DESCRIPCIÓN TECNICA

irrevocable, rushing old age.

Instead of the rupturing liquids of the sick vetula’s body, old age itself has become the rushing, disordered thing that cannot be held in check, the morbus pessimus that neither the puella nor anyone else, including the poet himself, can avoid. Perhaps this view represents the conclusions of an aging “Ovid,” who has begun to feel old age transform his own body. However we might interpret these sentiments, this confused poet who believes briefly in the meaningfulness of inseparable mixtures vanishes within the break between the second and third book. Within this break “Ovid” takes on a scholastic voice that speaks not about individual bodies but about the universal body—the body

microcosm—in which is written the truths of nature. In order to read this body, the philosophical “Ovid” returns to a hermeneutics of division and categorization.

Part Five:

Cosmic Body Boundaries

The third book of De vetula leaves behind “Ovid’s” amorous adventures as well as the autobiographical narrative style of the second book. The narrator of the third book is the philosophical “Ovid,” who surveys a wide range of topics, moving freely between natural philosophy and theology, often using his conclusions about the former to pursue

questions about the latter. He discusses the motion of the planets, the creation of the world, the composition of the earth, and the nature of God in the scholastic style of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries158 His attraction and aversion to the body as a system of order (i.e. the virgin puella) or disorder (the monstrous semivir and the vetula) persists in this book, but philosophical inquiry shifts his focus from particular female or feminized bodies to the human body as a miniature blueprint for the entire cosmos. For the continent and philosophical “Ovid,” the ordered body, its parts delineated and

compartmentalized, once an object of erotic desire, becomes a fleshy assurance of the precise order of every element in the universe. The following passage may be taken as a representative example of “Ovid’s” elaboration of the body microcosm motif.159 Note that this body is explicitly male:

Sol in corde manet et in arteriis dominatur, Vivificans per eos totius corporis artus. Mercurius patulam pulmonis habet regionem, Tracheam quoque vociferam linguamque loquacem, Testiculos Venus et que semen vasa ministrant Sortitur, sed epar Iovis est stomachusque cibator, Splen Saturnus habet, Mars fel, et Luna cerebrum.

DV 3.243-251

158 _{For a survey of Pseudo-Ovid’s philosophical sources for book three, see Robathan (1968), 11-12.}

Among the most significant are Albertus Magnus and Avicenna.

159 _{Other late-medieval examples of the motif can be found in Alain of Lille’s Anticlaudianus, Bernard}

The sun rests in the heart and is lord of the arteries, imparting life through the limbs of the whole body. Mercury holds the broad area of the lung, the vocal trachea, and the loquacious tongue. Venus is granted the testicles and the vessels that direct semen, but the liver and eating stomach belong to Jove. Saturn holds the spleen, Mars the gallbladder, and Luna the brain.

This passage is one of many that match each planet with a human virtue, or a particular combination of bodily humors with a celestial body, or a body part with a natural element, etc.160

The metaphoric relationship between the human body and the universe was a trope familiar to medieval philosophers.161 This microcosmic-macrocosmic similitude required that the human body, symbolically conceived, be organized normatively and legibly, at least by those trained in its sign systems. In certain regards, this similitude solves problems of corporeal instability. “Ovid” maps stability onto the (male) human body by identifying it with the supremely ordered natural universe, thus reinforcing the boundaries of both. The microcosmic body’s structure endures over the course of changes in individual bodies, and its lack of female body parts preserves it unmarked by reproduction and, therefore, mortality. The microcosmic body is not transformed by intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause, death, or decay. It lacks those parts specific to individual female bodies—vagina and uterus—through which liquids flow and amorphous substances coalesce into other living bodies destined to be born and die.

160 _{The precise physiological vocabulary in the third book has been taken to support the identification of}

the author of the poem as Richard de Fournival, who was the son of a doctor and pursued some medical studies himself. Fournival was named as the author of De vetula in an “unpublished encyclopedic work, written in 1424, entitled Vaticanus” (Robathan [1968] 3). Since the discovery of this statement in 1867, there has been speculation as to whether or not this evidence of authorship is sufficient. For a fuller discussion, see Robathan (1968), 3-10.

161 _{See Barkan (1975) and Ziolkowski’s careful analysis of the trope in Alan of Lille’s De Planctu Naturae}

At the same time, however, particular disordered bodies problematize the precise correspondences between the body microcosm and macrocosm. The resulting disaccord fuels anxieties about monstrous bodies, the very existence of which require, in the words of one scholar of medieval conceptualizations of the monstrous, the “recognition of the corresponding deformity of the cosmos for which the body is a figure.” The universe itself then risks becoming “a monstrous construct.”162 In “Ovid’s” philosophical ruminations, we find evidence of what is intimated elsewhere, namely that more is at stake in De vetula than the bodies of some eunuchs, one girl, and one old woman. Bodies that transgress their proper bounds destabilize the boundaries that structure truth,

knowledge, and the universe itself. By marking the semivir and the vetula as monstrosities, “Ovid’s” systems of knowing become less vulnerable to boundary violations; the structures of these systems of knowing are reinforced, so to speak, by designating instability elsewhere. But the monstrous returns.163 The semivir and vetula

haunt “Ovid’s” philosophical third book by casting an incongruous shadow over the human body microcosm.

This new universe that opens up before “Ovid” is a far cry from the one

Pythagoras describes in book fifteen of the Metamorphoses where bodies are as pliant as soft wax and are forever taking on new shapes.164 Bodies, moreover, are not the only things in a state of flux: cuncta fluunt.165 Everything in the universe “contains four

162 _{Williams (1996), 109-110.} 163 _{Cohen (1996), 20.}

164_{Metam. 15.165-172.} 165_{Metam. 178.}

generative bodies,” the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire.166 And these “bodies” continuously change position, gain and lose heft, separate and coalesce. “Nature,” which Pythagoras names “the renovator of things” (rerumque novatrix), is not to be found in a precise correspondence between the human body and the cosmos as “Ovid” asserts.167 The correspondence between humankind and the cosmos is to be found in nothing other than what unites all matter: its shifting materiality. Pythagoras’ Ovidian universe is, beneath the given “seals” (shapes) imprinted on the “wax” (matter), amorphous, but the philosophical “Ovid” insists otherwise, and his relentless mapping of the body

microcosm corroborates his claims. God’s body, however, is more difficult to read and monstrously haunts “Ovid’s” fledgling Christianity.

God’s body—a difficult concept in itself for “Ovid”—does not in any rationally conceivable way maintain the boundaries required of bodies by natural law. “Ovid” proves God’s uniqueness, pre-existence, and omnipotence relatively easily with the sort of deductive reasoning he used to determine that the semivir is a monster. A theological argument typical of this book unfolds in the following way. Having just proven that divinity is omnipotent, “Ovid” questions whether the divine is one or many: some say that there are numerous gods. But if there are two gods, both of whom must be

omnipotent, they must be absolute equals. If not, one would be subordinate to the other, in which case they could not both be omnipotent. If one cannot, then, be subordinate to the other, it may occur that they have contrary opinions. If one god yields to the opinion

166_{quattor aeternus genitalia corporea mundus}

continet ... (Metam. 15.239-240).

167_{Nec species sua cuique manet, rerumque nouatrix}

of the other, he is not omnipotent. Thus, omnipotence cannot exist in two gods. Therefore, there is only one God.168 But when “Ovid” comes to discuss prophecies of Christ’s birth, his philosophical method falters. Certain men, he writes, have been granted the gift of prophecy by cultivating a spiritual life and mastering the flesh.169 “Ovid” has heard from such men a prediction that a God-man is to be born:

Tales dixerunt quod sic de virgine nasci

Debeat unus homo simul deus, et quod utramque Humanam atque dei sit naturas habiturus.

DV 3.665-668