I am sometimes asked how I came to spend a career studying medieval literature. In fact, the question comes up so frequently that I early invented a facetious answer designed to disarm the apparent surprise or even disdain that resides within it. “When it became clear that I was going to be a college professor and therefore irrelevant anyway, I determined to do it with as much pizzaz as possible.” In fact, the choice was to some extent arbitrary. The world is infinitely interesting. The wonder of it all is to have lived in a time and place when the larger culture not merely allowed but actually encouraged me in a scholarly vocation. I could have as easily become a historian as a literary scholar. In fact, my view is that literary study when brought to bear on anything written before the day before yesterday is necessarily “historical”. This means that a real literary scholar has to learn a lot of other stuff along the way.
But beyond that, the aesthetic assumptions of the earlier (pre-Romantic) periods of European poetry were crucially different from those of modernity. Alexander Pope (early eighteenth century) famously defined “true wit” (roughly, fine literature) as “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” Originality of thought, and the individual expression of unique poetic consciousness, are in this view supplanted by tradition—what oft was thought. The English theologian and murder mystery writer Dorothy Sayers has an essay with a title that explains the classical idea succinctly: “The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement.” The “statements” of major medieval works require the study of history, philosophy, theology and very often earlier Latin and vernacular poems. I liked the idea of the “whole package”. To begin with, the medium in which literature exists—namely language—is among the most malleable of human institutions, so that the study of early literature necessarily brought with it philological challenges that intrigue me. Shakespeare’s language (around 1600)—classified by language students as modern English—is still a hill too steep for some of today’s undergraduates. Chaucer’s English (around 1400) actually does require a bit of preliminary study. The preparation to read Beowulf (about 1000 or earlier) requires learning an essentially foreign language.
My doctoral dissertation of 1963 was a hybrid literary-art historical essay in which I tried to interpret the moral and philosophical sense of the Romance of the Rose (Roman de la Rose in French) by analyzing the miniature painted illustrations to be found in so many of its surviving medieval manuscripts. There is visual as well as verbal allegory; and I would spend many years studying the language of medieval pictorial iconography. This poem enjoyed huge popularity among aristocratic readers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and exercised a large influence on such writers as Chaucer. It is a very long, and in some ways very difficult poem, the hybrid work of two authors living at different times (Guillaume de Lorris, probably about 1240, and Jean de Meun, closer to 1300). Jean claims to have taken up the unfinished work forty years after Guillaume’s death. The two authors, of whom the latter was by far the more prolific both in lines written and in ideas raised, were of very different temperaments. Guillaume was an elegant Ovidian love poet, Jean a learned university theologian and very much of an ideas man. He could also be distinctly ribald. The allegory that Guillaume began is that of a Lover in pursuit of a hard-to-get lady represented as a rose. In the continuation by the randy theologian the much sought-after rose is more clearly a part of a woman, if you follow—an emendation that considerably changes the tone of the work. I have not followed the philological track back to its origins. “Deflowering” (defloratio) is already in the moral vocabulary of early Christian writers.
Many flowers are lovely, but the rose is definitively the flower of love, romantic and sexual. Its classic simple statement, perhaps, is the most famous line penned by sweet Robbie Burns “O, my Luve is like a red, red rose…” Is it even possible to imagine the beloved object as hollyhock or petunia? For many poets, it was possible to imagine the “floral lady” in quite extraordinary ways.
One early poet who typically illustrates his Christian humanism in a union of the classical and the biblical is John Milton. In the fourth book of Paradise Lost, which is a fancy retelling of the biblical story of the “Fall of Man,” Milton describes the arrival of Satan on earth, an earth so stunning in its prelapsarian beauty that the poet can but tell us of about twenty beautiful places which--though of the greatest beauty described by the classical poets—cannot approach it. This is a catalogue of places that the site of our primal fall was not. And the first is this:
Not that faire field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flours
Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis
Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world… (P.L. 4, 268-72)
The geography of the brilliant image of Proserpina (Persephone in the Greek sources) as both flower gatherer and flower builds on a passage in Ovid. Enna is a hilltop town in the center of Sicily and therefore, in a sense, the very center of the Mediterranean. The infernal ravisher has also the names of Pluto and Hades, but Milton follows Dante (Purgatorio 28) in calling him Dis (Ditis in the medieval Italian, formed from the Latin genitive.) Dante’s own treatment of the story is stamped with the startling originality of the Tuscan genius: what oft was thought, but…Ceres, goddess of agriculture and mother of Proserpina, searched fruitlessly for her stolen daughter. The Romantic poet Shelley thought Dante’s remaking of Proserpina as Matelda so extraordinary that he translated it in a fine poem of his own.*
“Where have all the flowers gone?” crooned Pete Seeger in the ‘50s of my early youth. I think they were actually still there, certainly in song titles. Mainly red roses, and mainly Hibernian, as in “Rose of Tralee,” and “My Wild Irish Rose” and Robbie Burns. But we also have bluebells, daisies, and buttercups. And not all the roses are red. Mature readers of the blog may well remember the brilliant fist-fight scene in the film version of “Giant” (1956), one of the best of Edna Ferber’s terrific novels, in which the Rock Hudson character is beaten to a pulp by the racist proprietor of a two-bit diner as the broken Wurlitzer plays “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Theme music, you might say.
The "six degrees of separation” rule supposedly governing human beings is cumbersome when compared with the association of ideas, for which the number is usually one. One of the great joys of literary study is the caprice by which one thing leads to another, potentially endlessly. We may doubt that George Stevens, the director of “Giant,” was ever aware of the Latin poet Claudian; but here he comes. Claudian, I mean. Around the year 400 Claudian wrote an epyllion (baby epic) of a thousand lines or so entitled De raptu Proserpinae (The Rape of Prosperpina). I find it slightly tough sledding, but it seems to have been well-known to John Ruskin, the Victorian sage, art critic, architectural historian, early eco-warrior, and incidental medievalist. Most of his books are slightly odd in a geniusy sort of way. Modern Painters (1843-60) and The Stones of Venice (1851-) are the most famous monuments of his polemical erudition, and both works of permanent literary merit. He was himself a painter and draftsman of ability. The first book of his I ever bought was an old and battered copy of his essay on wildflowers: Proserpina. Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air Was Yet Pure Among the Alps and in the Scotland and England which my Father Knew (1879). We may note in passing that Ruskin, and not he alone, thought the earth’s atmosphere was already poisoned by 1860 or so. He hated the smoke-bellowing railroad engines with a passion. Eventually I bought up, one at a time and all for a song, most of the matched set to which this edition of Proserpina belonged. That volume reproduced dozens of his own exquisite botanical drawings, but it is necessarily of a larger format than the others in the set, and hence too tall for the “Ruskin shelf”. I have just conducted an exhausting (but obviously not exhaustive) search for it amid some of the double- and triple stacked shelves of my library. I had no better luck in finding Proserpina than did her mother. I know it must still be in this house somewhere, but where? A conundrum for the heirs. Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
* “Matelda Gathering Flowers”: from the Purgatorio of Dante
