On the Salernitan Questions

Abstract

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• On the Salernitan Questions
• Anthony Madrid (bio)

The backstory is charming. A book collector buys a Renaissance manuscript codex. He finds in it, amid piles of unrelated material, a transcript of a bizarre Latin poem, about three quarters of which is nothing but a rigmarole of questions. "Why do tidings of disgrace cure hiccups?" "Why do women have irrational pregnancy cravings?" "Why are puppies born blind, and then, exactly nine days later, they can see?" One hundred and thirty lines of this.

Our scholar does some research and locates the source text of the transcript, and the source text of the source text, and the source text of that, and so on, until he winds up a world expert on "Question" literature, aka "Problem" literature. It turns out there's this rich history.

The above, which sounds like something Borges would have made up, is real. I'm simplifying things, but it's all true. The collector's name was Brian Lawn. He died in 2001, age ninety-five or ninety-six. His first book, The Salernitan Questions (1963), was his attempt to introduce the reader to a genre he had come to love. The book is a chaste, scholarly edition of a text he calls the "Speculator Broadside," which is the immediate source text for the handwritten thing he had purchased, years before. And he doesn't just give you the Latin poem and the translation. He gives you the whole kit: "An Introduction to the History of Medieval and Renaissance Problem Literature."

I found out about The Salernitan Questions because I was amateur-researching a West African analogue to it. Let me give a choice specimen, originally delivered in Ewe, a language spoken mainly in Ghana:

"Hear a parable!" "May the parable come!" "One day an eagle swooped down upon the beautiful daughter of a chief and carried her to an island in the river. The chief looked for people to fetch his daughter away from the eagle. A thief, a hunter, and a mender came at once. The thief said he could steal the girl from the talons of the eagle. The hunter said that should the eagle see them and try to [End Page 75] recapture the girl, he would shoot him, so that he would die at once. The mender said that should the eagle (having been shot) fall into the boat and break it, he would patch it up.

"As soon as they had started off, the thief stole the girl. As they reached the middle of the river, the eagle came to take the child. Then the hunter shot him, so that he fell into the boat, which was shattered into a thousand pieces. The mender immediately patched the boat, so that they reached home safely. Which of these three people did the most, thereby gaining the praise of the chief?"

You have to understand: There is no "correct" answer to the question posed in the last sentence there. The story is intended as a prompt for discussion and for inventive replies. Many Niger-Congo languages have this genre, apparently: "Problem Stories." The whole fun is you have to speculate and get all cunning on it.

Good, so I was reading about that, and some footnote said something to the effect of "If you get off on this kind of thing, you should probably have a look at Brian Lawn's The Salernitan Questions." I followed up.

Here, reader, is a potted version of what I learned from Lawn about the history of his favorite genre. I'm going from memory here.

Start at Aristotle. The third-largest text in the vast "Aristotelian corpus" is a thing called the Problemata. Anyone who wants to know what the ancient Greeks knew and did not know, with regard to anatomy, zoology, astronomy, meteorology, and the like will have a field day with this book. (The Loeb Classics edition is two volumes; you can get them used; they're not that expensive.) The inquirer will see, however, that the text is not very poetic. For one thing, they always attempt to answer the questions. The thinkers of the "Aristotle School" did not collect this stuff as...