Saint Augustine famously "wept for Dido, who killed herself by the
sword," and many later medieval schoolboys were taught to respond in
similarly emotional ways to the pain of female characters in Virgil's
Aeneid and other classical texts. In Weeping for Dido, Marjorie
Curry Woods takes readers into the medieval classroom, where boys
identified with Dido, where teachers turned an unfinished classical poem
into a bildungsroman about young Achilles, and where students not only
studied but performed classical works.
Woods opens the classroom door by examining teachers' notes and marginal
commentary in manuscripts of the Aeneid and two short verse
narratives: the Achilleid of Statius and the Ilias latina, a Latin
epitome of Homer's Iliad. She focuses on interlinear
glosses--individual words and short phrases written above lines of text
that elucidate grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, but that also indicate
how students engaged with the feelings and motivations of characters.
Interlinear and marginal glosses, which were the foundation of the
medieval classroom study of classical literature, reveal that in
learning the Aeneid, boys studied and empathized with the feelings of
female characters; that the unfinished Achilleid was restructured into
a complete narrative showing young Achilles mirroring his mentors,
including his mother, Thetis; and that the Ilias latina offered boys a
condensed version of the Iliad focusing on the deaths of young men.
Manuscript evidence even indicates how specific passages could be
performed.
The result is a groundbreaking study that provides a surprising new
picture of medieval education and writes a new chapter in the reception
history of classical literature.
