Camões--and a Little Chaucer--at Harvard

   

 

 

    

 Watch out, Geoff.  I've got my eye on you.

 

 If I declare our visit to the Camões Conference at Harvard a great success—and I do—the credit for our personal comfort goes primarily to Leah and Brian, our generous hosts, who with what appeared to be ease balanced busy professional careers and the demands of two adorable children with the care and feeding of a couple of octogenarians.  On the academic side, on the Harvard campus, the treatment was likewise most welcoming, and the intellectual feast quite rich.  Many of the principal scholars in this field, including the Portuguese ones, were there; others made presentations via Zoom.  Rita Marnoto came from the University of Coimbra, the ancient academy at which Camões himself must have acquired some large part of his enormous erudition.  It is rather as though Davy Crocket had picked up a Yale doctorate on his way to the Alamo.  She gave the introductory talk, a bibliographical tour de force concerning the poem’s first edition(s) of 1572.  Around the edges there were pleasant group meals full of friendly and informative talk; Joan sneaked off for half a day at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and offered a report on some of the marvels viewed.

My belief concerning the European Renaissance, a belief by no means widely accepted by my colleagues, is that in most essentials it continued in the philosophical and theological traces of high medieval culture.  Historians are more interested in change than in stasis, and there of course appeared in the sixteenth century major stylistic changes and intellectual innovations for us to talk about.  My talk, indeed, in part concerned possible “medieval” relationships between Camões and Dante.  Such relevance as the digressive comments about the Middle Ages in this paragraph might possibly have  concern my welcome of two unexpected fourteenth-century Chaucerian interventions into our sixteenth-century Camonian event.

At the Houghton Library, where some of Harvard’s fabulous bibliographic treasures are stored, experts had mounted a small collection of first and other editions of the Lusiads.  The Harvard library is among the richest in the world in this as in so many other subjects.  But there is hanging in an elegant room not far from the exhibition space what is probably the most famous, and possibly authentic , portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer.  I had seen a hundred reproductions of it, but never it.  The Librarian of the Houghton, knowing that I had taught Chaucer for many years, took me aside for an unscheduled private viewing.  It was a very memorable kindness.

                         The Houghton Rare Book Library, Harvard University

A second way the Middle Ages intruded into our very Renaissance conference was via the front page of the New York Times, which reported that two major Chaucer experts had discovered new evidence concerning a mysterious episode in the poet’s life.  Though Chaucer’s life records, when sufficiently spread out and annotated, occupy a pretty thick book, there is a great deal we do not know about him, including practically anything that might shed light upon his “personality”.  One intriguing document, however, has garnered a great deal of attention and much speculation.  It is a legal affidavit attesting that a woman named Cecily Champagne absolves Chaucer of any charge of raptus against him.  This document has sometimes been used by feminist scholars and others to impute patriarchalism, misogyny, and other unpleasant medieval attitudes to the father of English poetry.  What is new in the Chaucer scholars’ discovery is that Cecily and Geoffrey were allied in a legal action denying the charge.  Any scrap of evidence about Chaucer is a major discovery, and the discoverers of this one merit high praise.  But there is no particular illumination of Chaucer’s character in it.  Anybody with access to the Du Cange dictionary of medieval Latin would know that it is quite unlikely that raptus in the context of the original document means forcible sexual possession.  Hardly more likely does it mean that he secretly married her.  No form of “kidnapping” or “false imprisonment” or other coercion is likely.  Secondly, and without the slightest ambiguity, what the document says is that Chaucer did not commit raptus, whatever raptus means.  Only in places like Park Slope has inveigling away somebody’s cleaning lady with an offer she cannot refuse risen to the level of a crime.  Somewhat strangely, one of the discoverers of the supplementary document was quick to add that nothing in this episode undermines certain previous scholarship concerning it.  This is a little like saying that nothing in Copernicus undermines anything in Ptolemy.  That is one of the current stylistic differences between scholarship in the humanities and scholarship in the natural sciences in America.  The study of past ages can be very rewarding and indeed instructive.  But the past is a series of unique ages, each with its own inherited cultural patterns each with at least some cultural innovations.  It cannot be true that “to understand everything is to pardon everything.”  Still it does little to divvy up the past into convenient but inadequate categories for flagellation among our own current moral and political certainties, many of which would seem novel if even comprehensible to our not too distant ancestors.

Traveling by train worked out very well.  It took about five hours.  Flying would not have required less, though it would have involved a great deal more difficult walking and the general hassle of security lines.  There are far worse fates than to sit in a comfortable, roomy seat with a good book for a few hours. 

Still I was once again struck, as I so often am, by the disparities between the private and the public in our country.  Everything I saw on the Harvard campus was elegant, functional, imposing, inviting.  It was clean.  It was tidy.  You might never guess that the institution’s endowment is less than sixty billion dollars.  Boston South rail station, where we arrived and whence we departed, is a civic disgrace.  The area from which the trains arrive and from which they depart has the air of a long-abandoned steel mill.  The vibe of the interior waiting room, where I was able to buy a pint bottle of soda water for $3.84, is decayed inelegance.  And though the Amtrak train did get us to Trenton, and on time… How are you going to keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?  The distance between Marseilles and Paris is greater than that from Trenton to Boston.  The TGV (very fast train) covers the distance in three hours and twenty-seven minutes, and you can safely place your bottle of soda water on the little-fold down table without fear that it will be bounced into your lap within the first quarter mile.  Of course my weekend thoughts were full of other cities: Lisbon on the Tagus River, and others I shall never see, Mombasa, Malinde, Goa.  Forget the train stations for the moment.   In this country I have actually been paid good money to read, teach, love, talk, and argue about old books that I love with a never-failing succession of inspiring young people.  And hang out at Camões conferences for down time.  What a privilege.  What an honor!

A Daring Journey

Vasco da Gama (maybe)
 

        In 1497 Vasco da Gama set out from Lisbon with the mission of finding a maritime route to what I shall call actual India—Columbus having just a few years earlier convinced himself and a good deal of the European learned world that he had reached India in the Caribbean.  He spent a long time on the trip, which included numerous European “firsts”, or at least “first recordeds”.   He navigated the treacherous waters off the Horn of Africa, the continent’s southern tip.  He spent a certain amount of time investigating some of the lands on both the western and eastern flanks of the continent.  These landings were the origins of Portugal’s African empire in Angola and Mozambique, among other places.  Most important of all he did make it to “real” India, where he raised a good deal of hell and scouted out the the possibilities of a  Portuguese colonial presence destined, in Goa, to create one of the teeming multicultural cities of the Renaissance.  In economic and cultural terms he challenged the Muslim maritime monopoly in the Indian Ocean and “opened up” the East for the lucrative commerce of Europeans.  Vasco’s voyage was epoch-making and epic in its statistics,  taking roughly three hundred days at sea, travelling roughly twenty-four thousand miles, and losing most of his crew (including his brother) before landing once again on Portuguese land in 1499.  Fifty years or more later—we really are not sure when--a somewhat mysterious countryman of Vasco’s, an erudite Latinist, a soldier, an adventurer, a disappointed lover, but above all a magnificent poet wrote (in an elevated form of the Portuguese vernacular) an epic poem about the voyage.

The poet’s name was Luis de Camões.  His poem is called the Lusiadas (Lusiads in English), which means roughly “the adventures of the sons of Lusus”) as Æneid means roughly “the adventures of Æneas.”  The connection with Virgil’s Æneid is crucial.  Camões lived, breathed, and presumably bathed in the poems of Virgil, which he appears to have more or less memorized.  Lusus is a highly iffy mythological character, probably the son of the god Bacchus, and the legendary founder of the nation of Portugal, the Latin name of which is Lusitania.  Most people have heard of Lusitania, or at least the Lusitania,  for a somber reason.  It was the sinking of a British passenger liner of that name by the Germans in 1915 that was the immediate “cause” of America’s entry into the First World War.  But if you think any poem that requires this much explanation just to understand its name is a pretty fancy poem, you are right.  It is.  It is also very long.  Nonetheless it did find a publisher, who brought it out in Lisbon in 1572.  The rest is history, and as historians love anniversaries, it has not gone unnoticed that 2022 is the 450^th anniversary of publication.  Under these circumstances, a group of enterprising young scholars at Harvard decided to put together an academic conference to celebrate the occasion.

                                                        Camões (maybe)

 

As Chaucer’s Friar said after listening to the Wife of Bath’s extensive remarks introducing the actual story she is preparing to tell, “This is a long preamble to a tale!”  That is not the sole resemblance between the Wife’s introductory remarks and my own.  In both instances the prologues are more interesting than the tales themselves.  Nonetheless, I must continue with my own tale.  I am quite interested in Camões, and I published a short book about one of his poems a few years ago.  The proposed “Camões at Harvard” conference was a chance to take a shot at his greatest work, the epic Lusiads.  So I sent in a proposal to the organizers, and more or less forgot about it.

 

During the time the idea for the conference was being hatched, the pandemic was raging.  Covid has had a major dispiriting effect on all of education, including higher education.  Many institutions felt they had to abandon “in person” teaching in favor of various more or less unsatisfactory on-line techniques.  The Age of Zoom had arrived.  Even in normal times conventions, conferences, and group meetings were known as possible spreaders of infectious diseases.  You will recall the infamous Legionnaires Disease, so named because of its first identification in relation to a meeting of the American Legion.  I once left a scholarly conference sick as a dog.  During the height of Covid many long-scheduled meetings were cancelled or indefinitely postponed.  But with the reasonable hope that things were improving, the planners of the Camões conference came up with an innovative plan.  The conference would be “hybrid”, part on-line, part in person, depending on circumstances and the preferences of individual participants at the time, which is—now.

 

The best part of academic meetings, from my personal perspective, has always been the informal conversations among participants.  Having signed up, I was willing to give my talk by Zoom from my home library but without much enthusiasm.  I was greatly relieved when Covid conditions improved sufficiently to move forward.  What sealed the deal for us was an invitation from a delightful friend on the Harvard faculty, once a graduate student at Princeton and now a rising scholarly star, to stay for a couple of nights with her and her husband in their house in Cambridge.  So later today Joan and I will be at the Trenton station to catch an Amtrak train scheduled to be in Boston South Station in the late afternoon.  This is a big deal for us.  We have become timid fuddy-duddies when it comes to serious travel.  I doubt that any of Vasco da Gama’s crew could have felt more edgy.  I am hoping to travel little more than five hundred miles in the semi-luxury of “distanced” business class, spend no more than three days doing so, and lose none of my crew.  But you never know.  It is embarrassing to be timorous in anticipation of a short and comfortable trip to hear about the memorials of one of the longer and most dangerous trips documented in world history; but travel mishaps do occur.  The extraordinary maritime empire of tiny Portugal spread across the world.  One of the established genres of the nation’s rich Renaissance literature is the history of maritime disasters.  To be fair, the Portuguese had so many disasters only because they always had so many ships at sea undertaking so many ambitious and dangerous voyages.  Wooden ships but iron men.  So I’m looking forward especially to hearing a scholar give a talk entitled: “The Lusiads: Flipside of 15^th Century Maritime Disaster Literature.”  I find the word flipside in the title particularly intriguing, and possibly disconcerting.