The Lives and Afterlives of Blessed Baptist Spagnoli of Mantua, known as Mantuan (2) : a Renaissance Entertainment

 Part Two: The Afterlives of Mantuan

A Carmelite Conversation conducted by Philip Harvey on Zoom on Wednesday the 1^st of March 2023

Mantuan dies in Mantua on the 22^nd of March, 1516, the year before the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. He himself represents the reforming spirit within the church itself. His life is an example of reform coming from within the institution, both the church and the Carmelite Order. He was not, however, a quiet administrator, as is evidenced by the social criticism evident in Eclogue IX: 

Hoc est Roma viris avibus quod noctua…

Rome is among men what the owl is among birds. She sits on a tree trunk and, as if she were the queen of birds, summons the multitude from afar with her haughty commands. Ignorant of her deception, the crowd assembles. They wonder at her large eyes and ears, foul head, and the hooked point of her menacing beak. And while their nimble lightness bears them here and there on the trees’ twig growth, a string ensnares the feet of some, twigs smeared with birdlime hold fast others, and all become spoils to be roasted on willow spits.(Piepho1 85)

 This poem could easily have been penned by a radical Protestant and in fact Eclogue IX was quoted by them in argument, Mantuan being adopted posthumously as one of theirs, as a critic of church corruption. A picture is created in pastoral manner of Rome being the cause of famine and drought, a desperate situation both political and spiritual brought about by Rome’s insatiable centralisation of power. The dialogue is contrived by a poet who knows well from experience the state divisions of Italy and their continual conflicted relationship with the Papacy. Magnify these perceptions to a European scale and we can see how the same arguments applied for reformers of whatever stripe outside of Italy, as well. Mantuan, meanwhile, appeals to the local for spiritual meaning and belonging. 

Heu pecus infelix, o laevo sidere pastor huc avecte…

Alas, unfortunate flock! Oh, shepherd borne hither by an unlucky star! More excellent far were it not to have known of this land, better to have passed my days securely in my father’s house. Better to have grown old within the cool caves; and on the banks of the Po or in Adige’s fields or where the Adda floats along in its glassy course, better far to have settled down and pastured my flocks on wholesome grass.(Piepho1 87)

 Mantuan seems to be speaking from experience. He, and some of his friends, have been burnt by their encounters with Rome; he finds his meaning at home in the north of Italy, an experience recorded all too frequently by Italians through time. Faustulus responds to Candidus thus: 

Te tua credulitas, et me mea fallit in horae…

Your credulity deceives you and mine deceives me from hour to hour. I myself have seen men who used to dwell on fortune’s peak fall when they sought things of praise and never rise from their troubles. Experience makes these men cautious. They explore matters beforehand and follow everything that men don’t extol: for those things that are better are wanting in praise.(Piepho1 87)

 Another reason to understand why Eclogue IX became a centrepiece of Protestant polemic is found in its conclusion. After criticising various bad shepherds on grounds of neglect, poisoning, and corruption, the poet presents the reader with “a shepherd to help us” (“pastor adest quadam ducens”), a man who “exceeds other Latians in every virtue as much as the Po exceeds the Tiber.” Very clearly drawing on his predecessor and inspiration Virgil, Mantuan champions a figure called Falco.

 Hic ovium custos ipse vigilantior …

This guardian of the flock is more vigilant than Argus himself, more skilled not only than Daphnis but him who is said once to have pastured Admetus’ flock in the fields of Thessaly; worthy to watch over the whole flock of that master from Jerusalem and to succeed that father of old who, forsaking his nets, was shepherd of the Assyrian flock. This man has the power to protect the flock, dispel sickness, moisten the ground, bestow pasturelands, release springs, appease Jupiter, and keep away thieves and wolves. If he smiles with favour, stay. But if he denies his favour, drive forth your flock, Candidus, and seek greener pastures.(Piepho1 89)

 Mantuan draws strongly on the tone of Virgil, appealing to both Classical authority, Argus, Daphnis and Apollo, and biblical authority, “the master of Jerusalem” (Solymi magistri) being Christ and “the shepherd of the Assyrian flock”, the apostle Peter, over the ways of the Curia at Rome.  

We cannot know which way Mantuan may have gone when the Reformation hit Europe, but we can be sure he would have been deeply antipathetic to attacks on religious life within the Orders. The Dissolution of the English monasteries in 1536, 20 years after his death, would have been for Mantuan an incomprehensible travesty. Yet in 1541 we find the first evidence of the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer’s introduction of Mantuan’s Eclogues into the curriculum of the newly reinstituted cathedral schools of England, after the Dissolution. In other words, Mantuan’s Latin poems came to be read for their excellence, example, and clarity by everyone in schools across England right through the 16^th century, just as they were read in Europe across the Protestant/Roman divide. This was the logical outcome of the classical Humanist project that had made possible something like Mantuan’s Eclogues in the first place. It’s why subsequent generations of English poets imitated him both in English and Latin, his influence borne of instant familiarity.

 Not that everyone was thrilled with the fashion for just anyone copying Virgil. The Venetian wit Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), in a celebrated letter to Lodovico Dolce written in June 1537 describes the literary revolution that Mantuan helped start, but then couldn’t stop:

“I tell you plainly that Petrarch and Boccaccio are properly imitated by the writer who expresses his ideas with the beauty and skill which they used to employ when they so beautifully and skilfully expressed their own ideas, and not by someone who plunders them not only for ‘hence’s’ and ‘thence’s’ and ‘ofttime’s’ and ’graciles’ but for whole verses.

“And if it should happen that the devil tricks us into filching from someone else, let’s make sure we behave like Virgil who looted Homer, and Sannazaro who purloined from Virgil, who both paid their debt with interest; and then we’ll be forgiven.

“But our pedantic poetasters turn imitation into bombast, and when they screech about what they’ve written in their notebooks, they change it into gobbledegook, as they tart it up with their sickly platitudes. O you blind fools, I tell you again and again that poetry is one of Nature’s joyful flights of fancy, and if the vital poetic fury is lacking the poet’s song becomes a broken tambourine, or a tower that’s lost its bell.

“It’s for that reason that anyone not gifted with poetic talent when still in his swaddling-clothes who yet wants to write verse is a complete numbskull. If you won’t accept that, let the following convince you. The alchemists, using all possible skill and effort to gratify their patient avarice, never made gold but only what looked like gold. But Nature, without the least effort, brings forth pure and beautiful gold.”(Aretino 102)

 Pietro Aretino is not attacking Mantuan, quite the opposite. The implications here are that a poet like Mantuan often comes close to the Virgilian ideal, free of any bombast, overblown language, or clichés. Mantuan spins something golden from his materials But neither is Aretino as adulatory (we imagine) as the great Erasmus of Rotterdam, who went so far as to dub Mantuan “Christianus Maro”, i.e. “the Christian Virgil”. This is a title almost impossible to claim for anyone, and some scholars conclude Erasmus is thinking of Mantuan’s that would be impossible for almost anyone to claim. 

 Despite criticisms of his poetry, notably Scaliger’s attack of 1561, Mantuan’s star continued to rise through the 16^th century. In 1567 the Eclogues were translated in full into English by George Turberville and in 1579 ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’ was published by Edmund Spenser, a series of pastorals in some ways a tribute to Mantuan and strongly inspired by him. 

Here is Edmund Spenser writing, not of Roman clergy like Mantuan, but English Protestant clergy in Elizabeth’s time. Spenser did not invent this kind of invective; it is in fact taken directly from Mantuan’s example:

I thought the soyle would have made me rich;
But nowe I wote it is nothing sich.
For eyther the shepeheards bene ydle and still,
And ledde of theyr sheepe what way they wyll,
Or they bene false, and full of covetise,
And casten to compasse many wrong Emprise.
But the more bene fraight with fraud and spight,
Ne in good nor goodnes taken delight,
But kindle coales of conteck and yre,
Wherewith they set all the world on fire:
Which when they thinken agayne to quench,
With holy water they doen hem all drench.
They saye they con to heaven the high-way,
But, by my soule, I dare undersaye
They never sette foote in that same troade,
But balk the right way and strayen abroad. (Spenser 282)

 Sometime in 1594-95 William Shakespeare composes ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’. It is certain that Shakespeare read Mantuan from an early age in the original at King Edward VI School in Stratford, as part of the standard humanist coursework of his time. It is this complete familiarity with the Italian poet that explains the cosy reference to him in the play by Holofernes, a schoolteacher. 

HOLOFERNES (to himself) ‘Facile precor gelida quando pecas omnia sub umbra ruminat’, and so forth. Ah, good old Mantuan! I may speak of thee as the traveller doth of Venice:

  Venezia, Venezia,

  Chi non ti vede, chi non ti prezia.

Old Mantuan, old Mantuan – who understandeth thee not, loves thee not. (He sings) Ut, re, sol, la, mi, fa. (To Nathaniel) Under pardon, sir, what are the contents? Or rather, as Horace says in his – what, my soul – verses. 

Holofernes is daydreaming while Nathaniel prepares to read a love poem in a letter that has fallen accidentally into the wrong hands. Of which more anon, but first let’s look at this daydream. He quotes Latin, or rather misquotes the Latin, which happens to be the very opening line of Mantuan’s Eclogues. All of the educated members of the audience would have laughed at this misquote, because they all knew the line, a line that took them back to their schooldays, a time of first love, mad love, and conflicting feelings of the kind they first experienced at school while reading about them in Mantuan’s poetry. That Holofernes misquotes the line only shows up his pedantry and loose memory, a further cause for hilarity. 

Speaking with fondness, he then paraphrases an Italian saying about Venice which in effect means you cannot value Venice if you have not seen Venice, which he turns into seeming praise of Mantuan, you cannot love him if you cannot understand him, a feeling common to secondary school students of any time period or year level trying to translate a difficult poem. It is not too far-fetched to imagine Shakespeare himself recalling this humorous view of Latin class from his own schooldays. That he puts the saying into the mouth of a Latin teacher this further compounds the absurdity. Holofernes then sings the Solfège scale, a reminder of elementary music training in such a school. All of Holofernes’ conversation is an over-the-top satire of grammar school teaching in Elizabethan England, played to an audience whose memories of those days are being prompted by the playwright. Holofernes is, indeed, an archetype of the pedantic, otherworldly academic or schoolmaster, lost in a maze of declensions and conjugations, mansplaining things in elevated language that could be said much more simply, an accepted eccentric on the landscape rather than in the Italian mode, a pitiable dottore or mere figure of fun. This is because he represents the big world outside school for his students. 

Language and how we use words is, in fact, a central preoccupation of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’. Honorificabilitudinitatibus, the longest word in Shakespeare, appears in this play, the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious of the Elizabethan stage. The play also has the longest speech and the longest scene (915 lines in the Clarendon edition of 1986) in Shakespeare. 

The earliest known performance of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ is at Christmas in 1597, at the Court before Queen Elizabeth. It was very much an entertainment to the London elite, most all of whom would have recognised lines of Mantuan, direct and indirect, so Shakespeare is also flattering their sense of being well-educated.

 At that time (circa 1600) more than 600 editions of Mantuan’s works had been published. He was a bestseller, and yet it is in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ that we also identify the beginnings of his changes of fortune. First and foremost is the gradually diminishing use of Latin in everyday life. Unlike in parts of continental Catholic Europe, the liturgy of the church had changed from Latin to the vernacular, with Thomas Cranmer instrumental in making English the language of the church. Although Latin held sway as a language of the royal courts, it was increasingly the language of gentlemen and diplomats. Writing poetry in Latin continued for centuries as a feather in the cap of a practising poet, but it was not going to be his or her first language. The poems written by the young lovers in the play are in an elevated English. The way they speak the rest of the time, no such matter. 

Then there is the gradual transformation of pastoral poetry, right up into the 20^th century, that made redundant the mode of rustic shepherds discussing philosophical truths in an orderly fashion. But that Shakespeare knew a little Latin is seen and heard in the closing Winter song of the play, regarded as a take from the opening of Mantuan’s Eclogue VI: 

Ninget hiems, mugit Boreas …

Winter’s snows have come, the north wind is bellowing, and icicles hang from the roof. Having bedded his oxen the plowman is resting, and the ground lies asleep. His sheepfold shut up, the shepherd, snug in his cloak, idly beguiles the time, and seated before the hearth, sooty Neaera is cooking polenta. Now we commend the summer season, intolerable to us before; and wintertime, commended once in summertime’s irksome heat, we now find displeasing.(Piepho1 49)

 Which Shakespeare, following Mantuan’s lead that “every season has its own delights and joys” transforms into something new and very English, at the close of Love’s Labour’s Lost: 

When icicles hang by the wall

  And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,

And Tom bears logs into the hall,

  And milk comes frozen home in pail;

When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,

Then nightly sings the staring owl:

Tu-whit, tu-whoo! – a merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

 

When all aloud the wind doth blow,

  And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,

And birds sit brooding in the snow,

  And Marian’s nose looks red and raw;

When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

Then nightly sings the staring owl:

Tu-whit, tu-whoo! – a merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

(Shakespeare 346)

 Shakespeare dies exactly a century after Mantuan, in 1616, but it is John Milton, a Puritan polemicist who wanted to latinize English, who is the last major influence we hear today. Mantuan’s Latin verse and ideas are identifiably present throughout Milton’s poetry, including ‘Paradise Lost’. The most overt example was written in 1637, an eclogue soliloquy called ‘Lycidas’. The poem employs the requisite Virgilian practice of shepherds sharing thoughts. Sometimes the levels of reference become so elevated we need a handbook to decode them all and it must be admitted that ‘Lycidas’ is a mysterious hybrid. A large part of the poem describes a shipwreck in the Irish Sea, making it an English precedent for ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. However Milton is not lamenting the loss of a group of nuns, but his close friend the Reverend Edward King, an evangelical pastor. While grief is a prevailing emotion of the poem, it turns at certain moments into a polemical attack on church corruption. The irony of this attack is not lost on historians, because while Mantuan’s Eclogue IX is written by a Carmelite criticising Roman clergy, and Spenser’s ‘September’ is written by an Anglican criticising other Anglicans, Milton’s eclogue ‘Lycidas’ is written by a Puritan criticising Anglican clergy.

 With indignant fervour, Milton heightens his sense of personal loss by casting stones at what he sees as the general corruption of the English clergy. Even St Peter himself is enlisted to damn the Anglicans for some time to come. He is described here not as the “shepherd of the Assyrian flock” but as the mitred “pilot of the Galilean lake”. The poem recalls the Cambridge of his youth, that hotbed of English religious difference before the Civil War:

 Next Camus, reverend sire, went footling slow.

His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge,

Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge

Like to that sanguine flower, inscribed with woe.

Ah! who hath reft, quoth he, my dearest pledge?

Last came, and last did go,

The pilot of the Galilean lake;

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain;

The golden opes, the iron shuts amain:

He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake:-

How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,

Enow of such, as for their bellies’ sake

Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold!

Of other care they little reckoning make,

Than how to scramble at the shearers’ feast,

And shove away the worthy bidden guest!

Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold

A sheephook, or have learn’d aught else the least

That to the faithful herdman’s art belongs!

What reeks it then? What need they? They are sped;

And, when they list, their lean and flashy songs

Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw:

The hungry sheep look up and are not fed;

But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,

Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:

Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw

Daily devours apace and nothing sed:

But that two-handed engine at the door

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

(Milton 612-614)

 In 1656, Mantuan’s Eclogues were translated into English by Thomas Harvey. Although this major pastoral form continues to be imitated, revived and revised, and tested right up to this day in styles that include the anti-pastoral, Harvey’s translation is the last flourish of the strict Mantuan method. Pastoral is famously a form in 18^th century Augustan verse, however the devoted copying of the shepherd idyll as popularised by Virgil and then at the Renaissance by Mantuan, goes out of fashion. The changes are rung by no less a figure than Samuel Johnson, who is openly hostile to this outmoded manner of speech. He complains that rustics do not discuss higher church politics and that this kind of verse is unreal, a case of shepherds talking like priests. Johnson’s opinions reveal how distant the Catholic Church had become from English life, but that he says this at all indicates  that Mantuan was still being read in Latin classes well into the 18^th century.

 I wish to conclude by identifying at least two other afterlives of the Carmelite poet. The first is the actual legacy of spiritual writing, as distinct from eclogues, that Mantuan left to the Order. Scholars are in agreement that it is his religious verse, sermons, and discourses that prompted Erasmus to call him the ‘Christian Virgil’, not simply the achievement of his Virgil-like poetry. It is a corrective to everything said up to this point, for example, to listen to Mantuan himself in De patientia speak of the Bible: 

“You will find that the reading of sacred scripture is a great and powerful remedy against bodily suffering and depression of mind. In my opinion, thee is no other writing, no matter how eloquent and stylish it may be, that can bring such peace to our minds and so thoroughly dissolve our cares as sacred scripture can.

 “I speak from personal experience: for there have been times when I was beset with anxieties, the worst of which came from the experience of my own weakness, and if on such occasions I sought relief in the scriptures, the hopes and desires that led me there were never disappointed. The word scripture proved to be a solid bulwark against my anxieties and a relief to my troubled spirit.”(Carmelite quotes website)

 Mantuan’s Latin prose writings would have remained a regular source of inspirational reading within the Order itself, whatever the fortunes of his poetry. We can conclude that his writing continued to be read by Carmelites and non-Carmelites even into the 20^th century, anyone that is who had a good grasp of Latin.

 The second afterlife is the enduring legend of Mantuan, especially in Italy and within the Order, leading in 1890 to his beatification by the Church. There is not opportunity to look at this in detail here, one reason being the great store of information about his legend written in languages other than English. Mantuan’s feast day was declared the 23^rd of March. His remains are held at St Peter’s Cathedral in Mantua, the town of his birth, life, and death.