"Diverse pathes," as Chaucer observed in his Treatise on the Astrolabe, "leden diverse folk the right way to Rome" (39-40), and this fine and nimble book is in some respects the nexus of C. David Benson's career-spanning scholarly contributions on subjects as diverse as medieval legends of Troy, Chaucer's religious tales, the achievements of John Lydgate, urban culture, Mandeville's Travels, and the creative energies of Piers Plowman. The milla viae of these research pathways intersect in fresh and unexpected ways in this lucid, well-balanced consideration of the poetic possibilities of ancient Rome--both pagan and early Christian--in medieval England. It is striking, as Benson points out, that ancient Rome (unlike, say, Troy) has thus far escaped systematic study as a creative focus within medieval English literary works, despite Britain's own status as a former Roman colony. This neglect plausibly owes to the submerged presence of Romanness or the "Roman scene" in the Middle English literary corpus, as compared with poets' more visible fascination with Troy or Athens. It also reflects the hard-dying habits of periodization, as a suggestive coda (which one may have wished longer) to the final chapter suggests. Rome, its civic history, and its intellectual heritage, the assumption goes, awaited the animating touch of a Donatello or a Shakespeare after a long medieval slumber. To consider the idea of Rome and its antiquities in an English framework before (or, in the instance of John Lydgate, the last of Benson's case studies, at the cusp of) Renaissance humanism is thus to be faced with English poets' murky, elliptical, and frequently conflicted efforts to imagine the ancient city whose ruins, repurposed or abandoned, testified to everything that was simultaneously awe-inspiring and threatening about antiquity. In his masterful, yet compact, analyses of the Roman imaginary in works by Gower, Chaucer, Lydgate, and Langland, Benson makes clear that there is nothing monolithic about the Urbs Aeterna within the space of Middle English poetry. Furthermore, Benson performs an important service in bringing into dialogue with these canonical, high-culture accounts a selection of extra-literary or otherwise marginal texts that occupy a common imaginative orbit. Most valuably, Benson enriches our understanding of medieval views of antiquity by insisting on the integrity of the "matter of Rome" (in this case, Rome itself, as opposed to the stories of the several world cultures from which it culminates) and, unlike studies of the influence of the classical Roman poets upon vernacular writing, conceiving of this in terms of place and polity rather than literary tradition.
Because none of the medieval authors this book studies ever visited Rome, the ancient city emerges as an imaginative construct, an idea, rather than an actual place or a physical reality. Accordingly, Benson's methodology is neither archaeological nor historicist, but resolutely "literary," incorporating the resources of stylistic and formalistic analysis. This book is unapologetic in discerning, and often admiring, evidence of deliberate craft in the most and least accomplished of the poets it studies. Because Rome, for these medieval English poets, is a "fantasy city" (2), what is ultimately illuminated in this study of literary representations of Rome, a bit circularly, are the ideological priorities, values, and projections of poets themselves more than the ancient metropolis in its own right. That several distinct fantasies of Rome, and a spectrum of attitudes toward Roman paganism, emerge from this analysis testifies to the striking diversity of poetic outlooks among late-medieval English poets.
In different hands, the scope of this topic might have become unwieldy, but Benson prudently focuses his study on poetry as distinct from other forms, and on ancient rather than medieval Rome, to illuminate how Rome functioned as an engine of the literary imagination and a framework for stories (as the subtitle of the book has it). This principle of selectivity means that some of the more memorable and commonly encountered discussions of Rome by medieval English writers are deliberately excluded from consideration: Margery Kempe's account of her pilgrimage to Rome, for example, and John Capgrave's pilgrim's guide to the holy city. Although Benson's rationale for exclusively focusing on poetry might have been more fully elaborated, his close literary analysis throughout the book successfully demonstrates how "attention to the stylistic elements and devices peculiar to poetry" illuminates each poet's approach to "the ancient city and its stories, reshaping and reimagining them for his own purposes" (7). Concomitantly, this book's close readings typically have a good deal to say about medieval translatio and intertextuality. All of the poems under consideration are either adaptations of non-English source texts or of one another. These chapters are replete with rich insights into how vernacular translations lacquered new thematic concerns and emotional registers onto Latin prose originals, and how, in the case of much-worked-over stories like that of Lucretia, Middle English writers creatively quited the work of their predecessors like so many Canterbury pilgrims. In such instances, Benson deftly guides the reader through the experience of reading in palimpsest and attending to the thematic and stylistic transformations that occur when (as with the texts treated in the first two chapters) Latin prose is recast as English poetry.
Imagined Romes is felicitously structured into two parts--"Ancient Rome and Its Objects" and "Narratives of Ancient Romans"--the first of which articulates a further "bifurcation of ancient Rome into pagan and Christian cities" (7) that informs the book as a whole. Chapters 1 and 2 form a diptych, analyzing texts that, respectively, idealize early Christian Rome as a holy place and as a site of pagan marvels and monuments. The anonymous late-medieval poems considered in the first two chapters, the Stacions of Rome and the Metrical Mirabilia interpolated into the Metrical Version of Mandeville's Travels, imaginatively reconstruct ancient Rome for essentially instructional purposes, offering a fascinating counterpoint to the imaginative, narrative-centered literary approaches to Rome taken up by the major canonical authors studied in part 2. The first chapter delineates the conceptual work performed by the Stacions of Rome, a late Middle English poetic adaptation of the fourteenth-century Latin prose Indulgentiae ecclesiarum urbis Romae. In establishing Rome as a holy place of miracles, distinguished by its multitudes of martyrs and saints and relics, the Middle English poem constructs an imaginative landscape within which the reader can make contact with the idealized early Christian city, presented here, in Benson's sparkling analogy, as a "spiritual Land of Cockayne" (31). The process of vernacular translatio incorporates stylistic embellishments echoing romance tradition, emotional appeals and prompts to affective involvement, and a more cohesive thematic structure centering upon sin as the "fundamental human problem" (23). Benson provocatively establishes that the vernacular poem, unlike its source, positions itself through these stylistic strategies as a surrogate for the armchair traveler: a "textual substitute for Rome rather than a guide to it" (23).
Chapter 2, on the Metrical Mirabilia (a translation of a twelfth-century Latin prose source, via what Benson identifies as a late, hybrid text of the Mirabilia), provides a more linear account of the development from source to adaptation. In an antiquarian spirit, albeit one based in imaginative lore rather than empirical observation, the Mirabilia catalogues ancient (pagan) objects and structures as evidenced by ruins and fragments, also incorporating stories of famed ancient Romans in connection with civic sites and monuments. Benson views the process of translatio in this case as involving ideological recalibration more than stylistic reframing. In contrast with what he contends is the Latin Mirabilia's celebratory, respectful stance on pagan achievements, the Middle English poem, in its selection and amplification of key details, is polemical and censorious toward them, emphasizing the imperative of its reinvention as a Christian city.
Having established the spectrum of medieval attitudes toward Rome and the ambivalence of its dual pagan and Christian heritage, Imagined Rome next reveals how deep was the creative fascination held by ancient Rome for the major Ricardian poets. The book's especially crisp third chapter, on John Gower's Confessio Amantis, begins with the salient observation that ancient Rome is the setting most frequently encountered in the lengthy story collection. It proceeds to observe, convincingly, that Rome for Gower functions as a resilient paradigm of "civic governance" (60), buttressing the thematic structure of this intensely politically conscious poem, especially in the section on "Policie" (part of Aristotle's counsel to Alexander) in book 7. Benson demonstrates that Gower's Roman stories recurrently glorify strong central leaders and advocate horizontal collaboration toward the common good, in part by tracing counterexamples of corrupt leaders (like Apius and Aruns) and instances of individual heroism. Interestingly, this chapter discovers the inverse of what the second chapter posited concerning the Mirabilia: pagan civic virtue, rightly balanced between ruler and community, serving as a corrective to contemporary Christian (papal) corruption in Rome.
Chaucer's perspective on ancient Rome, chapter 4 illustrates, could not be more distinct from Gower's: here is yet another revealing case study of the contrast in literary sensibilities between friendly rivals. Focusing on sections of Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales, Benson reads the structure of power in Chaucer's portrayals of Rome as heinously "vertical and gendered" (79), and the city itself as "feminized" as an engine of stories about female experience and resistance. Unlike in the Confessio, virtue is conceivable only outside of Rome's oppressive political structure, which is unredeemable; community--predicated upon female subjectivity, not male heroism--must be forged elsewhere. In what Benson describes as a hagiographical, as opposed to political, stance on Romanness, Chaucer critiques early Christian as well as pagan Rome with unparalleled hostility, and implies that perfidy toward women is etched into the very construction of Rome by virtue of the inescapable story of Aeneas's abandonment of Dido.
Perhaps the most unexpected body of analysis appears in chapter 5, which observes in William Langland'sPiers Plowman both a preoccupation with contemporary Christian Rome's inadequacies as a locus of salvation and an "indifference to Roman history and culture" (101) of a piece with the poem's broader disinterest in classical antiquity and allusion. Despite this, Benson compellingly argues, Langland's account (adapted, with important dramatic shifts, from the Legenda Aurea) of Emperor Trajan and Pope Gregory constitutes a reflection on Romanness that contributes importantly to the poem's thematic structure, particularly the reconciliation of virtues that climaxes in the later account of the Harrowing of Hell. Trajan's truthe, or justice, and Gregory's love, or mercy, illustrate the "dual legacy of ancient Rome, pagan and Christian" (119), further revising the association of Gregorian grace with material pardons in texts such as theStacions of Rome. Although the link between Trajan, Gregory, and Romanness can appear tenuous at times in this chapter (it is indicated, for example, that Langland's references to Rome in the Trajan episode diminish the source text's interest in "the reality of the physical city itself" [104]), Benson succeeds in establishing that the pervasive binary conception of Rome--as archetypally pagan and Christian--inevitably colors the special relationship between Trajan and Gregory and reinforces the "dialectic between justice and mercy that occupies so much of Langland's poem and is perhaps its major theme" (117).
Finally, the sixth chapter reads John Lydgate's representations of ancient Rome in Fall of Princes as both antiquarian in historical detail and Augustinian in outlook. Analyzing Lydgate's adjustments of his chief source, Laurent de Premierfait's French prose translation of Boccaccio's Latin prose De casibus virorum illustrium, and considering his creative dialogue with other English writers in the case of individual stories, Benson notes Lydgate's evocation of ancient Rome as a paradigmatically tragic image of "the ultimate futility of all worldly power," especially in the Envoy to Rome original to the English poem (129). Translatio forms a cornerstone of this chapter, although Benson's observations on this could have been more clearly integrated with the main line of argumentation (a discrete sub-section, pp. 125-7, on translation theory in the prologue of the first book of Fall of Princes, for example, is not explicitly reconciled with the chapter's analyses until much later, pp. 135-6). Nonetheless, Benson makes a strong case, particularly in his reading of Lucrece, for Lydgate as a skillful literary craftman capable of conveying psychological complexity, one who even is at times quasi-Chaucerian in his intertextual sportiveness, and cutting-edge in his interest in Italian humanism's reconception of Roman stories.
"Cities, like dreams," Marco Polo says to Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1972), "are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." [1] Much the same could be said about the medieval fantasies of Rome that are the subject of Benson's Imagined Romes. Instead of advancing a grand récit that accounts for the cultural functions of ancient Rome in medieval England in a comprehensive or theoretically self-contained way, this book consists of a series of intersecting micronarratives, inspired by the stylistic expression of each text, that trace Rome's afterlife as a space of story. Imagined Romes is intellectually generous in design, its voice almost teacherly, without ever being prescriptive. Both in its selection of texts and its analyses, Benson's book is concise, economical, wearing its learning lightly and guarding its scope jealously. Some might accuse this study of being too minimalistic, for example in raising but not pursuing the possibility that medieval poets' idealization (or, alternatively, denigration) of ancient Rome enables them to stake out a position on current ecclesiastical abuses in the debauched city, thus aligning what may seem remote artistic concerns with a ground game of social critique. Such possibilities are left, for better or worse, to the reader to pursue. In all, this lucid, richly suggestive, foundational study of an ancient locale makes a very welcome addition to current bodies of scholarship on medieval views of antiquity, travel narrative, and cultural encounter, one that in its accessibility will be appreciated both by researchers newer to these viae and to seasoned pilgrims.
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Notes:
1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974), 44.