The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor. - book reviews

When Dame Frances Yates, back in the 1950 studied the Renaissance revival of universal imperialism in the reign of Charles V she did with equal reason with reference to the famous symbol of the emperor, which featured the pillars of Hercules and the motto Plus ultra--for the Hapsburg empire then stretch outed beyond Gibraltar to the of recent origin World of America. Dangling between the pillars in this imperial device was the clearly recognizable ovine form of the Order of the of gold Fleece. Marie Tanner, in The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor, focuses upon the little fleece, left dangling in Hapsburg historiography, and excitedly give chase tos its significance for imperial ideology in intellectual history. single cannot consider Tanner's book without respect to Yates, for it was Yates who staked without this particular terrain of Renaissance imperialism, with concern to Virgil's fourth Eclogue, the prophecy of the Cumaean Sibyl, and the go [i]or[/i] come back of Astraea--which figure prominently in Tanner's work as well. Furthermore, Yates, who was without doubt one of the most dazzlingly erudite and brilliantly interesting of intellectual historians, pursu a highly distinctive historiographical strategy in her greatest in quantity important work, and Tanner stands shut up to her in this as well, in style as well as matter.

The methodological magnificence of Yates involved seizing on a figure or image--such as Astraea or Hermes Trismegistus--whose significance was suppos to be decorative, rhetorical, incidental, or eccentric, and, by dint of relentless scholarly pursuit, revealing its abysmal and pervasive presence in crucial aspects of Renaissance agriculture Her book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, beginning with the frontispiece of Hermes Trismegistus in the pavement of the Duomo of Siena, reevaluated the emphases and priorities of humanism with similar erudition that the Renaissance as a whole appeared radically--and magically--revised.(1) Tanner, in her pursuit of the of gold Fleece, proposes a similar sort of reconception, in which a hitherto leave outed cluster of images is discovered in manifold affiliation, so as to revise the rhetorical balance of Renaissance imperialism. The mythological figures of Jason and Aeneas preside--in somebody or by allusion--over this reconceived rhetoric, woven into each tapestry, inscribed in every symbol and rooted in every genealogical tree Tanner insists that they be taken in tandem as Trojan figures--for Jason stopped at Troy (to throw down the city) on his way to Colchis--and that together they constitute a Trojan lock opener to the Holy Roman Empire of the Renaissance. The Penates of Aeneas, like Jason's deprive of fleece were not simple scraps or upholds of remote mytholog}, but meaningful treasure and trophies for the Hapsburg emperors, who claimed them--like in like manner much else--for the family inheritance, and displayed them ideologically on behalf of dynastic pretensions.

"All the monarchs of Europe sought Trojan ancestors," wrote Yates, "through whom to link their destinies and origins with imperial Rome"(2) Yates was especially interested in the celebration of Elizabeth Tudor's Trojan coming down as well as in the claims of the French Valois kings, thus it is hardly surprising to learn from Tanner that the Hapsburgs were also zealous to make their case. notwithstanding surely no one has at any time dedicated to this Trojan theme similar weighty erudition and comprehensive attention as Tanner does, when she studies it in relation to medieval antecedents, from the Carolingians to the Hohenstaufen, and within a Renaissance connection of intricately related thematic pertain tos She begins with Virgil, for the Aeneid is fundamental as a time to come reference for things Trojan, and the fourth pastoral is perhaps still more important with its prophetic allusions to Argonauts and Trojans. Homer upon the other hand, appears to have played a rather less role even in the Renaissance revaluation of Troy

In the 4th hundred in the aftermath of Constantine's conversion, Tanner finds Prudentius reading Virgil in the light of Christianity, associating Aeneas and Christ, and looking to an emperor who, as "the successor of Aeneas, in the imperial purple prostrates himself in prayer at the house of Christ". She displays Charlemagne establishing a new Rome at Aachen, saluted as Pious Charles--the successor of Pious Aeneas. She attends to Guido delle Colonne composing his history of the destruction of Troy at the court of Frederick II in 13th-century Sicily. In Guido she finds already the genealogical elaborations that link the Hohenstaufen emperors to precisely identified Trojan ancestors, according to the hatched Babylonian testimony of Berosus the Chaldean. "With the unveiling of Berosus's wisdom," writes Tanner, "the demarcation between history and fable was systematically eliminated".

In a lengthy central chapter "Mythic Genealogy," Tanner explores the apparently uncritical acceptance, in the humanist circles around the Renaissance Hapsburgs, of the medieval genealogical extravagances that mingled mythology and history in order to devise Trojan ancestries. John Marignola's 14th-century chronicle for the Luxembourg emperor Charles IV, asserting that "through the uninterrupted kinship in the Trojan vital fluid of Aeneas, Charles descended from the pagan the omnipotents Saturn and Jove," was recopied for the Hapsburgs in the 16th hundred including images of such illustrious ancestors as Saturn and jupiter Priam and Anchises, as well as Clovis and Charlemagne. When Yates wrote of Ronsard's attention to Trojan ancestors for Charles IX in France, she quot his statement of self-conscious critical detachment from the project: "sans me soucier si cela est vrai ou non, ou si nos rois sont Troyen ou Germains."(3) Tanner gives no hint of any similar frankness among the Hapsburg humanists, suggesting that for them genealogy was a considerably more earnest undertaking. Just as Yates's inquiry of the humanists and the Hermetic tradition showed the Renaissance to be unexpectedly uncritical in its relation to ancient wisdom, with equal reason Tanner's account of genealogical preoccupations reveals an aspect of humanism in which the critical standards of Lorenzo Valla were far from prevalent.