Secretum Secretorum Research Articles

An Interpolation from Avicenna’s The Canon of Medicine in the Ruthenian Translation of The Secret of Secrets

The Ruthenian translation of the medieval treatise Secretum Secretorum (“The Secret of Secrets”) was made in Kiev during the second half of the 15th century from a Hebrew version that dates back to late 13th‒early 14th centuries, when it was translated from the Arabic original, which probably originated in its final form during the 10th century. The Ruthenian translation contains certain interpolations that had been already present in the Hebrew version before it was translated into Ruthenian. They had been extracted from several Arabic and Hebrew sources, such as the treatise Al-Mansuri by Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyā al-Rāzī (865‒925) and the treatises On Poisons, On Coitus, and On Asthma by Maimonides (1135/1138‒1204).The author argues that the same Ruthenian translation also contains a minor (one-page long) interpolation that through Hebrew mediation goes back to The Canon of Medicine written in Arabic by Avicenna (980‒1037). It is still to be established which of the seven known Medieval Hebrew translations and/or the around 30 commentaries on it (all unpublished) was used as the immediate source for the Kievan translation. Nevertheless, the newly identified Arabic origin of this particular interpolation to the Ruthenian version of the treatise The Secret of Secrets sheds some light on the prehistory of this particular text’s portion and compliments the list of sources used by the Hebrew-to-Ruthenian translators in Kiev during the second half of the 15th century.

Dividing Science by Ten

Abstract The Ġāyat al-ḥakīm (“the Aim of the Sage”), the Arab ancestor of the celebrated Picatrix on astral magic, includes a curious tenfold classification of the sciences, with five disciplines said to be compulsory “for the legislators” and five “for the philosopher”. This classification was once described by Hellmut Ritter and Martin Plessner as “ein Unikum in der umfangreichen Einteilungsliteratur”. This paper is a survey of medieval texts concerned with a tenfold classification of the sciences, ranging from a wide collection of sources including the world chronicles of Agapius and Girgīs al-Makīn, the Ādāb al-falāsifa, the Sindbādnāma, the Pseudo-Avicennian alchemical De anima, and Roger Bacon’s edition of the Secretum Secretorum. It appears from this survey that the Ādāb al-falāsifa certainly played a crucial role in the transmission of these traditions, but that other texts, in particular amongst the Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica, may have been influential as well. Regarding the ultimate origin of this material we are reduced to mere speculations, although various elements invite us to consider Middle Persian literature as a more plausible formative stage than Greek literature in the conception of tenfold classifications of knowledge.

A New Hoccleve Literary Manuscript: The Trilingual Miscellany in London, British Library, MS Harley 219

Abstract This essay identifies a hand which copies and corrects much of the literary manuscript, London, British Library, MS Harley 219, as that of Thomas Hoccleve. Texts in Hoccleve’s handwriting include selections from Odo of Cheriton’s Fables and the Gesta Romanorum (a source for the Series), all of a unique copy of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea, and a glossary of French terms translated into Latin and English. Additionally, Hoccleve’s handwriting can be found in corrections to a French Secretum Secretorum (a source for The Regiment of Princes) that is otherwise copied in another hand. This essay offers preliminary observations on the literary implications of these identifications and attempts to situate these texts within Hoccleve’s career as a clerk and poet.

Fit for a King: Decoding the Great Sloane Astrolabe and Other English Astrolabes with “Quatrefoil” Retes

Abstract The great Sloane astrolabe in the British Museum is the largest and most important of all medieval English instruments and yet its history is completely lost. In this paper, evidence from its various engravings is used to show that it is likely to have been commissioned, ca. 1326, by Richard de Bury as a teaching tool for Prince Edward of Windsor who was soon to become King Edward iii. Comparisons are made with two illuminated manuscripts, the “Milemete Treatise” and a copy of the Secretum Secretorum, which were also used in the Prince’s education. Two other medieval astrolabes, now in Liège and in the London Science Museum, are believed to be closely associated with the Sloane instrument and derived from it.

La literatura como recurso formativo del príncipe: evolución a lo largo de la Baja Edad Media

El presente artículo repasa la literatura medieval destinada a la formación de los príncipes avanzando para ello por la tradición historiográfica. Así, la necesidad de formar a un gobernante asesorado por unos consejeros en la misión de salvación de su pueblo sufrió un gran cambio durante los siglos XII-XIV: a) un primer momento centrado en definir las virtudes del<br />“buen rey” en el Liber Iudicum del siglo VII español; b) un marcado carácter oriental venido de Al-Andalus, con un maestro filósofo como preceptor en los exempla morales de finales del XI y principios del XII; c) unión de herencia hispánica e influencias orientales y occidentales propia<br />del siglo XIII, donde el dominio occidental queda evidenciado de la mano de Egidio Romano y su De regimine principum. Es así como se alcanza el género de “espejos de príncipes” como compendio de tradiciones promovido por Alfonso X, quien con su famoso Especulo, Libro de las Siete Partidas y su definitivo Setenario da cabida al Secretum Secretorum aristotélico en la imagen ejemplarizante de su padre Fernando III.

The Authority of Impersonation: Gower’s Confessio Amantis and the Secretum Secretorum

The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise Secretum secretorum uses essentially literary techniques to impersonate the voice of Aristotle writing to Alexander the Great about political, medical, and occult topics. John Gower’s Confessio Amantis borrows the theme of Aristotle’s counsel to Alexander in Book Seven, and its first version is addressed to Richard II, suggesting parallels between Gower and Aristotle as counselors to kings. The comparison of the two texts demonstrates that unlike the Secretum, the Confessio Amantis takes pains to treat Aristotle as a textual rather than embodied authority, displacing the Secretum’s concerns with the body and with occult knowledge onto the figure of Alexander’s biological father and tutor Nectanabus. While Gower does not impersonate Aristotle, he uses many of the Secretum’s techniques as he moves between his various literary personae in the poem, culminating in his return to the embodied and more selfaware character named John Gower.

Elementos Neoplatónicos en el Sirr al-Asrār (Secretum Secretorum). Atribuido a Aristóteles

Inheritors of the Alexandrian and Athenian Hellenistic tradition, the Arabs drew from a Neoplatonized Aristotle systematized through different attributed works, among them, the Sirr al-asrār, the Secretum secretorum in the Latin translation in which some genuine Aristotle doctrines are blended with Platonic, Neoplatonic, Neopythagorean and Hermetic elements. Brought in as a letter from Aristotle to Alexander, one of its chapters provides a Neoplatonic explanation of the Universe: while claiming that God’s nature is a simple spiritual substance from which the rest of the creation arisen, man is viewed as the unifying element of all created essences.

Christian Engagement with Islamic kalām in Late 14th-Century Egypt: The Case of al-Ḥāwī by al-Makīn Jirjis Ibn al-ʿAmīd ‘the Younger’

‭Towards the end of the 14th century ce, a Coptic government-bureaucrat-turned-monk called al-Makīn Jirjis ibn al-ʿAmīd produced a theological/ecclesiastical encyclopedia known sometimes as Mukhtaṣar al-bayān fī taḥqīq al-īmān, and sometimes as al-Ḥāwī al-mustafād min badīhat al-ijtihād, or simply as al-Ḥāwī. Book I, Chapter 1, Part 3 of this work is an essay on al-qaḍāʾ wa-l-qadar, which is described in the present essay. In making his case for humanity’s capacity for freely willed action, Ibn al-ʿAmīd presents arguments from the Old Testament and the New; a story from the Kitāb al-Siyāsa fī tadbīr al-riʾāsa (better known as Sirr al-asrār or Secretum secretorum), purportedly a book written by Aristotle for Alexander the Great (which is interesting as a witness to the use of Alexander-material by the Copts); and a typology in which the Muslim mutakallimūn Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāʾīnī, al-Bāqillānī, al-Ashʿarī, Abū l-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī, and the Muʿtazila in general serve as convenient labels for the positions described—and which turns out to be an epitome of a passage from masʾala 22 of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Kitāb al-Arbaʿīn. While the reproduction of al-Rāzī’s typology hardly amounts to a serious engagement with him or with the list of thinkers just mentioned, it is perhaps not insignificant that, in a time of sharp inter-communal tensions, Ibn al-ʿAmīd should claim the Muʿtazila as allies in his discourse on human freedom.‬

Elixir Atque Fermentum: New Investigations about The Link between Pseudo-Avicenna’s Alchemical De Anima and Roger Bacon: Alchemical and Medical Doctrines

Elixir Atque Fermentum:New Investigations about The Link between Pseudo-Avicenna’s Alchemical De Anima and Roger Bacon: Alchemical and Medical Doctrines Sébastien Moureau Introduction Between 1994 and 1997, William Newman published three articles1 in which, for the first time, a profound connection between Roger Bacon’s doctrine and Ps.-Avicenna’s alchemical De anima was pointed out. These studies were a major step in understanding Roger Bacon’s elemental physics, alchemy, and alchemical medicine, as well as his prolongatio vitae theory. By a thorough study of the physical, alchemical, and medical doctrine of the Jābirian treatises via Ps.-Avicenna’s De anima, in comparison with Bacon’s texts, I will continue the work initiated by Newman and draw some new conclusions. I will specifically focus on some principal differences between Roger Bacon and his favorite alchemical source, which allow us to understand the originality and innovation of the Franciscan. In addition to the De anima, a specific aspect of the alchemy of the Ps.-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum will also be studied here, being another of Bacon’s major sources. The following pages also include a set of new reflections about the elixir system and the ferment system. The case of Bacon’s doctrine and his sources brings new insights into the fundamental system of proportions that is found in those treatises, and allows us to reconsider and rethink both the elixir system and the ferment system, and to continue and perhaps refine the study of these fundamental notions. First, the alchemical De anima will be presented, along with the textual links of Roger Bacon’s works with it. Then, the physical, alchemical, and medical doctrines of Ps.-Avicenna’s De anima will be explained, followed by a description of Bacon’s elemental physics, alchemy, and prolongatio [End Page 277] vitae. After these observations, a comparison and a conclusion will be drawn. The Alchemical De anima of Ps.-Avicenna The De anima or Liber de anima, better known under the title of De anima in arte alchemiae,2 is the compilation and Latin translation of three now-lost Arabic alchemical treatises.3 It is impossible to date the compilation stage, but the translation seems to have been made around 1226 or 1235.4 Unfortunately, it is impossible to say whether the treatise was translated before its compilation or compiled before its translation. [End Page 278] The proposed translation date could be the translation date of the compilation, or the translation date of only one of the three parts. The first part is a treatise about elemental physics, the Porta elementorum (literally “chapter of the elements”), in which the physical basis of the alchemy of the De anima is presented. The Arabic original (no longer extant) was probably written before the mid-twelfth century,5 and the translation was probably made in Spain or by a translator who knew Castilian, attested by linguistic transformations of a specific word.6 Another text that seems to be another Latin version of this Arabic treatise is still extant in the manuscript Cotton Galba E IV, under the title De elementis, attributed to a certain Marius.7 The second part of the De anima, the main part of the book (about 80%) was written between the third quarter of the eleventh century and the mid-thirteenth century in Al-Andalus (Islamic Spain).8 This second part was translated in Spain or by a translator who knew Castilian, since many words are Castilian. The Arabic original is lost. The last part of the De anima, which was very likely inserted to complete the missing end of the second part, is impossible to date precisely. It was probably translated in Spain, because of linguistic traces, but the original is also lost.9 [End Page 279] The treatise was wrongly attributed to Avicenna.10 The De anima is characterized by Jābirian alchemy, presenting the same elixir theory as the Jābirian texts. It contains a very interesting description and classification of materials (dictio 5),11 which is indebted to Jābirian texts.12 The De anima is the main alchemical source of Vincent of Beauvais, who quotes it very often in the Speculum Naturale...

Elixir atque fermentum: New Investigations about the Link between Pseudo-Avicenna's AlchemicalDe animaand Roger Bacon: Alchemical and Medical Doctrines

Between 1994 and 1997, William Newman published three articles in which, for the first time, a profound connection between Roger Bacon's doctrine and Ps.-Avicenna's alchemicalDe animawas pointed out. These studies were a major step in understanding Roger Bacon's elemental physics, alchemy, and alchemical medicine, as well as hisprolongatio vitaetheory. By a thorough study of the physical, alchemical, and medical doctrine of the Jābirian treatises via Ps.-Avicenna'sDe anima, in comparison with Bacon's texts, I will continue the work initiated by Newman and draw some new conclusions. I will specifically focus on some principal differences between Roger Bacon and his favorite alchemical source, which allow us to understand the originality and innovation of the Franciscan. In addition to the De anima, a specific aspect of the alchemy of the Ps.-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum will also be studied here, being another of Bacon's major sources.

Qu’apprend-on aux rois ? La physiognomonie dans le Secret des secrets

According to physiognomy, the character of men may be inferred from their outward physical appearance. Physiognomy is found in some encyclopedias, in medical works and occasionally in political treatises ; in the later Middle Ages, it holds a privileged place in the Secret of Secrets, a work that is at the intersection of several genres. However, the text of the French translation of the Secretum secretorum (itself based on an Arabic treatise) modified the contents of the original chapter on physiognomy, which also now figures at the end of the work. The study of this branch of medieval science in three thirteenth-century treatises reveals its medical and political function. In the case of the Secret of Secrets, some differences between the vernacular version and the Latin text appear significant. This science was no longer being used for medical or political purposes. Rather, its role was now pedagogical : physiognomy thus invites the reader to claim a certain autonomy vis-a-vis scientific tradition.

Antònia Carré (ed.), ‘Libro llamado el Porqué’ de Girolamo Manfredi: Regimen de Salud y Tratado de Fisionomonía, traducción castellana de Pedro de Ribas (1567), Instituto Biblioteca Hispánica, Serie básica 2, (San Millán de la Cogolla: Cilengua, 2009), pp. 585, paperback, ISBN: 978-84-937654-0-8.

Antònia Carré (ed.), ‘Libro llamado el Porqué’ de Girolamo Manfredi: Regimen de Salud y Tratado de Fisionomonía, traducción castellana de Pedro de Ribas (1567), Instituto Biblioteca Hispánica, Serie básica 2, (San Millán de la Cogolla: Cilengua, 2009), pp. 585, paperback, ISBN: 978-84-937654-0-8. - Volume 55 Issue 2

A Different Kind of Book for Richard’s Sake: MS Bodley 581 as Ethical Handbook

A Different Kind of Book for Richard’s Sake: MS Bodley 581 as Ethical Handbook Katharine Breen Although the first version of the Confessio Amantis, completed in 1390, famously offers up a mixture of Aristotelian wisdom and literary recreation “for king Richardes sake,” Gower’s advice does not seem to have been received as intended. Two years later the author rescinded his gift, rededicating the Confessio to Henry of Lancaster and recharacterizing his book as “for Engelondes sake.” 1 While Gower’s multiple dedications have received a great deal of scholarly attention, 2 little of it has extended to another book of advice offered to Richard II at about the same time: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 581 (described in the Appendix). Like the Confessio Amantis, the constituent treatises of MS Bodley 581 undertake a task that is at once politically and rhetorically tricky: offering advice to a sitting monarch who was, according to both traditional wisdom 3 and [End Page 119] his own stated position, 4 no longer susceptible to the forms of counsel offered to minor kings and royal heirs. Not surprisingly, both efforts were unsuccessful as royal advice texts, whatever their other achievements. Here, however, the similarities largely end. Where the Confessio Amantis embraces the teachings of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum, especially in its climactic seventh book, MS Bodley 581 increasingly distances itself from this most popular of medieval Mirrors for Princes, implicitly critiquing its efficacy and questioning its entire model of advice. Instead, MS Bodley 581 seeks to reform the king through book technology. A combination of lavish illustrations, elaborate charts and diagrams, multiple indices and tables of contents, and even a rare cutaway thumb index entice the king to make decisions via the “scientific” practices of physiognomy, dream interpretation, and geomancy, rather than according to his own untutored will. These procedures assure that the king’s actions will be rational even if he himself is not, but they also have a disciplinary purpose. MS Bodley 581 thus serves as a particularly complex and ambitious instance of the habit-inducing objects Aristotle describes in the Nicomachean Ethics, shaping body and mind through an array of interpretive regimes. Where for Aristotle a harp creates a harpist and a building creates a master-builder, MS Bodley 581 sets out to make the king bookish by teaching him a specifically clerical mode of reading that will transform him into a para-clerical figure of discretion and justice. In the process, MS Bodley 581 addresses the crises of advice that marked Richard’s early reign by teaching the king, alone with his book, to advise himself. 5 In contrast to other aristocratic geomancies of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Libellus Geomancie that occupies the bulk of MS Bodley 581 is clearly designed to be used without professional help. Though written in Latin, its operative sections require the reader to parse only single words and short phrases, and its extensive series of tables spares the reader [End Page 120] the time-consuming calculations required by other geomancies. (In fact, although the contents of the Libellus are conventionally geomantic, the skills it requires have more to do with navigating a codex than with interpreting earth signs.) As a result, MS Bodley 581 seems to imagine royal advice not in the relatively optimistic terms of the 1390 Confessio Amantis, but in those of the somewhat earlier and much less courtly Piers Plowman. Langland’s poem takes as its starting point the traditional assumption that kings need neither clerical reading skills nor clerical discipline because they can consult authoritative Latin writings indirectly, through their trusted counselors. However, when a personified Reason arrives to counsel the king—accompanied by his servant “Caton,” who embodies the wisdom of the Disticha Catonis, a grammar school staple—his advice proves to be untranslatable (B.4.17). 6 When Reason concludes his perfectly sound moral exhortation with the suggestion “Late [þi] Confessour, sire kyng, construe [it þee on englissh],” he unwittingly unleashes a flood of self-interested interpreters, “Al to construe þis clause for þe kynges profit,/Ac noʒt for confort of þe commune ne for þe kynges soule” (B.4.145, 150–51). For...

Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 (review)

Reviewed by: Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 Rhiannon Purdie Joanna Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. 212. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6273–0. $99.95. The very specific theme of this volume as identified by its title—‘kingship and love’ in Older Scots poetry—belies the great value of this excellent study to all those with any interest at all in Older Scots poetry or medieval advisory literature. The distinctive Scottish situation of a succession of royal minorities through the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with all the social anxieties that this engendered, is reflected in the literature of this period by a marked interest in ‘advice to princes’ literature. Martin successfully widens this category to include the ‘strongly discernable body of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Scots poetry concerned with the wooing of kings’ (1). She argues that these texts use the lens of amatory discourse to explore ideas about ‘the most profound and challenging aspects of the governance of the self, that prerequisite quality for the rule of others’ (p. 2), thus broadening their significance from the personal or abstractly philosophical to the topically political. The focus of the texts discussed in this volume is, as Martin demonstrates convincingly, on ‘the challenges to self-governance (and thence to political governance) posed by the destabilizing advent of a young ruler’s sexual maturity’ and ‘the impact of desire on royal rule’ (pp. 12–13). Chapter one begins, inevitably, with The Kingis Quair (probably by James I) and the Quare of Jelusy, poems uniquely preserved in that important fifteenth-century Scottish anthology, Bodleian Library Arch. Selden B.24. Readers of Arthuriana will be particularly interested in the second chapter on Lancelot of the Laik. Four more chapters cover Gilbert Hay’s Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice (a chapter which provides much incidental insight into the Middle English romance Sir Orfeo via its Scottish cousin King Orphius), The Thre Prestis of Peblis, and King Hart. There is an epilogue on ‘Poetry and the Minority of James V,’ which deals with the much more direct relationship between Sir David Lyndsay and his one-time royal pupil. Underpinning this study is an investigation of the influence of three important works on this body of poetry: the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum; Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum and its vernacular descendents, and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Gower, she contends, is an ‘important precursor of the poetic combination of amatory and political discourses, and the focus on the king’s amatory self, in later Scots writing’ (p. 3). Martin’s study is characterized by shrewd and subtle close readings of her primary texts supported by a wealth of contextual evidence drawn from contemporary Scottish writings, antecedent English works (particularly those of Gower and Hoccleve), Continental sources, and the manuscript settings and circulation histories of these poems. This is a deeply scholarly work, elegantly written, highly informative, and an important contribution to the study of late-medieval Scottish literature. [End Page 141] Rhiannon Purdie University of St Andrews Copyright © 2009 Arthuriana

“To the Illustrious Lord Edward:” A Re-evaluation of Audience and Patronage in the Milemete Treatise and the Companion Secretum Secretorum

“To the Illustrious Lord Edward:” A Re-evaluation of Audience and Patronage in the Milemete Treatise and the Companion Secretum Secretorum

The History and Myths surrounding Johannes Hispalensis

This paper attempts to discuss and clarify the issues and misconceptions regarding Johannes Hispalensis (John of Seville), a twelfth-century translator, and to identify the area in which he began translating. His history encompasses the time of Sisnando Davidiz, Alfonso VI and the Christian campaign to regain the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim strongholds. The history of the emergent Portugal played a prominent part in identifying Limia as the area in which Hispalensis was translating when he signed himself Johannes Hispalensis atque Limiensis. His first three translations, the Secretum Secretorum to a Queen T., a tract on gout to a Pope Gregory, and the original version of Costa Ben Luca's De differentia spiritus et animae, were all medical translations. The early history of Portugal contained historical figures whose personal details tied in with reasons for the first two translations, thus helping to date their chronological order of composition. One of two important documents from 1116 produced a refer...

Shifting Focus to Mozart's Operas

Grassnick, Ulrike. Ratgeber des Konigs: Furstenspiegel und Herrscherideal im spatmittelalterlichen England. Koln: Bohlau Verlag, 2004. Pp. xii; 471. Ulrike Grassnick's book bears the subtitle Furstenspiegel und Herrscherideal im spatmittelalterlichen England, which accurately describes the contents of the volume. author studies seven Mirrors of Princes in Middle English: John Trevisa's Governance of Kings and Princes (c. 1388-92), Thomas Hoccleve's TheEegiment of Princes (c. 1410-11), John Lydgate and Benedict Burgh's Secrees qfoldPhilisqffres (1449-50), Sir Gilbert Hay's Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis (c.1456), George Ashby's Active Policy of a Prince (1470), John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Book VlI - 1386-93), and Geoffrey Chaucer's Tale ofMelibee (c. 13 72-74). All of these texts were produced between the 1370s and the 1470s (none are extant from the 1200s), and in their form the first five are pragmatic texts, while the last two are narrative-fictional. Interestingly, according to Grassnick, Chaucer's Tak ofMelibee, one of the narrative-fictional texts, is the earliest Furstenspiegel in English. Thus, Chaucer not only wrote the earliest manual on the use of a scientific instrument in English, The Treatise on the Astrolabe, but also the first Mirror of Princes in the vernacular. As G. points out, Tale qfMelibee is one of only two prose elements in the Canterbury Tales (along with Parson's Tale), and it is the one that the poet assigns to his own fictional alter ego, Chaucer-thePUgrim. G. gives special attention to narrative-fictional texts, so that her book is informative and thought provoking not only for students of political science but of literature and history as well. In her fifty-page introduction, G. defines the primary goal of the Furstenspiegel to be the creation of behavioral patterns proper to leadership (32), a function quite different from the mirroring of existing behavior that the word Furstenspiegel seems to imply. Quoting Pierre Bourdieu in English, she writes: Symbolic power is a power to construct reality (29) ; in fact, G. identifies her methodological position as borrowed from Bourdieu's Handlungstheorie (Praktische Vernunft. Zur Theorie des Handelns [Frankfurt a. M.: 1998]) and acknowledges her use of his central concepts of Feld, Kapital, Sozialer Raum, and Habitus [pattern of behavior - 18]. In her Literaturverzeichnis [Works Cited], sixteen entries are by Bourdieu. Within the political and literary fields of the Middle Ages, therefore, G. recognizes that the image of an ideal leader may be as much a construction of the texts as a critique of any prevailing system or specific leader. Her second chapter provides a brief history of the medieval Furstenspiegel During the Middle Ages theorists generally drew their models of kingship from Old and New Testament traditions rather than from those of classical antiquity, although the Secretum Secretorum [Secret of Secrets], the Letter to Alexander the Great by the Pseudo- Aristotle, was very influential and often translated. It was St. Augustine who interpreted the Bible as the first mirror, and that interpretation prevailed as other texts became secondary mirrors of archetypal and exemplary models of behavior. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Furstenspiegel followed this Augustinian textual tradition in the construction of ideal leader images. Grassnick's third chapter contains a separate section on each of the seven Furstenspiegel that her book treats. order of her discussion is not strictly chronological: the narrative-fictional texts (Gower's and Chaucer's) are grouped last because they offer the expanded possibilities of meaning that fiction permits. …

Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book In Covert Operations, Karma Lochrie brings the categories and cultural meanings of secrecy in the Middle Ages out into the open. Isolating five broad areas-confession, women's gossip, medieval science and medicine, marriage and the law, and sodomitic discourse-Lochrie examines various types of secrecy and the literary texts in which they are played out. She reads texts as central to Middle English studies as the Parson's Tale, the Miller's Tale, the Secretum Secretorum, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well as a broad range of less familiar works, such as a gynecological treatise, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and a little known fifteenth-century parody in which gossip and confession become one. As she does so she reveals a great deal about the medieval past-and perhaps just as much about the early development of the concealments that shape the present day.

Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England by Judith Ferster

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER I merely speak to the future ofBakhtin and medieval studies. I truly en­ joyed and was provoked by all of these essays. This volume represents a very rich and powerful combination of theory and credentialed me­ dieval scholarship in an age when both medieval studies and theory are under attack. The proponents of posttheory (neobelletrists, some bodytheorists and queer theorists, neopragmatists and neoapprecia­ tionists) and the long-cavilling, antitheory proponents of conservative medieval studies have a volume in Bakhtin and Medieval Voices that should challenge, irk, and I hope win them. I sincerely believe that this collection of new essays can have the impact of the now infamous 1990 issue of Speculum on the "New Philology." That collection, felicitously cited by Farrell in his smart introduction, provided one of the first workable fusions of theory and traditional, textualism-centered me­ dieval studies. I think that Bakhtin and Medieval Voices does the same. Anybody interested in Bakhtin, theory, the literature of the later Middle Ages, and medieval documentary materials should likewise value this volume. JAMES). PAXSON University of Florida JUDITH FERSTER. Fictions ofAdvice: The Literature and Politics ofCounsel in Late Medieval England. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 216. $32.95. The "Mirror for Princes" has often been thought of as an inert genre, in which complaisant scholar-lackeys, whether under solicitation or not, would give princes advice that it was not too painful for them to hear. Be wise and prudent, listen to faithful advisors, keep your promises­ these and other similarly bromide exhortations are easy to acquiesce in, it would seem, and impinge little on the actual business of governing. It is the great merit ofJudith Ferster's new book that it challenges these easy and self-indulgent assumptions, and makes one think again about some familiar materials. It is not suggested that the writers of these works were brave radicals with original views on the conduct of gov­ ernment policy who were prepared to risk the displeasure of princes, but rather that there was some equilibrium between power and provocation. The prince would do what he would, but he could do it more 256 REVIEWS successfully and for longer ifhe showed himselfreceptive to advice; and there might even develop some consensus about what constituted good government in which other interests than the prince's might be given weight. So Professor Ferster is prepared to find more in these works ofadvice than has usually been recognized in the past. "The mirrors for princes are not only more topical than they appear to be but also more critical ofthe powerful than we might expect" (p. 3). Her book examines a se­ ries ofsuch works in order to historicize them more fully, to show how their use offamiliar materials is often strategically selective, with read­ justments of emphasis that would have had important contemporary relevance and impact. She is interested in "the hermeneutics ofcamou­ flaged texts" (p. 4), in the possibility ofresistance to apparently mono­ lithically powerful regimes, and in arguments against the Foucauldian view that opposition is always co-opted. She is interested in the systems of encoding by which opposition and dissent can be communicated without offending those in power or without provoking repression. Ambiguity is one technique; the use ofhistorical examples, made safe by distance, another. Professor Ferster discusses the kind of political discourse that was possible in late medieval England, when there was no legally enforced censorship (except, it might be noted, ofheretical writings), but when authority exercised the usual pressures and con­ straints upon writers. She emphasizes the growth in the sense that there was a "commonwealth" in which all had a stake and, with the spread of the means ofdisseminating information, the development ofa "politi­ cal class" that might be interested in its nature and welfare. Chapters 3-5 introduce the Secretum Secretorum, the germinal text for the mirrors for princes, and some ofthe versions ofit that found their way into English, including the translation done by James Yonge in 1422 for the earl ofOrmonde. Professor Ferster uncovers some ofthe self-contradictions within the genre-to govern well, the king must be "well-governed...

Addressing ancient authority: Thomas Bradwardine andPrisca Sapientia

Summary Thomas Bradwardine's theological treatise De Causa Dei provides a valuable source for late medieval views on the relationship between science and religion. Bradwardine, who can be seen as belonging in a tradition deriving from Roger Bacon, was strongly impressed by the impotence of human reason in dealing with an apparent infinitude of facts, and accordingly stressed both ancient authority and prophetic revelation as appropriate sources of scientific knowledge. Two particularly important ancient works for him were the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum and De Mundo. The latter led him to an arresting image of the universe as a magnetically driven clock.