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ABSTRACT
This article investigates the status of rumor in two works of the mester de clerecía, the Libro de Apolonio and the Libro de Alexandre, as it ties together questions of language, sovereignty, politics, and literature. Considering different views of rumor, from noise to harmony, from lying to eloquence, this article contextualizes different views on rumor in the medieval period to interpret its varied use in these poems. The article investigates first the role of rumor in legal discourse, related to fama and secrecy; it then looks into the bodily metaphors of the multiple meanings of language as sins of the tongue, and finally into notions of harmony and volume to provide a complex picture of rumor as register. It then analyzes different moments in the Alexandre and the Apolonio that exploit these different meanings, often setting them against each other, to produce hermeneutical processes. Rumor serves in these works to plot the story, to characterize figures, to highlight moments of cognition, of politics, and to present the idea of the control of language as one attractive to both clerics and kings.
Notes on contributors
Simone Pinet is Professor of Spanish and Medieval Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Archipelagoes: Insularity and Fiction from Chivalric Romance to the Novel (U of Minnesota Press) and as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow for 2010–11 she conducted research for The Task of the Cleric: Cartography, Translation and Economics in Thirteenth-century Iberia (Toronto UP).
Notes
1 See Arizaleta, “El orden de Babel”, 6–7.
2 Hardie, Rumour, 233.
3 There are other instances of inarticulation, such as the “bien rides entre dientes e lanças mala coçes” (478c). In addition, one could consider instances of “como dizen” as not only a reference to popular knowledge or traditional culture, but as allusions to a form of dissemination close to rumor (565ab, 588c). All quotes from the Libro de Alexandre are from the Casas Rigall edition. All quotes from the Libro de Apolonio are from the Corbella edition. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine, and quotation numbers refer to stanzas.
4 From a decidedly verbal and rhetorical perspective, I want to frame this within what Williamson called an “aural turn” in medieval studies, helping to “advance the correction of the simplistic assumptions about dualisms such as body/mind, material/immaterial, exterior/interior, and visual/aural that have been taking place within medieval cultural history”. See “Sensory Experience”, 42.
5 See Phillips, Transforming Talk; Lochrie, Covert Operations. Both are devoted to late medieval England, but Lochrie's second chapter, on women's gossip and its imbrication with confession in relation to the gendering of discourse and authority, is of special interest here. Phillips argues for gossip as transformative (as opposed to transgressing), especially in relation to preaching and exemplary literature. See also Bowman, “Infamy and Proof.” Some questions on oral economy in the Libro de Alexandre are elaborated in Pinet, “Towards a Political Economy” and The Task of the Cleric.
6 As Hardie remarks, “in democratic Athens rumor, the voice of the people, could be positively valued. By contrast, and on a much larger canvas, it has been suggested that there has been a marked deterioration in the standing of ‘talk’ between the medieval and modern periods, as a result of the social and legal professionalization of the functions of talk”. See Rumour and Renown, 44.
7 Hardie, Rumour and Renown, 229.
8 Hardie, Rumour and Renown, 237.
9 See Gauvard, “Rumeur et stéreotypes”, 158–59.
10 Bowman, “Infamy and Proof”, 95. Théry also points this out, and adds that fama/infamy acquires a particular importance from the twelfth century onwards in legislation due to its role in the procedure of the inquisitio, which was especially developed between the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries (120, see also the extensive bibliography in 119-20n3, and 120n4). He analyzes the role of fama in pontifical cases, especially as fama communis, which is interesting in terms of the public nature of fame, and because in many of these cases it acquires a negative connotation of defamation or infamia.
11 Bowman, “Infamy and Proof”, 99.
12 Bowman, “Infamy and Proof”, 102.
13 Hardie, Rumor and Renown, 230.
14 Martha Malamud, “Writing Original Sin”, 329–60.
15 The common comparison (and interchangeability) between swords and tongues shows up all the way to Covarruvias's emblem 66 of the third series, Tu servare potes, tu perdere.
16 See Sigüenza Martín, “De buenas y malas lenguas”, 101.
17 See Sigüenza Martín, “De buenas y malas lenguas”, 97–100.
18 Cited in Galán Rodríguez and Rodríguez Ponce, “Utraque ex ore”, 7.
19 Brownlee, “The Critical Sense”, 76 and 78.
20 Brownlee, “The Critical Sense”, 80.
21 Brownlee, “The Critical Sense”, 86. The story, which Petrus Alfonsi made popular throughout Europe in the version rendered in the Libro del cavallero Çifar, builds on the episode of doubting Thomas, who had to be convinced of resurrection by the “sensing” of the embodied God.
22 1 Corinthians 13: 1–2, The New Oxford Annotated, 1392.
23 Similar to this is the place of laughter in the speech spectrum, as Descartes, quoted by Brownlee, described it: “This inarticulate and explosive voice that we call laughter.” Brownlee, at the end of her chapter, suggests other lines of inquiry into to the role of laughter in the Zifar (ibid., 88–89, cf. also 84n32 and 86n35).
24 Timaeus, 47 a–d, cited in Warning, “Seeing and Hearing”, 102. Rainer goes on to analyze how the medieval Christian theory of the senses gave sight a much higher place than that of hearing, as did Aristotle, and as a number of episodes from the Bible highlight, often tweaking interpretation to align Christian thought to antiquity.
25 Warning, “Seeing and Hearing”, 107. Augustine subordinates hearing to sight in a way that even the work of God is not heard, but seen as an inner light (108).
26 Williamson, “Sensory Experience”, 5.
27 Citing Augustine and other medieval writers Williamson affirms that “the notion of hearing in this ‘inner sense’ was common, in contrast with the neglect that modern scholars have shown the aural in favor of the visual” (“Sensory Experience”, 13).
28 Cited here from the late fourteenth-century translation. Juan Fernández de Heredia, Traducción de la Historia contra paganos de Orosio. Emphases added.
29 Such aural interchangeability should be thought in relation to classical experiments with fama, such as Hesiod's, where “the parallelism between Φημη and Eρις hints at an essentially agonistic quality of Fama, important above all in the epic tradition, in which the struggle between competing reports and reputations mirrors the physical contests of the epic battlefield, a struggle in which the epic poet himself is engaged in an effort to be the best”, an epic context where rumors and the noise of battle seem to equally complicate narration. Hardie, Rumour and Renown, 55.
30 Cohen, “Kyte oute yugilment”, 270. But this is a general remark that could be found elsewhere. Via Jacques Attali, he expands this generalization: “Noise is body, monster, materiality, the other, the sound of all of those differences that seem to have been excluded but inhabit the heart of identity” (269). Rumor undermines such lines of demarcation, and medieval Iberian texts reveal themselves not only to be aware of such ambiguity but to actually exploit it.
31 I cannot undertake here a complete study of the soundscapes of Berceo's Milagros, a text particularly rich in connotations, from polyphony to politics. See Devoto, “Tres notas sobre Berceo”, for a rich and suggestive approach from the perspective of music and harmony.
32 Fernández de Santaella, Vocabulario eclesiástico, consulted through CORDE.
33 Traducción de Vidas paralelas de Plutarco, II, fol. 36r, consulted online through CORDE.
34 Juan Manuel. Libro de los estados, 364. Several other examples in all of the meanings listed are to be found in El libro del conde Lucanor. Cohen offers a radically different view of the noise created by large numbers of people, especially those engaged in revolt. In the context of the Rising of 1381, Cohen briefly documents the animalization of the mob – of people's political speech – in the characterizations of John Gower and Thomas of Walsingham, who, in doing so, render it meaningless. It is interesting to note how the characterization of political collective speech is differently treated in roughly the same period in Iberia and England. The cluster to which Cohen's article serves as introduction, devoted to Chaucer and the Chanson de Roland, is a good starting point for such a comparison. Elsewhere in the article, Cohen, through Chaucer, sees music as playing a different role in alliance with – or erasure of – speech. See “Introduction to Medieval Noise”, 273–74.
35 The consideration of the opposite of noise, silence, is of course also pertinent, though not specifically considered in the study of the texts. Silence both as presence – as in the idea of the music of the spheres, the harmony of the cosmos, which remains present – and as absence, as a pause, or as the space between sounds, also has meaning. See Williamson, “Sensory Experience”, 32 et passim.
36 Another negative version of fame can be seen in stanza 646. Even the poet and protagonist cast such dissemination of the stratagem in such terms, but there is at least one instance in which fame is entirely positive: “cuanto el siglo dure, fasta la fin venida, / será en Mitalena la su fama tenida” (574cd).
37 See Hardie, Rumour and Renown, 59–61, on the contrasts between the crowd's roar, which is compared to the sea and the winds, the unruly or unmeasured words vs. the gentle words of gods – and Odysseus – in the Iliad.
38 Much of the musical vocabulary here has been widely debated and remains unclear. See, among many others, Corbella Díaz, “Estudio del léxico”, and Devoto, “Tres notas.”
39 Molina calls this a “rhetorical performance”, from where I take the heading to this section. He further points out texts that highlight the importance of different elements in performance: “In the Summa Musice, the importance of performing rhetorically is highly emphasized in lines 2046–65; in his De musica Johannes de Grocheio explains that a good fiddle player is expected to add improvised postlude melodies; and, the importance of ornamenting melodic lines is stipulated in many other contemporaneous treatises such as those by Jerome of Moravia, Elias Salomonis, and Johannes de Garlandia”, and suggests McGee's The Sound of Medieval Song for a compilation of these instructions, and Rodríguez Velasco's Castigo para celosos for instructions for troubadours (“Alleviators of Sadness and Tedium”, n. 14).
40 On performing women and music in medieval Iberia, see, among much interesting work, Cohen “Ca no soe joglaresa”, especially 66–80, and Filios, Performing Women in the Middle Ages. See also Molina, “Alleviators of Sadness”, on women musicians and prostitution.
41 Alexander, like his counterparts in the Libro de Apolonio, with similar terminology emphasizes the property and harmonious performative skills he has in the arts of music: “Sé por arte de música por natura cantar; / sé fer sabrosos puntos, las vozes acordar, / los tonos com’empiezan e como deven finar” (44ac). See Rico, “La clerecía del mester”, González Ollé, “La educación idiomática”, and Arizaleta, “Acerca de la educación”.
42 Hardie, Rumour and Renown, 243.
43 I here closely follow Hardie's analysis, Rumour and Renown, 239–40.
44 Gauvard, “Rumeur et stéreotypes”,161.
45 General estoria, cuarta parte, fol. 220r.
46 General estoria, cuarta parte, fol. 222v.
47 Hardie, Rumour and Renown, 234.
48 Hardie, Rumour and Renown, 238.
49 Alfonso el sabio, Las Siete Partidas, II. IV. II, 283. The Partidas are quoted by partida, law, and title, page numbers are to Scott's translation.
50 Siete partidas, II. IV. II, 283.
51 Siete partidas, II. IV. II, 284.
52 Siete partidas, II. XIII. II–IV, 334-46. Julien Théry, cited above, has analyzed how fama as public opinion became increasingly central to the exercise of justice towards the end of the medieval period, especially in its role in determining the juridical status of those involved and the types of processes they could or should be subjected to (such as torture), as new legal procedures were deployed. See especially 137–40.
53 Malkiel, “Old Spanish Paladino, Palaciano, Palaciego”.
54 Orality/aurality, as Ancos proposes in Transmisión y recepción, especially chapters 4 and 5, should be considered in dialogue with music theory.
55 In a larger history of “public opinion”, one could think about the king as public but individual body in contrast with the “people” – the terms are, after all, related (populus, poplicus, public) – as a collective without a body. See Peters, “Historical Tensions”, especially 4–13.
56 Hardie, Rumour and Renown, 241.
57 Hardie, Rumour and Renown, 241–42.
58 Hardie, Rumour and Renown, 241–42, who here closely analyzes Cicero's Pro Caelio.
59 Historia de rebus Hispanie, 233, 246.