I. Parchment's Momentum. Ms Phillipps 700, Scribal Culture, and the Temporality of Medieval Manuscripts
In 2008, I came into contact with an hitherto unknown and unstudied Bible codex written around 1525 in the important Benedictine monastery of St. Maximin in Trier (Germany). Richly illuminated and beautifully produced, this codex shows a striking and unique, virtually unparalled feature: although clearly intended for liturgical use, the codex also contains a *secular* Latin historiographical text, the Historia Excidii Sancti Maximini. This fascinating history - so far known to scholars only from later manuscripts and under the misleading title "Chronicon abbatiae Maximinae" (ed. E. Muench, 1829) -- focuses on events between 1512 and 1531, and deals with the politics of the emperors Maximilian I. and Charles V.; the rise and doctrines of Martin Luther; communitarian radicals in Trier; and, last but not least, the ongoing attempts by the archbishop and city of Trier to bring the monastery under their control by physical force and political stratagems. Yet why does a liturgical codex contain a history of worldly affairs? Is there a connection between this unusual form of transmission of historical knowledge to other liturgical manuscripts in St. Maximin? Why was this very same history, as it turns out, used as evidence in a lawsuit filed by the monastery against the bishop and city of Trier at around 1525? And how does this text relate to two (equally unstudied) ‘counterhistories’ I discovered recently – one written by the renowned humanist Latomus, the other by an official of the city of Trier?
II. Subjects of Desire: Readings, Histories, Genealogies of Medieval Latin Love Poetry
Much has been written about medieval “courtly love” – and the many approaches on Troubadour lyrics, German Minnesang, or the Italian Dolce Stil Nuovo (and its continuators) may even be understood as indexing the past and present state(s) of medieval literary criticism in general. Since the invention of the dubious term “courtly love” by Gaston Paris in 1883, scholars have complicated this concept in a way that it has virtually disappeared, making room for a plethora of scholarly approaches that often raise key issues of medieval literary culture. There are formalist approaches (Dragonetti) and studies on the absence – or emergence – of literary subjectivity in these lyrics (Zumthor vs Kay). Scholars have analyzed the relation between gender and genre (Gaunt); uncovered the fictional spaces created through a poetics of self-reflexivity (Strohschneider, Müller); and continue to be interested in the complex relationship between love lyrics and the structure, hopes or discontents of social groups at the court (Koehler, now Kay). Recent trends include a return to the manuscript evidence in terms of material philology, or a new interest in the ways how (long neglected) religious motifs pervade a seemingly secular genre (Gaunt). Should a comparative history of medieval literary criticism ever be written, it could be written as a narrative on how modern scholars since the 19th century have approached this genre: a genre which in consequence has become one of the best-known (and perpetually fascinating) genres within the field of medieval studies.
And yet there remains a blind spot. For at roughly the same time when members of a feudal elite and professional performers composed their love lyrics in Occitan, Middle High German, or Italian, another – much more improbable – group of authors emerged: authors who were neither powerful lords nor vassals in search of support nor singers based at a court; and authors who did not revert to their mother tongue for their verse on desire. They were men of the church – bishops and abbots, archdeacons, schoolmasters, students, and clerks; and they used Latin – the very language usually reserved for the spheres of religion and spirituality, law, theology, philosophy, or education.
Compared to the (quantitatively and qualitatively) abundant scholarly literature on vernacular love lyrics, this rich and challenging corpus has received far less attention from medievalists. Of course, basic aspects of the genre have been discussed by a number of older – mostly descriptive – studies, among them Brinkmann’s catalogue of shared topoi (1927), Lenzen’s study of patterns of transmission (1962) and Offermann’s study on the use of Ovid; there are also a number of more recent editions, studies and articles on single poems or authors, most notably the important work by Carsten Wollin and Daniel Traill. However, only three English monographs have so far appeared of which two (Dronke, Bond) discuss the genre in strong conceptual connection with vernacular love poetry; only one study – Moser’s A Cosmos of Desire (2005) – deals exclusively with Latin poems, albeit with a strong emphasis on poems transmitted in manuscripts produced in England.
Moser’s synthesis also presents what could be called the conceptual koine by which scholars have approached this genre during the last three decades. This koine revolves around a concept of secularity (see esp. Bond) or, more specifically, around the notion of an “Ovidian subculture” created through the many poems on love and desire (Bond, Moser): poets from the first phase create an imaginary sphere of literary role-play by which they try to escape from their Christian identities or align themselves with feudal elites (Bond); poets from the second phase write their poetry as part of a pervasive “Neoplatonist mentality” that evolves around a new “poetic and philosophical sense of the self, a persona of sorts [or] ironic mix of self-confidence and anxiety, which tried to incorporate eros and learning, busyness and contemplations […] classic and modern, into its broadly based sense of what an educated man should be.” (Moser, 9)
My planned project builds on these approaches, yet nevertheless aims at an alternative history of medieval Latin love poetry. Altogether, there are five conceptual areas – or shifts – by which I hope to enrich, and complicate, our understanding of an understudied genre.
First, I will carefully, and with the greatest possible philological precision, re-evaluate the ways how these poems relate to the specific institutional, political, intellectual, and discursive contexts in which they were produced. Building on my previous work on the “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” (Bezner 2005), my analysis will not be based on anachronistic notions as “secularity” or “Neoplatonism”, and equally avoid the fiction of a uniform clerical culture. Medieval love poetry, I shall argue, can be understood as a plural literary site in which learned authors develop and negotiate very specific, and diverse agendas revolving around the fraught issue of clerical desire: authors of the first phase, I shall show, use their love poetry to deal with the concepts, rhetoric and politics of the Church reform; authors of the second phase develop anthropologies of the human soul which need to be related to the increasing attempts to regulate the master-student community at the emerging university of Paris.
Building on previous work, I will, secondly, analyze the construction of selfhood and interiority in love poems not in terms of an emphatic “consciousness of the self” (Morris, Benton, Moser) than as moment of those normative practices, political agendas, and institutional dynamics that created the inner space of interiority.
Third, I will complicate our understanding of the ‘classicism’ behind medieval Latin love poetry. Overall, I argue, we need to focus less on the imitation of motives and langup speaker or the pluralism of personae in Horace), in order to understand how these authors – who were rarely interested in classicism eo ipso – used their classical models to formulate their own aesthetic and intellectual agenda; at least in the case of authors as Marbod of Rennes this interaction was meant as a rewriting, or even replacement, of their classical models. I will also show that Horace played a much greater role than often acknowledged: a role that was, as in the case of Ovid, deeply connected to the circulating commentaries and glosses on this author.
Fourth I will argue for a new understanding of the – difficult – intersections between Latin and vernacular love poetry. These intersections, I believe, cannot be understood in terms of an emphatic concept of courtly love (as in Dronke, Walsh, Jaeger). Rather, moments of courtly love in Latin poems, if present, need to be complicated in similar ways, as scholars have complicated the concept for vernacular texts.
And finally, I shall follow recent trends in material philology, and integrate the manuscript contexts of medieval Latin love poetry into my account: a perspective which, as in the case of vernacular love lyrics, provides important, yet rarely studied insights into audience, readership and conceptions of genre.
Altogether, my project could be described as a critical genealogy of medieval Latin love poetry – as an attempt to demonstrate how Latin poems on desire, through their aesthetics, engaged with, naturalized, opposed, or negotiated key problems, concepts, interests, and tensions of, and within, an emerging clerical culture. By this, I not only hope to stimulate the scholarly discussion in my own field, medieval Latin philology; but also to alert medievalists from disciplines as history, German, or French to a genre that deserves more attention than it normally receives.
And yet there remains a blind spot. For at roughly the same time when members of a feudal elite and professional performers composed their love lyrics in Occitan, Middle High German, or Italian, another – much more improbable – group of authors emerged: authors who were neither powerful lords nor vassals in search of support nor singers based at a court; and authors who did not revert to their mother tongue for their verse on desire. They were men of the church – bishops and abbots, archdeacons, schoolmasters, students, and clerks; and they used Latin – the very language usually reserved for the spheres of religion and spirituality, law, theology, philosophy, or education.
Compared to the (quantitatively and qualitatively) abundant scholarly literature on vernacular love lyrics, this rich and challenging corpus has received far less attention from medievalists. Of course, basic aspects of the genre have been discussed by a number of older – mostly descriptive – studies, among them Brinkmann’s catalogue of shared topoi (1927), Lenzen’s study of patterns of transmission (1962) and Offermann’s study on the use of Ovid; there are also a number of more recent editions, studies and articles on single poems or authors, most notably the important work by Carsten Wollin and Daniel Traill. However, only three English monographs have so far appeared of which two (Dronke, Bond) discuss the genre in strong conceptual connection with vernacular love poetry; only one study – Moser’s A Cosmos of Desire (2005) – deals exclusively with Latin poems, albeit with a strong emphasis on poems transmitted in manuscripts produced in England.
Moser’s synthesis also presents what could be called the conceptual koine by which scholars have approached this genre during the last three decades. This koine revolves around a concept of secularity (see esp. Bond) or, more specifically, around the notion of an “Ovidian subculture” created through the many poems on love and desire (Bond, Moser): poets from the first phase create an imaginary sphere of literary role-play by which they try to escape from their Christian identities or align themselves with feudal elites (Bond); poets from the second phase write their poetry as part of a pervasive “Neoplatonist mentality” that evolves around a new “poetic and philosophical sense of the self, a persona of sorts [or] ironic mix of self-confidence and anxiety, which tried to incorporate eros and learning, busyness and contemplations […] classic and modern, into its broadly based sense of what an educated man should be.” (Moser, 9)
My planned project builds on these approaches, yet nevertheless aims at an alternative history of medieval Latin love poetry. Altogether, there are five conceptual areas – or shifts – by which I hope to enrich, and complicate, our understanding of an understudied genre.
First, I will carefully, and with the greatest possible philological precision, re-evaluate the ways how these poems relate to the specific institutional, political, intellectual, and discursive contexts in which they were produced. Building on my previous work on the “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” (Bezner 2005), my analysis will not be based on anachronistic notions as “secularity” or “Neoplatonism”, and equally avoid the fiction of a uniform clerical culture. Medieval love poetry, I shall argue, can be understood as a plural literary site in which learned authors develop and negotiate very specific, and diverse agendas revolving around the fraught issue of clerical desire: authors of the first phase, I shall show, use their love poetry to deal with the concepts, rhetoric and politics of the Church reform; authors of the second phase develop anthropologies of the human soul which need to be related to the increasing attempts to regulate the master-student community at the emerging university of Paris.
Building on previous work, I will, secondly, analyze the construction of selfhood and interiority in love poems not in terms of an emphatic “consciousness of the self” (Morris, Benton, Moser) than as moment of those normative practices, political agendas, and institutional dynamics that created the inner space of interiority.
Third, I will complicate our understanding of the ‘classicism’ behind medieval Latin love poetry. Overall, I argue, we need to focus less on the imitation of motives and langup speaker or the pluralism of personae in Horace), in order to understand how these authors – who were rarely interested in classicism eo ipso – used their classical models to formulate their own aesthetic and intellectual agenda; at least in the case of authors as Marbod of Rennes this interaction was meant as a rewriting, or even replacement, of their classical models. I will also show that Horace played a much greater role than often acknowledged: a role that was, as in the case of Ovid, deeply connected to the circulating commentaries and glosses on this author.
Fourth I will argue for a new understanding of the – difficult – intersections between Latin and vernacular love poetry. These intersections, I believe, cannot be understood in terms of an emphatic concept of courtly love (as in Dronke, Walsh, Jaeger). Rather, moments of courtly love in Latin poems, if present, need to be complicated in similar ways, as scholars have complicated the concept for vernacular texts.
And finally, I shall follow recent trends in material philology, and integrate the manuscript contexts of medieval Latin love poetry into my account: a perspective which, as in the case of vernacular love lyrics, provides important, yet rarely studied insights into audience, readership and conceptions of genre.
Altogether, my project could be described as a critical genealogy of medieval Latin love poetry – as an attempt to demonstrate how Latin poems on desire, through their aesthetics, engaged with, naturalized, opposed, or negotiated key problems, concepts, interests, and tensions of, and within, an emerging clerical culture. By this, I not only hope to stimulate the scholarly discussion in my own field, medieval Latin philology; but also to alert medievalists from disciplines as history, German, or French to a genre that deserves more attention than it normally receives.
III. Miscellanea in Progress: Talks, Articles, Reviews etc.
- Talk on simultaneity in medieval Latin narrative; talk on "Entangled Subjects. Saying I in medieval Latin Love Lyrics" (see above under II)
- Articles on medieval Latin Love Lyrics (see above under II): "Body and Soul. Carmen Buranum 62, Constantine the African, and the Aesthetics of Medieval Latin Love Poetry"; "Opaque Souls. On the Poetics of Peter of Blois"; "The Bishop's Desire: Marbod of Rennes, Revisited"
- "Quintilian in the High Middle Ages", for: Oxford Handbook of Quintilian, ed. van der Poel/Murphy
- Entries for diverse dictionaries on "The Renaissance"; "Lorenzo Valla"; "Leonardo Bruni"; "Poggio Bracciolini"
- Reviews for Germanistik, Renaissance Quarterly, Speculum
- Further up the road: "Hoelderlin's Middle Ages" (with M. Franz, Tuebingen)