Machines of the Mind

Personification in Medieval Literature

Katharine Breen

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226776620
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Machines of the Mind, Katharine Breen proposes that medieval personifications should be understood neither as failed novelistic characters nor as instruments of heavy-handed didacticism. She argues that personifications are instead powerful tools for thought that help us to remember and manipulate complex ideas, testing them against existing moral and political paradigms. Specifically, different types of medieval personification should be seen as corresponding to positions in the rich and nuanced medieval debate over universals. Breen identifies three different types of personification—Platonic, Aristotelian, and Prudentian—that gave medieval writers a surprisingly varied spectrum with which to paint their characters.Through a series of new readings of major authors and works, from Plato to Piers Plowman, Breen illuminates how medieval personifications embody the full range of positions between philosophical realism and nominalism, varying according to the convictions of individual authors and the purposes of individual works. Recalling Gregory the Great's reference to machinae mentis (machines of the mind), Breen demonstrates that medieval writers applied personification with utility and subtlety, employing methods of personification as tools that serve different functions. Machines of the Mind offers insight for medievalists working at the crossroads of religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as for scholars interested in literary character-building and gendered relationships among characters, readers, and texts beyond the Middle Ages.

Part I

Prudentian Personification

Chapter One

Consecratus Manu: Men Forming Gods Forming Men

The personification called Pheme in Greek, Fama in Latin, and Fame or Rumor in English comes into being at the same moment both as a goddess and as a rhetorical personification. She takes shape before our eyes in the final lines of the “Works” section of Hesiod’s Works and Days (c. 700 BCE) as the authorial persona warns his brother of the danger of rumors:

Do these things, and avoid the wretched talk [pheme] of mortals, for talk [pheme] is evil, lightweight, and very easy to lift, but painful to carry and hard to put aside. No talk [pheme] that many people talk [phemizo] perishes completely. She herself is a kind of god [theos].1

Repeated three times as a common noun and then as the root of a verb, Pheme becomes a personification only gradually, as she begins to pass a series of “grammatical tests” for identifying personifications. Discussed as early as Priscian’s Institutes of Grammar (Institutiones grammaticae) but elaborated most fully by Morton Bloomfield, these tests include the use of a common noun as a proper name, the use of grammatical forms that imply animateness, and the use of verbs that normally apply only to living beings.2 In this case, Fame is first accorded a moral bearing (“pheme is evil”), then gains a physical body (“very easy to lift, but painful to carry”), then becomes the subject of a verb normally applied to living things (“perishes”), and finally is characterized as fully animate (“a kind of god”). Strikingly, she does not become a person but a divinity—albeit a divinity of a peculiar sort. Although the “Works” begins with a traditional invocation of Zeus and the Muses, it ends with a goddess who is created, and to an important extent mediated by human beings. Hesiod cautions his prodigal brother to avoid loose talk specifically in order to limit Fame’s power over him. In doing so, he suggests that if all mortals hold their tongues, Fame will lose her divine power, and perhaps even perish. At the same time, Hesiod presents Fame as his own poetic invention, with the circumlocution in the last line suggesting, as the classicist Emma Stafford puts it, “a poetic way of emphasizing rumour’s power rather than a reference to a deity already recognized by Hesiod’s audience.”3 Even as Hesiod recognizes that Fame is dangerous, then, she also represents the ambition of his poem, which likewise seeks to rise from low origins, as something akin to “the wretched talk of mortals,” to achieve immortality. Hesiod may encourage his brother to avoid loose talk, but he also urges him to talk up his poem. From the very beginning, Fame’s verbal power parallels that of the poet, while she herself is both larger and smaller than he is.

My reading of Fame highlights her status as both a goddess and a rhetorical personification because these two categories are usually treated as incompatible. As we have seen, the early-twentieth-century critic Johan Huizinga understood personification to be both inherently religious and inherently naïve. In his account, medieval personification allegories are not crafted by individual authors as much as they are generated, almost automatically, by the period’s ultrarealist conception of universals. Later critics, including James Paxson, accept Huizinga’s category of naïve religious personification but oppose it to a category of self-aware literary personification. Jon Whitman most clearly articulates this bifurcation:

It is necessary to distinguish two meanings of the term “personification.” One refers to the practice of giving an actual personality to an abstraction. This practice has its origins in animism and ancient religion, and is called “personification” by modern theorists of religion and anthropology. . . . The other meaning of “personification,” the one used throughout this study, is the historical sense of prosopopoeia. This refers to the practice of giving a consciously fictional personality to an abstraction, “impersonating” it. This rhetorical practice requires a separation between the literary pretense of a personality, and the actual state of affairs.4

As described here, the differences between these two types of personification are both disciplinary and chronological. While the first falls within the domains of religion and anthropology, the second belongs to literary studies and the history of rhetoric. The second also develops later than, and as a refinement of, the first. Although the creators of both kinds of personification engage in the identical activity of “giving . . . personality to an abstraction,” only the later and implicitly more refined creators of literary personifications understand what they are doing.

This chapter argues that, on the contrary, many personifications categorized as religious are also rhetorical, in the sense of being self-conscious human constructions, while many personifications categorized as rhetorical are also religious, in the sense of giving voice to divine or semidivine beings. Personifications such as Fame—first as elaborated by Hesiod, then as reimagined by Virgil, Ovid, and Chaucer—occupy an ambiguous middle ground. In a given rhetorical context, it is not necessarily clear whether Fame should be understood as a divinity, a semidivinity, a potential divinity, or as something similar or analogous to a divinity. Likewise, it is not necessarily clear to what extent each subsequent author who writes about Fame creates her anew and to what extent he describes an existing superhuman being. I will focus on the classical period, in which the worship of abstract ideas was commonplace, in order to demonstrate that the critical binary of naïve religious personification versus self-conscious rhetorical personification is not always tenable. But I will also argue that classical theories of personification illuminate the medieval practice of personification to a greater extent than is usually recognized. To be sure, classical treatments of personification that we now think of as rhetorical enjoyed both a wider medieval readership and a more favorable medieval reception than classical treatments of personification that we now think of as religious. Both sets of texts, however, exerted an important indirect influence on medieval writers. When medieval writers looked to the classical world for literary models, they encountered personifications who emerged from the same discursive, and sometimes authorial, matrix as the theoretical texts discussed in this chapter. Although the theoretical texts helpfully make explicit what is only implicit in the personifications themselves, the same metaphysics is embedded in the personifications for attentive and perceptive medieval readers to intuit or even unfold.

I will begin by examining Cicero’s theorization of religious personification in On the Nature of the Gods and On the Laws. In these texts, the deified virtues are both fully numinous and, without contradiction, the product of human intellectual craftsmanship. Indeed, Cicero recognizes that the process of deification is contingent, in the sense that the number of potentially deifiable virtues far exceeds those actually deified. In these circumstances, the Roman people rightly deify the virtues they most value and those of which they have the greatest need. The remainder of the chapter examines the parallel theorization of personification in rhetorical treatises, arguing that just as religious personifications can be rhetorical, so rhetorical personifications can be religious. In guides to rhetoric ranging from Demetrius’s On Style to the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s Orator, and Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory (Institutio Oratoria ), the paradigmatic examples of personification are not abstractions at all but the spirits of ancestors and localities. In this context, prosopopoeia becomes a form of religious invocation as well as a site for rhetorical invention. I thus argue for classical religious and rhetorical personification as continuous, sometimes overlapping, categories rather than binary opposites. Together they define what I am—admittedly anachronistically, at least for the purposes of this chapter—calling Prudentian personification. Like Platonic personifications, Prudentian personifications are religious, and thus realist. Like Aristotelian personifications, however, they are also self-consciously created, the product of human craftsmanship. They come into being through a process of consecration or deification, as contrasted with both the characteristically Platonic process of divine illumination and the characteristically Aristotelian process of abstraction from sense perceptions. Prudentian personification is accordingly formative in the same sense that experiences are formative. As such, it disrupts the categories as well as the chronologies of recent accounts of the longue durée of personification allegory.

The Rhetoric of Religious Personification

In his influential essay “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?,” Steven Justice objects to the axiomatic equation of medieval religious belief with credulity, an equation which he describes as constitutive of the field of medieval studies, indeed a primary means of defining the Middle Ages as modernity’s incomprehensible Other.5 In alluding to Paul Veyne’s book Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, Justice’s title implicitly compares medievalists to classicists, who in recent years have treated the same subject matter quite differently.6 Where medievalists see a stark opposition between religious naïveté and literary self-consciousness, classicists emphasize the “ontological ambiguity” of Greek and Roman personifications, including their slippage from literary to religious and back again.7 H. L. Axtell identifies over forty literary personifications who were also the beneficiaries of attested cults, while Amy Smith defines personification “as the representation of a thing, place, or abstraction as a person, where person may be human, mythical, and/or divine.”8 In a characteristically subtle reading, Stafford points out that since Quiet (Hesychia) is only personified in Pindar’s odes, “it is quite reasonable to suppose that the implied attribution of deity is a product of poetic license”—but then goes on to caution that Pindar’s hymnic invocation of Quiet represents her as “a being capable of receiving worship, whether or not her cult is actually observed anywhere.”9 Dunstan Lowe argues that when the goddesses of vengeance were “translated” from the Greek to the Roman pantheon, their ontological status shifted along with their name. Although the Greek proper name Erinys classifies them as personal deities, the Latin common noun Furia (Furies) situates them in a liminal space between divinity and personification—a space where Lowe likewise locates Virgil’s and Ovid’s Fame and Sleep (Somnus) and Ovid’s Hunger (Fames) and Envy (Invidia).10 Classicists thus tend to represent abstraction and deification, both separately and together, as processes rather than absolutes. They understand abstract ideas as susceptible to deification even when not empirically deified, while recognizing that deities were likewise susceptible to abstraction, whether through translations such as the one undergone by the Erinys; epithets such as Aphrodite Peitho (Aphrodite-Persuasion) and Athena Nike (Athena-Victory); ritual linkages such as altars to Health (Hygieia) in shrines of the personal deity Asclepius; or well-worn metonymies such the substitution of Dionysius/Liber for wine and Demeter/Ceres for bread—the latter so common that it gave rise to the modern English word cereal.11 In doing so, classicists treat belief not as a refusal to engage with facts but as a commitment to ideals such as Divine Order (Themis), Peace (Irene), and Democracy (Democratia).

In short, classicists now give little credence to the once popular claim that deified abstractions represent a primitive form of religious expression, gradually superseded by personalized deities.12 As early as the eighth century BCE, deities with abstract names mingled with the Olympian gods in the works of Homer and Hesiod, with the relationships among them both intimate and intricate. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Zeus takes as his first wife the titaness Metis, whose name means skill or wisdom, but, fearing that she will bear a son who will surpass him, incorporates her into himself by swallowing her whole. Thus internalized, she bears not a son but a daughter, the Olympian Athena, who emerges from her father’s head fully armed to become the goddess of skill and wisdom. In the Homeric poems, Metis becomes a quality or aspect of Zeus, who gains the epithet metieta, wise counselor. In other cases, gods with abstract names were understood as the children of gods with personal names, with Love (Eros) the son of Aphrodite, Youth (Hebe) the daughter of Zeus and Hera, and Hygieia the daughter of the deified mortal Asclepius. As these relationships indicate, many deified abstractions were venerated alongside, and sometimes in competition with, personalized deities. In Greece, there was an altar to Fame in Athens, a shrine to Divine Order and Retribution (Nemesis) at Rhamnous, and altars to Hygieia and Peitho in temples of Asclepius and Aphrodite. In Rome, sanctuaries were dedicated to Victory (Victoria), Fortune (Fortuna), Concord (Concordia), War (Bellona), Faith (Fides), Youth (Juventus), and a host of others. The temple of Victory was built at virtually the same time as a temple of Jupiter Victor—that is to say, of Jupiter in his aspect as Victor—and presumably competed with it for offerings, much as the cults of Good Reputation (Euclea) and Artemis Euclea coexisted in Athens. Where records are available—as for the fourth-century cults of Peace, Democracy, and Good Fortune (Agathe Tyche) in Athens—they suggest that the festivals of personified abstractions were conducted on the same scale as celebrations of Athena, Dionysius, and Zeus Soter.13 These juxtapositions undermine not just the older position that divine personifications gave way to personalized deities but also the more recent claim that later cults of divine abstractions were “more propaganda than religion,” with “the profusion of robed female statues of an allegorical character arous[ing] no more than dusty, aesthetic antiquarian interest.”14 Instead, personified abstractions seem to have been understood in largely the same terms as the personalized, anthropomorphic deities who were their fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, with the qualification that, as Stafford suggests, personifications often governed narrower, more clearly defined fields of responsibility.

None of these accounts associate religious personification with credulity. On the contrary, the divinity of personifications was subject to philosophical deliberation within the classical period itself. Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, which was known and copied somewhat sporadically during the Middle Ages, offers the best surviving evidence for the arguments of the major philosophical schools.15 It stages a debate among Velleius the Epicurean, Balbus the Stoic, and Cotta the Skeptic, with Cicero speaking in propria persona only in brief opening and closing statements. Although Velleius’s arguments are demolished so thoroughly that he is reduced to the position of spectator, the debate between Balbus and Cotta ends without a clear victor. The situation is complicated yet further by the fact that Cotta does not necessarily endorse the views he articulates. As an Academic Skeptic, he adopts a variety of hypothetical positions with the goal of identifying flaws in his opponents’ logic rather than advancing arguments of his own. Even as Cotta challenges the Stoic account of the divinity of abstractions, then, he accepts the worship of deified abstractions as p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Prudentian Personification
• Part II: Neoplatonic Personification
• Part III: Aristotelian Personification
• Notes
• Index