SLAVES AND PRINCES
TERENCE THROUGH TIME
his essay is in two parts: the first about Terence in monasteries; the second about Terence at court. In the two sections it will demonstrate the continuing reception, appropriation and subversion of Terence's Comedies for paideia, to teach the Latin language and to teach humanity and humility, both with laughter, whether in a monastic context or a regal one. Augustine, for instance, had had a love-hate relationship with the plays of Terence, which he transmitted in turn through his Christian writings: Augustine is shocked where Terence has a youth be incited to rape a virgin through seeing a pornographical painting of Jove raping Danae (Eunuchus 584-607; City of God II.vii, II.xii); Augustine is approving where Terence has a slave rebuke his young master for his lust (Andria 306-308; City of God XIV.viii). (Terence himself had been a slave, brought from Africa to Europe.) The major line that touched people's souls was that in the Heautontimorumenos where Chremes questions the laboring Menedemus, the rich father turned humble ploughman, and states his reason for doing so, "Homo sum: Humani nichil a me alienum puto" [I am a man: I consider nothing that is human to be alien to me]. That line would give rise to Cicero's concept of Humanities, and Michel de Montaigne would proudly paint it upon his study ceiling and carry that concept over to the New World with his essay "On Cannibals." Christianity, itself the religion of 'women and slaves', preserved Terence's Comedies in its amber.
I. TERENCE IN THE MONASTERIES
In order to explain Terence's preservation in medieval monasteries, let me begin with a story concerning the paideia of humility and the politics of inclusion. St. Jerome, himself for a while a hermit monk, wrote a tongue-in-cheek tale concerning St. Anthony of the Desert, considered to be the first hermit, and of his quest for St. Paul, whom he had learned was truly the first hermit in the Egyptian Thebaid. St. Anthony, in the story, set off across the sands under the blazing sun, supporting his tottering steps upon his Tau staff. He first met a Centaur, a pagan and chimaerical beast whom Plato said was a lie, and which essentially embodies an allegory concerning man's Reason yoked to his Lust. He asked this part man, part horse where St. Paul dwelled. The Hippocentaur raised his right hoof and pointed the way. Then the hermit encountered a Satyr or Faun, a being part goat and part man, who proclaimed himself a worshiper of Christ. St. Anthony was amazed that these monsters whom pagans worshiped and which were lies, should thus proclaim Christ as the Truth, when the inhabitants of Christian and civilized Alexandria still patronized the theatre and whores and still worshiped and believed in idols and centaurs, satyrs and fauns. Centaurs were even sculpted upon ivory, in reference to the Aeneid's gates of ivory and of horn, of lies and truth. And, as a grace note, Jerome notes that Paul dwelled where coins were counterfeited at the time of Anthony and Cleopatra - thereby warning us that this tale is counterfeit, that it is fool's gold and deceiving ivory.
Jerome, in this enchanting, counterfeiting tale, playfully presents lying pagan poetry, as Egyptian, Greek and Roman gold and ivory, in the service of Christianity. We recall that the Desert Fathers were in the main aristocrats fleeing the Empire, using the poverty of the Thebaid as if it were a "pastoral." Unable to relinquish Terence or Cicero or Virgil, both Jerome and Augustine, who were closely associated with the world of the Thebaid, still found means by which to preserve pagan poetry, which had been their paidiea, to adorn their scriptures concerning the Scriptures, Jerome especially translating Hebrew into Latin through mediating Greek, and Augustine giving as precedent for the use of pagan poetry in Christian sermons the model of the Hebrews' use of borrowed Egyptian gold first to fashion the idolatrous Golden Calf and then to adorn the Ark. To write so they could take as their Anthonine Tau crutch - as would John Milton after them - Paul's sermon on the Areopagus in which he had quoted Greek philosophers, Greek poets and Greek playwrights. For Jerome is playing not only upon the name of Anthony in his text but also upon the name of Paul - as would Dante after him.
Astonishingly this story - out of Africa - found its way to Anglo-Saxon territory and is sculpted on the Ruthwell Cross in Scotland, perhaps at the instigation of the Abbess Hilda of Whitby. This and other stories about the Desert Fathers, such as those about Abraham and Mary, about Thais and about Pelagia, whores who convert to being anchoresses, were copied out, treasured and emulated, side by side with Terence's Comedies about whores and youths sowing their wild oats, in Continental and English monastic libraries. Augustine and Boethius had both spoken out against the "whores of the theatre," yet found means to include them in their texts. We will find the Desert Fathers and Terence knit together in the plays written by the Benedictine nun, Hrotswitha. These stories reflect the paideia of humility of the Christian Gospels - and the human comedy of the reentry of Plato's Symposium's banished flute-girl, the Republic's banished poets. Terence, centaur-like, combined his proto-Christian paideia of humanity and humility with the Barthesian, Lacanian pleasure of the text. And those pagan centaurs, symbolizing man's lust and his reason, were next appropriated by Christianity. Mary Magdalen and Thais are a sisterhood and of the essence of drama; together they marry the Gospels and Terence.
When St. Benedict wrote his Rule he realized the importance of Benedictinism as united through Latin and as bonded through texts, that they were textual communities, to use Brian Stock's term, and he therefore mandated that his monks should read Latin works, whether Christian or pagan. As with many other classical, pagan authors, had there been no Christian monasteries, there would have been no surviving texts for our classicists today to study. In particular, manuscripts of Terence were most carefully copied out and treasured in abbeys, often with fine and lively illuminations, while those of Plautus and other dramatists in general were neglected. Why might Terence have been favored in Christian monastic communities? Let us recall that Christianity, in its origins, was subversive, a liberation movement in Israel against Roman imperialism, and that at that period it was decidedly the "religion of women and slaves." Terence - Publius Terentius Afer - lived two centuries before Christianity and the Roman Empire, at the time of the Roman Republic. He was a freed slave from Africa. Though patronized by the noble Scipios, he clearly heroized not the masters in his plays but their slaves, not the privileged men but the oppressed women, sympathizing subversively with those who institutionally, structurally, lacked power, whom he has win, not lose, in his comic plots of the world-upside-down. Besides being a parallel world-upside-down to Christianity, whose Gospels honored whores and lepers and sent rich privileged young men away sorrowing, Terence also wrote in the purest Latin.
His plays were therefore of use in teaching young oblates to read and write that stern language, with the comic laughter that is the best pedagogy, and therefore they were likely carefully and lovingly preserved. We need to envision oblates sitting in the cloister with their novice master, as Paul Mayvaert describes in his delightful essay in Gesta, studying their Terentian Comedies as a group, perhaps even reading them in parts. It is also clear that these plays, which are about whores, pimps, parasites, eunuchs, farmers, landlords, lawyers, slaves, nurses, midwives, slave floggers, freed slaves, wives, virgins, soldiers, sailors, old men and boys, could afford the oblates a glimpse of the real world beyond their cloister, a past world beyond their present, a world in which the lust they had abandoned held sway. In doing so it presented a drama that could make sense of the Gospels in Latin which they read alongside their Terence, of a world similarly filled with soldiers, whores, beggars, lawyers, seamen, merchants, tax collectors, publicans, which likewise for the young oblates would have been a counter culture foreign in space and time to their monastic cloistering. Terence's plays about unwed mothers, young girls in trouble, prostitutes with hearts of gold, parasites and slaves were being read side by side with the acting of liturgical dramas from the Gospels concerning the Virgin and Child and Mary Magdalen and Lazarus. There is a fitting complementarity here of Bakhtin's Two Worlds of the Middle Ages, its juxtaposition of Nature and Culture, not unlike that Rood at Nunburnholme, Yorkshire, which enchantingly shows an abbess with her book satchel as ephod on the north face, on the west, the Nativity of the Virgin and Child, beneath whom are a mother Centaur with her baby Centaur on her back.
Let us focus on three Benedictine abbeys, one in France, at Fleury, the others in England, at Winchester and St. Albans. On the banks of the Loire, the Benedictines had established a magnificent monastery, even bringing to it the bones, they say, of Saint Benedict, rescuing these from Monte Cassino in Italy. One enters the monastery church through a porch, a forest, of decorated and historiated capitals, capitals which are continued in the church itself and in its cloister. Some of these capitals have sculpted on them pagan motifs, lovely acanthus fronds, Sirens, Centaurs, and all those strange mingling chimaera that both horrified and delighted St. Bernard. Some of these capitals have scenes of saints' lives, like that of the soldier saint, Martin, dividing his cloak with the beggar who is Christ, or scenes from the life of St. Benedict, for instance where he is tempted by the devil with a beautiful woman, and some have scenes from the Benedictine liturgical dramas, such as the Three Marys bringing precious ointment and spices to the Tomb or of Christ raising Lazarus, where Mary Magdalen and Martha crouch at his feet. Some of the scenes, for instance, the Flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, are the same as those upon the much earlier Ruthwell Cross in Scotland. Most important, in that same French abbey, and in the same style as are these capitals of scenes from the liturgical dramas is an illuminated tenth-century manuscript of Terence's plays. We have, for instance, the image in a letter written by the learned Abbo of Fleury (who came to Fleury as an oblate, becoming its leading scholar and who had contacts with England) concerning the necessity of the monk to be humble, that he should, like Mary Magdalen, intercede with Christ and `wash the feet of Jesus with his tears.' He will also, in his Liber Apologeticus, quote from Terence's Andria. It was in that same work that Abbo of Fleury formulated the medieval concept of the Three Orders, of agricolae (the Ploughman), of agonistae (the Knight), of presbyteri, of the vita activa, as like Martha, of monks (the Monk), the vita contemplativa, as like Mary, the concept so ably studied by Georges Duby in The Three Orders. It is not impossible that Abbo of Fleury's system of categories was influenced by his boyhood memory of reading the similarly classificatory dramatis personae of Terentian Comedies while learning his Latin. At Fleury, certainly, the study and representation of Terence and the Gospels were paired in the illuminated pages of books and the sculptured stone of capitals.
A thirteenth-century manuscript, now Orléans, Bibliotheque Municipale 201, is thought to have been owned by the Abbey of St. Benedict at Fleury. It includes all the major Benedictine liturgical dramas, along with plays of saints' miracles, including those of the mischief-making St. Nicholas, patron of students and thieves. Its liturgical dramas center upon the figure of Mary Magdalen, giving to her moving and operatic melodies to sing, and it states most clearly that she, or the monk acting her in drag, is to be dressed as a whore, "in habitu meretricio." Another play it includes is the Officium Peregrinorum, generally the Easter Monday Vespers, in this case, Tuesday, because it also includes the Doubting of Thomas, giving the disappearance of Christ at the Inn at Emmaus, carried out, much as in the illuminations to Terence's Comedies, by means of concealment behind curtains. \However, though tradition assigns this manuscript's provenance to the abbey at Fleury, there exists the possibility that the manuscript is English and from Winchester. Solange Corbin noted that its musical notation is not Fleury and Diane Marie Dolan, her student, suggests it is English. We know that the two abbeys, of Winchester and Fleury, exchanged manuscripts. The scenes of the plays are those shown as well in the Winchester Benedictional, such as the Visit of the Three Marys to the Tomb, at folio 51v, and the Doubting of Thomas, at folio 56v.
Winchester in England, in fact, gives us three very important manuscripts in connection with liturgical drama, St. Aethelwold's Winchester Benedictional, mentioned above, a lavishly illuminated manuscript, stressing women as well as men, and the Regularis Concordia Anglicae Nationis Monachorum Sanctimonialiumque, again stressing women as well as men, and noting that the Easter dramas are performed as a pedagogic crutch for those who are unlettered, and the Winchester Troper, A.D. 979, giving the music, the Gregorian chant, to which the Latin words of the plays are sung. Thus we have for Winchester visual illustrations, written words, and musical notations concerning these plays. Moreover, the exquisite style of these illuminations, which are far more sophisticated than those of Fleury, will be replicated in those for the twelfth-century Comedies of Terence, known to have been at St. Albans in the thirteenth century, was given by the abbot to book-loving Richard of Bury, later Bishop of Durham, and is now at the Bodleian. That manuscript is noted by art historians to be in the Winchester manner. These illuminations climax a splendid series of manuscript illuminations, such as those to be found in the Vatican, in Paris and elsewhere They will not be surpassed until the series of illuminations carried out for the 1408 Terence des ducs, in the collection of the dauphin, Louis duc de Guyenne, who died at eighteen, the manuscript then going to Jean duc de Berry, and two other manuscripts, one of these owned by Jean de Berry from which the Terence des ducs was initially copied, the other also copied from the Berry manuscript, in France. Most manuscript illuminations present the characters of the slaves with their grotesque masks, while the Terence des ducs cluster of manuscripts humanize them.
It is of interest that the liturgical dramas were actually performed while the Terentian plays were only considered then to have been mimed by actors with the poet singing their text from a pulpit structure - as we see in Pietro Alighieri's commentary to his father's Commedia and as we see in the exquisite Terence des ducs and its copy's frontispieces. In conclusion to this section of my paper I should like to note that the monk, likely an oblate, acting Mary Magdalen is directed in the liturgical dramas to carry a pyx and that St. Albans in the twelfth century possessed a most beautiful ivory pyx sculpted with centaurs.
II. TERENCE AT COURT
In this section of this paper I will discuss the secularization of Terence, his intrusion into the laity, for instance in the Florentine Republic and in the French and English Monarchies. Education had been largely confined to the monasteries in the earlier Middle Ages. But notaries and other legal and medical professional people had always kept classical learning alive, fathers, for instance, teaching their sons. In this way we find Brunetto Latino's notary father teaching his son - who in turn taught his pseudo-son, Dante Alighieri. The Latino syllabus was Aristotle and Cicero, rather than Terence and Virgil. But it is clear that Dante was acquainted with the latter two authors. His son Pietro Alighieri, in turn, in his commentary to his father's poem states that it was called the Commedia after Terence's Comedies, and he gives a most interesting discussion of the way in which the Middle Ages believed Terence's plays were performed:
Libri titulus est: Comoedia Dantis Allegherii: et quare sic vocetur, adverte. Antiquitus in theatro, quod erat area semicircularis, et in ejus medio erat domuncula, quae scena dicebatur, in qua erat pulpitum, et super id ascendebat poeta ut cantor, et sua carmina ut cantiones recitabat, extra vero erant mimi joculatores, carminum pronuntiationem gestu corporis effigiantes per adaptionem ad quem libet, ex cujus persona ipse poeta loquebatur . . . et si tale pulpitum seu domunculam, ascendebat poeta, qui de more villico caneret, talis cantus dicebantur comoedia . . . . Item quod poeta in comoedia debet loqui remisse et non alte, ut Terentius in suis comoediis fecit . . . .In turn, Chaucer knew of these plays, likely through the filter of Boccaccio, who copied out all of Terence's plays and all of another African writer, Apuleius, and from these classical texts created his Renaissance ones. Those two Boccaccio manuscripts are today housed in the Laurentian Library of the Medicis in Florence, bound in red kermes leather, bossed with brass, and chained, according to Michelangelo's design. Now Troilus and Criseyde, with its splendid frontispiece in the Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, frontispiece, purports the text to be a work read to King Richard II for his edification; while the Canterbury Tales appears to be for both the nobility and of the people. Similarly the exquisite Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry shows not only nobles but also peasants, ennobling them, and the magnificent but more provincial Luttrell Psalter, showing its rustics, does so in the archaic grotesque manner as had earlier Terence manuscripts shown the mocking masks of slaves. The presence of Terence manuscripts in both countries appears to have spilled over into religious books for the privileged laity, and to have placed in them an attempted consciousness-raising concerning their laborers. Similarly would Shakespeare's plays, in turn influenced by Terence, be both for the monarchs, Elizabeth I and James I, and their courtiers, and for the groundlings of the Globe, and present in their casts royalty, nobility and rustics.
[The title of the book is the Comedy of Dante Alighieri: and that is as if to say, heed. In antiquity in the theatre was a semicircular area in which was a pulpit, into which climbed the poet or the cantor, in order to recite his song or sing it, outside of which where miming actors, who, as the song was pronounced, adapted the gestures of their bodies to it at will, according to the person concerning whom the poet was speaking . . . and into such a pulpit or little edifice the poet ascended from which he sang of common things, therefore such a song was said to be a comedy . . . Thus the poet in comedy ought to speak of low things and not high, as Terence in his comedies did.]
Contemporaneous with the exquisite Terence des ducs and its copies written for the noblest children in France were the plays of the Wakefield Master in the manuscript of the Towneley Plays, written by a learned cleric with access to Terence and Virgil, but whose players and whose audience were of Yorkshire shepherds and Yorkshire weavers, women and men under economic oppression from the Cistercian land enclosuring, the plays speaking out against that oppression. The Wakefield Master's shepherds and ploughman question their status quo by the privileged classes and, in the case of Mak, even daringly mock and imitate it. When Sir William Empson, the British Marxist critic, included a discussion of the Wakefield Master's quality of the world-upside-down and the double plot in Some Versions of Pastoral he was responding more truly than he knew to the liberationist aspect to the text, that aspect of Terence Christianized and rendered consonant with the Gospels. The same messages by all these writers were efficacious both for the governors and the governed, whether in a Republic, an Empire or a Monarchy, whether in Rome, in France or in England. That message, we remember, was originally written by an African freed slave.
Terence is essentially timeless and as universal as his own line, "Homo sum: humani a me nichil alienum puto." One finds Terence's Comedies in a Vatican manuscript of the fourth or fifth century, the Codex Bembinus, written out in exquisite rustic capitals. One finds Terence written out in rich Carolingian manuscripts. Some of these Carolingian manuscripts are then still being read and are annotated by Renaissance schoolboys. One finds sturdy Romanesque texts of Terence. One finds exquisite Gothic manuscripts of Terence. And one finds Humanist manuscripts of Terence. Each era attempts to revert to an earlier, more antique, style, for instance in using rustic capitals for play titles and in ending the manuscript or each play with "FELICITER" in such capitals after the line "Vos valete et plaudite". The magnificent Terence des ducs and its copies will in turn influence early woodblock illustrated editions of the plays printed in Lyons and elsewhere. These books were placed in the hands of schoolboys who often inscribed their names, drew childish sketches and wrote doggerel on the end papers. Some of these books are crude, some are perfection itself.
We know that the Terence des ducs cluster were created for the royal French Dukes. It is clear that these manuscripts were commissioned to teach nobles humanity, alongside of Latinity, and that that humanity is delineated within its pages with vivacity and dignity, unlike the earlier grotesque masks of the Carolingian tradition. The Terence des ducs and its associated manuscripts are works fashioned later than Dante's and Chaucer's uses of Terence in the Commedia and the Canterbury Tales, yet all these texts share traits in common, the polysemous and polyphonic dialogues throughout Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, the dramatis personae of the General Prologue and their articulation upon the road to Canterbury, and more. The frontispieces to the Terence des ducs manuscript and its companions, for instance, are not dissimilar to that for the Corpus Christi College Troilus and Criseyde. They replicate exactly what Pietro Alighieri describes concerning the poet and cantor and the acting mimes. Then they present each scene in turn, now without the grotesque masks and gestures of earlier manuscripts but instead showing all the characters with full humanity and dignity. We are here at a watershed concerning the reception of Terence.
Let us end with two printed editions of Terence. One is by Madame Anne Dacier, a scholar's daughter and herself a scholar in her own right, who, like Christine de Pizan, had the run of the King of France's library which contained magnificent Carolingian, Romanesque, Gothic and Humanist manuscripts of Terence. She edited these manuscripts in the Delphine series designed to educate the Dauphin, the son of the King of France. That edition gave Madame Dacier the same opportunity as a scholar as had had Terence as a playwright to speak to an audience as sovereign body, whether that body be a republic or a king, concerning the need and obligation to exercise humanity. Betty Radice, translator as well of the Letters of Abelard and Heloise, of Livy, Pliny and Erasmus, was to follow in Madame Dacier's footsteps, translating Terence into English for the series of Penguin Classics which she edited, which are designed for Virginia Woolf's "Common Readers" and their pocketbooks.
Similarly, Richard Bentley, however much he might have been hated by his contemporaries, edited the Comedies of Terence for the Prince of Wales, thereby teaching the future King of England how to have compassion for his subjects. The University of Colorado's Special Collections owns a fine exemplar of this edition. It gives both Terence and Aesop and prefaces these works with engravings concerning the texts into which are also placed portraits of the young Prince. We see in these translations a desire on the part of commoners to teach royalty compassion, a desire on the part of women for scholarly equality with men, a desire on the part of editors and booksellers for universal literacy and humanity.
Thus Terence's plays have about them a meta-drama, a timeless paideia, whose personae are as if centaurs and virgins, slaves and kings and their princely charges and sons, grammar schoolboys and oblates, novice masters and bluestocking women scholars, groundlings and graduate students, dialoguing across boundaries of class, race, gender, speaking from the margins to the center, joining ends to beginnings. We might remember, too, that in the classical world, centaurs were the pedagogues of heroes, their lesson, that the body and soul, lust and reason, are conjoined. Let me end with an aphorism in a fine Florentine Humanist Terence, Comedies, manuscript: "Quid est comedia, comedia est imitatio vite, speculum consuetudinis, et imago veritatis.""What is comedy but the imitation of life, the mirror of custom and the image of truth."
1I wish to acknowledge
the assistance of Gerard Farrell, O.S.B., Chant Master, in the
University Chapel productions of four liturgical dramas from
manuscript, which we staged from the Fleury capitals and Terence
second, participation through the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities
with Lucy Walker, Director, Eden Theatrical Workshop, Denver, at her
of Terence's Adelphoi and Phormio; then, support for research
Terence manuscripts in Europe from the Graduate School, University of
Boulder; lastly, the support for the conference, On Giants' Shoulders,
at which this paper was read, given by Edwin Mellen Press.
2Terence, The Comedies, trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976); trans. John Sargeaunt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), Loeb Classics 22, 2 vols; Augustine, The City of God, trans. William McAllen Green, etc. (Harvard University Press, 1965), Loeb Classics, 7 vols.
3Plato, The Republic, IX, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), p. 409, spoke of the image of the soul as created by the artist like the composite creations of ancient mythology, such as the Chimera, in which two or more different natures coexist (lion, man), some of the animals being tame, some wild, metamorphosing at will. See also, X, p. 429. For Centaurs, half men, half horse, see Odyssey, XXI 295-303; Parthenon and Olympia Temple sculptures of Centauromachia; for satyr plays and their iconography, see bibliography compiled by E.W. Handley and Frank Brommer, Satyrspiele (Berlin, 1959), Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (Oxford, 1968); Dana F. Sutton, The Greek Satyr Play (Meisenheim: Anton Hain, 1980); Lear's hermaphroditic conflation of male Centaurs with female Sirens and Sphinxs: "Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above," IV.vi.l23-4. That symbolic world of half men, half goats, or half men and half horses, of satyrs and centaurs, as well as chimaera such as the Sphinx, part woman, part lion, part eagle, and the Gorgon with serpents for hair who turns men to stone, were ways through which Greeks coded messages concerning what they feared.
4Helen Waddell, The Desert Fathers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), pp. 26-39.
5John Beckwith, Ivory Carvings in Early Medieval England (London: Harvey Miller and Metcalf, 1974), p. 74, plates 124-126. See Odyssey XIX.560-565; Aeneid VI.893-900.
6Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, trans. as On Christian Doctrine, by D.W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 75. Peter the Venerable is still to be found using that image when writing to Heloise concerning Abelard's death, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 278. Abelard, in Historia calamitatum, quoted Jerome, in Adversos Jovinianum, p. 89: "The senses are like windows through which the vices gain entry into the soul. The capital and citadel of the spirit cannot be taken except by a hostile army entering through the gates. If anyone takes pleasure in the circus and athletic contests, an actor's pantomime or a woman's beauty, the splendour of jewels and garments of anything of that sort, the liberty of his soul is captured through the window of the eye, and the word of the prophet is fulfilled: `Death has climbed in through out windows' [Jeremiah 12.21]. So when the marshalled forces of distraction have marched through these gates into the citadel of the soul, where will its liberty be and its fortitude? Where will be its thoughts of God? Especially when sensibility pictures for itself pleasures of the past and by recalling its vices compels the soul to take part in them and, as it were, to practise what it does not actually do. These are the considerations which have led many philosophers to leave crowded cities and the gardens outside them, where they find that water meadows and leafy trees, twittering of birds, reflections in spring waters and murmuring brooks are so many snares for eyes and ear; they fear that amidst all this abundance of riches the strength of the soul will weaken and its purity be soiled. No good comes from looking often on what may one day seduce you, and in exposing yourself to the temptation of what you find it difficult to do without. Indeed, the Pythagoreans used to shun this kind of contact and lived in solitude in the desert. Plato himself was a wealthy man (and his couch was trampled on by Diogenes with muddy feet), yet in order to give all his time to philosophy he chose to set up his Academy some way from the city on a site which was unhealthy as well as deserted, so that the perpetual preoccupations of sickness would break the assaults of lust, and his pupils would know no pleasure but what they had from their studies."
7In the Areopagitica, arguing in the House of Commons against the Puritans' censoring of books by means of the Scriptures themselves, though including as well the other African's writings, Apuelius' tale of Psyche sorting out seeds and grains.
8Acts of the Apostles, 17.23-31.
9G. Baldwin Brown, The Arts in Early England: The Ruthwell and Bewcastle Crosses (London: Murray, 1921), 5.224-226,244: Julia Bolton Holloway, "Crosses and Boxes: Latin and Vernacular," in Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Julia Bolton Holloway, Joan Bechtold and Constance Wright (New York: Peter Lang, 1980), pp. 69-70.
10Waddell, pp. 172-201.
11Augustine, Confessions, trans. V.E. Watts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), I.i, p. 36; City of God, see above; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. V.E. Watts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), I.i, p. 36 (it is of importance that Boethius, like Terence, conveyed to Latin Christianity anti-elitism, see his III.vi, pp. 89-90; Pierre Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophie dans la tradition litteraire (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1967), gives manuscript illuminations through time of the text, admirably showing this scene.
12Such as Homer discoursing upon Centaurs and Lapiths, Odyssey XXI.295-303.
13Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973); Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966-71); Le seminaire de Jacques Lacan (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
14Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
15The Rule of St. Benedict, ed. and trans. Abbot Justin McCann (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press), Chapters 47,48, pp. 108-113.
16The manuscripts themselves and also Suetonius gave the life of Terence, noting that he was dark, fuscus, and very handsome, was a freed slave of the Scipio's circle, many accounts adding that he died young, after writing six plays, perhaps by being shipwrecked beween Italy and Greece, and, in some accounts, that he died and was buried in Arcadia, "in Arcadia moritur" (London, British Library, Burney 262, fol. 1v).
17C.L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959, 1972) provides an excellent account of such comedy, in Shakespeare's instance.
18Domenico Comparetti, Virgilio nel Medio Evo (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1955), 2 vols; John Webster Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer: Studies in Virgilian Legends (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934). We recall that it is in the medieval world of the monastery that the name of Publius Vergilius Maro undergoes a metamorphosis to Virgil, in reference to the virga of the magician and necromancer, which the Middle Ages considered Virgil to be and which he is in Dante's Commedia, and the pedagogue, as boys in this period and the Renaissance were taught their Latin by means of the birch rod, the virga, with which they were soundly beaten when they erred. For Augustine and for countless generations after him, Virgil was quite literally "Latin with Tears." But Terence, with his compassion, laughter and humanity was their "Latin with Laughter." For arguments concerning the therapeutic quality of such opposing play to reality, see Victor Turner, "Dramatic Ritual/Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology," The Kenyon Review, New Series, 1 (1979), 80-93; Maria Corti, "Models and Antimodels in Medieval Culture," New Literary History, 10 (1979), 339-366; Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in Myth, Symbol and Culture, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 1-37.
19Paul Mayvaert, "The Medieval Monastic Claustrum," Gesta, 12 (1973), 53-59; Letters of Abelard and Heloise, pp. 214-215, discuss similar study in the convent.
20The types or characters listed in the Terentian dramatis personae are: "Meretrix; Leno; Parasitus; Eunuchus; Advocatus; Servus; Nutrix; Obstetrix; Lorarius; Libertus; Matrona; Virgo; Miles; Senex; Adulescens."
21Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 1-58,437-474; G. Baldwin Brown, VI.II,263, plate XC, Nunburnholme Cross Shaft, Yorkshire; see also the remarks later in this paper made by Sir William Empson on the Wakefield Master's Second Shepherd's Play and its parody with Mak and Gill and their sheep child to that of the Virgin and Child.
22St. Bernard of Clairvaux, "Apologia ad Guillelmum Abbatem," XII.29, Opere, ed. Jean Leclercq and H.M. Rochais, O.S.B. (Rome, 1963), 3.106.
23Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1971), I, plate 575, cites capital as Raising of Lazarus; Georges Chenesseau, L'Abbaye de Fleury a Saint Benoit-sur-Loire (Paris: Van Oest, 1931), plate 25, demonstrates that capital was given its present position, among miracles of St. Benedict, as a result of restoration work in the Abbey and that it had belonged originally with the capital of the Three (now broken and therefore only Two) Maries at the Tomb.
24Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale lat. 7900.
25Cited in Marco Mostert, The Political Theology of Abbo of Fleury: A Study of the Ideas about Society and Law of the Tenth-Century Monastic Reform Movement (Hilversum: Verloren Publishers, 1987), pp. 27-28.
26Pp. 50-51,61. He speaks of Terence as "iuxta illud Comici."
27Mostert, pp. 88-89; Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980).
28Edmond de Coussemaker, Drames liturgiques du Moyen Age (Rennes: Vatar, 1860); Sacre rappresentazione nel manoscritto 201 della Bibliotheque municipale di Orleans, ed. Giampiero Tintori and Rafaello Monterosso (Cremona: Athenaeum Cremonense, 1958).
29Charles W. Jones, St. Nicholas of Myra, Bari and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978).
30Fletcher Collins, Jr., Production of Church Music-Drama (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1972), p. 161.
31See Professor John Hoag's remarks in this volume concerning the scena frons and the use of curtains in architectural settings in this period. When we produced the Orleans 201 Officium Peregrinorum at Princeton University we made use of the Fleury Terence illuminations of such hiding and emerging through curtains.
32Solange Corbin, "Le MS 201 d'Orleans: Drames liturgiques dit de Fleury" Romania, 74 (1953), 1-43, first challenged the Fleury provenance; her student, Diane Marie Dolan, "The Notation of Orleans Bibliotheque Municipale, MS 201," Studi Anselmiana, 85 (1982), 279-288, believes it may be English; see also Leif Sltsjoe, "Quelques reflexions sur la naissance du theatre religieux," in Actes et Colloques: Xe Congres International de Linguistique et Philologie romanes, ed. Georges Straka (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1965), 2.667-675.
33The Abbot of Fleury obtained the Winchcombe Sacramentary, now Orleans 127: D.A. Bullough, "The Continental Background of the Reform," Tenth-Century Studies (London: Phillmore, 1975), pp. 20-36.
34They are also found in other monastic contexts, in Bibles, for which see Otto Pacht, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Pacht and Francis Wormald, The St. Albans Psalter (London: Warburg Institute, 1960); and in cloister sculpture, for instance, at Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain (cloister reliefs), at Norwich Cathedral in England (roof bosses N2,N3).
35George Warner, Benedictional of St. Aethelwold (London: Roxburgh Club, 1910).
36Regularis Concordiae Anglicae Nationis Monachorum Sanctimonialiumque, ed. Thomas Symons (London: Nelson, 1953).
37Now Oxford, Bodleian Library MS 775.
38Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. F.2.13=27603; discussed in Otto Pacht and Alexander, Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 3.16.
39See William Oakeshott, The Two Winchester Bibles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). Albinia de la Mare kindly sent me her complete description of the manuscript she wrote for the 1979 exhibition, "Tresors des Abbayes Normandes" at Rouen and Caen.
40Leslie Webber Jones and C.R. Morey, The Miniatures of the Manuscripts of Terence Prior to the Thirteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton Unviersity press, 1913); Millard Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and their Contemporaries (New York: George Braziler, 1974).
41Paris, Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal 664; Bibliotheque Nationale, 7907; lat. 8193; discussed in Henry Martin, Terence des ducs (Paris: Plon, 1908); Meiss, pp. 41-54.
42Meiss, p. 50.
43Beckwith, p. 74, plates 124-126; W.O. Hassall, Major Treasures in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1978), notes, p. 5, that a Chronicle of St. Albans told of an ancient manuscript being discovered in the ruins of Verulamium was destroyed by the monks for being pagan.
44Armando Petrucchi, Notarii: Documenti per la storia del Notariato italiano (Milan: Guiffre, 1958), p. 17.
45Pietro Alighieri, Commentarium super Dantis Comoediam, ed. Lord Vernon (Florence, 1845) and ed. Vedova and Silvotti, pp. 8- 9; see also Terence, Comedies, manuscript, Laurenziana 38.18, fol. 140v, similarly discussing the staging of the plays by mimes while they are being read out from the pulpit in the theatre.
46Boccaccian holograph manuscripts: Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana 38.17, Terence, Comedies; 54.32, Apuleius. John N. Grant, Studies in the Textual Tradition of Terence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), fails to note these manuscripts or several others (including early illuminated Terences which are most ably discussed by Henry Martin), while frequently listing as Terence manuscripts those which are not. A Strozzi manuscript, Biblioteca Nazionale II.IV.333 gives a Terence Comedies written, 1393, fols. 102ff, while fols. 60-61, instructions as to how one can live in time of pestilence. See Vittore Branca, Boccaccio Medievale (Florence: Sansoni, 1956, 1970); Christian Bec, Les marchands ecrivains: affaires et humanisme a Florence, 1375-1434 (Paris: Mouton, 1967), for mercantile milieu of classical texts.
47The Wakefield Master was composing updated Terence dramas for his local audience - in an area where manuscripts of Terence were available, J.W. Robinson, Studies in Fifteenth-Century Stagecraft (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute, 1991), noting copies of Terence at Rotherham and at York in Yorkshire during this period, p. 212. The Wakefield Master's writing is roughly contemporary with the Terence des Ducs but his audience is by no means similar. We can glimpse at the learning of the Wakefield Master in his Prima Pagina Pastorum where the Primus Pastor says: Virgill in his poetrie: sayde in his verse, Even thus by gramere: as I shall reherse; "Iam nova progenies celo demittitur alto, Iam redit virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna." (386-388)
48"Double Plots," in Some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk: Conn.: New Directions, 1960, p. 26. That both Marxist critics, Empson and Finley, became Sir William and Sir Moses, is, in turn, one of those jokes of the world-upside-down, where the power elite had the wit to subvert and corrupt with privilege the pro- proletariat. Witness the scene in Winter's Tale where Perdita's foster family become overnight "gentlemen born."
49Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, Vatican lat. 3226. Annotated, Angelo Poliziano. A palimpsest fragment of St. Gall is probably older than Bembinus.
50Lyon: Jean Trechsel, 1493, then dowry of his daughter and reprinted in Paris: Guillaume de Bossozel, 1539, Henry Martin, p. 20; reproduced, Arthur M. Hind, An Introduction to the History of Woodcut (New York: Dover, 1963), 2.610, fig. 538.
51British Library, Harley 2525; Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale II.IV.6; II.IX.127, from Prato; Riccardian 616, copied and owned by a barber, Francesco di Giovanni Sutoris, 1463, has schoolboy scribbles on flyleaves and "Arma viumque cano . . . " (discussed, Umberto Bucchioni, Terenzio nel Rinascimento (Saggio) [Rocca S. Casciano, 1911], p. 500; Riccardiana 532; Laurenziana 38.33; Lorenzo de Medici proudly says he copied out his Terence Comedies in his own hand, Laurenziana 38.24; Vaticana, Pal. Lat. 1622, Rimini manuscript; Ottob. lat. 1468; Barb. lat. 133, from Genoa.
52Vatican, Vat. lat. 3638, of the early 9th century, written and illuminated by Hrodgar and Adelricus of Corbie, actually shows some slaves as dark, Ethiopissa as black, as will also the Terence des Ducs. See Mary Hatch Marshall, "Boethius's Definition of Persona and Medieval Understanding of the Roman Theater," Speculum, 26 (1950), 471.
53Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Problems of Dosteivsky's Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1973).
54Fern Farnham, Madame Dacier: Scholar and Humanist (Monterey, 1980); Enrica Malcovati, Madame Dacier: una gentildonna filologa del gran secolo (Florence: Sansoni, 1952).
55[Madame Dacier.] Les Comedies de Terence traduits en Francois, Avec des Remarques, par Madame D***. III Tomes. Paris, 1688.
56Sir William Empson, "Milton and Bentley," in Some Versions of Pastoral, pp. 141-183, esp. 141.
57P. Terentii Afri. Comoediae recensuit Notasque suas et Gabrielis Faerni addidit Richardus Bentleius. Amsterdam, 1727.
58See Plato, Symposium, where Alcibiades compares Socrates, his teacher, to Silenus, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmonsdworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 100,102,110.
59London, British Library MS Harley 2526, formerly, Randulphi de Ricasoli, Florence.
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