by Scott McGill
Orosius’s (d. ca. 417) Histories Against the Pagans enjoyed an equal popularity, in part owing to its, and its author’s, association with Augustine. But Orosius’s Christian‐centered historical perspective also had its own appeal, not least the ways in which Orosius’s fresh retelling of world history concludes with the treatment of imperial history down to 417. Orosius’s popularity is proven by several hundred extant manuscripts that record the Histories, a work that seems to have been continually read throughout the Western Middle Ages by figures as disparate as Bede in the early eighth century and Orderic Vitalis (d. 1142) and Otto of Freising (d. 1158) in the twelfth (Rohrbacher 2002, pp. 148–149). In addition to widely being quoted, the Histories’ wide readership is also affirmed by the fact that an abridgment of the work was translated into Anglo‐Saxon in the ninth century and an Arabic translation survives from the tenth.
Less popular was Victor of Vita’s history of the Vandal persecution, written ca. 485, the floruit assigned also to its author. More than a few medieval manuscripts survive, which suggests a certain interest. Jordanes (fl. ca. 550), however, earned a much wider medieval readership for his Getica, or history of the Gothic people, though more as a historical source than as an author studied on his own merits. The Ravenna Geographer (fl. ca. 800?), for example, mined him for information, as did Paul the Deacon (d. 799), while the manuscript copies of his works prove his wide reception and preservation (Goffart 1988, pp. 110–111).
Gibbon’s view that, in the Histories of the Franks, Gregory of Tours (d. 594) “omitted almost everything that posterity desires to learn” (Thorpe 1974, p. 55) was not shared by medieval readers. By the seventh century Gregory’s Histories had been mined in order to flesh out the content of the so‐called Chronicle of Fredegar, especially much of its third book (Thorpe 1974, p. 38), and by the Carolingian period nearly every historical writer cited Gregory’s Histories or otherwise relied on it in some way, including Paul the Deacon (d. 799), Notker of Saint‐Gall (d. 912), Flodoard of Rheims (d. 966), Letald of Micy (fl. ca. 1000), and Hugo of Flavigny (fl. ca. 1100) (Contreni 2002, p. 422). Excerpts from the Histories are found in over 80 manuscripts from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries, many of these dealing especially with saints’ lives (Contreni 2002, pp. 423–424). Nor is the Histories the only of Gregory’s works to prove popular throughout the Western Middle Ages. Because of the wide interest in hagiography, Gregory’s so‐called Eight Books of Miracles also was long‐lived, demonstrated not least by some seven dozen manuscripts still extant and the many dozens of excerpts taken from the work that pepper a wide variety of collateral manuscripts (Contreni 2002, p. 425).
While grammarians and commentators such as Fulgentius (fl. ca. 500), Priscian (fl. ca. 500), and Servius (fl. ca. 400) are not likely to be considered literary authors, Servius is one of the interlocutors in Macrobius’s (fl. ca. 400) Saturnalia, a work that perhaps more easily crosses the line separating scholarship from literature per se. Macrobius seems to have been less widely read in the early Middle Ages, but he achieved an important place especially in the twelfth century, where the Saturnalia and also his commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis provided sources of scientific, philosophical, and literary knowledge (Curtius 1953, pp. 51, 443).
Some writers, such as Optatian (fl. ca. 325), wrote in forms or in styles that rendered them inaccessible to the Western Middle Ages, or, like Rutilius Namatianus (fl. ca. 415), took up topics or themes that proved less durable over the coming centuries. Other works, such as Sulpicius Severus’s (fl. ca. 400) Life of St. Martin, offered new forms that were influential in the medieval West in their own right or as models. And, needless to say, many authors survived but were not widely read. Nor did literature provide an exclusive entry into late antique writings: In addition to the commentary and scholarly traditions that emerge in late antiquity can be added, for example, the Justinianic law code that dates from the early sixth century, monastic rules, and pieces written for liturgical and ecclesiastical purposes.
Much more might be said about the medieval reception of late antique literature than has been said here, not least because the ways in which this large body of writing was received involve more than a mere history of reading, attending also to competing pressures provided by the church, the state, the classroom, and the copying and dissemination of texts. To these pressures can be added the rise of vernacular languages and literatures and the resulting attractions of national authors and traditions and the always‐fickle nature of readerly tastes. To conclude by noting these pressures, therefore, is to sketch some touchstones for a larger treatment of a much‐neglected topic.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Early Modern Receptions of Late Ancient Literature
Diane Shane Fruchtman
37.1 Introduction
Early modern Europeans did not have a sense of a distinct, innovative, and dynamic time period akin to what we now label “late antiquity.” They tended, instead, to regard the literature of the period from 284 to 600 simply as ancient, though not undifferentiated by style or quality. But within the vast epoch of classical antiquity, early modern intellectuals did, indeed, identify a separate age: the patristic age, the age of the “Church Fathers” – a time of Christian classical antiquity, when Christian truth encountered and engaged with classical civilization. Some early modern commentators, particularly the humanists, understood the encounter to have been one of exemplary synthesis, of the unification of piety and eloquence. They understood late ancient authors to have “charted a religious and intellectual path through Greco‐Roman thought and culture,” which validated their own efforts to position ancient culture as central to intellectual life; this understanding also justified further exploration of that ancient culture, as humanists sought to “understand the cultural and religious matrix that had formed the fathers themselves” (Rutherford 1997, p. 511). Other commentators, particularly scholastics, understood the encounter to have been one of antagonism, survival, and triumph, where the appropriation of pagan antiquity (“spoiling the Egyptians,” in Augustine’s words [Rummel 1994, p. 14]) had been achieved to the extent that it needed to be (with the notable exception of Aristotle, whose works, translated into Latin in the twelfth century, were deeply influential to the scholastic movement); the resulting works by Church Fathers represented not the pinnacle of Christian achievement but its foundation, hallowed by antiquity but made more useful by the commentaries and interrogations of intervening generations of scholars and theologians.
The early modern era saw renewed interest in this period of Christian antiquity, as humanists, with “somewhat undifferentiated enthusiasm” and often with a tenuous grasp on issues of dating and provenance, subjected familiar texts to novel forms of analysis and sought to “locate, investigate, study, and disseminate” more obscure patristic works (Stinger 1997, pp. 506–507; for the tendency to date later texts to the apostolic age and to misattribute texts, see Rice 1962, p. 140). Fueled by their search for a “purer,” simpler Christian piety and the eloquent “affective wisdom” of the generations closest to Christ, humanists elevated these texts as the antidote to the formal intellectualism of the scholastics. Scholastics, by contrast, were more circumspect about which late ancient writers should be regarded as authoritative and how they could be understood, but they, too, found themselves engaging more with the Church Fathers as they defended their readings and interpretations against humanist challenges and incorporated humanist textual findings into their assessments of the literature (or rejected them). Thus, the early modern era did not so much rediscover the works of the Church Fathers – most had been “available, read, and used” throughout the Middle Ages (Rice 1985, p. 120) – as reemphasize and rethink them.
Late ancient texts were widely read, used, and valued in the early modern period, to different degrees, to different ends, and with different emphases, such that even their detractors were forced to encounter them and address their use. And in the literary and educational culture of the time, they were ubiquitous – diffused in classrooms, in private libraries, in civic life, and at court: Elizabeth Tudor, for example, is said to have “daily turned over” Boethius’s Consolatio and “to have translated [it] handsomely into the English tongue” (Marcus, Mueller, and Rose 2000, p. 370n). But beyond the mere fact of their use, there are few sweeping state
ments one can make regarding the reception of late ancient literature in the early modern era.
Thus, to provide a sense of how early modern readers received and engaged with late ancient authors, this chapter offers first an overview of some defining features of early modernity and their effect on the reception of late ancient literature: the humanist–scholastic debate, the rise of text culture, and the growth of religious diversity leading up to and during the Reformation. It then proceeds to highlight one particularly illustrative case of reception: Desiderius Erasmus’s reception of Jerome.
37.2 Encountering Late Ancient Texts in the Early Modern Context
When we inquire about early modern receptions of late ancient literature, we must first define what we mean by “early modern.” The term is problematically teleological (though less restrictive and ideologically infused than either “Renaissance” or “Reformation”) and indicates different developments – technological, economic, intellectual, religious – depending on one’s area of inquiry. “Early modern” can refer to a variety of dates ranging from the mid‐fourteenth century all the way to the nineteenth (Scott 2015, p. 21; Starn 2002, pp. 298–302). To highlight developments in the reception of late ancient texts, this chapter focuses on literary, intellectual, and educational culture across central and western Europe. Thus, the most useful areas of focus for our purposes are seismic shifts in intellectual culture: the debates between humanists and scholastics that began in earnest in the fourteenth century; the proliferation of texts (both manuscript and print) in the mid‐fifteenth century; and the sense of crisis attending the state of faith from the fourteenth century (with the Avignon papacy and subsequent Western Schism) through the sixteenth (as Reformations flourished).
Humanism – broadly defined as an emphasis on language skills, including philological textual critique, translation, and elegance of articulation in speech and writing – was not the invention of Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), but his formulation of it initiated the debates about modes of intellectual inquiry that dominated the early modern period. In Petrarch’s view, the humanists’ primary opponents, the scholastics or “theologians” (who adhered to the centuries‐honed intellectual system of Aristotelian logic and disputation that dominated the universities) were more invested in “mental gymnastics” than in a “genuine search for truth,” whereas humanists sought to cultivate good morality through “wisdom and virtue” gleaned from whatever source it might be found in (Rummel 1995, pp. 30, 32–33). Petrarch further asserted that the scholastics’ conflict‐driven methods (dialectic, disputatio, sic‐et‐non reasoning) were ill‐suited to studying sacred Scripture, which should be approached with more reverence and less egotism. Scholastics, like Jean Gerson (1363–1429), asserted that theology must be the foremost arbiter of academic rigor, and that theological and philosophical quandaries must be explored with precise terminology and established forms of inquiry. Thus, while in its early years the humanist–scholastic debate mainly centered on literary pursuits, we can see the seeds of the later conflict here – from its literary origins, which included intense debate about the value and danger of non‐Christian classical texts, the debate expanded into the academic and institutional realms, as humanists and scholastics argued about what credentials and methodological competencies merited positions at universities. The debate then further intensified, fueling and being fueled by the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, as partisans on both sides (and in between) questioned one another’s ability “to understand and interpret the Word of God” (Rummel 1995, p. 9).
