I The Earth Is Made to Speak

A great part of the Consolatio philosophiae is, of course, devoted to demonstrating through logical argument the truths of the Neoplatonic view of the universe and man’s place in it. The problems and challenges this logical structure has given translators are the subject of F. Anne Payne’s work on the Old English version of the Consolatio, which shows how King Alfred attempted to find in personal wisdom and the resources of Old English syntax a non-logical alternative to the chain of propositions.2 But syllogistic reasoning is only a part—I would say a neat half—of the means by which Boethius tries to persuade us. In the course of the Consolatio, principally in the verse passages, Boethius resorts to mythological exempla in the careers of Ulysses, Orpheus, Hercules, and their satellites; to rhetorical allusion to such natural entities as the winds (Auster, Boreas, Corus) and the rivers (Euripus, Hermus, Indus), and to many other personifications and places from Tartarus to Thule. In addition, Boethius calls on human history—almost exclusively pre-Christian—for some forty illustrations from the lives of real persons from Aemilius Paulus to Zeno the Eleatic. The medieval French translators were fascinated by these allusions, and very few of them took King Alfred’s course of substituting a familiar name like Weland the Smith for a stranger like Fabricius. Instead, they tended to resort to narrative dilation of the brief Boethian notices, with the result that we are provided with a rich vein of
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evidence from which to mine non-discursive medieval interpretations of the late classical argument that is their matrix.

One place to begin is with a consideration of what these allusions and exempla meant to Boethius. And because most of them occur in the verses, a prior question should be what the use of verse itself meant to Boethius. Both H. F. Stewart and Pierre Courcelle, to take an older and a recent authority, concur in observing that, except for the basic notion of a medley of prose and verse, Boethius owed little to the earlier uses of satura by Menippus of Gadara (fl. 60 B.C.) or Terentius Varro, the younger Seneca (in his Apocolacyntosis Claudii), Petronius Arbiter, or even Martianus Capella, who wrote but a hundred years before him. Stewart observes that whereas Boethius’s forerunners

had heedlessly jumbled prose and verse, falling into the latter sometimes in the very middle of a sentence, he is careful to balance nicely the one against the other, choosing the moment with consummate art for the insertion of a song which shall carry on, and give emphasis to, the thoughts on which he has already exercised the full force of his pedestrian rhetoric and logical argument.

The regular appearance of poetry in the midst of a prose that (to us at least) is always difficult and sometimes dry, was doubtless intended to serve a double purpose: in the first place, to relieve the strain on the writer, without sensibly lowering the tone of the dialogue; and secondly, to refresh the reader with a constant and agreeable variety.3

Courcelle has this to say about what Boethius does and does not take from satura: “Enfin Boèce a pris à la satire l’usage d’introduire des sentences ou proverbes grecs, à titre d’ornements, dans sa prose. Au reste, Boèce doit peu au genre de la satire; car c’est lui-même qui a rendu cette alternance de prose et de vers régulière; et il refuse une loi du genre, qui admettait le cynisme et l’obscénité.”4 Later I shall discuss the medieval practice in relation to this last law, but here I may conclude this glance at authority by calling attention to the remark of Richard H. Green, a careful modern translator of the Consolatio, that Boethius seems to concur in the medieval estimate of poetry as one of the lower arts ancillary to dialectic when he alludes to the use of verse as rest and refreshment. But against this view of the basically ornamental function of the verses—ostensibly Boethius’s own
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view—Green opposes the “profound syntheses of the philosophical implications” and the “astonishing poetic concentration and power” of such verses as Book I, meter 5, and III, meter 9.5

The near-contradiction in these various comments is that their authors see the verses as secondary in importance to the prose discussion at the same time as they would claim for them an artistic status at least equal with that of the prose. This is, in fact, the view which is also implicit in the prefatory comments by the thirteenth-century author of the earliest French translation of the Consolatio, who noted that Boethius “fait vint e set manieres de metres que par la dolçor e la diversité del chant de musique conforte la dolor de la persone dolente. La plus grant partie del livre est faite par prose, quar Boece ne fu menor de Tulle en prose, ne Vergile en metre.”6 And on the same subject, the version printed by Colard Mansion in 1477 is only more academic and more lyrical: “Cestui acteur en forme poeticque a ensuivi Marcian l’eureux, lequel avoit ainsi par metre et par prose escript le livre des Nopces Philologie, comme Alain en son livre qu’il fist de la Complainte de Nature a ensuivi Boece. Maintenant nostre acteur monstre et fait chansons metrifiéez melodieuses pour soy souevement deliciter, maintenant il soubzjoinct proses pesantes et sentencieuses pour soy informer.”

A higher intellectual status for Boethius’s verses and their rhetorical matter may reasonably be claimed, however, than any ventured by the authors cited above. The emphasis on refreshment as the function of Boethius’s poetry, for example, arises only if we focus on those verses in which Philosophy herself is the speaker. Of course all the verse and prose is directed at our, the audience’s, delight and instruction, but in terms of the dramatic framework of the Consolatio not all of the poems have the same audience. Four of them are sung by the narrating Boethius, and when we look at these verses we can better see the range of non-discursive, and non-refreshing, uses of poetry. Book I, meter 1, is a complaint made up of intimate personal details—“Intempestiui funduntur uertice cani / Et tremit effeto corpore laxa cutis” (11-12)—to which are added sententious observations—“Qui cecidit, stabili non erat ille gradu” (22). But these verses lack rational explanation of the connection between the narrator’s prematurely grey hair and his longstanding insecurity. Meter 3 is an epic
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simile, comparing Boethius’s drying his eyes to the work of one wind in sweeping away the overcast brought by another and revealing “uibratus lumine Phoebus” (9). Meter 5 is, of course, the great prayer offered by Boethius, “O stelliferi conditor orbis,” which consists of directly addressed petitions, abstract questions, moral judgments, and classical allusions. Finally, Book V, meter 3, is an extension of Boethius’s claim in the preceding prose that divine foreknowledge and free human will are incompatible, but the verse is syntactically distinguished from the prose by a rich use of rhetorical questions—ten in thirty lines. Additionally, one poem, Book II, meter 2, is delivered by Philosophy in the persona of Fortune and in the subjunctive mood on the topic of man’s insatiable greed should even an ideal largess prevail. In these five varieties of discourse—and there are others—we can see some of the ways in which verses clearly not intended to refresh anyone are linguistically and functionally distinguished from the prose. In function the prose is restricted to rational dialectic, with the form limited to catechism, syllogism, and dialogue, none of which are to be found in the verses. The verses might be said, then, to constitute modes of knowing and discoursing alternative to those central to speculative philosophy, and this is a far cry from diverting decoration or even what Sir Philip Sidney called “a medicine of cherries.”

Boethius himself tells us (Book V, prose 4) that rational argument is only an intermediate stage in the levels of awareness from brute sensation to an intelligence of divine order. These levels constitute a spatial metaphor, but Boethius also uses a temporal metaphor that can be related to his use of poetic mythology. This temporal metaphor arises from his allegiance to the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence: “Quod quisque discit immemor recordatur” (Book III, meter 11, line 16). Remembering the truth is not the same as discovering it by syllogistic argument, and recalling the human past may be a temporal analogue to the spatial ascent to intelligence. Recollections of the pagan gods, heroes, and great men who form the myth of the past constitute a succession of flashbacks in human time which collectively mirror truth as it rests in eternity, where all events are perceived by the Boethian God as simultaneous. Although we cannot foresee the future, the more we remember of the past, the more like God we can become. This reminiscence has a practical use too. In the archetypical behavior of a Nero or a Hercules can be glimpsed patterns that organize the perplexing disorder that involves men here and now, and these poetic glimpses take their legitimate place in alternation with the
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conclusions at which reason arrives. History and myth are as true, then, as a syllogism is true, but their vehicle is more properly verse just as the most proper vehicle of the syllogism is prose. And the proper linguistic expression of the ultimate intelligence of timeless, spaceless divine order may be neither of these, but rather the laughter of a Troilus in the eighth sphere.

Although Boethius’s prose and verse are linguistically distinguished to some extent as two modes of knowing and discoursing, the notion of reminiscence also shares something with that of abstract reasoning. Just as the conclusion to a syllogism is implicit in its premises, just so the ultimate object of each chain of reminiscence is already contained in the memory. The function of allusion is to set the memory going, turning over its riches until the desired truth is reclaimed. A highly developed poetry of allusion is essentially non-narrative inasmuch as the narrative links are left to be supplied by the memories and imaginations of all those initiated into the rhetorical arcana. Not surprisingly, the men who translate such a poetry for an uninitiated audience will be moved to reconstruct the suppressed narrative links, on the score that such details will be unfamiliar to this new audience. The following discussion will focus on two aspects of this task: how the translators went about filling in the gaps, and what their narrative additions tell us about the medieval interpretation of Boethian allusions.

When we turn from the late classical milieu that governed Boethian rhetoric to the medieval French versions of the Consolatio, we find that the diversity of the translators’ responses to the allusions mirrors much of the range of other late medieval usage of the past—a range which I take to extend from the incidental adducing of antique example to the enthusiastic and encyclopedic amassing of genuine and spurious classical lore for assimilation into such works as Raoul Lefevre’s Le Recueil des hystoires de Troyes (1464). We shall see, for example, that certain of the translators worked in a near vacuum, and a dark one at that. Here, Jean de Meun’s refusal to extend the letter of the Boethian text must be contrasted with the simple ignorance of myth shown by the authors of the Wallonian prose version and, to a lesser extent, the first mixed version. Others, such as Bonaventura da Demena and Pierre de Paris, aggressively amplified their translations on the basis of homely religious or secular materials and fearless misinterpretations. In contrast with all these, such translators as the author of the Burgundian prose version and the glossator of the revised mixed version will be seen to have bound their work closely to the explications of myth and history available in the great Latin commentaries on the
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Consolatio—although their borrowings differ considerably as they are made early or late.

Still other translators, Renaut de Louhans and the Anonymous of Meun, for example, bear interesting though differing resemblances to the commentators described by Beryl Smalley as classicizers of the English mendicant sort.7 Finally, the work of Renaut and his revisors manifests both the effects of new principles of narrative experimentation for its own sake and later reactions to that freedom as adaptors retain, alter, and reject aspects of their predecessors’ elaborations. But the chief lesson of the translations is always to be sought in their tendency to medievalize the Consolatio in popular ways unavailable to the Latin commentators and to do so in a straightforward fashion uncomplicated by the ulterior purposes of higher art forms. Additionally, it will be seen that the illustrators of manuscripts of the translations reflected in their own medium quite parallel medievalizing tendencies.

At this point in the discussion I want to show that this basic division between stories, whether true or false, on the one hand and allegories on the other is paralleled in the iconography associated with manuscripts of the translations, and I want to show a couple of the unexpected consequences of the translators’ use of fable pure. The next chapter will take up the translators’ use of history, while Chapter III will explore in detail what the commentators and translators made of the term “integument.”

The evidence on Boethian iconography is drawn from the extensive discussion in Pierre Courcelle’s study,13 although I have seen in the original MSS all of the illustrations I mention. Courcelle’s remarks need to be supplemented with the information that fully half of his illustrations are drawn from texts of translations of the Consolatio. He nowhere mentions this, in keeping with his exclusion of any consideration of vernacular versions from his commentary. This happily gives me the opportunity to make what I think is an important connection between the art of the translators and that of the miniaturists.

Medieval manuscript illustrations of the Consolatio can be usefully divided into those which depict narrative episodes and those which present static allegorical tableaux, with the former quite outnumbering the latter. For this discussion I shall limit myself to examples from two MSS representing the extremes in this distinction. MS 12, Trinity Hall Library, Cambridge, is a well-known, thickly illustrated volume whose curiosities
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have been noticed not only by Courcelle but by M. R. James, Astrik Gabriel, and myself.14 The artist, working hastily but from excellent models according to James, sketched over 200 action-filled little scenes which convert even metaphors into narratives. Thus, on the mention of those philosophic sects which opposed Boethius’s beloved Neoplatonism, we see a miniature of several brutes ripping the garments of a stately lady, and Boethius’s defense of Paulinus from the Palatinae canes shows real dogs leaping at the Consul (fig. 1). But the artist’s conception of Ulysses’ sojourn on Circe’s isle is probably most useful for the contrast I am making. Folio 60 of the Cambridge MS shows three scenes from the narrative (fig. 2). On the left are three swine munching acorns—the transmuted companions of Ulysses. Above right Mercury is shown handing to Ulysses the protective herb moly, and below we see Ulysses, now educated, vigorously refusing Circe’s offer of food and drink. These scenes are realistic, the latter two seeming to be glimpsed through open windows.

With these representations let us compare some of the elegant miniatures in MS B. N. fr. 809. These beautiful half-page paintings are quite different in character from the sketches in the Trinity Hall MS. In the scene illustrating the Ulysses episode, we have clearly emblematic allegory (fig. 3).15 Centered, before a background of trees and rocks, stands Philosophy. On either hand is a group of figures facing front. To the left stand several men, a woman, and Boethius, who modestly points to the crew on the right, a collection of beastheaded figures with human bodies and dress. Below, phylacteries bear the mysterious legends “Providence” and “Predestination,” which Courcelle argues belong to a miniature at the head of Book IV. The scene, of course, illustrates no action from the appropriate meter, but rather a moral lesson implicit in it.

I will glance at just one other of the several illustrations in this MS worth calling attention to for their contrast with more narrative-based art. The interpretation of Fortune and her wheel is divided into two tableaux, and that on the left showing Philosophy consoling Boethius in prison is traditional (fig. 4).16 At the doorway Fortune, with a double visage, calls

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Figure 1. Boethius protects Paulinus from the palatini canes. (Cambridge, Trinity Hall MS 12, fol. 7v)

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Figure 2. Ulysses and Circe. (Cambridge, Trinity Hall MS 12, fol. 60)

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Figure 3. Circe and the transformed crew of Ulysses. (B. N. MS fr. 809, fol. 67)

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Figure 4. Fortune’s wheel and her goods. (B. N. MS fr. 809, fol. 40)

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Figure 5. Another wheel of fortune. (Cambridge, Trinity Hall MS 12, fol. 3)

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Figure 6. The Ascent of Boethius. (Rouen, Bibl. Mun. MS 3045, fol. 94)

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on Boece to observe the wheel on the right. She extends her arms and thus links the two scenes. But we do not see the wheel turning and precipitating the powerful into adversity—as in the whirling scene in the Cambridge MS (fig. 5). Three personages are seated on chairs at the quarters of the wheel; a fourth sits between the upright supports of the wheel. The king is at the top, but on the left is a bourgeois holding a full purse, and on the right a young man beholds himself in a mirror. Below, a knight grasps a lance. The wheel thus shows the personified goods of Fortune: power, riches, beauty, and glory. The artist has combined in a static scene the two Boethian themes of the wheel and the gifts of Fortune.

The two approaches that we find in these MSS to making the Boethian message graphic are related to the sorts of translations which carry that message. The Cambridge MS is a text of the Benedictine’s revision of Renaut de Louhans’s verse translation. This version is, in fact, the least allegorized of those medieval French translations of the Consolatio that elaborate the text. In contrast to most of the other versions, the only moral it attaches to the Ulysses episode is that brief one written by Boethius himself. MS B. N. fr. 809, on the other hand, is a curious composite of Jean de Meun’s prosing of Boethius’s verses coupled with the glossed proses drawn from the revised mixed version. The moralizing glosses to the Ulysses episode, taken from William of Conches, run to over fifty lines in the MSS. There are thus parallels to be found in these MSS between the narrative techniques of the translators and the methods of illustrators as they opt for literal or allegorical paths to Boethian allusions.

II King on a Wheel

The medieval french translators of Boethius regularly elaborated, occasionally at great length, the historical citations scattered throughout the Consolatio. Preliminary to any discussion of what they did with these notices, however, it is necessary to draw a distinction between Boethius’s use of history as incidental fact and history as exemplary illustration. Normally, such glosses as the translators supply to merely factual notices are brief and informative, such as Jean de Meun’s gloss on Theodoric’s coemption, which, by scribal elaboration, became 150 words in Chaucer’s final version.

In the course of outlining his personally costly services to the state in Book I, prose 4:44-9, Boethius mentions his efforts to unfix food prices during a famine: “Cum acerbae famis tempore grauis atque inexplicabilis indicta coemptio profligatura inopia Campaniam prouinciam uideretur, certamen aduersum praefectum praetorii communis commodi ratione suscepi, rege cognoscente contendi et ne coemptio exigeretur, euici.” The MSS of Jean de Meun’s translation and Chaucer’s version exhibit successive expansions of this original text and its associated glosses. Part of the reason for the expansion is the common feeling that the reader needs more information, but equally important for our understanding of how medieval texts grow is the fact that Jean carried the odd word coemptio directly into his version. The most primitive state of his text reads:

Comme coemption, c’est a dire communs achéz griéz et non mie desploiables, commandéz et establiz seur le peuple ou temps de la fain
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eigre fust veüz a degaster et a tormenter par souffrete et par mesaise champaigne et province, je reçui l’estrif encontre le provost de pretoire par la raison du commun profit. Je, le roi cognoissant, estrivé et vainqui que la coempcion ne fust requise ne ne passast.

[Dedeck-Héry, ed., pp. 177-78]

Only a short time after this first state appeared, a long gloss was added after the word comme: “le roi Theodoric qui par un chier temps avoit ses greniers plains de bles commanda que cist blé fust chierement vendu et fist crier ban que nus n’achetast blé fors que le sien jusques a tant qu’il eust tout vendu, je Boece alai contre cest establissement et le vainqui, le roi meïsmes sachant et cognoissant.” This is in part a gloss and in part another translation of the last lines of the original Latin paragraph. Still later, two MSS revise the gloss on coemption, giving after peuple: “Comme au temps de l’aigre fain fust establie ou criee grieve et male a espondre coemption, la quele si comme l’en veoit bien devoit trop domagier et tormenter la province de Champagne, je pris l’estrif encontre le prevost du pretoire et le roy sachant, je estrivoi.”

The effect of this new reading is to correct and refine the language of the preceding version. For example, it corrects the reading of Campaniam prouinciam and replaces the overstrong degaster with the more general domagier. Using this text of Jean’s version, Chaucer added a bit of information derived from the following gloss by Nicholas Trevet: “Quicumque modium frumenti emeret, daret regi quintam partem.” Chaucer’s version, swollen by all of these currents, reads:

Glosa. Whan that Theodoric, the kyng of Gothes, in a dere yeer, hadde his garneeris ful of corn, and comaundede that no man schulde byen no coorn till his corn were soold, and that at a grevous dere prys, Boece withstood that ordenaunce and overcom it, knowynge al this the kyng himselve. Textus. Whan it was in the sowre hungry tyme, ther was establissed or cryed grevous an unplitable coempcioun, that men seyen wel it shulde gretly tormenten and endamagen al the provynce of Campayne, I took stryf ayens the provost of the pretorie for commune profit; and, the kyng knowynge of it, Y overcom it, so that the coempcioun ne was nat axid ne took effect. Coempcioun is to seyn comune achat or beyinge togidre, that were establissed upon the people by swich a manere imposicioun, as whoso boughte a busschel corn, he most yyve the kynge the fyfte part.

[Robinson, ed., p. 324]

Thirty Latin words have been drawn into 150 words in the vernacular, and many medieval hands have helped in the pulling. Incidentally, the glossator
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of the revised mixed version brought it all up to date by comparing it with the famous gabelle on salt established in 1341.

It was to this sort of gloss that Jean de Meun and his revisors limited themselves in their rare excursions beyond the Boethian letter. But even this variety of annotation can produce arresting effects, as does the gloss in the revised mixed version which cites some modern instances of worthies whom death has confronted violently: “Note ci des nouveaux exemples de la cheitiveté ou misere des roys de nostre temps, comme du roy Edouart d’Angleterre, qui fu mort par les siens; item du roy Andry . . . en nostre temps La Broce, Marrigny, Guillaume Guette, Pierre Remy, Jordain de Lille, Henri Capel, Olivier de Clicon, Le comte d’Eu, connestable de France”1—all of whom were killed around the second quarter of the fourteenth century.

By far the most impressive example of this sort of background history appears in the lengthy prologue of the Anonymous of Meun in which he devotes over 500 lines to recreating the sixth-century milieu in which Boethius was condemned to death. Resorting to chapter 11, Book 17, of Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale, the Anonymous gleaned details about the Gotyens and their land beyond the Danubes and the Roman emperor Valent’s struggles with the Wisegos and the Estregos. Woven also into this account are notices of the realms of Espaigne, Galice, Aufrique, and Lombardie, and the personalities of Theodorique, Oudonacre, Pape Jehans, and Boethius’s father-in-law, Synacus. In all, it is a noteworthy account to have appeared in a vernacular tongue.

Of greater moment for the present discussion, however, are those historical examples which Boethius himself cites as relevant to the illustration of his philosophical message. In these, the translators found available for their elucidations such figures as the tyrant Dionysius the Elder, Romulus, Regulus, Fabricius, Brutus, Cato, Nero, Seneca, and others to whom Boethius alluded, sometimes obliquely, as he conjured up instances which gave structure and perspective to the terror of his own situation.

While the translators’ glosses include such curious legends as that of Zeno’s biting the ear of Phalaris, for the purposes of a discussion of the ways in which medieval authors reinterpreted Boethian ideas, the story of
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Croesus, king of Lydia (ca. 560-546) is the most useful. It is so partly because almost all of the translators—as well as Jean de Meun, Boccaccio, and Chaucer—essayed it. The reasons for its popularity are easy to see. Boethius’s Latin account is brief: “Nesciebas Croesum regem Lydorum Cyro paulo ante formidabilem mox deinde miserandum rogi flammis traditum misso caelitus imbre defensum?” (Book II, prose 2:34-6). But it is extremely important, because it is bracketed with explicit statements about the operation of Fortune and the nature of tragedy. Indeed, it is probably because of the association of this definition of tragedy with the story of Croesus, that Chaucer used both story and definition to conclude his Monk’s Tale of fallen notables.

In the statements immediately preceding the example of Croesus, Philosophy speaks in the persona of Fortune and justifies her ways to man. Of interest are both the pattern and motive of her actions. The pattern is simple polarity, and the motive is conformity with the lawful operation of non-human nature: “Licet anno terrae uultum nunc floribus frugibusque redimire, nunc nimbis frigoribusque confundere. Ius est mari nunc . . .” (23-5). The morphological parallelism of frugibusque with frigoribusque emphasizes the polarity and rightness of the seasons as frost follows upon fruit. And so Fortune deals with man, with an added touch of pleasure in the process: “Haec nostra uis est, hunc continuum ludum ludimus; rotam uolubili orbe uersamus, infima summis summa infimis mutare gaudemus” (28-31). Here again the syntactical symmetry recalls the simple inverse relation of the two states—weal and woe—of human fortune and the irrelevance of human qualities of will and intention to these sublunary processes.

Tragedy consists in the outcry against this situation. Following the Croesus example, Fortune asks: “Quid tragoediarum clamor aliud deflet nisi indiscreto ictu fortunam felicia regna uertentem?” (38-40). The implication here is that Fortune is so indiscriminate that she will regularly and mechanically throw down the happy and, it is important to add, the guiltless. For Boethius it is tragic to expect any other treatment, and humans are free at least to control their expectations. But for some medieval authors, as we shall see, it is tragic to have deserved such treatment. When Chaucer translated this passage for the conclusion of the Monk’s Tale, he made a significant change by characterizing the victims as “regnes that ben prowde.” Between this simple textual alteration and a great Boethian tragedy like Troilus and Criseyde lies the bulk of variations
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played upon the pattern and motive of Fortune’s actions and their tragic consequences to be found in the medieval translations of the Consolatio. But before we begin to discriminate among these accounts it will be of use to have as a touchstone a fuller and more authoritative narration of the story of Croesus than Boethius supplies.

Herodotus divides the major portion of his first Book between accounts of the careers of Croesus and Cyrus. Two aspects of his treatment are of interest here. While no very clear picture emerges of a central force behind Croesus’s downfall, that fall has been considerably managed in a literary way to provide a rich historical narrative. Herodotus locates the ultimate cause of Croesus’s suffering neither in his own character nor, as Boethius does, in a dispassionate, non-rational principle of change. But neither does he let the facts fall where they may.

The main details that characterize his treatment of the story are these. Croesus is seen early demanding of Solon, the wise man of Athens, some recognition of his particularly blest estate (1.29-33) and getting only the reply that no one can be judged fortunate until he is dead.2 We see his first reversal in the fates of his sons: one is born deaf and dumb; the other, Atys, is inadvertently slain by Adrastus. Croesus’s interpretation of the oracles leads him to befriend the Spartans and undertake a war with Cyrus, which he loses. Two important scenes follow. The first is his deliverance from the pyre—the event central to all accounts from Boethius’s aside to the twenty-five stanzas in John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes. And the second is his confrontation of the Delphic oracle. In this latter scene, Croesus chides the priestess for having let the gods deceive him by implying that he could attack the Persians successfully. In the priestess’s withering reply we can discern some of the forces that entrapped Croesus: a relentless determinism stemming from an offence some five generations back, the favorable but insufficient intervention of the gods in delaying the fall of Sardis and rescuing Croesus from the pyre, and, finally, in his failure to probe the original oracle, Croesus’s recognition of his own hamartia. In the self-recognition of this flaw, of course, we can see one of the links that Herodotus makes between history and tragedy.

The scene at the pyre is important because of its centrality to the medieval accounts of Croesus. These, however, differ markedly from that
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of Herodotus (1.86), who relates that Cyrus sent Croesus to the flames because, having heard that he was a god-fearing man, Cyrus wanted to see whether any god would save him. It then develops that Cyrus and his interpreters, on listening to Croesus reminisce about Solon, repent of the decision to burn him and order the fire quenched. When Cyrus’s servants cannot do so, Croesus cries to Apollo and is rewarded with a shower that not only extinguishes the blaze but persuades Cyrus that Croesus is “a good man and one beloved of the gods.” Such remarks, coupled with Herodotus’s observations about the many pious offerings made by Croesus around Greece, and the humanizing details about his unfortunate sons, serve to obscure further the roles played in his downfall by the gods and his own guilt.

In spite of this uncertainty about the major force driving Croesus down, it is clear that Herodotus contrived a literary narrative about the process that has discernible tragic overtones. He achieved these by a variety of means, two of which call for notice here. First, Herodotus enforces the inevitability of Croesus’s fall by making repeated glances forward to it in digressions. This constant foreshadowing contributes a solid sense of inevitability to the history that undercuts the equivocation of the explicit interpretations. The second literary strategy, and the one which at least one French translator rediscovered, is the establishment of symmetry between the careers of Croesus and Cyrus. This is achieved on a variety of levels: for example, the parallels to be seen in both kings’ misinterpretations of oracles, dreams, and portents. The relation between the two kings that is of chief significance, however, is Cyrus’s acceptance of the counsel of Croesus, now his slave, to attack the Massagetae, a decision that leads to Cyrus’s death in defeat. In the speech in which he gives this counsel, his last in the book, Croesus unwittingly—and Herodotus intentionally—engages in irony and, furthermore, employs what came to be in the Middle Ages the chief emblem of tragedy:

“Sire,” said he, “you have ere how heard from me that since Zeus has given me to you I will to the best of my power turn aside whatever mischance I see threatening your house. And disaster has been my teacher. Now if you deem yourself and the army that you lead to be immortal, it is not for me to give you advice; but if you know that you and those whom you rule are but men, then I must first teach you this: men’s fortunes are on a wheel (kuklos), which in its turning suffers not the same man to prosper forever. Then, if that be true, I am
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 39 ]] 
not of that same mind on the business in hand as these your other counsellors.”3

With such heavily dramatic devices at work in his narration, Herodotus could afford to be somewhat vague in his strictly historical explanations of the fates of Croesus and Cyrus. He had tragedy working for his history, and, in their own ways, so did the medieval translators of Boethius.

The translators’ glosses and adaptations of the story of Croesus range from the 150-word and 200-word accounts in the earliest prose version and the revised mixed version, through the 75 lines of Renaut de Louhans’s verse, to the 240 lines composed by the Anonymous of Meun. Such a succession of variations on a theme allows us to explore the changes rung by medieval authors on the relation of a personified Fortune to individual men’s fates. In the hope of demonstrating how the interpolated narratives put the medieval stamp on the Boethian conceptions of Fortune and tragedy, I shall also appeal to treatments of the story of Croesus in other vernacular works contemporary with the French translations.

All of the translators render Boethius’s explicit statements on Fortune and tragedy that bracket the example of Croesus, and, indeed, there is some interesting matter in their treatments. Renaut de Louhans, for example, extends the genre of tragedy to encompass some familiar medieval works:

Regarde bien la tragedie

Quant l’on fait une bonne feste

Que menestriers chantent de geste

Soit de Rolent et d’Olivier,

Soit de Charloy ou soit d’Ogier.4

But it is in their narration of the story of Croesus itself that the translators, now transformed into adaptors, reveal most accurately the actual positions of their concepts of Fortune, history, and tragedy around the Boethian nucleus. There were many possibilities. In his sketch of the medieval setting of Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale,5 R. W. Babcock sorted the documents into three “traditions.” The Roman, leading from Ovid and Hyginus to Boccaccio by way of Boethius and Isidore of Seville, develops
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 40 ]] 
the theme of fickle Fortune. The Clerical, comprising the moralistic exploitation of “falls” by such authors as Hugh of St. Victor, Innocent III, Jacques de Vitry, and John of Bromyard, extended after Chaucer into the works of Laurent de Premierfait and John Lydgate. And finally, the non-Clerical, or narrative, tradition which includes Simon de Freine’s Roman de Philosophie, the Speculum Stultorum, and the Roman de la Rose is the tradition that, along with the Roman, stands behind Chaucer. Rather than relate the translators’ various versions of Croesus to such traditions, I think it is aesthetically more illuminating to probe the ways in which those translators who were interested in what we would call narrative structure and irony exploited the possibilities inherent in the notion of tragedy, while those more inclined toward characterization and psychology played with Fortuna.

The gloss appended to the earliest French translation of the Consolatio is derived, like most of the expansions on mythological themes in that work, not, as Pierre Courcelle implies, from the commentary of William of Conches, but from the Vatican Mythographies.6 In this gloss we can see in germ one direction medieval authors would take in interpreting the story of Croesus: “Cirus prist Cresum, e por ce que il l’aveit molt grevé s’il comanda aardeir, il eschapa, defenduz par une grant pluie, e recovra son honor. Aprés se gloirefieit de sa beneurance. Salon, li uns de set sages d’Athenes, dist a lui, ‘Nul home se deit glorefier en cest siecle, com il ne sache quel chose li jors de demain apareille a lui’.”7 The gloss goes on to relate the interpretation given to a dream of Croesus’s by his daughter, Phania, a creature invented by the ninth-century commentator Remigius of Auxerre.8 Two things are notable in the gloss. First, it implies that Croesus’s self-glorification is connected with his fall. After Solon’s speech, Croesus as a person disappears, perhaps because his pride cost him his humanity. Things simply happen to his body: “Il sereit pris de rechef del cel meesmes enemi, e sereit levez en croiz. E Jupiter l’oindreit, ce est la pluie le moillereit, e li soleil le sechereit, e en tel manier avint.” The second
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 41 ]] 
thing to note is the beginnings of a dramatic treatment of the tale in the direct address given to Solon.

The interpretation of this legend by William of Conches as it appears in the gloss added to the revised mixed version is more complex than that derived from the Vatican Mythographies and suggests a contest between God and the Devil within the person of Croesus. The king is deceived by Apollo and rescued by “the Divine Will,” but both allow him to exercise to the full his capacity for human frailty. Croesus’s fatal sin of pride is explicit.

Cestui Cressus, quant il se devoit combatre contre Cyrus, requist au dieu Apolin savoir qu’il lui avendroit, si lui respondit par amphibolie doublement comme fait le Dÿable ainsi, “Cressus perdet alim transgressus maxima regna.” Si entendi en une maniere qu’il descomvoit le royaume Cyrus, et il n’avint pas ainsi, mais fut vaincu par Cyrus. Si fut prins et mené au feu pour ardoir et puis fut delivré par la volunté divine. Si avint qu’il s’en commença a glorifier et enorgueillir.9

One MS of the revised mixed version—B. M. Harley 4330—notes (fol. 30) that the example of Croesus appears in the Roman de la Rose, and it is worth turning to Jean de Meun’s account not only because it appears in time between the interpretations of William of Conches and Renaut de Louhans but also because it is a useful illustration of the qualifications that actual narrative usages place on the abstract statements of scholastics. Whereas lines 4837-4974 of the Roman give a substantially Boethian view of the work of Fortune, being in fact a near-translation of the Consolatio’s Book II, prose 8, Jean de Meun’s version of the story of Croesus is complicated and modified by the overriding themes and methods of the Roman de la Rose.

In the course of her lengthy interpretation of the puzzling dream of Croesus, Phania paints a Boethian miniature of Fortuna:

Si destruit ele maint preudome,

Qu’el ne prise pas une pome

Tricherie ne leiauté,

Ne vil estat, ne reiauté;

Anceis s’en jeue a la pelote,

Come pucele nice e sote,

E giete a grant desordenance

Richece, eneur e reverence.10

Two things contort the motions of this witless tennis player, however, and they are the love theme of the Roman and the psychologizing methods of its authors. The latter part of Phania’s address to her hapless father consists of her praise for Gentillece, personified as the daughter of Fortune and the only being for whom the goddess cares. Now, it is possible that true gentility, stoutly maintained, might produce an insouciance toward Fortune’s gifts somewhat analogous to Boethian stoicism, but the picture of so fated a man as Croesus, to whom the gods have vouchsafed visions of his doom, absorbing instruction on fine manners from a winsome girl is absurd. Gentilece is, of course, a wholly necessary aspect of Jean’s theme of love, as much as procreation, which frustrates the universal prospect of death. But news of the power of courtesy, as Jean knows, arrives too late for Croesus.

Also in league against a dogmatic use of Fortune as an instrument to explain men’s fates is the artful psychology of the dramatic contest between Phania and her father over their rival interpretations of his dream:

“Fille,” fait il, “de courtesie

Ne de sen ne m’aprenez mie;

Plus en sai que vous ne savez,

Qui si chastié m’en avez.

E quant par vostre fol respons

M’avez mon songe ainsinc espons,

Servi m’avez de granz mençonges;

Car sachiez que cist nobles songes,

Ou fausse glose voulez metre,

Deit estre entenduz a la letre;

E je meïsmes l’i entens,

Si con nous le verrons en tens.

Onc ausinc noble vision

N’ot si vil esposicion.

Le deu, sachiez, a mei vendront,

E le servise me rendront

Qu’il m’ont par cet songe tramis,

Tant est chascuns d’aus mes amis,

Car bien l’ai pieça deservi.”

[lines 6601-19]

Thus Croesus is finely realized as a prideful pedant and his daughter as a devotee of fin amour, but these satirical portraits, filled as they are with humanizing detail, leave little room for the simple mechanical motions of Fortune’s old wheel, or even her new racquet. Both symbols are too crude for their jobs.

The interpretation of the story of Croesus given by the Dominican friar Renaut de Louhans is significantly different from the others considered in this chapter because of its clear insistence on the direct role of the prosopopoeia of Fortune in men’s affairs and because of its clever exploitation of a serious misreading of the Latin text. From the very first word of his account, Renaut emphasizes the posturing presence of Dame Fortune—“Je croy bien,” she says, summoning our attention to Croesus’s high estate before his humiliating fall, his never-empty purse, his riches and his valor. The possibility of stressing Fortune’s personal role had always been there, because Philosophy narrates this entire passage in her persona, but Renaut is the only writer to make her so insistently present in the episode. We see this as she points to her repeated interventions in Croesus’s life, without always giving her reasons for them. At first she simply says, “I completely changed my manner,” when the once-great Croesus was captured by the king of Persia. She is silent also on who sent the life-saving rain, which just came. But after Croesus, who ought to have been humble, began to strut and raised himself by vainglory and failed to think on her, she exclaims, “Fis je la moe / Car aprés je tournay ma roe.”

At this point Renaut brings in the portentous dream and its interpretation by the unnamed daughter of Croesus, whom Renaut takes some care to characterize. She is frightened, appropriately, both by her father and by the contents of his vision, and she in no way resembles the sententious love-struck girl depicted by Jean de Meun:

Quant elle ouÿ la vision

Si fut en grant affliction,

Car vit la fin que fut amere,

Si ne l’ose dire a son pere

Tant que son pere l’en blasma.

Lors en ceste guise parla,

“Pere, voulez vous que je die

Ce que vo songe signifie?”11

And so it came to pass that in a little while the king of Persia seized him and hanged him from a gibbet. So much for Croesus, but for Renaut the story is not over. Not for nothing is Cyrus never named in this account, for Renaut seems to have assumed that the king of Persia who destroyed Croesus was the same King Perses whom Boethius mentions in a line following his notice of Croesus and before his remarks on tragedy:
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 44 ]] 
“Num te praeterit Paulum Persi regis a se capti calamitatibus pias inpendisse lacrimas?” (Book II, prose 2:36-8). By connecting the tragedy of this King Perses with that of Croesus—they were in fact separated in history by some 380 years—Renaut creates a symmetry and poetic justice in the acts of Fortune that remind us of the perfect Judge behind her, directing her choices if not her fickle manner.

The effect of Renaut’s innovation is clear. The continuous presence of the humanized Fortuna, who manipulates the guilty Croesus like a puppet, makes less mechanical the action of the Boethian personification. And, even though Croesus does not make proper use of his free will, the existence of a human will free to contemn the world is manifested here in the untemptable stoic Paulus, who cared nothing for palaces and treasures and the other gifts of Fortune and consequently defeated King Perses and wept for him too.

Finally, to round off this discussion of Renaut with a glance back at Jean de Meun, we may note that one manuscript of Renaut’s version of the Consolatio also contains a copy of the Roman de la Rose written by the same scribe (MS B. N. fr. 812), and that that scribe added to Renaut’s version a passage inspired by Jean’s account of Croesus. Following the line “Que Jupiter vous moullera,” this scribe wrote:

“Beau pere,” ce dit Phanie,

Sa fille qui moult fu corrucie,

“Se votre vie n’amendez,

Par autre serez amendez.”

Ce dit Cressus, “Ja n’avendra,

Ne ja mon cueur ne le croira

Que si tres noble vision

Ait si malle exposicion.”

[fol. 14v]

This angry, pithy girl is just the sort of hybrid that the manuscript process of compilation engenders, bearing the likeness of neither of the answerable parents.

In the first chapter I characterized the Dominican Renaut and the Anonymous of Meun as classicizers of the kind recognized by Beryl Smalley as existing among the English friars. And the Anonymous may himself have been a member of the preaching order. Where Renaut made extensive use of the classicizing commentaries of his fellow Dominican Nicholas Trevet, the Anonymous employed as fully the works of another
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 45 ]] 
Dominican, Vincent of Beauvais. Although Renaut and the Anonymous made vernacular verse translations of a secular work and not Latin prose commentaries on sacred ones, they do share with Smalley’s English academic mendicants an undisguised and often enthusiastic interest in the literature, history, and mythology of classical antiquity for their own sake.12 This interest is amply demonstrated in the Anonymous’s treatment of the story of Croesus, which at the same time exhibits his ability to shape Vincent’s encyclopedic details into the sort of tragedy that would easily have found a place among the hundred in the cell of Chaucer’s Monk and, oddly enough, might also have drawn the approval of his Knight for a reason which we shall see.

But first his flaws. The thoroughness of the Anonymous’s scholarship makes him something of a slave to circumstantial detail. Thus, when he comes upon Vincent’s description of the rivers crossed by Cyrus, he cannot resist culling details about the dimensions—breadths and depths—of the streams, and citing second-hand Vincent’s authorities: Martianus, Lucan, and Solinus.13 He goes on to mention the eels which in those streams reach a prodigious size—which he gives, “around thirty feet in length,” and so on and on. Such details, of course, soon exhaust their value in establishing verisimilitude.

When we turn to the account of Croesus proper, we see at once both how concerned the Anonymous is with our grasping the lesson of the exemplum and the fact that he perceives a real structure in the narrative:

Et pour Fortune miex entendre

Voel mon parler plus loing estendre

De ces .ii. roys qui jadis furent

Qui par long temps contens eürent.14

The long contest between the two sovereigns is to be his subject then, but first he devotes some 150 lines to describing Cyrus’s conquest of Babylon—with a digression on its dimensions. It is only after the Anonymous begins to narrate Belshazzar’s feast that we see the parallel being drawn between Daniel’s interpreting the ominous handwriting on the wall for the impious Balthasar and the many later portents that Croesus ignores at his
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 46 ]] 
peril. No sooner has Daniel expounded the third word than Cyrus puts the guests to flight. But the miraculous speech that springs to the lips of Croesus’s once-dumb son, Athis, restrains Cyrus from vengeance:

“Cyrus, Fortune tresmuee,

Com tu vois, et mi et mon pere

De prosperité en misere,

T’argüe pour nous et te somme,

Que tu te congnoisces pour homme

A qui il poët mesavenir,

Si com tu nous vois avenir.

Dont raisons te doit esmouvoir

A pitet de nos mauls avoir.”

[fol. 20]

Having ignored the example of his friend Balthasar who failed to heed a miraculous warning, Croesus now disregards the very marvel that moved the relentless Cyrus to his only merciful act. Not only is Croesus pictured here as unfeeling, he is also subsequently shown in the guise of a political rebel:

Mais aprés celle grace belle

Fist Cresus traïson nouvelle

Contre Cyrus, et esmut guerre

Pour fouler son regne et sa terre.

[fol. 20]

The opaque and implacable Cyrus seizes him again, and once more Fortune spares him, this time from the pyre. Thus having been delivered for the third time by a clearly providential intervention, Croesus, though unpsychologized and seen only from the outside, is now clearly labelled a bad one (“li malvais Cresus”) and hardly worth the last great effort that God himself, according to Phania, expends in trying to alert him to the inevitable plunge that must follow so many unmerited deliverances:

“Biaus peres, pechiés que t’enpence

D’orguel et d’outrecuiderie

Te doit briefment tollir la vie,

Pour ce que tu n’as remembrance

Jadis de ta double mescance;

Comment Cyrus t’a desconfit,

Et des graces que Diex te fit

Sauver ta vie et le tien rendre.

Et si voels de nouvel emprendre

 [[ Print Edition Page No. 47 ]] 

Contre Cyrus et rebeller,

Dont Diex t’a volut reveler

L’issue qui t’en avenra.”

[fol. 20v]

From these excerpts I think it can be seen that the Anonymous has hit, however amateurishly, upon one of the richest resources of Boethian tragedy, namely, the revelation through structure, through cumulative repetitions, of the terrible swings of weal and woe to which human life is subject, regardless of personal merit. The Croesus of the Anonymous of Meun starts out more blind than evil, and his inability to spell out the meaning of repeated signs is reminiscent of the hapless Palamon and Arcite of the Knight’s Tale who are introduced barely breathing in a heap of corpses and whose subsequent lives go “Now up, now doun, as boket in a welle.”

The translation of the Consolatio printed by Colard Mansion in 1477 simply represents Croesus as a lucky man: “Mais tantost aprés il, miserable, pris par le dict Cyrus, appliqué aux flambes embrasées, fut defendu de Fortune, luy favorisant par une pluie envoyée du ciel.”15 The account is useful, however, for it reminds us that the story is told by “Jehan Bocace en son livre du Dechiet des nobles hommes.” And it is worth turning to a vernacular version of that work for a final contrast with the medieval portrait by the Anonymous of Meun. Boccaccio’s De Casibus was translated into French by Laurent de Premierfait and from this version into English by John Lydgate.16 In this latter state we can see a medley of details from the encyclopedic tradition on which the Anonymous of Meun drew.

Lydgate begins his Book II with assurances that it is not Fortune who gives men the fall but vicious living, and that Fortune has no dominion over princes governed by reason. But as he relates successively the stories of Balthasar and Daniel, the “accidental” slaying of Croesus’s son, the defeat of Balthasar and Croesus by Cyrus—with the anecdote of the providential rain—and, finally, the slaughter of Cyrus and his army by Queen Tomyris, it becomes apparent that the role of Croesus is reduced to that of an innocent and uncomprehending victim of the tyrant Cyrus, who is the one ultimately to suffer divine retribution. In Croesus’s initial prosperity,
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 48 ]] 
“nothyng stood amys,” and his son’s death is “causeles,” whereas, “Cruel Cirus with malice was atteynt,” and:

whan he gan presumptiousli entende

To robbe and reue folk thoruh his pillage,

God & Fortune made hym to descende

Ful sodenli from his roial stage.

[lines 3746-9]

Thus, while Lydgate’s treatment of Cyrus is consistent with medieval views on the purposeful nature of suffering, the interpretation of the fate of Croesus, in structural emphasis similar to that by the Anonymous of Meun, tastes something like its Boethian original. Croesus in no way deserves either his joy or woe, which succeed one another like clockwork: “ther is non so gret a sorwe, / But it must cese, outher eue or morwe.” Lydgate also teaches Fortune’s lesson through symmetry—here the balance is between the fates of Croesus and Cyrus—but his monkish mind is also fixed on the delicious pathos of Croesus’s condition and the thrilling rightness of Cyrus’s dismemberment by a woman. Where Boethian man had free will, not to change his fate so much as ignore it, Lydgate’s pathetic Croesus is not only helpless but also too innocent, an ironic hero whose suffering is merely interesting.

Neither Jean de Meun nor Renaut shows much interest in making tragedy of Croesus’s situation, but they do adopt Fortune. Both seem to accept that aspect of the newer medieval tradition, sketched by John L. Grigsby,17 that makes Fortune the bailiff of God, the judge who probes our culpability. Jean and, to a lesser extent, Renaut turn their art to characterizing the guilty parties. But both authors also extend their psychologizing to the persona of Fortune and use the notion of play fixed on her (ludum ludimus) to humanize and satirize her as a “pucele, nice et sote” or the fickle busybody who cries “En jouer est toute ma joye!” So exclusively are human minds the interest of Jean de Meun’s account, and so diminished are plot events, that he never names Cyrus and resorts to impersonal constructions in indicating what actually happens to Croesus: “Puis le mist l’en au col la bride.”

In other words, the replacement of Boethius’s simple, irrational agency by a medieval one, highly motivated by notions of Justice, has resulted in
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 49 ]] 
increased attention to human qualities, even in the personifications. The victims are more carefully drawn and the mediating automata more delicately articulated, because it is human psychology that is beginning to rule both earth and heaven.

Lydgate and the Anonymous of Meun, on the other hand, seize on the tragic potential in the structure of the story of Croesus, while merely making the proper noises about Fortune. Although Lydgate had learned his Chaucer well enough to take pathos where he found it, the lack of guilt in his Croesus returns a Boethian tone to the story. Tragedy is the outcry against such unforeseen reversals as Croesus experienced, and tragedy becomes ironic to the extent that the audience can see the reversals coming. It is the contribution of the Anonymous of Meun that he regularized the pendulation of events above the head of Croesus and so raised an exemplum to tragic status. The complementary interests of Renaut and the Anonymous in characterization and underlying structure, psychology and dramatic irony, thus bring to the medieval French versions of the Consolatio something of those polarized points of view that see tragedy now as a process set in motion by the violation of moral law, human or divine, now as a condition mysteriously imposed by an omnipotent external fate.18

III The Tempting Integument

Now, wirthy folk, Boece, that senatour,

To wryt this fenyeit fable tuk in cure,

In his gay buke of Consolatioun

ffor our doctrene and gud instructioun;

Quhilk in the self suppoiss it fenyeid be,

And hid under the cloik of poetre.

Henryson, Orpheus and Eurydice, 415-20

When boethius had Lady Philosophy contemn the self-serving Stoics and Epicureans for tearing the garment she had woven with her own hands, he used a metaphor that came to be developed in the Middle Ages into a theory of truth in Scripture and, with weaker claims, in fiction. For the philosophic commentators on secular works, such as William of Conches and Nicholas Trevet, borrowed the theologians’ notion that God’s naked truth is veiled from vulgar eyes in Holy Writ and that it is the task of the theologians to reveal it, and the loan included the tripartite division of scriptural senses into literal, moral, and allegorical.

Medieval terminology for the allegorical sense varied from integumentum in William of Conches and John of Garland to involucrum in Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury, but its meaning was stable. This is to be seen in the succinct definition given by Bernard Silvester, who used both terms, in his commentary on the Aeneid: “Integumentum vero est genus demonstrationis sub fabulosa narratione veritatis involvens intellectum, unde et involucrum dicitur.”1 The terminology was also somewhat accessible to the laity through such works as the Roman de la Rose, where it is
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 52 ]] 
used by Dame Raison to defend her talk about testicles against the Lover’s charge of obscenity—an application of some importance if we are not to misunderstand the frequent appearance of bawdiness in the translations of Boethius. Jean wrote:

En ma parole autre sen ot,

Au miens quant de coilles palaie,

Don si briement paler voulaie,

Que celui que tu i veauz metre;

E qui bien entendrait la letre,

Le sen verrait en l’escriture

Qui esclarcist la fable ocure;

La verité dedenz reposte

Sereit clere s’ele iert esposte;

Bien l’entendras se bien repetes

Les integumenz aus poetes:

La verras une grant partie

Des secrez de philosophie.

[lines 7158-70]

Among the models on which the translators drew for their narrative dilations of the Boethian text, these Latin commentaries of William of Conches and others naturally figure prominently. As I shall show, they are important also for giving the translators something of the terminology noted above concerning the allegorical use of such narratives. In Chapter I, one of the commentators’ distinctions in the three-way contrast among fable, history, and integument was mentioned. Here I will explore in more detail the use the translators made of this third term both in theory and practice.

Édouard Jeauneau, on whose discussion my brief notice is based, makes two basic points, both of which need to be qualified in their application to the medieval French translators of the Consolatio. The first is that the main technique used by the commentators to reveal the truth beneath the veil of myth was etymology; the second point is that they also strove for polyvalence.

The etymology found in the commentators was not scientific etymology, of course, but a sort of exercise in ahistorical philological subtlety by
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 53 ]] 
which the essence of a word or proper name was discovered. Their followers, the translators, also made some use of this technique, even when they did not take it directly from the commentaries. But their use of it is limited and subservient to other techniques. On the subject of Boethius’s Epicureans and Stoics, for example, Pierre de Paris wrote that the first, “sont dis Epyguriens auci come homes demenans vie de pors, car epy en grezois vuet dire dessous en franceis, et guyros vuet dire porc.” The second, “sont apellé Stoyens de cest nom stoos, quar stoos en gregois vuet dire fosse en franceis, dont stoyen vuet dire auci come home habitant en fosses.”2 Appalled by the linguistic ignorance displayed in such etymologizing, Antoine Thomas throws up his hands; it is useless to insist, he says. But it may be urged that in doing so he has failed to recognize the method in the madness of the translator. Pierre may have had small Greek, but the context of Philosophy’s complaint clearly indicated that these Epicureans and Stoics were bad people. Pierre therefore finds the essence of the first in their piggishness and of the second in their isolation from others—men who live in pits. Could Plato have asked for more?

For an example of what less inept translators did with the techniques of the professional commentators, I turn first to the lengthy telling of the story of Orpheus by the anonymous Burgundian author of the earliest French translation and its moralization adapted from the commentary of William of Conches. And I will confine my illustrations here to the relations on Orpheus, although I could as easily have used Hercules, to whose labors the Anonymous of Meun and Renaut de Louhans each devote over 300 lines. In the Burgundian’s narration on Orpheus we can see not only to what small use the translator put etymology, but also what has become of Jeauneau’s second technique of polyvalence. By this term, Jeauneau means the valued multiplicity of competing and even contradictory interpretations to which any particular text could give rise. William, for instance, saw Eurydice’s descent into hell as a sinful fall, whereas Orpheus’s ostensibly similar journey, being made in the spirit of detached observation, symbolized the conversion of the sage from worldly things. This kind of polyvalence was carried into the glosses of the translation printed by Colard Mansion:

Mais a cestuy enfer povons nous descendre par trois voyes. C’est assavoir par nature, par vice, et par vertu. Par nature comme quant l’ame est conjoincte au corps elle, descendant du ciel, descend de sa propre dignité et est subjecte aux passions humaines et corporelles. Par vice comme quant aucun en sacrifiant au dyable parle a eulx, comme il est escript de Eneas, ou comme quant aulcun met toute son intention et voulenté en choses terriennes et vicieuses. Par vertu comme quant aulcun saige descend a la congnoissance des biens temporeux, et comme il n’ayt veü pou ou gueres de [fol. 91] bien en iceulx, tantost il en retrait sa concupiscence illicite. Et par ceste maniere descendirent Hercules et Orpheüs en enfers.

The point I would make about the fate of Jeauneau’s polyvalence as it has any relevance to the Burgundian’s version and most of the other French translations of the Consolatio is that while polyvalence began in William of Conches as an interest in the potential richness of multiple readings of mythic integument, it developed in the translations into a habit of proliferating narrative episodes. William himself is responsible for initiating this habit at least in the telling of the Orpheus legend, for he abandons the strictly Boethian details and adds the late classical story of Aristaeus, which he took from the Vatican Mythographies. In brief, that myth gives the following version of Eurydice’s death: one day while wandering through the fields, she met the shepherd Aristaeus who tried to rape her, and in fleeing, she stepped on a serpent whose fatal bite sent her to Hades. William of Conches used this tale to identify Eurydice as Natural Concupiscence or Human Desire. Aristaeus, through the transvaluation beloved by allegorists, becomes Virtue, which seeks to lift Desire from earthly things. Desire flees Virtue and descends to the pleasures of the world.3

William’s interest in the story was hermeneutic, but the demands it made on narrative content and structure were to be more significant in the translations. As can be seen from the selection in Appendix I, the anonymous
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 55 ]] 
Burgundian found it necessary to retell the story of Orpheus three times: once with its Boethian details; again with the Aristaeus addition and a moralization of details from the first telling; and a third time with a moralization of the Aristaeus matter. One effect of such repeated narrations was to minimize the allegorical interpretation as the translators sought additional narrative details to enliven and distinguish their redactions. An example of this is to be seen in the Burgundian’s treatment of William’s pairing together the infernal descents of Orpheus and Hercules. The translator turned this into a bit of dialogue as Orpheus protests to the inmates of Hades, “Je ne sui pas ci venuz por batre tun portier come fist Hercules. Je i sui venuz por ma femme, que est morte novelement.”

To the narrative texture of the earliest version, the Burgundian also added other medievalizing details. William, for example, had said simply that Tytius’s torment was continuous, but the translator added, “Li voltor li manjüent la gole tote la semaine josqu’al samedi, e au lundi est toz entiers.” And where William had ended his commentary on Boethius’s own solemn note, the Burgundian goes on to warn us about wine and women, for Orpheus was later killed by the priestesses of “Bachi del deu del vin . . . De ce dit Salemons, ‘Li vins e les femmes font meesmes les sagese foleer’.”

To establish an intermediate stage between the kind of successive retelling sketched above and the form that the narrative was given in the Anonymous of Meun’s version, it is useful to observe what the glossator of the revised mixed version did with the glosses from William of Conches a hundred years or so after the earliest translation. To the verse version of the story in its Boethian form, he added a retelling of the whole in some 300 words with an accumulation of details about Aristaeus, the Furies, Pluto, and Rhadamanthus, but at the end he gave only a short moralization of a hundred words—in spite of his protestation that it is unthinkable that so sage a man as Boece would put into his book “sanz cause, fables ne autres choses superfluez.” In this version the moralization has become shrunken and inept, but some skill is shown in the relation of such small narrative details as that Eurydice was killed by the serpent’s venom; that Orpheus’s song made the streams run back up hill (contre mont retourner); that the vultures tore Tytius’s liver with their beaks; and that Tantalus pined for the water at his chin and the apple at his nose.

The Anonymous of Meun’s 1238-line version of the legend of Orpheus is indeed lengthy, twice as long as either the Middle English Sir Orfeo or
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Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice, but even so it does not deserve the abuse it receives from Antoine Thomas, who finds it verbose, repetitive, and meaninglessly digressive.4 In order to give the meaning of the Anonymous’s version an opportunity to emerge for itself, I will offer a more extensive summary than Thomas’s and also indicate the Anonymous’s sources.

The Anonymous devotes his first eighty lines to a straightforward translation of the fifty-eight lines of Boethius’s meter. He then proposes to show that Boece “a moralité l’a faite / D’amour qui s’est de Dieu retrait.” There follow some thirty-eight lines narrating more lyrically the catabasis of Orpheus and the power of love to purge our sins. Twenty lines succeed on Tergeminus—not yet identified as Cerberus—which associate his three heads with the steps to false love: “Plaisance,” “Consentir,” and “Mailvaise Oevre.” Then the Anonymous relates the story of Ixion in some hundred lines, drawing on the Mithologiae of Fulgentius with its euhemeristic interpretation of the origin of the centaurs and its moralization of Ixion as the personified desire for dignity:

Car qui terryene honneur convoite

Or hault or bas cest roe droite

Qui lors s’arreste et plus ne tourne

En coer cui Dieu amours adourne.5

[fol. 46v]

Next, Fulgentius is drawn upon for a 105-line narration of the legend of Tantalus, the avaricious man; Pelops, as “fole amour”; and Minerva, who stands for Wisdom. We are told that when Minerva ate the shoulder of Pelops, she diminished his carnal folly, and by replacing it with one of “ivoire cler,” she restored him to the pure love of God. The story of Tytius follows, in eighty lines, and for this the Anonymous had to turn elsewhere for information. At first he made up his own details, telling of Tytius and Latona the same story he had just told of Ixion and Juno, but he soon appeals to “the gloss on Boethius” for a moralization that sees Tytius as the “luxureus.” This gloss is apparently that of William of Conches, who, like the translator, observes that the tormented liver is the seat of libido.

Next, Orpheus reappears, with some initial comments on music and
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number, again supplied by Fulgentius, in an account of some forty-five lines. And this appearance is followed by a brief and garbled version of the story of Aristaeus, who signifies “Tres bon engien qui subtillie / Erudix de s’amour rouver.” The Anonymous thereafter introduces a 125-line discourse on music and mathematics with a Christianizing interpretation that seems to be a mixture of homespun allegories and information taken perhaps from Boethius’s De Musica or Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum doctrinale:

Li ars de musique est trouvee

Et non sans plus en creature,

Mais ou Gouverneur de Nature

Qui la simplece d’unité

Multiplie en triplicité

De la melodie joieuse

De bonneurté glorïeuse

Dont unités est li bourdons

Qui accorde ces .iii. cordons.

Substance en trois personnes une

Et est es personnes commune

En la doulce consonancie

Qu’ou Saint Espir est alye

Dou Pere au Fil, du Fil au Pere

Accors aultres ne si compere.

[fol. 48v]

A long unmoralized account of the story of Arion and the dolphin follows, and this the Anonymous clearly drew from Vincent’s Speculum historiale.6 Thereafter, the translator returns to Orpheus, Cerberus, and the Furies for some 145 lines into which is injected much miscellaneous “interpretation” of such things as the triple fountain at which the child Orpheus drank—grammar, logic, rhetoric—and the three heads of Cerberus again, here as Europe, Asia, and Africa.7 A complex fable ensues (the longest in the account and the one I have chosen for inclusion in Appendix I), for which William of Conches is the source. It begins with a retelling of the Ixion story but quickly passes into a lengthy dramatized narration of the judgment of Paris, in which Juno, Pallas, and the victorious Venus are seen as representative of the active, contemplative, and worldly lives.
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Following this, the Anonymous again tells the Tantalus legend, this time using the interpretations of William or of Nicholas Trevet, who pretty much agree. For the succeeding fifty-line story of Tytius, however, the Anonymous undoubtedly relied on Trevet’s account, which stresses Apollo’s punishment of Tytius for the folly of his attempted divination. Finally, the translator returns to Orpheus for thirty-two concluding lines which lightly finish with a musical lesson:

Et ensy pert li homes sa paine,

Qui plus estudie et se paine

De consonances de musique

Ramener a arismetique;

Meïsmement a dire de fait

Pourquoy quelque accorde se fait

D’une note a l’autre et s’affiere

D’un teil son non d’aultre maniere;

Dont qui plus le quiert en appert

Comme Orpheüs sa femme il le pert.

[fol. 53]

While it is obvious from this summary that the Anonymous’s account of the Orpheus legend and associated matters is indeed repetitive, two things ought to be observed. The first is that the translator is quite aware of the structure of his narrative. In the telling of the judgment of Paris, for example, he looks both behind and ahead to related details in other parts of his book: “Mais quant a ore m’en delivre / Car dit en ay ou premier livre / Qui fu Venuz et de quel pere,” and twenty-four lines later, “Paris / Qui puis fu Helaine maris / Sicom je le propose a mettre / Ou quart livre et ou darrain metre.” Similarly, he notes Boethius’s discussion of themes relative to the Orpheus fable when he says, apropos the devil’s gifts, “Boeces chartre / En son tierche livre est fair memore / Dignités, richés, et glore.” Further, it should be observed that the Anonymous is quite conscious of his audience and the limits of their tolerance for digression and moralization. He clearly marks for them the transitions from tale to morality: “Et atant fine la parole / Tantalus en grec parabole / Mais quant attient a moral sench,” and later when he introduces his remarks on music, “Et qui par plus soubtil maistrie / Voelt dire par allegorie.” Having just related the story of Arion, he returns to Orpheus with this remark, “Mais il est boin qu’je me taise / Que mes lons parlers ne desplaise / Et a Orpheüs me radreche.” And he anticipates our pleasure in the story of the judgment of Paris:

Et cest che que l’ystoire dist

Se souffise quand a mon dit,

Mais pou solas un petit faire

Voel de .iii. dieuesses retraire.

Another aspect of the Anonymous’s solicitousness for his readers is his frequent citation of authorities, even those he does not really use. Before showing the one important effect this has, I should perhaps instance a couple of examples of this contrived scholarship. Although the Anonymous clearly indicates his reliance on Fulgentius, he goes on to cite second-hand the long-lost sources that Fulgentius himself had cited: “Sicom Dromotrides retraite,” and “Dont Batinius soloit dire.” He does the same when introducing the story of Arion, without mentioning this time that he found it all in the encyclopedia of Vincent of Beauvais, “Que recorde Helinans et dist / Et Agilles en un sien dit.” Whatever his motive for this sort of mild deception (one in which Chaucer, too, notoriously indulged), the allusions of the Anonymous do call our attention to the main cause for the repetitiveness that characterizes his account, namely his obvious allegiance to the tradition of scholastic interest in mythic polyvalence.

In broad outline, what the Anonymous of Meun seems to have done was draw in turn on Fulgentius’s Mithologiae, Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale, and a gloss on the Consolatio—probably some MS compilation of the glosses of William of Conches and Trevet. Instead of attempting to harmonize their accounts, however, the Anonymous simply exhausted the interest that each had for him and then moved on. The kind of use he made of Vincent, furthermore, seems to have been dictated in part by the fortuitous appearance of Boethius’s name in the encyclopedia. Thus, because Vincent noted that Boethius mentioned both Arion and Orpheus in his discourse on music, the Anonymous acquired one reason for interpolating the story of Arion into his translation. Of course there are deeper affinities between the tales of Arion and Orpheus, but Vincent probably supplied the original suggestion for the Anonymous’s associating them.

Although the original assembly of these diverse materials may have been motivated by scholastic affection for polyvalence, the product of their combination has the effect of invalidating for the translations another of Jeauneau’s observations about the commentaries. And that is his assertion that the allegorical significance of all three heroic figures—
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Ulysses, Orpheus, and Hercules—is the same: a presentment of Sapience.8 It is true that William identifies Orpheus as the sage and eloquent man, and this is reflected in the portrait drawn by the author of the earliest prose translation. But something quite different emerges from the translation just surveyed. As the Anonymous of Meun begins to multiply and elaborate on the sinful characters inhabiting hell, our interest turns to them and especially to the variety of reasons for their presence there. And as he elaborates on Orpheus as a failed contemplative, we can begin to discern in the whole collection of these persons something of a typical medieval panorama of the deadly sins. In Ixion we see the prideful seeker of personal glory; in Tantalus both the angry and the covetous man; and in the first Tytius, the lustful man guilty also of vaunting pride, while in the second Tytius, we have a more complex kind of Faustian pride in his knowledge and ability to prophesy. Where in this spectrum lies the sin of Orpheus?

Our first comparative glimpse comes in the characterization of Arion as a figure puzzled by his good fortune:

Aryons en la cité monte

Tous soels, tous moulliés, tous emplus,

Pensis, merveilleus, et tresplus

De ce que li ere avenu;

Et comment Diex l’avoit tenu

Sans perir en mer et empris

S’en estoit de paour espris.

[fol. 50]

The Anonymous does not allegorize Arion’s story, but it makes a good comparison with that of Orpheus, who also cannot understand the effect his music has on nature. But in Orpheus’s case the result is lamentable, because while all nature is soothed by his song, he is powerless to help himself: “Il remanoit tristes et mas.” And a similar portrait emerges from the contrasting story of the judgment of Paris. Where Hercules opts for the active life—a taste for which he inherited from Juno—and Paris chooses the blandishments of Venus, Orpheus is exhibited as too passive and enervated to concentrate on the gift of Pallas: a life of disinterested contemplation of such things as the music and mathematics exalted earlier. Thus, I think it is possible to see in Orpheus a victim of the medieval equivalent of the Boethian disease itself: the sin of acedia.

Concerning the kind of reallegorizing I am attempting here, Siegfried Wenzel offers a valid caution in his study of acedia. In Wenzel’s view, it might be justifiable to identify the Anonymous of Meun’s portrait of Orpheus with the concept of sloth only if “the allegorized concept does not stand in a vacuum but is linked to other allegorized concepts in a fashion that corresponds with a clearly recognizable and coherent pattern of medieval thought.”9 I think this demand can be satisfied, because the pattern of thought here emerges from two directions. In the sequence of equivalents of pride, anger, lust, and avarice that we see in the repeated portraits of Ixion, Tantalus, and Tytius, the association of Orpheus with tristitia and torpor animi allows us to fill the gap left for a victim of sloth; and, secondly, the positive portraits of Hercules, Paris, and the lucky Arion deepen by contrast the sad passivity of Orpheus.

Where William of Conches allegorized out of existence the patent and miserable defeat of Orpheus in Hades, the Anonymous of Meun, then, found in his miscellaneous materials the makings of a portrait of Boethian sloth. Thus the narratives based on the elaboration of the Consolatio by the Latin commentaries occasionally came to ignore the associated allegorical interpretations, because the fictive details accumulated by the translators were more easily structured by popular medieval schemata—such as the seven deadly sins—than by those arguments of interest to Neoplatonists.

I think this interpretation of the significance of the Orpheus legend is retained in the much-revised copy that appears in the only other manuscript of the version by the Anonymous of Meun: B. N. fr. 1543. Concerning this MS, Antoine Thomas notes only that it contains a great many changes in texture from MS B. N. fr. 576 and that it has a large gap in its narration of the Orpheus passage. But the MS, so far from being negligible, is remarkable, I believe, and that for the evidence it offers of a real attempt at significant structural revision of the story so as to eliminate the very repetitiveness to which Thomas objected.

The gap Thomas refers to occurs as a blank space left on the vellum
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amounting to a loss of some 215 lines from the copy in MS 576. This loss may reflect a gap in the scribe’s exemplar, or, if he is the revisor too, it may indicate a judgment about the relevance of the matter contained in the passage. That is, he may have decided that the story of Arion and some of the following matter on Calliope was of sufficient tangency to allow him to go on with the rest of the Orpheus story and return if time permitted. Other conjectures are of course possible, but it is the substantive revision of the latter part of the Orpheus material that is of greatest interest.

Before the large gap, this second MS lacks only eight lines from the copy in MS 576—except for initial lost folios—but after the gap the compression is considerable. The second telling of the Ixion legend is cut from fifty-six to eight lines with the remark, “duquel ja avons fait memore.” Following the story of the judgment of Paris, the final remarks on Ixion, Tantalus, and that part on Tytius not taken from Nicholas Trevet are cut from forty-eight to twelve lines. The two sections of new matter, however, are treated more cautiously. The judgment of Paris is reduced from 170 to 124 lines, the main deletions being details about Pallas’s astronomical knowledge and the bulk of Venus’s prize-winning speech to Paris. Only four lines are dropped from the final relation on Tytius, and these do not affect the new interpretation derived from Trevet. In all, the repetitive second half of the Orpheus meter is reduced by some 130 lines without significant loss of detail important to our understanding of the perils of Orphic paralysis. The deduction to be made from all this is that some medieval editor attempted to overcome one of the structural defects of eclecticism by making a narrative of cleaner lines, and it was on rewriting the exclusively narrative passages that the revisor expended his greatest effort.

It is interesting to compare the amateurish structure of the Anonymous’s version with the more skillful job in Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice (printed 1508).10 This 633-line poem is written in three different meters. The first two-thirds of the poem consist of fifty-two seven-line stanzas devoted to a somewhat aureate narration of the legend. Into these are intruded five stanzas of ten lines each constituting a courtly “Complaint of Orpheus.” The last third of the poem consists of 220 lines in couplets closely versifying parts of the commentary by Nicholas Trevet on Book III, meter 12, of the Consolatio.

The first narration has been adapted to the succeeding commentary by the inclusion of the Aristaeus episode and the naming of the Furies. Its other medieval features include the forementioned “Complaint,” a two-stanza technical digression on music—“Thair leirit he tonis proportionat, / As duplare, triplare, and emetricus”—and a list of the sinful inmates of hell, e.g., “Alexander for his wrang conqueist,” and “Herod with his brudiris wyfe.” But the poem also contains several novel, though no less medieval, passages such as the opening genealogy of the Nine Muses and the celestial descent of Orpheus through the several Ptolomaic spheres.

Thus, though Henryson’s poem may have been written as much as a century and a half after that of the Anonymous, and though its texture may show a renaissance glitter in its diction and prosody, the basic structure of the poem is profoundly medieval in its bifurcation, digressiveness, and polyvalence.11

When we narrow the focus from these structural matters to view the texture of the poem on Orpheus written by the Anonymous of Meun, we can see even more clearly how far we have come from an exclusive interest in moralization on the way to the delight in pure narrative exhibited by Renaut de Louhans. For example, William of Conches had supplied the Anonymous with the barest details of the fables of Ixion and the judgment of Paris. I quote a bit of the latter:

Vnde in fabulis invenitur quod tres dee Iuno, Pallas, Venus iudicio Paridis que dignior esset aureo pomo quesierunt, quia Iupiter diffinire noluit. Quod non fuit aliud quod tres vite sunt, scilicet teorica id est contemplativa, practica id est activa, philargiria id est voluptaria. Et ponitur Pallas pro contemplativa, Iuno pro activa, Venus pro voluptaria. Quod potest probari per premia que promittuntur Paridi. Pallas namque promittit sapientiam quia contemplatione fit aliquis sapiens. Iuno divicias quia per activam vitam acquiruntur divicie. Venus promittit feminam quia in ea est maxima voluptas. Iste tres dee pro pomo certant, id est pro beatitudine, quia unaqueque videtur facere beatum. Sed Iupiter hoc noluit diffinire ne libertatem arbitrii videretur auferre. Vnde querunt iudicium Paridis, scilicet cuiuslibet hominis. Sed Paris adquiescit Veneri quia maxima pars hominum consentit voluptati.12

The Anonymous turns these details into a spirited debate among the three ladies for possession of the golden apple bearing the legend, “Je suis le plus belle des trois!” In that debate, Juno briefly offers Paris the world, but for Pallas the sky is the limit of her gift of knowledge:

Quel cose c’est dou firmament,

De ses cours, de leur mouvement,

Et en aprés des .vii. planettes

De leurs erres et de leur mettes,

Des elemens, des creatures

Qui en sont en mainltes faitures.

But Dame Venus has the longest, most persuasive speech and the most insistent character. She begins with quiet laughter at the foolish remoteness of her rivals’ gifts, bears down hard on the delights of the flesh, and ends with a naked threat to deny Paris those Hellenic pleasures that he has begun to anticipate. Paris responds by throwing the apple at her feet and pledging himself to her in perfect courtly homage. William of Conches had simply said that Paris chose Venus because men are like that, but the Anonymous of Meun creates both psychological motives and social sanctions for Paris’s act.

In contrast, the version of the Orpheus meter by Renaut de Louhans represents the ultimate stage in the gradual rejection of explicit moralization in favor of the temptations of the integument, although it could have been written no more than two decades after the work of the Anonymous of Meun. Renaut’s 184-line narration proceeds without digression or moralization through a neat succession of modestly elaborated episodes that follow Orpheus on his singing tour through this world and the nether one. The focus is always on the effects of Orpheus’s music. Renaut’s relation of Tytius, for example, tells us that the giant suffered “pour sa transgression” without hinting what that was. We are given instead a picture of the vulture raising its head at the sound of Orpheus’s approaching music: “Pour la doulceur lieve sa teste / Et de menger tantost s’arreste.” There is no explanation. The narrative is everything.

Renaut’s Benedictine revisor wrote a new prologue and added some dozen lines according to his scholarly lights, pointing out that Orpheus was raised in Thrace in a part of Greece. The monk does make an interesting suggestion that Orpheus was an exponent of courtly love when he says that it is folly to make laws, “a fin amour / Car Orpheus fust amans fins,” but he fails to develop this as Henryson was to do later, and he ends with a new epilogue of six lines emphasizing the pains of hell: “Ce püant venimeux gouffre / Ou sans fin art l’eternel souffre.” Even with this tag, however, Renaut’s relation of Orpheus remains what it was: pure integument, an unworn dress.

We have seen in the progress observed in this chapter something like a structural reflex of the situation described by Donald R. Howard in his study of Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl-poet. There, it is argued, apropos of the development of courtly love, that “what the allegorists call cortex in the early writings . . . like the De Amore of Andreas, came in the later writings of the courtly tradition—for example, the sonnet sequence—to be in effect the nucleus,”13 although images of Christian charity continue to be used by sonneteers long after their attention has shifted to the once-peripheral erotic situation. Somewhat similarly, in the translations of the Consolatio, we see first the detailed scholastic explication of Boethian allusion for the sake of allegorizing it, followed by the gradual disappearance of this interpretive “nucleus” in the verse translations. We have, in effect, the replacement of the allusive, rhetorical Boethian mode by an explicit, narrative one, after an hermeneutic interlude. The story of Orpheus had served Boethius as an exemplary allusion to the necessity for the good man to keep his eye on celestial things. Scholastic commentary explicated and rationalized the appearance of this pagan myth in its revered authority by allegorizing it, but medieval scholarship also contributed to the accumulation of additional narrative traditions. Given the translators’ lack of interest in the former, it is the latter that survive. And it is possible that the resulting characteristics of the translators’ versions—their dwindling allegorical content and their patchwork composition—themselves had an effect on later vernacular literature. Somehow Chaucer found it reasonable to associate Boethian views directly with pagan contexts and safely attribute whole or partial versions of his ideas on Fortune and Providence to such figures as Troilus and Theseus, while Henryson’s poem, which focuses on the pagan myth and appends the translation of Trevet’s commentary as a jingling afterthought, is characterized by Kenneth Gros Louis as the last mythological poem of the Middle Ages and the last to “contain so many discordant echoes.”14

IV A Legacy for Common Profit

Pour ce que scet bien mon entente

Jehan de Calais, honnorable homme,

Qui ne me vit des ans a trente

Et ne scet comment je me nomme,

De tout ce testament, en somme,

S’aucun y a difficulté,

L’oster jusque’au rez d’une pomme

Je luy en donne faculté.

De le glosser et commenter,

De le diffinir et descripre,

Diminuer ou augmenter,

De le canceller et prescripre

De sa main et ne sceut escripre,

Interpreter et donner sens,

A son plaisir, meilleur ou pire:

A tout cecy je m’y consens.

                                 Villon, Le Testament, 1844-59

In his liberal bequest to a man who had not seen him in thirty years and who had never known his name, Villon’s irony crows, but the technical terms of that legacy bespeak something of the actual processes by which medieval literature was composed. In the discussion thus far we have seen some examples of that terminology in operation. When the medieval translators elaborated on the allusions to classical myth and history in the Consolatio, they were exercising their right to gloss and comment, define and describe, diminish or augment. In this final chapter we shall be looking at the ultimate stages of those processes heretofore discriminated, but the evidence will differ in two ways from that considered earlier. It will consist first of instances of alterations in form, as parts of the Consolatio, narrative or otherwise, were medievalized according to the canons of fourteenth-century poetics; and secondly, the evidence will
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 68 ]] 
comprise much post-classical matter as medieval authors sought apt illustration for their new interpretations of Boethian themes.

Part of the process of medievalizing the Consolatio consisted in submitting this valued text to the currents of poetic experimentation running so strongly through the century of Machaut and Deschamps. While the earliest translations in French were exclusively in prose, even the first of them recognized the value of Boethius’s meters by repeating, as we have seen, the commentators’ cliché that he was not only the equal of Cicero in prose but also of Virgil in verse. The meters had received continuous attention, of course, throughout the Middle Ages, both from scholars and poets. They formed, in fact, the exclusive topic of the earliest commentary, that by Lupus of Ferrières (mid-9th century).1 And, while many of the Latin commentators continued to use and revise the work of Lupus, a new commentary devoted solely to the metrics was written in the early Renaissance by Niccolo Perotti, archbishop of Siponto, in which he compared the prosodies of Horace and Boethius.2 As for the poets, King Alfred cast into formulaic, alliterative verse the proper passages in his prose translation,3 and at the latter end of the Middle Ages, interest in the Boethian medley was still so strong that an early print of one of the French translations claims to include a version of the Aeneid in alternating prose and verse.4 But it is in the French translations themselves that we see the most intense concern with the possibilities of Boethian metrics.

While the translator of the first mixed version restricted his verses to octosyllabic couplets, his revisor experimented with Alexandrines arranged into monorimed stanzas when he recast the translation of Book I, meter 5, “O stelliferi.” I give the first of these stanzas:

Tu qui les estoiles mises ou firmament

Et te siez en ton throsne sans nul esmouvement

Et faiz tourner le ciel tost et ysnellement,

Les estoiles gouvernes a ton commendement.

Ore est plaine la lune, ore est en defaillement

Et Lucifer l’estoile alume clerement.

Or la fin de l’advent, or le commandement,

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Or sont les jours en croys or en descroyssement

Le temps de l’an devises moult ordeneement

En autompne cheent fueilles, en printemps vont germant

Or recoyt on les blez, or les va l’ en semant.

[N.L.W. 5039, fol. 13]

This revision may stand as a sign of the times, for the only translations to be restricted to single metrical schemes throughout the text were the first mixed version and that by the Anonymous of Meun, and the latter, as we have seen, enormously elaborated his version in other ways.

In his wholly verse translation, Renaut de Louhans used eight-line stanzas for his prologue and Book I—except for one meter—and then changed to couplets for Books II through V, again with the exception of two stanzaic interpolations. In his interpretation of the second meter of Book I, Renaut experimented by turning it into six twelve-line stanzas riming a a b a a b b b a b b a.5 Of Renaut’s three revisors, each one recast this meter, at least partially, into a different verse form, and the MSS of the Benedictine’s revision show two traditions. A closer look at these variations will, I hope, demonstrate the vitality of formal experimentalism as an aspect of medievalization as well as show the diverse effects of such efforts on the Boethian meaning.

For the epitome in MS B. N. fr. 25418, the revisor picked some thirty-two lines out of Renaut’s stanzas and linked them largely into couplets, except for Renaut’s fifth stanza which appears to have been abbreviated in the spirit of his customary eight-liner. The reflexes of Book I, meter 2, in MSS of the Benedictine’s revision of Renaut are much more complex. I see three states. The first, represented in the Bibliothèque Nationale by MSS 12237 and 12240, is a complete retranslation of the meter in seven of Renaut’s normal eight-line stanzas and a final one of eleven lines. The second, and most common, state is represented by MSS B. N. fr. 577, 812, 813, 1094, 12238, 12239, 25416, and nou. acq. fr. 1982. This state is like the first except that it reduces the first two stanzas to six lines each by simple omission of lines. The third state is actually a compilation occurring only, to my knowledge, in MS B. N. fr. 12459.6 It is like the Benedictine’s first state but after the second stanza adds two eight-line stanzas mechanically
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 70 ]] 
reduced from Renaut’s stanzas two and three, and after the final stanza of the Benedictine’s version it simply attaches the last thirty lines of Renaut’s translation. Finally, the second mixed version, compiled from a revision of the Benedictine’s verses and an original translation of the prose, in the case of this meter rewords and rearranges lines somewhat for the first nineteen lines and then reproduces the remainder of the Benedictine’s version in its second state.

Before turning to the effect of all this revision on meaning, I would point out that the boldness of Renaut’s original experiments, imitated to some extent by the Benedictine, is clearly countered by the conservatism of manuscript processes which attempt to regularize Renaut’s forms in the direction of one or the other of his customary meters. This is a tiny instance of the very general medieval situation which I would call the socialization of creativity. As successive scribes and their managers produce successive “performances” of each literary work, their tendency is to smooth out the text, to eliminate eccentricity, and, in effect, to reduce or elevate all literature to a common standard. In such an environment it is not necessarily so that genius is an asset nor origin in an uncouth province a liability, for the odder effects of both may be eliminated.

The failure of Renaut’s stanzas here to conform to his general practice was only one of the revisors’ motives for redoing the translation of Book I, meter 2. The Benedictine, at least, seems to have been offended by Renaut’s violation of the original structure of the Boethian verse. Boethius’s poem is curious, for it presents but a single contrast in a three-part structure. Five introductory lines on the narrator’s present misery are followed by eighteen lines celebrating his former intellectual achievements, and four concluding lines recall us to his current mindless stupor. By contrast, in each of Renaut’s six stanzas, Philosophy both celebrates and laments Boethius’s two moods, often as the protasis and apodosis of a single sentence: “Cilz qui rendoit raison et cause / De toute chose haulte et basse / Maintenant a raison perdue.” A second feature of Renaut’s version is that it largely ignores the rich details of the central praise of intellectual beauty. The Benedictine’s stanzas attempt to remedy both of these novelties, and he produces, I think a successful evocation of the Boethian original:

Aussi discerne il proprement

Qui cause en printemps le doulx vent,

Dont la terre est toute florie

Et aournée cointement

Des roses . . .

The abbreviation in MS B. N. fr. 25418, on the other hand, by cutting out alternate lines, managed to make of Renaut’s version an almost exclusively morbid poem. And this effect is in keeping with the generally glum cast of this version, which also eliminates almost all of Philosophy’s positive vision in Book V. Its author was more monk than philosophe.

In contrast with these simplifying efforts, we can see in the verses made by the translator of Colard Mansion’s 1477 print several bold attempts to match the prosodic variety of the Latin model as he used couplets of varied lengths and some stanzaic patterns. The translator’s version of the final meter of Book I, for example, successfully imitates for forty lines the five-syllable scansion of his model:

Estoille mucée

De noire nuée

Nullement ne donne

Sur nous sa lumiere;

Se la mer tournée

Auster moult meslée

Chaleur fort foisonne,

L’eau de maniere.

[fol. 38v]

For the opening meter of Book II, the translator wrote six stanzas on the following complex pattern:

Quant Fortune la diverse

Ses offices change ou verse,

Comme Euripus se reverse

En s’eschauffant fort bouillonne

Toult et donne.

[fol. 41v]

And, finally, he ventured thirty-two long, and suitably epic, lines for his version of Book IV, meter 3:

Quant le duc Ulixes se retournoit de Troye,

Aprés qu’il eut perdu par mer ses gens, sa proye,

Droit en l’isle ou Circe demouroit print sa voye.

[fol. 103]

As a final example of the sort of formal experimentation that contributed to the medievalization of Boethius, we may turn to another of the results of the manuscript process of compilation, because works that surround, and in this case mingle with, the Boethian text may relate to
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 72 ]] 
contemporary interpretation of it in the same way that a modern edition influences its readers in some degree by the editor’s notes. In the curious Trinity Hall MS, Camb. 12—already remarked—we find a number of ballades interspersed between the latter books of the Consolatio and following works. One of these ballades has a refrain, “Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine,” which provides the line later chosen by Charles d’Orléans as the theme of his poetic “Concours de Blois.”7 The poem would have additional significance in the Boethian context if it were the case, as Philippe Ménard asserts, that this theme is an outgrowth of the Tantalus legend.8 The Benedictine’s treatment of this legend in the translation that surrounds these poems might well have been cited by Ménard for the bearing some of its phrasing could have had on that of the ballade: e.g., “L’onde tantost arriere fuit / Ainsi meure de soif jour et nuit.” In the context of this discussion, however, these interpolated ballades provide but one more example of the range of metrical exploration that medieval authors were willing to associate with the Boethian text, making it resemble such avant-garde works as Machaut’s Remède de fortune with its interpolated ballades in a medley of dialogue and verse.9 Certainly no other medieval translation was so honored by being so formally medievalized.

When we move from these formal details to look at the last phases of the medieval conquest of the content of the Consolatio, the record becomes that of an inevitable failure on the one hand and on the other of a convincing victory; because while the translators were only slightly more successful than the commentators in Christianizing this work, they were able to universalize much of its message.

Although there is adequate evidence that Boethius was a Christian, commentators on the Consolatio since the earliest Carolingian glossators have been troubled by its lack of Christian focus or, indeed, reference. Pierre Courcelle has convincingly argued the decent compatibility of these facts by showing that although the Consolatio belongs to the ancient genre of the apocalypse, its revelations concern exclusively human wisdom, perfected in Neoplatonism and personified in Lady Philosophy. This explains her silence on matters of divine revelation:

Elle ne peut, par sa nature propre, dépasser le point de vue rationnel; quand Boèce lui demandera s’il y a des châtiments après la mort, elle refusera de s’engager sur ce sujet. Il est donc naturel qu’elle ne cite pas l’Écriture, qu’elle ignore les théologiens. Que Boèce soit chrétien ou non, toute allusion à l’Écriture ou aux théologiens aurait été, après qu’il eut choisi ce personnage fictif de Philosophie, une faute de logique et de goût. Son silence n’est pas une négation.10

This explication would not, of course, have satisfied most medieval commentators, who attempted in various ways to Christianize Boethian views, particularly those on cosmology, the eternity of the world, and the pre-existence of souls. Their efforts ranged from the Eriugenan brink of heresy in accepting the Consolatio to the patronizing Aristotelian rejection of it by late medieval scholastics, and I refer those interested in the details of the process to Courcelle’s expert account. What is relevant to our argument is that these attempts to Christianize the doctrine of the Consolatio failed to persuade contemporaries. To the extent that the translators followed the model of the commentators, they too failed. What modest success they did achieve came about solely through the subversive effect of assumed Christian ethic in their narratives.

Both of the translations which take their glosses from William of Conches represent serious efforts to bring into the vernacular certain explicitly Christian interpretations of problematical doctrine in the Consolatio. In addition, the earliest translation draws upon the Christianizing tenth-century commentary of Adalbold of Utrecht for its gloss on Book III, meter 9. Neither of these efforts could be successful, of course, for any large appeal to Christ’s redemptive mission immediately renders supererogatory all of Boethius’s injunctions concerning the power of human reason to comprehend man’s fate. Such direct appeals are, in fact, only slightly subtler rejections of the Boethian position than that achieved by Bonaventura da Demena in the following announcement of certain interpolations in his translation: “l’auctor de ceste translacions veut ici moustrer les .x. comandamenz de la loi divine et les generals comandamenz de la dileccions de Deu et del prosme qi se treuvent en le Vielz Testament, et aucune doctrine des conseilz et de la profeccions del Nouvel Testament.”11 Bonaventura adds that Boethius left this matter out only because it is so well treated in Scripture. Such infrequent additions as
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 74 ]] 
these will not concern us, because they were unsuccessful as medievalizing agents and because they do not involve narrative.

The explicitly Christian allegorization of Boethian fable is of interest, however, because an author who says Ulysses reminds us of Christ may be more persuasive than one who simply contradicts Boethius. The earliest translation, in fact, makes some interesting parallels, as when it says that Ulysses returned home alone just as Christ left the Twelve behind, “for many are called, but few are chosen.”

Ce que nos avons dit par moralité pooms entendre par allegorie. Par Ulixes qui est estranges de toz, pooms entendre Jhesu Crist qui est veire sapience. Il vint a Troie, ce est en cest munde e venqui le deable e sez compaignons, e retorna par mer, ce est sofri maintes turbacions en cest siecle, e herberia en la maison de Circe, mais ne but pas de ses herbes. Ce est, Jhesu Crist fu veirs hom e fu entre les temporels ovres, mais non pecha. Il perdi moltz de ses compaignons poi en retornerent ensemble lui. Car l’Evangile le dit, “Moltz sunt apelé a la fei de Crist, mais poi sunt eslit.”12

Perhaps more successful in giving at least a Christian tone to the Consolatio are those instances of the apt use of a Christian example where none at all exists in the Boethian text. In Book IV, prose 6, for example, Philosophy remarks that God’s judgment is so delicate that He may spare a good man whom adversity might ruin and may not allow a man who cannot stand suffering to suffer, however instructive it might be for others. No example is adduced, doubtless because the annals of Rome are not crowded with hypersensitive heroes, but the glossator of the revised mixed version found a touching medieval example in William of Conches and used it, shorn of all scholastic comment:

Note ce que l’en list en la vie de Saint Julien comme l’en le traisnast et menast en la prison d’un tyrant vint un sien filz qui par l’inspiracion divine creoit en Jhesu Crist et suyvoit le martyr de Dieu et fut mis avec luy en la prison, et depuis converti sa mere a la foy de Notresire. Et quant le tyrant le sceut, il fist occire son filz et commanda que on lui amenast la mere pour la faire mourir, mais ceulx qui la vouloient prendre ne povoient et perdoyent le povoir des mains, car Dieu qui sçauvez la vouloit, savoit bien qu’elle ne pouvroit endurez les tourmens, mais quant elle eut dicté son oraison, elle trespassa en Notresire.13

While Boethius’s Latin commentators could not wrestle his Neoplatonic doctrines into submission to dogma, his French translators could at least quietly infiltrate the exclusively pre-Christian ranks of his examples. By doing so they make both truth and illustration more familiar, while extending to the Boethian deity such qualities as compassion.

This non-discursive sort of Christianization of the text is also achieved to a lesser extent by the illustrators, and I will call attention to but a single example that Courcelle also notes.14 Rouen MS 3045 contains a copy of Renaut de Louhans’s verse version of the Consolatio. Placed at the end of Renaut’s 500-line expansion of Book IV, meter 7—devoted mostly to the labors of Hercules—is a miniature showing Boethius being conducted to heaven by Lady Philosophy (fig. 6). He is adorned with the philosophic wings that the Lady was shown giving him in a previous icon. Above them, two angels point to the figure of God, who is pronouncing a blessing. The illustration, in effect, explicitly Christianizes the concluding lines of meter 7, which are inset into the picture, and, in consequence, their classical myth of Hercules’ apotheosis:

Et quant assés fut travaillie

Avec les dieux fut essaucie.

Alez donc les fors par proèsce

Ou bon example vous adresce,

Et veez que cilz vont requerre

Le ciel qui ont vaincu la terre.

It is in the translators’ efforts to universalize the message of the Consolatio, however, that they made it most medieval. By universalization I mean the extension of the text to new and larger audiences through an increased range of tones and points of view,15 and preliminary to a demonstration of this extension we need some idea of the limits placed on tone and audience by the original work. I have already cited Courcelle’s observation that Boethius’s use of satura excluded the customary cynicism
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 76 ]] 
and obscenity. In fact, he all but excludes everything unsolemn. Boethius does tell one joke (Bk. II, pr. 7) about how a true philosopher discomfited an imposter, but the original text of the Consolatio contains nothing like the range of indelicate detail the translators found for even those classical stories we have already noticed. In this, the translators were like the mendicant John Ridevall in following St. Augustine’s approval of harsh satiric remedies: “Illi enim poete romanorum, quos vocabunt satiricos, fuerunt fortes et acuti reprehensores vitiorum et carnalium delectationum, sicut patet in libris Iuvenalis et Persii et poete Oratii.”16 When they added non-classical matter, the translators brewed a stronger potion still.

The extent to which Boethian tones are limited by his presumed audience has never been sufficiently stressed. For the group to which not only the Consolatio but the theological tractates was addressed was aristocratic and educated. When Philosophy is first introduced among the poetical muses standing by Boethius’s bed, she becomes inflamed with anger at their presumption in trying to console a graduate of the academy: “At si quem profanum, uti uulgo solitum uobis, blanditiae uestrae detraherent, minus moleste ferendum putarem; nihil quippe in eo nostrae operae laederentur” (Bk. I, pr. 1:35-8). On all those other profane fellows she would not waste her time. This elitism is to be seen most dramatically, however, in the introduction to the tract De Trinitate which I quote from the Loeb translation:

For, apart from yourself [Symmachus], wherever I turn my eyes, they fall on either the apathy of the dullard or the jealousy of the shrewd, and a man who casts his thoughts before the common herd—I will not say to consider but to trample under foot, would seem to bring discredit on the study of divinity. So I purposely use brevity and wrap up the ideas I draw from the deep questionings of philosophy in new and unaccustomed words which speak only to you and to myself, that is, if you deign to look at them. The rest of the world I simply disregard: they cannot understand, and therefore do not deserve to read.17

There is no stronger justification for the medieval philosophers’ metaphor of unveiling truth than this statement of method by one engaged in wrapping up his pearls, and there can be no better immediate antidote to this
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 77 ]] 
elitism than to show how the homely fables in the version of Pierre de Paris both accommodate and extend Boethian truths.

In the first of these little tales, in fact, Pierre catches Philosophy in the act of having wrapped up nothing. She had just stated (Bk. III, pr. 12) that evil is nothing, since God, who can do all things, cannot do evil. At this point Boethius accuses her of weaving labyrinthine arguments, and the remainder of their dialogue concerns varieties of proof. Where the translator of the earliest French version chose to explicate labyrinth, Pierre innocently asks what has become of the question about whether God can do evil, and after giving his own answer that it is not the fact of evil that is important but the intent behind the act, Pierre adduces a little story which he says he found in the Vies des Pères. It concerns a hermit who gave penance to a murderous thief on condition that he restrain himself whenever he heard churchbells. The thief continued in his evil ways until one day, while in the act of assaulting a merchant, he heard the bells. The thief gave up his attack and tried to flee, but the merchant, believing that he had vanquished the thief, chased him and killed him. The text continues:

L’ermite si vi en celuy point l’arme dou malfaitor que les angles portoient droytement au ciel; et sur ce merveilla molt l’ermite et se despera et dist que il avoit .xxx. ans et plus esté en l’ermitage [et] n’avoit pas encore veu nulle grace que Dieu il eust faite en ensi grant tens come il avoit esté et demoré en penanse; si se parti del hermitage et fu condampné, et le larron fu sauvé, qui faizoit les mauvaises euvres.18

We thus pass from the lofty position of Boethian logic that the perfect deity can author no evil to the ethical mystery of his power to detect the saving spark in thieves and murderers, and we similarly pass from Roman notions of human virtue to one that sees it as essentially non-public and apolitical. Needless to say, there are no such obscure, holy sinners among Boethius’s exemplary patricians.

Another affecting example occurs in Pierre’s amplification of Book II, prose 1, which concerns the fidelity of Fortuna to her mutable nature: “Tu [Boethius] fortunam putas erga te esse mutatam; erras. Hi semper eius mores sunt ista natura. Seruauit circa te propriam potius in ipsa sui mutabilitate
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 78 ]] 
constantiam” (28-31). Into this elevated and abstract discourse, Pierre intrudes the oriental fable of the cat and the candle, which he mistakenly attributes to Marie de France:

Et auci de .i. chat, se il avenist qu’acun per son engin se feist servir a .i. chat en aucun office, si come en tenir une chandele ardant, si come l’en raconte en les fables que une feme fist; et si avenist par aucune aventure que, en celuy point que le chat tenroit celle chandele, il veist .i. rat passer par devant soy, certes ce celuy chat getast le chandele et corust aprés le rat, nul ne se devroit merveiller, car tele est sa nature, ne de riens ne l’auroit changée.19

In this comic picture of the once obedient little cat flinging aside his appointed candle to chase a rat, Pierre strikes a note characteristic of Gothic naturalism. The same may be said of the literal miniaturization achieved in his borrowed story of the pygmies and cranes: “En celes montaignes habitent une maniere de gent molt petis, et sont si petis que le greignor de touz n’est que de .i. paume lonc; et se combatent as grues,” and so on. Such stories recast Boethian solemnity into household figurines, redirect Boethian themes, and expand their application to include homely, pedestrian contexts. A sort of democratization of the aristocratic doctrine ensues and produces a two-way effect. The less than noble are introduced to the virtues of stoicism, and the stoics are humanized. We can see a splendid example of this latter effect in Pierre’s treatment of the allusion to Alcibiades.

The long process by which François Villon came to include one Archipiada among his list of vanished beauties has been well charted from its origins in Carolingian glosses on the Consolatio.20 Boethius had cited a lost work of Aristotle’s which said that if men had the penetrating vision of Lynceus the Argonaut, they could see through Alcibiades’ fair exterior to the vile entrails within (Bk. III, pr. 8). To tender medieval minds, fair bodies belonged to women, and details about this new female Alcibiades began to accumulate in glosses to the Boethian text. At the same time legends were growing about the medieval Aristotle, too, and with more point. Henri d’Andeli, who, like John of Garland, carried into the thirteenth
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 79 ]] 
century the older defence of school auctores against the champions of the new Aristotelian logic, wrote the timely, iconoclastic Lai d’Aristote (ca. 1250), in which Alexander’s mistress tricks the lovesick Aristotle into submitting to saddle and bridle and allowing her to ride him into the presence of his royal pupil.21 Pierre de Paris’s ingenious contribution was to identify that mistress with Alcibiades, which, to long memories of Socrates’ choice of companions, is witty. Pierre also adapted the story to the context of Book III, prose 8—which scoffs at men’s inability to be stronger than bulls or swifter than tigers—by signaling Aristotle’s metamorphosis: “et il chaitif estoit a .iiii. piés auci come une beste mue.” And finally, he changed the end of the story, which turned on the apt answer of Aristotle to the obvious charges. In Henri’s lai, Aristotle had remarked pithily that if one so wise as himself could tumble, his lusty master ought to take double care. Pierre changed this to the remark about Lynceus’s vision, except that by now the commentators had made Lynceus into a Lynx. In both stories professional wisdom wins the day, but the medieval Aristotle and Alcibiades are far more engaging persons than their austere antique incarnations, and, as a consequence, their virtue, like that of Sir Gawain after the Green Knight’s test, is more credible because it has been proved fallible.

Even more effectively than Pierre, Renaut de Louhans questioned the unrelieved solemnity and rigor of Boethius’s intellectual stand. Renaut drew on Nicholas Trevet’s commentary on the mid-thirteenth-century Disciplina Scolarium and, as Astrik Gabriel has shown, on the commentary of the Pseudo-Thomas on the Consolatio, for a comic story that Gabriel calls “The Inconstant Scholar,” about a young man who restlessly turned from one calling to another, deciding in turn not to be a clerk, merchant, farmer, knight, lawyer, bridegroom, or astronomer.22 He finally settled for being an ass: “Asnes ne met riens en sa teste / De riens au monde ne li chaut / Autant du froit come de chaut.” The account is, of course, satirical, as Renaut elaborated its sketches of the most uncomfortable features of each calling: the teacher’s unruly pupils, the merchant’s dangerous voyages, the fiancée’s prodigality, and so forth. This aspect Professor
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Gabriel’s article discusses in sufficient detail, and the value of the isolated tale for contemporaries is proven by its having been excerpted and circulated as a fabliau. What I would stress is the relevance of this interpolated story to the matrix of the Consolatio.

Inasmuch as it appears in Book II, prose 4, just after a biographical passage on Boethius, it might be argued that it contributes some desperately needed humor to the internal dynamics of the dialogue between the Lady and the Exile. In the scene before the fabliau, Philosophy has just conceded that Boethius’s happiness about the fact that his wife still lives is somewhat marred since her sorrow for him is killing her. In the poem immediately following, the steady man is shown laughing at the elements. A comic tale inserted between the two could make this transition seem more probable. It should be admitted, however, that this aspect of the story’s relevance is quite secondary.

Of far greater importance is the close connection between the theme and imagery of this tale and recurrent Boethian concerns. In this respect the final contrast of the fabliau is most significant. The last profession rejected by the scholar before he descends into assininity is that of astronomer, and the emphasis of the account is on the profound technical complexity of the subject. Having tried to master planetary motions both right and retrograde, the distinctions between fixed and erratic stars, poles arctic and antarctic, the mathematics of divisions, measurement and proportion, and the highest science of prognostication, our scholar “dit en sa melencolie / Que il vouldroit uns asne estre.” The irony, it seems to me, is aimed as much at Boethius as anyone, for he again and again exhorts us to look up, behold the heavens, use dialectic and make ourselves free. But in the popular medieval imagination such interests are suspect, if not fatal, as the beguiled carpenter observes in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale:

Men sholde nat knowe of Goddes pryvetee.

Ye, blessed be alwey a lewed man

That noght but oonly his bileve kan!

So ferde another clerk with astronomye;

He walked in the feeldes, for to prye

Upon the sterres, what ther sholde bifalle,

Til he was in a marle-pit yfalle;

He saugh nat that!

[lines 3454-61]

Renaut de Louhans’s anecdote is not more anti-intellectual than Chaucer’s,
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 81 ]] 
which goes back to Plato’s Theaetetus; it is simply more skeptical than Boethius of the exclusively rational approach. And it is also far more tolerant than Boethius of the failure to succeed. As we saw in Book III, meter 2, and in the fable of Ulysses’ companions, Boethius heaps scorn on any human yielding to the beast within, but Renaut is at least as concessive as a later Neoplatonist, Edmund Spenser, who found that the world had room to “Let Gryll be Gryll and have his hoggish mind.”

The last illustration to be used in this study also comes from the translation of Renaut de Louhans, and it seems to me that it draws together many of the medievalizing forces, both formal and thematic, that have been discussed in this and the preceding chapters. Into his version of Book II, meter 7, Renaut interpolated some twenty stanzas of six lines each, riming a a b a a b. Their theme is seen in the first and last words of each of those stanzas: La Mort. Formally, they intrude on the customary couplets of this meter and signal their superior importance by their intricate pattern.23 Like Renaut’s experiment in Book I, meter 2, this formal nonconformity bothered the conservative scribes—B. N. fr. 19137, for example, rearranges the lines of the first five stanzas to rime a a b b c c to make them resemble the couplet pattern. But it is in the poem’s treatment of its deadly theme that we can best see how far we have come from the Boethian meditation on mortality.

Book II, meter 7, focuses on the vanity and evanescence of earthly fame. No matter how great a man’s fame, it will not spare him the fact of death. And since his renown will one day fade too, the great man is doubly doomed, because he will die a second death. For instances of those whom death has humbled, Boethius cites the consuls Fabricius, Lucius Junius Brutus, and the elder Cato. His illustration, as well as his audience, is clearly patrician.

Nicholas Trevet, Renaut’s usual source for commentary, in this instance supplied him mainly with details about the careers of Fabricius, Brutus, and Cato. For the twenty stanzas which would extend both illustration and audience of Boethius’s poem, Renaut turned therefore to a rich medieval tradition of images and gnomic sentiments on Death the Leveler, a tradition that had been growing since Hélinant, Cistercian monk of Froidmont, wrote his famous Vers de la Mort (ca. 1195).24 Although
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 82 ]] 
there are many similarities between the poems of Hélinant and Renaut, the Dominican does not follow his witty predecessor to his more hedonistic and un-Boethian conclusions:

S’autres siecles n’est, donques viaus

Ait ci li cors toz ses aviaus

Et face quanque li delite:

Vive li hom comme porciaus,

Car toz pechiez est bon et biaus!

[36, lines 1-5]

Renaut’s poem begins with notice of the war Death has waged against humankind since Adam’s outrage and continues with a crowded procession of its victims from all human estates. The clergy is fully represented, and the Christian infiltration of the aristocratic ranks of Boethian personnel becomes here a mortal rout of clerks, priests, cardinals, popes, prelates in furs, clergied canons, cloistered monks, and veiled nuns. Following them troup emperors, kings, dukes and counts, and knights-at-arms. Delicate glimpses succeed of “jeunes damoisiaux” whom death will seize despite their rings, whose pet birds, now playing on their fingers, will seek the woods when Death comes courting. Death robs the rich villain of his wine and bread, and pitilessly takes the husband of the burdened wife. Death comes to advocates despite their pleas, and to physicians for all their oaths. It comes en masse in plagues but stealthily to suicides. It is everywhere, in fields, woods, and parks; in town and court and countryside. It plies the seas to every port. It comes home to take the sucking babe. And last of all, Death was most bold and hardy in seizing Jhesu, “le Filz Marie,” to whom we pray “Qu’il nous soit aidans en la vie / Et secours nous face a la mort.”

Like his portrait of Fortune, Renaut’s figure of Death is psychologized. Outraged, bold, and hardy, Death mocks his victims, saying to each, “Se tu m’eschapes / Tu serez moult pruez et fort!” Death, in fact, takes over the role of Fortune, and in this, Renaut’s conception surpasses Boethius in a truly medieval contempt of the world and its goods, because where Fortune also gave, Death only takes. Fortune was subject to Providence because Boethian man was always free to ignore her goods, but Death requires everyone’s attention.

The true universality of Renaut’s poem, however, emerges from the range of Death’s domain. Within his bending sickle’s compass come all classes and estates, all earthly space, and all historical time from Adam to Christ to the very medieval audience which the poem addressed. And that audience included many an unpatrician face not the least illuminated by thought of earthly fame nor worried about any death but the first. Of course, the poem’s last, least philosophic, and most universal irony is that, in the face of Death, the mercy of the Son of Mary is said to offer to men of all estates the best prospect of consolation.

But it is time to conclude. One persistent question about medieval culture concerns the relationship between the international world of Latin philosophy, theology, science, and art on the one hand and on the other the various popular vernacular literatures. A few writers like Dante and, on less exalted levels, Robert Grossteste, Richard Rolle, John Gower, and Alain Chartier have provided answers of their own by writing in both Latin and the vernaculars and on a variety of topics; but their situations are untypical.

Recent explications of medieval literature reveal opposing views of the commerce between intellectual strata in the Middle Ages. We have, for example, the judgment of C. S. Lewis in The Discarded Image that the “Model” which served as a comfortable backdrop for most medieval fiction was a psychologically unified collection of scraps from the Somnium Scipionis, The Divine Names, and the like, to which Plato and Aristotle lent folklore on demons. A contrary view would deny the cultural dichotomy and regularly bring to discussions of what is at stake in the adventures of Beowulf and Chauntecleer the citation of patristic apologists and Carolingian postillators. The translations considered here provide novel testimony about just what kind of matter travelled down the medieval cultural scale.

The true medieval audience for the Latin Consolatio was academic, and through its interest in cosmology and technical questions of orthodoxy and authority it created a demand for copies of the text and commentaries. But the appeal of such matters to the vernacular audience was limited. Chaucer is a good example of the best lay audience for the Consolatio, and he accepted Jean de Meun’s practice of distinguishing between translation and use. He adopted Jean’s base for his own literal prose version, while poetically making a variety of fictional uses of the text in his original works. These range from the dramatic exploitation of half of the
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Boethian argument on free will in characterizing Troilus25 to the forceful recasting of Book II, meter 5, in “The Former Age.” The first use is unfair to philosophy but makes good psychology, and the second is equally unacademic. But Chaucer was prepared to concede most Boethian technicalities upward to Bradwardine.

With the disintegration of the scholastic assumptions about the relevance of the Consolatio, copies, commentaries, and translations continued to be produced, but these last became accessible to other literary currents. The prime effect of its new academic status of obsolescent venerability was the liberation of the vernacular Boethius to poetic experimentation and narrative elaboration. Lesser authors than Jean and Chaucer applied their techniques not to original works but to the transmutation of a prestigious text. Without the pressure of academic assumptions about traditional distinctions between text and gloss, about canons of relevance in explications, and about adherence to a textual tradition, the translators played.

The earliest translators inherited from the Latin tradition the convention of philosophical and mythological glosses. They also exhibited a seemly inhibition in their strict adherence to prose throughout their versions. But translators like Bonaventura and Pierre merely imitated the outward form of the scholastic texts while resorting to their own popular resources for the medievalizing substance. Further decay of the academic format can be seen in those early mixed versions in which the glosses are selective and uncontroversial. As long as the Consolatio maintained its prestige in the schools against the encroachments of Aristotelianism, nominalism, and the contempt of familiarity, the production of vernacular versions formally reflected that reverence. But the Dominican and Benedictine religious who later romanced and refined the verse versions were exploiting the relaxation of academic conventions by certain kinds of poetic experimentation, unruffled by the intellectual storms higher up.

The quarter century that saw the verse elaboration of the Consolatio by the French Dominican Renaut de Louhans also witnessed the attack on the poetic theories of Albertino Mussato by the Dominican Giovanino of Mantua and the similar attack on Dante by the Dominican Guido Vernani of Rimini—an attack characterizing Dante as a “poetizing visionary and verbose sophist.”26 To understand Renaut’s efforts in this hostile context
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we must glance at the nature of the famous Thomistic distruct of poetics. According to Ernst Curtius, St. Thomas Aquinas viewed poetry as the lowest of all sciences—his Aristotelian source being the Metaphysics and not the Poetics—and this was essentially a new view in opposition to the older northern rhetorical tradition embodied in the poetic epics of Bernard Silvester and Alain of Lille, and in the literary studies of John of Salisbury and William of Conches. The Dominicans were attacking, then, not poetry itself—recall Thomas’s own great hymns—but the exalted place that theological poetics as a species of scientia had enjoyed in the high Latin tradition extending from Augustine and Boethius through Dante’s vernacular union of poetry and philosophy.

Renaut’s occasionally elaborate use of verse and his clear affection for classica is thus excused from liability to censure of the sort his fellow Dominicans directed at Dante and Mussato. It is possible to see, in consequence, a progressive weakening of the bonds between the two medieval cultures downward from Dante through the early Italian humanists and the English classicizers to the French translators, and this deterioration parallels the dissolution of that marriage of poetry and philosophy—successful in Dante—but on severe trial in the French adaptations of the Consolatio. The late classical union of philosophy and poetry achieved by Boethius was, as I have sketched, partly a formal matter of alternating the styles appropriate to prose and verse, partly an epistemological matter involving the quest for divine knowledge by both human reason, metaphorized as an ascent, and by Platonic reminiscence, made concrete through allusions to human and mythological history. Some of that allusiveness represents Boethius’s admitted effort to hide his kernels from the vulgar, and scholastic allegorizing succeeded in discovering fruit only at the cost of multiplying chaff in the accumulation of troublesomely discordant narratives. Beyond this, the late medieval translators often lost the Boethian formal distinction by rendering the Consolatio entirely in prose or verse. And finally, some declined the interpreters’ proffered nuts.

As nominalist theories moved late medieval philosophy away from allegorical and analogical modes toward a vision of the world as complex, ambiguous, and contingent,27 so the translators’ verse became extended narrative “digression,” but some of the original outlines of the Boethian
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conjunction remain. In Dante the result is a series of dramatic narratives arrayed within an eschatological scheme; in the classicizing friars something of the same motivation produced pagan tales and moralitates set within explications of Holy Writ; while in certain of the French versions of Boethius the result is an attractive mixture of translation, gloss, and narrative elaboration.

In the texture of these French translations of the Consolatio philosophiae we can see an illustration of the essential eclecticism of medieval art and perhaps of the truth of Robert Jordan’s suggestion that much of such art is inorganic, that it is significantly determined by its “exposed joints and seams, unresolved contradictions, and clashes of perspective.”28 If this is true, and I think it is, then we may be able to see in these translations, more easily perhaps than in the works of Chaucer, some of the aesthetic consequences, for better or worse, of that inorganicism. Here, I shall glance back at some of those results in terms of the failures and successes of the narratives as they extend or subvert Boethian meanings.

One of the structural effects of eclecticism results from drawing together several tellings of a story with much overlap of detail. This is neutral as regards meaning and may simply produce, as in the case of the relation of the Orpheus legend in the earliest prose translation, a mechanically repetitive account. But two of the narratives by the Anonymous of Meun realize two aesthetic possibilities of inorganic structure. The first of these successes is also partly owing to the shrinking interest among vernacular writers in the allegorical lucubrations of the schoolmen. Because he could discard much of the allegorizing that accompanied the narrative details gleaned from Fulgentius, Vincent of Beauvais, and the glosses, the Anonymous of Meun could also let those details fall in the direction of newer categories like the panorama of Deadly Sins. And the problematical redundancy of his account could be refined away by such revisions as that in MS B. N. fr. 1543. By associating Orpheus with acedia and Boethius with Orpheus, the Anonymous set the characterization of the Boethian malady of paralyzing ignorance within a rich medieval framework of greater accessibility.

A second positive aesthetic possibility also arose from the Anonymous’s addiction to encyclopedias. And it bore fruit in his version of the
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tragedy of Croesus, where the result is not so much a medievalization of the Boethian notion of tragedy as a fuller exploitation of its nature than the original text allotted to exempla. The collection of reversals that the Anonymous assembled add up to a clear structural realization of the ideas that Fortune strikes with mechanical dispassion and that tragedy bewails such clockwork.

The tonal results of such inorganicism as we find exhibited in these translations appear to be even more mixed than those effected in structure. It must be granted, I think, that a number of the interpolated narratives, particularly those which were identified as pure fable—having little purpose beyond the merely informative—occasionally and inadvertently sabotaged the tone of their context. Partly this is due to the very limited range of tones permitted by the solemn purposes and lofty audience of the original Consolatio, but the apparent damage is also the result of the very freedom with which medieval authors assembled their bits and pieces into art.

When a translator intrudes into a hymn of universal love a rape story, he may impede our comprehension of universal love. But when he extends examples in a poem on death’s universal sway to include more persons than Roman ex-consuls, he advances our understanding of the frightfulness of that sway. Between these extremes occur some interesting effects of medieval literary eclecticism.

I have claimed that the translators who reproduced the tendentious arguments of apologists for Christian cosmology shared their failure to significantly Christianize the Consolatio. But some translators were more successful in imparting a broadly Christian tone to the work. Thus, while Boethius certainly asserts the omnipotence of God, the vernacular adaptors extended the range of illustrations to include qualities of mercy and forgiveness in him. Similarly, the conception of human psychology that emerges from the interpolation of the homely instances that Pierre de Paris and Renaut de Louhans gathered of failed scholars and repentant thieves is more complex and more tolerant of complexity. Far from simply producing “unresolved contradictions,” then, the extension of the meaning of the Consolatio that is accomplished through the accumulation of such narratives as we have examined is one of the Gothic glories of the inorganic methods of translators half a millenium ago. And while those methods may at times have cast an icon ungainly as a hawk in armor, more frequently they reflect the consolation His creatures have taken in the witty diversity of their imperfection.