SOURCE: Ziolkowski, Jan. “Grammar in the World of Alan's Metaphors.” In Alan of Lille's Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to A Twelfth-Century Intellectual, pp. 13-49. Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1985.

[In the following essay, Ziolkowski discusses Alan's allegorical use of the rules of grammar and grammatical terminology to represent man's impropriety in nature, concepts, and actions.]

1. THE DREAMER'S GRAMMATICAL LAMENT

In the brief metric section which opens Alan of Lille's De planctu Naturae and previews the action to come, the narrator laments the disobedience of humanity to natural law in general and to those directives governing sexual conduct in particular. The dreamer-poet, judging the practices of homosexual men to be especially odious, devotes the entire introductory poem to detailing the deleterious effects such practices have on humanity. In keeping with his allegorical conventions, Alan does not describe sodomy explicitly but allusively through words and phrases with double meanings. Above all, he prefers lengthy metaphors that use grammatical terminology for the gender of nouns, figures of speech, and orthography. The three genders, trope and solecism, orthography and cacography: all these topics and many others are exploited to provide a sexual undertone.

As the De planctu Naturae progresses, Alan reveals in two ways that man's grammatical deviation belongs in the grand scheme of his allegory. Initially, he incorporates a sprinkling of grammatical metaphors into his exposition of the cosmology which is portrayed on Lady Nature's garments. By means of these metaphors he reminds us that, like a basic grammar book, the cosmos is a text to be studied.¹ Later, he achieves a more effective integration of the metaphors into the allegory as a whole when he permits Lady Nature to unfold her mythological explanation of the woes in the world. If Lady Nature's robe is a text, then this myth is the classroom exposition of the text by Lady Nature to her sometimes distracted student. Aptly, Lady Nature chooses a tale that has a schoolhouse setting. In her myth Nature, Venus, and Genius are all scribes subject to the same grammatical rules as man. Here, as in other works of his, Alan equates grammatical error with uitium (“vice” in a broader sense). The rejection by Venus of her scribal responsibilities parallels, on the cosmological level, the abuse by man of grammar; both problems find a corrective in the solution proposed at the end of the poem.

Although the capsulization of these events and concerns in the first metrum is cursory, fully a dozen of the fifty-eight lines are colored by grammatical metaphors. The first grammatical metaphors crop up as the dreamer specifies his grievances about man's perversity. Earlier, while hinting that his elegiac lament was inspired by sodomy, he digressed into an explanation of the cosmic motives for composing a threnode:

Cum Venus in Venerem pugnans illos facit illas
          Cumque sui magica deuirat arte uiros …
Musa rogat, dolor ipse iubet, Natura precatur
          Vt donem flendo flebile carmen eis.

(Metr. 1.5-6 and 9-10 = 431A)²

When Venus wars with Venus and changes “he's” into “she's” and with her witchcraft unmans man …, the Muse implores, grief itself orders, Nature begs that with tears I give them the gift of a mournful poem.

Now, refocusing on his initial theme, the dreamer underlines his belief that homosexuality disturbs the laws of nature, just as solecism (that is, an unacceptable grammatical construction) infringes upon the laws of grammar:

Actiui generis sexus se turpiter horret
          Sic in passiuum degenerare genus.
Femina uir factus sexus denigrat honorem,
          Ars magice Veneris hermafroditat eum.
Predicat et subicit, fit duplex terminus idem.
          Gramatice leges ampliat ille nimis.

(Metr. 1.15-20 = 431A)

The active sex shudders in disgrace as it sees itself degenerate into the passive sex. A man turned woman blackens the fair name of his sex. The witchcraft of Venus turns him into a hermaphrodite. He is subject and predicate: one and the same term is given a double application. Man here extends too far the laws of grammar.

According to Alan's ideal, a man should modify, through sexual intercourse, a woman, just as a predicate modifies a subject. To be appreciated properly as a metaphor, the sentence must be understood as referring simultaneously to the noun subiectum (a subject in grammar or logic) and to the verb subicio, -icere, -ieci, -iectum, from which the noun is derived; in one ordinary sense, the verb means “to place under (so as to subject to the operation of),” “to put (a mare to a stallion).”³ To make this dense metaphor easier to grasp, Alan expands upon his theme. He charges that, in the decadence of the times, men attempt to act both roles by themselves and hence assume the grammatical endings of both the first (feminine) and second (masculine) declensions.⁴ In this way sodomy upsets the correct state of verbs, predicates, and noun declensions; the whole world of grammar is thrown upside down through the black magic of Venus.

Style as well suffers from the sexual turpitude of man, who prefers to carry out acts which are novel and striking rather than acts which are tried and true:

Se negat esse uirum Nature, factus in arte
          Barbarus. Ars illi non placet, immo tropus.
Non tamen ista tropus poterit translatio dici.
          In uicium melius ista figura cadit.

(Metr. 1.21-24 = 431B)

Becoming a barbarian by nature, he disclaims the manhood given him by nature. Grammar does not find favour with him, but rather a trope. This transposition, however, cannot be called a trope. The figure here more correctly falls into the category of defect.

The technical terms in this passage (ars, tropus, translatio, uicium, and figura) would have been familiar to any educated person in the Middle Ages, thanks to the currency of Donatus's Ars grammatica (especially the third book, which circulated independently under the title Barbarismus); but to the modern reader the terms present a conundrum that deserves close examination. Alan means that a plain and simple style does not please man, who instead enjoys tropus, or literary contrivance. According to Donatus (whose definition is quoted verbatim in such twelfth-century grammatical treatises as Hugh of St. Victor's De grammatica), the term tropus designates those constructions in which words are used metaphorically both to create an ornament and to satisfy a necessity (“tropus est dictio translata a propria significatione ad non propriam similitudinem ornatus necessitatisue causa”).⁵ Alan characterizes tropus in a similar way in his dictionary of biblical and theological language:

Tropus dicitur conversio. Est etiam figura quando dictio a propria significatione convertitur, unde locutio dicitur tropica, id est figurativa.

(Distinctiones dictionum theologicarum, 981B)

A trope is a “turning round.” This figure of speech is present when a word is “turned round” from its proper signification; for this reason, such a mode of expression is called tropological, which is to say figurative.

Vitium and tropus were often paired as antonyms in medieval grammatical manuals. The two were considered similar, in that neither conformed perfectly to accepted grammatical usage; but tropes were exonerated of the blame put on stylistic uitia. A “vice” is an unpardonable aberration in aim, that is, in the author's purpose in writing (“deviatio a fine … sine causa excusante”), whereas extenuating circumstances make the trope forgivable.⁶ In a still more specialized sense, a trope is a rhetorical device and, at the same time, a “remedy” for metaphor (“tropus est figura et remedium translationis”);⁷ but in all cases the trope must be controlled (“tropi sustinendi sunt non extendendi”).⁸ The particular trope whose acceptance Alan bemoans (sodomy) does not fall under the heading of translatio (metaphor) but rather constitutes a figura (literary device) which slips into uitium. In most cases figura can be justified (“figura … est uicium ratione excusatum”),⁹ as even Lady Grammar herself granted in the Anticlaudianus (7.257: “damnat vicium toleratque figuram”);¹⁰ but here the figure of speech transgresses its limitations and becomes a “vice.”

Once the reader has digested the technical vocabulary, he can discern one level of figurative meaning underlying these grammatical terms: man scorns Nature's natural and unpretentious art (heterosexual intercourse directed toward the goal of reproduction) for Venus's magic art (homosexual intercourse) and thereby causes Nature's laws to fall into abeyance. Since this theme recurs throughout the De planctu Naturae, the person who has mastered the first metrum has a firm basis for interpreting all the grammatical metaphors that follow.

After the first barrage of grammatical jargon, Alan temporarily retreats from the topic of man's homosexuality while he reveals his cosmology through the description of Lady Nature. Although many of his grammatical metaphors deal with homosexuality, Alan does not restrict their meaning to this single issue. The grammatical metaphors in the cosmological section serve a different purpose, by showing that not just man but animals as well have syntactic functions to serve in the dialogue between creation and God. Thus Alan continues to use grammatical metaphors even in the course of the cosmological description. In portraying the apparel of the goddess, Alan illustrates how all living creatures and inanimate objects obligingly act out the roles assigned to them by nature. Sometimes the behavior of animals prompts Alan to use grammatical terms metaphorically; for instance, he describes the swan as a bird that “uite uaticinabatur apocopam” (pr. 1.157-158 = 436A: “prophesied the end of life”), a phrase that plays on the word apocopa, which indicates the dropping of a word or syllable at the end of a word.¹¹ At times a beast, in heeding Lady Nature, engages in activities that would not be seemly in a rational being; the ass, who is one example, “quasi per antifrasim organizans, barbarismum faciebat in musica” (pr. 1.248 = 438A: “as though a musician by antiphrasis introduced barbarisms into his music”).

When Alan describes the beaver's habit of mutilating its own sexual organs (in accordance with the traditional medieval etymological association between the words castor and castratus), he resorts once again to the language of the ars grammatica: “Illic castor, ne ab hostibus tocius corporis patiatur dieresim, corporis partes apocopabat extremas” (pr. 1.273-275 = 438C: “There the beaver, to avoid suffering complete dismemberment of his body by his enemies, cut off his hindmost parts”).¹² In this metaphor as in the others, Alan could have counted upon his readers or listeners to know the precise meanings of the terms, since the words appeared in the basic grammar of Donatus:

Aphaeresis est ablatio de principio dictionis contraria prosthesi, ut mitte pro omitte, temno pro contemno. Syncope est ablatio de media dictione contraria epenthesi, ut audacter pro audaciter, commorat pro commoverat. Apocope est ablatio de fine dictionis paragoge contraria, ut Achilli pro Achillis et pote pro potest.

Aphaeresis, which is the opposite of prosthesis, is the taking away (of a sound) from the beginning of a word, as mitte instead of omitte or temno instead of contemno. Syncope, which is the opposite of epenthesis, is the taking away (of a sound) from the middle of a word, as audacter instead of audaciter or commorat instead of commoverat. Apocope, which is the opposite of paragoge, is the taking away (of a sound) from the end of a word, as Achilli instead of Achillis or pote instead of potest.¹³

For Alan to use grammatical terms in describing the animals which are pictured on Nature's garments does not imply that he is condemning them. The animals, as irrational creatures, cannot be faulted for the irrational conduct which is their lot; to characterize their actions in grammatical terms demonstrates, on the contrary, that the animals know how to fulfill their designated roles in the book of nature. The metaphor of the book is very much alive in the De planctu Naturae; at the end of the list of birds on Lady Nature's clothes, Alan observes: “Hec animalia quamuis ibi quasi allegorice uiuerent, ibi tamen esse uidebantur ad litteram” (pr. 1.193-195 = 436D: “These living things, although they had there a kind of figurative existence, nevertheless seemed to live there in the literal sense”).¹⁴

Unlike the animals pictured on Nature's garment, man has the gift of reason to elevate himself above his sensuality. Man can look at the birds and see beyond their literal existence to interpret their allegorical meaning. Yet man has not availed himself of his capacity to read the book of nature. It is man, rather than any one of the brute animals, who has marred the garment that Lady Nature wears. Only man, gifted with the power of speech, could have caused the “scissure figurata parenthesis” (pr. 4.164-165 = 452B: “the representation of the parenthesis-like rent”).

Because man has an intellect and the capacity to communicate, the reaction of the dreamer upon seeing Lady Nature is distressing: he falls into a mute stupor. In terms of grammar, the dreamer's loss of verbal response when he is confronted with the operations of nature represents a “neuter” condition (pr. 3.6-7 = 442B: “nec uiuens nec mortuus inter utrumque neuter”). As the dreamer regains consciousness and the power of speech, rational discourse is once again possible; appropriately, grammatical metaphors reappear in full strength. Asked why she weeps, Nature explains that she is distraught because, of all creation, man alone refuses to obey her rules of moderation; she couches her censure in grammatical terms reminiscent of the first metrum, particularly those concerning nouns, gender, and figures of speech. With encyclopedic thoroughness, she enumerates the gender problems posed by man's divergence from sexual norms; in the process, she exhausts the vocabulary of noun classification:

Eorum siquidem hominum, qui Veneris profitentur gramaticam, alii solummodo masculinum, alii femininum, alii commune siue genus promiscuum, familiariter amplexantur. Quidam uero, quasi etherocliti genere, per hyemem in feminino, per estatem in masculino genere, irregulariter declinantur.

(Pr. 4.83-87 = 450B)

Of those men who subscribe to Venus' procedures in grammar, some closely embrace those of masculine gender only, others, those of feminine gender, others, those of common, or epicene gender. Some, indeed, as though belonging to the heteroclite class, show variations in deviation by reclining [literally, “declining”] with those of female gender in Winter and those of masculine gender in Summer.

As with so many of the grammatical metaphors, Nature's comparison rests on Alan's identification of grammatical gender with sexual gender. In his Regulae Alan takes the question of grammatical gender in a different direction; he makes gender an important marker in mapping when to use which pronouns in reference to God:

Nec mirum si nomina uel pronomina distinctiua in masculino et in feminino pertineant ad personam, in neutro ad essentiam, cum in naturalibus nomina in masculino et feminino pertinent ad rem generis, in neutro et ad genus rei. Adiectiua uero in masculino et feminino genere distinctiua sunt ratione generis. Genus enim masculinum et femininum distinctiuum est. Vnde et ipsum adiectiuum, quia ex uirtute discretionis ad rem generis pertinet, exigit substantiuum [PL 210: “subjectum”] quod determinet rem generis ut albus equus, alba mulier. Adiectiuum uero in neutro genere confusum est. Neutrum enim genus non dicitur genus per positionem sed per abnegationem et ita in neutro genere adiectiuum, quia confusum est, pertinet ad genus rei, non ad rem generis.

And it is no wonder, if nouns or pronouns with distinguishing endings in the masculine or feminine gender pertain to a person, but in the neuter to an essence, since in natural philosophy nouns in the masculine or feminine pertain to the matter of gender (rem generis), but in the neuter to the kind of matter (genus rei). For adjectives in the masculine and feminine gender are distinctive by virtue of gender; for gender, be it masculine or feminine, is a distinguishing feature. For this reason the adjective itself, in that it pertains to the matter of gender (rem generis) on the strength of a person's discernment, demands a subject, which decides the matter of gender (rem generis)—as, for example, when you say “white” in the masculine you must follow with a masculine word such as “stallion,” whereas when you say “white” in the feminine you must follow with a feminine word such as “woman.” An adjective in the neuter gender is confused [or, “uncertain”]. For the neuter gender is called a gender not because it involves the placement [of a grammatical ending], but rather because it involves the denial [of such placement]; and thus an adjective in the neuter gender, in that it is confused [or, “uncertain”], pertains to the kind of matter (genus rei), not to the matter of gender (rem generis).¹⁵

To Alan the equivalence of “neuter” and confusion was so apparent that he needed only to insert the word neuter to indicate the dreamer's state of bewilderment.

2. THE METRICS OF LOVE

As Nature and the dreamer converse in this section of the De planctu Naturae, Alan enlists the aid of figures of speech to corroborate his notion of sexual decadence, just as he did earlier, and even intersperses terms pertaining to metrics. For example, Nature declares that man works barbarisms and employs metaplasms improperly:

Humanum namque genus, a sua generositate degenerans, in constructione generum barbarizans, Venereas regulas inuertendo nimis irregulari utitur metaplasmo.

(Pr. 4.55-57 = 449C)

For the human race, falling from its noble estate, committing a barbarism in its construction of the genders, makes use of a highly irregular metaplasm by inverting the rules of Venus.¹⁶

Since barbarisms were designated in grammatical treatises as affronts contra naturam, Nature's metaphor acts subtly to unite the allegory of Lady Nature with the issues of grammatical and sexual uitia.¹⁷ More bluntly, the metaphor details the sexual conduct that has vexed and disheartened Nature. Alan's working definition of the two terms barbarismus and metaplasmus presumably resembled Hugh of St. Victor's, who established in his grammatical treatise that:

barbarismus est in prosa unius uerbi corruptio; metaplasmus est quando in metro fit idem necessitate metri, nam sine necessitate barbarismus est.

Barbarism is the corruption of a single word in prose; metaplasm is when the same thing happens in verse out of metrical necessity, for barbarism occurs without such necessity.¹⁸

Thus Nature taxes man with changing words unnecessarily to fit the meter of his sexual engagements, an accusation recalling the dreamer's earlier complaints of gender mutations in nouns and sexual role reversals in predicates. Homosexuality, she suggests, is an infraction of natural law that contributes no more to the beauty and pleasure of Nature or to the sexual behavior she considers natural than do barbarisms to poetry.

Metrics supplied material for Alan's vast grammatical metaphor even in the first section of poetry, when the dreamer noted:

Sic pede dactilico Veneris male iambicat usus
          In quo non patitur sillaba longa breuem.

(Metr. 1.31-32 = 431C)

Thus the practice of love goes as an iamb badly with the dactylic foot, in which a long syllable does not admit of a short one.¹⁹

This enigmatic couplet can be read in several ways. Probably Alan means that the dactyl of licit heterosexual lovemaking clashes with the iamb of homosexual intercourse: few types of Latin verse admit both iambs and dactyls. He would have been acquainted with the generally bad associations of the word iambus, such as are cited by Erchanbert of Freising (ninth century) in his Tractatus super Donatum:

Iambus detractor vel detrahens; iambozin Grece detrahere dicitur. Per hoc genus metri pravae inventiones vel detractiones vel convicia maxime canebantur.

Iambus means “disparager” or “disparaging”; in Greek, iambozin means “to disparage.” In this kind of meter vicious inventions, slanders, and insults were wont to be sung.²⁰

Yet Alan seems to refer more specifically to differing metrical characteristics of the dactyl and iamb. He may be taking a clue from the tendency of both classical and medieval Latin poets to personify, reify, and employ in metaphors metrical terms.²¹ Perhaps he has in mind the resemblance of the dactylic measure (especially when diagrammed—ss) to the penis and testicles; Alan's contemporary Matthew of Vendôme makes such an identification in his Ars versificatoria.²²

Alan appears to state that in the dactylic foot a long syllable is never replaced by a short one, whereas in an iambic foot such substitution may occur. The verb patior lends the idea of substitution a sexual air, since the verb patior refers to taking the passive or pathic role in intercourse.²³ This sexual tone would have been strengthened by the language of twelfth-century discussions of metrics. Grammatical treatises pointed out that the dactylic hexameter followed strict rules about the placement of the metrical feet, while the iambic senarius was quite lax in comparison; with an emphasis on the proper “places” in which metrical feet can be “received,” the discussions of metrics might have lent themselves to use as metaphors about sexual organs:

Recipit autem uersus hexametrum dactylum, spondeum et trocheum: spondeum locis omnibus preter quintum, dactylum similiter locis omnibus preter sextum, trocheum loco tantum ultimo siue spondeum. … Iambicum senarium recipit iambum locis omnibus. …

The hexameter verse admits of [literally, “receives”] the dactyl, spondee, and trochee: the spondee in all places except the fifth foot, the dactyl likewise in all places except the sixth foot, the trochee only in the final foot [literally, “place”]. … The iambic senarius admits of the iamb in all places.²⁴

Alan makes the couplet itself emblematic of the submission which he deplores, because he includes in the first line the only instance of elision to be found in all the poetry of the De planctu Naturae.²⁵

Still, Alan left unclear what figurative connotations he expected the words long and short to evoke.²⁶ If Alan assumed that a long syllable represented a male and two short ones a female, he would have considered the hexameter foot an apt metaphor for proper love. In contrast, he would have regarded the iambic foot as a metaphor for improper love, since it lacks one of the requisite two short measures. The metaphor would have been singularly apposite if he believed that the iambic foot is inherently unstable and permits the replacement of a short (female) by a long (male) syllable; in arriving at this conviction, Alan might have been influenced by Horace, who gave the iambs in iambic trimeter the air of being too complaisant in admitting spondees.²⁷ Metaphorically, such a replacement would constitute an act of sodomy, since it would couple long (male) with long (male). In any event, Alan implies that the loose rules governing iambic meters should not serve as a model for man's sexual comportment, since natural law demonstrates that in the meter of earthly love the only correct mating is of man with woman.

Alan's subtle symbolic interpretation of dactyls shapes the whole structure of the De planctu Naturae. In the course of the work, there is a steady movement from elegiac couplets to dactylic hexameters. This progression could be viewed as one from dactyls in disorder to dactyls in order, since the second line of an elegiac couplet incorporates fragmented dactyls.²⁸ The shift from the one meter to the other corresponds to the gradual restoration of the natural order, as exemplified by the dreamer's increasing awareness and the approach of Genius's judgement. Elegiacs alternate regularly with other meters in the first half of the De planctu Naturae and suit the material covered there, since one elegiac selection deals with the dreamer's sentiments about sexual perversion (metr. 1 = 431A-432A), another with the beauties of spring (metr. 3 = 441A-442A), and the third with the nature of Cupid (metr. 5 = 455A-456B). Hexameters completely displace elegiac distichs in the second half and accord equally well with the subject matter. The first hexameters describe avarice and the overthrow of reason (metr. 7 = 465C-467A), while the others depict the processional played for Hymen's entrance and thus lend gravity to the final excommunication scene (metr. 9 = 477B-478A). Nature herself seems to suggest that distichs are undignified and consequently refrains from using them when her talk with the dreamer grows serious:

Predicta igitur theatralis oratio, ioculatoriis euagata lasciuiis, tue puerilitati pro ferculo propinatur. Nunc stilus, paululum ad pueriles tue infantie fescenninas digressus, ad seriale prefinite narrationis propositum reuertatur.

(Pr. 5.17-20 = 456D)

The above histrionic discourse, that has wandered off into jests and jokes, is offered as a dish fit for your naïveté. Now let the mode of narration [“stylus paululum maturior” in the PL edition], that has digressed a little into the trivial, crude pieces suited to your undeveloped literary ability, return to the prearranged sequence of the prescribed discourse.²⁹

3. THE GRAMMAR OF HAMMERS AND ANVILS

Alan reiterated and underscored the grammatical and metrical metaphors as the De planctu Naturae developed, even to the extent of structuring it around dactyls. But no matter how intricately he used the metaphors, he needed more than them to do justice to his overarching theme of the moral disease which has afflicted human nature and disrupted the correct cosmic order.³⁰ At the same time, as an artist Alan had a duty to prevent the work from stagnating and losing the interest of his readers, for the number of sexual connotations which can be extracted from words concerning gender, figures of speech, and rhetoric is limited. Instead of allowing the De planctu Naturae to become monotonous, Alan introduced new metaphors, involving the imagery and terminology of arts other than grammar.³¹ By juxtaposing his grammatical metaphors to these other metaphors, Alan strengthened his emphasis on grammar as a proper and productive pursuit of humanity; he implied that grammar is as vital to man's function in the cosmos as any of the crafts which mark man apart from beast. The man who employs grammar is as much an artifex as any artisan who works with his hands.³²

For example, Alan often invigorated the grammatical metaphors by conjoining them with hammer-and-anvil imagery.³³ He had a richly resonant theological basis for making the acts of forging and sealing into metaphors for verbal expression. As Alan undoubtedly knew, a biblical precedent sanctioned the association between hammers and words: “numquid non mea verba sunt quasi ignis ait Dominus et quasi malleus conterens petram” (Jer. 23.29: “Is not my word like as a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?”).³⁴ Even without the Bible, Alan's own theories of res, forma, and nomen would have inclined him to liken both the divine “imposition” of forma and the human “imposition” of nomen on res to forging and sealing. In the Anticlaudianus Alan described how on the dress of Arithmetica “deitatis ydea / Impressit rebus formas mundoque figuras” (3.309-310: “The idea in the divine mind imprinted form on things and shape on the universe”).³⁵ In the De planctu Naturae he addressed a hymn to Nature: “Que, Noys puras recolens ideas, / Singulas rerum species monetas, / Rem togans forma clamidemque forme / Pollice formans” (metr. 4.13-16 = 447C: “who, working on the pure ideas of Noys, mould the species of all created things, clothing matter with form and fashioning a mantle of form with your thumb”). In the Summa “Quoniam homines” he declared: “Ut enim testatur Boetius rebus ex materia formaque constantibus solus humanus animus extitit qui prout voluit nomina rebus inpressit” (p. 141: “As Boethius attests, of all things composed of matter and form only the human mind has ever been able to stamp names upon things as it willed”).³⁶

In view of the analogy that Alan draws between God's duty to form and man's to name, it is not surprising that the De planctu Naturae charts a world pervaded by creatures conferring shapes and words upon creation. Not only does Nature the artifex coin on the anvil (compare Anticlaudianus 7.34-36), but so does the rest of creation; and many times the coining is an image of sound or verbal expression. Alan remarks that certain birds mint their music, while some even forge speech:

Illic phsitacus in sui gutturis incude uocis monetam fabricabat humane. Illic coturnicem, figure dictionis ignorantem fallaciam, imaginarie uocis decipiebant sophismata.

(Pr. 1.181-183 = 436C)

There the parrot fashioned on the anvil of his throat a mint for human speech. There the quail, failing to recognise the deception in inflection of speech, was deceived by the trickery of an imitative voice.

Through these cameo portrayals of birds placed early in his description of Nature's attire, Alan posits a relation between forging and verbal expression: the possibility of deception is innate in both of them.

These themes reappear on a higher plane of allegory in the Anticlaudianus. There Alan juxtaposes the acts of speaking and hammering even more overtly by making coining one of Lady Grammar's attributes: “Infantes docet ipsa loqui linguasque ligatas / Soluit et in propriam deducit uerba monetam” (2.409-410: “this maiden teaches infants to speak, looses tied tongues and shapes words in the proper mould”).³⁷ Though “proper coin” could refer specifically to declensions and conjugations,³⁸ Alan also characterizes Logic as guardian of the anvil and hammer; and in this passage the two implements must designate speech and writing in general, not merely morphology (3.79-80). Much later in the Anticlaudianus Alan returns to the narrowly grammatical connotations of the hammer and anvil when he gives us a glimpse of Lady Grammar instructing the novus homo: “ne verba monetet / Citra grammaticam, ne verbo barbarus erret” (7.253-254: “so that he may not coin words without regard for grammar or make mistakes in speech like a barbarian”). In all these instances Alan, though marveling at the fabrication of speech, still retains a healthy skepticism of a process which can be easily misused. Just as the serpent beguiles the quail, so the sophist misleads the uninitiated with a quick tongue and an impudent misapplication of the anvil of creation.

Elsewhere Alan engaged the hammer and the anvil as symbols; the hammer stood for the male sexual organs, the anvil ideally for the female sexual organs but also for any other part of the male or female body used to attain sexual release. From the very beginning of the De planctu Naturae he places discussions of the hammer and anvil next to grammatical metaphors for sexual practices which he regarded as perverse, as he did when he included in the first metrum one couplet about the mistreated hammer and anvil of humanity: “Cudit in incude que semina nulla monetat. / Horret et incudem malleus ipse suam” (metr. 1.27-28 = 431B: “He hammers on an anvil which issues [literally, “coins” or “stamps with an image”] no seeds. The very hammer itself shudders in horror of its anvil.”). While the exact import of these two lines is difficult to ascertain, Alan seems to equate the hammer with the penis and the anvil with any means of sexual release used in place of a vagina.

Later Alan makes a similar equation of stylus and parchment with the penis and vagina. Indeed, he describes with almost identical phrases the dangers of abusing hammer and anvil on the one hand and stylus and parchment on the other. Nature carefully tutors Venus: “ne ab incudibus malleos aliqua exorbitatione peregrinare permitteret” (pr. 5.29-30 = 457A: not to “allow the hammers to stray away from their anvils in any form of deviation”) and “ne a proprie descriptionis semita in falsigraphie deuia eumdem deuagari minime sustineret” (pr. 5.33-34 = 457A: not to allow “the same pen to wander in the smallest degree from the path of proper delineation into the byways of pseudography”).

To connect these symbols with the grammatical metaphors for sex was easy, not just because pens and hammers have an obvious potential as phallic symbols but also because the Latin words for hammer and anvil are, conveniently, masculine and feminine.³⁹ For this reason any transposition in the function of these tools would represent a grammatical uitium, since it would entail an erroneous change in grammatical gender. If the hammer is forced to mimic the anvil, its nature metamorphoses from masculine to feminine and a solecism results. Because of this interdependence, hammer-and-anvil symbolism meshed well with the grammatical metaphors. Both provided a gauge of sexual propriety, since hammer and anvil as well as grammar are prey to willful misuse. Besides acting as a counterpart to the orthographic theme of stylus and parchment, hammer-and-anvil symbolism varied what could have been mindless repetition of grammatical metaphors.

4. GRAMMATICAL METAPHORS IN COSMOLOGY AND MYTHOLOGY

If one way of expanding the significance of the grammatical metaphors was by relating them to other kinds of metaphors, another way was by incorporating them into the cosmology and mythology which Lady Nature unfolds for the benefit of the inquisitive dreamer-poet. Although grammatical metaphors appear infrequently in the description of the cosmic hierarchy, the metaphors Alan uses in this section are among the most important in the entire De planctu Naturae:

Et sic in quodam conparationis triclinio tres potestatis gradus possumus inuenire, ut dei potentia superlatiua, Natura comparatiua, hominis positiua dicatur.

(Pr. 3.162-165 = 446B)

Thus in a certain threefold arrangement of comparison we can find three degrees of power, in such a way that the power of God may be termed superlative, the power of Nature comparative, and the power of man positive.

Alan favored this particular metaphor. In a poem attributed to him, the metaphor is used to illustrate how the quality of love depends on the marital status of its object: “Sic matrone Venus est quasi positiua / Cum Venus uirguncule sit superlatiua” (“So the love of a matron is, so to speak, positive while the love of a young maiden is superlative”).⁴⁰ In his theological works, Alan brought up the same metaphor to depict the structure of obedience which informs the universe.⁴¹ For example, Alan divides dulia (obedience) into three categories and comments:

Et haec est quasi positiva quam majoribus debemus, quae consistit in dilectione, in servitio, in obedientia et hujusmodi. Media vel comparativa est quae debetur angelicae naturae. Maxima vel superlativa est quae debetur humanae Christi naturae.

(Distinctiones, 777C)

And the obedience which we owe to our superiors and which consists in love, attentiveness, submission, and other such qualities is like the “positive” degree of an adjective. The middle or “comparative” form of obedience is that which is owed to angelic nature. The greatest or “superlative” form is that which is owed to the human nature of Christ.

The appearance of this same metaphor in the De planctu Naturae is not fortuitous. In the degrees of adjectival comparison Alan finds a convenient means of ranking the priorities which a man should set for himself in fulfilling his dulia toward the universe—in fulfilling his proper function in the discourse which takes place between all of creation and God.

More often than in the cosmographic section of the De planctu Naturae, Alan used grammatical metaphors in the mythical section which deals with man's disruption of the cosmos. The indispensable link in the nexus of myth and grammar is orthography, which was an unquestioned component of grammar in the Middle Ages and was regularly taken up in treatises on grammar. In fact, a gloss on the Anticlaudianus gave as much weight to orthography as to all the other divisions of grammar combined: “Partes grammatice sunt due: orthographia, ubi docet recte scribere et recte loqui, diasentistica, ubi agit de natura dictionum et constructionum” (“The parts of grammar are two: orthography, which instructs in writing correctly and speaking correctly, and syntax, which is concerned with the nature of words and constructions”).⁴² In another of his poems (the rhythmus entitled De vanitate mundi), Alan makes orthography a metaphor for the state of nature: “Omnis mundi creatura / Quasi liber et pictura / Nobis est in speculum …” (“Every creature of the world is, like a book and a picture, as a mirror for us”).⁴³ He regards the components of nature as lessons written by God for man: “Nostrum statum pingit rosa, / Nostri status decens glosa, / Nostrae vitae lectio …” (“The rose portrays our state, the rose is a fitting gloss of our state and a lection of our life”).⁴⁴ The same assumption underlies the orthographic metaphors in the De planctu Naturae.

Alan builds up the theme of orthography by brief allusions before immersing his readers in prolonged analogies. In his description of Nature, he tells how she tries with a reed pen to draw lasting figures on tiles but fails in her “writing” (pr. 2.3-8 = 439CD). Nature herself explains later that she relies upon God's direction (and Venus's assistance) in this undertaking, “quia mee scripture calamus exorbitatione subita deuiaret, nisi supremi Dispensatoris digito regeretur” (pr. 4.234-235 = 454A: “for my writing-reed would instantly go off course if it were not guided by the finger of the superintendent on high”). Just as Nature guides Venus in her labor (pr. 5.33-34 = 457A), so God oversees Nature in hers.

The didactic exposition of orthography begins in earnest when Nature replies to the poet's initial questions about her grief. At first she accounts for man's perversion in her customary way by bewailing his confounding of grammatical gender and his excessive use of rhetorical figures. Then Nature complains that: “Homo uero, qui fere totum mearum diuitiarum exhausit erarium, nature naturalia denaturare pertemptans, in me soloecistice Veneris armat iniuriam” (pr. 4.19-21 = 448D: “Man, however, who has all but drained the entire treasury of my riches, tries to denature the natural things of nature and arms a lawless and solecistic Venus to fight against me”). She adds that “A Veneris ergo orthographia deuiando recedens sophista falsigraphus inuenitur” (pr. 4.58-59 = 449D: “Abandoning in his deviation the true script of Venus, he is proved to be a sophistic pseudographer”).

What is “the true script of Venus”? Does Alan mean the goddess, the eponymic act of sex, or both of them when he mentions Venus in these two passages? Alan tantalizes the reader with these touches of foreshadowing; for before she can finish her account, Lady Nature is interrupted by the dreamer-poet. He asks why she has castigated men for homosexual practices, since according to the poets the gods themselves cultivated the same practices. By way of example, he brings up the seizure of the Phrygian boy Ganymede by Jupiter; his account of the episode takes the form of an untranslatable metaphor involving a Latin word for metaphor: “Iupiter enim, adolescentem Frigium transferens ad superna, relatiuam Venerem transtulit in translatum” (pr. 4.117-119 = 451B). Nature, vexed that the dreamer has no notion of allegorical interpretation as an approach to poetry, shifts for a moment from her presentation of orthography to the more sublime matter of literary criticism.⁴⁵

Having satisfied her student on the score of allegorical interpretation and metaphoric language, the goddess is on the verge of returning to her main subject when the dreamer asks for an account of Cupid. In the metrum that she recites in response, Lady Nature employs the terminology of grammar and logic to express the unacceptable abuses that Cupid introduces into the discourse of human existence:

Nonne per antifrasim miracula multa Cupido
Efficiens, hominum protheat omne genus?
Cum sint opposita monachus mechator eidem
Hec duo subiecto cogit inesse simul.

(Metr. 5.21-24 = 455C)

Does not Desire, performing many miracles, to use antiphrasis, change the shapes of all mankind? Though monk and adulterer are opposite terms, he forces both of these to exist together in the same subject.

Only when she has thrown this explanatory poem as a sop to the dreamer can Nature at last reveal what she meant by Veneris orthographia.

According to Nature, God appointed her as an assistant scribe, responsible for guaranteeing the propagation of the species. For this reason he gave her not only hammers and anvils but also a pen with which she could compose. To simplify her chore, he directed her hand as it worked. This is only the first of a series of grammar school scenes, because Nature in turn deputized Venus, along with Venus's husband, Hymen, and son, Cupid. They received their own hammers and anvils, as well as intensive instruction in the grammatical art, so that they would not mishandle their reed pen and wander from orthodox constructions into false writing (pr. 5.30-34 = 457A).

In the process of reporting what she taught Venus, Nature conveniently defines many of the grammatical terms used earlier in the De planctu Naturae and supplements them with new ones. In words strongly reminiscent of the earlier grammatical metaphors, Nature tells how she taught Venus “quas artis gramatice regulas in suarum constructionum unionibus artificiosis admitteret, quas uelut extraordinarias nullius figure excusatione redemptas excluderet” (pr. 5.40-42 = 457B: “which procedures in the art of Grammar she should adopt in the artistic combinations of her constructions and which she should reject as irregular and unredeemed by any excusing figure”). Nature contends that natural and grammatical law concur on the matter of genders: there are basically two genders, masculine and feminine, although some masculine words lack their signaculum and are treated as neuters (pr. 5.43-46 = 457B). In grammatical terms signaculum refers to the masculine ending of a noun, but in real life the signaculum (distinguishing trait) of a man would be his genitalia.

Having fixed the meaning of the genders, Nature now specifies the one naturalis constructio that she granted to Venus. The masculine is to join itself to the feminine and never to the masculine, for such an irregular combination would not eventuate in procreation. In the language of Alan's grammatical metaphor, such an alliance would not be a figura but rather an unforgivable monstrosity of solecism (pr. 5.56-57 = 457C: “inexcusabili soloecismi monstruositate”).⁴⁶ Though Alan did not pause to emphasize the differences between regular grammar and Nature's grammar, a few decades later his compatriot Gautier de Coincy explained concisely, in Old French verse, that:

La grammaire hic à hic acouple,
Mais nature maldit la couple.
La mort perpetuel engenre
Cil qui aimme masculin genre
Plus que le femenin ne face
Et Diex de son livre l'efface:
Nature rit, si com moi sanble,
Quant hic et hec joignent ensanble;
Mais hic et hic chose est perdue,
Nature en est tot esperdue,
Ses poins debat et tort ses mains.

Grammar couples hic and hic, but Nature curses this coupling. He who makes love with the masculine gender will engender everlasting death and God will erase him from His book. Nature laughs, it seems to me, when hic and hec join together; but hic and hic is a lost cause, by which Nature is bewildered. She beats her fists and wrings her hands.⁴⁷

Closer chronologically to the De planctu Naturae, the anonymous twelfth-century debate between Ganymede and Helen, although permitting Ganymede to state the case for homosexuality, concludes that there are broad discrepancies between school grammar and natural grammar.⁴⁸ Ganymede maintains that sex should follow the laws of grammar (“hic et hic grammatice debent copulari”) because such copulating is more elegant (“eleganti copula mas aptatur mari”). Despite the cleverness of grounding the argument on style, Ganymede loses the debate when the judge, Ratio, enters the fray and condemns homosexuality.⁴⁹

In the De planctu Naturae, Lady Nature does not leave behind the technical vocabulary of ars grammatica after her discussion of solecism. Rather, she goes on to repeat in detail the instructions which she gave to Venus. In this passage Nature manipulates with dazzling complexity the metaphoric possibilities of such words and phrases as suppositum and appositum, adiectiua proprietas and substantiua proprietas, and actiuum and passiuum (pr. 5.58-72 = 457C-458A). Suppositum means the subject of a sentence but implies an object which is put underneath another one, while appositum means the predicate of a sentence but implies an object which is put alongside or atop another one.⁵⁰Adiectiua proprietas contains, in addition to its grammatical meaning of “adjective,” the suggestion of something added or inserted, while substantiua proprietas would have suggested, besides the obvious “substantive,” something or someone resting beneath something or someone else.⁵¹

Lady Nature's first precept is that in sexual coupling the man should mount the woman, not vice versa; no tampering with the process is to be countenanced. Taking for granted the differences between school grammar and natural grammar, Nature expresses this precept in her usual metaphoric fashion: man should play adjective to the woman's noun (just as the hammer modifies the anvil), and they ought never attempt to exchange roles. She explains that her directive accords with the laws of necessity, since the nature of the adjective is to modify, whereas the noun normally retains the substantive nature of the adjective. Interpreted biologically, her observation restates the truism that the male of the species impregnates the female.

In this same section, Alan epitomizes his fierce disapproval of homosexuality in a metaphor using figures of speech:

Si enim genus masculinum genus consimile quadam irrationabilis rationis deposcat iniuria, nulla figure honestate illa constructionis iunctura uicium poterit excusare sed inexcusabili soloecismi monstruositate turpabitur.

(Pr. 5.54-57 = 457C)

For if the masculine gender, by a certain violence of unreasonable reason, should call for a gender entirely similar to itself, this bond and union will not be able to defend the flaw as any kind of graceful figure but will bear the stain of an outlandish and unpardonable solecism.

Through an intricate play on words, these lines can be understood perfectly both as a literal statement and as a metaphor. As a literal statement, the sentence is indistinguishable from passages in grammatical tracts that a twelfth-century reader would have recalled from his school training:

Dicit enim Donatus quod si demonstrando virum dicimus hanc, aut demonstrando mulierem dicimus hunc, fit soloecismus. … Sed soloecismus est vicium inexcusabile. Ergo in talibus sermonibus erit vicium inexcusabile, non ergo figura.

For Donatus states that if in designating a man we say her or if in designating a woman we say him, we are committing a solecism. … But a solecism is an inexcusable error. Therefore an inexcusable error, not a figure of speech, will be evident in such manners of speaking.⁵²

Yet all the words enjoy a second moral meaning. Ratio is man's reason and not just “reason” in the sense of grammatical justification; soloecismus means sexual error as well as grammatical error; and uitium is vice as well as grammatical flaw. Thus Alan conveys his opinion that homosexuality is a monstrous and unconscionable vice (pr. 5.56-57 = 457C: “inexcusabili soloecismi monstruositate”).

In spite of Nature's elaborate directions, however, Venus failed in her mission. She became enmeshed in adultery with Antigamus, whose very name signifies the breakdown of marriage,⁵³ and at the same time she began misapplying the tools entrusted her by Nature. Although her violation of natural law took the form of heterosexual philandering, nonetheless it caused natural law to fall into desuetude just as homosexual acts were reported to have done in the opening metrum. The hammers and anvils coined strange products; Venus in her wantonness spawned a bastard whose illegitimacy is verbal as well as actual:

Qui dum nullius delectationis amenitate gauderet, nullius iocositatis uellet meridiari deliciis, ut quasi per antifrasim Iocus a iocositate dicatur, ei nomen usus impressit.

(Pr. 5.147-148 = 459D)

Since he took no pleasure in the charms of love, refused to relax in the delights of sport, the result was that he was, by antiphrasis, so to speak, called Sport, a word derived from sportiveness, and usage has stamped him with the name.

In accordance with the commutative principle of Alan's allegory, Iocus, born of a wrongful sexual act, was bound to represent verbal perversion. As his name indicated, Iocus was a trope gone awry—he was a lie. His name promised delight, but his way of life was as much a uitium in a moral sense as his name was a uitium in a grammatical sense.⁵⁴

5. THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE MYTHICAL GRAMMAR

Out of modesty, Nature couched her account of Venus's sin in grammatical terms and in so doing equated for the first time the malfeasance of the goddess with the perversity of human beings; until this point grammatical error had been employed as a metaphor to describe the sexual vagaries only of men, not of gods:

Sed pocius se gramaticis constructionibus destruens, dialecticis conuersionibus inuertens, rethoricis coloribus decolorans, suam artem in figuram, figuram in uicium transferebat. …

(Pr. 5.142-144 = 459CD)

On the contrary, destroying herself with the connections of Grammar, perverting herself with the conversions of Dialectic, discolouring herself with the colours of Rhetoric, she kept turning her art into a figure and the figure into a defect.

This act of transference is identical to the translatio detailed in the first metrum:

Se negat esse uirum Nature, factus in arte
          Barbarus. Ars illi non placet, immo tropus.
Non tamen ista tropus poterit translatio dici.
          In uicium melius ista figura cadit.

(Metr. 1.21-24 = 431B)

Becoming a barbarian in grammar, he disclaims the manhood given him by nature. Grammar does not find favour with him but rather a trope. This transposition, however, cannot be called a trope. The figure here more correctly falls into the category of defects.

In all these cases uitium is a loaded word, meaning both a fault in language and a fault in morals, since the classical and medieval Latin word had a richer set of meanings than does its modern counterpart “vice.”⁵⁵

In the Anticlaudianus Alan again speaks out on figural embellishment and again posits an interrelationship between grammatical solecism and moral error, playing upon both denotations of uitium. As could be anticipated, most of the hundred lines devoted to the inscriptions on Lady Grammar's garb digress into pyrotechnic displays of Alan's erudition, and yet some lines clarify his theories about grammar:

Illic imperium datur arti, regula regnat,
Exilium patitur uicium ueniamque mereri
Nescit. Gramatice paciens sine fine repulsam,
Deffendens sese propria racione, figura
Excubat ante fores artis ueniamque precatur.
Ars admittit eam, ueniam largita precanti,
Nec fouet in gremio sed tamen sustinet illam.

(Anticlaudianus 2.419-425)

There authority is given to the art and rules hold sway; deficiencies suffer exile and know not how to merit pardon. Figure, facing indefinite rejection at grammar's hands, defends itself with its own special method, sleeps outside the doors and craves indulgence. Art admits her, answers her prayer for indulgence but does not cherish her in her bosom but does, however, support her.

Here, as in the De planctu Naturae, the word uitium serves a double-edged function. Just as grammatical purity wards off stylistic excess, so moral propriety prevents sin: both must be vigilant against uitium. In the De planctu Naturae the uitium most commonly decried is an act of homosexual love; in the Anticlaudianus the word takes on a different array of sexual associations by calling to mind a stock scene in classical Greek and Latin poetry in which a lover who has been refused admittance to his mistress's house laments outside her door.⁵⁶

Because uitium and related grammatical terms conveyed the notion of vice in a broad sense and not solely in the sense of sexual nonconformity, Alan does not need to restrict his use of grammatical metaphors to sexual contacts. On the subject of heavy drinkers he states scornfully: “Dumque sic ad genus generalissimum potationis deueniunt, superlatiuum gradum ebrietatis ascendunt” (pr. 6.42-43 = 462C: “Thus, as they descend to the most common kind of drinking, they ascend to the superlative degree of drunkenness”). Elsewhere, rather than select specific points of grammar for metaphoric use, Alan refers to general stylistic decadence. For example, he stresses the hypocrisy of flatterers by demonstrating that the level of their style ranges from high-flown to humble, in proportion to the size of the bribe offered to them (pr. 7.108-113 = 470A). In a similar fashion he uses stylistic catchwords to contrast the mythical Cupid with Iocus: “In illo paterne ciuilitatis elucescit urbanitas. In isto paterne suburbanitatis tenebrescit rusticitas” (pr. 5.156-157 = 460A: “In the former there shines the urbanity of his father's courteousness; the boorishness of his father's provincialism denigrates the latter”). Alan already declared that stylistic urbanity is turned into rusticity when the predicate is torn away from its subject by an exaggerated metaphor, which is exactly what happened on the moral plane when Venus committed fornication with Antigamus: she allowed herself to be separated from her husband and joined illegally to another man (pr. 5.115-136 = 459AC).

A regular ploy of Alan's is to show how the paragons of the grammatical, rhetorical, and poetical arts suffer a dismal debacle when vice invades and turns the world of verbal excellence topsy-turvy. Arrogance distorts a man's self-estimation so much that: “alii, dum in artis gramatice uagientes cunabulis eiusdem lactantur uberibus, Aristotilice subtilitatis apicem profitentur …” (pr. 7.12-14 = 467B: “Others, while still wailing in the cradles of the Art of Grammar and being nursed at her breasts, affect the top-mast height of Aristotelian subtlety”). Under the sway of Cupid, the celebrities of poetic success and failure swap places: “Carmina dat Bauius, musa Maronis hebet. / Ennius eloquitur Marcusque silet …” (metr. 5.32-33 = 455C: “Bavius produces poems, Maro's muse grows dull; Ennius makes speeches and Marcus is silent”). The purse of Avarice is equally capable of muting Cicero and Virgil, thus undermining the grammatical art of Donatus (pr. 6.91-123 = 464AD).

The vices which subvert the correct status of outstanding poets and orators and with them grammar are not merely sexual in nature: any affronts against God suffice. Alan does not seem to have been concerned with homosexuality any more than with any other activity he considered sinful;⁵⁷ consequently, he aims the censure in the De planctu Naturae not so much at the individual failing of what he considered wrongful sexual preference as at the general rupture of the bond of divine love. This context gives the grammatical metaphors a special pertinence: the grammatical uitium of man stands for a greater uitium that breaks the chain of divine love uniting man to God and the cosmos. God gave man nature and with it natural law as exemplars, but man obstinately refuses to submit and follow his guides. The sin that man commits corresponds to the rebellion of Venus, which began in promiscuity but which soon manifested itself in many other ways.

God entrusted Nature, and man, with one essential task: to create like from like (pr. 4.223 = 453D: “ex similibus similia ducerentur”).⁵⁸ Alan, intentionally or not, glossed this passage in another work of his. In his fulmination against heretics he maintained that man sullies the covenant of “like from like” by uniting sexually out of carnal desire, and he offered a penalty appropriate to the crime:

Deus a prima mundi creatione naturam creavit, secundum quam, similia ex similibus produxit. Cum ergo Deus, mediante natura, res procreaturus esset, propter peccatum Adae noluit mutare legem naturae. Haec enim fuit lex naturae ab origine, ut ex similibus similia procrearentur, ut de homine homo, de rationali rationalis. Oportuit ergo ut post peccatum Adae, quia Adam infirmitati fuit subjectus, omnes qui ab eo descenderent infirmi essent, et sicut ipse reus erat, omnes qui ab eo descenderent, lege concupiscentiae rei tenerentur. Quia ergo quilibet homo concipitur in fetore libidinis, quod peccatum est, reus nascitur.

(Contra haereticos libri quatuor 1.40 = 345C-346A)

Immediately after the first creation of the universe God created nature, in accordance with which he brought forth like from like. Therefore when God, with nature as his intermediary, was about to procreate things, he did not wish to change the law of nature on account of the sin of Adam. For this had been the law of nature from the very beginning, that like should be procreated from like, that human being should come forth from human being and rational being from rational being. Therefore it was proper that after the sin of Adam, seeing that Adam had been subject to weakness, all who were descended from him should be weak; and that just as he had been a sinner, so all who were descended from him would be held to be sinners by the law of concupiscence.

In effect, the crime of concupiscence vouches for its own punishment because it isolates man (beginning with the first sinner, Adam) from the bond of divine love. Concupiscence is not merely sexual desire but any base craving that pulls asunder man's spiritual and corporeal natures. After all, man's body and soul are supposed to be husband and wife, held together by a copula maritalis (De planctu Naturae, pr. 3.42 = 443A; Anticlaudianus 7.56-73). Concupiscence snaps this conjugal bond.

As it turns out, Genius proffers this very solution (that the punishment consists in the crime) at the end of the De planctu Naturae—but in a style quite distinct from the straightforward prose of the Contra haereticos. Just as the offense was phrased in grammatical terms, so the penalty is expressed with the ornamentation of grammatical metaphors. Antigamus, the type of antimarriage and the avatar of the break in rational love, the scoundrel who embodies bad literary style, finds his antithesis in Genius, the type of marriage and the personification of the restoration of rational love, the paragon of good literary style.

The arrival of Genius brings into equilibrium the philosophic and metaphoric imbalances which rocked the earlier parts of the De planctu Naturae. Genius, like a good husband, restores poise to Nature, who was in tumult at the beginning of the work. As Alan relates, their marital relationship dates from the early days of the universe. At the moment when matter (Alan writes yle rather than res) and form (ydea rather than forma) united,⁵⁹ Genius and Nature exchanged a chaste kiss that resulted in the conception of their daughter, Veritas. Their kiss is reminiscent of the Song of Songs, “Osculetur me osculo oris sui,” which Alan explicated in his commentary as the coupling that produced the Incarnation (Elucidatio in Cantica canticorum, 53B-54A). Fittingly, Veritas assumes the role of the Verbum in Alan's Trinity: she is the Word of God as received by the Virgin.⁶⁰ The mention of Veritas hints at an assumption that Alan leaves unspoken throughout the De planctu Naturae: grammar, the ordering of human verbal expression, is a vital midpoint on a continuum leading ultimately to the Word of God.

The balance that Genius brings to the world reveals itself in the grammatical metaphors that describe Genius's entourage. The women who come to greet and accompany Genius elicit grammatical metaphors which, in their laudatory tone, offset the earlier ones denouncing sexual malpractice. Whereas previous metaphors assailed men who exercised no control over their bodily yearnings, these metaphors portray the restrained physical appearance of various personified virtues. Among the women, Humility in particular inspires grammatical terms: “Huius crinis tanta fuerat forpicis demorsione succisus, ut apocopationis figura fere in uicium transmigraret” (pr. 8.140-142 = 475B: “Her hair had been shortened by a cutting with the scissors so extensive that its apocope had [almost] turned from a figure into a defect”). The clothes of Veritas prompt Alan to bring forth an equally enthusiastic but scarcely translatable grammatical description: “Que uirgineo corpori tanta fuerant conexione iugate, ut nulla exuitionis dieresis eas aliquando a uirginali corpore faceret phariseas” (pr. 9.101-102 = 480C).⁶¹

As the cynosure of these ladies, Genius too calls for grammatical metaphors: “Cuius statura mediocritatis canone modificata decenter nec diminutionis querebatur afferesim nec de superfluitatis prothesi tristabatur …” (pr. 9.59-61 = 479C: “His height, kept within fitting limits by the rule of the mean, neither had a complaint to make about shortening by contraction nor was he saddened by superfluous elongation”). Together with such an explicitly grammatical metaphor (featuring the terms afferesis and prothesis), the virtuous Genius gives rise to other obliquely grammatical allusions.

Genius, in his every action, equalizes good and evil. Although he uses a papyrus reed to sketch figures, not words, on a skin, Genius nonetheless brings to a culmination the grammatical metaphors of orthography and scribal practice. Indeed, despite his involvement in the representational arts Genius is more of a literary artist than Nature herself; whereas her craft sometimes smacks of the workshop or smithy, his art consistently calls to mind a writer's study. The images Genius creates with his right hand are all either renowned personages from classical literature and myth (Helen, Turnus, Hercules, Capaneus, and Ulysses) or celebrated real-life orators and philosphers (Cato, Cicero, Plato, and Aristotle). Drawing with his left hand when his right is fatigued, the god awkwardly brings to life pathetic or reprehensible figures from classical literature (Thersites, Paris, and Sinon) and poets notorious in the Middle Ages for their ineptitude (Ennius and Pacuvius).⁶²

As the disparity between these two groups of literary notabilities suggests, Genius's stylistic range is as broad as that which was displayed initially on the garments of Nature; Genius commands all the nuances of the syntax whereby man communicates with God. At the same time, Genius mediates between man and divine justice; his right hand symbolizes justice and his left hand punishment. This symbolism keys perfectly with his speech, in which he declares that sin penalizes itself. Through wrongdoing the malefactor cuts himself off from God's love—a fate which is penalty enough for any fault.⁶³ The vice itself compounds the punishment because the greedy man always feels poor, the haughty man humiliated, the gluttonous man hungry, and so on. Thus Ennius suffers from being Ennius and Sinon from being Sinon. Alan takes this Boethian tenet and renders it wholly his own by recasting it in grammatical language:⁶⁴ “Qui a regula Veneris exceptionem facit anomalam, Veneris priuetur sigillo” (pr. 9.150-151 = 482A: “Let him who makes an irregular exception to the rule of Venus be deprived of the seal of Venus”). The man who fails Venus by engaging in homosexual practices sheds his grammatical sign (his genitalia or his hope of offspring). In strictly sexual terms, he becomes sterile like the eunuchs of whom Nature spoke earlier in the De planctu Naturae: “et quidam homines, sexus depauperati signaculo, iuxta meam oppinionem possint neutri generis designatione censeri …” (pr. 5.44-46: “Some men, deprived of a sign of sex, could, in my opinion, be classified as of neuter gender”). In terms of the grand discourse that Lady Nature embodies and describes, he loses all hope of participating in the syntax of proper conduct which links creation with God—the Verbum.

The ending of the De planctu Naturae sheds light on Alan's stand on grammar, at least as much as it illuminates his thoughts on homosexuality. It proves that Alan was no rabid fanatic, ready to repudiate altogether the value of either grammar or sex. Alan did not censure the mere presence of ornament in the grammar of Venus, but instead the excesses that led to anomalous and degenerate constructions. The recurrence of grammatical metaphors throughout the De planctu Naturae itself indicates that verbal embellishment, in Alan's opinion, can serve a valid purpose and is often indispensable.⁶⁵ Earlier in the allegory, Nature justified her version of the myth of Venus, packed as it is with grammatical metaphors, on the grounds that the material discussed was too coarse to present in its natural state to virgin ears; it needed a glaze of pleasant words (pr. 4.182-195 = 452D-453A). Elsewhere Nature declared that the heavens which compose her face are clothed in figurae so that they will not become familiar and contemptible (pr. 3.121-124 = 445B). On occasion, lofty grammar and rhetoric are absolutely necessary to preserve decorum.

To judge from the conclusion of the De planctu Naturae, Alan reached reasonable decisions about the proper role of grammar. In view of the dangers he perceived in the misuse of grammar and the analogies he drew between grammar and the question of sexual propriety, Alan might have campaigned for inflexible canons of terseness, yet he did not. Just as he never proposed total sexual abstinence but rather the form of sexual conduct apposite to the marital status of the individual person,⁶⁶ so did he never advocate a literary style bald of all decoration; instead he urged strict regulation of grammatical and rhetorical figures of speech.

Alan propounded his theory of verbal moderation unequivocally in the author's foreword to his summa on preaching: “praedicatio enim non debet splendere phaleris verborum, purpuramentis colorum, nec nimis exsanguibus verbis debet esse dejecta sed Medium tenuere beati” (Summa de arte praedicatoria, 112C: “For preaching ought not shine with spangles of words, with purple patches of the rhetorical colors; nor ought it be too cast down, with spiritless words. Rather, it should take place in the spirit of the Golden Mean—‘the blessed hold to the middle way’”).⁶⁷ In the De planctu Naturae Alan expressed the same theory allegorically, by highlighting the verbal associations of Temperantia (pr. 8.95-99 = 474A). Alan considered oratorical style, as he did many manifestations of grammar, from a moral point of view.⁶⁸ A vigorous style is a desideratum, except when the style camouflages a sinful content. In fact, a vigorous style can exert a powerful healing force; when the dreamer-poet swooned, Nature restored his consciousness through temperate and yet appealing words (pr. 3.7-10 = 442B). Equally appreciative of good rhetoric and grammar, Genius absolved the penitent and condemned the intransigent with stern and yet beautiful speech.

As the De planctu Naturae draws to a close, the dissatisfaction that the dreamer voiced in grammatical terms has been appeased by a solution that is cast in stylistic terms. Yet Alan's speculations on the clear and true literary style, however lucidly they are presented, are more a symptom than a summation of the motives which encouraged him to formulate his thoughts in grammatical metaphors. Alan made clear that he saw a connection between the state of a person's grammar and the state of a person's ethical conduct. He caused grammatical metaphors to interlock with hammer-and-anvil metaphors because he identified the coining of words with the coining of objects—he identified words with acts, grammar with artisanry. But if what Alan meant to convey through the metaphors seems plain after a reading of the De planctu Naturae, why he chose grammatical metaphors as the vehicle of this meaning is less obvious. Alan failed to elucidate his reasons for assuming that a metaphoric use of grammar in poetry would be aesthetically acceptable to his audience; he was equally reticent about his reasons for feeling that grammar as a discipline was suited to the portentous messages he wished to convey.

In the face of Alan's silence, an explanation for his special metaphoric penchant must be sought in places other than his two allegories. One part of the explanation may be found by studying analogues to Alan's grammatical metaphors in the writings of other writers, both Latin and non-Latin, both medieval and classical. Such analogues will bring out those qualities that are common to all cultures in which grammatical metaphors are written and those that are peculiar to Alan's period; by the same token, they will give prominence to those qualities that typify many twelfth-century Latin metaphors and those that are the hallmark of Alan's metaphors alone.

Notes

1. See Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, pp. 319-326, and Maureen Quilligan, “Allegory, Allegoresis, and the Deallegorization of Language: The Roman de la rose, the De planctu Naturae, and the Parlement of Foules,” in Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p. 173.

2. References to the De planctu Naturae are coordinated with two different texts. The first reference (in the form pr. 1.2 or metr. 1.2) indicates line numbers in the prose or metrical sections of the most recent edition, by Nikolaus M. Häring, which is available both as a separately bound offprint (Spoleto, 1978) and as part of Studi medievali, 3rd ser., 19 (1978), 797-879. The second reference, given after the equals sign (in the form 123A), is to column and section in volume 210 of the Patrologia Latina. All quotations of the De planctu Naturae are from Häring's edition; except when otherwise noted, all translations are from The Plaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan. I have changed Sheridan's words at the end of this passage (from “mournful ditty”).

3. See the Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Clare (Oxford, 1982), subicio 3. On the grammatical and logical term, see Raimund Pfister, “Zur Geschichte der Begriffe von Subjekt und Prädikat,” Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 35 (1976), 105-119 (esp. p. 110). On subject and predicate in Alan's writings, see Huizinga, Über die Verknüpfung, p. 32. Alan discusses subjects and predicates in his Regulae 10-13: see Nikolaus M. Häring, ed., “Magister Alanus de Insulis Regulae caelestis iuris,” Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 48 (1982), 134-135 = Theologicae regulae, PL 210.628B-629C.

4. On the nuances of copulo in Alan's logic, see his De arte seu articulis catholicae fidei, PL 210.601BC.

5. The sentence comes word for word from Donatus, Ars grammatica 3.6, in Keil, ed., Grammatici latini, vol. 4, p. 399, and in Holtz, ed., Donat et la tradition, p. 667. It is found also in Hugh of St. Victor, De grammatica, in Jean Leclercq, ed., “Le De grammatica de Hugues de Saint-Victor,” Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 18 (1943-1945), 319, and Roger Baron, ed., Hugonis de Sancto Victore opera propaedeutica (Notre Dame, 1966), p. 151. On the theory and definition of the word tropus, see Holtz, Donat et la tradition, pp. 200-216.

6. See the gloss (incipit “Admirantes quondam philosophi …”) on Alexander of Villedieu's Doctrinale, quoted by Charles Thurot, Notices et extraits de divers manuscrits latins pour servir à l'histoire des doctrines grammaticales au moyen âge (Paris, 1869; repr. Frankfurt, 1964), p. 459.

7. See the gloss (“Admirantes …”) quoted by Thurot, Notices et extraits, p. 462.

8. Alan makes this pronouncement in his Summa “Quoniam homines”: see P. Glorieux, ed., “La Somme ‘Quoniam homines’ d'Alain de Lille,” Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 28 (1953), 253.

9. See the gloss (“Admirantes …”) quoted by Thurot, Notices et extraits, pp. 460-461.

10. References to Alan's Anticlaudianus indicate the book and line number in Bossuat, ed., Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus, and in the English translation by Sheridan, Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus or the Good and Perfect Man.

11. The phrase “mortis apocopam” appears later in the De planctu Naturae (metr. 8.40 = 471C). In addition, the expression “sincopare coniugis uitam” comes up in a poem often ascribed to Alan: see Nikolaus M. Häring, ed., “The Poem Vix nodosum by Alan of Lille,” Medioevo: Rivista di storia della filosofia medievale 3 (1977), 184, line 134.

12. On the castor and castration, see Beryl Rowland, Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism (Knoxville, 1973), pp. 35-37.

13. Donatus, Ars grammatica 3.4, in Keil, ed., Grammatici latini, vol. 4, p. 396, and in Holtz, ed., Donat et la tradition, pp. 661-662.

14. See Quilligan, “Allegory and Allegoresis,” p. 174.

15. No. 27, ed. Häring, p. 143 = PL 210.634CD.

16. The translation of this passage is my own.

17. See Marius Servius Honoratus, Commentarius in Artem Donati, in Keil, ed., Grammatici latini, vol. 4, p. 444, lines 3-4: “Plinius autem dicit barbarismum esse sermonem unum, in quo vis sua est contra naturam.”

18. Leclercq, ed., “Le De grammatica,” p. 313, and Baron, ed., Opera propaedeutica, p. 141. For a thorough examination of barbarism and solecism in Donatus, see Holtz, Donat et la tradition, pp. 136-162, and, for metaplasm, pp. 170-182.

19. Sheridan translates the couplet as: “The one who has used the dactylic measure of Venus fares ill in iambics where a long syllable cannot be followed by a short.” Compare with Douglas M. Moffat, trans., The Complaint of Nature by Alain de Lille (New York, 1908), p. 4: “Thus the iambic measure goes badly with the dactylic foot of earthly love, in which always the long syllable does not permit a short.”

20. Wendell Vernon Clausen, ed., “Erchanberti Frisingensis Tractatus super Donatum,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1948, p. 113, lines 3-5.

21. See Ovid, Amores 1.1.1-30, in P. Ovidi Nasonis Amores, Medicamina faciei femineae, Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris, ed. E. J. Kenney (Oxford, 1961), pp. 5-6; Prudentius, Liber Cathemerinon 3 (“Hymnus ante cibum”), lines 28-29, in Aurelii Prudentii Clementis carmina, ed. Maurice P. Cunningham (Turnhout, 1966), p. 12, lines 28-29; Ausonius, Epistula 21, in Decimi Magni Ausonii Burdigalensis opuscula, ed. Sextus Prete (Leipzig, 1978), pp. 269-270 = Epistula 25, in Decimi Magni Ausonii Burdigalensis opuscula, ed. Rudolfus Peiper (1886, repr. Stuttgart, 1976), pp. 270-272; Arnulf of Orléans, Lidia, lines 169-170, in Comediae latinae saeculi duodecimi: Lateinische comediae des 12. Jahrhunderts, ed. and trans. Joachim Suchomski with the assistance of Michael Willumat (Darmstadt, 1979), p. 214; William of Blois, Alda, lines 187-188, in Lateinische comediae, ed. and trans. Suchomski, p. 146; and Nigel of Longchamp, Speculum stultorum, lines 883-884, in Nigel de Longchamps: Speculum stultorum, ed. John H. Mozley and Robert R. Raymo (Berkeley, 1960), p. 51.

22. Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria 1.53.79-80, in Edmond Faral, Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle: Recherches et documents sur la technique littéraire du moyen âge (Paris, 1924, repr. 1958), p. 127.

23. See Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, pp. 189-190. For an example in a poem chronologically close to the De planctu Naturae see the anonymous Altercatio Ganimedis et Helene 8.4, ed. with commentary in Rudolf Wilhelm Lenzen, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche und Verfasseruntersuchungen zur lateinischen Liebesdichtung Frankreichs im Hochmittelalter (Bonn, 1973), pp. 125-154, and in Rolf Lenzen, “Altercatio Ganimedis et Helene: Kritische Edition mit Kommentar,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 7 (1972), 161-186. There are two recent English translations by Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, pp. 381-392, and Stehling, Medieval Latin Poems of Male Love and Friendship, pp. 104-121 (with edition).

24. Leclercq, ed., “Le De grammatica,” p. 310, and Baron, ed., Opera propaedeutica, p. 138.

25. Raynaud de Lage, Alain de Lille, poète, p. 153.

26. For one possible interpretation, compare the line “Le plus lonc foutre et le cort batre,” which recurs in the fabliau “Du Sot Chevalier,” in A. de Montaiglon and G. Raynaud, eds., Recueil général et complet des fabliaux, vol. 1 (Paris, 1872), pp. 220-230.

27. Horace, in the Ars poetica, personifies the iamb and calls it “commodus et patients” (line 257), while earlier he mentioned that iamb is a name for “syllaba longa breui subiecta” (line 251): see the edition and commentary in C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry, vol. 2, The “Ars Poetica” (Cambridge, Eng., 1971), pp. 64 and 300.

28. Raynaud de Lage, Alain de Lille, poète, p. 153, has a convenient listing of the meters used in the verse sections of the De planctu Naturae. Although Häring does not identify the meters in his edition, Sheridan notes them as they appear in his translation.

29. Sheridan's translation has a misprint of “historic” for “histrionic.”

30. The most articulate examination of this theme is still Green, “Alan of Lille's De planctu Naturae,” [Speculum 31 (1956)] pp. 649-674.

31. For good observations on Alan's metaphors in general (but not on the grammatical ones in particular), see Huizinga, Über die Verknüpfung, pp. 59-65.

32. On the grammarian or the user of grammar as an artifex, see Karin Margareta Fredborg, “Universal Grammar according to Some 12th-Century Grammarians,” Historiographia linguistica 7 (1980), 72-74.

33. On coining imagery in the De planctu Naturae, see Huizinga, Über die Verknüpfung, pp. 57-59, and Rudolf Krayer, Frauenlob und die Natur-Allegorese (Heidelberg, 1960), pp. 28-29, 35, and 161-165.

34. Biblical quotations follow the Latin text in Robert Weber, ed., Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1975).

35. Compare 5.288-293.

36. See Glorieux, ed., “La Somme ‘Quoniam homines,’” p. 141.

37. I correct the misprint “prose mould” in Sheridan.

38. Krayer, Frauenlob, p. 29.

39. Krayer, Frauenlob, p. 162.

40. Häring, “The Poem Vix nodosum,” pp. 181 (for lines 63-64 of the text) and 168 (for the translation by James J. Sheridan).

41. See Alan's Summa de arte praedicatoria (PL 210.144C-145A), Sermones octo (224D), and Distinctiones (777C); and see George D. Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. 79.

42. Thurot, Notices et extraits, p. 132. Note also the detailed synopsis of orthography that Hugh of St. Victor gives: see Leclercq, “Le De grammatica,” pp. 297-298, and Baron, Opera propaedeutica, pp. 117-118.

43. Guido Maria Dreves and Clemens Blume, eds., Ein Jahrtausend lateinischer Hymnendichtung, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1909), p. 288. For an insightful survey of Alan's theories and practices in regard to metaphor, see Margaret F. Nims, “Translatio: ‘Difficult Statement’ in Medieval Poetic Theory,” University of Toronto Quarterly 43 (1973-1974), 218-220.

44. Dreves and Blume, eds., Ein Jahrtausend lateinischer Hymnendichtung, vol. 1, p. 288.

45. See Maureen Quilligan, “Words and Sex: The Language of Allegory in the De planctu Naturae, the Roman de la Rose, and Book III of The Faerie Queene,” Allegorica 2 (1977), 197.

46. On the scope of figura in Donatus's Ars grammatica, see Holtz, Donat et la tradition, pp. 183-199, and on solecism, pp. 136-157.

47. Gautier de Coincy, “Seinte Léocade,” in Etienne de Barbazan, ed., Fabliaux et contes des poètes françois des XI, XII, XIII, XIV, et XVe siècles, tirés des meilleurs auteurs, rev. and expanded by Méon, vol. 1 (Paris, 1808), pp. 310-311.

48. The similarity of the metaphors in the Altercatio Ganimedis et Helene and the De planctu Naturae has given rise to several very different explanations. Most scholars are convinced that the Ganymede poem was inspired by Alan's work. See Ch.-V. Langlois, “La littérature goliardique,” Revue politique et littéraire: Revue bleue 51 (1893), 174; Ingeborg Schröbler, “Zur Überlieferung des mittellateinischen Gedichts von ‘Ganymed und Helena,’” in Unterscheidung und Bewahrung: Festschrift für Hermann Kunisch zum 60. Geburtstag, 27. Oktober 1961, ed. Klaus Lazarowicz and Wolfgang Kron (Berlin, 1961), p. 323; and Lenzen, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche, pp. 113-116. At least one scholar sees the dependency as being in the opposite direction: see Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, p. 259, n. 60. Peter Dronke argues that Alan was the author of the Ganymede poem as well as of the De planctu Naturae: see Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, ed. Peter Dronke (Leiden, 1978), pp. 11-12.

49. See the Altercatio Ganimedis et Helene, stanzas 36 and 63-67, ed. Lenzen, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche, pp. 140 and 152-154.

50. On the place of these words in grammatical terminology, see Pfister, “Zur Geschichte der Begriffe von Subjekt und Prädikat,” pp. 108-116. A few additional references will be found in Alford, “The Grammatical Metaphor: A Survey,” [Speculum 57 (1982)] p. 748, n. 70.

51. On the senses of nomen substantiuum and nomen adiectiuum in grammar, see John of Salisbury, Metalogicon 1.15, ed. Clemens C. I. Webb (Oxford, 1929), pp. 34-35. Both words had long been part of the grammarian's terminological baggage. On the nongrammatical associations that adiectiua would have aroused, see the Oxford Latin Dictionary, adiectus and ad(i)icio 1 and 4.

52. Thurot, Notices et extraits, p. 264: compare Donatus, Ars grammatica 3.2, ed. Keil, vol. 4, p. 393, and ed. Holtz, p. 655, line 9.

53. Both Häring in his edition of the De planctu Naturae and Sheridan in his translation (see his note on p. 163) prefer the reading Antigenius to Antigamus.

54. See Quilligan, “Words and Sex,” p. 204.

55. To gain an appreciation of the breadth of uitium in comparison with the English vice, compare the entries for these words in the Oxford Latin Dictionary and in the Oxford English Dictionary.

56. See Frank O. Copley, “Exclusus amator”: A Study in Latin Love Poetry (Madison, 1956).

57. Alan's views on homosexuality are considered in passing by Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, pp. 255, 310-311, and 312, and by Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice, pp. 33-35. Balanced assessment of Alan's views will be impossible until the Sermones de peccatis capitalibus has been edited: see Johannes Baptist Schneyer, Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters, vol. 1 (Münster, 1969), pp. 69-83 (esp. no. 102).

58. Compare Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae 4 pr. 6.84-86, in The Theological Tractates: The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. and trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), p. 362.

59. On the philosophical background to the concepts involved in this passage, see Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, 1972), pp. 97-118 and passim.

60. See PL 210.54C and James J. Sheridan's stimulating observations on the Trinitarian grouping of Nature, Genius, and Truth (in his note on p. 218).

61. Note also the description of Generosity, who held her head properly and “[non] faciebat encleticam” (pr. 8.105 = 474B), and of Humility, who tilted her head modestly and “humiliter encleticabat in terram” (pr. 8.144 = 475B).

62. I am indebted in my interpretation of this passage to Jane Chance Nitzsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York, 1975), pp. 112-113. The passage should be considered in conjunction with Anticlaudianus 1.119-151, where Alan describes a painting that portrays real and fictional men, both good and evil, in terms of the seven liberal arts: see Jane Chance, “The Artist as Epic Hero in Alan of Lille's ‘Anticlaudianus,’” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 18 (1983), 238-247.

63. Alan's reasoning in this passage is to be compared with that in many parts of Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae; most striking is Boethius's statement in 4 pr. 3.36-38 (p. 332): “Sicut igitur probis probitas ipsa fit praemium, ita improbis nequitia ipsa supplicium est.”

64. See Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae 4 pr. 2.109-112 (p. 326): “sed esse absolute nequeam confiteri. Est enim quod ordinem retinet servatque naturam; quod vero ab hac deficit, esse etiam, quod in sua natura situm est, derelinquit.”

65. For a comparison of Alan's stylistic theories with his practices, see Alain Michel, “Rhétorique, poétique et nature chez Alain de Lille,” in Alain de Lille, Gautier de Châtillon, ed. Roussel and Suard, pp. 113-124.

66. Note Summa de arte praedicatoria (193-195), Contra haereticos 1.54 (366CD), and the tract De virtutibus et de vitiis et de donis Spiritus Sancti, ed. Odon Lottin, in Psychologie et morale au XIIe et XIIIe siècles, vol. 6 (Gembloux, 1960), p. 32.

67. Alan's several pronouncements on the levels of style are gathered and discussed in Franz Quadlbauer, Die antike Theorie der Genera dicendi im lateinischen Mittelalter (Vienna, 1962), pp. 82-86.

68. See Michael Zink, “La rhétorique honteuse et la convention du sermon ad status à travers la Summa de arte praedicatoria d'Alain de Lille,” in Alain de Lille, Gautier de Châtillon, ed. Roussel and Suard, pp. 171-185, esp. p. 177.