Twelfth-Century Latin Epic and the Virgilian Tradition

284 Pages·2014·1.4 MB·English

Recovering the Classic: Twelfth-Century Latin Epic
and the Virgilian Tradition
by
Justin Allen Haynes
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Medieval Studies
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Justin Allen Haynes 2014
Recovering the Classic: Twelfth-Century Latin Epic and the
Virgilian Tradition
Justin Allen Haynes
Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Medieval Studies
University of Toronto
2014
Abstract
This dissertation considers how ancient and medieval commentaries on the Aeneid can
give us new insights into four twelfth-century Latin epics—the Ylias by Joseph of Exeter,
the Alexandreis by Walter of Châtillon, the Anticlaudianus by Alan of Lille, and the
Architrenius by John of Hauville. Virgil’s influence on twelfth-century Latin epic is
generally thought to be limited to verbal echoes and occasional narrative episodes, but
evidence is presented that more global influences have been overlooked because ancient
and medieval interpretations of the Aeneid, as preserved by the commentaries, were often
radically different from modern readings of the Aeneid. By explaining how to interpret
the Aeneid, these commentaries directly influenced the way in which twelfth-century
Latin epic imitated the Aeneid. At the same time, these Aeneid commentaries allow us a
greater awareness of the generic expectations held by the original readers of twelfth-
century Latin epic. Thus, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of ancient and
medieval perceptions of the Aeneid while exploring the importance of commentaries in
shaping poetic composition, imitation, and reading. The first chapter presents evidence
that the allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid, as presented by Servius, Fulgentius, and
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Bernard Silvestris, served as an important structural model for the plots of the
Anticlaudianus and the Architrenius. The second chapter examines how the twelfth-
century understanding of history and myth in the Aeneid influenced the Alexandreis and
the Ylias. The final chapter explores how these medieval epics respond to the twelfth-
century ethical reading of the Aeneid and suggests possible links to modern ‘pessimistic’
interpretations of the Aeneid, building on the work done by Craig Kallendorf in The
Other Virgil and Richard Thomas in Virgil and the Augustan Reception.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank, first and foremost, my dissertation committee of David Townsend,
John Magee, Alison Keith, and Jarrett Welsh. They have been tireless in their support
throughout many drafts, and I consider myself enormously lucky to have had a committee
both so kind and so deeply learned. Many thanks also go to Joseph Farrell and Michael
Herren, my external and internal examiners respectively. They not only provided me with
helpful notes which have saved me from some embarrassing blunders, but they also asked
many insightful questions, which have given me some wonderful ideas for the future
direction of my work. I wish also to thank my father for being a constant source of
support and for proofreading each and every one of my translations from Latin into
English that appear throughout this dissertation. I hasten to add, however, that any
remaining errors and stylistic roughnesses are my own. I would also like to thank all of
my friends and family; I could not have written this without so much love and support!
Finally, I would like to offer special thanks to A.G. Rigg. While reading Tiberius
Donatus’ paraphrase of the Aeneid and discussing the nature of the Aeneid’s commentary
tradition with George, I began to formulate many of the ideas that have come to fruition
in this thesis. Many, many thanks!
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. iv
Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ v
Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1
Precedents and goals ....................................................................................................... 1
The authors...................................................................................................................... 7
Dates of composition .................................................................................................... 10
Dueling/dualing poets ................................................................................................... 22
Chapter summaries........................................................................................................ 28
Texts and translations ................................................................................................... 30
Chapter 1: Allegorical Mimesis ........................................................................................ 32
The Allegorized Aeneid in the Anticlaudianus and Architrenius ................................. 32
Virgilian allegory in the Anticlaudianus and Architrenius? ......................................... 35
Reading the allegorized Aeneid as a structural model for allegorical poems ............... 40
Relating the allegoresis of the Aeneid to the plots of the Architrenius and
Anticlaudianus .............................................................................................................. 44
Alan’s allegoresis of the whole Aeneid (Anticlaudianus 7-9) ...................................... 47
Aeneid 6 and Anticlaudianus 1-6: Descensus as ascent to God .................................... 56
Interpreting the structure of the Anticlaudianus ........................................................... 76
Aeneid Book 6 and the Architrenius: The philosophic descent .................................... 80
Interpreting the structure of the Architrenius .............................................................. 100
Chapter 2: Truth Behind Lies ......................................................................................... 104
Historia and Fabula in the Alexandreis and Ylias ...................................................... 104
Historia ....................................................................................................................... 113
Servius on creative anachronism ................................................................................ 115
The Aeneid and Joseph’s “true” history of Troy ......................................................... 119
Historia in the Alexandreis ......................................................................................... 127
Historia in the ecphrases of the Alexandreis .............................................................. 131
Fabula: The divine apparatus in Virgilian commentary ............................................. 136
Contextualizing the divine apparatus in later Latin epic ............................................ 142
Walter’s invocation in the Alexandreis ....................................................................... 145
The gods in the Alexandreis ........................................................................................ 148
Walter’s Servian katabasis .......................................................................................... 150
The gods in Joseph of Exeter’s Ylias .......................................................................... 154
Lucanian or Virgilian? ................................................................................................ 171
Chapter 3: Didactic Heroics ............................................................................................ 173
Ethical imitation of the Aeneid in twelfth-century epic .............................................. 173
The importance of ethics to the twelfth-century interpretation of epic ...................... 174
The legacy of antiquity on the moral character of Virgil’s Aeneas ............................ 177
Aeneas’ character in allegorizations of the Aeneid ..................................................... 184
The moral character of Virgil’s Aeneas in the twelfth century .................................. 187
Joseph of Exeter’s Aeneas .......................................................................................... 198
Virgil’s Aeneas in Walter’s Alexander? ..................................................................... 205
Alan’s allegory: Redeeming the classic ...................................................................... 215
An Epic of Everyman: the Architrenius and the Aeneid ............................................. 231
v
The ‘Harvard’ school in the twelfth century? ............................................................. 242
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 244
Virgilian commentary and ‘Chartrian’ humanism ...................................................... 245
Continuity of the Virgilian tradition ........................................................................... 250
Reintegration of Medieval Latin epic into the canon .................................................. 254
Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 260
Primary Sources .......................................................................................................... 260
Secondary Sources ...................................................................................................... 262
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1

Introduction

Precedents and goals

This dissertation focuses on four of the most influential and classicizing Latin
epics from the late twelfth century. Although these epics are well-known to Medieval
Latinists, their importance in the history of Latin epic has not received much
acknowledgement outside of specialist studies.1 Most surveys not only of Latin epic but
of the entire history of epic therefore suffer from an enormous lacuna.2 It is my hope to
stimulate interdisciplinary interest in these medieval epics by situating them in the
historical reception of the Aeneid. Recently, the well-known classicist Mary Beard
succinctly described the imperative of reception studies for all classicists—whether we
are aware of engaging in reception studies or not:
The study of the classics is the study of what happens in the gap between
antiquity and ourselves. It is not only the dialogue that we have with the culture of
the classical world; it is also the dialogue that we have with those who have gone

1 The history of Medieval Latin epic has yet to be written. Unfortunately, the monumental scale of such an
undertaking is inversely proportional to the number of Medieval Latinists. Max Manitius, in his Geschichte
der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1911), and F.J.E. Raby, in A History of
Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), mention many Latin epics but
they do not systematically treat them as a genre separate from other poetry. To date, the fullest and most
systematic consideration of Medieval Latin epic as a genre may be found in Jan Ziolkowski’s article,
“Epic,” in Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. F. Mantello and A. G. Rigg
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 547-55. See also the section subtitled
“overview” in the article by John O. Ward, “After Rome: Medieval Epic,” in Roman Epic, ed. A. J. Boyle
(London: Routledge, 1993), 261-7.
2 To cite but a handful of important examples, W. P. Ker’s Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval
Literature (London: 1896), in spite of frequent references to Homer and Virgil, makes not a single mention
of a Medieval Latin epic. Ninety years later, the same lacuna is in evidence in J. K. Newman’s The
Classical Epic Tradition (Madison: 1986), J. B. Hainsworth’s The Idea of Epic (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991), and David Quint’s Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to
Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). Failure to consider Medieval Latin epic also
severely mars and distorts the conclusions of important works on classical reception in early modern epic
such as Charles Martindale’s John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes &
Noble Books, 1986); Michael Murrin’s The Allegorical Epic: Essays in its Rise and Decline (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980); Tobias Gregory, From Many Gods to One Divine Action in
Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
2

before us who were themselves in dialogue with the classical world (whether
Dante, Raphael, William Shakespeare, Edward Gibbon, Pablo Picasso, Eugene
O’Neill, or Terence Rattigan).3

Considering Virgil’s almost unparalleled influence, it should be no surprise that a
large subset of classical reception focuses on the reception of Virgil. Indeed, two great
monuments to the medieval conception of Virgil exist in the form of Comparetti’s
Virgilio nel medio evo and Jan Ziolkowski and Michael Putnam’s The Virgilian
Tradition: The First Fifteen-Hundred Years.4 Whereas my own study focuses on Virgil’s
poetic legacy, these books are primarily concerned with tracing how Virgil, the man and
his works, was perceived in the Middle Ages. Most importantly for my argument, these
books reveal how much Virgil was admired in the twelfth century: consistently ranked
above all pagan poets, save Homer, and presumed to have possessed deep philosophical
knowledge.
The poetic reception of Virgil’s oeuvre in the Middle Ages has received less
systematic treatment; most existing studies focus on instances of Virgil’s reception in
vernacular poetry, not Latin. Surveys of Virgil’s reception, such as those found in the
companions to Virgil published by Cambridge University Press and Blackwell, similarly
ignore Latin epic composed between the fifth century and the fourteenth.5 This omission
is all the more remarkable because once direct access to Homer’s epics was lost in the

3 “Do the Classics Have a Future,” The New York Review of Books, Jan. 12, 2012. Cf. Charles Martindale
Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), 54: “Again—and this is one of the principal theses of the book—the reception of a text,
including the poetic revisions it engenders, is inseparable, in ways that are often ignored, from our current
readings of it; T.S. Eliot’s Virgil, for example, is in part created by his study of Dante’s, and in general,
both through Eliot and in other ways, the Comedy has left its traces in the Aeneid as many read it today.”
4 Domenico Comparetti, Virgilio nel medio evo (Florence: B. Seeber, 1896); J. Ziolkowski and M. Putnam,
eds., The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
5 See Joseph Farrell and Michael C. J. Putnam, eds., A Companion to Vergil's Aeneid and Its Tradition,
(Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Charles Martindale, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Virgil,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
3

West—as far as the majority of Western European poets were concerned, from
approximately the fifth to the fifteenth century—the Aeneid came to define not just Latin
epic, but the epic genre as a whole.6 This imbalance has resulted in scholarship which
frequently assumes the “novelty” of Virgil-imitation in early modern literature, especially
in epic. For example, Tobias Gregory voices a commonly held assumption when he
claims that “it is the degree of formal, stylistic, and thematic imitation of classical
models, the Virgilian above all, that distinguishes the epics of the Renaissance from those
of the Middle Ages.” 7 By placing twelfth-century Latin epic in the context of the
Virgilian tradition, I hope to begin bridging this gap in Virgilian reception scholarship, at
the same time linking late antique epic to early modern epic.
Besides Virgil’s unique place in the history of epic and in the twelfth-century
canon, there is another reason to assume that the Aeneid was an important model for the
four medieval epics in my study: the already documented fact that all four epics contain
extensive verbal echoes of the Aeneid.8 Yet, the scholars who have addressed the
question of Virgilian influence on twelfth-century Latin epic have concluded that Virgil’s

6 An essentially literal Latin translation of Homer did not appear, so it seems, before Boccaccio
commissioned one from Leonzio Pilato in 1360. See Agostino Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato fra Petrarcha e
Boccaccio; Le sue versioni omeriche negli autografi di Venezia e la cultura greca del primo umanesimo
(Venezia, Rome: Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1964). Around the same time, of course, Western
scholars were beginning to study Greek, but this knowledge was not initially wide-spread. For the claim
that most people even in the sixteenth century were not well acquainted with Homer, see, for example,
Christiane Deloince-Louette, Sponde: Commentateur Homère (Paris: Champion, 2001), 43.
7 From Many Gods to One, 24-5. David Wilson-Okamura, in Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), goes against the orthodoxy in stressing that “the idea of Virgil that was
current in the sixteenth century is largely the same one as was current in the fourth and fourteenth
centuries” (p. 8), but he still offers suggestions for concrete ways in which readings of Virgil did, in fact,
change. See especially Virgil in the Renaissance, 215-47.
8 For echoes of Virgil in the Ylias, see Thomas Gärtner, Klassische Vorbilder mittelalterlicher Trojaepen
(Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1999). For echoes in the Alexandreis, see Heinrich Christensen, Das
Alexanderlied Walters von Châtillon (Halle a.S.: Verlag der buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1905),
195-200. For echoes in the Architrenius, see Paul Gerhard Schmidt, ed., Architrenius (Munich: W. Fink,
1974), 57-8. For echoes in the Anticlaudianus, see Robert Bossuat, ed., Anticlaudianus: texte critique
(Paris: J. Vrin, 1955), 38-9.