Medieval Crossover

Augustine articulated in the De doctrina christiana a notion of Christian reading, controlled by charity, that promotes the love of God and turns readers away from an indulgence in carnal desires. D. W. Robertson read in this articulation an Augustinian rejection of engaging secular texts on their own terms and a privileging of charitable reading writ large—an understanding that, as Barbara Newman notes, created a totalizing program of reading, sometimes called “exegetics,” that shut down fruitful theorizing about the relationship of sacred and secular for several generations. On Robertson's view, only “sacred” readings were valid while “secular” interpretations, wherever they might be found, were to be sanitized through readerly love and made to mean in a “sacred” way.Newman's book works against the effects of Robertson's totalizing program, and on that score alone its contribution is considerable. That she has found so many moments in which the sacred would seem to exist with the secular is itself a convincing argument against “exegetics.” But a reader who comes to her book, as I do, from the later Latin literary tradition will be struck at how much that tradition anticipates the moves of later medieval litterateurs. And if a reader of Augustine, as I also am, happens to come upon Newman's book, that reader will also take pleasure in the irony of recognizing in Newman's notion of the medieval “crossover” work a bow to Augustine's dialogues, where such a work seems to be anticipated a decade before the De doctrina christiana. I will have more to say on the later Latin tradition and on Augustine below.First it should be said that few readers (not to say reviewers) will be fully up to the demands Newman makes on them, for she roams widely in secular texts written in English, Latin, and French, that cover multiple genres (romance, parody, lyric, to name but a few) and that focus on authors and works both famous (Marguerite Porete) and obscure (La Desputoison de Dieu et de sa mere, helpfully edited and translated in an appendix). But these readings gain further weight when viewed as evidence supporting Newman's theorizing about the crossover work, by which the culturally normative sacred space privileged in the Middle Ages is understood to accommodate the secular material to which Robertson refused to give warrant. Newman's readings underscore how wrong Robertson was about Augustine and how unfortunate the influence of “exegetics” has been on our understanding of medieval literary activity.I hope readers will forgive me for turning to an example of a crossover work that falls outside of Newman's purview. I do so to suggest what is most exciting to me about Newman's book, namely, that her “crossover” work existed as early as the sixth century and that the readerly method supporting it can be applied to much that was written in Latin in the Middle Ages. My text is Venantius Fortunatus's carm. 3.26, in which the poet addresses his friend, Rucco, in this way in the opening couplet of his poem: Altaris domini pollens, bone Rucco, minister, / hinc tibi festinus, mando salutis opus. Robertson would understand these words to say something like: “Good Rucco, powerful minister of the altar of the Lord, quickly from here I am sending you some word of my well-being.” On this reading, Rucco is placed in the culturally normative “sacred” space that has him functioning as a minister at Christ's altar, with Fortunatus describing his own status in the couplets that follow and demanding from Rucco a poem or letter confirming his good friend's safety.Such a reading will understand “powerful” (pollens) and “minister” (minister) to be vocatives, agreeing with “Good Rucco” (bone Rucco). In Robertson's terms, this is the “charitable” reading of the couplet that confirms the sacred while disallowing the obtrusion of a secular understanding of it. And yet in a poem devoted to the expression of abiding friendship, Fortunatus invites his readers to cultivate a secular reading at the same time as they entertain the sacred. Robertson would say such an invitation could not originate with Fortunatus and must therefore be resisted. But the poet invites such readings in virtually every poem he writes. If readers thus disabuse themselves of Robertson's view, as Newman's notion of crossover encourages them to do, a secular reading easily emerges: what were vocatives in agreement with “Good Rucco” become nominatives in apposition with the subject of the couplet, the poet himself (the “I” of mando, “I send”). The poem's “sacred” opening thus also supports a “secular” reading that celebrates deep friendship: “Good Rucco, I send to you some word of my well-being—I, who am a powerful minister of the altar of one who commands me [in friendship].”In Newman's prized texts, reading in a way that recognizes both sacred and secular reveals complicated meditations on human experience. Chrétien's Lancelot, for example, is both an example of fin'amor and a Christ-figure, and Malory's Arthur is both a lapsed Christian king and an immortal pagan legend. The sacred can no more be privileged in these works and others like them than can the secular. Instead, a reader must make what Newman calls a “double judgment,” participating in a hermeneutics of “both/and.” Secular and sacred exist on the same playing field, so to speak, and confront each other. Writers are thus understood to write in such a way as to exploit in their works this confrontation, and contemporary readers, no less than their medieval counterparts, are required to recognize and interpret “crossover” works.The beauty—and the power—of the notions of “double judgment,” the hermeneutics of “both/and,” and the idea of “crossover” go to the ways in which these ideas take shape in the thinking of Augustine himself, the very figure held up by D. W. Robertson as the paragon of a totalizing, “sacred” readerly model. Newman does not consider the De doctrina christiana in her theorizing of the “crossover” work except to mention Robertson's understanding of it. Still, she demonstrates in the practice of medieval literary artists that Robertson was wrong. And Augustine himself tells us why: his project in the De doctrina christiana, after all, was focused on the reading of scripture, whose contradictions needed to be somehow done away with. Augustine's model of charitable reading thus emerged as a means for scriptural antinomies to be ameliorated through readerly “charity.” But in the Soliloquies, written a decade before the De doctrina christiana, he had articulated a theory of language as curiously “false” and “true” at the same time, that is, as able to support both “sacred” and “secular” readings simultaneously. More than this, he constructed a model of Christian reading based on this notion of language in the Contra academicos and the De beata vita, where the words of Terence and Virgil are read in a way that recognizes their falsity (their secular meaning) and their truth (their sacred meaning) at the same time and in the same reading.That Augustine's notion of language and the mode of reading that derives from it so neatly support Newman's crossover work, both in practice and in theory, cannot be happenstance. Instead, I would suggest they prove the hermeneutic authenticity of Newman's crossover work, as something grounded in medieval literary culture with roots deep in earlier thinking and practice. Newman thus reveals a strain in medieval literary history with long antecedents and wide application. It would seem to have been waiting a long time to be revealed. On this view, then, Newman's book is revelatory

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