CLASSICAL AND CHRISTIAN IN THE Dissuasio
Walter Map's Dissuasio Valerii ad Ruffinum partakes of a twelfth-century craze. Antimatrimonial dissuading was a minor, if widespread, topic of contemporary Latin letters. The foundational example, of course, is Heloise's apparently conversational demonstration to Abelard of the inappropriateness of marriage to the philosophical life (see Blamires, Pratt, and Marx 1992, 88-89). And at the middle and during the third quarter of the century, examples of the genre proliferated1.
Map was a scholar and civil servant who secured for himself a comfortable life under Henry II of England. He lived under the income of a number of parishes given to support him as a royal clerk, and he held various offices in the diocese of Lincoln. He lived into the first decade of the thirteenth century. Not a prolific writer, in the 1170s he wrote his Dissuasio, a work that enjoyed a large circulation in the Middle Ages. Map himself included it in a much larger work, the De nugis curialium, boasting that the Dissuasio “pleased many, is greedily snatched up, eagerly copied, read with greatest delight” (De nugis 4.5). The larger anecdotal collection survives only in one manuscript and was not widely known until the nineteenth century. The Dissuasio, in contrast, survives in some 131 manuscripts often combined with Jerome's so-called Liber aureolus of Theophrastus or with other selections from Jerome's Against Jovinian, thereby forming a version of a book of “wykked wyves” such as so irritated the Wife of Bath (of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), who claimed it was eagerly read by her fifth husband, Jankyn (prologue 669-85).
Map wrote his Dissuasio, probably in the 1170s, in a context already rich with antimatrimonial argument—and he inspired more of it. To take the most readily at hand examples, he certainly know both John of Salisbury's and Hugh of Fouilly's essays. Within a decade of his having written the Dissuasio, Peter of Blois would pillage it for his own purposes. Yet Map's effort is distinctly different from all these surrounding texts. One can immediately focus these differences by a glance at an ignored yet revelatory instance of dissuading, in this case one in fact directed at Map himself.
Epistle 24 by Gerald of Wales, Map's friend, younger contemporary, and fellow Welshman, is addressed to Map. This epistle is very easy to overlook.2 I suspect Gerald, like Peter of Blois, responds to Map's work, rather than the other way round. But in certain respects, that is helpful: it makes the text a more pointed foil to Map's greater, if less substantial, effort.
Gerald's letter does not belong fully in the antimatrimonial arena. He certainly urges Map to forget about marriage (Brewer [1861] 1964-66, 277ff.), and he takes his ammunition in part from the Bible: for example, he follows St. Jerome, Heloise in her advice to Abelard (Blamires, Pratt, and Marx 1992, 88), and others in reading 1 Corinthians 7 selectively, turning it into an anti-marriage tract—so that, for example, “abstain from one another” (1 Cor. 7:5) is taken out of context to mean “abstain from marriage.” Gerald's primary target, however, is a good deal broader, although well within the parameters of Map's work. Gerald's effort is thoroughly protreptic: he wants Map to be sine macula (Brewer [1861] 1964-66, 278), “without stain.” Thus, along with marriage, he wants Map to give up his frivolities, his literary interests, altogether. By doing so, Gerald argues, Map will fulfill his promise and become the man he had been trained to be (he had a Paris M.A. after all)—a Christian philosopher. Map should by now, Gerald says, have sown his wild oats; consequently, he should grow up, act his age, and follow the sober life appropriate to his lofty training, Juvenilis enim excusabais est levitas, cum laudabilis fuerit ipsa maturitas [for frivolity is excusable in a young man, while maturity itself would be praiseworthy] (Brewer [1861] 1964-66, 288).3
Reading Gerald's letter tells one a great deal more about him than it does about Map. Thus, the text highlights the achievement of the Dissuasio by contrast. At many moments, one can see Gerald striving, perhaps a bit leadenly, for a wit one might recognize as an imitation of Map.
Marcum igitur amodo, mi charissime, manu teneas, non Martialem, non Martianum, non Maronem; nec Marcum solum, sed et Matthaeum, sed et Lucam, sed Johannem. (Brewer [1861] 1964-66, 286)
[So from now on, my dearest friend, hold Mark in your hand, not Martial, not Martianus, not Maro; and not only Mark alone, but also Matthew, Luke, and John.]
Hanna has elsewhere pointed to the gloriousness of Map's paranomasia, (rhyming words or wordplay);4 Gerald plainly can hear that, but he does not quite achieve it. In some sense, he appropriately demonstrates here his own detachment from frivolities, mere verbal luster. The classical poets are all the same (Mar- … Mar- … Mar-)—even Martianus Capella, whom one would have scarcely thought unedifying Christian reading.5 In contrast to such a repeated dull stroke, the Gospels open out expansively: Marcus does sound a bit like Martialis, but it is immediately varied into amodo … mi … manu, and beyond the further attenuated echo of Mattheaum follows the remainder of the evangelists.
Moreover, Gerald unabashedly argues theologically. His text, in contrast to Map's allusiveness, mainly cites. Gerald performs here as a compilator. In modern terms of “originality,” he is responsible only for the connective tissue of his letter. Otherwise, Gerald just piles up authoritative quotations—in the main scriptural—to support his point. In essence, he relies on one traditional theological style, argument by proof-text: a statement is immediately followed by the appropriate biblical statement that justifies it. Theological learnedness is biblical absorptiveness, knowing the text so thoroughly that the immediately relevant instance springs immediately to mind.
But this is not the only form Christian argument takes in Gerald's dissuasion. Often a more antique language of Christian exegesis appears. It is thoroughly explicit at such a moment as the following reading of Isaiah 33:18-19.
Super populum impudentem glosat Hieronymus “gregem philosophorum.” Super non videbis, “in ecclesia sanctorum.” Super populum alti sermonis, “sicut Platonis, Aristotelis, Tullii facundiam et subtilitatem,” quam pauci intelligunt; in quo populo scilicet, nulla est sapientia quantum ad Deum, qui per prophetam ait, “Perdam sapientiam sapientum, etc.” (Brewer [1861] 1964-66, 274)6
[On “an impudent people,” Jerome glosses “the herd of philosophers.” On “you will not see [the insolent people],” [he glosses] “in the church of the saints.” On “a people of deep speech,” [he glosses] “like the eloquence and subtlety of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero,” which few understand. No doubt in this people “there is no wisdom” relating to God, who says through the prophet, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,” and so on.]
Gerald ceaselessly argues that Virgil should have nothing to do with Christ, that the songs of the poets are like the croaking of frogs and must be rejected equally with pagan philosophy (Brewer [1861] 1964-66, 283), that pagan and holy letters should remain utterly segregated.
If Map agrees with Gerald's warning against mixing pagan and holy (and a number of modern critics have thought so), he does not write the Dissuasio in that way; instead, he interweaves a riotous fabric of sources with an eye for the colorful and humorous.7 For example, in one passage, a sentence starting with the exalted name of Jupiter ends in undignified mooing.
Iupiter, rex terrenus, qui etiam rex celorum dictus est pre singulari strenuitate corporis et imcomparabili mentis elegantia, post Europam mugire coactus est. (Dissuasio 89-91)
[Jupiter, an earthly king, who was also called king of the heavens because of the outstanding power of his body and the incomparable elegance of his mind, was driven to mooing after Europa.]
Map writes a masterpiece because of his equipoise. He straddles—apparently acknowledging the power of—both Mark and Martial. Utterly central to this stance is the status of his work as pseudonymous literature—or, put otherwise, as literary hoax (one so convincing that the Dissuasio is ascribed to its true author in only one manuscript out of some sixty, and for centuries readers ascribed the work to Valerius Maximus or Jerome).8
The Dissuasio went abroad into the world not with Walter Map's name affixed but as authored by one “Valerius,” who (though Valerius may also be a pun on Gauterus) is someone else, perhaps a classical figure, with an urbane style of argument. Indeed, the argumentative style of the Dissuasio (as will be illustrated further in this chapter) seems presented as an alternative to the invective that characterizes Roman diatribe satire, such as Juvenal's second and sixth satires (which attack homosexuality and marriage, respectively) and Jerome's Against Jovinian (an attack on marriage). In the Dissuasio, Valerius imputes flat-footed Christian argument of the Gerald of Wales stripe to his equally classical addressee, Rufinus. Thus Rufinus is either surprised or angry that Map takes so many of his examples from the heathens rather than the Bible (284-86), but his narrator wants Rufinus to be like a resourceful bee that can draw honey even from the nettle and hardest rock. This reference again cleverly combines classical allusions. First, it implies creativity of high quality, setting for Rufinus a goal as craftsman as great as Horace himself, who had famously compared his style of craftsmanship to the careful work of a bee, which, though small, draws honey from many places and does mighty works (Ode 4.2.28-33). Second, urtica, stinging nettle, was widely cited in classical literature as an aphrodisiac (e.g., Ovid Ars amatoria 2.417), so Map makes Valerius seem to be asking Rufinus to become the busy bee who will carefully avoid getting stung by incitements to marriage but, far from completely avoiding the pleasures of the world, will still end up rich in “honey,” a reference itself rich in sensuous overtones (so long as he does not turn that honey into marriage). Equally, when Map goes on to add “so that you may suck honey out of the rock and oil from the hardest stone,” he intermeshes the reference with a biblical allusion, the song of Moses praising the bountifulness of the Lord in Deuteronomy 32:13. The medium is the message: while urging Rufinus to draw on both Christian and heathen sources, Map sets the example and invokes God's blessing on the result.
This is particularly ironic, in a way that may serve as introduction to Map's Christian paganism. Map derives Rufinus's name from classical sources: Flavius Rufinus is the archcriminal in whose fall Claudian exulted, whereas Rufinus of Aquilea, his near contemporary, was the correspondent and rival of Jerome—hence, there was the false ascription of Map's treatise to Jerome. (Another allusion to Claudian underlies the title of Alain of Lille's Anticlaudianus, a poem about creating the perfect man, composed just after the Dissuasio in the 1180s.) Map's Rufinus is nominally, of course, criminal in his heterosexuality; yet he is doubly criminal in the strength of his hypocritical Christian avowals.
Thus the Dissuasio is redolent with classical allusion and quotation, as is Jerome's Against Jovinian, which is one of Map's sources, but with which he has obvious differences (on this issue, see, further, Delhaye 1951, 79-83; Hanna and Lawler 1997, 61-62). Perhaps the litmus for this stylistic behavior is the discussion of Solomon (Dissuasio 65-74). He is introduced as sol hominum [the sun of men], a touch of Christian etymologizing. But Map allows the discussion of his fall to segue neatly into a mythographic portrayal of the sun personified, Phoebus. The reference to the god being transformed into pastor Admeti [the shepherd of Admetus] (line 72; cf. Euripides Alcestis 8) incorporates into a biblical story a very appropriate pagan example of how the mighty have fallen and enshrines some serious classical scholarship (see Hanna and Lawler 1997, 204).9
Valerius presents himself from the opening of the epistle as the unwilling prophet of doom. But when he finally actuates this role rhetorically near the center of the work, he does not present himself as a figure like Gerald's Isaiah (by way of Jerome), a chastiser of erring Judean monarchs. Instead by a roundabout method, he takes as his model, from a pagan source, the “humble but holy” Tongillius, supposedly Caesar's soothsayer (Dissuasio 136-40); yet this is not the name for that soothsayer that Map had found in Suetonius but, rather, the name of an ambitious Roman who is ridiculed in the satiric tradition for using tricks to try to attract legacy hunters (Martial 2.40) and who tries to live beyond his means (Juvenal Sat. 7.130).
Thus, as a usual argumentative move, Valerius dissuades by eschewing the very Christian rhetoric Gerald insists upon. Map invents for his speaker what the classics might (or should) have said, allowing Valerius to voice a classical history. Indeed, Valerius is characterized as a sort of late classical yenta, someone who knows the true gossipy stories that underlie the formed literary presentations of classical texts (and some very obscure texts at that).
To take merely two examples, Valerius transforms snippets of Aulus Gellius into dramatic anecdotes. First, Gellius is the sole source for a famous antigamous oration by one Metellus; Map goes beyond the oration to record that private conversation whose learned wit gave Metellus the status to speak so compellingly (Dissuasio 217-22). Metellus's wit relies on twisting a recondite point in the Latin version of Aristotle's Topics (1.8.103b), Talia erunt predicta, qualia subiecta permiserint [Predicates will be such as their subjects permit], so that it refers no longer to grammar but to the necessity of a husband to be “subject” to his wife. This complex witticism indicates Map's willingness to use Parisian school training in a manner foreign to Gerald's sobriety, and Map's Valerius cannot resist doubling the joke: what Metellus actually said publicly (according to Gellius) has already been cited as a bon mot of Cato Uticensis: Si absque femina posset esse mundus, conversatio nostra non esset absque dus [If the world could be without women, our intercourse would not be without the gods] (Dissuasio 209-10). So attributed to Cato, the comment provides a wry commentary on a famous line by Lucan, victrix causa deis píacuit, sed victa Catará [While the gods were pleased with the victorious cause, Cato was pleased with the losing one] (Pharsalia 1.128). Map's suggestion is that Cato's failure to share in the opinion of the gods is enhanced by the presence of women.
Second, the anecdote involving Pacuvius and Arrius (Dissuasio 198-205) may rest on a meeting Gellius describes between the playwrights Pacuvius and Accius (the garbling of the latter name may be due to the recollection of a satiric story about “Attius and Tettius” in Gellius 3.16.13).10 As for the macabre joke about the wife hanging herself from a fig tree, Map found the inspiration for part of it in a joke (salsum) reported by Cicero in De matare 2.69.278. Thus, the status of the two figures and the exchange between them comes completely from Valerius's fictive insider knowledge of the late classical literary scene, particularly its comedy and satire.
With this sort of rhetorical move, Map creates a “classical” attitude a good deal more difficult and poised than Gerald's theological one. The Dissuasio does gesture at fixed bipolar opposites of a kind that Gerald would have found comfortable, opposites that would prioritize Christian over pagan, the mind over the body. There are argumentative moments that turn upon such polar pairings as voluptas and veritas (Dissuasio 18-20: “many persuade you to follow your desire but you have me alone as an advocate of truth”), Venus and Pallas (113-16: “bound to Venus like Mars, you will become an object of laughter; Pallas Athene was falsely rejected in the Judgment of Paris”), or delectare, “to delight,” and prodesse, “to be useful” (115-16). This last pairing is itself classical: the antithesis is found in Horace's Ars poética (333). But the Dissuasio never quite rests there.
A couple of examples may solidify the point. Unlike most dissuading, whether Jerome's late classicism or its twelfth-century resuscitations, the Dissuasio generally eschews invective. In fact, Valerius presents the rhetoric of invective, the reduction of someone to a butt of humor, as a subhuman activity. It is behavior ascribed to the satyrs, who in Map's version join the heavenly court to take part in the ridicule of Mars when he is trapped in Vulcan's net—a net into which Rufinus may fall if he allows himself, like Mars, to be chained to Venus (Dissuasio 106, 113-14). Contextually, one might think that the opposite to this half-bestial derision would be Jupiter's unfallen divine state, one of mentis elegantia [mental elegance] (Dissuasio 90-91); this state of fulfillment is in fact identical with the verbal control of the master rhetorician (cf. Valerius's use of elegantia as a “term of art,” a standard of verbal excellence he wants to maintain in his epistle to Rufinus, at Dissuasio 127). Hard as it might seem to match Jupiter's elegantia, Rufinus will have to actually surpass it, if he does not want a woman to set him “mooing” after her the way Jupiter did after Europa.
Similarly, Valerius constantly breaks down even those most hallowed oppositions that ought to be underwriting his argument. At moments, just as Gerald sought to, the Dissuasio insists on the value of profit over delight. But delight itself is never far from being privileged in its own right. One example is the wonderful medieval bestiary, colorful and rich in humor, which roams through the Dissuasio, starting with the voices of “cranes and screech owl,” which are rejected in the opening paragraph because they predict the coming of winter; instead, Map loves the lark and blackbird, which predict warmer weather (1-7). He fears that Rufinus may turn into a hog or an ass (12) or be bitten by a snake (16). Later, Valerius can suggest, rather conventionally, that Venus's rose is delightfully dangerous (214-16); yet his language equally suggests how unfortunate it is that what delights might produce sin. This problematic stance scarcely is Valerius's last word on the subject: quite incongruously, in the story of Periccion, the rose comes to be associated with chastity and its destruction; the “defloration” of its attracting purpura [purple flower] is both lamented and, with qualifications, extolled (279-83). Valerius may overtly urge Rufinus to imitate Cicero, eloquencie princ[eps] [prince of eloquence], who (in an anecdote borrowed from Jerome) would not marry again after his divorce of Terentia because he could not give equal attention to philosophy and to a wife. But Valerius is nonetheless eloquent and himself given to delight.
Thus Map's rather equivocal references to delectatio, “delight,” are informative. They are inevitably part of the several references to springtime scattered through the Dissuasio, most especially the opening reference to Philomela. Although Valerius is forced by circumstances to be a bird of ill omen, he implies that he would rather be a nightingale, the bird of spring—and of sex.
More powerfully, at least three of Valerius's allegedly misogynistic “heroes” are described in terms that link them firmly to delectation. Ulysses (Dissuasio 32-34), Canius (179-97), and, much less explicitly, Jason (321-25) all lived the opposite of cloistered lives; Canius indeed multarum gauderet amoribus [rejoiced in the loves of many women]. In short, all three men personify a logic of self-conscious indulgence. All enact what is inherent in the description of Venus's flower, the rose. Each allows himself to experience woman's temptation fully—but not permanently. Ulysses delectatus est [was delighted] by the Sirens (as well as by Circe, a connection Map leaves implicit), but he can experience the fullness of delight because he artificially restrains himself from sin by tying himself to his (nonetheless very phallic) mast. Similarly, Canius (produced by a reference in the first of Gerald's evil Mar- boys, Martial) wins measured approval for his explanation of his reason for having many lovers: Vices noctium dies reddunt letiores, sed tenebrarum perpetuitas instar inferni est [The changes that night brings make the days more cheerful, but a constant darkness would be like hell] (Dissuasio 186-87). In his sexual athleticism, he certainly does “sin,” but that very Don Juanism prevents his ever being committed to the slavery of marriage (and in this, Map follows good classical advice: cf. Ovid Remedia amoris 403-4, where the reader is advised to find a second lover in order to decrease his passion for the first).
Thus the Dissuasio rejects Gerald's dichotomies. These mainly underwrite an insistence upon the primacy of a single way of knowing, one fundamentally Bible-based and requiring the rational manipulation of the text as a vehicle for developing understanding. In contrast, Valerius imagines a more supple knowledge. For him, only through uncommitted indulgence of the prohibited, the forbidden, or the undesirable, by testing or experiencing, does one come to any mature view of virtue. He wishes for Rufinus, semel martius fueris et non sis, ut scias quod felicitatem impediat [If only you had been married once and were not now, so that you might know what impedes happiness] (Dissuasio 165-66). He claims that Cato could only achieve the wisdom that allows him to be cited as an authority by that indulgence that allows firm experiential knowledge.
Amice, Cato non nisi sensa et cognita loquebatur, nec quisquam feminarum
Execratur ludibria, nisi lusus, nisi expertus, nisi pene conscius. (Dissuasio 210-13)
[Friend, Cato said nothing except things he felt and knew, nor does anyone curse women's frivolousness unless he has been fooled, and knows it, and feels the pain.]
Like John Milton, who offers a similar argument against censorship in Areopagitica, Map knows this form of argument from the classics. There, it is a topic of pastoral most notably argued in Virgil's first eclogue: Tityrus's poetry has only limited value, unless he can continue to sing outside the shade “where the barren stones cover all” (Ec. 1.47), while Meliboeus faces an uncertain exile. That naive puer who still heads out to sea to court the fickle Pyrrha in Horace's Ode 1.5 thinks that she will be semper vacuam, semper amabilem [always free for him, always worthy of his love], in contrast to the fictive narrator of the poem, who has already hung up his dripping clothes as an offering to Neptune. From the point of view of the experienced, Gerald's theological argument constitutes what Milton would call “a cloistered virtue,” one that achieves its assertive power only through experiential ignorance: indeed, like Pallas, possessing a virgin's wisdom.
While such a reading may characterize Valerius's wit, one ultimately needs to ask a question that would never arise in the case of Gerald's epistle. What purpose does this sort of writing serve? Here Map's own answer, offered as part of the framing account in De nugis curialium (within which he recuperated the Dissuasio as his own, not Valerius's), seems most persuasive.11 In asserting authorship, Map must unveil the hoax—which, he claims, has insured the text's popularity and, indeed, its very legibility. Explaining pseudonymity (and recycling the text in a more expansive literary context) emphasized that authorial wit that Gerald found maddening about Map— and the epistle as its exemplification.
But, De nugis argues, the apparent classicism of the Dissuasio was conceived precisely to allow open-minded reading of the epistle. To have done otherwise, to have “published” the letter as his own, Map says, would have insured that it not be read. Its projected audience, twelfth-century advocates of “the ancients,” would have rejected the work as merely “modern.” It might only be appreciated by passing for something other than what it is and by substituting “the names of dead men in the title” for Map's own; thus Map alludes to the complaint of Horace in Epistle 2.1 that readers reject contemporary works and turn to what they consider “classics” because of their age.
As a rhetorical gesture, this argument resembles very closely what we have already described as one pedagogical movement of the epistle. Unlike Gerald's monotonal protreptic (a text that certainly situates itself as the product of a contemporary author that is purely derivative and imitative of established ways), Valerius the anonymous insists upon plural ways of knowing. In these terms, the work, from Map's perspective, functions as rhetorical satire of its audience. Not only does it explore and explode a current neoclassical craze, the rhetoric of dissuasion,12 but it also comments devastatingly on the audience's inability, when left to its own wits, to distinguish the primary terms of its own literary canons of taste, “ancient” and “modern.”
Further, this rhetorical satire is thoroughly consonant with the epistemological decorum that we have ascribed to Valerius's letter. Map addresses an audience prone to respond to texts in terms of external markers (e.g., the author's name and era). But just as Ulysses wants to hear the Sirens (even knowing that it is a dangerous business), Valerius's ideal reader (i.e., Walter Map) must experience the Dissuasio openly, without regard to its source, and must judge it on merits intrinsic to itself. In these terms, Map offers his audience a counter-definition of “modernity.” It is not the debilitated world of venerating “the ancients” that is highlighted in the explanation Map provides at the end of the Dissuasio. Rather, in ages to come, his book will provide the refinement that readers will have totally lost.
Simiarum tempus erit, ut nunc, non hominum, quia presencia sibi
deridebunt,
Non habentes ad bonos pacienciam. (De nugis curialium 4.5)
[It will be an age of apes (as it now is), not of men; they will scoff at their
present, and have no patience for men of worth.]
The hoax of the Dissuasio demonstrates strikingly the power of modernity. One “modern,” at least, can in fact “do classics” so well as to pass for such (even while leaving abundant clues that he is not an “ancient” at all). Not only does this act expose the pretensions of Map's contemporaries; it also shows that modernity might indeed exceed the classical past. This is not just because, as is the customary argument, it can exceed the classics because it is better; it is better because it is Christian. It can accomplish all that the classics did (well enough to be confused with them) and other things, too.
Ultimately, painful as it may be to admit it, Gerald of Wales is probably right about Map. He is a good deal too much like Valerius's character Canius, poeta facundie levis et iocunde [clever poet of frivolous eloquence] (Dissuasio 179-80). His modern classicism (which out-classics the ancients) appears born out of a severe distaste for John of Salisbury and idealizing Christian humanism. It is much more “Chartrian,” in the spirit of Bernard Silvester or Alain of Lille—or, in the native tradition, the “Nicholas of Guildford” who may have written a Philomela poem. Map, as rhetorical satirist, would surely have enjoyed the anonymous Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale.
Notes
1. See Hanna and Lawler 1997, 31-43. All citations of Map's Dissuasio are from the edition in that volume (121-47). Readers interested in pursuing Map's biblical and classical allusions will find them presented in full in the notes to that edition (pp. 196-219).
2. See Giraldus Cambrensis Symbolum electorum, epistle 24, in Brewer [1861] 1964-66, 1:271-89. Translations are ours.
3. Cf. the considerably more elegant Wane [divinam paginam] dudum floribus viris tui subarrasti; hec in estate tua expectat ut facias uvas; huius in iniuriam non ducas aliam, ne fadas in tempore vindemie labruscas [to this page you once betrothed yourself in the flowering of your spring; it expects that in your summer you will bring forth grapes; do not injure this page by wedding another, lest you bring forth wild grapes in your vintage season] (Map Dissuasio 304-7, citing Isaiah 5:2).
4. See Hanna and Lawler 1997, 52-54.
5. Martianus underwrites that moment in the Dissuasio that most resembles Gerald's, the appeal to marry not a woman but Christian wisdom (308-11).
6. We have adjusted the punctuation to emphasize the statement as biblical text and gloss; the Vulgate text of Isaiah reads ubi doctor parvulorum Populum impudentem non videbis, populum alti sermonis, ita ut non possis intelligere deserútudinem linguae eius, in quo nulla est sapientia [Where is the teacher of children? You will not see an impudent people, a people of deep language, so that you cannot understand the emptiness of its language, in which there is no wisdom (our translation)]. The source in Jerome, not reproduced with verbal exactness, is to be found in Corpus Christianorum 73 (1973): 416.76-88; the final scriptural allusion, which Gerald adds—a form of theological “originality”—is to Obadiah 8: Numquid non in die illa, dicit Dominus, perdam sapientes de Idumaea? [On that day, says the Lord, will I not destroy the wise out of Edom?]
7. See, e.g., the interpretation of D. W. Robertson, the twentieth century's mordant throwback to Hieronimian invective satire, in the headnote to his chapter on Map (1970, 223); cf. also Neil Cartlidge's nondescriptive reference (1997, 190-91) to “that misogynistic repulsion for female sexuality which is found in works like the Epístola Valerii. ”
8. For a survey of the ascriptions, see Hanna and Lawler 1997, 60-62; see also Pratt 1962, 12-14.
9. This scholarship sits cheek by jowl with submerged materials (and it is important that they are so submerged) from a text that seeks to moralize classical myth into Christian poetry, the Carolingian Écloga Theoduli.
10. Another variation on this pairing appears in Erasmus's Adagia 1.10.76: idem Acdi quod Titii [Accius and Titius take alike].
11. See James [1983] 1994, most particularly 312.
12. This is argued in Hanna and Lawler 1997, 47-52, 55-59.