The Journal of Medieval Latin

Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s early thirteenth-century Poetria nova was the preeminent textbook on rhetorical composition in prose and verse for nearly three centuries. Before he created his masterpiece Geoffrey had taught for some twenty-five years and written two textbooks in prose. The popularity of the poem that Geoffrey wrote in response to King Richard Lionheart’s sudden death in 1199 seems to have instilled a new sense of his poetic powers that sparked a creative re-engagement with his pedagogy and its sources. The immediate result was an anthology of rhetorical poems, as suggested by references to it as a “book of verses” in the anonymous Tria sunt; but within a few years this had evolved into a concise and memorable textbook in hexameter verse that came to be regarded as the legitimate heir to Horace’s Ars poetica.

Medieval translations of classical Latin texts into the vernacular, as well as being of interest in themselves, can also contribute to the study of the manuscript transmission of Latin commentaries on auctores. This article discusses two late-medieval Hispanic translations of Ovid’s Heroides (one into Catalan and the other into Castilian) as witnesses to the dissemination of William of Orleans’s Bursarii Ovidianorum in medieval Spain. A brief overview of the fifteenth-century Castilian translation, traditionally known as the Bursario, is followed by a detailed analysis of the introductions to the epistles in the fourteenth-century glossed Catalan translation. This analysis shows that the Catalan translation is very close to the text of manuscripts h and p of the Bursarii (Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek, MS 2013 4°, and Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS lat. 7996) and offers an explanation for some of the particular features of these manuscripts.

The article consists of a new translation of Bede’s important homily on the anniversary of the death of Benedict Biscop, founder of his monastery, footnoted to signal numerous changes from D. Hurst’s Corpus Christianorum text; discussion of the structure of the sermon, where it is argued that at least two versions have become entwined, leading to some incoherence; some remarks on the relationship between the homily and other sources of information on Biscop’s life; and a short appendix arguing against Hurst’s view of the manuscript tradition.

This article contains comments on a number of passages in John of Garland’s Clauis Compendii, primarily cases where the recent editio princeps by Elsa Marguin-Hamon can be improved or amended. Marguin-Hamon’s decision to privilege C (Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College 385/605) as a “manuscrit de base” is shown to be misguided; since the stemma is tripartite, the agreement of any two witnesses should give the reading of the archetype. Marguin-Hamon’s text can often be improved by repunctuation and closer attention to metre. Many problems in the work can be solved by comparison with parallel passages in other authors, including Isidore, Fulgentius, Priscian, Eberhard of Béthune, and “Macer,” as well as in John’s other works.

This article consists of both an introduction to, and a translation of the Liber de ordine creaturarum, an anonymous treatise written in Ireland in the second half of the seventh century. After summarizing the theological and cosmological content of the treatise, the introduction examines the date, the early manuscripts, the linguistic features and other elements in the text pointing towards an Irish environment. The reception of the Liber de ordine creaturarum is also traced: its influence was particularly strong in Anglo-Saxon England, but early Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionary activity and the mistaken attribution to Isidore of Seville ensured that the treatise spread throughout most of medieval Europe.

The De planctu Naturae is neither a simple affirmation of the power of Natura nor a flat condemnation of human sin. The real interest of its narrative of Nature’s failure to control human conduct lies in its pairing of sexuality and language as a central concern. The most serious questions it raises have mainly to do with the purpose and value of poetry, in particular its ability to deal adequately with human desire. Nature’s one creative act is the generation of what amounts to a virtual new mythology around the figure of Cupido, and by implication a new, modern poetics. This is the poem’s legacy. The immediate influence of the De planctu was evidently shortlived, but the implications of Nature’s coming-to-terms with “fallen” human language were recognized a century later by Jean de Meun, who restages Nature’s complaint, and inaugurates a new, vernacular tradition.