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

by Christopher Baswell

• ISBN13: 9780521027083
• ISBN10: 052102708X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-06-22
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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 new institutions and readerships? In this study Christopher Baswell takes as his model Virgil's Aeneid, and the many kinds of appeal it held 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 medieval vernacular poets used Virgil's prestige to lay their own claim to poetic and even political authority.

Table of Contents

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.