Alastair Minnis

Latin and vernacular : studies in late-medieval texts and manuscripts

Compilatio and the wife of Bath - Latin backgrounds, Ricardian texts, Ralph Hanna III Gowers Latin in the confession amantis, Derek Pearasall English andLatin versions of FitzRalphs Sermons, T.P. Dolan the evolution of the Speculum Christiani, Vincent Gillespie four middle english translations of John of Ardene, Peter Jones the character of the Carecter - ambiguous sigils in scientific and medical texts, Linda Ehrsham Voigts books, owners and makers in fifteenth-century Yorkshire - the evidence from some Wills and extant manuscripts, J.B. Friedman the European circulation of three Latin spiritual texts, A.I. Doyle.

Vernacular literary consciousness c. 1100–c. 1500: French, German and English evidence

Whilst it is reasonably assumed that there extended from the Merovingian period a long tradition of oral poetry in France which embraced the lyric, hagiography, epic and drama, a tradition which drew on Indo-European traditions, more localised folklore, and historical events, it is certain that vernacular French literature (i.e. what has been set down in letters) owes its emergence entirely to the church. It is doubtful whether the romana lingua of the Strassburg Oaths (as sworn by Louis the German and Charles the Bald in June 842) can really be called French, but the short Sequence of Saint Eulalia ( c . 881–2) from the area of Valenciennes is certainly French, as are parts of the Sermon on Jonah, also produced near Valenciennes, towards the middle of the tenth century. A Passion narrative and a Life of St Ledger copied c . 1000 have been preserved in the south-west of France, whilst in the following century we have fragments of Occitan and, from Normandy, two literary masterpieces, the Vie de Saint Alexis and the Chanson de Roland . With the exception of the last two we are dealing with works written in a supra-dialectal koine or scripta , designed to find favour with supra-regional audiences who could not tackle whatever Latin originals were available. Secular French literature written in a relatively standardised language (ultimately identified with that of the Ile de France) is the product of the twelfth century. It was preceded in England by the curiously precocious literary productions that owed much to the patronage of Henry I and II.

Medieval imagination and memory

In his Biographia literaria (written 1815, published 1817), Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave his theory of the literary imagination its fullest exposition. The ideal poet, he declares, ‘brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic [i.e. synthesising] and magic power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination’ (pp. 173–4). This connection between imagination and the value of creative genius persists in modern use of the term ‘imagination’ and especially in use of the adjectival form ‘imaginative’. But it is the tradition which Coleridge was breaking away from, the empiricist-materialist view of literary imagination as memory images brought together by association, which has more in common with medieval views on the subject. Moreover, while Coleridge was interested in the psychology of composition, medieval thinkers were more interested in the psychology of audience-response, images being common property of author and audience, having a life beyond the psyches of their creators. Standard late-medieval theory of imagination is cogently summarised in the encyclopaedic De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomew the Englishman (compiled before 1250), which was translated into several European vernaculars. The brain, he explains (following a description which goes back to Galen), is divided into three small cells, the first being ymaginatiua , where things which the exterior senses perceive ‘are ordered and put together’; the middle chamber is called logica , where the power of estimation is master; and the third and last is memorativa , the power of remembrance, by which things which are apprehended and known by imagination and reason are held and preserved in the treasury of memory (3.10).

The Trecento commentaries on Dante's Commedia

Copies of Inferno and Purgatorio were already circulating in northern Italy when Dante died in September 1321, and these lost early exemplars were the forerunners of hundreds of fourteenth-century manuscripts of the Commedia , complete and partial. Few vernacular texts achieved so rapid or widespread a diffusion anywhere in medieval Europe. But Dantes poem was not long allowed to go about unaccompanied. By 1322 commentators were working on Inferno ; by the decades end a commentary on the whole Commedia had appeared, and the first century of Dante criticism eventually yielded a vast crop of exegesis. It includes full-scale commentaries, in which theoretical prologues, proems to each canto and textual glosses are combined to form an organic whole; sets of individual glosses ( chiose ), either discontinuous or in connected prose; and a variety of paraphrases, summaries, introductions, biographies, and other prolegomena, frequently in verse, which flourished on the margins of commentary proper, especially in the 1320s. New material continues to come to light: a long-lost Neapolitan commentary on Inferno , of 1369–73, was published in 1998. Commentators wrote in Italian and Latin, all over Italy (Naples, Milan, Bologna, Venice, Verona, Pisa) and abroad (Germany). Even Dantes loved and hated native city paid tribute to the poem that so ruthlessly dissects it: Giovanni Boccaccio and Filippo Villani lectured and wrote on Inferno in Florence, while the Ottimo commento and the work ascribed to the ‘Anonimo Fiorentino’ almost certainly originated there.

Image Trouble in Vernacular Commentary: The Vacillations of Francesco da Barberino

In the fourteenth century, some innovative thinkers began to treat vernacular texts - as written either by themselves or their contemporaries - with the same sort of respect that for generations had been the prerogative of Latin ‘set texts’, as studied in medieval schools. My essay explores the part manuscript illumination played in one such project: the Documenti d’Amore of Francesco da Barberino (1264-1348). Here theorization lags far behind sophisticated practice, as Francesco denigrates the figurae which he himself designed - and which are vital to his ambitious commentarial enterprise - as having low epistemological status and hence suitable for the ‘vulgar’ rather than the learned.

John Wyclif—All Women’s Friend?

“He was evir (God wait) all womanis frend.” Thus Gavin Douglas, in a passage in the Middle Scots translation of the Aeneid that he completed in 1513, sought to excuse Chaucer for depicting Aeneas as a false traitor in love, thereby calling in question the twelve years of labor that Virgil had put into his poem. One could expect nothing else from Chaucer, argues Douglas, since he was a friend to all women.1 This passage is, of course, very well known and rightly has received much attention. Less well known is the charge by Thomas Netter (ca. 1377–1430), Carmelite theologian and confessor of King Henry V, that the main target of his righteous indignation, the heresiarch John Wyclif, was a shameless worker for women: Wyclif himself was not embarrassed to labor frequently on behalf of woman (non erubuit&pluries laborare pro foentina) in his book On [the Power ojj The pope, to the end that she might be suitable as a priest of the church, or a bishop, or a pope. I am ashamed to tell this story about a Christian man, a story which will be known to the Jews, will make a mockery of faith, and will be a scandal for the Saracens. But on the other hand, I am afraid to hide a whirlpool of such foulness: especially since from this very place [that is, this text] I believe that his followers have assumed the authority of ordaining women priests, who arc celebrating masses and other sacraments, being “readeresses” (lectrices) of the Scriptures and “preacheresses” (praedi-catrices) in the gatherings of Lollards.2

Purchasing Pardon: Material and Spiritual Economies on the Canterbury Pilgrimage

An idiom concerning the “purchasing” of “pardons” or indulgences was well established in Middle English, as these representative instances attest: Swa mykel pardoun may a man Purches here, þat he may þan In purgatory qwyte alle þe dett Prick of Conscience, 3918–20 I will passe in pilgremage þis pas vnto Rome, To purchese me pardonne of the pape selfen Morte Arthure, 3497 Treuthe herde telle herof, and to Piers sente To taken his teme and tilien the erthe, And purchaced hym a pardoun a pena et a culpa For hym and for his heires for everemoore after… Piers Plowman, B VII. 1–41