he had written and produced other texts (particularly the Remedium amoris) which asserted his change of heart.24 According to this interpretive model, Ovid had left his youthful misdemeanors behind him, and attained that wisdom which age (and painful experience) brings.
Fascinating problems arose when, in the later Middle Ages, certain vernacular writers sought to locate and empower their writings, and those of distinguished contemporaries, in relation to the systems and strategies of textual evaluation which academia had produced. Their sense of the worth of the vernacular in general and their own writing in particular impelled them irresistibly in that direction. But there was a major stumbling block; the shade of Ovid, as it were, haunted such attempts at valorization. Vernacular secular literature had human love as a major subject, and how could a poet who wrote about love, and/or expressed his own (limiting and probably demeaning) emotional experiences, be trusted as a fount of wisdom, accepted as a figure worthy of respect and belief? An auctor amans was an utter paradox, almost a contradiction in terms.
Dante met the problem with typical vigor. His Convivio, which is ostentatiously based on the medieval genre of the commentary on an auctor, elaborately brings out the profoundly scientific subject-matter of three of his canzoni. The point is being made that Dante’s vernacular works merit the full scholarly apparatus of commentary which for generations had been reserved for Latin auctores. Moreover, given that a (would-be) auctor has to have an impeccable character, Dante is anxious to emphasize that his life is not letting down his lyrics. The reader of these canzoni may have formed the impression that he had pursued a great passion of love, Dante admits. But in fact the motivation (or “moving cause”) was virtue, as, he promises, the subsequent expositions will make clear.25 Any potential threat to the authority of the text or the good character of its author is then refined out of existence by the techniques of allegorical exegesis.
However, in his Trattatello in laude di Dante Giovanni Boccaccio chose not to adopt such a defensive strategy. Instead he flatly declares that all his life Dante suffered from licentiousness: “Amid such virtue, amid such learning as we have noted there to have been in this magnificent poet, lust (lussuria) found most ample space.”26 “But who,” Boccaccio asks, “among mortals can play the just judge in condemning it? Not I.” The attractions of the female sex are very powerful, as is proved by both secular and sacred literature. No reasonable person can gainsay the testimony of holy Scripture, which offers the exempla of Eve’s persuasion of Adam, David’s adultery with Bathsheba and murder of her husband, and the story of the wise Solomon who, “to please a woman,” kneeled down and worshipped Baalim. Dante, then, may not be excused, but some comfort may be found in the fact that many other great writers experienced similar difficulties. The clear implication is that amor need not necessarily destroy auctoritas; the moral virtue of a text may survive the lapses of its author.
Those “sinful authors” Solomon and David are invoked to similar effect in what is probably the most daring defense of Jean de Meun to figure in the querelle de la Rose of the early fifteenth century. Pierre Col went beyond all analogies with Ovid—a major strategy in the querelle—to appeal to the precedent of Biblical lovers.27 Chancellor Jean Gerson had attacked the Rose on the grounds that “he who made it was a foolish lover.” Why then, Col retorts, does Gerson not make similar charges against Solomon, David, and other foolish lovers, who lived long before Jean de Meun, and “whose books are made a part of holy Scripture and their words a part of the holy mystery of the Mass”? It was “a foolish lover” (David) who “caused Uriah the good knight to be killed by treachery in order to commit adultery with his wife.” It was “a foolish lover” (Solomon) “who caused the temples with the idols to be built for the love of strange women.” If they are not to be condemned, neither should Jean de Meun.
Col raises the stakes even higher by comparing Jean de Meun’s situation to those of Saints Peter and Paul. Those revered auctores were more firm in the faith after they had sinned, he declares; similarly, Jean de Meun, because he had been a foolish lover, was very firm in reason, for the more he knew by his own experience the folly of foolish love the more he was able to despise it and praise reason. When he wrote the Rose he was no longer a foolish lover, and had repented of having been one—as is evident from the fact that he speaks so well of reason. The voice of “Raison,” it would seem, is in large measure the voice of Jean de Meun.28
The ingenious appeals to the Bible by Giovanni Boccaccio and Pierre Col echo a long-running controversy in Biblical exegesis, over how the fallibility of major Scriptural auctores could be reconciled with their undeniable authority. For generations theologians had attempted to cope with harsh historical facts concerning the lives of Kings David and Solomon.29 Here the strategies of allegorization were invaluable, David being interpreted as Christ, Bathsheba as the Church, and Uriah as the devil. Alternatively, the literal sense could be confronted, with David, Solomon, and (in a very different capacity) St. Paul being deployed as exempla of what to do and what to avoid. St. Bonaventure, writing c.1254–57 in his commentary on Ecclesiastes (then supposed to be by Solomon), affirmed that this work was written not by a sinner but by a penitent man who regretted his sins.30 This is in response to three powerful counter-arguments. First, when a carnal man preaches spiritual things, he scandalizes rather than edifies; therefore this book is likely to cause scandal rather than edification.31 Second, in Psalm 49:16 we hear God saying to the sinner, “Why dost thou declare my justices?” a dire penalty being threatened for such presumption (cf. v. 21. This auctoritas was to resonate through scholastic discussions of the immoral present-day preacher, as discussed in Chapter 1 below).32 If Solomon was a sinner, therefore he sins by declaring the divine justice. Third, a good author builds up faith, promotes trust and confidence. But an evil one does not—in conflict with the aim of holy Scripture, which is to generate faith. Bonaventure responds by affirming the opinion of Jerome that Ecclesiastes was the work of a repentant man. Because God does not cast away those who are repentant, it follows that Solomon was not in a reprehensible state when he wrote this book. Furthermore, Bonaventure continues, it may be argued that the holy Spirit speaks what is true and good not only through the good but also through the evil. Hence our Lord advises that we should “do what they say, not what they do” (cf. Matthew 23:3). He prophesied most clearly through the problematic Balaam (cf. Numbers 23 and 24); likewise, God said many good things through Solomon, although he was a carnal man. Solomon’s sin had nothing to do with his teaching, but everything to do with his failure to behave as he ought.
Arguments like this were probably in Col’s mind when he challenged Gerson’s reading of the Rose. Its implication seems to be that a writer’s amatory experience does not necessarily invalidate his work—providing that he has put his amours behind him (like David, and indeed like the chastised Ovid). But what if a writer does not leave his love behind? If, as in the case of Dante as described in Boccaccio’s Trattatello, the emotion persists? That is a far more difficult proposition to defend. But Col, to his intellectual credit, tries to do just that in a later part of the letter quoted above.33 First he argues that in itself to be a clerk, a philosopher, or a theologian is not irreconcilable with being a foolish lover—witness the examples of David, Solomon, and others. Indeed, he adds, some clerics even say that Solomon wrote the Song of Songs on account of his love of Pharaoh’s daughter. Why, one could bring forth “more than a thousand examples of people who were clerks and at the same time foolish lovers”! These roles are as compatible with one another “as being at once clerk and knight,” as were Pompey, Julius Caesar, Scipio, and Cicero.
Col then proceeds to taunt Gerson by suggesting that the Chancellor should not judge others by himself. Because he is a clerk, philosopher, and theologian without being a foolish lover, he assumed that all men behaved similarly. Which is manifestly not the case. Moreover, even if the great Gerson were, in the future, to become a foolish lover, that would not make him any the less a clerk—at least, not at the beginning of this passion.34
This vacillation is fascinating. On the one
