Vol:.(1234567890) International Journal of the Classical Tradition (2025) 32(2):174–197 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-025-00692-6 ARTICLE ‘Placetne Magistra?’ ‑‑ Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night Frances Myatt1 Accepted: 4 January 2025 / Published online: 26 February 2025 © The Author(s) 2025 Abstract Gaudy Night is unique among Dorothy L. Sayers’ detective novels in its prolific use of Latin quotations. While scholars have considered the two Latin quotations which are integral to the novel’s plot, this article will explore Sayers’ incidental Latin phrases and quotations as well, in order to fully illuminate the significant role the language plays within the novel. Sayers uses Latin to express the tense and ambigu- ous relationship between women and Oxford University, with her Latin quotations both acknowledging how universities had traditionally excluded women, and simul- taneously evoking a new equality of the sexes based upon an equality of academic capacity and achievement. Furthermore, Latin is key to negotiating a successful romantic relationship between Harriet and Peter. More than any other language, Latin represents intellect and scholarship to the English-speaking mind, and the intellectual equality between Harriet and Peter is key to their relationship. Yet, Say- ers does not only use Latin to represent abstract, asexual intellect, but also layers the learned with the erotic as part of the novel’s ongoing negotiation between the demands of brain and heart. Gaudy Night, published in 1935, is one of Dorothy L. Sayers’ best-known detective novels – somewhat surprisingly so, given that it is by no means a typical detective story.1 Not only is nobody actually murdered, but Sayers’ aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, plays almost a subordinate role in the novel. Gaudy Night centres instead on detective novelist Harriet Vane, who returns to her Oxford college for an alumni celebration, known as a Gaudy. The word derives from the Latin gaude, meaning ‘rejoice!’, while the specific title Gaudy Night is a quotation from Shake- speare’s Antony and Cleopatra. When Antony has decided to face Octavian at the decisive Battle of Actium, he exclaims: ‘But now I’ll set my teeth / And send to * Frances Myatt frym2@cantab.ac.uk 1 Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 1 D. L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, London, 1935. Referred to as GN in in-text citations. http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12138-025-00692-6&domain=pdf http://orcid.org/0009-0009-5838-4290 175‘Placetne Magistra?’ -- Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night darkness all that stop me. Come, / Let’s have one other gaudy night’.2 The densely allusive nature of this title, with the classical layered upon Shakespeare, is typical of Sayers’ work but, while all her works contain many quotations in both English and French, Gaudy Night is unique among Sayers’ novels in its prolific use of Latin quotations. Many have, however, been scathing of Sayers’ learned literary allusions. Janet Hitchman, for example, writes that: To many critics, her habit of quotations, not only in English but in French, Latin and Greek as well, is sheer intellectual snobbery. It is possible she could not help it and, as Wimsey says, a quotation ‘saves original thinking’.3 However, the very fact that Sayers has Wimsey comment flippantly on the use of quotation shows a self-awareness that makes it absurd to think that her use of quo- tations was somehow unconscious or simply designed to show off.4 While schol- ars are, happily, generally more ready nowadays to consider seriously the literary effect of Sayers’ intertextuality,5 scholarship on Sayers’ use of Latin in Gaudy Night has overwhelmingly focussed on the two Latin moments that are integral to the plot – namely, a quotation from the Aeneid which is left as a message by the mysterious college ‘poltergeist’ and Peter’s final proposal to Harriet at the novel’s conclusion. Yet, I would argue that it is essential to pay equal attention to more incidental Latin phrases and quotations in Gaudy Night in order to fully appreciate the significant role the language plays within the novel. Indeed, Sayers makes another implicit com- ment on her own use of quotation when Peter observes of the poltergeist’s Aeneid quotation that ‘it was the only message that was not in English … it wasn’t that [the poltergeist’s] feelings habitually expressed themselves in Latin hexameters’ (GN: 459). By contrast, Harriet and Peter frequently lapse into Latin, suggesting that their feelings do ‘habitually express themselves’ in that language. Their frequent, off-the- cuff quotations and Latin idioms should thus not be simply dismissed as ‘intellectual snobbery’ but read with care as a significant and meaningful contribution to their characterization, and to the characterization of their complex and unfolding roman- tic relationship. Too much focus on the Aeneid quotation, furthermore, can also obscure the fact that ‘Latin’ for Sayers did not simply mean ‘classical’. Sayers was deeply committed to Latin teaching in schools, but vocally opposed the educational focus on the clas- sical to the exclusion of the language’s later Christian evolution. As she says in her 1952 address to the Association for the Reform of Latin Teaching (ARLT): 2 W. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra. Edited by John Wilder, London, 1995, III. 13.220–2. 3 J. Hitchman, ‘Lord Peter Wimsey and His Creator’, Striding Folly, London, 2003, pp. 1–37 (22). Q. D. Leavis was particularly vocal in her criticism (see M. B. Durkin, Dorothy L. Sayers, Boston, Mass, 1980, p. 81). Durkin herself had little respect for Sayers’ intertextuality, saying dismissively of Have His Carcase that ‘puns, parody and literary quotations are not scintillating, but they provide mild humour’ (p. 63). 4 Dorothy L. Sayers, Have His Carcase, Harmondsworth, 1962, p. 53. 5 See, e.g. H. Klein, ‘Narrative Technique and Reader Appeal in Dorothy Sayers’ Fiction’, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 19, no. 1, 1994, pp. 41–61 on Sayers’ later novel, Busman’s Honeymoon. 176 F. Myatt … the greatest single defect of my own Latin education, and that (I expect) of many other people, is the almost total neglect of those fifteen Christian centu- ries. The great reproach cast up against Latin by those who would drive it alto- gether from the schools is that it is a dead language. But if it is dead today, it is because the Classical Scholars killed it by smothering it with too much love.6 Sayers draws her own Latin quotations in Gaudy Night from a wide range of both classical and non-classical texts – not only, as scholars have recognized, from the Latin statutes of Oxford university but also from sources as diverse as the sermons of John Donne, the biblical Song of Songs and Robert Burton’s seventeenth-century medical treatise, The Anatomy of Melancholy. One important effect of Sayers’ Latin throughout Gaudy Night is thus to embed the emotions and experiences of the nov- el’s characters in a long cultural tradition stretching back centuries, giving a univer- sality and wider applicability to the novel’s concerns. Latin is therefore an important facet in Sayers’ reworking of the detective novel into what we might call a more ‘lit- erary’ art form. In an essay on Gaudy Night, Sayers lamented that so many readers were convinced that ‘a detective plot cannot bear any relation to a universal theme’ and that the detective novel in the 1920s ‘enjoyed a pretty poor reputation and was not expected to contain anything that could be mistaken for “serious reading”’. She argued strongly that ‘if the detective story was to live and develop it must get back to where it began in the hands of Collins and Le Fanu, and become once more a novel of manners instead of a pure crossword puzzle’.7 Gaudy Night, with its rich tapestry of Latin quotations, is Sayers’ determined attempt to fulfil that goal.8 Yet, despite its ‘literary’ quality, Gaudy Night was still a mass-market novel, written and marketed as part of the immensely popular genre of detective writing, at a time when Latin was becoming less central to the educational experience of the majority of the population.9 It is therefore important to acknowledge that, for many of the novel’s readers, Sayers’ Latin quotations would have primarily been a marker of the rarefied academic community that forms the novel’s setting, analogous to the quotations from bell-ringing manuals in her earlier novel, The Nine Tailors. When challenged to account for the book’s popularity, Sayers replied that one of the rea- sons ‘it sold [was] because it dealt in a knowledgeable way with the daily life of a little-known section of the community. Readers seem to like books which tell them how other people live…’.10 To a non-classically trained reader, the ‘habit of quota- tion’ in Latin and other languages can also be viewed as an affectation of the aris- tocratic Peter Wimsey, on a par with his collection of incunabula and liking for fine 6 D. L. Sayers, ‘Ignorance and Dissatisfaction - Address to the ARLT’, 1952. 7 D. L. Sayers, ‘Gaudy Night’, Titles to Fame, ed. D. K. Roberts, Edinburgh, 1937, pp. 73–96 (76, 88). 8 As reflected in Harriet’s own work during the novel, as she is not only researching a book on Le Fanu while at Shrewsbury, but also slowly realizing that, in her own detective novels, she must ‘abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change’ (GN: 321). On Gaudy Night as a ‘novel of manners’, see T. M. Stein, ‘University Detective Fiction Then and Now: Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night and Amanda Cross’s Death in a Tenured Position’, VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center 10, 1993, pp. 31–42 (32–37). 9 As Sayers laments in her address to the ARLT (n. 6, above). 10 Sayers, ‘Gaudy Night’ (n. 7, above), pp. 90–1. 177‘Placetne Magistra?’ -- Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night port, and equally suitable for Harriet in her role as ‘an Oxford-Bloomsbury blue- stocking’.11 Yet, without diminishing the fact that, for many readers, the primary role which Latin plays in the novel is to contribute generally and superficially to set- ting and characterization, it is also worth analysing more closely the specific Latin quotations which Sayers employs. While Gaudy Night can be enjoyed perfectly well with no knowledge of Latin, an appreciation of the novel’s sophisticated intertex- tuality greatly adds to our understanding of Sayers’ wider themes, and particularly to the novel’s central theme of gender dynamics, which will form the focus of this article. I shall first build upon Isobel Hurst’s work on Sayers and women’s classical edu- cation to explore how Sayers uses Latin to express the tense and ambiguous relation- ship between women and Oxford university.12 We shall see that Sayers’ Latin quota- tions work to both acknowledge how universities had traditionally excluded women and simultaneously evoke a new equality of the sexes based upon an equality of academic capacity and achievement. Secondly, I shall consider how Latin is key to negotiating a successful romantic relationship between Harriet and Peter. More than any other language, Latin represents intellect and scholarship to the English- speaking mind, and Sayers herself writes that, ‘on the intellectual platform, alone of all others, Harriet could stand free and equal with Peter’.13 Yet, we shall see that Sayers does not only use Latin to represent abstract, asexual intellect, but also layers the learned with the erotic in part of the novel’s ongoing negotiation between the demands of brain and heart. Women and the University In both her depiction of Oxford life and her use of Latin, Sayers was drawing on personal experience. Unusually for the time, her father taught her Latin from the age of six, and she later studied at Somerville College, Oxford, where she took first- class honours in Modern Languages in 1915.14 This degree, like Harriet’s degree in English Literature, involved examinations in Latin and also ancient Greek, which was not dropped from Oxford’s initial examinations (responsions) until 1920. Both 11 D. L. Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon, London, 2016, p. 1. On the applicability of the soubriquet to Sayers herself, see N. Patterson, ‘“A Bloomsbury Blue-Stocking”: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Bloomsbury Years in Their Spatial and Temporal Content’, Mythlore 19, no. 3, 1993, pp. 6–15. 12 I. Hurst, ‘“Maenads Dancing before the Martyrs’ Memorial” : Oxford Women Writers and the Clas- sical Tradition’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 12, no. 2, 2005, pp. 163–82, I. Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer, Oxford, 2006, pp. 198–211. 13 Sayers, ‘Gaudy Night’ (n. 7 above), p. 82. 14 Scholars have often stressed how unusual Sayers’ knowledge of Latin was for a girl in those times – Hurst, for instance, writes that Sayers, ‘recalls a consciousness even at six that a knowledge of Latin would set her apart from the women of her family, associating her more closely with her father’ (Hurst, ‘Maenads’ [n. 12 above] p.175). This is, however, not entirely accurate – in her speech to the ARLT (n. 6, above), Sayers says: ‘… it seemed to me that it would be a very fine thing to learn Latin, and would place me in a position of superiority to my mother, my aunt, and my nurse – though not to my paternal grandmother, who was an old lady of parts, and had at least a nodding acquaintance with the language’. 178 F. Myatt Sayers and Vera Brittain, who studied English Literature at Somerville around the same time as Sayers, vividly describe the intensive work on Greek that was required to bring their proficiency in the language up to the same standard as their knowl- edge of Latin, which girls had at least some opportunity to study at school, if not to the same level as that offered by boys’ schools.15 Yet, although they passed the same rigorous exams as the men, women undergraduates were not officially awarded Oxford degrees until 1920, when Sayers became one of the first women to be retro- spectively awarded an official BA and MA. Furthermore, as Sayers acknowledges in the preface to Gaudy Night, the university statutes of the time limited the num- ber of female students, a limit which Sayers’ fictional women’s college explicitly exceeds.16 However, despite the second-class status of women within the university, in her preface Sayers nevertheless speaks with affection of the City and University of Oxford, wishing that ‘they might flourish forever’: ‘in aeternum floreant’ (GN: 5). Elsewhere, she refers to the university as her alma mater, exploiting the maternity inherent in the metaphor to describe her own relationship with Oxford, which was her birthplace as well as her university: ‘I that am twice thy child have known thee, worshipped thee, loved thee …’.17 Sayers’ ambivalent attitude towards Oxford, and the tension between its inclusion and exclusion of female students, is vividly encap- sulated in Gaudy Night’s use of Latin. Like her author, Harriet Vane retains a great affection for her old Oxford college, the fictional college of Shrewsbury, and therefore agrees to help investigate a series of threatening letters and instances of vandalism perpetrated by a mysterious ‘pol- tergeist’. After one of the poltergeist’s more dramatic appearances, a dummy clad in academical dress is found hanging in the college chapel with a breadknife thrust through the stomach. Pinned to it is a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid describing the harpies, monstrous birds of prey with the faces of women: tristius haud illis monstrum nec saevior ulla pestis et ira deum Stygiis sese extulit undis. Virginei volucrum vultus foedissima ventris proluvies uncaeque manus et pallida semper ora fame. 15 See I. Hurst, ‘“A Fleet of … Inexperienced Argonauts”: Oxford Women and the Classics, 1873–1920’, Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning 1800–2000, London, 2007, pp. 27, 30. Sayer’s ‘Address to the ARLT’ (n. 6, above) includes an equally vivid description of cramming Latin prose composition for the same responsions. 16 In 1927, Oxford imposed quotas to limit the number of women admitted to the University to 840 (raised to 970 in 1948). Restrictions on the number of female students were not removed until 1957. 17 Lay, II.3, D. L. Sayers, Op. 1, Oxford, 1916. Indeed, her early collection of poems opens with Alma Mater, a retelling of the Trojan war in which, as Barbara Prescott demonstrates, Helen functions as an allegory for Oxford University (B. L. Prescott, ‘Allegorical Reference to Oxford University through Clas- sical Myth in the Early Poetry of Dorothy L. Sayers: A Reading of “Alma Mater” from OP. I’, Mythlore 36, no. 2, 2018, pp. 43–72). For Sayers’ referring to Oxford as her alma mater in a personal letter to her friend Catherine H. Godfrey in 1915, see C. G. Heilbrun, Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women, New York, 2002, p. 255. 179‘Placetne Magistra?’ -- Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night ‘Harpies,’ said Harriet aloud. ‘Harpies. That seems to suggest a train of thought’ (GN: 160).18 In contrast to Clouds of Witness, where a full translation is provided for the long French letter that solves the novel’s mystery, here Sayers, via Harriet, supplies the reader only with the salient point that the Latin quotation concerns harpies.19 For many readers, the untranslated quotation thus contributes to the depiction of Oxford university as a rarefied and mysterious academic community, with its own secret, internal language, while Harriet’s immediate recognition and paraphrase of the quotation demonstrate her intellectual capabilities and familiarity with Latin liter- ature. Yet the fact that this unknown language is Latin also raises issues of both class and gender. Harriet’s initial reaction to the message is that ‘we can’t suspect … any of the scouts of expressing their feelings in Virgilian hexameters’ (GN: 160), for Latin was long the preserve of the educated classes. She is, however, mistaken, for Peter builds on the evidence collected by Harriet to discover that the ‘polter- geist’ is actually a scout, or college servant, named Annie Wilson. Annie blamed a fellow of Shrewsbury college, and educated women in general, for the dismissal of her husband, Arthur Robinson, from his academic post and his subsequent sui- cide. The misogynistic Aeneid quotation was copied from his suicide note, and thus the Shrewsbury academic Miss Hillyard is proved right in her interpretation of the Aeneid quotation, for she comments that, when she first read the harpies note, she‘ felt sure that a man was behind all this’ (GN: 459). For many centuries, knowledge of classical languages and literature was largely confined to men, for even upper-class women had very little opportunity of learning Latin, and even less of learning Greek.20 As Deforest comments, ‘in writings of the eighteenth century, words of Greek and Latin proclaimed the message NO GIRLS ALLOWED as emphatically as the sign on a boys’ tree house’.21 Sayers herself claimed that her father only taught her Latin because she had no brothers, and ‘in the absence of little boys, he seized upon such infant material as was at hand’.22 Among elite men, the classical languages could thus operate as a shared, inside code which largely excluded both women and the working class. Indeed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Latin and Greek were particularly used by men to express 18 Cf. Vergil, Aeneid 3.214–8: ‘No monster is grimmer than they, and never did any plague nor anger of the gods raise itself more savage from the Stygian waves. These birds have the faces of maidens, the foul- est excrement comes from their bellies, and they have clawed hands, and their faces are always pale with hunger…’ All translations are my own unless otherwise stated. 19 D. L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness, London, 2016, pp. 271–75. 20 The Schools Inquiry Commission Report of 1868 viewed Latin education in girls’ schools unfavour- ably, commenting that ‘the fault was plainly due to want of teaching’, while ‘Greek is so little taught that it need not be noticed’ (quoted in L. Gloyn, ‘This Is Not a Chapter About Jane Harrison’, Women Classi- cal Scholars, Oxford, 2016, p. 159). In Unnatural Death, Sayers’ elderly Miss Climpson comments that ‘when I was young, girls didn’t have the education or the opportunities they get nowadays… I should have liked a good education, but my dear father didn’t believe in it for women’ (D. L. Sayers, Unnatural Death, London, 1968, p. 29). 21 M. Deforest, ‘Jane Austen: Closet Classicist. (Miscellany)’, Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal 22, 2000, p. 98. 22 Sayers, ‘Address to the ARLT’ (n. 6, above). 180 F. Myatt fear, disgust or mockery of those women who attempted to crack this classical code and penetrate the male educational establishment.23 Hurst has suggested that the initial inspiration for Sayers’ Aeneid quotation may have come from an anecdote by Vera Brittain, who began her studies at Somerville two years after Sayers: ‘The woman undergraduate stood revealed. Two senile, placid dons pass me. “Monstrum horrendum informe”, I heard one murmur’.24 Like the harpy quotation, this phrase comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, and compares the female scholar to another ‘horrid, deformed monster’, the cyclops Polyphemus.25 Yet Brittain not only understands the don’s Virgilian Latin, in a clear demonstration of her intellectual abilities, but she flips the mockery on its head with her descrip- tion of the dons as ‘senile’. This is echoed in Gaudy Night, for, as the plot unfolds, the chauvinistic sentiment against educated women which is expressed through the harpy quotation is insistently exposed as irrational. Annie’s husband is revealed as an inferior scholar, who suppresses a manuscript in order to cheat his way to an aca- demic qualification and then slides into alcoholism after his deceit is uncovered by a more rigorous female scholar. As for Annie herself, the grudge she bears against female scholars is shown to be a form of insanity. Thus, while Sayers acknowledges that Latin has long been used, both in classical and modern times, to express hatred of women, her novel simultaneously rebuts such misogyny. This process of acknowl- edging conventional misogynistic beliefs or stereotypes, and even tempting the reader to participate in misogynistic beliefs, only to later demonstrate their fallacy, is a key method by which Sayers negotiates both the masculine literary tradition and the masculine educational tradition. Such a method is peculiarly suited to the genre of the detective novel, which relies upon the narrative technique of presenting an obvious possibility and leading the reader to believe it, only to reveal their error at the final, dramatic denouement. In Gaudy Night, Latinate university culture is, however, not simply a misogynis- tic fortress that works to exclude or express hatred of women. Harriet’s scholarly achievement, and the knowledge of classical languages that entailed, also offers her a position of status and security within Oxford’s academic world. Having changed into her gown and mortarboard, Harriet, ‘laughed suddenly, and for the first time felt confident’: 23 For a typical Latin verse from the 1902 Oxford Magazine satirizing the appearance of female students, see Hurst, ‘Maenads’ (n. 12, above), p. 167. For a poem from the Glasgow University’s 1892 student magazine ridiculing women’s ignorance of Greek, see C. Stray, Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning, 1800–2000, London, 2013, p. 256. For a similar poem mocking their newly acquired language skills, see S. M. Gilbert, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, New Haven and London, 1988, p. 33. 24 V. Brittain, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925, London, 1978, pp. 508–9, quoted in Hurst, ‘Maenads’ (n. 12, above), p. 168. The use of monstrum (also seen in Gaudy Night’s harpy quotation) recalls Horace’s designation of another frightening woman, Cleopatra, as a fatale monstrum in Ode 1.37. For discussion of the phrase, see J. V. Luce, ‘Cleopatra as Fatale Monstrum (Horace, Carm. 1. 37. 21)’, Classical Quarterly 13, no. 2, 1963, pp. 251–57. 25 Verg. A. 3.658. 181‘Placetne Magistra?’ -- Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night They can’t take this away, at any rate. Whatever I may have done since, this remains. Scholar; Masters of Arts; Domina; Senior Member of this University (statutum est quod Juniories [sic] Senioribus debitam et congruam reveren- tiam tum in privato tum in publico exhibeant); a place achieved, inalienable, worthy of reverence. (GN: 14) This Latin quotation – ‘it is decreed that Juniors should show to Seniors a deserved and fitting respect, both in private and in public’ – is adapted from the first section of Titulus XV: De Moribus Conformandis in the Oxford University Statutes: Statutum est quod Juniores Senioribus, id est nondum Graduati Baccalaureis, Baccalaurei Artium Magistris, Magistri itidem Doctoribus, debitam et con- gruam reverentiam tum in privato tum in publico exhibeant.26 Notably, Sayers edits out the section detailing the different possible ranks in the aca- demic hierarchy. She thus edits out the masculine nouns, leaving only the more gen- eral terms Juniores and Senioribus, both of which derive from comparative adjec- tives, for which Latin does not distinguish between masculine and feminine. The importance of her intellectual abilities, and the formal acknowledgement of those abilities by Oxford’s ancient Latin statutes, in giving Harriet a secure status within the intellectual environment of Oxford regardless of her gender is made clear in a later scene, when an undergraduate named Mr. Pomfret proposes to her. Slightly tipsy, he makes his declaration, exclaiming that ‘he wanted to stand between her and all the world – Mr. Pomfret was six foot three and broad and strong in proportion’ (GN: 257). However, they are interrupted by a proctor, one of the university officers who policed the streets of Oxford after dark, and Pomfret turns to flee: But the Proctor’s bull-dog … seeing a young gentleman not only engaged in nocturnal vagation without his gown but actually embracing a female (mulier vel meretrix, cujus consortio Christianis prorsus interdictum est) leapt glee- fully upon him. (GN: 257) The Latinate phrase ‘nocturnal vagation’ again alludes to Titulus XV: De Moribus Conformandis in the Oxford University Statutes, here referencing Section  6: De Nocturna Vagatione reprimenda. The Latin line, ‘whether respectable woman or prostitute, consorting with such a one is absolutely forbidden for Christian men’, is likewise adapted from a rule in Section  6: De Domibus Oppidanorum non frequentandis: 26 University of Oxford, Statuta Universitatis Oxoniensis, Oxford, 1906, p. 305: ‘It is decreed that Jun- iors should show to Seniors – that is to say, those who have not yet graduated to Bachelors, Bachelors to Masters of Arts, Masters in like manner to Doctors – a deserved and fitting respect, both in private and in public’. 182 F. Myatt Academici vero omnes abstineant ab aedibus infames seu suspectas Mulieres vel Meretrices alentibus aut recipientibus; quarum consortio Christianis pror- sus interdictum est.27 While Sayers removes the explicit reference to brothels, the inclusion of meretrix within her adapted quotation demonstrates the traditional association of women with sexuality and prostitution in Oxford’s statutes. Female sexuality was still policed by the university in Sayers’ time, as demonstrated when Harriet first encounters Mr. Pomfret, as he helps a female student sneak over the wall of Shrewsbury college after dark: ‘“It’s serious for her,” said Harriet. “You’ll get off with a fine or a gat- ing, I suppose; but we have to be more particular. It’s a nasty-minded world, and our rules have to remember that fact”’ (GN: 145). However, the Latin quotation here shows the ambivalent relationship between women and the university in the early twentieth century, as those same Latin statutes that once denigrated and excluded women and female sexuality now guarantee Harriet’s superior status as a Senior Member of the university. This status allows her to save Pomfret from punishment, in a scene that ridicules traditional displays of masculine strength and chivalry (GN: 260). Sayers thus performs a double movement of embracing those parts of Oxford’s Latinate culture which honour academic achievement regardless of gender, while gently mocking those parts which adhere to retrograde views of the relationship between men and women. In a later scene, Latin is likewise reworked to be inclusive of women rather than exclusionary, as Sayers again demonstrates the recent transformation in the role of women which has been made possible through academic achievement. After the poltergeist has almost been caught, Harriet speaks of seeking the opinion of Peter Wimsey: ‘“Aha!” said the Dean. “The exquisite gentleman who kissed my feet in St. Cross Road, crying, Vera incessu patuit dean?”’ (GN: 330). This Latin quota- tion comes once again from the Aeneid, when Venus comes to her son Aeneas in disguise but ‘is shown as a true goddess in her step’: ‘vera incessu patuit dea’ (Verg. A.1.405). The goddess (dea) of love and mother of Aeneas is thus transformed into the academic title of ‘Dean’, as the female academic is portrayed as not monster, but goddess. Yet, although Sayers, through the character of Lord Peter Wimsey, cel- ebrates these academic women, the novel also addresses the anxiety which many felt about this transformation of the role of women from lovers and mothers to aca- demic officers. When it seems that a Shrewsbury fellow must be responsible for the anonymous letters, Harriet and the other dons are inclined to impute the perpetra- tor’s motive to the sexual repression of a celibate, academic life, which for so long was considered unhealthy for the feminine psyche.28 After reams of malicious letters 27 Statuta (n. 26, above) p. 206: ‘On the houses in the town which should not be frequented: Truly all academics should abstain from houses that host or receive infamous or suspected women or prostitutes; consorting with whom is absolutely forbidden for Christian men’. 28 ‘… when popular ideas about psychology made unchastity more acceptable than its opposite, “learned women” were again perceived as unwomanly. Pervasive ideas about the psychological damage inflicted by prolonged celibacy undermined women at Oxford in their attempts to gain equality with men’ (Hurst, ‘Maenads’ [n. 12, above], p. 179.) The supposed psychological damage of celibacy is embodied in Miss Milsom in D. L. Sayers, The Documents in the Case, London, 2009, pp. 9–10. 183‘Placetne Magistra?’ -- Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night drive a student to attempt suicide, the female academic community begins to take on a threatening aspect in Harriet’s eyes: She was suddenly afraid of all these women; horti conclusi, fontes signati, they were walled in, sealed down, by walls and seals that shut her out. Sitting there in the clear light of morning… she knew the ancient dread of Artemis, moon- goddess, virgin-huntress, whose arrows are plagues and death. (GN: 316)29 Harriet, who has not committed herself to a celibate, intellectual life, begins to see those who have as not only prey to madness arising from sexual repression, but also as potentially violent towards other, sexually active women – just as the goddess Artemis violently excluded non-virgins from her followers.30 Sayers thus acknowl- edges the negative view that suppressing one’s natural womanly instincts to live an intellectual life within an exclusively female community leads to madness and vio- lence. Indeed, by allowing her own heroine to be seduced by this view, Sayers dem- onstrates how damaging the prevalent misogynistic culture, backed up by centuries of the literary tradition, can be to the self-respect and intellectual integrity of even the most intelligent women.31 As Hurst puts it, Gaudy Night ‘successfully plays on the willingness of the reader and of the characters who try to solve the mystery to accept the view that celibate life in an all-female college does not promote normality or sanity’, while Sayers herself commented that, ‘it was the kind of crime which the world in general would be ready enough to connect with a community of celibate women’.32 Sayers thus performs the same process of acknowledgement and rebuttal that we saw in the case of the harpy quotation. It is not, as the dons and the reader have expected, an academic spinster who has been writing the poisonous letters, but a widow with two children. Intriguingly, Sayers chooses a Latin phrase horti conclusi, fontes signati (‘enclosed gardens, sealed fountains’) to encapsulate the tensions between female sexuality and academia. This rich and multivalent quotation first appears in the nov- el’s preface, in a quotation from a sermon by John Donne:33 29 Despite her general focus on Latin rather than ancient Greek (see n. 34, below), it is notable that Sayers generally uses Greek rather than Roman names in her references to classical mythology. While beyond the scope of the present article, this intriguing disjunction merits further investigation, as indeed does Sayers’ wider use of classical mythology within her novels. 30 It is this aspect of virginity that has, I would suggest, led Sayers to compare Shrewsbury’s dons to the followers of Artemis, rather than to the Amazons, another militant, all-female band of women who were used by Matthew Arnold in his 1882 lecture ‘Literature and Science’ to describe the renaissance of women studying ancient Greek: ‘I believe that in the chain of forts, with which the fair host of the Amazons are now engirdling our English universities… they are studying it [Greek] already’. Quoted in Hurst, ‘A Fleet of … Inexperienced Argonauts’ (n. 15, above) p. 22. 31 As Harriet thinks to herself, ‘the warped and repressed mind is apt enough to turn and wound itself. “Soured virginity” – “unnatural life” – “semi-demented spinsters” – “starved appetites and suppressed impulses” – “unwholesome atmosphere” – she could think of whole sets of epithets, ready-minted for circulation’ (GN: 81). 32 Hurst, ‘Maenads’ (n. 12, above), p. 179; Sayers, ‘Gaudy Night’ (n. 7, above), p. 83. 33 Sermon 11 in J. Donne, The Sermons. Edited with Introductions and Critical Apparatus by G. R. Pot- ter and E. M. Simpson., vol. VI, Berkeley, 1953, pp. 223–40. 184 F. Myatt The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are there, Arts and Sciences flow from thence. Counsell Tables are Horti conclusi (as it is said in the Can- ticles), Gardens that are walled in, and that they are Fontes signati, Wells that are sealed up; bottomless depths of unsearchable Counsels there. At first reading, this passage simply reflects how the scholarly realm of Oxford is cut off from the passionate, bustling life of the outside world, with Latin acting as a marker of that learned community in which every speech is ‘adorned … with a clas- sical tag’ (GN: 18).34 Harriet’s later return to the Latin phrase as she begins to view Shrewsbury as a threateningly enclosed community then suggests the misogynistic view that a celibate, all-women’s college was a perversion of this scholarly paradise. However, Sayers was not the first to use this image in debates around women’s edu- cation. The imagery of ‘sealed fountains’ was famously used by Alfred Lord Ten- nyson in his 1847 poem The Princess to depict a university of women, in which ‘knowledge is no more a fountain sealed’.35 Princess Ida’s articulation of the rights of women was a source of inspiration to campaigners for women’s education in the nineteenth century, but in many ways Tennyson’s poem represents the then wide- spread, negative view of a female academic community.36 Princess Ida’s university is depicted as a viciously celibate community – over the door is carved the legend ‘LET NO MAN ENTER IN ON PAIN OF DEATH’37 – which is riven by petty jeal- ousies and denies the ‘natural womanliness’ of all its members who are not bitter, ‘shrewish’, old women. Those who are young and pretty are patronized as ‘sweet girl-graduates’,38 a phrase which is quoted in Gaudy Night by ‘one of the more fool- ish London dailies’ in a clear indication of Sayers’ view of Tennyson’s poem.39 Although she was more charitable towards Tennyson than many of her contemporar- ies, she strongly rebuts his view of gender and education: 34 In contrast to her deep and sophisticated engagement with Latin, Sayers uses Greek (a language with which she was less familiar) more as a ‘classical tag’ denoting the academic community, as when Har- riet thinks of the dons: ‘Bless their hearts, how refreshing and soothing and good they all were, walking beneath their ancient beeches and meditating on ὂν καὶ μὴ ὂν and the finance of Queen Elizabeth’ (GN: 62.). Possibly her only lengthy Greek quotation appears in her short story The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey, where Peter recites Homer in his disguise as a wizard chanting nonsensical magic spells (D. L. Sayers, Hangman’s Holiday, London, 2016, p. 57). 35 The Princess, II. 76. A. Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson: In Three Volumes. Vol. 2, ed. C. Ricks, Harlow, Essex, 1987, p.208. Tennyson’s poem was made particularly popular by the Gilbert and Sullivan 1884 operetta Princess Ida (for which point I would like to thank Dr Darcy Krasne), but Sayers’ quotes are sourced purely from the poem. 36 In 1875, the recently founded Girls Public Day School Trust adopted the above quotation as their motto. However, see, e.g. D. E. Hall, ‘The Anti-Feminist Ideology of Tennyson’s “The Princess”’, Mod- ern Language Studies 21, no. 4, 1991, pp. 49–62; Gilbert, No Man’s Land (n. 23, above), pp. 5–11. 37 II. 177, (see n. 35, above), p. 211. 38 Prologue 142 (see n. 35, above), p. 192. 39 ‘… there was a paragraph in one of the more foolish London dailies about an “Undergraduettes’ Rag” … Harriet wrote a tart letter to the paper pointing out that either “undergraduate” or “woman student” would be seemlier English than “undergraduette” … The only result of this was to provoke a correspond- ence headed “Lady Undergrads” and a reference to “sweet girl-graduates”’ (GN: 77). 185‘Placetne Magistra?’ -- Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night At one time … men had a monopoly of classical education. When the pioneers of university training for women demanded that women should be admitted to the universities, the cry went up at once: ‘Why should women want to know about Aristotle?’ The answer is NOT that all women would be the better for knowing about Aristotle – still less, as Lord Tennyson seemed to think, that they would be more companionable wives for their husbands if they did know about Aristotle – but simply: ‘What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle’.40 Yet, while Harriet’s temporary, misguided view of Shrewsbury college as a sexu- ally repressed, threatening and closed community recalls Tennyson’s celibate wom- en’s university – which is closed down at the poem’s conclusion when Ida agrees to marry Prince Hilarion – the Latin phrase Horti conclusi, Fontes signati, also has a second intertextual layer, with surprisingly erotic overtones. The phrase derives originally, as Donne reminds us, from the biblical Canticles or Song of Songs, in which the man describes his bride as ‘a walled-up garden, a sealed-in fountain’ (hor- tus conclusus, fons signatus).41 Religious scholars have long interpreted the Song of Songs allegorically; Honorius of Autun, for instance, reads the closed garden of the bride as the Church, garden of god, and the spring variously as Holy Scripture, Christ and the Church herself.42 However, it is also undeniably a passionate love song between a man and a woman, with the ‘walled-up garden’ and ‘sealed-in foun- tain’ a potential metaphor for the bride’s virginity. We might also remember that Donne himself was known for his erotic poetry as much as his sermons and that, in Busman’s Honeymoon, Harriet’s gift to Peter upon their marriage is a manuscript signed by Donne.43 Within the context of Gaudy Night, the presence of this sexu- ally explicit love song, in which the bride and groom express mutual desire for one another, within Donne’s vision of the paradisiacal university thus seems to suggest a positive answer to one of the novel’s central questions: ‘Could there ever be any alliance between intellect and the flesh?’ (GN: 440). This was a particularly pressing question for women, who, as noted above, were allowed much less sexual license 40 D. L. Sayers, ‘Are Women Human?: Address Given to a Women’s Society, 1938’, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 8, no. 4, 2005, pp. 165–78. Sayers’ own personal interest in Aristotle is evident in one of Gaudy Night’s few Greek moments, when Peter uses a quotation that the Warden of Shrewsbury colleges instantly recognizes as coming from Aristotle: ψευδῆ λέγειν ὡς δεῖ (GN: 348). Sayers later used this quotation from the Poetics (1460a) to discuss ‘the art of framing lies in the right way’ (D. L. Sayers, ‘Aristotle on Detective Fiction’, English: Journal of the English Association 1, no. 1, 1936, pp. 23–35.). For more, see R. K. Sprague, ‘Dorothy L. Sayers and Aristotle’, VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center 14, 1997, pp. 33–43. On Sayers’ attitude to Tennyson’s other works, see C. A. Colón, ‘Defending Tennyson: Dorothy L. Sayers and the Art of Charitable Reading’, Christianity and Literature 66, no. 2, 2017, pp. 274–92. 41 Chapter 4, Verse 12. 42 R. A. Norris, The Song of Songs: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators, Church’s Bible, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 183–84. 43 As his mother comments, ‘Peter has always been queer about Donne’, and on receiving the gift he addresses Harriet on the phone as ‘“dear heart,” in a voice I’d never heard him use in his life’ (Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon (n. 11, above), p. 25. The wider implications of Sayers’ use of Donne and the con- nection to her own Christian faith are intriguing questions that, sadly, lie beyond the scope of this article. 186 F. Myatt than their male counterparts while studying at Oxford, and after graduating almost always had to choose between marriage and a career.44 But, as Harriet frequently asks throughout the novel, what of those of us who have both brains and hearts? How can the horti conclusi, fontes signati of the university truly include, for women as well as men, the sexual passion of the Song of Songs, and thus create an intel- lectual paradise that unites scholarship and love? To discover how Sayers avoids the celibacy of Tennyson’s imaginary women’s university, while simultaneously avoid- ing the poem’s chauvinistic suppression of women’s intellectual ambitions, we must turn now to Harriet and Peter’s relationship, where Latin plays a central role in fash- ioning a marriage of intellectual equality and mutual desire. A Meeting of Minds Harriet and Peter first meet in Strong Poison, when Harriet is accused of poisoning her lover. After seeing her in the dock, Peter offers to prove her innocence – and also makes her an offer of marriage. However, although Peter successfully solves the case, Harriet feels that, due to the gratitude she is bound to bear him for sav- ing her from execution, the inequality between them is too great for a successful marriage. Apart from the detective plot, Gaudy Night thus contains another puzzle – how can Harriet meet Peter on an equal footing, without gratitude, resentment or loss of dignity? Sayers emphasizes that this puzzle was at the forefront of her mind in her development of Harriet and Peter’s relationship: I could not marry Peter off to the young woman he had (in the conventional Perseus manner) rescued from death and infamy, because I could find no form of words in which she could accept him without a loss of self-respect.45 It is striking that Sayers here uses an image from classical mythology to express the ‘damsel in distress’ trope, that staple of Gothic literature which remained influen- tial into the Victorian era and beyond – including in The Princess, when the prince saves Ida from drowning in Part IV.46 However, in this section, I shall demonstrate that Sayers once again uses Latin and the classical tradition to reconfigure misog- ynistic traditions as well as to express them. While scholars have recognized the significance of Peter’s final Latin proposal at the novel’s conclusion, even before this Latin plays a crucial role in tracing the development of the relationship between Harriet and Peter and finding that elusive ‘form of words’ which would enable the pair to enter into a marriage of mutual respect and affection. Moreover, the Latin allusions – which range from the early modern period back to the classical period 44 Sayers perhaps exaggerates the celibacy of the female academic community for the purposes of the novel, for Gloyn (‘This Is Not a Chapter About Jane Harrison’, n. 20, above) shows that many of the Classics staff at Newnham College, Cambridge, continued teaching after marriage, even retaining formal academic posts. 45 D. L. Sayers, ‘Gaudy Night’ (n. 7, above), p. 79. 46 On the trope in Gothic and Victorian literature, see, e.g. O. L. Moy, The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry, Edinburgh, 2022. 187‘Placetne Magistra?’ -- Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night via the church fathers – help to situate Harriet and Peter’s relationship in the con- text of the wider human experience, as played out across the centuries. Latin thus forms a powerful contribution to Sayers’ stated aim of rebutting ‘the conviction, still lingering in many people’s minds, that a detective plot cannot bear any relation to a universal theme’.47 In part, the Latinate course of Harriet and Peter’s love story plays out paratextu- ally, through the epigrams that head each chapter. Sayers was far from addicted to epigrams, using them in only two of her eight novels which deal exclusively with Peter Wimsey.48 However, they feature in three of the four novels in which Har- riet appears, visually signalling the more literary bent of these books to her readers, as she strove to reform the detective story from ‘pure crossword puzzle’ to ‘novel of manners’.49 Particularly notable within Gaudy Night are the repeated quotations from The Anatomy of Melancholy, a medical treatise by the seventeenth-century Oxford fellow Robert Burton. Ranging widely over depression, delusions and other melancholic mental disorders, The Anatomy’s frequent appearance within Gaudy Night echoes the healing process that occurs over the course of the novel for both Harriet and Peter. Both have been deeply damaged by their past, traumatic experi- ences – Harriet by being accused of murdering her former lover and almost sen- tenced to execution, Peter by his military service during the First World War. He suffered a severe mental breakdown immediately after the war and experiences relapses throughout the course of the novels. The conclusion of Busman’s Honey- moon, the last Wimsey novel, sees him suffering again from ‘my rotten nerves… I suppose I’ve not really been right since the war’. However, he makes the revolu- tionary step of choosing to come to Harriet for comfort, and the novel ends with him finally managing to express his emotions naturally: ‘Quite suddenly, he said, “Oh, damn!” and began to cry – in an awkward, unpractised way at first, and then more easily’, his head cradled in Harriet’s arms.50 Darren Gray observes that Wim- sey’s final exclamation ‘echoes the opening of, and Wimsey’s first words in, Whose Body?’, Sayers’ first detective novel – a ring composition that demonstrates how his relationship with Harriet enables Wimsey’s development from his initial characteri- zation as a deeply traumatized man concealing his pain beneath the caricature of a foppish aristocrat.51 The use of Burton’s Anatomy to track the course of Harriet and Peter’s unfold- ing relationship in Gaudy Night signals the centrality of their relationship to the broader narrative arc of their respective healing – and also reflects the centrality of Latin to that relationship, for the passages from The Anatomy are liberally sprinkled with Latin quotations, making Gaudy Night the only one of Sayers’ novels to feature 47 D. L. Sayers, ’Gaudy Night’ (n. 7, above), p. 88. 48 Clouds of Witness (1926) and Unnatural Death (1927), in which Harriet does not appear, use epi- grams. The first Harriet Vane novel, Strong Poison (1930), does not, but all subsequent novels in which Harriet appears do. 49 D. L. Sayers, ‘Gaudy Night’ (n.7, above), p. 76. 50 Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon (n. 11, above), pp. 448, 451. 51 D. Gray, ‘“I Suppose I’ve Never Been Really Right since the War”: Traumatised Masculinities in Dor- othy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey Novels’, Crime Fiction Studies 5, no. 1, 2024, pp. 34–50 (48). 188 F. Myatt Latin in its epigrams. Burtonian Latin appears early in the novel as the epigram to the second chapter, when Sayers quotes Burton on how those plagued by melancho- lia cannot be rid of it: Invitis occurrit, do what they may, they cannot be rid of it, against their wills they must think of it, a thousand times over, perpetuo molestantur, nec oblivisci possunt, they are continually troubled with it, in company, out of company; at meat, at exercise, at all times and places, non desinunt ea, quae minime volunt cogitare… (GN: 28)52 Melancholic reflection ‘occurs although they are unwilling… they are perpetually molested, nor can they forget… they cannot leave off those things, which they least want to think about…’. This refers to the fact that Harriet is unable to avoid being reminded of Peter and the unpleasant circumstances that first drew the two of them together, for this Burton epigram heralds Peter Wimsey’s first intrusion into the novel, as his name is mentioned at the Shrewsbury gaudy. Moreover, Burton’s eru- dite yet natural mixture of Latin and English reflects Harriet and Peter’s own fre- quent yet unaffected use of scholarly quotations, laying the scene for the fact that their successful relationship will be based on their intellectual equality. This point is emphasized by the fact that Peter’s first words within the novel contain a Latin quo- tation, mixed with English in true Burtonian style. Harriet remembers embarking on a trip around Europe with a female friend and asking Peter not to write to her while she is away, to which he replies, ‘I see. Very well. Vade in pacem’ (GN: 64). This phrase could allude to the practice of immuring, for an early edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable links the phrase vade in pacem (‘go into peace’) to the custom whereby ‘the Vestal virgins among the Romans, and the nuns among the Roman Catholics, who broke their religious vows, were buried in a niche sufficiently large to contain their body’.53 This would connect Harriet’s refusal of Peter’s affections to the rigid chastity of the Roman Vestal Virgins, which might remind us of Tennyson’s violently celibate women’s university, and which would paint Harriet’s retreat in terms of imprisonment and death rather than intellec- tual freedom. However, vade in pacem is not a particularly well-known phrase, as shown by its exclusion from the later edition of the Dictionary in 1923 that preceded Gaudy Night’s publication. If we instead assume vade in pacem to be a misprint for the more common vade in pace (and misprints of classical languages in par- ticular are common within editions of Gaudy Night), we can read Peter’s farewell as alluding instead to the last line of Luke 7 in the Vulgate Latin Bible: dixit autem ad mulierem fides tua te salvam fecit vade in pace (‘however, he said to the woman, your faith has made you safe, go in peace’).54 However, while the idea of vade in pace as a benevolent blessing might be appropriate for Peter’s farewell to Harriet, the wider context of the biblical passage, in which Jesus forgives a female sinner because of the devotion she has shown him, seems to make little sense in relation to 52 R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. J. B. Bamborough et al., vol. 1, Oxford, 2005, p. 394. 53 E.C. Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, London, 1881, p. 436. 54 Luke 7:50. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of this article for this suggestion. 189‘Placetne Magistra?’ -- Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night Harriet and Peter’s relationship – unless we read a bitter irony into Peter’s words, for at this stage of the novel it is he who is devoted to Harriet, rather than the other way around. I would therefore suggest instead that the most compelling effects of Peter’s Latin farewell are generated, not by the context of any specific intertext, but by more general characteristics of the phrase. Apart from the primary effect of establishing the importance of Latin for Harriet and Peter’s communication with one another, it stresses the importance of ecclesiastical as well as classical Latin within Sayers’ work – especially as almost all readers would be familiar with the phrase commonly found on Christian gravestones, requiescat in pace, ‘rest in peace’. Even for those unfamiliar with the practice of immuring, this echo of the grave gives an overtone of death to Harriet’s retreat from Peter and romance, in an early move in the ongoing conflict between brain and heart that recurs throughout the novel. A few pages later, Latin is again used to elegantly express Peter’s pessimism that Harriet will ever wish to marry him: He renewed his offer of marriage on an average of once in three months, but in such a way as to afford no excuse for any outbreak of temperament on either side. One First of April, the question had arrived from Paris in a single Latin sentence, starting off dispiritedly, ‘Num …?’ – a particle which notoriously ‘expects the answer No’. Harriet rummaging the Grammar book for ‘polite negatives’, replied, still more briefly, ‘Benigne’. (GN: 69) Here Latin, mediated through a grammar book, not only demonstrates Peter’s respect for Harriet’s intellect, but also keeps their relationship polite and dispassion- ate. Proffered on April Fool’s Day, Peter’s doomed proposal is almost an academic in-joke between the pair, that avoids any ‘outbreak of temperament on either side’. In similarly wry vein, Peter later telegraphs Harriet with the news that he is being sent to Rome, but that, ‘if you should want me – per impossibile – you can get me through the Embassies…’ (GN: 84). Yet, this is not so impossible as Peter thinks, for Harriet had been planning to ask for his help with tracking down the Shrews- bury college ghost – but, as she thinks upon receiving his telegram, ‘post occasio calva’ (GN: 84). Drawn from the so-called Disticha Catonis, a collection of moral sayings by an unknown Latin writer from the third- or fourth-century AD, this quo- tation is excerpted from the longer phrase fronte capillata, post est Occasio calva (‘opportunity is hairy at the front, bald behind’) – in other words, one must seize an opportunity quickly, while there is hair to grab.55 However, the exact meaning of the phrase has less impact than the fact that Harriet’s Latin quotation echoes Peter’s, drawing a connection between the two enabled by a shared cultural frame of schol- arly reference. 55 George Lyman Kittredge observes that the Disticha Catonis were immensely popular in the Middle Ages throughout Europe, with ‘abundant evidence of its continuous employment as a school-book, in England as well as elsewhere, down to 1750 or even perhaps 1800’ (G. L. Kittredge, ‘To Take Time by the Forelock’, Modern Language Notes 8, no. 8, 1893, p. 462). The inclusion of the quote in Gaudy Night thus again reflects Sayers’ interest in post-Augustan Latin and the medieval Latin tradition. 190 F. Myatt Even while Peter is away, Latin is used paratextually to reflect upon the course of Harriet’s love life. At Chapter XII – the novel’s halfway mark – a quotation from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy again forms the chapter’s epigram: As a Tulipant to the Sun (which our herbalists call Narcissus) when it shines, is admirandus flos ad radios solis se pandens, a glorious Flower exposing itself; but when the Sun sets, or a tempest comes, it hides itself, pines away, and hath no pleasure left… do all Enamoratoes to their Mistress. (GN: 248)56 The image of the lover in the presence of his mistress as a ‘glorious flower expos- ing itself to the rays of the sun’ suggests the absurd chivalry of Mr. Pomfret, who makes his declaration of love to Harriet in Chapter XII, declaring that ‘he could nei- ther work nor play games for thinking of her’ (GN: 257). Another epigram from the Anatomy of Melancholy then appears at the beginning of Chapter XX: For, to speak in a word, envy is naught else but tristitia de bonis alienis, sor- row for other men’s good, be it present, past, or to come: and gaudium de adversis, and joy at their harms. … ‘Tis a common disease, and almost natural to us, as Tacitus holds, to envy another man’s prosperity. (GN: 411)57 This epigram suggests the jealousy of Miss Hillyard, a scholar at Shrewsbury col- lege who is as infatuated with Peter as Mr Pomfret is with Harriet. Sayers later draws attention to the use of Latin epigrams to characterize these two instances of infatua- tion by bringing Burton out of the paratext and into the main text of the novel. After an uncomfortable interview with Miss Hillyard, Harriet looks down at a book which she had early plucked at random from the shelf, ‘and discovered that she was read- ing The Anatomy of Melancholy’: ‘Fleat Heraclitus an rideat Democritus? In attempting to speak of these Symptoms, shall I laugh with Democritus or weep with Heraclitus? They are so ridiculous and absurd on the one side, so lamentable and tragical on the other’ (GN: 437).58 Sayers takes the opening of another section of Burton’s work, where he comments on what he sees as religious superstition, and uses it here as a commentary on the tragi-comic infatuation of Miss Hillyard (and, implicitly, the earlier infatuation of Pomfret and his subsequent jealousy of Peter as the ‘someone else’ who has won Harriet’s affections). Burton’s allusion to the two Greek philosophers, Heraclitus and Democritus, refers to Lucian’s second-century dialogue, Philosophies for Sale, in which the pair are humorously depicted as respectively laughing and weeping uncontrollably, in a powerful image that has been used by many writers and artists 56 See R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. T. C. Faulkner, N. K. Kiessling, and R. L. Blair, vol. 3, Oxford, 1994, p. 154. 57 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 1 (n. 52, above), p. 265. Burton here joins together a refer- ence to Tacitus with quotations from a Latin translation of John of Damascus’ writings, known as De Fide Orthodoxa (Tacitus, Histories, 2.20; St John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa, 2.14). 58 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Vol. 3 (n. 56, above), p. 365. 191‘Placetne Magistra?’ -- Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night over the centuries.59 This is an excellent example of how Latin and classical allu- sion can situate the novel’s themes in the broad span of time, as the jealousies of Miss Hillyard and Mr. Pomfret are not only characterized as ‘a common disease’ and ‘natural to us’ from the times of the Roman historian Tacitus, but also linked diachronically to ancient philosophical reflections on the absurdities and sorrows of human life. Latin likewise helps place Peter and Harriet’s relationship within an ancient tradi- tion of mutual desire and respect that contrasts with the shallow infatuations of Mr. Pomfret and Miss Hillyard. Latin botanical imagery, as seen in the image of Mr. Pomfret as a tulip or narcissus, recurs later in a more positive framework within the text of the novel itself, as Peter is telling Harriet what he has discovered about Annie’s late husband, Arthur Robinson: A rich, damp fragrance gushed out upon them as they turned into the Market, and she was overcome by a sense of extravagant well-being. ‘I love this smell – it’s like the cactus-house in the Botanical Gardens’. Her companion opened his mouth to speak, looked at her, and then, as one that will not interfere with fortune, let the name of Robinson die upon his lips. ‘Mandragoræ dederunt odorem.’ ‘What do you say, Peter?’ ‘Nothing. The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.’ (GN: 415) Peter’s final words quote from the concluding line of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost – a play about a group of men who foreswear the company of women to devote themselves to academic study, only to conclude that study is worth little without love.60 More significantly, his previous Latin phrase is, like Donne’s horti conclusi, a quotation from the Song of Songs, from a section dwelling on how the lovers will go together to the countryside and give one another their stored-up love. The full quotation is highly appropriate for suggesting the coming fruition of Harriet and Peter’s long courtship: Mane surgamus ad vineas: videamus si floruit vinea, si flores fructus parturi- unt, si floruerunt mala punica; ibi dabo tibi ubera mea. Mandragorae deder- unt odorem in portis nostris omnia poma: nova et vetera, dilecte mi, servavi tibi.61 In the morning let us go up to the vines: let us see if the vine flowers, if the flowers are bearing fruit, if the pomegranates are flowering; there I shall give you my breasts. The mandrakes have given forth fragrance; in our gates are all the apples: new and old, my beloved, I have saved them for you. 59 Lucian, Philosophies for Sale, 13; see C. E. Lutz, ‘Democritus and Heraclitus’, The Classical Journal 49, no. 7, 1954, pp. 309–14. 60 W. Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost. Edited by R. David, London, 1951, V. 2.1002–3. 61 Chapter 7, Verse 13, as translated from the original Hebrew into the Latin Vulgate bible commonly used throughout Europe. 192 F. Myatt The return to the Song of Songs suggests that Harriet and Peter’s eventual marriage will offer an answer to the question of how Donne’s intellectual paradise can be united with the sexual passion of the Song of Songs, while avoiding the bogeyman of the maddened, sexually repressed female intellectual. The more positive view of female sexuality on offer here is particularly clear for, amidst a long tradition of love poems addressed to women by men, the Song of Songs is one of the few ancient examples of a man and women expressing mutual desire. The line quoted here comes from the Bride’s portion of the song, reflecting the fact that, while Peter has long desired Harriet, it is Harriet’s attraction to Peter that is now awakening. Interestingly, however, the line is spoken by Peter. I would suggest that this can not only be read as his recognition of her awakening desire, but also as an example of the sort of intellectual androgyny which Sayers advocates in her 1938 address to a women’s society, entitled Are Women Human?, in which she argues forcefully that intellectual capacities and interests are not related to physical sex, and that women should simply be considered as human beings.62 While the misogynistic scholar Arthur Robinson used Virgil’s vivid description of harpies to graphically express his hatred of women, Peter’s quotation from the Song of Songs offers an alternative configuration of gender and the Latin tradition, as he fluidly crosses gender lines to reflect the mutual desire – simultaneously physical and intellectual – that is growing between himself and Harriet. Indeed, in another contrast to the misogyny expressed by the harpy quotation from the Aeneid, Latin later serves not to intensify but rather to neutralize the threat of Peter’s masculine sexual power and the long tradition of male superiority which he inherits. After the chess pieces he has given Harriet are destroyed by the polter- geist, Peter visits her, and she muses that: She had first met Peter at a moment when every physical feeling had been battered out of her by the brutality of circumstance; by this accident she had been aware of him from the beginning as a mind and spirit localised in a body. Never … had she considered him primarily as a male animal … But now … she saw him with new eyes – the eyes of women who had seen him before they knew him … each in her own way had recognised the same thing: six centuries of possessiveness, fastened under the yoke of urbanity. … ‘Well?’ he said lightly, ‘how doth my lady? What, sweeting, all amort? ... Yes, something has happened; I see it has. What is it, domina?’ Though the tone was half-jesting, nothing could have reassured her like that grave, academic title. (GN: 433) 62 For example, as discussed above with regard to Tennyson, part of Sayers’ argument in support of women’s university education is that, while interest in Aristotle may not be widespread among either women or men, ‘I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him’ (D. L. Say- ers, ‘Are Women Human? [n. 40, above]). On Harriet and Peter’s androgyny, see E. A. Trembley, ‘“Col- laring the Other Fellow’s Property”: Feminism Reads Dorothy L. Sayers’, Women Times Three: Writers, Detectives, Readers, ed. K. G. Klein, Ohio, 1995, pp. 81–100. 193‘Placetne Magistra?’ -- Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night Peter first addresses Harriet with two Shakespeare quotations – ‘How doth my lady?’ from Romeo and Juliet, and ‘What, sweeting, all amort?’ from The Taming of the Shrew.63 These two plays offer two models for relationships. Margaret Hannay comments that, ‘Sayers has quite deliberately given Peter and Harriet three opportu- nities to fall into each other’s arms in the approved fashion’, only to performatively reject the Romeo and Juliet model of a surrender to thoughtless passion.64 On the other hand, Petruchio and Katherine’s relationship in The Taming of the Shrew is the archetype for a marriage of male control and domination. This spectre of ‘the shrew’ lurks throughout Gaudy Night, through the ‘six centuries of possessiveness’ which, whether he wants it or not, is Peter’s inheritance as an upper-class male. However, just as Sayers simultaneously acknowledges and resists the ‘shrew’ model by nam- ing her large and successful all-women’s college Shrewsbury, so Peter’s potential for domination is acknowledged, only to be defused by his final, Latin address.65 In her reaction to Peter’s speech, Harriet disregards both the marriage of thought- less passion and that of male domination, focussing instead on the final Latin word domina. This single word, which translates as ‘mistress’, can be said to hold the key to Harriet and Peter’s relationship.66 Domina was originally used by the Latin love poets to address their love objects, with the implication being that the woman’s power over the writer was like that of a Roman mistress’ over an enslaved man. This use of domina in Latin love poetry then gave rise to the later use of ‘mistress’ to refer to the lover of a more powerful, usually married, man. Both of these uses of domina imply an imbalance of power between male and female lovers – but, as Sayers stresses at the beginning of the novel, there is a third meaning of domina, for Harriet is, ‘Scholar; Masters of Arts; Domina’ (GN: 14). Presented with these three options, Harriet chooses to interpret domina as ‘that grave, academic title’ which she has earned in her own right through her academic endeavours. The erotic aspects of the title domina are still implicitly present, thanks to the juxtaposition with Peter’s alternative addresses of ‘my lady’ and ‘sweeting’, but Harriet’s interpretation brings the intellectual sense of the title to the fore. It is this reminder of her intellectual equality with Peter, as expressed through Oxonian Latin, that reassures her in the face of the traditional Petruchio-esque sexual domination of the upper-class male. As for Peter, the fact that he uses both romantic Shakespearean quotations and an academic title to address Harriet suggests that brain and heart are, for him, already combined, and that he regards her with respect as well as affection. 63 W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. Edited by R. Weis, London, 2012, V.1.14; W. Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew. Edited by B. Hodgdon, London, 2010, IV.3.36 64 Those three ways are, ‘when he sees that she loves him in that interlude on the river, when Harriet throws herself into his arms to cry over the chessmen, when he is demonstrating how to ward off the attack’ (M. P. Hannay, ‘Head versus Heart in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night’, Mythlore 6, no. 3, 1979, pp. 33–7 [35]). 65 In the novel, the college’s patroness is named as Mary, Countess of Shrewsbury, daughter of the famous Bess of Hardwick (GN: 57–8). 66 Note that Peter continues to address Harriet as domina in Busman’s Honeymoon, after their marriage (Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon (n. 11, above), pp. 142, 222, 361). 194 F. Myatt The perfect harmony of brain and heart, of intellectual respect and physical desire, is found in the last chapter of Gaudy Night, when Harriet and Peter finally become engaged. Burton again appears in the epigram to this chapter, marking the end of the narrative arc of Harriet and Peter’s relationship, which began with Bur- ton’s bitter reflections on the inescapability of melancholia. Now, he speaks on the ultimate remedy for the lovesick: The last refuge and surest remedy, to be put in practice in the utmost place, when no other means will take effect, is to let them go together and enjoy one another; potissima cura est ut heros amasia sua potiatur, saith Guianerius… Æsculapius himself, to this malady, cannot invent a better remedy,  quam ut amanti cedat amatum… than that a lover have his desire (GN: 475).67 This final epigram helps once again in Sayers’ stated aim of connecting her detective novel to universal themes, as fulfilment of Harriet and Peter’s relationship is placed in a long tradition stretching back via Burton and the fifteenth- and sixteenth-cen- tury medical writers he quotes to Aesculapius, Greek god of medicine. Moreover, this epigram brings with it a sense of approval as their romance is endorsed by this long scholarly tradition. The novel’s continuous and complex use of scholarly Latin then culminates in Peter’s final proposal to Harriet: She laid both hands upon the fronts of his gown, looking into his face while she searched for the word that should carry her over the last difficult breach. It was he who found it for her. With a gesture of submission, he bared his head and stood gravely, the square cap dangling in his hand. ‘Placetne, magistra?’ ‘Placet.’ (GN: 482) Miriam Brody has read this final use of Latin as a disturbing reminder of the anti-feminist Latin of the harpy quotation.68 Hurst, however, disagrees, arguing that the importance of Oxford’s Latin statutes in giving Harriet a secure status as ‘Scholar; Master of Arts; Domina; Senior Member of this University’ means that, ‘the assumption that any utterance in Latin indicates misogyny is no more accurate than Harriet’s mistaken perception that a note in Latin means that the writer is a scholar’.69 Yet, we can go far further than Hurst’s view, for not only does Latin not necessarily indicate misogyny in Gaudy Night, it has become almost a private ‘love language’ for Harriet and Peter. Although Donald Marshall has argued that the Latin of Peter’s proposal achieves a ‘double distancing’ effect, such a reading overlooks the more erotic overtones that have gradually accreted around Latin throughout the 67 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol 3 (n. 56, above), p. 243. Antonius Guianerius was a fifteenth century medical writer, while the second quotation comes from the work of a sixteenth century physi- cian, Jason Pratensis. 68 M. Brody, ‘The Haunting of Gaudy Night: Misreadings in a Work of Detective Fiction’, Style 19, no. 1, 1985, pp. 114–15. 69 Hurst, ‘Revising the Victorians’ (n. 12, above), p. 209. 195‘Placetne Magistra?’ -- Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night novel.70 Such eroticism does not compete, but rather accords with the language’s intellectualism, as Sayers works to negotiate that delicate balance between brain and heart necessary for the successful fulfilment of Harriet and Peter’s relationship. Peter’s Latin proposal thus builds naturally upon the significant and positive role that Latin has already played in the development of his relationship with Harriet. Indeed, the grammar of Peter’s two proposals elegantly demonstrates this develop- ment over the course of the novel. In his earlier proposal, Peter used the particle num, which, ‘notoriously expects the answer “no”’ (GN: 69), but in his final pro- posal he uses the neutral interrogative particle ne, which makes no assumptions about what answer will be received. However, perhaps the most significant aspect of this final Latin proposal is the fact that, as Heilbrun comments: Peter gains [Harriet’s] consent in the words of the great, long-male, ceremony of the granting of degrees. I think the idea for this was planted when Sayers attended the Encaenia in 1914 and wrote to her friend Tony about it. The let- ter describing the ceremony is very long indeed and contains many points that were to be echoed in Gaudy Night. She concludes with the moment when the Vice-Chancellor ‘addressed the assembled doctors in a sing-song little speech, beginning something about “Does it please you doctors of the University that so-&-so should be admitted to such and such degree – Placentne?”’71 Magistra is the feminine of magister (‘master’, ‘teacher’) so, as with domina earlier, Peter is again addressing Harriet by one of her academic titles, in this case Magistra Artium (Master of Arts). It is her academic status, and the respect Peter shows for it, that gives Harriet the confidence to accept his proposal, as she is now released from any sense of gratitude or inferiority. The absolute centrality of Oxford’s Latin- inflected ‘kingdom of the mind, glittering from Merton to Bodley’ (GN: 480) in ena- bling this happy conclusion to Harriet and Peter’s long courtship is then further rein- forced by the novel’s concluding paragraph: The Proctor, stumping grimly past with averted eyes, reflected that Oxford was losing all sense of dignity. But what could he do? If Senior Members of the University chose to stand – in their gowns, too! – closely and passionately embracing in New College Lane right under the Warden’s windows, he was powerless to prevent it. He primly settled his white band and went upon his walk unheeded; and no hand plucked his velvet sleeve. (GN: 482–83) The final phrase again refers to a tradition in degree ceremonies whereby any Master could veto a student’s graduation by plucking the sleeve of a passing Proctor. That the Proctor’s gown remains ‘unplucked’ thus demonstrates the University’s approba- tion of Harriet and Peter’s relationship. Significantly, it is not ‘a man and a woman’ whom the Proctor sees passionately embracing, but ‘Senior Members of the Uni- versity’, underlining the equality that Harriet and Peter have found within Oxford’s 70 D. G. Marshall, ‘Gaudy Night: An Investigation of Truth’, VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center 4, 1983, pp. 98–114 (109). 71 Heilbrun, Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women (n. 17, above), p. 256. 196 F. Myatt academic world. This equality is vividly demonstrated by the fact that they are both wearing academic gowns, one of the few items of clothing which could at that time be respectably worn by both men and woman. Indeed, the reader might remember an earlier incident, when Peter left Harriet’s rooms in a hurry: ‘Bless the man, if he hasn’t taken my gown instead of his own! Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. We’re much of a height and mine’s pretty wide on the shoul- ders, so it’s exactly the same thing.’ Then it struck her as strange that it should be the same thing. (GN: 300–301) Not so strange, if one considers how Sayers has clearly and methodically demon- strated that Oxford’s ‘kingdom of the mind’, encapsulated by its Latin degree cer- emony, provides a unique place where Harriet and Peter can meet, and love, on an equal footing, in a perfect fusion of brain and heart. Conclusion With Gaudy Night, Sayers has undeniably succeeded in her stated aim of writing a detective novel that is far more than a mere crossword puzzle. Her rich and sophisti- cated use of Latin helps connect the detective plot to the wider, universal themes of brain and heart, as Sayers uses the language to actively confront and develop ideas around both women’s education and women’s sexuality. Through Latin quotations, ranging from Virgil’s Aeneid to Oxford’s university statutes, she both acknowledges the traditional exclusion of women from the university while simultaneously recon- figuring Oxford’s Latinate tradition to be supportive and inclusive of all who have the intellectual interest, capacity and drive to excel within academia. Simultane- ously, Sayers uses Latin to demonstrate how an educated woman can retain her self- respect and combine both the intellect and the flesh in a romantic relationship – a relationship that is, furthermore, one of healing for two traumatized individuals, as Gaudy Night dramatizes the gradual curing of Harriet and Peter’s ‘melancholia’. Gaudy Night can, indeed, be read as a polemical rewriting of Tennyson’s The Princess from the perspective of an educated woman.72 Princess Ida bewails the ‘great clog of thanks’ and, ‘nightmare weight of gratitude’ which is forced upon her after the Prince saves her from drowning, just as Harriet has to come to terms with the gratitude she must bear Peter for saving her life.73 Princess Ida, however, must retreat from her studies in order to marry the Prince. By contrast, Harriet’s academic achievements and her position as a senior member of Oxford university, far from acting as an impediment, instead enable her marriage to Peter. In their relationship, the mutual sexual desire of the Song of Songs finds its proper place within the horti conclusi of the university, and their eventual engagement at the novel’s conclusion triumphantly rebuts the myth, perpetuated by Tennyson, that intellectual endeavours must entail the suppression of a woman’s sexuality. Indeed, The Princess ends, as 72 For further comparison of the two works, although with perhaps an overly generous interpretation of Tennyson, see Colón, ‘Defending Tennyson’ (n. 40, above). 73 VI. 110, 280 (n. 35, above), pp. 271, 276. 197‘Placetne Magistra?’ -- Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night Hall observes, not only in the closure of the Princess’ university in favour of mar- riage, but also in the suppression of female voices.74 In Gaudy Night, however, the final word spoken is by Harriet, as she finds the ‘form of words in which she could accept him without a loss of self-respect’ and answers Peter’s proposal with that sin- gle Latin word, placet. Acknowledgements Research for this article began as part of an MA in Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, and I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the course director, Dr Marlene Dirschauer, and of the Leverhulme Trust through a Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship. Since then, my research has been financially supported by the Cambridge Trust, the Jebb Fund and the Caroline Fitzmaurice Trust. I would like to thank Profes- sor Philip Hardie and Professor Carole Newlands for their comments, as well as audience members from the 2021 Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in the Reception of the Ancient World, particularly Dr Darcy Krasne. The perceptive comments made by peer reviewers for this article were extremely helpful, as was the assistance of Anna Petrie from the Oxford University Archives. I would like to thank David Myatt for proofreading, and most of all I would like to thank my mother, Clare Yarrington, for first introducing me to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers. Funding Funding was provided by Leverhulme Trust (Study Abroad Studentship), Cambridge Trust (Vice-Chancellor’s Award), Jebb Fund (Studentship) and Caroline Fitzmaurice Trust. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permis- sion directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. 74 After Ida ‘tremulously’ laments that the Prince can never love her because of her anti-male behaviour, the Prince answers in a long monologue that closes the tale of Princess Ida. “Yield thyself up” (VII 343), he commands as he dominates both the discourse and Ida. “Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me” (VII 345) are the words that end the narrative and indicate the stilling of Ida’s voice and reassertion of hegemonic male control over speech and women. When we return to the frame narrative after Ida’s capitulation, we hear only men’s voices, except for that of Lilia, who beseeches her aunt to “tell us what we are” (Conclusion 34). The aunt never has a chance to answer as she is drowned out by the male voices of visitors from the Mechanics Institute’ (Hall, “Anti-Feminist Ideology” (n. 36, above), p. 55). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ‘Placetne Magistra?’ -- Latin in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night Abstract Women and the University A Meeting of Minds Conclusion Acknowledgements