Allegory and Perversion In Alan of Lille’s De Planctu Naturae

Abstract

In moving from the Old French verse romance Eneas to Alan of Lille’s Latin prosimetrum De planctu Naturae [The Plaint of Nature],¹ I am making a somewhat radical departure. Both texts were written by learned clerics during the same period (the 1160s or 1170s) and in the same rough geographical area (England or Northern France).² Both are interested in questions of desire and morality, figuration and power. And as critics like Edmond Faral and Reto Bezzola long ago established, there are many indications that vernacular romance and the Latin poetry of the schools drew from a common literary and intellectual heritage.³ From a sociological and thematic perspective, however, the two texts could scarcely be more different. The Eneas was composed for a seigniorial or royal court and addressed itself to a largely illiterate, mixed gender audience. Its themes are inherently secular: erotic love, marriage, warfare, and statesmanship. By contrast, the De planctu addressed itself exclusively to male ecclesiastical readers trained in theology and the liberal arts. Its themes are intellectual and philosophical: the natural world and its laws, cosmology and ethics, language and figuration, sin and redemption.