Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee (review)

This collection of articles comprises a proper tribute to Winthrop (Pete) Wetherbee, whose contribution to medieval studies is three dimensional—long in production, broad in scope, and deep in thought. The first two dimensions are evident in Wetherbee’s bibliography, conveniently assembled on pages 19–24: seventy-three items ranging over Latin, French, Italian, and English literature of the Middle Ages. These include translations of difficult primary texts and also syntheses of scholarship written on the head of a pin, as Pete once put it to me (full disclosure: Pete was my teacher in the mid-1970s). A bibliography, however, cannot reveal the subtle character of a scholar’s work. Some sense of Pete’s quality of mind can be gained from Andrew Galloway’s introductory essay and from the “Afternote” by Robert Morgan. My charge, of course, is to offer comment, not on the honoree’s work, but on the essays in the present volume. These are arranged in sections devoted to Pete’s chief areas of interest: medieval Latin, Italian, and English literature. My review will proceed along somewhat different lines; I will juxtapose items that throw light on each other.

Most of the essays are philological in the large sense of philology. Danuta Shanzer, with her exemplary blend of learning and a light touch, practices the most fundamental kind of philology, that which establishes the literal text and its literal meaning. Her subject is the seventh-century Hisperica Famina, Latin texts somehow connected with Ireland, whose forms, purposes, and peculiar vocabulary remain mysterious in many particulars. Shanzer suggests very plausible sources for passages in the Famina, some allowing for agreeable emendations or lexical clarifications of the texts. Similar in force is the background that Thomas D. Hill brings to bear on his explication of Cleanness 885.

Shanzer’s and Hill’s work is what one might call “first-order” philology, the patient search for the Rosetta Stone(s) that will allow one to read the literal meaning of a text. Most other philological exercises in this compilation are examples of “second-order” philology, efforts to read more deeply those texts for which the literal level is reasonably well established. As such they raise the perennial problem of determining whether verbal cues are deliberate or accidental. The interpretive enterprise is in its way like the editorial one. The editor considers the odds that an author wrote this word or that word; the critic/scholar, the odds that an author uses a word with this sense or that sense. In some fashion, then, each addresses a statistical problem. In practice no one really tries to define a metric that is objective and understandable. We operate on vague standards of what seems reasonable; we intuit likelihood on the basis of long and wide experience as readers. Of course, no two readers have precisely the same experience, so perceptions of “right reading” will differ. My way of reading leads me to the following queries.

To Frederick Ahl, who argues that Chaucer engages in such wordplay as can be found in Latin literature, I must ask how one could know whether “tribute . . . contribution” in the first sentence of this review is a chance event or a deliberate echo? In truth, I did not notice the repetition while writing, and I was not pleased by my later discovery of it. I was taught long ago to avoid “jingles” in my prose, but I decided that the different stress patterns here kept the expression from being too ungainly. Ahl is certainly right that Chaucer jingles deliberately with Troy/destroy and Calchas/calculinge (highlighted within ten lines of text). But can “trewely” continually remind us of Troilus, or offer in Troilus and Criseyde III.159 any more than a “sight rhyme” with the word “wel”? When is word play...