Love Among the Ruins

In the twenty four hours since the announcement of the probable destruction of the temple of Baalshamin, which has stood in Palmyra since the reign of Tiberius, and near where the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad was tortured and murdered this last month, thoughts of destruction have been much on my mind. It just so happens that today is the traditional date of the sack of Rome by the Visigoth Alaric I. Palaces, mausoleums and basilicas were destroyed, although not for ideological reasons.

Today is also the traditional anniversary of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Now, I am a Pliny the Elder fangirl, and it is a distressing quirk of history that the author of one of the defining artefacts of the early Roman Empire, a naval commander, military historian and orator, should be remembered for the manner of his death. Pliny the Younger, as we know, avoided his uncle’s fate because of a propensity for Greek homework. The eruption, which lasted for two days, buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing thousands of people. Though the site of Pompeii wasn’t discovered until the late 16th century, the eruption (‘grades Campaniae’, disaster at Campania) was known to medieval readers of Pliny’s Naturalis historia, because the vast majority of its manuscripts were prefaced by a mini-biography of the author, much as the standard text of Troilus and Criseyde begins ‘Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London’.

Destruction by nature and destruction by man cannot really be considered in the same register. Dresden in 1945 may in certain ways have resembled the shores of Aceh in late December 2004, loss of life is loss of life, but there can be no rationalisation, however unsatisfactory, for the freak natural disaster. It happens and everyone is equally powerless to prevent it. As Tewkesbury Abbey confirms, all we can do is not build on flood plains.

Where circumstances allow, i.e. not in Plymouth, Montserrat, humans will also rebuild. There was much admiration in 2011 for how quickly roads in Tōhoku were repaired after the extraordinary earthquake and tsunami, while the Franconian city of Würzburg, almost entirely destroyed in bombing raids in 1945, has been rebuilt in identical style, such that it is still recognisable from its depiction in Schedel’s 1493 Weltchronik. In cases where conquering forces have remained, there are even examples of the preservation of existing buildings, such as the requisitioning of pagan temples as Churches from the fourth to seventh centuries in Rome.

‘For thousands of years the Romans were the best in the world at… almost everything.’

Yet we as humans clearly have a desire to salt the fields, to ensure the complete destruction of an enemy’s way of life. The Harrowing of the North in 1069-70, England’s answer to the Fall of Carthage, is one method of delivering such destruction. The systematic obliteration of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, Sufi shrines in Mali, the remains of the palace of Ashurnasirpal II in Nimrud, to name but a few, is another. Gilgamesh and Enkidu destroy the Cedar Forest, Alexander razed Persepolis, the Christians of Alexandria burned the Serapeum and its library, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine responds to his wife’s death as any dictator would:

This cursed town will I consume with fire
Because this place bereft me of my love.
The houses, burnt, will look as if they mourned,
And here will I set up her stature.

Such wanton destruction is inspired by a desire to cripple the enemy with the fear of one’s unwavering resolve. But, as has been much discussed in recent months, to destroy an enemy’s history is to remove every trace of their identity. In 2012, William Dalrymple wrote of the Umayyad mosque in Aleppo,

While the human pain inflicted by torture and killing is immeasurable, the destruction of a people’s heritage is irretrievable: once a monument is destroyed, it can never be replaced. With modern weaponry it only takes a few months of concerted shelling for the history of an entire people to be reduced to rubble. (The Guardian, 18.10.2012)

There is nothing that I can add that will sound any other than glib and half-hearted.

Perhaps, then, a message of hope: Saint Cuthbert was born in the early seventh century, and probably spent his entire life in Northumbria. Before the Conquest, he was arguably the most beloved of native English saints, even serving as a sort of Patron Saint of England, long before the concept existed, by merit of the devotion of the House of Wessex. He was buried at Lindisfarne, where he remained until it was sacked by Vikings in 875. Over the next two centuries, his body found rest at Chester-le-Street, Ripon and Durham, where in the early 12th century the Romanesque cathedral was constructed around his shrine. A very late Old English poem describes Cuthbert’s central role in the structure of the Cathedral:

Eardiæð æt ðem eadige      is in ðem minstre
unarimeda      reliquia,
ðær monia wundrum gewurðað,      ðes ðe writ seggeð,
midd ðene Drihnes wer      domes bideð.

[Inside the minster, by the blessed saint, are numberless relics; there many miracles occur, as books make known, while God’s servant lies there and waits for Judgement.]

The shrine was destroyed during the Reformation, and Cuthbert’s body buried elsewhere. Yet miraculously a copy of St John’s Gospel, which had been kept in his coffin perhaps since the early 8th century, survived. This book was recently purchased ‘for the nation’ for £9 million, and though officially attached to the British Library in London, has since been displayed in Durham, no more than a hundred yards from where it spent the better part of five hundred years.

There should be more stories like this.

Elf and Safety

Ever on the brave frontline of journalism, the Mail Online has in the last month run two stories revealing in shocking detail how innocuous, Photoshop-illiterate housewives have been minding their own business, photographing their Labradors on idyllic country walks, only to find upon closer inspection that A FAIRY is lurking in frame. ‘I was really shocked and freaked out at first’, said a Northamptonshire mother-of-two, whose inspiring story hit the headlines on May 7th. As well you might be: the thing she photographed was distinctly mosquito-sized while, as any fule kno, fairies are at least of a height with humans.

That’s right: fairies are more like the Dutch than the Daddy-Long-Legs.

Of course, they’d have to be, if changelings were to pass for human babies, which they seemed to fairly often in The Past. The Past itself was clear about this. Shakespeare may suggest that Robin Goodfellow has superhuman speed, but Mistress Page has no doubt that ‘urchins, ouphes and fairies, green and white’ are the size of human children, the Queen of the Fairies scaled up, bee-fashion, to the dimensions of a teenage girl. Martianus Capella’s Longaevi and Adam of Bremen’s Husi – probably one and the same – are of vaguely sylvan appearance, but without even a hint of titchiness. The Aes Sídhe of Irish myth read as human in appearance, inasmuch as they have any dimensions at all.

That’s not a fairy…

There are countless medieval representations of fairies, Lamias, Wild Hunts, and they all hinge on the same idea, fundamentally lacking in the Daily Mail’s otherwise heroic coverage of supernatural phenomena: nobody seems to have believed that they occupied the same earthly dimension as humans. Hence the various portals to their realms: barrow mounds, tree rings or caves; even dreams, as we see in the BBC’s stunning adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. The Middle English reworking of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend shows Dame Heurodys possessed by the stone-crowned Faerie King as she sleeps under a graft-tree at midday. She is spirited away (no/pun intended – delete as desired) under the nose of Sir Orfeo’s entire army, is found hunting by her husband after a decade in the wilderness, and followed through a rock.

When he was in þe roche y-go,
Wele þre mile, oþer mo,
He com in-to a fair cuntray,
As briȝt so sonne on somers day,
Smoþe & plain & al grene
Hille no dale nas þer non y-sene.

In this two-dimensional landscape, a castle stands, glowing day and night like the Heavenly Jerusalem, or Minas Morgul. And like the White Witch’s castle in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, its courtyard is full of corpses.

Sum stode wiþouten hade,
& sum non armes nade,
& sum þurth þe bodi hadde wounde,
& sum lay wode, y-bounde,
& sum armed on hors sete,
& sum astrangled as þai ete;
& sum were in water adreynt,
& sum wiþ fire al for-schreynt.

Far from pressing flowers and making organic porridge, these fairies pass their eternity in collecting the victims of violent deaths.

THAT’s a fairy.

Both Lewis and Tolkien lamented the association of volatile warrior-demigods with the imaginings of Cicely Mary Barker, and you could do worse than to read On Fairy-Stories or ‘The Longaevi’ in The Discarded Image. [I recommended Lewis’s chapter in particular to my students – and in grand old style, precisely one of them read it.]. Beings that are, in Lewis’s definition, ‘stronger, more reckless, less inhibited, more triumphantly and impenitently passionate’ than humans have become the patron saints of seed cake and elderflower cordial. As an analogy, I suppose it’s not unlike the use of pirates as learning aids. For those of us who prefer Black Sails to Captain Pugwash, this spiritual and physical shrinking stands as an emblem of sanitisation and creative decline.

Naturally, I blame Arthur Conan Doyle – or I would, if I weren’t so busy blaming the Daily Mail.

Sesoun of Mistes

Autumn is the perfect time of year for stereotypically medieval pursuits: lighting fires, boozing, grazing pigs, wearing velvet. Being an unapologetic pyromaniac oenophile with an excessive number of velvet jackets, and liking the colour orange, I feel the medieval English themselves afforded autumn, categorically the best season, rather short shrift. For to those who live cheek-by-jowl with nature, it is synonymous with coming crapness. As the Gawain-poet writes,

Wroþe wynde of þe welkyn wrasteles wit þe sunne,
Þe leues lancen fro þe lynde and lyȝten on þe grounde,
And al grayes þe gres þat grene watz ere.

An angry wind wrestles with the sun, and doubtless wins. All very well in a world of central heating and pumpkin spice lattes [get behind me, Satan], but not for those without.

Þis litel pygge, he to þe market ywent.

At risk of over-simplifying, medieval English meditations on autumn were more often than not meditations upon death. Despite the proliferation of excellent Saints’ Days in the run-up to Advent – not least of which is Michaelmas, the Feast of the Archangels Michael, Raphael and Gabriel, slayers of dragons, patron saints of ill people, and general badasses – autumn is the season in which to remember that you, like that leaf over there, will soon die.

The incomparable MS Harley 2253 contains a famous lyric set by Arnold Bax, in which

Winter wakeneþ al my care,
Nou þis leues waxeþ bare
… Al goþ bote Godes wille.
Al we shule deye þaȝ vs like ille.
Al þat grein me graueþ grene,
Nou hit faleueþ al bidene.

Which is all about as cheery as a hernia, and a far cry from barrèd clouds that bloom the soft-dying day. The early-13th-century Oxford, Bodleian MS Rawlinson G. 22 reassures us that everything is A-OK in summer, but

Oc nu necheþ windes blast
And weder strong.
Ey ey what þis niȝt is long,
And ich wid wel michel wrong
Soreȝ and murne and fast.

One almost wonders about the prevalence of S.A.D in medieval East Anglia. The blowing of Boreas the Northern Wind, which heralds the coming of cold, snow and man-flu, may be the playful refrain of a love lyric in the Harley 2253 collection, but it is incidental, miles away from the instrumental Western Wind (Zephyrus) of the celebrated 16th-century song:

Westron Wynd, when wilt thou blow,
The small raine doune can raine.
Cryst, if my love were in my armes,
And I in my bedde againe.

One reopens the heart with thoughts of love; the other concentrates the mind on sin and decrepitude:

Nou shrinkeþ rose & lylie flour
Þat while ber þat suete savour
In somer, þat suete tyde.
… Þah þou be whyt and bryth on ble
Falewen shule þy floures.

In this, as in many other things, we see that the medievals ruin something perfectly gorgeous because of their crippling fear of death. Having recently met a Fairly Monumental Landmark on the birthday front, I would be tempted to join with this panic. But think not of them, thou hast thy music too; and I have a wardrobe of velvet jackets to stroke.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

To my mind, one of the most touching instances in Richard II – a sob-worthy play if ever there was one – is the moment when Queen Isabella curses the Duke of York’s gardener for allegorising the political violence rife in England, storms off with her retinue, and the gardener says after her,

Here did she fall a tear; here in this place
I’ll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace:
Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen,
In the remembrance of a weeping queen. (III.iv)

Like the admission of the nameless amateur herpetologist at the end of Anthony and Cleopatra, for some reason Shakespeare’s minor characters and their naturalist hobbies appeal to me, both because their brief interjections allude to fully-fleshed characters in well-rendered worlds, and because ‘natural philosophy’ was a well-respected pursuit in the medieval and early modern periods. The tending of gardens and tending of the state are attractively overlapping concepts, and one suspects that Richard’s kingship would have been rather more successful had he been a little less of a pampered child-star, a little more of a patient, practical gardener.

In a period where chemical medicine and chemical flavourings had yet to be invented, gardens were the source of culinary, medicinal and aromatic materials, and from which one had to fill a pie, furnish a salad, fix a hangover, and scent ones hair. Unlike Tudor knot gardens, which may have smelled stunning but were in essence ornamental, monastic gardens in the high Middle Ages really were a one-stop-shop.

Brother Cadfael, the 12th-century detective-monk created by Edith Pargeter, spends a good deal of time strolling through the gardens of Shrewsbury Abbey, acting as physician and generally knowing his way around a borage flower. Multiple Middle English lyrics draw on both the dense naturalism of the Song of Songs, and on the associations their audiences may have made about certain sorts of flowers: in British Library MS Harley 2253, we read of a lover that,

Heo is lilie of largesse,
Heo is parwenke of prowesse,
Heo is solsecle of swetnesse.

Lily, periwinkle, marigold. Meanwhile the late 15th-century Boar’s Head Carol recommends that the Christmas hog be accompanied by hefty dollops of mustard – servitur cum sinapio. Lest we forget, mustard is also a plant.

Garden party. Nudity optional.

But in the way that I have a favourite tense (future perfect) and a favourite Gawain synonym for man (hathel), I also have a favourite medieval gardener: Walafrid Strabo, ninth-century monk of Reichenau, and writer of the most charming gardening manual in western literary history. First of all, it’s in hexameters – what a crazy cat! But also, Walafrid writes,

Haec non sola mihi patefecit opinio famae
Vulgaris, quaesita libris nec lectio priscis;
Sed labor et studium, quibus otia longa dierum
Postposui, expertum rebus docuere probatis.

[This stuff has become clear to me not only by common knowledge and rummaging about in old books, but from hard work and study, when I could have spent long days in leisure, but chose instead to learn.]

Ah, possible long days of leisure. Walafrid clearly writes from experience, however Virgilian his verse may be, and all the plants he grows in his south-facing, nettle-free patch have some medicinal use, be it the cooling melon, the soporific poppy, or the laxative rue. He writes of mint:

Sed si quis vires speciesque et nomina mentae
Ad plenum memorare potest, sciat ille necesse est
Aut quot Erythraeo volitent in gurgite pisces,
Lemnius aut altum quot in aera Mulciber ire
Scintillas vastis videat fornacibus Aetnae.

[But if any man can remember all the many kinds and properties of mint, it must be him that knows how many fish swim in the rushing Indian Ocean, how many sparks Lemnean Vulcan lets fly from his vast furnaces in Etna.]

In the grand Catullan tradition of ‘things of which there are many’ – kisses, stars, grains of sand in Libya – the properties of mint seem both humble and deeply unsexy, but Walafrid, both lover and supplicant, lavishes praise and poetry on the most prosaic of plants: gourd, celery; irises that remind him of Apollo’s lover Hyacinth; sage that, unbeknownst to Shakespeare, puts him in mind of civil war.

Naturally, he reserves his strongest praises for the rose:

Debueram viburna rosae pretiosa metallo

Pactoli et niveis Arabum circumdare gemmis.

[I ought to set my precious guelder roses with Turkish gold and the gleaming gems of Arabia.]

He reflects that the rose is as precious to France and Germany, as beautiful and as richly coloured, as murex is to Tyre. He calls it ‘florum flos’, the flower of flowers, the best in properties and fragrance, and then of course turns to a prayer to the Virgin Mary.

Umberto Eco wrote of a ‘new Middle Ages’ in which, following an utter collapse of social order, the artefacts we call civilisation may only be able to survive in hermetically-sealed communities, not unlike the early monastic houses in which the texts of the ancient world were copied and preserved. In rebuilding a broken society, knowing how to work a lathe and shun poisonous mushrooms might be amongst the most valuable skills for survival. I am not a misanthrope and I do not long for a zombie apocalypse – in which I would no doubt be one of the first to die – but our detachment from the land we occupy is both strange and unsustainable. We do not all have the luxury of access to or ownership of a garden, but Walafrid puts me in mind of Waterworld and Kevin Costner’s post-apocalyptic tomato plant: the nurture of something else, however small it is, can save us all, spiritually and medically.

Try As We May

Or, palaeography is still difficult.

I returned from a trip to America (very hot, no leaves on any of the trees because of recent snow) to be confronted by stinking may blossoms, fields hemmed by cow parsley, linden leaves in their early stage of sliminess, and row upon row of alliums. And this was just on the trip from the airport. But although I love plants (a strange thing to write, like “I love air” or “water’s pretty ok”), D G Rossetti-style meditations on the pastoral scenes of late spring aren’t exactly my bag.

On a marginally-related note, while in the US, I attended a panel commemorating the palaeographer Malcolm Parkes, who died last May, in which my friend Chris was presenting a paper on something far too clever for me to understand. The various panellists’ papers all agreed on this: difficult disciplines, that seem initially to offer nothing to those outside their narrow field, can be fundamental in more areas than one could imagine. Palaeography is a difficult discipline, and yet allows non-specialists to reconstruct, as if forensically, the literary and intellectual climates of periods and places long ago, far away, and otherwise impenetrable. Palaeographers in general, and Parkes in particular, are both scholars and facilitators.

Anyway, Derek Pearsall, co-author of Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (1973), was also speaking on the panel, again about something far too clever for me to understand, which got me thinking, naturally, about landscapes and seasons and palaeography and things that are difficult to understand, and Harley 2253, and this poem in particular, which uses flowers and lambs to disguise a morality tale which is genuinely patronising (unlike Derek Pearsall, who was a hoot), and no easier to stomach after transcribing:

The offending article.

 

(f.71v) In may hit murgeþ when hit dawes
In dounes wiþ þis dueres plawes
And lef is lyht on lynde
Blosmes bredeþ on þe bowes
Al þis wylde wyhtes wowes
So wel ych vnder fynde,
Ynot non so freoli flour
As ledies þat beþ bryht in bour
Wyþ loue who mihte hem bynde,
So worly wymmen are by west
One of hem ich herie best
From Irlond in to Inde.

Wymmen were þe beste þing
Þat shup oure heȝe heuene kyng
Ȝef feole false nere,
Heo beoþ to rad vpon vpon huere red,
To loue þer me hem lastes bed
When heo shule fenge fere.
Lut in londe are to leue
Þah me hem trewe trouþe ȝeue,
For trecherie to ȝere
When trechour haþ is trouþe yplyht
Byswyken he haþ þat suete wyht
Þah he hire oþer swere.

Wymmon war þe wiþ þe swyke
Þat feir ant freoly ys to fyke
Ys fare is o to founde
So wyde in world ys huere won
In uch a toune untrowe ys on,
From Leycestre to Lounde.
Of treuþe nis þe trechour noht,
Bote he habbe is wylle ywroht
At steuenyng vmbe stounde,
Ah feyre leuedis be on war
To late comeþ þe ȝeyn char
When loue ou haþ ybounde.

(f.72r) Wymmen bueþ so feyr on hewe
Ne trow y none þat nere trewe
Ȝef trechour hem ne tahte,
Ah feyre þinges freoly bore
When me ou woweþ beþ war bifore
Whuch is worldes ahte
Al to late is send aȝeyn,
When þe ledy liht byleyn
Ant lyueþ by þat he lathe,
Ah wolde lylie leor in lyn
Yhere leuely lores min,
Wiþ selþe we weren sahte.

Ladies, we’ve been warned.

With a Smile and a Song

For anyone who has been observing Lent, the end is in sight. While for a modern observer, this may mean fantasising about chocolate truffles or getting into cold sweats at the mention of the word ‘bacon’, for the medievals this would have meant a fair amount of fish, and a large amount of prayer. Tomorrow being Palm Sunday, and I being a colossal fan of Tomás Luis de Victoria, I’ve been thinking about the Holy Week hymn Vexilla regis prodeunt. As you do.

Composed by Venantius Fortunatus, the ubiquitous sixth-century Bishop of Poitiers, to commemorate the Byzantine Empress Helena’s discovery of the True Cross, it has seen almost thirteen centuries of regular liturgical use, scores of translations into multiple languages, and dozens of musical settings. [Top tip: Victoria’s more hispano version is the best. Just my opinion. But it definitely is.] The lyrics focus on the wood of the Cross as a flag-pole for the king’s (i.e. Christ’s) banners, not so much riding into battle as returning in military triumph.

An inopportune moment to have one’s jumper stuck over one’s head.

Now one of the various translations of it – and, as far as I am aware, the earliest into English – is an early-14th-century version by my homeboy Friar William Herebert. This has been much-anthologised, often in the great swathes of Herebert’s work that gets ignored as undergraduates flip from the strange but legible Ich am of Irlaunde to whatever Grimestone or Chaucer may have ended up on their reading list. Herebert’s poems are difficult to read, chiefly because he insisted on using firmly English-derived words, many of which are theological, arcane and attested nowhere else. His Vexilla regis is no exception.

Þe kynges baneres beth forth ylad;
Þe rode tokne ys nou tosprad
Whar he, þat wrouth hauet al monkunne,
Anhonged was uor oure sunne.

Another Palm Sunday chant that Herebert translated is Gloria, laus et honor tibi sit, a responsory by the ninth-century Bishop Theodulf of Orléans, which shares much of the previous poem’s strange vocabulary. It deals explicitly with Palm Sunday, showing people coming out in reception of Christ:

Þe volk of Gywes, wyth bowes, comen aȝeynest þe,
And wœ wyht bœdes and wyth song mœketh ous to þe.
Wœle, heriȝying, and worschype bœ to Crist, þat dœre ous bouhte,
To wham gradden ‘Osanna!’ chyldren clene of þoute.

To my knowledge, this has not been set by Victoria.

Smile like you mean it.

Though he addresses general Lenten hymns in his translation of Gregory the Great’s Audi benigne conditor, Herebert’s third and final Holy Week poem is a version of the lectio from Isaiah, read on the Wednesday before Maundy Thursday. It begins:

Questio angelorum
What ys he, þys lordling, þat cometh vrom þe vyht,
Wyth blodrede wede so grysliche ydyht,
So vayre ycoyntised, so semlich in syht,
So styflyche ȝongeþ, so douhti a knyht.
Responsio Christi
Ich hyt am, Ich hyt am, þat ne speke bote ryht,
Chaunpyoun to helen monkunde in vyht.

Which basically means,

Angel: ‘Who is that super knightly knight, and why is he covered in blood?’
Christ: ‘I’m here to kill your monstah.’

This too is lacking in Victoria.

All three poems contain my favourite word in the Herebert canon: ‘mylsfolnesse’, a word he uses widely to translate the equally atmospheric ‘misericordia’. Of course, this concept lies at the very heart of the celebration of Easter, and was perhaps the cornerstone of catholic worship in the medieval West. Such is its importance that the Misericordiae Domini from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, traditionally performed on the Saturday of Holy Week, is comprised solely of the verse

Misericordiae Domini quia non sumus consumpti, quia non defecerunt miserationes eius.

(It is because of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions do not fail.)

Tomás Luis de Victoria did set this one.

Love Is All You Need

A lovely thing happened on Saturday: some people got married. People get married every Saturday. Yet until two days ago, it was not legally possible for many of Saturday’s brides and grooms to marry. I am of course referring to the legalisation of same-sex marriage, which came into effect at midnight on Friday. While we find ourselves in a time when LGBT+ people around the world are facing new waves of persecution, both from hate groups and from the governments who ought surely to protect them, it is nonetheless important and marvellous that in England and Wales (and shortly in Scotland) steps towards equality-in-law are being taken.

Now today is International Hug a Medievalist Day, and I’ve been thinking about Peter Abelard. I was recently tickled by a throwaway remark by Anders Piltz, that Abelard is ‘nowadays better known for his amorous private lessons with the beautiful niece of an unpardonably naïve canon and the tragic consequences they had for his virility.’ In the grand scheme of castration euphemisms, this one is particularly dry. One of the finest minds of his generation – perhaps even his century – and a revolutionary force in the study of logic, many people today associate him entirely with his ill-fated affair, his violent gelding, and his monstrosity of a shared tomb in Père Lachaise. The whole affair is well-known from his perspective: Alexander Pope’s poem Eloisa to Abelard imagines her side of their legendary correspondence, a matter joked about by Cole Porter in Just One Of Those Things:

As Abelard said to Eloise,

Don’t forget to drop a line to me, please.

There will be a whole panel at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo dedicated to Abelard and Heloise. Love is in the air, and Tristram and Isolde ain’t got nothing on these two. Abelard is known to have written songs, now lost, to Heloise, setting them to music, and this no doubt contributes to his towering image as a romantic hero. Despite my misgivings about this status, it is from this angle that I read his Planctus David, a virtuosic lament for Saul and Jonathan, based upon a bit at the beginning of II Samuel.

As the story goes, the prophet Samuel anoints David as successor to the occasionally insane King Saul. David becomes fast friends with Saul’s son Jonathan, and they spend a significant amount of bro-time together, much to Saul’s chagrin. When father and son are killed in battle against the Philistines at Mount Gilboa, David sings a lament which, even in the delicate language of the Authorized Version, is an exemplar of eloquence in overwhelming grief.

The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!

In this form it has no explicit homosexual undertones. In I Samuel, it is stated that ‘Jonathan Saul’s son delighted in David,’ ‘he loved him as his own soul’, ‘they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded’ – but it is Platonic in the extreme, even unto the knitting of souls. Yet an undercurrent has been read since at least the fourteenth century: in sideways references to Edward II and Piers Gaveston, in sideways references to Achilles-Patroclus-type relationships in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the trial of Oscar Wilde, and in an extraordinary scene in A.L. Haydon’s 1926 romp Manisty of the School-House where a bespectacled fatty called John realises he’s in love with his glamorous, sporty chum David during a chapel sermon on this very passage. (The names could be the other way round, but are you actually going to read it?)

Bros before foes, woes and lign aloes.

Where the unlucky lothario Abelard comes into it is in his reapportioning of verses so that the lament, whose biblical source is largely about Saul, becomes mostly about Jonathan. The original parts about Mount Gilboa being cursed with dryness, and the daughters of Jerusalem weeping for Saul who had dressed them in crimson, remain. But here Jonathan’s relationship with David, so fundamental to I Samuel, is brought to the fore, often in loosely paraphrased biblical language. So where the Vulgate reads

Doleo super te, frater mi Ionatha,

(I mourn you, my brother Jonathan), Abelard’s version reads,

Plus fratre mihi Ionatha,

(Jonathan, more than a brother to me). Since in the earlier book Jonathan’s soul ‘was knit with the soul of David’, Abelard’s David states

Et me post te vivere mori sit assidue,
Nec ad vitam anima satis sit dimidia.

(For me to live after you would be continual death, for half a soul is not enough for life.)

This lament does however break from the language of its source. Its first and last verses, and their references to the ‘cithara’ and ‘fides’ (lyre), suggest not the battlefield explosion of II Samuel but a private, repeated meditation. In the biblical account, David gets up, goes up to Hebron and is anointed King. Despite his battlefield explosion, he gets on with his life with scarcely another word about Saul, and never another about Jonathan. Abelard’s song expresses both the immediate shock of grief and the knowledge that it will follow the griever for the rest of his life. In a phrase including the highest note used in the entire lament, David sings,

Tu mihi, mi Ionatha, flendus super omnia,
Inter cuncti gaudia perpes eris lacrima.

(To me, my Jonathan, you will be a thing to mourn above all, a source of perpetual tears amidst all joys.)

He couches his lament in language that, if not erotic, is undeniably intense, and the music that accompanies it, though austere, is extremely difficult to perform. The form itself was used by Abelard in six different planctus by Old Testament figures, including Jacob on parenthood and Dinah on the murder of her husband. It is his preferred medium for translating and dramatizing biblical passages that go to the very heart of human relationships and touch especially upon matters of grief and mourning. This week we mark the first anniversary of the death of a friend, and though it is not much of an insight, I have found it appropriate to dwell on the Vulgate’s statement,

Saul et Ionathas amabiles et decori in vita sua… Doleo super te, frater mi.

The important point is that Abelard, whose thought I generally trust, saw in David and Jonathan a fine example of love that is not only widely comprehensible, but also attested scripturally. Homosexual or simply homosocial, the relationship between David and Jonathan is biblical, a matter often overlooked by those whose first response to things they do not like is to turn to Leviticus. I don’t assume that Abelard would necessarily endorse same-sex marriage – he was, after all, of the twelfth century – but he recognised in this biblical relationship the sort of intensity that his biographers ascribe only to his romance with Heloise. So why not. To paraphrase St Paul, love matters. And to paraphrase Sammy Cahn, the legal recognition of love matters too.

Spring Is Sprung

Or, why palaeography is difficult.

These past few weeks I’ve been writing, then delivering, a lecture on The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, and everything else has had to take a back seat. But today I have two brief observations to make: it is finally, and beautifully, sunny; and several of my students have written essays on MS Harley 2253 and it’s put me in a good mood. Last week I asked some of them to read from Ker’s facsimile, which didn’t go tremendously well. It was crap weather at the time and I had no idea how prescient all this would be, but here I share with you the poem I asked them to attempt.

 

The offending article.

f. 71va

Lenten ys come wiþ loue to toune,

Wiþ blosmen and wiþ brides roune,

Þat al þis blisse bringeþ.

Dayeseyes in þis dales,

Notes suete of nytegales,

Uch foul song singeþ.

Þe þrestelcoc him þreteþ oo

Away is huere wynter wo

When woderoue springeþ.

Þis foules singeþ ferly fele,

And wliteþ on here wynter wele,

Þat al the wode ringeþ.

 

Þe rose rayleþ hire rode,

Þe leues on þe lyghte wode

Waxen al wiþ wille.

Þe mone mandeþ hire bleo,

Þe lilie is lossom to seo,

Þe fenil & þe fille.

Wowes þis wilde drakes,

Miles muryeþ hire makes,

Ase strem þat strekeþ stille.

Mody meneþ so doþ mo,

Ichot ycham one of þo,

For loue þat likes ille.

 

Þe mone mandeþ hire lyht,

So doþ þe semly sonne bryht,

When bryddes singeþ breme.

Deawes donkeþ þe dounes,

Deores wiþ huere derne rounes,

Domes for to deme.

Wormes woweþ under cloude,

Wymmen waxeþ wounder proude,

So wel hit wol hem seme.

Ȝef me shal wonte wille of on,

Þis wunne weale y wole forgon,

And wyht in wode be fleme.

We got as far as ‘singeþ’. In their defence, they don’t know it by heart. Yet.