Kiss My Relics: Hermaphroditic Fictions of the Middle Ages

By David Rollo

Conservative thinkers of the early Middle Ages conceived of sensual gratification as a demonic snare contrived to debase the higher faculties of humanity, and they identified pagan writing as one of the primary conduits of decadence. Two aspects of the pagan legacy were treated with particular distrust: fiction, conceived as a devious contrivance that falsified God’s order; and rhetorical opulence, viewed as a vain extravagance. Writing that offered these dangerous allurements came to be known as “hermaphroditic” and, by the later Middle Ages, to be equated with homosexuality.
 
At the margins of these developments, however, some authors began to validate fiction as a medium for truth and a source of legitimate enjoyment, while others began to explore and defend the pleasures of opulent rhetoric. Here David Rollo examines two such texts—Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose—arguing that their authors, in acknowledging the liberating potential of their irregular written orientations, brought about a nuanced reappraisal of homosexuality. Rollo concludes with a consideration of the influence of the latter on Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Sep 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9780226724607

Book preview

DAVID ROLLO is associate professor of English, with a joint appointment in the Department of French and Italian, at the University of Southern California. He is the author of two books, most recently of Glamorous Sorcery: Magic and Literacy in the High Middle Ages.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2011 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2011.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72461-4 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-72461-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72460-7 (e-book)

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the University of Southern California toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rollo, David.

Kiss My Relics : Hermaphroditic Fictions of the Middle Ages / David Rollo.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72461-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-72461-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Paraphilias in literature. 2. Intersexuality in literature. 3. Homosexuality in literature. 4. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. 5. Latin literature, Medieval and modern—History and criticism. 6. Martianus Capella. De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. 7. William, of Malmesbury, ca. 1090–1143. De gestis regum Anglorum. 8. Guillaume, de Lorris, fl. 1230. Roman de la rose. 9. Jean, de Meun, d. 1305?—Criticism and interpretation. 10. Alanus, de Insulis, d. 1202. De planctu naturae. I. Title.

PN682 .S38R65 2011

870.9—dc22

2011010524

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Kiss My Relics

HERMAPHRODITIC FICTIONS OF THE MIDDLE AGES

David Rollo

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART 1. Martianus Capella, Remigius of Auxerre, William of Malmesbury

1.  Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii: A Brother to Hermaphroditus

2.  Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii; Remigius of Auxerre, Commentum in Martianum Capellam: Venus Rediviva

3.  William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum: Empowering Remnants of Ancient Rome

PART 2. Alain de Lille: De planctu Naturae

4.  Alain de Lille, De planctu Naturae: The Orthography of Venus

5.  Alain de Lille, De planctu Naturae: The Vulgar Whorehouses of the Earth

6.  Alain de Lille, De planctu Naturae: Varied Colors of Venereal Discourse

PART 3. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun: Le Roman de la Rose

7.  Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose: The Garden of Unhallowed Delights

8.  Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose: Unrefined Reason

9.  Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose: Bele a coilles

Conclusion: Never Mind the Relics

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To complete this project required several unanticipated years in near-anchoretic academic isolation, during which I was, for the most part, engaged in the daunting but necessary task of negotiating the obscurities of Martianus Capella (and, as a consequence of doing so, periodically left wondering whether I was as crazed as the material I was working on). Life as a virtual recluse notwithstanding, I was fortunate (and just publicly visible) enough during that time to benefit from the welcome help, advice and inspiration of a number of people. They are Chris Baswell, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Bill Burgwinkle, Rita Copeland, John Ganim, Simon Gaunt, Anna Green, Noah Guynn, David Hult, Sylvia Huot, Steve Kruger, Don Maddox, John Mitchell, Sally Spence, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Bonnie Wheeler. I extend very special thanks to Anna, Bill, and Simon for their hospitality back in the UK, and to Sylvia for letting me read her then-unpublished Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets. Thanks are due also to my colleagues in medieval and early modern literature at the University of Southern California, especially Joe Dane, Moshe Lazar, and Bruce Smith.

Crucial throughout this process were the enthusiasm and insight of the students in my graduate seminars (particularly the classes of 2006 and 2010). With them, I was able to share some of the ideas laid forth in this study, and, to them, I owed timely confirmation of my sanity. I am grateful to the anonymous readers of the University of Chicago Press for their encouragement and helpful criticism, and to Randy Petilos, as supportive and patient an editor as anyone could ever hope for.

INTRODUCTION

One of the anecdotes that William of Malmesbury inserted into his Gesta regum Anglorum has become especially celebrated, though more for the permutations it underwent in later centuries than the treatment it received in its original historiographic context.¹ I shall call it The Statue and the Ring, and in broad outline its plot will already be known to anyone familiar with Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy or Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille. To paraphrase: Newly married, a young man in Christian Rome throws a party, and, after the feast, he and his guests go outside to exercise. As master of ceremonies, he is in charge of specifying the sport to be played and decides on pila, a ball game of some kind. Anxious not to damage his wedding ring, he puts it on the pointing finger of a bronze statue and proceeds to play single-handed against his friends. A short time after, exhausted, he takes a rest and goes to retrieve the ring. Yet, to his amazement, the finger of the statue, which only minutes before was pointing, is now clenched inwards to the palm, making the ring impossible to extricate. To avoid mockery, the bridegroom says nothing of the matter and allows the party to end.

Later, when everyone has left, the young man returns, but finds the situation has become even more bizarre, since the finger is back in its outstretched position and the ring has disappeared. At a loss, he gives up and goes home.² However:

Cumque hora cubandi venisset, seque juxta uxorem collocasset, sensit quiddam nebulosum et densum inter se et illam volutari, quod posset sentiri, nec posset videri. Hoc obstaculo ob amplexu prohibitus, vocem etiam audivit, Mecum concumbe, quia hodie me desponsasti: ego sum Venus, cujus digito apposuisti anulum; habeo illum, nec reddam. (Gesta regum Anglorum 2.205)

When it came time for bed, he lay down next to his wife, but sensed something nebulous and dense roll over between them, which could be felt but not seen. While this obstacle was getting in the way of his embraces, he heard a voice: Sleep with me, because today you made me your wife. I am Venus, and it was on my finger that you put the ring. I have it and will not give it back.

This uncanny performance is reproduced night after night, leading to a problem of some magnitude: much to the consternation of his spouse, the bridegroom cannot consummate his marriage, discovering his affections thwarted by the intruding presence of the pagan goddess.³

The Statue and the Ring is not only William’s figurative response to his own ambivalence toward the legacy of the Greco-Roman past. It is also representative of a more general anxiety that periodically manifested itself throughout the European Middle Ages. As a consequence of an education that lent authority to classical paradigms, medieval intellectuals came into contact with aesthetic and philosophical remnants of pagan culture that did not necessarily cohere with Christian belief. Some such thinkers, conservatively biased or timid in disposition, like the Roman bridegroom found the experience disquieting, and they wrote in order to admonish against pleasures they perceived to be snares of the devil. Others, confident in their faith or impatient of restraint, like William recognized their initial vulnerabilities, but only as a prelude to affirming their mature, lucid enjoyment of previously proscribed delights. And still others without demur embraced the metaphorical idols of the classical world.

This study is devoted to the writings of several such figures, each of whom used Venus as the patron deity of pleasures that devolved from reading, writing, or interpreting. Only one of the works addressed, the Roman de la Rose,⁴ is central to the modern canon. However, though for long unduly ignored, the text to which part 2 is dedicated, Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae,⁵ is now on the point of achieving the recognition it deserves, both for its engagement with contemporary concerns over sex, sin, and representation and for the influence it went on to bear on later authors such as Chaucer and Spencer.⁶ It is hoped that the present study will help further this process. Still peripheral to literary studies are the other three texts I consider, the early fifth-century Neo-Platonic De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii by Martianus Capella,⁷ Remigius of Auxerre’s ninth-century commentary on Martianus’ work, and William’s Gesta regum Anglorum. A wider critical acknowledgment of the first in particular is a matter of some urgency.

Chapter 2, in large part devoted to a medieval commentary on the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, the text analyzed in chapter 1, loses much of its resonance if read in isolation; and, because invoking a series of direct intertextual transpositions, the three chapters on the Roman de la Rose can only be understood in the light of material considered in those on Alain’s De planctu that precede them. Theoretical and bibliographic issues pertinent to each text will be addressed at the appropriate place in the relevant chapters.

My reason for beginning with Martianus’ De nuptiis is twofold. As a circumscription of the seven liberal arts, it occupied a fundamental position in the medieval curriculum, and its pedagogical centrality has long been respected.⁸ However, its frame narrative is one of the last fictions of the pagan gods to have been produced in classical antiquity, and it too proved widely influential. This other, literary prominence has been largely ignored in modern criticism. Two of the reasons are, no doubt, the extraordinary difficulty of Martianus’ Latin and the whimsical vagaries of the text.⁹ Yet, barriers to comprehension notwithstanding, the wedding of Philology and Mercury was an inspiration to authors as varied (and, to the modern academy, canonical) as Chrétien de Troyes¹⁰ and Chaucer.¹¹ More particularly to my own concerns, Alain de Lille, one of the greatest Latin poets of the Middle Ages, in part modeled his De planctu Naturae on Martianus’ prosimetrum¹² and created a text which then itself went on to exercise a definitive influence on one of the greatest Old French poets, Jean de Meun.¹³ In fine, Martianus is the demonstrable point of origin for a tradition of innovative writing and played as constitutive a role as any other classical author in influencing the development of medieval fiction, both Latin and vernacular.

I analyze Martianus’ work as an ascensional allegory in which the intellect (Philology) strives to join with a transcendent language (Mercury) that would enable humanity to articulate the workings of the divine mind (Pallas). The final result of this endeavor would be represented by the physical union of the first two of these personified categories, whose wedding is celebrated by the Olympian gods and accompanied by lengthy treatises on mortal learning in the allegorical figures of the seven liberal arts. Because transcending the bounds of mortal reference, the discourse that would be embodied by the conjunction of Philology and Mercury can never be described and is left as no more than a post-diegetic hypothesis. What it would not be, however, is made perfectly clear. It would not be the arid scholasticism intoned by the liberal arts, which bores not only the gods who are forced to listen but also, Martianus concedes, the reader of the text. This language of academic inquiry offends in particular Venus, Bacchus, and Voluptas, all of whom imply that whatever would supersede it would have to appeal in some way not simply to the mind but to the body. The appropriate register is finally suggested, though never explicated in detail, by Harmony, the last of the liberal arts to speak. Sensual yet capable of philosophical reference, the discourse she intimates would please and instruct, and it would benefit from the presiding influence not only of the goddess of wisdom but also of the goddess of love.

The De nuptiis came to achieve its canonical status in the aftermath of the Carolingian renaissance, and its importance to the era is evinced by the glosses of Johannes Scotus Eriugena,¹⁴ Martin of Loan,¹⁵ and Remigius of Auxerre. Such growth in interest can primarily be explained in pedagogical terms. During this period of cultural rebirth, a text that conveniently circumscribed many essentials of classical learning would obviously find a wide readership. But there is bibliographic evidence to suggest that the fable of Philology and Mercury also contributed to this appeal. All three glossators devote extensive space to the celestial wedding, and they plausibly do so with the assumption that their students and readers will share their interest.

It is to the glosses of Remigius of Auxerre, the most ambitious to have been produced during the ninth century, that I turn in chapter 2. Remigius interprets the De nuptiis as a combination of two texts, each of vastly different register and epistemological function. One is constituted by the seven books on the liberal arts, the circumscription of mortal learning couched in the language of scholasticism that Martianus recognizes as potentially dull. In an extraordinary revision of his paradigm, Remigius considers these pedagogical sections of the De nuptiis to represent the union of Philology and Mercury, whom he interprets respectively to represent ratio and sermo. According to the glossator, therefore, the wedding of categories hypothesized in the De nuptiis is actually consummated within the text itself, and the transcendence that marks the end of the paradigm, that moment at which Philology and Mercury come together under the influence of Harmony and a new poetics is anticipated, has been replaced by the far more mundane marriage of earthly reason and speech.

Remigius does not, however, ignore his predecessor’s intimation of a language that could appeal to mind and body. He simply identifies it differently, positing the mythological fabula of the marriage as the harmonious nexus through which the senses and the intellect are united and the truth of things made pleasurably manifest. Remigius accompanies his defense of fable with a redefinition of two classical gods. He rehabilitates Venus, transforming the pagan goddess of love into a positive force capable of supplementing reason with the pleasures of fiction, and he creates for her a new offspring, a brother to Hermaphroditus who would in later centuries find his avatar in the works of Alain de Lille and Jean de Meun.

The tolerant attitude that authors such as Remigius show toward pagan fiction marks a shift away from a cultural conservatism that also asserted itself with renewed vigor in the ninth century. To this more conservative viewpoint, the frame narrative of the De nuptiis was to be rejected as irretrievably unchristian, at best an empty diversion from the faith, at worst a snare contrived by demonic forces to seduce the faithful away from the love of the one true God. Ninth-century ecclesiastics who proscribed pagan letters in this way, most notably Hrabanus Maurus, were able to avail themselves of extraordinarily authoritative precedents, including those provided by Martianus’ Christian contemporary and fellow North African, Saint Augustine. I devote chapter 3 to one twelfth-century writer’s meditations on his own allegedly sinful dalliance with fable and his efforts—eventually triumphant—to negotiate his rebellion against these trends of confining Augustinianism. The writer is William, monk of Malmesbury.

The Statue and the Ring would seem particularly worthy of the censure I outline above, since it is not only an entertaining interlude in a work explicitly intended as a history of the English kings. It is an entertainment that dramatizes the bedroom influence of Venus, the pagan goddess of physical love and sexual pleasure, carnal appetites that had come to be as rigorously proscribed to men of monastic vocation as pagan belief itself. The very themes of the story go some way to anticipating this type of negative response, creating something of a warning against the revival of pagan culture. The Statue and the Ring is, after all, a tale in which the modern Christian inadvertently empowers an aspect of the classical past and does so with deleterious consequences. Yet the fact that the story reflects the moral implications of its own production (and, potentially also, the pleasure it will bring) bespeaks a lucid degree of authorial control. The bridegroom may at first empower Venus, but, with help, he finally and definitively succeeds in circumventing her baleful influence. Similarly, through this tale of spousal devotion lost and regained, William finally and definitively exorcizes the spirit of creative inertia and demonstrates his own masterful manipulation of fiction, a traditionally deleterious aspect of classical culture that Augustine, late in his career, viewed to be as harmful to the Christian as that demon dressed in the garb of a goddess, Venus herself.

The next three chapters are on the De planctu Naturae, which I consider the most sustained exercise in venereal writing to have been produced in the Latin Middle Ages. Alain employs a particular type of discourse and particular sexual inclinations to reflect one another, in both cases as aspects of a rhetorically decadent and allegedly unnatural order. Again, Venus is involved. Delegated the task of overseeing the perpetuation of the human race within the bounds of wedlock, the goddess of love set a disastrous precedent by indulging in extramarital fornication and bequeathed to humanity a widespread indifference to natural, reproductive sex. Nature depicts this fall from natural grace in terms that presuppose a corresponding fall from a state of natural language. In describing Venus giving herself over to adultery, Nature refers to the goddess committing a primordial discursive sin, ignoring the natural injunction to make words signify in a literal manner and allowing them instead to function as tropes. The irony is clear. By using a trope to describe Venus’ erotic transgression, Nature commits precisely the verbal transgression she warned Venus against and participates in the allegedly unnatural order the goddess initiated. Because of necessity a product of this order, the De planctu is representative of everything its characters decry. In lamenting erotic irregularity, Alain’s Nature and his first-person narrator/protagonist (henceforth, Alanus) use figurative language invoking the verbal arts. Most notably, as early as the inaugural poem, barren sexuality is identified as metaphor of such extravagance that it falls into verbal vice. Here too, the figurative use of the trope folds back on itself, since Nature and Alanus repeatedly partake in extravagant metaphor and figuratively perpetrate the supposed depravity they grammatically denounce.

Nature and Alanus effect their verbal deviance through a dialogue of hermaphroditic doubles. In the opening poem, Alanus dismissively characterizes gay men (for him, the exemplary perpetrators of nonreproductive sex) as hermaphrodites and goes on to affirm his own straight sexuality. He imagines the ecstasy he would feel if given the opportunity of kissing a beautiful young woman: his spirit would leave him as their lips met and would migrate into her body, there to live a blissful life, in illa alter ego. Shortly afterwards, Nature, a young woman of extraordinary loveliness, does indeed arrive and the fondly imagined kisses are indeed provided. Not only does the spirit of Alanus indeed migrate into Nature’s body when the kisses are exchanged, his fantasy of living in her another self also signals an analogous metamorphosis on the part of the other Alanus implicated in the text, and that, of course, is the author. In the dialogic structure of the De planctu, Alain orchestrates a dual-gendered exchange between his narrative surrogate and his feminized reflection and through it explores and, finally, vaunts, the rhetorical and referential potential of their metaphorical deviance, that necessary condition of inhabiting the fallen, venereal order Nature refers to as the vulgar whorehouses of the earth (uulgaria terrenorum lupanaria [8.4]).

Written with clear acknowledgment of Alain’s precedent, Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose also includes a meditation upon all that is implicated in a fall from an originary linguistic plenitude, and, here too, the context through which this meditation is realized is a hermaphroditic body. The oneiric landscape the romance evokes is populated by allegorical figures that are male or female, depending on the grammatical gender of the nouns that designate the concepts they signify. Dangier and Deduiz, for example, are male, and Honte and Jalousie female. This, however, has one curious effect. Bel Acueil represents the lady’s favorable welcome and is an affective disposition that would be communicated through the female face, body, or voice. Yet, consistent with the masculine gender of the noun acueil, the personified category is male, creating circumstances in which Amant, as he searches for an encouraging response from the lady he loves, is described pursuing the attentions of another man. In Jean’s continuation, the grammatical homoeroticism of this relationship is complemented by cross-dressing. Locked in a tower to prevent him from providing Amant the intimacy he seeks, Bel Acueil passes his time receiving advice in the art of feminine seduction from the old woman who, entrusted with the task of acting as his guardian, comes to pity him in his plight and facilitates a meeting between the lovers. Accordingly, in preparation for the time he and Amant can finally fulfill their desires, Bel Acueil learns, among other things, how to select dresses that will disguise excessively large breasts and to walk with the alluring modesty that befits women of high social standing.

I argue that Bel Acueil must be understood in terms of a programmatic hermaphroditism that Guillaume de Lorris introduces to provocative (if contextually unconcluded) effect in the first section of the romance and that Jean later exploits with characteristic exuberance in order further to explore Alain’s initiatives. Extending the sexual metaphors of the De planctu, Jean makes reading into a metaphorically erotic activity through which epistemological desire will be satisfied. In attempting to encourage Amant to espouse charitable love as the only rational foundation for human negotiations, Reason warns against the pitfalls of deliz, the physical lust that must be tempered by rational moderation. Yet she also uses this term elsewhere with an entirely positive resonance to render the gratification that accrues from submitting the poetic artifact to interpretation. The text, then, is the source from which a displaced sexual pleasure can be derived.

The site in which the two forms of deliz converge is the body that Bel Acueil represents. As the romance reaches closure, Amant finally satisfies his desire, penetrating his beloved and metaphorically plucking the rose. Yet the reader is also implicated in this allegory of coition, attempting to move beyond the poetic integument and to gain a clear understanding of what is taking place. On the most straightforward interpretative level, however, such clarity is difficult to achieve, as Jean purposefully alternates between male and female anatomical imagery to configure the body Amant penetrates. The conclusion is, once again, hermaphroditic, as the beloved displays both the literal masculinity of the primary signifier (Bel Acueil) and the displaced femininity of its signified (the ever-hypothetical woman the man represents).

In this instance hermaphroditism is a denial of uniform categorization: in semiotic effect the beloved is both male and female; however, for precisely this reason, he/she is not in any univocal sense either. Through its very exemption from univocality, this hermaphroditic bilvalence becomes the emblem of and vehicle for a pleasure that is distinctive to the post-lapsarian world. In words he scripts for Reason and Genius, Jean rehearses the end of the Golden Age that was precipitated by the castration of Saturn and identifies figurative language and the poetic text as its interrelated corollaries. Reason performatively demonstrates that transparency of reference ceased at the moment at which the body representing the old order ceased to be a pristine unity; and Genius, citing Ovid as authority and predecessor, advances the Arts, inevitably including the poetic endeavors of Ovid himself, as the ingenious response to the hardships intrinsic in the fallen order. Like Alain before him, Jean emphasizes the virtue in necessity, and he offers the reader the ambiguous body of Bel Acueil as a vehicle not for one satisfyingly transparent meaning, but for antinomies that threaten to cancel one another out, ultimately to create the absence of meaning itself. Yet the threat of pure nothing serves to validate the means of its perception, as the pleasure accruing from the act of interpretation supercedes the ever-elusive pleasure of a final, definitive and unified clarity of understanding.

1

Martianus Capella, Remigius of Auxerre, William of Malmesbury

CHAPTER ONE

Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii: A Brother to Hermaphroditus

The De nuptiis is the most confounding of texts. It is couched in Latin of often formidable opacity¹ and displays extreme eccentricities of tone and structure. A first-person narrator, who is an impatient old man (Felix Capella), explains how he once related the wedding of Philology and Mercury² to his disrespectful son (Martianus) and proceeds to tell the story he told all over again (1.2–3). However, the end of the tale is repeatedly deferred, as the authorial surrogate pauses to banter affectionately with a muse (3.221–22) and to argue with his literary genre, Menippean satire, which, personified, is attentively, though critically, observing the proceedings (6.576–79, 8.806–9). What goes on in the story the old man narrates is at least as bizarre, and here too consummation is inordinately withheld: the classical gods may assemble to celebrate the wedding, but they find themselves obliged instead to listen to the relentless self-exposure of mortal learning in the allegorized figures of Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Harmony.

Such oddities as these (and others that will be considered in due course) have prompted one reader to conjecture that Martianus was probably insane,³ with the expedient implication that his demented ravings are undeserving of academic scrutiny. This view has fortunately failed to gain wide acceptance, and recent scholarship has done much to elucidate the significance of the celestial union. Luciano Lenaz and Jean Préaux argue, with different emphases, that the De nuptiis is a soteriological allegory.⁴ Concentrating particularly on the second book, Lenaz sees in the story a variation on the Gnostic paradigm of the salvator salvandus, in which Philology and Mercury are respectively the fallen and transcendent halves of the divided soul.⁵ These ideas have been further pursued by Danuta Shanzer, who agrees that Philology represents the lapsarian trace of a primal unity, but who also points out that she is exceptional in the fallen order because, through a mastery of theurgical practice, she has of herself taken the first steps towards salvation.⁶ Stressing the importance of theurgy, Shanzer concludes that the De nuptiis was designed to be understood only by a sectarian elite, a group of initiates already conversant with the esoteric rituals that Philology performs; and, as such, it was calculatedly incomprehensible to anyone else, its multiple obscurities symptoms of a deliberate gesture of exclusion.⁷ Still according to Shanzer, this exclusivity was determined by historical criteria: produced during a period in which theurgy was punishable, the De nuptiis was by design opaque, an encoded message of serious import covered by an intentional veil of inconsequentiality.⁸

If Shanzer is right, then we today can approach the De nuptiis with no more than a feeling of hopeless disqualification. Faced with a work of purposeful unintelligibility, we may at best describe only its grammatical meaning, and even this is a daunting enterprise. It is impossible to stretch a syncretic net wide enough to accommodate its bewildering panoply of allegorized principles, which have a marked tendency to blend into one another. For example, Philology, Sophia, Pallas, Philosophy, Mantice, and Phronesis at various times and in different ways all seem to personify wisdom, but the implied distinction between them is often hard to determine. Similarly, following Lenaz, we could see in Philology a particular aspect of the soul, but we must then establish a difference between this category and the allied valences of Sophia, Mantice, and Psyche.⁹

Assessed within the perspective of medieval reception, these problems are largely overcome by the tradition of glossing I mentioned earlier. The ninth-century works of Eriugena, Martin of Laon, and Remigius of Auxerre clarify the difficulties of the original with a cluster of simplified (but by no means simplistic) definitions, recasting the marriage of Mercury and Philology as the union of sermo and ratio, eloquence and reason, the requisite attributes of intellectual inquiry and expression.¹⁰ Although the products of a Christian culture and very distinct from the pagan epistemology of fifth-century Carthage, these definitions unquestionably reflect allegorical principles at work in the original. Mercury embodies in utterance the movements of the mind of Jupiter¹¹ and, as messenger of the gods, bridges the transcendent and the contingent, while Philology suggests by her very name the human desire to elucidate the mysteries of creation through communion with the divine. Mercury, therefore, brings illumination downwards to humanity, and the earthbound Philology strives upwards to explore the secret recesses of the cosmos.¹² If only indirectly, their interaction in fact precedes their marriage: Mercury, by granting men and women the gift of the alphabet, supplied the