Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom
200
Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom
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Overview
Saint Augustine famously “wept for Dido, who killed herself by the sword,” and many later medieval schoolboys were taught to respond in similarly emotional ways to the pain of female characters in Virgil’s Aeneid and other classical texts. In Weeping for Dido, Marjorie Curry Woods takes readers into the medieval classroom, where boys identified with Dido, where teachers turned an unfinished classical poem into a bildungsroman about young Achilles, and where students not only studied but performed classical works.
Woods opens the classroom door by examining teachers’ notes and marginal commentary in manuscripts of the Aeneid and two short verse narratives: the Achilleid of Statius and the Ilias latina, a Latin epitome of Homer’s Iliad. She focuses on interlinear glosses—individual words and short phrases written above lines of text that elucidate grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, but that also indicate how students engaged with the feelings and motivations of characters. Interlinear and marginal glosses, which were the foundation of the medieval classroom study of classical literature, reveal that in learning the Aeneid, boys studied and empathized with the feelings of female characters; that the unfinished Achilleid was restructured into a complete narrative showing young Achilles mirroring his mentors, including his mother, Thetis; and that the Ilias latina offered boys a condensed version of the Iliad focusing on the deaths of young men. Manuscript evidence even indicates how specific passages could be performed.
The result is a groundbreaking study that provides a surprising new picture of medieval education and writes a new chapter in the reception history of classical literature.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691188744 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/05/2019 |
| Series: | E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 51 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Memory, Emotion, and the Death of a Queen
Teaching the Aeneid
I was forced to memorise the wanderings of Aeneas — whoever he was ... and to weep for the death of Dido, who killed herself for love. ... I wept for Dido, slain as she sought by the sword an end to her woe.
— St. Augustine, Confessions
The schoolboy Augustine's dismissive reaction to Virgil's hero Aeneas in this passage is in stark contrast to his obsessive boyhood identification with Dido and her emotional pain. In a moving biography of the Bishop of Hippo, who lived from 354 to 430 CE, Serge Lancel tells us that Augustine as a "twelve-year-old ... loved Latin literature passionately, especially Virgil, the Virgil of the Aeneid, which he knew by heart." We are reminded that this schoolboy, later saint and Father of the Church, was raised on pagan literature, and that before his conversion he was an extremely successful teacher of Latin rhetoric. The famous description of his childhood and education in the Confessions is full of memorable details like hating Greek and stealing pears, but it also describes the beginning of his lifelong obsession with Virgil, the subject of more than one monograph. Peter Brown describes Augustine's education as "surprisingly meagre: he would have read far fewer classical authors than a modern schoolboy. Vergil, Cicero, Sallust and Terence were the only authors studied in detail. It was exclusively literary." Yet the depth of this knowledge was profound and based on a complete internalizing of these texts. Brown continues, "A friend of Augustine's knew all Vergil and much of Cicero by heart." In fact, Augustine believed that this friend could recite the works of the two authors both backward and forward.
Yet while Augustine calls his own memorizing of Aeneas's wanderings a forced process (cogebar), he appears to remember Dido effortlessly, indeed almost against his will, and he associates that memory with strong emotions, particularly his reaction to her death. Augustine's rhetorically powerful sequence of words associated with weeping and death fixes his own emotional reaction in our minds, as Dido became fixed in his. Furthermore, Augustine tells us that he craved this experience: he would weep when kept from the very texts that would make him weep. He chastises himself: "Nothing could be more pitiful than a pitiable creature who does not see to pity himself, and weeps for the death that Dido suffered through love of Aeneas and not for the death he suffers himself through not loving You, O God." This emphasis on pity and the pitiful (Augustine's Latin here is suffused with cognates of miserere) was a consistent aspect of this classroom experience.
Who is this figure whom Augustine remembers so vividly? Dido enters the Aeneid in Book 1, when the Trojans, who have escaped shipwreck and Juno's anger (itself the subject of Augustine's school exercise discussed in Chapter 3), arrive on the shores of Africa. There Dido is queen, herself a refugee from Phoenicia and, as a gloss tells us, {driven to Libya} by her tragic past. Dido's story, told in some detail by Venus to Aeneas before he sees her, is often summarized attentively in the margins of manuscripts, as if providing notes to a teacher telling the story to students: Dido's greedy brother, Pygmalion, the King of Tyre, murdered her much-loved and very wealthy husband, Sychaeus, whose ghost appeared to her and told her to flee her homeland with his hidden treasure.
Dido is now regal, gracious, and welcoming, indeed the perfect ruler, to the Trojans who have arrived at her court fearing that their leader Aeneas is dead. In passages highlighted in a number of manuscripts, she exchanges formal speeches with Ilioneus, their spokesman.
Suddenly, Aeneas appears before her, "Gleaming in the clear light, his face and shoulders / Like a god's" (claraque in luce refulsit / os umerosque deo similis [Aen. 1.588–89; Lombardo 1.720–21]), thanks to help from his mother, Venus. While an Italian manuscript of the early fifteenth century suggests that deo similis (literally, "like a god") could mean {as if a god in conduct}, it is Aeneas's appearance and history that have the greatest effect on Dido, whose reaction to him reflects the beginning of her transformation from independent queen to lover. A number of manuscripts identify her first words to Aeneas, where she flatters and reassures him with her knowledge of his background and sad history, as a captatio benevolentiae, the rhetorical term from letter-writing manuals for capturing the goodwill of the listener (although Aeneas himself is technically the supplicant). The manuscript whose glosses are quoted in the Introduction, for example, identifies this speech in the margin as {the words of Dido to Aeneas in capturing his good will}, having said just above that she {is gripped with admiration} for him. In the fifteenth-century manuscript of the Aeneid in Munich glossed by the famous humanist and bibliophile Hartmann Schedel (Clm 261), too, it is Dido who {is capturing good will}. Another widely shared comment occurs in three German copies, two from the twelfth century (BL Add. 21910 and Clm 21562) as well as Schedel's much later manuscript. In these manuscripts her questioning of Aeneas about his past misfortunes is described as {admiring rather than interrogating}. A gloss in Clm 21562 explains, {Dido knows what has happened from what the Trojan [Ilioneus] recounted}. Dido ends her speech by emphasizing her shared pain as an exile and her public acceptance of Aeneas thereafter. In Image 1.1, these lines in a heavily glossed, fifteenth-century northern manuscript are highlighted with a framing squiggle down the bottom left margin — just a small part of the barrage of information offered on this manuscript page (ÖNB Cod. 3104, fol. 49r). Here in Stanley Lombardo's translation are the highlighted lines:
"My fortune too has long been adverse,
But at last has allowed me to rest in this land.
My own acquaintance with suffering Has taught me to aid others in need."
Thus Dido, and as she led Aeneas into her palace She proclaimed sacrifices in his honor In all the temples.
(Aen. 1.628–32; Lombardo 1.768–74)
Taking advantage of Dido's obvious attraction to Aeneas, his mother, Venus, uses her other son, Cupid, to make Dido fall obsessively and tragically in love with the Trojan leader. According to Schedel's manuscript, {Here he shows the effect of love, and what Dido herself did, led by a love of Aeneas sent by Cupid}. Asked by Dido to tell of his experiences, Aeneas relates in Books 2 and 3 the story of the downfall and burning of Troy, including the loss of his wife, Creusa, and the subsequent wanderings of the Trojans.
Dido's response, her love and final suicide, unfold in Book 4 with {pathos at the end, when the departure of Aeneas creates anguish}, as one of the twelfth-century German manuscripts puts it. According to a summary at the beginning of Book 4 in a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript (BL Add. 17404), {The fourth book ... contains the feelings (affectiones), that is the loves, of Dido, although in the end it has pathos and passions (passiones), for he narrates there how Dido kills herself. Hence the general theme of the whole book is the love of Dido and how she killed herself.}
Book 4 begins with a speech of Dido's in which she expresses her feelings about Aeneas to her sister, Anna. The queen sets forth both her attraction to Aeneas and her fears for the future should she enter into a union with him: she has taken a vow never to marry again. She is torn, although some manuscripts see her vacillation as a deliberate attempt to have her objections overridden, as in the same British Library manuscript (Add. 17404), where her speech is doubly identified as an Insinuation: {Insinuative discourse. A beautiful Introduction, an Insinuation}. In his discussion of this kind of introduction, or exordium, in the De inventione (widely known in the Middle Ages), Cicero notes that Insinuation (or the Subtle Approach) should be used when a scandal might be involved (Inv. 1.23), as would be the case with Dido. From the point of view of this commentator, Dido is successful, for Anna's response is glossed in the margin as {The answer of her sister Anna to Dido that she not fight love but rather follow through}. Dido and Aeneas become lovers while seeking shelter in a cave during a savage storm arranged by Juno and Venus. There, according to the summary at the beginning of Book 4 in this manuscript, {Aeneas had carnal knowledge of her, and Rumor (Fama) of this was made public}. The much-celebrated personification of Fama spreads knowledge of the continuing affair to Dido's subjects and incites the enmity of envious neighboring rulers, who would like to be in Aeneas's place — literally.
But then Aeneas receives a blunt reminder from the gods that he must continue on his mission to found another Troy in Italy. When Dido discovers that Aeneas is leaving, she becomes increasingly frantic and engages in a sequence of powerful speeches.
Finally she comes to tragic terms with his departure. As Aeneas is sailing away, Dido constructs a pyre topped with the bedding on which they have slept and the possessions he has left behind — the material remains of their life together. The queen tells Anna that the conflagration will enable her (with a witch's help) to move on from the relationship. Instead, she climbs on top of the pyre and {after most excellent words have been uttered, she kills herself with his sword}.
The illustration reproduced in Frontispiece 1 depicts an especially dramatic version of Dido's suicide in the famous Carmina Burana manuscript. It follows a series of laments based on the Trojan War (and Dido), several of which are discussed in Chapter 3. On the right of the top half of the illustration, Dido is throwing herself backward off the parapet of a castle, her braids and crown already falling into the pyre, while stabbing herself with a sword. The pattern of her flowing blood resembles that of the fire below. A colleague refers to this depiction of her as "Cirquedu-Soleil Dido," a phrase that captures some of the extravagant physicality of the scene.
The attraction of such a dramatic and doomed figure, even or perhaps especially to schoolboys, is not hard to understand. Augustine himself was probably around twelve years old when he was studying the Aeneid, and medieval students — for whom Latin was not a vernacular but an acquired, more difficult language as Greek was for Augustine — were at least this old and probably a little older when they encountered it. Although as an adult Augustine was guilt-ridden for having felt Dido's emotions more powerfully than his own, such immersion and luxuriating in the pain of literary characters allowed schoolboys to experience varieties of emotion not encouraged or even tolerated outside the classroom, and these created memories that could last a lifetime.
The allure of stories full of pathos, fantasy, danger, and death may be one of the most important aspects of the longevity and success of this aspect of the classical tradition, an attraction illustrated by the other parts of the Aeneid that Augustine liked most when he was in school, all found in Book 2: "the Wooden Horse with its armed men, and Troy on fire, and Creusa's ghost." Soldiers hiding in the Trojan Horse and the burning of Troy might be expected schoolboy interests no matter what period. Creusa, however, was another woman abandoned by Aeneas: his Trojan wife inadvertently left behind during the escape from Troy at the end of Book 2 of the Aeneid. She had been walking several paces behind her husband, who, in the iconic image of the flight from Troy, was carrying his father on his shoulders and leading his son by the hand. When Aeneas realizes that Creusa is not with them at the refugee camp whither the Trojans have fled, he returns to the burning city and frantically searches for her. Suddenly, her "sad ghost" appears to him (Aen. 2.772; Lombardo 2.912). The interlinear glosses in BL Add. 17404 can help us see how even just this phrase might help us understand classroom practice. One way to look at such glosses is as answers to possible questions: Why is the ghost sad? What is an image (simulacrum)? A shade (umbra)? Who is Creusa? The glosses on the phrase in this manuscript provide answers: "The sad {on account of death} image {figure} {is visible to me}, the shade {spirit} of Creusa {my wife} herself."
A completely different approach to interlinear glossing is taken in a thirteenth-century Italian manuscript in Berlin, SBB Ham. 678, where the fifteenth-century interlinear glosses focus relentlessly on interpersonal relationships. The cumulative, repetitive effect of the names in the glosses on the words of Creusa's ghost to Aeneas emphasizes the close bond of husband and wife now severed, to be replaced by a yet-unknown relationship in Aeneas's future:
"What good does it do {you}, {O Aeneas} my sweet husband To indulge {that is, to reach out} in such mad grief? These things {concerning me} {and others}
Do not happen without the will of the divine ones {that is, the gods}.
You may not take your Creüsa {that is, me, your wife} with you {***};
The Lord of Olympus does not allow it {namely that you bring me, Creusa, to that place}.
Long exile is yours {Aeneas}, plowing a vast stretch Of sea {that is, by furrows of ships}. Then you will come to Hesperia {that is, Italy}. ...
There {namely in Italy}, happy times {for you},
Kingship, and a royal wife {namely Lavinia, daughter of the King of Latium} {namely will be} yours.
Dry your tears {O Aeneas} for your beloved Creusa {once your wife}. ...
The Great Mother {Ceres or Cybele} keeps me {Creusa} on these shores.
Farewell {O Aeneas}, and keep well the shared {namely, your and my} love of our child {that is, Iulus}."
(Aen. 2.776–89; based on Lombardo, 2.915–33)
Then comes a wrenching scene of separation:
Creüsa spoke, and then left me there,
Weeping, with many things yet to say.
She vanished into thin air. Three times I tried to put my arms around her; three times Her wraith slipped through my hands,
Soft as a breeze like a vanishing dream.
(Aen. 2.790–94; Lombardo 2.934–39)
Classicists will recognize here the Homeric echoes of Odysseus's trying three times to embrace the shade of his mother, a reference noted among the very late glosses in an eleventh-century manuscript of the Aeneid in the Biblioteca Corsiniana (43 E 9): {From Book 11 of The Odyssey where he brings in the one wanting to embrace his mother}. In contrast, the glosses in the Berlin manuscript highlight the final painful separation of two who had been together. Since one of the glosses, {pectus rei / chest of the thing}, refers to the apparition as a thing, and since no gendered word occurs earlier in these lines, as an experiment I have substituted "it" for "she" in the following more literal translation of Virgil's lines interspersed with the Berlin glosses:
When it {namely Creusa} gave these words, with {me Aeneas} weeping,
Wanting to say many things, it vanished into thin air.
Three times {I was} trying to put my arms around the neck {namely Creusa's};
Three times {I} reached {toward the chest of the thing} in vain; the image {namely of Creusa} slipped through my hands {*** since he was catching only air}
Like {that is similar to} a soft breeze, most similar to a vanishing dream.
Schoolboys at liminal stages may have felt a particular attraction to the pain of abandonment, and not just Dido's or Creusa's, but also that of Aeneas himself, for it is he who is left behind in this last scene. Indeed, in another thirteenth-century Italian manuscript in the British Library, Harley 2744, a sketch of Aeneas's weeping profile (too light to be reproduced) has been attached to the first lines of her speech. It is squeezed between the text and the gloss that introduces it: {The words of Creusa wife of Aeneas to Aeneas, who nevertheless already had died} (fol. 61r). Below, the description of his reaching for her when she stops speaking is highlighted with a framing squiggle. While this manuscript contains only sporadic interlinear glossing, a number of small drawings in more than one style have been attached to emotional speeches or scenes. These usually but not always follow certain conventions: men in profile, heads only, women turned three quarters (see Image 2.4 in the next chapter). That such sketches brought added emotional emphasis is suggested by Anthony Grafton's description of a much later profile added to Guillaume Budé's printed copy of Plutarch's Life of Homer as "a slightly gloomy profile in the left margin — a visually as well as substantively memorable device — to make a statement about the text."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Images, xi,
Acknowledgments, xv,
Abbreviations, Sigla, and Rhetorical Terms, xix,
A Short Introduction, 1,
Chapter 1. Memory, Emotion, and the Death of a Queen: Teaching the Aeneid, 13,
Chapter 2. Troy Books for Boys: Glosses on the Achilleid and Ilias latina, 49,
Chapter 3. Boys Performing Women (and Men): The Classics and After, 104,
Works Cited, 153,
Index Locorum, 167,
Manuscript Index, 169,
General Index, 171,
What People are Saying About This
“Weeping for Dido is an important, groundbreaking book that shows that classical Latin texts were as foundational as biblical ones in medieval elementary classrooms and were copiously learned by boys throughout Europe, despite or indeed because of their ancient heroic content and frequent focus on women wronged by men. This book should appeal to a broad audience of scholars interested in oral-literate cultures, medieval and early modern education, the classical tradition, rhetoric, early humanism and Renaissance literature, and the history of the book.”—Mary Carruthers, New York University “Examining medieval manuscripts that have not been extensively studied by others, Marjorie Curry Woods, one of the leading authorities in the field, makes an important intervention in a number of areas: the study of the reception of canonical texts through commentaries, glosses, and marginalia; the history of education and of emotions; and the place of performance in a heavily textual culture. Weeping for Dido’s contributions to these subjects will ensure it a readership beyond medievalists and manuscript experts.”—Philip Hardie, University of Cambridge“Marjorie Curry Woods brings to life the experience of learning in the medieval classroom through her careful, imaginative interpretation of manuscript glosses and her analysis of schoolboys’ participation in the emotions of fictional female characters.”—Peter Mack, author of Rhetoric's Questions