THE APPRECIATION OF HANDMADE LITERATURE*
by Richard A. Dwyer
*Reprinted from The Chaucer Review, Vol.8, No. 3. Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park and London.
When the Council of Trent set outside of the biblical canon the old apocryphal book of Second Esdras, I like to think that it was manifesting the contempt of many modern editors for the common literary processes of the Middle Ages. For the books of Esdras owed their existence not to the meticulous transmission of Mosaic inspiration by generations of scholars but to the inspired semicomprehension of the scribes themselves. The old books of the Law having been burnt, Esdras, a priest, reader of the law, scribe by profession and prophet by calling, was commanded by the Lord to take five expert scribes out into the field for forty days; and there the Lord gave him such drink as fired his understanding and caused him to speak night and day, and the Most High gave such understanding to the five scribes that they wrote by course the things that were told them, in characters which they knew not. The prospect of the inspired scribe filling in the gap in the record is central to a proper appreciation of one of the ways medieval man created literature. The more modern attitude toward scribal tinkering, and the one we ought to overcome, can be seen in the comments surrounding an allusion to Second Esdras made by John Dryden in the Religio Laici. There, arguing against centuries of editorial corruption and consiliar interpretation and arguing for the simple sufficiency of the earliest scriptures, Dryden develops an image of both ancient text and medieval gloss:
From his distinction between the original fenceposts and the interpreters' feeble hedging, Dryden goes on to gently chide an ecclesiastical infallibility that proclaims truth but can neither tell where its manuscripts are corrupt, nor
Some of that brushwood stuffed in the works of neighboring ages may still attract our attention, and it will be the purpose of this paper to suggest that a proper appreciation of medieval literature requires us to respond, not with the attitude I have pinned on John Dryden, but in an informed and sympathetic fashion to that earlier belief in the value of scribal participation in the continuous recreation of literature transmitted by manuscript--of handmade literature.
In pursuit of this appreciation, my method will be to offer a collection of manuscript curiosities, handpicked from the researches of such scholars as Johm Matthews Manly, George Kane, and Rosemary Woolf. These instances are arranged in an informal sequence of increasing complexity leading into some work of my own on the labyrinthine case of the medieval French versions of the Consolatio philosophiae of Boethius. My hope is to urge the utility of looking to manuscript variation for answers to questions of literary history and interpretation.
We may start from two modern vantages, which, once reconciled, offer a suitable perspective from which to discuss these medieval processes. The first is T. S. Eliot’s dictum that each new work of art alters our view of many that preceded it. A new tragedy is, in other words, a kind of criticism of earlier tragedies. A new novel tells us, perhaps presumptuously, what certain other novels might have been. Such a notion of the critical potential of works of art is important for periods like the Middle Ages which lack the kind of practical contemporary criticism that we have found so useful since the time of Ben Jonson. The second helpful contribution I would locate in the recent attention paid to revisions and worksheets as clues to the problem passages in works of art. 1
The relation between two medieval MSS of the "same" work may sometimes be illuminated by a synthesis of these two modern notions-that a new work criticizes an old, and that creation is a process with occasional stopping points represented by drafts. The key which medievalizes this synthesis is the assumption that successive MSS may constitute both revisions and "adequate" states of a work. Just as the first issue of the Prelude satisfied one Wordsworth and the last another, so we may say that one manuscript performance of a work suits one scribe, audience, time and place, while its next copyist may alter it to fit a new set of circumstances. And as the work passes from copyist to editor, from remanieur to compiler, from redactor to translator, the creative process is partially externalized, made social, and may, in consequence, be extended beyond the limitations of individual energies, talent, and control. The works of art thus socialized may require viewing from the unique perspective of each of their manuscript performances if we are to fully understand them.
Although most modem discussions of revision focus on authorial revision--as opposed to such changes as those, say, that Ezra Pound is said to have made in T. S. Eliot's work--we have very little evidence from the Middle Ages about changes that authors made in their own works. Usually the most that we can say is that successive states are detectable and that sometimes there is support for saying--as in the cases of the two prologues to the Legend of Good Women and the two or three states of Troilus--that the original author was himself responsible for the alterations.
There are a few cases, however, where modern bibliographic research has exposed clear examples of authorial revision of medieval texts. Several are cited by Giovanni Pasquali in his Storia della Tradizione e Critica del Testo. Here I will cite just one instance of the sort of thing Pasquali caught Petrarch doing.2
There are two autograph manuscripts of Petrarch’s De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia; one a Hamilton MS and the other a Vatican. The Hamilton is the earlier and was to be the definitive edition, as is shown by the elegance of the script and of the writing materials; but it has not remained such. The greater part of the additions to the Hamilton have been inserted into the text of the Vatican MS, as is natural.
But a certain number were written in the margins of both copies; probably these are later ideas which Petrarch inserted at the same time in both copies. Thus, also, a small number of corrections common to both copies were written over erasures in each. Petrarch therefore made the same correction in both at the same time. Once he wrote an entirely new passage directly into the Vatican MS (that is, he composed it while copying the Vatican from the Hamilton
Although the detection of such processes requires great skill, the modern literary historian is rarely troubled by the results. What matters is not the creative process, which can continue as long as the work is copied, but the "final" state of the text as it left the author's hand. The situation with most medieval texts, however, is that we do not know who makes the revisions, probably cannot know, and probably do not need to know in order to write that sort of literary history most appropriate to the circumstances of medieval culture.
To appreciate this situation in passing from the familiar case of authorial revision to the more common medieval condition of anonymous or indeterminate revision, we can profitably look at the case of Piers Plowman. The fifty odd MSS of this Middle English poem are distributable into three versions on the basis of distinctive content. These versions, called A, B, and C, by Walter Skeat, probably represent different though perhaps not successive, authorial revisions. But the answers to questions about authorial versus scribal revision are complicated by conflation and by what editors like to call contamination within and among versions. The A-text has been definitively edited by George Kane. His lengthy discussion of the seventeen relevant MSS makes observations pertinent to my survey of the beneficial aftereffects of "contamination."
For one thing, the very existence of competing authorial versions is adduced by Kane as a partial explanation for the great freedom with which the scribes treated the A-text itself. Because of these versions, and the lively interest of the copyists in the theme and content of the work, and the apparent lack of technical discipline in its alliterative verse, the scribes became amateur editors of the text. Kane gives several examples of such copyists as Sir Adrian Fortescue, who attempted, around 1532, to bring his valued copy of the A-text up to date by interpolating some 400 lines from copies of the other available versions. Other scribes, many acting from conscious motives, produced a welter of variations in their manuscripts, but I shall focus on a single text chosen for what it can show us about the aesthetic tastes of a talented but anonymous participant in medieval literary processes.
This MS is number 150 in the Library of Lincoln's Inn.3 Its hand is the expert but unpretentious sort found in early fifteenth century provincial documents and private correspondence. In shape, the MS is a holster book--like the Percy folio MS--a foot long and about five inches wide. Piers Plowman is the odd work in the book; the other contents being Libeaus Desconus, Arthour and Merlin, Kyng Alisaunder, and The Seege or Batayle of Troye, all four of thern romances. But the presence of Piers among this lusty company becomes less anomalous when we look at the kind of variants which distinguish this text from most of the other copies of Piers. It seems the Lincoln's Inn scribe had a passionate interest in the alliterative form of Piers Plowman, which he expressed variously by increasing the number of alliterating staves in the lines, introducing secondary alliteration or replacing the classical form with an aa bb pattern, or with an especially elegant cross-alliteration. Kane cites over fifty instances of such alteration by the Lincoln's Inn scribe. For example, he changes:
to the following verses which show the aa bb pattern in two of the three lines:
I particularly like this example, because while the lines being copied seem to agree with John Dryden about the evils of glossing, the scribe felt no compunction against improving Langland's text; although he did so not for covetise, but because it pleased him to fix it up. The many variations of this sort, coupled with the infrequent translation in this copy of hard technical words, such as we see done in the Piers text in the Vernon MS, mark the maker of the Lincoln's Inn book as a conservative enthusiast for the old forms and stories--alliteration and romance--who may have been trying to bring Langland's novel use of those forms back into line.
Turning to scribal processes exhibited in the Chaucer texts, we find that we can learn something about medieval notions of tone and point of view. The phenomenon of excerption of stoiees from their original frameworks for inclusion in other contexts is familiar to students of the Canterbury Tales. Just to take one example, the Prioresse's Tale appears independently of other Canterbury tales in collections of religious verse and prose in Harley 1704 and with other poems on the Virgin in Harley 2251, with the Second Nun's Tale and other saints' lives in Chetham 6709 and Harley 2382; it is bound with Melibee in Pepys 2006 and with the Clerk's Tale in Rawlinson C 86. For those critics like R. J. Schoeck who would insist on an ironic reading of the Prioresse's Tale as the portrait of an anti-semite, the fact that the tale was excerpted for inclusion in other very straightforward contexts indicates that many contemporaries seem to have taken both tale and teller straight.4
Related problems arise with the additions to the Canterbury Tales and the non-authorized revisions of them. Lansdowne 851, for example, contains a full set of "spurious" links and indications by the scribe that he could, if he wished, supply the rest of the unfinished Cook's Tale and Squire's Tale. The Northumberland MS contains the Tale of Beryn, thoroughly adapted to the Canterbury pilgrimage. Christ Church 152 contains Hoccleve's poem "The Sleeveless Garment" with a prologue and heading calling it the Ploughman's Tale. Two MSS add Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, calling it the "last" of the Canterbury tales, and some 25 MSS contain the Tale of Gamelyn. These additions imply that some fifteenth-century readers felt that some non-Chaucerian pieces bore relations to the authentic canon. Do these insertions mean that medieval readers failed to see the dramatic linkings and oppositions of groups of tales that we detect, or that they saw others that we have missed?
The problem of fifteenth-century editing of the Canterbury Tales is notoriously complex, but three MSS are worth singling out here because they express the reactions of contemporaries to the poem. Harley 7333 is a small library of secular literature freely edited by a group of ecclesiastics who revised and excised objectionable features. Similarly, Harley 1239, made by a Hermit of Greenwich living on--or off--the pilgrimage route, collects Troilus and five Canterbury tales of the loftier sort, none of them fabliaux. Most curious of all is Paris MS. anglais 39, a copy made for Jean d'Angouleme, brother of Charles d'Orleans, when they were prisoners of the English. The text is heavily edited by the scribe, Duxworth, and even more so by Duke Jean himself, who made around 300 corrections, added some 23 lines, and summarily dismissed parts of five tales that displeased him. He liked the Knight’s Tale but became impatient with the Squire's imitation.
Finally, I would cite a couple of instances of the medieval rediscovery of Chaucerian unities. With the aid of Manly's researches, we can see the scribal process of compilation at work in Huntington MS. 144.5 This text contains sixteen items, but only Melibee and the Monk's Tale from the Canterbury Tales. The scribe collected his texts into eight little books and then gathered them all together. Although the scribe shows no awareness that the two works of Chaucer's he uses are Canterbury tales, he did recognize some relation between them. In Book IV a colophon at the end of "Prouerbis"--Melibee--invites the reader to observe how the principles therein set forth are illustrated by the stories in "The Falle of princis"--the Monk's Tale. Apparently, according to the collation, the Monk's Tale was copied first, then the scribe added leaves for Melibee and added his own "link"; then he, or some later person, removed the unused leaves between the tales. The critical point is that a scribe observed a literary relation of precept to illustration and acted accordingly.
A related case occurs in Trinity Coll. Camb. MS. R.3.19, also a conglomerate of booklets containing over fifty poems by Chaucer, Lydgate and others.6 Among the works here is one titled "Bochas," which is a composite of Lydgate and Chaucer. The scribe apparently copied from Caxton's 1478 print of the Canterbury Tales a "Prohemium" of 38 lines arranged as 8-line stanzas, switched to Lydgate's Fall of Princes for a while, reverted to Chaucer and continued to the end of the Monk's Tale, adding an explicit, followed by more stanzas from Lydgate. The chief difference between this case and that just mentioned is the fact that here the scribe knew that he was excerpting portions of the Canterbury Tales and combining them with bits of Lydgate in the name of Boccaccio, but the smorgasbord of tragedies he collected is entirely his own.
Moving to more complex examples of the literary effects of the manuscript process of conflation and compilation, I extract my remaining second-hand examples from the researches of Rosemary Woolf. These are even more typically medieval, because not only are the compilers anonymous, but, in the case of the religious lyric, the original authors are largely unknown and unknowable. We occasionally assume that only faulty knowledge makes so much medieval literature anonymous without recognizing that the makers of the bulk of medieval lyrics accepted a genuinely anonymous style subservient to tradition. The most ironical situation occurs when we know the identity, not of the begetter, but of some intermediate participant in the process of collective composition.
Richard Rolle's poem "Luf es Lyf" (Brown XIV, p. 104 ) is admirable for, among other things, the way in which the mystic concludes one stanza with a characterization of love drawn from the Glossa Ordinaria on the Song of Songs:
Rolle’s poem is pertinent to my commentary because its second part, beginning at line 69, may once have been a separate poem. In fact, a southern text of "Luf es Lyf" occurs in Lambeth MS. 853 with still another poem of 9 lines, "Ihesu god sone, lord of mageste," inserted between lines 68 and 69. As Rosemary Woolf remarks, "It is a fair inference that three originally distinct poems have here been conflated."7 The appreciative student of handmade literature will see in the complete poem that simple selection from a rich tradition of lyrics on the definition of love, of lovesongs of the Christ-Knight, and poems of devotion to the Holy Name has allowed a medieval poet-editor to make his own complex expression.
This process carried a step further can be seen in a later, long poem on the Holy Name, "Swete Ihesu, now wol I synge," frequently copied. This is in part a combination of two poems earlier than Rolle and his school: "Swete Ihesus, king of blisse"--a poem that itself grows from 3 to 15 stanzas in the MSS--and another lyric, "Ihesu, swete is the loue of the." But the post-Rolle combination of these two lyrics has been much expanded by such additions characteristic of Rolle's style as imagery of love-sparks, melody, and the wound of love. Woolf notes that the lack of logical arrangement in the verses thus accumulated "enables the incoherence to appear, at least to some extent, deliberately contrived and proper to the fervor and excited devotion of a lover."8 This is the felix sort of culpa with which medieval poets and modern readers are rewarded for transgressing against organic unity.
One of two manuscript transformations of a poem called "The Dollorous Complaint of our Lorde upone the Croce Crucyfyit," is intriguing for the challenge it gives to our notions of narrative propriety. In the Towneley Play of the Resurrection, the poem has been inserted into the text stanzas by the Towneley Reviser with a barely perceptible change in rime-scheme. After the angels sing the Easter antiphon "Christus resurgens," Christ utters his "Dollorous Complaint," where in the analogous place in the York play a dialogue ensues among the three Marys. The Towneley scene is, of course, inappropriate because the glorified Christ does not still suffer from his former wounds. Woolf remarks that the reviser was influenced by iconography and that "this episode in the play is exactly equivalent to the meditative lyric, the actor portraying Christ is in the same relationship to the audience as is an illumination of an imago pietatis to the readers of the accompanying lyric."9 We may further remark that a modern sense either of anachronism or irony will only limit our ability to respond to this complex interplay of lyric, icon, drama, and the processes common to manuscript literature.
Another example from Woolf's study goes even further to demonstrate the necessity of our attending to manuscript processes rather than, in this case, to our notions of genre. I refer to the curious situation of the later scribes treating lyrics as if they were dramas, an increasingly popular genre in the late Middle Ages. In the case of the Digby play of the Burial of Christ we have, in fact, not a play at all, but a manuscript collection of meditations meant to be read that has been crudely transformed by a scribe who worked through this compilation of prayers to saints and meditations on the passion, crossing out passages of narrative, adding names of speakers and words to fill out the meter. The leisurely meditative style is, however, ill-suited to dramatic form, giving the effect, in Woolf's words, of "indiscriminate copiousness of lamentation."10 While we must agree, we ought to stay mindful also of the experimental vigor such adaptations express of the efforts of late medieval writers to seek new forms for their traditional contents. The interest in the meditative content remains strong, but makers can be seen exchanging moribund forms like these overgrown lyrics for vital new vehicles like the drama.
While the literary critic may judge some of these works to be merely interesting, they do offer valuable testimony concernmg stylistic continuity and change to the literary historian. And the historian might even aid the critic on occasion. In 1951 Leo Spitzer published his article "Explication de texte Applied to Three Great Middle English Poems," in the course of which he explicates the lyric "Blow, Northerne Wind" and observes that "Even more aberrant from modern taste is the application of additive procedure to a lyrical description of physical loveliness--in accord with medieval canons . . with no attempt to fuse these independently perfect disjecta membra into a visualizable whole."11 And later he twits Carleton Brown for observing but not accounting for another typically medieval additive procedure: the bestowing upon the loveliest lady in land those attributes usually ascribed to the Blessed Virgin. "How is such eclecticism to be explained?" he asks. Spitzer's own explanation appeals to the identification of the Virgin with the Beloved of the Song of Songs to whom manifold sensuous epithets were ascribed. That will do in an explication that takes on only one texte at a time, but we have already noted how eclecticism of many sorts is the general case in medieval literary processes, particularly with respect to lyrics that accumulate lines as they are successively recopied. It should not surprise us if poets were led to imitate these inorganic and eclectic structures in poems that are not themselves the direct result of manuscript compilation. And perhaps the inorganicism that Robert Jordan identifies as an organizing principle in Chaucerian art is in part a reflex of the scribal habits I have been delineating 12
A final example from Rosemary Woolf's study shows the insight the literary historian can derive from the use of manuscript details as evidence of the decay of traditions. From the beginning, the genre of the debate between the Body and the Soul involved the intermingling of two themes: on the one hand was philosophical comment about the relative moral responsibilities of the body and the soul, and on the other was a usually virulent reproach and abuse amid meditations on the horrors of death. These poetic debates grew like other works in the manuscripts, and in B.M. Addit. MS 37049, body and soul are finally parted.
13 Two separate poems in this MS exhibit the distinct division of the debate along the thematic lines just mentioned. One philosophical poem appears in a prose translation from Guillaume de Guileville's Pelerinage de l’Ame. The other poem, "In the Ceson of Huge Mortality", is mainly a dialogue between a woman putrefying in her grave and the pontificating worms that are her final suitors. Miss Woolf likes the poem because instead of pairing off opposing scholastic positions, like the Pearl ,it shows a victim moving toward resignation. For my purposes the manuscript is important because it exhibits the break-up of unwieldy verse accumulations in accord with new literary demands.The varied effects of manuscript transmission can be arranged along a continuum extending from the simple Petrarchan instance of authorial revision with which I began to the complex Boethian situation to which I now turn. I will give first a sketch of the thirteen distinct medieval French versions of the Consolatio, paying some attention to the workings of manuscript processes in and among them, and then get to the point of it all: a sample of what the literary historian can learn about the collective medievalizing effect of all this free handling of Boethius.
14There are four early prose versions of the Consolatio, all in unique MSS, all in peripheral dialects; and all written before or just after the appearance of Jean de Meun's popular prose version. The earliest of these translations, in a Vienna MS, is a reproduction in Burgundian dialect of a standard medieval Latin text of the Consolatio, in that it consists of a biographical prologue, a translated text interspersed with glosses from the twelfth century commentary of William of Conches, some narrative supplements drawn from the Vatican Mythographies, and a 20-page gloss appended to Book III, meter 9. This long gloss is a translation of all that of the Christianizing commentary on the Consolatio written by Bishop Adalbold of Utrecht around the year 1000. Although this earliest translation represents a very accurate vernacular reproduction of its standard Latin counterpart, two other of these first prose versions seem to be amateur imitations of this Latin form with interpolations that go far beyond anything attempted in their scholastic models.
The version made by one Bonaventura da Demena, a Sicilian from the hinterland of Messina, has been variously called an imitation, a travesty, and a work attesting to "l’esprit persifleur et facetieux" of the fourteenth century, mostly on the basis of Bonaventura's homely retelling of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice in Boethius' third book. Bonaventura makes a conspiracy of howling devils scare the wits out of little Olfeus, but this ghost-story effect is the artifact of a naive style; for all the evidence tends to show Bonaventura as a pious cleric, solicitous for the instruction of his flock, and so little conscious of the translator's servile path that he repairs Boethius' neglect of Christian doctrine by inserting into the text the Ten Commandments and other counsels of perfection from the New Testament.
Bonaventura's amateur compilation is paralleled by the amateur commentary inserted by Pierre de Paris in his prose translation made around 1305. Despite his name, Pierre seems to have come from the Dalmatian coast to the island of Cyprus, where he attempted to use his modest French, island Greek, and school Latin to translate Aristotle and the Psalter for the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem. His version of the Consolatio is a work of aggressive ignorance, for he annotated all but a few of the philosophical niceties and rhetorical allusions in the Boethian text. To support his conclusions, however, he turned to no recognizable commentary but drew, rather, on his quite personal view of Aristotelianism and on folklore and hausmarchen. The point here is that medieval translators like Bonaventura and Pierre were merely imitating the outward form of the scholastic texts, while resorting to their own popular resources for the medievalizing substance.
This is not the case with the other two, quite literal prose versions. The first, a poor job extant in a single MS in the Wallonian dialect, omits many passages and leaves blank the proper names unknown to its author, but the other translation, that by Jean de Meun, has intrinsic merit. This lean and accurate version is extant in 18 MSS and served as the basis for Chaucer's translation. It is additionally interesting here because these manuscripts exhibit the cumulative growth of glosses as successive scribes attempted to clarify the notes of their predecessors, and because parts of Jean's version are worked into several composite texts aimed at particular audiences.
In addition to these early prose versions, there exists an anonymous sixth translation of the Consolatio, which seeks formal faithfulness by matching prose to prose and verse to verse. This version marks the beginning of vernacular attention to the work as a literary masterpiece with forms worth imitating. Surviving in four MSS, this version was composed in the dialect of Lorraine, and, although less exact than Jean de Meun's version, it remains closely bound to the model text. It attempts no interpolations, either of doctrine or narrative.
As evidence of the fact that some audiences were not yet ready for a version that departed so completely from the annotated scholastic manuscripts, we may call attention to a revision of this mixed translation which became the most popular of all medieval vernacular versions. This revision survives in some fifty MSS, which tend to be handsome and costly productions. It is not difficult to determine the reasons for its success. For one thing, its audacious maker simply lifted the proheme of Jean de Meun's version, with its dedication to Philippe le Bel, and attached it to his own revision of the mixed prose-and-verse translation just described. Fully as germane to its popularity is the fact that most MSS of this revision have within the text an extensive running commentary derived from William of Conches. The translator of the commentary and the reviser of the original mixed version were different persons, and two MSS show that a successor to both of them compiled a version using a revised dedicatory epistle, Jean's prose translation of the meters, and the proses of the mixed version. Another scribe, Matthias Rivalli, addressed himself around 1360 to the problem of the lay audience when, at the beginning of Boethius' difficult final book, he justified his substitution of Jean's more easily understood prose text for the text of the mixed version. These successive translators, glossators, editors, and compilers achieved the most physically attractive package of the Consolatio. And considering the subsequent history of the French translations of Boethius, these mixed versions may also have contributed to freeing the function of translation from subservience to the model text and opening it to other currents of medieval literary experimentation.
One of these currents can be seen in the attempts of those translators who versified the whole of the Consolatio to produce something of a philosophical romance using Boethius as a point of departure. There are four versions wholly in verse, three of them intimately related. The first, however, is quite an oddity. Sometime after the famine of 1315, to which he alludes, a prolific versifier compiled a digressive 12,300-line version of the Consolatio. This translation exists complete in one MS and fragmentarily in another. Of its author, only the birthplace--Meun--is known. His version extensively integrates material from the encyclopedia of Vincent of Beauvais into the dilation of Boethian allusion, producing in one place a 300-line account of the labors of Hercules and in another over 1200 lines on the legend of Orpheus. The fragmentary copy represents a serious attempt to remove the redundancy caused by the translator's habit of stitching together successive, slightly different retellings of the same story.
Another verse translation was completed by a Dominican friar, Renaut de Louhans, in 1336. Renaut's poem is also heavily digressive in ways quite different from the version by the Anonymous of Meun. It makes use of the first mixed version, already mentioned, as well as the commentary on the Consolatio by Renaut's fellow Dominican, Nicholas Trevet. Unlike the Anonymous of Meun, Renaut experimented extensively with the form of the poem. For his prologue and, except for one meter, his whole first book, Renaut used eight-line stanzas; then he changed to couplets for books two through five, again with the exception of two lengthy stanzaic interpolations. Renaut's translation, extant in over thirty MSS, was revised at least twice, and one of the revisions was in turn reworked. Such wholesale rehandling ought to indicate the vitality of formal experimentalism as an aspect of medievalization. And the narratives interpolated into Renaut's version are to be distinguished from earlier additions by their lack of explicit moralization. Renaut's version represents the extreme approach in the verse translations to the use of narrative for its own sake characteristic of the romances and the extreme departure from the hermeneutic function of scholastic commentary characteristic of the Latin manuscripts.
Around 1380 Renaut's version of the Consolatio was revised by an anonymous Benedictine monk whose version became as popular as Renaut's original. He completely rewrote some of the verses, bringing them more into line with the Boethian text, and he added many scholarly asides to what he left of Renaut. The translation of the Consolatio appearing in B.N. fr. 25418--the eleventh version to be noted here is a skillful, though anti-intellectual abbreviation of Renaut's translation that omits, for example, all of the philosophical arguments of Book V. Another curious MS, B.N. fr. 12459, is a unique compilation of the translations of Renaut and his Benedictine revisor. Taken all together, the MSS of the various versions and compilations based on Renaut de Louhans' verse translation outnumber those more elegant copies of the revised mixed version. Elsewhere I have argued that it is probably Renaut’s version that Francois Villon knew,
15 if he knew any, and that possibility is suggestive enough of the sort of audience that could be reached by even a Neoplatonist if he were suitably medievalized.With the final pair of medieval French versions of the Consolatlo we return to mixed prose-and-verse versions. The first of these is preserved in a unique MS in the National Library of Wales. Its verses represent a slight revision of the Benedictine's revision, but the proses are more original and seem to be a kind of updated epitome of Jean de Meun's prose. The thirteenth and last medieval version appears mingled with the commentary of Regnier de Saint Tron in a print issued by Colard Mansion in Bruges in 1477. This version reaches the first stages of the Renaissance goals of accuracy in translation and fidelity to the varied verse forms' of the Latin. The translator used couplets of various lengths and some stanzaic patterns in a vigorous effort to match the diversity of Boethian metrics. But the original matter is now clearly distinct from the gloss; we are never in doubt as to where the old fenceposts end and the Gothic brushwood fills in. We have left handmade literature behind and have arrived, and in print, at the modern condition.
If we are looking for a medieval statement summing up these manifold processes, we would need to search no farther than the Testament of that common reader, Francois Villon. And just as it would be difficult to recall readily a personality less like John Dryden's, so it might be equally hard to find an attitude toward manuscript matters more remote from his than that expressed in Villon's great poem. Here is a sample in which the poet gives away the document itself:
Because he understands my meaning,
to Jean de Calais, a man of honor,
who hasn't seen me all these thirty years
and doesn't know my name, if he finds
there are some difficulties in this
testament, I hereby give permission
for him to prune it
like an apple tree.
To gloss, annotate,
define, transcribe,
diminish or augment,
cancel and suppress
with his own hand, and if
he cannot write, to interpret
at his pleasure, for better or for worse;
to all this I herewith consent.
(1844-59)
Villon's bequest ironically recognizes the common desire of medieval heirs to get a free hand in their literary legacies, and the technical terms of that testament bespeak something of the actual processes by which medieval literature was composed. In the interest of offering a glance at one medievalizing effect of all this glossing, defining, and augmenting, I will point to its consequent enlarging of the audience of the Conso1atio through the increased range of tones and points of view supplied by the translators’ narrative dilations.
Boethius placed strict limits on the tone and audience of his work. In spite of its mixed form, the use of satura in the Consolatio excluded the customary cynicism and obscenity of the Roman genre. And the audience to which not only the Consolatio but the theological tractates were addressed was aristocratic, as can be seen typically in these remarks from the introduction to the tract De Trinitate: "A man who casts his thoughts before the common herd--I will not say to consider but to trample under foot, would seem to bring discredit on the study of divinity. So I purposely use brevity and wrap up the ideas I draw from the deep questions of philosophy in new and unaccustomed words which speak only to you (Symmachus) and to myself, that is, if you deign to look at them. The rest of the world I simply disregard; they cannot understand, and therefore do not deserve to read."
17 There is no stronger justification for the medieval philosophers' metaphor of unveiling truth than this statement of method by one engaged in wrapping up his truths, and there can be no better immediate antidote to this elitism than to show how the homely fables of Pierre de Paris both accommodate and extend Boethian truths. In the first of these little tales, in fact, Pierre catches Lady Philosophy in the act of having wrapped up nothing. She had just stated (Bk. III Pr. 12) that evil is nothing, since God, who can do all things, cannot do evil. At this point Boethius accuses her of weaving labyrinthine arguments, and the remainder of their dialogue concerns varieties of proof. Where the translator of the earliest French version chose to explicate labyrinth by telling the tale of Theseus, Pierre innocently asks what has become of the question about whether God can do evil; and after giving his own answer that it is not the fact of evil that is important but the intent behind the act, Pierre adduces a little story which he says he found in the Vies des Peres. It concerns a hermit who gave penance to a murderous thief on condition that he restrain himself whenever he heard churchbells. The thief continued in his evil ways until one day, while in the act of assaulting a merchant, he heard the bells. The thief gave up his attack and tried to flee, but the merchant, believing that he had vanquished the thief, chased him and killed him. At this point the hermit saw angels bear the soul of the thief directly to heaven. This miracle, and the fact that he had spent thirty years in the hermitage without any similar sign of God's favor towards himself, caused him to despair; and because he left the hermitage, he was damned while the repentant thief was saved.18 We thus pass, with the aid of this story, from the lofty position of Boethian logic that the perfect deity can author no evil to the ethical mystery of His power to detect the saving spark in thieves and murderers, and we similarly pass from Roman notions of human virtue to one that sees it as essentially non-public and apolitical. Needless to say, there are no such obscure, holy sinners among Boethius' exemplary patricians.Another affecting example occurs in Pierre's amplification of Book II, pr. 1, which concerns the fidelity of Fortuna to her own mutable nature. Into this elevated and abstract discourse, Pierre intrudes the oriental fable of the Cat and the Candle, which he mistakenly attributes to Marie de France.
19 And in his comic picture of the once obedient little cat flinging aside his appointed candle to chase a rat, Pierre strikes a note characteristic of Gothic naturalism. The same may be said of the literal miniaturization achieved in his borrowed story of the pygmies and cranes and so forth. Such stories recast Boethian solemnity into household figurines, redirect Boethian themes, and expand their application to include homely, pedestrian contexts. An interesting sort of vulgarization of the aristocratic doctrines ensues and produces a two-way effect. The less-than-noble are introduced to the virtues of stoicism, and the stoics are humanized. We can see a splendid example of this latter effect in Pierre's treatment of the allusion to Alcibiades.The long process by which Francois Villon came to include one Archipiada among his list of vanished beauties has been well charted from its origins in Carolingian glosses on the Consolatio.
20 Boethius had cited a lost work of Aristotle’s which said that if men had the penetrating vision of Lynceus the Argonaut, they could see through Alcibades' fair exterior to the vile entrails within. To tender medieval minds, fair bodies belonged to women, and details about this new female Alcibiades began to accumulate in the glosses to the Boethian text. At the same time legends were growing about the medieval Aristotle too. In the middle of the twelfth century, Henri d'Andeli wrote an iconoclastic Lai d'Aristote in which Alexander's mistress tricks the lovesick Aristotle into submitting to saddle and bridle and allowing her to ride him into the presence of his royal pupil. Pierre de Paris' ingenious contribution was to identify that mistress with Alcibiades. In Pierre’s story, the philosopher's final quip still wins the day, but the medieval Aristotle, down on all fours, and his darling Alcibiades are far more engaging persons than their austere antique incarnations, and, as a consequence, their virtue, like that of Sir Gawain after the Green Knight's test, is more credible because it has been proved fallible.Even more effectively than Pierre, Renaut de Louhans questioned the unrelieved solemnity and rigor of Boethius' intellectual stand. Renaut drew on Nicholas Trevet's commentary on the mid-thirteenth century Disciplina Scolarium for a comic story about a young man who restlessly turned from one calling to another, deciding in turn not to be a clerk, merchant, farmer, knight, lawyer, bridegroom, or astronomer.
21 He finally settled for being an ass. The account is, of course, satirical, as Renaut elaborated its sketches of the most uncomfortable features of each calling: the teacher's unruly pupils, the merchant's dangerous voyages, the fiance's prodigality, and so forth. The value of the tale for contemporaries is proven by its having been excerpted and circulated as a fabliau. What I would argue is the relevance of this interpolated story to the matrix of the Consolatio.There is some connection between the theme and imagery of this tale and recurrent Boethian concerns. In this respect the final contrast of the tale is most significant. The last profession rejected by the scholar before he descends into assinity is that of astronomer, and the emphasis of the account is on the profound technical complexity of the subject. Having tried to master planetary motions both right and retrograde, the distinction beween fixed and erratic stars, poles arctic and antarctic, the mathematics of division, measurement, and proportions, and the highest science of prognostication, our scholar said in his melancholy that he would rather be an ass. The irony, it seems to me, is aimed as much at Boethius as anyone, for he again and again exhorts us to look up, behold the heavens, use dialectic, and make ourselves free. Any survivor of the medieval university could tell you it is not that easy; that the application of human reason to unravelling the secrets of the skies is a difficult matter. Not that this passage is anti-intellectual; it is simply more skeptical than Boethius of the exclusively rational approach. And it is also far more tolerant than Boethius of the failure to succeed. As we see in the fable of Ulysses' transmuted companions, Boethius heaps scorn on any human yielding to the beast within, but Renaut de Louhans is at least as tolerant as a later Neoplatonist, Edmund Spenser, who found the world had room to "Let Gryll be Gryll and have his hoggish minde."
My final illustration also comes from the translation of Renaut de Louhans. Into his version of Book II, meter 7, Renaut interpolated some twenty stanzas of six lines each, the theme of which is death. Boethius' poem focussed on the vanity and evanescence of earthly fame. No matter how great a man's fame, he argued, it will not spare him the fact of death. And since his renown will one day fade too, the great man is doubly doomed, because he will die a second death. For instances of those whom death had humbled, Boethius cited the consuls Fabricius, Lucius Junius Brutus, and the elder Cato. His illustration, as well as his audience, is clearly patrician. Nicholas Trevet, Renaut's usual source for commentary, in this instance supplied him mainly with details about the careers of the consuls. For the twenty stanzas that would extend both illustration and audience of Boethius' poem, Renaut turned therefore to a rich medieval tradition of images and gnomic sentiments on Death the Leveller.
22 Renaut's poem begins with notice of the war Death has waged against human kind since Adam's outrage and continues with a crowded procession of its victims from all human estates. The clergy is fully represented, and the Christian infiltration of the aristocratic ranks of Boethian personnel becomes here a mortal rout of clerks, priests, cardinals, popes, prelates in furs, cloistered monks, and veiled nuns. Following them troop emperors, kings, dukes and counts, and knights-at-arms. Delicate glimpses succeed of young damoiselles whom death will seize despite their jewelry. Death robs the rich villein of his wine and bread, and pitilessly takes the husband of the pregnant wife. Death comes to advocates despite their pleas and to physicians for all their oaths. It comes en masse in plagues but stealthily to suicides. It is everywhere; in field, woods, and parks; in town and court and countryside. It plies the seas to every port, and comes home to take the sucking babe. And last of all, Death most boldly seized Jhesu, "le filz Marie," to whom the poet prays that He will aid us in life and succor us in death.23Death, here, takes over the role of Fortuna, and in this, Renaut's conception surpasses Boethius in a truly medieval contempt of the world, because where Fortune also gave, Death only takes. Fortune was subject to Providence, and Boethian man was always free to ignore her goods, but Death requires everyone's attention. The true universality of Renaut's poem thus emerges from the range of Death's domain. Within his bending sickle's compass come all classes and estates, all earthly space, and all historical time from Adam to Christ to the very medieval audience this popular poem addresses. And that audience included many an unpatrician face not the least illuminated by thought of earthly fame nor worried about any death but the first. Of course, the poem's last, least Boethian irony is that, in the face of Death, the mercy of the Son of Mary is said to offer men of all estates the best prospect of consolation.
I would not conclude without exonerating John Dryden, but I will do that simply by loading the onus on another. The great Byzantine scholar Alphonse Dain made a remark in his book Les Manuscrits that I hope one day he will have to eat. He said, "the immediate end of the study of manuscripts is the edition of texts. Rare are the scholars--I have known a few, however--who read manuscripts solely for the pleasure of reading. . . . The true user of the treasure of our libraries is the philologist, the editor of texts."
24 I think Rossell Hope Robbins, too, would like to see those words retracted, and in his article "Mirth in Manuscripts" he has begun the challenge by emptying out a merry grabbag of bijoux gathered over a lifetime of reading manuscripts almost wholly for pleasure. "It amounts to this," he quips, "a scholar never knows what assignation awaits him between the sheets; he may have one lean day, but he will be compensated later."25 It has been an unexpected compensation to me to catch as the bedfellows of old Boethius such an anecdotal crew of repentant thieves, humbled philosophers, and failed scholars huddled in the unedited folios of those handmade books.Florida International University
* A version of this paper was read at a colloquium. "New Techniques for the Appreciation of Medieval and Renaissance Literature," at the U.C.L.A. Center in March, 1971.
Notes
1. E.g., Jerome Beaty, Middlemarch from Notebook to Novel; Joseph Warren Beach, The Making of the Auden Canon; John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work; John Patterson, The Making of the Return of the Native among other studies.
2. I have altered slightly the translation given by John Matthews Manly in the introduction to his edition of The Text of the Canterbury Tales, II, 32-33.
3. George Kane, ed., Piers Plowman: the A Version (London: Athlone Press,1960), pp. 1~11, 141-42.
4. R. J. Schoeck, "Chaucer's Prioress: Mercy and Tender Heart," in Chaucer Criticism:The Canterbury Tales, ed. R. J. Schoeck and J. Taylor (Notre Dame:University of Notre Dame Press, 1960)' pp.245-58.
5. Manly, I, 292.
6. Manly 1,533-34.
7. Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1968), p.172.
8. Ibid., pp. 176-77.
9. Ibid., p.205.
10. Ibid., p.265.
11. Archivum Linguisticum, 3 (1953), 7, and Woolf, p.275.
12. Robert Jordan, Chaucer and the Shape of Creation: the Aesthetic Posatbilities of Inorganic Structure (Camb., Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
13. Woolf, p. 328.
14. The basic description of the versions is in Antoine Thomas and Mario Roques, "Traductions francaises de Ia Consolano Phiosophiae de Boece," in Histoire litteraire de la France (Paris, 1938), XXXVII, 419-88. See also R. H. Lucas, "Medieval French Translations of the Latin Classics to 1500," Speculum, 45 (1970), 225~3.
15. R. A. Dwyer, "Villon's Boethius," Annuale Mediaevale, 11 (1970),. 74-80.
16. Trans. Anthony Bonner (New York: Bantam Books, 1960), pp.119-21.
17. Boethius, ed. and trans. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand (Camb., Mass: Harvard University Press, 1962), p.5.
18. MS. Vatican lat. 4788, f. 67v.
19. Ibid., ff. 24-24.
20. Ernest Langlois, "Archipiada," Melanges de philologie romane dedie a Carl Wahlund (Macon, 1896),. pp. 173-79 and Dwyer, loc.cit.
21. See Astrik L. Gabriel, "The Source of the Anecdote of the Inconstant Scholar," Classica et Medievalia, 19 (1958), 152-76.
22. See Italo Sicliano, Francois Villon et les themes poetiques du moyen age
(Paris, 1934), pp.221-79.
23. See Thomas and Roques, p. 485.
24. A. Dain, Les Manuscrits (Paris, 1964), p.159.
25. H. H. Robbins, "Mirth in Manuscripts," in Essays and Studies (London).
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