. Among all the Latin poets, Virgil (ca. 70–19 B.C.) was the most “classical”—in the literal sense. Students read and relished his writings, copied and interpreted the Latin, and memorized and canonized his ideas from the earliest period. Those who followed the master imitated his style unashamedly: Ovid, Lucan, and Claudian, for example, allude to his works constantly. Medieval authors found in his works inspirational and exemplary inducements to pursue virtue. Both Virgil’s own person and his work became magical touch-stones of prophecy.
Virgil left to the Latin West three influential texts, each providing a unique allegorical matrix and unique perspective on life’s stages: the Eclogues, the Georgics, the Aeneid. The youthful, nostalgic, and pastoral mood of the Eclogues gives way to an adult husbandsman’s deep concern for nature in the Georgics.
In his mature years, Virgil composed a national epic in imitation of Homer, among other sources. The work was in many ways a perfect vehicle to be taken up by the medieval mind. Half allegory, half history and legend, Virgil tells of Aeneas’s flight from the burning citadel of Troy, wanderings in the Mediterranean, and struggles in Italy to found a new home. From the horrendous storm in Book 1 to the plangent melancholy of the Dido episode; from the marvelous underworld visit in Book 6 to the martyrdom of the young prince Pallas in Book 11—the poem became in the hands of interpreters a kind of three-part invention that fused the mythic past and mythic present to an imagined future. Bitter political irony often intrudes as well, because Caesar Augustus’s poet at once ambiguously reifies and decries the unspeakably violent and unscrupulous power games necessary to create and control a world empire.
Once the magic and prestige of this material was absorbed by visionary rulers like Charlemagne or William the Conqueror, there was no end to attempts to link up one’s royal dynasty with the lineage of the Trojans. With Julius Caesar and other grand emperors as your ancestors (and King Priam of the fifty sons behind them), any upstart baron could convince his liege or perhaps even the papacy of his imperial pretensions.
Studying Virgil’s Latin, like reading the Bible and savoring Ovid’s rhetorical trivialities, is what educated people have done for nearly 2,000 years. Throughout the Middle Ages, for church fathers like Jerome and Augustine, or for Christian poets like Prudentius, grammar study meant reading the Aeneid. Geoffrey of Monmouth used Virgil extensively.
Of the 1,500 or so surviving Virgil manuscripts—of which perhaps two-thirds were copied in France—many date from the crucial aetas Virgiliana, the 9th-11th centuries. Of those, some 170 carry ancient commentary from Servius, Fulgentius, and others, which were absorbed en passant by the mid-12th-century anonymous Énéas poet, who freely adapted Virgil’s Aeneid into the vernacular Norman French for a noble audience. This fascinating early romance combines many diverse elements that were used by subsequent French authors, such as Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Machaut, and Jean Froissart. The Énéas features rich descriptions of scientific marvels as well as a strong Ovidian intertextuality. The protracted love story of Lavine and Énéas provides interlaced counterpoint for the violent feudal battles. Little Virgilian texture remains, but much adventure and romance charmed both medieval listeners and future imitators.
Another thinker residing in France at this time, Bernard Silvestris, composed a keen allegorical interpretation of the first six books of the Aeneid. His commentary, a kind of Virgile moralisé replaced the older treatise by Fulgentius and remained a standard reference work throughout the Middle Ages.
Stylistically and axiologically, the works of Virgil exerted a profound influence upon much of the new vernacular literature of medieval France as well as in the intellectual and latinate culture of monastic scriptoria and cathedral schools.
Cardwell, R.A., and J.Hamilton, eds. Virgil in a Cultural Tradition: Essays to Celebrate the Bimillennium. Nottingham: Nottingham University Press, 1986.
Cormier, Raymond J. One Heart One Mind: The Rebirth of Virgil’s Hero in Medieval French Romances. University: Romance Monographs, 1973.
——.“The Present State of Studies on the Roman d’Énéas.” Cultura Neolatina 31(1971):7–39.
Jones, Julian Ward, and Elizabeth Ward Jones, eds. The Commentary on the First Six Books of the “Aeneid” Commonly Attributed to Bernardus Silvestris. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977.
Lectures médiévales de Virgile. In Actes du colloque organisé par l’École Française de Rome, 1982, ed. J.-Y.Tilliette. Rome: École Française, 1985.
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