La corónica. A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

188 Pages·1986·25.985 MB·

by  Modern Language Association of America

LAC OR0NICA
Volume1 4. Number2
Spring 1986
ARTICLES
Brunetto Latint's Tresor: Approachinq the End of an Era
(Spurgeon Bald~ . ......... . 177-193
The Poetic Tradition of the Drunken Comadres: Lyric and
Ballad Congeners (Andrea Warren Hamos) 194-212
The Conclusio in Fifteenth-Century Spanish Letters
(Carol A. Copenhagen) •........... 213-219
The Birth of the Hero in the Romancero( Janet L. Falk) . 220-229
Poetic Quotation in the Muwassahaa nd Its Implications:
Andalusian Strophic Poetry as Song (James T. Monroe) . 230-250
HowO ld is the Ballad Genre? (Roger Wright) 251-257
NOTES
Five Sephardic Ballads Collected in Los Angeles (Grace
Benveniste) . •.................. 258-262
Three Judeo-Spanish Ballads from the Island of Rhodes
Collected fn Los Angeles (Carol Merrill-Mirsky) 263-267
Sobre -dos cantigas marianas" de Juan Ruiz (Henk de Vries) . 268-271
The Dating of the Parts of the General estoria of Alfonso
el Sabio (Wilhel•ina L. Jonxis-Henkemans) ..... . 272 -27 3
"Y yo digo que hasta aquf/llega el confin del sabbat":
rn&ss obre los judfos y el antijudafsmo en la
Castilla del siglo XIV (Carlos Sainz de la Haza) . 274-279
Alfonsine Legends and References in Eastern Iberia
(David J. Viera) .............. . 280-284
La minorfa morisca: apuntes de sociolingOfstica hist6rica
(Luis Antonio Santos Domfnguez) ....... . 285-290
BOOST(4C harles 8. Faulhaber and Angel GdmezM oreno) .... 291-292
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El rey don Garcfa en el romancero: un nuevo testimon;o
(Samuel G. Armistead, Oro Anahory Librow;cz, and
Joseph H. Silverman) • . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293-295
CONFERENRCEEP ORTS
ARM!ricCo astro in Search of a NewH ispanic Humanism: A
Symposiumto Mark the Centenary of His Birth
(Samuel G. Armistead and Joseph H. Silverman) . 296-301
II Simposio Literario Internacional Sobre Aspectos de la
Literatura.Medieval Espanola (Courtesy of Dennis P.
Seniff) • . • • • . . . . . . • • . • . . . • • . . 302
Congreso de la Asociacidn Hisp&nica de Literatura Medieval
(Dennis P. Seniff, Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua, and Marfa
Jes~s Lacarra) ............•........ 303-306
Seventh Plymouth Medieval Forum (Courtesy of Roger Tinnell) 307
REVIEWS
Marilyn Olsen, ed. Libro del cauallero Cifar. Madison:
The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1984.
(Francisco J. Hern&ndez). ............ . 308-316
John R. Maier, ed. El Rrey Guillelme. Exeter Hispanic
Texts, 39. Exeter: University of Exeter, 1984.
(Dennis P. Seniff) ................ . 317-320
Marina Scordilis Brownlee. The Status of the Reading Subject
in the 'Libro de buen amor.1 Chapel Hill: Univ. of North
Carolina Press, 1985. North Carolina Studies in the
RomanceL anguages and Literatures 224. (John K. Walsh) 321-326
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Bibliography of Medieval Spanish Literature (Courtesy of
01 iver T. Myers) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327-341
Book Review Bibliography (1985) (Harold G. Jones) 342-346
RECENPTU BLICATIONPSR,E SENTATIOANNS,D R ESEARCINH PROGRESS. 347-348
ANNOUNCEME..N...T S . 349-354
IN MEMORIKAEMIT HW HINNO1H92, 7-1986 355-358
i i
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ARTICLES
BRUNETLTAOT INI'ST RESOR:A PPROACHING
THE END0 FAN ERA
Spurgeon Baldwin
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champa;gn
Dante's teacher, inwnortalized in Canto 15 of the Inferno, was born in
Florence around the year 1220. Notwithstanding the moral cloud which hangs
over him, he achieved public prominence in his native city, figuring in
documents from as early as the year 1254. Of central importance for our
purposes was his participation in an embassy to the court of Alfonso X to
request aid in the conflict against the Ghibellines: this journey to Spa;n
took place in the year 1260. As we read in the Tesoretto, he was on his way
back to Florence when in the vicinity of the Roncesvalles mountain pass he
met a young Spanish student who had just come from Florence; this young man
;nformed him of the disastrous re·sul ts of the battle of Montaperti. Brunetto
then proceeded directly to France, where he spent nearly seven years in
exile, during the course of which he wrote, in French, the Livre dou Tresor.
Weh ave very little record of these years: his name first appeared on a list
of exiles in September of 1260, and his presence is recorded later in Arras,
in Paris, and in Bar-sur-Aube. Other than this we know through his own words
that he found a protector and patron (the •biaus dous amis" to whomt he Book
of the Treasure is dedicated), but we do not know who this person was. At
any rate Brunetto returned to Italy in the year 1267, possibly in the
entourage of Charles of Anjou (the historian Oavidsohn thinks so, but Francis
Cannody, the most recent editor of the Treasure, regards the evidence as
inconclusive);l his name appears in Florentine documents beginning in the
month of March of that year. Namedp rotonotary to the Angevfns in the year
1269, he occupied various important posts up to the time of his death in
1294.
The Book of the Treasure is in large measure a compendiumo f classical
knowledge deriving from a long tradition of such compilations going back to
late antiquity and the first centuries of the Middle Ages, a tradition which
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survives for a time the incursions of Greco-Arabic science in the late Middle
Ages, to die finally in the Renaissance, an age which above all else required
direct access to the monumentso f antiquity, and which therefore would not
accept the traditional compendia, always derivative and often corrupt, a pale
reflection of the true wisdom of the Greeks. It was at this time that the
medieval compilations became nothing more than museump ieces, vestiges of
what culture was, and no longer representative of what culture is.
The most important authors of books of this kind were Cassiodorus,
Boethius, St. Augustine, and especially Martianus Capella (De nuptiis
Philologiae et Hercurii) and Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae). These
encyclopedic books were in varying degree manuals of pedagoqy, whether to be
used in the schools or not; for this reason ft seems appropriate to conwnent
briefly on education in the ancient world and on the conditions which gave
rise to works such as the ones with which we are dealinq here.2
In the oldest educational program of which we have knowledge the textual
basis is the poets, especially Homer. Closely associated with the study of
the poets, we see in a very early period references to the tradition of the
'symposium,' or 'banquet,' in the technical sense of 'formalized discussion
after supper on artistic subjects.' We should also take note of the popular
ity of such banquets as the framework for many literary works down through
the centuries.
In a l~ap we pass on to the time in which we can speak of a scientific
education: the fifth century B.C. In this period we see documented for the
first time what is called dialectic, that is, the art of achieving victory
in any sort of discussion, and rhetoric, the art of speech. Shortly there
after we see mathematics included as part of the educational program.
In the fourth century, the age of Plato and the ideal of wisdom, in addi
tion to pursuit of practical objectives education takes on a strong moral
character, and the idea of philosophy as the final goal of education emerges.
The tenn "paideia" was used to refer not only to education, but also to the
nurturing of the human spirit to its full development. It is significant,
most scholars aqree, that Varro and Cicero translate the Greek word "paideh"
as "humanitas." This ideal of "paideia" had become essentially a religion
among the Greeks, and modern scholars have been able to trace the survival of
this ideal in the Christian era.
Although much has been said about how the Romansw ere responsible for
the deterioration of the cultural heritage of the Greeks, we should note that
even among the Greeks the concept of "paideia" came to be understood merely
as "gener.al culture, basic culture," and "enkyklios paideia" came to mean
"general education, basic education." The modern meaning of the word
"encyclopedia," it has been said, represents a faulty understanding of the
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Greek tem, but it seems to me that the aspiration to a total;ty of culture as
seen in the modern encyclopedia is not inconsistent with the origins of the
word: the major problem is of course that matters moral, philosophical, and
spiritual are merely subject categories, not the basic framework. ..Encyclo
pedia• is thus a convenient tenn for the compilations and manuals which are
the repositories of wisdom in the Middle Ages.
It is possible that, in all that has been written about western culture,
no theme other than the Renaissance has been so often treated as the evolution
of the Greek world into a Romano ne; nevertheless, a few commentss eem in
order. In the first place, it is worthy of note that in the midst of this
process of translatio the two worlds seem to have recognized each other in
terms equivalent to those used to characterize them from our vantage point.
The Greeks, being philosophers, accused the Romanso f being inferior pedants
(consider the ubiquity of the episode recounted by the Archpriest of Hita,
describing the confrontation of Greeks and Romans). The Romans, on the other
hand, accused the Greeks of a lack of objective order, social order in a wider
sense, political in a more restricted sense. Although they had to recognize
the artistic and philosophical superiority of the Greeks, the ROl'lansc onsid
ered themselves heirs to the empire of Alexander the Great, with the divine
destiny of providing social order in the world. This is consistent with one
of the points to be made in the course of these comments, and although the
Greeks considered the philosopher to be the ideal man, it is not surprising
that Cicero, in accord with the Romani dea of the political destiny of man,
should assign the highest rank to the orators, the rhetorical arts repre
senting the intellectual pinnacle for practitioners of the political arts.
To all this we must add another factor: the Christian religion. Among
the Greeks religion was a ,static thing, and the relationship between God and
the cosmos was likewise static. We have to recognize in them a very differ
ent view of reality, one in which human intelligence contemplates and studies
eternal truths under a divine vigilance which in its essence never changes;
on the other hand, the Christian religion is unique in oostulating a God who
becomes human, an event which gives to humane xistence special significance,
very different from the cyclic vision of the Greeks. The fact that this new
Christian religion, with its unique view of human history, coincides in time
with the RomanE mpire's zenith takes on great importance: the coalition of
the social ideas of the Romansa nd the historical uniqueness of the Christians
creates at first a circumstance in which the great works of Greek thought no
longer have any practical significance, and the first centuries of the
Christian era represent a period in which there is a very real danger that
all of the classical tradition will be lost. The great losses occurred, in
fact, in late antiquity~ and not in the Middle Ages as has so often been
assumed. These first centuries after Christ, before the Christians ach;eve
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a certain level of culture, are truly dark ones, in spite of the insistence on
the part of some that the concept of Dirk Ages has no validity. Fortun1tely
for us, there were at least some scholars who dedicated thetnselves to the
preservation of the classical tradition in its aost perilous 11011ents. (A
particular irony is that Cassfodorus, who speaks in such negative terms of the
ancient learning, nevertheless is one of those most responsible for its
preservation; he saw ft as an unpleasant essential to dealing with Holy
Scripture.)
The Greeks apparently paid little attention to the composition of books
in which basic knowledgew as outlined, although we should recognize that the
Timaeus of Plato, in the fom of Chalcidius' Latin translation, is considered
by some scholars to be the most important single repository of what was known
of Greek science down to the introduction of Greco-Arabic knowledge in Europe
in the twelfth century. Of works written in Latin, the compendiumd one by
Varro, now lost, had a splendid reputation, and influenced almost all of the
works mentioned below, amongt hem notably the widely knowna nd respected
encyclopedia of Pliny. But between the age of Pliny and the time of Martianus
Capella we can affirm that there exists no compilation which can compare with
the latter: these are in truth the dark ages of late Latin antiquity, and
Martianus, Boethius, Cassiodorus, St. Augustine, St. Isidore of Seville are
the compilatores who at the end of the period established antiquity's legacy
to the Middle Ages.
With this list of authors we bridge the gap between the pagan and the
Christian worlds, and a few words are fn order by way of underlining the impor
tant events of the fourth century, the century in which Christianity really
established itself, the century in which the victory over paganism was
achieved. The most important dates are: 324, the year in which Constantine,
already a convert to Christianity, assumedl eadership of the Empire; 361-63,
under the Emperor Julian, conwnonlyid entified as the Apostate, years of
concerted effort to restore paganism; 392, the accession of the Emperor
Theodosius and the definitive prohibition of paganismi n the Empire. In the
next two centuries appear the works of the authors mentioned above. In the
case of Martianus and Boethius there is reasonable doubt as to whether they
were Christians, and ft seems prudent to consider them as pagans who were
intent on preserving traditional culture. With Cassiodorus we ·pa~s on to
the Christian scholars, and Cassiodorus it was who established the importance
of pagan culture in Christian education. The crucial roles played by
Hartianus and Cassiodorus have perhaps not been exaggerated by modern
scholars: "If Martianus Capella had been forgotten •.. there would have
been no chance of a revival of learning"; •but for Cass1odorus it is quite
possible that no Latin classic except the works of Virgil would have come
down to us in complete form.•3
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Wea ust insist on the unique ch1r1cter of Christian thought. Menn o
longer exist in a kind of stasis with reference to their God: the history of
Min fon11sa dynuic and inaediate part of God's plan, a plan soon to be
c0111pleted,n ot relegated to s0111vea gue and distant future. The entire past ;s
considered likewise to be part of that plan, the NewT estament is explained as
the fulfillment of the Old, and the new Christian culture must be erected on
a Greco-Latin foundation. It is no surprise that with such a philosophical
orientation the death of Socrates should be seen as a prefiguration of the
death of Christ and of the Holy Martyrs. With these principles finnly estab
lished St. Augustine, writing in a period in which Christianity has been
firmly established as the religion of the E111pirea, ccepts the heritage of
pagan culture, passing on to a serene defense of his own; he knows well the
ancient authors and confronts the 1110sitl lustrious of his pagan adversaries
1s a Christian who can no longer be called ignorant. In such solid psycholog
ical circ1.111stancesa re produced the.works with which we deal here, works
which enjoy undiminished popularity throughout the Middle Ages.
The acclaim of centuries is not shared by uny modern scholars, notably
those with strong prejudices in favor of the Greek and Latin classics,
scholars for whoa anything medieval ts by definition inferior. In Rose's
well-known history of Latin literature, for example, we learn that
Marti1nus' work is •the dullest and poorest stuff imaginable.•4 Others
have s1id simil1r things of Isidore. The sad result is that the harsh and
senseless criticism guarantees that the works under discussion will never be
appreciated. One (cid:127) ight argue that nearly a thousand years of popularity
ought to be enough for any writer, but it seems to me ironic that with the
Renaissance Martfanus' reputation vanishes, while his contemporary Macrobius
flourishes: his c0111entary on the dreamo f Scipio continues to enjoy favor
as an exaaple of Ciceronian style and as exposition of Neoplatonist philos
ophy.
Mlrtianus' i111p0rtanta chievements are these: first, in developing his
scientific explanations within the framewrk of the 1111rriagef estival of
Philology and Mercury (who represent wisd011a1n d eloquence). he more than
anyone else is responsible for popularizing the allegorical formula which
sustains its appeal throughout the Middle Ages, and his innovation of using
a (cid:127) ixture of prose and verse is a stylistic feature of equal importance.
The second achieveaent is widely recognized: the institution of the seven
liberal arts as the non111lp rogram tn the lledieval schools. Wem ight note
in passing that, in Martianus' work. Medicine and Architecwre are in fact
ready to speak after the other seven have finished (these last two, along
with the other seven, had constituted the nine sections of the lost work of
Varro); as a result of Martianus' refusal to let thetn speak, the two
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explanation: rigorous training in Latin grammari s muchm ore in order for the
Visfgothic society in which Isidore lives than for either the mature world of
Martianus• Romeo r the crumbling latinity and emerging vernacularity of•
Brunetto1s world. And the very fact that Brunetto1s work is written in the
vernacular renders a treatlnent Of Latin graanar incongruous, at least to a
certain extent.
There exists some confusion which derives primarily from frequent equa
tion with the tenn 1logic. 1 The semantic incongruity is explainable, in part,
through the evolution of the discipline's main focus. In the most distant
Socratic origins this discipline had as its purpose the search for truth
through discussion, that is, ft was a method for achievinq the goals of
philosophy. Afterwards, but still in a very early period, it was understood
that the discipline dealt with a discussion with an adversary, that is, an
argument or a debate, the final purpose of whfch was no longer truth but
victory. If at first it addressed the highest spiritual aspirations of Man,
through its emphasis on convincing rather than clarifying the discipline
eventually became, especially amongt he Romanj urists, an integral part of
the rhetorical art. From then on the concept of dialectic as the pure science
of logic was inextricably entangled with the practical art of disputation.
In Brunetto Latini the logical science has completely disappeared: his
dialectic is inseparable from rhetoric, since the Ciceronian base has to do
exclusively with rhetoric in forensic situations.
Being made up of numerous and disparate elements from a variety of
sources, our compendia have often been criticized for their taxonomic defects.
The one clear exception is Martianus Capella, for if he has been severely
reproved for his elaborate style, his structural scheme has assured that there
is little to complain about with regard to his organization. Because such
has not been the case with Isidore's organization, I think at least a few
words would be appropriate in his defense. In the first place, his organ;za
tion is such as to be undiscemable to the reader who has not followed
Dfaz y Dfaz' advice: 0se trata de una obra que hay que leery estudiar como
tal antes de pasar a ocuparse y discutir los menudosy dispares elementos que
la integran.•S I think that this is the fatal error of muchc riticism: to
leap to the attack in complete bad faith. Isidore's unity is observable not
so much in the arrangement of the sections as ft is in the narrative connec
tors interspersed throughout, and in the calculated repetition of certain
elements (repetition which the hostile critic always sees as a defect).
Here is one example: having earlier discussed word and phrase figures in
the graamar section, Isidore pauses in the midst of obvious repetitions
SOffle
in the rhetoric section to say •manyo f these figures ..• we have already
treated in the grananar compendium." He then goes on to treat for a second
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disc;plines are henceforth cons;dered to be professional disciplines, and not
as liberal arts, which are forever after seven in number.
Turning now to a more concrete account of the fate of classical learning,
we should again note the Latin world's preference for rhetoric and dialectic,
and its neglect of the quadrivium and especially of geometry. In all of the
major writers, that is, Martianus Capella, Boethius, Cassiodorus, Isidore,
geometry is now practically devoid of scientific content. Martfanus, in fact,
substitutes for geometry geography, as does Brunetto Latini in the thirteenth
century. Martianus follows his source, Solinus' abbreviation of Pliny, with
considerable fidelity, but by the time the tradition reaches Brunetto, after
nearly a millennium, the treatment is much more schematic. (We should also
note that, although Brunetto follows this traditional substitution of
geography for geometry, he does in fact include some elementary geometry
under astronomy.) Isidore manages a very short account which contains some
Euclidian material, explaining to the reader that after scholars had in fact
figured out all of the "earth measurements• they lost interest in the earth
and applied their methods to the study of the heavens.
Passing on to astronomy, we note that this section of Martianus' treatise
is regarded in our own time as the best in his entire quadrivium, and judging
from the large number of manuscripts of this section down through the twelfth
century, the Middle Ages shared that judgment. -While it is somewhatd isap
pointing to realize that Martianus1 claim to have consulted the great Greek
astronomers directly is a complete falsehood, in details such as the
SOflle
description of the heliocentric orbits of the planets Mercury and Venus, his
work was recognized as superior by Copernicus himself, who in the process of
developing his own theories evaluated traditional astronomy. Brunetto1s
astronomy section is quite extensive, giving a balanced account of the move
ments of the spheres through the twelve signs, but devoting an inordinate
amount of space to the moon.
Martianus, Cassiodorus. and Isidore explain arithmetic in some detail,
as well as music its cousin; their absence from Brunetto1s work is puzzling,
given the announcement in the opening chapters of his intention to deal with
them, and the extended effort in the astronomical section. It seems clear
that either Brunetto knew nothing of abstract mathematics and the related
fields of music (and little of geometry), or (more likely) he eventually saw
no reason to include such material in a work with an entirely d;fferent focus.
The case of granwnari s different: tacit acknowledgmento f the more or
less clear superiority of the works of Quintilian and Donatus may be the
explanation for the weak treatment in Martianus Capella and the complete
absence from Brunetto. Seen from another angle, it is obvious that the
skillful treatment seen in Isidore has at least one plausible circumstantial
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time the subject of anadiplosis. I think it is no coincidence that
anad1plos1s is precisely a figure which has to do,with repetition.
Brunetto Latini is even better at this sort of thing: primarily in the
introductory and final remarks in a given chapter. he inserts into the text
observations relative to what has been treated fn previous sections and to
what will be treated in subsequent ones. connunicating to the reader that
the author is perfectly aware at all times of his entire work, and promoting
the same awareness in the reader through gentle reminders of things past and
predictions of things to come.
Isidore's and Martianus' reputations have diminished by the thirteenth
century. the scientific infonnation they present being unable to withstand
the competition from the newly translated Greco-Arabic materials. Martianus
manages to keep things going for the next two hundred years. not by his
learning but by his style and allegorical structure, a structure with wide
spread influence on narrations of voyages to what Patch calls the other
world6 and. some say. on Dante: even in the fifteenth century his allegorical
structure can be seen perhaps as the model in Spain for the Visidn delectable
of Alfonso de la Torre.
Howc an one explain the appearance and success of Brunetto's Treasure
precisely at the time when the monumentso f the previous millennium are
beginning to disappear? One reason is this: although Brunetto ts based
almost entirely on classical sources. the bulk of the work deals not with
scientific knowledge but with ethics and rhetoric; even in Book I a great
deal of space is devoted to universal history. and the longest section is in
fact the Bestiary, a clear example of just how attractive traditional knowl
edge can be. The roots of this quasi-scientific treatise on natural history
go back nearly a thousand years before Brunetto's time, and the material had
an appeal which in fact scandalized those of Brunetto's contemporaries who
were in the forefront of an emerging empiricism in science (a notable example
is Roger Bacon). The intellectual stance he represents perhaps lies behind
the curious fate of Brunetto in Britain: of this formidable work. which
exists in nearly eighty medieval French manuscripts. perhaps thirty medieval
manuscripts in Italian. and at least seventeen in various Iberian tongues
(one in Aragonese. three in Catalan, and thirteen in Castilian). there is not
a single extant manuscript of a translation into English in the Middle Ages.
The case is similar with Martianus Capella: an almost complete indifference
to his work in the British Isles. One might interpret this as evidence of
widespread agreement with Bacon's contempt for Scholasticism and traditional
knowledge. but then how do we explain the popularity of Bartholomeus Anglicus,
whose eneyclopedia is based in large measure on none other than Martianus
Capell a?
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