When reading the Variae of Cassiodorus, one is often captivated by an author and a text that perform in a very particular political moment of the sixth century. That moment, locked in the turmoil of the Gothic War, seems to have produced a text that is entirely sui generis. Indeed, one could very easily assume, based on the usual criteria for reception, that Cassiodorus’s Variae existed only in the moment of its inception. At one time, the Variae seemed to be a dead-end specimen of political writing that other palatine and epistolary authors of the emerging Middle Ages never imitated. That was the standard understanding—that the Variae could teach us much about a particular moment in the political life of sixth-century Italy, but that it possessed little in the way of a legacy. Nicolas Michel’s new book, Une collection épistolaire plurielle, has changed that perception of the Variae. With codicological acumen and exacting diligence worthy of Theodor Mommsen, Michel’s new book subjects to examination an entire millennium of the Nachleben of Cassiodorus’s Variae in European political and moral thinking. Michel does more than simply trace the stemma of the manuscript tradition for the Variae from the sixth century to the sixteenth (which indeed he does with nimble dexterity). Michel traces the various pathways of readership by which Cassiodorus’s twelve books of letters were read, often in fragmented portions, to reconstruct how different audiences selectively reconstituted Cassiodorus as a legacy in medieval thought. Michel explores not only the manuscripts responsible for the modern editions that we consult today, but his study is also immersed in the many florilegia, compendia, and marginalia that preserve what was a growing and ever-changing “lore” about Cassiodorus. Through Michel’s reconstruction we come to understand how Cassiodorus held multiple personas for medieval audiences at different times and places, at once either a partner in benevolent kingship, a legal mind, an epistolary stylist, a church father, or a source in a long tradition of moral expression. Not surprisingly, given the scope of Michel’s undertaking, this is a long study (the text and various apparatus almost reach 500 pages); but the results are profoundly illuminating. By tracing how medieval audiences thought about Cassiodorus as an author, Michel’s study provides a compelling model for understanding how the medieval thought world changed over time, how ideas emerge into the mainstream of collective consciousness, and how ideas become so pervasive that they simply exist as commonplace assumptions totally divorced from historical antecedents.
The first part of the book, Un collection miraculée, follows an introduction to Cassiodorus and the manuscript tradition, and explores the emergence of the Variae into a wider world of political and literary discourse from the Carolingian period up to the twelfth century. The introduction correctly notes the relative paucity of attention given to the Nachleben of the Variae. As Michel notes, the book pursues the question of the uses to which medieval people put the Variae, “ce livre s’intéressera particulièrement à la question des usages que les mediévaux assignèrent aux Variæ” (26). Michel emphasizes the fact that the reception of Cassiodorus was embedded in the act of reading, an act that may be understood as a middle ground between the text (representing the ideas and intentions of the author) and the reader, whose interpretation of the text was contingent and constitutive of a new identity for both author and text. The first chapter seeks to answer the vexing question of what influence, if any, the Variae had during the lapse of roughly 300 years between Cassiodorus’s lifetime and the production of the earliest supposed manuscript mentioned in the catalogue of the Benedictine abbey of Lorsch ca. 830. Michel questions whether the Lorsch catalogue actually refers to the Variae and instead draws upon evidence for the use of excerpts of the Variae by church notaries at Rome during the tenth and eleventh centuries, from which Michel concludes that the Carolingian diaspora of Variae manuscripts originated with Carolingian contacts with the Papacy. Chapter Two considers the influence of the well-known Carolingian renewal of interest in late-antique epistolary collections on the dissemination of the Variae. Especially by the twelfth century, manuscripts with the letters of Ennodius, Jerome, Gregory the Great, Pliny, Seneca, Sidonius, and Symmachus circulated widely as exemplars of epistolary style; by contrast, the two families of transmission of the Variae (Books I-VI in “German” manuscripts and Books VII-XII in “French and English” manuscripts) follow the influence primarily of individuals connected to Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys. The Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux seems to have had particular influence as a point of dissemination, which Michel connects to the notarial culture of the church at Rome. Importantly, Michel notes the absence of the Variae from florilegia that included other authors commonly studied for epistolary style; instead, excerpts of language from the Variae frequently appeared in monastic charters in northern Italy, Lotharingia, and Bavaria. Thus, even though the greatest dispersion of Variae manuscripts occurred during the twelfth century, coinciding with the twelfth-century effervescence of epistolary style, codicological contexts suggest readers drew from manuscripts of the Variae to supply legal and moral language suitable for use by ecclesiastical chanceries and by palatine officials of the Holy Roman Empire, for whom the Variae provided an “easily imitable canvas” (“un canvas aisément imitable”) in Northern France, Germany and Italy (101). Thus, we see the authority of Cassiodorus coalescing around two distinct associations that made use of the Variae attractive—association with episcopal language, on the one hand, and with imperial government on the other.
The next two chapters comprise Part Two of the book, Une collection incarnée, where Michel considers the wide array of usages of the Variae in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Here, Michel demonstrates how the two tracks of transmission of the Variae gradually diffused into many medieval florilegia and compendia containing disparate bodies of moralizing literature. The presence of the Variaein these florilegia in turn elevated the authority of Cassiodorus as an author of moral matters and eventually contributed to interest in reproducing copies of the complete collection in the fourteenth century. Michel attributes the highly corrupted text of these complete copies of the Variae to the fact that compilators drew heavily from florilegia to reconstitute the original text. The fourteenth century, in particular, witnessed a notable spike in the overall production of manuscripts of the Variae, especially in Italy where more than forty percent of the fourteenth-century manuscripts were produced. By contrast, manuscripts for other epistolary authors, such as Sidonius, plummet in number at the same time that the social stratification of readers of the Variae becomes more visible. Cassiodorus became a staple in fourteenth-century universities, and quotes from the Variae can be found in a host of personal letters and works by a class of professionals for whom Latin literacy was commonplace—friars and monks of different orders, secular clergy, lawyers and judges, private academics, court educators, and students drawn from across western and eastern Europe. Although Michel does not use the phrase “popular culture,” the fourteenth-century Nachleben that he describes clearly seems to suggest a process by which Cassiodorus became a part of medieval intellectual popular culture. The engagement of a wide readership with the Variae is especially apparent in Michel’s treatment of the paratextual features of surviving manuscripts. For example, manuscripts increasingly included tables with title descriptions for individual letters of the Variae. Michel notes the distinct variety in descriptions provided for individual letters in these tables. The range of difference corresponds with the range of interests that the Variae satisfied among fourteenth-century readers. Thus, as Michel suggests, Cassiodorus was not a fixed idea, “une œuvre figée,” in the medieval imagination (167).
The last four chapters comprise Part Three of the book, Une collection interprétée. These chapters trace the reputation of Cassiodorus from apogee to the twilight of manuscript production in the sixteenth century. By examining records for prominent medieval scholars such as Henri d’Isernia, Bichilino da Spello, Giovanni di Bonandrea, and Gorro d’Arezzo, Michel reconstructs a discourse in which Cassiodorus figured as a master of political and moral rhetoric. Excerpts from the Variae abounded in collections of maxims being used as instruments of learning in universities as widespread as Bologna, Siena, Paris, London, Prague, Leipzig, and Krakow. The use of the Variae in medieval schools of grammar and rhetoric filters into the development of a coherent medieval political vocabulary visible in records of royal and imperial courts, pontifical chanceries, and the offices of Italian urban communes where the vocabularies of the Variae resurfaced as the language of medieval diplomatic, legal, and political correspondence and also the main stream of historical writing in, for example, medieval chronicles. It is in this stage of the Nachleben of the Variae that the letters become wholly re-assembled in anthologies in categories such as auctoritas, correctio, honor, utilitas, and misericordia. Thus, medieval readers increasingly encountered the Variae not as a letter collection, but as the source of sententiae providing ancient moral wisdom for the exercise of virtues and for precepts of leadership. Michel finds that the growth of Cassiodorus’s authority as a religiosus philosophus and as a religiosus rhetoricus in this period is increasingly detached from his historical role as the author of an epistolary collection. It is this extracted “essence” of Cassiodorus, embodied in moralizing sententiae, that eventually enters European vernacular languages (Italian, French, English, Catalan, Flemish, German, Polish, and Czech) and it was in this vernacular stream that medieval giants such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Christine de Pizan encountered Cassiodorus. Finally, Michel draws attention to the irony that the medieval humanist movement of which Cassiodorus was such a vibrant component also hastened the demise of interest in the Variae in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is in this final stage that increasing interest in “true” eloquence spurred the revival of, especially, the legacies of Cicero and Pliny the Younger, and the style of Cassiodorus increasingly fell into disfavor among scholars such as Petrarch and later Lorenzo Valla. By the time of Flavio Biondo, medieval scholarship had begun moving away from Cassiodorus as a source of rhetorical style and moral wisdom, and instead medieval scholars increasingly exploited the Variae as a witness to the documentary history of ancient Rome and as a witness to the historical features of the Amal government of Italy.
Michel’s conclusion notes briefly that Cassiodorus’s Variae, when read as a history of manuscript transmission, presents more than 1000 years of scholarly and popular interest in one late-antique figure. As such, the Variae sit at the junction of multiple fluid meanings in medieval intellectual history. Michel’s achievement is not slight; indeed, in regard to the Variae, Michel surpasses Theodor Mommsen. The appendices by themselves attest to the scope of labor undertaken in this study: Michel’s appendices provide updated descriptions of 160 manuscripts containing some or all of the Variae (including lists of the non-Cassiodoran content of each manuscript), descriptions of 34 surviving florilegia that contain excerpts of the Variae, and a list of the 88 institutional and private medieval libraries that had housed manuscripts of the Variae. Michel’s contribution to the scholarship of manuscript transmission and the development of medieval intellectual culture is truly inestimable.