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Essays in Medieval Studies 20 (2003) iii-iv



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Introduction

William Fahrenbach
DePaul University


In his paper at the plenary session of the 2003 meeting of the Illinois Medieval Association—a conference defined by the topic "Texts and Commentaries"—Alastair Minnis posed a curious question. As he puts it in the version of his paper presented here, "Where have all the English (or indeed Latin) glosses on Middle English texts gone? To be more precise," he continues, underscoring the curiosity, "why weren't they written?" The rather lean English tradition, Minnis notes, consists of scattered glosses in Chaucerian manuscripts, the Latin commentaries to Gower's Confessio amantis, references to sources in the Court of Sapience, and—stretching the English tradition to include Scotland—Gavin Douglas's unfinished commentary to his translation of the Aeneid. This meager evidence of commentary in late-medieval England contrasts markedly with the much more abundant, developed tradition of commentary in Italy in particular. Dante set a remarkable standard as both a commentator on his own work, as Mario Trovato discusses in his paper here, and as the subject of commentaries in both Latin and Italian; and when interest in Dante seems to have fallen off in the fifteenth century, Italian commentators turned energetically to Petrarch and to Ariosto in particular. France and Spain, Minnis shows, provide instances of similar work in vernacular commentary.

Minnis argues that the differences between the English and continental traditions can be explained in part by the lack of royal commitment to patronage in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, to which we might also add a lack of civic sponsorship of public scholarship along Italian lines. In England, the west country lord Thomas Berkeley emerges in the early part of the fifteenth century as the most conspicuous sponsor of vernacular explications of Latin texts in the form of English translations, among which John Walton's translation of Boethius's De [End Page iii] consolatione philosophiae is noteworthy. The methods of the Berkeley translators—John Trevisa, Walton, and an anonymous translator of Vegetius's De re militari—provide an interesting analogue to the common practices of glossators and commentators. But Berkeley's prominence as a patron of scholarship signals ironically a broader failure of support for translation and commentary in England, compounded, as Minnis argues, by authoritarian anxieties about the vernacular, lay appropriation of religious texts, reflected in Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions, the suppression of Lollards, or Dives and Pauper.

Minnis is concerned with glosses and commentaries in their familiar, conventional form, as annotations, marginal texts, or explications parallel to an authoritative text. As he suggests, English seems to have lacked sufficient status to become a viable medium for this sort of expression, despite the efforts of Trevisa and others to represent it as a successor language to Latin translating Greek. In Latin, however, evidence of the learned, academic tradition of marginal commentary continues to be available in school texts and manuscripts, as Janine Larmon Peterson explains in her paper, "Defining a Textbook: Gloss versus Gloss in a Medieval Schoolbook." Peterson provides an illuminating account of the layers of glossing in a twelfth-century Italian manuscript of Lucan's De bello civili, known as New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS 332. Three distinct groups of glossators, ranging from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, annotated the text and defined in the process a range of academic interests in Lucan. In effect, Beinecke 332 represents the commentary tradition as alive and well in schoolish, non-political circumstances. But beyond that, as Peterson argues, the range of academic interests in the various glosses in the Beinecke manuscript prompt a re-consideration of our idea of the medieval school book. The different sets of glosses contend with each other as variant readings of Lucan without canceling each other out, moving us from a notion of the textbook as a fixed expression of durable truths—a concept that reflects twentieth-century ideas about the critical edition—to a more fluid, reader-defined idea of the text, occasioning different responses depending on the reader's circumstances and purposes. Thus in addition to its...

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