The "Comedieta" of the Satira : Dom Pedro de Portugal's Monkeys in the Margins

The little-studied Sátira de infelice e felice vida, by Dom Pedro, Constable of Portugal (c. 1429-1466), unjustly neglected by Hispanomedievalists, offers its readers an ideal opportunity to consider the ambiguous status of the margins of a late medieval text. ¹ Originally composed in Portuguese at mid-century (a version now lost) and translated soon thereafter into Spanish by Dom Pedro himself while exiled in Castile, the Sátira presents an amusingly ironic view of the process of authoring, staged most strikingly in the voluminous glosses which fill the folios of the surviving manuscripts. ² Julian Weiss has discussed cogently the auto-exegetical vogue among vernacular authors in fifteenth-century Castile, who sought to confer auctoritas on their works by appending erudite glosses to them, a trend popularized by Florentine writers of the previous century (The Poet's Art 117-29). ³ The Sátira falls within this general tendency, certainly, but the way in which the Constable authorizes his text involves a process fraught with contradiction.

Dom Pedro presents himself as an eminent crafter of paradoxes, a stance tropologically allied with contemporary courtly poetry in a sentimental vein, though his paradoxes go well beyond the stereotypical quandaries of the suffering lover who subjects himself to a merciless beloved: he problematizes the very act of authoring a text. The marginal glosses represent the principal locus of his most daring metafictional exploits. Here Dom Pedro ironically asserts his literary authority by means of a parallel undermining: on the one hand of the conventions of courtly love (for example, by juxtaposing his chaste pseudo-autobiography with famous tales of lust in the glosses) and on the other hand of his own claims to encyclopedic erudition—the very authority of his marginalia. The apparently subversive humor of Dom Pedro's glosses, which programmatically preclude their own exegetical utility, reminds one of less "serious" varieties of codicological marginalia, like those studied by Michael Camille in the context of illuminated manuscripts. Despite the problems inherent in extrapolating notions about the visual to the context of the verbal, it is nonetheless tempting here to invoke Camille's assessment of such marginal images as signs that "pretend to avoid meaning, [and] seem to celebrate the flux of 'becoming' rather than being" (9), for the Constable foregrounds in his dubiously informative margins (What really do they mean? How are they in fact relevant to the main text?) the very processes of literary creation and interpretation: the writer's doubts as he edits his own text and his creation of new, ambiguous readings through self-exegesis.

Indeed, it would seem that Dom Pedro has transferred the carnivalesque logic of the marginal baboons and grylluses of illuminated manuscripts to the presumably staid discourse of the explicative gloss, taking advantage of the fact that in the Middle Ages, the margins of a codex admitted both the subversive humor of the illuminator and the center-affirming auctoritas of the scholiast. Or, viewed from another standpoint, Dom Pedro has self-consciously placed his text and commentary at variance, merely exploiting the inescapable condition of the traditional gloss, by which—for example, when a Christian glossator euhemeristically accommodates Ovid to an alien cultural context—"meaning [is] imposed upon the text" (Dagenais 35), a form of literary manipulation that Robert Hanning has called in a suitably amusing turn of phrase, "textual harassment." Hanning goes on to point out that "the idea that a gloss manipulates rather than explains its text may seem a particularly modern one, but medieval scholars and satirists were by no means unaware of the possibilities of such textual harassment" (29). ⁴ Dom Pedro's awareness seems apparent, as I hope to show; the irony in his case is that he himself does the imposing of whatever "meaning" the glosses might seem to communicate.

The result is an ingenious, hybrid text that entertainingly reveals the author's...