Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  40. In this it naturally relates to other Marian themes, such as the Virgin enclosing the elect under her mantle. Like the subjects discussed here, the theme is found widely in devotional literature, especially in France in the mid-thirteenth century, and is especially widespread in Italy in the early fourteenth century; for this tradition, see Vera Sussman, “Maria mit Schutzmantel,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 5 (1929): 285–351.

  41. Un trésor gothique, no. 13, 300–303.

  42. Bruno Boerner, “Interprétation du programme iconographique de la châsse de sainte Gertrude à Nivelles,” in Un trésor gothique, 225–33.

  43. In illumination too the new dispensation is shown by placing Sponsa or Ecclesia in structures with recognizably modern architectural details; see Reiner Haussherr, “Templum Salomonis und Ecclesia Christi: Zu einem Bildvergleich der Bible Moralisée,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 31 (1968): 101–21; and Véronique Germanier, “L’Ecclesia comme Sponsa Christi dans les Bibles Moralisées de la première moitié du XIIIème siècle,” Arte Cristiana 84, 775 (1996): 243–52. At this time stained glass programs in architectural choirs increasingly assert ecclesiastical presence; see Peter Kurmann and Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz, “Französische Bischôfe als Auftraggeber und Stifter von Glasmalereien: Das Kunstwerk als Geschichtsquelie,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 60 (1997): 429–50, who refer to the programs as creating an “église archiépiscopale” (440).

  44. Cambrai, Bibl Mun., ms. 154; see Un trésor gothique, no. 53.

  45. Philippe Verdier, “Les staurothèques mosanes et leur iconographie du Jugement Dernier,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 16 (1973): 199–213.

  46. It is unlikely that someone just wanted to include these subjects because several are already represented in the initials in the Hours of the Virgin.

  47. Examples include the initials in the Bury Bible and Lothian Bible; see Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, no. 56, p. 89 and Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, no. 32, p. 79.

  48. The frame dimensions are approximately 17 x 10 cm.

  49. The cycle of the Hours of the Cross shows the presumed patron in a series of temptations. For a detailed discussion, one looks forward to Adelaide Bennett, “A Woman’s Power of Prayer Versus the Devil in a Book of Hours of ca. 1300,” in Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).

  50. Published in Rezeau, Le prières aux saints, no. 217, pp. 515–18. The final verses (lines 55–60) read: “Et quant m’arme ert del cors sevree, / faites que soit representee / devant la parmanaule joie, / la ou sans fin avec Diu soie, / ou jou le voie fache a fache. / Pryés ent Dieu et il le fache.”

  51. For a depiction of the visio dei of slightly later date, see Lucy Freeman Sandler, “Face to Face with God: A Pictorial Image of the Beatific Vision,” in England in the Fourteenth Century, Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1986), 224–35. For devotional works, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), ch. 4. An interesting analogy to the introductory role of the Cambrai miniature is the illumination of Christ, Mary, and the saints in heaven which, along with the facing page of the Four Evangelists, introduce the Gospel Lessons (which precede the Hours in the Virgin) in a Flemish Horae of c. 1440, Morgan Library, M. 357; see Roger S. Wieck, Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York: George Braziller in association with the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1997), 49.

  52. Philip, Ghent Altarpiece, chap. 1.

  53. See Elisabeth Dhanens, “De Wijze Waarop het Lam Godsaltaar was opgesteld,” Gentse Bijdragen tot de Kunstgeschiedenis en de Oudheidkunde 22 (1969–72): 19–90, who proposes that the various panels were arranged into a large cabinetlike structure. The analogy to a reliquary—in this case it would be a box reliquary—is still apt, all the more so because the central panels in her reconstruction enclose a tabernacle.

  54. Philip, Ghent Altarpiece, 55–61. Various authors have argued for the influence of specific theological works, especially Rupert of Deutz; see the summaries in H. Silvester, “Le retable de l’Agneau mystique et Rupert de Deutz,” Revue Bénédictine 88 (1978): 274–86; Elisabeth Dhanens, Van Eyck: The Ghent Altarpiece (New York: Viking Press, 1973). For Berengaudus, see Derk Visser, Apocalypse as Utopian Expectation (800–1500) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 152–64.

  55. See Carol J. Purtle, The Marian Paintings of Jan van Eyck (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 17–39, esp. 35–38. The author also interprets the Annunciation on the exterior in terms of its spousal imagery and argues that the altarpiece was originally seen as a pairing of the Annunciation and Coronation of the Virgin, subjects linked in several contemporary works.

  56. They may, however, have known similar works, as Jan and possibly Hubert may have worked as illuminators. Some of the altarpieces of their contemporary Robert Campin seem to have been influenced by the same True Cross triptychs discussed above. For Jan, see Anne van Buren, Das Turin-Mailander Stundenbuch (Lucerne: Faksimile Verlag, 1996), 303–6, 313–19; for Campin, see Barbara Lane, “‘Depositio et Elevatio’: The Symbolism of the Seilern Triptych,” Art Bulletin 57 (1975): 21–30.

  57. Trottmann, La vision béatifique, 357–60, 370–72, and passim.

  The Limits of Apocalypse: Eschatology, Epistemology, and Textuality in the Commedia and Piers Plowman

  1. Important recent work on Dante and apocalypse includes Guglielmo Gorni, “Spirito profetico duecentesco e Dante,” Letture classensi (1984): 49–68; Dennis Costa, Irenic Apocalypse: Some Uses of Apocalyptic in Dante, Petrarch and Rabelais (Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1981); Ronald Herzman, “Dante and Apocalypse” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1992); the chapter on “The Commedia: Apocalypse, Church, and Dante’s Conversion” in Emmerson and Herzman’s The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); and Rebecca S. Beal, “Bonaventure, Dante, and the Apocalyptic Woman Clothed with the Sun,” Dante Studies 114 (1996): 209–28. On Langland, see Morton W. Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962); Mary Carruthers, “Time, Apocalypse, and the Plot of Piers Plowman” in Acts of Interpretation: The Text and Its Contexts, 700–1600, ed. Mary Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982); Robert Adams, “Some Versions of Apocalypse: Learned and Popular Eschatology in Piers Plowman” in The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985); and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Richard Emmerson’s “ ‘Or Yernen to Rede Redels?’ Piers Plowman and Prophecy,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 7 (1993): 27–76, provides a comprehensive clarification of the critical confusion surrounding prophecy, apocalypse, and millennial expectation in Langland’s poem and medieval culture more generally.

  2. This definition and its derivation are more fully explained in the introduction to my “Fictions of Judgment: The Apocalyptic T in the Fourteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1996), in which I address the problem of apocalypse qua genre through the work of J. J. Collins in “Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre,” Semeia 14 (1979); Bernard McGinn in Apocalyptic Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), Lois Parkinson Zamora in Writing the Apocalypse (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), Victor Turner in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), and Dennis Costa in Irenic Apocalypse. While apocalypse as a literary genre may not have existed in the fourteenth century, as Emmerson argues in “The Apocalypse in Medieval Culture” (The
Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, pp. 295–300), the Commedia itself provides a generic template for the fiction of judgment, in light of which it is possible to consider Langland’s negotiations with his own text.

  3. Relevant comparisons of Dante and Langland can be found in Mary Carruthers, The Search for St. Truth: A Study of Meaning in Piers Plowman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Anne Middleton, “Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman” in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982); and Pietro Cali, Allegory and Vision in Dante and Langland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1971).

  4. Citations and quoted translations from the Commedia are from Charles Singleton’s edition and translation, Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy’, trans. and comm. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970–75), with my bracketed emendations.

  5. On post-Commedia representations of the otherworld as based on Dante’s, see, e.g., Eugene Paul Nassar, “The Iconography of Hell: From the Baptistery Mosaic to the Michelangelo Fresco,” Dante Studies III (1993): 53–105. See also Alison Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Other World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  6. Robert Hollander has pointed out one moment when this claim is made explicit in “Dante’s Book of the Dead: A Note on Inferno XXIX, 57,” Studi Danteschi 54 (1981). The lines in question refer to the tenth bolgia of the Inferno, in which the falsifiers are punished:

  . . . là ‘ve la ministra

  de l’alto Sire infallibil giustizia

  punisce i falsador che qui registra. (Inf.29: 55–57)

  . . . where the ministress of the High Lord, infallible

  Justice, punishes the falsifiers whom she registers here.

  The claim that God’s own justice (the same justice that punishes) registers itself, infallible, here in Dante’s fiction makes it analogous, as Hollander notes, to the libri of life and death mentioned in the Apocalypse, the Book of Daniel, and the Dies Irae. See also Jesse Gellrich, “Dante’s Liber Occultorum and the Structure of Allegory” in The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).

  7. See Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992) for a brilliant analysis of the narrative sleights of hand with which Dante achieves this effect and of how critics have for centuries allowed themselves to be fooled.

  8. While Dante makes it clear (because only a few seats in the celestial rose remain to be filled) that the end of time, though imminent, has not yet arrived, he also says that he sees the blessed as they will appear at the end of time. See Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), esp. chapter 7, for the controversies surrounding the beatific vision and its precise eschatological significance (was it granted to the blessed at death or only at the end of time?) around the time of Dante’s writing.

  9. As Bloomfield points out: “the dream was a favorite [medieval] literary device because it bespoke a revelation, a higher form of truth. . . . A dream was or could be a vision, and the poet in reporting visions was only fulfilling his traditional role as seer” (11). Morning dreams were particularly endowed with truth in the Macrobian tradition on which the Middle Ages based their oneirology. However, Jacqueline T. Miller amply demonstrates the limitations of authority in the dream convention with the chapter “Dream Visions of Auctorite,” in her Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  10. I will quote from the better-known B-text unless otherwise specified, using The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (London: Everyman’s, 1978) and J. F. Goodridge’s prose translation in Piers the Ploughman (London: Penguin, 1959), with my bracketed emendations.

  11. As Mary Carruthers has argued in The Search for St. Truth, Piers Plowman is basically “an epistemological poem, a poem about the problem of knowing truly,” which is in large part, for Langland, a problem of language (see esp. 4–11).

  12. In “Narration and the Invention of Experience” Middleton argues for the sense of inconclusiveness and indeterminacy present throughout Piers in the many “episodes” that move the poem forward without exactly giving it a plot, “units whose arrangement seems somehow reiterative rather than progressive” (92). These episodes each comprise “disputes” between competing authorities that inevitably remain unresolved: “While the purpose of this procedure may be, like that of scholastic disputation, to draw explicit discrepancies to the surface so as to show in what sense they may all point to the same truth, its narrative effect is quite different” (97–98)—it results rather in a sense of truth’s fragmentation and multiplicity.

  13. Carruthers asserts, regarding the poem’s open ending, that “From the point of view of literary plot, Christian history refers both its beginning and end to an all-causative, all-significant middle [i.e., Christ]. Because of this, both beginning and end lose importance in relation to the midpoint. . . . Piers Plowman mirrors this distinctively Christian economy of time in its own plot. It neither has a decisive beginning nor builds toward a climactic ending. . . . From Langland’s viewpoint . . . to tie up everything into a consonant whole as the classical canons of art would dictate would be to confirm the fictiveness of such an imposed design” (“Time, Apocalypse,” 185–87). Interestingly, however, this view of the eschatological and epistemological limitations of Christian “plot” does not take into account the apocalyptic text’s stance with respect to its own textuality, in which closure is traditionally definitive. While “the cry of St. John which ends Revelation exactly captures the eschatological expectation of ending, and is echoed in Conscience’s cry after Grace at the end of Piers Plowman” (186), John’s authorial ending, in which those who alter the text are cursed (Apoc. 22: 18–19) has no parallel in Piers.

  14. Pietro Cali delineates other aspects of this allegorical parallel, Allegory and Vision, 109ff.

  15. See Robert Hollander, “Dante and His Commentators” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 226–36, who asserts that “this poet behaves in such a way as to indicate that he is evidently in frequent search of a glossator” (227), and Barolini, who suggests the ways in which the poet then constrains the critics’ exegesis, in Undivine, esp. 3–20.

  16. See Robert Kaske, “The Seven Statūs ecclesiae in Purgatorio XXXII–XXXIII,” in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton, ed. Aldo Bernardo and Anthony Pellegrini (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983).

  17. See “Fictions of Judgment,” chap. 1, for my argument that the major prophecies in the Commedia (the Veltro and the 515) are actually metatextual prophecies of the Commedia itself in its apocalyptic role.

  18. For my discussion of the end of Piers Plowman, I will use the C-text, which I believe represents the most fully formed “fiction of judgment” among the versions of the poem (Piers Plowman, ed. Derek Pearsall [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], with my own translations of any differences from B). See “Fictions of Judgment” for an interpretation of the “apocalyptic” evolution of the three versions, and Theodore L. Steinberg’s similar conclusions in Piers Plowman and Prophecy: An Approach to the C-Text (New York: Garland, 1991). See also the new verse translation of C by George Economou (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). On Book, see Robert E. Kaske’s “The Speech of ‘Book’ in Piers Plowman” Anglia 77 (1959): 117–44, in which a “Janus-like pattern of allusion” (124) is detected in Book’s speech, where past and future are mirrored in the Word of the New Law (126).

  19. My literal translation attempts to retain the ambiguities others have elided, particularly regarding the “Iewene i
oye.” Goodridge offers “and dash to pieces all the triumph of the Jews” (224), while Economou has “And all the joy of the Jews dissolve and despise” (189), and Pearsall glosses “they” (1. 267) as the Jews, adding “The conversion of the Jews to the New Law . . . was a traditional part of millennial prophecy” (331 n.267). More suggestively, Kaske interprets the grammatical difficulties of this passage by glossing the first line as “I, Book, will be burned, but Jesus (will) rise to life” (“Speech,” 134–38), and reads the results in light of the tradition of the Evangelium aeternum in the writings of Joachim of Fiore, who conceived of this testament for the third age “not as a written document, but as the spiritual meaning or understanding of both Old and New Testaments. . . . According to Joachim, the intellectus spiritualis of the Evangelium aeternum will consume the letter of the Old and New Testaments like the fire which consumed the sacrifice of Elias” (139).

  20. On the dangers of vernacular revelation in late-medieval England, see, e.g., Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70, 4 (October 1995): 822–64.

  21. These lines are an addition in the C-text that suggests Langland’s heightened apocalyptic awareness in the final version of his poem, for the knowledge of good and evil is apocalyptic knowledge, rightly reserved only to God (my translation).

  22. This triple vision suggests the “theology of history” of Joachim of Fiore, the influence of which on this part of the poem is considered by Kaske, who sees that “Langland seems to be clothing the Resurrection at least partly in the imagery of the third status mundi” (“Speech,” 140). The role of Joachim in Piers Plowman is seen also by Bloomfield, Kerby-Fulton, and Robert Frank in Piers Plowman and the Scheme of Salvation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), and is considered briefly by Lawrence Clopper in “Songes of Rechelesnesse”: Langland and the Franciscans (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), chapter 7. See Emmerson, “Piers Plowman and Prophecy” for an overview of Joachimist interpretations of the poem, and Emmerson’s rejection of them (41–49). In “Fictions of Judgment,” I suggest a role for Joachim’s thought in both Dante and Langland, but argue that both poets appropriate elements of a Joachite “episteme” to their own visions, without their poems being subsumed by them.