Many medieval authors who have been identified here wrote in the twelfth century, a circumstance that is no coincidence. The long twelfth century witnessed extensive ‘‘culture wars,’’ in which authors of new Latin texts had to vie for recognition as never before in an ever-more-crowded market. One aspect of the competition was with the past: if they hoped to have their compositions become fixtures in the curriculum, they had to oust the old standbys of earlier poets that were already entrenched there. Thus was born the friction between antiqui et moderni (the ancients and the moderns), a querelle des anciens et des modernes centuries before the phrase existed (Gossmann 1974; Zimmermann and Vuillemin-Diem 1974). The relationship of the twelfth-century poets with antiquity marked a departure from preceding centuries, since it was characterized by a rivalry with the past. Much has been made, rightly, of the twelfth-century image of the ‘‘modern’’ author and scholar as a dwarf standing on the shoulder of a giant (and ‘‘modern’’ deserves quotation marks, since the adjective came into its own in Latin precisely during this century) (Merton 1965). By this same pygmaean measure, Walter of Chatillon (ca. 1135 - ca. 1179) invoked Vergil with apparent deference in the prologue to his great Alexan-dreis. But simultaneously Walter evidenced pride at having had the audacity to deal with lofty material, the epic ofAlexander the Great, that no classical poet had dared to essay. A different, but equally elaborate, expression of the same uneasy emulation of bygone works comes to the fore in the Courtiers’ Trifles of Walter Map (ca. 1140-1209). After he has interpolated his (in)famously misogamous ‘‘Dissuasion of Valerius to the Philosopher Rufinus, that he should not take a Wife,’’ he inveighs at length against the popularity it had enjoyed when it had circulated pseudonymously, since it would never have won renown had it been published under the name of its modern-day author, without the patina of pseudo-antiquity:
My only offence is, that I am alive; it is, however, one which I have no intention of correcting - by dying. I changed our names for those of dead men in the title, for I knew that would be popular: had I not done so, my book, like myself, would have been thrown aside.... Every century has disliked its own modernity; every age, from the first onwards, has preferred the previous one to itself. (Map 1983: 312-13)
Another part of the competition that twelfth-century poets had to face was with their contemporaries, since rivalries about style and content burned intensely. A case in point is the blistering contempt that Alan of Lille voices in his Anticlaudianus for the Alexandreis of Walter of Chatillon as well as for the equally classicizing treatment of The Trojan War by Joseph of Exeter (died ca. 1210). Although Alan bandies about the names of Ennius and Maevius as bywords for his two rivals, these particular ancient poets were to him no more than that - names. More germane than tracing the poems and commentaries from which he would have been familiar with the reputations of these two ancient poets is to grasp what divided Alan on the one hand and Walter and Joseph on the other. Whereas Alan wrote a philosophical-allegorical epic with near complete avoidance of elision, Walter and Joseph produced classicizing epics with heavy use of the same technique. Despite the rifts among the three poets, all of them gauged shrewdly their audiences and markets and earned outstanding and abiding places in it: within a short span of their appearance, the Alexandreis, Trojan War, and Anticlaudianus each had been explicated in a commentary or gloss, one solid mark that a text had passed the hurdle into the schools.
The library catalogues and reading lists of the eleventh and twelfth centuries furnish data to document the burgeoning interest in the poetry of Ovid, satires of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, and prose of Cicero. The growth in the cultivation of the Latin classics was such that the twelfth century has been justly recognized for its distinctive humanism (Southern 1995-2000). The respect and appetite for Ovid in particular led to the generation of a substantial pseudo-Ovidian corpus, not to mention many attempts to foster appreciation and acceptance of genuine Ovidian texts through glosses, commentaries, and the cullings of extracts or “flowers” that are known as florilegia (Coulson and Roy 2000).
The exaltation of such suspect authors as Ovid provoked a backlash from moralists who viewed secular learning with distrust or outright contempt; but the gravest threat to the revered school authors, the auctores whose words and concepts endued their users with auctoritas (authority), came from the spreading fascination with dialectical methods of analysis. Whereas Chartres and especially Orleans were associated with literary studies and the classics, Paris became the center for training in dialectic (Ferruolo 1985). In the thirteenth century a French poet, Henri d’Andeli, cast the rivalries as The Battle of the Seven [Liberal] Arts, in which Orleans and the proponents of classical literature suffer defeat at the hands of Paris and the dialecticians (Ziolkowski 1985).
The skirmishes over grammar and dialectic, over knowledge through reading canonical texts or intelligence through learning methods of reasoning, and over the relative weight to be accorded ancient and modern authors were waged fervently in the schools and universities. Whereas in the age of Charlemagne and his successors most formal education had been restricted to monasteries and monastic schools, by the end of the tenth century the cathedral schools had become a force to be reckoned with; from the mid-eleventh through the mid-twelfth centuries they expanded greatly (Jaeger 1994). In comparison with monasteries, cathedral chapters allowed their members a rule that was looser and a life that was far less constrained by the burdens of religious duties. Yet whether young men were destined for ecclesiastical service or lay careers, all of them were still supposed to be clerics, functionally literate in Latin although native speakers of at least one vernacular dialect.
At the very latest by the beginning of the thirteenth century, the earliest universities had become well established in France, Italy, and England. Education had progressed from being groups of boys under the tutelage of a single teacher to crowds of young men who studied with an assortment of masters (Le Goff 1993). The exuberance manifested itself not only in the vast and varied products of Latin literary culture, but also in the rapid refinement of the Romance vernaculars. This refinement was accompanied by a newfound confidence in the worthiness of vernacular cultures as well as languages. According to Chretien de Troyes (second half of the twelfth century) in his Cliges (lines 28-42), medieval France had inherited the distinction in chivalry and learning that in earlier times had been possessed by Greece and Rome (Freeman 1979). Chretien’s outlook can be construed as the secular, vernacular equivalent to Hildebert’s views in his two elegies on Rome: although the magnificence that had been pagan had largely crumbled into ruins, the glory that was the Christian Urbs (city) prospered as never before. More generally, the distinctively twelfth-century optimism of combining reverence for the past with recognition of the advantages of the present comes to life memorably in the previously mentioned cliche of ‘‘dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants’’: however deficient twelfth-century men found their own aptitudes in comparison with those of their intellectual and cultural forebears, they cherished a belief that nonetheless their perspectives surpassed those of their predecessors. As the beneficiaries of the university and other institutions that the twelfth century created without the benefit of Athens and Rome, we should perhaps credit them with even greater powers of perception than they allowed themselves.
The relationship of the twelfth century, as of the ninth and tenth centuries before it, to ancient Greco-Roman culture went beyond mere revival. At least since the Renaissance many scholars have been indoctrinated to accept classical antiquity as the preeminent model of culture and have tended therefore to perceive the Middle Ages as a cycle of cultural collapses and classicizing renewals that are sometimes termed renaissances or renascences. Yet the classics were hardly the only wellspring of energy and discontent among the literate in the twelfth century, who grappled with a past that rested equally firmly on Christianity - on the Bible and patristic writings, not to mention medieval additions to the already-sizable sea of Christian literature. Furthermore, the classics were never imitated as closely in the twelfth century as they were to be in the Renaissance: the classicizing of John of Salisbury (ca. 1115-80), if classicizing it can be called, is a far cry from that of Petrarch (Martin 1984). However much we admire the humanism that comes to the fore occasionally in his Metalogicon, Policraticus, and verse works, however much we are impressed by John’s admiration of Vergil, Ovid, Seneca, and Cicero, we must not be misled into mistaking twelfth-century humanism for the later humanism tout court. At the same time, we must fight the impulse to judge the one by the other and especially the temptation to criticize the Middle Ages for falling short of the Renaissance. John of Salisbury was no Petrarch, it is true, but by the same token Petrarch was no John. Rather than pitting the one against the other, we would do well to esteem each in his own way - and to see that there were more than passing likenesses in two poets who rested their hopes for fame on Latin hexameter epics about, respectively, Alexander the Great and Scipio Africanus.
FURTHER READING
Two dated overviews of the classical tradition, Highet (1949) and Bolgar (1954), remain useful, with the latter being more detailed and reliable for the Middle Ages. (Other volumes edited by Bolgar contain essays on medieval topics.) Curtius (1953) offers a monumental synthesis. On the textual traditions of individual authors, see Reynolds (1983); on textual traditions more generally, see Reynolds and Wilson (1991). Details on manuscripts are in Munk Olsen (1982-9), with findings distilled in Munk Olsen (1991). Valuable bibliographies can also be found in Munk Olsen and Leonardi (1995), and Munk Olsen and Friis-Jensen (1997). Author-by-author listings may be found in the ‘‘Fortleben’’ section of the annual bibliography Medioevo Latino. On commentaries and translations, see Kristeller et al. (1960-). Paradigmatic books have been devoted to the reception of individual authors. Vergil: Comparetti (1997) and Baswell (1995), with a massive anthology of materials by Putnam and Ziolkowski (forthcoming). Ovid: Hexter (1986) (for citation and analysis of Traube’s three aetates [ages], see pp. 2-3). Horace: Reynolds (1996).
A Companion to the Classical Tradition Edited by Craig W. Kallendorf Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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