The Return of Proserpina by Sarah Spence

Author:Sarah Spence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Ceres and Redemption

By the fourteenth century the return of Proserpina had taken a new turn and was closely allied with the notion of Purgatory, even as the location of Purgatory had been increasingly identified with Etna in the context of this story: atonement and prayers in this life can lead to positive results for others in the next. The journey to the parallel world of Jerusalem that you make for yourself and for others becomes through time the rhetorical journey to the underworld that you make through prayer, based on the return of Proserpina. William of Tyre’s version of Urban II’s speech offers a reading of the Proserpina myth from the Verrine orations that casts the notions of loss and recovery in terms of guilt and penitence, a reading supported by later versions such as that of the Ovide Moralisé. Moreover, his choice of the Verrines points to Sicily as the root of this new form of empire, in which the language of penitence and the description of Purgatory are intertwined.32

The echoes of the Verrine orations in William of Tyre’s account of Urban II’s speech, then, draw on a long association of Sicily with purgation even as they adapt to speak to a new understanding of the Christian mission. It is perhaps relevant at this point to remember that many of the crusading missions left from Messina, near Etna, on Sicily. Sicily was, in so many ways, the starting point of the Crusades. From Sicily—from its myths of purgation, penitence, and redemption—the new Christian mission, the crusading mission, was launched. Ceres rather than Proserpina becomes the focus of the myth, and redemption through language becomes a means for restoring lost innocence in this fallen world. As we shall see, Dante’s understanding of Purgatory is guided by these very notions, and redemption in Purgatorio continues to be explicitly linked to the story of Proserpina.

I have argued in the preceding chapters that Cicero’s Sicily, as mediated through Vergil and Ovid, becomes a site of poetic and rhetorical exploration: good empire for Ovid is an empire of letters, a process of competition and rivalry within the literary sphere. The explosion of stories around the straits of Messina suggests that Cicero’s identification of Sicily and empire has become in Ovid’s hands a poetic methodology, one that encourages poetic competition as the productive form of empire building. Ulysses’ victory over Ajax—a thinly veiled allegory of Ovid’s over Vergil—reiterates this point. Poetic rivalry, intertextuality, and expansion of the literary enterprise are all presented as a form of empire. As Cicero’s Proserpina myth becomes interpreted by Ovid in terms of Venus’s extension of her power into the underworld, so it also becomes a proto-humanist model for literary competition and rhetorical debate across generations of writers. As we saw in chapter 3, the myth of empire, in Ovid’s hands, becomes a poetics.

Yet in the medieval accounts of Sicily and tales of Proserpina we have looked at, this turn toward the poetic takes on a renewed value in the real world, as language becomes the means to both education and redemption.

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