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‘Ye that pasen by pe Weiye’: time, topology and the medieval use of Lamentations 1.12

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950236x.2011.561259

1470-1308

Isabel Davis,

Theology and Canon Law Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I am grateful to Laura Salisbury, Richard Rowland, Anthony Bale, the anonymous reader at Textual Practice as well as the organizers and delegates who attended a fruitful conference on Medieval Skin at Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, for their many generous suggestions. Notes Quotations from the Bible are taken from the Latin Vulgate Bible (http://vulsearch.sourceforge.net/); unless otherwise stated the English translation is taken from the Douay–Rheims Bible, which is also available through vulsearch. For an overview on the question of authorship, see S. K. Soderland, ‘Lamentations’, in International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Geoffrey W. Bromiley (ed.) and revised by Melvin Grove Kyle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1915, revised edition 1929), pp. 65–68 (pp. 65–66). Survival is the main theme of the most recent full study of Lamentations. Tod Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000). For Lamentations as part of the affective poetic treasury of scripture, see A. J. Minnis, ‘Literary Theory in Discussions of Formae Tractandi by Medieval Theologians’, New Literary History, 11 (1979), 133–145 (p. 144). The relationship between this typological connection and Cistercian and Franciscan affectivity has been suggested by Ronald L. Martinez, ‘Mourning Laura in the Canzoniere: Lessons from Lamentations, Modern Language Notes, 118 (2003), 1–45 (p. 4, footnote 10). Paschasius Radbertus, Threnos sive Lamentationes Jeremiae, in Patrologia cursus completes […] Series Latina, Jacques-Paul Migne (ed.), 221 vols (Paris: Migne, 1844–64), 120, col. 1063A (hereafter abbreviated PL). See, for a translation of parts of Radbertus’ commentary as they were used in the Glossa Ordinaria, Gilbert Universalis, Glossa Ordinaria in Lamentationes Ieremie Prophete: Prothemata et Liber I: A Critical edition, ed. and trans. by Alexander Andrée, Acta Universitatas Stockholmiensis, 52 (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 2005), p. 163. Radbertus, Threnos, PL 120, col. 1061C. This distinction between narratives that are ‘of time’ and those that are more specifically ‘about time’ is discussed by Paul Ricoeur and, after him, Mark Currie. Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 1–2. For a modern definition and history of trauma, see Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), e.g. p. 2. See, for a discussion of the commentary tradition and the way in which the modes of scriptural reading were considered in relation to time and the Book of Lamentations, an idea which is first explicitly stated by Willam Alton c. 1259–60, Athanasius Sulavik, ‘Principia and Introitus in the Thirteenth-Century Christian Biblical Exegesis with Related Texts’, in La Bibbia del XIII secolo. Storia del testo, storia dell'esegesi, Giuseppe Cremascoli and Francesco Santi (eds) (Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2004), pp. 269–311 (pp. 283–84). Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. by Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). For a fuller discussion of topology and Serres' interest in it, see Laura Salisbury, ‘Michel Serres: Science, Fiction, and the Shape of Relation’, Science Fiction Studies, 33 (2006), pp. 30–52 (p. 33) and Steven Connor, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, Anglistik, 15 (2004), pp. 105–117 (p. 106). Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, ‘Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism’, The Art Bulletin, 87 (2005), pp. 403–415 (p. 408). Nagel and Wood, ‘Towards a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism’, p. 408. They claim, though, that this is a property only of artefacts and not of texts. I am concerned here particularly with poetry in England but Lamentations has also been influential in other European literature. For example see, for a discussion of the Italian context, Ronald Martinez, ‘Mourning Beatrice: The Rhetoric of Threnodi in the Vita nuova’, Modern Language Notes, 113 (1998), pp. 1–29 (passim) and Martinez, ‘Mourning Laura’ passim. Siegfried Wenzel, Verses in Sermons: ‘Fasciculus Morum’ and its Middle English Poems (Cambridge MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1978), p. 122. Augustinus Hipponensis, Confessiones, Book XIII, ch. xv, in PL 32, cols. 0851-0852. The English translation comes from: Augustine, The Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). The Psalm is numbered 103 in the Vulgate Bible. Whilst Augustine reads the Latin ‘pellis’ and the Wycliffite Bible, with its reliance on the Vulgate, renders this as ‘skyn’, the Hebrew text is more properly translated as ‘curtain’. Thus the King James, Geneva and Great Bibles all read ‘curtain’. The Douay Old Testament offers something of a concession in its reading: ‘pavillion’. Augustinus, Confessiones, XIII, xv, PL 32, col 0851; Augustine, Confessions, p. 282. For a discussion of ‘membrana’, see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England 1066–1307, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 120. Pellis could also mean clothing and other things made out of skin. See entry in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). Augustinus Hipponensis, De Genesi ad litteram, Book II, ch. 9, dist. 22; PL 34, col. 0271; Augustine, On Genesis, trans. by Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 2002), pp. 202–203. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. by Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 79. Currie, About Time, p. 2. Augustinus, Confessiones, Bk XI, ch. 8, PL 32, col. 0812; Augustine, Confessions, p. 225. Augustinus, Confessiones, Bk XI, ch. 26, dist. 33, PL 32, col. 0822; Augustine, Confessions, pp. 239–240. Currie, About Time, p. 16. On the ninth-century Carolingian commentary tradition see, E. Ann Matter, ‘The Lamentations Commentaries of Hrabanus Maurus and Paschasius Radbertus’, Traditio, 38 (1982), 137–163 (passim). For a list of other commentaries see Philip S. Alexander, The Targum of Lamentations (Collegeville MN: Liturgical Press, 2007), pp. 69–70, footnote 66. For a discussion of the musical setting for the liturgical use of Lamentations, see Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Liturgical Representation and Late Medieval Piety’, in Liturgy and the Arts in the Middle Ages: Studies in Honour of C. Clifford Flanigan, ed. by Eva Louise Lillie and Nils Holger Petersen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1996), pp. 181–204 and the Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0012_0_11786.html [accessed 23.x.2009]. Nicola Vicento, L'antica Musica ridotta alla moderna practica (1555), cited by Paul Van Nevel, ‘A Short History of Lamentations’, trans. by Derek Yeld, in Lamentations de la Renaissance (Harmonia Mundi: 2008), pp. 12–16 (p. 14). Hieronymus Stridonensis, Liber Jeremiae, PL 28, col. 0848C. For discussion of the names for the Hebrew letters and Jerome's contribution to this tradition, see H. Tur-Sinai, ‘The Origin of the Alphabet’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 41 (1950): 83–109 and H. Tur-Sinai, ‘The Origin of the Alphabet (Continued)’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 41 (1950): 159–179 (esp. p. 160). Matter, ‘The Lamentations Commentaries’, pp. 156–157 on Hrabanus and Radbertus; Gilbertus Universalis, Glossa Ordinaria, pp. 54 and 167. On the introitus of Stephen Langton, William of Alton, William of Luxi in the thirteenth century, see Sulavik, ‘Principia and Introitus’, passim. Michael Graves, Jerome's Hebrew Philology: A Study Based on his Commentary on Jeremiah (London: Brill, 2007), p. 49, footnote 31; James Barr, ‘St Jerome's Appreciation of Hebrew’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 49 (1967), pp. 281–302 (p. 293). Hieronymus Stridonensis, Epistolae, PL 22, col. 0902, #108 ch. 26. James Barr, ‘St Jerome and the Sounds of Hebrew’, Journal of Semitic Studies, 12 (1967), 1–36 (p. 35). Hieronymus, Epistolae, PL 22, col. 1079, #125 ch. 12. Barr, ‘St Jerome's Appreciation of Hebrew’, pp. 285–286; Adam Kamesar, Jerome, Greek Scholarship, and the Hebrew Bible: A Study of the Questiones Hebraicae in Genesim (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1993), p. 48. See the entry in Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary. Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 66. Michael A. Signer, ‘From Theory to Practice: the De Doctrina Christiana and the Exegesis of Andrew of St Victor’, in Reading and Wisdom. The De Doctrina Christiana of Augustine in the Middle Ages, ed. Edward D. English (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 84–98 (p. 89) has also rejected the idea of Jerome's use of Hebrew text and Jewish advisors as ‘philosemitism’. Augustinus, Confessiones, Bk XI, ch. 3, dist. 5, PL 32, cols 0811; Augustine, Confessions, p. 223. Signer, ‘From Theory to Practice’, pp. 88–89. On the myth of the Septuagint, see for example Signer, ‘From Theory to Practice’, p. 85. Hieronymus, Epistolae, PL 22, cols 0442-0443, #30. On Jerome as a translator, see Rita Copeland, ‘The Fortunes of “non verbum pro verbo” or, why Jerome is not a Ciceronian’, in The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, R. Ellis (ed.) (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), pp. 15–35 (esp. p. 29). For a consideration of the acrostic form and the literary possibilities of the Book of Lamentations in the later ordinary gloss, see E. Ann Matter, ‘The Legacy of the School of Auxerre: Glossed Bibles, School Rhetoric, and the Universal Gilbert’, Temas Medievales, 14 (2006), pp. 85–98 (pp. 90–92). For a picture of a manuscript page of Lamentations 1.1 with a large rubricated Aleph, see Matter, ‘The Legacy of the School of Auxerre’, p. 97. On the medieval response to literary form in scripture, see A. J. Minnis, ‘Literary Theory in Discussions of Formae Tractandi, p. 138. See, for example, the first initial in British Library manuscript, Harley 4665 spaces have been left throughout the manuscript for others. For a full description of Lathbury's oeuvre, see Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), pp. 221–239 and 339–344; and, particularly on Lathbury's interest in versification, see pp. 228–229. Stephen Langton, ‘Introitus super Threnos B’, in Sulavik, '‘Principia and Introitus’, p. 301. Radbertus, Threnos, PL 120, col. 063A and Langton, ‘Introitus’, p. 301. Lathbury, Liber Moralium in Threnos Hieremiae, excerpts printed in Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity, pp. 373–378. On the opacity and magic of Hebrew in the Middle Ages, see Naomi Seiman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 168. See also the discussion of the Tetragrammaton and other Hebrew talismanic inscriptions in Don C. Skemer, Binding Words; Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (Penn State University Press, 2006), pp. 25, 107, 112 and the discussion of the magical power thought to reside in the Hebrew alphabet, in the medieval use of Lamentations also see Norman K. Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations, rev. edn (London: SCM Press, 1962), p. 25. Agamben, The Time that Remains, p. 87. Agamben, The Time that Remains, p. 79, the emphasis here is Agamben's. Agamben, The Time that Remains, p. 82 for this quotation. Agamben, The Time that Remains, p. 85. He has also offered a more detailed account of the problem of endings in poetry, given the disjunction of sound and sense, again connecting it to Christian theology in Agamben, The End of the Poem, pp. 109–115. Others, too, have connected up early Christian liturgy and thought with rhymed versification; see Michael McKie, ‘The Origins and Early Development of Rhyme in English Verse’, The Modern Language Review 92 (1997), 817–831 (p. 817). On liturgical music as a representation of Christian time, see Petersen, ‘Liturgical Representation’, p. 196. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 109–111. The idea of the Old Testament acrostics, and the one in Lamentations in particular, as aide-mémoires has been discussed by Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations, pp. 26–28. Augustinus, Confessiones, Book XI, ch. 31, dist. 41, PL 32, col. 0826; Augustine, Confessions, p. 245. See for example the use of the Corinthians passage in Augustinus Hipponensis, De Trinitate, PL 42, cols 1067–1071, Book XV, ch. 8–10. The quotation comes from another discussion of Augustine's theories of time and their enduring influence, Friedrich-Wilhelm Von Herrmann, Augustine and the Phenomenological Question of Time, trans. by Frederick Van Fleteren and Jeremiah Hackett (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2008), p. 46. ‘The Long Charter of Christ’, in The Middle English Charters of Christ, ed. by Mary C. Spalding (Bryn Mawr: Furst, 1914), A-text, ll. 93–96. Wenzel ed., The Fasciculus Morum, p. 216. R. T. Davies ed., Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), # 46, p. 125. This theme, and other related ones in medieval lyrics have been most fully discussed by Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 36–44. Woolf, though, is differently engaged in determining the literary quality of such verse. Middle English Dictionary, abiden, meaning 8. Augustinus, Confessiones, Bk XI, ch. 13, dist. 16, PL 32, col. 0815; Augustine, Confessions, p. 230. ‘York Pinners’ Play', ll. 253–258, in The York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling, Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), p. 220. This urban theme also governs Dante's interest in Lamentations, according to Martinez, ‘Mourning Beatrice’, pp. 19–20. For a different discussion of the transformative effect of this speech, see Pamela King, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), p. 149. Oxford English Dictionary, fine v1. meaning 2. The inscriptions of this tombstone and the one that follows can be found in J. G. Waller, ‘The Lords of Cobham, Their Monuments, and the Church’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 11 (1877), pp. 49–112 (p. 66). The Italics are mine and they indicate the rhyme scheme. These inscriptions are part of a tradition of tombs which address the passer by in a way which imitates Lamentations 1.12. For examples and further discussion see George Gilbert Treherne, Eglwys Cymmin: Epitaphs (Carmarthen: W. Spurrell, 1920), pp. 13–15. What is more there is a connection between this funeral use and the ‘Charter of Christ’ poems. According to the marginal note below the ‘Charter of Christ’ in British Library MS Sloane 3292, fol. 2: ‘Mr Lambert a Justice of Peace in Kent found this on a grauestone in an Abby in Kent bearing date Ao Dni 1400’. Richard Glasser, Time in French Life and Thought, trans. by C. G. Pearson, first published 1936 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 23. See, for example, the examples given in Treherne, Eglwys Cymmin, pp. 13–14. The unusual character of this inscription is noted by Waller, ‘The Lords of Cobham’, p. 66. These tombs are also discussed in the context of the Cobham family and medieval cultures of memorialisation in Nigel Saul, Death, Art and Memory in Medieval England: The Cobham Family and their Monuments, 1300–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), see esp. p. 96. On St Paul's thinking here and its significance in terms of later Marxist ideas about the imminent abolition of class, see Agamben, The Time that Remains, pp. 29–34. OED, Tent, n2. Beadle, ‘The York Cycle’, pp. 209–221 and, for a broad discussion of late medieval and early modern properties and product placement, see Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Properties of Skill: Product Placement in Early English Artisanal Drama’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. by Natasha Korda and Jonathan Gil Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 35–66. Gregorius Magnus, Regulae Pastoralis, PL 77, col. 0049, Bk III, Prologue. Augustinus, Confessiones, Bk XI, ch. 31, PL 32, col. 0826; Augustine, Confessions, p. 245. See for example, British Library MS Harley 7322, fol. 109v, where a simple pen drawing sits above a lyric, asking the reader to ‘behold me’ in an otherwise unillustrated manuscript. Mary Carruthers, ‘Meditations on the “Historical Present” and “Collective Memory” in Chaucer and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Time in the Medieval World, ed. by Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 137–155 (pp. 153–154). On the question of Augustine's influence, see also Throup, Temporality, Eternity, and Wisdom, p. 93 and Herrmann, Augustine and the Phenomenological Question of Time, p. 6. Augustinus, Confessiones, Bk XIII, ch. 31, PL 32, col 0826; Augustine, Confessions, p. 245. The English translates a different manuscript version, hence the extra thought which I have put in parenthesis. Calvin L. Throup, Temporality, Eternity, and Wisdom: The Rhetoric of Augustine's ‘Confessions’ (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), p. 104. Fasciculus Morum, pp. 214–15. ‘The Long Charter of Christ’, ed. Spalding, ll. 78–80. British Library MS Harley 4012, fol. 69v. The documentary and bureaucratic form of the ‘Charters of Christ’ has been most fully considered by Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Middle English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 5. The image is printed in Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London: Routledge, 1972), plate 5. This example is actually of the ‘Short Charter of Christ’. For an example of a charter which stands alone, see British Library, Stowe MS 620, folio 11v. For discussions of St Bartholomew and the culture of anatomy, see Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), esp. pp. 186–187 and Daniela Bohde, ‘Skin and the Search for the Interior: The Representation of Flaying in the Art and Anatomy of the Cinquecento’, in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, ed. by Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 10–47 (p. 10). St Bartholomew is discussed in relation to manuscript culture by Sarah Kay, ‘Original Skin: Flaying, Reading and Thinking in the Legend of Saint Bartholomew and Other Works’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 36 (2006), 35–73. Kay has also compared the parchment metaphor in ‘The Charter of Christ’ (pp. 45–46). Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London: Reaktion, 2005), chapter two, pp. 59–82. Mills, Suspended Animation, p. 68. There are numerous echoes between clothing and flayed skin in the images he discusses, see especially plates, pp. 67–68. The quotations come from Mills, Suspended Animation, pp. 61 and 82. This idea is discussed in many places. See, for example, Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Anti-Judaism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 20; David E. Timmer, ‘Biblical Exegesis and the Jewish-Christian Controversy in the Early Twelfth Century’, Church History, 58 (1989), pp. 309–321 (esp. p. 315) and Steven F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, Medieval Cultures, 40 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 6. See for example, Kruger, The Spectral Jew, pp. 1–8. Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 1. On the connections between this digressive story and the body text, see Anthony P. Bale, ‘Richard of Devizes and Fictions of Judaism’, Jewish Culture and History, 3 (2000), pp. 55–72 (passim). Richard of Devizes, Chronicon Richardi Divisensis De Tempore Regis Richardi Primi, John T. Appleby (ed.) (London: Thomas Nelson, 1963), pp. 68–69; the English translation comes from Richard of Devizes, Chronicon de rebus gestis Ricardi Primi, in Chronicles of the Crusades, being Contemporary Narratives of the Crusade of Richard Cœur de Lion, trans. by J. A. Giles, (London: Bohn, 1848), pp. 1–64 (p. 52). For a précis of the liturgical use of Lamentations in both traditions, see Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations, p. 113. On structures of Jewish grief and the use of Lamentations in Jewish liturgy, see for example Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations, p. 65; Linda Weinhouse, ‘Faith and Fantasy: The Texts of the Jews’, Medieval Encounters, 5 (1999), pp. 391–408 (passim) and Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations, pp. 119–120, 130–132, 143–144. Alexander, The Targum of Lamentations, p. 68. Fasciculus Morum, p. 214 and 217 and ‘The Long Charter of Christ’, l. 84. These equivocations are also discussed by Bale, ‘Richard of Devizes and Fictions of Judaism’, pp. 62–64. Bale, ‘Richard of Devizes and Fictions of Judaism’, p. 65. Kruger, The Spectral Jew, p. 1. This quotation is the heading to the chapter. Appleby, ‘Introduction’ in Richard of Devizes, The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes, pp. xx–xxiv. There are only two manuscripts of this text; the relationship between the main text and margin is unruly in both. Bale, ‘Richard of Devizes and Fictions of Judaism’, p. 68.