The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages

Front matter

ical Antiquity through the Middle Ages from Class

PENELOPE REED Doos

-THE IDEA OF.

Part One The Labyrinth In The Classical And Early Christian Periods

. The Literary Witness: Labyrinths in Pliny, Virgil, and Ovid

. The Labyrinth as Significant Form: Two Paradigms A clash of paradigms 40 The multicursal model 46 The unicursal model 48 The essence of the maze 51

. A Taxonomy of Metaphorical Labyrinths The labyrinth as a sign of complex artistry 66 The labyrinth as a sign of inextricability or impenetrability 72 The labyrinth as a sign of difficult process 82

ParT Two THE LABYRINTH IN THE MIDDLE AGES

. Etymologies and Verbal Implications vii xvii

17 39 viii « Contents

5. Mazes in Medieval Art and Architecture The three-dimensional labyrinth (buildings and gardens) Diagrammatic labyrinths 112 Turf and stone mazes 113 Labyrinths in churches 117 Labyrinths in manuscripts 133

The mythographers 148 Moral labyrinths in other literature 155 Readings of selected texts 165

The Gesta Romanorum 165,

Il Corbaccio 167

The Assembly of Ladies 171

La Queste del Saint Graal 175

7. Textual Labyrinths: Toward a Labyrinthine Aesthetic Labyrinthine Inventio 198 Labyrinthine Dispositio 201 Labyrinthine Elocutio 211 Difficult process 213

PART THREE LABYRINTHS OF WORDS: CENTRAL TEXTS AND INTERTEXTUALITIES 8. Virgil’s Aeneid 9. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy

10. Dante’s Divine Comedy The labyrinthine landscape 281 The labyrinthine journey 287 The myth transformed and reenacted 294

Appendix: Labyrinths in Manuscripts Index

227 254 271

341 343

OND wo

List of Plates

. Prehistoric Cretan-style labyrinth rock carving from Rocky

Valley, near Tintagel, Cornwall

. Labyrinth from the Tragliatella wine-pitcher (Etruscan, seventh century B.C.)

. Roman mosaic labyrinth, Via Cadolini, Cremona . Early multicursal labyrinth, adapted from Claude Paradin’s

Dévises héroiques (1551)

. Circular unicursal diagrammatic labyrinth (ninth or eleventh century) The Greek key pattern or meander

. Eye-brain diagram (1350—1400) . Diagram of the brain, from Jehan Yperman’s Cyrurgie

. Labyrinth and amphitheater, from Raban Maur’s De rerum naturis (late fourteenth century)

. Illustration of a three-dimensional labyrinth (ca. 1460) . Garden maze, attributed to Pozzoserrato (ca. 1550)

. Turf-maze at Wing, Rutland

. Diagram of Julian’s Bower, turf labyrinth, Alkborough,

Lincolnshire

. Labyrinth roof boss, Saint Mary Redcliffe, Bristol

(fourteenth—fifteenth century)

. Labyrinth on baptismal font, Saint Martin’s, Lewannick,

Cornwall

. Drawing of labyrinth with figures of architects (ca. 1240) in the nave of Reims Cathedral

. Diagram of the labyrinth (ca. 1194—1220) in the nave of

Chartres Cathedral

111 114

19. 20.

21. 22.

24. 25.

List of Plates

Architectural depiction of the Cretan labyrinth, from a manuscript of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (1250— 1275)

Labyrinth from a manuscript of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (thirteenth century)

The Cretan labyrinth, from a manuscript of the Libellum de septem miraculis mundi (late twelfth century)

The city of Jericho as a labyrinth (late twelfth century)

Labyrinth in a fourteenth-century manuscript of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy

Labyrinth in a fourteenth-century manuscript of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy

Illumination (1419) from Dante’s Inferno

Labyrinth in a manuscript (1419) of Dante’s Divine Comedy

140 141

143 256

275 276

Acknowledgments: Four Labyrinths help along the way. But if labyrinths are icons of difficult

process, by the same token they are occasions for generosity, and I have encountered more than my fair share of gracious guides. Pliny tells us that four labyrinths existed in ancient times. Taking up his clue, I thank those who have eased my passage through the four mazes I have experienced while imagining and then writing The Idea of the Labyrinth.

First came the magnificent, many-folded labyrinth of medieval studies, endlessly attractive precisely because of its multitudinous difficulties. It was probably Geoffrey Chaucer, English Daedalus “with his playes slye,” who enticed me into this maze, but he had wily accomplices, not least the late R. W. Ackerman of Stanford University, who persuaded me to become a medievalist even though I had no interest in Old Norse. Classical and medieval mazes typically begin where they end and end where they began, as Boethius told Lady Philosophy; hence, appropriately, my point of entry into medieval studies, the origin of this book, and the final chapter all coincide in that brilliantly eclectic poem Chaucer’s House of Fame, which is not only a beginning and ending but also an eccentric thread of Ariadne to the labyrinth of medieval literature. B. J. Whiting introduced me to the poem at Harvard University, where English 115 began with his wry line-by-line commentary. Although our approaches to Chaucer are fundamentally different, it was he who first revealed to me the charm of a work that has captivated me ever since and who inspired me to begin my own Chaucer courses with that poem. (It was while teaching The House of Fame to a group of baffled undergraduates in 1970 that I hit upon the idea that the poem was itself a maze, only to realize how much was yet to be discovered about medieval

P EOPLE who wander in mazes for twenty years need a lot of xi xii

Acknowledgments labyrinths.) At Stanford, A. G. Rigg fed my addiction with impromptu soirées where a group of us read the poem aloud, stopping every few lines to explore one or another of the many paths branching out into other medieval texts and traditions. I never studied The House of Fame with V. A. Kolve, but his astonishing Chaucer seminars at Stanford persuaded me of the fruitfulness of looking for controlling metaphors— what he would later call “narrative images”—in Chaucer’s poetry. And while I never worked with the late E. Talbot Donaldson, his enthusiasm for my research on Chaucer and labyrinths alike often gave me confidence to forge ahead when I was weary.

All writers are necessarily implicated in three additional labyrinths. First, they are maze-treaders: as the English historian Ralph Higden complained, would-be scholars have to make their way through the labyrinths of invention—their material, their sources—before they can even begin to write. Second, they are maze-makers: as the rhetorician Geoffrey of Vinsauf reminds us, writers are architects, aspiring to design a well-crafted Daedalian domus. This is the labyrinth of disposition, of conceptual order. Third, the text itself is a labyrinth through which readers wander at will, comprehending all or nothing according to the mental fit between text and reader: as the preacher Robert of Basevorn warned, one man’s artistry is another man’s inexplicable maze. This is the labyrinth of words and of the reception of texts. Writers need help as they tread, create, and entangle others in mazes.

In the labyrinth of invention I encountered many tutelary spirits who directed me along unexplored pathways. Régine Astier, Christopher Baswell, Harry Bober, John Leyerle, Guy Lobrichon, Kathryn Kerby- Fulton, V. A. Kolve, Ruth Mellinkoff, Brian Stock, David Wallace, and Francis Woodman suggested references, answered questions, or found possible illustrations. Ann and Nollaig MacKenzie traveled to Cornwall to trace a labyrinth of whose existence I was uncertain. Colin Burrow, Terry Hoad, and Charlotte Morse retraced my steps for me when I was unable to do so myself and provided last-minute reference-checking in British libraries. Eleanor Silk, Yvon LePage, and Margaret F. Nims gave me liberal access to unpublished material. Ross Arthur, Christina Hawkes, A. G. Rigg, and Brian Stock helped interpret what I saw darkly in untranslated texts.

Readers of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose know that libraries, like texts, are labyrinths in their own right, and I am grateful to the guardians of such mazes for letting me explore hidden treasures at the British, Bodleian, and Cambridge University libraries and at many Oxford and Cambridge college libraries. The Library of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto continues to be the friendliest of labyrinths, and staff at York University Libraries were tireless in satisfying my Minotaurian gluttony for exotic interlibrary loans.

Acknowledgments

Many people have played Saint Julian, patron of travelers and maze-treaders alike, on my behalf: I thank Ann Kussmaul, Paul and Elaine Hyams, Harriet Kirkley, and Mahmoud Manzalaoui for their hospitality in England on my various research trips. To Wendon Dobbs and Clive Evans, who generously let me and my labyrinthine obsessions invade their London home for many summers, I owe the deepest gratitude and affection.

One can neither explore nor build labyrinths without material support, and that I have had in abundance from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Glendon College Research Grant Fund, and York University. Pliny thought the ancient labyrinths were a tremendous waste of resources, and I hope those who have invested enormously in this book feel their money has been somewhat better spent. Maze-walkers also need help in the exhausting tasks of searching bibliographies, checking dates and quotations, writing for permissions, photocopying articles, and so on. In this regard, I have been lucky in my talented and painstaking research assistants: Sheila Barry, Jinnean Bernard, Lucia Cino, Colleen Cowman, Nirmal Dass, Brandi Dickman, Patrick Johnson, Tom Klubi, Birgit Langwisch, and especially Dyan Elliott.

Would-be architects of a book like this one need special help in designing its complex groundplan, and I’ve been blessed with friends who helped me see the labyrinth whole. Judson Allen, John Leyerle, and Brian Stock played the roles of Ariadne and Daedalus, helping me chart the ground. Still more important, they believed in what I was doing even when I despaired of ever reaching the end. That this book exists at all is in large part due to their persistent encouragement over two decades.

If one needs an overview of the maze, one also needs distraction from its labors now and again. In this respect, I record my gratitude to my dear friend, the late Constantin Patsalas, who granted me the privilege of intense involvement in his own Daedalian artistry as a choreographer. His imagination sparked mine, and I often returned from rehearsals and excited discussions of his ballets with far greater energy to attack my own work. We had planned some day to collaborate on a ballet about the Cretan myth; his early death ended that hope.

People who create labyrinths need to gain perspective by stepping back and describing what they have designed so far. For letting me give papers and lectures on parts of this research over the years and for valuable feedback, I want to acknowledge Nicholas Mann (Oxford, 1975), Raymond St. Jacques and Douglas Wuertele (Universities of Ottawa and Carleton, 1981), John Leyerle (University of Toronto, 1982), Diana Theodores Taplin (University of Waterloo, 1982), Otto Griindler (International Congress of Medieval Studies, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1989), Patricia Briickmann (“Discovering in Wide Landscape,” 1983), Thomas xiii

XIV

Acknowledgments

Hahn and Marjorie Woods (University of Rochester, 1984), the Dance History Scholars Association (1985), George Brown and Donald Howard (Stanford, 1985), and V. A. Kolve (Medieval Academy, 1988). A special award for patience in adversity must go to the generations of York University graduate and undergraduate students who, since 1970, have had versions of the chapters on The House of Fame and The Consolation of Philosophy inflicted on them, often at trying hours in the early morning.

Ancient labyrinths were lavishly decorated with works of art, and while my labyrinth of words is not as extensively ornamented as the mazes of Egypt or Etruria, I have been able to draw upon some supplemental visual artistry. Permission to reproduce photographs was graciously provided by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana; the Bibliothèque Municipale, Dijon; the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris; the Bodleian Library; the British Library; Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; Edwin H. Gardner; the Ghent University Library; the Laurentian Library, Florence; the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England; the Soprintendenza Archeologica, Milan; and the Staatsbibliothek Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Berlin. Michel Baridon, William C. Irvine, and Leonard Boyle generously helped me obtain certain photographs, and Alison and Robert Ouellette provided expert assistance with other photographs and drawings. For dealing skillfully with the impact of the computer age on the generation and regeneration of textual mazes, I am grateful to Deirdre Maclean and Chris Monteith.

Once a verbal maze exists, its architect needs readers and listeners willing to venture inside and report on what they have seen. Many friends and colleagues have cheerfully traced various versions and segments of my labyrinthine text, and the book’s present form owes a great deal to their comments; if those comments sometimes contradicted one another, that’s what labyrinthine paradox is all about, and my task as architect has been to try to find some comprehensive if not transcendent resolution. I thank these courageous readers: Judson Allen, Ross Arthur, John Briickmann, Jane Couchman, Talbot Donaldson, Rachel Jacoff, Christopher Kleinhenz, Charlotte Morse, Glending Olson, Thomas L. Reed, Jr., David Staines, Brian Stock, Janet Warner, and Marjorie Woods. For suggesting unexplored by-ways and better paths after I thought my work completed, I am grateful to the readers so ably chosen by Bernhard Kendler of Cornell University Press: Christopher Baswell, James Miller, Hope Weissman, and Winthrop Wetherbee. Roger Haydon of the Press suggested appropriate finishing touches. While the manuscript has been much improved by the advice of all these fellow travelers, the academic enterprise remains an irrevocably multicursal maze in which I have sometimes insisted on my own way despite the wisdom of my guides. If errors remain, as they surely do, they go with

Acknowledgments the territory. Indeed, errors define the territory—without errores, there’s no labyrinth.

My greatest debt is to my husband, Graham Parker, who accompanied me to countless labyrinth sites, tolerated recurrent crises of confidence, and lugged innumerable books back and forth from libraries during the years I was embroiled in the impenetrable labyrinths of administrative office. More important, he read one draft after another, providing the judicious perspective that only a highly literate nonspecialist can give. Having endured the countless labors, errors, false turnings, and blind alleys I have brought upon him in the course of writing this book, he has staunchly remained my center and my path.

PENELOPE REED DOOB Toronto, Canada

XV

AJP Arch] Batschelet- Massini CCSL Charland

Chaucer

CSEL CJ CR EETS e.s. o.s.

Etymologiae

Faral

HF Inf.

JMRS Kern

Lewis and Short LCL

Abbreviations

American Journal of Philology

Archeological Journal

Werner Batschelet-Massini, “Labyrinthzeichnungen in Handschriften,” Codices Manuscripti 2 (1978), 33-65

Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina

Th.-M. Charland, Artes praedicandi, Publications de l'Institut d’Etudes Mediévales d’Ottawa, 7 (Paris and Ottawa: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin / Institut d’Etudes Mediévales, 1936)

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987)

Classical Journal

Classical Review

Early English Text Society extra series original series

Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum, ed. Wallace M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911)

Edmond Faral, Les arts poétiques du XIe et du XIIe siècles, Bibliothèque de l'École des Hautes Etudes, fasc. 238 (Paris, 1924)

The House of Fame

Inferno

Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Hermann Kern, Labirinti: Forme e interpretazioni: 5000 anni di presenza di un archetipo, trans. Libero Sosio (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981)

Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879)

Loeb Classical Library xvii xviii `

Matthews

MED

MGH

M&H

MLN

MLR

MP

MS

NLH

Oxford Latin Dictionary

Para.

PL

Plato

PMLA PQ

Pseudo-Bernard

Silvester:

J&J

S&M

Purg.

RES

SAC Santarcangeli

SP SUR UTQ

Abbreviations

W. H. Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths: Their History and Development (1922; rpt. New York: Dover Books, 1970)

Middle English Dictionary

Monumenta Germaniae Historica

Medtevalia et Humanistica

Modern Language Notes

Modern Language Review

Modern Philology

Medieval Studies

New Literary History

Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. Glare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968-82; consolidated ed., 1983)

Paradiso

Patrologia Latina

Plato: Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961)

Publications of the Modern Language Association

Philological Quarterly

The Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid of Vergil Commonly Attributed to Bernardus Silvestris, ed. Julian Ward Jones and Elizabeth Frances Jones (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977)

Bernardus Silvestris, Commentary on the First Six Books of Virgils Aeneid, trans. Earl G. Schreiber and Thomas E. Maresca (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979)

Purgatorio

Review of English Studies

Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Paolo Santarcangeli, Le livre des labyrinthes: Histoire d’un mythe et d’un symbole, trans. Monique Lacau (Paris: Gallimard, 1974; orig. publ. as Il libro dei labirinti [Florence: Vallecchi, 1967)

Studies in Philology

Stanford Italian Review

-THE IDEA OF.

THE LABYRINTH

‘INTRODUCTION -

It may be good, like it who list, But I do doubt. Who can me blame?

Alas, I tread an endless maze That seek to accord two contraries; And hope still, and nothing haze, Imprisoned in liberties. . . .

—Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ballade 85

NCIENT and medieval labyrinths or mazes (the words have

different etymologies but mean the same thing) are charac-

teristically double. They are full of ambiguity, their circuitous design prescribes a constant doubling back, and they fall into two distinct but related structural categories. They presume a double perspective: maze-treaders, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted and fragmented, suffer confusion, whereas maze-viewers who see the pattern whole, from above or in a diagram, are dazzled by its complex artistry. What you see depends on where you stand, and thus, at one and the same time, labyrinths are single (there is one physical structure) and double: they simultaneously incorporate order and disorder, clarity and confusion, unity and multiplicity, artistry and chaos. They may be perceived as path (a linear but circuitous passage to a goal) or as pattern (a complete symmetrical design). They are dynamic from a maze-walker’s perspective and static from a privileged onlooker’s point of view. Their paths are linear, but—since many ancient and medieval labyrinths are round—their pattern may be circular, cyclical; they describe both the linearity and the architecture of space and time. They may be inextricable (if no one can find the exit) or impenetrable (if no one can find the center). Our perception of labyrinths is thus intrinsically unstable: change your perspective and the labyrinth seems to change. As images, then, labyrinths are convertible and relative: what you see and feel and understand one moment can shift completely the

- Introduction next like a reversible figure, an optical illusion. Thus mazes encode the very principle of doubleness, contrariety, paradox, concordia discors, as Wyatt knew.!

Accordingly, the aims of this book are dual: to reconstruct the idea of the labyrinth in the western Middle Ages by extrapolation from a wide variety of sources, both literary and visual, and to see how that idea informs an array of important literary texts. I use the word zdea to mean the general governing concept of the labyrinth as a visual or verbal sign, its ruling principles, the theoretical set of characteristics abstracted from and manifested in the specific labyrinths of art or literature. The idea of the labyrinth thus encompasses both formal principles (e.g., circuitousness, complexity) and habitual, culturally shared and transmitted significances of labyrinths (e.g., artistry, imprisonment). Unlike a Platonic idea, the kind of idea I’m talking about is not “true,” universal, or immutable; like other human ideas, the idea of the labyrinth is subject to temporal change, the most marked change occurring in postmedieval times, when the presence of false turnings and repeated choice became the labyrinth’s dominant characteristic. But because there is considerable constancy in the idea of the labyrinth over many centuries, including those spanned by this book, I speak of an idea (albeit one with permissible variations), not of many ideas. Since it allows for certain variations, this idea is not monolithic, a fixed and perfect template; rather, it includes a small repertory of attributes and associations among which a maze-maker can select, emphasizing these as opposed to those to shape the precise significance of this particular maze, which will in turn be interpreted by readers or viewers in accordance with their familiarity with the received idea of the labyrinth.

The word idea is also appropriate because I am interested not only in “real” labyrinths—mazes one can see and touch, things that are labeled labyrinths—but also in metaphorical labyrinths and in the very concept of the labyrinth. Thus I am also concerned with the labyrinthine: with identifying certain features closely associated with labyrinths (for instance, enforced circuitousness; disorientation; the idea of planned chaos;? the bivium or critical choice between two paths; inextricability; intricacy; complexity), and with examining how constellations of these features operate in things, metaphors, and texts that function like labyrinths even though they may not be identified as such. In this context, I have coined the term “labyrinthicity,” by which I mean the condition of possessing significant features habitually associated with labyrinths.

1. See epigraph to this chapter and Ballade 85 in Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 120-121.

2. I first encountered this phrase in Alfred David’s “Literary Satire in The House of Fame,” PMLA, 75 (1960), 333-339, where it struck me as the perfect definition of a maze.

I speak of reconstructing the medieval idea of the labyrinth because I want to avoid imposing modern definitions and canons of interpretation on medieval mazes. The modern idea of a labyrinth is curiously limited. It holds that mazes must contain many points of choice between two or more paths (they are multicursal, to use a word that will recur throughout this study—see plate 4) with dead ends leading nowhere, and that they are intended to confuse and frustrate. This idea is not foreign to the Middle Ages: many literary texts assume a multicursal model, and some see confusion as the maze’s primary function where others present bewilderment as merely a byproduct of brilliantly complex structure. But the modern concept of the maze excludes virtually all medieval labyrinths in the visual arts, which show a single winding path leading inevitably to the center and then back out again (they are thus unicursal—see plate 5). The medieval idea of the labyrinth allows both patterns, so modern readers must discard their mental image of the maze if they are to approach medieval examples and see what is actually there. Previous studies of medieval labyrinths have been seriously handicapped by their failure to appreciate, let alone to examine carefully, the implications of the coexistence of these radically different paradigms of the maze. Similarly, most modern studies of labyrinths manifest an interest in determining anthropological origins or archetypal significance.? This search for the Ur-labyrinth may tell us something about twentieth-century ways of thinking about signs in general and the labyrinth in particular, and it can provide cross-cultural insights and suggestive speculation about the maze’s prehistory, but it tells us next to nothing about how medieval people saw and used the sign and hence has no place in my discussion. Instead, I want to recover what medieval people actually thought about mazes, what their “horizon of expectations” might have been when they heard the word laborintus or saw a maze in a cathedral nave, what they meant by the sign in their own works; I want to describe an appropriate code for deciphering medieval visual or literary works involving literal or metaphorical labyrinths, to define the “literary competence” required

3. See, e.g., Janet Bord, Mazes and Labyrinths of the World (London: Latimer New Dimensions, 1976); Philippe Borgeaud, “The Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King: The Greek Labyrinth in Context,” History of Religions, 14 (1974), 1-27; Gaetano Cipolla, Labyrinth: Studies on an Archetype (New York: Legas, 1987); Raymond J. Clark, Catabasis: Vergil and the Wisdom-Tradition (Amsterdam: B. R. Griiner, 1979); C. N. Deedes, “The Labyrinth,” in S. H. Hooke, ed., The Labyrinth: Further Studies in the Relation of Myth and Ritual in the Ancient World (London: SPCK, 1935), pp. 3-42; Kern, Labirinti, W. F. Jackson Knight, Cumaean Gates: A Relation of the Sixth Aeneid to the Initiation Pattern (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936); Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths; Jill Purce, The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974); and Santarcangeli, Livre des Labyrinthes. My short study “The Labyrinth in Medieval Culture: Explorations of an Image,” University of Ottawa Quarterly, 52 (1982), 207-218, based on papers given at Oxford in 1975 and at Ottawa in 1981, is very sketchy in comparison to the present book.

- Introduction to appreciate labyrinth references and intertextualities.4 The kinds of questions I want to answer are these: What was the documentable medieval reception and development of the form, concept, and meaning of the labyrinth, as witnessed by the broadest possible range of texts and visual images from both official and unofficial cultures? What were characteristic and atypical medieval ways of seeing the labyrinth? How did the idea of the labyrinth, both literary and visual, generate metaphor, and what are the consequent metaphorical uses of the sign?> How does the idea of the labyrinth function as a heuristic tool for understanding labyrinthine literary texts that may or may not explicitly identify themselves as labyrinths? This general focus on the medieval, the metaphorical, and the literary distinguishes my work from most recent studies of labyrinths.

Readers familiar with W. H. Matthews's seminal Mazes and Labyrinths, Paolo Santarcangeli’s Livre des labyrinthes, and Hermann Kern’s Labirinti may wonder why another book is necessary. First, these previous studies concentrate on the visual arts, not on literature, and certainly not on labyrinthine texts. Second, they treat the labyrinth from prehistory to the present, and the medieval idea of the labyrinth merits far more attention than they have given it. Third, despite their visual orientation, they give little or no attention to the formal implications of the two medieval paradigms of the maze and the tensions between literary and visual traditions. Fourth, my work deals more with metaphorical labyrinths than with real ones.6

The best way to suggest the scope, rationale, and methods of this book is through a brief overview of its contents. Part One lays the groundwork for the study of medieval labyrinths by examining several facets of the classical and early Christian background. Focusing on the written witness, Chapter 1 identifies, analyzes, and compares two major classical traditions associated with different kinds of literature and well-known to

4. See Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” pp. 3-45 in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, introd. Paul de Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), and Jonathan Culler, “Literary Competence,” pp. 101-117 in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Culler’s essay is excerpted from his Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).

5. We encounter a chicken-or-egg question in regard to whether the visual image of the labyrinth generated myth and metaphor or vice versa. Given the great antiquity of the typical round, unicursal design, the visual image may have come first, begetting (or attaching to itself) myth and metaphor, but the question is really unanswerable.

6. I remain deeply indebted to Matthews’s pioneering work and appreciative of the valuable studies of Santarcangeli, Kern, and Batschelet-Massini; these works have not significantly influenced my own approach or conclusions, but they have made this book shorter than I expected when I began my research in 1970, for they cover some ground so ably that, to paraphrase a medieval commonplace, if in some ways I can see farther and more accurately, it is because I am standing on the shoulders of giants I can cite in footnotes.

the Middle Ages—the historical-geographical, quasi-factual description of four ancient labyrinths as real buildings, discussed by Pliny the Elder, Strabo, and others, and the purely literary tradition established by Virgil and Ovid, the classical poets who most influenced medieval thought. Here I explore characteristically labyrinthine dualities—artistry vs. chaos, order vs. confusion, admirable complexity vs. moral duplicity—in these traditions and texts; I discuss the physical facts and narrative implications of the labyrinth and its associated myth; and I show how the written tradition presupposes the multicursal model of the maze, transmitting that model to the Middle Ages.

Chapter 2 focuses on the surprising conflict between written tradition and the visual arts, which endorse not the multicursal model but rather the unicursal model that persists in art throughout the Middle Ages. It is almost impossible to overestimate how remarkable this paradigmatic incompatibility is: as an analogy, imagine that literary descriptions of circles defined them as having four sides joined by right angles, whereas visual illustrations showed the figure we recognize as a circle. Other studies of the labyrinth at best mention the extraordinary discrepancy between medieval unicursal and modern multicursal visual models. But I will argue that it is precisely the peaceful coexistence of ancient and medieval literary multicursal models and visual unicursal models that is the key to understanding what medieval people meant by the word laborintus. Analysis of the two paradigms, then, constitutes the substance of Chapter 2. First I examine the formal implications of each model, showing how its characteristic features imply metaphorical potential; for instance, the presence of true and false paths in the multicursal maze may suggest the importance of correct moral or intellectual choice within a confusing world, whereas the single circuitous passage of the unicursal type argues that persistence in the difficult path prescribed by God— or in the devious path designed by the devil, or in the philosopher’s complex argument—leads ineluctably to the appropriate destination, be it heaven, hell, or knowledge. Since the single word laborintus denotes both unicursal and multicursal models, and since the name and the visual image often appear together, classical and medieval people must have assumed that the paradigms, so contradictory from our point of view, shared enough common features to comprise a single category; therefore I deduce the classical-medieval definition of this category, laborintus, by identifying the two models’ most important shared characteristics. The formal features that both models share broadly outline the general idea or the essence of the labyrinth; they reveal the most important criteria for labyrinthicity and shape the major aspects of the maze’s metaphorical potential. Formal features specific to one model or the other fill in the picture and allow considerable flexibility in individual instances: medieval authors can pick the model that best suits the meta-

- Introduction phor in mind, or (occasionally) they can select features from both models, or (very rarely) they can describe a transformation of one model into the other.