Satiric
Vulgarity in Guibert de Nogent's Gesta
Dei per Francos
By
Robert Levine
Attempts to
characterize Guibert de Nogent (1053-1121) generally focus upon his Autobiography, not on his history of the
First Crusade. What scholarly attention the Gesta
Dei per Francos has received is devoted to the theological problems Guibert
set about solving in it {See M.D. Coupe, "The personality of Guibert de
Nogent reconsidered," Journal of Medieval History IX, no. 4 [Dec.
'83], pp. 317-329 for a summary and judgement of the work of J. Kantor, Benton,
and others. See also Charaud, Jacques, "La conception de l'histoire de
Guibert de Nogent," Cahiers de
civilisation médiévale VIII (1965),
pp. 381-395, and Klaus Schreiner, "Discrimen veri ac falsi," Archive fur Kulturgeschicht XLVIII (1966), pp. 1-51. Both Charaud and
Schreiner are concerned to demonstrate
the degree to which Guibert's vision of history is ruled by theology, and
tropology in particular; both articles
can be read as respectful corrections of Bernard Monod, "De la méthode
historique chez Guibert de Nogent," Révue historique 84 (1904), pp.
51-70. Georg Misch also makes an attempt to characterize Guibert, in Geschichte
der Autobiographie, vol. 3, part two, first half, Frankfurt, 1959, pp.
108-162} Nevertheless, the same personality that dominates the autobiographical
text penetrates the historical text. As cantankerous as Carlyle, Guibert
reveals in the Gesta the same qualities that Jonathan Kantor detected
elsewhere:
The tone of the memoirs is consistently condemning and not confiding; they were written not by one searching for the true faith but by one determined to condemn the faithless. {Journal of Medieval History 2 (1976), p. 299 (of pp. 281-303).}
However, Kantor goes on to argue, on the basis of a
comparison with one other twelfth-century historian, that Guibert's writings
are "the product of a cloister mentality" (300), thereby missing an essential literary fact about
Guibert: like many others before him,
including Jerome and Liudprand of Cremona, he was an anima naturaliter
satirica. Like Liudprand, he found
an opportunity to vent his spleen in the course of composing an historical
work.
The anger they
express, however, is often taken as a symptom of their own instability. In a
thirteenth-century poem attributed to Walter Map, the poet complains that the
flatterer appears to be calm and judicious, while the man who speaks the truth
is sad, satiric, and strange (fanaticus
in Classical Latin might mean "inspired" or "insane").
Qui palpo fuerit, ille pacificus,
illeque dicitur esse probaticus;
qui vera loquitur est melancolicus,
immo satiricus, immo fanaticus.
{ll. 97-100 of "De Palpone et
Assentore," in The Latin poems commonly attributed to Walter Mapes,
ed. by Thomas Wright, London, 1841. The passage may be distantly related to
Terence, Andria 68, Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit,
which Isidore of Seville uses as his example of the third kind of enthymeme, the sententiale (Etymologies, ed. W.M
Lindsay, Oxford, 1911, II.9.11)}
The flatterer is said to be calm and judicious, while he who
speaks the truth is melancholic, satiric, even mad {Misch, op. cit., p. 577,
describes Rather of Verona's Phreneticus as perhaps the most elaborate
medieval use of madness as a satiric strategy.} The truth-teller, then,
qui vera loquitur, seems abnormal
to others; therefore the truly perceptive
person will realize that qualities that appear to be socially negative are actually
signs of accuracy and reliability.
Modern readers also
have had difficulty with the nature of satire, sometimes attributing to
individual, personal sensibility what was part of a rhetorical posture shared
by many writers {When John Benton says of Guibert, "he exhibits some of the
tortures of a distressed mind," Self and Society in Medieval France,
New York, 1970, p. 32.} he may be misconstruing the rules of the "game of
truth" {J.M.A. Beer's phrase, in Narrative Conventions of Truth in the
Middle Ages, Geneva, 1981, p. 22 et alibi}. Guibert's posture and tone may
have been intensely personal, yet they are also the result of his participation
in a long and effective rhetorical tradition.
Vituperation
provides the dominant tone in the one work of Guibert's which gets any
attention in standard histories of rhetoric, the Liber quo ordine sermo fieri
debeat. Characteristically, he associates the wrong kind of speech with the
lower body, asserting that men whose motives for speaking are generated by
pride, disdain, and envy are literal ventriloquists:
hoc isti ne sermocinatores vocentur, quod infame genus hominum esse solet, quia pro suo ventre loquuntur, unde a Gregorio Naziano ventriloqui appellantur, ex typo nimio dedignantur. {Migne PL 156.22}
These men cannot be called speakers,
because they belong to that group of men who speak for their own bellies, for
which reason they are called "ventriloquists" by Gregory of
Nazianus.
The techniques of
debasement reappear when Guibert finds ample room for exercising his
condemnatory impulses in reworking accounts of the First Crusade. In the Gesta
Dei per Francos, whose title is itself an attempt to correct what Guibert
argued was Fulcher's misleading version of events (the deeds were done through
not by the French), Guibert attacks several groups: those who believe in relics
{See Guibert's De pignoribus sanctorum, Migne PL 156.607-684) for an
extended attack on those who believe in the wrong relics.} other than those
which he himself believes to be authentic; those who choose a style more
elaborate or less elaborate than the one that he himself uses; aristocrats who belong to factions other
than his own; Jews, heretics, and Arabs.
Some of the
strategies Guibert invokes to mount his attacks resemble those of classical
diatribe, psogos, or invective, although his text contains no convincing
evidence of Guibert's familiarity with specific prescriptions by Cicero,
Quintilian, or the author of the Ad Herrenium. Manuscripts of standard
classical handbooks did circulate and were transcribed during the middle ages.
In the ninth century Lupus of Ferrières transcribed a copy of Cicero's de
oratore. Copies of the same work existed at various French monasteries during
the late tenth and early eleventh century, at Saint-Gildas near Bourges in the
eleventh-century, and at Cluny by the middle of the twelfth century. L.D. Reynolds, Texts and
Transmission, Oxford, 1983, pp. 102-109.} However, whether Guibert produced
invective and diatribe spontaneously out of an anima naturaliter satirica, or
found models for his invective and diatribe in
specific rhetorical texts, or inferred them from reading poets and
historians is a question that cannot be answered authoritatively on the basis of research done so far.
Nevertheless, John
Ward implies that Guibert, in the letter to Lysiard that forms part of the
prefatory material for the Gesta, makes use of patterns described and
prescribed by Cicero and his epigones. {Classical Rhetoric and
Medieval Historiography, ed. by Ernst Breisach, Kalamazoo, 1985, pp.
138-139. On the basis of the same
assumption, Ward demonstrates the presence of traditional rhetorical patterns
in Baudry of Bourgeuil as well.} Ward, however, devotes no attention to the
classical models for Guibert's diatribe and invective.
Conventionally,
classical invective is an inversion of
classical panegyric. As codified and practiced by the writers of the
Second Sophistic, Cicero's description of panegyric covers most of the
same ground, without enumerating the
topics; see E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham,
Cicero: De Oratore, Cambridge, 1967, v. I, pp. 456 ff. See also Quintillian, ed. H.E. Butler, New York,
1920, vol I, pp. 472-473. 3.7 on laus et vituperatio. In his study of Claudian, Alan Cameron has
pointed out that, "in theory invective was simply an inversion of
panegyric."(Alan Cameron, Claudian: Poetry and Propaganda at the Court
of Honorius, Oxford, 1970, p. 254). Harry L. Levy shows some of the ways in
which Claudian's In Rufinum follows the prescriptions for panegyric and vituperation, in "Claudian's In
Rufinum and the Rhetorical Psogos," Transactions and Proceedings of
the American Philological Association, 77 (1946), pp. 57-65. For the tendency to confuse praise and blame
in some satiric texts see Robert
Levine, "Why praise Jews; History and Satire in the Middle Ages," Journal
of Medieval History XII (1986), pp.
291-296.} panegyric consisted of six topics:
To attack someone,
then, the speaker might use the same categories, reversing the values. As
Cicero pointed out, in a passage that also suggests a link between what is serious
and what is comic, praise and blame have different subject matters, but they
share the same method:
Dixi enim dudum, materiam aliam esse joci, aliam severitatis; gravium autem et iocorum unam essem rationem...eisdem verbis et laudare frugi servum possumus, et, se est nequam, jocari.
For I said before that, though the
fields of jesting and austerity lie wide apart, yet the methods of seriousness
and jesting are identical... we can, in
identical terms, praise a careful servant, and make fun of one who is good-for-nothing. De Oratore, Sutton and Rackham, pp. 396-97,
382-383}
The sixth topic of
panegyric, the prayer for the future welfare of one's subject, in psogos often becomes an excuse for
the writer to compose a hideous death-scene, in the course of which he may
insult the object of his vituperation by appealing to other topics as well.
Perhaps the best-known of these scenes occurs in Seneca's Apocolocyntosis,
where the emperor Claudius at his death propels himself to heaven by his
own flatulence. That Guibert had access
to the work cannot be demonstrated. Reynolds, op. cit., pp. 361-362, reports
that Hucbald (840-930) owned a copy of the Apocolocyntosis, and that
various other manuscripts of the work existed throughout the middle ages} After
providing a mixture of verse and prose, Greek and Latin, as a preamble, Seneca
describes the moment of death:
Ultima vox eius haec inter homines
audita est, cum maiorem sonitum emisisset
illa parte, qua facilius loquebatur: "vae mihi, puto, concacavi me."
Quod an fecerit, nescio; omnia certe concacavit.
The last words he was heard to speak in
this world were these. When he had made a great noise with that part of him
which talked easiest, he cried out, "Oh dear, oh dear! I think I have made
a mess of myself." Whether he did or no, I cannot say, but certain it is
he always did make a mess of everything {Petronius, translated by
Michael Heseltine, London, 1913, pp. 380-381}
{In this example as well as in the later ones, the
strategies of classical psogos clearly resemble the techniques of
debasement that characterize "grotesque realism," as described,
explored (and severely oversimplified
in the area of medieval literature) by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais
and his World, Cambridge, 1968}
Claudian, at the end
of the fourth century, offers an
example of another such exercise, in an attack on one of Eutropius'
allies, a former weaver named Leo, for whom he provides an absurd death on the
battle-field. After having rhetorically demolished Hosius, another ally of
Eutropius, Claudian calls upon topic five, comparisons, to help debase the
death of Leo. Not like the lion his name proclaims, but like a deer, Leo meets
his death, while his horse sweats
beneath his massive weight:
Ipse Leo dama cervoque fugacior
ibat,
Sudanti tremebundus equo; qui pondere
postquam
Decidit implicitus limo, cunctantia
pronus
Per vada reptabat.
Leo himself, swifter than dear or
antelope, fled trembling on his
foam-flecked horse, and it falling under his weight Leo sank in the mire and on all fours fought his way through the
clinging slime.
{Claudian,
edited and translated by Maurice Platnauer, London, 1956, II. 440-43}
Stuck in the mud, he groans like a pig; Claudian now recalls
Hosius' abilities as a cook, composing a simile which allows him, by
association, to spit and roast his opponent:
caeno subnixa tenaci mergitur, et pingui suspirat corpore
moles,
More suis, dapibus quae jam devota
futuris
Turpe gemit, quotiens Hosius mucrone
corusco
Armatur, cingitque sinus; secumque
volutat
Quas figat verubus partes, quae frusta
calenti
Mandet aquae, quantoque cutem distendat
echino. (II.444-459)
Held up at first by the thick mud, his
fat body gradually settles down
panting like a common pig, which destined to grace the coming feast, squeals
when Hosius arms him with flashing
knife, and gathers up his garments, pondering the while what portions he will
transfix with spits, which pieces of
the flesh he will boil and how much sea-urchin stuffing will be needed to fill
the empty skin.
As part of his "technique of debasement," then,
Claudian applies to the would-be-hero Leo what Curtius has called
"kitchen imagery," {E.R. Curtius,
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, New York, 1953, pp.
431-435.} without, however, providing the parody of divine afflatus to be found in Seneca's
representation of the death of Claudius.
In his description
of the death of Jovinian, and the transmission of his ideas to Vigilantius,
Saint Jerome combines the image of pigs with the parody of divine afflatus,
providing a Christian variation for these motifs:
Hic Romanae Ecclesiae auctoritate damnatus, inter Phasides aves et carnes suillas non tam emisit spiritum, quam eructavit.
Jovinianus, condemned by the authority
of the church, amidst pheasants and swine's flesh, breathed out, or rather
belched out his spirit.{PL XXIII.355. Translation by W.H. Fremantle,
in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers VI, London, 1892.}
Elsewhere in the Adversus Jovinianum, in the course
of attacking his opponent as the modern Epicurus, Jerome again associates him
with pigs:
Quoscunque formosos, quoscunque
calamistratos, quos crine composito,
quos rubentibus buccis videro, de tuo armento sunt, imo inter tuos sues
grunniunt.
If ever I see a fine fellow, or a man
who is no stranger to the
curling-irons, with his hair nicely done and his cheeks all aglow, he
belongs to your herd, or rather grunts in concert with your pigs. {PL XXII.349. Fremantle, op. cit., t.
p. 414.}
In this passage Jerome is probably recalling Horace's
playfully self-deprecating description of himself as Epicuri de grege porcum
(Ep. 1.4.16), although he has very clearly changed the tone. A few lines later, Jerome reinforces the
connection with swine
Et pro magna sapientia deputas, si
plures porci post te currant, quos
gehennae succidiae nutrias?
And do you regard it as a mark of great
wisdom if you have a following of many pigs, whom you are feeding to make pork
for hell?
The association of
pigs, Epicurus and heretics proved particularly useful in Christian polemics
against Mahomet, who inspired a wide range of invective. Byzantine writers
provided the Prophet with epilepsy; Bartholomew of Edessa assured his readers
that Mahomet had been dragged to his death by a drunken camel, while others
imagined him eaten by dogs. {See A. d'Ancona, La Leggenda di Maometto in
Occidente, pp. 199-281; Embricho of Mainz, La vie de Mahomet, ed. Guy Cambier,
1962, pp. 30-31. For a discussion of later versions of this scene, with particular emphasis on the version offered
by Matthew Paris, see Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris, Berkeley, 1987,
pp. 99-101.} Embricho of Mainz,
however, perhaps thirty years before the First Crusade, offers a version of the
death of Mahomet that combines epilepsy, sexual excess, and pigs.
In Embricho's
leonine elegiacs, Mahomet falls into an
epileptic fit, at which point a band of pigs finds him and eats him:
Accurrere sues -- digna repente lues!
--
Qui rapidus sic grex quasi spernens
quod foret his rex,
Totus in hunc properat et miserum
lacerat.
Pigs fell upon him, a worthy punishment; the band of pigs, as though spurning him as their king, all rushed upon him and tore the wretch apart.
{Cambier, op. cit., p. 88. The poem is also printed
by Migne, PL 171, attributed to Hildebert. Christ driving the unclean spirits
into the Gadarene swine (Mathew 8.30-32) may be part of the inspiration
for this passage.}
Although his
depiction of the death of Mahomet (a scene that allows him simultaneously to
attack two of his favorite foes: Semitic foreigners and heretics), is more
abbreviated than Embrichon's, Guibert adds the parody of divine afflatus. Having spent much of the early part of the Gesta Dei per Francos attacking
heretics, towards the end of the first book he turns to the Arabs, whom he
portrays as sexual maniacs. According to Guibert, they force the women whom
they capture to sing while their mothers are being raped, then force the women
to exchange roles. He takes the apparently fastidious postion that such activity is partially excusable, since
heterosexual activity is "natural," but when the Arabs rape men, even
a bishop, they have gone too far.
Embricho also goes to great lengths in his denunciation of Arabic
perverse sexuality (Cambier, pp. 78-79). }
His abhorrence of
the sexual excesses of Arabs is so great that it allows him the license of interrupting
the chronological narration of events
to compose a cadenza on the life of Mahomet. {Guibert de Nogent, Gesta Dei
per Francos, RHC.HO IV, p. 130.} After devoting some attention to the
theological errors for which the prophet was responsible, Guibert launches into
a narrative that emphasizes the Prophet's low birth (topic two) and the sexual
license (topic four: "deeds") engaged in and encouraged by Mahomet.
In the case of the prophet himself, the result, acccording to Guibert, was an
excessive number of children, and
epilepsy. Having passed out during one of his seizures, Mahomet is eaten
by pigs. Guibert adds a detail to Embricho's
account: the prophet's heels are all that remains of him:
Quum subitaneo ictu epylenseos saepe corrueret, quo eum diximus superius laborare, accidit semel, dum solus obambulat, ut morbo elisus eodem caderet; et inventus, dum ipsa passione torquetur, a porcis in tantum discerpitur, ut nullae ejus praeter talos reliquiae invenirentur.
Since he often fell into a sudden epileptic fit, it happened once, while he was walking alone, that he suddenly fell in a fit; while he was writhing in this agony, he was devoured by pigs, so that nothing could be found of him except his heels.
Thus the heretic, having given himself up to bestial
appetite, is "justly" devoured by the beasts most commonly associated
with excessive physical appetite, as
well as the beasts whom Muslims are forbidden to eat. In Embricho's text, an Arab priest draws an explicit moral
also:
Hoc ut monstraret et aperte
significaret,
Ipse pati voluit nosque per hoc
monuit
Quam fragiles simus. Sed quamvis carne
perimus,
Post mortem reliqua spes tamen est
aliqua,
Fit quia nostrarum mors ipsa salus
animarum,
Et quando morimur, tunc Mahumet
sequimur (p. 91)
This shows and clearly demonstrates
that his suffering was designed to
tell us how weak we are. But although we may perish in the flesh, after death
some hope remains that our death may be the salvation of our souls, and when we
die, we may follow Mahomet.}
The association of
food, sex, and the misuse of language
is one that Guibert also uses in the Liber quo ordine sermo fieri
debeat
Nam sicut victualia sobrie sumpta ad corporis nutrimentum in corpore permanent, immoderate vero vorata in detrimentum vergunt, et vomitum provocant; et qui semine legitimo et parce modesteque edito conjugi miscetur, prolem creat, qui vero semine fluit, nihil utile efficit, sed carnem foedat: ita qui nimie verbum profert, et id quod auditorum cordibus insitum erat, et proficere poterat, aufert. Migne PL 156.25.
For food moderately taken to feed the
body remains in the body, but devoured
immoderately is detrimental and provokes vomiting; he who carefully and
restrainedly copulates may create a child, but he who is lavish with his seed
does nothing useful, merely soiling the flesh. Thus the man who offers too many
words vitiates the good that he might do for the hearts of his listeners.
The death of Mahomet
also gives Guibert a chance to compose a routine against one of his favorite
objects for invective: false relics. To begin the routine, Guibert meditates on
the significance of the narrative he has just given, providing an exegesis in the course of which he recalls the fate
of Epicurus, offers the Stoics as types of true Christians, and asserts the
precise fitness of the death of Mahomet:
Ecce legifer optimus, dum Epicureum, quem veri Stoici, Christi scilicet cultores, occiderant, porcum resuscitare molitur, immo prorsus resuscitat, porcus ipse porcis devorandus exponitur: ut obscoenitatis magisterium obscoenissimo, uti convenit, fine concludat. Talos jure reliquit, quia perfidiae ac turpitudinis vestigia deceptis miserabiliter animabus infixit.
While the true Stoics, that is, the
worshipers of Christ, killed Epicurus, lo, the greatest law-giver (Guibert's
antiphrasis) tried to revive the pig, but the pig itself lay exposed to be
eaten by pigs, so that the master of filth appropriately died a filthy death.
He left his heels fittingly, since he had wretchedly fixed the traces of false belief and foulness in deceived souls.
Guibert may have the image of Mahomet grinding his heels into their
souls.}
Guibert now shifts
his tone, composing a comic routine that oscillates between prose and verse,
and that deliberately and self-consciously goes "too far."
First he calls upon
two parts of an Horatian ode to assist in
interpreting the death of Mahomet:
Cujus talorum titulo exegimus tetrasticum juxta Poetam:
Aere perennius,
Regalique situ
pyramidum altius:(III,xxx, 1,2)
ut vir egregius,
omni porco felicior,
cum poeta eodem dicere
valeat:
Non omnis moriar, multaque pars
mei
Vitabit Libitinam. (III.xxx. 6-7)
We shall find an explanation for the heels
in four lines of the poet. So that the fine man, happier than any pig, might
say with the poet: "I shall not die entirely, a great part of me shall
avoid Hell
Thus Guibert converts a line Horace wrote in praise of his own poetry into invective against
Mahomet.
He proceeds to offer
an elegaic quatrain of his own to magnify the absurd,abhorrent qualities of the
death he has just described:
Manditur ore suum, qui porcum vixerat,
hujus
Membra beata cluunt, podice fusa
suum.
Quum talos ori, tum quod sus fudit
odori,
Digno qui celebrat cultor honore
ferat.
He who has lived by the pig is chewed
to death by the pig and the limbs which
were called blessed have become pigs'
excrement. May those who wish to honor
him carry to their mouths his heels, which the pig has poured forth in
stench.
Charaud's response to the excesses of this routine shows a
proper appreciation of Guibert's deliberate violation of decorum:
Et le moine s'en donne à coeur joie
lorsqu'il livre à la postérité un quatrain d'horreur et de grossièrtés où
l'analogie entre le porc et le prophète Mahomet est savamment établie. {Op.
cit., p. 385.}
Guibert, however, is
still not finished with debasing his opponent, but instead steps up the use of
banquet imagery, bringing in the Manicheans, and speculating on the number of
angels created by the process of eating Mahomet:
Quod si Manichaeorum sunt vera repurgia sectae, ut in omni quod comeditur pars quaedam maneat commaculata Dei, et dentium comminutione, et stomachi concoctione pars ipsa Dei purgetur, et purgata jam in angelos convertitur, qui ructibus et ventositate extra nos prodire dicantur: sues de hujus carnibus pastas quot credimus angelos effecisse et magnis hinc inde flatibus emisisse?
What if there is some truth in what the
Manicheans say about purification,
that in every food something of God is present and that part of God is purified
by chewing and digesting, and the purified part is turned into angels, who are
said to depart from us in belching and
flatulence: how many angels may we
believe were produced by the flesh eaten by these pigs and by the great farts
they let go?
Having indulged
his penchant for grotesque comedy, Guibert now tries to re-establish the
illusion that he is an objective historian by offering a seemingly fair
assessment of the contributions of Mahomet:
Sed omissis jocularibus quae pro
sequacium derisione dicuntur, hoc est insinuandum: quod non eum Deum, ut aliqui
aestimant, opinantur; sed hominem justum eumdemque patronum, per quem leges
divinae tradantur.
But, laying aside the comic remarks
intended to mock his followers, my point is that they did not think that he was
God, but a just man and leader, through whom divine laws might be
transmitted.
Cicero offers a
model, though less extravagant, yet still porcine, for this kind of rhetorical
behavior in the In Verrem. After associating his opponent with pigs
("pork gravy," anticipating the modern "pork barrel"), he
apologizes for the vulgar comic relief:
Hinc illi homines erant qui etiam
ridiculi inveniebantur ex dolore; quorum alii, id quod saepe audistis, negebant
mirandum esse ius tam nequam esse verrinum: alii etiam frigidiores erant, sed
quia stomachabantur ridiculi videbantur esse, cum Sacerdotem exsecrabantur qui verrem tam nequam
reliquisset. Quae ego non commemorare
(neque enim perfacete dicta neque porro hac severitate digna sunt) nisi vos
illud vellem recordari, istius nequitiam
et iniquitatem tum in ore vulgi atque in communibus proverbiis esse
versatam.
Hence those people whose indignation
went so far as to make them humorists: some of these made the remark you have
often heard repeated, that ius
verrinum was of course poor stuff: others were still sillier, only that
their irritation passed them off as good jesters, when they cursed Sacerdos for
leaving such a miserable hog behind him. I should not recall these jokes, which
are not particularly witty, nor, moreover, in keeping with the serious dignity
of this Court, were it not that I would have you remember how Verres' offences
against morality and justice became at the time the subject of common talk and
popular catchwords. {Cicero, The Verrine Orations, ed. and transl. by
L.H.G. Greenwood, London, 1928, I, pp. 252-53.}
Cicero, then, provides one possible model for indulging in
and apologizing for bad taste; having associated his opponent with pigs, he
dissociates himself from the act. {For a study of Cicero's sense of humor,
useful in spite of its Bergsonian bias, see Auguste Haury, L'Ironie et
l'humour chez Ciceron, Leiden, 1955.}
Thus Guibert, like
Cicero in his attack on Verres, indulges in, and then distances himself from a
joke told in deliberately bad taste. His attack on Mahomet concludes with an
exercise in the sixth topic of psogos, with some help from at least two
other topics. In addition, in the cause of Christian polemic, he invokes the
techniques of classical rhetorical debasement, with particular emphasis on "kitchen imagery,"
drawing some of his material from a tradition represented most vividly by
Seneca's portrayal of Claudius' flatulent apotheosis, and by Jerome's attack on
Jovinian. For later uses of flatulence as a debasement of speech, see
Dante's devil, who avea del cul
fatto trombetta (Inferno XXI.39), and the conclusion of Chaucer's
Summoner's Tale. }