FLORENCE BISTAGNE, CAROLE BOIDIN, AND RAPHAËLE MOUREN
This collection of articles on the ‘Afterlife of Apuleius’ is the result of a two-day international conference held at the Warburg Institute in London on 3 and 4 March 2016. The conference was jointly organized by the Warburg Institute, the Institut Universitaire de France, and the Institute of Classical Studies. It formed part of a series of conferences on the ‘afterlife’ of ancient authors (following a long tradition of Nachleben investigations at the Warburg Institute), the proceedings of which are published as supplements to the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. We wish to thank the editors of the Bulletin for accepting the present volume as part of this series.
The fortunes of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses owe a great deal to the negative judgement of Macrobius and his position in favour of philosophy over recreational literature in late antiquity.1 As a result, Apuleius’ narrative writings suffered the same fate as various other discredited forms of escapist literature; late antiquity and the Middle Ages were only able to save Apuleius the philosopher and the fable of Cupid and Psyche, an isolated episode which allowed for an allegorical interpretation of the sort that was popular at the time. The first manuscript to restore the antique tradition was the Mediceus alter (Laur. 68.2), stamped F, which was to become the source for the whole medieval tradition, and includes the Apologia, the Metamorphoses, and Florida. Thanks to Boccaccio, transmission of Apuleius’ Opera omnia began once again.
An important change can be noticed here: Apuleius was no longer only considered to be some distant and mute philosopher, or a strange magician, but rather a literary and stylistic genius.2 The central role of the literary and rhetorical works in the material history of Apuleian texts has long been studied by philologists, mostly specialized in Renaissance textual traditions.3 However, this volume of the ‘Afterlife’ series deliberately focuses on the medieval and early modern periods, down to the eighteenth century, in order to try to shed a new light on the philological and historical conditions of the appreciation of Apuleius, as well as on the literary and linguistic productivity of this reception. The project was guided by the will to gather together various approaches and to provide an interdisciplinary investigation of the evolution of the image of Apuleius and his texts through time, and of the literary appropriations to which this renewed image gave birth. This early modern panorama is, thus, a contribution to the history of the reception of Apuleius, set within an enlarged historical frame and explored through the use of a range of methodological procedures. In addition, it also offers new perspectives by widening the geographical scope of interest to take in Latin American and Near Eastern receptions.4
The philological study of the material transmission of Apuleian texts leads directly to literary considerations, not only in terms of aesthetic influence but also because of the inscription of this influence within literary milieux. The literary debates about and polemics concerning these texts reveal the evolution of tastes, norms, and licences, with the growing circulation of manuscript and printed versions drawing ever-wider circles of readers into these discussions. The Italian connection played a major and multidimensional role in this regard. When we look at the manuscripts that Boccaccio possessed, annotated, or copied, we can see the definite influence of the narrator Apuleius not only on Boccaccio’s early work but also on his Decameron. This is true especially for the manuscript, now known as Laurentianus 29.2 (ϕ), that was copied sometime around the year 1200: Boccaccio had access to this manuscript in Naples in 1339-1341, and he both read and annotated it.5 Petrarch also owned a manuscript of a work by Apuleius, now the Vaticanus latinus 2193, which he annotated at some point between 1340 and 1343.6 We therefore know that Apuleius’ works were circulating a long time before the publication of the editio princeps of 1469 by Sweynheim and Pannartz in the edition established by Giovanni Andrea Bussi (one of the first ten books they published, predating even Virgil and Cicero’s epistles). Later, in Bologna, Filippo Beroaldo the Elder’s Commentarii in asinum aureum were published by Benedetto d’Ettore Faelli in 1500, and then again in 1501 by Aldus in Venice.7 Printed in more than 1200 copies, then reprinted in numerous editions in Italy and beyond, Apuleius benefitted from the popularity of the current fashion for anything ‘Egyptian’ and became, once more, a key text.
One of the decisive moments in Apuleius’ subsequent voyages throughout Western culture was at the court of the Estes in Ferrara during the quattrocento. Here, between 1469 and 1479, Matteo Maria Boiardo prepared his translation as a ‘volgarizzamento’, with the work finally being printed some forty years later in 1518. In the final book, Boiardo includes the epilogue of Lucian’s Loukios or the Ass, the history of which has always been linked to that of Apuleius.8 The court of Isabella d’Este was also the place where the fable of Cupid and Psyche began to circulate as an autonomous text. There, Niccolò da Correggio composed a long Latin poem, Fabula Psiches et Cupidinis, on the subject towards 1490, and it also became a pictorial theme. Long after Fulgentius’ allegorical reading of this story within the story, Psyche would become the subject of a renewed interest.9 In nearby Mantua, Giulio Romano also devoted a whole cycle of paintings in the Palazzo del Te to the myth. With the great Aldine editions of 1501, the Apuleian text began to circulate more widely and was to have an incredible success in vernacular literature in sixteenth-century Spain, seventeenth-century England, and in France in 1669, when Jean de la Fontaine took advantage of the current taste for both oriental matters and the roman à clefs by setting his Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon in Versailles.
The international conference on The Afterlife of Apuleius brought together a number of the most knowledgeable scholars working on various aspects of the reception of Apuleius, from late antiquity to the modern period and beyond. This volume gathers together papers which include the results of the multiple discussions that were held during the conference. The order in which they are presented here is not only chronological but, rather, reflects the diversity of methodological choices in the papers, from diachronic analysis to micro-historical studies. This diversity opens up new perspectives on the early modern reception of Apuleius’ work. The first group of contributions offers a global vision of Apuleius’ historical and geographical diffusion, with various selected focuses. Robert Carver draws new conclusions concerning the High Medieval transmission and reception of the Metamorphoses in Europe, whereas Andrew Laird presents the means and consequences of the circulation and appropriations of the book in New Spain after the first European incursions. Carole Boidin suggests a complementary approach by considering the multifarious influence of Apuleius and the Metamorphoses in Europe and the way in which it was unexpectedly framed by ideological discussions concerning the African origin of the author, and by the supposedly oriental taste of the novel. Two sections are then devoted to the famous fable of Cupid and Psyche. The first focuses on the reception of the fable in the Middle Ages, with Julia Gaisser retracing its genealogy while Igor Candido examines how the tale was used by Petrarch and Boccaccio. The second section considers two English readings and adaptations of the fable, with studies of theatrical and poetic versions by Thomas Heywood in 1634 (Stephen Harrison) and Mary Tighe in 1805 (Regine May). Once again, the aim in these chapters is to combine historical case studies with a literary approach, insisting on the creative effects of the intellectual polemics and of the artistic genres in which the Apuleian material was used and reshaped. The Metamorphoses are also the subject of a more diachronic section concerning the evolution of specific formal devices and the variation of literary values. Ahuvia Kahane, Françoise Lavocat, and Loreto Nuñez demonstrate how the device of the embedded narrative illustrated in the Metamorphoses became generalized as a fictional model, and how the book made its way into the Western literary canon, from late antiquity to the Italian Renaissance and the Spanish Siglo de Oro. In a final section on lexicography, the focus shifts from the reception of the book to the appreciation of Apuleius’ language and style. This section shows how, during the quattrocento in Italy and the early sixteenth century in Paris, Apuleius and his vocabulary and syntax became a major issue in contemporary discussions not only on the purity of the Latin language of Ancient Rome (Clementina Marsico) but also concerning the role of grammar and, leading on from this, the new philological methods of the humanists (Andrea Severi). It is no coincidence that we find in Giovanni Pontano’s dialogue Asinus (1491) a satire of both clerics and politicians, in the form of what is almost a comedy in five acts, in which the greatest source of expressiveness is in fact the very language that is used. This is not Ciceronian written Latin but the mimetic Latin of the oral tradition, the variety that is the most able to reproduce the vividness of the spoken word, the Latin of Plautus and Apuleius. The donkey, used here as a symbol of ingratitude (a political event having sparked off the dialogue), subsequently becomes a pretext for a deeper excursus on the nature of language, in which dialogue is impossible unless all the available resources of the lexicon are used. Far from being a conservative exercise, imitation becomes a model for modernity. And this is precisely what this conference set out to prove: the modernity, in every sense of the term, that an ‘ancient’ author can have, and the necessity of taking an interdisciplinary approach when studying the culture of the early modern period.
We wish to thank the co-organizers of the conference, Greg Woolf and Olivier Pédeflous, for their scientific expertise, as well as Jane Ferguson for her efficient practical assistance and warm welcome. Thanks are also due to Elizabeth Potter, Publications Manager at the Institute of Classical Studies, and Paul Scade for their help during the publication process.
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5 See G. F. Gianotti, ‘Da Montecassino a Firenze: la riscoperta di Apuleio’, in Il ‘Decameron’ nella letteratura europea, ed. C. Allasia (Rome 2006) 9–46 and I. Candido, Boccaccio umanista: studi su Boccaccio e Apuleio (Ravenna 2014).
6 See C. Tristano, ‘Le postille del Petrarca nel ms. Vat. Lat. 2193 (Apuleio, Frontino, Vegezio, Palladio)’, Italia medioevale e umanistica 17 (1974) 365–468.
7 See Filippo Beroaldo l’Ancien. Un passeur d’humanités / Filippo Beroaldo il Vecchio. Un umanista ad limina, eds S. Fabrizio-Costa and F. La Brasca (Bern 2005).
8 See E. Fumagalli, Matteo Maria Boiardo volgarizzatore dell’‘Asino d’oro’. Contributo allo studio della fortuna di Apuleio nell’Umanesimo, Medioevo e Umanesimo 70 (Padova 1988).
9 On the fortunes of the story of Cupid and Psyche, see S. Cavicchioli, Le metamorfosi di Psiche. La fortuna della favola di Apuleio nei secoli (Venice 2002); V. Gély, L’Invention d’un mythe : Psyché, Allégorie et fiction, du siècle de Platon au temps de La Fontaine (Paris 2006).