Ovid and Dante in Machiavelli

Introduction: Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing

Centres of learning may be formal or informal, either institutions dedicated to the systematic inculcation of learning, or locations in which learning more or less haphazardly takes place. This chapter focuses on one sort of informal centre, the late-medieval and Renaissance household, the importance of which as a location of learning has perhaps not received due attention. In the great households of the fifteenth century, learning activity and literary culture can be said to have been channelled in various ways. First, there was education in the essentials of courtly behaviour. A second area of education in the household concerns piety and religious instruction. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, humanistic culture began to have an impact upon this pattern of learning. To some extent the Renaissance household continued patterns of family structure and social dynamics evolved through the Middle Ages. Keywords: learning activity; literary culture; Middle Ages; Renaissance household

Important as the classical tradition is, the origins of the modern idea of fair play lie in the fusion of the éistian ethic with the warrior traditions of the Dark Ages. The Christian injunction to treat others, even enemies, with the consideration we would expect for ourselves is essential to the idea of fair play. As early as the 8th century we can see this attitude clearly in Beowulf’s approach to his fights with the monsters. Chrétien de Troyes’s insistence that warriors must act fairly marks the true beginning of the literature of chivalry. Its culmination in the Middle Ages is Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, where we find an ethic of competition we still recognise: no cheating, no ganging up, no hitting a man when he is down. But chivalry in the Middle Ages was not just a literary cult; in the tournament practical rules were developed over the centuries to produce the first example of a sporting activity governed by clear rules of fair play. The literary tradition of chivalry adapted itself to changing tastes and times. Spenser started to show ways in which chivalry could be made to yield more democratic implications. Shakespeare showed how the fellowship of chivalry could become the basis for new ideas which transcended the distinctions between the knightly and the lower classes. Its implications for fair play lay ready to be used once again when Sir Walter Scott rediscovered the cult of knighthood for the common reader at the turn of the 19th century.

Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition surveys and analyzes Latin parodies of texts and documents--Biblical parody, drinker's masses, bawdy litanies, lives of saints such as Nemo (Nobody) and Invicem (One-Another), and nonsense texts--in Western Europe from the early Middle to the Renaissance. This book also sketches in the background to the canonical works of medieval literature: Chaucer's fabliaux, French comic tales such as the Roman de Renart, and medieval satire in general.Bayless' study shows with great clarity that parody was a significant and vibrant literary form in the Middle Ages. In addition, her research sheds new light on clerical culture. The clerics who composed these parodies were far from meddling guardians of somber piety; rather, they appeared to see no contradiction between merriment and devotion. The wide dissemination and long life of these drolleries--some circulated for a thousand years--indicate a taste for clerical amusement that challenges conventional views of medieval solemnity.Parody in the Middle surveys in detail five of the most common traditions of parody. It provides a complete list of all known medieval Latin parodies, and also provides twenty complete texts in an appendix in the original Latin, with English translations. These texts have been collated from over a hundred manuscripts, many previously unknown. The study brings to light both a form and many texts that have remained obscure and inaccessible until now.Parody in the Middle Ages appeals to the modern audience not only for its cultural value but also for the same reason the parodies appealed to the medieval audience: they are simply very funny. This welcome new volume will be of particular interest to students of medieval satire and literary culture, to medieval Latinists, and to those who want to explore the breadth of medieval culture.Martha Bayless is Assistant Professor of English, University of Oregon.

It was not that long ago that anyone curious about the reception of Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages picked up one of two surveys: George Cary's The Medieval Alexander (1956) for a broad account of the crafting of the legend from late antiquity to the High Middle Ages, or Paul Meyer's Alexander le Grand dans la littérature française du moyen âge (1886) for a more specialized study of the romance Alexander in France. These days one can read studies dissecting the medieval Alexander from a host of perspectives: linguistic, geographical, intellectual, historical, codicological, literary. All of this activity in the last twenty-five years or so has steadily established this legend as a near subdiscipline, Alexander Studies, among medievalists.The impressive framework from which this scholarship draws its inspiration is the vast textual network of Alexander narratives, in classical and vernacular languages, stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to western and northern Europe. One distinct branch of texts emanated from the vulgate histories, the surviving classical accounts in Greek (Diodorus Siculus's Bibliotheca historica, Arrian's Anabasis Alexandri, and Plutarch's Parallel Lives) and Latin (Quintus Curtius Rufus's Historia Alexandri Magni and Justin's epitome of the Philippic Histories by Pompeius Trogus), and another from the Greek text known as the Pseudo-Callisthenes, which, as it directly and indirectly influenced versions in Hebrew, Latin, and the medieval vernacular romances, accumulated various fabulous episodes (e.g., Alexander's flight in a chariot led by griffins) and moralizing anecdotes (e.g., his failed attempt to enter an earthly paradise). As scribes and writers transmitted and interpolated these texts from both branches across Europe, knowledge of and attitudes towards the ancient figure crystallized based on geography and availability of sources: those in southern Italy, for example, introduced Jewish episodes of Alexander to the Latin narratives based on the Pseudo-Callisthenes, and their counterparts in England reasserted the authority of the Latin vulgate, particularly the Philippic Histories. This collective transmission created over many centuries Chaucer's oft-cited designation of the story of Alexander as “commune,” a loaded adjective that the author discusses in the opening pages of her book.Bridges situates Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great against recent scholarship in the field by arguing that postmedieval “nationalist” approaches to the figure (e.g., the so-called “French” or “English” Alexander) are misguided in examining him in geographical and linguistic isolation and that genre studies are too broad, given that the legend is reliant upon a cacophony of authorial voices, many of which blurred the boundaries of generic conventions. She is right, of course, that we must not assume that the Alexander legend was so neatly packaged across Europe, but no scholar who has examined the prolonged literary activity that accounted for the medieval Alexander has argued as much. She is also right to remind us that Alexander texts are “transnational,” but this is not a novel stance. By the very nature of textual transmission from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the continuous adaptation of the most widely circulated narratives in so many languages, the Alexander legend is inherently transnational and indeed transcontinental. While offering her book as a means of righting the ship of Alexander Studies (although I do not know that the ship is off course), Bridges provides, in fact, a supplementary study. While she argues that studies organized by nation and language perpetuate the oversimplification of the complex corpus of Alexandriana (a point with which I agree), by neglecting the various branches and texts of the literary schema that created the medieval Alexander, she is guilty of the same.Despite the expanse and complexity of this textual network that ultimately provided us with an intimidating body of “medieval Alexander narratives,” Bridges rejects the use of the words “tradition” and “transmission” in her discussion of a handful of texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and concerns herself not with the sources behind them but with reading these texts in dialogue with contemporary narratives of—and, intriguingly, not of—the protagonist. She argues that such reading across languages and genres, rather than within them, reflects an “accurate historicist approach” and offers “perhaps the closest modern scholars can come to experiencing key aspects of medieval literary culture” (p. 241). If we acknowledge, however, that an individual author's material for crafting an Alexander narrative depended upon the sources that had made their way to his corner of Europe and that readers encountered any given narrative in various versions (such as the Historia de preliis, the series of Latin adaptations of the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes) and in various manuscripts (perhaps none so frustrating as the collective French work known as the Roman d'Alexandre), then we must be cautious in taking her word for it.The result is more an insightful discussion of translatio studii, the unifying theme of the book, than of Alexander's medieval reception, and although Bridges's reading of texts in dialogue both within and beyond the Alexander corpus is a welcome addition to the field, her generalization of this vast textual corpus behind the legend is disconcerting. This is apparent in two of the book's early chapters: “Alexander in Antiquity,” a survey of the classical translatio studii of Alexander in Greek and Latin; and “Anxious Romance,” a comparative reading of Walter of Châtillon's twelfth-century Latin epic Alexandreis with the composite, cumulative text known as the Roman d'Alexandre. Surveying the classical Alexander, Bridges writes, “this complex network [is] too diverse and intertwined a body of texts to be defined using terms like ‘tradition’ or ‘transmission’” seemingly as justification for using Richard Stoneman's Penguin edition of the Greek Alexander Romance (the Pseudo-Callisthenes) as the basis of her discussion of the “complex web of Latin material” (p. 35). In similar fashion, relying on Alexandre de Paris's Roman d'Alexandre (volume 2 of the Princeton series, the Medieval French Roman d'Alexandre) is a questionable decision in a study that criticizes generalizations in how we write of the medieval Alexander.What Bridges offers is a reasonable case that “the critical debate over the historicity (or otherwise) of the antique accounts . . . has dominated scholarship, potentially to the detriment of analyzing the texts for their literary characteristics, including translatio” (p. 239). I agree with her on this point—to the extent that Bridges's concluding remarks on the Alexandreis as a poem that “is deeply indebted in contemporary debates about literary and political cultures, debates that transcend boundaries of genre, geography, and polity” (p. 109) reflect a standard assumption about any text featuring the politically valent protagonist. No doubt more work is to be done in reading the Alexander legend alongside other narratives within the classical tradition. Her discussions of individual texts removed from the aforementioned network are compelling. Bridges offers insightful readings of the Alexandreis, Joseph of Exeter's Ylias, the Roman d'Alexandre, the Roman de Troie, and Cligès, all of which she examines via geographical contexts that may have informed their intellectual influences and hermeneutic and poetic responses to Alexander and the classical tradition. Valuable, too, is Bridges's discussion of the Anglo-Norman Roman de toute chevalerie, a poem that has long sat neglected in the long shadow of the Contintental Roman d'Alexandre, and in her interpretation of the author's remarks on his source-texts as an excursus on “how to read and interpret material” (p. 159), a concern that she detects in both the author's remarks on his sources and in the characters whom he portrays, she offers a sound argument on what we stand to benefit from not ignoring the poetics of the surviving medieval treatments of Alexander.The strength of her book is this attention to the “literary characteristics” that Bridges (rightly) accuses some of her fellow Alexander scholars of too often ignoring. However, readers may be distracted from this merit by her frequent suggestions of all that must be corrected within Alexander Studies and the “red herring” that we chase in discussing “historical,” as it were, from “fictional” versions of Alexander in medieval literature (p. 239). Comments throughout the book suggest a broad wave of the hand at the wider corpus of Alexander texts and the scholarship dedicated to it: her search for evidence that the Alexandreis and the Roman d'Alexandre “are . . . indirectly connected via Latin material” (p. 112) (true of countless Alexander texts that drew either from the Valerius Epitome or the Historia de preliis); her casual suggestion, without any sustained discussion, that Alexander is a generic hero from the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes onward (p. 167); her review in her first chapter of Greek sources that had no bearing on Alexander texts in her period and place; her insistence that we must now consider as transnational texts that accumulated various episodes as they were transmitted from Greek, Hebrew, and Latin to Europe's vernaculars and from one end of the continent to the other (pp. 3–12). This is not to say that one cannot be critical of the vibrant, and still evolving, field of Alexander Studies, but one should not do so while remaining disengaged from the textual creation of the Alexander legend via a pan-European network of translations, adaptations, and interpolations—the very reason why we have seen of late such prolific scholarship on the classical figure.

There they stood at Paston—eleven volumes, with the poems of Lydgate and Chaucer among them, diffusing a strange air into the gaunt, comfortless house, inviting men to indolence and vanity, distracting their thoughts from business, and leading them not only to neglect their own profit but to think lightly of the sacred dues of the dead. For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad daylight, reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming—or what strange intoxications was it that he drew from books? In her essay, “The Pastons and Chaucer” in The Common Reader, which was first published in 1925, Virginia Woolf imagines a row of manuscripts lining a wall in the family’s house in the Norfolk village of Paston, and a mother’s annoyance at finding her son, Sir John Paston, often referred to as John Paston II, with his head deep in a book rather than attending to the business of maintaining his estates. Woolf’s essay was written in response to reading James Gairdner’s monumental edition of The Paston Letters, published at the turn of the twentieth century. The Pastons were a fifteenth-century gentry family from Norfolk and their correspondence represents the largest surviving archive of private letters from medieval England. In thinking about women’s literary culture in medieval England, the Paston letters must not be overlooked, if for no other reason than that around one-fifth of the letters were written by women, and that the most prolific of the writers was a woman: Margaret Paston, the mother whose perspective Woolf adopts in the above quotation. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) would come to play a central role in the tracing of feminist literary histories from the early modern period through to the twentieth century. Yet, Woolf’s own reading of the letters results in her characterising Margaret Paston as an individual for whom the distinctive, seductive, visceral smell of medieval manuscripts is dismissed as “a strange air”, and for whom poetry and literature are distractions from the real business of tending to the souls of the dead and to the property of the living. This idea that Margaret Paston was, if not hostile to books, then at any rate “not a reader” is one that continues to dominate her critical reception, and it is tied to wider generalizations about the limited engagement of middle-class laywomen with the literary culture in the later Middle Ages. But how valid are such assumptions about Margaret Paston or about late medieval women more generally?

The conflict and contact between Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages is among the most important but least appreciated developments of the period from the seventh to the fourteenth century. Michael Frassetto argues that the relationship between these two faiths during the Middle Ages was essential to the cultural and religious developments of Christianity and Islam—even as Christians and Muslims often found themselves engaged in violent conflict. Frassetto traces the history of those conflicts and argues that these holy wars helped create the identity that defined the essential characteristics of Christians and Muslims. The polemic works that often accompanied these holy wars was important, Frassetto contends, because by defining the essential evil of the enemy, Christian authors were also defining their own beliefs and practices. Holy war was not the only defining element of the relationship between Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages, and Frassetto explains that everyday contacts between Christian and Muslim leaders and scholars generated more peaceful relations and shaped the literary, intellectual, and religious culture that defined medieval and even modern Christianity and Islam.

The conflict and contact between Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages is among the most important but least appreciated developments of the period from the seventh to the fourteenth century. Michael Frassetto argues that the relationship between these two faiths during the Middle Ages was essential to the cultural and religious developments of Christianity and Islam—even as Christians and Muslims often found themselves engaged in violent conflict. Frassetto traces the history of those conflicts and argues that these holy wars helped create the identity that defined the essential characteristics of Christians and Muslims. The polemic works that often accompanied these holy wars was important, Frassetto contends, because by defining the essential evil of the enemy, Christian authors were also defining their own beliefs and practices. Holy war was not the only defining element of the relationship between Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages, and Frassetto explains that everyday contacts between Christian and Muslim leaders and scholars generated more peaceful relations and shaped the literary, intellectual, and religious culture that defined medieval and even modern Christianity and Islam.

“Rede hit sofft”: John Audelay's Practice of Care

Christ’s life, as related through the Gospel narratives and early Apocrypha, was subject to a riot of literary-devotional adaptation in the medieval period. This collection provides a series of groundbreaking studies centring on the devotional and cultural significance of Christianity’s pivotal story during the Middle Ages. The collection represents an important milestone in terms of mapping the meditative modes of piety that characterize a number of Christological traditions, including the Meditationes vitae Christi and the numerous versions it spawned in both Latin and the vernacular. A number of chapters in the volume track how and why meditative piety grew in popularity to become a mode of spiritual activity advised not only to recluses and cenobites as in the writings of Aelred of Rievaulx, but also reached out to diverse lay audiences through the pastoral regimens prescribed by devotional authors such as the Carthusian prior Nicholas Love in England and the Parisian theologian and chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson. Through exploring these texts from a variety of perspectives - theoretical, codicological, theological - and through tracing their complex lines of dissemination in ideological and material terms, this collection promises to be invaluable to students and scholars of medieval religious and literary culture.

Catherine of Siena (b. 1347–d. 1380) was an author, spiritual leader, religious reformer, and one of the more remarkable public figures of the Middle Ages. Born to a prosperous family of cloth dyers, in her youth she developed a reputation for unusual piety, and in her late teens or early twenties joined the local community of Dominican female penitents (precursors to what became in the 15th century the Dominican Third Order). She developed a following that included a number of young Sienese nobleman, as well as religious from various orders, and in 1374 was enlisted by the Dominican order and the papacy to help advance several causes, including a Crusade to the Holy Land and peace in Italy. Between 1374 and her death in 1380, through her letters and in person, Catherine advocated for ecclesiastical reform, the return of the papacy to Rome from Avignon, and the Roman observance after the schism of 1378. In addition to her letters—the largest epistolary collection by a woman in the Middle Ages—she is known for a masterpiece of mystical theology, her Libro di divvina dottrina (Book of Divine Teachings), better known today as the Dialogo, a synthesis of her spiritual insights, structured in the form of a dialogue between Catherine and God. It was largely through her Libro, in addition to the hagiographical tradition, that her reputation spread throughout Europe. Catherine became the object of an active cult before her canonization in 1461, and she was embraced in the early modern period as a mystic and model for female monasticism. In the period of Italian nationalism from the Risorgimento through World War II, she became an emblem of Catholic Italy, and more recently she has been valued more for her active engagement with the world as well as for her spiritual writings. Scholars of Catherine of Siena and her devotees—two not-mutually exclusive groups—have over time vacillated radically in their sense of Catherine’s association with Italian politics and society, and in their assessments of her writings and their place in literary culture. Until recently, she has not been taken seriously by Italian literary critical scholarship: the inspired, devotional character of her prose, and its mix of oral with literary characteristics, has seemed to place her outside of literature, properly speaking. But there is currently a renewed interest in Catherine as an author, as well as a return to questions regarding the complexities of her texts and their composition first raised in the initial flowering of Catherinian source criticism in the 1930s and 1940s. She emerged as an important figure in international medieval scholarship with the rise of interest in hagiography, lay spirituality, and women’s religion and gendered religiosity in the last quarter of the 20th century, and is now recognized by historians as a key representative of important trends in late-medieval religion.

Christ’s life, as related through the Gospel narratives and early Apocrypha, was subject to a riot of literary-devotional adaptation in the medieval period. This collection provides a series of groundbreaking studies centring on the devotional and cultural significance of Christianity’s pivotal story during the Middle Ages. The collection represents an important milestone in terms of mapping the meditative modes of piety that characterize a number of Christological traditions, including the Meditationes vitae Christi and the numerous versions it spawned in both Latin and the vernacular. A number of chapters in the volume track how and why meditative piety grew in popularity to become a mode of spiritual activity advised not only to recluses and cenobites as in the writings of Aelred of Rievaulx, but also reached out to diverse lay audiences through the pastoral regimens prescribed by devotional authors such as the Carthusian prior Nicholas Love in England and the Parisian theologian and chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson. Through exploring these texts from a variety of perspectives - theoretical, codicological, theological - and through tracing their complex lines of dissemination in ideological and material terms, this collection promises to be invaluable to students and scholars of medieval religious and literary culture.

Christ’s life, as related through the Gospel narratives and early Apocrypha, was subject to a riot of literary-devotional adaptation in the medieval period. This collection provides a series of groundbreaking studies centring on the devotional and cultural significance of Christianity’s pivotal story during the Middle Ages. The collection represents an important milestone in terms of mapping the meditative modes of piety that characterize a number of Christological traditions, including the Meditationes vitae Christi and the numerous versions it spawned in both Latin and the vernacular. A number of chapters in the volume track how and why meditative piety grew in popularity to become a mode of spiritual activity advised not only to recluses and cenobites as in the writings of Aelred of Rievaulx, but also reached out to diverse lay audiences through the pastoral regimens prescribed by devotional authors such as the Carthusian prior Nicholas Love in England and the Parisian theologian and chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson. Through exploring these texts from a variety of perspectives - theoretical, codicological, theological - and through tracing their complex lines of dissemination in ideological and material terms, this collection promises to be invaluable to students and scholars of medieval religious and literary culture.

The religious houses were central to the development of literary culture in the British Isles throughout the Middle Ages. In the earliest medieval centuries their contribution was as the most developed and settled environments in which the written word was used and preserved; as the Latin Roman church advanced across Britain they became a natural focus for linguistic exchanges and translation. The growth and growing ecclesiastical and seigniorial power of religious houses in the tenth and eleventh centuries saw them established as the principal focus for the production and transmission of literature in Latin and the vernacular. This energy was not entirely displaced by the Norman Conquest and in the century that followed the religious houses led England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland in the development of literary genres – in history, epic, and hagiography – and, as before, in translation. While secular clerical courtly and urban centers increasingly contributed to literary culture after 1250 the role of the religious orders did not recede: withstanding the effects of the Black Death they were the major cultural patrons in late medieval and pre‐Reformation England; they were also commercial and editorial pioneers of printing and proponents of the new currents of Italian humanism. Their contribution to cultural life was still developing when they were suppressed by the Henrician and Scots Calvinist reforms of 1536–61.

Christ's life, as related through the Gospel narratives and early Apocrypha, was subject to a riot of literary-devotional adaptation in the medieval period. This collection provides a series of groundbreaking studies centring on the devotional and cultural significance of Christianity's pivotal story during the Middle Ages.