Imagining Subterranean Peoples and Places in Medieval Latin 00 Literature 105

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Mediaevistik 32 . 2019 105 2020 Scott G. Bruce

00 Sunt altera nobis sidera, sunt orbes alii: Imagining Subterranean Peoples and Places in Medieval Latin 00 Literature 105

118 Owing to the enduring popularity of Jules Verne’s science fiction story Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), modern readers have taken for granted a hollow, habitable 2020 core beneath the earth’s crust as a time-honored, though scientifically implausible, setting for speculative fiction.1 Verne’s fantastic tale of Professor Otto Lidenbrock’s descent into the Icelandic volcano Snæfellsjökull and his perilous adventures underground featuring forests of giant mushrooms and prehistoric monsters remains the most widely read work of nineteenth-century “subterranean fiction.” In 1926, the story was reprinted in a three-part serial in the widely-read American science fiction maga- zine Amazing Stories (Fig. 1). Throughout the twentieth century, it spawned a host of imitators, from Edgar Rice Burrough’s Pellucidar series (1914‒1963) to C. S. Lewis’ Narnian chronicle The Silver Chair (1953), as well as a successful 1959 film adaptation starring James Mason and Pat Boone. The notion that the earth was both hollow and habitable predated Jules Verne by at least two centuries. In 1665, the German Jesuit and polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602‒1680) published his lavishly illustrated, two-volume Mundus subterraneus, an 800‒page potpourri of scientific knowledge and folkloric accretion about the geography and ecology of subterranean realms, with long digressions on the existence of underworld megafauna, like giants and dragons, and some first-rate speculation on the site of lost Atlantis.2 Like the hero of Verne’s story, Kircher was intrigued by the possibility that volcanoes provided gateways to the lightless world below. In 1638, he had himself lowered into the active crater of Mount Vesuvius in the Gulf of Naples, because, in his own words “[a]fter having searched out the incredible power of Nature working in sub- terraneous burrows and passages, I had a great desire to know whether Vesuvius also had not some secret commerce and correspondence with Stromboli and Aetna.”3 (Fig. 2) Historians of science have typically situated Kircher’s work at the beginning of a tradition of critical inquiry into what we would now call the geological sciences, but his indebtedness to the Hebrew scriptures and to ancient literature on the topic of subterranean worlds suggests that these parts of his magnum opus are better understood as a summa of premodern speculation about people and places that may exist below the earth’s surface. In fact, Mundus subterraneus stands at the end of an even longer tradition of imagining what lies beneath the earth's crust that dates back to the Greeks and the Romans, who did much to inform medieval thinkers and story-tellers. It is the purpose of this paper to examine evidence from Latin literature of the Euro- pean Middle Ages for the idea that the earth was both hollow and habitable.4 It begins

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Fig. 1: Amazing Stories (June 1926), featuring Part 2 of a three-part serial of Jules Verne’s novel, here entitled “A Trip to the Center of the Earth.”

with the ancient notion that the territory below the earth’s surface belongs primarily to the spirits of the dead. Following the maps of the netherworld left by Greek and Roman poets and Hebrew prophets, Christian thinkers likewise imagined a vast subterranean Mediaevistik 32 . 2019 107

Fig. 2: Cross-section of Vesuvius in Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneanus.

realm populated by departed souls.5 While the idea of an infernal underworld domina- ted the premodern subterranean imagination, beginning in the twelfth century stories featuring underworld inhabitants also appeared in collections of wonders and in works of hagiography. Two of these stories, the first about green children who emerged from a cave in Suffolk, England, and the second about a pygmy who cursed an ancient king of the Britons, are well known; another, expressive of the fear among Christians that their Muslim adversaries made use of underground caves and passageways, has thus far escaped critical attention. While unrelated to one another, these anecdotes provide compelling evidence that twelfth-century thinkers writing in Latin had active and vivid ideas about the world below.

1. Descensus ad infernos

Ancient notions about the geography of the afterlife did much to inform medieval thinkers about the possibility that there was more than loose soil and hard rock beneath their feet. Drawing on the traditions of the Greeks enshrined in the works of Hesiod and Homer, Roman authors claimed that human souls departed from their corpses 108 Mediaevistik 32 . 2019 upon death and migrated to a realm of their own, invisible to the eyes of the living. The location of the kingdom of the dead was a matter of some debate, but most authorities situated it below the ground and identified particular rivers, caves, and volcanic craters as possible entrances. Under extraordinary circumstances, heroes like Odysseus and Aeneas braved the threshold of this kingdom to obtain information that only the dead could know, but ordinary mortals could not enter until their souls left their bodies. Medieval monks first encountered Roman literature as children in the classroom.6 A ninth-century schoolbook from the abbey of Reichnau claimed that “[l]ittle children, of course, read Virgil for the reason that the great poet, the most renowned and best of all, when absorbed by tender minds, may not be easily obliterated by forgetful- ness, because according to the dictum of Horace: A jar will keep for a long time the scent in which it was steeped when it was new.”7 Owing to the central role played by the Aeneid in the medieval curriculum, Virgil’s account of Aeneas’ intrepid descent into the underworld was the most widely read story about the ancient land of the dead among monastic readers in the Middle Ages.8 After making the appropriate sacrifices to the goddess Night, to her sister Earth, and to Persephone, the unwilling bride of Hades, Aeneas drew his sword, plucked up his courage, and raced after his guide, the Sibyl of Cumae, as she “plunged wildly into the open cave” (tantum effata furens antro se immisit aperto) that led down to the realm of spirits and silent shadows, where they would learn things that were “buried in the deep earth and the darkness” (pandere res alta terra et caligine mersas).9 Medieval monks dismissed literal readings of the pagan rituals that attended Aene- as’s journey below, but they found confirmation that the dead dwelled underground in an ancient authority even more powerful than Virgil’s poetry: the Hebrew scriptures. In the Old Testament, the abode of the dead is called She’ol, which the translators of the Septuagint later rendered into Greek as Hades (ᾅ δ η ς) and Jerome, later still, into Latin as Hell (infernus).10 In the Hebrew scriptures, She’ol is depicted as a grim and lifeless place below the earth described variously as a grave, a tomb, and most often a pit.11 There the souls of the dead abide bereft of the qualities and ambitions that they possessed in life: “Their love, their hate, and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun … for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.”12 She’ol was presumably the subterranean abode from which Saul ordered the witch of Endor to raise up the ghost of the prophet Samuel.13 Only the mercy of God could deliver his followers from this place of anguish. As the psalmist exclaimed with relief: “For great is your mercy upon me and you have plucked my soul from the very depths of Hell” (de inferno extremo).14 These ancient ideas about the realm of the dead informed patristic discussions about the location of Hell and ultimately reinforced the prevailing view that it was situated below the surface of the earth. Augustine (354‒430) was initially equivocal on the question. In Book 19 of his magisterial treatise Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, written in the 420s, he imagined Hell in terms of the condition of the sinner’s soul rather than its physical location after death: “The wretchedness of those who do not belong to this City of God will be everlasting. This is called the ‘second death’ because the soul cannot be said to be alive in that state, when it is separated from the life Mediaevistik 32 . 2019 109 of God, nor can the body, when it is subjected to eternal torments.”15 But a few years later, on the eve of his own death in 430, the bishop of Hippo wrote in his retrospective Retractions that upon further consideration he firmly believed that Hell is located under the ground.16 Gregory the Great (ca. 540‒604) was less equivocal than Augustine. In the final book of his Dialogues, which appeared in 594, the pope told stories about the fate of the souls of ordinary Christians to a young disciple named Peter. When Pe- ter asked his master if Christians should believe that Hell is located above the earth or beneath it, Gregory replied with recourse to Psalm 85: “For there are some who believe that Hell is in a certain part of the world, while others believe that it is under the earth. But it seems to me that, if we call it hell (infernus) because it lies below (inferius), then hell should be as far beneath the earth as the earth is beneath heaven. It is because of this, perhaps, that the psalmist says, ‘You have plucked my soul from the very depths of Hell (de inferno extremo).’”17 Abstract ruminations on the location of Hell found their counterpart in popular stories that featured a subterranean realm of dead souls. The most successful of these was the Gospel of Nicodemus, an apocryphal gospel originally composed in Greek during late antiquity. It circulated widely in the Middle Ages in an anonymous Latin translation.18 The oldest part of this work, the so-called Acts of Pilate, retold with miraculous flourishes the trial of Jesus based on the canonical account in the Gospel of Luke. The second section of the Gospel of Nicodemus is a later addition known as Christ’s Des- cent into Hell (Descensus ad infernos). This is couched as the testimony of men raised from the dead by Jesus, who were “in the depths in the darkness of shadows” with everyone who has died since the beginning of the world and therefore witnessed its harrowing firsthand.19 They then returned to life to bear witness to the truth of Christ’s resurrection and his power over death. The depiction of Hades as both a personified character who rules over the dead and the location in which the narrative takes place complicates our understanding of the author’s conception of the physical location of Hell, but the subterranean setting is clear both from Christ’s need to descend to the gates of Hades’s realm and from Adam’s statement of gratitude upon his liberation: “O Lord, because you have brought my soul up from the depths (ab inferis), you have saved me from those descending into the lake (of fire).”20 Translated into a host of vernacular languages, the Gospel of Nicode- mus was without doubt the most widely read apocryphal text in the Middle Ages and exerted a strong influence on devotional practices centered on the Passion of Christ.21 To be sure, dead souls are not living people and no ancient authority postulated the existence of a subterranean realm inhabited by sentient creatures. But these early ref- lections on the location of the netherworld suggest that medieval people could incorpo- rate a world beneath the ground within the horizons of their geographical knowledge. Time and again, encounters with Roman literature presented medieval readers with descriptive tableaus of this unfathomed land below. The most evocative may have been Claudian Claudianus’s unfinished mythological epic The Rape of Proserpine (De raptu Proserpinae), written around the year 400 C.E. While it did not enjoy the universal popularity of the works of Virgil, Claudian’s poetry was a mainstay of the medieval curriculum. Monastic scribes eagerly copied and sometimes even decorated manuscripts of his work.22 By the late Middle Ages, authors from Vincent of Beauvais to 110 Mediaevistik 32 . 2019

Geoffrey Chaucer attest to the poem’s enduring influence, especially as an authority on the underworld. In the second book of Claudian’s Rape of Proserpine, Hades soothed his reluctant bride with the promise that she would not live in a lightless underworld: “Do not believe that you have lost the daylight. We have other stars and other worlds, and you will see a purer light and wonder rather at the sun of Elysium and its righteous inhabitants.”23 With these words, Claudian delineated for medieval readers the lost horizons of an ancient subterranean realm that the living could only visit upon death.

2. De terra emergentibus

Having populated the putative netherworld with the souls of the dead, medieval thinkers did not nurture a repertoire of stories concerning subterranean peoples and their habitat. When these authors did hint at the possibility that there was a habitable land below the surface of the earth, they usually couched their tales in terms of surface encounters with underworld inhabitants, rather than in terms of the foray of surface-dwellers to uncharted regions below. English chroniclers writing in the decades around 1200 told one such story about the green children of Woolpit, who had migrated to the surface world from their subterranean home during the reign of King Stephen (1135‒1154). In his History of English Affairs (Historia rerum anglicarum, written ca. 1190), the Augustinian canon William of Newburgh called the appearance of these children in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk “a prodigy unprecedented since the world began” (inauditum a seculis prodigium).24 Abbot Ralph of Coggeswall agreed, including an account of this marvel (mira) in his English Chronicle (Chronicon Anglicanum, written ca. 1220) under the chapter heading “Concerning a boy and a girl who came up out of the earth” (De quodam puero et puella de terra emergentibus).25 William and Ralph tell very much the same story about these green children, though they differ in some of the details. As the story goes, two unknown children – a girl and her younger brother – appeared one day near the village of Woolpit. Their appearance was striking as much for its suddenness as for their odd countenance and behavior, for their skin was green in hue, their clothes were “of unusual color and unknown mate- rial” (coloris insoliti ex incognita materia veste operti), and they could not speak the local language of the villagers.26 The children were very hungry, but they recognized no food except for beans until the locals taught them how to eat bread. They eventu- ally lost their green color and learned how to speak the native dialect. In time, they received baptism and joined the community, but the little boy died at an early age. His sister, however, “differing not even in the slightest way from the women of our own kind” (nec in modico a nostri generis feminis descrepante), took a husband and beca- me fully integrated into village life.27 When the green children had obtained sufficient language proficiency, the villagers asked them where they had come from. They replied that they were people from St. Martin’s land, who were pasturing their flocks when they heard the distant tolling of unknown bells. In William of Newburgh’s version of the story, the children related that after suffering from a kind of temporary madness (“it was as though we were out of Mediaevistik 32 . 2019 111 our minds” – tanquam in quodam mentis excessu positi), they suddenly found them- selves near the ancient ditches that gave the village of Woolpit its name.28 According to Ralph of Coggeswall’s account, however, the children followed the sweetness of the sound of the bells from their homeland pastures into a cave, through which they wan- dered for a long time before entering into our world. Although they were struck with terror when they realized that they had strayed so far from home, they could not find the entrance of the cave from which they had emerged.29 Both William and Ralph seem to have agreed on the point that the homeland of the children was a dim, subterranean place. Both accounts relate that in response to further questioning the girl maintained that “the sun does not rise among the natives of our land and it obtains very little light from the sun’s rays, but is satisfied with that measure of its brightness which in your country precedes its rising or follows its setting.”30 Moreover, she explained that “a shining land” (terra quaedam lucida) was visible not far from St. Martin’s land, but separated from it by the broad expanse of a river.31 For their part, modern scholars have been less interested in the location of St. Martin’s land than in explaining the green hue of the children’s skin. In his article “The Colour Green,” Derek Brewer dismissed the fantastic elements of the episode and posited that the story grew out of an incident involving children who had strayed too far from their forest village and “(in modern terms) did not know their own home address.”32 He explained the green hue of their skin as a symptom of chlorosis, a kind of anemia caused by iron deficiency that is also known as green sickness because it turns the skin of those afflicted a greenish hue. But the story is -ex ceptional among medieval narratives because it posits a subterranean realm inhabited by Christian people who differ little from surface-dwellers. It is, in fact, the first such story to break the uncontested hegemony of the notion of a purely infernal world below the earth’s crust. Contemporary with these tales of the green children of Woolpit was the story of King Herla recounted by Walter Map (ca. 1140‒ca. 1210) in his collection of satirical anecdotes entitled On the Trifles of the Courtiers (De nugis curialium).33 According to Map, an ancient monarch of the Britons named Herla was cursed by a king who lived beneath the earth. This subterranean ruler was “a veritable pygmy, for the smallness of his stature was no greater than that of a monkey … this little man rode on a large goat and could be described as a kind of Pan.”34 The pygmy appeared unannounced before Herla one day and foretold the arrival of ambassadors from the king of the Franks who brought a marriage proposal for him. The pygmy then showed up at the wedding with a great multitude of his kind, who served the human guests with vessels made of gold and precious stones. In return for this favor, Herla promised to attend the pygmy king’s wedding on the same day the very next year. True to his word, the king of Britons repaid the debt by visiting his fellow monarch’s kingdom, which they entered through a cavern in the face of a very tall cliff cauer( - nam igitur altissime rupis ingrediuntur). From there, Herla and his entourage passed “through darkness into a light which did not seem to come from the sun or the moon, but from many lanterns” and arrived “at the homes of the pygmies, a dwelling place ever bit as handsome as the palace of the sun described by Ovid.”35 Even though Herla kept his promise to attend the pygmy king’s wedding and fulfilled his pact appropria- 112 Mediaevistik 32 . 2019 tely, his host cursed the departing humans by giving them a small bloodhound as a gift and warning the king and his entourage not to dismount from their horses until the dog jumped down. When Herla returned to the surface world, he found to his dismay that hundreds of years had passed; his own name was a distant legend. Even worse, when some of the members of his entourage came down from their horses, they immediately turned to dust. Cursed in this way by the pygmy king, Herla and his entourage were doomed to an endless, fruitless march. Walter Map’s depiction of the pygmy monarch and his home beneath the earth drew from classical literature of the ancient Mediterranean rather than northern European mythology.36 Map’s allusions to the Greek god Pan and to the palace of Phoebus reveal his indebtedness to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but the subterranean setting of the kingdom of the pygmies seems to have been his own invention.37 While the tale served his satirical purpose – Herla’s court prefigured the hectic and ineffectual routines of the court of Map’s employer King Henry II – another twelfth-century author, the Anglo- Norman monk and historian Orderic Vitalis (ca. 1075‒ca. 1142), invested this ancient story with a warning about the restless wanderings of the sinful dead in the world to come.38 Unlike Map, however, Orderic left out the part about the pygmy king and his underground kingdom.

3. Per subterraneas cavernas

Some medieval claims about dwellers below the earth were far less fanciful than these tales about the green children of Woolpit and the pygmy king who doomed King Her- la and may have been founded on empirical information and plausible concern. One such story appeared in the twelfth-century Life of Bernard of Tiron.39 Written in the late 1140s by a monk named Geoffrey Grossus at the request of Geoffrey II of Lèves, bishop of Chartres, this vita provided a hagiographical portrait of Abbot Bernard of Tiron (ca. 1046‒1116). A charistmatic reformer, Bernard’s presence loomed large in northern France in the tumultuous decades around the year 1100, when adherents to traditional forms of cloistered life faced challenges from those swept up in new cur- rents of religious enthusiasm that found expression in broad reinterpretations of the monastic vocation. As Geoffrey’s vita makes clear, Bernard’s career embodied many of these tensions. He was at various times a monk, prior, and abbot of a cenobitic community, but he was also a restless individual who retreated from his obligations to inhabit remote forests and craggy islands as a hermit. He argued unsuccessfully before Pope Paschal II to keep the abbey of Saint-Cyprien independent from the encroachment of the Cluniacs. Thereafter, he adopted with enthusiasm the vocation of a wandering preacher in the company of Robert of Arbrissel, the founder of Fontrevault, and Vital of Mortain, who would establish the Order of Savigny. In 1109, with the support of the crusading noble Rotrou II, Count of Perche, Bernard founded the monastery of Tiron to the west of Chartres. This religious community would enjoy considerable success after Bernard’s death in 1116 as the motherhouse of a congregation of dozens of reformed Benedictine abbeys and priories that survived until its dissolution during the French Revolution. Mediaevistik 32 . 2019 113

One of the most striking anecdotes of Geoffrey’s vita is a case of mistaken identity. Shortly after 1109, when Bernard and his followers established the abbey of Tiron to the west of Chartres in the most remote retreats of the forests of Perche, they adopted habits of the most modest sort.40 Geoffrey went out of his way to describe them as “cheap, unadorned, and shaggy; not at all like the habits worn by other monks and much more like the very sheep from which they had been taken.”41 Indeed, the attire of Bernard and his brethren was so course and unusual that the local inhabitants of the region did not even recognize them as monks. Instead, due to their bestial appearance, the dwellers of Perche mistook the holy men of Tiron for Saracen infiltrators, who they believed had come through underground caves (per subterraneas cavernas) to spy upon them.42 Upon closer inspection, these boorish rustics, as Geoffrey called them, quickly realized their mistake. They found that the monks were peaceful and unarmed rather than devising evil schemes; they were building modest cells rather than fortifi- cations and towers; and they were ruminating on psalms and hymns rather than raging for war. Despite the novelty of their crude raiment, Bernard and his followers were not Saracens, but new prophets sent by God to dwell in the desert.43 Is it plausible that the rustic inhabitants of twelfth-century Perche truly believed that Muslims marauders posed a credible subterranean threat to their security and well-being? Geoffrey’s anecdote has no direct literary antecedent in classical or medieval descriptions of Saracen activity, but it does have a close analogue in contemporary Cluniac hagiography. In the summer of 972, Abbot Maiolus of Cluny and his entourage were kidnapped by Saracens as they crossed the heights of the Great Saint Bernard Pass when returning to Burgundy from Rome.44 Throughout the early tenth century, Muslims had harried merchant and pilgrim traffic through the Alpine passes from their base at a citadel called Fraxinetum on the coast of Provence (modern La Garde-Freinet, near St. Tropez). They ransomed the abbot of Cluny for a sizable sum, but the insult of his capture galvanized the will of local Christian lords who rallied their troops and wiped out the Saracen settlement once and for all. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the brethren of Cluny told and retold the story of Maiolus’s abduction in works of hagiography written to promote his sanctity. While the ear- liest accounts of the abbot’s kidnapping are spare with respect to the details of the physical setting of the Muslim ambush high in the Alps, a twelfth-century retelling of the story written by a monk of Cluny named Nalgod during the abbacy of Peter the Venerable (1122‒1156) — and thus contemporary with Geoffrey’s Life of Bernard — prominently features the use of caves by these Saracen adventurers.45 In Nalgod’s version of the story, we learn that Maiolus and his companions took flight when they encountered the Muslims and reached the town of Pons-Ursariae (modern Orsières, in Switzerland). There they were captured and stripped of their possessions before their abductors hauled them away into a hidden network of caverns in the mountainside (in abditas cavernas et diversoria montis) to await their fate.46 The intersection of details between Nalgod’s story and the vita of Bernard of Tiron suggests that two centuries after the abduction of Maiolus, the subterranean details of the story of his kidnapping by Muslim brigands still haunted the imagination of Christians in northern Europe. ******* 114 Mediaevistik 32 . 2019

In conclusion, while historians of science have lauded Athanasius Kircher’s late se- venteenth-century treatise Mundus subterraneus as the precursor to the geological sciences, doing so has hindered the exploration of the European Middle Ages as a time when poets, theologians, and story-tellers dared to imagine realms in the earth under their feet. To be sure, the rich inheritance of Greek, Roman, and Jewish traditions about the underworld exerted a profound influence on medieval Christian authors, who followed their lead in populating the world below with the souls of the dead. This tradition would endure unchallenged well into the early modern period, until Tobias Swindon argued that the location of Hell could not possibly lie beneath the earth’s surface, because the planet lacked both the mass to contain the innumerable souls of the damned and the heat necessary to torment them. Instead, in a treatise entitled An Enquiry into the Nature and Location of Hell (1714), he argued that the sun was a more plausible location of Hell because it was much larger than the earth and exponentially hotter. This novel theory found little purchase among Swindon’s contemporaries. While medieval Latin literature relied on ancient antecedents for information about the subterranean world, by the twelfth century there was clearly room for further rumination. The tales of the green children of Woolpit who strayed from St. Martin’s land, the fable told about the underground realm of the pygmy king who cursed King Herla, and the stories of the subterranean activities of marauding Muslims show that medieval people were not simply slavish imitators of ancient authorities about the netherworld. Instead, they propelled their imaginations into the depths of the earth to lend marvel, menace, and meaning to stories whose power to enthrall readers remains undiminished all of these centuries later.

Scott G. Bruce Department of History 614 Dealy Hall Fordham University Bronx, New York 10458 Scott Bruce

Endnotes

1 I presented an earlier draft of this paper at 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo MI (May 2016) in a session organized by Professor Ellen Arnold. The following abbreviations are used in this article: AASS = Acta sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, ed. Jean Bolland et al. (Paris, 1643–); and PL = Patrologiae Cur- sus Completus: Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 220 vols. (Paris: Migne-Garnier, 1844‒1890). For an entertaining popular survey of this literature, see David Standish, Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Ad- vanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth’s Surface (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Books, 2006), esp. pp. 109‒141 on Jules Verne. For a much longer view of human exploration beneath the earth’s surface, encompassing literature on geology, archaeology, and mythology, see Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019). Mediaevistik 32 . 2019 115

2 Athanasius Kircher, Mundus subterraneus in XII libros digestus, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Apud Joannem Janssonium à Waesberge & Filios, 1678). For a brief summary of his life and work with reference to earlier scholarship, see Agustín Udías, Jesuit Contribution to Science: A History (London: Springer, 2014), pp. 55‒68. 3 John Glassie, A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012), pp. 91‒96 (quotation at p. 94). 4 The present inquiry is limited to Latin sources composed before ca. 1200, but subterranean motifs abound in the vernacular literature of the later Middle Ages, a subject that demands further study. 5 Kircher himself was an heir of this tradition. When this man of science reached the lip of Vesuvius in 1638, amidst the “horrible bellowings and roarings” and the “unexpressible stink,” his first thought upon looking down into the crater was that he gazed upon “the ha- bitation of Hell, wherein nothing seemed to be much wanting besides the horrid fantasms and apparitions of Devils.” See Glassie, A Man of Misconceptions, p. 94. 6 For what follows, see John Contreni, “The Pursuit of Knowledge in Carolingian Europe,” The Gentle Voices of Teachers: Aspects of Learning in the Carolingian Age, ed. R. E. Sullivan (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1995), pp. 106‒141, rptr. in id., Le- arning and Culture in Carolingian Europe: Letters, Numbers, Exegesis, and Manuscripts (Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2011), no. II; and Anna A. Grotans, Reading in Medieval St. Gall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 49‒109. 7 Vita Noricensis II: “Virgilium nempe propterea parvuli legunt, ut videlicet poeta magnus ominium praeclarissimus atque optimus teneris ebibitus animis non facile oblivione possit aboleri, secundum illud Horatii: Quo semel est imbuta recens, servabit odorem testa diu.” ed. and trans. (slightly altered) Matthew Ciardiello and Jan M. Ziolkowski, in The Virgi- lian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski and Michael C. J. Putnam (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 280‒81. 8 More advanced students read classical texts alongside authoritative commentaries, the most extensive of which provided background about the life of the author as well as a word-by-word analysis of his work, including notes on his sources, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, as well as information about geographical references, mythological allusions, and the ways of understanding the text in different registers of interpretation (literal, mo- ral, allegorical, and so on). The early fifth-century commentary on Virgil by Servius was the authoritative guide to the poet in the early Middle Ages. For his treatment of the descent to the underworld in Book 6 of the Aeneid, see Frances Foster, “Servius on Virgil’s Underworld in Late Antiquity,” Imagining the Afterlife in the Ancient World, ed. Juliette Harrisson (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 173‒189. 9 Virgil, Aeneid 6.236‒267, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, in P. Vergili Maronis Opera (Oxford: Cla- rendon Press, 1969), pp. 234‒235 (quotations from lines 262 and 267, respectively). 10 The meaning of these terms changed in the process of translation from Hebrew to Greek to Latin. See Alan E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 11 Nicolas J. Tromp, Primitive Conceptions of Death and the Nether World in the Old Testa- ment (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1969); Bernstein, The Formation of Hell, pp. 131‒202; and Philip S. Johnson, Shades of Sheol: Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2002). 12 Ecclesiastes 9:6 and 9:10. 13 1 Samuel 28:11‒15. 14 Psalm 86.13. Compare Psalm 49.15‒16. 15 Augustine, De civitate Dei 19.28: “Eorum autem, qui non pertinenet ad istam ciuitatem Dei, erit e contrario sempiterna, quae mors etiam secunda dicitur, quia nec anima ibi ui- 116 Mediaevistik 32 . 2019

uere dicenda est, quae a uita Dei alienate erit, nec corpus, quod aeternis doloribus sub- iacebit.” ed. Emanuel Hoffmann, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 40.2 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1900), p. 423; trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin Classics, 1972), p. 894. 16 Augustine, Retractiones 2.50, ed. Pius Knöll, in Sancti Aureli Augustini Retractationum Libri Duo, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 36 (Vienna: F. Tempske, 1902), p. 160. 17 Gregory the Great, Dialogues 4.49, quoting Psalm 85.13: “Nonnulli namque in quadam terrarum parte infernum esse putauerunt, alii uero hunc sub terra esse aestimant. Sed tamen hoc animum pulsat, quia si idcirco infernum dicimus quia inferius iacet, quod terra ad caelum est, hoc esse inferus debet ad terram. Unde et fortasse per psalmistam dicitur: Liberasti animam mean ex inferno inferiori.” ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, in Grégoire le Grand, Dialogues, Tome III (Livre IV), Sources chrétiennes 265 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1980), pp. 156 and 158. 18 For a convenient single-text edition of the medieval Latin translation, see The Gospel of Nicodemus: Gesta Salvatoris, edited from the Codex Einsidlensis, Einsiedeln Stiftsbiblio- thek, MS 326, ed. H. C. Kim (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973). 19 “Nos cum essemus cum omnibus patribus nostris positi in profundo in calignine tenebra- rum.” ed. Kim, p. 36. 20 “Domine, eduxisti ab inferis animam meam, saluasti me a descendentibus in lacum.” ed. Kim, p. 44. 21 Zbigniew Izydorczyk, “The Evangelium Nicodemi in the Middle Ages,” in The Medieval Gospel of Nicodemus: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts in Western Europe (Tempe, Ari- zona: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), pp. 43‒101. On the enduring influence of underworld journeys of this kind in western literature, with an emphasis on Spenser and Milton, see Warren Tormey, “The Journey within the Journey: Catabasis and Travel Narrative in Late Medieval and Early Modern Epic,” Time, Travel, and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: Explorations of World Perceptions and Processes of Identity Formation, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2018), pp. 585‒621. 22 See, for example, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 228, made in northern France, ca. 1200‒1210. For a full description of this manuscript, see Illuminated Manuscripts in Cambridge: A Catalogue of Western Book Illumination in the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge Colleges, Part Three: France, Volume One: c. 1000‒c. 1250, ed. Deirdre Jackson, Nigel Morgan, and Stella Panayotova (London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller Pu- blishers, 2015), pp. 178‒79 (no. 62). 23 Claudian, De raptu Proserpinae 2.282‒285: “Amissum ne crede diem: sunt altera nobis / sidera, sunt orbes alii, lumenque videbis / purius Elysiumque magis mirabere solem / cultoresque pios.” ed. and trans. Claire Gruzelier, in Claudian, De raptu Proserpinae (Ox- ford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 42‒43. 24 William of Newburgh, Historia rerum anglicarum 1.27, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh and M. J. Kennedy, in William of Newburgh, The History of English Affairs, Book 1 (Warminster, Wiltshire: Aris & Phillips, 1988), pp. 114‒117. 25 Ralph of Coggeshalle, Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. Joseph Stevenson (London: Longman and Co., 1875), pp. 1‒208, at pp. 118‒120. 26 William of Newburgh, Historia rerum anglicarum 1.27, ed. Walsh and Kennedy, p. 114. 27 William of Newburgh, Historia rerum anglicarum 1.27, ed. Walsh and Kennedy, p. 116. 28 William of Newburgh, Historia rerum anglicarum 1.27, ed. Walsh and Kennedy, p. 116. 29 Ralph of Coggeshalle, Chronicon Anglicanum: “Qui inde emergentes, nimia claritate solis et insolita aeris temperie, quasi attoniti et examines effecti, diu super oram speluncae Mediaevistik 32 . 2019 117

jacuerunt. Cumque a supervenientium inquietudine terrerentur, diffugere voluerunt, sed introitum speluncae minime reperire potuerunt, donec ab eis comprehenderentur.” ed. Ste- venson, pp. 119‒120. 30 William of Newburgh, Historia rerum anglicarum 1.27: “‘Sed sol’ inquiunt ‘apud nostrates non oritur; cujus radiis terra nostra minime illustratur, illius claritatis modulo contenta quae apud vos solem vel orientem praecedit vel sequitur occidentem.” ed. Walsh and Kennedy, p. 116. Compare Ralph of Coggeshalle, Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. Stevenson, p. 119. 31 William of Newburgh, Historia rerum anglicarum 1.27, ed. Walsh and Kennedy, p. 116. 32 Derek Brewer, “The Colour Green,” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Johnathan Gibson (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997), pp. 181‒190, at p. 182. 33 For what follows, see Walter Map, De nugis curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles 1.11, ed. and trans. M. R. James, rev. ed. Christopher N. L. Brooke and Roger A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 25‒30. For a new translation of this episode, see The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters, ed. Scott G. Bruce (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), pp. 144‒146. 34 Walter Map, De nugis curialium 1.11: “pigmeus videbatur modicitate staturae, que non excedebat simiam. Institit homuncio capro maximo secundum fabulam insidens, vir qualis describi posset Pan.” ed. Brooke and Mynors, p. 26; trans. Bruce, p. 144. 35 Walter Map, De nugis curialium 1.11: “Et post aliquantas tenebras in lumine, quod non ui- debatur solis aut lune sed lampadarum multarum, ad domos pigmei transeunt, mansionem quidem honestam per omnia qualem Naso regiam describit solis.” ed. Brooke and Mynors, p. 27; trans. Bruce, p. 145. 36 While dwarves were common in medieval vernacular literature, they were vanishingly rare in the medieval Latin tradition. See Werner Schäfke, “Dwarves, Trolls, Ogres, and Giants,” in Handbook of Medieval Culture, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 347‒383, esp. pp. 348‒372, which surveys Celtic, Old French, Middle High German, and Old Norse literature. 37 Owing to their subterranean home, Jean-Claude Schmitt associated the pygmies of Walter Map’s story with the spirits of the dead, going so far as to call Herla “the king of the dead,” but that connection is not explicit in the anecdote. See Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 111‒112 and 184. 38 Orderic Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica 8.17, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, in The Ec- clesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968‒1980), vol. 4, pp. 135‒150. 39 The most accessible Latin text of this vita is Gaufridus Grossus, Vita Bernardi Tironiensis, PL 172, cols. 1362‒1446, a faulty reprint of Jean-Baptiste Souchet’s 1649 edition: Geoffroy le Gros, B. Bernardi, fundatoris et primi abbatis SS. Trinitatis de Tironio Vita, ed. Souchet (Paris: Chez Billainé, 1649). For an English translation, see Geoffrey Grossus, The Life of Blessed Bernard of Tiron, trans. Ruth Harwood Cline (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univer- sity of America Press, 2009). For what follows, see also Kathleen Thompson, The Monks of Tiron: A Monastic Community and Religious Reform in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 95‒125 on the career of Abbot Bernard. 40 Geoffrey,Vita Bernardi Tironiensis 70, PL 172, col. 1409. 41 Geoffrey,Vita Bernardi Tironiensis 71, PL 172, col. 1410: “Habitatoribus illius patriae penitus ignoti, habitum quidem monachi habentes, sed vilem, incultum, villosum, a cae- terorum habitu monachorum valde dissimilem, ovibus ipsis a quibus sumptus fuerat valde consimilem.” 42 Geoffrey,Vita Bernardi Tironiensis 71, PL 172, col. 1410: “Porro huiusmodi habitum rudes atque bestiales homines, in illis partibus habitantes, quia antea non noverant, abhorrebant; 118 Mediaevistik 32 . 2019

nec monachos eos, sed Saracenos, per subterraneas cavernas ad explorandos cives suos advenisse existimabant.” 43 Geoffrey,Vita Bernardi Tironiensis 71‒72, PL 172, col. 1410. 44 On this episode and its representation in Cluniac hagiography, see Scott G. Bruce, Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet: Hagiography and the Problem of Islam in Medieval Europe (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015). 45 Nalgodus, Vita Maioli, edited under the title Vita ex prolixoribus coaevorum actis a Nal- godo monacho post sesqui secum contracta, in AASS Maii 2:657‒67. For a brief account of Nalgod’s career and literary activity, see Rémy Ceillier, Histoire générale des auteurs sacrés et ecclesiastiques (Paris: L. Vivès, 1757), 21:412‒13. 46 Nalgodus, Vita Maioli 22, in AASS Maii 2: 662.