The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton

Notes

Notes =< introduction 1. My view of the Confessions’ relation to epic history is thus distinct from that argued in such studies as Fichter 1982 (40–69) and Røstvig 1994 (75–130). Despite their own very different interests (Fichter studies the theme of imperium in “dynastic epic”; Røstvig pursues “topomorphical” or structural/numerological analyses of various literary works, including Renaissance epics), they share a common focus on the question of a poem’s unity (artistic, conceptual, and metaphysical), crediting the unifying vision of the Confessions for supplying an important bridge from the classical to a Christian epic ethos. Cf. McMahon 1989 for a study of “the literary form” of Augustine’s Confessions. In another volume, McMahon brie›y discusses the idea that the Confessions is “a counter-Aeneid or an anti-Aeneid” in the context of an analysis of Milton’s effort to resolve the “tension between Christianity and epic” in Paradise Lost (1998, 157–58). 2. Duabus adhuc adamantinis dextra levaque premeris cathenis, que nec de morte neque de vita sinunt cogitare (Petrarch 1977b, 110). All subsequent citations of Petrarch’s Secretum are from the 1977 edition, although I do not follow its style of setting off Petrarch’s quotations of other works in italicized block quotes; instead, these quotations are incorporated in the text within quotation marks. For discussion of Augustine’s moral teaching in the Secretum, see Heitmann 1960 and, with a speci‹c focus on Augustine ’s demand that Petrarch abandon the Africa, Martinelli 1983. For analyses of his role from the perspective that the Secretum testi‹es to the “crisi psicologico-religiosa del Petrarca,” see Tateo 1965, 4–9, 39–51; Martinelli 1982, 31–35. A standard study of the Secretum’s broader signi‹cance in Petrarch’s thought and place in history is Dotti 1978. In contrast, see Oscar Giuliani’s argument that “the ‘fable’” of Petrarch’s exchange with Augustine is not a confession of the poet’s “conscienza interiore” but an allegory of moral philosophy—“not a narrative of his own chronological development, but the revelation of an ideal development by means of a moral system, one that reveals the phenomenology of sin” (La ‘fabula’ di Francesco è narrata non nel suo svolgimento crono195 logico, ma spiegata nel suo svolgimento ideale mediante un sistema morale, che spiega la fenomenologia del peccato [1977, 200–201]). An essay that appeared after the present study was completed, Rigolot 2004, stresses as I do Petrarch’s immense historical in›uence—though in the context of an analysis of Renaissance dialogue—with a hyperbolic opening sentence that is virtually identical to my own (“In the beginning was Petrarch’s Secretum, . . .” [3]). The nature of Augustine’s importance to Petrarch generally continues to inspire a striking range of opinions. See Verdicchio 2002 for the startling notion that Augustine is the subject of demolishing critique in Petrarch’s writings—that “Augustine, for Petrarch, is only another pagan writer, more in the line of Pygmalion, with gods always within reach listening to his prayers, and always prepared to make his wishes real” (145). Cf. the very different interpretation in Quillen 1998, 182–222: Petrarch’s “invented Augustine,” she argues, “not only sanctioned but insisted on the use of classical literature in the human search for spiritual health and ful‹llment” (216); his “example and words,” therefore, “could authorize humanist textual practice” (222). 3. . . . scis ne de ea muliere mentionem tibi exortam, cuius mens terrenarum nescia curarum celestibus desideriis ardet; in cuius aspectu, siquid usquam veri est, divini specimen decoris effulget; cuius mores consumate honestatis exemplar sunt; cuius nec vox nec oculorum vigor mortale aliquid nec incessus hominem representat? (116). 4. Deum profecto ut amarem, illius amor prestitit (126). 5. This and all subsequent references to Dante’s Divine Comedy are to Charles Singleton ’s text and translation in Dante 1973. 6. Ab amore celestium elongavit animum et a Creatore ad creaturam desiderium inclinavit. . . . At pervertit ordinem (126–27). 7. Te ipsum derelinquere mavis, quam libellos tuos (186). 8. The modern critical edition of De viris illustribus is in Petrarch 1964. 9. On this event, see Wilkins 1951, 9–69. Hans Baron (1985, 133–36) speculates on its relation to the Secretum. The text of Petrarch’s coronation speech (known as the Collatio laureationis) is in Godi 1970, with an English translation in Wilkins 1955, 300–13. 10. Abice ingentes historiarum sarcinas: satis romane res geste et suapte fama et aliorum ingeniis illustrate sunt. Dimitte Africam, eamque possessoribus suis linque; nec Scipioni tuo nec tibi gloriam cumulabis. . . . His igitur posthabitis, te tandem tibi restitue atque, ut unde movimus revertamur, incipe tecum de morte cogitare, cui sensim et nescius appropinquas. Rescissis velis tenebrisque discussis, in illam oculos ‹ge (186). 11. Amplector et gratias ago. Sentio enim languori meo consentaneum esse remedium; fugamque iam meditor (152). 12. The Petrarch of the sonnets maintains a powerful hold on the modern critical imagination, inclining many scholars to want to interpret every work by him as if it were the Canzoniere. So, e.g., one reads in Miller 1997 that Petrarch “never agrees” in the Secretum “to abandon his love for Laura” (155), which quite misrepresents the dialogue, even if we allow for potential backslide in Petrarch’s statement “I intend my escape” (surely we are expected to understand at this point that Petrarch will keep his promise just as Aeneas carried out his intention to “escape” Dido). We should resist the temptation , in other words, to overgeneralize Petrarch’s exploitation of the Laura/Lauro pun by assuming that these are never divisible in Petrarch’s imagination, that the pursuit of one must always, in all of his writings, mean pursuit of the other, for that is to err in two notes to pages 3–4 196 < respects: ‹rst, it neglects Petrarch’s other favorite persona besides the tormented unrequited lover of Laura—that is, Petrarch the rehabilitated Laura addict (the Petrarch who narrates the Africa); second, it assumes that Petrarch’s own moral and artistic distinctions between his vernacular lyric poetry and his Latin compositions, particularly the genres of epic and history that he professes to hallow so greatly, must always be disingenuous . 13. Neque aliam ob causam propero nunc tam studiosus ad reliqua, nisi ut, illis explicitis, ad hec redeam: non ignarus, ut paulo ante dicebas, multo michi futurum esse securius studium hoc unum sectari et, deviis pretermissis, rectum callem salutis apprehendere . Sed desiderium frenare non valeo (194). 14. In antiquam litem relabimur, voluntatem impotentiam vocas. Sed sic eat, quando aliter esse not potest, supplexque Deum oro ut euntem comitetur, gressusque licet vagos, in tutum iubeat pervenire (194). 15. By “traditional,” I mean only the traditional models of epic history followed in previous studies of the subject. These studies nevertheless exemplify the whole spectrum of contemporary critical approaches to literary analysis, including, e.g., Elizabeth J. Bellamy’s 1992 psychoanalytic study of “narcissism and the unconscious” in the Aeneid, Orlando Furioso, Gerusalemme liberata, and The Faerie Queene and Susanne Lindgren Wofford’s 1992 deconstructionist explication of “the ideology of ‹gure” in the Iliad, the Aeneid, The Faerie Queene, and (more brie›y) Paradise Lost and Don Quixote. 16. Permutatio est oratio aliud verbis aliud sententia demonstrans (Ad Herennium 1954, 4.34.46, with the translation by Caplan slightly adjusted). Cf. the de‹nition of allegory in the seventh-century Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville: “Allegoria est alieniloquium , aliud enim sonat, aliud intelligitur” (1982–83, 1.37.22). 17. At the time of this writing, only the ‹rst two volumes of the English translation of Lubac’s four-volume Exégèse Médiévale have appeared. Here I quote from the translated volumes but also supply page references to the original. For a more succinct account of “the four senses of scripture,” see Caplan 1929. 18. It is understood that I adopt the term “negative via” in this study in the sense that Buckley uses it in the quote cited in text, referring merely to the idea of taking the wrong path to the right destination. It is not to be confused with the “theology of negation ” or “apophatic theology” associated with Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who recommended negative statements about God (what God is not) over positive ones (what God is) on the grounds that the in‹nite vastness of God’s being exceeds the possibility of human predication. Recent feminist histories and critiques of medieval tradition have described various versions of a “gendered” negative via that constitute one important context for the particular type that is charted here. Caroline Bynum, for instance, in her survey of patristic and other medieval Christian texts, notes that frequently “men saw male and female as contrasting sets of values or behaviors and used gender reversal as an image of their exchange of ordinary (male) for extraordinary (female) status” and that men’s “description of themselves as ‘weak women’ expressed something positive: their desire to reject the world, to become the meek who inherit the earth” (1991, 165). Further comments on this image may be found in Bynum’s study of the medieval representation of “Jesus as Mother” (1982) and in the essays by Barbara Newman gathered under the title, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ (1995). Elizabeth Fiorenza notes a parallel trend in medieval representations of Christ and the Christian male as subjugated female, which Notes to Pages 5–9 197 = she argues served the purpose of a “positive” salvation theology based on the notion of “redemptive victimization” (1994, 98–99; a study of the same idea in “the Christology of Paradise Lost” is in Labriola 1981). 19. The starkness of this dichotomy is just one re›ection of a well-documented aspect of Augustine’s portrayal in the Secretum (see, e.g., the chapter “Augustine Invented” in Quillen 1998, 182–216): Petrarch’s strategic simpli‹cations of complex ideas in Augustine’s thought, not least his view of the relation between the single source of love in God versus fallen man’s “divided will” (on which see Rist 1994, 148–202) and his corresponding belief in the essential “unity of love for God and neighbor” (as described in Canning 1993). 20. For a survey of Petrarch’s writings showing that they evince such “a restless humanist’s dialogue with Christian antiquity” over the course of his whole career, see Schildgen 1996. Cf. the account of “Petrarch’s maturation from ‘philologia’ to a ‘philosophia’” in Rico 1986. 21. Cf. (with the caveat stated in n. 12 of this introduction) Aldo Bernardo’s irresolute assessment of the Secretum’s conclusion: “We thus have in Petrarch’s Secretum the poet’s near acceptance of Augustine’s dismissal of his love of Laura as a woman but not as a goad to the higher reaches of Parnassus and to the laurel crown. Indeed, what really appears to happen at the very end of the Secretum is the discovery by the poet that he can almost logically substitute one passion for another. He cannot ‘bridle his desire’ to write or to justify his laureate. In short, he feels con‹dent that although his passion for poetry is not detrimental to ultimate salvation, Laura might be. He had, however, already confessed that the distinction between Laura and poetry was very slight indeed” (1974, 81). 22. In this regard, I am indebted to, and strive in this book to complement, two important studies of the ‹gure of Dido in medieval and early modern literature: Marilynn Desmond’s Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (1994) and John Watkins’s The Specter of Dido: Spenser and the Virgilian Epic (1995). See also the study of “Dido as an example of chastity” in Lord 1969 and the analysis of “the two faces of Dido” in “classical images and medieval interpretation” in Ortiz 1986. On the AeneasDido story in the Renaissance period, see Roberts-Baytop 1974 and Garrison 1992, while a survey of the “Aeneas-Dido-mythe” in medieval French, Italian, and Spanish vernacular literature is in Leube 1969. Finally, cf. Mihoko Suzuki’s study of the “metamorphoses of Helen” in epic history (1989), in which Suzuki argues that (beginning with Homer’s Iphigeneia) “woman as Other is consistently assigned the role of sacri‹cial victim or scapegoat so that epic community among men can be maintained and af‹rmed,” such that “the substitution of sacri‹cial victims motivates the metamorphoses of Helen into other female ‹gures” (6)—including Dido (92–149). 23. Cf. Ruether 1983, a critique of the traditional formulation of women’s “direction of salvation” up through the chain of being, from female to male to spirits to God, as being obversely a “trajectory of alienation” (79). 24. In hac enim benedictione concessam nobis a te facultatem ac postestatem accipio et multis modis enuntiare, quod uno modo intellectum tenuerimus, et multis modis intellegere, quod obscure uno modo enuntiatum legerimus (13.24 in Augustine 1992; all subsequent references to the Confessions are to this edition, and translations are my own). I cite a slightly later passage in this chapter than does Bloch—as he quotes, “I have known a thing to be signi‹ed in many ways by the body that is understood in one way by the mind, and a thing to be understood in many ways by the mind that is signi‹ed in notes to pages 9–10 198 < but one by the body” (1991, 215 n. 6)—but the point is the same. For a discussion of this and Augustine’s other citations of Genesis 1:28 in the context of a study of the verse’s interpretation in ancient and medieval exegesis, see Cohen 1989, 245–59. 25. As John Fleming puts it, “Augustine the convert had said that many paths led to Truth, only to be contradicted by Augustine the bishop” (1984, 48). 26. Sed quisquis in scripturis aliud sentit quam ille qui scripsit, illis non mentientibus fallitur. Sed tamen, ut dicere coeperam, si ea sententia fallitur qua aedi‹cet caritatem , quae ‹nis praecepti est, ita fallitur ac si quisquam errore deserens viam eo tamen per agrum pergat quo etiam via illa perducit (Augustine 1995, 1.88, with facing-page translation by R. P. H. Green). Petrarch was well aware, of course, that this sentence is immediately followed by one in the sterner tone recreated in the Secretum’s Augustine: “But he must be put right and shown how it is more useful not to leave the path,” the passage continues, “in case the habit of deviating should force him to go astray or even adrift” (Corridendus est tamen, et quam sit utilius viam non deserere demonstrandum est, ne consuetudine deviandi etiam in transversum aut perversum ire cogatur [ibid.]). The implication is that Petrarch can go through one or two more ‹elds—can work at one or two more of his tasks, like the Africa—before his going “astray” becomes being “adrift.” 27. Cf. Andrew Fichter’s useful explanation (1982, 10–12) of the Augustinian ontology underlying the apparent opposition in Christian epic between the earthly and the heavenly city, such as Carthage and Rome represent: “The city of man is a false objective , not only in the sense that it is the locus of moral error but also it is the negation of that upon which being depends. To follow one’s cupidinous desires, the promptings of one’s own pride or passion, is to move not toward an alternative city, a Carthage rather than a Rome, but toward nonbeing” (11). On the idea of the two cities in Augustine’s thought, see also Rist 1994, 216–25. 28. Aeneid 4.624–25: exoriare, aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor qui face Dardanios ferroque sequare colonos . . . This and subsequent citations of the Aeneid are from Vergil 1969, with my translations. 29. Cf. Fleming’s observation in the context of his study of medieval dialogues between “Reason” and “the Lover”: “we look in vain for a dramatic conversion of Franciscus in the Secretum. Perhaps we are searching in the wrong book. The evidence may lie in the Africa, or rather in the silence of blank leaves that lie between the Africa as we know it and the poem that is the object of the reproaches of Augustinus” (1984, 167). Fleming stresses that the Secretum has much more in common with Augustine’s Soliloquia than with the Confessions (136–83, esp. 146–48 and 153–54), a point that is also made in Murphy 1980, 239 (see also Fleming 1984, 156–57, and Rico 1974, 17, for discussion of Petrarch’s allusions at the start of his dialogue to the Soliloquia’s opening lines). 30. E.g., see Pamela Williams’s assertion that “the signi‹cant point about 366 . . . is that while Petrarch repudiates Laura he is still in love with her; the last canzone is a prayer for rescue not an assertion of freedom” (1996, 31). The effort to de‹ne the poetics of the Canzoniere is an ongoing preoccupation among Petrarchan scholars and may, without too much exaggeration, be characterized as a continuing engagement with Freccero’s thesis, implicitly if not explicitly. See, e.g., Waller 1980, 27–104; Sturm-Maddox 1985 and 1992; Boyle 1991; Scaglione 1992; Estrin 1994, 41–90; and my own essay from Notes to Pages 11–12 199 = which this discussion derives (J. C. Warner 1996). A reading of the Secretum that is inspired by Freccero’s essay is in Miller 1997. The strongest objections to Freccero’s thesis and the studies it has inspired are still those of Thomas Roche (1989, 1–69), who stresses the circumscribing function of the Canzoniere’s framing poems and calls on readers to take Petrarch’s expressions of penitence at face value. 31. Petrarch 1977b, 22, cited in Freccero 1975, 37. 32. Cf. the extensive “reexamination” by Sturm-Maddox “of Laura and of the laurel ” at the center of “two ‘readings’ of the poet’s story” in the Canzoniere, “one a redemptive itinerary, the other a fall” (1992, 9). This extends Sturm-Maddox’s previous analyses of the sequence’s allegory of the fall (1983) and of its “redemptive” and “confessional subtexts” (1985, 65–127). 33. On this point, see the critique in Roche 1989, 483 n. 30. Similarly, in a major recent study of “the origins of humanism from Lovato to Bruni,” Ronald Witt describes Petrarch as “a third-generation humanist” whose deeply held Christian faith “divert[ed] humanism from the secular-civic orientation given it by the ‹rst two generations of humanists.” It was not until the ‹fteenth century, Witt shows, that Bruni and other “‹fth generation humanists” succeeded in “return[ing] humanism to its original secular context, whence it had been wrenched by Petrarch” (2000, 497). Nevertheless, as Witt is quick to concede, however much “Petrarchan humanism balanced a passionate classicism with a traditional Christian devotion,” we witness throughout Petrarch’s writings that “the two could often be held together only by verbal subterfuge” (290). 34. No. 366, lines 121–23; this and subsequent citations of the Canzoniere are from Petrarch 1996, with my translations. 35. Cf. Lisa Freinkel’s characterization of Petrarch’s “poetics of deferred meaning” (2002, 164): “Petrarch’s lyrics will ‹ll page after page, gesturing toward a plenitude of meaning that they continually hold at bay. In this way the lyrics emerge as the work of an eternal pilgrim—as the consummate work of an unconsummated desire” (49); or put another way, “he strives consistently . . . to keep the moment of conversion present, self-conscious: to keep turning without ever having turned” (127). 36. Veni Carthaginem, et circumstrepebat me undique sartago ›agitiosorum amorum . nondum amabam, et amare amabam, et secretiore indigentia oderam me minus indigentem. quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare, et oderam securitatem et viam sine muscipulis, quoniam fames mihi erat intus ab interiore cibo, te ipso, deus meus, et ea fame non esuriebam, sed eram sine desiderio alimentorum incorruptibilium, non quia plenus eis eram, sed quo inanior, fastidiosior. et ideo non bene valebat anima mea et ulcerosa proiciebat se foras, miserabiliter scalpi avida contactu sensibilium. sed si non haberent animam, non utique amarentur. amare et amari dulce mihi erat, magis si et amantis corpore fruerer. venam igitur amicitiae coinquinabam sordibus concupiscentiae candoremque eius obnubilabam de tartaro libidinis, et tamen foedus atque inhonestus , elegans et urbanus esse gestiebam abundanti vanitate. rui etiam in amorem, quo cupiebam capi. deus meus, misericordia mea, quanto felle mihi suavitatem illam et quam bonus aspersisti, quia et amatus sum, et perveni occulte ad vinculum fruendi, et conligabar laetus aerumnosis nexibus, ut caederer virgis ferreis ardentibus zeli et suspicionum et timorum et irarum atque rixarum (3.1.1). For discussion of the Cartago/sartago pun in Augustine’s imagination, see Fleming 1984, 89–91; on Augustine ’s use of the terms libido and concupiscentia, see Bonner 1962 and the entries for these words in Mayer 1994. notes to pages 12–18 200 < 37. . . . multa tu, dum corporeo carcere claudebaris, huic similia pertulisti. Quod cum ita sit, passionum expertarum curator optime (4). 38. . . . adhuc tenaciter conligabar ex femina (8.1.2). 39. . . . suspendio magis necabar (6.4.6). 40. Convertisti enim me ad te, ut nec uxorem quaererem nec aliquam spem saeculi huius (8.12.30). 41. Postquam plene volui, ilicet et potui, miraque et felicissima celeritate transformatus sum in alterum Augustinum (20). chapter one 1. Ennius ad dextram victoris, tempora fronde / Substringens parili, studiorum almeque Poesis / Egit honoratum sub tanto auctore triumphum (Petrarch 1926, 9.400–402). All subsequent references to the Africa are to the 1926 edition. Translations are my own, but for convenience I provide the corresponding line numbers from the English verse translation by Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson (Petrarch 1977a; for the passage cited here, lines 558–60). 2. I cite the translation in Toffanin 1954, 111, 113–14. 3. Bernardo summarizes Petrarch’s various depictions of Scipio in the Secretum, De viris illustribus, Rerum memorandarum libri, and all his other writings (1962, 1–126); see especially his discussion subtitled “Scipio vs. Laura” (47–71), which rather stresses the af‹nity between Scipio and Laura in Petrarch’s imagination, since they are representatives of “the oneness of true glory and virtue” (55). Many of the more recent studies of the Africa continue to stress Petrarch’s aim to write a “purely classical epic” or, following Bernardo in his other claim, Petrarch’s troubled effort to strike a “compromise” between the classical and the Christian, to create something “near-Christian.” So, e.g., Thomas Greene describes the Africa as Petrarch’s “most sustained effort to revive ancient heroism” (1982b, 49), while Craig Kallendorf, contending that Petrarch’s “views about poetry, especially epic poetry,” are much “more thoroughly colored by epideictic than has been previously recognized” (1989, 22), argues that “the entire poem functions [and pretty much only functions] to praise Scipio’s many virtues” (23). For an earlier study of the Africa that, like Kallendorf ’s, takes as its guiding interpretive principle the assumption of Renaissance humanists that “poetry in general ought to praise virtue and condemn vice” (ibid., 24), see Seagraves 1980, which catalogs all of Scipio’s merits. Such strict focus on this principle (really, it is a lowest common denominator in the literature of the period) unfortunately leaves little for interpretation and, in the end, tends to elicit such negative judgments as Bergin and Wilson’s that “the Africa has a fatal ›aw” in that “it presents us with a ›awless hero” who “is simply too good to be true” (Petrarch 1977a, xv). Also in this line of the poem’s critics is Philip Hardie, who recognizes, with Kallendorf, that “Scipio is the historical embodiment of supreme virtue,” but who echoes Bernardo, too, in viewing the poem’s hero as “a ‹gure for Petrarch’s own search for a form of virtue that satis‹es both humanist and Christian requirements” (1993a, 299; cf. Klecker 2001). 4. Hans Baron, while rejecting some of the direct connections that Fenzi and Rico draw between the Secretum and Africa (Baron 1985, 124–27), nevertheless agrees that Petrarch experienced a “religious crisis” in the early 1350s and that this crisis is re›ected in the soul-searching of the Secretum and the un‹nished state of the Africa (129–31). Notes to Pages 18–23 201 = 5. Proinde non solum ut talis merces talibus hominibus redderetur Romanum imperium ad humanam gloriam dilatatum est; verum etiam ut cives aeternae illius civitatis , quamdiu hic peregrinantur, diligenter et sobrie illa intueantur exempla et videant quanta dilectio debeatur supernae patriae propter vitam aeternam, si tantum a suis civibus terrena dilecta est propter hominum gloriam (Augustine 1955, 5.16.9–16; translation [here slightly modi‹ed] by R. W. Dyson in Augustine 1998, 166; subsequent references to The City of God are also to these editions). 6. Librum imperfectum esse eius demonstrat editio, quia ordo ipsius rei prout res se habuerit non procedit. Nam si secunda belli summa spectetur, multa deesse conspiciemus , ut Scipionis ex Hispania transitum ad Siphacem. . . . Sed praeter hoc, neque traiectionem exercitus in Africam, neque castrorum Syphacis nocturnam exustionem, aut ut postea Syphax atque Hasdrubal aperta acie victi sunt; neque ut in‹dus rex tandem in suo regno a Massinissa et Laelio superatus et captus sit: sed haec omnia, ut Vergerius scribit, ratio inducere potuit, cum supremam pugnam, quae inter duos summos duces, scilicet Sipionem et Hannibalem fuit, descripturus esset, quae bello ‹nem posuit. . . . Sunt praeterea, quae monstrant non fuisse correctum opus, versus dimidiati et imperfecti, ut est creberime apud Maronem nostrum (Solerti 1904, 358; for the identical argument by Vergerio, see ibid., 300). On Petrarch’s alleged wish, in imitation of Vergil, to have his poem burned, see Bernardo 1962, 173. 7. Hizo, en suma, lo que Agustín amonestaba hacer a Francesco (1974, 422). 8. See Haley 1989 for a study of Livy’s characterization of Sophonisba (Sophoniba). Petrarch, of course, had a special relationship with Livy’s history on account of his instrumental role in its textual transmission (for this story, see Billanovich 1951). Thus, for the same reason that Petrarch so often alludes to Cicero’s Pro Archia (a “lost speech” rediscovered by Petrarch), we might surmise here in passing that Petrarch’s seeming obsession with the ‹gure of Scipio throughout his writings is in part a dimension of Petrarchan self-promotion—that is, it is no less a sustained campaign to advertise the importance of Livy and of the guardian of Livy’s legacy than it is an expression of humanistic admiration for the virtues of Scipio’s character. 9. This and subsequent references to Livy’s history of the Second Punic War are to Livy 1949, but with my translations. 10. Augustine scolds Petrarch: “What you could have been she has snatched from you, or rather you have tossed it away. For she is innocent” (quod esse poteras illa preripuit , imo tu potius abstuli. Ista enim innocens est [126]). 11. The usual explanation for Petrarch’s correction (e.g., see Kallendorf 1989, 40–44) is that he believed poets are bound not to contradict the historical record, which, as Petrarch knew, depicted Dido as “an exemplum of chastity” (ibid., 41). 12. Petrarch here alludes to the etymology of the name Carthago, meaning “new town,” as Servius (citing Livy) explains: “Carthago enim est lingua Poenorum nova civitas , ut docet Livius” (1961, 1:124, commentary to Aeneid 1.366; cf. chap. 2 n. 21 in the present study). 13. On this tradition, see Lord 1969, which includes discussion of Petrarch’s references to his sources (219–20). 14. Scholars have long debated whether the tears ›ow from Dido, Anna, Anna and Dido, Aeneas, or all three. See the survey and evaluation of these interpretations in the commentary on Aeneid 4 by Arthur Stanley Pease (Vergil 1935, note to line 449). 15. Ita mens, ubi ‹xa est ista sententia, nullas perturbationes, etiamsi accidunt infenotes to pages 24–31 202 < rioribus animi partibus, in se contra rationem praevalere permittit; quin immo eis ipsa dominatur eisque non consentiendo et potius resistendo regnum virtutis exercet. Talem describit etiam Vergilius Aenean, ubi ait: Mens immota manet, lacrimae volvuntur inanes (9.4.98–104; 364–65, with translation slightly revised). 16. . . . quam illae quibus tenere cogebar Aeneae nescio cuius errores, oblitus errorum meorum, et plorare Didonem mortuam, quia se occidit ab amore, cum interea me ipsum in his a te morientem, deus, vita mea, siccis oculis ferrem miserrimus. Quid enim miserius misero non miserante se ipsum et ›ente Didonis mortem, quae ‹ebat amando Aenean, non ›ente autem mortem suam, quae ‹ebat non amando te, deus, lumen cordis mei et panis oris intus animae meae et virtus maritans mentem meam et sinum cogitationis meae? non te amabam . . . et haec non ›ebam, et ›ebam Didonem extinctam ferroque extrema secutam (1.13.20–21). As Nancy Ruff notes, this passage has been “oddly and frequently taken to indicate Augustine’s sympathy for Dido”; she rightly emphasizes that its aim is “to illustrate his poor spiritual state in those days” (1994, 881). For references to this passage in the context of discussions of Augustine’s reception of Vergil, see Bono 1984, 45–50; Desmond 1994, 75–79; Watkins 1995, 34–39. 17. . . . quam pridem tibi sat familiariter cognitam arguta circumlocutione testatus es (3). Just after this statement, Lady Truth commends Petrarch for having “built” for her, “with poetic hands” (poeticis . . . manibus erexisti) in the Africa, “a beautiful and glorious palace, in the far west atop Mount Atlas” (in extremo quidem occidentis summoque Atlantis vertice habitationem clarissimam atque pulcerrimam [2]). Strangely, I think, a number of critics have interpreted this passage not as Petrarch’s invitation to discover the “subtle circumlocution” or allegory of the Africa—the truth that lies within the palace that is his poem—but as evidence that the apparent description of Laelius’s entry into Syphax’s palace (3.88ff.), which begins after an obvious lacuna, is instead a misplaced fragment describing an ethereal “Palace of Truth.” This view was ‹rst asserted by the Africa’s modern editor, Nicola Festa, and is most fully developed in his introduction to the poem (Petrarch 1926, lxvii–lxix). In Festa’s view, the passage belongs at the end of book 4. A summary and evaluation of Festa’s argument is in Bernardo 1962, 128–42, but I am not persuaded, as is Bernardo, that Festa makes a strong case. At any rate, if we may cite as evidence the argumenta that preface the Africa’s books in early Venice editions of Petrarch’s works, then book 3’s argument indicates that the passage in question was understood, at least by the editors of these early editions, to belong to Petrarch’s account of Laelius’s reception at Syphax’s palace (see Petrarch 1501, 16v: “Postquam visa ducis sol excutit optimus heros / Acciri propere lelium iubet illicet ille. / Mittit ad reges syphacem ut federa ponat. / Hospitis inde thoro fruit citharista iocosus / Carmine pangebat”). 18. Bernardo, e.g., suggests that “perhaps the sixty-eight verses . . . added by Petrarch to Book IX, following the death of King Robert of Naples, may provide some hint” to the “important truths” hidden in the Africa. He proposes that Robert’s death symbolizes “the death of the arts, with the result that this poem must now wander unrecognized through the centuries until the present ‘Lethean sleep’ is over” (1962, 45). But again, this is a message in plain view, and it does not indicate that there are any “hidden truths” to be sought in the characters or events of the poem itself. Closer to my view of the Africa, Janet Smarr encourages us to search for Petrarch’s Christian allegory, noting that “Augustine had written that Romans who acted well on behalf of the Earthly City shadowed forth or presented models for Christian actions on behalf of the Eternal Notes to Pages 32–33 203 = City, where Christ is ‘the giver of true glory and citizenship.’” Smarr only goes on to observe, however, that “with the serpent as a recurring image for the Carthaginian foe [Africa 2.103–13, 6.544–48], Biblical resonances clearly emerge,” and that “thus Petrarch may have hoped that the Africa, like Dante’s Commedia, could be read polysemously: a history of Rome, a moral war in the soul; and a shadow of Christ’s victory over sin, the triumph of the truly Eternal City” (1982, 138). I would also include among allegorical interpretations of the Africa Paul Colilli’s singular poststructuralist reading based almost exclusively on Petrarch’s self-references in book 9. Collili proposes that the poem can be read as a kind of Heideggerian and Derridean allegory of “the revealing and concealing of the signi‹cance of Being” (1993, 31), what he terms “l’aletheia poetologica” and “l’aletheia ‹lologica.” A portion of this argument is available in English in Colilli 1990. Finally, the most ambitious reading of the Africa’s allegory would have to be T. K. Seung’s chapter on Petrarch’s epic in Cultural Thematics: The Formation of the Faustian Ethos (1976). For Seung, the poem represents a stage in the Western development of individualism and the insatiable acquisition of personal power; hence Scipio is an exemplar of this “Faustian ethos.” That thesis produces many bizarre interpretations of details in the Africa, but Seung is to be credited for two insights that I develop in the present analysis: ‹rst, that for Petrarch, “the Africa is ultimately an epic of his own soul” (155), or rather, we are meant to interpret it as such; and second, “Petrarch’s epic can indeed be read as the Psychomachia (‘our mind is a battle‹eld’) of his tormented soul of the Secretum” (155), which requires “reading it on an allegorical level” (156). 19. In some editions of Petrarch, including the 1554 Basel publication of his works, this is letter 4.4: the discrepancy is a result of other editions including the treatise De of‹cio et virtutibus imperatioriis as Seniles 4.1 rather than printing it separately. The letter is numbered 4.5 in the modern critical edition of the Rerum senilium to which I refer (Petrarch 2003, with facing-page French translation) and in the English translation by Bernardo, Levin, and Bernardo (Petrarch 1992, 139–51; see 115 n. 2 for their explanation of the letter’s numbering). 20. E.g., see the reference to this letter in Bernardo 1962, 199. The most sophisticated treatments of Petrarchan allegory concern, as we would expect, the Canzoniere (e.g., Sturm-Maddox 1992), the Secretum (e.g., Giuliani 1977), and Petrarch’s account of his “Ascent of Mount Ventoux” (Familiares 4.1), which, like the Secretum, testi‹es to the poet’s struggles between his literary ambitions and his faith ‹ltered through a response to St. Augustine. On the “Ascent,” see Durling 1974, 1977; Greene 1976; O’Connell 1983; Robbins 1985; Ascoli 1991; Asher 1993; and, for a determinedly skeptical reading, Verdicchio 2002. Cf. the argument in V. Kahn 1985 that Petrarch’s Secretum is “a metadiscursive re›ection on the use and abuse of the divinely given will to signify”—on “the difference ,” that is, “between a character in an allegory and being an interpreter of allegory” (164). However, given my position that the Africa’s allegory operates conventionally even if it has gone largely unremarked, I would incline toward Thomas Roche’s view, expressed in response to Durling and Greene but with relevance to the later studies just listed, that a convincing argument has not been made “that Petrarch differed radically from other writers of allegory in his time” (1989, 484 n. 33). 21. . . . quasi gemmas linteo obvolutas (868). Translations are my own. 22. . . . quidnam, dimoto quam circumfusum vero est allegoriarum velo (73); . . . notes to pages 33–34 204 < constat divino illo in opere . . . altius aliquid sensisse quam quam loquitur (75). 23. . . . Virgilium revertar, cuius ‹nis ac subiectum, ut ego arbitror, vir perfectus est (que perfectio vel sola vel praecipua ex virtute con‹citur (79). 24. The classic treatment of Petrarch’s understanding of Vergil is in de Nolhac 1965 (1st ed. 1892), 1:123–61, which includes a description of Petrarch’s marginal notes to his personal copy of Vergil’s Opera (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Madrid, S.P. 10, 27). These notes are moral in nature, but in their scattered responses to local details, they make no attempt to relate to one another or to an overall interpretation of the Aeneid’s meaning (cf. my discussion in chap. 2 of the present study of the same distinction between Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses and his commentary edition of the Aeneid). However, the case for “allegorie und empire in Petrarcas Virgilglosse” is brie›y made in Berschin 1986, 116–21. A facsimile of the “Ambrose Vergil” is in Petrarch 1930. Petrarch’s letter to Frederigo Aretino and a passage from the Secretum quoted (in note 29 below) are frequently cited in order to make the point that Petrarch knew of and transmitted the medieval tradition of reading Vergil allegorically, but I am not aware of an attempt to connect this insight to a comprehensive interpretation of the Africa. 25. . . . videri michi solent venti illi nichil aliud quam irarum impetus et concupiscentie motusque animi in pectore subterque precordia habitantes . . . Eolus autem, ipsa ratio regens frenansque irascibilem et concupiscibilem appetitum anime (79). 26. . . . Venus obvia sylve medio ipsa est voluptas . . . os habitumque virgineum gerit ut illudat insciis. Nam siquis eam qualis est cerneret, hauddubie visu solo tremefactus aufugeret: ut enim nichil blandius, sic nichil est fedius voluptate. . . . Habitu demum venatricis, quia venatur miserorum animas (81). 27. . . . vit[a] . . . voluptatis et libidinum, que Veneri assignatur (81). 28. Hec Enee genitrix fertur, quod etiam viri fortes ex voluptate generantur et quod singularis quedam illi fuerit venustas, qua, exul atque inops, castis etiam oculis placuisse describitur (81, 83). 29. In the Secretum, Petrarch mentions this allegorical reading of Aeneas’s relationship with his mother again, when he refers to the destruction of Troy in the Aeneid to illustrate the miseries that attend a life devoted to the pleasures of Venus. Petrarch recalls for Augustine: As long as he wandered amid the enemy and ›ames accompanied by Venus, he was unable to see the wrath of the offended gods even with eyes wide open, and as long as she was speaking to him, he understood nothing but earthly matters. But, after she departed from him, you know what followed; it at once happened that he saw the angry faces of the gods, and recognized the dangers round him: “The fearful sight of gods was visible, divine powers hostile to Troy” [Aeneid 2.622–23]. From these lines I picked out this: occupation with the concerns of Venus removes one’s sight of the divine. [Atqui quam diu Venere comitante inter hostes et incendium erravit, apertis licet oculis, offensorum iram numinum videre non potuit, eaque illum alloquente, nil nisi terrenum intellexit. At, postquam illa discessit, quid evenerit nosti; siquidem mox iratas deorum facies eum vidisse subsequitur, et omne circumstans peric[u]lum agnovisse: “apparent dire facies inimicaque Troie / numina magna deum.” Ex quibus hoc excerpsi: usum Veneris conspectum divinitatis eripere. (84)] Notes to Pages 34–35 205 = 30. . . . hoc est consuetudine voluptatum a prima etate copulata animo (97). 31. . . . ‹lius Veneris nudus remanet turpiterque incipit amari. Ipse quoque nonnunquam ›ectitur quia dif‹cile est, etiam perfectis, excellenti rerum specie non moveri, presertim ubi se amari senserint, atque appeti (83). 32. . . . ille etiam sat beatus qui, etsi consenserit peccatoque succubuerit, sive— quod est gravius—male consuetudinis visco implicitus fuerit et astrictus vinculis et fasce curvatus, aliquando tamen, Dei instinctu tacito vel alicuius monitu Deiplacitum nunciantis, assurgit neglectaque, qua tenebatur, voluptate, ad virtutis et glorie rectum iter redit (83). 33. . . . ille, licet passionatus ‘magnoque animum labefactus amore’ [Aeneid 4.395], paret tamen imperio celesti (83). 34. . . . tandem ipsa se perimit, quia nimirum animus dum, Apostoli consilio, preterita obliviscens, ad honesta convertitur, voluptas feda per se ipsam perit (85). 35. . . . huius siquidem puelle, cuius de connubio certatur, pater animus, mater vero sponse animi caro . . . mater tamen, in‹rmior et consilii inops, natam domesticis et iuxta se genitis iungere satagit (hoc est carnalibus desideriis studiisque terrestribus) (87). 36. Numerous studies of the Aeneid note the verbal parallels between Vergil’s accounts of Dido and Turnus (e.g., Monti 1981, 95–96), parallels that could have encouraged Petrarch to equate them allegorically as he does. In addition, see Mackie 1992–93 for the point that some of Vergil’s sources had Dido and Turnus sharing common ancestral connections. 37. . . . precipiti ruens saltu pedes pergit in prelium: quia etiam post edomitos atque extinctos carnis motus, adhuc fomes interior non quiescit (89). 38. Eneas, et sagitta ictus et labante genu (quia scilicet vir, quantumlibet virtute armatus, interdum tentationibus [temptationibus in Petrarch 1554] vulneratur, sic ut in proposito claudicet . . .) (89). 39. . . . dum adversus carnale desiderium acies mentis intenditur, nescio quid amarum reperit (91). 40. Venus (id est delectatio operis ac voluptas bona quidem et honesta) (91). 41. Proinde Eneas advena—idest virtus seu vir fortis carnis victor—iam facilem ac sequacem hastam manu arripit libransque felicius ac certius competitorem suum indigenam , carnalem, humi sternit affectum (91). 42. . . . quia, iuxta famosissimum dogma platonicum, quod Augustinus reverenter amplectitur multique alii, nil magis humanum animum impedit a divinitatis intuitu quam Venus et vita libidinibus dedita (101). Petrarch alludes in this passage to the description of “the two Venuses” in Plato’s Symposium, which is discussed in chap. 2 of the present study. 43. . . . neque “libidine dominante temperantie locum esse, neque omnino in voluptatis regno virtutem posse consistere,” denique “omne illam animi lumen extinguere” (103). Here Petrarch is quoting Cicero (De senectute 12.41). 44. Cf. C. S. Lewis’s observation that “the importance of Fulgentius [an allegorizer of the Aeneid to be discussed in chap. 2 of the present study] is plain,” that “once the ancients are read in this way, then to imitate the ancients means to write allegory” (1938, 85). 45. Ah demens! Ita ne ›ammas animi in sextum decimum annum falsis blanditiis aluisti? Profecto non diutius Italie famosissimus olim hostis incubuit, nec crebriores illa notes to pages 35–37 206 < tunc armorum impetus passa est, nec validioribus arsit incendiis, quam tu his temporibus violentissime passionis ›ammas atque impetus pertulisti. Inventus est tandem qui illum abire compelleret; Hanibalem tuum quis ab his unquam cervicibus avertet, si tu eum exire vetas et, ut tecum maneat, sponte iam servus invitas? (117–18). 46. Cf. Thomas Greene’s discussion of the passage just cited from the Secretum, where he interprets its ambiguous representation of Laura as “a subversive psychic force” indicating Petrarch’s “lapse” once more “into narcissism” (1982b, 37). 47. Bergin and Wilson state in their note to the passage, “The woman referred to is Dido” (Petrarch 1977a, 243). 48. Venus’s guile is a trait that Aeneas himself objects to, in a passage from the Aeneid that is alluded to frequently in the other epics discussed in the chapters to follow: quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis ludis imaginibus? cur dextrae iungere dextram non datur ac veras audire et reddere voces? (1.407–9) [Why, so cruel, do you mock your son so often with false images? Why may not I join my hand to yours and hear and speak true words?] In one sense, of course, this plaint of Vergil’s hero is a piece of moral one-upmanship over Homer, whose ever-scheming Athena, right to the end of the Odyssey, is hatching plots to aid the ever-wily Odysseus. 49. A brief but compelling discussion of the “cumulatively evocative ‘burnings’ of Carthage” in literary history, from the Aeneid to Augustine’s Confessions to T. S. Eliot’s “Fire Sermon” (“To Carthage then I came / burning burning burning burning / O Lord Thou pluckest me out”), is in Reckford 1995–96, 43–53. Also, see Edgeworth 1976–77 for an argument that Vergil drew on Polybius’s account of the self-immolation of Hasdrubal ’s wife over Carthage’s surrender to Scipio for the image of Dido’s burning pyre at the end of Aeneid 4. “It is quite plausible,” Edgeworth suggests, “that the manner of the historical queen’s death gave rise, at least as a partial cause, to the motif of the interior ‹re which blazes within Dido throughout the book” (133). 50. Jonathan Foster observes that this passage in the Africa is inspired by the similar lines from Vergil’s Aeneid, but his only assessment of the parallel is that it “give[s] a new cohesion to the context in Petrarch” (1979, 295). Cf. Bernardo’s comment that the “heat” of this “symbolic burning of the Carthaginian ›eet . . . surpasses in intensity even the most renowned mythological examples of puri‹cation” (1962, 160). 51. As Otto Skutsch describes and as Petrarch was of course aware, this episode is modeled on “fragments and direct testimonia” related to the early Latin poet Ennius that “attest a dream encounter with Homer, who revealed in a discourse on the natura rerum that his soul had passed into Ennius” (Ennius 1985, 147–67; see, in the same volume , Annales book 1, fragments ii–x). 52. The link between the dangers of sexual desire and of pagan texts in Augustine’s imagination has been well described by Marilynn Desmond: “In the Confessions Augustine pointedly identi‹es Carthage with lust (3.1), so that the queen of ancient Carthage might ‹gure female sexuality and pagan literature simultaneously”; “indeed,” she continues , “this section of the Confessions ends with Augustine’s pointed juxtaposition of the affective experience of reading Dido in Aeneid 4 to the comforting knowledge of the Notes to Pages 38–46 207 = ‹ctionality of the affair between Aeneas and Dido,” thereby supporting “Augustine’s view of his schoolboy self as a naïve reader, seduced by the rhetorical veneer of pagan texts” (1994, 77–78). John Watkins cites the same passage to make the point that “as an alternative to Virgil’s dangerously alluring poetry, Augustine advocates the rudimentary studies of grammar and mathematics,” for “just as Aeneas abandoned Dido for Rome, Augustine ought to abandon Virgil for truth” (1995, 35–36). Yet Watkins also makes the crucial observation that “as straightforward as these dichotomies might seem, Augustine ’s own Virgilian allusiveness dismantles them.” Watkins explains: “The passage’s central paradox lies in its conspicuous appropriation of classical ‹ctions to renounce classical in›uence. For all Augustine’s talk about rejecting Virgil, the Aeneid provides him a narrative for understanding and describing his spiritual autobiography. He does not absolutely abandon Dido but translates her into an image of classical culture” (36). chapter two 1. Ma questo quarto mostra una gran stupidità di Venere, la quale per scampare Enea dalle mani di Cartaginesi, quanto è a lei lo con‹na in Cartagine. Perciocchè ella fa innamorare così Enea di Didone, come Didon di Enea, e se non era la ammonizione di Giove per Mercurio, più avea fatto Venere a impedir la andata di Enea in Italia, che Giunone istessa (Speroni 1740, 4:434–35). 2. . . . l’ aver fatto innamorare Didon di Enea, e consentito a Giunone che facessero nozze, era a danno di essa Venere, ed a satisfazion di Giunone. cosa ridicula (4:543). 3. The idea of the two Aphrodites also underlies the discussion of love in the ‹rst half of the Phaedrus (Plato 1961, 230e–257b), but this is less often cited than Pausanias’s speech in the Symposium. Plato’s distinction in the latter work between the ‹rst goddess, “whose nature partakes of both male and female,” and the second, “whose attributes have nothing of the female, but are altogether male” (181d), is not a point that is stressed in the explications of the two Venuses discussed in the present chapter. Robert Hollander , in Boccaccio’s Two Venuses, notes that medieval authors in fact had more than two images of Venus available to them: “There has generally existed an understandable tendency to associate three kinds of love with Venus: 1) a perfect intellectual love, having no physical component, 2) a positive sexual love, present in matrimony and resulting in the creation of offspring, 3) a negative sexual love, seeking mere sexual satisfaction, and having destructive and anti-social results. Since the basic literary (or painterly) tradition tends to polarize rather than triangulate the aspects of Venus, a given writer (or painter) will formulate his particular double Venus from among these three basic possibilities” (1977, 159). For studies of the tradition of “the two Venuses,” see Wind 1958, 100–29; Schreiber 1975; Economou 1975. Also informative is Hughes 1929, which suggests that Spenser may have drawn on medieval and Renaissance Vergilian allegory, particularly the scheme of the two Venuses, for imagery in The Faerie Queene. This question is pursued in the study of “Spenser’s Venus-Virgo” in di Matteo 1989. 4. Venus (id est delectatio operis ac voluptas bona quidem et honesta) (2003, 91). 5. Venus illi iterum ‹t obvia, excusans Helenam Paridemque. Quidni autem Venus venereum opus excuset, cum sepe etiam apud rigidos censores data venia sit amori? (2003, 99, 101). In the passage following just after is another illustration of Petrarch’s conception of Venus in both her negative and positive aspects: “With these notes to pages 51–53 208 < words Venus departs: for among the dangers and harshness of life’s events, lust, the friend of secure and soft ease, knows no place; and although later returning when she accompanies [Aeneas] as he is leaving, now she is not lust, but that honest pleasure arising from his escape from danger” (Hic dictis et Venus abscedit: inter pericula enim rerumque asperitates libido non habitat, securi lenique otii amica; que, etsi post rediens abeuntem comitetur, non iam libido est, sed honesta quidem e periculi fuga oriens voluptas [101]). In contemporary criticism of the Aeneid, many scholars ignore Mercury’s ‹rst mission to Carthage and accept as unproblematic that Venus merely “seeks to ensure Aeneas’ safety at Carthage by using Cupid to make [Dido] fall passionately in love with him” (Harrison 1989, 10; for similar interpretations, see H. Kahn 1968 and Swanepoel 1995, 36; the long-standard study of “Venus und die missverstandene Dido” is in Pabst 1955). Others, however, do attempt to justify Venus’s seemingly counterproductive behavior in books 1 and 4, and their accounts bear an uncanny resemblance to the traditional appeal to “two Venuses.” Kenneth Reckford, e.g., while insisting that Venus should not be “reduced to allegory” (1995–96, 35), explores Vergil’s representation of Venus “as seductive mother” (8), “her disreputable other self” (22), in addition to her role as Venus Genetrix, “mother of the gens Iulia and ancestress of the Roman race” (7). Similarly, G. H. Gellie observes that “there is no easy accord between serene motherhood and the passion that [Venus’s] name equally suggests” (1972, 142), for she has “a rag-bag of functions” in the Aeneid: “we ‹nd her shifting and fragmenting under our gaze” because there is a “blend of functions within the single Venus” (143). To cite one last example, in the context of an analysis of Venus’s enigmatic smile at Aeneid 4.128, Charles Segal states: “Venus may be smiling ‘at the wiles that Juno has invented,’ or she may be smiling because she has ‘found out or detected the wiles’ with which her rival thought to deceive her, or she may be ‘smiling at her own wiles that she has (thus) invented.’ Commentators are divided about which of these meanings is the ‘correct’ one. Venus, of course, is just being herself: the love-goddess works by guile, deviousness , and treachery and acts out her characteristic mode of behavior within the human heart” (1990, 1–2). Also on Venus’s smile and motives, see Konstan 1986 and Bandini 1987. More broadly, contemporary debate over Venus and Dido re›ects the larger tension in Vergil studies between “positive” and “pessimistic” accounts of Vergil’s intentions in the poem. What is often called “the Harvard School” of Aeneid criticism, characterized by its vision of an “anti-imperial” Vergil whose hero, Aeneas, loses his humanity in service to Rome’s manifest destiny, is credited to Pöschl (1966, which is a translation of the original edition of 1950) and Parry (1963) for its inception. “We hear two distinct voices in the Aeneid,” says Parry famously, “a public voice of triumph, and a private voice of regret” (79). A number of subsequent studies have extended this insight: see, e.g., Putnam 1965; Quinn 1968, 1972; Johnson 1976; R. D. Williams 1967, 1983–84 (a representative rebuttal may be found in Stahl 1981). Focusing just on the debate over the Aeneas and Dido story, we ‹nd that earlier inquiries into the nature of Dido’s culpability or “fatal ›aw” (given that her character and unhappy fate are so clearly rooted in the conventions of Greek tragedy) have evolved into a debate over whether Vergil wanted his readers to view Dido as culpable at all or instead to hold Aeneas—and the whole Roman imperial telos—as morally culpable for her death and the destruction of all that is “other.” See, to begin with, the monograph study of the Note to Page 53 209 = Dido and Aeneas episode by Richard C. Monti, who emphasizes its con‹rmation of Roman social and political values and characterizes Dido as a “convergence” of “the ideal Roman dynast” and “a Greek sentimental heroine” (1981, 37; for more recent studies of Dido as tragic heroine, see Harrison 1984 and Swanepoel 1995). For an argument that the death of Dido represents a purgation of evil in the Aeneid, a necessary sacri‹ce to Augustan moral values in Vergil’s eyes, see duBois 1976. Similarly, Perkell (1981, 370) stresses the signi‹cance of the fact that at Aeneid 4.393—following Aeneas’s last conversation with Dido, in which he resists her demands that he stay in Carthage—he is called “pius” for the ‹rst time in book 4 and for the ‹rst time since Aeneid 1.378. In contrast, Rudd (1976) insists on the dif‹culty of de‹ning “Dido’s culpa”: “So what was Dido’s moral ›aw? I must admit I am quite unable to say” (34); “we must ask whether Virgil means us to judge the queen as harshly as she judges herself” (42). Of course, the extent to which Dido represents Cleopatra must also in›uence critics’ estimates of her character ; on this point, see duBois 1970. One effort to divert the course of the debate is in Farron 1993, which asserts that the Dido episode is designed to be nothing more than “a love story which arouses pity” and that, as such, the episode “makes no comment on Aeneas or Rome, whether positive, negative, or ‘two voices’” (70; note that this is a reversal of Farron’s position in an earlier essay, in which he claims that “Vergil deliberately portrays Aeneas’ mission as brutal and destructive” to evoke sympathy for defeated peoples [1980, 34]). Cf. the contention in O’Hara 1993, which makes a ‹tting cap to this brief overview of the range of perspectives in Vergil studies: “Too often literary criticism of Vergil has been like a courtroom trial,” says O’Hara, but “questions of right, wrong, duty, loyalty, piety, guilt, and innocence in the story of Dido and Aeneas are blurred and ambiguous beyond any simple resolution.” O’Hara concludes, “Those who want to ‹nd in the Aeneid only blame for Dido and Turnus, and only praise for Aeneas, and those who seek to defend Dido and Turnus and castigate Aeneas, must read selectively and myopically” (112). 6. On Augustine’s complex relationship with the Aeneid, see primarily MacCormack 1998 (esp. 175–224, for a discussion of Vergil’s Rome in Augustine’s imagination) and Bennett 1988. Studies that have previously explored the in›uence of this relationship on epic literary history include Fichter 1982, 40–69; Spence 1988, 55–80; and Watkins 1995, 35–36. Studies of Augustine’s experience of the classics in general appear in Hagendahl 1967, Stock 1996, and Brown 2000. Cf. also the references in chap. 1 n. 52 of the present study. 7. In de‹ning the “norms of epic,” Thomas Greene states that “the epic is the poem which replaces divine worship with humanistic awe, awe for the act which is prodigious but yet human. It is the City of man, not of God” (1963, 14). That “norm” is not just challenged but reversed in Christian epic, but for a study that already problematizes Greene’s characterization of “the City of man” in classical epic, see Morwood ’s compelling analysis of the profound ambiguity and interminable deferral of the New Troy that is Aeneas’s quest (“No city, sacked cities, a Theme Park city, the wrong city, an escapist city, a dream city, aborted cities, stopgap cities—these interlinking ideas clearly constitute a Leitmotiv in the poem” [1991, 216]). See, too, Di Cesare’s discussion of “the search for the city” as “controlling metaphor of Books I–IV and, in important ways, of the entire poem” (1974a, esp. 1–37) and Bettini’s characterization of the surviving Trojans’ dilemma in the Aeneid as between “an endless nostalgia” for their lost Troy, on the one hand, and, on the other, a “future requir[ing] that they forget their own selves, losing contact with the very city that gave them birth, abandoning their language notes to pages 54–55 210 < and their customs” (1997, 30–31). On Vergil’s ambivalent vision of the interdependent relation between the founding of Rome and the destruction of Carthage, see Carney 1986 and Wilhelm 1987. 8. On Servius and the early tradition of Vergil exegesis, see Starr 1997; Kaster 1988, 169–97. For analyses of the different types of allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid from Servius to the late Middle Ages, see Baswell 1985 and 1995, 1–163; Jones 1960–61, 1964, 1986, 1987, and 1989; Starr 1991–92. On the exegetical tradition through to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see D. Allen 1970, 135–62; Kallendorf 1989, 1–18; Kallendorf 1995; and the references (to studies of Landino) in n. 31 in the present chapter . It is clear, from the present chapter, that my assessment of this tradition differs from Andrew Fichter’s, who states that “the preoccupations of the commentators are not congenial to the production of epic literature” (1982, 19). The argument could be made that one other tradition of interpreting Vergil is represented by the divination practice known as sortes Vergilianae, although see my discussion of this practice in chap. 5, in addition to Distler 1966, 151–56, and R. Hamilton 1993. Still a standard reference on the medieval reception of the Aeneid is Comparetti’s Vergil in the Middle Ages (1966, reprint of the 1908 translation; orig. pub. 1872, with an expanded edition, by Pasquali, in 1937–41), though this has been superseded in many respects by Baswell 1995. The classic account of Vergil’s reception in medieval and Renaissance Italy is in Zabughin 1921–23. However, for what may still be the most discerning study of Vergil’s place in Italian humanist poetic theory, see Alan Fisher’s examination (1987) of three epistles written in response to the destruction of Vergil’s statue at Mantua in 1397. 9. Juno, explains Servius, represents air, and Jupiter represents ether and ‹re both, so “because the elements” of air and ether “are equally thin, they are said to be siblings , but since Juno, that is the air, is subject to ‹re, which is Jove, she is rightly given the name of spouse to the higher element” (physici Iovem aetherem, id est ignem volunt intellegi, et Iunonem vero aërem, quoniam tenuitate haec elementa paria sunt, dixerunt esse germana. sed quoniam Iuno, hoc est aër subiectus est igni, id est Iovi, iure superposito elemento mariti traditum nomen est [Servius 1961, 1:32, commentary to Aeneid 1.47]). These examples are discussed also in Jones 1960–61, 218–21. 10. . . . iuventutis . . . cecitas . . . Feriatus ergo animus a paterno iudicio in quarto libro et venatu progreditur et amore torretur, et tempestate ac nubilo, velut in mentis conturbatione, coactus adulterium per‹cit (Fulgentius 1997, 62; translation by Leslie George Whitbread in Fulgentius 1961, 127; subsequent citations of Fulgentius are also from these editions). 11. Mercurius enim deus ponitur ingenii; ergo ingenio instigante aetas deserit amoris con‹nia. Qui quidem amor contemptus emoritur et in cineres exustus emigrat; dum enim de corde puerili auctoritate ingenii libido expellitur, sepulta in oblivionis cinere favillescit (62, 64; 127, with punctuation slightly modi‹ed). The anonymous “Virgil Commentary of mixed type” recently edited by Julian Ward Jones (a fragment that picks up at book 4) was presumably written in the fourteenth century and in some places indicates an awareness of the commentary of Bernardus Silvestris, but it follows Fulgentius closely in its interpretation of the Aeneas and Dido story (Jones 1996, 73, with my translation): Great continence is what in the beginning Aeneas was seeking on his hunt in this fourth book, but he was in›amed with love, forced by a storm into comNote to Page 56 211 = mitting the meanest adultery. In this sojourn a long while, by the instigation of Mercury, he cast off his love of pleasure: thence Dido died and was turned into ashes. By all this youth is denoted. . . . He commits adultery, incensed by love and dragged by a storm because youth are delighted in love and in being compelled by the perturbation of the mind with lust, but Mercury inciting him, he leaves such things. For Mercury is interpreted as the god of natural wisdom and prudence. Thus with wisdom inciting, he scorns and leaves love. Dido dies scorned and turns into ashes because love scorned is annihilated and departs as if burned in ›ames. [Continencia huius quarti voluminis tanta est quod in principio Eneas venatum progreditur, amore incenditur, tempestate coactus ad ultimum perpetravit adulterium . In quo diu commoratus, Mercurio instigante, libidinis sue amorem reliquit : deinde Dydo moritur et in cineres mutatur. Per hoc totum iuventus designatur . . . . Qui per‹cit adulterium, amore incensus et tempestate tractus quia iuvenes in amore et libidine mentis perturbacione compellente delectantur, sed Mercurio instigante, talia relinquit. Mercurius enim deus ingenii et calliditatis interpretatur. Ergo ingenio instigante, amorem contempnit et deserit. Dydo contempta moritur et in cineres mutatur quia amor contemptus annichilatus et quasi in cineres exustus migrat.] 12. Illic etiam et Dido videtur quasi amoris atque antiquae libidinis umbra iam vacua. Contemplando enim sapientiam libido iam contemptu emortua lacrimabiliter penitendo ad memoriam revocatur (70; 131). 13. Notandum est vero in hoc loco, quemadmodum in aliis misticis voluminibus, ita et in hoc equivocationes et multivocationes esse et integumenta ad diversa respicere (Bernardus 1977, 9; translation by Earl G. Schreiber and Thomas E. Maresca in Bernardus 1979, 11). Subsequent references to this commentary and its translation are also to the editions cited here, and for the sake of convenience, I refer to the author as “Bernard” rather than “pseudo-Bernard/us,” though the latter is increasingly common. 14. Bernard also ascribes to Aeneas in this passage “an abundance of humors coming from a super›uity of food and drink” (In hoc quarto volumine natura iuventutis exponitur mistice . . . Tempestatibus et pluviis ad cavernam compellitur, id est commotionibus carnis et af›uentia humoris ex ciborum et potuum super›uitate provenientis ad immundiciam carnis ducitur et libidinis [23–24; 25]), but he then provides an involved physiological account of how this “super›uity of food and drink” is also linked to carnal passion, since it is converted into “foam” and “emitted through the male member,” and he concludes, “thus one reads that Venus is born of sea foam and is therefore called froden” (Cum autem spume nimia est super›uitas . . . per virilem virgam . . . emittitur. . . . Unde legitur Venerem de spuma maris natam et ideo proprie vocatam esse “afroden” [24; 26]). 15. Que immundicia carnis cavea dicitur quia serenitatem mentis et discretionis obnubilat. . . . Itaque ducunt pluvie Eneam ad caveam iungiturque Didoni et diu cum ea moratur. Non revocant eum turpia preconia fame quia iuventus libidine irretita nescit “quid pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non” (24; 25–26). Bernard is quoting Horace (Epistulae, 1.2.3). 16. Discedit a Didone et desuescit a libidine. Dido deserta emoritur et in cineres excocta demigrat. Desueta enim libido def‹cit et fervore virilitatis consumpta in favillam , id est in solas cogitationes, transit (25; 27). notes to page 57 212 < 17. Bernard’s commentary leaves off at Aeneas’s entrance to the Blissful Groves in Aeneid 6.31–36, but we see clearly enough in Bernard’s last remarks (114) that the hero is approaching a state of divine wisdom. Atque fornice: this is the vault of the human brain. Portas: the three chambers. We come to heavenly contemplation by exercising wit, reason and memory. Adverso: Aeneas turns his head and looks to heaven. Hec ubi: at the gates, since Aeneas and the Sibyl are presently in the cells of memory. Dona: philosophy. . . . Viarum: of virtues. Medium: that virtue which is the mean between human and divine substances. (106–7) [ATQUE FORNICE: fornix est humanum cerebrum testudineum. PORTAS, id est celulas. Per has enim ut supradiximus exercendo ingenium, rationem, memoriam celestia contemplatione ingredimur. ADVERSO: Respicit capud ad celum. HEC UBI, id est in quibus portis, quia in cellula memorie. DONA: pholosophiam . . . VIARUM: virtutum. MEDIUM: ipsam virtutem que est media hominum et divinarum substantiarum.] 18. Anchises enim celsa inhabitans interpretatur quem intelligimus esse patrem omnium omnibus presidentem (9; 10). 19. Veneres ergo duas legimus esse, legitimam scilicet et petulantie deam. Legitimam Venerem legimus esse mundanam musicam, id est equalem mundanorum proportionem , quam alii Astream, naturalem iusticiam, vocant. . . . Impudicam vero Venerem et petulantie deam dicimus esse carnis concupiscentiam que omnium fornicationum mater est (9; 10–11). 20. Venus ut supra dictum est aliquando carnis concupiscentiam, aliquando mundi concordiam; . . . Ubi ergo invenies Venerem uxorem Vulcani matrem Ioci et Cupidinis, intellige carnis voluptatem, que naturali calori coniuncta est et iocum et coitum parit. Ubi vero leges Venerem et Anchisem Eneam ‹lium habere, intellige per Venerem mundanam musicam, per Eneam humanum spiritum (10; 11, with punctuation slightly modi‹ed). 21. Tectus nube Carthaginem venit. Quemadmodum nubes coruscationem abscondit, ita ignorantia sapientiam. Sub ignorantia Carthaginem venit, id est ad novam civitatem mundi scilicet qui quidem civitas est omnes habens in se habitores (12; 13). Here Bernard alludes to the etymology of the name Carthago in calling the city a “novam civitatem”; see the discussion in chap. 1 n. 12. 22. In hac civitate regnum habet Dido, id est libido (12; 13). 23. Legitur namque treas deas, Iunonem, Palladem, Venerem, Paridem adisse ut iudex existeret que earum aureum pomum haberet. Per Pallada theoricam vitam accipimus , per Iunonem activam, per Venerem voluptatem. . . . Quidam enim preferunt contemplativam vitam reliquis, ut philosophi; quidam activam ut politici; quidam philarginam active et contemplative sicut Epicuri. Paridi videtur pulchrior Venus quia sensus contemplari et agere voluptati postponit ideoque Pallas et Iuno Troiam persecuntur . Namque sensui pulcrum est dif›uere voluptatibus, laboriosum carni contemplari vel agere (46; 46–47, slightly revised). Craig Kallendorf points out, in discussing the relation between Ficino’s commentary on Philebus and Landino’s commentary edition of the Aeneid, that Ficino, in an appendix to his work, likewise “allegorizes the Judgment of Paris so that Minerva presides over wisdom, Juno over political power, and Venus over sensual pleasure” (1983, 541). Notes to Pages 57–59 213 = 24. . . . externis hanc generis fata destinassent (hoc est operosis et dif‹cilia atque ignota penetrantibus) (2003, 87). 25. Cf. the opposing view—that Vegio “avoids any step that would lead the reader toward any medieval, anagogical interpretation of the hero’s life”—expressed by Michael C. J. Putnam in Vegio 2004 (xviii), from whose Latin text I cite in this discussion , though with my translations. Also see Kallendorf 1989, 100–128, for an analysis of the Supplement that stresses Vegio’s care to “complete” the Aeneid following the poem’s rhetorical precedents (e.g., in the comparative length of its speakers’ speeches) and according to an understanding of Vergil’s epideictic aims that was then current. Cf. Hijmans 1971–72 and Fichter 1982, 12–15, on the Supplement’s moral and religious designs. 26. The ‹rst edition of Vergil’s Opera to include the Supplement is item 2 in Kallendorf 1991. For a discussion of its rise and fall in popularity, see Anna Cox Brinton’s introduction to her edition of the Latin text and two sixteenth-century translations, by Thomas Twyne (into English) and Gavin Douglas (into Scots), in Vegio 1930. 27. Transtulit Aeneam Venus astra in summa beatum (Vegio 1930, 52; the “argumentum ” is not included in Vegio 2004). 28. Cf. Metamorphoses 14.581–84 (Ovid 1933–36, with translation by Frank Justus Miller): Iamque deos omnes ipsamque Aeneia virtus Iunonem veteres ‹nire coegerat iras, cum, bene fundatis opibus crescentis Iuli, tempestivus erat caelo Cythereius heros. [Now had Aeneas’s courageous soul moved all the gods and even Juno to lay aside their ancient anger, and, since the fortunes of the budding Iulus were well established , the heroic son of Cytherea was ripe for heaven.] See also Putnam’s discussion of Vegio’s use of Ovid (Vegio 2004, xiv–xviii). 29. For discussions of Vegio’s conventionally moralistic treatment of Dido in his Supplement and in his pedagogical tract De educatione liberorum et eorum claris moribus, see D. Allen 1970, 141, and Kallendorf 1984; 1989, 100–128; and 1999, 52–53. A modern critical edition of the De educatione liberorum is available in Vegio 1933–36. 30. For the date of completion, see Fubini 1995. As manuscript evidence attests, Landino had incorporated allegorical interpretations of the Aeneid into the university lectures he gave on Vergil over a decade before. On the chronology and content of these lectures, see Cardini 1973, 16–17; Field 1978, 1981, and 1988, 243–56. 31. For summaries of Landino’s allegory of the Aeneid and discussion of its relation to the medieval tradition of commentary on the poem, see D. Allen 1970, 144–54; Murrin 1980, 27–50, 197–202; Kallendorf 1983; Kallendorf 1989, 129–64; Di Cesare 1984. A monograph study of the Disputationes Camaldulenses within the milieu of the “Platonic Academy” is in Müller-Bochat 1968. From the ‹fteenth century, there are, of course, many other, briefer articulations of the “stages of man” interpretation of Vergil’s Aeneid. One of the most familiar is in Francisco Filelfo’s letter to Ciriaco d’Ancora (see Filelfo 1488, 4r–5v, discussed in Robin 1991, 53–55). 32. Citations of the Commentarium in Convivium Platonis are from Ficino 1944, which includes Sears Reynolds Jayne’s English translation following the Latin text. The standard critical edition of the Commentarium is now Ficino 2002, with facing-page notes to pages 60–64 214 < French translation by Pierre Laurens; however, in the passage discussed in the present analysis, the differences between the two are insigni‹cant. 33. . . . duplex est Venus. Una sane est intelligentia illa quam in mente angelica posuimus. Altera vis generandi animae mundi tributa (49; 142). 34. Utraque sui similem comitem habet amorem. Illa enim amore ingenito ad intelligendam Dei pulchritudinem rapitur. Haec item amore suo ad eandem pulchritudinem in corporibus procreandam. Illa divinitatis fulgorem in se primum complectitur ; deinde hunc in Venerem secundam traducit. Haec fulgoris illius scintillas in materiam mundi transfundit. Scintillarum huiusmodi praesentia singula mundi corpora, pro captu naturae, speciosa videntur. Horum speciem corporum humanus animus per oculos percipit. Qui rursus vires geminas possidet. Quippe intelligendi vim habet. Habet et generandi potentiam. Hae geminae vires duae in nobis sunt Veneres, quas et gemini comitantur amores. Cum primum humani corporis species oculis nostris offertur , mens nostra quae prima in nobis Venus est, eam tamquam divini decoris imaginem , veneratur et diligit, perque hanc ad illum saepenumero incitatur. Vis autem generandi, secunda Venus, formam generare huic similem concupiscit. Utrobique igitur amor est. Ibi contemplandae, hic generandae pulchritudinis desiderium. Amor uterque honestus atque probandus. Uterque enim divinam imaginem sequitur. Quid igitur in amore Pausanias improbat? Dicam equidem. Si quis generationis avidior contemplationem deserat, aut generationem praeter modum cum feminis, vel contra naturae ordinem cum masculis prosequatur, aut formam corporis pulchritudini animi praeferat , is utique dignitate amoris abutitur. Hunc amoris abusum vituperat Pausanias. Quo qui recte utitur, corporis quidem formam laudat, sed per illam, excellentiorem animi mentisque et dei speciem cogitat, eamque vehementius admiratur, et amat (49; 142–43, but without Jayne’s paragraph breaks). 35. Says Augustine in De doctrina Christiana 1.7 (citations are from Augustine 1995, with facing-page translation by R. P. H. Green): There are some things which are to be enjoyed, some which are to be used, and some whose function is both to enjoy and use. Those which are to be enjoyed make us happy; those which are to be used assist us and give us a boost, so to speak, as we press on towards our happiness, so that we may reach and hold fast to the things which make us happy. And we, placed as we are among things of both kinds, both enjoy and use them; but if we choose to enjoy things that are to be used, our advance is impeded and sometimes even diverted, and we are held back, or even put off, from attaining things which are to be enjoyed, because we are hamstrung by our love of lower things. [Res ergo aliae sunt quibus fruendum est, aliae quibus utendum, aliae quae fruuntur et utuntur. Illae quibus fruendum est nos beatos faciunt; istis quibus utendum est tendentes ad beatitudinem adiuvamur et quasi adminiculamur, ut ad illas quae nos beatos faciunt pervenire atque his inhaerere possimus. Nos vero, qui fruimur et utimur inter utrasque constituti, si eis quibus utendum est fruit voluerimus , impeditur cursus noster et aliquando etiam de›ectitur, ut ab his rebus quibus fruendum est obtinendis vel retardemur vel etiam revocemur inferiorum amore praepediti.] In the immediately following passage, Augustine draws an analogy that is relevant to the allegorical epic: he imagines those who “enjoy” what should only be “used” in this world Notes to Pages 64–65 215 = as “travellers” (peregrini) who are “fascinated by the delights of the journey and the actual travelling, . . . perversely enjoying things that [they] should be using” and so “being ensnared in the wrong kind of pleasure and estranged from the homeland whose pleasures could make us happy.” “So,” he says, “we are like travellers away from our Lord” (quod si amoenitates itineris et ipsa gestatio vehiculorum nos delectaret, conversi ad fruendum his quibus uti debuimus nollemus cito viam ‹nire et perversa suavitate implicati alienaremur a patria, cuius suavitas faceret beatos. sic in huius mortalitatis vita peregrinantes a domino [1.8–9]). Cf. the discussion of these passages in Fish 1972, 24–25. On Ficino’s appeals to Augustine, however, see M. Allen 1998, 86–88; Allen observes that “Augustine was in many ways a stalking-horse for an un-Augustinian programme” (86), particularly in the way that Ficino “does not predicate the surrender of the reason to the puri‹ed will, at least in this life, except perhaps in states of ecstasy, suggesting instead a religion of the reason, or at least for the reason” (88). 36. In book 1 of the Disputationes Camaldulenses, it is Landino’s contention that the active life properly lived is not opposed to the contemplative life and that the contemplative life should not be simplistically conceived as either pure meditation or otium. In fact, Landino maintains, action and contemplation can really be divided only in philosophical speculation (on this point, see Field 1988, 195, 262; for extensive treatment of the vita activa and vita contemplativa in Landino’s thought, see Rombach 1991, and on these ideas’ currency in the Renaissance generally, see the essays collected in Vickers 1991). Nevertheless, the very logic of the plot of a hero’s spiritual journey entails, in Landino’s allegory of the Aeneid, some simplifying of his theory by representing activity and contemplation as opposed stages in the good man’s progress rather than as complementary modes of virtuous living. 37. A skeptical way to characterize this, of course, is that Landino preferred his own Christian Platonism to Vergil’s originally intended meaning. But that, as Michael J. B. Allen recently has observed (describing Ficino’s less than generous terms for bringing poets back in from “outside the city”), re›ects what was at heart Neoplatonic philosophy ’s “censorious vision” of poetry (1998, 118). “For whatever the poet’s express intentions ,” explains Allen, “be they good, bad, or indifferent, and whatever the affective or imitative success of his poetry, the allegorical meaning is both postulated and possessed by the theologizing interpreter. . . . In short, bad poets and their bad passionate poetry would be administered in the Platonic city if all its citizens were philosophers and could interpret any poetry in the light of Platonic theology and the soul’s ascent to the true and the good” (105). This vision is clearly the basis of Landino’s comments in the treatise De laboribus Herculis that “when the mystical interpreter opens up the hidden things of the poet and has changed them by referring individual things to God, to nature, or to customs, although he has found what the author could not have known or said, no doubt he should consider himself to have lit upon a permissable meaning,” and that “if perchance it was not the true teaching and the names do not correspond to what the author intended, he will have found a meaning far more suitable than what the author had purposed” (Cumque poetarum abdita misticus interpres aperiet, et ad deum, naturam, vel mores singula referens adaptaverit, sine dubitatione reputet se, quamvis incogitatum ab autore dici queat id quod invenerit, in sententiam tolerabilem incidisse. . . . aut si forsitan [veram sententiam] non fuerit, et ad id quod autor intendisset nomina non accedant, longe commodiorem sensum quam autor cogitaverit invenisse [quoted and translated in Field 1988, 250]). For recent scholarship on Landino notes to page 65 216 < and his views on poets (both ancient and modern), on poetry, and on the relation of poetry to philosophy, see McNair 1999; Parker 1993, 77–85, 89–97; Field 1988, 231–68; Di Cesare 1986, esp. 166–76; Weiss 1981, 23–36, 66–117. For the broader context of Landino’s interpretive theory and practice, see James Hankins’s useful “typology of reading in the ‹fteenth century” (1990, 1:18–25). 38. O divinum ingenium! O virum inter rarissimos viros omnino excellentem et poetae nomine vere dignum! qui non Christianus omnia tamen Christianorum verissimae doctrinae simillima proferat. Lege apostolum Paulum! . . . Quid enim ille fuse lateque describit, quod hic poeticis angustiis non coarctet? (Landino 1980, 175). Subsequent citations of the Disputationes Camaldulenses are also from the edition cited here, and the translations are mine, although I have at times bene‹ted from consulting Stahel 1968. (At time of this writing, an I Tatti Renaissance Library edition of the Disputationes Camaldulenses is planned.) Cf. Maffeo Vegio’s similar question in De perseverantia religionis 1.5: “if we substitute heaven for Latium and life for Troy, why might the passage not have come from the pen of the Apostle Paul?” (si pro latio celum: pro troia vitam immutantes verba dicamus: quid obstiterit quin ex of‹cina pauli apostoli deprompta ista esse videnture [Vegio 1511, 11v; translation by Anna Cox Brinton in Vegio 1930, 28]). Landino furthermore justi‹es his allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid in the Disputationes by referring to the practice of scriptural exegesis, when he says, “we see in our theology that the weightiest passages are interpreted in various ways by the most learned men” (Videmus enim et gravissimos in nostra theologia locos variis modis a doctissimis viris interpretari [237]). 39. See Kallendorf 1995 (subsequently incorporated into chap. 3 of Kallendorf 1999) for a discussion of the ways that “several of the commentaries most frequently published in Italian Renaissance editions of Virgil attempted to provide enough interpretive clues to steer between the Scylla of ahistorical syncretism and the Charybdis of a pure classicism that had little bearing on an everyday life infused with the goals and values of Christianity” (43), with an acknowledgment that “a clear, consistent approach” was not found by any of them (49). “For Landino,” explains Kallendorf in the same essay, “a Platonizing version of the traditional theologia poetica provided the guidance he needed for bringing Virgil into conjunction with the Christian faith” (53), which was taken much further in the Italian commentary based on Landino by Giovanni Fabrini (56–58)—discussed later in the present chapter. Kallendorf establishes a crucial point in this essay, one supported further in his scholarly work generally, that “the modern argument that ‘it was humanism which placed Virgil back into his historical context’ is certainly based on what some Renaissance authors believed themselves to have been doing,” but “this view is only a partial one.” Kallendorf explains, “Behind Renaissance reading practices was a theory, linking the poet to the theologian, which encouraged the reader to accommodate classical texts to Christian meanings” (62). 40. . . . virum . . . qui plurimus ac maximis vitiis paulatim expiatus ac deinceps miris virtutibus illustratus id, quod summum homini bonum est quodque nisi sapiens nullus assequi potest, tandem assequeretur. Verum cum illud in rerum divinarum speculatione consistere a Platone didicisset (119). 41. Troiae igitur oritur Aeneas, per quam urbem recte, ut puto, primam hominis aetatem intelligemus, in qua, cum ratio ad huc omnis consopita sit, solus sensus regnat (120). 42. Troiae igitur et Aeneas simul et Paris aluntur. Verum alter, quoniam Venerem Notes to Page 66 217 = Palladi, id est virtuti voluptatem anteponit, necesse est, ut una cum Troia pereat; alter autem duce matre Venere se ab omni incendio explicat. Quod quid aliud intelligamus nisi eos, qui magno amore in›ammati ad veri cognitionem impelluntur, omnia facile consequi posse? Quapropter Venerem divinum amorem recte interpretabimur (121). Cf. Kallendorf’s discussion (1983, 537–38) of the doctrine of the two Venuses in Landino’s 1488 commentary edition of the Aeneid. 43. Animus autem noster cum et ipse similes quasdam vires habeat intelligendi atque gignendi, duas itidem Veneres habere dicitur, quas gemini comitentur cupidines. Cum enim corporea pulchritudo oculis nostris obicitur, mens nostra, quae prima Venus est, eam non quia corporea sit, sed quia simulacrum divini decori admiratur atque diligit eaque veluti via quadam ad caelos effertur, gignendi autem vis, quae secunda Venus est, formam gignere huic similem concupiscit. Quapropter uterque amor iure dicitur, ut alter contemplandae, alter gignendae pulchritudinis desiderium sit. Nemo igitur nisi totius rationis expers sit duos istos amores damnare audebit, cum uterque humanae naturae necessarius sit; neque enim diu esse mortalium genus sine sobolis propagatione neque rursus bene esse sine veri investigatione poterit. Praestantiori igitur illa Venere duce in Italiam pervenire potuit Aeneas (125–26). 44. Aeneas . . . paulatim ex Troiano incendio, id est ex corporearum voluptatum ardore . . . (127). 45. Aeneas huiuscemodi parentibus natus est, ut Venus dea, Anchises mortalis sit. . . . Hinc igitur assiduum atroxque certamen illud exoritur spiritus adversus carnem, ut nostri dicunt, cum mens totum hominem ad divina trahere conetur et sensus in potestatem redigere et sibi obtemperantes reddere cupiat (130–31). 46. In qua autem re summum bonum consistat, nondum cognoscit. Iure igitur exul appellatur (133). 47. Divinus enim amor nil aliud meditatur, nil molitur, nulla alia in re laborat, nihil tentat, nihil nititur, nisi ut iam corporeae pulchritudinis aspectu concitus ad divinam nos pulchritudinem rapiat (128). 48. Nunquam enim ad veram contemplationem deveniemus, nisi prius ipsa, ut Christianorum verbo utar, sensualitas non modo extincta, verum etiam penitus sepulta in nobis fuerit (158). 49. I quote the judgment of Schrieber and Maresca in Bernardus 1979 (112 n. 4). 50. Puto vos meminisse Italiam speculationis, Carthaginem actionis ‹guram habere (170). 51. Nam cum in vita civili quae recta et honesta sunt diu coluerimus, ex illorum pulchritudine ad divina, quorum haec veluti simulacra sunt, erigimur (180). 52. . . . se in vitam socialem conferunt, in qua civilibus virtutibus exculti cum versentur laudem non mediocrem reportant (174). 53. Cf. Fichter’s comment that “Augustine . . . ultimately accepts Rome, when Rome can be regarded with eyes that do not stop at its physical reality.” Fichter explains, “The objective is to contemplate Rome to see God indirectly rather than to see only Rome, or only a monument to human pride” (1982, 65). 54. Ducem in primis habent, quem sequantur, cuius imperium nunquam contemnant . Labores inter se summa aequitate distribuunt. Summa concordia et opera sua faciunt et hostes arcent. Quicquid quaeritur, id omne in commune quaeritur (182). 55. Quae quidem omnia si in rem publicam aliquam transferas, Platonicam civitatem constitues (182). notes to pages 67–68 218 < 56. Longe tamen ab ea divinitate, quam quaerimus, absunt (174); . . . virtutes in vita sociali potius incohatae quam absolutae sunt . . . (182). 57. . . . consilio abeundi abiecto arces Carthaginis fundare ac tecta novare instituat purpuramque et ensem lapillis exornatum, quae omnia imperii insignia sunt, gestare gaudeat (187). 58. Libido enim imperandi Aeneam Didoni coniungere, id autem est virum excellentem regno prae‹cere cupit, sed rem per‹cere non valet, nisi assentiatur eius amor. Amor autem animadvertit huiuscemodi coniunctione non Aeneae, sed Didoni consuli; non enim animis hominum ad maiora natis, sed ipsi imperio conducit. Praestat enim nobis ad veram sapientiam pro‹cisci quam in actionibus versari, sed rerum administratio a sapientibus si deseratur, actum sit de rebus humanis oportet. Itaque quamvis falsa esse cognoscat, quae libido regnandi persuadet, tamen assentitur, sive iam illa irretitus sit, sive eorum quibus consulendum est misericordia motus (185). 59. Sed ita paulatim in deterius labuntur, ut quae pudicissima fuerat mulier et in re publica administranda vigilantissima turpi amore victa in lasciviam otiumque labatur. Quibus omnibus ostenditur, quam facile rebus secundis humanae mentes a labore in libidinem declinent (182). 60. . . . quod paulo ante dicebam, fundamenta rerum publicarum, quae ex parvis crescunt, habere meliora initia quam exitus, iccirco reginam a principio in omni re temperatam posuit, paulo vero postea amore insurgente paulatim ex temperantia in continentiam labitur, postremo victa amore incontinens ita reditur, ut demum in summam intemperantiam incidat (183). 61. Est enim triplex hominum recte et ex ratione viventium ordo. Horum trium inferior est eorum, qui in sociali ac civili vita degentes rerum publicarum administrationem suscipiunt. His proximi, sed tamen erectiori gradu constituti ii sunt, qui a publicis actionibus veluti tempestuosis ac procellosis et in quibus fortunae temeritas omnino dominetur se in portum tranquillitatis transferunt et a turba in otium se recipientes quietam vitam degunt, non ita tamen, ut non aliquid adhuc restet, adversus quod luctandum sit. Supremo autem loco eos cernes, qui penitus a rerum humanarum concursatione ac tumultu remoti nihil cuius paenitendum sit conmittunt (153). 62. Recte igitur arguitur Aeneas, quod uxoris urbis—ea enim est vita in actione posita—administrationem susceperit (194–95). 63. Cf. Nancy Ruff’s conclusion to her survey of allegorical interpretations of Dido from Servius through Landino: “In his Disputationes the Aeneid is transformed to an allegory expounding the virtues of the contemplative life over the active. . . . Perhaps appreciating the dignity of Virgil’s Dido, not to mention that of her historical counterpart , Landino allowed the character to represent something a little loftier than the meretrix of Servius and the libido of Silvestris, something corresponding to the amor ferinus of his own Platonic system. Nonetheless, by the time Landino had added his ‹nal twist to the accumulated interpretations of her story, Dido had been thoroughly transmuted into the symbol of a concept, and the concept is still a variety of cupidity” (1994, 880). 64. . . . contemplationis, qua sola mentes humanae regnant . . . Ascanio saltem heredi successorique suo consulat, cui regnum Italiae ac Romana tellus debetur. Quo in loco quidnam aliud Ascanium intelligemus nisi futuram aeternamque vitam, quae huic brevi et momentaneae succedit? (195). 65. Venit in Italiam Aeneas, verum eo virtutum genere, quae purgatoriae appellantur , a quibus antea quam penitus expiata sit mens necesse est, ut acerrimum bellum, Notes to Pages 68–70 219 = quemadmodum nostri aiunt, spiritus adversus carnem gerat. Nam quanto magis haec supra humanam imbecillitatem sunt, tanto maiori periculo aggredimur (210). 66. . . . non enim facile Scipionem invenias, qui nunquam minus solus esset, quam cum solus (210). Cf. Cicero 1928, 1.27: “[Africanus] numquam se plus agere, quam nihil cum ageret, numquam minus solum esse, quam cum solus esset.” This statement is also made, in slightly different form, in Cicero’s De of‹ciis 3.1; I shall return to it in chap. 6. As John Fleming would also remind us, the De of‹ciis of St. Ambrose forms part of the context of this common Ciceronian allusion. Ambrose’s “third book,” notes Fleming, “begins not with Scipio, but with David and Solomon, models of contemplation, and what he has to say of Scipio is that ‘he was not the ‹rst to understand that he was not alone when he was alone, nor less at leisure than when he was at leisure’ [revising Cicero].” “The ‹rst,” adds Fleming, “was Moses” (1984, 74). 67. Nam quemadmodum in chamaldulensibus philosophi interpretis munus obivimus: Sic in his commentariis grammatici rhetorisque vices praestabimus (Vergil 1499, 112r; subsequent citations of Landino’s commentary are also to this edition, and the translations are mine). 68. Mater: quare Venus in excidio troiano se ut deam ‹lio ostendit: et quare hic ut venatricem: in nostris chamaldulensibus expressimus: qui locus non te fugiat obsecro lector. Videbis quam altos quamque profundus sensus divinus poeta sub huiuscemodi fabularum ‹gmentis abscondet (130r). 69. . . . enim aeneam a didone nihil aliud est: ut in allegoriis ostendimus: quam virum egregium a Iove per Mercurium monitum. id est adeo per doctrinam eruditum a vita activa ad contemplativam trans‹re (200v). 70. The other major Aeneid commentary printed with sixteenth-century editions of Vergil’s Opera was that of Jodocus Badius Ascensius, whose annotations are also predominantly “rhetorical and grammatical” in nature rather than allegorical (or “philosophical ”); yet it is the subject matter of book 4 that inspires Ascanius to mention that “Saint Augustine confessed that he was compelled to tears by the complaints of Dido,” and Ascanius admonishes his readers to search for the moral allegory of the poem, repeating the “stages of man” account of its “deeper meaning”: “You shall observe that the poet constructs a lifetime in the arrangement of his book. For in the ‹rst book infancy is described,” “in the second, boyhood,” “in the third, adolescence,” which “contains the errors of Aeneas” and is the stage of life in which “the most wise Solomon admitted he utterly knew himself not”; the fourth book represents “youth, which involves love”; the ‹fth represents “virility”; and in the sixth, we see “old age tending toward death and contemplating the future” (. . . ut divus Augustinus sese ad lachrymas compulsum, Didonis querela con‹teatur. . . . Idque servato aetatum cum libris ordine facit poeta. Nam in primo libro infantiam describit. . . . In secundo pueritiam. . . . In tertio adolescentiam, cuius vitam sese penitus nescire fatetur sapientissimus Solomon: unde recte Aeneae continet errores. In quarto iuventam, quae amoribus implicatur. In quinto virilitatem. . . . In sexto senium ad manes tendens, et futura praemeditans [Vergil 1544, 266v]). See Renouard 1908 for a bibliography of Ascensius’s writings, including a list of the many Renaissance editions of Vergil’s works that contain his commentary. 71. Citations of Fabrini’s commentary are from the 1588 Venice edition of Vergil’s L’opere (no. 121 in Kallendorf 1991), with my translations. In this edition, interestingly, the “allegorical and moral meaning” of the poem receives all the more emphasis with a set of special illustrations for Aeneas’s descent into the underworld in book 6, which notes to pages 70–72 220 < were taken from Alessandro Vellutello’s 1544 commentary edition of the Divine Comedy . For discussion of these illustrations see Kleiner 1989, 30–31; Kallendorf 1994, 146–51; Kallendorf 1999, 118. 72. . . . la prima erà de l’huomo, done non domina punto la ragione, ma il sense. . . . parte da Troia, . . . cioè à la vita civile, e santa (103r). 73. Questa favola signi‹ca, che Iddio fece da principio l’huomo doppio di lume, cioè naturale, e divino: per il che insuperbiti, Iddio tolse loro il divino, che fu il dividergli , e andava togliendo loro il naturale, e gli riduceva come bestie: ma havuto di loro compassione, mandò Mercurio a risanargli, che fu Christo, che liberò l’huomo, e lo ricomperò, che era perduto per il suo peccato: & cosi l’huomo è salvo hora per la medicina de la passion di Christo (290v). 74. . . . l’opinione di Virgilio è santissima opinione vera Christiana . . . (309r). 75. Dice adunche Platone nel Fedro, che Venere è sopra à l’amore divino, e lascivo. E nel Sinfosio, che sono due Veneri l’una celeste, e l’altra vulgare, e che la celeste nacque del cielo senza madre. per laquale ‹ntione non signi‹ca altro, che quella intelligenza, che è ne la mente de l’Angelo, e che per un certo amore naturale si volta à contemplare la bellezza di Dio (103r). 76. . . . accioche ella fusse assaltata da la bellezza del corpo, e al ‹ne d’onesta e casta, diventasse disonesta, e impudica: perche per Didone Virgilio mostra la vita attiva, e civile, la quale vita civile da principio è di questa natura, ch’ella ha per ‹ne la virtù, ma occupandosi ne le cose corporee, e mortali alettata da le lusinghe loro, abbandona la virtù, e si dà a le vanità (199v). 77. The chapter on Tasso in Fichter 1982 (112–55) is in this respect representative— not only of contemporary criticism on Gerusalemme liberata, but of the debate that raged in Italian literary circles through the end of the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries—for its preoccupation with Tasso’s (successful or failed) effort to compose an epic that would respond to the artistic challenge posed by romance literature, speci‹cally Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (cf. the essays collected in Finucci 1999). A recent account of the early controversy over Ariostan romance and Tassoan epic, with selections from some of the more important treatises, is in Sberlati 2001. chapter three 1. PQ 4638 A881b Cage in the Folger collection, marginalia on p. 261. 2. Of course, Tasso could well have drawn these symbols immediately from the commentary tradition on Vergil and from allegorical literature generally, but I am in agreement with Roche that they were, more deeply, Augustinian. Cf. Lubac’s argument that “the most privileged symbol of all” in medieval exegetical tradition “is that of Jerusalem,” which provides “much more than an example; for in this single name of Jerusalem the whole history of the people of Israel is summed up, and in it also is contained the whole substance of the Old Testament; and along with it is the whole Church of Christ, the whole Christian soul, the whole city of God—and the whole mystery of the ‘Virgo singularis’ as well—so much so that the explication of Jerusalem condenses ‘in nuce’ as it were, the total explication of Scripture and the total exposition of the Christian mystery” (1959, 2:645; 2000, 109). 3. Like Roche, Murrin concentrates on the episode of the enchanted wood in his defense of Tasso’s “Prose Allegory.” To appreciate the range of perspectives on Tasso’s Notes to Pages 72–75 221 = guide to his poem, see Kennedy 1972; Steadman 1974, 73; Derla 1978; Savoia 1984; Olini 1985; Larivaille 1987, 140–46; Rhu 1988. In a subsequent study by Lawrence Rhu of “the genesis of Tasso’s narrative theory” (along with which, cf. Patterson 1971), Rhu af‹rms the role of allegory in the Gerusalemme liberata but also sounds the usual, judicious caution against interpretations that force the poem into an allegorical straitjacket. Tasso came to write an allegory for his epic somewhat reluctantly, and his misgivings about doing so have led to the accurate perception that he felt compelled to protect his poem from censorship by providing a high-minded rationale for its vulnerable passages; but that insight about his motives by no means implies that the allegory is merely a postfactum addition without an organic connection to the Liberata. Recent critics have convincingly demonstrated otherwise . In the process, however, they tempt us to ‹nd secure meanings in the very aspects of Tasso’s poem that disclose instability and danger symptomatic of his cultural moment and indicative of his own second thoughts as he composed his epic. The desire for a snug ‹t between the allegory and the poem or between the history of Tasso’s ideas that demonstrate how he developed the allegory and the resultant document itself may lead us to overlook the space between them and the tensions that these gaps betray. (1993, 51) For the insight that the poem’s allegory is much more topical than has previously been recognized, see David Quint’s excellent chapter “Political Allegory in the Gerusalemme liberata” (1993, 213–47), in which he argues that the poem “celebrates the triumph of the imperial, Counter-Reformation papacy” (230). A rather abstract yet compelling account of the poem’s allegory is in Dennis Looney’s chapter “Tasso’s Allegory of the Source” (1996, 142–64), in which Looney analyzes the story of the desert spring in canto 13 to delineate “an allegory of imitative poetics which provides the critic with a theoretical gloss on the poet’s use of sources” (142). Finally, among allegorical interpretations of the Gerusalemme liberata, I would also include those studies that proffer psychoanalytic interpretations of the poem, meaning they read it as an allegory of Freudian psychology. Samples are in Ferguson 1983, 110–36 (where we ‹nd the statement that “to understand what is really at stake in Tasso’s attitude toward his two poems [Gerusalemme liberata and Gerusalemme conquistata] and his act of revision itself, we must see that the Conquistata, that ‘new birth’ of his intellect, is associated in Tasso’s mind not only with his assumption of a new paternal authority, but also with a triumph over the realm of the ›esh which allows him to imagine spiritual reunion with his mother” [116]), and Bellamy 1992, 131–88 (in which Tancredi’s horror in the enchanted wood is glossed as a fear of castration [171]). Comparable arguments are in Zatti 1983 and Günsberg 1998. 4. . . . Venere ad Enea, s’ella era dea de l’amore . . . dove Enea vede Venere e per sua grazia le idee e le intelligenza, vuole intendere ch’egli si solleva sovra l’umanità con la contemplazione (Tasso 1998, 316–17, with my translation). 5. This letter is no. 48 in Tasso 1995, to which subsequent page citations refer. Translations are mine. 6. . . . quando cominciai il mio poema non ebbi pensiero alcuno d’allegoria, parendomi soverchia e vana fatica; e perché ciascuno de gli interpreti suole dar l’allegoria a suo capriccio . . . e perché Aristotele non fa più menzione dell’allegoria nella Poetica e nell’altre sue opere . . . ma intende per allegoria la metafora continuata (456–57). 7. Ma poi ch’io fui oltre al mezzo del mio poema e che cominciai a sospettar della notes to pages 75–76 222 < strettezza de’ tempi, cominciai anco a pensare all’allegoria come a cosa ch’io giudicava dovermi assai agevolar ogni dif‹cultà (458); . . . [per esempio] accoppiando Platone con Aristotle (463). 8. Ella, sì come è doppia la vita de gli huomini, così hor dell’una, hor dell’altra ci suole essere ‹gura; però che, ordinariamente per huomo intendiamo questo composto di corpo, e di anima, e di mente: et all’hora vita humana si dice quella che di tal composto è propria, nelle operationi della quale ciascuna parte d’esso concorre; . . . . Alcuna volta, benché più di rado, per huomo s’intende non il composto, ma la nobilissima parte d’esso, cioè la mente: e secondo questo ultimo signi‹cato si dirà che il viver dell ’huomo sia il contemplare e l’operare semplicemente con l’intelletto; come che questa vita molto paia participare della divinità, e quasi trashumanandosi angelica divenire (Tasso 1988, 1–2; translation by Ralph Nash in Tasso 1987, 469; subsequent citations of the “Allegoria del poema” are also from these editions). 9. Hor della vita dell’huomo contemplante è ‹gura la Comedia di Dante e l’Odissea quasi in ogni parte; . . . e nell’Eneide ancora, benché in questa sci scorga più tosto un mescolamento d’attione e di contemplatione. . . . quando [Enea] scende all’Inferno et a i Campi Elisi . . . ci è signi‹cata una sua contemplatione delle pene e de’ premi, che nell ’altro secolo all’anime buone et alle ree si riserbano (2; 469–70). 10. Essendo composto l’essercito di varii Principi e d’altri soldati Christiani, signi‹ca l’huomo virile, il quale è composto d’anima e di corpo: e d’anima non semplice , ma distinta in molte e varie potenze. . . . Goffredo . . . è in vece d’intelletto . . . Rinaldo, Tancredi e gli altri Principi sono in luogo dell’altre potenze dell’animo; et il corpo da i soldati men nobili ci vien dinotato (3; 470). 11. Gierusalemme . . . segna la felicità civile, qual però conviene al buon Christiano; . . . la quale è un bene molto dif‹cile da conseguire, e posto in cima all’alpestre e faticoso giogo della virtù: et a questo sono vòlte, come ad ultima meta, tutte l’attioni dell’huomo politico (3; 470). 12. . . . Ma perché questa civile beatitudine non deve essere ultimo segno dell ’huomo Christiano, ma deve egli mirar pìu alto alla Christiana felicità (9; 474). 13. . . . per questo non desidera Goffredo d’espugnar la terrena Gierusalemme per averne semplicemente il dominio temporale, ma perchè in essa si celebri il culto divino, e possa il Sepolcro liberamente esser visitato da pii e devoti peregrini; e si chiude il Poema nella adoratione di Goffredo, per dimostrarci che l’intelletto affaticato nelle attioni civili, deve ‹nalmente riposarsi nelle orationi, e nelle contemplationi de’ beni dell’altra vita beatissima, et immortale (9; 474). 14. Gierusalemme, che è la purgatione dell’anima nostra (Tasso 1593, 12r). The 1593 edition is one of several late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century editions that reprints the allegorical glosses from Il Goffredo . . . con gli argomenti e allegorie a ciascun canto d’incerto auttore (Venice: G. Perchacino, 1582). 15. Landino 1980, 210. Cf. Landino’s commentary to the opening lines of Aeneid 5: “Sed cum nondum in eo virtutum gemine quo anima iam purgati dicuntur consistat: sed in virtutibus purgatoriis constitutus sit quamvis divina praecepta quibus caelestia contemplari: et terrena despicere iubemur sequi decreverit” (Vergil 1499, 172r). 16. Sentenza di Platone . . . la Ragione contra le Cupidigie (Tasso 1590, 60). 17. On the intense industry of Italian scholars in the ‹eld of literary criticism during the sixteenth century, fueled largely by the rediscovery and translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, see Weinberg 1961 and Hathaway 1962. 18. Concedamisi dunque ch’in questa e in alcune altre poche opinioni lasci ArisNotes to Pages 76–78 223 = totele, per non l’abbandonare in cosa di maggiore importanza, cioè nel desiderio di ritrovar la verità e nell’amore della ‹loso‹a; percioché in questa diversità di parere io imiterò coloro i quali nella divisione delle strade sogliono dividersi per breve spazio, e poi tornano a congiungersi nell’amplissima strada la qual conduce a qualche altissima meta o ad alcuna nobilissima città, piena di magni‹che e di reali abitazioni, e ornata di templi e di palazzi e d’altre fabriche reali e maravigliose (Tasso 1964, 259; translation by Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel in Tasso 1973, 205). My interpretation of this passage is opposite that of Thomas Greene, who cites it intending to show that for Tasso, epic “replaces divine worship with humanistic awe,” celebrating “the City of man, not of God” (1963, 14). 19. In contemporary scholarship, this fact that the Canzoniere so thoroughly pervades the text of Tasso’s epic has meant that the most in›uential account of the Canzoniere ’s poetics—Freccero 1975—likewise pervades accounts of Gerusalemme liberata’s. So, e.g., in James Chiampi’s essay “Tasso’s Deconstructive Angel and the Figuration of Light in the Gerusalemme liberata” (1987), the subject is Tasso’s own version of the struggle between the theology of the ‹g tree and the poetics of the laurel. Like Petrarch, says Chiampi, “Tasso fears that the matter of poetry will become the occasion of wandering , of errare as error” (113), and Chiampi sees Tasso “at constant pains” to avoid this error, to achieve “a univocal conformity to a truth that exists fully formed before its inscription in a text” (114). Cf. Timothy Hampton’s argument that “Gerusalemme liberata explores a struggle between two ideologies, one of which is seeking to control the other.” Hampton continues: “Tasso seeks to merge Counter-Reformation piety and the discourse of heroic exemplarity, de‹ning a new type of epic with new models of action and selfhood. The interplay of Goffredo and Rinaldo constitutes the allegorical representation of this struggle” (1990, 101). For a study—published earlier than Freccero’s— that treats the relation between the poet of the Canzoniere and “the ‹gure of the poet in Renaissance epic,” see Robert Durling’s chapter on Petrarch in Durling 1965, 65–87; cf. Della Terza 1963 speci‹cally on “Tasso’s experience of Petrarch.” 20. Tasso 1590, “Luoghi osservati dai Mag. Giuliu Guatavini” (paginated separately after the poem), 5 and 39 (indicating verbal parallels between Gerusalemme liberata 2.66 and Africa 7.283–87, and between Gerusalemme liberata 20.110 and Africa 7.1093–96, respectively). 21. Citations of Gerusalemme liberata, hereafter provided in text, are from Lanfranco Caretti’s edition (Tasso 1983). I quote the English prose translation by Ralph Nash in Tasso 1987, except that I occasionally revert names to their Italian forms (e.g., Tancredi rather than Tancred). 22. De rerum natura 1.936–43 (text from Lucretius 1992, but with my translation): sed veluti pueris absinthia taetra medentes cum dare conantur, prius oras pocula circum contingunt mellis dulci ›avoque liquore, ut puerorum aetas inprovida ludi‹cetur labrorum tenus, interea perpotet amarum absinthi laticem deceptaque non capiatur, sed potius tali pacto recreata valescat, sic ego nunc . . . Tasso is also echoing in this formula what had become by his time the standard explanation of the meaning of tragic catharsis in Aristotle’s literary theory—that like a strong notes to pages 79–81 224 < purgative, tragedy expels the unhealthy emotions of pity and fear from its spectators. For examples and discussion of the notion of catharsis and of the medical simile in sixteenth -century Italian criticism, see Weinberg 1961, esp. 343, 658; Hathaway 1962, 205–300, esp. 254, 382. On Tasso’s conception of catharsis related to his epic, see Kates 1983, 21, 67. On “the aesthetic of the good physician,” see also Fish 1972, 1–77; see esp. 21–43, on its version in Augustine’s imagination. 23. Tasso’s use of the word condito in this line, which Nash translates “hidden,” is particularly apt, for it has the primary meaning of “seasoned” or “dressed,” “made savory,” which describes the sweetening of the bitter medicine. In Latin, condire, “to season, to spice,” and condere, “to conceal” (in one of its senses), share the same past participle, conditus. 24. See Zetzel 1996 for a compelling argument that Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis “played a much larger role in Virgil’s thinking” than merely as one of many sources for Aeneas’s underworld journey in Aeneid 6, that it supplied him, rather, with “a way to understand the destiny of Rome and its empire as something inherent in the natural law of the cosmos” (311). However, in Zetzel’s view, both these texts provide “poetic visions of justice as a philosophical” myth that are “like Plato’s ideal state in their unreality” (318). Also, see Fleming 1984 on perceived parallels between Petrarch’s Secretum and Macrobius’s commentary on the Somnium Scipionis (160). For a general study of the “celestial journey” motif from antiquity to 1700, including the various manifestations of the Dream of Scipio in literature, see Hammil 1980. 25. De republica 6.15 in Cicero 1928. Subsequent citations of Cicero’s Dream of Scipio are also from the Loeb edition cited here, though the translations are mine. 26. Like James Chiampi’s, Yavneh’s reading of Petrarch’s in›uence on Tasso is indebted to John Freccero’s account of the self-referential, idolatrous poetics of the Canzoniere. Hence Armida’s pledge of submission to Rinaldo at Gerusalemme liberata 20.135–36, which is much debated (and vili‹ed) because it seems to incorporate a startling biblical allusion to Mary (see discussion in the present chapter, esp. n. 40), is unconvincing in Yavneh’s view because Armida’s “status as idol—as both character and ‹ctive poetic construct—is too strongly con‹rmed by the Petrarchan allusions which emphasize an alternative, and idolatrous, incarnation” (1993, 134). Cf. the characterization of Armida in Stephens 1989 as “a counterfeit Blessed Virgin, a new, sinister Laura conscious of and willing to manipulate the pseudo-religious sexual fantasies that men spin about her, as the Christian soldiers do so intensely in cantos four and ‹ve.” “Indeed,” Stephens continues, “Petrarch’s sonnet 213, the echo of which introduces Armida, provides an intertextual ‘prophecy’ of her counterfeit Mariological power over men” (197). See Del Giudice 1984a on “the metaphor of the veil” that “‹lters deep into the lexicon of the entire poem and is immediately associated with Armida” (40); see Johnson-Haddad 1992 for the argument that “Armida, particularly in her alternations between Siren and Virgin Annunciate, stands as an emblem of Tasso’s textual material” (212). Also comprising the critical background to my analyses is the discussion of Sofronia in Hampton 1990, 116–17 (which stresses her and particularly the veil’s “curious ambiguity”); the study of Sofronia “as Martyr Manqué” in Yavneh 1999; the comparison of Sofronia and Armida in Migiel 1993, 115–16; and the discussion of Sofronia and Dante’s Beatrice in Larivaille 1987, 178. 27. As Naomi Yavneh comments, “their presence together on the funeral pyre is a literalization and parody of the ›ames of love, to which Olindo draws attention” (1993, 151). Notes to Pages 81–88 225 = 28. Cf. the corresponding lines in the Aeneid: Nox erat, et placidum carpebant fessa soporem corpora per terras, silvaeque et saeva quierant aequora, cum medio volvuntur sidera lapsu, cum tacet omnis ager, pecudes pictaeque volucres, quaeque lacus late liquidos quaeque aspera dumis rura tenent, somno positae sub nocte silenti lenibant curas et corda oblita laborum. (4.522–28) 29. Cf. Andrew Fichter’s discussion (1982, 75–77) of Ariosto’s prior use of this Vergilian passage in Orlando Furioso 8.79, where it is applied to Orlando’s frenzied lovesufferings . 30. As an African, Clorinda invites association with Dido and Sophonisba, but consider also David Quint’s compelling answer to the question “Why is Clorinda an Ethiopian?” (234): “Her long-deferred baptism represents . . . the conversion not simply of a Muslim to the Christian faith, but of a schismatic Ethiopian to the Church of Rome. As royal Clorinda ‹nally becomes the handmaiden of Christ [referring to her baptism by Tancredi after he has unknowingly wounded her mortally in battle], she ful‹lls the same act of obedience that King Atani Tingil had, it was once thought, pledged to the pope in Bologna, placing his national church under the authority of the Apostolic See. Tasso thus depicts an ideal return of Ethiopia into the Roman fold that was being disappointed by historical events” (1993, 245). 31. Cf. the corresponding lines in the Aeneid: o quam te memorem, virgo? namque haud tibi vultus mortalis, nec vox hominem sonat; o dea certe (an Phoebi soror? an Nympharum sanguinis una?) (1.327–29) 32. In her remarks on Tancredi’s “Petrarchan adoration” of Clorinda, Elizabeth Bellamy points out that he apostrophizes Clorinda as “Oh meraviglia!” when he sees her in person at Gerusalemme liberata 1.47–48 and that he then repeats this phrase in 13.41, when he thinks he has discovered her spirit in a tree (1992, 168). To him, Bellamy notes, she is already a phantasm in life, and it is her “image” that is “a constant fuel to his ›ame” (169). Before she has died, in other words, Tancredi is guilty of the idolatry for which he is scolded by Peter the Hermit in 12.86, quoted shortly. 33. In addition to Murrin’s analysis of the enchanted wood’s allegory, see Roche 1977. Presumably, my reinterpretation of this scene supports Elizabeth Bellamy’s diagnosis of contemporary criticism’s preoccupation with the enchanted wood episode, which, she says, is “the inevitable meeting place of critics of the Liberata and their interpretive will-to-power.” “Thus,” Bellamy concludes, “the impulse to analyze the Liberata will inevitably become an overdetermined compulsion to return to the trees as the central enigma of Tasso’s epic” (1992, 183). 34. For a superb analysis of Dante’s transformation of the Polydorus episode in Inferno 13 for the purpose of highlighting the unbridgeable gap between Vergil’s conception of pietas and Dante’s in the Christian age, see Biow 1991. See also Spitzer 1942, to which nearly all contemporary studies of this canto are indebted. 35. Cf. Timothy Hampton’s comment that it will be Armida’s “recuperation” that notes to pages 92–101 226 < ultimately “offers what might be called a recuperation of all the scenes [before],” a “conversion ” that “redeems and replaces the earlier moments of error and confusion” (1990, 127–28). 36. It is, says Del Giudice, Armida’s “polymorphism, through its mutability and illusion,” that “embodies the Tassian concept of the chaos and void of Hell” (1984a, 29). Cf. Naomi Yavneh’s characterization of Armida as a “false mediatrix—the passive vessel —by which the creator of words, rather than the Word, is ultimately the ‹nal referent of his creation”; she “is both creation and creator, the uninterested Laura and the ‘author’ of the Petrarchan lover-like projections of Goffredo’s men” (1993, 148). In a different assessment of her character, Marilyn Migiel describes Armida’s “narrative power,” her “interpretive and narrative control,” which Migiel argues is the source of Armida’s threat to the Christian army (1993, 113–44). Andrew Fichter, also cataloging Armida’s various exemplars (Dido, Cleopatra, Omphale, etc.), observes that her variety is mirrored by Rinaldo, who “is another Antony, or another Aeneas as Mercury ‹nds him in Carthage, or another Ruggiero as Melissa ‹nds him in the seventh canto of Orlando Furioso.” Fichter adds that Rinaldo is also “Aeneas as Iarbas labels him, a second Paris with his eunuch train” (1982, 133). 37. Fichter observes: “Rinaldo and Armida are not so much in love with each other as bound together in mutually gratifying narcissism. She sees herself re›ected in his crystal pendant; he gazes on his own image in her eyes” (1982, 133). See Giamatti 1966, 203, for a similar analysis. 38. For a discussion of this passage’s basis in Aeneid 4.331ff. and 4.393–96, see Giamatti 1966, 208–9. 39. On Armida’s “sweet poison” of Venus and her several associations with myrtle as both the tree of Venus and the tree of death, see Del Giudice 1984a, 32, 36, 49 n. 5, 50 n. 11). On the signi‹cance of Rinaldo’s success in the wood to the poem’s own commentary on allegory, Migiel observes: “when Rinaldo brings the forest back to its ‘natural ’ state, so that it can be used in order to construct Christian war machines, he gives new meaning to Tancredi’s experience. He establishes the parameters for the control of the interpretation of the literal and ‹gural; he de‹nes acceptable stories of identity and acceptable forms of thought” (1993, 170–71). See, too, Murrin’s discussion of the value of “the Prose Allegory” in explicating Rinaldo’s reestablishment of right reason to the Christian army (1980, 113–14). 40. Similarly, see Rhu 1988 for the judgment that Armida’s last words are evidence of “the violence that this poet must work upon his material to make everything come out right in the end” (128), and see Del Giudice’s view that in the image of a “redeemed Eve” being “reconciled with her redeemed Adam” in this passage, “the reader, although accustomed to Armida’s changeability, is nonetheless shocked by this discordant statement and by Armida’s ‹nal transformation to a Marian ancilla and suspects that this phase too is a ‹ctio” (1984a, 48). For unsuspicious readings, see Fichter 1982, 113 (for the observation that “Armida . . . by virtue of the transforming power of grace can ful‹ll the roles of both Virgil’s Dido and his Lavinia”); Roche 1977, 70–71; Stephens 1989, 187 (stressing Tasso’s vision of women’s “acceptance of subjection to men within the hierarchy of relations”; Stephens quotes, too, Milton’s famous description of Adam and Eve, “He for God only, she for God in him”). “Goffredo’s powers over the army,” explains Stephens, “are exactly congruent with the powers Armida gives Rinaldo over herself; that is, Armida’s words allusively declare her the ‘body’ of Rinaldo, in covert Notes to Pages 101–5 227 = response to his overt proposal of matrimony” (194). Stephens adds that “the movement from the ‘Edenic’ canto sixteen to canto twenty thus plays upon the traditional view of the Blessed Virgin as the woman who reversed and redeemed the sin of Eve (Eva-Ave) through her humility” (195) and that “when Rinaldo seizes Armida, preventing her from killing herself on a literalized Petrarchan arrow of love (20.123–128.7), his act is expressed through the ironic recall of a verse in Petrarch’s apotheosis of Laura: ‘le fe’ d’un braccio al bel ‹anco colonna’” (198). In the end, Stephens argues, “her imitatio of the Virgin’s words signals an ideal subordination that embraces both Christianity and a speci‹cally Pauline wifely virtue by pointing to the ideal of Christian womanhood” (198). As I noted earlier in the present chapter, however (in connection to the tales of Olindo and Sofronia and of Odoarado and Gildippe), if Armida’s subjection does function as such a “pointer,” it would be to an ideal and idealized marriage relation that is outside the epic’s narrative. In contrast to these interpretations of Armida as a “religious ‹gure,” ‹nally, an important cautionary note is sounded by Jo Ann Cavallo (1999, 97): “Critics,” she says, “have treated this phrase as a direct quotation from the Bible, whereas Tasso had already found the same expression used in the Italia liberata without any overt religious connotations . In the earlier epic, Elpidia offered herself in marriage to the knight of the Captain ’s choosing”; Elpidia’s “exact words that she uses to signal her obedience to Captain Belisardo,” Cavallo shows, include the phrase “ecco la vostra ancella” [behold your handmaid]. 41. Cf. the parallel lines in the Aeneid: iamque aderat Phoebo ante alios dilectus Iapyx ipse suas artis, sua munera, laetus Apollo augurium citharamque dabat celerisque sagittas. ille, ut depositi proferret fata parentis, scire potestates herbarum usumque medendi maluit et mutas agitare inglorius artis. (12.391–97) 42. Cf. the parallel lines in the Aeneid: non haec humanis opibus, non arte magistra proveniunt, neque te, Aenea, mea dextera servat: maior agit deus atque opera ad maiora remittit. (12.427–29) chapter four 1. A convenient survey of late Renaissance biblical epics (in the context of a study of the literary background to Paradise Regained) is in Lewalski 1966, 78–92. For background on early medieval hexameter versions of biblical books, referred to variously as epics or “epic paraphrases,” see Roberts 1985 and Nodes 1993. 2. For a bibliography of Renaissance editions of Vida’s works see Di Cesare 1974b. 3. I cite from Milton 1957, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. 4. See, e.g., Drake 1980; Revard 1980, 146–47, 213–14; Steadman 1987, 187; Quint 1993, 276. Cf. the comments of Tillyard, who grudgingly allows that Vida’s one “true talent was descriptive” (1954, 220), and Thomas Greene’s expression of incredulity that, in notes to pages 106–10 228 < its day, “so frigid a work as Vida’s Christiad was received as a masterpiece” (1963, 4). Among Vida’s defenders is Craig Kallendorf, who declares the Christiad “an epic poem whose fusion of the Christian and the Virgilian resolves the tensions within the commentary tradition” between “ahistorical syncretism” and “pure classicism” (1995, 43). In Vida’s epic, he tells us, “form and content become one” (62), thereby achieving “a ‹nal union of theologica poetica and Christianity” (58). More modest appraisals of the Christiad are Hardie 1993a, 303–10; Lewalski 1966, 61–65; and Mario Di Cesare’s Vida’s Christiad and Vergilian Epic (1964), which purposes “to examine the Christiad critically as an epic poem and to appraise critically Vida’s Vergilian humanism” (vi). Di Cesare is to be credited for saving scholarly interest in Vida’s epic just when it was threatened with extinction, but his summary overview of the Christiad’s plot, style, characterizations, and themes supports only very general conclusions. On Vida’s heroic style, for instance, he concedes that its “echo” of Vergil “adds a luster that is sometimes dubious,” yet he maintains that at other times, “the allusion well employed draws directly on the masterwork , bringing to signi‹cant or highly charged scenes the weightiness or the feeling associated with that work” (161). One way to de‹ne my purpose in this chapter is as an attempt to invest such generalizations with speci‹city and illustration, by working ‹rst toward a more precise de‹nition of the Christiad’s poetic and spiritual designs. Not surprisingly , given the central argument of this study, I would suggest that Di Cesare’s analysis of the Christiad is hindered from the start by his dismissal of Petrarch’s Africa and subsequent “chronicle epics” of the quattrocento as “better history than poetry,” with “their only importance for literature” being “that they indicate the continuing attraction to literary men of Vergil’s style and Vergil’s epic achievement, and the complete lack of distinction between epic and annales” (75–76). He asserts this even though, just previously, in the context of discussing Vida’s Ars poetica (58–59), he quotes Petrarch’s explicit invitation in the Africa to read his epic allegorically (Africa 9.90–102, discussed in chap. 1 of the present study). 5. Nam et si artis praecepta sine ullo salutis discrimine pueris facile tradi possint: non tamen autorum explanationes malorum, qui veluti syrenae quaedam sub blando fucatae eloquentiae Lenocinio discipulos perdunt et magistros. per deum immortalem (ut Ovidium, Propertium, Catullum, ceterosque Lenones venereos praetermittam) quid ornatius, quidve disertius, latinoque sermoni videtur aptius afri versipellis Terentii comedia? (Vida 1569, i; subsequent references to Botta’s commentary are also to this edition, with my translations). Cf. Augustine’s similar complaints about Terence in the Confessions (1.16). 6. At mille talibus exemplis (quae facilius animos alliciunt quam verba) tota poetarum scena referta est. . . . Si quidem hae siliquae seculares sunt doctrinae, steriles, vanitatem personantes, de quibus laudes idolorum, fabularumque ad deos gentilium pertinentium vario sermone atque carminibus percrepant. quibus demonia delectantur. cumque in his aliquid solidum et rectum quod ad beatam vitam pertineat quispiam cupiat invenire: non potest (i). 7. Expertae credite syreni venerisque magistrae . . . Intentio haec est. retrahere christianos a poeticorum lectione ‹gmentorum. quia per oblectationes fabularum, mentes legentium excitantur ad incentiva libidinum (i, iii). 8. His verbis quibus etiam Aeneas usus est ad corroborandos sociorum animos, videtur signi‹cari Vergilium per Aeneam intellexisse, virum prudentem. per longam navigationem, errores pericula ac tempestates peregrinationis nostrae per mare huius Notes to Pages 110–11 229 = seculi diversas prudentum mondanorum opiniones: quae divinae sapientiae comparatae erroneae sunt multaque discrimina vitae praesentis quae patitur unusquisque. per italiam vero coelestem patriam. unde quidam versus illos sic mutavit. per varios casus per tot discrimina rerum tendimus in coelum: sedes ubi fata quietas ostendunt. illic fas regna resurgere Christi (5r). 9. Virgilius semper in manibus habebatur. et quod in pueris videbatur permitti causa necessitatis, crimen in se faciebant voluptatis. ne igitur sub eruditionis ‹gmento . . . ad impietatem idolorum, et perniciosam voluptatem libidinum, pueri et cuiusvis aetatis homines deducantur: mandatum fuit a Leone x. et Clemente vii. summis ponti‹cibus. ut quaecumque ad litterariam eruditionem virgiliana lectio continebat, ea noster divinus vates colligeret. et in hoc piissimum opus transferret (iii). 10. Cf. Philip Hardie’s observation that “Vida’s ideal reader is one who from early childhood has immersed himself in Virgil, alive to the echoes at the smallest verbal level” (1993a, 305). 11. All citations of the Latin text of the Christiad are from Vida 1978, which is edited with facing-page translation by Gertrude C. Drake and Clarence A. Forbes. However, the translations provided in the present text are my own. 12. Cupiditatis ignem describit. quo visus interior excecatur, et accenditur concupiscentia . cuius contrarium operatur charitatis ardor. illuminat enim intellectum et concupiscentiae ardores extinguit. quamobrem alter ab altero protinus effugatur. est enim cupiditas (ut inquit Augustinus) radix omnium malorum. et radix omnium bonorum charitas. et simul ambae esse non possunt. nisi una penitus evulsa fuerit. alia plantari non potest (18r). 13. For interpretations of Lavinia’s blush, see, e.g., Todd 1980; Lyne 1983; Dyson 1999. 14. Propter mundiciam castitatis virgo liliis compararatur. sicut et in canticis dicitur . Sicut Lilium inter spinas, sic amica mea inter ‹lias. rosis autem assimilatur propter ardorem charitatis: qua plenissima fuit beatissima virgo (93r). 15. Cf. the angel’s greeting to Mary at Luke 1:28: “have gratia plena Dominus tecum benedicta tu in mulieribus.” 16. As Botta reminds his readers in his comment on virgineo ore (and as Michelangelo depicts on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, e.g.), “learned ones say that this deceitful serpent had such an appearance” (Tali facie dicunt doctores dolosum hunc serpentem fuisse [34r]). 17. Sicut ex Virgilio colligitur. namque haud tibi vultus mortalis, nec vox hominem sonat (45v). 18. Romanus preses auditis quae a seniore Iosepho, quaeque ab Ioanne de mirabilibus Christi operibus fuerant enarrata, tanquam persuasus tota intentione nitebatur eum de manibus, ac impetuoso tumultu iudeorum eripere. iccirco mens illius variis cogitationibus angebatur. versans nunc modum hunc, nunc illum (148v). 19. Conclusio est sylogismi: qui constat ex propositione, assumptione, et conclusione . sed hic dupliciter colligitur. negative, et af‹rmative. nam si nihil mortale sonat, ergo deus, item si per omnia Deo similis est, ergo Deus est. et rursus, “Deus ille. dei aut Cer, Prol,” utrumque verum est. nam et deus est et dei ‹lius (150v). 20. The passage of the Christiad that most fully reveals the extent of Pilate’s wasted knowledge, ending again with his call to the Jews to “acknowledge your God,” is 5.160–74: notes to pages 111–22 230 < Nec se progeniem superi negat ipse parentis, Quem vos promissum coelo divinitus olim Venturum tandem auxilio mortalibus aegris Non latet, ut veteres genitoris molliat iras Concilians generi vestro, culpamque parentum Ipse sua virtute luat. sic ferre priorum Accepi monimenta, patres id prodere vestros, Et rebus probat ipse. adeo circum oppida lustrans Arrexit totam monstris ingentibus oram, Quae non ullae artes hominum, non ulla potest vis. Quin etiam in lucem quosdam revocavit ab umbris, Quis penitus iam mors totos immissa per artus Solverat haerentes animae de corpore nexus. Quare agite o odiis miseri desuescite iniquis. Ne frustra pugnate, Deum sed discite uestrum. [He himself does not deny that he is the son of a heavenly father, and there is no secret it was promised to you that one would come from heaven someday, by divine agency to help af›icted mortals, so as to mitigate the ancient wrath of the creator, redeeming your race and washing away the sin of your forefathers by his merit. I have heard that the scriptures of the patriarchs say this, your forefathers proclaimed it, and he himself proves it by his deeds. You know that while wandering in the surrounding towns he roused the whole coast with great miracles, which not any art or any power of man could accomplish. What is more, he has recalled from darkness into light those in whom death, thoroughly admitted, had dissolved the bond of the lingering soul from the body. So go, o wretched men, lay aside your unjust hatred. Do not ‹ght in vain, but acknowledge your God.] 21. In this episode, Vida has much elaborated the report in Matthew 27:19 of Pilate’s wife having suffered a bad dream and sent warning to him not to harm the innocent prisoner. 22. Stella Revard’s summary of this scene also emphasizes the matched intensity of the angels’ activity and Vida’s style (1980, 146–47). 23. Cf. the corresponding lines in the Aeneid: Tum vero infelix fatis exterrita Dido mortem orat; taedet caeli convexa tueri. (4.450–51) [Then, indeed, awed by her doom, unhappy Dido prays for death; she is sick of gazing on the vault of heaven.] 24. Not even greater, we must add, is the grief of Euryalus’s mother for her dead son (Aeneid 9.493–94), which, as Philip Hardie notes (1993b, 53), is echoed “in the Virgin ’s lament at the cross in both Vida’s Christiad, 5.850–8 and Sannazaro’s De Partu Virginis , 1.344–67.” 25. “With Christiad 6.881–2,” suggests Hardie (1993a, 312 n. 39), “cf. Africa 9.404–9.” 26. I defer to Drake and Forbes in this line in understanding that the children who have learned to sing “certatim” (i.e., “emulously”) are singing antiphons. Notes to Pages 122–32 231 = 27. This is the translation of Drake and Forbes in Vida 1978. 28. Cf. the analysis of John’s role in the Christiad as a model of divine poet and prophet in Ogilvy 1978, 145–54. chapter five 1. As Samuel I. Mintz observes in his survey of Hobbes’s contemporary reception, “the Leviathan Ross hooked was a queer heretical ‹sh, and Hobbes the very type of heresiarch; Ross called him an Anthropomorphist, Sabellian, Nestorian, Sadducean, Arabian, Tacian, Manichee, Mohammedan, Cerinthian, Tertullianist, Audean, Montanist , Aetian, Priscillianist Luciferian, Originist, Socinian, and Jew” (1962, 55). It seems, says Mintz, that “the ‹rst task of a seventeenth-century divine would be to destroy Leviathan; the second might be to understand it” (45). 2. In quibus omnia quae de Domino nostro Iesu Christo in utroque Testamento, vel dicta vel praedicta sunt, altisona Divina Maronis tuba suavissime decantantur (Ross 1638, title page; all subsequent citations of the Christiad are to this edition, although a few obvious typographical errors are silently corrected according to the 1659 edition). Translations are my own. 3. Nulla autem est in hoc opere (exceptis paucis) linea in qua non invenies integrum Virgilianum Carmen, vel saltem Dimidium, aut phrases illius (A6r). 4. There is one history of cento poetry available, but it is more an anthology of excerpts than a study: see Delepierre 1868 (298–334 for Ross’s epic). Perhaps Ross’s most immediate inspiration for his cento was Lelio Capilupi’s Cento ex Vergilio de vita monachorum (1555), a short satire on monks that was reprinted in Edinburgh in 1565 and translated into English by George Lauder in 1622 as The Popes New Yeares Gifts. On this poem’s composition and popularity, see Calitti 1987 and Tucker 1997. Interestingly, Lauder’s 1623 revision of his translation, printed in The Anatomie of the Romane Clergy, is accompanied by “certaine verses taken out of the Epistles of Francis Petrarch, Archdeacon of Parma, which were sine titulo, written to his friend whom he might not name for feare of the Roman clergie” (15). Here, of course, we are making acquaintance with Petrarch in his guise as enemy of papist Rome, a favorite ‹gure during the Reformation . Lauder, in his preface, repeats the much-circulated tale that Petrarch was once “earnestly solicited” by Pope Benedict XII, “who offered to giue him a Cardinals Hat if he would perswade his sister, a very faire young woman dwelling in Auignion, to prostitute her bodie to his desire”; Petrarch, “the honest man abhorring his ‹lthie Hat, was not to be receiued vpon such an vnhonest condition” and used “his penne [to] paint forth [Benedict’s] knauerie” in “certain Epistles sine titulo” (A3v–A4r). 5. The work was also reprinted in the eighteenth century, at Leipzig (1733) and London (1769). 6. E.g., see Lewalski 1966, 87, 117. For a survey of England’s Latin writings (including Ross’s) during the Renaissance, see Binns 1990. 7. Historically, this assertion is hardly the boldest on Milton’s debt to Ross. I do not go so far as William Lauder, the eighteenth-century classicist and critic of Milton who included Ross’s epic among the sources from which, he claimed to much scandal, Milton had plagiarized. After the initial publication of Lauder’s charges in The Gentleman ’s Magazine (1748), a book was printed in 1750 by the same title as the original essay (An Essay on Milton’s Use and Imitation of the Moderns in His Paradise Lost), with the notes to pages 132–37 232 < publishers’ disclaimer that “as this man . . . has been guilty of such a wicked imposition upon us, our friends, and the public . . . we declare, that we will have no further intercourse with him, and that we now sell his book only as A CURIOUSITY OF FRAUD AND INTERPOLATION, which all the ages of literature cannot parallel” (iii). The interpolation of spurious material into various of his sources, to which Lauder confessed when it was discovered, was not perpetrated in his discussion of Ross’s poem, for which see Lauder 1750, 94–102. In Ross 1987, 46 n. 45, Glenn provides a bibliography of Lauder’s publications and Milton’s defenders. 8. Proba 1981, 6. For a time, there was some controversy over the identi‹cation of Proba and the poem’s dating, but the conventional attribution seems to have been well defended in Matthews 1992 and Green 1995, over the objections in Shanzer 1986 and 1994. Cf. Sivan 1993 for discussion of the apparent political context of the poem’s composition . 9. Jerome’s criticism of “Homerocentonas et Vergiliocentonas” occurs in Epistles 53. Though he does not name Proba there, he quotes from her cento and sniffs, “these things are puerile and like the foolery of a quack” (puerilia sunt haec et circulatorum ludo similia [Jerome 1949–63, 3:16]). Disapproving of the earlier editor’s decision to include centos in the ‹rst edition of the Anthologiae Latinae (1894), Bailey writes, “Vergilian centos . . . , scandals of literature, do not require much in the way of critical ability, and neither am I one who, in doing honor to the poet, could bear to insult my readers by printing them again” (Centones Vergiliani [Riese 7–18], opprobria litterarum , neque ope critica multum indigent neque is sum qui vati reverendo denuo haec edendo contumeliam imponere sustineam [1982, iii]). See Opelt 1964 for a condemnation of Proba’s unorthodox theology. 10. Green thus expands on Clark and Hatch’s observation that “children [supplied with Proba’s cento] might . . . learn Vergilian Latin, without needing to hear of Dido’s passion or of bloody warfare” (Proba 1981, 7; cf. Green 1995, 559). He argues, too, that we should probably view Proba’s motives in the context of the 362 decree of Julian the Apostate prohibiting Christians from teaching classical authors. Here he elaborates on a point ‹rst suggested in Amatucci 1929, 147, which was subsequently supported by Cariddi (1971) and Clark and Hatch (Proba 1981, 98–100). 11. Nor does Hoole, who recommends supplementing, not replacing, the traditional Latin curriculum with Ross’s epic. “Virgil,” he says, is “the Prince and purest of all Latine Poets . . . [so] I would have him to be constantly and throughly [sic] read by this form on Mondaies and Tuesdaies for after-noon lessons” (1660, 178). Hoole continues in a later passage: But for gaining a smooth way of versifying, and to be able to expresse much matter in few words, and very fully to the life, I conceive it very necessary for Scholars to be very frequent in perusing and rehearsing Ovid and Virgil, and afterwards such kind of Poets, as they are themselves delighted with all, either for more variety of verse, or the wittinesse of conceit sake. And the Master indeed should cause his Scholars to recite a piece of Ovid or Virgil, in his hearing now and then, that the very tune of these pleasant verses may be imprinted in their mindes, so that when ever they are put to compose a verse, they make it glide as even as those in their Authours; Mr. Rosse his Virgilius Evangelizans will easily shew a young Scholar may imitate Virgil to the life. (187–88) Notes to Page 137 233 = 12. Quod vero ad phrasin attinet, elegi Virgilianam, nihil enim illa purius, castius, ornatius; est enim Maro, non solum omnium Poetarum doctissimus, sed modestissimus quoque, et vere virgineus (A4r). Cf. W. F. Jackson Knight’s reference to Vergil’s “feminine intensity” (1966, 125). As Knight elsewhere admits, the alternate spelling of Vergil’s name with an i had long contributed to the notion that the poet’s character was “maidenly” (55), but Knight seems to have believed, with Ross, that it had historical basis. 13. Non propter superstitionem prophanorum debemus musicam fugere, aut literas non discere, quia earum repertorem discunt esse Mercurium: inquit D. Augustinus . Liceat ergo mihi cum Hebraeis sacrum hoc tabernaculum immundorum animalium pellibus convestire; et cum primis Christianis Christum in idololatrico templo colere; illique aedem profanam consecrare; quamvis non video quare tam castum et utile Virgilii poema profanum dici debeat; imo illi potius profani sunt, qui licet Christiani , impudici amoris ille cebras carminibus immodestis doceant; Paulus nihil suae sanctimoniae amisit, quando vectus fuit in nave idolatrica Castoris et Pollucis, nec Christi nomen profanatur, si in nave Virgiliani vehatur: sed quis audet dicere Maronem, de Christo nullam habuisse cognitionem, cum de eo tam aperte scribat in 4. Egloga, et in degressu de morte Caesaris, in ‹ne 1. Geor. nemo tam coecus est, quin haec de Christo esse dicta perspiciat, inquit L. Vives (A4v). 14. Fastidienti stomacho salubrem Scripturarum cibum, mihi liceat, sapientis Medici instar, suavi condimento gratiorem reddere. Hic enim pura Virgiliana phrasi, veram pietatem, et Religionis nostrae Mysteria a teneris annis imbibent (A5v). 15. . . . nihil in se scandalosum, aut Orthodoxae Religioni Catholicae, Sacrique Romani Imperii Constitutionibus adversum, vel bonis moribus contrarium . . . (Schiller 1627, A1r). Following this dedication are several “approbations” from the Theological Faculty at the University of Ingolstadt and other noble bodies and personages, likewise con‹rming that Schiller’s atlas “nihil continet contra ‹dem Catholicam” (A1v). 16. For descriptive accounts of the 1627 and 1660 editions of Schiller’s atlas, with a reproduction of the star map of the Innocents (the constellation Draco), see D. Warner 1979, 229–32. 17. The earliest known use of the term sortes Vergilianae occurs in the Historia Augusta, where Hadrian, anxious about his standing with the emperor and an approaching military campaign, “consulted the Vergilian oracle” (Scriptores Historiae Augustae 1921, 2.8). For discussions of this instance, see R. Hamilton 1993; Distler 1966, 151–56. 18. Another famous literary example of the practice is Petrarch’s. In the account of his “Ascent of Mount Ventoux” (Familiares 4.1), he opens and reads a random passage from Augustine’s Confessions. 19. [A]rripui, aperui, et legi in silentio capitullum quo primum coniecti sunt oculi mei: “non in comessationibus et ebrietatibus, non in cubilibus et impudicitiis, non in contentione et aemulatione, sed induite dominum Iesum Christum et carnis providentiam ne feceritis in concupiscentiis” (8.12.29, quoting Romans 13:13–14). 20. In Ross’s day, the practice of sortes Vergilianae was presumed to have survived since late classical times, was universally condemned by scholars, and was of‹cially prohibited by the Church. As Richard Hamilton remarks in his review of the evidence, however, it is quite possible that “this practice did not exist at all in the Medieval period and was, in fact, a Renaissance invention based on the Christian procedure” of sortes notes to pages 138–41 234 < Biblicae (1993, 323, with reference in n. 49 to Ganszyniec 1930, the foundational study on the subject). 21. See chap. 4 n. 10. 22. Pavlovskis (1989, 80 n. 39) points out that comparable claims are made by Rosa Lamacchia in two essays (1958a, 1958b) on the technique of cento composition by (primarily ) the poet Hosidius. In this respect, Pavlovskis’s argument controverts the view of R. P. H. Green (1997, 559) that in Proba, “the context of each original line is, strictly speaking, irrelevant.” 23. This citation of Proba’s cento, with the identi‹cation of source-lines from Vergil, is from Schenkl 1888. The translation is my own. 24. Ross indicates his source for each line only by work and book number (G refers to the Georgics, E to the Eclogues; no initial indicates the Aeneid). Whenever possible, I have supplied references to each line number. Where I have not been able to locate the source for a given line or half-line (e.g., the ‹rst half of the seventh line of this passage), only Ross’s citation of a particular book number is provided. References in parentheses provide the actual book and line number of Ross’s source when the book indicated seems an error (e.g., the twelfth line of this passage is supposed to be found in Aeneid 2, but Aeneid 7.534 seems to be the closest match). Note that the ‹rst line of this passage and the ‹rst word of the second line are from the now usually deleted opening lines of the Aeneid (admitted by Donatus and Servius, but rejected by Varius; see Vergil 1936 [where the lines are numbered 1a–d], 240–41, including 240 n. 1), in which the poet advertises his shift of theme from pastoral (in the Georgics) to martial (in the Aeneid). 25. For convenience, I provide line numbers for the longer passages cited from Ross’s poem; however, only here (a quote of the opening lines of book 1) do they correspond to the actual line numbers within the book cited. 26. I cite the London 1607 edition of the 1602 Geneva New Testament commentary. 27. Both London editions have die in this line, which I emend to dei; not only does this make better sense, but it matches up with Aeneid 2.788’s “deum genetrix,” and as my colleague John McMahon noticed before me, die does not scan. 28. The great exemplar in English literature was Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (1553). chapter six 1. Fish quotes from Milton’s Tetrachordon. Explicating Matthew 19:3 (“And the Pharises came unto him tempting him and saying unto him”), Milton writes, “The manner of these men coming to our Saviour, not to learne, but to tempt him, may give us to expect that their answer will bee such as is ‹ttest for them, not so much a teaching, as an intangling” (1959, 642). 2. Subsequent references to Surprised by Sin are also to the 1997 edition, which, after the preface, is paginated identically to the ‹rst, published in 1967. 3. In Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (1996), John Rumrich similarly calls Fish’s Milton “a carping didact,” a “censorious parrot,” and a “redundant pedant” (xii, 19, 21), but the alternative that Rumrich would have us embrace—Milton the enlightened “poet of indeterminacy” (24; cf. Herman 2003)—strikes me as a singularly unpersuasive corrective to the “prig” that he accuses Fish of inventing. I refer readers to Fish’s critique (1997, xli) of those who would have their Milton be Richard Rorty. Notes to Pages 141–57 235 = Unfortunately, caricature of Fish’s argument in Surprised by Sin proves the frequent resort of critics whose reading of Milton is contradicted by Fish’s thesis but who are disinclined to commit themselves to the sustained argumentation that would be required of a serious effort to dispute it. Even Rumrich hardly engages the text of Surprised by Sin, either in his original essay (1990) or in his 1996 book (see Fish 1997, preface, esp. xv–xxiv, for replies to Rumrich’s concrete criticisms). To cite just one, more recent instance, Neil Forsyth dismisses Fish’s Milton with the remark that “a poet who keeps luring his reader into mistakes and then saying ‘Gotcha!’ is unlikely to appeal to any but masochistic students” (2003, 72). The idea that “student appeal” is our measure for Milton ’s aims and methods is a problem in addition to the caricature, but ultimately what is most disturbing about such statements is that they disallow any possibility that scholars might be swayed by Surprised by Sin as a plausible historical argument about what Milton strived to achieve by his poem. Instead, such “pro-God” critics, or “neo-Christians ,” as Rumrich calls them (echoing the language of Empson [1961]), must be motivated by religious “orthodoxy” (or as Forsyth asserts—in truly a hit below the belt— their right-wing political commitments [2003, 74–75]). Rumrich will even denounce the “common critical tenet” that Milton is “a poet who still produces spiritual pro‹t by entrapping sinful readers and inculcating standard Protestant doctrine” (1996, 249–50), a situation that Rumrich calls “a pedagogical disaster” (3); but I am skeptical that either the “tenet” or the pedagogy is common, and even if they were, they certainly do not represent Fish’s aims and practices as a literary critic, either in Surprised by Sin or in How Milton Works (2001)—and (lest there be any mistake) neither do they represent mine. 4. This is also John Rumrich’s contention, but his zeal to substantiate it leads to his report of what can only be called a bizarre experiment: “poll[ing] over ‹fteen-hundred students, from Freshmen and Sophomores in large surveys to Ph.D. candidates in small seminars,” over a period of “‹fteen years of teaching Milton at various universities in various cultures” (including “Charlottesville, Virginia; the Bronx, New York; Austin, Texas; Beijing, China; Kyoto, Japan; Wellington, New Zealand, and Montpellier , France”), to con‹rm that not a single one of these students experienced two particular lines in Paradise Lost (1.125–26) in the way that Fish claims the reader does or should—that is, as a “humiliating ‘rebuke’” from the poem’s narrator (Rumrich 1996, 21). As much as I am ready to admit that any one of Fish’s claims about “the reader’s experience” of a particular line or passage may actually be untrue to any reader’s experience in history, nevertheless it seems to me that it should occur to Rumrich that the absence of seventeenth-century readers in his poll rather diminishes its relevance to the evaluation of Fish’s thesis as a historical argument—that is, the question of whether it does or does not plausibly describe how Milton intended his poem to work upon the readers of his day (those whose responses he most reliably might predict and whom most immediately he hoped to “move and delight”). 5. See Fish 1997, 92–130 (esp. 93, 101, 130), for his discussion of the “carnal responses” provoked and corrected by the word wanton and similar language in Paradise Lost. 6. I would suggest, as well, that the kind of “concordantial” habit of reading scripture that Carol Kaske recovers in Spenser and Biblical Poetics (1999), entailing the recognition of repeated images that appear in bono et in malo, would also have contributed to the ability of Milton’s readers to anticipate and accommodate themselves to the shifting meanings and nuances of such words as wanton, from positive to negative or from negnotes to pages 157–58 236 < ative to positive. Striking a similar note, Dayton Haskin, in his study of Milton’s reading strategies and understanding of scripture, argues that Milton came to “a view to getting readers to forebear making too much of any particular biblical place,” for “he regarded the Bible less as a stable frame of reference than as a starting point for a massive and potentially pleasurable project of interpretation” (1994, 236). 7. Bona tentatio est qua Deus etiam bonos probandi causa tentat, non sua causa quasi ipse quales futuri sint nesciat, sed vel ad eorum ‹dem aut patientiam exercendam, aut illustrandam, quemadmodum Abrahamum et Iobum tentavit; vel ad eorum con‹dentiam minuendam in‹rmitatemque redarguendam, ut et sic ipsi rectius noscant aliique erudiantur: Sic Ezechiam (Milton 1933–34, 15:86, 88, with facing-page translation by Charles R. Sumner that is also quoted, in part, in Fish 1997, 40). 8. My sense is that the Christiads’ method of “teaching by intangling” in›uenced Milton’s strategy more so than The Faerie Queene’s, but even so, those who object to Fish’s interpretation of Paradise Lost on the grounds that Milton lacked literary precedents for such a method neglect Maureen Quilligan’s argument, in Milton’s Spenser, that “the rhetorical strategy Milton learned from Spenser was how to make the reader interpret his or her own interpretations, to judge the moral quality of his or her own response to reading, to feel the work as a large rhetorical appeal to the will, and to make a choice” (1983, 41). 9. Here, though, I avoid the debate over whether or not, or to what extent, Paradise Lost is an allegorical epic itself. For recent, ambitious studies arguing both sides of this question, see Treip 1994; Martin 1998; Borris 2000. I recommend Stephen Fallon’s chapter on “the substance of allegory” in Paradise Lost (1991, 168–93) for the clarity and utility of its basic distinctions. For major studies of the Aeneid’s in›uence on Paradise Lost, see Bowra 1945; Harding 1962; Blessington 1979; Webber 1979; Lewalski 1985; Porter 1993; Cook 1996. For interpretations of “Milton’s Dido and Aeneas” that most closely correspond to my analysis of the biblical epics’ allusive poetics, see Rudat 1981 and Verbart 1997, which argue that allusions to Dido and Aeneas in Paradise Lost invite readers to compare and contrast the Vergilian and biblical contexts for the purpose of opposing the one’s false vision of earthly glory to the other’s divine Truth. However, because Rudat and Verbart focus almost exclusively on Vergil’s and Milton’s texts in their “direct relation” to each other, they share with others who have studied the thematic parallels between the Aeneid and Paradise Lost an implicit assumption that Milton’s engagement with Vergil was unmediated by any other text besides the book that was the foundation of his faith. (Rudat 1981 is exceptional for acknowledging that “Milton and his contemporaries did not read Vergil ‘cold’ but together with the commentaries written by the exegetists” [40], but this vital point prefaces Rudat’s discussion [40, 43] of only two brief notes by Servius). Many other studies comprise the critical context of my analysis of Paradise Lost. A comparison of the theological positions of Augustine and Milton is in Fiore 1981. On the question of Neoplatonic ideas and imagery in the poem, see Madsen 1968, esp. 85–144 (although one must heed Fallon’s caution [1991, 242] that Madsen’s account undervalues the evidence and implications of Milton’s monism); Daniel 2004. A reading of Eve’s association with “the Neoplatonic Graces” as conceived by Ficino is in Boyette 1976. See Gossman 1971 on the question of Milton’s possible debt to allegorical commentaries on Vergil. “It is impossible,” she judges, “to prove the direct in›uence on Milton of such commentaries as those of Fulgentius and Landino,” but in her view, “Milton’s synthesis Notes to Pages 158–59 237 = is the logical continuation of the Christian humanism, especially the Christian Neo-platonism , of the age preceding his” (118). See also the chapter on Paradise Lost as a “drama of the soul” in Muldrow 1970, 54–107. Samuel 1947 is still important on “Milton’s Plato.” For brief discussions of the “doctrine of the two Venuses” in Milton’s imagery, see McColley 1983, 72–73; Mulyran 1996, 100. Studies of Vida’s in›uence on Milton include Di Cesare 1980 and Haan 1992, 1993a, 1993b, and 1995. Any new study of Milton’s debt to earlier biblical epics must also acknowledge the argument of Ryken 1984 that certain books of the Bible itself offered epic models for Milton, while the standard study of Paradise Lost “in the Genesis tradition” is Evans 1968. The major study of Tasso and Milton is by Kates, who astutely perceives that both poets “constructed their poems out of a similarly problematic relationship to epic tradition” (1983, 11), but whose conception of this tradition is essentially limited to the classical and vernacular romance epics. Finally, McColley 1983 and Gallagher 1990 are important for distinguishing Milton’s “idea of woman” from the misogyny that many scholars argue characterizes Western literary and intellectual tradition generally, including the epics treated in this study. See also, in this line, Wittreich 1987; Lewalski 1990; Guillory 1990; the opposing view in Walker 1998, 158–87, 219–23; the essays on “Milton and the idea of woman” collected in Walker 1988. 10. In addition to Fallon’s convenient summation of this point (1991, 240–43), see his explanation (esp. 153, 180–81) of the contrast between the monism of Paradise Lost and the Neoplatonism of such seventeenth-century “philosophical epics” as Edward Benlowe’s Theophila, or Love’s Sacri‹ce (1652) and Henry More’s Platonick Song of the Soul (1647). 11. Of course, the word happy participates in other contexts and resonates with other words besides those discussed here, such as are discussed by David Gay, who studies the manner in which “Milton plays upon the words ‘hap’ and ‘happiness’ . . . [as well as] ‘hapless’” (2002, 63–98). 12. See esp. Ricks 1963, 73–74; McColley 1983, 110–35, 145–47; Shoaf 1993, 144–53. 13. Cf. the discussion of dolus and its synonyms in chap. 1. 14. For discussions of this line and the analogous relations that might be seen to exist between Dido’s curse against Rome and God’s judgment on humankind, see Rudat 1981, 37–38; Verbart 1997, 114; DuRocher 2001, 148–50. 15. See Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “happy,” 2b. 16. Cf. Virginia Mollenkott’s discussion in “Milton’s Rejection of the Fortunate Fall” and her frequently cited statement of Milton’s view that “the grace is fortunate, the sin is not” (1971, 2), which counters the long-standard treatment of the subject in Lovejoy 1937. For other debate on this issue, see M. Bell 1953; Ulreich 1971; Danielson 1982, 202–33. An excellent recent analysis is in Forsyth 2003, 324–28. See Fiore 1981, esp. 92–93, for a relation of Milton’s understanding of the felix culpa to Augustine’s, but with a caveat. Fiore cites the relevant lines in Paradise Lost 12 that con‹rm Milton’s agreement with the traditional Pauline and Augustinian view that (as Fiore quotes from Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana) man being “freed from sin and death by God the Father through Jesus Christ” is “raised to a far more excellent state of grace and glory than from which he fell” (92), although “no praise of the sin of Adam is implied in this doctrine” (93); however, Fiore does not clearly enough stress Milton’s rejection of the proposition that this “excellent state of grace and glory” could not have been attained, or would not notes to pages 159–63 238 < have been more easily and more swiftly (not to mention universally) attained, through man’s continued obedience. 17. Milton 1933–34, 15:206–7, with facing-page translation by Charles R. Sumner. 18. Barbara Pavlock (1990, 198–201) also notes the parallel between Eve’s effect on Satan in these lines of Paradise Lost and Sofronia’s on Aladin in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. 19. Isabel MacCaffrey observes: “the Adam who leaves Paradise to wander down to a lower world is a wayfarer, and will always be, until the end returns to the beginning. He is, besides, a warrior who must do battle with a monster within himself in order to complete his journey” (1959, 24). On the journey motif in another sense, see Fish’s statement that “the dif‹culties of reading [Paradise Lost] are to be equated with the dif‹culties of the earthly pilgrimage” (1997, 207), especially his explanation of the fourth step of this reading experience, the “invitation to ascend,” wherein “the reader is invited to ascend on the stylistic scale by ‘purging his intellectual ray’ to the point where his understanding is once more ‘‹t and proportionable to Truth the object and end of it,’ and his affections follow what his reason (the eye of the mind) approves” (90). As Fish acknowledges , this “describes a Platonic ascent, which culminates (for the reader who is able to move with it) in the simultaneous apprehension of the absolute form of the Good and the Beautiful,” which “in Christian terms . . . imitates the return of the soul to God and pre-‹gures Christ’s victory over death” (90 n. 1). A different conception of the reader’s “journey,” one more congenial to Rumrich’s view of Milton as “a poet of indeterminacy ” (see n. 3 in the present chapter), is in Carrithers and Hardy 1994, which argues an understanding of Milton’s writings as a progressive “hermeneutic journey” that “undertake [s] not to unveil but rather to participate in a Miltonic method that disquali‹es closure or pretended monopoly of truth” (17). Discussions of the theme of the active life versus the life of contemplation in Milton are generally focused on Paradise Regained, such as in Steadman 1987, 209–10, where it is noted that Christ “rejects Satan’s version of the ‘life contemplative’ just as decisively as he has hitherto refused the devil’s offers of the life of pleasure and the apparent goods of the active life” (209). 20. This understanding of Raphael’s vision runs counter to Robert McMahon’s assertion that “the poem as a whole . . . reveals Raphael’s NeoPlatonism to be erroneous, a nostalgic ‹ction,” not just in today’s fallen world, but in Eden too, for “Raphael’s speech constitutes not a prelapsarian vision but only the fallen poet’s aspiration to one” (1998, 9). However, McMahon’s intriguing interpretation of Paradise Lost’s narrator as an exemplum of man’s fallen perspective, a fallible “character” in the poem in his own right, produces, here as elsewhere in his book, some confusion on the question of which aspects of his representation of the prelapsarian world Milton intends for us to accept as true and which should be recognized as ‹gments of a fallen nostalgia. On the same page, McMahon states that “Raphael’s ladder is no longer a viable way to heaven,” which allows that the ladder was once viable and therefore not “erroneous” or “a nostalgic ‹ction.” 21. Davis Harding (1962, 37) observes a “remarkable verbal parallel” between Vergil’s comment on Aeneas’s speech to his followers after their landing in Africa (Aeneid 1.208–9) and Milton’s comment on Satan’s speech after he and the other fallen Notes to Pages 164–67 239 = angels have landed in hell (Paradise Lost 1.125–26), which Harding argues associates the cities of Carthage and Pandemonium as emblems of error and sin. 22. Psalms 107:4–7 (Geneva Bible 1969, 258v). 23. Correspondingly, the ‹rst parents’ disobedience, says Milton in De Doctrina Christiana, stands for all other sins that can be committed by man (1933–34, 15:180–83). For what sin can be named, which was not included in this one act? It comprehended at once distrust in the divine veracity, and a proportionate credulity in the assurances of Satan; unbelief; ingratitude; disobedience; gluttony; in the man excessive uxoriousness, in the woman a want of proper regard for her husband , in both an insensibility to the welfare of their offspring, and that offspring the whole human race; parricide, theft, invasion of the rights of others, sacrilege, deceit, presumption in aspiring to divine attributes, fraud in the means employed to attain the object, pride, and arrogance. [Sub hoc enim quid non perpetravit homo, credulitate in Satanam, in credulitate in Deum iuxta damnandus, in‹delis, ingratus, inobsequens, gulosus, uxorius hic, mariti illa inobservantior, uterque suae prolis, totius generis humani, parricida, fur, et alieni raptor, sacrilegus, fallax, divinitatis insidiosus, et indignus affectator, superbus, arrogans.] 24. See the notes to this passage in Milton 1957 and 1998 for summaries. 25. See Fowler’s notes to Paradise Lost 9.217–19 and 9.426–27 in Milton 1998 for a summary of both the rose’s and the myrtle’s relevant symbolism in these scenes. 26. . . . Traciam, id est in avaritiam; . . . Polimestor . . . id est plurimum mensura. . . . Polidorus autem multa amaritudo interpretatur. . . . Hic Polidorus in Tracia sepultus est quia multa amaritudo in avaricia involuta est (Bernardus 1977, 17–18; translation of Earl G. Schreiber and Thomas E. Maresca in Bernardus 1979, 21). 27. Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis has, of course, been recognized and discussed brie›y as part of the general context of Eve’s dream (e.g., see McColley 1983, 102), but in terms of its signi‹cance in epic literature as the model of a celestial journey, it has not been compared alongside Eve’s dream as is carried out in the present analysis. 28. Harding (1962, 82–84) locates Milton’s literary models for this scene in the dreams of Dido and Turnus at Aeneid 4.464–68 and 7.406ff., respectively. Others have noted the correspondence between Eve’s dream inspired by Satan and Redcrosse’s dream inspired by Archimago in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (see, e.g., Martin 1998, 262). Much of the most compelling commentary on Eve’s dream has focused on its basis in the conventions of witchcraft or demonic sorcery in late Renaissance culture: see esp. Hunter 1946; Steadman 1965 (revised in 1984, 160–66); van den Berg 1986. A psychoanalytic approach to its interpretation is in Schwartz 1994. 29. Many critics have been alert to the way that Satan, here and in the temptation scene of book 9, adopts the “manner of a courtly lover worshipping his lady,” suggesting an attempt at sexual “seduction” (McColley 1983, 188). 30. George Musacchio rightly stresses this point: “To accuse Eve of being overwhelmed by the smell of the fruit because she desires its proffered knowledge is to read into the poem that which is not there” (1991, 103). Similarly, see the discussion of Eve’s dream in Burden 1967, 124–49 (esp. 128–30), in the context of an analysis of “the notes to pages 168–76 240 < provocative fruit” in Milton’s poem; and see McColley 1983, 98–104, including her objection to interpretations that would place the dream within the “felix culpa tradition ” (99–100). 31. Cf. Diane McColley’s comments on Satan’s temptation of Eve in book 9, when Satan again exalts Eve and “degrades everything else”: “the contemptus mundi is preposterous ,” McColley observes, “and so Eve is too surprised to rejoin at once (if preposterousness deserves rejoinder)” (1983, 196). At the same time, as Neil Forsyth rightly stresses, we ought not forget the central paradox that is Satan, the “unimaginable” spectacle of “evil aris[ing] in bliss” when he began to “hate in Heav’n” (2003, 24). The fact of Satan thereby presents at least the possibility for evil to arise, untempted by Satan, in bliss again. 32. Or, rather, this may be an ancillary illustration of the effect of Ithuriel’s spear, if we take it to be “a poetic principle,” as John Guillory suggests, representing “an ideal relation between the object and the process of representation.” Guillory argues that the “touching of Satan,” like Eve’s return to her proper place in Paradise, “is recognizably an apotropaic ritual, a warding off of the evil spirit, as well as a translation of truth” (1983, 149). 33. For an acute analysis of Eve’s movement in book 9 from “not unamaz’d” to “more amaz’d unwary” (9.614), “without traversing the intermediate space of amazement ,” see Gallagher 1990, 58–59. 34. On the related issue of Milton’s “equation of preaching and writing,” see Shawcross 1993, 67, and Lares’s monograph study Milton and the Preaching Arts (2001). 35. Cf. Kathleen Swaim’s comment that “Michael is Adam’s instructor in typology and Scripture, as Raphael is Adam’s instructor in analogy and the book of nature.” She continues: “Raphael sets forth a hierarchical structure by which our bodies may at last turn all to spirit in contemplation of created things; Michael also presents a prospect of translation from ›esh to spirit, but that transition is now to be effected not through climbing a ladder of analogies but through leaps of faith and ›ashes of revelation. In Raphael’s universe and pedagogy, things expand in clearly widening circles to open up the luminous ideas they contain. In Michael’s allegorical world it is a given that things have been separated from their meaning by time and sin and that the perceivers must supply the meaning by searching their sometimes contradictory books and their memories and aligning the meanings there secured to the outward evidences” (1986, 24–25). Swaim expands on these insights in her chapter on “lapsarian poetics” (159–214). 36. In his commonplace book, Milton refers to the 1635 life of Petrarch by Jacopo Filippo Tomasini (Milton 1953, 468), which is reprinted in Solerti 1904, 568–665, and has the full title Petrarcha redivivus integram poetae celeberrimi vitam iconibus aere celatis exhibens. Accessit nobilissimae foeminae Laurae brevis historia. In it, Tomasini quotes Boccaccio’s praises of the “divina Africa,” including the latter’s reference to Petrarch being awarded the laurel at Rome for his epic: “Esto, aevo nostro tertius exsurgat Africanus, gloria non minori maiori tamen iustitia delatus in aethera, versu viri celeberrimi Francisci Petrarchae, nuper laurea Romae insigniti” (Solerti 1904, 582, 586). Tomasini lists all the titles of Petrarch’s works printed in the Basel editions of his Opera (the ‹rst in 1554), which Boswell includes as a “possible or likely” volume in Milton’s library (Boswell 1975, item 1095). Milton certainly knew of the Africa, therefore, and it is probably safe to conjecture that he read it. Predictably and reasonably, previous scholNotes to Pages 177–79 241 = arship on Petrarch’s possible in›uence on Milton has focused on the poet of the Canzoniere and “Petrarchan tradition,” such as in Iona Bell’s essay “Milton’s Dialogue with Petrarch” (1992). 37. E.g., see Fish 2001, 521. Milton’s portrayal of Adam and Eve’s “mysterious marriage ” in Eden has been much studied and debated: see Berkeley 1987 and, in particular, Luxon 2001 and Pruitt 2003 for treatments of the special nature of the ‹rst parents’ “wedded love.” 38. Cf. Augustine’s assertion, in De bono coniugali, that “the explanation why marriage is a good lies, I think, not merely in the procreation of children, but also in the natural compact itself between the sexes” (Quod mihi non videtur propter solam ‹liorum procreationem, sed propter ipsam etiam naturalem in diverso sexu societatem [Augustine 2001, 6, with facing-page translation by P. G. Walsh). afterword 1. Most recently, this Milton is the object of critique in Herman 2003 and Forsyth 2003 (esp. 64–113), which both presume that a Milton who was deeply con›icted about many aspects of his experience and religion contradicts, perforce, Fish’s view of him. But there is no necessary reason that we cannot have an Empsonian Milton ‹lled with many doubts—and a Paradise Lost that betrays all the strain and incertitude of a poet who means to “justify the ways of God to men” (1.26)—and yet still also have a Milton who works or at least intends to work, if not all the time then much of the time, the way Stanley Fish describes him working in Surprised by Sin. 2. On the question of Spenser’s appropriation of the cursus Virgilianus, see Cheney 1993 and Donnelly 2003. On Spenser’s response to the Aeneid and the allegorical commentary tradition, see Hughes 1929 and Watkins 1995. Also see Quitslund 2001, 108–20, for a discussion of Christopher Landino’s commentaries on Dante and Vergil in the context of an examination of Platonic natural philosophy in The Faerie Queene (cf. the earlier study of “neo-Platonism in Spenser’s poetry” in Ellrodt 1960). More generally , among the numerous studies of the nature, sources, and structure of Spenserean allegory, the classic treatments are in Berger 1957; A. C. Hamilton 1961; J. E. Hankins 1971; Nohrnberg 1976; and Murrin 1980, 131–52. 3. Cf. Murrin’s statement, in a subsequent study, that “if someone believes in resurrection , then the life of the individual literally has no end, and teleology becomes impossible” (1980, 150). We might observe, however, that Murrin’s imagery in the paragraph just quoted in the present text parallels Milton’s in his description of the devils in hell when they are in the throes of philosophical inquiry. Others apart sat on a Hill retir’d, In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate, Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledg absolute, And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost. (Paradise Lost 2.558–61) 4. Throughout, I cite from Thomas Roche’s edition of The Faerie Queene in Spenser 1978. notes to pages 181–86 242 < 5. For a contrasting view of The Faerie Queene’s design, see Dixon 1996, which argues for a rhetorical motive and structure that focus the effusiveness of The Faerie Queene and bring it to formal closure in the Mutability Cantos. Even so, Dixon’s characterization of each quest in the poem as a dialectic of “undifferentiated alternative answers to a speci‹c question as data” that “narrow inductively through a series of ordered abstractions to a single principle of principles at the apex,” an “answer” that “transcends any individual answer” (11–12), offers a compelling elaboration of the view that the momentum of The Faerie Queene is explained primarily by its unceasing drive to inquiry, that is, the way it continuously “inventories, questions, and evaluates received wisdom,” in John Webster’s formulation (1994, 82). 6. The “Errour episode” is one of the most analyzed in Spenserean criticism; see Blisset 1989 and Rhu 1994 for excellent treatments of the literary background, though not including the allegorized Aeneid. 7. All subsequent references to the ‹rst canto of book 1 are indicated by stanzas and line numbers only. 8. Chaucer 1989, 4.530, 533–35. 9. For Watkins, it is the “Fradubio episode” in the second canto of book 1 that ‹rst “brings a Virgilian subtext, Aeneas’s encounter with Polydorus, into dialogue with its Ariostan parody” (1995, 95), but I think that encounter begins in 1.1.8–9. 10. On the various “analogical links between the Fradubio episode and the rest of Book I,” and for a nuanced interpretation of “the centrality” of Redcrosse’s encounter with Fradubio qua Doubt in light of the Polydorus motif in Vergil, Dante, Aristo, and Tasso, see the seminal essay by William J. Kennedy (1973). On Redcrosse eventually “learning to read,” see Lees-Jeffries 2003. 11. Yet it would be one, to be sure, heavily in›ected by Spenser’s Protestant theology of grace. See Watkins 1995 (esp. 103–12) for a careful examination of Spenser’s Vergilianism in light of this theology, with observations on points of contrast in the allegorized Aeneids of Bernard, Vegio, and Landino. Notes to Pages 188–93 243 = ...