The Space that Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari (review)

Claudian, in his De raptu Proserpinae, presents the reader with an ecphrasis in which Proserpina’s mother sees her daughter’s nearly-finished tapestry: “Ceres recognizes the threads, half ruined around the fallen / weft, and also the stilled craft of the comb. / That divine work is lost, and the space that remained, / An audacious spider filled it in with her sacrilegious text” (trans. Pelttari, 163). This image serves as a representation of the central thesis of Aaron Pelttari’s The Space that Remains, the title of which derives from the passage. Pelttari proposes that one of the defining features of Latin poetry in Late Antiquity was that authors to a greater degree than ever before had come to rely upon and expect the reader’s involvement with the text itself. The Claudian extract prompts Pelttari to reflect on the interplay between Claudian, this passage’s spider, and Ovid’s Arachne: “Because of Ovid’s Arachne, the spider could naturally be read as a metaphor for the artist… If Claudian is like this spider, he is a secondary author; if his poem is like Proserpina’s text, its gaps remain for the reader to construe” (163). Late antique poetry uniquely needed a reader to fill in these gaps. It should be noted here that this is a theoretical reader; Pelttari consciously eschews any discussion of the physical act of reading (this is one of the few books on readers in Late Antiquity which does not feel the need to cite the well-worn story of Augustine seeing Ambrose reading silently to himself).

Pelttari begins the book with a few choice samples of late antique poetry that demonstrate some of its unique properties, all of which will be discussed in greater detail in the chapters below. He then provides a brief précis of the contents: “I will explore the ways in which reading was constructed in late antiquity on the level of text, paratext, intertext, and commentary” (8). Four chapters do just that (albeit not in that order).

Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of Scriptural commentary in Late Antiquity. Despite the book’s title and emphasis on Latin poetry, this discussion of prose is both necessary and well-integrated with the book’s argument concerning poetry. Jerome is presented first as the scholar whose expertise guaranteed the “proper” interpretation of Scripture (13–17). Pelttari draws a unique conclusion from Jerome’s production of commentaries: for Jerome, and others, reading Scripture, and therefore reading, had become the central act in literary production. Originality itself was not as prized as originality in reference to a canonical work. Moreover, the authority of the canonical work in question lent authority to its exegete. In his section on Augustine (and Tyconius), Pelttari presents a different model (17–25). Instead of presenting himself as an expert exegete, Augustine (in his De doctrina Christiana) provided guidelines so that the informed reader could correctly interpret Scripture on his or her own. But in either case, late antique literature was fundamentally a result of reading. The remainder of the chapter, an extensive discussion of late antique readers of Virgil focusing on Macrobius’s Saturnalia (25–44), demonstrates that this emphasis on reading was limited to neither Christians nor commentaries on prose works. Thus for all late antique authors, or at least many of them, reading was the fundamental act by which new literature was produced.

Chapter 2 is very straightforward. Pelttari investigates what relationship authors expected of readers in their “paratexts,” that is, in the prefaces and introductions to Latin poetry. In late antiquity, these could function either to define for the reader how a text should be read or as a way for an author to compel the reader to play an active role in the text. Claudian and Prudentius are cited as generally providing examples of the former (55–62), and Ausonius the latter (62–72). Pelttari ably demonstrates that...