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 The Dialogue
of Solomon and Marcolf
 p Middle English Texts Series p

General Editor
Russell A. Peck, University of Rochester
Associate Editor
Alan Lupack, University of Rochester
Assistant Editor
Martha Johnson-Olin, University of Rochester

Advisory Board
Theresa Coletti Michael Livingston
University of Maryland The Citadel
Rita Copeland R. A. Shoaf
University of Pennsylvania University of Florida
Susanna Fein Lynn Staley
Kent State University Colgate University
Thomas G. Hahn Paul E. Szarmach
University of Rochester Western Michigan University
David A. Lawton Bonnie Wheeler
Washington University in St. Louis Southern Methodist University

The Middle English Texts Series is designed for classroom use. Its goal is to make available to teachers,
scholars, and students texts that occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but have
not been readily available in student editions. The series does not include those authors, such as Chau-
cer, Langland, or Malory, whose English works are normally in print in good student editions. The focus
is, instead, upon Middle English literature adjacent to those authors that teachers need in compiling
the syllabuses they wish to teach. The editions maintain the linguistic integrity of the original work but
within the parameters of modern reading conventions. The texts are printed in the modern alphabet
and follow the practices of modern capitalization, word formation, and punctuation. Manuscript
abbreviations are silently expanded, and u/v and j/i spellings are regularized according to modern
orthography. Yogh (h) is transcribed as g, gh, y, or s, according to the sound in Modern English
spelling to which it corresponds; thorn (þ) and eth (ð) are transcribed as th. Distinction between the
second person pronoun and the definite article is made by spelling the one thee and the other the,
and final -e that receives full syllabic value is accented (e.g., charité). Hard words, difficult phrases,
and unusual idioms are glossed either in the right margin or at the foot of the page. Explanatory and
textual notes appear at the end of the text, often along with a glossary. The editions include short
introductions on the history of the work, its merits and points of topical interest, and brief working
bibliographies.

This series is published in association with the University of Rochester.

Medieval Institute Publications is a program of

The Medieval Institute, College of Arts and Sciences
The Dialogue of Solomon and
Marcolf: A Dual-Language
Edition from Latin and Middle
English Printed Editions

Edited by
Nancy Mason Bradbury and Scott Bradbury

TEAMS • Middle English Texts Series

M edieval Institute P ublications

Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo
Copyright © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University
Manufactured in the United States of America

The Library of Congress has already cataloged the paperback as follows:

The dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf : a dual-language edition from Latin and Middle
English printed editions / edited by Nancy Mason Bradbury and Scott Bradbury.
p. cm.
"Published for TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) in
Association with the University of Rochester."
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-58044-180-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Salomon et Marcolphus. 2. Dialogues, Latin (Medieval and modern)--Translations into
English. 3. Dialogues, Latin (Medieval and modern)--History and criticism. 4. Solomon,
King of Israel--In literature. I. Bradbury, Nancy M. II. Bradbury, Scott. III. Salomon et
Marcolphus. English & Latin.
PA8420.S14D53 2013
872'.03--dc23
2012033896

ISBN 978-1-58044-180-3
eISBN 978-1-58044-456-9
 CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

INTRODUCTION 1

THE DIALOGUE OF SOLOMON AND MARCOLF 26

EXPLANATORY NOTES 65

TEXTUAL NOTES 91

APPENDIX 95

BIBLIOGRAPHY 103

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1, MARCOLF, LATIN TEXT, C. 1488 22

FIGURE 2, SAMPLE OF THE PROVERB CONTEST, LATIN TEXT 23

FIGURE 3, MARCOLF AND HIS WIFE, POLYCANA, BEFORE KING SOLOMON,

MIDDLE ENGLISH TEXT, 1492 24

FIGURE 4, SAMPLE OF THE PROVERB CONTEST, MIDDLE ENGLISH TEXT 25

FIGURE 5, SOLUTIONS TO RIDDLES POSED BY MARCOLF TO SOLOMON, 1487 64

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to Smith College for funding our travel to Oxford and Cambridge to
examine the printed editions of our texts housed in their university libraries. We thank our
colleagues Eglal Doss-Quinby and Luc Gilleman for sharing their expertise and Jan M.
Ziolkowski for providing us with a prepublication copy of Solomon and Marcolf, his compre-
hensive 2008 study of the Latin work. The editors of Speculum graciously gave permission
for us to draw in our introduction upon the 2008 article “Rival Wisdom in the Latin Dialogue
of Solomon and Marcolf” by one of this volume’s editors. We salute with gratitude and affection
our two meticulous research assistants, Sarah Allen and Teresa Pandolfo. For expert editorial
guidance, patience, and good nature, many thanks to John H. Chandler, Martha M. Johnson-
Olin, Kara L. McShane, and Russell A. Peck at the University of Rochester and Patricia
Hollahan at Medieval Institute Publications. We thank also the National Endowment for the
Humanities for its support of the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series.

vii
 INTRODUCTION

1. NATURE OF THE PROJECT

The facing texts, Latin and Middle English, presented in this volume preserve a lively,
entertaining, and revealing dialogue between the Old Testament wisdom figure, Solomon,
and a medieval peasant, Marcolf, ragged and foul-mouthed but quick-witted and verbally
adept. The work’s traditional Latin title is Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolfi (The Dialogue of
Solomon and Marcolf); from about 1410 to 1550, versions of this dialogue were literary best-
sellers by the standards of the day. Their widespread appeal is attested by the survival of
Latin versions in some twenty-seven manuscripts and forty-nine early printed editions, as
well as translations into a wide variety of late medieval vernaculars, including German,
Dutch, Swedish, Italian, English, and Welsh. In 1914, Walter Benary published a critical
edition of the Latin dialogue under the title Salomon et Marcolfus, using as his base text the
manuscript Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek M.ch.f. 65, which bears the date 1434 on fol.
174r (see below, section 6.b). Benary’s Latin text was reprinted by Jan M. Ziolkowski in 2008
under the title Solomon and Marcolf with a modern English translation and extensive
commentary, a publication that will greatly advance the study of this intriguing work.
The two texts of the Dialogue presented here both derive from early printed editions,
a Latin version printed c. 1488 and a Middle English translation printed in 1492, both
produced in the Antwerp workshop of Gerard (or Gheraert) Leeu.1 Leeu has been described
by historians of printing as “the most original publisher in the Low Countries in the
fifteenth century,”2 and he deserves to be better known to readers of English, for his career
overlapped with that of England’s first printer, William Caxton. Indeed it is likely that they
died in the same year, 1492, shortly after Leeu printed the Middle English text presented
in this volume.3 Leeu began printing books for the English market in the 1480s, little more
than a decade after Caxton printed the first book in English. Thus Leeu’s edition of The
Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf numbers among the very first printed books in English to
be issued from outside the Caxton workshops. Leeu’s Middle English edition survives in a

1
For the dates, see W. Hellinga and L. Hellinga, Fifteenth-Century Printing Types, 1:420.
2
W. Hellinga and L. Hellinga, Fifteenth-Century Printing Types, 1:72.
3
For more about the career of Leeu, see section 6.c below. The dates of both deaths have been
debated, but for Caxton, the evidence points to the first three months of 1492; see Blake, “William
Caxton,” p. 44. Leeu’s death date is sometimes given as 1493 because his last book, an edition of the
Chronicles of England, did not appear until that year, but W. Hellinga and L. Hellinga, Fifteenth-Century
Printing Types, 1:73, cite a burial record that places the death between December 3 and 24 of 1492.
The colophon to the Chronicles (quoted in section 6.c below) testifies that Leeu was already dead when
the book appeared in 1493.

1
2 THE DIALOGUE OF SOLOMON AND MARCOLF

single printed edition, now shelved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, as Tanner 178 (3).
Facsimiles are available in the editions by E. Gordon Duff and Donald Beecher and at Early
English Books Online.4
Our dual-language edition pairs Leeu’s Middle English text with the Latin text of the
Dialogue he printed some four years earlier. Although Leeu’s Latin text is the source most
likely to have been used by the English translator, no distinctive shared readings decisively
link the two and there are a few minor discrepancies between them. Nothing is known about
the circumstances under which the English translation was made, but it shares a few
readings with a later Dutch translation that are not present in Leeu’s Latin text. It is most
likely that the earlier Middle English text influenced the later Dutch, but it is not impossible,
as one scholar has argued, that a now-lost earlier edition of the surviving Dutch translation
influenced or served as the model for the English (see section 6.c below). Whatever its
relation to other versions, the Middle English translation that Leeu printed in 1492
corresponds very closely to the text of his Latin print of c. 1488, and thus a reader of our
edition with some knowledge of Latin can now compare the English to the extant text most
likely to have served as its model. Our explanatory notes emphasize the English text but
include comments on the Latin as well, particularly on problems of translation. The Middle
English is thoroughly glossed on the text pages. For the general interpretation of the
dialogue offered in this introduction as well as the early history of the Latin text, we have
drawn upon an article by one of the present editors, Nancy Mason Bradbury, “Rival Wisdom
in the Latin Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf,” and we thank the journal editors for
permission to do so.
To find one’s way through the maze of Solomon and Marcolf texts, it is important to
recognize that the Dialogue survives in various Latin versions, and these versions can differ
significantly. For example, the longest of the dialogue’s verbal contests is a competitive
exchange of proverbs. The fullest manuscripts of the Dialogue contain some 138 exchanges
(depending on where one begins and stops counting), whereas some manuscripts and all
printed editions contain only 88–90 exchanges. When and why this abridgement or bowdler-
ization might have occurred will be explored below in section 6.c, but we note that the
omitted exchanges are often striking and their absence changes the complexion of the work.
Many include scatological retorts from Marcolf, and some others are blasphemous, obscene,
or rabidly misogynist. In an appendix, we include the forty-nine exchanges omitted from the
proverb contest by the printed versions, supplying the missing exchanges from the standard
manuscript-based text edited by Walter Benary, along with our own translations. Our
appendix shows how much of its satiric bite the proverb contest loses by this abridgement.

2. IMPORTANCE OF THE DIALOGUE OF SOLOMON AND MARCOLF

The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf is very much a medieval work; mentions of earlier
avatars begin around the year 1000 and are widespread by the thirteenth century.5 It pits
a static clerical authority, represented by Solomon, against an outrageously provocative

4
Duff, ed., Dialogue or Communing; Beecher, ed., Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus; Early
English Books Online is available at <http://eebo.chadwyck.com>.
5
For a full list of the early allusions with original texts and translations, see Ziolkowski, Solomon
and Marcolf, pp. 316–60.
INTRODUCTION 3

voice for improvisation and innovation, polarizing these two voices but also bringing them
into dialogue. Thus part of its importance for medievalists is as yet another piece of evidence
that the intellectual rebirth for which early modern thinkers gave themselves full credit had
deep roots in medieval culture. Despite the considerable attention earlier forms of the work
attracted, no manuscripts survive prior to 1410, and the earliest print is dated c. 1473. In
the cultural climate of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the explosive collision
between Solomon’s authoritative wisdom and Marcolf’s morally ambiguous cleverness
generated enough energy to propel the Dialogue into multiple Latin manuscript versions
and then into numerous printed editions in Latin and a variety of European vernaculars.
The Latin Dialogue and its vernacular translations are better known to scholars of Con-
tinental Europe than they are to Anglo-American medievalists. Versions of the work were
especially popular in German-speaking lands from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries,
first in Latin and then in the vernacular, and German scholars have long taken an active
interest in it.6 In Italy, this dialogue inspired a minor classic still widely available in paper-
back, Giulio Cesare Croce’s Bertoldo (1606), and thus a modern Italian scholar, Maria Corti,
calls the Latin dialogue “a well-known text, familiar within our culture.”7 Scholars of Old
French and Anglo-French know Marcolf from his mordant contributions to a series of
rhymed proverb exchanges.8 Interest in the dialogue on the part of Middle English scholars
stems in part from new attention to a “Marcolf” poem by John Audelay.9
The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf has also played a significant role in the history of
medieval scholarship via its influence on Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. Readers
are often struck by how “Bakhtinian” or “carnivalesque” Marcolf’s provocative contributions
seem, but it would be more accurate to call Bakhtin’s theory of popular culture “Marcolfian.”
The Dialogue was one of a relatively small number of medieval (as opposed to ancient, late
antique, and early modern) works Bakhtin cited in illustration of his ideas about the subver-
sive and life-affirming potential of “the material bodily lower stratum.”10 Bakhtin uses this
phrase to designate the parts of the human body most effaced or even demonized by clerical
writings but celebrated in a variety of comic and anti-institutional forms, including jests,
drinking songs, and parodies of sacred texts. Like the Latin texts of the Dialogue, much of
this antiauthoritarian material very likely originated among medieval clerics themselves, as
they were the authors and readers, and therefore the most likely parodists, of Medieval
Latin literature. Despite its probable origins among medieval clerics (a category that included
priests, scholars, monastics, and others educated in Latin), this variegated mass of anti-
authoritarian (or anti-institutional) materials incorporated preexisting verbal forms that
circulated throughout medieval vernacular culture: forms such as jests, riddles, and popular
proverbs. Thus works such as The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf reveal a resistant spirit that
Bakhtin called “the people’s festive laughter” to distinguish it from the solemn, penitential

6
Curschmann, “Marcolfus deutsch”; Griese, Salomon und Markolf.
7
Corti, “Models and Antimodels in Medieval Culture,” p. 357. For the Latin dialogue as the
source of Bertoldo, see Cortese-Pagani, “Il ‘Bertoldo’ de Guilio Cesare Croce ed i suoi fonti.”
8
Hunt, “Solomon and Marcolf.”
9
See Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. Fein; Green, “Marcolf the Fool and Blind John Audelay” and
“Langland and Audelay”; Simpson, “Saving Satire after Arundel’s Constitutions”; and Pearsall,
“Audelay’s Marcolf and Solomon and the Langlandian Tradition.”
10
Bakhtin, Rabelais, pp. 368–436.
4 THE DIALOGUE OF SOLOMON AND MARCOLF

tone that permeates the official products of medieval institutions.11 In comparison to the
vast amount of devout and institutionally sanctioned literature that survives from the Middle
Ages, these mocking and transgressive forms are much rarer, but they nevertheless have an
important role to play in helping us to understand the full range of medieval culture.

3. SOLOMON

Although his peasant interlocutor hails from medieval Europe, the Solomon figure of
our work draws heavily upon the language and life history of the Old Testament patriarch.
The genealogy Solomon recites early in the Dialogue derives from scripture, as do many of
his speeches. In the Latin texts, Solomon speaks in the accessible, international Latin of the
Vulgate Bible. Thus his language contrasts tellingly with Marcolf’s more concrete, colloquial,
and earthy speech, with its insistent references to the barnyard and to the human body and
its animal functions. Vernacular translators such as our unknown English writer easily
render the familiar language of Solomon’s side of the dialogue while Marcolf’s often-cryptic
utterances give them much more trouble, as our explanatory notes indicate.
The basic elements that make up Solomon’s life and character in this dialogue are
already present in the Old Testament account in 3 Kings 3–11: most notably, his possession
of extraordinary wisdom, his skill in rendering just judgments, and the threat to his pre-
eminence posed by challengers determined to test that fabled wisdom.12 In a dream the
young Solomon asks God for “an understanding heart, to judge thy people, and discern
between good and evil” (3 Kings 3:9). Pleased with his request, God grants him “wisdom and
understanding exceeding . . . the sand that is on the sea shore” so that he becomes “wiser
than all men” (3 Kings 4:29–31). From the beginning, then, Solomon’s is a moral wisdom,
a faculty that allows him to make just judgments and to hold three thousand proverbs (3
Kings 4:32, Latin Vulgate parabolae) in his capacious memory. That Solomon’s words derive
mainly from the Old Testament wisdom books would make sense to medieval readers, who
attributed a substantial part of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament to Solomon,
including Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus. The
Solomon of the dialogue alludes in the proverb contest (4.5a) to his famous biblical judg-
ment between two women who claim the same child (3 Kings 3:16–28), and the circum-
stances of the judgment are narrated in more detail in 16.1–4. Even this quintessential
example of Solomon’s wisdom is undermined in The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, however,
when Marcolf deliberately recounts a distorted version in order to discredit the king with
his female subjects (18.3).
Long before the appearance of the medieval peasant Marcolf, Solomon’s reputation for
preeminent wisdom had attracted challengers. In the Bible, the queen of Sheba comes “to
try him with hard questions” (3 Kings 10:1). According to early Jewish tradition, another
biblical figure, Hiram, king of Tyre, competed against Solomon in a riddling contest, as
does Marcolf in our dialogue, and Jewish legend also tells of the efforts of the demon

11
Bakhtin, Rabelais, pp. 4–15 and 59–123, quotation at p. 12.
12
Biblical citations in Latin in this volume are from the Vulgate; English translations are from
the Douay-Rheims Bible.
INTRODUCTION 5

Asmodeus to get the better of Solomon.13 Around the sixth century, the title Contradictio
Salomonis (or Interdictio, depending on the manuscript) appears in a list of books prohibited
by a decree falsely attributed to Pope Gelasius (432–96) — this otherwise unknown but
apparently controversial work may have recorded another irreverent challenge to Solomon’s
wisdom. An Anglo-Saxon poem dated to c. 900 represents Solomon debating Saturn, the
latter depicted as a Chaldean pagan. This poetic dialogue, known as Solomon and Saturn II,
makes a single reference to a land of Marcolf — “Marculfes eard” (line 180b).14 At least
another century elapses before the first direct reference to a verbal challenger named
Marcolf appears; see our account of Marcolf in the following section and our summary of
the Dialogue’s prehistory in section 6.a below.15

4. MARCOLF

No one has solved the riddle of what connection, if any, exists between the peasant hero
of our dialogue and the reference to “Marculfes eard” (Marcolf’s land) in the Anglo-Saxon
poetic dialogue Solomon and Saturn II. If Marcolfus (Marcolphus, Marculfus) is a Latinized
version of the Anglo-Saxon or Germanic name Marculf or Marcolf, the name probably
derives from mark-wulf, ‘wolf of the marches or borderlands,’16 so that even in his name,
Marcolf is an unsettling, marginal figure associated with a literal or figurative periphery. In
most versions of the Dialogue, Marcolf comes to the court of King Solomon in Jerusalem
“from the east” (Latin “a parte oriente,” Middle English “out of th’este”). Ziolkowski notes
that in Solomon and Saturn II, Solomon’s antagonist Saturn is traveling in eastern lands,
where he encounters the mysterious “land of Marculf.”17 The Anglo-Saxon poem thus may
help to support the work of early scholars who sought to connect Marcolf with various
eastern figures from medieval legend, some of them demonic, who presented early
challenges to Solomon.
The earliest reference to Marcolf as a challenger to Solomon’s wisdom occurs in the
work of Notker Labeo (Notker of St. Gall, 952–1022). Notker objects to various types of
profane literature, including works in which Marcolf contends with the proverbs of Solomon,
in beautiful words that lack truth.18 If Notker has in mind a tradition or a work that
resembles the extant dialogue, his criticism may acknowledge the verbal agility of some of
Marcolf’s replies, but reject their irreverence. The large temporal gap that separates passing
allusions such as this one from the written texts that emerge in the fifteenth century suggests
that earlier versions circulated orally as well as in writing. The wide variation among the
surviving texts may also point toward some form of oral transmission. Sabine Griese cites

13
For Hiram, see Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 4:141–42; for Asmodeus, see Bose, “From
Exegesis to Appropriation,” pp. 192–93.
14
Menner, ed., Poetical Dialogues of Solomon and Saturnr; see also O’Brien O’Keeffe, “Geographic
List of Solomon and Saturn II.”
15
For information about confrontations between Solomon and his challengers prior to Marcolf,
see Bose, “From Exegesis to Appropriation”; Ziolkowski, Solomon and Marcolf, pp. 19–22; and the
extensive references cited, especially by the latter.
16
Menner, ed., Poetical Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, ed. Menner, p. 119.
17
Ziolkowski, Solomon and Marcolf, p. 22.
18
For text and commentary, see Ziolkowski, Solomon and Marcolf, pp. 317–20.
6 THE DIALOGUE OF SOLOMON AND MARCOLF

a possible piece of evidence for the oral performance of an earlier version of the dialogue:
Lambert of Ardres describes an entertainment at the court of Arnold of Guînes in 1194 that
included tales of a variety of figures, including a “Merchulfo” that Griese identifies with
Marcolf.19
Although there is no direct evidence for such an activity, the dialogue may have been
influenced by some sort of irreverent game in which participants in the “Marcolf” role made
up scandalous mock-Solomonic proverbs. Certainly the surviving exchanges vary widely in
their wit and their crudity. As a bit of much later evidence for such an activity, Natalie
Zemon Davis observes that the brief exchange between Solomon and Marcolf mentioned
in chapter 33 of François Rabelais’ Gargantua (1534) sounds very much like a game of “the
dozens,” an insult-swapping match, as do many of the exchanges in the Dialogue itself.20 In
an exchange not present in the versions of the Dialogue that survive to us, Rabelais’ ambitious
courtier Spadassin cites a version of a well-known proverb: “‘The man who ventures nothing
wins neither horse nor mule,’ as Solomon said.” To this a seasoned old campaigner replies,
“‘The man who ventures too much loses both horse and mule,’ as Malcon answered.”21
Rabelais’ “Malcon” replies with the same sardonic pragmatism we associate with Marcolf,
once again set against Solomon’s optimistic idealism.
In addition to its possible oral ancestry, the clandestine nature of the Marcolfian
tradition, with its scatology, blasphemy, and occasional obscenity could also help to account
for the dearth or disappearance of whatever early manuscripts may once have existed. The
fullest Latin manuscripts preserve the tradition’s razor-sharp edges, with the transgressive
verbal parallels Marcolf draws between, for example, wisdom and shit, the evangelists and
the supports of a latrine, or the Lord and the anus (Appendix, nos. B 38ab, B 89ab, and B
138ab), but even among the existing manuscripts, omissions and substitutions suggest that
softened versions were often more acceptable to transmitters and readers, and by the time
of the Latin prints and vernacular translations, the text had been very much sanitized.
Many traces remain of Marcolf’s reputation in medieval England. As Malcolm Jones and
Michael Camille have shown, Marcolf’s antiauthoritarian posture can take quite literal form
in the margins of medieval manuscripts, where he bares his posterior to the viewer, as he
does to a startled Solomon in the Dialogue (24.8–12).22 Images of Marcolf appeared in a
thirteenth-century register of writs, a now-vanished mid-thirteenth-century wall painting
(Henry III’s “Marcolf” chamber in the palace at Westminster), and two early fourteenth-
century psalters. The Marcolf of our dialogue is a skilled wielder of proverbs, and thus it is
fitting that a reference to him occurs in the Proverbs of Hending, a versified collection of
English sayings that circulated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the version
found in British Library MS Harley 2253, Hending is identified as “Marcolves sone,” and
at the end of the moral proverbs assigned to Hending in Cambridge University Library MS

19
Griese, Salomon und Markolf, pp. 1–2. Lambert of Ardres, Historia Comitum Ghisnensium, ed.
Heller, p. 607. In English, Lambert of Ardres, History of the Counts of Guines, pp. 129–30.
20
Davis, “Proverbial Wisdom,” p. 227.
21
“Qui ne se adventure, n’a cheval ny mule, ce dist Salomon. Qui trop (dist Echephron) se
adventure perd cheval et mulle, respondit Malcon” (Gargantua, ed. Ruth Calder [Geneva: Droz,
1970], p. 200), an alternate reading of lines 142–43. We cite the English translation by J. M. Cohen,
Gargantua and Pantagruel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 112.
22
Jones, “Marcolf the Trickster”; Camille, Image on the Edge, p. 26 and illustration 15 on p. 34.
INTRODUCTION 7

GgI.1, the reader finds this Marcolfian grumble against the utility of sententious wisdom:
“‘Al to late, al to late / Wan the deth is at the õate,’ Quod Marcol.”23 Evidence for Marcolf’s
existence survives at the very edges of English medieval art and literature, but his appear-
ances there are consistent in their pragmatic, survival-oriented, antiauthoritarian stance.
The English priest John Audelay wrote a series of poems c. 1410–26, one of which
adopts the voice of Marcolf the “fool” as a vehicle for some sharp criticism of church and
state.24 Richard Firth Green notes that Audelay cites the ominous English proverb, “Be war
or ye be wo,” in contexts that recall its politically charged use in the letters of John Ball and
his followers during the Rising of 1381.25 The fifteenth-century English poet John Lydgate
refers to Marcolf in two of his poems. In “The Order of Fools,” Lydgate hails Marcolf as
“foundour, patroun, & president” of the order; in the final stanza of “The Debate of the
Horse, Goose, and Sheep,” he deplores “Fals supplantyng clymbyng vp of foolis, / Vnto
chaires of worldly dygnyte, / . . . Marcolff to sitt in Salamonis see [‘seat’].”26
Finally, although it does not mention Solomon or Marcolf, it is worth noting among the
traces of the Marcolfian tradition in England an anonymous Middle English poem
preserved in British Library MS Harley 541, fols. 212r–213r, in a hand dated to the first half
of the fifteenth century.27 In a dialogue between two allegorical personifications that
represent nature (Kynd) and training or upbringing (Nurtur), Kynd supports its claims to
override Nurtur through a variety of arguments that culminate in the same “cat and the
candle” demonstration employed to the same persuasive end by Marcolf in our Dialogue
(13.1–8). As Braekman and Macaulay note, the word nurtur suggests a possible source in
Latin for the Middle English poem, and it is of course possible that the source was a version
of the Latin Dialogue. One variation of the poem’s refrain, “I preve that kynde passis
nurture” (line 28), corresponds quite closely to Marcolf’s statement, “coram te probavi plus
valere naturam quam nutrituram,” 13.5 (“I proved before you that nature is more influential
than nurture”). In the Latin manuscripts of the Dialogue that circulated in the first half of
the fifteenth century when this poem was written down, Solomon restrains his well-trained
cat from chasing a mouse with a variety of sounds or gestures, depending on the manu-
script: a grunt (grunitu), a groan (gemitu), or a shout (clamore), as Benary’s apparatus
indicates. In the Middle English poem, Nurtur, the Solomonic figure who stands for a
proper upbringing, restrains the cat by speaking to it, apparently by name: “‘What, Nyce,’
quoth Nurtur, ‘com do thi cure’” (line 58). Whether the author of the English “Kynd and
Nurtur” poem had encountered a version of The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf remains an
open question, but clearly the poem shares one of the Dialogue’s main themes, the contest
between a Solomonic belief in the lasting effects of moral training and a Marcolfian

23
Ziolkowski (Solomon and Marcolf, pp. 354–55) reproduces the opening section of the Harley
2253 text, where the reference to “Marcolf’s son” occurs in line 3. The Harley text and Cambridge
University Library MS GgI.1 are edited by Gustav Schleich, “Die Sprichwörter Hendings und die
Prouerbis of Wysdom,” Anglia 51 (1927), 220–77.
24
Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. Fein, pp. 32–64; Poems of John Audelay, ed. Whiting, pp. 10–46.
25
Green, “Marcolf the Fool,” pp. 569–70.
26
Lydgate, Minor Poems, “The Order of Fools” appears on pp. 449–55 (citation of line 5), “The
Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep” on pp. 539–66 (citation of lines 604–05, 608).
27
For the dating and a text of the poem, see Braekman and Macaulay, “Story of the Cat and the
Candle in Middle English Literature.”
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