canticum Canticorum, of the Old Testament, then with roses, of the New, are symbols for their books. Botticelli’s drawings show these figures with each of them holding their own book. John, the last of the figures, sleeping, who dreams his Revelation, the Apocalypse. The embedding of Beatrice amongst them in a quadriga, a carroccio, drawn by the four Beasts of Ezechiel and John (whom the Griffon unites in himself) is accompanied by the three Theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity and the four Cardinal, pagan virtues, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance (which are the seven stars, the seven planets), is her appearance as théia anágnosis. The Four Beasts represent the four Gospels, the four Evangelists25, and at the same time may be the polysmous fourfold modes of reading the Bible, of lectio divina, combining this with the personification allegories of the virtues of the pagan philosophers and poets. While the liturgical procession echoes that of the ‘Cena Domini’ in Santa Reparata in Florence, still carried out on Maundy Thursday in the Duomo di Santa Maria del Fiore, with the candelabra and the great flag surmounted by olive branches. Later in Paradiso we meet also the Church Fathers and their books commenting on the Scriptures, the Bible, the Verbum. Previous encounters have been with authors of pagan literature, composers of profane lying poetry. But even these come to be written into the Book God holds in his hand. Towards the end of the third Canticle (Paradiso XXXI, 7-12), we find Virgil’s simile of the building of Carthage of Augustine’s Dido likened to bees gathering nectar, Aeneid I, 430-437, ‘Qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura/ exercet sub sole labor, cum gentis adultos/ educunt fetus, aut cum liquentia mella/ stipant et dulcis distendunt nectare cellas,/ aut onera accipiunt venientum, aut

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agmine facto/ ignavum fucos pecus a praesepibus arcent/ fervet opus redolentque thymo fragrantia mella’), paradoxically inseminating the celestial rose: ‘sì come schiera d’ape che s’infiora/ una fiata e una si ritorna/ là dove suo laboro s’insapora,/ nel gran fior discendeva che s’adorna/ di tante foglie, e quindi risaliva/ là dove ‘l suo amor sempre soggiorna’, then XXXIII, 9, ‘così è germinato questo fiore’), palimpsested upon the Eternal City of Rome, the Celestial City of Jerusalem. The anagogy is the revelation of inclusion, even of enemy cities; it is the Gospel’s Love, of the right hemisphere, the synchronicity of time and space. No longer the Guelf/Ghibelline separation, the division between the powerful and the poor, the separation of Pharisees, Puritans, Nationalists, of the left hemisphere, against Christ’s teachings and Christendom.

The Commedia is a book about books and about the Book. Dante’s library, the books of the Commedia, the Commedia itself, are both profane and sacred, are the ‘Allegory of the Poets’ and the ‘Allegory of the Theologians’, which collapse and centre on one Book, the Bible, the Creation (Paradiso XXXIII, 85-87).

Nel suo profondo vidi ch’è s’interna, legato con amore in un volume, ciò che per l’universo si squaderna.

It is a Book which includes all genres: epic, lyric, simile, fable, prophecy, history, gospel, epistle, drama, philosophy, theology, epithalamium, liturgy, tragedy, comedy, satire, treaty, speech, oath, motet, psalm, sculpture, and all the encyclopaedic Seven Arts. It includes the pages of Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, Terence, Lucan, Statius, Sallust, Seneca, Aesop, Ovid, Claudian, Horace, Macrobius, Alfraganus, at the service of its christological text. It also includes archives, the Registers of the city government of Florence compiled by Brunetto Latini, which name the historical persons of flesh and blood: Charles of Anjou, Alfonso el Sabio, Frederic II, Manfred, Pier delle Vigne, Cavalcante Cavalcanti, Guido Guerra, Tegghaio Aldobrandi, Iacopo Rusticucci, Ugolino della Gherardesca, l’Arcivescovo Ruggiero, Tesauro di Vallombrosa, Bocca degli Alberti, Farinata degli Uberti, Cardinale Latino Orsini, Andrea Spigliati de’ Mozzi, Gianni di Procita, Vanni Fucci, Rinieri de’ Pazzi.26 Pietro Alighieri tells us that Dante’s meeting with Brunetto Latino, who is real, in the poem is a fiction (‘Fingendo auctor se ibi invenire inter

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sodomitas Ser Brunettum Latinum de Florentia’, p. 175), similarly with these others. It includes a florilegium of the Provençal, Sicilian, Tuscan and ‘dolce stil nuovo’ poets’ love songs, as if they were Egyptian gold used first to fashion the Golden Calf, then being the gold of psalms and laude used to adorn the Ark, which together conserve the Bible. It includes the similes of the humble and poor folk of the Magnificat, drawn from the agora, the field, the sea. It is a hybrid of lie and truth, a muddling and unifying of the ‘Allegory of the Poets’ and the ‘Allegory of the Theologians’, yoking lectio profana with lectio divina, weaving the world into an incarnational unity that reconciles all binary oppositions, pagan/Christian, evil/good, men/women, dark/light, profane/sacred, literal/allegorical, left/right, self/universal, time/eternity, exclusion/inclusion, flesh/spirit, by means of the Trinity’s ‘terza rima’.

The Bible speaks of the two disciples in the road who meet with the Third, telling of the Exodus, ‘dum fabularentur’ (Luke 24,15, ‘fabling’), and Christ’s sermons (17, ‘hi sermones’) at Emmaus. With the vision of God’s Book, Dante mirrors that of the Creation, in the encyclopaedia which he writes and which we now hold in our hands. The Commedia becomes the Bible, the Word in Italian, that he situates in a precise moment in time, ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’, playing with ‘In principio erat Verbum’ (John 1,1), and thus Florence in the Jubilee year of 1300 becomes at the centre of the circle, as it does in our time and space, today in 2015, wherever we read his book.

One can at this point think of the historical Dante Alighieri, in flesh and blood, an exile from Florence, as incarnated in the literal sense, like Adam exiled from Eden, who in his poem evolves into a Christian Luke, a contemplative Bernard, in a Pilgrim’s Progress. The fourfold theological allegory is not entirely within the Commedia, which is the ‘Allegory of the Poets’. The literal and the anagogical senses, we discover, lie outside of its pages. These are the pages God writes, not Dante, but which Dante weaves into his text for the ‘Allegory of the Theologians’ 1) ‘Nam si ad litteram solam inspiciamus, significatur nobis exitus filiorum Israel de Egypto, tempore Moysis’, for Dante is his exile in flesh and blood from Florence in 1302; 2) ‘si ad allegoriam, nobis significatur nostra redemptio facta per Christum’, is present in the poem in each instance where two encounter a third (first Dante with pagan Virgil, then with Christian Beatrice, encountering countless others, sinners and saints), where the Third is figura, typos, of the meeting of the two disciples

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with Christ on the road to Emmaus, thus helping Dante (and with him, his readers, ourselves) become those ‘che ne l'uscita de l'anima dal peccato, essa sia fatta santa e libera in sua potestate’ (Convivio II; Romans 8,21); 3) ‘si ad moralem sensum, significatur nobis conversio anime de luctu et miseria peccati ad statum gratie’, in which the poem has us participate in confession (Inferno), contrition (Purgatorio), satisfaction (Paradiso) with the help of pagan Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, joined with Christian Boethius’ Consolation, the Magnificat (Luke 1.46-55), and the Beatitudes (Matthew 5,3-12, Luke 8,20-45); 4) ‘si ad anagogicum, significatur exitus anime sancte ab huius corruptionis servitute ad eterne glorie libertatem’ being outside of the text, beyond the text, but reached through the text, the poem thus an instrument of salvation, and through these means attaining the centre of the circle, becoming facie ad faciem with God.27 It is a felix culpa that ‘Dante Aligheri’ was written and condemned in the Libro del Chiodo.28 The high pagan tragedy, Virgil’s ‘alta mia tragedia’ (Inferno XX, 113), is rewritten, revised and reversed by God through the Holy Spirit into a lowly and joyous Christian comedy. Dante’s poem journeys from slavery to freedom to become the lectio divina of the Bible for the salvation of his readers. In the manuscript miniatures to the Commedia – which copy those of the Consolation of Philosophy and the Roman de la Rose – we see the literal author, Dante in flesh and blood, who in exile writes his poem. With him we then enter into his profane and infernal nightmare, a fictional dream which he pretends is real, in the realm of the false and lying gods, but which is deeply untrue. Then all is turned inside out in the lying poem, which, in a paradox, becomes true and salvific, the theologians’ allegory, when he confesses truly at its end that it is ‘alta fantasia’ (XXXIII.143), that it is the poets’ allegory, that it is fiction. Therefore the manuscripts open at the literal level with the image of the author, Dante Alighieri writing his book, then close at the anagogical level with the image of the Author – God -- and his Book.

We have already noted that in the Middle Ages authors and their books were analogous, authors and their books being identified one with the other. Gerhart Ladner showed that the portraits of authors in art are refractions of the image of God and of his Book, the Bible, the Creation, his Word.29 Amongst the sculptures at Chartres Cathedral is the statue showing God/Christ creating Adam with tenderness and love in his own image and likeness. Adam has the same face as has the face of Christ. Dante, when he comes to the anagogical vision of God, exclaims:

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Mi parve pinta della nostra effige (Paradiso XXXIII, 131).

Horia-Roman Patapievici, Professor of Physics at Bucharest University, shows that at the moment in which Dante drinks with his eyes from the river of stars gleaming like jewels, he enters past these ‘umbriferi prefazi’ into the true Paradise (XXX, 61-130).30 In that instant the whole cosmos, the Creation, is turned inside out, or right way round. No longer is the little temporal earth at the centre, but at the centre is God in the eternity of all times, past, present and future, collapsed into one instant, St Benedict’s single ray of light, Julian of Norwich’s hazelnut in the palm of her hand, Abbot Suger of St Denis’s gems.31 The pagan god, Neptune from the depths of the sea marvels at this (Paradiso XXXIII, 93-96).32 Or perhaps the cosmos oscillates between the two, and the meeting with Christ takes place not at the Jerusalem Temple but on the road to Emmaus, with the one who blesses and breaks our daily bread in a tavern, in the agora (Luke 24,30), the moment when we become citizens of the kingdom of heaven (Luke 17, 20-21), the moment when the Word becomes flesh in our midst (John 1,14), the moment of the Eucharist, the théia anágnosis. Because when we see God, Emmanuel (as in the mosaics at Cefalù and Monreale, where one half of God’s face is merciful, the other the God of justice), it is the face in which we, as pilgrims, readers, contemplatives, created in his image and likeness, with our two hemispheres, are reflected. It is the face we encounter in the pilgrim Everyman on the road.

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NOTES

1. Fray J. Peres de Urbel, El Claustro de Silos, Fernán Gonzáles, Burgos 1975, pp. 95-98, tavole a pp. 96, 98, 100-101, 103-105. Essay published in Divus Thomas 115 (2012), 150-170. I use Dante Alighieri, La Commedìa: Testo critico secondo i più antichi manoscritti fiorentini, ed. Antonio Lanza, De Rubeis, Anzio 1996

2. Luke 24,13-35; http://www.umilta.net/peregrinus.html, accessed 23/07/2012; Bolton Holloway, J., The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante Langland and Chaucer, Peter Lang, Berne1987/1992; trans. it., Il Pellegrino e il libro: Uno studio su Dante Alighieri, De strata francigena 20/1 (2012), Centro Studi Romei, Firenze; E. de Coussemaker, Drames liturgiques du Moyen Âge, Didron, Parigi 1861; ‘Una rappresentazione inedita dell’apparizione ad Emmaus’, Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 5° ser., 1 (1892), pp. 769-782; K. Young, ‘A New Version of the Peregrinus’, PMLA 34 (1919), pp. 114-129; Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1933, vol. I, p. 451-483; O. Schűttpelz, ‘Der Weltlauf der Apostel und die Erscheinungen des Peregrinispiels im geistlichen spiel des Mittelalters’, Germanistische Abhandlungen, 62 (1930), pp. 57-59; W. Smoldon, Peregrinus (Beauvais MS), Oxford University Press, London 1965; F. Collins, The Production of Medieval Church Music-Drama, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville 1972, pp. 99-116; Medieval Church Music-Drama: A Repertory of Complete Plays, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville 1976, pp. 63-88; Sacre rappresentazioni nel manoscritto 201 della Bibliothèque Municipale di Orléans, ed. G. Tintori e R. Monterosso, Athenaeum Cremonense, Cremona 1958; F. C. Gardiner, The Pilgrimage of Desire: : A Study of Theme and Genre in Medieval Literature, E. J. Brill, Leiden 1971; The Fleury Playbook: Essays and Studies, a cura di T. P. Campbell e C. Davidson, Medieval Institute, Kalamazoo 1985; R. Edwards, The Montecassino Passion and the Poetics of Medieval Drama, University of California Press, Berkeley 1977, notes the connection between liturgical dramas of the Passion and pilgrims’ texts; Adam de la Halle’s ‘Pilgrim’s Prologue’ to ‘Robin et Marion’ (trans. it., Teatro Marsilio, Venezia 2004), is a profane play; Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Banco Raro 19, Laudario di Sant’Egidio, f. 9 ‘Onde ne vien tu pellegrino amore’, cited by U. Betka, ‘Marian Images and Laudesi Devotion in Late Medieval Italy, 1260-1350’, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Melbourne,

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Melbourne 2001, p. 588. Gerard Farrell and Dunstan Tucker, O. S. B. researched and directed the music of the performance of the Officium Peregrinorum at Princeton University, Easter Monday, 1976. For Emmaus iconography, see L. Rudrauf, Le Repas d’Emmaus, Nouvelles Éditions Latines, Paris 1955.

3. Mons. Bishop E. Dal Covolo, Prefazione, in J. Bolton Holloway, Il Pellegrino e il libro: Uno studio su Dante Alighieri, De strata francigena 20/1 (2012), Centro Studi Romei, Firenze, p. 10; V. Placella, ‘Guardando nel suo Figlio… ‘, Saggi di esegesi dantesca, Napoli, Federigo & Ardia, 1990, p. 66.

4. Homer, Odyssey I.1.

5. H. de Lubac, Exégèse mediévale: les quattre sens de l’Ecriture, Aubier, Paris 1959-63; trans. it., Esegesi medievale, Opera Omnia n. 17-18.19.20, Jaca Book, Milano 1986/2006, passim; V. Placella, ‘Guardando nel suo Figlio… ‘ op. cit., pp. 61-124; ‘Dante e l’Anagogia’, Studi medievali e moderni 1 (2006), pp. 70-86.

6. A. Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1964; trans. it., Allegoria: teoria di un modo simbolico, Lerici Editore, Roma 1968, pp. 318-319.

7. F. Jameson, ‘Metacommentary’, PMLA 86 (1971), pp. 9-17.

8. E. Auerbach, ‘La cicatrice di Ulisse’, in Mimesis: Il Realismo nella letteratura occidentale, Einaudi, Torino 1956, pp. 3-29; ‘Figura’, Studi su Dante, Feltrinelli, Milano 1991, pp. 205-207.

9. S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Norton, New York 1962, pp. 16-18; trans. it., Il disagio della civiltà, in Opere, Vol. X, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 1972.

10. B. Latini, Il Tesoretto, ed. J. Bolton Holloway, Garland, New York 1981; B. Latini, Il Tesoretto, eds. G. Fini, F. Arduini, F. Mazzoni, I. G. Rao, J. Bolton Holloway, Le Lettere, Firenze 2000.

11. Julian of Norwich, Showing of Love: Extant Texts and Translations, ed. Sr A. M. Reynolds, C.P. e J. Bolton Holloway, SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, Firenze 2001, pp. 40-43.

12. J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton Miffin, Boston 1976; trans. it., Il crollo della mente bicamerale e

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l’origine della coscienza, Adelphi, Milano 1984; J. B. Taylor, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, Hodder, London 2009; trans. it., La scoperta del giardino della mente. Cosa ho imparato dal mio ictus cerebrale, Mondadori, Milano 2009; conferenza TED 02/2008: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html, accessed 23/7/2012.

13. Boezio, The Consolation of Philosophy, III.xii.

14. D. Alighieri, Convivio, ed. F. B. Ageno, Le Lettere, Firenze 1995, pp. 66-67.

15. D. Alighieri, Epistola a Cangrande, ed. E. Cecchini, Biblioteca del Medioevo Latino, Giunti, Firenze 1995, pp. 10-11; P. Alighieri, Petri Allegherii super Dantis ipsius genitoris Comoediam commentarium, ed. Vincenzo Nannucci, Lord Vernon, Firenze 1845, pp. 4-6, ‘anagogicus, unde anagogia, idest spiritualis intellectus’.

16. P. Alighieri, p. 58.

17. J. Bolton Holloway, Il Pellegrino e il libro, cit., chapters III-VII, pp. 63-150.

18. T. G. Bergin’s letter to T. Bogdanos about E. Auerbach dated 11 October 1971. ‘I remember him also once checking with me to reassure himself that ‘qui’ in the Comedy always signifies here on earth… i.e. where Dante the writer is, not where Dante the pilgrim is’. When I speak of Dante as ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ I use D. Comparetti, Virgilio nel Medio Evo, 3 vols., ‘La Nuova Italia’ Editrice, Firenze 1955, which studies the medieval Virgil as magician and necromancer.

19. E. Auerbach, ‘Dante’s Addresses to the Reader’, in American Critical Essays on The Divine Comedy, ed. R. Clements, New York University Press, New York 1967, pp. 37-51.

20. J. Bolton Holloway, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, Peter Lang, Berne 1993,

21. P. Alighieri, op. cit., p. 89.

22. J. Bolton Holloway, Il Pellegrino e il libro, cit., pp. 132-137.

23. Il Canzoniere Palatino. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze Banco Rari 217 (ex Palatino 418). I Canzonieri della lirica italiana delle origini III, ed. L.

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Leonardi, Biblioteche e Archivi 6/III, SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, Firenze 2000.

24. Y. Rokseth, Polyphonies du XIIIe siècle: Le manuscript H 196 de la faculté de médicine de Montpellier, Oiseau Lyre, Paris 1936-1939, 4 voll. We recall that the use of pagan profane poetry in Christian sermons is justified by Paul’s sermon on Mount Areopagus, which cites pagan poets (Acts 17,22-31), by St Augustine (De Doctrina Cristiana XL), and by Peter the Venerable in his letter to Heloise at the death of Abelard, who both recall the figura of Egyptian gold, used first to forge the Golden Calf, then to adorn the Tabernacle of the Ark (Exodus 3,21; 32,1).

25. This chariot symbolizes the cart with the Ark drawn by oxen (2 Sam 6,3-23), which we see sculpted in Purgatorio X, 55-72, immediately following the scene of the Annunciation, X, 28-48, Luke 1,26-38 (sculpted on the wall of Santa Reparata in Dante’s day, still there, now on the wall of the Duomo). Luke’s symbol is the ox, which perhaps symbolizes the evolution of the Golden Calf. In Purgatorio XII, 1, we next see Dante and Oderisi, ‘come buoi che vanno a giogo’, writer and illuminator together, drawing the book of words and images, speaking of Cimabue (Head of Ox), Giotto and Francesco da Bologna. In Purgatorio XXIX, 92-105, 133-138, Luke is represented twice, first as the Ox for his Gospel, then as a doctor for the Acts of the Apostles with St Paul. Amongst other shadowy allusions one can observe the pun between Luke and Lucan, between the Luke’s Gospel and Lucan’s Pharsalia, in particular with the humble figure of Amyclas (Pharsalia V, 510-531, Paradiso XI, 67-69), in reference to Mary and St Francis. (Another echoing is between Lucca and its Santo Volta, drawn in legend by oxen, Inferno XXI, 48) We recall that Dante’s Guild is that of Giotto, the ‘Arte dei medici e speziali’, and that its stemma is of the Virgin and Child as painted by St Luke.

26. J. Bolton Holloway, Twice-Told Tale, cit., passim; Il Tesoretto, ed. J. Bolton Holloway, speaking of the bad treatment of his book by his students says: ‘E di carte in quaderno/ Sia gettato in inferno’, 105-112, p. 6, which Dante jokingly turns inside out in Paradiso XXXIII, 85-87.

27. P. Alighieri, p. 6, defends and explains the value of a fable which teaches a moral while negating that of a fabliau which teaches nothing ‘fabula, quae dicitur a fando, quae nihil informationis habet nisi vocem’.

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This is a scheme for the different registers, the different realities, in Dante’s writing:

I. ‘Allegory of the Poets’ Literal and allegorical, from books: Virgil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s Pharsalia, Statius’ Thebaid, etc., in the Commedia Provençal, Sicilian, Tuscan love lyrics in the Vita nova and the Commedia II. ‘Allegory of the Theologians’, God’s Bible, God’s Creation 1) Litera, foris: Beatrice, Dante, historical persons, Vita nova, Commedia Other historical persons in the Commedia Classical, Provençal, Sicilian, Tuscan Poets Similes in the Commedia 2) Allegorical Typology, Figura, intus: Biblical parallels in the Vita nova, the Commedia 3) Tropological, Moral, intus: Dante in the Vita nova, the Commedia Other historical persons put into the Commedia Characters taken from Classical and Medieval poetry Vita nova, Commedia 4) Anagogical, foris: Beatrice, théia anágnosis, in the Vita nova, Commedia God, beyond the Vita nova, beyond the Commedia 28. Il Libro del Chiodo, ed. F. Klein, Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Le Lettere, Firenze 2004, pp. 4, 5, 147, 169, 170, 326.

29. G. Ladner, Ad imaginem Dei: The Image of Man in Medieval Art, Wimmer Lecture, Latrobe 1965.

30. H.-R. Patapievici, Gli occhi di Beatrice. Com’era davvero il mondo di Dante?, Mondadori, Milano 2006.

31. E. Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1979, pp. 62-64, who gives the similar anagogical vision of the Abbot: ‘Omnes, inquam, lapis preciosus operimentum tutum, sardius, topazius, japiis, crisolitus, onix et berillus, saphirus, carbunculus et smaragdus [Ez 28.13]. De quorum numero, præter solum carbunculum, nullum deesse, imo copiosissime abundare, gemmarum proprietatem cognoscentibus cuum summa ammiratione claret. Unde, cum ex dilectione decoris

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domus Dei aliquando multicolor, sanctarum etiam diversitatem virtutum, de materialibus ad immaterialis transferendo, honesta meditatio insistere persuaderet, video videre me quasi sub aliqua extranea orbis terram plaga, quæ nec tota sit in terrarum fæce nec tota in cœli puritate, demorari, ab hac etiam inferiori ad illam superiorem anagogico more Deo donante posse transferri’.

32. E. R. Curtius, Kritische Essays zur europäishcen Literatur, trans. The Ship of the Argonauts, Essays on European Literature, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1973, pp. 465-496; trans. it., Letteratura della letteratura. Saggi critici, Il Mulino, Bologna 1984, pp. 301-325. We remember the joke of St Jerome – translator of the Vulgate Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin – in the Vita Sancti Pauli where the centaur and the hippogriff, who are chimaeram (menzogne, lies), witness truly to Christ in the desert, for which see H. Waddell, The Desert Fathers, pp. 26-39, http://www.umilta.net/PaulHermit.html. J. Bolton Holloway, ‘Travelers’ Supreme Fictions: Homer and Plato’, in Jerusalem: Essays on Pilgrimage and Literature, AMS Press, New York 1998, pp. 15-30, citing W. Shakespeare, As You Like It, III.iii.18-20:

Audrey: I do not know what ‘poetical’ is: is it honest in deed and word? is it a true thing? Touchstone: No, truly; for the truest poetry is the most feigning.

Pietro Alighieri, op. cit., p. 740, writes of his father’s poem as a false dream/true vision in reference to Virgil’s gates of ivory and horn: ‘Et hoc per fictam et phantasticam recitationem ut etiam nunc autor iste fecit, et ibi dicit. Sed qui vere ab oculis visa recitat, et scribit, exit per corneam portam.’

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IV STEALING HERCULES' CLUB

INFERNO XXV'S METAMORPHOSES1

t is the nature of poetry, which is the opposite and yet the mirror of nature, to lie and to steal. But it is also its nature to teach ethics. Dante in the

Commedia creates a fiction, poetando (99) with past poets, mutating and metamorphosing their works, which do ‘suffer a sea change, into something rich and strange.’2 Yet he intersperses and intermingles these lies and thefts with Biblical and Florentine history, the past and the present truths, as well as leading us into realms of make-believe. He combines and intertwines Romanesque materials with Gothic intricacy. To decode his text we shall need to explore both prior texts and archival documents, all of which in the canto are stolen for its uses, just as Vanni Fucci steals from the Pistoian treasury, its reliquary and archives, and, further, even imputes that crime to another, causing the gravest miscarriage of justice, a surrogate execution. Indeed, in many of the circles of sins, Dante himself presents himself as sinning that sin as our surrogate. Witness his dying fall in Inferno V, his outburst of anger in VIII, and, if it is sodomy that is punished in XV, his homoeroticism for Ser Brunetto in that canto. From these sins, but only by means of confession, contrition, and satisfaction, Dante, and we his readers, can be exonerated and redeemed, becoming like Dismas, the repentant Good Thief, crucified beside Christ.

Dante, if this is the playful logic of the fiction, in the Circle of Thieves, becomes himself a thief, an arch-plagiarist, robbing material from countless Roman and Romanesque prior authors, Terence, Virgil, Pliny, Livy, Ovid, Sallust, Statius, Lucan, Apuleius, Jerome, Isidore, and Brunetto Latino, braiding and insinuating their writings intertextually, metamorphosing Latin into Italian as he does so, in order to shape his text in turn about contemporary events.3 Rather than humbly acknowledging his sources, or making restitution for his thefts, he here boasts of his act vaingloriously, ‘Taccia Lucano . . . . /Taccia . . . Ovidio.’ The early commentators note that

I

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here Dante intermingles fraud, theft, and violence.4 As had Virgil before him, and as Spenser would after him, he plays with the texture of his poetry as being the poisonous snake concealed in the grass, Aeneid II.471-475, Inferno VII.84, Faerie Queene III.xi.28, entrapping his reader unawares.

Behind this text of Inferno XXIV-XXV, is a tangible artifact, the silver shrine at Pistoia to St. James as Pilgrim, today with a fine Gothic image of St. James as Pilgrim, with pilgrim hat, scrip, staff, and gourd, at its center and with Adam and Eve and the serpent in the garden, which was spoken of as that city's Palladium.5 In Paradiso XXV, in the Commedia's symmetry, Dante the Pilgrim will come face to face with St. James the Pilgrim who tells him he has been permitted to come from Egypt to Jerusalem (55-56). In a sense, in silver, that Pistoian shrine and Palladium is in turn a divine comedy, interspersed with tragedy. For generations Pistoians added to its treasure, in the hopes of attaining their souls' salvation; and sometimes subtracted from it by theft, compounded with lies, even to the bearing of false witness resulting in death sentences, to their eternal damnation. Bastard Vanni Fucci, one such thief, ending the previous canto with bitter prophecies, now at the beginning of this canto, ‘al fine delle sue parole,’ as a thief, ‘il ladro,’ mockingly blasphemes God.

Christ had been thought to trample upon serpents, being interpreted as the one in Psalm 91 who ‘Super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis; et conculabis leonem et draconem,’ [You shall trample upon the lion and adder; you shall trample the young lion and the serpent under your feet].6 (The difference here between the Latin and the English is due to the English being more accurately translated from the Hebrew, the Latin referring to asps, basilisks, lions and

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dragons.) Hellishly, in Inferno serpents embrace Fucci as one of their own, stealing and turning inside out Virgil's description of the just Laocoön and his sons at Troy, defeated by Sinon's insinuating rhetoric7 and enwreathed by the two serpents from Tenedos (Aeneid II.40-249). Sinon similarly, in a photographic negative, held up his just un-shackled hands, proclaiming that his words serve and save Troy (145-161). Sinon is blasphemously and treacherously parodying Laocoön's Christlike truthfulness and piety. Connected with this scene is another, of the theft of the Palladium, the idol of the Virgin Pallas Athena from Troy by Ulysses and Diomedes, Sinon's colleagues who, he now lyingly says, have treacherously turned against him.8 Palimpsested upon that is also Theban Capaneus' blasphemy against God.9 Contemporary Pistoia and Florence are thus intermeddled in Dante's poetry with Statius' Thebes and Virgil's Troy.10

Let us look at actual and historical documents, which survive in Florentine and Pistoian archives to this day. In 1292 a Florentine council meeting, at which Brunetto Latino was present, had discussed Vanni Fucci in connection with a horse valued at thirty-two florins of gold.11 Dante's text associates him, as a bastard, with a mule (Inferno XXIV.125).12 When the supposed thieves were sentenced to be executed it was by being hanged to death after first being dragged to the square by a horse or a mule.13 For Vanni Fucci, in 1294, stole the silver relief statues of the Virgin Mary and the Apostles from the altar panels of Sant' Jacopo, the treasury of Pistoia's Duomo, enshrining their most precious relic acquired from Compostela.14 His act parallels that of Ulysses and Diomed stealing the Palladium of the Virgin Athena from Troy. To save his own neck Vanni Fucci accused Vanni della Mona of the crime, bearing false witness against him, for which his surrogate and namesake was executed. We learn of a payment for a mass for the dead for Vanni della Mona, in 1296, of thirty soldi, thirty pieces of silver.15 In another version of the account it was said that these two implicated a third, who was innocent, and who was exonerated in time, due to his prayers to the shrine and its relic.16

It is interesting that these events transpired when Dante's own relative, Giano della Bella, was podestà of Pistoia, Corso Donati having been so earlier,17 and that another member of Dante's family, Rolandus de Aldigheriis or Rainaldi di Aldigeriis, had been captain from May, 1272, to February, 1273.18 Dante's household, as well as his teacher, would thus be familiar with these Pistoian

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events. Moreover, the Tuscan pattern of hiring a captain and a podestà from another city to enforce the Ordinances of Justice created a legal intertextuality amongst these cities. Those of Pistoia, written out under Charles of Anjou in 1267, were preserved in the treasury of Sant' Jacopo, and remained in force until Florence took over in 1296.19 Giano della Bella, of course, had enforced such Ordinances of Justice upon Florence herself, 1293-1295, next being driven into exile while the Pistoian pestilence of Black and White reached Florence, ranging Dante Alighieri and Guido Cavalcanti of the White party against Corso Donati of the Black, events which would result in the tragedies of Guido's death from pestilence and Dante's own bitter exile.20

Now the stealing, lying Vanni Fucci is wreathed with serpents who shackle him, as he makes the defiant gesture of the ‘figs,’ the almost-punning, metamorphosing fiche/Fucci, of the woman's genitalia, in opposition to the masculine, of the serpents.21 We learn that Prato forbade that sign and yet that neighboring Pistoia erected two marble arms making that gesture towards Florence.22 Vanni Fucci is associated with Thebes, written about by Statius, and with Troy, written about by Virgil, though he is unworthy of epic immortalizing. He is by birth from Pistoia, the city founded by the traitor Catilina and named for ‘pestilence,’23 written about by Sallust and Livy, Latino and Villani. Dante next gives a reference to the Maremma, notorious in turn for its pestilences and snakes.24 In these attitudes Dante blends together the truth of history and the projections of propaganda; he also makes use of the past as a ‘Distant Mirror’ of his present. In this canto it is as if he plays a game of snakes and ladders with time, with history and poetry.

Lurking and being insinuated into the words of Inferno XXV is also an episode from Aeneid VIII, from Livy I and VII, and from Ovid, Fasti I, where we find the monster Cacus (Evil) stealing Hercules' spoils from the monster Geryon, reversing the oxen's hoofprints to furtively conceal his act and being then killed by blows from Hercules' club.25 This can take us to a study of Milton's intertextuality, based on Virgil's comment that it was easier ‘to steal the club of Hercules’ than to purloin a line (or letter) from Homer.26 Moreover, Dante's blatant stealing and braiding of texts is not unlike the splendid intertwines and arabesques of the Turkish carpet design he gives to the monster of Fraud, Geryon (in turn, braided into the tale of Hercules and Cacus), and whom Virgil and Dante trust to fly them in labyrinthine gyrations down the ravine in Inferno XVII. 14-18.

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Added to these plagiarized and insinuating uses of texts are those by Brunetto Latino. Dante's teacher had written an encyclopaedia, in French, Li livres dou Tresor, in Italian, Il Tesoro, which includes a section in its bestiary on serpents, these chapters being ‘delli serpenti, dell'àspido, della natura del basilischio, della natura di più dragoni, della natura dello isitalis, della vipera, del lusardo e della salamandra.’27 A magnificent Laurentian manuscript, Plut. 42.19, of Brunetto’s Tesoro, likely written by Dante’s fellow student, Francesco da Barberino, and which Dante may well have seen, has the luridly green serpents illuminated, perhaps with poisonous arsenic, as slithering between the chapters which discuss them.28

Folio 31v

It is useful to remember that medieval zoology was not accurate concerning snakes, serpents and dragons, these being seen by them as having clawed feet. Besides that Tesoro bestiary, Brunetto Latino, in the Rettorica, spoke of Sinon and of insinuatio, accepting that pun.29

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For lack of space, I pass over most of the discussions of serpents in the Tesoro, which in turn derive from Isidore, Lucan, Ovid, and Pliny, discussing only as a test case one out of many, the basilisk.30 Interestingly, this one, which is not in Dante's Commedia, is read into that text by James Joyce and Umberto Eco. Basilisks are the kings of serpents. Filled with venom, the basilisk can kill birds by its smell and with its gaze slay men. It is the size of a foot, with white stains, and crested like a cock. Alexander found basilisks and let men see them through one-way walls of glass made up of bottles, thereby being able to kill them with arrows and liberating his army from them.31 Even Umberto Eco warns us, with Salvatore's Desperanto (derived in turn from James Joyce's addition from Brunetto Latino to Inferno XV), as if braiding it into that canto and XXV, ‘Cave basilischium! Est lo reys dei serpenti, tant pleno del veleno che ne riluce tuto fuori! . . . Ti attosca . . . Et ha macule bianche sul dosso, et caput come gallo . . . .’ [Beware the basilisk! It is the king of serpents, so full of poison that it can relight all outside it. It poisons you. And it has white spots on its back, and a head like a cock's.]32

Already, in Canto XXIV, Dante had written

Più non si vanti Libia con sua rena; chè se chelidri, iaculi e faree produce, e cencri con anfisibena. 85-88

[Libya could not boast with its sand of producing such chelidri, jaculi, phare, and cencri with anphisbena.]

He thus outdoes Lucan's Pharsalia in so describing Vanni Fucci coiled about with serpents, dropping to the ground as ashes, then being hellishly reborn, Phoenix-like, from them. Now Dante steals a further episode.

Taccia Lucano omai là dov'e' tocca del misero Sabello33e di Nasidio, ed attenda ad udir quel ch'or si scocca. 94-96

[Be silent now, Lucan, where you touch upon the miserable Sabellus and of Nasidius, and wait to hear what will now follow.]

That rhetorical and slithering use of the occupatio contains within itself the joking madness of stating it does not state what it is stating; being Plato's

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Pharmacy of the oxymoron of silent speech, the speaking silence of prior books, written by now dead, once living authors. That ambiguity is now spread throughout this cloven-tongued and hissing canto and the Commedia.34

In Lucan's text that censored/stated passage is further embedded in one of horror, which it in turn outdoes. Lucan claims that the serpents in the Libyan desert are due to Perseus' flight above it, clutching the severed head of Medusa, from which blood dropped, infesting that region with catalogues of serpents:

. . . the scytale, unique in its habit of sloughing a skin while hoarfrost still covers the ground35; the withered dipsas; the dangerous two-headed amphisbaena; . . . the flying javelin-snake; . . . the gluttonous, foaming-jawed prester; the seps, whose venom dissolves bone as well as flesh; but above all the basilisk, which scares away all lesser snakes by its terrifying hiss, and reigns alone over the empty desert, for it can kill without biting.36

In this ‘horrorshow’ of a Ciceronian period, we see from whence Brunetto Latino in turn plagiarized his catalogue. It is not that of Pliny.37 It is Lucan's. But Lucan in turn had stolen it from Ovid's Metamorphoses IV.38

Next, Lucan tells us, Aulus the standard bearer trod on a dipsas which bit him, causing him to drop the standard and bringing on his death from maddening thirst.39 Then Sabellus was bitten by a minuscule seps, causing not only his flesh but even his bones to dissolve into a tiny liquid puddle of filth. After him, Nasidius, bitten by a fiery prester, began to swell, puffing out like huge ships' sails, his breastplate flying off like a ‘lid from a fiercely steaming cauldron.’ Nightmarishly, ‘His friends fled in horror and, as they glanced back, the body was still swelling in every direction.’40 Ernst Curtius spoke of such ‘outdoing,’ ‘Ueberbeitung,’ as a classical and medieval poets' game of silencing other poets, ‘Taceat,’41 in a ‘horrorshow’ of ghastliness.42

Dante has taken on not only Lucan but also his source, Ovid, in this game, challenging not one, but two predecessors. For, turning to Ovid's Metamorphoses IV, we find that the explicit references cover up and furtively conceal a host of others, that that text also is richly bedabbled with Medusa's blood, yielding a terrible harvest of snakes. Of these Dante only explicitly cites the metamorphoses of Theban Cadmus into a serpent and Arethusa into a fountain.43 But the simile, for instance, of Cianfa as serpent entwining

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himself about Agnello comes from Ovid's narration concerning Salmacis' wooing of Hermaphrodite as being like the coils of a serpent and like clinging ivy.44 (We shall see later, Dante then adds even a third simile, ‘outdoing’ those of Ovid.) Next, Ovid has Tisiphone with her serpents in her hair, bringing with them whiffs of the fens about the Stygian lake and dusky Pluto's dismal realm, just prior to the description of Theban Cadmus and Illyria's transformation into mating serpents.45 Immediately following upon that Ovid gives the tale of Perseus and the Medusa's head and the dragon guarding Andromache, that book ending with Pallas' shield bearing that same serpent-haired head.46 Book V continues with Perseus' adventures in alliance with Pallas Athena, even including the monstrous serpent Typhon, then these metamorphose into the tales of Proserpina and Arethusa which wash away the gloom of Styx and death, the textual journeying being from the realms of Theban unreason to those of Athenian wisdom.

Into these classical and fictional textual thefts, Dante braids accusations and condemnations of five contemporary medieval thieving Florentines, whose stories he would have learned from insinuating legal gossip, and also from the reality of brown ink and parchment diplomas in archives, such as the Peace of Cardinal Latino of 1278-80 in which the names of two of these men are mentioned:47 Black Guelf Cianfa Donati or degli Abati; Ghibelline, then White Guelf, then Black,48 Agnello Brunelleschi;49 Francesco Guercio Cavalcanti;50 Buoso degli Abati51 or de' Donati;52 Ghibelline, then Guelf, Puccio Sciancato (the lame) de' Galigai.53 Five Florentines, from five of the best families, Donati, Brunelleschi, Cavalcanti, Galigai and Abati,54 are best passed over in a medieval occupatio. Such scandals are shameful and I leave them here for mere footnotes, for the curious and indefatigable gossip-lovers to peruse. But one cannot resist braiding and bringing in the tale of the mimic Gianni Schicchi de' Cavalcanti55 and his nephew Simon, the first impersonating the dying Buoso de' Donati, who wished to restitute his ill-gotten, stolen gains, and supposedly dictating Buoso's will in favor of Gianni, himself, and Simon, leaving to himself, Buoso's mule.56 Here the speech act itself, metamorphosed into writing, is theft and fraud. It also braids back to the likewise flesh and blood mortal, Vanni Fucci, associated with mules and horses, and partly mirrors his bearing of false witness against another, accusing that person of his own crime, combining theft, fraud, and murder. Gianni and Vanni act in their own self-interest, not their neighbours', in their thefts of others' possessions and even lives.

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Throughout Inferno XXV, Dante calls attention self-referentially and emphatically to the venomous text braiding together the classical and medieval worlds, which he is writing and which we are reading, even as he quasi-steals it from us by burning its corners and margins as we struggle to peruse its remaining twisting words, fraudulently silencing, concealing, destroying evidence of his thefts. It is when one silences one's sources that one is a plagiarist, not otherwise when they are acknowledged and honoured.

First he makes the reader as well as his guide pause:

per ch'io, acciò che'l duca stesse attento, mi puosi il dito su dal mento al naso. Se tu se' or, lettore, a creder lento ciò ch'io dirò, non sarà maraviglia, chè io, che 'l vidi, a pena il mi consento.57 44-44

[For which I, while my leader stood aside waiting, put the finger from the chin to the nose. And if you, reader, are slow to believe that which I am about to say, it would not be marvellous, when I, who saw it, scarcely believe it.]

He here has himself call attention to Virgil by using the gesture indicating silence (‘Taci!’ echoing the ‘Taccia,’ Dante will use of Lucan and Ovid, 94-99, here first addressed even to Virgil, adumbraited in Inferno IV, 104-5, ‘parlando cose che'l tacer è bello sì com'era parla colà dov'era.’ ), but also ambiguously like those drawn hands with index finger pointing to the text in so many medieval manuscripts, as if saying ‘Nota bene.’ This is the second use of manual signing in the canto, the first having been the figs of Vanni Fucci, ambivalently mirroring in turn Sinon's seemingly liberating gesture, though in actuality it had been of impending conquest and the crossed fingers of lies. Hereby attention is conspiratorially drawn away from the Virgilian dragon affixing itself upon the half-man, half-beast Cacus, who stole cattle from Hercules on the site where Rome was to be built, to the remark overheard by Florentine Dante amongst the fleeing Florentines about the unperceived serpent as Cianfa (‘Cianfa dove fia rimaso?’43) which next fastens itself upon Agnello, the two becoming one, not literally turning to ash this time as had Cacus,58 but the metamorphoses being as like ivy entwined about an elm, then that shape changing as one perceives when paper is

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burning and curling into distorted shapes, that double metaphor/ metamorphosis inevitably calling attention to the very pages upon which these words are written, evoking Fahrenheit 451 and Il nome della Rosa's deconstructive, fictional, holocausts of book burning in the future and the past:

come procede innanzi da l'ardore per lo papiro suso, un color bruno, che non è nero ancora, e il bianco more. 64-66

[as before the flame on paper goes a brown color which is not yet black, and the white decreases.]

We recall that books of satanic magic, in Paul, in Shakespeare's Tempest, and in Milton's Areopagitica are threatened with voluntary auto da fe drownings and bonfires.59 It is also of interest that Dante refers here to paper, papiro, not parchment, pergamene.60 For we have no extant example of Dante's hand though we have ample material from Latino, all on parchment. Did Dante then customarily write on paper rather than on parchment and is this why his autograph has not survived?

Next, Cianfa Donati or degli Abati and Agnello Brunelleschi become Ovidianly, hermaphroditically, merged into one ‘imagine perversa’ (77), the Christ-like little lamb thus metamorphosing into its opposite, the Satanic serpent, in this infernal magicking of Dante's verses.61

Along with these self-referential remarks about the book, its pages and their reader, are also further wordy remarks about the silencing of speech. (We had already met with a hoarse Virgil, I.63). Men who become serpents, as Milton was also to note, can only hiss.62 In Apuleius' Metamorphoses Lucius magicked into an ass could only bray, lacking the power of words to proclaim his innocence.63 The serpent coils about Vanni Fucci's neck to shut off his blasphemy, as if saying ‘'Non vo' che più diche'‘ (6), at the same time that he is compared to Capaneus in Statius' Thebaid who blasphemed against Zeus and who for this was silenced and destroyed by a thunderbolt.64 In response, the thief fled, ‘che non parlò più verbo’ (16), with a twyform Centaur, half man, half horse, pursuing him with angry, scolding outcry.65

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Next, Francesco Guercio Cavalcanti is bitten by a little livid black serpent in his belly button and falls into a deathly sleep while he changes places with his assailant, each becoming the other, Dante noting that the man's legs become his penis as he metamorphoses into a serpent, validating Freud's dream analyses, ‘diventaron lo membro che l'uom cela’ (116).66 Francesco, now crawling on the earth, is likened to a snail drawing in its horns as he draws back his ears into his head and next loses the faculty of speech:

e la lingua, che avëa unita e presta prima a parlar, si fende, e la forcuta ne l' altro si richiude 133-136

[and his tongue, whch was before one and readily able to speak, clove itself, and the forked tongue in the other reclosed itself.]

While the other follows, now talking and sputtering, as if to say that Dante's human part has lost the ability to write and speak this poem, his bestial part, with forked tongue, now having appropriated those faculties. Reader, beware. Only one of the five is now left unaltered, in this hellish choreography, of Hell's uneven numbering and of slipping of gears: Francesco and Buoso repeat Agnello and Cianfa's exchangings of being; only Puccio Sciancato de' Galigai, the cripple, remains in his own, albeit twisted, shape. And in the following canto we twist from Pistoia even more bitterly to witness sarcastic invective against Florence, ‘Godi, Fiorenza!’ Rejoice, Florence, that among the thieves I, Dante, a Florentine, found five of your citizens to only one Pistoiese! We remember the Stoic paradox, the self-cancelling tautology, so reminiscent of these serpentine metamorphoses, ‘Epamonides is a Kretan. Epamonides says 'All Kretans lie!'‘ Dante here accuses himself, confesses himself, a thief. Would one buy a used or worse yet, stolen Geryon-like vehicle from this man? Or a horse or a mule or a centaur or a plague of snakes or croaking frogs or a manuscript of the Inferno?67 Or from any other Florentine? Should one trust Dante saying, ‘Godi, Fiorenza,’ echoing Sinon's triumphant ambages concerning Troy? Not in these cacaphonous non-cantos, whose anti-God is Satan, Father of Lies. To write of this pattern in the Tartar carpet's whorls, the words and arguments, the body and the footnotes of this essay likewise, have had in turn to gyre and intertwine, bearing false/true witness to the text. Reader, do not trust Geryon, or the Inferno, or the Trojan Horse, or this Lectura.

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In the next canto, fittingly, we meet cloven-tongued Greek Ulysses (with Diomedes), past master, both Virgil and Cicero (in Latino's translation), would tell us, of the insinuatio, and artificer of the Wooden Horse, the idol foisted off on the Trojans in place of their stolen Palladium by the Greeks. ‘Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes’ [I fear the Greeks, bearing gifts (II.49)], are Laocoön's last words, his Last Will and Testament, concerning it. We should heed those words. Interestingly, too, the voyage Dante has Ulysses make, through the Mediterranean, past the Pillars of Hercules, and out into Oceanus, is that also made twice by peregrinate Saint James of Compostela, first, living, to preach in Spain, second, as a corpse in a stone boat, according to the legend, following his beheading in Jerusalem.68 Dante, in these three Inferno cantos, XXIV through XXVI, with that of Paradiso XXV, is knitting together architectonically the themes of the theft of the Palladium, from Troy and from Pistoia, and the figures of Ulysses and Saint James of Compostela, Pistoia's patron, the one the exile, the other the pilgrim, both negative and positive shadows of Dante's role toward us, his readers.

The serpentine dragon's venom, which is for a while Dante's ink upon burning paper, first needs to be washed off on the shores of Purgatory and likewise the flames of hell be doused, this material needing to be truly, rather than falsely, silenced, before we can hear Purgatorio II's Gothic motet of Casella's melodious Italian solo, ‘L'amor che ne la mente mi ragiona,’ harmonized with the hundredfold choir's Gregorian and Latin Chant of Psalm 113's ‘In exitu Israel de Aegypto.’ In the Greco-Roman world we had had the idolatry of the Palladium of Reason, replaced by the Wooden Horse of Folly. In the Judaeo-Christian world Psalm 113 in turn is the poetry of the history of the Bible's book of Exodus and of its central account of a false pagan idol, the Golden Calf, made from ‘borrowed,’ stolen Egyptian artifacts to be metamorphosed as the adornment of the Tabernacle of the Holy Ark in Jerusalem. These metamorphoses are metaphors for Dante's uses of poetry, his tragedy become comedy, his exile Commedia metamorphosed into restitution for his thefts as pilgrimage to St. James and God.

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Notes

1 This paper was presented at the Lectura Dantis session of the Xth AAIS Conference, University of Virginia Rotunda, April 10, 1990. I gratefully acknowledge grants in 1989 and 1990 from the University of Colorado's Graduate Committee on Research and Creative Work for travel to Florence and Pistoia. I specially wish to thank the Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), the Archivio di Stato di Pistoia (ASP) and the Società Dantesca Italiana. I trust the reader will permit, in the text and these footnotes, a sphere of playfulness, especially of arabesquing with time. Dante borrowed/stole from the past, but the future, Michelangelo, Milton, Blake, Joyce, Eco, borrowed/stole from him in this symposium beyond time and death. As an amusing footnote, perhaps I can add that this essay was first commissioned, then rejected, while another, who had asked to borrow it, then published a version of it, appropriately borrowing/stealing it. It was my first experience of being plagiarized. My next encountering was to be far more serious, involving nuns, deacons, priests, bishops and archbishops and the borrowing/theft of a priceless manuscript between cathedral and abbey. 2 Pietro Alighieri, Dante's son, insists upon the fictive, shaped quality of Dante's poem throughout, Petri Allegherii super Dantis ipsius genitoris Comoediam commentarium, ed. Vincenzio Nanucci (Florence: Piatti, 1845); Il ‘Commentarium’ di Pietro Alighieri nelle redazioni ashburnhamiana e ottoboniana, ed. Roberto della Vedova e Maria Teresa Silvotti (Florence: Olschki, 1978); in the Inferno, the realm of lies, Dante lies by having us believe his lies are truths, while in the Paradiso he truthfully proclaims he lies, that he writes fiction; Shakespeare, The Tempest, I.ii.399-400. 3 Joan Ferrante, ‘Good Thieves and Bad Thieves: A Reading of Inferno XXIV,’ Dante Studies, 104 (1986), 83-98, ably argues that poetic theft is good, actual theft bad. I see Vanni Fucci as a reverse, perverse Jeremiah, Dante writing here a Blakean Bible of the Devil. For useful review of prior scholarship, consult Domenico de Robertis, ‘Lo scempio delle umane proprietadi (Inferno, canti XXIV e XXV, con una postilla sul XXVI),’ Bulletino storico pistoiese, 14 (1979), 37-60. 4La Divina Comedia nella figurazione artistica e nel secolare commento, ed. Guido Biagi (Torino: UTET, 1924), I, 599-601, for instance, Cristofero Landino speaks

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of the presence of centaurs as here among the thieves rather than amongst the violent because thieves mix fraud with violence and fraud is the more serious sin, p. 600. 5 Altar to St James, Pistoia Cathedral. In Dante's day the silver altar had, since 1287, only figures of the Madonna and Twelve Apostles in Gothic niches, Vanni Fucci stealing these, along with the city's archives, 25 January 1293. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries these other figures seen here replaced the loss through theft. Sabatino Ferrali, L'Apostolo S. Jacopo il Maggiore e il su culto a Pistoia (Pistoia: Opera dei santi Giovanni e Zeno, Fabbriceria della Cattedrale, 1979). 6 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Religious Meaning of the Ruthwell Cross,’ in Late Antique, Early Christian and Medieval Art (New York: Brazillier, 1979), pp. 151-160. 7 Vergil, Aeneid, ed. Clyde Pharr (Boston: Heath, 1964), II, lines 40-23l. Brunetto Latini, La Rettorica, ed. Francesco Maggini (Florence: Le Monnier, 1968), pp. 167-168, 193-198, in his translation of Cicero's text, insinuated this material from Virgil about Sinon's speech as an example of insinuatio. 8 For an excellent discussion of the meaning of the Palladium in Dante and Chaucer, see John V. Fleming, Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer's Troilus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), pp. 75-78, 124-128, 133-138, 143-153 and passim. 9 Statius, Thebaid, III.598-619,648-669, X.907-39. 10 Pietro Alighieri, ed. Vedova, Silvotti, pp. 347-8, relates the scene as well to Sallust on Catilina, Fiesole, and Pistoia. 11 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Liber Fabarum III, fol. 100, July 22, 1292; Consulte della Repubblica florentina dall'anno MCCLXXX al MCCXCVIII (Florence: Sansoni, 1898), II.200, 452: ‘Item, super emendatione facienda Vanni filio Fuccij de Pistorio de masnada domino Rogerij de Lilla, de quodam equo, in quantitate Triginta duorum florenorum auri.’ Brunetto Latino, ‘Ser Burnectus Bonaccursi notarius,’ was present at that Council of the Hundred,

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‘in Consilio Centum virorum.’ The money was to be paid for horses and mules needed for the army in readiness for war against Pisa the following June. 12 Petri Alligherii, ed. Nannucci, p. 220, spoke of Vanni Fucci's bastard state, ‘Vanni Fucci bastardus fuit filius domini Fucci de Lazaris de Pistorio, qui furto spoliavit ecclesiam cathedralem suae terrae’. 13 Peleo Bacci quoted condemnation, ‘ad mortem dicebatur dampnari et tandem ad caudem equi vel muli et ad furcas suspendi,’ in Dante e Vanni Fucci secondo una tradizione ignota (Pistoia: Popolo Pistoiese, 1892). 14 Archivio di Stato di Pistoia, Opera di S. Jacopo, cod. 1, fol. 62; Bacci, Dante e Vanni Fucci, transcribed ‘Miraculum de Furibus Thesauri Sancti Iacobi,’ of March 13, 1295, from ASP, Stanze IX, Tesoretto, Opera di S. Iacopo, fol. 39, noting that Giano della Bella was podestà, March 1294; Corso Donati had been podestà, 1289; Sabatino Ferrali, L'Apostolo S. Jacopo il maggiore e il suo culto a Pistoia (Pistoia: Fabbriceria della Cattedrale, 1979), pp. 83-96; Robert Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, trans. Giovanni Battista Klein (Florence: Sansoni, 1957), III.531,706, noted shrine was Pistoia's Palladium; Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), discusses medieval analogues where paradoxically relics were more desirable if they had been stolen, or even if a lying tale said they had been stolen, rather than if honestly acquired. 15 See Peleo Bacci, Del notaio pistoiese Vanni della Monna e del furto alla sacrestia de' Belli Arredi ricordato da Dante nel Canto XXIV dell'Inferno (Pistoia: Cacialli, 1895). 16 Giancarlo Savino, ‘Il furto 'a la sagrestia d'i belli arredi,'‘ Bulletino storico pistoiese, 14 (1979), 61-71. 17 ‘dum temporis et in fortia potestatis videlicet Giani della Bella de Florentia et comunis Pistori,’ p. 69. I found, ASSP, Opera di S. Jacopo I, fols. 173-174, that Giano della Bella condemned and banished men for making insults with defensive weapons and with naked swords in their hand, ‘Fecit insultum . . . cum armis defensibilis et ano spada falçone nudo in manu.’ The 1293 expenses

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incurred by the theft are given in the same volume, fols. 63, 66v-68v. Further materials concerning Giano della Bella occur in vol. 1, fols. 173-174v, 186-197v, 1294, vol. 24, fols. 184-185, June 5, 1294. These large volumes, recording for instance sentences of banishment, were originally kept in the shrine of Sant' Jacopo. 18 ASP, Statuti e ordinamenti, fol. 58v. This volume likewise stresses the interconnectedness of the shrine of Sant' Jacopo and the legal structure of Pistoia. The marginal note to the text is ‘Aldigerii avo di Dante.’ 19 Breve et Ordinamenta Populi Pistorii Anni MCCLXXXIIII, ed. Ludovicus Zdekauer (Milan: Hoepli, 1891), 2 vols. 20 Dino Compagni's Chronicle of Florence, trans. Daniel F. Bornstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 14-22, 26, 28 and passim, p. 20 discussing Giano della Bella as podestà of Pistoia. 21 Besides the scene recalling, in a photographic negative, the virtuous Laocoön wreathed by snakes of Aeneid II, we can play games with time and recall Michelangelo's future punishment of the Vatican's money-pinching Chamberlain in the Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment fresco. 22 Raffaello Andreoli, in Biagi, I.599, notes, ‘Nello Statuto di Prato, chiunque 'ficas fecerit versus celum vel figuram Dei' è condannato in lire dieci; e, non pagandole, ad esser frustrato.’ Giovanni Villani, Cronica VI.5 (Rome: Multigrafica, 1980), II.12: ‘E nota, che in su la rocca di Carmignano avea una torre alta settanta braccia, e ivi su due braccia di marmo, che faceano le mani le fiche a Firenze.’ 23 Jacopo Alighieri discusses Pistoia in connection with Sallust, Catilinaria, Statius, Thebaid, in Biagi, I.596, giving this information; Pietro Alighieri, ed. Vedova, Silvotti, pp. 347-353; other commentators following the suit of Dante's sons. 24 Francesco da Buti says there was a most beautiful monastery at Maremma, near Pisa, which had to be abandoned because of the abundance of snakes, in

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Biagi, I.600. 25 Petri Allegherii, ed. Nannucci, pp. 221-222, who also notes that Cacus' cavern is situated by the church of Santa Sabina in Rome. 26 Davis P. Harding, The Club of Hercules: Studies in the Classical Background of Paradise Lost (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), esp. pp. 40-66, 86-113. Similar studies, before intertextuality became fashionable, Robert O. Payne, The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer's Poetics (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1963), for Chaucer; John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study of the Ways of the Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1959), for Coleridge. 27 Il Tesoro, ed. Luigi Carrer (Venezia: Gondoliere, 1839), pp. 209-214; in the French these being: ‘des serpens, de l'aspide, dou serpent as .ii. testes (anfemeine), dou besilike, dou dragon, de scitalis, de la vipre, de la lisarde,’ Li Livres dou Tresor, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948); in the Spanish, ‘de las serpientes, del aspide, de anfimenia, del basilisco, del dragon, de citales, de vipra, del lagarto,’ The Medieval Castilian Bestiary, ed. Spurgeon Baldwin (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1982), pp. 10-15; Attilio Momigliano, ‘Il Canto XXV dell'Inferno,’ in Letture Dantesche: Inferno (Florence: Sansoni, 1955), p. 473, notes catalogue is from Latino and Isidore; Umberto Eco, Il nome della Rosa (Milan: Bompiani, 1987), p. 52, also steals the catalogue to embellish the marble of his portal and the page of his book, ‘serpenti pelosi, salamandre, ceraste, chelidri . . . iene . . . draghi . . . basilischi . . . presteri . . . anfisbene, jaculi,’ etc. 28 Biblioteca Laurenziana, Plut. 42.19, fols. 39v-40; Michael Camille, ‘Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,’ Art History, 8 (1985), 26-49. 29 See fn. 5. 30 Sion Segre-Amar, ‘Su un codice parigino del Tresor,’ Studi francesi, 71 (1960), discusses a Maître Honoré manuscript, now Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, 179, folio 47, illuminating the basilisk among other serpents. Omitted material includes asps who bite men, making them die of

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thirst, in the Italian text there being three kinds, difise, emori, and presto, which cause men to die by sleeping or by losing all their blood. They carry the precious carbuncle and to defeat magicians' spells to obtain that stone, they put one ear to the ground, plugging the other with their tails in order to be deaf. 31 Brunetto continued with dragons as the largest serpents of all, living in India and Ethiopia in caves, flying through the air and causing it to catch fire, their strength being in their tails, and fearing only the elephant; scitalis, serpents which move slowly, which are gaily colored and which can be easily caught and are warm; vipers which when copulating and when giving birth are devoured by their partner (for this St Ambrose says they are the cruelest beasts known); lizards being of three kinds, little and big, and among them are salamanders which can poison all the apples on a tree, killing those who eat them, and likewise can poison wells, and they can live in fire. Dante placed Latino in the context of Cato's and Alexander's marches through deserts, beneath hails of flames, Inferno XIV. 13-15, 31-42. In doing so he is stealing from, yet half acknowledging, the writings of Lucan and, supposedly, Alexander writing to Aristotle giving material his teacher could then include in his encyclopedic tomes. 32 Il nome della Rosa, p. 311. James Joyce had bought an edition of Latino in Trieste for his own children. It gives the Italian text, illustrating these with photographs of medieval sculpted capitals. Brunetto Latini, I libri naturali del 'Tesoro,' emendato colla scorta de' codici commentati e illustrati, ed. Guido Battelli (Florence: Le Monnier, 1917; Geneva: Olschki, 1920); Richard Elllmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), catalogue of Trieste books, p. 795; James Joyce, Giacomo Joyce (New York: Viking, 1958), ed. Richard Ellmann, pp. xxxvi & 15, ‘E col suo vedere attosca l'uomo quando lo vede. I thank you for the word, messer Brunetto’; Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 194, ‘Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes, glinting stern under wrinkled brows. A basilisk. E quando vede l'uomo l'attosca. Messer Brunetto, I thank thee for the word.’ T. S. Eliot similarly cast W.B. Yeats as a ‘dead master,’ originally as a ‘Ser Brunetto,’ but without the Bestiary connection, Dame Helen Gardner, The Composition of 'Four Quartets' (London: Faber and Faber, 1977). pp. 63-69, 174-181. My thanks to A. Walton

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Litz and Victoria Mahaffey for these references. 33 Ettore Paratore, ‘Il Canto XXV dell'Inferno,’ in Nuove Letture Dantesche II: Anno di Studi 1966-67 (Florence: Le Monnier, 1968), p. 284, notes that Dante changes, metamorphoses, Lucan's Sabellus into Sabellius, transmogrifying insinuatingly his name into that of the arch-heretic. The Biblioteca Laurenziana, Plut. 40.22, variant is ‘Sabellio.’ 34 See Allen Mandelbaum's introduction to his translation of the Inferno (New York: Bantam, 1982), p. x. 35 See opening of previous Canto, Inferno XXIV.4-6. 36 Lucan, Pharsalia IX.700-733, trans. Robert Graves (Baltimore: Penguin, 1957), p. 215; Latin text, ed and trans. J. D. Duff (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Loeb 220), pp. 556-558. 37 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), pp. 28,46,62-66,98-100, on serpents, etc. Other sources for Brunetto were Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, Patrologia Latina, ed. J.P. Migne, LXXII, and ed. W.M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911, 1962), XII.v, vol. II, listing dragons, basilisks, vipers, asps, presters, seps, cerastes, scytales, amphisbaenas, hydras, chelydros, natrix, cenchris, boas, iaculi, dipsas, etc., with quotations from Lucan, Ovid, Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum majus (Douai, 1624), 4 vols. See Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Doris Nussey (New York: Harper, 1958), pp. 43-45, for this material, including photographs from Amiens Cathedral of the basilisk and adder. It is interesting that Amiens has an excellent, though now tragically vandalized, early manuscript Brunetto Latino, Li Livres dou Tresor, Bibliothèque Municipale, 398. Its first folio robbed. 38 Its reverse/obverse is that in the Greek world, known of by Ovid, dreams of snakes within labyrinths were healing, Carl Kerenyi, Asklepios: Archetypal Image of the Physician's Existence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 12, 35, 41; on labyrinths, William H. Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of their History and Development (New York: Longmans, Green,

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1922), p. 60 and passim; W. F. Jackson Knight, Cumaean Gates: A Reference of the Sixth Aeneid to the Initiation Pattern (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. 12-27; Georg Röppen and Richard Sommer, Strangers and Pilgrims: An Essay on the Metaphor of Journey (New York: Humanities Press, 1964). 39 Deeper in hell we will meet with a relative of these thieves, Bocca degli Abati, who betrayed Florence by killing her standard-bearer at Montaperti, Inferno XXXII. 76-123. 40 Pp. 216-217. What Dante omits, perhaps because he steals many of these for his own text, are Tullus' death from a bite from a haemorrhois, which first caused his blood to spurt out in all directions, Laevus's death from an asp bite which numbed his heart, causing him to fall into a deadly sleep, Paulus' death from the flight of a non-poisonous javelin-snake passing right through his temples, and Murrus having to cut off his own arm after attempting to slay a basilisk, and watching that arm dissolve on the ground before him. At night, when the soldiers slept the snakes lost their venom but crept to the men to share their warmth. 41 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1953, Bollingen 36), pp. 162-165. See Mario Sansone in Inferno: Letture degli anni 1973-'76: Casa di Dante in Roma (Rome: Bonacci, 1977), pp. 634-635, on Curtius' ‘Ueberbeitung’ and this Canto. 42 Clockwork Orange makes use of the Russian's near pun for ‘very good’ as ‘horrorshow,’ wittily exemplifying that ambiguous oxymoron of excelling in evil: Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 22, etc.; William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1947). 43 Metamorphoses IV.563, V.572. 44 See John Milton, Paradise Lost, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957), IV.307, V.215-216, IX.214-219, 430-433, for topos of ‘vine prop't elms.’

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45 Shakespeare's Ovid Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London: Centaur Press, 1961), pp. 90-96. 46 Pp. 97-101. Marianne Shapiro, ‘XXV,’ Dante's Divine Comedy: Introductory Readings, I. Inferno, ed. Tibor Wlassics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1990) pp. 321,329, reminds us that Cacus is Medusa's son by Vulcan. 47 ASF, Capitoli di Firenze, Registri 29, fols. 325-348. The Peace of Cardinal Latino also names Brunetto Latino, fol. cccxxxvij. The Roman numbering is more complete than the Arabic. 48 ASF, Capitoli, Reg. 29, fol. cccxxxvi verso. 49 Sansone, p. 628, on political arabesquing; Ettore Paratore, p. 282, on thieving, ‘infino picciolo votava la borsa al padre e alla madre, poi votava la cassetta alla bottega e imbolava,’ and Vittorio Capetti, Il Canto XXV dell'Inferno letto nella Sala di Dante in Orsanmichele (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), p. 20. 50Pietro Alighieri, ed. Nannucci, p. 225, ed. Vedova, Silvotti, p. 352: ‘Per quem supradictum dominum Guercium, occisum per hominem Gaville, magna controversia facta fuit illis de illo castro Gaville, Districtus Florentini.’ 51 Peace of Cardinal Latino, ASF, Capitoli, Reg. 29, fol. cccxxx verso. 52 Paratore, p. 283, noting Buoso Donati made others' things his own, ‘fatto dell'altrui suo.’ 53 Paratore, p. 283, noting Benvenuto da Imola, ‘non erat bene aptus ad fugiendum quando ibat cum aliis ad furandum, quia erat claudus.’ 54 Capetti, p. 30; Pietro Alighieri, ed. Nannucci, p. 225, ed. Vedova, Silvotti, p. 352: ‘Puccius de Galigariis, dominus Buosus de Abatibus, dominus Guercius de Cavalcantibus, dominus Cianfa de Donatis, Agnellus de Bruneleschis, omnes de Florentia, magni fures suo tempore.’

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55 In the Peace of Cardinal Latino, ASF, Capitoli, Reg. 29, fol. cccxxxviiij, he is ‘Ghianni Schichi de' Cavalcantibus.’ 56 Paget Toynbee/Charles Singleton, A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 120-121; Davidsohn III.229. The joke here, of the disguised author of the will leaving property to himself, is not unlike Odysseus' tale to Eumaios of the cloak he obtained from Odysseus, Odyssey, trans. A.T. Murray (Harvard University Press, 1980, Loeb 105), XIV. 462-517, vol. II, pp. 66-71. 57 Erich Auerbach, ‘Dante's Addresses to the Reader,’ in American Critical Essays on the Divine Comedy, ed. Robert J. Clements (New York: New York University Press, 1967), pp. 37-51; Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967); Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 58 Paratore, p. 281, quoting Daniele Mattalìa, notes the echoing of ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes,’ ‘il biblico 'pulves es, et in pulverum reverteris.'‘ 59 Acts 19.19; William Shakespeare, The Tempest, V.i.57; Milton, Areopagitica, ed. Hughes, p. 728. 60 Pompeo Venturi, in Biagi, I.606, notes ‘papiro’ used in Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, but not Italian, which is ‘carte,’ and that because Italians used to use papyrus from Egypt in lamps they associate this with burning. 61 See here, William Empson's comment upon The Second Shepherd's Play, in ‘Double Plots,’ Some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1960), p. 26. He did not claim this as original with himself when I questioned him about it orally, though medievalist colleagues state that he was the first to observe this perversity, of the blasphemy of the cannibalism of the sheep in the cradle, in print. 62 Paradise Lost X.504-547.

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63 Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans. W. Adlington (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977, Loeb 44), III.25,29, pp. 136,142. 64 Statius, Thebaid III.598-619,648-669, X.907-39. See Fleming, pp. 84-87. 65 I can only braid this into a footnote but centaurs, half men, half horses, are another aspect of this psychologizing and allegorizing of man's metamorphoses from reason to lust, from good to evil: Homer, Odyssey, XXI.288-304, on Lapiths and Centaurs, to be sculpted on the pediments of the Parthenon and the Temple of Olympia, and even the centaurs and fauns to be jokingly used by Jerome, Vita Sancti Pauli et Antonii, ed. and trans. Helen Waddell, The Lives of the Desert Fathers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), pp. 26-39, esp. 32-33; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1912) I.vi.7-19; C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Chronicles of Narnia (New York: Macmillan, 1950). Another bestial marginal note to the Inferno, the serpents of this canto derive from the serpents of Exodus, Petri Allegherii, ed. Nannucci, pp. 225-226. Pietro Alighieri, who seems to have inherited his father's library, was an excellent intertextual reader of the Commedia, giving biblical and classical references. 66 Blake illuminates this scene of the one falling to the ground, the other becoming erect. Oreste Capo, Il Canto XXV dell'Inferno letto nella ‘Casa di Dante’ in Roma, il 25 gennaio 1959 (Torino: SEI, 1959), p. 25, notes that Dante, a member of the ‘Arte dei Medici e degli Speziali’, like Homer, knows his medicine and his anatomy in his poetry. 67 Glossa ordinaria sees Exodus plague of frogs, repeated several times by Dante in his Inferno, as analogous to the inane songs of pagan poets, Patrologia latina, ed. J.P. Migne, CXIII.205. Another image in the Canto, XXV.142, is where this bolgia is called a ship's keel, ‘Così vid'io la settima zavorra mutare e trasmutare.’ Pietro Alighieri, ed. Nannucci, p. 226, ed. Vedova, Silvotti, p. 353: ‘Vocando zavorram hanc septimam bulgiam comparative loquendo, quia sicut alveus de fundo galae et navis habet glaream, quae dicitur zavorra.’ Dante's use of ship similes in the Commedia is self-referential and in the Inferno is threatening: Julia Bolton Holloway, The Pilgrim and Book: A Study of Dante, Langland, and Chaucer (Berne: Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 61-65. A keel is

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needed by a ship to give it stability, here it mutates. One would only see it when the ship is in dry dock or dangerously storm-tossed or sinking. Momigliano, p. 488, notes the perversity and peril of vision in this Canto. We are seeing the seamy, underside, inside out of things. But Paradiso II.1-18, XXXIII.94-96 rights these wrongs. 68 See Julia Bolton Holloway, ‘Semus Sumus: Joyce and Pilgrimage,’ Thought, 56 (1981), 212-225, which discusses Joyce's similar use of Ulysses and St. James of Compostela as personae for himself.

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V DANTE AS TIMOTHEUS:

PURGATORIO II AND THE MUSIC OF THE COMMEDIA

I. Purgatorio II’s Polyphony

n the shores of Purgatory Dante and Virgil pause from their pilgrimage to listen to the seductive and vainglorious words of Dante’s own ‘Amor,

che ne la mente mi ragiona’ sung solo in the dolce stil nuovo of the Tuscan vernacular by his friend Casella (Purgatorio II.112; Convivio III; De vulgari eloquentia II.VI.6). In so doing they forget the plain chant of a hundred puritanical pilgrim souls who sang the tonus peregrinus Psalm CIII, ‘In exitu Israel de Aegypto’, a capella, in unison, disembarking on the mountain island journeying by sea from the Tiber, from Ostia where Augustine’s Monica had died following their shared vision (Purg. II.46).1 It had been the psalm Hebrew pilgrims sang in Exodus, and when coming to Jerusalem and its Temple, before Christ.2 It was particularly used in the Easter Baptism liturgy, which in Florence took place only in the Baptistery, where Dante, a babe in arms, would have seen the mosaics of its octagon, narrating the Bible.

Then, as a child beside Florence’s Badia, he would often hear the monks chant this Psalm with its great antiquity, embedded particularly in the liturgical Hours of Prayer for Sunday’s Vespers. Dante, twice, in prose, Convivio II.I.6; Epistola XIII.7, discussed this psalm, and he explicitly based his pilgrim allegory upon it. It is the oldest, plainest music in the Commedia.

In contrast to it these same pilgrim souls are seduced by Casella’s voice singing solo Dante’s dolce stil nuovo rhymes, the Commedia’s newest music.

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Documents exist in Siena’s archives where Casella is fined for singing in the streets, disturbing the peace.3 The pilgrims are next rudely, shockingly, interrupted by the harsh cry of stern puritanical Cato in prose, chiding them for their negligence and bidding them rush to the mountain, bidding them to return immediately to their penitential pilgrimage (Purg. II.120-133). Dante’s teacher Brunetto Latino, had quoted Cato: ‘¶|Cato dice. Jra impedisce l'animo/ke non può giudicare lo uero’ [Tesoro, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana 42.19, fol. 53vb]. Here Dante, jokingly, has Cato exhibit the rage he had spoken against, fulfilling Brunetto’s further statement concerning both Cato and Augustine: ‘|Cato disse/ciò che tu biasimi/ti guarda di fare. che laida cosa è/quando la colpa cade sopra lui. ¶|Agustino dice. Bene dire. e male operare/non è altro/che se con sua boce dannare’ [Tesoro, 54ra]. Figurally and iconographically, in this scene, Cato is as Moses, Virgil as Aaron, who permitted the Golden Calf worshipping, the Psalm being godly, Dante’s lyric, a Golden Calf, this iconography especially borne out in the miniature to Purgatorio II in the Neapolitan British Library Additional 19587 manuscript, folio 62.4

It is possible, as in the thirteenth-century Reading Abbey motet of the bawdy lines of ‘Sumer is icumin in’, sung simultaneously in a round with the sacred Latin ‘Perspice cristicolae’, and in the thirteenth-early fourteenth century motets given in the Montpellier H 196 manuscript,5 to put these two contradictory pieces of music together polyphonically. But not initially. The two are worlds apart. Though that diversity will be blended at the end of the Commedia in a vernacular Franciscan lauda sung as prayer by a famed Latin-writing allegorist on the Song of Songs of Solomon, Cistercian St Bernard (Par. XXXIII.1-39). Scholars have studied such obverse/reverse juxtapositions between the bawdy and the sacred in the macaronic use of the vulgar vernacular and the sacred Latin in texts, and in medieval manuscript miniatures and borders, our heritage from Mikhail Bakhtin and Michael Camille.6 But perhaps we also need to do so for medieval music and its use of

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motets, especially in Dante’s dolce stil nuovo and ars nova world of the Vita Nova and the Commedia.

Dante Alighieri’s teacher, Brunetto Latino, himself a composer of a Francescian lauda and cognisant of Gallegos and Provençal lyrics, expounded this dialectic in his Tesoro, saying ‘This book teaches that to learn virtue one must also study vice, in order to follow one and eschew the other, Aristotle saying that the same teaching is through two such contraries’ [Tesoro, 6ra, 72ra].7

II. Boethius on Polyphony

Boethius in De Institutione Musica in a passage in Doric Greek condemns Timotheus for inventing polyphonia, for arrogantly adding extra strings to the harp, polychordia, (like Thebes’ Amphion), and for being vainglorious, for which the Spartans exile him.8 Then Boethius himself used this strategy in his De consolatione philosophiae, his persona progressing from sonneteering self-pity to philosophical wisdom. Dante will do the same, his pilgrim persona in the Vita Nova journeying from adulterous lechery to Christian love, in the Commedia progressing from pride to humility. These works become his Augustinian Confessions, his Collodian Pinocchio, a bildungsroman, first wallowing in the eating of stolen fruit, then converting to true faith. Indeed the medieval manuscripts show Dante the character, the pilgrim, the apprentice, within the text, in blue, even as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice to Virgil the Necromancer, as the medieval world saw Publius Vergilius Maro,9 while outside the textual frame, as wise author, Dante Alighieri is in doctoral red, in teachers’ robes.

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Dante and Virgil Luca Signorelli, Orvieto, Fresco Imola, Bibl. Com. 37, fol 7r

Boethius opens his discussion of music in De Institutione Musica with the Pythagorean teaching that we are greatly influenced sensually and morally by music, which can incite us to violence or lechery, or which can channel excessive grief into poetry. He divides music into the harmony of the spheres, then the human music of the soul, and, last and least, instrumental music. Of the instruments, stringed lyres and harps with seven strings replicating the seven spheres, are the highest, wind and percussion instruments being the lowest, Francesco Ciabattoni noting the references to trumpets, drums and lutes in the Inferno, but generally to vocal music only, save in similes, in Purgatorio and Paradiso.10 Timotheus is particularly condemned because he adds extra strings to the seven of the harp to a total of ten, distorting its music which replicates that of the seven spheres. Boethius next plunges into ratios, proportions and harmonies.11

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius leaves that Pythagorean work, the De Musica, unfinished, being imprisoned in exile in Pavia in 523, awaiting his 524 execution, upon which he subsumes all its theory into the game Philosophia and he play of the wrong and right uses of music, the wrong being the lecherous music of the whores of the theatre into which Boethius’ ‘selfie’ has plunged and wallowing in self-pity, and the right use of music being Philosophia’s which balances and heals his soul to heavenly harmonies; though she seems to him at first to be a punishing Moses, a condemning Cato. She is his soul, his better half, calling him back to reason and to wisdom, instead of to the Sirens’ lust and Circe’s lethargy.

III. Dante’s Education

Vittorio Imbriani in the nineteenth century in Naples proclaimed Brunetto Latino to be far too busy a man to have also taught.12 Yet medieval Commedia commentaries and Leonardo Bruni’s Vita e costume di Dante note that Brunetto Latino was Dante’s teacher, that he became the orphan boy’s guardian, and

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that Dante’s fellow students with him were Guido Cavalcanti and Francesco da Barberino. We know from the archives in Fiesole that Brunetto’s father and brother were notarii to the Diocesan Bishops, including Filippo da Perusgia, the Franciscan who journeyed to Constantinople in 1279, and that traditionally notaries trained their sons in this skill, preserving, doing so, classical learning. In 1260, at the time of Montaperti’s Battle, Brunetto as the youthful Chancellor of Florence, had been sent on embassy to Alfonso el Sabio in Seville. There he also encountered Arabic learning, which preserved Greek learning largely lost to the West. Sentence of exile being proclaimed against his family, Brunetto next journeyed to Montpellier and Arras and earned his keep as notary of Florence’s Guelf government in exile, while at the same time producing his Tesoretto, dedicated to Alfonso el Sabio, and Li Livres dou Tresor, dedicated to Charles of Anjou. In the latter he plays the role of Aristotle who teaches a Charles of Anjou in the role of Alexander. In this text he also consciously quarries Boethius’ pedagogy. Alfonso, in his desire to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor with Florence’s aid, would present Florence with one of his magnificent Las Cantigas de Santa Maria manuscripts now in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Banco Rari 20. On his return from exile in Florence, Brunetto oversaw the production of the Tesoro in Florentine Italian by his students, one manuscript of which is written and copiously illustrated by Francesco da Barberino (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 42.19, and which even portrays Brunetto with his students, one of them Dante with the Tesoro in his lap. Only one Li Livres dou tresor manuscript exists in Florence, while a plethora of the Tesoretto and the Tesoro manuscripts do so in Italian. It is clear that this was Dante’s version, his education; Brunetto being as if Timotheus and Alexander to Pythagoras, Aristotle and Dante.13

Brunetto’s manuscripts often also contain Provençal lyrics, he exchanges a Tresor, now in the Escorial, for Alfonso el Sabio’s Las Cantigas de Santa Maria given to Florence, and he himself writes a Franciscan lauda for a Florentine

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compagnia dei laudesi.14 Of the next generation we learn from Boccaccio’s Trattattello in lauda di Dante Alighieri che ‘Sommamente si dilettò in suoni e in canti nella sua giovanezza, e a ciascuno che a que’ tempi era ottimo cantatore o sonatore fu amico e ebbe sua usanza; e assai cose, da questo diletto tirato compose, le quali di piacevole e maestrevole nota a questi cotali facea rivestire’.15 Thus we see Dante’s generation in the context of the dolce stil nuovo, delighting in singing and playing musical accompaniments with his fellow students and friends. Imagine them as like the Beatles of Liverpool. Florence’s Biblioteca Nazionale Banco Rari 217’s Canzoniere Palatina contains a rich collection of Sicilian and Tuscan lyrics, including ones by Guido Cavalcanti, one of these misattributed to Dante, and which often have the portraits of their poets, as do those of Provençal troubadours and Swiss minnesingers.16 From these Dante initially constructs his Boethian Vita Nova of love lyrics with the vida and razio, discussing them in De vulgari eloquentia II and the Convivio, then recycling some of these lyrics in his Commedia’s motets. In all these manuscripts with their author portraits as teaching their students or singing to their lady loves, we realize we are in a rich oral culture, whether in spoken prose or in sung verse, that these portraits, these vida, are sensual voices, as we see in the Canzoniere Palatino with its portraits and accompanying songs of Guittone d’Arezzo, Notaro Iacomo Lentini, Pier delle Vigne, Guido Guinizelli, Bonagiunta Urbiciani, and Guido Cavalcanti, their portraits and their voices echoed again in the Commedia, save for that of Cavalcanti – whose dolce stil nuovo was silenced to exile and death by Dante as Prior. Leonardo Bruni in Vita e costumi di Dante says of them: ‘Cominciossi a dire in rima, secondo scrive Dante, innanzi a lui circa anni centocinquanta; e furono i principi in Italia Guido Guinizzelli bolognese, e Guittone cavaliere Gaudente d'Arezzo, e Bonagiunta da Lucca, e Guido da Messina, i quali tutti Dante di gran lunga soverchiò di sentenze, e di politezza, e d'eleganza, e di leggiadria in tanto, che è opinione di chi intende, che non sarà mai uomo che Dante vantaggi in dire in rima.’

IV. Dante’s Sevenfold Polyphony

In Florence, in preparation for the 750th anniversary of Dante’s birth, the Ensemble San Felice of Federico Bardazzi and Marco Di Manno acted on a suggestion that we perform the music of Dante’s Commedia, making use of the manuscripts of the period, his ecclesiastical music being carefully documented, while his secular lyrics, for which the music has not survived,

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are performed contrafactum from music manuscripts of lyrics in canzonieri and laudari in Tuscan, Gallegos, Catalan, Provençal, etc., related to Brunetto’s and Dante’s rich multicultural ambience and from which Dante and his fellow poets fashioned the dolce stil nuovo, just as we find in Dante’s era in church music the heady experimentation of the ars nova, the use of forbidden polyphonia. St Francis had already shaped this rich duality with troubadour lyrics in the vulgar vernacular as contrafactum to the sacred love of the Creation and the Creator, sung in Florence and elsewhere by secular compaignie dei laudesi as at Orsanmichele and Sant’Egidio. In the pairs that follow I shall list the music chosen by my esteemed colleagues to perform in concert.

Hell has no music, apart from the parodic plagiary of the Templars’ hymn from Venantius Fortunatus, Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni (Inferno XXXIV.1) This snatch of a hymn, perhaps functioning as if a photographic negative, cacophonically mingled with groans and cries, contrasts tragically to the ensuing heaven-seeking polyphony. Yet Dante’s Hell is replete with musical instruments, particularly those connected with war violence, trumpets, bells, drums, bagpipes (Inferno XXII.7-10), and also to the obscene shape of the new-fangled Saracenic lute forced to sound like a drum (XXX.49,103), most of the other references being to the Apocalyptic Trump of Doomsday, a list reminding one of Bosch’s scenes of Hell. It is in Purgatorio II.46 that we first hear voices raised in melodious song, in a work, an exilic ‘carmen et error’ (Ovid, Tristia II), that becomes a Commedia a ‘Cantica Canticorum’ of Solomon, that will henceforth be filled with songs, both sacred and secular.

1. Purgatorio II.46-48,112, Psalm CIII, ‘In exitu Israel de Aegypto’, ‘tonus peregrinus’/ Casella/Dante, ‘Amor, che ne la mente mi ragiona’ (Convivio III, De vulgari eloquentia II,VI,6, contrafactum, ‘Mariam Matrem Virginem’, Llibre Vermeil de Montserrat, XIV C.).

But, immediately, a backsliding Timothean duality is presented, Psalm CIII’s In exitu Israel de Aegypto’s tonus peregrinus sung in choral unison by a hundredfold pilgrim souls (Purgatorio II.46-48) juxtaposed to Dante’s lyric, ‘Amor, che ne la mente mi ragiona’, Convivio III, De vulgari eloquentia II,VI, 6,

set to music and sung by Casella solo, becomes a motet (II.76-120), the sacred Latin translating the sacred Hebrew juxtaposed to the Tuscan vernacular, the centuplum monophony to solo polyphony, the first, Puritanical in its humility, antiquity and plainness, the second arrogantly seductive and new-fangled in

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its evocation of minstrelsy, of songs sung before the windows of one’s love, an ‘amoroso canto’ (II.107) – Siena’s State Archive documents fining Casella for so disturbing the peace of public space with his serenading. The De vulgari eloquentia clusters Dante’s lyric with those by ‘Folquetus da Marsilia, Arnaldus Danielis, Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcantis’, giving that by Folquetus (Folco of Marseilles, whom we shall meet in Paradiso IX), as ‘Tan m’abellis l’amoros pensamen’. We remember medieval, Renaissance and modern jokes, Chaucer’s Miller and his bagpipes leading Chaucer’s bawdry to Canterbury, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale lone Puritan who ‘sings psalms to horn-pipes’, and Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd’s ‘And ‘a can play the peanner, so ‘tis said. Can play so clever that ‘a can make a psalm tune sound as well as the merriest loose song a man can wish for’.

2. Purgatorio XIX.7-36,73, ‘Io son dolce Sirena’, contrafactum, ‘Co’ la Madre del Beato’, Laudario Fiorentino, BNCF, BR 18)/ Psalm XIX, ‘Adhesit pavimento anima mea’

Dante has already had Ulysses tell of his suicide-bombing shipwreck that has killed himself and all his comrades on the shores of the nuova terra (Inferno XXVI.46-142). Now we encounter the Siren and her song in Purgatorio XIX.7-36 that had earlier so threatened Ulysses’ voyage, and also Boethius’ example of the wrongful use of music, in a dream within the dream of the Commedia. (Ernest Jones in a footnote to his Hamlet and Oedipus states that the play within the play, like the dream within the dream, is that which the dreamer wishes were not so but which is.14 In questing manuscripts of St Birgitta of Sweden in her double monasteries throughout Europe I came across one in Munich written for Brigittine monks on the problem of ‘wet dreams’ and could not help smiling remembering when I taught for Franciscans in Quincy, of a novice and his water bed, pinning outside his Friary door a cartoon of a customer returning his water mattress saying to the salesman, ‘It gives me wet dreams’!) Dante’s Paradiso II.1-18 will open explaining that his poem is a pilgrim ship, the manuscript illuminations showing the Jerusalem cross upon its sail, such pilgrim ships setting sail with singing ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’.15

The contrafactum motet to the Siren’s Song is Psalm CXIX.25 which is barely heard at all as it is said by souls expiating their avarice by clinging to the pavement: ‘Adhesit pavimento anima mea’ (Purgatorio XIX.73). And which includes the lines, ‘Averte oculos meos ne videant vanitatem in via tua vivifica me’.

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In this second motet or pairing the psalm follows, instead of preceding the sinning song.

3. Purgatorio XXIII.10, XXIV.51, Psalm L, ‘Labia mea Domine’/ Bonagiunta Orbiciani/Dante ‘Donne che avete intelletto d’amore’ Vita Nova XIX, contrafactum ‘Imperauritz del ciutat joyosa’, Llibre Vermeil de Monserrat, XIV C.

In the circle where gluttony is punished we first hear lines from David’s Penitential Psalm on opening one’s lips to proclaim the praise of God, Purgatorio XXIII.10, his Psalm written to expiate his crimes of adultery and murder, then the backsliding into the seduction and celebration of the dolce stil nuovo, where lips are opened in the praise of women, rather than of God, where Bonagiunta da Lucca sings Dante’s Vita Nova lyric of Dante’s composing, ‘Donne che avete intelletto d’amore’, then speaks of the Sicilian Notaro Jacopo da Lentini and the Aretine Guittone as with him. (Again I recall a story, of a seminary student in Milan tasting the fruit of his first prostitute, being told by his rector, ‘Amato, no fruit for a week. You have had enough of it.’)

4. Purgatorio XXV.121, XXVI.140-147, Summe Deus clementie/ Arnaut Daniel/Dante, ‘Tan m’abellis vostre cortes deman’, contrafactum, Thibaut de Navarre, ‘Dex est ausi comme li pelicans’.

In Purgatorio XXV.121 the souls of the lustful, who include the poet Guido Guinizelli, do not sing a psalm, but instead a hymn to which the contrafactum becomes Arnaut Daniel’s Provençal lyric, Purgatorio XXVI.140-147, in actuality again composed by the virtuoso Dante, showing off his not inconsiderable skills, and for which he plagiarizes not Arnaut Daniel but Folquet da Marsiglia’s and Berenguer de Palou’s ‘Tan m’abellis’. As author,

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Dante assumes the masks of many other authors, as poet that of other poets, purloining from them their poetry throughout his pages.

5. Purgatorio XXVII.58,100-108, Venite, benedicti patris mei/ ‘Sappia qualunque mio nome dimanda’, contrafactum, Alfonso el Sabio, ‘Maravillosos miragres’, Cantiga de Santa Maria 272, BNCF BR 14.

In Purgatorio XXVII.58 a voice is heard singing, announcing eventide. Then Dante falls asleep and dreams of a singer who is Lia with Rachel, as a precursor to Matelda with Beatrice, the active versus the contemplative life (Purgatorio XXVII.100-108). Apart from the Siren, also heard in a dream, this is the first woman’s song we hear, Lia/Matelda functioning as the precursor, like John the Baptist, to Rachel/Beatrice as Christ. We recall Dante had already played such a transvestite game in the Vita Nova, where Cavalcanti’s Giovanna is the ‘prima vera’, the herald to Beatrice. We are entering the realm of the Blessed, the expiation from sin being almost fulfilled.

6. Purgatorio XXX.11,19,21,83-84, Veni de Libano, sponsa mea, contrafactum, ‘Peccatrice nominato Magdalena da Dio amata’, Laudario Fiorentino, BNCF BR 18/ Benedictus qui venis/ Manibus o data plena lilias/In te, Domine, speravi, contrafactum, ‘Ortorium virentium/Virga Yesse/Victime paschali laudes’, Laudario Fiorentino, BNCF BR 18, Psalm XXXI

Here the motet, this time, triple, perhaps even quadruple, is entirely in Latin, from the Song of Songs, the Gospel (Luke 19, 38; Matthew 21, 5 and 9) and from Virgil’s Aeneid, the Jewish, the Christian and the pagan Roman, all together (Purgatorio XXX.11,19, 21), followed by Psalm XXXI at lines 83-84. We know of Dante’s friendship with Emmanuel Romano, likewise a composer of polyphony, and thus that he could also know that the ‘Benedictus qui venis’ sung at Palm Sunday at Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, comparing him to David, derives from the wedding song sung at a

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bridegroom’s entry into Synagogue.* Here we have Beatrice being greeted as if Bathsheba, and the Queen of Sheba, Dante being greeted as if David and as if Solomon, while the Aeneid recalls the lines about the funeral of Marcellus over which his uncle Caesar Augustus wept and Octavia fainted on hearing Virgil chant them in Rome, Aeneid VI.884. It is just possible that this motet is even more complicated, quadruple, and that its burden is Psalm XXXI. For in the same canto we find the angels singing, ‘In te, Domine, speravi’, until they come to the lines of ‘pedes meos’ (Purgatorio XXX.82-84, Psalm XXXI,1-8).

7. Paradiso VIII.29/37, Agios, O Theos/ ‘Voi che’ntendo il terzo ciel movete’ (Convivio II, contrafactum, Marchetto da Padova, Ave regina/Mater innocentiae)

In Paradiso VIII.37, we again meet a gathering of poets, Dante encountering his dead friend Carlo Martello of Anjou, King of Hungary, and brother to Franciscan St Louis of Toulouse, the motet combining ‘Hosanna’, here sung in its Greek form by the Ensemble San Felice, and Dante’s own famous lyric ‘Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete’, sung here by a saintly king, in a conversation that will be followed by discourse of Sordello and Folco (Folchetto) of Marseilles (Paradiso IX). The third sphere is that of Venus and thus evokes the singing of canti amorosi; however, it is also St Paul’s vision in which he was caught up into the third heaven, his conversion from his old Saul self to his new: ‘Boasting is necessary, though it is not profitable; but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago-- whether in the body I do not know, or out of the body I do not know, God knows-- such a man was caught up to the third heaven. And I know how such a man-- whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, God knows—‘ (2 Corinthians 12. 1-3). Indeed in Convivio II, first giving this lyric, Dante had written of allegory as the truth hidden beneath a beautiful lie and how Psalm CIII gave both the carnal sense and the allegorical, of the literal history, of the Exodus of Israel from Egypt, but also how the soul freed from sin is made holy and free.

The Commedia has other uses of music apart from these seven motets. Among them the most lovely weaving together of the three and four Graces, the Christian and Pagan Virtues, singing Psalm LXXVIII, in Purgatorio XXXIII.1-3, that is so particularly poignant following the Loss of the Jerusalem Kingdom: Deus venerunt gentes. Beatrice’s death in the Vita Nova, 8 June 1290, had coincided with the loss of the Jerusalem Kingdom, 28 May 1291, from which Dante poetically constructs the new Jerusalem as a Florence/Rome of

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penitential pilgrimage. It is a scene which Botticelli will still be echoing in his ‘Primavera’, just as his ‘Birth of Venus’ resurrected the dead Simonetta Vespucci. When I heard this Psalm sung alternatim by the three and the four women’s voices of the Ensemble San Felice in Orsanmichele it was as if we were in the presence of the Music of the Spheres, as if Amphion’s ten-stringed lyre and David’s ten-stringed harp converted back to Pythagoras’ seven-stringed lyre were a’building the new Jerusalem, a new Florence, though she was born out of the sorrows of the old, even as a new Thebes over whom Niobe mourned.

Another is where the souls on Purgatorio XI.1-5’s Terrace of Pride sing the Pater noster vulgarized into Italian as a Franciscan canticle, a Franciscan lauda, ‘O Padre nostro, che nei cieli stai . . . laudato sia il tuo nome. . . da ogni creatura’, the mortals’ song mirror-reflecting that of angels chanting Osanna (10-12), reminding us as well of Andrea Della Robbia’s Santa Croce sculpture shaped from Adam’s clay but glazed with sky blue, of Jesus, as God-Man, praying this prayer with us to God.16

V. From Seven to Ten

To the classical dictate of the strict limit of seven strings to the lyre, resonating with the seven heavenly spheres, there was, however, the concept that David’s harp had ten strings signifying the Ten Commandments given to man by God. A concept taught to Dante by Brunetto concerning David in the Tesoro: ‘|Ma dauid profetoe fuori di queste iiij. maniere |Che egli profetoe per somma interpretatione di dio. e di sancto spirito. ke'l insegno dire/tutta la natiuitade di xpo. Che elli scoprio quello/ke li altri profeti aueuano detto copertamente. secondo l'uomo puote uedere nel suo libro. ke appellato salterio. in sembiança d'uno stormento/chiamato altressi saltero. lo quale a. x. uoci. che significano. x. Comandamenti de la legge. che dio die a moyse. El saltero ne parla molto di ciò. in .Cl. salmi che vi sono’ [Tesoro, fol. 12vb]. In Dante’s Judaeo-Christian culture, David, Moses and God with their ten-stringed harp, their Ten Commandments, can trump Pythagoras’s monophonic seven, permitting Timothean polyphonic games. Timotheus’ name, itself, means that ‘fear of God’ which is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 1.7, 9,10, Psalm 111,10).

For all these outrageous tensions of sacred yoked to profane, harmonies to discord, obverse and reverse, the seven polyphonies, become resolved in the

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magnificent Magnificat paradox the white-clad Latin-writing Cistercian St Bernard will pray in Paradiso XXXIII, ‘Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio’, a song which paradoxically is in Italian and which is a Franciscan lauda such as were sung by the Florentine laity, by women and children unlearned in Latin, in their compagnia dei laudesi. This is the eighth side of the baptismal font, the renewal, the salvation of the anima. For it Federico Bardazzi chose the contrafactum of ‘Parade mentes ora’, Alfonso el Sabio’s Cantiga 241.

Brunetto Latino, who himself wrote a magnificent lauda to the Virgin, says in the Tesoro:

Et sappiate che la nostra donna moriò al secolo corporalmente. e portarolla li apostoli a seppelire ne la valle di iosaphat. faciendo si grandi canti li angeli in cielo ke non si potrebe ne dire ne contare. |Et quel canto udirono li apostoli. e molti altri per l'uniuerso mondo. |Ma poi chella fu seppellita. al terço dì li apostoli non ui trouaro el corpo suo. |Onde douemo credere che domenedio la resuscito. et è collui ne la gloria di paradiso [Tesoro, fol. 15rb].

This recalls the sculpture placed by Arnolfo di Cambio above the left entrance to Santa Reparata of the Dormition of the Virgin where Christ compassionately carries aloft to heaven the soul of his mother, sculpted with the anatomical boning of a little girl child, the ‘Daughter of her Son’, Wisdom, who plays at God’s side at the Creation of the world (Proverbs 8, 22-36). Timotheus/Amphion/ Orpheus/David/Solomon/Paul/Augustine/Boethius/ Dante have redeemed themselves in redeeming us their readers and hearers. Thus the discordia concors of the Commedia is resolved – humbly and anonymously. Dante here, for once, does not boast proudly of his own exquisite virtuoso composition - which is nowhere found amongst Bernard’s Latin words.

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Notes

In my 2013 University of Pennsylvania paper, ‘Piccarda: Monasticism and Neuro-Humanities ‘, I had already called for performing Dante and for studying him in a right, rather than left, brain context, with sound and colour, music and image. Right brain constructions are complex, yoke contraries, as in motets, and create antiphonal, symmetric, enveloping, chiastic structures, as in Gothic vaulting; left brain methods are linear and analytical, in architecture making use of simplistic lintel and post boxes, and are overly blunt and superficial when applied to medieval masterworks.

1 Augustine, Confessions IX.x. Augustine’s mystical discourse with his mother at Ostia centres on their arriving at a mutual and global silence. At her death, chapter xi, a psalm is sung. While Dante has Casella disturb the holy island mountain with lecherous song of Dante’s own composing, until Cato breaks its Sirenic spell.

2 Mattias Lundberg, Tonus Peregrinus: The History of a Psalm Tone; Dunstan J. Tucker, O.S.B., ‘ ‘In Exitu Israel de Aegypto’: The Divine Comedy in The Light of the Easter Liturgy’, Benedictine Review 11:1 (1960) 43-61; Robert Hollander, ‘Purgatorio II: Cato's Rebuke and Dante's scoglio,’ Italica 52 (1975) 348-363.

3 Nicolino Applauso observes that Casella is fined, 13 July 1282, Biccherna 84 c. 1r, Archivio di Stato di Siena: ‘Casella homine curiae quia fuit inventus de nocte post tertium sonum campanae Comunis’, ‘‘S’i fosse foco ardere’ il mondo’: L’esilio e la politica nella poesia di Cecco Angiolieri’, Letteratura Italiana Antica, p. 226.

4 Julia Bolton Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer, pp. 145-162, Plate Xa.

5 Fernand Mossé, Handbook of Middle English, Plate II, pp. 201-202, 369; Yvonne Rokseth, Polyphonies du XIIIe siècle: Le manuscript H 196 de la faculté de médicine de Montpellier, 4 vols, passim.

6 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World; Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol, passim.

7 ‘|Che due cose contrarie quando sono insieme/l'una contra l'altra. elle sono più cognoscenti’ [Tesoro, 6ra], and ‘I|N questo libro ci ae mostrato el mastro L’insegnamenti de le uirtù e de uitij. L’uno per operare. e l’altro per

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schifare. che questa e la cagione per che l’uomo de sapere bene e male. |Et tutto chello libro parli più de le uirtù ke de uitij. non pertanto la oue lo bene sia comandato a farlo. secondo che aristotile dice. |Vno medesimo insegnamento è in due contrarie cose [Tesoro, 72ra].

8 Boethius, De Institutione musica.

9 Domenico Comparetti, Virgilio nel Medio Evo, passim.

10 Francesco Ciabattoni, Dante’s Journey to Polyphony, pp. 48-66.

11 Once I called up a manuscript of the De Musica in Verona’s Biblioteca Capitolare to find its complex visual images of these harmonies gloriously colour-coded. Alongside manuscripts of Dante’s Vita Nova and those of Provençal lyrics, from which Ezra Pound’s appunti fell to the floor.

12 Vittorio Imbriani, 'Dimostrazione che Brunetto Latini non fu maestro di Dante', Giornale napoletano di filosofia e lettere. A VII (1878). 1-24, 169, 198; rpt. as 'Che Brunetto Latini non fu maestro di Dante', StD, 1891, pp. 335-80. Francesco Novati, Le Epistole. Conferenza letta da Francesco Novati nella Sala di Dante in Orsanmichele, 1905, pp. 7-14; 'Il Notaio nella vita e nella letteratura italiana delle origini', Freschi e minii del Dugento, 1925, pp. 243-64, 269-76; challenges Imbriani by demonstrating Brunetto educated Dante.

13 Julia Bolton Holloway, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, passim.

14 Provençal poems in Brunetto Latino MSS: Li Livres dou Tresor: Torino, Biblioteca Nazionale, L.II.18; Fiore di filosofi e di molti savi, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Conv. Soppr. F.4.766. Li Livres dou Tresor, Madrid, Escorial L.II.3; Alfonso el Sabio, Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Banco Rari 20. ‘Maestro latino’, Lauda, in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Palatino 168, fols. 34v-37r, Twice-Told Tales, pp. 504-509.

15 Boccaccio, Trattattello in lauda di Dante Alighieri.

16 Il Canzoniere Palatino: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Banco Rari 217, ex Palatino 418, ed. Lino Leonardi.

17 Leonardo Bruni Aretino, Vita e costume di Dante.

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18 Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia II.

19 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ‘A baggepipe wel koude he blowe and sowne/And therewithal he brought us oute of toune’, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, General Prologue, lines 565-566, p. 32; William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, IV.iii.40.50, ’but one puritan amongst them, and he sings psalms to hornpipes’, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Hardin Craig and David Bevington, p. 1233; Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, pp. 92-93.

20 Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus, p. 99.

21 Julia Bolton Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book, ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’, pp. 73, 83-84.

22 Immanuello Romano, L’Inferno e Il Paradiso, ed. Giorgio Battistoni; Giorgio Battistoni, Verona, ‘Il Libro della Scala, Dante Alighieri, La Commedia, e Immanuello Romano, L'Inferno e il Paradiso’, The City and the Book International Conference II, The Manuscript, The Illumination, Accademia delle Arte del Disegno, Via Orsanmichele 4, Florence, 4-7 September 2002, http://www.florin.ms/beth3.html

23 I Della Robbia e l’arte nuova’ della scultura invetriata, ed., Giancarlo Gentilini, pp. 202-203.

24 Arnolfo alle origini del Rinascimento fiorentino, ed., Enrica Neri Lusanna, pp. 260-261.

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Manuscripts:

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Benvenuto da Imola, Commentary to Dante Alighieri, Commedia, Imola, 32, fol. 7r.

Brunetto Latino. Il Tesoretto. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Strozzi 146.

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Brunetto Latino. Il Tesoro. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 42.19.

‘Maestro latino’. Lauda. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Palatino 168, fols. 34v-37r.

Il Canzoniere Palatino. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Banco Rari 217, ex-Palatino 418.

Dante Alighieri, Commedia. British Library, Additional 19587, fol. 62 r.

Dante Alighieri, Commedia. Imola, Biblioteca Comunale, 32, fol. 7r.

Laudario Fiorentino, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Banco Rari 18

Monserrat, ‘Mariam Matrem Virginem’, Llibre Vermeil de Montserrat

Montpellier H 196, fols. 270r-377r. http://manuscrits.biu-montpellier.fr/vignettem.php?GENRE[]=MP&ETG=OR&ETT=OR&ETM=OR&BASE=manuf

‘Sumer is icumen in’. London, British Museum, Harley 978, fol. 11v. http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Harley_MS_978

Studies:

Dante Alighieri. La Commedia. Testo critico secondo i più antichi manoscritti fiorentini. A cura di Antonio Lanza. Anzio: De Rubeis, 1996.

Dante Alighieri. La Commedia secondo l'antica vulgata a cura di Giorgio Petrocchi. Edizione Nazionale a cura della Società Dantesca Italiana. Milano: Mondadori, 1966-1967.

Dante Alighieri. La divina commedia nella figurazione artistica e nel secolare commento. A cura di Guido Biagi, Giuseppe Lando Passerini, Enrico Rostagno & Umberto Cosmo. 3 vols. Torino: UTET, 1924-39.

Dante Alighieri. La Divina Commedia. Illustrazioni di Sandro Botticelli. Firenze: Le Lettere, 1997.

Vittorio Alinari. Paesaggi italici nella 'Divina Commedia'. Firenze: Presso Giorgio e Piero Alinari, 1921.

Beniamino Andriani. La Musica della Divina Commedia.

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http://www.culturaservizi.it/vrd/files/ZG1966_musica_Divina_Commedia.pdf

Gilberto Aranci. Il Laudario fiorentino del trecento. Montespertoli: Aleph, 2002.

Erminia Ardissino. ‘I Canti liturgici nel Purgatorio dantesco’. Dante Studies, 108 (1990), 39-65.

Arnolfo alle origini del Rinascimento fiorentino. Ed. Enrica Neri Lusanna. Firenze: Polistampa, 2005.

Augustine. Confessions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977. Loeb Classics 16-17.

M.M Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius. De Institutione musica. Leipzig: Teubner, 1867.

Sr Julia Bolton Holloway, Federico Bardazzi, Marco di Manno. La Musica della Commedia. Firenze: Ensemble San Felice, 2015. DVD of music performed, Ravenna, 14 June, Florence, Duomo, 8 September, 2015, and elsewhere.

Julia Bolton Holloway. The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer. Berne: Peter Lang, 1992.

Julia Bolton Holloway. Twice Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri. Berne: Peter Lang, 1993.

Peter Brieger, Millard Meiss, Charles S. Singleton. Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. 2 vols.

Michael Camille. The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in the Medieval Art. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Il Canzoniere Palatino: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Banco Rari 217, ex Palatino 418. A cura di Lino Leonardi. Firenze: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2000.

Geoffrey Chaucer. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Francesco Ciabattoni. Dante’s Journey to Polyphony. Toronto: University of

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Toronto Press, 2010.

Fletcher Collins. The Production of Medieval Church Music-Drama. Charlottesville, 1972.

Fletcher Collins. Medieval Church Music-Drama: A Repertory of Complete Plays. Charlottesville, 1976.

Domenico Comparetti, Virgilio nel Medio Evo. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1941.

Edmond de Coussemaker. Drames liturgiques du Moyen Age, texte et musique. Rennes: Vatard, 1860.

Raffaele De Benedictis. Ordine e struttura musicale nella Divina Commedia. Florence: European Press Academic Publishing, 2000.

I Della Robbia e l’arte nuova’ della scultura invetriata. Ed., Giancarlo Gentilini. Fiesole, Basilica di Sant’Alessandro, 29 maggio-1 novembre 1998. Firenze: Giunti, 1998.

Robert Hollander. ‘Purgatorio II: Cato's Rebuke and Dante's scoglio,’ Italica 52 (1975) 348-363.

Vittorio Imbriani. 'Dimostrazione che BL non fu maestro di Dante'. Giornale napoletano di filosofia e lettere. A VII (1878). 1-24, 169, 198. Rpt. as 'Che BL non fu maestro di Dante'. StD. Florence: Sansoni, 1891. Pp. 335-80. Ernest Jones. Hamlet and Oedipus. Garden City: Doubleday, 1955.

Mattias Lundberg. Tonus Peregrinus: The History of a Psalm Tone. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

Jacopo Mazzei. ‘Trovatori e lirica profana nella Divina Commedia’ Tesi di laurea, Università di Bologna, 2006-7.

Fernand Mossé. Handbook of Middle English. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1952.

Francesco Novati. 'Il Notaio nella vita e nella letteratura italiana delle origini'. In Freschi e minii del Dugento. Milano: Cogliati, 1925. Pp. 243-64.

Le Epistole. Conferenza letta da Francesco Novati nella Sala di Dante in Orsanmichele. Firenze: Sansoni, 1905. Lectura Dantis.

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Thomas Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

Judith Peraino. Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Yvonne Rokseth. Polyphonies du XIIIe siècle: Le manuscript H 196 de la faculté de médicine de Montpellier. Paris: Oiseau Lyre, 1936-1939. 4 vols.

Immanuello Romano. L’Inferno e Il Paradiso. Ed. Giorgio Battistoni. Firenze: Giuntina, 2000

William Shakespeare. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. Hardin Craig and David Bevington. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman, 1973.

Leo Spitzer. Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony. Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘Stimmung’. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963.

Mimi Stillman, ‘The Music of Dante’s Purgatorio’. Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies Vol. 1, No. 1, 2005 http://hortulus.net/journal/20052Stillman.pdf

Sacre rappresentazioni nel manoscritto 201 della Bibliothèque Municipale di Orléans. A cura di Giampiero Tintori. Cremona, 1958.

Dunstan J. Tucker, O.S.B., ‘ ‘In Exitu Israel de Aegypto’: The Divine Comedy in The Light of the Easter Liturgy’. Benedictine Review 11:1 (1960) 43-61

Dunstan J. Tucker, O.S.B., ‘Dante's Reconciliation in the Purgatorio’. Benedictine Review 20:1 (1969) 75-92

Paul Walker. http://www.worldofdante.org/docs/chanttexts_translations.pdf

Karl Young. The Drama of the Medieval Church. Oxford, 1933. 2 vol.

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VII FRANCISCAN COMEDY

PARADISO XI

I. Commentaries

aradiso XI’s commentators can be divided into several groups. The earlier

commentators can write marginal glosses to the text, surrounding its

Italian with deeply learned Latin explanations, giving it the same treatment

as would theologians the Gospel and Bible, these coming into print under the

Victorian aegis of Lord Vernon, being assembled in the volumes of Guido

Biagi, 1924-39, and, later, edited by Vincenzo Cioffari and Massimiliano

Chiamenti. Of these Pietro Alighieri, Dante’s son, is probably the closest to

his father’s intent and who also had access to the paternal library, but,

because he is most truthful about his father’s fictiveness (as also is Francesco

da Buti), his commentary has been disparaged. Another group, which

includes an early commentary, are Dominicans who approach the text with

both appreciation and scholarship through the lens of the Queen of Sciences

of the University of Paris. Yet another group are Franciscans, and a subgroup

of theirs, those who relate Dante and Giotto, seeing the Canto coupled with

images, its backdrop being the history of their Founder and their Order, who

participate in the text affectively and who seek the same for their readers. A

fourth group are the academic and secular editors of Dante’s text and the

composers of Lecturae Dantis upon it, in the school of Croce and Momigliano,

who tend to eschew the wisdom and theology of the Dominican and the

ardour and iconography of the Franciscan schools, while reading the text

with perhaps too much literalness, as a sacred cow, turning a blind eye to the

laughter within it. This Lectura Dantis, as in a kaleidoscope, will try to gather

all their oppositions into a unity.

P

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II. The Canto’s Context

It is not just Canto XI that celebrates Franciscanism, it is the whole Commedia,

indeed Dante’s entire life and death, that does so: St Francis’ wolf of Gubbio

shadowed as in a photographic negative in Inferno I.49-54; the dropping of

the Franciscan’s cord (a soul-selling) to summon Geryon,

Around my waist I had a cord as girdle,

and with it once I thought I should be able

to catch the leopard with the painted hide.

Inferno XVI.106, referring to I.31-36;

Francesco di Bartolo da Buti of the University of Pisa claiming Dante was first

a Franciscan oblate, studying at Santa Croce’s famous school, when he was

left orphaned of his mother at five, of his father at twelve, later a tertiary, a

point not disputed until the Positivism of the Victorians; Guido da

Montefeltro’s use and abuse of the Franciscan cord, ‘then wore the cord,

believing that, so girt, I made amends’, Inferno XXVII.67-68; the Padre Nostro

in Purgatorio XI.4-5 as a lauda, ‘laudato sia ‘l tuo nome . . da ogne creatura’,

‘praised be Your name . . . by every creature’; the story of Clarissan Piccarda,

of the Donati family, whose convent in Florence, founded by St Francis for St

Agnes, St Clare’s sister, possessed Frances' saio, his garment, in Paradiso III; St

Francis’ prominent presence, before Saints Benedict and Augustine, in the

Celestial Rose, Paradiso XXXII.34; Dante’s Invocation to the Virgin that he

gives to Cistercian St Bernard of Paradiso XXXIII to sing as likewise a

Franciscan lauda, in its use of the vernacular, not Latin; and finally Dante's

burial in exile at the church of San Francesco in Ravenna, his corpse in

Franciscan garb as is traditional of a Tertiary.

But Dante chiastically and chivalrously presents Franciscanism to us through

the lens of its rival Dominicanism. Indeed we are not in Francis’ presence in

Paradiso XI, his story rhetorically narrated by another, Bruno Nardi

reminding us that it is not really Thomas Aquinas even who is speaking to us

of Francis of Assisi, but Dante himself, using Aquinas as his mask to do so, as

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he will later do with the mask of St Bernard invoking the Virgin. We are in

the world of Dosteivsky and Bakhtin, a world of polyphonic voices. Dante

then creates with these interlocked cantos, Paradiso X-XIV.1-86, of the Sun,

echoing St Francis’ Canticle of the Sun, echoing Solomon’s Song of Songs, an

image of a clock with its escapements, the contrapassi of ‘for every action there

is an equal and opposite reaction’, of twelve Church Fathers, theologians all,

decidedly not all in agreement with each other, of whom St Thomas Aquinas

O.P. is one, ending Paradiso X with a statement about a flock of sheep, which

Aquinas, smiling, quotes again twice in Paradiso XI, following Dante’s own

discourse to the Reader on leaving behind worldly things for Heaven, to be

followed by a further circling of twelve Church Fathers, again all theologians,

again in a harmony of opposites. At the centre of each of these two circlings

of lights (like a mirror-reflecting double rainbow), an active, rather than

contemplative, prince of the Church is lauded, the Dominican Aquinas

lauding seraphic St Francis in Paradiso XI, the Franciscan Bonaventure

lauding cherubic St Dominic in Paradiso XII. These are the thirteenth-century

preaching mendicant Founding Friars, with an urban ministry, who enliven

the Church from its earlier elite and remote Benedictine and Cistercian

monasticism at Norcia and Subiaco, at Clairvaux and Rievaulx. But both

mint-new Orders are now in turn rapidly becoming corrupt, the Franciscans

splitting between Spirituals, who live Francis’ Gospel Rule, deemed heretical

by the status quo, and Conventuals, led by Brother Elia of Cortona, who

comply with worldliness and the Papacy, seize the body of Francis from the

Cathedral and build the great Basilica for it of dressed stone, funded by the

Curia, both Franciscan and Dominican Orders straying from their Founders’

charisms. They exhibit a bedraggled out-dated ‘modernity’, like an Arab

Spring quickly gone sour, needing the escapement of this narration, its checks

and balances.

III. The Canto’s Apostrophe

Canto XI opens with a powerful apostrophe against sophistic learning for

personal gain, lust and idleness, used by lawyers, physicians, priests and

politicians, through plagiary, fraud and violence, those who have strayed

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from their teachers of the choreography of the twelve dancing and singing

doctors of the previous Canto, Paradiso X, whom John Freccero and Vincenzo

Placella see as also the Signs of the Zodiac: Thomas Aquinas, Albertus

Magnus, Gratian, Peter Lombard, Solomon, Dionysius the [Pseudo-]

Areopagite, Orosius, Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Bede, Richard of St Victor,

and Siger of Brabant; and the twelve of the next Canto, Paradiso XII:

Bonaventure, Illuminato da Rieti, Augustine of Assisi, Hugh of St Victor,

Peter of Spain [Pope John XXI], Peter Comestor, Nathan, John Chrysostom,

Anselm, Donatus, Hrabanus Maurus, and Joachim of Fiore:

O senseless cares of mortals, how deceiving

are syllogistic reasonings that bring

your wings in flight so low, to earthly things!

One studied law and one the Aphorisms

of the physicians, one was set on priesthood

and one through force or fraud on rulership;

One meant to plunder, one to politick;

one labored, tangled in delights of flesh,

and one was fully bent on indolence (1-9).

This counter list of those who are foolishly for themselves rather than for true

learning is juxtaposed to Dante’s own placement in Heaven with Beatrice

encircled by these twenty-four:

while I, delivered from our servitude

to all these things, was in the height of heaven

with Beatrice, so gloriously welcomed (10-12).

Raoul Manselli notes Jacopono da Todi lamenting, ‘Mal vedemmo Parisi,

c’have destrutto Ascisi’. While Bruno Nardi sees Hippocrates’ Aphorisms as

being commented on by Taddeo Alderotti (who translated Aristotle’s

Nicomachean Ethics and who dedicated a work to Corso Donati). Francesco

Mazzoni notes the apostrophe’s antecedants in Lucretius and Persius and

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also relates the lines on the quest for power to Dante’s criticism of Corso

Donati (who became podestà of Treviso). The later reference (48) to Umbria

being under the ‘giogo’, yoke, tyranny, of Robert of Anjou, reflects back to

this apostrophe. It is as well a splendidly up-to-date passage, prophesying

John Donne’s ‘The Sunne Rising’, describing all our ills today in the academy,

in medicine, in law, in politics become deeply corrupt.

In Dante’s text we are not in the modern world’s linearity of discreet boxes,

though we treat Cantos, (which were simply units, sound bites for his

audience’s attention span, best suited for oral recitation, but with hooked

atoms, perils of Pauline, back and forth referencing to the rest of the

Commedia), in this way with reverently solemn Lecturae Dantis. Dante’s mode,

instead, is in a right-brain world of circles which include and embrace

opposites in chiastic and choreographed patterns, even to turning themselves

inside out. The polyphonic dance of the previous canto returns to its original

position, and the light that is Aquinas, like a moving hand-held candle now

set at rest in its stand (15), as in those great circled candled lights in churches,

in a mirror structuring to wheel/rose windows of the Twelve Apostles about

the Virgin and Child, but on a plane at right angles, smiles.

IV. Aquinas’ Francis

Thomas Aquinas, smiling, then speaks again, explaining that by the light of

Christ, through the Holy Spirit, which his light but reflects, he understands

Dante’s unspoken question, his two doubts, and he explains the statement he

had made earlier, ‘U’ ben s’impigna’, ‘They fatten well’, of Friars as their

needing to follow their two Founders’ opposing charisms closely. He leaves

the second doubt, ‘Perils of Pauline’, concerning Solomon and all his wisdom,

for the succeeding Canto. He explains that Providence has selected these two

to guide the Church, the widowed Bride of Christ, so that Christ’s cries – his

loud cries as his orgasm – be greater, to whom she is wed in his blessed

blood. (This explanation is consonant with Etienne Gilson’s lectures at

Berkeley in which he noted that Aquinas described the orgasm of Adam and

Eve in Paradise as greater than any following the Fall, though it shocks such

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commentators as Umberto Bosco and Francesco Mazzoni who only read this

as the Gospel ‘clamans voce magna’ of Matthew 27.50.)

One prince is seraphic (Francis, 37), whom John S. Carroll speaks of as ‘Love’,

the other, cherubic (Dominic, 38-9), whom Carroll calls ‘Wisdom’, in

compliance with Aquinas’ own definitions of Seraphim and Cherubim. They

are like the angelic Shekinah, the twinned winged presence of God

surrounding the Ark. They also embody the two champions who will right

the Church, and combat against the Antichrist, one from the East (Italian

Francis), one from the West (Spanish Dominic) of Joachim da Fiore’s

prophecy. Manselli and Nardi see Francis as the Joachite Sixth Seal of the

Apocalypse: ‘angelus ascendens ab ortu solis, habens signum Dei vivi’, ‘the

angel ascending from the garden of the sun, having the seal of the living

God’, of the Liber Figurarum, this seal being both the seal of the Papal Bull

authorizing the Friars Minor and the seal of the five-fold stigmata at Monte

Averna. Dante has Aquinas reconcile their opposition to each other, as in

their historical embrace in Rome in 1215, reflected in the later Della Robbia

sculpture and the Fra Angelico painting, by having the Dominican celebrate

the Franciscan and vice versa in a chiasmus of humility, rather than of

discordant rivalry. Nor was this extraordinary, for it was the tradition for

centuries in the two Orders for a Franciscan to preach to Dominicans on St

Dominic’s day and vice versa.

Perhaps the best commentators for this Canto’s Franciscanism and

Dominicanism are an anonymous Dominican – whom Vincenzo Cioffari

demonstrates has to cease writing his commentary in British Library MS

Egerton 943 at Paradiso XII when Chapter in Santa Maria Novella in 1335

forbids members of the Dominican Order of Preachers to read the Italian

works of Dante – then the modern Dominican scholars being freed from that

prohibition, Kenelm Foster, O.P., and Etienne Gilson. The fourteenth-century

Dominican glossator, Anonimo latino, notes Francis’ espousal of poverty is a

doctrine that is ‘falsam et hereticam’, false and heretical, complying with

political correctness to the Papal Curia’s ruling against the Spirituals. He also

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corrects Dante’s text (65), saying that the dating should include 120 more

years than just ‘eleven hundred’, to reflect the time when the two Orders

‘predicatorum et minorum’ of Friars Preachers and Friars Minor, were

founded.

V. The Canto’s Geography

Dante frequently anchors his allegorical poem to real geography, Gorni

speaking of Dante’s Commedia as a Baedekker, so much so that Vittorio

Alinari was able to travel throughout Italy photographing the places that are

named and which we today can explore using Google Earth. Here Dante lists

the river Topino, between the Tiber and the Arno, Perugia, Nocera and

Gualdo (43-48), giving his tale ‘a local habitation and a name’. He speaks of

this territory as that of the hermit Ubaldo who became Bishop of Gubbio,

Francis’ saintly precursor and role model. Then he plays on the allegory of

Assisi’s name just as he has already mentioned Perugia’s Porta del Sole (46),

equating Assisi with the sunrise, ‘Ascesi’, ‘O Oriens’, as in the Advent

Antiphon, drawing the analogy of Francis to Christ, Francis as imitatio Christi,

the mint-new Christ, as did modern Italians to a fellow Franciscan, Padre Pio

– and now to Pope Francis. He even plots this journeying of the Sun from its

rising in the Ganges in India (51), to Assisi (52-54), to it being seen from

Perugia’s Porta del Sole (46). Interestingly, Francesco da Buti suggests the

river Ganges is ‘Geon’, one of the Four Rivers from Paradise (Gihon/Gyon,

Physon, Tigris, Euphrates), which Josephus and Brunetto Latino also so

identified.

VI. Auerbach’s Lady Poverty

Erich Auerbach wrote in exile from Hitler in Istanbul, with just a suitcase of

books to do so, a brilliant essay on the shock of Povertà as the desired

prostitute of the Friars, coupled with the school of Giotto fresco in Assisi's

lower basilica seen by the priest celebrating Mass of that scene (likely

influenced by Dante’s Canto). There is something odd about that fresco. The

figure of Lady Poverty is brilliant, anorexic, ragged, patched, terrifying, who

is cruelly stoned by children. The Friar being married to her by Christ,

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however, is not the lean ascetic Francis in grey but a plump generic

Conventual in black. Auerbach’s essay shocked the Italian dantisti, Umberto

Bosco and Francesco Mazzoni, who preferred the traditional solemn

ritualistic Lectura Dantis, though Marguerite Chiarenza argues for the erotic

allegoreses from late medieval theologians, such as Bernard, on Solomon’s

Song of Songs. Psalm 19.4-5, has the sun be like a bridegroom coming forth

from his chamber. Dante, having already spoken of ‘loud cries’ (32) and of

the ‘porta del piacer’ (60, which even the Enciclopedia Dantesca from the Roman

de la Rose, speaks of as the woman’s private parts), now describes Poverty, the

true Holy Church, as mounting the Cross, consummating her marriage with

Christ there in most public intimacy, while Mary mourns at his feet. The

shock is achieved by having allegory (allos, ‘other than’, agorein, ‘the market

place’) violently intrude into its very opposite, the agora, the marketplace

outside of the church, of reality. Early Christianity, until eleven hundred

years before 1300, had espoused her. Not so its later corrupt version which

came to scorn and despise her until that moment in Assisi’s town square

when St Francis tore off his clothing before the Bishop in his father’s shocked

presence. The 1207 scene that the school of Giotto painted circa 1300 in

Assisi’s Upper Basilica peoples this drama with then modern people, the

figure of Pietro Bernardone left holding the rich clothing of his textile wares,

like Saul/Paul at the stoning of Stephen, naked St Francis being covered by

the bishop. Dante’s Latin in the midst of his Italian, ‘et coram patre’, in his

father’s presence, is a medieval legal term, used in witnessing notarial

documents. His text palimpsests all this. And palimpsests as well the violent

conjoining and yoking of opposites of Francis’ Vows of Poverty, Chastity and

Obedience with Poverty as heavenly wealth, Chastity as adulterous

promiscuity, Obedience as disobedience to his father, even as elopement

without parental consent, to obey Christ and his bishop, as well as having

allegory be its contrary, flesh and blood in the marketplace. Following which

other followers of Francis commit themselves to adultery with his Bride:

Bernard da Quintavalle, Egidio and Silvester. This was the century when in

Florence also seven rich young men, sons of merchants and nobles, became

Servi di Maria, Servants of Mary, seeing her in a vision on Monte Sennario

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and founding the Servite Order. Even in modern times in Florence a count, a

marquis and a duke, all adolescent and rebelling against their parents, fled to

the mountains together with a young woman claiming to see visions. Sir

Franco Zeffirelli in 1972 captured the ‘Flower Power’ ethos of these tales in

Brother Sun, Sister Moon. Beside the Servi, Dante also ignores the other two

major fraternal Orders, the Carmelites and the Augustinians. While

witnessing this narration by Aquinas in Paradise are the pair, Dante and

Beatrice, both married to other spouses.

VII. Christian/Classical

Time and again Dante gives us parallel universes, the one Christian, the other

Classical. And here he interjects the tale of Amyclas from Lucan’s Pharsalia

V.505-721, a poem already recalled with the serpents in Inferno’s Circle of

Thieves, and with Purgatorio’s Cato, and previously cited in his Convivio

IV.xiii.12-13, to discuss the freedom, not bondage, of poverty. Caesar seeks

the help of a poor fisherman living in a shack by the seashore, waking him up

at night and promising him ‘opibus subitis’, ‘subiti guadagni’, ‘sudden

wealth’, expecting the fisherman to fawn upon him. Amyclas replies,

speaking of the natural omens of sun and moon, landscape and seascape,

being filled with foreboding, then attempts to ferry Caesar. They are driven

back, having risked nameless death. The following day the sun shines

brightly, the account ending with the flight of cranes, a flight Dante again

borrowed in Inferno V.46-48.

Nor did it help her when men heard he

who made earth tremble, found her unafraid –

serene, with Amyclas - when he addressed her (67-69).

VIII. Dante and Giotto

Dante’s bitter opening apostrophe ‘O insensate cura de’ mortali’, ‘O senseless

cares of mortals’, not only in the Italian means ‘thoughtless’, ‘stupid’,

‘foolish’, but also the left-brain’s black and whiteness, its competitiveness, its

insensitivity to the other, versus the medieval world’s right-brain celebration

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of the senses, of colour, sound, smell, taste, touch, and caring for the other. St

Francis’ use of the Nativity scene at Greccio heralded in a great change in

Western Christian art, where the Word becomes flesh and dwells in our

midst, which encouraged such sensory incarnational enactments, in drama, in

fresco. Dante presents in words what is simultaneously being presented in

pigment on the walls of churches in Rome, Assisi, Padua and Florence.

Sermon, Legend, Fresco, Poem, all celebrate, all document, the life of the

Christ-like Saint, the alter Christus in our own moment in time, in our midst.

Byzantine, Eastern Orthodox icons spiritualize. Benedictine and Cistercian

monasticism absent flesh and blood imaging and are Romanesque in style.

Not so the great Franciscan explosion of vernacular song and near-

photographic art – of which the Commedia is a major example. Nardi sees this

explosion as continuing into the exquisite fresco cycles of Benozzo Gozzoli at

Montefalco. These are more than Gothic; they herald the Renaissance.

Many writers comment on the likeness between Dante and Giotto. None that

I know of note that in Florence they were members of the same guild, the

‘Arte dei medici e speziali’, the Guild of Doctors and Spice Merchants, whose

patron is St Luke, the portraitist of the Virgin and Child (reflected in Paradiso

XXXIII). Moreover, Dante, 1265-1321, writes Giotto’s vita (Purgatorio XI.94-96),

commenting precisely on this tremendous paradigm shift from the

Byzantinising Cimabue, while Giotto, 1267-1337, paints Dante’s portrait in

Paradise (Florence, Bargello, Magdalen Chapel, circa 1321), again in a

poignant context, for Dante was exiled from that city of pain of burning and

execution if he ever returned and the Bargello, so close to Dante’s home, in

which his posthumus portrait is painted, was the prison for those awaiting

execution and was where the Libro del Chiodo, condemning him three times,

was kept.

The school of Giotto fresco cycle in the upper church of the great Assisi

Basilica was being completed for the 1300 Jubilee funded by the Papal Curia.

We have already discussed the wedding of Francis and Poverty on the ceiling

above the altar in the lower church and the refusal of his father’s worldly

155

wealth on the wall in the upper church. Another scene chronicled by both the

school of Giotto and by Dante (91-93) is his visit to Innocent III, receiving

from him verbal approval of his austere Rule, as his first seal, in 1210, then

the second from Pope Honorius III in 1223 (97-99). That first sealing was

caused, which Dante does not narrate, but which is well chronicled in Pietro

Alighieri’s Commentary) by Innocent’s dream of the Lateran Basilica falling,

St Francis propping it up on his shoulder, in the Assisi fresco, as well as in

Franciscan hagiography. In that period the Lateran, rather than the Vatican,

was the Roman Curia’s headquarters. However it was largely destroyed in

the 1307 fire and had also been subjected to earthquakes. Innocent’s dream is

thus prophetic, while the similes of the barbarians and the 1300 pilgrim

marvelling at the Lateran, Paradiso XXXI.33-36, 43-45, have poignantly

become no longer possible when Dante writes.

Following these Papal authorizations Dante discusses Francis’ 1219 quest for

martyrdom in the Egypt of the Crusades (100-102), and then his receiving the

stigmata, his third seal, at Mount Averna (106-108), finally his dying at

Portiuncula upon the bare earth, in the Jewish fashion with no coffin (109-

117), all of which the Giotto fresco cycles in Assisi and Florence carefully

chronicle.

IX. Geography Again

St Francis attempted to convert the Sultan of Babylon at Damietta in the

Egyptian Delta of the Nile on the Crusade. Here he is being like a Dominican

preaching to a heretic, however, not with the threats of hellfire, but instead

with the peaceable charity of the Gospel:

And after, in his thirst for martyrdom,

within the presence of the haughty Sultan

he preached of Christ and those who followed Him (100-102).

The fourth Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt was al-Malik al-Kamel Naser al-Din Abu

al-Ma'ali Muhammed (1180–1238), who later would grant Emperor Frederic

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II, Jerusalem, permitting the Franciscans their mission there as Custodians of

the Holy Land. This story has most commentators consider that Francis

journeyed to Syria on this mission, the error compounded by the failure to

note that for the Crusaders and for Brunetto Latino in the Tresor/Tesoro, even

for John Milton in Paradise Lost, the Evil Empire of ‘Babylon’ was Cairo on the

Nile in Egypt, a dense and rich palimpsesting of the Egypt of the bondage of

Exodus and the Babylon of the Apocalypse, this geographic and

anachronistic blending of the two captivities being crucial to Dante’s Psalm

113 Exodus allegory for the Commedia.

Immediately following this Dante gives us the great crude rock face of Mount

Verna and its grotto where St Francis dwelt as a hermit (best glimpsed in the

Vittorio Alinari photograph of the scene, in Bellini’s painting, and in the

school of Giotto fresco), receiving the stigmata from the flaming seraphic and

crucified Christ. Dante notes this Casentino landscape as being the source for

the two rivers, the Arno and the Tiber, the rivers that flow through the cities

of Florence and Rome. Francis lives but two years more. We know from the

contemporary biographies and from the Giotto frescoes that he dies, lying on

the earthen ground, at the Porziuncula, that little church now nestled within

the great one of Santa Maria degli Angeli beneath Assisi, and that his body is

then taken past San Damiano where St Clare and her ladies mourn him, and

next is brought to the Cathedral of San Rufino. From whence the Conventuals

will seize it and build, with Papal funds, the great Franciscan Basilica of cut

stone.

Dante adds that Francis commended his Lady Poverty to his brethren (112-

114), just as Jesus on the cross commended his mother Mary to John. Dante

then packs a terza rima with palimpsested meanings:

and when, returning to his kingdom, his

bright soul wanted to set forth from her bosom,

it, for its body, asked no other bier (115-117).

157

To explicate this as prophesy we need to return to the Piccarda Canto,

Paradiso III, and to recall St Clare, Foundress of the Clarissans. It was Clare

who followed, and preserved, Francis’ first Rule, rejected by the Church’s

hierarchy, and who won from Pope Innocent III the ‘Privilege of Poverty’ in

1216. After her death her Clarissan Sisters sewed St Francis’ original Rule into

her clothes, upon her bosom. Clare thus became Dante’s ‘Lady Poverty’, the

true widowed Church, not that of the Black Guelfs and the Popes, or of the

black-clad Conventuals of the Assisi Basilica, who condemned Dante, who

condemned the grey-clad Spirituals, who were Francis’ true followers.

X. Florence’s Francis

This essay has spoken of Dante’s St Francis. I should like to place that

argument in its Tuscan and Florentine context. Florence was immediately the

target of Franciscanism, particularly with the convent founded in

Bellosguardo’s Monticelli by St Clare’s sister, St Agnes, possessing St Francis’

saio, or ragged tunic, and where Piccarda Donati of Paradiso III was briefly a

nun. Dominicans preached learned sermons and were rigorously in control of

their audiences. Franciscans instead set their theology to vernacular love

songs, to catchy tunes, within a vibrant and democratic ministry, Francis’

mother being Provençal. Quickly lay confraternities formed in Florence and

Cortona to sing these laude. This lauda to St Francis himself originally dates

from before the composing of the Commedia and appears in three

manuscripts, Lauda 87, ‘Sia Laudato san Francesco’ (c.1260-97 in Ms. Cortona

92), and two others from the Compagnie dei laudesi of Santo Spirito and

Sant’Egidio, Florence:

1. A Cristo configurato,/ de le piache fue signato/ inperciò che avea portato/

scripto in core lo suo amore.

2. Molti messi avea mandate/ la divina Maiestate,/ et le genti predicate/

come dicon le Scripture.

3. Intra quali non fue trovato/ nullo privilegiato,/ d'arme nuove corredato,/

cavaliere a tanto honore.

158

4. A La Verna, monte sancto,/ stava 'l sancto con gran pianto;/ lo qual pianto

torno in canto/ il seraphyno consolatore.

5. Quando fu da Dio mandato/ san Francesco lo beato,/il mondo ki era

intenebrato/ recevette gran splendore.

6. Per divino spiramento/ fugli dato intendimento/ di salvare da

perdimento/ molti ch'eran peccatori.

Refrain:

Let Saint Francis be praised,

the one who bore the marks of crucifixion

like the Redeemer.

1. Made to resemble Christ,

he was branded with His wounds,

because he had carried

the love for Him written in his heart.

2. The Divine Majesty

had sent many messengers,

and peoples were evangelized

as the Scriptures say.

3. Among them no other

privileged knight was found,

equipped with new arms

in such an honourable way.

4. On the holy mount of La Verna

the holy man was weeping copiously;

the comforting seraphim

turned that weeping into a song.

5. When blessed Saint Francis

159

was sent by God,

the world, that was in the darkness,

received great splendour.

6. By divine inspiration

he was given the aspiration

to save from perdition

many sinners.

This lauda is illustrated in both Florence Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale BR 18

and BR 19 (Laudario of Sant’Egidio c.1330) with an image of the saint receiving

the Stigmata at La Verna.

I would suggest the reader of this essay sing this lauda in its Italian in the

jaunty style in which Angelo Branduardi sings Canto XI, in this way entering

the performative right-brain aspects, the living forms, of these moving texts.

XI. Aquinas’ Dominic

Aquinas then turns to speak of his own Order’s Founder, St Dominic:

Consider now that man who was a colleague worthy of Francis; with him, in high seas, he kept the bark of Peter on true course (118-120).

Francesco da Buti notes that while St Francis won for his Friars their

particular Rule, the Dominicans and all other Orders since then have been

obliged to adopt the Rule that St Augustine wrote first for his sister. Kenelm

Foster, O.P., explains that Dante likely studied at Dominican Santa Maria

Novella under Remigio de’ Girolami who himself studied under Aquinas in

Paris. At Franciscan Santa Croce Dante was exposed to the Franciscan

Spirituals, Pietro Olivi and Ubertino da Casale.

160

While the commentators note that Aquinas now speaks of Dominic Guzman

they do not tend to explain this visual image of the bark, the ship, of Peter.

We have noted the dream of Innocent III of the Lateran Basilica falling into

ruins with St Francis propping it up. Giotto was commissioned by Cardinal

Stefaneschi to create a great mosaic, now destroyed, on the old St Peters at

the Vatican, of the dramatic scene of Doubting Peter walking on the waves to

Christ, having stepped out of his ship on the Sea of Galilee. This image of the

great ship greeted the 1300 pilgrims receiving their plenary indulgence in

that Jubilee year, and the year in which Dante sets the Commedia, so filled

with images of the poem as ship. St Catherine of Siena will later die,

following sensing that same great ship weighing down on her shoulder,

crushing her. While in the Lateran Square two pillars stood with sculptures

on top of them, one of the naked boy pulling the thorn from his foot, at which

pilgrims threw stones, the other having a crowing cock on top of it, right

outside the Pope’s bedroom (where he dreamed of Francis propping up the

Basilica), recalling to him Peter’s Denial. Thus the Church’s medieval

architectural iconography embedded within itself deconstructive Doubt and

Denial. Dante’s audience was primed by these images to Dante’s text. We are

not.

Victor Turner, the structuralist/symbolic anthropologist, discussed the

importance of pairs of opposites in The Ritual Process: Structure and

Antistructure. M.M. Bakhtin and Maria Corti applied such concepts to

medieval literature. In Canto XI we have the following pairs;

Francis/Dominic; Franciscan/Dominican; Founder/Disciple; Ardor/Wisdom;

Seraphim/Cherubim; Sun/Moon; East/West; Italy/Spain; Poverty/Wealth;

Chastity/Promiscuity; Allegory/Reality; Faith/Doubt; Augustinian/

Aristotelian; Lateran/Vatican; Santa Croce/Santa Maria Novella; Italian/Latin;

Lean/Fat; Assisi/Rome; Jerusalem/Babylon; Israel/Egypt. This patterning of

polarity/harmony is very much Dante’s architecture for his Canto XI, just as it

had been in the previous Canto’s polyphony. Then Aquinas/Dante returns for

the third time to the discourse of feeding sheep (referring to Friars, both

Franciscan and Dominican, Pietro Alighieri noting the line is from Isaiah)

161

who do not stray from their Founders’ charisms (121-139). He had already

termed St Francis ‘archimandrite’ (99), Greek for ‘chief of shepherds’.

XII. Franciscan Comedy

And why have I titled this Lectura Dantis, ‘Franciscan Comedy’? Erich

Auerbach read the wedding of Francis and Poverty (prophesying Boccaccio’s

and Chaucer’s Marquis Walter and Griselda, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale of

the ‘loathly hag’, echoing the Bible’s figures of Sarah laughing at the birth of

Isaac, Elizabeth rejoicing at her pregnancy with John, and Alcibiades on

Socrates as a Silenus box carved with ancient pregnant laughing ladies in

Plato’s Symposium and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel), as bawdy fabliau,

as comedy. I have noted Dante’s use of Franciscan vernacular laude, Florence

in his day celebrating half-Provençal Francis in song, with the compagnie dei

laudesi in Orsanmichele, Sant’Egidio and elsewhere, the laity singing in

Italian, understood, Dante notes, also by women and children, the sacred

story in charity and fellowship. But there is more. Pietro Alighieri in his

commentary discusses his father’s comments concerning Terence and his

Comedies. Terence, the black ex-slave from Africa, in the household of the

Scipios, whose pure Latin influenced and taught Cicero, wrote laughter-filled

plays in which sons defied their fathers to marry the girl they love, the lowly

slaves saving the day, and in which the women and slaves come out on top.

What Auerbach and Nardi note in the text concerning the disobedient

rebellious marriage of Francis to Povertà, despite Pietro Bernardoni, Dante

had already read in those long ago but vibrant pages. Terence’s Comedies

were used to teach Latin with laughter to the young, oblates in monasteries,

nuns in convents, continuing with the Wakefield Master, Shakespeare,

Montaigne and Molière. Dante chooses this title for his epic poem because the

Christian story, the Franciscan story, is a scandal (the crudo sasso, the

stumbling block), and is a comedy. It is not a despairing tragedy of the elite,

but instead gives a world-upside-down in which the lowly of the Magnificat,

speaking – and singing - the humble and joyous vernacular, are exalted over

the great with their solemnly serious male-only Latin and Greek. The Inferno

and the Aeneid remain in the realm of tragedy, of the tears of things, lacrimae

162

rerum; Francesca and Paolo are forever in adulterous unsated bondage. But

Francesco and his followers joyously wed an unwanted widow. Pier delle

Vigne, blinded, is a suicide in San Miniato’s prison tower; while Romeo,

instead, chooses pilgrimage’s poverty and freedom. Even Thomas is smiling

from his lofty cathedra, his university chair, as he narrates of Francis to Dante

and Beatrice. (Etienne Gilson and Walter J. Ong have noted that Aquinas

gave up writing the left-brain categorizing Summa, saying ‘It is nothing but

straw’, and instead wrote exquisite, palimpsested, right-brain lyrics on the

Eucharist, which we still sing today.) And Dante too is joking, having fat

sedentary Aquinas (who died, 1276, from Charles of Anjou’s gastronomical

poisoning, Purgatorio XX.67-68), narrate, three times, of sheep fattening who

do not vagabond about and stray away from their milk, and he presents, as

corrective and escapement, the checks and balances of this solar clock, the

thin, ascetic, errant Francis, a proto-type San Bernardino, and his skinny,

ragged bride, Povertà, after whom his athletic shoeless brethren also run.

163

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Ong, Walter J., S.J. 'Wit and Mystery: A Reevaluation in Medieval Latin

Hymnody'. Speculum 22 (1947), 310-341.

http://www.umilta.net/walterjong.html accessed 23/12/2012.

Orlandi, Maria Grazia. Una Valle Dantesca: Il Casentino nella vita e nelle opere di

Dante Alighieri. Scandicci: Anscarichae Domus, 2002.

Paolazzi, Carlo. ‘Canto XI del Paradiso: Note esplicative’. Fonti Francescane:

Scritti e biografie di San Francesco d'Assisi. Cronache e altre testimonianze del

primo secolo francescano. Scritti e biografie di Santa Chiara d'Assisi. Padova: Il

Messagiero, 1983. Pp. 1725-1734

Papini, Giovanni. Dante vivo. Firenze: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1933.

Patapievici, Horia-Roman. Gli occhi di Beatrice: Com'era davvero il mondo di

Dante? Milano: Mondadori, 2006.

Placella, Vincenzo. ‘Meditazione «considerazione» contemplazione nella

Commedia, partendo dai canti del cielo del Sole’. ‘Guardando nel suo Figlio . . .’:

Saggi di esegesi dantesca. Napoli: Federico & Ardea, 1990. Pp. 35-61.

Puppo, Mario. ‘L’arte interiore di Dante nei canti XI-XII del Paradiso’. Lectura

Dantis Modenese: Paradiso. Modena: Comitato Provinciale Dante Alighieri,

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1986. Pp. 105-114.

Rokseth, Yvonne. Polyphonies du XIIIe siècle: Le manuscript H 196 de la faculté de

médicine de Montpellier. Paris: Oiseau Lyre, 1936-1939. 4 vols.

Romano, Immanuello. L'Inferno e Il Paradiso. A cura di Giorgio Battistoni.

Firenze: Giuntina, 2000.

Singleton, Charles S. The Divine Comedy, Paradiso 2. Commentary. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1975.

Sola, Leonardo. ‘Francesco e Madonna Povertà: Lettura in chiave gnostica del

XI Canto del ‘Paradiso’’. Sotto il velame : Rivista semestrale dell'Associazione di

Studi Danteschi e Tradizionali VI, n.s. (2005), 51-64.

Terence (Publius Terentius Afer). Comedies. Ed. J Sargeaunt. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard Univerity Press, 1986, 1983. Loeb Classics 22,23. 2 vols.

Trovato, Mario. ‘‘Paradiso’ XI’. Lectura Dantis: A Forum for Dante Research and

Interpretation 16-17 (1995), 156-171.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago:

Aldine, 1969.

Tuscano, Pasquale. ‘San Francesco (Par. canti X-XI)’. Lectura Dantis Modenense,

Paradiso. Modena: Banca Popolare dell’Emilia, 1986. Pp. 79-113.

Ulivi, Ferruccio. ‘Il Canto X del Paradiso (San Francesco, Dante, Giotto’. Dal

Medioeva ad Petrarca: Miscellanea di studi in onore di Vittorio Branca. Firenze:

Olschki, 1983. Pp. 289-304.

Vallone, Aldo. ‘Paradiso XI’. La dimensione umana e la prospettiva divina in

Dante. Ed. Pasquale Sabbatino. Biblioteca ‘L. Pepe’, 1983. Pp. 13-39.

Villani, Giovanni. Istoria di Firenze. Florence, 1823; Rome: Multigrafica

Editrice, 1980.

Werge, Thomas. ‘The Race to Death and the Race for Salvation in Dante’s

Commedia’. Dante Studies 97 (1979), 1-21.

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GEOFFREY CHAUCER AND ‘GOTHIC’

VIII BLACK AND RED LETTER CHAUCER1

Catherine of Siena, Orcherd of Syon, Wynken de Worde

arly printed books sought to replicate (and at the same time to make more cheaply available) manuscript books. In working with medieval

manuscripts one becomes intensely aware of two major types of scripts: Romanesque and Gothic. The Romanesque, as with the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels, with many of the manuscripts of Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, is rounded, simple, strong; while the Gothic tends to be spiky and squarish, perhaps in imitation of Hebrew lettering, such as would have been encountered by French Crusaders in Jerusalem. Interestingly, the Renaissance was not a movement for newness but for oldness and so it revived the Romanesque script as the Humanist one, using a typeface for its books derived from Carolingian manuscripts.2 We moderns, today, for our printed books' lower case use that older Romanesque script, our capital letters reverting even further in time to the classical Roman letters chiseled on

E

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marble monuments. The modernizing technology of printing quickly adopted an antiquarian typeface of authority. Before it did so it had used the more modern (and perhaps, if it imitates Hebrew, even more ancient) ‘Gothic’ typeface, Black Letter.

Chaucer's printers, as late as the William Morris Kelmscott edition of 1896, a hundred years ago, believed that Chaucer should be printed in the type appropriate to his period, Gothic, which was commonly known as ‘Black Letter’ in England, as fraktura in Germany.3 I will argue in this essay that Romantic and Victorian poets experienced Chaucer in the Black Letter, for instance, of William Thynne's editions of 1532, 1542 and 1545, and Thomas Speght's of 1598, 1602 and 1607.4 Speght's Elizabethan edition retains Chaucer's text in Black Letter, though it gives the titles to the works in modern typeface (that is, Roman and Romanesque), while Shakespeare, the contemporary poet, was printed entirely in modern type. Thus for centuries readers' expectations, their reception aesthetics, were shaped concerning Chaucer by the ‘distant mirror’ of the medieval Black Letter in which he was written and printed. They ‘switched codes’ when they read him, shifting back into past paradigms that paradoxically were also more modern than their own.

If we similarly are willing to become travellers in time we can make some interesting discoveries, especially about their act of reading. Let us first pick up a volume of the Poems of John Keats, whose poems are so often on picking up a volume of poems.5 Some of these volumes Keats uses intertextually are classical, some are medieval, some are Elizabethan.

Most of us, lacking Keats' Black Letter Chaucer, fail to realize that ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is in Thynne's and Speght's canon and included in their Black Letter Chaucer editions. Though eventually excluded in 1896's Kelmscott Black Letter by its editor, F. S. Ellis, on the basis of W. W. Skeat's advice,6 it had originally apocryphally been in the Chaucerian canon. I share with my gentle reader the 1532 and 1542 opening verses.

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Figure I.

Then Chaucer, or pseudo-Chaucer, the love-lorn poet, enters the poem landscape, dialoguing, as Amant, with the Dame. While Keats, as reader, in his poem, written in May of 1819 and published in May of 1820, the year before his death, describes himself with a Knight which whom he dialogues, the Knight having been bewitched by a Faerie Queene.7 Thus he imitates the Chaucer of the Book of the Duchess and of the ‘Sir Thopas,’ and the Spenser of The Faerie Queene. He is writing about writing, its enchantment of the act of reading, and I quote here from the ‘Ode to the Nightingale,’

. . . the same that oft-times hath Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.8

Similarly, William Morris in a stained glass window now owned by the Victorian and Albert Museum, South Kensington, gave ‘The Poet Chaucer Asleep.’9

The magic of the book is that it is not reality, it is a sometimes insane looking glass model for reality, mirror-reversing what is, or showing perhaps what it

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could be, but not what is flesh and blood. I recall pouring over medieval manuscripts in a library, in the Sala de Investigadores Miguel de Cervantes in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, beneath modern paintings of Don Quixote reading medieval manuscripts and early printed Black Letter chivalric romances, and going mad, a reflection upon ourselves.10 The Renaissance and the Enlightenment could both laugh at and yearn for a return to the lunatic escape of the Gothic romance, associated by them with the archaic, antique, arcane Black Letter Gothic, such as in a Caxton Malory, or a Thynne, or Speght, or even Kelmscott Chaucer. They preferred seeing the Gothic world in its own appropriate media of Black Letter type, and of brilliant, colored, not clear, white, glass. They sought his alterity amidst their pseudo-modernity.11

In 1840, Hengist ‘Farthing’ Horne commissioned leading poets to translate Chaucer, including the then desperately ill Elizabeth Barrett, later to marry Robert Browning. Other poets approached included William Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Monckton Milnes, Tennyson, Talfourd, Sir E. L. Bulwer, etc. Horne stated of the project:

Miss Barrett, though still supposed to be hovering near the grave [her brother Edward had drowned and she had almost succumbed to tuberculosis, Keats' malady], cheerfully, and with enthusiasm, agreed to lend her aid to the work. And it is with great pleasure to recollect that almost everybody to whom I applied cordially consented, with the exception of Landor, who, however, objected in a form that could not be displeasing to those engaged in this labor of love . . . [Walter Savage Landor stated:] ‘Pardon me, if I say I would rather see Chaucer quite alone, in the dew of his sunny morning, than with twenty clever gentlefolks about him, arranging his shoe strings and buttoning his doublet. I like even his language. I will have no hand in breaking his dun but rich-painted glass, to put in (if clearer) much thinner panes.’ And thus [Horne continued], with the true, but narrow, devotion of the best men on the black-letter side, and their resistance to all attempts to melt the obsolete language and form it into modern moulds, . . . the Homer of English Poetry continues unread, except by very few.12

It is interesting that when this 1841 correspondence was published in 1877, it was nevertheless felt necessary to quote Chaucer's Middle English text in

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Black Letter, in Gothic fraktura, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's translation of it in modern type, which in turn, we remember, is paradoxically based on the even more ancient Carolingian and Insular scripts. Figure II.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century it had been John Keats and Walter Savage Landor, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning who responded as poets to Chaucer. Later in the century it was the scholars who took the text in hand. Frederick Furnivall had more than a part in founding the Early English Text Society in 1864, the Chaucer Society in 1868, the Ballad Society in 1869, the New Shakespeare Society in 1873, the Wyclif Society in 1881, likewise the Browning Society in that year, and the Shelley Society in 1886. He also worked closely with the Philological Society on the Oxford English Dictionary. Elizabeth Murray, Dictionary Murray's granddaughter, described the Dictionary project:

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To save time and make for clarity, Furnivall started buying books which were then offered to readers for marking or cutting up . . . a number of valuable old books did get cut up, and a lover of them would be horrified to see the earliest dictionary slips with bits of Black Letter editions of the sixteenth century pasted onto them.13

We know from Elizabeth Murray's book, Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford Dictionary, that the Dic and the little Dics inherited this massive task, started by Furnivall, of compiling the Oxford English Dictionary from sacks of such slips in the iron shed in their Oxford garden, the children, with magnificent Anglo-Saxon and Celtic names, earning their pocket money by these means.14

At the same time that the Dictionary was progressing, often thanks to the scholars' editions of texts printed by the Early English Text Society, such as by W. W. Skeat, the stage was being set for the Kelmscott Chaucer. On its page 554, its colophon states in a beautiful William Morris version of Black Letter type:

Here ends the Book of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by F. S. Ellis; ornamented with pictures designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and engraved on wood by W. H. Hooper. Printed by me William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, Upper Mall, Hammersmith, in the County of Middlesex. Finished on the 8th day of May, 1896.

The hearty thanks of the Editor and Printer are due to the Reverend Professor Skeat for kindly allowing the use of his emendations to the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and also of his emended texts of Chaucer's other writings. The like thanks also the Editor and Printer give to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press for allowing them to avail themselves of Professor Skeat's permission.

Thus the Kelmscott Chaucer hovers between the archaic, arcane and romantic ambience of Thynne and Speght's Black Letter, and the scholarly one of the Early English Text Society, W. W. Skeat, F. N. Robinson and Larry Benson, combining the worlds of poetry and the academy.

My third visual example is from a book published in Sweden in 1954 about the contents of the shrine of St. Birgitta at Vadstena (III).15 In that shrine a

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team of anthropologists found various bones from six women and from seven to nine men. One of these bones had on it the words ‘de sancto sigfrido,’ which the Swedish scholars presented within their modern text in Black Letter and using the abbreviation for ‘sancto’ in line 8 of the passage below. From this research they were able to ascertain that the bones of Saint Birgitta had mainly been given to her daughter houses, convents in Italy, Bavaria, Prussia, Holland, England, Denmark, Finland, and elsewhere, including one given by Thomas Gascoigne, Chancellor of Oxford University, to the Oseney Abbey of Chaucer's Miller's Tale, while other saintly bones came to be deposited in their place in the Vadstena shrine, like Victorian visiting cards, creating, as it were, a skeletal jigsaw puzzle across the map of Europe.

Figure III.

I have presented an argument for the set of expectations, the reception aesthetics, readers, until recently, have had concerning Black Letter texts, as presenting not just themselves but their entire ambience and anthropological context, in architecture, religion, law, custom, culture. The change in typeface was an major paradigm shift.16 Today, our editors pretend this is not so and stress Chaucer's modernity. I recommend we also stress his alterity, in line with neo-historicism, and again encourage the partial use of Black Letter.

The Kelmscott Chaucer is both modern and ancient. The Burne-Jones woodblocks have figures that are too mannered and slender, even Chaucer being like anorexic Dante and not having his own jolly, plump rotundity. But

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the text, with its red rubrication amidst the Black Letter upon the white, is exquisite. I recommend we so typeset the Paris manuscript of Julian of Norwich's Showing of Love, which is similarly written in black and red, and in doing so also retain the manuscript's beautiful, old, but readable, spelling. I recommend that we publish again in facsimile, perhaps by computer scanning, the editio princeps of major medieval texts, ones which today we can barely use as scholars as they are locked up in special collections in a handful of libraries in the world. We need access to Brunetto Latino's Tesoro, published in 1474 in Treviso; we need access to Saint Birgitta of Sweden's Revelationes, published in 1492 in Lübeck; we need access to Wynken de Worde's Orcherd of Syon, published in 1569 in Westminster; we need access to the Thynne, Speght and Kelmscott editions of Chaucer of 1532, 1598, and 1896. All of these are at the same time influential and aesthetically beautiful books. The reading of such Black Letter editions can then enable our students to read with ease the medieval manuscripts upon which they are based, entering that world of the book into which Dante and Chaucer penetrated through their readings of Virgil and Macrobius.

For paradoxically nineteenth-century poets and artists tampered less with Chaucer than did scholars. Their use of windows, rather than mirrors, calls to mind Murray Krieger's use and metaphor of windows/mirrors for Shakespeare's sonnets.17 Such editions' retention of Black Letter, evoking either richly illuminated manuscripts, or printed books in black and red, or even richly-colored, stained glass windows, is one to treasure, rather than spurn. By acknowledging the differing styles of time we, too, can conquer alterity and enter into Prospero's magic isle of books and discover Keats' poetic ‘faerylands forlorn.’

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Notes

1 This paper was written longhand in Italy and England for the 1990 New Chaucer Society Congress, Canterbury, Kent, and the manuscript version of it was faxed, with added sections in photocopied Black Letter, from the Hotel Excelsior, Florence, Italy, to Professor Betsy Bowden, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, as Professor Gail MacMurray Gibson, Davidson College, North Carolina, required last minute revisions of her essay in Equally in God's Image to be made, necessitating leaving my Toshiba laptop and Nota Bene software in a graduate student's hands in Colorado, just as I was flying to Europe to carry out research on four books amongst manuscripts of Birgitta of Sweden, Julian of Norwich and Margery of Lynn, Brunetto Latino and Terentius Publius Afer, among others, if the book on medieval women were to be published. Technology can be both flexible and limiting, both enhancing and crippling. [Twenty-five years later I prophesy that with the availability of manuscripts digitized electronically on the web it can be possible to carry out a new Renaissance, where we can transcribe these on facing pages for their accessibility to all.] Research for this paper was carried out at Baylor University's Armstrong Browning Library and in London's British Library. I also wish to thank Jean Preston, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Princeton University, for providing the Black Letter texts in question, and Southern Methodist University at University College, Oxford, for their invitation to William Morris' Kelmscott Manor.

2 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Renaissance and Renascences,’ Kenyon Review 6 (1944), 221 and passim. 3 Martin Luther's Bible was published in fraktura, Black Letter, and therefore German books were so published into our century. One can still see German fraktura books in American yard and garage sales. The King James Bible was, instead, published in modern (really more ancient) type and thus that prevailed in English, as well as Romance speaking nations. 4 I make use of Constance S. Wright, ‘The Printed Editions of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women: 1532-1889,’ The Chaucer Review, 24 (1990), 312.

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5 John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956): Sonnet XI, ‘On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,’ p. 38; Sleep and Poetry, with its motto from Chaucer, pp. 42, 43, etc. 6 Colophon, Kelmscott Chaucer (London: Kelmscott Press, 1896), p. 554. 7 Pp. 350-351. 8 ‘Ode to the Nightingale,’ p. 209. 9 Helen Dore, William Morris (London: Octopus, 1990), p. 58. The window (Victoria and Albert, #774, 1864, shows Chaucer with daisies in his hand, a garden with a fountain and sun dial, poppies and thistles, and the inscription, ‘Imago Chaucer poetae.’ Other lights in that window are of ‘Alcestis and Eros,’ ‘Dido and Cleopatra,’ all evoking Chaucer's Book of the Duchess. May Morris noted that the children in the family believed Chaucer's portrait in the Red Lion Square wardrobe, now in the Ashmolean, to be that of Edward Burne-Jones, their ‘Uncle Ned,’ p. 35; while a tile painted by William Morris showed Rossetti as Chaucer, reading a book beneath a white rose, p. 64. 10 I am remembering a story read as a child in Kenneth Graham's Dream Days or Golden Days, of the boy who finds a precious illuminated manuscript in a library of the house they are visiting, sits down to read it, exploring the illuminations as they lead further and further up a road and almost into a medieval city he so desires to enter, when the adults catch him, close the book, and scold the child; I am also remembering a favorite film in Berkeley, based on Jan Potock's novel, which I have never seen printed in English, only in Italian, and which is Polish, the Manoscritto trovato a Saragozza in which the dream action always loops back upon itself, the hero forever finding himself again in the arms of corpses. 11 Hans Robert Jauss, ‘The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature,’ New Literary History 10 (1979), 181-229. 12 ‘Chaucer Modernized,’ in Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne, ed. S. R. Townshend Mayer (London: Richard Bentley

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and Son, 1877), I. 93-127. 13 K. M. Elizabeth Murray, Caught in a Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the 'Oxford English Dictionary' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 139, who also notes M. P. W. Gee, The Philological Society NED Vocabulary of Words Beginning with the Letter B (1863), listing books to be cut up, including several folios of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Furnivall's activities described, p. 89. 14 ‘In 1899, James acknowledged in his report to the Philological Society that the alphabetical arrangement of quotations had been done mainly by his younger children, but in the many accounts of the making of the Dictionary, the child labor goes unrecognised,’ p. 180. See, for instance, John H. Cowley, The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary: Some Background Notes, 1972. Elizabeth Murray tells how ‘As each child reached an age when he or she could read, they were pressed into service. Rosfrith, the ninth, remembered her father catching her by the pinny one day as he passed her in the hall, and exclaiming, 'It is time that this young woman started to earn her keep,'‘ p. 178. 15 A. Bygdén, N.-G. Gejvall, and C.-H. Hjortsjö, Les reliques de Sainte Brigitte de Suède: Examen médico-anthropologique et historique (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1954), p. 1. 16 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

17 Murray Krieger, A Window to Criticism: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Modern Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).

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II. FACT AND FICTION

WOMEN IN AND OUT OF LOVE

Chaucer has his Wife of Bath mention:

a clerk at Rome, A cardinal, that highte Seint Jerome, That made a book agayn Jovinian

and:

Helowys

That was abbesse nat fer fro Parys. III.673-678

his essay will discuss three pairs of letter writers, Roman Paula and

Jerome, English Lioba and Winfrith, and French Heloise and Abelard,

who are flesh and blood women and men, then will compare and contrast

them with the fictional Wife of Bath. It will show that monastic women took

the opportunity of the letter format to flaunt their classical learning, and that

they did so in a manner that was humanistic, rather than scholastic, personal,

rather than detached, using their reading in a manner that looked back to

Cicero and Seneca and forward to Montaigne and Woolf. Ovid's Heroides,

letters written as by women, likewise were an important model; but so also

were Paul's Epistles, which frequently mention women. This essay will show,

by these means, that Heloise was following in the footsteps of literary

predecessors, making use of an established epistolary style that was already

created for use by women in the Church. I wish to challenge the assumption

that is still held by some university-trained scholars, that since Heloise's

letters are so learned they could only have been written by Abelard; the

T

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similar charge also being made against Paula, that Jerome must have written

her letter, albeit in a style not his own.1 At the same time I will most certainly

accede to Chaucerian and male authorship of the Wife.

I. Paula and Jerome

Few of Paula's writings survive. The case for Jerome is quite different.

However, we do have an important letter Paula and her daughter,

Eustochium, wrote to Marcella, coupled with Jerome's later account,

concerning Paula's pilgrimage to the Holy Places. We learn much about Paula

in Jerome's voluminous writings. He tells of her luxurious Roman life, her

wealth, and her very great status. She, who had once always dressed in silks,

and who had been used to being carried about Rome by her eunuch slaves so

that her feet might never touch the ground, who was descended from

Agamemnon, and whose husband was descended from Aeneas, had joined

Marcella's group of high-born, wealthy Roman ladies, who together

attempted to follow a life of monastic severity. Jerome became their teacher,

expounding the Scriptures to them. But he quarrelled with Church officials in

Rome most bitterly and found it expedient to return to Bethlehem. Paula and

her daughter, Eustochium, joined him there, Paula leaving behind the rest of

her children weeping on the quay. In the Holy Land Paula studied Hebrew so

that she might sing the psalms, the chief early Christian devotional practice,

in their original language and assist him in his translation work. She lived for

twenty years in Bethlehem, dying there in A.D. 404.2

Paula's letter to Marcella pleads with her old friend that she leave Rome,

called in the letter a ‘Babylon,’ and come to Jerusalem and its Holy Places.3 It

describes Paula's pilgrims to all these Holy Places in such a way as to have

Marcella participate in their sacred journeying, mentally, and vicariously, in

her imagination. Paula and Eustochium begin their letter by stating that,

although the Crucifixion may have made Jerusalem an accursed place, there

is ample scriptural justification for Christians to return to that holy city. Paula

relies not only on the Scriptures but also upon Cicero for this argument,

describing both St. Paul speaking of his need to return to Jerusalem and

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Cicero speaking of his need to learn one's Greek not only in Sicily but in

Athens, one's Latin not in Lilybaeum but in Rome. She adds, in a capstone to

her argument, that Jerusalem is ‘our Athens.’ She then quotes Virgil's First

Eclogue on the great distance of the British Isles from Rome in noting that

Christian Gauls and Britons all make haste to come, not to Rome, but to far

Jerusalem.4 Paula movingly contrasts the wealth of Rome and the poverty of

Bethlehem:5

Ubi sunt latae porticus? ubi aurata laquearia? ubi domus miserorum

poenis et damnatorum labore vestitae? ubi instar palatii, opibus privatorum

extructae basilicae, ut vile corpusculum hominis pretiosius inambulet et

quasi mundo quicquam possit esse ornatius, tecta magis sua magis

quidquam velit aspicere, quam caelum? Ecce in hoc parvo terrae foramine,

caelorum conditor natus est, hic involutus pannis, hic visus a pastoribus,

hic demonstratus a stella, hic adoratus a Magis . . . In Christi vero . . . villula

tota rusticitas, et extra psalmos silentium est. Quocumque te verteris, arator

stivam tenens, alleluia decantat. Sudans messor Psalmis se avocat, et curva

attondens vitem falce vinitor aliquod Davidicum canit. Haec sunt in hac

provincia carmina, hae, ut vulgo dicitur, amatoriae cantationes. Hic

pastorum sibilus, haec arma culturae. Verum quid agimus, nec quid deceat

cogitantes, solum quod cupimus hoc videmus?

[Where are spacious porticoes? Where are gilded ceilings? Where are

houses decorated by the sufferings and labours of condemned wretches?

Where are halls built by the wealth of private men on the scale of palaces,

that the vile carcase of man may move among more costly surroundings,

and view his own roof rather than the heavens, as if anything could be

more beauteous than creation? . . . . In the village of Christ . . . all is

rusticity, and except for psalms, silence. Whithersoever you turn yourself,

the ploughman, holding the plough handle, sings Alleluia; the perspiring

reaper diverts himself with psalms, and the vine-dresser sings some of the

ballads of this country, these are the love-songs, as they are commonly

called; these are whistled by the shepherds, and are the implements of the

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husbandman. Indeed, we do not think of what we are doing or how we

look, but see only that for which we are longing.]

Paula has written a Christian Georgics, a Christian pastoral, though as if

through the eyes of Karl Marx, Simone Weil, and Frantz Fanon.6 Her style is

shaped by Cicero and Virgil, Horace and Juvenal; her social thought is

shaped by the Prophets and the Gospels.

In contrast to this letter, Jerome's account of the pilgrimage Paula made is

almost barren of references to classical authors. He writes it after Paula's

death, giving her vita to her virgin daughter, Eustochium.7 The letter waxes

most sentimental about her parting from her family members, describing her

as torn between the love of her children and her love for God. He does,

however, mention the ‘fables of the poets,’ de fabulis Poetarum, in giving the

tale of Andromeda chained to a rock, as happening at Joppa, which he notes

was also the harbour of the fugitive Jonah. He had earlier cited some lines of

the Aeneid concerning the Greek Isles. But, unlike Paula, he does not show off

his classical learning. He is here being more Christian than Ciceronian. (We

recall his dream in which he is chided, or chides himself, by being told, ‘Thou

art not a Christian. Thou art a Ciceronian.’8) He mentions Paula as visiting the

tomb of Queen Helena, famed in Jerusalem for having given wheat during a

famine to the populace. (This Queen Helena in pilgrim legends may have

become conflated with the Empress Helena.) He notes Paula's deep piety at

the Cross and the Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and at the cave and church in

Bethlehem.9

Jerome even notes Paula telling him that she realizes that the Hebrew means

not Mary, mother of God, ‘her,’ but God, ‘him,’ in Psalm 132: ‘Behold, we

heard of her/him in Ephratah, and found her/him in the fields of the wood,’

because he has corrected her on this matter of the Hebrew ‘zoth.’10 A woman,

reading of that apology, can sense its pain. It is a male rebuke to her feminist

reading of the text, and she, rather than he, may be correct. There was not yet

a Dame Julian to console her as there would be for the later Dame Margery

concerning such male rebuffs.

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The remainder of Jerome's account in Epistola CVIII is quite dry, sometimes

enlivened by allegorical interpretations, and mostly illustrated with scriptural

passages. Jerome ends by saying: ‘Her zeal was wonderful-her courage

scarcely credible for a woman. Forgetful of her sex and the weakness of her

frame, she desired to dwell with her maidens among so many thousands of

monks’ in the Egyptian Thebaid, but returned to Jerusalem.

Mirabilis ardor, et vix in femina credibilis fortitudo. Oblita sexus et

fragilitatis corporae, inter tot milia Monachorum cum puellis suis habitare

cupiebat.

It is an interesting relationship, that between Paula and Jerome. We should

not forget that Chaucer will play upon it when he writes the Wife of Bath's

Prologue, in which he has the Wife, in her scarlet garb, visit the same Holy

Places as did St. Paula, and has her constantly cite, not classical authors, but

St. Jerome, especially his treatise, Adversus Jovinianum, his diatribe against

marriage and widowhood, in which he advocates, as he also did in a letter to

Paula's daughter Eustochium, perpetual virginity.11 Paula's journey is

replicated in fiction by the Wife of Bath, in fact by Egeria of Spain, St. Birgitta

of Sweden and Margery Kempe of England.12 Margery Kempe is to discuss

her hysteria and her pilgrimage with Dame Julian of Norwich.13 In these

writings we can see some of the reverberations of that relationship between

Paula and Jerome, and we can also see how Paula as a pilgrim became a

model of other Christian women, one of power and financial independence,

in so doing achieving much admiration, even from such a misogynist as St.

Jerome.

II. Egburga, Lioba, and Wynfrith

The second part of this argument, as it were its control group, discusses St.

Boniface, the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon missionary monk, otherwise

known as Wynfrith, and his correspondence with English nuns, paramount

among them, Eadburga, Bugga, and Lioba.14 I shall begin with a letter written

to Boniface by Egburga, a nun whose brother Oshere had been killed and

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who seeks consolation from her brother's friend, Wynfrith. What is

extraordinary about the letter is the erotic language used by Egburga to

Boniface:

Charitatis tuae copulam fateor dum per interiorem hominem gustavi,

quasi quiddam mellitae dulcedinis, meis visceribus hic sapor insidet. Et

licet statim ut nacia sum, aspectu corporali visualiter defraudata sim,

sororis tamen semper amplexibus collum tuum constrinxero. [Thy love is

a bond that holds me; since I tasted it in my inner being, like some

honeysweet essence the sweetness of it fill my soul. And now, though I

have been robbed of the sight of thee, yet shall I always hold thy neck

entwined with a sisterly embrace.]15

What is also extraordinary is the letter's use of Virgil, whom Egburga quotes,

from the Aeneid, four times in the brief epistle, while also quoting from

Jerome's letter to Rufinus, Epistola III, and from the Bible. The Aeneid

quotations are echoed in

Et quamvis temporum series ocius currendo discreverit, moeroris tamen

numquam me nebula atra deseruit [Time has run quickly on its course, but

the dark cloud of my grief has never abandoned me] VIII.258;

Et postquam mihi simul charissima soror Wetburga, quasi inflicto

vulnere, iteratoque dolore, subito ab oculis evanuit [And after my dearest

sister Wethburga, a new wound, a fresh grief, suddenly vanished from my

sight] XI.658;

Testor, ubique dolor, ubique pavor, ubique mortis imago [I declare

everywhere was sorrow and desolation and the face of death] II.369-370;

and

Ille superi Rector olympi ineffabili [Behold the Ruler of High Olympus]

II.779.16

Two scriptural quotations follow these four Aeneid quotations. Then comes

the quotation from Jerome's letter to Rufinus:

185

Quapropter, crede mihi, non sic tempestate jactatus portum nauta

desiderat, non sic sitientia imbres arva desiderant, non sic curvo littore

anxia mater filium exspectat, quem ut ego visibus vestris frui cupio.

[Therefore, believe me, not so eagerly does the storm-tossed sailor long for

the harbour, not the thirsting fields crave rain, not the anxious mother on

the curved shore await her son, as I long for the sight of thee.]

Lioba, Abbess of Bischopsheim, around 732 A. D., then writes to Boniface,

sending him verses she has written according to the teaching of Eadburga,

Abbess of Thanet.17 We also hear of Boniface requesting from Eadburga a

book written with letters of gold, in the Roman manner which was adopted

by the Church for its sacred pages.18 (I suspect that this Eadburga is the

previous Egberga, grown somewhat less girlish, her name shifting from

manuscript corruption.) Now Lioba in turn is asked by Boniface and through

the request of a priest, Torthat by name, to give instruction to a certain girl for

a time, such instruction being not only indoctrination in Hebrew and

Christian Scriptures but also in pagan learning, their medium through which

to learn the Church's universal language, Latin.19 The only figure capable of

quoting so much classical material as Egburga is a Bishop Milret of Worcester

who, in writing to Bishop Lul about the martyrdom of Boniface, likewise

pulls out all the organ stops and quotes Horace, Ode II, and Virgil, Aeneid I

and IV.20

Thus classical texts, in such letters, appear to be a medium for the expression

of emotion. We are dealing also with the letters of a very learned circle of

men and women, people who are constantly exchanging manuscripts books

between England and Germany, and where the women are the copiers of

these manuscripts. Brian Stock would speak of such groups as ‘textual

communities’, though he uses that term of heretical sects in the Middle

Ages.21 The impression gained from this correspondence is one of intellectual

equality between the women and men of Anglo-Saxon Romanesque

monasteries, whether in England or Germany, and perhaps even superiority

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on the part of women. The tone of these letters is always loving, thoughtful,

consolatory. Jerome's letters to women provided a clear model. In the midst

of barbarism, here is civilization. In the cold north we sense the warmth of

the Mediterranean and of its African and Asian shores.

III: Heloise and Abelard

For the third part of the argument eternal indebtedness is expressed to

Professor, who became Sir Richard, Southern of Oxford University in whose

Seminar on the Twelfth Century at Berkeley in 1968 we came to appreciate

the humanity and intelligence of Heloise. The letters of Paula and Jerome

were written in the fourth century; those of Boniface and Egburga in the

eighth century. The twelfth-century letters of Abelard and Heloise are deeply

influenced by those of Paula and Jerome. Interestingly, the earliest Jerome

manuscripts we have are eleventh-century; those of Boniface and Egburga

exist in twelfth-century manuscripts only and may have had no influence

upon Abelard and Heloise's correspondence though they definitely were

influenced by Jerome's epistolary friendships with women;22 while the letters

of Abelard and Heloise come to us in thirteenth-century manuscripts. (This

has led to some scholars' claim that the Letters are forged, though the same

claim has not been put forward for the Letters of Jerome.) A private

collection in Scandinavia and London possesses a later Abelard and Heloise

manuscript which may be seen at

http://www.schoyencollection.com/literature-collection/medieval-

renaissance-literature-collection/heloise-abelarde-ms-2085 clicking on folio

image to enlarge it.

In a study of the correspondence of Abelard and Heloise it is necessary first

to stress the letter written by Abelard, then the exchange of letters, between

an abbess and an abbot, the abbot of Breton St. Gildas, and the abbess of the

French Abbey of the Paraclete. And it should be noted that perhaps for the

first time in these pairs of epistolary friendships there is also a sexual

relationship, to which we shall return. We tend to think of Abelard's History

of My Calamity as an autobiography, forgetting that in the early manuscripts it

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is titled: ‘Abaelardi ad amicum suum consolataria epistula’.23 It is Abelard's letter

of consolation to a friend. It is a spiritual and physical biography, and it

parodies Augustine's Confessions. Here is Abelard's ‘chambering and

wantonness’ with Heloise. She is sixteen or seventeen, he is in his thirties.

Sub occasione itaque disciplinae amori penitus vacabamus et secretos

recessus quos amor optabat studium lectionis offerebat. Apertis itaque

libris, plura de amore quam de lectione verba se ingerebant; plura erant

oscula quam sententiae; saepius ad sinus quam ad libros reducebantur

manus; crebrius oculos amor in se reflectabat quam lectio in scripturam

dirigebat. [Her studies allowed us to withdraw in private, as love desired,

and then with our books open before us, more words of love than of our

reading passed between us, and more kissing than teaching. My hands

strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages; love drew our eyes to look

on each other more than reading kept them on our texts.]24

It is not for nothing that these words resonate with Paul's Epistle and

Augustine's Confessions.25 They echo too Bernard's Epistle to Abbot William, in

which he spoke against eyes straying to the sculpted marble grotesqueries of

Benedictine cloisters more than to the pages of books one ought to read

there,26 and Dante's Inferno V concerning Paolo (whose name echoes Paul's)

and Francesca who so defy Paul and Augustine: ‘That day,’ Francesca tells

Dante, ‘We read no further.’27 (One can also hear Virgil and Milton here: ‘Ille

dies primus leti primusque malorum causa fuit’, Aeneid IV.16; ‘That day was

the first day of death and all our woe’, Paradise Lost, I.3.)

Abelard is writing these words within a well-defined tradition and a

continuum. And Abelard's epistle is not only resonant with Paul's; it is also

quoting from Jerome's Epistle CXVIII, where he notes that Fulbert is the last

person to realize that there is scandal within his own household:

Unde et illud est Beati Hieronymi in Epistola ad Sabinianum: Solemus

mala domus nostrae scire novissimi, ac liberorum ac coniugum vitia vicinis

canentibus ignorare. [We are always the last to learn of evil in our own

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home, blessed Jerome tells us in his Epistle to Sabianus, and the faults of

our wife and children may be the talk of the town but do not reach our

ears.]

Heloise bears Abelard the child Astralabe and Abelard offers to placate

Fulbert by marrying her. Heloise strongly opposes this move, citing both Paul

and Jerome against marriage, and noting how opposed philosophy and child-

bearing are, how far apart desks and cradles, books and distaves, styli and

spindles:

Quae enim conventio scholarium ad pedissequas, scriptoriorum ad

cunabula, librorum sive tabularum ad colos, stilorum sive calamorum ad

fusos?28

She goes on to cite Seneca and Josephus on philosophers and monks as those

who depart from the world and its ways, especially from women and

children. She even throws in the tale of Socrates, Xanthippe and the piss pot,

from Jerome's Adversus Jovinianum, for good measure.29 However, they are

married secretly with Fulbert as witness. Abelard takes her to Argenteuil.

Then he is castrated by ruffians in Fulbert's pay.

At her husband's request Heloise takes the veil at Argenteuil, Abelard being

professed as a monk at St. Denis. Abelard tells of her profession and of how

she went up to the altar saying with sobs Cornelia's speech at her husband

Pompey's defeat, from Lucan's Pharsalia:

. . . O maxime coniunx, O thalamis indigne meis, hoc iuris habebat In

tantum fortuna caput? cur impia nupsi, Si miserum factura fui? [O noble

husband/ Too great for me to wed, was it my fate/ To bend that lofty head?

What prompted me/ to marry you and bring about your fall?]30

Professor Southern noted of this scene how extraordinary it was that while

Heloise was clearly applying these words to herself personally and at a most

intense and deep level, Abelard seems not to hear the meaning of the words,

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merely to be proud of the learning which he has taught her. She is doing

‘Reader Response’, he merely ‘New Criticism’.

Abelard then continues with his self-pitying litany of woes, the history of his

calamities. What is interesting is his strong identification with Saint Jerome.

When he is driven from the Paraclete to St. Gildas in Brittany he says he has

been driven west, much in the same manner that quarrelsome St. Jerome was

driven east, from Rome to Bethlehem where he would be joined by Paula and

Eustochium. Abelard quotes, in fact, from Jerome's Letters again and again.

He gives the abandoned Paraclete to Heloise and to her nuns, noting that she

is no longer his wife and has now become his sister in Christ. When rumour

begins to spread Abelard draws direct parallels between himself and Jerome,

Heloise and Paula, and he quotes Jerome's Epistle XLV to do so.31

What is important to remember in the letters that follow is that medieval

teaching concerning sex in marriage was paradoxically more liberal than

Victorian teaching. Both spouses, as Elizabeth Makowski has shown, then

had equal rights to demand sex when they needed it and wanted it from the

other, the payment of the marriage debt according to Paul's Epistle.32 Not

only that, but medieval women who had previously led an active sexual life

found great difficulty relinquishing it.33 This is Heloise's predicament and,

according to medieval culture, though not our own, it would have been

understandable for her to have expressed this desire. Professor D. W.

Robertson, Jr., expressed shock to me concerning Heloise's statements and

was convinced that they could not be her letters (but instead her husband

Abelard's), as he imposed upon Heloise the perspective of southern gentility,

believing that no lady could utter such remarks, rather than seeing them in

the perspective of medieval canon law or medieval medical teaching.34

Heloise's predicament thus is similar to the one Augustine describes

concerning his lust, or sexuality, in the Confessions. She is asking Abelard to

play the role in his epistles to her as had Paul in his Epistles to the Romans

and the Corinthians and others. She is asking Abelard as the most responsible

party to convert her from her lust. She knows, besides, that this could be the

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best grief therapy and consolation she could offer to her maimed and ego-

diminished spouse, that he is still intensely desirable to her. She, after all,

vowed before God to love him, for better or for worse, in sickness and in

health, till death do them part. In medieval canon law, Makowski notes,

marriage vows have precedence over vows of chastity, of pilgrimage, of

monastic precedence.

Heloise’s second stratagem, and again a practical one, is where she involves

Abelard in the designing of a Rule for her nuns, thereby giving him a far

greater sphere of control over members of her sex than he would have had

when merely married to her.35 She sets him as well to composing hymns for

the nuns of the Paraclete to sing, including the exquisite ‘O quanta qualia,’

and also homilies.36 One hymn Abelard writes is the ‘Planctus Dinae Filiae

Jacob,’ in which he empathizes with Heloise, in adopting the persona of

Dinah who was raped and whose brothers first circumcised, then killed, the

prince who had raped her and who had been willing to marry her, and all his

men. Another is the mourning of Israel over Samson's Fall to Dalilah; another

is of Jephthah's Daughter. Heloise's nuns would have sung these laments in

which Abelard's loss, and likewise Heloise's, could be vented through Biblical

analogues and parallels, rather than classical ones.

Thus Heloise's letters guide both herself and her former lover from their

sexual life to the worship of God, and provide spiritual consolation for each

other to replace their former physical consummation.37 Not only that but all

the letters associated with Heloise acknowledge her great learning. Abelard

twice credits Heloise with the knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew,

making her a second Paula, and we recall that Boniface's learned circle also,

at times, quoted Greek in their letters.38 Abelard in the History of My Calamity

quotes from Cicero and Jerome, from Ovid and the Bible, from Juvenal and

Eusebius, from Diogenes Laertes and Quintilian, from Horace and Bede, from

Lucan and Pseudo-Dionysus, from Seneca and Josephus, among others. But

in the remainder of the letters he will rarely do so. That was also true of

Boniface and of Jerome. It is the women who display, nay, even flaunt, their

precocious classical learning when writing to their menfolk.

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The letter Heloise was prompted to write on reading the History of My

Calamity she addressed as follows:

Domino suo immo patri, coniugi suo immo fratri, ancilla sua immo filia

ipsius uxor immo soror, Abaelardi Heloisa. [To her master, or rather her

father, husband or rather brother; his handmaid, or rather his daughter,

wife, or rather sister; To Abelard, Heloise.]

She then re-narrates the substance of Abelard's letter, and notes that hers can

also serve as a consolation letter, because by its means she will share

Abelard's burden with him. To substantiate this claim she quotes from a letter

by Seneca written to his friend Lucilius, a letter which states that the act of

letter writing brings absent friends into each other's presence:

Quam iucundae vero sint absentium litterae amicorum ipse nos exemplo

proprio Seneca docet ad amicum Lucilium loco sic scribens; Quod

frequenter mihi scribis gratias ago. Nam quo uno modo potes te mihi

ostendis. Numquam epistolam tuam accipio quin protinus una simus. Si

imagines nobis amicorum absentium iocundae sunt quae memoriam

renovant et desiderium absentiae falso atque inani solatio levant quanto

iocundiores sunt litteras quae amici absentis veras notas afferunt? [Letters

from absent friends are welcome indeed, as Seneca himself shows us by his

own example when he writes these words in a passage of a letter to his

friend Lucilius: 'Thank you for writing to me often, the one way in which

you can make your presence felt, for I never have a letter from you without

the immediate feeling that we are together. If pictures of absent friends give

us pleasure, renewing our memories and reliving the pain of separation

even if they cheat us with empty comfort, how much more welcome is a

letter which comes to us in the very handwriting of an absent friend.'39]

She adds that such letters will not cause scandal. She next quotes Cicero on

justice. She then observes that there is a genre already in the Church in which

holy ladies are consoled by holy men, and here she means the letters written

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by Jerome and Paula and her circle, prompting him thereby to emulate

Jerome, and she chides Abelard for not having made use of the genre:

Your superior wisdom knows better than our humble learning of the

many serious treatises which the holy Fathers compiled for the instruction

or exhortation or even the consolation of holy women, and of the care with

which these were composed. And so in the precarious early days of our

conversion long ago I was not a little surprised and troubled by your

forgetfulness, when neither reverence for God nor our mutual love nor the

example of the holy Fathers made you think of trying to comfort me,

wavering and exhausted as I was by prolonged grief, either by word when I

was with you or by letter when we had parted.40

She next declares, and this is the passage that shocks prudes:

Deum testem invoco, si me Augustus universo praesidens mundo

matrimonii honore dignaretur totumque mihi orbem confirmaret in

perpetuo possidendum, carius mihi et dignius videretur tua dici meretrix

quam illius imperatrix. [God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of

the whole world, though fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all

the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more

honourable to me to be called not his empress but your whore.]41

This is a memory of Thais as well in Terence, the Desert Fathers, and

Hrotswitha, and it is to be echoed in Shakespeare's Othello: ‘She could

command an emperor tasks,’ and in Emily Dickinson, ‘Unmoved she notes

the Emperor's kneeling on her low mat.’42 Heloise concludes:

Cum me ad turpes olim voluptates expeteres, crebris me epistolis

visitabas, frequenti carmine tuam in ore omnium Heloisam ponebas. Me

plateae omnes, me domus singulae resonabant. Quanto autem rectius me

nunc in Deum quam tunc in libidinem excitares? Perpende, obsecro, quae

debes, attende quae postulo. [When in the past you sought me out for

sinful pleasures your letters came to me thick and fast, and your many

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songs put your Heloise on everyone's lips, so that every street and house

echoed with my name. Is it not far better now to summon me to God than it

was then to satisfy our lust? I beg you, think what you owe me, give ear to

my pleas.]43

Abelard makes haste to answer this letter. That plea, ‘quod debes,’ ‘what you

owe me,’ plays upon the Pauline marriage debt. In Abelard's answer there are

no classical allusions, only scriptural ones. It is a letter of comfort and

consolation sent by the founder of the Paraclete, the Comforter, to its abbess.

He goes on after speaking of women who were succoured in the Scriptures to

say that in the Old and New Testaments the miracles of resurrection were

shown first to women, such as the whore Mary Magdalen, rather than to

celibate males. Jerome, before him, had made such statements in letters to his

women friends. What Abelard is writing is a letter of consolation that will

outdo the Fathers' letters of such consolation.44

Heloise replies in kind: ‘Unico suo post Christum unica sua in Christo’ [To her

only after Christ, she who is alone in Christ]. She is still quoting from Seneca

and Lucan. In this letter she internalizes her guilt and that of all women,

responding with dialectic to Abelard's Praise of Virtuous Women with

Heloise's Blame for Vicious Females, naming Eve, Dalilah and Job's Wife.45 It

is in this letter that she states that she still thinks of her husband carnally,

even at Mass. This is her Augustinian Confession. She ends by quoting the

translator of the Vulgate:

Cui quidem consilio nostro ut ex auctoritate quoque robur adiungam,

beatum audiamus Hieronymum: Fateor imbecillitatem meam. [Let the

weight of authority reinforce what I say - let us hear St. Jerome: I confess

my weakness . . . .]46

Abelard's letter in answer is addressed: ‘Sponsae Christi servus eiusdem.’ [To

the Bride of Christ, Christ's servant.] He complains about Heloise's complaint

that he had put her name before his by citing Jerome's letter to Eustochium in

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which that weighty saint had likewise insisted on doing so: ‘My lady

Eustochium,’ he had written.47

In this letter Abelard stresses that Heloise was once a poor mortal's bride and

is now raised to the bed of the King of Kings. He compares Heloise in her

nun's black to the Ethiopian queen of Solomon and Moses' Ethiopian wife: ‘I

am black but comely, o ye daughters of Jerusalem.’ For a moment, he lets

down his guard and first quotes Jerome's writing to the virgin Eustochium,

and then even Virgil describing the wanton and coy Galatea: ‘Et fugit ad

salices, inquit, et se cupit ante videri’ [She flees to the willows and wishes first to

be seen], Eclogue III.48 He then quotes from Lucan's Pharsalia, VIII.83-86, that

text they may have shared together with their kisses and which they certainly

did at their bitter parting.

Cave, obsecro, ne quod dixit Pompeius maerenti Cornelia tibi

improperetur turpissime: 'Vivit post proelia Magnus! Sed fortuna perit.

Quod defles illud amasti.' [I beg you beware lest Pompey's reproach to

weeping Cornelia is applied to you, to your shame: ‘The battle ended,

Pompey the Great lives, but his fortune died. It is this you now mourn and

loved.’]49

In so speaking Abelard is acting the role of Pompey to her as the grieving,

rebuked Cornelia.

These are the Personal Letters. What follows are the Letters of Direction,

themselves an aspect of Heloise' therapy for both Abelard and herself.

Abelard's final Letter of Direction concludes with:

Quod si in tantae fervorem devotionis accendi non valetis, imitamini

saltem et amore et studio sanctarum litterarum beatas illas sancti

Hieronymi discipulas Paulam et Eustochium quarum praecipue rogatu tot

voluminibus ecclesiam praedictus doctor illustravit. [You can at least in

your love and study of sacred Scriptures model yourself on those blessed

disciples of St. Jerome, Paula and Eustochium, for it was mainly at their

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request that the great doctor wrote so many volumes to bring

enlightenment to the Church.]50

Johan Huizinga, in his essay on ‘Abelard,’ likewise notes that ‘Abelard

belonged to those on the side of Jerome. He quoted him again and again, he

praised him, he sought in him the explanation of the Scriptures. Erasmus, too,

was later to stand on the same side,’51 while at the same time Huizinga spoke

of Abelard's ‘conscious and noble sense of the rights and dignity of women.’52

Petrarch, another Humanist, was drawn to the Epistles (he, likewise, being an

Epistle writer), owning a manuscript and carefully annotating it.53

Finally, there will be the consoling letter from Peter the Venerable, which first

softens Heloise with praise:

Mox vero . . . longe in melius disciplinorum studia commutasti; et pro

logica Evangelium, pro physica apostolom, pro Platone Christum, pro

academia claustrum, tota iam et vere philosophica mulier, elegisti. [You

turned your zeal for learning in a far better direction, and as a woman

wholly dedicated to philosophy in the true sense, you left logic for the

Gospel, Plato for Christ, the academy for the cloister.]54

He goes on to say, ‘You snatched the spoils of the defeated enemy and

passing through the desert of this pilgrimage, with the treasures of the

Egyptians, you built a precious tabernacle to God in your heart.’ We likewise

find Peter the Venerable quoting from Ovid and Virgil. Then he breaks the

news of her beloved Abelard's death. In her reply to him she thanks him, then

asks that he look out for the needs of their son, Astralabe.55 (And there are

male scholars who say that Abelard wrote all these letters; including those

written after his death!)

Heloise and Abelard can play with the dialectic of the pagan poetry of lust,

such as Ovid's Heroides, and the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures and Epistles

against lust, because the tradition already, especially where women's epistles

to men are concerned, permitted such a playfulness. Egburga and Wynfrith,

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Heloise and Abelard, were playing with conventions already set up by Paula

and Jerome. But it is not really playfulness. The women could express their

deepest and most immediate emotions through the medium of distant and

past poetry. It is also the women who are most in control of the genre,

manipulating it at their will. Though they proclaim themselves humble

handmaids, they are also being imperious. They proudly exhibit their

classical learning from that imperial world. One wonders whether their

menfolk always catch on to their loving ruses. But it is a gentle dialectic in

which they can speak of lonely hours spent reading of Virgil's Dido and

Lucan's Cornelia, as if they were yellow-backed French romances (books

Rousseau said were to be read with one hand and certainly books so read by

Emma Bovary),56 and the stern Judaeo-Christian Scriptures and Epistles

which insist upon sexual restraint and which required of female readers

virginity and the black weeds of widowhood in the convent, rather than the

scarlet of the market place of Mary Magdalen. Latin letters for them

encompassed both pagan and Christian worlds, both the scarlet and the

black.

IV. Chaucer's Wife

These three pairs of letter writers have been of flesh and blood. Chaucer's

Wife, who is a fiction, our ‘Glorious Fourth,’ presents within her Prologue

Jankyn's Book of Direction and Correction, which she then destroys. Her

Jankyn, reader of Jerome and Abelard, though not likely of Wynfrith, is

university-trained, a Clerk of Oxenforde. She cannot be. But clearly she both

envies and emulates his Scholasticism in her dialectic against him. Paula,

Lioba and Heloise had read the classics and had used them in the Ciceronian

Humanist and familiar style to express their chaste love. The Wife flaunts her

exempla wrenched from classical texts into fragmented and misogynistic

anthologies as arabesquing weapons in a quasi-Scholastic diatribe against

men to express her sexual hate. I would suggest that Chaucer learned that

sexual hatred out of misogynistic university schoolbooks and that it is Gothic

rather than Romanesque, pagan rather than Christian. Indeed, Chaucer

acquired the tale of Abelard and Heloise out of the quintessentially Gothic

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text of the Roman de la Rose, its second author, Jean de Meun, being the first to

present that correspondence to the world.57 Yet Alice's marriage to Jankyn is

analogous to that of Heloise to Abelard, similarly destroying his scholarly

career; while her pilgrimages to Jerusalem are those of Paula and Margery,

arousing similar gossip, and would have had her stand at Bethlehem in the

Cave of the Holy Family, and the adjacent cave in which Saint Jerome and

Holy Paula translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into a Latin redolent

of Cicero and Virgil.

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Notes

1 While Etienne Gilson, Heloise and Abelard, trans. L. K. Shook (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1960), R. W. Southern, ‘The Letters of Abelard

and Heloise,’ Medieval Humanism and Other Studies, and Peter Dronke, Abelard

and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press,

1976), do believe in her letters' veracity, D. W. Robertson, Jr., Abelard and

Heloise, John F. Benton, ‘Fraud, Fiction and Borrowing in the Correspondence

of Abelard and Heloise,’ Pierre Abélard-Pierre le Vénerable, les courants

philosophiques, littéraires et artistiques en Occident au milieu du XIIe siécle, Actes et

memoires du colloques international, Abbaye de Cluny, 2-9 juillet, 1972 (Paris:

Editions du CNRS, 1975), pp. 469-512, the editor of the Letters, J. T. Muckle,

C.S.B. (Mediaeval Studies, 12, 15, 17, 18 (1953-1956), Georges Duby (quoted by

Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from

Perpetua (+203) to Marguerite Porete (+1310) [Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1984], p. 281, as saying to the Press: ‘Quant à Héloise, tout

donne à penser que ses lettres ont été écrites ou récrites par un homme’), and

John V. Fleming, personal communication, do not. Peggy Kamuf, Fictions of

Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

1982) accepts this argument and therefore presents them likewise as fiction.

On Kamuf, see review by Gabrielle Verdier, Studies in Medievalism, 3 (1987),

83-86. For Paula, see remarks later in this essay and footnote 3.

2 The biographical details can be gleaned from Jerome's Epistles, Patrologia

Latina, 22, ed. J. P. Migne, especially Epistola CVIII. See also J. N. D. Kelly,

Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies. It is interesting that all three pairs

of letter writers, Paula and Jerome, Lioba and Boniface, Heloise and Abelard,

were to be buried together, as if married couples; which was also true of

Saints Scholastica and Benedict.

3 Kelly, p. 141, remarks that this letter is ‘written in the name of Paula and

her daughter but manifestly by Jerome himself, to Marcella,’ then goes on to

say, ‘It is an idyllic piece, relating spiritual serenity and contentment . . . and

stands in striking contrast to the querulous, vituperative note’ of Jerome's

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typical writings. We find other male scholars making the same statements of

Heloise's letters, that they are Abelard's, yet that they are in a totally different

style than his. The letter in question is Epistola XLVI and is published in PL,

ed. Migne, 22.490-491; Saint Jerome, Lettres, ed. Jérome Labourt (Paris: Societé

d'editions ‘Les Belles Lettres,’ 1951), II.100-114, and in English translation, The

Letter of Paula and Eustochium to Marcella about the Holy Places (365 A. D.),

trans. Aubrey Stewart (London: Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society, 1896);

omitted from Select Letters of St. Jerome, trans. F. A. Wright (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1963), Loeb Classical Library 262.

4 Jerome is also fond of this phrase, but states it the opposite way: ‘Et de

Hiersolymis et de Britannia aequaliter patet aula coelestis: regnum enim dei

intra nos est,’ Epistola LVIII. Chaucer may have had it in mind with his Wife

of Bath, who so often speaks of Jerome.

5 Epistola XLVI, PL, ed. Migne, 22.490-91.

6 These insights into the injustices of privileged wealth bridge time; one can

find them in the Prophets and the Gospels, in Horace and Juvenal, in Wyclif

and More; but they are especially likely to be perceived by women who stand

outside the structures of power, such as Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and

Nadine Gordimer.

7 Epistola CVIII, PL, ed. Migne, 22.490-491; trans. Aubrey Stewart (London:

Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society, 1896), who notes that the earliest manuscript

is eleventh century.

8 CETEDOC CLCLT CD, Epistola XXII, ‘et ille, qui residebat: 'entiris', ait,

'Ciceronianus es, non christianus; ubi thesaurus tuus, ibi et cor tuum.'‘

9 Epistola CVIII. The experience of women pilgrims is so intense that it is

expressed as if it were hallucinatory, for instance, with Paula, with Birgitta of

Sweden, with Margery Kempe. See Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness

in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), for a

partial explanation. However, see also the Christian meditative tradition as

exemplified by Jerome, and continued in Pseudo-Bonaventure, Meditations on

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the Life of Christ, and St. Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, which requires the

imaginative participation in the events of the sacred drama as a form of

prayer.

10 Epistola CVIII. Jane Barr, ‘The Vulgate Genesis and St. Jerome's Attitude

towards Women,’ Studia Patristica, 18 (1982), 268-273, republished in Equally

in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Julia Bolton Holloway and

Constance S. Wright (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 122-128, also

discusses this issue. Jerome will commission Paula's tomb in Bethlehem,

stating of it, ‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius,’ quoting Horace's Ode.

11 Jerome's Letter to Eustochium and Adversus Jovinianum, PL, ed. Migne,

23.221-354.

12 The Pilgrimage of St. Sylvia of Aquitania to the Holy Places (London: Palestine

Pilgrims' Text Society, 1896), I; also ‘Peregrinatio Aetheriae,’ Egeria: Diary of a

Pilgrimage, trans. George E. Gringras (New York: Newman Press, 1970); The

Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen

(London: Oxford University Press, 1940/1961), Early English Text Society,

Original Series, 212; Johannes Jørgensen, Saint Bridget of Sweden, trans.

Ingeborg Lund (London: Longman's Green, 1954).

13 Pp. 42-43.

14 PL, 89; The English Correspondence of Saint Boniface: Being for the Most Part

Letters Exchanged Between the Apostle of the Germans and his English Friends,

trans. Edward Kylie (London: Chatto and Windus, 1911).

15 Epistola XXXIII, 732B; English Correspondence, p. 57.

16 Pp. 57-60.

17 Letter XXIII, pp. 110-111.

18 Letter XIV, pp. 90-91.

19 Letter XXIV, p. 112

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20 Letter XLVIII, pp. 206-209.

21 Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Modes of

Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1983).

22 While Jerome's fourth-century letters in extant manuscripts date back only

to the eleventh century, a hiatus of six centuries, Father Muckle, editor of the

twelfth-century ‘Letters of Abelard and Heloise,’ claims their letters cannot be

genuine since their earliest manuscripts are thirteenth century, and gives this

particularly as a major reason for Heloise's letters not being her own.

23 PL, 178; ‘Abelard's Letter of Consolation to a Friend (Historia

Calamitatum),’ ed. J. T. Muckle, C.S.B., Mediaeval Studies, 12 (1950), 163-213;

‘The Personal Letters between Abelard and Heloise,’ ed. J. T. Muckle, C.S.B.,

Mediaeval Studies, 15 (1953), 47-94; ‘The Letter of Heloise on Religious Life and

Abelard's First Reply,’ ed. J. T. Muckle, C.S.B., Mediaeval Studies, 17 (1955),

240-281; ‘Abelard's Rule for Religious Women,’ ed. T. P. McLaughlin, C.S.B.,

Mediaeval Studies, 18 (1956), 241-292, for the Latin texts; The Letters of Abelard

and Heloise, ed. and trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), for

the English translation.

24 PL, 178, 128A; ed. Muckle, 12 (1950), 183; trans. Radice, p. 67.

25 Romans 13.13-14; Augustine, Confessions, VIII, ‘So quickly I returned to the

place where Alypius was sitting; for there I had put down the volume of the

apostles, when I rose thence. I grasped, opened, and in silence read that

paragraph on which my eyes first fell, 'Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in

chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the

Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provisions for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts

thereof.'‘ No further would I read, nor did I need, for instantly, as the

sentence ended, - by a light, as it were, of security into my heart, - all the

gloom of doubt washed away.’

26 Bernard, Apologia ad Guillelmum Abbatem: ‘Ceterum in claustris, coram

legentibus fratribus, quid facit illa ridicula monstruostias, mira quaedam

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deformis formositas ac formosa deformitas? . . . Tam multa denique, tamque

mira diversarum formarum apparet ubique varietas, ut magis legere libeat in

marmoribus, quam in codicibus, totumque diem occupare singula ista

mirando, quam in lege Dei meditando,’ Opera, ed. Jean Leclercq, H. M.

Rochais (Rome: Editions Cistercienses, 1963), III.106.

27 Inferno V.138: ‘quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.’

28 Ed. Muckle, p. 184; trans. Radice, p. 68.

29 Ed. Muckle, p. 186; trans. Radice, p. 71; p. 73 for the Adversus Jovinianum

Socrates and Xanthippe episode. Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of

Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1982), pp. 130-131, was

to rewrite that story delightfully, describing Xanthippe rushing into Socrates'

prison cell and dashing the cup of hemlock away from his lips, onto the

ground, out of her great love for him.

30 Lucan, Pharsalia, VIII.94-95; ed. Muckle, p. 191; trans. Radice, p. 76. Lucan

and Jerome provided Abelard and Heloise a rich intertextuality for their own

lives and texts.

31 Ed. Muckle, p. 194; trans. Radice, p. 98.

32 First Epistle to the Corinthians 7.1-5; Elizabeth Makowski, ‘The Conjugal

Debt and Medieval Canon Law,’ Journal of Medieval History, 3 (1977), 99-114,

reprinted in Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Julia Bolton

Holloway and Constance S. Wright (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 129-

143.

33 Monica Green, when a graduate student in History of Science, Princeton

University, informed me of such statements in Trotula and Hildegard of

Bingen.

34 Abelard and Heloise, pp. 125-127, 50-54, 58-59.

35 Augustine, Letter 211, and Caesarius of Arles for his sister Caesaria, had

already written Rules for nuns, but apparently neither Heloise nor Abelard

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knew this. The Anglo-Saxon Regularis Concordia is also written for nuns, its

full title being Regularis Concordia Anglicae Nationis Monachorum

Sanctimonialiumque [The Harmonizing of the Rules for Monks and Nuns of the

English Nation], ed. Dom Thomas Symons (London: Nelson, 1953).

36 PL 178, 1817-1818.

37 My former student, Lauren Jackson Beck, noted that the use of therapeutic

repetition is mirrored both in the Consolation of Philosophy and the Letters of

Abelard and Heloise, in which the self-pitying is played back by one party to

the other. Both Abelard and Heloise are well aware that their abbey/convent

of the Paraclete means the ‘Holy Ghost,’ the ‘Comforter,’ the ‘Consoler.’

38 Ed. Kylie, p. 43; I am intrigued by Abelard's use of the onos lyras tag line of

Greek, ed. McLaughlin, Mediaeval Studies, 18 (1956), 289. See Julia Bolton

Holloway, ‘The Asse to the Harpe: Boethian Music in Chaucer,’ in Boethius

and the Liberal Arts, ed. Michael Masi (Bern: Peter Lang, 1981), pp. 175-186,

republished in Tales within Tales: Apuleius through Time, ed. Constance S.

Wright and Julia Bolton Holloway (New York: AMS Press, 1992).

39 Ed. Muckle, 16 (1953), p. 68-69; trans. Radice, p. 110.

40 Ed. Muckle, p. 70; trans. Radice, p. 112.

41 Ed. Muckle, p. 71; trans. Radice, p. 114. Shadowing this statement is

Lucan's Cornelia saying she brings such misfortune to her husband she

wishes she were her husband's enemy's wife, Caesar's: Pharsalia VIII. 88-89,

‘O utinam in thalmos invisi Caesaris issem/ Infelix coniunx et nulli laeta

marito!’

42 My graduate students, Alecia Dantico and Patricia McIntyre wrote on

these Terentian parallels for our volume of essays, Latin with Laughter: Terence

through Time; Julia Bolton Holloway, ‘Death and the Emperor in Dante,

Browning, Dickinson and Stevens, Studies in Medievalism, 2:3 (1983), 67-72.

43Ed. Muckle, p. 73; trans. Radice, pp. 117-118.

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44 Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard

R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1963), p. 162-165.

45 Ed. Muckle, p. 77. A parallel occurs in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,

lines 2416-2419: ‘For so watz Adam in erde with one bygyled,/ & Salamon

with fele sere, & Samson eft-sone3,/ Dalyda dalt hym hys wyrde, & Dauyth

þer-after/ Watz blended with Barsabe, þat much bale þoled.’

46 Ed. Muckle, p. 82; trans. Radice, p. 136.

47 Trans. Radice, p. 153.

48 Ed. Muckle, p. 87.

49 Ed. Muckle, p. 92.

50 Ed. McLaughlin, 18 (1956), 292; trans. Radice, p. 268.

51 In Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, trans. James S.

Holmes and Hans von Marle (New York: Meridian, 1959), p. 194.

52 P. 193.

53 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 2923. My colleague and friend, Professor

Richard J. Schoeck, has drawn my attention to Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Letters

to Women, ed. Hugo Rahner, trans. Kathleen Pondand S. A. H. Westman

(Frieburg: Herder and Herder, 1960) which demonstrates the continuity of

the tradition beyond the Middle Ages.

54 PL, ed. Migne, 189.347; trans. Radice, pp. 277-284.

55 PL, ed. Migne, 178; trans. Radice, p. 285. See also Giles Constable, Letters

and Letter Collections, Typologie des sources du Moyen Age occidental, Fasc.

17 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1976), and his edition of The Letters of Peter the Venerable

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 2 vols.

56 Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973); Jacques Lacan, Ecrits

(Paris: Seuil, 1966-71); Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, edited, Jacques-Alain

Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

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57 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, has the early and best manuscript of the

Letters of Abelard and Heloise, which had been owned by Petrarch and

which he annotated. Did it influence his love for Laura? It is a text Humanists

revered, but not Scholastics.

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X. CONVENTS, COURTS, COLLEGES

THE PRIORESS AND THE SECOND NUN

Sculpture becomes most interesting when showing two or more figures in tension against each other, rather than only one; as in the Alexandrian clustering of the Three Graces, one of whom gives, one who takes and one who both gives and takes, peaceably reconciling their warring opposites.1 It is wise to tell students not to write on only one Shakespearian dramatis persona, as their artistic existence is only achieved through their co-existence with the other characters in their play. Chaucer similarly compares and contrasts characters, in words in a book rather than with actors upon a stage or as forms and shapes in sculpture, in the Canterbury Tales. Literature is not reality, though it plays games with codes of representation. We have, amongst that diverse pilgrimage cavalcade, the lusty Wife and the celibate Clerk, the Benedictine Monk and the Franciscan Friar, the young and jovial Kentish Miller and the elderly and choleric Norfolk Reeve, and a host of others. Some personify occupations in competition with each other,2 others represent the tension of worldly hierarchies, the experienced Knight accompanied by the apprentice Squire, the Prioress, taking first place, prior, with the Second Nun, taking second. Chaucer's Prioress is simperingly Gothic, his Second Nun, forthrightly Romanesque.

On a pilgrimage, ideally, all were to be equal, kings with beggars, women with men, which was a major reason for the pilgrimages performed by such women as Saint Birgitta of Sweden, a member of that country's royal household, and Margery Kempe, the wife of a Norwich burgess.3 But, from the Council of Whitby until Vatican II, cloistered clergy were not to go on pilgrimage. Theirs was the interior pilgrimage, their cloister with its well at the center a paradigm of paradise amidst the wilderness of the world and its sinfulness.4 Chaucer's cavalcade is satiric and comic. Pilgrims ideally were to walk, and preferably, barefoot, on pilgrimages. We hear of Henry II doing so after his murder of the Archbishop, Thomas Becket. Even Henry VIII, before his murder of Thomas More, went so on pilgrimage to Walsingham.5 The

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Parson's Tale states: ‘Commune penaunce is that preestes enjoynen men communly in certeyn cas, for to goon peradventure naked in pilgrimage or barfot’ (X.104) and ‘This folk taken litel reward of the ridynge of Goddes sone of hevene and of his harneys whan he rood upon the asse, and ne hadde noon oother harneys but the povre clothes of his disciples; ne we ne rede nat that evere he rood on oother beest’ (X.434).6 Chaucer, placing his pilgrims all on horseback, is joking, a joke his medieval readers would have relished for its code-switching and breaking but to which we are not privileged, having lost that canonical lore.

Pilgrimage, after Whitby, and before Vatican II, was a secular activity, a performance of piety by the laity, not by the clergy; although there were a few exceptions.7 Chaucer's Monk, Friar, Prioress, Nun, Priest, Summoner, Pardoner and Parson ought not to be here. Their presence is outrageous comedy. Inns were forbidden to the cloistered clergy who, if they had to travel, were enjoined to stay in other monastic establishments along their route. The Tabard, so close to the Bell, was situated outside the city limits of London, in its red light district, as was later to be also Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, giving rise to those references within his plays to venereal diseases, brothels and whores. Similarly were the theatres of ancient Rome in the unincorporated areas and Renaissance woodblocks for Terence's Comedies therefore show us the Boethian ‘whores of the theatre’ plying their oldest profession amidst the theatre goers.8 The Cook's Prologue and his Tale give us that cityscape. What is the Prioress doing in such an unsavoury context?

Victor Turner has shown us how pilgrimage and its piety inevitably gives way to its opposite, to Vanity Fair, to St. Denis' Lendit, to commerce and license, great fairs rising up next door to sacred shrines.9 Maria Corti has spoken of ‘Models and Anti-Models.’10 The sign demands its anti-sign, its undoing, its deconstruction. Pilgrimage texts, especially those in the vernacular, appear to require such a dynamic play of opposites on many levels and planes. Dante noted that he wrote his pilgrimage work in the language of ‘women and children,’ the vernacular.11 Mikhail Bakhtin has observed how the two worlds, of official Latin, and of the folk, and defiant, vernacular, played against each other, the unofficial world of the proletariat mocking, parodying and profaning the sacredness of Latin. Bakhtin has also noted how these Two Worlds' juxtaposition give us Carnival/Lent.12 In such a

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dialectic we can expect Lent to turn back into Carnival, sacrament to become excrement, eschatology to be scatological.

Elsewhere I have written of the vernacularization in Dante, Langland and Chaucer of Luke's Gospel, where the first people who meet the risen Christ at Easter and then tell others, Mary Magdalen, Luke and Cleophas, are accounted to be telling lying fables, not truthful sermons. I noted there that the account of the Emmaus Pilgrims allowed for the use of inns, pilgrims and fables, the world of Carnival, to be followed by that of the sermon of bread and wine as the sun set, the world of Lent and Resurrection.13 In that study I stated that theology was the critical theory of medieval pilgimage poetry. In the Pauline structure women were forbidden to preach sermons and the old wives' tales they told were not to be listened to.14 In the opposing Christian anti-structure women and beggars, whores and lepers, were on top, in which the first shall be last, in a world upside down.15 In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales women can preach, as does the Wife of Bath, and the pilgrims are not deaf to her words, even if she herself is. The Gospels, revolutionary texts that they are, broke paternalistic codes in having, as Jerome is careful to say to Marcella, Paula and Eustochium and then Abelard to Heloise,16 Mary Magdalen the whore be the first to see the risen Christ. The Gospels themselves allowed the up-so-doun Carnival of the Canterbury Tales in this game of texts and codes. Then they were followed by the Pauline Epistles and the Parson's Sermon, order restored.17

Mikhail Bakhtin also wrote on the Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics, seeing there the use of many voices, each with its own part of the code of the whole, as dialectic and dialogical.18 Similarly, the Russian Formalists have discussed Pushkin's Tales of Belkin in which Pushkin creates an author who collects stories from his acquaintances, two of these stories being supposedly by a novel-reading woman and in all of which are characters who are influenced by written or spoken stories.19 Authors can create authors of tales within tales. And sometimes these personae can even carry out sex changes, authorial transvestism and cross dressing, such as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, Gustave Flaubert's Emma Bovary (‘Madame Bovary, c'est moi!’), Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and James Joyce's Mo[l]ly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales we have a Geoffrey Chaucer who creates a plurality of characters, who in turn often create a plurality of characters, reminding one of those racks of masks in classical and medieval

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Terence manuscripts.20 Among these masks Chaucer assumes are those in transvestite drag of scarlet-clad, Mary Magdalen-like Alisoun of Bath (following upon his mask of the Miller assuming the mask of black-and-white-clad Alisoun), and of the black and white clad Prioress (though she has a touch of gold and like her literary ancestress, the Roman de la Rose's Constreyned Abstinence, a touch as well of scarlet coral) and the Second Nun.21

This triad of ‘women,’ the elderly Wife/Widow of Bath, the mature and ‘courtly’ Prioress and the humble, virginal and young Second Nun, confront us in the text as part of its Sphinx riddle. I have argued elsewhere that the three forms of the Wife of Bath fragmented in her Prologue/Tale are manifestations of the Great Mother who customarily took the forms of Crone, Wife and Maiden at well heads and who was particularly worshiped at Bath.22 The Wife boasts that she has had the world in her time (‘That I have had my world as in my tyme,’ III.473) and sighs, ‘Allas, allas! That evere love was synne!’ (III.614), while her Prologue portrait states, ‘Of remedies of love she knew per chaunce,/ For she koude of that art the olde daunce’ (I.475-6). The Prioress, who should never have been traveling with the Monk, and certainly not staying at an inn with him, bears a brooch that reminds us of his with the love knot (‘He hadde of gold ywroght a ful curious pyn;/ A love-knotte in the gretter ende ther was,’ I.196-7), hers stating ‘Love conquers all’ (‘And theron heng a brooch of gold ful sheene,/ On which there was first write a crowned A,/ And after Amor vincit omnia,’ I.160-62). Love lust has conquered the Wife and the Prioress, but not the Second Nun.

The Wife and the Prioress, in scarlet and in black, are both stitched together out of the intertextuality/ intersexuality of Ovid and the Roman de la Rose. The Second Nun comes from the pages of the Golden Legend. The Wife is the secular pilgrim par excellence, traveling to Rome, Jerusalem (three times emphatically), Compostela and Cologne, except that, unlike Saint Birgitta of Sweden and Margery Kempe, she is interested in sex, not in vows of chastity. Thus she with her peripatetic, far-flung journeys in the world contrasts strongly with what the Prioress and the Second Nun should exemplify, the cloistered life within convent walls. Her story, despite her pilgrimages, is pagan, about magic and marriage. At least the other two women tell Christian tales. But the scarlet 'A' of Hawthorne’s Hester (Esther of the Bible) Prynne is not too secretly borne by the Prioress as well as boldly by the Wife.

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Only the Second Nun is free from its taint. Let us now turn to their two tales and see how in them, ‘Mordre wil out’ (VII.576; VII.3052, in the latter instance this being stated to have been caused because of gold, mostly associated in the Canterbury Tales with sin and death).

I. The Prioress

In this discussion we will give the Prioress that precedence that, in the world's eyes, she deserves. Her Prologue portrait pairs her with the Monk, both of them having dogs, which were forbidden in monastic rules and communities. Her table manners come straight out the Roman de la Rose,23 and were there taught by the ancestress of the Wife of Bath, La Vieille. She swears, or does not swear, by St. Loy, St. Eligius, the patron saint of goldsmiths and hay and dung carters.24 Her name comes out of courtly romance, such as from the Lais of Marie de France, not the Golden Legend. She is Lady Sweetbriar, ‘madame Eglentyne’ (I.121). She counterfeits, imitates, the behaviour of court. And indeed her convent, Stratford atte Bowe, had once a royal member, Elizabeth of Hainault, sister of Queen Philippa, who died there in 1375.25 The absurd rosary ‘brooch of gold ful sheene’ she carries with its ‘crowned A’ (I.160-1), is typical of the adulation for Richard II's Queen Anne who died at Sheen in 1394.26 In all, despite the goodness of Queen Anne, neither the portrait limned by Chaucer of the Prioress nor her tale are positive.

D.H. Lawrence said ‘Trust not the teller, trust the tale.’ In the Prioress' Tale, ‘Mordre wil out.’ Her Prologue portrait stressed her sentimentality:

But, for to speken of hire conscience, She was so charitable and so pitous She wolde wepe, if that she saugh a mous Kaught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde. Of smale houndes hadde she that she fedde With rosted flessh, or milk and wastel-breed. But soore wepte she if oon of hem were deed, Or if men smoot it with a yerde smerte; And al was conscience and tendre herte. (I.142-150)

The Tale instead is of a vicious pogrom, a program of vengeance gone out of bounds without any statute of limitations, the Jewish lex talionis being no

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more than an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. But here an entire community is wiped out to avenge the death of one child. We meet the merciful Prioress' vengeful shadow.27 In England we would say that she would be the sort who would contribute to the Royal Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and not to the Royal Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Children. In America she would likely be a dues-paying, card-carrying member of Animal Rights groups.

These anti-Semitic tales spread across Europe, particularly taking hold in times of stress, such as the Black Death. The scrupulous hygiene exercised by Jewish communities and individuals created anxiety and hostility amongst the less careful Christians. An early version, told in Byzantium, became embedded in the text Arculf dictated to Adamnan on the island of Iona. In it an iconoclastic Jew throws an icon of the Virgin into a privy.28 Later versions of these tales are frequently coupled with the (non-existent) figure of St. Nicholas, patron of school children and thieves, patron of mischievousness and naughtiness, and as such occur, for instance, in the monastic dramas for schoolboys and oblates of the Orléans 201 manuscript.29 In Spain, during the time of tension connected with the Reconquista, King Alfonso the Learned composed and had illuminated many Cantigas de Santa Maria with such tales against Jews amongst them.30 The tales, psychiatrically, are sick, often about defecation, with much projecting and inappropriate scapegoating; but generally in the genre the Jew is not put to death, only forced to convert, a fate worse than death, and be forgiven.

Perhaps what we have is uncontrollable internalized hostility unleashed by one oppressed, powerless group, women, against another mirroring group, Jews, cathecting intolerance. (Later, in the South, similar patterns of internalized/ projected hostility amongst share-croppers living on the margins of poverty would result in the scapegoating lynching of African Americans.) In Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice we see side by side on the stage Portia as Mercy, Shylock as Justice, debating and enacting their crucial and cruel dialectic. In Langland's Piers Plowman we witness the Four Daughters of God embrace harmoniously on Easter morn following an initial discord. But in the telling of the Prioress's Tale it is the Marian ultra-feminine Prioress who should be ultra-merciful who becomes instead ultra-judgemental, demanding far more than a pound of flesh, demanding the shedding of blood, genocide.

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The lady-like Prioress, so careful not to leave a ‘ferthyng’ of grease in her cup, with her impeccable table manners (I.130-141), tells a tale of a child of seven (following upon her likening herself to a child of one), who obnoxiously sang a hymn to the Virgin through the length and breadth of the Jewish Ghetto31 and who was slain, his body cast into the privy. The mother, a grieving Rachel, in this photographic negative of the Slaughter of the Jewish Innocents by Herod seeking to murder the Messiah,32 finds the schoolchild still singing, despite his throat cut to the neck bone. The body of the boy is taken to the convent in a procession still singing all the while, with his mother swooning over him (he is presumably still covered with latrine filth), and then he is finally cleansed with holy water (VII.639).33 Later, the Abbot will weep salt tears upon him, reminiscent of the scene in Saint Erkenwald where the Bishop, weeping, baptizes the dead Judge.34 The boy meanwhile has told of the grain laid by Mary upon his tongue, reminiscent of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament where a Christian in collusion with Jews retained the sacrament in order for it to be used in a Black Mass.35 In this version so much that is relevant to the Jewish community becomes here carried out by the Christian child in odd distortions. Much else is strange, including the link's words concerning Saint Augustine (VII.441), followed by the Prologue's reference to the holiness of a babe at the breast (VII.453-457), when we recall that Saint Augustine spoke of a child being green with jealousy at his sibling's nursing at the mother's breast, and not being sweetly innocent.36 Another odd reference, in this anti-Semitic tale, is the figural likeness drawn between the Virgin and ‘O bussh unbrent, brennynge in Moyses sighte’ (VII.468-9). We have already noted the reference to ‘Thise new Rachel’ (VII.627), Jacob's bride mourning her lost sons. Is the Prioress, in her much protested ‘innocence,’ ignorant, or knowledgeable, of the illogical arabesques she appropriates from the Hebrew Scriptures?

Just as Jews, the physicians of kings in the Middle Ages, could be resented for their careful hygiene, so also were they envied for their great access to learning, to the Book at its source and origin which next shaped Christendom and Islam. The technology of the alphabet was a brilliant Semitic invention, to be appropriated by the Greeks (alpha, beta are not Greek words but derive from aleph, beth), Etruscans (their alphabet became the Germanic runes), and Romans. After the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70 by Titus and Vespasian, Judaism, in mourning, gave up its magnificent heritage of music, including the singing of David's Psalms. Christian monks kept alive that

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tradition not only of those written words, now translated into Syrian, Coptic, Greek and Latin, but also of that music. In time secular songs were harnessed to that music, giving us both Ambrosian hymns and Gregorian chant. Women in convents in the earlier Middle Ages had had access to Latin learning but, with the coming of the universities (a largely Arabic and Jewish institution in its origins) from which they were excluded, women were further separated off from power structures. We know from Eileen Power's work that the ability for nuns in convents to learn grammar, Latin, had greatly decreased in this period.37 (Yet we will find the Prioress' apprentice, the Second Nun, proficient in English, Italian and Latin, and finding it best to study books rather than to court idleness. Similarly the Canon's Yeoman, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, surpasses his master, the Canon, in virtuousness and repents and reforms.) Barred from preaching sermons, women could still sing hymns (we find Abelard composing such for Heloise and her convent of the Paraclete based upon stories of women and men in the Hebrew Scriptures) as an outlet for their emotions, if not their intellect. The Prioress creates a persona for herself, a Jungian animus of herself, in the illiterate hymn-chanting school boy who is terrifyingly and tauntingly caught, trapped and victimized in mirroring ghettoized worlds. She is unforgiveably both victim and victimizer.

The text has played with the use, and abuse, of words by children who do not understand them. The Marian Prioress has spoken of herself as an innocent infant of but twelve months old, ‘innocent’ meaning not nocent, not harmful, infant, ‘infans,’ not yet speaking. She has likewise stressed the seven year old child as not learning to read his primer, not understanding and instead learning by rote the hymn he sings perpetually. The tale has the same effect upon many of us as the hymn within it upon the Jewish community. The Prioress with her cultivated and counterfeited appearance and falsely assumed stance of innocence and childishness reminds one of the whited sepulchre back in Belgium that is Kurtz' Intended in Heart of Darkness.38 She is kin to both the Monk and the Canon. She is kin, intertextually, as well to the Roman de la Rose's Faus Semblant's leman, Constreyned Abstinence, in appearance and in hypocrisy. Both she and her tale are negative and, I believe, neither should be trusted.

The tale has followed an account of a Monk, a Wife and a Merchant in which the Monk has broken so many of his vows, poverty, chastity and obedience,

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and so much of his Rule, against staying overnight, against eating when on a day's journey, against money-dealing and against sexuality. The Host censored that behavior (‘Draweth no monkes moore unto youre in,’ VII, 442), but the Prioress, addressed twice by the Host as ‘My lady Prioresse’ and ‘my lady deere,’ murmurs not at all against the Monk of the Shipman's Tale. Her rhyme royal tale is then followed by the rhyme doggerel of the mock-courteous Tale of Sir Thopas, as if Chaucer were ridiculing the Prioress and her ‘courtliness.’ And feigning himself to be as untaught as she. But the link between the Tales of the Prioress and the Author gives us an embarassed wordlessness. The pilgrims are at a loss as to how to respond to Eglentyne's tale-telling. They remind us of those awkward moments during Civil Rights when someone inadvertently made a racist remark, the rest of the company falling silent, hoping that the silence could register disapproval and discomfort.39

II. The Second Nun

The Second Nun (the last shall be first) received, humbly, a mere line and a half, along with the half-line for the Nun's Priest, in the General Prologue. Similarly had Langland in Piers Plowman given Lady Mede a grandiose ten line catalogue and inventory of scarlet and golden ribbons, emerald and ruby jewelry, and then to Holichirche a mere half line of white linen garb, that garb of the saved in Apocalypse.40 The Second Nun's Tale, following upon the Nun's Priest's, and close to the end of this bawdy pilgrimage, turns excrement back into sacrament, scatology back to eschatology. She begins with again a reference to the Roman de la Rose, referring to the figure of Idleness, portress of the gate of the cupidinous garden of that poem.41 She recommends that we eschew that portress, putting her down by means of her opposite, business.42 The Monk may have kept himself occupied in his cell with tragedies. She has occupied herself in her cloister with mirroring Golden Legends and weaving literary garlands of roses and lilies, of saints and martyrs.43 I illustrate her with a 1500 woodblock of St Birgitta at work in a book-filled scriptorium writing her Revelationes.

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St Birgitta, Revelationes, Nuremburg, Anthony Koberger

She next invokes the Virgin, echoing lines plagiarized by Chaucer from Dante said in the Commedia by St. Bernard,44 and the Virgin's mother, St. Anne,45 then follows those with the Golden Legend's etymologizing of the name of ‘Seint Cecilie,’ as containing the meanings of lily, light, heaven, Leah (again lifted from Dante, Purgatorio XXVII.97-108, to be echoed in XXVIII.40-XXXI.145), people, and so forth. The reference to Lia/Leah is interesting, for the Prioress had woven Rachel into her Tale. Another common figural parallel, implied here, is that of Mary Magdalen, the contemplative, and Martha, the vita activa. Wycliffite Chaucer appears here to be saying he prefers good works to the idleness (and sexuality) of the ‘contemplative’ life. The Nun's Tale, rather than being set in both a distant city in Asia and in England's Lincoln,46 is a Roman drama.47 Though the Second Nun's own garb is of humble black and white, her heroine's is of cloth of gold, but under it is a hair shirt (VIII.132-3). She is married to Valerian, but refuses to consummate her vows, telling him of her guardian angel. Valerian, believing the angel could instead be a ‘hende Nicholas,’48 is sceptical, but goes according to her instructions to the Catacombs along the Appian Way to be baptized by the Pope, St. Urban. In a vision he there sees St. Paul holding out to him a book written with letters of gold. He is convinced and baptized into the faith, returning home to find the angel, now visible, holding out to both spouses crowns of lilies and roses. The domino effect next has Valerian bring his brother Tiburce into the fold, to be rewarded with the palm of martyrdom.49 All three have laid aside the required Roman idolatry, the mandatory

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sacrifice to idols of either naked pagan gods or of clothed deified emperors upon phallic pillars.50

For this Civil Disobedience, Almachius, the prefect of Rome, given in this tale a Saracen, Muslim name, insists that they sacrifice to the ‘ymage of Juppiter.’ The officer Maximus is their next convert, for he finds he cannot carry out the death sentence upon them. Cecilia preaches to them, telling them that by their coming martyrdoms they win the crown (stephanos) of life (VIII.388). Next, Almachius summons Cecilia to appear before his court. She argues her case with conviction, telling him she is of noble birth, telling him that he is a balloon/bladder filled with air, to be pricked with a pin/needle and burst, telling him that though he says he has the power of life and death, he is wrong as he only has the power of death, not life. She stands before her judge/accuser like an Antigone before a Creon, like an Iphigenia before an Agamemnon, like Socrates before the Athenian court, like Christ before Pilate in the Gospels or before the Grand Inquisitor in Dosteivsky's Brothers Karamazov, like Joan of Arc before the English ‘godams,’ as in Shaw's play, like the conscientious objector in Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You, like Gandhi on trial by the British Raj,51 or with the simplicity of Rosa Parks refusing to give up a bus seat because her feet were tired. Anthropologists, studying ceremonies of power, have noted that it takes only one dissident to call into question all that is illusion.52 What is also of interest that these incidents are embedded not only in history but also, powerfully, in literary texts using them, Sophocles and Euripides' plays, Plato's dialogues, the Gospels, Thoreau's essay, Dostoevsky's novel, Tolstoy's book, Shaw's play, and more. The early Christian martyrs, especially the women saints, in golden legends (acts which were read), were admired through time for this defiant disobedience to imperial authority. Chaucer externalized Bohemian Queen Anne, bride to his King Richard II, as the outward symbol, the ‘crowned A,’ worn by the Prioress; he may have also internalized her Wycliffite interests and support and up-so-doun humility into the figure of the Second Nun. Chaucer in giving the Second Nun this tale to tell is giving her a royal revolution.

Unlike the child with his throat cut who could not die but was left amidst the ordure of a latrine, St. Cecilie lies in a cleansing bath of purifying flame. Then, her head three times smitten with a sword, her throat likewise cut, she continues defiantly to live and preach for three further days to the Roman

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people.53 The Prioress, obedient to and manipulative of male hierarchy, carried out revenge, in fantasy, against both a male child and a religious, racial minority in her tale, strangely identifying herself with both and displacing her internalized/projected anger upon them most unjustly and with the greatest sadism.54 The Second Nun, her subordinate, her subaltern,55 chose a different answer, that of non-violent Holy Disobedience, the only effective way there is to rectify inequities of power. Chaucer, what is more, departs from the Golden Legend in having Cecilie preach, which patriarchal Paul forbade to women.

This tale and others like it were in the feminine domain, and used by them as peaceable weapons. Already Hrotswitha had written Comedies in the manner of Terence about Christian woman martyrs, celebrating their defiance of authority, yet submitting and presenting these plays to her Abbess.56 Already Christina of Markyate had read to her husband on their wedding night the tale of St. Cecilia, then jumped out the window, ran away and become an anchoress.57 Women chose virginity in order not to submit to male power, in order to be free, in order to be like men.58 Christianity had been the liberating religion of women and slaves, though men could impose Pauline doctrine upon it. The Second Nun chose liberation theology, the Prioress complied to the Establishment. Wycliffite Chaucer appears to be on the side of the Second Nun.59

III. Christine’s Treasure

How did the tellers of these two Tales manage to live together in the same convent? The answer can best be found in the work by Christine de Pizan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies. This is a treatise written a generation after Chaucer by an Italian woman at the court of the King of France whose son was page to the Earl of Salisbury. Chaucer's son and granddaughter likewise had connections with that household, Alice Chaucer becoming Countess of Salisbury.60 In this text Christine gives us sensible advice on how women can co-exist, despite jealousy, at court, in a convent, and even (though this was impossible from the founding of the universities in the Gothic era to our own twentieth century as these institutions excluded us), in a college. At the beginning of its text the three allegorical ladies of Reason, Rectitude and Justice appear to Christine, telling her to eschew idleness and to write to teach women:

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May all the feminine college and their devout community be apprised of the sermons and lessons of wisdom, First of all to the queens, princesses and great ladies, and then on down the social scale we will chant our doctrines to the other ladies and maidens and all classes of women, so that the syllabus of our school may be valuable to all.61

When it comes to dealing with a difficult princess, a prima donna, Christine counsels patience and service, laying down clear and excellent guidelines concerning what to do in the face of envy and pride. She discusses first how a princess should behave, next how a lady serving her should do so, even if she has a bad mistress. And finally Christine addresses women of all ranks, wives, widows, whores and much more, giving them wisdom. She especially discusses the problems of jealousy and envy, which the Russian Formalists would later relate to Pushkin's Mozart and Saleri.62 Christine's de Pizan's Book of the Treasure could be read today with profit by women on the corporate ladder as well as by women members of university faculties.

In all these tales within tales are texts within texts. The Wife is in lusty rebellion against her clerkly husband's ‘Book of Wikked Wives’, and manages besides to quote intertextually from the Bible and from pilgrimage books, from Jerome, and even to bring in a reference to Chaucer's now lost Book of the Leoun.63 The Prioress gives us a boy eschewing his primer in order to sing a hymn he does not understand from the antiphoner. Her Tale is set in the era when women came to be increasingly denied literacy and education as the Aristotelian influence from Greco-Arabic Spain took hold, establishing universities with their scholasticism and which excluded women, imposing an apartheid of gender.64 The Second Nun is well read in the Golden Legend and in secular Dante's Commedia's use of monastic St. Bernard. The period of her tale looks back to the comparatively Golden Age of Roman culture, which can show us the iconography of women with styli held to their lips, wax tablets clutched in their hands,65 and also it looks to such monastic women as Hilda presiding over the Council of Whitby, as Lioba writing letters quoting Virgil to Boniface, as Hildegard of Bingen presenting herself as writing the book of her visions which she contemplates and likewise illuminates, and to Saints Birgitta and Catherine ordering Popes to return to Rome. Christine de Pizan, who had had the run of the King of France's library, reworks all the tales of the Book, the Bible, and of the Greek and Latin authors into her

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visions, and makes her books in turn be royal libraries for her readers. She opens to women the doors of the men's textual communities of power. Similarly had Pushkin's Tales of Belkin, with its masks within masks, had some of its tales within a tale be provided by a woman and have within them women who read texts, including one where she pretends to be unlettered and needing to be taught by her literacy-enamoured lover how to write love letters.66 Both Chaucer and Pushkin lived in ages where there were newly flourishing textual communities overthrowing ancient, masculine thraldoms, replacing these, the Hebrew, Greek and Roman, with vernacular literatures in which, as Dante said, women and children could share along with men. Dante and Chaucer were writing literature that complied with the newly-stirring Feminism of their day. In these three women personae of the Canterbury Tales Chaucer may be making a statement concerning forms of Feminism, and siding not with continued bondage and displaced revenge through the imitation by women of men's mistakes, but with open rebellion to the male establishment in order to gain equal access to power and justice.

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Notes 1 Raymond Pucinelli, Mills College; Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968); Piers Plowman makes use of these triads, where the third combines and reconciles the two opposites. This paper was forged in the crucible of two Chaucer conferences, 'Tales of Passion and Piety: Women and Religion in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales' and 'Tales within Tales: Apuleius and Chaucer', University of Colorado, Boulder, 1989, the latter funded by the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities. 2 Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 1-16, 128-137. 3 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969); The Liber Celestis of St. Bridget of Sweden, ed. Roger Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), EETS 291; The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), EETS OS 212. 4 George Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought: The Biblical Experience of the Desert in the History of Christianity and the Paradise Theme in the Theological Idea of the University (New York, 1962). 5 Edmond-René Labande, ‘Recherches sur les pélerins dans l'Europe des VIe et XIIe siécles,’ Spiritualité et vie littéraire de l'Occident, Xe-XIVe siécles (London: Variorum, 1974), pp. 339-349; Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Medieval Religion (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976), pp. 127-128; Durandus, pp. 135-136; Joinville, Memoirs of the Crusades, trans. Sir Frank T. Marzials (New York: Dutton, 1958), p. 166. 6 Text from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 7 H.F.M. Prescott, Friar Felix At Large: A Fifteenth-Century Pilgrim to the Holy Land (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). Pilgrims were to grow beards, not so friars. Friar Felix delights in his, confounding the medieval hair

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code. 8 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. V.E. Watts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), I. i, p. 36; Arthur M. Hind, An Introduction to the History of Woodcut (New York: Dover, 1963), II. 610, fig. 358, from Terence, Comoediae, Lyon, 1493. 9 Victor Turner, ‘The Center Out There: Pilgrim's Goal,’ History of Religions, 12 (1973), 191-203. 10 Maria Corti, ‘Models and Anti-Models in Medieval Culture,’ New Literary History, 10 (1979), 339-366. 11 Dante Alighieri, De eloquentia, I.i, in Le Opere di Dante, ed. M. Barbi, E.G. Parodi, F. Pellegrini, E. Pistelli, P. Rajna, E. Rostagno, G. Vandelli (Florence: Società Dantesca Italiana, 1960), p. 297. 12 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 1-58, 437-474. 13The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer (Berne: Peter Lang, 1987, 1989, 1993). 14 I Corinthians 14.34; I Timothy 4.7. 15The Reversible World, ed. Barbara Babcock (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). 16 Jerome, Epistola CXXVII, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1854), XXII, 1090; Abelard to Heloise, Letter 6, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, ed. and trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 180. 17 Augustine provides this patterning of the pilgrimage, through lust, to God, in the Confessions; see also the Santa Maria Novella Spanish Chapel fresco, the Via Veritatis, the Pisan Campo Santo fresco, in both of which a procession of travelers and revelers meet up with a confessor: Millard Meiss,

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Painting in Florence and Siena After the Black Death (New York: Harper, 1964). 18 (Ann Arbor, 1973), pp. 150-69. 19 P.N.Medvedev/M.M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. x, discussing Viktor Vinogradov and Valentin N. Voloshinov, of the Bakhtin school, on Puskin's Tales. 20 Leslie Webber Jones and C.R. Morey, Miniatures of the Manuscripts of Terence Prior to the Thirteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931). It is not without interest that the Laurentian Library holds a manuscript of the Comedies in Boccaccio's autograph hand. 21 Turner, Ritual Process, passim, notes the sacred importance of red, white and black in Ndembu ritual; Victor Masayesva observed that Chaucer's use of these colours is similar to the ritual structuring amongst the Hopi. 22 John Sharkey, Celtic Mysteries: The Ancient Religion (London: thames and Hudson, 1976), p. 7, plates 14, 23-25; John Adair, The Pilgrim's Way: Shrines and Saints in Britain and Ireland (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), p. 95; Roger Sherman Loomis, Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 43 and passim; Julia Bolton Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer (Berne: Peter Lang, 1987); this account also relates the Wife's pilgrimages to pilgrimage texts, juxtaposing her and the Pardoner, pp. 179-195. 23 Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1976), II, lines 13355-13411. 24 Anne S. Haskell, Chaucer's Saints (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 1-2, 32-37. Medieval agriculture required the use of dunging to restore nitrogen to the soil. For this reason Lancelot momentarily hesitates before entering the cart to carry out the rescue of his Guinevere. See Friar's Tale, III.1564, Nun's Priest's Tale, VII.3018.

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25The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 654. Chaucer's own daughter was a nun at Barking, whose foundress was sister to Bede's St. Eorconwald, the Middle English poem's St. Erkenwald. 26 Chaucer had played similar games at the conclusion of the Book of the Duchess with Richmond and Lancaster, the long castle on a rich hill (1318-19). 27 Carl G. Jung, ‘The Shadow,’ and ‘Christ, A Symbol of the Self,’ in Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), Bollingen Series XX, pp. 8-10, 36-71. 28 Adamanan/Arculfus, De locis sanctis, ed. Denis Meehan (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1958), Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, 3, p. 119; this tale repeated in Alfonso el Sabio, Cantiga 34. 29 Edmond de Coussemaker, Drames liturgiques du Moyen Age (Rennes: Vatar, 1860); Sacre rappresentazione nel manoscritto 201 della Bibliothèque municipale di Orléans, ed. Giampiero Tintori and Raffaello Monterosso (Cremona: Athenaeum Cremonense, 1958); Charles W. Jones, St. Nicholas of Myra, Bari and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978). 30 Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, ed. Walter Mettmann (Coimbra: Universidad, 1959-1972), I-IV, Cantigas 4, 6 (of English child singing ‘Gaude Virgo Maria’ with refrain to King David), 12, 25, 27, 34, 108, 286; Carleton Brown, ‘The Prioress's Tale,’ in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), pp. 447-485. 31 Interestingly, it has been argued that there was transmission of Hebrew music from the Jewish communities of the Sephardim in Spain to those of the Ashkenazim in Germany by way of Christian pilgrims, Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music (New York: Tudor, 1929), p. 143; see also Eric Werner, The Sacred Bridge: The Interdependence of Liturgy and Music in Synagogue and Church During the First Millenium (London: Dobson, 1959), who argues for the retention of the psalms' music from the Hebraic tradition into Gregorian

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chant. 32 Liturgically, and in the drama, the passage concerning Rachel mourning her lost children by Jacob was repeated on the Feast Day of the Slaughter of the Innocents, as it had been repeated in Matthew 2.8, and as it was to be repeated in Melville's Moby Dick, whose captain is kin to our prioress. 33 Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 173, tells us that baptismal water was recycled if the child pissed, only replaced if the baby defecated into it. 34 St. Erkenwald, ed. Ruth Morse (Cambridge: Brewer, 1975), p. 64. 35 Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), pp. 754-788. 36 Augustine, Confessions, trans. W. Watts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), I.vii, pp. 20-21. 37 Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), pp. 246-255. See also Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 38 William J. Brandt, The Shape of Medieval History: A Study in Modes of Perception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), on stance amongst the aristocracy; Joan Ferrante, ‘Public Postures and Private Maneuvers: Roles Medieval Women Play,’ Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 213-229. Gothic Criseyde amidst her Romanesque cityscape is another example of such behavioral double standards between outward appearance and inward reality. 39 I recognize that Chaucerians are of two camps, some defending the Prioress, others loathing her. See Richard J. Schoeck, ‘Chaucer's Prioress: Mercy and Tender Heart,’ Chaucer Criticism, ed. Richard J. Schoeck and

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Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1960), I. 245-258; Florence H. Ridley, The Prioress and the Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965); Graciela S. Daichman, Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature (Ithaca: Syracuse University Press, 1986); while Sister Mary Madeleva, A Lost Language (New York: Russell and Russell, 1967), defended her. 40 William Langland, Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (London: Athlone, 1975), II.8-17, I.3. 41Roman de la Rose, 495-698; D.W. Robertson, Jr., ‘The Doctrine of Charity in Medieval Literary Gardens: A Topical Approach through Symbolism and Allegory,’ in Essays in Medieval Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 21-50. 42 The shadow tale to the Second Nun's Paradiso, is the Canon's Yeoman's Inferno, of a different kind of business, Satanic rather than Godly, of magic rather than theology. 43 Reflected in the May garlands Emily wove in the Knight's Tale (‘This maked Emelye to have remembraunce/To doon honour to May, and for to ryse . . . And in the gardyn, at the sonne upriste . . . /She gadereth floures, party white and rede, To make a subtil gerlend for hire hede; And as an aungel hevenysshly she soong,’ I.1046-1055); parodied in the ale stake garland of the Summoner, I.666-667; echoed in the lilies and roses (the brains and blood upon Canterbury's Cathedral floor) of St. Thomas Becket's martyrdom, ‘E sur le pavement l'un od l'autre gesir, /De roses e de lilies li péust sovenir: Car dunc veîst le sanc el blanc cervel rovir, /Le cervel ensement el vermeil sanc blanchir,’ 5637-5640, in Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, La vie de Saint Thomas Becket, ed. Emmanuel Walberg (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1964), pp. 173-4. 44 Howard Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1984), notes that both Prioress and Second Nun use Dante's invocatio, pp. 206-208, giving parallel passages, but does not observe borrowing of tale of Rachel and Lia, Magdalen and Martha, Beatrice and Matilda.

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45 Medieval Books of Hours delighted in showing St. Anne teaching the Virgin to read. St. Birgitta had St. Agnes, in visions, teach her Latin. Thus women created a subversive textual community against that of the male universities. St. Anne also echoes Richard II's Queen Anne, who sided with the Wycliffites and their literacy campaign. 46 For a brilliant account of the Jewry of York, see Joanne Greenberg, The King's Persons (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963). It has been suggested the Prioress' Tale was composed for the occasion of the visit of Richard II and his consort, Anne, to Lincoln, 26 March, 1387. 47 G.H. Gerould, ‘The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale,’ in Sources and Analogues, pp. 664-684; Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (New York: Longman's, Green, 1941), pp. 689-695. 48 ‘Angelus ad Virginem’ is sung by Nicholas to Alisoun, I.3216. 49 Revelation 7.9; ‘Pèlerinage à Rome,’ Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. Fernand Cabrol and Henri Leclercq (Paris, 1939), XIV, 45 and passim, gives engravings of palms sculpted on Roman Christian tombs; mosaics at Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, show white-clad, palm-holding martyrs. These had also appeared on Jewish tombs. 50 William S. Hecksher, Sixtus IIII aeneas insignes statuas romano populo restituendas censuit (The Hague: Utrecht University, 1955); Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper, 1972), pp. 88-90, 112, 151, 155; Meiss, p. 157. 51 Julia Bolton Holloway, ‘Feminist Gandhi,’ Gandhi in the Postmodern Age: Issues in War and Peace, ed. Sanford Krolick and Betty Cannon (Golden: Colorado School of Mines, 1984), pp. 61-64. 52 Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages, Collection Drawn from the Essays Presented and Discussed by the Shelby Colum Davis Center Seminar from 1980 to 1982, ed. Sean Willentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985; Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in

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Interpretative Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 53 Paul, I Corinthians 14.34; the Master of the Magdalene gives a splendid scene of the Magdalene preaching in a fifteenth-century painting whose Brussels donor family consists of a husband, wife and one child, a daughter: Jeanne Tombu, ‘Un Triptyche du Maître de la Légende de Marie-Madeleine,’Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Series 5, 15 (1927), 299-310. I owe my knowledge of this painting to Liesel Nolan. 54 A similar binary polarity, even to the sense of smell, is conveyed in the Fleury liturgical dramas where, in the Resuscitatio Lazari, the actors must hold their noses because of the living/dead Lazarus' stench, here the living/dead child covered with latrine filth, then in the Visitatio Sepulchri Mary Magdalen wafts incense and the three Maries bring precious ointments to the resurrected Christ, in the Cecilie story being the perfume of the crowns of lilies and roses. The two versions of the story were related as, for instance, on an early Christian ivory box in the British Museum, showing the ‘Resuscitatio’ sculpted on the doors of the tomb of the ‘Visitatio,’ the stories presented in Chinese boxes, Russian dolls style. Interestingly, nuns as well as monks wrote and performed in these plays and Hrotswitha concocts such a play about a prostitute turned hermit. 55 I here borrow a term from Gayatri Spivak's account of Bengali Feminist-Marxists, Boulder, 1986. 56 Hrotsvithae Opera (Leipzig: Teubner, 1930); The Plays of Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, trans. Larissa Bonfante (New York: New York University Press, 1979). 57 The Life of Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Recluse, ed. C. W. Talbot (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), pp. 50-51. 58 Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1883), XXXIII, 215-352, is not a diatribe against women but a treatise on virginity. 59 On Wycliffism, Lollardism, see, for instance, G. M. Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe, 1368-1520 (New York: Harper, 1963).

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60 Martin B. Rudd, Thomas Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1926), p. 87. 61 Christine de Pisan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, or The Book of the Three Virtues, trans. Sarah Lawson (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 32. 62 Bakhtin/Medvedev, Formal Method, p. xix. One suspects that the Nun's Priest's Tale is likewise a comment about the problems in this convent, where hen-pecked Chauntecleer's rebellion against Pertelote is the Nuns' Priest's rebellion against the Prioress, just as is the Second Nun's Cecilie likewise a rebellion against authority, shadowing the Second Nun's rebellion against her Prioress. Similarly we will see the Yeoman's rebellion against the Canon. In all these instances the rebellion is positive, though it was not in the case of Perkyn Revelour the apprentice against his master in the Cook's Tale. 63 Mary Carruthers, ‘The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,’ PMLA, 94 (1979), 209-222. 64 Prudence Allen, R.S.M., The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 BC-AD 1250 (Montréal: Eden Press, 1985). 65Roman Art, ed. Patricia Corbett (New York: Avenel, 1980), plates XXIV-XXV. 66 ‘The Squire's Daughter,’ The Tales of Belkin, in The Complete Prose Tales of Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin, trans. Gillon R. Aitken (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1966), pp. 119-140.

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XI THE TOMB OF THE DUCHESS

n a Master's Orals I asked the candidate to discuss Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and Browning's ‘My Last Duchess’. Behind my question also lay

the memory of a dream-like church in the Cotswalds, Ewelme, where Chaucer's grand-daughter, the Countess of Salisbury and the Duchess of Suffolk, lies buried in an exquisite Gothic tomb worthy of a bishop's simony or of Browning's poetry. This essay will argue for 'Gothic' Chaucer, the Chaucer of the ‘Sweet New Style’. Let us take these connections and see where they might lead us.

I. The Books of the Duchesses

Chaucer was born to a London vintner, who lived in a ‘fair and large’ house there with carpets and embroidered bed hangings and silver dishes counted by the dozen and other articles of silver plate engraved with the family's arms.1 It is the type of setting William Morris could describe. Then, as a young page, Geoffrey Chaucer lived in the castles and palaces of John of Gaunt, who, by his marriage with the Duchess Blanche, had become Duke of Lancaster and who had already been Earl of Richmond. When the Duchess Blanche died, Chaucer wrote his first major poem, The Book of the Duchess, in which his elegy becomes, like the anonymous Pearl, paradoxically an epithalamium, where the craft and alchemy of poetry restores the dead to life. The text plays powerful games with clocks, stained glass windows, books, hunts and puns. Chaucer married Philippa, the daughter of Sir Paon de Ruet, whose other daughter was Catherine Swynford. Philippa Chaucer had first served as lady-in-waiting to Edward III's wife, Queen Philippa. Both Catherine and Philippa were most closely attached to the household of John of Gaunt, Catherine being the governess of the Duke's children by first Blanche and later Constance of Castille, and ultimately marrying the Duke herself. One of these children was to become Henry IV of England.2

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When John of Gaunt married Chaucer's sister-in-law, Catherine de Ruet, it caused somewhat of a scandal at court. Froissart tells us both of the event - and of the courtiers' response to it:

Around that time the Duke of Lancaster entered into a third marriage with a lady who had been the daughter of a knight of Hainault called Sir Paon de Ruet, in his day one of the knights of good Queen Philippa of England, who had loved the Hainaulters because she was of their nation. This lady, whom the Duke of Lancaster now married, was called Catherine; in her youth she had been placed in the household of the Duke and Duchess Blanche of Lancaster. After Duchess Blanche had passed away and also Madam Constance of Castile, daughter of King Peter of Spain, whom the Duke of Lancaster married as his second wife and by whom he had that daughter who became Queen of Spain; when, then, this second Duchess Constance had died, the Duke of Lancaster had maintained this lady, Catherine de Ruet, who for her part had become married to an English knight. Both during and after the knight's lifetime, Duke John of Lancaster had always loved and maintained this lady Catherine, by whom he had three children, two sons and a daughter. The elder son was named John, otherwise Beaufort of Lancaster, and was a great favorite with his father. The other's name was Henry; his father the Duke sent him to the school at Oxford and made a great jurist of him. This learned man was later Bishop of Lincoln, which is the noblest and richest diocese in the whole of England. Out of love for his children, the Duke of Lancaster married their mother, Madam Catherine de Ruet, which caused much astonishment in France and England, for she was of humble birth compared to the other two ladies, Duchess Blanche and Duchess Constance, whom the Duke had had as his wives before her.

When the news of this marriage to Catherine de Ruet reached the great ladies of England, such as the Duchess of Gloucester, the Countess of Derby, the Countess of Arundel and other ladies with royal blood in their veins, they were surprised and shocked, considering it scandalous, and said: `The Duke of Lancaster has quite disgraced himself by marrying his concubine. And since she has got so far, it will mean that she will rank as the second lady in England when she comes.' They went on to say: `We will leave her to do the honours all by herself. We will not go to any place where she may be. It would really demean us too much if that kind of

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duchess, who comes of humble stock and was the Duke's concubine for a very long time, inside and outside his marriage, were to take precedence over us. Our hearts would burst with vexation, and rightly so.'

The two who had most to say about this were the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. They considered that the Duke of Lancaster had overstepped all bounds when he took his concubine to wife and said they would never recognize her marriage or call her lady or sister. The Duke of York soon got over it, for he was most often in the company of the King and his brother of Lancaster. The Duke of Gloucester was of different stuff, for he respected no one's opinions, although he was the youngest of all the brothers [the King's uncles]. He was inclined by nature to be proud and overbearing and he was always in dis-agreement at the King's councils, unless they went exactly as he liked.

This Catherine de Ruet remained Duchess of Lancaster the rest of her life. She was the second lady in England and elsewhere after the Queen and she had a perfect knowledge of court etiquette because she had been brought up in it continually since her youth. She loved the Duke of Lancaster and the children she had with him, and she showed it in life and in death.3

The Duchess's sister, Chaucer's wife, Philippa de Ruet, does not seem to have to have gained as much recognition among Chaucer's circle or among later Chaucer scholars, as had Catherine de Ruet. From Chaucer's own joking and clerical references to marriage we tend to envision her as more of an Alice of Bath. And, to examine those references, let us now turn to the figure of Chaucer's Arch-Wife.

II. Alice's Books and Tombs

Chaucer is that oxymoron, a misogynist feminist. He, like Chrêtien de Troyes and Andreas Capellanus, had to write for women patrons, first for the Duchess Blanche, translating for her Deguileville's Pélèrinages' ABC, then for Queen Anne of Bohemia, wife to Richard II. She had been shocked by Troilus and Criseyde: so he wrote Legend of Good Women at her command. But he is also heir to all the misogyny conveyed in his Clerks of Oxenforde's books, whether carried on pilgrimage to Canterbury in black and red covers, or read to the Wife at home in Bath. Could, in that argument in the kitchen in Bath, be reflected Philippa de Ruet's own rage at Chaucer's lack of attention

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towards her when he is for ever pouring upon books? Certainly the Wife desires that her husbands be sexually attentive, tearing pages from and even burning their books, when they are not so. Elsewhere, I have argued that that scene in the kitchen in Bath comments upon the entirety of the Canterbury Tales as book, encoding within itself its own negative reader response, drawing the analogy to the same action performed by the red-garbed figure to the extreme left in the Florentine pilgrimage painting, the Via Veritatis in the Spanish Chapel, in Santa Maria Novella, painted with funds given in the time of plague.4

What is especially interesting is that Chaucer uses two styles, the high style for the court, a low style for the people. So also had Dante, who had spoken of the need to use the low, rather than the high, style.5 Similarly do we see in the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry the use of both styles, giving us the cardboard and Gothic ceremoniousness of the aristocracy, and the detailed and Romanesque reality of the life of the peasants. Both the tenets of Christianity and of Boethius, and the greater box office of the Commons, dictate that the low style should be used in preference to the high. Besides, we see from the arguments of William J. Brandt, in The Shape of Medieval History, and in Barbara Tuchman, in A Distant Mirror: The Calamitious Fourteenth Century, that aristocrats, living in their world of stance, lacked rich personalities. They are clothes horses, not seemingly of flesh and blood. Enguerrand de Coucy is placed against the backdrop of a fascinating and rich tapestry, but he is himself one-dimensional. Chaucer, in order to write of his wife, safely downgrades her into the rank of the Commons. But in reality Chaucer's household is aristocratic and by no means middle class.

He even sarcastically jokes with his figure of the Wife building an aristocrat's sarcophagus for her dead and bourgeois husband when she comes home from her Jerusalem pilgrimage.

He died whan I cam fro Jerusalem, And lith ygrave under the roode beem, Al is his tomb noght so curyus As was the sepulcre of hym Daryus, Which that Appelles wroghte subtilly; It nys but wast to burye hym preciously

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Let hym fare wel; God yeve his soule reste! He is now in his grave and in his cheste.6 III.495-502

There are Chaucer scholars who believe Jankyn and Alice murdered her husband.7 Perhaps the tomb is verbally erected from guilt? Perhaps Chaucer believes that his wife would have liked to have murdered him? Certainly, both Chaucers, husband and wife, would have been likely to have known of similar murders taking place around them in the aristocracy. A most famous one in Gower and in Shakespeare is that in 1397 of Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. Froissart tells us of him:

He had conceived such a hatred for the King that he could find nothing to say in his favour. In spite of the fact that, with his brother, the Duke of Lancaster, he was the greatest man in England and ought to have taken a leading part in the government of the realm, he showed no interest in it. When the King sent for him, he went if it suited him, but more often he stayed away. If he did go, he was the last to arrive and the first to leave. As soon as he had given his opinion, he insisted on its being accepted without question, then took his leave immediately and mounted his horse to ride back to Pleshey, a place in Essex thirty miles from London where he owned a fine castle. It was there that he spent most of his time. [He plots against King Richard II. The Earl of Salisbury gives him a manuscript of Brunetto Latino's Li Livres dou Tresor. Richard invites him away alone from Pleshy, and he is next taken to London, then Calais. His copy of Li Livres dou Tresor was similarly seized.] When the Duke of Gloucester had been taken into the castle of Calais and found himself shut in there and deprived of his attendants, he began to feel very afraid. He said to the Lord Marshall: ‘Why have I been spirited out of England and brought here? You seem to be treating me as a prisoner . . . ‘ ‘Sir,’ replied the Earl Marshall, ‘. . . My lord the King is a little displeased with you at the moment. He wishes you to stay here and put up with our company for a time. You will do that until I receive further instructions, which I hope will be soon. As for your own displeasure, I am very sorry about it and I wish I could relieve it. But I have my oath to the King, which I am bound in honour to obey.’

That was all the Duke could get from him and concluding from other signs that he noticed one day, that his life was in danger, he asked a priest who

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had already sung mass for him to hear his confession. He confessed at some length, kneeling before the altar in a pious frame of mind, devout and contrite. He prayed and asked God's mercy for all the things he had done and repented of all his sins. It was indeed high time for him to purge his conscience, for death was even nearer to him than he thought.

According to my information, just at the hour when the tables were laid for dinner in the castle of Calais and he was about to wash his hands, four men rushed out from a room and, twisting a towel around his neck, pulled so hard on the two ends that he staggered to the floor. There they finished strangling him, closed his eyes and carried him, now dead, to a bed where they undressed his body. They placed him between two sheets, put a pillow under his head and covered him with fur mantles. Leaving the room, they went back into the hall, ready primed with their story, and said this: that the Duke had had an apoplectic fit while he was washing his hands and had been carried to his bed with great difficulty. This version was given out in the castle and the town. Some believed it, but others not.8

John Gower also writes of the event, calling the murdered Duke the ‘Swan’ in his triadic animal allegory.9 During this period King Richard II's payments to Chaucer are in arrears and Chaucer is seriously in debt. When King Henry IV, John of Gaunt's son, accedes to the throne, all Chaucer's annuities are restored to him. Interestingly, Henry IV, while in exile as the Earl of Derby, had made many of the same pilgrimages as those of the Knight in the Canterbury Tales, which are shadowed in a woman's form by those of the Wife, in turn, modeled upon and parodying those of the powerful Saint Birgitta of Sweden.

But let us now turn to the real tombs of Chaucer's family. His own, of course, is in Westminster Abbey in the Poets' Corner. But it is not there because of his poetic creations of such figures as the Wife of Bath. He is buried there because he is brother-in-law to John of Gaunt and therefore related to the King. Chaucer's poetry can be low in style; his rank and that of his family is elite.

III. The Tomb of the Duchess Alice

In the Cotswalds a church was built when Alice Chaucer, granddaughter to Geoffrey Chaucer, married William de la Pole, first Duke of Suffolk. This

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church and the Manor of Ewelme were inherited by Alice Chaucer from her mother, Matilda Burghersh, who had married the poet's son, Thomas Chaucer. Both Thomas (1367-1434) and Matilda Chaucer (+1436) were buried here, side by side, in a chapel in honour of St. John, roofed by angels, with IHS (Jesus in Greek) covering the walls and with the families' arms upon the floor tiles, the figures of Thomas and Matilda being inscribed in brass, commemorating them. Coats of arms in the stained glass and on the tombs include those of John of Gaunt, whose third wife was Chaucer's wife's sister. Thynne's edition of Chaucer's Works notes:10

Thomas Chaucer, the last heire male of the Chaucers, and owner of Ewhelme and Donnington Castle, the inheritance of the Chaucers, lieth buried in a black marble tombe in a faire Chappell in the parish church of Ewhelme, in the south side of the Quier, with this Epitaph: Hic iacet Thomas Chaucer Armiger, quondam dominus istius villae, et patronus istius Ecclesiae, qui obiit 18, die mensis Novembr. anno Dom. 1434: & Matilda uxor eius, quae obiit 28 die mensis Aprilis anno Dom. 1436.

Thomas and Matilda Chaucer, Tomb Brasses, Ewelme

Their daughter, Alice Chaucer, born in 1404, had been affianced first to Sir John Philip (+1415), then she married Thomas Montague, Earl of Salisbury, who died in battle in France in 1428, and she lastly married William de la Pole, who, earlier had been defeated in battle by Joan of Arc, captured by the French, then ransomed, then, as Duke of Suffolk, had attained great power, ruling England with Margaret of Anjou during the incapacity of Henry VI, and was then treacherously beheaded in 1450.

Alice's son, John, the second Duke of Suffolk, at her death in 1475, placed in the church at Ewelme a most exquisite tomb to honour his mother. Sculpted out of alabaster it shows Alice in nun's garb,11 a ducal crown upon her head, the Garter upon her left fore-arm,12 her hands folded in prayer, while

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beneath her, again sculpted in alabaster, lies her cadaver in death, partly wrapped in its shroud, as a momento mori. Between the two figures a chest holds the actual remains of the Duchess. Painted on its underside are scenes that escaped the Reformation's iconoclasm, of the Annunciation to the Virgin by the Angel Gabriel, Saints Mary Magdalen and John the Baptist.

Alice Chaucer, wimpled as a nun, with ducal coronet

Her cadavre sculpted in alabaster

The first edition of Chaucer's Works, edited by William Thynne and dedicated to King Henry VIII, also describes the Duchess's tomb:

This Alice wife of Duke William surviving her husband, was after buried in the parish church of Ewhelme, on the South side of the high altar, in a riche tombe of Alabaster, with an image in the habite of a Vowesse, and Duchesse crowned, lying on the same tombe: And another image under the tomb, so neare as it may be, like unto her at the time of her death, with this Epitaph: Orate pro anima serenissima principissae Aliciae Suffolkiae, huius Ecclesiae patrone, et primae fundatricis huius Eleemosinariae, quae obiit 10 die mensis Maii, anno Domini 1475.

The church is not built in Cotswald style but instead in the East Anglian style of the Duke's native Suffolk. It has flint walls, and, in St. John's Chapel, an exquisite angel ceiling, like that at Bury St. Edmunds. The font cover is an immensely tall (ten and a half feet), delicately sculptured Gothic pinnacle, so perfectly balanced that it can be raised and lowered with one finger, which was given to the church by John, Duke of Suffolk, at his mother's death.

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Ewelme Baptismal Font

Connected with the church, built by the Suffolks' charity, are also a school and an almshouse, its rooms for thirteen pensioners built around a peaceable quadrangle down steps from the church, the school and the almshouse both still in use to this day, the school, founded in 1437, being the oldest church school in England using its original building. The Thynne edition describes Ewelme's church and charities:

This William and his wife translated and encreased the Manor place of Ewehelme, and builded there a parish Church, and an hospital called Godshouse, for two priests and thirteene poore men to be sustained for ever. One of the priests to be master of the Almes-house and Almespeople, them to instruct: the other Priest a Schoolmaster, freely to teach the children of the Tenants of the said Lordship their Grammar: and either of them to have .x. pounds by the yeere. One of the poore men to be called Minister to present the faults of the other to the Master, and to ring their common Bell to service, and to have sixteenepence the weeke, and the rest fourteene pence.

John, Duke of Suffolk, was to marry Elizabeth Plantagenet, sister to Edward IV and Richard III, the Yorkist kings. John and Elizabeth's three sons died supporting the Yorkist cause against the new Tudor monarchs, as did Elizabeth's father, Richard of York. Her daughter by the earlier marriage, Alice Montague, married Richard Nevill, their son Richard marrying Ann Beauchamp and becoming Earl of Warwick.13

IV. The Duchess's Chantry

The Duchess Alice was born four years after Chaucer's death. Nevertheless, it is perhaps significant that her father, Thomas Chaucer, appears to have had

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her be named after his father's fictional creation, his Alice of Bath. (We recall that James Joyce's grandson was named Stephen.) Yet two more different people can scarcely be imagined. Chaucer's Alice is bourgeois and lusty, not unlike the monastic wood-carved figures on misericords which reflect the grotesques of manuscript marginalia; Alice Chaucer is aristocratic and, after the deaths of three husbands, a widow vowed to chastity, a consecrated votary. To find Alice Chaucer's true counterpart we must return to the Book of the Duchess's Duchess, Blanche, first wife to John, Duke of Gaunt, Chaucer's patron, and to Queen Anne of Bohemia, first wife to King Richard II, both of whom were mourned and loved by all.

Chaucer built a chantry of words in his Canterbury Tales, asking that we, who read that text, pray for his soul. His granddaughter built a chantry where thirteen almsmen, to this day, pray for her soul, her son in turn having that request be sculpted as well upon her tomb.14 We are more likely to find copies of the Canterbury Tales, and heedlessly disparage its consummation, than we are to find the unique and sleepy Cotswalds village church; but, if and when we do stumble upon the latter, that chantry request will be heeded.

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Notes

1Chaucer Life-Records, edited, Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), p. 11. 2 Information on Philippa Chaucer for the years 1366-86 is to be found in Chaucer Life-Records, pp. 67-93. 3 Froissart, Chronicle, trans. Geoffrey Brereton (Harmonsdworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 418-420. 4 Julia Bolton Holloway, The Figure of the Pilgrim: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 250-253, Plate XVIIIa; Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death: The Arts, Religion and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth-Century (New York, 1951). 5 De vulgari eloquentia I.1; Letter to Can Grande. 6 While Dryden translated the Wife's Tale, it was left to Pope to do her Prologue, in which he changed Darius' tomb to Mausolus' at Rhodes: ‘A tomb, indeed, with fewer Sculptures grac'd, Than that Mausolus' Pious Widow plac'd, Or Where inshrine'd to Great Darius was’ (lines 247-249): Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (London: Methuen, 1962), p. 69. 7 Beryl Rowland, ‘On the Timely Death of the Wife of Bath's Fourth Husband,’ Archiv, 209 (1973), 273-82; Dolores Palomo, ‘The Fate of the Wife of Bath's Bad Husbands,’ Chaucer Review, 9 (1975), 303-319. 8 Pp. 430-431. See also John Gower. Woodstock's son is Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who established the fine Humanist library at Oxford. When Woodstock died, Brunetto Latino's Li Livres dou Tresor, against tyranny, was in his possession; it had been given to him by William Montague, Earl of Salisbury. Manuscript today is in Duke Humfrey, Bodleian Library. Christine de Pizan's son would be page to Earl of Salisbury. 9 The Major Latin Works of John Gower: The Voice of One Crying and the Tripartite Chronicle, edited and translated, Eric W. Stocton (Seattle: University of

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Washington Press, 1962), p. 303. It is also possible that the same poison was administered to him as was used in the Nun's Priest's Tale, which brings about symptoms and death of and by suffocation. 10 The Workes of Geffray Chaucer newly printed, with dyuers workes which were neuer in print before, etc. London: Thomas Godfray, 1532, ff. xiii-ccclxxxiii. [Ed. William Thynne, Preface, Sir Brian Tuke.] 11 The dress of medieval consecrated widows and nuns were one and the same, nuns being Christ's widows, vowed to chastity and in mourning for him. The ceremony for the Consecration of Widows is described in Edward L. Cutts, Scenes and Characters from the Middle Ages (London: Virtue, 1902), pp. 21-22.120-194. 12 Alice was given permission to wear the insignia of the Garter, ‘at the ensuing Feast of S. George, 1432.’ Queen Victoria sent to Ewelme to find out how ladies ought to wear the Garter and followed the example upon Alice Chaucer's tomb. 13 Guide to St. Mary's Church, Ewelme, and the Almshouse and the School (Abingdon, Oxford, n.d.); Peter Renshaw, A Guide to the Memorials and Brasses of Ewelme Church (n.p.: 1987); Chaucer's Works, ed. Thynne; Bodleian Library, Oxford, catalogue entry: ‘Deposit. Deeds. Ewelme, Conspectus of MSS Deposited Deeds Ewelme with Bodleian shelfmarks.’ 14 For a bourgeois version of such a chantry, such as the Wife of Bath might have tried to build, see Anthony Luttrell, ‘Englishwomen as Pilgrims to Jerusalem: Isolda Parewastell, 1365,’ in Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Julia Bolton Holloway, Joan Bechtold, Constance S. Wright (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 184-197.

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ROMANESQUED ‘GOTHIC’

XII ‘GOD'S PLENTY’

TERENCE IN DANTE, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER

Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto. Heauton Timorumenos 77 (painted on Michel de Montaigne’s study tower’s ceiling) ’Tis sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty. John Dryden on Geoffrey Chaucer Dedicated to Lucy Walker, who produced Adelphoe and Phormio in Denver

n the Laurentian Library in Florence are several manuscripts written out in Boccaccio’s hand. One, Laurentian Plut. 38.17, is of all Terence’s

Comedies. Another, Laurentian Plut. 54.32, of all Apuleius’ writings.1 (Plut. 38.17 and Plut. 54.32 are at http://teca.bmlonline.it/TecaRicerca/index.jsp.) The marvellous mixture of two excellent African writers, Terence and Apuleius, creates the Decameron in Tuscan Italian. Which in turn creates the ‘God’s plenty’ in Middle English of the Canterbury Tales. Already, before Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, in the same century, had created the Commedia in Florentine Italian, though in exile from that city whose bread has no salt. Tragedy is about dysfunctional royalty; comedy, instead, is about healing democracy.2 These authors borrow from Terence his circular theatre and they borrow from him his plots, his tales. These authors, copying Terence, play games of dialogue between noble and labourer, between women and men, and even children; they play games of tales within tales, of narrations within narrations, they indulge in Baktinesque and Gospel Magnificat turnings of the world upside down, in

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which the slaves, women and children come out on top to healing laughter and applause. Such tales like those in Terence manuscripts can end with 'FELICITER' in rainbow capitals. It should be noted that Terence, the freed African slave associated with the Scipios in Rome, wrote in such pure Latin that his Comedies were used throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to teach that language in monasteries, convents and schools, to both men and women, and especially to children. England possessed one such (ca. 1150 CE), which came to be owned by St Albans Abbey and is now in the Bodleian Library (Auct. F.2.13=27603). It is one of the thirteen illustrated manuscripts from before 1300 that have survived for us; these typically provide the actors’ masks on their rack and often illustrate the plays’ scenes.3 Later manuscripts could be lavishly illuminated, giving rise to printed books with woodblocks for every scene. There were two strands to the writing of plays. One was of straight drama. The other came from the law courts of Athens, where logographers trained defendants in trials to make their own speeches—and who to do so astutely studied their clients’ psychology and the context of their crimes in order to present convincingly what was a lie as a convincing alibi. These became Theophrastus’ Characters and Terence’s dramatis personae—and even Brunetto Latino’s examples of law cases in the Athenian, Roman, Byzantine, and Florentine agora in his Rettorica and his Li Livres dou Tresor III.4 A drama articulated a grouping of such character studies, setting the masks, the personae, the characters, as its machinery, in motion.5 The author thus multiplied his voices, his own multiple personalities. Terence’s use of intricate double-plotting created even further complications and ironical conjunctions.6

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For example, in the Adelphoe, of the two younger pair of brothers, Aeschinus is in love with an Athenian-born Pamphila, who is about to bear a child, while he pretends to seize a flute-girl, procuring her in reality for his love-lorn brother Ctesipho. Sannio is the slave dealer seeking payment for the flute-girl; Geta is the slave appalled at Aeschinus’ seeming betrayal. The older brothers, Demea, the father of both boys, and Micio, who has adopted the older one, disagree on how to raise them, Demea being severe, Micio lenient. Sostrata, Pamphila’s mother, laments that her wronged daughter has no dowry, and she has only a ring dropped by Aeschinus. All the exchanging and disguising is resolved when the father and uncle switch places: Demea, who had been harsh, becoming too lenient. The Woman from Andros, like Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, tells the story of a shipwreck, the father dying, the baby living. Now grown, that child, Glycerium, in turn gives birth to a child, its father’s father Simo preventing the marriage because he believes her to be the sister of a prostitute. Simo arranges instead for Pamphilus to marry Chremes’ daughter, with whom Pamphilus’ friend Charinus is in love. Pamphilus is distraught, nor does the slave Davus’ attempts to resolve the matter help. Crito arrives and identifies Glycerium as the lost niece of Chremes and all ends well with the double wedding of Pamphilus and Glycerium, of Charinus and Chremes’ nameless daughter. The other four Terentian dramas play similar games with youthful heirs courting brides and concubines, their fathers instead preoccupied with rank and dowries. As if in a quadrille danced at Bath in a Jane Austen novel, the concerns are about class and wealth, in Austen’s time being about getting a living in the Church or a commission in the Army. Jane Austen’s mask is Elizabeth Bennett (Austen=Augustinian; Bennett=Benedictine). Terence’s mask is Geta, the slave, who so skilfully stage manages the whole that all shall be well. Women and slaves outside of power yet speak truth to that power. Here is Geta in Phormio defending himself to Demipho with the argument that he cannot accuse or defend anyone in a court of law: servom hominem causam orare leges non sinunt / neque testimoni dictiost (‘The laws don’t allow a slave to argue a case in court or to give evidence’, 292-93). The endings of both novels and plays then have their protagonists marry and live

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happily ever after: vos valete et plaudite. We should not forget that liturgical dramas of scriptural events and of saints’ legends were created in the monasteries, whose libraries contained Terence manuscripts, for the young oblates to act, thereby learning their Latin and their Gregorian chant simultaneously—in play. Among these plays was the Winchester/Fleury Officium Peregrinorum of Luke 24, in which the disguised Christ, with intense dramatic irony, appears as a pilgrim to Luke and Cleopas, who do not recognize him; Jesus then dines with them at the inn at Emmaus, blesses, breaks the bread, and vanishes.7 Other dramas, such as the Resuscitatio Lazari and the Visitatio Sepulchri, movingly use the scarlet-clad figure of Mary Magdalen, in the first with Lazarus, her dying leprous brother. All these dramas were influenced by Terence, whose manuscripts were copied out in monastic scriptoria and treasured in monastic libraries. Their continuation, the vernacular cycle plays for lay audiences enacted by guilds, are also influenced by Terence and explicitly so in those plays written by the Wakefield Master.8

After Chaucer, there would be a flurry of fine illuminated Terence Comedies in Paris, often created to educate the King of France’s sons. Besides the dramatis personae and scenes of the plays these illustrations, both as manuscript illuminations and as woodblock prints, could include a diagram of a theatre, as it was later thought to have been, a structure somewhat like the Globe of Shakespeare’s production or a baroque opera house with the spectators ranged in tiers, the mimes on stage, while Calliopius sings the chorus.9 The 1490, 1493 woodblocks go so far as to show the prostitutes plying their trade outside these theatres, reflecting Plato’s Symposium’s flute girls, the Gospels’ Mary Magdalen, Boethius’ ‘whores of the theatre’, and the ‘red light cum theatre’ districts of Chaucer’s Tabard Inn and Shakespeare’s London Globe Theatre in Southwark and New York’s Forty-Second Street.10

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I. Terence's Comedies and Dante Alighieri’s Commedia For his own theatre of Hell, Dante adopts a structure consisting of circle upon circle of sinners in whose crimes he, and we, participate. Their voices create dialogues across time and space. Finally we meet their ‘author’, the ‘father of lies’, enmeshed in icy silence with flapping bats’ wings, seeming like a windmill, amidst giants who seem like towers (Inferno XXXIV). Dante then turns this tragic theatre upside down, or the right way round, as he and his now-lost guide Virgil climb into the Antipodes of Purgatory to find a similar but inverse theatre of comedy, whose actors/spectators interact upon the cornices of a mountain, now facing outward instead of inward, to have Dante arrive at Beatrice, leaving behind Virgil—and tragedy. Ultimately they meet God, the supreme Author of the drama of mankind, the mirror reverse of bat-like Satan, and into whose playbook all the ‘God’s Plenty’ of the scattered leaves of the universe are bound and gathered up into one volume (Paradiso XXXIII.85-90, 130-31). God is thus a mirror to Dante’s Terentian motto, homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. Dante first has his mirroring authorial protagonist/sorcerer’s apprentice journey through lugubrious Hell, guided by Virgil, the poet of lacrimae rerum, the ‘tears of things’. The pagan world viewed life as tragic, to be confronted

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with Stoicism or Epicureanism. The ambience of Christendom, instead, saw reality through the lens of mercy, of redemption, honoring the outsider from power. Needing Latin to be kept alive for centuries this now Christian cultural ambience turned naturally to a writer like Terence, who wrote in a living Latin, the Latin of families, the Latin presenting the perspectives of slaves, children, and women, all of whom the Christian Gospels upheld in a similar world upside down. Hrotsvita and Heloise could feel comfortable, at home, within the pages of a Terence manuscript. Dante knew this, but elected even further to write in the vernacular, Florentine, the language which even women and children had by then come to most readily understand in Tuscany (De vulgari eloquentia, I.1). He also shows us this culture of oral literature in Italian of women and children in Paradiso XV.121-26, in a landscape that foretells of Boccaccio’s Fiesolan Decameron:

L’una vegghiava a studio de la culla, e, consolando, usava l’idioma che prima i padri e le madri trastulla; l’altra, traendo a la rocca la chioma, favoleggiava con la sua famiglia di’ Troiani, di Fiesole e di Roma. One woman watched with loving care the cradle and, as she soothed her infant, used the way of speech with which fathers and mothers play; another, as she drew threads from the distaff, would tell, among her household, tales of Trojans, and tales of Fiesole, and tales of Rome.

In doing so, Dante Alighieri reflects his teacher Brunetto Latino’s choice of writing in the vernacular. Brunetto’s family came from La Lastra in Fiesole, Brunetto’s father and brother being notaries to the Bishop of Fiesole, the Franciscan Filippo da Perusgia, and with him were involved with embassies to Constantinople, preserving classical humanism in the Middle Ages, which was then taught to Guido Cavalcanti, Francesco da Barberino, and Dante Alighieri. Brunetto translated the classic works of Aristotle and Cicero into French and Italian but did so while also expecting his students to learn to write in a living Latin. Joseph Russo has argued that Dante could have had

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access to Terence in Verona.11 It is far more likely that Dante already knew Terence as a school boy studying under Brunetto Latino long before his exile from Florence, in whose libraries can still be found important manuscripts of Terence predating Dante’s time. (Florence’s Laurentian Library, http://teca.bmlonline.it/TecaRicerca/index.jsp has Plut.38.27 and Plut.38.24a; Plut.38.27 being a manuscript of the ninth to eleventh century, which came to be owned by Giannozzo Pucci, for whose wedding Botticelli painted a series of paintings illustrating the Decameron’s Fifth Day’s Eighth Tale, and then by a Medici son).

One can glimpse Dante’s love of Terence in the commentary written by his son, Pietro Alighieri, on the Commedia:

Libri titulus est: Comoedia Dantis Allegherii: et quare sic vocetur, adverta. Antiquitatis in theatro, quod erat area semicircularis, et in ejus medio erat domuncula, quae scena dicebatur, in qua erat pulpitum, et super id ascendebat poeta ut cantor, et sua carmina ut cantiones recitabat, extra vero errant mimi joculatores, carminum pronuntiationem gestu corporis effigiantes per adaptionem ad quem libet, ex cujus persona ipse poeta loquebantur ... et a tale pulpitum seu domunculum, ascendebat poeta, qui de more villico caneret, talis cantus dicebantur comoedia ... Item quod poeta in comoedia debet loqui remisse et non alte, ut Terentius in suis comoediis fecit.12 The title of the book is the Comedy of Dante Alighieri: and pay attention why it is called so. In antiquity in the theatre, which was a semicircular area, in the center of which there was a small edifice, which was called scena, in which was a pulpit, into which climbed the poet or the cantor, in order to recite his song or sing it, outside of which were miming actors, who, as the song was pronounced, adapted the gestures of their bodies to it at will, according to the person concerning whom the poet was speaking ... and into such a pulpit or little edifice the poet ascended from which he sang of common things, therefore such a song was said to be a comedy ... Thus the poet in comedy ought to speak of low things and not high, just as Terence did in his Comedies.

For Dante uses the word comedia, as his son states, to mean writing in a humble style. For instance, in the De vulgari eloquentia, he says: deinde in hiis

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que dicenda occurrunt debemus discretione potiri, utrum tragice, sive comice ... si tragice canenda videntur, tunc assumendum est vulgare illustre ... si vero comice, nunc quandoque mediocre, quandoque humile vulgare sumatur (‘about the possible subject matters of poetry we must have the judgment to understand whether they are to be written about in tragedy or comedy ... If they are to be sung tragically, then the illustrious vernacular is to be used ... Or, if comically, then sometimes the middle level of the vernacular, sometimes the low', II.4). In one of his Epistles (XIII.10), Dante notes that the word comedia signifies ‘rustic song’ (villanus cantus). He adds that by nature comedy ‘deals with certain adverse conditions but ends happily, as appears from the comedies of Terence’ (comedia vero inchoat asperitatem alicuius rei, sed eius material prospere terminatur, ut patet per Terentium in suis comediis). Concerning its diction, comedy employs an unstudied and low style (vero remisse et humiliter), and here Dante supports his comments by quoting Horace’ Ars Poetica (93-96). Then he finally justifies the title of his own work:

et per hoc patet quod Comedia dicitur presens opus. nam si ad materiam respiciamus, a principio horribilis et fetida est, quia Infernus, in fine prospera, desiderabilis et grata, quia Paradisus; ad modum loquendi, remissus est modus et humilis, quia locutio vulgaris in qua et muliercule comunicant. And from this it is clear that the present work is to be described as a comedy. For if we consider the subject-matter, at the beginning it is horrible and foul, as being Hell; but at the close it is happy, desirable, and pleasing, as being Paradise. As regards the style of language, the style is unstudied and lowly, as being in the vulgar tongue, in which even women-folk hold their talk. And hence it, is evident why the work is called a comedy.13

In the Purgatorio, Dante has Statius ask Virgil where Terence is, and Virgil replies that he is in the first circle of Hell, a circle reserved for virtuous pagans like himself:

‘dimmi dov’è Terenzio nostro antico, Cecilio, Plauto e Varro, se lo sai; dimmi se non dannati, ed in quel vico.’ ‘Costoro e Persio, ed io, a altri assai,’ rispuose il duco mio, ‘siam con quel Greco

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che le Muse lattar più ch’altre mai, nel primo cinghio del carcere cieco.’ (XXII.97-105) ‘Tell me where is our ancient Terence, and Caecilius and Plautus, where is Varius, if you know; tell me if they are damned, and in what quarter.’ ‘All these and Persius, I, and many others,’ my guide replied, ‘are with that Greek to whom the Muses gave their gifts in greatest measure. Our place is the blind prison, its first circle.’

It is with this encounter, with the mask of Statius, that we first learn overtly that Dante has modelled each encounter of two with a third, as it happens again and again in the Commedia, upon that other drama, the Officium Peregrinorum (Purgatorio XXI.7-9). He equates Statius, the secretly baptized Roman poet, with the disguised Christ, Virgil as the elderly Cleopas, himself as the younger Luke, the omniscient writer of the text, presenting himself as the foolish participant in the text, as one whom Christ in the Gospel chides for being slow and dull of heart not to recognise the Saviour.14 Indeed, the Officium Peregrinorum takes pains to note that an oblate or the abbot is chosen ad representandum Christi. He is not Christ but he acts the role, the mask, the disguise of Christ, further disguised as a pilgrim who is not recognized as Christ. In a similar mode, Dante can play games with real people acted out as masks in a fiction, among them his own teacher, Brunetto Latino, or pagan poets, such as Homer, Virgil, and Statius. Terence populates his plays with masks of daughters, wives, and prostitutes, with merchants, soldiers, sailors, sons, and fathers, the full spectrum of the social order, as in the prologue of Eunuchus:

qui magis licet currentem servom scribere, bonas matronas facere, meretrices malas, parasitum edacem, gloriosum militem, puerum supponi, falli per servom senem, amare, odisse, suspicari? (36-40) How is it more permissible to present a running slave or good matrons or wicked courtesans or a greedy parasite or a boastful soldier or babies being

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substituted or an old man being deceived by his slave or love or hate or suspicions?

Following the same pattern, Dante adds nuns, monks, and friars, Emperors and Kings, Popes and Cardinals. Dante places these Theophrastian and Terentian characters, modelled upon historical persons within a further machinery, that of teaching Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, acquired for Florence by Brunetto Latino, his Master, who translated the text into the vernacular French and Italian, with the Gospels and Christ’s world-upside-down parables. In the Commedia, we listen to dramatic voices, but in Italian, to a dramatic dialogue, as if from a Terence play. We listen to voices which are placed even as if in Terence’s mansions, in the various circles of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Aristotle defines tragedy as a work where the recognition, the anagnorisis, comes tardily, whereas in comedy it is timely. In Hell, for instance, the knowledge comes too late, as in the scene with Guido Cavalcanti’s father, in Inferno X.61-72,15 while in Purgatorio and Paradiso, knowledge comes in time for redemption, as with the recognition by Statius of Virgil to Dante’s laughter of delight (Purgatorio XXI.97-136). Though Dante alludes to Terence’s Comedies in his writings, it has been suggested that he may not have read the plays. The mention of Chremes in Epistola XIII, quoted above, is taken from Horace’s interpretation of Terence. A reference in Inferno XVIII.133-36 to the courtesan Thais, a character in the Eunuchus, shows that Dante’s use of the play may derive from Cicero’s De amicitia, not from the Eunuchus itself;16 Hrotsvita also uses powerfully the figure of Thais from the writings of the Desert Fathers. But, given his arguments that we saw above concerning Terence’ humble style, we can note the ways in which he switches codes: the poet displays remarkable versatility, from the proud Ghibelline speech, which as logographer he concocts for Farinata in Inferno X, to the common words ‘giri . . . il villan la sua marra’ (‘let the peasant turn his mattock’), about a contadino used in Brunetto Latino’s Inferno XV.96, which echoes the discourse between laboring Menedemus and critical Chremes of the Heauton Timorumenos (53-174). We can find the Terentian/Gospel hilarity in the account by the Dominican St

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Thomas Aquinas of the life of the Franciscan founder, St Francis of Assisi. Lady Poverty was wed to Christ, then no one wanted the afflicted widow until St Francis came and married her. Immediately, all his followers hurriedly pursued her, as if she were the village prostitute.17 Giotto or a follower painted that episode in Assisi’s Lower Church: Lady Poverty in rags, gaunt, emaciated, with thorns about her, being married to Francis, the singer of love songs to her.18 Shadowed behind that hilarity are those Terentian episodes of the proud poor maidens who are ultimately revealed to be Athenian citizens with dowries. Boccaccio’s, Petrarch’s, and Chaucer’s Grisilda is shaped in their mould.

Francis weds Povertà The Marquis weds Griselda, far right Despite its tragic ending, the real-life story of Piccarda Donati resonates with Terentian comedy. Dante places the Donati family siblings, to whom he was related by his marriage to their cousin Gemma Donati, separately: Corso Donati in Hell (discussed in Purgatorio XXIV.82-87), Forese Donati in Purgatory (Purgatorio XXIII.40-XXIV.25, 74-103), and Piccarda Donati in Paradise (Purgatorio XXIV. 10-15, Paradiso III.16-123). Piccarda’s vocation as a virgin nun was brutally violated by her brother Corso, who kidnapped her from her Clarissan house and forcibly married her off to his associate

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Rossellino della Tosa. We find her, still faithful to her Vows in spirit in the sphere of the Moon in Paradise. Ultimately the feliciter of Dante’s text shall be St Bernard’s Hymn to the Virgin, heaping paradox upon paradox, that she is daughter of her son, this pregnant maiden, this madre ragazza, who, as Theotokos, births God in Paradiso XXXIII.1-39, upon whom Dante and his Beatrice, the wife of another, gaze. The Florence of Dante and Boccaccio put into ethical practice the Seven Acts of Mercy, giving drink to the thirsty, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the stranger, visiting the prisoner, tending the sick, burying the dead, building vast hospitals for pilgrims and for abandoned babies, such as the Buonomini di San Martino, Orsanmichele as granary to feed even the enemy in time of famine, the Arcispedale Santa Maria Nuova, the most beautiful Ospedale degli Innocenti, which taught the boys skills and gave the girls dowries, and the Arciconfraternita della Misericordia members, who tend to the sick and dying and who bury the dead, who laid the first stone of the new Duomo seven hundred years ago, and whose feet each Maundy Thursday the Cardinal washes. Those ‘world-upside-down’ structures, except for Orsanmichele, continue into the present and, side by side with the upstart Medici ascendancy, shaped a Florence which carefully copied out Terence manuscripts. The Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana with its manuscripts of Terence, Apuleius, Dante and Boccaccio, bound in red kermes leather with horn labels, brass bosses and iron chains anchoring them to reading desks, in Michelangelo’s design for them, was open democratically to the public. II. Terence's Comedies and Boccaccio’s Decameron We are not sure of Dante’s actual reading of Terence, though we can be certain of his knowledge of him. We know that Giovanni Boccaccio not only read all of Terence, but he even copied out not only the Commedia of Dante but also all the Comedies of Terence in his own hand, the latter into the manuscript, Laurentian Plut. 38.17 (http://teca.bmlonline.it/TecaRicerca/index.jsp). To create his works, such as the Teseida and the Decameron, Boccaccio blended together classical writers, among them Statius, Apuleius, Cicero and Terence, as well as his beloved

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Dante. Again, like Dante, he creates tales within tales, making use of the dramatis personae, the rank of masks, of daughters, wives, prostitutes, merchants, soldiers, sailors, sons, and fathers, adding to these masks those of nuns, monks, and friars. The seven women and the three men, who meet in the church of Santa Maria Novella in plague tide, and who then journey with their quarrelling tale-telling servants to the abandoned villas around Fiesole telling ten tales, each day for a fortnight, create thus a hundred tales, mirroring Dante’s hundred cantos of the Commedia. From the midst of tragedy and chaos of the city of Florence during the plague they come to its beauteous countryside and repeat what Dante had already described, of women telling tales while they rocked the cradle and spun the yarn in Fiesole in centuries past. Pampinea, the first Queen to be crowned to preside over the first day, appoints Dioneo’s manservant, Parmeno—from the rotuli of Terence’s plays and racks of masks—to be steward and to organize their lodgings and meals for each day, while Chremes as a name is re-cycled for Boccaccio’s Tenth Day’s Eighth Tale. The voices of Terence, the conversations Dante holds with those whom he encounters in the Cantos, the tales Boccaccio's brigata of ten tell, multiply into the countless dialogues of countless masks within their dramas, ‘God’s Plenty’. Drama had been seen as therapy in the classical world, especially at the great theatre by Aesculapius’ temple at Epidauros. Similarly the telling of tales is about healing and salvation, as with Scheherazade in a Thousand and One Nights. Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale is a tale much like those in Terence, of abandoned babies restored to their parents. Bruno Bettelheim, survivor of Auschwitz, wrote The Uses of Enchantment, advocating the telling of tales for children.19 Leslie Silko showed how the telling of tales among Native people functions as consolation.20 Germaine Greer in her Guardian essay, ‘Grandmother’s Footsteps’, eloquently advocates the telling of such tales.21 While Stith Thompson22 and Vladimir Propp23 mapped how these tales share in specific formulae, as indeed we find is the case in Terence, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. Nor should we forget a marvellous bit of self-referentiality in Boccaccio’s Sixth Day’s First Tale on how not to tell a tale, particularly in confusing the characters and jumbling the plot, that follows upon the servants’ row, in which Licisca boasts of women’s sexual

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exploits and infidelities to put down Tindaro. Chaucer will play the same joke with his offending, aborted ‘Sir Thopas’ in the Canterbury Tales. We remember such moments of seeming incompetence and muddle-headedness on stage engineered by the hero-slaves cum author, who save the day and organize the plot in Terence's Comedies and in Luke's Gospel. Let us now discuss some parallels between Terence’s Comedies and Boccaccio’s Decameron in more detail. In Terence’s Hecyra, Pamphilus, in love with the courtesan Bacchis, is married off to Philumena against his will. She becomes pregnant by him when, in his drunkenness, he rapes her, not knowing who she is, and takes a ring from her by force. To hide her pregnancy she leaves her mother-in-law, Sostrata, and returns to her mother, Myrrina. Laches believes that the marriage breakdown is due to his wife, not to his son. The child is born, and Pamphilus acknowledges his wife and son only when the ring is recognized by Philumena’s mother, Myrrina, through the kindness of Bacchis, the courtesan with the heart of gold. All ends well, even though, as Pamphilus says, in an exception to the rule of comedies (866-69), the parents and his servant ignore the dark secret of his formerly unknown consummation of marriage. In the second prologue to the play, Terence requests that it inspire others to write to follow suit: mea causa causam accipite et date silentium, / ut lubeat scribere aliis mihique ut discere / novas expediat posthac pretio emptas meo (‘For my sake listen to my plea and grant me silence, so that other authors may be encouraged to write and it may be worth my while in the future to put on new plays bought at my own expense,’ 55-57). Boccaccio indeed retells the story in the Decameron, as does Shakespeare also in All’s Well That Ends Well. In Boccaccio’s Third Day’s Ninth Tale, Neifile, the Queen for that day, recounts the story of the unwilling husband, Count Bertrand of Roussillon, his pregnant wife, Gillette of Narbonne, and a ring. Gillette wins Bertrand as her husband through curing the King of France of a fistula; Bertrand is reluctant and replies to the king that he would never marry a she-doctor. Rejected Gillette then follows Bertrand to Florence where, disguised as a poor pilgrim, she bears him twins. Shakespeare next turns the tale back into a play with Bertrand and Helena/Diana for Philumena and Bacchis in Terence, and doubles the rings: Helena’s is the gift from the king whom she has healed, to exchange with Bertrand’s ancestral one. Then Helena appears on stage not

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bearing two sons in her arms but heavily pregnant (with twins?). Both Boccaccio and Shakespeare dwell on the Count Roussillon’s snobbishness in not wedding/bedding the low-born Helena, while in both works the King of France disagrees with Roussillon’s arguments, as later would Louis XIV in supporting Molière and his Tartuffe. Shakespeare then ends the play with an epilogue straight out of Terence:

[King] The king’s a beggar, now the play is done. All is well ended, if this suit be won, That you express content; which we will pay, With strife to please you, day exceeding day: Ours be your patience then, and yours our parts; Your gentle hands lend us, and take our hearts. Exeunt omnes. (All’s Well, V, Epilogue, 335-40)

But the story of the unwanted wife and the ring in Terence, Boccaccio, and Shakespeare has very ancient roots in drama: a similar literary device is found in ancient Sanskrit drama, with a notable example in Kālidāsa's play Abhijñānaśākuntalam ('The Recognition of Shakuntala'), which is based on an episode from the earlier Indian epic, the Mahabharata. As the title suggests, The Recognition of Shakuntala revolves around the idea of recognition. It tells the story of King Dushyanta who, while on a hunting trip, meets Shakuntala and marries her. A mishap befalls them when he is summoned back to court: Shakuntala, pregnant with their child, inadvertently offends a visiting sage and incurs a curse, by which Dushyanta will forget her completely, until he sees the ring he has left with her. On her trip to Dushyanta’s court in an advanced state of pregnancy, she loses the ring and has to come away unrecognized. The ring is found by a fisherman, who recognizes the royal seal and returns it to Dushyanta, who then regains his memory of Shakuntala and sets out to find her. After more travails, they are finally reunited. All these versions of the tale, whether in India or in Rome or in Florence or in London, lend themselves to analysis with Stith Thompson’s Folklore Index (1955-58) and Vladimir Propp’s ‘Functions’ (1968): ß = absentation; g = interdiction; d = violation; e = reconnaissance; z = delivery; h = trickery; B = mediation; C = beginning counteraction; ↑= departure; D = first function of the donor (testing or interrogation); E = the hero's reaction; F = provision or receipt of a magical agent [ring/rings]; G = spatial transference between two

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kingdoms; ↓ = return; O = unrecognized arrival; M = difficult task; N = solution; Q = recognition; W = wedding, concluding with the ‘FELICITER’ of the Terence manuscripts. Emilia tells the Second Day’s Sixth Tale. It is a story in which disaster at first threatens, then it is resolved, much in the manner of The Woman from Andros, with the recognition of a shipwrecked child. Set in the times of Manfred and the Sicilian Vespers, in the landscapes of Lunigiana and Sicily, it has one very moving speech by the lost son, Giannotto/Giusfredi, who is imprisoned for having seduced his host’s daughter. Giannotto/Giusfredi speaks to Currado, father of the girl:

'Currado', he replied, 'neither the lust for power nor the desire for riches nor any other motive has ever led me to harbour treacherous designs against your person or your property. I loved your daughter. I love her still, and I shall always love her, because I consider her a worthy object of my love (amai tua figliuola e amo e amerò sempre, per ciò che degna la reputo del mio amore). And, if in wooing her, I was acting in a manner that would commonly be regarded as dishonourable, the fault I committed was one which is inseparable from youth (la giovinezza congiunto). In order to eradicate it one would have to do away with youth altogether (che se via si volesse tòrre, converebbe che via si togliesse la giovinezza). Besides it would be considered half so serious as you and many others maintain, if old men would remember that they once were young, and if they would measure other people's shortcomings against their own and vice versa (se i vecchi si volessero ricordare d’essere stati giovani e gli altrui difetti colli loro misurare e li loro cogli altrui). I committed this fault not as your enemy, but as your friend. It has always been my wish to do what you are now proposing, and if I had thought your consent would be forthcoming, I would have asked you long ago for your daughter's hand. . . . Send me back to prison and have me treated as you like. Whatever you do to me, I shall always love Spina, and for her sake I shall always love and respect her father' (tanto sempre per amor di lei amerò te e avrotti in reverenza).24

These words epitomize Terence’s arguments in many of his comedies, from Andria to Adelphoe. This is clearly a Terentian sentiment to be echoed also in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, ‘Wostow nat wel the olde clerkes sawe/ That ‘who shal geve a lovere any lawe?’’ (I.1163-64).

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Terence’s Phormio and the Decameron’s Fifth Day’s Tenth Tale share the joke, in which what is criticized by one participant turns out to be a mirroring wrongdoing, which effectively silences both. Terence’s Phormio would have been better titled the Geta, for he, the slave, is the true hero and resolver of difficulties. He has been left in charge of two sons, Antipho and Phaedria, sons of Demipho and Chremes respectively, two brothers, who are away on business. Demipho returns first, furious that Antipho has married dowryless Phanium, through the parasite Phormio’s ruse that an Athenian citizen left orphaned must be married to her kin. Phaedria is in love with a flute girl, Pamphila, and cannot buy her from her slave-dealer, Dorio. In fact, Chremes/‘Stilpho’ has gone to Lemnos seeking his daughter by a bigamous marriage only to find that she and her mother had already come to Athens where her mother died, leaving Phanium in the care of Sophrona, her old nurse. Geta contrives the price for Pamphila by begging for the dowry for Phanium to marry Phormio. There is wonderful stage business, to be copied by Shakespeare in Winter’s Tale, where Geta tells Antipho and Phormio of overhearing, off-stage, of Chremes telling Demipho of parenting Phanium. Phormio then informs Chremes’ first wife, Nausistrata. She next defends Phaedria’s acquisition of the flute girl on the basis that Chremes had thought he could get away with having two wives. In Boccaccio’s Fifth Day’s Tenth Tale, told by Dioneo, both wives in Perugia are being unfaithful to their rich elderly husbands. The story ends with Pietro de Vinciolo agreeing to let his wife’s lover share supper with them, and more than that. Likewise in Phormio, Nausistrata invites the parasite to join them at Chremes’ table. A similar tale is found in Boccaccio’s Seventh Day’s Eighth Tale, told again by Neifile, of aged Arriguccio Berlinghetti and his young, unfaithful and noble wife, Sismonda, where again silence is the response and resolution. (Compare this tale with the Fourth Day’s Fifth Tale on Lisabetta/Isabella and the Pot of Basil, mirrored in Keats’ poem on the same and in Pre-Raphaelite Holman Hunt’s painting of his dead pregnant wife,25 which, however, lacks an analogue in Terence but does show the power of these tales to be mirrored/echoed through time, generation upon generation.)

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Medieval society had adopted classical society’s priestly celibacy for their clergy. Both Boccaccio and Chaucer give stories concerning scandals of clergy abuse. The Terence play which comes closest to this is the Eunuch. Thais, the courtesan, is given by the captain Thraso (who has a dissolute parasite companion, Gnatho), an Athenian-born girl, who had been raised with her as her sister. Phaedria, who is in love with Thais, presents her the old eunuch Dorus. Chaerea, Phaedria’s brother, in love with Thais’ young ward, disguises himself as a eunuch instead, on the suggestion of the slave Parmeno, and enters the house to seduce the maiden. Chremes, her Athenian brother, then arranges her marriage to Chaerea. In that play a scene caused Terence’s fellow-Carthaginian Augustine’s concern (City of God 2.7), where Chaerea, the young disguised hero, is sexually aroused through seeing the erotic painting of Danae where Zeus comes to her in a shower of gold. Dante’s rendering of the real-life tale of Paolo and Francesco is in the tragic, though Christian, Arthurian mode and that scene of pornographic adultery does not partake of the imitatio Terentii, except for this scene, so deplored by Augustine, when the pair read together of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere’s adultery against their king and her husband, Arthur, which becomes Inferno V.137’s meretricious line, ‘Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse’ (‘A Gallehault indeed, that book and he who wrote it, too’). Boccaccio even draws that scene as well as writing it out in Riccardian 1035:

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This engenders further Boccaccio’s:

COMINCIA IL LIBRO CHIAMATO DECAMERON COGNOMINATO PRENCIPE GALEOTTO, NEL QUALE SI CONTENGONO

CENTO NOVELLE, IN DIECE DÌ DETTE DA SETTE DONNE

E DA TRE GIOVANI UOMINI

Here begins the book called Decameron, otherwise known as Prince Galeotto, wherein are contained one hundred stories told in ten days by seven ladies and three young men.

Dante and Boccaccio have combined Terence’s scene from the Eunuch with the Matter of Arthur, where, in the story of Guinevere and Lancelot, their assignation takes place through the machinations of the Prince Gallehault; in the story of Tristan and Isolde, the boatman who leads that pair astray into adultery is likewise named ‘Gallehault’; Dante’s Inferno V is a ‘Galeotto’ to Paolo and Francesca in Ravenna and even to himself and ourselves. Terence is writing plays for the red-light district; the writers of Arthurian romances, Dante, and Boccaccio are writing ‘pillow books’. III. Terence's Comedies and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Chaucer never mentions either Terence or Boccaccio, even though he does refer to Dante and Petrarch. Arguably his clearest use of Terence’s Comedies is of the dramatis personae, where the General Prologue presents each pilgrim tale-teller assembled at the Tabard Inn and ambling along the Canterbury road from London. For Chaucer takes up the Boccaccian frame tale of tales being told, marshalling his pilgrims together in a flock, not by the Parson, but by Harry Bailly, the innkeeper of the Tabard, and includes himself amongst their number on the journey to Canterbury. The General Prologue (and especially so

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in the illuminated Ellesmere Manuscript), thus functions like the Masks upon the Rack, so typical of early illustrated Terence manuscripts, such as that at Oxford (Bodleian Library Auct. F.2.13=27603).

The Table below gives the correspondences between Terence’s characters and Chaucer’s:

Mask Terence, Comedies Chaucer, Canterbury Tales

x

Bacchis, Heutontimorumenos Thais, Eunuchus Philotis, Bacchis, Hecrya Bacchis (muta), Adelphoi

Wife of Bath Prioress

Obstetrix Lesbia, Andria

Nutrix Canthara, Heutontimorumenos Sophrona, Eunuchus Sophrona, Phormio

Anus Syra, Hecyra Canthara, Adelphoi

Wife of Bath

Ancilla Mysis, Andria Pythias, Eunuchus

Virgo Blycerium (muta), Andria Antiphila, Heutontimorumenos Pamphila (muta), Adelphoi

Second Nun Prioress

Matrona Sostrata, Heutontimorumenos Nausistrata, Phormio

Guildsmen's Wives Wife of Bath

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Sostrata, Myrrina, Hecyra Sostrata, Adelphoi

Servos, Laborator

Davos, Byrria, Andria Syrus, Dromo, Heutontimorumenos Parmeno, Sanga, Eunuchus Davos, Geta, Phormio Parmeno, Sosia, Hecyra Geta, Parmeno (muto), Adelphoi

Cook; Ploughman; Miller, Reeve; Yoeman; Manciple

Lorarius Dromo, Andria

Leno Dorio, Phormio Sannio, Adelphoi

Libertus Sosica, Andria Franklin

Narvarchus

Shipman

Mercator

Merchant, Gildsmen

Medicus

Physician

Puer Dromo, Adelphoi

Adulescens

Pamphilus, Charinus, Andria Clitipho, Clinia, Heutontimorumenos Phaedria, Chaeria, Chremes, Antipho, Eunuchus Antipho, Phaedria, Phormio Pamphilus, Hecyra Aeschinus, Ctesipho, Adelphoi

Squire

Eunuchus Dorus, Eunuchus

Monk; Clerk; Pardoner; Summoner; Friar; Nuns' Priest; Canon's Yoeman; Parson

Advocati Hegio, Cratinus, Crito, Phormio Man of Law

Parasitus Gnatho, Eunuchus Phormio, Phormio

Miles Thraso, Eunuchus Knight

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Senex

Chremes, Crito, Andria Chremes, Menedemus, Heutontimorumenos Demes seu Laches, Eunuchus Demipho, Chremes, Phormio Laches, Phidippus, Hecyra Demea, Hegio, Adelphoi

Reeve

Harry Bailly, like Calliopus, like Chaucer himself, defies pigeon-holing.

In this arrangement, as had Dante and Boccaccio before him, Chaucer adapts the masks of Classical Latin drama to the divisions of Christian culture which kept aside God’s servants in sexual abstinence, as if eunuchs, and which divided society into the Three Estates of Ploughman, Knight, and Monk, each presented in the General Prologue.26 The Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales27 and the Luttrell Psalter28 are both exquisite—except for the comic faces and distorted bodies of some of their characters. Then one realizes that both illuminators, and also Chaucer himself, were familiar with Terence’s Comedies, in which this is the tradition. Terence, as much as Aristotle, gave medieval culture a mirror in which to view itself, albeit at times a distorting cruel funhouse, a writer’s desk with pigeonholes, a set of mocking masks to don.

The Ellesmere Canterbury Tales Miller Luttrell Psalter, Psalm 96, fol. 173

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Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde based on Boccaccio’s Filostrato is magnificently illustrated in the Cambridge Corpus Christi College manuscript, with Chaucer in a pulpit structure, a domuncula, preaching the tale to his king, Richard II, who is clad in cloth of gold, and to his court; behind them can be seen the scene of the prisoner exchange of the tale.

In a word, it is constructed as the Middle Ages perceived Terence’s theatre to be with Chaucer as Calliopus. The Canterbury Tales is also filled with references to drama, to theatre. The Knight’s Tale, based on Boccaccio’s Teseida, combines both tragedy and comedy. Its tale of two young men, cousins, in love with the same maiden, is resonant of many Terentian plots. Arcita is tragically killed following his victorious duel/tournament played out in an elaborate theatre built by Theseus, structured like a windrose, a compass, where the mansions become temples, replete with intense allegorical meanings (CT KT I.1885-1892), while Palamon lives and marries Emelye, following the funeral games, ‘Ne how the Grekes pleye / the wake pleyes’ (I.2959-60). We recall that two of Terence’s plays, Hecyra and Adelphoe, were performed at the funeral games for Lucius Aemilius Paulus. This classic construct is echoed in medieval plays in England, such as the Castle of Perseverance, where the domunculus becomes a castle,29 and in the Cornish dramas30.

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The Miller’s Tale machinery involves the play of Herod and the Noah play (I.3384, I.3513-82). The Wife of Bath enjoys going ‘to playes of myracles’ (III.558). While the Franklin’s Tale plays with the subtle and noble theatre of dinner entertainments, of ships seeming to sail on oceans and hunting scenes (V.1141-50, 1189-1204), evocative of Boccaccio’s Fifth Day, Eighth Tale, taking place amongst Ravenna’s pines, evoked for Dante’s encounter with Beatrice in Purgatorio XXVIII.20, painted by Botticelli for the wedding of Giovanozzo Pucci.

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Chaucer, though he never mentions Boccaccio, is Boccaccio in English. He rewrites Boccaccio’s Filostrato as Troilus and Criseyde and Boccaccio’s (Statius’) Teseida as his Knight’s Tale.31 the first story of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer thus creates of the Canterbury Tales a sequel as it were, a copy, of Boccaccio’s Decameron. In addition to Chaucer’s intertextual relationship with Boccaccio and thus with Terence, there are his acknowledged debts to Dante and to Petrarch: the Wife of Bath (CT III.1125-1130) uses Dante’s Convivio (IV.iii), to argue that ‘gentilesse’ is not from the hereditary nobility but accessible to all through the practice of virtue, an argument also found in Boethius, and influenced by both Terence and the Gospels; the Friar’s Tale against the Summonour (CT III.1520) mentions Dante; the Monk (CT VII.2407-2462) retells Dante’s infernal tale of Ugolino of Pisa (Inferno XXXIII.1-90), and the Second Nun (CT VIII.36-49) translates Paradiso XXXIII,1-39’s invocation to the ‘Mayde and Mooder, doghter of thy Sone’. Chaucer passes off Boccaccio’s final tale of the Decameron as Petrarch’s, for Petrarch had admired it so much that he had translated it into Latin, concealing its true source; Chaucer gave it to his Clerk of Oxenforde to tell (CT V.31-33, 1147-48). To discuss the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales is to understand the second as using analogues of the first, rather than as considering the Decameron as an open source. The Hundred Tales of the Decameron veer from courtly romance to raucous fabliau; and so do the Canterbury Tales. In addition, we see in

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Chaucer the legends of saints and the moral and allegorical romances from the pages of the Golden Legend and the Gesta Romanorum. The Miller’s, Reeve’s, and Cook’s Tales are more fabliaux than romance, more Boccaccio than Terence. The Miller’s Tale is of a January/May marriage, and so is that of the Merchant. In Boccaccio, this pattern even becomes the tale of the Tenth Day’s Fifth Story, where the Lady asks the would-be lover for the miracle of a May garden in January, which will become the Franklin’s Tale, given a local habitation and a name in Brittany. But let us pass over the parallels between Boccaccio and Chaucer in this chapter on Terence’s influence upon both of them, and instead delight in the fullness of all these authors, their humanity, their celebration of diversity. E. E. Cummings best caught the Terentian aspects of boundary transgression, of pyramid busting, of pilgrimage liminality, in Chaucer’s great comedy:

honour corruption villainy holiness riding in fragrance of sunlight (side by side all in a singing wonder of blossoming yes riding) to him who died that death should be dead humblest and proudest eagerly wandering (equally all alive in miraculous day) merrily moving through sweet forgiveness of spring (over the under the gift of the sky knight and ploughman pardoner wife and nun merchant frère clerk somnour miller and reve and Geoffrey and all) come up from the never of when come into the now of forever come riding alive down while crylessly drifting through vast most nothing’s own nothing children go of dust.32

A fine aphorism in a Florentine Humanist Terence manuscript, now in the British Library, can embrace all our writers, Terence, Luke, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer: quid est comedia, comedia est imitatio vite, speculum consuetudinis et imago veritatis (London, British Library, Harley 2526, formerly owned by Randulphi de Ricasoli of Florence).

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Notes Editions and translations used in this essay are: Terence, Publius Terenti Afer, Comoediae recognovervnt brevique adnotatione critica instrvxerunt, ed. Robert Kauert and Wallace M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979) Oxford Classical Texts; The Lady of Andros, The Self-Tormentor, The Eunuch. Sargeaunt, J, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) Loeb Classical Library 22; Phormio, The Mother-in-Law, The Brothers, trans. J. Sargeaunt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) Loeb Classical Library 23; Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l'antica vulgata (Mondadori, Milan, 1966); Tutte le opere, ed.Luigi Blasucci, Luigi, ed. (Florence, Sansoni, 1987); The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1902-1986); Giovanni Boccaccio, Opere, ed. Cesare Segre (Milan: Mursia, 1978); The Decameron, trans. C.H. McWilliam, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991); Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, Larry D. Benson and F.N. Robinson (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1987); William Shakespeare, The Complete Works. ed. Hardin Craig and David Bevington (Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1973). 1 Italian Humanist manuscripts of Terence derive from Angelo Poliziano’s copy, Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, Banco Rari 97, made from the fifth-century Vatican 3226 Bembino manuscript in rustic capitals. 2 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968) discusses pilgrimage and liminality which can be applied equally well to comedy, in particular to Terence, in which social distinctions are annihilated, as in Moliere’s Tartuffe where the maidservant Dorine saves the day, and likewise the butler in James M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton. 3 Oxford, Bodleian Library Auct. F.2.13=27603, is published in Major Treasures in the Bodleian Library: Medieval Manuscripts in Microform, 9, ed. W.O. Halsall (Oxford, 1978), and discussed in Otto Pächt and J.J.G. Alexander, Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), III.16; Leslie Webber Jones and C.R. Morey, The Miniatures of the Manuscripts of Terence Prior to the Thirteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1913).

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4 Julia Bolton Holloway, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri (Berne: Peter Lang, 1993), 259-85. 5 Mary Hatch Marshall, 'Boethius’ Definition of Persona and Medieval Understanding of the Roman Theater', Speculum 26 (1950), 471-82. 6 Sir William Empson, ‘Double Plots,’ Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1960), 27-88. 7 Julia Bolton Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer (Berne: Peter lang, 1995), 27-55. 8 The Towneley Plays. (1897) England, George F., ed. Early English Text Society, Oxford. EETS 71. 9 Millard Meiss, French Painting in the time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and their Contemporaries (Braziller, New York, 1974) passim and plates 7, 19, 63-64, 171-199, 201-221, 226-227, 230. 10 Arthur M. Hind, An Introduction to the History of Woodcut. (New York: Dover, 1963); Pierre Courcelle, La Consolation de philosophie dans la tradition littéraire, antécedents et posterité de Boèce (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1967). 11 Joseph Russo, 'Did Dante Know Terence?', Italica 24 (1947), 217. 12 Pietro Alighieri, Commentum di Pietro Alighieri nelle redazioni ashburnhamiana e ottoboniana, eds. Roberto Della Vedova, Roberto e Maria Teresa Silvotti (Florence: Olschki, 1978), pp. 8-9. 13 Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, in Tutte le opere, ed. Luigi Blasucci (Florence: Sansoni, 1981). 14 Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer (Berne: Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 27-84.

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15 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Garden City: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 151-177. 16 Russo, p. 212. 17 Auerbach, 'St. Francis of Assisi in Dante’s ‘Commedia’, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 79-98. 18 Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death: The Arts, Religion and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century, (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 109, fig. 102. 19 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Random House, 1977). 20 Leslie Silko, 'Language and Literature from the Pueblo Perspective', Tales within Tales: Apuleius through Time, ed. Constance S. Wright and Julia Bolton Holloway (New York: AMS Press, 2000), pp. 141-156. 21 Germaine Greer, ‘Grandmother’s Footsteps’, Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/15/germaine-greer-old-wives-tales). 22 Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature. A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest- Books and Local Legends (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 6 vols. 23 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). 24 Giovanni Boccaccio, Opere, ed. Cesare Segre (Milan: Mursia, 1963-78), pp. 116-17; Decameron, trans. G.M. McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), pp. 119-120.

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25 William Holman Hunt buried his wife Fanny in Florence's 'English' Cemetery, in a tomb he sculpted for her. 26 Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Jill Mann, Chaucer's Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 27 Theo Stemmler, The Ellesmere Miniatures of the Canterbury Pilgrims (Mannheim: University of Mannheim, 1977), Poetria Mediaevalis 2. 28 Janet Backhouse, ed. The Luttrell Psalter (London: British Library, 1989). 29 David Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s Teseida (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). 30 David Bevington, The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind: A Facsimile Edition with Facing Transcriptions (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1972). 31 Richard Southern, The Medieval Theatre in the Round (London: Faber and Faber, London, 1957); Markham Harris, The Cornish Ordinalia. A Medieval Dramatic Trilogy (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1969). 32 E.E. Cummings, Complete Poems, 1904-1962, ed. George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright, 1991), 52, p. 661.

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EPILOGUE

DANTE IN ATTICA

BOETHIUS THE EXILE, DANTE THE PILGRIM

n October 15, 1981, four Dante scholars, William Stephany, Rachel Jacoff, William E. Gohlman and myself, gathered at Attica Correctional Facility

at the invitation of the State University of New York's University College of Arts and Sciences at Geneseo and the Genesee Community College's education program. Ronald Herzman and William Cook noted in their introduction to the Conference, titled Learning in Exile: Dante in Attica, held to commemorate the Attica Prison Riot of 1971, that this was a unique event in the histories of prisons and academia. The four of us talked on different aspects of Dante to an audience of Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans for the most part, a third of whom were murderers. We were searched at the entry of the prison. We walked to the lecture hall through a multitude of gates that had to be specially unlocked by guards. It was as if we were in the landscape of Dante's poem.

William Stephany of the University of Vermont gave the first paper on ‘Dante's Exiles,’ describing Dante's paralleling of Pier delle Vigne, the prisoner who commits suicide and who is met by Dante in Hell where he has become a tree whose branches bleed and speak when broken, and of Romeo, the pilgrim in Paradise. Both men were unjustly accused of crimes they had not committed, like Dante himself, and had then responded, in the first case by suicide in prison, in the second by leaving the court, penniless, possessing only a staff and a mule and going forth on pilgrimage. Rachel Jacoff of Wellesly College gave a paper on ‘Dante and Virgil.’ She stressed the poignancy of Virgil as the pagan, as the outsider, who is the instrument of Dante's salvation but who is himself damned to remain in Hell for all eternity. The final paper, by William E. Gohlman of State University College of Arts and Sciences at Geneseo, on ‘Dante and Islam,’ was of interest to the audience, many of whose members were Black Muslims. William Gohlman

O

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stressed the universality of Islamic beliefs, its respect for Judaism and Christianity, the ‘Peoples of the Book,’ and of Dante's interest in Islam.

My paper, ‘Boethius the Prisoner, Dante the Exile,’ was the second to be given. As you read its words, imagine yourself not in your comfortable study chair but instead as in its audience, composed of young ‘lifers,’ who are in the prison's college program, in a room with bars on the windows, with uniformed guards, many of them surprisingly, women, and also surprisingly, all of them unarmed, standing behind you, and resenting the fact that you have the privilege of hearing this lecture. (Guards with machine guns man the Gothic-styled Disneyesque outer towers of the prison, but since the Riot, guards on the floor of the main prison, which is built like a Romanesque dungeon and fortress, are never armed.) The lecture will be interrupted by walkie-talkie's noisy commands and guards calling out individual inmates' numbers, not names, who will momentarily stiffen in resistance, then obey, and leave the room.

I.Boethius the Prisoner, Dante the Exile

his would be an easy lecture to give on the outside. In the present context I find giving this lecture both humbling and intense. I feel that I

am inadequate to give it to this audience and yet that this material is far more meaningful here than in a more ordinary institution.

I should actually like to begin with a story that happened in Italy, in Rome. I was there when it happened. The Italian Cardinals had elected an old man to be Pope, thinking that he would die soon and wouldn't be a nuisance. Pope John XXIII, however, was of peasant stock, the kind of person who would take the Christian Gospel very literally. One morning, and I heard them, the Italians in Rome were saying to each other: ‘Do you know what the Pope did this morning?’ ‘He went to Regina Coeli prison and visited the prisoners.’ The Regina Coeli prison means the Prison of the Queen of Heaven, of the Virgin Mary, a beautiful name, like Attica, for a terrible place. The Romans were delighted at what he had done. The Pope's actions, which obeyed Christ's command in the Gospel that Christians visit prisoners, seemed to say that even the most sinful had the chance of being forgiven by the most holy, and this made everyone happy that morning,

T

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everyone could forgive themselves. A much loved photograph of Pope John XXIII shows him with a striped-pajama'd prisoner of Rome's Regina Coeli prison. 1

I am going to talk about two Italians, Dante and Boethius, both of whom were punished for crimes they had not committed. Boethius was exiled, imprisoned, and executed in a most brutal manner, ropes being twisted around his head until his eyes burst out, and he was finished off with a bludgeon and an axe. While on Death Row, awaiting his execution, he wrote a most remarkable book which he called the Consolation of Philosophy. Dante, when exiled from Florence, was to turn to that book for consolation and to use its patterning for writing the Divine Comedy. Dante and Boethius lived many years, centuries even, apart. Boethius (470-524 A.D.) lived in the twilight of the Roman Empire. He was one of the last men, until the Renaissance, to know of both Greek and Latin philosophy. He was a Senator of Rome, descended from ancient Romans, but his Emperor was a Barbarian, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. That was in the fifth century after Christ. Ten centuries before that, Socrates had been tried and imprisoned and forced to drink the hemlock in Attica, in Athens, in the fifth century before Christ. Boethius knew the texts, written by Plato, describing the last days of Socrates, about Socrates on Death Row, and so he modelled his Consolation of Philosophy upon those works. Dante was to be exiled from Florence and to write the Divine Comedy in the fourteenth century. During the nine centuries in between and beyond Boethius' word was read, copied and loved by all who knew it, at a time when Plato's work concerning Socrates' imprisonment in Athens of ten centuries earlier was lost. The Consolation of Philosophy was translated into our language by King Alfred, by Geoffrey Chaucer, and by Queen Elizabeth.2

Socrates was imprisoned and executed largely for political reasons. Boethius was likewise exiled from Rome, imprisoned, and then executed for political reasons. Dante had grown up in the city of Florence, had been intensely involved in his city's politics (a word which literally means the affairs of the city) and had then had to go into exile when his political party lost power. Both Boethius and Dante first knew success, then utter failure. Both men found consolation in their writing and in turn their works consoled their readers.

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I shall need to discuss, for a moment, what were the customs in the ancient world for the punishing of traitors and criminals. The Mediterranean civilization insisted that the stranger, the pilgrim, the exile be treated with respect, as if he were a god, or God, in disguise. If a man committed a murder, or were, for political reasons, sent into exile from his city, he had to leave his immediate surroundings and journey elsewhere, receiving shelter, bread, and water, wherever he went. Homer's Odyssey and Aeschylus' Oresteia show this. In the Greek world such a stranger, such an exile, was considered to be under Zeus' protection. He was paradoxically sacred, though a criminal. He was considered to be as if one of the sacred gods in disguise visiting mortals to test their piety. If such a person did not go into exile as a pilgrim, then he would be imprisoned and executed, as was Socrates. Socrates preferred the latter because he could not conceive of the idea of living away from his beloved city of Athens, in the region of Greece known as Attica. Boethius later had to endure both imprisonment and exile, meeting his death in the city of Pavia, not the city of Rome of which he was Senator. Dante is forbidden to return to his city of Florence, of which he had been Prior, unless he would publicly undergo a humiliating penance in the Duomo or Cathedral of St. John; failing that he would have been publicly executed by burning if he were to have returned unrepentant. Instead, he chose to live as a pilgrim exile, traveling to the cities of Arezzo, Verona, Rome, Ravenna and other places and composing the Divine Comedy, all the while eating the bitter bread and climbing the hard stairs of others, as he states in his writings.3

Christian pilgrimage and exile had inherited both the concept of the Greek exiled stranger, who was to be under Zeus' sacred protection, and also the Judaic story of Cain, who had murdered his brother Abel, and who was marked by God to signify that no man was to slay him in turn while he wandered homeless about the earth. We witness such brands being used upon the forehead in Boethius' account of his accusers, Opilio and Gaudentius,4, and also in Dante's Purgatorio, Canto IX, where Dante himself is branded by the angel with seven P's, cut by a sword blade, upon his brow, seven letter P's which signify the seven deadly sins, peccati, that he has committed and which are then to be erased one by one by an angel's feather upon each of the terraces in turn.5 Pilgrims wore such badges which both marked their shame and yet paradoxically protected them from harm from others. A further story, a Gospel account in Luke 24, told of Christ

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himself going about disguised as a pilgrim, a stranger, not recognized by two of his disciples who travelled with him. That tale made the medieval world treat the stranger, the pilgrim, as if he might be Christ in disguise, though he might be a Cain-like murderer. Dante refers to that story in Purgatorio XXI. Medieval law stated that no pilgrim could be killed, even though he were a murderer; if he were to be killed, his murderer in turn was to be instantly slain. It is for these reasons that Dante has himself and Virgil be as pilgrims who meet others upon their pilgrimage; in Purgatorio all of them expiating their crimes, in Hell to be exiled, unrepentant and damned for ever.

The Consolation of Philosophy, written by Boethius when imprisoned and in exile, is a deeply moving book. It is not an academic text at all. I turn to it when I am in despair. It is a book that functions towards its readers as if it were the most humane and wise, compassionate and effective psychiatrist treating his favourite patient whose restoration to sanity he most wishes to achieve, but such psychiatrists would be rare in reality. A modern parallel could be Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, likewise written in a prison context and likewise speaking of hope, rather than despair, understanding, rather than negative bitterness, a mental freedom that can, in one's thoughts, cancel out physical imprisonment.6

The Consolation, modelled on Plato's account of Socrates' imprisonment, has two main characters. Plato had described Socrates speaking of a beautiful woman who came to him, clothed in bright garments. Just so Boethius describes himself in prison visited by Lady Philosophia:

While I silently pondered these things and decided to write down my wretched complaint, there appeared standing above me a woman of majestic countenance whose flashing eyes seemed wise beyond the ordinary wisdom of men. Her colour was bright . . . and yet she seemed so old that she could not be thought of as belonging to our age. Her height seemed to vary: sometimes she seemed of ordinary human stature, then again her head seemed to touch the top of the heavens . . . At the lower edge of her robe was woven a Greek P, at the top the letter TH [for practical, praxis, and theoretical, theoria, applied and pure philosophy, the letters really being the Greek Pi and Theta], and between these were

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seen clearly marked stages, like stairs, ascending from the lowest level to the highest.7

Medieval manuscripts of this scene show Philosophy with an embroidered ladder on her dress between the two letters.

The two dialogue with one another. Boethius the prisoner is presented as despairing, stupid, and self-pitying. Lady Philosophia, who is really a part of himself, her name in Greek meaning ‘Love of Wisdom,’ is shown as wise, sane, optimistic, looking on the bright side of things. The two characters in the literary work are really the two sides of Boethius' own personality, one being the wilful, self-destructive, despairing side, the other, the wise, creative, and hopeful one. The one behaves like a stupid student, the other like a wise, tolerant, forgiving, inspiring teacher. But this is really a work of self-teaching, of self-consoling, of self-help, and it teaches its readers to choose to laugh at their own self-pity and to cast it aside. Boethius is presenting a dialogue between his foolish side and his wise one. Boethius spends most of his time with Philosophy going over the accusations against him and complaining about how fickle Fortune has been to him. Philosophy gets him, slowly, to realize that all this is a question of perspective, of seeing things in proportion. She gets him to stop thinking of himself as a mere pawn who has been manipulated by events and to see that he has himself partly shaped his present predicament, that he has himself chosen to consider himself as a victim and to wallow in self-pity, when he could rise above that state and look at events clearly while standing apart from them. He asks her whether she is also not a prisoner.8

Her answer is ‘No,’ and she adds that while he may consider himself such he nevertheless helped his own becoming a prisoner because he has chosen to ‘fasten the chain by which he will be drawn.’9 She chooses not to share in his dungeon of despair, in his agony over the loss of his library, in the bitterness of his exile.10 She tells him that Philosophy dwells in the mind rather than in books on shelves. She points out that while he complains of being an exile he is living in a place that to others is home.

She then teaches him to appreciate ‘the love that rules the earth and the seas and commands the heavens,’11 a phrase that will be echoed and reflected and repeated more and more in the last lines of the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, culminating in ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’ of Paradiso XXXIII.146. She next speaks of Fate, whose other names

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are Fortune and Lady Luck, and its reverse, or perhaps, obverse, Freedom. These contraries she analogizes to the circle and the centre. For Philosophy evil does not really exist; it is simply the tending toward non-being, the choosing to depart from the centre into the greater spaces of the exterior circles, the choosing to depart from God ‘whose service is perfect freedom.’ Chaucer translated this as the departing ‘into the greater envirownings.’ Boethius, no longer self-pitying but caught up in the intricacies of her arguments, protests, and does so by writing, like Dante, in the first person:

‘You are playing with me,’ I said, ‘By weaving a labyrinthine argument from which I cannot escape. You seem to begin where you ended and end where you began. Are you perhaps making a marvelous circle of the divine simplicity? A little while ago you began with happiness, declared it to be the highest good, and located its dwelling in almighty God . . . . You also affirmed that God rules the universe by the exercise of his goodness, that all things willingly obey him, and that there is no evil in nature. And you proved all this without outside assumptions and used only internal proofs which draw their force from another.’ Philosophy answered, ‘I have not mocked you at all . . . . For it is the nature of the divine essence neither to pass to things outside itself nor to take any external thing to itself. As Parmenides puts it, the divine essence is `one body like a sphere, perfectly rounded on all sides'; it rotates the moving orb of the universe while it remains unmoved itself. You ought not to be surprized that I have sought no outside proofs, but have used only those within the scope of our subject, since you have learned, on Plato's authority, that the language we use ought to be related to the subject of our discourse.’12

The intellectual construct that results from Philosophia's argument and which shaped medieval thought is a simple one of a circle and its centre, the circle representing fate, time, man, the lessening of being (the only evil there is); the centre, freedom, eternity, God, being. It is the same scheme that is found in Augustine's and Aquinas' writings. It is both shaped by Plato and by Aristotle, while having its roots in the Presocratics.13 Philosophy explains:

Consider the example of a number of spheres in orbit around the same central point: the innermost moves towards the simplicity of the centre . . .

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whereas the outermost, whirling in a wider orbit, tends to increase its orbit in space the farther it moves from the indivisible midpoint of the centre. If, however, it is connected to the centre, it is confined by the simplicity of the centre and no longer tends to stray into space. In like manner, whatever strays farthest from the divine mind is most entangled in the nets of Fate; conversely, the freer a thing is from Fate, the nearer it approaches the centre of all things. And if it adheres firmly to the divine mind, it is free from motion and overcomes the necessity of Fate. Therefore, the changing course of Fate is to simple stability of Providence . . . as time is to eternity, as a circle to its centre.14

Dante, before his exile, is to make use of this image of the circle and the centre in the Vita nova in which he has Love appear to himself, telling Dante: ‘I am at the centre of the circle, equidistant from all parts; but you are not.’ In the Divine Comedy the image of the circle and the centre will be paramount. I especially love one example. Dante has taken it from a line in Virgil, about the reflections of water in a golden bowl as being analogous to thought within the mind. But here he is speaking of the relationship of man and God as a two-way communication, both from the centre and from the circle, a reaching out to each other. In Paradiso XIV, Dante tells us:

The water in a round vessel moves about from centre to rim if it is struck within, from rim to centre if it is struck from without.

I knew about ripples in a pond circling ever outwards, but not of this other movement. I was studying Dante in graduate school and came to this line, so I asked my children about it. We got down our big bread-making bowl and tried it out. Yes, Dante is right, when the outside of the bowl is banged the ripples go ever inwards meeting at the centre.

Now turn to the previous lines at the end of Paradiso XIII:

Let Tom and Jane not think, because they see one man is picking pockets and another is offering all his goods to charity,

that they can judge their neighbours with God's eyes: for the pious man may fall, and the thief may rise.

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Those words are spoken by Thomas Aquinas in the poem. Dante's image of the bowl, partly from Boethius, is the thought that comes to his mind as he tries to understand the theologian's paradoxical statement, which to him does not seem to make sense. Dante's text is speaking of the good thief and the hypocritical philanthropist. One is Dismas; the other, Dives, finding tax loopholes.

There are many aspects of the Divine Comedy that are reflections of Boethius' observations in the Consolation. The structure itself of the Comedy has the Inferno be the region of fate, Fortune's Wheel, a labyrinthine prison of eternity, the Purgatorio be a half-way house, and the Paradiso be freedom. Dante, like Boethius, had been accused of a crime he had not committed. In Inferno XIII he shows a person, named Pier delle Vigne, who likewise was accused of a crime which he did not commit, but who in his despair killed himself. We meet Pier delle Vigne, as like a thorny tree, which, when a branch is broken off it, bleeds and speaks in a nightmarish way. Dante himself could have been such a bitter suicide as is Pier delle Vigne had he not heeded Boethius' Consolation against despair. In Paradiso VI Dante meets another person, who also had been accused of a crime which he had not committed. Romeo, whom Dante meets in the realm of the pearl, tells Dante that when this happened to him he had simply asked his ruler for his pilgrim staff and his mule and had then set forth to continue on the pilgrimage which had first brought him to Berengar's court. Dante, likewise, in writing his Comedy, has chosen not suicide, but pilgrimage. Both he and Boethius openly state that they write their Consolation and their Comedy in order that ‘posterity may know the truth and have a record of these events.’ Similarly, Dante gives the souls of Pier delle Vigne and Romeo the chance to speak of the false accusations made against themselves, to counter the bearing of false witness against them.

Cicero had earlier written a work called the ‘Dream of Scipio.’15 It was known and loved by both Boethius and Dante. Boethius quotes from it when he speaks of the smallness of the earth in contrast to the rest of the universe: ‘You know from astrological computation that the whole circumference of the earth is no more than a pinpoint when contrasted to the space of the heavens; in fact, if the two are compared, the earth may be considered to have no size at all.’16 Dante knew this statement in Cicero and in Boethius concerning the smallness of the earth, engarlanded by the

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ocean. In classical and medieval cosmology, astronomy, this small earth was nevertheless thought to be the centre of the universe. Galileo was to be in serious trouble with the Church for observing that the earth was not the unmoving centre, but instead one of the planets that circled about the sun. But Dante lived before Galileo. In Paradiso XXII Dante looks down from heaven and this is what he sees:

My eyes went back through the seven spheres below, And I saw this globe, so small, so lost in space, I had to smile at such a sorry show. 133-135

It is almost, but not quite, what the astronauts saw. I do not think we ever realized until those photographs were published from space how beautiful the earth is, how fragile, how delicate.17 Classical Cicero, patristic Boethius, and medieval Dante all thought of the earth as an object of contempt, imperfection, sinfulness, not of exquisite loveliness. It, for them, was fallen, sinful, matter, at the centre of their universe, but it was the exact opposite of Boethius' godlike centre to a circle of ever-increasing non-being.

So Dante turned the whole thing inside out. He does this in Paradiso XXIII. Beatrice has him look at God and Mary who are within the Rose, around which all sing the anthem ‘Regina Coeli.’ (Remember that was also the name of the Roman prison Pope John XXIII visited.) The ordering of the universe, Dante implies, was inside out, and now is the right way round, with God at the centre, the humble earth and sinning man at the outermost part of the circle. Yet not so, for sinning man, who is represented by the figure of Dante, has come to the centre; the Regina Coeli, the Queen of Heaven, has redeemed the earth and man. It is as if we are caught up in Gödel's Theorem, in the eternity of eight on its side, everything twisted into the true.

But before that happens, and before we find Boethius, where Dante placed him, in Paradiso X, we must still journey through the prison that is Hell and the correctional facility that is Purgatory. Inferno is set in the realm of darkness, of the terrible three days from Good Friday until Easter Sunday, and its similes are set in the season of winter, that season Shakespeare was to call ‘the winter of our discontent,’ the winter of despair. Purgatorio returns us to the ‘sweet season’ of the poem's opening, to Spring, to Easter, to Resurrection from death, while Hell had been deadly. Both regions are

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stony, but upon Purgatorio's cliff walls the sun shines like a blessing. Actually the two places mirror each other. Both are labyrinthine gyres, the first being the inside-out version of the second. Both have entry gates. We remember vividly the horror, the inexorability of the first, its words chiselled upon granite, as upon a tombstone, as Moses' law upon the stone tablets, as upon a Roman triumphal arch: ‘ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO

ENTER HERE.’

Yet that same gate spoke of itself as made by Sacred Justice, Divine Omnipotence, Primordial Love, and Ultimate Intellect. How could Love create such an artifice, a memorial to despair, to negation, to atheism, one asks? However, there is a similar gate in Purgatorio IX, upon entering which Dante is branded with the seven P's upon his forehead. A fresco in Santa Maria del Fiore, painted by Michelini, shows Dante explaining his Commedia to the city of Florence. The gate to the city of Florence is mirrored in that to Hell. And both of these are shown as the same as that to the cornices, to the terraces, of Purgatory. It is the same gate: but the first time it is entered in a state of despair; in the second it is the Golden Gate of hope. What Dante has done is to present it twice over, the first as if seen by a Boethius wallowing in despair, the second as if by a Boethius imbued with hope by Philosophia. It is the same gate but perceived from a different mental perspective. This time it is more truly the gate of Sacred Justice, Divine Omnipotence, Primordial Love, and Ultimate Intellect. It is not the gate into the prison, but the gate out of it.

My inclinations are to leave Hell far behind. But I must return there to discuss two episodes. In Inferno V Dante and Virgil meet Paolo and Francesca. Francesca tells her tale of woe and includes in it the statement, in the subjunctive, that if God were their friend she would pray for Dante. It is not that God is really their enemy, but only that their perception of God is that he has withdrawn himself from them. In fact, in Boethian terms, they have chosen to withdraw themselves from God and therefore speak of him in the subjunctive, twisting language to match their twisting of truth. It is actually they themselves who do not forgive themselves, not God. Later, in Inferno, the souls will speak of God in ever worsening terms, as the enemy power, the podestà, the tyrant, as they will, in the form of that verb that denotes choice, themselves further and further from his presence, voluntarily placing themselves in eternal exile from him.

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The other tale is that of Ugolino of Pisa in Inferno XXXIII who, shut up in prison with his little sons for having betrayed his city, in his hunger took to devouring their dead bodies, a terrible act of cannibalism that he now carries out in revenge on the frozen ice upon the head of Archbishop Ruggieri who had so imprisoned him and his progeny. Further on, across the ice, in this realm of uttermost despair, is found Satan, the most imprisoned prisoner in the prison of hell, and he is mirroring the act of Ugolino, as he in turn devours his three sons, Judas, Cassius and Brutus, traitors to the holy cities of Jerusalem and Rome. This devouring of one's progeny, this annihilation of oneself and one's kind, is that Boethian definition of evil, that annihilation of self, that tending to non-beingness, that despair brings about. Despair, in theology, is the worst sin, the sin against God, and against oneself in the image of God.

Individuals under stress, such as the stress of imprisonment or the loss of identity that exile brings about, compensate in some cases by creating works that restore meaning to their lives. Carl Jung observed mental patients to create mandalas, labyrinths that restored order to their psyches.18 Thomas Usk, Chaucer's friend, when awaiting his execution, wrote in prison a Boethian Testament of Love which spells out in acrostics a prayer on his behalf to a Margaret, a Pearl, who symbolizes his soul.19 King James of Scotland, when captured by the English, wrote a poem in Chaucer's manner and based on Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, which is known as the Kingis Quair, the King's Book.20 Sir Thomas More, when a prisoner in the Tower of London wrote the Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation in which two Christian Hungarians, an uncle and a nephew, console themselves about the coming of the infidel Turks.21 Sir Walter Ralegh and Jawarlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi's father, when in prison wrote histories of the world.22 Navaho Indians when they are ill have sand paintings done while the narration of the creation of the world is recounted, narrations which name the individual for whom the rites are performed.23 In all these attempts to reorder human lives these accounts, whether on paper or in sand or with the spoken word or with paint, centre themselves upon the individual in question, including that person in the totality of the work, and having that person be at the centre of the design or order, of the re-creation of meaning and sense and pattern. Similarly, Boethius and Dante place and name themselves within their labyrinth, mandala-like works in which they journey from the outside of the circle, which lacks

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meaning and sense and has the wrong perspective, to its centre where they attain meaning, truth, freedom, and consolation.

We are dealing with a paradox, for that very design, that very order they create is somewhat akin to a prison. Why is it that man has always loved rigorous design and pattern, planning cities out in blocks, designing hell with bolgias and purgatory with cornices, and prisons and monasteries with cells, I do not really know. I do know that while I would gain a certain sense of satisfaction in creating a Utopia, an ordered community, I would not choose to inhabit one designed by others, in which I had no choice as to its shaping. The French Poststructuralist, Michel Foucault, has studied this aspect of prisons and found that the origin of the concept had as its intention the aiding and reforming of prisoners, rather than the destruction of their souls.24 Let us say that, for some, the idea of order is seen as like a paradise; a medieval monastery was understood in this way for its cells centred upon a cloistered garden with a well that thus represented the City of God on earth.25 While for others, such order is the stuff of nightmares. Dante's Hell is most certainly that. Interestingly it was partly modelled upon the medieval tale of St. Patrick's Purgatory as seen in the Vision of the Knight Owain. He had slept in St. Patrick's Cave, which was on an island in the middle of a lake in Ireland, and there he had dreamt a most fearsome dream of bridgy chasms, bolgias, catwalks, from which he nearly did not emerge alive.26 In the nineteenth century the English essayist, Thomas de Quincey, described Coleridge showing him Piranesi's prints, called the Carceri, the Prisons, prints which the Italian Renaissance Piranesi engraved in the aftermath of a fever delirium, of terrible stone vaulted prison cells that went on forever, with awful instruments of torture upon the floors, great racks and wheels, while balustrades and terraces lead from one tier to the next, upon which one can see the diminutive figure of Piranesi himself, striving to escape from one region of the prison only to find himself in the next.27 I have always wanted to do a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet with these scenes as scrims and backcloth to illustrate its Denmark as a prison.

This is what Dante in a sense himself does in creating his Hell from Virgil's Aeneid VI and placing himself and Virgil within that construct, naming himself within the text, giving himself meaning. He sees the Inferno as a prison of eternity, a nightmare, from which there is no escape for the

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inhabitants, other than for himself, and his reader mirrored in himself. These prisoners are lifers. They do not themselves even ever wish to earn parole. But Purgatorio is an utterly different kind of imprisonment. It is willed and chosen by its participants, much as the inhabitants of a medieval monastery chose for themselves their lives of orderliness. The Purgatorio's inhabitants are not static exiles at the outside of being, but can choose to ascend from one cornice to the next, journeying as pilgrims towards the centre whenever they themselves know they are ready to do so. The inhabitants of Purgatorio have sinned the same sins as the inhabitants of Inferno, but their attitude is different. They have died in hope of redemption, not despairingly convincing themselves they are damned. The Purgatorial mountain is thus a penitentiary in the original sense of the word, where pilgrims could atone for and expiate their crimes, after which the slate was wiped clean, the record clear, their debt to man and God paid up. Paradiso is a realm of utter freedom, where the souls are both at the centre and wherever else they choose, bringing with them that all-encompassing perspective of the centre's freedom even when they descend earthward, as in Beatrice's case when, at the instigation of Mary and Lucy, she even comes to Virgil in the Inferno, these three ladies being the three Graces rather than the three Fates and Furies.

What is especially important to realize in Dante's text is that the inhabitants of Hell's bolgias and circles, while they consider themselves fated and imprisoned by God, the enemy power, have, in fact, chosen freely, in bitterness and self-pitying rage, to pervert the truth and the reality of their existence, blaming another for what is their doing. They have chosen, freely, to believe that they are fated and punished and damned; they have done this to themselves and it is not the deed of another. God, who upon the Gate of Hell is noted as being Power, Love, and Wisdom (in some translations, Omnipotence, Love and Intellect), has created these beings in his image, so that they share his power, love and wisdom as well, if they choose to do so. Or they may just as freely choose to relinquish that power, that love, and that wisdom, becoming powerless, hateful, and mad, and thereby alienate themselves from God; which, in fact, they have done. Dante, in creating these bitter, proud and willful souls has shaped them, and also himself, in the image of the foolish Boethius in the Consolation. And through the pages of the Comedy, he journeys away from that foolish self to the wisdom of Philosophia and Beatice, he journeys quite literally

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from the tragedy of Virgil's pagan Aeneid to a Christian comedy of salvation attained through the choice made to know himself, to forgive himself, and to purge himself, the medieval rites of confession, contrition, and satisfaction, which includes restitution to one's victim and to society.

A quality all these works share is that the author quests or meets another, who is female, rather than male. This occurs in Boethius' Consolation, in Dante's Commedia, in Usk's Testament, and in King James' Book or Quaire. This female represents the author's soul, from which he is no longer alienated when he attains wisdom. (In the same way, Shakespeare has Lear's soul be Cordelia, Prospero's, Miranda, Leontes', Perdita.) Her love is at the centre. There, as well, is her power and her wisdom. For Socrates in prison in Attica this was Diotima. For Boethius in prison in Pavia this was Philosophia. For Dante in exile from Florence this was Florentine Beatrice. For Thomas Usk this was Margaret and for the King of Scotland the woman he glimpses through the bars is to be his wife and Queen. For Eldridge Cleaver, writing Soul on Ice in prison in San Quentin, this is the Black Queen of the Song of Solomon in the Bible. By these means, on a mental plane, these writers cancel out the horror of imprisonment and exile.

Let me end this prison talk by noting that when Dante meets the soul of Boethius in Paradiso X he speaks of him as having come

to this peace . . . from exile and martyrdom. 128-129

In those words Dante mirrors his own journey from despair to hope, from fate to freedom, and from the bitterness of his own exile to that ‘vision of peace’, the meaning of the word, ‘Jerusalem,’ he so joyously celebrates in the Comedy's Paradiso.

That was my paper at Attica State Prison, or rather, Attica Correctional Facility. We mentioned to the guards how attentive and how perceptive the inmates had been to us. A guard's angry reply was that they had only behaved well in order to have another such conference. During the Symposium on Learning in Exile the guards shuffled their feet and the chairs, talked on their walkie-talkies, called out the prisoners by number rudely and loudly, and rattled plates. The prisoners sat in such rapt attention that a pin could have been heard dropping, and they won our hearts by conveying to us

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that they were people of dignity and worth. They made comments, relating the texts to themselves, noting they had been like the souls in Hell, blaming everyone but themselves, with disarming honesty.28 One young Hispanic asked whether we could include Spanish and Caribbean texts in our material next time. I told him of Juan de Mena's Laberinto, a Spanish Commedia, and of Jorge Luis Borge's writing on labyrinths,29 but confessed my ignorance of Caribbean poetry and apologized. Another, Black, asked me whether it was not the difficulties and vicissitudes (yes, that was his vocabulary) of Dante's life that had caused him to write such an exquisite and powerful work as the Commedia. A third, Native American, made a similar comment. We went to Attica State Prison, now euphemistically named Attica Correctional Facility, thinking we would be teaching; instead we learned, we were taught, and in that prison found Philosophia, Lady Wisdom, for her home is less in a university library than it is in a place of misfortune.

The Symposium lasted most of the day. We came back again that evening to meet with the class that had been studying Dante that semester. Once again we were escorted past many locked gateways by guards. As we went down one corridor, Ron and Bill were telling us that the rioting and shooting of ten years before took place in the courtyard we could see outside that corridor's windows. That night it looked strangely peaceful. The next evening we went to Vespers at the Cistercian Abbey of Genesee. It felt right to combine a prison and a monastery. We spent hours talking together about the experience at Attica and of our research on Dante. The prisoners taught us much about the outsiders, Virgil, Boethius, Dante, Saladin, we had half-encountered within our texts, and also they taught us about themselves in such a way that we found ourselves fully being, understanding ourselves and others.30 They, like Beatrice, led us to the centre.

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Notes

1 John Robert Glorney Bolton, Il Papa (Milan: Longanesi, 1959), p. 272; Living Peter (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), pp. 185-186. 2 Trans. King Alfred, ed. John Walter Sedgefield (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900); trans. Geoffrey Chaucer, in The Riverside Chaucer; trans. Queen Elizabeth, in Queen Elizabeth's Englishings of Boethius, Plutarch and Horace, ed. C. Pemberton (London: Early English Text Society, 1899), EETS OS 113. 3 Convivio I.iii; Paradiso XVII.58,60. To this day Florentine bread is not salted. 4 Of his accusers, Boethius says, ‘One of them was Basil who had earlier been expelled from the King's service and was now forced by his debts to testify against me. My other accusers were Opilio and Gaudentius, also men banished by royal decree for their many corrupt practices. They tried to avoid exile by taking sanctuary, but when the King heard of it he decreed that, if they did not leave Ravenna by a certain day, they should be branded on the forehead and forcible expelled. How could the King's judgement have been more severe? And yet on that very day their testimony against me was accepted.’ Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1962), p. 11. 5 I saw, at the dispensary at Cistercian Casamaris Abbey in Italy, monks dispensing penicillin, but also dressing sores by applying lotion with a bird's wing feather from a jar. 6 Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Delta, 1968). 7 Pp. 3-7. 8 P. 7: ‘Mistress of all virtues,’ I said, ‘why have you come, leaving the arc of heaven, to this lonely desert of exile? Are you a prisoner, too, charged as I am with false accusations?’ 9 P. 9.

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10 He speaks of ivory and crystal book cabinets. 11 P. 41, Book II, Poem 8. 12 Pp. 72-73. 13 Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, ‘The Philosophy of Parmenides,’ Ph. D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1963. 14 Pp. 91-92. 15 Cicero, ‘Dream of Scipio’ in Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, ed. Robert P. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 96-105. 16 P. 37. 17 A prisoner said here, ‘It was beautiful!’ when I asked them what the earth was like in those pictures. 18 Carl G. Jung, Mandala Symbolism, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 19 Thomas Usk, ‘The Testament of Love,’ in Chaucerian and Other Pieces, edited, W. W. Skeat, (London: Oxford University Press, 1897), vol. VII.1-145. 20 King James I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair, John Norton-Smith (Leiden: Brill, 1981). 21 Sir Thomas More, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, edited, Louis L. Martz and Frank Manley, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), vol 12. 22 Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the World, ed. C.A. Patrides (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1971; Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to his Daughter, Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People (New York: John Day, 1942).

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23 Mircea Eliade, Aspects du myth (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), pp. 33-70. 24 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 25 Herrad von Landsberg, Hortus Deliciarum, ed. Rosalie Green (London: Warburg Institute, 1979); George Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought: The Biblical Experience of the Desert in the History of Christianity and the Paradise Theme in the Theological Idea of the University (New York: Harper, 1962). 26 St. Patrick's Purgatory: The Versions of Owayne Miles, ed. Robert Easting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), EETS 298; Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). 27 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989). 28 I now recognize that this ability to be honest comes from the procedures, which are self-taught, of the Alcoholics Anonymous Twelve Steps. I wish university administrators and faculty, politicians and their voters, could work the same Twelve Steps. 29 Juan de Mena, Laborinto de Fortuna, ed. Louise Vasvari Fainbag (Madrid: Alhambra, 1976); Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1962); El Aleph (Madrid: Alianza, 1971). 30 Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972).