Solomon and Marcolf (review)

The tales of the sage Solomon and the scatological peasant Marcolf form one of the most potent testimonies to the Otherness of the Middle Ages. In circulation by the eleventh century, the texts remained popular for some six hundred years and saw print in forty-nine editions of the early modern period. But where earlier periods relished Marcolf’s gleeful obscenity and translated the story into innumerable languages, modern scholarship has been content to leave it in Latin; consequently, Ziolkowski’s excellent Solomon and Marcolf marks the first appearance of these once-popular texts in English since 1492.

One benefit of waiting this long to produce an accessible version is that Ziolkowski has been able to bring his extensive knowledge of folklore and popular culture to the enterprise, producing a wealth of material reflected in the copious notes. So comprehensive is this volume that it could easily form the centerpiece of a thoroughgoing—albeit indelicate—course on medieval culture. Encompassing such nuggets as the derivation of Marcolf’s name and how theology compared Christ to a napkin, the text is also a rich repository of adages, a textual analogue of Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs. The prefatory material and the appendices are compendious enough that they could serve as a de facto second volume of commentary for related books such as Daniel Anlezark’s recent Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn.

Ziolkowski’s thorough introduction sets the text in its cultural context, discussing the popularity of proverbs and dialogues as a staple of elementary education and the relation of proverbs to both Biblical and peasant traditions. The exposition is so complete that perhaps the greatest oddity is that Ziolkowski defines the term “pseudepigraphic,” but not “ithyphallic” or “paroemiologist.” In addition to providing an extensive historical introduction, Ziolkowski examines the implications of the text, noting its appeal to Rabelais, Bakhtin, and other champions of the carnivalesque, while wisely refraining from overstating the case. As he notes on the subject of overturning hierarchies, the medieval audience “could have been entranced to see a king bested by a plodding countryman—but their delight need not have meant that they were even remotely ready to go to the barricades to emancipate the peasantry” (p. 42). Ziolkowski does, however, credit Solomon and Marcolf with subtler and less quantifiable powers of resistance, proposing that the text was so popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries because it allowed “controlled release of doubts and resentments about curtailments of personal liberty caused by social changes, such as the spread and heightened prestige of higher education” (p. 32). Undoubtedly there will always be reasons to escape the pressures of reality, differing by period and context; but we hardly need to find complicated and particular excuses for enjoying a hearty joke.

Ziolkowski also provides food for thought in his observations on the Latinity of profanity: he notes that some of the most irreverent and obscene passages of Solomon and Marcolf are spelled out in Latin versions but suppressed in early modern vernacular versions (p. 33). His explanation for this is that Latin training inculcated a shared moral and ideological background so unassailable that even Marcolf’s bottom-exposing profanity could not disturb its inviolable nature. This argument seems at odds with the claim that the text is subversive, suggesting that it would only have a subversive effect on the audience who lacked the Latin to read it. The argument and the language of the text both are certainly an intriguing inversion of the stereotypical assumptions that crude humor is the domain of the coarse and vernacular peasantry, far removed from the more refined Latinizers. Not incidentally, this paradigm also disturbs the elite-religious-Solomon/crude-peasant-Marcolf dichotomy constructed by the text itself: it may assign profanity to peasants, but its author and audience, by virtue of their Latin, were securely installed in elite culture.

The subject matter of Solomon and Marcolf is so infectious...