Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer by Christopher Baswell (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER needs. The insight thus provided into the amazing pains taken by the "translator" to reorganize his Latin texts in the vernacular enriches our understanding of a significant cross-cultural activity in the medieval period. MARION GLASSCOE University of Exeter CHRISTOPHER BASWELL. Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, vol. 24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xviii, 438. $60.00. At the heart of this book, perhaps at the heart of its author, are three chapters, each studying a British manuscript of the Aeneid, represent­ ing readerly activity from the twelfth to the late fourteenth centuries, and a useful appendix called "Manuscripts of Virgil Written or Owned in England during the Middle Ages." The book's first project is to doc­ ument the multiple ways of reading the Aeneid during these centuries, and to group them into three ample clusters: the well-known allegorical tradition; the increasingly familiar romance tradition, in which female characters and vernacular languages challenge a more conservative, masculinist, and imperialist Virgil; and-underappreciated these days-the pedagogical tradition lodged in the schools. Baswell's first manuscript, Oxford AS 82, bears three sets of annota­ tions spanning three centuries, the three sets together evincing the vari­ ety of purpose and intention for which Baswell argues in the pedagogi­ cal tradition. Against the line of scholarship that has taken commentary's dominant method to be allegorical and medieval readers "unable or un­ willing to understand ancient texts as set in a past which must be imag­ inatively recaptured" (p. 48), Baswell argues for these commentators' persistent efforts to recover with precision the particularities of lan­ guage, religion, social order, and geography in Virgil's world. Baswell's exemplar of the familiar commentary tradition, that of "spiritual allegory" and "platonizing cosmology," is the twelfth-century Cambridge, Peterhouse College MS 158-a manuscript containing, as Baswell discovered, an unexpectedly early transcription of the com216 REVIEWS mentary on Martianus Capella attributed to Bernardus Silvestris. Calling upon such late-antique fabulists as Macrobius and their high­ medieval beneficiaries, Baswell traces in Pl58, with its substantial al­ legorizing narratives preceding and following the poem, a "codicolog­ ical move from marginal notes more closely tied to the authorial text, to a separate commentum more loosely inspired by that text" (p. 91). Like others, Baswell emphasizes that this kind ofreading is generated by a reverence for Virgil's arcane wisdom, with the paradoxical result that Virgil's poem is taken as demanding integumental interpretation and eliciting the ingenuity ofa magister in ways that the more grammatical pedagogical tradition does not. Baswell follows the geohistorical for­ tunes ofthis manuscript, one document in the intellectual life ofthe English west country in the twelfth century showing that "Chartrian Platonism and humanist interest in the classics" comprised "a major strand in the milieu ofEnglish culture," even after "similar interests had begun to die down on the continent" (p. 133). Finally there is a fourteenth-century Bodleian manuscript, Add. 27304, with its idiosyncratic commentary by a Norwich reader whose need to make ofthe Aeneid a series of hortatory exempla links him to moral allegory-a familiar enough tradition, but one emerging here in the effort ofone reader as lively, peculiar, and personally urgent. The behavior ofVirgil's characters is taken to exemplify social, sexual, and preacherly ideals: "Behold how suitably [Aeneas} answers, and men should answer questions to the point"; "[Virgil} shows how a woman should be given to her husband [i.e., intacta}" (p. 151); on Dido's curses against Aeneas, "by so much more strongly is excommunication to be feared" (p. 154); perhaps most wonderfully, "Note, Aeneas flees Dido at the order ofMercury and Jupiter. And mankind does not flee sin at the order ofGod and the preacher" (p. 153). Warmth offeeling toward this Norwich reader and toward the pedagogical impulse ofall commentary is one ofBaswell's strengths; in his patient, detailed reconstructions of classroom and clerkly readerships, he vivifies a hunger for utterance and response among teachers, students, and texts. The fruits ofthese read­ ing dynamics, notwithstanding their male-only institutionalism, de­ serve the acknowledgment that they receive here: at...