Textual Obscurity in the Middle Ages

Textual Obscurity in the Middle Ages
Lucie Dolezalova, Jeff Rider, and Alessandro Zironi
When one has „figured out“ the meaning of a dream, one has lost touch
with the aliveness and elusiveness of the experience of dreaming: in its
place one has created a flat. bloodless decoded message. 1
Obscurity has been recognized as a component or aspect, a possibi l i ty, of
d i scourse since the very beginnings of European culture. The word has
numerous connotations, some of which contradict one another, and perhaps
refers to a set of ideas rather than to a single idea. Nevertheless, as
this volume shows, the notion is crucial for the overal l conception of real
ity and its exploration reveals new features of medieval l i fe and
thought.
The English word „obscurity“ belongs to an ancient semantic field that i s
particularly multifaceted i n the Sanskrit language, for example, where
the metaphorical meanings of the words for „obscurity“ fall into three
different groups which expand in various d i rections the concrete sense
of darkness:
1) Obscurity as suffering
2) Obscurity as a burden
3) Obscurity as a secret
The first group focuses on the idea of suffering, torment and hopelessness
i n connection with a Situation of obscurity. Sanskrit klistatva „obscurity
(of a text)“ is an apt example. lt is derived from the main form
klishta, which means „being distressed, tormented“ and, used rhetorically,
„not easily inte l l i gible.“ The word comes from an lndo-European
root * kleik- „to pull with pain“ connected to the Slavenie root • kliSa „pl iers,
scissors.“ ln other words, the obscurity of a text expressed by the
ward klistatva is something that causes pain and torment, an uneasiness
Themas H. Ogden, „The Dialectically Constituted/Decentered Subject of Psycheanalysis.
I. The Freudian Subject,“ The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 73
(1992): 521.
2 TEXTUAL ÜBSCU RITY IN THE MI DOLE AGES
which provokes suffering.2 The same sense of deprivation and ignorance
of wisdom can be d i scovered in the Sanskrit word tamas „darkness,
gloom, obscurity,“ which can be used to refer to mental darkness and ignorance.
lts negative meaning is reinforced by the idea that tamas is one
of the three constituents of the creation, the one that causes heaviness,
ignorance and, in general, a l l irrational states of mind (pride, Iust, etc.) .
The word is also used for the obscuration, the movement from light into
darkness, of the sun or moon in eclipses. The word does not derive from
the lndo-European root • tem(a}-, temes- „darkness,“ which can be compared,
for example, with Latin tenebrae and Old High German demar
„darkness,“ or German Oämmerung.J
The second group into which the metaphorical meanings of the
words for „obscurity“ in Sanskrit fall is connected with the idea of
something overwhelming and oppressive. This is the case of Sanskrit
atibhära, which means „excessive burden, excessive obscurity (of a
sentence) . “ Since -bhara comes from an lndo-European root •bher- „to
bring“ (compare Latin ferö or Gothic bafran) and the Sanskrit prefix atiis
used with nouns and adjectives to add the sense of „excessive,
extraordinary,“ the ultimate connotation for obscurity in the form
atibhara is clear. When atibhara is used in a rhetorical context connected
with language, the obscurity of a sentence is perceived i n a negative way
as bringing with it an overwhelming burden.4 A similar semantic context
can be proposed for the Sanskrit term andhatämisra, which is used to
refer to the complete darkness of the soul. The term is connected to the
word-root andha „darkness, turbid water“ and derives from the lndoEuropean
root • andho- “ b l i nd, obscure,“ whose meaning is suggested by
the Latin word andabata-which Varro and Cicero considered a loan-
Manier Monier-WIIIiams, A Sanskrit – English Oictionary Etymologically and Philologically
Arranged (Dehli: Motilal Banars1dass Publishers, 1 995) [first ed. 1 899),
324; Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, I (Tubingen:
Francke, 20024) [first ed. 1 959), 602.
Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit, 438; Pokorny, Indogermanisches, 1 063; Friedrich
Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Berlin, New York: Walter
de Gruyter, 197521) [first ed. 1884). 120; Alois Walde and Johann Baptist
Hoffmann, Lateinisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg: Carl Winter,
19383) [first ed. 1906), 664.
Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit, 1 2; Pokorny, Indogermanisches, 1 28; Winfred Lehmann,
A Gothic Etymological Oictionary (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 57.
I NTRODUCTION 3
word from Gall ican-which refers to a gladiator who fights without eyesl
its in his helm.s
The third and last group into which the metaphorical meanings of the
words for „obscurity“ in Sanskrit fall is represented by the Sanskrit word
güdhC!tva „obscurity of sense.“ l t derives from the main word güdha
„covered, hidden, invisible, secret, a secret place or mystery,“ and is related
to the derivative form güdhC!rtha „the hidden of mystic sense, having
a hidden meaning.“ The word güdha comes from an lndo-European root
*gheugh-, ‚ghugh- „to hide; to do something in secret,“ and is related to
the Avestic guz- „to hide“ or Old Danish gyg „someone who lives (hidden)
in the underworld.“6
The metaphorical meanings of the words for „obscurity“ in Sanskrit
thus suggest that obscurity is a negative aspect of communication which
causes suffering or is considered a burden but is also a complex of
knowledge shared and maintained in secrecy by a selected group.
This connection with something secret and mysterious is represented
in ancient Greek by the verb Kpvmw „to hide,“ which derives from
the lndo-European root *krä[u]-, ‚k’du-, *krii- „to hide.“7 From the Greek
Kpvrrrw comes the substantive KPVf/)lOTI’Jc; „obscurity, secrecy.“ The other
Greek word for „obscurity“ is aKoT􀀣tv6c;, aKOUiv6rryc;. The lndo- European
root of these words is *skot- „shadow“ (Gothic skadus, Old Engl ish
sceadu), which shows its fundamental connection with an optical context,
8 and it can be used figuratively to refer to something that obstructs
the discernment of knowledge and thus creates anxiety and fear. The
main word, aK6roc;, is always used in connection with communication
expressing a negative feeling; it underli nes obscurity due to the Iack of
clarity in the communication or in the speaker but also due to the absence
of knowledge.
The semantic field for „obscurity“ in other lndo-European languages
is based on words that have a chromatic connection to the colors brown
or black or that derive from words connected with smoke or mist. Latin
obscurus, for example, derives from lndo-European *(s)kew-, *skewa,
*skü- „to cover“ and can be understood to mean what is covered or hid-
Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit, 44; Pokorny, Indogermanisches: 4 1 ; Walde and Hoffmann,
Lateinisches, 46.
Monier-Wi lliams, A Sanskrit, 360-6 1 ; Pokorny, Indogermanisches, 450.
Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire etymologique de Ia Iangue grecque. Histoire des
mots (Paris: Klicksieck, 1 968), 589; Pokorny, Indogermanisches, 6 1 7 .
Chantraine, Dictionnaire etymologique, 1 022; Pokorny, Indogermanisches, 957;
Lehmann, A Gothic, 307.
4 TEXTUAL ÜBSCURITY IN THE MI DOLE ÄGES
den by darkness. Latin obscuritas thus means something which is protected
or hidden.
. ..
Any text may be obscure (or a source of suffering, a burden, or a secret-
i n the other meanings of the word) depending on the context, the
i nterpretative framewerk in which it is placed. Consequently, clarifications
of obscurity also depend on contexts and interpretative frameworks:
the explanation or solution puts an end to the enigma, turns the obscurity
into clarity-but only within the particular environment in which it
was perceived as obscure in the fi rst place. The question of what constitutes
a successful interpretation or solution to an obscurity is, again, dependent
on the context: must the solution produce general consent, or is
it enough to find one that simply pleases the interpreter hirnself or herseit?
Must it take into account as many aspects of the text as poss ible, or
is it enough to address its most troub l i ng feature? One interpretative
community may be puzzled by d ifferent features of a text from another,
and thus the same text may be obscure in different communities for different
reasons.
Texts that were clear in their original contexts, that is, texts that operated
smoothly in their original community, are liable to become obscure
when transported into a new community, one with different rules and
expectations. Obscurity is in fact a violation of expectations, rules, or order
within a particular framework. This is especially apparent when one
deals with texts from the past: they a l l tend to seem obscure and in need
of explanation to us. Of course, some texts are generally perceived as
more obscure than others because some expectations are more generally
shared than others. For example, if a text violates the grammatical rules
of a language, it w i l l strike more readers as obscure than if it v iolates
semantic rules or simply does not follow the current stylistic trends.
The solutions to obscurities depend on the available tools and competencies
and dealing with obscurity may transform the community that
does so. lf it Iacks the tools and competences to solve the enigma, the
community may appropriate it, actualize it, or establish new rules that
w i l l accommodate it. in this way, either the enigma itself or the i nterpretive
framewerk in which it is set is transformed in order to produce a
solution. Thus, obscurity is very productive of change.
Obscurity may, from another point of view, be seen as the normal
state of affairs: this world is in fact naturally obscure and ambiguous.
I NTRODUCTION 5
The human desire to i mpose order and system on it results inevitably in
only partial and temporary solutions. Every system produces only partial
order and leaves part of reality unexplained and obscure. Attempts to
explain the obscure leftovers bring about new systems which w i l l inevitably
fail to explain yet other aspects of rea l i ty. Reality is thus a dynamic
space on which we i mpose changing concepts of what is normal and
what is exceptional, what is clear and what is obscure, what is central
and what is marginal, and our focus regularly shifts between the center-
the canon-and the margins.
The history of the perception and treatment of a textual obscurity can
teil us a great deal about the interpretative communities through which
texts move. The texts that a community deemed worthy of i nterpretation
were surely not those that simply seemed the most obscure. They were
those that were considered both obscure and meaningful, that is, interpretable;
those whose obscurity could be clarified and made useful in a
particular environment. The appropriation of the obscure text aimed at
achieving something and eventually gaining some power in the commun
ity. lt is thus worthwhi l e to study what texts were considered obscure
under what conditions, and in what ways their obscurity was treated.
Same texts seem to have presented a continuous challenge to i nterpretation
while others were explained once and the explanation was accepted.
ls it possi ble to identify what constitutes clarity-what makes an interpretation
acceptable-at least within a given community? ls it possible
to specify the origin of the feeling that a particular aspect of a text is significant
and needs to be interpreted? Why were some texts more likely
to be chosen for i nterpretation than others?
Modern Western readers of medieval texts often find them obscure.
Same of this obscurity is accidental and inevitable and is due to the historical
and cultural d i stance that separates them from medieval authors.
lt comes from the d i sappearance of the material and social contexts i n
which these works were written, the loss of their linguistic contexts, the
loss of sources, our ignorance of certain codes that may have governed
their production, the vagaries of the transmission of these texts over the
centuries, and so on.
Some of this accidental obscurity would, of course, have rendered
medieval texts obscure for medieval readers as weil. A poorly transmitted,
twelfth-century French text might, that is, have been even more obscure
to a fifteenth-century Polish reader than it is to a modern French
one. Even when allowances have been made for the historical and cultural
d istance between modern readers and medieval authors, however,
6 TEXTUAL ÜBSCURITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES
many medieval texts seem to be w i l lfully and frustratingly obscure. Same
of this frustration, at least, is due to significant differences between modern
readers‘ attitudes towards textual obscurity and those of medieval
readers and authors, who appear to have had a higher tolerance for textual
obscurity than we do. They even seem to have viewed obscurity as
desirable and a virtue in certa in texts and certain contexts. Textual obscurity,
that is, was an accepted and inherent part of mainstream medieval
„high“ culture.
Even though obscurity had been recognized as a component or poss
i b i l ity of discourse lang before the Middle Ages, the tolerance of and
even taste for obscurity in medieval l iterary circles was new and remarkable.
lt seems to have had three principle sources: the obscurity of the
Bible for medieval readers; a rhetorical and l i terary tradition of obscure
composition; and a Iack of l i nguistic authority.
As the history of biblical exegesis and its importance in medieval culture
show, the Bible was an obscure text for medieval readers. Given that
communications of supramundane origin seem to have been traditionally
and habitually obscure throughout human history (perhaps as a sign
of the incommensurabil ity of the mundane and supramundane), their
obscurity was in fact a guarantee of their divine origin: the more obscure
a passage was, the more pregnant it seemed to be with divine meaning.
Bibl ical obscurity was thus a promise and a challenge for medieval exegetes
and led them to develop both intricate schemes of textual interpretation
and intricate theories of obscure signification. Primarily because
of the Bible and the discourse surrounding it, obscurity was also understood
to be a part of objective real ity. God’s other „books,“ the created
universe and h istory, were likewise feit to be full of obscure and inexhaustible
meaning. God was understood to have expressed himself obscurely
in order to subdue human pride, exercise the human intellect,
and associate the pleasure of d iscovery with the revelation of his intentions.
The Church Fathers had, however, a lready established that
communication between God and mankind had broken down after the
F a l l of Adam and Eve. As Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa explain, human
beings are unable to understand plain messages from God because of
their corrupted nature. God thus has to employ oblique means of
communication when addressing them i n order to accommodate his
INTRODUCTION 7
message to the i mperfection of human intel lect.9 In fact, the source of
obscurity in the Bible is often the surprising character of divine speech.
On the one hand, there was a universal expectation that the Bible be
perfect since it is the word of God. On the other hand, however, medieval
readers could not fail to see certain „imperfections“ in the Bible. Since
these imperfections ran contrary to their expectation, they perceived the
„imperfect“ passages to be obscure: Why did God bother to record so
many l i ttle details concerning the lives of the patriarchs or the prophets?
Why are bibl ical heroes sometimes praised for apparently immoral
behavior? Why is Jesus sometimes depicted as if he had doubts, when he
was God and God cannot have doubts? The Iitera! meaning of these
passages was clear but the reasons for including them in a sacred and
perfect book were obscure. Why would God include in his revelation so
many banal details, or, as in the case of the Song of Songs, erotic scenes?
These were i mportant cases of obscurity to the medieval mind, and the
usual explanations for them argued that God intentionally concealed h i s
own divine nature a n d used h u m a n modes o f communication in order to
get closer to the human intel lect. Thus, for example, Jesus pretends to
have doubts i n order to bring his message closer to his disciples, or
i nessenti a l l i ttle deta ils of a bibl ical story a l lude to divine mysteries
which cannot be communicated d i rectly.
ln any case, attempts to interpret the Bible, the u niverse and history
were praiseworthy activities bringing one closer to God.
The interpretation of biblical obscurity also revitalized this old text
composed in and for a radically different culture and made it relevant to
medieval life and preoccupations. And once the machine of textual exegesis
had been built and was running smoothly, its methods of adjusting
and recuperating an old text in new contexts through the interpretation
of its obscurities could be applied to a wide array of obscure or „unacceptable“-
ancient and pagan-texts, bringing them into the reservoir of
medieval culture and enlarging it. These methods made even the unintentional
creation of obscurity culturally productive, as when, for example,
obscurity produced by an „author’s“ conceiving of himself as a mere
copyist led to subsequent „clarifications·· and further „corruptions.“
Obscurity also had a disti nct and established role in the rhetorical
and poetic traditions the Middle Ages inherited from Antiquity. ln these
traditions, discourse was understood to consist of a play between clarity
Gillian Rosemary Evans, The Language am:J Logic of the Bible: The Earlier Middle
Ages (Cambndge: Garnbridge University Press, 1991), 1-8.
8 TEXTUAL ÜBSCURITY IN THE MI DOLE AGES
and obscurity. which was something to be actively employed as a particular
way of encoding a message. lts use was recommended, at least
occasionally. as a refreshing strategy to draw attention to one’s discourse,
to make it more memorable, and to increase the audience’s pleasure
of understanding by delaying it and making it work for it, although
rhetors and authors were also warned against using it too much or too
often.
Created obscurity was also used as a pedagogical tool. „to establish,“
as Virgilius Maro put it, „students‘ acuteness of perception“ (sagacitatem
discentium adprobare).lO l t could be used in a related way to make a discourse’s
meaning less accessible to the uneducated crowds. lt thus created
an additional source of social pleasure for, an elite subaudience of
people who could u nderstand it. Obscurity operated as an „added value,“
separable from the message, making it more accessible to some than to
others.
Created obscurity could similarly be made to serve political ends by
veiling a subversive or contestatory d iscourse reserved for a group of
initiates. lt was thus a lways suspect to some degree and viewed as a potential
challenge to the clarity produced by established order. The play
between obscurity and clarity thus also involved, or was an a l l egory for,
a play between the margin and the center, the refused and the accepted,
the unknown and the known, anarchy and order, heresy and orthodoxy.
The opposite of obscurity was in fact less clarity than the order, the authority
that produces clarity. A clear d iscourse can be combined easily with
other clear discourses to produce a totalizing or encyclopedic one, a single
grand d iscourse of which the many individual d iscourses are but
parts.
Medieval audiences schooled in these traditions appreciated even
unresolvable obscurity in moderation, which suggests that they did not
a lways find it necessary to understand a discourse to enjoy it. These traditions
permitted and in some ways encouraged a linguistic creator to
lose hirnself or herself in language; to develop a metaphor or an etymology
until it broke the bars of received knowledge and developed new,
unforeseen meanings that expanded existing epistemological possibilities;
to talk or write even when one had nothing to say, for the pleasure
10 Epitome 1 0, Johannes Huerner, ed., Virgilii Maronis Grammatici opera (Leipzig: B.
G. Teubner, 1 886). 76; Giovanni Polara, trans .. L. Caruso and G. Polara. eds., Virgilius
Maro Grammaticus, Epitomi ed Episto/e, Nuovo medioevo 9 (Naples: Liguori,
1 9 7 9). 128.
I NTROOUCTION 9
of talking or writing, or to provoke a reaction. Obscure d iscourse could,
that is, be an i nventive, Ieisure activity, a form of pure pleasure and pure
research.
The tolerance and even taste for obscurity in medieval literary circles
was also in part the result of a Iack of linguistic authority. Obscurity is
a lways relative, is obscure only from the point of view of some norm or
canon: the stronger the norm, the more different kinds of discourse w i l l
appear obscure in relation to it. ln the Middle Ages, however, l iterary
languages were still i l l -defined and i l l-regulated. Even the leading literary
language, Latin, had no clear speifing guidel ines and no settled
grammatical rules, while most of the „vulgar“ languages were, so to
speak, uncultivated wildernesses-or absolute democracies.
Many medieval texts that seem quite obscure to modern scholars
were often fully i ntegrated into the mainstream culture; their obscurity
was not considered striking or unusual. The medieval approach to texts
was fuzzy and approximate rather than clearly definable, distinguishable,
and articulate. Medieval audiences were simply more ready to
tolerate obscurity because it formed a n integral part of their world. Sometimes
they did pursue the oqjectives of system, order, and efficiency
but rarely in a systematic, orderly, and efficient manner: they d i d not believe
that obscurity could ever be eradicated. They were not scared of
the indescribable, undividable, and ungraspable; they accepted reality as
complex and ultimately unintelligible. Obscurity was not simply a riddle
to be solved. lt was a source of wonder, questioning and a search for meaning.
Whatever its source, whether created or accidental, obscurity was
also a source of change in the Middle Ages. What entered the culture as
obscure might very quickly become the norm, pushing what was originally
clear to the obscure peri pheries. And there were always admirers of
the margins as weil as of the center.
Obscurity itself went in and out of fashion during the M i ddle Ages. lt
was more normal, more tolerated, more desirable at some times than
others. One might suggest, for example, that the exegetical triumphs of
the eleventh century led to the flowering of obscurantism in the twelfth,
which led in turn to the encyclopedism of the thirteenth, which led to the
obscure flamboyance of the later Middle Ages.
The study of medieval attitudes towards, and uses of obscurity, is, finally,
a n important form of self-reflection that can teach us much about
our own attitudes towards obscure texts, including those of the Middle
1 0 TEXTVAL ÜBSCURITY IN THE MIOOLE AGES
Ages, and our own desires to understand and thus recuperate those
texts, both past and present.
. . .
The essays col lected in this volume present „partial successes:“ interpretations
of particular obscurities in which, however, a certain degree of
obscurity persists. For example, biblical exegesis, which can never be
completely „satisfactory“ (since the Bible cannot be fully comprehended
in this l i fe), or interpretations that do not meet with universal consent or
that are built of strange associations and suspicious links and seem obscure
in themselves. This „persistent obscurity“ is of two kinds. One is an
enigma which seems to have been created in order to rema in enigmatic
as a means to provoke i nterpretation. Greti Oinkova-Bruun and Noel
Putnik d i scuss this kind of obscurity in the Bible, while Florin George
Cälian focuses on provocative enigmas in Plato and Jeff Rider on those of
twelfth-century French l iterature. The second kind of persistent obscureity
is found in texts that were probably not meant to be enigmatic but became
obscure when transferred to a new community, and have been
transmitted without any fixed i nterpretation attached to them. These
obscure texts continued to be handed down perhaps through inertia or
because of the authority attached to them. They were often strikingly
„successful,“ that is widely copied and read, as Hiram Kümper shows.
The essays are presented here in a rough chronological order but this
is not intended to suggest any development i n the perception, use, or i n terpretation
o f obscurity. There are subjects that reappear i n the essays
across the volume. such as d iscussions of the deliberate creation of obscurities
within particular communities (Veyrard-Cosme, Rider. Piecene),
the (often obscure) medieval strategies for interpreting obscurities
(Cälian, Dinkova-Bruun, Forrai, Putnik, Kümper), or the contemporary
i nterpretations of medieval obscurities (Zironi, Small, Mehtonen) .
. . .
F l o r i n G e o r g e C ä l i a n d iscusses an example of interpreting obscurity
which seems rather obscure in itself: interpreting Plato allegorically in a
neoplatonic context. Based on his analysis of Proclus’s i nterpretation of
Plato’s Parmenides, Cälian explores allegory as a philosophical device rather
than a literary mechanism, and asks why someone would read a
philosophical text al legorically, and what conditions al lowed al legory to
INTRODUCTION 1 1
be included i n a phi losophical inqu iry. ln this case, he suggests that they
were the authority of the author (Piato’s texts were bel ieved to be both
coherent organisms with a hidden meaning, and divinely inspired), and
the belief of the neoplatonic interpretive community in the principle
„panta en pasin,“ that is, the interconnectedness of reality whose elements
can thus be used to expla i n each other.11
C h r i s t i a ne Veyra r d – C o s m e analyzes Latin collections of riddles
from the seventh and the eighth centuries (dominated by the works of
Aldhelm) and the nature of the textual poetics created within the insular
monastic environment. Veyrard-Cosme argues that obscurity, l inked to
brevity, was perceived within this environment as an i nherent part of the
created order and an important tool for spiritual instruction: the collections
of enigmas were intended to be m1crocosmic representations of the
universe, and their enigmatic qualities reflected the enigmas of the
world. The riddles i m itated God’s creation both by their order and by
their obscurity. Their poetic form initiated the reader to the pursuit of
higher meaning and proved the reality of a higher Ievei of existence.
Thus, the same i nterpretative framewerk was to be applied to solving
the riddles and to understanding the created world.
Jeff R i d e r , too, addresses the deliberate creation of enigma in a particular
social environment. He argues that when French I iterature
emerged in the twelfth century it did so from and against a clerical-
ecclesiastical, learned and Latinate-background. lts authors had
been trained in clerical schools or at least in the clerical tradition and the
I iterature they created was in some sense Latinate I i terature for people
who d i d not know Latin, had not been to school, and were used to oral
entertainments. The I iterature that evolved from this encounter welcomed
some obscurity as a provocation to interpretation and resulted i n
a n enigmatic style in the works of twelfth-century court poets like Marie
de France and Chretien de Troyes, who sought first and Foremost to entertain
their audiences. They also embraced the enigmatic style in order
to endow the aristocratic life portrayed in their works with its own spiritual
d i mension, a mysterious, quasi-allegorical aura, suggesting they had
a hidden higher meaning for those who have ears to hear. The audience
11 ln spite of the obvious similarities, this i s a different theoretical model of obscurity
than the mainstream Christian ideas about the obscurity of the Bible. E.g.
there is no notion of the original sin, no idea of God taking on human form and
accommodating his message to human 1mperfection in neoplatonism, and in
Christianity there is no principle „panta en pasin.“
1 2 TEXTUAL ÜBSCU RITY I N THE M I DOLE AGES
for works in French had changed significantly by the mid-thirteenth century,
however, and the French l iterary tradition had grown increasingly
independent of the Latin one. The enigmatic style gave way to a more
„realistic“ and often ironic style anchored more clearly in secular concerns
and reflecting more clearly worldly attitudes.
S u s a n S m a l l ’s essay explores the ways i n which the hermeneutic
device of „mise en abyme,“ or infinite regress, serves to organize and
elucidate the semiotic structures underlying Marie de France’s twelfthcentury
„Lay of the Nightingale.“ Tracing the complex i nterplay of mirror-
image symmetry and kaleidoscopic refraction in “ Laüstic,“ the essay
finds its center i n the figure of the dead nightingale, wrapped in an embroidered
shroud and enclosed in a jeweled casket at what T.S. Eliot
might term the i nert, ambiguous, and endlessly reflective „sti l l point of
the turning world.“
G r e t i D i n k ov a – B r u u n ’s contribution i ntroduces the treatment of
biblical obscurity in an educational context. Alexander of Ashby and Aeg
i d i us of Paris, both writing at the beginning of the thi rteenth century,
propose two different views about the perplexing nature of the biblical
narrative for the sake of students. l n the prologue to his bibl ical versification,
the Breuisssima Comprehensio historiarum, Alexander outlines
three main turbationes that confuse the carnal soul when it attempts to
understand scripture: obscuritas significationis, uarietas expositionis, and
mutatio personarum. Being a preacher and a teacher, Alexander then
goes on to explain these difficulties and to give practical advice to his
readers on how to deal with them. Aegidius takes a much more mystical
approach. ln his prose prologue to Peter Riga’s Evangelium, he links the
obscurity of the Bible to the Book of Revelation and the seven seals mentioned
in it. Scripture is sealed by God with signacu/a and enigmata
which can be understood only by those who know how to unlock their
secrets. Despite their d ifferences, both Alexander and Aegidius exempl ify
scholastic methods of study and strive to bring order and clarity to the
vast field of theological thought i nherited from previous centuries in order
to make it useful in the classroom.
C a r l a P i c c o n e also deals with thirteenth-century didactics, but she
i ntroduces us to the practice of teaching Latin grammar. She draws our
attention to examples of widely diffused grammatical d idactic poetry
(Aiexander de Villa Dei’s Doctrinale puerorum, Eberhard of Bethune’s
Grecismus, and Conradus de Mure’s Novus Grecismus) that are, upon a
first uncontextual i zed reading, very obscure because they are highly
condensed, eliptic, and closely connected to Ionger textbooks (e.g., PrisINTRODUCnON
1 3
cian’s Latin grammar) with which one has to be fam i l iar in order to understand
them. They are highly condensed in order to be more easi ly
memorized and were intended to be accompanied by the oral instruction
of the master, which made them clear and useful. For those who were
instructed on the correct use of these verses, they are clear. Brevitas
Ieads to firmior memoria and facilior acceptio. Obscura brevitas is a vice;
brevitas should always be lucida. ln the way they operate, these verses
are similar to versus memoriales and differentiales, which address the
subject of equivoca, homophones, or exceptions to a particular grammatical
rule, often in a very cryptic manner. The fact that these verses
were already frequently glossed in medieval manuscripts suggests that
they often already seemed obscure then.
A l e s s a n d ro Z i r o n i ’s essay discusses the role and reception of the
Latin poet Virgil i n Middle High German I iterature during the thirteenth
century. Accord ing to a so-called Liber Maronis, Virgil was hirnself an obscure
figure who cryptically transmitted forbidden arts, specifically the
ars notoria. The representation of Virgil as a magician and I or necromancer
probably originated in Naples, but thanks to British and German
intel lectuals like Gervase of Tilbury and Konrad von Querfurt, it rapidly
spread throughout Western Europe, and to Germany in particular. When
the stories about Virgil reached Germany, they were incorporated into
poems like labulons Buch and Reinfried von Braunschweig, and thus became
popular among a courtly public. ln this case study, we thus witness
the productive Force of obscurity as the obscure figure of Virgil produces
a variety of new meanings and associations.
H i r a m K ü m p er discusses the obscurity that arises through the
process of transmission and reception, and focuses on the practices
within a community of later readers who strive to use texts that have become
unintelligible but still possess great authority. Using the examples
of trad itional Saxon lega I texts, the Saxon Mirrara nd the Magdeburg Law
( Weichbildrecht), he discusses the various attempts of changing audiences
to understand these highly authoritative yet increasingly obscure
texts and make them useful.
N o e I P u t n i k examines some examples of the ways the Renaissance
Neoplatonist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa ( 1 486-1535) reinterpreted
some of the standard doctrines of Christian orthodoxy by dwelling on the
obscurities and ambiva lences of Scriptu·e. He argues that Agrippa’s aim
i n doing so was to legitimize his theological synthesis by grounding it in
the Bible. One of the cases i n question is Agrippa’s treatment of the Johannine
and Pauline notions of spiritual rebirth. For example, by apply1
4 TEXTUAL ÜBSCURITY I N THE M I DOLE AGES
ing his exegetical methods to 1 John 3: 9, Agrippa apparently changed
the basic theologica l meaning of the passage and attributed an aura of
orthodoxy to an otherwise highly heterodoxical idea-that of spiritual
rebirth as understood in the late antique Corpus Hermeticum. However,
the basic theological sense of the notion was itself unclear, thus enabling
Agrippa to build it into his Platonic-Hermetic paradigm of spirituality.
Putnik demonstrates that reinterpreting obscurities in Scripture was a
deliberate rhetorical and l i terary strategy for Agrippa that served an important
goal: to apologize for his synthesis and increase its persuasive
power.
R e k a F o r r a i traces the l ineage of the concept of obscuritas i n
translation theories from Antiquity to the Renaissance. She argues that
medieval and humanist translation practices were based on two different
understandings of obscurity. Medieval translation practice focused
mostly on philosophical and theological texts, and used a philosophical
concept of obscurity. Obscurity in this practice was not a negative result
of an unskillful translation, but a characteristic of the original text which
had to be respected and taken into account. Humanists, on the other
hand, considered obscurity from the point of view of rhetoric, and
tended to see it as a shortcoming to be avoided, the opposite of clarity.
One should therefore notjudge the achievements of the medieval translators
according to humanist (or for that matter, modern) criteria, but
instead try to reconstruct the value system according to which these
translations were produced.
P 􀋬 iv i M. Me h t o n en explores the links between fi rst-person speech
and obscure language in medieval historical and mystical texts as weil as
in later fiction that emulates such pre-modern forms. Mystica I first-person
speakers often emphasize the obscurity of the experiences that they
and they alone have had, or the Iimits of their ability to understand them.
Starting from the medieval reception of Cicero’s doctrine of the genus
obscurum and the modern notion of auto-communication, the essay discusses
cases of first-person I iterature that alternate between narrative
and non-narrative forms (e.g., meditative essays, „descriptions“ of an inner
state as weil as medieval and modern fiction that adopts such forms).
This final chapter aptly i l lustrates that part of our experience always remains
obscure and surpasses our ability to articulate it. Thus, however
difficult it is to grasp and communicate, obscurity forms a natural part of
everyday life.
Obscurity in Medieval Texts
MEDIUM AEVUM QUOTIDIANUM
SONDERBAND XXX
Obscurity in Medieval Texts
edited by
Lucie Dolezalova, Jeff Rider,
and Alessandro Zironi
Krems 2013
Reviewed by
Tamas Visi
and Myriam White-Le Goff
Cover designed by Petr Dolezal with the use of a photo of the interior of
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (photo Lucie Dolezalova)
GEDRUCKT MIT UNTERSTÜTZUNG
DER
CHARLES UNIVERSITY RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS
„UNIVERSITY CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF ÄNCIENT AND MEDIEVAL
INTELLECTUAL TRADITIONS“
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80TH AT THE FACULTY O F HUMANITIES, CHARLES UNIVERSITY IN PRAGUE
UNDDER
CZECH SCIENCE FOUNDATION
WITHIN THE RESEARCH PROJECT
„INTERPRETING AND APPROPRIATING ÜBSCURITY
IN MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPT CULTURE“
(GACR P405/1 0/Pl 1 2)
A l l e Rechte vorbehalten
-ISBN 978-3-901094-32-13′.3
Herausgeber: Medium Aevum Quotidianum. Gesellschaft zur Erforschung der materiellen
Kultur des Mittelalters. Körnermarkt 1 3. 3500 Krems, Österreich. Fur den
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Acknowledgements
List of Figures
T able of Contents
Textual Obscurity in the Middle Ages (lntroduction)
Lucie Dole2alov􀭟. Jeff Rider. and Alessandro Zironi
„Ciarifications“ of Obscurity:
Conditions for Proclus’s Allegorical Reading of Plato’s Parmenides 1 5
Florin George Cäl ian
Lucifica nigris tune nuntio regna figuris. Po!!tique textuelle de I‘ obscuritas
dans I es recueils d‘!!nigmes latines du Haut moyen Age (V He-V I I I • s.) 3 2
Christiane Veyrard-Cosme
The Enigmatic Style in Twelfth-Century French Literature 49
Jeff Rider
Mise en abyme in Marie de France’s „Laüstic“ 63
Susan Small
Perturbations of the Soul: Alexander of Ashby and Aegidius of Paris an
Understanding Biblical Obscuritas 75
Greti Dinkova-Bruun
Versus obscuri nella poesia didascalica grammatocale del X I I I sec. 87
Carla Piccone
Disclosing Secrets: Vorgil on Middle High German Poems 1 1 0
Alessandro Zironi
Obscuritas tegum: Traditional Law. Learned Jurisprudence, and Territorial
Legislation (The Example of Sachsenspiegel and fus Municipale Maideburgense) 124
Hiram Kümper
Ta Be Born (Aga in) from God:
Scriptural Obscurity as a Theological Way Out for Cornelius Agrippa 1 45
Noel Putnik
Obscuritas in Medoeval and Humanist Translation Theories 157
R!!ka Forrai
The Darkness Within:
First-person Speakers and the Unrepresentable 1 72
Päivi M. Mehtonen
Contributors 1 90
Index nominum 1 94
Index rerum 197
Acknowledgements
This volume grew out of a conference held in Prague in October 6-8. 201 1 .
The conference and the book were supported by a post-doctoral research
grant from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, “ l nterpreting and
Appropriating Obscurity i n Medieval Manuscript Culture“ no. P405/1 0/
P1 1 2 undertaken at the Faculty of Arts at the Charles University in Prague,
by The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports through l nstitutional
Support for Longterm Development of Research Organizations to the
Faculty of Humanities of the same university (PRVOUK 1 8 and UNCE
204002), and by the European Research Council under the European
Community’s Seventh Framewerk Programme ( FPJ/2007-2013) I ERC
grant agreement No. 263672. We are much grateful to these i nstitutions.
Further thanks goes to the individual contributors to this volume who have
been very quick and patient during the process, as weil as to Petr Dolezal
for the cover design and Adela Novakova for the index.
List of Figures
Figure 1 : Scene from one of the Saxon Mirror’s codices picturati (Wolfenbuttel, HerzogAugust-
Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 3.1 . Aug. 2°, fol. 34r).
Figure 2: Index for a manuscript of the Richtsteig Landrecht (Göttweig, Sti ftsbibliothek,
Cod. 364rot, fol. 526r).
Figure 3: Printed text of a Saxon Mirror with Gloss (Christi an Zobel, Leipzig, 1 569).
Figure 4: A remissorium from a Saxon Mirror edited tn 1536 by Chistoph Zobel (Leipzig).
Figure 5: Editorial report for a Saxon Mirror pri nted in 1545 by Nikolaus Wolrab
(Leipzig).
Figure 6: Sebastian Stelbagius, Epitome sive summa universae doctrinae iusticiae legalis
(Bautzen, 1 564 ).
Figures 7 and 8: Melchior Kling, Das Gantze Sechsisch Landrecht mit Text und Gloß in eine
richtige Ordnung gebracht (Leipzig 1 572).