Abstract
In Virgil’s Aeneid, the famous prophetess known as the Sibyl of Cumae is imagined as coextensive with her cavernous home, a porous volcanic cave that amplifies her voice. However, as the twelfth-century adaptors of the Aeneid reimagined the many-mouthed cavern of prophecy as the murky and blackened ecology at the entrance to the underworld, the Sibyl is similarly transformed into a withered and blackened witch in the Roman d’Eneas. This marginalized and racialized woman is poisoned by her environment, the ‘trans-corporeality’ of flesh and environ a harmful constellation of material and cultural factors. And yet the Sibyl survives, perhaps preserved by the toxic landscape and even granted specialized knowledge. A bit of moss growing from her ear in the German Eneit also suggests that mastery over nature is impossible, entanglement within the environment a kind of feminine resistance to masculine attempts at dominance over nature.
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Notes
The story of the Cumaean Sibyl was so popular that it even compelled a tourist industry of visits to various grottos that were said to have been her home (Monti, 1991, 39–59).
See Bernardus Silvestris (1979).
Translation my own.
For more on the entanglements of race, gender, origins, and literary topoi, see de Weever (1998).
R.J. Cormier describes the poet’s awareness of the emerging interest in natural philosophy in the twelfth century (2015, 87–105).
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Montroso, A.S. ‘Skin black and wrinkled’: The toxic ecology of the Sibyl’s cave. Postmedieval 11, 91–101 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00160-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00160-1