A Cosmos of Desire: The Medieval Latin Erotic Lyric in English Manuscripts

by Thomas C Moser Jr.

Overview

Thomas C. Moser, Jr. explores the fascinating body of medieval Latin erotic poetry found in English manuscripts. His study describes the intellectual and social context from which the great erotic songs of the twelfth century emerged, and examines a variety of erotic poems, from school exercises to the magnificent lyrics found in Arundel 384. He also illuminates the influence of neoplatonic philosophy on this poetry, explicating key neoplatonic texts and applying that analysis in close readings of erotic lyrics from the same period and milieu.
A Cosmos of Desire will interest scholars of medieval literature as well as specialists in Latin poetry and philosophy. Students of Middle English literature will find that it fills an important gap in our understanding of English intellectual life between the twelfth and the fourteenth century. All Latin prose and poetry is translated, some works for the first time, and the book is generously illustrated with photographs of the manuscripts discussed.
Thomas C. Moser, Jr. is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472113798
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	08/09/2004
Series:	Studies In Medieval And Early Modern Civilization
Pages:	502
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Thomas C. Moser, Jr. is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.

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A COSMOS OF DESIRE
The Medieval Latin Erotic Lyric in English Manuscripts

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By Thomas C. Moser Jr.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2004
University of Michigan
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-472-11379-8

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Chapter One The Classicists of Northern France

There are only two Anglo-Latin manuscripts containing erotic verse written before the second half of the twelfth century, and they are very different from each other. The older one, Cambridge University Library MS G9.5.35, originally written at Canterbury around 1050, contains a large collection of secular and religious songs, many in nonclassical meters, including seven poems that might be called erotic. The other manuscript, British Library Additional MS 24199, was copied at the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds sometime in the first half of the twelfth century. It contains a significant collection of Latin poems composed by identifiable continental writers in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, as well as numerous unique and anonymous Latin poems in the same style, some of which are erotic. The poems found in Additional 24199 are largely composed in classical and pseudoclassical meters and are quite distinct in form and content from the older erotic poems found in Cambridge University Library Gg.5.35. In the next chapter I will discuss the erotica in these two manuscripts as an indication of what was available in insular intellectual circles before the second half of the twelfth century and before the great twelfth-century flowering of erotic Latin verse that is the principal subject of this book. In this chapter, however, I will examine briefly the classicizing, often explicitly Ovidian, erotic poetry produced by four important poets in northern France: Fulcoius of Beauvais, Godfrey of Reims, Marbod of Rennes, and Baudri of Bourgued. Such analysis is important because the works of these poets provide the most immediate intellectual and literary context for an understanding of the erotic poems contained in Additional 24199. Northern France in the later eleventh century, and through the whole of the twelfth century, remained the training ground for many of the clerics with careers in the Anglo-Norman church and state. In its modest way, Additional 24199 supplies evidence for significant insular interest in northern French Latin verse of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, and it shows clear insular participation in the production and circulation of verse of this sort, including erotic verse.

The four poets we will look at here were familiar with each other and participated together in the social, political, and educational world of the ecclesiastical elite in northern France in the later eleventh century. All were products of the cathedral schools, all maintained a high profile throughout their careers, and all achieved important administrative positions in the church. Around 1080, a year when all four were actively writing, Fulcoius was an archdeacon, Godfrey and Marbod were chancellors of important cathedral schools, and Baudri was the abbot of a rich Benedictine abbey near Tours. The four shared, by and large, a common set of attitudes about classical poetry and about the writing of Latin verse. They saw themselves as the inheritors and transformers of a revered classical heritage, and Ovid was probably the single most important classical presence in their creative lives. As Hennig Brinkman pointed out many years ago, following the reentry of Ovid into the school curriculum in the eleventh century, his authority as a poet increased until, by the twelfth century, he had become one of the poets most quoted by medieval authors of artes poeticae, and the Ovidian elegiac line came to hold a preeminent place among verse forms. For many clerics, part of being well educated came to mean being schooled in Ovid. While medieval Latin poets drew on other classical sources when they wrote about erotic experience, Ovid was the dominant archetype of the love poet, the name frequently singled out as a focus for all the regrets and anxieties voiced over lascivious love songs or wasted youth. Fulcoius, who fantasized about his role as a latter-day Virgil and wrote often in hexameters, is probably the least Ovidian of the group, and the most old-school; Baudri, who constructed a bucolic fantasy of his own position as a new Ovid of the Loire Valley and wrote largely in distiches, is certainly the most devoted follower of the author of the Amores, Heroides, and the Ars Amatoria, and the most avant-garde of the group.

If we took, then, to these four clerics, we will find them reinventing a classical past in order to construct a poetic self that adopts the figure of an imagined vates, a poet of wide experience and reading with a sacred calling and a unique place in society. The practice of producing classically based Latin poetry was central to their identities as teachers and ecclesiastical politicians, and a mark of their elite status. As a group they believed in the power and social value of poetry, believed in the special status and authority due to poet-philosophers, as they styled themselves. At times, they used their poems to confront difficult matters from a particular authorized, but daring, point of view. Not surprisingly for admirers of Ovid and Horace who were also teachers, they wrote about eros, recovering erotic material from the classics and analyzing the workings of eros in their own world. Imaginative play with classical myth and poetry provided them with one key to understanding eros in the life of the wise and educated man. They recognized the danger eros posed to an ordered and moral life, described the erotic power of male and female bodies, and observed the struggle between learning and erotic desire. Writing sophisticated but playful poems to their students and peers, they apparently imagined a clerical world in which erotic verse might have a cohesive social function.

For these ecclesiastics, composing pseudoclassical poetry was inevitably a political act that established their credentials as part of a high-culture elite; through poetic composition they showed their mastery of classical wisdom and art at the most sophisticated levels within that culture. The sort of vigorous intellectual identity they embody would later be elaborated and codified in the pedagogical program of humanist educators in Paris and elsewhere. The persona they established-one willing to admire Ovid, extol the classical vates, play freely with myth, and write erotic verse-would ultimately become common currency in certain clerical circles in the mid-to-late twelfth century. In their works, especially Baudri's, we can also begin to see what might be called an emerging cosmological perspective on eros-a sense of eros as a force running through the universe from top to bottom, potentially linking the sublunar to the divine, where male creativity and academic study may even be viewed as erotic activities in their own right. Like their persona, this perspective would be much more explicitly explored by poets in the twelfth century. But here, in the years around 1100, we can witness in these four clerics the early development of the much more radical poetic identities that would be so welt represented later in Anglo-Latin manuscripts.

The verse produced by this loose coterie of authors reveals the extent to which classical poetry was absorbed in areas that would become part of the educational heartland for the Anglo-Norman intelligentsia. The writers of Latin erotica who emerged in northern France in the second half of the eleventh century were part of what one recent writer has called a "textual community" of shared literary interests and attitudes, a little universe populated by latinate clerics, a few nuns, and probably some aristocrats, all trained in classical poetry, particularly the newly incorporated Ovidian corpus, who circulated poetry for their own satisfactions. If this "subculture" was thus largely clerical, it did not exist in a political vacuum. The poetical works produced by these late-eleventh-century clerics were not, by and large, poems for entertainment in secular courts, but at times the clerical community did expand, and its works could be "sent in search of patronage outside the institutional confines to educated members of the secular world." Reto R. Bezzola's analysis of this literary milieu stresses the role of the court of Countess Adèle, daughter of William I of England and wife to Étienne, count of Blois-Chartres-Meaux. At Blois she supported a court that was not as important, perhaps, as the twelfth-century creation of Marie de Champagne, but still "an important and eminent cultural and literary center." Although none of the poets to be discussed in this chapter was formally attached to her court, Baudri wrote a long and learned poem to her. And there were clearly other courts in this milieu where adventurous pseudoclassical poetry might be appreciated: Baudri and Marbod both wrote praise-poems to Queen Matilda of England; Marbod cultivated Ermengard, countess of Rennes, who was reputed to encourage poets. The episcopal court of Manasses of Reims, at least until about 1080, also seems to have supported, perhaps more directly, several poets.

The lyric erotica such writers composed was not so much a precursor to the poems of the Provençal troubadours as a parallel development at some geographic distance and in a somewhat different social milieu. The first troubadour whose works have survived, William VII, count of Poitiers, ninth duke of Aquitaine, was from 1086 to 1126 ruler of an area with close political and social ties to the Loire. Most scholars agree that William must have been writing in a well-established vernacular tradition, and it is hard to imagine that there was no intellectual cross-fertilization between the powerful ecclesiastical literati north of the Loire and vernacular poets of the court of Aquitaine in the late eleventh century (fig. 1). The audience for Duke William's vernacular songs and the audience for the works of the northern French Latin poets were probably not that different: aristocrats and courtiers, men and women, with some education and a developing taste for sophisticated art forms. Certainly, as one of Marbod's poems strongly suggests, vernacular love songs would have been performed in ecclesiastical courts, even if the dissemination of Latin songs and poems into more secular courts might have been less common. What we have, really, are two overlapping circles of interest, one ecclesiastical and highly Latinate and the other secular and less well trained, to some degree separate but not isolated one from the other. In the twelfth century we wilt find, I think, increasing penetration of the secular court realm by clerics and a continuing interest on the part of educated men, cleric and noble, in Latin literary activity (including erotic lyrics). In northern France, in the years between about 1070 and 1120, we observe an early version of the educated, mixed courtly and clerical culture that provides the social matrix for the erotic lyric in the heart of the twelfth century.

FULCOIUS AND GODFREY: TWO POETS IN THE COURT OF REIMS

Two of the four northern French classicists under discussion here, Fulcoius of Beauvais and Godfrey of Reims, passed much of their careers in close association with Manasses I, archbishop of Reims from 1069 until Gregory VII removed him from office in 1080. Both poets held important posts under Manasses-Fulcoius was archdeacon of Meaux and Godfrey served as chancellor of the cathedral school in Reims-and they wrote sophisticated Latin poetry with the encouragement of the archbishop during his uneasy reign." Fulcoius functioned as a sort of apologist for Manasses in his strained dealings with the pope and various secular magnates in the 1070s and 1080s; he seems to have sided consistently with the archbishop, writing letter-poems to him and on his behalf, and dedicating to him his De nuptiis, a long versified summary of the Bible. Though Fulcoius never mentions Godfrey in any of his poems, Godfrey must have been a major figure in Fulcoius's poetic circle and in the intellectual world of northern France after 1050, with connections beyond Reims linking him to Marbod and Baudri. Educated in Reims at midcentury, Godfrey became chancellor there in 1077; he appears from time to time in charters up through 1094, until replaced in the records by a new chancellor in 1095, presumably upon his death. Baudri called Godfrey Manasses' "calamus" and "Musa," suggesting strongly that he served in some capacity as a court poet. Like Fulcoius, Godfrey probably owed his ecclesiastical position to Manasses; unlike Fulcoius, Godfrey must finally have sided with Gregorian reformers, surviving the political results of Manasses' fall and continuing on in his position in Reims after 1080.

Fulcoius was not a self-consciously Ovidian poet, and most of his twenty-six surviving verse epistles are in hexameter, often leonine hexameters of the sort Marbod appreciated, though he occasionally wrote elegiac distiches, usually with internal rhyme. Evidently he exchanged poems with some of those to whom he wrote his verse epistles, suggesting the existence of circles of poetic exchange within the educated elite of the region. One poem closes with a plea to Manasses for poems in return-"Fac, precor, audenter mihi, carmina mitte frequenter" [I beg you, do it boldly for me, send poems frequently]-and a letter addressed to "matrona Ida" indicates that he expects her to write back in response to the poems he has sent her: "Ida, quod assignas, 'da,' produc, 'i,' precor, et 'da' / Qualemcunque dedi uersum, quem, cara, rogasti" [Ida, that which you assign, 'give,' bring forth, 'go,' I beg, and 'give' / (me) a verse such as I have given (you), which you requested, dear]. Like other ambitious poets in his milieu, Fulcoius engaged in a project of self-construction that drew on the classical past and made room for eros in the well-educated cleric's life, but the idealized self-image Fulcoius offers in bits and pieces through his poems is more heroic and Virgilian than the poetic selves we will see crafted by the other three poets. So Fulcoius proclaims in an epistle to Emperor Henry IV: "Cesare Henrico redierunt aurea secla / Alter Virgilius redit alter et Octouianus" [Golden ages have returned with Emperor Henry / Another Virgil returns and another Caesar Augustus"], and it is generally Virgil he holds up as the ideal classical poet. In an explicit self-portrait he offers his services as knight-scholar to Manasses, riding a horse trained by the banks of the Marne and Thérain, his native rivers, and decorated with the cosmos: the seven planets on its head, the signs of the zodiac on its breast, the movements of the stars and the months and seasons on its saddle.") Pallas instructs the seven liberal arts to make Fulcoius's armor; Abraham gives him sandals; David gives him the helmet, sword, and spear of Goliath; and Moses provides a shield with the image of God on the boss and painted with the events of Genesis." Thus he is carried along by the knowledge of the visible universe and armed by the classical heritage and biblical learning. In addition, as Fulcoius reminds his master in epistle 26, great poets can offer their patrons immortality:

Sic est in mundo Manases, sit tempore longo. Heroes prisci uiuunt rebus bene gestis, Et bene gesta quidem dumtaxat carmine uiuunt, Carmina per uatem: Manases, to carmine uate Viues, mandatis istis geminis bene gestis. Ergo scribatur tua gloria ne moriatur. [So the name "Manasses" is in the world, let it exist for a long time. Ancient heroes live on in their well-done deeds, and things well done live only in song, through the songs of bards. Manasses, you will live on in a song through a poet, since these twin commissions have been well accomplished. Therefore let your glory be written that it not die.]

Together Manasses and Henry are the inheritors of a tradition of laudatory song through which deeds are memorialized; like the "heroes prisci" of classical poetry, they live on through the agency of the latter-day vates.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents List of Figures....................xv
Introduction....................1
Part One Adumbrations: Erotic Latin Lyric in the Eleventh Century CHAPTER ONE The Classicists of Northern France....................17
CHAPTER TWO Erotic Lyrics in Two Early English Manuscripts....................66
Part Two Eros and Poetry in the Anglo-Norman World CHAPTER THREE Contexts for the Erotic Latin Lyric in the Twelfth Century....................99
CHAPTER FOUR Education, Myth, and Neoplatonism: The Idea of a New Man....................122
CHAPTER FIVE Between Grammar and Desire: Erotic School Poetry....................149
Part Three The Triumph of Erotic Latin Song CHAPTER SIX The Rhythms of Eros (I)....................195
CHAPTER SEVEN The Rhythms of Eros (II)....................241
CHAPTER EIGHT Myth, Eros, and Lyric: An Invitation to Allegory....................284
Appendix....................331
Notes....................359
Bibliography....................449
Index....................465