A Dissertation on Invective

Getting Medieval

“The Middle Ages were no less rich in works of an invective nature,” according to Ennio Rao, in “The Humanistic Invective as Literary Genre” (in the 1989 volume of the Selected Proceedings of the Pennsylvania Foreign Language Conference, pp. 261-7). “Suffice it to mention the invectives of Berengarius in defense of his master Abelard against Bernard of Clairvaux, and those of Gerard de Berry against Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury. We must pass over the countless works of invective nature by such authors as Alain de Lille, Dante and Marsilio of Padua.” (For invectives from the late classical / early Christian period, Rao suggests reading Jerome, Julian the Apostate, Claudian, Arnobius, Tertullian, and Paulus Orosius.)

In western medieval literature we find considerable rupture with the classical invective tradition, though also some continuity. In an essay from 1974, “La tradizione dell’invettiva tra il Medio evo e l’Umanesimo,” Pier Giorgio Ricci writes that “il Medio Evo conserva intatta per un millennio la tradizione polemica di stile classico” [Lettere Italiane Ottobre-Dicembre 1974, XXVI, n.4, 405-414]. However, various factors intervened to mutate the ancient tradition, among them the rise of Christianity and the Scholastic method. In his 2005 book Early Renaissance Invective and the Controversies of Antonio da Rho, David Rutherford argues that not until 1352 would anyone “consciously employ classical rhetorical invective against an opponent”:

Throughout the Middle Ages, to be sure, people did not shrink from attacking, insulting, cursing, and otherwise verbally abusing their enemies. The word ‘invective,’ coined in late antiquity, was variously used right through the Middle Ages. Yet Peter Lombard’s ‘Invective against those who say God can do nothing except what he wills’ indicates just how little affinity this work has with classical invective, for it is set in the scholastic sic et non tradition. Hence, few studies of medieval invective attempt to portray it as a continuation or revival of a classical genre.

In the 2006 essay collection Invectives: Quand le corps reprend la parole, Étienne Dussol has written a “petite introduction à l’invective médiévale” [pp 160-173] that is very useful, even if it is largely restricted to France:

How can this verbal violence full of destructive intentions that is invective, fundamentally, exist in a literature that, as we well know, was only permitted by the Church on the condition that it help build an orderly, peaceful and stable world under the watch of God?

This seems like an important question, and it would be interesting to know to what extent medieval authorities censored invective on the grounds of its destructiveness, a question that Dussol touches on but doesn’t frontally address.

Dussol defines medieval invective much as ancient invective was defined. It was an arm of ad hominem quarrel and yet also directed at modifying the behavior of society generally:

… like modern invective, which is very similar in many ways, it seeks to destroy, in its own eyes or in those of another, the image of an individual, an institution, or a social group, or to prevent this or that social group from acquiring a positive image that would permit it to ameliorate its situation, its everyday life… Like modern invective, like all invective in general, it most often employs the registers of ‘base corporeality’ ['bas corporel', a reference to Bakhtin] and bestialization. But there’s nothing really surprising there, considering that these clerics were [...] naturally hostile to the most animal functions of human existence and highly invested in the triumph of the mind over the animal….

Dussol moves on to “a brief panorama of the most obvious forms of medieval invective”:

First domain of invective, literary invective, very common in the langue d’oc literature, in which it went [...] by the name of “sirventes“. A good example of this is Peire d’Auvergne, in his sirventes on twelve troubadours, from which I extract the following strophes:

The fifth, mister Guilhem de Ribes,

who is bad on the inside and bad on the outside.

He speaks all his verses with a hoarse voice,

his squeakings are so disagreeable,

that a dog could do as much… [...]

Problem: Is this a case of highlighting one’s own merits, by contrast, in order to line one’s own pockets, or, as Pierre Bec thought in his Anthologie des Troubadours, a simply literary game with no other goal but to entertain? [...]

Playing the dozens, as we might say today.

Dussol’s second category of medieval invective will probably resonate even more with my academic readers:

Another domain of invective: university invective. This is more common and more violent than one would think. Medieval academics obviously didn’t hold back on each other.

Here are some examples that I’m borrowing from the already venerable work by Jacques le Goff on the intellectuals of the Middle Ages.

The Sorbonne professors, as seen by D. de Morley of the 12th century:

My passion for knowledge chased me from England. I stayed for a while in Paris. There I saw only savages settled with grave authority on their scholarly seats, with two or three work stands in front of them loaded with enormous tomes (…) Their ignorance forced them to remain as still as statues, but they pretended to show their wisdom with such silence. As soon as they opened their mouths I heard only the babbling of babes. [tr. Teresa Lavender Fagan, 1993]

Anselme de Cantorbery seen by Abelard:

In verbiage he was gifted; in intelligence, contemptible; in reason, bereft. His flame filled the house with smoke instead of illuminating it. From afar his full-leafed tree attracted the eyes, but as one approached, one noticed that it had not a single fruit. (…) Wised up, I wasted no time in his school.

[...]

How to explain such verbal violence? No doubt we mustn’t forget [...] that in the 12th century, the medieval university is rather ‘competitive.’ A master’s reputation, and thus much of his salary, depends on the number of students who take his courses. [...]

Unlike literary invective, university invective seems to have also played an important role:

Alongside these motives, which we can legitimately deem not very honorable, we see also that, in certain cases, attacking a colleague is one of the only, if not the only, available means of trying to bring change to a university, which, like many medieval institutions, abhorred novelty and change [...]

Thus for example Pierre de Blois celebrates the benefits of continually rereading the ancient authors which were being rediscovered at the time thanks to the Arabs:

Let the dogs bark, let the pigs grunt. I won’t be any the less a partisan of the ancients. All my efforts are for them, and dawn each day will find me studying them.

As for Adelard of Bath, he wrote this:

I learned from my Arab masters to take reason as my guide. You’re content to chain yourself like a slave to a moralizing authority. What other name to give to authority than that of the chain? Just as dumb animals are led by a chain and don’t know where or why we’re leading them, and content themselves to follow the cord that holds them, so the majority of men among you are the prisoners of an animal credulity and let themselves be led in chains into dangerous ideas, by the authority of what is written.

[See also M.-M. Dufeil, Guillaume de Saint-Amour et la polemique universitaire parisienne, 1250-1259 (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1972)]

Now we arrive at the more impassioned medieval invective:

“Third domain of invective: politico-religious invective.

The texts here are rather numerous: in particular we find them in epic literature, troubadour songs, crusade songs, and goliardic literature, but also in Rutebeuf and Saint Bernard.

They are very numerous and also very diverse, in content and in form, all of which isn’t very surprising, considering the centrality of politico-religious issues in medieval literature and thought generally.

A first group of texts concerns the defense of Christianity. The foreign enemy, the Muslim, is their primary target, damned in advance (recall Roland’s line: ‘Pagans are wrong and Christians are right’). Invective appears primarily before combat, explicitly when the adversary is showered with insults before being confronted, more covertly when, before the same combat, a caricature [portrait-charge] is sketched of him

[...]

Extracted from the Coronation of Louis, the translation of two portraits of the Muslim King Corsolt:

He is louche and ugly, hideous like a demon

his eyes are red like embers,

his head big, his hair prickly,

His two eyes are half a foot apart,

an entire fathom separates his shoulder from his waist,

no bread-eating man could be more hideous.

Or again:

The Turk headed out the distance of crossbow shot.

Spurring all the way, he brandished his army

and headed for Guillaume, his mouth open;

he frothed like an overheated animal

being chased by dogs through forest brush.

(One will remark that the semi-dehumanization of the figure in the first portrait gives way to the explicit bestialization of the second.)

Such invective was surely intended to help forge unity among western forces, unity that needed shoring up in part because internal invective threatened to tear it apart, however good-intentioned it may have been:

After the foreign enemy, the internal enemy: incarnated in the decadent knight and especially in the corrupted cleric.

[...]

If the clergy is corrupt, as we saw in the texts just cited, the Church as an institution isn’t far from being it either. This is an extremely common theme among a wide variety of authors.

[...]

After having read these very violent texts, whether the attacks they contain are direct or deliver, like the last one, very bitter irony, it seems to me important to note that even if this violence was, and one can understand it this way, felt to be very destructive by the people it targeted (hence the efforts of the authorities in place to silence, with prison or death, the authors of these texts), it was, in reality, fundamentally constructive, not destructive. The intended goal was in no case to destroy the Church, but rather to reform it by reminding it of its responsibilities and the core message of the Gospel: the primacy of service to the poor and the condemnation of the cult of money.

Jan Huss, at the end of the Middle Ages, won’t say anything else … and will pay with his life … Whence, beginning with the Renaissance, the verbal and physical violence tied to the confrontation of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, violence that thus appears to be a tragic prologation of that of the Middle Ages, and a prologue to that of the 20th and 21st centuries…

The most virulent invective Dussol finds can be classifed as

Last register: politico-social invective

which was directed at internal groups (such as women or the poor), but is in many ways more reminiscent of xenophobic invective than it is of attacks on internal religious factions, even though religion is always in the mix:

Let’s note first that this is not always easy to distinguish from politico-religious invective. When, in the Middle Ages, one seeks with invective to give the darkest possible image of an individual or social group, it’s rare for religion not to be present [...]

This kind of invective, like those above that attacked the corrupt clergy, thus appear as a kind of ‘Janus Bifrons’ with one very destructive face, the attack properly speaking, and one very conservative face, the declaration or restatement of the moral-religious principles that justify it.

In the politico-social domain we find also texts that violently attack groups [that were] often in difficult situations in the Middle Ages, in particular women, peasants, and the poor generally.

[...]

[T]he central reproach addressed to that daughter of Eve that is woman, is that of a devouring lasciviousness, a total submission to all the appetites of the flesh [...] Thus in this text taken from the chanson de geste Alyscans, where the marquis Guillaume, is ready to kill [...] Blanchefleur, we find invective of the most extreme violence:

Shut up, damned dirty bitch,

Thibaut d’Arabie took you as his mistress,

and worked you countless times like a whore:

There’s certainly no reason to listen to you!

When you eat your meat and your poivrade,

and when you drink your wine in your gold cup,

clear drink or filtered spice-wine

when you eat your bread of well-sifted flour,

when you hold in your hands your covered cup,

near the fire, before the chimney,

until you’re well roasted and warmed,

and all aglow with luxury,

gluttony quickly set you aflame.

And when thus your face is on fire,

and when Louis has turned and turned you,

and worked you three or four times beneath his body,

when you are well and drunk on luxury,

and sated with food and drink,

you don’t worry a bit about war or winter,

about the great battles and privations

that overpower us in foreign lands.(…)

Dirty whore, miserable bitch without shame! (…)

Truly these are devils who crowned you!

Unacceptable in themselves, to the degree that they seek only to push down targeted social groups in their own eyes, to prevent any revolt on their part, and thus legitimate in advance the repression of any such revolt, these texts are that much more [unacceptable] to our eyes, when we consider that this already extreme verbal violence was often accompanied by entirely real physical violence.

Just as in ancient times, invective could be a deeply conservative force just as easily as a progressive one, and with bloody consequences:

It suffices to think for example of the repression of the poor at the end of the Middle-Ages [...] or of the savage repression, starting in the 12th century, of the rare peasant revolts [...] or finally, even if its exact magnitude remains difficult to measure, of the fight against essentially feminine sorcery, beginning at the end of the Middle Ages and continuing into the 18th century at least… A fight said to be justified, in this last case, not only by texts, confessions obtained by torture, but also by the well-known iconography of the sabbath theme and the copulation with the devil [...]

In his conclusion, Dussol writes that invective

closely affects the functioning of medieval society, which clerics dreamed of making as orderly and perfect as possibly, whence the violence of the attacks against all whose [...] comportment put in danger or appeared to put in danger this dream of order and perfection, attacks that weren’t restricted to mere words, but often ended in serious physical violence that they prepared and legitimated in advance.

—————

[Notes: in this post, only the ellipses in square brackets are mine. Also I have changed bold text in Dussol to italics, so that bold can reflect my own emphases.
The (rough) translation from Dussol is mostly mine. The 1993 Teresa Lavender Fagan translation of Le Goff was helpful in parts, and with the Morley quote I simply employ her translation wholesale.

Other important sources for the study of medieval invective include: L'invective au Moyen Age: France, Espagne, Italie, conference papers published in Atalaya n.5 (Automne-Hiver 1994); Kenneth R. Scholberg's 1971 book Satira e Invectiva en la Espana Medieval; Lynn Forest Hill's 2000 book Transgressive Language in Medieval English Drama; and Marina Marietti's book Dante. La cité infernale (Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2003)]

30 May 2007 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment

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