The Early Modern Medea

Medea in English Literature, 1558–1688

K. Heavey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137466341
• eBook ISBN: 9781137466242
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This is the first book-length study of early modern English approaches to Medea, the classical witch and infanticide who exercised a powerful sway over literary and cultural imagination in the period 1558-1688. It encompasses poetry, prose and drama, and translation, tragedy, comedy and political writing.

1

Medieval Medea

In the English literature of the Middle Ages, Medea is often deprived of the opportunity to demonstrate her considerable and alarming powers to the full. In Book 5 of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, the figure of Amans assures the Confessor, ‘I have herde it ofte seie / Hou Jason tok the flees aweie / Fro Colchos’ (5.4231–3).¹ Medea’s crucial role is unmentioned here, and although earlier in the poem Gower has described her magic, and the crimes she was willing to commit for Jason, it is not her ability or her ruthlessness but her unrequited love for Jason that is stressed as her story closes, in terms which clearly disempower Medea and give Jason the upper hand. Such a description is typical of the medieval English approach to Medea, which on the whole sought to elide or undercut her power wherever possible, despite medieval authors’ knowledge of powerful classical and continental Medeas. English authors such as Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate and Caxton gleaned their knowledge of Medea not only from Ovid but also from continental sources, such as Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae, Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus and De Genealogia Deorum Gentilium Libri and Raoul Lefèvre’s Histoire de Jason, as well as from late antique and medieval mythographies and commentaries.² What is most noticeable, however, is the extent to which these English authors attempt to contain Medea’s power, by either ignoring it altogether or describing it in highly circumscribed ways.

Continental Medea

There was a thriving tradition in the Middle Ages whereby continental authors in particular sought to allegorise or rationalise Medea’s story, particularly as they found it in the Metamorphoses. Also significant for English medieval authors who sought to represent Medea, however, were two early continental accounts of Jason’s quest for the Fleece and of the assistance he received from a love-struck Medea. These were Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Old French poem the Roman de Troie (c.1160) and a Latin prose adaptation by Guido delle Colonne, the Historia Destructionis Troiae (1287). Although Guido’s work takes Benoît’s as its model, the two are significantly different, and in fact may be said to exemplify the two most common English approaches to the problem of Medea’s power: the romanticising impulse and the misogynistic attack.

As its title suggests, Benoît’s Roman de Troie sees the Argonautic voyage, and Jason’s love affair with Medea, as a precursor to the first sack of Troy by the Argonauts, and to the eventual Greek defeat of Priam’s city, as a result of Paris’ rape of Helen. The poem as a whole owes a clear debt to Ovid, and also to the De Excidio Troia Historia, a sixth-century Latin work by Dares the Phrygian, which was believed in the Middle Ages to be an eyewitness account of the Trojan War.³ Benoît is primarily interested in Medea as a woman who is undeniably magical and powerful, but who is utterly overthrown by the strength of her own feelings for Jason. In this account, Medea is struck by love for Jason immediately, and suffers the physical changes medieval readers would expect from a romance heroine – going red and white, hot and cold as she looks at him. Benoît observes that when she sees the Argonauts, Medea, ‘que d’amor esprent, / S’en vient a eus mout vergondose’ (who burned with love, / came to them very modestly) (1.1308–9).⁴ Equally, an account of Medea’s magical abilities finishes with a reference to her beauty: ‘el païs ne el regné / N’aveit dame de sa beauté’ (There was nobody of her beauty in the country or kingdom) (1.1247–8).

Unlike some subsequent authors, who attempt to rewrite the quest for the Fleece as a wholly male achievement, Benoît recognises and acknowledges the part Medea has to play. Though he provides a lengthy account of Jason’s success in his tasks (which is contained in the Metamorphoses), Medea’s role is also underscored by their long conversation which precedes the tasks, and which is absent from the Metamorphoses (there, Medea speaks only to herself, to debate the wisdom of saving Jason). Barbara Nolan has shown how Benoît builds on his sources, both Ovid and Dares (who does not mention Medea at all) to create a sense of the intimacy between Jason and Medea, and indeed between Medea and the reader: as Nolan points out, the reader is invited into Medea’s bedchamber, as she wrestles with her desire for Jason.⁵ During their subsequent night together, Medea describes in detail what Jason must do to overcome his obstacles, and gives him a ring and magic potion to ensure success. Here, Benoît takes his inspiration from the Metamorphoses and Heroides, both in his account of Jason’s tasks and in the very clear sense that Jason owes his success to Medea, something she angrily stresses in Heroides 12.⁶

Benoît’s interest in emphasising Medea’s role in the conquest of the Fleece might seem to reflect an interest in her power. After Jason’s triumph, however, Benoît abruptly cuts short the story, blaming Dares (whose De Excidio Troia Historia does not say a word about Medea) in his disingenuous observation ‘Ne Daires plus n’en voust escrire, / Ne Beneeiz pas ne l’alonge’ (As Dares does not wish to write any longer, so Benoît will not elaborate) (1.2064–5). Though the pair return to Iolcos in triumph, Benoît does not describe the killing of Apsyrtus or Pelias, or the rejuvenation of Aeson, and refers only obliquely to Medea’s final revenge, which, as Morse shows, he ascribes to ‘The gods’ rather than to Medea herself.⁷ His determined ignoring of the grisly events he would have found amply referenced in the Heroides and Metamorphoses is noticeable and notable. The elision of Medea’s crimes, instantly obvious to those of his readers who might have recourse to Ovid, is problematic, betraying Benoît’s desire to construct a Medea who is powerful but essentially and predominantly a romance heroine, a woman whose power serves male interests in a productive way, and who is intended above all to demonstrate the pitfalls of what Nolan calls ‘young, foolish love’.⁸

This version of the story was popular in its own right, and spawned several prose redactions. The enduring legacy of the Roman, particularly with regard to the presentation of Medea, however, is its impact on the Latin work of Guido delle Colonne.⁹ Despite his emphasis on Medea’s sensitivity and his refusal to dwell on the most negative aspects of her classical characterisation, such as her violence and anger, Benoît’s account ironically provides the model for one of the most concerted attacks on Medea in the Middle Ages, Guido’s deeply misogynistic Historia Destructionis Troiae, completed in 1287.¹⁰ The Historia is a Latin translation of a prose redaction of Benoît’s work (though it does not advertise itself as such, claiming instead to draw directly on Dares). It is a translation with significant additions and alterations, however, for though he follows the basic outline of the story that he inherits from Benoît, Guido makes critical and often virulently misogynistic additions to Benoît’s observations on Medea’s power and abilities, and her love for Jason. For example, while Benoît suggested an intimate and passionate relationship between Jason and Medea, Guido makes this far more explicit and characterises Medea as in control and sexually insatiable, in ways that would be deeply alarming for the male medieval reader:

Medea licet sui uoti satisfactionem impleuerit per uiriles amplexus et optatos actus uenereos a Iasone, propterea non euanuit scintilla cupidinis in eadem; immo per expertos actos postea grauiora concepit incendia quam per facinus ante commissum. (p. 25)

[A]lthough Medea enjoyed the satisfaction of her wishes through the manly embraces and longed for acts of love by Jason, still the spark of lust did not die down in her; on the contrary, when the acts were finished, she conceived a more intense passion than she had before the thing was done. (3.117–21)¹¹

Crucially, Guido also extends his criticism of Medea into an attack on all women, as he criticises her willingness to deceive her father (and herself) over the nature of her desire for Jason:

Omnium enim mulierum semper est moris ut cum inhonesto desiderio uirum aliquem appetunt, sub alicuius honestatis uelamine suas excusationes intendant. (p. 18)

For it is always the custom of women, that when they yearn for some man with immodest desire, they veil their excuses under some sort of modesty. (2.294–6)

Guido’s inspiration for these lines may be the Metamorphoses, in which Medea wonders whether she is deluding herself as to the nature of her relationship with Jason, as she ponders whether to help him: ‘coniugiumne putas speciosaque nomina culpae / inponis, Medea, tuae?’ (But do you deem it marriage, Medea, and do you give fair-seeming names to your fault?) (7.69–70).¹² In Guido’s rendering, the answer is supplied: Medea clearly deludes herself that her desire for Jason is blameless. Her ability to follow the wrong course of action here makes her peculiarly alarming and worthy of a criticism that can be conveniently extended to medieval women.

Similarly, just as he makes it clear that her sexual desire for Jason is a flaw in Medea’s character and one which should be condemned, Guido seeks to undermine the magical power that Benoît has suggested and which he finds so threatening. After including Benoît’s description of Medea’s powers, Guido feels driven to include a lengthy explanation of how Medea could not really have enjoyed the power over God and nature that Benoît ascribes to her. Guido attributes such stories to ‘fabularis Sulmonensis Ouidius’ (p. 16) (‘that storytelling Ovid of Sulmo’) (2.206–7), and later he points out that Medea ultimately proves unable to foresee her own undoing:

Sed certum est astronomie iudicia super incerto firmata, de quo manifestum exemplum potenter et patenter in te elicitur, que tibi prouidere per ea nullatenus potuisti … In quibus nullus deprehenditur futurorum effectus, nisi a casu forte contingat, cum solius Dei sit, in cuius manu sunt posita scire tempora temporum et momenta. (pp. 24–5)

It is certain the judgements of astronomy are based upon uncertainty, of which the manifest example is most powerfully and plainly seen in you, who were in no way able to see into the future through astronomy … In these things no effect of the future is to be discovered, unless perhaps it is touched upon by chance, since it is of God alone, in whose hand is the knowledge of times and the moments of times. (3.103–11)

Like Benoît, Guido ends his account of Medea once the pair leave Colchis, observing of her: ‘Sane diceris peruenisse in Thesaliam, ubi per Thesalum Iasonem, ciuibus inueneranda Thesalicis, occulta nece post multa detestanda discrimina uitam legeris finiuisse’ (p. 32) (You are said to have arrived in Thessaly where, on account of Thessalian Jason you are described as having finished your life with an obscure death, despised by the Thessalian citizens, after many detestable adventures) (3.379–82). Guido is far more keen than Benoît to characterise Medea as alarming, to linger on her unseemly desire for Jason and hint at the crimes she goes on to commit (which are not, as they are in Benoît’s poem, ascribed to the gods). Guido sees nothing to commend in Medea’s abilities, however, and as a result he either questions the very existence of such power, or else turns it into an attack on women. These are two approaches that would retain their popularity into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even as later versions of Medea’s story became more widely read in England than the Historia Destructionis Troiae.

Medea in allegorical and moralising tradition

If Medea’s story was turned to the ends of romance and misogynistic criticism by Benoît and Guido, equally important are those uses of her which reflect another abiding interest of medieval writers: the tradition of summarising or allegorising classical authors, particularly Ovid. Medea had featured in late antique and early medieval mythographies, such as the works of the Vatican Mythographers, Hyginus’ Fabulae and Fulgentius’ Mythologiae. In these works, her criminal power is described: for example, the second Vatican mythographer expands on the work of the first, which had described the murder of Glauce, and the attempted murder of Theseus, by explaining that Medea fled Corinth ‘suis Iasonisque natis interemtis’ (having killed the sons that belonged to her and to Jason) (138.35).¹³ The Fabulae, attributed uncertainly to the first-century ad Roman writer Hyginus, describes Medea’s killing of Pelias, Creusa and her sons, although, like Apollonius Rhodius’ earlier epic the Argonautica, it attributes the killing of Medea’s brother Apsyrtus (here an adult) to Jason.¹⁴ In the Metamorphoses, medieval authors would have found similar accounts of her violence and cruelty, but unlike the Vatican Mythographers and Hyginus, who give matter-of-fact descriptions of Medea’s abilities and crimes, writers who allegorise the poem often undermine her role, despite the compelling power they found in Ovid. For example, John of Garland’s mid-thirteenth-century commentary on the poem, the Integumenta Ovidii, picks up on Ov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• Introduction
• 1 Medieval Medea
• 2 Translating Medea
• 3 Tragic Medea
• 4 Comic Medea
• 5 Political Medea
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index