Poetry and Parody: Boethius and Gestures in the Letters of Godfrey of Rheims

The literary work of Godfrey of Rheims, born sometime between 1025 and 1040, consists of four poetic letters, three of them written in elegiac distics and the fourth in leonine hexameters, three epitaphs and a letter in prose which precedes the fourth poetic letter. ¹

All four letters reveal their author as an educated man who probably studied at the cathedral school of Rheims, one of the most important cultural centres in the High Middle Ages, where he became Scholasticus and Chancellor. ² A document of 1094 lets us know that he was still Chancellor at that time, although his former patron, archbishop Manasses I, was deposed and driven from Rheims in 1080. Since a charter of 1095 gives the name of another Chancellor, we can deduce that Godfrey died between 1094 and 1095.

It is already known that Godfrey, like many of his contemporaries, made use of classical authors in order to find not only ideas, motives, and themes for his poetic compositions, but also verse forms and expressions. He knew Virgil and Ovid, as can be readily seen in his letters, not only in a way that demonstrates general knowledge, produced by the study of anthologies or school books, but also in a deeper and more involved sense. Godfrey, like his friend Baudri of Bourgueil, creates a poetic world in which the classical poets seem to be alive and to share their literary ideas with him. ³ He recreates classical myths and motives, including the Trojan war, Orpheus, Hercules and Cacus, and Ganymede's rape. Scholars have traced Godfrey's classical borrowings to their sources. ⁴ But to date no one has commented on Godfrey's debt to another kind of ancient author, a figure as important for the educational scope of the Middle Ages as Virgil, Ovid or Cicero. I refer to Boethius, author of the De consolatione Philosophiae, one of the most widely read books in the Middle Ages, as we can judge from the many manuscripts and commentaries which have copied and transmitted the work. In this paper, I argue that Godfrey parodies a famous scene of Boethius's work, the dream in which the healing Philosophy visits the sick prisoner. This scene, as Boethius presents it, uses terms and describes gestures that have to do with the world of medicine. In his second letter, Godfrey of Reims reproduces these gestures and these words in order to use them in a comical way by changing the characters involved and, at the same time, allowing the reader to remember the well-known Boethian source. I also want to show how parody has not only a comical purpose, but also a critical one, or at least, that it makes clear the differences between Boethius's ideas about the values of philosophy and poetry and the opinions that Godfrey seems to have about them.

At the very beginning of his second letter, Epistola de Odone, which deals with Odo of Orleans and was written between 1060 and 1095, Godfrey seems to use, as on many other occasions, verses borrowed from classical authors, as Williams and Boutemy have already stressed. The poem begins with a topical description of the arrival of the night:

Abdiderat celerem sol pronus in equore currum
Occeanique sacrum merserat amne caput.
Luna suas accinctas faces inuectaque bigis
Venerat et toto sparserat astra polo.
In niueo releuanda thoro de more qieti.
. . . .
Dumque sopor placida refouet dulcedine corpus
Cordaque fessa suis usibus apta facit. (1-8) ⁵

The sun had hidden his fast chariot in the sea
and submerged his holy head in the flow of the Ocean.
The moon had come with her torches borne by her carriage,
and extended her light throughout the universe.
. . .
And while sleep comforts bodies with his quiet sweetness
and makes tired hearts more suitable to his purposes. . . .

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