Revealing New Perspectives Studies in Honor of Stephen G Nichols Kevin Brownlee All Chapter

Revealing New Perspectives: Studies in
Honor of Stephen G. Nichols Kevin

Brownlee
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Revealing New Perspectives: Studies in

Honor of Stephen G. Nichols
“The breadth of topic and learning in this celebratory volume are a fitting
tribute to the remarkable Stephen Nichols. It would be difficult to imagine
a more distinguished international array of colleagues, all writing in warm
admiration of Nichols’s pioneering influence in manuscript studies, the
visual arts, narrative, drama, and lyric in Italian, Iberian, German, Byzantine
Greek, and Middle English as well as French. Kevin Brownlee and Marina
S. Brownlee have assembled a vital testament to the ‘pathos and passion of
philology’ in its most contemporary and medieval senses.”
—A rdis Butterfield, John M. Schiff Professor of English;

Professor of French and of Music, Yale University
“Revealing New Perspectives is a fitting tribute to the pioneering scholarship

and ongoing innovation of Stephen Nichols. A volume that includes the fruit
of long-standing reflections by some of today’s most eminent medievalists
and exciting new work by a number of Nichols’ former students, Revealing
New Perspectives offers rich reading for established scholars, and accessible
pathways for students to some of medieval studies’ most compelling current
issues, including the opportunities for investigation opened up by new tech-
nologies and the insights to be gained from engaging with the specificity and
complex situatedness of each medieval work.”
—Daisy Delogu, Professor of French, University of Chicago
“The first thing one notices upon perusing this book is the extraordinary
list of contributors, a line-up that befits a celebration of Stephen G. Nichols’s
impact on medieval studies. These engaging essays reflect the innovative-
ness and interdisciplinarity of their honoree’s approach, and, in keeping with
the spirit of Nichols’s own work, open up intriguing possibilities for further
exploration.”
—Geri L. Smith, Professor of French and Chair, Department of Modern

Languages and Literatures, University of Central Florida
“To honor medievalist and comparatist Stephen G. Nichols, this beautifully
illustrated book assembles a roll call of skilled literary critics and histori-
ans from across the globe. In five sections, sixteen essays probe texts and
topics in English, French, German, Iberian, Italian, and Occitan, from the
Middle Ages through the mid-t wentieth century. The striking breadth and
depth—methodological, linguistic, and chronological—pay fitting tribute
to Nichols, whose long and distinguished career has stretched the study of
medieval poetry through the creation and application of (just for example)
material and digital philology.”
—Jan M. Ziolkowski, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor

of Medieval Latin, Harvard University
Revealing New Perspectives
This book is part of the Peter Lang Humanities list.
Every volume is peer reviewed and meets
the highest quality standards for content and production.
PETER LANG
New York • Berlin • Brussels • Lausanne • Oxford
Revealing New Perspectives
Studies in Honor of Stephen G. Nichols
Edited by
Kevin Brownlee and
Marina S. Brownlee
PETER LANG
New York • Berlin • Brussels • Lausanne • Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-
Cataloging-in-
in-Publication
Publication Control Number: 2022013124
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
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978-1
ISBN 978- 1--4
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331-88775-
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DOI 10.3726/
10.3726/b19676
b19676
Cover image: Erich Mendelsohn (1887–

(1887–1953),
1953), Library and Office Building of Salman
Schocken, Jerusalem, Israel, Interior perspectives, 1935. Graphite and color pencil
on tracing paper. 14 × 11 ½ʺ (35.6 × 29.2 cm). Gift of Milton Sheingarten.
Photo credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed
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All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
For Steve—w ith admiration and friendship.
Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction, in honor of Stephen G. Nichols 1
K evin Brownlee and M arina S. Brownlee
Curriculum Vitae of Stephen G. Nichols 5
Essays 21
K evin Brownlee and M arina S. Brownlee
Philology
1. M
aterializing Philology: Language, Literature, and Manuscript
Culture in the Middle Ages 33
G abrielle Spiegel
2. Philology and Poetry: The Petitcreiu Ekphrasis in Gottfried’s Tristan 41
M ark Chinca
3. Errant Glory: The Lineages of Peter Schlemihl 55
Daniel H eller-Roazen
Visuals
4. S yllogisms in Stone: Theophilus, Stephen, Abelard on the Walls of
Notre-Dame de Paris 75
R. Howard Bloch
viii C ontents
5. S igns on the Wall: Painting History into Satire in the Roman de

Fauvel of Paris, BnF MS fr. 146 105
Nancy Freeman R egalado
6. B
urlesque Signs: Performance, Translation, and the Betrayal
of Sexism 125
Jody Enders
Lyric
7. François Villon and the Ages of Life 143
Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet
8. The Alterity of Medieval Iberian Poetry 153
Joachim Küpper
9. The Space in the Poem: Jordi de Sant Jordi, IX & XIV 185
A lbert L loret
Alterity
10. Gaston Paris and Anatole France 207
M ichel Zink
ictionalizing Modernization Theory in Alejo Carpentier’s Los Pasos
11. F
Perdidos: The Middle Ages in the Jungle 221
Nadia A ltschul
12. M
aterial and Spiritual Exchange: Examples from the Greek East and
Latin West 241
M arina S. Brownlee
Reworkings
13. Boccaccio’s Decameron—Novella I, 3 255
A ndreas K ablitz
14. Chaucer’s Early and Late Uses of the Two French Rose Authors 277
K evin Brownlee
arrative and History in Paris, BnF, fr. 1553: The Roman de la
15. N
Violette in the Context of a Late 13th-Century Anthology Manuscript 289
K athy K r ause
Contents ix
16. Sapience, Prudence, and Theatricality: Preparing the Political Princess 311

Tr acy A dams
List of Contributors 331
Index 337
Illustrations
Figure 4.1 Theophilus window, Beauvais 77

Figure 4.5 Miracles, Chartres 81
Figure 4.6 Theophilus, Souillac 82
Figure 4.7 Theophilus, Notre-Dame, Paris 83
Figure 4.8 Theophilus, Notre-Dame, Paris 84
Figure 4.9 Saint Stephen’s Portal, Notre-Dame, Paris 87
Figure 4.12 Notre-Dame, Paris 91
Figure 4.17 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Notre-Dame, Paris 100
Figure 4.18 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Notre-Dame, Paris 101
Figure 5.1 Col. A, min. 52, Fortune, Fauvel, and Vaine Gloire;
col. B, min. 55, Le Palais de la Cité; col. C, min.
56, Seine River Scene 107
Figure 5.2 (left) The Royal Motets; (right) col. A, min. 16, The
Narrator Reading His Book; (right) col. B, min 17,
Fauvel Enthroned 108
Figure 5.3 Fol. 12r, col. B, min. 18, Charnalité 110
Figure 5.4 Min. 61, Fauvel’s Wedding Night, The Chalivali 111
Figure 5.5 Min. 26, Fauvel in Colloquy with the Vices 112
xii I llustr ations
Figure 5.6 (left) col. B; (right) col. A, Conditio / O Nacio /

Mane; (left) col. C; (right) col. B, description of the wall
painting 115
Figure 5.7 (left) The Creation of Eve; (right) Two Centaurs 116
Figure 5.8 Min. 46, Fortune, Fauvel, and Gilbert de Poitiers 118
Figure 6.1 Title page of the Discours facétieux des hommes qui
font saller leurs femmes (1600) 134
Figure 15.1 Frontispiece, Paris, BnF, fr. 1553 292
Figure 15.2 Frontispiece, Richard de Saint Laurent’s
De virtutibus (depicting Robert de Béthune, abbot of
Clairmarias Abbey) 293
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the contributors to this volume for their

scholarly essays and for their deep-felt collegial recognition of Steve’s achieve-
ments. We also thank Cecilia Hsu and Samantha Pious for their essential edi-
torial assistance. Our special thanks to Philip Dunshea, Senior Acquisitions
Editor for the Humanities at Peter Lang, and to the fine work of the produc-
tion team.
Introduction
This volume of studies in honor of Stephen G. Nichols by colleagues, friends,
and students is called Revealing New Perspectives because that is what his
career exemplifies. As both the verb and adjective forms suggest, Steve has
undeniably changed the course of medieval studies in ways that have had a
global impact that continues to be profound.
We are delighted to have this opportunity to celebrate this world-class
medievalist whom we have had the great good fortune to know since the late
1970s when he hired us at Dartmouth fresh out of grad school. Since then we
have enjoyed a truly special friendship, and thanks to Steve’s vision, indomita-
ble energy, and generosity, we have collaborated on many innovative projects.
After completing his undergraduate days at Dartmouth and his graduate
degree at Yale, Steve taught briefly at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin
before joining the faculty at Dartmouth for 18 years, at Penn for 7, and at
Johns Hopkins for another 18. While building French, Romance Languages,
and Comparative Literature departments and programs at these institutions
and others, he was also invited to teach and provide administrative advice at
many other prestigious institutions both in the U.S. and abroad.
The wealth of contributions that he has authored in countless books,
articles, and colloquia, as well as digital projects, is admirably daunting, and
to do it justice would require a book in itself. So instead we would like to
focus briefly on a few of Steve’s publications that articulate some of his most
transformative ideas.
Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography (1983),1
winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize, showed how a medieval literary
artifact must be analyzed along with the artistic, architectural, political, and
historical currents that prevailed during the moment of the text’s production.
By means of a reading of the Oxford Roland alongside art, hagiography, and
history, Steve carefully charts how a historical figure can acquire the status
of a martyr. Romanesque Signs illustrates the “multi-media literacy” at issue
2 I ntroduction
in medieval textuality and the fact that secular and sacred elements and ideas
oftentimes, far from being antithetical, reinforce one another constructively.
Another inspired and inspiring insight was launched with his “Philology
in a Manuscript Culture,” in a volume of Speculum coedited with Howard
Bloch entitled The New Philology.2
Here Steve boldly proclaims that “In medieval studies, philology is the
matrix from which all else stems” (1). What is revolutionary in this concep-
tion is that he invokes a new philology that “should seek to minimize the
isolation between medieval studies and contemporary cognitive disciplines”
(1). He has always been committed to not only contextualizing the intellec-
tual and artistic production of the past in which a work was created but also
considering it according to the current theoretical optics of our time, since
each age has its own set of aesthetic and cultural realities and expectations.
It is this strong belief in the paradoxical “mutable stability” of the medie-
val text itself and of its readers over time that has also made Steve a trailblazer
in exploring philology by means of digital tools. Paul Zumthor articulated
the notion of mouvance, the instability particularly of anonymous medieval
texts, and Bernard Cerquiglini focused on the variante, or varying articula-
tions of vernacular works and their impact on textual authority. Yet Steve has
taken these notions of textual instability and their implications for authorship
and authority to a much higher level by creating a global network of possi-
bilities for studying hundreds of texts and miniatures from many disciplinary
angles. He has achieved this by spearheading the Digital Library of Medieval
Manuscripts,3 an elegantly configured website that continues to grow and
provide scholars with invaluable access to manuscripts worldwide.
Much more could be said of these and others of his visionary projects,
but we will conclude by mentioning his 2016 monograph entitled From
Parchment to Cyberspace: Medieval Literature in the Digital Age.4 This book
considers the exciting possibilities of digital tools for medieval book his-
tory and the ideological mentalities that differentiate digitized manuscripts
from critical editions. It is the narrative of a personal adventure, as is clear
from the book’s introduction entitled “Why I Wrote this Book, or Medieval
Manuscripts Unchained.” And it is an adventure from which we have all been
enriched.
Kevin Brownlee
Marina S. Brownlee
Introduction 3
Notes
1. Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1983).
2. “Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum 65, no. 1 (1990): 1–10.
3. Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts, http://d lmm.libra ry.jhu.edu/en/d igital-
libra ry-of-medieval-manuscripts.
4. From Parchment to Cyberspace: Medieval Literature in the Digital Age (New York: Peter
Lang, 2016).
Curriculum Vitae of Stephen
G. Nichols
Stephen G. Nichols , Ja mes M. Beall P rofessor E mer itus of
F r ench and Humanities and R esearch P rofessor at Johns
Hopk ins University
Education
Ph.D. Yale University (Comparative Literature), 1963.
B.A. Dartmouth College (cum laude), 1958.
Dissertation
Rhetorical Design in the Chanson de Geste (1963), dir. René Wellek.
Honors
Fellow, Medieval Academy of America, 1988.
Docteur ès Lettres Honoris Causa, University of Geneva, 1992.
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2013.
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation International Prize, Berlin/Cologne, 2009–10.
Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize Reprise, Berlin/Cologne, 2015–16.
Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, 1988–2001.
Honorary Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, 2001–present.
Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, French Ministry of Culture, 1999–2007.
Officier des Arts et Lettres, French Ministry of Culture, 2007.
Comité scientifique, Martin Bodmer Foundation, Geneva, 2015–19.
European Research Council (Brussels), Scientific Research Grants Selection Committee,
Humanities Panel, 2008–15.
6 C ur r iculum Vitae of Stephen G. Nichols
Appointments
Academic
James M. Beall Professor Emeritus, July 1, 2010–present.
Research Professor, July 1, 2010–16.
James M. Beall Professor of French and Humanities, Johns Hopkins University,
1992–2010.
Edmund J. Kahn Distinguished Professor of Humanities, University of Pennsylvania,
1986–92.
Professor of Romance Languages, University of Pennsylvania, 1985–86.
Edward Tuck Professor of French, Dartmouth College, 1984–85.
Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College, 1968–84.
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin, Madison,
1965–68.
Assistant Professor of French, University of California, Los Angeles, 1963–65.
Administrative
Director of the School of Criticism and Theory, 1995–2000.
Chair, Department of German and Romance Languages, Johns Hopkins University,
2006–09.
Chair, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, 1999–2006.
Chair, French Department, Johns Hopkins University, 1995–99.
Sheridan Director (Interim), Johns Hopkins University Libraries, 1994–95.
Director of the Louis Marin Center for the Study of French Classical and Contemporary
Culture and Science, 1993–2009.
Director of Graduate Studies, French Department, Johns Hopkins University, 1992–94.
Associate Dean for Humanities, University of Pennsylvania, 1988–91.
Chair, Romance Languages, University of Pennsylvania, 1987–88.
Director of Graduate Studies (French), Romance Languages, University of Pennsylvania,
1986–87.
Chair, French and Italian, Dartmouth College, 1982–85.
Chair, Romance Languages, Dartmouth College, 1974–77.
Chair, Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College, 1969– 71, 1973– 74, 1977–78,
1979–82.
Chair, Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1967–68.
Director of Graduate Studies, Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin, 1965–67.
Other Appointments
Advisory Council, Schoenberg Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Libraries, Philadelphia, 2014–present.
Visiting Professor, Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität, Berlin, 2016–17.
Visiting Professor, Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität, Berlin, 2009–10.
Visiting Professor, Albertus-Magnus University, Cologne, 2009–10.
Chair, Board of Directors, Council of Library Information Resources (CLIR), 2009–12.

Board of Directors, Council on Library Information Resources (CLIR), 2005–08.
Visiting Professor, Historisches Kolleg, Munich, June 2003.
Faculty, School of Criticism and Theory, 1989, 1995, 2001, 2005.
Visiting Professor, University of Munich, June 2005.
Visiting Professor, Albertus Magnus University, Cologne, 2004.
Directeur d’Études Associé, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, November 2001.
Visiting Professor, École Normale Supérieure (rue d’Ulm), Paris, June 2001.
Visiting Professor, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, 1996–2001.
Visiting Professor, École Normale Supérieure (Ulm), Paris, November 1999.
Visiting Professor, Université de Paris 7, December–January 1997–98.
Visiting Professor, École Normale Supérieure (Ulm), Paris, December 1996.
Visiting Professor, Dartmouth College, 1995–96.
Directeur d’Études Associé, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 1995.
Visiting Professor, Romance Languages, University of Pennsylvania, Fall 1995.
External Advisory Board, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, 1993–99.
Director, Andrew W. Mellon Summer Seminar in the Humanities, Johns Hopkins
University, May 25–July 1, 1993, May 24–June 30, 1994.
Fellow, University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, 1990.
Co-Director, NEH Summer Seminar, The Medieval Lyric, Mt. Holyoke College, 1987.
Academic Director, Dartmouth Institute for Executive Education, 1984–85.
Visiting Professor, French, University of California, Irvine, 1985.
Faculty, Dartmouth Institute for Executive Education, 1980–85.
Faculty, Comparative Literature Institute, New York University, 1979–81, 1983.
Visiting Professor of Humanities, Arizona State University, 1981.
Visiting Professor of Humanities, Exeter University (England), 1980.
Visiting Professor of Humanities, Tel Aviv University, 1977.
Director, NEH Summer Seminar, Medieval Epic and Narrative, 1975, 1979.
Visiting Fellow, Medieval Institute, University of Toronto, 1971.
Grants, Awards
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Officer’s Grant for development of the Digital Library of
Medieval Manuscripts at Johns Hopkins University, March 1–July 31, 2013, $50,000.
Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Research Grant, October 2010–2013, $40,000.
Andrew W. Mellon Scholarly Communications Research Grant, “Innovative Scholarship
for Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Delivered in an Interoperable Environment at
Johns Hopkins University,” January 2011–March 2014, $346, 281.12.
Andrew Mellon Foundation Grant to continue the project for Digital Surrogates of the
Roman de la Rose (with the Eisenhower Library of Johns Hopkins), 2006–2009,
$719,000.
Distinguished Visiting Professor, Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen,
October 2003.
National Science Foundation Grant: “A Data Capture Framework and Testbed for
Cultural Heritage Materials” (Rose Project), $497,827, 2002–05.
ACLS Senior Fellowship, 2001–02.
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 1988.
James Russell Lowell Prize for the Outstanding Book, Modern Language
Association, 1984.
NEH Senior Fellowship for Independent Study and Research, 1978–79.
American Council of Learned Societies Grant, 1968–69.
American Philosophical Society Grants, 1968, 1977.
Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, 1966–67.
Samuel S. Fels Dissertation Fellowship, Yale University, 1962–63.
Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, Yale University, 1959–60.
Rotary Foundation Fellowship (France), 1958–59.
Editorial Work
Editor, Medieval Interventions: New Light on Traditional Thinking, Peter Lang
Publishing, 2014– present.
Co-Founder, Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Culture, hybrid e-journal and print
journal published by the Johns Hopkins University Press (Project Muse), first issue,
Spring 2012.
Co-Editor, Re-T hinking Theory: Critical Discourses in the Humanities, a book series pub-
lished at the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008–14.
Principal Investigator, Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts, Milton S. Eisenhower
Library, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1996–present (URL: http://
dlmm.libra ry.jhu.edu/en/d igital-l ibra ry-of-medieval-manuscripts/, accessed 1996).
Editor, MLN, French issue, 1995–2009.
Co-Editor, Parallax: Revisions of Culture and Society, a book series published at the
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987–2009.
Editorial Board, Publication of the Modern Language Association, 1988– 89.
Advisory Committee, PMLA, 1980–84.
Editorial Board, Medievalia, 1975–95.
Editorial Board, Medievalia et Humanistica, 1974–85.
Editorial Board, Olifant, 1974–83.
Editorial Committee, PMLA, 1969–74.
Advisory Editor, Appleton-Century Crofts Old French Texts Series, 1963–68.
Conferences Organized
Some 45 international conferences on such topics as “The Secret Life of Texts” (with
Marina Brownlee); “Europe and the Mediterranean World” (with Andreas Kablitz
and Joachim Küpper); “Digital Approaches to Medieval Manuscripts”; “The Present
of the Religious Past” (with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Joachim Küpper); “Poetic
Knowledge in the Troubadours” (with Sarah Spence, Sarah Kay, Simon Gaunt, and
Daniel Heller-Roazen); “Living Theory” (with Amanda Anderson); “Les Altérités
au Moyen Âge”; and “The Medieval Miscellany” (with Sigfried Wenzel).
Books
Mind and Environment in Medieval Manuscripts. Series: Medieval Interventions: New
Light on Traditional Thinking. New York, Bern, Berlin: Peter Lang Publishing, 2021.
From Parchment to Cyberspace: Medieval Literature in the Digital Age. Series: Medieval
Interventions: New Light on Traditional Thinking. New York, Bern, Berlin: Peter
Lang Publishing, 2016.
Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1983.
James Russell Lowell Prize for Best Book, Modern Language Association, 1984. Paperback
edition: New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Second edition, revised and
expanded, Aurora, CO: The Davies Group, 2011.
Formulaic Diction and Thematic Composition in the “Chanson de Roland”. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961. Reprinted in Classical and Medieval
Literary Criticism, ed. D. Poupard and J.O. Kronik. Detroit: Gale Research
Co., 1987.
Books & Special Journal Issues Edited

Spectral Sea: Mediterranean Palimpsests in European Culture (with Joachim Küpper).
Series: Medieval Interventions: New Light on Traditional Thinking, 3. New York: Peter
Divisible Derridas (with Victor Taylor). Aurora, CO: Noeisis Press, The Davis Group, 2017.
De Theoria: Early Modern Studies in Memory of Eugene Vance, special issue of MLN, 127,
no. 5 (December 2012).
The Long Shadow of Political Theology, special issue of MLN (October 2011).
Rethinking the Medieval Senses: Heritage /Fascinations /Frames. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes (with John D. Lyons). Second
edition, Aurora, CO: The Davies Group, 2005.
Altérités du Moyen Âge, special issue of Littérature, 130, June 2003.
The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany (with Siegfried Wenzel).
Recentiores Series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Medievalism and the Modernist Temper: On the Discipline of Medieval Studies (with
Howard Bloch). Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Electronic re-publication,
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Commentary as Cultural Artifact. Special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly (Fall 1992)
(with Lee Patterson).
The New Medievalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Electronic
edition, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Boundaries and Transgressions. Special issue, Stanford French Review (Fall–W inter
1990–91).
The New Philology. Special issue, Speculum 65 (January 1990). Best Special Issue 1990
(Honorable Mention) International Awards Competition, Council of Editors of
Learned Journals.
The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages. Special issue, Romanic Review (January 1988).
Images of Power: History/Text/Discourse. Special issue, Yale French Studies (1986) (with
Kevin Brownlee).
Medieval and Renaissance Theories of Representation: New Reflections (with Nancy
J. Vickers). Special issue, Poetics Today (1984).
Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes (with John D. Lyons).
Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982.
The Troubadour Lyric: Texts and Contexts. Special issue, L’Esprit Créateur (1979).
The Meaning of Mannerism (with Franklin Robinson). Hanover: University Press of New
England, 1972.
Comparatists at Work. Boston: Ginn-Blaisdell, 1968.
Guillaume de Lorris, “Le Roman de la Rose.” New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967.
Reprinted by Irvington Publishers, 1972.
René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.
The Songs of Bernard de Ventadorn (with A. Bartlett Giamatti et al.). Chapel Hill: North
Carolina, 1962. Reprinted 1968.
Report
The Evidence in Hand: Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections
(Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2001).
Reprinted continuously, translated into Arabic and Chinese.
Journal Founded
Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Culture. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
Co-founded with Nadia Altschul. Founded as an e-journal with simultaneous hard-
copy publication.
Contributions to Books
“Castration as Exemplum: The Making of a Medieval Trope,” in Coups de Maître: Studies
in Medieval and Early Modern Literature in Honor of John D. Lyons. New York: Peter
“Places of Thought: Environment, Perception, and Textual Identity in Medieval

Vernacular Manuscripts,” in Futures of Medieval French Literature, eds. Jane Gilbert
and Miranda Griffin. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2021.
“The Year 1000 and the Promise of a New Millennium through the White Mantle of
Churches,” in The Cambridge Guide to the Architecture of Christianity, ed. Richard
Etlin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Foreword, Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages, eds. Mark Chinca
and Christopher Young. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
“Reading the Digital Roman de la Rose,” in Approaches to Teaching the “Roman de la
Rose,” eds. Daisy Delogu and Anne-Hélène Miller. New York: Modern Language
Association, 2021.
“Language, Soul, & Body (Parts),” in Body and Spirit in the Middle Ages, ed. Gaia
Gubbini, 79–87. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020.
“What’s in a Word? Language, Philosophy, & Satire in Troubadour Poetry,” in
Revisioning French Culture, ed. Andrew Sobanet, 187–211. Liverpool: Liverpool
“Greek Fathers, Roman Tyrants, Spanish Martyrs & the Invention of European Vernacular
Language,” in Spectral Sea: Mediterranean Palimpsests in European Culture, eds.
Stephen G. Nichols and Joachim Küpper, 69–90. New York, Bern, Berlin, Brussels,
Vienna, Oxford, Warsaw: Peter Lang Publishing, 2017.
“Paris,” in Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418, ed. David Wallace, 1:11–42.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
“Pour une lecture dynamique des manuscrits médiévaux,” in De toutes Flours: Mélanges
en l’honneur de Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015.
“What is a Manuscript Culture?” in The Medieval Manuscript: Cultural Approaches,
eds. Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen, 34–59. Cambridge: Cambridge
“Counter-figural Topics: Theorizing Romance with Eugene Vinaver and Eugene Vance,”
in De Theoria: Early Modern Studies in Memory of Eugene Vance. MLN, Comparative
literature special issue (Supplement), 127, no. 5 (December 2012): S174–S216.
“New Challenges for New Medievalism,” in Rethinking the New Medievalism, eds. R.
Howard Bloch, Alison Calhoun, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Joachim Küpper,
and Jeanette Patterson, 12–38. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
“Political Grail: On Theological Fictionality,” in The Long Shadow of Political Theology,
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“The Medieval Author: An Idea whose Time hadn’t Come?” in The Author in Medieval
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Introduction, Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, eds. R. Howard Bloch and
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Foreword, The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. June McCash, xi–xix.
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“Philology in Auerbach’s Drama of (Literary) History,” in Literary History and the
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“In Hoc Signo Vinces: Constantine, Mother of Harm,” in Monarcha della Pitture: Piero
della Francesca and his Legacy, ed. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, 37–47. Studies in the
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“Commentary and/as Image,” in Commentary as Cultural Artifact, eds. Stephen G.
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965–92.
“Ekphrasis, Iconoclasm, and Desire,” in Rethinking the Romance of the Rose, eds. Kevin
Brownlee and Sylvia Huot, 133–66. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
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“Prophetic Discourse: St. Augustine to Christine de Pizan,” in The Bible in the
Middle Ages: Its Influence on Literature and Art, ed. Bernard S. Levy, 51–76.
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“Marie de France’s Common Places,” in Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and
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“Voice and Writing in Augustine and the Troubadours,” in Vox in Texta: Orality
and Textuality in the Middle Ages, eds. A. N. Doane and Carol Pasternak.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
“The New Medievalism: Tradition and Discontinuity in Medieval Culture,” in The New
Medievalism, eds. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols,
1–26. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
“An Intellectual Anthropology of Marriage in the Middle Ages,” in The New
Medievalism, eds. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols,
70–95. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
“On the Sociology of Manuscript Illumination,” in Annotation and Its Texts, ed. Stephen
Barney, 43–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
“Remodeling Models: Modernism and the Middle Ages,” in Modernité au Moyen Age: Le
défi du passée, eds. Brigitte Cazelles and Charles Méla, 45–72. Geneva: Droz, 1990.
“Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” in The New Philology, special issue of Speculum 65

(January 1990): 1–10.
“Deflections of the Body in the Old French Lay,” in Boundary and Transgression in
Medieval Culture, eds. Kevin Brownlee, Marina S. Brownlee, and Stephen G.
Nichols. Stanford French Review 14, nos. 1–2 (1990): 27–50.
“Medieval Women and the Politics of Poetry,” in Displacements: Women, Tradition,
Literatures in French, eds. Joan DeJean and Nancy K. Miller, 99–125. Baltimore: Johns
“Empowering New Discourse,” in Reconceiving Chaucer: Literary Theory and Historical
Interpretation, ed. Thomas Hahn. Special issue of Exemplaria 2 (January 1990):
127–47.
“The Politics of Periodization: A Romanesque Example,” in Art and Literature 1, ed.
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Foreword, Fictional Truth, by Michael Riffaterre, vi–x. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
“Medieval Women Writers: Aisthesis and the Powers of Marginality,” in The Politics
of Tradition: Placing Women in French Literature, eds. Joan DeJean and Nancy
K. Miller. Special issue of Yale French Studies 75 (Fall 1988): 77–94.
“1127: William IX and the Early Troubadours,” in A New History of French Literature,
ed. Denis Holier, 30–36. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
“Working Late: Marie de France and the Value of Poetry,” in Women in French
Literature, ed. Michel Guggenheim, 7–16. Stanford French and Italian Studies, 58.
Stanford: Anima Libri, 1988.
“Rewriting Marriage in the Middle Ages,” in The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, ed.
Stephen G. Nichols. Special issue of Romanic Review 79 (January 1988): 42–62.
“Solomon’s Wife: Deceit, Desire, and the Geneology of Romance,” in Space, Time,
Image, Sign: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. J.A. Heffernan, 19–40.
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“Peire Cardenal,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, 9:483–85.
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“Theosis and Kingship: Greek Ideals and Latin Narrative,” in The Meeting of Two
Worlds: Cultural Exchange Between East and West during the Period of the Crusades,
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“Le Lai du Cor,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, 7:317–19.
New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1986.
“Fission & Fusion: Mediations of Power in Medieval History and Literature,” in Images
of Power: History/Discourse/Literature, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Stephen J. Nichols.
special issue of Yale French Studies 70 (1986): 21–41.
“Amorous Imitation: Bakhtin, Augustine, Le Roman d’Eneas,” in Romance: Generic
Transformation from Chretien de Troyes to Cervantes, eds. Kevin Brownlee,
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1985.
“The Promise of Performance: Discourse and Desire in Early Troubadour Lyric,” in
The Dialectic of Discovery, eds. John D. Lyons and Nancy J. Vickers, 93–108.
Lexington: French Forum, 1984.
“From Passion to Pietà: Modes of Death in the Legend of Roland,” in Literary Theory
and Criticism: Festschrift in Honor of René Wellek, ed. Joseph Strelka, 1041–73.
Bern: Lang, 1984.
“François Villon,” in European Writers: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance. ed. W.T.H.
Jackson, 535–70. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1983.
“Romanesque Imitation or Imitating the Romans,” in Mimesis: From Mirror to Method,
Augustine to Descartes, eds. Lyons and Nichols, 36–70. Hanover: University of
New England Press, 1982.
“Towards an Aesthetic of the Provençal Lyric II: Marcabru,” in Italian Literature: Roots
and Branches, eds. Giose Rimanelli and Kenneth Achity, 15–36. New Haven: Yale
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Gentil, 569–85. Paris: S.E.D.E.S., 1973.
“The Medieval Lyric and Its Public,” in Medievalia et Humanistica, ed. Paul Clogan,
133–53. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve, 1972.
“The Rhetoric of Recapitulation in the Chanson de Guillaume,” in Studies in Honor of
Tatiana Fotich, 79–92. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1972.
“Vision and Tradition in John Hawkes’s Second Skin,” in Studies in Second Skin, ed. John
Graham, 69–82. Columbus: Charles E. Merrill, 1971.
“Towards an Aesthetic of the Provençal Canso,” in Disciplines of Criticism, eds. Demetz,
Greene, and Nelson, 349–74. Hew Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.
“Georg Lukacs: The Problematics of Dialectical Criticism,” in Criticism, Speculative and
Analytical Essays, ed. L.S. Dembo, 75–92. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1968.
“The Rhetoric of Sincerity in the Roman de la Rose,” in Romance Studies in Memory of
Edward B. Ham, ed. U.T. Holmes, 115–29. Hayward, California, 1967.
“Benedetto Croce,” in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. W.B.
Fleischmann. New York: Ungar, 1967. Revision for second edition, 1980.
“Ethical Criticism and Medieval Literature: Le Roman de Tristan,” in Medieval Secular
Literature, ed. Will Matthews, 68–88. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1965.
“Henri d’Andeli, The Lay of Aristotle: Verse Translation with Introductory Note,” in
Masterpieces of World Literature: The Medieval Age, 320–30. New York: Dell, 1963.
Articles
“Erich Auerbach’s Political Philology,” Critical Inquiry 45 (Autumn 2018): 29–46.
“Digitized Manuscripts & Literary Hermeneutics: New Challenges,” Poetica: Zeitschrift
für Sprach-und Literaturwissenschaft 48 (2017): 279–303.
“Codex as Critic: One Manuscript’s Dialogue with the Roman de la Rose,” Digital
Philology: A Journal of Medieval Culture 6, no. 1 (2017): 90–120.
“Mutable Stability, a Medieval Paradox: The Case of the Roman de la Rose,” Queste 23
(2016): 71–103.
“Dynamic Reading of Medieval Manuscripts,” Florilegium 32 (2015): 19–57.
“Materialities of the Manuscript: Codex and Court Culture in 14th-Century Paris,”
Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Culture 4, no. 1 (Spring 2015).
“The Anxiety of Irrelevance: Digital Humanities and Contemporary Critical Theory,”
Poetica : Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 45 (2013): 1–17.
“Global or Universal Language? From Babel to the Illustrious Vernacular,” Digital
Philology, a Journal of Medieval Culture 1 (Spring 2012): 73–109.
“Philology as Blood Sport: The Romanic Review’s First Decade,” Romanic Review 101,
nos. 1–2 (2011): 75–89.
“Contingency and Post-Figural Historiography in the French Restoration, 1815–1830,”
MLN 124, no. 4 (September 2009): 777–96.
“Time to Change Our Thinking: Dismantling the Silo Model of Digital Scholarship,”
Ariadne 58 (January 2009): http://w ww.ariad ne.ac.uk/issue58/n ichols/.
“Christian Delacapagne, Philosopher of the World,” MLN 123, no. 4 (September
2008): 692–96.
“Erich Auerbach: History, Literature, and Jewish Philosophy,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch
58, no. 7 (November 2008): 161–86.
“When the Library is Your Co-Teacher,” Bulletin of the Council of Library and Information
Resources, Washington, D.C., September 2008.
“Reading and Seeing Troubadours in a Manuscript Context,” Poetica: Zeitschrift für
Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 38 (2006): 297–328.
“Writing the New Middle Ages,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (March 2005): 422–41.
“Laughter as Gesture: Hilarity and the Anti-Sublime,” NeoHelicon 32, no. 2 (2005): 375–89.
“The Narrative of Nation: Political Allegory in 14th-Century France,” Romanistisches
Jahrbuch (2001): 1–25.
“Histoire et mythe ou le fantasme de l’historiographie,” in A partir de Michel de
Certeau: de nouvelles frontières: Rue Descartes/25, Collège international de philoso-
phie, 96–106. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.
“Re-reading the Apocalypse,” in Revisions in Romanticism: Memory and History, ed.
Robyn Gardner, Mattoid 55 (Winter 2000).
Chinese translation of “Building History: Romantic Historiography in Restoration
France,” in Chung- wai Literary Monthly (January 2000): 129– 57. (Published
January 2001.)
“Why Material Philology? Some Thoughts,” special issue of Zeitschrift für deutsche
Philologie 116 (1997): 1–21.
“Daniel Poirion: Medievalist of Two Continents,” Speculum 72 (July 1997): 931–33.
“René Wellek: Comparatist and Mentor,” Comparative and General Literature 44
(1996): 46. (Published 1998.)
“ ‘Supple Like Water’: Lyric and Diaspora,” MLN 111, no. 5 (1996): 990–1009.
“Textes mobiles, images motrices dans une civilisation manuscriptuaire,” Littérature 99
(October 1995): 19–33.
“Picture, Image, and Subjectivity in Medieval Culture,” MLN 108 (September
1993): 617–37.
“Seeing Food: Ekphrasis and Still Life in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” MLN
106 (September 1991): 818–51.
“The Image as Textual Unconscious: Medieval Manuscripts,” L’Esprit Créateur 29
(1989): 7–23.
“Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Beginning of Vernacular Lyric,” The Waverly Consort
Program Guide 4 (1988): 2–10.
“Images of Arthur,” Humanities 7 (June 1986): 3–5.
“Deeper into History,” L’Esprit Créateur 23 (1983): 91–102.
“The Light of the Word: Narrative, Image, and Truth,” New Literary History 11 (Spring
1980): 535–4 4.
“Sign as (Hi)story in the Couronnement de Louis,” Romanic Review 81 (January
1980): 1–9.
“The Generative Function of Chant and Récit in the Old French Epic,” Olifant 6
(Summer 1979): 305–25.
“Introducing the Literature: A Modest Proposal,” American Comparative Literature
Association Newsletter 10 (1978): 14–20.
“A Poetics of Historicism? Recent Trends in Medieval Literary Study,” Medievalia et
Humanistica 8 (1977): 77–101.
“Signs of Royal Beauty Bright: Word and Image in the Legend of Charlemagne,” Olifant
4 (1977): 21–47.
“Canso > Conso: Structures of Parodic Humor in Three Songs of Guilhem IX,” L’Esprit
Créateur 16 (Spring 1976): 16–29.
“Undergraduate Comparative Literature: Profile 1974,” American Comparative
Literature Association Newsletter 7 (Fall 1975): 1–32.
“N.E.H. Summer Seminar: Interaction of Myth and Culture in Medieval Narrative
Literature,” Olifant 2 (1975): 198–204.
“The Spirit of Truth: Epic Modes in Medieval Literature,” New Literary History 1
(1970): 365–86.
“Remembrance of Things Recreated: Aspects of New French Criticism,” Contemporary
Literature 11 (Spring 1970): 243–68.
“Roland Barthes and the Science of Literature,” Contemporary Literature 10 (Winter
1969): 51–77.
“Interaction of Life and Literature in the Peregrinationes ad loca sancta and the Chanson
de Geste,” Speculum 44 (1969): 51–77.
“Historical Illusion and Poetic Reality in the Chanson de Geste,” French Review 43
(1969): 23–33.
“Georg Lukacs: The Problematics of Dialectical Criticism,” Contemporary Literature 9
(1969): 349–66.
“Marot, Villon and the Roman de la Rose: Part I,” Studies in Philology 63 (April
1966): 135–43.
“Marot, Villon and the Roman de la Rose: Part II,” Studies in Philology 64 (January
1967): 25–43.
“Realistic Perception in Twelfth-Century French Literature,” L’Esprit Créateur 5 (Winter
1965): 119–33.
“Crítica moralizante y literatura medieval,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 2
(1965): 119–31.
“Discourse in Froissart’s Chroniques,” Speculum 39 (1964): 279–87.
“Roland’s Echoing Horn,” Romance Notes 5 (1964): 78–84.
“Style and Structure in Gormont et Isembart,” Romania 84 (1963): 500–53.
“La Tension dramatique du Sponsus,” Romance Notes 3 (1962): 69–74.
Papers
Roughly three hundred invited lectures in North America, the United Kingdom, Europe,
Israel, Japan, and China at universities, conferences, and colloquia.
Reviews
Published in such journals as Speculum, Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature
Studies, The American Historical Review, MLN, Medievalia et Humanistica, Bulletin
of the History of Medicine, Romance Philology, Canadian Review of Comparative
Literature, H-France, New Republic, The Nation, and Los Angeles Times.
Essays
The contributions to this volume are divided into five sections: “Philology,”
“Visuals,” “Lyric,” “Alterity,” and “Rewritings.” While it can, of course, be
argued that each essay partakes of more than one of these categories, they
have been globally organized into the category that predominates in their
articulation.
Philology
Gabrielle Spiegel turns her attention to an analysis of Steve Nichols’s seminal
article on “material philology,” entitled “Philology in a Manuscript Culture.”
As she indicates, materiality and culture seem to be antithetical terms, since
philology involves the study of words (their structure, meaning, and histor-
ical development), and thus does not suggest materiality. The paramount
significance of Nichols’s material philology (in the celebrated 1990 issue of
Speculum entitled “The New Philology”) established what he termed a “post-
modern return to the origins of medieval studies,” meaning by this that there
are no edited, thus no fixed versions of medieval texts. Such fixity would
distort the production and reproduction/revision of manuscript culture—a ll
its actual variations in wording, interpolations, annotations, visual images,
musical notation, etc. Knowing that manuscripts tend to extend beyond the
life of the author by decades or even centuries, Nichols conceives of “the
medieval matrix as a place of radical contingency; of chronology, of anachro-
nism, of conflicting subjects, of representation.” Spiegel lucidly conveys the
challenge inherent in recognizing a text’s stability, on the one hand, and its
inevitable transformation, its seemingly paradoxical “mutable stability” on
the other. She values his dynamic appreciation of medieval textuality and
the fact, as she explains, that “each manuscript version of a work has a story
to tell about itself,” about its moment of production and about the cultural
climate in which it was forged. The final frontier of Nichols’s innovative
approach is the digital environment and its possibilities in our appreciation of
22 E ssays
the ever-changing world of material philology, which Spiegel rightly sees as

an exciting new world of possibilities.
An equally essential dimension of philology is addressed by Mark Chinca
in his essay, namely the role of affect. Recalling Socrates’ self-description as
an “aner philologos” (“a man fond of discourse”), Chinca notes that Werner
Hammacher shares his belief in the affective essence of philology, viewing
Socrates as “the exemplar of a philological practice that never forgets its foun-
dation in affect even when it has become institutionalized as an academic dis-
cipline with its techniques of textual criticism, its methods of interpretation,
its established canons, genre classifications, and narratives of literary history.”
Moreover, philology, as Schwindt explains in his “Traumtext,” is profoundly
paradoxical in that “the authentic character of the text can only appear in
the unauthentic medium of its descriptive reconstruction.” In addition, as
Chinca affirms, poetic self-reflection stems from the same procedures as phil-
ological analysis. The paradigmatic proof of this observation is in Gottfried
von Strassburg’s Tristan, where “philology discovers its own reflection and
anticipation” in the description of the little dog Petitcreu in lines 15791–99.
The words used to describe this diminutive canine are communicated not
by the narrator, but through the conflicting accounts of various characters.
Indeed, none of Petitcreu’s commentators can give an objectively accurate
description of his color, thereby pointing to the basic contingency of poetic
language. And because of the notable discrepancies contained in Petitcreu’s
descriptions, Chinca paradoxically concludes that the “language applied …
reduces language to silence,” further proof of its inherent contingency.
Philology’s concern with the historical development of words and their
meanings is charted by Daniel Heller-Roazen, who traces the example of
the term “schlemiel,” which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is
a colloquial term (originally and chiefly in Jewish usage) denoting “an awk-
ward or clumsy person, a blunderer; a habitually unlucky person; a foolish
or pathetic person.” Heller-Roazen begins his genealogy of Peter Schlemihl
with Chrétien de Troyes, who was an innovator, among other ways, in cre-
ating “heroes remembered for their poor judgment, foolishness, and misfor-
tune.” Unlike the outcasts and outsiders of the Arabic “bandit poets” and
the persecuted, exiled figures found in Old Norse and Icelandic sagas, Peter
Schlemihl first appeared in 1814 in The Marvelous History of Peter Schlemihl
written in German by the Franco-German writer Adelbert von Chamisso.
Schlemihl takes the radical step of selling his shadow to the Gray Man,
thereby becoming rich, but at the same time unable to be a part of the human
community. Though some readers attempt to categorize Schlemihl as a vari-
ation on Goethe’s Faust and the Gray Man as a version of Mephistopheles,
Essays 23
he quite is different. Left without either a shadow or money, he becomes a

patient in a “Schlemilium,” an institution founded to take care of Schlemihl
and other unfortunate beings, as his name has now become a common noun
and all the patients therein are named “schlemihls.” A philologist in his own
right, Heinrich Heine notes 30 years after Chamisso’s tale that the name
“schlemihl” does not originate with it, but rather with the Hebrew bible in
the book of Numbers, where the name comes to signify a clumsy person. And
by his verbal sleuthing, Heine forges “a new word from an ancient condition.”
Visuals
In his essay, Howard Bloch begins by focusing on visual renderings of the
narrative of Saint Theophilus, given that he is such a popular subject. This
saint, whose name means “friend of God,” was in fact so significant that
“perhaps no figure is more present in medieval stained glass than the way-
ward cleric” who signs a contract with the devil, but thereafter, weary of the
things of this world, renounces it in order to return to the faith. Bloch sees
the Theophilus narrative as the story of a “realist,” a “rationalist,” a “relativ-
ist,” and even an “existentialist” who mirrors the changing urban values of
13th-century society. Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr on record, as
well as Abelard, who famously scrutinized theology according to philosophy,
are, likewise, read provocatively by Bloch as “relativists” and “existentialists.”
In a final section, he offers a thought-provoking contemplation of philoso-
phy’s impact on art and on architectural building style, aligning Abelard’s
relativism with the “optical relativism” of Gothic architecture, whose flying
buttress he envisions as a “syllogism in stone.”
Moving from the materially visual to an unillustrated verbal visualiza-
tion of a wall painting in the satirical allegory that is the Roman de Fauvel,
Nancy Regalado chooses this complex moment of manuscript fr. 146 for a
strategic reason. The description of the throne room of the evil horse, Fauvel,
is a particularly rich moment because it crystallizes a question that is key to
many medieval manuscripts, namely, “How do textual, musical, or pictorial
additions to and even page layout of an existing text bring out historical
allusions and political meanings in the minds of readers?” The work was
composed in three parts: in 1310, in 1314, and in 1316, the last emendation
being an expanded version by Chaillou involving 2,700 new verses compris-
ing such diverse matière as love lyrics, topical poems, a moral commentary on
the reigning French monarchy, a rhymed chronicle, 78 illustrations, and 169
musical compositions both in Latin and French. Regalado astutely situates the
reader of this manuscript in a non-linear relationship to it—by “zigzagging”
24 E ssays
back and forth between the dominant atemporal, allegorical satire of the text
and visibly temporal references to contemporary events and people.
In a provocative statement regarding medieval theater—t he genre of farce,
but more broadly all theatrical forms—Jody Enders offers a third type of
visual appreciation: neither the material stained glass nor the verbal painting
of a throne, but the visual possibilities and willed ambiguities of the stage. As
she explains, “What we do not see on the page is often what matters the most
… mime, gesture, song, dance, or vocal inflection.” The opposite—silence—
can be equally telling: “Silence does not always mean what we think it does;
nor does it necessarily denote consent.” Words are clearly less important than
gesture, particularly in farce. Theater is inevitably a kind of translation, and
the page is a space full of possibilities given the multiple participants who are
needed to produce it, and, of course, the boundless possibilities of gesture
and inflection in one and the same actor. An additional layer of complexity
results when the title page displays a woodcut that has nothing to do with the
play itself. Enders illustrates how a deceptively chosen visual can distort the
meanings of a work, reducing them to a serious misreading. She concludes
her essay with a meditation on the seemingly paradoxical combination in
theater: its lack of subtlety, even its cruelty, functions with its possibilities as
a vehicle for ethical reflection.
Lyric
The perennial fascination with age and its characteristics is the topic that
Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet has chosen to consider in her contribution,
with a focus on the lyric poet François Villon. Like Dante, Villon consid-
ered the 35th year to constitute the midpoint of life. Known for his alleged
unsavory reputation as a murderer, thief, and vagabond, Villon’s lyric output
is unique in its treatment of youth and old age, both of which he charts
carefully in his Lais and Testament. Indeed, he is obsessed by youth and
old age, and consistently presents them, in Cerquiglini-Toulet’s words, with
“abruptness” and a “lack of evolution.” He writes, for example, of a woman
who is first “young” and then “old,” with no intervening stages of aging. As
for himself, Villon has the striking habit of self-presenting either as a child or
as an old man—never as an adult. His unique approach to human chronology
is “not that of a puer senex, but rather, a figure of Merlin in constant meta-
morphosis.” Childhood is evoked both in the Lais and the Testament as a
mechanism for ridiculing the aged, and old men are, in Cerquiglini-Toulet’s
words, akin to “faux-children.” In a bleak portrayal, the young are presented
as meting out revenge against the old, who are impotent, in a stark portrayal
Essays 25
of life as a harsh and abrupt progression from cradle to grave in a uniquely

bitter lyric voice.
A markedly different kind of lyric expression is explored by Joachim
Küpper in the uniquely Iberian and anonymous cantiga de amigo (“friend
song”) corpus, a genre that was penned in the 13th and 14th centuries (from
the 1220s to 1400). This lyric corpus, comprising some 500 poems, rep-
resents the largest body of female-voiced love lyric that has survived from
either ancient or medieval Europe. The first-person voice in these poems
is virtually always a girl, her mother, the girl’s girlfriend, or her boy-
friend. Stylistically, they are characterized by simple strophic forms, with
repetition, variation, and parallelism, and are marked by the use of a refrain
in roughly 90 percent of the texts. Gil Vicente (1465–1536), the renowned
Portuguese playwright and poet who acted in his own plays, as well as being
an extraordinary goldsmith, was fascinated by this popular poetic form fea-
turing a female voice that speaks with unadorned immediacy about physical
attraction and carnal love. Küpper focuses on this corpus by considering
three poems: one by Vicente, and two anonymous traditional compositions
classed as “rimas amorosas”/“vilancicos y letras.” Because of the cantiga
de amigo’s frank discussion of sexual attraction and its pleasures—a girl
reveling in the plucking of the rose by the young woman rather than the
man—Küpper signals the striking alterity of this Spanish lyric poetry in
comparison with Italy, using the key examples of Dante and Petrarch, where,
rather than singing of physical consummation, there is an expression of spir-
itualized love, as eros is transformed into agape.
The importance of space— more precisely, the topography of lyric
space—is the focus of Albert Lloret’s contribution to this volume. He selects
the privileged example of the illustrious 15th-century Valencian poet Jordi
de Sant Jordi, who was influenced by troubadours (as well by as Oton de
Granson, Guillaume de Machaut, and Petrarch), and who wrote in a hybrid
language combining Catalan and Occitan. Lloret provides for a “metacrit-
ical approach to the interplay between space and lyric”: drawing his inspi-
ration from Malpas’s recasting of Heidegger, he analyzes two of Jordi’s 18
poems in terms of “the ontology of space.” The key example is a poem that
could have been written in one of three radically different environments in
1423: 1—while the author and his men languished in prison, waiting to be
ransomed; 2—as a recollection after his release; or 3—as part of a masque
performed before the court. Lloret illustrates how texts are thus not simply
verbal communication, “situated uses of language,” but rather lived events at
the moment of their enunciation and reception, not only at the place where
they are first performed and published, but throughout space and time.
26 E ssays
Every poem is a complex and unfolding textual event, since it continues to be

“edited, reedited, iterated, and reproduced.” Lloret speaks very appropriately
of the ever-changing “nested” quality of places where the text is located and
continues to evolve.
Alterity
The contribution by Michel Zink speaks to the otherness of the Middle
Ages in the works of two 19th-century titans of French letters who sought
to recuperate the literature of medieval France for the “modern” 19th
century: A natole France, “one of the most famous, admired and (mildly)
controversial French writers,” and Gaston Paris, “the most prominent fig-
ure in romance philology and medieval French literature” in all of Europe.
Gaston Paris (who, along with Paul Meyer, founded Romania, the illustrious
academic journal devoted to the representation and interpretation of medi-
eval Romance studies) sought to understand the cultural values of medieval
literature. For him, religious contexts are supremely important to a decoding
of the literary expression of the Middle Ages. In Zink’s words, “it is impos-
sible to distinguish or to separate religious literature from secular literature.”
In fact, Zink adds that for Gaston Paris, “there is no such thing as secular
literature.” Interestingly enough, however, Gaston Paris does not look to
the Latin tradition as the root of medieval French literary inspiration, but to
other traditions like folklore and Celtic sources. Anatole France was attracted
to medieval French literature, and he counted Gaston Paris as one of his
circle of close friends, even dedicating his composition Le Jongleur de Notre
Dame to him. Paris’s works are “pastiches of the hagiographical literature of
late Antiquity and of the Middle Ages.” It is surprising, moreover, to note
that despite his devotion to the field, Gaston Paris sees medieval literature as
a kind of “naïve” religious literature, which is the result of his own atheism.
This would also explain his quest for Celtic and folkloric inspiration rather
than Latin-based sources. It was Anatole France, by contrast, who wrote that
religious belief endowed medieval literature with the quality of “sensitivity.”
An appreciably different kind of temporal alterity is at issue in Nadia
Altschul’s inquiry into the medievalism that endured in Latin America long
after the end of the European Middle Ages. To achieve this, she theorizes Alejo
Carpentier’s 1953 novel, Los pasos perdidos, which moves from contemporary
New York City to an unnamed capital city in Latin America from another
century in the jungle. In accord with Sánchez Albornoz’s idea that “the con-
quest of America was a continuation of the so-called Spanish Reconquest,”
Altschul sees Carpentier’s use of magical realism not as “an encounter with
Essays 27
the unexpected entity of the subcontinent, but a fictionalization of stages of

development associated with modernization theory.” The “medievality” that
the narrator encounters in the capital city is dramatized, for example, by the
anachronism of protruding roof-top television antennas next to a monumen-
tal building from the 16th century of Phillip II. The “layers of temporality”
that Carpentier exposes are highlighted by Altschul’s appreciation of histor-
ical consciousness. Referencing Kosseleck, she gives the example of Rosario,
an “authentic” local woman, who lacks an understanding of historicity. She
has an atemporal grasp of things, assuming that the medieval Genevieve of
Brabant and she herself inhabit the same timeframe. In accord with González
Echevarría, Altschul sees the “marvelous real” as the effect of layered tempo-
ralities, the anachronistic presence of both premodern and modern societies.
This is the temporal multiplicity of the “third world.”
Rather than the North-South axis that Altschul explores in terms of
North and South America, Marina Brownlee turns to an East-West alterity
in exchanges between the Western Middle Ages and its Eastern, Byzantine
imperial counterpart. Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligès is one of the few Byzantine-
related texts routinely mentioned by Western authors as a result of its focus on
Alexander, the eldest son of the Emperor of Constantinople, and his interac-
tions with King Arthur and his men. Brownlee’s essay looks first at Digenis
Akritas, a problematic 12th- century romance- epic set on the Byzantine
Empire’s eastern frontier near the Euphrates in the 10th century, where the
Akritans are defending their territory from invading bands of Arabs, Persians,
Turks, and Sarracens. The protagonist, a “half-blood” of mixed race, half Arab
and half Byzantine, is an extraordinary warrior who withdraws from society
rather than conducting a public life defending his territory. He is also deeply
problematic in his treatment of women, while being celebrated as an exemplary
Christian. The other text Brownlee considers is a Byzantine Greek reworking
of Rustichello da Pisa’s Compilation, an Arthurian prequel in which King
Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon, and the other knights of his circle and of
his generation do battle with Branor le Brun, who is more than 120 years old,
and are defeated. In the Greek version, comic and indecorous depictions of the
knights of Arthur’s court figure the unambiguous decadence of the Arthurian
world compared to the preceding generation. This is a striking cultural trans-
lation that would, no doubt, appeal to its post-fourth Crusade Greek audience.
Reworkings
The first of the four reworkings in this section is Andreas Kablitz’s analysis
of Boccaccio’s third story of Day 1 of the Decameron as it pertains to the
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and benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their
church and spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March;
The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran
by selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers
of Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels
by refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians,
Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be
permitted to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic.
Nations that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of
taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be
found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice.
The “instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice,
has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A
state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength,
and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of
manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts”
naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social
intercourse. Those contracts need not always be [139]specified by
written laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech.
Their obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of
social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every
man his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are
international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social
instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of
preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea
Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed
to exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were
almost equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial
fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An
islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a
common pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would
hold) before the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as
the sailors had about all the provisions they could use. But the next
morning, in trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful
breeze, they were overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-
rowing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The traveler
Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fishermen who boarded his
ship to deliver a harpoon which former visitors had forgotten in their
winter-camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of their Roman
adversaries, was almost unknown among the hunting-tribes of the
primitive German woodlands. The natives of San Salvador received
their Spanish invaders with respectful hospitality, and scrupulously
abstained from purloining, or even [140]touching, any article of their
ship-stores; and a similar reception welcomed their arrival in Cuba
and San Domingo, the natives being apparently unable to conceive
the idea that their guests could repay good with evil. “Fair play” is the
motto of boyish sports in the kraals of Kaffir-land, not less than on
the recess-ground of Eton College. A rudimentary sense of justice
manifests itself even among social animals. A baboon who wantonly
attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is liable to get mobbed by the
whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to beat an immediate retreat
under penalty of being attacked by all the winged neighbors and
relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure the most inhuman
methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of gratuitous cruelty.
They may resign themselves to a system of consistent severity, but
refuse to submit to evident injustice.
[Contents]
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable

crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior
strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do
unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a
tyrant,” says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is
the rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive
from heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen
beaks, but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And
it is not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the
[141]justest of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.”
History has more than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The
reputation of incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and
even private citizens, the arbiters of nations.
King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike

neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage
(Ibn Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed
to decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a
synonyme of an “honorable,” i.e., honest, reputation. The
commercial integrity of Hebrew merchants has overcome race-
jealousies and religious prejudices, and in America the worship of
wealth does not prevent an upright judge from ranking high above a
wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.
The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than

once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power.
It biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it
enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King
Cyrus, and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and
Burgundy. A just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union,
surpasses the value of common interests, which a slight change of
circumstances is apt to turn into conflicting interests and
disagreement. Strict adherence to the principles of political equity
has preserved small states in the midst of powerful neighbors,
whose greed of conquest is restrained by their hesitation to incur the
odium of wanton aggression. Belgium, [142]Holland, and Denmark
have thus preserved their national independence in Europe, as
Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central Africa the honesty and
simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has proved a match for the
cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly pillage their
neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division of their spoils,
and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have again and again been
obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised “heathen.”
The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the

proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs of
commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best policy,”
even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to
promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a
wealthy knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and
ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in
direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes
may miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of
prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.
[Contents]
C.—PERVERSION.
Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and
too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of
Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has
condensed in the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of
man,” was recognized already by the ancient historian who observed
that “every nation makes its [143]gods the embodiments of its own
ideals,” though, happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is
better than the object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the
moral standards of the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly
prejudiced by the lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is
equally certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can
be partly explained, as well as condoned, by the moral
characteristics of their dogma-God. According to the accepted
doctrine of the Middle Ages, the administrative principles of that God
seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which even the poetic
license of a saner age would have hesitated to ascribe to a fiend.
The same deity whom the creed of the Galilean church makes the
omniscient creator of all the physical and moral instincts of human
nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish with endless torture
nearly every free gratification of those instincts, and demand a
voluntary renunciation of a world which his own bounty had filled with
every blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness. The
God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a moderate
share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the Christian dogma,
nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an
“unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The
most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the
supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny,
but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic
Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the
cruel murder of a [144]god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The
doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments
and rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of
predestination distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by
their own merits, but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous
act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an
eternity of woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of
immersion, the guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the
eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even
children, nay, newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no
doubt,” the Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants,
only a few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a
doctrine which the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so
atrocious, and at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it
would be simply impossible for the imagination to surpass its
insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in
danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such
infamies to their creator.
[Contents]
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit
of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and
scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and
Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The
worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children
and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the
[145]bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded
fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots
could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty
“sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to
himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; the Faust-
Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the
Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent)
ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments
of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage
duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates,
and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that
power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian
citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no
place in that code of revealed ethics.
Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the

Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by
the outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the
inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to
be, by being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.
“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the

Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is
disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the
intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last
experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution. [146]There,
too, the despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the
strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many
generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests
and princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts
learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were
mangled by the fangs of those beasts.
The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice

for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the
consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly
every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of
his conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let
scholars starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with
chains. His successors who lavished the treasures of their vast
empire on pimps and clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in
penury. The sovereign protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates
refused to relieve the last distress of John Kepler. The moralists who
thought it a grievance that the church should be denied the right of
tithing the lands of southern Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of
the men whose labor had made those lands blossom like the
gardens of paradise, and who were exiled by thousands for the
crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran to the trinitary gods
of the New Testament.
[Contents]
E.—REFORM.
The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an

antinatural creed is still glaringly evident [147]in the prevailing notions
of natural justice and the precedence of social duties. The modern
Crœsus who deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen and a
Christian to contribute an ample subvention to the support of an
orthodox seminary, has no hesitation in swelling his already bloated
income by reducing the wages of a hundred starving factory children
and taking every sordid advantage in coining gain from the loss of
helpless tenants and dependants. The pious Sabbatarians who
doom their poor neighbors to an earthly Gehenna and premature
death by depriving them of every chance for healthful recreation,
lavish their luxuries and their endearments on the caged cutthroat
who edifies his jailer by renouncing the vanities of this worldly sphere
and ranting about the bliss of the New Jerusalem. The bank cashier
who would never be pardoned for kicking the hind-parts of a
mendicant missionary is readily absolved from the sin of such
secular indiscretions as embezzling the savings of a few hundred
widows and orphans.
Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of
departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common
honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men.
Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral
reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious
atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible
for his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims
of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of
Secularism should insist on a truth not [148]unknown to the moralists
of antiquity, that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a
virtue, and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness
by failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud
and endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men.
[Contents]
CHAPTER XII.
TRUTH.
[Contents]
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The enemies of Nature have for ages based the favorite arguments
of their creed on the doctrine of Natural Depravity. According to the
theories of that tenet the natural instincts of the human heart are
wholly evil, and its every nobler impulse is due to the redeeming
influence of theological education. The baseness of the
“unregenerate soul” is their favorite antithesis of “holiness by grace;”
and the best test of that dogma would be a comparison of the moral
characteristics of a young child of Nature with the moral results of
theological training. We need not adduce the extreme case of a child
like Kaspar Hauser or the ape-nursed foundling of Baroda, whose
propensities had been modeled in communion with solitude or the
dumb denizens of the wilderness. For, even in the midst of “Christian
civilization,” thousands of peasants and mechanics are practically
pure Agnostics, and ignore the absurdities of the New Testament as
persistently as their deer-hunting ancestors ignored the absurdities
[149]of pagan mythology. At the end of his sixth or seventh year the
offspring of such parents would still represent a fair specimen-child
of unregenerate Nature, and the normal bias of that Nature is
revealed in the honesty, the trusting innocence, the purity, and the
cheerfulness of the young Agnostic, and the absence of every
appreciable germ of the secret vices, the rancorous spites, and the
joy-hating bigotries of the representative Christian convent-slave.
But the most characteristic features of that contrast would perhaps

be the double-tongued hypocrisy of the old Jesuit and the artless
candor of the young peasant boy. The truthfulness of young children
antedates all moral instruction. Its motives are wholly independent of
theological, or even abstract-ethical, influences, and are based
merely on a natural preference for the simplest way of dealing with
the problems of intellectual communication. Truth is uniform,
falsehood is complex. Truth is persistent and safe; falsehood is
unstable, fragile, and precarious. Children instinctively recognize the
difficulties of plausibly maintaining the fictions of deceit, and dread
the risk of incurring the suspicion of habitual insincerity. Hence their
uncompromising loyalty to facts; their innocence of artifice and
mental reservation; hence also their extreme reluctance in
conforming to the conventional customs of social hypocrisy and
polite prevarication.
“Are you not glad Mrs. D. is gone?” Master Frank once asked his
mother in my presence. “Well, yes, I am.” “Then what’s the use
asking her to call [150]again and stay for supper? She could not help
seeing that we were tired of her gabble.” “Well, it wouldn’t do to insult
her, you know.” “Oh, no, but what’s the use telling her something she
cannot believe?”
That last remark, especially, recurs to my memory whenever the

expedience of hypocrisy is defended by the conventional sophisms
of Christian civilization. That prevarications are unprofitable as well
as unpardonable is a truth which Jesuitry has shrouded with a veil of
its choicest cant, but the clear vision of childhood penetrates that
cant, and the “natural depravity” of unregenerate souls may reach
the degree of doubting the merit of simulation even in the interest of
an orthodox creed, as the reverend dogmatist might ascertain by
happening to overhear the recess comments of our American
Sabbath-school youngsters.
[Contents]
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The Utilitarians hold that motives of enlightened self-interest would

be sufficient to make a man perfectly virtuous. With the conventional
definition of “virtue,” that tenet might require certain qualifications;
but it is more than probable that perfect prudence would insure a
voluntary devotion to perfect truthfulness. In its most aggressive form
the hatred of falsehood may imperil the temporary interests of the
aggressor, but in every other sense the path of truth is the path of
safety. All the ultimate tendencies of the moral and physical universe
conspire to vindicate truth and discredit fraud. [151]
Assertions based on fact stand erect, upheld by the evidence of

experience as an upright building by the law of gravity; deception,
with all its props of plausible sophisms, is tottering like a wall out of
plumb, or a rotten tree upheld by artificial supports which in their turn
must yield to the test of time.
Even from a standpoint of purely secular considerations, truth, like

honesty, is in the long run the best policy. Abstinence from insidious
poisons is easier than temperance, and the lessons of experience
have at all times convinced the most clear-sighted of our fellow-men
that consistent abstinence from the vice of hypocrisy is preferable to
any compromise with the interests of imposture. The non-clerical,
and almost Agnostic, education of the American wilderness seems to
favor that type of moral teetotalism, and among the hardy hill-
farmers of our New England highlands, and Southern mountain
states, one may find men almost constitutionally incapable of
conscious deceit in deed or word, and practicing veracity without the
least pretense to superior saintliness, in a quite untheological and
often, indeed, decidedly profane medium of speech. They stick to
truth from habit, rather than from moral principles, yet among their
simple-hearted neighbors they enjoy a respect withheld from
unctuous hypocrisy, and in emergencies can always rely on the
practical value of a life-long reputation for candor. Their word is
sufficient security; their denial of slanderous imputations is accepted
without the aid of compurgators.
The simple religion of Mohammed has favored the development of a

similar disposition, and on the [152]Austrian-Turkish frontier the word
of a Mussulman generally carries the weight of a casting vote. On
the Indian ocean, too, the verdict of international opinion favors a
preference for Unitarian testimony. “Wish to heaven we could fall in
with some Acheen fishermen,” Captain Baudissin heard his pilot
mutter among the reefs of the Sunda Islands, “it’s no use asking
such d—— liars as those Hindoos and Chinese.”
The love of truth compels the respect even of impostors and of

professional hypocrites, as in the case of that curate mentioned by
the German Freethinker, Weber (author of the philosophical
cyclopedia, “Democritus”). Professor Weber passed his last years in
the retirement of a small south-German mountain village, where his
undisguised skepticism made him the bugbear of the local
pharisees; yet on moonless evenings he was more than once
honored by the visits of a neighboring village priest, who risked
censure, and, perhaps, excommunication, for the sake of enjoying
the luxury of a respite from the sickening cant of his colleagues, and
devoting a few hours to intellectual communion with a champion of
Secular science.
Lessing’s allegory of “Nathan” is founded on something more than

fiction, and there is no doubt that even in the midnight of the Middle
Ages the gloomy misery of the Hebrew pariahs was often cheered by
the secret visits of some intelligent Christian whom the thirst for truth
impelled to defy the vigilance of the heretic-hunter, and to prefer an
intellectual symposium in the garret of a Jewish slum [153]alley to a
feast in the banquet hall of a Christian prelate.
“It is lucky for you that your opponents have not learned to utilize the
advantage of truth,” Mirabeau replied to the taunt of an insolent
Jesuit; and in logic that advantage can, indeed, hardly be overrated.
“They find believers who themselves believe,” and, as the
philosopher Colton observes, a sort of instinct often enables the
simplest countryman to distinguish the language of honest conviction
from the language of artful sophistry. “Our jurymen seem to
appreciate a first-class lie only from an artistic standpoint,”
confessed a lawyer of my acquaintance, “for some of them privately
hinted that they could tell it every time.”
Others, no doubt, lack that degree of acumen; but first-class orators,

as well as first-class authors, have always recognized the wisdom of
not relying on such mental defects of the public. Charles Darwin’s
works, for instance, owe their popularity to their erudition and their
grace of style, hardly more than to the absolute candor of the author,
who reviews the evidence for and against his theories with the
fairness of a conscientious judge, and by that very impartiality has
succeeded in prevailing against the partisan arguments of his
adversaries. For similar reasons our “Christian” temperance
societies can date their triumphs only from the time when they
frankly repudiated the sophisms of their predecessors, who hoped to
reconcile the lessons of science with the teachings of the alcohol-
brewing Galilean. For truth [154]prevails against half-truth, as well as
against absolute untruth.
[Contents]
C.—PERVERSION.
Since the dawn of rationalism perhaps no other literary product of

Freethought has provoked the enemies of Nature to that degree of
rancorous fury excited by the appearance of Moliere’s “Tartuffe.” The
hero of that famous drama is an old pharisee whose resolve to
renounce the “vanities of earth” is constantly tripped by the
promptings of his physical instincts, and who resorts to all kinds of
ludicrous sophisms to palliate the antagonism of two ever
irreconcilable principles:
Le ciel défend, de vrai, certain contentements,

Mais on trouve avec lui des accommodements—
and the drama never failed to attract a jubilant audience; but the
French priesthood moved heaven and earth to stop the performance,
and can, indeed, hardly be blamed for rejecting the apologies of the
author’s friends; for the irony of Tartuffe ridicules the shams, not only
of the Catholic clergy, but of their creed and the creed of their
Protestant colleagues: it is, in fact, a scathing satire on the
absurdities of Christian Antinaturalism. The impossibility of
reconciling the demands of Nature with the precepts of a world-
renouncing fanatic has, indeed, made the worship of that fanatic a
systematic school of hypocrisy and subverted the moral health of its
victims as effectually as the unnatural restraints of convent life
subverted the basis of physical health. [155]
God is paid when man receiveth;

To enjoy is to obey;
says Nature with the poet of reason. “God delights in the self-torture
of his creatures—crucify your flesh, despise your body, disown the
world; renounce! renounce!” croaks the chorus of Christian
dogmatists, and can silence protest only by turning health into
disease or candor into hypocrisy.
The dogma of salvation by faith offers an additional premium on

mental prostitution. By punishing honest doubt as a crime and
inculcating the merit of blind submission to the authority of reason-
insulting doctrines, the defenders of those doctrines struck a deadly
blow at the instinct of free inquiry, and for a series of generations
actually succeeded in eradicating that instinct from the mental
constitution of their victims.
“The persecutor,” says W. H. Lecky, “can never be certain that he is

not persecuting truth rather than error, but he may be quite certain
that he is suppressing the spirit of truth. And, indeed, it is no
exaggeration to say that the doctrines I have reviewed represent the
most skilful and at the same time most successful conspiracy against
that spirit that has ever existed among mankind. Until the
seventeenth century, every mental disposition which philosophy
pronounces to be essential to a legitimate research was almost
uniformly branded as a sin, and a large proportion of the most deadly
intellectual vices were deliberately inculcated as virtues.… In a word,
there is scarcely a disposition that marks the love of abstract truth
and scarcely a rule which [156]reason teaches as essential for its
attainment that theologians did not for ages stigmatize as offensive
to the Almighty.”
And those perversions culminated in the miracle-mongery of the

wretched superstition. If the material universe was at the mercy of
witches and tricksy demons, no man could for a moment trust the
evidence of his own senses and was naturally driven to complete his
mental degradation by an absolute surrender of common sense to
dogma. The history of Christian dogmatism is the history of an
eighteen hundred years’ war against Nature and Truth.
[Contents]
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The drift sand of the deserts covering the site of once fertile empires
still attests the physical consequences of a thousand years’ reign of
Antinaturalism, but, happily, the time has already come when many
of our fellow-men almost fail to credit the degree of mental
abasement realized during the most orthodox centuries of that reign.
It would be no overstatement to say that for nearly six hundred years
the priests of the Galilean miracle-monger persuaded a plurality of
the Caucasian nations to risk their lives in defense of dogmas the
mere profession of which would start a modern Christian on a
galloping trip to the next lunatic asylum.
Decapitated saints were believed to have emerged from their tombs

and paid their respects to a newly appointed bishop; flying dragons
descended through the air to snatch the bodies of unbelievers and
disappeared with screams that frightened orthodox [157]neighbors to
take refuge in their cellar-holes; swarms of angels carried bones,
crosses, and whole buildings from Bethlehem to Loretto; King Philip
the Second paid a thousand doubloons for a skeleton of St.
Laurentius, and having been informed that a complete skeleton of
the same saint was for sale in the south of Italy, he at once ratified
the bargain and blessed heaven for having favored him with a
duplicate of the precious relic. Thousands of unfortunates were tried
and executed on a charge of having taken an aerial excursion on a
broomstick or a black he-goat; of having caused a gale by churning a
potful of froth and water; of having turned themselves into foxes,
wolves, and tomcats.
The instinct of recognizing the absurdity of even the most glaring

superstitions seems to have become wholly extinct in the minds of
the forty generations from the middle of the tenth to the end of the
fourteenth century; and during that millennium of madness the
suppression of free inquiry encouraged thousands of pious tract-
mongers to devote their lives to the wholesale forgery of saintly
biographies and miracle legends, and disseminate under the name
of historical records insanities too extravagant even for the readers
of a modern nursery-tale.
The war against Truth was carried to the length of suppressing not
only the skeptical inferences of science, but science itself; chemists,
astronomers, physiologists, mathematicians, and bona fide
historians could pursue their inquiries only at the risk of an
inquisitorial indictment; and a cloud of ignorance, which in the days
of Horace and Pliny would [158]have been thought disgraceful to the
obscurest hamlet of the Roman empire, brooded for ages over the
face of the entire Christian world.
For a series of centuries the encouragement of credulity and

imposture almost annulled the value of contemporary records.
Travelers and chroniclers, as well as biographers, accommodated
the popular taste by dealing, not in marvels only, but in miracles;
witchcraft anecdotes, preternatural resurrections, prodigies of skill
and physical prowess, giants, dragons, were-wolves, and no end of
spectral manifestations. It is no exaggeration to say that for a period
of more than nine hundred years the dogma of the Galilean
antinaturalist systematically favored the survival of the unfit, by
offering a premium on mental prostitution and making common
sense a capital crime.
[Contents]
E.—REFORM.
The triumph of the Protestant revolt has ushered in a dawn which, in

comparison with the preceding night, may justly vaunt its era as an
Age of Reason; but the thousand years’ perversion of our moral
instincts has not been wholly redeemed by the educational
influences of a short century. For even eighty years ago the
educational reforms of the Protestant nations attempted little more
than a compromise between reason and dogma, while their southern
neighbors revolted against the political influence, rather than against
the dogmatical arrogance, of their priesthood. Nay, even at present
the fallacies of the compromise plan still hamper the [159]progress of
reform in manifold directions. As an American Freethinker aptly
expresses it: “Truth is no longer kept under lock and key, but is kindly
turned loose to roam at large—after being chained to a certain
number of theological cannon-balls.” Evolution may pursue its
inquiries into specific phases of organic development, but must not
question the correctness of the Mosaic traditions; rationalists may
inveigh against the insanities of the Middle Ages, but must pretend to
overlook the fact that the doctrine of the New Testament contains the
germs of all those insanities; the science of health may denounce
modern fallacies, but must beware to mention the anti-physical
precepts of the body-despising Galilean; Materialists must attack the
hobgoblins of the Davenport brothers, but ignore the hog-goblins of
Gadara; historical critics may call attention to the inconsistencies of
Livy and Plutarch, but must not mention the self-contradictions of the
New Testament.
Yet logic and philosophy will be little more than a farce till the axiom
of a great biologist can be applied to the pursuit of every human
science. “Inquiries of that sort” (the “Descent of Man”), he says,
“have nothing whatever to do with personal tastes or vested

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Revealing New Perspectives: Studies in

Honor of Stephen G. Nichols Kevin

Revealing New Perspectives: Studies in

—​A rdis Butterfield, John M. Schiff Professor of English;

“Revealing New Perspectives is a fitting tribute to the pioneering scholarship

—​Daisy Delogu, Professor of French, University of Chicago

—​Geri L. Smith, Professor of French and Chair, Department of Modern

—​Jan M. Ziolkowski, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor

Studies in Honor of Stephen G. Nichols

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Cover image: Erich Mendelsohn (1887–​

© 2022 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

All rights reserved.

5. S igns on the Wall: Painting History into Satire in the Roman de

16. Sapience, Prudence, and Theatricality: Preparing the Political Princess  311

Figure 4.1 Theophilus window, Beauvais  77

Figure 5.6 (left) col. B; (right) col. A, Conditio / O Nacio /

We would like to acknowledge the contributors to this volume for their

Chair, Board of Directors, Council of Library Information Resources (CLIR), 2009–​12.

Books & Special Journal Issues Edited

“Places of Thought: Environment, Perception, and Textual Identity in Medieval

Preface, A Critical Edition of “Le Roman de Parthenay ou Le Roman de Melusine” by

“Le Livre tuera l’édifice: Resignifying Gothic Architecture,” in Autobiography, History,

“Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” in The New Philology, special issue of Speculum 65

47–73 and Marina S. Brownlee. Hanover: University Press of New England,

the ever-​changing world of material philology, which Spiegel rightly sees as

he quite is different. Left without either a shadow or money, he becomes a

of life as a harsh and abrupt progression from cradle to grave in a uniquely

Every poem is a complex and unfolding textual event, since it continues to be

the unexpected entity of the subcontinent, but a fictionalization of stages of

Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable

King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike

The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than

The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the

Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the

“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the

The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice

The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an

But the most characteristic features of that contrast would perhaps

That last remark, especially, recurs to my memory whenever the

The Utilitarians hold that motives of enlightened self-interest would

Assertions based on fact stand erect, upheld by the evidence of

Even from a standpoint of purely secular considerations, truth, like

The simple religion of Mohammed has favored the development of a

The love of truth compels the respect even of impostors and of

Lessing’s allegory of “Nathan” is founded on something more than

Others, no doubt, lack that degree of acumen; but first-class orators,

Since the dawn of rationalism perhaps no other literary product of

Le ciel défend, de vrai, certain contentements,

God is paid when man receiveth;

The dogma of salvation by faith offers an additional premium on

“The persecutor,” says W. H. Lecky, “can never be certain that he is

And those perversions culminated in the miracle-mongery of the

Decapitated saints were believed to have emerged from their tombs

The instinct of recognizing the absurdity of even the most glaring

For a series of centuries the encouragement of credulity and

The triumph of the Protestant revolt has ushered in a dawn which, in

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—A rdis Butterfield, John M. Schiff Professor of English;

—Daisy Delogu, Professor of French, University of Chicago

—Geri L. Smith, Professor of French and Chair, Department of Modern

—Jan M. Ziolkowski, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor

Cover image: Erich Mendelsohn (1887–

5. S igns on the Wall: Painting History into Satire in the Roman de

16. Sapience, Prudence, and Theatricality: Preparing the Political Princess 311

Figure 4.1 Theophilus window, Beauvais 77

Chair, Board of Directors, Council of Library Information Resources (CLIR), 2009–12.

the ever-changing world of material philology, which Spiegel rightly sees as