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The Bedraggled Cupid: Ovidian Satire in ‘Carmina Burana’ 105

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2016

Alison Goddard Elliott
Alison Goddard Elliott*
Affiliation:
Brown University
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Extract

Ovid's exceptional popularity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is past dispute; the exact nature of his influence, however, is somewhat less clear. The medieval student first read Ovid early in his career at cathedral schools such as Orléans and Chartres, where his teacher taught him that the classical poets were wise and learned authorities who could offer a Christian much profitable instruction (in Ovid's case, this interpretation involved a considerable distortion, to which we shall return). The student also learned that imitating the Roman authors was a safe and respectable course to follow. As far as Ovid is concerned, medieval poets learned their lessons well. Whether writing in classical, quantitative meters or in medieval, accentual ones, the poets, when they turn to love, sing in the Ovidian vein.

Type
Miscellany
Information
Traditio , Volume 37 , 1981 , pp. 426 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © Fordham University Press 

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References

1 I thank Traditio's reader, Winthrop Wetherbee, for several helpful suggestions.Google Scholar

2 The most recent survey is McGregor, James H., ‘Ovid at School: From the Ninth to the Fifteenth Century,’ Classical Folia 32 (1978) 29–51.Google Scholar

3 For a description of the methods of an inspired instructor, Bernard of Chartres, see John of Salisbury, Metalogicon 1.24.Google Scholar

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9 All numbers and quotations are from the edition of Alfons Hilka, Otto Schumann, and Bernhard Bischoff (Heidelberg 1930–1970). No. 105 is in I 2.173–75.Google Scholar

10 This line does not scan properly and may be corrupt; the auctoritas seems to echo Ars amatoria 2.345, ‘nil adsuetudine maius.’ Google Scholar

11 See n. 14 for the auctoritas. Google Scholar

12 Walsh, P. G., Thirty Poems from the Carmina Burana (Reading University Medieval and Renaissance Texts; Reading 1976); Walsh does not, however, view the poem as a particularly serious statement but stresses (rightly) its playfulness.Google Scholar

13 Stanza 2, ‘Cupido pharetratus,’ cf. Amores 2.5.1, ‘pharetrate Cupido,’ Metamorphoses 10.525, ‘pharetratus puer’; stanza 6, ‘evanuit iam virtus,’ cf. Met. 14.356–57; stanza 9, cf. ‘condita si non sunt Veneris mysteria cistis,’ AA 2.609; stanza 10, ‘corporibus non tactis,’ cf. AA 2.634.Google Scholar

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22 For witty use of statues of Venus (Aphrodite) see the series of epigrams in the Greek Anthology 16.159f.Google Scholar

23 Lines 624 (cf. CB 105.49) and 625 (cf. CB 105.45).Google Scholar

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38 Pactum, as Walsh (above, n. 12) notes, may refer specifically to the marriage contract (cf. Juvenal 6.25; Valerius Flaccus 8.401, Tacitus, , Annals 6.45). For pactio conjugalis in the twelfth century, see Bras, Gabriel Le, ‘Le mariage dans la théologie et le droit de l'Église du xie au xiiie siècle,’ Cahiers de civilisation médiévale (Xe-XIIe siècles) 11 (1968) 194. Marriage was held by some (e.g. the Countess of Champagne, as reported by Andreas) to be antithetical to love.Google Scholar

39 Wright, (above, n. 30) 431.Google Scholar

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46 De amore 1.7, ed. Trojel, 221 (emphasis added). I am particularly grateful to Winthrop Wetherbee for calling this passage to my attention. It is hard to take this defense as other than facetious. In a similar vein is Ovid's humorous excuse for Aegisthus' adultery — he had nothing better to do (‘quaeritis, Aegisthus quare sit factus adulter? / in promptu causa est: desidiosus erat,’ RA 161–162).Google Scholar

47 De amore, ed. Trojel, 311.Google Scholar

48 De amore 106.Google Scholar

49 Douglas Kelly, for example, calls the De amore ‘the only true art of courtly love we possess,’ although he goes on to point out the harshness of its attack on love in the Third Book; ‘Courtly Love in Perspective: The Hierarchy of Love in Andreas Capellanus,’ Traditio 24 (1968) 119. See also Schlösser, Felix, Andreas Capellanus: Seine Minnelehre und das christliche Weltbild um 1200 (Bonn 1960) especially 176f.Google Scholar

50 See Butturff, Douglas, ‘The Comedy of Coquetry in Andreas’ De Amore,' Classical Folia 28 (1974) 181–90, and the bibliography cited there. Butturff suggests that the De Amore is best viewed sub specie ludi (181). Peter Dronke in his review of Schlösser (Medium Aevum 32 [1963] 60) concludes that the finest poets of courtliness and ‘the amusing, vulgar, gossiping little clerc have virtually nothing in common.’ As Dronke points out, Andreas is not an isolated case but must be viewed in his proper context, as one of numerous medieval adaptations of the Ars. To give only one example, another adaptation of Ovid's joke, the Facetus ‘Moribus et vitae,’ is decidedly cynical (see Allegorica 2 [1977] 27f.) Google Scholar

51 Bowden, Betsy, ‘The Art of Courtly Copulation,’ Medievalia et Humanistica 9 (1979) 67–85.Google Scholar

52 The text is in Oulmont, Charles, Les Débats du clerc et du chevalier (Paris 1911); also Meyer, W., Nachrichten von der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Philologisch-historische Klasse (1914) 1–19. The poem is squarely in the Ovidian tradition; at the ‘trial’ the Gospel according to Ovid, the Ars Amatoria, is read.Google Scholar

53 Shedd, Gordon M., ‘Amor Dethroned: The Ovidian Tradition in Courtly Love Poetry’ (Diss. Pennsylvania State University 1965) 48.Google Scholar

54 One of the most outspoken of Ovid's critics was Guillaume de St. Thierry, whose censure of Ovid's followers in De natura et dignitate amoris (PL 184.379) is so harsh its editor has subtitled the work ‘Anti-Nasonem.’ Conrad, , Dialogus super auctores (above, n. 34) 114. Bacon, Roger, Opus tertium cap. 15, in Opera quaedam hactenus inedita, ed. Brewer, W. S. (London, 1859) I 54. Google Scholar