Teaching Eco's "Baudolino" in a Medieval Latin Class

Author(s): Christopher Brunelle

Source: The Classical Journal, Vol. 101, No. 3 (Feb. - Mar., 2006), pp. 303-310
Published by: The Classical Association of the Middle West and South
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 TEACHING ECO'S BAUDOLINO
IN A MEDIEVAL LATIN CLASS

Fourth-term Latin at Saint Olaf College is taught every spring,

alternating on a yearly basis between Vergil and Medieval Latin. Our
Classics department views the ancient world as the common prop-
erty of all, so over the years every course has been taught by almost
every professor. When it came time for me to teach Medieval Latin in
the spring of 2004, I organized a syllabus around the inclusion of
Baudolino, Umberto Eco's new medieval fiction. This article will
briefly describe my reasons for assigning an English novel in a Latin
class, my strategies for coordinating the novel with the term's other
readings, and my impression that this experiment was a success.
In teaching Medieval Latin, quot homines, tot syllabi. Over the
course of one semester, undergraduate students who have taken
only three semesters of Latin can cover only a minute amount of the
possible literature, and a teacher must choose between a panoramic
tour, including small representative portions of the period's many
different genres, and a focus on one or two themes, creating thematic
coherence at the expense of the varied overview. I prefer the smor-
gasbord approach to Medieval Latin, believing it better to let stu-
dents glimpse the wealth of available material even if the semester
offers little opportunity to go into much detail. At the beginning of
the spring 2004 term, many students could name only a small hand-
ful of medieval authors, often only the most famous (Augustine,
Aquinas); by the end of the term, every student could acknowledge
the variety and depth contained in a millennium of material. This
approach is also guaranteed to offer something of interest to every-
one. When I asked at the end of the semester for their favorite au-
thors, the anonymous responses covered almost the entire syllabus.
The syllabus itself began with Traube's apothegm, "There is no such
thing as Medieval Latin," not as a warning against the non-existence
of the course but as a reminder that the breadth of Medieval Latin is
such as to render any definition of the genre inadequate.

1
Eco (2003). New copies of the paperback English translation currently sell for
about 15.

THE CLASSICALJOURNAL 101.3 (2006) 303-10

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304 CHRISTOPHER BRUNELLE

The great challenge of this approach, of course, is that variety

easily slips into chaos. When every class period introduces a new
work of literature, students lose track not only of the narrative de-
tails but of the authors themselves; relative chronology and the sense
of an author's persona are replaced by the image of the medieval
world as a timeless present in which shadowy figures write inter-
changeable texts. This is not an insurmountable problem, since most
intermediate students are still focused on issues of grammar and
translation and pay less direct attention to the concepts of authorial
voice or historical context, but a stable literary context does make it
easier to reinforce those fundamental linguistic skills. Nor did my
students find it impossible to correlate texts with authors; no one, for
example, mistook Hildegard's visions for a chapter out of Isidore's
Etymologiae. Still, it is not as easy to improve one's Latin when the
context in which that Latin appears is constantly in flux.
One successful solution to this lack of thematic coherence is to
end the semester with a text that incorporates almost all of the
authors and ideas from the rest of the term. A unifying text that
formed a successful capstone for my class is Umberto Eco's recent
novel Baudolino.2Eco has created a title character whose picaresque
exploits bring him into contact with the great historical and literary
figures of the 13thcentury (including Frederick Barbarossa and Nike-
tas Choniates) and whose literary ingenuity allows him to become
the author of a wide range of Latin prose and verse, including the
poems of the Archpoet and the letter of Prester John. Baudolino pro-
vides a useful and refreshing synthesis for the end of a course: it
incorporates the ideas and texts of dozens of medieval Latin authors,
provokes debate on the nature of medieval authorship and textual-
ity, animates the past in a way that few medieval authors can do,
and at the end of a long semester offers a welcome and relatively in-
expensive relief from the intensive translation of Latin.3
With the twin goals of literary variety and Eco's Baudolino in
mind, I designed my syllabus with readings drawn in part from the
flawed but voluminous second edition of Harrington's Medieval
Latin.4 Harrington's selections range widely through history and

2
Eco (2003). New copies of the paperback English translation currently sell for
about 15.
2
Most of these goals could also be met by using Eco's justly famous Name of the
Rose, with its abundant quotations of Latin and its greater narrative coherence. I chose
Baudolino instead for the variety of its allusions (not limited like those in The Name of
the Rose to Christian topics), for its discussions of narrative reliability and for its inclu-
sion of a personal literary favorite, the letter of Prester John.
2
Most of these goals could also be met by using Eco's justly famous Name of the
Rose, with its abundant quotations of Latin and its greater narrative coherence. I chose
Baudolino instead for the variety of its allusions (not limited like those in The Name of

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 TEACHING ECO'S BAUDOLINO 305

genre, and the first half of the term included Egeria's travel narra-
tives, Prudentius' autobiographical verses, Proba's Vergilian cento,
Isidore's peculiar etymologies, Hildegard's songs and visions, Ray-
mond of Aguilers' account of the discovery of the holy spear, several
Carmina Burana, and excerpts from the letters of Abelard and He-
loise. In addition, we read correspondence between Jerome and Au-
gustine, excerpts of Hildebert of Lavardin's poetic descriptions of
Rome, legends of Saint Patrick (on Saint Patrick's Day) and some of
Rome's mirabilia (the salvatio civium as reported by Magister Gre-
gorius). Most of these texts were chosen for the light they shed on
the medieval reinterpretation of earlier Latin texts and ideas, so that
students would gain an appreciation of the historical and literary
connections between the classical and medieval periods. Moreover,
although almost none of these texts appears verbatim in Baudolino,
the novel makes indirect reference to all of them, so these first
readings were both an introduction to the medieval world and a
preparation for the end of the term.
The second half of the term was devoted to two sets of readings:
texts that are quoted at length in Baudolino and texts chosen by the
students themselves. The first set of texts comprises Otto of Frei-
sing's Chronica sive historia de duabus civitatibus, the Archpoet's Con-
fession, and the letter of Prester John, with a bit of the description of
student life in medieval Paris drawn from Nigel Whiteacre's Spe-
culum stultorum. In addition to the excerpts from the letters of Abe-
lard and Heloise we also read from the anonymous letters that have
been attributed to them, recently edited by Mews and incorporated
by Eco in Baudolino.5
The second set of texts was assembled by the students, each of
whom was responsible for finding, preparing and teaching a medi-
eval text from an author not otherwise included in the syllabus.
Given the opportunity to pursue their own interests and to lead the
rest of the class through a short passage with commentary that they
had prepared, the students were almost unanimously excited by
their own projects and by the material that their colleagues had
chosen. Our class of 16 students met for 55 minutes three times per
week, and two students presented their material in each class period,
so almost three weeks of the syllabus ended up under their control,
and no student had to prepare more than 25 minutes of material. The
thematic variety of the course was also strengthened by the wide

the Rose to Christian topics), for its discussions of narrative reliability and for its inclu-
sion of a personal literary favorite, the letter of Prester John.
5
Harrington (1997) 492-511; Mews (1999). See Eco (2003) 79-80 and 84, with ex-
cerpts from letters 1, 20, 80, 84 and 85.

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306 CHRISTOPHER BRUNELLE

range of the students' choices: history (Ammianus Marcellinus,

Bede, William of Malmesbury, Odo of Deuil), poetry (Avianus, Boe-
thius, Hrotsvit), religious and secular legislation (Benedict, Gregory
X, Magna Carta), Christian metaphor and exhortation (Agnes
Blannbekin, pseudo-Albertus Magnus), philosophy (Anselm, Hugo
of St. Victor, Aquinas) and magic (Picatrix). The final exam included
some of these selections, so all the students were responsible for
translating the passages that their colleagues had chosen; these
student-led periods therefore avoided the lack of class involvement
that often occurs in other kinds of student presentations.
The last three periods of the term were spent with Baudolino. For
the first period we read the first 14 chapters, in which most of the
novel's direct references to medieval Latin literature appear. We
began class by naming from memory all the authors (nearly 40 of
them) that we had read during the term; as a group project, this was
easy to do, and the sight of several dozen names on the board
reinforced their confidence in having covered such a great amount of
material over the course of the semester. We then connected as many
of these authors as we could to the text of Baudolino, noting not just
the direct quotations of literature (the letter of Prester John, the Arch-
poet, Otto of Freising, pseudo-Heloise) or the brief references to
names and titles (Isidore, Mirabilia urbis Romae)but also the incorpor-
ation of similar ideas and themes: Odo of Deuil's account of the
Second Crusade (p. 103), Ammianus' descriptions of siege weapons
(p. 3), Hildebert's vision of the Holy City (reappearing in the fable of
Prester John), the miracles of the Holy Spear as recorded by
Raymond of Aguilers (cf. the relics of Constantinople), and so on up
to the very idea of fictional authors (Baudolino, pseudo-Heloise,
pseudo-Albertus Magnus). In the end, almost all the term's authors
found their place in the intellectual farrago of Eco's novel, even the
authors that the students had chosen themselves. These connections
are a result of Eco's extravagantly wide-ranging literary style, and
one can imagine finding a link in Baudolino to almost any medieval
author; it is this inclusivity that makes the novel particularly worth-
while for students of Medieval Latin.
On the second day we read through Chapter 31 (p. 408). Class
discussion ranged as widely as the novel itself, but many students
were particularly interested in the blurring of truth and fiction-not
only the debates within the novel over the nature of literature and
the role of the author but also Eco's refusal to clarify for the reader
which of his details are historically valid and which are no more real
than the monsters that Baudolino claims to have encountered. What
is the ratio of fact to fancy in the novel? Most readers (and reviewers) of
Baudolino have the impression that they can pick up some of Eco's
historical and literary allusions but miss many others. Likewise, my

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 TEACHING ECO'S BAUDOLINO 307

students' concern over the factual basis of the novel was at least al-
leviated by their ability to appreciate the references that they as
readers of Latin could discern. And though Eco provides English
translations for most of the Latin, the parts that remain untranslated
let the Latin student share the pleasure of Eco's scholastic jokes.
In addition to the middle chapters of the novel, the class also
read one of Eco's brief essays, "Dreaming of the Middle Ages,"
which describes the recent growth of medieval fiction and offers ten
general categories into which that fiction falls.6I asked my students
as they read the essay to consider which of those ten categories
seemed most relevant to Baudolino. The point of the assignment was
not to make them choose the one correct answer out of ten; there is
no single correct answer. Eco wrote "Dreaming of the Middle Ages"
decades before he wrote Baudolino, and his list of categories is expli-
citly incomplete.' My goal was rather to help the students gain a
wider appreciation of the different uses to which the Middle Ages
are put in modern literature and thus to see Baudolino itself in a the-
oretical framework.
On the third day we finished the novel. Our discussion contin-
ued to center on the issue of narrative reliability; despite the self-
congratulatory pompousness of the novel's last sentence, the final
page does nicely summarize the pleasures and challenges faced by
any reader of Baudolino or of medieval Latin literature."Our delight
in reading the exploits of Baudolino (or the Archpoet, or Raymond of
Aguilers) is coupled with our doubt in their veracity, and to hear
Eco's characters talk explicitly about the conscious authorial mani-

6
Eco (1986).
6
"I'll try to outline at least ten types of Middle Ages...." Eco (1986) 68. Eco pro-
vides titles and examples for his categories: 1. the Middle Ages as a pretext (opera, The
Three Musketeers); 2. the Middle Ages as the site of an ironical revisitation (Cervantes,
spaghetti westerns); 3. the Middle Ages as a barbaricage (Frank Frazetta's art, Wag-
ner's Ring); 4. the Middle Ages of Romanticism (Beckford's Vathek);5. the Middle Ages
of Thomistic philosophia perennis (Jacques Maritain); 6. the Middle Ages of national
identities (Walter Scott); 7. the Middle Ages of Decadentism (Huysmans, Ruskin, Car-
ducci); 8. the Middle Ages of philological reconstruction (Jean Mabillon, ltienne Gilson);
9. the Middle Ages of Tradition or occult philosophy (Rosicrucianists, neo-Kabbalists
[and the forces at work in Eco's Foucault's Pendulum]); 10. the Middle Ages as an ex-
pectation
8 of the Millennium (sects expecting the end of the world via the Antichrist).
Baudolino has told his life's story to Niketas Choniates, the historian whose
chronicles describe the fall of Constantinople in 1204. After the departure of Bau-
dolino, Niketas recounts all that he has heard to Paphnutius, a blind but perspicacious
friend. Paphnutius orders Niketas to remove all trace of Baudolino from his chroni-
cles: "In a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges."
When Niketas laments the loss of such a beautiful story, Paphnutius (and the novel)
concludes: "You surely don't believe you're the only writer of stories in this world.
Sooner or later, someone-a greater liar than Baudolino--will tell it" (Eco (2003) 521).

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308 CHRISTOPHER BRUNELLE

pulation of truth allows us all the more easily to imagine the same
forces at work in the literature of the medieval period.
For example, we had previously read Magister Gregorius' ac-
count of the magical statues by which Rome supposedly maintained
control of its far-flung empire:

Among all the marvelous works that were once in Rome, the most
astonishing is the collection of statues called "The salvation of the citizens."
These statues were dedicated through the art of magic to every nation that
had been brought under Roman rule.... Most of the walls of this building are
still standing, and its vaults seem stark and inaccessible. In this building the
aforementionedstatues once stood in order, and each statue had the name
written on its chest of the nation that it represented;each also had a silver
bell around its neck.... And if any nation attempted to rise in rebellion
against the Roman Empire, its statue immediately stirred and the bell on its
neck rang, and a priest would at once write down the name of the statue and
bring it to the rulers. Above this hall of statues there was also a bronze
soldier on his horse;he moved in conjunctionwith the statues, and he would
point his lance at that nation whose statue was moving. The Roman rulers
were thus forewarned by this indisputable evidence; to quell that nation's
rebellion they instantly sent an army, which usually arrived before the ene-
my had readied their weapons and supplies and thus without difficulty or
bloodshed brought them back under the yoke.9

Eco borrows this narrative from Gregorius (who borrowed it from

pseudo-Bede's De septem miraculis mundi), blends it with other me-
dieval versions of the same fable, and ascribes it to Baudolino, who
explains to Niketas the justification for his authorship of such mira-
bilia (35-6):

When we were heading for Rome, a priest by the name of Corrado told me
about the mirabiliaof that urbs, the seven automata of the Lateran,which
stood for the individual days of the week, each of them with a bell that an-

Magister Gregorius, Mirabilia urbis Romae ch. 8: Inter universa opera monstruosa
quae Romae quondam fuerunt, magis miranda est multitudo statuarum quae 'Salvatio
civium' dicebantur. Haec arte magica fuit consecratio statuarum omnium gentium
quae Romano regno subiectae fuerunt. Huius autem domus magna pars parietum
adhuc restat et cryptae eius horridae et inaccessibiles apparent. In hac quondam domo
praedictae imagines ex ordine stabant et quaelibet imago nomen gentis illius, cuius
imaginem tenebat, in pectore scriptum habebat et tintinnabulum argenteum.... Et si
qua gens in rebellionem consurgere conabatur in imperium Romanorum, protinus
statua illius movebatur et tintinnabulum in collo eius sonuit et statim scriptum nomen
illius imaginis sacerdos principibus deportabat. Erat autem supra domum his
imaginibus consecratam miles aeneus cum equo suo, semper concordans motui
imaginis lanceamque apud illam gentem diregens, cuius imago movebatur. Hoc
itaque non dubio indicio praemoniti, Romani principes sine mora exercitum ad
rebellionem illius gentis reprimendam direxerunt, qui, saepius hostes antequam arma
et impedimenta paravissent praevenientes, facile et sine sanguine eos sibi
subiugaverunt.

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 TEACHING ECO'S BAUDOLINO 309

nounced a revolt in a province of the empire; and about the bronze statues
that moved on their own, and about a place filled with enchanted mirrors....
Then we arrived in Rome, and that day, when they were killing each other
along the Tiber, I took to my legs and wandered through the city. As I
walked, I saw only flocks of sheep among ancient ruins, and under the ar-
cades some poor people who spoke the language of Jews and sold fish. As
for mirabilia, not a sign, except for a statue of a man and a horse in the
Lateran, and even that didn't seem to me anything special. Yet, on our re-
turn journey, when they were all asking me what I had seen, what could I
say? That in Rome there were only sheep among the ruins and ruins among
the sheep? They would never have believed me. So I told of the mirabilia
that I had been told about and I added a few of my own.

As the students saw, Eco's version neatly explains the connections

between fantasy and desire (the peasants insist that Rome must be
magical; how else could it have been the center of the world?) and
illuminates the methods of a raconteur (Baudolino adopts earlier
mirabilia and invents others in the same style). Eco even manages a
sly dig ("even that didn't seem to me anything special") at the fam-
ous equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which in the 12thcentury
was located at the Lateran palace. Physical details such as these
allow Eco to reevaluate not only the literary history of the medieval
world but its artistic history as well.
Most of the final exam dealt with the accurate translation of
Latin, as is proper for any course whose primary objective is linguis-
tic. But my secondary goal for the course was to help my students
improve their knowledge of Latin within its historical, intellectual
and literary contexts, and it was with this goal in mind that I as-
signed Baudolino. The final exam therefore included the following
essay: "How has Eco's Baudolino changed your impression or inter-
pretation of medieval Latin literature?" In the 16 individual re-
sponses there reappeared several clear themes that-at the risk of
oversimplification-can be stated as follows. Before reading Bau-
dolino, students generally perceived medieval Latin literature as lofty
and severe, written for the most part by grim Christian monks who
had little connection with one another or the outside world, which
was full of ignorant and foolish dolts. After the students had read
Baudolino, the world of medieval literature seemed much more like
our own world, where authors know one another personally, where
common folk are aware of literary ideas and of the political implica-
tions of literature, and where the apparently incomprehensible ac-
ceptance of outrageous fictions can be explained by the desire to
believe.
Of course, the idea that the medieval literary world resembles
our own is an idea open to debate. Baudolino did help many students
to see the somewhat cartoonish nature of their former views and
gave them a new vision of medieval literature, but that new vision

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310 CHRISTOPHER BRUNELLE

was still shaped by Eco. The novel is both a revelation and a warn-
ing: through its beautiful fictions it imaginatively reveals the human
forces that constructed our Latin texts, and through its emphasis on
the unreliability of narrators it warns against taking its own revela-
tion as the only plausible account. Eco suggests, "Every time one
speaks of a dream of the Middle Ages, one should first ask which
Middle Ages one is dreaming of,"'0 and this is just as true of Bau-
dolino as of any other medieval fiction.
More importantly, the novel also helped my students to see that
literature was and is written for all sorts of different reasons, and
these personal, political and cultural pressures shape the creation
and interpretation of narrative. The truth of a story is not so much
some externally verifiable quantity but a product of the reason for
which the story is told. Baudolinohelped them to understand why we
had spent the term reading dozens of unconnected and often out-
landish narratives; by creating a fictional but integrated context for
those narratives, Baudolino allowed them to imagine other and richer
ways of interpreting those stories than as simply the benighted scrib-
blings of authors unfortunate enough to live in an age of ignorance.
These, then, are the two primary benefits of reading Baudolino in
the Medieval Latin classroom: an appreciation of the human forces at
work behind medieval literature, and a better grasp of the issues that
shape any modern attempt to recapture the past. The novel's recur-
ring discussions of historical truth and literary trustworthiness mean
that students do not simply replace one interpretation with another;
they also learn that their new interpretation, shaped by Eco, is itself
open to question.
CHRISTOPHERBRUNELLE
St. Olaf College
WORKS CITED

Eco, Umberto. 1986. "Dreaming of the Middle Ages." In Umberto Eco,

Travels in Hyperreality(San Diego 1986), 61-72.
. 2003. Baudolino, translated by William Weaver. New York.
Harrington, K.P., ed., and Joseph Pucci, rev. 1997. Medieval Latin. Chicago.
Lbfstedt, Bengt. 1999. Review of K.P. Harrington, Medieval Latin, in Bulletin
du Cange57:297-305.
Mews, ConstantJ. 1999. TheLostLoveLettersof Heloiseand Abelard:Perceptions
of Dialoguein Twelfth-Century
France.New York.
Traube, Ludwig. 1911. Einleitungin die lateinischePhilologiedes Mittelalters,
ed. Paul Lehmann. Munich.

10
Eco (1968) 68.

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