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The Classics in the Middle Ages
Papers of the Twentieth Annual Conference
of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies
Edited by
- .J_
,5 c
Aldo S. Bernardo
Saul Levin
rneaievaJ & Renaissance 'texts & srzröies
Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies
Binghamton, New York
1990The Heritage of Fulgentius
ROBERT EDWARDS
The sixth-century allegorical writer Fulgentius is an important, if at
times problematic, figure in the transvaluation of the classics in later peri-
ods. He enjoyed a remarkably durable reputation among later writers
in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Isidore of Seville and Rabanus
Maurus, the major encyclopedists of the early Middle Ages, use him as
a source for glosses and allegorical explanations, as do the three Vatican
Mythographers who succeed him as a commentator on pagan myth. The
Carolingian abbot Smaragdus of St. Michel counts Fulgentius among
the Church Fathers whom he draws on to adorn his book "full of the
flowers of allegories," Max Laistner points out that Fulgentius' ornate
style and exotic language influenced Carolingian writers to use rare words,
mythological allusions, and etymologies in their compositions.f In the
eleventh century, Sigebert of Gembloux mentions Fulgentius' acumen in-
genii for interpreting pagan myths according to natural and moral
philosophy in his Afytlwlogio.e.3 Fulgentius' equally renowned treatment of
Vergil and especially of the Aeneid (the Vergiliana continentia) inspired a similar
commentary on Statius' Thebaid, which was ascribed to Fulgentius but
arguably written by a later hand." Literary historians credit Fulgentius
in particular with introducing a sustained allegorical framework to con-
tain the partial and fragmented glossings of Donatus, Servius, and Mac-
robius.f
The high estimate of Fulgentius in the Middle Ages is balanced, in
some measure, by healthy skepticism, if not frank reservations. It is Boc-
caccio who reflects perhaps most clearly the divided response that some
writers felt. Boccaccio praises Fulgentius as "doctor atque pontifex catholi-
cus," but at several places in his Genealogie deorum gentilium he protests that
he avoids the flights of fancy that often mark Fulgentius' search for ob-
scure meanings in literary texts." Nonetheless, Fulgentius remains a142 The Heritage of Fulgentius
source for allegories for humanist scholars like Coluccio Salutati.? The
Fulgentian thesis that the Asneid outlines a scheme of moral development
through the various ages of man establishes a framework for Mapheus
Vegius to bring Vergil's epic to aesthetic and moral completeness by add-
ing a Thirteenth Book." The same thesis reappears in William Adling-
ton's translation of Apuleius' Metamorphoses (1566): "this book of Lucius
is a figure of man's life, and toucheth the nature and manners of mortal
men, egging them forward from their asinine form to their human and
perfect shape,"
The examples I have been citing give some indication of Fulgentius'
stature as an authority for interpreting myth and poetry, but they tell
relatively little about the kind of fascination he exercised over subsequent
writers, about the qualities to which those writers responded while ad-
mitting that his interpretations could be hyperbolic and precious."
These are more subtle dimensions ofliterary influence than citation and
testimony, but they offer a way of understanding the complex dialectic
by which Christian culture assimilated classical literature. There are abun-
dant sources on which a comparative study of this kind of influence might
draw, such as Albericus of London's rewriting of the story of Syrophanes
from the Mythowgiae or John de Ridevall's extension of Fulgentius' moral
iconography in the Fulgentius mefß.juralis.l1 But I shall confine myself to the
commentary on the first six books of the Asneid which is generally thought
to have been written by the twelfth-century Platonist Bemardus Silves-
tris, for it is in the reading ofVergil that the assumptions and difficulties
of Fulgentius' method stand out clearly.12
I have discussed at length in another paper the underlying assump-
tions of Fulgentius' Mythowgiae and Vergiliana continentia.13 Briefly, Fulgen-
tius draws on the conventional distinction between things (res) and words
(uerba) in classical linguistic theory, but he emphasizes the separation of
the linguistic sign from the thing signified, of the proper from the figurative
sense of words. Without claiming for pagan myths and secular texts the
divine inspiration that Christian exegetes find in Scripture, he argues
that a kind of philosophical truth exists apart from the surface of lan-
guage. This truth provides the moral lessons which he takes as the figura-
tive sense of classical myths."
Furthermore, having established this separation of signs from refer-
ents, Fulgentius comes to equate the perception of hidden meaning with
its actual presence. Reading is defined as an act of ingenuity and critical
virtuosity. hi the Prologue to book 2 of the Mythologiae, Fulgentius im-
agines it as a gymnastic arena (arenam nostri studii and tui palestram ingenit)
where the reader can exercise and test his skill for seeing hidden sig-ROBERT EDWARDS 143
nificance: a space of play and moral rehearsal. Reading, then, is a con-
scious projection of ethical assumptions and associations onto the for-
mal structure of the text; and it is made on the authority of moral truth,
which resides outside the text and independent from the problems ofliter-
ary representation. In the commentary on Vergil, Fulgentius dramatizes
this style of reading and its potential for play by constructing an im-
agined dialogue with the poet, in which Vergil explains his intention to
offer common-sense moralizing while the commentator summons the
courage to explain the hidden truths of the poem to its author. What
Fulgentius establishes in this fictive exchange is the proximity of discur-
sive and interpretive writing to the mimetic and imaginative works that
commentary is supposed to elucidate. Commentary and exegesis, he
demonstrates, share important properties and formal characteristics with
fictional discourse. Reading a text in the light of its ultimate reference,
the interpreter subtly reshapes the original to reveal meaning beyond
authorial or aesthetic intent.
In Bernardus' commentary, Fulgentius is a source for specific points
of interpretation, and he lends the general notion that Vergil's poem in-
corporates the ages of man into its structure. Fulgentius' division between
proper and figurative meanings reappears in the commentary, as does
his insistence on the dual nature of the poet. In addition, Bemardus makes
an effort to assimilate the techniques of Fulgentius' allegorizing to other
literary authorities. Fulgentius had discussed Vergil as uaies, but Bemardus
adds Macrobius' testimony that a "twin doctrine" operates in the Aeneid,
and he assigns Vergil the roles of "poeta et philosophus.?" Like earlier
commentators, Bernardus discovers a moral purpose in Aeneas' exam-
ple of suffering, filial piety, and reverence, and he sees a caution against
immoderate love in Aeneas' desire for Dido.16 He also adapts Horace to
redefine the poem's genre and bring it in line with Fulgentian moraliz-
ing. Reworking Horace's famous admonition that poets should instruct
or entertain (Ars Poetica 333), he looks in the Asneid for both the useful-
ness of satire and the delight of comedy; those two genres are then joined
in yet a third form, historical writing. Although epic devices may afford
heightened verbal adornment, Bernardus argues, Vergil's poem is relat-
ed essentially to the functions of the middle style, which St. Augustine
had earlier defined as praise and blame (De doctrina christiana 4.17-19)and
which Fulgentius implied in stressing Vergil's adherence to the rules of
praise.
Two radically divergent styles had helped to animate the ~rgiliano. con-
tinentia while remaining above the text which is their source of play. Ful-
gentius rehearses the lessons of the grammatici, while his Vergil expounds144 The Heritage of Fulgentius
the original intention. By contrast, Bernardus uncovers two distinct orders
within the text; he sees a rhetorical joining of artificial and natural ord-
er that mirrors the poet's dual roles. Vergil as poet, beginning "a medio
narration em," constructs an artificial order whose affinities, Bernardus
remarks, are to Terence's comedies rather than the epics of Lucan and
Statius. Meanwhile, as a philosopher, Vergil observes a natural order in
treating "humane uite naturam" and setting down "quid paciatur huma-
nus spiritus in humano corpore temporal iter positus" ("what the human
spirit undergoes while temporarily placed in the human body" [3]). This
description of the poem's rhetorical economy marks an advance over Ful-
gentius' view that philosophical meaning overarches the text. Like Mac-
robius who found four kinds of oratory combined in Vergil (Saturnalia
5.1.1-7), Bernardus argues for a coherent rhetorical organization of the
poem in which the poet's dual roles and the narrative orders effect a syn-
thesis of meaning. His argument, as Brian Stock notes, "is an attempt
to integrate the creation of a literary work into the realm of experience"
by employing moral and physical allegory."
The concern with rhetorical order in the Asneid leads Bernardus to
speculate generally about the nature oflanguage and particularly about
its figurative use. Fulgentius' radical dislocation of signifier and signified
had proceeded from his assumption that there is a disparity between
authorial intention and hidden meaning: significance resides in a com-
prehensive philosophical system whose moral precepts are the things to
which the text must ultimately refer; hence aesthetic unity is to be sought
somewhere other than in the constructions oflanguage itself. Bernardus
formulates a different sort of problem by considering the various mean-
ings that arise from the poetic fiction but still reflect a sense of integritas.
He interprets Venus, for example, in her legitimate aspect as musica mun-
dana (or the equal proportions of the cosmos or natural justice) and in
her wanton aspect as cupidity. He then remarks: "Notandum est uero
hoc in loco, quemadmodum in aliis misticis uoluminibus, ita et in hoc
equiuocationes et multiuocationes esse et integumenta ad diuersa respi-
cere" ("One must remember in this book as well as in other allegorical
works that there are equivocations and multiple significations, and there-
fore one must interpret poetic fictions in diverse ways" [9]).
Bernardus is suggesting in a way that might anticipate modern views
of language and signification that the problem of allegorical discourse
does not lie chiefly in devising figurative meaning, as it had for Fulgen-
tius, but in dealing with the literal text. Questions of denotation pre-
cede questions about the transferred sense. Much like his contemporary
William of Conches who managed a deft balancing of the terms integumen-ROBERT EDWARDS 145
turn (allegorical covering) and ueriias in his glosses, Bernardus links the
fact of polysemous language to the existence of truth: "Hie autem diver-
sus integumentorum respectus et multiplex designatio in omnibus mis-
ticis observari debet si in una vero veritas stare non poterit" ("Hence,
one must pay attention to the diverse aspects of the poetic fictions and
the multiple interpretations in all allegorical matters if in fact the truth
cannot be established by a single interpretation" [9]). In other words,
signs mark an approach toward the things that they are supposed to sig-
nify; they record an act of predication that somehow never achieves com-
pletion. A mythological figure like Jupiter, for instance, can be identified
variously as fire, the human soul, the world soul, and a star. Rather than
invoke meaning in a discrete act of perception, Bernardus chooses to see
it evolve through a device of multioocatio which allows the dioersa nomina
of myth and poetry to flourish. The alternate names and identities of
the gods reflect not the confusion of a fragmented system of correspond-
ences but a spectrum of meaning accessible to the attentive reader.l"
The implication of this shift away from Fulgentian allegory touches
on the wider relations of allegory and poetry. Where language (uerba)
no longer equals a thing signified (r&r),it begins to assume a function
that has otherwise been assigned to myth. Modern interpreters regard
the myth-making process as filling the gap between some present state
of understanding and the unknown. The diuersa nomina come to represent
a process of definition, a search for a middle term between words and
things. To the extent that linguistic structures such as rhetorical order
and repetitions operate in the play between words and things and there-
by fill the gap, they, too, become mythological. Thus the effort to under-
stand poetic language, and the larger structures it forms, moves forward
by partial recognitions of meaning and a rough tracing of conceptual
patterns that emerge as language continually falls short of enunciating
completely what it sets out ~o say and name. And in this respect, one
can see the great wisdom of EdouardJeanneau's insisting that integumen-
turn, the key term in Chartrian discussions about the nature of allegori-
callanguage, should be translated as 'myth." The wheat and chaff that
fascinated writers from Augustine to Chaucer are not polarities of meaning
so much as dialectical antitheses that permit the construction of meaning.
What I have been calling the mythological dimension oflanguage proves
important for Bernardus in establishing the epistemological and moral
status of poetry. Interpretation shares with poetry the capacity to evoke
meaning, and both enlist the reader as a collaborator. They also share
the paradox of searching for a viable order of truth within fiction. This
dilemma has its roots, of course, in antiquity, and it resurfaces in Mac-146 The Heritage of Fulqentius
robius and the writers of the High Middle Ages who assert the primacy
of the arles semwnciales for all human understanding.J? In the Vergil com-
mentary, there is a powerful example of this paradox in book 6 where
Bernardus treats the ekphrasis by which Vergil recounts the visual figures
inscribed on the temple of Apollo. Bernardus treats this verbal portrai-
ture as a summa narraiionis. Returning to a distinction in Macrobius, he
asserts, "Sunt namque poete ad philosophiam introductorii, unde uolu-
mina eorum 'cunas nutricum' uocat Macrobius" ("Indeed, the poets in-
troduce one to philosophy, whence Macrobius calls their volumes 'nurses'
cradles'" [36]). Peter Dronke proposes that Bernardus' interpretation of
the key phrase cunas nutricum is greatly influenced by William of Con-
ches' own commentary on Macrobius." Macrobius (COTTITTIeTIlumin Som-
nium Scipionis 1.2.8) rejects fables that only delight the ear and are
consequently diverting rather than instructive, but the Chartrian writers
see the fables as part of a psychological and philosophical progression.
Their view is in keeping with Fulgentius' notion of the ages and moral
development of man.
Bernardus explains that this motif of progression is incorporated in
the architectural structure of Apollo's temple, on whose exterior history
and fable, the forms of discourse that Macrobius struggled to keep
separate, are depicted as equivalents. Passing through the entrance way
signifies the study of the arts and the authors ("in introitu ad artes, scilicet
in auctoribus"). The temple itself signifies the philosophic arts. There-
fore, Bernardus says, "quas qui ingressuri sunt oportet quod prius cer-
nant picturas ante descriptas, id est ut dent operam istoriis et fabulis
et hoc est quod in porticum ab introeuntibus cernuntur historie depicte
et fabule" ("those about to enter should first see pictures made before-
hand, i.e. they pay attention to stories and fables, and this is the reason
why should pictorial history and fable are seen by those entering the par-
tico" [36-37]).
This reading of the temple and its adornment reinforces the traditional
division of learning into the Trivium and Quadrivium. But by seeing
the authors as introductory and preparatory, Bernardus complicates the
larger question of the status of poetry. Does poetry embody certain kinds
of essential truths, or does it merely and inadequately point toward their
existence, much as language only predicates the things it talks about?
Is it a kind of knowledge or only a cipher of something beyond itself?
Bernardus gives an answer that seems to resolve the question in the nega-
tive: "He fabule que sunt extra templum figurant omnes poetarum fab-
ulas et ita non sunt mistice intelligende" ("These fables outside the temple
represent all the fables of the poets and hence are not to be understoodROBERT EDWARDS 147
allegorically" [37)). His answer, however, is less direct and less dismis-
sive of poetry than it might at first appear. The fables, he is careful to
say, are a representation for all poetic fiction making, and they refer not
to things in the world but to themselves. Like allegorical interpretation,
they situate imaginative discourse within language, which follows simi-
lar codes and structures and makes the same uneasy claims to reach some-
thing beyond itself.
In following the logic of the architectural imagery, then, Bernardus
has gone beyond Macrobius' original distinction between useful and divert-
ing fictions to suggest that all poetic figments are incapable of being read
in a figurative sense.22 Although earlier he proposed that a story like
that of Dido and Aeneas in book 4- can describe the youthful nature of
man "manifeste ac mistica narratione" (24), he seems now to revoke the
sanction for allegorical reading. Yet this seeming reversal marks some-
thing other than a contradiction or a lapse in his argument. In his gloss-
ing, Bernardus is trying to define the shifting limits for allegorical and
poetic discourse. The cautionary nature of the example of book 4- and
its ready transference to a moral senteniia have to be taken, he suggests,
on a different level from the approach to mystery and deeper philosophical
truth in book 6. Much as Boethius' introduction to the essential reality
of moral life and the cosmos can be said to begin with Lady Philosophy's
banishing the Muses, the instruction of Aeneas and of Bernardus' search-
ing reader demands the gesture of a radical break with earlier orders
of knowledge. The moral lessons which the authors portray remain ap-
plicable to experience in the world, while the epic quest for truth (trans-
latable into an act of reading) inquires into the causes of things. This
is the distinction between moralizing and mystical meaning that Fulgentius
plots in his dialogue with Vergil, but it emerges in Bernardus' commen-
tary with greater subtlety and resonance than before.
This concern with the mythic function oflanguage connects the com-
mentary to Bernardus' own poetic work, especially his cosmological poem
the Cosmographia (De uniuersitate mundi). Winthrop Wetherbee has remarked
that there exists "a general relationship between the themes of the Cos-
TlWgraphia and the reading of the Aeneid presented in Bernardus' commen-
tary."23For Bernardus, Aeneas' descent to the underworld is an introduc-
tion to philosophy as an all-encompassing field of knowledge, and it
portrays the struggle of the intellect against vice and ignorance; similar-
ly in the COSTlWgraphia man must come to terms with destiny, order, and
violence. Wetherbee says, "A long chain of fate and history depends from
the first man, as Bernardus' Nature beholds him in the Table of Destiny,
and there is, as in the world of Aeneas, a significant historical dimen-148 The Heritage of Fulqentius
sion to the universe of the Cosrrwgraphia. The challenge of destiny and the
burden of experience seem to be inseminated in human life from the
very beginning, and the conflict between order and violence in the his-
tory of man is foretold in the stars" (26).24
Bernardus' commentary and his epic poem depict mankind as a pro-
totypical soul, seen at a moment before his own history, at an ethical
and imaginative threshold where he must read his destiny and grasp the
meaning of human action. By locating him at that boundary, both works
transform Fulgentius' allegory, however. Man stands like Aeneas before
the temple, but his work there is in earnest, not in play; it involves some-
thing more than the "gymnasium of ingenuity" where one practices the
art of interpretation. Pierre Courcelle notes, moreover, that in manuscript
miniatures depictions of Aeneas before the temple serve as a background
for his meeting with the Sybil.25 The conflation of the scenes intensifies
Aeneas' confrontation with history, fate, and moral choice.
An even more suggestive staging of this scene occurs in Augustine's
Corifessions, in a passage where the author struggles to cancel the Vergilian
source of his own moral definition (1.13). Augustine says that he repents
memorizing the wanderings of Aeneas and lamenting Didds suicide, and
he contrasts the value of reading to the deception of poetry. He then adds,
"at enim uela pendent liminibus grammaticarum scholarum, sed non illa
magis honorem secreti quam tegimentum erroris significant" ("It is true
that curtains are hung over the entrances to the schools where literature
is taught, but they are not so much symbols in honour of mystery as
veils concealing error").26 The image Augustine evokes is the scene in
which Aeneas stands before Apollo's temple, ready to penetrate the mys-
tery represented by the Sybil. The formulation he gives this image (uefa
liminibus) both describes the moral enterprise of reading and registers the
profound ambivalence it will have for Bernardus.
Notes
1. Smaragdus of St. Michel, "Collectiones in Epistolas et Euangelica quae
per circuitum anni leguntur," in Patrologia Latina 102.13: "allegoriarum floribus
plenum curaui colligere librum."
2. Max L. W. Laistner, "Fulgentius in the Carolingian Age,"in The lniellectu-
al Heritage of the Early Middle Ages: Selected Essays by M. L. W. Laistner, ed. Chester
G. Starr (1957; repr., New York: Octagon Books, 1966), 204, 209.
3. Sigebert of Gembloux, De scriptmibus ecdesiasticiss, 28 (PL 160.554). Sige-
bert erroneouslyidentifiesFulgentiuswith the bishop of Ruspe by the same name.
4. Fulgentius, Opera, ed. R. Helm, rev.Jean Preaux (1898; repr., Stuttgart:ROBERT EDWARDS 149
Teubner, 1970), and Bernard Bischoff, Mitteltdterliche Studien, 3 vols. (Stuttgart:
Anton Hiersemann, 1967), 2:271.
5. O. B. Hardison, Jr., "Toward a History of Medieval Literary Criticism,"
MedUvalw. et Humanistica, n.s., no. 7 (1976): 5. See also Giuseppe Pennisi, Fulgenzio
e la "'Expositio Sermonum AntiqUIJTUTTi'(Firenze: Felice Le Monnier, 1963).
6. Giovanni Boccaccio, GtneakJgie deorum gentilium, ed. Vincenzo Romano, 2
vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1951), 2:736. Boccaccio refuses to cite Fulgentius' explana-
tion of Chimera, saying that Fulgentius leaves more in obscurity on the literal
level than he could ever explain below the surface (4.24). He dismisses Fulgen-
tius' explanation of Castor and Pollux with the comment (11.7), "Posuissem Ful-
gentii expositionern, sed quoniam per sublimia uadit, omisi" ("I might have set
forth Fulgentius' explanation, but 1 have omitted it because it rushes off into
the sublime"). For translations of Fulgentius 1 use Leslie George Whitbread, Ful-
gentius the Mytlwgrapher (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971).
7. Coluccio Salutati, De Labonbus Herculis, ed. B. L. Ullmann (Turin: Thesau-
rus Mundi, 1951).
8. Anna Cox Brinton, Mapheus Vegius and his Thirteenth Book of the Aeneid:
A Cho.pter on Vtrgil in the Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1930),
24-40.
9. William Adlington, trans., The Golden Ass of Ludus Apuleius, ed. F. J. Har-
vey Darton (privately printed, n.d.), 14, 15, 18-20.
10. See the account in Domenico Comparetti, Vtrgil in the Middle Ages, trans.
E. F. M. Benecke (1895; repr., London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1966).
11. Mythographus Tertius, De diis gentium et i1iorum allegoris, in Scriptores Rerum
Mythicarum Latini tres Romae nuptr rtptrti, ed. Georg H. Bode (1834; repr., Hil-
desheim: Georg Olms, 1968); and John de Ridevall, Fulgentius Afefllforalis: Ein Beitrag
zur Geschichtt der antiken Mytlwlogie im Mittelalter, ed. Hans Liebeschütz, Studien der
Bibliothek Warburg, 4 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1926).
12. The attribution to Bernardus Silvestris is disputed by the commentary's
latest editors. Julian Ward Jones and Elizabeth Frances Jones, eds., The Com-
menfllry on the First Six Books of the "Ameid" of Vergil Commonly Attributed to Bemardus Sil-
vestris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977). The evidence bearing on
attribution is summarized in a review of the edition by Theodore Silverstein,
Speculum 54 (1979): 154-57. Citation of the commentary will be made in the text
with reference to the pages in the Jones's edition. The translation is that of Earl
G. Schreiber and Thomas E. Maresca, Commentary on The First Six Books of Vtrgil~
Aeneid by Bemardus Siloestris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); some
minor changes have been made for consistency.
13. Robert Edwards, "Fulgentius and the Collapse of Meaning," Helios, n.s.,
3 (1976): 17-35.
14.Jean Pep in, Mythe et Alligorie: Les origines grecques et /es contesflltionsjudio-chretimnes
(Aubier: Editions Montaigne, 1958), 76-81 observes that the relation of sign to
signifier underlies most allegorical systems; at issue here is not a semiotic struc-
ture but the disjunction within it. Fulgentius is the first mythographer to com-
bine euhemerism and a philosophical interpretation; see Paule Demats, Fabula:
Trois etudes de mytlwgraphie antique et midi/vale (Geneva: Droz, 1973), 57-59.
15. John of Salisbury's Polycraticus similarly treats the ages of man (8.24) and
the poet's dual role (2.15, 6.22).150 The Heritage of Fulqentius
16. Pierre Courcelle, Leaeurs paiens et lecteurs chritiens de I'Eniitk, 2 vols. (Paris:
Institut de France, 1984), 1:146.
17. Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bemard SylveslLr
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 43.
18. In a commentary on Martianus CapeIIa possibly written by Bernardus,
these equiuocaiiones et multiuocationes are again said to give double and multiple mean-
ings to the literal sense of the text. See EdouardJeauneau, "Uusage de la notion
d'[niLgumentum a' travers les gloses de Guillaume de Conches," Archives d'histoire doe-
trinale et littiraire du Moyen Age 32 (1957): 37-38; Stock, 36n-37 summarizes the
evidence for and against attribution. Daniel Poirion, "De l' 'Eneide' a l' 'Eneas':
mythologie ou moralisation; Cahiers tk la civilisation midiivale 19 (1976): 226, notes
the value of the mythographers as a source for the poetic transformations of
mythology and for identifying new relations among symbols, images, and themes.
Hans RobertJauss, "Allegorie, 'remythisation' et nouveau mythe. Reflexions sur
la captivite chretienne de la mythologie au moyen age," in Me1anges d'histoire litti-
a
raire, tk linguistique et de philologie romanes oJJerts Charks Rostaing, ed. Jacques De
Caluwe, Jean-Marie D'Heur, and Rene Dumas (Liege: Association des
Romanistes de l'Universite de Liege, 1974),469-99, argues that the effort of al-
legorists to reduce classical myth to a static meaning succeeds conversely in offer-
ing new possibilities for myth in the High Middle Ages.
19. EdouardJeanneau, "Ilusage de la notion d'IniLgumentum a travers les gloses
de Guillaume de Conches," 37-38. Peter Dronke has contended that the word
designates both the outer covering of poetic fable and the meaning that the fa-
ble conveys; see Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, Mit-
tellateinische Studien und Texte, 9 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 16-28.
20. See the discussion in R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Liter-
ary Anthropology of tile French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
21. Fahula, 17n.
22. J. Reginald O'Donnell, C.S.B., "The Sources and Meaning of Bernard
Silvester's Commentary on the Aeneid," Mediaeval Studies 24 (1962): 247.
23. Winthrop Wetherbee, trans., The Cosmographia of Bernardus Siloestris,
Records of Civilization, 89 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973),22-23.
24. The importance of Bernardus' commentary for Dante's sense of the soul's
history is discussed by Theodore Silverstein, "Dante and Vergil the Mystic," Har-
vard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 14 (1932): 51-82; Giorgio Padoan,
"Tradizione e fortuna del commento all' "Eneide" di Bernardo Silvestre," Italia
medioeoale e umanistica 3 (1960): 237-40; and David Thompson, "Dante and Ber-
nard Silvestris," Vzator no. 1 (1970): 203. Other examples of influence in medieval
vernacular literature are more problematic to trace. John Gardner, "Fulgentius'
Expositio Vergiliana Continentia and the Plan of Beowulf: Another Approach to the
Poem's Style and Structure," Papers on Language and Literature 6 (1970): 227-62,
argues for an impact on the Old English epic. Influence on the Roman d'Eneas
is denied by Jean Frappier, "Remarques sur la peinture de la vie et des heros
antiques dans la litterature francaise du XUe et XIUe siecle," in L'humanisme
midiival dans /es littiratures romanes du XII' au XIV' siede, ed. Anthime Fourrier, Actes
et Colloques, 3, Universire de Strasbourg (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1964), 19; and
Alfred Adler, "Eneas und Lavine: Puer et Pudla Senes," Romo.nische Forschungen 71 (1959):
77-79. Raymond J. Cormier believes there are some reminiscences; see "TheROBERT EDWARDS ISI
Present State of Studies on the Roman d'Eneas," Cultura Neolatina 31 (1971): 33n;
and One Heart, One Mind: 171e Rehirth of Vergil's Hem in Medieval French Romance (U niver-
sity, Mississippi: Romance Monographs, Inc., 1973), 183-87.
25. Lecteuts paiens et lecteurs ehr/liens de l'Eniide, 2:197, 223 (figs. 358, 396). Cour-
celle also notes that the ethical reading of book 6 of the Aeneid goes back as far
as Seneca, who finds in it an example of Stoic heroism: "Thttitude de Seneque
a regard du livre VI est maintenant claire. Il s'interesse exclusivement a la par-
tie qui precede la descente aux Enfers, cest-ä-dire a ce qui concerne la conduite
de l'homme. Enee est, a ses yeux, le type du Sage stoicien" (1:425).
26. Saint Augustine, Corfessionum Iibri tredecim, ed. Pius KnölI, CSEL 33 (Vienna:
Tempsky, 1896; repr., New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1962), 19; the
translation is taken from Corifessicns, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore: Pen-
guin Books, 1973), 34.You can also read
