Download PDF | Steven A. Epstein - The Talents of Jacopo da Varagine_ A Genoese Mind in Medieval Europe-Cornell University Press (2016).
314 Pages
Prologue
Jacopo da Varagine is not known to most people who have heard of Aquinas or Dante or St. Francis, to name three well-known Italians of the thirteenth century.' The Golden Legend, by far his most famous work, has been intensely studied and translated into many languages.” This collection of saints’ lives and other essays, surviving in many hundreds of manuscript copies (and variants) in Latin, was translated into German, Occitan, French, Italian, English, Dutch, Spanish, and other languages by the end of the Middle Ages and was one of the earliest and most frequently printed books from the late fifteenth century.
Yet like many texts, it has become detached from its context, the city of Genoa, where Jacopo was probably born, passed much of his life, and died as its archbishop in 1298. Also, except for a few Genoese scholars, the study of this text occurs without any notice of his other works, the many hundreds of sermons and his history of Genoa.* These circumstances justify a new approach to Jacopo that encompasses all his works and his social and cultural milieu. What exactly this book is will be explained in a moment, as soon as I make clear that it is not a biography, intellectual or otherwise, of Jacopo da Varagine. The materials for such a life do not exist, as I shall show by briefly summarizing the little we know about him.*
Jacopo was born, most likely in Genoa, in late 1228 or 1229.° Most of what we know derives from the rare personal comments in his history of Genoa. These will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5. Jacopo remembered an eclipse of 1239, when he was a boy. He entered the Dominican order in 1244, in many ways the decisive event of his life.° A near contemporary made a will in Genoa when entering the Order of Preachers, ending his ties to his family, and Jacopo may have done the same, though his will does not survive.’ As far as we know he was first educated in the Dominican convent and its studium generale in Genoa.* Stefania Bertini Guidetti reasonably suggests that Jacopo attended from 1246 to 1251 the studium generale the Dominican order operated at Bologna.’
Jacopo recalled the great comet in the summer of 1264. After compiling the core of The Golden Legend over the years 1260-67, he became prior of the Dominicans in Lombardy, centered in Milan, for the period from 1267 to 1277, probably the same time as he wrote many of his model sermons for preachers. He attended the General Chapters of the Dominican order in 1267 at Bologna, 1271 at Montpellier, 1273 at Pest, 1274 at Lyon, 1277 at Venice, and Bordeaux in 1281 where he left office. Spending some time in Pest seems to have interested Jacopo in Hungary and its saints and miracles. At these meetings he had the chance to meet the great men of his order, including Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, but there is no proof that he did so. Back in another official capacity at a general meeting at Bologna in 1281, he also spent the 1280s writing two of his great collections of sermons, the Lenten and Sunday books. In 1283/84 he was briefly regent of the Dominican order, and he spent most of this decade in Bologna with frequent travels to Rome, Genoa, and elsewhere.
In 1292 Pope Nicholas IV made Jacopo archbishop of Genoa. It is unclear why Nicholas granted the Genoese petition to have an archbishop at this time, since the see had been vacant for about four years.'” The pope died before conferring the pallium. The details of Jacopo’s career as archbishop are few because almost nothing survives recording his activities in office, apart from what he provides in his chronicle, a few papal letters, and a handful of notarial acts concerning his extended family and official business. For example, we do not have a single letter by Jacopo, and the episcopal register from this period did not survive the vicissitudes of Genoese history. He wrote one last body of sermons while archbishop, all on Mary. Major buildings housing important institutions of church and state—the Dominican convent, the cathedral of San Lorenzo and the adjoining palace, the Palazzo Pubblico, in the heart of the port—were all within a few hundred meters of one another and comprised Jacopo’s neighborhood, where he was born. He was dead by the morning of July 14, 1298, probably passing away the previous night. Jacopo would have been around seventy. From these basic facts and a few others biographers have produced accounts of his life of varying length and quality.
Given how little we know about Jacopo, it is reasonable to turn to the great mass of his writings to learn how he thinks about Christianity, his main preoccupation. Jacopo’s extreme personal reticence and the lack of particularities in his sermons make this task difficult. I am not the first person to wonder about Jacopo’s mind. Bertini Guidetti, studying the sermons, concluded that his tendency toward impersonality needed to be balanced against the “inexhaustible evidence of the process of elaborating ideas and mental associations this notable artistic personality” exhibits.'' “A gallery of portraits animates the sermons and furnishes the warp and woof on which he weaves a complex and continuous pattern of metaphors, similes, analogies.” Derived from intense study of the sermons, these views apply well to Jacopo’s other works, as we will see. His readers, past and present, have been struck by his ability to take a few details or an idea and spin out a complex web of associations.'?
I agree that Jacopo, while writing in an intellectual tradition he was usually careful to credit, also thought of himself as an artist, in the sense that he applied his creative and imaginative talents to his subjects, be they a biblical passage as a topic for a sermon, the life of a saint, or the history of Genoa. Bertini Guidetti saw Jacopo’s portraits as a way to take a close look at what she called his system of presentation, as part of an approach to his imagination situated in the history of mentalities.'’ Hence her approach to the way Jacopo thought is primarily concerned with how he used his cultural tools and his imaginative skills to convey abstractions to his audience. I have greatly benefited from Bertini Guidetti’s fine work.
Jacopo was, after all, one of the most active and talented minds of his time, but not the only one. His writing reveals how his mind worked, but this truism applies to nearly every honest person who writes. Because Jacopo was so reticent about his personal life, because his contemporaries have almost nothing to say about him, and because, as we will see, his use of sources, what he read or heard, is at times impenetrable, a standard biography simply will not work. Some thirteenth-century writers reveal so much about themselves or were the subjects of a near contemporary biography that their opus can sustain a “life and times.” For example, Jacopo’s contemporary the Catalan Raimund Lull (ca. 1232-1316), whose life and many works have been intensely studied, frequently visited Genoa and experienced a profound spiritual crisis there in 1292/93, when Jacopo was archbishop.
Even though Lull was actually for a time in 1293 living in the Dominican house in Genoa and thinking of joining the order, there is no evidence that he and Jacopo paid any attention to one another, though we can imagine that some interaction must have occurred. This intersection of lives and experiences led Lull to leave Genoa by ship for missionary work in Tunis and Jacopo to the task of compiling sermons on Marian themes while busy as archbishop. Lull’s huge number of surviving works, his lay status, and the immense amount of scholarship on him all suggest he would not be a profitable comparison to Jacopo’s very different career.
For these and other reasons I have turned to Richard Southern’s study of Jacopo’s near contemporary Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln (ca. 1170-1253), as an inspiring model for this book.’ Southern subtitled his book The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe. The parallels between Grosseteste and Jacopo are far from exact (more below), but I take from Southern’s great book on an important person a few ideas for a lesser work on a less significant figure. First, whatever we can suppose or say about the distinctive qualities of an English mind in this century, I believe Jacopo had a “Genoese mind.”
This highly educated and successful Dominican shared some traits with his one hundred thousand or so fellow Genoese but more so with the few hundred men appearing in the vast notarial records or the few dozen writers (mostly annalists or historians). Like all medieval Europeans having significant careers, these men and women had an aptitude for hard work and ambitions to achieve something worthwhile, in Jacopo’s case to serve God. More typically Genoese is his special manner of disliking Jews in a Genoa where there were none, by design. On the positive side Jacopo’s contemporaries shared a love of tidiness and system, a desire to bring order out of chaos, whether in business or faith. It cannot be a coincidence that the greatest collection of saint’s lives and the most important Latin dictionary of the Middle Ages were written by Genoese Dominicans. Second, Jacopo was a widely read and well-traveled Dominican preacher comfortable in the academic and spiritual milieu of Europe.
Hence we must balance the particularly Genoese with the wider context of European intellectual life in the late thirteenth century, just as Southern situated Grosseteste in the first half of the century. Lastly, since historians study change over time and we have Jacopo’s writings from nearly four decades, we must consider to what extent his mind grew, or he extended his intellectual horizons, over the course of his career. This book is not a comparative study of Jacopo to anyone else, so we can briefly note here, and then leave behind, some contrasts between Robert Grosseteste and Jacopo da Varagine. These similarities and differences set the parameters for what we can learn about the way Jacopo thought, the real subject of this book. Jacopo’s education outside Genoa is unknown, so we have a university gap (likely at Bologna), where Robert’s education has been reasonably surmised to have occurred at Oxford and Paris. Jacopo was a well-traveled person knowing much of Europe; Robert knew England (a place Jacopo never visited) and the roads to Paris and Rome. Their European minds reflect these experiences of the world.
Jacopo was careful to list all his writings, while Robert’s oeuvre is plagued with misattributions and spurious writings. Jacopo rose to be archbishop of Genoa and Robert to be bishop of Lincoln, the largest and richest diocese in England. Both men were active preachers, but we have only a few of Robert’s sermons and hundreds of Jacopo’s. Apart from religion, Jacopo was most interested in history and became a father of social history, Robert in natural science; neither wrote on the other’s favorite subject. Robert became a learned pioneer in Greek and could translate works from that language, while Jacopo (possibly to his disappointment and a definite handicap) never learned it. Jacopo was a Dominican from his teens, and Robert was very close to the Franciscans in Oxford, though he never joined the order. As we will see Jacopo had acquired the habits of a scholastic mind; Robert remained resolutely apart from this new method of analysis and argument.
Jacopo revered Pope Innocent IV (124354) from the noble Fieschi family of Genoa and Lavagna; Robert had terrible relations with Innocent and probably loathed him.'° Both men had an interest in daring, extrabiblical books or pseudepigrapha of great antiquity. Jacopo put a lot of faith in the Gospel of Nicodemus, and Robert used the Testament of Judah.'’ Finally, neither one became a cardinal or was canonized, but how they responded to these facts or hopes is unknown. Several medieval efforts to canonize Robert failed; Jacopo was belatedly beatified in 1816." These contrasts, which we might make with any other author, episcopal or otherwise, in this century, show some of the things we can learn about Jacopo’s mind by reading his writings. I cannot cover here the vast, complex subject of the reception of his works.!’ In order to thoroughly investigate his writings, one must have read, or at least consulted, everything Jacopo read, claims to have consulted, or cites, and I have not done this; I am not sure anyone could.
The editors of his writings have done some of this, although at present only one of his sermon collections benefits from a modern edition.” I have read enough of what Jacopo “knew” in order to have some sense of where he borrows, compiles, or is thinking on his own, and it is the last category on which I concentrate. For example, I have some sense now of how Jacopo read the Bible, a work he knew better than any other. It is another, harder matter to catch Jacopo having an original thought about a Bible passage because he was so careful to credit his respected predecessors. Also, Jacopo did not in my view esteem originality as a proper goal for a theologian, and he did not boast about having original ideas. But he did, probably more than some of his readers have thought. His thinking occurred in the context of Genoese history in the thirteenth century, set in the framework of the larger history of Europe. I have provided, where necessary, enough background to make sense of Jacopo’s writing. But I have tried to keep this context to a minimum, partly because Jacopo aimed in his sermons and saints’ lives for a European-wide audience and hence kept his own notices of Genoa to a bare minimum. The “times” of Jacopo da Varagine have been discussed elsewhere and become one of the main subjects when we look at Jacopo as a historian.”
Jacopo’s name does not evoke any great thesis or new teaching staking a claim to his originality as a thinker or author. Nothing he wrote or did rivaled Dante in artistry, Aquinas in theological subtlety, Lull in sheer volume, or Grosseteste in original scholarship. He worked in three genres with different touchstones of originality. What, after a thousand years of Christian preaching, was an original sermon? Jacopo disdained personal and newsy sermons. His models were supposed to aid other preachers, and amplified through them to edify congregations everywhere. He collected, selected, and edited hundreds of saints’ lives. This grand idea for an encyclopedia of the saints rendered older works irrelevant and held the field for centuries. As a historian Jacopo radically departed from the annalistic conventions of his worthy Genoese predecessors.
He decided that history could be more than universal or providential, but he called his work a chronicle for a reason. By pushing history beyond its thirteenth-century canons Jacopo made his most original contribution to the historiography of Genoa, a city with no particular claim on contemporary readers. Until recent centuries the least known of Jacopo’s works, the small audience for the chronicle ranked far behind the many readers of The Golden Legend and even the comparatively fewer readers of his sermons. Jacopo’s talents across genres kept him from being valued as a thirteenth-century intellectual of impressive range.
My method is to consider Jacopo first as primarily an industrious compiler, and hence experienced selector of which details to include and which to omit. Learning his habits of selection, along with noting his opinions and factual errors, is the best way to interrogate his works with the purpose of learning about the originality of his mind. The only hope for finding growth is to consider his writings in chronological order. This stance toward his writings rests on the three fresh approaches suggested above. First, we look at all his works, so when we arrive at his Marian sermons we will already know the preacher, hagiographer, and historian. Second, the Genoese milieu is the touchstone by which we will be seeing and evaluating what he has to say. Third, paying more attention to the sources for his sermons, saints’ lives, and history circumscribes his originality but also illuminates the traditions, mainly his faith and the Bible, shaping his imaginative and artistic powers. For these reasons I begin with chapter 1 on the sermons, then two chapters on The Golden Legend, then two more on his history of Genoa. I conclude with his late sermons on Mary in order to illuminate what we may understand from the growth of this Genoese mind in medieval Europe.
As the epilogue to this book shows, Jacopo’s last words as an author, perhaps the final sentence he wrote, display a typically humane concern that his readers would find it easy and useful to consult his book. Jacopo solved his problem by supplying an index, presumably one he made himself. By this time in his life Jacopo’s thinking had become so self-effacing that he would surely have cringed at the prospect of intense scrutiny. Certainly no near contemporary as far as we know ever wrote a book about his life. Nor do we have any evidence, apart from the huge numbers of surviving manuscripts, how audiences received Jacopo’s preaching and other writings.” He would have wondered, as readers of this book may very well ask: what possible claim does a book on the thinking of a well-intentioned but frankly obscure Genoese, dead more than seven centuries, have on busy people at the beginning of the third millennium?—a date that might have shocked Jacopo, who thought he lived close to the end. Jacopo was a type of person worthy of our consideration not simply for his numerous surviving works, for many such people have been completely and in most cases rightly forgotten. Nor does being Genoese by itself demand notice, especially far from the locale that just might by itself justify remembrance. Since Jacopo appears to have been a great reader, we cannot do justice to the ways in which he recycles the vast corpus of his lifetime’s reading, let alone can we be sure that we have detected all the gold of original thinking in a fair amount of ore.
Above all these concerns, I place before the potential reader this argument for paying some attention to Jacopo da Varagine. As far as I can tell, the animating passion of his life was his Christian faith—a stance he shared with many of his contemporaries. But he was not content to hide his light under a bushel basket. He worked hard for decades, using his talents to explain to the men on the front lines of his religion, his fellow priests, friars, and preachers, what they needed to know to be effective in their work. Why he did this is clear enough—charitable duty. Jacopo believed, in common with other learned friars like the great theologian Aquinas and the master of the Franciscans Bonaventure, that he owed his colleagues the fruits of his talents applied to the faith. He did not write scholastic books or advice or regulations for Dominicans. Instead, he applied his energies to works of love, in the first instance for his fellow friars. But he also wanted to help anyone, religious or secular, engaged in making it easier for beginners and experienced practitioners to teach what people needed to know to be good Christians, and to a lesser and more local context to be useful citizens of Genoa. How he did it is the subject of this book; the evidence is on the pages he wrote—the relics of his thinking.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق