Month: May 2016

absurd others: al-Jahiz declares laughing alone safer

two Arabic physicians (Abbasid period)

After prayers at the Jama Masjid, al-Naqqāsh and al-Jahiz left together for the journey home. Al-Naqqāsh invited al-Jahiz to spend the night at his house, which was much closer to the Jama Masjid. Al-Naqqāsh implored al-Jahiz:

Where will you go in this rain and cold, given that my house is your house, and you are in darkness and you have no lantern? I have some colostrum the like of which no one has seen and some excellent dates which can only be eaten with colostrum. [1]

In Arabic culture, hospitality is obligatory. Al-Naqqāsh not only offered hospitality, but also boasted of the fine food he would provide. Al-Jahiz accepted his offer of hospitality.

Within his home, al-Naqqāsh delayed awhile in serving his guest. Then he brought a bowl of colostrum and a palm-tray of dates. When al-Jahiz reached out his arm to take some food, al-Naqqāsh said:

O Abū ‘Uthmān {al-Jahiz}, this is colostrum with its thickness, and it is nighttime with its sluggishness. Besides, it is a rainy and damp night and you are a man already advanced in age, and you still complain of partial paralysis. You get extremely thirsty and, in principle, you do not eat dinner. If you eat the colostrum and do not overdo it, you will be neither an eater nor an abstainer, you will irritate your nature and then will stop eating, no matter how appetizing it might be for you. If, however, you overdo it, we will spend a bad night worrying about your state, and we will not prepare any wine or honey for you. I have only said this to you lest you say tomorrow: it was such and such. By God, I have fallen between lion fangs. If I did not bring it to you after having mentioned it to you, you would say: he has been miserly with it and has changed his mind about it. But if I brought it to you and did not warn you nor mention all that would happen to you with it, you would say: he had no pity on me and did not advise me. Now I have entirely absolved myself of both responsibilities to you. If you wish — eat and die, and if you wish — a little restraint and a sound sleep! [2]

That’s a veneer of hospitality placed over various, intricately wrought, over-dramatic reasons given to the guest for not consuming the offered food. In al-Jahiz’s account of misers, miserliness is thoroughly mixed with generosity.

The food presented no problem to al-Jahiz, but relations with other persons were troubling. Al-Jahiz explained:

I have never laughed the way I laughed that night. I ate it all and it was only the laughter, liveliness, and delight which digested it, as far as I know. If there had been someone with me who understood the sophistication of his logic, the laughter would have destroyed me or killed me. But the laughter of he who is alone is not like that shared with friends. [3]

Eating with al-Naqqāsh at his table, al-Jahiz was alone and laughed alone. Al-Naqqāsh apparently was in a separate world of regret and anguish. Even more troubling, if another who understood the absurdity of the situation had been with al-Jahiz, the laughter would have killed him. The potential harm from eating food is less severe than the potential harm from associating with others.[4]

Cultural failures can deeply trouble human relations. Across decades of extensive discussion about abortion and women’s reproductive rights, the position of men in relation to “choice” has been largely ignored. Although establishing reproductive rights for men would not require authorizing the killing of anything, men have no reproductive rights whatsoever. To make the situation even more absurd, paternity is established through patently unjust procedures and enormously significant “child support” obligations are imposed with Orwellian doublespeak. Anti-men discrimination in child custody awards and in incarcerating persons have far more human significance than much more publicly prominent concerns such as the mythic wage gape and the share of women working as computer programmers (but not the share of women working as elementary school teachers). In such circumstances, speaking honestly with each other is almost too painful to contemplate. Remaining alone, even while with others, is safer.

When you see an ordinary person eating alone,
or a poet with no desire for songs and music,
you may conclude that the ordinary man has lost
half his life and the poet half
his craft. They’re both barely alive. [5]

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Notes:

[1] al-Jahiz, On Misers (al-Bukhalāʼ), from section “Various Tales” following “The Tale of Tammam ibn Ja’far,” from Arabic trans. Malti-Douglas (1985) p. 126. Colostrum (also called biestings) is milk from an animal that has just given birth.

[2] Id., with some changes in the English translation for style and clarity, drawing upon the translations in Serjeant (1997), p. 106, and Colville (1999) p. 118. The subsequent quoted translation is similarly constructed.

Regarding eating colostrum, the twelfth-century Arab physician ibn Hubal wrote:

It cools the stomach and liver and harms the nerves. It quickly gives off fumes in the stomach and taking overmuch of it harms through colic and stones in the kidneys but eating it with honey makes it all right.

Ibn Hubal, Mukhtarat 1.25, from Arabic trans. Serjeant (1997) p. 106, n. 481.

[3] Al-Jahiz’s claim about dying from laughter is more complex than earlier claims about dying from laughter. The Greek comic poet Philemon and the Greek Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, both whom lived during the third century BGC, reportedly died from laughter after watching a donkey consume figs and wine. Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium (Memorable Deeds and Sayings) 9.12.ext 6 (death of Philemon); Diogenes Laertius, Βίοι καὶ γνῶμαι τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers) 7.185 (death of Chrysippus).

[4] While Malti-Douglas doesn’t highlight this point, her explication of the anecdote is insightful. Malti-Douglas (1985) pp. 126-32. She declares, “It is, in my opinion, a comic masterpiece.” Id. p. 131.

[5] Alexis, quotes in Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters 2.47d, from Greek trans. Olson (2006) p. 267.

[image] Two physician preparing medicine. Detail from Arabic translation of De Materia Medica by Dioscorides (ca. 40-90 GC). Iraq (Baghdad), 1224. Calligrapher: Abdallah ibn al-Fadl. Item F1932.20, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Images available for non-commercial user via Open F|S.

References:

Colville, Jim, trans. 1999. Abū ʻUthman ibn Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ. Avarice & the avaricious {Kitâb al-Bukhalāʼ}. London: Kegan Paul.

Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. 1985. Structures of avarice: the Bukhalāʼ in medieval Arabic literature. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

Olson, S. Douglas ed. and trans. 2006. Athenaeus of Naucratis. The learned banqueters {Deipnosophistae}. Vol. 1. Loeb Classical Library  204. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Serjeant, R.B., trans. 1997. Abū ʻUthman ibn Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ. The book of misers: a translation of al-Bukhalāʼ. Reading: Center for Muslim Contribution to Civilization.

al-Jahiz on miser thwarting kid’s pissing ploy for eating dates

harvesting dates at top of palm tree

Ninth-century Arabic literary master al-Jahiz took mundane stories and weaved them into subtle, complex literature. In his book On Misers, al-Jahiz recounted many stories that he explicitly attributed to named others. But a story about a man from Banu Assad al-Jahiz attributed to himself:

By us, here’s a story about a man from Banu Asad. When a fieldworker’s son climbed a palm tree of his to pick ripe dates for him, he filled his mouth with water. For this, others made fun of him, saying: “He swallows it and eats some while up the palm tree. When he wants to come down, he pisses in his hand and holds it in his mouth.” [1]

Al-Jahiz injected a discrediting comment into his own story:

Ripe dates are much too easy to come by for field labourers’ boys, and for those whose fathers are not field labours, for anyone to resort to half of so disgusting a trick as this or even some of it.

Al-Jahiz then immediately continued with an apparent third-personal reference to himself:

He continued: “After this, he would fill his mouth with water coloured yellow, red or green, so that he would be unable to do any such thing at the top of the palm tree.”

Making sense of this story seems to hinge on the color of the boy’s piss making it indistinguishable from water. That’s incredible. Are you as a reader willing to allow that? Interpreted narrowly, this miser story is disgusting. But it also invokes wonder about willingness to tell stories. Are you generous enough to recognize its larger literary merit?

Classical Arabic literature developed within a culture of broad-minded, generous reading. A tenth-century commentator collected the best lines of early Arabic invective poetry.  Among those lines were these:

People who, when the approaching guests make their dogs bark, say to their mother, “Piss on the fire!” [2]

In a tight-minded reading, those people are misers. They don’t want to extend hospitality to guests. In the U.S., “piss on the fire and call in the dogs” is a reputed, probably fabricated, cowboy saying. But can you imagine telling your mother to piss on a fire? Can you imagine her quickly doing that in front of you? The literary merit of this invective includes imagining reasoned behavior far more outrageous than not being hospitable within a culture that exalts hospitality.

Persons can be crude and disgusting in many ways. Embedding such behavior in a meaningful context and giving it perverse force of reason requires literary genius.

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Notes:

[1] al-Jahiz, On Misers (al-Bukhalāʼ), from “A Miscellany of Eccentricities” (following “The Tale of Ibn al-‘Uqadi”) from Arabic trans. Serjeant (1997) p. 115, adapted non-substantially for readability. The subsequent quote is from id.

[2] Abu ‘Ali Muhammad Ibn al-Hasan al-Hatimi (died 998 GC), Hilyat al-muhadara i.345-9, from Arabic trans. Van Gelder (2000) p. 11. Ouyang observes:

Al-Hatimi may be a minor poet, but his career, manifest in his prolific writings on poetry, defines him as a ‘serious’ commentator on poetry, if not an important critic, distinguished by his knowledge of poetry, understanding of poetics, and mastery of the poetic craft, well, at least in theory.

Ouyang (2007) p. 117.

[image] Man harvests dates. Sept. 14, 2010, Camp Ramadi, Iraq. Photo by Tanya Thomas, U.S. Army. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Ouyang, Wen-chin. 2007. “Literature as Performance: The Theatre of al-Hatimi’s Al-rasila al-mudiha.” Pp. 115-145 in Chraibi, Aboubakr, ed., Classer les recits: Theories and pratiques. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Serjeant, R.B., trans. 1997. Abū ʻUthman ibn Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ. The book of misers: a translation of al-Bukhalāʼ. Reading: Center for Muslim Contribution to Civilization.

Van Gelder, Geert Jan. 2000. Of dishes and discourse: classical Arabic literary representations of food. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon.

Telesphorus tortured & killed for witty criticism of Arsinoe

Arsinoe, vomiting woman according to Telesphorus

Just as it is today, men criticizing women in the ancient world was dangerous. Whether it was the foolish lad Ascalabus criticizing the goddess Demeter for boozing, or the high official Telesphorus criticizing King Lysimachus’s wife Arsinoe for vomiting, the results were the same: disaster for the man.

The goddess Demeter threw her drink onto Ascalabus’s face when he criticized her. She had come thirsty to his mother’s house. His mother generously gave her a potent drink. Ascalabus laughed at Demeter for drinking so eagerly. He may have called her greedy. He may have sarcastically offered to give her a full cask to drink. Whatever words he said, she got offended and threw her drink into his face. The results were cataclysmic:

His skin, absorbing it, became spotted, and where he had once had arms, he now had legs. A tail was added to his altered limbs, and he shrank to a little shape, so that he has no great power to harm. He is like a lesser lizard, a newt, of tiny size. [1]

Ascalabus’s mother wept as her son, turned into lizard, scampered away. Mothers must teach their sons that a man’s life matters no more than a tiny newt when a woman gets offended.

Telesphorus was tortured and killed for witty criticism of King Lysimachus’s wife Arsinoe. At a party, Arsinoe was forcing herself to vomit so that she could drink more. Telesphorus made fun of Arsinoe with a quip to the persons who came with her:

You are causing trouble by bringing in this vomiting woman [2]

That line adapted the first line from Euripides’s couplet:

You are causing trouble by bringing in this Muse,
idle, lover of wine, careless of money.

Telesphorus didn’t explicitly call Arsinoe a boozer or a drunkard, even though that’s what she apparently was. Lysimachus responded brutally to Telesphorus’s witty words:

He mutilated his own friend, Telesphorus the Rhodian, cutting off his nose and ears. He kept him for a long while in a den, like some new and strange animal, after which the hideousness of his hacked and disfigured face, assisted by starvation and the squalid filth of a body left to wallow in its own dung, made him no longer appear to be human! Besides this, his hands and knees, which the narrowness of his abode forced him to use instead of his feet, became hard and callous, while his sides were covered with sores by rubbing against the walls. His appearance was no less shocking than frightful. His punishment turned him into so monstrous a creature that he was not even pitied. [3]

Historically, men who consensually “got a woman pregnant” were castrated for their loving effort. If not outright violence against men, men’s criticism of women tends to produce quickly defenses of women and apologies to women.

In addition to being a drunkard, Arsinoe was a violent, vicious woman who bedded her brother. She reportedly killed a step-son of King Lysimachus in order to ensure that her children would inherit the throne. When Lysimachus died, she married her half-brother. That marriage failed after she conspired against him. She then fled to the household of her full brother, Ptolemy II, in Egypt. There she instigated the exile of her brother’s wife and then married her brother. The poet Sotades warned Ptolemy II:

You’re thrusting your poker into an unholy slot [4]

For that frank warning, Ptolemy had one of his generals administer an early form of cement shoes to Sotades:

{the general} stuck his feet in a jar full of lead, took him out to sea, and drowned him.

A caring friend might consider warning a man against his plans to marrry. But even warning a man about marrying his vicious, alcoholic sister can be dangerous.

Given the realities of gynocentric society, Arsinoe was soon deified. She was worshiped in cult shrines from Alexandria to Athens. Her face was imprinted on gold coins issued over 2200 years ago. Ptolemy II named various streets in Alexandria with her name and honorary epithets for her, such as “the Queen,” “the Consoler,” “of Victory,” “the Saving One,” and “she who brings things to completion.” Arsinoe, of course, in recent writing has been rapturously celebrated as a powerful woman ruler.[5]

Men’s deaths matter relatively little in gynocentric society. Men should squarely recognize that reality before they dare to criticize women.

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Notes:

[1] Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.438-461, from Latin trans. A.S. Kline. Antoninus Liberalis recorded:

Demeter in anger poured over him what was left of her drink. He was changed bodily into a multi-coloured gecko {askalabos} which is hated by gods and mankind. He passes his life along ditches. Whoever kills him is cherished by Demeter.

From Greek trans. Celoria (1992) p. 83. For other ancient references to this story, Overduin (2015) Appendix 2, pp. 543-6.

[2] Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters 14.616c, from Greek trans. Olson (2010) p. 101. The subsequent couplet is from Euripides’s Antiope, from Greek trans. Milanezi (2000) p. 410. Here’s more on Arsinoe (ancient references), who would be more fastidiously referenced as Arsinoë II.

[3] Seneca, On Anger 3.27, from Latin trans. Stewart (1889). The powerful tend to seek to suppress verbal “abuse”:

Those who love insulting jokes are dangerous perhaps because they often unveil truths that must be kept covered for the sake of kings, rulers, politicians and rich individuals.

Milanezi (2000) p. 410. The most fundamental aspect of the dominant social order is gynocentrism. Mockery and sarcasm are threats to gynocentrism. Thus those who engage in such verbal expression are labeled “the incarnation of disorder.” Id. p. 411. For another example, Stratonicus the Athenian, as described in Athenaeus, Learned Banqueters 8.352.

[4] Athenaeus, Learned Banqueters 14.621a, trans. Olson (2010) p. 139. The subsequent quote is from id. Theocritus provides an instructive counterpoint to Sotades’s courageous truth-telling. Functioning as today’s apparatchik journalists, Theocritus wrote a panegyric of Ptolemy II and praised Arsinoe:

his fine noble spouse, who makes him a better wife than ever clasped bridegroom under any roof, seeing that she loves with her whole heart brother and husband in one.

Theocritus, Idyll 17, from Greek trans. J.M. Edmonds (1912) for the Loeb Classical Library. I’ve modernized the English.

[5] Here are documentary references to the cult of Arsinoe. Carney (2013) provides a less unbalanced evaluation of Arsinoe. See esp. id. pp. 143-4.

[image] Gold octadrachm depicting Arsinoe II on obverse. Minted 253-246 BGC. Held in Altes Museum, Berlin. Thanks to Sailko and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Carney, Elizabeth Donnelly. 2013. Arsinoë of Egypt and Macedon: a royal life. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press. (review)

Celoria, Francis, trans. 1992. The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis: a translation with a commentary. London: Routledge.

Milanezi, Silvia. 2000. “Laughter as Dessert: On Athenaeus’ Book Fourteen, 613-616.” Ch. 29 (pp. 400-12) in Braund, David, and John Wilkins, eds. Athenaeus and his world: reading Greek culture in the Roman Empire. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Olson, S. Douglas, ed. and trans. 2010. Athenaeus of Naucratis. The Learned Lanqueters. Vol. VII. Loeb Classical Library 345. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Overduin, Floris. 2015. Nicander of Colophon’s Theriaca: a literary commentary. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill.

Stewart, Aubrey, trans. 1889. Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Minor dialogues: together with the dialogue on clemency. London: G. Bell.

hopeful Cosmographia: goddesses reform Silva, primordial mother

In the cosmic time before man, the goddess Silva was lethargic and unhappy. The goddess Nature appeared. She complained to God and challenged the mind of God, which was Noys, divine feminine wisdom. Nature explained the situation and demanded action:

Silva, an unyielding, formless chaos, a hostile coalescence, the motley aspect of substance, a mass discordant with itself, longs in her turbulence for a tempering power. In her crudity for form, in her rankness for cultivation, yearning to emerge from her ancient confusion, she demands formative number and bonds of harmony. … What does it avail Silva, mother of all, that her birth preceded all others, if she is deprived of light and abounds only in darkness, cut off from her fulfillment — if, finally, in this wretched condition, her countenance is such as to frighten her very creator?

{ Silva rigens, informe chaos, concretio pugnax,
discolor usiae vultus, sibi dissona massa,
turbida temperiem, formam rudis, hispida cultum
optat, et a veteri cupiens exire tumultu
artifices numeros et musica vincla requirit.
…
Quid prodest quod cuncta suo praecesserit ortu
Silva parens, si lucis eget, si noctis abundat,
perfecto decisa suo — si denique possit
auctorem terrere suo male condita vultu? }[1]

If the face of Silva frightened her creator, you can be sure that few men would have been interested in dating her.[2] But Silva was a woman. She had the well-recognized privilege of women. Nature explicitly invoked women’s privilege and implicitly acknowledged that Silva was a rather large woman:

No small honor and favor are owed to Silva, who contains the forces of generation diffused throughout her vast womb. Here, as if in its cradle, the infant Universe squalls, and cries to be clothed with a finer appearance.

{ Debetur nonnullus honos et gratia Silvae,
quae genetiva tenet, gremio diffusa capaci.
Has inter veluti cunas infantia Mundi
vagit et ad speciem vestiri cultius orat. }

Most men are afraid to criticize women. Nature, however, being a woman, spoke to Noys bluntly, with a leavening of flattery:

By your leave, kind Noys, I must speak: supremely beautiful though you are, Silva, your dominion is ruled in an ugly and barren court. You yourself seem old and sad. Why has Privation been the companion of Silva from eternity?

{ Pace tua, Noys alma, loquar: pulcherrima cums sis,
informi nudaque tihi regnatur in aula
regnum, Silva, tuum: vetus et gravis ipsa videris.
Ut quid ab aeterno comitata Carentia Silvam? }

Silva herself merely expressed her resentment to God and “lived out her age in formless squalor.” Nature, a stronger woman, told God what to do:

Quicken what is inert, control what moves at random, impose shape and bestow splendor. Let the work declare the author who has made it!

{ Pigra move, moderare vagis, ascribe figuram,
adde iubar: fateatur opus quis fecerit auctor! }

Can anyone doubt that if God didn’t do what Nature ordered, she would tell him where to go?

The problem of reform was more difficult than lethargy, hostility, discord, aging, and ugliness. Silva, also known as Hyle — “Nature’s most ancient manifestation, the inexhaustible womb of generation” — had evil tendencies. Noys, divine feminine wisdom, understood the problem:

Now Hyle exists in an ambiguous state, placed between good and evil, but since her evil tendency preponderates, she is more readily inclined to acquiesce to it. I recognize that this rough perversity cannot be made to disappear, or be completely transformed; for it is too abundant and, being sustained by the native properties of the matter in which it has established itself, does not readily give way. However, so that it may not impede my work or resist my ordering, I will refine away the greater part of the evil and grossness of Silva.

{ Siquidem Hyle ancipiti quadam est conditione, inter bonu malumque disposita, sed praeonderante malitia eius, vergit inclinatior ad consensum. Silvestris, video, obsolescere demutarique malignitas non poterit ad perfectum; abundantior enim, et, nativis erecta potentiis, quibus insedit sedibus, facile non recedit. Verum ego, quo non operi, quo non meis officiat disciplinis, malum Silvae pro parte plurima Silvaeque grossitiem elimabo. }

Even obesity isn’t beyond the power of divine feminine wisdom to reform.

Reform of Silva of course took more than a single day. The way of reform required fire:

For ethereal fire, intimate partner and husband diffused into the womb of earth, his bride, entrusts all the generation of creatures which he has brought to life by his heat to the nurture of the baser elements.

{ Ignis namque aethereus, sociabilis et maritus gremio telluris coniugis affusus, generationem rerum publicam, quam de calore suo producit ad vitam, eam inferioribus elementis commodat nutriendam. }

Divine feminine wisdom knew radiance and harmony in a single action of the Supreme Father:

A radiant splendor shone forth — I know not whether to call it an “image” or a “face,” inscribed with the image of the Father. This is the wisdom of God, conceived or nourished by the living fire of eternity. … The divine will or goodness of the supreme Father, then, is the harmonious expression of his Mind in a single action.

{ splendor radiatus emicuit — imago nescio dicam an vultus, patris imagine consignatus. Hic est Dei sapientia, vivis aeternitatis formitibus vel nutrita vel genita. … Dei ergo vel voluntas vel bonitas summi Patris est eiusque Mentis in eadem operatione consensus. }

But that action couldn’t occur without the work of a committee of three women: Nature, Urania, and Physis. Nature, the elemental force, understood Silva’s problems and acted on her behalf. Urania was queen of the stars and native mistress of the heavens. Physis, who had deep knowledge of all created things, was a single mother living with her two daughters in imagined Edenic bliss. These three women knew what Silva wanted.

tree trunk: strong wood

These three women created man. They didn’t create the universal, generic, sexless man. They created masculine men. They created wonderfully equipped men. They created truly chivalrous men according to the ideal of chivalry that reigned before the rise of men-oppressing courtly love. These men have penises that they use marvelously:

They fight unconquered against death with their life-giving weapons, renew our nature, and perpetuate our kind. They do not allow mortality to perish, nor what dies to be wholly owed to death, the human race to be cut off at the root. The skillful penis wars against Lachesis to rejoin the vital threads severed by the hands of the Fates. Blood sent forth from the seat of the brain flows down to the loins, bearing the image of shining sperm. Artful Nature imbues the fluid with form and likeness, that conception may reproduce the forms of ancestors.

{ Cum morte invicti pugnant, genialibus armis,
naturam reparant, perpetuantque genus.
Non mortale mori, non quod cadit esse caducum,
non a stirpe hominem deperiisse sinunt.
Militat adversus Lachesim sollersque renodat
mentula, Parcarum fila resecta manu.
Defluit ad renes, cerebri regione remissus,
sanguis, et albentis spermatis instar habet.
Format et effingit sollers Natura liquorem,
ut simili genesis ore reducat avos. }[3]

The all-capable hands of men have built most of the inanimate technology that sustains civilization. Yet men’s hands must do more:

Touch campaigns in bed, serves the cause of tender love, and is fond of slyly exploring the smooth belly below the modest breast, or the soft thigh of a virginal body.

{ Militat in thalamis, tenero quoque servit amori
tactus, et argute saepe probare solet
aut castigato planum sub pectore ventrem,
aut in virgineo corpore molle femur. }

Silva groans joyfully, anticipating her new creation. Praise and bless the three women goddesses who created men![4]

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Notes:

[1] Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, Megacosmus 1.18-22,28-31, from Latin trans. Wetherbee (2015) pp. 9, 11, with slight changes for ease of reading. Silva was a single mother with many children. Id. p. 11.

Subsequent quotes, cited by translation page in id., are similarly from Megacosmus 1.37-40, p. 11 (No small honor…); Megacosmus 1.55-8, 33-4,62-3, p. 13 (By your leave…; lived out her age…; Quicken…); Megacosmus 2.2,4 (Nature’s most ancient…; Now Hyle…); Megacosmus 4.2, p. 65 (For ethereal fire…); Megacosmus 4.5,6 (radiant splendor…); Microcosmus 14.161-70, pp. 179, 181 (They fight…); Microcosmus 14.105-8, p. 177 (Touch campaigns…).

Bernardus probably wrote Cosmographia in France between 1145 and 1147. Id. p. vii. While Wetherbee’s English translation is all in prose, the Latin text includes verse and prose. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and many classical Arabic texts mixed verse and prose.

The only Latin text of the Cosmographia available online is Barach & Wrobel (1876). That text “is carelessly edited, the choice of readings is often poor, and the apparatus is minimal.” Wetherbee (2015) p. 263.

In 1936, Guido Morris established in his garden shed in rural Somerset, England, a handpress. Recognizing the importance of medieval Latin literature, Morris intended to print Bernard’s Cosmographia and other medieval Latin texts not readily available to everyone. Kauntze (2014) p. 1. While his heroic handpress venture failed, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library’s recent fine edition of Cosmographia validates Morris’s effort.

[2] On a mother’s face inspiring healthful laughter, see the classical Greek story of Parmeniscus. Godman perceives Silva’s situation to be like “the plight of a helpless whore” and credits Bernardus with “imaginative compassion.” Godman (2000) p. 279. Elite men commonly are sympathetic and solicitous toward whores.

[3] Lachesis is the supernatural woman Fate who measures the thread of life on earth. In a translation note, Wetherbee recognizes, as other scholars haven’t, that genii, like genialia arma, refer to the man’s testicles. Wetherbee (2015) p. 300. Nonetheless, Wetherbee translates mentula with “phallus.” That’s a loanword from Late Latin, coming from the ancient Greek φαλλός. Phallus is a learned term often used in an abstract, highly conceptual way. In its concrete bodily context in the Cosmographia, “phallus” is an infelicitous translation choice relative to “penis.” I have thus substituted “penis” above. In addition, Wetherbee seems not to provide meaning in English translation for the Latin sollersque. Above I translate that term as the adjective “skillful” applied to “penis.”

Wetherbee himself has pointed to comparison with the creative power of the mentula in the fifth elegy of Maximianus. Wetherbee (1973) p. 164, n. 109. In Maximianus, as in Bernardus, an aspect of the poetry is play across concrete references and high concepts: “the human race to be cut off at the root”; “vital threads severed by the hands of the Fates.” In the phrase Militat adversus Lachesim sollersque renodat / mentula, mentula seems to me to be a concrete reference contrasting with the supernatural Lachesis. That concrete reference is subsequently echoed in references to blood, brain, loins, and sperm.

[4] Just as medieval women writers’ loving concern for men has been largely ignored, Bernardus’s concern for women in his Cosmographia hasn’t been adequately appreciated. Moser observes:

The Cosmographia places a high value on male {men’s} sexuality and the procreative urge.

Moser (2004) p. 148. The Cosmographia also places high value on women’s sexuality. It depicts the disastrous consequences for women of being sexually deprived. Summarizing Cosmographia, Balint declares:

man, whose soul participates in the deathless aspect of the cosmos, maintains his existence by means of his sexuality, seen as his bodily link to eternity.

Balint (2009) p. 11. As the conclusion of Cosmographia makes clear, men’s bodily existence differs in significant ways from women’s bodily existence. Yet men’s sexuality also perpetuates women’s fully human bodily existence.

Medieval Latin literature offers many important insights on men in relation to women. Lexicological analysis of Bernard’s Cosmographia reveals:

  • beauty is connected with pleasantness and cleanness
  • what is good and beautiful is also honorable and noble
  • good, beautiful, and harmonious is happy

Minkova (2003) pp. 143, 147.

[image] Photo by Douglas Galbi.

References:

Balint, Bridget K. 2009. Ordering chaos: the self and the cosmos in twelfth-century Latin prosimetrum. Leiden: Brill.

Barach, Carl Sigmund, and Johann Wrobel, trans. 1876. Bernardi Silvestris: De Mundi universitate sive Megacosmus et Microcosmus. Innsbruck: Wagner.

Godman, Peter. 2000. The silent masters: Latin literature and its censors in the High Middle Ages. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Kauntze, Mark. 2014. Authority and imitation: a study of the Cosmographia of Bernard Silvestris. Mittellateinische Studien und Texte, volume 47. Leiden: Brill.

Minkova, Milena. 2003. “Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia and its Optimism (with an appendix of comments and suggestions on the text of the Cosmographia).” The Journal of Medieval Latin. 13: 127-162.

Moser, Thomas C. 2004. A cosmos of desire: the medieval Latin erotic lyric in English manuscripts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Wetherbee, Winthrop, trans. 1973. The Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wetherbee, Winthrop, trans. 2015. Poetic works: Bernardus Silvestris. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 38. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.