Fluid Bodies and Bodily Fluids in Premodern Europe: Bodies, Blood, and Tears in Literature, Theology, and Art 9781641892391

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FLUID BODIES AND BODILY FLUIDS IN PREMODERN EUROPE

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BORDERLINES Borderlines welcomes monographs and edited collections that, while firmly rooted in late antique, medieval, and early modern periods, are “edgy” and may introduce approaches, methodologies, or theories from the social sciences, health studies, and the sciences. Typically, volumes are theoretically aware whilst introducing novel approaches to topics of key interest to scholars of the pre-​modern past.

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FLUID BODIES AND BODILY FLUIDS IN PREMODERN EUROPE BODIES, BLOOD,  AND TEARS IN LITERATURE,THEOLOGY,  AND  ART Edited by

ANNE M. SCOTT and MICHAEL DAVID BARBEZAT

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DEDICATION This volume is dedicated to the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group which celebrates scholarship and sustains scholars with a winning mix of collegiality, openness and friendship.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

© 2019, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

The authors assert their moral right to be identi ied as the authors of their part of this work.

Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC) or would be determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 page 2 or that satis ies the conditions speci ied in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94–553) does not require the Publisher’s permission.

ISBN: 9781641892384 e-ISBN: 9781641892391

www.arc-humanities.org

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii 1

Introduction: Bodies, Fluidity, and Change MICHAEL DAVID BARBEZAT AND ANNE M. SCOTT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

PART 1: TRANSFORMATIVE AND MANIPULATIVE TEARS

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Where Did Margery Kempe Cry? ANTHONY BALE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Elusive Tears: Lamentation and Impassivity in Fifteenth-​century Passion Iconography HUGH HUDSON. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Catherine’s Tears: Diplomatic Corporeality, Affective Performance, and Gender at the Sixteenth-​century French Court SUSAN BROOMHALL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

PART 2: IDENTITIES IN BLOOD

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Piers Plowman and the Blood of Brotherhood ANNE M. SCOTT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Performative Asceticism and Exemplary Effluvia: Blood, Tears, and Rapture in Fourteenth-​century German Dominican Literature SAMUEL BAUDINETTE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

“Bloody Business:” Passions and Regulation of Sanguinity in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear KARIN SELLBERG. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

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Contents

PART 3: BODIES AND BLOOD IN LIFE, DEATH, AND RESURRECTION

8 Saintly Blood: Absence, Presence, and the Alter Christus DIANA HILLER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

9 The Treatment of the Body in Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp HELEN GRAMOTNEV. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

10 Augustine on the Flesh of the Resurrection Body in the De fide et symbolo: Origen, Manichaeism, and Augustine’s Developing Thought Regarding Human Physical Perfection MICHAEL DAVID BARBEZAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Select Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Places in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where Margery Kempe cried ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 26 Figure 2. Attributed to Bartolomeo Bellano, Lamentation of Christ, ca. 1476–​1497, stone, plaster, pigments, and gold leaf (?), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, presented by Tomas Harris Esq. (1276–​D4). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Figure 3. Cristoforo Guerra (printmaker), after Cesare Vecellio (designer), Generale di Venetia (Venetian General), woodblock print, from De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diversi parti del mondo libri due (Venice: Damian Zenaro, 1590), f­ igure 102b. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Figure 4. Carlo Crivelli, Lamentation of Christ, ca. 1476, tempera and gold leaf on panel, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Figure 5. Giovanni Bellini, Pietà, late 1460s or early 1470s, tempera on panel, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

Figure 6. Piero and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (1473–​1475), oil on wood (291 × 203 cm).. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Figure 7. Master of Staffolo, Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian (1449), verso of the Misericordia Standard, tempera and gold on wood, Museo Nazionale del Palazzo Venezia, Rome. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Figure 8. Giovanni del Biondo, Martyrdom of St. Sebastian and Scenes from His Life (ca. 1374), tempera and gold on wood (224 × 89 cm). Florence, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 Figure 9. Cosmѐ Tura, St. Sebastian (ca. 1484), oil on poplar, panel from altarpiece (panel 75.5 × 33.2 cm). Berlin, Gemäldegalerie-​ Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Figure 10. Luca Signorelli, Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (ca. 1498), oil on wood, Pinacoteca Comunale, Città di Castello (288 × 175 cm).. . . . . . . . . 144 Figure 11. Gentile da Fabriano, Valle Romita Polyptych (ca. 1405), upper panel, tempera and gold on wood, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (157 × 80 cm).. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148

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List of ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 12. Aretine Workshop, Crucifix with St. Francis, detail, late thirteenth century, tempera and gold on wood, Arezzo, Chiesa di San Francesco. Scala. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

Figure 13. Carlo Crivelli, St. Francis Collecting the Blood of Christ (ca. 1490–​1500), tempera on wood (20 × 16 cm). Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Figure 14. Taddeo di Bartolo, Death of St. Peter Martyr (ca. 1400), predella panel, tempera and gold leaf on wood (14¼ × 15⅜ in).. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 Figure 15. Giovanni Bellini, The Assassination of St. Peter Martyr (ca. 1507), oil and tempera on wood (100 × 165 cm).. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Figure 16. Giovanni Bellini, Assassination of St. Peter Martyr (1509), oil on panel, The Courtauld Gallery, London (68 × 100 cm). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Figure 17. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632. Oil on canvas (216.5 × 169.5 cm). Mauritshuis, The Hague.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 Figure 18. Bartholomeus Dolendo after Jan Cornelisz Woudanus, The Anatomical Theatre in Leiden, 1609. Engraving (46.6 × 55.8 cm). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Figure 19. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, The Slaughtered Ox, 1655. Oil on wood (94 × 69 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

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Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: BODIES, FLUIDITY, AND CHANGE

Michael David Barbezat and Anne M. Scott FLUID BODIES AND Bodily Fluids in Premodern Europe: Bodies, Blood, and Tears in Literature, Theology, and Art is an interdisciplinary collection, containing chapters from specialists in history, art history, and literature, dealing with material from the early Middle Ages to the early modern period. The essays focus on discussions regarding the body and how its fluids both signify and explain change. For medieval and early modern thinkers, the apparent solidity of the body only came about through the dynamic interplay of a host of fluidities in constant flux. The intimately familiar language of the body served as a convenient medium through which to imagine and describe transformations of the larger world, both for the better and also for the worse. Rethinking the human body was one way to approach redefining the social, political, and religious realities of the world. Fluid Bodies situates itself in the context of a rich and ongoing conversation regarding conceptions of the human body and its significations in the medieval and early modern Western world. There is no shortage of scholarship on the subject of corporeality in these periods. Past work has interrogated the range of meanings assigned to the category of body. This work has stressed the multiplicity of these meanings, destabilizing monolithic categories of universal personhood or universal body by approaching their subjects through the lenses of gender,1 teleology,2 narrative,3 sexuality,4 and developing notions of the role played by bodily fluids in human physiology, particularly the humoral body and its reciprocal relations with its environment.5 Materiality itself has also served as a frequent focus for recent research, particularly into the way the sacred and the material can interact and sometimes cohere. This work, especially as it has been developed by scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum, has stressed the recurrent anxieties that result from the investment of the divine in the material. Most pertinently for this volume, it also explores the ultimate fruitfulness of these anxieties as drives for cultural expression and creative thought, particularly in 1  Kay and Rubin, Framing Medieval Bodies. The works cited here are listed in the bibliography at the end of the chapter and further key works are listed in the Select Bibliography at the end of the volume. 2  Akbari and Ross, The Ends of the Body; Hirai, Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy. 3  Cohen and Weiss, Thinking the Limits of the Body.

4  Dinshaw, Getting Medieval; Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation.

5  Paster, Humoring the Body; Horstmanshoff, King, and Zittel, Blood, Sweat, and Tears; Lange, Telling Tears in the English Renaissance.

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the signifying power of blood.6 Bynum’s work has illustrated that speculation regarding bodily change often prompts focused reflections on personal identity. In fact, the need to maintain personal identity and the desire to keep the world recognizable have often provided limits to the imagining of a better human being or a more perfect world in the Western tradition. These speculative limits suggest some of the motivations that lay beneath thought regarding embodiment and demonstrate that a total separation between body and soul, that is, between essential personhood and the body, cannot stand at most points in the medieval and early modern tradition. The unique contribution of this volume to ongoing scholarship is that it focuses on the body and its fluids as tools for signifying and understanding processes of change. It situates its inquiries within the imagery and discourse employed by historical actors, and through these historicized perspectives it recovers something of the productive fluidity of embodiment in medieval and early modern worlds. It questions ideas of personhood in their entanglement with embodied experience. It explores the different purposes and narratives that explained and structured the experiences of medieval and early modern bodies, both individual and collective. On the level of bodily matter, it interrogates the role of the constituent material parts of the body and their participation in a greater whole. In the sphere of heuristics, it explores the potential for the body and its changeability to function as signs. Finally, in all of these functions, its individual chapters draw attention to the different ways that speculation regarding the body reflected speculation regarding the larger political and material ordering of the world. In early medical theory, the human body was considered to be composed of fluids and these fluids were themselves made up of the four elements that came together to constitute all terrestrial material substances. The four basic fluids, or humors, of the body—​blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—​mirrored the four terrestrial elements.7 Arising from Hippocratic medicine, the four humors played an essential role in the body’s economy, generating and sustaining it. These liquids also influenced, and sometimes were believed to constitute, individuals’ psychological states. In the words of Gail Kern Paster, due to the workings of the humors in the body, the “passions were liquid forces of nature.”8 The exact balance of these fluids in a person varied as part of their individuality. This balance, or complexion, described the humoral state natural to a given individual and defined which humor was predominant (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic).9 Yet the individual complexion was not really stable, being subject to constant disruption through disease. In its constant negotiations for a variable and unique balance, always under some threat, the fluidity of the body reflected both the promising and the dangerous malleability of the world. 6  Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body; Metamorphosis and Identity; Wonderful Blood; Christian Materiality. 7  As well as the four primary qualities (hot, wet, cold, dry). 8  Paster, Humoring the Body, 4.

9  Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 104–​6.

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As medieval theologians often explained, the eventual perfection of the human body was an essential part of the perfection of the entire world.10 Speculation regarding the one frequently attracted the other. Embracing the ancient concept of humanity as microcosm, or a version of the larger universe in miniature, intellectuals imagined that transformations of the human body mirrored transformations of the world and vice versa; reimagining one involved the reconceptualization of both. Study of and speculation regarding the self, likewise, were not necessarily distinct from the study of the external processes of nature. Since humanity was an image of the elements, principles, and forces active in the world, human beings enjoyed a privileged position from which to understand the processes by which they were formed and by which the world itself continued.11 The body and its processes, as a vehicle through which to rethink the world and its orderings, did not always, of course, require grand mythological, theological, and philosophical edifices such as that of the Neoplatonic homo microcosmus or learned medicine. Instead, just as man as microcosm drew together so many different genres, so too did other forms of speculation regarding the body and its fluids in the context of change. Beyond literature and written texts, artistic representations of the body also brought together the interests and influences of multiple genres, and such representations invoked a wide range of associations and implications just as rich as those found within textual sources. The convergence of multiple genres, in unique and often idiosyncratic combinations reminiscent of the unstable diversity of the larger world, is the point of departure for our volume. Each chapter takes as its focus representations and conceptions of the body, its fluids, and their significations within specific historical contexts. In taking this approach it follows scholars who have insisted, “that we cannot take ‘the body’ for granted as a natural, fixed and historically universal datum of human societies.”12 Individually, the chapters take the fluidity of the body in the terms set by a particular context, exploring what it meant in specific moments and in specific places. The authors in this collection highlight many concepts that have faded, or routes that were not taken, while identifying others that have only grown more powerful and normative over the passage of time. From the point of view inhabited by modern scholars interested in the past, these individual chapters are in a unique position to illustrate what Glenn Burger has called a process of “becoming.”13 In the present day, certain assumptions about the meanings of the body and its constituent parts are used to structure society and human experience. Our chapters demonstrate that there have been many other valid ways of understanding the body, and that our current interpretations reflect only a few out of many possibilities. 10  For example, Hugh of St. Victor, De sacramentis christianae fidei, 2.17.28 and 2.18.1, in Patrologia Latina, 176:609–​10; trans. Deferrari, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, 466. 11  Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century, 275. 12  Turner, “Body in Western Society,” 17. 13  Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, x.

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The individual chapters chart an eclectic course through these issues within three main sections. Each chapter, within the bounds of its own case study, considers the role of the body in medieval and early modern culture, and explores its potential to become fluid. In those chapters that deal with blood and with tears, it becomes evident that the emission of those bodily fluids causes something to happen—​they become agents of change. The contents of each section are not arranged chronologically but by theme. The first section, “Transformative and Manipulative Tears,” explores performances of weeping as attempts to invoke social, political, or personal change. The chapters in this section explore tears in a number of different modes: as a divine gift that authenticates the sanctity of its recipient, as social performances that connect the weeper to biblical figures and to God, and as a gendered political strategy. The second section, “Identities in Blood,” examines presentations of blood as a marker and a shaper of identity outside familiar categories of race or heredity. The chapters in this section question the role of blood, in itself or as an image, in the formation or reformation of the self. These chapters examine Christ’s blood as a mimetic template for the faithful and explore later understandings of the role of blood in the composition of a human individual. The third and final part of the collection, “Bodies and blood in life, death, and resurrection,” examines instances in which contemplation of the human body and its dominant fluid, blood, provided an opportunity for thinkers from late antiquity to the early modern period to critique and reimagine both their roles in society and the nature of humanity itself.

Transformative and Manipulative Tears

A rich scholarship on tears provides a foundation for this section. Nagy, in Le don des larmes, argues for tears as a purely physiological function, a view sustained by the early modern philosopher, René Descartes, in Passions of the Soul. The collection Crying in the Middle Ages,14 provides a useful starting point for charting change and development with regard to weeping as portrayed in medieval art and literature. For the early modern viewpoint, Telling Tears in the English Renaissance15 warns against the simplistic assumption that the reasons given for tears are unchanging. Lange points out the differences over time in attitudes to weeping, suggesting that tears are a valuable indication of fashions in conceptions about feelings. The first three chapters of this volume engage with and build on this scholarship, offering new insights with which to approach well-​studied subject matter.16 First, Bale advances an original explanation of the tears shed by the fifteenth-​ century mystic, Margery Kempe. He argues that she represents her spirituality by “a crying that is not only socially performative but also follows and supports certain 14  Gertsman, Crying in the Middle Ages. 15  Lange, Telling Tears.

16  Nagy, Le don des larmes; Descartes, The Passions of the Soul; Gertsman, Crying in the Middle Ages; Lange, Telling Tears.

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rhetorical and contextual cues.”17 Rather than seeing tears as a sign of Kempe’s gender or of her “madness,” Bale’s chapter discusses Kempe’s highly logical geography of tears. It considers how her crying functions allusively not only to other holy weepers but also how it responds to certain sites connected with weeping—​especially those concerned with the Magdalene and the Passion of Christ. Bale sets Kemp within a tradition deriving from other mystical and religious authorities. He calls her crying “richly allusive and intertextual,” and points out that her allusion to “the heat of the fire of love is appropriate because tears were a sign of heat and moisture.”18 Kempe’s crying is more than personal; it is public, performed in defined places which have specific significance for the medieval worshipper. In ­chapter 3, Hudson makes the point that the public shedding of tears is governed by certain codes of conduct, and here, Bale concurs that, “in many medieval texts, crying only means something when other people see it.”19 Nonetheless, Kempe’s crying is deeply personal, and is stimulated by her deep devotion to Christ. Her imaginative emotional oneness with the human, suffering body of Christ elicits torrential tears of empathy, a reaction that is a normal, human reaction to the suffering of a loved one whose pain cannot be eased and must be borne alone. This empathy is perfectly understandable as a human emotion, but drawing a parallel between blood and tears, Bale points out the spiritual significance of the reaction: tears and blood are both warm, wet humors, but additionally, Kempe’s tears were “pseudo-​stigmatic,” since they symbolize the wounding that she experiences at Calvary. In a later chapter by Baudinette, “Performative Asceticism and Exemplary Effluvia: Blood, Tears, and Rapture in Fourteenth-​century German Dominican Literature,” it will be seen that Kempe’s near contemporaries, the late fourteenth-​ and fifteenth-​century Dominican nuns, demonstrated in their bodies the significance of shedding their own blood in empathy with the physical sufferings of Christ in his passion.20 Hudson’s chapter discussing A Lamentation of Christ attributable to the fifteenth-​ century Paduan sculptor Bartolomeo Bellano, and a number of similar compositions in sculpture and painting, invites nuanced hypotheses about the relationship between the bodily expression of emotion, devotional practices, and decorum in early modern art. His analysis of the curious juxtaposition of extreme lamentation and impassivity in fifteenth-​ century passion iconography is closely aligned with Bale’s chapter. In this genre, biblical figures are often portrayed showing obvious signs of grief beside the crucified Christ, while the figures of the donors, who funded the work, are often shown as impassive. Like Bale, Hudson too positions the religious mourner in context, and considers the shedding of tears within the context of social mores, prescriptions of religious decorum, and historical understandings of the expression of emotion. For Hudson’s figures, even though they are static in contrast to the intensely corporeal and vibrant Margery Kempe, the shedding or the restraining of tears takes place in time, in place, and in society. 17  Bale, ­chap. 2. 18  Bale, ­chap. 2. 19  Bale, ­chap. 2. 20  See ­chap. 6.

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Hudson relates both the active expressions of grief and the passive expressions of the donor figures to traditions of affective piety, and carefully contextualizes them. As the hugely influential Thomas à Kempis suggests, there is a time and place for crying, but it is quiet tears, shed inwardly in meditation, that are spiritually efficacious.21 Hudson charts a pathway between texts of devotional literature which advocate emotionally involved contemplation of Christ’s life and Passion and sumptuary texts and conduct books that counsel restraint in public expressions of grief. He points out that the artworks illustrate “the tension or contradiction between the appropriateness of ardent religious feeling and the inappropriateness of its embodied expression.”22 Moving the discussion of public weeping into the secular sphere, Broomhall, “Catherine’s Tears: Diplomatic Corporeality, Affective Performance, and Gender at the Sixteenth-​century French Court,” explores the implications of Catherine de’ Medici’s tears both in space—​in the public domain of the court—​and in the context of diplomatic relationships.23 Here, again, tears are contextual, purposeful, and related both to the space where they are shed, and the socio-​political context. This chapter explores how gesture and physical performance, particularly the shedding of tears, constructed key aspects of diplomatic negotiation for both women and men at the sixteenth-​century French court. The humoral constitution of the queen led her to employ tears as a political strategy. These bodily emissions helped to construct the queen’s representation of particular sentiments in the context of political events. Indeed, they also helped to construct these contexts, and highlighted the challenges that Catherine faced as a woman involved in government. She had to contend with the way these gendered liquid emotions drew upon contemporary understandings of humors and gender; women were conventionally expected to be weak in government, and the use of tears, whether in women or men, was traditionally viewed as a sign of weakness. But Catherine’s tears became a strategic tool, which she wielded in the face of the fears experienced by male diplomats: fears of emotional contagion, including the dangerous power of empathy in the diplomatic moment.

Identities in Blood

In the second part of the collection, blood is explored as the life force not just of the human body, but of the community. Wonderful Blood and Medieval Blood are foundational texts for the medieval period; The Heart and the Vascular System in Ancient Greek Medicine from Alcmaeon to Galen and William Harvey and the Mechanics of the Heart are two texts among many that explore the amazing bodily fluid, blood, in the early modern era.24 21  Hudson, ­chap. 3. 22  Hudson, c­ hap. 3. 23  Chapter 4.

24  Bynum, Wonderful Blood; Bildhauer, Medieval Blood; Harris, The Heart and the Vascular System; Shackleford, William Harvey and the Mechanics of the Heart.

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Identities in Blood is a theme that dominates Scott’s chapter: “Piers Plowman and the Blood of Brotherhood.” In line with the theme of the collection, the poem considers Christ’s materiality which coexists with his divinity, a theme that resonates with the final chapter in which Barbezat rigorously examines the young Augustine’s attempts to explain various ways of conceiving of the body of God, the resurrection body, and the bodies of the elect at the end of time.25 Langland approaches the idea of blood through the portrayal of Christ’s body perceived in three ways: his body as human and corporeal, his body as the Church, and his body as sacramental, considered in the sacraments of both Baptism and the Eucharist.26 Throughout the poem Christ’s blood is said to be the cause and ground of brotherly unity and of human solidarity. In his portrayal of Christ as human and divine, unlike Margery Kempe or the Dominican nuns discussed in the following chapter, Langland does not empathize with the suffering Christ; he portrays him poetically, and blood is the main feature that he stresses. This blood is seen as the arma Christi, the blazon or coat of arms on the human flesh of Christ. Langland poetically refers to Christ’s human body as the ceremonial knightly garment that he has put on or assumed. It is this body emblazoned with blood that defines Christ, the anointed one, as the crucified and risen one. In tune with Augustine’s efforts to comprehend the implications of Christ’s body both in its temporal and eternal manifestations, mentioned in the final chapter by Barbezat, Langland strives through poetry to make sense of the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ by portraying his humanity in its corporeality. The blood is the direct sign of that corporeality, just as it is the sign of his human/​divine nature worshipped in the sacrament of the Eucharist. For Langland, as for worshippers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the blood is key. And, as the liquid that is used for the mortar to build the Barn of Unity, the allegorical building that Langland portrays as the body of Christ as Church, this blood supports the building of the brotherhood of the church, just as blood courses through the veins of Christ’s corporeal body. Pursuing the concept of flowing blood, Baudinette in the next chapter gives an analysis of the penitential practices of medieval Dominican nuns in what is now modern Germany. He examines how, in their bloody somatic piety, the religious women seek a greater connection to Christ through the emulation of his suffering, just as Margery Kempe does with her tears. Baudinette carefully contextualizes extreme penitential practices within the Dominican Order, showing how, in their efforts to achieve oneness with the crucified Christ, early founding fathers and later Dominican nuns both practised intensely corporeal penances. Baudinette explains their deliberate drawing forth blood and shedding manifold tears as a bodily manifestation of their union with God through the crucifixion of the human body of Christ, and subsequent eucharistic transubstantiation of Christ’s glorified, or as Barbezat names it, “resurrection” body and blood. The flowing blood is both spiritual and material, transforming each of the practitioners into an alter Christus (another Christ), a concept pursued further by Hiller who considers the 25  Chapter 10. 26  Chapter 5.

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blood shed by the popular saints, Sebastian, Francis of Assisi, and Peter Martyr.27 Where Margery Kempe is presented by Bale as empathizing with Christ in his sufferings, and involuntarily shedding tears in grief, the Dominican nuns emulate Christ’s sufferings by purposefully drawing blood to achieve an ecstatic oneness with the divine and human nature of Christ. In this suffering emulation, the nuns play out in their bodies a desired transition from a corporeal existence to an experience of what they perceive to be the resurrection body. In subjecting their bodies to bloody torment, they experience, by imitation, the sufferings that led to the death and Resurrection of Christ, and they perceive their experience as a spiritual validation. By enduring extreme corporeal torment which leads to spiritual ecstasy, they get as close as is humanly possible to the transubstantiation of Christ’s body and blood into the much venerated eucharistic elements of bread and wine. The final chapter in this section, “ ‘Bloody Business’: Passions and Regulation of Sanguinity in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear,” transitions from explorations of Christ’s bloody body, and the empathetic shedding of their own blood by the Dominican nuns, towards an early modern medical understanding of blood. Sellberg argues that historians of science have overlooked the central congruence between the passions and the humoral body fluids in early modern scientific thought. Even before the publication of William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis in 1628, ideas of circular sanguinity were in fact widespread in medical as well as in cultural conceptions of the body, and she examines several of these texts, less well-​known today, but influential in their own period: “Blood was an element that bridged the spiritual and physical world in early modern science and culture. It was the humor of the human body facilitating communication between flesh and soul, inner passions and social and political interaction.”28 Sellberg exemplifies this in an analysis of Macbeth and King Lear, demonstrating how the sickened and disrupted familial relationships of blood within these plays permeate the whole community in each realm. They give rise to moral diseases and sicknesses within the polity and among its members that can only be purged by catastrophic blood letting.

Bodies and Blood in Life, Death, and Resurrection

The final section in the volume places the human body centre stage visually, in Rembrandt’s painting of an anatomical dissection, and in several images of the act of martyrdom. Interwoven with this strongly corporeal presentation is an emphasis on the immaterial person, and the concluding chapter of the book brings this preoccupation to the fore. Throughout the volume authors have argued, each in a unique case study, that the body in all its facets, material, sensuous, feeling, and vibrant, is the earthy manifestation of the whole human being, body, mind, emotions, and spirit. The collection comes full circle with an analysis of Augustine’s exhaustive attempts to explain, within 27  Chapter 8.

28  Sellberg, ­chap. 7.

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the thought processes of late antique Christendom, how the body can achieve resurrection after corporeal death. The first two chapters of this section offer a view of saintly bodies pierced and mutilated in a sacrificial martyrdom (Hiller), and a secular, quasi-​sacrificial treatment of the body on Dr. Tulp’s anatomy table (Gramotnev). The final chapter (Barbezat), acts as a coda, reflecting on the tension between corporeal and spiritual bodies, voiced in antiquity, and still reverberating among philosophers, theologians, and Scripture scholars. The rich historiography on the body, much of which has been referenced at the start of this introduction, is extended by these chapters. Particularly pertinent are studies of body as an object used to enhance scientific knowledge, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, and The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe.29 Hiller’s chapter, “Saintly Blood: Absence, Presence, and the alter Christus” sub­ stantiates many of the themes explored by others in this collection. Her unique contribution to study of the depiction of bodies and blood in Renaissance art is to suggest a congruence between the blood shed by Christ in scenes portraying his Passion, and the blood shed in martyrdom by three particular saints: St. Sebastian, St. Francis, and St. Peter of Verona. Hiller points out that the presence of blood in visual images has received far less attention from scholars than references to blood in texts; and furthermore, such studies “have concentrated almost exclusively on the bodily fluids of Christ.”30 Bodies, and even body parts of saintly martyrs are often depicted as bloodless: a statuesque St. Agatha holds her bloodless breasts on a plate, for example. But in the case of St. Sebastian, St. Francis, and St. Peter of Verona, their bodies bleed profusely during their actively violent martyrdom. Hiller traces the conformity of each of these saints to the iconography of Christ in his passion, and suggests that they are being portrayed as the figure of an alter Christus. Gramotnev offers an example of a more secular understanding of corporeality. Her analysis of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp may seem to take the reader far away from the religious concerns of other authors examined in this collection; yet, the questions she identifies and explores remain firmly rooted in the same tradition. Rembrandt is intensely conscious of the physical and lifeless body on the dissecting table. Yet the very bloodlessness of the corpse accentuates the fact that it was once vibrantly alive and emotionally motivated. The author ponders the identity of this person, and the cessation of his life. The dissection is presented as a clean, bloodless opening of an arm, with the body surrounded by a theatrical staging of animated surgeons. This staging reflects the fluidity of contemporary Dutch society, not only emphasizing its progressive structures, but also challenging the place and the meaning of a human body. Rembrandt offers no answers to the enigma of what the body can reveal about the vital spirit that once infused it. But the observers within the picture, and we, as onlookers at one remove, are forced to consider the corporeal and incorporeal or spiritual nature of 29  Sawday, The Body Emblazoned; Hillman and Mazzio, The Body in Parts. 30  Hiller, ­chap. 8.

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the man, according his body the respect given to it by the infinitely careful actions of the surgeon. The last chapter in the collection brings many of the themes explored in the volume back to their beginning, illustrating the deep thematic continuities in the use of the body’s fluids to imagine and to conceptualize processes of change. Barbezat examines the views of Augustine of Hippo on the nature of the resurrection body as offered in his De fide et symbolo and subsequent Retractions of thirty-​six years later. He interrogates Augustine’s attempt to imagine a human body after the Resurrection that would have no flesh and no blood. In his De fide et symbolo, Augustine argues that such a body would be changeless and perfect, because “all flesh is also body, but not every body is also flesh.”31 As an older man, Augustine changed his position on the resurrected body, insisting that to be human it will have to possess both flesh and blood made somehow immune to change. Augustine sifts through the heritage of ancient scholarly medical and theological proposals, carefully avoiding the pitfalls open to those who suggest that anything without a corporeal presence does not exist. He wrestles with the concepts of flesh, spirit, and the nature of God, attempting to make sense of the transformations that must take place in the human body as it prepares for transition from a temporal to a resurrection body. Augustine negotiates a place for the resurrection body in lines of discussion that lead to “the meeting space of our body and the perfect.” 32 The earlier chapters in this volume testify to the ongoing attempts of later authors to negotiate just such a meeting place, by examining the transforming power of bodily fluids, and the enduring importance of corporeality. The ten chapters of this volume make a vital contribution to the study of corporeality and change. They illustrate the ways in which conceptions of the body and its fluids acted as forces that moved individuals as well as societies. They tell stories about the theorization of change in the context of ongoing processes of historical change. As explored in these chapters, such inquiry was able to make use of the body and its fluids as its object, and equally as a model and a metaphor. While the material of the human body sustained and transformed itself according to principles that could be understood and sometimes altered, so too could the larger processes of the world that authors and artists often likened to the body and its members. Like communication through words, the place of individual and social bodies in space, as well as fluids flowing from the flesh, conveyed meaning. This volume interrogates these communications seeking to access the richness and multiplicity of medieval and early modern encounters through fluid bodies.

Author Biographies

Michael David Barbezat is an historian of medieval intellectual, religious, and cultural history, and a research fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Faculty of Theology and Philosophy at Australian Catholic University. His research engages with 31  Barbezat, ­chap. 10.

32  Barbezat, ­chap. 10.

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medieval conceptions of the afterlife and how these conceptions both reflected and helped to shape the ordering, institutions, and experience of the regular world. He is the author of Burning Bodies: Communities, Eschatology, and the Punishment of Heresy in the Middle Ages (Cornell, 2018). Anne M.  Scott is an Honorary Research Fellow in English and Literary Studies at The University of Western Australia. She has published a monograph on Piers Plowman, edited and contributed to six essay collections, and published numerous articles and chapters on late Middle English literature.

Bibliography Akbari, Suzanne, and Jill Ross, eds. The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2013. Bildhauer, Bettina. Medieval Blood. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006. Burger, Glenn. Chaucer’s Queer Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone, 2011. ——​. Metamorphosis and Identity. New York: Zone, 2001. ——​. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–​1336. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. ——​ . Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, and Gail Weiss, eds. Thinking the Limits of the Body. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. Translated by Stephen Voss. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989. Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-​ and Postmodern. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Gertsman, Elina, ed. Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History. New York: Routledge, 2012. Harris, C. R. S. The Heart and the Vascular System in Ancient Greek Medicine from Alcmaeon to Galen. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Hillman, David, and Carlo Mazzio, eds. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. Hirai, Hiro. Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy: Renaissance Debates on Matter, Life, and the Soul. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Horstmanshoff, Manfred, Helen King, and Claus Zittel, eds. Blood, Sweat, and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Hugh of St. Victor. De sacramentis christianae fidei. In Patrologia Latina, vol. 176, cols. 173–​618. Paris: Migne, 1854. ——​. On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith. Translated by Roy J. Deferrari. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1951.

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Kay, Sarah, and Miri Rubin, eds. Framing Medieval Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Lange, Marjorie E. Telling Tears in the English Renaissance. Leiden: Brill, 1996. Nagy, Piroska. Le don des larmes au Moyen Âge: Un instrument spiritual en quête d’institution (Ve–​XIIIe siècle). Paris: Albin Michel, 2000. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. Shackleford, Jole. William Harvey and the Mechanics of the Heart. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Siraisi, Nancy G. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Stock, Brian. Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Turner, Bryan. “Body in Western Society: Social Theory and Its Perspectives.” In Religion and the Body, edited by Sarah Coakley, 15–​41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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Chapter 2

WHERE DID MARGERY KEMPE CRY?

Anthony Bale “What Aylith Thee, Woman?” THE BOOK OF Margery Kempe (1436 x 1438)  is a unique and crucial document for exploring medieval subjectivity. At its heart, it is a text about one person’s sensitive reactions—​Kempe’s “mevynggys,” “steringgys,” “felyngys,” “peynes”—​and as such it offers a hugely valuable account for the historian of emotions.1 In this chapter, thinking about fluidity and embodiment, I turn to Kempe’s tears, one of the most striking and controversial elements of her religious identity. The first modern editor of Kempe’s book, the American medievalist Hope Emily Allen, diagnosed Kempe in the 1930s with what she called “neuroticism” because of her tears. In offering this medical or quasi-​medical diagnosis, Allen set the tone of much twentieth-​century writing on Kempe, in which Kempe was described as suffering “post-​partum psychosis,” as being “quite mad—​an uncurable hysteric with a large paranoid trend,” a depressive woman going through “a manic-​depressive illness,” as a “psychotic,” as suffering from “frontal lobe epilepsy.”2 These assessments—​given by neither qualified medical doctors nor psychiatrists—​ diagnose Kempe’s crying as an illness and an ailment to be explained medically or psychologically, rather than understood spiritually or rhetorically, which is how I approach it here. More recently, Kempe’s tears have received sophisticated analysis, through a variety of approaches. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has identified “becoming liquid,” a dissolving of the self by crying and sobbing, as one of Kempe’s main modes.3 Santha Bhattacharji has placed Kempe in the tradition of “loud and violent” religious weeping practised in later medieval mysticism; Bhattacharji identifies the main stimuli of Kempe’s weeping as the overlapping causes of “penitence for her own sins; penitence for the sins of the world; 1  I am very grateful to the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions for an International Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the University of Melbourne and The University of Western Australia, summer 2015, during which I undertook the work for this chapter. Quotations from The Book of Margery Kempe are taken from The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Staley. Book and line numbers are given parenthetically; where I  am closely analyzing the language, I have provided both Middle English and Modern English texts. Where I am using the text illustratively, I have only provided the Modern English translation, taken from The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. Anthony Bale, with page numbers given parenthetically. 2  See The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. Anthony Bale, xxviii–​xxx. 3  Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, 156.

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and intense compassion for the sufferings of Christ.”4 As Bhattacharji explains, Kempe’s weeping maps closely onto the advice given by the English mystic Walter Hilton, in which “great fits of weeping” and crying “with all the powers of the body” accompanied meditation given by God and compassion for Christ.5 Esther Cohen, in her work on the history of pain, has drawn a sharp distinction between bodily pain and medieval tears; Kempe’s tears, “like stigmatization, … placed her apart from the rest of society, and she had to show her special devotion by openly weeping.” Cohen suggests that mystical tears like Kempe’s “were considered a baptism of the soul, born of contrition or emotional upheaval. Weeping from physical pain emerges only in the context of illness and suffering, not in the context of sanctity.”6 Gary Ebersole has argued strongly against the “universality” of tears and suggested instead, through the anthropology of religion, that “tears—​whether actually shed or withheld, or as they are represented performatively, pictorially, or narratively—​must be understood in terms of the local sociocultural ‘feeling rules,’ moral values, and the aesthetics and politics of aesthetic display.”7 In terms of Kempe, Ebersole argues that the meaning of her tears is always “socially negotiated.” Most recently, Barbara Rosenwein has written a cogent account of Kempe within the history of emotions; Rosenwein charts Kempe’s emotional lexicon and, amongst other things, finds that various words connected with tears appear amongst Kempe’s most “heart-​felt” terms—​that is words connected to the heart, the touchstone of emotion. These terms include “cryin,” “compunccyon,” “mornyn,” “peyne,” “rewful,” “roryngys,” “sadnes,” “terrys,” “tribulacyon,” “wepyn,” “wepyng,” and “wreth.”8 For contemporary audiences outside academia, Kempe’s tears frequently arouse doubt and ire. The microblogging site Twitter contains numerous judgements on the nature and meaning of Kempe’s tears, for instance “Margery Kempe we do not care for your tears. They are not sent by god. Grow up” (@liveserrage93, March 26, 2015), and “Margery Kempe’s autobiography? Ambitious, gift of tears, totally irritating, thoroughly nuts. Love her” (@katharineash, September 23, 2011). Kempe’s tears had, and continue to have, a remarkable capacity to antagonize or confound her audiences and the “problem” of Kempe’s crying continues to haunt her. Kempe’s own account sees several different kinds of physical and mental disturbance alongside crying—​losing one’s wits, headaches, a pain in the stomach—​as positive stimuli to self-​transformation, and such moments are pathways in her book for the forming of an identity and learning to see the truth. However, Kempe’s crying is neither constant nor unmodulated but, as I argue in this chapter, occurs at specific and strategic moments and in specific places; this is a crying that is not only socially performative but also follows and supports certain rhetorical and contextual cues. My approach here is influenced in part by the growing 4  Bhattacharji, “Tears and Screaming,” 229. See too Ross, “ ‘She Wept and Cried.’ ” 5  Bhattacharji, “Tears and Screaming,” 229.

6  Esther Cohen, “The Animated Pain of the Body,” 65–​66.

7  Ebersole, “The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited,” 213. 8  Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 194–​210 at 196–​97.

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literature connecting emotion and place; as Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron, and Liz Bondi have commented, “emotions are a vital ingredient in the very composition of the world as a world, as something more than a concatenation of causes and affects, as those places, people and incidents, that become meaningful, that we care about, fear, disdain, miss, hate, and sometimes, inexplicably, love.”9 To bring these issues into focus let us turn to the English city of Norwich in the fifteenth century, specifically the churchyard of St. Stephen’s parish church. Today, the gravestones are post-​medieval, the medieval church has been demolished, the whole site was badly damaged in the German bombing raids of 1942, and the churchyard is now overwhelmed by shops, ringed by Marks & Spencer and Superdry. But, in Margery Kempe’s day, this churchyard was at the centre of what was the second biggest city in England, probably the wealthiest city in Britain apart from London. The church is situated on Rampant Horse Street, where, in the 1420s, the horse market met: we must imagine a busy, bustling space, a public but also spiritual arena in a cosmopolitan, vibrant, and highly urban environment. One day in the 1420s, Kempe went to this churchyard to see the grave of the recently deceased local vicar, a man called Richard Caister. We know Richard Caister had died on March 29, 1420, so this was probably during the summer of 1420. Caister wrote various religious works, including poetry in English, and seems to have been a noted preacher. When he died, he left all his wealth to the city’s poor, saying that “the goods of the church, according to canon law, belong to the poor.”10 This social action led to him becoming locally regarded as a saint and a cult developed around his church at St. Stephen’s, and there is evidence of local people leaving legacies to the church because of Richard’s sanctity.11 Richard Caister was known personally to Margery Kempe as he had acted as her confessor in Norwich and supported her against her critics. Kempe’s account of the visit to the grave, as recorded in The Book of Margery Kempe, is as follows: Whan sche cam in the chirch yerd of Seynt Stefyn, sche cryed, sche roryd, sche wept, sche fel down to the grownd, so fervently the fyer of lofe brent in hir hert. Sithyn sche ros up agen and went forth wepyng into the chirche to the hy awter, and ther sche fel down with boistows sobbyngys, wepyngys, and lowde cryes besyden the grave of the good vicary. … And in so meche was hir devocyon the mor incresyd that sche sey owr Lord werkyn so special grace for swech a creatur as sche had ben conversawnt wyth in hys lyfetyme. Sche had so holy thowtys and so holy mendys that sche myth not mesuryn hir wepyng ne hir crying. And therfor the pepil had gret merveyl of hir, supposyng that sche had wept for sum fleschly er erdly affeccyon, and seyd unto hir, “What eylith the, woman? Why faryst thus wyth thiself? We knew hym as wel as thu.” (ll. 1.3470–​88)

9  Smith, Davidson, Cameron, and Bondi, “Geography and Emotion,” 2.

10  Discussed in Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 232–​33. 11  Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 232–​33.

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Anthony Bale (When she came to the churchyard of St. Stephen’s, she cried, she roared, she wept, she fell down to the ground, so fervently did the fire of love burn in her heart. After that she got up again and went on, weeping, into the church to the high altar, and, all ravished with spiritual comfort in the goodness of our Lord, there she fell down with violent sobs, weeping, and loud cries beside the grave of the good vicar. … And in this way her devotion was increased, so that she saw our Lord work such special grace for such a creature as she had been conversant with during his lifetime. She had such holy thoughts and such holy memories that she had control over neither her weeping nor her crying. And therefore the people were greatly astonished at her, supposing that she wept out of some physical or earthly affection, and said to her, “What’s wrong with you, woman? Why are you conducting yourself like this? We knew him as well as you did.” (133))

This passage introduces several key points about Kempe’s particular brand of crying. First, we can see that “crying” involves a great number of physical movements and manifestations—​not just tearfulness but also crying out, roaring, and weeping, falling down to the ground, sobbing: it is clear that much medieval crying involved a lot more than modern crying, which tends to be very much focused on the eyes. For Kempe, to burst into tears involved voice, speech, and the entire body, as well as the eyes. The detail included here that Kempe fell down to the ground is important, as this is a moment of prostration which not only implies the presence of God—​Kempe bowing down before Him—​but conforms to a recommended manner of entering a church, that is, prostrate and in tears. Kempe here also reflects a strain of medieval Christian asceticism, charted by Mary Carruthers, in which postures of prostration were valued as they placed great pressure on the lungs and the stomach, in order better to produce tears, to induce gut-​ wrenching crying. People were advised to lie on their stomachs or chest and, as St. Benedict said, the true sign of effective prayer was when one sees “an effusion of tears,” a visible, liquid demonstration of pure compunction.12 We can see from Kempe’s account of her crying at Norwich that this reaction, of “violent sobs, weeping, and loud cries,” is not static but engages with the site, starting in the churchyard and “ascending” through to the high altar of the church. That is, the sobbing accompanies, and enables, a kind of tour of the devotional space as, for Kempe, sobbing is a travelling mode, a way of moving through space and laying claim to this space, a point I will develop below. Second, in this passage, we can see how this is not a self-​destructive or even distressing kind of weeping, but something highly edifying—​the language used is of “spiritual comfort,” “in this way her devotion was increased”—​and far from crying being a sign of damage to oneself, as we might think of it today, it was a way of building a self. Third, this kind of crying is authorizing and citational, and we can see this in the use of the words “the fire of love” to describe the feeling Kempe felt in her heart—​this is a reference to other mystical writers, not least Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240), who used the phrase several times in his biography of the thirteenth-​century holy weeper Marie 12  See Carruthers, “On Affliction and Reading,” 9.

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d’Oignies (d. 1213).13 The phrase was further popularized by the English mystic Richard Rolle, whose treatise, The Fire of Love or Incendium Amoris was one of the most important Middle English mystical texts and was certainly known to Kempe. So, as elsewhere in Kempe’s Book, the moment of crying is richly allusive and intertextual; it is not so much a personal crying but rather a crying which calls to mind other mystical and religious authorities. We might also note here that the heat of the fire of love is appropriate because tears were a sign of heat and moisture. The final point to make about this passage is that Kempe’s crying, like much medieval crying, is noteworthy within the narrative because it is social; it is certainly not a moment of private withdrawal, but rather a profoundly public performance, and the fact that she chose to do it at this church in the city centre of Norwich is significant, as in many medieval texts, crying only means something when other people see it. The crux of this incident at Norwich is in the people around her and their question—​“supposing that she wept out of some physical or earthly affection”—​“What’s wrong with you, woman?” or, in Middle English, “what eylith thee, woman?” To them, Kempe’s crying is a sham, a performance, a ridiculously overblown reaction, and, crucially, a kind of malady. The socially generated question of the bystander to crying—​“What eylith thee, woman?”—​ and the interpretative gap between Kempe’s own crying and the view of those around her should not be read as a sign of Kempe’s hypocrisy or her failure to engage people; rather, we might see it as symptomatic of a larger medieval and modern issue, which is the lack of a coherent understanding of what crying is. These tensions, over whether crying is an emotional or a physiological state, whether tears are produced by emotions or the humors, whether people can make themselves cry, and what the connection is between crying and spirituality can be traced back certainly over the last two thousand years.14 These were issues about which people in the Middle Ages were profoundly concerned, but about which there was very little consensus, as shown in the mixed reaction Kempe’s crying received at Norwich. Kempe’s account of her tears forces us to reassess the modern platitude that crying is irrational, that crying represents a loss of reasons or wits—​precisely the misunderstanding that is at play in the description of her audience’s response that day in Norwich. Often but not always, both in The Book of Margery Kempe as in other medieval texts, crying is highly logical, rewarding, and deeply strategic. In this chapter, and via this extended preamble, I am attempting to move beyond two positions; first, the diagnosis of Kempe as “mad.” Medieval crying is not connected to hysteria and the gendered associations of that word (hysteria from the Latin and Greek 13  See King, Two Lives of Marie d’Oignies, 58–​64.

14  For an overview, see Lutz, Crying, 72–​85. The most comprehensive study of medieval religious culture and “the gift of tears,” Nagy’s Le don des larmes, argues strongly for a physiological approach, that crying is best understood as a bodily function. Nagy rejects “psychological” explanations of tears. Nagy’s approach yields useful analyses of Christian thought up to the thirteenth century, but it seems to me at odds with the evidence furnished by mystical texts, in which crying can reflect an “internal” thought process. See too Nagy, “Religious Weeping as Ritual.”

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word for the womb). Medieval kings, medieval bishops, medieval warriors all cry in ritualized and highly aestheticized ways;15 Margery Kempe did not simply cry because she was either a woman or, to use an anachronistic term, a lunatic. Second, I suggest that we should consider The Book of Margery Kempe not as a record of Kempe’s emotions but as a cultural document of the performance of emotions; this may sound like a specious difference, but we cannot retrieve “how Kempe really felt”; we can, rather, retrieve the rhetorical and performative gestures she used to convey a sense of feeling and which structure the Book’s account of feeling.

For Crying Out Loud

In medieval culture, crying and weeping could mean many different things. We tend to read crying today as a stricken emotional response to sadness, grief, or pain, but this is a modern understanding of crying as an outpouring of emotional distress. When a character like Margery Kempe says she is crying, it is not entirely clear what the main content of this crying is: sobbing, shrieking, weeping, roaring, and convulsions may or may not come under Kempe’s category of “crying.” In medieval England, tears could be understood much as we talk about them today, as appearing in the eyes because of a strong emotion, “bitter tears,” tears of sadness or distress. Tears could also be caused by entirely physical stimuli: Bartolomaeus Anglicus in his encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum named two common causes of crying as “smellinge of scharpenesse of oynouns & garlek” (the pungent smell of onions and garlic) and “Smooke (which) grevyþ yȝen and makeþ hem droppe out teeres” (smoke which pains the eyes and causes them to emit tears). Clearly, people in the Middle Ages knew that crying could be an anatomical or physiological phenomenon, rather than what we might now call an emotional one. But we also quite often find the surprising phrase “blodi tears,” as in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde “The blody teris from his herte melte, | As he that nevere yet swich hevynesse | Assayed hadde” (the bloody tears were melting from his heart as one who had never tasted such an anguish.)16 The connection between tears and blood is not as strange as it might at first sound, because Hippocratic medical theory held that tears were humors from the brain and so, like any bodily humor, an excess of them needed to be purged by the body, just as blood had to be let. Tears were thought of as warm and moist (hence the fire of love that kindled them for Margery) and as such they were closest to blood, the warm and wet humor. Tears were contrary to hard, cold, or dry states, a notion retained today in the idiom of a “heart of stone” belonging to someone who is not moved to tears. St. Gregory of Nyssa, the early Christian theologian, described tears as being “like blood in the wounds of soul:”17 tears were full of life, they could heal, they had vitality, and they were evidence of good, pious feeling. Indeed, as Laura Kalas Williams has recently 15  See, for example, Harvey, “Episcopal Emotions.”

16  Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1445–​47 (Benson, ed., 533). 17  Cited in Carruthers, “On Affliction and Reading,” 7.

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argued, Kempe’s tears were “pseudo-​stigmatic,” drawing a parallel between blood and tears, as “Kempe’s tears symbolize the wounding that she experiences at Calvary.”18 As Mary Carruthers has forcefully stated in her stimulating essay on medieval tears, “[in medieval ascetic and mystical writing] tears are not necessarily expressions of sadness, nor indeed of any particular emotion. … Tears can accompany any number of different emotional states, including joy—​hence the monk can look happy yet inwardly groan, or weep and be inwardly joyful. Tears are produced by the deliberate exercise of compunction, which calls upon different emotions, from fear to grief to joy.”19 Carruthers’s argument is useful, although in the evidence from later medieval England, tears are more often than not associated with lamentation or grief. One of the valuable things Carruthers’s work does, which is developed in Suzannah Biernoff’s work on medieval optics and tears, is to show that tears were thought of as a key part of moral understanding, as the state of crying distilled a moment of correct understanding and perfect compunction, compunction being the deep and authentic moment at which an idea or an emotion was imprinted on the receptive intellect or soul.20 This element of tears as a constructive part of composition and a sign of authentic selfhood lies behind the character Pandarus’s advice to Troilus in Troilus & Criseyde to “biblotte” (blot) a love letter with his tears, as a sign of emotion (albeit a contrived one), advice that Troilus is then seen taking up, sealing the letter with his ruby signet bathed with tears. A “real-​life” version of this can be seen, in the 1450s, of a correspondent saying in a letter that he had bathed his letter in tears. Writing on May 5, 1450, the Norfolk gentryman William Lomnor wrote to John Paston: “I … am right sory of that I  shalle sey, and haue soo wesshe this litel bille with sorwfulle terys that on-​ethes ye shulle reede it (i.e. you shall hardly be able to read it).”21 Lomnor was in fact writing to report the execution of the Duke of Suffolk three days previously. Do we read his tears shed over his letter as a figure of speech, or as a contrivance designed to show the sincerity and depth of his inner feelings? Lomnor’s letter is quite legible, and so the reader seems to be being asked to imagine him weeping as he writes, in order better to connect his emotional and affective states during the act of composition. This leads us back to the problem of tears: their sincerity is constantly doubted. For the devout weeper, however, tears often represent an outpouring of moral or pious understanding as bestowed by the mercy and favour of God. Medieval tears might thus be presented as a sign of rationality—​of good devotion or inspiration and its sincere liquid distillation—​rather than a sign of boundless or limitless emotion or of affective, pre-​cognitive reaction. Yet idioms in Middle English include people crying for pity, for joy, for “mischaunce” (that is bad luck), in rage, in pain. The hermeneutic possibilities of 18  Williams, “ ‘Slayn for Goddys lofe,’ ” 92.

19  Carruthers, “On Affliction and Reading,” 8.

20  Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages, 117–​19; see too McEntire, The Doctrine of Compunction.

21  “From William Lomnor,” Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, part 2, ed. Davis, 35 (#450).

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tears and crying are reflected in the fact that they are very rarely represented as signs of disembodied or abstracted “emotion” but rather signs of intersubjective or physical interaction. People cry because of how they have engaged with something, something physical, something visual, or someone else. In a fascinating extended section of her book in which she attempts to explain and interpret her crying, Margery Kempe describes how “she had such great compassion and such great pain to see our Lord’s pain that she could not keep herself from crying and roaring, though she could have died from it” (64). Clearly, Kempe’s crying is intersubjective (between her and Christ) and empathic (a shared feeling of pain), and it is caused by a combination of “compassion”—​literally, a suffering with, cum passionem—​and pain, a mixture of “mental” and “physical” stimuli to tears. Kempe goes on to explain how her crying was profoundly influenced by things she saw around her: whan sche saw the crucyfyx, er yf sche sey a man had a wownde er a best … er yyf a man bett a childe befor hir er smet an hors er another best wyth a whippe, yyf sche myth sen it er heryn it, hir thowt sche saw owyr Lord be betyn er wowndyd lyk as sche saw in the man er in the best, as wel in the feld as in the town, and be hirselfe alone as wel as among the pepyl. (ll. 1.1586–​90)

(when she saw the crucifix, or if she saw a person or a beast … who was wounded, or if a man beat a child in front of her, or struck a horse or another beast with a whip, if she could see it or hear it, in her thought she saw our Lord being beaten or wounded, just as she saw it in the man or the beast, either in the fields or in town, and alone by herself as well as amongst people. (65))

The role of sensory perception in making Kempe cry is very clear here: seeing or hearing is the stimulus. But we might also note the absence of sympathy for the victim: Kempe does not cry out of emotional grief for the victim of violence, but because violence stimulates thoughts of Christ, and this is profoundly resonant for her not of an empathic reaction but in order to enter into the biblical narrative. This crying, the Book explains, “come nevyr wythowtyn passyng gret swetnesse of devocyon and hey contemplacyon” (never came without unsurpassed sweetness of devotion and high contemplation) (65), demonstrating its valuable seriousness and intellectual usefulness.

“Why Weepest Thou?” Jerusalem is the zenith of Kempe’s weeping: not only because it is where she starts her uncontrollable crying via divine communication, but because it is at this point in the book where Kempe’s scribe or amanuensis, who wrote down The Book of Margery Kempe, felt it was necessary to include this excursus on the meaning of her excessive tears. This is the context in which Kempe’s crying was transformed from a sign of distress and wretchedness into a proper contemplative crying received from God. Kempe explains how it was at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where she “first cried in contemplation,” that is, rather than crying because of a physical affliction, this is where she cried through divine communication. Kempe and her pilgrims were led, as was standard

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at the time, around the Church by Franciscan friars; they “led the pilgrims around from one place to another where our Lord had suffered His pains and His Passion, every man and woman bearing a wax candle in their hand” (64). This appears to be a solemn, quasi-​ liturgical procession which emphasized the pilgrims’ shared emotional and pious community, but, as elsewhere in her book, Kempe’s emotional performance marks her out from the polity amongst which she has placed herself. Kempe describes how, at the Holy Sepulchre, she started to weep and sobbed “so plentifully as though she had seen our Lord with her physical eye, suffering His Passion at this time. Before her, in her soul, she saw Him truly by contemplation, and caused her to have compassion” (64). This kind of crying then is connected to the eyes, but as the mediators of the mental, imaginative, and intellectual exercise of returning to the Bible and feeling compassion. Kempe’s crying reaches a crescendo as the pilgrims approach Calvary: “When they came up on to the Mount of Calvary, she fell down because she could not stand or kneel, but rather writhed and wrestled with her body, spreading out her arms widely, and crying with a loud voice as though her heart should burst apart, for in the city of her soul she saw truly and freshly how our Lord was crucified. Before her face she heard and saw in her spiritual sight the mourning of our Lady, of St John, and Mary Magdalene, and of many other who had loved our Lord” (64). Again, her crying is a profoundly physical mode but one that facilitates a vivid intellectual movement. At this point in The Book of Margery Kempe the narrative moves away from describing Kempe’s crying in Jerusalem and gives a detailed excursus on, and defence of, Kempe’s crying. This is one of the points in the Book where the scribe or amanuensis steps back from the details of Kempe’s life and considers instead the construction of her reputation, moving from biography to apologia. Here, the Book describes how: as soon as she perceived that she was going to cry, she would hold it in as far as she could, so that the people should not hear it, to keep from annoying them. Because some people said that it was a wicked spirit that vexed her; some said it was a sickness; some said she had drunk too much wine; some cursed her; some wished that she were thrown in the harbour; some wished she were put out to sea in a bottomless boat; and so on, each person as he or she thought. Others—​spiritual people—​loved her and esteemed her all the more. Some important clerics said that neither our Lady nor any saint in Heaven cried so, but they knew very little about what she felt, nor would they believe that she could not desist from crying if she wanted. (65)

This is a very important passage for Kempe, and connects to the account of her crying at Norwich. It shows the difficulties for her in establishing the authority of her emotional behaviour; at the same time, the failure of the people around her to discern the holiness of the spirit that moves her authorizes her as a visionary, a maverick, and an outsider, with an unusual gift. Kempe undertook her tour of the Holy Land as a member of a standard Franciscan group tour, in which the pilgrims were led from one site/​sight to another; each place was a “biblical” locus, connected with the lives and deaths of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints. This was very much a journey of tears, and there are abundant records of pilgrims not only crying their way around Jerusalem but being directed where to cry. The vistas of

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the city at Mount Joy (Nabi Samwil) and the Mount of Olives (at the church of Dominus flevit, where Jesus is said to have wept over Jerusalem) became especially well known for ritualistic displays of crying, weeping, and mourning over Jerusalem; as Burchard of Mount Sion wrote of Jerusalem in his widely read Description of the Holy Land, “O God, how many devout tears have been shed at this place by those who have there beheld the joy of the whole earth, the city of the great King!”22 Moreover, this was a tour of sites around a history of tears—​in and around medieval Jerusalem numerous “new” pilgrimage sites were developed which valorized crying. These included a stone on the Mount of Olives at the Church of the Ascension, later a mosque, which had been bathed in the apostles’ tears; a shrine at the Jacobite church of Mary Magdalene on Mount Zion commemorating the spot where the Magdalen had fallen at the feet of Jesus, wetting them with her tears; the church of St. Peter of the Cock Crow, St. Peter in Gallicantu, which was also known as St. Peter’s Tears—​St Peter ad lacrimas—​where Peter was found weeping by the women coming from the Resurrection; the church of Dominus flevit on the Mount of Olives, where Christ was said to have wept over Jerusalem; a place on the via dolorosa where the women of Jerusalem wept over Christ; a place called the Vale of Tears near Hebron, where Adam was said to have lamented for the murder of Abel; and four stone columns inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre always dripping water, known as “the stones which wept for Our Lord’s Death.” Kempe herself describes how her group of pilgrims spent the night in vigil in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, each pilgrim holding a wax candle, and “as they went around, at all times the friars told them what our Lord suffered in every place” (66). This was a place of ritualized, public weeping, in which crying was neither individualized nor secret, but publicly sanctioned, encouraged, and spatially contingent in that there were specific places which celebrated and encouraged crying. The description of Jerusalem in The Book of Margery Kempe is essentially a tour of weeping through some key holy sites, especially at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. She lists the places where her “cryings” took place, and we might read such moments as the key spaces in which Kempe most keenly felt that piercing compunction which causes the outflow of tears. It was at Calvary that Kempe’s crying was felt most keenly, where “sche fel down that sche mygth not stondyn ne knelyn but walwyd and wrestyd wyth hir body, spredyng hir armys abrode, and cryed wyth a lowde voys as thow hir hert schulde a brostyn asundyr” (l. 1.1573–​74) (she fell down because she could not stand or kneel, but rather writhed and wrestled with her body, spreading out her arms widely, and crying with a loud voice as though her heart should burst apart (66)). However, it seems that prior to this Kempe’s crying had been building to a crescendo as she toured the building (see ­figure  1); first, “Whan this creatur wyth hir felawshep cam to the grave wher owyr Lord was beriid” (l. 1.1646) (when this creature with her companions came to the grave where our Lord was buried), that is the holy sepulchre itself, “sche fel down wyth hir candel in hir hand as sche schuld 22  Burchard of Mount Zion, Description of the Holy Places, 64.

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a deyd for sorwe. And sythen sche ros up ageyn wyth gret wepyng and sobbyng as thow sche had seyn owyr Lord beriid even befor hir” (ll. 1.1648–​49) (she fell down with her candle in her hand, as if she should die of sorrow. And after that she got up again with great weeping and sobbing, as though she had seen our Lord buried right in front of her (67)). Then she visited the Franciscan Chapel of the Nailing to the Cross, “Ther cryed sche and wept wythowtyn mesur that sche myth not restreyn hirself” (there she cried and wept without measure, for she could not restrain herself). At the “ston of marbyl that owyr Lord was leyd on whan he was takyn down of the cros … sche wept wyth gret compassyon, havyng mend of owyr Lordys Passyon” (“the marble stone that our Lord was laid on when He was taken down off the Cross … she wept with great compassion, remembering our Lord’s Passion”); this was at the Stone of Unction or Slab of Anointing, near the Church’s entrance. Further crying attended Kempe receiving communion at Calvary where “sche wept, sche sobbyd, sche cryed so lowde that it wondyr was to heryn it” (l. 1658) (“she wept, she sobbed, she cried out so loudly that it was a marvel to hear it” (67)). She then mentions that she received communion in four places within the Church, each time “with plentiful tears, and with noisy sobbing:” at Calvary, at the Holy Sepulchre, at the Slab, and at St. Helena’s Chapel “where the Holy Cross was buried” (68). The last places she describes in the Church are “the chapel where our blessed Lord appeared to His blissful mother before all others on Easter Day” (70)—​that is, the Franciscan Chapel of the Apparition—​and finally, the Chapel of Mary Magdalene. Kempe’s route around the building is similar though not identical to those of other later medieval Latin visitors. For instance, Mandeville’s widely read Book of Marvels and Travels lists the order of a visit as first the sepulcher itself, then Calvary, then the pillar on which Christ was scourged, then the Chapel of St. Helena where the Cross was buried, the place where the nails of the Passion were buried, and then the place where Joseph of Arimathea laid Christ’s body.23 As we would expect, Kempe largely avoided Greek, Armenian, and non-​Latin sites that were not shared with the Franciscans, and the majority of the Chapels she visited were Franciscan (the Latin Calvary, the Chapel of the Nailing, the Chapel of the Apparition, and the Chapel of the Magdalene). It is especially telling that her journey around Jerusalem ends at the Franciscan Chapel of Mary Magdalene within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Chapel of Mary Magdalene was (and is) a Franciscan space, adjacent to the Franciscan monastery which serves the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Franciscan order of course had pious weeping as a fundamental image, through the life of its founder St. Francis of Assisi who was described as being blinded not by old age but by the profusion of his holy tears.24 Kempe is described thus: “sche stode in the same place ther Mary Mawdelyn stode whan Crist seyd to hir, ‘Mary, why wepyst thu?’ ” (she stood in 23  Mandeville, The Book of Marvels and Travels, 39–​43. 24  See Apostolos-​Cappadona, “ ‘Pray with Tears,’ ” 206.

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Figure 1. Places in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where Margery Kempe cried. A: The Holy Sepulchre

B: The Chapel of the Nailing to the Cross C: The Slab of Unction D: Calvary

E: T  he Chapel of the Discovery of the Holy Cross F: The Chapel of the Apparition

G: The Chapel of Mary Magdalene

the same place where Mary Magdalene first stood when Christ said to her, “Mary, why weepest thou?” (John 20:15)). Kempe creates a tableau in which she styles herself as Mary Magdalene;25 she directly refers to the gospel of John and explicitly invites comparison with the culturally resonant image of Mary Magdalene’s crying. This too, as presented in the gospel account, is a moment of correct and incorrect perceptions and discernments—​ the Magdalene must learn to see and weep correctly, and it is a point at which her own tears are subject to scrutiny. But most importantly this moment shows us quite clearly how what at first appears to be Kempe’s highly individual and disruptive emotional performance is citational, intertextual, and allusive. By styling herself as Mary Magdalene, Kempe boldly and strategically authorizes not only her weeping, but her own heightened perception of her pilgrimage and her own special closeness, like Mary Magdalene, to Christ. Upon leaving Jerusalem, Kempe describes crying at a further set of places, all of which were established Franciscan way-​stations: “the place where the apostles 25  See further Craymer, “Margery Kempe’s Imitation of Mary Magdalene.”

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received the Holy Ghost”;26 “the place where our Lady was buried”;27 “she rode by ass to Bethlehem, and when she came to the temple and to the crib where our Lord was born, she had great devotion, much speech, and conversation in her soul, and high spiritual comfort with much weeping and sobbing, so that her fellow pilgrims would not let her eat in their company. And therefore she ate her food alone by herself” (68); Kempe also visited Mount Quarantine, Ein Kerem, Bethany, with “weeping, sobbing, and crying” (69).

Conclusion

Throughout her Book, Kempe deploys crying at strategic moments of self-​ authorization. Yet we can go beyond such a judgement of Kempe’s emotional landscape and instead place it within a historical geography of emotions, in which emotional responses take place within and are engendered by specific spatial environments. With this in mind, I  conclude this chapter with a remarkable moment of Kempe’s crying, this time somewhere in the city of Rome, which she visited after she had been in Jerusalem: An other tyme, ryth as sche cam be a powr womanys hows, the powr woman clepyd hir into hir hows and dede hir sytten be hir lytyl fyer, gevyng hir wyn to drynke in a cuppe of ston. And sche had a lytel manchylde sowkyng on hir brest, the which sowkyd o while on the moderys brest; an other while it ran to this creatur, the modyr syttyng ful of sorwe and sadnes. Than this creatur brast al into wepyng, as thei sche had seyn owr Lady and hir sone in tyme of hys Passyon, and had so many of holy thowtys that sche myth nevyr tellyn the halvendel, but evyr sat and wept plentyuowsly a long tyme that the powr woman, havyng compassyon of hir wepyng, preyd hir to sesyn, not knowyng why sche wept. Than owr Lord Jhesu Crist seyd to the creatur, “Thys place is holy.” (ll. 1.2195–​204)

(Just as she went past a poor woman’s house, the poor woman called her inside and had her sit down by the little fire, giving her wine to drink from a stone cup. And she had a little baby boy sucking on her breast for some of the time; at other times it ran to this creature (i.e. Kempe), as the mother sat full of sorrow and sadness. Then this creature burst into tears, as though she had seen our Lady and her son at the time of His Passion, and she had so many holy thoughts that she could never tell the half of them, but always sat and wept plenteously for a long time, so that the poor woman, having compassion for her weeping, pleaded with her to stop, not knowing why she wept. Then our Lord Jesus Christ said to the creature, “This place is holy.” (86))

26  The Cenacle or “Upper Room” on Mount Zion, just outside the city walls of Jerusalem.

27  The Franciscan Church of the Tomb of the Virgin, in the Kidron Valley, to the east of the Old City.

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Kempe is manipulating a number of representations here, including the family’s picturesque poverty recalling the Holy Family, the miserable Roman woman recalling the mater dolorosa; Kempe’s reaction is to weep not for them but because of the mental work they stimulate and facilitate for her. Weeping comes from engaging with the biblical story, not from empathy. The reaction of Kempe’s Christ is remarkable here: “This place is holy.” One way of reading this moment is that Kempe’s weeping has sacralized the ground, has in fact consecrated it with her liquid tears. Tears are, in Kempe, representative of the pain of feeling God fully and properly, but they seem very often to take on this territorial aspect. Kempe’s performances of emotion have a social and spatial politics which allow her to lay claim to particular resonant spaces and yet also step outside, or disregard, the immediate contingences of these spaces. We are rarely told of Kempe crying alone, and her crying takes place at symbolically charged locations. In this way, Kempe’s crying provides a spatial index to her journey, as her Book stages a mental movement through emotionally charged loci in a way reminiscent of medieval memory theories, according to which the best way to remember something was through the creation of a chain, or journey, of violent, strong emotions. Tears provide the reader of The Book of Margery Kempe with a logical but emotional “map for remembering,” showing Kempe’s own affective via crucis and her proper compunction received from God. Abstract This chapter considers the status of tears and crying in the fifteenth-​century Book of Margery Kempe. Crying is one of the most distinctive, and controversial, expressions of Kempe’s religiosity, and reflects a larger late medieval culture of religious tearfulness. This chapter explores several key moments of crying in The Book of Margery Kempe in their local, spatial, and literary contexts, focusing especially on Kempe’s tears in Norwich, Jerusalem, and Rome. Kempe’s crying in Jerusalem, in particular, allows us to see how tearfulness is spatially resonant and was part of an emotional geography, contingent on learnt reactions to specific places. Author Biography Anthony Bale is Professor of Medieval Studies and Executive Dean in the School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London. He has published a translation of The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford, 2015) and is now working on pilgrimage and emotion in the Middle Ages.

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Bibliography

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Apostolos-​Cappadona, Diane. “ ‘Pray with Tears and Your Request Will Find a Hearing’: On the Iconology of the Magdalene’s Tears.” In Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination, edited by Kimberley Christine Patton and John Stratton Hawley, 201–​ 28. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Bhattacharji, Santha. “Tears and Screaming: Weeping in the Spirituality of Margery Kempe.” In Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination, edited by Kimberley Christine Patton and John Stratton Hawley, 229–​42. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Biernoff, Suzannah. Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Burchard of Mount Zion. Description of the Holy Places. Edited and translated by Aubrey Stewart. Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society 12. London: Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1897. Carruthers, Mary. “On Affliction and Reading, Weeping and Argument: Chaucer’s Lachrymose Troilus in Context.” Representations 93 (2006): 1–​21. Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde. In The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson, 471–​585. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Cohen, Esther. “The Animated Pain of the Body.” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 36–​68. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Medieval Identity Machines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Craymer, Suzanne L.  “Margery Kempe’s Imitation of Mary Magdalene and the ‘Digby Plays.’ ” Mystics Quarterly 19 (1993): 173–​81. Ebersole, Gary. “The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited: Affective Expression and Moral Discourse.” History of Religions 39 (2000): 211–​46. Harvey, Katherine. “Episcopal Emotions: Tears in the Life of the Medieval Bishop.” Historical Research 87 (2014): 591–​610. Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. Edited by Lynn Staley. Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1996. http://​d.lib.rochester.edu/​teams/​publication/​staley-​the-​book-​of​margery-​kempe. ——​. The Book of Margery Kempe. Translated by Anthony Bale. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. King, Margot H., ed. and trans. Two Lives of Marie d’Oignies. 4th ed. Toronto: Peregrina, 1998. Lomnor, William. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, Part  2. Edited by Norman Davis. rev. ed. EETS supplementary series 21. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Lutz, Tom. Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears. New York: Norton, 1999. Mandeville, John. The Book of Marvels and Travels. Edited and translated by Anthony Bale. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. McEntire, Sandra J.  The Doctrine of Compunction in Medieval England: Holy Tears. Lewiston: Mellen, 1990.

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Nagy, Piroska. Le don des larmes au Moyen Âge: Un instrument en quête d’institution (Ve–​ XIIIe siècle). Paris: Albin Michael, 2000. ——​. “Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 48 (2004): 119–​37. Rosenwein, Barbara. Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–​1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Ross, Ellen. “ ‘She Wept and Cried Right Loud for Sorrow and for Pain’: Suffering, the Spiritual Journey, and Women’s Experience in Late Medieval Mysticism.” In Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics, edited by Ulrike Wiethaus, 45–​59. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Smith, Mick, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron, and Liz Bondi. “Geography and Emotion—​ Emerging Constellations.” In Emotion, Place and Culture, edited by Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron, and Liz Bondi, 1–​20. London: Routledge, 2009. Tanner, Norman. The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370–​1532. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984. Williams, Laura Kalas. “ ‘Slayn for Goddys lofe’: Margery Kempe’s Melancholia and the Bleeding of Tears.” Medieval Feminist Forum 52 (2016): 84–​100.

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Chapter 3

ELUSIVE TEARS: LAMENTATION AND IMPASSIVITY IN FIFTEENTH-​CENTURY PASSION ICONOGRAPHY

Hugh Hudson TEARS ARE AMONG the most visible, and yet elusive, aspects of the body’s mutability. When tears come, they are impossible to ignore, but, of course, they can be extremely fugitive—​fleeting and leaving scarcely any physical trace. Religious paintings and sculptures depicting tears, and the lamentation that prompts them, constitute a large body of conspicuous and enduring sources of information about crying in the early modern period, while secular representations are much rarer. Yet, when examining this evidence, it is readily apparent that individual images, and even parts of images, can be interpreted differently depending on the cultural context in which they are considered. Historically, in some contexts, the sincerity and even sanctity of tears were honoured, while in others, their potential for disruption and perceived lack of faith were censured. This chapter will investigate the complex relationship between early modern images and experiences of lamentation and crying, by analyzing examples of an iconographic genre in which these commonly occur: the Passion of Christ. The literature on tears in early modern religious images and in the experiences of their viewers has flourished in recent decades. Notably, the 2012 book Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History included three chapters on thirteenth-​, fourteenth-​, and fifteenth-​ century depictions of lamentation in religious paintings and mosaics from northern and southern Europe.1 This chapter aims to complement these studies by drawing attention to an analogous, but significantly different kind of image to those already investigated. A Lamentation of Christ (henceforth referred to as “Lamentation” for brevity) attributed to the fifteenth-​century Italian sculptor Bartolomeo Bellano (­figure 2, National Gallery 1  This chapter originated as a paper delivered on February 15, 2013 at the Australia and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Conference, at Monash University, Melbourne: “Serenity in Mourning: The Lamentation Attributed to Bartolomeo Bellano in the National Gallery of Victoria and Early Modern Sculpture in Australian Public Collections.” I am grateful to Dr. Ted Gott, Senior Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, for providing photographs of the Gallery’s Lamentation attributed to Bellano, and for sharing the Gallery’s research into the work. I also thank Professor Candida Syndikus, Graduate Institute of Art History, National Taiwan Normal University, for inviting me to present a version of this paper on June 22, 2016, as part of her course on Italian Renaissance sculpture, and for her valuable comments. For an historical survey of crying as an aspect of Christian devotion in the West, from as early as the third century, but with a focus on the Counter-​Reformation movement of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Imorde, “Tasting God.”

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Figure 2. Attributed to Bartolomeo Bellano, Lamentation of Christ, ca. 1476–​1497, stone, plaster, pigments, and gold leaf (?), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, presented by Tomas Harris Esq. (1276–​D4). Credit: National Gallery of Victoria.

of Victoria, Melbourne)2 and a number of similar works of sculpture and painting show conspicuously impassive male devotional figures in Passion scenes. These call for further discussion of crying in, and in response to, early modern images, with reference to such contemporary influences as devotional practices, sumptuary laws, and decorum. In the first of the three chapters just mentioned from Crying in the Middle Ages, Henry Maguire noted that Byzantine church writers commended expressions of grief, but in moderation, because conspicuous displays were said to show a lack of decorum and to imply a lack of faith. According to Maguire, this was reflected in Byzantine art until the end of the twelfth century, in which expressions of emotion were usually muted, with a few specific exceptions, such as images of penitents. From the thirteenth century, however, emotionally expressive figures became more common, notably in Passion scenes. This was said to reflect changing attitudes of church writers, who began to advocate a more personal, emotional, and participatory engagement with the liturgy and Passion 2  Attributed to Bartolomeo Bellano, Lamentation of Christ, ca. 1476–​1497, stone, plaster, pigments, and gold leaf (?), 91.5 x 95.0 x 18.8 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, inv. no. 1276–​D4.

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ceremonies in this period.3 Judith Steinhoff’s chapter on fourteenth-​century Tuscan representations of women in Passion iconography concurred that there was a more positive approach to crying and expressions of grief in religious thought from the thirteenth century. However, she observed that some fourteenth-​century artists depicted female saints expressing grief much more openly than the female donor figures in the same Passion scenes. This difference was interpreted as reflecting contemporary legal limitations placed on women’s mourning in Tuscan society.4 Felix Thürlemann’s chapter was dedicated to Rogier van der Weyden’s ca. 1430 altarpiece Descent from the Cross (Museo del Prado, Madrid). He interpreted the figure of Nicodemus in tears as a portrait of the donor, and suggested it functioned as a model of devotional practice for the painting’s viewers.5 Steinhoff and Thürlemann’s different approaches to explaining the appearance of donor portraits in Passion scenes may appear to be at odds. Whereas the donor figures cited by Steinhoff were said to model restraint in the expression of emotion, the donor figure cited by Thürlemann was said to model its free expression. This difference could conceivably be put down to the issues of gender (female in Steinhoff’s case and male in Thürlemann’s) or period (the fourteenth century in Steinhoff’s case, and the fifteenth in Thürlemann’s). However, this discussion will draw attention to a related category of images, which suggests that a more nuanced interpretation is needed to account for the general phenomenon of the relationship between gender and the modelling of lamentation and crying in early modern images of the Passion. Comprising fifteenth-​century sculptures and paintings from north and south of the Alps, this different category of images features more or less impassive male devotional figures—​whether or not they can be conclusively identified as donor portraits—​in Passion scenes where other figures express sorrow openly. The Lamentation relief is an exemplar of this, inasmuch as it encompasses in its tightly arranged composition two strongly contrasting emotional states: the grief of the Virgin and Saints Mary Magdalene and John, surrounding Christ’s body, and the serene worship of its male praying figure. Despite being nestled intimately between Christ’s legs, the man stares straight ahead with a blank expression. He is, thus, closely connected physically to the highly charged emotion of the Passion scene, yet remains psychologically remote. One might also say that he is physiologically unresponsive as well, since he does not exhibit marked facial expressions or appear to cry. To account for this representation, two arguments will be made. First, important influences on early modern behaviour, such as church doctrine, sumptuary law, and conduct texts, implicitly or explicitly included men when advocating restrained expressions of emotion in devotion and mourning. Texts of the affective devotion movement advocated emotionally engaged meditation on the Passion by all Christians, male and female, but with an emphasis on the quiet, inwardly focused experience of these feelings. While Steinhoff argued persuasively that restrictions on expressions of grief and mourning in 3  Maguire, “Women Mourners in Byzantine Art,” 6–​7. 4  Steinhoff, “Weeping Women.”

5  Thürlemann, “The Paradoxical Rhetoric of Tears.”

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fourteenth-​century Tuscany disproportionately affected women, some restrictions on displays of tears and crying aloud at funerals, as she described them, implicitly applied to men as well. Sumptuary law from elsewhere in northern Italy supports the idea that men were implicitly included in restrictions on mourning rituals. Indeed, it has been shown that in one commune, discussed below, while such laws emphasised restrictions on women’s behaviour, it was men who were much more frequently prosecuted for excessive mourning. Further, late medieval Italian conduct texts explicitly advised men to restrain expressions of devotion in church, and even occasionally acknowledged the tension or contradiction experienced between ardent religious feeling and quiet devotion. These factors may help account for the impassivity of the male devotional figures in the group of fifteenth-​century artworks addressed here. Second, it will be argued that figures in Passion scenes cannot be neatly divided into two categories of devotional paragons, either saintly biblical figures on the one hand, or devout contemporary individuals on the other. Rather, a range of sometimes multivalent exemplary figure types can be identified. Their variety defies systematic categorization, but includes biblical figures, contemporary individuals in the guise of biblical figures, patron saints, and contemporary individuals appearing as themselves. Thus, the difference between Steinhoff’s and Thürlemann’s interpretations can be reconciled by reference to the different degrees of historical “embeddedness” of the donor portraiture they identified. The point will also be made that the tension or contradiction between the poles of biblical and contemporary models of devotion is analogous to the tension between artifice and naturalism in these images, and in the low relief sculpture medium in particular. The first task of this chapter, then, is to describe in detail one such low relief sculpture, little studied to date, in this context.

A Case of Male Impassivity in an Image of Lamentation

The Lamentation low relief sculpture in the National Gallery of Victoria shows a half-​ length figure of Christ, slightly smaller than life-​size. While his body appears to hang limply, his hands rest in such a way that their stigmata are visible. On his head is the crown of thorns, and across his lap is a cloth. He is supported on the left by a female saint with a halo. She must be the Virgin Mary, given her close proximity to Christ and the great sorrow visible in her furrowed brow and open mouth. Another supporting female saint on the right can be identified as Mary Magdalene by her long, flowing hair, and the elaborate lacing on the front of her dress. Her forehead, too, is puckered in an expression of grief. The head of a male saint, probably John the Evangelist, following medieval accounts of the Passion,6 is in the upper right part of the relief. His mouth is open, and eyebrows arched, in an expression of sorrow. 6  The Gospel of John 19:25–​27 records that the Virgin and a disciple were present at the Crucifixion, and that the Virgin was given into the care of the disciple. Thomas à Kempis’s Meditations on the Life of Christ identified that disciple as the Apostle John (À Kempis, Meditations on the Life of Christ, 170–​71).

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The torso of a man in prayer occupies the bottom left of the relief. He stands out from the other figures in a number of ways. First, he does not have a halo, unlike the other four figures, and so he is not likely to be a saint. Second, being much lower than the others, he appears to be kneeling in prayer, where the others are upright. Third, his hair seems much more carefully styled and his costume more distinctive than is the case for the others. Combed close to the scalp, except for a wave around the edges, his hairstyle is similar to that of Ludovico Maria Sforza in the painted altarpiece Virgin and Child with Saints and Ludovico Sforza, Beatrice d’Este-​Sforza, and Their Children, of 1494–​1495 (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan). In the relief, the man’s cloak has three buttons on the right shoulder, an uncommon feature of male attire in Italian Renaissance art. However, the position of the buttons is paralleled in the painting Portrait of Giovanni Emo attributed to Giovanni Bellini, which is housed in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Emo was a Venetian patrician who held many important offices, including as a senator, ambassador, and military leader.7 Not just the position on the right shoulder, but also the form of the buttons in the painting and sculpture is similar, rising to a small knob in the centre. Cesare Vecellio’s 1590 account of the costumes of Venetian officials records that ambassadors and consuls wore cloaks fastened at the left shoulder with gold buttons, while the cloaks of generals were fastened at the right. His illustration of a general’s costume has a row of round buttons, each rising to a small knob in the centre, on the right shoulder, similar to the arrangement in the Lamentation (­figure 3).8 This correspondence is not sufficient to conclude that the man represented in the Lamentation was a general, but his costume does suggest that he was probably an elite male. Fourth, and perhaps most enigmatically, the man’s face is unmarked by emotion, unlike the Virgin and Saints Mary Magdalene and John. When a figure of modern appearance kneels in prayer in an early modern religious image, it is often identified as a portrait of the patron or donor who commissioned the work. Steinhoff, for example, in her analysis of Giottino’s painting The Lamentation over Christ (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), identified two kneeling women in modern dress (one lay and one religious) as donors.9 Sometimes such identifications can clearly be made, for example, when the figure is accompanied by their family coat of arms, a widely recognized symbol of patronage or ownership. An example is Albrecht Dürer’s Lamentation of Christ of ca. 1500, now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. It shows Albrecht Glimm and his first wife, Margreth (née Holzhausen), identifiable by the coats of arms on shields beside them. They are also distinguished from the biblical figures by

7  Attributed to Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of Giovanni Emo, ca. 1475–​1480, oil on panel transferred to canvas mounted on panel, 48.9 x 34.6 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington. On the portrait, including a detailed discussion of its costume, see Anne Markham Schulz, “A Portrait of Giovanni Emo in the National Gallery of Art.”

8  Cesare Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo libri due (Venice: Damian Zenaro, 1590), chaps. 84 and 102 (unpaginated). 9  In her chapter in Crying in the Middle Ages: “Weeping Women,” 35–​52.

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Figure 3. Cristoforo Guerra (printmaker), after Cesare Vecellio (designer), Generale di Venetia (Venetian General), woodblock print, from De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diversi parti del mondo libri due (Venice: Damian Zenaro, 1590), ­figure 102b. Credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Estampes et photographie, 4-​OB-​12.

their much smaller scale, and by being shown kneeling in prayer.10 However, in the case of the Lamentation relief, there is no unambiguous visual or documentary evidence of its patronage. Thus, it is safer to refer to the praying man as a “devotional figure” than a “donor portrait.” This might seem like quibbling. However, the point will be made below that the uncertain or hybrid (both historical and contemporary) identity of figures in religious images contributes to the tensions or contradictions in the way they model devotional behaviour. To a present-​day viewer, the way the devotional figure presses up so closely against Christ’s lap might seem overly familiar or indecorous. In the context of church writings, however, it can be explained as a representation of contemporary models of affective devotion. The widely read, early fifteenth-​century German-​Netherlandish church writer 10  On the difficulty of distinguishing between donor figures and representations of individuals in other roles, such as the recipients of gifts, see Smith, “On the Donor of Jan van Eyck’s Rolin Madonna.” On the difficulty of distinguishing between portraits and generic “heads” in fourteenth-​ century sculpture and other media, see Wright, “The Reinvention of the Portrait Likeness in the Fourteenth Century.”

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Thomas à Kempis, for example, composed “Prayers to the Several Parts of Christ’s Body” in which the devotee is prompted to imagine covering Christ’s dead body with kisses, from feet to head.11 Another curious feature of the relief is that, despite the physical intimacy of the figures, none of their gazes meet. The devotional figure stares straight ahead, Saint Mary Magdalene’s gaze is cast down in his direction, but seems to pass over the top of his head, Saint John’s eyes roll back slightly in a swoon, looking out to the viewer’s upper right, and the Virgin’s eyes are level with Christ’s cheekbone. Christ’s eyes are open and the iris visible in his left eye. His “gaze,” if it can be described as such, is directed down, past the Virgin’s face, in the direction of the top of the devotional figure’s head. It might be thought that he is in some sense “watching over” the devotional figure. The canonical gospels are in agreement that Christ died on the cross (Matthew 27:50; Mark 15:37; Luke 23:46; and John 19:30). Nevertheless, early modern images of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, displaying the wounds from his crucifixion, did sometimes depict him with eyes open, as though alive.12 In a frequently cited article on donor portraits in early Netherlandish devotional paintings, Craig Harbison rightly identified religious visionaries as models of devotion for patrons. Celebrated accounts of religious visions, such as that of Emperor Augustus and the Tibertine Sibyl, provide a conceptual framework for understanding the representation of patrons and religious figures in paintings: the images show the donors’ ardent meditation as though they were experiencing visions. Thus, patrons’ gazes and gestures, directed away from the figures around them, would represent their meditative experiences.13 However, Harbison did not explore the issues of gender or embedded portraiture in the depiction of donors, or address the role of patrons as models for the paintings’ viewers. Neither did he account for the instances in which the gazes of biblical figures and saints in paintings do not meet. Disengagement of figures from the scenes in which they appear is not restricted to the donors’ vision-​like experiences, but was probably intended to model meditation on emotional experience more generally. The issue of vision is important for understanding sculpture as well as painting. The rendering of eyes was considered an important aspect of the sculptor’s art by Bellano’s contemporary, the Neapolitan humanist Pomponius Gauricus. He devoted considerable attention to the subject in his treatise on bronze sculpture, De sculptura, published in Florence in 1504. The section on eyes begins with the longstanding view that they are like windows to the soul, before going on to provide a very elaborate list of the features 11  À Kempis, Prayers and Meditations on the Life of Christ, 189–​93. On physical intimacy in fifteenth-​ and sixteenth-​century northern European Passion scenes in painting as a key aspect of affective devotion, with particular reference to donor portraits as models of devotion, see Pulichene, “To Touch the Divine.” 12  Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, 2: figs. 471–​75.

13  Harbison, “Visions and Meditations in Early Flemish Painting.”

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of eyes, which are said to reveal various character traits.14 Gauricus’s views are certainly important for the early history of physiognomy in art treatises,15 but their often imprecise, contradictory, or seemingly arbitrary interpretation of signs of character provide little useful insight into the iconography of the Lamentation. For example, Gauricus wrote at one point that eyes that do not move when open signify either meditation or remorse. In light of this, the seemingly undirected gaze of the devotional figure in the Lamentation could be interpreted as a sign of meditation or remorse. However, elsewhere, Gauricus described fixed eyes as “never a good sign” because if “humid,” they indicate a fearful temperament, if dry, foolishness, if pale, nonsense, and if large and red, debauchery.16 Nevertheless, Gauricus’s obvious belief in the importance of eyes may usefully draw attention to the issue of vision for the Lamentation’s meaning. If the devotional figure models the viewer’s behaviour, the fact that he does not look at, or outwardly engage with, the biblical figures might be interpreted as an example for the viewer to internalize the vision of the Passion scene as a subject of meditation. Long identified as stone,17 the sculpture’s principal medium is a grey, fine-​grained stone, possibly pietra serena (Tuscan grey sandstone). The front surface of the relief has received an off-​white coating, seemingly of gesso. Its original whitish colour is visible in particular where it has dripped over the edges of the haloes onto the reverse. On the recto, this coating appears to contain gritty materials and fibrous-​looking impurities in places, perhaps to mask faults in the stone.18 A different application of the off-​white layer, with fewer impurities and so with a smoother appearance, is present in the faces. The fact that the surface of the stone was prepared with gesso suggests that it was intended to receive a layer of colouring, and at least some of the present colouring is likely to be original. Most of the flesh tones of the faces are beige, with a darker red-​brown in some shadows. In the costumes, the colouring ranges through tones of pale brown in the highlights to charcoal in the shadows. Less subtle areas of red-​brown patina appear on the right side of Christ’s torso and over Mary Magdalene’s hair and costume. Since a similar red-​brown colouring extends over the losses in the broken part of the frieze at bottom right, it seems that at least some of the red-​brown colouring is a later addition, perhaps intended to render the losses less visually disturbing. Christ’s and Saint John’s haloes also have tiny traces of a yellowish colour on the surface, possibly vestiges of gold leaf. However, the extent to which the present colouring over the surface of the relief is original is difficult to determine with certainty with the naked eye. 14  Gauricus, De sculptura, 136–​47.

15  Moshe Barasch observed that “Pomponius Gauricus seems to have been the only artist to include a chapter on physiognomy in an art theoretical treatise written earlier than the middle of the sixteenth century.” Barasch, “Character and Physiognomy,” 427. 16  Gauricus, De sculptura, 140–​41.

17  Philipp, “A Relief Attributed to Bartolomeo Bellano,” 4.

18  For reference to the use of a coating of gesso containing earth or ground-​up pottery to join pieces of Italian Renaissance terracotta sculpture after firing, see Boucher, “Italian Renaissance Terracotta,” 8.

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The Lamentation’s Authorship and the Origins of Its Composition The attribution of the Lamentation has implications for the discussion of the cultural context in which it was produced. The earliest publication of the Lamentation addressing its attribution is Franz Philipp’s short notice in the Quarterly Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria, shortly after the sculpture was donated to the Gallery in 1952. Its provenance before that was, and still is, unknown.19 Philipp recorded that the attribution was due to the opinions of Sir Leigh Ashton and Sir John Pope-​Hennessy, for whom the work was “very probably by Bellano.”20 Pope-​Hennessy has been regarded as one of the most distinguished English-​speaking authorities on Italian Renaissance sculpture. He worked in the Department of Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London after the Second World War, at the time Ashton was Director. Nevertheless, Philipp did not agree with their opinion. When comparing the relief in Melbourne with Bellano’s Lamentation in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Philipp observed that the Melbourne relief is weaker in execution. He suggested that the Melbourne relief was by an anonymous hand from an unidentified Paduan or north Italian studio. Yet, in his article, Philipp only compared the Melbourne relief with one work of Bellano’s, and one which is much more substantial, and has recently been described as having “a fair claim to be Bellano’s masterpiece.”21 The Melbourne Lamentation was not included in Volker Krahn’s 1988 monograph on Bellano.22 However, this more likely indicates Krahn’s ignorance of the work than his rejection of its attribution to Bellano, since he did discuss works he thought to be by imitators of Bellano. Thus, the attribution of the Melbourne Lamentation to Bellano deserves reconsideration. Archival evidence for Bellano’s life and work is not extensive. He was most likely born in Padua after 1435, and he died there around 1496–​1497, but his activity was not confined to that city.23 He is documented as a collaborator with, or assistant to, Donatello in Florence in 1456, in connection with the celebrated Judith and Holofernes bronze sculpture (Palazzo Vecchio, Florence). Stylistic evidence suggests Bellano probably also assisted Donatello with other works in Florence and with the large commission for the sculptures on and around the high altar of the Basilica of Sant’Antonio in Padua. Bellano’s documented independent works include the marble reliefs and bronze sculptures made in 1469–​1472 for the Armadio delle reliquie in the sacristy of the same 19  The sculpture was donated to the National Gallery of Victoria by Tomás Harris in 1952. On Harris, see Deacon, The British Connection, 174, 78, 80, 82–​83; and West, Historical Dictionary of Cold War Counterintelligence, 146. 20  Philipp, “A Relief Attributed to Bartolomeo Bellano,” 4–​5. 21  Cooper and Leino, “Introduction,” 37. 22  Krahn, Bartolomeo Bellano.

23  The bibliography on Bellano is not extensive, but see Kitchens, “The Small Bronzes and Reliefs of Bartolomeo Bellano,” Krahn, “Bartolomeo Bellano,” and Krahn, Bartolomeo Bellano. For a recent discussion of Bellano’s career, focusing on his working relationship with Donatello, see Kim, The Travelling Artist in the Italian Renaissance, 103–​7.

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Basilica. His 1479 testament mentions an imminent trip to Constantinople, where, if he did indeed go, he might have worked alongside Gentile Bellini at the court of Sultan Mehmet II.24 Bellano is also believed to have worked in Rome and Perugia.25 Two sculptures are carved with Bellano’s name, although they are not universally accepted as genuine signatures.26 On stylistic grounds, a handful of marble, limestone, pietra serena, terracotta, and bronze sculptures in north Italian churches and museums around the world have also been attributed to him. In this author’s opinion, the Melbourne Lamentation is similar in style to works attributed to Bellano, even if it is less elaborate and less forcefully modelled than most. The drapery has less depth, fewer folds, and forms less rhythmic patterns than is usual in Bellano’s works. Similarly, the modelling in the faces is generally less robust than is usually the case in Bellano’s work, although, Christ’s emaciated head, with a flat ridge along the bridge of the nose, and a crown of thorns comprised of two, thick interwoven strands, does resemble the features of a bronze Bust of Christ that has been attributed to Bellano.27 The carving of Christ’s and Saint Mary Magdalene’s hair in strongly defined, wavy “rivulets” is similar to the style of the hair in Bellano’s London Lamentation. The somewhat rustic overall quality of the Melbourne Lamentation is characteristic of the level of finish that Bellano often achieved. Further, the “cut-​out” low relief sculpture in stone—​without a solid background around the figures—​is a format Bellano used.28 On balance, the attribution of the Melbourne Lamentation to Bellano seems reasonable.

24  For an argument in favour of Bellano having gone to Constantinople, see Cevizli, “Bellini, Bronze and Bombards.”

25  Bellano’s posthumous reputation suffered from the caustic assessment of Pomponius Gauricus, who labelled Bellano an “ineptus artifex” (inept craftsman) in his treatise, published just a few years after Bellano’s death. However, the modern editors of Gauricus have observed a strong preference in his treatise for artists of his own generation, belonging to the same Humanist movement in Padua around 1500, with its dedication to Classical revival. The greater naturalism of the previous generations of sculptors, including Donatello and Bellano, seemingly did not stand comparison for Gauricus (De sculptura, 202–​3 and 46–​47). Nevertheless, Bellano’s reputation has since been rehabilitated, and he is now regarded as one of the leading Paduan sculptors of the late fifteenth century.

26  The two sculptures with inscriptions naming Bellano (as the author) are: Virgin and Child with an Angel and Saint John in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Virgin and Child with Two Angels, Musée Jacquemart-​André, Paris. 27  A seemingly previously unpublished bronze Bust of Christ was sold at Finearte Semenzato in Venice on November 6, 2005 (sale number 1313, lot number 138) with an attribution to Bellano. At the time of writing, the work is illustrated online (“Opere venete in asta a novembre 2005,” www. veneziacinquecento.it/​Notizie/​Archivio/​2005novembre/​news293.htm).

28  This “cut-​out” format was not uncommon in fifteenth-​century Italy. Notably, it was used by Donatello in the bronze Lamentation in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and by Bellano in the terracotta Virgin and Child with Two Angels in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to name just two examples.

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At the time of writing, the relief is catalogued and exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria as attributed to Bellano.29 In any case, the design of the Lamentation was in all likelihood not all the sculptor’s own work. It has not been noted in the literature30 that the composition of the relief is closely related to Carlo Crivelli’s Lamentation painting now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (­figure 4).31 This painting is believed, on stylistic and compositional grounds, to have come from the top of an altarpiece made by Crivelli for the high altar of the Church of San Domenico at Ascoli Piceno, in the Marches. The remainder of the altarpiece from which it came, sometimes called the Demidoff Altarpiece after a former owner, is now housed in the National Gallery, London. The central panel in London carries Crivelli’s signature and the date 1476.32 The arrangement of the figures in the Lamentation painting and the Lamentation relief is virtually identical, except most noticeably for the absence of a devotional figure in the painting, a less emotional Saint John in the relief, and the fact that the Virgin and Saints Mary Magdalene and John are all crying in the painting, but none are visibly crying in the relief. It is true that tears in sculpture are uncommon, perhaps because the medium does not lend itself easily to such subtleties. Still, in Marian Bleeke’s chapter in Crying in the Middle Ages, she observed that a twelfth-​century Eve sculpture, from a lintel previously in the Church of Saint Lazare in Autun (now housed in the Musée Rolin in the same city), appears to have a tear in the corner of Eve’s eye.33 Another example is Veit Stoss’s early sixteenth-​ century, carved pearwood Mourning Virgin in the Cleveland Museum of Art, which has tears running down the Virgin’s face. Perhaps the most celebrated example of sculpted tears in Western art occurs in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s seventeenth-​century Rape of Proserpina (Galleria Borghese, Rome). Liliana Leopardi has argued that Crivelli was inspired by Donatello’s sculpture in Padua,34 and so, by extension, it seems possible Crivelli might also have been inspired by a work of Donatello’s collaborator or assistant, Bellano. However, the New York painting 29  At the time of writing, the Lamentation is catalogued on the National Gallery of Victoria’s website as: “Lamentation of Christ (late 15th century) Bartolommeo BELLANO (attributed to)” (National Gallery of Victoria, “Lamentation of Christ,” www.ngv.vic.gov.au/​explore/​collection/​work/​3322/​). 30  Dr.  Tedd Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), reported that unpublished research by staff of the Gallery showed that they were also aware of the connection between the compositions of the Melbourne Lamentation and New York Lamentation: “The motif, best known from the Pietà of 1476 by Carlo Crivelli, now in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, was clearly a very popular one in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Since 2009, when we last investigated the NGV work, some interesting cognate sculptural works have come to our notice which clearly attest to the interest in the subject among sculptors and patrons in eastern Italy around Padua, Modena and Ascoli Picena” (personal communication, February 18, 2016). 31  Carlo Crivelli, Lamentation of Christ, ca. 1476, tempera and gold leaf on panel, 71.1 x 63.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 32  On Crivelli’s altarpiece, see Lightbown, Carlo Crivelli, 217–​25. 33  Bleeke, “The Eve Fragment,” 16.

34  Leopardi, Aesthetic Hybrids, 68–​69.

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Figure 4. Carlo Crivelli, Lamentation of Christ, ca. 1476, tempera and gold leaf on panel, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access for Scholarly Content.

is datable to 1476, whereas the hairstyle of the donor in the relief was current in the 1490s. Furthermore, the slightly awkward way the donor has been squeezed into the space of Christ’s lap tends to favour the hypothesis that the composition recorded in the painting was adapted for the sculpture.35 That said, the painting in New York may not have been the direct or only model. Crivelli created a number of similar versions of the subject (these works are now variously named “Lamentation,” “Entombment,” or “Pietà”). The frieze decorated with a palmette border along the bottom of the Melbourne relief is not found in the New  York painting, but similar friezes are present in two of Crivelli’s Lamentation paintings now in Detroit and Boston. In these works, the friezes 35  A celebrated example of a fifteenth-​century sculpture based on a painting is the reliquary commissioned by Charles the Bold between 1467 and 1471 for Saint Lambert’s Cathedral in Liège (now housed in the treasury of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in the same city). It is based in large part on the appearance of the donor and his patron saint in Jan van Eyck’s painting Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele of 1436 (Musée Groeninge, Bruges). In the sculpture, Charles the Bold takes the Canon’s place in the painting. See Van der Velden, The Donor’s Image, passim, but especially 81–​153.

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appear to represent the top of the sarcophagus into which Christ’s body is lowered.36 However, neither painting has a palmette pattern identical to the one in the Melbourne Lamentation, suggesting that the Melbourne relief may have been based on a lost version of the composition, or incorporates aspects of a number of Crivelli’s designs, as well as modifications by the sculptor. Bearing the above relationships in mind, the Melbourne Lamentation can be dated approximately towards the end of Bellano’s career, around the 1480s or early 1490s. Given the popularity of such Lamentation of Christ images in northern Italy in the fifteenth century, known in diverse media and countless variations of composition, there is no question of tracing them all to a celebrated original version. Nevertheless, a key cognate image is Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan (­figure 5). It shows a simpler version of the composition, with Christ flanked only by the Virgin and Saint John. Dated by scholars on stylistic grounds to the late 1460s or early 1470s, it is apparently earlier than the version by Crivelli in New York, and so could be a precedent for it.37 Bellini’s painting has attracted considerable attention from art historians, for the inscription painted on its fictive cartellino: “HAEC FERE QVVM GEMITVS TURGENTIA LVMINA PROMANT BELLINI POTERAT FLERE IOANNIS OPVS” (translatable as “Since these swelling eyes almost elicit sighs, Giovanni Bellini’s work might be able to shed tears”).38 However one translates and interprets the inscription—​and there have been many attempts—​it clearly speaks to Bellini’s artistic skill, which is demonstrated by the viewer’s emotional response to it. Significantly, while it alludes to the elicitation of the viewer’s embodied emotions, there is a clear implication of only bringing the viewer to the point of expressing them. Thus, the viewer’s experience remains largely internal, and, of course, the reciprocal effect on the painting (“might be able to shed tears”) remains rhetorical. Such an abstract invocation of tears in the context of devotion, early in the chronology of images discussed here, suggests that the culture in which the Melbourne Lamentation was created could be as concerned with the idea of tears, as much as the presence or absence of the bodily fluid itself.

Lamentation, Impassivity, and Gender in a Range of Passion Images

Although the original function of the Melbourne Lamentation relief is unknown, the fact that it does not have a solid background around the figures suggests it was not part of a larger structure, such as an altarpiece, tabernacle of the sacrament, or tomb, but was intended to stand alone against a wall, perhaps above a door, but conceivably in almost any context. The inability to ascribe an origin to the Melbourne Lamentation more

36  Lightbown, Carlo Crivelli, 124. The two paintings are the Lamentation of Christ (or Entombment) in the Institute of Arts, Detroit, and The Dead Christ with the Virgin, and Saints John and Mary Magdalene (or Pietà) in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

37  Bernard Berenson saw a connection between the figure of Christ in Crivelli’s painting in New York and Bellini’s “calm and noble” representations of Christ (Berenson, Venetian Painting in America, 23). 38  Olszaniec, “The Latin Inscription in Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà.”

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Figure 5. Giovanni Bellini, Pietà, late 1460s or early 1470s, tempera on panel, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Credit: Bridgeman Images, London.

specific than “attributed to Bellano,” and therefore coming from northern Italy, might pose a problem for interpreting its iconography in a specific social or religious context. However, its kind of emotionally distant and physiologically unresponsive male devotional figure is not an isolated case. It is found in sculpture and painting, in examples from north and south of the Alps. A more extreme example is found in Bellano’s Lamentation in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Appearing at the upper left are the tonsured head and shoulders of a man turning his back on the lamentation scene. The expression on his face is sober, not anguished. Unlike every other figure in the relief, his mouth is closed. Pope-​Hennessy suggested the figure might represent an ecclesiastical patron, a view that is still favoured, even if the work’s original provenance remains unclear.39 In Italian painting, a conspicuously impassive devotional figure is found in the Entombment in the lunette of the Annunciation of ca. 1455, housed in the Pinacoteca, Camerino. It is attributed to the Master of the Annunciation of Spermento, variously identified as Girolamo di Giovanni 39  Cooper and Leino, “Introduction,” 37.

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or Giovanni Angelo d’Antonio.40 It shows the head of a man without a halo, his hands held together in prayer, positioned close up against Christ’s waist. Nevertheless, the man’s head is turned away from Christ, while almost every other figure looks towards him. A Netherlandish example in painting is the Lamentation by Rogier van der Weyden and his workshop, datable to the mid-​to-​late fifteenth century, and now in the Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen in The Hague.41 Here, an unidentified prelate—​apparently not a saint since he does not have a halo, as other figures do—​kneels with hands joined in prayer. He stares into the space ahead of him, while Christ’s body lies directly below his line of sight. Similarly, in the Lamentation from the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, now housed in the National Gallery, London, a devotional figure is accompanied anachronously by Saint Jerome (born in the fourth century), probably the patron saint of the devotional figure, whose name may have been Hieronymus, Jérome, or Girolamo.42 Yet, even as Saint Jerome connects the presumed patron with the scene, by resting one hand on the man’s back and placing his other hand under Christ’s head, still, the presumed patron stares out into space, unresponsive—​outwardly at least—​to what is right in front of him. Different again is the Crucifixion triptych (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), attributed entirely to Van der Weyden himself, which shows unidentified male and female devotional figures at the foot of the cross. As Dirk de Vos observed, “The man gazes up at the cross, while the woman turns away slightly, experiencing the scene in a more prayerful and meditative way.”43 Another case of gender differentiation in devotional figures is Petrus Christus’s mid-​ fifteenth-​century Lamentation painting in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-​Arts, Brussels. Maximiliaan Martens has proposed that the figures on the right of the painting can be identified as the patrons, who for him are probably the Bruges patricians Anselmus Adornes and his wife, Margaretha vander Banck.44 Leaving aside the woodenness of all the figures’ expressions and postures, which is a characteristic of Christus’s painting style, they all exhibit a certain disconnectedness from the scene in which they are present, looking away from the body of Christ before them. Nevertheless, the presumed patron and his wife are the most disengaged figures in the painting, standing back and looking away with subdued gestures. As in van der Weyden’s Crucifixion triptych, the woman is more disengaged from the Passion scene than the man. She turns away from the figure of Christ, and away from the viewer. Remarkably, she even raises her robe to her nose, a gesture familiar from fifteenth-​century Netherlandish paintings of the Raising of Lazarus, in which onlookers shield themselves from the stench of the body’s decomposition.45 These last two images do support the idea that devotional or donor 40  Edited by De Marchi and López, Il Quattrocento a Camerino, 197. 41  On this work, see De Vos, Rogier van der Weyden, 403–​4.

42  On this work, see De Vos, Rogier van der Weyden, 370–​71. 43  See De Vos, Rogier van der Weyden, 234.

44  Martens, “New Information on Petrus Christus’s Biography,” especially at 12–​23.

45  Comparable gestures are seen, for example, in the late fifteenth-​century Raising of Lazarus by Aert van den Bossche, in the inside right wing of the Miracles of Christ triptych in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

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figures in art are affected by gender, in the way they are depicted, and thus how they might act as models of devotion, with men more outwardly involved in Passion scenes than women, even if both males and females are less involved than the (more clearly) biblical figures.

Historical Sources for Understanding Images of Lamentation and Impassivity

There are many historical sources that could help account for the restrained devotional or donor figures in these Passion scenes. Following Maguire’s example, one might look to the influence of church writings. One of the most important developments in popular devotional practices in the early modern period was the affective devotion movement. Its supporters advocated emotionally involved contemplation of Christ’s life and Passion, so that these became a vivid part of the spiritual life of the faithful. The movement was well established across Europe by the fifteenth century. Indeed, Stephen J. Shoemaker traces its origins to a much earlier period: According to a prevailing view in the study of medieval spirituality in the Latin West, the late eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed a revolution in Christian piety when a new style of devotion, often named “affective piety” or “affective spirituality”, abruptly burst onto the scene. Very much at the centre of this innovative spirituality stood the Virgin Mary, whose unique witness to the events of the Passion emerged as one of the primary vehicles for “affective devotion.” Nevertheless, it is now apparent that the  tradition of Mary’s compassionate sorrows at the foot of the cross first emerged in its mature medieval form in the earliest Life of the Virgin, a seventh-​ century Greek ­composition  ascribed to Maximus the Confessor that survives only in Old Georgian.46

Thomas à Kempis’s fifteenth-​century The Imitation of Christ, advocates, in part, affective devotion for Christians. It enjoyed an extremely wide readership, male and female.47 It certainly acknowledges the place of tears in prayer and devotion, for example, saying: “It is better to call upon the saints in devout prayers and tears and with a humble mind to ask them for help than it is to nag them with silly questions.”48 Nevertheless, at another point, it suggests there is a time and place for crying: “Right now your work is fruitful, your tears acceptable, your sighs heard, your sorrow satisfies and cleanses your soul.”49 Elsewhere, it indicates that it is quiet tears that are spiritually efficacious: “Only in silence and peace does a devout soul find floods of tears in which it may wash and cleanse itself each night.”50 46  Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross, East and West,” 570. 47  Steinmetz, “Devotio Moderna,” 114.

48  À Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 125. 49  À Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 28. 50  À Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 22.

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The extent to which affective devotion led to the shedding of actual tears, silent or otherwise, is moot. Perhaps the best known fifteenth-​century account of crying in front of a religious image is in the Ricordi of the Florentine merchant Giovanni Morelli. He described his lamentations at home, before a panel (perhaps a painting or relief) of the Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John. His devotions combined his vision of the Virgin’s grief over the death of her son, with his own grief for the loss of his son, as well as his guilt over his failings as a father. Morelli recounted how he cried before the image, and even kissed it, as his son had done before him. The passage has been interpreted by historians as evidence of affective devotional practice at the time,51 and, alternatively, as part of a calculated representation, with the intention of persuading readers of the Ricordi—​Giovanni’s surviving sons in particular—​of the author’s virtue.52 Following Steinhoff’s example, one might also look at sumptuary law in early modern Italy for insight into the circumstances in which expressions of grief in mourning were deemed acceptable. These laws paid significant attention to funerals, proscribing extravagant rituals, accessories, and behaviour, with a view to maintaining social harmony.53 As Steinhoff described them, the fourteenth-​century Siena statutes placed disproportionate emphasis on limiting female mourning, but implicitly included men in places. To quote Steinhoff: “No one was to express sorrow with tears or cry in a loud voice outside the house or wherever the corpse lay before the sounding of the death bell, or at night.”54 In his discussion of the late fourteenth-​ century Paduan statutes, Antonio Bonardi noted that at a funeral, handkerchiefs were only to be given to members of the deceased’s household and to their mother, sister, or daughter (memorably, Andrea Mantegna depicted the use of a handkerchief in mourning, when he painted the Virgin crying into one in his celebrated Lamentation now housed in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan).55 It would be reasonable to deduce from these arrangements that there was an expectation that females would participate in mourning rituals more than males, that males who had had a daily relationship with the deceased might participate prominently, but that overall there was a limit to the amount of mourning that was to be sanctioned. However, Carol Lansing has shown that in thirteenth-​ and fourteenth-​century Orvieto, while laws concerning mourning were written with an emphasis on restricting women’s behaviour, prosecutions were overwhelmingly of men. Lansing argued that the emphasis on women in the wording of the laws was rhetorical, making an example of women, while the application of the laws was an expression of the male prosecutors’ belief that it was male sobriety that was important for ensuring civic order. As Lansing

51  For example, see Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art, 157–​58. 52  Roush, Speaking Spirits, 150–​53.

53  Kovesi-​Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–​1500, especially 71–​76. 54  Steinhoff, “Weeping Women,” 48.

55  Bonardi, Il lusso di altri tempi in Padova, 11.

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noted, the high proportion of elite males among those prosecuted shows, ironically, that the laws were routinely broken by the same kind of people who had created them.56 Recent studies have also drawn attention to how issues of decorum in early modern Italy, as described in a variety of conduct texts, influenced the visual arts. For example, Laura Jacobus has discussed correspondences between Francesco da Barberino’s views on proper deportment in his early fourteenth-​century text I documenti d’amore and Giotto’s depiction of well-​and ill-​mannered biblical figures in his mural paintings in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.57 Notwithstanding the fact that I documenti d’amore dates to more than a century before the impassive devotional figures discussed here, it is potentially still pertinent that the text advises men when in church to keep their eyes from settling on vain matters, not to speak too much, and to keep their voice lowered when praying.58 Jennifer Fisk Rondeau included laude in her analysis of medieval conduct texts, noting that the statutes of the confraternities in which laude were sung explicitly regulated their members’ behaviour, devotional practices in particular. She analyzed the construction of subjectivity in these texts, noting examples where the wording of laude presents contradictory readings. One example of a lyric quoted by her is telling for the present discussion. Expressing the inadequacy of words to praise God, it reads: “I remain as silent /​ in outward aspect /​ as I cry aloud within /​ what my lord is like.” For Rondeau, this singing about “silent” devotion illustrates the unstable relationship between such texts and their meanings.59 Here, it also illustrates the tension or contradiction between the appropriateness of ardent religious feeling and the inappropriateness of its embodied expression. While the artworks and sources discussed above provide a small sample of the models of crying, devotion, and mourning available in early modern images and texts, they do point to divergent attitudes. In particular, they suggest how viewers of Passion scenes in art might well have experienced a sense of tension or contradiction, seeing different models of behaviour in a single image. The tears of the saints were commendable as a visible demonstration of devotion to Christ, while the dry eyes of contemporary figures were commendable as signs of humility and decorum. The issue was particularly complex, because the identities of figures in images were not always clearly defined, nor did they necessarily fall neatly into one category. Steinhoff 56  Lansing, Passion and Order, in many places, but especially 2, 7, and 61–​72. In his review of this book, McClure (“Carol Lansing. Passion and Order,) claimed that Lansing had not proved her argument that the prosecutions were intended to curb excessive displays of “feminine” emotion considered to undermine civic order, preferring the conventional explanation that they were meant to curb expressions of factional solidarity. Theoretically, however, there could be overlap between these motivations, if one accepts that factional loyalty arose in part out of emotional impulses, rather than purely rational strategy. 57  Jacobus, “Piety and Propriety in the Arena Chapel,” 183. For references to the issue of decorum in fifteenth-​century northern Italian sculpture, see Carson, “The Quintessential Christian Tomb.” 58  Da Barberino, Documenti d’amore, 33. 59  Rondeau, “Conducting Gender,” 196.

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may be correct that the kneeling women in Giottino’s Lamentation are representations of the donors, but they are not unequivocally identified as such, by means such as coats of arms or inscriptions.60 Even if Thürlemann is correct to identify the figure of Nicodemus in Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross as containing a portrait of the donor—​and it has been disputed—​it would represent an ambiguous or hybrid model of devotion.61 Thus, viewers had to recognise the presence of portraits, as well as their level of embeddedness. It is probably true that early viewers of these Passion images would have known more about the circumstances in which they were made and who they represent than is known today. However, they would still have faced complex, multi-​layered images enmeshing distant and local places, historical and recent time, and biblical and later personages. These images had then to be interpreted through the prisms of righteousness and decorum, informed by a range of overlapping influences, including church writings, sumptuary laws, and conduct texts, to serve as models of devotional behaviour. From the present-​day perspective, early modern tears of devotion become even more elusive considering the potential gap between reality and rhetoric in the sources relied on as evidence.

Conclusion

In searching for evidence of the fluidity of bodies in the early modern period, a stone sculpture might seem an unlikely place to look. Yet, the example of the Melbourne Lamentation demonstrates the complex and subtle interplay between the issues of representation and embodiment involved. It provides the viewer with a particularly liminal experience of an early modern image of lamentation, one that destabilizes the viewer’s embodied and mental encounter with its representation of exemplary bodies. Low relief sculpture partially simulates lifelike, physical bodies in space, without being able to deny its own artifice. On one hand, sculpture responds to ambient light much more than painting and other essentially two-​dimensional artworks. This makes the viewer’s experience potentially more immersive and involving. A candle held by a devotee before a “cut-​out” low relief sculpture will throw shadows behind the carved figures as it would for real people. On the other hand, the illusion of depth is lost as soon as the viewer moves in front of the relief. The limited realism of a low relief sculpture, far from being a disadvantage, may encourage the viewer to pass from a physical encounter to a metaphysical one. The impassive devotional figure in the Lamentation, despite his remarkable physical intimacy with Christ, models the internalization of the Passion through 60  Strehlke (“Giovanni da Milano,” 712) has affirmed that neither the patronage nor date of the painting had been determined.

61  There is no documentation for the work’s patronage. The crossbows depicted in the upper corners of the painting and its provenance from the Chapel of Our Lady without the Walls in Louvain are usually interpreted as indicating that it was commissioned by or for the Great Archers’ Guild of Louvain, which had the patronage of the Chapel. See De Vos, Rogier van der Weyden, 10–​41 and 185–​87, where the suggestion that the figure of Nicodemus includes a portrait of the donor is disputed.

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prayerful mediation, rather than fixing his gaze on the outward appearance of the figures around him. This is in accord with the advice in The Imitation of Christ, elaborating on Ecclesiastes 1:8: “ ‘The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor is the ear filled with hearing.’ Make every effort, then, to shift your affection from the things that you can see to the things you cannot see.”62 The Lamentation seems also to encourage the viewer to take more than a literal view through the abstraction of its subject: the relief is coloured, but in a schematic rather than a naturalistic way, Christ is shown crucified but not entirely dead, the Saints grieve without tears, and the devotional figure is inserted into the centre of the Passion drama without actively participating in it. Abstract A Lamentation of Christ relief sculpture attributed to the fifteenth-​century Italian artist Bartolomeo Bellano raises questions about perceptions of lamentation and tears in the early modern period. While the grief-​stricken emotional response to Christ’s death by his mother and followers in the relief is vividly represented, the devotional figure in the same work remains serenely impassive. Recent scholarship on the representation of tears in early modern Passion scenes shows that expressions of grief became more common in images over the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Yet, against the background of increasing emotional expressiveness, there are cases when the expression of sorrow in individuals is conspicuously restrained. This chapter presents an analysis of a broader range of image types than those already examined in relation to this issue, beginning with the Lamentation of Christ, and interprets them in the light of a wider range of historical sources, to reveal more about the variety, complexity, and occasional ambivalence in the way tears were viewed and in the way images acted as models of devotional practice. Author Biography Dr. Hugh Hudson is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Institute of Art History at National Taiwan Normal University, and has also taught at The University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, Hunan University of Technology, and Hubei Polytechnic University. His research spans subjects in art history, visual culture, museology, and art conservation, with a focus on the early modern period.

62  À Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 3–​4.

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À Kempis, Thomas. The Imitation of Christ: A New Reading of the 1441 Latin Autograph Manuscript. 2nd ed. Translated by William C.  Creasy. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2007. ——​. Meditations on the Life of Christ. Translated and edited by Henry P. Wright and Samuel Kettlewell. New York: Dutton, 1892. ——​. Prayers and Meditations on the Life of Christ. Translated by William Duthoit. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1908. Barasch, Moshe. “Character and Physiognomy: Bocchi on Donatello’s St. George. A Renaissance Text on Expression in Art.” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 413–​30. Berenson, Bernard. Venetian Painting in America: The Fifteenth Century. New  York: Sherman, 1916. Bleeke, Marian. “The Eve Fragment from Autun and the Emotionalism of Pilgrimage.” In Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, edited by Elina Gertsman, 16–​34. Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture 10. London: Routledge, 2012. Bonardi, Antonio. Il lusso di altri tempi in Padova: Studio storico con documenti inediti. Miscellanea di Storia Veneta, 3rd series, vol. 2. Venice: Emiliana, 1909. Boucher, Bruce. “Italian Renaissance Terracotta: Artistic Revival or Technological Innovation?” In Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Dontatello to Canova, edited by Bruce Boucher et al., 1–​31. Exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 18, 2001–​February 3, 2002, and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 14–​July 7, 2002. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Carson, Rebekah. “The Quintessential Christian Tomb: Saints, Professors, and Riccio’s Tomb Design.” Renaissance Studies 28 (2013): 90–​111. Cevizli, Antonia Gatward. “Bellini, Bronze and Bombards: Sultan Mehmed II’s Requests Reconsidered.” Renaissance Studies 28 (2014): 748–​65. Cooper, Bruce, and Marika Leino. “Introduction.” In Depth of Field: Relief Sculpture in Renaissance Italy, edited by Donal Cooper and Marika Leino, 21–​40. Bern: Lang, 2007. Da Barberino, Francesco. Documenti d’amore di M.  Francesco Barberino, edited by Federigo Ubaldini. Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1640. Deacon, Richard. The British Connection: Russia’s Manipulation of British Individuals and Institutions. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979. De Marchi, Andrea, and Maria Giannatiempo López, eds. Il Quattrocento a Camerino: luce e prospettiva nel cuore della Marca. Exh. cat., Convento San Domenico, Camerino, July 19–​November 17, 2002. Milan: Motta, 2002. De Vos, Dirk. Rogier van der Weyden: The Complete Works. Translated by Ted Alkins. Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1999. Gauricus, Pomponius. De sculptura. French translation and annotations by Andre Chastel, Robert Klein, and a team from the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Hautes Études Médiévales et Modernes 5. Geneva: Droz, 1969. Harbison, Craig. “Visions and Meditations in Early Flemish Painting.” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 15 (1985): 87–​118.

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Imorde, Joseph. “Tasting God: The Sweetness of Crying in the Counter-​Reformation.” In Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, edited by Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler, 257–​68. Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 26. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Jacobus, Laura. “Piety and Propriety in the Arena Chapel.” Renaissance Studies 12 (1998): 177–​205. Kim, David Young. The Travelling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Kitchens, David Patrick. “The Small Bronzes and Reliefs of Bartolomeo Bellano.” MA thesis, University of Georgia, 1979. Kovesi-​Killerby, Catherine. Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–​1500. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Krahn, Volker. “Bartolomeo Bellano (Padova 1437/​1438–​1496–​1497).” In Donatello e il suo tempo: Il bronzetto a Padova nel Quattrocento e nel Cinquecento, edited by Franco Ambrosio, 63–​79. Exh. cat., Musei Civici, Padova, April 8–​July 15, 2001. Padua: Skira, 2001. ——​. Bartolomeo Bellano: Studien zu Paduaner Plastik des Quattrocento. Munich: Scaneg, 1988. Lansing, Carol. Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Italian Medieval Communes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Leopardi, Liliana. “Aesthetic Hybrids: Interpreting Carlo Crivelli’s Ornamental Style.” PhD diss., NewYork University, 2007. Lightbown, Ronald. Carlo Crivelli. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Maguire, Henry. “Women Mourners in Byzantine Art, Literature and Society.” In Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, edited by Elina Gertsman, 3–​15. Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture 10. London: Routledge, 2012. Martens, Maximiliaan P.  J. “New Information on Petrus Christus’s Biography and the Patronage of His Brussels ‘Lamentation.’ ” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 20 (1990–​91): 5–​23. McClure, George W. “Carol Lansing. Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes. (Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past.) Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. xi, 244. $45.00.” American Historical Review 114 (2009): 472–​73. Olszaniec, Włodzimierz. “The Latin Inscription in Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 72 (2009): 233–​36. Philipp, Franz. “A Relief Attributed to Bartolomeo Bellano.” The Quarterly Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria 3 (1953): 4–​5. Pulichene, Nicole. “To Touch the Divine: Picturing Christocentric Touch in Late Medieval Passion Devotion.” Hortulus 8 (2012): 28–​56. Rondeau, Jennifer F. “Conducting Gender: Theories and Practices in Italian Confraternity Literature.” In Medieval Conduct, edited by Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark, 183–​206. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Roush, Sherry. Speaking Spirits: Ventriloquizing the Dead in Renaissance Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

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Schiller, Gertrud. Iconography of Christian Art. 2  vols. Translated by Janet Seligman. Greenwich: Lund Humphries, 1971–​72. Schulz, Anne Markham. “A Portrait of Giovanni Emo in the National Gallery of Art.” Studies in the History of Art 9 (1980): 7–​11. Shoemaker, Stephen J.  “Mary at the Cross, East and West: Maternal Compassion and Affective Piety in the Earliest Life of the Virgin and the High Middle Ages.” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., 62, pt. 2 (2011): 570–​606. Smith, Molly Teasdale. “On the Donor of Jan van Eyck’s Rolin Madonna.” Gesta 20 (1981): 273–​79. Steinhoff, Judith. “Weeping Women: Social Roles and Images in Fourteenth-​century Tuscany.” In Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, edited by Elina Gertsman, 35–​52. Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture 10. London: Routledge, 2012. Steinmetz, David C.  “Devotio Moderna.” In The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, edited by Gordon S. Wakefield, 113–​14. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983. Strehlke, Carl Brandon. “Giovanni da Milano; Giotto and his Heirs. Florence.” The Burlington Magazine, 150, October 2008, 710–​13. Thürlemann, Felix. “The Paradoxical Rhetoric of Tears: Looking at the Madrid Descent from the Cross.” In Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, edited by Elina Gertsman, 53–​75. Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture 10. London: Routledge, 2012. Tinagli, Paola. Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation and Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Van der Velden, Hugo. The Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of Charles the Bold. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000. Vecellio, Cesare. De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo libri due. Venice: Damian Zenaro, 1590. West, Nigel. Historical Dictionary of Cold War Counterintelligence. Lanham: The Scarecrow, 2007. Wright, Georgia Sommers. “The Reinvention of the Portrait Likeness in the Fourteenth Century.” Gesta 39 (2000): 117–​34.

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Chapter 4

CATHERINE’S TEARS: DIPLOMATIC CORPOREALITY, AFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE,  AND GENDER AT THE SIXTEENTH-​CENTURY FRENCH COURT

Susan Broomhall CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI’S tears were a significant part of diplomatic interactions and the subject of intense study by foreign political agents at court. In courtly receptions and formal audiences, both words and gesture were considered vital aspects of the political messages being conveyed. These presentations were complemented by other sources of information and observation gathered by diplomats in the courtly environment in order to understand the character, corporeal and affective behaviour, and thus meanings of the performances, of their French hosts. Moreover, as I  will explore, diplomatic political agents considered the emotional and social, as well as political, implications of Catherine’s tears for them. Their perceptions were founded upon understandings about the power of female tears to permeate their own bodies in complex ways. From the early 1560s to her death in 1589, Catherine de’ Medici (1519–​1589) occupied roles of significant power as a regent for her son Charles IX (1550–​1574), and as informal advisor to his brother Henri III (1551–​1589). Broadly speaking, her political behaviour tended towards the protection and propagation of the House of Valois, safeguarding the integrity of France from international interests and seeking peace among France’s divergent religious groups and political factions. Scholars of art and architecture have long highlighted the importance of tears as part of a concerted visual and material grief programme that Catherine introduced after the untimely death of Henri II (1519–​1559), who had been fatally injured in a jousting accident in July 1559.1 Tears were one component of a conventional visual scheme for mourning employed by other contemporaries.2 However, for Catherine de’ Medici, they were also integral to her identity as a political protagonist protecting the Valois dynastic legacy of her husband and sons. Catherine’s corporeal and emotional experiences as a grieving widow were performed as visual and material presentations through which both the gendered body and political agency were simultaneously produced.3 At her husband’s death, Catherine replaced her device of the rainbow, with one understood by contemporaries to be “appropriate and fitting to her mourning and tears, which was a mountain of quicklime, on which drops of water fell abundantly from the sky, and with these following words in Latin: Ardorem extincta testantur vivere flamma. Although the flame was extinguished, the

1  Discussed in Conihout and Ract-​Madoux, “Veuves, pénitents et tombeaux.”

2  See examples in Conihout and Ract-​Madoux, “Veuves, pénitents et tombeaux.” 3  See Broomhall, “Heart Tombs” and “Making Power.”

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56 Susan Broomhall drops of water and tears maintained their ardour … Thus our queen showed her ardour and her affection by her tears, although the flame that was the king her husband was extinguished … she made it very clear by her tears that she could not forget him and that she loved him always.”4

Among the material and textual manifestations of Catherine’s weeping, tears were displayed alone or with the quicklime motif in multiple media forms such as book bindings and tokens.5 To date, however, there has been little attention paid to the evidence for Catherine’s actual performances of weeping as they were interpreted by contemporaries. Yet Catherine’s tears, and indeed the documents of those who witnessed them at court, constituted affective and emotional performances that were an active component of particular presentations of self. These were presentations of identity appropriate to specific contexts, produced at both conscious and sub-​conscious levels. This understanding reflects insights developed by Judith Butler concerning the construction of gendered selves through the ongoing practice of acts legitimate to that culture, as “performativity,” and more recently, of emotional and affective behaviours as socio-​cultural practices.6 In this chapter, I analyze ambassadors’ interpretations of Catherine’s lacrimal behaviours through specific “diplomatic events”; that is, specific rhetorical and gestural encounters between Catherine and ambassadors. These diplomatic events were recorded as crafted textual and emotional perfor­ mances in ambassadors’ correspondence and relations. This chapter analyzes sources written by eyewitnesses representing Venice, Tuscany, Spain, England, and the Vatican, who were themselves political agents negotiating their power, agency, and identity in precise ways for readers who were typically their colleagues or superiors, including monarchs. Reports were expressed through different language conventions, relating to distinct political contexts and varied religious ambitions for the political groups that they represented. Within these political alignments, letters were composed by resident ambassadors who held differing social networks at the court and beyond, and who had individual temperaments, working styles, and ambitions. These elements clearly affected the relationships that individual ambassadors had with Catherine and the broader court. But they also shaped how diplomatic agents interpreted and described Catherine’s affective behaviours within documents that also charted their own emotions 4  “propre et convenable à son deuil et à ses pleurs, qui estoit une montagne de chaux vive, sur laquelle les gouttes d’eau du ciel tumboient à foison; et disoient les mots tels en latin, Ardorem extincta testantur vivere flamma. Les gouttes d’eau et de larmes monstrent bien leur ardeur, encor que la flamme soit esteinte … Par ainsy nostre reyne monstroit son ardeur et son affection par ses larmes, encore que la flamme, qui estoit le roy son mary, fust esteinte; … elle faisoit bien paroistre par ses larmes qu’elle ne le pouvoit oublier et qu’elle l’aimoit tousjours,” Pierre de Bourdeille, sieur de Brantôme, Vie des dames illustres françoises et étrangères, 48. All translations are my own. 5  See examples in Conihout and Ract-​Madoux, “Veuves, pénitents et tombeaux.”

6  Butler, Gender Trouble. See also the interpretation of performativity explored by Reddy, in the context of “emotives” in his The Navigation of Feeling. On emotional and affective behaviours as practice, see Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”

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and behaviours in constructions of their own identities.7 Scholars are increasingly analyzing such texts as highly crafted literary documents written by well-​educated men to others in their circle. As Filippo de Vivo has recently argued of epistolary reports regarding Italian diplomatic negotiations, “[w]‌ritten instructions provided ambassadors with basic plotlines, but they adapted their positions to changing circumstances through witticisms, eloquent gestures, studied pauses and more or less premeditated improvisation.”8 Rivkah Zim has likewise examined how the English dramatist and diplomat Thomas Sackville (1536–​1608) retained “creative control—​editorial and interpretative” over the events and encounters at the French court that he described to Elizabeth I (1533–​1603) and his colleagues in his epistles.9 The presentation of Catherine’s tears in foreign reports to colleagues and superiors at home structured both explanations of affective and political responses at court and individuals’ feelings as a component of male identity. Powerful assumptions about the expression and experiences of emotions by women and men underpinned these interpretations. In the sections below, I explore how these men interpreted Catherine’s tears through a number of lenses—​in relation to contemporary understandings of symbolic political performance, of women’s place in the formal political world, ideas of correspondence between experienced feelings and affective display, and as persuasive evidence of diplomatic agents’ emotional acuity and political expertise.

Tears as Political Performance

Tears performed powerful functions in political acts. Male leaders were expected to respond to female tears in specific ways within precise political contexts. Long-​held notions and practices of governance held that the king’s justice was to be tempered by mercy, often invoked by a consort’s compassion displayed though the performance of tears.10 Justice and mercy were counterbalancing and complementary forces of royal rule, in which women’s tears played an important role. Tears were also understood by contemporaries as an oratory tool of political persuasion.11 Antoine Fouquelin (d. 1561), the author of a contemporary oratory manual, La rhétorique française (1555), identified two components to speech—​voice and gesture.12 Recalling Cicero, Fouquelin argued that “the mute body speaks by its gesture and 7  For examples of Spanish interpretations of her anger, see Broomhall, “Performances of Entangled Emotions and Beliefs.” 8  De Vivo, “Archives of Speech,” 535.

9  Zim, “Dialogue and Discretion,” 305.

10  See such studies as McCune, “Justice, Mercy and Late Medieval Governance”; Parsons, “The Queen’s Intercession in Thirteenth-​century England”; Lacey, The Royal Pardon; Ormrod, “The King’s Justice.”

11  “Le pleur est en effet une pratique courante et fréquente dans la culture politique français de la fin du XVIe siècle.” Xavier Le Person, “Practiques” et “practiqueurs.” La vie politique à la fin du règne de Henri III, 232. 12  Fouquelin, La rhétorique française, 112.

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movement.”13 Those wishing to win praise for their oration “must carefully watch all changes in the voice, all the gestures, and aspects of general and universal action particular to each person, … which requires long experience and practice.”14 Furthermore, the head was of chief importance, for the face “is the image of the mind, and can express all its emotions, cogitations and thoughts.”15 Accordingly, “one must moderate the sight [of the face], for as the face is the image of the mind, so the eyes are indicators of it, the sadness and gaiety of which must be moderated according to the matter in question.”16 Fouquelin, recommending a Ciceronian ideal of corporeal eloquence, expected a precise and considered politics of the body that was a fundamental complement to rhetorical skills. Significantly, Fouquelin understood these as skills equally applicable to political women as men. He was tutor to the young Mary Stuart (1542–​1587), who was raised at the French court, and his work was dedicated to her. In the preface, he recalled how Mary had “defended in a well Latined oration, against the common opinion, that it was appropriate for women to know the liberal arts.”17 These highly controlled performances of certain affective behaviours, gestures, and speech were fundamental to political discourse. Ambassadors were trained to understand their art as one of explicit emotional dissimulation and discernment, where they were to act as emotional ventriloquists for their royal superiors, and also to obscure their true feelings in order to advance their political cause. Tracy Adams’s analysis of fifteenth-​and sixteenth-​century diplomatic manuals, including the Enseignements composed around 1505 by regent Anne de France (1461–​1522) for her daughter Suzanne de Bourbon (1491–​1521), notes emphasis in these texts on “the importance on the effective performance of one’s own emotions in order to manipulate those of one’s interlocutors.”18 Likewise, poet, author, and secretary and councillor to Catherine de’ Medici, Estienne du Tronchet (ca. 1510–​1585) argued in his Discours académiques florentins, appropriez à la langue Françoise (1576) that dissimulation was vital in political contexts for “he who exposes his secret, prostitutes his freedom into the hands of another.”19 Maintaining emotional expression and speech that both sides understood to be political fictions was essential in diplomatic labour. The letters of both Catherine and the English 13  “cōme si le corps muet parloit par son geste & mouuement,” Fouquelin, La rhétorique française, 128.

14  “doit songneusement regarder tous les changementz de la vois, toutes les manieres de geste, & parties d’action generalles, & universelles, singulieres & propres de chacune partie, lesquelles … requierent long usage & exercice,” Fouquelin, La rhétorique française, 131–​32.

15  “est image de l’esprit, laquelle peut exprimer toutes les affections, cogitations & pensees d’icelluy,” Fouquelin, La rhétorique française, 129. 16  “il faudra moderer la veue: car comme le visage est image de l’esprit, ainsi les yeus sont indices d’iceluy: la tristesse & gayeté desquelz, il faudra moderer selon les choses desquelles il sera question,” Fouquelin, La rhétorique française, 129.

17  “vous soutenies par une oraison bien latine, & defendies contre la commune opiniō, qu’il estoit biē seant aus femmes de sçavoir les letres & ars liberaus,” Fouquelin, La rhétorique française, n.p. 18  Adams, “Married Noblewomen as Diplomats,” 54.

19  “quy expose son secret, prostitue sa liberté en la main d’autruy,” (Paris: L. Breyer, 1576), fol. 81r–​v, cited in Le Person, “Practiques” et “practiqueurs,” 242.

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ambassador Sackville regarding a “spontaneous” encounter in the gardens of the Tuileries palace indicate a shared understanding of the event’s various performances. Sackville explained how he was “to bringe iii. or iiii. gentelmen with me}as though to visite her.m. gardens and roiall buildinges there [.]‌where, at the same time I shold also seme (as it were by good hap) to mete her h.}all which was performed acordinglie}and after some ceremonies and speche from her.m.}to entertain the beholders a while}she left her traine of ladies}and monnsieur de foitz … and directing her walk with me in to a grove very plesant and fast by}thus she began her speche vnto me[\].”20

Catherine’s own letter to her ambassador in England, Bertrand de Salignac-​Fénélon, sieur de la Mothe (1523–​1589), was equally clear about the simulated emotions of surprise, as she explained that Sackville “made as if to come to see the Tuileries and me to be walking there without design, where I feigned to come across him.”21 Similarly, Catherine was wary of the veracity of male tears in her presence, writing to her son Henri III about one meeting with the powerful leader of the ultra-​Catholic faction, Henri, Duke of Guise (1550–​1588), in April 1585, in which he first made a melancholic reverence to her “and, beginning to speak, he shed tears, suggesting that he was most saddened.”22 Later that month, she reported to her son a second meeting, this time with Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon (1523–​1590), in which he “cried and sobbed hard, suggesting that he regretted to have embarked on this course of events.”23 Catherine’s phrasing carefully described both the actions and the inference that the pair hoped she would draw from their behaviours, alerting her son to be watchful regarding the affective performances of his leading subjects. Some ambassadors readily acknowledged that Catherine’s own political presen­ tations similarly contained elements of dissimulation. Her political capabilities, and capacity for dissimulation, were often assessed favourably in summative analyses by diplomats representing Venice and Tuscany. Giovanni Michiel, the Venetian ambassador to the French court, considered in 1561 that Catherine had “(because she wanted it thus) been considered shy” but, after the death of her husband, she conducted herself as one “who does not let herself be understood easily and, as with Leo X and others of the Medici, knows well how to feign and dissimulate.”24 A  later Venetian ambassador, 20  March 16, 1570/​1. PRO, SP 70}117, “The sixt conferens betwixt the Quene mother and the Lorde Buckehurst,” cited in Zim, “Dialogue and Discretion,” 301 and 303.

21  “il fis semblait d’aller voir les Tuilleries et moy d’y estre allée me promener sans dessein, où je feignis de l’entrevoir,” March 2, 1571, Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, ed. La Ferrière, 31–​32.

22  “et estans entrez en propos, il a jecté des larmes, monstrant d’estre fort attristé,” April 9, 1585, Lettres, ed. Baguenault de Puchesse, 245.

23  “pleura et soupira fort, monstrant avoir regrect de se voir embarqué en ces choses-​cy,” April 30, 1585, Lettres, ed. Baguenault de Puchesse, 269.

24  “Estimata essa regina per donna che se bene sin qui (per aver voluto cosi) sia stata tenuta timida … che non si lascia intendere così facilmente e secondo l’uso di papa Leone e degli altri suoi de’ Medici sa molto ben fingere e dissimulare,” Relazione de Giovanni Michiel, 1561, in Tommaseo ed., Relations des ambassadeurs vénitiens, vol. 1, 426.

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Girolamo Lippomano, made similar observations in 1577 in his summation of her character: “as her body is robust so too is her mind … She ordinarily appears cheerful and listens to everyone.”25 These eyewitnesses understood the queen’s bodily spectacles as convenient and highly controlled political fictions, and assumed that Catherine’s presentation of a happy or timid disposition suited her objectives.

Validating Male Political Agency

Although some diplomatic personnel identified Catherine as an expert political performer in the summative analyses that they sent home, few officials interpreted her tears in these terms as they measured her behaviour in their close, personal encounters that were described in their correspondence. Assessments of Catherine’s weeping in these exchanges were often shaped by contemporary ideas about the gendered nature of the political world and of emotional experience and display. A lengthy scholarship has considered medieval perceptions of tears as signs and consequences of the permeable female body. According to humoral theory, due to its lack of sufficient heat, the female body was unable to burn up excess fluids and thus was required to expel them in various forms. Tears were one aspect of these fluid excesses to which women were perceived to be more prone, and a sign that confirmed contemporary assumptions about women’s corporeal infirmity.26 These notions were coupled, by the late medieval period, with a feminized devotional tradition that rendered tears an important aspect of compassion for Christ’s suffering. Sarah McNamer has considered how compassion was complicated for men by what she assesses as its increasingly eroticized and feminized forms, including weeping. The complex gender performativity of such compassion practices led men by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, she argues, to resist this form of “intimate emotional communion with Christ on the cross.”27 Contemporary political agents certainly perceived significant gendered elements to political displays of emotion at the sixteenth-​century French court. Male weeping was frequently understood as political weakness, for example. At the Franco-​Spanish conference in Bayonne during July 1565, Charles IX and Catherine were again to see Elisabeth de Valois (1545–​1568), the wife of Philip II (1527–​1598), for the first time since her departure more than five years earlier for the Spanish court. The Spanish ambassador, Francés de Alavá (1519–​1586), reported home that the French Constable Anne de Montmorency (1493–​1567) had advised the king in his room that he should not cry in public “because it would be very noticeable to his subjects and foreigners and it would be very bad for 25  “come è del corpo indefessa cosi è dell’ animo ancora … Per ordinario si mostra sempre allegra, e ascolta tutti,” Tommaseo ed., Relations des ambassadeurs vénitiens, vol. 2, 630.

26  Classic literature includes Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages.” See also Nagy, Le don des larmes; Gertsman, Crying in the Middle Ages. 27  McNamer, Affective Meditation, 20–​21, quote 20.

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Kings to have tears in their eyes.”28 But Charles could not resist, as Alavá reported to his royal master, “from San Juan de Luz began the tears of His Majesty, his mother and his brothers and they were many and genuine because the love they have is great.”29 Alavá did not suggest that these were deliberate displays of emotions for political purpose, but rather, in textually juxtaposing Montmorency’s advice with the actual behaviour of Charles and his family members, suggested the young French king’s political weakness because he could not control emotions that Alavá perceived he genuinely felt. In practice, weeping by senior officials at the French court was commonly judged disapprovingly by onlookers as a sign of political and personal frailty. An earlier Spanish ambassador, Antonio Perrenot de Chantonnay, described the scene of Cardinal de Bourbon, on his knees before the young French king François II, in 1560, as a moment of reconciliation of the House of Bourbon after an ambitious failed political misstep. As the Cardinal begged the king to see him and his brothers as his faithful servants, “so many tears ensued.”30 Chantonnay provided some of his information to Philip II in coded passages, signalling the high importance of reporting on emotional display and its perceived significance in understanding political adversaries and agents. On another occasion, he described the Cardinal, again seeking to reconcile the errant behaviour of family members, as a “poor man [who], with tears in his eyes, confessed the evil of his nephews.”31 Tears constituted a key part of an affective repertoire that enabled the Cardinal, his House’s senior representative, to assuage tensions in a dynasty straddling the religious divide and a range of political positions.32 However, contemporary diplomats judged him a weak character. An anonymous English assessment of key members of the French court interpreted the Cardinal’s lacrimal displays not as signs of cunning political dissimulation, but as signs of a cowardly changeability: “He is of a very weak mind, and does all that one asks. He laughs when one laughs, and cries when one cries.”33 In the lived experience of diplomatic encounters and observations of the French court’s practice, men’s tears were rarely interpreted as a political strength or as a rhetorical device in the way that oratory conduct books suggested, but were more often 28  “porque sería muy notado de sus vasallos y de los extranjeros y les estaba muy mal a los Reyes las lágrimas en los ojos,” Alavá to Philip II, July 4, 1565, Negociaciones con Francia, vol. 7, 517. For the wider context on Franco-​Spanish ambassadorial relations of this period, see Valentín Vásquez de Prada, Felipe II y Francia (1559–​1598): Política, religión y razón de estado; and Jean-​Michel Ribera, Diplomatie et espionage.

29  “desde San Juan de Luz comenzaron las lágrimas e Su Majestad, madre y hermanos y cierto fueron muchas y muy de veras porque el amor que se tienen es grande,” Negociaciones, vol. 7, 517. 30  “le sobrevinieron tantas lágrimas,” Chantonnay to Philip II, October 8, 1560, Negociaciones, vol. 1, 438.

31  “El pobre señor, con las lágrimas en los ojos, confesó la maldad de sus sobrinos,” coded passage, Chantonnay to Philip II, Negociaciones, vol. 3, 97. 32  See Eugène Saulnier, Le role politique du cardinal de Bourbon (Charles X), 1523–​1590.

33  “Il est d’esprit fort imbecille, qui faict tout ce que l’on veulle, qui rit quant on rit et pleure quant on pleure.” Traité des princes, conseillers et autres ministres de l’estat de France, in Foreign Intelligence and Information in Elizabethan England, ed. Potter, 27.

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perceived as confirming evidence of the weakness of particular individuals who were temperamentally unsuited to achieve their ambitions in the political world. If men’s lacrimal displays caused diplomats to suggest to their readers that some men were unfit to assert themselves politically, so too they argued were women whether they wept or not. Catherine’s decisions and actions were regularly interpreted through assumptions about women’s place in the political world broadly. When Catherine appointed Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre (1518–​1562), as Lieutenant-​General of France in 1561, anonymous advice provided to Cosimo de’ Medici, Duke of Florence (1519–​1574), declared that the “Queen Mother has finally demonstrated that she is a woman; she has given all her authority to the King of Navarre” and lamenting the state of France, given “the cowardice of the Queen … God help us!”34 In the same period, Michele Surian, the Venetian ambassador, described “supreme authority in the hands of the queen, who is a woman; wise, though timid and irresolute.”35 Many foreign ambassadors assumed that the political world was not for women whose general corporeal weakness disabled them just as a display of tears marked male political infirmity. These powerful ideas shaped diplomatic interpretation of Catherine’s affective behaviours. When the queen wept in specific encounters with foreign officials, her tears were frequently interpreted as unmediated access to her emotional experiences and, for many ambassadors, confirmation of her unsuitability for positions of governance. In December 1560, the Spanish ambassador Chantonnay reported Catherine’s response to a papal nuncio who had presented the advice of Pius IV (1499–​1565) regarding the state of religion in France, just after the death of Catherine’s son François II (1544–​1560), that “because of her many tears, [she] could not read nor answer the Brief.”36 He did not overtly countenance the possibility that Catherine’s tears were an important means of delaying a response to a report that was challenging in the context of France’s rising religious tensions, including among courtiers. As they did of male affective display, Spanish ambassadors regularly reported to Philip II on Catherine’s tears in coded passages of their letters. In a conversation in August 1564, in which Alavá assured Catherine of Spanish support, he noted that his assurances were so well received “that the mother burst into tears” and later “took a napkin in her hand and dried her tears.”37 These observations suggest the strategic significance that such information could have for the diplomat and his master in assessing her vulnerabilities. Likewise, Alavá reported from discussions that he had had with Catherine at the end of May 1565 in which he was seeking to know

34  “La Regina Madre a pur finalmente mostrato di non essere altro che donna, essendosi condotta a dare quasi tutta la sua autorità al Re di Navarra. … viltà della regina … Si che Dio ne aiuti!” March 27, 1561, Canestrini and Desjardins eds., Négociations diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane, vol. 3, 449. 35  “la suprema autorità in mano della regina, che è donna; e seben savia, però timida e irresoluta,” Tommaseo ed., Relations des ambassadeurs vénitiens, vol. 1, 558.

36  “aunque la Reina, por sus muchas lágrimas, ni pudo leer el Breve ne responderle,” Chantonnay to Philip II, 5 December 1560, Negociaciones, vol. 1, 499.

37  “descifrado: que a la madre se le saltaron las lágrimas de los ojos … y con esto tomó una servilleta en la mano y, enxugándose las lágrimas,” Alavá to Philip II, August 9, 1564, Negociaciones, vol. 6, 337.

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whether she intended to meet with an envoy from the Sultan Suleiman I (1494–​1566), that Catherine “burst into tears, and although she does it easily, she certainly seemed pained.”38 Significantly, the Spanish ambassador, Alavá, suggested that Catherine’s angry outbursts could reveal her political positions. He twice depicted Catherine as a “lioness” protecting the interests of her children.39 During a difficult moment of Franco-​Spanish interactions regarding their conflicting colonial actions on the Florida peninsula, Alavá described Catherine’s rapid rise to anger in decrying the Spanish violence to French settlers in the region: “[T]‌he Queen jumped up and became like a lioness, while turning her face to Montmorency and the Bishop of Valencia and many others who were there, and saying in a loud, clear voice that could easily be heard: ‘Have the Turks or Moors ever done such cruelties as the Spanish have to the subjects of my child?’ ”40 Alavá continued: “Her eyes were filled with tears of rage, and she trembled with agitation.”41 Catherine was, in his view, “like a rabid person, unable to speak to me,” only capable of asides to her ministers.42 These moments of poorly controlled anger demonstrated, in Alavá’s presentation, Catherine’s emotional weakness. Moreover, they were affective responses that held strategic significance for the Spanish, for “when she is taken by surprise, her embarrassment is great, and we learn more of their mind.”43 Alavá’s reports strongly suggested that he could understand Catherine’s feelings via her outward affective behaviour. He did not explicitly consider the possibility that they were a deliberate deployment of emotional display but represented what he saw as an insight into Catherine’s lived experience. Interestingly, Alavá occasionally depicted for Philip his interactions with Catherine in equally emotional terms, writing of one meeting that Catherine “became angry with me, and I with her, to tell your Majesty the truth, because she did not answer me.”44 Alavá’s exasperations and frustrations at Catherine’s unwillingness to engage with him on political matters on his terms—​whether they were performed in his meetings or solely in his 38  “Aquí le saltaron las lágrimas de los ojos, y cierto, aunque ella las da fácilmente,” Alavá to Philip II, May 31, 1565, Negociaciones, vol. 7, 365.

39  “La reina despaviló los ojos y llegóse /​descrifado: como una leona /​a oír lo que decía a su hijo,” Alavá to Philip II, Negociaciones, vol. 8, 144.

40  “saltó esta Reina, sin dexarme hablar palabra, hecha una leona, diciendo a voz alta y volviendo el rostro a Momoransi y al Obispo de Valencia y otros muchos que estaban allí, con curiosidad clara para que lo entendiesen: Hase hecho entre turcos ni entre moros tan grand crueldad como han hecho españoles en los súbditos de mi hijo?” Alavá to Philip II, March 16, 1566, Negociaciones, vol. 8, 262. 41  “veinte veces los ojos rasados en agua y temblándole el rostro como una azogada,” Negociaciones, vol. 8, 262. 42  “como una rabiosa, no me dexando hablar,” Negociaciones, vol. 8, 263.

43  “tomándola de improviso es grande su embarazo y sácase más de sus ánimos,” Negociaciones, vol. 8, 265. 44  “la cual se metío en cólera comigo, y yo con ella, para decir a Vuestra Majestad la verdad, porque no me respondía,” Alavá to Philip II, November 29–​30, 1565, Negociaciones, vol. 8, 144–​45.

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letters to Philip—​were not presented as weakness of his own emotional fortitude, but rather as evidence of the challenges of negotiating with a female political agent. Whatever they understood Catherine’s tears to demonstrate of her own character, ambassadors were acutely concerned by their power to alter the course of the French political programme. In August 1572, the English ambassador Francis Walsingham (ca. 1532–​1590) wrote to colleagues lamenting a decision not to proceed with an independent French engagement in the Low Countries that would have favoured Protestant interests. He attributed this change to Catherine’s lacrimal emissions and the frailty of her emotional state that underpinned them. Walsingham perceived Catherine, “who governs everything,” to be “naturally fearful.”45 He wrote: “those of the Council who are for the Spanish party made the Queen Mother so afraid, … that her tears changed the mind of the King who was otherwise strongly resolved to it.”46 Although it was the king who was reported to have changed his mind, this analysis represented Catherine as fickle, nervous, and a dangerously changeable force in French foreign policy. “Nothing,” wrote Walsingham to Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester (1532–​1588), “was more powerful for changing the King from his resolution than the Queen his mother who said, with tears in her eyes, that she could not consent that he acted openly without English forces. Thus you see, My Lord, how fear and defiance are capable of spoiling everything.”47 Walsingham rued that “pleasure and youth” (that is, Charles IX) would prevent the English from profiting in this situation, summarizing what may have been Catherine’s caution to encourage France to risk its forces against Spain as the English looked on, as government by those (principally Catherine) who were “fearful and irresolute.”48 Fabio Frangipani, the extraordinary nuncio appointed by the Vatican, was equally frustrated by a woman whose emotions, he perceived, governed her decision-​making. He reported how, when Henri, Duke of Anjou (later Henri III) had announced that he had no intention of marrying Elizabeth I because of his faith, “the Mother and brothers all dissolved into tears.”49 Frangipani had no sympathy for the English Protestant queen nor Catherine’s attempts to pursue peace with the Huguenots in France. This latter idea, he reported that he told Catherine in July 1576, would make her look like a “woman of little value and bad conscience:” “I said freely to her: madame, you are speaking about things 45  “qui gouverne tout ici, est naturellement peureuse,” Walsingham to Burghley, November 8, 1571, Mémoires et instructions pour les ambassadeurs, ou, Lettres de negotiations de Walsingham, 171. 46  “Sur cela ceux du Conseil qui sont dans le parti d’Espagne ont fait si grand’peur à la Reine Mere … que ses larmes ont fait changer le Roi, qui étoit autrement fort resolu,” Walsingham to Burghley, August 10, 1572, Mémoires et instructions, 275.

47  “Rien n’a été plus puissant pout faire changer le Roi de resolution, que la Reine sa Mere qui lui a dit larmes aux yeux qu’elle ne pouvoit consentir qu’il agit ouvertement sans les Forces d’Angleterre. Ainsi vous voyez, Milord, que la peur & la défiance sont capables de tout gâter,” Walsingham to the Earl of Leicester, August 10, 1572, Mémoires et instructions, 276.

48  “La plaisur & la jeunesse nous empêcheront de profiter de nos avantages, & ceux qui gouvernent sous nous sont craintifs & irresolus,” Mémoires et instructions, 276.

49  “la Madre, et essi fratelli insieme venero in lachrime,” Frangipani to Rusticucci, August 14, 1571, Correspondance du nonce en France Fabio Mirto Frangipani. Martin and Toupin, 144.

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that are not your business.”50 He considered Catherine “a woman who does not understand” and “of little prudence.”51 Indeed, Frangipani suggested that fluid corporeal infirmities challenged Catherine to focus politically. When he reported that the queen was suffering from catarrh that rendered her “so stupid and sleepy with heaviness and pain in the head,” he added “which, in my opinion, do not make for much circumspection.”52 Catherine’s tears, for many diplomatic witnesses, confirmed that men (although not all men) were best suited for political endeavour. As they interacted with Catherine in negotiations and meetings, a range of foreign representatives sent home reports that detailed the queen’s affective behaviours, especially her tears, in a variety of political contexts. Though letters and reports between elite men, they conveyed impressions about Catherine’s political acuity and strategy (or lack thereof) that were underpinned by ideas about the unsuitability of women in political environments and in high-​level negotiation and decision-​making related to both foreign and domestic policy, which reinforced their own fitness to participate in the political world. Catherine’s tears confirmed rather than challenged these views. In the texts of these authors, lacrimal emissions provided evidence that the queen was ruled by her emotions and could not look beyond her feelings to wider religious and political interests, or control the display of her sentiments on her face, in her voice, or by her gestures.

Lacrimal Persuasion

Clearly, as Frangipani had so touchingly described the scene of the royal family’s collective weeping, or Alavá the tear-​filled delight of a mother and brothers reuniting with their sister, Catherine was considered lacrimally susceptible to the speeches and sight of her children (and they to her). When the young François II gave a response to his Privy Council in February 1560 about the threat of Protestantism in the kingdom, the Venetian ambassador Surian reported that the “words of the king to his council touched everyone—​and especially the Queen [mother] who was moved to tears.”53 But tears affected more than Catherine’s judgement; they affected that of others too. Tears were seen by ambassadors to have a perturbing power to move male interlocutors, as Walsingham reported in the case of her son Charles IX. Unsettlingly, political agents perceived family members to be especially prone to such lacrimal persuasion. In 1551, an

50  “Madama voi parlate di cosa che non è vostro mestiero,” “una donna di poco valore, et di mala conscienza,” Frangipani to Galli, July 14, 1576, Correspondance du nonce en France Fabio Mirto Frangipani, 280. 51  “simili cose dette da femina che non l’intende,” “donna di poca prudenza,” Correspondance du nonce en France Fabio Mirto Frangipani, 280–​81.

52  “la tiene però così stupida et sonnolente con gravezza et dolor di testa, che per mio parere non à da farne così poca consideratione,” Frangipani to Rusticucci, October 22, 1570, Correspondance du nonce en France Fabio Mirto Frangipani, 115. 53  “Le quali parole commossero ognuno et specialmente la Regina che venne fin alle lacrime,” Suriano to the Doge, February 19, 1560 (ns 1561), Despatches of Michele Suriano and Marc’ Antonio Barbaro, ed. Layard, xviii.

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anonymous report to Cosimo I, Duke of Tuscany, explained that hopes of a planned close alliance between the French court and the Duke had been destroyed by Catherine, who “had raged and cried with the King,” her husband Henri II.54 There were, therefore, some potentially disquieting aspects to the conceptualization of governance with complementary aspects of justice and mercy. If a woman’s tears could soften a king’s anger or his heart, they could move and shape his emotional state. Female tears were operating within the male body to produce effect and affect, rendering his corporeal form not so much fixed and bounded as potentially open and porous. Kingly responses to female tears ideally demonstrated men’s discretionary capacity for feeling under the control of reason. However, the demands of royal mercy could potentially expose kings to forms of vulnerability. Similarly, ambassadors feared that male courtiers who operated in proximity to Catherine would also be affected by her tears. They carefully noted the ways in which Catherine sought assistance and advice from France’s leading officials and the role of tears in these interactions. In March 1583, for example, Giovanni Battista Castelli, the papal nuncio, wrote of how Catherine sought out Charles III, Duke of Lorraine (1543–​1608), to discuss her fears for her son François, Duke of Anjou and Alençon (1555–​1584), and “with many tears, begged him to advise her what to do.”55 Female tears were clearly complex fluids of significant political power. Resident ambassadors could also spend many years at court, observing directly and interacting regularly with Catherine and her sons in what were perceived to be both formal events and “off-​guard” moments. Relationships between the royal family and these men evolved over years in relation to specific political contexts and, through such kinds of proximity, had the potential to create forms of intimacies and potentially even sympathies. The ambassadors whose interpretations are the focus in this chapter were not monarchs, but their position was complicated, for they were counterparts in a dialogue between international leaders, often the formal ventriloquists for royal masters and religious leaders, and at the same time individuals who were subordinates to the woman they perceived crying. For some ambassadors, Catherine’s tears were framed in their letters as a testing ground, where they could prove their capacity for mastery over her influence and of themselves. A queen’s tears were not simply a symbolic aspect of kingship but lived experiences and entanglements that ambassadors faced both as representatives of monarchs and as men in their own right. Given the susceptibility that they perceived in other men witnessing Catherine’s tears, ambassadors worked strenuously to persuade their readers that they had not also succumbed but were in fact expertly negotiating her weeping to their political advantage. In reports that were intended for colleagues and superiors back home, ambassadors 54  “ed in somma che ella ha fatto le pazzie e pianto col Re,” anonymous report to Cosimo I, June 1551, Canestrini and Desjardins eds., Négociations diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane, vol. 3, 278.

55  “con molte lacrime lo pregò a consigliarla quello che devesse fare,” Castelli to Cardinal de Côme, March 7, 1583, Correspondance du nonce en France Giovanni Battista Castelli, ed. Toupin, 509.

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appear at pains to highlight that Catherine’s tears did not affect the pursuit of their own responsibilities. Alavá, for example, whose objectives for Spain often appeared to run counter to those of Catherine for France, characterized Catherine’s tears as springing forth all too easily. This rendered the queen’s affective behaviour not a consequence of his actions, words or even self-​proclaimed anger for which he should take responsibility or be emotionally affected, but rather a result of the weakness of her own temperament. Spanish ambassadors’ repeated reporting of Catherine’s weeping, detailing all the stages of progression and attendant gestures, implicitly provided the evidence for such a view. Additionally, Alavá’s regular accounts of his own affective displays and contrasting emotional experiences, seem intended to provide assurances to Philip of the ambassador’s own emotional fortitude. He would not be swayed by Catherine’s sentimental programme but would remain both resolute in his own feelings and correspondingly focused on his own political objectives. In a contrasting interpretation of witnessing the same fluid emissions, other ambassadors reported occasions of Catherine’s weeping to their superiors seemingly as evidence of their intimate access to the queen in “off-​guard” moments. This demonstrated their subtle skills as covert sympathetic auditors who could use the knowledge that they gained to further their party’s interests at the French court. In 1569, the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Correr, emphasized Catherine’s efforts to control the outward appearance of her emotional experiences: “I know well that she has been seen crying in her cabinet more than once; but then she would regain control of herself, wipe her eyes and show herself in public places with a cheerful demeanour.”56 He then detailed an ostensibly revealing episode in which he had succeeded in gaining insight into Catherine’s feelings and mind. He reported how Catherine had once confessed to him in a moment of seemingly intimate reflection how she managed emotional challenges by situating her experiences in relation to those of queens past: Her Majesty said to me one day that she would consider herself the most unfortunate woman in the world if she alone of all the queens of France felt these trials: but she consoled herself with this old observation, that always in the minority of kings the leading men made trouble, because of the government, not being able to tolerate being controlled by others than their own rightful kings. And continuing to speak, she added, that she had read at Carcassonne, on her return from Bayonne, a handwritten chronicle in which was shown that the mother of the king Saint Louis was widowed with a son who was no more than eleven, and immediately the grandees of the kingdom rose up murmuring about not wanting to be governed by a woman, and a foreign woman … I told her: “Madame, Your Majesty must feel great consolation because since current events are like a portrait of the things that happened in those days, she could be absolutely assured that the ending (meaning the punishment) will be likewise.” She, heartily laughing out loud (as she does

56  “So bene che è stata veduta nel suo gabinetto a piangere più d’una volta: poi, fatta forza a se stessa, asciugatisi gli occhi, con allegra faccia si lasciava vedere nei luoghi pubblici,” Tommaseo ed., Relations des ambassadeurs vénitiens, vol. 2, 156–​58.

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68 Susan Broomhall when she hears something she likes) said: “I would not have anyone know that I have read this chronicle, because it might be said that I govern in imitation of that good lady and queen.”57

Correr interpreted Catherine’s seeming confession as a moment of privileged access to her feeling experiences and in which she had disclosed the nature of the reading material that formed a kind of emotional regulation for her. Similarly, the Tuscan ambassador, Vincenzio Alamanni, was able to write to Francesco I, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1541–​1587), in September 1575 that he had found the Queen Mother greatly afflicted, and that made me marvel greatly, as I had never seen her in all the time she has been in France so sorrowful. She spoke to me with few words and all broken up … and said little except with tears in her eyes, and almost forgot her dignity, I never thought I would see this. … She said that I could well consider what state they found themselves in with things and that she had no other refuge in this case in all the world if not to you, no recourse but to you, one of her blood, and of all people, the only person in whom she could confide.58

Whatever Catherine might have felt, such tears had political power. They communicated very specific messages in discrete political contexts for both performer and viewer. They also helped Catherine to form social relationships with her ambassadors 57  mi disse sua maestà un giorno, che la si riputarebbe la piu sfortunata donna del mondo se solo a lei tra le regine di Francia fusse tocco sentire di questi travagli: ma si consolava con questa osservanza antica, che sempre nelle minorità dei re i principali son soliti tumultuare, per causa del governo, non potendo essi tollerare d’esser comandati da altri che dal proprio lor re naturale. E continovando il parlare, soggiunse aver letto in Carcassonna, nel ritorno suo da Bajona, una cronica scritta a penna, nella quale vidde che la madre del re San Luigi rimase vedova col figliuolo, che non aveva più di undici anni: e subito i grandi del regno si sollevarno mormorando di non voler esser governati da una donna, e donna forastiera. … io gli dissi: “Madama, vostra maestà deve sentire grandissima consolazione, perchè, essendo questi motivi un ritratto delle cose successe in quei tempi, ella può essere in un certo modo anco sicura totalmente del fine (intendendo dei gastigo).” Ella, postasi a ridere forte (come quando sente alcuna cosa che gli piaccia), rispose: “Non vorrei già, che qualch’uno sapesse che io avesso letto questa cronica, perchè diriano che io mi governo ad imitazione di quella buona dama e regina che si chiamava Bianca, e fu figliuola d’un re di Castiglia,” Tommaseo ed., Relations des ambassadeurs vénitiens, vol. 2, 106–​10.

58  “Trovai appresso la Regina Madre afflittissima, in tanto che mi fece maravigliare grandemente, non l’avendo io mai più vista per cosa che sia nata in Francia, cosi addolorata. Parlommi di questo caso con le più brevi e con le più interrotte parole del mondo, … e disse poco meno che con le lagrime agli occhi, e quasi scordata della regia dignità sua, che non avrebbe mai pensato questo. Mostrò pur anco d’avere qualche speranza in sè di ridurlo, ma disse poi, che se ciò non venisse fatto, io poteva considerare bene in che stato si ritrovavano quà le cose; e che ella non aveva in tal caso altro refugio al mondo che Vostra Altezza; alla quale ricorreva, come a uno del suo sangue, e fuor del quale non conosceva persona in chi confidare,” September 22, 1575, Canestrini and Desjardins eds., Négociations diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane, vol. 4, 45–​46.

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and suggest intimacy that helped to convey particular political messages as significant. For her ambassadors, Catherine’s affective behaviours in these seemingly spontaneous settings were understood as lived emotional experiences and they claimed veracity for the messages conveyed with them. Through her affective display, Catherine may have been seeking to induce ambassadors to sympathy and understanding for her political position and the challenges and contexts that she faced in decision-​making. Certainly, some ambassadors who perceived that they had gained insights into Catherine’s mind through her affective display did provide sympathetic interpretations of the queen for readers at home. Correr, for example, concluded: “I say again that I do not know which prince would have been so prudent not to be led astray by so many twists and turns, much less a foreign woman without confidants … therefore, I have compassion rather than blame for her.”59 At Catherine’s death, a later ambassador of Tuscany, Filippo Cavriana, would talk of his own tears in a letter home. “Your worship excuse me,” he begged. “I can not write longer, because of the pain and the tears that abound in me, reminding me of the virtues of that great Queen, my loving mistress; and, if this letter is not as it should be, my passion is the reason.”60 Witnessing the queen’s tears was potentially an emotionally challenging event for diplomatic men and their letters reveal varied strategies for demonstrating their mastery over these female fluid emissions. Some reiterated their capacity not to succumb to sympathy for a woman whose floods of tears came, they claimed, all too easily. For others, Catherine’s tears highlighted their own ability to catch the queen unawares and to gain a political advantage through displaying an apparent sympathy for her plight. Catherine may have hoped her tears would be persuasive in drawing foreign diplomatic agents to an understanding of her political position, but these same tears offered diplomats their own opportunities to persuade their readers of affective displays and emotions in the construction of images of their own identity. As such, these were lacrimal persuasions in the service of more than Catherine alone.

Conclusion

Tears were multivalent fluids with enormous psychic charge. In the diplomatic environment, agents were conscious of their capacity to represent messages that served political objectives. As such, the words, gestures, spaces and contexts that coalesced with tears constituted important data that were meticulously recorded in fine detail

59  “Torno a dire che non sò qual prencipe si prudente non si fosse smarrito in tanti contrarii, non che una donna forestiera, senza a confidenti … però l’ho piuttosto compassionata che accusata,” Tommaseo ed., Relations des ambassadeurs vénitiens, vol. 2, 156.

60  “Vostra signoria mi scusi; io non posso esser più lungo per il dolore e per le lagrime che mi abbondano, ricordandomi della virtù di quella gran Reina, mia amorevole padrona; e, se non trovasse la lettera come ella merita, scusimi con la mia passione,” Cavriana to Serguidi, January 6, 1589, Canestrini and Desjardins eds., Négociations diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane, vol. 4, 854–​55.

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as political information to be carefully interpreted. Just as significantly, in the context of ambassadorial epistles to readers at home, the tears of Catherine in particular provided opportunities for authors to construct presentations of their own identities through their description of events in which they encountered, reacted to and assessed the meaning of the queen’s lacrimal emissions. Diplomatic corporeality was firmly understood through a normative male body but it was a corporeal form that was permeable to female fluid affect. How ambassadors described in letters their responses to Catherine’s tears, therefore, validated the sense of entitlement of these individuals to the political sphere as educated men who were particularly capable of withstanding the mental, emotional and physical challenges of complex international negotiations. Interpretations of the weeping queen thus enabled diplomatic agents to demonstrate their own emotional control, structured affective display, subtle tactical expertise and achievement of political objectives—​qualities that they rarely assumed in their female political interlocutor. Abstract This chapter analyzes how Catherine de’ Medici’s tears were understood as part of diplomatic interactions by foreign political agents at court. These agents considered the emotional and social, as well as political, implications of Catherine’s tears for them. They interpreted them in relation to contemporary understandings of symbolic political performance, of women’s place in the formal political world, against ideas of correspondence between experienced feelings and affective display, and as persuasive evidence of their own emotional acuity and political expertise. Importantly, how ambassadors described their responses to Catherine’s tears validated their sense of entitlement to the political sphere as educated men who were capable of withstanding the mental, emotional and physical challenges of complex international negotiations.

Author Biography Susan Broomhall is Professor of History at The University of Western Australia. She researches gender, emotions, material culture, cultural contact, and the heritage of the early modern world. She is also Editor of Parergon: The Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and a Series Editor of “Gender and Power in the Premodern World,” published by ARC Humanities Press.

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Chapter 5

PIERS PLOWMAN AND THE BLOOD OF BROTHERHOOD Anne M. Scott “Is that Iesus the ioustare,” quod Y, “that Iewes dede to dethe? Or is hit Peres the Plouhman! Who paynted hym so rede?” Quod Conscience, and knelede tho. “This aren [his] armes–​ His colours and his cote armure; ac he that cometh so blody Is Crist with his croes, conquerour of Cristene.”

(“Is that Jesus the jouster” I said, “whom the Jews put to death? Or is it Piers the Plowman? Who painted him so red?” Then Conscience said, kneeling down, “These are his arms, His colors and his coat of arms; but the one who comes so bloody Is Christ with his cross, conqueror of Christians.”) (C.21.10–​14)1

This excerpt from William Langland’s great poem, Piers Plowman, graphically illuminates the title of this chapter. The blood of brotherhood as portrayed in the poem springs from the human blood embodied in the divine person, Jesus Christ, who, at his Incarnation, took on the flesh and blood of human nature while maintaining his godhead. “Peres the Plouhman”—​Piers the Plowman—​has many manifestations within the poem, but overall, he appears as the human representative of Christ who, in the above quotation, is said to be wearing Piers’s “cote armure,” a metaphor for Christ’s human form. The scene derives from the biblical narrative of the Passion, and shows Jesus on his way to crucifixion on Calvary. In Christian teaching, the Passion and death of Jesus seal and validate his humanity which he shares with his blood brothers—​the rest of humanity.2 I will argue that, in Langland’s scheme, the concept of “blody bretherne”—​blood brotherhood between one human being and another—​derives its strength and significance from being associated with the blood of Christ.3 For Wille, the poem’s visionary protagonist, a long 1  All quotations from Piers Plowman are taken from A. V. C. Schmidt, Piers Plowman: A Parallel Text Edition. The Middle English is quoted first, followed by the modern English, since Middle English is not a foreign language, just an earlier form of English. The rendering into modern English of all texts in this chapter is my own. I have chosen to quote from the C-​text of the poem, apart from a few instances of the B-​text which I have noted.

2  Bettina Bildhauer demonstrates how, in the Middle Ages, the bleeding of Christ’s body in miraculous bleedings of the sacred host and crucifixes, was understood to be a proof of his humanity. Medieval Blood, 28–​31. 3  See note 6 below.

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and tortuous life’s journey spent trying to discover “How Y may saue my soule” (How I may save my soul) (C.1.80), leads to the practical understanding that salvation comes, not by human efforts, but by participating fully in the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, both of which are intimately connected with the shedding of Christ’s blood. Much has been written about medieval understandings of blood over the last fifteen years or so, building on earlier studies of the body, and particularly the fragmented body, examined under its component parts of which blood is fundamental. Within this historiography I  select three avenues of research that shed light on the preoccupations of Langland. They are, first, the concept of blood as being bounded, kept in, by the body, and hence contributing to the health of the body when contained, and causing harm to the body, or forming a taboo when it flows out, whether by injury or natural motions.4 The second is the understanding of Christ’s blood as a material component, which has been perpetuated as matter in the eucharistic element of consecrated wine, and also in miraculous manifestations of the sacred blood which were widely venerated in Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.5 The third is the importance of blood as fundamental to bloodlines of kinship, particularly with regard to biological relationships, leading to an understanding of how Langland develops the idea of “the blood of brotherhood.”6 Piers Plowman is a long poem of twenty-​two passus written in the second half of the fourteenth century over a period of twenty-​five years by the English poet, William Langland.7 The poet, about whom we know nothing except what can be gleaned from the quality and content of the poetry, is deeply spiritual, profoundly intellectual, steeped in understanding of the theological life of the Church, and a sharp critic of the venality and hypocrisy he witnesses in all strata of society, both civil and ecclesiastical. The poem charts the progress of an allegorical character, Wille, through a life characterized by human frailty, error, and, simultaneously, genuine devotion and strenuous seeking for the knowledge that will enable him to save his soul. Any short chapter on this complex work of literature runs the risk of oversimplifying the poem’s message. For indeed there is no single “message.” The poem is an exploration of what it means to be fully and corporeally human in the contemporary world of fourteenth-​century England, and simultaneously to be an informed and devout follower of the God who is incarnate in the human person of Jesus. Unlike the experiences of Langland’s contemporaries, mystics Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, this understanding has nothing mystical about it, nor does it express itself in affective piety, but depends on Wille’s acceptance of his own corporeality, his own “body and blood.” In 4  Bildhauer, Medieval Blood, 51–​83. 5  Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 25–​81.

6  Bildhauer explains that, to the medieval mind, “Just as blood was imagined as suffusing and uniting the individual body, so it was envisaged as connecting the members of a social body, as blood was actually believed to be passed on from parents to children and shared between members of a family.” Medieval Blood, 134.

7  The poem charts a man’s pilgrimage through life, and each passus (literally “step”), charts his progress.

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exploring the resonances of blood within Piers Plowman, it will be seen that Langland anchors his religious message in the materiality of human life, and measures that life sub specie aeternitatis by its conformity to that of the incarnate Christ.

Corpus Christi—​the Body and Blood of Christ

Religious thinkers and devout laity in the fourteenth century had been made intensely alive to the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation by the new feast of Corpus Christi (1264). The feast and the doctrine that informed it recognize the importance of understanding the hypostatic union, ​the union of godhead and human nature in Jesus Christ; and across Europe devotion to the two elements, the body and the blood of Christ, expressed itself in many ways. These included popular veneration of relics of the blood of Jesus; popular devotion to that blood as witnessed in miraculous liquefactions; narratives of the miraculous metamorphosis of the host into a flesh and blood person offered in sacrifice on the altar; and, as Samuel Baudinette notes in his contribution to this volume, personal flagellation in imitation of Christ’s bloodshed in his passion and death.8 The overriding theological understanding of the new feast is expressed movingly in hymns widely acknowledged to have been written by St. Thomas Aquinas at the request of Pope Urban IV for the new liturgy of the feast. Adoro te devote, Pange lingua, Lauda Sion, and O sacrum convivium, are, to this day, performed during the Mass and the hours of the Divine Office.9 In all these hymns one strong theme emerges: faith alone, rather than the senses, can comprehend the mystery that the Godhead has become human, and that Jesus was simultaneously a full human being of flesh and blood, while remaining a fully divine person. There is no doubt that the feast of Corpus Christi celebrates the body and blood of Christ, but Aquinas insists that the senses are inadequate in helping people to grasp the mystery: “sensuum defectui” (the senses are inadequate); “et si sensus deficit” (and if sense fails); “Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur” (sight, taste, touch are defeated in you).10 Aquinas’s poetry considers the nature of the reality. On the cross only the divinity of Jesus was concealed: “In cruce latebat sola Deitas”; his humanity was patently obvious. But in the sacrament, both his divinity and his humanity are concealed from view: “At hic latet simul et Humanitas.” They are only visible to the mind informed by the words of Christ: Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur, Sed auditu solo tuto creditur.

8  Baudinette, ­chap. 6; Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 25–​81.

9  Texts of these hymns are found in The Saint Andrew Daily Missal, Feast of Corpus Christi, 626–​38; Maundy Thursday, 433–​34; and Liber Usualis Missae et Officii, Sequence for the Mass of Corpus Christi, 792–​96. For a full history of the Feast of Corpus Christi and the development of its Offices and Mass see Rubin, Corpus Christi, 164–​201.

10  Bynum gives a full discussion of the theology behind transubstantiation and the presence of God in the eucharistic elements, and medieval understandings of this. Wonderful Blood, 86–​92.

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(Sight, touch, taste are defeated in you, But faith can safely rely on hearing alone. I believe whatever the Son of God has said; There is no truer word than this word of truth.)11

And in the last analysis, faith alone is the means by which understanding can be achieved: “Ad firmandum cor sincerum | Sola fides sufficit.” (Faith alone can strengthen the sincere heart.)

Corporeality and Piers Plowman

Writing around one hundred years later, and imagining the body of Christ in distinctly corporeal terms, Langland presents his own meditation on the body and blood of Christ in a vision experienced by the protagonist of the poem, Wille, who witnesses Christ blood-​soaked and exhausted carrying his cross. Like Aquinas, Langland keeps us firmly in the realms of faith. The blood is interpreted as the “cote armure” of Piers Plowman, who moves through the poem in various incarnations, at this point representing humankind. So, Langland concurs with Aquinas in that at this point the Godhead is hidden from view, and the humanity of Jesus is figured forth.12 This emphasis on Christ as a fully human person of flesh and blood underpins Langland’s emphasis on Wille’s qualities as a seeker after truth in the here and now of his contemporary world, living a strenuously corporeal life even as he searches for salvation. Another fourteenth-​century English person discussed within the present volume, Margery Kempe, is similarly at home within her body while she makes her physical and spiritual pilgrimages, and experiences contact with the divine. Like Margery’s journey through life, the trajectory of Wille’s pilgrimage through life is set against the backcloth of contemporary England; Wille progresses through encounters with allegorical figures who counsel him and challenge him in the context of fourteenth-​century social, political, and ecclesiastical life. Piers Plowman insists throughout that the human person is a “body/​soul” creature.13 The human being at the heart of the poem—​the “I” narrator, otherwise known as “Wille”—​has a profound spiritual and intellectual life which we are privileged to share as 11  From Adoro te devote, source as in note 9. Rendering into modern English is by the author.

12  The symbolism of blood as experienced in fourteenth-​ and fifteenth-​century Europe is extensively considered by Bynum in Wonderful Blood, passim, but a fascinating overview is given in her introductory pages, 1–​21.

13  Although Langland does not engage in specific discussions concerning the division of body and soul, such as have been explored by Bynum in The Resurrection of the Body, the whole poem is informed by an awareness of those debates, and an awareness of the role of body in experiencing the spiritual. See Bynum, Resurrection, especially the final chapter which relates to fourteenth-​ century writings, 318–​43.

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he encounters allegorical figures: for example the Lady Holy Church, Dame Study, Kynde Nature, Wit, Conscience, and Reason. But while the poem has deeply spiritual sections that meditate on the scriptures, the sacraments, the Passion, death, and Resurrection of Christ; and savagely satirical sections that dramatize the corruption of the Church and State, it is also gloriously corporeal in its portrayal of the best and the worst in humankind. Wille lives in the temporal and material world, and his corporeality is fundamental to how he learns. Two examples from the poem emphasize how Wille’s spiritual search is grounded in his physical circumstances and makeup. At the opening of the poem, Wille seems to be setting out on his life’s quest, wearing the heavy, scratchy and probably smelly garments of sheepskin—​“Y shope me into shroudes as Y a shep were” (I dressed myself in outer garments as if I were a sheep) (C.Prol.2)—​that were associated with shepherds, hermits, and, in hagiography, with images of St. John the Baptist, the herald of Christ. Hermits are ambivalent; they can be saintly, like the followers of Benet and Austin, but they can also be idle fraudsters, living on alms given to them freely by the laity who perceive them to be men of God, but neglecting the prayer, penance, and spiritual counselling for their contemporaries that pertains to their calling: Grete lobies and longe that loth were to swynke clothed hem in copis to be knowe fram othere, And made hemself heremites here ese to haue.

(Great tall layabouts who were averse to manual labor Dressed themselves up in copes to be distinguished from the other tramps, And set themselves up as hermits, to have an easy life.) (C.Prol.53–​55)

Wille, too, strives to live according to the teaching of Holy Church, but as the poem progresses, we witness him at times falling into both physical and intellectual idleness that make him appear guilty of the sloth associated with false hermits. This causes constant soul-​searching. One particularly striking episode, widely regarded as autobiographical to the life of Langland the poet, portrays an allegorical debate between Wille, Reason, and Conscience which examines the validity of his life (C.5.1–​108); is he making an excuse of being a clerk and a poet (makar) in order to justify not taking his share of labouring tasks? At the conclusion of this debate he acknowledges that his moral standing has been deeply influenced by his physical sloth. The allegorical portrayal of the seven deadly sins participating in the sacrament of penance that follows in the next passus (C.6.1–​440) shows even more graphically how sin and forgiveness are grounded in corporeality. Always memorable is the uproarious portrayal of Glutton who overeats, then belches, farts, and spews his way through Saturday night, oversleeping and missing mass on Sunday morning (C.6.360–​417). This is just one example of many that demonstrate the poem’s insistence that bodily functions are inseparably linked with the human person’s spiritual health. Another example showing how important Wille’s corporeality is in determining his spiritual progress occurs at the end of the poem (C.22.51–​380). In a vision of the attack of

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Antichrist at the end of time, Wille, caught up in the allegorical battle between the forces of Antichrist and those summoned by Conscience, portrays himself as physically suffering old age with all its attendant disabilities. Wille’s old age parallels the last days of time, depicted here in visionary force. While Antichrist relies on the seven deadly sins to corrupt both churchmen and laity, Conscience unleashes in counterattack, as if in punishment for sin, natural ills summoned up by Kynde—​disease, old age, and death. Wille takes refuge in the Barn of Unity Holy Church, but even this apparently safe haven is violated by the looming figure of the friar, Sire Penetrans-​domos, who perverts the course of contrition and repentance among those within, weakening their moral strength by giving apparent absolution for sin without demanding repentance and amendment. The spiritual ills of the church are portrayed as bodily ills, in an evocative image of a field hospital under siege by Antichrist and his forces, with the ministering friar going from one sick person to another, offering false healing. Even Conscience lies drugged with the poisonous “physik” that the friar has given him. As Wille is attacked by weakness and age, so the Church is assailed by the treachery of venal friars who offer absolution for money instead of leading the sinner to repent and sin no more. Here, the integrity of the body which is the Church has been ruptured by the penetration of the false friar, and the waning spiritual life of those who have taken shelter in the Barn of Unity Holy Church is further damaged by the easy penances he gives. While blood is not mentioned in the text, the life of the wounded body of Christ, which is the Church, is sapped in just as certain a manner as that of the bloody body of Christ on the way to Calvary, a scene to which I shall return later in this chapter.

Blood in its Contemporary Context

While the battle between Conscience and Antichrist, and the Siege of the Barn of Unity Holy Church are portrayed as fierce and raging battle operations, blood is not mentioned. The “blood” of the poem is concentrated in a few specialized usages: the blood of injustice; the blood of shared brotherhood; the blood of martyrdom; and the blood shed by Christ. This blood of Christ appears as a historical phenomenon all over Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The “Precious Blood” came to be venerated in its own right as a material presence of Jesus whose resurrected and glorified body is not on this earth.14 While manifestations of the “Precious Blood” occurring at various European shrines stress the physical nature of the relic and its relationship with the corporeality of Jesus Christ, in Piers Plowman the poet’s and the reader’s attention is concentrated on understanding the sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—​the Eucharist—​and Wille’s relationship to it. In Passus C.19.83–​95 of Piers Plowman, the Samaritan—​a figure taken from Luke’s Gospel narrative (Luke 10:25–​37), but in this poem allegorically representing Christ—​stresses that there is only one way for humankind to attain salvation, and that is not by shedding its own blood, but by partaking of the already shed blood of Christ—​drinking it. This blood of Christ is material, and it is the partaking of this blood that overcomes sin. Later in this chapter I will return to Langland’s understanding of the sacraments. For now, I wish to explore further his feeling for blood. 14  See Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 35–​40.

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The poem’s first mention of blood is in the context of the pursuit of justice by the character called Peace (C.4.45–​100), who has endured many attacks by the character Wrong, including damage to his property, his wife, and maid, repeated attacks on his menservants, cheating him at market by forestalling, breaking into his barns, and making away with his wheat and oats. After many attempts to negotiate with and placate Wrong, Peace, as a last resort, comes to court, where he shows his “panne blody” (bloody head) as a sign that he wears in his body the marks of all this violence and injustice (C.4.74). The justice he seeks, however, is not to be. Showing the blood is a living proof of wrong done, and the king understands this.15 However, the event is embedded in the context of Lady Mede’s arrival at court, her proposed marriage to Conscience, and her trial before the King. “Mede” is the Middle English word for reward, and Lady Mede represents reward in its many forms, including bribery, venality but also payment for favours done. The incident with Peace and his bloody head highlights the corrupting power of Mede on whom are blamed all the ills attendant on obtaining justice. Instead of Wrong being clapped into irons and left to rot in prison, several powerful advocates—​variously named Wisdom, Wit, and Wiles, satirically representing legal advisors at court—​recommend that he be given the opportunity to pay a fine, with Lady Mede as his guarantor. The language of the proposal itself, with its elaborate alliteration, is an attempt to bamboozle: Yf he amends may do, lat Maynprise hym haue And be borw for his bale, and buggen him hym bote, And amende that is mysdo and eueremore the betere.

(If he can make compensation, let Bail take charge of him And go surety for his evil acts, and buy him compensation, And patch up all his wrongs so that everyone is satisfied.) (C.4.84–​86)

Persuasively they argue that the king will win—​the crime will become a means of making money. Even Peace himself is won over by Lady Mede’s sweet offer of financial compensation, and withdraws his plea; as Pearsall comments: a good example of the private self-​ interest that jeopardizes comun profit.16 The king has been violently against this as it will encourage others to commit crime and pay their way out, and finally appoints Reason and Conscience to be his Chancellor and King’s Justice, so that they can withstand the insidious power of Mede who otherwise holds subversive sway over the powerful. Peace, with his bloody head, has provided a test case for Reason; his blood provokes the king to establish Reason and Conscience over the venal Lady Mede. A final note about the bloody head: in a later chapter in this volume, images of Peter Martyr represent him with blood gushing from his head, and this has led the author of 15  If a lord strikes his vassal on the head and blood comes forth, it constitutes a grievance so serious that the vassal might be absolved of his duties to his lord. I owe this information to Michael Barbezat. In the case of Pees and Wrong, the attack has come from the marauding bands of purveyors acting in the name of the lord who maintained them. Pearsall, Piers Plowman, 104n45. 16  Pearsall, Piers Plowman, 105, note to lines 94–​98.

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c­ hapter 8, Diana Hiller, to argue that Peter Martyr’s blood makes him an alter Christus—​ another Christ. I cannot claim that the bloody head of Peace has any connection with images of Peter Martyr (Hiller’s examples are all drawn from fifteenth-​century Italy). Peace is portrayed as a pitifully weak character here, whining about his bloody head, and then capitulating to the lure of money offered by Mede in compensation. Yet the shedding of his blood—​his life’s blood—​is a measure of the injustice done to him; money can compensate his injured property but it does not equal his blood.17

Blody Bretherne

“And hit are my blody bretherne for God bouhte vs alle” (And they are my blood brothers for God bought us all) (C.8.217) “At Caluarie, of Cristis bloed Cristendoem gan sprynge, And blody bretherne we bycome there, of o body ywonne.” (At Calvary, Christendom sprang up as a shoot from Christ’s blood, And we became blood brothers there, won back by one body.) (C.12.110–​11) “And we his blody bretherne, as wel beggares as lordes.” (And we his blood brothers, beggars equally with lords.) (C.12.117)

These are crucial texts for the whole poem. The concept of human brotherhood lies behind Langland’s great effort of presenting his whole society in all its calibrations—​between rulers and ruled, providers and consumers, the wealthy and the needy, the just and sinners, the learned and the ignorant, the lettered and the student. For Langland, blood brotherhood betokens sharing in the blood of Christ who shed his blood on Calvary. The rationale for solidarity among all members of society is that the blood of Christ, shed on Calvary, became the ransom that bought, or won, or redeemed humankind.18 Towards the end of the poem (C.20), this redeeming act is played out in a narrative of the harrowing of hell, an imagined scenario, also of ancient tradition, portraying how the crucified—​but not yet risen—​Christ confronted Satan and led out of hell the souls of all who had died since the beginning of time.19 It was Christ’s blood that 17  The ancient concept of “blood-​money” may be understood here. See “blod-​wite (n) An amercement or fine for shedding blood; also, the right to receive such fines.” Middle English Dictionary, https://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​m/​med/​.

18  The idea of Christ’s crucifixion being a ransom is of great antiquity in Christian tradition. Deriving the idea from the earliest Apostolic writings, the Fathers, starting with Irenaeus, then Origen, Augustine, and later medieval theologians, particularly Anselm and Abelard, all spoke of atonement in terms of ransom. William Kent, “Doctrine of the Atonement,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 2, www.newadvent.org/​cathen/​02055a.htm (accessed January 23, 2019). For an exploration of Langland’s interpretation see Scott, Piers Plowman and the Poor, 255–​57. A full appraisal of critical writings on Langland’s representation of redemption and other medieval literary portrayals of the ransoming of mankind from hell is given by Marx, The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption, on whose findings I draw here. 19  The liturgy and theology of the early Church as well as Apostles’ Creed declared that Christ “descended into hell,” and this became a major subject of the literature, drama, and visual arts of the

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paid out the ransom for humankind, and it was his blood that was shared to make human beings blood brothers. This is a hard notion to grasp, but aspects of it can be understood in the context of the kind of brotherhood shared by the knights of Arthurian romance, or some of the heroes of Scandinavian literature, for whom the relationship created by the formal “blood brotherhood” overrode familial relationships.20 This concept of blood brotherhood is discussed specifically in Emily Steiner’s Reading Piers Plowman, where the author defines the “blody bretherne” concept as essentially “a form of identification firmly rooted in an aristocratic notions of community.” Steiner makes the point that, in medieval literature, knights on opposing sides would have more affinity with each other than knights and low-​born men on the same side.21 Bearing this in mind, it is easy to grasp the shocking aspect of what Langland means when he says that all have been made blood brothers, “as wel beggares as lordes.” The first mention of “blody bretherne” in the poem occurs in the context of the ploughing of the half-​acre, one of the most quoted and studied sections of the whole poem, which describes how labourers must work to create a harvest, and what happens when there is dearth and Hunger strikes the community.22 The scene plays out how, in practical terms, all are bound in a brotherhood of shared need. The equilibrium of a well-​ordered society in which every person has a role, some to plough and sow, some to govern and keep order, is shattered by the intrusion of those who, in fourteenth-​century terms, are the beggars and the wasters who either cannot or will not work. Piers asks the allegorical figure, Hunger, what is to be done about these people. His question is framed in terms that seek to understand the divine logic at play in a society that seems to allow for the inequity that arises when some work and others do not. His question voices the confusion that is always felt by those who feel duty-​bound to assist the needy but are unsure whether help should be given to those who appear undeserving, and are equally unsure how to distinguish those who are deserving. The context is of disaster—​Hunger has just struck and all feel its effects. But should those who have not contributed to the labour of ploughing, sowing, and reaping be helped once famine strikes?23 Piers’s overriding concern is that “hit are my blody bretherne for god bouhte vs alle” (C.8.216). In identifying all the beggars, both genuine and fake, as his “blody bretherne,” Piers enunciates his concerns for their physical need, but also for their moral status. In response, Hunger makes a distinction that articulates ideas Piers has already Middle Ages. For an inspiring analysis of the doctrine and Langland’s interpretation of it, see Aers, Salvation and Sin, 114–​17. See also Russell, Lucifer, 135–​47.

20  Corinne Saunders alludes to the power of blood brotherhood as shown in medieval romance, and the destructive violence that ensues when the relationship is disrupted by other bonds of love. “Love and the Making of the Self” in Saunders, A Concise Companion to Chaucer, 135. See also Saunders, A Companion to Romance, 88; and “Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales,” in Saunders, A Companion to Medieval Poetry, 456. 21  Steiner, Reading Piers Plowman, 78.

22  It is the section covering Passus 8 in the C-​text (6 in B, 7 in A).

23  In this and the following few paragraphs I am drawing on work already published in my earlier study: Piers Plowman and the Poor.

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voiced, advocating minimal rations for “bolde beggares and bygge þat mowe here breed biswynke” (bold and big beggars who are able to work for their bread) (C.8.224), and generous almsgiving to those “þat fals men han apayred” (who have been harmed by false men) (C.8.229). But raising the responses above the merely practical, Hunger punctuates his speech with quotations from scripture—​a technique widely used by Langland as a kind of shorthand for a whole scriptural context. In an age when oral memory was considerable, these scriptural allusions would have called up for Langland and his readers the full passage from which they were taken. The first one: “Alter alterius onera portate” (Bear ye one another’s burdens) (Galatians 6:2), is a quotation from a passage in which Paul is teaching about both spiritual and material mutual assistance. Christians, Paul says, ought to correct, with gentleness, those found guilty of some fault. Paul’s text advises against the passing of judgement, but recommends the correction of faults. In Piers Plowman, the spiritual collapse of the deceitful beggars has also been Piers’s concern. Unlike the fourteenth-​century Statutes of Labourers, frequently a reference point in the poem, which deal with the immediate symptoms of idleness, errancy, and dishonesty, Piers is committed to helping those on the half-​acre to understand their moral obligations in charity, because they are “blody bretherne.” The verses that follow in Galatians consider both spiritual and material sustenance, once more drawing upon the imagery of sowing and harvest, and stressing the concept of solidarity (“but especially to those who are of the household of the faith”): “Be not deceived, God is not mocked. For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap. For he that soweth in his flesh, of the flesh also shall reap corruption. But he that soweth in the spirit, of the spirit shall reap life everlasting. And in doing good, let us not fail. For in due time we shall reap, not failing. Therefore, whilst we have time, let us work good to all men, but especially to those who are of the household of the faith”24 (Galatians 6:7–​10). Hunger’s advice to Piers to tell the strong ones to go and work exonerates Piers from any wrong if he subsequently gives to the undeserving. The judgement is left to God. “Theiʒ þei doon yuele, lat þow God yworþe” (B.6.225). Piers had earlier said that “Truþe woot þe soþe” (B.6.130); and here in Galatians Paul says “Deus non irridetur” (God is not mocked.) In Galatians, the sowing and reaping refer to the practice of good works towards other people, and this must be considered in a reading of Piers’s words and actions. Any generous works will reap an eternal reward and will become a spiritual harvest. Piers has known from the start that all must be included in charity, yet it is not an easy inclusivity, for, as in the parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Matthew 13:24–​30),25 Hunger’s words imply that human beings will choose to sin. Yet as in that parable, so here, Piers acknowledges the kinship of all, sinners and non-​sinners alike:

24  “Nolite errare: Deus non irridetur. Quæ enim seminaverit homo, hæc et metet. Quoniam qui seminat in carne sua, de carne et metet corruptionem: qui autem seminat in spiritu, de spiritu metet vitam æternam. Bonum autem facientes, non deficiamus: tempore enim suo metemus non deficientes. Ergo dum tempus habemus, operemur bonum ad omnes, maxime autem ad domesticos fidei.” All scriptural quotations are taken from The Douay-​Rheims Bible, online at www. drbo.org/​drl/​. 25  I am grateful to Michael Barbezat for reminding me of the parable’s influence at this point.

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And hit are my blody bretherne, for God bouhte vs alle. Treuthe taughte me ones to louye hem vchone And to helpen hem of alle þyng, ay as hem nedeth.

(And they are my blood brothers, for God redeemed us all. Truth once taught me to love each one of them And to help them in all things, always, in whatever way they need.) (C.8.217–​19)

No-​one is to be excluded from Piers’s charity; his words are inclusive: “God bouhte vs alle”; “louye hem vchone”; “helpen hem of alle þyng”; “ay as hem nedeth.” In terms of the employer/​ employee relationship he is not limited by the statutes and their discrimination; he has put human needs into a far larger context than that of fourteenth-​century work and wage relations. Piers’s inclusivity reflects that of Christ whose inclusivity towards those of his blood is expressed again towards the end of the poem when the risen Christ descends into hell to confront Satan. Here Christ asserts his human solidarity even with those who have not been baptized: Ac to be merciable to man thenne my kynde asketh, for we beth brethrene of o bloed, ac nat in baptisme alle.

(But at that point, my nature requires me to be merciful, For we are brothers of one blood, though not all are baptized). (C.20.417–​18)

And to clinch the argument, he stresses the material quality of his kinship and his compassion: For blood may se bloed bothe afurst and acale, Ac bloed may nat se bloed blede, bote hym rewe.

(For blood may see blood both thirsty and cold, But blood cannot see blood bleed without grieving.) (C.20.437–​38)

The second instance of the specific “blody bretherne” reference comes in the centre of the poem, when the shade of the Emperor Trajan bursts onto the scene, and presses home his understanding of human dignity. This pagan emperor, according to a legend of Pope Gregory, is said to have been granted salvation without having been baptized because he performed an act of kindness to a poor widow. Trajan dismisses clerical theory—​“baw for bokes” (a straw for your books) (C.12.76)—​by invoking the doctrine of good deeds. He chooses the emotive term “beggere” to drive home the shockingly inclusive nature of God’s love: Almyʒty God [myʒte haue maad riche alle] men, if he wolde, Ac for þe beste ben som riche and some beggeres and pouere. For alle are we Cristes creatures, and of his cofres riche, And breþeren as of oo blood, as wel beggeres as erles.

(Almighty God might have made everyone rich, if he wished, But for the best some are rich and some are beggars and poor. For we are all Christ’s creatures, and made rich from his coffers,

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In three different ways the equal dignity of all is stressed. Whether beggars are associated with the poor (B.11.197), with earls (199), or with a “boye” (203)—​a scoundrel or knave—​ all have been made rich from Christ’s coffers. The blood which makes “blody breþeren” (201) is the same blood which makes God human, and the same blood which gave birth to the infant church on Calvary. The poor at the feast described by Trajan are true kin—​all brothers of one blood. When Trajan quotes the text quasi modo geniti he echoes the mass of the first Sunday after Easter, whose introit refers to “newborn infants,” the new church which is the body of Christ; this is followed, in the liturgical readings, by an extract from John’s epistles which speaks of the redeeming blood of the incarnate Christ.27 As members of the church, feeding on Christ, redeemed by his blood, all are “gentil men echone” (each one a gentle man) (B.11.202). So, the pagan emperor Trajan, while seeming to dismiss scripture (“bokes”), has assimilated the core of scriptural and sacramental teaching on the brotherhood that is created within the eucharistic Church. The discrimination which was a problem to Piers in the harvest episode is no problem here, for the only discrimination is made by sin: “No beggare ne boy among vs but yf it synne make” (There is no beggar nor knave among us unless he commits sin) (B.11.203). The poem, at this point, presents society from what Trajan suggests is a heavenly viewpoint, where all are equally “gentil,” but beggars are the point of reference. Gentle blood is derived from the blood of Christ which makes all brothers. Wealth, as the Fathers and the decretists teach, comes from God and is available for all (B.11.198).28 David Aers has argued convincingly that Langland is not advocating the “semi-​Pelagian” idea that Trajan “broke out of helle” without the application of Christ’s saving blood.29 Trajan’s words here about brotherhood make it clear that what matters is the brotherhood or bloodline in Christ. In our supposedly egalitarian society, it requires a leap of the imagination to conceive the immense social distance between a medieval beggar and a lord. To suggest that they become blood brothers is quite shocking, and Langland means it to be so, devoting many lines to the concept, and returning to it at several points in the poem. In medieval literary references, as Emily Steiner has pointed out, blood brotherhood is an aristocratic concept and she wonders whether Langland thinks beggars are to be upgraded to become as the nobility, or nobles downgraded—​levelled to the beggar’s status.30 This is 26  These lines are not included in the C text, although the sense is still there.

27  “Quis est qui vincit mundum nisi qui credit quoniam Iesus est Filius Dei? Hic est qui venit per aquam et sanguinem, Iesus Christus: non in aqua solum sed in aqua et sanguine” (1 John 5:5–​6). (Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God? This is he that came by water and blood, Jesus Christ: not by water only, but by water and blood.)

28  Chaucer uses thus same concept in The Wyf of Bath’s Tale, where the Wyf of Bath’s hag talks of gentle birth as coming straight from Christ and not through ancestors. Gentility comes from God. The Riverside Chaucer, The Wyf of Bath’s Tale ll. 1109–​206, 120–​21. 29  Aers, Salvation and Sin, 122–​31.

30  Steiner, Reading Piers Plowman, 78–​80.

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an intriguing question. How can the poor be considered blessed, when all the scriptural imagery of heaven refers to palaces, mansions, kingdoms, jewels, and other emblems of happiness constituted by nobility and wealth? In scriptural terms, the poor will definitely be raised in status, with material wealth being invoked as the symbol of spiritual reward. Yet Langland is clear: using an earthy image drawn from the graveyard, he points out that in a charnel house, the knight’s bones are indistinguishable from those of his tenant labourer (C.8.42–​45); and he maintains this egalitarian imagery throughout the poem, stressing that those who are the poorest on this earth have, by their suffering, earned a reward in heaven, whereas the rich, whose earthly life has been spent in ease, must earn their reward by performing good works.31

The Church and the Blood of Christ

The final blood image I  want to address is that of Jesus the Jouster—​the knight who comes covered in blood, whose bloody coat of arms, the human incarnation in flesh and blood, is shared with the human nature of Piers the Plowman: “Is that Iesus the ioustare,” quod Y, “that Iewes dede to dethe? Or is hit Peres the Plouhman! Who paynted hym so rede?” Quod Conscience, and knelede tho. “This aren [his] armes–​ His colours and his cote armure; ac he that cometh so blody Is Crist with his croes, conquerour of Cristene.”

(“Is that Jesus the jouster” I said, “whom the Jews put to death? Or is it Piers the Plowman? Who painted him so red?” Then Conscience said, kneeling down, “These are his arms, His colors and his coat of arms; but the one who comes so bloody Is Christ with his cross, conqueror of Christians.”) (C.21.10–​14)

This is one of the important moments in the poem when the blood mentioned is the flowing, red, viscous substance that courses through bodily veins and bursts out through the pierced skin, and it looks back to the very first Passus, which recounts the yearning desire experienced by Love—​the Son of God—​to take on human flesh and blood: For heuene myght nat holden it, so was it heuy of hymselue, Til it hadde of the erthe eten his fille. And whan it hadde of this fold flessh and blood taken, Was neuere leef vpon lynde lighter theraftur. (For heaven could not contain it, it was so heavy in itself, Until it had eaten its fill of the earth.

31  B.14.103–​90. See Scott, Piers Plowman and the Poor, 145–​51, for a close reading of this passage. The motif of the rich man’s difficulty in entering heaven is widespread in medieval religious literature, particularly in the widely quoted parable of Dives and Pauper, Luke 16:19–​31. See Crassons, The Claims of Poverty, 66–​67, for an astute analysis of Langland’s use of this text.

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Anne M. Scott And when it had taken flesh and blood of this world, No leaf on a linden tree was ever lighter thereafter.) (B.1.153–​56)

When God became incarnate his veins were filled with human blood, and it is this blood that is later “peynted al blody” on Christ’s body: “…he that cometh so blody Is Crist with his croes, conquerour of Cristene.” (C.21.13–​14)

There is an element of rapture in these references to the blood of the Son of God, Christ, linked, as Langland here says, to Christ’s desire to become human, and then to his victory over sin. Rapture in the presence of Christ’s blood is well documented in devotional literature, as Bynum has amply demonstrated. And while this rapture can lead to physical imitation, as Baudinette describes,32 Langland focuses on the importance of blood in relation to the sacraments of the Church. Earlier, in Passus C.17, the allegorical character Anima had described the blood of Christ’s heart as the fluid of baptism (C.17.268) and spoken of how many martyrs shed their blood in order to bring baptism to Christ’s “half-​brothers”—​those who share in his humanity but have not yet been baptized. In Passus C.19, the Samaritan, with relentless imagery, describes how the only hope for humankind is to be anointed and baptized in the blood of a child, and subsequently to eat the flesh of the child and drink his blood. I use the word “relentless” here, because this doctrine that underpins the Eucharist is recorded in John’s Gospel as having been a stumbling block when Christ first announced it,33 and has remained a stumbling block through the centuries. Yet Jesus did not back down on his words, and watched many of his most loyal followers turn away at the thought of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Langland uses blood in its literal sense here. It is wet, red, and is caused by pain, ​the pain of the infant Jesus’s circumcision, ​“the bloed of that barn,”​ and the adult Jesus’s crucifixion. And he associates this blood with baptism: “And with the bloed of that barn enbaumed and ybaptised” (And with the blood of that child anointed and baptized) (C.19.88), as well as the Eucharist: And thouh he stande and steppe, riʒt stronge worth he neuere Til he haue eten al that barn and his bloed dronken.

(And although he can stand and walk, he will never be really strong Till he has eaten all that child and drunk his blood.) (C.19.89–​90)

“Baptism of Blood” has long been recognized in the church in the case of those who died for the Christian faith before they could receive the sacrament.34 The effects of martyrdom of blood are the complete remission of sin and the title to immediate entrance into heaven. The expression entered the Christian vocabulary during the first three centuries when many catechumens awaiting baptism and pagans suddenly converted to the Christian faith were martyred before they could receive formal baptism of water. This 32  Chapter 6 in this collection. 33  John 6:34–​61.

34  Catechism of the Catholic Church, 285.

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shedding of blood, of the baptized as well as the unbaptized, unites the martyr with Christ in a literal blood brotherhood, since, as Sellberg and others writing in this volume point out, in both spiritual and material ways, blood is the life force of human beings.35 Langland links baptism with blood on six separate occasions, ​reinforcing the concept that the only corrective to sin, and means of salvation, comes through the literal shedding of Christ’s blood. It is only a theological step further to turn the anointing with blood of baptism into the washing with the waters of baptism. Tertullian is widely considered to have said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church (quoted by Hiller),36 and Langland says “At Caluarie of cristis bloed cristendome gan sprynge” (C.12.109). After Christ had died on the cross, the blind centurion, Longinus, plunged his spear into Christ’s side, whereupon “The bloed sprang down by the spere and vnspered the knyghtes yes” (The blood poured down by the spear and unsealed the knight’s eyes) (C.20.88).37 As Langland presents it, this is not just the physical cure of a blind man, but opening the eyes of faith to one whom Langland calls a Jew. Tertullian, followed by Augustine, tells us that, in the flowing of blood and water from the pierced side of Christ, the Church was born.38 Langland chastises Jewry for having been blind to their redeemer and depicts them as blinded ever since.39 For Langland, the Church has replaced Jewry which became discredited when it failed to embrace Jesus Christ as the Messiah. This concept leads directly to my final example, in which the flowing blood of Christ is used by Piers to build the house in which to store his grain, ​the House of Unity, ​Holy Church. At the end of the poem, Piers who has identified closely with the bloody Christ on the cross, in turn described as wearing Piers’s “cote armure” as a knight, reverts once more to his role as farmer building a barn to store his harvest. But now he is the leader of the Church, entrusted with building God’s house. While the symbols of the Passion are all incorporated into the building—​the cross and the crown of thorns providing the timber for the construction—​the wet blood is used to make the mortar, which is named as mercy: “And of his bapteme and bloed þat he bled on rode | He made a maner morter, and mercy hit hihte” (C.21.325–​6). As the substance at the basis of the mortar, the blood of Christ is all pervasive, and his extensive and all-​inclusive mercy granted to sinners is made available to them within the Barn of Unity Holy Church. But just as Jesus the Jouster was depicted by Langland as streaming with blood, so the Body of Christ in the Church, the Barn of Unity, is penetrated and injured by the treason from within. At the end of the poem the Dreamer, Wille, resolves once more to set off in search of Piers Plowman, who at times in the poem has been conflated with Christ, and now is seen as 35  Sellberg, ­chap. 7.

36  Hiller, ­chap. 8. See also Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 263n7.

37  This incident is recounted in the Gilte Legende Cap. xlvi, 212.

38  “For as Adam was a figure of Christ, Adam’s sleep shadowed out the death of Christ, who was to sleep a mortal slumber, that from the wound inflicted on His side might, in like manner (as Eve was formed), be typified the church, the true mother of the living.” Tertullian, De Anima, cap. xliii. Similar terms are used by Augustine of Hippo, In Joannis Evangelium. 39  Pearsall, Piers Plowman, 326n81.

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his iconic earthly representative; to follow him will bring testing, suffering, and salvation by sharing in the blood of Christ.

Conclusion

Langland has a keen grasp of the relationship blood signifies: ​natural blood bonding of kin, of shared humanity, of affinity, as well as of baptism in Christ. Being of one blood creates the body of humanity that is also the body of Christ. To be of one blood is several times referred to in Piers Plowman as reinforcing human equality in the sight of God. This is more than a metaphorical understanding of the connection between God, humankind and the interrelationship between human beings. Christ has purchased this oneness by a tit-​for-​tat bargain, when he shed his blood on the cross, thus atoning to the Father for humanity’s sins. As Bettina Bildhauer explains: “this notion continues to be used and elaborated so enthusiastically in medieval thought … because it makes sense within the medieval ideas of social and individual bodies being generated and held together by blood.”40 Langland is always concerned with the how and why of bodily life and its connection with the spiritual life. For him the vast unrolling of the history of redemption has its climax in the birth of the baby who is also God. Towards the end of the poem, the Samaritan figure, talking of how to restore the health of a victim fallen among thieves,​ a sinner, ​describes how a baby has been born whose blood must bathe the victim as in baptism; penance, the plaster which will heal the victim’s wound, depends on the death of the baby, ​the “passion”; and the victim needs to eat the child and drink the baby’s blood, ​in the Eucharist (C.19.88–​90). Following a long tradition of church teaching, David Aers argues, quoting Augustine, “To maintain that ‘without the cross of Christ a person can become righteous by the natural law and the choice of the will’ is ‘to do away with the cross of Christ’ (see 1  Cor.:1.17), and to imply that Christ has died in vain (Gal.:2.21).”41 The whole poem is directed towards answering Wille’s question, how may I save my soul? And inseparable from all the other aspects of the answer, teased out during the course of the poem, is the emphatic assertion that Wille will find salvation from sin through the sacraments, and these are the sacraments to be administered within the Church. The contentious arguments put forward by Trajan, by Patience who advocates the salvation of the suffering poor, and witnessed in the conversion of the Jew, blind Longinus, are all linked in the blood shed by Christ and the blood that makes brotherhood. So, although Langland expresses deserved disdain for many of his contemporary church’s prelates, his thrust within the poem is towards securing the body of Christ that is the Church, represented by the Barn of Unity, whose integrity is attacked and permeable at the end 40  Bildhauer gives a concise and lucid explanation of the medieval concept of atonement, and the importance of shedding blood in this context, in Medieval Blood, 140–​47. 41  Aers, Salvation and Sin, 87.

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of the poem, just as, in the act of crucifixion, Christ’s body is attacked, penetrated and sheds Christ’s healing blood. Abstract Langland has a keen grasp of what blood signifies. Frequently during the poem Piers Plowman he uses the term “blody bretheren” (blood brothers) to drive home his understanding of human dignity. This blood which makes human beings “blody bretheren” is the same blood which makes God human, and the same blood which gave birth to the infant church on Calvary. This is more than a metaphorical understanding of the connection between God, humankind and the interrelationship between human beings. Langland is always concerned with the how and why of bodily life and its connection with the spiritual life. This chapter will trace the significance of blood as a physiological phenomenon that underpins Langland’s understanding of the theology of Incarnation, Redemption, and the bonds that bind human beings. Author Biography Anne M. Scott is an Honorary Research Fellow in English and Literary Studies at The University of Western Australia. She has published a monograph on Piers Plowman, edited and contributed to six essay collections, and published numerous articles and chapters on late Middle English literature.

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Bibliography

Aers, David. Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland and Fourteenth-​century Theology. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2009. Augustine of Hippo. In Joannis Evangelium. Edited by Jaques-​Paul Migne, Patrilogia Cursus Completus: Series Latina, 35, cols. 1579–​1976. Paris: Migne, 1841. Bildhauer, Bettina. Medieval Blood. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006. Bynum, Caroline Walker. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–​1336. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. ——​. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval and Northern Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Catechism of the Catholic Church. London: Chapman, 1994. The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2.  New  York: Robert Appleton, 1907. www.newadvent. org/​cathen/​02055a.htm. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Edited by Larry D.  Benson. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Crassons, Kate. The Claims of Poverty. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. The Douay-​Rheims Bible. http://​drbo.org/​drl/​index.htm. Gilte Legende. Edited by Richard Hamer and Vida Russell. Vol. 2.  Early English Text Society, O. S. 328. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Lefebvre, Gaspar et al. The Saint Andrew Daily Missal with Vespers for Sundays and Feasts. Bruges: Abbey of Saint Andrew, ca. 1945. Liber Usualis Missae et Officii. Paris: Desclée, n.d. Marx, C. W. The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England. Cambridge: Brewer, 1995. Pearsall, Derek, ed. Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-​text. 3rd ed. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008. Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Saunders, Corinne. “Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.” In A Companion to Medieval Poetry, edited by Corinne Saunders, 452–​75. Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2010. ——​, ed. A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. ——​, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer. Malden: Blackwell, 2006. Schmidt, A.  V. C.  Piers Plowman: A Parallel Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions. London: Longman, 1995. Scott, Anne M. Piers Plowman and the Poor. Dublin: Four Courts, 2004. Steiner, Emily. Reading Piers Plowman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Tertullian. De anima. Edited by A.  Gerlo et  al. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 2. Turnhout: Brepols, 1954.

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Chapter 6

PERFORMATIVE ASCETICISM AND EXEMPLARY EFFLUVIA: BLOOD, TEARS, AND RAPTURE IN FOURTEENTH-​CENTURY GERMAN DOMINICAN LITERATURE

Samuel Baudinette THE DOMINICAN MYSTICS of fourteenth-​century Germany are usually viewed as distrustful of ascetic practices and affective expressions of religious devotion. Understood to be characteristic of this trend is the earliest vernacular treatise which Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–​1328) composed for the Dominican brethren of Erfurt, where the famed mystic and theologian was prior from 1294 to 1303, in which the fraternity is instructed to avoid excessive attention to religious works and practices (uebunge, in Mittelhochdeutsch).1 In these Reden der unterscheidunge (“Counsels on Discernment”), delivered to the brothers as part of the spiritual instruction that accompanied their nightly meal, the Meister outlines his doctrine of “detachment” (abgescheidenheit) or “letting be” (gelâzenheit).2 The truly detached, for Eckhart, are those who, in “living without a why,” deny their own wills and seek union with the pure ineffable Godhead in the ground of their souls by avoiding all attachments. The Meister, in the Reden, thus opines that: People say: “O Lord, how much I wish that I stood as well with God, that I had as much devotion and peace in God as others have, I wish that it were so with me!” Or “I should like to be poor,” or else, “Things will never go right for me till I am in this place or that, or till I act one way or another. I must go and live in a strange land, or in a hermitage, or in a cloister.” In fact, this is all about yourself, and nothing else at all. This is just self-​will, only you do not know it or it does not seem so to you.3

It was impossible, the Meister believed, to achieve union with divinity when locked into a pattern of egoistical devotions and ascetic practices. For God himself is neither “this” nor “that” and cannot be approached through particular ways. To attempt to do so, Eckhart 1  Versions of this chapter were delivered at the original “Blood, Sweat and Tears” Conference at the University of Western Australia in Perth and at the fifty-​first International congress of Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. I want to thank everyone who offered necessary advice and questions, as well as the editors of this volume. For the biography of Meister Eckhart, see Senner, “Meister Eckhart’s Life”; McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, 1–​19. 2  Meister Eckhart, Reden, trans. Colledge in Essential Eckhart, 247–​94. 3  Meister Eckhart, Reden, trans. Colledge, Essential Eckhart, 249.

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claims, is like wrapping God in a mantle and shoving him beneath a bench.4 Ultimately, Eckhart preaches, those committed to outward displays of penitential and pious devotion may appear perfect, but inwardly they are nothing more than ignorant donkeys.5 By making such statements Eckhart is generally understood to be criticizing the tendency towards ecstatic experience he saw in the spiritual practice of his contemporaries. Eckhart is not necessarily unique in this regard. The Franciscan novice-​master David of Augsburg in his De compositione hominis exterioris et interioris (“On the Composition of the Exterior and Interior Man”) warns his readers not to trust spiritual visions, and Humbert of Romans, the fifth Master General of the Dominican Order, in his Institutiones de officiis ordinis (“Institutes on the Offices of the Order”) reminds novices that visions and miracles contribute nothing to their salvation.6 The Beguine Marguerite Porete, who although condemned to the flames as a heretic in 1310 was a significant influence on Eckhart’s thought,7 likewise argued in her Miroir des simples âmes (“Mirror of Simple Souls”) that “there are those who completely mortify the body in doing works of charity; and they possess such great pleasure in their works that they have no understanding that there might be any better being than the being of the works of virtues and death by martyrdom.”8 Whilst such people are happy in their works, Marguerite maintains they are “lost” because they fail to transcend their wills and desires to achieve union with God’s being. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, therefore, there was growing criticism of excessive attachment to ascetic practices, which were seen as distracting the practitioner from their true spiritual purpose: union with the divine. Significantly, each author stressed that such exercises were dangerous because they could lead the practitioner to become excessively attached to their own wilful selves rather than God. Despite such criticism, however, ascetic and devotional practices remained highly popular in late medieval Germany. The Dominicans, who themselves had a lengthy tradition of corporeal discipline going back to the Order’s founder, continued to emphasize the spiritual value of suffering and mortification in their instructional literature. This was especially so for the Dominican sisters of fourteenth-​century Germany, whose Schwesternbücher (“Sisterbooks”) and Offenbarungen (“Revelations”) acted as didactic “spiritual biographies” that described the all-​important role that castigating the flesh played in their attempts to relive the Passion of Christ, and hence come to identify with the divine through the abnegation of the will.9 As Caroline Walker Bynum argues in the wider context of medieval women’s spirituality, such corporeal punishment allowed women to imitate the crucified Christ in their own bodies. “Women’s efforts to imitate this Christ,” she writes, “involved becoming the crucified, not just patterning themselves 4  Meister Eckhart, Pr. 5b, trans. Colledge, Essential Eckhart, 183.

5  Meister Eckhart, Pr. 52, trans. Colledge, Essential Eckhart, 199.

6  Wegener, “Eckhart and the World of Women’s Spirituality,” 421–​23.

7  See the various studies in McGinn, Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics. 8  Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, 132.

9  On this literature see Ringler, Viten-​ und Offenbarungsliteratur; Lewis, By Women, for Women. “Spiritual Biographies” translates Ringler’s Gnadenvita.

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after or expanding their compassion toward, but fusing with, the body on the cross.”10 Flagellation, often public or communal, was thus implemented by the Dominican sisters as part of a performative strategy to deconstruct the self. Corporeal punishment and physical discipline in imitation of the Crucifixion were seen as useful aids to the beginner on the path of spiritual detachment which came to ground the practitioners’ identity in the divine.11 This was not only a trend amongst female Dominicans. Significantly, Meister Eckhart’s own disciple Henry Suso (ca. 1295–​1366) in his masterwork, the Exemplar, transformed Eckhart’s mysticism into a system of devotional piety and practice which emphasized the transcendence of outward physical suffering in order to be truly detached by suffering inwardly.12 The ascetic practices, especially flagellation and corporeal discipline, exemplified by the auto-​hagiographical figure of the Servant of Eternal Wisdom in Suso’s writing and the many sisters described in the Dominican Schwesternbücher, bear witness to the continuing importance of the imitatio Christi in the devotional life of fourteenth-​century Germany. More than this, the somatic piety and exemplary effluvia shed by the Dominican mystics of Germany, whether blood or tears, opened a space in speculative mysticism for the asceticism that Eckhart and those like him had viewed with such great suspicion. Ultimately, the suffering bodies described and inscribed in German Dominican spiritual literature give witness to a complex “hermeneutics of embodiment,” where the reader discovered their own true identity in Christ as revealed by the blood and tears shed by the hagiographical exemplars. This process is made most explicit by the introduction to Suso’s Leben, where the text and author himself are asserted to be one: Hie vahet an daz erste tail dizz bueches, daz da haisset der Súse (“Here begins the first part of this book, that is called Suso”).13 The Exemplar and Schwesternbücher thus offer more than simple didactic models for extreme devotional exercises. Instead, by reading these treatises the ascetic potential inherent to the bodies described in the text could be activated by the reader, ultimately assisting the spiritual beginner on their own journey towards inward suffering and detachment in imitation of Christ. To chart this process the following chapter is divided into three parts. The first part begins by briefly tracing the role of flagellation and corporeal discipline in the exemplary and instructional literature of the Dominican Order. This section examines how the blood and tears shed by the earliest saints of the Order provided a model for the corporeal practices of the Dominicans into the fourteenth century, as well as how this literature contributed to the hagiographical formation of a shared Dominican identity in Christ. The second part gives an overview of the role that flagellation and flowing blood 10  Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 121 (original emphases). 11  Largier, In Praise of the Whip, 35–​71.

12  Suso, Heinrich Seuse’s Deutsche Schriften, ed. Bihlmeyer and translated by Frank Tobin in Henry Suso, The Exemplar. 13  Suso, Heinrich Seuse’s Deutsche Schriften, 7. Suso, The Exemplar, 63 gives as translation: “Here begins the first part of the book on the life of a Dominican named Suso,” which elides this important conflation of author and text.

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played in the writing of Dominican women in fourteenth-​century Germany. This section outlines how these didactic accounts of corporeal discipline promoted the performative deconstruction of the self against the backdrop of a growing obsession in medieval Germany with the mystical significance of blood and suffering. The third part concludes by examining how this tradition of corporeal mysticism is combined by Henry Suso in the Exemplar with Eckhart’s doctrine of detachment. This section describes how the performative asceticism attributed to the Servant in Suso’s Leben gives rise to the hermeneutics of embodiment inherent in the treatise, by examining the role ascetic practice plays in the exemplary relationship between the Servant and his spiritual daughter Elsbeth Stagel.

Models for Corporeal Punishment in Dominican Literature

The Order of Preachers, founded in 1216 by Dominic of Caleruega, an Augustinian canon of Osma, had a long tradition of discipline and flagellation, which began with the saintly founder himself.14 The performative asceticism of the fourteenth-​century German Dominicans must be understood as part of this tradition. According to the testimony given by John of Spain on August 10th at the canonization process of Dominic in 1233, the Order’s founder regularly took “the discipline with a triple chain, particularly at night, either giving it to himself or getting someone else to give it to him, and there are many brethren who can attest this, who beat him at his request.”15 A close companion of Dominic during times of illness reported at the canonization process that “he often said that it was his desire to be whipped and cut up for the name of Christ, and finally to die.”16 Similarly, Rudolph of Faenza in the midst of passages describing Dominic’s fervent devotion to prayer and fasting maintained that “the blessed father wore an iron chain next to the skin,” which Rudolph claimed for himself as a “great treasure” until ordered to hand it to Dominic’s successor as Master of the Order, Jordan of Saxony.17 Because of such practices, the hagiography of the Order stressed that Dominic was “imitator of the Lord” (domini imitator), and drew a direct connection between their founder and the suffering Christ who preached the message of his Gospel whilst on earth.18 As a result, physical discipline was eventually incorporated into the Customs and Regulations of the Order in the form of communal flagellation at chapter meetings, as well as after Matins and Compline, oftentimes accompanying the airing of grievances.19 Thomas of Cantimpré, a regular canon of Liège who joined the Order in 1232, thus saw fit to praise the Dominicans in his Defence of the Mendicants, composed during the bitter 14  For a discussion of the Dominican tradition of discipline, see Tinsley, The Scourge and the Cross, 13–​47; Ames, Righteous Persecution, 147–​59. 15  Tugwell, Early Dominicans, 73. 16  Tugwell, Early Dominicans, 75. 17  Tugwell, Early Dominicans, 76.

18  On the tradition of imitating Christ amongst the Dominican friars, see Newhauser, “Jesus as the First Dominican?” 19  Ames, Righteous Persecution, 153–​55.

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controversy between the mendicant and secular masters at the University of Paris in the middle of the thirteenth century, for practising “community life with its accusations and beating and fasting,” and for almost daily taking discipline after Compline.20 The Dominican brethren were also exhorted in their instructional literature to take up the communal practice of discipline. In the De modo orandi (“Ways of Prayer”), an instructional guidebook for the Dominican fraternity on how to pray correctly by following the example of their founder, the third way of prayer involves taking the discipline. The treatise explains that “this is why the whole Order determined that all the brethren, out of respect for the memory of St. Dominic’s example, should take the discipline on their bare backs with sticks of wood every ferial day after Compline, saying the Miserere or the De Profundis.”21 The taking of the discipline in this treatise is also linked to the seventh manner of prayer, in which Dominic is transformed through rapture into a prophet-​like figure.22 Other hagiographical witnesses to the Dominican commitment to corporeal punishment and discipline exist beyond Dominic. This is in keeping with the general thrust of the earliest instructional literature of the Order which sought to emphasize that, despite his privileged status as founder, Dominic was simply one of the exemplary brethren that friars were called to emulate.23 Composed between 1250 and 1260 at the request of the General Chapter of the Order, for instance, Gérard de Frachet’s Vitae fratrum (“Lives of the Brethren”) places exemplary tales from Dominic’s life alongside those of numerous other friars who lived during the earliest days of the Dominican movement.24 The primary purpose of this treatise was to edify the Dominican community by ensuring that the members of the Order learnt to emulate the virtues of their illustrious predecessors. To this end, it was one of the many pieces customarily read at meal times. The final part of the Vitae fratrum presents a didactic catalogue of virtues practised by the early friars for the instruction of the contemporary brethren. This section, consisting of twenty-​three chapters which detail the “religious fervor which pervaded the Order in the days of our holy fathers Dominic and Jordan,” includes several accounts of the flagellation engaged in by the earliest Dominicans.25 The opening chapter of the fourth part accordingly narrates in a description of the earliest brethren’s celebration of Compline how certain friars “after rigidly examining their consciences … disciplined themselves with rods and scourges so that the sound could be heard some way off.”26 Another chapter describes the disciplining of a friar who had accepted an inappropriate gift by Brother Reginald of Cremona before a gathering of the brethren.27 As Humbert of 20  Tugwell, Early Dominicans, 133. 21  Tugwell, Early Dominicans, 96.

22  Tugwell, Early Dominicans, 100.

23  On Dominic’s role in wider Dominican hagiography, see van Engen, “Dominic and the Brothers.” 24  Gérard de Frachet, Lives of the Brethren.

25  Gérard de Frachet, Lives of the Brethren, 133. 26  Gérard de Frachet, Lives of the Brethren, 134.

27  Gérard de Frachet, Lives of the Brethren, 137–​38.

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Romans remarks in his Expositio in constitutiones (“Commentary on the Constitutions”), composed sometime between 1263 and 1277, such discipline and the penitential use of pain ultimately brought one closer to Christ and the community of apostles who the Order sought to emulate. Humbert consequently maintains that if communal discipline was most appropriate for the apostles it must be even more proper for the Order. The chastisement of the body, he concludes, was a necessary means to avoid sinning in the flesh, for all temptations flee before “the discipline of rods.”28 The shedding of blood and tears also played important roles in the hagiography of the Dominican Order, and was closely linked to the tradition of discipline. Dominic was a particularly lachrymose saint, and he is often depicted in the early writing of the Order weeping and crying aloud in flights of affective rapture. The prologue to the De modo orandi, for instance, describes how during prayer Dominic would “dissolve utterly into weeping, [which] so kindled the fervour of his good will that his mind could not prevent his bodily members from showing unmistakeable signs of his devotion.”29 As such, in the instructions which Dominic imparts to the brethren appended to the second method of prayer, the founder of the Order exhorts the friars to weep not only for themselves, but also for all sinners.30 Although the descriptions of Dominic’s discipline in either the De modo orandi or the Order’s hagiography rarely include reference to the saint bleeding, blood does emerge in Jordan of Saxony’s description of Dominic’s desire for martyrdom. Jordan relates in his Vita of the Order’s founder that when confronted by heretics during the Albigensian crusades, Dominic once said that: “I should have asked you [i.e. the heretics] not to strike me down quickly and kill me all at once, but to prolong my martyrdom by mutilating my limbs one by one, and then to display the mangled bits of my body before my eyes, and then to gouge out my eyes and either leave what remained of my body wallowing in its own blood or finish me off completely; a slow martyrdom like that would win me a much finer crown.”31 Blood and the desire for martyrdom are noticeable motifs in the hagiography of other prominent Dominicans. The accounts of the second saint of the Order, Peter Martyr of Verona, for instance, are replete with gory details of his assassination. The version of Peter’s life given in the Legenda aurea (“Golden Legend”) of the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine (ca. 1230–​1298) describes the assassination of the Martyr by heretics with a blow upon the head by a woodman’s billhook which glutted itself upon Peter’s blood.32 After the martyrdom, Peter’s blood forever remained upon the path where it was spilled and even became the source for several miraculous healings.33 Images of the saint in narrative and non-​narrative artwork further heighten the importance of this spilt blood in the symbolism of the Martyr by depicting the saint with the billhook stuck firmly in 28  Cited in Ames, Righteous Persecution, 155. 29  Tugwell, Early Dominicans, 94. 30  Tugwell, Early Dominicans, 96.

31  Jordan of Saxony, Libellus 4:34, in Jordan of Saxony, trans. Tugwell, 9. 32  Legenda aurea, in Golden Legend, vol. 1, 258.

33  Legenda aurea, in Golden Legend, vol. 1, 265–​66.

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his still bleeding wound, or showing Peter after the attack writing the Credo upon the earth in his own dying blood. Furthermore, Peter Martyr’s fate at the hand of the heretics as described in the Order’s hagiography consciously recalled the suffering of Christ’s Passion.34 Donald Prudlo thus argues that Peter Martyr, even more than Francis of Assisi, who was famed for his assumption of the stigmata following a vision in 1224 of the crucified Christ as a Seraph on Mount la Verna, deserves to be understood as an alter Christus (another Christ), as he died bleeding for the salvation of the Christian community.35 The tears and blood of the Dominican saints thus provided the supreme didactic models, alongside the earliest brethren of the Order, for the ascetic flagellation of the fourteenth-​ century German Dominicans. This was especially true for the Dominican sisters, whose exemplary and visionary accounts of performative asceticism are discussed below.

Somatic Piety in the Dominican Schwesternbücher and Offenbarungen

The Schwesternbücher and Offenbarungen composed by the Dominican sisters of fourteenth-​century Germany contain numerous didactic tales meant to impart the importance of flagellation for the spiritual development of their communities. These treatises, often composed in the vernacular, recounted the exemplary lives of holy and saintly sisters who belonged to the convents of Germany. Dating from the end of the thirteenth century and into the middle of the fourteenth century, these self-​composed vitae from a diverse range of Second Order Dominican convents reflect the practical and spiritual concerns of these female communities. Convents which have passed down Schwesternbücher include Adelhausen, Engelthal, Gotteszell, Katherinenthal bei Diessenhofen, Kirchberg, Töss, Unterlinden, and Weiler.36 As Gertrud Jaron Lewis argues, the Schwesternbücher are distinctive insofar as they occupy their own unique genre modelled upon hagiographical precedents, such as the Vitae fratrum, that reveal “a markedly non-​authoritarian approach [to spirituality] in as much as these female authors invite the reader and listener to participate in their thinking and feeling.”37 Situated within the larger context of a Dominican literature about discipline, flagellation, and corporeal punishment, the Schwesternbücher and Offenbarungen are often understood to offer advice for the “practical mysticism”38 that responded to the speculative mysticism advocated by the Dominican friars of the fourteenth-​century Rhineland and the growing obsession in medieval Germany with the mystical significance of blood.39 34  Legenda aurea, in Golden Legend, vol. 1, 259.

35  Prudlo, The Martyred Inquisitor, 177. See also Diana Hiller’s contribution in this volume (­chap. 8) on the artistic portrayal of Peter Martyr, where the author proposes that Peter Martyr is portrayed in some artworks as an alter Christus.

36  For a list of available editions and for the manuscripts, see Lewis, By Women, for Women, 286–​91. 37  Lewis, By Women, for Women, 55.

38  Ringler, Viten-​und Offenbarungsliteratur, 14.

39  On the ties between the mystical literature of Dominican women and its relation to friars such as Meister Eckhart, see Leonard P.  Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal, 17–​21; Lewis, By Women,

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In the opening chapters of the Vitae sororum (“Lives of the Sisters”) of the convent of Unterlinden in Colmar, one finds a striking description of the fervour with which the sisters incorporated physical discipline and flagellation into their devotional practice: At the end of matins and compline, the sisters remained together in the choir and prayed until they received a sign, upon which they began the most rapturous form of worship. Some tormented themselves with genuflections while praising the power of God. Others, consumed with the fire of divine love, could not hold back their tears, which were accompanied by rapturous crying voices …. Finally, others tortured their flesh by maltreating it daily in the most violent fashion, some with blows from rods, others with whips equipped with three or four knotted straps, others with iron chains, and still others by means of scourges arrayed with thorns.40

The sisters routinely included flagellation into their liturgical observances, gathering together after services and prayer to mortify their bodies “with all manner of scourging instruments until their blood flowed.”41 A similar description of the community of Töss occurs in the opening of the Schwesternbuch of that convent, attributed to its prioress Elsbeth Stagel. The author describes how the sisters “took very extreme measures of discipline at the appointed hour, so that often, a dozen of them would assemble before the chapter house and beat themselves so soundly that wondrous scenes of suffering ensued.”42 Like at Unterlinden the variety of instruments employed by the sisters of Töss were diverse; “some beat themselves with iron chains, some with flails, and some with thorny branches.”43 Both accounts seem heavily influenced by similar descriptions of communal flagellation from Gérard de Frachet’s Vitae fratrum and the prologue of the Töss Schwesternbuch even includes a genealogical survey of exemplary Dominican saints and friars—​including Dominic, Peter Martyr, and Thomas Aquinas—​which places the spiritual practices of the sisters of the community alongside those of the illustrious members of the Order’s past.44 Corporeal punishment was thus one of the spiritual practices engaged in by the Dominican women of late medieval Germany which they shared with the entire Order, alongside other monastic virtues such as chastity, poverty, and obedience. Self-​castigation and physical discipline also formed part of individual and private devotional practice for the Dominican sisters of late medieval Germany. In this respect, once again, the sisters of the Schwesternbücher resemble the exemplary friars found in Dominican instructional and hagiographical literature. Gertrud of Colmar, the Vitae sororum of Unterlinden relates, every day “used to beat herself with very for Women, 186–​93. McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, 297, correctly downplays the influence of the Rhenish mystics on Dominican women and argues instead that “the influence moved more in the other direction.” 40  Vitae sororum, trans. in Largier, In Praise of the Whip, 36. 41  Vitae sororum, trans. in Largier, In Praise of the Whip, 36.

42  Töss Schwesterbuch, trans. in Tinsley, The Scourge and the Cross, 44. 43  Töss Schwesterbuch, trans. in Tinsley, The Scourge and the Cross, 44. 44  Tinsley, The Scourge and the Cross, 15–​18.

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sharp disciplines,”45 whilst Agnes of Ochsenstein, in order to “satisfy the fervour of her spirit, which was always seething with the fire of divine love … tied three different kinds of girdle tightly round herself next to the skin,” including one ringed with sharp iron nails that constantly tore at her flesh.46 Blood and bodily mortification similarly manifested in the sisters’ ecstatic visionary lives. In the Schwesternbuch of the convent of Gotteszell near Württemberg, for instance, it is recorded that a certain sister Adelheid, who desired “to become aware and experience how great the pain was that our Lord felt when the crown of thorns was lowered onto his divine head,” was visited by an angel in bed one evening who “beat her so bitterly that, in quite patient and disciplined voice, she cried out because of the great and miserably unbearable pain.”47 Forever after, the author of the Schwesternbuch relates, Adelheid exhibited upon her head “deep furrows and marks that had remained there from the bitter blows.”48 Likewise, the famed visionary and mystic Margaret Ebner of Maria Medingen near Dillingen, in her Offenbarungen, relates her desire for the stigmata in emulation of Francis of Assisi.49 Ebner received several visions of Christ’s “five holy signs of love,” which became a source for her devotional prayers, and she felt a special connection to the suffering Christ.50 The empathetic link between Margaret and Jesus was so great that the mystic recorded that she could not hear the Easter liturgy without crying out in pain and misery.51 Such expressions of somatic piety reveal the extent to which the blood mysticism (Blutmystik) of late medieval Germany, which was ultimately rooted in the eucharistic liturgy and its associated cults, had influenced Dominican women.52 For example, consumption during Mass of the consecrated host, identified with the bleeding body of Christ, led to a spiritual communion with Christ when the wafer was ingested; a rite with great spiritual force even after access to the Eucharist became restricted to officiating priests in the later Middle Ages.53 This moment became a central element in medieval women’s spirituality, alongside the feast of Corpus Christi—​partly instigated by the efforts of the Dominican Order—​and devotion to Christ’s stigmata.54 The devotion to the blood and body of Christ reached its apex in the phenomenon of miraculous bleeding wafers, widely attested in Germany during the fifteenth century, which were often the 45  Tugwell, Early Dominicans, 422. 46  Tugwell, Early Dominicans, 418.

47  Gotteszell Schwesternbuch, trans. in Lewis, By Women, for Women, 82. 48  Gotteszell Schwesternbuch, trans. in Lewis, By Women, for Women, 82. 49  Ebner, Offenbarungen, in Major Works, 127. 50  Ebner, Offenbarungen, in Major Works, 130. 51  Ebner, Offenbarungen, in Major Works, 120.

52  On the development of blood mysticism and its relationship to the Eucharist, see Bynum, Wonderful Blood; Rubin, Corpus Christi. 53  Rubin, Corpus Christi, 24.

54  Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 122–​24.

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cause for lengthy polemics by Dominican friars eager to promote Thomas Aquinas’s theories concerning the doctrine of transubstantiation and belief in the substantial nature of the host’s transformation into flesh and blood.55 As part of the general trend towards the mystical veneration of blood, the Man of Sorrows (Schmerzensmann) became a highly popular figure of devotion amongst the German Dominican sisters, who sought to emulate the suffering (liden) and torture (marter) of Christ.56 As already noted, suffering in imitation of the Passion served as the primary means for women in the Middle Ages to imitate Christ in their own bodies, and two key examples from the Schwesternbücher are discussed by Gertrud Jaron Lewis. The Schwesternbuch of the convent of Katherinenthal bei Diessenhofen, she explains, reports that a sister named Hilti Brúmsin, whilst “praying before a picture of our Lord standing at the pillar [of his flagellation],” felt such compassion for Christ that “all her veins and limbs were inundated with such great pain and bitterness that she experientially experienced the passion our Lord had suffered when he stood at the pillar.”57 Lewis also describes how, in a vision, a certain sister Agnes of the convent of Unterlinden beheld how Christ’s tormentors “pulled him from one court of justice to another, mocking him, giving him a box on the ear and frequent blows,” and how “they spat into his face, crowned him with thorns, and scourged him with sharp instruments until blood flowed.”58 The ascetic suffering of the sisters was the principal means through which they united with the divinity in the form of the crucified Christ, whose Passion they re-​ enacted meditatively, or with the scourge and the whip. Such visions, therefore, reveal the extent to which Christ’s pain and humiliation acted as the supreme exemplar for the women in the Dominican convents of Germany, just as they had for the exemplary friars they were also called to emulate. Ultimately, the main spiritual purpose of flagellation in the Dominican female communities of fourteenth-​century Germany was the performative deconstruction of the self. Niklaus Largier describes how the punishment of the flesh through flagellation acted as a strategy that both affirmed and denied the flagellant’s subjectivity through the mortification of the body. Flagellation, he argues, “evokes and lays bare an ‘I’ that is simultaneously negated in favour of an overarching continuity of reconciliation between humanity and God.”59 This process reveals in its theatrical asceticism the connection between humankind and the suffering Christ whose resurrection promises the redemption of sinful flesh.60 To this end, claims Largier, corporeal discipline and punishment of the kind practised by the Dominican sisters is a “gestural practice” that reveals “a chain culminating in the never fully graspable,” as each whipping or scourging in imitation of Christ “points simultaneously to another gesture” that embodies the “suffering that in 55  Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 88–​89.

56  Lewis, By Women, for Women, 106. 57  Lewis, By Women, for Women, 106. 58  Lewis, By Women, for Women, 106. 59  Largier, In Praise of the Whip, 171. 60  Largier, In Praise of the Whip, 56.

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the eyes of God is both the most individual and the most universal.”61 In this way, the rigorous corporeal discipline described in the Schwesternbücher and the ecstatic visions of the bleeding Christ described in the Offenbarungen is in dialogue with the speculative mysticism of the German friars, such as Meister Eckhart, who promoted an apophatic theology based upon the continual affirmation and denial of the attributes of God.62 Performative asceticism through the shedding of blood thus resulted in a divine union of the flesh, in the same manner that, for Eckhart, true understanding of God through negations and affirmations united the soul to the ineffable divine intellect. The dialectic deconstruction of the self through suffering and physical discipline amongst the Dominican women of late medieval Germany is best revealed by the ascetic exercises of Elsbeth von Oye of the convent of Oettenbach in Zürich.63 In her Offenbarungen, preserved in a single manuscript written in her own hand, Elsbeth chronicles her attempts to relive the suffering of Christ’s Passion through the mortification and mutilation of her own body. Elsbeth records regularly employing a scourge to mortify her flesh until her blood flowed, as well as tying a cross with protruding nails to her bare back. “Sometimes I wore my garment so long,” she writes, “that it rotted and would no longer hang on my body, and then I felt such discomfort from the garment and belt with which I bound my cross to myself that I cannot describe it.”64 Of particular importance for Elsbeth was the role of blood in her suffering. As a spiritual voice instructs Elsbeth in one of her many visions, “just as my divine nature was made man in the person of my son, thus your human nature will be made divine in the painful agony of your cross.”65 By sharing in the suffering of Christ’s Passion, Elsbeth was able to transcend her own human nature. The voice thus declared to Elsbeth that “my blood blooms in you and your blood blooms in me.”66 The more extreme Elsbeth’s suffering became, the more Elsbeth’s individual nature fell away until it was subsumed into that of the divinity. As Christ revealed to Elsbeth, in language highly reminiscent of Meister Eckhart, “you are the purest, most unified, most similar, most natural within itself creature that ever flowed from my fatherly heart. And that is why I never cease to suck out the innermost inner arteries of your soul.”67 Elsbeth’s corporeal discipline thus leads her to the assumption of a shared nature with the living God through the intermingling of their blood, ultimately resulting in a kind of fluid embodiment of Christ. Through the divine transfusion brought about by the theatrical castigation of her flesh which Elsbeth describes, her subjective being gives way for the being of God. This fluid embodiment is ultimately the aim to which every Dominican flagellant described in the Schwesternbücher aspired. How this 61  Largier, In Praise of the Whip, 57.

62  For a detailed analysis of apophatic discourse, see Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying. 63  Tinsley, The Scourge and the Cross, 49–​85.

64  Elsbeth von Oye, Offenbarungen, trans. in Tinsley, The Scourge and the Cross, 50. 65  Elsbeth von Oye, Offenbarungen, trans. in Tinsley, The Scourge and the Cross, 50. 66  Elsbeth von Oye, Offenbarungen, trans. in Tinsley, The Scourge and the Cross, 50. 67  Elsbeth von Oye, Offenbarungen, trans. in Tinsley, The Scourge and the Cross, 51.

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programme of performative asceticism is related to Eckhart’s notion of detachment in Henry Suso’s Exemplar remains to be seen.

Henry Suso’s Exemplar: Flagellation and Blood as a Hermeneutic of Embodiment

Henry Suso, also known as Heinrich von Berg or by the diminutive Amandus (“the sweet one”) was born ca. 1295 near the Bodensee (Lake Constance), possibly in the free imperial city of Überlingen.68 He was admitted to the Dominican priory of Konstanz at the age of thirteen and studied theology and philosophy at the convent of Strasbourg between 1319 and 1321 and then again at the Dominican studium generale in Cologne ca. 1327 under Meister Eckhart. He acted as the lector to the priory of Konstanz, where he was also possibly prior between 1330 and 1334. In 1339 Suso, along with the rest of the friars of the convent, was expelled from Konstanz until 1342 as a result of tensions between Pope John XXII and the Holy Roman Emperor. Suso was transferred to the convent in Ulm in 1348, where he remained until his death in 1366. During this last period of his life Suso cultivated a vast network of spiritual connections, including the Gottesfreunde (Friends of God) and several Dominican nuns throughout Germany where he seems to have had pastoral responsibilities. The most important of these was Elsbeth Stagel, prioress of the convent of Töss. Suso is most well known for his Exemplar, consisting of four vernacular treatises known as the Leben Seuses (“The Life of Suso”), Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit (“The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom”), Das Büchlein der Wahrheit (“The Little Book of Truth”), and a short book of letters. Suso also composed a number of sermons, a cycle of one hundred devotional prayers on Christ’s Passion, and a Latin translation of Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit titled the Horologium sapientiae (“Clock of Wisdom”).69 The treatises which Suso composed for the Exemplar, especially the opening Leben, are best understood as fitting into the genre of writing that Richard Kieckhefer has termed “auto-​hagiographical.”70 This is because the Leben is not simply a biography of Suso’s life, but instead a consciously legendary presentation of major events in Suso’s life, often modelled upon hagiographical precedents, that had a didactic purpose. In this regard the Leben is similar to the Schwesternbücher. It would be far too simple, however, to write this off on an apparent feminine quality in Suso’s mysticism—​although, as Bynum argues, Suso’s writing is feminine “if we use the term feminine … to mean affective, exuberant, lyrical, and filled with images.”71 Instead, Suso’s Leben must be read as an exercise in exemplarity that forms part of the continuous tradition of exemplary Dominican spiritual literature discussed above. To this end, Jeffrey F. Hamburger remarks that the Exemplar “offers the reader a model of the religious life in the form of an extended meditation between exemplars and experience construed, in absolute 68  For the life of Henry Suso, see McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism, 197–​204. 69  Suso, Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours.

70  Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 6; Tobin, introduction to The Exemplar, 41. 71  Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 105 (original emphasis).

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terms, as the relation between the Logos and the self.”72 This is especially salient, as the manuscript tradition of the Exemplar also bears witness to a series of images accompanying the text, possibly commissioned by Suso himself, which had instructional and devotional significance.73 In the prologue to the Exemplar, Suso explains that “the purpose of this book is to afford refreshment and relief for a detached spirit” and “the pictures of heavenly scenes, which precede or follow, serve the purpose of allowing a religiously minded person, when he leaves the world of the senses and enters into himself, always to have something to draw him away from this false world … and upward toward our beloved God.”74 The images in the Exemplar thus serve a twofold purpose. They not only authenticate the spiritual authority of Suso and his exemplary alter-​ego, the Servant of Eternal Wisdom, but also serve a pedagogical function that aims to bring a beginner to the heights of intellectual union. The Leben itself complements this aim by presenting a tri-​part narrative of the Servant’s conversion from a spiritual beginner to a true disciple and, finally, into an adept or master of detachment.75 The first book of the Leben thus outlines the ascetic practices of the Servant, as well as his move towards true detachment through the abandoning of such practices; whilst the second book of the Leben describes the journey of the Servant’s spiritual daughter, Elsbeth Stagel, towards detachment through inner suffering. This second book contains a number of letters composed by Suso for Elsbeth on the nature of detachment and bears witness to Eckhart’s influence upon his student. As detailed in the early chapters of the Leben, many of the Servant’s sufferings were self-​inflicted. The Servant crafted a wooden cross with thirty barbed nails that he “fastened … to his bare back on the skin between his shoulders” that “rubbed his back open where the bones were, making him bloody and torn.”76 The Servant also wore “an undergarment of hair made secretly with thongs worked in to which a hundred and fifty nails had been attached,” as well as the standard penitential iron chain.77 He whipped himself with a leather scourge, covered in brass tacks, including one shaped like a hook that ripped out any caught flesh, which he used to scourge himself every morning until “his fellow religious became aware of it.”78 As a result of all these frightful practices, the Life relates, the Servant’s “feet became diseased, his legs swelled as though he were getting dropsy. His knees were bloody and open, his hips full of scratches from the undergarment of hair, his back covered with wounds from the cross. His body was wasted because of immoderate fasting, his mouth parched from not drinking, and his hands shook from weakness. In such torment he spent day and night.”79 72  Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 233.

73  Colledge and Marler, “Mystical Pictures in the Suso Exemplar.” 74  Suso, Leben, in The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 58.

75  On the structure and purpose of Suso’s Leben, see Blank, “Heinrich Seuses ‘Vita,’ ” 293. 76  Suso, Leben, in The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 89. 77  Suso, Leben, in The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 87.

78  Suso, Leben, in The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 89–​90. 79  Suso, Leben, in The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 92.

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The Servant begins to move away from his earlier emphasis on physical discipline, however, after a vision of Christ informs him that the nature of his suffering must change.80 In this section, Suso reveals the naivety of the Servant’s commitment to corporeal punishment, and instead interior suffering is revealed to be the primary path to mystical enlightenment and union. The purpose of such inner suffering, Christ informs the Servant, is to be “tried in all things to your very ground.”81 This occurs through the vilification of the Servant’s good name amongst his fellow brethren and the townspeople, and even through complete abandonment by God in times of hardship.82 The Servant is subsequently accused of adultery, heresy, and of poisoning a town’s well. Finally, the Servant moves towards a desire for universal suffering and exclaims that “I desire from the boundless abyss of my heart all the sufferings and grief that I have ever experienced … and all the hidden and open suffering and sorrow that I or any other afflicted person ever experienced.”83 With this universal suffering the Servant’s will is annihilated and a voice from heaven instructs him that by emulating Christ the Servant has become worthy of “the power of wishing in heaven and on earth,” “divine peace,” and “oneness of essence” with God in full detachment.84 Such suffering thus leads to the abandonment of the senses in spiritual detachment that Eckhart had outlined in his sermons and treatises. The corporeal and ascetic discipline of the Servant is transcended, the flow of blood ceases and true detachment is achieved, in keeping with Eckhart’s insistence that ascetic “ways” ultimately distract the mystic and misdirect them away from true union with divinity. The purpose of the descriptions of the Servant’s corporeal punishment and flagellation need to be read against this goal of transcendence. As such, the exemplary interplay between the Servant and his spiritual daughter, Elsbeth Stagel, in the Leben reveals how Suso had intended his Exemplar to be received by the Dominican sisters of fourteenth-​century Germany who appear to be the treatise’s primary audience.85 This is not to suggest that the images in the Exemplar have no didactic purpose. As Suso explains in his prologue, the Leben “describes by concrete example the life of a beginner and demonstrates in a veiled manner how a beginner should order his inner and outer self according to God’s dear will.”86 Yet, as Hamburger notes, although Suso’s treatise ostensibly seems to indicate that the inclusion of images is “a necessary concession to the novice,” in practice such imagery was included as a spiritual reminder for the advanced soul.87 The imagery that abounds throughout the Exemplar is thus more than simply instructive. The descriptions of the Servant’s asceticism instead contributed 80  Suso, Leben, in The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 100. 81  Suso, Leben, in The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 105. 82  Suso, Leben, in The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 101. 83  Suso, Leben, in The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 127. 84  Suso, Leben, in The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 129.

85  Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 262–​67. 86  Suso, Leben, in The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 58. 87  Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 232.

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to a complex interchange between body and text that was always aimed directly to the already detached. This is especially evident from the most famous of the Servant’s ascetic practices—​his decision to carve the divine monogram IHS into his chest with a stylus.88 Moved by his love and desire for Eternal Wisdom, the androgynous personification of Christ that he had married at the beginning of the Leben, the Servant in a “state of fervent earnestness … threw aside his scapular, bared his breast, and took a stylus in hand.” Using the stylus, the Servant carved the divine monogram on the flesh before his heart, which caused blood to gush from the wound and cover his chest. “Because of his burning love,” the Leben relates, “he enjoyed seeing this and hardly noticed the pain.” This single act of devotion, the carving by the Servant of the divine monogram onto his chest, served as the site of interaction between the reader of the Exemplar and Suso himself. The monogram is found in certain of the manuscripts of the Exemplar in thick, blood-​red, rubrication—​figuratively dripping blood from the vellum. Just as with a stylus the Servant had forever marked his flesh with Christ’s name, serving as a conduit for devotion to the blood of Christ, so did the stylus of the scribe mark (even wound) the vellum of the manuscript which, the incipit instructs us, is actually Suso itself.89 Marlene Villalobos Hennessy, in her examination of a fifteenth-​century Carthusian manuscript of the English mystic Richard Rolle’s Incendium amoris (“Fire of Love”), charts how such inscriptions contribute to a “hermeneutics of embodiment,” where “books and images are invested with indwelling personality” through the interweaving of author and text.90 The hermeneutics of embodiment is thus “a spiritual encounter taking on physical, written form.”91 Such a technique reveals what Ernst Robert Curtius refers to as the “religious metaphorics of the book,” where parchment and flesh are merged together and writing and wounding are synonymous.92 The inscription of the divine monogram is therefore a kind of literal or figural stigmata, which links Suso to the suffering Christ, even as the bleeding monograms reveal the figure of the Servant embodied in the pages of the Exemplar. The complex interplay between the identity of the Exemplar and its author is further reinforced by the intertextual evidence that Suso himself wanted to emphasize the exemplary nature of the wound upon the Servant’s body and the wound described and inscribed in the Exemplar. The final section of the Leben relates Elsbeth’s desire to emulate the Servant and inscribe Christ’s name upon her own chest. Instead, the Servant instructs her to embroider a cloth with the monogram in red, which Elsbeth could hold to her chest in imitation of the Servant’s self-​inflicted and bleeding wound.93 88  Suso, Leben, in The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 70–​71. 89  See note 15.

90  Hennessy, “Aspects of Blood Piety,” 190. Rozenski, “Authority and Exemplarity in Henry Suso and Richard Rolle” points to a number of commonalities in Suso and Rolle’s construction of embodied suffering. 91  Hennessy, “Aspects of Blood Piety,” 186.

92  Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 311. 93  Suso, Leben, in The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 173–​74.

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After doing so, Elsbeth also embroidered other pieces of cloth with the red IHS and distributed them amongst the Servant’s other followers, which is illustrated in one of the manuscript illuminations of the Exemplar.94 Thus, the manuscript copies of the Exemplar which bear the bleeding monogram could stand in for Suso in the same way that the wound of the Servant became present for Elsbeth through the embroidered reproduction. For Hamburger, therefore, the “imitatio Christi is recast in ritualized institutionalized forms, governed by texts and enacted through images … Suso’s example mediates between Stagel and Christ; she reproduces his practice, without re-​enacting it.”95 In the act of reading the Exemplar, the book as Suso actually performs in the mind of its reader the flagellation and scourging which it describes. The Exemplar, wounded with the divine monogram IHS, bleeds for the reader, just as the Servant described in its pages bleeds out of his devotion to, and imitation of, Christ. Just as the readers of the Schwesternbücher shared in the devotions of the sisters described within, the exemplary effluvia of the Servant engage the reader, affectively move the reader, and are ultimately and most importantly, brought to life by the reader, in a complex interweaving of text and author, imagined and corporeal body.

Conclusion

The gestural practice of corporeal discipline, by its performative nature, implies a constant witness to the connection between human flesh and the incarnate body of Christ. In this way the shedding of blood and tears contributed towards an understanding of the self grounded in the suffering body of Christ. The Dominican spiritual literature of fourteenth-​century Germany is no different, insofar as it is modelled upon exemplary precedents such as the Vitae fratrum or the De modo orandi that saw the asceticism of the earliest Dominicans as emulating Christ and the apostolic community. The whipping and scourging in imitation of Christ by the sisters described in the Schwesternbücher, as well as the ascetic excesses of the Servant in Suso’s Exemplar, attest to the vitality of such models, even after friars like Meister Eckhart had condemned such practices as misguided and unnecessary for the truly detached. The ascetic literature produced by the Dominicans of Germany, instead, reveals how the performative deconstruction of the self, characteristic of flagellation, is complementary to the speculative mysticism of Eckhart and his disciples. For the Dominican sisters especially, the dialectically affirmed and denied flesh of the flagellant unites with the suffering body of Christ through the theatrical shedding of blood. This devotional tendency emerged most strongly in the suffering of the Servant in the Exemplar, a treatise which not only provided a hagiographical treatment of Suso’s own ascetic endeavours, but which also stood in for Suso himself. Through a complex hermeneutics of embodiment, the reader of Suso’s hagiographical account of his suffering came to identify the blood shed by the Servant when he carved the divine monogram onto his 94  Colledge and Marler, “Mystical Pictures in the Suso Exemplar,” 334–​38. 95  Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 263.

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chest, as well as the images and illustrations of this event contained in the manuscripts of the Exemplar, with the suffering body of Christ as it could be potentially activated in their own bodies. Moreover, like his contemporary Elsbeth von Oye, Henry Suso’s self-​inflicted and bleeding wound involved a fluid embodiment of Christ, one which had an explicit didactic purpose. The Exemplar thus acted as a conduit between the reader, who aimed for spiritual detachment, and Suso’s ascetic emulation of Christ. As such, the Exemplar itself was a bleeding, suffering body which became a meditative departure point for the spiritual beginner on their own path towards inner suffering. The bloody monogram inscribed upon the chest of the suffering Servant and in the pages of the Exemplar itself ultimately shows how blood in the performative ascetic discourse of the German Dominicans came both to figure and inform the deconstruction of the self, which was necessary to realize one’s full identity in Christ. Nevertheless, Suso in keeping with Eckhart’s insistence that detachment can never be achieved through obsessive and egotistical emphasis on devotional practices, maintained that such performative asceticism was appropriate only for the spiritual beginner. Abstract The Schwesternbücher and Offenbarungen composed by fourteenth-​century German Dominican nuns and the “auto-​hagiographical” Exemplar of the friar Henry Suso are replete with accounts of the performative deconstruction of the self through corporeal punishment and physical discipline. Suso, in particular, accentuated the usefulness of ascetic practice for the spiritual beginner and stressed the transcendence of outward suffering in order to be truly detached by suffering inwardly. The bleeding and lacerated bodies described and inscribed in the Exemplar and Schwesternbücher, however, are more than didactic models for extreme devotional exercises. Their lyrical descriptions of ascetic suffering instead witness a complex hermeneutics of embodiment, where the meditative reflection on the ascetic content of the text provides a departure point for the reader’s own mystical journey towards spiritual detachment, in keeping with longstanding Dominican traditions of exemplary literature and practice.

Author Biography Samuel Baudinette is currently a doctoral student at the University of Chicago Divinity School, in the History of Christianity programme, and is interested in the intersections between medieval philosophy, theology, and mysticism. He completed a Master’s degree in Religious Studies at Monash University in 2015, writing a thesis on silence in German Dominican theology and practice during the fourteenth century. Samuel is also the joint editor of a critical edition of Maurice of Kirkham’s twelfth-​ century treatise, the Contra Salomitas, with Constant Mews and Rina Lahav of Monash University, for a volume currently under contract with PIMS, Toronto.

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Bibliography Primary

de Frachet, Gérard. Lives of the Brethren of the Order of Preachers. Translated by Placid Conway. London: Blackfriars, 1955. Early Dominicans: Selected Writings. Translated by Simon Tugwell. New  York: Paulist, 1982. Ebner, Margaret. Major Works. Translated by Leonard P. Hindsley. New York: Paulist, 1993. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saint. Translated by William Granger Ryan. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Jordan of Saxony. On the Beginnings of the Order of Preachers. Edited and translated by Simon Tugwell. Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1982. Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense. Edited and translated by Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn. New York: Paulist, 1984. Porete, Marguerite. The Mirror of Simple Souls. Translated by Ellen L. Babinsky. New York: Paulist, 1993. Suso, Henry. The Exemplar, with Two Sermons. Translated by Frank Tobin. New  York: Paulist, 1989. ——​. Heinrich Seuse’s Deutsche Schriften. Edited by Karl Bihlmeyer. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1907. ——​. Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours. Translated by Edmund Colledge. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994. Secondary

Ames, Christine Caldwell. Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Blank, Walter. “Heinrich Seuses ‘Vita’: Literarische Gestaltung und pastorale Funktion seines Schrifttums.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 122 (1993): 285–​311. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone, 1991. ——​. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. ——​. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Colledge, Edmund, and J. C. Marler. “Mystical Pictures in the Suso Exemplar. MS Strasbourg 2929.” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 54 (1984): 293–​354. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated by William Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Hamburger, Jeffrey F.  The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Sanctity in Late Medieval Germany. New York: Zone, 1998. Hennessy, Marlene Villalobos. “Aspects of Blood Piety in a Late Medieval English Manuscript: London, British Library Additional 37049.” In History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, edited by Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger, 182–​91. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

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Hindsley, Leonard P.  The Mystics of Engelthal: Writings from a Medieval Monastery. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Kieckhefer, Richard. Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-​century Saints and their Religious Milieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Largier, Niklaus. In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal. Translated by Graham Harman. New York: Zone, 2007. Lewis, Gertrud Jaron. By Women, for Women, about Women: The Sister-​books of Fourteenth-​century Germany. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996. McGinn, Bernard. The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200–​1350. New York: Continuum, 1998. ——​. The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany. New York: Crossroads, 2005. ——​, ed. Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete. New York: Continuum, 1994. ——​. The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing. New York: Crossroads, 2001. Newhauser, Richard. “Jesus as the First Dominican? Reflections on a Sub-​theme in the Exemplary Literature of Some Thirteenth-​century Preachers.” In Christ among the Dominicans: Representations of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order of Preachers, edited by Kent Emery and Joseph Wawrykow, 238–​55. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998. Prudlo, Donald. The Martyred Inquisitor: The Life and Cult of Peter of Verona (†1252). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Ringler, Siegfried. Viten-​ und Offenbarungsliteratur in Frauenklöstern des Mittelalters: Quellen und Studien. Munich: Artemis, 1980. London: D. S. Brewer, 2013. Rozenski, Steven. “Authority and Exemplarity in Henry Suso and Richard Rolle.” In The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium VIII, Papers Read at Charney Manor, July 2011, edited by E. A. Jones, 93–​108. Cambridge: Brewer, 2013. Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Sells, Michael. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Senner, Walter. “Meister Eckhart’s Life, Training, Career, and Trial.” In A Companion to Meister Eckhart, edited by Jeremiah Hackett, 7–​84. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Tinsley, David F. The Scourge and the Cross: Ascetic Mentalities of the Later Middle Ages. Leuven: Peeters, 2010. Van Engen, John. “Dominic and the Brothers: Vitae as Life-​forming Exempla in the Order of Preachers.” In Christ among the Dominicans: Representations of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order of Preachers, edited by Kent Emery and Joseph Wawrykow, 7–​25. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998. Wegener, Lydia. “Eckhart and the World of Women’s Spirituality in the Context of the ‘Free Spirit’ and Marguerite Porete.” In A Companion to Meister Eckhart, edited by Jeremiah Hackett, 415–​43. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

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Chapter 7

“BLOODY BUSINESS”: PASSIONS AND REGULATION OF SANGUINITY IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S MACBETH AND KING LEAR

Karin Sellberg BLOOD WAS AN element that bridged the spiritual and physical world in early modern science and culture. It was the humor of the human body facilitating communication between flesh and soul, inner passions, and social and political interaction. It was also a substance that extended outside the individual body, connecting one corporeality to another in familial bonds of heredity and alliance; and the shared shedding of blood enabled affective relationality. In a recent article, Monique Scheer discusses the philosophical implications of the emphasis on “emotional practices” in studies of the history of emotions. She argues that affective responses are means to engage with the world, and to form contingencies between self and environment, body and mind. According to Scheer emotions are thus “practices,” or embodied processes, orchestrated through physical and social interaction, and this is how we can talk of them having a “history.”1 Scheer bases her analysis of emotions on practice theory, and the philosophy of Pierre Bourdieu, but she traces the general approach further back in time, to the writing of Baruch Spinoza and other seventeenth-​century metaphysical philosophers. Indeed, Scheer’s view of emotions corresponds closely with early modern perceptions of inner life, and the relationships between passions, spirit, and humors, especially the blood, and as this chapter will show, the idea of “emotional practices” thus provides a useful analytic framework to explore early modern conceptions of self and embodiment. This chapter investigates Scheer’s theory of emotions in relation to ideas of sanguinity and passions regulated by the blood in early modern medicine. As a point of reference, it explores the expression of these discourses in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear, both thought to have been first performed in 1606. Shakespeare’s oeuvre has often been used as a means to contextualize and make sense of early modern medical writing, and as Gail Kern Paster argues in Humoring the Body, Shakespeare’s oeuvre is extraordinarily rich in references to the physical processes of the body.2 Curiously, however, considering their general popularity in Shakespeare studies, Macbeth and King Lear appear relatively seldom in this literature. Their themes of sickness, death, and decay have been discussed at length in general Shakespeare criticism, but usually, as in Jonathan Gil Harris’s book Sick Economies, in relation to the decay of the state or 1  Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?,” 194. 2  Paster, Humoring the Body, 8.

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body politic, or as in John F. Danby’s classic study Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature, as an exploration of the decline and boundaries of “human nature.” As Paster argues, however, “human nature” in Shakespeare is always to some extent embodied,3 and Macbeth and King Lear locate their discussions of sickness and decay in specific body parts and bodily processes. In the following sections, I  will focus on these plays’ negotiation of sanguinity and intemperance of the blood. The first section investigates sanguinity as one of the principal “passions” of the body, and the practice of emotional and passionate balance. The second section explores the physical nature of blood, and the means by which its motions express themselves physically and emotionally. The two final sections discuss attempts to regulate the blood in Macbeth and King Lear, arguing that in these plays the maintenance of power and control is literally a “bloody business” (Mac 2.1.48).

Passions and Emotional Practices

According to Scheer’s theory of emotional practice, emotions are “something we do, not just have.”4 Her article is an attempt to “de-​naturalize emotions,” by emphasizing the social and cultural parameters through which they are experienced.5 This is coherent with seventeenth-​century theories of the “passions.” Conceptions of the passions inhabited a curious and interstitial space between theology and natural philosophy in early modern culture. They were simultaneously substances negotiated through the body and faculties controlled by the mind. As the Catholic priest and foremost philosopher of the passions in seventeenth-​century England, Thomas Wright, conceives of them in The Passions of the Minde in General (1604), passions are products of a complex negotiation between each person’s soul or agency, their body and its material components. Basing his theory on Galenic, or humoral medicine, alongside natural philosophy and theology, Wright argues that the passions are determined by highly individual and physically balanced humors, or fluids.6 However, these humors are simultaneously determined by each individual’s passions, “perturbations” of the mind or mental/​physical reactions to the outside world. This complex co-​determination positions “passions” alongside, but also in direct opposition to the body’s “actions,” mannerisms, and performance. They are the involuntary and simple natural responses to outside stimuli, which both humans and animals share: Three sorts of actions proceed from men’s souls: some are internal and immaterial, as the acts of our wits and wills; others be mere external and material, as the acts of our senses: seeing, hearing, moving, etc.; others stand betwixt these two extremes and

3  Paster, Humoring the Body, 7.

4  Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?,” 194 (original emphases). 5  Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?,” 196.

6  This complex relationship between soul, passions, and the physical body was further developed later in the seventeenth century by Baruch Spinoza and René Descartes, and negotiated into a type of theory of the physical means in which mind and body communicate. See James, Passion and Action, esp. 211–​13.

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border upon them both, the which we may best discover in children because they lack the use of reason and are guided by an internal imagination, following nothing else but that pleaseth their senses, even after the same manner as brute beasts do. For as we see beasts hate, love, fear, and hope, so do children. Those actions, then, which are common with us and beasts we call passions and affections, or perturbations of the mind.7

Passions should not be confused with emotions. They are “passive,” unfiltered by rational thought processes, and thus entirely subconscious. Emotions, or “emotional practices,” on the other hand, are carefully deliberated reactions to sensual input. Each man (and indeed woman) eventually learns to control his/​her passions, but it takes time, experience, and careful education of the body and mind, and this is why, according to Wright, youth of both sexes are prone to outbursts and indiscretions when they are overcome by passionate impulses. Wright’s philosophy relies on an Aristotelian division of the soul into three distinct segments, or types of soul: the vital soul (shared by all plants, animals, and humans, allowing powers of reproduction, growth, and nutrition); the sensitive soul (shared by animals and humans, allowing sensation and movement in space); and finally the rational soul (present only in humans, allowing them rational thought, and reflection on their own existence).8 Passions are present in animals as well as humans, and are products of the sensitive soul. Animals and humans receive sensual input, and respond to stimuli with movement, curiosity, and passion. In humans, the rational soul is able to monitor and control these passions, however, and with experience and education humans are thus to some extent able to control their emotions. Scheer’s discussion of emotional practices corresponds closely with this seventeenth-​ century view on emotional life. Citing the phenomenologist philosopher Robert C.  Solomon, she argues that emotions are “not entities in consciousness,” but “acts of consciousness.”9 Emotions are neither timeless nor disembodied. They are situated in the body as well as in the rational soul, which according to most seventeenth-​century natural philosophers including Wright had its physical seat in the brain. Emotional practices change with times and customs, as well as with different physical states and habits, such as diet, exercise, and environment. Most importantly, Scheer argues that emotions are a “habitus,” a term borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu, to describe the “practical sense” through which our bodies take on culturally specific, but yet physically determined habits.10 Translating this concept into a seventeenth-​century framework, the “habitus” is the rational soul’s means of controlling the passions, but this is not achievable through the power of the brain, or the mind alone. Bourdieu explains that the “habitus” comes from each individual body, and shapes the way each body appears and is perceived. It takes 7  Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 5. 8  Aristotle, De Anima, 211–​13.

9  Solomon, True to Our Feelings, 155–​57; Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?,” 194 (original emphasis). 10  Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 136–​37; Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?,” 202.

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expression in poses, stances, habitual movement, muscle tissue, fat deposits, bone density, innervation, and circulation of the blood.11 The passions are the means by which the body and the different parts of the soul communicate, and the means by which the body is “enspirited” and comes alive. This means that in order to change or control the passions, we have to change the physical conditions of our bodies, and vice versa. In the seventeenth century, this was only thought to be doable through a careful negotiation and balancing of the body’s four humors: black bile; yellow bile; phlegm; and blood. The most volatile, but also most manageable or controllable of these, according to a number of seventeenth-​century natural philosophers, surgeons, and physicians, including Helkiah Crooke, William Harvey, Nicholas Gyer, Simon Harward, and Thomas Wright, was the blood. A number of different regulating practices, including evacuation through blood letting, or “phlebotomy,” and generation through high-​protein diets, were readily available and worked relatively quickly.12 Controlling the blood was a means of controlling the passions, but no means of regulation could hold the bloody humors at bay if the passions became ungovernable. When humors abound, “those humors which are in the body, oppresse the powers of nature, whereupon nature being oppressed and not able to gouerne those humors: they being as it were forsaken of nature, lose their goodnes, and of force putrifie.”13

The Physics of Blood and Circulation

The nature and movement of blood was a fervently debated topic in late sixteenth-​and early seventeenth-​century English studies of anatomy, and it has been discussed at some length in studies such as Fay Bound Alberti’s Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine and Emotion and Robert A. Erickson’s The Language of the Heart, 1600–​1750.14 It was generally considered one of the most important humors to keep in balance, for as the physician and theologian Simon Harward states in his 1601 Harwards Phlebotomy: “bloud is the most excellent and principall humour that is dispersed in the whole body” and “the best and most familiar iuice in man is bloud.”15 Gyer similarly claims that “The iust and agreable proportion of humors is this: That in a man throughly healthfull & of good temperature: there is lesse yelow choler than Melancoly: lesse Melancoly than flewme: lesse flewme than pure bloud: so that that bloud is accounted best.”16 Blood is a form of moderator and measurement of deficiency and abundance in the other three humors: “For it can not be, that only pure & good bloud should be conteined in the veines, without som 11  Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 136–​37; Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?,” 202. 12  Gyer, The English Phlebotomy, 2. 13  Gyer, The English Phlebotomy, 5.

14  Interestingly, however, most historical studies have focused on the heart, rather than the blood, although as Margaret Healy recognizes in “Was the Heart ‘Dethroned’?,” the blood to an extent was considered more animate than the heart in early modern theories. 15  Harward, Harwards Phlebotomy, 6 (original emphasis). 16  Gyer, The English Phlebotomy, 7.

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mixture of choller, flewme or Melancholie: which must be so likewise vnderstood, where it is saide that any other humor aboundeth, the same is not pure alone without mixture of others, but that humor ioyned with others aboundeth in the vessels.”17 Blood letting (in the case of abundance) or increased generation of blood (in the case of deficiency), according to the cleric and physician Nicholas Gyer’s 1582 work The English Phlebotomy and most other seventeenth-​century physicians, was thus the most effective cure for all humoral imbalance. However, exactly how blood was produced, how it made its way throughout the body, what it was for, and what forms it could take was less readily agreed upon. In 1628, William Harvey published De Motu Cordis, where he established what most medical historians consider a “groundbreaking” idea; that blood continuously circulates throughout our bodies. Yet, the animacy of blood was not an entirely new idea. Even before this point most anatomical writers agreed that blood was a substance of flux. As Heather Webb establishes in The Medieval Heart, blood had long been considered a vehicle for passionate and spiritual, as well as physical movement. Blood was not merely a substance circulated around the body; it was animate in itself.18 It never remained still in the body, and if for some reason it was brought to stagnation, there were serious physical and emotional consequences. There was considerable debate throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century surrounding the nature of blood; what it was, where it came from, and where it ended up after it had performed its function. Harvey simply argued that it was “life itself:” “the primum vivens, ultimum moriens, the first part to live, the last to die.”19 Harvey draws this inference from a study of chickens and chickens’ eggs, the reproductive functions of which remained one of his major interests throughout his career.20 He challenges his reader to observe a little red drop, “no larger than a pin prick,” in each egg’s yolk.21 This is the first sign of life, and the catalyst for the generation of life, a power which each egg harbours within its thin shell. Indeed, Harvey believed that the blood, even in this embryonic and premature form, and divorced from any type of living flesh, was alive: “Nay, has not the blood itself or spirit an obscure palpitation inherent in it, which it has appeared to me to retain after death?”22 It was a substance residing in the physical as well as the metaphysical realm, “betwixt the visible and the invisible, betwixt being and not being, as it were, it gave by its pulses a kind of representation of the commencement of life.”23 Blood was the seed of life, animate and vital in and of itself, and as such it did not necessarily require any outside force to move it throughout the body. All the same, Harvey did believe that it was conducted through the body’s veins and arteries by the 17  Gyer, The English Phlebotomy, 4.

18  Healy, “Was the Heart ‘Dethroned’?,” 15–​16. 19  Harvey, Works, 29 (original emphasis). 20  Bayon, “William Harvey,” 52. 21  Harvey, Works, 29. 22  Harvey, Works, 28. 23  Harvey, Works, 29.

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power of the heart. This was not a new conception, as ancient authorities like Galen and Hippocrates had stipulated this to be the primary function of the heart. The means of circulation, the paths taken by the blood and the mechanical function of the heart Harvey proposed were different from previous conceptions, however. Harvey’s model was relatively simple. He writes that “in the more perfect and warmer animals, and man, the blood passes from the right ventricle of the heart by the vena arteriosa, or pulmonary artery, into the lungs, and thence by the arteriae venosae, or pulmonary veins, into the left auricle, and thence into the left ventricle of the heart.”24 The heart, according to Harvey, is a muscle, or a “ventricular pump,”25 and it moves the blood throughout the body in a continual circular motion. Harvey’s sanguine system is simple, closed, and intact. The blood moves round and round, in one set of vessels, and the body contains a set amount, that is continually re-​spirited and reused. This understanding of the function of the blood may seem commonplace to a modern reader, but it was in fact quite different from the classical and Galenic notions of the function of the heart and blood. Galen believed that the heart was more like a kiln than a pump, and for seventeenth-​century physicians and surgeons following the Galenic tradition, like Harward, the key to a healthy and balanced body was the correct regulation of heat, and this was the heart’s major function. Harward refers to the motion of the blood as a process of “concoction:” the liver turns nourishment from the stomach into blood, the heart “concocts” or heats it, and it is “by the vaynes and arteryes perfected and distributed into all the body.”26 The motion we sense when we feel somebody’s pulse is the natural expansion and contraction of any liquid as the temperature changes, and the repulsion and attraction of various bodily fumes and vapours. In such a view of the body, the blood is thus stagnant, but fluctuating in volume as it carefully keeps track of the system’s sensitive heat regulation. It is produced by the liver, and like any other of the bodily humors, it continually needs to be purged and replenished. Assuming that the Galenic view of blood was generally accepted among English physicians pre-​Harvey is problematic, however. Although Galen’s work was held in high respect, and he is frequently quoted as one of the most reliable ancient authorities, most early modern anatomists had their own approach to the various aspects of Galenic medicine. For example, writers like Gyer, who devoted his English Phlebotomy entirely to the function of blood, adapt Galen’s theory according to his own emphasis on the formative division between good and bad in the body. Gyer disagrees with Galen about the cause of the pulse—​he argues that the blood moves throughout the body by the means of repulsion and attraction. When the blood is bad or “vaporous” it “offends” the various parts of the body to which it brings heat and nutrition, and when it is “good” or full of nourishing spirits, the parts draw the blood towards them.27 24  Harvey, Works, 24. 25  Harvey, Works, 25. 26  Harvey, Works, 86.

27  Gyer, The English Phlebotomy, 10.

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The physician Helkiah Crooke argues in his Mikrokosmographia, published in 1615, that the blood certainly moves throughout the body. He also proposes that Galen was wrong in considering the heart a kiln, and instead likens it to a blacksmith’s bellows, filling the blood with heat and spirit and gusting it into continual circulation—​and he recognizes this motion to be what we can feel in the pulse. Crooke believed that the function of the blood was to nourish the rest of the body, but this idea of nourishment was quite wide. It was not merely a matter of nutrition, but also of life and spirit—​ that is, the true physical “nature of the creature”—​and the power and vitality of these different entities could be detected by measuring the different qualities of the blood—​ “Heate, Spirit, Life, Motion and Sense.”28 All these concepts are curiously synonymous for Crooke—​and through them, the lifeless flesh blossoms with vitality and sensibility. He writes that as we follow them, “we are now ariued in these meadowes, where the vessels like so many brookes do water and refresh this pleasant Paradise or model of heauen and earth; I mean the body of man. And surely by these streames doe grow many pleasant flowers of learning to entertaine and delight our minds beside the maine profit arising therefrom unto the perfection of that Art we have at hand.”29 Crooke bases a large amount of his theories on Galen and Aristotle, although his views of the various physical processes also contradict some of their basic tenets—​often as a response to his avid reading of the work of the French surgeon Ambroise Paré and the Swiss anatomist Gaspar Bauhin. He develops the Aristotelian notions of vitality and the “soul” as a division between three different spirits—​vital, sensitive, and rational—​ into a theory of three types of blood. Physiological “perfection” is a balance of these three elements, supported by three different vessels—​arteries, veins, and sinews. The arteries carry the hotter, more unruly and impure vital spirits, and they catch the various nasty vapours and waste products of the body on their way through the various organs and muscles. The veins transport the purer animal spirit to its various parts—​and the purest and hottest rational spirit is delivered to the brain through the nerves or sinews.30 In accordance with Galen, Crooke argues that the liver is the source of the blood, but through its continual motion, the heart is the dispenser of all three blood-​borne spirits, although they are destined for different vessels. The left ventricle heats, spreads, and nourishes the spirits—​and in quick and nimble motions feeds the veins. However, as Crooke establishes, the heart also has the power to transform the blood and the spirits—​ the right ventricle cools and slows the arterial blood down, expunging “smoky and fumed vapours” and making sure that the spirits are not clouded by unsavoury substances.31 Indeed it is the very motion and circulation of the blood that accounts for this function. A vigorous heart, with a balanced amount and quality of blood running through it, has the capacity to take care of external as well as internally produced dangers. As Crooke 28  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 825. 29  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 825. 30  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 84.

31  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 824.

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says, the body is the “model of heaven and earth,”32 and as such, its motions reverberate throughout. Because of the primary function of blood in humoral medicine, Harward refers to Galen’s observation that the physician’s chief duty is to safeguard the health of the heart, for “the greatest dignity of all is that which concerneth the actions of the heart,”33 and this includes care for the passions of the heart, which according to Wright are insatiable.34 A  set of emotional practices, or a regiment of control and care, is necessary in order to ensure the safe and savoury passage of the blood throughout the body. This can to some extent be protected by the careful ordination of phlebotomy, whenever the blood overheats, grows unruly, or is corrupted by vaporous spirits, but Wright also encourages the development of a certain measure of “policy in passion” in each individual or group of individuals,35 and his primary ordinance for this is friendship, good counsel, and performance of control. By acting in a calm and collected way, one individual in a group can calm down the other individuals, and by acting in an impassioned and unruly manner, he can similarly stir the passions of the rest of the group.36 As Scheer puts it, these emotional practices are an intricately socialized set of performances, internalized to appear “natural” or “inevitable,” but are in fact regulated through social control, and “the individual agency that emerges from the habitus is dependent on socialization, but not reduced to it.”37 Individuals have the power to control their emotions, but they have to perform the socially determined sets of behaviours developed for such control. In order to examine the practice of such policy in action, this chapter will now turn to Shakespeare’s tragedies of Macbeth and King Lear.

Regulation of Blood and Passions

In Macbeth and King Lear the function and effects of blood play a significant part, within both the bodies and relationships of the title characters and the political spheres and countries they attempt to govern, England and Scotland. This part of the chapter will argue that these can be understood as different systems of circulation—​public and individual circulation of blood, seed, and passions. It may seem tenuous to draw such direct links between political and physical bodies, but as critics of Macbeth and King Lear largely agree, these two plays invite such a reading.38 Both Macbeth and Lear react to the failure of their rules in terms of the implications of their personal bodily processes—​it 32  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 824.

33  Harward, Harwards Phlebotomy, 92 (original emphasis). 34  Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 105. 35  Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 150. 36  Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 152.

37  Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?,” 204.

38  See, for example, Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature; Hall, “Color Him Red”; Favila, “ ‘Mortal Thoughts’ ”; Hampton, “Purgation, Exorcism, and the Civilizing Process”; La Belle, “ ‘A Strange Infirmity’ ”; and Ramsey, “The Perversion of Manliness.”

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is the failure of Lear’s bodily balance, and the realization of the degeneracy of his bloodline, that leads him into madness (Lear 3.4); and in Macbeth’s case the very absence of a bloodline, and his excessive spilling of the blood of his kingdom, drive him out of balance. Both Lear’s and Macbeth’s sanguine systems are incontinent, and the stagnation of further movement or circulation within either their bodies, their family lines, or their kingdoms, brings their legacy to a natural end. As literary critics like Jenijoy La Belle, Marina Favila, and Bryan Adams Hampton have pointed out, in both of these plays there is a curious juxtaposition of political and bodily processes, and there are continual references to the unnaturalness of bodies as well as actions. John F. Danby points out that variations of the words “natural,” “nature,” or “unnatural” occur more than forty times in King Lear, and forces that defy or oppose nature are the very impetus of Macbeth. When Lady Macbeth famously ask the “spirits that tend on mortal thoughts” to “unsex her” (Mac 1.5.39–​40), to remove her feminine nature, so she can perform her cruel task, it is not necessarily, as many scholars of Shakespearean gender and sexuality, like Stephen Orgel and Thomas Laqueur, have argued, her lack of femininity we should focus on—​but rather her unnaturalness.39 She does not stop at a simple request to be defeminized. She asks the spirits to “make thick my blood, | Stop up th’access and passage of remorse; | That no compunctious visitings of Nature | Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between | Th’effect and it!” (Mac 1.5.42–​46). This is no mere transformation into a man she is describing—​it is an altogether unnatural and inhuman being. And in her incantation, she asks the “murdering ministers” (Mac 1.5.47) that wait on “nature’s mischief” (Mac 1.5.49), not to make her more manly, but to come to her “woman’s breast” (Mac 1.5.46) and “take [her] milk for gall” (Mac 1.5.49). It is in her form as an—​albeit monstrous—​woman that she is able to dispense her deadly venom. Gender or sexual difference, in whatever guise this concept existed at the time, is not the primary truth that is being troubled here, but rather the body’s natural processes—​and, indeed, nature itself. As tragedies, Macbeth and King Lear ask us to probe into the intimate and physical workings of its unnatural characters. When Gloucester finally saves Lear from a great storm in the wilderness of the northern heaths, into which he has been thrown by Regan and her husband, he exclaims: “let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” (Lear 3.6.73–​75). So, this is what the remainder of this section will do—​I will anatomize the hard-​hearted and unnatural characters of King Lear and Macbeth. It is pivotal to observe that the emphasis both in the case of Regan and of Lady Macbeth is on stagnation, or lack of circulation, and as Webb establishes, this “hardening” or cessation of movement was a common trope in medieval thought surrounding female hearts.40 Regardless of whether we follow Harvey’s, Harward’s, Gyer’s, or Crooke’s theory of the blood, the consequences of a “hardened” or “unmoving heart” would have been dire. Purely physiologically, it would mean that the thick arterial blood was never purged—​as in the case of Lady Macbeth—​and that 39  Orgel, Impersonations; Laqueur, Making Sex. 40  Webb, The Medieval Heart, 112.

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the vital and affective spirits would not reach their required outlets.41 Whereas the veins could boil and quicken blood of their own accord, the arteries did not have this power, so once the arterial blood slowed down, it would thicken indefinitely.42 Thickened blood becomes a type of spiritual shut-​down and vaporous build-​up. For Gyer, this would mean that the “bad” is never separated from the “good,” whereas for Crooke and Harward, a clogged-​up heart would lead to melancholy—​spiritual and mental decline—​and ultimately madness.43 According to Crooke, melancholy was drawn from particular types of food in the spleen and transported back into the stomach through the blood stream in order to arouse hunger. Without a constant and steady blood stream carrying it back to the spleen to be purged, however, it would spread throughout the body and fester. Both Gyer and Crooke recommend arterial blood letting as a means to relieving melancholy momentarily44—​and indeed in Macbeth, there is a continuous blood letting of the political body, of Scotland. As Hall points out, and Malcolm notes in act 4, scene 3, Scotland under Macbeth’s rule bleeds and bleeds—​as its tyrannous head, Macbeth, and its heart, his wife, try to purge her of all threats to their rule. But “blood will have blood” (Mac 3.4.123), and as the play progresses, it becomes clear that the toxic element distempering the country is the unnatural deed that became its ruler’s inauguration, for as the doctor declares, “Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles” (Mac 5.1.70–​71). As Malcolm says, the only medicine for such a “deadly grief” (Mac 4.3.216) and “[b]‌oundless intemperance in nature” (Mac 4.3.66–​67) is a “great revenge” (Mac 4.3.215). If the initial murder of Duncan is presented as a stopping of the great “spring,” “head,” “fountain,” or “source” of Scotland’s blood (Mac 2.3.96–​97), the final decapitation of Macbeth is the final purge that closes and heals her many gashes and wounds (Mac 5.8). The passions that come to circulate in Macbeth quickly become unruly. The protagonists, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, both employ the other’s counsel, as Wright advises, but they do not have a tempering effect on the passionate onslaught. Rather, each conversation between the protagonist spouses rouses further infirmity and bloodshed. Wright warns against such power of counsel, when employed injudiciously: regardless of ethical merit “a tale well told in rhetorical manner, flexibility of voice, gestures, actions, or other oratorical persuasions” can suspend a man’s natural judgement and “permit his will follow too far his motion.”45 A persuasive performance of passion in a leader may engender passion in their followers, and Wright advises his readers to be wary of performances of passion that are “more artificial than natural, grounded upon affectation rather than reason,” as such displays may be used as tools of manipulation.46 Only authentic, reasonable, and “natural” expressions of passion in a leader may be trusted 41  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 86. 42  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 86.

43  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 326; Harward, Harwards Phlebotomy, 86. 44  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 326; Gyer, The English Phlebotomy, 6. 45  Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 168. 46  Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 168.

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to have a healing effect on the body politic. As Hampton convincingly shows, there is a continuing civilization process, an education of passionate control of the Scottish people in Macbeth,47 and this eventually leads to an end of the physical intemperance and sanguine incontinence. Scotland learns to tell the difference between a “curséd” “usurper” and a “true” king (Mac 5.8.54–​55), and her wounds are duly healed. This view of “authenticity” in contrast to “affectation” of passion is very effectively communicated in the opening scene of King Lear, when the protagonist asks his three daughters to make a public exclamation of their love for him, to help him determine the division of his kingdom England. Regan and Goneril describe their love for their father in superlative and sycophantic terms, whereas Cordelia opts to say nothing at all, in order to stay “true” (Lear 1.1.109), to “[l]‌ove and be silent” (Lear 1.1.64). In accordance with Wright, she rejects the artifice of words in favour of an authentic and sincere heart: “I am sure my love’s more ponderous than my tongue … I cannot heave my heart into my mouth” (Lear 1.1.79–​80, 93–​94). The true passions of her heart may only speak for themselves, and by the end of the play Cordelia’s eternal silence, her dead lips, come to communicate her deep and unwavering love for her father (Lear 5.3.285).

The Generation of a Bloodline

King Lear’s immediate reaction to Cordelia’s silence in the opening scene of the tragedy is to state angrily that: “Here I  disclaim all my paternal care, propinquity and property of blood, and as a stranger to my heart and me hold thee from this forever” (Lear 1.1.115–​18). He relinquishes his care, referring to concepts relating to generation, by literally cutting his blood ties. The language used in relation to Macbeth’s sickly rule, also deserves some consideration. Macbeth states that “blood will have blood” (Mac 3.4.123, my emphasis), and that unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles (Mac 5.1.70–​71). There are numerous allusions to generation in this play. Despite the fact that Macbeth gets the crown he yearns for, he curiously never feels content, primarily because he is perturbed by the fact that Banquo’s seed one day will take his place as king. Macbeth has no offspring of his own, and thus has no direct successor to the throne. The idea that his crown is “fruitless” is devastating to him. Arguably, he is spilling blood in the absence of any viable seed. His generational offering is fear and violence, and fed by Lady Macbeth’s “mother’s milk,” which is turned to gall, they parent a country built on destruction. Connections between blood, family lines, and generation in early modern culture have been explored at length by historians such as Patricia Crawford, Sara Read and Eve Keller,48 and their studies have established that these connections changed throughout the life span of the bodies. It was a common notion in Galenic medicine that excessive sanguinity led to a propensity for lechery, and Thomas Wright writes at length about the importance of controlling the sanguine hot-​headedness and “frivolity of youth of 47  Hampton, “Purgation, Exorcism, and the Civilizing Process,” 338–​40.

48  See Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families; Read, Menstruation and the Female Body; Keller, Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves.

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either sex,” in order to curtail their propensity to fall in love, contrary to reason, and their rational will.49 Interestingly, it was generally believed that the passions of the heart were directly connected to genital regions, through “spermatic vessels,” and there was a direct link between the eyes, the heart, and the womb. In fact, most seventeenth-​ century physicians explain that seed, blood, and mother’s milk are composed of the same elements.50 Helkiah Crooke argues that mother’s milk is highly nourished blood from the womb, transported to the breast and “pulled and drawn” by the mammaries into milk.51 Seed, which both men and women possessed, was also produced from blood. The testicles, or spermatic glands—​Crooke uses both words interchangeably—​boil and heat the blood to its extreme, thus charging it with spirit—​and this concoction is then led to the genital parts through the spermatic vessels to be mixed and moulded during generation: The matter of the seede is double, the ouerplus of the last nourishment and spirits. The ouerplus is bloud, not altered and whitened in the solid parts as the Ancients imagined, but red, pure and sincere, deriued to the Testicles and the preparing vessels from the trunke of the hollow veine through the spermaticall veines. And hence it is that those men who are very immoderate in the use of Venus, auoyde sometimes bloody seede, yea nowe and then pure blood … therefore it is … that the Ancients called those that were of kindered Consanguineos, of the same bloud, because the seed is made of bloud, which phrase we also at this day retayne.52

The blood of the parents was of course not the only thing that shaped the nature of the child. The mother’s various experiences during the pregnancy, imaginative or physical, her or the nurse’s diet and habits during breast feeding, as well as general upbringing and habits in later life were of course at least as important.53 The stars were also important for some more astrologically inclined scientists, but Crooke and many other physicians rejected this.54 Regardless, however, there is still a considerable part of the creative spirit, the innermost nature or soul of the child that will belong to the parent. King Lear of course had a “fruitful” crown, three healthy daughters, but it ends up being exchanged for a fool’s flower adornment at the end of the tragedy (Lear 4.6). The betrayal of his two sycophantic daughters, Goneril and Regan, drives him insane, and renders him seemingly deformed: “methought his eyes were two full moons. He had a thousand noses. Horns whelked and waved the enragèd sea. It was some fiend” (Lear 49  Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 40.

50  Sara Read discusses this at some length in Menstruation and the Female Body, 136–​37. There were various theories in circulation, but most writers agree that there was a connection between the two. In some texts, menstrual blood was said to be turned into mother’s milk, whereas in others menstrual blood was considered a corrupted form of milk, putrefying because of lack of use. 51  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 251. 52  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 259. 53  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 257. 54  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 257.

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4.6.69–​72). Lear’s infirmity is not merely a result of disappointment in his daughters, however. When he recognizes a superficial, heartless, and “unnatural” streak in his offspring, according to the seventeenth-​century theories of generation, heredity, and bloodlines, he also recognizes a possible unnatural streak in himself. His disgust extends to his own body: “twas this flesh begot those Pelican daughters” (Lear 3.4.69–​70). Kent and Edgar try to convince him otherwise, but Gloucester, who also suffers from deceitful offspring, supports his view: “Our flesh and blood is grown so vile, my lord, that it doth hate what gets it” (Lear 3.4.132–​33). Lear’s own blood is clouded, and his own body is distempered by Goneril and Regan’s betrayal. He tells Goneril that “thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter, or rather a disease that’s in my flesh, which I must needs call mine, thou art a boil, a plague-​sore, an embossèd carbuncle, in my corrupted blood” (Lear 2.4.217–​22). When Lear’s blood is thrown increasingly out of temper, his spirit and mind become increasingly infirm, for “We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body” (Lear 2.4.103–​5). In accordance with Wright’s theory of the passions, Lear’s body is distempered by the ensuing distemper of his mind. From the very start of the play, he is unable to distinguish between authentic and affectatious expressions of loyalty and love, and as a consequence fails to let his rational mind take charge of the division of his kingdom, and sway his emotions in the correct directions. His heart, like Gloucester’s is “flawed” (Lear 5.3.190): his emotional practices are uneducated and insufficiently controlled, and as a consequence he allows himself to be fooled by his daughters’ sycophantism and deceit. As in the case of Macbeth, King Lear’s mental infirmity, physical deformity, and corrupted blood lead to infirmity, “monstrosity,” and corruption in the body politic. Arguably, the great storm on the heath, into which he gets thrown by Regan and her husband, is stirred up by his mental decline, and as Steve Mentz has argued, the strange weather in King Lear curiously aligns with the protagonist’s strange mental states.55 England grows wild, “strange” (Lear 4.1.11), “monstrous” (Lear 5.3.153), and corrupted (Lear 2.4.222), and the only thing that can cure the infirmity is to cure the “great breach” in its king’s “abusèd nature” (Lear 4.7.18). In King Lear, as in Macbeth, the pivotal concept of the circulation of the blood is disrupted, but this time in its enspirited form, the seed. Lear’s conviction that his sickness belongs to his own blood and spirit makes his body unbearable to him, and the very processes of his bloodline’s continuation a curse. In the storm on the heath he thus exclaims against the whole concept of generation, asking the storms to “crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once” (Lear 3.2.8). As in Macbeth, there is an excessive blood letting—​or in this case, seed letting—​of the body politic, and it is important to note that this does not stop with the demise of the physical body of the mad king himself. The most important difference between Crooke’s, Harward’s, and Gyer’s ideas of circulation, and the circulation of the blood introduced by William Harvey, is the nature of the system itself. Whereas Harvey’s blood is contained and continually recirculated in one intact 55  Mentz, “Strange Weather in King Lear,” 140.

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body, Crooke’s, Harward’s, and Gyer’s blood circulates throughout all bodies, their offspring, and the environments they inhabit. It is not an easy task to keep this circulation in check. Shakespeare’s two 1606 tragedies show how the containment of the blood and its circulation, and control of the spirits and passions it engenders, was a pivotal part of seventeenth-​century education. From Monique Scheer’s perspective, it was a matter of emotional practices. Learning to master the complicated emotional practices surrounding blood, and developing a practical sense of sanguinity and the passions, was pivotal to the early modern subject, as a means of controlling your body, and your social and political interaction with other people. Sanguine emotional practices were involved in the balancing of the body, as in Macbeth, and the engendering of political legacy and a solid bloodline, as in King Lear. Blood was a bridge between body and soul: it was the physical vessel of the passions and the material route of affective expression, connection, and relationality. “[B]‌y the veines,” as Crooke puts it, “the whole body hath a kind of connexion and coherence.”56 Abstract According to traditional histories of European medicine, ideas of how blood circulates around the body changed radically in the first half of the seventeenth century with the publication of William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis (1628). However, a number of English vernacular texts predated Harvey’s magnum opus, including Nicholas Gyer’s The English Phlebotomy (1592), Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia (1615), and Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Mind (1601), which focused on the circulation and balancing of sanguine spirits and passions, and further evidence of cultural conceptions of the circularity of bodily functions in early modern drama. This chapter argues that there was a central congruity between the passions and the humoral body fluids in early modern scientific thought, and that ideas of circular sanguinity were in fact widespread in medical as well as in cultural conceptions of the body before the introduction of Harvey’s thesis. It draws on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear and early modern English medical texts, as a means of conceptualizing ideas of animacy, spirit, and circulation in theories of early modern blood. Author Biography Karin Sellberg is a lecturer in humanities at the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland. She is primarily a literary scholar with research interests in feminist philosophy, gender studies, medical humanities, and historiography. She has a forthcoming book on constructions of transgender embodiment in late twentieth-​century feminist and queer theory and new historicist criticism of early modern drama and she has published extensively on queer and feminist conceptions of history and time.

56  Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 827.

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Aristotle. De Anima (On the Soul). Translated by Hugh Lawson-​Tancred. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Bayon, H.  P. “William Harvey (1578–​1657): His Application of Biological Experiment, Clinical Observation, and Comparative Anatomy to the Problems of Generation.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 2 (1947): 51–​96. Bound Alberti, Fay. Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine and Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy: what it is, with all the kindes, cavses, symptomes, prognosticks, and seuerall cvres of it: in three maine partitions, with their seuerall sections, members, and subsections: philosophically, medicinally, historically opened and cut up. Oxford: J. Lichfield & J. Short, 1621. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Crawford, Patricia. Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 2004. Crooke, Helkiah. Mikrokosmographia: a description of the body of man; together with the controversies and figures thereto belonging. London: Th. Cotes & R. Young, 1615. Danby, John F.  Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear. London: Faber, 1949. Erickson, Robert A. The Language of the Heart, 1600–​1750. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Favila, Marina. “ ‘Mortal Thoughts’ and Magical Thinking in Macbeth.” Modern Philology 99 (2001): 1–​25. French, Roger. William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. Gyer, Nicholas. The English phlebotomy: or, Method and way of healing by letting of blood Very profitable in this spring time for the preseruatiue intention, and most needful al the whole yeare beside, for the curatiue intention of phisick. Collected out of good & approued authors at times of leasure from his other studies, and compiled in that order that it is: by N.G. London: William Hoskins & Iohn Danter for Andrew Mansell, 1592. Hall, Evelyn W. “Color Him Red.” The English Journal 56 (1967): 564–​65. Hampton, Bryan Adams. “Purgation, Exorcism, and the Civilizing Process in Macbeth.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900 51 (2011): 327–​47. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Harvey, William. The Works of William Harvey: Physician to the King, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery to the College of Physicians. Edited and translated by R. Willis. London: Sydenham Society, 1847.

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Harward, Simon. Harwards Phlebotomy: or, A treatise of letting of bloud fitly seruing, as well for an aduertisement and remembrance to well minded chirurgians, as also to giue a caueat generally to all men to beware of the manifold dangers, which may ensue vpon rash and vnaduised letting of bloud. Comprehended in two bookes: Written by Simon Harward. London: F. Kingston for Simon Waterson, 1601. Healy, Margaret. “Was the Heart ‘Dethroned’? Harvey’s Discoveries and the Politics of Blood, Heart and Circulation.” In Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–​1700, edited by Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Dechamp, 15–​30. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Henry, John. “The Matter of Souls: Medical Theory and Theology in Seventeenth-​century England.” In The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, edited by Roger French and Andrew Wear, 87–​113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Hillman, David. “Visceral Knowledge.” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, 81–​105. New York: Routledge, 1997. James, Susan. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-​century Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Keller, Eve. Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. La Belle, Jenijoy. “ ‘A Strange Infirmity’: Lady Macbeth’s Amenorrhea.” Shakespeare Quarterly 31 (1980): 381–​86. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Mentz, Steve. “Strange Weather in King Lear.” Shakespeare 6 (2010): 139–​52. Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Paré, Ambroise. The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey translated out of Latine and compared with the French. Translated by Th. Johnson. London: Th. Cotes & R. Young, 1634. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. ——​. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ——​. “Nervous Tension.” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, 107–​25. New  York: Routledge, 1997. Ramsey, Jarold. “The Perversion of Manliness in Macbeth.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900 13 (1973): 285–​300. Read, Sara. Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Scheer, Monique. “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is that What Makes Them Have a History?): A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion.” History and Theory 51 (2012): 193–​220.

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Shakespeare, William. King Lear. 1606. Edited by R. A. Foakes. The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series. London: Nelson, 1997 [edition cited above as Lear]. ——​. Macbeth. 1606. Edited by Kenneth Muir. The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series. London: Routledge, 1989 [edition cited above as Mac]. Solomon, Robert C. True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Stevens, Scott Manning. “Sacred Heart and Secular Brain.” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, 263–​82. New York: Routledge, 1997. Webb, Heather. The Medieval Heart. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Wright, Thomas. The Passions of the Minde in General. London: Valentine Simmes, 1604.

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Chapter 8

SAINTLY BLOOD: ABSENCE, PRESENCE, AND THE ALTER CHRISTUS

Diana Hiller CHRIST IS THE figure most commonly associated with blood in early modern Italian art. Painters drew on the five occasions that Christ shed blood: at his circumcision; in the Garden of Gethsemane; during the flagellation; at the Crucifixion; and at the opening of his side by Longinus. Paintings of Christ on the Cross and as the Man of Sorrows are among the most consistently bloody images in Christian art. Blood piety was a means through which worshippers could contemplate the effect of their sins and articulate their devotion, and depictions of Christ’s bloody wounds provided viewers with a powerful visual focus for emotional and affective responses. In paintings of Christ’s Passion, his salvific blood was the most compelling symbol of his Incarnation and sacrifice, and in popular textual sources his physical agonies and the shedding of his sacrificial blood are recurrent themes for contemplation. The account of the Passion in the Legenda aurea, for example, enumerates Christ’s multiple sufferings in explicit detail.1 The early fourteenth-​century Meditations on the Life of Christ enjoins devout readers to immerse themselves in affective descriptions of Christ’s pain-​racked body.2 For early modern devotees, texts and images reflecting the blood of Christ aided contemplation and understanding of Christ’s sacrifice. Blood as object and as textual and cultural metaphor has become an important area of research, and in an early modern context, scholars, most notably Caroline Walker Bynum in her widely acclaimed Wonderful Blood, have explored the cultural constructions of blood and blood relics.3 The fluidity of the connections between notions of body and blood and the importance of blood in literary texts and historical contexts have also been the subject of research.4 Blood in visual images, however, has less often been explored; moreover, such studies have concentrated almost exclusively on the bodily fluids of Christ.5 Although saints also shed blood, rarely has their spilt blood been a focus of 1  A longer version of this essay first appeared in Parergon 32 (2015): 183–​212. I thank the editors for their permission to include the piece in this volume. Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 1:384–​402. (To avoid ambiguity, pages cited will include both Latin and Italian texts.) 2  Meditations on the Life of Christ, 323–​34. 3  Bynum, Wonderful Blood.

4  See, for example, Bildhauer, Medieval Blood, and Johnson and Decamp, Blood Matters.

5  Some examples include: Clifton, “A Fountain Filled with Blood”; Rubin, “Blood Sacrifice and Redemption”; and Fricke, “A Liquid History.”

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inquiry.6 In this chapter I would like to further the discussion by examining the depiction of blood in painted images of saints—​in particular, three saints who, I will suggest, were perceived as alter Christus. Contemplation of images of Christ was not the only means through which the faithful sought to reduce the distance between the human and the divine. Many saints, as well as being venerated, were also seen as familiar and accessible intercessors through whom to solicit heavenly intervention.7 And in their sufferings and tortures many martyrs shed the blood that for Tertullian was the seed of the church8 and the key to paradise.9 However, in early modern textual and visual sources, references to the blood spilt by saints and martyrs are often merely token or even absent. Drawing on examples from Italian panel paintings, I briefly examine the notable absence of blood in many depictions of saints before looking in some detail at three saints who, in visual images, are regularly associated with the flow of blood.

Absence of Blood in Paintings of Saintly Martyrs

In many of the early sources cited in the Acta Sanctorum compilation and in the Legenda aurea the responses of the saints to these sufferings—​and the blood that would have been shed—​are rarely described. The legends of the virgin martyr St. Agatha collated in the Acta Sanctorum record that the saint welcomed the pains of the rack as a delight and, following the seemingly bloodless removal of her breasts, dismissed the violation by declaring that in her soul her breasts were unharmed.10 The multiple torments of St. Vincent who was racked, mutilated, had his entrails forced out and his ribs dislocated, and was finally roasted in a fire are described in considerable detail in the Legenda aurea; however, not only did he reprove his tormentors for being too slow, but the reference to the loss of his blood is perfunctory.11 Early accounts of the breaking of St. Apollonia’s jaw and teeth rarely mention blood.12 Even in legends of saints who were beheaded, descriptions of the gushing blood that would have accompanied decapitation are frequently omitted. Several versions of Bartholomew’s death are related in the Legenda aurea but blood is absent not only from each version of his flaying but also from his beheading.13 Similarly, no blood is mentioned 6  Although her object is the colour and form of blood in artistic representation, a rare exception is found in the examination of Andrea del Castagno’s St. Jerome in Dunlop, “Drawing Blood.” 7  For an example of the efficacy of saintly intercession see Augustine, De civitate Dei, 47:279–​80. 8  “semen est sanguis Christianorum,” Tertullian, Apologeticum, 171. 9  “Tota paradisi clavis tuus sanguis est,” Tertullian, De Anima, 863.

10  Neither Isidore of Seville nor Symeon Metaphrastes mentions spilt blood in their accounts of the abscission of her breasts: Acta Sanctorum (AASS), February 5: 597, 622. 11  Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 2:208–​11. 12  See her passio: AASS, February 9: 278–​83.

13  Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 2:926–​33.

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in the account of the beheading of St. John the Baptist,14 or the manifold tortures and ultimate beheading of Saints Cosmas and Damian.15 An interesting tradition surrounds the beheading of St. Catherine of Alexandria from whose head milk, not blood, flowed,16 and St. Paul who, when decapitated, gave forth milk before blood. His severed head was so miraculously unharmed that it spoke Christ’s name.17 An explanation for the lack of emphasis in texts on a saint’s suffering—​and any loss of blood—​lies in the particular nature of saintly torture. Christ’s suffering for humanity is fundamental to his sacrifice as only through his suffering can mankind be redeemed. In contrast, a defining component of saints’ legends is the demonstration of a saint’s manifest indifference to pain and torment: saints and martyrs need to be seen to embrace and even to welcome affliction as a testament to their faith and intercessory powers. When we examine visual images in early modern Italian art, we find a similar pattern: artists also frequently omitted signs of blood in images of saints and martyrs. Paintings of the penitent St. Jerome, for example, typically depict the saint in a rocky wilderness kneeling before a cross or a crucifix and beating his chest with a stone; however, blood is rarely seen on his chest. Images of tortured and martyred saints figure prominently in polyptych altarpieces and as adjunct figures in sacre conversazioni. Moreover, when painters portrayed a saint whose attribute was associated with his or her suffering, blood was rarely a feature of the iconography. Characteristically, St. Agatha is depicted holding her severed but bloodless breasts ceremonially on a plate; St. Lucy presents her bloodless eyes in a dish, and St. Bartholomew’s knife attribute is virtually never a bloodied instrument. In these instances, the genre is the decorous formal “portrait,” and the saintly figures are presented in an essentially heroic guise. Far fewer paintings depict the agonizing deaths suffered by many saints. Instead, painters generally preferred to illustrate the martyr’s heroic stoicism, or the moment of divine intervention or attainment of sainthood. Nonetheless, even in many narrative scenes of the trials undergone by saints the absence of blood is notable. In the panel painting of the Martyrdom of St. Matthew, Jacopo and Andrea di Cione depict a soldier stabbing the praying saint but do not include any blood.18 Domenico Veneziano’s predella of the stabbing to death of St. Lucy captures the moment that the knife penetrates 14  Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 2:972–​73. See also Mark 6:27–​28. Biblical references in English are from the Douay-​Rheims Bible. 15  Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 2:1096–​97. 16  Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 2:1358–​59.

17  Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 1:648–​51. In medieval thought breast milk and blood—​and by extension the life-​giving milk of the Virgin and the bodily fluids of Christ—​were connected, and the flow of milk here is a metaphor for the nourishment of the church and saintly immortality. A very particular symbol of blood as milk is the pelican in her piety feeding her children with her own breast blood. While not the focus of the present essay, there is a large body of research in this area, for example Carolyn Walker Bynum has explored gendered implications in Jesus as Mother and in Holy Feast and Holy Fast. 18  The panel is part of the Altarpiece of St. Matthew and Scenes from his Life (ca. 1367–​1376) and is in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

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her neck but shows no blood.19 Even images of the flaying of St. Bartholomew do not always include the blood that would have poured from his body, as evidenced by Giovanni dal Ponte’s 1434 fresco in the Scali chapel, Santa Trinita in Florence, and an altarpiece by Niccolò di Liberatore commissioned for a side chapel at San Bartolomeo di Marano, Foligno. Francesco Granacci’s painting, the Martyrdom of Sant’Apollonia,20 and Sebastiano del Piombo’s 1519 painting of a near-​nude St. Agatha having her breasts torn off are quite bloodless. The focus of the latter work is the saint’s beautiful and virginal body, not her cruel death.21 Similarly, blood is generally absent in artistic representations of the stoning of St. Stephen, as a fresco by Bernardo Daddi22 and a 1520 painting The Stoning of St. Stephen in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart by Vittore Carpaccio demonstrate. When depicting the beheading of a saint, painters frequently chose to focus on the moment before execution, perhaps the executioner with his sword raised or the saint innocently kneeling in prayer. Even when a saint’s body was depicted after a beheading, blood was not always a feature as, for example, in Andrea de’ Bartoli’s fresco of the Beheading of St. Catherine of Alexandria (ca. 1368) in the Basilica of St. Francis, Assisi; and Bicci di Lorenzo’s Beheading of St. Donatus.23 However, despite some exceptions, the majority of images of decapitations are bloody affairs. It is possible that artists considered that a severed head without its issuing blood strained credulity too far. As necessary components of the narrative of a saint’s life, such scenes commonly appear in small predellas and side panels. Less commonly are they the major focus of panel works or altarpieces. Although blood featured more prominently in artworks following the Counter-​ Reformation, and notwithstanding the fact that its absence was not a consistent tradition in northern iconography, it seems that early modern Italian artists were often reluctant to include blood in works depicting the tortures of saints and martyrs. The lack of blood was part of the constructed narratives surrounding the saints, and served as an effective indicator of saintly indifference to suffering. An area that has rarely been the subject of art historical inquiry, however, is that a visual iconography regularly associated with blood did develop for three particular saints: St. Sebastian in certain roles; St. Francis; and St. Peter of Verona. The hypothesis offered here is that the different iconography of these three saints lies in their identification as alter Christus—​an identification given expression through an association with blood, the most sacred issue of Christ that denoted his sacrifice and the redemption of mankind. In the hierarchy of intermediary figures, a saint with the rare status of “another Christ” was an empathetic and affective focus for devotion and intercession, 19  The predella from the Santa Lucia de’Magnoli Altarpiece (ca. 1445) is in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin. 20  The painting (ca. 1530) is in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence. 21  Today it is in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

22  The Martyrdom of St. Stephen (ca. 1330), Pulci-​Berardi Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence.

23  The predella scene is from a Triptych of the Virgin and Child with Saints by Bicci di Lorenzo (1371–​1452) in the Church of Sant’Ippolito, Bibiena.

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and when these saintly figures were presented as alter Christus in early modern Italian painting a prominent feature of their iconography was blood. The concept of alter Christus is seldom defined. In a recent publication looking at some early figures seen as “the other Christs,” Candida Moss fails to effectively distinguish between the terms “imitatio Christi” and “alter Christus.”24 In considering its application in art, Henk van Os has argued that the nature of the alter Christus needs a “more precise definition” and relates it to the idea of a mystic finding an identity in another, or being acclaimed as such by others. While Os was primarily concerned with paintings of St. Francis as an orant, he also argued that narrative scenes of the saint were even more illustrative of the theme of Francis as a second Christ.25 Donal Cooper observes that although the term has a “shared understanding” among Franciscan scholars it is “rarely defined”;26 however, he acknowledges its common use in medieval textual sources.27 A dimension to an understanding of the concept of alter Christus lies in the identification of such Old Testament figures as Abel, Jonah, and David as prefiguring “types” of Christ–​ –​an identification in both art and texts that significantly influenced their iconography. The later application of the term “another Christ” to a select group of Christian saints is largely in line with this tradition. It would seem that for a saint to be accorded the status of alter Christus a perception or attribution by others that goes beyond conscious–​ –​or even unconscious–​–i​ mitation is required. Further to this observation is the rarely explored question of the association between a saint depicted as another Christ and a visual iconography involving blood. To explore this question, the figures of three saints—​ Sebastian, Francis, and Peter Martyr—​will be examined in some detail.

Saint Sebastian

Saint Sebastian is a complex figure in art, functioning in a number of propitiatory and exemplary roles, not all of which are mutually exclusive. To varying degrees, the presence or absence of blood in paintings of the saint is an artifact of these roles. According to the Legenda aurea, Sebastian was a Roman soldier who converted to Christianity and persuaded others to seek a martyr’s death.28 Diocletian had him bound and shot at by Roman archers until “he was so filled with arrows he seemed like a hedgehog”29 and was then left for dead. In Ambrose’s earlier account we learn that Sebastian was found by the widow Irene and nursed back to life.30 Following this “resurrection” the Emperor had him clubbed to death and thrown in the Cloaca Maxima. 24  Moss, The Other Christs, 45–​73.

25  Os, “St. Francis of Assisi as a Second Christ,” 115, 130.

26  Cooper ascribes the term’s first art historical use to Os: Cooper, “ ‘Love Not the World,’ ” 199. 27  Cooper, “ ‘Love Not the World,’ ” 199n1.

28  Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 1:194–​201.

29  “Qui ita eum sagittis impleverunt ut quasi hericius,” Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 1:198. 30  AASS, January 20:278.

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Artists portrayed the saint in a number of roles, many of which are conspicuous for the lack of blood. Although this chapter is concerned with paintings that show St. Sebastian as a bloodied figure, to contextualize these works depictions of the saint from other visual traditions need to be briefly noted. In such paintings as Antonello da Messina’s St. Sebastian (ca. 1478), for example, Sebastian embodies the triumph of Christianity over paganism. The saint stands near a broken classical column that clearly references the defeat of the classical world; three arrows pierce his body but the wounds show little blood.31 In Mantegna’s large Louvre St. Sebastian (ca. 1480) the small trickles of blood are incidental—​Mantegna’s intent here is to reference the paragone, the saint’s stoicism and faith, and the Christian victory over the pagan world.32 Other images involve Sebastian in a celebration of the beauty of the male nude. The increasing interest in the Renaissance in the heroic proportions and comeliness of the male body frequently resulted in a tension between the ostensible devotional or pious characteristics of the work and the erotic or homoerotic effect. Vasari famously recounts that a painting of St. Sebastian by Fra Bartolomeo elicited such a sensuous response from women that it had to be removed from its position in church.33 The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (1473–​1475) by Piero and Antonio Pollaiuolo is a fine example of the type of painting that celebrates the male figure while also demonstrating painterly virtuosity (­figure 6).34 Of the two closest figures to the viewer, one is gratuitously naked, the other—​seemingly in flesh-​toned hose—​presents enticingly curvaceous buttocks. Notwithstanding the penetrating arrows, Sebastian’s body is essentially bloodless.35 Sebastian also had an important role as a plague saint,36 and in paintings often accompanies Saints Roch and Job as plague intercessors. In such works his wounds frequently show little blood, for example, Andrea da Murano’s 1478 polyptych in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Giovanni Bellini’s San Giobbe Altarpiece (1478–​1480),37 and Vincenzo Civerchio’s St. Roch and St. Sebastian.38 In Gozzoli’s great fresco St. Sebastian Intercessor (1464) in Sant’Agostino, San Gimignano, the saint’s blood is of so little consequence to his role as a protector from the ravages of the plague that he is depicted fully 31  The work is now in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.

32  Further examples include Pinturicchio’s Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (1492–​1494) in the Borgia apartments in the Vatican; Vincenzo Foppa’s Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (1490–​1500), Castello Sforzesco, Milan; and his St. Sebastian (ca. 1489) fresco in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. 33  Vasari, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, 4:188.

34  The work was painted for the Pucci chapel in SS Annunziata, Florence.

35  Similar examples include Giovanni Bellini’s St. Vincent Ferrer Polyptych painted in the 1460s for SS Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, and Marco Zoppo’s St. Sebastian in a Rocky Landscape with Saints (ca. 1475–​1478) in the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and Dosso Dossi’s St. Sebastian Altarpiece in the Duomo, Modena (1518–​1521). 36  See Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 1:200–​1. See also Marshall, “Manipulating the Sacred,” and Barker, “The Making of a Plague Saint.”

37  Now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, the altarpiece was commissioned for the Franciscan church of San Giobbe, in Venice. 38  The attributed painting is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

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Figure 6. Piero and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (1473–​1475), oil on wood (291 × 203 cm). Credit: National Gallery, London. National Gallery, London/​Bridgeman Images.

clothed. As an intercessory plague saint Sebastian has also been seen by some as a type of Christ.39 An aspect that seems not to have been considered, however, is the connection between the saint’s blood and his status as an alternative Christ. The recognition of Sebastian as a saint with a special connection with Christ preceded perceptions of him as a plague intercessor. Ambrose, for example, makes no mention of the plague in his account of the saint; however, he draws parallels between 39  For example, Marshall, “Reading the Body of a Plague Saint,” 246–​57; and Barker, “The Making of a Plague Saint,” 106.

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St. Sebastian and Christ in a number of ways. He records the saint’s miraculous resurrection from the dead, and ascribes to Sebastian the words: “Ad hoc me Dominus meus Jesus Christus resuscitare dignatus est.”40 The verb resuscitare (to raise) was specifically used by Christian writers in connection with the resurrection of the dead and, in particular, with Christ’s Resurrection. In Acts 2:32 of the Vulgate, for example, Peter uses the verb to describe the Resurrection of Christ: “Hunc Jesum resuscitavit Deus, cuius omnes nos testes sumus.”41 Images that reference Sebastian as a Christ figure do not necessarily do so to the exclusion of his other roles. Nonetheless, there is a considerable corpus of images that emphasize his Christological parallels, and it is in these works that painters typically depict Sebastian with bloody wounds. Paintings that portray the saint bound to a column, his body pierced with arrows, or that present his near-​naked figure elevated above his tormentors are alluding to visual traditions associated with Christ’s Passion.42 The painter known as the Master of Staffolo, who was probably a follower of Gentile da Fabriano, painted a double-​sided processional panel the front of which is titled the Madonna della Misericordia (1449).43 The Madonna is shown protecting a group of kneeling disciplinati whose bare, lacerated backs are turned towards the viewer. On the rear of the panel the patron saints of Fabriano, John the Baptist, and Sebastian, stand defensively over the walled city depicted in the background (­figure 7). Sebastian is tied to a column with his hands bound behind him as though ready for the lash. His body is marked with multiple arrow wounds from which the blood flows freely. Like the penitents on the other side of the panel, he is a bloodied figure and there is an intricate relationship between penitence, flagellation, and blood. The penitents shed blood for their individual sins and seek protection from the Madonna. Sebastian sheds the blood of martyrdom but, like Christ, he does so vicariously. Here, as a patronal figure, he bleeds for the population of Fabriano. At Sant’Ambrogio in Florence, a fresco depicting the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, probably by Agnolo Gaddi, is sited above a side pulpit on the right-​hand wall of the church. The saint’s hands are extended above him and tied to a column in a pose which, as Sheila Barker observes, is similar to that used by painters when portraying the flagellated Christ.44 At the same time the saint’s bloody and violated body is positioned on a small platform on a tall column that towers above the soldiers and onlookers grouped below in a manner typical of images of Christ at the Crucifixion.45 The constructed visual parallels highlight similarities between the saint’s passion and that of Christ. 40  “My Lord Jesus Christ has deigned to raise me to this,” AASS, January 20:278. 41  “This Jesus has God raised again, whereof we are all witnesses.”

42  See, for example, Ahl, “Due San Sebastiano di Benozzo Gozzoli,” 47–​48. 43  Today it is in the Museo Nazionale del Palazzo Venezia, Rome.

44  Barker, “The Making of a Plague Saint,” 106. A  similar example is Niccolò Semitecolo’s Saint Sebastian Shot by Arrows (1367) in the Museo Diocesano, Padua.

45  Among numerous examples are Simone Martini’s Crucifixion (1333) from the Orsini Polyptych in the Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp; Pietro Lorenzetti’s Crucifixion panel from the 1340s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Lippo Memmi’s Louvre Crucifixion (ca. 1350).

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Figure 7. Master of Staffolo, Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian (1449), verso of the Misericordia Standard, tempera and gold on wood, Museo Nazionale del Palazzo Venezia, Rome. Credit: De Agostini Picture Library/​ Bridgeman Images.

Giovanni del Biondo’s St. Sebastian triptych was painted during the 1370s in response to the 1374 outbreak of plague in Florence. The central panel depicts Sebastian’s martyrdom and the form and context are revealing (­figure 8). The panel is heavily indebted to the type of early Crucifixion scene showing the single elevated cross above a crowd of soldiers and mourners. Sebastian, studded with arrows, is bound to a square wooden beam raised above a crowd of archers and onlookers. Giovanni has painted Sebastian as a Christ-​on-​the-​Cross figure. The two side panels show four scenes from Sebastian’s life and are sited below the angel of the Annunciation on the left and the Annunciate Virgin on the right. In depictions of Christ’s Crucifixion Christ’s head is oriented towards the figure of the Virgin at the foot of the cross. Giovanni does not include the Virgin in the scene of Sebastian’s martyrdom; however, he paints the saint gazing fixedly on the Virgin on the panel to his left. In this interpretation of Sebastian’s passion, the saint’s tortured body, naked but for a loin-​cloth, bleeds copiously. A Cosmѐ Tura oil painting titled St. Sebastian and executed around 1484 is an extraordinary evocation of Christ on the cross (­figure  9). Here the body of Sebastian is tied to a flat upright wooden structure reflecting Christ’s cross rather than the more usual column. Although his arms are not lashed to a cross beam they are depicted in an exaggerated and unnaturally horizontal pose: precisely in the manner of a crucifixion.

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Figure 8. Giovanni del Biondo, Martyrdom of St. Sebastian and Scenes from His Life (ca. 1374), tempera and gold on wood (224 × 89 cm). Florence, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. © 2018. Photo Scala, Florence.

Literally redundant but visually redolent, the bindings are clearly evident, and the blood flows freely down the saint’s body suspended in its Christ-​like pose. Painters of St. Sebastian also employed a variety of visual tropes to emphasize parallels between the saint and Christ and, characteristically, in these examples Sebastian is a bloody figure. Niccolò di Liberatore’s Madonna with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian (1482) for the Church of San Francesco, Cannara shows the Baptist—​in a rare departure from his traditional role—​pointing not to the Christ child but to the bleeding figure of Sebastian.46 In Luca Signorelli’s oil painting the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (ca. 1498) blood streams from Sebastian’s chest, down his thighs, and over the edge of the stand of his quasi cross (­figure 10).47 Moreover, as Louise Marshall 46  Niccolò di Liberatore is also known as Niccolò da Foligno or Niccolò Alunno. 47  The work was painted for the church of San Domenico, Città di Castello.

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Figure 9. Cosmѐ Tura, St. Sebastian (ca. 1484), oil on poplar, panel from altarpiece (panel 75.5 × 33.2 cm). Berlin, Gemäldegalerie-​Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Joerg P. Anders. © 2018. Photo Scala, Florence/​bpk, Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin.

has observed, on the road on the right of the picture we see a bound Sebastian being harried by soldiers in a scene paralleling Christ’s journey to Golgotha.48 When painters portrayed St. Sebastian as the Miles Christi triumphing over the pagan world, or as the embodiment of classical ideas of the body beautiful, or as a plague saint, they frequently omitted his bloodied wounds. However, when blood was a prominent feature of the iconography it was characteristically in paintings that referenced his role as an alternative Christ.

Saint Francis

Saint Francis (ca. 1181/​82–​1226) did not die a bloody death, but in art he is regularly associated with blood in two fundamental scenes: receiving the stigmata and when painted as present at the Crucifixion. Francis was canonized in 1228 by Gregory IX. 48  Marshall, “Reading the Body,” 248.

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Figure 10. Luca Signorelli, Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (ca. 1498), oil on wood, Pinacoteca Comunale, Città di Castello (288 × 175 cm). Credit: Pinacoteca Comunale, Città di Castello, Italy/​Bridgeman Images.

The papal bull noted many miracles but made no mention of the stigmata on the saint’s body.49 Indeed, many doubted the veracity of the saint’s imprints—​as evident by the nine papal bulls between 1237 and 1291 denouncing the sceptics. 49  See Mira Circa Nos, July 16, 1228, in Francis of Assisi, 1:565–​69.

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Despite the early scepticism, however, the miraculous imprinting is among the most frequently painted scenes of the saint, and is a crucial element in the connection between Francis and his very particular conformity to Christ through blood. Francis’s forty days of meditation on Mount la Verna, his vision of a seraph with six wings,50 and the subsequent imprinting with a sign which—​as Brother Elias noted in his letter to the Order—​had since the world began only been borne by Christ,51 marked the founder of the Franciscans as a man with a special connection with Christ.52 Accounts of the imprinting differed among early Franciscan writers and these, together with changing aspects of religious devotion, affected the early iconography including that involving the saint’s blood. For both Brother Leo and Thomas of Celano the wounds followed Francis’s encounter with the seraph but were not caused by it.53 The source of the imprinting has implications for Francis’s role as alter Christus. Many of the early paintings portray the seraph qua seraph. Typically, in these works no visible interaction between the saint and his vision is depicted, and no emitting beams unite the man and the angelic presence. Guido da Siena’s small side scene of the stigmata in his altarpiece St. Francis and Eight Scenes from his Life is a good example of this early type.54 In these early works, Francis’s status is of one favoured with a mystical vision from God. Heavenly agency is implicit but not visually explicit, and the notion of Francis as an alternative Christ is not yet manifest. Painters gradually included rays linking the saint and the seraph, albeit not always specific to the stigmata, and the seraph began to appropriate some of the attributes of the crucified Christ; however, the angelic form still dominated. For example, three broad rays descend from the seraph to the head of St. Francis in a Stigmata of St. Francis (ca. 1228) attributed to Bonaventura Berlinghieri and today in the Galleria degli Uffizi. In a form of spiritual “mouth-​to-​mouth,” a Guido da Siena workshop piece, St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, shows the rays descending from the mouth of the seraph to the mouth of St. Francis.55 This early iconography was relatively short-​lived, however, with the growing perception of Francis as a Christ figure. Arguably the most significant textual formulation of this 50  Isaiah 6:1–​13 was an important passage for Franciscan iconography. It contains the only biblical reference to seraphim with six wings, and describes God’s revelation to the prophet as the chosen figure. 51  Elias of Cortona, “Epistola encyclica de transitu Sancti Francisci,” 254.

52  While it does not deal with visual images, the most comprehensive study of the early writings on St. Francis as alter Christus is by Campagnola and Santachiara, L’angelo del sesto sigillo e “l’alter Christus.”

53  See, for example, Thomas of Celano, “Tractatus de miraculis Beati Francisci,” chap. 2, 4, 647–​48.

54  The altarpiece (ca. 1275–​1285) is today in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena. Similar examples include The Saint Receiving the Stigmata (1235) from an altarpiece in the Church of San Francesco in Pescia by Bonaventura Berlinghieri, and a Paolo Veneziano panel in his Triptych of St. Clare (1328–​1330) today in the Museo Civico, Sartorio, Trieste. 55  The image is a detail in a Diptych of Stories of Saints (1250–​1300) in the Pinacoteca, Nazionale, Siena.

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lies in the writings of Bonaventure. Francis’s conformity to Christ is the transforming topos in the narrative of the Legenda maior. In the Prologue, Bonaventure likens the saint to the angel of the sixth seal because both have the sign of the living God.56 His later account of the piercing of Francis with the sacred stigmata emphasizes Christ’s presence and agency while the seraph is the visible form.57 Bonaventure changes Thomas of Celano’s description of a “Seraph on a cross”58 to “Christ in the form of the Seraph.”59 Christ gazes on Francis and reveals to the saint that he is to be “wholly transformed into the likeness of the crucified Christ.”60 For Bonaventure, saint and Saviour become so closely identified that “Francis was fixed with Christ to the cross in body and spirit.”61 In fresco cycles, panel paintings, altarpieces, and small devotional images, events in the life of St. Francis were presented as paralleling incidents in the life of Christ. Two well-​known examples include the frescoes of the Franciscan Master in the nave of the lower church of San Francesco in Assisi that thematically and structurally compared St. Francis with Christ, and Taddeo Gaddi’s twenty-​six quatrefoil panels for a sacristy cupboard at Santa Croce with its matching scenes from the life of St. Francis and the life of Christ.62 In Benozzo Gozzoli’s fresco cycle, painted between 1450 and 1452 at San Francesco, Montefalco, the iconography of St. Francis’s birth is nuanced with the presence of an ox and an ass. The accompanying inscription draws attention to the fact that, like Christ himself, St. Francis had to be born in a stable.63 Domenico Ghirlandaio’s The Obsequies of St. Francis fresco in the Sassetti chapel at Santa Trinita depicts a lay figure reaching out to touch St. Francis’s chest wound in a gesture that recalls Thomas putting his hand into the opening in Christ’s side. In hagiographic materials, sermons, devotional texts, and pictorial works, the perception of St. Francis as an alternative Christ grew in Franciscan circles and the popular consciousness—​and this perception was accompanied by changes in stigmatization iconography.64 As depictions of the 56  Bonaventure, Legenda maior, Prologus, 1, 778.

57  Bonaventure, Legenda maior, Prologus, 13, 3, 891–​92.

58  “Seraph in cruce positum,” Thomas of Celano, “Tractatus de miraculis Beati Francisci,” chap. 2, 4, 647. 59  “Christo sub specie Seraph,” Bonaventure, Legenda maior, 13, 3, 891.

60  “totum in Christi crucifixi similitudinem transformandum,” Bonaventure, Legenda maior, 13, 3, 892.

61  “Christo igitur iam cruci confixus Franciscus tam carne quam spiritu,” Bonaventure, Legenda maior, 13, 3, 898. 62  The majority of Gaddi’s panels (ca. 1335–​1340) are in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence.

63  For the cycle’s theme of St. Francis as an alter Christus see, Ahl, “Benozzo Gozzoli’s Cycle of the Life of Saint Francis.”

64  For example, in Bartholomew of Pisa’s De conformitate (ca. 1385) the chapters are constructed as parallels between the life and works of Christ and St. Francis: Bartholomew of Pisa, De conformitate vitae beati Francisci ad vitam Domini nostri Jesu Christi. In his 1425 Easter sermon San Bernardino declared that “Santo Francesco s’accostò tanto a lui che diventò un altro Cristo crucifisso” (“St. Francis came so close [to God] that he became another Christ crucified”), Bernardino of Siena, “Predica 44,” 4:428.

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seraph came to be subordinated to the image of the crucified Christ, artists often painted five golden rays emanating from Christ’s wounds to pierce the hands, feet, and side of St. Francis. At the same time, however, there was another visual and iconographic tradition of the depiction of Francis’s stigmatization. The changing preoccupations and emphases in religious life and popular piety between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries engendered a spiritual environment that emphasized the personal and emotional. The growth of the mendicant orders, the rise of female religious movements and religious confraternities, the growing feminization of religion, and the pious goal of a life in the spirit of the imitatio Christi led to increasingly affective devotional practices. In paintings of St. Francis receiving the stigmata these developments encouraged an iconography that fostered and appealed to a new emotional relationship with images. The colour of the rays linking Christ’s wounds and the imprinted marks on the saint’s flesh changed to a colour that promoted a more empathic and sympathetically human response—​blood red. The iconography had moved from golden rays of glory to red rays of suffering. A notable early example of this type is the Stigmatization of St. Francis altar panel (ca. 1325–​1330) by Taddeo Gaddi in which scarlet rays imprint the bloody stigmata.65 In two paintings of the stigmatization by Gentile da Fabriano, one executed in 141566 and another in an upper panel in the Valle Romita Polyptych painted around 1405 and now in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, the distinctively red rays proceed from a Christ figure that, in the latter example, visibly drips blood (­Figure 11.) In the majority of early paintings of the stigmatization, Francis’s wounds are discreet and understated. However, along with the increasingly affective images of the suffering Christ and a new emphasis on the redness of the rays that linked Christ and Francis, depictions of the saint’s wounds become more prominent and the issuing blood is shown as dripping or even spurting. A  vivid example is a 1505 fresco by Paolo da Serrungarina in the left transept of the church of the Monastery of San Francesco in Rovereto, in the Marche. The crucified Christ is depicted on the upper branches of a Tree of Life, the seraph is no longer present, and red rays from Christ’s wounds flow directly to those of St. Francis whose hands and feet drip with blood. The association between blood and St. Francis was not confined to scenes of the stigmatization. In images of the Crucifixion, Francis is commonly depicted as physically in contact with Christ’s flowing blood. Lorenzo Monaco’s Christ on the Cross (1405–​1407) is a good example. Saints Benedict and Romuald sit reverently at the side and at a discrete distance from the cross. In contrast, Francis embraces the bloodied cross and kneels in Christ’s blood. Such is the visual and spiritual identification between the two figures that fresh blood spurts from Francis’s left hand and feet as he clasps the cross.67 In a 1487 altarpiece by Niccolò di Liberatore, Francis embraces the cross and Christ’s 65  Probably painted for Santa Croce, Florence, the work is in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 66  The panel is in the Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Corte di Mamiano, Parma. 67  The work is in the Staatsliches Lindenau-​Museum, Altenburg.

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Figure 11. Gentile da Fabriano, Valle Romita Polyptych (ca. 1405), upper panel, tempera and gold on wood, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (157 × 80 cm). Credit: Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy/​Mondadori Portfolio/​Electa/​Sergio Anelli/​Bridgeman Images.

coursing blood. The viewer’s attentive gaze is drawn into the painting through the saint’s blood—​here in the form of his conspicuously bleeding feet sited close to the picture plane.68 The flowing blood captures the intimate, physical, and spiritual correspondence between the saint and Christ. Francis clasping Christ’s bloodied feet in painted crosses is a familiar device. A particularly powerful example, and one that would have prompted a visceral response from contemporary viewers, is a late thirteenth-​century Crucifix with St. Francis in Arezzo (­figure 12). Red rivulets of blood stream down Christ’s body while St. Francis lovingly cradles his Saviour’s bloody right foot, which also serves as a pointer to Francis’s own open chest wound.69

68  The altarpiece, probably painted for the convent of Santa Chiara, Aquila, is in the National Gallery, London.

69  Formerly ascribed to Margaritone of Arezzo, the crucifix is now regarded as an Aretine workshop piece: Cooper, “Experiencing Dominican and Franciscan Churches,” 51.

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Figure 12. Aretine Workshop, Crucifix with St. Francis, detail, late thirteenth century, tempera and gold on wood, Arezzo, Chiesa di San Francesco. © 2018. Photo Scala, Florence.

Crucifixion scenes frequently included a number of saints around the cross. It was the figure of St. Francis, however, that painters chose to depict as the male saint70 who embraced the cross down which Christ’s blood flowed.71 A notable exception might seem to be Fra Angelico’s magnificent fresco, St. Dominic Adoring Christ on the Cross (1441–​1442), in the cloister of Sant’Antonino in the Museo di San Marco, Florence. Blood streams down the base of the cross to the kneeling St. Dominic; however, with extraordinarily delicate precision the red flow ceases immediately above Dominic’s two hands positioned on the cross. Artists also gave expression to Francis’s conformity with the Saviour through blood in images that referenced Christ pointing to his chest wound in paintings of the Man of Sorrows. On a wing of a portable altarpiece used for private devotion, Fra Angelico

70  Mary Magdalene is often portrayed clasping the base of the cross, but it is rare for a male saint other than St. Francis to appear in this position.

71  Among many examples are Ugolino di Nerio’s Crucifixion with the Virgin, St. John and St. Francis (ca. 1310–​1330) in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, and Taddeo di Bartolo’s ca. 1400 predella Crucifixion, today in the Louvre, Paris.

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painted St. Francis pointing to a conspicuously bloody wound in his side.72 Further examples include a Bartolo di Fredi work from his Coronation of the Virgin Altarpiece, 1388,73 a St. Francis panel (ca. 1400–​1410) by the Master of the Straus Madonna held in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, and a Sano di Pietro St. Francis from the 1450s.74 Typically, these are small intimate works that serve to facilitate the devotee’s relationship with the Saviour through an accessible alter Christus. Francis’s reception of Christ through blood is explicit in an audacious work by Carlo Crivelli: St. Francis Collecting the Blood of Christ (­figure 13). The little work (only 20 x 16 cm) is steeped in blood and eucharistic imagery. A column references the flagellation, and instruments of the Passion rest on the column and hang from the cross. Of most significance, however, is the standing figure of the bleeding Christ holding back the lips of his open wound to allow his blood to pour into the chalice held by the kneeling friar. In contrast to the prevailing perception of St. Francis, the founder of the Dominicans was typically characterized as “domini imitator Dominicus” (“Dominic imitator of the Lord”)—​fundamentally an active validation.75 In this work, Crivelli nuances St. Francis’s identification with Christ such that it implies essence. The little devotional panel is an articulation of martyrdom, suffering, and resurrection through the blood that unites St. Francis with the Lord.

Saint Peter Martyr

In St. Francis, the Friars Minor had a natural candidate for an alter Christus. The founder of the Dominicans, however, was a much less likely figure. Saint Dominic, along with the majority of the early Dominicans, was venerated more for his religious zeal than his mystical status. As Vauchez notes, “Dominican sainthood, in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, resulted less from imitation of a person than from fidelity to a rule.”76 Nonetheless, in matters of prestige, power, and influence, there was considerable rivalry between the two main mendicant orders, and a Dominican saint comparable to the stature and popular appeal of St. Francis was desirable. In the figure of St. Peter of Verona the Dominicans had a suitable candidate for an alternative Christ. The Vitae fratrum of Gérard de Frachet, written between 1256 and 1259, gives an account of Peter’s childhood, his entrance into the Order, and the many miracles attributed to him following his martyrdom.77 In this and in a number of early texts, including those in the Acta Sanctorum compilation and the Legenda aurea, the fashioning of Peter

72  The panel painting, dated 1430–​1433, is in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 73  The work is today in the Museo Civico e Diocesano d’Arte Sacra, Montalcino.

74  The small panel is in the Robert Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 75  See Gérard de Frachet, Vitae fratrum, pt. 2, chap. 20, 80. 76  Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, 338.

77  Gérard de Frachet, Vitae fratrum, pt. 5, chap. 1, 236–​48.

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Figure 13. Carlo Crivelli, St. Francis Collecting the Blood of Christ (ca. 1490–​1500), tempera on wood (20 × 16 cm). Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli. © 2018. Photo Scala, Florence.

as an alternative Christ was carefully crafted.78 Peter of Verona (1205–​1252), who came to be known more generally as Peter Martyr, was a preacher and inquisitor actively engaged in denouncing the Cathar heresy that flourished in northern Italy in the thirteenth century. He and his friar companion Domenico were attacked by an assassin hired by a group of Cathars. Peter was struck on the head with what is generally characterized as a woodsman’s falcastrum79 or billhook, which in the Legenda aurea is described as “sated” with blood. A second weapon, a sword or knife, was plunged into his chest.

78  The entry for Peter in the Acta Sanctorum, compiled by the Dominican Ambrogio Taegio around 1500, includes biographical material from the 1253 canonization bull of Innocent IV and the detailed Vita by the Dominican Tomasso Agni da Lentino (d. 1277): AASS, April 9:678–​719. See also Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 1:474–​97.

79  The word “ense” (sword) is used by Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 1:478 and in AASS, April 9: 706. The source for a billhook as the weapon is unknown.

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In his dying fall Peter uttered the words of Christ on the cross: “Into thy hands O lord, I commend my spirit” and recited the Apostles’ Creed.80 Peter died in April 1252 and was expeditiously canonized by Innocent IV in March 1253—​just 337  days after his death. Innocent’s canonization bull (Magnis et crebris) characterized Peter as a man without sin, and such texts as the Legenda aurea energetically nurtured the growing perception of him as alter Christus. Jacopo da Varazze explicitly compares Peter’s passion to that of Christ. Both figures suffered for defending the truth; both suffered at the hands of heretics; both died at Easter; Christ was betrayed for thirty “denari,” Peter for forty Pavian lire; and by their deaths both converted many heretics.81 In his sermons, Jacopo continued the construction of Peter as a Christ-​like figure by emphasizing similarities between the wounds to the chest and head suffered by both Christ and Peter.82 Prudlo goes so far as to declare that “[t]‌hough St. Francis merely followed Christ, for the Dominicans St. Peter Martyr was literally ‘another Christ.’ ”83 In contrast to the minimal references to blood in the textual sources for St. Sebastian and St. Francis, many of the miracles that followed Peter’s death, and recounted in the Legenda aurea, were associated with his blood. Further, his very status as a martyr is defined by his blood: “He was a martyr in that he shed his blood for the defence of the faith.”84 In both non-​narrative and narrative paintings Peter Martyr was consistently associated with blood. Typically, there are two types of non-​narrative images. The first presents the saint with a billhook or large knife buried in his bloodied head as seen, for example, in Bartolomeo Vivarini’s Madonna and Child Enthroned with Four Saints where Peter is one of the four saints,85 and Vecchietta’s St. Peter Martyr panel dating from the 1470s and today in the Galleria di Palazzo Cini in Venice. A further version of this type provides evidence of the popular perception of Peter as an intercessor, as occurs in a fresco in the Portinari chapel, in Sant’Eustorgio, Milan, the site of Peter’s Ark. The work was probably painted by Benedetto Bembo around 1460 and shows a kneeling Pigello Portinari requesting Peter’s blessing. In the second type of non-​narrative image the billhook is absent; however, the saint’s bloodied head is a prominent and consistent feature. For Fra Angelico this is the default image of Peter. It is to be found, for example in the St. Peter Martyr Altarpiece (1427–​1428) painted for the nuns of San Pier Martire in which Peter’s head is drenched in blood; the San Marco Altarpiece (1438–​1440); and his Bosco ai Frati Altarpiece (1450).86 Also at San Marco is the evocative painting of Savonarola in the guise of Peter Martyr. Fra 80  Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 1:480–​81.

81  Peter as an alternative Christ is examined in Prudlo, The Martyred Inquisitor, 102–​7. 82  See Delcorno, “La predicazione duecentesca su San Pietro Martire,” 309–​10. 83  Prudlo, The Martyred Inquisitor, 177.

84  “Martyr in eo quod pro defensione fidei sanguinem suum fudit,” Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, 1:480.

85  Probably painted in the mid-​fifteenth century, the work is in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. 86  All three altarpieces are in the Museo di San Marco, Florence.

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Bartolomeo had already painted a portrait of the charismatic preacher, but in this work (ca. 1510) he raises Savonarola to the status of a saint—​specifically, the Dominican saint promoted as an alternative Christ.87 Narrative paintings of Peter’s death are even more conspicuous for the depiction of blood and the subsequent promulgation of his status as another Christ. Andrea da Firenze’s fresco painted around 1335 in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella depicts the savage attack on Peter and the ensuing streams of blood. At the beginning of the fifteenth century Taddeo di Bartolo painted the saint’s assassination as a continuous narrative in his predella Death of St. Peter Martyr: first the impending attack on the unnimbed friar, then the knife slicing his bloodied head and the nimbed Peter writing “Credo” in his own blood as it pours on the ground, and finally his slain figure with the bloody head and chest wounds (­figure 14). The literary sources recount that Peter recited the Creed before his death. The visual tradition is different. In narrative works, the dying Peter graphically affirms the life of his faith by writing “Credo” in his living blood. This iconography is particularly significant for Peter’s status as alter Christus.88 Peter’s blood on the ground is an allusion to Abel’s spilt blood crying out to God from the earth89 and to the perception of Abel as a Christ figure and his murder as a foreshadowing of Christ’s sacrifice.90 Peter’s “Credo” written in his spilt blood was a powerful visual sign—​literally and figuratively—​relating him to Christ. Artists variously expressed the connection between Peter and blood through the quantity spilt or through metaphor—​occasionally both. A notably bloody narrative scene appears in the upper right section of Fra Angelico’s St. Peter Martyr Altarpiece, and in Gentile da Fabriano’s Valle Romita Polyptych blood drips copiously from Peter’s head at the moment of the attack.91 Giovanni Bellini painted two versions of Peter’s martyrdom. In the version painted with assistants around 1507 no blood is seen on Peter’s body (­figure  15). Instead, Bellini paints a scene of savage destruction in the background—​ the violent hacking of trees and the sliced tree limbs felled by wood choppers presage the attack on Peter. Bellini’s 1509 Assassination of St. Peter Martyr is quite different (­figure 16). It is the intense bloodiness of Peter’s martyrdom that is now the focus: blood spurts from his head, the blood from his chest stains his white scapular and pools on the ground, blood drips from his staff and the assassin’s discarded spear, and in a collective visual pathetic fallacy, blood streams from the numerous severed tree stumps. A very particular sign of Peter as alter Christus, and one that draws on the bloody nature of his death, lies in his association with the triple crown. Scriptural sources refer to a number of heavenly crowns including the crown of justice or righteousness (2 Timothy 4:8) and the crown of glory (1 Peter 5:4). Gradually these crowns became reified and codified into the triple crowns of preaching, virginity, and martyrdom. In 87  Painted after Savonarola’s death in 1498, the work is now in the Museo di San Marco, Florence. 88  In painted works it is variously written as: “Credo, Credo in Deum” or “Credo in Unum Deum.” 89  Genesis 4:10.

90  Romans 5:14.

91  The polyptych, painted around 1405, is in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

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Figure 14. Taddeo di Bartolo, Death of St. Peter Martyr (ca. 1400), predella panel, tempera and gold leaf on wood (14¼ × 15⅜ in). SC 1958:38, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA.

liturgical, textual, and visual sources Peter of Verona was frequently associated with the triple crown.92 That the connection was immediate is evident from a reference to it in the 1252 inscription on his tomb in Milan.93 Allusions to Peter’s triple crown also appear in painted works, for example, Jacobello del Fiore’s Death of St. Peter Martyr (ca. 1428),94 and Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Martyrdom of St. Peter Martyr (1486–​1490) in the Tornabuoni Chapel at Santa Maria Novella. 92  See, for example, Jacopo da Voragine, Legenda aurea, 1:474–​75. The entire prologue of Tomasso da Lentino’s Vita revolves around parallels between heavenly and earthly trinities: AASS, April 9: 682. Peter’s “triplici aureola” is the subject of a sermon in Gérard de Frachet, Vitae fratrum, pt. 4, chap. 24, 214.

93  For the inscription “D.O.M. Divo Petro Ordinis Prædicatorum, tribus coronis doctrinæ, virginitatis et Martyrii, anno MCCLII” see AASS, April 9: 684.

94  Now held at the Museum, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, the painting was once attributed to Gentile da Fabriano.

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Figure 15. Giovanni Bellini, The Assassination of St. Peter Martyr (ca. 1507), oil and tempera on wood (100 × 165 cm). Credit: National Gallery, London/​Bridgeman Images.

Figure 16. Giovanni Bellini, Assassination of St. Peter Martyr (1509), oil on panel, The Courtauld Gallery, London (68 × 100 cm). Credit: Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London/​Bridgeman Images.

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Peter was one of the very few saints who could fulfil the near-​impossible triple-​ crown criteria of virgin, preacher, and martyr. In Peter, the Dominicans had a claim that not even the Franciscans could match: St. Francis had not died for his faith. For the Dominicans, Peter depicted in the red blood of his martyrdom, was the embodiment of an alternative Christ.

Conclusion In vitae and hagiographical sources, references to the blood shed by saints being tortured or put to death are frequently omitted from the accounts, and in early modern Italian art the precious blood of Tertullian’s martyrs is often more conspicuous for its absence than its presence. The effect of this absence is to draw attention not to the saints’ broken bodies but to their acceptance of pain and torment as a testament of faith. The visual tradition for three key saints in the Christian pantheon, however, is remarkably different, and for Saints Sebastian, Francis, and Peter Martyr a distinct and more nuanced blood-​associated iconography emerged. When painters were not primarily concerned to depict St. Sebastian as a classical male nude or a plague saint they presented his wounded body flowing with blood; in paintings of St. Francis the emphasis on the blood of his stigmata became increasingly prominent with the developing affectiveness of Franciscan spirituality; and in the textual sources describing the death of Peter Martyr the focus on his spilt blood becomes a consistent and defining feature of the saint’s visual iconography. The hypothesis offered here is that this distinctive blood iconography may be accounted for by the very particular perceptions of these three saints as alternative Christ figures. Abstract In early modern Italian art, the blood shed by Christ was an important feature of paintings of the Passion. In contrast, in non-​narrative portraits and even in narrative scenes, when artists depicted saints, they often omitted the blood that would have been spilt during their tortures and martyrdom. However, there are three saints whose iconography does not follow the general pattern: St. Sebastian, St. Francis, and St. Peter of Verona. The conformity of each of these saints to the figure of an alter Christus may account for this very different iconography.

Author Biography Diana Hiller is an independent scholar of early modern Italian painting, focusing on Christian iconography, viewership, and the religious contexts of paintings. Although not confined to the genre, much of her research concentrates on frescoes. Her most recent project concerns the iconography of a small group of images of Christ found in wall paintings in selected rural churches in central and northern Italy. She is the author of Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes, ca. 1350–​ 1490 (Ashgate, 2014).

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Dunlop, Anne. “Drawing Blood.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 63/​64 (2013): 71–​79. Elias of Cortona. “Epistola encyclica de transitu Sancti Francisci.” In Fontes Franciscani, edited by Enrico Menestò et al., 253–​55. Assisi: Porziuncola, 1995. Francis of Assisi: Early Documents. Edited by Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short. 3 vols. New York: New York City Press, 1999; repr. 2001. Fricke, Beate. “A Liquid History: Blood and Animation in Late Medieval Art.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 63/​64 (2013): 53–​69. Gérard de Frachet. Vitae fratrum ordinis praedicatorum: necnon cronica ordinis ab anno MCIII usque ad MCCLIV. Edited by Benedikt Maria Reichert. Louvain: E. Charpentier and J. Schoonjans, 1896. Jacopo da Varazze. Legenda aurea con le miniature del codice Ambrosiano C 240 inf. Edited by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni. 2 vols. Tavarnuzze: SISMEL–​Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007. Lander, Bonnie Johnson, and Eleanor Decamp, eds. Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–​1700. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Marshall, Louise. “Manipulating the Sacred.” Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 485–​532. ——​. “Reading the Body of a Plague Saint: Narrative Altarpieces and Devotional Images of St. Sebastian in Renaissance Art.” In Reading Texts and Images: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Art and Patronage in Honour of Margaret M. Manion, edited by Bernard J. Muir, 237–​72. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002. Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Ital., 115. Edited by Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green. Translated by Isa Ragusa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Moss, Candida R.  The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Os, Henk W. van. “St. Francis of Assisi as a Second Christ in Early Italian Painting.” Simiolus 7 (1974): 115–​32. Prudlo, Donald. The Martyred Inquisitor: The Life and Cult of Peter of Verona (†1252). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Rubin, Miri. “Blood Sacrifice and Redemption in Christian Iconography.” In Blood: Art, Power, Politics and Pathology, edited by James M.  Bradburne, 89–​99. Munich: Prestel, 2002. Tertullian. De Anima. Edited by A.  Gerlo et  al. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 2. Turnhout: Brepols, 1954. ——​. Apologeticum. Edited by E.  Dekkers et  al. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 1954. Thomas of Celano. “Tractatus de miraculis Beati Francisci.” In Fontes Franciscani, edited by Enrico Menestò et al., 641–​753. Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 1995. Vasari, Giorgio. Le opere di Giorgio Vasari: Con nuove annotazioni e commenti di Gaetano Milanesi. Edited by Gaetano Milanesi. 9 vols. Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1906; repr. 1998. Vauchez, André. Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. Translated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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Chapter 9

THE TREATMENT OF THE BODY IN ANATOMY LESSON OF DR. NICOLAES TULP

Helen Gramotnev DUTCH ART OF the seventeenth century encompassed an explosion of genres concerned with everyday life, with the theme of life and death consistently running through it. The image of a living body (human or animal) that has become dead addressed the balance between this life and the promise of the next under the complex power structures of the Dutch society driven by religion, politics, and progress. Under the doctrine of Protestant Reformation, concerned with “God made flesh,”1 the focus on the body as a transformative tool, connecting man with the higher power of God, appropriately took centre stage. Fulfilling more than a narrative function,2 or an interest in purely physiological approach for educational purposes,3 the image of a dead body in Dutch art was used to imagine and describe transformations of the larger world. The imagery went beyond Christian iconography, and extended to still-​life, dead game and hunting trophies, market scenes portraying meat stalls and bleeding carcasses, and narrative depictions commemorating important events. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, as one of the leading Dutch artists of the century, considered the fluidity of contemporary Dutch society by blending genres of art and engaging the viewer with dramatic compositions.

Genre Painting: Group Portraiture and the Anatomy Lesson

The growth of the painting market in Holland in the seventeenth century sparked increased interest in and accessibility of art. In the first half of the century the number of painters rose dramatically, doubling in its peak between 1619 and 1639.4 As art was in demand among the middle classes who wanted to decorate their homes with pictures, artists developed strategies for increased productivity.5 The striving for stylistic techniques to distinguish themselves from others6 instigated developments in both portraiture and genre paintings. When Rembrandt arrived in Amsterdam in 1631, his reputation had already been established in his home town of Leiden.7 Anatomy Lesson of 1  Tripp, “The Image of the Body,” 131–​37.

2  Weiss, “The Body as a Narrative Horizon.” 3  King, “Introduction.” 4  Prak, “Guilds,” 238.

5  Prak, Dutch Republic, 238–​39; Prak, “Guilds,” 238. 6  Prak, “Guilds,” 244.

7  Bevers, Hendrix, Robinson, and Schatborn, Drawings by Rembrandt, xi.

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Figure 17. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632. Oil on canvas (216.5 × 169.5 cm). Mauritshuis, The Hague. Photo: Mauritshuis, The Hague.

Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (­figure 17) was his first group portrait commission in Amsterdam, and intended to commemorate the members of the surgeons’ guild. A painting of an anatomy lesson portrayed a once-​a-​year event, the public dissection of a criminal, conducted by the Praelector (the Head Surgeon) for that year.8 The painting was intended to depict the guild members in the context of their profession. Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson reflects the preoccupation with realism prevalent in art at the time,9 and gives an insight into the relationship between God, man, and knowledge that was taking form in Holland in the seventeenth century. This chapter deals with the blend of group portraiture and genre painting in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. It will demonstrate that Rembrandt’s treatment of the dead body on the surgeons’ table is comparable to the images of animal carcasses popular in Dutch art of the time. By recalling animal carcasses in his portrayal, Rembrandt draws attention to the progress, efficiency, and expanding knowledge in Dutch society, while at the same time reinforcing the values of religious piety and subordination to authority. 8  Middelkoop, Noble, Wadum, and Broos, Under the Scalpel, 10; Gross, “Dr. Joan Deijam,” 238. 9  Westermann, A Worldly Art, 88–​92; Alpers, The Art of Describing, xxiv.

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The group portrait was a Dutch Protestant way of celebrating achievement.10 By representing the guild members in accordance with their status within the guild, group portraits offered an insight into relative social and financial positions of the sitters, deduced from the prominence of their positions as captured by the portrait;11 it also reflected their monetary contribution towards the commission.12 By the 1630s, group portraiture in Holland demonstrated what Aloïs Riegl calls internal coherence (interaction between the sitters)—​a contrast to the earlier group portraits of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century that mostly concerned themselves with external coherence (connection with the viewer).13 Riegl further argues that this new style of group portraits utilized subordination achieved by focusing the sitters’ attention on an authoritative figure, and that this subordination became a feature of civic group portraits by the early 1630s.14 At the time of Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp group portraiture was an established genre, but the concept of an “Anatomy Lesson” painting was still in its infancy. Only three portraits of the surgeons’ guild of Amsterdam had been painted before Rembrandt’s: Aert Pietersz’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Sebastian Egbertsz (1601–​1603); Thomas de Keyser’s Anatomy Lesson by Dr. Sebastiaen Egbertsz de Vrij (1619); and Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Johan Fonteijn by Nicolaes Eliaszoon (1625). Aert Pietersz’s portrait was the most symmetrical of the three, placing the sitters in three-​quarter or en face positions to maximize the recognizability of each individual. The resulting emphasis on the individual impressions outweighed the narrative aspect in this work. Thomas de Keyser was the first to introduce a shift towards increased internal coherence in his group portraits.15 Both his and Eliaszoon’s anatomy lesson paintings demonstrate increased interaction within the group (exchange of glances, mutually interactive body positions, and not all sitters looking out of the frame), increasing the level of internal coherence and creating a greater sense of realism. This realism reached a new height in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. The painting caused a sensation in its day16 by achieving the balance between narrative (portrait of the group entity) and presentation (the individuals in it). What Michael Podro in The Critical Historians of Art describes as Riegl’s tension between interior unity (the relationships inside the portrait) and exterior unity (the spectator’s relationship to the portrait)17 is conveyed in Rembrandt’s painting both through the relationships between the sitters themselves, and their relationship with the viewer. The surgeons 10  Kruger, “The Scientific Impact,” 85.

11  Schroeder, Visual Consumption, 125; Berger, Manhood, Marriage, & Mischief, xvi.

12  Bruyn, Haak, Levie, and van Thiel, Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, 183; McNeil Kettering, Rembrandt’s Group Portraits, 14; Heckscher, Rembrandt’s “Anatomy,” 6. 13  Riegl, Group Portraiture, 239.

14  Riegl, Group Portraiture, 241–​51. 15  Riegl, Group Portraiture, 239. 16  Riegl, Group Portraiture, 254. 17  Podro, Critical Historians, 83.

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are painted in their own individual self-​presentations: some sit or stand upright, some lean towards the body in the foreground. All are caught in their own unique reactions to the demonstration, exchanging glances among themselves, or looking towards Dr. Tulp in response to his demonstration. The internal drama created by these varying glances is unified through the authoritative figure of Tulp. As the internal relationships unfold, Rembrandt chooses three men to make the external connections with the viewer: the surgeon identified as Franz Van Loenen18 in the top left, the man with the list in the centre looking straight out of frame, and the man in the bottom left glancing out as if momentarily distracted by the viewer. The delicate balance of internal and external unity allows Rembrandt to “involve the subjective life of the spectator,”19 embodying the model of group portraiture for the audiences at the time.20 The drama of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson is heightened by the presence of the dead body in full view. Rembrandt chose to portray the body on the dissection table in its entirety—​something that had not been seen in the earlier portraits of the surgeons’ guild. Indeed, Aert Pietersz hides the dead body behind the living bodies of the surgeons in the 1601–​1603 painting; it is replaced by a skeleton in the 1619 painting by Thomas de Keyser; by a skull in the Anatomy Lesson by Nicolaes Eliaszoon in 1625. These artists chose to focus on the portraiture, only hinting at the narrative aspect of the anatomy lesson. By removing or restricting the dead body from view these artists have also spared their audiences the confronting nature of a human dissection, while still making effective references to human mortality through their use of memento mori. Rembrandt not only puts the body into full view, but places it forward in the composition. As a result, the viewer becomes part of the action. The light falling from the left serves two purposes: it illuminates the surgeons’ faces, fulfilling the needs of the portrait aspect of the work, and casts light—​and shadow—​on the dead man on the table. The pyramidal shape used in the composition layers it vertically, with living bodies hovering over a dead one. The glances of the men shooting in different directions create crossing diagonals typical of baroque style. The surgeons’ individual facial expressions, dramatic lighting, and multiple lines cutting through the composition all evoke a sense of anticipation over the body in the foreground. The spectacle of a public dissection of a human cadaver in front of an audience of both medical and ordinary people was common in continental Europe.21 The popularity of this event is evident from the guild’s records of public dissections and receipts from 1631 to 1731.22 An annual anatomy lesson in the seventeenth-​century Dutch Republic attracted audiences of hundreds of spectators.23 The 1609 engraving The Anatomical 18  Bruyn, Haak, Levie, and van Thiel, Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, 180–​81; Steiner, “Cultural Significance,” 278. 19  Podro, Critical Historians, 83.

20  Riegl, Group Portraiture, 254.

21  Gross, “Dr. Joan Deijam,” 238; Kemp and Wallace, Spectacular Bodies, 29. 22  Middelkoop, Noble, Wadum, and Broos, Under the Scalpel, 11.

23  Gross, “Dr. Joan Deijam,” 238; Middelkoop, Noble, Wadum, and Broos, Under the Scalpel, 11.

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Figure 18. Bartholomeus Dolendo after Jan Cornelisz Woudanus, The Anatomical Theatre in Leiden, 1609. Engraving (46.6 × 55.8 cm). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Theatre in Leiden by Bartholomeus Dolendo provides visual context for the event (­figure 18). The demonstrations usually happened in winter in order to maximize the preservation of the body for the duration of the ritual which lasted several days.24 The event was accompanied by flute music and scented candles.25 The Praelector would perform the dissection of the abdominal cavities on the first day, followed by the head on 24  Heckscher, Rembrandt’s “Anatomy,” 30; Afek et al., “Third Day Hypothesis,” 389. 25  Gross, “Dr. Joan Deijam,” 238.

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the second day, and finally the limbs on the third day.26 The organs were passed around, but hefty fines were in place if they were not returned.27 Each spectator paid a fee to attend, which covered the Praelector’s fees and the banquet for the surgeons following the dissection.28 The rarity of the event ensured its popularity, also suggesting that commemoration of such an event would have been a privilege for the commissioned artist.

Genre Painting: The Slaughtered Animal

Dead bodies of both humans and animals were not unfamiliar subjects in Dutch art, and Rembrandt’s displayed cadaver recalls images of meat stalls and slaughtered animals. Oxen and pigs were the animals most frequently appearing in such genre painting.29 These animals were often portrayed opened up and hanging on ladders, and Rembrandt himself painted two version of The Slaughtered Ox: first in 1649 and then again in 1655 (­figure 19). Both versions show a carcass of an ox tied to a rack on the ceiling, with blood drained, and with its internal details fully visible to the viewer. Given the rise of animal still-​life, its strong relationship with mortality, and the questions about the status of animals as creatures of God,30 it seems these paintings present parallels with the human dissection in The Anatomy Lesson. There have been numerous interpretations by art historians of slaughtered animals: moralistic allegories of punishment of sinners; representation of gluttony; religious sacrifice; crucifixion; and a powerful reminder of death.31 They highlight religious overtones evoked in the paintings, while at the same time showing off the artistic, scientific, and social progress of Dutch society in the seventeenth century. Oxen were imported from Denmark and Germany by the end of the sixteenth century to be fattened in the meadows of the northern Netherlands.32 As pigs roamed free and caused public and private property damage,33 killing a pig served various purposes. A large carcass of an ox or a pig, salted and smoked for consumption in winter, supplied nutrition and sustained life. Pigs were considered “healthful,” were prescribed to the sick, and even instructions on carving pigs were published.34 These instructions explained how to steady and carve the carcass in order to get the most meat out of it. Such detailed and structured carving of a body is not unlike a public dissection: the three-​day detailed process of a human dissection during an anatomy lesson echoes the detail and efficiency of carving large animals. If such a strategic approach was prevalent in the Dutch markets 26  Afek et al., “Third Day Hypothesis,” 390.

27  Gross, “Dr. Joan Deijam,” 239; Heckscher, Rembrandt’s “Anatomy,” 28.

28  Gross, “Dr. Joan Deijam,” 238; Heckscher, Rembrandt’s “Anatomy,” 32–​33. 29  Barnes and Rose, Matters of Taste, 96. 30  Cohen, “Life and Death,” 2:607–​8.

31  Craig, “Rembrandt and ‘The Slaughtered Ox,’ ” 237–​38; Poseq, “A Proposal,” 271. 32  Barnes and Rose, Matters of Taste, 18. 33  Barnes and Rose, Matters of Taste, 96. 34  Barnes and Rose, Matters of Taste, 96.

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Figure 19. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, The Slaughtered Ox, 1655. Oil on wood (94 × 69 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-​Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/​Gérard Blot.

and households, it is not surprising that public events were approached with the same level of competence and efficiency. In death both the human body and the animal carcass serve a particular purpose that contributes to life. The animal’s meat is eaten; the human body is studied to gain understanding of anatomy. The source of life from death closes the circle of life, and Rembrandt’s excited surgeons hovering over their subject reflect the interest in death in order to preserve life. Still-​life constitutes another prevalent genre in Dutch art of the seventeenth century, often featuring dead game: small animals such as hares, rabbits, and deer. These were generally reserved for feasts, and were hunted by nobility.35 These trophy animals served as a reminder of the power of man over animal and the skill of the hunter. The images of dead game often increased the sense of reality by depicting full-​scale representations of the animals.36 Just as the body in the anatomy theatre symbolized the prestige of the 35  Barnes and Rose, Matters of Taste, 18.

36  Grootenboer, Rhetoric of Perspective, 35, 67.

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medical profession, God’s power, and Protestant righteousness, the body in Rembrandt’s painting represented the power of knowledge, celebrated the surgeons’ skills, and commemorated them through the power of art. A  hunting trophy recognizing the achievement of the hunter and celebrating his skill was not that different from the commemoration of a surgeon’s skill through an anatomical demonstration of a body on the dissection table. Rembrandt’s realistic portrayal of the dead body, the size of the human corpse, and its prominent forward position make a display of the carcass. As Dr. Tulp begins to dissect the body, it becomes both a study object and a trophy for science.

The Body on the Table

The body on the table in Rembrandt’s painting is not only visible, but it has been identified from the Guild’s records as most likely belonging to Aris Kindt (an alias for Adriaan Adriaanszoon)—​a thief executed for his crimes.37 Part of Kindt’s punishment was public dissection for the benefit of medical knowledge and for the education of the public. By bringing the body forward in his composition, Rembrandt reinforces the narrative and evokes an emotional response from his viewers. The liveliness of the crowding figures above the body suggests that the desired responses were probably admiration for the skill of the surgeon and curiosity. The body is a prized possession—​not as an object of sainthood or a treasure, but as a source of learning, combined with assertion of control and a perception of good triumphing over evil. A dissected criminal was always from another town,38 ensuring that the local population saw him merely as a dead body. His soul was considered beyond redemption.39 Thus the “contribution” of his body to science was considered as an appropriate and justified use of his body, and Tulp’s triumph over the dead body represents the triumph of righteousness over evil and corruption. Still, respectful treatment of body organs was demanded from the audience of a publicly executed anatomy lesson, and neither talking nor laughing was permitted during the event.40 While the bodily contribution of a condemned individual rejected by society did not imply salvation for that individual, their body served a moral, educational purpose, at the same time asserting the power of the authorities. As an object of science and study, it was expected to be taken seriously. As Amsterdam grew, its scholars could rival those of Leiden’s older institutions, and, as the Praelector, Dr. Tulp intended for the Anatomy Lesson to publicize the quality of Amsterdam’s surgeons.41 Nicolaes Tulp, himself a prominent physician originally known as Claes Pieterszoon, adopted the name Tulp (Tulip) during the height of the 37  Afek et  al., “Third Day Hypothesis,” 390; Middelkoop, Noble, Wadum, and Broos, Under the Scalpel, 20. 38  Middelkoop, Noble, Wadum, and Broos, Under the Scalpel, 10. 39  Steiner, “Cultural Significance,” 278.

40  Gross, “Dr. Joan Deijam,” 238; Heckscher, Rembrandt’s “Anatomy,” 28. 41  Sutherland Harris, Seventeenth-​century Art, 349.

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tulip trade.42 Over the span of his career, Dr. Tulp had contributed to medical concepts that are relevant today: for example migraine, the effects of tobacco on lung deterioration, placebo effect, and the discovery of the ileocecal valve (junction of large and small intestines) that is still called the “valve of Tulpius.”43 His publication titled Observatione Medicae contained a collection of causes of death and disease, details on dissections of various animals, and the earliest known sketch of a chimpanzee.44 Rembrandt’s particular attention to the presentation of Dr.  Tulp in the Anatomy Lesson highlights the subordination in group portraiture discussed at length by Aloïs Riegl.45 Rembrandt sets Dr.  Tulp apart, leaving ample space behind him, and crowding all the other surgeons opposite him. He is the only one wearing a hat, a symbol of authority,46 and X-​ray analysis of the painting by Mauritshuis Museum has previously shown that a hat was removed from the head of the surgeon identified as Van Loenen in the top left of the composition.47 Perhaps this was done because of the geometry of the composition, since Van Loenen is positioned at the top of the pyramid connecting the surgeons, in order to grant Dr. Tulp the higher status in the painting. Indeed physicians, being university educated and able to read Latin, enjoyed a higher status than ordinary surgeons.48 Whatever the reason for the removal of the other hat, the end result remains: Dr. Tulp is undoubtedly the leader in this scene, in control, demonstrating the function of the delicate muscles and tendons in the left arm and hand. With numerous medical attributions to him, it was in Tulp’s interest to be portrayed as an elite researcher. That could be the reason for the historically inaccurate portrayal of the dissection. Rembrandt skips the gruesome details of open abdominal cavities (day one) and the head (day two), and goes straight to the analysis of limbs (day three).49 We are presented with an image of a clean, bloodless dissection of a hand and an arm. Dr. Tulp delicately clasps the muscles that move the fingers, while at the same time with his left hand demonstrating the movement those muscles would instigate in a living human being. By choosing to focus on that particular function, Tulp is captured in the portrait demonstrating the function that most closely associates man with God and distinguishes him from most animals. While not his own discovery, Tulp’s demonstration of this function of a human hand emphasizes intellect. The intense curiosity and amazement registered on the other surgeons’ faces and their eagerly leaning bodies capture a moment of enlightenment. The dead body is Tulp’s means of asserting his prestige as a surgeon. This clean, idealized presentation of the dissection enables 42  Prak, Dutch Republic, 88.

43  Kruger, “The Scientific Impact,” 86–​88. 44  Kruger, “The Scientific Impact,” 88–​91.

45  Riegl, Group Portraiture, 241–​51, 254–​59. 46  Steiner, “Cultural Significance,” 278.

47  Bruyn, Haak, Levie, and van Thiel, Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, 180–​81; Steiner, “Cultural Significance,” 278–​79. 48  Prak, Dutch Republic, 130.

49  Afek et al., “Third Day Hypothesis,” 390.

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a commemoration that not only highlights the knowledge that might be gained from this dissection of the dead man, but also emphasizes the progressive nature of Dutch society at the time, their thirst for progress and proud desire to stay ahead in the race for knowledge. The focus on the function of the hand also serves as a useful parallel with the skill of a painter’s hand and the intellectual status of the artist. As the number of painters in Holland was rising dramatically, artists looked for ways to distinguish themselves in order to compete in the prestigious art market.50 Securing a commission to paint a group portrait of a guild was an indication of Rembrandt’s already established reputation as an artist, despite the fact that he could not have been older than twenty-​six when he painted this work.51 Svetlana Alpers compares the achievement of realism in painting to a microscopic analysis,52 and the keen interest in microscopic images in Holland at the time is noted by Maarten Prak.53 Rembrandt’s ability to combine realism with a flair for capturing human emotion allows the narrative aspect of this painting to challenge its portrait function. This engagement, setting Rembrandt apart as an artist, explains Riegl’s statement that “the painting’s attribution would be safe even without the artist’s signature.”54 The emphasis on the function of the hand allows the dead body to provide a pathway to recognition not only for Tulp whose surgical skills are immortalized in the painting, but to Rembrandt himself through his surgical approach to his art and the achievement of drama and realism. To a modern audience a procedure wherein a human body is relieved of its organs, its head is cut off, and then limbs cut open, hardly seems the subject for a portrait commemoration. Yet the confronting process of a public dissection was not unappealing for seventeenth-​century audiences. The Mauritshuis X-​ray analysis points to a more brutal portrayal of the body in the earlier version of the painting. It suggests an opened abdominal cavity, and possibly a stump on the right arm, which would account for the length discrepancy between the arms on the body.55 Rembrandt was no stranger to depicting violence: Blinding of Samson (1636) is one of his most confronting paintings, with the muscular Samson held down by several struggling men, and having a spike driven through his eye. Yet the final result of his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is far more civilized than a body cut up into pieces. Rembrandt uses his skills in depicting realism to focus on intellect instead of violence, and through that elevates both the skill of a surgeon and the skill of an artist. The violence hidden under the final version of the painting would have been a much closer portrayal to the images of slaughtered animals. In Rembrandt’s own The Slaughtered Ox (1655) the skinned carcass is shown with internal organs removed, strung open and hung up by its hind legs. The internal tissue and ribcage take up almost 50  Prak, “Guilds,” 244; Prak, Dutch Republic, 238–​39. 51  Riegl, Group Portraiture, 254.

52  Alpers, The Art of Describing, 72–​91. 53  Prak, Dutch Republic, 222–​23. 54  Riegl, Group Portraiture, 254.

55  Afek et al., “Third Day Hypothesis,” 391.

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the entire composition in a confronting depiction. The young girl in the background poking her head through the doorway brings casualness to the scene, pointing to the lack of shock factor associated with an image of a large animal carcass. Meat stalls and butcher shops were depicted often showing parts of or a whole carcass, skinned, disembowelled, sometimes with blood still covering the meat, such as A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms by Pieter Aertzen (1551), and A Butcher Shop by Frans Snyders (1630s). The images of shops and market stalls can be read as an association with trade and celebration of the Dutch economic prosperity. Tobin Siebers even argues that the Dutch were “not sufficiently disinterested” to see the aesthetic of paintings, because of their focus on the celebratory and economic element of what they depicted.56 But these images also point to a particular interest in bodies and their anatomy. The physiological emphasis addressed in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, and in particular the initial portrayal of the body as a cut-​up corpse, suggests that Kindt’s body is treated and perhaps viewed in much the same way as an animal carcass. Since he is condemned and rightfully punished, his body is dehumanized from the perspective of art, and its humanity remains significant only from the perspective of gaining knowledge and offering moral instruction for the people.

Kindt and the Dead Christ

Similarities have been noted by scholars between the body of Kindt and the body of Christ as portrayed in Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (ca. 1478–​ 1485).57 Indeed, the loin cloth on Kindt recalls that on the body of dead Christ, the large book at Kindt’s feet is imposing and resembles a Bible, and the arch-​like appearance of the room could be interpreted as resembling a tomb. The sight of the soles of the dead man’s feet recalls medieval iconography, where bare feet were associated with poverty and humility,58 and the depictions of Christ and his apostles with bare feet. Indeed, Mantegna’s Christ is shown with the soles of his feet closest to the viewer. However, the purity of the elevated imagery of Mantegna’s painting inspires very different emotions to Rembrandt’s work. Mantegna shows a body that is virtuous and sacred. In contrast, the body of Kindt is shown being violated by the surgeons, as Dr. Tulp begins the dissection. The soles of the corpse’s feet are closest to the viewer with the body positioned on a diagonal, but they are in shadow, which also covers half of Kindt’s face. As a reminder of the criminal’s damnation it presents a sharp contrast to the humility and empathy felt at the sight of the soles of the feet of Mantegna’s Christ. Remembering the initial depiction of the body visible on the X-​ray the parallels with meat stalls and animal carcasses seem more justified than those with the body of Christ. The surgeons are seen “sacrificing” this body to science, but as it is an earthly punishment of an execution imposed onto the man, this is not to be compared with Christ’s voluntary sacrifice. Instead Rembrandt is suggesting that we should see this as a human affair helping us to gain better knowledge of the human body, and through that to come closer to understanding God. 56  Siebers, “Defining the Body Aesthetic,” 7. 57  Steiner, “Cultural Significance,” 278. 58  Hall, Dictionary, 131.

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The Protestant devotion to God which was opposed to beautiful images of religious artwork went hand in hand with the Dutch interest in secular art, non-​state portraiture, and still-​life paintings. Religious art was commissioned by wealthy patrons, rather than by churches themselves—​not to be worshipped but as a documentation of biblical history, serving as a reminder of God’s omnipresence.59 Indeed, the dominant image of a body throughout medieval and early modern European art is the body of Christ. In 1633 Rembrandt painted The Raising of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross, now both residing in Alte Pinakothek in Munich. The image of the dying Christ mounted on the cross focuses on the body as a symbolic object of salvation for human kind. The dead Christ is portrayed as still a warm body, limp and twisted, evoking strong emotions in a poignantly un-​idealized way, and highlighting the painful reality of the scene. While the body is dead, it is not portrayed as such, and its living essence is emphasized. In contrast, the stiff-​looking body of Kindt laid out on the dissection table is portrayed clearly as life-​less: his skin is of greyish hue, the blood does not flow from the opened forearm, suggesting that this man has been dead for a few days. Taking a prominent position in this painting, the body becomes a symbol of new life, only this time through understanding scientific knowledge extracted from the dead. In a sense the science emerging from surgical dissection is anti-​symbolic, even if not inconsistent with religious belief. The bloodlessness of the corpse also poses a problem to the parallels with Christ. An act of sacrifice implied spilling of blood, and blood itself symbolized essence of life,60 as well as serving as a reminder of mortality. Thus, Christ’s blood spilled publicly intended to emphasize his humanity. In the Anatomy Lesson though, the spilling of blood is absent. Even the mode of execution that Kindt suffered is bloodless: he was hanged. Therefore, the lack of blood on Kindt’s body, highlighted by its greying appearance, implies de-​ humanization. While the market stall and butcher shop images often showed bloody meat and fresh carcasses, the status of the bloodless grey body on Tulp’s table is reduced even below that of the animals. De-​humanization is necessary to prevent the audiences from seeing the corpse as a person. Blood as a Christian symbol of sacrifice61 not seen flowing from Kindt’s veins implies a detachment from humanity and justifies the body’s treatment as an object of science. Of course, by the third day (dissection of limbs) the blood would no longer be flowing from the body, and given that it was transported from another city, it probably would not have flowed even on the first day of dissection. Rembrandt’s realism implies a lack of life, separating this image from the imagery of Christ. The stillness of the body is monumental: it is grey, dry, and lifeless, and acts as its own memento mori. The painting can be seen as a “human still-​life” where instead of caterpillars eating away at leaves, a group of eager surgeons are watching the human fruit cut open in front of them—​even if it is dry. Once again, Rembrandt is redefining conventions, blending the genres to reach his viewer on an emotional level, and using the dead body as the link between the genres. 59  Power Bratton, Environmental Values, 202. 60  Hall, Dictionary, 51. 61  Hall, Dictionary, 51.

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The Spectacle of Human Dissection The ritual of an anatomy lesson served multiple purposes. Efficiency of the process was impressive: nothing was wasted. Every part of the body was studied carefully, with organs passed around and respect demanded from everyone attending the event. The God-​fearing people watched the execution in one town, and those in another observed the additional punishment of a public dissection, paying a fee for the privilege. If the study of anatomy were the only purpose here, dissections would probably have been a more frequent occurrence, and performed in the privacy of the Guild’s quarters with a limited audience. Yet as an event open to the public the dissection shows a thought beyond science or religion only. It is a celebration of human knowledge and of God’s power, at the same time witnessing to a social duty of both entertaining and educating the public. Combining the duty to God with the drive for knowledge suggests a forward-​thinking society that consciously searches for its own answers to the questions of life and the universe while still respecting religious beliefs and maintaining control of the people. This society was able to combine a progressive, scientific approach with religious piety, without the two being in conflict. Care was taken that man’s soul was not violated—​only a man who was judged to be beyond redemption could be put on the dissecting table. But once a body was on that table, a methodical approach to the dissection ensured that social, scientific, religious, and human needs were satisfied in the most efficient way. In fact, the engraving by Bartholomeus Dolendo (­figure 18) effectively summarizes the full potential of the spectacle of human dissection. While the human body on the table is centrally positioned, the rounded seating of the theatre creates a closed world of learning around it. Trophies of animal heads decorate the walls, and animal skeletons in the background serve as reminders of scientific knowledge. The human skeletons holding up the flags are scattered through the audience. As the viewer “stands” behind the row of attentive observers in the foreground of the composition, this monumental presentation shows off the study of anatomy in all its glory. The act of watching in Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is significant on several levels. The complex interaction of glances between the surgeons and the viewer implies the viewer’s inclusion in the narrative. In fact, the viewer has the most uninterrupted view of the procedure—​no one outside the frame has to lean over people or move around to see Dr. Tulp’s demonstration. It is as if the viewer is placed in the front row, at the best angle to observe not only the working of the exposed muscles and tendons but also the body itself and the subsequent reaction of the surgeons. Interestingly, Mauritshuis Museum—​the home of this painting since 179862—​displays it in an elevated position, with a large empty table placed in front of it. The elevation gives the work extra stature: the viewer has to look up at the image of Dr. Tulp. The body on the table positioned at their eye level means it is the first point of contact with the painting. The table in front acts as a mediation device between the scene depicted and its audiences. It is curious that the table also makes it impossible to come too close to the painting, resulting in the museum visitors leaning over if they really want to get close! Dividing the professionals 62  Baljet, “The Painted Amsterdam Anatomy Lessons,” 10.

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from the amateur viewers preserves the superior status of the surgeons commemorated, and simulates the leaning depicted in the painting. Effective interplay between the image and reality creates an acute and immediate connection with the painting, allowing the audience to “enter” the scene and feel emotionally involved with it.

Conclusion From the displayed animal carcasses, to the still-​bleeding meat in market stalls, to the limp body of Christ, the fluidity of bodies in the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age reflects the fluidity of its genres. Rembrandt’s drive to outdo himself and his contemporaries resulted in a ground-​breaking composition for its time. It is a lively depiction of a real event, however historically inaccurate, poignant for its drama and innovation. He steps away from symmetry forcing the eye to move through the composition, thus inviting the viewer to experience the somewhat paradoxical vitality of the scene, the curiosity for the body, and the need to explore. Rembrandt’s use of baroque stylistic elements (crossing lines, dramatic lighting) not only gives the body centrality, but highlights its significance in the Dutch society of the time: a celebration of knowledge, progress, and proximity to God. While this portrait does the job of commemorating the members of the guild, its links with genre paintings provide additional layers of interpretation. By echoing depictions of meat stalls, dead game and hunting trophies, Rembrandt is able to connect the complex layers of Dutch society by incorporating elements of multiple genres into his group portrait, and to emphasize control through the lack of bodily fluids in the painting. The image serves as a bridge between what is known and what is yet to be discovered, feeding the Dutch desire for knowledge, prestige, and progress, while keeping religion at the top and ensuring the desired subordination within the layers of society. Abstract This chapter considers the representation of the body in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. Rembrandt blends portraiture with genre painting to bring forth a depiction of the body that is about scientific progress and the prospering Dutch economy on the backdrop of religious and state control. The lack of fluids and stiffness in the body are used to emphasize authority. By recalling animal carcasses, Dutch market scenes, still-​life paintings of hunting trophies, and the images of the Dead Christ, Rembrandt conveys the fluidity of the Dutch society.

Author Biography Helen Gramotnev is an independent researcher, art historian, and curator. Her research work focuses on Dutch art of the seventeenth century, and French art at the turn of the twentieth century. Her research deals with the representation of bodies in art, with artist-​designed frames, and with the links between high fashion and French modern art. She is the exhibition curator at the Queensland Military Historical Society in Brisbane. Her blog Brushword Art Space deals with promotion of contemporary artists, exhibition reviews, and articles on curatorial perspectives.

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Bibliography Afek, Arnon, Tal Friedman, Chen Kugel, Iris Barshack, and Doron Lurie. “Dr.  Tulp’s Anatomy Lesson by Rembrandt: The Third Day Hypothesis.” The Israel Medical Association Journal 11 (2009): 389–​92. Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. London: Penguin, 1983. Baljet, R.  “The Painted Amsterdam Anatomy Lessons: Anatomy Performances in Dissecting Rooms?” Annals of Anatomy 182 (2000): 3–​11. Barnes, Donna R., and Peter G.  Rose. Matters of Taste: Food and Drink in Seventeenth-​ century Dutch Art and Life. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002. Berger, Harry. Manhood, Marriage, & Mischief: Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” and other Dutch Group Portraits. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Bevers, Holm, Lee Hendrix, William W.  Robinson, and Peter Schatborn. Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupil: Telling the Difference. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009. Bruyn, L., B.  Haak, S.  H. Levie, and P.  J. J.  van Thiel. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings: Volume II: 1631–​1634. Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1986. Cohen, Sarah. “Life and Death in the Northern European Game Piece.” In Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts, edited by Karl Ennenkel and Paul Smith, 2:603–​40. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Craig, Kenneth. “Rembrandt and ‘The Slaughtered Ox.’ ” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983): 235–​39. Grootenboer, Hanneke. The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-​ century Dutch Still-​life Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Gross, Charles C. “The ‘Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Joan Deijam.’ ” Trends in Neurosciences 21 (1998): 237–​40. Hall, James. Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art. Boulder: Perseus, 2008. Heckscher, William S. Rembrandt’s “Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp.” New York: New York University Press, 1958. Kemp, Martin, and Marina Wallace. Spectacular Bodies: The Art of Science of the Human Body from Leonardo till Now. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. King, Helen. “Introduction.” In Blood Sweat, and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe, edited by Manfred Horstmanshoff, Helen King, and Claus Zittel, 1–​24. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Kruger, Lawrence. “The Scientific Impact of Dr.  N.  Tulp, Portrayed in Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy Lesson.’ ” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 14 (2005): 85–​92. McNeil Kettering, Alison. Rembrandt’s Group Portraits. Zwolle: Waanders, 2006. Middelkoop, Norbert, Petria Noble, Jorgen Wadum, and Ben Broos. Rembrandt under the Scalpel: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp Dissected. Amsterdam: Six Art Promotion, 1998. Podro, Michael. The Critical Historians of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Poseq, Avigdor W.  G. “A Proposal for Rembrandt’s Two Versions of ‘Slaughtered Ox.’ ” Artibus et Historiae 60 (2009): 271–​76.

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Power Bratton, Susan. Environmental Values in Christian Art. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Prak, Maarten. The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ——​. “Guilds and the Development of the Art Market during the Dutch Golden Age.” Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 30 (2003): 236–​51. Riegl, Aloïs. The Group Portraiture of Holland. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999. Schroeder, Jonathan E. Visual Consumption. London: Routledge, 2002. Siebers, Tobin. “Introduction: Defining the Body Aesthetic.” In The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification, edited by Tobin Siebers, 1–​13. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Steiner, Gary. “The Cultural Significance of Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.’ ” History of European Ideas 36 (2010): 273–​79. Sutherland Harris, Ann. Seventeenth-​century Art and Architecture. London: King, 2008. Tripp, David. “The Image of the Body in the Formative Phases of the Protestant Reformation.” In Religion and the Body, edited by Sarah Coakley, 131–​51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Weiss, Gail. “The Body as a Narrative Horizon.” In Thinking the Limits of the Body, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss, 25–​35. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Westermann, Mariët. A Worldly Art: The Dutch Republic, 1585–​1718. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

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Chapter 10

AUGUSTINE ON THE FLESH OF THE RESURRECTION BODY IN THE DE FIDE ET SYMBOLO: ORIGEN, MANICHAEISM, AND AUGUSTINE’S DEVELOPING THOUGHT REGARDING HUMAN PHYSICAL PERFECTION

Michael David Barbezat WITHIN THE CHRISTIAN tradition, the Incarnation and ascension of Christ and the eventual perfection of all human bodies at the Resurrection push the conception of the body itself to the edge of the imagination. In his De fide et symbolo, or On the Faith and the Creed, Augustine engages with the very idea of body through these issues.1 The De fide is an exposition of the Creed of the Christian faith offered by a young Augustine to his superiors in the African church. Within it, Augustine engages with various ways of conceiving of the body of God and the bodies of the elect at the end of time. In this discussion, he reveals what he saw as a possible route to the perfection of the human body, while at the same time insisting on the disembodiment of all aspects of God except the body of Christ. In the larger context of conversations regarding the body and its fluids from antiquity to the eve of modernity, Augustine’s attempts to imagine the perfection of the human body illustrate the profound connection between the human body and human identity, and how this connection tends to provide an imaginative limit to the possibility of human transformation. Within this tradition, while the soul may be able to endure, at least for a time, without the body, the body consistently remains an essential part of personhood. Changing the body too much threatens to transform a human being into someone else or something else, as Caroline Walker Bynum has found in her study of changing conceptions of the Christian resurrection.2 Augustine’s changing ideas regarding the resurrection body provide an example in miniature of the tug-​of-​war between change and continuity that defines Western attempts to imagine a perfect human. In his final argument, Augustine found that a human body needs blood. Despite the strong association of this fluid and its motion with change and the post-​lapsarian inevitability that change leads to corruption and decay, removing blood entirely proved too much of a change to endure.

1  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, ed. Zycha; Augustine, De fide et symbolo, trans. Meijering.

2  My approach to the major currents acting upon ideas of the resurrection body are heavily indebted to Caroline Walker Bynum’s thesis in The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 11.

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The route towards perfection charted by the young Augustine abstracts or spiritualizes the body to a high degree and would prove unacceptable to him in his old age. In an argument influenced by a combination of ideas found in Origen, the Neoplatonic tradition and perhaps Manichaeism, he proposes an ideal, angelic ethereal body, free from all grossness and change, going so far as to say that at the Resurrection “there will no longer be flesh and blood, but only body.”3 As an older man, Augustine felt that the refinement of the body into something like a divine vapour negated the very idea of body, through the destruction of its substance. In the Retractions, he returns to this text, insisting that the perfect body will be fleshy as it is now, complete with its fluids but without their impulse towards change.4 Augustine does not, however, reconcile this statement with the forces that drew him in his youth towards a radical transformation of the body, leaving a large un-​bridged gap between the currents in his eschatological theology emphasizing transformation and those emphasizing continuity. This text provides a microcosm of the shift between the worldview of Augustine’s youth and his old age charted by Peter Brown. The original argument of the De fide et symbolo is confident in the powers of the rational mind to make an ascent from the “laws of nature” to “the true law” of the divine.5 In the light of the Retractions, the nature of this ascent appears transformed, and the perfection of humanity has become part of a currently insoluble mystery navigated by faith.6 The specific attributes of both Christ’s risen body and also the human resurrection body in the De fide et symbolo present a window onto the uneasy composite between Platonizing notions regarding the body and older materialistic conceptions, not only in Augustine’s thought, but also in the Christian tradition. The need to spiritualize, or abstract, the body to reach perfection found itself in a constant tug-​of-​war with the impetus to limit radical change in order to maintain human identity. A disembodied or utterly transformed view of the life to come threatened the faithful with the spectacle of oblivion. If we cannot recognize ourselves or the forces that act upon us, do we in truth still exist? We can see such a compromise expressed in the inexplicable body of the ascendant Christ, the recognizable, fleshy bodies of the saved, and the incorporeal existence of the divinity itself. The De fide is a small part in the unfolding imagining of ourselves and the meaning of our bodies within the Christian tradition, combining the desire for transcendence of the body’s limitations, with the hope of true individual immortality.

3  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 10.24, 30 (Meijering, 150), “quia illo tempore immutationis angelicae non iam caro erit et sanguis, sed tantum corpus.” 4  Augustine, Retractationum libri duo, 1.17, ed. Mutzenbecher, 52–​54. 5  Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 415–​17.

6  My use of the term “navigated” draws upon the importance and spiritual productivity of moments where current human reason reaches its limits in Augustinian theology. See Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word.

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The Text: Themes, Contents, and Structure

Augustine composed the De fide et symbolo while he was still a priest and delivered it before the assembled African bishops at the synod of Hippo Regius in October of 393. The text is an exposition of the Creed, called the symbol, but which creed is somewhat of an open question. It is not the famous Nicean Creed. E. P. Meijering argues that it is either the Vetus Romanum, or the Confession of Milan. He believes that the Vetus is the most likely possibility.7 Even if the Creed is the Vetus, Augustine proceeds in a somewhat eccentric order. Based upon chapter incipits, Meijering offers the following reconstructed Creed: “I believe in God the all-​powerful Father and Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only begotten son of the Father, our Lord, who was born through the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. [I believe that] he rose from the dead on the third day, ascended into Heaven [and] sits at the right hand of the Father, hence he will come and judge the living and the dead. And [I believe] in the Holy Spirit, the holy church, the forgiveness of sinners and the resurrection of the flesh.”8 A priest addressing a group of bishops in this fashion offered an unusual, perhaps unprecedented, opportunity for the young Augustine to display his erudition and oratorical skills. Likely due to its purpose and circumstances, Augustine did not count it among his sermons but rather called it a disputatio.9 The issues surrounding the body of God in this text depend heavily on their context. As a result, I  will initially follow Augustine’s order of ideas. The purpose of this treatise is to move beyond a mere faith in words to a deeper understanding of their meaning. Augustine begins by explaining that the faith must be expressed for the benefit of believers, and that it must be defended against heretics. This faith is briefly outlined in the symbol (the Creed) so that the newly baptized may have an easy object for their faith. A deeper insight behooves those who wish to progress further, so Augustine offers a needed explanation and elaboration of the symbol that will also inoculate them against common errors as well as the ideas and arguments promoted by various heretics.10 Augustine warns his listeners about a false understanding of God as creator. Just as the Creed states, he is all-​powerful and truly not constrained by anything. Philosophers who argue that the creator of the world was not almighty, but really limited by the prime matter of the universe are in error. Here, he is almost certainly criticizing not only Manichaean beliefs, but also the Platonic demiurge or craftsman, which crafted the 7  Meijering, De fide et symbolo, 11.

8  Meijering, De fide et symbolo, 11. “Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, et Jesum Christum, Filium Dei, Patris unigenitum, Dominum nostrum, qui natus est per Spiritium sanctum ex Maria virgine, qui sub Pontio Pilato crucifixus est et sepultus. Tertio dei resurrexit a mortuis, ascendit in caelum, sedet ad dextram Patris, inde venturus et iudicaturus vivos et mortuos, et in Spiritum sanctum, sanctam ecclesiam, remissionem peccatorum, carnis resurrectionem.” The translation is mine. 9  Augustine, The Retractions, trans. Bogan, 76.

10  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 1.1, 3–​4 (Meijering, 15–​23).

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universe out of matter that already existed.11 Augustine explains that an immersion in the things of this world leads to such an erroneous perception. Seeing human craftsmen working with wood or clay it is natural to assume that even the universe came about through a similar process, but this is a carnal understanding. To make matter co-​eternal with the creator is, in essence, to make matter God.12 Since there is only one all-​powerful being, however, God must be the creator of everything, since he precedes everything.13 In this introductory passage, Augustine has already highlighted what will become one of the driving tensions throughout the treatise: the relationship between matter as it currently exists and divine perfection. To avoid the creation of two gods, all that exists must be the work of one God, whom we believe to be good. The clearest sticking point is the body. If anything should reveal a weakness or wickedness in God, it should be the fallible body and the world of changeable matter in which it exists. God is not weak, and the body as we have it, is his work. A work vitiated by our sins but one that will be perfected in the time to come. This perfection, however tempting, should not undo matter as if it were a mistake, although what Augustine will later propose may sound close to this undoing of matter to some readers. In Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, we have already come to the problem of the body. After God’s creation of matter, he turns to the meeting of God and his creation in Jesus Christ or the Word. The Word should not be understood in a simple sense, as in the manner of a man speaking. Just as in God’s creation of the universe, his word does not use pre-​existing matter. The Word is not created but generated, and unlike the carnal words of human mouths and throats, the divine Word reveals the intention of the speaker perfectly. Jesus is the perfect language, the ideal realization of the intangible into the material.14 Augustine warns against heretical understandings of the Son. The Son was not made, and he has no beginning. He is not unequal to the Father, nor is he the same as the Father. The Son regarded it as worthy of himself to be also created among men, to show us how to return. This was not a surrender of his divinity but the taking of the form of a servant, an act of humility, adding our changeable nature to the unchangeable wisdom of God.15 The Word of God in this action assumed total manhood: body, soul, and spirit. Just taking on body alone would not have meant taking on humanity, since we are a composite of body, soul and spirit.16 The body did not pollute the Word, nor was the Word befouled by its birth through a woman. The soul is truly polluted by desire, not 11  Plato, Timaeus, 52d–​53c, 54–​55.

12  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 2.2–​2.3a, 4–​6 (Meijering, 25–​28). 13  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 2.2, 5 (Meijering, 30).

14  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 2.3b–​III.4, 6–​8 (Meijering, 38–​50). 15  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 4.5–​IV.7, 8–​11 (Meijering, 51–​66).

16  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 4.8, 12 (Meijering, 69), “quippe cum ista susceptio pro salute nostra gesta sit, cauendum est, ne, cum crediderit aliquid nostrum non pertinere ad istam susceptionem, non pertineat ad salutem. et cum homo excepta forma membrorum, quae diversis generibus animantium diversa tributa est, non distet a pecore nisi rationali spiritu, quae mens etiam nominatur, quomodo sana est fides, qua creditur, quod id nostrum susceperit dei sapientia, quod habemus commune cum pecore, illud autem non susceperit, quod inlustratur luce sapientiae et quod hominis proprium est?”

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by its mere existence in the flesh.17 The status of the body again serves as the heart of the issue that concerns Augustine. He devotes almost the entirety of chapter four to an engagement with heretical ways of understanding the unity of God with humanity. He recognizes that in imaging the unity of God with mankind, one may think first that this is simply a unity of the divinity with a weak body, but a human being is more than a body. A body, soul, and spirit constitute a true human being, and Christ had to possess them all. Following this formation, the Ascension of Christ into heaven, the uplifting of his body, soul and spirit to the “right hand of the Father,” presents a conceptual problem. How is Christ in heaven? Where is he? Is heaven a place? Are there other embodied creatures there to keep him company? Augustine begins to address these issues, by explaining how certain “gentiles or heretics” utilize the arguments of philosophers to assert “something which is earthly cannot be in heaven.”18 These philosophers do not know the meaning behind: “an animate body is sown, a spiritual body rises” (1 Cor. 15:44). The body does not change fully into spirit.19 Instead, “it is subjected to the spirit in such a way that it is suitable for dwelling in heaven, since all earthly fragility and pollution have been changed and transformed into heavenly purity and stability.”20 He places this section in the context of our own resurrection, since a similar ascension has been “promised to us” in Matthew 22:30 where we read, “They will be like angels in heaven.”21 A body similarly purged of “all earthly fragility and pollution” awaits the faithful in the heavenly Jerusalem at the end of time. Some readers, however, have found this section in conflict with statements Augustine will make in chapter ten, where he could give the reader the impression that the body will be changed into a spirit. It all depends on how one envisions a body free of all earthly pollution, and imbued with “heavenly purity and stability,” and if one’s own concept of body can withstand such a radical transformation. Augustine returns to the issue of Christ’s body in heaven and in doing so reaches a point of rational impasse regarding its current state. To those who ask how Christ’s body exists in a spiritual heaven, Augustine responds: “But it is curious and superfluous to ask where and how the body of the Lord is in heaven. For our fragility cannot investigate into the secrets of heaven but our faith must have high and honest feelings about the dignity

17  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 4.9–​10, 12–​14 (Meijering, 72–​82), esp. 4.10,14: “Non enim cum regit corpus atque vivificat, sed cum eius bona mortalia concupiscit, de corpore anima maculatur.” Augustine does not retract this statement, despite its clear resonance with the theology of Pelagius.

18  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 6.13, 15 (Meijering, 89), “ut dicant terrenum aliquid in caelo esse non posse.”

19  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 6.13, 15 (Meijering, 90), “quasi corpus uertatur in spiritum et spiritus fiat.”

20  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 6.13, 15–​16 (Meijering, 90), “sed spirituale corpus intelligitur, quod ita spiritui suditum est, ut coelesti habitationi conveniat, omni fragilitate ac labe terrena in coelestem puritatem et stabilitatem mutata atque conuersa.”

21  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 6.13, 15 (Meijering, 88), “quem beatitudinis locum etiam nobis promisit, dicens: erunt sicut angeli in caelis.”

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of the Lord’s body.”22 As Meijering states, this is a strange eruption of forces contrary to the text’s entire purpose. The point of the text is to bring believers further than mere faith in the symbol, but in this moment, Augustine asks the audience to “go no further than mere faith.”23 This moment in the text constitutes the breaking point of rational argument. The state of Jesus’s fully human, but perfected, body in heaven pushes reason to its limit, and the journey to this limit opens the door to faith.

Spiritual Bodies and Corporeal “Spirits”

The collapse of human understanding enclosed in the question of Christ in heaven brings our own existence in the time to come into a similar state of rational uncertainty, because Augustine has linked the two. As a result, where caution entails a respite, the issue cannot be allowed to rest. In chapter ten, he will explore the body promised to the resurrected along similar lines and in the meanwhile will add another complication to the issue of the body’s relationship with God: God both has and does not have a body. Discussion of the implications of Christ’s ascendant body resumes in the exploration of the phrase, “he sits at the right hand of the Father.” When we say, “he sits at the right hand of God,” this should not be taken to mean that God has a human form. Even to imagine this is a form of idolatry.24 “At the right hand” symbolizes the highest state of blessedness not physical position. Likewise, God the Father is spoken of as sitting to symbolize his powers of judgement and rulership, not sitting in a corporeal sense as the position of limbs.25 While Christ is approachable through his likeness to us—​indeed, as we will see later, Christ’s humanity is what allows us to ascend to God ourselves—​the rest of God is inaccessible via images, and even attempting to envision the existence of Christ and God the Father together is fraught with dangers. The issue of Christ at the right hand of God may have been more pointed in the fourth century than it first appears, because opinions regarding God’s incorporeality were far from uniform. Augustine has just argued for the existence of Jesus’s resurrected body in heaven, although the details are unfathomable in their totality for a human mind. One reason they may be beyond the capability of human comprehension is that Christ’s corporeal presence in heaven may lead one logically to presuppose that he exists in a corporeal heaven with a materially embodied God the Father. Carl W. Griffin and David L. Paulsen have argued that many early Christians and not just the “simpliciores” believed that God 22  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 6.13, 16 (Meijering, 91–​92), “sed ubi et quomodo sit in caelo corpus dominicum, curiosissimum et superuacaneum est quaerere; tantummodo in caelo esse credendum est. non enim est fragilitatis nostrae caelorum secreta discutere, sed est nostrae fidei de dominici corporis dignitate sublimia et honesta sentire.” 23  Meijering, De fide et symbolo, 92.

24  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 7.14, 16 (Meijering, 93–​94), “tale enim simulacrum deo nefas est christiano in templo collocare; multo magis in corde nefarium est, ubi vere est templum dei.” 25  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 7.14, 17 (Meijering, 96).

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was materially embodied or anthropomorphic.26 They credit Augustine with making the incorporeality of God and the soul fundamental doctrines in the West.27 Elizabeth Clark likewise maintains that God’s corporeality served as a real point of controversy in late fourth-​century Egypt.28 Within early Christianity, materialistic conceptions of the soul and of God, arising from Stoic philosophy and certain strands of Judaism, conflicted with Platonic disembodiment, and before Augustine’s lifetime the “winner” may not have been as obvious as it appears to many modern commentators. Tertullian serves as an excellent example of an early Christian thinker who, under the influence of Stoic ideas, believed that all things that exist must possess some kind of body. He believed that all reality is corporeal; anything without body is a fiction, no more than an idea without reality of its own. The soul, spiritual beings, and even God are corpora, or bodies. In this formation, “the possession of substantia = materia = corpus differentiates realities or existent things from fictions.”29 Tertullian concludes, “Nothing is incorporeal except that which is nothing.”30 Tertullian’s idea of a corporeal soul fits well within the long tradition of classical medical theory. In early Hellenistic theories, all psyché is soma and cannot exist without it and medical writers devoted a good deal of effort to distinguishing this corporeal soul from the body itself.31 Many of these theories developed ideas of pneuma somehow connected to the nerves. Most of these theories thus posited a mortal soul, such as Erasistratus’s conception of a soul constantly renewed by the physiological processes of the body like blood.32 Before the Orphics and Plato, the idea of a soul, separate from the body, which somehow holds a stronger claim to our true identity and existence than the body, was not well developed or very prevalent.33 Even the Manichaeism that so enthralled the young Augustine before his conversion is not at all as dualist, when it comes to the existence of truly bodiless beings, as later writers have often assumed. The real division is between good and evil, not body and non-​body.34 The Realm of Light, which houses the good principle of Mani’s cosmology, is made of air, wind, light, water, and fire. The Kingdom of Darkness is shaped out of corrupted versions of the pure five. It is from these five corrupted elements or powers mixed with part of the pure five that the human body takes its form. Slowly, over time, 26  Griffin and Paulsen, “Augustine and the Corporeality of God,” 97.

27  Griffin and Paulsen, “Augustine and the Corporeality of God,” 105. 28  Clark, The Origenist Controversy, 45.

29  Stead, “Divine Substance in Tertullian,” 59–​61.

30  “Nihil est incorporale nisi quod non est” (Tertullian, De carne Christi, 11.4, CCSL 2:895), cited in Griffin and Paulsen, “Augustine and the Corporeality of God,” 106. 31  Von Staden, “Body, Soul, and Nerves,” 79–​80. 32  Von Staden, “Body, Soul, and Nerves,” 92.

33  Robinson, “Defining Features of Mind–​Body Dualism,” 37–​39.

34  Common misconceptions regarding Manichaean doctrine often arise from the views ascribed to medieval dualist heresies, which, I argue, owe much more to the Christian Platonic tradition than to Mani.

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the bits of the Light imprisoned in us and in this world will be released, and the two kingdoms will be restored to their pristine separation.35 The release of trapped light particles can occur in particular through the digestion of the things of this world by the Elect, not only freeing the Light, but also refining the body at the same time, and the soul that arises from it. The Manichaean soul is corporeal and it comes about from food.36 The body of one of the Elect becomes so suffused with the purer substance of the Kingdom of Light that it brings about a purer soul, more likely to return to the Realm of Light.37 I will return to this theme later, as it may have resonances with Augustine’s argument regarding the Christian resurrection body as a transformed and heavenly type of corporeality. Augustine himself states in his Confessions that he was glad to discover that Catholics did not believe God possessed a human form, as he had earlier thought they did: “I learned that your spiritual children … do not understand the words ‘God made man in his own image’ (Gen. 1:27) to mean that you are limited by the shape of a human body, and although I could form not the vaguest idea, not even with the help of allegory, of how there could be substance that was spiritual, nevertheless I was glad that all this time I had been howling my complaints not against the Catholic faith but against something quite imaginary which I had thought up in my own head.”38 The allegorical interpretation of “in his own image” that so appealed to Augustine, in contrast to the literalism and materialism of the Manichaeans, originates in the work of Origen.39 Influenced by Platonic philosophy, he believed, unlike the Stoics and the Manichaeans, that intellectual first principles existed independently of matter. Origen interpreted “in his own image” to mean “the whole company of virtues” which allow a human to imitate God, not the form of a body.40 Origen recognized that the kind of Platonic disembodiment he proposed was unusual in the Christian tradition, and that the term “incorporeal” in the Latin West could be 35  Lieu, Manichaeism, 12–​29.

36  BeDuhn, “The Metabolism of Salvation,” 14–​18. 37  BeDuhn, “The Metabolism of Salvation,” 27.

38  Augustine, Confessiones, 6.  3.4, ed. Verheijen, 76 (trans. Pine-​Coffin, 114). “Vbi uero etiam comperi ad imaginem tuam hominem a te factum ab spiritalibus filiis tuis, quos de matre catholica per gratiam regenerasti, non sic intellegi, ut humani corporis forma determinatum crederent atque cogitarent, quamquam quomodo se haberet spiritalis substantia, ne quidem teniter atque in aenigmate suspicabar, tamen gaudens erubi non me tot annos aduersus catholicam fidem, sed contra carnalium cogitationum figment latrasse.” See also 7.1.1–​2, 93 (Pine-​Coffin, 133), “Although I did not imagine you in the shape of a human body, I could not free myself from the thought that you were some kind of bodily substance extended in space, either permeating the world or diffused in infinity beyond it.”

39  Griffin and Paulsen, “Augustine and the Corporeality of God,” 101; for the lack of allegorical interpretation in Manichaeism, Lieu, Manichaeism, 31.

40  Origen, De principiis, 4.4.10, ed. Koetschau, 363 (trans. Butterworth, 327), “non per effigiem corporis, quae corrumpitur, sed per animi prudentiam, per iustitiam, per moderationem, per virtutem, per sapientiam, per disciplinam, per omnem denique virtutum chorum.”

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slippery, due to a limited concept of what the body was. He states, “The term asomaton, that is incorporeal, is unused and unknown, not only in many other writings but also in our scriptures.”41 He goes on to explain that incorporeal as often applied to demons in the West is not the same thing as the Greek philosophers (Platonists) mean when they discuss incorporeal nature. The savior did not have such a body as the demons have. Now this body is by nature a fine substance and thin like air, and on this account most people think and speak of it as incorporeal; but the savior had a body which was solid and capable of being handled. It is customary for everything which is not like this to be termed incorporeal by the more simple and uneducated of men, just as the air we breathe may be called incorporeal because it is not a body that can be grasped or held or that can resist pressure.42

He concludes that only God is incorporeal in the Greek sense. Origen, in this passage, is proposing what was to some a new category: non-​body. This new category exists as a step beyond the hyper-​refined but nonetheless material bodies of “spiritual” creatures, familiar to writers like Tertullian. Origen’s work is, in many respects, an attempt to reconcile the extreme corporeality of the Christian Incarnation with the intellectual power of Platonic philosophy. Origen’s push to fully extricate God from the material proved successful; however, his similar ideas about the future transformation of human bodies were roundly rejected. I  will argue that they earned their rejection for the exact reasons Origen cites, namely, in the minds of many, a body that cannot be “grasped” is not a real body. In the context of a human being, this conviction that a body without substance is not a real body combined with Tertullian’s assertion that something that is not a body does not exist.

An Ethereal Body without Flesh and Blood

When Augustine comes to the Resurrection in the De fide, he explains how such a rebirth and transformation may be logically possible. Man is divided into three parts: spiritus, anima, and corpus. Anima and spiritus are often mashed together in discussion, 41  Origen, De principiis, 1.Preface.8, 14 (Butterworth, 5), “Apellatio autem asomaton (id est incorporei) non solum apud multos alios, verum etiam apud nostras scripturas inuisitata est et incognita.” 42  Origen, De principiis, 1.Preface.8, 15 (Butterworth, 5–​6), “In hoc enim libello ‘incorporeum daemonium’ dixit pro eo, quod ipse ille quicumque est habitus vel circumscriptio daemonici corporis non est similis huic nostro crassiori et visibili corpori; sed secundum sensum eius, qui composuit illam scripturam, intellegendum est quod dixit, id est non se habere tale corpus quale habent daemones (quod est naturaliter subtile quoddam et velut aura tenue, et propter hoc vel putatur a multis vel dicitur incorporeum), sed habere se corpus solidum et palpabile. In consuetudine vero hominum omne, quod tale non fuerit, incorporeum a simplicioribus vel imperitioribus nominator; velut si quis aerem istum quo fruimur incorpoream dicat, quoniam quidem non est tale corpus, ut conprehendi ac teneri possit urgentique resistere.”

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but spiritus is the rational part that animals lack.43 The anima is the life with which we are bound to the body. To achieve perfection, these parts must be arranged in a hierarchy: “The Nature of anima is perfect when it subjects itself to its spiritus and when it follows its spiritus which follows God.”44 This order of subjugation echoes Augustine’s earlier argument that certain bodies can dwell in heaven if they are “subjected to the spirit” despite what certain “gentiles or heretics” claim the philosophers say.45 This is the change promised in 1 Cor. 15:52. The body will rise, not just the rational mind. In this argument, the perfection of corpus is just one aspect of a human being in perfect relation to authority. The spiritus is subjected to God, the anima to the spiritus, and finally the corpus to the anima. When all is in perfect order, the result is harmony. The anima will be cleansed of the inclinations arising from the flesh, and so too will the flesh be purged of disorder. At first sight, Augustine insists on a human being as a unity of three elements that must all be brought into proper order for the perfection of the whole. This formulation takes the body as an indispensable and constant part of personhood. If such a transformation seems impossible, it is because we can only see how the flesh is now, not “how it will be, because at that time of angelic transformation there will no longer be flesh and blood, but only body.”46 He further explains what he means by this assertion, “For all flesh is also body, but not every body is also flesh.”47 For example, wood is a body, but it is not flesh. Likewise, “in the heavenly things there is no flesh at all, but simple and shining bodies which the apostle calls spiritual, but some call ethereal.”48 If someone should think such a transformation is impossible, he should regard how earth can be changed into water, and then water into air. It follows that this air could then be changed into the next more refined substance, namely an ethereal body, especially with the active will of God guiding the process.49 Augustine again invokes the philosophers he cited at the beginning of chapter six, saying that they believe in such a transformation 43  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 10.23, 28 (Meijering, 141), “Et quoniam tria sunt, quibus homo constat: spiritus, anima et corpus, quae rursus duo dicuntur, quia saepe anima simul cum spiritu nominator—​pars enim quaedam eiusdem rationalis, qua carent bestiae, spiritus dicitur—​principale nostrum spiritus est.” 44  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 10.23, 29 (Meijering, 144), “Est autem animae natura perfecta, cum spiritui suo subdictur et cum sequitur sequentem deum.” 45  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 6.13, 15–​16.

46  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 10.24, 30 (Meijering, 150), “quod cui videtur incredibile, qualis hunc sit caro adtendit, qualis autem futura sit non considerat: quia illo tempore immutationis angelicae non iam caro erit et sanguis, sed tantum corpus.” 47  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 10.24, 31 (Meijering, 152), “Omnis enim caro etiam corpus est, non autem omne corpus etiam caro est.”

48  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 10.24, 31 (Meijering, 152), “In caelestibus uero nulla caro, sed corpora simplicia et lucida, quae appellat apostolus spiritualia, nonnulli autem uocant aetherea.”

49  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 10.24, 31 (Meijering, 153), “Et de aere si quaeratur utrum in aethereum corpus, id est, in caeleste possit mutari, iam ipsa uicinitas persuadet.”

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of bodies or elements, and that since our flesh originates in the earth, why can it not be refined so as to enter heaven?50 Augustine envisions an angelic resurrection body purged of the flesh. The substance of this body will be ethereal, unlike the substance of the fallen human body. Although we will possess an ethereal body, it will nonetheless remain a corporeal body, forged from the stuff of our current bodies. Like the refinement of the four elements, the highest of which, fire, rises towards the firmament by its own nature, so too will the dirt of our bodies be transmuted into a heavenly substance. Meijering finds Augustine’s argument for an angelic transformation into an ethereal body difficult to explain, especially in light of his assertion in 6.13 that the body of Christ was not transformed into a spirit in order to dwell in the heavens.51 I believe that Meijering is falling into the same slippage that Origen warned about in the introduction to the De principiis. Is it fair to regard Augustine’s use of “spiritus” and “aethereus” or “coelestus” as meaning the same thing? Could “ethereal” be the way Augustine imagines the body described in Chapter 6 as, “subjected to the spirit in such a way that it is suitable for dwelling in heaven, since all earthly fragility and pollution have been changed and transformed into heavenly purity and stability?”52 I believe that Augustine’s argument depends upon an understanding of the resurrection body as a transformed type of corporeality that is very different from the flesh of current bodies. If by spirit, we mean a hyper-​refined but still corporeal substance, then Augustine is arguing for a transformation into spirit. If we mean a transformation into a Platonic intellect by the word spirit, then he is not. As Augustine has explained to us in the tripartite division of man, he understands spiritus in this text to mean the incorporeal rational soul. It follows that, in the mind of the young Augustine, he was not arguing for a transformation into spirit, but instead imagining a type of body that could be perfect. Ethereal matter is a type of heavenly and unchanging corporeality appropriate for the heavens according to an Aristotelian cosmological model.53 Such a refined body resonates with the bodies of the Manichaean elect, with which Augustine was doubtless quite familiar, who also attempted to transform not only their flesh but their corporeal soul as well through a refining process.54 An ethereal body as it appears in this text is the young Augustine’s attempt to salvage the idea of body within the intellectual frameworks most familiar to him. 50  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 10.24, 32 (Meijering, 156), “caro enim nostra utique ex terra est; philosophi autem, quorum argumentis saepius resurrectioni carnis resistitur, quibus asserunt nullum esse posse terrenum corpus in caelo, omne corpus in omne corpus conuerti et mutari posse concedunt.” 51  Meijering, De fide et Symbolo, 152.

52  Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 6.13, 15–​16 (Meijering, 90), “quod ita spiritui suditum est, ut coelesti habitationi conveniat, omni fragilitate ac labe terrena in coelestem puritatem et stabilitatem mutata atque conuersa.” 53  Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 247. 54  BeDuhn, “The Metabolism of Salvation,” 27.

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Augustine’s conception in this passage of an ethereal body sounds very similar, not only to the Manichaean elect, but also to Origen’s conception of the resurrected body. Furthermore, Augustine’s argument regarding the refinement of elements appears to originate from book four of Origen’s De principiis, which Augustine might have encountered through Rufinus’s treatise on the creed.55 Origen argues that the body will rise but it will be spiritual. It will enter the earth as a seed, and like a wheat grain that contains the principle of the stalk but not all of its substance, it will restore the body at God’s command in a spiritual form that is nonetheless the true essence of body. This new body will be capable of dwelling in the heavens.56 Origen may have elaborated these ideas in ways that are reminiscent of Augustine’s later comments regarding this text in his Retractions. We cannot be sure, as his Latin translator Rufinus altered the text to accord more closely with orthodoxy. G. W. Butterworth, however, argues that it is reasonable to believe that Origen maintained that the Lord’s body was spherical, that all resurrected bodies will be the same, and that eventually even the spiritual bodies of the resurrected will pass away, when a being returns to its original state as a pure intellect.57

The Ethereal Body Rejected: Bodily Continuity in the Retractions

In his Retractions, written some thirty-​four years after the De fide et symbolo, Augustine appears aware of the problematic implications of his earlier statements regarding the body. He perhaps realized that by cribbing from Rufinus’s he had in fact advanced a truncated form of Origen’s unpalatable views on the Resurrection. The only criticism he levels at this text regards the body and its substance. Augustine does not state that he was wrong in his Retractions, but instead attempts to clarify how his words should be interpreted. This rhetorical strategy has led some modern commentators to believe that Augustine did not in fact initially argue for something akin to an Origenist resurrection.58 Nevertheless, it is clear that Augustine reverses his original argument in favour of retaining the flesh as we know it now. He states that no one should interpret his words, “there will no longer be flesh and blood but only body,” to mean that “the earthy body as we have it now is so changed into a celestial body at the resurrection that there will be neither these members nor the substance of flesh.” Anyone who does interpret the text in this way, “Certainly, without a doubt, is to be reproved, admonished by the body of the Lord who, after the Resurrection, appeared with the same members. He was not only visible to the eyes, but touchable by the hands. Furthermore, He confirmed, also by 55  Augustine, “De Fide et Symbolo” et “Sermo ad Cathechumenos,” trans. Whitaker, 60–​62. 56  Origen, De principiis, 2.10.3, 175–​76 (Butterworth, 139–​41).

57  Origen, De principiis, 2.10.3, 176 (Butterworth, 141). Koetschau, Anathema X of the Second Council of Constantinople. These assertions also play a prominent role in the attacks of Origen’s critics, especially Jerome. While the charges levelled against Origen and his supposed followers varied from context to context, these elements, if not their interpretation, remain relatively stable. Clark, The Origenist Controversy, especially chap. 3, “The Charges Against Origenism,” 85–​158. 58  Bogan, The Retractions, 76, “No corrections or adverse criticisms of the treatise proper are presented.”

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word, the fact that He had flesh saying: ‘Feel me and see, for a spirit does not have bones and flesh as you see I have.’ ”59 Jesus’s flesh had substance since he could be touched and so it must remain flesh. The change was in large part that it had become incorruptible. While the resurrected body, like that of Christ, will have “these members” and “the substance of flesh,” the final refinement of the elements that constituted it remained a part of Augustine’s eschaton. In the City of God, he writes that a final “conflagration of all the fires of the universe” will end the current world and usher in the new. This conflagration will burn up the “qualities of the corruptible elements,” resulting in perfect bodies that do not change.60 This final changelessness of the matter that constituted all of material creation addressed what Bynum observes as the recurrent association of natural processes with deterioration and decay in Augustine’s thought.61 The arrestment of the body’s mutability, and indeed the mutability of all matter, remained an aspect of perfection, but the state in which this changelessness was achieved had moved closer in its fundamentals to the experience of the present. In adopting the position that a body that cannot be “grasped or held” is not a real human body but rather a spirit, Augustine has reversed himself and adopted the position Origen derided. Augustine clears himself of any connection to Origenist assertions, which he himself never made, regarding the lack of limbs in the human resurrection body, but he also reverses himself on the idea of bodily substance that he had formerly presented. Augustine, however, has gone further than Origen’s comments regarding the extent of what can be termed a body in this moment. Origen warned that even though air cannot be held, it is still a body. He made this distinction in his attempt to secure the category of non-​body in Christian discourse. Here, for Augustine, an aerial body is too abstract and too close to the incorporeal to serve as our expression; it would represent a transformation into something that is not human. The forces, which wanted the substance of the resurrected body to remain flesh, possessed interesting parallels with the discussions surrounding the corporeality of God. In both cases, spiritualizing a formerly material body raised the threat of non-​existence. For example, in Cassian’s Conlationes, he recounts one Egyptian monk’s reaction to the doctrine that God has no body. Upon hearing that God has no material substance, the 59  Augustine, Retractions, 1.17, 53 (Bogan, 74–​75), “In hoc libro, cum de resurrection carnis ageretur … ‘quia illo tempore immutationis angelicae non iam caro erit et sanguis sed tantum corpus et cetera … ’ Sed quisquis ea sic accipit, ut existimet ita corpus terrenum, quale nunc habemus, in corpus caeleste resurrectione mutari, ut nec membra ista nec carnis sit future substantia, procul dubio corrigendus est, commonitus de corpore domini, qui post resurrectionem in eisdem membris non solum conspiciendus oculis, uerum etiam minibus tangendus apparuit, carnemque se habere etiam sermone firmauit dicens: ‘Palpate et uidete quia spiritus ossa et carnem non habet sicut me uidetis habere.’ ” The words of Jesus are Luke 24:39. 60  Augustine, De civitate Dei, 20.16, ed. Dombart and Kalb, 726–​27 (trans. Dyson, 1002), “Ut dixi, conflagratione mundana elementorum corruptibilium qualitates, quae corporibus nostris corruptibilibus congruebant, ardendo penitus interibunt, atque ipsa substantia eas qualitates habebit, quae corporibus inmortalibus mirabili mutatione conueniant.” 61  Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, 101.

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monk threw himself upon the ground in tears wailing, “Oh woe to me! They have taken my God away from me. I no longer have someone to hold onto. I no longer know whom I should worship or pray to.”62 The removal of God’s body, for many early Christians, raised the spectre of the removal of God. Tertullian had said that “Nothing is incorporeal except that which is nothing.” Augustine only overcame this conception with the help of the Platonizing theology of Ambrose of Milan. In his Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine criticized those who believed: “God should be thought of as a body. … Thus, constantly immersed in the corporeal and living the life of the senses, people are unwilling to think that the soul is anything other than a body, for they fear that if it is not a body it may be nothing. Consequently, they are all the more afraid to think that God is not a body in proportion as they fear to think that God is a nothing.”63 I believe a similar fear underlies conceptions of the Resurrection, especially in the De fide et symbolo; however, unlike God’s incorporeality, this concern arises from our familiarity with the current human state and from our ideas about what it means to be a human being and the role of flesh in that being. Etherealizing the body in the way Augustine at first proposed in the De fide et symbolo could transform the Egyptian monk’s lament, recorded by Cassian, into, “They have taken me away from myself. I can no longer imagine what I will become.” As he grew older, Augustine exhibited a marked drift towards the more literal and material in his thoughts on the Resurrection, heaven, and hell. This movement is clearly evident in his retraction of an ethereal resurrection body, and I believe represents part of an important strand in Augustinian theology regarding the acceptance of the limits of current human reason in light of revelation. This shift away from the abstract could stem from his pastoral role and the impact of recurrent controversies with rivals who more and more resembled him in his youth.64 In order to explain to the faithful what their destinies were, Augustine insisted on continuity with the sensible world as much as possible when the ultimate authority of revelation suggested such continuity. Nowhere should this tendency manifest more than in the human form itself. While the final form of humanity had to remain recognizable, Augustine’s Christology elaborated on Jesus’s promise of salvation in ways that occluded his own perfected body from view. The ascension represents Christ taking his humanity away from view so his followers could approach him through faith.65 This faith unites man with Christ and makes him a member of Christ’s body. In this way, those who believe in Christ are the body of Christ, and then through the human nature that they share with Christ the 62  Cassian, Conlationes, 10.3, ed. Pichery, 77, “Heu me miserum! Tulerunt a me deum meum, et quem nunc teneam non habeo uel quem adorem aut interpellem iam nescio.”

63  Augustine, De genesi ad litteram, 10.24, ed. Zycha, 327 (trans. Taylor, 2:128), “quod anima corpus sit, etiam deus corpus esse credatur. Propter hoc enim corporalibus adsuefacti et adfecti sensibus nolunt animam credere aliud esse quam corpus, ne, si corpus non fuerit, nihil sit, ac hoc tanto magis timent etiam de deo credere nihil esse.” 64  O’Meara, “Contrasting Approaches to Neoplatonic Immaterialism,” 177. 65  Marrevee, The Ascension of Christ, 63–​64.

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faithful can return to God.66 Augustine argues that Jesus’s appearance as a man effectively disguised the Word. In order for an individual truly to accept his divinity, one had to go beyond his physical appearance. The removal of the human body made approaching the divinity easier. True Christians could only be praised for faith in the unseen, not what they saw clearly before them.67 In working out the significance—​and purpose—​of the ascension, Augustine again returned to the difficulty in the meeting of the divine and the bodily, and our ability to perceive only what the carnal world has prepared us to see. This recurring gap is an essential point of confrontation in the journey to God. This division between the known and the unknowable, the corporeal and the incorporeal becomes clear in the person of Christ himself. The human form of Christ must remain like us in order to be really human, and we must remain fundamentally similar to the way we are now to stay ourselves. The divinity within, however, cannot be fully reconciled with the man without, and so the man must disappear so that our bodies, which we know, can become instead a meeting point with the divine. This joining, however, is in the fallible world of images to which we are presently confined.68 In this discussion of the De fide et symbolo and the conversations in which it plays a part, the meeting point of perfection and the body remains impossible to truly envision. The ancient medical theorists of the Greek world had avoided this dilemma through the creation of a corporeal soul, which could be joined to the body. Origen, on the other hand, had attempted to imagine it through the eventual abandonment of the body and a return to a purely intellectual existence. The Orthodox could not accept either of these extremes and had to experience and think along a balance between them.

Conclusion

The De fide paired with Augustine’s comments in the Retractions represents his continuing efforts to construct that space in which bodily existence, and the human identity shaped by it, could encounter perfection. The young Augustine envisioned a perfection of the body brought about through the purgation of flesh and blood, a body free of all the grossness of the material world and the limitations of its substance. Later, he felt that such a body would not be human, and perhaps not a body at all, drawing too close to the category of non-​body he had reserved for God alone. Something so far removed from what we know ourselves to be, threatens the very existence of the self. The original argument of the text may also have struck an older Augustine as too consistent, too consonant with the limited logic of the current world to adequately reflect the ultimate 66  Marrevee, The Ascension of Christ, 117.

67  Marrevee, The Ascension of Christ, 93–​105.

68  The Augustinian “region of unlikeness,” where humanity, created in the likeness of God, resembles its model imperfectly, is also a state of being in which most cognition occurs through the likeness of things as images in the mind. As the human likeness is distorted, this cognition through likenesses can also mislead. See Nolan, Now through a Glass Darkly, 57. For the origin of the term, Augustine, Confessiones, 7.10, 103.

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mystery of the eventual perfection of the entire human condition. This was a perfection that would change mutability into stability, while still preserving the essence of a human body, the experience of which in the current world is most clearly marked by the persistence of change.69 In this instance, and maybe the wider intellectual world of Christian attitudes towards the body, the meeting space of our body and the perfect remains an abstraction that must somehow act in the imagination, and the result is a continuous negotiation between the two poles of incorporeal spirit and the purely material. In conceptions of the perfected body, the tension between matter and spirit as well as the tug-​of-​war between change and continuity endure into the present in the Western tradition. In our contemporary theology, pop culture literature, and imaginings of a “trans-​humanist” future, authors continue to ask if change at a certain point goes too far, leading to a being that is not human. Likewise, authors continue to ask where it is, exactly, that personhood resides. The questions that concerned Augustine in the De fide are still finding new attempts at answers. How much of personhood is in the mind or the memories and how much in the flesh? Can mind and body even be separated in this way? As Augustine looked forward to answers in the world to come, we often look to the technologies of the not-​too-​distant-​future for ours. Abstract Around the year 393, in his De fide et symbolo, or On the Faith and the Creed, Augustine of Hippo outlined a future body for the human race in which “there will no longer be flesh and blood, but only body.” This resurrection body would be ethereal and perfect, and despite its near-​total transformation it would remain a true human body, because “all flesh is also body, but not every body is also flesh.” As an older man, Augustine felt that the refinement of the body into something like a divine vapour negated the very idea of body, through the destruction of its substance. In the Retractions, he returns to this text, insisting that the perfect body will be fleshy as it is now. Augustine’s changing conceptions of the resurrection body present a window onto the tug-​of-​war between change and continuity in human attempts to imagine a perfect body that still remains human.

Author Biography Michael David Barbezat is an historian of medieval intellectual, religious, and cultural history, and a research fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Faculty of Theology and Philosophy at Australian Catholic University. His research engages with medieval conceptions of the afterlife and how these conceptions both reflected and helped to shape the ordering, institutions, and experience of the regular world. He is the author of Burning Bodies: Communities, Eschatology, and the Punishment of Heresy in the Middle Ages (Cornell, 2018).

69  “Matter as the locus of change” served as the site for long-​running and productive anxieties in the centuries after Augustine. See Bynum, Christian Materiality; Bynum, “The Sacrality of Things,” 8n25.

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197

INDEX

Abel, 24, 137, 153 Abelard, 82 Acta Sanctorum, 134, 150–51, 157 Adam, 24, 89 Adelhausen, 99 Adelheid, 101 Adoro te devote, 77, 7 Adriaanszoon, Adriaan, 166; see also Aris Kindt Aers, David, 83, 86, 90–91 African, 175, 177 Agnes of Ochsenstein, 101 Agnes of Unterlinden, 10 Alamanni, Vincenzio, 68 Alcmaeon, 6, 11, 194 Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 35, 170 Alter Christus, 7, 9, 82, 99, 133–34, 136–37, 145–46, 150, 152–53, 156–57 Ambrose of Milan, 137, 139, 188 Amsterdam, 159–61, 163, 166, 171, 173–74, 195 Anne de France, 58 Anselm, 82 Antichrist, 79, 80 Arezzo, 148–149 Aristotle, 115, 119, 127 Ascension, 24, 175, 179, 188–89, 192, 195 Augustine, 7–8, 10, 82, 89–91, 134, 157, 175–92, 194–95 Bale, Anthony, 4–5, 8, 15, 28–29 Banquo, 123 Baptism, 7 Barberino, Francesco da, 48, 51 Barbezat, Michael David, 1, 7, 9–10, 81, 84, 175, 190 Barn of Unity, 7, 80, 89–90 Bartolomaeus Anglicus, 20 Basilica of Sant’Antonio, 39

Baudinette, Samuel, 5, 7, 77, 88, 93, 109 Bauhin, Gaspar, 119 Bayonne, 60, 67 Bellano, Bartolomeo, ix, 31, 32, 37–41, 43–44, 50, 52 Bellini, Gentile, 40 Bellini, Giovanni, 35, 43–44, 51–52, 138, 153 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 41 Bethany, 27 Bethlehem, 27 Bhattacharji, Santha, 15–16, 28 Biernoff, Suzannah, 21, 29 Bishop of Valencia, 63 Bleeke, Marian, 41, 51 Bodensee, 104 Bonardi, Antonio, 47, 51 Bonaventure, 146, 157 Book of Margery Kempe, The, 15–17, 19–20, 22–25, 27–28 Bourdieu, Pierre, 72, 113, 115–16, 127, 129, 196 Broomhall, Susan, 6, 55, 57, 70–71, 193 Brother Elias, 145, 158 Brother Leo, 145 Brother Reginald of Cremona, 97 Bruges, 42, 45, 92 Brúmsin, Hilti, 102 Burchard of Mount Zion, 24, 29 Burger, Glenn, 1, 3, 11 Butler, Judith, 56, 71 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 1, 2, 6, 11, 60, 71, 76–80, 88–89, 91, 94–95, 101–2, 104, 110, 127, 133, 135, 157, 175, 187, 190–91, 193

Caister, Richard, 17 Calvary, 5, 21, 23–26, 75, 80, 82, 86 Carcassonne, 67 Cardinal de Bourbon, 59, 61, 72 Carruthers, Mary, 18, 20–21, 29, 193

198

198

Index

Cassian, 187–88, 191 Castelli, Giovanni Batista, 66, 71 Catherine de’ Medici, vii, 55–60, 62–67, 69–72, 193 Catholic, 10, 59, 82, 88, 91, 114, 182, 190 Cavriana, Filippo, 69 Chapel of the Nailing to the Cross, 25, 26 Charles II, Duke of Lorraine, 66 Charles IX, 55, 60, 54–5 Chaucer, 1, 3, 11, 20, 29, 83, 86, 91–92, 192–93, 195 Christ, ix, x, 4–9, 16, 22–28, 31–38, 40–43, 45–46, 48–51, 60, 71, 75–80, 82, 85–91, 94–96, 98–99, 101–4, 106–9, 111, 133–37, 139–43, 145–53, 156–58, 169–70, 172, 175–81, 185, 187–89, 192, 195 Christendom, 9, 82 Church of Dominus Flevit, 24 Church of Mary Magdalene, 24 Church of San Domenico at Ascoli Piceno, 41 Church of St Lazare, Autun, 41, 51 Church of St Peter in Gallicantu, Church of St Peter of the Cock Crow, 24 Church of St Peter’s Tears, St Peter ad lacrimas, 24 Church of the Ascension, 24 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 22, 24–26 Church of the Tomb of the Virgin, 27 Church (institution), 7, 17, 76, 79, 80, 82, 86–91, 134–35 Cicero, 57 Cleveland Museum of Art, 41 Cloaca Maxima, 137 Cloud of Unknowing, The, 76 Cohen, Esther, 16, 29 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 1, 11, 15, 29, 174, 193, 196 Cohen, Sarah, 164, 173 Conlationes, 187–8, 191 Conscience, 75, 79–81, 87 Constantinople, 40, 186 Cordelia, 123 Corpus Christi, 77, 92, 101, 111, 196 Correr, Giovanni, 67–9 Cosimo I, Duke of Tuscany, 66

Creed, 82, 152–53, 175, 177, 186, 190 Crivelli, Carlo, 41–43, 52, 150 Crooke, Helkiah, 116–22, 124–27 Crucifixion, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 45 d’Oignies, Marie, 19, 29 da Fabriano, Gentile, x, 140, 147–48, 15–54 da Messina, Antonello, 138 da Murano, Andrea, 138 dal Ponte, Giovanni, 136 Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit, 104 Das Büchlein der Wahrheit, 104 David of Augsburg, 94 de Alavá, Francés, 61–63 de Bourbon, Antoine, 62 de Bourbon, Suzanne, 58 Descent from the Cross, the, 33, 49, 170 De Fide et Symbolo, viii, 10, 175–80, 184–86, 188–91 de Frachet, Gérard, 97, 100, 110, 150, 154, 158 de’ Medici, Cosimo, 62 de Montmorency, Anne, 60 de Salignac-Fenelon, Bertrand, 59 De Sculptura, 37, 38, 40, 51 de Valois, Elizabeth, 55 De Vos, Dirk, 45, 49, 51 del Biondo, Giovanni, ix, 142 Demidoff Altarpiece, 41 Denmark, 164 Descartes, René, 4, 11, 114 di Cione, Jacopo and Andrea, 135 di Giovanni, Girolamo, 44 Dinshaw, Caroline, 1, 11 Diocletian, 137 Dives and Pauper, 87 Dolendo, Bartholomeus, 168, 171 Dominic, 96–98, 100, 111, 149–50; see also Saint Dominic Dominican nuns, 5, 7, 8, 104, 109 Dominican Order, 7, 94–95, 98, 101; see also Order of Preachers Donatello, 39–41, 51, 52 du Tronchet, Estienne, 58 Dudley, Robert, 64

199



Duke of Suffolk, 21 Dürer, Albrecht, 35 Dutch Republic, 159, 162, 167, 168, 174

Easter, 25, 86, 101, 146, 152 Ebersole, Gary, 16, 29, 193 Ein Kerem, 27 Eliaszoon, Nicolaes, 161, 162 Elizabeth I, 57, 64 Engelthal, 99, 111 England, 17, 20–21, 29, 56–57, 59, 61, 71–72, 76, 78, 92, 111, 114, 120, 123, 125, 127, 128, 193–95 English Phlebotomy, 116–18, 126–27 Erasistratus, 181, 192 Erfurt, 93 Eucharist, 7, 76, 80, 88, 90, 92, 101, 111, 196 Exemplar of Suso, 95, 96, 104–10

Father, the, 90, 177–180 Fire of Love, The, 19, 107 Florence, 35, 37, 39, 53, 62, 135–36, 138, 140–43, 146–47, 149–53, 157–58 Fouquelin, Antoine, 57, 71 Fra Angelico, 149, 152, 153 Fra Bartolommeo, 138, 153 France, 36, 55, 58, 61–62, 64–69, 71–72 Francesco I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 68 Francis of Assisi, 8, 99, 101, 144, 158; see also St Francis Franciscan Chapel of the Apparition, 25–26 Frangipani, Fabio, 64–65, 71 Franҫois II, 61–62, 65 Franҫois, Duke of Anjou and Alenҫon, 66

Gaddi, Agnolo, 14 Gaddi, Taddeo, 146–47 Galen, 6, 11, 118–20, 192, 194 Galleria Borghese, 41 Galleria degli Uffizi, 35, 135 Gauricus, Pomponius, 37–38 Germany, 7, 11, 91, 93–96, 99–104, 106, 108, 110–11, 127, 157, 164, 193–94 Gertrud of Colmar, 101

Index

199

Gertsman, 4, 11, 51–53, 60, 71, 193, 195–96 Gethsemane, 133 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 146, 154 Giottino, 35, 49 God, 4, 7, 10, 16, 18, 21–22, 24, 28, 31, 48, 51, 62, 76–79, 82–91, 93–94, 100, 102–6, 111, 140, 145–46, 153, 159, 160, 164, 166–67, 170–72, 175, 177–84, 186–89, 191, 194 Godhead, 75, 77–78, 93 Goneril, 123–25 Gott, Ted, 31, 41 Gotteszell, 99, 101 Gozzoli, Benozzo, 138, 140, 146, 157 Gramotnev, Helen, 9, 159, 183 Gyer, Nicholas, 116–18, 121–22, 125–27

Harbison, Craig, 37, 51 Harris, Tomas, 32, 39 Harvey, William, 6, 8, 12, 116–18, 121, 126–28, 193–94 Harward, Simon, 116, 118, 120–22, 126, 128 Heaven, 23, 87–88, 106, 120, 177, 179– 80, 184–85, 188 Hebron, 24 Hell, 82, 85, 188 Henri II, 55, 66 Henri III, 55, 57, 59, 64, 71–72 Hiller, Diana, 7, 9, 82, 89, 99, 133, 156 Hillman and Mazzio, 9, 11, 128–29, 194, 196 Hilton, Walter, 16 Hippocrates, 118 Hippocratic medicine/theory, 2, 20 Holy Church, 79, 80, 89 Holy Family, The, 27, 169 Holy Land, The, 23–24 Holy Sepulchre, The, 22–26 Hudson, Hugh, 5, 6, 50 Humbert of Romans, 94, 97–98 Hunger, 83, 84 I documenti d’amore, 48 Imitation of Christ, the, 46, 50 Incendium amoris, 19, 107

200

200

Index

Innocent IV, 152 Institute of Arts, Detroit, 42 Italy, 34, 43–44, 47–48, 82, 151, 156

Jacobus de Voragine, 98; see also Jacopo da Varazze Jacopo da Varazze, 152; see also Jacobus de Voragine Jacques de Vitry, 18 Jerusalem, 22–28, 179 Jesus, 7, 24, 27, 75–78, 80, 87–89, 101, 140, 177–78, 180, 187–89 Job, 138 John of Spain, 96 Jonah, 137 Jordan of Saxony, 96–97, 98 Joseph of Arimathaea, 25 Judaism, 181 Judith and Holofernes, 39 Julian of Norwich, 76 Katherinenthal bei Diessenhofen, 99, 102 Kempe, Margery, 4, 5, 7, 8, 15–28, 78 Kindt, Aris, 166, 169–70; see also Adriaanszoon, Adriaan King Lear, 120–21, 124–25 King Lear, 8, 113–14, 120–21, 123, 125–26 Kingdom of Darkness, 181 Kirchberg, 99 Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen, 45 Konstanz, 104 Krahn, Volker, 39 Kynde, 79, 80

La Rhétorique Française, 57 Lady Macbeth, 121–23 Lamentation, 5, 31–36, 38–45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 169 Langland, William, 7, 75–80, 82–84, 86–91 Lauda Sion, 77 Legenda Aurea, 98, 133–34, 137, 150–52 Legenda maior, 146 Leiden, 159, 163, 166 Leo X, 59

Life of the Virgin, 46 Light, 49, 162, 181–82 Lippomano, Girolamo, 60 Lomnor, William, 21 London, 17, 39–41, 45 Longinus, 89, 90, 133 Louvre, 138, 165 Love, 5, 16–21, 23, 56, 61, 85, 87, 100–1, 107, 115, 123–25 Luca Signorelli, 142, 144 Ludovico Maria Sforza, 35 Macbeth, 120–23 Macbeth, 8, 113, 114, 120–23, 125–26 Maguire, Henry, 32, 46 Malcolm, 122 Man of Sorrows, 37, 102, 133, 149; see also Schmerzensmann Mandeville, 25 Mani, 181 Manichaean, 177, 182, 185–86 Manichaeism, 176, 181 Mantegna, Andrea, 47, 138, 169 Margaret Ebner, 101 Mary Magdalene, 5, 23, 25–26, 33–35, 37–38, 40–41 Mary Stuart, 58 Master of Staffolo, 140 Master of the Annunciation, Spermento, 44 Mater dolorosa, 28 Mauritshuis Museum, 167–68, 171 Maximiliaan Martens, 45 Maximus the Confessor, 46 Mede, 81–82 Meister Eckhart, 93–96, 103–6, 108–9 Melbourne, 32, 39, 40, 42–43, 49 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 41 Michiel, Giovanni, 59 Mikrokosmographia, 119, 126 Miroir des simples âmes, 94 Montefalco, 146 Morelli, Giovanni, 47 Mount Joy (Nabi Samwil), 24 Mount la Verna, 99, 145

201



Mount of Calvary, 5, 21, 23–26, 75, 80, 82, 86, 91 Mount of Olives, 24 Mount Quarantine, 27 Mount Sion, 24 Mourning Virgin, 41 Musée Rolin, 41 Musees Royaux des Beaux Arts, Brussels, 45 Museo del Prado, Madrid, 33 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 42

National Gallery of Art, Washington, 35 National Gallery of Victoria, 34, 39, 41 Neoplatonic, 3, 176 Nicean Creed, 177 Nicodemus, 33, 49 Norwich, 17, 18, 19, 23, 28

O sacrum convivium, 77 Oettenbach in Zürich, 103 Offenbarungen, 94, 99, 101, 103, 109 Order of Preachers, 96; see also Dominicans Origen, 82, 176, 182–83, 185–87, 189 Orvieto, 47 Our Lady, 23, 27; see also The Virgin Our Lord, 18, 22–25, 27, 101–2, 177

Padua, 41, 48 Palazzo Vecchio, 39 Pandarus, 21 Pange lingua, 77 Paré, Ambroise, 119 Passion of Christ, 5, 6, 9, 23, 25, 27, 31–34, 38, 45–46, 48–50, 75, 77, 79, 89–90, 94, 99, 102–4, 133, 140, 150, 156 Paster, Gail Kern, 1, 2, 12, 113, 114, 128 Paston, John, 21 Patience, 90 Peace, 81–82 Peres the Plouhman, 75, 87; see also Piers Plowman Perronot de Chantonnay, Antonio, 61 Perugia, 40

Index

201

Petrus Christus, 45 Philip II, 60–64, 67 Philipp, Franz, 38–39, 52 Piers Plowman, 7, 11, 75–78, 80, 83–84, 90–91 Piers the Plowman, 75, 78, 83–87, 89; see also Peres the Plouhman Pietersz, Aert, 161 Pieterszoon, Claes, 166; see also Tulp, Nicholaes Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, 35, 43–44, 47, 147–48 Pinacoteca, Camerino, 39 Pius IV, 62 Pollaiuolo, Piero and Antonio, 138–39 Pope-Hennessy, Sir John, 39, 44 Porete, Marguerite, 94 Portrait of Giovanni Emo, 35 Precious Blood, 80, 156 Protestant, 64–65, 159, 161, 166, 170, 174, 196 Rape of Proserpina, 41 Realm of Light, 181–82 Reason, 79, 81 Regan, 121, 123–25 Rembrandt, 8, 9, 159, 160–62, 164–172 Resurrection, 7–8, 10, 24, 79, 102, 140, 150, 175–77, 179, 182–83, 186–88 Retractions, 10, 176, 186, 189, 190 Rhineland, 99 Rolle, Richard, 19, 76, 107 Rome, 27, 28, 40 Rudolph of Faenza, 96 Rufinus, 186 Sackville, Thomas, 57, 59 Samaritan, 80, 88, 90 San Francesco, 142, 146–47 Sant’Ambrogio, 140 Santa Croce, 146 Santa Maria Novella, 153–54 Sassetti chapel, 146 Satan, 82, 85 Scali Chapel, 136 Schmerzensmann, 102

202

202

Index

Schwesternbücher, 94–95, 99–104, 108–9 Scotland, 120, 122–23 Scott, Anne M., vii, 1, 11, 75, 82, 87, 91 Scrovegni Chapel, 48 Sellberg, Karin, 8, 89, 113, 123, 126 Servant of Eternal Wisdom, 95, 105–108 Shakespeare, William, 8, 113–14, 126 Sire Penetrans-Domos, 80 Slaughtered Ox, the, 164–65, 168 Son, the, 78, 87–88, 177–78 Spain, 56, 64, 67, 96 Spinoza, Baruch, 113 St. Agatha, 9, 134–36 St. Apollonia, 134, 136 St. Bartholomew, 134–36 St. Benedict, 18, 147 St. Catherine of Alexandria, 135–36 Sts. Cosmas and Damian, 135 St. Dominic, 97, 98, 100, 149, 150 St. Francis of Assisi, 8, 9, 25, 99, 101, 136–137, 143–150, 152, 156 St. Gregory of Nyssa, 20 St. Helena’s Chapel, 25 St. Jerome, 45, 135 St. John the Baptist, 79, 135, 140–42 St. John, 23, 33–35, 37–38, 41, 43, 47, 86 St. Louis, 67 St. Lucy, 135 St. Paul, 84, 135 St. Peter Martyr, 150–156; see also St Peter of Verona St. Peter of Verona, 9, 98, 136, 150–56; see also St Peter Martyr St. Roch, 138 St. Sebastian, 8, 9, 137–43, 152, 156 St. Stephen’s, 17–18 St. Thomas Aquinas, 77–78, 100, 102 St. Vincent, 134 Stagel, Elsbeth, 96, 100, 104–8 Statutes of Labourers, 84–85 Steinhoff, Judith, 33–35, 47–48 Stoic, 181–82 Stone of Unction or Slab of Anointing, 25 Stoss, Veit, 41 Sultan Mehmet II, 40

Sultan Suleiman I, 63 Surian, Michele, 62, 65 Suso, Henry, 95–96, 104–9; see also von Berg, Heinrich

Taddeo di Bartolo, 149, 153–54 Tertullian, 89, 134, 156, 181, 183, 188 Thomas à Kempis, 6, 37, 46 Thomas de Keyser, 161, 162 Thomas of Cantimpré, 96 Thomas of Celano, 145–46 Thürlemann, Felix, 33 Töss, 99, 100, 104 Trajan, 85–86, 90 Troilus and Criseyde, 20–21 Tuileries Palace, 59 Tulp, Dr Nicolaes, 9, 159–62, 166–74, 194–95 Tulpius, the valve of, 167 Tura, Cosmè, 141, 143 Tuscany, 34, 53, 56, 59, 66, 68–69, 196 University of Paris, 97 Unterlinden in Colmar, 99–102 Urban IV, 77

Vale of Tears, 24 Valois, House of, 55 Van der Weyden, Rogier, 33, 45, 49 Van Loenen, Franz, 162, 167 Vasari, 138 Vatican, the, 56, 64 Vecellio, Cesare, 35–36, 53 Veneziano, Domenico, 135 Venice, 56, 59, 138, 152 Via crucis, 28 Via dolorosa, 24 Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 39, 40, 44 Virgin and Child with Saints, 35 Virgin, the, 23, 33–35, 37, 41, 43, 46–47, 141, 150, 177 Vitae fratrum, 97, 99–100, 108, 150, 154, 158 Vitae sororum, 100–101

203



Von Berg, Heinrich, 104; see also Suso, Henry von Oye, Elsbeth, 103, 109

Walsingham, Francis, 64–65 Weiler, 99

Index

Wille, 75, 76, 78–80, 89–90 Wit, 79, 81 Word, the, 78, 178, 189 Wright, Thomas, 114–116, 120, 122–26 Württemberg, 101

203

204