This slim volume offers a twelve-essay tribute to Gernot R. Wieland's prodigious career and an introduction detailing the highlights of his career. When read according to the four textual categories into which Greti Dinkova-Bruun and Tristan Major divide them, the essays illuminate the diverse legacy that Wieland bequeathed to the field, especially to the areas of Anglo-Saxon and Latin literature and manuscripts. The whole book, though difficult to synopsize, consists primarily of manuscript studies that employ a range of philological and analytical methodologies. Due to spatial constraints, I cannot devote equal attention to all twelve essays, nor do they command equal attention in the volume, considering that the length and depth of the essays also vary; I therefore attempt to follow the focal points of the book to elucidate some of its salient features.
The first section contains four essays on glossing traditions, with glossing being used throughout the book to refer to both word-to-word explications and more extensive paratextual notes. This section provides the most explicit homage to Wieland's work, initiating its chapters with tributes to different aspects of his critical corpus. The first chapter, Sinéad O'Sullivan's "Text, Gloss, and Tradition in the Early Medieval West: Expanding into a World of Learning," inaugurates the collection by analyzing early medieval glosses as a means for understanding the interconnected nature of the period's intellectual cultures. Relating in part to O'Sullivan's own 2018 article for Speculum, the essay demonstrates the range of information accumulated in manuscripts; however, rather than duplicate the Speculum article's case study of a Virgil manuscript, this essay provides a sampling of early medieval glosses accumulated in the works of Martianus Capella and Virgil, glosses added by various scholars from multiple exemplars. According to O'Sullivan, these glosses amassed over time to collect knowledge spanning from the grammatical and linguistic to the encyclopedic and allegorical, yet with interconnected layers that often required readers to disassemble and reassemble the information, thereby serving not only as "containers of knowledge" but also as useful memories suited for recollection (24). In the end, O'Sullivan proposes that these interconnected glossing processes resulted in the interconnection of learning, elevation of authorities, and formation of repositories of learning.
The second glossing essay discusses how references to homosexuality in Walter of Châtillon's Alexandreis invited additional information on the topic during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the chapter, "Passing Over Queerness: Silence and Sexual Heterodoxy in Walter of Châtillon's Alexandreis," David Townsend supplies close readings of Alexander's queerness in relation to the glosses' "textures of silence," produced primarily by praeteritio (the rhetorical trope that methodically underscores material by claiming to elide it) (26). Townsend connects these elisions to the queerness, or sexual heterodoxy, that the Alexandreis "passed over" in its sources. Townsend proposes that the text, which was never meant to supplant its sources, used queerness to reify "tropes of undecidability and palpable silence," securing the text's narrative mode and structure by means of rhetorical strategies that are neither direct nor univocal (27).
Siân Echard provides the third glossing essay, entitled "Palimpsests of Place and Time in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britannie." The essay examines how Geoffrey of Monmouth affects the Historia regum Britannie's strict geographical boundaries by moving from past to present in his text as well as in Geoffrey's sources, acquired glosses, and antiquarian uses. According to Echard, the changing place names and their gloss names physically and historically change the appearance of reading. Echard observes that the Historia uses temporal and linguistic interplay within a singular region's history to demonstrate how Geoffrey layers the past and present to depict history as a "linguistic context written on both the landscape and the page," but whose paratexts and first printed editions show the many ways that names can be lost to memory (59).
The final essay in this section, Lucia Kornexl's "Qwerby knowyst…?--Tracing the Origin of 'Signs' in the Late Middle English Latin Grammar Texts," surveys the early British history of signs as indicators of Latin inflectional categories, expanding on Thomas Kohnen's findings about signs in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century vernacular grammars. [1] Kornexl links the appearance of signs in Middle English grammar-masters' texts to Anglo-Latin and Old English practices that had already transformed signs from a "grammatical glossing device to an explicit component of the late Middle English grammatical treatises" (63). Kornexl thus identifies Anglo-Latin and Old English glossing as the original indicators of synthetic or inflectional Latin categories in English contexts, indicators that were perpetuated after the Norman Conquest, reinforced by French and English analytic tendencies, and yet characterized by Latin teaching in vernacular frameworks.
The second section of the book contains three essays on Anglo-Saxon literature. The first of the section, Tristan Major's "Ælfric of Eynsham and Self-Translation," endeavors to contribute to the emerging field of self-translation studies by focusing on Ælfric of Eynsham's first Latin and Old English letter for Wulfstan, in which his self-translation shows awareness of his non-Latinate audience. Major deems these letters, written for Wulfsige and Wulfstan, both one of the earliest and most anomalous examples of European vernacular self-translation. Major points out how Ælfric's act of self-translation demonstrates a self-conscious tailoring of the Latin for a less exegetically developed vernacular audience and a more aesthetically alliterative rhythmic propensity. Major then supplies an appendix to juxtapose the three letters and their disparate renditions of similar contents, but with similarities that are sometimes as indistinct as a shared name.
The next essay, Frans van Liere's "The Old English Hexateuch Cotton Claudius B.IV and its Readers," queries the intended and actual audiences for Ælfric's Old English Hexateuch based on the accumulation of Old English and Latin glosses in London, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius B.IV. Challenging previous treatments of the text's vernacularity as evidence it was intended for either illiterate laity or uneducated monks, van Liere suggests that the notes reflect the teaching practices of the Abbey of Saint Augustine at Canterbury. With the notes' lack of preference for Latin over Old English when studying the biblical text, van Liere concludes that the readers prove to be more learned than originally assumed and that Ælfric's text played a greater role in shaping clergy's intellectual activities than he himself presumed when composing a vernacular translation.
The last essay in the Anglo-Saxon literature section is Patrizia Lendinara's "A Poem for All Seasons: Alcuin's 'O vos, est aetas." The essay reexamines Alcuin's short poem "O vos, est aetas" (Carm. 80.1), which Lendinara claims has been misconstrued as an introduction to Alcuin's De dialectia and Disputatio de rhetorica et virtutibus. Focusing especially on manuscript circulation and textual analysis that compares the work to Alcuin's other short poems, Lendinara argues that "O vos, est aetas" constitutes an independent poem that expresses Alcuin's abiding interest in educational practices.
In the third section, the book turns its attention to the texts and contexts of medieval Latin literature outside of Anglo-Saxon England, beginning in Cluny with Scott G. Bruce's "Clandestine Codices in the Captivity Narratives of Abbot Maiolus of Cluny." Bruce discusses the history of lost books to reconstruct the library of tenth-century bibliophile Maiolus, Abbot of Cluny. As Bruce points out, despite being an avid reformer, Maiolus left behind scant written material from his forty-year tenure as abbot of Cluny. To compensate for this dearth, Bruce turns to the hagiographies and histories that circulated about Maiolus during the eleventh and twelfth century, especially the accounts of Muslim adventurers' abduction of Maiolus, which includes accounts of the personal books he carried with him for the solace of himself and to the provocation of his captors.
The second essay in this section, Alexander Andrée's "The Virtues of a Medieval Teacher: ingenium and memoria in the Twelfth Century," examines how numerous preeminent twelfth-century intellectuals such as Hugh of St. Victor, Peter Abelard, and John of Salisbury deemed ingenium (i.e. aptitude or natural talent) and memoria an essential pair of traits for a successful teacher, a point Andrée acknowledges that this chapter only begins to explore.
The next essay, Gregory Hays's "The Dissuasio Valerii and its Commentators: Some Supplementary Notes," provides a brief introduction and notes for commentaries on Dissuasio Valerii, a letter written by Valerius (that is, Walter Map) during the late twelfth century to dissuade a perhaps imaginary friend named Rufinus from marrying. As Hays points out, Dissuasio commentaries are extant in Walter Map's De nugis curialium, but more commonly circulated independently. The majority of the chapter then provides previously overlooked sources and emends the modern edition by Ralph Hanna III and Traugot Lawler to exhibit the complexities and similarities of medieval and modern glossators.
The final section of the book contains two essays about Latin texts and manuscripts. The first is Michael W. Herren's "An Eleventh-Century Travel Phrase-Book in Demotic Greek," an essay about an unusual eleventh-century Greek phrase-book for travelers copied in Avranches, Bibliothèque municipal, MS 236. According to Herren, the phrase-book proves unique in that it contains fairly accurate transliterations of demotic Greek words. The chapter supplies an edition of the work and frames it with broader discussions of Greek transliteration by both ancient Greeks and Romans. As Herren observes, this particular fragment proves to more accurately represent contemporary Greek language than other phrase-books and glossaries and to more usefully provide travel phrases such as lines about eating and drinking. The essay concludes that these traits render the work both practical and nearly correct, despite being produced by non-native speakers.
Greti Dinkova-Bruun concludes the essay portion of the book with "'How Do Waters Stay Above the Firmament': British Library, MS Additional 62130 and its De aquis supra firmamentum questio quedam," a study and edition of the Questio de aquis supra firmamentum in a Cistercian manuscript created at the Abbey of the Blessed Virgin at Fountains: London, British Library, MS Additional 62130. The study portion of the chapter focuses on the Questio's approaches to the common medieval question about how the firmament stays above water in Genesis 1.6, relating the text's answers to those by earlier exegetes and to the manuscript's own copy of the Divisio philosophiae. Dinkova-Bruun treats the combination of these texts as an important insight into thirteenth-century Cistercian intellectual culture that connected the English Abbey to continental practices disseminated by the earlier school of Chartres. Dinkova-Bruun masterfully interweaves this context into a discussion of the similarly compiled points in this so-called questio, concluding that the fragment is an example of pre-scholastic inquiry characteristic of the School of Chartres in that it compiles different opinions to show a shared pursuit of universal truth that does not contradict scripture.
Overall, Teaching and Learning in Medieval Europe offers many compelling new readings especially for specialists in manuscript studies of England, with several additional essays supplying tangents into other European traditions. As an homage to Wieland's career, the collection successfully conveys the extent of his scholastic legacy; however, as often occurs in festschrifts, the book lacks a cohesive narrative of its own, focusing instead on degrees of consanguinity with the honoree. Additionally, in their devotion to Wieland and other scholastic traditions, some of the essays begin with extensive descriptions of critical traditions, some of which do not immediately connect to the essays' own interpretive contributions. The title as well seems to derive from Wieland's scholarship and Tony Hunt's three-volume Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England, whereas this book focuses primarily on reading and interpretation. The title decision, nonetheless, derives from Wieland's work in addressing the ways in which manuscript glosses and marginalia indicate their uses for teaching purposes. [2] Although the title of the work suggests somewhat broader geographical coverage and more focused pedagogical interests than the volume technically supplies, the essays contribute many incisive studies and new or expanded editions, resulting in a compilation of erudition and well-framed case studies of little-studied works.
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Notes:
1. Thomas Kohnen, "Creating Counterparts of Latin: The Implicit Vernacular Tradition in Late Middle English and Early Modern English Grammars and Textbooks," in Indigenous Grammar across Cultures, ed. Hannes Kniffka (Frankfurt am Main, 2001), 507-542.
2. Gernot Wieland, "Latin Lemma-Latin Gloss: The Stepchild of Glossologists," Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 19 (1984): 98.