12 - Literacy: a new model for the classical text in the Middle Ages?

Summary

Quid facit cum Psalterio Horatius?

‘What does Horace have to do with the Psalter?’

Jerome, Epistles, XXII, 29

In this one short question, we have the germ of a dilemma which persisted in Western culture for over a millennium. How can a Christian culture accommodate the heritage of a pagan past? In Augustine's famous words, how can pagan texts ‘be converted to Christian use’ (in usum convertenda christianum)? Modern scholars have perpetuated this question and continue to use it as a way of characterising the place of classical texts in medieval culture. In this model, reading the classics is full of anxiety and grammatica's contact with authoritative texts is hedged about with the fear of moral contamination. Of course, there are plenty of accounts from medieval chronicles, lives and prescriptive curricula to justify this view, and, what is more, they make good reading: monks corrupted by Ovid turn to the more substantial pleasures of prostitutes and young boys, teachers warn of the seductive powers of the secular auctores. We now need to ask whether the practice of reading, the interaction with texts in history that we have traced, can be squared with this model.

I have found only one example of this form of anxiety in glossing on Horace's Satires. At the beginning of Satires 1, 8, the glossator in ms r asserts that Horace's intention (again, the hermeneutic key) is ‘to reprehend sorceresses’ (reprehendere veneficas) and ‘the belief of the Romans’ (fidem romanorum).