Paths and Puzzles: Walking the Maze in the Apocalypse of Golias

Abstract

The Cambridge Quarterly endows a prize for the dissertation gaining the highest mark in the Cambridge University final examination in English. The article printed here is the Prize Essay for 2022. He laid bare the secrets of his right hand, and when I had looked and began to read, I found written in dark lettering, ‘I am the leader who goes before, and you must follow me.’ He whom I had begun to follow glided quickly past, and, as I was led more rapidly, we tumbled together into another land. (ll. 25–31)1 This is the first of several disorientating narrative movements in the late twelfth-century Latin poem, the Apocalypse of Golias.2 The poem narrates a dream or vision which begins under an oak tree with the appearance of Pythagoras, the leader in the passage above, proceeds to an apocalyptic vision, and ends with a cursory coda in heaven. The difficulty posed by these movements has led several influential critics to condemn the poem for structural incoherence: F. Raby judged the beginning ‘not very well related to the rest of the narrative’ and ‘irrelevant’; J. B. Hauréau added that titling a work ‘apocalypse’ does not license the mixing of incoherent material; and Karl Strecker claimed that the two outer sections were appended unnecessarily to the central one.3 It is to this discussion of structure and movement that the present investigation contributes, employing more recent developments in scholarship on miscellanies and the ‘whole book’, and approaching the poem through the specific instance of its transmission in Cambridge, Trinity College, O.2.45, a thirteenth-century miscellany from Cerne Abbey, Dorset.4 Specifically, it is suggested that the materials surrounding the poem in O.2.45 – diagrammatic, mathematical, and riddling – might have schooled a reader in methods of reading which would equip him to negotiate the narrative shifts and turns in the Apocalypse which have traditionally been attributed to poor poetic construction. Underlying this essay is a methodological approach, outlined by Nichols and Wenzel, which, proposing that ‘the individual manuscript contextualizes the text(s) it contains in specific ways […] seeks to analyze the consequences of this relationship on the way these texts may be read and interpreted’.5 Using both formalist and material-text analysis, this essay explores possible routes through the text, and their interaction with ideas of memory and numerical structure, games and diagrams, to advance an interpretation that places the reader at the centre of a textual diagram which amazes and amuses.