The Classics in the Middle Ages

Papers of the Twentieth Annual Conferenceof the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies

Edited by- .J_,5 c

Aldo S. BernardoSaul Levin

rneaievaJ & Renaissance 'texts & srzröiesCenter for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies

Binghamton, New York1990

The Heritage of Fulgentius

ROBERT EDWARDS

The sixth-century allegorical writer Fulgentius is an important, if attimes problematic, figure in the transvaluation of the classics in later peri-ods. He enjoyed a remarkably durable reputation among later writersin the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Isidore of Seville and RabanusMaurus, the major encyclopedists of the early Middle Ages, use him asa source for glosses and allegorical explanations, as do the three VaticanMythographers who succeed him as a commentator on pagan myth. TheCarolingian abbot Smaragdus of St. Michel counts Fulgentius amongthe Church Fathers whom he draws on to adorn his book "full of theflowers of allegories," Max Laistner points out that Fulgentius' ornatestyle and exotic language influenced Carolingian writers to use rare words,mythological allusions, and etymologies in their compositions.f In theeleventh century, Sigebert of Gembloux mentions Fulgentius' acumen in-genii for interpreting pagan myths according to natural and moralphilosophy in his Afytlwlogio.e.3 Fulgentius' equally renowned treatment ofVergil and especially of the Aeneid (the Vergiliana continentia) inspired a similarcommentary on Statius' Thebaid, which was ascribed to Fulgentius butarguably written by a later hand." Literary historians credit Fulgentiusin particular with introducing a sustained allegorical framework to con-tain the partial and fragmented glossings of Donatus, Servius, and Mac-robius.f

The high estimate of Fulgentius in the Middle Ages is balanced, insome measure, by healthy skepticism, if not frank reservations. It is Boc-caccio who reflects perhaps most clearly the divided response that somewriters felt. Boccaccio praises Fulgentius as "doctor atque pontifex catholi-cus," but at several places in his Genealogie deorum gentilium he protests thathe avoids the flights of fancy that often mark Fulgentius' search for ob-scure meanings in literary texts." Nonetheless, Fulgentius remains a

142 The Heritage of Fulgentius

source for allegories for humanist scholars like Coluccio Salutati.? TheFulgentian thesis that the Asneid outlines a scheme of moral developmentthrough the various ages of man establishes a framework for MapheusVegius to bring Vergil's epic to aesthetic and moral completeness by add-ing a Thirteenth Book." The same thesis reappears in William Adling-ton's translation of Apuleius' Metamorphoses (1566): "this book of Luciusis a figure of man's life, and toucheth the nature and manners of mortalmen, egging them forward from their asinine form to their human andperfect shape,"

The examples I have been citing give some indication of Fulgentius'stature as an authority for interpreting myth and poetry, but they tellrelatively little about the kind of fascination he exercised over subsequentwriters, about the qualities to which those writers responded while ad-mitting that his interpretations could be hyperbolic and precious."These are more subtle dimensions ofliterary influence than citation andtestimony, but they offer a way of understanding the complex dialecticby which Christian culture assimilated classical literature. There are abun-dant sources on which a comparative study of this kind of influence mightdraw, such as Albericus of London's rewriting of the story of Syrophanesfrom the Mythowgiae or John de Ridevall's extension of Fulgentius' moraliconography in the Fulgentius mefß.juralis.l1 But I shall confine myself to thecommentary on the first six books of the Asneid which is generally thoughtto have been written by the twelfth-century Platonist Bemardus Silves-tris, for it is in the reading ofVergil that the assumptions and difficultiesof Fulgentius' method stand out clearly.12

I have discussed at length in another paper the underlying assump-tions of Fulgentius' Mythowgiae and Vergiliana continentia.13 Briefly, Fulgen-tius draws on the conventional distinction between things (res) and words(uerba) in classical linguistic theory, but he emphasizes the separation ofthe linguistic sign from the thing signified, of the proper from the figurativesense of words. Without claiming for pagan myths and secular texts thedivine inspiration that Christian exegetes find in Scripture, he arguesthat a kind of philosophical truth exists apart from the surface of lan-guage. This truth provides the moral lessons which he takes as the figura-tive sense of classical myths."

Furthermore, having established this separation of signs from refer-ents, Fulgentius comes to equate the perception of hidden meaning withits actual presence. Reading is defined as an act of ingenuity and criticalvirtuosity. hi the Prologue to book 2 of the Mythologiae, Fulgentius im-agines it as a gymnastic arena (arenam nostri studii and tui palestram ingenit)where the reader can exercise and test his skill for seeing hidden sig-

ROBERT EDWARDS 143

nificance: a space of play and moral rehearsal. Reading, then, is a con-scious projection of ethical assumptions and associations onto the for-mal structure of the text; and it is made on the authority of moral truth,which resides outside the text and independent from the problems ofliter-ary representation. In the commentary on Vergil, Fulgentius dramatizesthis style of reading and its potential for play by constructing an im-agined dialogue with the poet, in which Vergil explains his intention tooffer common-sense moralizing while the commentator summons thecourage to explain the hidden truths of the poem to its author. WhatFulgentius establishes in this fictive exchange is the proximity of discur-sive and interpretive writing to the mimetic and imaginative works thatcommentary is supposed to elucidate. Commentary and exegesis, hedemonstrates, share important properties and formal characteristics withfictional discourse. Reading a text in the light of its ultimate reference,the interpreter subtly reshapes the original to reveal meaning beyondauthorial or aesthetic intent.

In Bernardus' commentary, Fulgentius is a source for specific pointsof interpretation, and he lends the general notion that Vergil's poem in-corporates the ages of man into its structure. Fulgentius' division betweenproper and figurative meanings reappears in the commentary, as doeshis insistence on the dual nature of the poet. In addition, Bemardus makesan effort to assimilate the techniques of Fulgentius' allegorizing to otherliterary authorities. Fulgentius had discussed Vergil as uaies, but Bemardusadds Macrobius' testimony that a "twin doctrine" operates in the Aeneid,and he assigns Vergil the roles of "poeta et philosophus.?" Like earliercommentators, Bernardus discovers a moral purpose in Aeneas' exam-ple of suffering, filial piety, and reverence, and he sees a caution againstimmoderate love in Aeneas' desire for Dido.16 He also adapts Horace toredefine the poem's genre and bring it in line with Fulgentian moraliz-ing. Reworking Horace's famous admonition that poets should instructor entertain (Ars Poetica 333), he looks in the Asneid for both the useful-ness of satire and the delight of comedy; those two genres are then joinedin yet a third form, historical writing. Although epic devices may affordheightened verbal adornment, Bernardus argues, Vergil's poem is relat-ed essentially to the functions of the middle style, which St. Augustinehad earlier defined as praise and blame (De doctrina christiana 4.17-19)andwhich Fulgentius implied in stressing Vergil's adherence to the rules ofpraise.

Two radically divergent styles had helped to animate the ~rgiliano. con-tinentia while remaining above the text which is their source of play. Ful-gentius rehearses the lessons of the grammatici, while his Vergil expounds

144 The Heritage of Fulgentius

the original intention. By contrast, Bernardus uncovers two distinct orderswithin the text; he sees a rhetorical joining of artificial and natural ord-er that mirrors the poet's dual roles. Vergil as poet, beginning "a medionarration em," constructs an artificial order whose affinities, Bernardusremarks, are to Terence's comedies rather than the epics of Lucan andStatius. Meanwhile, as a philosopher, Vergil observes a natural order intreating "humane uite naturam" and setting down "quid paciatur huma-nus spiritus in humano corpore temporal iter positus" ("what the humanspirit undergoes while temporarily placed in the human body" [3]). Thisdescription of the poem's rhetorical economy marks an advance over Ful-gentius' view that philosophical meaning overarches the text. Like Mac-robius who found four kinds of oratory combined in Vergil (Saturnalia5.1.1-7), Bernardus argues for a coherent rhetorical organization of thepoem in which the poet's dual roles and the narrative orders effect a syn-thesis of meaning. His argument, as Brian Stock notes, "is an attemptto integrate the creation of a literary work into the realm of experience"by employing moral and physical allegory."

The concern with rhetorical order in the Asneid leads Bernardus tospeculate generally about the nature oflanguage and particularly aboutits figurative use. Fulgentius' radical dislocation of signifier and signifiedhad proceeded from his assumption that there is a disparity betweenauthorial intention and hidden meaning: significance resides in a com-prehensive philosophical system whose moral precepts are the things towhich the text must ultimately refer; hence aesthetic unity is to be soughtsomewhere other than in the constructions oflanguage itself. Bernardusformulates a different sort of problem by considering the various mean-ings that arise from the poetic fiction but still reflect a sense of integritas.He interprets Venus, for example, in her legitimate aspect as musica mun-dana (or the equal proportions of the cosmos or natural justice) and inher wanton aspect as cupidity. He then remarks: "Notandum est uerohoc in loco, quemadmodum in aliis misticis uoluminibus, ita et in hocequiuocationes et multiuocationes esse et integumenta ad diuersa respi-cere" ("One must remember in this book as well as in other allegoricalworks that there are equivocations and multiple significations, and there-fore one must interpret poetic fictions in diverse ways" [9]).

Bernardus is suggesting in a way that might anticipate modern viewsof language and signification that the problem of allegorical discoursedoes not lie chiefly in devising figurative meaning, as it had for Fulgen-tius, but in dealing with the literal text. Questions of denotation pre-cede questions about the transferred sense. Much like his contemporaryWilliam of Conches who managed a deft balancing of the terms integumen-

ROBERT EDWARDS 145

turn (allegorical covering) and ueriias in his glosses, Bernardus links thefact of polysemous language to the existence of truth: "Hie autem diver-sus integumentorum respectus et multiplex designatio in omnibus mis-ticis observari debet si in una vero veritas stare non poterit" ("Hence,one must pay attention to the diverse aspects of the poetic fictions andthe multiple interpretations in all allegorical matters if in fact the truthcannot be established by a single interpretation" [9]). In other words,signs mark an approach toward the things that they are supposed to sig-nify; they record an act of predication that somehow never achieves com-pletion. A mythological figure like Jupiter, for instance, can be identifiedvariously as fire, the human soul, the world soul, and a star. Rather thaninvoke meaning in a discrete act of perception, Bernardus chooses to seeit evolve through a device of multioocatio which allows the dioersa nominaof myth and poetry to flourish. The alternate names and identities ofthe gods reflect not the confusion of a fragmented system of correspond-ences but a spectrum of meaning accessible to the attentive reader.l"

The implication of this shift away from Fulgentian allegory toucheson the wider relations of allegory and poetry. Where language (uerba)no longer equals a thing signified (r&r),it begins to assume a functionthat has otherwise been assigned to myth. Modern interpreters regardthe myth-making process as filling the gap between some present stateof understanding and the unknown. The diuersa nomina come to representa process of definition, a search for a middle term between words andthings. To the extent that linguistic structures such as rhetorical orderand repetitions operate in the play between words and things and there-by fill the gap, they, too, become mythological. Thus the effort to under-stand poetic language, and the larger structures it forms, moves forwardby partial recognitions of meaning and a rough tracing of conceptualpatterns that emerge as language continually falls short of enunciatingcompletely what it sets out ~o say and name. And in this respect, onecan see the great wisdom of EdouardJeanneau's insisting that integumen-turn, the key term in Chartrian discussions about the nature of allegori-callanguage, should be translated as 'myth." The wheat and chaff thatfascinated writers from Augustine to Chaucer are not polarities of meaningso much as dialectical antitheses that permit the construction of meaning.

What I have been calling the mythological dimension oflanguage provesimportant for Bernardus in establishing the epistemological and moralstatus of poetry. Interpretation shares with poetry the capacity to evokemeaning, and both enlist the reader as a collaborator. They also sharethe paradox of searching for a viable order of truth within fiction. Thisdilemma has its roots, of course, in antiquity, and it resurfaces in Mac-

146 The Heritage of Fulqentius

robius and the writers of the High Middle Ages who assert the primacyof the arles semwnciales for all human understanding.J? In the Vergil com-mentary, there is a powerful example of this paradox in book 6 whereBernardus treats the ekphrasis by which Vergil recounts the visual figuresinscribed on the temple of Apollo. Bernardus treats this verbal portrai-ture as a summa narraiionis. Returning to a distinction in Macrobius, heasserts, "Sunt namque poete ad philosophiam introductorii, unde uolu-mina eorum 'cunas nutricum' uocat Macrobius" ("Indeed, the poets in-troduce one to philosophy, whence Macrobius calls their volumes 'nurses'cradles'" [36]). Peter Dronke proposes that Bernardus' interpretation ofthe key phrase cunas nutricum is greatly influenced by William of Con-ches' own commentary on Macrobius." Macrobius (COTTITTIeTIlumin Som-nium Scipionis 1.2.8) rejects fables that only delight the ear and areconsequently diverting rather than instructive, but the Chartrian writerssee the fables as part of a psychological and philosophical progression.Their view is in keeping with Fulgentius' notion of the ages and moraldevelopment of man.

Bernardus explains that this motif of progression is incorporated inthe architectural structure of Apollo's temple, on whose exterior historyand fable, the forms of discourse that Macrobius struggled to keepseparate, are depicted as equivalents. Passing through the entrance waysignifies the study of the arts and the authors ("in introitu ad artes, scilicetin auctoribus"). The temple itself signifies the philosophic arts. There-fore, Bernardus says, "quas qui ingressuri sunt oportet quod prius cer-nant picturas ante descriptas, id est ut dent operam istoriis et fabuliset hoc est quod in porticum ab introeuntibus cernuntur historie depicteet fabule" ("those about to enter should first see pictures made before-hand, i.e. they pay attention to stories and fables, and this is the reasonwhy should pictorial history and fable are seen by those entering the par-tico" [36-37]).

This reading of the temple and its adornment reinforces the traditionaldivision of learning into the Trivium and Quadrivium. But by seeingthe authors as introductory and preparatory, Bernardus complicates thelarger question of the status of poetry. Does poetry embody certain kindsof essential truths, or does it merely and inadequately point toward theirexistence, much as language only predicates the things it talks about?Is it a kind of knowledge or only a cipher of something beyond itself?Bernardus gives an answer that seems to resolve the question in the nega-tive: "He fabule que sunt extra templum figurant omnes poetarum fab-ulas et ita non sunt mistice intelligende" ("These fables outside the templerepresent all the fables of the poets and hence are not to be understood

ROBERT EDWARDS 147

allegorically" [37)). His answer, however, is less direct and less dismis-sive of poetry than it might at first appear. The fables, he is careful tosay, are a representation for all poetic fiction making, and they refer notto things in the world but to themselves. Like allegorical interpretation,they situate imaginative discourse within language, which follows simi-lar codes and structures and makes the same uneasy claims to reach some-thing beyond itself.

In following the logic of the architectural imagery, then, Bernardushas gone beyond Macrobius' original distinction between useful and divert-ing fictions to suggest that all poetic figments are incapable of being readin a figurative sense.22 Although earlier he proposed that a story likethat of Dido and Aeneas in book 4- can describe the youthful nature ofman "manifeste ac mistica narratione" (24), he seems now to revoke thesanction for allegorical reading. Yet this seeming reversal marks some-thing other than a contradiction or a lapse in his argument. In his gloss-ing, Bernardus is trying to define the shifting limits for allegorical andpoetic discourse. The cautionary nature of the example of book 4- andits ready transference to a moral senteniia have to be taken, he suggests,on a different level from the approach to mystery and deeper philosophicaltruth in book 6. Much as Boethius' introduction to the essential realityof moral life and the cosmos can be said to begin with Lady Philosophy'sbanishing the Muses, the instruction of Aeneas and of Bernardus' search-ing reader demands the gesture of a radical break with earlier ordersof knowledge. The moral lessons which the authors portray remain ap-plicable to experience in the world, while the epic quest for truth (trans-latable into an act of reading) inquires into the causes of things. Thisis the distinction between moralizing and mystical meaning that Fulgentiusplots in his dialogue with Vergil, but it emerges in Bernardus' commen-tary with greater subtlety and resonance than before.

This concern with the mythic function oflanguage connects the com-mentary to Bernardus' own poetic work, especially his cosmological poemthe Cosmographia (De uniuersitate mundi). Winthrop Wetherbee has remarkedthat there exists "a general relationship between the themes of the Cos-TlWgraphia and the reading of the Aeneid presented in Bernardus' commen-tary."23For Bernardus, Aeneas' descent to the underworld is an introduc-tion to philosophy as an all-encompassing field of knowledge, and itportrays the struggle of the intellect against vice and ignorance; similar-ly in the COSTlWgraphia man must come to terms with destiny, order, andviolence. Wetherbee says, "A long chain of fate and history depends fromthe first man, as Bernardus' Nature beholds him in the Table of Destiny,and there is, as in the world of Aeneas, a significant historical dimen-

148 The Heritage of Fulqentius

sion to the universe of the Cosrrwgraphia. The challenge of destiny and theburden of experience seem to be inseminated in human life from thevery beginning, and the conflict between order and violence in the his-tory of man is foretold in the stars" (26).24

Bernardus' commentary and his epic poem depict mankind as a pro-totypical soul, seen at a moment before his own history, at an ethicaland imaginative threshold where he must read his destiny and grasp themeaning of human action. By locating him at that boundary, both workstransform Fulgentius' allegory, however. Man stands like Aeneas beforethe temple, but his work there is in earnest, not in play; it involves some-thing more than the "gymnasium of ingenuity" where one practices theart of interpretation. Pierre Courcelle notes, moreover, that in manuscriptminiatures depictions of Aeneas before the temple serve as a backgroundfor his meeting with the Sybil.25The conflation of the scenes intensifiesAeneas' confrontation with history, fate, and moral choice.

An even more suggestive staging of this scene occurs in Augustine'sCorifessions, in a passage where the author struggles to cancel the Vergiliansource of his own moral definition (1.13). Augustine says that he repentsmemorizing the wanderings of Aeneas and lamenting Didds suicide, andhe contrasts the value of reading to the deception of poetry. He then adds,"at enim uela pendent liminibus grammaticarum scholarum, sed non illamagis honorem secreti quam tegimentum erroris significant" ("It is truethat curtains are hung over the entrances to the schools where literatureis taught, but they are not so much symbols in honour of mystery asveils concealing error").26 The image Augustine evokes is the scene inwhich Aeneas stands before Apollo's temple, ready to penetrate the mys-tery represented by the Sybil. The formulation he gives this image (uefaliminibus) both describes the moral enterprise of reading and registers theprofound ambivalence it will have for Bernardus.

Notes

1. Smaragdus of St. Michel, "Collectiones in Epistolas et Euangelica quaeper circuitum anni leguntur," in Patrologia Latina 102.13: "allegoriarum floribusplenum curaui colligere librum."

2. Max L. W. Laistner, "Fulgentius in the Carolingian Age,"in The lniellectu-al Heritage of the Early Middle Ages: Selected Essays by M. L. W. Laistner, ed. ChesterG. Starr (1957; repr., New York:Octagon Books, 1966), 204, 209.

3. Sigebert of Gembloux, De scriptmibus ecdesiasticiss, 28 (PL 160.554). Sige-bert erroneouslyidentifiesFulgentiuswith the bishop of Ruspe by the same name.

4. Fulgentius, Opera, ed. R. Helm, rev.Jean Preaux (1898; repr., Stuttgart:

ROBERT EDWARDS 149

Teubner, 1970), and Bernard Bischoff, Mitteltdterliche Studien, 3 vols. (Stuttgart:Anton Hiersemann, 1967), 2:271.

5. O. B. Hardison, Jr., "Toward a History of Medieval Literary Criticism,"MedUvalw. et Humanistica, n.s., no. 7 (1976): 5. See also Giuseppe Pennisi, Fulgenzioe la "'Expositio Sermonum AntiqUIJTUTTi'(Firenze: Felice Le Monnier, 1963).

6. Giovanni Boccaccio, GtneakJgie deorum gentilium, ed. Vincenzo Romano, 2vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1951), 2:736. Boccaccio refuses to cite Fulgentius' explana-tion of Chimera, saying that Fulgentius leaves more in obscurity on the literallevel than he could ever explain below the surface (4.24). He dismisses Fulgen-tius' explanation of Castor and Pollux with the comment (11.7), "Posuissem Ful-gentii expositionern, sed quoniam per sublimia uadit, omisi" ("I might have setforth Fulgentius' explanation, but 1 have omitted it because it rushes off intothe sublime"). For translations of Fulgentius 1use Leslie George Whitbread, Ful-gentius the Mytlwgrapher (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971).

7. Coluccio Salutati, De Labonbus Herculis, ed. B. L. Ullmann (Turin: Thesau-rus Mundi, 1951).

8. Anna Cox Brinton, Mapheus Vegius and his Thirteenth Book of the Aeneid:A Cho.pter on Vtrgil in the Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1930),24-40.

9. William Adlington, trans., The Golden Ass of Ludus Apuleius, ed. F. J. Har-vey Darton (privately printed, n.d.), 14, 15, 18-20.

10. See the account in Domenico Comparetti, Vtrgil in the Middle Ages, trans.E. F. M. Benecke (1895; repr., London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1966).

11. Mythographus Tertius, De diis gentium et i1iorum allegoris, in Scriptores RerumMythicarum Latini tres Romae nuptr rtptrti, ed. Georg H. Bode (1834; repr., Hil-desheim: Georg Olms, 1968); and John de Ridevall, Fulgentius Afefllforalis: Ein Beitragzur Geschichtt der antiken Mytlwlogie im Mittelalter, ed. Hans Liebeschütz, Studien derBibliothek Warburg, 4 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1926).

12. The attribution to Bernardus Silvestris is disputed by the commentary'slatest editors. Julian Ward Jones and Elizabeth Frances Jones, eds., The Com-menfllry on the First Six Books of the "Ameid" of Vergil Commonly Attributed to Bemardus Sil-vestris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977). The evidence bearing onattribution is summarized in a review of the edition by Theodore Silverstein,Speculum 54 (1979): 154-57. Citation of the commentary will be made in the textwith reference to the pages in the Jones's edition. The translation is that of EarlG. Schreiber and Thomas E. Maresca, Commentary on The First Six Books of Vtrgil~Aeneid by Bemardus Siloestris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); someminor changes have been made for consistency.

13. Robert Edwards, "Fulgentius and the Collapse of Meaning," Helios, n.s.,3 (1976): 17-35.

14.Jean Pep in, Mythe et Alligorie: Les origines grecques et /es contesflltionsjudio-chretimnes(Aubier: Editions Montaigne, 1958), 76-81 observes that the relation of sign tosignifier underlies most allegorical systems; at issue here is not a semiotic struc-ture but the disjunction within it. Fulgentius is the first mythographer to com-bine euhemerism and a philosophical interpretation; see Paule Demats, Fabula:Trois etudes de mytlwgraphie antique et midi/vale (Geneva: Droz, 1973), 57-59.

15. John of Salisbury's Polycraticus similarly treats the ages of man (8.24) andthe poet's dual role (2.15, 6.22).

150 The Heritage of Fulqentius

16. Pierre Courcelle, Leaeurs paiens et lecteurs chritiens de I'Eniitk, 2 vols. (Paris:Institut de France, 1984), 1:146.

17. Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bemard SylveslLr(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 43.

18. In a commentary on Martianus CapeIIa possibly written by Bernardus,these equiuocaiiones et multiuocationes are again said to give double and multiple mean-ings to the literal sense of the text. See EdouardJeauneau, "Uusage de la notiond'[niLgumentum a' travers les gloses de Guillaume de Conches," Archives d'histoire doe-trinale et littiraire du Moyen Age 32 (1957): 37-38; Stock, 36n-37 summarizes theevidence for and against attribution. Daniel Poirion, "De l' 'Eneide' a l' 'Eneas':mythologie ou moralisation; Cahiers tk la civilisation midiivale 19 (1976): 226, notesthe value of the mythographers as a source for the poetic transformations ofmythology and for identifying new relations among symbols, images, and themes.Hans RobertJauss, "Allegorie, 'remythisation' et nouveau mythe. Reflexions surla captivite chretienne de la mythologie au moyen age," in Me1anges d'histoire litti-raire, tk linguistique et de philologie romanes oJJerts a Charks Rostaing, ed. Jacques DeCaluwe, Jean-Marie D'Heur, and Rene Dumas (Liege: Association desRomanistes de l'Universite de Liege, 1974),469-99, argues that the effort of al-legorists to reduce classical myth to a static meaning succeeds conversely in offer-ing new possibilities for myth in the High Middle Ages.

19. EdouardJeanneau, "Ilusage de la notion d'IniLgumentum a travers les glosesde Guillaume de Conches," 37-38. Peter Dronke has contended that the worddesignates both the outer covering of poetic fable and the meaning that the fa-ble conveys; see Fabula: Explorations into the Uses ofMyth in Medieval Platonism, Mit-tellateinische Studien und Texte, 9 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 16-28.

20. See the discussion in R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Liter-ary Anthropology of tile French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

21. Fahula, 17n.22. J. Reginald O'Donnell, C.S.B., "The Sources and Meaning of Bernard

Silvester's Commentary on the Aeneid," Mediaeval Studies 24 (1962): 247.23. Winthrop Wetherbee, trans., The Cosmographia of Bernardus Siloestris,

Records of Civilization, 89 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973),22-23.24. The importance of Bernardus' commentary for Dante's sense of the soul's

history is discussed by Theodore Silverstein, "Dante and Vergil the Mystic," Har-vard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 14 (1932): 51-82; Giorgio Padoan,"Tradizione e fortuna del commento all' "Eneide" di Bernardo Silvestre," Italiamedioeoale e umanistica 3 (1960): 237-40; and David Thompson, "Dante and Ber-nard Silvestris," Vzator no. 1 (1970): 203. Other examples of influence in medievalvernacular literature are more problematic to trace. John Gardner, "Fulgentius'Expositio Vergiliana Continentia and the Plan of Beowulf: Another Approach to thePoem's Style and Structure," Papers on Language and Literature 6 (1970): 227-62,argues for an impact on the Old English epic. Influence on the Roman d'Eneasis denied by Jean Frappier, "Remarques sur la peinture de la vie et des herosantiques dans la litterature francaise du XUe et XIUe siecle," in L'humanismemidiival dans /es littiratures romanes du XII' au XIV' siede, ed. Anthime Fourrier, Acteset Colloques, 3, Universire de Strasbourg (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1964), 19; andAlfred Adler, "Eneas und Lavine: Puer et Pudla Senes," Romo.nische Forschungen 71 (1959):77-79. Raymond J. Cormier believes there are some reminiscences; see "The

ROBERT EDWARDS ISI

Present State of Studies on the Roman d'Eneas," Cultura Neolatina 31 (1971): 33n;and One Heart, One Mind: 171e Rehirth of Vergil'sHem in Medieval French Romance (U niver-sity, Mississippi: Romance Monographs, Inc., 1973), 183-87.

25. Lecteuts paiens et lecteurs ehr/liens de l'Eniide, 2:197, 223 (figs. 358, 396). Cour-celle also notes that the ethical reading of book 6 of the Aeneid goes back as faras Seneca, who finds in it an example of Stoic heroism: "Thttitude de Senequea regard du livre VI est maintenant claire. Il s'interesse exclusivement a la par-tie qui precede la descente aux Enfers, cest-ä-dire a ce qui concerne la conduitede l'homme. Enee est, a ses yeux, le type du Sage stoicien" (1:425).

26. Saint Augustine, Corfessionum Iibri tredecim, ed. Pius KnölI, CSEL 33 (Vienna:Tempsky, 1896; repr., New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1962), 19; thetranslation is taken from Corifessicns, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore: Pen-guin Books, 1973), 34.