Weeping for Dido

In Weeping for Dido, Marjorie Curry Woods applies her expert knowledge of the teaching of rhetoric in medieval education to consider how teachers and students interacted with three literary works that were fundamental to medieval teaching—the Aeneid, the Achilleid, and the Ilias latina. Through close attention to glosses, highlighting, and formatting of manuscript copies of these works, Woods reveals that the education of medieval men regularly featured learning emotions through guided concentration on the experiences of fictional women. Although part of an overall focus on emotional passages and speeches in medieval classrooms, Woods's evidence shows that students and teachers paid notably greater attention to the words of distraught women. In order to help decipher repeated and at times cryptic manuscript features, Woods places them firmly in the context of classical and medieval rhetorical treatises, which offers an insightful view of classroom lessons and their underlying “course objectives.” The geographical scope (Germany, Italy, England, and France) and chronological range (twelfth to the fifteenth centuries) of the manuscript sources reveals continuities in educational practices, while also offering an avenue for future comparative work. Woods' investigation, therefore, makes thought-provoking connections between education, emotions, and gender performance.The book's three chapters were developed from the E.H. Gombrich Lectures given at the Warburg Institute in 2014. The brief introduction quickly familiarizes the general reader with the form and content of the key evidence, namely manuscript glosses, formatting, and highlighting. Given the aural and oral aspects of education, Woods notes that these glosses were likely heard by students as “continuous and sequential elaboration,” and that they can thereby reveal how teachers and students engaged with these texts (8).The well-known reflections of one of the most famous students and teachers, Augustine of Hippo, frame Chapter 1 (“Memory, Emotion, and Death of a Queen: Teaching the Aeneid”). Augustine famously noted that his own education was marked by memorizing the wanderings of Aeneas, but also by feeling the sufferings of Dido. Woods applies modern studies on the connections between memory and emotions to understand why, like Augustine's own reflections, the manuscripts' glosses on the Aeneas placed so much emphasis on emotional passages. She suggests that these practices reflect a certain immersive pedagogical technique. Teachers guided their students in internalizing such scenes of pathos, particularly the tragic fate of Dido, to aid in memorization of the material. The chapter also notes that the stress placed on these scenes likely permitted boys a means to practice otherwise prohibited emotions.Chapter 2 (“Troy Books for Boys: Glosses on the Achilleid and Ilias latina”) examines manuscripts of two works that remain largely unknown to modern scholars, but were widely used in medieval classrooms: the Achilleid and the Ilias latina. Both stories convey interesting messages about the performance of masculinity. The Achilleid tells the story of Thetis' failed attempt to prevent her son, Achilles' participation in the Trojan War by abducting him and dressing him as a girl, while the Ilias latina presents a condensed, action-packed version of the Iliad. Woods first offers a sequential analysis of the Achilleid along with the teachers' comments, many of which clarified vocabulary and grammar, but also accentuated emotions like Achilles' feelings of abandonment and the rape of Deidamia. Furthermore, Woods argues that these comments reflect the categories of characterization described in Cicero's De inventione attributa personarum, with more basic identifications (nomen and natura) found in glosses of the Ilias latina, and more advanced lessons on the characters and plot (victus, habitus, fortuna) found in the comments on the Achilleid. Therefore, these texts and their glosses on the development of Achilles from a boy to a fighting man, appear to have worked in tandem to guide students in their educational growth, while simultaneously conveying an unambiguous message on the character and permanence of their masculinity.The final chapter (“Boys Performing Women (and Men): The Classics and After”) contends that these instructional works were intended to be performed through recitation, suggesting the importance of physical memory in these learned or manufactured emotions. Woods starts this chapter analyzing a reference to a boy's moving performance of a woman's lament, written by Marbod of Rennes (d. 1123). Woods asserts that the notable gender ambiguity in this lyric offered flexibility in how the speaker would have imagined his gender role. Building on the work of Martin Camargo, Klementyna Aura Glińska, and Jan Ziolkowski, the chapter then turns to consider the possible instructions offered for similar performances. Since many manuscripts do not offer explicit instructions for how they were intended to be recited in the classroom, Woods analyzes a copy of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, in which the tones of amplification were applied to Dido's speeches. The chapter then builds on this argument by returning to examine the highlighting and glossing that indicate the classical parts of speech in passages of the Aeneas and the Achilleid. Woods resourcefully adds to these indicated parts their possible tones as recommended in Rhetorica ad Herennium. In this chapter, therefore, Woods makes a compelling argument by drawing together the explicit details on the manuscript page and the implicit references to recognized rhetorical structures to indicate the presence of performance cues. Woods provides ample evidence that these texts were performed, but there remains less certainty surrounding the implications or mood of these performances. For example, in contrast to Augustine's empathy with Dido, Woods notes that the recitations of women's emotional speeches could have just as easily resulted in rambunctious humor and in some cases, cues even suggest over-the-top recitations.The organizational details, conversational tone, and affordability of Weeping for Dido make this work on medieval education ready for use in the modern classroom, especially for courses on the history of education, the reception of classical texts, and medieval emotions and gender. As the introduction notes, the close details of unedited manuscripts require that her readers pay careful attention, but by defining specialized terms and including numerous images, transcriptions, and translations, the author equips a wide range of readers to follow the manuscript evidence. What may be a little more difficult to follow for general readers are the complex interrelated details from classical and medieval rhetorical treatises, but a handy list of rhetorical terms is provided in the front matter. Beyond its promising pedagogical value, Weeping for Dido invites scholars to consider the longstanding and fascinating tradition of boys inhabiting the emotions of fictional women, providing a basis for them to pursue their own investigations into the possible influence of such learned emotions

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