Virgil

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: Volume 1: 800–1558 Rita Copeland (ed.) https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199587230.001.0001 Published: 2016 Online ISBN: 9780191820410 Print ISBN: 9780199587230 Search in this book 9 Virgil  Jan M. Ziolkowski https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199587230.003.0009 Published: January 2016 Pages 165–186 Abstract No other poet in any language has achieved a cultural impact of the length or strength that Virgil has had in England. Virgil was the most broadly known, cited, and invoked of all classical Latin authors, remaining a xture from Roman Britain of the rst century BCE , through the transition into the AngloSaxon era (c.450–1066), until the Norman Conquest, and many years beyond, long after the medieval shaded into the early modern period. At the same time, many uctuations took place in how, and how much, he was studied, interpreted, translated, and adapted, and the modulations have much to tell us about the Middle Ages. This chapter traces the cultural, learned, and literary receptions of Virgil in the British Isles, with special attention to commentaries and to literary imitation by Anglo-Latin writers, Chaucer, Lydgate, Caxton, and Douglas. Keywords: Virgil, Aeneid, Eclogues, Georgics, Roman Britain, monastic learning, Chaucer, House of Fame, magic, William Caxton Subject: Classical Literature Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online In examining the classical tradition in the Middle Ages, to what extent does it make sense to isolate any one writer such as Virgil, no matter how highly reputed, for individual attention? The shortest answer would be that no other poet in any language has achieved a cultural impact of the length or strength the Mantuan (as he is sometimes called after his approximate birthplace) has exercised in England. Both before and after the battle of Hastings he occupied a unique place throughout the British Isles as the most broadly known, cited, and invoked of all classical Latin authors. Sporadic e orts to oust from the elementary curriculum any and all literature written by pagan Romans ultimately failed in England as elsewhere in western Europe. Consequently, Virgil remained a xture, from Roman Britain of the rst century BC , through the transition into the Anglo-Saxon era (c.450–1066), until the Norman Conquest, and many years beyond, long after the medieval shaded into the early modern period. At the same time, many uctuations took place in how, and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 CHAPTER how much, he was studied, interpreted, translated, and adapted, and the modulations have much to tell us 1 about the Middle Ages as well as about Virgil. The chief explanation for the longevity of this poet may lie less in the sheer quality of his œuvre or in the ambitious scope of what he attempted and achieved poetically than in the functions that his works served as textbooks for grammatical correctness and proper taste in Latinity. Although his stock rose and fell across the centuries and varied from locale to locale, he abided as the most familiar of all classical Latin writers. Virgil’s corpus is tripartite, comprising three major works in verse: the ten poems known collectively as the epic poem in twelve books. John of Garland ( ourished 1220–58), English by origin though French by long p. 166 residence, codi ed the idea that the three genres embodied in the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid correspond to an equal number of stylistic levels, professional or social groups (shepherd, farmer, soldier), and trappings of those classes. Beyond the three major works, a small number of other pieces circulated under the poet’s name in the Middle Ages. Despite having never attracted pseudonymous works as Ovid did, Virgil was accounted the author of the poems in the so-called Appendix Vergiliana, still bound up with his name, but generally regarded to be mostly or even totally spurious. One English manuscript of the late tenth century (Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk. 5.34, fols 84r–111r) contains not the whole Appendix but just the two poems from it known as the Aetna and Culex. The English teacher and scholar Alexander Neckam (1157– 1217) embraces the biographical fallacy that Virgil was the shepherd in the last-mentioned item, an epyllion 2 or short narrative poem set in the pastoral world. Virgil was extolled as a master of style, knowledge, wisdom, and power—but all the same he was still a pagan, despite the fact that he was often presented as having come close to anticipating Christian truths. Even when his works were not directly available or studied, his name and poetry remained far from forgotten. He was ubiquitous, in writings by Augustine, Jerome, Isidore, and others who shaped culture powerfully even when the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid were not directly approachable. Even the denunciations of him by authors such as Augustine would have created an appetite for reading his poems. Wherever Latin was studied, Virgil stood pre-eminent at the head of the auctores (literary ‘authorities’)— and he retained this salience even during phases when the stature of non-Christian poets in the curriculum slipped, since like it or not, his poetry was embedded in the grammatical and rhetorical treatises that constituted the foundation of education. Sometimes his writings, especially his epic, became tantamount to grammar itself, even if contrarians occasionally contested the propriety of his diction, prosody, and other stylistic features. Thus to call Virgil canonical would be an understatement. While e orts were made to Christianize the grammars of Latin antiquity by substituting examples from the Bible for those from Virgil 3 and other classical authors, such experiments failed to gain traction. At times the study of Virgil became strictly con ned within Latin grammar, itself regarded as nothing more than the unavoidable preliminary to study of the Bible and its exegesis. Three Latin commentators, none of them English, are now especially credited for having allegorized parts of Virgil’s poems, especially the Aeneid: Fulgentius (sixth century, North Africa), Bernardus Silvestris (twelfth century), and Christopher Landino (1424–92). This allegorical tradition, which also manifested itself sporadically in less famous commentaries in England, brings us as close as we can approach to a moralized Virgil on the lines of what was accomplished for Ovid in the Ovidius moralizatus, a Latin mythographic work by Pierre Bersuire (c.1290–1362), and the Ovide moralisé (early fourteenth century), a French poem distinct from Bersuire’s work. p. 167 By etymology the nouns ‘grammar’ and ‘literature’ are built upon roots that refer to a letter of the alphabet, gramma in Greek and littera in Latin. In the Middle Ages the domains of grammar and literature, which we could di erentiate as meaning on the one hand learning grammar, reading texts, and interpreting Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 Eclogues (alternatively known as the Bucolics); the Georgics, a didactic poem in four books; and the Aeneid, an literature, and on the other writing prose and poetry, were tied together more tightly than they are today. For most of the period grammar was known mainly by the Latin word grammatica and meant ‘Latin grammar’, though encompassing far more than merely the rules of proper expression. Throughout western Europe literacy presumed a command of letters, in the sense of both alphabet and belles lettres: the ability to read (and even more so to write) was acquired through the learned tongue, and a working knowledge of Latin was gained alongside grounding in its literature. Mastery of the prestige language took on a lustre verging on the magical that is summed up aptly in the Scottish English word glamour, a direct derivative of the Latin grammatica by way of the French. Glamour is cognate with gramarye ‘magic, necromancy’ (a noun English). The nexus between grammar and magic helps to explain why a tradition that Virgil had magical powers seized as many imaginations as it did between the twelfth century and early modern times. The most glamorous of authors in the Latin grammar school was the Roman poet Virgil, who in most places 4 and times held a central position in schooling. Narrow and long-outdated conceptions of in uence or imitation fall short of the mark in clarifying the nature and functions of Virgil’s poetry in post-classical Europe. From early on Latin literature was marked by intertextuality, the complex interrelationship between an individual text and those that preceded and succeeded it in the literary tradition, with Virgil eventually at the heart of the interaction as both a transmitter of earlier literary practices, including those typical of Greek literature that was not otherwise available in the West, and an object of subsequent attention and reuse. Sometimes the Aeneid was regarded as a historical record, a true story of an exile who transplanted the remnants of the city of Troy to lay the groundwork abroad for the establishment of the new and equally real Rome. Taken as truth—the secular equivalent of gospel truth—the Troy story most familiar through the Aeneid could be extended into a foundation myth for nations and empires other than the Roman. Claim was laid to Trojan origins by peoples and princes throughout Europe, chronologically from the Merovingians to the Habsburgs, geographically from Italy to Iceland. Among British writers a Trojan genealogy was attested already in the ninth century by the Welsh writer of Latin, Nennius, in the Historia Britonum, but it was given its most in uential expression in 1136 by Geo rey of Monmouth in Historia regum Britanniae. Geo rey’s account of the founding of the British nation by British kings with an ancestry stretching back to Troy owes 5 much to Virgil. p. 168 At other times the epic was denigrated as sheer ction, gments of a poet’s imagination. When held to be ctitious, the epic was contrasted to the supposedly veracious accounts of the alleged eyewitnesses to the Trojan War, Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan. Dares enjoyed a healthy afterlife in England, since his prose was adapted into hexameters by Joseph of Exeter in an oft-read work entitled Ilias Daretis Phrygii or De bello Troiano that nonetheless reveals debts to Virgil, as in the portrayal of the gods intervening in the 6 events. Since antiquity, traditions counter to the Aeneid had existed. One held that the actual historical Dido was chaste, in contradistinction to Virgil’s ctitious, unchaste woman. The chaste Dido helps to avoid the dilemma of an Aeneas who lapsed into sloth, as highlighted by John Gower in his Confessio amantis (4.77– 146), composed c.1386–90. Another negative counter-tradition maintained that Aeneas was inglorious and even traitorous. The latter view was given new life by vernacular adaptations of Dares, beginning in about 1165 with the Old French Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure. Picked up by Guido, this perspective is hinted at in the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and also made explicit in the Confessio amantis 7 (1.1093–128). Whether purportedly fact or ction, Virgil and his poetry were frequently enlisted to validate through their prestige this or that regime or policy, as they continue to be invoked even today. His poetry, especially the Aeneid but even the Eclogues, could be seen to uphold speci c models of empire and power, types of relations Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 seldom heard nowadays) and grimoire ‘magician’s manual’ (a French word that never really took in between women and men, and kinds of interdependencies between poets and rulers. Whether or not Virgil was a compliant propagandist for Augustan imperialism, a subtle protester against it, or both simultaneously, his writings served for Romans as one stretch of the training ground on which the essence of Romanness was formed in the young as they were educated. Virgil’s poetry was dictated, parsed, scanned, and recited in grammar schools wherever the Roman Empire reached, which explains why a small brick unearthed near Seville in Spain has inscribed on it the opening of the Aeneid in a cursive majuscule that may date from the 50s AD , why a papyrus fragment with a quotation from the same epic (Aeneid 4.9) has been discovered at the citadel of Masada in Israel that was besieged and ti in Pompeii from the moment of the eruption in AD 79, and why many papyri with traces of Virgil (sometimes di cult to pin down chronologically with precision) have been found in Egypt and elsewhere in 8 the Middle East. These troves justify the conclusion that within a century of his death, Virgil had been exported wherever Romanization (an even more extensive process than Latinization) was under way. The stature attained by Virgil in antiquity, with modi cations to re ect cultural and linguistic changes, prevailed throughout the millennium or so that is commonly called the Middle Ages. Beyond being available p. 169 in many manuscripts, his poems, mainly but not solely the Aeneid, were embedded so deeply in literary culture that even when not read directly, they were often encountered indirectly through quotations and references in other texts. Consequently, not all of the testimonies in medieval literature that at rst blush look Virgilian necessarily signal intimate or even passing acquaintance with his poetry, any more than the ability in English to pepper speech or writing with obiter dicta such as ‘All that glitters is not gold’, ‘All the world’s a stage’, or ‘All’s well that ends well’ guarantees that the speaker or writer has ever engaged directly with Shakespeare by seeing or reading even a single play. Many people would have been more familiar with bits and snatches of Virgil’s poems as tags than with them as wholes. Gauging the debt of medieval Latin authors to Virgil can be challenging, since many lines and turns of phrase of the Roman poet entered the common store upon which later writers drew without always necessarily meaning a speci c allusion. What may appear to be the incorporation of words as a subtle allusion may be only an ultimate debt, when a poet is instead borrowing from a later poet or even not borrowing at all but rather coming forth with a 9 catchphrase familiar from what has been termed the ‘hexameter lexicon’. In a poem entitled De triumphis ecclesiae (c.1245–52), John of Garland coordinates (and contrasts) the crusades with the deeds of Aeneas when he rings a change upon the rst words of Virgil’s epic by announcing ‘Arma crucemque cano’ (‘I sing 10 of arms and the cross’). Henry of Avranches (active second quarter of thirteenth century) likewise opens 11 his verse life of St Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1200) with a quotation from the incipit of the Aeneid. Anxiety of Virgilian in uence began early, even immediately after publication of the epic, perhaps even 12 before it. In particular, Virgil has always stood for eloquence. In the very rst canto of the Inferno the character Dante addresses the Roman poet, upon their initial meeting, as ‘that fount which pours forth so 13 broad a stream of speech’ and as ‘he from whom I took the fair style that has done me honor’. The identi cation of Virgil as the Classic by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) held true until very recently, if in fact the 14 Roman poet has surrendered that stature even now. We must be wary of exaggeration, as in the assertion of Anglo-Saxon England that ‘Practically every Englishman of whose work we have more than a page or two 15 —and some who have left us only a few lines—shows some acquaintance with the Aeneid.’ All the same, Virgil must be credited as by far and away the most prestigious classical author, and by extension authority, in the Middle Ages. A mention of ‘the poet’ (poeta or vates) without further ado referred unmistakably to none other than Virgil. Thus Gervase of Melkley, who wrote his ars poetica between 1208 and 1216, de ned antonomasia (the gure of speech by which we may designate Shakespeare simply as ‘the Bard’) with the following two examples: ‘This usage must always signify a certain preeminence, as for example: The 16 Apostle says, that is, Paul. The Poet, that is, Virgil.’ Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 conquered in AD 73–4, why dozens of lines—at least one from all three poems—have been brought to light as gra Virgil became deeply entrenched in England already within decades of the de nitive Roman conquest of the p. 170 island, and he remained a xture nearly continuously from antiquity on. The long stretches of time in which he maintained a central position argue strongly against attempting to treat English literary history in isolation, since Virgil rst came to England as a result of cultural contact and later remained and evolved there through constant exchange of peoples, books, learning, interpretations, and literature. An urban legend (or trite national stereotype) claims that a British newspaper headline once read, ‘Fog in Channel: Continent Cut O ’. Whether or not the supposed headline was actually apocryphal, the insularity to which it adverts is at many points, in the Middle Ages as now, not borne out by the evidence: in the Virgil, while in turn the mainland repaid the favour through such phenomena as the tra c of Virgil codices (and Virgilianists) from Norman monasteries after the Conquest and the impact of Dante’s Virgilianism on Chaucer. In fact, it can be perplexing to decide what quali es as English. Learned Englishmen travelled often on the Continent, as for example Anglo-Saxon missionaries in the Frankish Empire and scholars such as Alcuin (c.730–804) who transplanted themselves at the bidding of Charlemagne. Such wayfaring proselytizers would have been unlikely to tote with them codices of the classics: Boniface (d. 754) shielded 17 himself with a Gospel book and not the Aeneid as he was on the verge of being martyred. To look at movement from the other direction, Abbo of Fleury (d. 1004), who was born and died in France, had a long stay at Ramsey in the late tenth century (985–7) during (or after?) which he produced his 18 Quaestiones grammaticales. This text o ers Abbo’s responses, saturated with references to Virgil, to the ‘Grammatical Questions’ posed to him by his Anglo-Saxon pupils. Whatever our decision about the merits of considering Abbo within a treatment of English literature, we can surmise that his Virgilianism a ected the young Anglo-Saxons whom he instructed, such as Byrhtferth (c.970–c.1020) of Ramsey, whose writings 19 reveal modest awareness of Virgil’s poems. The foundations for the hegemony of Virgil among classical poets whose works circulated in the British Isles were laid (and are attested) already during the Roman era. Writing tablets from around the year 100 have been excavated at a location south of Hadrian’s Wall (near Chesterholm, Northumbria) on the frontier of the Roman Empire in the north of Britain. A few of the ink-and-stylus tablets deciphered so far pay tribute to the broad di usion of the Georgics as well as the Aeneid. On the slim basis of the Virgilian quotations, the inference has been drawn that the site, known as Vindolanda, was a centre of sorts for the 20 study of Virgil and that the tablets have annotations apparently indicative of such scrutiny. The most telling circumstance is that although most of the testimonies are limited to a single line, one tablet has 21 Aeneid 1.1 on its front and back in two di erent hands, apparently as a writing exercise. Not quite two centuries later, a coin minted by Carausius, a Roman naval commander who proclaimed himself emperor in Britain and northern Gaul and who held power for seven years (286–93), carries the p. 171 legend ‘expectate veni’ (‘Come, Long-Awaited One’), adapted from Aeneid 2.282–3. Other coins by Carausius display beneath the emblem the initials RSR, which has been explained as referring to three successive words ‘redeunt Saturnia regna’ (Eclogues 4.6 ‘The Golden Ages have returned’) in the so-called Messianic Fourth Eclogue. This explanation is con rmed by the existence of two bronze medallions of Carausius, one with the same three letters and the others with INPCDA, nonsensical until one realizes that these happen to be the initials of the words in the following line: ‘iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto’ (Eclogues 4.7 ‘Now a new generation is dispatched from heaven on high’). The allusion to this passage signals the extraordinarily bold and Virgilian claim of this usurper that his regime would restore the good old days, speci cally the Saturnian age of pastoral paradise, presumably earlier in the Roman rule of Britain 22 and the rest of the Empire. From an uncertain date comes another written remain of Virgil from Roman Britain, in an inscription scratched upon a ue-tile in the town of Calleva Atrebatum in Silchester, Hampshire: ‘Pertacus per dus, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 earliest centuries England seems to have exported to the Continent both manuscripts and knowledge of Campester Lucilianus, Campanus, conticuere omnes’ (‘Untrustworthy Pertacus, Campester, Lucilianus, Campanus, all fell silent’), which at the end incorporates the opening two words of Aeneid 2.1 that describe 23 the reaction of the audience as Aeneas begins to recount the sack of Troy. the Aeneid that even the verb conticuere by itself su So famous was this moment in ced to call to mind the scene. The late Roman period has left abundant evidence of Virgilianism in English art. The earliest narrative art of any kind in England is a mosaic pavement, probably from the mid-fourth century, in the bathhouse of the Low Ham villa in Somerset, with four panels of scenes from the Aeneid relating to the story of Dido and Aeneas. In the Otford villa in Kent a wall-painting, alas too fragmentary for the scene to be reconstructed, Also in Kent, Lullingstone villa has a dining-room mosaic, dated c.330–60, with a non-Virgilian scene of Europa and the bull, but with a caption of a single 25 elegiac couplet that alludes to the Aeneid (1.50–63). At Frampton villa in Dorset another mosaic pavement from the fourth century that has since perished had a representation, recorded rst in watercolour drawings and then in engravings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, of Aeneas holding a spear and 26 plucking the golden bough, most likely drawn from Aeneid 6.210–11. The rst British-born author whose Latin writings survive is Pelagius (c.350–c.418), an ascetic Christian reformer who was eventually condemned as a heretic. Although his choice of a tag from the Aeneid in referring to the sack of Rome in 410 probably re ects his early education, his language divulges little 27 colouring that hints at classical literary culture. This meagre trace does not support the conclusion (to which the coins, medallions, ue tile, and mosaics might incline us) that the literature of Roman Britain would have been through and through Virgilian—but at the same time no reason exists to doubt that the poet was well known there. p. 172 When the Roman Empire crumbled in the West, the works of Virgil had been read, studied, committed to memory, commented upon, and copied already for half a millennium over immense stretches of territory. This success ensured that Virgil would endure through the disrupted centuries to follow, even if the poems were not written in fresh manuscripts from the sixth to the end of the eighth century. From the ample supplies that had been produced by the end of the fth century, su cient copies remained for the Virgilian tradition to persevere in the strongholds where the dwindling population of potential readers was concentrated. Tracing the history of Virgil’s reception in English literature after the disintegration of the Roman Empire requires piecing together clues of two sorts. First is what can be gleaned from the manuscripts of Virgil’s poetry, Virgilian commentators, and grammarians. Second is what the authors and texts of Old and Middle English literature themselves tell us. No Virgil manuscripts survive from the seventh century. What happened after the disruptions of those 100 years? Ludwig Traube (1861–1907), a palaeographer who held the rst chair of Medieval Latin (at Munich), formulated a schema (often recapitulated by literary historians) according to which the Middle Ages was divided into three stretches of two centuries each: rst the aetas Virgiliana in the eighth and ninth centuries, then the aetas Horatiana in the tenth and eleventh, and nally the aetas Ovidiana in the twelfth and 28 thirteenth. During most of the time before the Norman Conquest the main vernacular tongue in England for literature that was recorded in writing (and the more abundant oral literature that was not) was Old English or AngloSaxon. Yet in the Anglo-Saxon period the story is more elaborate than just the interaction of Latin and English, since England had cultural contacts with various other peoples, among them Celts such as the Irish, who may have had their own heritage of Virgilianism, and emissaries from the Christian Mediterranean dispatched by the Church in Rome. Virgil had not disappeared entirely even from sixth-century Britain, since in De excidio et conquestu Britanniae the cleric Gildas quotes the Aeneid, the only poetic text we can be Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 24 bears an inscription with a phrase from the Aeneid. 29 absolutely certain that he knew. Latin grammar schools would have been (re)established with new vigour after the arrival in 597 of the ‘apostle to the English’, Augustine of Canterbury (d. 604). With the schools came the best known of Roman poets. Much debate has raged over the extent of contacts with Ireland and the degree of indebtedness to a special Irish classical tradition in the poorly documented centuries between the collapse of Romanized Britain and the establishment of a clearly Anglo-Saxon England. Prudence argues for paying at least passing heed to the functions Virgil served in Ireland and in the Irish diaspora of the early Middle Ages. In so doing we must be cautious not to exaggerate the reach of Irish in uence. On the other hand we must beware of taking the p. 173 30 Few insular scholars before the Carolingian period can be proven beyond the called the legacy of Rome. 31 shadow of a doubt to have studied Virgil. But later Irish masters such as John Scotus Eriugena taught the poet in ways that may re ect what they had learned as students in Ireland, through study of the poems themselves as well as through use of works such as Macrobius’ Saturnalia and Priscian’s Institutiones 32 grammaticae. A few indicators suggest that the British Isles may have played an outsized role in the maintenance of the Virgilian tradition through grammar and commentary during the seventh and eighth centuries. An ars grammatica, extant in two ninth-century manuscripts but composed in the seventh or eighth century, is 33 ascribed to one Malsachanus, who appears to have been an Irish grammarian. Although he names Virgil explicitly only four times, 18 of Malsachanus’s 26 citations from classics come ultimately from the Roman poet. But the quali cation ‘ultimately’ is essential, since most of these citations are drawn from the 34 grammatical tradition rather than from Virgil directly. The Gallo-Roman grammarian called Philagrius (or Philargyrius, among more than a half dozen other spellings), probably active in the second half of the fth century, wrote commentaries on Virgil that in turn in uenced later commentators and that between the 35 mid-eighth and ninth centuries were out tted with Old Irish and Old Breton glosses. The Scholia Bernensia (Bern Scholia), which bear occasional glosses in Old Irish, are based on an archetype that emanated from a 36 centre of Irish learning, either in Ireland or in a monastery with Irish monks. The glosses incorporate material that can be traced back to Adomnán (679–704), who was abbot (627/8–704) of the monastery on Iona, an island just o 37 the north-west coast of Britain. Adomnán’s own knowledge of Virgil was predicated almost a century ago on the basis of allusions in his extant writings, the Vita Sanctae Columbae 38 and the De locis sanctis (‘On Holy Places’). For these reasons the conclusion is reasonable that Virgil was 39 studied at Iona during Adomnán’s abbacy. Such Irish learning surrounding Virgil may have arrived in Anglo-Saxon England through the cultural interactions of Anglo-Saxons such as Aldhelm (d. 709/10) with Irish clerics. Whatever the source, England appears to have accumulated learning relating to Virgil. The commentary tradition designated as Servius auctus (Servius Expanded) or Servius Danielis (also DServius), resulted from the augmentation—hence auctus—of Servius on the basis of another ancient commentary which was either that of Aelius Donatus or another closely related to it. It is hypothesized to have taken shape in seventh40 century England. By chance the earliest extant fragment of Servius is a bifolium with excerpts from a Servius auctus in Anglo-Saxon minuscule that was brought to light in Germany near Fulda. It is thought to 41 have been written in south-west England, perhaps Malmesbury, in the rst half of the eighth century, 42 has been ascribed to a member of Boniface’s circle. 43 contain Anglo-Saxon glosses. and The excerpts, on Aeneid 3.651–5.638 and 7.710–8.713, Of the three early manuscripts of the Virgilian commentary by Tiberius Claudius Donatus ( . 430s?), one (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS 45.15, from Tours) was p. 174 copied in the second half of the eighth century by two scribes, one of whom wrote an early Carolingian minuscule and the other an Anglo-Saxon script. The attentiveness with which the commentators were copied shows that Virgil held a solid place in the schools and that readers sought enlightenment about both speci c particularities and global interpretation Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 opposite stance of denying any credit to the Irish in the maintenance and reconstruction of what has been of their cherished poet. Various Anglo-Latin authors, such as Aldhelm, Boniface (d. 754), Alcuin, and 44 Byrhtferth, appear to evince familiarity with Servius; Aldhelm may have known Pseudo-Probus as well, 45 since the commentator he cites as Valerius could well be Marcus Valerius Probus (c.35–c.100). Aldhelm’s immersion in Virgil is evident from words and phrases that re ect all three works in the œuvre (especially 46 Aeneid 1, 4, 6, and 10), as well as from features of prosody and style. 47 attributed to Virgil, the Pedagogus. He also cites the opening of a poem Aldhelm’s two metrical treatises and riddles were combined in a composite text called the Epistola ad Acircium, addressed to King Aldfrith of Northumbria (d. 704/5). The two treatises alone contain 130 citations, quotations, and tags from Virgil, while in an address at the close of the 48 Aldhelm quotes Virgil four 49 times in his prose De virginitate, and he embeds within his poetry seven entire lines from Virgil. The Anglo-Saxon scholar Bede (672/3–735) does not manifest the same devotion to Virgil as shown by Aldhelm—but even in drawing back from the Roman poet he reveals knowledge that transcends snippets 50 culled from grammatical treatises. On the contrary, Bede demonstrates close knowledge of parts of the 51 poems and of Virgil’s prosody and metrics. In an alphabetical and epanaleptic hymn to honour Queen Etheldreda (or Æthelthryth, c.636–678) in Historia ecclesiastica 4.20, he distances himself and his own poetic composition from Virgil and the Aeneid, because whereas he focuses on peace, chastity, and the gifts of God, 52 his Roman predecessor trained his sights on war, lechery, and the earthly. Although Bede makes clear that he favours the metrical and prosodic practices of the Christian biblical poets over the outdated proclivity of Virgil for spondaic verses and hiatus, in the De arte metrica (which contains thirty-four recognizable quotations from the works of Virgil) he draws comparisons between the dramatic sections of the Bible and 53 the Eclogues, as well as between the Book of Job and the Aeneid. Despite such protestations, Bede is far better acquainted with Virgil than with any other classical poets. In his quotations, he directs the reader to the Roman poet by name, refers simply to the poet as poeta (unde poeta dicit), or, perhaps most revealingly, 54 quotes without any fanfare whatsoever. By extension a consensus has emerged that a copy of the Aeneid as 55 well as (less certainly) of the Eclogues and Georgics existed at Wearmouth Jarrow. Among other Anglo-Latin authors, Boniface, whose original Anglo-Saxon name was Wynfrith, presumably picked up his familiarity with Virgil while studying at a monastery in Nursling, outside modern Southampton. His Ars grammatica cites all three of Virgil’s works, although often probably by way of the p. 175 earlier grammatical tradition, and his Enigmata (‘Riddles’) are indebted in dozens of verses to all three of 56 Virgil’s works, but in the Aeneid exclusively to the rst six books. Although the citations of Virgil in the Ars by Tatwine (c.670–734) appear all to be drawn from other grammars, the Enigmata give sign that he knew 57 all three of Virgil’s poems. If we redirect our lens from Anglo-Latin to Old English literature, we nd Virgil identi ed explicitly (as ‘Frigilius’ and ‘Firgilies’) in only one work, namely, the Old English adaptation of Boethius’ De consolatione 58 philosophiae, where the Roman poet is said to have learned to compose verse from his friend Homer. The pickings are slim for passages in Old English poetry in which Virgil holds promise of being the likeliest source for either phraseology or scene-setting. The theory has been presented that Old English poets based 59 their practice of postpositioning prepositions on what they learned from reading Virgil. Of Old English poems Beowulf is the one that interpreters have sought most often to couple with the Aeneid, but no 60 consensus has developed that any of the contentions carry conviction. In Beowulf 1699 the unique phrasing ‘Swīgedon ealle’ (‘All fell silent’) is identical in construction to the famous ‘Conticuere omnes’ in 61 Aeneid 2.1, 62 while in Christ and Satan 36a ‘eisegan stefne’ calls to mind ‘ferrea vox’ in Aeneid 6.626. To turn our gaze to the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, the form of French known as Anglo-Norman held sway as the most prestigious among the various living languages and dialects spoken in what is now England, before Middle English eventually became a legitimate vehicle for literature. Further complicating the situation is that in certain places and times ties to Wales and Scotland must not be overlooked or underestimated alongside those to Ireland. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 Epistola Aldhelm likens himself to Virgil and quotes Georgics 3.11–13 and 292–3. The Angevin courts of King Henry II (1154–89), his wife, and his sons provided patronage for much literature. Henry and other early members of the House of Plantagenet (1154–1485) established in England, much of France, and far beyond a realm that could be fairly described as multicultural. French sources exerted a powerful in uence as mediators of classical material. This is not because they allude commonly to 63 Virgil, beyond well-known passages in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, but because they helped to provide a characteristically romance form of classical epics, in which twelfth-century aristocratic society and its chivalric values displaced Roman military and imperial values, just as French pushed aside Latin. Romans d’antiquité (romances of antiquity) such as the Roman de Brut (‘Romance of Brutus’, c.1155) of the dedicated to Henry, while Roman d’Enéas (‘Romance of Aeneas’) and Roman de Thèbes have often been associated with the Angevins as well. The Enéas conveyed radically di erent perspectives on Virgil from what the epic itself and the commentary tradition would have furnished, focusing on intimate portraits of Enéas and other heroes as aristocratic knights, sympathetically elaborating the gure of Dido, and developing a narrative of courtly love between Enéas and his destined bride, Lavine. The romance never p. 176 even refers outright to Virgil. Together such materials projected what has been called a ‘romance 64 vision’. The Aeneid provided an account in which men dominated, and the epic was parsed by boys under the instruction of men. Aeneas lost his wife Creusa, obeyed duty by abandoning Dido, and forged a strategic marriage with Lavinia. The story was construed as the script for how a man—not a human being in general, but speci cally the male of the species—should lead life. The torrid and tortured romance in the fourth book was reduced in allegorical treatments to being a depiction of what happens sexually to youthful men as a result of overindulgence in food and drink. Yet despite all e orts to dampen the appeal of Dido, this section of the Aeneid simultaneously exercised an outsized attraction, to judge by the frequency with which it was endowed with neums (an early form of musical notation) and became the topic of freestanding laments in 65 Dido’s voice, in both Latin and vernacular languages. The twelfth century witnessed the next great explosion in copying after the Carolingian renewal of the ninth 66 century. In England looking merely to tally locally produced manuscripts would be misleading, since books travelled across the Channel from Normandy and beyond. Whatever the provenance of the parchment and codices, Virgil was as widely available as ever. One touchstone of English Virgilianism in the twelfth century is John of Salisbury (c.1115–1180), perhaps the most exemplary of twelfth-century humanists from 67 England. John presented Virgil as limitless in enhancing quality of thought: ‘Thoroughly shake Virgil or 68 Lucan, and no matter the philosophy you profess, you will nd in their works seasoning for it.’ Calling a major text ‘divine’ may have sometimes been a cliché, but it may betoken the favour in which Virgil was held during the so-called twelfth-century ‘renaissance’ that Alexander Neckam (1157–1217) attached this 69 epithet to the Aeneid. Although in Traube’s framework of three ages the twelfth and thirteenth century are predominantly the age of Ovid, Virgil was not thrust aside altogether. A case in point would be John of Salisbury. John’s reverence is 70 manifest in his view that Virgil’s epic enshrines ‘the secrets of all philosophy’. In fact, he delivers in the Policraticus (c.1159) a compact allegorization in which he interprets the rst six books of the Aeneid as dealing allegorically with all six ages in a man’s life (Policraticus 8.24–5 [819D]). But if John puts Virgil on a pedestal, it is a di erent one from earlier centuries: he also provides the earliest account of Virgil the magician, by describing a bronze y in Naples that served as an apotropaic (Policraticus 1.4 [393c]). Neither before nor after 1066 did Latin lose its primacy in the schooling of the people—most often, especially in the early Middle Ages, the men—who with the help of such literacy became equipped for the composition and interpretation of English literature. Those who composed in Old and Middle English were often grounded educationally and culturally in Latin, and they drew frequently upon the literature to which they had been exposed in school. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 Norman poet Wace and Roman de Troie (1155–60) of the French poet Benoît de Sainte-Maure (d. 1173) were p. 177 Among Middle English writers Chaucer stands out as being versed in the story of Aeneas as recounted by Virgil, but even he may have garnered his knowledge of classical antiquity in part indirectly, through Dante. Like many other medieval poets, Chaucer lavishes his attention upon Dido, but he displays awareness of 71 other episodes as well. The plenitude of mosaics from the Roman period with scenes or inscriptions relating to Virgil’s Aeneid contrasts with the paucity of representations in English art from the Middle Ages that relate to Virgil or his poems. The closest to an illustrated Virgil from England is one illustration at the start of the Eclogues in a 72 single twelfth-century manuscript, argued to be English. Notwithstanding the lack of evidence in extant its descendants, since in three of his dream-visions he includes descriptions of murals which owe ultimately to Virgil’s description of the temple of Juno in Aeneid 1.446–93. At the opening of the rst book of The House of Fame the narrator dreams of nding the Aeneid engraved in brass in a temple of Venus (143–8). In the extended summary of the epic that follows (151–467), he highlights the story of Dido. In the third book he has Virgil standing alone on a column, truly paramount among all the notabilities of past history 73 (1481–5). He also includes descriptions of murals in The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls. Chaucer is exceptional in engaging explicitly with Virgil’s poem. When most other Middle English poets show a special interest in Virgil, it grows out of traditions relating to Virgil as a magician (often misleadingly styled Virgil the Necromancer) that circulated mostly outside the learned commentary tradition. One favourite story told how the poet became infatuated with the emperor’s daughter and pursued her until she agreed to an assignation. The plan was that she would hoist him one night in a basket to her chamber atop a tower, but instead she left him stranded halfway. To retaliate for the public ridicule he received, he worked magic to extinguish all the res in Rome and enabled them to be rekindled only by placing the torches at the nether regions of the woman. Virgil appears as a character three times in Gower’s Confessio amantis, twice in this guise as an infatuated lover (6.98, 8.2714–25). William Langland’s Piers Plowman includes only one explicit reference (B 12.43–45) to Virgil, as meeting a wretched end like Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Alexander the Great. The origins of such traditions have been disputed, and various hypotheses have been advanced. Two elements possibly connected with the folklore are onomastic. One is the false etymological association of the name Virgil with the Latin for ‘wand’ (virga), while the other is the identity of Magus, a family name in Virgil’s biography, with a word for a magician in the learned language. Another possible explanation is that 74 local folklore arose in Naples, in connection with Virgil’s supposed tomb. In the second half of the twelfth century and later, clerics who visited southern Italy related legends about p. 178 Virgil’s application of his purportedly magical powers to bene t the city and its environs. These non- Italian visitors included Englishmen of the twelfth century such as John of Salisbury and Gervase of Tilbury (c.1150–c.1228). At the end of the fteenth or very beginning of the sixteenth century Robert Langton (archdeacon of Dorset 1486–1514), a supporter of Appleby Grammar School in Appleby, Westmoreland, visited the grotto where 75 Virgil was buried. Many other English scholars who are not known to have visited Naples touched upon the legends in their writings. Two cases in point would be Alexander Neckam and Walter Burley (c.1275–after 1344). The Franciscan John of Wales (d. 1285), who resided in Oxford before spending the nal two decades of his life in Paris, knits together tales about the magician with observations on Virgil as a poet. One of the so-called classicizing friars of the following century, John of Lathbury (d. 1362), cites a few peculiar traditions about Virgil from a text he thought to be by Fulgentius the mythographer. The interest expressed in Latin sources appears in English too, for instance in John Lydgate of Bury (c.1370–c.1451) and in the English Life of Virgilius (published in the early sixteenth century in Antwerp). The third of Virgil’s three appearances in Gower’s Confessio amantis is as the inventor of a magic mirror (5.2031–244). The motif of the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 codices, it is worth wondering if Chaucer might have seen illuminated manuscripts of the Aeneid or any of magic mirror created to make visible any imminent dangers to Rome also appears in Chaucer, although 76 without mention of Virgil as its maker. Not to be underestimated is the reputation Virgil acquired for having anticipated almost prophetically the birth of Christ. It was widely accepted that the so-called Messianic eclogue (Eclogue 4) foretold the birth of 77 Christ. This tradition helps to account for the appearance of Virgil, along with the Sibyl and prophets, as a witness to the Incarnation in plays. This Messianism could have also encouraged a belief in stories in which the poet had magical powers and employed or fabricated magical devices that retained their e ects until a virgin gave birth. omniscience. The late antique author Macrobius, who devoted four of seven books in his Saturnalia to Virgil, ascribed universal knowledge to him, with command of rhetoric, literature, lore, and all else. Gervase of Melkley cites a Roger (of Devon or Dover?) who ‘says that in Virgil’s Aeneid are contained all vices and all 78 gures, all rhetorical colors as well, in addition to the whole of philosophy and the whole of ethics’. In the Fall of Princes (1430) John Lydgate is more restrained, singling out the author of the Aeneid speci cally for 79 having excelled ‘In rethorik be souereynte of stile’. Later in the same poem he cites Virgil rst in a short 80 list of ancient poets, but his point in rehearsing their names is to proclaim ignorance of the classics. The commentators of late antiquity understood Virgil’s three works as covering a spread in their learning and style. In learning, Philagrius saw them as representing physics, ethics, and logic (Hagen 2bf), while Servius detected a stylistic spectrum running from tenuis through moderatus to validus (Comm. 1–2). From p. 179 such triads John of Garland developed the idea of the Rota Virgilii (Virgil’s Wheel), which arranged the low, middle, and high styles with speci c social classes, characters, animals, implements, places, and trees. Another type of threesome is nowadays called the Virgilian career, a progression in which a writer moves generically from pastoral through didactic to epic. An anonymous poem in Latin hexameter couplets that was appended to a few manuscripts with poems of John Gower attempts to coordinate the Middle English 81 poet with Virgil, since both wrote three major works. The Middle Scots poet Robert Henryson himself shows an awareness of the progression. The rst book printed in English, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (‘Collection of the Stories of Troy’, 1474) by William Caxton (c.1422–c.1492), was based ultimately on the late thirteenth-century Latin prose account by the Italian Guido delle Colonne as translated into French. This version, independent of the Aeneid, perpetuates the notion of Aeneas as a traitor. The medieval custom of paraphrasing and adapting the Aeneid culminated (and terminated) in William Caxton’s Eneydos (1490), which is likewise not indebted to Virgil. Instead, it follows the French retelling in the Eneas. Roughly two decades after Caxton, Gavin Douglas (c.1475–1522) took on with stunning success the challenge of translating the Aeneid. His feat of adapting Virgil’s dactylic hexameters into the heroic couplets of his Eneados (completed in 1513) is impressive by itself, since it is the rst translation into an English dialect of the complete Aeneid, including the continuation in Latin dactylic hexameters by the Italian poet 82 Maphaeus Vegius (Ma eo Vegio, 1407–58). In this version Douglas denounces Caxton harshly for having handled the story in a way prejudicial to Aeneas, and he privileges Virgil’s version over both Chaucer and Caxton. He demonstrates at least some familiarity with the Eclogues and Georgics in his so-called seasonal 83 prologues, in which he describes generally the season and circumstances in which he wrote the book. Douglas’s achievement is compounded by his e ort to incorporate into his vernacular the essentials of the experience that a reader of his day would have had in reading the Aeneid in Latin, thanks to the commentary tradition that had burgeoned around the epic. Douglas’s approach to the poem re ects his knowledge of both the medieval and the humanistic commentary traditions. He supplies prologues to the individual books Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 Short of viewing Virgil as a sorcerer, it had been customary to laud his poetic perfection and seeming of the epic, verse summaries, chapter divisions, and (although only halfway through the translation of 84 Aeneid 1) marginal prose commentary. In Prologue 6 he asserts that Virgil is universally esteemed, as borne out by Servius, Augustine, and Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462–1535). He explains how the rst six books of the Aeneid deal with human life and death, the sixth with the afterlife. He ties this coverage to the foretelling of Christ and the golden age in the Eclogues. Many passages in Virgil are consonant with Christianity, although he was a pagan who made such p. 180 errors as referring to multiple gods and transmigration of the soul. He touches upon the interpretation of Virgil as a prophet. He translated ‘Mantua me genuit,’ a sign of his immersion in the commentary and 85 Middle English quatrain survives of two lines from Virgil’s second eclogue (2.17–18). Douglas’s translation may have marked a great advance in its quality and in the comprehensiveness with which it codi ed the commentary tradition, but it did not mark an end to the characteristically medieval Virgil the magician. About ve years after the rst printing of Douglas’s translation, the printer Jan van Doesborch (d. 1536) published at Antwerp an English Life of Virgilius, translated from a Dutch text that was also the source of a French version. It o ers a rich dossier of the legends about Virgil that had been associated strongly with England since the twelfth century. Virgil served as a constant in the literary culture of England, in the Middle Ages as before and after. His three poems, especially the Aeneid, were pored over as an essential component in the learning of Latin and in the acquisition of literary culture. Despite intermittent discomfort over his paganism, Virgil’s works were understood to transcend the spiritual limitations of ancient Rome. In the later Middle Ages Geo rey Chaucer and Gavin Douglas stand out for the subtlety with which they engaged with Virgil. Other Middle English poets often evidence more awareness of Virgil’s folkloric doppelgänger, the magician Virgil, than of the poet. Notes 1 Among key references on the Virgilian tradition in early and later medieval England, see Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twel h Century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995); on Chaucer see also Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca, NY, 1988), ch. 3 on Virgil and Ovid in the Troilus, pp. 87–110. On Lydgateʼs apprehension of Virgil see in this volume Chapter 22 by Edwards and references there. More generally see The Virgil Encyclopedia, eds Richard F. Thomas and Jan M. Ziolkowski, 3 vols (Oxford, 2014). 2 De naturis rerum, 2.109, in Alexandri Neckam De naturis rerum libri duo. With the poem of the same author, De laudibus divinae sapientiae, ed. Thomas Wright (1863), pp. 190–2. 3 Vivien Law, The Insular Latin Grammarians (Woodbridge, 1982), p. 30. 4 Günter Glauche, Schullektüre im Mittelalter: Entstehung und Wandlungen des Lektürekanons bis 1200 nach den Quellen dargestellt (Munich, 1970), and Birger Munk Olsen, LʼÉtude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 4 vols (Paris, 1982–2014). 5 Fiona Tolhurst Neuendorf, ʻNegotiating Feminist and Historicist Concerns: Guenevere in Geo rey of Monmouthʼs Historia regum Britanniaeʼ, Quondam et futurus 3 (1993), 26–44. 6 On the Troy traditions, see Chapter 13 in this volume by Desmond. 7 Meyer Reinhold, ʻThe Unhero Aeneasʼ, Classica et mediaevalia 27 (1966), 195–207, and Sharon Stevenson, ʻAeneas in Fourteenth-Century Englandʼ, in The Classics in the Middle Ages: Papers of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, eds Aldo S. Bernardo and Saul Levin (Binghamton, NY, 1990), pp. 371–8. 8 For these items, see The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fi een Hundred Years, eds Jan M. Ziolkowski and Michael C. J. Putnam p. 181 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 biographical tradition. Beyond the Middle Scots translation of the Aeneid by Douglas, a translation into a (New Haven, 2008), pp. 44–5, and Maria Chiara Scappaticcio, Papyri Vergilianae: lʼapporto della papirologia alla storia della tradizione Virgiliana (I–VI D.C.) (Liège, 2013). For the expression, see Lateinisches Hexameter-Lexikon: dichterisches Formelgut von Ennius bis zum Archipoeta, ed. Otto Schumann, MGH Hilfsmittel 4 (Munich, 1979–83). For poetry the most complete database at present is Poetria Nova 2: A CD-ROM of Latin Medieval Poetry (650–1250 A.D .), eds Paolo Mastrandrea and Luigi Tessarolo, 2nd edn (Florence, 2010). 10 Prologue 11, ed. Thomas Wright (1856), p. 1. 11 Henry of Avranches, The Metrical Life of Saint Hugh of Lincoln, ed. Charles Garton (Lincoln, 1986). 12 For the contemporary response, see Virgilian Tradition, eds Ziolkowski and Putnam, pp. 5–14. 13 Inferno, 1.79–80 and 86–7, ed. and trans. C. S. Singleton, The Divine Comedy, 3 vols (Princeton, 1971–5). 14 ʻWhat Is a Classic?ʼ, in T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1957), pp. 52–74. 15 J. D. A. Ogilvy, Books Known to the English, 597–1066 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 258. 16 Ars poetica, ed. Hans-Jürgen Gräbener (Münster/Westfalen, 1965), p. 68, lines 4–5: ʻApostulus dicit, id est Paulus. Poeta, id est Virgilius.ʼ 17 On the absence of the classics among manuscripts relating to the Anglo-Saxon mission in Germany, see Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006), pp. 77–81. 18 On Abboʼs sojourn in England, see Roger Wright, ʻAbbo of Fleury in Ramsey (985–987)ʼ, in Elizabeth M. Tyler, Conceptualizing Multilingualism in England, c.800–c.1250 (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 105–20. 19 Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 124 and 273–4. 20 See R. S. O. Tomlin, ʻThe Book in Roman Britainʼ, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, c.400–1100, ed. Richard Gameson (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 375–88, at p. 380, and Maria Chiara Scappaticcio, ʻVirgilio, allievi e maestri a Vindolanda: per unʼedizione di nuovi documenti dal forte britannicoʼ, Zeitschri für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 169 (2009), 59–70, especially pp. 61–3. 21 Alan K. Bowman and J. David Thomas, The Vindolanda Writing-Tablets = Tabulae Vindolandenses, vol. 3 (2003), p. 160, on Tabulae Vindolandenses 2: 452. ʻVindolandaʼ, VE 1339–40. 22 Guy de la Bédoyère, ʻCarausius and the Marks RSR and INPDAʼ, Numismatic Chronicle 158 (1998), 79–88. 23 The Roman Inscriptions of Britain: II instrumentum domesticum, fascicules 1–8, eds S. S. Frere, M. W. C. Hassall, et al. (Gloucester, 1990–5), vol. 2, fascicule 5, p. 138: 2491 ʻGra iti on Tilesʼ, no. 148. Both campester and Campanus could be adjectives rather than names: ʻUntrustworthy Pertacus, countryboy Lucilianus, the Campanian—all fell silent.ʼ 24 Roman Inscriptions of Britain, vol. 2, fascicule 4, p. 67: 2447 ʻWallplasterʼ, no. 9: ʻbina manuʼ (Aeneid, 1.313, 7.688, or 12.165). 25 Roman Inscriptions of Britain, vol. 2, fascicule 4, p. 86: 2448 ʻMosaicsʼ, no. 6. 26 M. Henig, ʻJames Engleheartʼs Drawing of a Mosaic at Frampton, 1794ʼ, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 106 (1984), 143–6. Alternatively, the scene could have been inspired by Ovid (Metamorphoses, 14.113–15). 27 Georges de Plinval, Pélage, ses écrits, sa vie et sa réforme: étude dʼhistoire littéraire et religieuse (Lausanne, 1943), pp. 72–4. 28 Paul Lehmann, ʻEinleitung in die lateinische Philologie des Mittelaltersʼ, in Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen 2, ed. Ludwig Traube (Munich, 1911), pp. 1–176, at p. 113. 29 Neil Wright, ʻGildasʼs Reading: A Surveyʼ, Sacris erudiri 32 (1991), 121–62, at p. 129. 30 For a balanced view, see Michael Herren, ʻScholarly Contacts between the Irish and the Southern English in the Seventh Centuryʼ, Peritia 12 (1998), 24–53. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 p. 182 9 Law, Insular Latin Grammarians, p. 9. 32 In the Vita Gudiana 1 Eriugena is credited with a particular explanatory schema for Virgil: see Virgilian Tradition, pp. 254 and 256. 33 Vivien Law, ʻMalsachanus Reconsidered: A Fresh Look at a Hiberno-Latin Grammarianʼ, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1 (1981), 83–93. 34 Giuseppina Barabino, ʻLe citazioni virgiliane in Malsacanoʼ, in Grammatici latini dʼetà imperiale: miscellanea filologica (Genoa, 1976), pp. 195–218, at pp. 197 and 218. 35 For a classic early expression of the case, see C. H. Beeson, ʻInsular Symptoms in the Commentaries on Vergilʼ, Studi medievali NS 5 (1932), 81–100. 36 Besides Beeson, ʻInsular Symptomsʼ, pp. 94–100 see David Daintree, ʻThe Transmission of Virgil and Virgil Scholia in Medieval Irelandʼ, in Romanobarbarica 16 (1999), 33–47. 37 One gloss cites ʻAdamnanusʼ in a way that confirms Adomnánʼs activity in explicating Virgil: see Michael Lapidge, ʻThe Career of Aldhelmʼ, Anglo-Saxon England 36 (2007), 15–69, at p. 30. 38 See Gertrud Brüning, ʻAdamnans Vita Columbae und ihre Ableitungenʼ, Zeitschri für celtische Philologie 11 (1917), 213– 304, at p. 241. 39 See Lapidge, ʻThe Career of Aldhelmʼ, at pp. 15–16 and 29–30. 40 See Charles Murgia, ʻServius, Manuscripts ofʼ, in The Virgil Encyclopedia, eds Richard F. Thomas and Jan M. Ziolkowski, 3 vols (Oxford, 2014), pp. 1154–7. 41 Murgia, ʻServiusʼ, p. 1157. 42 Malcolm B. Parkes, ʻThe Handwriting of St Boniface: A Reassessment of the Problemsʼ, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 98 (1976), 161–79. 43 Peter K. Marshall, ʻThe Spangenberg Bifolium of Servius: The Manuscript and the Textʼ, Rivista di filología e di istruzione classica 128 (2000), 192–209. 44 For Aldhelm, see Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 186; for Alcuin, Ogilvy, Books Known to the English, pp. 241–2; for Byrhtferth, David Ganz, ʻWhen is a Library Not a Library?ʼ, Early Medieval Europe 17 (2009), 444–53, at p. 452. 45 Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 96–7. 46 Andy Orchard, The Poetic Art of Aldhelm (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 130–5. 47 Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp. 178–91, especially pp. 188–90. See Variae collectiones aenigmatum Merovingicae aetatis (including Aldhelmʼs Aenigmata), ed. Fr. Glorie, CCSL 133 (Turnhout, 1968), 375, line 135. 48 Andy Orchard, ʻAldhelmʼs Libraryʼ, in The Cambridge History of the Book, vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 591–605 (at pp. 596–8). 49 Orchard, Poetic Art, p. 132. 50 Neil Wright, ʻBede and Vergilʼ, Romanobarbarica 6 (1981), 367–71. 51 Michael Lapidge, ʻBede and the Poetic Diction of Vergilʼ, in Poesía latina medieval (siglos V–XV): actas del IV Congreso del ʻInternationales Mittellateinerkomiteeʼ, Santiago de Compostela, 12–15 de septiembre de 2002, eds Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz and José Maria Díaz de Bustamante (Tavarnuzze [Firenze], 2005), pp. 739–48. 52 ʻBella Maro resonet, nos pacis dona canamus; | munera nos Christi, bella Maro resonet. | Carmina casta mihi, foedae non raptus Helenae, | Luxus erit lubricis, carmina casta mihi. | Dona superna loquar, miserae non proelia Troiae, | Terra quibus gaudet: dona superna loquarʼ (ʻLet Virgil sing wars, let us sing the gi s of peace; let Virgil sing wars, us the gi s of Christ. My song is chaste, I sing not the rape of sinful Helen; that will be indulgence for the wanton, my song is chaste. I will sing of heavenly gi s, not the battles of piteous Troy; I will sing of heavenly gi s in which the earth rejoicesʼ). Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, trans. J. E. King, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1976–9), 2, 112–13 (translation adapted). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 p. 183 31 Seppo Heikkinen, ʻVergilian Quotations in Bedeʼs De arte metricaʼ, Journal of Medieval Latin 17 (2007), 101–9. 54 M. L. W. Laistner, ʻBede as a Classical and Patristic Scholarʼ, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Fourth Series 16 (1933), 69–94, at p. 73. 55 Rosalind Love, ʻThe Library of the Venerable Bedeʼ, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britian, vol. 1, ed. Gameson, pp. 606–32, at p. 629. 56 Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 38 n. 44. 57 Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p. 44. 58 The Old English Boethius, Meter 30.3, eds and trans. Susan Irvine and Malcolm R. Godden (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), pp. 380–1. 59 Michael Lapidge, ʻAn Aspect of Old English Poetic Diction: The Postpositioning of Prepositionsʼ, in Inside Old English: Essays in Honour of Bruce Mitchell, ed. John Walmsley (Oxford, 2006), pp. 153–80, at pp. 176–9. 60 From the substantial bibliography, the first and latest major studies give an idea of the spectrum that has developed: Friedrich Klaeber, ʻAeneis und Beowulfʼ, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 126 (1911), 40–8, and Richard North, The Origins of Beowulf: From Vergil to Wiglaf (Oxford, 2006). The most useful survey of possibly related passages is provided in Tom Burns Haber, A Comparative Study of the Beowulf and the Aeneid (Princeton, 1931). 61 Haber, A Comparative Study, p. 80. Far from everyone is persuaded: see John D. Niles, Beowulf: The Poem and its Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 75–6 and 78, and Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 133. 62 Robert Hasenfratz, ʻEisegan stefne (Christ and Satan 36a), the Visio Pauli, and ferrea vox (Aeneid 6, 626)ʼ, Modern Philology 86 (1989), 398–403. 63 In the Folie Tristan dʼOxford, the fool claims to have had a whale for his mother, and proceeds then (where the Folie Tristan de Berne identifies his father as a walrus) to refer to a nursing tigress, recalling the Hyrcanian tigress mentioned in Aeneid 4. 367: see Early French Tristan Poems, ed. Norris J. Lacy, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1998). 64 Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 167–219. 65 On the musical notation of Dido laments, see Jan M. Ziolkowski, Nota bene: Reading Classics and Writing Songs in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 275–7 and 286–7, and Jan M. Ziolkowski, ʻWomenʼs Lament and the Neuming of the Classicsʼ, in Music and Medieval Manuscripts, eds John Haines and Randall Rosenfeld (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 128–50, at pp. 128, 131, 133–5. See also Chapter 3 in this volume by Woods, ʻExperiencing the Classics in Medieval Educationʼ. 66 Birger Munk Olsen, ʻVirgile et la renaissance du XII siècleʼ, in Lectures médiévales de Virgile: actes du colloque organisé par lʼÉcole française de Rome, ed. Jean-Yves Tilliette (Rome, 1985), pp. 31–48, at p. 36. 67 Seth Lerer, ʻJohn of Salisburyʼs Virgilʼ, Vivarium 20 (1982), 24–39. 68 Metalogicon, 1.24, translated (and construed for the first time in this way) by Édouard Jeauneau, Rethinking the School of Chartres, trans. Claude Paul Desmarais (Toronto, 2009), pp. 84, and 122 n. 273. 69 Translated by Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter, Medieval Rhetoric and Grammar: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300– 1475 (Oxford, 2009), p. 536. 70 Policraticus, 6.11. 71 Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 220–69, and Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval ʻAeneidʼ (Minneapolis, 1994), pp. 128–62. 72 Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 22 and 296–7, on London, Lambeth Palace, MS 471. 73 Compare ʻKnightʼs Taleʼ, 1914–2088. 74 Joseph Burney Trapp, ʻThe Grave of Vergilʼ, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984), 1–31. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 p. 184 53 p. 186 The Pilgrimage of Robert Langton, ed. E. M. Blackie (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), transcribed from the unique copy in Lincoln Cathedral, dated 1523. 76 ʻSquireʼs Taleʼ, 231. See Gerald Robert Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1961), p. 187 n. 3. 77 For a summary of the Christian reception of Eclogue 4, see The Virgilian Tradition, eds Ziolkowski and Putnam, pp. 487–8. Useful surveys of the tradition include J. W. Jones, Jr, ʻThe Allegorical Traditions of the Aeneidʼ, in Virgil at 2000: Commemorative Essays on the Poet and his Influence, ed. J. D. Bernard (New York, 1986), pp. 107–32; Stephen Benko, ʻVirgilʼs Fourth Eclogue in Christian Interpretationʼ, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 31:1 (Berlin, 1980), 646– 705; Pierre Courcelle, ʻLes Exégèses chrétiennes de la quatrième éclogueʼ, Revue des études anciennes 59 (1957), 294–319. 78 Ars poetica, ed. Gräbener, p. 7, lines 12–16. 79 Lydgateʼs Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS ES 121–4 (1924–7), Book 4.71–7, at 73. 80 Fall of Princes, ed. Bergen, Book 9.3401–4: ʻI never was acqueynted with Virgyle, | Nor with sugryd dytees of Omer | Nor Dares Frygius with his goldene style, | Nor with Ovyde, in poetrye moost enteer.ʼ On Lydgate see also Chapter 22 in this volume by Edwards. 81 Michael P. Kuczynski, ʻGowerʼs Virgilʼ, in On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2007), pp. 163–87. 82 On Douglasʼs translation of the Aeneid see further Chapter 26 on Douglas in this volume by Royan. 83 Douglas Gray, Later Medieval English Literature (Oxford, 2008), p. 82. 84 Gray, Later Medieval English Literature, pp. 555–63. 85 Siegfried Wenzel, ʻUnrecorded Middle-English Versesʼ, Anglia 92 (1974), 55–78, at pp. 55–6 (discussion) and 67–8 (text), on Worcester, Cathedral Library, MS F. 126, fol. 12v. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/37357/chapter/331319512 by Harvard University Library user on 18 January 2024 p. 185 75