Virgil in Medieval England
Figuring The Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer

Examines the impact of an ancient and prestigious text on medieval culture.

Christopher Baswell (Author)

9780521027083, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 June 2006

460 pages, 6 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.2 x 3 cm, 0.701 kg

"No student of medieval of Renaissance classicism can ignor Baswell's book. it is a treasure trove of information about the medieval Virgil brilliantly distilled to serve the needs of literary analysis." Barbara Nolan, Modern Philology

What happens when a prestigious text of one period is read and reused in a different, much later world? What can we learn from the annotations accumulated by a single manuscript as it moved among different institutions and readerships? In this study Christopher Baswell takes as his model Virgil's ancient epic poem The Aeneid, which held many kinds of appeal for the culture of the Middle Ages. He examines a series of Latin manuscripts of the text which were copied in twelfth-century England but reused and reannotated for three centuries, and shows how their users approached the epic in very different ways. He then charts the progression from the Latin of the original to the vernaculars of the Roman d'Eneas and Chaucer's House of Fame and Legend of Good Women, to show how medieval vernacular poets used Virgil's prestige to lay their own claim to poetic and even political authority.

Introduction: manuscripts and their contexts
1. Auctor to Auctoritas: modes of access to Virgil in medieval England
2. Pedagogical exegesis of Virgil in medieval England: Oxford All Souls College 82
3. Spiritual allegory, platonising cosmology, and the Boethian Aeneid in medieval England: Cambridge, Peterhouse College, 158
4. Moral allegory and the Aeneid in the time of Chaucer: London, BL Additional 27304
5. The romance Aeneid
6. Writing the reading of Virgil: Chaucerian authorities in the House of Fame and the Legend of Good Women
Conclusion
Apendices
Notes
Bibliography, Indexes.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]