Medieval Ovid: Frame Narrative and Political Allegory

Frame Narrative and Political Allegory

A. Gerber

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137482822
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ovid's Metamorphoses played an irrefutably important role in the integration of pagan mythology in Christian texts during the Middle Ages. This book is the only study to consider this Ovidian revival as part of a cultural shift disintegrating the boundaries between not only sacred and profane literacy but also between academic and secular politics.

1

Introduction: Reframing the Frame Narrative

Abstract: “Reframing the Frame Narrative” defines the frame narrative tradition as it appeared in the late Middle Ages. Challenging modern criticism’s tendency to label works such as Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium encyclopedias, this chapter recovers an overlooked medieval genre. Although derived from a term that did not appear until the nineteenth century, frame narrative analysis reveals a formerly obscured reticulation of interconnected narratives and political frameworks.

Gerber, Amanda J. Medieval Ovid: Frame Narrative and Political Allegory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137482822.0003.

Of hem that written ous tofore

The bokes duelle, and we therfore

Ben tawht of that was write tho:

Forthi good is that we also

In oure tyme among ous hiere

Do wryte of newe some matiere,

Essampled of these olde wyse. (Confessio Amantis, Prologue 1–7)

These opening lines of John Gower’s prologue for the first recension of the Confessio Amantis establish his project as an adaptation. Interpreting texts as living entities that “duelle” and instruct, this passage models proper writing practices that are new yet “essampled of these olde wyse.” Such notions of duplicating old rhetorical styles and materials to create new writing methods flooded the late medieval imagination without contradiction, inspiring writers such as Gower to incorporate narratives from Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and contemporaneous lore into imitative yet original compositions.

These amalgamations have long fascinated medievalists, who attempt to define the interstitial spaces between translation and appropriation, hermeneutics and rhetoric, as well as the writing and rewriting of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman compilations. These categorizations connote polarizing significations for modern readers, significations that favor Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for its “original” rhetoric to Lydgate’s Fall of Princes with its hackneyed translations. Most modern scholarship classifies these latter types of texts as encyclopedic story compilations that moralize and thereby sanitize the pagan past for Christian purposes, leading to the Metamorphoses’s increased dissemination of pagan mythology at the end of the Middle Ages. Such Christianization supposedly employs embedded narratives, which, according to Mieke Bal, insert, subordinate, and homogenize all inserted stories, rendering them subservient to and yet independent from the overall text.¹ This inclination to render embedded narratives from Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman lore interchangeable, seemingly results in a work that is ostensibly incomplete and therefore perpetually in the process of being written, because of its lack of finite circumscriptions for source materials or subject periodization. However, such perceptions of the tales inserted into this textual structure denigrate both the narrative form that appropriates them and the historical significance of their popularization; the fact that so many of these mixed-mythologies developed into a similar format of narrative embedding during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—as evinced in the works of Boccaccio, Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Christine de Pizan—leads me to question the applicability of these former evaluations of the late medieval predilection for such compositions. Instead of presupposing that pagan mythology only suited medieval writers in sanitized, prepackaged, and homogenized forms, this book posits that the many manifestations of pagan narratives in medieval reception history provide a more evocative story of how the late-medieval writer envisioned his relationship to the classical, mythological, and historical past.

This process of readeption begins with embedding and interrelating Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian lore, but this blending of source materials increasingly appropriated rhetorical structures that underscored their intertextuality and their contemporaneous political significations. This book relates these rhetorical structures to the repopularization of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in that both emerged during the same period and both were specially equipped for distributing mixed mythologies. The academic treatments of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the secular literature presenting these mixed mythologies demonstrated interpretive flexibility that began to reimagine these collections of embedded tales as frame narratives. The frame narrative, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as the Mahabharata, Thousand and One Nights, and the Decameron, can be generally identified by the application of framing devices that interweave a collection of shorter embedded stories. Admittedly, the label “frame narrative” or “frame tale” invites anachronism, considering that it first appeared in the nineteenth century; however, without a medieval designation for these shared formal characteristics, the term must, for the moment, suffice.² The genre, if it can even be called such, often resists description owing to its capacity to encapsulate a multitude of genres within its frame, its centuries of use, and its various cultural applications. In fact, the most consistent aspect of the frame narrative is its inconsistency. As Bonnie Irwin observes, the frame narrative demonstrates infinite flexibility, allowing it to encompass various themes, lengths, and styles, providing space for “an almost limitless supply of material.”³ But even more than its function to gather materials, the frame narrative is defined by its interpretive context for collected and juxtaposed tales.

According to Irwin, these contexts derive from a dominant narrative that initiates the tale-telling, such as Chaucer’s pilgrims telling stories to entertain themselves during the voyage, a context that the Metamorphoses lacks. This type of frame leads her to define the genre as a partially oral tradition devoted to fiction, providing a record of oral composition that depicts the relationship between a tale-teller and his audience.⁴ However, the majority of Ovidian commentaries, as will be discussed in the following chapter, produce such an interpretive frame to define its tales’ contexts, especially the context that prompts Ovid to write. Although Irwin excludes story collections without oral interpretive frames from her classification, these textual emphases in works such as Boccaccio’s Genealogie deorum gentilium demonstrate even more of an awareness of their contexts than their oral forebears.

By acknowledging these textually motivated compilations as frame narratives, I reveal their similarly textual interpretive frames which, unlike the oral frame narrative’s reliance on listeners’ responses, generate an internal conversation with written authorities, often self-consciously contemplating the nature of composition as each inset narrative functions as a representation of the author, of the other embedded narratives, of the framing devices used to connect tales, and of the sources to which the author responds. Much of the following treatment of frame narratives relies on Irwin’s definition of the genre as an interdependent structure, with form and content shaping significations. However, this book expands that definition beyond its oral origins to encompass the increasingly academic and textual understanding of the genre, a development that corresponds with the proliferation of Ovidian mythology and its similar interpretive and structural tendencies. This growing attention to the written implications of frame-narrative intertextuality derive from a complex network of influences involving Ovidian traditions, but the impulse, as the following pages will reveal, results as much from Ovid as it does from the shifting cultural imperatives that made Ovidianism so important to late medieval audiences.

As scholasticism was disseminated to increasingly secular audiences, writers of frame narratives were able to rely on readers better equipped to decipher the political aims embedded within textual frameworks, aims associated with secular audiences’ and writers’ greater interest in political rather than theological explications. This capacious format appealed in particular to late medieval writers in areas with shifting power dynamics, particularly communal Florence (with its repeated challenges to tyranny) and London (with its redistribution of wealth and the growing prominence of guilds). In fact, Gerald Harriss claims that by the thirteenth century these communes governed according to a horizontal (instead of hierarchical) validation of laws, locating the source of authority in a corporation of the state’s members and deviating from the theocratic monarchy characteristic of France. As St. Thomas Aquinas importantly maintained, harmonizing Augustine’s and Aristotle’s discordant political theories, monarchical rule should exist within a politically autonomous society, with the king retaining divine aspects that allowed him to render justice and uphold laws, but only when directed toward the common good as defined by the collective reason of citizens. Therefore, the king became integrated into society as the administrator of law, not the head of society, nor the source of law. Harriss suggests that this redistribution of power was accompanied by constant tension among the king, magnates, churchmen, and commons, with each group vying for control, such as the middling classes seeking governmental reform to promote the common good via parliament, and the plebs rebelling on behalf of natural justice.⁵ The perspectives of these competing social groups, similar to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (at least according to most medieval accessus to be described later), challenged hegemonic control, subverting traditional hierarchies by contesting abuses of power.

These political readings have received most critical attention when presented as “Mirrors for Princes,” which Irwin and Karla Mallette consider to be part of the frame-narrative tradition that focuses on extended conversations between teachers and pupils, such as Gower’s Confessio.⁶ In general, mirrors for princes collect embedded narratives as exemplars to instruct princes for moral and political purposes. Similar to mirrors for princes, the texts noted herein all employ exemplars and framing devices. Yet this genre does not account for the flexible framework and the harmonizing of multiple types of lore, source materials, and character voices that come to characterize works such as Gower’s Confessio. The frame narrative instead distinguishes itself in its promotion of continuous reading, and of interweaving embedded tales by means of shared characters, plots, settings, or themes. Such works often found inspiration in the Metamorphoses because, unlike other mythological predecessors or mirrors for princes, it presumed exhaustiveness, recording “mutatas . . . formas . . . ab origine mundi ad mea . . . tempora,” or the changing forms from the beginning of the world to Ovid’s time (Metamorphoses, 1.1–4).

Despite its many potential permutations, this book, for the sake of interpretive consistency, defines the frame narrative as an interconnected series of historicized polyvocalic tales from disparate sources, and which demonstrate a degree of structural sensitivity that separates them from encyclopedic story-collections. I make this distinction because the former category presumes conscientious manipulation of source materials, whereas the latter assumes exclusive emphasis on collection. This frame-narrative format originated in the East, but medieval writers in the West primarily accessed it through commentaries on and appropriations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—texts that were widely used for classroom composition instruction and read for personal use, as late medieval audiences increasingly clamored for access to classical materials, but struggled to understand them without a critical apparatus or summary.⁷

Following in the footsteps of Alastair Minnis—who noted more than 25 years ago that medievalists need to turn to commentary traditions to study medieval notions of writing—this book furthers the discussion of medieval Ovidianism, as well as of medieval compositional practices in general.⁸ Instead of reproducing former interpretive paradigms that trace specific secular readings to individual source texts, this book expands the critical conversation to address the manifold interpretive methods and predilections that shaped late medieval appropriations of pagan mythologies. By analyzing these scholastic origins, the notions of medieval encyclopedism begin to unravel as the preponderance of such texts at the end of the Middle Ages demonstrates a particular fascination with their rhetorical, not just informational, capacities. With excerpts from commentaries that promulgated their value, and case studies of the texts that use similar stories and formats, the following pages reconstruct the strategies used to compose them. Beginning with the earliest known Western European commentaries on frame narratives, namely, those on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this book unearths the foundations for centuries’ worth of scholarship that culminates in the appropriations of Ovidian mythology in the works of Boccaccio, Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and the like. Admittedly, the brevity of this book precludes an exhaustive account of this vast corpus of literature. I instead initiate a conversation about the many priorities, interests, and strategies that led medieval audiences and writers to mythology in the first place, beginning with one of the most important stages of this co-opting of pagan mythology in Christian lore, namely its derivation from the capacious Ovidian packaging provided in frame-narrative form. To delineate the impetus and foundation for this fourteenth- and fifteenth-century phenomenon, the next chapter offers an overview of the Ovidian commentary tradition, which, owing to its breadth and scope, cannot be chronicled exhaustively; therefore, the purpose here is to treat its salient attributes to lend a clearer understanding of the historical and rhetorical moment that facilitated one of the most widespread genres of the late Middle Ages. By explicating the disparate Ovidian traditions that circulated throughout Western Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, this book offers the first overview of all the known compositional strategies used to interpret and frame the Metamorphoses. As a result, the next chapter examines both the exegetical methods and the cultural contexts that developed these reading strategies and their rhetorical applications, thereby establishing the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Reframing the Frame Narrative
• 2  Rethinking Ovid: The Commentary Tradition
• 3  Communal Narrative: Boccaccio and the Historical Paraphrase Tradition
• 4  Clerical Expansion and Narrative Diminution in Chaucers Canterbury Tales
• 5  Overlapping Mythologies: The Political Afterlives of Frame Narratives in Gowers Confessio Amantis and Lydgates Fall of Princes
• 6  Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index