Born around 1040, Ivo of Chartres is primarily known to modern scholarship as a canonist, and he is occasionally recognized as a prolific writer of letters, but relatively little regard has been given to his surviving collection of homilies [1]. This scholarly neglect has been most keenly demonstrated by the absence of critical editions of the sermons, despite the call of Roger Reynolds over thirty years ago, with the overall effect of reducing the quality of academic discourse on one of the more prominent liturgists of the period of the Investiture Controversy [2].
Cambridge, Corpus Christi, Parker Library 289. Ivo of Chartres, Sermo de sacramentis neophitorum, here ascribed to Hugh of St. Victor. Images courtesy of The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
The text most commonly cited in scholarly literature, and the one used in my translation of this homily, is that published by Jacques Paul Migne in Patrologia Latina vol. 162, which is in turn based on previous editions by Fronteau and Hittorp. Although I was not able to consult them within the scope of this project, more than seventy manuscripts survive that contain some or all of the homilies included in the Migne edition. The most important would be Chartres, Bibliothèque Municipal 138, which formerly belonged to Chartres Cathedral, but it was heavily damaged in the Allied bombing of the city during the Second World War and is now largely unreadable. The remaining manuscripts are distributed broadly across Western Europe, with large concentrations in the British Museum, various colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Vatican. A surprising number of the extant witnesses date to the twelfth century, suggesting that this collection became popular shortly after its creation. The collection as a whole, to the best of my knowledge, has never been translated into a modern language. This specific sermon, however, was partially translated in the late 1940s as part of a broader gathering of works from across the Patristic and Medieval homiletic tradition [3].
The homilies in Ivo’s collection fall broadly into two categories. The first, encompassing numbers 1–6 and 22–24, are essentially liturgical commentaries, offering detailed allegorical explorations of various rites (e.g., Sermo I, De sacramentis neophytorum), other incidental features (e.g., Sermo III, De significationibus indumentorum sacerdotium), or specific prayers (e.g., Sermo XXII, De Oratione Dominica) of the Church. The balance of the homilies are on the feasts of the church, beginning with Advent and working through the feasts of the Nativity, Circumcision, Epiphany, Purification (Candlemas), and the Lenten and Paschal cycles. The audience for some or all of these homilies appears to have been an assembly of the local clergy of Chartres: many of the manuscripts add the phrase “in synodo habitus” (something like “considered in synod”) to the titles of some of the texts, and even in the text below Ivo addresses his audience as “Your Fraternity,” strongly suggesting, at least to me, that he was speaking to other clerics [4].
The text presented below is the first of the festal homilies and discusses Advent, or, as Ivo insists, both Advents of Christ. The entirety of the work maintains a parallel structure, contrasting the first Advent, i.e., the earthly ministry of Christ, with the second, during which Christ will return as judge. Throughout, an emphasis is placed on the redemptive and restorative work that has already been accomplished during the “hidden” Advent, which prepares his audience for the completion of salvation in the second, “manifest,” coming.
Nick Kamas PhD in Medieval Studies University of Notre Dame
The most comprehensive study of Ivo of Chartres is by Rolf Sprandel, Ivo von Chartres und seine Stellung in der Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1962). His life is also occasionally discussed in other secondary literature, especially on Ivo as a canonist, e.g., Christof Rolker, Canon Law and the Letters of Ivo of Chartres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Roger Reynolds, “Liturgical Scholarship at the Time of the Investiture Controversy: Past Research and Future Opportunities,” The Harvard Theological Review, 71 (1978): 109–124).
Ray C. Petry, ed., No Uncertain Sound, Sermons that Shaped the Pulpit Tradition, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1948), 140–142.
Credit belongs to Margot Fassler for suggesting the setting for these homilies, The Virgin of Chartres (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 136.
The Republic, The Symposium, The Phaedrus, The Apology, and The Phaedo––these are just a few of the works of Plato that were not widely available throughout most of the Middle Ages. No extended depiction of the most just city in the Republic. No discussion of love in The Symposium and The Phaedrus. No self-defense for Socrates at his trial as found in The Apology, and no final dialogue before his suicide as found in The Phaedo. For lovers of great texts, especially Plato, such news can be shocking. What kind of Plato does a person know if they don’t have these key works? How much of Socrates’ life and Plato’s philosophy could even be known? These are the questions that many medieval scholars of the Latin Platonist tradition have dedicated their lives and careers to answering, and the answers can be quite surprising.
One aspect of this research that ought to be appreciated by the wider reading public (outside of the narrow confines of medievalists) is that Plato’s Timaeus wasthe most widely available Platonic work throughout most of the Middle Ages. In fact, examining the text of the Timaeus and why itwas such one of the few Platonic texts preserved reveals how peculiarly modern our current canon of Platonic literature is.
What we value in Plato was not necessarily what late antique or medieval readers valued, and yet, their ability to read well meant that they understood a lot more than might be supposed. An attention to the reception history of Plato’s Timaeus can give modern readers of Plato a better appreciation for the importance of both mathematics and poetry in Platonic philosophy.
The Timaeus is Plato’s work on the origins of the universe. It begins with a dialogue between Timaeus, Socrates, Hermocrates, and Critias, in which Socrates expresses a desire for a “moving image” of the city they had been talking about the day before. The summary of the previous day’s discussion appears to bear some resemblance to the conversation found in the Republic although scholars are divided over whether this summary perfectly matches the Republic that we now possess. Regardless of its accuracy, this summary would have been the closest a medieval reader would have had to a taste of the Republic. The opening dialogue covers all sorts of fascinating topics from Solon’s visit to Egypt, oral culture, the mythic origins of writing, and the myth of Atlantis, but the bulk of the work features a narration about the origins of the universe recounted by the Pythagorean, Timaeus.
The Timaeus was received in the Middle Ages through three main channels of Latin translations: the translation of Calcidius (which ends at 53b), the translation of Cicero (available but not widely used or even known, which ends at 42b), and the excerpts from the Ciceronian translation of the Timaeus that can be found in Augustine’s City of God. Although it does not contain the whole text of the Timaeus, Calcidius’ translation is much more complete than Cicero’s: rather than giving merely the speech of Timaeus like Cicero’s translation does, it includes the opening dialogue (even though the commentary itself ignores it).
Most modern Plato scholars would probably not choose The Timaeus as theone and only work they could save from destruction for all time. But, a better understanding of who Calcidius was and why he wrote the commentary on the Timaeus suggests that the preservation of the Timaeus in the Latin West was not an accident of fate. Rather, the results of Gretchen Reydams-Schills’ lifelong study of Calcidius give a plausible reason for why Calcidius’ commentary may have been the Platonic work of choice for many late antique philosophers.
Reydams-Schils argues that Calcidius wrote his commentary as an introduction to the Platonic corpus, essentially reversing the Middle Platonic curriculum, which traditionally ended with the Timaeus. One major piece of evidence for this theory is that Calcidius’ commentary often reserves discussion of harder philosophical concepts for the end of the commentary.Furthermore, unlike the Neoplatonists, Calcidius did not read the Timaeus synoptically and believed strongly in the importance of sequential reading of the Platonic corpus. In Calcidus’ Platonic curriculum, the Timaeus came first with its teachings on natural justice, then the Republic with its teaching of positive justice, and finally, the Parmenides came with its teaching of the forms and intelligible realities. Calcidius believed that a thorough understanding of mathematics was necessary for understanding of almost all of the Platonic works, which is why his commentary on the Timaeus turns out to be something like a crash course in Pythagorean mathematics.
Thus, although the Timaeus was one of the only Platonic works available throughout the early Middle Ages, Calcidius’ commentary gave readers some introduction to the entire Platonic corpus as well as a great deal of Pythagorean mathematics. Perhaps there might be good reason for a philosopher to save The Timaeus (especially a copy with Calcidius’ commentary)from a burning building!
Medievalists who study the textual reception of the various translations of The Timaeus have been able to identify a shift in kinds of interest in Plato over time. The primary Latin translation of the Timaeus used until the eleventh century was Cicero’s. Medieval scholars used to assume that the revival of Calcidius began with the twelfth century Platonists, but Anna Somfai has demonstrated that the proliferation of copies of Calcidius’ text and commentary began in the eleventh century when championed by Lanfranc of Bec (c.1050). The late twelfth-century actually experienced a decline of copying the Timaeus as interests shifted towards other texts.
What motivated the eleventh-century interest in Calcidius appears to have been the mathematical content of the Calcidian commentary because, by the Carolingian period, much of the actual content of the quadrivial arts had been lost, and scholars in the Middle Ages attempted to piece together what scraps of it remained from a variety of sources. Calcidius’ commentary on the Timaeus appears to have been particularly valued as a source text for the quadrivial (or mathematical) arts. As my two previous MI blogs have explored here and here, medieval thinkers in the traditional liberal arts tradition recognized that the quadrivial arts were the foundation for philosophical thought, even if they had few textual sources for actually studying them.
And although some of the interest in the kinds of mathematics found in the Timaeus and Calcidius’ commentary may have declined after the twelfth century, it was by no means lost completely. As David Albertson has demonstrated, the mathematical interest in Plato found in the work of the twelfth-century scholar, Thierry of Chartres, would eventually be picked up by the fifteenth-century scholar, Nicholas of Cusa, and many scholars have noted resonances of Cusa’s quadrivial agenda in the thinking of Leibniz, the founder of calculus:
It seems that God, when he bestowed these two sciences [arithmetic and algebra] on humankind, wanted to warn us that a much greater secret lay hidden in our intellect, of which these were but shadows. (Leibniz as quoted by Albertson, p.2)
Even though the interest in scribal copying of the Timaeus seems to have declined somewhat by the twelfth-century, another kind of imitatio or translatio studii was being enacted by a different kind of scholar, Bernard Silvestris. He wrote a prosi-metric telling of the creation of the world that emulates Plato’s Timaeus. The title of his work, Cosmographia, roughly translates as “universe writing,” and Bernard delivered an oral performance of itbefore Pope Eugenius III in 1147. Bernard’s creative retelling of the Timaeus poetically depicts the role of imitation in the divine creation of the world in the form of “divine writing.” Performatively, the Cosmographia demonstrates that this divine writing is then imitated by poets in the form of human writing. In other words, Bernard values Plato’s Timaeus here not merely for its insights into mathematics or even the structure of the universe, but also what this mathematics in the universe implies about the mimetic nature of poetry itself.
As many literary scholars have demonstrated, much of the European literary tradition follows suit in seeing the value of Timaean Platonism for the production of literature. This interest can be seen in such diverse authors as Alan of Lille, Chrétien de Troyes, and Dante.
While I would personally be loath to give up the access to the Platonic corpus that I possess, the medieval reception of the Timaeus constantly pushes me to reconsider how I am reading that corpus. Having a large corpus of texts actually places an onus on the modern reader to ask the question of where to place the textual emphasis: Which texts of Plato should be considered central (and which ones periphery) and why? For example, should Plato’s Republic be considered his last word on poets and poetry? What would happen if Plato’s Timaeus were given more weight?
C.S. Lewis once wrote in his introduction to On the Incarnation by Athanasius:
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.
These words about reading the great books can also apply to reading the old books as they were read by past readers. Understanding medieval readings of Plato might very well be a good counterweight to modern presuppositions about who Plato was and what he was about. How might the idea of Plato as both a mathematician and myth-maker transform our modern understanding of Platonism and its history?
Somfai, Anna. “The Eleventh-Century Shift in the Reception of Plato’s Timaeus and Calcidius’ Commentary.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 65, 2002, pp. 1–21.
From its earliest recordings in African, Indian, and Egyptian cultures, the hare, which later became interchangeable with the rabbit, has been recognized as a symbol of generative powers.
In the ancient Greco-Roman world, the hare symbolized fertility, as well as love and lust. The hare was the favored sacrifice to the gods of love, Aphrodite and Eros.[1] Consumption of the animal’s flesh was thought to enhance the beauty in the eater for several days. The animal’s body was also incorporated into medicines meant to cure conditions connected with sex.
Roman mosaic depicting a hare, dated to the 4th century and discovered in Cirencester, England. The mosaic was excavated in 1971 and is housed at the Corinium Museum. Photo credit: Isobel Wilkes, “Hares in Roman Art”.
Hares and rabbits were known as prolific breeders, but the classical world often exaggerated the creature’s capacity for reproduction. Aristotle, for example, believed the rabbit was capable of superfetation – that is, he thought a pregnant rabbit could become pregnant again, thereby gestating multiple litters at once. These ideas persisted into the Middle Ages, passed down by Aristotle and other philosophers such as Herodotus, as well as Pliny the Elder.
In his Naturalis historia, written during the first century, Pliny the Elder characterizes hares and rabbits as the only animals that superfetate, “rearing one leveret while at the same time carrying in the womb another clothed with hair and another bald and another still an embryo.” He also discusses how wild rabbits laid waste to Spain. Describing their fertility as “beyond counting,” he says that “they bring famine to the Balearic Islands by ravaging the crops.”[2]
England, however, did not share Spain’s poor experience with rabbits. Although hares are indigenous to the British Isles, rabbits are not. They were introduced to England by the Normans in the 13th century and were raised for their meat and fur.[3] They were also kept as pets and were a particular favorite of nuns.[4]
Woman flushes a rabbit from its warren using a ferret or a small dog in the Taymouth Hours, England, c. 1260, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 13, f. 70v.
Rabbits did not initially thrive in the British climate, and they required careful tending by their owners, who constructed warrens for them. As Mark Bailey explains, “In modern usage the rabbit-warren refers to a piece of waste ground on which wild rabbits burrow, but in the Middle Ages it specifically meant an area of land preserved for the domestic or commercial rearing of game.”[5] These artificial burrows called “pillow-mounds” protected domestic rabbits from the elements and provided a dry, earthen enclosure that supported both survival and breeding.
Rabbit warren depicted in the Luttrell Psalter, c. 1320-40, Lincolnshire, England, British Library, Add MS 42130, f. 176v.
Despite their modern reputation as pests, rabbit populations were primarily confined to privately owned warrens in medieval England. They were not considered vermin but, rather, valuable commodities, and they were protected by law. Poachers were a problem, as were the rabbit’s natural predators, which included the fox, stoat, weasel, polecat, and wildcat.
Hunter approaches a rabbit warren with his dog in the Rutland Psalter, c. 1260, England, British Library, Add MS 62925, f. 57v.
Yet in medieval English literature, rabbits retain their symbolic association with reproduction, as exemplified by Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, a Middle English poem dated to the mid-14th century. Set in a garden during springtime, the poem centers a congregation of birds that meets to select their mates and explores themes related to love and marriage, as well as breeding.
Rabbits, or “conyes,” are depicted at play amidst the gathering of birds:
On every bough the briddes herde I singe, With voys of aungel in hir armonye, Som besyed hem hir briddes forth to bringe; The litel conyes to hir pley gonne hye. (Chaucer 190-93)[6]
I heard the birds on every branch singing Like the voice of an angel in their harmony, Some had their young beside them; The little rabbits were busy at their play. (my translation)
Now virtually obsolete, the term coney was used in medieval England to differentiate an adult rabbit from a younger one. Deriving from the pun made possible by the Latin word for rabbit, cuniculus, and the Latin word for the female genitalia, cunnus, the term was also used as sexual slang in the medieval period and well beyond.[7] Essentially, coney, or cunny, was a crass term that referred to the vulva or vagina, to a woman or women, or to sexual intercourse.[8]
Bestiary rabbit catalogued under the Latin name cuniculus in the Liber de natura rerum, c. 13th century, France, Bibliothèque Municipale de Valenciennes, MS 320, f. 58r.
Despite its long-standing sexual symbolism, the rabbit was simultaneously imparted with sacred symbolism in the Middle Ages. In England, the rabbit became a symbol of purity when portrayed alongside the Virgin Mary. The animal also functioned as a symbol of salvation. As David Stocker and Margarita Stocker explain, “their sacred meaning is not as divorced from their profane meaning (libidinousness) as may at first appear. One the one hand, their symbolism of lust and fertility refers to the carnal body; on the other, their symbolism of salvation and resurrection refers to the ‘body of this death’ from which the soul is saved.”[9]
Indeed, the theologian and philosopher Saint Augustine, writing between 397 and 400 CE, connects the rabbit with Christianity, further attesting to how the animal’s sexual and spiritual symbolism culturally coexisted. Discussing the rabbit in relation to salvation, Saint Augustine renders the creature a symbol of cowardice. He describes the rabbit as “a small and weak animal” that is “cowardly” and then draws a parallel between the rabbit and the fearful man: “In that which he fears, man is a rabbit.”[10] Later in the Middle Ages, the rabbit “denoted a soldier who burrowed underground or someone who fled from his pursuers.”[11]
Perhaps the rabbit’s connection with cowardice, then, provides some insight into the images depicting bunnies as antagonistic and often murderous beasts in the margins of medieval manuscripts. Immortalized on screen by Monty Python’s Rabbit of Caerbannog and more recently popularized on social media, the rabbit adopts many forms and runs rampant across the pages of manuscripts from England and Europe.
Rabbit strikes a knight with a lance in the Breviary of Renaud, c. 1302-05, France, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 107, f. 141v.
Rabbits spar with knights, wield axes at kings, and lay siege to castles. They ride snails with human faces and carry hounds on their shoulders into battle. They beat, they behead, they hang, they flay. Ranging from delightfully strange to strangely sadistic, the images of rabbits enacting violence reveal a world turned topsy-turvy through their reversal of expectations.
Rabbit beheads a man with a sword—the final image in a series of five that features rabbits hunting, capturing, and killing a man—in the Smithfield Decretals, c. 1340s, London, England, British Library, MS 10 E IV, f. 61v.
But medieval bunnies are not all bad. In bestiaries, they pose timidly in their portraits or express fear as they flee from hunting dogs. They frequently adorn decorative borders sans weapons and sometimes appear surprisingly realistic, as in the stunning illumination from the Cocharelli Codex below.
Pair of hares in the Cocharelli Codex, c. 1330-40, Genoa, Italy, British Library, Add MS 28841, f. 6v.
Although the killer coney and the cowardly knight have become a familiar motif, it is not a reflection of the rabbit population ransacking the English countryside, as some might be inclined to suspect. After all, wild rabbits did not become abundant until centuries later. But whether turning the world upside down or nestled benignly within a manuscript border, rabbits in medieval marginalia showcase their multifacetednous as an enduring and aptly inexhaustible cultural symbol.
Emily McLemore, Ph.D. Alumni Contributor, Department of English
[1] Claude K. Abraham, “Myth and Symbol: The Rabbit in Medieval France,” Studies in Philology, vol. 60, no. 4 (1963), pp. 589-597, at 589.
[9] David Stocker and Margarita Stocker, “Sacred Profanity: The Theology of Rabbit Breeding and the Symbolic Landscape of the Warren,” World Archaeology, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 265-72, at 270.
