European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages

by Ernst Robert Curtius, Colin Burrow (Introduction)

Published just after the Second World War, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is a sweeping exploration of the remarkable continuity of European literature across time and place, from the classical era up to the early nineteenth century, and from the Italian peninsula to the British Isles. In what T. S. Eliot called a "magnificent" book, Ernst Robert Curtius establishes medieval Latin literature as the vital transition between the literature of antiquity and the vernacular literatures of later centuries. The result is nothing less than a masterful synthesis of European literature from Homer to Goethe.



European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is a monumental work of literary scholarship. In a new introduction, Colin Burrow provides critical insights into Curtius's life and ideas and highlights the distinctive importance of this wonderful book.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Literature, Medieval, 20th Century

696 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

Ernst Robert Curtius was a German literary scholar, a philologist and Romance language literary critic. He is best known for his 1948 work Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter.

Reviews

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite early on, as in the seventh or eighth sentence of the Epistles, Seneca notes that it is best to know the masters well rather than know a little bit about every sort of text. We see this vision more recently in the pedagogical offerings of Nabokov, Derrida, and Bloom, as well as in patterns of good men we may know or have heard of. With this man increasingly in agreement with Seneca since about age 26, i.e. zeroing in on mastery of the masters, rather than attempting to have a hand in every inconsequentially esoteric nook and cranny of seasonal subway fads, which then trickle into the lesser cities two years later and the towns a good five years later (I have seen this in my scholarly wanderings in terms of Robert(?) Bolano, Ugh Boots (V. fitting title), something profane I believe is entitled 'Pokeymon', &c. (Echoing Melville, as he echoed Job: "And I have only escaped to tell thee").

The liberation in discarding that which is mainstream is the liberation of solitude; the contemplatives know it well. The summit of peace is solitude with adequate beverage, bread, and materials for whatever it is one loves most to do. Anyone - which is to say most - who believes that human freedom lies in solitude's opposite, masses of brainwashed fools demanding that which will annihilate them first, are of course caricatures of themselves. Ours is, in a word, a planet of caricatures.

But in all of this, on a sleepless evening, I am getting at the fact that E.R. Curtius is indeed now officially part of my Heuristic Canon. We might add Augustine, Hegel, Lonergan, and Ingarden to this list too, with about 45 others that may be hidden now, but that shall in time be made manifest.

For the professional scholar, the lay scholar, or even one with scholarly inclinations borne of a desire to simply become the polar opposite of what society considers 'progressive', one cannot hit the literary-critical mark much higher than Curtius here. Yes, you should have an encyclopedic knowledge of European Literature and the intention to actually work with Curtius's many notes; for I myself have often been derailed by Curtius amidst a seemingly innocent note which, in turn, leads me on 12-hour days frequenting innumerable bookstores and libraries around New York City. If one is at minimum respectably familiar with Goethe and, say, is willing to move backward through Latin-poetical time to, as Maritain would say, Distinguish in order to unite, then it would do one well to stop whatever one is doing and experience this testament's Heraclitean fire of the mind.

It is, in brief, the sort of book one wishes one could go back in time and read for the first time again. And yet it is so erudite, prosaic, and flowing, that one is simultaneously cognizant that there is so much here that even the most painstaking, laborious first go cannot possibly digest everything. The yearning, then, may be related to the fact that it feels as though this text was composed not some decades ago, nor centuries, but on another planet altogether. This is holy despair: for now we must either right this wrong or support those who set out to do so (Mt. 7:16-20).

[Michael Stapleton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t think anyone could be educated well enough today to write a book like this.

[Brandon Hawk · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the heart of this project, Curtius establishes three main currents: first, to demonstrate the centrality of the Middle Ages to European literature and culture; second, to establish the importance and study of medieval Latin literature; and, third, underlying the other two, to "[attack] the barbarization of education and the nationalistic frenzy... of the Nazi regime" (Curtius's "Forward to the English Translation," vii). In all of these, Curtius achieves his goals. While Latin rhetoric rests at the heart of the study--which much of the book revolving around this controlling principle--the details span a deep understanding of medieval culture, and the individual sections provide wonderful examinations still worthy of reference.

Especially relevant for all medievalists (and all readers in general) are the first two chapters, "European Literature" and "The Latin Middle Ages." In their close titular associations, these chapters unsurprisingly establish the bases for the rest of Curtius's work, discussing the culture of the Middle Ages generally, the historiography of medieval studies, and how these issues fit into the wider realm of European culture and scholarship. The following two chapters also present basic foundations, discussing "Literature and Education" and "Rhetoric." For the rest of the chapters, Curtius mainly traces specific themes throughout various literatures, both creating and demonstrating a methodology of topological study. In all of these, the most important and lasting contribution to scholarship is the synthesis of topics: Curtius draws together many threads from medieval literature to weave a great single piece of art.

Importantly, Curtius's work is both very accessible and still relevant for anyone interested in medieval studies: it is still cited and discussed, and (despite some datedness) remains a monument for both the general and particular arguments made. It is recommend it for students of European literature, medieval studies, and general interest.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Deep Stuff

Not sure if I even fully comprehend even 30% of this, seeing as how I am far from fluent in Latin. Wish I had read this before taking college lit courses. Can definitely see why T.S. Eliot and Harold Bloom revered this book.

[Isabel Su · Rating 4 out of 5]

After read this book, believe it's rightly for me to study comparative literature.

[James F · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost the final book I read last year (2023) was John Herman Randall, Jr.'s The Making of the Modern Mind; the second book I began this year (although it has taken me over a month to finish a few chapters at a time) is Ernst Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Both books were written to re-assert the unity of "Western civilization" or the "European tradition" in the face of the First World War, the rise of Hitler and the Second World War. Curtius is by far the more intense, writing in Germany under the Hitler regime, after the earlier catastrophes of World War I and the chaos of the Weimar Republic; he literally says that the European tradition entered a decline in the nineteenth century (the last major literary figure was Goethe) and has already collapsed. If this perhaps seems rather extreme, it is understandable given where and when it was written. While Randall's book was not particularly influential and has been largely forgotten today, Curtius' book has had a major influence and is still important for anyone interested in the history of European literature and intellectual culture in general.

What Curtius is interested in is the relation of continuity and transformation between Antiquity and the "Middle Ages", and the transmission and modification of ancient literary culture through the Middle Ages into modern literature. Although he uses the traditional term, even in his title, he is very critical of the Antiquity/Middle Ages/Modern periodization. His second chapter (the first chapter is more or less an introduction) surveys the positions of various historians on the dividing line between the Ancient and Mediaeval periods; the arbitrary date I had to learn in high school (and have since forgotten), the death of the last Emperor in the West, Romulus Augustus, isn't even mentioned, but Curtius considers the dates of 337 (the death of Constantine — Rostovtzeff), 395 (the death of the Emperor Theodosius, who enforced Christianity and deliberately tried to destroy pagan learning and culture — Moss, and the date Curtius considers most useful), around 567 (the death of Justinian and final loss of the Western Empire), 641 (end of the "Dominate" and beginning of the Byzantine Empire — Kornemann), about 675 (Arab conquest of the Mediterranean trade routes — Pirenne, Toynbee), or even the beginning of the Carolingian period (which marks the real beginning of Mediaeval culture, thus considering the two "dark" intervening centuries as belonging to the collapse of Antiquity rather than to the Middle Ages.) He also questions the end of the Middle Ages at the Italian Renaissance or the Reformation, considering that the "Modern" period really begins with the sixteenth-century rise of science or even the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Whatever the dates, however, he considers the periodization essentially irrelevant, preferring to examine the details of the continuity and discontinuity of specific traits. This is what he describes in detail in the remainder of the book.

This is a book which is very dense in information; I learned things on literally every page of the more than 650 pages of text (there is a long index, although unfortunately no bibliography.) Curtius says that it is written for the "lover of literature" rather than for scholars, but he is obviously thinking of those with an early-twentieth-century upper-class German classical education — the book would be incomprehensible to anyone without a good reading knowledge of Latin (there are also untranslated passages from French, Spanish, and Italian) and at least some familiarity with the Roman (and early modern) classical writers. The Mediaeval authors on the other hand he is careful to identify and put into their historical and other contexts.

The book begins by outlining the late Roman educational system, based on what would later be called the trivium and quadrivium, and especially on the teaching of rhetoric. The development of rhetoric is outlined from the time of Aristotle through the end of antiquity, with rather detailed discussion of the different styles and levels and of the figures, and its influence on theories of literature is explained in depth; this is the basis of the Mediaeval theories (and practice) of poetics. He explains the importance of "topics" and gives examples of many of the more important topics for talking about people, landscape and so forth; he devotes an entire chapter to the topic of "invocation of the Muses" from Homer through Dante (and in fact all the way to William Blake.)

As an example of his procedure, I will summarize what to me was the most interesting chapter, on "Classicism". He begins by asking, with his friend T.S. Eliot, "What is a classic?" He derives the term for a model author from "classicus", which referred to the highest of the five tax-brackets based on property in the late Roman Empire (a sixth class was the proletarians, who had no taxable property.) The late writer Aulus Gellius in discussing the proper grammatical usage of words says that the way to decide is to look at how words are used by the older writers (antiquiores), but "the classics, not the proletarians" — in other words, the writers in the "top bracket". Curtius comments, "What a tidbit for a Marxist sociology of literature!" After this one sentence, the word was not used in this sense again for a millennium and a half, when it reappears in a French manual of poetics in 1548, obviously by someone who had read Gellius; the first use in English is not until Alexander Pope. As for the word and idea of "classicism", it first becomes popular in the debates over Romanticism in the 1820's. Curtius considers the opposition of Classicism and Romanticism to be an inadequate schema which only applies to France and which has been imposed as a straightjacket onto the literary history of other countries. For the contrary or complement of Classicism, he borrows the word "Mannerism" from art history, which is the title of the following chapter, devoted mainly to the Spanish siglo de oro (which is also the subject of several of the longest "Excurses" in the second part of the book).

The longest chapter of the work is on "The Symbolism of the Book", which treats of the use of books as metaphors and particularly of the metaphor of the "book of nature". This is followed by a chapter on Dante, and an epilogue, which finishes up the book as a continuous consecutive argument, on about page 400. There are then about 200 pages of "Excurses", short essays on a variety of subjects which shed light on the arguments of the book. The English edition follows these with a lecture, "The Mediaeval Bases of Western Thought", given at a Goethe conference in Colorado in 1949 and printed as an appendix, which could serve as a summary of the work for those who do not know Latin or other languages; and a 55 page epilogue by Peter Godman about Curtius' life and the origins of the book. Godman ends his discussion by contrasting the book with another work which I read many years ago, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis; where Curtius emphasizes the diachronic continuity of the tradition and denies the reality of stylistic periods and Zeitgeist, asserting the complete autonomy of literature, Auerbach on the contrary emphasizes the synchronic unity of the writers in the various periods and considers the historical and socio-economic influences upon literature. I think the two approaches should be taken as complementary rather than as an "either/or" dichotomy; each deals with aspects which the other ignores.

Taking the work as a whole, I would say that Curtius' detailed studies are very impressive, his interpretations always stimulating, and his value judgements — rather problematic. In any case, this is an important book which I would recommend to anyone with the now rather anachronistic education to understand it.

[sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was one of the most important books when I studied.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Todo el libro está edificado sabiamente con el rigor y la crítica de un filólogo consumado. Su entusiasmo sólo se equipara con su erudición. E. R. Curtius le ha dado a una larga época —Antigüedad tardía y Edad Media— el trato que merece, sí, y que se necesita tanto para desmentir las leyendas negras que tienen cultural y literariamente como para dar cuerpo y crítica a esas literaturas, esos espíritus. Da la impresión, por desgracia, que ya no es posible producir un libro de este calibre, ni para el filólogo más versado.

[rodri]

Terminado en un bus a Horrem.

[Zach Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

a very extensive study on the topic. I did find it a bit weird there was not much on Mary but it was nevertheless interesting.

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

"As we have already indicated, no stretch of European literary history is so little known and frequented as the Latin literature of the early and high Middle Ages. And yet the historical view of Europe makes it clear that precisely this stretch occupies a key situation as the connecting link between declining Antiquity and the Western world which was so very slowly taking shape. But it is cultivated - under the name of 'medieval Latin philology' - by a very small number of specialists. In Europe there might be a dozen of them. For the rest, the Middle Ages is divided between the Catholic philosophers (i.e., the representatives of the history of dogma in the faculties of Catholic theology) and the representatives of medieval history at our universities. Both groups have to deal with manuscript sources and texts - hence with literature. The medieval Latinists, the historians of Scholasticism, and the political historians, however, have little contact with one another. The same is true of the modern philologists. These also work on the Middle Ages, but they usually remain aloof from Medieval Latin philology as they do from general literary, political, and cultural history. Thus the Middle Ages is dismembered into specialties which have no contact. There is no general discipline of the Middle Ages - a further impediment to the study of European literature. Troeltsch could rightly say in 1922: 'The culture of the Middle Ages still awaits presentation' (Der Historisumus, 767). That is still true today. The culture of the Middle Ages cannot yet be presented, because its Latin literature has as yet been incompletely studied. In this sense the Middle Ages is still as dark today as it - wrongly - appeared to the Italian Humanists. For that reason a historical consideration of European literature must begin at its darkest point. The present study is therefore entitled European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, and we hope that this title will justify its purport with increasing evidence from chapter to chapter."

[Matthew Dambro · Rating 5 out of 5]

The seminal work on Latin philology in the mid-20th Century. Incredibly detailed and learned survey of the use of language from late Antiquity through the 18th Century. Although done in the German style of Geschicte, Curtius was in fact a Francophile. During the Hitler era he was forced to move back to medieval studies to avoid the attention of the Gestapo. His thesis is somewhat dated; that all medieval literature is a continuation of Roman topos. It was at the forefront of research in the earl 1950s. My teacher, Norman Cantor, spent a great deal of energy refuting Curtius, but always granting his brilliance and new kind of historical research. This is a must read for anyone interested in European cultural history.

[Fred R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Auerbach's Mimesis, an impossibly learned history of Western literature from a German horrified at the continent's mid-20th century convulsions. This would have benefited from some stronger organizing principle than a basic desire to demonstrate the cultural unity and continuity of the 'nordic-mediterranean' west.

I was surprised to see that France, rather than Germany, receives the strongest criticisms for its cultural imperialism.

[David Bird · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an incredibly learned one, such that one hesitates to criticize, and yet, I have basic qualms about the premise that the most important part of literature is proving that no idea is new, that there was always somebody earlier who had it.

[AlexWatson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good first step in the study of romance languages.

[Elizabeth Pyjov]

literature is “a reservoir of spiritual energies through which we can flavour and ennoble our present-day life”

[Ak Hauck · Rating 5 out of 5]

An almost perfect book! The breadth and width of literary history is stunning. A must read for those interested in classical and/or medieval literature. This is one I will read again and again.

[Katarina · Rating 5 out of 5]

HRV: Pročitano za nastavu na faksu i korišteno u seminarima.

ENG: Read for my college classes and used for seminars.

[Александра Дыкан]

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