Geoffrey of Vinsauf: Poetria nova (review)

This book is a reissue by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies of the translation of the Poetria nova that Margaret F. Nims published in 1967, a translation that has been admired and used for many years. Since Nims died in 1995 (a pertinent fact oddly not mentioned anywhere here), Martin Camargo has overseen the reissue, providing an excellent new introduction that draws on new scholarship by himself and others to give a clear account of the probable course of Vinsauf’s development toward publishing this, his culminating work, and offering a few revisions of Nims’s notes as well.

But I find myself wishing that he had done, or that the publisher had allowed him to do, much more. In the first place, there ought to be some explicit recognition of Margaret Nims, giving her dates and some facts about her distinguished career as a teacher and scholar at the University of Toronto; the silence (which I lay to the publisher, not to Camargo) seems gauche. And a whole lot more could have been done with Nims’s notes, which I have always found to be strong on history and sources, but not nearly as helpful as they might be to a reader striving to understand Geoffrey’s often bizarre ideas and his elusive expression of them. The revision gives us the same old notes “with a few corrections and additions,” the additions bracketed and signed MC. In fact there are no corrections, and just five additions. There should be plenty more, of at least these four kinds:

1. 1. Updating bibliography. This would include citing new editions since 1967 of texts Nims cites, such as my own 1974 edition of John of Garland (cited, I grant, in the introduction, but not added to the note at 146–49), or the several new editions of Bernard Silvester’s commentary on Virgil; and new scholarship, such as Jan Ziolkowski’s Fairy Tales from before Fairy Tales (2007), which puts the snow-child story into a broad context. There is plenty of updating in the introduction, granted, but that should have been complemented by more of the same in the notes. (There is one note added, at 1366–80, that draws on George Rigg’s History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066–1422 [1984].)

2. 2. Identifying allusions. Why not capitalize on the opportunity to use electronic search vehicles unavailable to Nims and Edmond Faral, whose 1924 edition Nims translated? Thus we have unaltered Nims’s confession that the reference to the Topics at lines 1740–42 (“Astruit auctor/In Topicis, ‘ubi pauca magis speculatio, major/Est via’”) has not been identified, but I found it pretty quickly by using the online Brepols Library of Latin Texts. (It’s in Boethius’s translation, 2.2, p. 32 in Lorenzo Minio-Paluello’s edition, Aristoteles Latinus 5.1–3 [Brussels, 1969]: “Considerare autem secundum species et non in infinitis: via enim magis et in paucioribus.” The version printed in the Patrologia Latina 64, the only resource available to Nims, has “transitu” [64.924] for the key word “via.”) Again, at lines 464–66, in the treatment of personification, Geoffrey speaks of the earth complaining to Jove about the damage wrought by Phaeton and of Rome complaining tearfully to Caesar in a dream. Nims leaves these allusions (to Metamorphoses 2.279–300 and Lucan’s De bello civili, 1.190–92 [more on the Lucan below]) unidentified, though they do not require a search engine to find, and Camargo should have added a note identifying them.

3. 3. Elucidation of hard passages. Take lines 77–86, for instance, in which Geoffrey outlines the whole book. It would be very helpful to show a reader just what line numbers constitute each of the four sections here outlined—and grant that Geoffrey should have mentioned memory here, since that is in fact one of his sections: there are five, not four. Again, when...