secundum voluntatem Patris unigenitus Filius ejus Dominus noster epulatur, sicut ipse ait, ‘Meus cibus est, ut faciam voluntatem Patris mei qui in caelis est.’ Hic cibus nobis est salutaris” (Enarrationes in XII Psalmos, PL 14.1131) (Do you know what food God provides for men? The food that according to the will of the Father his only-begotten Son our Lord eats himself, as he says, “My meat is to do the will of my Father who is in heaven.” This food is salutary for us.) Ambrose quotes John 4:34 over and over, and once says, sounding like Patience, “Qui autem jucundior cibus quam facere voluntatem Dei?,” What more delightful food than to do the will of God? (De officiis ministrorum, PL 16.70).
240 wonte: mole. Hanna 2010a:6–7, n. 12, has suggested that B.14.41 worme should have been emended to this word.
241 The Cryket by kynde of þe fuyr (B.14.42 in þe fir þe Criket): Skeat says that “Usually this fabulous story is spoken of the salamander,” and gives evidence from the Promptorium parvulorum that salamanders were called crickets in English, but finally settles for the domestic cricket with its well-known fondness for warm places. But the cricket lives in the hearth, not the fire; the salamander’s ability to survive in fire is declared in full by Isidore (Etymologiae 12.4.36), copied by all who followed him (as searching salamandra in the PL online shows), and still enshrined in our culture (as the full entry in the OED shows—Rape of the Lock 1.59–60 is but one example of many); John Trevisa translated Bartholomaeus’s salamandra as “cryket” (1127/28). For all these reasons, it seems evident that L meant the salamander.
241 (B.14.43) corleu: According to Spearman 1993, probably not our curlew (numenius) but the quail (coturnix), regularly also called “curlew” in ME, and to be associated with the quails of Exodus 16.13 and Numbers 11.31–32. Spearman does not cite Peter Comestor, PL 198.1159–60 (on Exodus 16), “Est autem coturnix avis regia, quam … nos vulgo curlegium dicimus a currendo” (The coturnix is the royal bird that we call the curlew because it runs), and 1226 (on Numbers 11), “Fuerunt hae coturnices, ut tradunt, non modicae quae apud nos sunt; sed illae majores, quae regiae aves dicuntur, quas curleios, a currendo, vocamus” (These coturnices were, they say, not the little ones we have, but the bigger ones, called regal birds, that we call curlews because they run). These remarks suggest that Comestor thought that numenius and coturnix were related, and that the bigger one, the regal one, is indeed our curlew, a far more majestic bird than the quail—though quail run much more often than curlews. L probably never saw a curlew. In any case, Spearman is surely right in regarding the God-sent birds of Exodus and Numbers as what is meant here; it is not too much of a stretch, in fact, to take clennest flessh of briddes as deriving from Comestor’s regia; see OED, s.v. clean, adj., III.9 and its citations, and MED, s.v. clene, adj., 5, and its citations (some the same as in OED). Or it means ritually cleanest: would God have sent anything else? Neither bird is in the lists of birds to be avoided in Lev 11:13–19 and Deut 14:12–18.
As for living off the air: the chameleon (proverbially—see Whiting C135—and in at least some Latin sources, e.g., Bartholomaeus Anglicus, trans. Trevisa, 1161.2–8) and the spider (Etymologiae 12.5.2) do that, not the quail or the curlew. But the idea was common enough, especially as a way of praising God’s providence, as L does. Eustathius, misrepresenting or mistranslating St Basil, says that bees and wasps semper ex aere nutriuntur, are always nourished by the air (In Hexaemeron sancti Basilii, PL 53.954). Hildegard of Bingen says that “certain birds of great strength” are strengthened further by the air, “and the air itself sometimes descends into rivers and further strengthens large fish so that they can exist for some time without any food,” Liber divinorum operum 1.4.58 (PL 197.847). Aquinas in Catena aurea (ed. Guarienti, 1953: 2.182) on Luke 12:24 (“Consider the ravens … God feedeth them”) cites Theodoretus on Psalm 146.9 (“Who giveth to beasts their food, and to the young ravens that call upon him”): “He (the Psalmist) doesn’t mention any birds except ravens because God nourishes their young by a special providence, for ravens bear young but neglect them, don’t feed them; in a wonderful way food carried on the breeze reaches their mouths, which they open to take it, and that is how they are nourished.” The anonymous continuator of Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorologies, however, says, “Licet autem aliqua animalia dicantur nutriri in alio elemento, ut aves in aere et salamandra in igne, tamen haec omnia nutriuntur ex terra et aqua, vel ex his quae nascuntur in eis, ut manifestum est in avibus” (Though some animals are reputed to be nourished in another element, as birds in air and the salamander in fire, in fact all are nourished by earth and water or by things that are produced in them, as is obvious for birds) (Editio Leonina, t. III (1886), p. CXXIV). He goes on to grant that the salamander does exist for a long time “in igne ex sicco terreo adusto et fumoso … non autem nutriretur in igne puro” (in fire from dry earthy matter burnt and smoky … it would not be nourished in pure fire).
244a (B.14.46a) Quodcumque pecieritis a patre in nomine meo dabitur enim vobis: Whatsoever you shall ask the Father in my name shall be given you. (B ends in nomine meo &c.) The B line is verbatim (or nearly so; see Alford, Quot.) from John 14:13; C’s dabitur enim vobis replaces John’s hoc faciam (That will I do) with a phrase from Matt 7:7 (adding enim).
244a Et alibi: Non in solo pane viuit homo &c (B.14.46a Et alibi, Non in solo pane viuit homo set in omni verbo quod procedit de ore dei): Not by bread alone doth man live, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Matt 4:4, Jesus quoting Deut 8:3. In Deuteronomy, though, as Maillet 2014:78–79 insists, there is ambiguity: God sent both deprivation and manna to show the Israelites that man lives not on bread alone but on the word of God; she argues that the manna is a symbol of God’s word (Paul calls it spiritual food, 1 Cor 10:3, as she also points out, pp. 81–82): the passage in Deuteronomy must be one warrant to L for insisting that fiat voluntas tua is food. But see John 6:31ff, where Jesus contrasts the manna to himself, the true bread from heaven (Maillet 82).
Of the two quotations, this second is the more apt: see the next note.
247–49 (B.14.49–50) A pece of þe paternoster … fiat voluntas tua: For a list of the places where L mentions the Paternoster, see the entry in Alford, Quot. for B.10.468; for an illuminating discussion of the whole use of the Paternoster in the poem, and for the tradition of commentary on this petition, “thy will be done,” see Gillespie 1994. Note that Francis had the brothers who were lay, not clerics, say the Paternoster whereas the clerics said the divine office (which includes the Paternoster) (Testament, ed. Habig 1983:68). Alford 1977:93 argues that the three Latin quotations (in 244a and 249, B.13.46a and 50) go together in the commentary tradition, but he doesn’t say clearly what seems the essential thing: that, being a phrase of the Paternoster, the Lord’s prayer (Matt 6:9–13, Luke 11:2–4)—and also a phrase of Christ’s prayer to the Father in the garden of Gethsemane, Matt 26:42, as Kirk 1972:157, 1978:95 and Anna Baldwin 1990:82 point out—fiat voluntas tua is a verbum quod procedit de ore Dei; it’s also something asked a patre. Thus I think L is being very much himself here, not being conventional. He is also thinking of “give us this day our daily bread” (Actyf’s favorite phrase; see 208–13n above), and wittily implying both that to have just said fiat voluntas tua sincerely is to have had your daily bread and, since one of the things God wants is to feed us, fiat voluntas tua and panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie are two ways of asking the same thing. And anyway, Inquirentes dominum non minuentur omni bono, as Wit said (10.202a, B.9.109a) and, in B, the narrator repeated (B.11.282a). It surely isn’t conventional to call the phrase a meal. However, see John 4:34, cited above, which has to be the scriptural basis of the idea that fiat voluntas tua is food; see Mann 1979:30–32, Barney 1988:121, and 5.86–88n above. So perhaps it is conventional, but Patience revitalizes it with his wit.
Actually, the idea is not original in the poem with Patience. Will himself has said at 5.87–88 that
