Having contributed to number stuff myself (more on the liturgical numbers
in Amoretti, for example)I may feel a little defensive on this, but for me
there are two main criteria: does the number symbolism go with the text in
any probable way (this sounds primitive, but I simply mean that Christian
numerology in Homer would give me pause and to deduce the magic date 1789
in Samuel Daniel would too) and does it require suspending the laws of
probability to deny the number stuff. For example (see a minor essay of
mine years ago in Ren&Ref), when Giles Fletcher writes 52 sonnets to his
Licia one might suspect an allusion to the year. That's not a stretch.
Allusions to her are cold at the start, hot up in the middle, and cool off
again toward the end. If he has a January start that's pretty clear too.
Now if each sonnet is a week, then each day gets two lines. OK, that's a
bit more stretched, and it doesn't add up to 365 days. Oops. BUT: one
sonnet adds some lines as though Fletcher "intended" to make the lines,
too, add up to a year. He adds four, though. Two too many. Damn. But aha!
1592 was a leap year, which works out. No wonder the lady's name gestures
at "light." And then there's the internal allusion to how he spends days
and weeks loving her. At that point the mathematical probability that
there is *not* number stuff seems to me too small to worry about. Nor is
this sort of play dead--both Anthony Burgess and John Gardner use it. A
Columbia student wrote Gardner to ask if *Grendel* is indeed based on the
Zodiac (with a March start, of course, and ending in Pisces, which is good
symbolism for how Garder reads *Beowulf*). Garder wrote back saying
something like "Well, duh" and adding that no reviewer--including my late
husband--had caught it. Where I get skeptical is when the numerology is
extremely complex and seems not to relate to the matter at hand.
A note on numerology: years ago I was telling a class about Kent
Hieatt's book on Epithalamion and used the word "numerology" without
writing it on the board. On her exam she said, "Spenser believed in a
New Morology and he thought this Morology would make his marriage
last a long time." I told Kent, who wrote back that "According to
Desiderius E. without the Old Morology nobody would get married to
begin with." Funny. Anne P.
> Hannibal Hamlin wrote:
>> At the risk of
>> committing an intentional fallacy, how far is it reasonable to expect
>> that Spenser went in constructing the numerological puzzles? How far
>> can a reader be reasonably expected to go in rooting them out? It
>> reminds me of the numerology of Renaissance motets (Josquin et al. --
>> some compositions use patterns embodying the golden mean, or the
>> dimensions of Solomon's Temple, etc.), but music is much closer to
>> mathematics anyway, and the general take on such patterns (I think) is
>> that they are there not for the human listener (for who could possible
>> hear proportional ratios??) but for God.
>
> 1. Intentio auctoris may or may not be a fallacy, but it's something
> that the old commentators always try to provide. Old = ancient to
> Renaissance.
>
> 2. I was skeptical about some of this until I read Derek Attridge's book
> on quantitative meter in vernacular verse. The first part of the book
> reconstructs how Greek and Latin meter were taught, and shows that the
> primary method for deriving vowel quantities was "by position." As a
> result, when these kids read classical poetry, they were always
> counting. Counting, counting, counting. Numerology, even of the most
> minute and trivial sort, is a natural development of this habit.
> Granted, some of the games seem petty, and as Thomas Aquinas says of
> allegory in the Bible, you wouldn't want to use them as a basis for
> "doctrine." But that they played the games does not surprise me anymore.
>
> 3. On poetry and music: one of the reasons for resurrecting quantitative
> meter was to bring poetry closer to music.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr. David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask]
> English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
> East Carolina University Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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