Gender, Power, and Persona in the Poetry of Baudri of Bourgueil by Susannah Giulia Brower A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Susannah Giulia Brower 2011 Gender, Power, and Persona in the Poetry of Baudri of Bourgueil Susannah Giulia Brower Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto 2011 Abstract The late eleventh and early twelfth centuries saw a revival in the study of Ovid in the literary circles of the Loire Valley region of France. The poetry of Baudri, abbot of Bourgueil from approximately 1078-1107 and archbishop of Dol from 1107 until his death in 1130, exemplifies this trend. Baudri‘s determinedly Ovidian collection contains 256 poems, several of which are addressed to nuns and to boys subject to his authority as abbot. Baudri‘s use of Ovid displays an intricate understanding of the issues of gender and power at play in Ovid‘s works, in particular the Ars Amatoria and Amores. Baudri uses his position of authority to manipulate his inferiors into behaving in ways that are pleasing to him, crafting an unflattering persona that shares many characteristics with the unsympathetic Ovidian amator and praeceptor amoris. Baudri‘s letters to boys problematically evoke the tradition of monastic friendship letters, using classical allusion to represent an inappropriately sexualized and manipulative discourse. His letter to the nun Constance and her reply depict a struggle for control of discourse. Constance, by following Ovid‘s instructions to the elegiac puella in her reply to Baudri, demonstrates that she is circumscribed by Baudri‘s dominant male discourse, which she nonetheless manages to undermine from within. Baudri‘s depiction of the power relationships between himself and his social inferiors mirrors the relationship between the Ovidian praeceptor amoris and the elegiac puella, and consequently engages with the plight of his inferiors in the same way that Ovid‘s ii poetry draws attention to the dangerous lives of the courtesans in his elegy. Furthermore, his Ovidianism can be situated within the context of the contemporary Gregorian Reforms. In the same way that the puella can be seen as a projection of elite Roman males‘ experience of disenfranchisement amidst the rise of the Principate, Baudri‘s problematic correspondence with his social inferiors reflects social anxieties in the face of the Church‘s assertion of centralized power and curtailment of clerical freedoms. iii Acknowledgments I have been extremely fortunate in the support I have received at all stages of writing this dissertation. Most importantly I want to thank my supervisor, Professor David Townsend, whose patience and guidance have been unfailing throughout my time at Toronto. He has been a constant source of support as I have completed my coursework, my major fields, and now this dissertation, helping me organize my scattered thoughts into a coherent topic and take the project into a far more sophisticated direction than I had initially imagined. He is always willing to make time to talk about ideas, even by phone when he is out of town, and I could not have asked for a better supervisor. I also thank the rest of my dissertation advisory committee, Professors John Magee and Alison Keith, both of whom devoted a great deal of their time to reading and providing helpful feedback on drafts. Professor Keith generously agreed to join the committee even though she had only met me once, and she has always taken care to include me in Classics department events that may be of interest. Professor Magee has consistently gone out of his way to be helpful, starting during my MA year when he took time out of his busy schedule to supervise a directed reading course for me. Finally, I am grateful to the whole committee for their forbearance and understanding during my final rush to submit before the deadline. Professor Lawrin Armstrong deserves special mention for all of his help during my major fields. I wish that there had been a feasible way of working the Humanists into the dissertation, because it would have given me an excuse to keep him on board. I would also like to thank Grace Desa, Rosemary Beattie, and Liz Pulickeel, without whom I suspect the Centre would entirely cease to function. I am very grateful to Professors Michael Herren and Sharon James, my internal and external examiners, for their time and attention. Both professors gave me thought-provoking and useful feedback, and their insights will be a tremendous help as I continue my work on this topic. Extra thanks are due to Professor James, whose own work on elegy was one of my main sources of inspiration for this dissertation. I would never have decided to pursue a graduate degree if not for the encouragement I received as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College. I owe a debt of gratitute to the entire faculty of the French and Classics departments, but in particular to Professors Darby Scott, Grace Armstrong, iv and especially Julia Gaisser. Professors Armstrong and Gaisser have kept in touch with me and encouraged me in my various endeavors, and I appreciate their mentorship more than I can say. I would also like to thank my high school Latin teacher, Gale McCall. I only took Latin in tenth grade because the psychology class I wanted to take was full. But her teaching was so inspiring that I immediately fell in love with the subject, and here I am now. Many of my friends have been a source of support through the years. From Bryn Mawr, Kathryn Kleppinger and Sarah Janda deserve special mention; my time abroad in France and Italy would have been nowhere near as much fun without them. Thanks also go to Stephanie Riley for generously agreeing to proofread my bibliography. At Toronto, my fellow students have been a source of both moral support and academic collaboration. Thanks in particular go to Beth Watkins, Laura Mitchell, Dan Brielmaier, Clare Snow, Jen Konieczny, Eileen Kim, Emily Butler, Emily Blakelock, Anna Wilson, Justin Haynes, Sandy Carpenter, Giselle Gos, Alice Hutton Sharp, Abbie Owen, Kaitlin Heller, Vanessa McCarthy, Jen Gilchrist, Steffany Campbell, Rachel Kessler, Lindsay Irvin, Amy Tanzer Hawkes, the entire Facebook Thesis Support Group, and many others. They are the sort of friends who will drop everything to help in a crisis, no matter how busy they are themselves. I can‘t end without thanking one Sam the Cat. Adopting him last year provided a much-needed morale boost at a time when everything seemed to be going wrong. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their endless support, especially my brothers, Natty and Ben Brower, who on occasion drove me to Toronto from Syracuse, picked me up at train stations, drove me to airports, and helped me whenever I needed it. The biggest thanks of course go to my parents, Rena and David Brower, to whom this work is dedicated. I can‘t even begin to list everything they have done for me, and I could never have made it anywhere near this far without them. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments ..................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... vi Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1 Contemporary and Medieval Approaches to Ovid ..................................................... 18 Chapter 2 The Baudri-Constance Correspondence and Other Poems to Women ........................ 54 Chapter 3 Baudri‘s Poems to Boys ..........................................................................................113 Chapter 4 The Historical-Political Context of Baudri‘s Poetry .................................................169 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................216 Bibliography ...........................................................................................................................224 Primary Sources: Editions, Commentaries, and Translations ...............................................224 Secondary Sources ..............................................................................................................227 vi 1 Introduction Baudri of Bourgueil, sometimes called Baldric of Dol,1 was a prolific author of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries who served as abbot of Bourgueil and ultimately as archbishop of Dol-de-Bretagne. The bulk of Baudri‘s literary output, which will be discussed below, consists of prose works, but he also published a diverse collection of poetry; his Ovidian letter poems, specifically those addressed to nuns and boys, are the subject of this dissertation. When discussing Baudri‘s Ovidianism, previous scholars have tended to focus on his use of the Heroides. While I agree that the Heroides represent an extremely important source text for Baudri, here I explore instead his use of Ovid‘s Ars and Amores, and discuss the implications of his decision to emulate the elegiac genre as an abbot. I argue that the current feminist understanding of Ovidian elegy is instructive for such an inquiry, because the same concerns with power and gender that feminist scholars have noted in Ovid are also visible in Baudri‘s adaptations of Ovid. In Chapter