Person:

Ziolkowski, Jan

Against Ruth B. Bottigheimer’s argument that the sixteenth-century Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola originated fairy tale in its best-known form, this article maintains that ancient and medieval texts contain earlier literary adaptations of folktales that qualify as fairy tales. Particular attention is paid to simi- larities between Straparola’s “Il re porco” and the Medieval Latin Asinarius. Such affinities suggest that oral tradition is not as difficult to document before the print era as Bottigheimer asserts. With regard to her theory that Straparola invented the narrative pattern that she calls “rise tales,” this article offers evidence that one such tale may be found as early as the second century CE, in Apuleius’s famous “Cupid and Psyche.” In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries folklorists were deeply concerned with studying the distribution of folktales across space and time; their key preoccupations were questions about origins and about the relationship between orality and literacy. These issues deserve to retain a central place in folklore studies.

Grammar and the schoolrooms in which it was studied were foundational in many branches of literary life throughout the Middle Ages. Although this generalization has relevance to arts and letters in most languages that were written during the period, it applies most completely to medieval Latin literature. After all, the ineluctable prerequisite of self-expression in medieval Latin was knowledge of a language that tended to be learned not at a mother’s knees but mainly at a schoolmaster’s feet. The medieval grammar school was first and foremost a school of Latin grammar, since until the late Middle Ages basic skills in reading and writing — even in the vernacular tongues — were attained after first acquiring at least a rudimentary ability to speak, read, and write Latin. The methods by which such capacities were achieved look very stable, perhaps deceptively so, across the thousand-year expanse that runs from late antiquity until the Renaissance and that coincides with the heyday of the manuscript codex as the preeminent medium for the preservation of texts and knowledge.

Ancient and medieval usages of the Latin noun auctoritas display an intrac tability that induced one lexicographer not fifty years ago to warn bluntly against trying even to translate it: The word auctoritas belongs to the most significant and lasting coinages of the Latin language. Its meaning is not always easy to ascertain, and attempt ing to translate it causes even more trouble. A wise person will do better to refrain from the effort. To guard against such difficulties, I will not unfold a full history of auctoritas and auctores from the beginning of the Latin language down to the pres ent day. Furthermore, I will not attempt to address systematically the vast scholarship on authorship, as distinct (sometimes) from auctoritas, in the Middle Ages. Instead, I will aim mainly to sketch attitudes toward authority, and authors, that prevailed among rhetoricians, grammarians, and exegetes through the earlier Middle Ages and to offer a partial list of new stances that developed afterward. In so doing, I will train my sights on literary auctoritas and auctores, those implicated in reading and writing. Even within this re stricted ambit, I accept the impossibility of attaining exhaustive complete ness. The period I will seek eventually to elucidate may be called the long twelfth century. Centuries are arbitrary slices of time, and major transitions may refuse willfully to take place just as the ninety-ninth year yields to the hundredth. In my definition, the long twelfth century extends from after the Great Schism of 1054 that divided the Greek and Latin branches of Christendom to around the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.

As a letter writer Peter Abelard is known best for the autobiographical Historia calamitatum, which presents itself ostensibly as a consolatoria [epistola] to an unnamed friend, and his correspondence with Heloise, which amounts to seven letters, often subsumed into the so-called Personal Letters (Letters 2–5) and the so-called Letters of Direction (Letters 6–8). These eight letters are now most often numbered continuously from one through eight, although confusingly they have been presented sometimes with the Historia calamitatum unnumbered and the letters from and to Heloise numbered one through seven, rather than two through eight. (This is to say nothing of the so-called Lost Love Letters, which have been argued recently and controversially to be excerpts from the billets doux exchanged by Heloise and Abelard during their love affair. ) All of these texts have been made easily accessible in good editions and translations and are generally familiar to medievalists. Less studied have been at least a half dozen other letters, among which are Letters 9–14, which were edited definitively by the late Edmé Smits (1950–1992). These other writings have the disadvantages of not being as closely associated with the personal engagement of Peter Abelard and Heloise, of having separate addressees, and of being transmitted separately rather than in an organic collection. But several of them stand out for being as extraordinary in their own right as is the personal correspondence, and they hold the potential to repay the effort of close examination. In this case I would like to probe two of them to glean insights into Peter Abelard’s practice as a historian and as a textual critic. Letters 11 and 10 will be treated chronologically, not according to the traditional numbering.

Interpretation and philology have a long, rich, and complicated relationship. In one sense philology takes interpretation as its point of departure, while in another philology aims ultimately at facilitating or achieving interpretation. Since in discussing literary criticism and theory the practice is sometimes followed of conveying the most serious thoughts in nouns derived from Greek, the circularity of the relationship between interpretation and philology could be reduced to the following statement: interpretation figures in both the etiology and the teleology of philology. Even if we put aside the question of philology, interpretation by itself is an impressively far-reaching enterprise. It is associated intimately with such extensive and varied practices as hermeneutics and exegesis, glosses and commentary, and translation