Note 545 — Chapter I · BEFORE DANTE.

Three other poems of the twelfth or early thirteenth century (referred to above) are more original, two of them at least are more amusing, and all have obtained more notice from general literary historians. These are the Speculum Stultorum or Brunellus of Nigel Wireker, the Architrenius (see p. 410) of John of Hauteville, and the Anti-Claudianus of Alanus de Insulis. All three may be found most conveniently in Wright’s above-cited work, Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets of the Twelfth Century (2 vols., Rolls Series, London, 1872). They are by no means to be neglected by us, though their testimony is mostly negative, and a slight reference to its nature will cover, indirectly, the absence of reference in the text to such still more generally famous authors as John of Salisbury and Walter Mapes himself. It is probable that all five writers, as well as Godfrey of Winchester (also in Wright, op. cit.), who could write fair epigrams in the more decent style of Martial, and others, were well acquainted with no inconsiderable part of the classics. Upon satirists, moreover, like Wireker and John of Hauteville, who were attacking the vanity of monkish and clerical life, hopes, and ambitions, the labour-in-vain of Universities, and the like, some such indirect but substantive literary criticism as we find in their Roman originals would seem almost imperative. But there is nothing of the kind, either in the Speculum or in the Architrenius. In the much duller Anti-Claudianus, Rhetoric, like the other arts, appears, and she is employed, consistently with her presentation in Martianus (though the Rhetoric of Capella would perhaps have been too proud to do this directly) to “paint and gild the pole” of the allegorical Chariot of Prudence. But of criticism there is nothing, or so little as to be nothing. Nor will much be found in the interesting notice of mediæval notices of books and book collections which occurs in M. Cocheris’ ed. of the Philobiblon (v. infra, p. 455), pp. xxxiv-xlvii.