Historians agree that Liudprand of Cremona is amusing(1), relatively informative, and not entirely trustworthy. Previté‑Orton complained that, "he had a soul above documents," and was "singularly retentive of amorous scandal however devoid of probability."(2) Literary historians and critics also have not been entirely comfortable with him. For example, instead of considering him in the context of other tenth‑century historians, like Widukind of Corvey, Hrosthvita, Flodoard, or Richer, two twentieth‑century medievalists ‑‑ Erich Auerbach and Georg Misch ‑‑ have used him as a ficelle by means of which to praise Rather of Verona.

Both fascinated and embarassed by Liudprand, Auerbach quotes a passage involving the Priapic equipment and activities of the priest Dominic, but spares it the kind of close analysis for which he is justly known(3). Rather of Verona, he argues, shares some of the qualities he finds disturbing in Liudprand, but seems a more tolerable human being: Their works are full of scurrilitas, indiscretion, and immoderation, though in the one these spring from a heartfelt need, in the other from rancor and self‑importance. Both lack the sense of the appropriate, the control and harmonious form which lend unity and dignity to literary expression(4). Sincerity, then, is an excuse for bad taste(5).

Misch finds Rather introspective, anxious, neurotic, and therefore more interesting than Liudprand, whose anger finds its objects outside of the self. Accordingly, Misch disposes of the bishop of Cremona in a nine‑page sketch, inserted in the midst of a 141‑page appreciation of the bishop of Verona(6).

The two bishops certainly had different sensibilities;

the following passage from Rather's confessional dialogue,

in which he suggests that he had improper thoughts in his

mind during the sacred service, illustrates one of the

qualities that might endear him to modern readers:

Peccavi ego peccator in oscùlo et in amplexibus

illecebrosis, palpando et blandiendo inique; et in

ecclesia stans vel sedens, ubi sanctae lectiones

vel divina officia efficiuntur, otiosis fabulis,

vel iniquis cogitationibus me occupavi, et non

cogitavi, quae debui, et aures non accomodavi ad

ea quae sancta sunt. Intuendo quoque injuste et

petulanter et recordando (quod adhuc pejus

virorum) animalium, pecudumque concubitus, et alia

quaedam obscena(7).

‑ 2 ‑

Liudprand displays no such confessional impulses; his failure, however, to behave like Rousseau, Dostoievsky, Jean Paul, or Lenny Bruce, should not be held against him. what drove him to write was not a tortured, introspective agony, but rather a world of political violence and chaos, which left him and his fellow countrymen constantly subject to German, French, Greek, Magyar, Saracen, and internal Italian aggression. Four years old when the Hungarians burned Pavia, his native city, he spent much of his adult literary life praising those who protected him and launching diatribes against their enemies.

Liudprand's praise was as extravagant as his blame, but

less interesting, of course, since panegyric is, as Isidore

defined it:

licentiosum et lasciviosum genus dicendi in

laudibus regum, in cuius conpositione homines

multis mendaciis adulantur(8).

Vituperation, however, generally produces more satisfying

results, since most audiences find human weaknesses more

tolerable than human strengths, perhaps because, as one of

Ivy Compton Burnett's characters says, "it is easier to be

disparaging than to be just."(9) Liudprand's diatribe is

produced by a voice compounded out of various postures,

including that of indignant ecclesiastic, cynical Italian,

reflective Stoic, committed misogynist, and begging poet.

Perhaps the best known of Liudprand's rhetorical set‑pieces occurs in the Legatio, where his effictio of Nicephorus as a grotesque pygmy, dark as an Ethiopean, with the eyes of a mole, a neck an inch long(10), hair like the bristles of a pig, a distended belly, and smelly linen(11), provides the usual pleasures of diatribe. Fashioning a grotesque figure out of one's enemy is a conventional rhetorical strategy of the Christian historian; Lactantius, for example, offers this humorless description of his principal villain, Maximian: Erat etiam corpus moribus congruens, status celsus, caro ingens, et in horrendam magnitudinem diffusa et inflata(12). However, the passage also functions as a prelude to one of several panegyrics devoted to the emperor Otto(13).

To formulate and amplify both praise and blame, Liudprand calls upon the arsenal his conventional rhetorical training made available to him, not only to carry out his agenda, but to disguise it, at least initially. Therefore he opens the Antapodosis with a combination of conventional postures, some of which are designed to relieve himself of the responsibility for the performance he is about to give. First, in a variation of the humility‑topos, he insists that he writes only because urged to do so by higher authority; humble and fearful of acrimonious critics, he has been slow

to discharge bishop Recemund's command to report what he has

seen with his own eyes. In addition, Liudprand insists that

he is offering recreational trifles, designed to provide

relaxation after intellectually more arduous tasks, like

studying Cicero:

quod si perplexa faceti Tulli lectione fatigantur,

talibus saltem neniis animentur(14).

Availing himself of a commonplace traced to several of

Plato's text by Jacques Derrida(15), he offers his work as a

kind of pharmakon, providing shelter from the sun:

Nam, ni fallor, sicut obtutus, nisi alicuius

interpositione substantiae, solis radiis

reverberatus obtunditur, ne pure, ut est,

videatur, ita plane mens achademicorum,

peripathetiocorum stoicorumque doctrinarum iugi

meditatione infirmatur, si non aut utili

comodiarum risu aut heroum delectabili historia

refocilatur.

His audience's initial expectation, then, is to be entertained by a skilled academician, capable of mixing genres, tones, and top01. Liudprand, whose early training as a court‑singer(16) may have prepared him for the role of court‑jester, does not disappoint their expectations. They could not, however, have expected everything that they find, since the Antapodosis gradually reveals itself to be both more and less academic than the initial pages suggest.

Those studying Cicero, for example, will be amused to find that when Berengar I finds Louis III in hiding, he begins his speech with the opening of the first Catiline: Quousque tandem abutere, Hulodoice, patientia nostra. Their amusement may turn to something else, however, when Berengar proceeds to punish Louis with blinding(17).

The bishop of Cremona's peculiar sense of humor has led to some confusion. In explaining the distaste Liudprand expresses in the Legatio for what he found at the Byzantine court, Rentschler offers the misleading hypothesis that Liudprand, as a Westerner, came from a tradition that was antipathetic to homo ludens(18). However, as the work of Huizinga, Rahner, Suchomski, Wehrli, and others demonstrates, homo ludens was no stranger to western Europe(19). Witty, satiric, sarcastic, sceptical, Liudprand offers the credentials of an exemplary medieval homo ludens.

Several of the characters of whom he approves in the Antapodosis show the same sense of humor. The Byzantine Emperor Leo VI, for example, plays two tricks on his soldiers. First, in a test of the reliability of his guards, he disguises himself and bribes the first two groups he meets, into disobeying his orders. The third set, however, proves incorruptible, beats him and throws him into jail.

‑ 4 ‑

After considerable difficulty, he convinces his jailer to go to the palace with him, where Leo is recognized and the jailer is astonished. When the emperor asks the man, who has shown some knowledge of astrological terminology, to predict what will happen to him now, the jailer invokes the Fates to describe his predicament:

"Parcarum," infit, "optima Cloto nere desinit,

Lachesis vero in torquendo laborare amplius non

cupit, saevissima autem harum Atropos articulos

iam in condilum solam imperii tui sententiam

expectavit, fila contrahens rumpat(20).

Impressed with his response, subridens, Leo gives him a four‑pound bag of gold coins, and arranges to reward those who beat him and to punish those who took his bribe.

In a second ludus, emperor Leo distributes gold coins to his sleeping men(21). One guard, however, was awake and collected all the gold. He relates the event the next day to the emperor as a "dream," interpreting the numbers of bags of gold and sleeping men in the manner of a patristic exegete:

Cumque imperium tuum quasi repedare sotiosque hac in visione cernerem dormitare, continuo ceu laetus exurgens undecim dormientum aureorum numismatorum libras tuli meoque in rnarsupio, in quo una erat, apposui, quatinus ob transgressionem decalogi ne solum essent XI verum ob memoriam apostolorum mea una adhibita essent et ipsae XII(22).

Amused by the play with the number of Commandments and apostles, the emperor laughs, compliments the speaker on his powers, quotes from Lucian, and permits the soldier who remained awake to keep the coins.

Each incident offers a ludus involving a display of rhetorical competence, for which the performer is rewarded. In the first instance the jailer plays with material derived from Graeco‑Roman, Stoic commonplaces, to be found in Claudian, and eventually, later in the middle ages, to be associated with Boethius, about the nature of Fortune and fate(23). In the second instance the material is derived from Biblical exegesis. Both incidents show Liudprand's ability to play with serious, even sacred material, perhaps in an attempt to follow Horace's prescription, ridendo dicere verum.

Such an attempt is implicit in the opening of the Antapodosis. At the same time that he claims to be delivering relief from serious studies, Liudprand, with the help of a Boethian allusion, attacks those who he imagines are about to attack him, classifying them among those who

have only a fragment of Philosophy's garment:

qui supercilio tumentes, lectionis desides ac

secundum eruditi viri sententiam Boetii

‑ 5 ‑

philosophyae vestis particulam habentes totamque se habere putantes(24). He continues to broaden his claims for the greater scope and tone for the Antapodosis at the beginning of book VI. Modern times demand a tragedian rather than an historian(25), Liudprand insists, as he weaves into his statement a phrase from Psalm 22, to represent an agony simultaneously personal and timeless: Temporis instantis qualitas tragoedum me potius quam historiographum quaereret, nisi pararet Dominus in conspectu meo mensam adversus eos, qui tribulant me. Insisting that his predicament more properly calls for luQere Qua m scribere. Liudprand contrasts the condition of the inner and outer man, finally offering the conventional Stoic solution: contemplating the wheel of Fortune brings meditative relief, since one at the bottom may anticipate an upward rotation: Instantia enim si mutaberit, salutem, quae deest, adferet, infortunatam, quod adest, expellet(26). These meditative postures, however, are not undertaken in the service of purely philosophic speculation; for Liudprand the purpose of invoking history, tragedy, and Stoic disdain towards events in the phenomenal world is to aid in composing vengeful invective again the enemies of Otto(27).

He begins his attack on Willa and Berengar early in the Antapodosis, invoking from the rhetoric of classical satire the impossibility‑topos, to represent the impiety of the objects of his scorn: nec lingua proferre nec calamus praevalet scribere. At the beginning of book 111(28), in the course of explaining the significance of the title he has chosen, Liudprand explicitly claims that the purpose of his work is retributio, with the specific, immediate objects of his wrath Berengar and his wife Willa, whom he describes as a secunda Iezabel(29), as well as a Lamia. Eventually the attack on Berengar seems to devolve into a series of anti‑feminine routines against Willa, permitting Liudprand to participate in the relentless diatribe against the "Pornocracy" of the late tenth‑century(30).

To aid in getting even, and to further the Ottonian

cause, Liudprand regularly injects tragic and Stoic postures

into his diatribe. One of the ways in which he tries to

expand the significance of his invective is by recalling the

two major Graeco‑Roman civil wars: Thebes and Rome. The

opening of Statius' Thebiad would seem to be the passage

with which he is competing, when, in the course of

describing the contest between Rodulf and Berengar (July,

923), he composes verses on the internecine nature of the

battle, in which father fights son, grandfather fights

grandson:

Gnato pater ipse perhennem

Fert interitum, genitusque

‑ 6 ‑

Perhimit patrem, dolor heu quis? Loetum parat ecce nepoti Abavus, sternendus ab ipso; Furiis pulsatus ab atris Fratrem fodit eminus alter(31).

To describe the challenge Otto's brother Henry, instigated by count Everard, offered, in 939 A.D., for the throne, Liudprand composes elegiacs, upbraiding Henry for going against God, and for provoking, in Lucan's phrase, fraternas acies(32).

The Antapodosis, then, oscillates between moments of tragic horror and moments of comic absurdity, between the sufferings of the outer man and the contemplative resignation of the inner man; the two extremes are held together by the vituperative purpose of the author, an angry, pious, comic, exiled ecclesiastic(33), who offered, in Becker's words, satire, sarcasm, and cynicism(34).

Among the results of these activities is a text that displays some of the symptoms of what Bakhtin has isolated and labeled as the techniques of debasement, and of grotesque realism. Bakhtin establishes a polarity between classicism and the tradition of grotesque realism; according to his scheme, classicism vitiates the awareness of the body; grotesque realism insists upon the body and the physical nature of reality by deliberately exaggerating and profaning whatever high culture has established as sacred: Debasement is the fundamental principle of grotesque realism; all that is sacred and exalted is rethought on the level of the material bodily stratum or else combined and mixed with its images(35). As Bakhtin conceives of it, the classical aesthetic is one of exclusion; the excluded elements are the ones that grotesque realism, as a kind of vox populi, reintroduces and insistently magnifies: The new bodily canon, in all its historic variations and different genres, presents an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual. That which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off (when a body transgresses its limits and a new one begins) is eliminated, hidden, or moderated. All orifices of the body are closed. The opaque surface and the body's "valleys" acquire an essential meaning as the border of a closed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and with the world. All attributes of the unfinished world are carefully removed, as well as all the signs of its inner life. The verbal norms of official and literary

language, determined by the canon, prohibit all that is linked with fecundation, pregnancy, childbirth. There is a sharp line of division between familiar speech and "correct" language(36). Grotesque realism, on the other hand, relies upon the principle of excess, violating "official" norms, overflowing boundaries(37). Bakhtin also includes banquet imagery(38), games and riddles as part of the parphenalia of grotesque realism: "the images of games were seen as a condensed formula of life and the historic process: fortune, misfortune, gain and loss, crowning and uncrowning."(39)

Misleadingly, Bakhtin insists on folk culture as the source of the strategies of debasement and grotesque realism, and his consequent inability to find these strategies in medieval literature, except in the obscure Cena Cypriani, is a sign of the limited attention he chose to pay to medieval literature. In fact, the strategies of debasement and grotesque realism can be found throughout the middle ages and Liudprand's texts offer particularly rich examples.

Banquet imagery, for example, occurs in the the opening of book VI, quoted above, where, in the process of determining the genre to which his history properly belongs, Liudprand expresses the hope that the lord may prepare a table for him in the presence of his enemies: Temporis instantis qualitas tragoedum me potius quam historiographum quaereret, nisi pararet Dominus in conspectu meo mensam adversus eos, qui tribulant me. The motif of feeding ‑‑ here a reference to a sacred relationship ‑becomes a major topic for debasement both in the Leqatio and in the Antapodosis(40).

In the Legatio, Liudprand constantly denounces the behavior of his hosts at table. He finds their food vile, their manners terrible, and their failure to provide him with tablecloths intolerable(41). His complaints about feeding habits are not gastronomical in the modern sense, but are attacks, both in the Lectatio and in the Antapodosis, against the abuse of the central, civilizing ritual, both secular and sacred, that unites human beings. In addition, in the Legatio, Liudprand's attacks on the meals prepared for him as the legate of Otto are designed to show Nicephorus' ill‑will towards the Western Emperor(42).

In the Antapodosis, the function of "banquet imagery" is more complex. The earliest occurence of profanation of feeding results in Wido losing France to Odo. When the steward Wido sent ahead of him to prepare a banquet, more reqio, instead suggests to the bishop of Metz that he

‑ 8 ‑

economize on the meal ‑‑ in exchange for the gift of a horse ‑the outraged bishop declares: Non decet...talem super nos regnare regem, qui decem dragmis vile sibi obsonium praparat(43).

Liudprand's bêtes noires, the Hungarians, drink their defeated enemies' blood(44), and attack Christians in the midst of a meal, in a scene whose intensity is magnified by the specific image of transfixed throats: ut cibo recrearentur, descenderant; quos tanta Hungarii celeritate confoderant, ut in gula cibum transfigerent aliis(45).

When Marozia's son Alberic addresses the Romans, he attacks the Burgundians in typically medieval fashion, by providing a disparaging etymology for their name(46). He claims that they are gurguliones, either because of their guttural speech, or because of their inordinate indulgence of their gula.

Hatto betrays Adalbert by tricking him with an invitation to dinner(47), and when Flambert plots against Berengar I in Verona, the king enacts a Last Supper with him. After telling him that he has heard of Flambert's plot, the king offers him a pledge of peace:

His expletis aureum non parvi ponderis poculum rex ei porrexit atque subiunxit: "Amoris salutisque mei causa, quod continetur, bibito, quod continet, habeto." Vere quippe et absque ambiguitate post potum introivit in illum Sathanas, quemadmodum et de Iuda proditore domini nostri Iesu Christi scriptum est. "Quia post bucellam tunc introivit in illum Sathanas."(48)

At this point, to emphasize the violation of the sacred, Liudprand composes a poem on the event, borrowing the verse‑form Prudentius had used to celebrate the dawn in Cathemerinon 1(49), to provide a resonantly pious death: A tergo hunc ferit impius Romphaea; cadit heu pius Felicemque suum Deo Commendat pie spiritum(50)! In effect, then, the sign of sacred community, the meal, proves ineffective.

Even more graphic, more elaborately ludic debasement occurs when Liudprand turns to the body and images of pregnancy, fecundation, and childbirth. Women receive most of the attention in this area, as Liudprand portrays a world in which sexuality and politics are inextricably, destructively entwined. Although Willa is the declared central focus of his anti‑feminism, Ermengard, Marozia, Theodora, Berta and Willa's mother Willa also receive enough detailed attention to sustain the charge that Liudprand was

‑ 9 ‑

a committed misogynist. Since Berta and Willa are sisters, and Ermengard is Bertha's daughter, Liudprand manages to magnify his vengeance by distributing his Ottonian bile over several generations.

The first of the abhorrent women to appear in the Antapodosis is Wido's wife, who ministers a sleeping potion to her husband's rival Arnulf, establishing the figure of woman as greedy and conniving(51). When she offers the drink, vipperina callidate, to Arnulf, Liudprand breaks in

to invoke Vergil ( Aeneid III. 56‑57) on the power of gold, Auri sacra fames. Significantly, however, Liudprand speculates that Arnulf received what he had earned by his neglect of God, and particularly by permitting churches to be turned into playgrounds, carnivals, and houses of

prostitution:

In his namque simbolam faciebant, gestus turpis,

cantus ludicres, debachationes. Sed et mulieres

eodem publice, pro nefas, prostituebantur(52).

In Liudprand's mind, then, political and sexual disorder generate each other.

Berta, daughter of Lothair II and Waldrada, and, through her first husband Theutbald, mother of Hugh (whose sexual problems also lead to political disasters), is the next sexual powerhouse to appear in the Antapodosis. Having captured her husband Adalbert, Lambert speaks ironically of Berta's predictive powers, and her Circe‑like ability to turn men into beasts(53). After her husband's death, Liudprand complains, she exercises as much authority as her son Wido, the rightful inheritor. Her weapons include cleverness, an appeal to greed, and sexual competence; she gets her way, cum calliditate, muneribus, tum hymenaei exercitio dulcis(54) Her daughter Ermengard is described as equally talented in the area of sexual performance, Afroditi dulcedine coaecrualem. According to Liudprand, Ermengard carried on carnal commerce with everyone, noble and commoner(55). When she convinces Rodulf to desert his men, Liudprand compares him to Holofernes, decapitated (i.e., "uncrowned") by a woman(56).

Theodora, scortum impudens, seduces the man who will become John X, arranging his election to the Papacy in 914, because, according to Liudprand, she found the distance from Rome to Ravenna an intolerable impediment to her lust(57). Her daughters, Theodora and Marozia, Liudprand assures us, were equally venereal(58). In addition, Marozia and her husband Wido are instrumental in bringing about the death of John X, first killing Peter, John's brother, before the Pope's very eyes. Then they imprison the Pope, who dies in 928, perhaps smothered with a pillow(59)