The Golden Legend Revisited

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by michelinewalker in Art, Literature

Tags

Bible, Golden Legend, Gutenberg Bible, illuminated manuscript, Jacobus, Jacobus de Voragine, Middle Ages, Nuremberg Chronicle

: Saints Primus and Felician, from a 14th century manuscript of the Golden Legend. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Golden Legend

There is no mention of Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend,[i] or Legenda aurea, in my list of other illuminated manuscripts, my last post. Yet hagiographies and martyrologies, the lives of saints and martyrs, were among illuminated manuscripts and the Golden Legend, compiled around the year 1260, was the bestseller of the Middle Ages.

Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1230 – July 13 or July 16, 1298), also known as Giacomo da Varazze, Jacopo da Varazze and Jacques de Voragine, was an Italian chronicler and, reluctantly, the Archbishop of Genoa. As a chronicler, he wrote a Chronicle of Genoa. However, he is also the author of Sermones de omnibus evangeliis, discourses on all the Gospels, and several other texts. In fact, Voragine was a prolific writer and may have translated the Bible. If he did, that translation has disappeared. In short, although it is illuminated, the Golden Legend, or Légende dorée, is first and foremost a text.

(please click on the picture to enlarge it)

: “Crucifixion” (showing also the archbishop Jacobus de Voragine with his book the Golden Legend in his hands), by Ottaviano Nelli, Chapel of the Trinci Palace, Foligno, Italy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hagiographies and Martyrologies

However, as a text, the Golden Legend was not just any text. In the Middle Ages, lives of saints and martyrs were a favourite. Saints perform miracles and some kill mythical animals. St George slayed a dragon, which made him a popular saint during the Middle Ages. Miracles are manifestations of the supernatural and dragons, a mythical creature born of the collective human imagination. The Golden Legend has an apocryphal St Sylvester who goes down a dungeon, tames a dragon and climbs out carrying the dragon.

The Subject Matter

So, there can be little doubt that the Golden Legend owes its popularity in part to its subject matter. Hagiographies belong, to a large extent, to that special realm of literature we call the “fantastic” and, in Voragine’s case, a Christian fantastic, or “merveilleux [marvellous] chrétien,” a term used by scholars to describe “fantastic” aspects of French medieval literature. In short, Voragine wrote legends, golden legends. Miracles and martyrdom constitute another “reality.”

Fiction: a Legend

Moreover, Voragine wrote extremely well. He knew the merits of fiction and style, which may be the real key to the success of the Golden Legend. Other authors wrote hagiographies and martyrologies, but not in a way that truly engaged readers. As for Jacobus, he “embellished” his texts to the delight of readers. Voragine is also said to have “borrowed” from other writers such as Jean de Mailly[ii] and Bartholomew of Trent,[iii] but did he “borrow” or retell?

Vincent de Beauvais, the author of the Speculum Maius (The Great Mirror), “the compendium of all of the knowledge of the Middle Ages” also borrowed from Mailly, Bartholomew of Trent and other authors. (See Speculum Maius, Wikipedia.) Borrowing need not be plagiarism. Although a large number of La Fontaine’s Fables are Æsopic in origin, Jean de La Fontaine is one of the finest French authors.

A Calendar

Finally, the Golden Legend was yet another calendar, a liturgical calendar. Every day of the year, a saint or an event, such as the birth of Christ, is commemorated. Voragine himself was beatified in 1816 and his feast day is July 16th. The Golden Legend’s calendar is divided into five seasons.

(please click on the picture to enlarge it)

: A Golden Legend illumination (Photo credit: Google images)

An Illuminated Manuscript and an Incunable

Yet, The Golden Legend was illuminated, not by Voragine but by several Italian artists. Moreover, it was copied (calligraphy), again not by Voragine, but by different scribes, probably monks working in a scriptorium.[iv] So The Golden Legend could have been listed in Other Illuminated Manuscripts as several copies were made between 1260 and 1450, the year Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1395 – February 3, 1468) invented the printing press. However, it also constitutes an incunable (sometimes called a “fifteener,” fifteenth century).

Incunables or incunabula (incunabulum, singular: “in the cradle”) are books printed between 1450 and 1501, of which the best known is the Gutenberg Bible (also known as the 42-line Bible, the Mazarin Bible or the B42). To see the facsimile, click on Gutenberg Bible. Another famous incunable is the Hartmann Schedel Weltchronik (a German translation of the Liber Chronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle). But The Golden Legend is also, and not negligibly, an incunable.

One characteristic of incunables is that the printer often left room on the printed page so an artist could illuminate the text. For instance, incunables often featured rubricated (from red) letters. Rubricated letters are slightly different than historiated letters, a matter that can be discussed later.

Page from Valerius Maximus, Facta et dicta memorabilia, printed in red and black by Peter Schöffer (Mainz, 1471). The page exhibits a rubricated initial letter “U” and decorations, marginalia, and ownership stamps of the “Bibliotheca Gymnasii Altonani” (Hamburg). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Conclusion

I will pause by saying that The Golden Legend tells far more than the lives of saints and martyrs and does so because Voragine embellished his accounts to the point of creating saints and martyrs. He was a storyteller and that may well be the reason his hagiography has endured. However, for the record, The Golden Legend is

the bestseller of the Middle Ages,
an illuminated manuscript,
an incunable and, after 1501,
a printed book.

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[i] Online text, The Golden Legend (Fordham University)

[ii] Abbreviato in gestis miraculis sanctorum (Summary of the Deeds and Miracles of the Saints)

[iii] Epilogum in gesta sanctorum (Afterword on the Deeds of the Saints)

[iv] It would appear that the scriptorium was a series of recesses located in a monastery and not a room.

composer: Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300 – April 1377)

form: Virelai

piece: Douce Dame Jolie

Sermones de Sanctis

11 February 2013

WordPress

You can’t please everyone: Æsop retold

21 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Fables

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

AT 1215, Æsop, Fable, Ferdinand Hodler, François de Malherbe, Hartmann Schedel, Milo Winter, Nuremberg Chronicle, Racan, Walter Crane

Le Meunier, son fils et l’âne, François Chauveau*

*François Chauveau[i]

Jean de La Fontaine (July 8, 1621 – April 13, 1695)

This fable is very old and everybody knows it. But fables have a way of never going out of fashion. Moreover, I am using La Fontaine’s rewriting of this fable, which updates it considerably. It is now a seventeenth-century masterpiece.

Aarne-Thompson-Uther Type 1215: The Man, the Boy and the Donkey

Æsop‘s The miller, his son and the donkey, Perry Index 721 (English)

[eBook #25433], page 23

La Fontaine’s immediate predecessor was Honoré de Racan, seigneur de Bueil, (February 1589 – 21 January 1670), a disciple of François de Malherbe (1555 – October 16, 1628), a critic, a poet, and a translator who all but dictated the rules of classical poetics. La Fontaine’s rendition of this fable was dedicated to his dearest friend, Monsieur de Maucroix (1619 – 1708).

Æsop as depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel in 1493

* * *

The miller, his son and the donkey

A father and his son want to take a donkey to market and sell it. They tie the donkey’s feet together and run a rod underneath the tied feet. This is their way of carrying their merchandise.

(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)

The miller, his son and the donkey, by Milo Winter (7 August 1888 – 1956)

(Photo credit: The Æsop for Children, Gutenberg EBook

A man

On their way to market, the father and his son meet a man who makes fun of them and calls them: ânes, which is this case means “asses.” So the donkey is set on its four legs and the son rides on it. The donkey protests “en son patois” (in his dialect).

Three merchants

They then come across three merchants who give themselves the right to tell the son that his father should be riding on the back of the donkey, the father being older. So the father starts riding on the back of the donkey while the son walks.

Three girls

A little later, they meet three girls who tell the father that he looks like a bishop (un évêque) and is acting like a calf (un veau: an idiot).

Tandis que ce nigaud [idiot], comme un évêque assis,

Fait le veau sur son âne, et pense être bien sage.

The miller, his son and the donkey, by Ferdinand Hodler (14 March 1853 – 19 May 1918)

A third group

The father’s first reaction is to tell the girls to go their own way, but he starts second-guessing his answer and sits his son on the donkey. No sooner is the son comfortably seated, that a third group exclaim that both the son and the father are crazy (fous). Can’t they see that they are killing the poor donkey?

So they let the donkey lead the parade and, once again, find a critic who calls the donkey, the son and his father “trois ânes,” or three asses, at which point the father says that whether he is blamed (blâmer) or praised (louer), he will do as he pleases: à ma “tête.”

The Moral or the Morals

Usually, this fable is given the following moral: one cannot please everyone. But I suspect there is a moral underneath this first moral. The moral beneath the first moral would be that they are encountering judgmental individuals. The people they encounter do not even ask for an explanation before they start throwing stones.

Can’t please everyone

Walter Crane‘s (1845 – 1915) composite illustration of all the events in the tale for the limerick retelling of the fables, Baby’s Own Aesop, an 1887 children’s edition of Æsop’s Fables or fables credited to Æsop (620 – 560 BCE). Doubt lingers as to whether or not there ever lived a Æsop. There is, however a Æsopic corpus. In this image, our fable is entitled “The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey.”

(Please click on the image to enlarge it.)

Sources:

Jean de La Fontaine, Le Meunier, son fils, et l’âne (French text)
Æsop‘s Fables, The miller, his son and the donkey, Perry Index 721 (English)
http://www.art.com/products/p14605179-sa-i3022294/ferdinand-hodler-the-miller-his-son-and-the-donkey.htm
Aarne-Thompson-Uther Type 1215: The Man, the Boy and the Donkey, by D. L. Ashliman

La Fontaine’s Poetics

As I have mentioned in other blogs, usually La Fontaine lets animals talk, which is obliqueness,’ or dire-sans-dire, at its best. Given that this fable is the first of tome 1, book III, it is part of La Fontaine’s “poetics.” The first fable of each book includes comments on the writing of fables. This time, animals are not the ones who talk; the fable uses human beings, which makes it a lybistic fable, a fable featuring humans. However, before the ancient story is told, La Fontaine quotes Malherbe who says: “What, please everyone!” Contenter tout le monde!). Furthermore, Malherbe, not La Fontaine, is the one who tells the story. Malherbe was an authority.

Persons who have read earlier blogs know that there are ways of telling without telling or dire-sans-dire (to say without saying). “Le Meunier, son fils, et l’âne” is an example of dire-sans-dire. It is a discours oblique or, to quote Jürgen Grimm, a discours enveloppé, or wrapped up.

Moreover, those who have read my blog on “The Oak Tree and the Reed,” also know that there may be more than one moral to a fable. There may be an implicit moral underneath an ‘explicit’ moral. Good readers can grasp the moral underlying the moral, and my readers are good readers.

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[i] François Chauveau (10 May 1613, Paris – 3 February 1676, Paris). Chauveau was the first artist to illustrate La Fontaine’s Fables. La Fontaine called on him to illustrate his first book of Fables, published in 1668.

Le Meunier, son fils, et l’âne and The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey