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Why Not Read Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina clericalis in the British Literature Survey?

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Jews in Medieval England

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

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Abstract

As part of the burgeoning recognition of the deficiencies of a monolingual British literature survey, Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina clericalis deserves a place in our syllabi, alongside more commonly taught Anglo–Latin works like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain and Anglo–French works like Marie de France’s Lais. Several strands of evidence connect Petrus’s genre-bending Latin collection of Arabic moral tales and proverbs to medieval England. Although a native of Sepharad/al-Andalus, Petrus seems to have written Disciplina clericalis in the orbit of Henry I’s Norman court, and the work was well received in medieval England. Restoring Disciplina clericalis to its former place of prominence gives survey students a richer and more cosmopolitan perspective on early British literature.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The most comprehensive account of the medieval reception of Disciplina clericalis appears in John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), esp. 132–58.

  2. 2.

    Notable exceptions to this negligence appear among scholars of Spanish literature. For a recent example, see David A. Wacks, Framing Iberia: Maqāmāt and Frametale Narratives in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 17–40.

  3. 3.

    See Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “Between Diaspora and Conquest: Norman Assimilation in Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina clericalis and Marie de France’s Fables,” Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008), 17–37.

  4. 4.

    Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M.H. Abrams et al., 1st ed., vol. 1 (New York: Norton, 1962).

  5. 5.

    On the significance of this anthology and for an explanation for the linguistic expansion, see David Damrosch, “The Mirror and the Window: Reflections on Anthology Construction,” Pedagogy 1 (2001): 207–14. See also the reflections on the term British in “Preface,” The Longman Anthology of British Literature, ed. David Damrosch, et al., 1st ed., vol. 1 (New York: Longman, 1999), xxix–xxx.

  6. 6.

    Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M.H. Abrams, et al., 7th ed., vol. 1 (New York: Norton, 2000), xxxiv.

  7. 7.

    Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al., 9th ed. (New York: Norton, 2012).

  8. 8.

    For the convenience of the prospective teacher, the translations of Disciplina clericalis (as well as the titles of the tales) are taken from the only Modern English translation currently in print: The Scholar’s Guide: A Translation of the Twelfth-Century Disciplina clericalis of Pedro Alfonso, trans. Joseph Ramon Jones and John Esten Keller (Toronto: PIMS, 1969); cited parenthetically by page number. The corresponding Latin passages are taken from Petri Alfonsi, Disciplina clericalis: Lateinischer Text, ed. Alfons Hilka and Werner Söderhjelm (Helsinki: Druckerei der Finnischen Litteraturgesellschaft, 1911) and are recorded in the footnotes: “libellum compegi, partim ex proverbiis philosophorum et suis castigationibus, partim ex proverbiis et castigationibus Arabicis et fabulis et versibus, partim ex animalium et volucrum similitudinibus” (2).

  9. 9.

    On Petrus’s other writings, see John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi.

  10. 10.

    The text reads “henrici primi regis anglorum medicus” in Cambridge, University Library, Ii. 6. 11, fol. 99r.

  11. 11.

    On Petrus and Walcher, see John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi, 61–66.

  12. 12.

    On the extant witnesses, see Klaus Reinhardt and Horacio Santiago-Otero, “Pedro Alfonso. Obras y Bibliografía,” Estudios sobre Pedro Alfonso de Huesca, ed. María Jesús Lacarra (Huesca: Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses, 1996), 24–26. At least 19 of the 85 manuscripts in this most recent survey of witnesses—all of the witnesses currently housed in English libraries—are of English provenance and origin. Hilka and Söderhjelm use the fourteenth-century Corp (Oxford, Corpus Christi College 86) as their base text (xix). The D manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 3) from the mid twelfth century is likely the oldest witness.

  13. 13.

    R.F. Yeager, in his “Spanish Literary Influence in England: John Gower and Pedro Alfonso” (John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception, ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R.F. Yeager [Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014], 119–29), suggests that the English response to Disciplina clericalis lags behind that of the rest of Europe (120–21). However, the Insular response to Disciplina clericalis looks more prompt and thorough when non-Anglophone literature is considered. Furthermore, Disciplina clericalis seems in general to have caught the attention of most European Christian readers rather later than Petrus’s other major work, Dialogus contra Iudaeos ; see John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi, 139.

  14. 14.

    The Anglo-Norman Alexander (Le Roman de Toute Chevalerie) by Thomas of Kent, ed. Brian Foster and Ian Short, 2 vols. (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1976–1977). The adaptation of Petrus’s Disciplina clericalis appears at 1.255–56 and derives from “The Parable of Alexander’s Golden Tomb” (112). David R. Howlett, The English Origins of Old French Literature (Dublin: Four Courts, 1996), points out the dependence of Le Roman de Toute Chevalerie on the Petrus tale (142).

  15. 15.

    Berechiah ha-Nakdan, Fables of a Jewish Aesop, trans. Moses Hadas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 117–18 and 220–21. Most of Berechiah's Hebrew fables almost certainly derive from another Insular story collection, such as Marie de France’s Anglo-French Fables (Hadas, “Introduction,” viii).

  16. 16.

    Though Mishle Shu’alim is quite a bit longer than Disciplina clericalis and its translation is no longer in print, the collection is quite excerptable and pairs interestingly with Petrus’s tales, Marie’s Fables, and even Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.

  17. 17.

    John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi, 73.

  18. 18.

    David A. Wacks, Framing Iberia, 33.

  19. 19.

    Barry Taylor, “Wisdom Forms in the Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi,” La Corónica 22 (1993): 24–40. See also my “Framing, Parataxis, and the Poetics of Exemplarity in Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis,” Medieval Encounters 21 (2015): 26–49.

  20. 20.

    For a catalogue of homiletic uses of Disciplina clericalis tales, see Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, “La capture du récit. La Disciplina clericalis de Pierre Alphonse dans les recueils d’exempla (XIIIe–XIVe s.),” Typologie des formes narratives brèves au Moyen Âge (domaine roman) II: Colloque international, Madrid, Casa de Velázquez, 20–21 mars 2000 (Nanterre: Centre de recherches ibériques et ibéro-américaines, Université Paris X Nanterre, 2001), 48–58, and John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi, 139–54.

  21. 21.

    “Hic est vere amicus qui te adiuvat, cum saeculum tibi deficit” (Disciplina clericalis, ed. Hilka and Söderhjelm, 4).

  22. 22.

    Lydgate’s adaptation is known as Fabula duorum mercatorum and can be found in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. H.N. MacCracken, vol. 2 (1934; London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 486–516.

  23. 23.

    “Communi itaque consilio rex eis omne crimen quod sibi imposuerant condonavit, eo tamen pacto ut criminis sibi impositi causas patefacerent” (Disciplina clericalis, ed. Hilka and Söderhjelm, 6).

  24. 24.

    On the medieval reception of these tales, see Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, “La capture du récit,” 49–50. Three of the five Disciplina clericalis tales in the Norton Anthology of World Literature, ed. Martin Puchner, et al., 3rd ed., volume B (New York: Norton, 2012) come from the “wiles of women” sequence. The other two tales are the “Parable of the Half Friend” and the “Parable of the Whole Friend.”

  25. 25.

    “[I]ngenio feminae perversae” (Disciplina clericalis, ed. Hilka and Söderhjelm, 14).

  26. 26.

    Disciplina clericalis, ed. Hilka and Söderhjelm, 25.

  27. 27.

    I make a more extended case for this interpretation of the passage and for its significance in “Framing, Parataxis, and the Poetics of Exemplarity,” 32–47.

  28. 28.

    “Spero quod si quis homo tam sapiens erit ut semper timeat se posse decipi arte mulieris, forsitan se ab illius ingenio custodire valebit” (Disciplina clericalis, ed. Hilka and Söderhjelm, 18).

  29. 29.

    “Nunc visum erat mihi quod duo angeli unum ex vobis accipiebant et aperiebant portas caeli ducebantque ante Deum; deinde alium accipiebant duo alii angeli et aperta terra ducebant in infernum. Et his visis putavi neminem vestrum iam amplius rediturum et surrexi et panem comedi” (Disciplina clericalis, ed. Hilka and Söderhjelm, 27–28).

  30. 30.

    “[T]ranseuntia mundi gaudia sectantes et diversis ut retineant inhiantes de improviso veniens dies, id est finis vitae, intercipit et quaeque cupita velint nolint adimit” (Disciplina clericalis, ed. Hilka and Söderhjelm, 43).

  31. 31.

    Eberhard Hermes, “Introduction,” The Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi, ed. Eberhard Hermes, trans. P.R. Quarrie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 28–35. Moreover‚ “The Parable of the Shepherd and the Sly Merchant” echoes the embedded shepherd tale in “The Parable of the King and His Storyteller” at least as strangely and provocatively as it echoes “The Parable of the Two City Dwellers and the Country Man.”

  32. 32.

    John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi, 89–91. The other two major themes that Tolan observes involve “the perils of credulity” and the “philosopher and the king” (Petrus Alfonsi, 86–91).

  33. 33.

    On the sources and analogues of Disciplina clericalis, see Haim Schwarzbaum’s comprehensive four-part article, “International Folklore Motifs in Petrus Alphonsi’s Disciplina clericalis,” Sefarad 21 (1961): 267–99; 22 (1962): 17–59 and 321–44; and 23 (1963): 54–73.

  34. 34.

    For a modern English translation of Petrus’s polemic against Judaism, see Petrus Alfonsi, Dialogue against the Jews, trans. Irven M. Resnick (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2006).

  35. 35.

    On Petrus’s “spectral” conjuring of his former Jewish self and his ambivalent converso identity formation in the Dialogus, see Steven Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), esp. 110–32. On the broader cultural ambivalence of the more fully assimilated but unconverted medieval Sephardic poets of al-Andalus, see Ross Brann, The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

  36. 36.

    For a brief and lively biography of Petrus, see María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 147–57. Menocal is particularly attentive to the Norman context of Petrus’s post-conversion life, as the title of that chapter—“An Andalusian in London: Huesca 1106”—suggests.

  37. 37.

    Berechiah ha-Nakdan, The Fables of a Jewish Aesop, 118.

  38. 38.

    “Rex est similis igni: cui si nimis admotus fueris, cremaberis; si ex toto remotus, frigebis” (Disciplina clericalis, ed. Hilka and Söderhjelm, 36).

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  1. Department of English, Converse College, Spartanburg, SC, USA

    Gabriel Ford

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  1. University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio, USA

    Miriamne Ara Krummel

  2. University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA

    Tison Pugh

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Ford, G. (2017). Why Not Read Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina clericalis in the British Literature Survey?. In: Krummel, M., Pugh, T. (eds) Jews in Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63748-8_16

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