Ernst Robert Curtius European Literature And The Latin Middle Ages

 European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages still often figures on reading lists for students of medieval literature. It’s more often mined as a reference work than read through. This is a shame, since it aspires to be a totality. Professional medievalists tend to give rather guarded replies when asked what they think of it. The chief objections to it are that its focus on topoi diminishes the role of individuality in medieval Latin poetry;20 that it concentrates on elite and university culture at the expense of oral and popular culture; that it is insufficiently concerned about the mechanisms by which learning was disseminated and transformed; that its conception of a “topos” lacks theoretical rigor; and that its canon (and its account of the genesis of the literary canon, and of the idea of a literary canon, p. 259) is distorted by its focus on Latin materials. It is sometimes also criticized for being unduly Eurocentric, and for not extending its gaze eastward into the Slavonic world or beyond.

None of these criticisms is entirely fair, although it’s easy to see why most of them have arisen. Curtius’s word “topos” encompasses a much wider array of phenomena than the “common places” of the rhetorical tradition, and the boundaries of the concept are sometimes as a result unclear. Sometimes the topoi are presented as rhetorical building blocks of composition, but from time to time they are presented as atemporal truths, or even connected to Carl Jung’s archetypes. Curtius was interested in comparative history, particularly the work of A. J. Toynbee, whose survey of recurrent patterns of rise and decline in transnational civilizations provides much of the historiographical superstructure of his early chapters. He also read works of anthropology and comparative religion. Eliot indeed offered to send him a copy of Frazer’s Golden Bough in the 1920s (he scrupulously protested that he could only afford to send the abbreviated one-volume edition).21 Curtius’s idea of “European literature” is consequently held together by several conceptually distinct forces. The first is the idea that the mind of Europe through the Middle Ages was united by an educational elite, who preserved and disseminated a rhetorical and classical heritage through a range of different topoi and rhetorical conventions. The second is the very different notion that European literature might be held together by quasi-archetypal concerns, which recur because they are archetypal rather than because they are directly transmitted from one generation to the next. The presence of this second line of argument is partly why critics of European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages have sometimes objected to the narrowness of its geographical scope: if the goddess Natura is, as Curtius suggests (p. 122), a manifestation of the Jungean anima, then what is the justification for not exploring further examples of this apparently transhistorical topos in Polish or Indian or even in Chinese literature? This is, though, not a serious objection. The words “Latin” and “European” in the title of this book should give most reasonable readers grounds to expect that India and China will be marginal to its concerns. The neglect of the eastern perimeter of European Latin culture is a limitation, however. It can only be explained by Curtius’s desire in the aftermath of the war to look principally westward and southward.

European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is energized by several internal contradictions, which are largely the product of the circumstances in which it was written. It is driven by a belief in the unity of European literary traditions, which culminate in and are most fully articulated by Dante, to whom Curtius devotes his final chapter. This unified vision is articulated, however, in an increasingly fragmentary form. As the excursuses on different topoi and particular literary relationships multiply at the end of the volume—and they make up almost a third of its overall length—Curtius seems to fall victim to his own ambition to understand everything. To see Europe as a whole means accumulating large numbers of fragments, and those fragments do not always cohere. This again has parallels with the careers of other modernists born in the 1880s. As Ezra Pound famously declared toward the end of The Cantos, in which he tried to reconfigure the epic tradition, to explore the relationship between East and West in new ways, to account for the rise of usury, and to tie all of this back in to Occitan poetry, “I am not a demi-god / I cannot make it cohere.”22 Curtius’s intellectual trajectory had more in common with Eliot’s than with Pound’s (although by the 1940s there were substantial differences between the two men, particularly in their attitudes to the church).23 Like Eliot, Curtius can substitute an idea of “tradition” for history, and he is also prone to assume that there is an inverse relationship between the value of literary culture and the number of people who possess it. He can even give the impression that culture is a static treasure to be protected and handed down through the generations like an imperial crown: “The bases of Western thought are classical antiquity and Christianity. The function of the Middle Ages was to receive that deposit, to transmit it, and to adapt it” (p. 593). It is not surprising that the preservation of these treasures sometimes seems to matter more to Curtius than their adaptation or their transformation. He had seen Cologne burning on the horizon, and he had lived through the hyperinflation of the Weimar period. This inclined him to see literary culture as a kind of gold standard (“that deposit”), which the Middle Ages preserved and later ages squandered.

This gives rise to the most tantalizing aspect of European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, and to the most significant of the criticisms that can be leveled against it by those who live in more fortunate times. Its surveys of literary topoi do offer enormous riches. Anyone interested in the idea of literary immortality, in the notion of inexpressibility, the invocation of the muses, the rhetorical methods for arousing passion, or in any of a dozen more recurrent literary themes will find the best starting point for further research in these pages. But Curtius shows relatively little interest in the process by which these topoi were disseminated, or how they were absorbed and transformed by later readers. His pan-Europeanism also means that he is reluctant to dwell on the changes that can result from transmitting particular topoi from one environment to another, be that a different nation or a different institution. The content and character of what is known, like the social composition of those who know it, do not seem so far as he is concerned to alter a great deal between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, or from the Tiber to the Rhine. The topoi recur and live on. The “deposit” of learning is preserved rather than diversified.

Curtius had clearly reflected on these questions, but his overall desire to describe and praise acts of cultural preservation finally triumphed over his interest in transmission and transformation. The short excursus on “The Ape as Metaphor” (pp. 538-40) from John of Salisbury to Shakespeare is one of a number of oblique recognitions that cultural transmission without change might become simple repetition or mimicry, since this excursus is about writers who “ape” other writers, and simply reproduce either nature or their reading without transforming it. His concluding discussion of how ideas of literary imitation are transmuted into notions of inspiration in Longinus (pp. 398-401) also acknowledges that the Latin culture of the Middle Ages needed to be actively reinvigorated in order to remain alive, and that simply treasuring it in the bank vault of the mind was not enough. But readers are left without a clear formulation of how one writer changes or transforms what he or she reads. The topoi do sometimes seem to be a super-personal repository of universal wisdom.

So what then can be taken from this book? What makes it more than a historical curiosity? The first answer to these questions is that the historical position of its author actually makes European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages more rather than less interesting. It is not just a great book about the Middle Ages. It is also a book that reveals a huge amount about twentieth-century literature. It shows a former Weimar modernist attempting to construct a vision of European literature after the war. It is emphatically a book about European literature and the Latin Middle Ages, rather than just European literature in the Latin Middle Ages, since it indirectly addresses Curtius’s present as much as the past. As well as providing a mass of leads for thinking about how Dante grew from Virgil, or about the significance of Alan of Lille or Bernardus Silvestris, this book still shows a great critic rethinking literary history in response to a cultural catastrophe. Its emphasis on the continuity of classical and rhetorical learning through the Middle Ages also makes it permanently valuable. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages stands as a monumental refutation of the Renaissance humanists’ mythology that Latin literary culture was heroically recovered in the fifteenth century after centuries of darkness. The Middle Ages described here are not at all dark. They are effectively a long series of renaissances and enlightenments that run on until the eighteenth century, after which the real dark ages begin.

But the main quality that makes European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages a great book is its breadth of vision. Critics are today prone to bury their noses in one corner of time and space. Few readers are willing to take a wide view across centuries or across national and linguistic boundaries. There is for Curtius no excuse for not knowing or not reading any work; there is no excuse for not trying to see how every literary text fits into a larger European picture. Even if finally he found that the larger picture he wanted to create fragmented into a series of brilliantly detailed excurses—something that history may well show to be a recurrent tendency within all aspirations to pan-European unity—he would never have seen many of those details if he had not had the ambition to see European literature as a whole.