European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century (Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies) [1 ed.] 0268007276, 9780268007270, 0268036101

Citation preview

EUROPEAN TRANSFORMATIONS

N O T R E D A M E C O N F E R E N C E S I N M E D I E V A L st u dies

EUROPEAN

TRANSFORMATIONS THE LONG TWELFTH CENTURY

Edited by

THOMAS F. X. NOBLE and

JOHN VAN ENGEN University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2012 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data European transformations : the long twelfth century / edited by Thomas F.X. Noble and John Van Engen.    p.  cm. — (Notre Dame conferences in medieval studies) Papers from a conference hosted by the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame, October 26–28, 2006. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-268-03610-2 (paper : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-268-03610-1 (paper : alk. paper) 1. Europe—History—476–1492—Congresses.  2. Social change—Europe— History—To 1500—Congresses.  3. Europe—Intellectual life—Congresses. 4. Europe—Social conditions—To 1492—Congresses.  5. Europe—Religion— Congresses.  6. Church history—Middle Ages, 60–1500—Congresses.  I. Noble, Thomas F. X.  II. Van Engen, John H.  III. University of Notre Dame. Medieval Institute. D201.8.E87 2011 940.1'82—dc23 2011048878 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and ­ durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Contents

List of Abbreviations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Thomas F. X. Noble one

The Twelfth Century: Reading, Reason, and Revolt in a World of Custom John Van Engen

17

two

A Historian of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance and the Transformation of English Society, 1066–ca. 1200 John Gillingham

45

three

Chivalric One-Upmanship in France, ca. 1100 Dominique Barthélemy

75

four

Reconquest, Renaissance, and the Histories of Iberia, ca. 1000–1200 Adam J. Kosto

93

five

Italy in the Long Twelfth Century: Ecclesiastical Reform and the Legitimization of a New Political Order, 1059­–1183 Maureen C. Miller v

117

vi  Contents six

Sutri 1046—Canossa 1077—Rome 1111: Problems of Communication and the Perception of Neighbors Hanna Vollrath

132

seven

The Europeanization of Europe: The Case of Scandinavia Sverre Bagge

171

eight

Ambiguous Beginnings: East Central Europe in the Making, 950–1200 Piotr Górecki

194

nine

Lords, Markets, and Communities: The Urban Revolution of the Twelfth Century David Nicholas

229

ten

Peasants, the Seigneurial Regime, and Serfdom in the Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries Paul Freedman

259

eleven

Clothing, Iron, and Timber: The Growth of Christian Anxiety about Islam in the Long Twelfth Century Olivia Remie Constable

279

t w elve

Continuity and Change in Twelfth-Century Christian-Jewish Relations Anna Sapir Abulafia

314

thirteen

The Legal Revolution of the Twelfth Century Anders Winroth

338

fourteen

Liminalities: Literate Women in the Long Twelfth Century Barbara Newman

354

Contents  vii fifteen

Philosophy and Theology John Marenbon

403

sixteen

Semiotic Anthropology: The Twelfth-Century Approach Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak

426

seventeen

Three-in-One: Making God in Twelfth-Century Liturgy, Theology, and Devotion Rachel Fulton Brown

468

eighteen

John of Salisbury, a Philosopher of the Long Eleventh Century C. Stephen Jaeger

499

List of Contributors

521

Index 524

Abbreviations

ANS

Anglo-Norman Studies

Annales E. S. C.

Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations

CCCM

Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis

CCSL

Corpus Christianorum Series Latina

CHR

Catholic Historical Review

EETS

Early English Texts Society

EHR

English Historical Review

European Revolution Robert I. Moore, The First European Revolution, ca. 970–1215 (Oxford, 2000) HR

Historical Research

HSJ

The Haskins Society Journal

JEH

Journal of Ecclesiastical History

JMH

The Journal of Medieval History

MA

Medium Aevum

Making of Europe

Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton, 1993)

MGH

Monumenta Germaniae Historica

Const

Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum

SS Scriptores   SS rer Germ

Scriptores rerum Germanicarum ix

x  Abbreviations

MS

Mediaeval Studies

NCMH

The New Cambridge Medieval History

  vol. 3

ed. Timothy Reuter (Cambridge, 1999)

  vol. 4

ed. David Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Cambridge, 2004)

  vol. 5

ed. D. Abulafia (Cambridge, 1999)

P&P

Past & Present

PIMS

Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto

PL

Patrologia Latina

PMLA

Proceedings of the Modern Language Association

Renaissance

Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1927)

Renaissance & Renewal

Robert R. Benson and Giles Constable, eds., with Carol D. Lantham, Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Toronto, 1991)

Reformation

Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996)

RS

Rolls Series

Spec

Speculum

Trad

Traditio

TRHS

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Acknowledgments

On October 26–28, 2006 the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame hosted a conference on “European Transformations, 950–1200.” The conference provided three days of rich presentations, robust discussion, and warm conviviality. The undersigned conveners always planned to publish the papers presented in the conference, but it took longer than anyone hoped or wished to get everyone’s paper in hand and in proper form. Nevertheless, patience and good will have made it possible for the present volume to contain all of the papers presented at Notre Dame, along with an introduction. In addition to the participants, the conveners owe deep thanks to a number of people without whose able assistance the project would never have been successful. Roberta Baranowski, associate director of the Medieval Institute, handled all the logistical chores involved in actually mounting the conference. The Henckels Lectures Fund of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts provided a substantial grant that was critical to the conference. Graduate students in the Medieval Institute ferried participants to and from the airport. In the process of assembling the book we had the able assistance of Theresa O’Byrne, a doctoral student in the Medieval Institute. She smoothed out spelling and reference conventions and edited the text with a sure but gentle touch. We would also like to thank Andrew Irving for translating Dominique Barthélemy’s chapter. Margaret Cinninger, ad­ ministrative assistant to the director of the Medieval Institute, skillfully combined all the files into a single manuscript. At the Press, we wish to thank Barbara Hanrahan, Harv Humphrey, Stephen Little, and Matt Dowd. The maps included in the volume were drawn by Erin Greb. The editors acknowledge gratefully a generous subvention from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts of the College of Arts and Letters for the peparation of the index. Thomas F. X. Noble John Van Engen St. Patrick’s Day 2011 xi

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Introduction Thomas F. X. Noble

Periodization schemes for the Middle Ages have been among the hardiest perennials in the historian’s garden of debate. Once upon a time it was easy. Rome fell, the tapers of civilization were snuffed out, and the Middle Ages dawned. After almost a millennium of unrelieved darkness, the bright light of the Renaissance ushered in the modern world. The idea that a dark age filled the gap between the rather different glories of antiquity and modernity may still hold sway in the popular mentality, but it has long since been abandoned by scholars, by no means all of them medievalists. Alongside debates over periodization there have been struggles over the meaning of words such as renaissance, reform, renewal, and revolution. The old and relatively simple view has not been replaced by an equally straight-forward one. In the last generation or two, scholars have come to speak of “Late Antiquity,” by which they mean a period running from at least 300 to 700, and sometimes from 180 to 900, that was itself distinctive and dynamic. With the emergence of Late Antiquity it became impossible to speak of an abrupt and catastrophic end to classical civilization or of the sudden appearance of the medieval world. The period running from about 1300 to 1550 has also proved problematic. In one view this is the Renaissance, the “rebirth” and assimilation of classical antiquity that put medieval backwardness to flight and inaugurated the modern world. On another reckoning, this is the late, or declining, Middle Ages, a period marked by war, plague, famine, and the dissolution of medieval social,

1

2  T h o m a s f. x. N o b l e

r­eligious, and institutional structures. Modernity had to wait until the Reformation sundered Christendom, exploration and discovery opened the globe to European exploitation, and the scientific revolution shattered a long-cherished worldview. All this chipping away at the beginning and end of the Middle Ages need not have disturbed the received view of the medieval period as dark and backward, superstitious and violent. In 1927 Charles Homer Haskins, professor of medieval history at Harvard University, published a book that has come to be almost iconic: The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Haskins’s preface began thus: The title of this book will appear to many to contain a flagrant contradiction. A renaissance in the twelfth century! Do not the Middle Ages, that epoch of ignorance, stagnation, and gloom, stand in the sharpest contrast to the light and progress and freedom of the Italian Renaissance which followed? How could there be a renaissance in the Middle Ages, when men had no eye for the joy and beauty and knowledge of this passing world, their gaze ever fixed on the terrors of the world to come? After a brief historical introduction, Haskins devoted eleven chapters of modest length to “Intellectual Centers,” “Books and Libraries,” “The Revival of the Latin Classics,” “The Latin Language,” “Latin Poetry,” “The Revival of Jurisprudence,” “Historical Writing,” “The Translations from Greek and Arabic,” “The Revival of Science,” “The Revival of Philosophy,” and “The Beginnings of Universities.” A few years later three scholars, G. Paré, A. Brunet, and P. Tremblay published a work also entitled The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, but much narrower than Haskins’s book in so far as it focused exclusively on schools and instruction.1 By 1940, the eminent Renaissance historian Wallace K. Ferguson could speak of the “Revolt of the Medievalists.”2 Haskins’s bold claim, however much it came to be modified in precise details, had won a durable place.3 Haskins himself was modern, secular, and progressive. He very much wanted the Middle Ages to be understood in those terms. Over time, Haskins’s personal stance has held up less well than his conviction that important and original things happened in the twelfth century. The great art historian Erwin Panofsky did not deny that the twelfth century was creative and dynamic, but he thought it inappropriate to apply the label “Renaissance” almost indiscriminately across the historical landscape.4 By the time he was writing, there were Northumbrian, Carolingian,

Introduction  3

and Ottonian Renaissances to be reckoned with. Panofsky urged that the word Renaissance be reserved for the Italian world of the fourteenth and later centuries and that the new coinage Renascence be applied to other periods of cultural efflorescence. Panofsky also believed that participants in medieval Renascences believed themselves to be in continuity with the ancient world whereas the Italians of Petrarch’s and later generations looked back “as from a fixed point in time”; they believed themselves to be different. Panofsky’s interpretation has interesting and important implications for an understanding of Haskins. Was the Renaissance really different and, if so, were the achievements of the twelfth century ephemeral? Or did Renaissance writers merely assert that they were different and, if so, what might this imply about their debts to the twelfth century? Between Ferguson’s day and our own, countless arguments ranging from the arid to the erudite have been lavished on the meaning of the term renaissance. This is not the place for even a short summary of all the possible views.5 It is not difficult to agree with Richard Southern who once said of “Renaissance” that it is “a mere term of convenience which can mean almost anything we choose to make it mean. . . . It achieves . . . the sort of sublime meaninglessness which is required in words of high but uncertain import.”6 Despairing, perhaps, of finding a commonly accepted definition of renaissance or an agreed-upon list of phenomena that could be subsumed under that word, some scholars have looked for other words. Giles Constable spoke of The Reformation of the Twelfth Century,7 and some years before that Brenda Bolton entitled a book that focused on the twelfth century The Medieval Reformation.8 These scholars were not being clever or contrarian. Both in fact were trying to capture the deeply religious aspects of twelfth-century life and thought that were all but ignored by Haskins. Bob Moore took a different tack when he called the twelfth century The First European Revolution.9 This, again, was not academic gamesmanship. Moore’s attention was caught by social, economic, and institutional forces that neither Haskins nor Constable nor Bolton had in their sights. Quite recently, Thomas Bisson published a massive book with the engaging title The Crisis of the Twelfth Century.10 If there was something mildly teleological in Haskins’s attempt to trace modern ideas of progress and originality back to the twelfth century, Bisson argues that “modern” government, or its faint beginnings, arose as a response to the lawlessness and violence of twelfth-century Europe. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable entitled a famous book, about which more will be said below, Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century.11 The volume contains revised essays of papers presented at a 1977 conference at Harvard

4  T h o m a s f. x. N o b l e

commemorating the achievement of Haskins. That Renaissance should appear in its title seems perfectly understandable. But the editors intend their title to “promise not only a fresh survey of the terrain which Haskins charted but also an inquiry which goes beyond the limits he set for ­himself.”12 If there is as yet no consensus about how to label this period, neither is there certainty about the chronology of the period in question— those periodization questions again! For Haskins the twelfth century lasted from about 1050 to 1250. Benson and Constable say that “for the movement as a whole we must really go back fifty years or more and forward ­almost as far.” Nevertheless, their volume explicitly concentrates on the years from the 1060s to the 1160s.13 Robert Swanson accepts Haskins’s framework.14 In an elegant and influential book, Southern argued that the Middle Ages were “made” between 972, when Gerbert d’Aurillac began teaching logic at Reims, and 1204, when Constantinople fell to crusaders.15 Moore’s Revolution lasted from ca. 970 to 1215. The New Cambridge Medieval History dedicated two stout volumes to the twelfth century, encompassing the years 1024 to 1198.16 Ernst Robert Curtius argued that “medieval thought and expression become creative only around 1050,” which puts him in good company but he also believed that the Middle Ages, having entered upon a “wonderful climate of spring,” lasted until the Industrial Revolution.17 No one else’s twelfth century lasted seven hundred years. Curtius notwithstanding, Karl Leyser, in his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford (1984), spoke about “The Ascent of Latin Europe.”18 But the world he saw ascending was the early eleventh century, and Leyser associated its ascent with an air of distinctiveness that he perceived in a number of historical writers. One wonders what Panofsky would have thought of this. Clearly, the twelfth century as a historical phenomenon has always meant something more and different than the twelfth century as a calendrical one. Current trends in scholarship, and the essays in this volume, tend to attach more and more of the eleventh century to the twelfth in an attempt to capture a reasonably coherent period. Although some phenomena from this “long” twelfth century definitely persisted into the thirteenth century, the years after 1200 do seem to have had a rhythm all their own. But how long was the “twelfth century”? Some would argue that the Carolingian period constituted the first Europe after the late antique world had finally spent its energy.19 By about 900, dynastic squabbling, institutional fragility, and foreign attacks by Vikings, Magyars, and Muslims brought the Carolingian era to a close, and

Introduction  5

in the tenth and eleventh centuries a new Europe began slowly to constitute itself.20 The twelfth century represented the culmination of this longterm process. Central to that culmination, in this view, was a gradual superseding of Carolingian ways in social organization, government, education, intellectual life, and the arts. While no one would say that the long twelfth century began in the ninth, some would argue that one fruitful way of understanding the twelfth century is to imagine it as poised in a kind of dialectical relationship with the ninth. To mention a few examples among many possible ones: affective rather than prescriptive spirituality; dialectical rather than exegetical theology; juridical rather than moral/ ethical political thought. For others the Carolingian world brought Late Antiquity to a close, and the tenth century witnessed Europe in Its Infancy21 and The Making of the Middle Ages.22 The twelfth century saw the maturation of trends that reached back only a century or a century and a half. Southern and his student Moore began their stories in about 970 whereas Haskins, Benson, Constable, and Swanson—to mention only a few prominent figures—hold to about 1050. A few pages above, the chapters in Haskins’s Renaissance of the Twelfth Century were listed. Benson and Constable’s Renaissance and Renewal intended to “commemorate” Haskins’s contribution. It would be tedious to list its twenty-six chapter titles. It suffices to repeat that the book sought to review Haskins’s findings and also to add perspectives on religion, the arts, and vernacular culture. Specifically, Benson and Constable characterized their “conceptual framework for advance reflection on the twelfthcentury renaissance” under these headings: (1) the defining characteristics of the renaissance; (2) the problem of classicism; (3) the sources of the renaissance; (4) religious elements in the renaissance; (5) social, economic, and institutional setting; and (6) the chronological and regional framework. How does the present volume compare? Taking up first what Benson and Constable sought to add to Haskins, this volume also treats religion in detail and from a variety of points of view. It was intended that the conference from which this volume takes its rise would include discussion of the arts, but for various reasons that proved impossible. Benson and Constable’s book does not contain any single essay devoted to vernacular literature but has two that address some vernacular texts and authors. Likewise, this book has no essay exclusively devoted to the vernacular but instead contains many that pick up on the themes and contributions of the vernacular. Taking up Benson and Constable’s “conceptual framework,” some overlaps and divergences are apparent. Many of the essays in this book self-consciously place themselves within one or the other

6  T h o m a s f. x. N o b l e

s­cholarly tradition and thereby situate the twelfth-century renaissance. The problem of classicism comes up often in this book but perhaps less explicitly than in its predecessor. Sources appear again and again in the pages that follow. Sometimes they are remote and ancient, sometimes nearer and Carolingian, sometimes absolutely contemporary and really a matter of mobile influences. In general, this book agrees with Benson and Constable in declining to follow Haskins’s stress on outside, especially ­Arabic and Greek, influences. Religious issues, as already noted, recur repeatedly in Benson and Constable and also here. Benson and Constable actually devoted relatively little attention to the economy and institutions and only one or two essays to society. Institutions appear in many of the essays that follow, but none is exclusively devoted to them. The economy appears from time to time but, again, does not receive separate treatment. Social issues, however, are at the heart of several of the following essays and make an appearance in many of them. One essay after another in this book tackles chronological and geographical issues. On the whole, this book is broader in both respects than Benson and Constable. The present collection of essays does not in any way intend to supplant either Haskins or Benson and Constable. The former is a classic and the latter is assuming that status. The aim here, as had been the case with Benson and Constable, is to resume the conversation. Not surprisingly, therefore, there is a great deal of overlap among the three books. But there are differences too. Just as Benson and Constable’s book reflected changes in scholarly interests and perspectives a half-century after Haskins, so too this book reveals some of the shifts in the more than thirty years since the Harvard conference. Benson and Constable did not dedicate chapters to particular countries and solicited no coverage at all of Iberia and Scandinavia. Except for an essay on Toulouse, their book had no coverage of cities. Jews found no place in Renaissance and Renewal. Neither did women nor peasants. All of these topics find ample coverage here. Religion in Benson and Constable amounted to ideas of reform, liturgy, and theology. This book addresses these topics more or less explicitly but adds devotion. —  But what happened? How is it that this long twelfth century possesses both intrinsic interest and inner coherence? “It seems clear,” say ­Johann P. Arnason and Björn Wittrock, “that the early centuries of the second millennium C.E. constitute a major formative phase within some parts of Eurasia.”23 In their impressive collection of expert essays ranging in coverage from the British Isles to China, Arnason and Wittrock signal

Introduction  7

some of the major changes. Each of the essays in Eurasian Transformations, like many of them in the present volume, as well as in Benson and Constable’s Renaissance and Renewal, explores relationships between long-term processes and formative phases. Arnason and Wittrock draw parallels between the years from about 1000 to 1300 and the “Axial Period” (the ­middle centuries of the last millennium B.C.E.) and the full emergence of modernity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries C.E. In their individual contributions to the volume, Arnason and Wittrock specify some of the kinds of changes they have in mind.24 First, they identify state formation, which can mean the emergence of new states, the consolidation of incipient ones, or the transformation of older ones. Within states, various forms of “elite contestation” reveal shifts in both the personnel and attitudes of governing classes. Simultaneously, there arose new combinations of relationships between sacred and secular authorities. Second, the period witnessed the rise of more or less autonomous urban communities. These communities were enabled by dramatic agricultural growth and spawned commercial enterprise. Third, there was intellectual innovation evidenced in particular by the emergence of the studium alongside the regnum and sacerdotium. This change entailed the development of new kinds of institutions for the training of secular and religious elites. Fourth, and with particular respect to the European zone of Eurasia, there was the “Europeanization” of Europe. Arnason’s and Wittrock’s general essays constitute both syntheses of current scholarship and summations of the more focused essays in their volume. Accordingly, much that they say will already be familiar to students of medieval European history. For example, it was Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change that gave wide currency to the idea of “the Europeanization of Europe.”25 Whereas earlier scholars, including Haskins, tended to focus on northern France, Bartlett, and now many others, have instead interpreted a dynamic and expanding Europe as more cosmopolitan than had been the case in earlier centuries. The specifically intellectual dimensions of this “Europeanization” were limned by Richard Southern in his last and perhaps greatest works, the two volumes of his Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe.26 Whereas Southern tended to focus on intellectual life and the structures that sustained it, Bartlett was more alert to the dissemination of the economic, social, institutional, and political features of the post-Carolingian world. The consolidation of effective states in Ireland and Scotland, the continuing Reconquista in Iberia and in southern Italy and Sicily, and above all the appearance of new states in Scandinavia and

8  T h o m a s f. x. N o b l e

in a thick band of Slavic realms running from the Baltic to the Balkans constitute one of the greatest achievements of the period. Ireland and Scotland had long been Christianized, and Iberia and Italy had historical roots reaching back into Roman times, so it was really in the North and East that something new appeared on the scene. In his contribution to the Arnason and Wittrock volume, Gábor Klaniczay says that the meeting of the German emperor Otto III and the Polish ruler Bolesław Chrobry at Gniezno in 1000 “could be considered as the representative event announcing that a new, extended Europe had been born.”27 There is a serenity in Klaniczay’s interpretation that belies long-standing tensions over the shape of Europe. The German lands, those territories lying between the Rhine and the Elbe to the northeast and the Carpathians to the southeast, had been wrenched into Europe by the Caro­lingians. That is clear. But, leaving Scandinavia aside for the moment, what is to be made of the new states running from Poland to Hungary? From Oskar Halecki28 to Jenő Szűcs,29 scholars have refined their understanding of “East Central Europe” and have claimed a place for that region within the confines of Europe as both a geographical and historical phenomenon. The bases on which that zone can be called European have been more controversial. Christianity and Latin culture along with the deliberate and incidental influences of Germany have been seen as key Europeanizing dynamics. This is reasonably uncontroversial at the most general level. Clear too is the critical role of Christianization in state formation. At this point, it is possible to say that the dynamics that functioned in Scandinavia are just like those in evidence in East Central Europe, although the British Isles influenced the northern realms in ways that they did not impact the eastern ones. What is controversial, from Arctic regions to the Mediterranean, is the relative degree of emphasis to be accorded to conscious borrowing from the West, forcible imposition by the West, locally inspired adaptations, and deeply planted local traditions.30 Quite simply, the “Europeanization” of Europe made many regions more like one another, and doubtless more mutually intelligible, but it did not thereby make them all the same. To these areas of consensus one more may be added, identity, albeit it is not one that any of the previously discussed works drew into sharp focus. Haskins’s view of the Middle Ages as progressive and even in some ways modern drew in its wake the idea that they were really just like us. In the 1960s and 1970s, on the contrary, medievalists in many disciplines began to stress the utter difference between the Middle Ages and the modern world and between medieval and modern people. Alterity—strictly

Introduction  9

speaking, “otherness”—became the cry.31 One way of grasping a sense of that alterity as a historical phenomenon turns on questions of identity. Historians began to draw on anthropological arguments, in particular, to explore identity as a way of understanding how people saw themselves, how they saw others, and how others saw them. In varying degrees, scholars believe that identity is constructed; that is, identity is not ethnic, sexual, or in any other way primordial.32 Where the long twelfth century is concerned, identity matters because Europeans became more conscious of what made themselves distinctive and what made others different.33 They also began to gain awareness of all the ways in which they themselves, as Europeans, differed from one another—Europe’s “Europeanization” notwithstanding. Consensus therefore reigns in a number of areas of historical interpretation pertaining to the long twelfth century. Europe was expanding geographically. Its population was growing as perhaps never before. The pace of economic life was quickening in all its aspects. It is amusing to think that greed took a place next to pride in the strictures of contemporary moralists. New schools formed and scholars traveled farther to attend them. The curriculum changed as new subjects such as law or old subjects such as dialectic achieved prominence. The church was continually reformed and continually revised its relations to the secular world around it. And yet, amid all that was new and bright and promising, there were disturbing elements as well. The eleventh century experienced more famines than any other century on record. Crusaders on the march visited unspeakable barbarities on Jewish communities. Lords’ attempts to aggrandize their landholdings often came at the cost of the brutal subjection and suppression of peasants. The new intellectual currents of the age struck some as laudable but others as vain and even blasphemous. Finally, it is well to bear in mind Giles Constable’s sage observation that “the difficulty of understanding the real nature of the movement is increased . . . by the reformers’ attachment to the old ways.”34 Many voices proclaimed the dawn of a new age, and Haskins listened closely to them, but others denied or regretted novelty, and their voices must be heard too. —  This book bears the title European Transformations. By now the meaning of the word European should be clear. Transformation calls for a few comments. It is the word used recently by Arnason and Wittrock. It was the word used by the European Science Foundation’s massive, five-year-long (1993–1997) investigation of “The Transformation of the

10  T h o m a s f. x. N o b l e

Roman World.” The word connotes change without denying continuity. The word suggests that there were significant differences between conditions existing at both ends of a span of time without pointing to a place, time, event, or cause that somehow effected that difference. The word avoids all the historiographical baggage carried by “renaissance” and perhaps by “reform” as well (although it might be legitimately argued that it brings along its own baggage). Some comments on the ways in which the essays in this book perceive, describe, and analyze transformation may serve to conclude these introductory remarks. John Van Engen’s essay sets the tone for the volume. After offering some reflections on the differing ways in which scholars in many fields have viewed the twelfth century, he turns to writers of that era. He notes that William of Malmesbury, for example, complained that he and his contemporaries got too little credit for their achievements, while Hildegard of Bingen complained that she lived in “womanish times” that desperately needed reform. Some people embraced change and others resisted it. Lawyers said that reason and (new?) written law should trump custom, while some theologians were anxious that custom prevail over novelty. New books sometimes posed challenges, but equally or even more challenging were novel readings of old books. Custom and innovation, reform as a return to the old or as an implementation of the new, were all hallmarks of the period. The next several essays in the book treat discrete geographical regions. The authors take a variety of quite different vantage points on what was and was not transformed in the twelfth century. In the past, scholars might well have put their emphasis on the growth of central governments. That topic, admittedly an interesting and important one, is rarely front and center in these essays. The authors included in this volume offer multiple perspectives on both specific historical issues and on themes and issues that although applied here to one place might just as well be applied to other places. John Gillingham argues that no part of Europe was more fundamentally transformed than England. The reader may decide whether Sverre Hakon Bagge or Piotr Gorecki would agree with him! Gillingham builds up his case by looking closely at one of England’s greatest historical writers, William of Malmesbury (ca. 1095–ca. 1142). In William’s pages one can perceive the growth of learning, the proliferation of schools, the internationalizing of culture (in particular the importation of much that was French), the increasing prominence of towns, and the reform of religious institutions. Dominique Barthélemy looks at chivalry, the most

Introduction  11

French of medieval cultural phenomena—albeit one that was gradually ­“Europeanized”—and asks why the Germanic warrior ethos of the secular elite was transformed. He looks for an answer in the acute challenge to the old order posed by the new world of towns and townsmen. Whereas Gillingham and Barthelémy explore different kinds of transformations within England and France, Adam Kosto asks slightly different questions about Iberia. He observes that for generations Iberia, when it has not been neglected, has been viewed under two optics: the Reconquista, the centuries’ long war waged by Christian powers against Muslim ones, and convivencia, the complex pattern of relationships between Christian and Muslim, and to a lesser extent Jewish, populations. Now, Kosto asks, what if one looks at political development without the Reconquista and cultural development without the old tropes of enlightened Muslims and backward Christians. In fact, Iberia’s forms of political fragmentation and localism are not unlike those evident elsewhere in contemporary Europe, and the peninsula’s Christian culture was vibrant and flourishing, different from Muslim culture to be sure but not necessarily inferior. The increasing importance of the papacy in the twelfth century has long been a commonplace of scholarship. Italy and Germany were the lands most deeply influenced by the surging papal government. In looking at Italy, Maureen Miller takes an unusual tack. She focuses on the rise of the communes with their precocious and distinctive institutional features, and points out that the popes played a key role in the political development of the Italian cities. This important transformation has not always been acknowledged by earlier historians who tended to emphasize churchstate battles. Hanna Vollrath investigates three decisive encounters between popes and German rulers: in Sutri in 1046, in Canossa in 1077, and in Rome in 1111. Instead of narrating the familiar series of crises that make up the Investiture Contest, she observes that vastly greater “intelligence” was at the disposal of the contending parties in 1111 than had been the case in 1046. She attributes this important transformation to the quickening pace of cultural life in Europe’s dawning twelfth century. Vollrath’s argument invites reflection on the role of communication in political developments throughout the period and all across Europe. Sverre Bagge and Piotr Gorecki write about Scandinavia and Slavic Europe (especially Poland), respectively. Each historian stresses the “Europeanizing” forces of state formation and Christianization. Both scholars are attentive to issues of local traditions, outside intervention, and deliberate borrowing. Gillingham’s arguments notwithstanding, it is probably the

12  T h o m a s f. x. N o b l e

case that Europe’s greatest transformations took place in the vast stretch of lands running from the Arctic Circle to the northern Balkans. The next essays turn to the material and human settings within which twelfth-century developments played out. David Nicholas tackles the immense subject of urban development across the whole of Europe. In his exposition, readers will encounter transformations in four related aspects of urban life: existing cities expanded; new towns were founded; urbanization shifted from seigneurial to economic practices; and, the government and laws under which townfolk lived underwent revolutionary change. Paul Freedman discusses Europe’s peasants, the overwhelming majority of the population. Like Van Engen and Kosto, Freeman begins with some historiographical reflections, in his case focusing on the peasantry, serfdom, and the seigneurial regime. He notes the shifting interests of historians and the extreme difficulty of finding acceptable definitions that work effectively across space and time. Freedman identifies dramatic transformations but also shows how hard it is to generalize about them. Olivia Remie Constable and Anna Sapir Abulafia take up questions of identity. For Constable, Pope Innocent III’s prohibition on the export of iron and timber, essentially war materials, to the Muslim world opens up perspectives on heightened anxieties about the markers of Muslim and Christian identity. After a century or more of increasing contacts in the Mediterranean world between Christians and Muslims and of growing trade, products could signify concerns about personal and religious identity, sexuality, improper mixing, and ultimate loyalties. People began to notice and talk about dress and beards. Sharpened perceptions led to stereotyping as never before. Abulafia offers some explanations for how the old tradition that Jews were to be tolerated as long as they were subservient began to change and weaken. The Jewish population was rising, and with the growth of towns there were more and larger Jewish communities. Jewish scholars were gaining prominence just as Christian schools were expanding in number and size. The groundwork was laid for bitter contests over the meaning of scriptures shared by Jews and Christians. Pope Innocent III tried to restore protection of the Jews even as he and his contemporaries tried to understand what Jewish subservience meant in practice. Violence against individual Jews and Jewish communities became more common. Again, markers of identity were growing in significance. At the point where the volume shifts to consider the cultural realm more directly stands the essay of Anders Winroth on law. He too perceives sharp transformation. To take one example, in the early twelfth century the influence of Roman law was virtually nonexistent, whereas by centu-

Introduction  13

ry’s end it was pervasive. This change involved the acquisition of books and the evolution of schools. Alongside the recovery of Roman law, and amid calls for ecclesiastical reform, the canon law of the church was collected, systematized, taught, and studied as never before. That broad phenomenon is interesting in itself, but it also manifests itself in specific ways. For example, the canonists developed doctrines on the rights of litigants that eventually found their way into almost all western legal systems. Barbara Newman’s discussion of the forms of literacy in which women participated reveals in a general way the expanded character of cultural life in the twelfth century. Whereas scholars long concentrated on Heloise, Hildegard, and the shadowy Marie de France, now they pursue inquiries that include these women alongside others. Some attention has shifted to women readers with the important discovery that anchoresses were in many ways ideal readers. The currents of ecclesiastical reform that have usually been interpreted as damaging to women have come to be seen, on the contrary, as fostering new kinds of relationships between men and women. Not least among these relationships is a rich participation by women in forms of discourse formerly the preserve of men. In the German Empire women retained their Latin culture longer than elsewhere, and their writings form a key constituent of Richard Southern’s “monastic humanism.” Newman’s literate women and schools lead on to John Marenbon’s account of theology and philosophy. He notes critical transformations in the twelfth century. Monastic theology, deeply scriptural and exegetical, was largely replaced by the commentary tradition. The profusion of competing schools in the early twelfth century gave way to the highly organized university. And the twelfth-century emphasis on logic and Aristotle’s treatises on logic ceded to a much broader interest in Aristotle’s works. Brigitte Bedos-Rezak combs the writings of twelfth-century masters for a new theme. She says that masters assigned matter a role in cognition, that is, the material world was asked to yield meaning that could mediate between the terrestrial and the divine. At the same time, means of representation changed and spread—such things as seals, badges, and heraldic emblems. Some writers compared the creation of man with seal impressions and thereby procured a new way to talk about transcendence and immanence, the metaphysical and the physical. Rachel Fulton Brown interrogates twelfth-century masters too, to see what they can tell us about devotion, a subject usually lost somewhere between theology and liturgy. In a way, identity was involved: theology was seen as rational, systematic, and masculine, whereas devotion was alleged to be affective, imagistic, and

14  T h o m a s f. x. N o b l e

feminine. God could be intellectualized and remote or intimate and proxi­ mate. Just as seal metaphors could help to explain creation and incarnation, so also, Fulton Brown argues, Trinitarian reflections could open perspectives on the same difficult topics. Dogma was a spur to devotion, not somehow a commentary on it. The Trinity was as much an object of love and worship as of logic and explication. Finally, Stephen Jaeger takes a look at one of the period’s great thinkers and schoolmen, John of Salisbury. Jaeger’s essay bookends the volume along with Van Engen’s. The latter sees the Janus-like dimensions of the twelfth century, and the former thinks that a long eleventh century might be helpful in explaining some figures, not least John of Salisbury. Because John wrote beautiful Latin and was widely read in the classics, he has been claimed as a “renaissance” figure. Yet to read his work is to see how he swam against the tide. He was a product of several of the twelfth century’s most important transformations yet he questioned or rejected many of them. Notes 1.  La renaissance du 12e siècle: Les écoles et l’enseignement, Publications de l’Institut d’Études Médiévales d’Ottowa 3 (Paris, 1933). 2.  In his The Renaissance (New York, 1940). Later he published a masterpiece of historiography: The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston, 1948). 3.  In his 1979 presidential address to the American Historical Association, William J. Bousma was at some pains to defend the proposition that the Renaissance was a distinct historical period and a decided improvement over what had gone before: “The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History,” American Historical Review 84 (1979), pp. 1–15 and www.historians.org/info/aha_History /wjbouwsma.htm. One might compare the AHR Forum “The Persistence of the Renaissance,” American Historical Review 103 (1998), pp. 50–124, with contributions by Paula Findlen, Kenneth Gouwens, William J. Bouwsma, Anthony Grafton, and Randolf Starn. 4.  Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm, 1960), esp. ch. 2. 5.  For a recent attempt see Leidulf Melve, “‘The Revolt of the Medievalists’: Directions in Recent Research on the Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” JMH 32 (2006), 231–52. 6.  “The Place of England in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” History 45 (1960), p. 201. 7.  Cambridge, 1996. 8.  London, 1983. 9.  Oxford, 2000. 10.  Princeton, 2009.

Introduction  15

11.  Cambridge, Mass., 1982. 12.  Renaissance & Renewal, p. xvii. 13.  Renaissance & Renewal, pp. xxvii, 16. 14.  The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester, 1999). 15.  The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1953), p. 11. 16.  David Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-Smith, eds., vol. 4, parts 1 and 2 (Cambridge, 2004). 17.  European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953). The brief comments here derive from an appendix, “The Medieval Bases of Western Thought,” added to the English translation. The appendix began as a lecture delivered in 1949 to the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation in Aspen, Colorado. Curtius enthusiastically praised American contributions to medieval scholarship, beginning in a serious way with Haskins but starting with Henry Adams. 18.  In his Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, ed. Timothy Reuter (London, 1994), pp. 215–32. 19.  Richard E. Sullivan, “The Carolingian Age: Reflections on its Place in the History of the Middle Ages,” Spec 64 (1989), pp. 267–306. 20.  See, for example, Carlrichard Brühl, Naissance de deux peuples: Français et Allemands (9e–11e siècle) (Paris, 1994; orig. German ed., Cologne, 1990); Pierre Toubert, L’Europe dans sa première croissance: De Charlemagne à l’an mil (Paris, 2004). 21.  Robert Fossier, L’enfance de l’Europe, Nouvelle Clio 17 and 17bis (Paris, 1982). 22.  Richard Southern, n. 15 above. 23.  “Introduction,” in Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissances, ed. Johann P. Arnason and Björn Witt­ rock, Medieval Encounters 10, nos. 1–3 (Leiden, 2004), p. 2. 24. Arnason, “Parallels and Divergences: Perspectives on the Early Second Millennium,” pp. 13–40; Wittrock, “Cultural Crystallizations and World History: The Age of Ecumenical Renaissances,” pp. 41–73. 25.  Princeton, 1993. 26.  Volume 1, Foundations, and vol. 2, The Heroic Age (Oxford, 1995, 2001). 27.  “The Birth of a New Europe about 1000 C.E.: Conversion, Transfer of Institutional Models, New Dynamics,” in Arnason and Wittrock, Eurasian Transformations, p. 100. 28.  The Boundaries of Western Civilization: A History of East Central Europe (New York, 1952). Halecki’s “campaign” had begun in the 1920s. 29.  “The Three Historical Regions of Europe: An Outline,” Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 29 (1983), pp. 131–84. In the present context, one cannot resist calling attention to the Latin title of one of Hungary’s premier periodicals. 30.  Klaniczay, “Birth of a New Europe,” pp. 99–129 passim, and p. 112: “a point to be retained from all these competing, parallel influences is that one cannot identify a single model transferred to this region.” Nora Berend, “Introduction,” in Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c. 900–1200, ed.Nora Berend (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 1–46, esp. pp. 2–3.

16  T h o m a s f. x. N o b l e

31.  Among a multitude of studies, reference may be made to Paul Freedman and Gabrielle Speigel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” American Historical Review 103 (1998), pp. 677–704. 32.  Fredrik Barth, “Enduring and Emerging Issues in the Analysis of Ethnicity,” in The Anthropology of Ethnicity: Beyond Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, ed. Hans Vermeulen and Cora Govers (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 11–32, revising and updating his foundational Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston, 1969). See also Siân Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity (London, 1997), esp. chs. 3–5. 33.  Michael Borgolte, Europe entdekt seine Vielfalt (Stuttgart, 2002); Michael Mitterauer, Warum Europa? Mittelalterliche Grundlagen eines Sonderwegs (Munich, 2003). 34.  Reformation, p. 35.

one

The Twelfth Century Reading, Reason, and Revolt in a World of Custom J o h n Van En g e n

The twelfth century in European history, from about 1050 to 1215, has served medievalists for nearly three generations as our most compelling response to an abiding fascination with modernity and its origins. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Burckhardt’s 1860 epoch-making “Kultur” (civilization) of fifteenth-century Italy has generally set the modern narrative line (and in many ways still does). But medieval alternatives had appeared even earlier. Early on, post-Revolutionary liberals discovered Peter Abelard as rationalist, iconoclast, and free lover, his and Heloise’s bones ceremoniously moved to Paris for modern veneration. That portrait is still with us, professional medievalists too sometimes forgetting Abelard the theologian and monk who wrote hymns and sermons and biblical commentaries. But the more lasting move came sixty years after Burckhardt. Charles Homer Haskins countered in 1927 with a “renaissance of the twelfth century,” highlighting in it a “revival of the Latin classics,” a “new humanism,” a “new science,” and a “philosophical revival,” all culminating in the foundation of universities.1 His cheeky title quickly assumed the status of a standard historical rubric, other scholars then uncovering twelfth-century origins for the “individual” or “romance” or “literacy” or “university learning.”2 Not everyone in the twentieth century, however, lived in, or looked out from, the same “modernity.” A long line of Catholic scholars, actively rebuilding their church and traditions a century after the Revolution, seized upon the twelfth century as a “renaissance,” but one inventing 17

18  J o h n Van En g e n

s­ cholastic method, the reasoning apparatus underlying philosophical and theological stances by which they still lived, and as producing the sophisticated legal apparatus that informed canon law and a monarchical papacy.3 These large historical paradigms, twelfth-century humanism and twelfth-century scholasticism, both remain with us, if now as narratives tacitly assumed or, more often, self-consciously played against, or against each other.4 After the near destruction of Europe during the Second World War, scholars began looking anew for its original “take-off,” its “Aufgang,” as Heer put it in 1949.5 They found it once again in the twelfth century, now quite especially in a feature entirely passed over by Haskins: forms of religious renewal as the key to human and cultural flourishing (see Heer’s ­subtitle). Reform was now envisioned as driving the period’s creative ­energies—a view that underlay the work of R. W. Southern, Jean Leclercq, Christopher Brooke, and countless others. Monks, not schoolmen or crusaders (a still earlier notion), emerged as the twelfth century’s prime movers, generating in turn a “monastic humanism” and “monastic theology,” paradigms since widely adopted as well.6 This historical energy was magisterially set out by Giles Constable as The Reformation of the Twelfth Century.7 From still another vantage point, Georges Duby, reprising Marc Bloch’s second feudal age, defined society after the year 1000 as shaped above all by a new class of warriors, relentless exploiters of the land and its people, shapers of a new ruling class, generators of a new knightly culture driven in part by a new “youth.”8 And so a kind of orthodoxy came to set in: the twelfth century gave birth to a distinctively European civilization, with forms of culture and religion and society that would persist into the eighteenth century (“Old Europe”), marking a turning-point in European historical narrative thus fully as decisive as any fifteenth-century classicizing Renaissance or sixteenth-century protestant Reformation. Then a reaction set in. Early medievalists objected that features ascribed to the twelfth century—literacy, reform, statecraft, classics, ­ ­poetry—could be found in the ninth as well; indeed, that twelfth-century figures had perversely destroyed the evidence (memory) of those foregoing achievements;9 and moreover, that a drive for centralizing reforms only obliterated age-old local patterns.10 More importantly, post-Holocaust and then post-60s, medieval scholars came to see a much darker modernity, the shadow side to an expanding Europe—its origins too, strikingly, located in the twelfth century. R. I. Moore came to stand for many who perceived the twelfth century as having given birth to a “persecuting society,” unprecedented violence now wrought for the first time against dissenters,

The Twelfth Century  19

Jews, lepers, and peasants. He too wanted to understand, he recounted later, “who the real innovators were,” and found them in the dissenters, not the schoolmen or monks or church reformers or crusaders.11 From this general upheaval was born, in Moore’s later formulation in The First Eu­ ropean Revolution, power coalescing in incipient states and a state-like church, with an elite new class of literate clerics together with privileged knights acting as the enablers and becoming the beneficiaries.12 At the same time, historians set to work belatedly to integrate Jews fully into the European story,13 then women too,14 and did so initially mostly in darker tones: Jewish-Christian relations framed by the pogroms of 1096, malefemale relations by religious reformers and dynastic lineage-builders leaving ever less space for women, Jews cast by schoolmen as fleshly and irrational, women by churchmen as unattainably virginal or destructively alluring (these new commonplaces in turn also now being challenged). Medieval historians also moved to fit European history inside global and postcolonial perspectives. Bartlett influentially retold the story of European energies as springing first from a forceful internal colonization, the real social and cultural basis for the “Europeanization of Europe.”15 All this leaves the twelfth-century story in a peculiar place, the era still, willy-nilly, accounted crucial, but now more for its social and political and religious violence than for any “renaissance” or “revolution.” Several interpretive dimensions seem at work here, some of them modeled on Haskins or perceptions of Haskins: an effort to locate those forces that went into the making of a culture and society identifiably medieval or European; lifting out cultural or social forces which modern readers, an ever varying lot, can connect to; and a narrative of transformation so extraordinary as to count as “renaissance” or “reformation” or “revolution” (and now also “crisis”16). Much of the work has been superb and rests on deep immersion in twelfth-century sources. Constable in particular noted that his title (Reformation) derived from twelfth-century terminology, not from trying to one-up the sixteenth-century movement, though he did argue for foundational shifts in twelfth-century religion.17 Amidst all this focus on twelfth-century transformation, any number of early medievalists and early modernists remained quietly or not so quietly dubious about extrava­ gant claims, and other historians inherently skeptical of any grand narrative. But only one recent scholar, as I see it, has posed a direct challenge to the broader narrative argument. Stephen Jaeger, coming from a lifelong study of Latin literature and both royal and episcopal courts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, sees instead a mid-twelfth-century rhetorical flourishing as the culminating point for cultural traditions reaching back to the

20  J o h n Van En g e n

ninth century, rudely upended by a barbaric new logic-chopping pedagogy as well as confusions brought on by incorporating women into courtly culture.18 To all the oft-cited textual expressions of reform, renewal, springtime, or modernity (meaning present-day), he counterposes laments about the age as a dark and darkening time, unprecedented only for its corruption, a world sinking into ruin, a theme going back ultimately to Augustine’s mundus senescens.19 A single chapter cannot sort out such a deep and tangled historiographical crux. But it can make observations and point toward themes. Worthy of notice, first, is the material evidence itself, particularly documents and buildings, both of which underwent exponential growth across this period,20 objects of study, to be sure, though rarely integrated into the larger argument. The script that paleographers generally call “praegothica” or proto-gothic, though in origin it is a form of “Caroline” invented in the late eighth century, sometimes gets labeled “late Caroline.” For reasons paleo­graphers cannot explain, a more angular and compact form emerged, first in Anglo-Norman England and northwestern France, then also in central Italy, evolving into its own script, increasingly distanced from that of ninth-century Carolingians (though derived from it), yet not the gothic book hand that would prevail from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.21 Its newly emerging shape, above all its ­angularity and tighter lines, a kind of assertive freeing from a Caroline substructure, so to speak, may stand as an emblem for what we are trying to grasp. The same applies to architecture, in this case long since given its own name, “Romanesque” (a label some would like to apply to twelfth-century script as well). The building and rebuilding on a massive scale during the eleventh and twelfth centuries represented an enlargement upon a core of principles and styles also traceable back into the eighth- or ninth-century remaking of Roman styles.22 But Romanesque buildings are not Carolingian, their articulation, size, and refinement creating something quite new, just as, to give a more dramatic example, Anglo-Norman buildings would never be confused with Anglo-Saxon, whatever architectural principles and forms they might share. On the other hand, Romanesque would not be confused with what emerged from or after it, also something new, also towards the end of the twelfth century, also subsequently called gothic (like the book hand), though labeled at the time “French” (or “Frankish” in Bartlett’s paradigm). In general narratives, high Romanesque work often gets overshadowed, as with the script, by a frenetic hunt for the beginnings of Gothic style, which indeed fall in the mid-twelfth century, though it does not really take off until after 1180.

The Twelfth Century  21

One way to proceed is to focus on features distinguishable from either the Carolingian or the Gothic (to use those terms broadly for what would precede and follow). This holds notably for the most important form of written public communication in the twelfth century, the letter. Culture and politics in that era were moved by letters (epistolae), even as rights and practices became increasingly set down in writing (litterae: charters, documents). Much of what historians treat as tractates—from disputes between Henry IV and Gregory VII to Abelard’s autobiography to questions about simony or contested practices—appeared first as letters. Contemporary authors were aware of this and frequently alluded to the interplay between private letter and public intervention, even played on it.23 These were semi-public documents, read aloud, the voice or persona of one person sounded in the presence of others.24 This must inform, importantly, how we think of society acting, or being acted upon, as well as our notions of what circles could participate and how. At one end of this spectrum was the royal writ, a short and peremptory written voice intervening legally in local societies, especially in England,25 and at the other, virtual tractates— Damian on simoniacs, Ailred on friendship, Bernard on Cluniacs—all composed in rhetorically fine Latin, all meant for public reading and discussion. In between came the letters that did the business of twelfth-­ century society. Politics and religion carried forward by way of the letter in turn informed culture. Key figures collected theirs as literary display, and indeed did so in the hundreds (Damian, Anselm, Bernard, John of Salisbury), including Hildegard of Bingen’s visionary and prophetic persona ­addressing everyone from kings to nuns in four hundred extant letters.26 This “lettered” voice—a styled writing, yet orally presented—spurred action, invoked sentiment, instilled conviction, revealed the divine, represented a case, settled arguments. Here too, twelfth-century endeavors presumed, but also wholly transformed, the Carolingian inheritance, letterwriting now so vastly amplified and refined as to serve distinct cultural functions. Likewise, it then faded from sight (as a medium of public culture) after about 1200, to become routinized into notarial culture before being re­discovered and redeployed again in mid-fourteenth-century humanist ­culture. Twelfth-century Europe inherited and extended Carolingian culture, and also dialectically superseded it. Its “newness” was not simply the final flourishing of ninth-century initiatives. Nor, on the other hand, was it simply the beginning of something that only subsequently reached its maturity, thus “early scholasticism” preparing the way for Thomas’s Summa Theologiae (as that scholarly project was widely conceived for a century).

22  J o h n Van En g e n

We have mostly read twelfth-century culture and society far too one-­ sidedly with our eyes fixed ahead on other cultural paradigms: on the Latinity and letters of the Italian Renaissance, the theology of later scholasticism, the schools of a corporate university, the tropes and mores of courtly romance, a monarchical papal church, an emergent state, a colonizing Europe. What we need is a sense of the social and cultural dynamics peculiar to that era. We may then better recognize that what began to stir at the end of the twelfth century, if hardly thinkable apart from what had come before, would itself prove startlingly new. Reforming monks headed for the countryside in the twelfth century were not the same as thirteenthcentury mendicants setting up shop in towns, independent teachers in schools not the same as corporate masters in their guilds, letter-tractates as quodlibets, the vicar of St. Peter as the vicar of Christ. Dramatic changes transformed Europe between the 1180s and 1240s, those transformations in turn inventive of what was to become distinguishable as “Old Europe.” To get at this twelfth-century mix of inheritance and refinement on the one hand, and challenge and renewal on the other, consider two intriguing examples. William of Malmesbury, writing history about 1125, complained that little credence was given to recent expert chronological work, and unburdened himself in a passionately felt aside: “I often marvel at why this misfortune taints the learned people of our time: that among such a large number of scholars, among so many sadly pale with heavy thinking, hardly anyone achieves full praise for learning (scientia). So fully does age-old practice (usus: usages, the customary) please (placet); so little assent is given to new discoveries as earned and accepted, even when they are quite probable. People creep along, with great effort, toward the views of the ancients. Everything new is foul.”27 A generation later, Hildegard of Bingen, looking back in her sixties to the time of her birth, “about the eleven-hundredth year after Christ’s,” as she put it, observed that just then true teaching and ardent justice began to slacken and turn hesitant. Her lifetime—our twelfth century—she berated as “childish.” Preaching to the assembled clergy at Trier in 1160, she denounced it: we live in womanish times; we await soon the great purgation that will bring manly times. She projected, in fact, quite another narrative: an extended period of fervor begun when the Son was born of a Virgin, a slackening of that fervor just in her lifetime (1098–1160s) accompanied by a consequent steep decline in mores, all this to be dealt with in the imminent future by a great purgation. More, because most prelates were setting bad examples or keeping ­silent, the “Living Light” had singled out her, a “poor woman,” to speak. God reversed good order in society to restore it.28

The Twelfth Century  23

William’s outburst against received usages and Hildegard’s warnings about womanish times alert us by implication to a world of inertial forces, resistant to change, whatever form they came in. How we position religion in all this, whether we ignore it as Haskins did or make it central (positively or negatively) as many others have since, vitally affects the narrative. In the twenty-first century this comes layered with additional complexities and sensitivities following centuries of disputes, first confessional (Catholic, Protestant, Jew), then broader still (a European Union accounted Christian or post-Christian). We need simply to listen to twelfth-century sources, with all their surprises. At a Roman synod in the year 1075, Pope Gregory called on lay people to avoid masses said by married or unchaste priests. On hearing this Sigebert of Gembloux, an aging monk in the imperial bishopric of Liège, penned a stunning rhetorical response. He issued no plea for “married” priests, but he sharply protested this unheard-of inter­vention, this reversal of good legal order: What else now are the workhouses of spinning women and the shops of craftsmen abuzz with than the laws (iura) of all human society thrown into confusion, the precepts of Christian holiness torn up, the sudden reversal of the status of the people, the impious ruin of the church’s honor, plots of servants against their lords, everywhere the suspicion of lords over against servants, treacherous betrayals by conspirators, sad machinations against powers ordained by God, friendship injured, faithfulness neglected, imperious license granted impudent evil, and teachings introduced contrary to the Christian religion?—and, most pitiable, all these monstrosities permitted, or agreed to, or authorized, by those called leaders of the Christian community.29 This was revolt in his experience, of the people against their priests, a new zeal turned against accustomed practices, all fomented by the pope no less, partisan of a purity that overturned religious order by calling into question the sanctity per se of the sacrament. Reformers, on the other hand, expressed horror at any notion that the anointed hands of a priest touch the intimate parts of a woman, then afterwards proceed to make and hold the Body of Christ. At Rome in 1049, clerical hearthmates were threatened with servitude, the ultimate social ostracizing, if they did not leave their clerical mates.30 But chronicles also recorded shock at a pope calling on people to avoid tainted priests and suspect masses—as they did again when he banned and deposed the German king and future emperor, even as reformers repudiated earthly kings daring to pretend they could confer the symbols of spiritual power.

24  J o h n Van En g e n

Such dramatic scenes pose at least two interpretive problems, distinct and not to be confused: the source of the innovative energy (which too often in retrospect appears just self-evidently right or wrong) and equally the role and stature of the customary (hardly studied by twelfth-century historians outside isolated social practices). By the year 1000, Christian sanctions touched most aspects of European society, so that in local societies of the christened, the spiritual and the material had long since merged. When the Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen opened marsh land to Dutch settlers in 1106, he documented their contractual conditions as follows: the tax/rent owed on each unit of worked land; the parish tithe owed on harvest and animals; further church obligations regulated according to their home diocese of Utrecht; a right to self-regulate local legal matters; a right to found parish churches and claim part of the tithe to support a priest.31 Founding new communities and founding churches, meeting obligations secular and religious, if still particular, also overlapped, even for this archbishop at the height of the Investiture Contest. So too in battles over appointing bishops and priests (and also popes), rival interests could not be sorted out by either side as neatly temporal or ­spiritual. Reform accordingly entailed some measure of revolt against prevailing practice, just as social or political claims usually sought, or infringed upon, religious sanctions—thus William the Conqueror obtained a blessed banner from that same Gregory VII. The embedded character of religion extended to all aspects of the human exchange with the divine: children cloistered for life by their parents, gifts in exchange for appointment to sacred offices and monasteries, endowments to pray for departed souls, kings selecting bishops, bishops gathering armies, local priests with hearthmates. It is how society worked, and had for generations. Challenge entailed revolt. Reformers envisioned now a purified channel of sacred life and power separated out, regrouped into a sacred society—what their critics labeled a “party.” Animated by a powerful vision of the truly holy, they aimed to separate out from an undiscriminating society of all the baptized.32 Some limited papal election to an inner circle of reformed cardinal bishops, thereby excluding the people, king, and clergy of Rome; others narrowed true monasticism to those who followed ad litteram the Rule of Benedict; still others now accounted as married or as licitly professed only those who had willingly consented to their estate in society. Yet another set of intellectual reformers defined as learned or “clerics” only those who had mastered the books of the arts curriculum, mostly antique poets and philosophers. Open schism and divisions lingered for a full century in one

The Twelfth Century  25

form or another, down to the time of Becket’s murder in 1170 in England and to 1177 in the papacy.33 At mid-century, Gratian and Peter Lombard still left unresolved the ecclesiastical status of simoniacs as well as the validity of sacramental grace among those accounted heretics—making the foundational textbooks for medieval church law and theology purveyors potentially of Donatist heresy. Likewise, those renowned administrative and legal initiatives—papal legates dispersed across Europe, local councils called under papal headship, a right of appeal to Rome over the heads of local societies—served in practice to link together a “friendship network,” as they said, like-minded reformers and allies across Europe, quite distinct from customary local societies or hierarchies.34 Prudential political considerations counted as secondary, whence reformers could look so dangerous, and bishoprics across Europe, especially in the German Empire (including northern Italy), often broke apart in civil war, not least the Roman bishopric itself. To ban giftexchange and sexual relations was to remove a person from customary society. Alternatively, it was to imagine sacral power entirely swallowing up things material, the totalizing vision of Cardinal Humbert and probably Pope Gregory. But to separate the sacral entirely from social relations (as new monks would try), the spiritualist vision Pope Paschal acceded to in 1111, seemed equally unthinkable, hooted down by churchmen who said a spirit could not live in this world apart from its body. Yet not to remove bishops from gift-exchange and priests from sexual relations was, some held, to pollute and put at risk the salvific Passion. This was revolt, and perceived as such. A colophon from the year 1084, written into a manuscript by a monk of Lobbes, recorded the times this way: “I wrote this out in the year of the Lord’s Incarnation 1084, King Henry, son of the emperor, also Henry, now for three years besieging the city of Rome, seriously putting pressure on Pope Gregory, also called Hildebrand, confined within it and in rebellion against him (rebellione sibi).”35 For the prevailing sacral and royal order (including this monk and Sigebert), the pope and his reforming allies were simply rebels. By way of justifying his own stance, Gregory VII famously declared (in a letter fragment subsequently entered into church law): “Christ said ‘I am truth’; he did not say, ‘I am custom.’”36 Custom, the inherited patterns of social rights and religious practice, had, for truth’s sake, to be cast off. Custom, inherited practices understood as authoritative rights, came as deeply embedded in how society functioned as did the Christian religion, if not more so, and must be construed in the plural (like the practice of the Christian religion), as differing widely by groups and locales. But

26  J o h n Van En g e n

something was stirring in this era, and not just among exceptional “rebels” like Pope Gregory VII. Consider this case from the 1110s. Bishop Stephen of Autun confronted the local count, also the duke of Burgundy, over “evil customs” (such as exactions) claimed with respect to certain villages and persons. As the dispute dragged on, the bishop drew up a charter to state his position and argued for it in a diocesan-wide peace gathering. But the duke continued to insist on his customary rights and refused to give in to what that document—circular irony here—had set out as its true reasonings and authentic writings (veridicis rationibus et scriptis), that is, reason and writing invoked against customary practice. So the matter went before a local council with representatives carefully chosen from each side, clerical and lay. They judged in favor of the bishop—but on the basis of memory, memory of what the duke’s father had practiced. The present duke then had to swear aloud to give up the customs he exacted, this oral declaration recorded in writing at the conclusion of the document along with the names of witnesses.37 In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as historians have long noted, perhaps often too one-sidedly or peremptorily, the exercise of local social power now became caught up in an interweaving of the oral and the written, the remembered and the inscribed, the two sometimes in tension, sometimes in coalition, with the remembered and the customary still foundational but the written gaining ever greater prestige. What we witness stunningly at the highest level of rival papal-imperial claims, but no less at the local level of material exactions, may be found increasingly in other parts of the society as well, but quite especially in the worlds of professed religion and professional learning. Forty years after Gregory claimed truth against custom, Peter Abelard, raging against what he deemed hypocritical monks in his day and describing them to Heloise as sporting themselves in all their pompous finery, accused them of following custom as their rule, and then blasted them with that same saying, “The Lord said, ‘I am truth,’ not ‘I am custom.’”38 He mistakenly ascribed it to Augustine, not Gregory, and called any other stance “judaizing,” as substituting custom for rule. Abelard, for all his own troubles, or maybe precisely for that reason, was vitally concerned with how people lived and why, and in his Conversation of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian set up an encounter in which his Philosopher claimed to stand on natural law and reason, while his Jew and Christian defended their practices on the basis of their respective sacred texts. People hold to a particular faith-­ community, the philosopher is made wryly to observe, because they were raised in its practices, brought up in its customs (educatio: the Roman word in its first meaning) even as they were “nourished” in physical life

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(nutritura) by their parents. This effects a kind of grafting for Jews or Christians, turning custom into nature, their religious loyalty springing thus from blood, not reason. Abelard dismissed unexamined religious practice as the self-regarded “common sense” of his time, prevailing equally among rich or poor, noble or peasant. Acquired from birth, it underwent no growth in intellect or understanding (intelligentia), he observed, nor was it expected to.39 This was meant to shock, in his case staging natural law or “reason,” not Gregory’s truth, to probe painfully a world suffused in Jewish or Christian practices. And, at least as we have this work, whether never finished or its conclusion in this form deliberate, he provided no resolution. At about the same time, Adelard of Bath, interested in matters of the natural world, set probing query against customary authorities. Reason, he declared, should serve as the universalis iudex on these matters, not usus (ordinary practice) nor inherited books. Authors should receive trust (fides) only insofar as their assertions are based on reason, authorities brought in secondarily.40 Whether it be the world of politics and ecclesiastical order, moral practice and religious order, or natural phenomena and cosmogony, reason and truth (often elided by these authors, though not by Gregory) were dramatically invoked to counter or correct inherited ways of seeing and doing and thinking. Recent scholars have tended of late to sideline groundbreaking conflicts between probing reason and inherited authorities among theologians and lawyers as airy in-house battles among a few elite schoolmasters and churchmen arguing over, say, how grammatically and ontologically bread could be Body, the first great dispute of this era, twenty years prior to Pope Gregory’s intervention. But we must recognize a broader rethinking, a laser beam turned on one aspect of society after another. That, in turn, confusingly, generated a critique of inherited custom and multiple written authorities and reinforced efforts to employ and clari­fy them. Practice and custom did not simply give way but now ironically, or perhaps necessarily, became written and integrated into taught law. Roman law had long since acknowledged a place for custom, and twelfth-century teachers took over those definitions, civilians by way of the newly recovered Digest, canonists almost entirely by way of Isidore of Seville as passed to jurists, prelates, and schoolmen by Gratian’s Concord of Discordant Canons.41 “Custom is a certain right (ius: law) established by practice (mores), taken as law when written law (lex) is absent.” Again: “It is called ‘custom’ because it is in common usage.” Gratian, attempting to make sense of Isidore (an scripture, an ratione consistat), construed consuetudo in his personal dictum, tellingly, as partly redacted in writing (linking

28  J o h n Van En g e n

thus writing and reason) but also as exercised simply in usages or practices, alluding to a broad historical reality all around him.42 In Isidore’s etymological word-games, “lex” came from reading (legendo), while “mos” was custom drawn from practice (moribus). At the very beginning, moreover, Gratian famously introduced church law with a declaration that human beings are ruled by two things: natural law, defined as contained in law and gospel, and practices (moribus). In the former, one might be tempted to see both secular and divine law, but in fact it refers, echoing a biblical phrase, entirely to divine law. Secular law thus arose entirely out of practices,43 some written down and rendered legislative (constitutio, in Roman and later church law), others not written down and called “custom.”44 This mirrored an early twelfth-century world where custom largely predominated still, and where church reformers now widely regarded usages or practices as uniformly human or secular in origin, as distinguished from natural (divine) law. Gratian shared deeply in the new critical spirit of Gregory VII and Abelard. After setting up natural (that is, divinely given) law he explained (D. 8) that evil custom was to be rooted out (c. 3), custom to cede to reason and truth (c. 4), always indeed yielding to truth (c. 5, the Gregorian sentence, also citing Cyprian), necessarily so once truth is revealed (c. 6: what Abelard cited), opposing reason in vain (c. 7) since custom cannot obstruct reason (c. 8) and truth is not required to follow human customs (c. 9)—passages nearly all drawn from Augustine and Cyprian, along with the text ascribed to Gregory VII.45 Usage and custom, these new teachers of law declared, always yielded to written law and reason, whether it be the natural law, the truth and reason of canonists, or the reason and writing of civilians—a position, to be sure, identified more starkly with church than civil lawyers, and resting in its sharpest formulation on one of the most cantankerous of Roman church fathers, Tertullian. This spirit or conviction drove church lawyers, then some civil lawyers too, to compile, coordinate, and enforce written law; or, put negatively, to check, contain, or eliminate practices that had heretofore qualified as inherited law. Given our own reliance on surviving written materials, this can then easily appear the dominant or even sole voice, the world of practice functioning only as straw man, that which was to be regulated, assessed, approved, or over-ruled. And indeed legal historians have tended to create narratives that point triumphally ahead, moving from this moment to modern legal jurisprudence.46 Realities on the ground suggest a far more complex picture. Susan Reynolds has recently emphasized that in the twelfth century even among

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lawyers and prelates the new work of law-giving still rested upon, and was deeply informed by, law-practice.47 Paul Hyams’ fine study of “rancor and reconciliation” has questioned this narrative for England in subtle and compelling ways. Moves toward general royal supervision of law and law courts by way of lawyers’ writs only seriously got underway in the early 1160s, and the king and his legal adjutants could then only open up access to king’s law, not ultimately control the workings of local law.48 Similarly, in his study of twelfth-century Tuscany, Chris Wickham has focused attention on the actualities of practice and locality, without disputing lawteaching in Bologna and a gradual Romanization of law, moving toward what people call the ius comune.49 The heart of the matter, from the perspective of this essay on the twelfth century, is the conflict, the new claims and ongoing practices, and the dialectic that ensued, the balance tipping irrevocably to the new only in the later twelfth century—as indeed the papacy as law-giver would only emerge in generalized practice under Alexander III (1159–83), then definitively under Innocent III (1198–1216), and an authentic papal law book only in 1208 and then definitively in 1234. Concessions to customary practices, general and local, appear all through the jurists’ teachings, even if they are generally little noted. It was a vastly complex and sometimes heated discussion, with emphases varying between civilians and canonists and among individual jurists. I summarize, for the purposes of this essay, a few basic points. In a climate where written law and reason were trying to claim the high ground, a key practical difficulty loomed: how then to authenticate custom. According to ­university-trained jurists, custom consisted of a usage not contradicted by contrary practices or judgments and of which there was no memory of its being introduced. Church lawyers said this meant practices of at least forty years’ duration; civil lawyers of ten or twenty.50 Moreover, deep into the thirteenth century and beyond there remained an implicit assumption that custom held as law unless explicitly trumped by written or divine law. This could produce quite surprising ideas. Canonists, borrowing from Roman law, held that property—claiming “mine” and “thine”—had originated in customary law, and actually as sinful practice (per iniquitatem prius cepit) contrary to a primitive communism. Ownership and lordship, the most basic of human institutions, were adjudged nonreprehensible nonetheless by way of their age-old usage, even if they only subsequently became fixed as written law.51 In 1198, Pope Innocent III noted that in Scandinavia public law revolved around the customs and rulings of kings, with no law of testament or written wills. Gifts to the church therefore came by way of a practice

30  J o h n Van En g e n

called scotatio, placing a clump of earth in the hand or vestment of a prelate, then on the altar. Someone had challenged such an act, possibly relatives wanting their property back, more likely someone demanding proof. Here the pope ruled that age-old usage prevailed, the fact of the properties once handed over standing itself as proof (argumentum) under customary law.52 Ironies abound, not least that a pope in Rome intervened in writing to guarantee unwritten customs in Scandinavia; that prelates who ordi­ narily sided with written law and reason ruled otherwise in this case to protect church property. Eleven years later, that same pope ruled on a heavily contested abbatial election in France. At issue was the Benedictine Rule’s written prescription that an abbot be elected and the right to m ­ odify this in a certain house based on age-old customs practiced there. The textbook rubric written above this complex and messy case drew the conclusion that “custom is the best interpreter of written laws” (optima est legum interpres).53 In the definitive issuance of papal law in 1234, a title on custom (1.4) followed the opening on “constitutions” and “rescripts” (the two main written forms in Roman terminology, taken over for church law), those with thirteen and forty-three chapters each, custom then with eleven. That written law predominated as the expression of truth and reason was simply now presumed, reiterated in a final chapter added by Gregory IX himself: custom could never trump (derogate) natural (divine) law where salvation was at stake. Yet his final sentence, acknowledging realities on the ground, expressed greater ambiguity: “Although the authority of age-old custom is not vile, it is nonetheless not so strong that it should c­ reate any obstacle (praeiudicium) to positive (written) law, unless it be rational and properly issued (legitime praescripta).”54 That is, if custom, acknowledged in a double negative (not vile), approaches the higher standard of rational written law, it holds. This excursus has led us more than a century past the opening conflicts, and more than a generation past what this essay suggested earlier might represent another turn in medieval and European history (the 1180s). So we need to return to the upheaval of that twelfth-century world, of “reason” or “truth” in revolt against “custom,” a world of usages claimed as age-old rights, of usus recognized as ius. Custom cut two ways. Virtually all the so-called heretical groups from the early eleventh to midtwelfth century, and then the Cathars, rejected infant baptism: the customary dipping of babies into water and impressing God’s sign upon them as the authentic way to name children and incorporate them into society. It was patent nonsense, they held, having no bearing on adult belief or acts. That came only by way of a voluntary group made up of true believ-

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ers and “adult” rites, perhaps a laying on of hands and the imparting of ­acquired texts or maxims. At Arras in 1025, sectarians repudiated baptism because it made no sense, they said, to confer it on unwilling infants, hardly prevented a life of future vice, and also came by way of tainted priests. These “refusers” were burned, the first such in Europe.55 The charter of the archbishop of Cologne in 1106 treated village and parish as ultimately of a piece. In local practice, this meant the christened located their customary allegiance ever more assuredly in the community of the local font. Any who did not stood out ever more sharply (whether “refusers” or Jews) and might appear ever more threatening. For the horror a rejection of infant baptism could arouse in the twelfth century, listen to Peter the Venerable rage against a group called the Petrobrusians: Since virtually all in our epoch and in our memory were baptized as infants and there took the Christian name. . . . Since all Gaul, Spain, Germany, and Italy and the whole of Europe for three or five hundred years has had only the baptism of infants, it would then have no Christians . . . and therefore no church and therefore no Christ. Thus all our ancestors would have perished. . . . Who can bear to hear this?56 This querying of a sacramental infant incorporation into a unitary Christian society, even more penetratingly in some ways than revolts staged by papal or monastic reformers, proposed to cut through the material-­ spiritual symbiosis, to imagine a religious society made up of adults consenting and choosing, and thus to probe the foundations of what had become a customary religious society. If the orthodox party was shocked by people taking religion into their own hands, rethinking or repudiating age-old custom, that is exactly what orthodox reformers were also doing. If new small groups resorted to maxims, reformers turned to reason and written authorities. Papal reformers seized upon texts they believed to be ancient (some of them PseudoIsidorean forgeries of the mid-ninth century) to bolster Petrine primacy and law-giving that, at least in the form they now exercised it, was largely new. Breaking with inherited forms of religion also animated those whom historians call the new religious: monks separating from old houses, hermits retiring to woods or setting up along byways, even a whole village in Swabia adopting the common life. They sought holiness, which they did not see in conventional religious practice. Though given to preaching, they gave up parish churches. Though defending “old” or “true” religion, they tended likewise to accept only adult converts, tending also to worry

32  J o h n Van En g e n

somewhat less about tainted sacraments than tainted lives. They dismissed, at least initially, inherited monasticism’s public intercessory tasks, and aimed to participate directly in the passion of Christ, as well as the love and even the “seeing” of God, through experience. The liturgical and organizational customs that Cluniacs and others were just beginning to write down, more descriptively than prescriptively, these new monks rejected on the basis of a Rule, whether from Augustine or Benedict. Many of these groups in revolt, in fact nearly all, regrouped around the sanctity of texts. This could extend, Brian Stock argued twenty-five years ago, to mediated texts, materials, or maxims that unlettered or semilettered people made their own by way of a presenter, often a cleric.57 Earlier scholars have focused on these texts as monuments in their own right: ecclesiastical reformers compiling ancient canons in updated, now thematically organized, law collections; monks thumping the Rule of Benedict or Augustine; scholars acquiring newly translated texts or immersing their minds in ancient authors and Aristotle’s logic. But new texts offer, at best, only a partial explanation. After all, monks had read the Rule in chapter every day for centuries, all Christians or Jews experienced their holy books mediated to them in community worship, and earlier prelates too had drawn up church canons to sort out ecclesiastical affairs. What struck contemporaries was the use of these texts, their ways of reading them. Listen to Arnulf, a privileged cleric at Milan, narrating the coming of a new “horror,” “people now rising up against the clergy.” A certain deacon of relatively low birth, he tells us, favored by the then bishop, was given opportunity for study and became, “a most severe interpreter of the divine law (severissimus est divine legis factus interpres),” on the basis of which he “exercised harsh judgments against the clergy alone.” This man, said to be of relatively low status and not a good speaker, got another, of abler tongue, to seize the role of preacher and lay a heavy yoke—what they took from these texts—squarely on the shoulders of the clergy, going so far as to call their masses “dog shit.”58 “Divine law” in this era often meant simply scripture, or rather a range of authoritative religious writings beginning with scripture. Arnulf, our aristocratic chronicler, did not find it new that a deacon studied or invoked divine law. What he found new was his interpretation: harsh, zealous in the extreme. Further, to Arnulf ’s disgust, this tough new reading came only at the expense of ruling clergy, a reversal of educated upper clergy using divine teaching to lord it over an immoral and ignorant ­people. In the aftermath of what became a very public struggle, three bishops at a synod, bishops no less, reportedly sought to refute this new inter-

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pretation by invoking scripture for themselves. Whether or not this attack rested on new texts (which was never claimed) or a new zeal for applying them, it sprang from a new way of reading—in part or in whole, as with so many other of these cases, of texts that for the most part had always been there. Abelard tells how on a dare he picked up the difficult book of Ezekiel, and bypassing the glosses, that is, all the inherited interpretations so carefully compiled by masters and now increasingly written in the margins, simply started reading and interpreting for himself—so wonderfully and originally, he claims, that everyone gathered round him to the envy of an established master.59 Whatever we make of Abelard’s story and his ego, we should not miss the claim to a new reading, nor should we limit new readings to the new clerical schools, as past scholarship so often has. In the Jewish community of northern France, Rashi undertook a new reading of the Talmud. In a relatively isolated monastery, Guibert of Nogent undertook a new reading of the minor prophets, read for their moral or ethical teachings. Rupert of Deutz, originally of a monastery outside Liège, was repeatedly charged with going beyond the fathers—that is, the customary and received ­commentaries—by proposing his own scriptural interpretations. Pressed for explanation, on the defensive, he ascribed these readings to a divine gift conferred on him in an adolescent crisis when, in a vision, Christ came down from the cross to embrace him in an open-mouthed kiss, penetrating his mouth but even more his mind and spirit. The holy Trinity ­appeared another time to lift him high, notably, on a book. Rupert, elaborating on a line that went back in part to Jerome, declared his right to turn over the fields of scripture with the ploughshare of his own genius.60 His was a genius for reading the scriptures figuratively, finding in its images elaborate symbolic and salvation-historical figures. But if one read divine texts through the lens of experience, as Bernard claimed he did for the Song of Songs, one uncovered in this betrothal poem the ultimate union between an aspiring human and the loving divine: “Turn to yourselves,” he said, “let each attend your consciousness, for today we read in the book of experience.”61 Schoolmen too practiced a sort of new reading, and their form we scholars, as its heirs, have in some sense declared normative (or self-­ evident). They began to read the text of scripture textualiter, as they said, word by word, and whole biblical books, not selected pericopes. They presented and taught Holy Scripture, the book incensed and kissed in public worship, as a text to be “run through,” as they said, line by line, word by word, explicated in the same way as a text in the liberal arts, with teaching

34  J o h n Van En g e n

glosses likewise built up around it. Their reading broke with custom only to set a new custom, their readings reincorporating tradition, now literally surrounding and overwhelming the text in densely inscribed margins.62 What this era spawned, in short, was not so much new texts, though those were important too, but multiple new ways of reading, competing and overlapping, each challenging customary readings. New readings in turn made the texts themselves appear new, even threatening. A simple example, well-known, is the New Monks’ reading of the Benedictine Rule. These monks were after its true letter, what Bernard labeled in one treatise, the “strict literalness of the Cistercians” (Cisterciensium districtionem litteratorium), their following the Rule wholly and purely to the letter (ex integro pure ad litteram). This he contrasted with the “usus” and the “ritus” of the Cluniacs, their practices and liturgical rites.63 The impulse of the new schoolmen and the new monks was strikingly similar. Cistercians, ironically, thus asserted for the first time a single prescriptive interpretation of the Rule, how it was to be read and performed, even as schoolmen increasingly claimed their literal reading of scripture as authoritatively orthodox. Francis too, in the 1220s, a layman, perceived what had been afoot in the previous century and would declare that there was to be no altering or glossing of his Rule. It was to stand on its own, its reading treated as ­self-evident—only to become, of course, the spark for embittered rival ­readings. When things came to blows, society had to invent ways to choose among readings, to declare some prescriptive and some out of bounds. Cistercians famously invented a new organization (general chapter) partly to deal with that, as schoolmen maneuvered their way toward exclusive control over the teaching license. Pope Gregory famously declared that the Petrine Roman church would decide what constituted a “canon.” Gratian equated reason and truth with natural law, that reason inherent in the nature of things, spelled out in basic biblical precepts such as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and in those broad moral precepts recognized by ancients such as a right of self-defense—that is to say, what was persuasive in a profound moral sense. Others came to see that deciding among readings, determining which was persuasive, proved less than simple, and no one set that out so plainly once again as Abelard. Texts were often unclear or contradictory or even erroneous, possibilities set out elaborately in the introduction to his Sic et Non, a collection of counterposing texts on 158 theological questions. Texts might offer teachings not only diverse but adverse owing to transcription errors, confusion, misunderstanding, or distinct genres. At issue was how to settle disputed points

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(controversia) in the writings of saints, first of all, if possible, by reason. In the end, though, the meaning and understanding (de sensu et intelligentia) of these texts, that is to say, truly to enter into the hearts of those saints, was possible only for God.64 Reason, that probing tool in which so many were putting so much confidence, could only approximate divine truth. Thus, on the matter of God as triune, as Abelard pointed out tellingly in his Theologia, he could not promise full truth, only something approximating it, near human reason.65 His most significant conceptual move, most scholars hold, was to place consent at the heart of any ethical act, not the deed as such. Doing good without willing consent was of little use or merit.66 Now we must recognize that intention as such was fully adumbrated in Augustine and Gregory. The crux of Abelard’s move, construed historically or contextually, pertained directly to our twelfth-century dialectic, a point-blank shot. For people to act meritoriously, whether Jews or Christians, monks or prelates, husbands or wives, they had finally to act with personal consent, not following customary practice, not out of group dynamic, not in concert with social and peer pressure, all those compelling realities in tiny medieval communities. Here the reasoning faculty, reconfigured as sprung from authentic personal intention, could crack wide open a customary and group-oriented society. Abelard, typically, pushed the point until it caused pain. The deed itself, the heart of customary practice, counted for nothing, he opined, or at least nothing more. Philosophical reflections moved in concert with broader cultural and social energies. Consider the attack on child oblation: after centuries of the reverse usage, customary practice from childhood in a habit and cloister now no longer made a monk, reformers, lawyers, and prelates held. Consent at the age of reason—this set at puberty (twelve for girls, fourteen for boys)—made a monk, and this was the stance insisted upon in practice by most new monks and argued in theory by lawyers beginning about 1140. Likewise, sexual consummation, staged rape, or familial arrangements did not make a marriage; these also were the practice of centuries. Marriage now required the consent of only two persons, their “I do” in the present tense, assuming, that is, these persons were of the age of reason, or as lawyers put it, capable of guile.67 This was revolt, in the name of reason and justified by a new reading of received texts. But if age-old customs governing the most fundamental institutions of medieval society, marriage and professed religion, could be subjected to reasoned critique and brought into a world of personal consent, so could, at least in principle, every other facet, from abstruse points of belief to detailed statutes for a monastery or

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a town. What we have called the discovery of the individual was actually more like the introduction of personal reflection and individual consent into a world of group practice.68 Schoolmen-chancellors, notably, reached repeatedly for the metaphor of the seal, then expanded vastly beyond the sphere of royal prerogative, as a way to think profoundly about the nature of individuality and identity and replication.69 For some theologians and lawyers at least, this sprang from an insistence from within on reason and truth.70 This “individual” manifests in reality a new dialectic between the personal and the group, the tension between personal intention and collective expectation worked out more and more self-consciously in literary expression. Driven by a dynamic that was spiritualizing and separatist in a world where the spiritual, the material, and the local had come to seem inseparable, spirited people broke away from customary practices across many spectrums in the twelfth century. But these same rebels also disciplined. The “parties” or “sects” who broke with an inclusive society of the baptized emerged in a generation or two as a new elite, trying now simultaneously to withdraw themselves and to draw the whole after them, be they papal reformers in Rome or Cistercian new monks or Parisian masters. Bernard’s De consideratione in 1153 advised a Cistercian pope how to rule the church and live as a contemplative—the last time this combination was imaginable, excepting the angel-pope episode of 1293. The results of this dia­ lectical tension were paradoxical and go to the heart of the age as history. Reformers banned gift exchange to secure church office but made administration the heart of an institutionalized church, instituting a long line of lawyer-popes. They insisted on the Rule and constructed the first prescriptive religious congregation (never foreseen by Benedict). Through it all, customary ways hardly disappeared. They projected an international society apart, anchored in texts and law, but then absorbed local custom into it. Patronage over local parish churches, for instance, once largely in lay hands, now increasingly in monastic hands, continued, but under a legal rubric with rules and guidelines, the Ius patronatus. So who prevailed? The reformers and scholars who had this crucial local practice fit firmly under a legal and institutional rubric, or those who continued to exercise local oversight over local churches? Reason itself might tear into the fabric of customary outlooks, but soon became constrained anew as itself a close reading of set texts, the predominantly Aristotelian curriculum limiting discourse as fully as any early medieval set of expectations. Notably, one might even say emblematically, sic et non was incorporated into the heart of legal and theological teaching, always beginning with the non.

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As reasonableness was made to mark authenticity or truth over against vilified custom, it could also mark off anything deemed unfitting. Schoolmen and churchmen often used the vetula, the “silly old woman,” as figuring the outer limits of good sense or intelligent faith, the opposite of the schooled male cleric. So too, as Anna Abulafia has argued,71 Jews now got labeled irrationalis. Not only were they given to the letter rather than the spirit, as Christians traditionally charged, but they proved unreasonable, irrational, in refusing to see and accept the authentic reasonableness of the Christian practices and beliefs all around them. In the violence of 1096, beyond inherited anti-Judaic prejudice, at work was, in part, a sense of how Jews stood out from customary ways. Even a cultured prelate like Peter the Venerable wrote a book “against the inveterate hardness of Jews.” He captured this tone in his opening appeal: “Behold the whole world for a long time now has acknowledged Christ, and you alone do not. All peoples obey him, and you alone do not listen. Every tongue confesses him, and you alone deny him. Others see, hear, and understand, while you alone remain blind and deaf, hard as stone.”72 Twelfth-century rebels and the cultural tools they fashioned served thus, ironically, to define a new custom—or old customs such as infant baptism and Christian predominance as alone reasonable. In principle, custom could never overrule—abrogate—either prescriptive law or reason. In practice, it frequently did, and jurists sought to account for that, Rufinus noting about 1160 that mores, constantly practiced, in fact simply did. And he saw a way to construe this as licit. Just as the Roman people had conferred authority on the emperor, as Roman law had it, so the Christian people have on the pope. Laws therefore needed papal consent to be enacted, he argued, or his objection to be nullified. Consequently, it might be counted as tacit consent to a customary practice if the pope had not specifically overruled it.73 This quite remarkable twist of hierarchical and legal logic allowed thus for an indirect legitimizing of local social practice. Winroth has now alerted us to the layers that went into the making of Gratian’s Concord of Discordant Canons. The original Gratian of the 1120s or ’30s, while recognizing custom, stood almost entirely on the side of divine and written law, truth and reason, as noted earlier. Distinctio 11, part of his opening disquisition on law, argued that “usage yields to authority, that law and reason should conquer evil usage” (c. 1) and that custom could never obstruct implementation of a papal ­issuance (c. 2), though, he conceded importantly, custom was inviolable when not demonstrably contrary to human laws or sacred canons (c. 5) or to faith (c. 6). Moreover, absent other authority, the practice of the people

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(mos populi) was to be kept as law (c. 7). His heirs, at work in the midtwelfth century, felt constrained to insert four tell-tale additional texts on this matter of custom (cc. 4, 9–11), all to the effect that the custom and practice of the Roman church trumped all local custom.74 By the time ­Rufinus commented on this passage another two decades later the point was clear: “Among all good customs those especially should be kept which the Roman church establishes for itself and for every church, whence no one was to dissent from the custom of the Roman church.”75 Reason, reading, and revolt, crucial engines of change in the European twelfth century, would not suffice for governing the new society reformers put in place. People lived by mores. So written law established a reasoned hierarchy for defining, among other things, which customs were to prevail. Notes 1.  Charles Homer Haskins, Renaissance, pp. 10, 16. Behind his narrative lay careful investigations collected as Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), and Studies in Mediaeval Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1929). Unlike many of his later readers, he acknowledged Carolingian precedents, his twelfth-century story an “intensification of intellectual life rather than . . . a new creation.” He was hardly alone in pointing to the twelfth century as a cultural ­turning-point. See Gerhart B. Ladner, “Terms and Ideas of Renewal,” in: Renaissance & Renewal, pp. 1–19 and esp. his bibliographical note, pp. 29–33. Narrative surveys continue; see R.N. Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester, 1999), with bibliography, pp. 216–29. 2.  I note representatively, Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual (New York, 1972); Robert Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven, 1977); Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England 1066– 1307 (Oxford, 1979; 2nd ed., 1993); Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983); R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe (Oxford, 1995). 3.  Martin Grabmann, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode, nach den gedruckten und ungedruckten Quellen (Munich, 1909) set in motion a massive and productive research agenda that flourished into the 1960s, much of it centered on the twelfth century as “early scholasticism.” See too for its title and date, Gérard M. Paré, A. Brunet, and P. Tremblay, La Renaissance du 12e siècle: Les écoles et l’ensiegnement (Paris and Oxford, 1933). See, for a rethinking, Marcia Colish, Remapping Scholasticism, Étienne Gilson Series 21 (Toronto, 2000). Research on the church itself centered initially on the Gregorian reform’s assertion of papal leadership in European life, thus Augustin Fliche, La réforme grégorienne, 3 vols. (Louvain, 1924– 37). Two highly influential journals, now essentially defunct, were Studi gregoriani (from 1947) and Studia gratiana (from 1953).

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4.  In ingenious and thoughtful essays that have gained relatively little following, R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford, 1970), pp. 1–85, interpreted the scholastic vision of the human and of human reasoning as a humanism uniting the two, or rather reimagining the categories. 5. Friedrich Heer, Aufgang Europas: Eine Studie zu den Zusammenhängen zwischen politischer Religiosität, Frömmigkeitsstil und dem Werden Europas im 12. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1949). English-speaking readers probably know better his The Medieval World, Europe 1100–1300 (New York, 1962; orig. German ed., 1961), where an innovative twelfth century leads into an institutionalized and sclerotic thirteenth century. 6.  Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and Desire for God: A Study in Monastic Culture (New York, 1961). The French original of 1957, based on lectures given to monks in 1956, had as its subtitle: Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Age. This drove a recovery of medieval monastic authors, all anchored by a new edition of the works of Bernard of Clairvaux issued between 1957 and 1977. 7.  Giles Constable, Reformation. 8.  See Georges Duby, “The Culture of the Knightly Class: Audience and Patronage,” in Renaissance & Renewal, pp. 248–62, and his influential essay “Les ‘jeunes’ dans la société aristocratique dans la France du Nord-Ouest au 12e siècle,” Annales E. S. C. 19 (1964), pp. 835–46. 9.  Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994). 10.  Julia M. H. Smith, Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History 500–1000 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 293–4. 11.  Robert I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987), reissued twenty years later with a new subtitle: Authority [instead of Power] and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250. On Moore’s historical vision, see the shrewd analysis of Edward Peters, “Moore’s Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: Travels in the Agro-Literate Polity,” and Moore’s own “Afterthoughts on The Origins of European Dissent,” in Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work of R. I. Moore, ed. Michael Frassetto (Leiden, 2006), pp. 11–29, 291–326, at p. 300. This general reversal underlies many recent studies, for instance, Dominique IognaPrat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–1150) (Ithaca, 2002). 12. Moore, European Revolution. Already earlier Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (New York, 1938)—a rewriting in English of a work written in German following the First World War, Die europäischen Revolutionen (Jena, 1931)—argued that the Gregorian Reform of the church represented the first “revolution” in European history (and the Russian Revolution the last). 13.  The violence unleashed by the First Crusade in 1096, along with subsequent friction between Jews and Christians, intellectual or social, has produced an enormous recent literature. For orientation, see Jews and Christians in Twelfth-­ Century Europe, ed. Michael Signer and John Van Engen (Notre Dame, 2001); Robert Chazan, Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom (Cambridge, 2004); Susan Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, 2002); and, from a different perspective, Jonathan

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Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 2007). 14. The problem noted by Swanson, Twelfth-Century Renaissance, pp. 188– 206, and now addressed by Fiona Griffiths, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia, 2007). See also John Van Engen, “The Voices of Women in Twelfth-Century Europe,” in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olsen and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame, 2005), pp. 199–212. 15.  Robert Bartlett, Making of Europe. A generation ago the issue was raised with regard to crusader conquests: Joshua Prawer, The Crusader’s Kingdom: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (New York, 1972), based on a volume published in Hebrew in 1963. For nearly the opposite view, this epoch as the “discovery of diversity,” see Michael Borgolte, Europa entdeckt seine Vielfalt 1050–1250 (Stuttgart, 2002). 16.  This essay was completed before the publication of Thomas Bisson’s The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton, 2009), with its argument of European patterns (governance) arising out of a violent twelfth-century upheaval in power. 17. Constable, Reformation, pp. 3–4. 18.  C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 923–1210 (Philadelphia, 1985); The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia, 1994). 19.  C. Stephen Jaeger, “Pessimism in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” Spec 78 (2003), pp. 1151–83. 20.  A point often made, most tellingly with respect to documents perhaps by Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, but influentially as well by Richard Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 106–21. With respect to an exponential increase in manuscript production, all still in parchment, there are no definitive studies but endless evidence on the diffusion of twelfth-century work, thus Rudolf Goy, Die Überlieferung der Werke Hugos von St. Viktor: Ein Beitrag zur Kommunkationsgeschichte des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 1976). 21.  See Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 56–71, with discussion and literature. 22. See, for instance, Raymond Oursel, Invention de l’Architecture Romane (La-Perre-qui-Vire, 1970). Roger Stalley, Early Medieval Architecture (Oxford, 1999) treats the Carolingian and Romanesque together but says of the latter: “Thus the Romanesque style did not constitute a renaissance of Rome: it was a new style created out of a vocabulary inherited from the past” (p. 235). 23.  There are countless examples of this, including nearly the entire massive corpus of letters from Peter Damian. I note a work by Bernard of Clairvaux (returned to below), crucial for understanding the observance of the Rule in the Cistercian movement. It originated as an epistolary reply and was self-consciously expanded into a rationale: “Rescriptum meum ad epistolas duorum Carnotensium quorumdam monachorum, vobis primum ut promiseram, destinare curavi, ubi et

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aliud quoque impletum est quod iussistis. Nam cum breviter rescribere decrevissem, et epistolis epistolam tantum reddere velle coepissem, hortatu vestro in libri, ut cernitis, longitudinem protraxi stilum, ut in pluribus plures possint aedficari.” Bernard, De praecepto et dispensatione, praefatio, in Opera, ed. J. Leclercq and H. M. Rochais (Rome 1963), vol. 3, p. 253. That is, a question of practice, raised in a letter, and answerable in a letter, grew into a letter-tractate meant to inform others on general policy. 24.  For orientation to this vast and under-appreciated subject, see Giles Constable, Letters and Letter Collections, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental 17 (Turnhout, 1976), and John Van Engen, “Letters, Schools, and Written Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Dialektik und Rhetorik im frühen und hohen Mittelalter, ed. Johannes Fried, Schriften des historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 27 (Munich, 1997), pp. 97–132. Liudolf Melve, Inventing the Public Sphere: The Public Debate during the Investiture Contest (ca. 1030–1122), 2 vols. (Leiden, 2007) attempts to draw on Habermas and Stock to account for twelfth-century public exchanges but never confronts the genre issue. 25.  Insightful new work, amidst a vast literature, in Paul Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation (Ithaca, 2003), pp. 155ff. 26.  John Van Engen, “Letters and the Public persona of Hildegard of Bingen,” in Hildegard von Bingen in ihrem historischen Umfeld, ed. Alfred Haverkamp (Mainz, 2000), pp. 375–418. 27. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum anglorum 3.292, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), p. 526. My more literal translation; compare theirs p. 527. 28.  The vision of her birth-time inserted into Vita Hildegardis 2.2, ed. Monica Klaes, CCCM 126 (Turnhout, 1993), p. 22. For the letter to the clergy of Trier: Hildegard, Epistolarium, 223R, ed. L. van Acker, CCCM 91A (Turnhout, 1993), pp. 490–6. For Hildegard’s apocalyptic vision of Christian history, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and “Piers Plowman” (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 26–75. 29. Sigebert, Epistola, ed. Erwin Frauenknecht, Die Verteidigung der Priesterehe in der Reformzeit (Hannover, 1997), pp. 218–9. This opening rhetorical blast is but a taste of the tirade directed against these new correctores who in effect, and with a false understanding of the sacrament, license the people, said to be ever ready in any case to rise up against their priestly leaders. Frauenknecht’s study is basic for Gregorian era treatises on this subject. For actual practice, much harder to get at, see Christopher N. L. Brooke, “Gregorian Reform in Action: Clerical Marriage in England, 1050–1200,” The Cambridge Historical Journal 12 (1965), pp. 1–21, 187ff; and Maureen Miller, The Formation of a Medieval Church: Ecclesiastical Change in Verona, 950–1150 (Ithaca, 1993), pp. 55ff. 30.  An echo of this conflict would enter Gratian, Decretum C. 2, q. 8, c. 3, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Emil Friedberg, vol. 1, Decretum magistri Gratiani, p. 760. See Susan Mosher Stuard, “Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slavery,” P&P 149 (1995), pp. 3–28, at pp. 11–12. 31.  For this document, see Dietrich Kurze, “Ländliche Gemeinde und Kirche in Deutschland während des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts,” in his Klerus, Ketzer, Kriege,

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und Prophetien: Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Jürgen Sranowsky, Marie-Luise Heckmann, and Stuart Jenks (Warendorf, 1996), pp. 47–83, at pp. 73–4. 32.  A point too easily lost when the narrative is cast as reformers and their adversaries, a point made tellingly, for instance, by Phyllis Jestice, “Peter Damian against the Reformers,” in The Joy of Learning and the Love of God: Essays in Honor of Jean Leclercq (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1995), pp. 67–94. 33.  In a book that reached me after this essay was written, Johannes Fried, Das Mittelalter: Geschichte und Kultur (Munich, 2008), p. 186, labeled this “Das lange Jahrhundert der Papstschismen,” not the first to make this observation but the first to make it a rubric for the twelfth-century church. 34.  A point made in recent literature; see for instance, I. S. Robinson, “Periculosus homo: Gregory VII and Episcopal Authority,” Viator 9 (1978), pp. 103–32. 35.  Tournai, Bibliothèque du Séminaire 1, f. 276rb. For an image see Manuscrits datés conservés en Belgique, Tome 1 (Brussels, 1968), pl. 5. 36.  This letter fragment ascribed to Gregory VII is found in Gratian, Decretum D. 8 c. 5, who apparently drew it from Ivo, Collectio tripartitum 3.8–9 (see n. 38). The gospel text echoed is John 14:6. 37.  PL 172: 1309–11. 38.  Peter Abelard, Letter 4, ed. J. T. Muckle, “The Personal Letters between Abelard and Heloise,” MS 15 (1953), p. 85. What Abelard cited as his source (Augustine, De baptismo contra Donatistas 3, 6.9) appears next in Gratian (D. 8 c. 6) but also in Ivo, Collectio tripartitum 3.7, 14, where the text that Abelard echoed appears first, whence likely his attribution to Augustine. 39.  Peter Abelard, Collationes 7–8, ed. John Marenbon and Giovanni Orlandi (Oxford, 2001), pp. 8–10. 40.  Adelard of Bath, Questiones naturales 7.39, ed. Charles Burnett, Adelard of Bath, Conversation with his Nephew (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 104–6, 166. 41.  This is a complex and mostly under-studied topic. But see André Gouron, “Sur les origins de l’expression ‘droit coutumier,’” “Coutume contre loi chez les premiers glossateurs,” and “Non dixit: Ego sum consuetudo,” all most easily accesible in his Droit et coutume en France aux 12e et 13e siècles (Aldershot, 1993). The classic work was by Siegfried Brie, Die Lehre vom Gewohnheitsrecht (Breslau, 1899). 42. Gratian, Decretum D. 5, ed. Friedberg, p. 2. 43.  This is the way Paucapalea read it as well: “‘humane moribus constant’ quia quod prius fuit in consuetudine et postea in scriptis redactum est, lex uocatur.” Paucapalea, Summa über das Decretum Gratiani, ed. Johann Friedrich von Schulte (Giessen, 1890, repr 1965), p. 4. 44. Gratian, Decretum D. 1, ed. Friedberg, p. 1. 45.  Ibid. D. 8, cc. 3–9, ed. Friedberg, pp. 14–16. I follow the rubrics of the Decretum, which are likely a bit later. This strong reading corresponds to the earliest layer of glossing as well, which was, if anything, even stronger, thus for c. 5 (Gregory): “Usum ueritati contrarium omnifariam abolendum.” See Rudolph Weigand, Die Glossen zum Dekret Gratians, Studia Gratiana 25–6 (1991), p. 413. 46. This applies as well to the otherwise outstanding summary offered by Peter Landau, “The Development of Law,” in NCMH, vol. 4, pp. 113–47. Compare now Edward Peters, “Introduction: The Reordering of Law and the Illicit in

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Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Europe,” in Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe, ed. Ruth Mazo Karras, Joel Kaye, and E. Ann Matter (Philadelphia, 2008), pp. 1–14, an outstanding essay which covers some of the same ground as this one, from a slightly different vantage point. 47. Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford, 1994), pp. 5–8. 48. Paul Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca, 2003), esp. ch. 5, pp. 155ff. 49.  Chris Wickham, Courts and Conflict in Twelfth-Century Tuscany (Oxford, 2003). 50.  The best summary, too late for our purposes but very influential for the future, was that of Hostiensis in his Summa (Lyon, 1537; repr. 1962), pp. 14–15. 51.  Thus, representatively and very influentially, Rufinus Summa Decretorum, ed. Heinrich Singer (Paderborn, 1902; repr. 1963), p. 21: “tamen quia in longum usum deriuatum est (exactio obsequiorum et dominatus premens), non iam iniquitatis peruersitate sed consuetudinis iure exercetur, ita et quod aliquid proprium possideretur ardente aliquorum cupiditate primitus factum est, quod tamen postea ex longeuo usu et legum institutione inreprehensibile iudicatum est.” Ironically, it was the custom of lordship, age-old, together with its getting rendered as law, that made it irreproachable—a striking rebuff to the reformers’ reason, truth, and written authorities. 52. This entered into received church law, presumably for the general legal principle it laid down: Decretales 1.4.1, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Friedberg, vol. 2, Decretalium Collectiones, p. 36. 53.  Ibid., 1.4.8, ed. Friedberg, vol. 2, pp. 39–41. 54.  Ibid., 1.4.11, ed. Friedberg, vol. 2, p. 41. 55.  These incidents, and the relatively spare texts that report them, have been the object of much study over the past generation, though without quite catching the potential societal significance inherent in rejecting infant baptism. See R. I. Moore, The Origins of European Dissent (London, 1977), pp. 9ff; Stock, Implications of Literacy, pp. 120–39. 56.  Petrus Venerabilis, Contra Petrobruisanos 11, ed. James Fearns, CCCM 10 (Turnhout, 1968), pp. 13–14. This diatribe against heretics is at the center of Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, who (pp. 151–2) treats it primarily as a reductio ad absurdum, which may be rhetorically true but nonetheless goes to the heart of the matter, a revolt against the inherited Christian order. 57.  The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983). 58. Arnulf, Liber gestorum recentium 3.8–11, ed. Irene Scaravelli (Bologna, 1996), pp. 110–6. 59. Abelard, Historia calamitatum, ed. Jacques Monfrin (Paris, 1959), pp. 68–9. 60.  See John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley, 1983), pp. 48–54. 61. Bernard, Sermo super Cantica 3.1, in Opera, ed. J. Leclerq, C. H. Talbot, H. M. Rochais (Rome, 1957­–77), vol. 1, p. 14. For orientation, in a vast literature, see M. B. Pranger, Bernard of Clairvaux and the Shape of Monastic Thought: Broken Dreams (Leiden, 1994).

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62.  John Van Engen, “Studying Scripture in the Early University,” in Neue Richtungen in der hoch- und spätmittelalterlichen Exegese, ed. Robert Lerner, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 32 (Munich, 1996), pp. 17–38. 63.  Bernard of Clairvaux, De praecepto et dispensatione 48–9, in Opera, vol. 3, p. 286. See, for instance, Klaus Schreiner, “Puritas regulae, Caritas und Necessitas: Leitbegriffe der Regelauslegung in der monastischen Theologie Bernhards von Clairvaux,” in Zisterziensische Spiritualität: Theologische Grundlagen, funktionale Voraussetzungen und bildhafte Ausprägungen im Mittelalter, ed. Clemens Kaspar and Klaus Schreiner, Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweigen, Ergänzungsband 34 (St. Ottilien, 1994), pp. 75–100. 64. Peter Abelard, Sic et non, ed. Richard McKeon and Blanche B. Boyer (Chicago, 1976–77), pp. 89–104, at pp. 96, 90–1. 65.  Petrus Abelardus, Theologia ‘Scholarium,’ ed. E. M. Buytaert and C. J. Mews, CCCM 13 (Turnhout, 1987), p. 314. See Christel Meier, “Rupert von Deutz Befreiung von den Vätern: Schrifthermeneutic zwishen Autoritäten und intellektueller Kreativität,” Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales 73 (2006), 257–89, at pp. 285–9. 66. Fundamental now is John Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge, 1997), esp. pp. 251–64, 304–23. 67. On marriage (a large literature), basic orientation in James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987), pp. 187–99, 260–88; on profession, John Van Engen, “Religious Profession: From Liturgy to Law,” Viator 29 (1998), pp. 323–43. 68.  Scholars were first alerted to this point by Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” JEH 31 (1980), pp. 1–17; with further observations in Susan R. Kramer and Caroline W. Bynum, “Revisiting the Twelfth-Century Individual: The Inner Self and the Christian Community,” in Das Eigene und das Ganze: Zum Individuellen im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum, ed. Gert Melville and Markus Schürer, Vita regularis 16 (Münster, 2002), pp. 57–85. 69.  Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, “Medieval Identity: A Sign and a Concept,” American Historical Review 105 (2000), pp. 1489–533. 70.  This noted as well, if from a more abstract or philosophical perspective, by Georg Wieland, “Rationalisierung und Verinnerlichung: Aspekte der geistigen Physiognomie des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Philosophie im Mittelalter: Entwicklungslinien und Paradigmen, ed. Jan P. Beckmann, Ludger Honnefelder, Gangolf Schrimpf, and Georg Wieland (Hamburg, 1987), pp. 61–79. 71.  Basic on this is Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the TwelfthCentury Renaissance (New York, 1995). 72.  Petrus Venerabilis, Adversus Iudeorum inueteratam duritiem, ed. Yvonne Friedman, CCCM 58 (Turnhout, 1985), p. 1. Compare Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, pp. 265–366. 73. Rufinus, Summa, p. 21. 74. Gratian, Decretum D. 11, ed. Friedberg, pp. 22–6. 75. “[E]docemur quod nulli a consuetudine Romane ecclesie liceat dissentire . . . inter omnes consuetudines bonas illa potissimum seruanda est quam Romana ecclesia sibi et omni ecclesie generaliter statuit,” Rufinus, Summa, p. 28.

two

A Historian of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance and the Transformation of English Society, 1066–ca. 1200 J o h n Gi l l in g h a m

No part of Europe was more fundamentally transformed during the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries than England, the kingdom in the southeastern part of Britain, that “other world” (alter orbis) cut off by the ocean from the rest of the continent.1 The process that Robert Bartlett called the “Europeanization of Europe”—the shift from the greater differentiation within the different parts of early medieval Europe to an increasingly homogeneous European society and culture—hit England hard in the decades after 1066.2 No other country went through anything like the virtually total dispossession of its old elite, as happened in England as a consequence of the Norman Conquest. Although there were marked continuities in the structures of government and society after 1066, and although the long-term impact of the Conquest on the daily life of the overwhelming bulk of the population who worked the land and lived on bread and ale is highly debatable, so far as the old English landowning elite is concerned there is no debate. England received not just a new royal dynasty, but also a new ruling class, a new culture and language. In the words of Sir Richard Southern: “At the level of literate and aristocratic society, no country in Europe, between the rise of the barbarian kingdoms and the twentieth century, has undergone so radical a change in so short a time as England experienced after 1066.”3 One consequence, Elizabeth van Houts has suggested, was that “the English were so traumatised that they could not bring themselves to write down their memories.”4 Versions of the Old English annals known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were continued in a 45

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few monasteries, but for a long time there was no attempt to make sense of the Conquest of 1066 and its aftermath in the language of European learning. Not until circa 1110 when Eadmer of Canterbury began his Historia novorum in Anglia was a start made. For him the new things were the ecclesiastical innovations made by William the Conqueror; in this context “new” meant “bad.”5 This changed dramatically in the second quarter of the twelfth century, when a new generation of historians, in particular William of Mal­ mesbury and Henry of Huntingdon writing in Latin, and Geoffrey Gaimar writing in French, all born after 1066, took a new look at both their insular past and their more cosmopolitan present. The first and greatest of these was William of Malmesbury.6 In the Gesta Regum Anglorum he undertook a reinterpretation of the whole course of English history from the fifth-century invasions down to his own day.7 Despite the fact that Gesta Regum Anglorum was his own choice of title, reflecting, as he explained in his prefatory letter to Earl Robert of Gloucester, “the greater part of its contents,” it was anything but a narrowly political and insular history.8 What he wrote was in effect a history of the development of European civilization in England, a development of which the Norman Conquest was the recent culmination.9 William’s attitude to new things was very different from Eadmer’s. The new things of the modern age delighted him—if anything there were not enough of them. He observed that old ideas are hard to root out, that people are all too reluctant to reject what they have imbibed with their mother’s milk. “Why,” he asked, “do we so often just plod along in the footsteps of the Ancients without giving new ideas the acceptance they ­deserve?”10 And this from a historian who knew the Ancients better than any other, and greatly admired them: “the most notable reader and scholar of the Latin classics in the whole of twelfth-century Europe.” “As historian and humanist he was passionately interested in ancient Rome.”11 But he was also impressed by the cultural achievement of his own day. He noted, for example, that in the England of Godfrey, prior of Winchester (1082– 1107), and Lanzo, prior of Lewes (1077–1107), “there were many people distinguished for their learning as well as famous in religion. . . . By their admirable lives they have made the stories of the past seem credible.”12 On the subject of the leaders of the First Crusade, in particular Godfrey de Bouillon and Tancred, he wrote: “Let eulogistic poets and ancient fables no longer praise the old heroes. . . . Nothing that was done in those or any times can compare with the glory of what these men have achieved.”13 He admired buildings raised after the Conquest in what he recognized as

A Historian of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance  47

a new architectural style. “You may see everywhere in villages, in towns and cities, churches and monasteries rising in a new style of architecture.”14 He admired the skill of modern poets, referring casually to the “modern polish” (moderni temporis lima) that he thought lacking in the verses on what he believed was John the Scot’s tomb.15 He cited the poem “Par tibi Roma nihil” by Hildebert of Le Mans both to “justify his admiration for Hildebert and to illustrate his general point that in his own time antique culture was experiencing a rebirth.”16 In most senses of the word “Renaissance,” William was a Renaissance historian. Although a Benedictine monk himself, William’s Gesta Regum is in many ways a very secular-minded history of kings—perhaps not surprising since he claimed he wrote it to please secular patrons, members of King Henry I’s family, Queen Matilda, the Empress Matilda, King David of Scotland, and Earl Robert of Gloucester. When William wrote about monks such as Bede or Benedict Biscop, he emphasised their learning or their contribution to art and architecture. Benedict Biscop, for instance, was “the first man to invite to England craftsmen skilled in building in stone and in glazing windows.” In William’s view, Benedict had been inspired by love of his native land and delight in refinement (amor patriae et voluptas elegantiae) which made him “eager to bring new things” (aliquid insolitum) to his people.17 Of his own work, William said that it was written “for love of his native land” (propter patriae caritatem). In his narrative of the foundation of the Cistercian order, he put into the mouth of the English monk, Stephen Harding, a lengthy endorsement of the high place of reason in the world, a passage that was quoted at length and commented upon by two of the contributors to Benson and Constable, Giles Con­ stable himself and Chrysogonus Waddell.18 Neither, however, had reason to note William’s explanation for including a digression on events in Burgundy in an English history: “because it is part of the glory of England to have produced the great man who was the founder and promoter of this form of religious life.”19 As Rees Davies has put it, the English history offered by Malmesbury and Huntingdon was a story of three chapters “presented in sophisticated and evolutionary fashion”: chapter one, the making of the English “into one people” (in unam gentem); two, the political unification, the making of a united kingdom of England under a single king with the reign of ­Egbert being given a pivotal role; and three, “more particularly prominent in William of Malmesbury, that of a cultural and social improvement in manners and civility, learning and governance.” Moreover, this newly minted English history was to be very influential. It would be the English

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view of English history, the great English historical myth—secular, political, progressive—at least down to the twentieth century.20 Indeed, it was already influential in the twelfth century, employed to make sense of and to justify the fact that English rule was being imposed, willy-nilly, on peoples to the west of England. By the mid-twelfth century the author of the Gesta Stephani reckoned that Wales was being so greatly transformed by invaders and settlers that it now seemed to be “a second England.”21 By the 1180s and in the aftermath of the English invasion of Ireland, Gerald de Barri looked forward to the Irish learning a “better form of life from England” (vivendi formam meliorem ex Anglia).22 To what extent, and in what ways, might this confident English perception of English culture and way of life be a reflection of the real transformation of English society in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest? One field in which William would undoubtedly have witnessed a transformation was very close to his heart, Latin literature—as has recently been made abundantly plain in R. M. Thomson’s study of books and learning, from which I take all of the few points made here. On the eve of the Conquest, English book collections had looked pre-Carolingian, being poor in patristic and classical texts and containing a high proportion of works in English. After ca. 1075, the new leaders of the English church set about remedying the situation, bringing in scribes and exemplars from France, the Low Countries, and Lorraine, and building up libraries, that is, institution-based collections. “They thought of themselves as initiating a process that could be called ‘Europeanization.’” Herbert Losinga, bishop of Norwich (1090­–1119), for example, wrote to Fécamp asking for a copy of Suetonius, “whom I cannot find in England.”23 As a direct consequence of their efforts, “more volumes survive from the sixty years after the Norman Conquest than from the four and a half centuries before it.”24 At Malmesbury, William drew attention to his own efforts in continuing the work begun by the Norman abbot, Godfrey of Jumièges, in building up the library. “If I single out this activity, I think I have every right to do so, for in this area I have been inferior to none of those who went before; indeed (if I can say this without boasting), I have easily surpassed them all.”25 As is evident from the breadth of William’s own reading, it was far from being just a question of the number of manuscripts. Bury St Edmunds, for example, during the abbacy of Archbishop Anselm’s nephew, Anselm (1121–48), formerly abbot of Sts. Alexius and Saba at Rome, acquired patristic, classical, and late antique writings “at a furious rate,” as well as collections of twelfth-century Latin poetry, notably the work of Hildebert of Le Mans and Marbod of Rennes. By 1200, Waltham Abbey

A Historian of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance  49

had “an amazing collection of liberal arts texts, including many classics.”26 In the 1120s, William of Malmesbury was conscious that there had been a revival of letters since the time of Lanfranc, whom he praised for “encouraging the whole Latin world to pursue the liberal arts.”27 The last person to have a whole chapter in the Gesta Regum devoted to him was Godfrey, prior of Winchester, whom William called “a priceless storehouse of philosophy,” distinguished for his books, beautifully written letters, epigrams, and poems.28 The impact of Parisian scholastic learning in the second half of the century is reflected in the appearance of glossed books of the Bible in virtually every library together with the standard modern works by Hugh of St. Victor, Peter Lombard, Peter Comestor, and Peter the Chanter. In Thomson’s words, “The process took nearly a century to complete across the whole of England; what it entailed was nothing less than a transformation of English book-collections.”29 With the new books came a higher quality education, even in old established institutions such as Malmesbury Abbey where, in William’s view, “the monks who had been mere stutterers in common or garden learning, were now given a proper education.”30 But from now on teachers and learners could be found in new places. Before 1066, there had been teachers in monasteries and in some great households; after the Conquest, schoolmasters can be found in cathedral cities and other towns in England, their schools open not just to members of the institution but to anyone who could afford the fees and expense of attending them. Hence it has been claimed that “it is in the twelfth century that the modern history of English education may well be said to begin.”31 By the mid-twelfth century, one commentator complained that teachers were now as common as royal tax-collectors.32 Such was the reputation of Oxford as a ­center of learning by 1187, the year in which Gerald de Barri held his three-day book launch party there, that the arguments in favor of it being a place where teachers and students congregated as early as the first half of Henry II’s reign clearly have force.33 The emergence of the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge by circa 1220 is a measure of England’s educational transformation.34 In large part, the rise of schools was a function of urbanization, the growth in the number and size of towns, a trend visible in England, as it was throughout Europe as a whole, from the tenth century onwards. In many towns the immediate impact of the Norman Conquest was destructive, with streets and houses demolished to make room for castles. But by 1100, Norman lords had founded about twenty new towns, and another twenty were founded in Henry I’s reign. Altogether about 120 new towns

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were founded in England in the century and a half after 1066, more than doubling the number of towns, and a faster rate of new town creation than in any other similar length period in English history.35 There was also the beginning of municipal self-government. Again, it was not just a question of number and size. A lord could guarantee himself a useful annual sum with virtually no effort on his part by leasing to the burgesses the right to administer his town and collect the revenues. By 1130, both London and Lincoln had bought these rights from the king. From the twelfth century on, records of grants of “liberties and free customs” survive in increasing numbers, mostly in the form of borough charters, the vocabulary of which reflects the influence of the economically more advanced towns of northern France, the Low Countries, and the Rhineland. By Henry II’s reign, the law accepted the custom that a serf able to live for a year and a day “in a privileged town as a citizen received into their commune” would be “thereby freed from villeinage.”36 Twelfth-century historians shared the ­enthusiasm of contemporary aristocratic society for towns and markets. William gave high marks to those who founded new towns or developed established ones. He praised Edward the Elder (901–24) for “providing many cities in suitable sites, either by repairing old ones or by designing new,” and Edward’s sister Ætheflæd for being “no less effective as a builder of cities.” He wrote about Exeter in glowing terms and attributed its prosperity to Athelstan’s investment: “the splendor of the city and wealth of the inhabitants (civitatis magnificentia et incolarum opulentia), the number of visitors, the abundant market in which you can find all that men could possibly desire (quod humano usui conducibile existimes).”37 In William’s mind, towns and a “superior” lifestyle were clearly linked. A development that fundamentally transformed lives was the end of slavery. By 1066, slavery may well have died out in Normandy (as in most of western Europe north of the Alps and Pyrenees). Hence the Norman Conquest may have been the first conquest in the history of Britain and Ireland that did not result in more slaves being taken to market.38 Nonetheless, the evidence of Domesday Book demonstrates that the Normans kept the English slave system going for at least a generation after the Conquest.39 According to William of Malmesbury, Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester (1062–95), had to campaign hard in order to stop the export of slaves from Bristol to Ireland. In 1102, the council of Westminster decreed that “henceforth no one is to dare to carry on that shameful trade (illud nefarium negotium) by which in England people used to be sold like animals (velut bruta animalia).” Significantly, this was the last English church council to ban the slave trade. By the 1120s, William of Malmesbury

A Historian of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance  51

clearly regarded it as a barbarous thing of the past.40 For Lawrence of Durham, writing in the early 1130s, the passing of the English trade meant the end of the custom of selling members of one’s own family into slavery.41 The end of slavery still left many people with cause to lament their relative lack of freedom. Yet however servile the conditions of their lives or the terms on which they held land, at least they were not slaves. Families could no longer be broken up nor individuals taken to market and sold. Nor was it lawful for their landlord to kill or wound them—in contrast to the view of the author of the early twelfth-century Leges Henrici Primi, who held that a master who killed his slave—his own property—was guilty of a sin only.42 Once the slave trade had been abandoned, so too was the slave raid, in all previous times a central ingredient in aggressive war. By the 1130s, English authors were describing Scottish and Welsh raids into England in language that reveals how appalled they were by the methods of that oldstyle warfare that they themselves had only recently given up. When the Scots invaded Northumbria in 1138, according to Richard of Hexham: They slaughtered the sick in their beds, women who were pregnant or in labor, babies in their cradles or at their mothers’ breasts, and sometimes they killed their mothers too. They slaughtered worn-out old men, feeble old women, anyone who was disabled. They killed husbands in front of their wives. Then they carried off their plunder and the women, both widows and maidens, stripped, bound, and roped together, they drove them off, goading them with spears on the way. Their fate was either to be kept as slaves or sold on to other barbarians in exchange for cattle.43 Inevitably, even when conducted by societies that no longer engaged in slaving, war remained a brutal activity in which ordinary people suffered. Orderic described a Norman raid in 1118 in which not only adult males (knights and farmers) were captured, but also wives and children, even babies, in order to extort ransoms.44 But slave raiders, aiming to sell their human cattle on the market, tended to kill babies rather than carry such unprofitable items with them. The fact that “we” too had once practiced slave raiding and slave trading, but did so no longer, meant that men such as William of Malmesbury and Lawrence of Durham were convinced that they lived in an age superior to the past. It was not only women and children whose life-chances were immeasurably improved by significant changes in the conduct of war in this period. The lives of aristocratic males were also much more secure than they

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had been before the development of the convention of taking prisoners for ransom because killing on the scale habitually seen in Anglo-Scandinavian warfare became rare after 1066.45 Whereas in England before 1066 aristocrats who found themselves at the mercy of their enemies had to reckon with the real possibility that they might suffer death or mutilation, the influence of French conventions in the generations after the Norman Conquest meant that similarly placed nobles could be confident that life and limb would be spared. The hanging of William de Alderie by William II in 1095 was the last time for two hundred years that the death penalty was inflicted on an aristocrat found guilty of treason. Although many ­nobles were accused of treachery by the twelfth- and thirteenth-century kings of England, none of them were condemned to death; instead they were punished in other ways—imprisonment, confiscation of their estates, and exile—all punishments that were reversible.46 It seemed to Maitland that “for two centuries after the Conquest, the frank, open rebellions of the great folk were treated with a clemency which, when we look back to it, through intervening ages of blood, seems wonderful.”47 William I’s generous treatment of Edgar the Atheling after 1075 (when he was received at court after being at the head of resistance movements since 1069) contrasts with the way all previous rivals for the throne had been dealt with in England. The new leniency was observed with approval by the historians of the post-Conquest generation. Henry of Huntingdon made the point explicitly. In contrast to the cruelty of the Danish conquest, the Normans gave life, liberty, and their ancient laws to the defeated.48 According to William of Malmesbury, William the Conqueror ruled all England successfully (feliciter) by taking strong action against rebels while dealing mildly (leniter) with those who submitted. By contrast, King Cnut had acted barbarica levitate when he ordered the killing of an earl who had ­already submitted to him.49 The quality of mercy meant so much to William that it even led him to disagree with his intellectual hero, the Venerable Bede. Where Bede had recorded in neutral terms Cadwalla’s promise to give a quarter of his gains to the church once he had slaughtered the pagan population of the Isle of Wight—these, after all, were the norms of seventh- and eighth-century wars, Christian as much as pagan—William explicitly condemned Cadwalla for shedding so much blood.50 His shorthand characterization of the first named “Englishman” in his history, the fifth-century warleader Hengist, was that, “giving free rein to his natural cruelty, in all his actions he preferred bloodshed to diplomacy.”51 The civilized ruler, he believed, should act with clemency and moderation (cum clementia et m ­ ansuetudine)—his ­description of the political style of Egbert

A Historian of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance  53

of Wessex, the king accorded a pivotal role in the making of an English kingdom, a ruler who, William believed, learned his political values at the Frankish court.52 One sphere in which historically minded monks such as William and Orderic were unquestionably convinced that matters in England had improved immensely since the coming of the Normans was the religious. ­According to Orderic, “lack of discipline affected clergy and laity alike . . . regular life was undermined, and canonical rule was not restored until the time of the Normans. . . . Monks wore no habit and took no vows; they indulged in feasting and private property and countless foul transgressions. But by the governance of King William this order was brought back to a regular life and salubrious customs.” Or, in William’s summary: “The standard of religion, dead everywhere in England, has been raised by their arrival.”53 Historians of Anglo-Saxon England have often argued that these were biased caricatures rather than accurate descriptions of the pre-­Conquest state of affairs. But whether or not religious life was improved after 1066, there is no question but that, by the standards of men who saw themselves as reformers, it was “reformed.” As Frank Barlow put it, for the church in England the hundred years after 1066 constituted “by any standards” a “revolutionary” period, during which “the church was radically reformed” and when “most of the deeper changes were part of the general transformation of Europe.”54 Even without the 1066 factor, England would clearly have been hit by the controversies convulsing churches throughout the Latin world. Indeed, in England people had been aware of a new radicalism at the papal curia ever since 1049 when several English prelates attended the council at Reims at which Pope Leo IX launched a spectacular attack on what he regarded as ecclesiastical abuses. Nonetheless, the fact that a French duke, now king of England, appointed an Italian scholar-monk as his archbishop of Canterbury was an unmistakable signal that those habits of the English church that had allowed its leading figure, Archbishop Stigand, to hold Canterbury and Winchester simultaneously, were no longer regarded as acceptable. The Conquest coincided with the wildly ambitious Gregorian project of abolishing both secular control of the church and the family life of the clergy. In the event, the campaign for clerical celibacy gradually achieved a measure of success in England. Not even family men such as Henry of Huntingdon felt able to oppose this “reform” openly.55 By 1154, in Barlow’s judgement, “the marriage of priests and deacons had been invalidated, if not abolished, and hereditary succession to benefices checked.”56 It was otherwise, of course, with the influence of secular power over the

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church. Neither William I nor his successors had any intention of relinquishing control over appointments to major ecclesiastical offices, nor— except in very occasional and exceptional circumstances—did they do so in practice.57 For the English church free election turned out to be achievable only in form, not in substance. In other areas, however, rulers were willing to allow a much greater degree of separation between the secular and the ecclesiastical than had been the case before. One fundamental consequence of this was that by 1200 there had emerged a system of ecclesiastical law administered separately from the law of the land by a network of ecclesiastical courts in which the papal court had the last word. The development of this new canon law system was to have a very considerable impact on society since, in addition to dealing with the internal business of the church, it touched the lives of laymen at many critical points: the legitimacy of their birth, their sexual conduct, their marriages and divorces, and the distribution of their movable property after death. How it was that in England the royal courts took no effective steps to prevent the church obtaining primary jurisdiction over succession to chattels remains a mystery.58 Few twelfth-­century testaments survive, but Henry II’s, for example, was sent to the pope for confirmation in 1182.59 As a result of the Reformation, the papacy was shut out, but in other respects this system survived until the nineteenth century. Indeed, in England jurisdiction over testaments remained with church courts until 1857. An ecclesiatical administration was established and professional administrators and judges produced. With the intention of creating safeguards for those accused, increasingly complex procedural rules were devised; the informality of earlier centuries was no longer acceptable. All this helped to transform the church into a structure in which clerical officials and lawyers counted for as much as—and inevitably many said more than—priests. In England the beginnings of this sytem can be traced back to the 1070s when William I issued a writ stating that “anyone accused of any matter relating to the rule of souls” would have to answer to the bishop or archdeacon, and ordering that no layman, in particular no royal official, should “interfere with the laws that pertain to the bishop.” In conscious departure from earlier practice, this set out the principle of separate spiritual and temporal jurisdictions. “Before my time,” ran the words of the writ, “episcopal laws were not properly administered in England according to the precepts of the holy canons.”60 Previously, moral offences had been matters for local (hundredal or shire) courts in which both laymen and churchmen presided and decided; from now on there was in practice a

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clearer differentiation between, on the one hand, questions of sin, including slander and blasphemy, which went before the church courts, and, on the other hand, the wide range of offences that were dealt with in the public courts—­except, that is, when the person accused of crime was a member of the clergy. Although the kings of England, like rulers throughout Europe, proved to be ready to accept the principle that there should be separate courts, there were inevitably disputes as to where the boundary between ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction should be drawn, and the question of “benefit of the clergy” proved to be the most controversial. The idea that churchmen should only have to answer to church courts, where death sentences could not be imposed, appeared to many to be tantamount to encouraging criminal behavior. But Thomas Becket’s fierce ­defense of the right of the church to have exclusive jurisdiction over “crimi­ nous clerks,” and the damage to Henry II’s reputation caused by Thomas’ murder in 1170, forced the king to give way. In modified form, this aspect of twelfth-­century canon law survived in England until 1827. Although outstanding prelates such as Archbishop Wulfstan of York had appointed archdeacons long before 1066, there is little to suggest that most pre-Conquest bishops had been much concerned to supervise local clergy and parish life. At the council of Windsor in 1070, however, Lanfranc ordered bishops to appoint archdeacons, and very quickly all English dioceses were divided into archdeaconries and their subdivisions, rural deaneries. Given the job of enforcing the church’s law at the local level and equipped with the power to impose fines as well as penances, archdeacons were able to make a good living out of the failures of both clergy and laity to live up to the standards, especially in sexual matters, being set by canon law.61 In the eleventh century and earlier, rules on marriage and divorce had been promulgated by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities.62 Lanfranc’s decree that no marriage should take place without a priest’s blessing and his prohibition of marriages within seven degrees of kinship demonstrate his desire to take control of marriage law. The fact that Henry I was accused of having dissolved marriages on the flimsiest of pretexts implies that at this date marriage disputes still came into the king’s sphere of jurisdiction.63 Yet by the end of the twelfth century, when questions of the validity of a marriage came up in the king of England’s courts, the judges routinely passed them over for churchmen to settle. Until the nineteenth century, matrimonial litigation remained exclusively a matter for the church courts. The law of marriage worked out in twelfth-century Europe (and revised by Innocent III in 1215) remained the law enforced in ­English courts until the 1750s—and longer in Scotland. This included

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two radical notions: that a marriage was indissoluble, and that all it required to be valid was the freely given exchange of marriage vows between two unmarried people of age (twelve for girls and fourteen for boys) who were not related within the prohibited degrees. Neither witnesses nor a public ceremony were strictly necessary; nor, even more remarkably, was the consent of parents, lords, or guardians.64 That monks should have, by the 1120s, been impressed by the transformation in religion after 1066 is not surprising, given the dynamism of monastic development in this period. At the time of the Conquest there were few monks in England, perhaps only fifty houses attempting to follow the Benedictine rule. Most of the major churches were collegiate churches (translating the Latin monasteria as minsters, not monasteries), staffed by groups of priests, often married, who provided church services and burial in consecrated ground, in return receiving renders or tithes from the people who lived within the large area, the parish, that they served.65 But there was always a certain kudos attached to celibacy, and the extraordinary violence, by contemporary French standards, of the Norman Conquest—events such as the massacre at Hastings and the Harrying of the North—meant that there were many from the king downwards who felt in dire need of the “best” form of prayer. The Conquest’s extra­ ordinary success meant the conscience-struck suddenly had the wealth to be very generous. During the reigns of William I and II, another thirty Benedictine abbeys and priories were founded in England, including the first Cluniac priory at Lewes in 1077.66 By 1135, there were already almost two hundred religious houses; by the 1220s, about seven hundred (approximately 550 for men and 150 for women). However tentative the estimate, the likelihood that by then there were about thirteen thousand male and female religious in England (as opposed to about one thousand in 1066) means that a much higher proportion of the total population had formally adopted a regular monastic, in other words, celibate, lifestyle by the early thirteenth century. The implication of this is that there is a prima facie case for accepting Knowles’ contention that very few houses remained “preserves of the aristocracy.” “Every indication goes to show that in the reigns of Richard and John the monasteries were recruited almost entirely from what may be called at the risk of anachronism, the ‘middle class.’”67 Moreover, the creation of new orders from the late eleventh century onwards—Augustinians, Cistercians, Templars, Hospitallers, Gilbertines, Premonstratensians, Carthusians—each with its own distinctive style and ethos, greatly extended the variety of

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monastic life on offer. Only the Gilbertines were a “home-grown” product; the rest came to England from the Continent. William of Malmesbury was particularly impressed by the austerity of the Cistercians, the most high-profile of the new orders, even though the first of their houses in England (at Waverley, 1128) had still not been founded at the time he was writing his major works.68 In William’s case, one of his self-proclaimed motives for praising them as “an example for all monks, a mirror for the zealous and a gadfly for the easy-going,” was that “it shows generosity of spirit to praise in others the virtue whose absence you lament in yourself.”69 Since Benedictine houses recruited largely through oblates, the Cistercians were setting radically new standards when they prohibited entry for anyone under sixteen and insisted upon a year’s novitiate.70 By the end of the twelfth century, even the Benedictines felt compelled to follow the Cistercian example here. From now on, the new model army of monks and nuns consisted of adult volunteers, not child conscripts. In several important ways, indeed, this was a period that saw people winning greater freedom for themselves. The end of slavery and of the system of child oblates, and then, though no doubt far more often in theory than in practice, the new marriage law combined to mean greater freedom of choice as increasingly individuals were able to choose for themselves their lifestyles, whether celibacy or legitimate sexual activity (marriage) with a partner freely chosen.71 This was part of the common experience of medieval Europe as a whole in this period.72 The same period also witnessed a transformation of the external, manmade landscape. “The sheer volume of construction in the first generation after the Conquest must have turned the country into a vast building site, with almost every city, town and village affected.”73 The organized wealth of England was in the hands of the conquerors, and they celebrated their triumph in stone—whereas architectural reminiscences of Danish conquest and rule are nonexistent. New royal and aristocratic castles displayed such distinctively French design features as mottes and great towers. William I’s great towers at London and Colchester and William II’s Westminster Hall were the largest buildings of their kind to be erected in northern Europe since the fall of Rome. The old cathedral and monastery churches, with the exception of Edward the Confessor’s Norman-style Westminster Abbey, were demolished, and new ones built in the new style influenced by models from the Rhineland as well as France. Although Westminster was, except for the cathedral of the Salian emperors at Speyer, the largest church built north of the Alps since the fourth century, it was itself soon

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exceeded in size by the new Norman churches at St Albans, Winchester, York, Ely, Bury St Edmunds, and Durham. After this massively triumphalist building boom, judged by Eric Fernie to be “the only period in the ­architecture of this country which not only rivaled but outstripped in ingenuity, size, and numbers the equivalent buildings elsewhere in Europe,” the pace of ecclesiastical building slowed down a little—though only a little.74 With the switch from Romanesque to Gothic, however, the principal source of inspiration clearly remained northern France. Where surviving remains show that the pace of building continued to accelerate is in domestic architecture. Despite the increasing wealth of the elites in the tenth and eleventh centuries, nothing of the houses they built for themselves survives above ground.75 The residences of the powerful consisted of timber buildings, generally all of them of a single story, visible today only as excavated post-holes, since they were constructed using earth-fast timbers that rotted away. Stone brought big advantages.76 Fireplaces and chimneys could safely be set in the thickness of stone walls so that it was no longer necessary to rely for warmth upon open fires or braziers in the centre of the floor space and a louver in the roof to draw out some of the smoke. Thick walls could hold lead pipes for running water from a well or from a cistern on the roof; they could also house corridors and private rooms, above all privies. In addition to castles, a few twelfthcentury stone town houses still survive, as at Lincoln; two storys high, such houses seemed to contemporaries to be urban palaces. The increasing use of glass allowed rooms to be better lit; window seats set into the walls enabled people to take full advantage of it, and gave them a better view of their gardens, fishponds, orchards, and parks. Unsurprisingly, in England the kings set the fashion, as with Henry I’s palatial hunting lodge and park at Woodstock.77 At the same time, many hundreds of small, local churches were built, many of them in conjunction with the developing network of small parishes, which meant that by the thirteenth century in twenty-seven out of the thirty-nine English counties (all except Cornwall, Devon, and the north), no one would have to walk more than a mile to their parish church. Although the emergence of this network was well under way long before 1066, partly reflecting demographic growth in the more populous southern and eastern regions of England, it is likely that the process was accelerated by the Norman Conquest. The making of a small parish meant that the old minsters (“mother-churches”) lost their monopoly of burial rights and at least a share of their revenue from tithes. It has been plausibly argued that the arrival of French lords with no family tradition of loyalty to

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established mother-churches led to the collapse of many ancient minsters.78 Economic growth also helps to explain why from the eleventh and twelfth centuries on, many of these parish churches, even some of the tiniest, were built in stone rather than in timber. In stone, they achieved an enduring presence in the landscape, creating the archetypal English village scene: manor house and nearby church, squire and parson.79 William of Malmesbury’s lapidary account of what he saw as the Norman religious revival is remarkable for its emphasis on buildings, architecture, and the generosity of rich men rather than on the spirituality of the religious-minded. “The standard of religion, dead everywhere in England, has been raised by their [the Norman] arrival. You may see everywhere churches in villages, towns, and cities, monasteries rising in a new style of architecture; with new devotion our country flourishes, so that every rich man thinks a day wasted if he does not make it remarkable with some great stroke of generosity.”80 The emphasis on style and on the generosity of wealthy patrons, both laymen such as Earl Robert of Gloucester and churchmen as secular-minded as the notorious bishop of Durham, Ranulf Flambard, is yet another reminder of the “Renaissance” outlook of this Benedictine monk.81 The most obvious consequence of the Norman Conquest was the arrival of a new French-speaking ruling class. Hence Gervase of Canterbury’s observation that “William the Bastard transformed England, bringing in a new form of living and speaking.”82 For at least three hundred years after 1066, French—or roman, as the language was called in French—remained the vernacular of polite society. But the ability to speak roman offered so many advantages that it did not remain exclusive to the ruling class. In turn, the Normans, through their mothers, nurses, and wives, learned how to speak English. Only widespread bilingualism explains the way the syntax and vocabulary of English were dramatically altered by French influence, the linguistic transformation that was to help English become a global language. “On which note, it may be as well to conclude that the ultimate victor, thus far at least, of the Battle of Hastings was English.”83 In twelfth-century England virtually all, if not all, authors must have known and spoken at least three languages: English, French, and Latin.84 “The re-establishment of Latin as the language of the church and scholarship, with French as the auxiliary vernacular, opened new roads for English scholars. The careers of men like Adelard of Bath, Robert Pullen, and John of Salisbury were a new phenomenon; and although these men, and others like them, caught a European tide, it was the Normans who caused it to flow around England.”85 The new ruling elite’s landed estates

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in Normandy and their connections across the porous Norman frontier meant that they enjoyed easy access to Paris, the Loire valley, Flanders, and the Rhineland. They sent their children to be educated on the tournament fields and in the schools of northern France. In the period 1179–1215, one-third of all students in Paris whose origins are known were English.86 For the first time in their history, the English had become full members of a wider European community, one in which French culture was central.87 In London, Lincoln, Oxford, and Winchester the political, social, and ­religious leaders belonged to very nearly the same cultural world as their neighbours and rivals in Angers, Arras, Paris, Poitiers, and Troyes.88 The continuing use of English arguably meant that England possessed a “uniquely multi-lingual culture.” It is to this indeed that Ian Short attributes the literary “precocity” of Anglo-Norman.89 Recognizing the new intensity of the European dimension of English history, William of Malmesbury included a good deal of French history in his Gesta Regum Anglorum on the explicit grounds that the French “are our neighbors and the people mainly responsible for the Christian empire.” “Had it not been for the might of the Frankish emperors, Europe would long since have been subjugated by the Saracens.”90 Naturally, he noted the Frenchification of English society. The Normans, he commented, had adopted two English habits, that of eating until they were sick and drinking until they vomited; “as for the rest, the English adopted the customs of their conquerors.”91 In the words of Orderic Vitalis: “You could see many villages and town markets filled with displays of French wares (Gallicis mercibus) and merchandise, and observe the English, who previously seemed contemptible to the French in their native dress, completely transformed by foreign fashions (nunc peregrino cultu alteratos).”92 In William’s view this was all to the good. The French nation, he wrote, “are clearly superior (facile princeps) to all other peoples of the West (cunctarum occi­ dentalium). They are superior in military practice (exercitatione virium) and in elegance of manners (comitate morum).”93 Much as he lamented the political losses suffered by native-born Englishmen, William felt that the Frenchified society of his own day was superior to the one that had existed before 1066. Given that he was writing a history for the new royal family, it no doubt made good political sense for him to say this. But it was clearly an attitude much too deeply felt to be merely a cynical tactic. In any case, William’s special genius was not just to write a history of the Norman Conquest but to integrate it into his interpretation of the whole course of English cultural development, a progress from barbarism to civility.94 As told by William of Malmesbury, the Conquest was the most recent phase of a very old story.95

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In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, learned Europeans, Italians such as Lanfranc and Pope Paschal II, and Frenchmen such as William of Poitiers and Ivo of Chartres, had sometimes referred to the English as barbarians (barbari).96 Obviously they cannot have been using the word barbarus to mean “non-Christian,” as many writers had done in the previous three or four centuries.97 Nor in most of the contexts in which they used the term can it have had merely the “innocent” connotation of “foreigner.” It clearly reflected a sense of superiority that they felt they enjoyed over the English. Orderic remembered how when he arrived in Normandy as a ten-year-old boy in 1085 he was regarded as barbarus et ignotus advena.98 William of Malmesbury’s response to this was to allow that the English had been barbarians once,99 but to insist that they were no longer. In William’s interpretation of the longue durée of English history there had been many formative contacts between the French and the English. Indeed, the two peoples were linguistically close. “The native tongue of the Franks is related to English because both peoples originated in Germany.”100 The implication here is that the Franks, far from being descendants of the Trojans as they liked to claim, had once been Germanic barbarians themselves.101 But William had no qualms about applying the term “barbarous” to other Christian peoples, notably to England’s western, northern, and eastern neighbours. Indeed, in his view, there were some among the barbarian peoples (in nationibus barbaris) who were so Christian that they responded to Pope Urban’s call to crusade: the Scots, Welsh, Danes, and Norwegians.102 In the context of a miracle story about merchants sailing out of Bristol, he referred to Ireland as “that barbarous part of the world.”103 William’s sensitivity to language made it inevitable that at times he would use “barbarian” to mean little more than “not in Latin.” In other contexts, however, it is clear that he was using the word with a much wider range of meaning. Among people who think of themselves as civilized, it has been common to think that barbarians had little or no control over their animal instincts, both in their “sexual excesses” and in the “bloodthirsty savagery” with which they treated their enemies. The earliest condemnations of Irish mores, by Pope Gregory VII and Lanfranc for example, focused on their sexual excesses, that is, their marriage customs.104 John of Salisbury accused the Welsh of despising the laws of marriage and incest; he referred to one of the offenders, Owain of Gwynedd, as barbarorum princeps et rex.105 Unusually for a monk, however, sexual depravity seems to have been of much less interest to William of Malmesbury than that of barbarous “cruelty.”106 Gerald de Barri was thinking along the same lines when he

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c­ ompared the customs of what he called Gallica milicia (French chivalry), with the practice of war in Ireland and Wales: “in France knights are taken prisoner, here they are beheaded; there they are ransomed, here they are butchered.”107 A policy that William attributed to King David I of Scotland, one of the men to whom he dedicated the Gesta Regum, suggests that he also measured barbarity and civility in terms of lifestyle, in particular in matters of dress and table manners. Allegedly, David offered tax exemptions to all those Scots who were prepared to live in a more cultivated fashion, dress more elegantly, and eat with more refinement. He did this, wrote William, because having been brought up amongst us from boyhood, he had lost all his barbarous Scottish rust.108 Moreover, it is clear that William associated a cultivated lifestyle with the amenities provided by towns and a market economy. In a particularly revealing passage, he bracketed together the English and the French in drawing a contrast between them and the Irish. “The soil [of Ireland] lacks all advantages, and so poor, or rather unskillful, are its cultivators that it can produce only a ragged mob of rustic Irishmen outside the towns; the English and French, with their more civilized way of life, live in towns and carry on trade and commerce.”109 When Ailred praised David of Scotland, he included urban and commercial development among his achievements: “he adorned you with castles and towns . . . he filled your ports with foreign goods.”110 The connection between towns and a civilized lifestyle was most explicit in Gerald de Barri’s description of the Irish in his Topographia Hibernica, a work written when Gerald was at his most English.111 They get their living from beasts only, and live like beasts. They have not progressed at all from the primitive ways of pastoral living. While mankind usually progresses from the woods to their fields, and then from fields to settlements and communities of citizens, this people despises agricultural work, has little use for the money-making of towns, despises the rights and privileges of civil life, and has no wish to abandon or cut back the life it has been accustomed to lead in woods and pastures.112 When Gerald wrote that the Irish would get “a better way of life” from England, he presumably saw the amenities offered by towns as a major component of this “better life.” He and William evidently accepted the ancient notion that towns were central to civilised life. So too by implication did

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William of Newburgh when he wrote that towns in Scotland were in­ habited by the English.113 Other twelfth-century English authors who followed William of Malmesbury’s usage in explicitly referring to the barbarity of their Celtic neighbors include Richard of Hexham, the anonymous author of The Conquest of Lisbon, Ailred of Rievaulx, Ralph de Diceto, and William of Newburgh.114 One thing that needs explaining about this widespread English view of Celtic peoples is its emergence in the twelfth century. After all, there were already in the eleventh century substantial differences between England and its Celtic neighbors. England in 1066 was already urbanised; by contrast, there were no towns in Scotland and Wales, and only a handful of port-towns—Waterford, Limerick, Wexford, Cork, and Dublin, all former Scandinavian settlements—in Ireland. England was also monetarized, in the sense of producing substantial quantities of coin, as Scotland, Wales, and Ireland—except briefly in Dublin circa 1000—were not. Only in England were Benedictine monasteries to be found; only in England were there archbishops and a network of dioceses with defined borders and cathedrals as their centres. In terms of economic and ecclesiastical organization, England already conformed to the “core European pattern,” while the Celtic realms did not. Despite these differences, none of those eleventh-century English authors whose works survive ever referred to Celts in anything like the condescending fashion that became the English norm from William of Malmesbury on. In reading works written within the Anglo-Saxon world during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, what is striking is the absence, despite the hostility of Bede’s attitude towards the Britons, of any clearly defined attitude towards the Welsh, Scots, and Irish.115 It is as though they were peoples like any other. Why then was this condescending new note struck in the twelfth century? How far should we seek an answer in the post-Conquest transformation of England to which much of the preceding essay has been devoted? W. R. Jones suggested that “the Norman Conquest accentuated differences between the English and Celtic worlds by importing into England the Norman feudal régime, Continental urban institutions, and the reformist ideals of Roman Christianity.”116 Since the notion that the Normans in­ troduced “feudalism” or “the feudal system” into England is an interpretation invented in the seventeenth century, the fact that, as John Prestwich pointed out, no contemporary or near-contemporary noticed anything of the kind, can hardly come as much of a surprise.117 With respect to urban institutions and reformist ideals, however, there is clearly a case to be made

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along the lines that European developments affected the southeast of Britain, “a wealthy region close to centers of learning,” more rapidly than they did “a remote upland fringe.”118 “Centers of learning” may be the crucial phrase here. William of Malmesbury’s Latin learning, his immersion in classical literature—he has “a good claim to be regarded as the best-read European of the century”119—made it unusually easy for him to accept the classical notion of the “barbarian” with connotations that were moral, social, and cultural rather than religious. That his ideas and words struck so many chords with subsequent English readers was doubtless partly because they could help to legitimize the ongoing invasion and settlement of Wales and Ireland, but partly also due to the intellectual and cultural movement commonly labeled the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. As it happened, during the course of the twelfth century the Celtic realms were brought more into line with European norms, at least in terms of diocesan structure and monasticism.120 It is likely also—though absence of evidence creates problems here—that by 1200 slavery was no longer a feature of the Celtic economy.121 The values of chivalric politics were also gaining ground in Scotland and native Wales.122 But even in the later twelfth century the urbanization of Ireland, Wales, and to a much lesser extent Scotland remained a process driven more by English invaders and settlers than by the native elites. In any event, the later beginnings of the transformation of the Celtic realms came too late. By then, a new, negative, and condescending attitude towards Celtic peoples had become entrenched and was to endure for many centuries after the twelfth.123 William of Malmesbury’s creative reinterpretation of the past and present of English and Celtic peoples was among the most influential of attempts by “twelfth-century European writers to delineate the face of the barbarian.” It “resulted in a striking intellectual achievement, but also produced an ideological weapon which has not yet lost its cutting edge.”124 So far as the history of Britain and Ireland is concerned, the Twelfth-Century Renaissance was the one that mattered. Notes 1.  For this ancient perception of Britain still occasionally used in the early twelfth century see Rodney M. Thomson, Books and Learning in Twelfth-Century England: The Ending of “Alter Orbis” (Walkern, 2006), pp. 1–2. 2.  Robert Bartlett, Making of Europe, pp. 1–3, 269–91. 3. Richard W. Southern, “Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 4. The Sense of the Past,” TRHS, 5th ser., 23 (1973), p. 246. 4.  Elisabeth Van Houts, “The Memory of 1066 in Written and Oral Traditions,” ANS 19 (1996–7), pp. 171–2, 179.

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5. Eadmer of Canterbury, Historia Novorum in Anglia, ed. M. Rule, RS (London, 1884). Eadmer was born ca. 1060. His work reveals the continuing hostility of the English clergy and people to what they saw as the manifest injustices of French rule. As Southern noted, “The long friendship with Anselm did not extinguish the sense of grievance”; R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 406–7. 6.  “One of England’s greatest historians”; Edmund King, William of Malmesbury, Historia Novella (Oxford, 1998), p. xvii. Cf. “by almost any standards a great historian”; Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1999), p. 137. 7. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum. I cite this by chapter number to facilitate reference to the editions by both William Stubbs, RS (London, 1887) and by R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998). 8.  It was, he wrote, multarum historiarum breviarium—a summary of many fields of history. In book 4, the book on the reign of William Rufus, he spent more time on the crusade than on events in England and Normandy. He saw the crusade as Europe’s struggle for power and territory against Asia and Africa, and as a conflict between independent-minded and bold westerners (gens occidentalis) and the more submissive peoples of the East; cc. 347, 360. “He was by temperament a universal historian”; Rodney M. Thomson, William of Malmesbury, 2nd ed. (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 152. 9.  John Gillingham, “Civilizing the English? The English Histories of William of Malmesbury and David Hume,” HR 74 (2001), pp. 17–43. 10.  William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, cc. 292 (commenting upon a new scheme of chronology), 335 (à propos of the beginnings of the Cistercian order). 11.  “Most of his borrowings from Virgil are unacknowledged and absorbed into the fabric of his own prose; for William, Virgilian style had become instinctual. He was almost equally familiar with Statius and Lucan”; Thomson, Books and Learning, p. 95. Quotes in the main text are from Thomson, William of Malmesbury, 10, 28. See also Neil Wright, “William of Malmesbury and Latin poetry,” Revue Bénédictine 101 (1991), pp. 122–53. 12. “Erant prorsus tunc in Anglia multi scientia illustres, religione celebres. . . . Laudabiliter igitur vivendo fidem preteritis historiis, nec vetera possint falsitatis argui, cum novorum exemplo probentur potuisse fieri”; William of Mal­ mesbury, Gesta Regum, c. 445. 13.  Ibid., c. 372. 14. “Videas ubique in villis aecclesias, in vicis et urbibus monasteria novo edificandi genere consurgere”; ibid., c. 246. 15.  Ibid., c. 122; and see Thomson, William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, vol. 2, General Introduction and Commentary (Oxford, 1999), pp. 100–1 for discussion of the possible identity of this John the Scot. 16. Thomson, William of Malmesbury, p. 20. 17.  “Industriam, quod copiam librorum advexit, quod artifices lapidearum edium et vitrearum fenestrarum primus omnium Angliam asciverit, . . . quippe studio advehendi cognatis aliquod insolitum amor patriae et voluptas elegantiae asperos fallebant labores”; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, c. 54.

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18.  Benson and Constable, eds., Renaissance & Renewal, pp. 61–3, 104–5. 19.  William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, c. 334. 20.  Rees Davies, The Matter of Britain and the Matter of England (Oxford, 1996), pp. 14–15. Cf. Rees Davies, “The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400, 4: Language and Historical Mythology,” TRHS, 6th series, 7 (1997), pp. 18–20. 21.  “Postquam autem Normanni . . . castellis innumeris munire . . . constanter excoluere; ad pacem confovendam, legem et plebiscita eis indixere; adeoque terram fertilem omnibusque copiis affluentam reddidere . . . pacis eam multimodaeque fecunditatis adeo reddidit affluentem, ut secunda esse Anglia perfacile crederetur”; Gesta Stephani regis, ed. K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis (Oxford, 1976), pp. 14–16. 22.  Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock, and G. F. Warner, 8 vols., RS (London, 1861–91); Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica, ed. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin, 1978), p. 100. 23. Thomson, Books and Learning, p. 5 and n. 95. 24.  R. Gameson, Manuscripts of Early Norman England (Oxford, 1999), p. 1; see T. Webber, Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral ca. 1075–ca. 1125 (Oxford, 1992) for an exemplary study. 25.  William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, ed. M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 2007), vol. 1, c. 271. 26. Thomson, Books and Learning, pp. 31–2, 94. 27.  “Latinitas omnis in liberalium artium scientiam per doctrinam eius se incitabat”; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, c. 267. Gilbert Crispin’s Vita Herluini had already credited Lanfranc with restoring Latinitas to its ancient state; J. Armitage Robinson, Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminster (Cambridge, 1911), p. 95. 28. “Epistolae familiari illo et dulci stilo editae, maximeque epigrammata quae satirico modo absolvit.” “The whole divine office which had become a kind of rustic survival (agresti quadam vetustate obsoletum) by his efforts was restored to its natural beauty (nativa excultum venustate) and given new brilliance.” William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, c. 444. 29. Thomson, Books and Learning, pp. 5, 87–8. 30.  William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, c. 271. 31.  Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London 1973), p. 167. 32.  R. W. Southern, “Master Vacarius and the Beginning of an English Academic Tradition,” in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to R. W. Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford, 1976), p. 268. As argued in Paul R. Hyams, Rancour and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca, 2003), especially chapter 7, one outcome of this academic tradition seems to have been the gradual emergence of the learned common law distinction between crime and tort. 33.  H. Mayr-Harting, “The Role of Benedictine Abbeys in the Development of Oxford as a Centre of Legal Learning,” in Benedictines in Oxford, ed. H. Wansborough and A. Marett-Crosby (London, 1997), pp. 11–19; R. M. Thomson, “Serlo of Wilton and the Schools of Oxford,” MA 68 (1999), pp. 1–12. 34.  R. M. Thomson, “England and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” P&P 101 (1983), pp. 3–21, at pp. 19–20. Yet see below for the continuing preeminence of French schools.

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35. Maurice Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages: Town Plantation in England, Wales and Gascony (London, 1967). 36.  Glanvill, ed. G. D. G. Hall (London, 1965), book 5, 5, p. 58. From 1191 on, the “Commune of London” was administered by a mayor and aldermen. Winchester had a mayor by 1200, Exeter by 1205. 37.  William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, cc. 125, 134 and see Gillingham, “Civilizing the English?” pp. 38–9 for another contemporary opinion. 38.  Though see John Gillingham, “‘Holding to the Rules of War (Bellica Iura Tenentes)’: Right Conduct before, during and after Battle in North-Western Europe in the Eleventh Century,” ANS 29 (2006–7), pp. 1–16, at pp. 7–8. 39. David A. E. Pelteret, Slavery in Early Medieval England (Woodbridge, 1995). 40.  William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, c. 269; Vita Wulfstani, 2, c. 20, in William of Malmesbury, Saints’ Lives, ed. M. Winterbottom and R. M. Thomson (Oxford, 2002), pp. 100–3; Councils and Synods, 871–1204, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett, and C. N. L. Brooke (Oxford, 1981), vol. 2, p. 678. 41.  “Life of S. Brigid,” in Vitae sanctorum Hibernie, ed. W. W. Heist (Brussels, 1965), p. 1. 42.  “If anyone kills his own slave, the sin and the loss are his,” Leges Henrici Primi, c. 75, 4, ed. L. J. Downer (Oxford, 1972). 43.  Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. R. Howlett, 4 vols., RS (London, 1884–89), vol. 3, pp. 156–7. Other authors such as Henry of Huntingdon, John of Hexham, and the Gloucester continuator of John of Worcester tell similar atrocity stories. For their significance see J. Gillingham, “The Beginnings of English Imperialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 5 (1992), pp. 392–409, and “Conquering the Barbarians: War and Chivalry in Britain and Ireland,” HSJ 4 (1992), pp. 67–84, both reprinted in J. Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge 2000), pp. 3–18, 41–58. 44.  Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History 6, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1969–80), pp. 192–3. 45.  Matthew Strickland, “Slaughter, Slavery or Ransom: The Impact of the Conquest on Conduct in Warfare,” in England in the Eleventh Century, ed. C. Hicks (Stamford, 1992), pp. 41–60; Matthew Strickland, War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Percption of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 183–203. See also the essay by Dominique Barthélemy in this volume. 46.  J. Gillingham, “1066 and the Introduction of Chivalry into England,” in Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy, ed. G. Garnett and J. Hudson (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 31–55, reprinted with a postscript in Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, pp. 209–31. 47.  F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law (Cambridge, 1898), vol. 2. p. 506. 48.  Henry Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. Diana Greenway (Oxford, 1996), p. 272. 49.  William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, cc. 180, 258. 50. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 4.16; William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum, c. 34.

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51.  “Genuinae sevitiae indulgens, omnia cruentius quam civilius agere mallet”; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, c. 8. William’s moral priorities lend support to the contention that “the level of preoccupation with the subject [cruelty] in the twelfth century is extraordinary in the medieval West when compared with the preceding centuries”; Daniel Baraz, Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (Ithaca, 2003), p. 121. 52.  William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, c. 106. Cf. his praise for Cenwulf of Mercia’s clemency, c. 95. 53.  Ibid., c. 246; Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis 2, pp. 246–9. 54.  Frank Barlow, The English Church 1066–1154 (London, 1979), pp. 2, 6. 55.  But that he did object strongly seems clear from his comment on the ban on priests having wives promulgated by Anselm in 1102: “This had not been prohibited before. It seemed to some to be the greatest purity, but to others there seemed a danger that if they sought a purity beyond their capacity, they might fall into horrible uncleanness, to the utter disgrace of the Christian name”; Huntingdon, Historia, p. 450. On Henry’s problems here, see Nancy Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago, 1977). 56. Barlow, English Church, p. 316; J. Barrow, “Hereford Bishops and Married Clergy, ca. 1130–1240,” HR 60 (1987), pp. 1–8; C. N. L Brooke, “Gregorian Reform in Action: Clerical Marriage in England, 1050–1200,” Cambridge Historical Journal 12 (1956), pp. 1–21. 57.  Thus Henry I was accused, after his death, of “shutting or opening the door of the church more often with the key of Simon than with that of Peter”; Gesta Stephani, p. 26. 58.  For the peculiarity of the English law of succession see Richard Helmholz, The Canon Law and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction from 597 to the 1640s, Oxford History of the Laws of England 1 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 387–8. In what follows here, I have relied a great deal on this work. 59.  The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols., RS (London, 1879–80), vol. 1, pp. 297–300. 60.  Councils and Synods, 2, pp. 620–4. By announcing that he and his sheriffs would help bishops and archdeacons enforce ecclesiastical discipline in England, William I ushered in a long period of, in comparison with most other European countries, unusually close cooperation between “church” and “state.” Helmholz, Canon Law, pp. 108–11. 61.  Ibid., pp. 136–7, 627–9. 62.  See, for example, the Laws of Cnut, which say no woman can be forced to marry a man she dislikes, or sold for money, and no man should have more than one wife. 63.  Gesta Stephani, p. 26. 64.  On the thinking that led to the creation of this law, see David d’Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford, 2005). Ironically, in practice this ecclesiastical law of marriage allowed the institution to remain substantially outside the church’s control. “Despite its recognized judicial competence, the church’s rules about marriage did not command the obedience of large numbers of ordinary men and women”; Helmholz, Canon Law, p. 522.

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65.  The Domesday Book demonstrates that in 1086 the major churches held between them about one seventh of the total assessed wealth of the kingdom. 66.  Additionally, about forty-five priories (to be known later as alien priories) were established as daughter houses of French abbeys. 67.  D. Knowles and R. N. Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1971), p. 494; D. Knowles, The Monastic Order in England (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 424–5. 68. Thomson suggests that William may have visited a Cistercian house in France. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, 2, p. 291. 69.  He noted that Stephen (abbot 1109–33) had already founded sixteen abbeys and begun seven more. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, c. 334–7. Even so, he predicted their decline on the grounds of the “unfailing principle of human frailty that nothing achieved by great toil can endure for long”; cc. 334, 337, 413. 70.  Indeed, for a while the Cistercians even offered a half share in the religious life to the poor, allowing them to take the vow and wear the habit in return for doing the manual labor on their estates. 71. J. Gillingham, “Love, Marriage, and Politics in the Twelfth Century,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 25 (1989), pp. 292–303; reprinted in my Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry, and War in the Twelfth Century (London, 1994), pp. 243–55. See also J. Gillingham, “Some Observations on Social Mobility in England Between the Norman Conquest and the Early Thirteenth Century,” in England and Germany in the High Middle Ages, ed. Alfred Haverkamp and Hanna Vollrath (Oxford, 1996), pp. 333–55, reprinted in Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, pp. 259–76. 72.  Alfred Haverkamp, “Ein Zeitalter der Befreiung von persönlichen Abhängigkeiten oder deren Abschwächung,” in his Aufbruch und Gestaltung: Deutschland 1056–1273 (Munich, 1984), p. 308. 73.  Eric Fernie, The Architecture of Norman England (Oxford, 2000), p. 19. 74. Ibid., 303. 75.  Except in timberless places such as the Orkneys and Shetland. 76.  English exchequer accounts, surviving from the twelfth century on, show just how much more expensive it was to build in stone instead of timber. A timber hall, chamber block, kitchen, and gatehouse all within a sixteen-foot-high palisade at Kinver (Staffs.) cost Richard I £24 18s 9d. By contrast, Henry II’s great stone tower at Newcastle on Tyne cost £912. 77.  Here the king kept his collection of exotic animals, from lions and camels to the porcupine that so impressed William of Malmesbury; Gesta Regum, c. 409. Later evidence attributes the building of a stone wall around the park to Henry I; H. M. Colvin, ed., The History of the King’s Works, 2 vols. (London, 1963), vol. 2, pp. 1009–17. 78.  Whereas new local churches in pre-conquest England often received an allocation of one-third of the tithes with two-thirds being retained by the mother church, French lords of manors felt free to divert the whole tithe to “their” parish churches. John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), pp. 447–9. 79.  Richard Morris, Churches in the Landscape (London, 1989).

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80.  “Religionis normam, usquequaque in Anglia emortuam, adventu suo suscitarent; . . . recenti rituali patriam florere, ita ut sibi perisse diem quisque opulens existimet quem non aliqua preclara magnificentia illustret”; Gesta Regum, c. 246. 81.  On Robert of Gloucester, ibid., cc. 398, 449. On Ranulf, cc. 444–5, with the comment that “in these modern times even the prelates who fell short in holiness of life did their best to compensate for their shortcomings by lavishing wealth on holy places, by building new churches, and by clothing the bodies of saints in gold and silver.” A Durham monk, the poet Lawrence, went even further in admiring Flambard’s building works, seeing in Bishop Ranulf ’s time (1099–1128) a golden age for Durham. Dialogi Laurentii Dunelmensis, 2.231–40, ed. J. Raine, Publications of the Surtees Society 70 (1878–80), p. 22, a reference I owe to the kindness of Mia Münster-Swendsen. 82.  “Willelmus cognomine bastardus . . . Angliam in novam vivendi transtulit formam et loquendi”; Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. Stubbs, vol 2, p. 60. 83. Ian Short, “Language and Literature,” in A Companion to the Anglo-­ Norman World, ed. C. Harper-Bill and E. Van Houts (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 213, and “On Bi-lingualism in Anglo-Norman England,” Romance Philology 33 (1980), pp. 467–79. 84.  And three of the most creative, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Walter Map, and Gerald de Barri, probably knew some Welsh too. 85. Barlow, English Church, 1066–1154, p. 317. 86.  John W. Baldwin, “Masters at Paris from 1179 to 1215: A Social Perspective,” in Renaissance & Renewal, pp. 138–72, esp. pp. 148–50, 155–7. 87.  “Never before or since has the union of England with the community of Europe been so all-embracing and so thoroughly accepted as part of the nature of things”; Richard Southern, Medieval Humanism (Oxford, 1970), pp. 135, 140. As Paul Hyams observed, Southern’s trail-blazing lecture “originated in radio talks at the time of Britain’s first abortive negotiations for Common Market membership in the early 1960s,” and was part of “the quite recent realization of English historians that our island is part of Europe”; Paul R. Hyams, “The Jews in Medieval England, 1066–1290,” in England and Germany, ed. Haverkamp and Vollrath, p. 176. 88.  “A kind of cultural unity”; A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066–1422 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 67, writing of the period 1154–1216 when in his view Anglo-Latin literature possessed “a European dimension” that had gone by 1300. 89.  “French literature begins . . .. in twelfth-century Anglo-Norman England. The first adventure narrative (or proto-romance) in French literature; the earliest example of historiographic writing in French; the first eye-witness history of contemporary events in French; the earliest scientific texts in French; the first administrative texts in French; the first Biblical translations in French; the earliest French versions of monastic rules; the first scholastic text to be translated into French; the earliest significant examples of French prose; the first occurrence of the French octosyllabic rhyming couplet (the standard verse form of medieval French narrative); the first explicit mention of secular courtoisie in vernacular French; the first named women writers in French; the earliest named and identifiable patrons of literature in French—an impressive list of firsts by any standards, and all to be credited not to

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Continental French culture, but to Insular Anglo-Norman society of the twelfth century”; Ian Short, “Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth-Century England,” ANS 14 (1992), pp. 229–49, at p. 229. To this impressive list can be added the earliest extant legal treatise in French, the Leis Willelme. Wormald, Making of English Law, pp. 407–9; B. R. O’Brien, God’s Peace and King’s Peace (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 28–9; B. R. O’Brien, “Legal Treatises as Perceptions of Law in Stephen’s Reign,” in King Stephen’s Reign (1135–1154), ed. P. Dalton and G. J. White (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 189–91. 90.  “Cum et confines nobis sint et ad eos maxime Christianum spectet imperium”; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, cc. 67–8, 92. 91.  “De ceteris in eorum mores transeuntes”; ibid., c. 245. English drinking habits meant that in battle they fought rashly rather than manfully, wrote William at this point, though he had concluded c. 228 by describing them as courageous men who, renouncing their love for their bodies, laid down their lives for their country. 92.  Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History 2, pp. 256–7. William too admired Norman dress sense and cuisine. “Normanni . . . erant tunc, et sunt adhuc, vestibus ad invidiam culti, cibis citra ullam nimietatem delicati”; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, c. 246. 93.  “Est enim gens illa et exercitatione virium et comitate morum cunctarum occidentalium facile princeps”; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, c. 106. Since William was here writing about the period of Charlemagne’s reign, his use of the present tense is striking. 94.  Not that he saw English history as a steady progress to ever higher levels of civilization. Under Danish rule the civilizing process went into reverse. As a result of frequent contacts with the Danes, the citizens of eleventh-century London “almost adopted barbarian ways,” and he composed a ferocious account of English manners on the eve of the Conquest. Ibid., cc. 188, 245. 95.  For this theme see Gillingham, “Civilizing the English?” Cf. J. Gillingham, “The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain,” ANS 13 (1991–92), pp. 99–118, reprinted in Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, pp. 19–39, at pp. 28–9. 96.  The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, ed. and trans. R. H. C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1998), bk. 2, cc. 17, 20, 37; The Letters of Lanfranc, ed. and trans. Helen Glover and Margaret Gibson (Oxford, 1979), p. 30; “The Letters of Ivo de Chartres,” PL 162: 219–20 (letter 215). Paschal II’s letters referring to the English as barbaros and to gentis barbariem were quoted by Eadmer, Historia Novorum, pp. 135, 185–6. 97.  W. R. Jones, “The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (1971), pp. 376–407, especially p. 377 (where he described the antithesis that opposed civilization to barbarism as a cliché useful as “a means of self-congratulation and a rationalization for aggression”) and pp. 387–91. 98.  Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History 3, p. 6. 99.  Hence he used phrases such as “gens eatenus barbara,” “omnemque barbariem,” “barbariem gentis,” “gentilitia barbarie” to refer to sixth-, seventh- and eighth-century English peoples. Gesta Regum, cc. 9, 97, 106; Gesta Pontificum, c. 74.

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100.  “Naturalis ergo lingua Francorum communicat cum Anglis, quod de Germania gentes ambae germinaverint”; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, c. 68. 101.  In saying the Franks came from Germany, William observed that he was presenting the truth in place of fable: “Volo de linea regum Francorum, de qua multa fabulatur antiquitas, veritatem subtexere”; ibid., c. 67. 102. Ibid., c. 348. For other references to the barbarism of Christian Danes see cc. 162, 165, 180, 188, 259, 261. On Wales “omnem illam barbariem,” c.196. 103.  “Illius terrae barbariei,” in Vita Wulfstani 2, c. 19. In the next chapter, he dealt explicitly with the slave trade to Ireland. William of Malmesbury, Saints’ Lives, pp. 98–103. 104. Lanfranc, Letters, pp. 64–7. 105.  The Letters of John of Salisbury, vol. 1, The Early Letters, ed. W. J. Millor, H. E. Butler, and C. N. L. Brooke (London, 1955), pp. 135–6. This theme remained potent in the writings of Gerald de Barri, and indeed well into the early modern period. 106.  “Barbarous” sexual mores are absent from the Gesta Regum, and rarely appear in William’s other major work, the Gesta Pontificum Anglorum. The exceptions are a reference to the seventh-century South Saxons as “barbari qui adhuc veri Dei nescii bachanalia vivebant” and a tale in which the mother of King Magnus of Norway (1035–47) was raped first by a Norwegian noble and then by the Norwegian king Olaf (Saint Olaf ). William introduced this story by comparing Danes and Norwegians: “Utrorumque immanis barbaries, sed Norreganorum cupiditas rapatior, libido infestior”; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, cc. 100, 259. 107.  Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica, p. 246. The same passage was reused in the Descriptio Kambriae, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vol. 6, p. 220; J. Gillingham, “Conquering the Barbarians: War and Chivalry in Britain and Ireland,” HSJ 4 (1992), pp. 67–84, reprinted in Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, pp. 41–58. On ransom: Strickland, War and Chivalry, pp. 183–203. 108.  “David iuvenis ceteris curialior et qui, nostrorum convictu et familiaritate limatus a puero, omnem rubiginem Scotticae barbariei deterserat. Denique regno potitus mox omnes compatriotas triennalium tributorum pensione levavit qui vellent habitare cultius, amiciri elegantius, pasci accuratius”; William of Mal­ mesbury, Gesta Regum, Letter 1 and c. 400. 109.  “Ita pro penuria, immo pro inscientia cultorum ieiunium omnium bonorum solum agrestem et squalidam multitudinem Hiberniensium extra urbes producit; Angli vero et Franci cultiori genere vitae urbes nundinarum commertio inhabitant”; ibid., c. 409. 110. Addressing Scotia desolata: “Ipse te castellis et urbibus decoravit . . . ipse portus tuos peregrinis mercibus fecundavit . . . qui de terra inculta et sterili gratam fecit et uberem.” According to Ailred, this went hand in hand with the ending of barbarism. “Unde tota illa gentis illius barbaries mansuefacta, tanta se mox regi benevolentia et humilitate substravit, ut naturalis oblita saevitiae, legibus quas regia mansuetudo dictabat, colla submitteret”; Ailred of Rievaulx, Eulogium Davidis, in Pinkerton’s Lives of Scottish Saints, ed. W. M. Metcalfe (Paisley, 1889), pp. 271, 279. 111.  On Gerald’s Englishness, see J. Gillingham, “‘Slaves of the Normans?’ Gerald de Barri and Regnal Solidarity in Early Thirteenth-Century England,” in

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Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays in Honour of Susan Reynolds, ed. P. Stafford, J. L. Nelson, and J. Martindale (Manchester 2001), pp. 160–72. 112.  “Est autem gens ex bestiis solum et bestialiter vivens; gens a primo pastoralis vite vivendo modo non recedens. Cum enim a silvis ad agros, ab agris ad villas civiumque convictus, humani generis ordo processerit, gens hec, agriculture labores aspernans et civiles gazas parum affectans, civiumque iura multum de­ trectans, in silvis et pascuis vitam quam hactenus assueverant nec desuescere novit nec descire”; Topographia Hibernica in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. Brewer, Dimock, and Warner, vol. 5, p. 151. Since he wrote that the Welsh “do not engage in trade or industry . . . nor live in towns, villages or castles” (Descriptio Kambriae, Opera, vol 6, pp. 180, 200–1), he evidently saw them as being at a similar stage, though in this case he did not make the developmental point explicit. For the association between barbarous sexual customs and a pastoral economy, see William of Poitiers, an author whom William of Malmesbury had read, on the Bretons: “They do not care for the cultivation of fields or for good customs. They live on plentiful milk and very little bread. Wide open spaces provide rich grazing for cattle, but crops are almost unknown. A Breton warrior might sire fifty children since more barbaro each one could have ten or more wives”; Gesta Guillelmi, 1, c. 44. As Marjorie Chibnall points out in a footnote to this passage, it bears some resemblance to Caesar’s account of Germans in De bello Gallico. There were similar ideas in Adam of Bremen’s descriptions of Scandinavians. On all this, see the chapter “The Face of the Barbarian,” in Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales 1146–1223 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 158–77. 113.  William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, 2, c. 34, in Chronicles, ed. Howlett, vol. 1, p. 186. 114.  W. R. Jones, “England Against the Celtic Fringe: A Study in Cultural Sterotypes,” Journal of World History 13 (1971), pp. 155–71. R. R. Davies, “Buchedd a moes y Cymry: The Manners and the Morals of the Welsh,” Welsh Historical Review 12 (1984–5), pp. 155–79. 115.  For consideration of the argument that this was no more than a trick of the evidence, see “The Beginnings of English Imperialism” and “The Foundations of a Disunited Kingdom,” in Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, pp. 3–18, 93–109. 116.  Jones, “England Against the Celtic Fringe,” pp. 155–6. 117.  J. O. Prestwich, “The Military Household of the Norman Kings,” EHR 96 (1981), pp. 31–2. See David Bates, “England and the ‘Feudal Revolution,’” in Il feudalismo nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto Medioevo 47 (2000), pp. 611–49, and, of course, Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (Oxford, 1994), pp. 1–14, 323–95. 118.  Robin Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100–1400 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 72–3. This seems particularly true of towns. As late as 1200, towns in Wales and Ireland, and perhaps to some extent still in Scotland, were in effect islands of Englishness. By 1200, Jews, who first came to England after 1066 from Normandy, had settled in a score of English towns, but there were never Jewish communities anywhere in medieval Ireland, Scotland, or Wales. 119. Thomson, William of Malmesbury, p. 40.

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120.  Gerald professed to believe that by the time of writing, in the late 1180s, the Irish had already been induced to give up many of their evil customs thanks to the ecclesiastical constitutions introduced at Henry II’s behest with the intention of making the Irish church conform to the norms of the English. Expugnatio Hibernica, pp. 98–100. See Marie Therese Flanagan, “Henry II, the Council of Cashel, and the Irish Bishops,” Peritia 10 (1996), pp. 184–211. But Stephen of Lexington’s report on his visitation in the 1220s insists that Irish Cistercian houses fell far short of the standards he expected and lays emphasis on education and a knowledge of Latin and French as the sine qua non of the proper monk. Register of Stephen of Lexington, Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 2 (1946), no. 95. 121.  In the 1130s, Lawrence of Durham believed that slavery was already less prevalent in Scotland and Ireland than it had been. Vita S. Brigidi, p. 1. 122.  On the chronology here, see J. Gillingham, “Killing and Mutilating Political Enemies in the British Isles from the Late Twelfth to the Early Fourteenth Century: A Comparative Study,” in Britain and Ireland 900–1300, Insular Responses to Medieval European Change, ed. Brendan Smith (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 114–34. 123.  But for a more optimistic view, see David Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery, Britain 1066–1284 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 15–25, 530. 124. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, p. 177.

three

Chivalric One-Upmanship in France, ca. 1100 D o m ini q u e Bart h é l e m y

The transformations undergone by France between 950 and 1200 are currently the subject of debate among historians.1 While it seems to me that the chronological markers employed by historians of the old school (from the eighteenth century until Marc Bloch) were not in themselves erroneous, it is now necessary to reexamine in many respects the models with which these scholars were working. Historians formerly spoke of a feudal revolution occurring not at the turn of the first millennium but in 877. With the counts’ seizure of power, the realm split into around ten large fiefs whose feudatory lords, ensconced in their castles, had some difficulty in containing the pressure coming from their own vassals. The ensuing civil wars between the counts and their vassals caused, it was argued, tremendous social instability—barbaric times again, after the all-too-brief period of calm under the Carolingians. As Karl Ferdinand Werner has suggested, however, these “feudatory lords” now need to be reevaluated as post-Carolingian “princes.” Werner has successfully demonstrated the cultural and moral continuity of noble families from the Carolingian empire to feudal France. The shift is in fact at the end of the ninth century, but “revolution” is too strong a word: “transformation” fits better, given that we are able to rethink the violence of the civil wars in line with the contributions made by anthropology, as Stephen White has suggested.2 Next, there is the revolution of the turn of the twelfth century, similarly noted by historians for the last three hundred years and long considered to have been antifeudal. A few historians managed to bewail its 75

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occurrence, more hailed it; but none took any the less seriously the struggles concerning common land, urban, and rural franchises, Louis VI’s wars against the feudal lords of Île-de-France, the Gregorian church’s emancipation from the feudal system, and last but not least, the loves of Peter Abelard or William IX of Aquitaine. With the work of Achille Luchaire, the establishment of seigniorial governments (the governments of the regional princes) came to be seen as complicating any simple opposition between the monarchy (or the state) and feudalism, without abrogating revolutions themselves.3 On the contrary, even as cities such as Rouen, Bruges, and Troyes were enriching their prince, they were proportionately impoverishing his vassals. Finally, rightly nuancing several of these themes, Marc Bloch developed the idea of the transition around 1100 being but the passage from one feudal age to another, the latter being nevertheless a little less feudal than the former.4 In a recent article, I pondered why historians today tend, on the contrary, to see the period around 1100 as a high point of the feudal system or “feudalization” with its encellulement of lands.5 Why not simply agree with these scholars over and against the uncritical celebration of the emancipation of peasants and civilization of social attitudes? On the other hand, is it really necessary to underestimate gains of the urban élite—whether this group was a “bourgeois aristocracy” or a “patriciate”? Further, if indeed there was feudalization around 1100, are we therefore compelled to defeudalize the tenth and eleventh centuries? Would it not rather be better to contrast the feudal interaction of the earlier period with the administrative feudalism of the latter? And then there is the appearance around 1100 of the rites, ideals, and practices of classical chivalry, as studied in Maurice Keen’s great work: the dubbings, knightly romances, the tournaments, and courtly etiquette.6 Chivalry has also been the subject of two contrasting approaches. Historians of the old school were content to see in the advent of chivalric codes (alongside the emancipation of serfs) one aspect of moral progress, or of what might be called the “civilizing process.” According to them, feudal France was still entirely barbaric throughout the eleventh century. Though it had inherited the Germanic practice of dubbing, France had still barely Christianized it, and its uncouth lords and their vassals were galvanized by the bloody tales of the old Frankish epics. The church alone was capable of checking this barbarity using the Peace of God, by wielding the threat of anathema, or by channeling it into the crusades using the lure of an indulgence. Around 1100, the church’s efforts found support, these scholars argued, in seigniorial and princely courts where the ascendency of women

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and social interaction between vassals led to stories of love and examples of elegant valor prevailing over epic tales of vengeance and fights to the death, and courtly etiquette and games triumphing over feudal squabbles. All this was presented as “the French miracle,” or, at the very least, as a joint effort undertaken by the church and poetry. Hence the whole of Europe did follow the French pattern of which France has never ceased to boast ever since!7 Such opinions even persist to this day. With an admirably unbiased sense of giving credit where it is due, John Gillingham has credited the French with having introduced chivalry (that is, the careful treatment of and respect for vanquished enemies) into England from 1066.8 It is worth pointing out, however, that in so doing Gillingham dates this development earlier than did his predecessors and that he does not privilege the role of the church. In contemporary scholarship, however, the assertion of chivalry at the turn of the twelfth century is interpreted and understood entirely differently by those historians who hold to the narrative of a transformation having occurred a century earlier at the turn of the first millennium. For these writers, the ideals and practices of chivalry came to sacralize the social advancement of a new class of knights and its moral fusion with the nobility. The argument runs that having used violence around the turn of the millennium to elevate its own status, this class served as a vehicle for the advancement of more warlike values: it “militarized” the nobility.9 However, the use of this latter term, which originates from a literal translation of miles and its derivatives, lacks subtlety. After all, once made a knight, did a lord, for all that, renounce his role as an administrator of ­justice? Nevertheless, the problem of knights trying to outdo each other in feats of valor in a kind of chivalric one-upmanship does indeed arise around 1100 with the advent of new practices of fighting with lances. When evoking gangs of young knights in the twelfth century, it is hardly their nice manners that Georges Duby recalls. He depicts them as predatory young men, greedy for sporting victories and for conquests of women.10 For Duby, these youths exhibited the same ardor that knights at the turn of the millennium would have had in their assaults on free-­holding peasants, with the difference being that here we are dealing with competition not against peasants but against other knights in battles between princes, in tournaments, and in ambushes. Such competition was not undertaken without the kind of careful consideration and calculation that Matthew Strickland has studied so well, drawing in particular on Orderic Vitalis’ Ecclesiastical History.11 One can

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just as easily, however, find in this History blood-soaked panegyrics, and it is no longer possible to assert with all the assurance of historians of the old school that there was a reduction in “barbarism” at the time of the First Crusade. In a way, if the transformation around the turn of the millennium had actually occurred as those who argue for it have suggested, that might have explained a parallel rise in or at least a parallel display of aggression. It is such a pity they are wrong! These authors do nevertheless confront us with a real challenge: how are we to understand the advent around 1100 of chivalric style, the style chevaleresque? To begin with, let us return to feudal war before 1100. This will enable us better to examine and understand the sources in our quest for contexts and circumstances that could favor the rise of chivalric one-upmanship at the turn of the twelfth century. —  For historians of the old school, French society in the century on either side of the turn of the millennium (950–1050), like the societies of other post-Carolingian lands, gave the impression of being characterized by Germanic barbarism. Was it not, after all, dominated by an élite group whose social capital was symbolized by the very weapons and horses that assured that group a certain military superiority and security? Despite the absence of any accounts of ritual dubbings, the evidence offered by charters that mention donors being gladio militiae accincti and the practice of laying down of arms upon entry into religious life does need to be taken seriously. The Latin term militia regni in royal diplomas, and the expression ordo militaris so dear to Richer of Reims, ought not, however, prompt us to think of counts and vassals at the turn of the millennium as “neo-­ Romans.” The Roman inheritance of the Frankish early Middle Ages is, of course, incontestable and admittedly was until recently underestimated. Is it not the case, however, that it is presently sometimes being overestimated? It has been applied in kingdoms whose élite were a single group without any distinction between civil and military militias12 who were armed and proud of being Franks (that is, proud of being fierce and free), and who settled their conflicts by means of a system based on acts of vengeance and compromise. In the absence of racial Germanity, it may be argued that what we do find here is a sociological Germanity, to wit, an aristocracy in the strict sense of that term—an aristocracy whose submission to the state, even the Carolingian state, remained limited. If we have been forced to abandon the idea that this aristocracy was in some way barbarous, it is because anthropology has helped us both to discern in honor-

Chivalric One-Upmanship in France  79

based societies a real means of social control and to perceive in systems of vengeance and armed reprisals a means of limiting and regulating conflict. The defense of justice as a reason for going to war, and, at the same time, sparing one’s adversary of the same culture and social status, these are the fundamental values of “Germanity” so defined, and it is not difficult to see that in its own way classical chivalry maintained these values. In this sense, chivalry has Germanic roots. Can chivalry, however, be distinguished from Frankish Germanity by its more Christian spirit? Even that is doubtful, despite the depth to which Christian ideals had permeated amongst the warrior nobility of the early Middle Ages: Old Testament psalms could, after all, accompany the righteous exacting of revenge in battle, while, at the same time, the Gospels’ spirit of peace could be used to justify cautious dealings with and compromises between nobles.13 Nevertheless, the Carolingians did play a particular role in this development. Anxious to outlaw acts of blood vengeance and homicide between Christians, they also strengthened the bonds between vassals and lords as a means of securing the allegiance of powerful noble families, counts, and royal vassals. Thus, the idea of a militia regni already existed in the ninth century. Richer of Reims describes it being deployed in battle behind King Eudes against the Normans, but the militia regni was woven at least as much from bonds of fealty that were characteristic of vassalage. The story of the valiant signifer Ingo in Richer’s Historiae presents him as braving death and killing both for his lord the king and, at the same time, to save his people.14 It is worth observing, however, that Ingo undertakes these risks (and gains the ensuing glory) voluntarily, and that it is he who seizes the initiative in committing a salutary act of sacrilege: holding the Viking for a trickster, he kills him—and he later obtains his pardon. This veritable phoenix of the ordo militaris is then by no means a disciplined Roman soldier. The ritual of admission of this tenth-century militia regni is not like enlisting in an army: it is nothing but the oath of fealty accompanied by the ritual homage of hands that sets a noble adult apart. While in principle, the militia was motivated by a genuine public spirit, in practice it worked by consent and only as occasion arose. Like the Germanic chiefs described earlier by Tacitus, the king or regional prince actually had to convince his followers of his rights, to seek their counsel, and to set an example of bravery himself. Hugh Capet in Richer and the Norman dukes idealized by Dudo of Saint-Quentin are examples of this. Even so, Dudo is not far from the truth when he writes of a certain civilizing effect on attitudes and behaviors following Rollo’s baptism in

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911. Baptism and vassal allegiances brought about a transition from the hard wars between Christians and pagans to “intracultural” war. Modern historians have made rather too much of the feudal wars of the age of castles that, from 888, tended to take over from the wars against the pagans. Their estimation of these wars has been overly colored by their familiarity with modern, bitter wars of religion, in which opponents consider each other barbarians. They have also been too ready to see in epics such as Raoul de Cambrai the direct reflection of the struggles of the tenth century, without sufficiently allowing for poetic dramatization. In fact, feudal warfare, as described laconically in the Annals of Flodoard, appears to have been a highly codified practice.15 What was at stake between kings and vassal counts was some material honor—an inheritance, a disputed fief— not blood vengeance. The objective was, therefore, not to kill the adversary, for in a world upon which Charlemagne’s moral sway had not ceased to exercise its influence, such a deed would have seriously tarnished one’s reputation. Rather, the objective was to cause harm to the adversary’s property, in other words, to raid his peasants and seize his less important castles in the zone of conflict. In order to achieve this objective, castles were hemmed in and then besieged without a general assault being undertaken. If they fell, it was more as a result of a betrayal or surrender than because of wholesale attack. Sometimes bloody skirmishes did occur, but there were few full-scale battles. The very word miles little by little came to replace vassus in charters, and, like the term vassus (of which it was a synonym), it designated a knight who had entered into the ties of vassalage, and who had thereby, as by his birth, entered into the élite group. This group was not, however, made up of the gangs of vassals of which Susan Reynolds has furnished a justly critical account,16 and to whom too many modern historians have attributed a spirit of utter (and utterly bellicose) devotion to their liege lord. It goes without saying, of course, that vassalage did forge between lord and vassal a solidarity in vengeance-taking. And it was certainly stated as a matter of principle and recounted in epic narratives of the period that a vassal was obliged to kill and to die to defend the rights of his lord; this is the message of the story of Ingo in Richer of Reims, and of Otto II’s speech to his vassals after Lothar’s affront in 978. In practice however, such campaigns were limited to pillaging, and when Otto’s vassal army came up against its counterpart in Hugh Capet’s men, the result was not a battle, but one-on-one combat.17 Following Lothar’s affront to Hugh Capet, Hugh’s vassals cautioned their lord against any action that might resemble rebellion and counseled instead prudence and a sense of civic responsi-

Chivalric One-Upmanship in France  81

bility (980).18 In so doing, they both dispensed themselves from the obligation to die or kill for their lord, and at the same time dispensed him from the need to expose himself to such a danger by authorizing him to negotiate skillfully and to be accommodating with his adversary. Richer has doubtless edited these accounts, but we may ask whether there is really any justification in following his modern editor Robert Latouche in interpreting them as little more than examples of a “literary development,” and one that runs contrary to the spirit of the civil wars of the period.19 It is worth noting that the De moribus of Dudo of SaintQuentin concerning the Norman crisis of 942–3 is filled with negotiations and sophismes written in precisely the same style.20 One important text in this connection that has received much scholarly attention in the last fifty years is the Conventum Hugonis, a kind of memorandum of the 1020s biased towards Hugh Chiliarchus, the illtreated vassal of the Count of Poitiers.21 In this text, it is clear that the lord is expected to mete out justice to his vassal, to assist him in claiming his own rights, and to treat him with respect. The two men are presented as friendly foes: hostilities between them alternate with alliances on a regular basis. At times they support each other against a third party in claiming honores (especially castles and parts of castles); at times they accuse the other of being too weak in his support, and the result is a cautious confrontation. Nothing could be more foreign to the little world into which the Conventum gives us such precious insight than the excessive use of ­violence. What emerges, rather, is a picture of a kind of chivalry between lord and vassal—two well-established powers, two great heirs living side by side. One might almost find these men rather un-warrior-like. What, after all, are we to make of Hugh Chiliarchus’ declaration of war before the assembled feudal court, in which Hugh immediately promises to attack neither the person nor the main castle (Poitiers) of his lord now become his enemy? And how are we to interpret the fact that hostilities between the two men have hardly even begun before they are reconciled? In the light of this incident, we are better able to understand how Dudo of Saint-Quentin could present the Norman duke, Richard I, as a true follower of the Beatitudes of justice and peace—mostly when it suited him, to be sure!22 In the tenth century, neither the king nor the counts nor the royal vassals elevated to the status of castellans were great military captains. Rather, they were level-headed heirs, careful to guard their warrior reputation once it had been gained, and therefore to eschew very nearly any unnecessary act of violence or heroism. As a result, we can actually credit these men with numerous mediations and with exhibiting a certain

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reticence in going to war. The Life of Gerald of Aurillac, composed in the 930s by Odo of Cluny, might plausibly be interpreted in this way.23 It is by no means clear that the historical Gerald behaved much differently from other lords of his day, or that his hagiographer disguised in some way Gerald’s true attitudes towards combat: Odo merely selected the episodes and interpreted them in his own way. The question is: did evading battle, gaining control of castles by means of the treachery or the capitulation of those defending them, and afterwards negotiating with the enemy really constitute exceptional actions for a lord in this period? What about escaping attempted capture? For all its limitations and its pretenses (his defense of the weak is rather half-hearted), Gerald’s mode of chivalrous behavior is presented as being quite fitting. He serves as an example both as vassal, in his fidelity to the king, and as a lord over vassals, the rights of whom he defends and upholds, and to whom he gives each what is rightfully theirs. Sparing one’s enemies if at all possible was a golden rule of feudal ­warfare—a rule that was able to be maintained by avoiding confronting one’s enemies too directly. This was the practice that the Norman Conquest introduced, or, more correctly, transplanted into England in 1066, since what we are discussing was, above all, a mode of negotiating interactions employed between Norman lords. This chivalry in feudal interactions greatly reduced knights’ ability to accomplish great feats of valor. How, at the turn of the millennium, was one to equal the ancestors of whom one claimed to be the heir, and who, like William Taillefer of Angoulême, had cut Normans in two with a single mighty blow?24 Unless ­bitter vengeance actually prompted them, in spite of everything, to mistreat a captive, nobles in this period hardly attempted to do more than capture each other in order to extort concessions or ransoms, with scant regard for loyalty. Describing the accomplishments of his father Rodulf, Richer of Reims could only recount commando-style operations done to order, not dazzling exploits undertaken on his own initiative; Rodulf used a combination of cunning and courage to seize Laon in 948 and to capture the wife and children of an enemy of Queen Gerberga in Mons in 956.25 Similarly, when faced with the vassal army of Otto II in 978, Hugh Capet did not join battle against him; he simply selected and paid for a champion to answer Otto’s provocations in one-on-one combat with a German and to kill him with a battle-axe.26 One senses something of an unsatisfied ardor among the young men—these tyros, or household knights, so to speak—who moved in the entourages of princes.27 After all, had not Rodulf, Richer’s father, been one of the spearheads of the “royal cavalry” before he married? Richer notes on

Chivalric One-Upmanship in France  83

several occasions his father’s presence in the squadrons at the front line in feudal warfare, and it is assuredly Rodulf ’s ideas about and tales of battle that his son is rehearsing. Furthermore, does not Richer’s legendary Ingo, even though he is ex mediocribus in terms of his birth (one must, however, question to what degree this was actually the case), constitute the very incarnation of the aspirations of the royal and princely household in his excessive daring, in the way in which he upstages the “nobility” in the foreground, and in his final good fortune? This household seems still to have been made up of young men who were relatively well born and not wealthy serfs, men whose increased wealth and pretensions to knighthood derived from their role as seigniorial agents rather than from any exploits on the battlefield. As for Dudo of Saint-Quentin, before drawing on the Beatitudes, he cast Richard I in a different role, namely, that of a young warrior eager to cross swords with the Count of Blois, egged on by the tyros in his entourage. It is the barons, the majores natu, who have to hold Richard back by the bridle of his horse.28 In reality, however, in line with the expectations of his patron Duke Richard II, Richard’s son, Dudo did preserve warrior values in several passages in his work. He composed speeches inciting the Normans to valor and enjoining them not to be effeminate,29 and, on the eve of Rollo’s baptism, he had him recognized by the marquis Robert as skilled vassal, world famous, in terms already approaching those used by Goffredo Malaterra and Orderic Vitalis around 1100.30 Vassalus is employed here in an absolute sense, and ought, in fact, to be translated as “knight,” precisely as is the case with Old French vassal as that word is ­employed in twelfth-century epics. —  In the second half of the eleventh century, chivalry is suddenly on display in France. A number of charters and a few chronicles (especially Orderic Vitalis’ Historia ecclesiastica)31 make mention of the ritual dubbing of young lords: the “chivalric” arms (militaria) of adult manhood were formally handed over, they were girded with them, and thereby made knights. A similar description usually prefaces accounts of the demands of young knights, their acts of revenge, and even their revolts. The way the accounts unfold, it is as though their dubbing actually propelled them to demand their rights and inheritance using force against relatives whom they held in scant regard. At the very least, dubbing entitled them to react to threats and to defend their lordship. When we learn of the dubbings of kings and princes—Phillip I, Louis VI, and the sons of William the Conqueror—it

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is as though in passing and without extensive development, after a gap of more than two centuries. The Astronomer and the Annals of Saint-Bertin had indeed noted the bestowal of arms on certain Carolingians, but there had been no mention of this practice since.32 And yet, would not a ritual dubbing of Louis VI in 936 have been quite fitting in Richer’s Historiae? 33 Could not the same be argued for a dubbing of the Norman dukes in Dudo’s work or for Buchard in Odo of Saint-Maur’s Vita? 34 The function of dubbing at the turn of the twelfth century was certainly similar to that of the Germanic bestowal of arms described by Tacitus (Germania, 13); the link, however, between the two cannot be traced with any certainty, and perhaps it would be better to speak of a “neo-Germanic” dubbing ritual.35 The chronicles at the turn of the twelfth century also promote rivalry in bravery. After all of the speeches of the tenth century filling the pages of Richer and Dudo, it was now time for acts of chivalry, for exploits accomplished both militariter and, as Goffredo Malaterra states regularly and Orderic Vitalis echoes on numerous occasions, with a keen eye for glory and profit.36 William of Poitiers assures us that William the Conqueror-tobe is ready, at the age of twenty, to take real risks in confronting a small group of adversaries with a lance during the siege of Moulihene in Anjou in 1049. William knocked one of the men off his horse and broke his hip, and so earned himself great renown, despite the fact that his lord, Henry I, censured him for needlessly putting himself in danger.37 The slightly younger future Louis VI was obviously occupied by the same concern for his reputation when he fought on behalf of the Vexin in armed conflict against William Rufus. Abbot Suger mentions this incident, despite omitting any mention of Louis’ dubbing. Suger makes a show of passing modest censure on Louis’ actions, but does not pass up the opportunity to dazzle his readers with the chivalry of the age as exhibited in Louis38 and in other young lords.39 When they record the gifts made by Norman knights to monasteries and to the church during this period, monks such as Goffredo Malaterra and Orderic Vitalis seize the opportunity to write about the valiant deeds of these men, and in so doing they assure the reader both that the donors’ renown surpassed that of their peers and that it was universally recognized.40 France at the turn of the twelfth century clearly did share with ancient Germany a taste for rituals employing weapons and for public demonstrations of valor that knights could use to attract public acclaim. And so the modern reader is reassured: far from being effeminate, these men for whom jongleurs sang the blood-drenched verses of the Chanson de Roland had perhaps never before been quite so Germanic. Unfortunately, the

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analogy is rather strained. The year 1100 is, after all, quite different from the year 100. Tacitus wrote about the Germanic practice of bestowing arms without ever mentioning anything like this long course of training in the practices of war and in government for which chivalric dubbing came to serve as the conclusion (even as it simultaneously indebted the recipient to his prince). Training in weaponry and in horse-riding in 1100 was far more complex and the equipment far more expensive than what Tacitus describes. Whereas Tacitus emphasized that among the ancient Germans the combatants’ ardor was egged on by the physical presence of their close relatives (Germania, 8), what mattered now was gaining universal renown; there was a kind of global knightly news network of knights—at least in theory. Lastly, while Tacitus wrote about the valor of the poorly armed warrior (Germania, 6), Orderic Vitalis’ accounts of the age of chivalry indicate just how difficult it could be to kill men covered in metal, whose horses, moreover, were used just as frequently for fleeing as for charging the adversary. The question might justifiably be asked whether death was really the desired outcome in any case. Having argued that in 1098 the knights of the Vexin wanted to uphold to the death French honor against the Normans, Orderic Vitalis proceeds only to recount their efforts to capture, not kill, the enemy.41 Like the cocky young Burgundian knights in the same period, who, when heading off for a simple pillaging raid in Berry, had a jongleur precede them singing of the valiant exploits of days of yore,42 these men were, we might say, more warlike in word than in deed. In fact, in practice, valiant knights had a hard time finding an adversary, even on the most convincing terms possible, to engage in chivalric combat. Furthermore, the feudal warfare that served as the backdrop to their feats of valor was comprised of marches and countermarches, the evasion of danger and surprise attacks, ambushes, ruses, and treachery.43 The question arises whether attempting to kill one’s knight opponent was even the norm in these combats or indeed any other. The new practice of using the couched lance in combat was first and foremost a technique for knocking one’s opponent off his horse;44 it was designed to enable a knight to seize his opponent while he was on the ground and then to hold him for ransom, or, at the very least, to seize his horse and harness. The death of an adversary whom one had no good reason to hate could, of course, be atoned for by means of the system of vengeance and pardon tinged with Christian ideals. That would be costly, however, whereas a ransom actually brought money to knights who were enamored not only of glory but, at the same time, of profit. Certainly, knights were killed; Guillaume of Moulins-la-Marche attracted the criticism of Orderic Vitalis

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that, out of vainglory, he had all too often rendered himself guilty of homicide. Orderic did not usually hold back from celebrating the glorious deeds of knights who made donations to his monastery. Guillaume’s mistake lay in having fought too harshly: “he was reputed to have shed much blood, and to be of such ferocious cruelty that no one ever escaped death who had received the slightest wound at his hands.”45 Moreover, it was not unusual for the death of a knight during combat to be lamented by both parties present—friend and foe alike, even if, as at Mileto in 1062, this did not entirely remove the possibility of taking revenge later.46 It is significant, however, that it was preponderantly the young knights whom the more mature lords and church leaders reproached for being superficial and pretentious, and for taking unnecessary risks such as participating in massacres. It is in this context that we are better able to understand the lack of reticence exhibited by more than one cleric or monk in sketching a positive portrait of a knight travelling from court to court to make a name for himself in military exercises and to receive gifts in compensation. According to Goffredo Malaterra, Tancred of Hauteville was just such a knight.47 Furthermore, Tancred fathered many capable and energetic sons, whose own valiant exploits seem to have dispensed with any need to mention whether or not they were ever dubbed knights. The idea of outclassing one’s companions in arms in some kind of sporting competition seeped into the church as well. Note, for instance, the one-on-one competitions between itinerant hermits closely linked with knights: though obsessed with performance around 1100, these hermits did not, however, afflict themselves with the sorts of physical trials undergone by their late-antique predecessors. Note, too, the disputationes in which Peter Abelard boasts he triumphed, whereby he too won for himself universal renown.48 Indeed, is not the turn of the twelfth century the very age of noble rivalry? A follower of the Beatitudes is hardly ever to be found amongst the ranks of knights any more: at any rate, no chronicler invents such a character. Now was the time for reconciling military values with Christian ascesis in the crusades, and those lords who managed this feat returned with the renown, not of pious men, but of knights who had been tried in battle. Through the ritual presentation of arms and especially in the accounts of warlike acts of derring-do (militaria facinora), knighthood was all of a sudden on display: unabashed, proud, and, on occasion, rather “cavalier.” Was this also the period of the sort of unprecedented social tension discerned by historians of the old school, and from which the theory of

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transformation at the turn of the millennium has rather too successfully diverted scholarly attention? This theory has too exclusively directed our attention toward rural areas and secondary fortifications at the expense of the already burgeoning towns and the authority that had been retained, and wealth that had been gained, by the regional princes. After all, does not Richer note that the Counts of Anjou and of Blois appealed for mercenaries from 995?49 Throughout the eleventh century, the vassal armies of the king and his princes were the very place where reputations for valor were formed before being retailed at annual festivals and at ever more splendid and fashionable competitions. Interregional wars seem generally to have been conducted with both care and calculation; bloody battles were condemned. While castle blockades did still crop up, these wars were characterized more and more by challenges and by valiant deeds accomplished during minor combats. One gains the impression that the princes quickly felt overwhelmed by the ardent enthusiasm of young men eager to make a name for themselves and mercenary knights50 anxious to increase their market value. Even so, as we have seen, the princes got caught up in the same spirit too, and if the moral code and rituals of post-Carolingian vassalage continued to be based on honor, these courtly knights do nonetheless develop new modes of action and behavior. Generally speaking, they love themselves more than they hate their enemy. The glorification of individual acts of prowess and rivalry between commilitationes from various regions of France, England, and Germany, created an environment conducive to new ideas— those of twelfth-century romans—flourishing. Collective pride and resentments were partially eclipsed by the affirmation of a moral and social solidarity among knights everywhere. They wanted to fight each other without archers killing their horses, and so they invented the tournament. Whenever possible, they treated the new urban élite with a mixture of barbarity and greed.51 In my opinion, the trend among knights at the turn of the twelfth century to affirm solidarity among themselves and to engage in chivalric one-upmanship with the support of their princes ought, in the final analysis, to be interpreted as a response to the emergence of a new urban bourgeoisie that was threatening them in some way. But this new class, for all its prudence, was itself a kind of aristocracy, and one far less close to the common people of town and country than used to be thought in the nineteenth century. This was not a class that was capable of forming a grand Rooseveltian coalition with church and king against the “feudal lords.” It therefore put up with an armed aristocracy that the king, church, and

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r­egional princes had a tendency to support even as they tried to keep it somewhat in check. This armed aristocracy retained real social superiority, albeit one less absolute than in the Frankish or post-Carolingian world. It is in Galbert of Bruges’ accounts of Flanders in the 1120s that we get the clearest picture of the gains made by the burghers: they formed alliances among themselves to keep their lords and the knights at bay, even when they were involved in the same conflicts as these groups. We can also measure, however, the limits of this group’s power, for even in this highly urbanized region knights remained the dominant force. Count Charles the Good led a team of knights from his own county and headed off to participate in tournaments in Normandy, France, and even outside the realm in the German empire. Even this pious prince was motivated by a desire for worldly renown in a display of levitas that the church had later to absolve.52 Like the king, regional princes and, on their own lands, great barons appear to have functioned as arbiters of social tensions who were rather biased toward helping other knights (many of whom were their own vassals) to hold their ground and to prosper. The princes’ relationships with other knights and with the ideals and practices of classical chivalry were, however, far from straightforward: they supported this chivalric society even as they were attempting to control it. As Matthew Strickland has rightly observed, chivalric combats, with their captures and ransoms, entailed winning not only over peasants but over other knights. And who financed this stream of interaction but the princes and great barons, enriched by their taxes on towns and by the encellulement of their rural estates? Indeed, one might argue that it is their generosity during the dubbings and on other occasions that is at the very root of this phenomenon. The dukes of Normandy certainly did play a historic role in this development. Made spectacularly rich by the conquest of England from 1066, they were able to recruit mercenaries in huge numbers and to pay any potential ransoms. Thus, their wealth was, in a way, set up as a prize, a sort of sporting trophy for knights tried in battle, who came from all over France to try their chances against them. During the siege of Fresnay-leVicomte (1083–5), battle-hardened knights flocked from neighboring regions (de Aquitania et Burgundia aliisque prouinciis Galliae) to come to the aid of the viscount of Maine against William the Conqueror and the Normans, and for the opportunity to line their own pockets with ransoms paid for the Normans they captured.53 The same scenario played out fifteen years later, when Louis VI defended the Vexin against William Rufus.54 In other words, as Suger makes quite clear (albeit almost despite

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himself ), French chivalry was being subsidized by English wealth now in the hands of William and his sons: it was they who directly or indirectly sponsored knighthood’s great acts of derring-do in Northern France. The ideas and practices of chivalry had a certain autonomy, however, in relation to the princes; indeed, they may have even had a subversive, antifeudal edge, given that the mark of belonging to the élite shifted from one’s allegiance as a vassal to one’s status as a knight. Ritual dubbings created no explicit obligation towards the person doing the dubbing, nor even an allegiance to some code of chivalry, any violations of which such a person might sanction. Knighthood was, then, not a Roman militia, a specialized and disciplined army, the renaissance of which John of Salisbury would soon be singing the praises in the mid-twelfth century;55 indeed, it was only slowly and imperfectly that a similar idea would find a place in the ideals of classical chivalry. French literature of the twelfth century, which exalted the Frankish knightly élite, accorded kings (and, through them, princes and lords) a less than glamorous role: they were imperfectly obeyed, sometimes they were fought against, and generally speaking they were outshone by the powerful personalities of knights tried in battle. Classical European chivalry as it thus developed in France and in the empire (but always in interaction with other countries), was made up of compromises, tensions, and the ambiguities highlighted by Richard ­Kaeuper56—to such an extent that it defies any attempt at strict definition. All the values it extolled, however, tended to preserve the preeminence of the noble warrior and of a nobility with warrior trappings, despite the medieval urban revolution and, before long, the beginnings of capitalism. This, in my opinion, is the historical significance of chivalric one-­ upmanship at the turn of the twelfth century. The theory of a transformation at the turn of millennium would cause us to overlook this phenomenon and to treat it rather as the product of a rise of a class with its own “warrior” or even “military” values. In fact, it was a defense mechanism of a sociologically “Germanic” warrior aristocracy against the rise of another élite group. Notes 1.  An excellent introduction to the period and historiographical debates can be found in Jean Dunbabin, France in the Making, 843–1180, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2000). 2.  Stephen D. White, Feuding and Peace-Making in Eleventh-Century France, Variorum Collected Series (Aldershot, 2005).

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3.  Achille Luchaire, Les premiers capétiens 987–1137, vol. 2, pt. 2, Histoire de la France depuis les origines jusqu’à la révolution (Paris, 1911), pp. 283–87. 4.  Marc Bloch, La société féodale, 2 vols. (Paris, 1939–40). 5.  Dominique Barthélemy, “La mutation de l’an 1100,” Journal des Savants (2005), pp. 3–28. 6.  Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven and London, 1984). 7.  See Robert Bartlett, Making of Europe. 8.  John Gillingham, “1066 and the Introduction of Chivalry into England,” in Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy: Essays in Honour of Sir James Holt, ed. George Garnet and John Hudson (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 31–55. And see his essay in this volume. 9.  Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, La mutation féodale, 10e–12e siècles, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1991), pp. 172–3. 10.  Georges Duby, “Les ‘jeunes’ dans la société aristocratique dans la France du nord-ouest au 12e siècle,” in ibid., Hommes et structures du Moyen Âge, vol. 1: La société chevaleresque (Paris, 1988), pp. 129–42. 11.  Matthew J. Strickland, War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217 (Cambridge, 1996). 12.  See my La chevalerie: De la Germanie antique à la France du 12e siècle (Paris, 2007), pp. 95–102, for the transposition of this theme of the two militias onto relationships between the church hierarchy and lay nobles. 13.  Ibid., pp. 55–62; see Keen, Chivalry, pp. 51–5. 14.  Richer of Saint-Remi, Historiae, 1.8–11, ed. Hartmut Hoffmann, MGH SS 38 (Hannover, 2000), pp. 44–7. 15.  See my “Chivalric Feud in the Tenth Century according to Flodoard and Richer of Reims,” in Vengeance in the Middle Ages: Emotion, Religion, and the Discourse of Violent Conflict, ed. Susanna A. Throop and Paul R. Hyams, (Aldershot, 2010), pp. 105–13. 16. Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Ox­ford, 1994). 17. Richer, Historiae, 3.73–77, ed. Hoffmann, pp. 209–12. 18. Ibid. 19. Richer, Histoire de France (888–995), ed. and trans. Robert Latouche, vol. 1 (Paris, 1930), p. x. For Richer, see Jason Glenn, Politics and History in the Tenth Century: The Work and World of Richer of Reims (Cambridge, 2004). 20.  Dudo of Saint-Quentin, De moribus et actis primorum normanniae ducum, 7–9, ed. Jules Lair, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de Normandie 23 (Caen, 1865), pp. 224–5. 21.  Conventum inter Guillelmum Aquitanorum comitem et Hugonem Chiliarchum, ed. Jane Martindale in her Status, Authority and Regional Power: Aquitaine and France, 9th–12th Centuries (Aldershot, 1997), cc. 7–8. 22.  Dudo of Saint-Quentin, De moribus, 127, ed. Lair, pp. 293–5. 23.  See my Chevaliers et miracles, La violence et le sacré dans la société féodale (Paris, 2004), pp. 48–58. 24.  Ademar of Chabannes, Chronicon, 3.28, ed. Pascale Bourgain, Richard Landes, and Georges Pon, CCCM 129 (Turnhout, 1999), pp. 148–9. 25. Richer, Historiae, 2.87–90, 3.7–10, ed. Hoffmann, pp. 162–4, 174–5.

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26.  Ibid., 3.76, p. 211. 27.  See, for the eleventh and twelfth centuries: Marjorie Chibnall, “Mercenaries and the familia regis under Henry I,” History 62 (1977), pp. 15–23; repr. in her Piety, Power and History in Medieval England and Normandy (Aldershot, 2000), no. 18. 28.  Dudo of Saint-Quentin, De moribus, 109, ed. Lair, p. 272. 29.  Ibid., 40, 45, pp. 184, 190. 30.  Ibid., 27 (p. 167). Later on, Dudo speaks of palma militiae, that is vassal’s service. 31.  The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 3.25; 5.7, 10, 13; 6.8, 10; 8.1; 13.3, 33, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1969–80), vol. 2, p. 25; vol. 3, pp. 40, 112, 126; vol. 3, pp. 256, 324; vol. 4, p. 120; vol. 6, pp. 190, 328. 32.  Virtually every possible reference to the practice was collected already in 1902 by Paul Guilhiermoz, Essai sur l’origine de la noblesse en France au moyen âge (Paris, 1902), pp. 393–404 and 412–21, where the author underlines the great similarity between the medieval ritual of dubbing and the Germanic practice of bestowing arms. 33.  Richer 2, 4, ed. Hoffmann, p. 100–1. King Louis IV is landing on the shore near the Pas-de-Calais, the great men acknowledge him as their king, and he shows how he can ride; all the same, no one gives him a sword or weapons, as had been done for young Carolingians of the ninth century. 34. Odo of Saint-Maur-les-Fossés, Vie de Bouchard le Vénérable, comte de Vendôme, de Corbeil, de Melun et de Paris (10e–11e siècles), ed. Charles Bourel de la Roncière (Paris, 1892). Count Buchard died in 1005. His Latin biography dates to 1058, and begins with an account of education at the court of this nobili stirpe progenitus, who, after his baptism, is nobiliter in religione catholica militari tironcinio eductus (c. 1, p. 5). It is true that this text is primarily concerned with the pious actions of Count Buchard towards the Abbey of Saint-Maur-les-Fossés; for this reason it seldom mentions the rites, ideals, and practices of chivalry of the age (it does, however, mention ritual homage with hands: see c. 7, p. 19). 35.  I do not wish to imply here that there was some conscious design at work, but rather to counteract the tendency of some contemporary historians to militarize the word militia on every occasion it appears, both before and after the turn of the millennium. 36.  Goffredo Malaterra, De rebus Rogerii calabriae et siciliae comitis et Roberti Guiscardi Ducis fratris eius, ed. Ernesto Pontieri, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores 6.1 (Bologna, 1928), see especially: 1.5, 24; 2.23, 39; 3.11; 4.26, pp. 9, 20, 36, 48, 63, 105. 37.  The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, 1.11–13, ed. and trans. R. H. C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1998), pp. 14–19. 38. Suger, Vie de Louis VI le Gros, c. 1, ed. Henri Waquet (Paris, 1929), pp. 6–9. 39.  Notably in Hugh of Crécy, albeit in conflict with Louis VI. Suger, Vie de Louis VI, c. 15, ed. Waquet, pp. 94–7. 40.  Goffredo Malaterra, De rebus Rogerii, 1.6, 23, 38, 40, ed. Pontieri, pp. 10, 36–7, 47–8, 48–9; Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, 3.24; 5.19; 8.14, ed. Chibnall, vol. 2, p. 23; vol. 3, p. 174; vol. 4, p. 218, inter alia.

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41.  Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, 10.5, ed. Chibnall, vol. 5, p. 216. 42. The poor young men consequently make a rather poor showing of it. Rodulfus Tortarius reports that when confronted by a counter-attack by peasants they disbanded. Rodulfus ascribes their fear felicitously to a miracle by St. Benedict, which, it seems to me, helps them to save face to some degree: Les miracles de saint Benoît, 8.36, ed. Eugène de Certain (Paris, 1858), pp. 336–9. 43.  Cf. the coup of Gisors: Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, 12.37, ed. Chibnall, vol. 6, pp. 342–5. 44.  D. J. A. Ross, “L’originalité de ‘Turoldus’ et le maniement de la lance,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 6 (1963), pp. 127–38. 45.  Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, 5.13, ed. Chibnall, vol. 3, pp. 132–4. 46.  Goffredo Malaterra, De rebus Rogerii, 2.23, pp. 36–7. 47.  Ibid. 1.40, p.25. 48.  “Diversas disputando perambulans provincias.” Abelard boasts that “ad hoc autem scolarum nostrarum tirocinio ita in arte dialetica nomen meum dilatari cepit”; Historia calamitatum, ed. Jacques Monfrin (Paris, 1978), p. 64. 49. Richer, Historiae, 4.82, 90, ed. Hoffmann, pp. 288, 293. 50.  See Marjorie Chibnall, “Mercenaries.” They remain noble and praised, and they live in courts and osts (armies). 51.  Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, 8.15, ed. Chibnall, vol. 4, p. 226. 52.  Galbert of Bruges, De multro, traditione et occisione gloriosi Karoli comitis Flandriarum, 4, ed. Jeff Rider, CCCM 131 (Turnhout, 1994), p. 13. 53.  Orderic Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica, 7.10, ed. Chibnall, vol. 4, p. 48. 54. Suger, Vie de Louis VI, c. 1, ed. Waquet, pp. 8–10; cf. Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, 10.5, ed. Chibnall, vol. 5, p. 216. 55.  John of Salisbury, Policratus, 6.1–7, 11–16, ed. Clemens Webb (Oxford, 1909), vol. 2, pp. 2–21, 26–44; see my La chevalerie, p. 466–8. 56. Richard Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999).

four

Reconquest, Renaissance, and the Histories of Iberia, ca. 1000–1200 A da m J . K o s t o

“Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Spain remained the land of mystery, of the unknown yet knowable, for inquiring minds beyond the Pyrenees. The great adventure of the European scholar lay in the Peninsula.”1 Thus wrote Charles Homer Haskins surveying the intellectual scene eight hundred years ago, although he may as well have been talking about 1927, when he was writing, and the analysis remains somewhat valid even today. For the scholarly construct of the twelfth century has treated Iberia in a very shabby fashion, and perhaps by way of revenge Iberia has not taken much notice of the twelfth century. It was an interesting neighborhood for a while in the Visigothic early Middle Ages,2 and the Islamic invasion in the eighth century certainly made headlines, if only because of the refugees flooding into southern Francia.3 Later, in the thirteenth century, with the twin reigns of Jaume I of Aragon and Alfonso X of Castile, the place started once again to show a little spark.4 In between? Developments in the intervening years are easily summarized by the term Reconquista—an endless war, a mere footnote to the real crusades, that, while providing the opportunity for fortune and fame for a lucky few, prevented anything truly important from going on. The real action—real ­history—took place on the other side of the Pyrenees. This description is caricature, but only mildly so. For while Spain has now found a place in many general accounts of European society in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, earlier views persist about Iberian ­exceptionalism—its backwardness, or the immaturity of its institutions and culture. When combined with the very real linguistic and disciplinary 93

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divide grounded in the existence of Arabic language sources, such views hamper the effective integration of Iberia into the story of the long European twelfth century. This problem is reinforced by the common un­ derstanding of Iberia’s internal development, which has adhered to the framework of Reconquista. But a historiography based on this Reconquest framework distorts Iberia’s history. Dismantling that framework, or at least setting it aside temporarily, allows for an account of Iberian history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries that may fit more easily into the historiography of medieval Europe. —  Debates about the Reconquista date back to the nineteenth century at least, but a particularly vigorous questioning of the idea was unleashed by the end of Franco’s own Reconquest regime.5 The questioning has been successful enough that a fairly conservative English-language survey of the period 1031–57 can now carry the neutral title The Contest of Christian and Muslim Spain, while the latest comprehensive study of medieval Iberian historiography makes little of the old governing concept.6 Recent books and dissertations, written by scholars with access to Arabic and archaeological sources known less well or not at all by their predecessors, and employing a finely tuned regional methodology, are offering a newly complex picture of the Christian-Muslim encounter in medieval Iberia.7 Still, even the new consensus tends to stress the distinct natures of Christian and Islamic societies,8 and specialists who reject a simplistic view of the Reconquest continue to find it a seductive subject of research, offering sophisticated analyses of its deployment, both in the medieval period and in modern historiography.9 As a label or a “conceptual framework useful to historians,”10 the Reconquest remains popular and firmly rooted in textbooks and important works of synthesis, particularly with reference to the eleventh and twelfth centuries.11 To argue against using the Reconquest as the dominant historiographi­ cal framework for Iberian history in this period requires ignoring an idea and a discourse that was demonstrably real for contemporaries. The word itself does not appear in the Iberian medieval sources,12 but the idea can be traced back to at least the late ninth century. The Reconquest traditionally began with the victory of Pelayo at the battle of Covadonga. Nobody is entirely sure exactly what happened there, or even when it happened, in 718 or 722. But one version of the Chronicle of Alfonso III, dating from the 910s but drawing on a text from the 880s, which may or may not enshrine earlier oral traditions, speaks of the “restoration (reparatus) of the army of

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the Gothic people” and the “recovery (recuperatione) of Church, or people, and kingdom.”13 Neo-Gothicism, the conceit that the rulers of eighth-­ century Asturian warbands were the genetic or at least political descendants of the Visigothic kings, and thus that their military victories over their Islamic neighbors to the south were not simply conquest but reconquest, clearly got an early medieval start.14 Nor was this conceit limited to Christian thought. ‘Abd Allāh, an eleventh-century king of Granada, famously recorded in his memoirs the claim of Count Sisnando: “Al-­Andalus originally belonged to the Christians. Then they were defeated by the Arabs. . . . Now that they are strong and capable, the Christians desire to recover what they have lost by force.” Similarly, Ibn ‘Idhārī (ca. 1300) preserves the call of Fernando I of Castile: “go to your own side of the straits and leave our lands to us, for no good will come to you from dwelling here with us after today. For we shall not hold back from you until God decides between us.”15 The people who were being reconquered knew it too. It is, on the other hand, also true that the early Reconquest idea— known from a few texts, some of which are preserved only in sixteenthcentury manuscripts, and some of which were discovered only in the twentieth century16—does not seem to have been all that common. There is certainly little evidence outside of these texts that it was a major concern in the tenth and eleventh centuries.17 This allows for the revisionist position that, like feudalism and church reform, ideological warfare against the Muslims—and more to the point, successful ideological warfare against the Muslims—was an eleventh- and twelfth-century French import.18 Still, the argument that Reconquest ideology makes sense as an indigenous development of the neo-Gothic is more persuasive. So yes, the Reconquista is a historical construct, but it is a medieval one. Furthermore, there are the facts on the ground. While the eighthand ninth-century parts of the story are very murky, there is undeniable genetic and political continuity between the rulers, whether kings or counts, of the northern Iberian communities in the eleventh century who first extended their control over the river Duero and the Catholic kings of the late fifteenth who expelled the Nasrids from Granada. Nor, appeals to convivencia aside, is it possible to avoid the confessional conflict behind the political one: territory under the control of Muslim rulers became territory under the control of Christian rulers, and it did so by means of the sword rather than by baptismal waters. The teleology is extraordinarily ­seductive, especially for the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The fact that the midpoint between the years 711 and 1492 is 1101 is merely a useful symbol. More significant is the fact that the first major push south, the

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Barbastro campaign, took place in 1064, and the decisive battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. The bulk of the Reconquest, that is, took place in the last two-thirds of the period 1000–1200.19 How would it be possible not to use the Reconquest to organize thinking about the history of Iberia in the long twelfth century? Scholars writing on the Reconquest now hedge their descriptions with caveats about the fact that the Reconquest was not simple or monolithic: “it was a process unfolding in the context of the changing political, religious, social, and economic circumstances of the epoch. It was characterized by a slow and intermittent advance from one river frontier to another and was accompanied by the colonization or repopulation of occupied territory” (Joseph O’Callaghan); “The complicated and ever-shifting alliances among Muslim and Christian powers of the area defies the myth of a coherent and unified program of Christian ‘reconquest’” (Brian Catlos); “The impression that we are left with is that in this age the frontier was not a hard-and-fast line between opposed camps but a permeable zone” (Richard Fletcher).20 This cautious language does not go far enough, especially for the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Without rejecting the idea of the Reconquest, we can make much more sense of the eleventh and twelfth centuries if we ignore it, or at least suspend our belief in it. When the eleventh and twelfth centuries are abstracted from the teleological framework that has one end at 711 and another at 1492, or even earlier at 1212, things look different. Consider the Cid. Rodrigo Díaz can be read as the embodiment of the Reconquest spirit: the Christian hero out to vanquish Islamic foes, or the national hero, loyally serving his king. In contrast, recent interpretations view him more as an adventurer out for his own interests rather than those of church or crown, evidence of the porous nature of the frontier.21 And he is hardly an isolated example. The Cid had an Islamic counterpart in the poet Ibn ‘Ammār, who led the army of Seville against Murcia, with troops hired from the count of Barcelona. Exiled, he turned to the court of Alfonso VI of Castile-León at Toledo, before ending up at Zaragoza, where he no doubt encountered the Cid himself, also in exile.22 Around the same time, Sisnándo Davídiz, reared as a captive at Seville, served first the Muslim ruler of Seville and then Fernando I and Alfonso VI as an administrator, ambassador, and governor. A century later, Geraldo Sem Pavor, the so-called Portuguese Cid, followed a glorious military career in royal service with exile at the Almohad court.23 His contemporary, Pedro Fernández de Castro, fought for the Almohad caliph at Alarcos in 1195 and received the surrender of the castle from his coreligionists.24 Each of these

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warriors is interesting precisely because of the Reconquest framework: they are in exile, or renegades, living or fighting on the “other side” of a war—one with a foreordained outcome—pitting Muslim forces against Christian forces, arrayed north and south. Their individual behavior is less striking in the context of the groups of mercenaries that were active throughout the period, such as the Muslim troops acquired by Vermudo II of León in 984 to stabilize his succession, or the Christians who (perhaps ambivalently) took part in al-Mansūr’s sack in 997 of the holiest Christian site on the peninsula, Santiago de Compostela. Mercenary companies can also be thought of as boundarycrossers.25 But when the crossing and renegade behavior is elevated to the level not of individuals and warrior bands, but of polities—counties and kingdoms and caliphates entering alliances with the “enemy”—what becomes of boundaries and frontiers?26 What becomes of the logic of Re­ conquest? The clearest indicator of the difficulties with the Reconquest framework in the eleventh and twelfth centuries comes from the very end of this period. In the early 1190s, Alfonso IX of León and Alfonso VIII of Castile fell into violent conflict in which León was allied with Sancho VII of Navarre and the Almohads—the same fundamentalist Islamic invaders from North Africa that were holding up the progress of the Reconquest. At this point, Pope Celestine III excommunicated the king of León, and then granted crusading indulgences for those who attacked him . . . him, the king of León, not the Almohads.27 At the height of the Reconquest, then, the pope launched a crusade against an Iberian Christian monarch. The Almohads at this point agreed to a ten-year truce, which left the kings of Aragon, Castile, León, Navarre, and Portugal free to tear the Christian kingdoms apart for a decade. What we are looking at here are—and I am hardly the first to make this point—Christian taifas, taifa being the term applied to the polities, as many as thirty, that emerged in the wake of the collapse of the caliphate of CÓrdoba in 1008.28 The usual story relates how the Islamic taifas looked to Christian powers for help, first against each other and then against North African interlopers: the Almoravids, in 1086, and the Almohads, in 1147. The Christian kingdoms, the story goes, were able to take advantage of these internal conflicts in al-Andalus to prosecute the Reconquest.29 But as just seen, at the very end of the twelfth century, Christian polities were turning to their Islamic neighbors to the south for help in their own internal struggles. For two hundred years, this sort of complexity was characteristic of medieval Iberia.30

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Some of the activity that undermines the simple Reconquest model was small-scale and very local. One of the principal complaints made by Ramon Berenguer I of Barcelona against the rebel Mir Geribert was that he had entered into negotiations with the taifa of Tortosa in the 1050s (“nunciis Mironis qui iverunt in Ispaniam”), and at the time of his ultimate submission in 1059, he had taken refuge there (“qui tunc erat in Tortuosa . . . iam dictus Miro venit a Tortuosa in Barchinona”).31 In the next decade, the legitimate count of Pallars Jussà, Ramon IV, turned to his taifa neighbor for help against rebellious magnates, as shown by a grant he made to the canons of La Seu d’Urgell in an attempt to expiate his sin of having “brought in Saracens against Christians.” He even issued a complaint (querimonia) against the rebel Arnau Mir de Tost, who had violated the agreement with his Muslim ally. Of course, Ramon IV’s opponents were not beyond making their own agreements across the frontier, as shown by the terms of a collective oath that thirty of his men swore to him.32 And the Cid’s initial fall from grace was set in motion by his capture of important Castilian counts who were fighting for the ruler of Granada, while the Cid himself was fighting for the ruler of Seville.33 But much more common, if not constant, were large-scale actions or long-term alliances involving nominally Christian and nominally Muslim polities. The year 1010 is memorable in Catalan history for the death of three bishops, of Vic, Girona, and Barcelona, who died in battle against Islamic foes. What is usually glossed over, however, is the fact that they died fighting for Islamic allies, supporters of the caliph al-Mahdī, in one of the first open contests for power after the collapse of unitary Islamic rule. This was not a question of a few mercenaries: the sources report nine thousand Catalans, led by the counts of Barcelona, Urgell, and probably Besalú. Histories also generally fail to mention that the Córdoba that they entered in June had been sacked eight months earlier by Castilian troops under Count Sancho Garcés alongside Berber supporters of a different caliphal claimant, Sulaymān al-Mustaīn. Count Ramon Borrell of Barcelona headed south again in 1017 at the side of Mundhir, emir of Zaragoza, in support of yet another rebellion.34 With the disappearance of the caliphate, the nature of Christian-­ Muslim political interaction changed, and the focus turned to conflicts first among the individual taifas and Christian polities, and then between the Christian polities, the taifas, and the Almoravids and Almohads. The Cid’s first major military adventure, in 1063, saw Castilian troops coming to aid the ruler of the taifa of Zaragoza against the Aragonese.35 For his part, Alfonso VI of Aragon was a ready ally of the taifas when it proved

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useful, joining with Toledo to attack Granada in 1074; aiding Barcelona, Navarre, and Lleida-Tortosa against a Castile-Zaragoza alliance in the following decade; and negotiating with taifa lords threatened by Almoravid power soon after 1089. Meanwhile, Barcelona and Lleida-Tortosa combined against the taifa of Valencia.36 In the following century, the count of Barcelona and the alcaid of Lleida subscribed a convenientia (1121) that, among other things, transferred castles from Lleida to Barcelona and ships from Barcelona to Lleida. It also foresaw a grant to the alcaid of a one-half share of the parias: the tribute payments made—to slip into the language of Reconquest for a moment—by Muslim taifas to the rulers of the Christian kingdoms; in this case, the parias were destined for Muslim purses.37 Christian payments to the caliphs were a feature of the pre-taifa situation: ‘Abd al-Rahmān III (912–61), for example, received tribute from León, Castile, Navarre, and Barcelona, and Vermudo II agreed to annual payments to al-Mansūr in 995.38 But this fact is downplayed in the traditional Reconquest narrative, which in any case does not allow for a southward flow of tribute after the beginning of the eleventh century. In 1157, King Lobo of Murcia (Ibn Mardanish) joined with Alfonso VII of León to besiege Almohad Almería.39 Only thirteen years later, the king of León allied himself with the Almohad caliph against Castile, foreshadowing the alignment of forces three decades on.40 Outsiders could easily get in on this act, further evidence of the flexibility of the political situation: in 1211, the Almohad caliph met in Seville with an ambassador of King John of England, who was hoping for a military alliance to distract the French.41 It was not all a matter of fighting. Even in the pre-taifa era, the magnates of León turned to the caliph ‘Abd al-Malik to help decide who should serve as regent for Alfonso V in 1004.42 In 1072, after their defeat by their brother Sancho II, Alfonso VI and García briefly undertook exile in the taifas of Toledo and Seville. Similarly, Count Rodrigo González spent part of his exile in the 1130s from the court of Alfonso VII with Ibn Gāniya, governor of Valencia.43 In 1149, the Genoese and Pisans—more outsiders—signed commercial treaties with King Lobo.44 A particularly striking example of the distortion caused by the Reconquest framework in the eleventh and twelfth centuries comes from a description of the council in 1135 at which Alfonso VII of León-Castile was awarded the imperial title. The Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris reports that the decision was made because of all of the great men who had recently become his vassals: García IV Ramírez, king of Navarre; Ramon Berenguer IV, count of Barcelona; Alphonse-Jourdain, count of Toulouse . . . and Zafadola—Sayf al-Dawla— lord of the taifa of Rueda.45 The confusion of Christian and Muslim ­polities was here elevated to constitutional principle.

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The preceding is admittedly a tendentious reading of the events. One can explain many of these episodes as cynical maneuvers: suppression of ideology to obtain a long-term goal; not wanting to cut off the source of parias; or working with the enemy until such time as that enemy could be wiped out. There was open criticism of this behavior from both sides. Ibn Bassām’s complaints that the taifa lords had supported Christians and thus “broken the bonds of the community of the prophet” find echoes in the songs of the trobador Peire Vidal: “Dels reis d’Espanha.m tenh a fais . . .” (The kings of Spain are such a pain . . .).46 And, from the Christian side at least, the Reconquest framework is best supported by the series of ­treaties—Tudellén in 1151, Sahagún in 1158, Cazola in 1179, and ­others—by which the Christian kings carved up territories that they had not yet conquered.47 But if the Reconquest framework is set aside, different things come into relief. Those same prospective treaties that carved up al-Andalus also carved up Navarre and Portugal. Ibn ‘Ammār died a traitor’s death at the hands of the emir of Seville, but the blow was struck with an axe that the emir had received from the king of Castile.48 What is lost in the neat picture of Reconquest is regained elsewhere. What comes across is a common pattern throughout the peninsula, a pulsation of consolidation, disintegration, and recombination of political units on either side of a conceptual frontier that more often than not may not have existed. And if it did not exist, then Iberia begins to look a lot like Languedoc, or Italy, or many other regions of eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe, where power was highly local in the years before strong monarchies developed, or failed to do so. —  In addition to opening up new perspectives on the internal history of Iberia, setting aside the Reconquest also has potential benefits for its external historiography, furthering the integration of Iberian history into a wider European context. Spain for a long time was treated by nonspecialists as completely different or simply ignored—and this was encouraged at least in part by Spanish medievalists themselves. More recent research, based on a new regional (instead of national) understanding of the medieval world, has shown how easy it is in a variety of areas to discuss Spain as part of the larger story. Traditional, Francocentric crusade historiography ignored events on the Iberian Peninsula, but the newer “pluralist” approach includes them.49 Similarly, for a long time Iberia was the paradigmatic land of “incomplete” feudalism, but it now claims a place in syn-

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thetic European narratives of, and debates surrounding, eleventh- and twelfth-century feudal society.50 Likewise, Iberian towns now add variety to discussions of medieval urban history, where the Italian examples long sufficed to represent the Mediterranean world.51 Yet these discussions still adopt the Reconquest framework. Sometimes this is explicit, as in the debates surrounding the question “Was the Reconquest a Crusade?” or in the description of Iberian municipal militias as a “society organized for war.”52 In other cases, it exists simply in the failure successfully to integrate Islamic institutions into analyses, as in the case of Iberian feudalism, or legal and urban history; as noted, the recent trend is to stress the specificity of each cultural complex.53 This implicit ­influence of the Reconquest framework, and the benefits of looking beyond that framework, is particularly noticeable in one area that was central to Haskins’s vision, namely cultural and intellectual history, the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. For Haskins, the Twelfth-Century Renaissance was, above all, a French phenomenon. Italy “had its part”; England and Germany were important insofar as they spread culture from Italy and France. But what of Spain? There was the Arabic translation movement, of course, but this was not ­really about Spain. For Haskins, Spain’s “part was to serve as the chief link with the learning of the Mohammadean world. . . . Christian Spain was merely a transmitter to the North.” Futhermore, Haskins notes that the translation movement was better characterized as European than as Iberian: there was a John of Seville, but also a Gerard of Cremona, a Hermann of Carinthia, and a Robert of Chester—devaluing even further Spain’s particular relevance. “Most of the translators,” he writes, “were of foreign origin.”54 In areas beyond the translation movement, Iberia barely features in his classic book, and when it does so it is often negatively. Epic literature developed on the road to Compostela, but most of that road, and thus most of the literature, was in France. The catalogue of the monastery of Poblet shows forty-four codices, but they were all liturgical manuscripts rather than the more interesting things one finds in the North. In fact, the number of twelfth-century manuscripts in Spain is “disappointingly small.” To the extent that anything interesting was happening in Iberian monasteries, it was in the eleventh century, and it was a result of French Cluniac influence; by the twelfth, these centers were in decline. Courtly cultures? Nothing until Alfonso X. Roman law? A later import, and that despite Haskins’s unusually detailed discussion of the vitality of juridical study in Languedoc and Provence. Historical writing? Only the Codex Calixtinus and the History of the Cid deserve mention; both were as much

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l­egendary as historical, and the first was in any case mostly French. He even raises doubts about the notion that Gerbert of Aurillac learned his mathematics in Spain.55 Fast forward fifty years, to the 1977 anniversary conference, and little had changed. In noting how scholarship had enlarged Haskins’s northern French focus geographically, Benson and Constable observed that the Renaissance was best viewed as a Francophone rather than a French phe­ nomenon, thus drawing in England, southern Italy, and the Crusader States. Spain is lumped together with Sicily and Hungary, of all places, as regions whose contribution to the renaissance “remains something of an enigma.”56 The papers in that collection do a better job of acknowledging the relevance of Spain, although again often in a backhanded way: Alfonso VI merits note in the chapter on patronage, but as a patron of Cluny; Petrus Hispanus appears in the chapter on schools, but as the lone Spanish master at Paris; the Catalan expedition to Mallorca inspired notable historical writing, but in Italy.57 Iberia mostly appears in notes and asides, not as the subject of extended analysis. The two papers on translation and science improve a little on Haskins’s depiction of Iberia as a simple conduit for translated texts, although even here the traditional framework is decisive: “the great movement of translations followed the progress of the Reconquista.”58 Apart from these, the only subject on which Iberia can be said to have been better integrated into the general European story is in literature, mostly in the essay of Peter Dronke, but in John Mundy’s essay on Toulousain culture as well.59 Both recognize the porousness of the Pyre­ nean border in the lives and audiences of Occitan poets. Dronke goes futher, though, lauding the Tractatus Garsiae as “a turning point in the ­satiric tradition” with the “literary verve of the finest twelfth-century satires.”60 In both of these areas—science and literature—a common theme is the appreciation of the richness of the Iberian cultural context. Spain becomes an incubator of trends rather than simply a locus of transmission. But such a view is absent from most of the collection, as from the most recent synthesis of the topic, which adds little to older views of Iberian developments, or lack thereof.61 Granted, in some fields this dismissive attitude toward Iberia is perfectly reasonable, and in others the absence of evidence is a daunting challenge. Yet the reliance of this history on the Reconquest framework gives pause. In cultural terms, the peninsula is bifurcated. It is only with the progress of the frontier southward—and, not incidentally, with the influx of properly trained Roman clergy to man all of the new ecclesiastical offices opened up by the expansion—that Arabic learning from the other

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side of the frontier was free to spread north into Europe. At the same time, nothing could happen in Christian Iberia itself, because warfare displaced all other activity.62 In the absence of such assumptions—that any high ­culture was necessarily Arabic, that it necessarily flourished only in Islamic or recently Islamic territory; that, because of the Reconquest, the region could only exist as a zone of transmission without people or institutions capable of independent participation in cultural developments; and that the pace of developments was dictated by the location of the frontier—it is possible to begin to rethink the place of Iberia in the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Consider first the idea that Spain was simply the place where Arabic culture was transferred. Given the nature of the knowledge being transmitted, it seems highly unlikely that this could have been the case. Issues of language aside, highly sophisticated religious, philosophical, and scientific texts rarely allow for simple and straightforward translation. Recent research, in fact, has taken a strong interest in the way the translators could depart from literal renderings of their sources—in various ways depending on context and audience—and how they were capable of intelligently blending elements from the Latin and Arabic traditions. Thus, for example, Charles Burnett has argued that a group of translators demonstrate a “conscious attempt to draw together what Latin and Arabic authors respectively had to say on the subject of metaphysics.” Similarly, Thomas Burman has shown how the earliest Latin translations of the Qur’ān were produced with the assistance of tafsīr—commentaries—just as the Parisian scholars of the school of St. Victor accessed the Hebrew commentary tradition in preparing their own work.63 This sort of project, which goes well beyond simple translation and transmission, presupposes an institutional and human infrastructure. The precise nature of that infrastructure and its relationship to Islamic antecedents remains obscure,64 but an infrastructure was certainly there, even if we look only at the traditional categories familiar to students of the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Iberia knew no true universities until the thirteenth century; the studium generale of Palencia may have formed in the late twelfth, but it was gone by the mid-thirteenth, leaving Salamanca to get all the attention.65 But then again, no other region knew true universities before the thirteenth century either. What was important was the emergence of nonmonastic schools, and those were thick on the ground in Spain. Gerbert of Aurillac famously learned his science at the Catalan monastery of Ripoll, but, as Richer reports, he was under the tutelage of Bishop Ató of Vic, and it is from those same years that the cathedral school at Vic emerges into

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the historical record.66 On the other side of the peninsula, there was the cathedral school of Santiago de Compostela, where archbishop Diego Gelmírez received his training, as did bishop Pelayo of León—which pushes its date back into the first half of the eleventh century. Palencia’s ­cathedral, in whatever state, hosted the founder of the Dominican Order from around 1184. Toledo had its cathedral school by the twelfth century, as did Astorga, León, Zamora, Salamanca, Burgos, Girona, Lisbon, Oviedo . . . and pretty much every Iberian see.67 We often know about this institutional infrastructure because of docu­mentary attestations of magistri, or the human infrastructure. The leap from magistri to schools is, of course, a treacherous one, but the old debates surrounding this issue are only recently being applied to the Iberian evidence.68 Magistri there were, over three hundred before the year 1300 just in the ten Castilian schools that were the subject of the most detailed study to date of the topic, a number that compares favorably, for example, with English evidence.69 Two things about the Iberian evidence are noteworthy. First, most of the references come from local sources. Just as Richer’s account makes the tenth-century Ató of Vic sound more like Gerbert’s professor than the academic administrator that he more likely was, Peter the Venerable’s mention of a magister Petrus Toletanus has created a Qur’ān translator in the Toledo chapter who seems not to have existed there, and the papal chancery in the space of a week could address letters to a pair of figures who were designated successively “masters Maurice and Michael,” “Maurice and master Michael,” and “master Maurice and Michael.”70 The rich Iberian ecclesiastical archives themselves offer a more trustworthy foundation for investigation of this question. Second, these magistri are not, as the old story held, all Frenchmen, sent from Cluny to rescue Spain from liturgical barbarism and general intellectual backwardness. Foreigners there were, but to the extent that they were “French,” they were from the Midi, which in this period was much closer culturally to Iberia than it was to the schools in Paris, and in fact English and Italian visiting scholars were more numerous. Furthermore, as Adeline Rucquoi observes, “Such foreigners as there were . . . came not to teach but to learn.” It is the privileging of the quintessentially Parisian subject of theology that has led scholars to think the opposite. And Hispani who travelled abroad for educational purposes often returned home.71 In short, Iberia was not an intellectual colony of the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, neither a supplier of raw materials in the form of nuggets of Arabic learning nor the consumer of finished goods in the form of polished clerics to

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man schools and church offices alike. It was an important node in a European network of knowledge. The few currently known major texts authored, rather than translated, in the region—the Tractatus Garsiae, the Planeta of Diego García de Campos, the Concordia of Martin of León, the De processione mundi of Gundisalvus of Toledo, the Liber mahameleth 72— look rather different from this perspective: not inexplicable aberrations, but the products of a vibrant intellectual community.73 The legal culture of eleventh- and twelfth-century Iberia offers support for this interpretation of the cultural and intellectual history of the region. In the shorthand version of Spanish legal history, the eleventh and twelfth centuries fall squarely in the gap between the Visigothic Code and the Romanist-influenced legislative activity of Jaume I and Alfonso X in the thirteenth century, notably the Furs of Valencia and the Siete Partidas. To the extent that there is a distinctive reflection of Iberian law in the period, it is the fueros—charters of custom granted to towns—which are in any case more evidence of primitivism and fragmentation than monuments of juridical science.74 But the introduction of the new legal learning was in Iberia, as in many other regions of Europe, clearly a twelfth-century phenomenon. Law books circulated. In his testament of 1185, the bishop of Oporto had four volumes of law books to bequeath—not only Gratian and the Digest, but a book of summas. The memorial book of the chapter of Coim­bra records that a magister Iohannis diaconus (d. 1187) bequeathed a Decretum, and a Iohannes presbiter qui fuit primus ecclesie magister scolarum (d. 1192) left a Librum Decretorum cum summa eorum. On the other side of the peninsula, there is mention in documents from Catalonia of the ­Digestum vetus (1188), the “totum ‘Corpus iuris’ exceptus ‘Authenticum’ ” (1197), the Institutes (1197), the Codex and Authenticum (1197), and the Authenticum and Institutes (1195). The oldest civil law manuscript in the library of Toledo is a glossed Authenticum dating to circa 1180 and connected to Bologna. The reconstruction of contemporary libraries is revealing these cases to be anything but exceptional.75 The presence of books can be inferred at even earlier dates from textual studies. Romanist ideas worked their way into the Usatges of Barcelona, reflecting knowledge from as early as 1150 of the Exceptiones Petri, an early twelfth-century Roman law text from the Midi; that same text also leaves traces in the nearly contemporary second recension of the Collectio Caesaragustana.76 This is hardly surprising, given not only the proximity of Montpellier with its

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great law school, but the fact that the town was often closely tied politically to the counts of Barcelona. In the legal realm, too, Iberia was not simply a consumer of imported goods. While just one of the forty-seven regent masters at Paris between 1179 and 1215 surveyed by John Baldwin for the 1977 Haskins conference could be linked to Iberia, studies of Hispani in the law schools of Bologna—students and masters—have shown such surprisingly large numbers for the early thirteenth century that a late twelfth-century presence is now presumed. For example, Santa María de Roncesvalles acquired around 1200 a foundation in Bologna, La Mascarella, which served as a center for Navarrese law students in the town; if the foundation was acquired in reaction to a need, then the Navarrese presence in the town must already have been substantial. Similarly, eighty-nine Catalan scholars can be traced there in the period 1218–29 alone.77 Petrus Hispanus was an early glossator of Gratian, active from the 1170s; his countrymen, Melendus and Martín Arias, from the 1190s; and Bernardus Compostellanus and Pelayo Gaytán from around 1200. Iberian canonists only become easier to trace in the early thirteenth century: Vicentius Hispanus, Laurentius Hispanus, Ioannes Garsias Hispanus, Silvester Hispanus, and of course Ramón de Peñafort. Among civilians, Pere de Cardona (d. 1183) appears first. Crucially, many of these figures can be shown to have returned to Iberia to take up bishoprics: Martín Arias at Zamora (1193–1217), Melendus at Osma (1210–5), Laurentius Hispanus at Orense (1218–48), and perhaps Vicentius Hispanus at Zaragoza (1239–44). Pere of Cardona, a Catalan, went from teaching law at Montpellier to serving as chancellor of ­ satges Castile under Alfonso IX from 1178 to 1182.78 If texts such as the U or even the fueros are examined, not for scraps of learning or vocabulary introduced by foreigners,79 but as the products of a sophisticated legal culture, they too begin to appear in a different light. And if a sophisticated indigenous legal culture existed, what is the likelihood that it remained entirely cut off from Islamic legal thought and practice? Just as the Reconquest-free reading of Iberian history in this period with which this essay began can only be called tendentious, this discussion of eleventh- and twelfth-century Iberian intellectual life is undoubtedly a maximalist interpretation of limited evidence. Yet given the historiographi­ cal shifts seen in other subfields and, more importantly, the fact that the sources are only now being mined by scholars willing to conceptualize the intellectual history of this period in a new way, it is an interpretation that may yet be proved valid.

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—  I have argued that the internal, political history of Iberia makes more sense in the absence of the Reconquest narrative. The result is more complex, but at a minimum it allows new aspects of Iberian history to emerge, and it may ultimately be a more faithful account of that history. I have also claimed that the rejection of the Reconquest framework benefits the writing of the external history of the Iberian Peninsula—the way in which it can be written into the broader narrative of European history generally. The approach taken here toward cultural and intellectual ­history—the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century—might fruitfully be extended to other fields. These are not arguments for a new version of convivencia—although they might support an older view of that phenomenon, as Castro’s original conception made more room for conflict than the current rosy scenarios tend to.80 Richard Bulliet’s proposed adoption of the notion of Islamo-Christian civilization, that historians of Europe and the Islamic world readjust their perspective so as to recognize a “common socioreligious system” and a “single civilizational complex,” may be closer to the mark.81 There is certainly a utility to this approach for the medieval period in general and medieval Iberia in particular. From this perspective, we can find that a complicated and occasionally integrated Iberian Islamo-Christian intellectual culture fits nicely into the twelfthcentury narrative. If thinking about a complicated, integrated, IslamoChristian political world helps us get there—even if it is just a heuristic device, a matter of suspension of belief in the Reconquest—then so be it. Notes 1. Haskins, Renaissance, p. 285. I would like to thank the participants at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame conference on “European Transformations, 950–1200,” held October 26–28, 2006, for their observations, many of which have found their way into this paper, and particularly Paul Freedman and Piotr Górecki, who offered comments on later versions. 2.  Roger Collins, Visigothic Spain, 409–711 (Malden, 2004). 3.  On the Hispani, see most recently Cullen J. Chandler, “Between Court and Counts: Carolingian Catalonia and the aprisio Grant, 778–897,” Early Medieval Europe 11 (2002), pp. 19–44. 4.  Robert I. Burns, ed., The Worlds of Alfonso the Learned and James the Conqueror: Intellect and Force in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1985). 5. Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford, 1993), pp. 205–9. Manuel González Jiménez, “¿Re-conquista? Un estado de la cuestión,” in Tópicos y realidades de la Edad Media (I), ed. Eloy Benito Ruano (Madrid, 2000), pp. 155–78, is a very useful, if selective, survey of the historiography.

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6.  Bernard F. Reilly, The Contest of Christian and Muslim Spain, 1031–1157 (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), where the word Reconquista appears first on p. 31; Ángel J. Martín Duque, ed., La historia medieval en España: Un balance historiográfico (1968–1998); 25 Semana de estudios medievales, Estellla-Lizarra, 14–18 julio 1998 (Pamplona, 1999). See also R. A. Fletcher, “Reconquest and Crusade in Spain, ca. 1050–1150,” TRHS, 5th ser., 37 (1987), pp. 31–47, and the works cited there at p. 47, n. 49. For a broader view of the attachment of Iberian historiography to such grand ideas, see J. N. Hillgarth, “Spanish Historiography and Iberian Reality,” History and Theory 24 (1985), pp. 23–43. 7.  Brian A. Catlos, The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 1050–1300 (Cambridge, 2004); Thomas W. Barton, “Conquest and Consolidation: Authority and Territoriality in New Catalonia, 1000– 1300” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2006); Hussein Fancy, “Mercenary Logic: Muslim Soldiers in the Service of the Crown of Aragon, 1213–1327” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2007). The work of Thomas F. Glick has been particularly important both in the reconceptualization of the relationship between al-Andalus and the Christian kingdoms and in the integration of archaeological evidence: Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 2005); From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (Manchester, 1995). For a full bibliographical survey, see María Jesús Viguera ­Molins, “Al-Andalus: De Omeyas a Almohades,” in Martín Duque, La historia medieval en España, pp. 51–147. 8.  José Ángel García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, “Glosa de un balance sobre la historiografía medieval española de los últimos treinta años (I),” in Martín Duque, La historia medieval en España, pp. 807–24, at p. 818, describes “el abandono del paradigma mozárabe, en otras palabras, la sustitución del modelo albornociano (la contextura vital del homo hispanicus) por el modelo guichardiano (Al-­ Andalus, una sociedad islámica de Occidente). En definitiva, el reconocimiento de la existencia en la Península Ibérica durante la Edad Media de dos sociedades globales: la feudal cristiana y la andalusí, cada una con sus pautas específicas de organización y funcionamiento.” The references are to the visions of the historians Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz y Menduiña (1893–1984) and Pierre Guichard. 9.  For example, Catlos, The Victors and the Vanquished, pp. 13, 86–9; Flocel Sabaté, L’expansió territorial de Catalunya (segles 9–12) ¿Conquesta o repoblació? (Lleida, 1996). 10.  Derek W. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain (London, 1978), p. 1. 11.  Recent examples: Julio Valdeón Baruque, La Reconquista: El concepto de España: Unidad y diversidad (Madrid, 2006); Béatrice Leroy, En Espagne chrétienne du 11e–15e siècle: La reconquista (Pau, 2006); Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia (Ithaca, 2006). For syntheses and textbooks, see, for example, Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, ed., La Reconquista y el proceso de diferenciación política (1035–1217), Historia de España Menéndez Pidal 9 (Madrid, 1998); Robert Bartlett, Making of Europe, pp. 11–13 and passim; Judith M. Bennett and C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe: A Short History, 10th ed. (New York, 2006), pp. 217–20; Clifford R. Backman, The Worlds of Medieval Europe (New York, 2003), pp. 198–200. Edward Peters, Europe and the Middle Ages, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2004), pp. 233–6, goes the furthest

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in taking on the new trends in scholarship. Fletcher, “Reconquest,” pp. 33 and 46–7, suggested that Spanish historiography had (in 1987) already moved on to different concerns. To the extent that the present essay repeats his dismantling of the Reconquest framework, it is because it remains potent outside Spain, although I think that my argument goes further than his and in a different direction. 12.  David Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002–1086 (Princeton, 1985), p. 273. 13.  Chronicle of Alfonso III (Ovetensis) 6, ed. Jan Prelog, Die Chronik Alfons’ III: Untersuchung und kritische Edition der vier Redaktionen (Frankfurt, 1980), p. 24. For the dating, see pp. clxxxvi–clxxxvii. 14. Linehan, History, c. 4, pp. 94–127; Julio Escalona, “Family Memories: Inventing Alfonso I of Asturias,” in Building Legitimacy: Political Discourses and Forms of Legitimacy in Medieval Societies, ed. Isabel Alfonso, Hugh Kennedy, and Julio Escalona (Leiden, 2004), pp. 223–62. 15.  ‘Abd Allāh b. Buluggīn, The Tibyān 5, trans. Amin T. Tibi (Leiden, 1986), p. 90; Ibn ‘Idhārī, al-Bayān al-Mugrīb 3.282, s.a. 459, trans. Felipe Maíllo Salgado, La caída del califato de Córdoba y los reyes de taifas (al-Bayān al-Mugrib) (Salamanca, 1993), p. 233; Eng. trans. Wasserstein, Party-Kings, p. 250. 16. Prelog, Die Chronik Alfons’ III, pp. xiii–xxii. 17. Fletcher, “Reconquest”; cf. Catlos, The Victors and the Vanquished, pp. 86–8. 18.  Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia, 2003), p. 24, and “The Integration of Christian Spain into Europe: The Role of Alfonso VI of León-Castile,” in Santiago, Saint-Denis, and Saint Peter: The Reception of the Roman Liturgy in León-Castile in 1080, ed. Bernard F. Reilly (New York, 1985), pp. 101–20 (on church reform); Adam J. Kosto, “What about Spain? Iberia in the Historiography of Medieval European Feudalism,” in Feudalism: New Landscapes of Debate, ed. Sverre Bagge, Michael Gelting, and Thomas Lindqvist (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 135–58. 19. Lomax, Reconquest, rehearses the standard narrative. 20. O’Callaghan, Reconquest, p. 19; Catlos, The Victors and the Vanquished, p. 13; Fletcher, “Reconquest,” p. 36. 21. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, La España del Cid, 7th ed., 2 vols. (Madrid, 1969); Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid (London, 1989). The recent interpretations date back to R. P. A. Dozy, Recherches sur l’histoire politique et littéraire de l’Espagne pendant le Moyen Âge (Leiden, 1849), pp. 320–706; see Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, pp. 200–1. 22.  R. Dozy, Histoire des musulmans d’Espagne jusqu’à la conquête de l’Anda­ lousie par les Almoravides (711–1110), ed. E. Lévi-Provençal, new ed. (Leiden, 1932), vol. 3, pp. 83–117; Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, pp. 34–9. 23.  Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Emilio García Gómez, “El conde mozárabe Sisnando Davídiz y la política de Alfonso VI con los taifas,” Al-Andalus 12 (1947), pp. 27–41; David Lopes, “O Cid português: Geraldo Sempavor (novas fontes ­árabes sôbre os seus feitos e morte),” Revista portuguesa de história 1 (1941), pp. 93–111. 24.  Julio González, El reino de Castilla en la época de Alfonso VIII, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1960), vol. 1, p. 968, n. 94.

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25. “Veremudus vero profectus est antea ad Almezor Regem magnum Is­ maelitarum, & cum Rex audisset obtium Ramiri, vocavit Veremudum, & petivit ei, ut si suo adjutorio posset recuperare Regnum suum, quod daret ei aliquod servitium & concessa innumera paganorum multitudine restituit eum in regno suo”; Chronicon Iriense 12, ed. Henrique Flórez, España sagrada, vol. 20 (Madrid, 1765), pp. 607–8; Dozy, Histoire, vol. 2, pp. 238 and 256–61; Ibn ‘Idhārī, al-Bayān alMugrīb 2.318, trans. E. Fagnan, Histoire de l’Afrique et de l’Espagne intitulée alBayano’l-mogrib, 2 vols. (Algiers, 1901–4), vol. 2, p. 492. See generally Simon Barton, “Traitors to the Faith? Christian Mercenaries in al-Andalus and the Maghreb, ca. 1100–1300,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence: Studies in Honour of Angus MacKay, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 23–45; and now for the opposite phenomenon, Fancy, “Mercenary Logic.” 26.  On the vexed question of the frontier, see, e.g., J. Gautier Dalché, “Islam et Chrétienté en Espagne au XIIe siècle: Contribution à l’étude de la notion de frontière,” Hesperis 46 (1959), pp. 185–217; Eduardo Manzano Moreno, “The Creation of a Medieval Frontier: Islam and Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula, Eighth to Eleventh Centuries,” in Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, 700– 1700, ed. Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 32–54. 27.  Philipp Jaffé, Regesta pontificum romanorum ab condita ecclesia ad annum post Christum natum 1198, 2nd ed., ed. Wilhelm Wattenbach et al., 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1885–8), no. 17433; Fidel Fita Colomé, “Bulas históricas del reino de Navarra en los postreros años del siglo 12,” Boletín de la Real academia de la historia 26 (1895), pp. 417–59, at pp. 423–4 (no. 3). 28.  “The key transformation of the Reconquest was not from the Islamic absolutism of the Caliphate to the Christian absolutism of the Catholic kings, but rather from the cellular structure of the Islamic Taifa to that of the Christian Taifa”; Thomas F. Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 173. 29.  For example, “Preoccupied often with pettier ambitions, they either lost sight of the need for vigilance against the common enemy or, worse, realized it only when it was too late”; Wasserstein, Party-Kings, p. 6. 30.  And it hardly ended after Las Navas. See, e.g., Angus MacKay, “Religion, Culture, and Ideology on the Late Medieval Castilian-Granadan Frontier,” in ­Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus Mackay (Oxford, 1989), pp. 217–43, esp. pp. 218–28. 31.  Barcelona, Arxiu de la Corona de Aragó, Cancelleria, Pergamins [hereafter ACA], Ramon Berenguer I, sd 38, ed. Gaspar Feliu et al., Els pergamins de l’arxiu comtal de Barcelona de Ramon Borrell a Ramon Berenguer I (Barcelona, 1999), vol. 2, pp. 954, 956 (no. 523); Pierre Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du 10e à la fin du 11e siècle: Croissance et mutations d’une société (Toulouse, 1975–76), vol. 2, pp. 643–4. 32.  Cebrià Baraut, ed., “Els documents, dels anys 1051–1075, de l’Arxiu capitular de La Seu d’Urgell,” Urgellia 6 (1983), pp. 7–243, at pp. 183–4 (no. 823); ACA, Ramon Berenguer I, sd 32, sd 186, ed. Feliu et al., Els pergamins, vol. 3, pp. 1392–3 and 1501–2 (nos. 843bis and 936); Bonnassie, La Catalogne, vol. 2,

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p. 618; Michel Zimmermann, “Le role de la frontière dans la formation de la Cata­ logne (9–12ème siècle),” in Aragón en la Edad Media: Las sociedades de frontera en la España medieval; Sesiones de trabajo: II Seminario de historia medieval (Zaragoza, 1993), pp. 7–29, at p. 18. For earlier, similar cases of rebellions in concert with Muslim troops, see José Manuel Ruiz Asencio, “Rebelions leonesas contra Vermudo II,” Archivos Leoneses 23 (1969), pp. 215–41. 33.  Historia Roderici vel Gesta Roderici Campidocti 7–11, ed. E. Falque Rey, CCCM 71 (1990), pp. 49–51; Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, pp. 128–32. 34.  Dolors Bramon, De quan érem o no musulmans: Textos del 713 al 1010 (Vic, 2000), pp. 354–63; Bonnassie, La Catalogne, vol. 1, pp. 348–51; Dozy, Histoire, vol. 2, pp. 294–6 (a. 1009), 297–8 (a. 1010), 314–5 (a. 1017). 35.  Historia Roderici 4, ed. Falque Rey, p. 48; Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, p. 112. 36.  Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under King Alfonso VI, 1065–1109 (Princeton, 1988), pp. 83–4, 164, and 210; Santiago Sobrequés, Els grans comtes de Barcelona, 4th ed. (Barcelona, 1985), pp. 105–7, 113–20; Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, e.g., pp. 134–8. One could cite many other similar alliances from these years. 37.  ACA, Ramon Berenguer III, 229, ed. José María Lacarra, Documentos para el estudio de la reconquista y repoblación del valle del Ebro, 2 vols., Textos medievales 62–3 (Zaragoza, 1982–85), vol. 1, pp. 84–5 (no. 69). A tornio before Lleida between the count of Barcelona and the king of Aragon shortly thereafter may reflect the count’s military aid to his new ally. “Rex Adefunsus fabricat castellum super Lerita et habuit tornio cum illo Pictauino et illo comite de Barchilona”; Lacarra, ed., Documentos, vol. 1, pp. 104–5 (no. 90). See also Barton, “Conquest and Consolidation,” p. 125. 38.  Évariste Lévi-Provençal, Histoire de l’Espagne musulmane, vol. 2, Le califat umaiyade de Cordoue (912–1031), new ed. (Paris, 1950), pp. 76–7; Dozy, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 249; Chronicon Compostellanum 2, ed. Flórez, España sagrada, vol. 20, p. 609; Ibn Khaldūn, Kitāb al-‘Ibar, trans. R. Dozy, Recherches sur l’histoire et la littérature de l’Espagne pendant le Moyen Age, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1881), vol. 1, pp. 100–1. 39.  Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under King Alfonso VII, 1126–1157 (Philadelphia, 1998), p. 133; Ambrosio Huici, “Un nuevo manuscrito de al-Bayān al-Mugrib: Datos inéditos y aclaraciones sobre los últimos años del reinado de Alfonso VII, el emperador,” Al-Andalus 24 (1959), pp. 63–84, at pp. 75–6. 40.  Julio González, Regesta de Fernando II (Madrid, 1943), pp. 86–90. 41.  Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. Henry Richards Luard, 7 vols., RS 57 (London, 1872–83), vol. 2, pp. 559–66; Nevill Barbour, “The Embassy Sent by King John of England to Miramolin, King of Morocco,” Al-Andalus 25 (1960), pp. 373–81; O’Callaghan, Reconquest, pp. 66–7. 42. Wasserstein, Party-Kings, p. 46; Ibn ‘Idhārī, al-Bayān al-Mugrib 3.10, s.a. 394, trans. Maíllo Salgado, La caída, p. 183; Ibn Khaldūn, Kitāb al-‘Ibar, trans. R. Dozy, Recherches, vol. 1, pg. 102; Ibn al-Khatīb, A‘māl 87, trans. Wilhelm Hoenerbach, Islamische Geschichte Spaniens: Übersetzung der A‘māl al-a‘lām und ergänzender Texte (Zürich, 1970), pp. 194–5.

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43.  Chronicon Compostellanum 2, ed. Flórez, España sagrada, vol. 20, p. 609 (García); Historia Silense 9, ed. Justo Pérez de Urbel and Atiliano González RuizZorilla (Madrid, 1959), p. 120 (Alfonso); Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris 1.48, ed. Antonio Maya Sánchez, CCCM 71 (1990), p. 172 (Rodrigo González); Reilly, ­Alfonso VI, pp. 63–4; Reilly, Alfonso VII, p. 57. 44.  Codice diplomatico della repubblica di Genova, ed. Cesare Imperiale, vol. 1 (Rome, 1936), pp. 247–8 (no. 196); I diplomi arabi del R. archivio fiorentino, ed. Michele Amari (Florence, 1863), pp. 239–40 (no. 2.1). 45.  Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris 1.70, ed. Maya Sánchez, p. 182. 46.  Peire Vidal, Songs Poésies 32.5, ed. Joseph Anglade, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1923), p. 103; Wasserstein, Party-Kings, pp. 279–82 (quotation at p. 280); Miguel Asín Palacios, “Un códice inexplorado del cordobés Ibn Hazm,” Al-Andalus 2 (1934), pp. 1–56, at pp. 42–3; O’Callaghan, Reconquest, pp. 63–4. 47.  Francisco Miquel Rosell, ed., Liber feudorum maior: Cartulario real que se conserva en el Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1945–7), vol. 1, pp. 39–44 and 48–51 (nos. 29 [Tudellén] and 34–5 [Cazola]); González, Alfonso VIII, vol. 2, pp. 79–82 and 528–32 (nos. 44 [Sahagún] and 319–20 [Cazola]); O’Callaghan, Reconquest, pp. 47, 50–1, 56 (citing additional editions of the treaties). 48. O’Callaghan, Reconquest, pp. 51, 56; Dozy, Histoire, vol. 3, p. 117; Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, p. 38. 49.  Giles Constable, “The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries,” Trad 9 (1953), pp. 213–80, which addresses the Iberian aspect of the undertaking, has been identified as one of the roots of the pluralist approach. See Jonathan RileySmith, “The Crusading Movement and Historians,” in The Oxford History of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith (Oxford, 1999), pp. 1–14, at pp. 11–12. 50.  Kosto, “What about Spain?” Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton, 2009) brilliantly renovates the entire question; see for Iberia pp. 95–111, 243–59, 345–8, 371–8, 431–7, 499–514. 51. Stephen P. Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 1096–1291 (Cambridge, 1995), who notes (p. 4) how “towns of the medieval Mediterranean have usually been viewed through the stylishly tinted lenses of Italian glasses.” Similar analyses are possible for almost every area of history (slavery, the peasantry, ecclesiastical reform, governance . . .). Studies of the Iberian nobility, to take just one more example, are of relatively more recent appearance, but they again address their analyses to a typically European eleventh- and twelfth-century questionnaire: family structure, marriage strategies, property management, and relations to ecclesiastical and royal institutions. See, e.g., Simon Barton, The Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century León and Castile (Cambridge, 1997); Marie-Claude Gerbet, Les noblesses espagnoles au Moyen Age 11e–15e siècle (Paris, 1994), esp. pp. 9–72; Martin Aurell, Les noces du comte: Mariage et pouvoir en Catalogne, 785–1213 (Paris, 1995). 52. O’Callaghan, Reconquest, pp. 19–22, and works cited there; James F. Powers, A Society Organized for War: The Iberian Municipal Militias in the Central Middle Ages, 1000–1284 (Berkeley, 1988); Elena Lourie, “A Society Organized for War: Medieval Spain,” P&P 35 (1966), pp. 54–76.

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53.  Above, n. 8. 54. Haskins, Renaissance, pp. 11, 52–3, 278ff. 55.  Ibid., pp. 12, 47 (epic), pp. 41–3, 83 (manuscripts), p. 43 (monasteries), pp. 197, 209ff. (Roman law), pp. 266–9 (historical writing). 56.  Renaissance & Renewal, pp. xxvi–xxvii. 57.  Ibid., p. 145 (Petrus Hispanus), p. 253 (Alfonso VI), p. 395 (Liber Maio­ lichinus). 58.  Ibid., pp. 421–62 (quotation at p. 440), 463–87. 59.  Ibid., pp. 229–47, 569–92; cf. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London, 1953), pp. 541–3 (“Spain’s Cultural ‘Belatedness’”). See now, in this vein but integrating Arabic sources, Cynthia Robinson, In Praise of Song: The Making of Courtly Culture in alAndalus and Provence, 1005–1134 A.D. (Leiden, 2002), esp. part 2. 60.  Renaissance & Renewal, p. 583. 61. R. N. Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester, 1999); Leidulf Melve, “‘The Revolt of the Medievalists’: Directions in Recent Research on the Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” JMH 32 (2006), pp. 231–52, ignores Iberia ­entirely. 62. An interpretation associated with, among others, Américo Castro. See Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain, p. 295, and related comments at pp. 298–9, linking Castro’s thought to Haskins; Américo Castro, The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History, trans. Willard F. King and Selma Margaretten (Berkeley, 1971), pp. 519, n. 11, and 573. 63.  Charles Burnett, “The Blend of Latin and Arabic Sources in the Metaphysics of Adelard of Bath, Hermann of Carinthia, and Gundisalvus,” in Meta­ physics in the Twelfth Century: On the Relationship among Philosophy, Science, and Theology, ed. Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Alexander Fidora, and Andreas Niederberger (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 41–65; Thomas E. Burman, “Tafsīr and Translation: Traditional Arabic Qur’ān Exegesis and the Latin Qur’āns of Robert of Ketton and Mark of Toledo,” Spec 73 (1998), pp. 703–32; Charles S. F. Burnett, “Literal Translation and Intelligent Adaptation amongst the Arabic-Latin Translators of the First Half of the Twelfth Century,” in La diffusione delle scienze islamiche nel medio evo europeo (Roma, 2–4 ottobre 1984) (Rome, 1987), pp. 9–28; and Charles Burnett, “The Institutional Context of Arabic-Latin Translations of the Middle Ages: A Reassessment of the ‘School of Toledo,’” in Vocabulary of Teaching and Research between Middle Ages and Renaissance: Proceedings of the Colloquium, London, Warburg Institute, 11–12 March 1994, ed. Olga Weijers (Turnhout, 1995), pp. 214–35, esp. at pp. 225–6: “In fact, the more research that is done by modern scholars, the more thorough and, one might say, scientific, this task of interpreting would seem to have been.” Burnett notes (“The Blend of Latin and Arabic Sources,” p. 61) that the three scholars in question were more likely to be united by a connection to Chartres than to Spain, but the point here about a synthetic method remains relevant. For a concise survey and bibliography of the translation movement in general, see Charles Burnett, “The Translating Activity in Medieval Spain,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden, 1992), pp. 1036–58. 64.  For example, Burnett, “Institutional Context,” pp. 226–7; Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain, pp. 302–13; Cándido María Ajo González y Sáinz de Zúñiga,

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Historia de las universidades hispánicas: Orígenes y desarrollo desde su aparición hasta nuestros días, vol. 1, Medievo y renacimiento universitario (Madrid, 1957), pp. ­183–95. 65.  Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, new ed., ed. F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1936), vol. 2, pp. 63–114 (ch. 7, “The Universities of Spain and Portugal”); Ajo González y Sáinz de Zúñiga, Historia de las universidades hispánicas, pp. 195–201. Vicente Cantarino, “Medieval Spanish Institutions of Learning: A Reappraisal,” in L’enseignement en Islam et en Occident au Moyen Age: Communications présentées pendant la session des 25–28 octobre 1976, ed. George Makdisi, Dominique Sourdel, and Janine Sourdel-Thomine (Paris, 1977) [=Revue des études islamiques 44/hors série 13 (1976)], pp. 217–28, argues for a distinct Iberian path. 66.  “Hattoni episcopo . . . instruendum commisit. Apud quem etiam in mathesi plurimum et efficaciter studuit;” Richer, Historiae 3.43, ed. Hartmut Hoffmann, MGH SS 38 (2000), p. 192. See also Josep M. Masnou, “L’escola de la catedral de Vic al segle 11,” in Actes del congrés internacional Gerbert d’Orlhac i el seu temps: Catalunya i Europa a la fi del 1r millenni; Vic-Ripoll, 10–13 de novembre de 1999, ed. Imma Ollich i Castanyer (Vic, 1999), pp. 621–34. 67. José María Soto Rábanos, “Las escuelas urbanas y el renacimiento del siglo 12,” in La enseñanza en la edad media: 10 semana de estudios medievales, Nájera, 1999, ed. José-Ignacio de la Iglesia Duarte (Logroño, 2000), pp. 207–41, at pp. 228–32; Richard Fletcher, Saint James’ Catapult: The Life and Times of Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela (Oxford, 1984), pp. 103, 324–6; Susana Guijarro, “Masters and Schools in the Castilian Cathedrals during the Spanish Middle Ages, 1000–1300,” Medieval History 4 (1994), pp. 218–47, at p. 219. 68.  Julia Barrow, “Education and the Recruitment of Cathedral Canons in England and Germany, 1100–1225,” Via 20 (1989), pp. 117–38; Reniassance & Renewal, pp. 134–5. 69.  Guijarro, “Masters,” pp. 226–7. 70.  Thomas N. Bisson, “L’aprentatge dels savis a Europa pels volts de l’any mil: Les lliçons de Gerbert, Abbo i Fulbert,” in Ollich i Castanyer, Actes del congrès, pp. 577–91, at p. 580; Adeline Rucquoi, “Las rutas del saber: España en el siglo 12,” Cuadernos de historia de España 75 (1998–99), pp. 41–58, at p. 46 (cf. Peter the Venerable, Letter 111 [in The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. Giles Constable (Cambridge, Mass. 1967), vol. 1, p. 294]); Aquilino Iglesia Ferreirós, “Escuela, estudio y maestros,” Historia: Instituciones; Documentos. 25 (1998), pp. 313–26, at p. 317. Peter, of course, did travel to Iberia in 1142, and Constable dates the letter (vol. 2, p. 172) to 1144, but he still qualifies, like Richer and the anonymous scribes of the papal chancery, as an outsider. 71.  Rucquoi, “Las rutas del saber,” quotation at p. 52. 72.  Tractatus Garsiae, or the Translation of the Relics of SS. Gold and Silver, ed. Rodney M. Thompson (Leiden, 1973); Diego García de Campos, Planeta: Obra ascética del siglo 13, ed. Manuel Alonso (Madrid, 1943); PL 208: 27–1350 (Martin of León); [Dominicus Gundissalinus], De divisione philosophiae, ed. Ludwig Baur (Münster, 1903). See also: Adeline Rucquoi, “Gundisalvus ou Dominicus Gundi­ salvi?” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 41 (1999), pp. 85–106; Raymond McClus-

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key, “The Genesis of the Concordia of Martin of León,” in God and Man in Medieval Spain: Essays in Honour of J. R. L. Highfield, ed. Derek Lomax and David Mackenzie (Warminster, 1989), pp. 19–36; Santo Martino de León: Ponencias del I congreso internacional sobre Santo Martino en el 8 centenario du su obra literaria (1185–1985) (León, 1987); J. Sesinao, “Le Liber mahameleth: Un traité mathématique latin composé au 12e siècle en Espagne,” in Histoire des mathématiques arabes: Actes du colloque, Premier colloque international sur l’histoire des mathématiques arabes, Alger, 1, 2, 3 décembre 1986 (Algiers, 1988), pp. 69–98. I have not had an opportunity to consult Anne-Marie Vlasschaert, “Le ‘Liber mahameleth’: Édition critique, traduction et commentaires” (Ph.D. diss., Université Catholique de Louvain, 2002). My thanks to my colleague George Saliba for the last two references. 73.  “Nous sommes sans doute loin ici de l’image traditionnelle d’une ‘école de traducteurs’, travaillant isolée sous la houlette de l’archevêque, recourant à des traducteurs juifs pour pallier aux lacunes en arabe de ses membres, et oeuvrant à la diffusion en Occident des connaissances philosophiques et scientifiques transmises par les textes arabes. Nous nous trouvons en revanche en face à une communauté intellectuelle importante, bilingüe et composite qui vivait et travaillait à Tolède, où d’aucuns comme Dominicus Gundisalvi traduisaient, d’autres comme Gundisalvus réfléchissaient et élaboraient une œuvre originale en latin, certains comme Gérard de Crémone enseignaient au sein des écoles qu’ils avaient ouvertes, où un certain nombre continuait à polémiser en arabe avec les musulmans, d’où partaient des prophéties astrologiques qui faisaient trembler l’Occident, où chacun, finalement, selon ses goûts et ses capacités personnelles avait accès aux débats philosophiques et religieux, scientifiques et astrologiques”; Rucquoi, “Gundisalvus,” pp. 105–6. 74.  For example, E. N. van Kleffens, Hispanic Law until the End of the Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1968); Santos M. Coronas González, Manual de historia del derecho español, 2nd ed. (Valencia, 1999), e.g., p. 139: “Esta costumbre . . . se refiere genéricamente a esa creación popular y espontánea del Derecho, arraigada en una práctica no escrita, consagrada por el tiempo y aceptada por la comunidad o grupo social. Normalmente su ámbito de aplicación fue local o comarcal.” 75.  Antonio García y García, “El Corpus iuris civilis en els documents dels segles 12–15,” Ausa 6 (1969), pp. 89–101, and “La canonística ibérica (1150–1250) en la investigación reciente,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 11 (1981), pp. 41–75, at pp. 52–3; Isaías da Rosa Pereira, “Livros de direito na idade média,” Lusitania sacra 7 (1964–66), pp. 7–60, at pp. 19, 22, and 23; Rucquoi, “Las rutas del saber,” p. 54; Soto Rábanos, “Las escuelas,” pp. 234–5; Maunel C. Díaz y Díaz, “Bibliotecas de los reinos hispánicos en el siglo 12,” in Alfonso VIII y su época: II curso de cultura medieval, Aguilar de Campóo, 1–6 octubre 1990 (Madrid, 1992), pp. 61–9, at p. 66. 76. Adam J. Kosto, “The Limited Impact of the Usatges de Barcelona in Twelfth-Century Catalonia,” Trad 56 (2001), pp. 53–88, at p. 61; André Gouron, “Sur la compilation des Usatges de Barcelone au douzième siècle,” in El dret comú i Catalunya: Actes del 8 simposi internacional, Barcelona, 29–30 de mai de 1998, ed. Aquilino Iglesia Ferreirós (Barcelona, 1999), pp. 219–36; Lotte Kéry, Canonical Collections of the Early Middle Ages (ca. 400–1140): A Bibliographical Guide to the Manuscripts and Literature (Washington, D.C., 1999), pp. 260–2. See generally

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José María Font Rius, “La recepción del derecho romano en la Península Ibérica durante la Edad Media,” Recueil des mémoires et travaux publiées par la Société du droit et des institutions des anciens pays de droit écrit 6 (1967), pp. 85–104. 77.  Renaissance & Renewal, pp. 138–72; Soto Rábanos, “Las escuelas,” p. 241, n. 74; Pascual Tamburri Bariain, “Estudiantes navarros en Bolonia (siglos 12–19): Notas sobre una ‘nación’ navarra,” Principe de Viana 59 (1998), pp. 763–99, at pp. 770–3, and “Presencia institucional de Roncesvalles en Bolonia (siglos 13–16),” Hispania sacra 49 (1997), pp. 363–408. Antonio García y García, “El studium bononiense y la península ibérica,” in his Iglesia, sociedad y derecho (Salamanca, 1985), vol. 1, pp. 45–64, esp. pp. 50–2: “El primer hecho histórico del que podemos partir, en relación directa con nuestro tema, consiste simplemente en la presencia durante la segunda mitad del s. 12 en Bolonia de una colonia española, que aparece ya en estado adulto, sin que se conozcan sus orígenes.” For the substantial Iberian presence at Montpellier from the thirteenth century on, see André Gouron, “Les Espagnols et l’enseignement du droit a l’ancienne Université de Montpellier,” Anuario de historia del derecho español 57 (1987), pp. 687–96. 78.  García y García, “La canonística ibérica,” esp. pp. 53–65; Rucquoi, “Las rutas del saber,” p. 53; Joseph F. O’Callaghan, “The Beginnings of the Cortes of Leon-Castille,” American Historical Review 74 (1969), pp. 1503–37, at p. 1509, n. 26; F. Valls-Taberner, “Le juriste catalan Pierre de Cardona, cardinal de l’église romaine sous Alexandre III,” in Mélanges Paul Fournier (Paris, 1929), pp. 743–6; André Gouron, “Autour de Placentin à Montpellier: Maître Gui et Pierre de Cardona,” Studia Gratiana 19 (1976), pp. 339–54. 79. Such as Ugolino da Sesso and Ardericus, Italians teaching at Palencia: ­Domenico Maffei, “Fra Cremona, Montpellier e Palencia nel secolo 12: Ricerche su Ugolino da Sesso,” Rivista internazionale di diritto comune 1 (1990), pp. 9–30; Linehan, History and the Historians, p. 309. 80. Hillgarth, “Spanish Historiography,” p. 33; cf. Jonathan Ray, “Beyond Tolerance and Persecution: Reassessing Our Approach to Medieval Convivencia,” Jewish Social Studies 11 (2005), pp. 1–18. 81.  Richard W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York, 2004), quotations at pp. 15 and 32.

five

Italy in the Long Twelfth Century Ecclesiastical Reform and the Legitimization of a New Political Order, 1059–1183 Maur e e n C . Mi l l e r

Attempts to characterize the transformation of Europe over the central Middle Ages usually assign a minor role to Italy. In both Robert I. Moore’s First European Revolution and Robert Bartlett’s Making of Europe, northern Italy is considered part of mainstream or “core” developments, mainly because of its economic sophistication and schools of law, but England and France are clearly the heartlands of the new Europe.1 Both highlight the influence of ecclesiastical reform on broad social and political changes. In this respect, they build upon an earlier generation’s recognition of ecclesiastical reform as a crucial force that shaped Italian culture in this period. The revival of legal studies that was the peninsula’s decisive contribution to Charles Homer Haskins’ Renaissance of the Twelfth Century has come to be understood as promoted by the needs of reformers.2 In the arts too, the influence of reform patronage and ideals is now widely acknowledged.3 Somewhat less appreciated, however, is the role of ecclesiastical reform, particularly the changed character of the papacy, in the political transformation of the Italian peninsula during the central Middle Ages. Historians have rightly emphasized and long appreciated the economic revival that brought Italian merchants to an unrivalled commercial dominance in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean by the thirteenth century. The other area of rapid change on the peninsula, however, was political, and here the teleology of general narratives has tended to depict Italy’s development as eccentric. The city republics of the north, while recognized 117

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as innovative, did not become the dominant form of government in Europe; and the peninsula’s two monarchies, the papal and the Norman, did not lay the foundations of a future nation state. But the emergence of a monarchical papacy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was a crucial development in western political history and one, I will argue here, that must be understood in its specifically Italian context. If the long twelfth century is chiefly important for the origins and spread of a distinctively European culture, then Italy played a key role that has too long been ­occluded. Two characteristics of historical approaches to the medieval history of Italia have contributed to this occlusion. The first is the fractured treatment of the different geographical zones of the peninsula. The history of medieval Italy is often equated with the history of northern Italy, dominated by independent city republics. While scholars over the last fifty years have done much to bring greater balance to the picture by illuminating the history of the mezzogiorno, our knowledge of Italy south of Tuscany is still quite underdeveloped, and the south is still routinely treated separately from the north.4 Nonetheless, as studies continue, a greater appreciation of relations uniting the disparate regions of the peninsula is growing. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the single most important experience common to north and south was rapid, often revolutionary, political change. The fact that this change yielded two very different regimes—­independent city-states in the north and monarchy in the south—has obscured the key role that ecclesiastical reform and the papacy played in both. The second tendency is the routine segregation of the history of Italy from the history of medieval Europe as a whole. Practitioners prefer the cosmopolitan Mediterranean context of their quarry and less frequently consider medieval Italian developments in relation to the world beyond the Alps. The changes experienced within the Italian peninsula over the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, offer an opportunity to better incorporate medieval Italy into general narratives of European history. Italy is not just important because of its merchants and their commercial innovations, or because the communes constitute some evidence of republicanism that prefigures later European developments. Italy is important because it gave birth to one of the most influential monarchies in medieval Europe—the papacy—and because the politics of the peninsula had a formative influence on the political culture of medieval Europe. By the latter, I mean that the role of the papacy as a powerful counter-force to which political oppositions throughout Europe could appeal and as an active ­intervener in the affairs of kingdoms and principalities on the behalf of

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particular rights and ideals emerged in the specific context of Italian politics in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. While this papal role is often ­regarded as negative, as retarding the emergence of modern centralized “states,” it is undeniably an important “structure” in the political culture of medieval Europe, fostering an enduring and valuable tradition of appeal to an “international” institution when the power of government was felt to be oppressive or corrupt. The Collapse of State Power in Italy and the Emergence of a New Political Order

In the early eleventh century, the most significant characteristic of the peninsula was the uneven collapse of state power. Public institutions and administrative sophistication endured longest in the south. In the Byzantine catapanate (roughly Apulia and Calabria) and in Sicily under the Kalbid emirs, there were still systems of taxation, public functionaries, and public judicial proceedings.5 The Lombard principality of Salerno was not as sophisticated in its finances, but through the mid-eleventh century, it did have administrative districts in which gastalds collected dues and services on res publica (palace lands).6 Some public officials and institutions also survived in cities both north and south: notaries, judges, and mints.7 Throughout most of Italy, however, the state became irrelevant. Public rights and lands devolved to bishops, monasteries, and private individuals. In this new political landscape, the exercise of power was intensely localized; the kings and emperors, who continued to claim sovereignty, interceded only intermittently and ineffectually. Their “supporters” called on them in order “to pursue their own private and local advantage.”8 What replaced the state, at first, were autonomous cities and new aristocratic lineages. Groups of citizens in urban communities both north and south began to exercise power. The maritime cities were most precocious. As early as 1056, the Genoese were administering justice in their city and gained recognition of their customs from the Obertenghi marquis ­Alberto.9 By 1063, judges in Gaeta were exercising judicial roles once reserved to the dukes on behalf of their fellow citizens.10 Inland too, urban dwellers were taking collective political action. Sometime before 998, the citizens of Cremona claimed jurisdiction over their city and even convinced Emperor Otto III of their rights (only to have him repudiate them in favor of the bishop),11 while at Benevento, residents formed a commu­ nitas in 1015 and then an oath-bound alliance in 1041, each time rising against their rulers.12

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Beyond the cities, new aristocratic lineages built regional lordships around castles on their scattered land holdings. In the south, the old Lombard principalities of Capua, Benevento, and Salerno had fractured into family lordships in mountain valleys dominated by castelli.13 In most of the north one sees a similar pattern. François Menant’s magisterial study of eastern Lombardy documents the emergence of more than a dozen banal lordships centered on castles in the dioceses of Bergamo, Cremona, and Brescia in the early eleventh century.14 In the mid-eleventh century, the ­exercise of power was extremely fragmented and localized. A century and a half later, in the late twelfth century, a new, less fractured, and more enduring political order had emerged. In the north, aristocratic families exercising authority in the countryside had either thrown in their lot with the urban commune or been conquered or pacified by it. The entire zone from the Alps to Rome was a mosaic of tiny states, each consisting of a city and its subjugated countryside. In the south, a powerful unified kingdom had been created by the heirs of Norman merce­naries. The uneven collapse of the state in the tenth and early eleventh centuries had a formative influence on the shape of this new political order. The areas where public institutions persisted longest became the foci of the new states: in the north, the cities; in the south, Sicily. The Need for Legitimization

The stories of the emergence of these new political entities are well known, as are their innovative aspects. Although quite different in their forms and modes of exercising authority, they shared a common, glaring need in the eleventh and twelfth centuries: legitimization. What I would like to underscore here are the roles of reform movements and the papacy in providing legitimacy. These roles have long been recognized in the emergence of the Norman monarchy in the south: Pope Nicholas II’s investiture of Robert Guiscard in 1059 was a crucial turning point in the construction of the regno. They have not been adequately acknowledged in the history of the communes.15 This is partly because, in the end, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s cession in the Peace of Constance of 1183 of regalia in return for an annual payment and his recognition of the consuetudines of the northern cities provided a more secure legal foundation for the communes.16 This was the legitimization that ultimately mattered. But it mattered more because of the military threat the emperor posed than because of the legal

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basis of his lordship in the north. Both the Byzantine emperors and their German counterparts had compelling claims to the south: the region had been ruled from Constantinople for centuries, and after Otto I’s crowning in 962 as Roman emperor of the West, various German emperors had campaigned in the south and gained the recognition, even if temporary, of the Lombard princes.17 Neither Byzantium nor the German Empire, however, was able to stem the emergence of the Norman kingdom or defeat it. It was only through the marriage, in 1186, of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s son, Henry, to King Roger II’s daughter, Constance, that imperial claims to the south were effectively advanced. Across the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, of course, the papacy claimed to wield an authority superior to that of kings and emperors. Gregory VII believed he could judge the conduct of kings to determine if they were “suitable” rulers and did not hesitate to absolve subjects of their fealty to those he deemed “wicked.” He thought kings should be vassals of St. Peter and his vicar, the pope, and this was precisely the mechanism that had been used to legitimize Norman rule in the south.18 Nicholas II did not make clear where he derived his right to invest Guiscard in 1059 with the duchy of Apulia, Calabria, “and in the future with the help of God and St. Peter, of Sicily,” but a number of early medieval imperial grants to the papacy could have been invoked.19 Hubert Houben suggested that Nicholas “probably drew implicitly on the Donation of Constantine.”20 Regardless of later successful challenges to papal primacy and modern diplomatic critique of the documents underpinning it, papal claims to authority in the eleventh and twelfth centuries must be taken seriously. Various imperial donations, including the infamous Constitutum Constantini, were believed to be valid, and it was not at all clear that the papacy’s claims were untenable. In this light, the relations of the papacy and its reform allies with the cities of northern Italy, particularly Alexander III’s role in supporting the Lombard League and in negotiating peace with Barbarossa, should be taken seriously as having political value. Contemporary understandings of legitimacy and pragmatic attempts to achieve it are more useful in understanding the politics of the era than the criteria of modern philosophical definitions of legitimacy. Efforts to Achieve Legitimacy

Let us begin with the uncontroversial case of the Normans. They came first, around the turn of the millennium, as mercenaries, but from 1042

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onwards, they began conquering in their own right. The key actors were the sons of the minor Norman baron Tancred d’Hauteville, particularly Robert Guiscard (“the Cunning”) and Roger of Sicily. At first, these highly successful warriors sought legitimacy by marrying into established dynasties. In 1058, for example, Robert Guiscard put aside a Norman wife to marry Sichelgaita, the daughter of Prince Gisulf of Salerno. His brother, Roger, the conqueror of Sicily, married into the Aleramici, a powerful lineage from the Piedmont, and despite having sons from his first two Norman wives, it was Adelaide’s son, Roger, who succeeded and became the first king of ­Sicily and southern Italy.21 The next generation did even ­better: Roger II married the daughter of King Alfonso VI of Castile and León. Another important means of legitimizing their rule, however, was their alliance with the papacy. Leo IX, usually considered the earliest reform pope, at first tried a military solution in dealing with the Norman conquerors. His 1053 expedition ended in a disastrous defeat at Civitate. Several chronicle accounts concur that as the armies approached each other, the Normans had tried to stave off battle: They sent envoys who requested a peace treaty and who asked the pope to receive their submission benevolently; they all declared that they were ready to obey the pope, that they did not wish to offend him, but to hold title to what they had acquired from him. They requested that he be willing to be their lord and that they might be his fideles.22 This is, of course, the solution the papacy accepted after its army was obliterated. In 1059 at the Council of Melfi, Leo’s successor, Nicolas II, invested Robert Guiscard with his lands as a vassal of the Holy See and with the title of duke after the Norman leader swore fealty to the pope. This initiated an important, if difficult, relationship in which the papacy was clearly the weaker party. But even after Roger II had united Sicily and southern Italy under his rule, foiling all papal attempts to frustrate that consolidation, he was willing to swear fealty to Anacletus II in 1130 in order to be invested with the title of “king.” He forced Innocent II— who had by 1132 been recognized as legitimate pope over Anacletus—to renew the same pact after defeating papal forces at the battle of Galluccio in 1139. Even with the pope at his mercy as his prisoner, “what Roger sought was papal recognition and investiture.”23 His successors continued to renew the bond.

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The reasons popes across the period cultivated this Norman relationship are numerous. Ideologically, the performance of papal lordship through the creation of vassals of Saint Peter expressed Gregorian understandings of papal primacy. Pragmatically, the Norman alliance was es­ sential to carrying forward ecclesiastical reforms in the south. Guiscard harried the lands of many ecclesiastical institutions before this alliance but became an important patron, particularly of Monte Cassino, after.24 Even more pragmatically, popes from Gregory VII on needed the military support of the Normans and the safe haven they provided when Rome was not hospitable to their court. Indeed, the popes least able to live securely in Rome—Urban II, Pascal II, Innocent II, and Alexander III—were the most active in seeking alliances throughout the peninsula. All of these motivations spurred papal involvement in central and northern Italy too. They found allies not only in supporters of reform but also among citizens seeking greater control over local affairs. Let us consider a few specific cases. The earliest evidence of the commune of Ferrara is a letter of Pope Pascal II, dated 8 April 1105, addressed to Landulf, the bishop of Ferrara, and to three men identified as “consuls” of the city. Pascal confirmed to the church and city, through the bishop and these consuls, twelve territories (massae), including that of the city itself. The pope also set out the boundaries of the county (comitatus) of Ferrara and nullified previous “bad and irregular customs” in the city, preserving only the one denarius owed annually by each free man “for the support of the Holy Roman Church.” Further, he conceded half the river and market tolls “for the communal use, the improvement and restoration” of the city, while retaining the other half, and judicial rights, to the Holy See.25 Ferrara, of course, was part of the old exarchate that the papacy claimed as the patrimony of Saint Peter, but as a suffragan of Ravenna it had, like the rest of the Pentapolis, effectively been removed from any meaningful papal control while Archbishop Wibert of Ravenna (imperial anti-pope Clement III, 1080–1100) adhered to the imperial cause.26 Just before this recognition of the commune, the city had been reconquered by the Countess Matilda, who had installed Bishop Landulf. Two characteristics of papal intervention in the north are evident in this example. First, popes of the period preferred to extend their influence through alliances with bishops and lay feudatories like Matilda. Second, they were not real advocates of urban autonomy, but pragmatically they, like their ally Matilda, seemed willing to acknowledge and legitimize communal rule in return for financial resources and acceptance of papal sovereignty.27

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Another good example of this alliance and pragmatism aiding the emergence of a commune is Cremona. From the late tenth century, there is evidence of urban dissatisfaction with the rule of its powerful imperial count-bishops. Yet in the late eleventh century, the commune emerged in, as Giovanni Tabacco acknowledged, an “institutional symbiosis between church and city.” This conclusion is unavoidable given the character of our first evidence of the commune in a charter of 1098. In the presence of five boni homines, Matilda “invested the men of Cremona [investivit homines Cremone]—namely, Gotefredus de Bullusco and Morcius and Cremoxano Aldoni—on behalf of the church of Cremona dedicated to Holy Mary and of the commune of this city of Cremona [comunum ipsius Cremone civi­ tatis] with the whole county of Isola Fulcheria.” In return for this beneficium, these representatives of the church and commune agreed to provide military service to the countess until a bishop came into the see, and they agreed that the bishop would thereafter, with his captains and all the rest of his knights, continue this service. Tabacco expressed obvious disappointment that even in this city with a long tradition of civic resistance to episcopal and imperial rule “the urban collectivity seems to act in a subordinate role with respect to the episcopal church,” and he concluded that the church “at Cremona and elsewhere, could form an obstacle to the autonomous institutional development of the city.”28 Another set of conclusions, however, could easily be reached from this evidence. First, one has to take into account that there was a powerful local movement for reform in the city. Bonizo of Sutri recounted how in 1067 these reformers, “turned out all the priests and deacons living in concubinage; how they flogged the bishop himself when he attempted to arrest a priest of the Patarini on the very day of the Lord’s Passion and how after Easter day, they sent worthy men as envoys to the pope.” The bishop the reformers had flogged was Arnulf, the nephew of Archbishop Wido of Milan, whom Henry IV had invested with the see of Cremona at the behest of his uncle. Those envoys sent by the leaders of the Pataria to Rome received the support of Pope Alexander II.29 His successor, Gregory VII, deposed and excommunicated Arnulf at the Lenten synod of 1078, declaring him “a simoniac publicly convicted in our presence and self-­ confessed.”30 From 1086, there is evidence of a papally allied bishop in the see.31 It seems to me, therefore, that papal intervention in support of local reform initiatives was critical in bringing new leadership to the see, and that, in collaboration with the see and its papal allies, the commune emerged.

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Parma is another case where a powerful imperial see was brought into alliance with the papacy by local advocates of reform, and then the city appears to act autonomously under the leadership of its new papally allied bishop. Although one can see evidence of lay political organization in the see as early as its revolt in 1037 against Emperor Conrad II, evidence of consuls comes only in 1149.32 There is earlier evidence of the commune’s emergence in the vita of Bernard degli Uberti, Bishop of Parma. The life recounts how Bernard came to Parma as a legate of Pope Pascal II and was honorably received by the better part of the people. These citizens begged Bernard to save the city by restoring the “schismatics,” meaning imperial supporters, to concord with the church. Bernard’s preaching at their invitation led to a violent confrontation in the church during which imperial supporters seized and then imprisoned the legate. According to the vita, the saintly compassion of Bernard for his oppressors converted them, and these “citizens begged the lord Pope Paschal to let this man, considered so holy, be their bishop.” Pascal granted their request in 1106 on the condition that they “obey his commands and no longer serve sinful kings against the decree of the apostolic church,” and immediately the pope came to Parma to consecrate its new cathedral. Another life, also written shortly after Bernard’s death, goes on to recount how when Parma was attacked by the forces of Piacenza and Cremona in either 1119 or 1120, “the holy man called the people together, stirred them up to defend their city; he blessed them, appointed a captain over them, and gave him a banner [vexillum] with his most sacred hands.”33 Beyond these individual examples of papal support for local reform movements that decisively aided the emergence of communes, one must also remember that the papacy was an early and consistent supporter of the Lombard cities in their resistance to Frederick Barbarossa. As early as 1159, the year after the emperor’s diet of Roncaglia reimposed direct imperial rule in northern Italian cities, Pope Adrian IV allied with the cities of Milan, Brescia, Piacenza, and Cremona to resist the imposition of these imperial decrees.34 Pope Alexander III supported both the first and second Lombard Leagues, and his allies founded the city of Alessandria in his honor in May of 1168. After the emperor’s unsuccessful siege of the city in 1174–5 and his defeat by the combined forces of the Lombard cities at Legnano in 1176, the pope was a key negotiator in the preliminary peace of Anagni in November 1176 and in the Truce of Venice in 1177.35 The final peace of Constance in 1183 demonstrated clearly that the Lombard cities were content with imperial recognition: the emperor’s

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rights in the old regnum Italiae were clear, and a distant sovereign was preferable to a nearby papal overlord. But the papacy played a very useful role in the achievement of autonomy for the northern Italian cities. Although weak in most of the traditional attributes of a monarchy—in military force and in financial resources—the eleventh- and twelfth-century papacy had immense spiritual prestige and a long history of revered lordship in Rome and beyond. As an unquestionably legitimate authority on the peninsula in this period, it played a key role in the emergence of a new political order, both north and south, in Italy. Its role in the south is much more obvious and, in the long run, important, but by including the south in our historical purview, we are in a better position to see and appreciate developments in the north that have been obscured by the agendas dominating the history of the communes. This is at least one advantage of considering the peninsula as a whole. The influence of its specifically Italian context on the history of the papacy, I would like to suggest, deserves greater emphasis. In 1995, Tom Noble published a salutary critique of the ways in which historians have approached the papacy.36 One of the trends he praised was a growing appreciation of the popes in “their local environment”—that is, in the city of Rome and in central Italy. The definition of “local environment” could, however, be profitably expanded to include the rest of the peninsula. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the unsettled conditions in Italy had an influence upon the development of the papacy. They provided the emergent papal monarchy with both the impetus and the opportunity to exercise lordship, cultivate alliances, and develop diplomatic and judicial roles. The impact I would like to underscore here is how political flux ­enlarged the utility of appeal to Rome for both the papacy and local ­appellants—mainly, but not exclusively, members of aristocratic families. Robert Bartlett has emphasized how the ties forged between the reform papacy and local elites contributed to an emergent cultural unity: Latin Christendom.37 It also contributed to the emergence of a political system within Western Europe in which an institution with claims to universal authority successfully intervened in the affairs of kingdoms and princi­ palities, most often in defense of its property, personnel, and institutions, but also in the name of ethical or moral claims. The most famous example of this, of course, is Gregory VII’s encouragement of princely opposition to Henry IV, but smaller scale examples crop up in the pope’s register. The unsettled conditions of the Italian peninsula and proximity to Rome fostered appeal to the papacy. We hear of citizens of Imola coming to Rome to complain of the powerful archbishop of Ravenna’s efforts to force them

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to swear oaths of fealty to him and “to subject them entirely to his own ­jurisdiction.” The people of Piacenza complained of their count-bishop’s despoiling of their goods as well as his affliction of their souls. A certain Goizo and his two brothers came to the pope complaining of having been dispossessed of a castle by their count-bishop-elect. What is striking about Gregory’s responses is how he frames the injury in moral terms, even though property and rights were clearly at issue in each case. The citizens of Imola, constrained by their archbishop, are being forced to commit perjury, imperiling their souls because they have already sworn fealty to Saint Peter; the pope invites Count Guy of Imola to bring about “peace.” Gregory deposed Count-Bishop Dionysius of Piacenza not only for his own sins, but also for the danger he posed to the bodies and souls of those ­people of Piacenza, whom the pope released from their oaths of fealty to their lord. Gregory characterizes the knight of Bergamo and his brothers as “servants of God” whom the bishop-elect has not only failed in his duty to protect, but also harassed and molested.38 Papal intervention on moral grounds in the regular governance of a city or realm influenced the development of western politics in two im­ portant ways. First, it inhibited the acquisition by emergent states of total jurisdiction within their geographical boundaries. Rulers complained of papal meddling and tried to ban appeals to Rome. While political theorists have viewed this papal role negatively, as retarding the development of the modern state, one might take a more positive view, especially since the totalizing power of the state in the twentieth century has been used for horrific ends. One might view limitations to state power as salutary checks on despotism and as tools of popular resistance to abuses of power. Me­ dievalists usually trace limitations on royal power and the origins of constitutionalism to feudal customs, but religious checks deserve to be part of this story too. The second influence of papal interventionism on western politics is that it established an important, if distant, precedent for international institutions in the modern world. Modern historians of institutions like the United Nations take a very short view of their histories, but a broader historical perspective on rationales for intervention in the affairs of state and institutions for securing peace should include the papacy. The role papal monarchy developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—as court of appeal and ally to the discontented and dispossessed—was disruptive. But it fostered, as part of the political tradition of the West, the notion that one could question the actions and exactions of established rulers and appeal to a moral authority beyond the bounds of the state.39

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Notes 1.  The peninsula receives somewhat less emphasis in Moore’s model, which is still quite concerned with explaining the rise of powerful monarchical regimes, than in Bartlett’s cultural account. Moore includes Italian examples for the vibrancy of new urban centers, aristocratic greed, changes in inheritance practices, and the rise of law as a new technology of power. Bartlett particularly emphasizes the northsouth divide, placing northern Italy among the centers of the dynamic society “Europeanizing” Europe while the south was a zone of conquest and colonization. Moore, European Revolution, pp. 33, 46–7, 68, 119; Bartlett, Making of Europe, pp. 2, 20, 51, 227, 288. 2.  Renaissance, pp. 11–12, 21–4, 193–222; Stephan Kuttner, “The Revival of Jurisprudence” in Renaissance & Renewal, ed. Benson and Constable, pp. 303–4. 3.  Herbert Bloch, “The New Fascination with Ancient Rome,” and Ernst Kitzinger, “The Arts as Aspects of a Renaissance: Rome and Italy,” in Renaissance & Renewal, ed. Benson and Constable, pp. 615–21, 637–70; Ernst Kitzinger, “The Gregorian Reform and the Visual Arts: A Problem of Method,” TRHS, 5th ser., 22 (1972), pp. 87–102; Christine Verzár Bornstein, Portals and Politics in the Early Italian City-State: The Sculpture of Nicholaus in Context (Parma, 1988); Hélène Toubert, Un art dirigé: Réforme grégorienne et Iconographie (Paris, 1990); Mary Stroll, Symbols as Power: The Papacy following the Investiture Contest (Leiden, 1991); Valentino Pace, “Riforma della chiesa e visualizzazione della santità nella pittura romana: I casi di Sant’Alessio e di Santa Cecilia,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 46/47 (1993/94), pp. 541–8; Anat Tcherikover, “Reflections of the Investiture Controversy at Nonantola and Modena,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 60 (1997), pp. 150–65; Dorothy F. Glass, “Prophecy and Priesthood at Modena,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 63 (2000), pp. 326–38; Serena Romano, La pittura medievale a Roma, Corpus volume 4: Riforma e tradizione 1050–1198 (Milan, 2006); Roma e la Riforma gregoriana: Tradizioni e innovazioni artistiche (11–12 secolo), ed. Serena Romano, Julie Enckell Julliard (Rome, 2007); Dorothy F. Glass, The Sculpture of Reform in North Italy, ca 1095–1130: History and Patronage of Romanesque Façades (Farnham, 2010). 4. As in NCMH, where Giovanni Tabacco contributes two chapters on northern and central Italy (vol. 4.2, pp. 72–93, 422–41) and Graham Loud another two on southern Italy (vol. 4.2, pp. 94–119, 442–74) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. 5.  Jeremy Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal Diwan (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 22–30; Michele Amari, Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Catania, 1933–39), vol. 2, pp. 10–43; Jules Gay, L’Italie méridionale et l’empire byzantin depuis l’avènement de Basile Ier jusqu’a la prise de Bari par les Normands (867–1071), Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, fasc. 90 (Paris, 1904), pp. 343–9; Chris Wickham, Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society, 400–1000 (Totowa, 1981), pp. 157–8; Graham A. Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest (Harlow, 2000), pp. 29–41.

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6.  Valerie Ramseyer, The Transformation of a Religious Landscape: Medieval Southern Italy, 850–1150 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006), pp. 23–5; Wickham, Early Medieval Italy, pp. 59–61; Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard, pp. 42–3. 7. Wickham, Early Medieval Italy, pp. 188–91. Excellent studies of public authority and institutions in northern cities are Reinhold Schumann, Authority and the Commune, Parma, 833–1133, Fonti e studi serie seconda 8 (Parma, 1973), and Gérard Rippe, Padoue et son contado (10e–13e siècle): Société et pouvoirs (Rome, 2003); see also Philip Jones, The Italian City-State from Commune to Signoria (Oxford, 1997), pp. 110–51, with attendant bibliography. In the south, Vera von Fal­ kenhausen, “Bari bizantina: profilo di un capoluogo di provincia (secoli 9–11),” in Spazio, società, potere nell’Italia dei Comuni, ed. Gabriella Rossetti (Naples, 1986), pp. 202–3; there were not only notaries and judges at Gaeta, but by the early twelfth century, consuls. Patricia Skinner, Family Power in Southern Italy: The Duchy of Gaeta and its Neighbors, 850–1139 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 191–203 (on Gaeta), 204–9 (Amalfi and Naples). 8. Wickham, Early Medieval Italy, p. 181; see also his contribution to “Debate: The Feudal Revolution,” P&P 155 (1997), pp. 196–208. 9.  Steven A. Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958–1528 (Chapel Hill, 1996), pp. 19–21. 10.  They consented to transactions by minors, witnessed important transactions, and acted as advocates. Skinner, Family Power, pp. 194–7. 11.  Le carte cremonesi dei secoli 8–12, ed. Ettore Falconi, 4 vols., Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, Biblioteca statale di Cremona, Fondi e sussidi 1/1–4 (Cremona, 1979–88), vol. 1, pp. 260–3 (no. 95). 12. Jones, The Italian City-State, p. 133; Gianni Vergineo, Storia di Benevento e dintorni, 4 vols. (Benevento, 1985), vol. 1, pp. 185–202. Gina Fasoli’s discussion of the limited results of these “proto-communal” movements in the south should be noted; see her “Città e ceti urbani nell’età dei due Guglielmi,” in Potere, società e popolo nell’ Potere, società e popolo nell’età dei due Guglielmi: Atti delle quarte giornate normanno-sveve, Bari, Gioia del Colle, 8–10 ottobre 1979 (Bari, 1981), pp. 147–72. 13. Wickham, Early Medieval Italy, 159–67; Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard, pp. 43–7; Valerie Ramseyer, “Territorial Lordships in the Principality of Salerno, 1050–1150,” HSJ 9 (1997), 79–94. In Gaeta, too, the duchy fragmented into several castle-centered lordships. Skinner, Family Power, pp. 160–73. 14.  François Menant, Campagnes lombardes du moyen âge: L’économie et la société rurales dans la région de Bergame, de Crémone, et de Brescia du 10e au 13e siècle (Rome, 1993), pp. 402–24, 601–64. 15.  Timothy Reuter’s insightful comments on Barbarossa in Italy constitute a welcome exception: see his “The Medieval German Sonderweg? The Empire and its Rulers in the High Middle Ages,” in his Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 407–9; I thank Bob Moore for calling this work to my attention. 16.  A critical edition of this important document was published in the final volume of Le carte cremonesi, vol. 3, pp. 377–406 (no. 614). Still essential for the alliances and treaties leading up to it is Cesare Vignati, Storia diplomatica della lega lombarda, originally published in 1867, and now reissued with an updated bibliography by Raoul Manselli (Turin, 1975). See also La pace di Costanza 1183:

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Un difficile equilibrio di poteri fra società italiana ed impero, Milano-Piacenza, 27–30 aprile 1983 (Bologna, 1984). 17.  See Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard, pp. 14–27. 18.  I. S. Robinson, “Church and Papacy,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge, 1988), esp. pp. 300–4. 19.  The papacy held extensive estates in southern Italy and Sicily, and these were no doubt behind attempts to extend temporal authority in these regions. Interpolations to the Pactum Ludovicianum of 816–17 included Sicily within the territory of the Republic of Saint Peter, and in 962 Otto I confirmed to the Holy See “the patrimony of Sicily if God shall grant that it fall into our hands.” Thomas F. X. Noble, The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680–825 (Philadelphia, 1984), pp. 172–4. 20.  Hubert Houben, Roger II of Sicily: A Ruler between East and West, trans. Graham A. Loud and Diane Milburn (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 10–11; see also Graham A. Loud, “The Papacy and the Rulers of Southern Italy,” in The Society of Norman Italy, eds. G. A. Loud and A. Metcalfe (Leiden, 2002), pp. 155–6. 21. Houben, Roger II of Sicily, pp. 24–5; on the Aleramici, see Renato Bordone, “Affermazione personale e svilippi dinastici del gruppo parentale Aleramico: Il marchese Bonifacio ‘del Vasto’ (sec. 11–12),” in Formazione e strutture dei ceti dominanti nel medioevo: marchesi conti e visconti nel regno italico (secc. 9–12); Atti del primo convegno di Pisa, 10–11 maggio 1983 (Rome, 1988), pp. 29–44. 22.  William of Apulia, as quoted in Amatus of Montecassino, The History of the Normans, trans. Prescott N. Dunbar and Graham A. Loud (Woodbridge, 2004), p. 100, n. 61. Both chroniclers wrote in praise of the Normans and viewed the conquest as divinely ordained. See Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard, pp. 4–5. 23.  Loud, “The Papacy,” p. 168; on the continuing history of the relationship, pp. 169–84 as well as I. S. Robinson, The Papacy 1073–1198: Continuity and Innovation (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 383–97. 24.  H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Age of Abbot Desiderius: Montecassino, the Papacy, and the Normans in the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries (Oxford, 1983), pp. 115–76. 25.  PL 163: 159–61. For the background to this relationship and its subsequent history see Andrea Castagnetti, Società e politica a Ferrara dall’età postcarolingi alla signoria estense (sec. 10–13) (Bologna, 1985), pp. 57–89; Augusto Vasina, “Comune, Vescovo e Signoria estense dal 12 al 14 secolo,” in Storia di Ferrara, vol. 5, Il basso Medioevo 12–14 (Ferrara, 1987), pp. 76–89. 26.  See Peter Partner, The Lands of St. Peter (Berkeley, 1972), pp. 123–6, 138. 27.  Ibid., pp. 146, 178–9. There is a great deal of evidence of the papacy supporting communal development within the patrimony in order to wrest control of cities from local lords. By the late twelfth century, however, they allied themselves with powerful families who had more resources at their disposal to defend Rome and to support papal military efforts. See Giorgio Falco, “I comuni della Campagna e della Marittima nel medio evo,” Archivio della R. Società Romana di storia patria 42 (1919), pp. 537–605, but especially pp. 565–79, and Paolino Manassei, “Alcuni document per la storia della città di Terni e di Spoleto trascritti ed annotati,” Archivio storico italiano ser. 3, 22 (1875), pp. 384–5, a bull of Pascal II dated 1109

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granting to the citizens of Terni the right to rebuild bridges and roads and the re­ galia. 28.  Giovanni Tabacco, The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy: Structures of Political Rule, trans. Rosalind Brown Jensen, Cambridge Medieval Textbooks (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 324–31. The key 1098 document is published in Le carte cremonesi 2.53–4 (no. 242). 29.  Bonizo of Sutri, “To a Friend,” trans. I. S. Robinson in The Papal Reform of the Eleventh Century (Manchester, 2004), pp. 205, 211–3. 30.  H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 261 (5.14a). 31.  Le carte cremonesi 2.30–2 (no. 230), 38–40 (no. 234), 44–7 (no. 237), 72–4 (no. 253). 32. Schumann, Authority and the Commune, pp. 169–205, 239. 33.  MGH, SS 30, vol. 2, pp. 1317–19, 1326; Regesta pontificum romanorum: Italia pontificia, ed. Paul F. Kehr, 10 vols. (Berlin, 1906–75) [hereafter IP] 5.418, no. 14, 5.421 no. 2. 34.  Anne J. Duggan, “Totius christianitatis caput: The Pope and the Princes,” in Adrian IV, The English Pope (1154–1159), ed. Brenda Bolton and Anne J. Duggan (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 137–8; Robinson, The Papacy, p. 472; IP 6/1.117. 35. Robinson, The Papacy, pp. 490–9. 36.  Thomas F. X. Noble, “Morbidity and Vitality in the History of the Early Medieval Papacy,” CHR 81 (1995), pp. 505–40. 37. Bartlett, Making of Europe, pp. 243–50. 38. Cowdrey, Register, pp. 10–11, 147–8, 321 (1.10, 2.54, 6.39). 39. I would like to thank Thomas F. X. Noble for his invitation to think broadly about Italy in this period and all the participants in the October 2006 conference, “European Transformations, 950–1200,” held at the University of Notre Dame, whose questions and contributions deepened my reflections. Carol Lansing, Randolph Starn, and R. I. Moore kindly read a draft and provided myriad suggestions, too few of which I have been able to incorporate here. My thanks to Kathleen Frydl for an illuminating discussion of the history of state power and modern international institutions.

six

Sutri 1046—Canossa 1077—Rome 1111 Problems of Communication and the Perception of Neighbors Hanna V o l l rat h

In 2006, a historical exhibition in Paderborn entitled Canossa 1077: Die Erschütterung der Welt (Canossa 1077: The Shaking of the World) drew an enormous number of visitors.1 This exhibition used Canossa as a pivotpoint from which to treat “the crisis of medieval Germany” in the second half of the eleventh century.2 At Canossa, in 1077, the German king and emperor-to-be Henry IV did penance before Pope Gregory VII. This event had been preceded and, in fact, occasioned by several conflicts, in the course of which Henry had withdrawn his allegiance from the pope, whereupon Gregory had excommunicated the king. This proved to be a fatal trap for the latter, as an important number of German princes, both lay and ecclesiastical, decided not to tolerate an excommunicate on the throne. They threatened that they would elect a new king should Henry fail to get the ban lifted within a year of its pronouncement. These princes had been in revolt against their king for quite some time for reasons that manifested themselves particularly in Saxony, and it may very well be that they took the papal ban as a pretext to legitimize the renewal of their fight. Parallel with the Saxon quarrels, Henry faced problems in his Italian kingdom. The election of a new archbishop of Milan had brought him into opposition with a strong faction of disenchanted Milanese citizens, who sought and found the support of the popes for their candidate. Eventually, Henry felt that the pope was violating his royal prerogative of investiture in Milan, and, together with many German bishops, he withdrew his allegiance from Gregory VII. The pope retaliated by making a move 132

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unprecedented in the Middle Ages: he banned the king and his followers. It was this papal ban that brought fundamental change to the whole set of conflicts with which Henry was coping. He saw himself confronted with the accusation that he was an enemy of the church, even an enemy of Christendom, whereas theories about the God-given order of the world had made him see himself as the Lord’s anointed protector of the churches in his kingdom and, as emperor-to-be, even beyond Germany (although neither he nor anybody else would have been able to define just what “beyond” actually meant). For King Henry it was a matter of political survival to dissociate the papal from the princely faction in Germany. To many people’s surprise, he set out for Italy in the middle of winter to have the papal ban lifted. At Canossa he performed a rite of humble submission to the pope and presented himself as a repentant sinner, thereby acknowledging that even a king owed obedience to the supreme pontiff. In modern scholarship lively debates have ensued about the political meaning of Canossa.3 Canossa also became one of the very few events of medieval history to gain a place in German cultural memory. That someone will have to go to Canossa, or that something will be his or her Canossa, is proverbial to the present day.4 This partly explains why the recent exhibition drew so many visitors: it connected with something people knew or thought they knew. The subtitle, “The Shaking of the World,” was meant specially to address expec­ tations and feelings coming from the public. It insinuates that Henry’s penance was dramatic and destructive, an event of decisive importance in German history. The expression comes from a contemporary text written by Bonizo, bishop of Sutri near Rome, a supporter of the Gregorian cause. In his view, however, it was not Henry’s penance at Canossa but Gregory’s ban the year before which had disrupted the world: “After the banning of the king came to the ears of the populace (vulgus), our universal Roman world began to tremble (universus noster Romanus orbis contremuit).”5 This change in perception, from penance to ban, is symptomatic of differences between medieval and modern understanding. Today, people, at least in the western world, experience secular law and government as ordering the public sphere on the one hand and various religious communities as offering spiritual guidance, for those who want it, on the other. It is hard to imagine a pope excommunicating a head of state in our days and even harder not to imagine him meeting with practically universal disapproval if he ever attempted it. It is this modern separation of church and state that makes people consider the humble submission of a king disgraceful and shocking.

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Bonizo’s dictum raises another question, however: who or what is meant by “our universal Roman world”? Does Bonizo give us to understand that the event, the first banning of a king in the Middle Ages, disturbed or agonized people in the then known world, or rather in his world, whatever he may have meant by that: his diocese, Italy, Latin Europe, or even Christendom?6 The answer might tell us something about the coherence of Latin Europe, the ascent of which Karl Leyser set out as occurring during the time of the investiture controversy.7 His observations have been widely accepted, and when we compare the Western European world of the tenth century with that of the twelfth, there can be no doubt that the latter had grown into some kind of unity during the time in between, and that the Roman Church brought about this change by assuming a new kind of responsibility for the whole of Latin Europe.8 What impact, however, did these events actually have on what people knew about regions of Latin Europe other than their own? This question has many implications and any attempt to answer it has to take more general developments into account. First and foremost in importance is population growth, gradually filling the land as well as former Roman towns that had shrunk to a fraction of their former size since the last decades of the Roman Empire. Growing populations established the towns once again as economic, cultural, and communicative centers for the land surrounding them. Migrations from country to town stand for growing ­mobility, discernible in the greater number of pilgrims, the crusades, an increasing number of long-distance trading expeditions and the foundation of distant trading posts, conquests such as the Norman conquests of England and southern Italy with contacts continuing between Normandy and the others, the foundation of new monastic orders like the Cistercians with their novel structure of filiations and a corporate governing body, a growing number of royal and noble “international” marriages, and much more. Except for the crusades and the Norman Conquest, such developments were not altogether new. But the remarkable increase in numbers was the difference. As people moved closer together and more people traveled for one reason or another, communication increased. It may be assumed that people on the move spread news.9 But it is difficult to ascertain what caught their attention and what they thought interesting enough to tell in other places. So, when it comes to the investiture controversy, it is generally assumed that certain events elicited strong emotional responses from a wider German public. But did people in kingdoms neighboring Germany share the agitation that seems to have aroused the German public? This is a dif-

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ficult question to answer. Before trying to deal with it by looking at contemporary historiography, it seems reasonable to give an outline of how communication worked among the political elites in the earlier Middle Ages. It is about them that we hear most in narrative sources as well as in documents emanating from their chanceries. Kings especially needed long-distance contacts. How did they get information from places that lay at a distance from wherever they themselves happened to be? How did they prepare journeys to far-away places in order to be informed when they reached their destination? Did they send trustworthy persons from their entourage ahead to reconnoiter the situation? Rulers in the earlier Middle Ages were almost constantly on the move in incessant perambulations, and during the often extended intervals when they were not on the spot to talk to local leading men themselves, they needed reports. In the eleventh century, this was particularly true of the Norman kings of England with their Norman duchy on the continent, as well as German kings, also king of the former Lombard kingdom of Italy and, after 1033, of Burgundy. The first part of my essay will deal with the movement of information in general, then with the events surrounding Henry III at Rome in 1046, to show with what kind of difficulties long-distance policy making had to cope. I will then turn to historians to ask which of those outside of Germany took notice of this conflict between the German kings and the popes, and how they wrote about them. King Henry IV’s penance at Canossa in 1077 will be dealt with in the same way. I will first ask what the sequence of events reveals about communication between the pope and the German royal court, and then I will analyze some contemporary historians in and outside of the German lands for their perceptions of Canossa. Finally, I will briefly examine the scandal of 1111, when King Henry V took Pope Paschal II prisoner and forced him to accept investiture “with ring and staff ” by the king in the empire and also to crown Henry emperor. Sutri—1046

Given modes of communication in the earlier Middle Ages, Italy was a distant kingdom for the German kings. Although there must have been a more or less constant flow of people going back and forth,10 German rulers normally visited their most southerly kingdom only at great intervals. For most of the time, knowledge of what was going on there depended on

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what visitors told them or on messengers and letters dispatched when they wanted particular information.11 Visits by Italian bishops, abbots and abbesses, or their representatives to the royal court in Germany are known to us mostly by the charters issued to them or their names present on ­witness-lists. Often it is impossible to tell why they undertook this long and sometimes arduous journey over the Alps: was it to plead for a royal diploma to boost the legitimacy of their claim to some property,12 or were these diplomas by-products of travels undertaken for quite different reasons, business dealt with orally and therefore leaving no trace in our written sources? In relating an event, historians sometimes refer to an Italian delegation as present. The election of King Conrad II was one such. His predecessor Henry II had died without issue in 1024. Wipo, who wrote his Gesta Chuonradi some twenty years later (between 1041 and 1046) gives a circumstantial account of Conrad’s election, and mentions too an Italian delegation to the German royal court the year following.13 It was headed by Archbishop Aribert of Milan and acknowledged the new king. Wipo’s report is exceptional in many ways, however. As royal chaplain and eyewitness he knew many details of what had happened. Also, some Italian magnates had offered the Lombard crown to two other candidates, so the arrival of the eminent archbishop of Milan was more noteworthy than an acknowledgment under “normal” conditions would have been.14 It seems, therefore, that the circumstances of the delegation were exceptional, and for this reason Wipo recounted it in detail. Most Italian visits known through charter evidence remain dark as to any news they brought or any business they pursued. Although the frequency of Italian visitors varied from ruler to ruler, it is reasonable to assume that German kings had many opportunities to acquire information about what was going on in their kingdom south of the Alps. It is usually taken for granted that Italian visitors provided a political analysis of the situation in their country and that the German king would be well enough informed to act suitably when he set foot on Italian soil. It must be remembered, however, that in cultures like that of the earlier Middle Ages, where the social and the political spheres formed as yet an undifferentiated complex, and the very concept of “politics” did not yet exist,15 it is next to impossible to know what kind of conversation was deemed appropriate for a king to engage in. I doubt that Italian visitors were expected to give “objective” reports on what we would call politics. A recent study of the role “honor” played in kings’ social relationships suggests that royal communication was dominated by considerations of rep­ resentation and self-assertion rather than expedience.16 But even if we

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assume that Italian visitors to the German royal court were expected to give an overview of the latest happenings in their country, we do not know to what extent this included Roman and especially papal affairs. There were also members of the German king’s chancery who appear as officials for Italian affairs. “Archchancellor for Italy” was a position of honor archbishops of Cologne eventually became entitled to, and the “chancellor for Italy,” a kind of deputy to the archchancellor, served more practically in handling business concerning Italy.17 An archchancellor with a chancellor as deputy suggests a structured institution with defined areas of responsibility in the German king’s chancery. To the extent of our knowledge, it was not. It was a group of people assembled by the king for quite varied reasons. The more eminent they were, the less they tended to act as officials under instruction. We do not know what instructions the king gave, nor whether some informal routine established itself over the years. It could be that this Italian administration consisted of haphazard moves devised spontaneously in response to particular challenges. Depending upon the emphasis a ruler or an office-holder himself gave to Italian affairs, the churchman assigned to the position of chancellor might be mainly occupied either with drafting royal diplomas for Italian recipients or functioning as an active agent in Italo-German communication. Before reform popes began in the middle of the eleventh century to extend papal activities beyond the city of Rome and its leading families, the pope was mostly a local power. Notwithstanding their local preoccupations, popes continued to be venerated in Latin Christendom as spiritual leaders.18 German bishops, abbots, and abbesses went to Rome seeking papal privileges like ecclesiastics from other kingdoms, pilgrims visited holy shrines, and occasionally legates crossed the Alps and participated in royal councils. As far as long-distance communication was concerned, the king was probably among the best informed people in Germany, maybe the best informed altogether, though it may be wondered whether he was really well informed or actually wanted continuously to be well informed.19 Historians were in an altogether different position. Others have observed that in the course of the ninth and tenth centuries the Carolingian world’s wider perspective shrank, that, for instance, historians in Saxony had no more than hazy notions about what was going on in the West Frankish kingdom, and vice versa.20 The German king’s renewal of the Carolingian empire in 962 did not lead to the renewal of that Carolingian perception of unity or of a more or less worldwide realm. With the beginning of church reform, however, a new focal point slowly began to establish itself: Rome and the reform papacy. The bishop of Rome claimed to

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be speaking and acting for the whole of Christendom. Historians are unanimous that the year 1046 marked the beginning of this “revolution,”21 acknowledging at the same time that changing religious attitudes prepared the way for it. Hence, I have chosen the events of 1046 as a touchstone for these more general remarks on long-distance communication. In 1046, the German King and Emperor-to-be Henry III journeyed to Italy for his imperial coronation. Henry was known to be a pious man married to the even more pious woman Agnes, who had strong connections to Cluny in Burgundy, a reform monastery founded by one of her forebears. When their son Henry, the later Henry IV, was born in 1050, the couple asked Abbot Hugh of Cluny to raise him from the baptismal font as his godfather. Wherever Henry III went, he took care to create the image of a king taking seriously his duty as protector of the church. On his way to Rome, he met with a large number of Italian bishops who had assembled in Pavia, and it was probably there that he gave the harangue against simony that the historian Radulf Glaber ascribes to him.22 It is not Henry’s pious sermon that is of interest here, but his meeting with Pope Gregory VI in Piacenza. We know of this meeting because some German annals mention the honorable reception that the German king accorded Pope Gregory, and because the memorial book of the monastery San Sa­ vino in Piacenza has a joint inscription of both king and pope. They had concluded a fraternity of prayer both with the monks of San Savino and with each other, its date established as shortly after the synod at Pavia.23 Pope Gregory, so it can be inferred, had heard of the king’s imminent ­arrival and gone north to meet him, and Henry had acknowledged him as pope. At the time the papacy was in turmoil. During the first half of the eleventh century, the powerful counts of Tusculum were preeminent in Latium and the city of Rome, and had used their power to have three members of their family successively installed as popes Benedict VIII (1012–24), John XIX (1024–32), and Benedict IX (1032–45). But after count Alberich, long-time head of the house of Tusculum, died, a revolt broke out in September 1044 and ousted many of those who owed their position to Tusculani influence. Pope Benedict IX was among them, driven out on the pretext that he had proved utterly depraved and unworthy of the papacy.24 In January 1045, a bishop belonging to the rival Crescenti clan was installed in his stead as Pope Sylvester III. Benedict eventually ­declared himself willing to resign, but unwilling to leave the papacy to his rival Sylvester III. So he came up with a third candidate, namely John Gratianus, his blood relation and godfather, who enjoyed a reputation for piety and priestly zeal.

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Benedict, however, would not resign without compensation for his loss of income from the papal domains. Eventually he got his money and duly resigned, and John was made pope in his stead on 1 May 1045, taking the name Gregory VI. It is hard to determine whether Gregory was personally involved in the financial transaction, but it gave rise to discussion among the Roman clergy as to whether Gregory had committed simony. There seems to have been agreement that a problem existed, but even some of the most reform-minded people continued to support Gregory because they considered him a virtuous man caught in a dreadful trap that was not his fault.25 There was as yet, moreover, no accepted juridical definition of simony, which referred generally to an illicit mix of secular gain and ecclesiastical duty.26 Gregory VI was recognized not only in Rome but by churches in Italy, Germany, and France as well. The most surprising document is a papal confirmation charter for the monastery MontSaint-Quentin, a small place, a property of the nearby counts of Péronne.27 The French King Henry I (1031–60) had sent a messenger to Rome petitioning for a papal charter for the monastery.28 How an apparently inconspicuous little place called a cella and a monasteriola could get two kings, the pope, and a mighty count to issue charters in its favor is an enigma, though Mont-Saint-Quentin later became one of the most important reform monasteries in the region. With Sylvester III having quietly returned to his episcopal see sometime in 1045, and Benedict IX now withdrawn, there was no one who actively challenged Gregory’s position. He had thus been the acknowledged pope for a good year and a half when he met with Henry III in Piacenza. Yet there were two other popes, however dubious their legal status, who still existed. Benedict IX could justly claim that he had been deprived of his office illegally by force and might demand restitution if a political turn should make that possible. He tried in fact in 1048, when the political situation seemed favorable, and reappears as pope as late as 1055.29 Syl­ vester III, his elevation dubious in the first place, could well be called a usurper but had nonetheless been pope and was never properly judged. As for legality, Gregory’s position was as questionable as that of the other two: as far as we know, he had never really been cleared of the suspicion of simony, it being of no legal import that a group of reform-minded people in Rome declared Gregory suitable. When Henry subsequently neared Rome he convened two synods successively, one at Sutri and one at Rome, and he had all three popes deposed. Thus, he took two contradictory actions within a very short time: he entered into confraternity with Gregory and only six weeks later had

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the same man deposed. How can this be explained? The answer usually is that he changed his mind on his way from Piacenza to Rome.30 He certainly did, but why? There seem to be two possible answers: either he was inadequately informed about the situation in Rome, or he was an exceptionally imprudent man given to rash actions. In light of Henry’s full record as a ruler, the second option seems unlikely. I prefer to think that the German king was only superficially informed about the situation in Rome. At San Savino he seems to have had no doubts that Gregory was the le­ gitimate pope, and there were good reasons for thinking so: Gregory had acted as pope for a year and a half without apparent opposition. Still, it seems surprising that King Henry would not have inquired after Benedict IX, the pope with whom he had dealt only three years before. A charter again reveals this: in April 1044 the Abbot of San Miniato al Monte near Florence had received a charter of papal protection from Benedict IX,31 and in November of the same year at the request of two papal legates, Henry III issued a letter of protection at Ingelheim for the monastery.32 Would he have received Gregory VI so demonstrably if he had known how a turnover of the papal throne had been effected? It was not difficult to surmise that noble families and their factions had led to the schism and that their grip on the papacy would persist. It was easy to know, it seems, who the acting pope was, but difficult to get an unbiased assessment of the political and juridical complexities in a close-knit society dominated by quarrelling clans. To get this kind of assessment would have required experienced and trustworthy representatives acquainted with leading people from all factions and also the means to judge among the many opinions they would hear in the course of many conversations. Such representatives would have had thus to be in touch with Roman affairs on a more or less permanent basis, not just when a distant ruler decided to come for his imperial crown, and hence be permanent representatives on the spot. Resident ambassadors, however, began to appear only in the thirteenth century.33 Before that, communication across the Alps seems to have been mostly occasional, a means for attending to particular business, and the bulk of it concerned people and places in northern Lombard Italy, papal representatives being then but rarely involved.34 Why legates came to Henry’s diet at Ingelheim in 1043 is not known. The visit of those legates occurred before the Crescenti revolt had overthrown the Tusculani papacy of Benedict IX in 1044 and thereby started the turmoil with which Henry III would be confronted when he approached Rome.

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Henry’s ill-advised action at San Savino might have had something to do with the death of Kadeloh in 1045. Very probably an Italian by birth, Kadeloh had been a very active chancellor for Italy during the preceding eight or nine years and might well have been dispatched after news of the Roman revolt reached King Henry. But he never returned, dying in Italy in 1045. This means that King Henry set out shortly after he had lost his most knowledgeable adviser, a person present whenever Italian business came up. Kadeloh’s death had more than individual import. The German chancery was not yet an institution. It consisted of clerics with differing backgrounds whom kings had respectively assembled in the chapel for differing reasons, and who accompanied him on his constant perambulations. Within the chapel the chancery was a special group.35 With little or no institutionalized administrative continuity, expertise was personal, dying with the incumbent. Kadeloh had served as chancellor for eight years, and judging by his activities in Italy and for Italian recipients he was expert.36 But there was nobody we know who could transmit Kadeloh’s knowledge of Italian noble networks in his time to a successor. There were several reasons then why Henry III was insufficiently informed when he met with Gregory VI in Piacenza. After he learned how muddled the whole affair was, he had consequently to change his mind. Long-distance policy making, I want to suggest, would have presupposed a system of information much more sophisticated than the one German kings of the high Middle Ages had at their disposal. This pertained not only to a total lack of any technical media of communication linked to their constant physical mobility.37 The Anglo-Norman and English kings of the twelfth century, with their vast continental dominions, show this could be made to work more efficiently than eleventh-century German kings did, for whom long-distance communication lacked all administrative routine and established procedures, depending heavily on the inge­ nuity, competence, and good will of individuals. Even if we suppose that every person did their very best to provide good information, it was next to impossible for a distant recipient to know whether the news he received was unbiased and was more or less the complete story, or simply wrong owing to inexperience, negligence, incompetence, or even ill intent. Even if trustworthy representatives were employed, which most kings probably could do, it was still impossible to know whether the messenger had contacted the right people. Also, news was not so new when it reached its ­destination. If messengers were really fast and weather conditions favorable, they could make it in perhaps a month from Rome to the royal court

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in Germany, depending also, of course, on where the court happened to be.38 Often it took longer. In times of revolt and unrest, the situation might have changed considerably by the time messengers arrived to tell their story. An analysis of twelfth-century letters shows that it was and remained extremely difficult to get reliable information.39 Was Henry III aware of these difficulties? His actions seem to suggest he was not, or he would not have declared himself in favor of Gregory VI before making sure that he was the legitimate pope. Was Henry III exceptional in his carelessness, or were German kings unable to perceive the challenge they confronted in long-distance policy making? Could it be that in the eleventh century and earlier German kings in general, and perhaps princes from other regions as well, grew used to going to distant places without first acquiring detailed information about social networks, the complexities of social alliances, and the conflicts arising from them? They must have sent messengers to prepare household necessities for their large retinues. But adequate political intelligence? This example seems to indicate it was not part of the preparations for a journey. If Henry III set out for his coronation without having taken care to be informed about the situation in Rome, he must have believed it ­unnecessary—for I am convinced people will come by what they consider important. A well-known German medievalist once characterized the government of the medieval German kings as “decision-making from the ­saddle.”40 Such rule does not need, and therefore does not create, elaborate systems of communication. People who care to know, will know; those who don’t, won’t. The way Henry III intervened in papal affairs in 1046 reveals something about the historical outlook of his time. Henry’s way of proceeding seems to indicate that even kings could be barely familiar with the world outside their own sphere of life. Henry’s actions give the impression of having been spontaneous, not premeditated, “from the saddle.” His major point of reference seems to have been his own sacrality, his claim to be God’s supreme representative on earth, and his calling to act out this role wherever he was. That way of perceiving the world and its people is basically self-centered. Modern scholars tend to believe that his main concern was being crowned emperor by a pope of unquestionable legitimacy.41 When accusations of simony against Gregory reached him somewhere on his way from Piacenza and Rome, Gregory had to go. By having three popes deposed and a reform-minded German bishop installed as pope in their place, Henry acted under the heading of bringing peace to the Roman Church and the whole world (totus orbis). Did the world know? If we go by contemporary sources, we must conclude that

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the world neither knew nor cared about the events of 1046 and their aftermath. Nor did it take notice of the German king’s claim to promote peace by divine ordinance or indeed the fundamental changes this eventually brought for the papacy and the whole church. Few historical sources from Italy and the German lands mention the events. Most were written somewhat later, and they arrived at very diverse judgments depending on which faction their authors belonged to after the conflicts associated with the name of Gregory VII had broken out.42 In some German literary sources, Henry III is compared to David and Solomon and acclaimed for having promoted peace, in others he is vituperated for his avarice; but only once does his ending the papal schism get mentioned.43 In France, Henry’s activities were known, this shown by a tract on the canonical form for ordaining and deposing bishops which seems to have been written very shortly after the synod of Sutri.44 The presumably French author alludes to Henry’s depositions of the popes and calls them illicit from his broadly legal outlook. In his eyes, that made Henry “a most evil emperor.” This author did not intend to write history, but bears witness to the fact that Henry’s way of ending the schism was known to more people than our written histories reveal. It also shows that people—probably only churchmen at that time—began to get agitated over issues that went beyond their own regional, local, or individual concern. The anonymous author of this tract deals with specific cases by relating them to general rules. That rule was canon law in its yet very rudimentary form in the pre-­ Gratian eleventh century, and he judged the events of 1046 according to what he thought canon law required. To judge a particular event by setting it in relation to a rule was not the way people were generally accustomed to order their experience; they normally referred to custom and familiar traditions. This normative way of thinking and judging was reestablishing itself and gaining ground in the course of the eleventh century. As for England, there is nothing to suggest that King Edward and his leading men had taken notice of what was happening in far-away Rome. This should not be accepted at face-value, however, since few historical sources survive from this time. A retrospective view may help uncover what might have reached England to become part of English oral or historical traditions but not survive into modern times. The great twelfthcentury English historian William of Malmesbury may provide indirect evidence for what might have been known in England three-quarters of a century before he finished the first version of his main works. He completed his two major historical works, the De Gestis Regum Anglorum45 and De Gestis Pontificum Anglorum46 in 1125. As a scholar, William traveled far

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and wide visiting the libraries of Britain, gathering and extracting material for his works and thus becoming “the best-read man of the century.”47 As far as historical writings in Old English are concerned, “there was very little still accessible today which was not known to William, and in addition he knew some works now lost.”48 His conscientious approach seems to suggest that nothing would have escaped his searching eyes if hidden in English libraries and relevant to his work. His intention was to write English history, to relate the deeds of ­English kings and bishops. But William shows some interest in continental affairs and includes episodes that tell about popes and kings. Yet they are mostly legendary and oral, as he explains about tales of the sumptuous marriage of King Canute’s daughter Gunhild to the German King Henry III “being sung in the streets even in our own day.”49 Gunhild was a girl of sixteen when she married the then eighteen-year-old Henry on Pentecost 1036 in Nijmegen. She died only two years later from the plague in Italy, leaving a baby daughter called Beatrix who later became abbess of the very renowned monastery at Quedlinburg.50 William wrote his History of the English Kings some eighty years after Gunhild’s death. Except for the fact of her marriage to Henry III, her life-story as told by William has virtually nothing to do with what we know from more contemporary sources. He has her live a long life in matrimonial fidelity, then finding herself at length accused of adultery. After her champion had miraculously prevailed in judicial combat, she refused to go on living with her husband, preferring to become a nun instead, “spending her days calmly in the service of God.”51 Gunhild was Canute’s daughter from his marriage to Emma, King Æthelred’s widow whom King Canute had married in 1017 to strengthen his position as king of the English. Gunhild was thus an English princess, and yet her life as queen on the continent left no trace in her home ­country. After having entertained his readers with Gunhild’s fate as Henry’s queen, William goes on to write about Gunhild’s husband Henry III. The first chapter is promising. He not only mentions Henry’s wars against the western Slavonic Wends and Liuticii, which actually took place, but describes the latter’s heathen cult in a more detailed way than any other western writer of his time.52 Yet what follows are legends attached earlier to other rulers. “William’s ignorance of even the most basic data on German history in the post-Carolingian era is profound, but not greater than that shown by Orderic Vitalis or John of Salisbury.”53 There is nothing at all on Henry’s intervention in papal affairs in 1046. That this was not through negligence but ignorance is apparent from the way William arranged his material. Shortly after his chapters on Henry III, he has several

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on Gregory VI, mostly filled with legends as in the case of Henry. William does not establish any connection between the two men. He makes Gregory’s papacy end a time of robbery and other criminal acts in the city of Rome, dealt with at length, culminating in a fervent speech by Gregory on his death-bed in which he is made to defend himself for his severity against the evildoers. It is known through other evidence that William used a “Catalogue of Popes,” which he transcribed into his version of the Liber Pontificalis,54 a work he finished between 1119 and 1125, thus before completing his Gesta Regum. It must be from there that William got the name of the pope.55 William of Malmesbury provides other bits and pieces about the depositions of 1046 in a rather unlikely place, the story of Stigand. Stigand was the last Anglo-Saxon made archbishop of Canterbury, after the Norman Robert had been driven out as a consequence of the anti-Norman revolt of the Godwineson clan in 1051–52.56 After 1066, Stigand’s position was untenable, and he was finally deposed by a synod that two papal ­legates convened at Winchester in 1070. William has nothing favorable to say about Stigand “who would never have earned a pallium from Rome . . . if a certain Benedict had not illegally seized the apostolic see. Benedict sent him a message of congratulations for calling him pope, when the other archbishops treated him as a joke. But Benedict was soon deposed, his acts made null and void, and a decree passed in a proper council that the pallium could not have been legally bestowed by someone who was not legally pope.”57 One may wonder whether William’s reticence allows us to draw any conclusions as to what was known in England about the depositions at Sutri and Rome. King Edward’s royal court might have had information that left no trace for a historian like William writing his chronicle some eighty years after the event. It is surprising though that William made no use of the chronicle of Marianus Scotus, of which he had made a copy.58 Canossa—1077

For my second example, I turn to Canossa.59 In the thirty years between 1046 and 1077, the pope’s position had undergone decisive change. Step by step, the popes had assumed the role of supreme leader in fighting customs then prevailing in the church, which a growing number of people had come to consider evil, bad customs summed up under the terms simony and nicolaitism. Definitions of those terms, however, were anything

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but clear. Rural priests especially were used to having wives and children. Was that nicolaitism? Many priests rejected this interpretation and wanted to reserve the term nicolaitism for licentiousness.60 Nor was there any accepted definition of simony, nor was it clear whether sacraments administered by a priest accounted guilty of these sins were valid. But there was genuine fear that one’s soul and salvation were in danger when such priests performed sacraments. In this situation, more and more people turned to Rome for clarification, and popes intervened in local affairs more and more by way of legates, papal jurisdiction, and generally with papal ­synods. When Gregory VII became pope in 1073, the popes and their doings had already become much better known to a greater number of people than thirty years before when Henry III had ended the schism by depositions. As in 1046, it was the German king and emperor-to-be who undertook to depose the pope, this time in Worms where Henry III’s son Henry IV had convened the bishops and leading lay nobles of his kingdom. Henry was involved in two conflicts that up to that time had developed separately. One concerned Milan, where a new archbishop had to be elected after the incumbent Guido had resigned. The social unrest leading to Guido’s resignation continued to disrupt the city and led to violence at the archiepiscopal election. As in all other churches, there was no established procedure that would have allowed them to reach a peaceful de­ cision. The only electoral “law” available was a venerable old formula stipulating that an episcopal election should be done “by clergy and ­people” (clero et populo). This formula was not concerned with procedure but presumed unanimity in acceding to the will of God.61 In actual practice, the will of God was believed to manifest itself in the consensus of the important men of a given community, whose authority the others were made to follow.62 This, however, could not be had in strife-ridden Milan, where the faction that had supported Guido followed custom by turning to the king for the investiture of their candidate, whereas the revolting “Pataria” sought and received support from the popes, an unlikely alliance given the proud self-assertion of the Ambrosian Church.63 Popes supported the Patarene candidate in the name of “church reform” against “evil customs.” Thus Henry became the enemy of the papacy. The conflict escalated when Gregory VII became pope in 1073. He claimed to be speaking and acting in the name of “truth” and “the liberty of the church,” and ­demanded obedience from the king, which Henry refused, claiming to ­defend his customary royal rights against unheard-of presumptions. The other conflict concerned the Saxons. In a way, Henry had in­ herited the enmity of leading Saxon nobles from his father Henry III. In

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the eleventh century, as during most of the earlier Middle Ages, kingdoms and principalities were very loosely structured entities. The bigger they were, the more the mental and physical tools of government proved inadequate to administer a large complex of lands and people. A king’s range of action was determined by his ability to establish consent and cooperation with leading regional and local lords in his realm.64 The basis of royal government was the king’s physical presence, made manifest in his wandering court. When diverging interests disrupted the basic consensus demonstrated there, revolts easily flared up. Provincial opposition was strongest in those parts of their kingdoms where kings tried to assert royal predominance without being able to rely on strong ties of consanguinity and friendship.65 In Germany in the eleventh century, this was particularly the case in Saxony, where leading noble families had formed alliances against the Salian king, whose own roots and possessions lay in the Frankish ­middle Rhine valley around Worms. The Saxons protested that the king was endangering their liberty by bringing ministerials—“men raised from the dust”66—from southern Germany into royal strongholds in Saxony.67 The Swabian ministerials were unacceptable to Saxon nobles on two grounds: they were “foreigners,” and they were not equal in birth and therefore not honorable enemies. In 1073, the conflict escalated into open war. In June of 1075, Henry was able to win an important battle with his host, and on October 25 of that same year the Saxon rebels solemnly submitted. In view of this success, Henry seems to have felt no need to comply with the pope’s demands in the Milanese affair. Six weeks later, Pope Gregory dictated a letter to Henry in which he peremptorily demanded obedience from him.68 The written papal ultimatum reached Henry on 1 January 1076 in Goslar. A triumphant king, made confident of his strength to overcome enemies, confronted a letter reinforced by oral admonitions demanding h ­ umble submission to the pope’s will. Since Henry also knew that many of his bishops shared in his indignation at Gregory’s hierarchical pretensions, they too having been confronted with demands from Rome, the king was all the more willing brusquely to repudiate Gregory’s letter. He summoned a “general assembly of all the princes of his kingdom”69 to meet in Worms. Twenty-four of thirty-eight German bishops attended.70 On 24 January 1076, in two separate letters, the king and bishops withdrew their allegiance from the pope and demanded his abdication. In a third letter, Henry ordered the Romans to force Gregory to step down. Gregory’s answer was pronounced on the last day of the Lenten synod, probably on 22 February 1076. He excommunicated the king and all who had signed

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the episcopal letter. This was the first excommunication of an anointed king in the Middle Ages, a thing unheard of, which nobody seems to have known how to deal with. Bonizo of Sutri might have caught the spirit of those who witnessed or heard of it when he wrote: “After the banning of the king reached the ears of the people, our whole Roman world began to shake.”71 The escalation of the conflict, as scholars have long realized, was largely and fatally due to coincidences in time, thus to the conditions of communication in the eleventh century. It took Gregory’s letter of December 8 three and a half weeks to reach Henry’s court at Goslar, and it seems next to impossible that Gregory knew about the Saxons’ submission when he dictated it. He knew of Henry’s decisive victory in June 1075, but probably had little or no up-to-date information on relations between Henry and the revolting princes. With long-distance policy making in the eleventh century, neither side could estimate into what situation messengers would deliver letters and oral instructions given to them several weeks before. Gregory VII also seems not a man to reflect on the repercussions of far-away political situations for his own actions. He was moved by his vision of the church and his role as pope. Neither do Henry’s actions suggest that he weighed the pope’s strength against his own, thinking more like his father about the sacrality of his own claims and role. This does not mean that his dealings with the nobles sprang from those same principles. Heroic warrior kingship and the sacrality of the Lord’s anointed had not yet amalgamated into a new perception of kingship. That was to develop from the twelfth century onwards.72 The papal ban would have had far less effect on Henry’s kingship had the king’s former enemies among the lay and ecclesiastical German nobility not chosen to treat it as a judgment that had to be obeyed. It is impossible to tell whether this meant that the German elite was guided by basic ideas of church reform and papal authority, or that these princes used the ban as a welcome pretext to renew their revolt. Contemporary letters reveal that the princes were anything but unanimous. Papal legates had arrived at Oppenheim in the middle of October to join the deliberations. The most adversarial of the princes were pushing for the election of a new king. As a kind of compromise, the whole assembly confronted Henry with a threat that they would indeed elect a new king if he failed to get the ban lifted within a year of its proclamation. This caused King Henry to set out for Rome, accompanied by his wife and baby son. The company intercepted Pope Gregory at the stronghold of Canossa. Different parts in the act of penance were negotiated

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with the help of illustrious mediators: Henry appeared before the pope in the garb of a repentant sinner and carried out the solemn rites that had been agreed upon, begging to be reconciled to Mother Church. Even the date of the penance seems to have been part of the negotiated agreement: it started on January 25, the commemoration of the conversio Pauli, when Saul the pursuer of Christians became Paul the Lord’s apostle. The transmission of all the events surrounding Canossa is far more contradictory, and continuing tensions among different factions far less clear, than might appear from this summary account.73 Still, in comparison with earlier events, there is an impressive amount of material relating to Canossa, another peculiarity of eleventh-century communication, information from far-away places ordinarily being not obtainable but possible to organize when extraordinary events required it. The banning of King Henry IV was such an event, with all its ensuing contacts. On extraordinary occasions, extraordinary efforts could be made to ensure a more or less continuous flow of information. But this kind of long-­distance information did not yet generate administrative routine, something apparently made to work on special occasions but not yet a part of routine government. When we ask what resonance Canossa had outside of Italy and Germany, the answer must be short: next to none. Even for Germany, modern historical narratives give a misleading impression because they are composite reports, compiled from those contemporary sources scholarly criticism has judged most reliable. Even some of those medieval historians who dealt extensively with Henry IV and his conflicts seem to have known surprisingly little; even the name “Canossa” is unfamiliar to them. Although Gregory himself had written a letter to the German princes in which he extensively described Henry’s penance at Canossa and the events surrounding it,74 knowledge about all this was distributed very unevenly in differing regions of Germany.75 The most surprising case is Saxony. Lampert of Hersfeld, who wrote his annal shortly after 1077, seems to have been the only one with eyewitness reports and Gregory’s letter, offering many details for his view of Canossa. It is quite different with Brun of Merseburg.76 He inserted many letters into his violently anti-Henrician Book on the Saxon War, finished in 1082. Gregory’s letter to the princes is not among them. A detailed account of Canossa would most certainly have suited him, but his narrative is very meager on that point. The only thing he seems to have known is that Henry did penance before the pope “barefoot and in woolen garments.” The location is not named, “Canossa” never mentioned.77 Readers with no other information might think that

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Henry’s penance had taken place not at Canossa but at Rome, and the author might have thought so himself. Brun hated the king, but mostly for “Saxon” reasons. His report on Canossa is very short, no drama, just another piece in a long story. What had happened in Italy seems not to have agitated ordinary Saxons very much. We find another cluster of relevant historiography in southern Germany, especially at Reichenau where Hermann of Reichenau’s student Berthold continued his master’s chronicle after the latter’s death in 1054.78 Access to Italy was easy via Lake Constance, and Reichenau’s abbots belonged to Germany’s ecclesiastical elite. Berthold himself had access to the cathedral library at Constance situated not far from his monastery,79 and was excellently situated to hear about events in the regnum Italiae. He followed his teacher Hermann in using the annalistic form and in writing from the vantage point of an imperial monastery.80 But in the late 1060s his worldview changed, and he rewrote the earlier part of his annals as a Gregorian partisan. This coincided with turmoil inside his monastery, where King Henry had introduced two successive abbots from outside the community. Berthold gave vent to the convent’s resentment against “strangers” (one from Hildesheim in Saxony and the other from Bamberg in Franconia) and called Henry’s appointments simoniac. After the first one had resigned and the second one was deposed, one Eggehard, a monk of Reichenau, was elected abbot in 1073. Under the leadership of Eggehard, who went to Rome to be consecrated by Pope Gregory himself, the community fervently followed a Gregorian course, a turn that also made it anti-Henrician. In this new spirit, Berthold rewrote the earlier parts of his chronicle, then continued on in a Gregorian tone. He has much to say about simony, a word used whenever he notes an ecclesiastical appointment made by the king, and in general about “scandalous presumptions against Mother Church.”81 The cathedral library at Constance put at Berthold’s disposal many Gregorian documents, from which he extracted whole passages for his chronicle. As far as Canossa was concerned, he clearly had written material before him, providing many details, all seasoned by his own judgments betraying his loathing of the king. Except for some later tracts and annals and an anonymous life of King Henry written at the beginning of the twelfth century,82 only at Hersfeld and on Lake Constance83 were strictly contemporary German reports about Canossa produced.84 Hugh of Flavigny may be mentioned here too, though his career path makes him something of an exception. He started life as a monk in the monastery of St. Vanne in Verdun, part of the imperial church at that time and a renowned cultural center in Lotharingia.

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When tensions broke out between the bishop of Verdun, who was proHenrician, and St. Vanne, whose abbot and convent sided with the Roman reform party, Hugh went into exile and joined the monastery of Flavignysur-Ozerain near Dijon, where he sought out the company of Abbot Hugh of Cluny and also took up contact with Archbishop Hugh of Lyon, Gregory VII’s most active propagandist in the French church. It was at Flavigny that he started in 1096 to write a chronicle in two books.85 His career path allowed him to draw material from both Verdun and Lyon,86 thus making him hardly “French.” He copied many documents into his chronicle and was well informed, knowing and quoting from Gregory’s letter to the German princes in January 1077. Beyond German historians and Hugh of Flavigny, there were also narrative sources from northern Italy, most written in places near Canossa.87 Except perhaps Brun of Merseburg’s chronicle, all German narrative sources were based on written materials and written by clerical or monastic intellectuals. We have nearly nothing to indicate that “ordinary people” participated in the debate, none of those “public rumors” referred to in twelfth-century texts as sources of all kinds of news. We cannot completely exclude the possibility that news “as some swift and fickle rumor . . . got around through the mouths of the people,”88 and that lay people were agitated by what they heard about their king’s penance at Canossa. It seems far more likely, however, that only a limited number of high nobles took notice of this. The addressees of Gregory’s letter would have been informed, at the latest at Forchheim, where Henry’s enemies came together with two papal legates in March 1077 and elected a new king. Only Marianus Scotus might have integrated oral information into his chronicle. Marianus was an Irishman who became a monk in 1052 and went to Germany in 1056, where he had himself immured at the monastery of St. Alban’s in Mainz in 1069, and there lived and wrote his chroni­ cle until his death about 1082. He was a direct contemporary of Canossa and excellently placed for information since the archbishop of Mainz was the highest churchman in Germany and deeply involved in the conflict: Archbishop Siegfried had presided at the crucial meeting at Worms in January 1076, then changed sides shortly afterwards. But this is what readers (or listeners) would find in Marianus: “King Henry and Pope Hilde­ brand came together in March in Lombardy, and the king received from the pope the loosening of the ban, and the pope received (accepit) the papal throne from the king.”89 Marianus evidently missed the essential point.90 Gregory had demanded obedience from the king, from all kings, whereas Henry had insisted on his royal prerogatives. By doing penance

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Henry ­acknowledged that he had been in the wrong, that in matters ecclesiastical he could not ignore papal commands even with respect to churches in his own kingdom. Henry acted out the role of the repentant sinner, Gregory that of the benevolent spiritual father. The arrangement and the staging of Henry’s penance definitely demonstrated hierarchy. But Marianus has both act on an equal basis. He has both come together (convenientes) and achieve a peaceful understanding, a kind of compositio as practiced in secular law. Although he might have been closer to what actually happened than modern interpretations want to have it,91 he cannot but be wrong in having the pope “accept” the papal throne from the German king. Marianus reveals that he had missed the very essence of the change happening in his time, because even if Canossa was essentially a peace treaty, the pope had definitely made Henry accept his supremacy. Was this the story ­Henrician-minded people were spreading deliberately to make the king look less subordinate, or had public rumor in the course of dissemination adapted a story people could make no sense of into something more familiar to their thinking? There is one other point I find somewhat disturbing. As noted, Marianus Scottus and Archbishop Siegfried lived in Mainz, next door to each other, and at the end of the eleventh century, the towns were still very small. The archbishop had known the recluse personally for a long time, just as Marianus surely had known the archbishop.92 Now, Archbishop Siegfried had been in discussions about the legal implications of different steps to reconciliation at Canossa, and criticized the pope for having loosened the ban without first demanding satisfaction from King Henry.93 This archbishop manifestly held detailed information about what happened at Canossa, while the historian Marianus who lived next door to him had a completely different story to tell. In the case of Canossa, an exception, we have several parallel accounts that allow us to be certain that Marianus was wrong. But should the case of Marianus make us suspicious that what we find in historians may be nothing more than their personal haphazard perceptions?94 Marianus’ version of the events at Canossa might not deserve mention had his chronicle not been brought to England in the middle of the twelfth century by Bishop Robert of Hereford. Of it three copies are extant today, one written in the hand of the historian John of Worcester, another in that of William of Malmesbury. A collation of these two manuscripts indicates that each historian made independent transcriptions of the Here­ford Manuscript.95 For a long time, Marianus’ version was the only written in-

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formation pertaining to Canossa available in England; thus it was the only reliable information either John of Worcester or William of Malmesbury had for their own chronicles. John closely followed the first part of Marianus’ sentence, then abbreviated its second part: “King Henry and Pope Hiltibrandus came together in Lombardy in the month of March and made peace with each other, but falsely as it turned out later.”96 William of Malmesbury does not mention Canossa but refers to Henry IV on several occasions. He offers a portrait of the king, then sums up the dramatic turns in his life with a notable judgment: “that was the period when the pitiful and almost disastrous tenure of imperial power by Henry . . . was for fifty years a grievous burden to the Germans. Himself neither uneducated nor idle, he became by some freak of fortune a general target, so much so that whoever took up arms against him thought himself to be serving the cause of religion.”97 This judgment is surprising. It might have corresponded to attitudes held in English “government” at the time of Canossa, namely, by William the Conqueror and Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury. Both were reform-minded in the somewhat old fashioned sense of wanting to improve the morals of the English clergy, the piety of the English laity, and the functioning of the English church in general. Both agreed this could be achieved best through cooperation between the English king and the primate of the English church. Both stayed aloof from Gregorian-style zealotry. Lanfranc left letters from Pope Gregory unanswered and ignored invitations to papal councils.98 King and archbishop were suspicious, it appears, of papal interventions and fearful of their disruptive force if religious arguments were to be seized upon by enemies and deployed as weapons against the newly established Norman order in England. William of Malmesbury seems to suggest that this is exactly what happened to the German King Henry IV. That would also explain the surprisingly balanced characterization of Henry in the chapter where he dealt briefly with papal schisms after Gregory VII’s death in 1085. William did not approve of Henry’s antipope, nor did he approve of the emperor’s obstinacy in that regard; but here too he counterbalanced these judgments with yet another laudatory characterization of Henry: [T]here were many other points which you would approve in an emperor: he was a powerful speaker with a keen intelligence nourished by wide reading, and active in charitable causes. In him good qualities of mind and body were immediately obvious: a ready warrior (he had fought it out in pitched battles sixty-two times), a just arbiter of

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­ isputes, a man who, when things had gone badly, turned his comd plaints towards Heaven and from Heaven expected help. The majority of his enemies came to a pitiable end.99 This could be either a summing-up of detailed knowledge or a blowing-up of scant knowledge by inserting the ideal image of an early medieval king. In the first case, it would mean that William of Malmesbury knew more about King Henry than he finally put down. In the second, it would mean that in spite of all the scathing criticism the hapless king met with in Germany, the vague image that somehow got to England was rather favorable. At Canossa, Pope Gregory VII successfully excommunicated a king and helped destroy his standing as king. Was that not reason enough for other kings to be alarmed? Seemingly not, so far as can be inferred from extant sources. Outside the German and Italian kingdoms nobody seems to have bothered with it. Perhaps this is understandable: the event took place far from the others’ normal sphere of action and was complex in its background and meaning. Even people who lived close by could hardly grasp what it was all about. Still, should not other kings have had reason to be alarmed, the more so as the French king had been threatened with excommunication even before Henry IV?100 Apparently not. For other kings to be interested in and connect to the events at Canossa, I wish to suggest, would have required a degree of intellectual abstraction not common at the time. If historiography and its language can be used as a guide to the way people perceived the world in which they lived, we must assume that they thought in terms of discrete entities and not so much in complexly structured social systems. Abstract nouns, conceptual abstractions, were rather rare. That’s why modern historians have to create so many concepts to describe the medieval social world—since we are used to ordering our world through categorically defined relationships. This does not mean that early medieval writers completely lacked all powers of conceptualization and categorically defined systems of order, only that abstract nouns and a categorically ordered relating of things and people were far less important in the eleventh century than they were from the twelfth century onwards, when people’s minds in time underwent the influence of scholastic thinking’s categorizing approaches. In the older mode of ordering one’s world from experience, the affairs of people living outside one’s world meant very little to those within. If Henry IV went to Italy to do penance before the pope, that did not concern other kings. I doubt it had entered their minds that what Pope Gregory demanded of King Henry all popes could demand of all kings. But from Gregory’s vantage point, this

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looked quite different. He wrote numerous letters to virtually all of the rulers in Latin Europe and manifestly tried to establish a Christian community of all people and all kingdoms through their collective submission to the Roman Church.101 Rome—1111

Among many instances of change in the twelfth century, I wish to consider the conflict between King Henry V and Pope Paschal II in 1111. In that year, the German king went to Rome for his imperial coronation, like his grandfather Henry III before him, the differences now not personal in nature but broadly in principle and leading to a violent confrontation. Whereas Henry III had been surprised to find that the pope who was to crown him was accused of simony and so had him deposed, his grandson had known since before he became king in 1106 that the papacy, not just a single pope, was fundamentally opposed to the customary way in which kings and other great lords in Latin Europe appointed bishops, by investing them with ring and staff. Since 1078, popes had prohibited investiture by laymen and made it clear that they considered kings laymen, while the ring and staff were spiritual symbols reserved for ecclesiastics. Still, there was a problem, also acknowledged by popes. Bishops had been endowed with great landed wealth by kings and other benefactors ever since Carolingian times and also held numerous rights that would today be called “public.” This made them princes and barons in their own right, and kings had an understandable interest in underscoring the duality of this position. By 1111, the French and the English kings had found ways to remain involved in the investiture of their ecclesiastical barons and princes and thus to guard their interests, though they had abandoned the controversial symbols—but not the German king when he set out for Italy. Henry V was well acquainted with the issue of investiture. Delegations had been sent to Rome to negotiate possible compromises, but a settlement had not yet been reached. When the king met with papal legates on his way to Rome, a revolutionary proposal was presented: bishops should return all regalian rights, meaning all rights by which they participated in the governance of the realm as lay magnates did, that on which their princely status depended.102 In return, Henry would abstain from all participation in episcopal elections and investiture.103 This was radical indeed. It was a pact that, if implemented, would have completely changed the structure of the governing elite in the German kingdom. Henry seems

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to have recognized this, because he insisted on unanimous approval by the ecclesiastical and lay princes for the agreement to go into effect.104 When it was read out to the princes assembled in St. Peter’s Basilica for the imperial coronation, violent protests erupted, blocking completion of the ceremony. Tumult and fighting swept the city and prevented new negotiations. Henry then led the pope and several cardinals out of Rome and pressured them into acknowledging his traditional right of investiture with ring and staff and crowning him emperor. He also forced the pope to issue a papal privilege to this effect, later denounced as a “pravilege” by a Roman synod, thus a “depraved” privilege.105 This time, the event did not pass unnoticed in Europe as similar events had in the past. There were two main reasons for this. First, the issue of investiture had been on the agenda for decades. All kings and princes had felt the pressure from Rome, though the ways they dealt with it differed. But they knew from their own experience what the quarrel was about. Second, in the course of the investiture controversy, popes had transformed into practical politics what had before been mostly an ideal, namely that the papacy represented the highest authority in all things spiritual and churchly. Kings, princes, and high churchmen had in general more contacts with the papacy more often than ever before and therefore knew more about the papacy. It was the papacy, moreover, that had initiated the First Crusade and assumed its leadership, making many people realize that Latin Christendom had united for a common cause, notwithstanding the reality of persistent ethnic antagonisms on crusade. In France, clear-sighted and determined churchmen brought the French church to see itself as “the oldest daughter of the church.”106 The papal legate Hugh of Die avidly picked up Gregory VII’s admonitions to fight investiture by laymen and have archbishops and bishops deny consecration to anyone who had received investiture from a layman. Hugh, who was archbishop of Lyon from about 1081 to 1106 and thus primate of the Ecclesia Gallicana, established himself as one of the most fervent proponents of the papal cause.107 In France, church reform became synonymous with allegiance to the pope and the Roman Church. In his Life of Louis VI, Suger spelled out this new royal theology of the French kings, calling it their privileged honor to prostrate their royal majesty at the supreme pontiff ’s feet, to lower their crown, and to sit by the pope “as the most devoted son of the apostle.”108 Little wonder that Henry V’s violent attack on the pope elicited unanimous outrage in France. The events of 1111 assured Henry V a place as “the disturber of kingdom and Church,” the fiend, the antichrist.109 That negative image enabled the Capetians with their

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r­ising power and self-assertion to appear as the perfect example of true Christian kingship, thus to establish an exclusive royal ideology of rex Chris­tianissimus. In England things developed quite differently. After Archbishop Lanfranc had died, it took King William II Rufus, son and heir of William the Conqueror, three years to decide upon Abbot Anselm of Bec as Lanfranc’s successor. Anselm is said to have protested vehemently against his nomination. This was more than ritual humility. Anselm perceived his personal vocation as that of a religious philosopher, a spiritual guide for his flock in faith. He dreaded the chores of administration and feudal obligations attached to the archbishopric. But finally he gave in. There was no election by the monks of Canterbury, and it was the king who nominated him and first tried to make him accept the crozier. When the king did not succeed, those bishops there present came to his aid and forced the staff into Anselm’s tightly locked hands. The monk Eadmer, Anselm’s trusted companion and biographer, who described this scene, gives not the least hint that Anselm refused because it was the king who offered it to him or because he knew the procedure to be counter to what popes had tried to establish as canonically correct since 1078. When Anselm was finally installed as archbishop, he consecrated several bishops earlier invested by King William. “Clearly Anselm knew nothing about the conciliar decision and continued to know nothing about it for another six years.”110 This is surprising, since Anselm had been abbot of the flourishing Norman monastery at Bec. He would have had means to be informed about ecclesiastical developments in Rome as well as France if he thought it necessary. Anselm did not mean, as with his predecessor Lanfranc, deliberately to obviate papal authority by feigning ignorance. He venerated the papacy as a distant luminary in the Christian sky. But he had not turned his attention to Rome simply because he did not expect anything from there. Established custom led him to seek the king’s cooperation and, if need be, support, as Lanfranc had before him. Like Lanfranc, he saw the English church as in need of moral and spiritual reformation, and was as convinced that this was best achieved by joint responsibility of king and primate. When the king refused to cooperate, however, in what Anselm felt it was his duty to achieve, Anselm went into exile. During his stay on the continent he went to Rome. Only after having participated in the papal Easter synod of 1099 and hearing Pope Urban II himself condemn lay investiture and homage did he grasp the incompatibility between papal legislation and English custom. When Henry I succeeded his brother William Rufus in 1100, he recalled Anselm from exile, not knowing that the archbishop would feel

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obliged to implement canon law in its new papal version. It was then that the conflict over lay investiture broke out in England. Henry I vehemently refused to give up any of his royal prerogatives, and in much the same words as the German Henrys: “May your holiness know that by the will of God I will not as long as I live tolerate the diminution of the honors and customs of the kingdom of England.”111 Anselm experienced the situation as a clash of conflicting loyalties. After initial negotiations for a compromise failed, he apparently saw no way out and fled again into exile. The king threatened to confiscate Canterbury’s possessions, and the pope excommunicated several royal counselors and threatened to excommunicate the king himself. Negotiations nonetheless continued, and a compromise was proclaimed in August 1107: Henry surrendered investiture with ring and staff but retained homage as a visible sign of the personal bond between ecclesiastical barons and their lord and king. It is hard to know whether Henry I realized that his German namesakes Henry IV and Henry V had been confronted with similar papal demands. He must have been at least familiar with Henry V’s status in Germany, since he had concluded a marriage alliance with the German king in 1108 on behalf of his then-seven-year-old daughter Matilda, sent in 1110 to her fiancé’s country to prepare for her role as German queen and empress-to-be.112 William of Malmesbury’s Historia Regum is all the more surprising. He did not base his account on information one might expect would be available in England, but exclusively on a report by David the Scot. As noted above, David served in Henry V’s chancery, accom­ panying the king’s host to Rome in 1110, and wrote an eyewitness report of the dramatic events there. William thought David more favorable to Henry V’s cause “than is appropriate for a historian,” and offered two examples of instances where he believed David to have treated Henry’s deeds and opinions with too much leniency. One was the “unexampled violence of seizing the Holy Father.”113 But that was all he had to say about Henry’s taking the pope prisoner, an event which met with an enormous outcry in France. Most of William’s report consists of various privileges King Henry V and Pope Paschal II had exchanged, which he claims to have copied verbatim from David. While twice he makes it clear that he thinks ­David’s report too favorable to Henry,114 he apparently had no other material at hand to disentangle himself and write an account corresponding more to his own views. John of Worcester was in a similar situation, he too basing his narrative on David’s account. Unlike in 1046 and 1077, in any case, these events of 1111, dramatic for German history, were at least superficially known in England.

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Do William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester attest to a new network of international communication in the twelfth century, one that did not exist in the eleventh century? This question is difficult to answer. William calls David the Scot the bishop of Bangor,115 an identification that has been questioned.116 If William was right, however, David likely brought his narrative with him back to the British Isles, where English historians were able to read and copy it. If not, Matilda likely brought it with her entourage when she came back to her father’s lands after her husband Henry V died in 1125.117 Does Matilda stand for a new type of international network, based on the resurgence of the papacy as the focal point of Latin Europe, reinforced by an increase in far-reaching activities such as international marriages? When did foreign queens first begin to establish networks of communication that had not existed before? It seems clear to me that the resurgence of the papacy paved the way. But even for the papacy it was a long and slow process, only eventually allowing historians to become more interested in what happened beyond the borders of their own world. Notes 1.  The title of the exhibition carried over into the books that came out of it: Canossa 1077: Die Erschütterung der Welt; Geschichte, Kunst, und Kultur am Aufgang der Romanik, ed. Christoph Stiegemann and Matthias Wemhoff, 2 vols. (Munich, 2006). Volume 2 features essays written by specialists for a broader public on aspects of the confrontation between popes and German kings. 2.  Karl Leyser, “The Crisis of Medieval Germany,” repr. in his Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, 2 vols. (London, 1994) vol. 2, pp. 21–49. 3.  There are a huge number of historical works on Canossa and its context, most in German. I offer the titles of some recent monographs in alphabetical order. They all feature extensive bibliographies for further reading: Gerd Althoff, Heinrich IV. (Darmstadt, 2006); Uta-Renate Blumenthal, Gregor VII: Papst zwischen Canossa und Kirchenreform (Darmstadt, 2001); Herbert E. J. Cowdrey, Gregory VII (1073–1085) (Cambridge, 1989); Paolo Golinelli, Matilde e i Canossa: Nel cuore del medioevo (Florence, 1996), German trans.: Mathilde und der Gang nach Canossa. Im Herzen des Mittelalters (Düsseldorf, 1998); Ian S. Robinson, Henry IV (Cambridge, 1999); Tilmann Stuve, Salierzeit im Wandel. Zur Geschichte Heinrichs IV. und des Investiturstreits (Köln, 2006); Stefan Weinfurter, Canossa: Die Entzauberung der Welt (Munich, 2006), and Das Jahrhundert der Salier (1024–1125) (Ostfildern, 2004). 4.  Harald Zimmermann, Der Canossagang von 1077. Wirkungen und Wirklichkeit, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz. Abhandlungen der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse 5 (Mainz, 1975). 5.  MGH, Libelli de Lite Imperatorum et Pontificum, vol. 1, p. 109.

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6. Rudolf Schieffer discusses what Bonizo may have meant to express by Romanus orbis. He concludes that it meant “einen weiteren Gesichtskreis, der das päpstliche Rom zum Mittelpunkt hat, meint eine ganze Anzahl christlicher Völker und Reiche, die ihren Blick auf die Kirche des hl. Petrus richteten (oder doch nach gregorianischem Verständnis richten sollten)”; “Gregor VII. und die Könige Europas,” Studi Gregoriani 13 (1989), pp. 189–211, at p. 189. 7.  Karl Leyser, The Ascent of Latin Europe: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 7 November 1984 (Oxford, 1986). 8.  Gerd Tellenbach, Die westliche Kirche vom 10. bis zum frühen 12. Jahr­ hundert (Göttingen, 1988), trans. Timothy Reuter, The Church in Western Europe (Cambridge, 1993); Rudolf Schieffer, “Das Papsttum als Autorität für die euro­ päische Ordnung des Hochmittelalters,” in Salisches Kaisertum und neues Europa, ed. Bernd Schneidmüller and Stefan Weinfurter (Darmstadt, 2007), pp. 47–63, and “Motu proprio: Über die papstgeschichtliche Wende im 11. Jahrhundert,” Historisches Jahrbuch 122 (2002), pp. 27–41. 9. Letters from the twelfth century have striking examples of travelers as under a kind of obligation to share news with their fellow travelers and the people who hosted them on their way; cf. Hanna Vollrath, “Kommunikation über grosse Entfernungen: Die Verbreitung von Nachrichten im Becket-Streit,” in Der Weg in eine weitere Welt, ed. Hanna Vollrath (Berlin 2008), pp. 85–114. 10.  Wolfgang Huschner, Transalpine Kommunikation im Mittelalter: Diplomatische, kulturelle, und politische Wechselwirkungen zwischen Italien und dem nordalpinen Reich (9.–11. Jahrhundert), 3 vols. (Hanover, 2003). 11.  There are some detailed studies on messengers mostly on the basis of later material: Pierre Chaplais, English Diplomatic Practice in the Middle Ages (London and New York, 2003); Giles Constable, The Letters of Peter the Venerable (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), vol. 2, pp. 23–9, and Letters and Letter Collections, Typologie des Sources du Moyen Âge Occidental 17 (Turnhout, 1976), pp. 52–5; Stefan Freund, “Boten und Briefe: Formen und Wege bayerisch-italienischer Kommunikation im Früh- und Hochmittelalter,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte, Beiheft 18, Reihe B (2001), pp. 55–103, and “Kommunikation in der Herrschaft Heinrichs II.,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 66 (2003), pp. 1–32; Bernd Schneidmüller, “Briefe und Boten im Mittelalter,” in Deutsche Postgeschichte, ed. Wolfgang Lotz (Berlin, 1989), pp. 14–23; Medien der Kommunikation im Mittelalter, ed. Karl-Heinz Spieß (Stuttgart, 2003); Horst Wenzel, “Boten und Briefe: Zum Verhältnis körperlicher und nicht-körperlicher Nachrichtenträger,” in Gespräche— Boten—Briefe, ed. Horst Wenzel, Philologische Studien und Quellen 143 (1997), pp. 86–105; Jürg Zullinger, “Ohne Kommunikation würde Chaos herrschen: Zur Bedeutung von Informationsaustausch, Briefverkehr, und Boten bei Bernhard von Clairvaux,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 78 (1996), pp. 251–76. 12.  Huschner assumes that they came, “um Herrscherurkunden zu erhalten,” in Transalpine Kommunikation, vol. 2, p. 838. 13.  It can be doubted, however, whether this is a description of what actually happened or was rather a more theoretical learned tract on how an election should ideally proceed; cf. Hagen Keller, “Schwäbische Herzöge als Thronbewerber: Hermann II. (1002), Rudolf von Rheinfelden (1077), Friedrich von Staufen (1125),” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 131 (1983), pp. 123–62, and Zwischen

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regionaler Begrenzung und universalem Horizont, Propyläen Geschichte Deutschlands 2 (Berlin, 1986), pp. 73–9. 14.  For Wipo’s text see Gesta Chuonradi II. Imperatoris, c. 7, ed. Harry Bresslau, MGH, Ss rer Germ, 3rd ed. (1915); cf. also Herwig Wolfram, Conrad II, trans. Denise H. Kaiser (Philadelphia, 2006), pp. 62–4. 15.  Philippe Buc has underscored this many times in his critical assessment of “political rituals”; see his “Political Ritual: Medieval and Modern Interpretations,” in Die Aktualität des Mittelalters, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz (Bochum, 2000), pp. 255–72, and The Dangers of Ritual (Princeton, 2001), and “Political Rituals and Political Imagination in the Medieval West (4th to 11th Centuries),” in The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet Nelson (London and New York, 2001), pp. 189–213; “Rituel politique et imaginaire politique au haut Moyen Âge,” Revue historique 306 (2002), pp. 843–83. 16.  Knut Görich, Die Ehre Friedrich Barbarossas (Darmstadt, 2001). 17.  Wolfgang Huschner, “Über die politische Bedeutung der Kanzler für Italien in spätottonisch-frühsalischer Zeit (1009–1057),” Archiv für Diplomatik 41 (1995), pp. 31–47. 18.  For a short survey see Uta-Renate Blumenthal, “The Papacy 1024–1112,” in NCMH, vol. 4, pp. 8–37; there is an extended and thoughtful select bibliography accompanying Blumenthal’s article, pp. 790–4. 19. The young scholar Stefan Freund, “Kommunikation in der Herrschaft Heinrichs II,” p. 19 argues that the German King Henry II (1002–24) had at his disposal “ein weite Teile seines Herrschaftsgebiets erfassendes, dicht geknüpftes Informationsnetz von ganz erstaunlichem Ausmass, das im wesentlichen zuverlässige Nachrichten lieferte und mit verblüffender Geschwindigkeit funktionierte.” Apart from whether there really was dependability of information within the German kingdom (which I doubt), I believe that we have to distinguish communication within German lands from that with Henry’s other kingdoms of Italy and Burgundy. 20.  Bernd Schneidmüller, “Wahrnehmungsmuster und Verhaltensformen in den fränkischen Nachfolgereichen,” Deutschland und der Westen Europas, ed. Joa­ chim Ehlers, Vorträge und Forschungen 56 (Stuttgart, 2002), pp. 263–302. 21.  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die europäischen Revolutionen und der Charakter der Nationen (Stuttgart, 1961); trans. with additional chapters as The Driving Power of Western Civilization: Out of Revolution (Boston, 1951); Karl Leyser, “Am Vorabend der ersten europäischen Revolution,” Historische Zeitschrift 257 (1993), pp. 1–28; Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); see the critical comment by Rudolf Schieffer, “The Papal Revolution in Law? Rückfragen an Harold J. Berman,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 22 (1988), pp. 19–30. 22.  Radulf has Henry deliver a sermon against simony and makes it appear as direct speech without, however, naming the place. This sermon and other documents relating to simony in connection with Henry III’s voyage to Italy in 1046 have been the subject of controversy ever since the end of the nineteenth century. See Heinz Wolter, Die Synoden im Reichsgebiet und in Reichsitalien von 916 bis 1956 (Paderborn, 1988), pp. 373–98, especially p. 377 and accompanying nn. 221 and

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222. For Radulf ’s text of Henry’s speech, see Rodulfus Glaber, The Five Books of Histories 5.5, ed. John France (Oxford, 1989), p. 133. 23.  Karl Schmid, “Heinrich III. und Gregor VI. im Gebetsgedächtnis von Piacenza des Jahres 1046,” in Gebetsgedenken und adeliges Selbstverständnis im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 1983), pp. 598–619. 24.  The verdict of Benedict’s enemies was taken at face value for a long time. See Albert Dresdner, Die italienische Geistlichkeit des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts in ihrem Verhältnis zur Kirche (mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Entwicklung der Simonie): Ein Beitrag zu ihrer Kultur- und Sittengeschichte (Breslau, 1890). Today the reason for his deposition is seen primarily in inter-Roman rivalries; see Klaus-Jürgen Herrmann, Das Tuskulanerpapsttum (1012–1046): Benedikt VIII, Johannes XIX, ­Benedikt IX., Päpste und Papsttum 4 (Stuttgart, 1973). For a short overview, Gustl Frech, “Die deutschen Päpste—Kontinuität und Wandel,” in Die Salier und das Reich 2, ed. Stefan Weinfurter (Sigmaringen, 1991), pp. 303–53; T. di Carpegna Falconieri, “Tusculum, Grafen v.,” in Lexikon des Mittelalters 8 (Munich, 1997), pp. 1122–4. 25.  Petrus Damiani, the hermit of Fonte Avellana, later made cardinal bishop of Ostia, fervently welcomed him as pope, as his letter to Gregory shows: Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani 1, ed. Kurt Reindel, MGH, Epistolae: Die Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit (1983–93), vol. 4, no. 13; Petrus seems to have accepted the later synodical judgment on Gregory “quia venalitas intervenerat,” ibid., no. 72, p. 363. For a detailed analysis of the differing strands of judgment as to what happened in 1045–46, see Reginald Lane Poole, “Benedict IX and Gregory VI,” Proceedings of the British Academy 8 (1917–18), pp. 200–35, repr. In his Studies in Chronology and History (Oxford, 1934), pp. 185–222; and G. B. Borino, “L’elezione e la deposizione di Gregorio VI,” Archivio della R. Società Romana di Storia Patria 39 (1916), pp. 141–252, 295–410. 26.  Rudolf Schieffer, “Geistliches Amt und schnöder Mammon: Zur Bewertung der Simonie im hohen Mittelalter,” in Medievalia Augiensia, ed. Jürgen Petersohn, Vorträge und Forschungen 54 (Stuttgart, 2001), pp. 399–474; Hanna Vollrath, “L’accusa di simonia tra le fazioni contraposte nella lotta per le investiture,” in Il seculo 11: Una svolta?, ed. Cinzio Violante and Johannes Fried, Annali dell’ Instituto storico italo-germanico 35 (Bologna, 1993), pp. 131–56; Timothy Reuter, “Gifts and Simony,” in Medieval Transformations: Texts, Power, and Gifts in Context, ed. Esther Cohen and Mayke de Jong (Leiden, 2001), pp. 157–68. 27.  Harald Zimmermann, Papsturkunden 896–1046 (Vienna, 1985), vol. 2, no. 629. 28.  It reads in the narratio: “quod misit ad nos filius noster, Henricus scilicet rex Francorum, paternitatem nostram humiliter obsecrans, ut quamdam cellam . . . apostolicae authoritatis praesidio muniremus.” It appears that the papal charter followed charters now lost, which the mighty counts of Vermandois had given, in whose county the monastery was situated, and perhaps charters of protection by the French Kings Robert II and Henry I, which are equally lost. For the manuscript tradition see Dietrich Lohrmann, Papsturkunden in Frankreich, Neue Folge 7: Isle de France und Vermandois (Göttingen, 1976), pp. 126–7. 29.  Cf. Harald Zimmermann, Papstabsetzungen des Mittelalters (Graz, 1968), pp. 119–26.

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30. Werner Goez, Kirchenreform und Investiturstreit 910–1122 (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 90–1. 31. Zimmermann, Papsturkunden, vol. 2, no. 619. 32.  MGH, Diplomata, Heinrich III, no. 115. 33. Donald Queller, “Thirteenth-Century Diplomatic Envoys: Nuncii and Procuratores,” Sp 36 (1960), pp. 196–213. 34.  For a short survey of the special relationship between German rulers and the popes from Ottonian times, see Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages 800–1056 (London, 1991), pp. 274–86. 35.  Josef Fleckenstein, Die Hofkapelle der deutschen Könige, MGH Schriften 16.2 (Stuttgart, 1966); see also Paul Fridolin Kehr, Vier Kapitel aus der Geschichte Kaiser Heinrichs III., repr. In his Ausgewählte Schriften 2 (Göttingen, 2005), pp. 1230–2, who remarks on p. 1232: “Von einer italienischen Kanzlei kann man eigentlich nicht oder nur mit Vorbehalt sprechen. Denn ein eigenes Büro der italienischen Kanzlei hat es damals nicht gegeben.” 36.  After Kadeloh’s death early in 1045, there were seven different men who succeeded him in the position as chancellor for Italy to the end of Henry’s reign in 1056. With one exception they held the office for about a year and then were made bishops either in Germany or in Italy. For the chancellors during the years 1045–56, see the list in Harry Bresslau, Handbuch der Urkundenlehre für Deutschland und Italien 1 (Leipzig, 1912), p. 474. 37. Thomas Wetzstein, “Europäische Vernetzungen: Straßen, Logistik und Mobilität in der späten Salierzeit,” in Salisches Kaisertum, pp. 370–441. 38. Reinhard Elze, “Über die Leistungsfähigkeit von Gesandtschaften und Boten im 11. Jahrhundert: Aus der Vorgeschichte von Canossa, 1075–1077,” in Histoire comparée de l’administration (4–18 siècles), ed. Werner Paravicini and KarlFerdinand Werner, Beiheft der Francia 9 (Munich, 1980), pp. 3–10; Martina Reinke, “Die Reisegeschwindigkeit des deutschen Königshofes im 11. und 12. Jahr­ hundert,” Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 123 (1987), pp. 225–51. 39.  See nn. 9 and 11, especially contributions by Giles Constable, Jürg Zullinger, and Hanna Vollrath. 40. Hermann Heimpel, Die Vener von Gmünd und Straßburg 1162–1447 (Göttingen, 1982), vol. 1, pg. 8: “das Entscheiden aus dem Sattel,” characterizing the prevalent way of government prior to university-trained administrators (gelehrte Räte) professionalized the personal rule of kings and nobles. Cf. also Rudolf Hiestand, “Planung—Improvisation—Zufall: Politisches Handeln im 11. Jahrhundert, oder noch einmal Piacenza 1076,” Von Sacerdotium und Regnum, Festschrift für Egon Boshof, ed. Franz-Rainer Erkens and Hartmut Wolff (Cologne, 2002), pp. 362–79. 41. Wolter, Synoden, p. 385; Franz-Josef Schmale, “Die ‘Absetzung’ Gregors VI. in Sutri und die synodale Tradition,” Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 2 (1979), pp. 55–103; Stefan Weinfurter, Herrschaft und Reich der Salier (Sigmaringen, 1991), p. 93. 42.  Franz Steindorff, Die Jahrbücher des Deutschen Reiches unter Heinrich III. 1 (Leipzig, 1874), Exkurs 3, pp. 456–510; Poole distinguishes three strains of tradition, Hildebrandine, Imperial, and anti-German/local Roman in his “Benedict IX and Gregory VI.”

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43.  Paul Gerhard Schmitz, “Heinrich III. Das Bild des Herrschers in der Literatur seiner Zeit,” Deutsches Archiv 39 (1983), pp. 582–90; a hermit named Wipert is said to have appealed to him to liberate the Roman church from three popes and to find a suitable new one, p. 588. For Wipert see Wilhelm Bulst, “Politische und Hofdichtung der Deutschen bis zum hohen Mittelalter,” Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 15 (1937), pp. 189–202. 44. Irene Schmale-Ott, “Einleitung ‘De ordinando pontifice,’” in Quellen zum Investiturstreit, Ausgewählte Quellen 12b (Darmstadt, 1984), p. 6; Hans Hubert Anton, Der sogenannte Traktat “De ordinando pontifice”: Ein Rechtsgutachten in Zusammenhang mit der Synode von Sutri (1046) (Bonn, 1982); Horst Fuhrmann, “Beobachtungen zur Schrift ‘De ordinando pontifice,’” in Aus Archiven und Bibliotheken: Festschrift für Raymund Kottje, ed. Hubert Mordek (Frankfurt, 1992), pp. 223–37; William Ziezulewicz, “The School of Chartres and Reform Influences before the Pontificate of Leo IX,” CHR 77 (1991), pp. 383–402; Erwin Frauenknecht, De ordinando pontifice (Hanover, 1992). 45.  Gesta Regum Anglorum: The Deeds of the English Kings, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998). 46.  De Gestis Pontificum Anglorum, N. E. S. A. Hamilton, ed., RS (London, 1870); David Preest, William of Malmesbury, The Deeds of the Bishops of England: Gesta Pontificum Anglorum (Woodbridge, 2002). 47.  Rodney M. Thomson, “The Reading of William of Malmesbury,” Revue Bénédictine 85 (1975), pp. 362–403, at p. 363. 48.  Ibid., p. 389. 49.  “. . . nostro adhuc seculo in triuiis cantitata”; Gesta Regum 188, p. 338. 50.  For Gunhild and her short married life, see H. Schwarzmaier, Von Speyer nach Rom (Sigmaringen, 1991), pp. 72–6; Wolfram, Conrad II, p. 142. 51.  Gesta Regum 188, p. 338. 52.  Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 182–3. 53.  Ibid., p. 182. 54. Rodney M. Thomson, “William of Malmesbury’s Edition of the Liber Pontificalis,” Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 16 (1978), pp. 93–112. 55.  It is a curious detail that the Liber Pontificalis as edited by Louis Duchesne mentions Henry III deposing Pope Gregory: “Gregorius . . . qui etiam pontificatum tenuit . . . et per imperatorem legaliter perdidit illum, et ductus extitit in Cisalpinis partibus” ; Le Liber Pontificalis 2, ed. Louis Duchesne (repr. Paris, 1955), p. 270. As it neither mentions the emperor’s name nor Gregory’s surname Gratianus, William may not have been able to identify the people. 56. The revolt of 1051/2 stands witness to Norman-Anglo-Saxon tensions during the reign of Edward the Confessor and is seen as a prelude to the Norman Conquest of England some fifteen years later. See R. Allen Brown, The Normans and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge, 1985). 57.  Gesta Pontificum 1.23, pp. 35–6. 58.  See below, n. 91; William would not have known that Marianus’ story is rather muddled, but so is the one concerning Canossa, which William did not hesitate to copy. 59. The events leading up to Canossa and Henry IV’s penance there are treated in all histories of medieval Germany and all major histories of the papacy.

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For a detailed modern account in English, see Robinson, Henry IV, pp. 105–70; for Canossa and its aftermath up to modern times see Zimmermann, Canossagang. There are many relevant articles in Canossa 1077, ed. Stiegemann and Wemhoff. See also the titles given in n. 3. 60. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Married Priests and the Reforming Papacy: the Eleventh-Century Debates, Texts and Studies in Religion 12 (New York, 1982); Erwin Frauenknecht, Die Verteidigung der Priesterehe in der Reformzeit (Hanover, 1997). 61.  Paul Schmid, Der Begriff der kanonischen Wahl in den Anfängen des Investiturstreits (Stuttgart, 1926); Rudolf Schieffer, Die Entstehung des päpstlichen Investiturverbots für den deutschen König (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 7–47. 62.  Churchmen did not think and act very differently from their lay relatives. For the functioning of customary law before the legal change in the twelfth century, see the seminal study of Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1997). 63.  Herbert E. J. Cowdrey, “The Papacy, the Patarenes, and the Church of Milan,” TRHS, 5th ser., 18 (1968), pp. 25–48; Hagen Keller, “Mailand im 11. Jahrhundert: Das Exemplarische an einem Sonderfall,” in Die Frühgeschichte der europäischen Stadt im 11. Jahrhundert, ed. Jörg Jarnut and Peter Johanek (Cologne, 1998), pp. 81–104; Claudia Zey, “Im Zentrum des Streits. Mailand und die oberitalienischen Kommunen zwischen regnum und sacerdotium,” in Vom Umbruch zur Erneuerung des 11. und beginnenden 12. Jahrhunderts—Positionen der Forschung, ed. Jörg Jarnut and Matthias Wemhoff (Munich, 2006), pp. 595–611. 64.  Bernd Schneidmüller, “Konsensuale Herrschaft: Ein Essay über Formen und Konzepte politischer Ordnung im Mittelalter,” in Reich, Regionen, und Europa in Mittelalter und Neuzeit: Festschrift für Peter Moraw, ed. Paul-Joachim Heinig, Historische Forschungen 6 (Berlin, 2000), pp. 53–87. 65.  For the meaning of the term “friend” in premodern societies and the role played by personal ties in kingdoms without state-like institutions, see Gerd Althoff, Verwandte, Freunde, und Getreue: Zum politischen Stellenwert der Gruppenbindungen im früheren Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 1990). 66.  This is the sentence with which a disgusted Orderic Vitalis characterized the non-noble administrators the English King Henry I drew into his service. See Ralph Turner, Men Raised from the Dust: Administrative Service and Upward Mo­ bility in Angevin England (Philadelphia, 1988), p. 1. In Germany, those of servile ­origin—the ministeriales—were mostly employed as soldiers. The Saxon nobles resented that the king set up serfs to guard and, if need be, fight for his possessions in Saxony, thus making men of servile condition the enemies of the nobles. 67.  Karl Leyser, “Von sächsischen Freiheiten zur Freiheit Sachsens: Die Krise des 11. Jahrhunderts,” in Die abendländische Freiheit vom 10. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert, ed. Johannes Fried (Sigmaringen, 1991); English trans., “From Saxon Freedoms to the Freedom of Saxony: The Crisis of the Eleventh Century,” in his Communications 2, no. 3, pp. 51–67; also his “The Crisis.” For a dissenting view, see Weinfurter, Jahrhundert der Salier, pp. 136–46. 68.  The letter is dated 8 December 1075 and transmitted in Gregory’s famous register: Das Register Gregors VII, ed. Erich Caspar, MGH Epistolae Selectae (Berlin 1920 and 1923), vol. 3. 10, pp. 263–7. Early copying and dissemination of this

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letter enabled contemporary historians to insert its text into their narratives. For an English translation of Gregory’s register, see Herbert H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085 (Oxford, 2002). 69.  See Henry’s letter of invitation: Die Briefe Heinrichs IV., ed. Carl Erdmann, MGH, Deutsches Mittelalter 2 (1937), p. 14. 70.  This means that about one-third of the bishops did not come. Did all the absentees want to distance themselves from Henry’s policy by not showing up? The time between the arrival of the papal letter at Goslar on January 1 and the actual beginning of the council of Worms was less than three weeks, a very short time for a royal messenger to find a bishop in his diocese (if he happened to be there) and for the bishop to get himself and his entourage ready for a winter journey to Worms. Cf. Elze, “Uber die Leistungsfähigkeit von Gesandtschaften,” pp. 4–5. An episcopal entourage would not have been able to make more than about eighteen to twenty kilometers a day. Weather also has to be taken into account. The dioceses of two absentees, Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg and Bishop Altmann of Passau, lay in or near the Alps. Later they were indeed among the enemies of the king; but so was Archbishop Siegfried of Mainz, who in 1076 chaired the meeting at Worms. 71.  See above, p. 133, along with n. 5 above. 72. Karl Leyser offered “Some Reflections on Twelfth-Century Kings and Kingship,” in his Medieval Germany and Its Neighbours, 900–1250 (London, 1982), pp. 241–67. 73. For recent general narratives, see n. 3 above; Bernd Schneidmüller, “Canossa—das Ereignis,” in Canossa 1077, pp. 36–46 offers a succinct overview of the complex background. Johannes Fried questions all former interpretations of the meeting at Canossa arguing that Henry did not perform a rite of humble submission but concluded a treaty of peace and friendship with the pope; see his “Canossa,” in Die Faszination der Papstgeschichte: Neue Zugänge zum frühen und hohen Mittel­ alter, ed. Wilfreid Hartmann and Klaus Herbers (Köln, 2008), pp. 139–97. 74.  Gregory VII, Registrum 4. 12, ed. Caspar, pp. 311–4. 75. See the pictogram in Zimmermann, Canossagang, p. 138; I have dealt more extensively with the dissemination of the news of Canossa in the German kingdom in my forthcoming paper “Lauter Gerüchte? Canossa aus kommunikationsgeschichtlicher Sicht,” in Funktionsweisen päpstlicher Herrschaft im Mittelalter, ed. Stefan Weinfurter. 76.  Brunonis Saxonicum bellum, in Quellen zur Geschichte Kaiser Heinrichs IV., ed. Franz-Josef Schmale and Irene Schmale-Ott, Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 12 (Darmstadt, 1974), pp. 191–405. 77.  Later he inserted three letters to the pope from Henry’s German enemies that note Henry’s penance without giving the name of the place. One also mentions the letter Gregory wrote to inform the German princes of the event. But that does not mean Brun himself was familiar with it (cf. his chapter 108, pp. 354–60). See also the editor’s remark, “dass Brun selbst von den in den Briefen erwähnten Geschehnissen nichts weiß und nur die Briefe ein wenig paraphrasiert, denen er sein ganzes Wissen verdankt,” ibid., p. 354, n. 8. 78.  Bertholds und Bernolds Chroniken, ed. Ian Stuart Robinson, trans. Helga Robinson-Hammerstein and Ian Stuart Robinson, Ausgewählte Quellen 14 (Darmstadt, 2002).

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79.  Johanne Autenrieth, Die Domschule von Konstanz zur Zeit des Investiturstreits (Munich, 1956). 80. For this and the following, see Robinson, “Einleitung,” Chroniken, pp. 1–8. 81. Berthold, Chronik, 2n. recension, Annal for 1075, p. 78. 82.  Vita Henrici IV, in Quellen zur Geschichte Kaiser Heinrichs IV (Darmstadt, 1974), pp. 407–67. The Vita treats the events at Canossa briefly, without mentioning the name of the place. Henry, so it says, intercepted the pope on his way to Germany “suddenly and unexpectedly” and by this clever move (“inito tam occulto quam astuto consilio”) got himself absolved from the papal ban, p. 420. 83.  Reichenau and the cathedral school at Constance put together material pertinent to the ongoing dispute between pope and king. This material also served Berthold for his chronicle. He had received his schooling in Constance. 84.  Hans-Werner Goetz pointed out that not only Canossa but the whole investiture controversy was of much less interest to contemporary German historians than its repercussions for their respective churches or monasteries: “Aus der Perspek­ tive der Zeitgenossen und nach deren eigenen Kriterien stellt sich der Investiturstreit demnach ganz anders dar als in der modernen Forschung”; “Der Investiturstreit in der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung von Lampert von Hersfeld bis Otto von Freising,” in Canossa 1077, pp. 47–59, at p. 54. 85.  Chronicon Virdunense seu Flaviniense, MGH Ss, vol. 8, pp. 280–502. See Franz-Reiner Erkens, Die Trierer Kirchenprovinz im Investiturstreit (Cologne, 1987), pp. 75–81; Frank G. Hirschmann, Verdun im hohen Mittelalter: Eine lothringische Kathedralstadt und ihr Umland im Spiegel der geistlichen Institutionen (Trier, 1996). 86.  Rudolf Köpke, “Die Quellen der Chronik des Hugo,” Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde 9 (1847), pp. 240–92; Ian Stuart Robinson, “The Dissemination of the Letters of Pope Gregory VII,” JEH 34 (1983), pp. 175–93. 87.  Paolo Golinelli, “Die Rezeption des Canossa-Ereignisses und das Bild der Markgräfin Mathilde,” in Canossa 1077, pp. 592–602. 88.  “. . . nescio quo prepetis et inquiete fame preconio . . . que per ora populi uolitabat.” So John of Salisbury described to Thomas Becket his surprise that he found many people in France and Rome well informed about goings-on at the royal court in England which he himself had not heard of. The Correspondence of Archbishop Thomas Becket 1, ed. Anne J. Duggan (Oxford, 2000), no. 24, pp. 64–77, at pp. 66–8. 89.  Marianus Scottus, Chronicon, MGH Ss, vol. 5, p. 561: “Heinricus ergo rex et Illibrandus papa convenientes mense martio in Langobardia, rex a papa solutionem banni, papa vero sedem apostolicam a rege accepit.” 90. Marianus was wrong about many other things. He added twenty-two years to the calendar worked out by Dionysius Exiguus, placing Canossa in the year 1100. William of Malmesbury drily remarked in his Gesta Regum that few wanted to follow him in this; 3.292, pp. 524–6. 91.  Cf. Fried, Canossa. 92.  Siegfried had been elected abbot of Fulda in 1058 where Marianus was living as a recluse and encouraged the latter to follow him to Mainz upon becoming archbishop there in 1060; Marianus’ abode there was built onto the cathedral

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church of St. Martin. The archbishop and the Irish recluse were literally next door neighbors. 93.  Only fragments of Siegfried’s tract survive, “Fragment eines Manifests aus der Zeit Heinrichs IV.,” ed. Oswald Holder-Egger, Neues Archiv 31 (1906), pp. 183–93; cf. Weinfurter, Canossa, p. 147. 94.  Perceptions are made up of many elements, one of the most obvious being memory, which transmutes information according to its own rules. See Johannes Fried, Der Schleier der Erinnerung, Grundzüge einer historischen Memorik (Munich, 2004), who bases his arguments on discussions in the neurosciences. There is an abstract of this much-discussed book in English: The Veil of Memory, Annual Lecture of the German Historical Institute, London (London, 1998). 95.  Thomson, “Reading of William of Malmesbury,” p. 394. 96.  “Heinricus rex and Hiltibrandus papa conuenientes in mense Martio in Longobardia, inuicem pacificantur, sed falso ut postea claruit”; The Chronicle of John of Worcester 1, ed. R. R. Darlington and P. McGurk (Oxford, 1996), s. a. 1078, p. 30; for John of Worcester, see Martin Brett, “John of Worcester and his Contemporaries,” in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford, 1981), pp. 101–26. 97.  Gesta Regum, 1.288, pp. 520–1. 98.  Margaret Gibson, Lanfranc of Canterbury (Oxford, 1978), pp. 131–40. 99.  William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, 1.289, pp. 522–3. Referring to the pitiable end of Henry’s enemies, William uses an argument that was very common in the Middle Ages. Since it was strongly believed that life and death are in the hand of God, an untimely “bad” death was seen as a sign of God’s punishing justice. See Paul Rousset, “La croyance en la justice immanente à l’époque féodale,” Le Moyen Age 54, 4th ser., 3 (1948), pp. 225–48. Brun of Merseburg deploys the same argument the other way around. He has a list of untimely or cruel deaths of those princes who had supported King Henry: “it is evident that almost all of Henry’s familiars and trusted followers died miserable deaths”; Brunonis Saxonicum bellum, 74, pp. 316–20. 100.  Rolf Grosse, “Frankreichs neue Überlegenheit,“ in Salisches Kaisertum, pp. 195–215, at p. 204; Cowdrey, Gregory VII, pp. 334–40. 101.  Schieffer, “Gregor VII. und die Könige Europas.” 102.  King and pope differed, it seems, on the meaning of “regalia”: the pope understood public rights emanating from the realm as a political body such as jurisdictions, tolls, mints, and comital rights, whereas the king understood by it everything secular as opposed to spiritual; see Johannes Fried, “Der Regalienbegriff im 11.und 12. Jahrhundert,” Deutsches Archiv 29 (1973), pp. 450–528. 103.  The agreement was put into writing as two separate “promises,” one by the king, the other by the pope. Both were supplemented by oaths from several secular princes on Henry’s side and an oath by the cardinal Petrus Pierleone on the papal side; MGH Const 1, nos. 83–6. 104.  Thus the anonymous author of the Kaiserchronik, who added that nobody thought that approval by all the princes was at all likely: Anonymi chronica imperatorum, in Frutolfi et Ekkehardi chronica necnon anonymi chronica imperato-

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rum, ed. Franz-Josef Schmale and Irene Schmale-Ott, Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 15 (Darmstadt, 1972), p. 256. The anonymous author is known to have used the report of David Scottus, a member of the royal chancery who accompanied Henry’s host to Rome and wrote an eyewitness report afterwards. The report has not survived, but many contemporary historians claimed to have used it. 105.  This took place on 11 April 1111. MGH Const 1, no. 90. Again there were separate promises with supporting oaths from both sides supplementing the privilege; ibid., nos. 91–5. The Roman synod which rescinded the agreement took place in March 1112. 106. Alfons Becker, Studien zum Investiturproblem in Frankreich: Papsttum, Königtum, und Episkopat im Zeitalter der gregorianischen Kirchenreform (1049– 1119) (Saarbrücken, 1955); some qualifications on the basis of new research made by Schieffer, Investiturverbot, pp. 159–67; Rolf Grosse, Deutsch-französische Geschichte 800–1214 (Darmstadt, 2005), and “Frankreichs neue Überlegenheit.” 107.  For Hugh, see Theodor Schieffer, Die päpstlichen Legaten in Frankreich vom Vertrage von Meerssen (870) bis zum Schisma von 1130 (Berlin, 1935); Rudolf Hiestand, “Les légats pontificaux en France du milieu du 11e à la fin du 12e siècle,” in L’Église de France et la papauté (10e–13e siècles), ed. Rolf Grosse (Bonn, 1993), pp. 54–80. 108.  Vita Ludovici Grossi Regis, ed. Henri Waquet, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1964), p. 54. 109.  Bernd Schneidmüller, “Regni aut ecclesiae turbator: Kaiser Heinrich V. in der zeitgenössischen französischen Geschichtsschreibung,” in Auslandsbeziehungen unter den salischen Kaisern, ed. Franz Staab (Speyer, 1994), pp. 195–222; also the older, still important study by Karl-Ferdinand Werner, “Das hochmittelalterliche Imperium im politischen Bewußtsein Frankreichs (10.–12. Jahrhundert),” in Historische Zeitschrift 200 (1965), pp. 1–60. Gerd Tellenbach, “La questione del carattere dell’ imperatore Enrico V: Uno studio di storia della personalità,” in Società, Istituzioni, Spiritualità: Studi in onore Cinzio Violante (Spoleto, 1994), pp. 943–73; Mireille Schmidt-Chazan, “Le point de vue des chroniqueurs de la France du nord sur les Allemands dans la première moitié du 12ème siècle,” Travaux et Recherches 1973 (Metz, 1974), pp.13–36. 110.  Richard W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge, 1990), p. 191; for Eadmer, see Southern, St. Anselm and his Biographer (Cambridge, 1963). 111. Anselm, Epistola, n. 215, ed. Franciscus S. Schmitt, S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, 2 vols. (repr. Stuttgart, 1968); for a comparison of the positions of king and archbishop, see C. Warren Hollister, Henry I, ed. and completed by Amanda Clark Frost (New Haven, 2001), pp. 120–4; Judith A. Green, Henry I (Cambridge 2006), pp. 254–83. 112. Karl Leyser, “England and the Empire in the 12th century,” TRHS, 5th ser., 10 (1960), pp. 61–83, repr. in his Medieval Germany and Its Neighbours, pp. 191–213; Marjorie Chibnall, The Empress Matilda (London, 1991), pp. 22–6. 113.  Gesta regum 420, pp. 764–5. 114.  The second instance is in Gesta Regum 426, pp. 770–1.

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115.  Ibid., p. 765. 116.  Friedrich Hausmann, Reichskanzlei und Hofkapelle unter Heinrich V. und Konrad III., MGH Schriften, vol. 14 (Stuttgart, 1956), pp. 83–6, 310–8. 117.  William of Malmesbury completed his Gesta Regum in 1125, leaving him time possibly to write the chapters taken over from David. But there was a major revision completed in 1135, on which the current editions are based. Similarly it has been surmised that Matilda brought the only existing manuscript of the Kaiserchronik to England, where it is preserved still. See Franz-Josef Schmale and Irene Schmale-Ott, Frutolfs und Ekkehards Chroniken, p. 43; see also n. 102 above.

seven

The Europeanization of Europe The Case of Scandinavia Sv e rr e Ba g g e

In 1079, Pope Gregory VII sent a letter to King Olav of Norway, addressing this ruler and his people “on the farthest edge of the circle of the globe”1 with advice and consolation. More precisely, the pope had two messages to deliver. He asked the king to send some young men of noble origin to the curia for education, so that they could return to their home country to teach their fellow countrymen Christian doctrine and ethics. Secondly, he warned King Olav against meddling in the rivalry between the late Danish King Svend’s sons over the succession. We do not know whether King Olav actually sent any young Norwegians to Rome; most of the evidence of Scandinavians studying abroad is later. Concerning the second admonition, the king did refrain from interfering in the Danish succession, but not necessarily because of the pope’s initiative. Never­ theless, the letter points to important aspects of Western Christendom in the Middle Ages and Scandinavia’s position within it. The letter was issued at a crucial period in the rise of Western Christendom by the great leader of the ecclesiastical reform movement, who at the time was engaged in the conflict with King Henry IV of Germany; its date is between the first excommunication of Henry in 1076 and the second in 1080. The letter shows the pope’s wish to unite the whole of Christendom under his leadership—during Gregory’s pontificate, mainly a wish, but one that came closer to reality during the following centuries. It also illustrates two important aspects of the civilization that was developing at the time, cultural unity and territorial division, both of which have played a part in the discussion of Western civilization in comparison 171

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with other civilizations and of the importance of the Middle Ages in this context. The cultural revival of the High Middle Ages, notably the twelfth century, was a central theme in Charles Homer Haskins’ famous book on the Twelfth Century Renaissance as well as in the influential volume prepared at the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary in 1977,2 and the division into kingdoms and principalities has been dealt with by medievalists as well as early modernists. According to R.I. Moore, the First European Revolution (975–1225) consisted in the formation of a strong, hierarchical, and authoritarian church, clearly distinct from the secular state, which in turn became more strongly organized than its counterpart in other civilizations.3 Most accounts of the European revival in the Middle Ages, including Moore’s, have focused on internal changes. However, an important aspect of this revival or revolution was the expansion of Western Christendom, which was the theme of Robert Bartlett’s book on the making of Europe4 and was also more prominent in the Notre Dame conference than its predecessor in 1977. From this point of view, Pope Gregory VII’s letter belongs to the first stage of the European conquest of the rest of the world. The expansion partly took the form of conquest and even colonization, parallel to what happened during the Great Discoveries from the sixteenth century onwards, but it also led to the formation of independent kingdoms and principalities, which is its most interesting feature from our point of view. Whereas the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, with some exceptions, was the object of conquest and colonization, independent kingdoms were established on both sides, namely, the three Scandinavian kingdoms in the north and west, and Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary in the south. The different fate of these areas deserves to be an object of study in itself, but cannot be dealt with in any detail here. I shall confine myself to pointing out the time difference between their integration in Western Christendom: early, the ninth to eleventh centuries in the case of the kingdoms, and late, from around 1150 onwards in the regions that were conquered. Early and voluntary Christianization was thus an important asset for the six kingdoms, which in turn points to the importance of Christianity for state formation. The Formation of the Scandinavian Kingdoms

Traditionally, Scandinavian historians have regarded the formation of the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden as a “unification” (rikssam-

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ling). There is little evidence, however, that these kingdoms were in any way natural units. Agricultural settlement in Scandinavia goes back to around 4000 B.C.E., and there is archaeological evidence of chieftains and principalities during the following period, but hardly of permanent units resembling the three later ones.5 Nor were there any linguistic or cultural divisions corresponding to the borders that developed from the tenth century onwards. It is therefore more relevant to consider the region as a whole and ask why it was divided into just three kingdoms, with the borders that emerged during the eleventh century retaining their basic outlines until the great changes in the mid-seventeenth century. In explaining this result, the alternative to national teleology is not chance events but geopolitical factors, above all the importance of sea power, combined with challenge and response. Once a strong power had emerged in one part of the area, it would be likely to expand until it met resistance in the form of another strong power. Weaker powers would then be likely to submit to one of the competing great powers. In practice, Denmark, bordering on Germany and likely to be subject to pressure from its mighty ruler, would seem to have initiated the whole process. Danish kings are mentioned in Carolingian sources from the early ninth century.6 It is possible to follow a series of rulers until the middle of the century, when there seems to be an eclipse for about a hundred years, either because the kingdom dissolved or because of the decline of the Caro­lingian Empire, which put an end to their attempts to Christianize and subordinate the Danish rulers and therefore also to information about Denmark in Carolingian sources. A revival seems to have occurred in the mid-tenth century with Harald Bluetooth, who in the inscription on the Jelling stone boasts of having conquered the whole of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian. It is uncertain whether the formation of the kingdom of Denmark started in Jutland or from the islands, but the Bluetooth dynasty is most likely to have had its basis in Jutland. A power controlling Jutland could of course easily conquer the surrounding islands as well as the coast on the other side of Øresund, Scania. This area was separated from the core areas of the Swedish kingdom by forest and thinly populated land and was thus more likely to be conquered from Denmark than from Sweden. The Danes might also have expanded further north along the coast and were as likely to get hold of the Oslofjord area as the Norwegians. Controlling the whole of the Norwegian coast, however, would imply long lines of communication. Moreover, attempts at conquest might also lead to reactions from the Norwegians and to the emergence of a power that could more easily

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c­ ontrol the area. This was actually what happened, first under Harald Finehair around 900 and then later under a series of Norwegian kings and chieftains, partly in competition and partly in alliance with the Danish kings. The Danish kings several times managed to conquer or be recognized as rulers of Norway but were not able to control the country over longer periods. The last conquest (1028­–35) under Cnut the Great (1017–35) eventually backfired and led to the permanent establishment of a Norwegian kingdom. Still, the Danes tried to gain the Oslofjord as late as the mid-twelfth century. There is hardly any geopolitical inevitability in the Norwegian victory in this case, but it may be explained by the fact that the king of Norway was likely to give higher priority to this problem than the king of Denmark, who had other fields of expansion: England, Northern Germany, and the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. Sweden was the late-comer in this process, which also has a geopolitical explanation. Admittedly, Rimbert mentions a Swedish king in the mid-ninth century, but he was probably a local ruler in the area near Birka in the Mälar region.7 Sea power was important in Sweden as well, but the political unification seems to have centered around the great lakes rather than the coast. Sweden naturally falls into two parts: Götaland in the west around the lakes of Vänern and Vättern, and Svealand in the east, around Lake Mälaren. The two regions were divided by dense forests, and few kings were able to exert control over both of them before the mid-­ thirteenth century.8 By that time, the coastal region of Götaland had ­already been divided between Norway and Denmark. Only in the midthirteenth century was the king of Sweden able to gain a tiny corridor out to the sea at the mouth of Göta Älv, near present-day Gothenburg. By contrast, there was less foreign competition in the east, so that the principality of Svealand was not only able to reach the coast, but also to expand on the other side of the Baltic Sea, in the southern and western part of present-day Finland. In the inter-Nordic struggles, however, the Swedish king for a long time had to confine himself to supporting the weaker power in the Danish-Norwegian struggles in order to prevent the unification of both countries under one king. Thus, Swedish intervention may have been of some importance, both in separating Norway from Denmark and in securing Norwegian control of the Oslofjord area, which from a Swedish point of view had the advantage of preventing the same power from controlling both sides of the Göta Älv. Moreover, Sweden had the advantage, compared to Norway, of being more protected against foreign intervention. A Danish conquest of Sweden would seem highly unlikely, as this would involve long marches through forest and wilderness. Whereas

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a united Danish-Norwegian kingdom might seem a geopolitical possi­ bility as early as the eleventh century, a kingdom uniting the whole of Scandinavia would not. Thus, the three Scandinavian kingdoms and their borders seem a likely, although not inevitable outcome of the geopolitical situation during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Internally, the formation of the Scandinavian kingdoms has its background in population increase and expansion of agriculture, which created greater economic surplus. Externally, there are two main factors, the first of which is the rise of Germany. As Germany bordered on Denmark, Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, it seems a likely assumption that unification in all four countries was connected to pressure from this powerful neighbor. The rise of the Danish kingdom in the early ninth century may well have its background in German pressure. In a similar way, the final conversion of the country to Christianity around 965 is clearly connected to the rise of Ottonian power to the south, coming just after Otto I’s victory over the Hungarians at Lech in 955 and his invasion of Italy and imperial coronation in 962. It also coincides with the conversion of Poland, traditionally dated to 966, and is preceded by the conversion of Bohemia some decades earlier and followed by that of Hungary some decades later. The Christianization of Germany’s neighbors—on which we have very little information—may alternatively be regarded as the result of increasing German influence or as a countermeasure to avoid being absorbed by German power, thus in either case provoked by increasing German strength.9 The unification may be regarded in a similar way. Germany may have served as a model for the conquering king, while at the same time he could use German pressure to gain support for himself, the magnates and petty kings having to choose between submitting to the Germans or to a local conqueror. However, the rise of the Scandinavian kingdoms and their Christiani­ zation is not only the result of defensive but also of offensive measures, as they took place during the Viking Age, when Scandinavian Vikings plundered all over Europe from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, thanks to their fast ships and skill at navigation. The Viking expeditions contributed to military specialization as well as to the creation of an economic basis for stronger principalities by giving chieftains the gold, silver, and luxury items that could be used for gaining followers. Gift exchange was an important political and economic factor in the Viking age, as well as later, and royal generosity as well as the valuable objects that were given are celebrated in the skaldic poetry.10 The wealth from the Viking expeditions made it possible for chieftains to attach more men to their service than

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earlier; these men could in turn be used to gain further wealth. However, this wealth was likely to increase the number of chieftains as well as the number of their followers, and consequently did not necessarily lead to larger political units. Nor did the surplus necessarily have to be spent on creating national kingdoms. Many chieftains preferred to establish themselves abroad, in the British Isles, Normandy, or Russia. Moreover, as long as it was easy to gain wealth from Viking expeditions, the principalities that emerged were likely to be unstable; new chieftains with fresh resources might easily expel the old ones. Consequently, the ­Viking expeditions seem to have made available a greater surplus to be invested in lordship, created greater ambitions among the chieftains, and led to more intense struggles between them, but did not necessarily lead to consolidated kingdoms. This seems rather to have resulted from the end of the Viking expeditions. When the strengthening of feudal Europe in the eleventh century had put an end to the Viking expeditions, the only way for ambitious chieftains to gain wealth and power was within Scandinavia. In this respect, Scandinavia conforms to the kingdoms of East Central Europe whose emergence also coincides with the end of the raiding expeditions against Germany and other parts of Western Christendom: the Slavs were defeated by Henry I in 929 and 933, and a Polish duchy emerged a few decades later; the Hungarians were defeated by Otto I in 955, and the principality—from AD 1000, kingdom—of Hungary was established towards the end of the century. From a European point of view, the formation of the Scandinavian kingdoms, together with those of East Central Europe, Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, was an important step in the formation of the European state system. It established the multiple-state system in this part of the continent, while at the same time setting a limit to German expansion and thereby preventing a revival of the Carolingian Empire. If we regard this multiplicity as an essential feature of Europe, in contrast to, for instance, China and the Islamic world,11 as is usually done, the expansion becomes equally as important as the internal changes. Whereas most of Western Christendom had been united under one ruler in the Carolingian period and a substantial part of it under the Ottonian and Salian emperors, the expansion, combined with the weakening of the central power in Germany, made the territorial principality the normal political organization of Western Christendom. In addition to the three kingdoms of East Central Europe and Denmark on Germany’s border, territorial principalities like Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, and Pomerania made themselves independent of the emperor in most respects. The expansion thus contributed to

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the combination of cultural unity and territorial division that had characterized Europe until the formation of the European Union in the second half of the twentieth century. Scandinavia and the European Revolution

Moore’s European revolution was carried out by the church and the aristocracy. A clear division was made between the lay and the ecclesiastical aristocracy, both becoming more exclusive and increasing their control of the ordinary population. This in turn affected the monarchy, which eventually developed its own basis, independent of the two others. The same forces were at play in the formation of the Scandinavian kingdoms. The rise of the Scandinavian kingdoms is an example of the export of some central features of the civilization which was forming at the time in Western Christendom. The main example of this is the religion itself, Christianity. Christianization and the rise of kingdoms largely took place at the same time, and the two processes were probably related. Although political centralization was not incompatible with paganism, Christianity seems to have had some advantages in this respect as early as the missionary period, such as the replacement of local cults, controlled by a variety of chieftains, with a new religion, represented by one king. These advantages increased with the development of ecclesiastical organization. Denmark was the first of the Scandinavian countries to have an ecclesiastical organization conforming to normal European standards, partly because of the early introduction of Christianity in this country, partly because of the greater influence of the German mission, which was more concerned with organizational questions than the English one. Despite some earlier attempts in this direction, the Danish diocesan organization with eight dioceses dates, in practice, from around 1060. Regular dioceses were established in Norway in the late eleventh century, but the organization was not fully developed until the mid-twelfth century. The parish organization came later in Scandinavia, as in the rest of Europe. In 1104, Scandinavia became an independent church province with its archbishop in Lund in Denmark (now in Sweden). The province was further divided in 1152/53, when Norway got its own archbishop in Trondheim, and in 1164 with the Swedish archbishopric, centered in Uppsala. In all three countries, the contact with the curia and the ecclesiastical reform movement centered there became closer as a consequence of the establishment of the church provinces. The sporadic contacts exemplified in Gregory VII’s letter of

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1079 were replaced by regular ones from the mid-twelfth century. The fact that the church provinces almost corresponded with national borders was also of some importance for the permanence of these borders. In the case of Norway, whose church province also included the islands in the North Sea, the Atlantic, and on the northern and eastern coast of the British Isles, the ecclesiastical affiliation served to strengthen the king of Norway’s claims in the area. Thus, a series of Norwegian bishops in Iceland contributed to the Icelanders submitting to the king of Norway in 1262–4. Although the medieval church was far from being a Weberian bureaucracy, its introduction to Scandinavia marks a decisive step in the direction of bureaucratization. The church, particularly the post-Gregorian church, introduced the idea of office and hierarchy. The ecclesiastical organization consisted of officers, from the local priest to the pope on top of the whole organization, officers who were supposed to act not on their own behalf but on behalf of the organization to which they belonged. Through common rules of behavior and of rights and duties, education, and, from the eleventh century, celibacy, the church tried and at least partly succeeded in introducing an esprit de corps among its servants. In its capacity of being an organized hierarchy, the church could insist on obedience from inferiors to superiors in a way that might serve as a model for secular organization as well. Even as late as the mid-thirteenth century, the Norwegian treatise The King’s Mirror uses the ecclesiastical hierarchy as an example when teaching the king’s men the importance of obedience: if the priest disobeys his bishop or the bishop his superior, they are deposed from their offices. And Saul’s sin is worse than David’s, not because it is worse in itself not to kill the Amalechites than to commit adultery and kill in order to cover up the sin, but because Saul’s sin is the result of disobedience.12 From a materialistic point of view, conversion meant that a cheap and nonbureaucratic religion was replaced by an expensive and bureaucratic one. As far as we know, the pagan religion had neither a professional clergy nor a network of cult buildings comparable to Christian churches.13 The cult consisted of great sacrificial parties, presided over by local chieftains, and financed by contributions from the participants, and to some extent by generosity on the part of the chieftains. Admittedly, the great ship burials, with costly arms, gold and silver, and exquisitely handmade objects, suggest that great resources were spent on religion in the pagan period as well, corresponding to similar expenses in the Christian period. In both cases, we are dealing with resources that were spent or “buried,” without any significant redistributive effect. Although any quantitative comparison between the two is hazardous, it seems unlikely that less was spent on such

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purposes in the Christian than in the pagan period. The difference was that the monuments were visible, not buried in the ground. They were set up in churches where they testified to the deceased’s and their families’ piety and adherence to the community of the faithful, while at the same time marking their wealth and status compared to other benefactors of the church. From this point of view, the main difference between the two religions, however, lies in the resources that did have a distributive effect: the tithes, donations of land, fines, and other incomes that went to support the clergy. Whereas the pagan religion apparently mainly gave its cult leaders a surplus of prestige, participants in the Christian cult paid a high price for what, in material terms, did not amount to more than a thin wafer received once or a few times a year. Christian worshippers invested in spiritual surplus, eternal salvation, and divine aid even in their earthly lives. What the believers received in return was the church’s spiritual treasures, such as supernatural help with problems on earth and, above all, help to gain eternal life after death. Assuming that people believed in the church’s message, there was thus a give-and-take relationship between the church’s never-ending surplus of spiritual treasure and the believers’ limited surplus of material treasure. In addition, the church profited from a number of central and prestigious undertakings and customary rituals, for example, baptisms, weddings, burials, masses for the soul, and sale of maintenancefor-life at monasteries. The surplus derived from contributions from the faithful secured the higher clergy a standard of living far above that of the average population; the bishops were the greatest magnates of the realm, and prelates, abbots, canons, and even monks and nuns in the most important monasteries belonged to the aristocracy. The clergy might thus, from a modern point of view, be regarded as a parasitic class, and even contemporaries often criticized the clerics for their wealth. However, this wealth did not exclusively benefit the clergy; parts of it were returned to broader strata of the population in the form of hospitals, alms, salaries, gifts, cultural and intellectual acti­vities, and numerous opportunities for laymen to make a career in the service of the ecclesiastical aristocracy. Moreover, clerics were not only para­sitic, they constituted an organized bureaucracy with a well-­defined purpose, in which office-holders were appointed and certain skills were necessary for appointment. This, in turn, is a consequence of the fact that Christianity, in contrast to the pagan religion, is a religion of the book, with a set of dogmas that the believers have to be taught and in which they are supposed to believe, and with a set of ethical rules whose practice the clergy is supposed to supervise. The establishment and expansion of the

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ecclesiastical bureaucracy thus formed a major step in the direction of organized government, which expanded further as a consequence of Christian doctrine as well as ethics. The professional clergy not only appropriated a substantial part of the surplus of the agricultural production, it also interfered in people’s behavior to a great extent through its detailed rules about holidays, attending religious services, confession, and penance. It is doubtful whether it would have been possible to bureaucratize any other purpose than religion to the same extent under contemporary conditions. As the Norwegian historian Halvdan Koht puts it, the church gained control over fields that had not earlier been under control of any public authority, such as marriage and sexuality, thus not reducing the king’s power but extending the field of central authority. Consequently, the church could gain without the state losing.14 A number of other examples may be added to those of Koht. In practice, the church introduced writing, for liturgical and literary as well as administrative purposes. It also introduced the first general tax in Scandinavia, the tithe. It probably had a major role in introducing public justice. Whereas the old judicial system, as far as we can see, was concerned with conflicts between individuals and kindred, the church introduced the idea of crimes against God and society, and took steps to punish them. For a long time, this had to be done within the framework of the old judicial system, where the bishop or his representative acted like any other individual who felt himself wronged, but in practice this meant the gradual development of ecclesiastical prosecution and courts of law. Finally, the church influenced legislation, partly by developing its own legislation based on international canon law and partly by contributing to national legislation. Although we hardly find a consistent distinction between private and public law in medieval Scandinavia, both the king and the church in practice played a much more important part in the field of justice from the thirteenth century onwards than earlier. Whereas the church was an important factor behind the changes taking place in the civilian sector, the changes in the military sector, which also had far-reaching consequences, resulted from closer contacts with the European secular aristocracy. Traditionally, the Scandinavians fought on foot or, above all, at sea, but they gradually adopted European military technology.15 Heavy cavalry on the European model was introduced from the first half of the twelfth century in Denmark.16 From the end of the century onwards, the popular levy (leding) was transformed from a military obligation in which each district had to muster a number of men for personal service, mostly in the fleet, to a tax used to pay for full-time war-

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riors, who were exempt from taxes in return for their service. The formal expression of the new order in Sweden came in the Statute of Alsnö, probably in 1280, which is usually regarded as a kind of “constitution” for the Swedish aristocracy, confirming the principle of specialized military service in return for privileges. At about the same time, the king of Norway made his officials agree to muster an elite force, although without extensive privileges and intended as a supplement rather than a replacement of the peasant levy. The last step in this transition was the introduction of castles, the first of which were built in the twelfth century, whereas the great expansion, in size and elaboration as well as numbers, came from the late thirteenth century onwards.17 These new castles not only improved the king’s military capacity, they also led to far-reaching administrative and social changes. They were expensive both to build and maintain but enabled the king to exploit the people more efficiently, a small number of armed men in a ­castle being able to suppress a wide area. Thus, in reducing the number of armed men the king needed and increasing the cost of keeping them, they furthered the transition from the popular levy to a limited number of royal retainers, financed by taxes from the majority of the population. Both for strategic reasons and because of the cost and labor necessary to build and keep the castles, they also turned into administrative centers. The older royal administration consisted of a combination of stewards of the king’s estates, who fulfilled various functions on behalf of their master, and allies among the local magnates. Basically, this system was retained in Denmark and Sweden, but transformed through the development of castles, their commanders becoming the governors of the surrounding area. By contrast, Norway, the poorest of the three countries, kept the old popular levy. From a military point of view, this made sense in a country with a long coast where most of the population lived, and with political interests in the direction of the islands and coastal areas in the North Sea and the Atlantic. The fleet was also used with some success in wars against Denmark in the late thirteenth century, whereas the Norwegians were less successful in land warfare against Danish and Swedish adversaries across their southern and eastern borders. The lack of military specialization and the small tax incomes of the Norwegian king also explain the fact that fewer castles were erected in this country than in Denmark and Sweden. The local administration therefore developed in a different way from that of the neighboring countries. From the second half of the twelfth century, a new royal official, called syslumaðr, a parallel to the English sheriff and to continental officials of the same

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­ eriod, was introduced. From the first half of the thirteenth century, the p country was divided into fixed districts, around forty in all, each headed by a royal official who often had no connection with the district in which he served. He might also be replaced and moved from one district to another. Norway thus developed a local administration more directly under the king’s control, while at the same time the Norwegian aristocracy became an administrative more than a military class. The total effect of these changes was to make the Scandinavian countries, particularly Denmark and parts of Sweden, more similar to their neighbors to the south and west in social structure, government and administration, and religion and culture. Concerning the changes in social structure, the problem is that we do not know very much about the early period. Earlier historiography often imagined early Scandinavian society as relatively egalitarian and often described a drastic change from a society of moderately wealthy farmers to a sharp division between an aristocratic elite and a great mass of poor and dependent peasants in the high Middle Ages. Recent research tends to regard Scandinavian society as aristocratic as far back as the first centuries C.E. Archaeological evidence also strongly suggests the existence of a wealthy aristocratic elite. Nevertheless, the changes sketched above point to an increasing exclusivity of this elite and a greater difference from the population as a whole. The replacement of the popular levy by landed elite forces reduced the military importance of the peasants and thus their ability to resist pressure from above, and probably also led to an increase in aristocratic land ownership. The growth of the ecclesiastical hierarchy worked in the same direction, as the church eventually became the greatest landowner, controlling up to forty percent of the total land rent. It is subject to discussion to what extent this increase came from peasant owners or was mainly the result of transfers from the king and the aristocracy. A large part of it no doubt came from the latter. Even so, the church must have contributed to increased concentration of landed wealth, partly because it replaced a number of smaller aristocratic land owners and partly because it was an institution that never died, whereas the wealth of lay land owners might decrease as well as increase, depending on the vicissitudes of hereditary succession. Finally, demographic and economic conditions also contributed to greater social differences. As in the rest of Europe, the population increased in Scandinavia during the high Middle Ages, and new land was cleared for cultivation, which towards the end of the period seems to have resulted in considerable pressure on the land resources. It is debated whether this amounted to a Malthusian crisis, but the land rent had reached quite a high level by the end of the period. A sharp decline as a consequence of the high mortality

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caused by the Black Death, down to around twenty percent in Norway but much less in the other countries, suggests that the rent in the previous period was largely the result of demographic pressure.18 The European revolution may be said to have had a bureaucratic as well as a feudal aspect, which means that it might have positive as well as negative effects from the point of view of state formation. The bureaucratization resulting from the growth of the ecclesiastical organization served as a model for the king and might also be actively used by him. The ecclesiastical doctrine of the king as God’s representative on earth was exploited by the monarchy in all three countries and contributed to the increasing exclusivity of the dynasty and clearer rules for succession. It was expressed symbolically in unction and coronation, introduced for the first time in 1163/4 in Norway but later adopted in all three countries. Royal justice expanded, and an increasing number of cases were settled in royal courts of law, which also served to carry out public justice on behalf of the king. The king emerged as the supreme judge and legislator in the kingdom and issued laws for the whole or parts of the country: the Danish Law of Jutland (1241), the Norwegian, and later the Swedish National Law (1274–7 and 1350). These are not the first Scandinavian laws. The earliest regional laws of Norway go back to the late eleventh or early twelfth century, whereas the extant regional laws of the other countries date to around a hundred years later. The Scandinavian laws have been subject to much discussion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the extant written laws were mostly believed to have been preserved orally over centuries and were used as sources for ancient, common Germanic law. This theory is now almost universally rejected, and greater importance has been attached to the king and the church, although there is still disagreement about what is old and what is new. Clearly, however, the king had become a legislator and a judicial authority to a greater extent in the new laws than in the old ones, while at the same time these laws are composed in a more learned and systematic way, showing greater influence from Roman and canon law. The emergence of an administration based on writing enabled the king to control his realm through a network of officials instead of his ­personal presence, although this latter was still of great importance. The military transformation increased the king’s ability to fight external and internal adversaries, as can be illustrated by the Danish kings’ expansionist policy in Northern Germany. Administratively and financially, the castles enabled the king to lay greater financial burdens on the people. On the other hand, the strengthening of the church and the aristocracy might also be a danger. The rise of a strong aristocracy is no unmixed blessing for a state. The existence of castles favored the defenders over the

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attackers, which enabled a disloyal castle commander to resist the king. And even if castles are an effective means to exploit the population, the profit may well go to the castle commander rather than to the king. Thus, the new military technology might actually weaken the central government and lead to the country falling apart into smaller principalities, as happened in Germany in the thirteenth century. The church might present a similar danger. From the Gregorian reform movement onwards, it demanded freedom from lay interference, and conflict between the church and the royal government was a frequent occurrence in Scandinavia as well as in other parts of Europe. As great land owners and fief-holders, the prelates might also join the secular aristocracy in opposition to the king. According to R. H. Moore, one of the characteristic features of the “First European Revolution” (975–1215) was the rise of a class of professional bureaucrats in the king’s service, recruited from outside the aris­ tocracy proper, from the gentry, bourgeoisie, or from younger sons of aristocratic families in a system of primogeniture.19 Although it can be doubted how specifically European this pattern is,20 such a class did develop in countries like England and particularly France and to some extent formed a counterweight to the top aristocracy. This happened to a lesser extent in Germany and East Central Europe, where the aristocracy, at least from the thirteenth century onwards, was strong enough to prevent such encroachments. Scandinavia in this respect conforms to the Eastern rather than the Western pattern. Although we know very little about the financial aspect of castle administration in the Middle Ages, it seems that the net surplus the king derived from it was not very great. The greater gross surplus resulting from the military transformation was thus not only invested in military efficiency or other services to the king, but also in conspicuous consumption and a higher standard of living for the aristocracy. Politically, there were frequent conflicts between the king and the aristocracy or factions within the aristocracy in Denmark and Sweden in the Middle Ages. The council of the realm, which was institutionalized from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century onwards, became an instrument of the aristocracy to limit the king’s power. This is expressed particularly clearly in the definition of the two monarchies as elective, both in 1320, with the council being, in practice, the deciding institution. By contrast, the king of Norway’s reliance on the aristocracy was rather the result of the strength of the monarchy, which made it less necessary for him to recruit men from lower layers of society as a counterweight to the aristocracy. Norway had the strongest monarchy of the Scandinavian kingdoms in the sense that the aristocracy depended more on the king than in the two other countries. As early as 1260, a law defined the

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monarchy as hereditary, and later amendments defined the rules of succession more clearly. The strength of the monarchy is also expressed in the lack of aristocratic opposition to the king and the late development of a council of the realm and its greater weakness in the later Middle Ages than those of the neighboring countries. Nor was there any independent aristocratic jurisdiction; only the church competed with the monarchy in this field. Thus, despite its relative poverty, the Norwegian monarchy had the advantage of strength and internal unity. The importance of this advantage of course depended on the internal conditions in the neighboring countries. Sweden was the most divided in the Middle Ages, with almost constant struggles between two competing dynasties until the mid-thirteenth century, conflicts within the dynasty in the early fourteenth century, and clashes between the king and the aristocracy and between different aristocratic factions from the mid-fourteenth century until the early sixteenth century, when the country became united under a strong dynasty that eventually made it into a Europan great power. Denmark went through a period of internal struggles and conflicts between the king and the aristocracy (1241–1340) but recovered. Despite occasional conflicts, the relationship between the king and the aristocracy remained harmonious during the rest of the Middle Ages, which strengthened the country’s military as well as administrative capacity and made Denmark the leading country in the region and the center of a Scandinavian union that from 1397 included Norway and, in periods, also Sweden. Whereas Sweden finally broke out in 1523, Norway remained until 1814. Although the rise of the aristocracy set limits to the king’s power and reduced his economic surplus, it did not lead to permanent internal dissolution. An important factor from this point of view was that the fiefs never became hereditary, except in some cases for members of the dynasty. The king’s day-to-day control and his surplus might be limited, but the aristocratic holder never became firmly entrenched in his fief, and the king might therefore use the attractive castle commands as a means to keep the aristocrats loyal and receive services from them. The church represented a similar problem as the lay aristocracy. The great increase in the king’s revenues resulting from the confiscations of ecclesiastical lands after the Reformation indicates his “loss” in the previous period because of the church’s wealth—although it is of course by no means certain that this wealth would have belonged to the king if the church had not possessed it. From a political point of view, the leaders of the church formed part of the aristocracy, as the bishops were members of the council of the realm and, at least in some cases, joined in a common aristocratic policy. There were also conflicts between the king and the

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church in all three countries over classic questions like episcopal elections, jurisdiction, taxation of ecclesiastical property, secular fiefs held by bishops and other prelates, and various other privileges to the church. The Scandinavian churches, with some exception for that of Iceland, managed to maintain the basic independence from the secular power prevailing in most of Christian Europe. When alone in open conflicts with the monarchy, however, as in Denmark in the period 1252–1325 and in Norway in the 1280s, the church was usually defeated and could thus hardly be regarded as a dangerous enemy of the monarchy. Moreover, successful kings were able to profit from the services of the prelates, employing them in their administration and using ecclesiastical offices to reward their servants. Above all, the church contributed to bureaucratization, centralization, and expansion of public government, which made it an important element in medieval state formation. Whereas medieval military tech­ nology based on castles and heavy cavalry—in contrast to that of the Early Modern period—favored small units, the ecclesiastical organization is likely to have contributed to greater bureaucratization and centralization than would otherwise have been the case. The conclusion from these observations must therefore be that the bureaucratic elements of the First European Revolution were stronger in Scandinavia than the feudal ones. The internal divisions were eventually overcome, the central government was strengthened rather than weakened through the expansion of the church and the aristocracy, and the Scandinavian countries, notably Denmark, were largely successful in the competition with their neighbors. One reason for this may be the fact that feudalism and bureaucracy were introduced at about the same time. Although demanding independence from the king, the post-Gregorian church was a more efficient bureaucratic organization than the earlier one, and the ­castle administration was introduced at a time when the king had at his disposal a professional administration with a chancellor, scribes, lawyers, and accountants. The Cultural Aspect: European and Indigenous Features

Culturally, the program sketched in Gregory VII’s letter of 1079 eventually came to be carried out in the following period. The clerical elite culture of Western Christendom was transmitted to Scandinavia. Members of the higher clergy studied at cathedral schools, monasteries, and eventually universities in France, Italy, and Germany, and became familiar there with theological, philosophical, and legal learning and with Latin litera-

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ture. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, universities were even established in Scandinavia itself, at Uppsala (1477) and Copenhagen (1479). Canon law was practiced in the ecclesiastical administration and influenced secular legislation and legal practice. Knowledge of these categories of learning can be traced in various texts, in fragments of original manuscripts and library catalogues. A large religious literature in Old Norse translation has also been preserved, mainly in Iceland. The translations also include classical literature, chivalric romances, and works on geography, astronomy, and other kinds of learning. In these respects, Scandinavia emerges as a part of Christian Europe, receiving the contemporary international religion and learning and to some extent making original contributions to it. Examples of the latter are two Danes in Paris in the later thirteenth century, Boethius and Martinus. From a purely religious point of view, the great figure is Birgitta of Vadstena in Sweden (1303–73), saint and founder of a religious order and a person of great influence, who contributed to the pope’s return from Avignon to Rome in 1367. Both she and her environment made important contributions to religious thought and practice. Generally, Denmark and Sweden were more influenced by the clerical elite culture than Norway and Iceland. This is also expressed in the number of Scandinavian students at European universities. Scattered references from the University of Paris from the first half of the fourteenth century plus matricula from the English nation, which are partly preserved from 1333, give eighty-five Swedes, thirty-two Danes, and one Norwegian. The more extensive, but not complete, material from the late medieval universities in Germany, the Netherlands, and East Central Europe gives 2,146 Danes, 811 Swedes (including Finns), and 219 Norwegians.21 The use of literary language marks another line of division within Scandinavia: the vernacular dominates in Norway and Iceland, whereas Denmark and Sweden mainly kept to Latin. In this respect, Denmark and Sweden conform to the pattern in the other “new” countries in Western Christendom, the kingdoms of East Central Europe, whereas Norway and Iceland resemble the old ones, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, where a vernacular literature developed from the late twelfth and particularly the thirteenth century. England represents a similar trend, except that the literary language was French rather than English until the mid-fourteenth century. Haskins regarded historiography as one of the main examples of the Twelfth Century Renaissance, with the rise of vernacular historiography from the end of the century and particularly the beginning of the next as one of its greatest achievements.22 Insofar as the Twelfth Century Renaissance can be characterized as humanistic and literary, Scandinavian

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l­iterary culture seems a good example of this movement. Saxo Gram­ maticus’ Gesta Danorum, probably written around 1200, is one of the masterpieces of European Latin historiography, while the first half of the thirteenth century is the golden age of the Old Norse kings’ sagas, most of which were composed in Ireland.23 Both genres are concerned with the national past, the origins of the people, and above all the dynasty. Such origo gentis accounts are known from most European countries, but they differ in length and amount of detail as well as in content.24 Whereas those of Poland and Bohemia are mostly brief and seem largely to be constructions from the Christian period, based on biblical or hagiographic models, the Danish and Norwegian ones seem to have some basis in tradition and strong links to the pagan religion, knowledge of which was preserved until the thirteenth century and apparently formed a part of the cultural heritage, in a similar way as ancient mythology in other European countries. The longest and most detailed of these accounts is Saxo’s account of the early history of the Danes, before the conversion to Christianity, which covers about half of this lengthy work, around three hundred pages in the recent edition.25 In his preface, Saxo presents the Latin language as the proper medium for an account of the heroic past, without which the deeds of the ancients cannot be properly celebrated. He writes a highly rhetorical, difficult Latin based on Silver Age and late antique models, is familiar with classical Latin literature, and often uses classical models when describing his heroes. However, he consistently refrains from any references to the Roman Empire and avoids any foreign descent for the dynasty and the people. The message is clear: Denmark and its kings have been independent from the beginning and have never been conquered by the Romans, which means that the contemporary Roman emperor—just south of the border—has no right to interfere. Most accounts of the origin of the Norwegian dynasty also avoid links to the ancient peoples. Although the main aims of the two genres are largely similar—to cele­ brate national heroes and their deeds from the distant past to the p ­ resent— their style, attitude, and understanding of history differ. Saxo’s language is highly rhetorical and in a certain sense subjective. He is not content with simply telling the story, but wants to emphasize its significance from a moral or typological point of view, in accordance with practice in contemporary Latin historiography in the rest of Europe. By contrast, the sagas keep to the simple style, aim at concreteness and vividness, and avoid explicit comments. Whether this style imitates the Latin sermo humilis or is based on oral narrative is subject to discussion, but it is certainly a matter of deliberate choice, as its development can be followed through various texts from the late twelfth century to its full blossoming in masterpieces

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like Sverris Saga (1202–ca. 1220) and Heimskringla, the latter composed around 1230 by the Icelandic chieftain Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241).26 From this point of view, Saxo seems the more learned and intellectual, whereas the saga writers are mainly narrators. From another point of view, the saga writers are the more intellectual. They are more particular in establishing an exact chronology, as well as more critical regarding their sources. Thus, Snorri explicitly addresses the question of how to gain information about the distant past and tries to lay down rules for the relative trustworthiness of his sources. Finally and most importantly, the saga writers try to explain success and failure in political and secular terms. Snorri’s account of the fall of King Olav Haraldsson (king 1015–30) is not only a dramatic account of clashes between great men, but also an attempt to explain why a king who has been extremely successful during the first ten years of his reign gradually loses control and is deposed and killed by his own people. Snorri achieves this through a detailed account of the many conflicts Olav becomes involved in with various magnates, in which he refuses any compromise, thus ending up challenging too many enemies at the same time. Snorri’s explicit explanation of this behavior is Olav’s strict justice, but the narrative makes it clear that Snorri also blames Olav for political mistakes. At the same time, he shows how loyalty to kin and concern for honor force Olav’s enemies to take up arms against him. Sverris Saga gives an extraordinarily vivid account of a fascinating man who fought his way to the throne from obscure origins, claiming to be the illegitimate son of an earlier king. The saga claims that God is behind Sverre’s successes but at the same time explains them in purely human terms, painting a marvelous picture of a great leader who manages to inspire and lead his men to victory and gets them to perform astonishing deeds through his intelligence, encouragement, sensibility to their reactions, humor, eloquence, and ability never to give up and keep calm and resolute in the greatest difficulties. The saga’s descriptions of the various battles and encounters are not only vivid and dramatic but show great tactical and strategic understanding. The reader understands in purely human terms why Sverre won and can easily follow the strategic situation at the various stages of the narrative. There is a close connection between these works and what may be called pre-state society or at least the earlier stages of state formation—in the thirteenth century represented by Icelandic society above all—to which most of the saga writers belonged, a society still dominated by competing chieftains and not submitting to the Norwegian king until 1262–4. This society is also reflected in the Icelandic family sagas, the part of Old Norse literature best known to modern readers. By contrast, the last king’s

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saga, the saga of King Håkon Håkonsson (1217–63), composed shortly after his death, and even more so, the saga of his son Magnus (1263–80), which is only preserved in fragments, show the changes resulting from a more bureaucratic organization and a stronger emphasis on the king’s majesty and the rex iustus ideology. Håkon’s saga is an impressive piece of work, with its detailed account of many aspects of the king’s reign, its ­understanding of strategy and tactics in the accounts of warfare, and its Christian and moral interpretation of the king’s acts, but it lacks the vividness of the earlier sagas. There is also evidence of the influence of the contemporary aristocratic culture in Scandinavia. The Norwegian King Håkon Håkonsson commissioned the translation of a series of chivalric romances, mostly French, probably intended to create a courtly culture according to European models. A considerable number of ballads, with religious, heroic, ­romantic, or courtly content, are also known from Scandinavia, partly preserved in manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Denmark, partly in oral tradition in Norway, which was written down in the nineteenth century. Although the date of the originals has been subject to discussion, there is much to suggest that the genre originated in aristocratic and courtly circles in the late thirteenth century. Whereas saga writing declined from the late thirteenth century, a new genre within chivalric literature was introduced in Sweden with Eriks­ krönikan, a verse chronicle about the Swedish dynasty between circa 1230 and 1320, but mainly dealing with the internal struggles between 1302 and 1319, in which King Birger’s younger brother and opponent, Duke Erik, is represented as a hero. The work seems to be influenced by German sources and represents an aristocratic and courtly culture, celebrating chivalry, wealth and generosity, and refined manners, along with clever tactics and the ability to outwit one’s opponents. It has been highly regarded by modern scholars for its literary qualities; in particular, the account of the duke’s and his brother’s tragic end—betrayed, taken captive, and starved to death by their brother—is very impressive. The genre was continued from the mid-fifteenth century with a series of works celebrating contemporary struggles against the Danish kings who tried to restore the union between the Scandinavian countries. Scandinavia in an Expanding Euope

In 1247, Cardinal William of Sabina visited Norway to crown the king. The saga refers to a speech by him at the dinner after the ceremony where

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he explains that he was warned against visiting the country by people who said that it was poor and its people barbarian. This, however, had turned out to be completely wrong.27 The people were as civilized as any other in the Christian world; the main city, Bergen, was full of ships from other countries and all commodities necessary for a comfortable life; and the king was wise, cultivated, and pious. The speech may well have been composed by the saga writer and is in any case intended to flatter, but actually there is every reason to believe that a high-ranking foreign prelate might experience a Scandinavian country in this way. The coronation took place in a Romanesque cathedral, similar to those in other parts of Europe, notably Germany—it was later completely destroyed. Bergen was a city of about average size for Northern Europe; the festivities were apparently of a similar kind as at other European courts. Most importantly, the cardinal could converse in Latin with the Norwegian prelates and probably also with the king, and the problems they discussed were of the same kind as in the rest of Europe: the relationship between the church and the monarchy, conflicts between the mendicants and the parish clergy, and various other questions regarding ecclesiastical discipline. Although the contacts between Scandinavia and the rest of Europe date back to well before the Christianization of the region, at least to the period of the Roman Empire, these contacts were intensified during the period of the first great expansion of Western Christendom, from the first known Viking attack on England in 793 to the conversion of the last pagan country in Europe, Lithuania, in 1386. They led to far-reaching changes in Scandinavia and the other “new” countries in Western Christendom: the introduction of Christianity, the ecclesiastical and royal bureaucracy, writing and the Latin language, and a new military technology that had important social consequences. They also resulted in a cultural renewal, partly through imports from abroad and partly through the meeting between European and indigenous traditions. But the expansion also had consequences for Western Christendom as a whole, establishing and confirming the combination of cultural unity and political division that has characterized this part of the world up to the present day.

Notes 1.  “In extremo orbe terrarum positi”; Latinske dokument til norsk historie, ed. Eirik Vandvik (Oslo, 1959), no. 2, p. 30. 2.  Charles Homer Haskins, Renaissance; Robert L. Benson and Giles Con­ stable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal.

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3.  Robert I. Moore, European Revolution, and “The Transformation of Europe,” in Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissances, ed. Johann P. Arnason and Björn Wittrock (Leiden, 2004), pp. 77–98. 4.  Robert Bartlett, Making of Europe. 5.  Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen, Det danske imperium: Storhed og fald (Copenhagen, 2004), pp. 8–39. 6.  General surveys in English of Scandinavian history in the Middle Ages are: Birgit Sawyer and Peter Sawyer, Medieval Scandinavia: From Conversion to Reformation (Minneapolis, 1993); Sverre Bagge, “The Scandinavian Kingdoms,” in NCMH, vol. 5, pp. 720–42; Knut Helle, ed., The Cambridge History of Scandinavia 1 (Cambridge, 2003); and Sverre Bagge, From Viking Stronghold to Christian Kingdom: State Formation in Norway c. 900–1350 (Copenhagen 2010). As all these works contain references to earlier literature, I shall not normally give precise references for factual information contained in them. 7. Rimbert, Vita Ansgari, c. 11, 19, etc., ed. Werner Trillmilch, Quellen des 9. und 11. Jahrhunderts zur Geschichte der hamburgischen Kirche und des Reiches, Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 11, 7th ed. (Darmstadt, 2000), pp. 16–133. 8.  There is less evidence for the early history of Sweden than for that of the two other countries, and opinions about the process have been widely divided. See, in addition to the literature already cited, Nils Blomkvist, The Discovery of the Baltic: The Reception of the Catholic World System in the European North (AD 1075– 1225) (Leiden, 2005), pp. 579–623. 9.  Jerzy Strzelzcyk, “Bohemia and Poland: Two Examples of Successful Western Slavonic State-Formation,” in NCMH, vol. 3, pp. 514–35, and “The Church and Christianity about the Year 1000 (the missionary aspect),” in Europe around the Year 1000, ed. Przemyslaw Urbanzyk (Warsaw, 2001), pp. 51–2; Dušan Třeštik, “Von Svatopluk zu Boleslaw Chrobry: Die Entstehung Mitteleuropas aus der Kraft des Tatsächlichen und aus einer Idee,” in: The Neighbours of Poland in the 10th Century, ed. P. Urbanzyk (Warsaw, 2000), pp. 111–45. 10.  Bjarne Fidjestøl, Selected Papers (Odense, 1997), pp. 117–32. 11. For example, William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since AD 1000 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 79–143, on the steady improvement of military technology, strategy, and organization as the result of constant competition; and Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 430–43, on the political division within a common cultural framework as part of the European dynamic. For examples of this in Scandinavia, see below, as well as the situation in the seventeenth century, when Sweden defeated Denmark thanks to its military innovations, which in turn forced the Danish king to introduce the same measures. Recently, however, several scholars have denied the importance of this feature, e.g., Jack Goldstone, “Efflorescence and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ and the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of World History 13 (2002), pp. 334–9. 12.  Konungs skuggsiá [The King’s Mirror], ed. Ludvig Holm-Olsen (Oslo, 1945), p. 109; cf. Sverre Bagge, The Political Thought of ‘The King’s Mirror’ (Odense, 1987), p. 122.

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13.  The existence of separate cult buildings in the pagan period was denied by Olaf Olsen, Hørg, hov og kirke: Historiske og arkæologiske vikingetidsstudier, Aarbøger for nordisk oldkyndighed og historie (Copenhagen, 1965), but recent evidence suggests that some such buildings may have existed. See Stefan Brink, “Mytologiska rum och eskatologiska föreställningar i det vikingtida Norden,” in Ordning mot kaos: Studier au nordisk förkristen kosmologi, ed. Anders Andrén et al. (Lund, 2004), pp. ­291–316. 14.  Halvdan Koht, Innhogg og utsyn (Kristiania, 1921), p. 271. 15. Bartlett, Making of Europe, pp. 60–84. 16.  Recently, Niels Lund, Lid, leding og landeværn: Hær og samfund in Danmark i ældre middelalder (Roskilde, 1996), has argued against the existence of a popular levy in Denmark in the early period, dating its introduction to the late twelfth century, but his view has not met with general acceptance. 17.  There is archaeological evidence of fortifications from much earlier periods, either wooden castles or the large Viking camps found in Denmark, but there seems to be no continuity between them and those of the High Middle Ages. 18.  Svend Gissel et al., Desertion and Land Colonization in the Nordic Countries ca. 1300–1600: Comparative Report from the Scandinavian Research Project on Deserted Farms and Villages (Stockholm, 1981), pp. 158–71. 19. Moore, European Revolution, pp. 132–4, 193–4, etc. 20.  Sverre Bagge, “The Transformation of Europe: The Role of Scandinavia,” in Eurasian Transformations, pp. 157–60. 21.  Sverre Bagge, “Nordic Students at Foreign Universities,” Scandinavian Journal of History 9 (1984), pp. 5ff. 22. Haskins, Renaissance, pp. 224–77. 23.  Iceland was settled by Norwegians from the late ninth century onwards and developed a rich literature, mostly in the vernacular. Contacts between the Icelandic and the Norwegian elites were close, and in 1262–4, the Icelanders submitted to the king of Norway. 24.  Norbert Kersken, Geschichtsschreibung im Europa der ‘nationes’: Nationalgeschichte im Mittelalter (Cologne, 1995), pp. 533–53, 615–38, 788–816. 25.  Karsten Friis-Jensen, “Saxo Grammaticus’s Study of the Roman Historiographers and His Vision of History,” in Saxo Grammaticus: Tra storiografia e letteratura: Bevagna, 27–29 settembre 1990, ed. Carlo Santini (Rome, 1992), pp. 61–81. 26.  On these works, see Diana Whaley, Heimskringla: An Introduction (London, 1991); Sverre Bagge, Society and Politics in Snorri Sturluson’s “Heimskringla” (Berkeley, 1991), and From Gang Leader to the Lord’s Anointed: Kingship in “Sverris Saga” and “Hákonar Saga Hákonarsonar”; The Viking Collection (Odense, 1996). 27. [Hákonar saga,] The Saga of Hakon and a Fragment of the Saga of Magnus with Appendices, ch. 255, ed. Guðbrandur Vigfusson, Rerum britannicarum medii ævi scriptores, 88.1–2 (London, 1857; repr. 1964), and [Hákonar saga,] The Saga of Hakon and a Fragment of the Saga of Magnus with Appendices, ch. 255, transl. G. W. Dasent, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Ævi Scriptores, 88.4 (London 1894; repr. 1964).

eight

Ambiguous Beginnings East Central Europe in the Making, 950–1200 P i o tr G ó r e cki

In memory of Richard Hellie, advisor, teacher, friend

The Problem

Situating Eastern or (as I will refer to it instead) East Central Europe within the framework of the general history of the Continent encompassed by the years 950 through 1200 immediately poses several challenges.1 From the perspective of medieval Europe in its entirety, these three centuries constitute a historical period that is formative and defining. Whatever we actually mean by “medieval” or by “Europe,” the civilizational area specified by these words emerged, or “matured,” or was well underway to having been “made,” sometime between the tenth and the early thirteenth century. Moreover, during those same centuries, this area experienced several fundamental transitions at the highest level of the political, societal, and institutional order. But from the perspective of East Central Europe, the same chrono­ logical boundary specifies, at least at first blush, a very different kind of historical period, which might be called a time of beginnings—ambiguous beginnings. I do not mean “origins”—that is to say, an actual emergence of some specific element, or elements, of past reality, which is itself a dif194

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ficult and elusive subject—but, more modestly, the earliest period about which we, as historians, have access to any knowledge about that reality. For the peoples and societies of this macro-region, the several decades surrounding the year 900 are the time when some of those big elements of a large-scale societal and political order that might potentially be compa­ rable to their counterparts across the Continent, first become observable to the historian. This is different from origins, because by the mid-tenth century, some aspects of that large-scale order had had a long previous history, while elements did indeed arise, or “originate,” that is, have a real beginning, in the course of those three centuries. Among the latter is the use of writing.2 The decades around the turn of the tenth century witnessed the origins of written evidence about much that interests us in this macro-region. Over the subsequent centuries, written evidence became significantly more ample, more authoritative, and in general more important, but, despite these transitions, always remained at levels of output (and presumably of use) that were exceedingly modest in comparison to several other regions of contemporary medieval Europe. This comparative sparseness of the written record is, in my view, one of the major distinguishing features of the East, or the East-Center, of the Continent as a whole—during the three centuries under review and permanently thereafter. The implications of this global difference have not, to my knowledge, been thoroughly explored. At present, let me note three such implications. The first, today perhaps slightly old-fashioned but irreducibly important, is empirical. For the period spanning the years 950 to 1200, we are simply constrained to know much less about the realities that interest us regarding this region of Europe than we are regarding places situated some distance to the west. As a problem, this is entirely different from the difficulty with which Philippe Buc struggled nearly a decade ago, namely, whether, with written sources securely in hand, we can ever truly “know” or “access” the realities to which such sources refer;3 here, sadly, until relatively late we have no sources securely in hand. A second implication is comparative. Precisely because of this relative sparseness, these three centuries encompass a very interesting subject, namely, early writing—its structure, form, apparent purpose, uses, and (very importantly) its alternatives.4 The third implication is interestingly frustrating. At any point of its production, the early written record offers us teasing, exceedingly fragmentary glimpses of a social, political, economic, and seigneurial world which was well entrenched, complex, and, moreover, in the process of

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transition. We know that this world existed. We assume, on first principles, that it had coherence. But, at least in my view, we cannot analytically reproduce—that is, conceptually impart to that world—that coherence.5 Thus, common to this macro-region, specifically during these three centuries, is an irreducible ambiguity of our own understanding of its beginnings. But in addition, the entire subject of East Central Europe begs a basic question: what exactly do we mean by this macro-region? Leaving aside for the moment the differences between the designations “East Central” and “Eastern,” specification of this cultural and geographic terrain has always been largely residual, or negative, emphasizing either what this part of the Continent was not—a former part of the Roman Empire, or the Carolingian Empire and its post-843 subdivisions, or the principal external sources of influence upon it—above all Germany or Byzantium, Aachen or Constantinople.6 Understood essentially as an open, negative space, this macro-region has always, so to speak, yearned to be filled, by means of a cognitive process combining explanation with metaphor—a metaphor referring to transfer and to the act of bridging a distance. The long historiography behind this proposition comprises a kind of lesser, intra-European “Orientalism”—a conceptual framework that still looms large today and that, if pursued here, would lead us onto a complicated detour through late-modern historiography. At this point, let me merely note that that late-modern historiography is itself very old; it, as well as the issues it raises, extend all the way back to the three centuries from 950 to 1250. Sparse as they are, our earliest written records repeatedly address the subject of civilizational distance: a geographic, political, and cultural peripherality of East Central Europe, or some part of it, assessed in terms of a wide range of criteria.7 Significantly, this subject is not primeval; it emerged during the course of our three centuries, not at their outset. That is to say, when, in the first years of the eleventh century, Bruno of Querfurt or Thietmar of Merseburg, looked back to the beginnings of the Polish polity consolidated under Dukes Mieszko I and his son Bolesław the Brave, they did not portray these two rulers or the polity over which the rulers presided as at all distant from their own, European “core”—the world centered upon the German kings and emperors—but, on the contrary, as fully engaged, important actors in that world—to the great distress of Thietmar (as least insofar as Bolesław was concerned) and with rousing support from Bruno. In medieval Polish sources, we first encounter this subject in 1075, when Gregory VII enjoined the second Duke Bolesław (nicknamed the

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Bold or the Generous) to furnish his realm with a permanent, fixed episcopal network presided over by a metropolitan.8 Thereafter, we have a steady trickle of papal bulls and letters, beginning in 1136 and culminating shortly after 1200, observing typically (and with a typical brevity) that “the country of the Poles (Poloniorum regio) is situated in the farther parts of the world” or that “the region of Poland has [only] recently been penetrated by the light of the Christian faith” or some equivalent expression.9 Although the image recurs in papal documents, it also appears from other perspectives. In the opening years of the twelfth century, the author of the deeds of the third Duke Bolesław (“the Wrymouth”), known conventionally as Gallus and now also as the Polish Anonymous, geographically located “the country of the Poles (regio Polonorum) . . . far away from the routes of pilgrims, . . . known to few besides those travelling to Russia for the purposes of trade,” in an encircling perimeter of thick forest. Yet, within that perimeter—one might say, on the other side of the physical and cultural frontier—the writer attributed to Poland an economic, demographic, and political robustness that, throughout his history, is one of his basic messages about his adopted country.10 Today, I think, we still tend to place East Central Europe, and its regions and peoples, in general medieval history much as our medieval predecessors did. Conceptually, the exercise currently uses some variant of three models. The first model emphasizes a difference in chronology. In the formulation of its most distinguished proponent, Jerzy Kłoczowski, the Continent’s “East” (or “East-Center”) is a Europe “younger” than regions situated far to the west.11 In Kłoczowski’s formulation, “youth” is not a simplistic, evolutionist metaphor but means, far more subtly, that in the two macro-regions of Europe of which one is “younger” than the other, the crucial formative and definitional period occurred at different times; and that therefore the kind of global, systemic transformation that occurred in the European “West” during the long twelfth century had its full equivalent—though, I hasten to add, not a straightforward replication— in Europe’s “East” a full two, perhaps even three, centuries later. The second model also entails a difference in chronology but focuses on one specific feature of what happens over time, namely, “diffusion.” Here, the basic stuff of the historical process is the transfer of particular, well-specified elements of high-level order from a “core” macro-region of the Continent toward other macro-regions, which, by virtue of this process, can be viewed as Europe’s “frontiers.” Europe’s East, or East-Center, is one such frontier. This model has been used, with great effectiveness and subtlety, by Robert Bartlett.12 The formation, transformation, and

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definition of Europe in its entirety entailed a global impact of the diffusion of key elements of order, out of the core and outward and up to the frontiers, Europe’s East included. The period over which that happened encompassed the years 900–1200, but continued thereafter, and so the overall process exceeds the chronological scope of this volume by at least one full century.13 The third model is really a bundle of approaches, which I will loosely call parallel development. One variant of this model emphasizes the similarities, or the differences, in the directions of change of specific, potentially comparable elements of high-level order in the different macro-­ regions of Europe: kingship, lordship, the peasantry, the towns, spirituality, the law, and much else. Another deemphasizes directions of change in favor of focusing on the similarities, or the differences, between such elements of order in different macro-regions of Europe.14 Yet another emphasizes the fact of coexistence, both within and across particular macro-­ regions, of such elements of high-level order and of phenomena specifically related to that coexistence—phenomena such as contact, negotiation, or conflict. Outstanding examples of this approach are the books by Nora Berend on Hungary and by David Nirenberg on Spain.15 Finally, one may focus, as Michael Borgolte has done in his recent book,16 directly upon diversity ­itself—a diversity that is irreducible and permanent, that does not necessarily lend itself to comparison, and that does not, over time, assume or tend toward any specific outcome, such as “diffusion,” convergence, coexistence, negotiation, and so forth. I would like to adopt an approach that is different from all three of these possibilities, though informed by each. Between the tenth and the early thirteenth centuries, some elements of high-level order glimpsed through the documents concerning East Central Europe were directly comparable to their contemporaneous counterparts elsewhere. Others were also directly comparable but occurred (or at least are documented) later. Yet others have no documented counterparts outside the macro-­ region at all—and are, therefore, apparently specific to East Central Europe or some part of it. Thus, in my view, the notable feature of this macro-region is neither a chronological or developmental delay (“youth”) nor a global “diffusion” nor, on the other hand, a permanent state of difference, entailing multilateral negotiation and (sometimes) impact. Instead, what situates this macro-region within its contemporary medieval world is an integration of elements of high-level order that is partly explicable in terms of these three models, yet, at any one time, highly distinct.17

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This rather abstruse proposition may be developed with reference to any one of the major, conventionally defined polities comprising East Central Europe between about 950 and 1200. One such polity is the principality, or group of principalities, first ruled by Duke Mieszko I after the 950s, which, with a manageable touch of anachronism, I shall call Poland, or, more neutrally, the Piast duchy or duchies.18 The method here is to select, as carefully as possible given the sparseness of the written record, those elements of high-level order that are potentially comparable (though, as we will see, not necessarily similar) to their counterparts elsewhere in medieval Europe. Within Piast Poland, during the early period with which we are concerned, two major phenomena lend themselves to this kind of close, and at least potentially comparative, attention. One is the power of the ruler: invariably the duke, eligible for that office by virtue of membership in a dynasty (dubbed “the Piasts” in the early modern period) and presiding over one or more of the duchies that comprised Poland.19 The other is conversion, by which I shall mean a transition, multileveled and broadly understood, from one religion or religious system to another.20 Toward a Comparative Perspective

Although they are ultimately related, these two major phenomena—ducal power and religious conversion—are very different from one another, and so I am stressing here a conjuncture rather than a direct analogy. However, at least on a general level, the two phenomena do actually parallel one ­another. Both are highly dynamic. Both entail complicated patterns of ­activity by interesting protagonists. Both are represented by a relatively ample written record, right from the beginnings of that record in the course of the tenth century. Finally, both reflect the fact that, as of the mid-tenth century, Poland was, among other things, part of post-­ Carolingian Europe. At first blush, that last statement is obviously, and quite deliberately, problematic. In contrast to Bohemia or (earlier) to Moravia or to regions further south, the polity ruled by Mieszko I and his successors never experienced, in any meaningful sense, an actual impact, let alone a presence, of the later Carolingian dynasty or its agents, or a political order which can in some reasonably specific sense be described as Carolingian.21 Moreover, the meaning of “post-Carolingian,” both as a period and as a phenomenon, is now so strongly contested that this expression is an awkward

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marker for transition.22 Despite these caveats, the post-Carolingian context works for early Piast Poland on at least one level. Whatever else it was or was not, the post-Carolingian period entailed either an actual emergence, or a contemporary perception of an emergence, of a new mode in exercising power—a new kind of lordship. In a crucial article published nearly a decade ago, Thomas Bisson brought this general insight to bear specifically upon Poland—as portrayed by the Polish Anonymous in the early twelfth century.23 In that article, Bisson was interested above all in the implications of the Anonymous’ Gesta for our conceptualization of power and of its post-Carolingian transformations. Reversing this thematic equation, let me note the implication of Bisson’s analysis to a regional problem: the meaning and significance of power, and of its transformations during the tenth century and thereafter, in that part of East Central Europe where the Gesta are rooted. Consistently with what Bisson has long asserted about places much further to the west, here, during the tenth century, the exercise of power underwent a very real, very concrete change. We know this not from the written record, but from ash—layers of it, archaeologically excavated, and datable to the third, fourth, and fifth decades of the tenth century, the period coinciding with the presumed consolidation of the new, aggressive ducal kindred subsequently (and today) known as the Piasts.24 The ash resulted from a deliberate destruction by fire—an act effected by some collective agency that was obviously capable of doing this—of one network of defensive centers and their surrounding settlement, followed by a creation of a new network of the same kind: what must have been a deliberate, violent episode of force, centered above all in the region around Gniezno, Poznań, Kruszwica, Giecz, and Żnin—that is to say, Great Poland, the region that Thietmar, the Polish Anonymous, and subsequent authors presented as the heartland, or the territorial core, out of which Mieszko I, Bolesław the Brave, and their successors projected their power over larger regions, in different geographic directions. As a variant of post-Carolingian lordship, this kind of power is problematic. Intuitively, it seems entirely different from the patterns of domination, force, conflict, constraint, and command, centered upon autonomous castles and their knightly crews,25 which we glimpse through the story of Hugh de Lusignan, for example; and from comparable (if, presumably, themselves highly varied) configurations in other regions of the former Carolingian world.26 The differences are many. Right from the accessible beginnings, in Poland lordship was held by the dukes recruited from this dynasty.27 To be sure, as we will see, ducal power was contested;

Ambiguous Beginnings  201

however, that contestation consistently involved the duke as a central protagonist. Moreover, the space over which the dukes wielded that lordship was relatively large—very large, in fact, as imagined, for example, in the Anonymous’ recollections of the expansion of the duchy until Bolesław the Brave’s death in 1025—though, across the dynastic generations, it diminished.28 Finally, the concrete, material base of this power is very difficult to pin down, at least before the early twelfth century. Again, we are quite far from groups of heavily armed men, physically based in smallscale, local fortifications from which they were able to impinge upon the surrounding space, people, and resources. Yet, at a stretch, the conceptual distance is bridgeable. After that primeval period of burning and destruction, the first Piasts did construct a substantially new network of fortified centers—significant defensive earthworks, called in the Latin of the later documents “castles” (castra) or “cities” (civitates)—that, among their other functions, comprised the defensive and residential cores of the earliest Polish towns, and places that were central to the surrounding, presumably rural, settlement.29 The Polish Anonymous explained the power of all three Bolesławs specifically in terms of the dukes’ control over the most important localities of this type, the “principal seats of the kingdom,” staffed by large crews of heavily armed, mounted knights, each in charge of gathering the resources required to feed and otherwise furnish the ruler during his peregrinations.30 In the 960s, the Jewish traveler Ibrahim ibn-Ya’qub learned that Mieszko I kept a large contingent of mounted, heavily armed knights permanently in attendance upon himself and that he furnished that household retinue with weapons, horses, and food.31 The Piasts were not alone. During these three centuries, power was wielded most conspicuously by members of ruling dynasties—the Přemý­ slids in Bohemia and Moravia, the Árpads in Hungary, the Riurikids in the Rus’—based in the fortified cores of substantial towns, impinging upon large territories and subject populations, and, assisted by warriors, engaged (among other things) in war.32 These ruling kindreds comprised a network of intermarriage that intersected with another network, centered upon the German emperors, kings, margraves, and lords, to form, overall, a large, macro-regional, endogamous universe. Moreover, all such dynastically framed populations generated, with more or less success, protocols for establishing seniority and succession in the family group. One option affecting these two concerns was acquisition, by someone in the group, of royal office—a prospect that remained remote for the Piasts, frequent for the Přemýslids and the Árpads.

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This brings me to another post-Carolingian phenomenon of which the early Piasts are an instance: tenth- and eleventh-century kingship. Mieszko I, Bolesław the Brave, Mieszko II, and their successors were a part of that universe of duchies, principalities, and kingdoms that is exemplified, far to the west, by Normandy or the county of Flanders; to the north and northwest, by the Scandinavian kingdoms, especially Denmark; and, to the immediate west, by those same German rulers, margraves, and other lords who are, in my view, the most important collective protagonist in Thietmar of Merseburg’s history viewed in its entirety. The polities thus established were both relatively large, and, as territorial or political units, sometimes quite transient—a pattern of which Poland offers a spectacular, perhaps extreme, example, with the dramatic territorial and political rupture of the Piast realm in the 1030s.33 Whether framed as an instance of post-Carolingian lordship or of post-Carolingian kingship, this presentation of early Piast power is, in at least one respect, woefully incomplete. Apart from the dukes, their sisters, and their wives, who mattered? Who wielded power within the substantial principalities over which the dukes presided? What were the resources available to the creation and the sustenance of that power? An important part of the answer is one type of protagonist, other than the duke, who participated in lordship, perhaps even helped shape it. He (and it is a he) appears as an actor in each of the three major historical works that, between them, span our three centuries: the chronicle of Thietmar of Merseburg, the Gesta of the Polish Anonymous, and the so-called Chronicle of Poland written in the third decade of the thirteenth century by the bishop of Kraków, Vincent, conventionally nicknamed Kadłubek.34 The main subject of those narrations in which that protagonist appears is one recurrent event: succession to ducal office. During the centuries with which we are concerned, this is the best-documented specific circumstance in reference to which lordship was contested in medieval Poland. Likewise from the tenth century onward, Poland was a terrain of religious conversion. As Bartlett noted in 1993, one relatively straightforward element of conversion was the formation of an institutional framework— of bishoprics, monasteries, and other types of churches, and of a corresponding variety of secular and regular clerics.35 In the first years of the eleventh century, Thietmar of Merseburg recalled the presence, in 966, of exactly one bishop in Mieszko I’s realm, Jordan of Poznań.36 He also noted, in 1005, exactly one monastery, in Międzyrzecz, where, during a campaign against Bolesław the Brave, Emperor Henry II paused with his army to worship and took special care not to inflict damage upon the abbey or

Ambiguous Beginnings  203

the monks.37 Thereafter, Thietmar said nothing about clergy, secular or regular, but as of the year 1000, he counted in Bolesław’s realm a total of five bishops: Radzim, the new metropolitan archbishop of Gniezno, Unger of Poznań, Reinbert of Kołobrzeg, Poppo of Kraków, and John of Wro­ cław.38 Obliquely, Thietmar also suggested resistance by Unger, Jordan’s successor at the oldest see in Poznań, against the newly established metropolis and Archbishop Radzim.39 A century after Thietmar, the Polish Anonymous recalled the dramatic erasure of Polish bishoprics—above all, of the material fabric of Gniezno—in the crisis of the early 1030s and, in his own present, repeatedly addressed his Gesta to a total of five Polish bishops: Martin, the metropolitan of Gniezno, Simon of Płock, Paul of Poznań, Maurus of Kraków, and Żyrosław of Wrocław.40 Bartlett has also implied that, apart from an expanding institutional framework, conversion was a process and a pattern of activity. Now, on this subject, our written record reflects, and in itself represents, a very strong degree of discontinuity. Early on, between the mid-tenth and the early eleventh centuries, that record consists almost exclusively of hagiographic material: truly a minor explosion of biographies centered on a small handful of holy men, above all Saint Adalbert of Prague and his associates.41 For present purposes, this hagiographic tradition places Bolesław the Brave’s monarchy within the highly cosmopolitan monastic, eremetical, espiscopal, missionary, and imperial world that had comprised Europe since at least the age of Saint Boniface. But this tradition ends quite abruptly, perhaps in conjunction with the wholesale (if temporary) reversal of conversion in the 1030s. Thereafter, conversion in Poland is best reflected by a significantly later, and a very different, type of source. In form, that source is a piece of parchment—a charter, a letter, or a notice. In substance, it is a subset of those twelfth-century documents that, as we have seen, explicitly broach the subject of Poland’s civilizational distance in relation to some notional European “core.” The earlier and the later sources also differ in terms of actors. Not surprisingly, the hagiographic material has as its principal protagonist the holy man—or group of holy men—seeking (and indeed successfully finding) martyrdom at the hands of the pagan Prussians. There are other actors, above all Duke Bolesław the Brave, but they play a supportive or a protective role. In contrast, the twelfth-century material notes a whole range of principal protagonists—the dukes but also, more prominently, other important persons—all of whom share three traits. They are not (or at least are not identified as) outsiders but are indigenous to Poland. They actively elicit, and at least to a degree accomplish, specific moments of

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c­losure of that distance between Poland and some faraway European “core” that is a subject of those same documents. And they are not, in any sense, portrayed as holy men; thus, even though these documents concern an active, highly desirable religious transition, we do not have here hagiographic texts nor texts indirectly indebted to hagiography. Both of our major subjects are especially well reflected in selected sources. The protagonist who actively contested ducal power appears most fully in one story narrated by Thietmar of Merseburg and in several stories presented by the Polish Anonymous. The subject of civilizational distance and its closure—understood as a precondition to and an aspect of ­conversion—is most fully developed in two substantial twelfth-century charters. The first is a letter composed and sent sometime between 1143 and 1145 by the bishop of Kraków, Matthew, to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in which the great abbot is invited to visit Poland and preach.42 The second is a long notice, issued in 1198 by Monachus, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, recalling a long process, extending about four decades into the past, of endowment of the canons of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem with a large estate situated in “the duchy of Poland”—or, more precisely, in and near Miechów, about twenty kilometers to the north of Kraków.43 Contestation of Power

Considered as a literary subject, the protagonist with (or against) whom the Piast ruler contested his power, specifically in the context of succession, is broached for the first time by Thietmar of Merseburg in his description of the two marriages by Duke Mieszko I: the first in 965, to the Czech princess Dubravka; the second, twelve years later, to Oda, daughter of a German margrave.44 Thietmar closed his narration about Mieszko and Dubravka with the first of his many references to their son, Bolesław, the future Bolesław the Brave. Likewise, he concluded the story of Mieszko and Oda with a reference to three sons who issued from that marriage, of whom he identified two by name (Świętopełk and Mieszko),45 and of whom the third, Lambert, is identified by that solitary extant document actually produced during Mieszko’s reign: the notice extracted sometime between 985 and 992 from the register of Pope John XV, and quaintly known today as the Dagome iudex.46 In its own very brief narration, that notice asserted that Mieszko, Oda, and their two sons Mieszko and Lambert had placed their entire polity under the protection of “Saint Peter.”47 This detail, obviously, raises our other major subject, conversion (glimpsed

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here as a moment of direct contact between the ducal family and the bishop of Rome), but it also bears upon succession. The group noted here was centered upon Mieszko’s second marriage, and the sons of that marriage. Where, in this picture, was Bolesław?48 Thietmar was presumably unaware of the Dagome iudex. He did, however, recall a succession conflict that was closely related to Mieszko’s two marriages and to the resulting population of sons. As the bishop presented the story, the source of the conflict was a disparity in expectations concerning the disposal of Mieszko’s “realm” (regnum) after his death. On the one hand, the duke “left his realm to be divided, among many”—­ presumably the sons of the two marriages, although Thietmar did not explicitly say. On the other, “soon after” Mieszko’s passing, “his son Bolesław, having exiled his stepmother and [the three] brothers, and blinded their companions Odylen and Przybywój, with a vulpine shrewdness assembled [the realm] into one. In order to be able to exercise power by himself that much more, he did away with the law and with all fairness.”49 Thietmar’s perspective on the legitimate disposal of the “realm” could not be clearer. Mieszko’s initial plan is presented as entirely expected and legitimate, Bolesław’s frustration of it as malevolent and treacherous—two traits that reverberate throughout his work, in his treatment of Bolesław the Brave. In the present context, the story is important because of the brief appearance of Duchess Oda and of her sons’ two “companions” (familiares), Przybywój and Odylen. They were, in some sense, relevant to the implementation of Duke Mieszko’s testament. In what sense, Thietmar did not say; but they mattered enough to Bolesław to be worth mutilating and thus, together with Oda and her sons, must have threatened Bolesław’s expectation to succeed. They are the earliest example of our protagonist. Thietmar tells us nothing about any kind of broader context in which we might situate Przybywój and Odylen. In comparison, the Anonymous’ collective portrayal is positively luxuriant in its detail. From his perspective, a crucial factor affecting ducal succession was the presence of ­enemies—persons directly responsible for disturbances in the succession itself or, after a succession, in the subsequent exercise of ducal power. The Anonymous referred to such people in terms that were collective, impersonal, and pejorative: “traitors” (traditores), “knaves” (maliciosi ), or “rivals” (emuli).50 He explained their activities in terms of emotion. They threatened or frustrated the incumbent dukes because of a legacy of ill will— spanning the same generations across which succession was contested.

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That ill will was a complicated mix of hatred, envy, and above all vengeance, or the fear of vengeance. Thus, the castration, in 1031, of Bolesław the Brave’s son Mieszko II was an act of vengeance for an even more severe mutilation that Bolesław had inflicted upon an ancestor of Mieszko’s tormentors.51 In 1034, Mieszko II’s son, Casimir I, was exiled because his enemies feared that he might avenge his own, earlier, forced exile.52 Around 1090, yet another Mieszko, the older son of Bolesław II the Bold, was ­poisoned—again, in order to preempt the possibility of his avenging the exile of his father Bolesław, which had occurred about a decade earlier, after Bolesław executed the bishop of Kraków, Stanisław.53 The Anonymous is very stingy about the specific circumstances behind those stories. Instead, he points us, however darkly, to a political space occupied by people who made a serious difference in the devolution of Piast power. In other stories, he describes several specific, individualized actors who inhabited that space. Those stories are grouped around two specific successions: after 1034, during that global, systemic crisis of the polity originally established by Mieszko I which marked, for the Anonymous, a period of decline;54 and between 1090 and about 1109, a time of the long transfer of power from Duke Władysław Hermann to his two sons, Zbigniew and Bolesław III, ending, ultimately, in the chronicler’s own present.55 The former story involved only one protagonist, by the name of Miecław. The latter entailed a complicated interaction between several individuals and groups, among whom the crucial actor was a man named Sieciech. Miecław’s is a tale of a deliberate, self-driven ascent to power at a time when (and specifically because) the duke, Casimir I, was absent from his realm. Following Bisson, we might see here an excellent example of a replacement of the duke by a new kind of power holder, a lord—two capacities that, in this story, are presented as essentially different modes of wielding power, the private and the public. Indeed, the Anonymous himself discerned something like this, and rebuked Miecław specifically for it: the protagonist presented himself as, and perhaps thought that he had in fact become, “the prince and the leader of the people” and tried “by the boldness of his presumption, to obtain that which had not accrued to him either by right or by nature.”56 Implied here is an aspiration to a position essentially identical to ducal office, perhaps a usurpation of the office itself. As of 1034, Miecław enjoyed access to several resources that, presumably, enabled him to embark upon his social climbing. He had a relationship with both dukes involved in this particular succession: he was, right at the start of his story, the “butler and servant of [Duke Casimir’s] fa-

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ther, Mieszko [II].” His subsequent gambit for power was closely tied to the succession from Mieszko to Casimir: he began to assert his standing as “prince” and “leader” specifically “after [Mieszko’s] death.”57 He also spanned this generation genealogically, since he must have been considerably older than Casimir. He extended his sway over an entire large province, Masovia, which, as the Anonymous noted, had remained relatively unafflicted by the 1034 crisis, attracted migrants from the more afflicted regions further west, and became “densely settled with Poles”—at which point, the Anonymous recalled that province’s prosperity in a short but positively glowing message.58 Thus, Miecław’s power also rested on a period of demographic and economic expansion. Finally, presumably in connection with these resources, he was supported by “his [own] knighthood,” of whose “bravery he was confident,” sufficiently, as the Anonymous recalled, to “refuse to obey [Duke] Casimir.”59 Sieciech was different. At the time he appears in the story, he had wielded considerable power for some time, so this is not principally a tale of an aggressive social climber. That power, too, had been based partly on a relationship with a duke—in this case, Władysław Hermann, whom Sieciech served as “leader of the knighthood” (milicie princeps).60 While in that capacity, he appointed, on Duke Władysław’s behalf, a network of subordinate officials, specifically in two other provinces: Pomerania, after its (brief ) conquest by Władysław and subjection to Piast lordship; and Silesia, with the city of Wrocław at its center. Around 1090, this particular function placed Sieciech in conflict with another protagonist by the name of Magnus, identified by the Anonymous as “the count of Wrocław.”61 Magnus was disturbed by the existence of Sieciech’s subordinates—who, as the Anonymous noted just here, obeyed Sieciech, not Magnus62— throughout the province over which he was “count.” In other words, Magnus expected to wield, without external or internal competition, a par­ ticular kind of power, upon which Sieciech was impinging. Sieciech’s encroachment upon Silesia, and upon Magnus, was an aspect of a trait that elicited vigorous condemnation from the Anonymous: a lust for power. “[B]linded by greed,” the man “carried out many cruel and unbearable acts,” specifically illicit manipulation of social status and social mobility: “[S]ome [people] he sold [into slavery], on the most trifling occasions, others he drove out of the country, [and] he placed the ignoble above the noble.” Thus, “many . . . ran away” and “wandered . . . through diverse parts,”63 until the ruler of one of those other major polities in the region, Bohemia, Duke Břetíslav I, invited the exiles to settle in

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Prague and actively encouraged them to use his court as a base for opposition against Sieciech, and, through Sieciech, against Władysław Hermann. For that purpose, Břetíslav and the Poles mobilized the third protagonist in this contest for succession, Bolesław III’s half-brother, Zbigniew. Zbigniew was older than Bolesław, but the Anonymous noted that his mother had been Władysław’s “concubine,” whilst Bolesław was the son of Judith, a Czech princess whom Władysław “received as wife.”64 The author’s semantic markers of the two women’s marital status, concubine and wife, may or may not reflect anyone else’s contemporary distinction between the licitness of Władysław’s partners, and the legitimacy of the resulting sons.65 Be that as it may, on his part Zbigniew certainly expected to succeed his father in the natural scheme of things, and that expectation is confirmed by Duchess Judith’s subsequent action to remove him from the course of succession. “[W]hen he was already an adult,” he was “given to letters in the city of Kraków,” and later his stepmother “sent him out” further afield, to Saxony, to continue learning in a women’s convent, almost certainly Quedlinburg.66 Sometime thereafter, “[w]ith a Czech shrewdness,” Duke Břetíslav recruited him from the convent to Prague, where, as Břetíslav specifically intended, Zbigniew established an alliance with the Polish exiles.67 What ensued was a multilateral negotiation that, among its other attributes, can properly be called a contestation of lordship. The active protagonists were two collectivities and four individuals: the Polish exiles in Prague; a population associated with the city of Wrocław, interchangeably identified by the Anonymous as “the magnates of the Wrocław region” and “the people of Wrocław”; Magnus, the “count of Wrocław”; Sieciech; and the ducal couple, Władysław Hermann and Judith. Action began as the Polish exiles, still in Prague but assured by Zbigniew’s presence, sent emissaries to Wrocław with a message to Magnus. This message was an especially important part of the story; the Anonymous composed it in direct speech, and as an elaborate piece of rhetorical persuasion.68 The interlocutors began by taunting Magnus, “tearfully pity[ing]” the discrepancy between the appearance and the reality of his power: “[F]or you, the name of leadership (nomen ducatus) is a source of shame rather than honor,” and “you dare not rule over (dominari non audeas) Sieciech’s local deputies.” They then offered a solution: “[B]ut if you wish to cast the yoke of servitude off your neck, hasten to receive the boy whom we have [among us],” that is to say, Zbigniew, “under the shield of your protection.”69 Magnus responded with a sequence of acts. He hesitated, “for a long time.” Then, he “took counsel with the great (cum maioribus), and de-

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cided” to agree with the emissaries. Finally, he “received” Zbigniew from Prague back to Wrocław.70 On his side, Duke Władysław Hermann acted assertively to underscore his own power over all the protagonists. He did so by means of an inquiry. He sent his own emissary, to Magnus and to “the magnates of the Wrocław region,” with two questions, posed to that group, now in indirect speech: why the Wrocław group “received” Zbigniew “without [the duke’s] command” (sine . . . imperio) to do so; and whether the group “wished” to “be rebels against” Władysław, or “to obey him.” In response, the Wrocław group “unanimously” affirmed its continued collective adherence “to the lord duke and his legitimate son Bolesław” and stated that it “wished faithfully to obey” them “in all things.” They explained that, by welcoming Zbigniew back from Prague, they had indeed “received the lord, the duke’s son, and his fugitives,” but disavowed any intention thereby to adhere to the Czech ruler, Břetíslav. Finally, they pointed out that their true enemy was Sieciech “and his evil works.”71 This assurance did not end the succession conflict—either between the Wrocław group associated with Zbigniew on one side, and Sieciech and Duke Władysław on the other; or, later, between the ageing Sieciech and the two contenders for succession, Zbigniew and Bolesław; or finally, and still later, between those two brothers themselves. Moreover, a century later, Vincent Kadłubek narrated several other conflicts of this kind—­ focused, however, on Kraków and Little Poland72—involving protagonists who shared the traits cumulatively exemplified by Miecław, Magnus, and Sieciech, and possibly, long before them, by Odylen and Przybywój. Cumulatively, these traits included: close association with the duke, usually expressed as performance of office; an ability, autonomously of the duke, to exact obedience or to seek “counsel” from broader social groups, such as a “knighthood,” an urban community, or a privileged category of “the great” or “the noble”; an ability to wield control over one, several, or a part of those large provinces that comprised the Piast polity, over their more important towns, and over their material, social, and demographic framework; active use of these resources in social climbing; and competition against similar protagonists of the same type, and against the dukes themselves.73 Conversion

As presented by the two documents issued by Bishop Matthew and Patriarch Monachus, the question of distance and its closure hinges on two recurrent events: contact within a small but important group of actors and

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some kind of a resulting transfer. Contact is previewed, so to speak, right in the opening sections of both charters. Although Bishop Matthew actually composed the letter to Saint Bernard, in the salutation he identified as his fellow sender (and, in that sense, as his co-author) “Count Peter of Poland”—apparently a layman sufficiently important to be designated by a title of very high status.74 Matthew reiterated the role Peter had played in the invitation, and Peter’s high status, by underscoring, at the end of the letter, “the ardent desire . . . by which I and Count Peter—a man most devoted to the cult of God, to the Church, and to [right] observance—await your advent” into Poland.75 The contact summarized here affected, on the one hand, two important persons, a Polish prelate and a Polish lay lord; and, on the other, the great abbot himself. The transfer, as envisioned here, was to consist of that “advent”—that is to say, Bernard’s visit to Poland— and, very importantly, its consequences. On the other hand, the treatment of contact by Patriarch Monachus in the opening clause of his diploma is more open-ended and general. The patriarch issued the document in his own name only and positioned himself specifically, and exclusively, as its author; he did not explicitly attribute the events he was recording to himself or to anyone with whom he had contact. Moreover, his addressees are a broad, open-ended, and potentially fluid group: “all the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, and other prelates of churches, to dukes, counts, barons, knights, and other sons of the . . . church, [now] established, and to be established in the future, throughout the duchy of Poland.”76 In this opening phrase, contact consisted of an act of communication directed toward a population that was potentially either large or small, and, as described here, entirely ­anonymous—and, moreover, that might be substantially enhanced in the future. The subsequent narrations of the two documents considerably thicken the nature and the planned impact of the contact. Bishop Matthew recalled that his joint initiative with Count Peter had itself been a response to an earlier initiative, which the bishop attributed ultimately to the great abbot himself. Addressing Bernard directly, Matthew recalled that “[y]our beloved son, Master A., has sought, on your behalf, our advice about whether someone might . . . be able to extirpate the godless rites and observances of the Russians (Rutheni).”77 Master A. cannot today be identified with certainty,78 but his role, as described here, is clear. Bernard had sent him on a mission to the bishop of Kraków regarding the conversion of a people situated, in its entirety, to Poland’s own east. Thus, the number of persons directly involved in the contact of which Bishop Matthew’s let-

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ter was an expression increases to four: Bernard, Master A., the bishop himself, and Count Peter. The patriarch of Jerusalem recalled that at some moment in the past— a moment that, in a broad sense, is independently datable, but which Monachus did not himself specify79—another important Polish layman, “lord Jaksa . . . of good memory, came up to the Lord’s Sepulchre, and worshiped in the place where the Lord’s feet had once stood.” As Bishop Matthew had done earlier with Count Peter, Monachus added a brief laudatory sketch of this protagonist: Jaksa was “a most Christian man . . ., devoted to the Lord’s Sepulchre.”80 According to this story, the crucial contact was initiated by Jaksa, as he traveled to Jerusalem, either as a pilgrim, or, more specifically, as a crusader.81 The stories, the patterns of contact, and above all the impact, as described in the two narrations, diverge considerably. Thus, we have here two parallel yet quite different scenarios of conversion. In the mid-1140s, Bishop Matthew was formulating a plan; in 1198, Patriarch Monachus was reconstructing an actual, past course of events that had resulted from a plan formulated several decades earlier, during Jaksa’s visit to Jerusalem, and thereafter successfully implemented. Immediately after summing up the purpose of Master A.’s mission to Poland, Matthew proffered, directly to Saint Bernard, the advice that Master A. had been instructed to solicit on the abbot’s behalf: “Someone might, lord, someone might indeed” help correct the Russians’ religious error, “but only one who is imbued with the strength of [God’s] grace. And so we trust in Lord Jesus . . . that if the abbot of Clairvaux were here, he would be able to bring about this good [outcome].”82 The entire remainder of Matthew’s letter is a reiteration of that plea to Bernard, crafted as an elaborate exercise in rhetorical persuasion. The narrative aspect of the document ends abruptly with Master A.’s visit, and with this urgent expression of invitation. In contrast, the results of Jaksa’s visit to Jerusalem had, right during that visit, a further plot, and, thereafter, a long aftermath—of which the authorization of the entire story by the patriarch in 1198 was itself a part. Monachus recalled that, at the time he visited the Holy Sepulchre, the Pole had intended to perform some act “toward the fulfillment of the vow which he had made.” We do not know whether this was specifically a crusading vow or more generally a promise to be fulfilled at the end of a pilgrimage; in any event, a vow had clearly been made, had antedated Jaksa’s journey, and had required an act at the journey’s end. Jaksa chose to fulfill the vow by making of a gift, and by formulating an elaborate plan to ef­ fectuate that gift. “[A]mong the other signs of his devotion,” the visitor

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“­ requested that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre send one of its canons to Poland with him, in order to invest him [the canon] with certain inheri­ tances, toward the fulfillment of the vow.”83 Jaksa’s ecclesiastical hosts in Jerusalem must have agreed, because sometime later Jaksa “led a certain canon with himself to Poland,” and “assigned to the canon and his successors, in eternal alms, three villages, that is to say, Miechów, Zagorzyce, [and] Komorów.”84 That initial gift resonated strongly in the social world in which it was made. Monachus closed his narration by noting that “in the course of time, many noble men conferred their alms, and inheritances, and villages upon our church,” and the entire remainder of his document is a substantial roster of a large group of Polish donors, and of the holdings they granted over the subsequent decades to the newly formed estate of canons regular of the Holy Sepulchre in Miechów. Contact here involved, at its core, Jaksa himself and that unnamed canon of the Holy Sepulchre, both of whom in turn made another journey, this time back to Poland. At the destination, the canon’s role was that of a recipient in a property transfer, who also acted on behalf of an open-ended group of future recipients, his “successors.” Monachus said nothing else about the clerical side of the resulting community. However, he implied (and we independently know) that, by means of this initial property transfer, Jaksa had created contact with a larger group of canons regular, and that impacted the foundation and endowment of a regionally very important monastic community. Also brought into contact over the subsequent years and decades— though not explicitly by Jaksa himself—was that significant population of other Polish donors to the newly established monastic community. Moreover, right at the time of his return to Poland, in company of that original Jerusalem canon, Jaksa brought into the midst of the initial gift the duke of Little Poland—yet another Bolesław, this time the Fourth, or the Curly. First, Jaksa conveyed the three holdings to the recipient “by the consent and unequivocal will of the excellent Duke Bolesław.” Second (perhaps during that same event), he elicited from Bolesław an act that secured that gift from future legal challenge: And in order that no one from among his successors may be able to cause his gifts to be voided, or to withdraw the aforesaid villages from the lordship of the Church of Jerusalem, in foresight of future peace and quiet, he came up to the aforesaid Duke Bolesław, his lord, in friendly fashion, and sought again his confirmation, by instance of familiar prayers.85

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Right after this clause, Monachus’ narration ends, with his brief reference to additional gifts by “many noble men,” and thus with an implicit reference to the subsequent history of the Miechów community and its estate. Bishop Matthew’s letter to Saint Bernard expresses a very different aftermath of the initial request, namely, its reiteration and justification in the letter itself. The bishop elaborated his proposal for Bernard’s intended project by means of an unusually rich and complicated imagery of ­distance—framed, on this occasion, in spatial, climatic, environmental, and ethnographic terms. He did this in three substantial passages, placed in sequence, and jointly comprising the core of the letter. The first, and longest, concerns the project in which Bernard himself had expressed interest: the conversion of the Rus’. On this subject, Matthew repeatedly presented that “people” or “stock”—the gens Ruthenica—as constituting a specifiable, but a fully illegitimate, order. “This . . . stock (gens illa) . . . ­[i]mbued ever since . . . its conversion with various errors . . . worships Christ only in name, but utterly renounces Him in deed. It does not wish to conform either to the Greek or the Latin Church, but, . . . separated from both, participates in communion through void sacraments,”86 several of which Matthew then went on to describe. In the second passage, the bishop turned to a project that went beyond Bernard’s original intention and that concerned—among its other destinations—Poland. Matthew hoped for the abbot’s salutary presence “[n]ot only in the Rus’—which is, as it were, another world—but also in Poland and Bohemia, that is under one name Slavonia, which consists of many provinces.”87 Interestingly, Matthew imagined this—in a sense, his own—region in terms of an utter absence of order. “Deign,” he implored the abbot, “to instruct the unruly Slavs (Sclavos incompositos) about the ways of [right] custom and the principles of life, . . . so that through your teachings an uncouth barbarity (inculta barbaries) may mature,” and that “through your erudition the inhuman people (homines inhumani) may be persuaded to place themselves under the yoke of the Lord.”88 Here, the relevant population is not described as a gens, but with several collective designations, all of them conceptually fluid, and one expressing a brutal paradox concerning the nature of the species. The quasi-zoological classification becomes quite extravagant in the third passage (which, in contrast to the first two, is not explicitly associated with any specific region), where Bernard’s intended audience is described as the “wild and cruel peoples” (gentes efferas et immanes) who are to be “reconcile[d] . . . to Christ,” and as the “forest and stone people” (sylvestres et lapideos homines), who may, if all goes well, be “led . . . to subject themselves to the law.”89

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The three passages also differ in their use of metaphor. In the text concerning the Rus’, Matthew limited himself to asserting that “[t]his Russian people is countless as the stars.” Closer to home—in Poland, Bohemia, and all of “Slavonia”—the bishop presented things with metaphors that were devoid of reference to populations: “Loving father, . . . deign to enlighten our shadows. . . . Deign to visit the icy region (gelidum axem) with the presence of your person, so that with the advent of our abbot the terrible cold of the north (frigus horridum aquilonis) may be tempered by the grace of the southern wind, and by the flame of Vulcan.”90 This metaphoric admixture is completed with those forests and stones by means of which, as we have seen, Matthew brought those “inhuman people” who inhabited his region right into his plea to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard never traveled to Poland. So, in one brutally simple sense, Matthew’s elaborate plea was a prelude to a non-event. But this is one of those documents that are interesting not for what they actually effect, but for what they imply or presuppose. Bernard of Clairvaux had himself been actively interested in one aspect of Bishop Matthew’s local world (Poland), namely, its possible use as a base for conversion of the Rus’. In this sense, for one single fleeting moment, Poland served the two correspondents as one of those standards or criteria of distance, with respect to some other region, itself distant from it. Bernard’s interest was strong enough for him to entrust Master A. with a mission and to seek advice from the bishop of Kraków; but it was not strong enough to prompt Bernard to follow that advice. On his side, Matthew presented his plan as a fantasy of creating contact across distance. The bilateral nature of this initiative, the small but highly specific group actually involved in it, and the ultimate discrepancy between Bishop Matthew’s fantasy and the outcome, add up to an interesting example of the meanings, the ambiguities, and, very importantly, the limitations of closure of the distance that, right in those same years, contemporaries perceived about, and within, Poland. Our medieval colleagues, who (among their many other activities) produced written accounts of their own past, included at least one interesting actor who knew, used, and shaped the imagery related to distance, specifically in order to affect behavior by an extremely important fellow cleric and European—whom he expected to know one thing about Kraków, Poland, and the macro-region of which they were a part: the fact that they, and it, were in every sense very far away from Clairvaux. For Matthew, distance and its potential closure worked as an idiom of communication. In using distance for that purpose, the bishop refined that subject so that it specified the position of his own world, placing just out-

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side of it—in “another word, as it were”—that unfathomably large polity situated even further to “the East,” the Rus’; and, inside it, setting out a plausible scenario for a desirable closure and transfer—intended outcomes whose particulars nevertheless remain darkly lodged beneath the unusually thick mixture of metaphor. Clearly, Bishop Matthew was not actually heard (or read) in Clairvaux. But his plea was not a cry in the wilderness. Bernard’s moment of interest in the Rus’ antedates, by a very few years, the launching of the first formal crusade in the European north, directed against the “Wends,” a Slavic population situated to the northwest of Poland91—not part of Matthew’s “Slavonia,” to be sure, but, when viewed from far away, perhaps not entirely different from it. The interest is also coterminous with the foundation of the two earliest Cistercian monasteries in Poland, at Jędrzejów in Matthew’s own diocese and at Łekno, to the north.92 The latter, by the way, was founded by a group of Great-Polish secular lords,93 and so yet another conjunction here is the fact that Matthew’s associate and co-author, Count Peter, was, during exactly those same years, himself a prolific ecclesiastical benefactor and donor.94 Finally, these were the years when the Polish lord, Jaksa, was presumably an adult—antedating, but not by much, his own trip to Jerusalem and its consequences.95 Beyond “Diffusion” and Its Alternatives?

Switching perspective, at long last, back to the major questions concerning Europe in its entirety, we have here a handful of narrative images of two major phenomena in one specific place that lend themselves to a comparison with contemporary realities elsewhere. One is ducal power and its contestation, which in earlier medieval Poland comprised a crucial variable in lordship. The other is religious conversion, which worked as a closure of civilizational distance. To revisit Robert Bartlett’s dynamic metaphor, one criterion of the “making” of Poland as a conceptually meaningful part of Europe between the tenth and the early thirteenth centuries is the presence, and the importance, of the type of lordship wielded by the protagonist (or protagonists) involving the contestation of ducal power. Other such criteria are the specific contacts and activities that tended to close that civilizational distance. On the other side of the metaphor, one meaning of the “making” of Europe in its entirety is the presence, in Poland, of a type of lordship that, while distinct, is conceptually intelligible in terms of lordship elsewhere. Another is the presence, or the possible emergence,

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in Poland, of a person, a group, a type of practice, or an institution that are recognizable elsewhere in Europe as recurrent aspects of the church in the world. What gets a bit tricky is the application to these two “makings”—of Poland in Europe, and of Europe with Poland as its part—of any particular model of cultural transmission or impact: diffusion, parallel development, negotiated coexistence or interaction, or some alternative. First, as already noted, the two phenomena entailed in the “makings” are quite different from each other and therefore lend themselves to different models. The set of traits that jointly define our protagonists contesting ducal power, and the resulting patterns of lordship, has—at least in the record available to us—no clear, unambiguous beginning. Moreover, it has no single, specifiable source, whether indigenous or external. It recurs. Of course, I do not mean to assert that people such as Przybywój, Miecław, Sieciech, or their many successors, are, as a type, somehow primeval or immutable, and that, out of these three narrations, I have culled some kind of essentialized proto-Pole. On the contrary, several of these defining traits underwent major transitions—transitions affected, at least in part, by an external influence. For example, around 1200, more individuals performed more kinds of specified, official functions on behalf of dukes, and did so with far more reliance on writing and on Latin, than had been the case in 992 or, for that matter, around 1100. Other traits remained substantially continuous—above all, in my view, the permanent importance of the Piast duke (and, I should add, the duchess) as an actor, or as a resource, within the political terrain upon which our protagonist moved.96 Conversion was quite different. It had (at least) two sharp, unambiguous beginnings: the first in the mid-tenth century, in connection with Dubravka’s marriage to Mieszko I, the second at some point in the eleventh century, during the recoveries from the crises of the 1030s and 1070s. Furthermore, right on its face, and for obvious reasons, conversion is expli­ cable in terms of external sources impinging upon Poland and the Poles: Bohemia, as exemplified by Dubravka and Saint Adalbert; Rome, first sharply visible in the Dagome iudex, then, right from 1075 onward, in that trickle of papal bulls and letters; France—albeit fleetingly—as a focus of Bishop Matthew’s desire for his important visitor; and, on many levels, and in the longer run most importantly, Germany. Finally, conversion is strongly discontinuous. As we have seen, both the documentation itself, and the activities to which it refers, underwent significant transition. Yet here, in turn, I do not mean to deny significant areas of continuity. Thus,

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even though they appear as actors in very different stories and contexts, Saint Adalbert of Prague (the central protagonist of that early, hagiographic record of Poland’s conversion) and Bishop Matthew of Kraków are not entirely dissimilar. Nor are two dukes by the name of Bolesław: the first (“the Brave”) in his capacity as friend and protector of Saint Adalbert on the eve of the holy man’s fatal departure to Prussia; and, many decades later, his Kraków namesake, Bolesław IV the Curly, who extended a legal protection over the newly established properties of Miechów house of the canons of the Holy Sepulchre at the request of its initiator, lord Jaksa. The kind of collective activity by several types of recurrent pro­tago­ nists—dukes, bishops, other clerics, important secular l­andholders—that we glimpse in Bishop Matthew’s collaboration with Count Peter and Master A., or in lord Jaksa’s efforts involving that visiting canon from Jerusalem, Duke Bolesław the Curly, and—perhaps indirectly, but clearly as part of the same set of events—the dozens of subsequent lay donors to the Miechów canons regular, are early instances of a pattern of giving that ­recurs in medieval Poland very frequently, indeed routinely, throughout the later twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries.97 Moreover, in ­Poland, such collective efforts comprise the usual process of founding the network of churches that, when formally consecrated and entrenched, comprised that institutional framework with which Robert Bartlett opened his story of Europe’s “making.”98 Clearly, when viewed from up close, the conceptual juggling of “diffusion,” parallel development, coexistence, convergence, and the alternatives, lead us in complicated but, I think, nicely textured directions. That texture becomes enhanced as, in conclusion, we turn to some of the assumptions or ideas about our two major phenomena that are implicit in the sources. According to the Anonymous, when in 1034 Miecław asserted, and actually carried out, the roles of “prince” (princeps) and a “leader” (signifer), and aspired to “obtain that which had not accrued to him by right or by nature”; or when, around 1090, the Polish exiles in Prague pointed out to Count Magnus that Sieciech was frustrating his ­exercise of prerogatives that belonged to Magnus in the “name” of his “leadership” (nomine ducatus)—the implication was an enhancement or a diminution of some specific kind of power. But what kind of power? Whether or not, at these contested moments, the two men were in fact or thought that they were acting in a clearly differentiated ducal capacity, that capacity worked for the Anonymous (and perhaps for others) as the standard, or a criterion, in terms of which this particular type of lordship was comprehended.

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Another subject that attracted the attention of our authors was the moral, or explicitly evaluative, dimension of power and its contestation. As presented by the Anonymous, the interrogation posed by Duke Włady­ sław Hermann toward the Wrocław group about the group’s intentions (especially concerning their continued loyalty and obedience to himself or the possibility of its renunciation)—and, in response, that group’s expression of the proper, legitimate lines of obedience linking the various protagonists—refer, on both sides, to a shared ethical framework for tempering the underlying conflict. That framework is fidelity.99 But, in its turn, that subject was hardly new in the Anonymous’ Gesta. Thietmar of Merseburg had repeatedly used fidelity—meaning a sense of reliable trust, centered in his case upon the German king—as the principal criterion in his moral contrast between the good Polish duke, Mieszko I, and the bad Polish duke, Bolesław the Brave. Much later, Bishop Vincent Kadłubek did much the same regarding the protagonists in a whole series of contested ducal successions. On the other hand, in his letter to Saint Bernard, Bishop Matthew broached a very different kind of morally charged subject: intense hope and, as its corollary, the potential for disappointment. These patterns of thought, in terms of which our authors understood and evaluated power and its contestation, and distance and its closure, help “make” Poland comprehensible for reasons that, to be sure, entail our three models—­ diffusion and its alternatives—but also go beyond them. As glimpsed, darkly, through the fragmentary record, we have here a mix of phenomena that, while individually recognizable in terms of their counterparts elsewhere, produced highly distinctive results. Those results are perhaps best captured by a word by means of which, in his article of 1998, Thomas Bisson introduced the Polish Anonymous to a wider readership. That mix of phenomena—partly explicable in terms of our three models, potentially comparable and mutually intelligible across Europe, yet, in its close detail, everywhere varied—is, I think, what Bisson meant by resonance. Notes Part of this article, incorporated into a different context, appears in my article “Ius Ducale Revisited: Twelfth-Century Narratives of Piast Power,” in The Gallus Anonymous and Hist Chronicle in the Context of Twelfth-Century Historiography, ed. Krzysztof Stopka (Kraków, 2010), pp. 35–44, for which I owe thanks to the editor and the publisher of that book.

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1. My preference for “East Central,” rather than the more open-ended “Eastern” or “Central,” as the qualifying adjectives for the region reflects both current usage in several scholarly vernaculars, and, substantively, perhaps the least unsatisfactory shorthand for the region situated between the historical Germany and the historical Rus’—in full awareness of the limitations of this particular criterion, on which in any event, more below in the text. Among the large literature, see Jerzy Kłoczowski, Młodsza Europa: Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia w kręgu cywilizacji chrześ­ cijańskiej średniowiecza [The Younger Europe: East Central Europe in the Ambit of Medieval Christian Civilization] (Warsaw, 1998), pp. 11–17; Jean W. Sedlar, East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000–1500 (Seattle, 1994), pp. vii–xvi; Antoni Mączak, Henryk Samsonowicz, and Peter Burke, eds., East-Central Europe in Transition: From the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge and Paris, 1985); Paul W. Knoll, “Literary Production at the University of Cracow in the Fifteenth Century,” in The Development of Literate Mentalities in East Central Europe, ed. Anna Adamska and Marco Mostert, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 9 (Brepols, 2004), pp. 217–46, at p. 217, n. 2; Timothy Garton Ash, “Does Central Europe Exist?” New York Review of Books 33, no. 15 (October 9, 1986), pp. 45–53. 2.  On this subject, see the individual essays in Adamska and Mostert, Development of Literate Mentalities, and, for Poland, Teresa Michałowska, Średniowiecze [The Middle Ages], Wielka historia literatury polskiej 1 (Warsaw, 1995), pp. 62–71. 3.  Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, 2001). 4.  Anna Adamska, “Dieu, le Christ et l’Église dans les préambules des documents polonais au Moyen Âge,” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 155 (1997), pp. 543–73; Adamska, Arengi w dokumentach Władysława Łokietka: Formy i funkcje [Preambles in the Charters of Władysław the Short: Forms and Functions] (Kraków, 1999); Adamska, “‘From Memory to Written Record’ in the Periphery of Medieval Latinitas: The Case of Poland in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, ed. Karl Heidecker (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 83–100; Tomasz Nowakowski, Idee areng dokumentów książąt polskich do połowy 13 wieku [Ideas in the Preambles of the Documents Issued by Polish Dukes through the Mid-Thirteenth Century] (Bydgoszcz, 1999); the individual essays in Adamska and Mostert, Development of Literate Mentalities; see also Piotr Górecki, “Communities of Legal Memory in Medieval Poland, ca. 1200–1240,” JMH 24 (1998), pp. 127–54, at pp. 153–4; Górecki, “A View from a Distance,” Law and History Review 21 (2003), pp. 367–76, at pp. 370–3; Górecki, “The Henryków Book and Its Contexts,” in A Local Society in Transition: The Henryków Book and Related Documents, trans. Górecki, Studies and Texts 155 (Toronto, 2007), pp. 1–90, at pp. 29–36. 5.  For this problem and its implications, see Piotr Górecki, Economy, Society, and Lordship in Medieval Poland, 1100–1250 (New York, 1992), pp. 45–65; Górecki, Parishes, Tithes and Society in Earlier Medieval Poland, 1100–1250 (Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 8–10; Górecki, “Medieval Peasants and their World in Polish Historiography,” in The Rural History of Medieval European Societies: Trends and Perspectives, ed. Isabel Alfonso, The Medieval Countryside 1 (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 253–96, at pp. 258–60.

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6. Two excellent statements of the difference between Europe’s “East” and “West” expressed in terms of the principal source of external influence are Jerzy Kłoczowski, Europa słowiańska w 14–15 wieku [Slavic Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries] (Warsaw, 1984), pp. 9, 11–12, 196–9, and Bartlett, Making of Europe, pp. 1–2, 8. 7. On this subject, I am much indebted to Anthony Perron’s notion of “fringeness,” expressed in personal communications and refined in an excellent series of articles, beginning with “Metropolitan Might and Papal Power on the LatinChristian Frontier: Transforming the Danish Church around the Time of the Fourth Lateran Council,” Catholic Historical Review 89 (2003), pp. 182–212. 8.  Pomniki Dziejowe Polski—Monumenta Poloniae Historica, gen. ed. August Bielowski et al., 6 vols. (Lwów, 1864–88, and Kraków, 1893; repr. Warsaw, 1960–1), vol. 1, pp. 367–8; see Górecki, Parishes, Tithes, and Society, pp. 13–4, 22–3, and, for the broad context, Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 271–2. 9.  Schlesisches Urkundenbuch, ed. Heinrich Appelt (Graz, Vienna, and Cologne, 1971), vol. 1 [hereafter SU 1], no. 7 (1133), p. 6; Stefan Vrtel-Wierczyński, Wybór tekstów staropolskich: Czasy najdawniejsze do roku 1543 [A Selection of Old Polish Texts from the Earliest Times until 1543], 4th ed., (Warsaw, 1969), p. 4, ll. 5–8; SU 1, no. 15 (1148), p. 11; no. 28 (1155), p. 20; Kodeks dyplomatyczny Małopolski [The Diplomatic Codex of Little Poland], ed. Franciszek Piekosiński, 2 vols. (Kraków, 1876–86; repr. New York, 1965), vol. 2 [hereafter K.Mp. 2], no. 375 (1198), p. 20; see further Górecki, Parishes, Tithes, and Society, pp. 14, 21–3. 10.  Gesta principum Polonorum—The Deeds of the Princes of the Poles, trans. Paul W. Knoll and Frank Schaer, Central European Medieval Texts 3 (Budapest, 2003) [hereafter GpP.], bk. 1, introduction, pp. 10, 14; Marian Plezia, “GallAnonim” [Gallus the Anonymous], in Pisarze staropolscy: Sylwetki [Old Polish Writers: Profiles], ed. Stanisław Grzeszczuk (Warsaw, 1991), vol. 1, pp. 54–92; Teresa Michałowska, Średniowiecze, pp. 107–29. 11.  Jerzy Kłoczowski, Młodsza Europa, a book which on this subject is, to a degree, an expansion of Kłoczowski, Europa słowiańska. 12.  Robert Bartlett, Making of Europe, which is a culmination of his work centered on this approach, including, among others: Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223 (Oxford, 1982); “The Conversion of a Pagan Society in the Middle Ages,” History 70 (1985), pp. 185–201; “Technique militaire et pouvoir politique, 900–1300,” Annales E. S. C. 41 (1986), pp. 1135–59; and, coedited with Angus MacKay, Medieval Frontier Societies (Oxford, 1989). For a brief prototype of the diffusionist approach, see Archibald Lewis, “The Closing of the Medieval Frontier, 1250– 1350,” Spec 33 (1958), pp. 475–83. 13.  For a discussion of Bartlett’s contribution specifically in the context of Poland and East Central Europe, see Piotr Górecki, “‘Tworzenie Europy’ Roberta Bartletta w kontekście anglosaskich badań historycznych nad początkami i kształ­ towaniem się Europy” [Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe in the Context of English-Language Scholarship on the Origins and Formation of Europe], in Bartlett, Tworzenie Europy: Podbój, kolonizacja i przemiany kulturowe, 950–1350, trans. Grażyna Waluga (Poznań, 2003), pp. 505–15.

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14.  Of course, all good historians, in some sense or another, attempt to isolate and analyze potentially comparable phenomena and the directions of their change over time. Among the many who have done so as the principal goal of their inquiry, let me note Robert I. Moore, European Revolution; and, for Poland and some nearby regions in particular, Oskar Kossmann, Polen im Mittelalter: Beiträge zur Sozial- und Verfassungsgeschichte (Marburg/Lahn, 1971); Kossmann, Polen im Mittelalter: Staat, Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft im Bannkreis des Westens (Marburg/Lahn, 1985); Karl Bosl, Europa im Aufbruch: Herrschaft, Gesellschaft, Kultur vom 10. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1980); Benedykt Zientara, Henryk Brodaty i jego czasy [Henry the Bearded and his Times], 2nd ed. (Warsaw, 1997); Karol Modzelewski, “La division autarchique du travail à l’échelle d’un état. L’organisation ‘ministériale’ en Pologne médiévale,” Annales E. S. C. 19 (1964), pp. 1125–38; Modzelewski, Organizacja gospodarcza państwa piastowskiego, 10–13 wiek [The Economic Organization of the Piast State from the Tenth to the Thirteenth Century], 2nd ed. (Poznań, 2000); Modzelewski, L’Europe des barbares: Germains et Slaves face aux héritiers de Rome, trans. Agata Kozak and Isabelle Macor-Filarska (Paris, 2006); S. C. Rowell, Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295–1345 (Cambridge, 1994). Adopting this as the principal goal of inquiry has always characterized my own work, cited here and otherwise. 15.  Nora Berend, At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims and “Pagans” in Medieval Hungary, ca. 1000–ca. 1300 (Cambridge, 2001); David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996). 16. Michael Borgolte, Europa entdeckt seine Vielfalt, 1050–1250 (Stuttgart, 2002). 17.  This approach continues the analysis I have sketched out, in a different context, in Górecki, Parishes, pp. 9–10, and sought to develop throughout that book. 18.  As has been the case throughout my work, those two labels are essentially coextensive and are not meant either to imply modern “national” categories—­ especially in those Piast duchies, which, over their much longer history, became subject to Bohemia and thereafter to Germany (above all, Silesia)—or to somehow substitute for what the medieval contemporaries actually meant by Polonia, Poloni, and the like. On Poland as a properly historicized construct, see Jerzy Strzelczyk, Mieszko Pierwszy [Mieszko I] (Poznań, 1992), p. 17; Przemysław Urbańczyk, “Po­ czątki państw wczesnośredniowiecznych w Europie Środkowowschodniej” [Beginnings of Early Medieval States in East Central Europe], in Ziemie polskie w 10 wieku i ich znaczenie w kształtowaniu się nowej mapy Europy [The Polish Lands in the Tenth Century and Their Significance for the Making of the New Map of Europe], ed. Henryk Samsonowicz (Kraków, 2000), pp. 53–70, at pp. 66–7; Paul W. Knoll, “National Consciousness in Medieval Poland,” Ethnic Groups 10 (1993), pp. 65– 84; Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, 2 vols. (New York, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 23–63, especially pp. 39–52; Górecki, “The Henryków Book,” p. 6, n. 13. 19.  Among the enormous literature on the Piasts, the recent (or, in the case of Oswald Balzer, recently reissued) treatments of the dynasty in its entirety include Marek Kazimierz Barański, Dynastia Piastów w Polsce [The Dynasty of the Piasts in

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Poland] (Warsaw, 2006); Stanisław Szczur and Krzysztof Ożóg, ed., Piastowie: Leksykon biograficzny [The Piasts: A Biographical Dictionary] (Kraków, 1999); Oswald Balzer, Genealogia Piastów [The Genealogy of the Piasts], 2nd ed., (Kraków, 2005); Szczur, Historia Polski: Średniowiecze [History of Poland: the Middle Ages] (Kraków, 2002), pp. 47–81, 103–47, 209–25, 257–316, 333–97; Jerzy Wyrozumski, Dzieje Polski piastowskiej (8 wiek–1370) [The History of Piast Poland: the Eighth Century through 1370], Wielka historia Polski 2 (Kraków, 1999), passim. Much more briefly, see also Davies, God’s Playground, vol. 1, pp. 61–105, and Górecki, “The Henryków Book,” pp. 57, 61–73. 20.  On this second subject, the literature is so enormous that I will limit myself to citing the following positions: Jerzy Kłoczowski, “Chrześcijaństwo w Europie Środkowowschodniej i budowa organizacji kościelnej” [Christianity in East Central Europe and the Building of the Ecclesiastical Organization], in Samsonowicz, Ziemie polskie, pp. 3–16; Kłoczowski, Dzieje chrześcijaństwa polskiego [The History of Polish Christianity] (Paris, 1987), pp. 17–21, 25–53; Morris, Papal Monarchy, pp. 263–68, 271–7; Nora Berend, ed., Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy (Cambridge, 2007)—the last of which appeared after the present article was completed. 21. An excellent study of what is here meant by Carolingian impact is Charles R. Bowlus, Franks, Moravians, and Magyars: The Struggle for the Middle Danube, 788–907 (Philadelphia, 1995). 22.  Behind these generalizations lurks the major, ongoing controversy about the nature—and indeed the meaning—of the systemic transition between the Carolingian period and its aftermath, culminating in the “year 1000,” for which see (among other literature) the discussion by Warren C. Brown and Piotr Górecki, “What Conflict Means: The Making of Medieval Conflict Studies in the United States, 1970–2000,” in Conflict in Medieval Europe: Changing Perspectives on Society and Culture, ed. Brown and Górecki (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 1–35, and in particular two articles in the same book: Stephen D. White, “Tenth-Century Courts at Mâcon and the Perils of Structuralist History,” pp. 37–68, and Fredric Cheyette, “Some Reflections on Violence, Reconciliation, and the ‘Feudal Revolution,’” pp. 243–64. 23. Thomas N. Bisson, “On Not Eating Polish Bread in Vain: Resonance and Conjuncture in the Deeds of the Princes of Poland (1109–13),” Viator 29 (1998), pp. 275–89; see also Bisson, “Princely Nobility in an Age of Ambition (ca. 1050– 1150),” in Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe: Concepts, Origins, Transformations, ed. Anne Duggan (London, 2000), pp. 101–13. 24.  Andrzej Buko, “Unknown Revolution: Archaeology and the Beginnings of the Polish State,” in East Central and Eastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Florin Curta (Ann Arbor, 2005), pp. 162–78, at p. 165; P. M. Barford, The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (Ithaca, 2001), pp. 147– 8; see also Janusz Górecki’s discussion comment to Urbańczyk, “Początki,” in Samsonowicz, Ziemie, pp. 95–6. 25.  Here, as an ideal type of sorts, the model of lordship against which I am pitching the comparison is, of course, indebted to the rise of the independent castellanies as described by Georges Duby, La société aux 11e et 12e siècles dans la région mâconnaise, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1971), and greatly refined, elaborated, and (relatively recently) strongly reassessed since that book was published in 1953. Two reflections

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of the current state of that model of lordship include White, “Tenth-Century Courts,” and Thomas N. Bisson, “La terre et les hommes: A Programme Fulfilled?” French History 14 (2000), pp. 322–45. 26.  An excellent collective entrée into the variations of post-Carolingian lordship and its relationship to royal, ducal, or comital power is now provided by the following publications (to which I am here deeply indebted in general terms): Matthew Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: The Middle Rhine Valley, 400–1000 (Cambridge, 2000); Warren Brown, Unjust Seizure: Conflict, Interest, and Authority in an Early Medieval Society (Ithaca, 2001); Hans J. Hummer, “Reform and Lordship in Alsace at the Turn of the Millennium,” in Brown and Górecki, Conflict, pp. 69–84; Hummer, Politics and Power in Early Medieval Europe: Alsace and the Frankish Realm, 600–1000 (Cambridge, 2005); and Eric Goldberg, Struggle for Empire: Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German, 817–876 (Ithaca, 2006). 27.  Note Thomas Bisson’s emphasis on the Piast “duke-lords,” “dynastic lordship,” “princely lordship,” and similar expressions of fusion of ducal and segneurial attributes, at Bisson, “Princely Nobility,” pp. 104–7, 110–1. 28.  This net shrinkage of the effective ambit of power of the individual members of the Piast dynasty to their “duchies” is a process that partly overlaps with our period but really defines the subsequent two centuries or thereabouts, and therefore cannot be adequately addressed, let alone explained here. It has conventionally been named, in the Polish context, “feudal fragmentation,” on which see Henryk Łow­ miański, “Rozdrobnienie feudalne Polski w historiografii naukowej” [Poland’s ­Feudal Fragmentation in the Historiography], in Polska w okresie rozdrobnienia feudalnego [Poland in the Period of Feudal Fragmentation], ed. Łowmiański (Wrocław, 1973), pp. 7–34, and the review article of Łowmiański (among others), Paul W. Knoll, “Feudal Poland: Division and Reunion,” Polish Review 23 (1978), pp. 40– 52; Szczur, Historia, pp. 210–8, 224–5, 257–306, 308–16; Barański, Dynastia, pp. 283–98, 302–78. That earlier construct does not appear in the two recent books by Szczur and Barański; Knoll described the ambiguities in the concepts related to feudalism in the two scholarly vernaculars (“Feudal Poland,” pp. 50–1), on which, from a different perspective, see Janet Nelson, review of Berend, At the Gate, American Historical Review 107 (2002), pp. 1279–90; see also Górecki, “The Henryków Book,” p. 62, n. 243. 29. Tadeusz Wasilewski, “Poland’s Administrative Structure in Early Piast Times,” Acta Poloniae Historica 44 (1981), pp. 5–31; Karol Modzelewski, “L’or­ ganizzazione dello stato polacco nei secoli 10–13: La società e le strutture de podere,” Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 30 (1983), pp. 557–99; Modzelewski, “Jurysdykcja kasztelańska i pobór danin prawa książęcego w świetle dokumentów 13 wieku” [The Castellan’s Jurisdiction and the Collection of Exactions Due according to Ducal Law in Light of Thirteenth-Century Sources], Kwartalnik Historyczny 87 (1980), pp. 149–74; Modzelewski, “Organizacja gro­ dowa u progu epoki lokacji” [Castle Organization on the Eve of the Period of Urban Franchise], Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej 28 (1980), pp. 329–40; Gó­ recki, Economy, pp. 19, 45–6, 72–3, 81, 124–5, 141–2, 145–52, 164–5, 167, 171–4, 177–80. 30. GpP., bk. 1, c. 8, pp. 46, 48; bk. 2, c. 7, p. 133.

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31.  Relacja Ibrahima Ibn Ja’kuba z podróży do krajów słowiańskich w przekładzie Al-Bekriego [Ibrahim Ibn Ya’qub’s Account of his Journey to Slavic Lands in AlBekri’s Translation], ed. and trans. Tadeusz Kowalski (Kraków, 1946), pp. 90–1. 32.  Laszló Makkai, “The Foundation of the Hungarian Christian State,” in A History of Hungary, ed. Peter F. Sugar, Péter Hanak, and Tibor Frank (Bloomington, 1994), pp. 15–22; Pál Engel, The Realm of St Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary, 895–1526, trans. Tamás Pálosfalvi, English ed. Andrew Ayton (London, 2005), pp. 25–65; Lisa Wolverton, Hastening toward Prague: Power and Society in the Medieval Czech Lands (Philadelphia, 2001); Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200 (London, 1996). 33. Gerard Labuda, Mieszko II król Polski (1025–1034): Czasy przełomu w dziejach państwa polskiego [Mieszko II, King of Poland (1025–34): Time of a Breakthrough in the History of the Polish State] (Kraków, 1992), pp. 93–134; Szczur, Historia, pp. 79–82; Barański, Dynastia, pp. 95–109; Janusz Bieniak, Państwo Miecława: Studium analityczne [Miecław’s State: An Analytical Study] (Warsaw, 1963). 34.  The latter source recently re-edited as Mistrza Wincentego zwanego Kad­ łubkiem Kronika Polska—Magistri Vincentii dicti Kadłubek Chronica Polonorum, ed. Marian Plezia, Pomniki Dziejowe Polski, seria 2, tom 11—Monumenta Poloniae Historica, nova series, tomus 11 [hereafter MPH, s.n., vol. 11] (Kraków, 1994); Plezia, “Mistrz Wincenty zwany Kadłubkiem” [Master Vincent, Known as Kadłu­ bek], in Grzeszczuk, Pisarze, pp. 93–131; Michałowska, Średniowiecze, pp. 129–44. 35. Bartlett, Making of Europe, pp. 5–18. 36.  Die Chronik des Bischofs Thietmar von Merseburg, ed. Robert Holzmann, MGH, SS rer. Germ. n.s., vol. 9 (Berlin, 1935) [hereafter Thietmar], bk. 4, c. 56, p. 196, l. 6. 37.  Ibid., bk. 6, c. 27, p. 306, ll. 15–20. 38.  Ibid., bk. 4, c. 45, p. 185, ll. 1–2, 7–10. 39.  Ibid., bk. 4, c. 45, p. 185, ll. 7–10. 40.  GpP., bk. 1, opening dedication, p. 2; bk. 1, pp. 78, 80; bk. 2, opening dedication, p. 110. 41.  Janina Pleziowa, trans., Średniowieczne żywoty i cuda patronów Polski [Medieval Lives and Miracles of the Patrons of Poland] (Warsaw, 1987), pp. 7–96; Michałowska, Średniowiecze, pp. 76–94, 109. 42.  SU 1, no. 11 (1143–5), p. 9; Brygida Kürbis, “Cystersi w kulturze polskiego średniowiecza: Trzy świadectwa z 12 wieku” [The Cistercians in the Culture of the Polish Middle Ages: Three Twelfth-Century Sources], in Historia i kultura Cystersów w dawnej Polsce i ich europejskie związki [The History and the Culture of the Cistercians in Old Poland, and their European Connections], ed. Jerzy Strzel­ czyk (Poznań, 1987), pp. 321–42; Michałowska, Średniowiecze, pp. 99–102; Miko­ łaj Gładysz, Zapomniani krzyżowcy: Polska wobec ruchu krucjatowego w 12–13 wieku [The Forgotten Crusaders: Poland and the Crusading Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries] (Warsaw, 2004), pp. 48–50. 43.  K.Mp. 2, no. 375 (1198), pp. 12–14, with the narrative portion relevant to this essay re-edited by Heinrich Appelt at SU 1, no. 65 (1198), pp. 42–3; Maria Starnawska, Między Jerozolimą a Łukowem: Zakony krzyżowe na ziemiach polskich w średniowieczu [Between Jerusalem and Łuków: Crusading Orders in the Polish

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Lands During the Middle Ages] (Warsaw, 1999), pp. 73–5; Gładysz, Zapomniani, pp. 106–15, with the full literature. 44. Szczur, Historia, pp. 49, 53; Barański, Dynastia, pp. 46–8, 52–3; Maciej Wilamowski, “Mieszko I,” in Szczur and Ożóg, Piastowie, pp. 15–22, at pp. 16, 19–20; Jerzy Strzelczyk, Mieszko Pierwszy [Mieszko I] (Poznań, 1992), pp. 18, 106–10, 113–6, 120, 162–4; Gerard Labuda, Mieszko I (Wrocław, 2002), pp. 43–5, 87–97, 104, 151–5. 45.  Thietmar, bk. 4, c. 57, p. 196, ll. 31–2; Wilamowski, “Mieszko I,” pp. 21–2. 46. Szczur, Historia, pp. 56–7; Barański, Dynastia, p. 58; Wilamowski, “Mieszko I,” pp. 15–6; Strzelczyk, Mieszko, pp. 17–8, 64–7, 74–6, 181–96; Labuda, Mieszko, pp. 177–80, 190–5. 47.  SU 1, no. 2 (985–92), p. 3: “Dagome iudex et Ote senatrix et filii eorum Misica et Lambertus leguntur beato Petro contulisse unam civitatem in integro quae vocatur Schinesghe.” 48. Labuda, Mieszko, pp. 188–90. I am grateful to Grzegorz Myśliwski for alerting me to the implications of the Dagome iudex to the first succession difficulty faced by the Piasts. 49.  Thietmar, bk. 4, c. 58, p. 196, l. 35, and p. 198, ll. 1–6: “relinquens regnum suimet plurimis dividendum quod postea filius eiusdem Bolizlavus noverca et fratribus expulsa excecatisque familiaribus suis Odilieno atque Pribuvoio vulpina calliditate contraxit in unum. Hic ut tantum solus dominaretur, ius ac omne fas postposuit.” 50.  GpP., bk. 1, c. 17, p. 74; c. 18, p. 74; c. 29, p. 102. 51.  Ibid., bk. 1, c. 17, p. 74; Szczur, Historia, p. 79; Barański, Dynastia, p. 98; Labuda, Mieszko, pp. 78–92; Marek D. Kowalski, “Mieszko II Lambert,” in Szczur and Ożóg, Piastowie, pp. 40–6, at p. 44. 52.  GpP., bk. 1, c. 18, p. 74; Szczur, Historia, pp. 81–2; Barański, Dynastia, pp. 100, 102–3; Kowalski, “Mieszko,” pp. 44–5; Patrycja Gąsiorowska, “Kazimierz I Odnowiciel” [Casimir I the Renewer], in Szczur and Ożóg, Piastowie, pp. 50–4, at pp. 50–2. 53. GpP., bk. 1, c. 102; Szczur, Historia, pp. 112–7; Barański, Dynastia, pp. 155–8, 175, 180–1; Marek D. Kowalski, “Bolesław II Szczodry (Śmiały)” [Bolesław II the Generous (or the Bold)], in Szczur and Ożóg, Piastowie, pp. 57–63, at pp. 60–2; Kowalski, “Mieszko,” pp. 70–1; Karol Maleczyński, Bolesław III Krzywousty [Bolesław III the Wrymouth] (Wrocław, 1975), pp. 16–7; Tadeusz Grud­ ziński, Bolesław Śmiały/Szczodry i biskup Stanisław [Bolesław the Bold (or the Generous) and Bishop Stanisław] (Warsaw, 1982); Krzysztof Benyskiewicz, Mieszko Bolesławowic, 1069–1089: Źródła i tradycja historiograficzna [Mieszko, Son of Bolesław (1069–89): The Sources and the Historiographical Tradition] (Kraków, 2005), pp. 151–98. 54.  GpP., bk. 1, c. 19–20, pp. 78, 80, 82, 84; for the literature, see n. 33 above, especially Bieniak, Państwo Miecława. 55.  GpP., bk. 1, c. 30, p. 104; bk. 2, c. 1, pp. 116, 118; c. 4, pp. 122, 124, 126, 128; cc. 7–8, pp. 132, 134; c. 16, pp. 140, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150; Szczur, Historia, pp. 115–31; Barański, Dynastia, pp. 179–202; Lidia Korczak, “Władysław I Herman,” in Szczur and Ożóg, Piastowie, pp. 63­–6, at 65­–6; Patrycja Gąsiorowska,

226  P i o tr G ó r e cki

“Zbigniew,” and Andrzej Marzec, “Bolesław III Krzywousty” [Bolesław III the Wrymouth], in Szczur and Ożóg, Piastowie, pp. 67–75 and 75–84, respectively; Maleczyński, Bolesław, pp. 20–6, 29–34, 36–9, 43–77; and, in its entirety, Zbigniew Dalewski, Rytuał i polityka: Opowieść Galla Anonima o konflikcie Bolesława Krzywoustego ze Zbigniewem [Ritual and Politics: Gallus the Anonymous’ Tale about the Conflict between Bolesław the Wrymouth and Zbigniew] (Warsaw, 2005). 56.  GpP., bk. 1, c. 20, p. 82: “Masouie gentis sua presumptione princeps existebat et signifer . . . nisus est obtinere per presumptionis audaciam quod sibi non cedebatur per ius aliquod vel naturam.” 57.  Ibid., bk. 1, c. 20, p. 82: “Erat . . . quidam Meczzlauus nomine pincerna patris sui [i.e., Casimir’s] Meschonis et minister post mortem ipsius Masouie gentis sua presumptione princeps existebat et signifer.” 58.  Ibid., bk. 1, c. 20, p. 82. 59.  Ibid.: “Unde Meczlauus in audacia sue milicie confisus . . . obedire Kazimiro renuebat.” 60.  Ibid., bk. 2, c. 1, p. 118. 61.  Ibid., bk. 2, c. 4, p. 124. 62.  Ibid.: “pristaldis Zethei dominari non audeas.” 63.  Ibid., bk. 2, c. 4, p. 122: “Setheus palatinus comes . . . avaricia excecatus multa crudelia et inportabilia exercebat. Alios . . . vili occasione transvendebat, alios de patria propellebat, ignobiles vero nobilibus preponebat. Unde multi sua sponte non coacti fugiebant.” 64.  Ibid., bk. 1, c. 30, pp. 104, 106; bk. 2, c. 4, p. 122. 65.  On marriage in medieval Poland, including the issue of its legitimization, the fundamental study remains Władysław Abraham, Zawarcie małżeństwa w pierwotnem prawie polskiem [Entrance into Marriage in the Earliest Polish Law] (Lwów, 1925); see also Adam Vetulani, “Nowe źródło do historii staropolskiego prawa małżeńskiego” [A New Source for the History of the Old-Polish Law of Marriage], in Vetulani, Z badań nad kulturą prawniczą w Polsce piastowskiej [Essays on the Legal Culture of Piast Poland] (Wrocław, 1976), pp. 35–74. 66.  GpP, bk. 2, c. 4, p. 122; for the identification of that monastery with Quedlinburg, see Marian Plezia, ed., Anonim tzw. Gall: Kronika polska [The Socalled Gallus Anonymous: the Polish Chronicle], trans. Roman Grodecki, 7th ed., Biblioteka Narodowa, 1.59 (Wrocław, 1996), p. 68, n. 3. 67.  GpP., bk. 2, c. 4, pp. 122, 124. 68.  Marian Plezia, “Wstęp” [Introduction], in Plezia, Anonim, pp. iii–lxxxvii, at lx; on uses of direct speech (though in a different source), see Piotr Górecki, “Rhetoric, Memory, and Use of the Past: Abbot Peter of Henryków as Historian and Advocate,” Cîteaux 48 (1997), pp. 261–93, at pp. 269–71, 281–9. 69.  GpP., bk. 2, c. 4, p. 124: “tibi Magne cui nomen ducatus est plus dedecoris quam honoris lacrimabiliter condolemus cum laborem honoris nec honorem habeas, cum pristaldis Zethei dominari non audeas. Sed si iugum servitutis de cervice volueris excutere festina puerum quem habemus in clipeum defensionis ­habere.” 70.  GpP., bk. 2, c. 4, p. 124. 71.  GpP., bk. 2, c. 4, p. 126: “legatum Magno Wratislauensisque magnatibus regionis transmiserunt sciscitantes quid hoc esset quod Zbigneuum cum fugitivis

Ambiguous Beginnings  227

sine patris imperio recepissent, si rebelles existere vel obedire sibi vellent. Ad hec Wratislauienses unanimiter responderunt non se patriam Bohemicis vel alienis nacionibus tradidisse sed dominum ducis filium suosque fugitivos recepisse, seseque velle domino duci legitimoque filio suo Bolezlauuo in omnibus et per omnia obedire sed Setheo suisque malis operibus modis omnibus contraire.” 72. MPH, s.n., vol. 11, pp. 108–9, bk. 3, c. 20.6–13 (Peter Włostowic); pp. 115–7, bk. 3, c. 26.4–12 (Wszebor qui princeps erat militie); p. 120, bk. 3, c. 28.1–2 (Archbishop James; Wszebor); pp. 144–5, bk. 4, c. 6.1–4 (primi principum, Jaksa and Świętosław); p. 147, bk. 4, c. 8.2–3 (Żyro, princeps); p. 156, bk. 4, c. 14.4 (Nicholas, summe uirtutis uir); p. 175, bk. 4, c. 21.4 (Pełka, bishop of Kraków); bk. 4, c. 23.23 (Bishop Pełka; Nicholas, palatine comes excellentie); pp. 190–1, bk. 4, c. 26.1–4 (Goworek; Nicholas). 73.  For this kind of accumulation of traits as a recurrent marker of privilege in Poland after the twelfth century, see Piotr Górecki, “Words, Concepts, and Phenomena: Knighthood, Lordship, and the Early Polish Nobility, ca. 1100–ca. 1350,” in Duggan, Nobles and Nobility, pp. 115–55, especially pp. 118–35. 74.  For this very important protagonist, see Brygida Kürbis, “Wstęp” [Introduction], in Kürbis, trans., Mistrz Wincenty (tzw. Kadłubek): Kronika Polska [Master Vincent, the So-Called Kadłubek: the Polish Chronicle], 2nd ed., Biblioteka Na­ rodowa 277 (Wrocław, 1996), pp. iii–cxxxii, at pp. x–xi; Janusz Bieniak, “Polska elita polityczna XII w. (Część III.A. Arbitrzy książąt—krąg rodzinny Piotra Włos­ towica)” [The Polish Political Élite of the Twelfth Century: Part 3a—Arbiters of the Dukes: The Family Circle of Piotr Włostowic], in Społeczeństwo Polski średniowiecznej [The Society of Medieval Poland], ed. Stefan S. Kuczyński (Warsaw, 1990), vol. 4, pp. 13–107, at pp. 13–48. For the title comes, see Ambroży Bogucki, “Komes w źródłach średniowiecznych” [The comes in Medieval Sources], Roczniki Towarzystwa Naukowego w Toruniu 76 (1971), pt. 3; Karol Modzelewski, “Comites, Principes, Nobiles: The Structure of the Ruling Class as Reflected in the Terminology used by the Gallus Anonymous,” in The Polish Nobility in the Middle Ages: Anthologies, ed. Antoni Gąsiorowski (Wrocław, 1984), pp. 177–206, at pp. 188–90, 192; GpP., p. 17, n. 6; Górecki, “Henryków Book,” pp. 59–60. 75.  SU 1: no. 11 (1143–5), p. 9: “ardenti desiderio ego et comes Petrus vir utique circa dei cultum et ecclesiam religionemque devotissimus vestrum . . . praestolemur adventum.” 76.  K.Mp., 2: no. 375 (1198), p. 12. 77.  SU 1: no. 11 (1143–5), p. 9. 78. Gładysz, Zapomniani, p. 48, n. 17. 79.  Perhaps to the early 1160s; Gładysz, Zapomniani, p. 107. 80.  K.Mp., 2: no. 375 (1198), 12: “dominus Iaczo uir bone memorie dominicum adiret Sepulchrum et in loco ubi steterunt pedes Domini adoraret. . . . [E]sset uir christianissimus et precipue circa dominicum Sepulchrum deuotus.” 81.  For Jaksa’s possible status as a participant in the Second Crusade, and the implications of that status for his (presumably later) visit of which Monachus’ charter is a record, see Gładysz, Zapomniani, pp. 106–9. 82.  SU 1: no. 11 (1143–5), p. 9. 83. K.Mp., 2: no. 375 (1198), p. 12.

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84.  K.Mp., 2: no. 375 (1198), p. 13: “Cum ergo quendam canonicum secum in Polonia perduxisset egregii ducis Boleslaui consensu ac uoluntate omnimoda tres uillas . . . Mechou, Zagoriz, Commarouo in perpetuam helemosinam canonico et suis successoribus assignauit.” 85.  K.Mp., 2: no. 375 (1198), p. 13. 86.  SU 1: no. 11 (1143–5), p. 9. 87.  Ibid.: “Nec modo et Ruthenia quae quasi est alter orbis, verum etiam in Polonia et Boemia vel communi appellatione Sclavonia quae plures provincias ­continet.” 88.  Ibid.: “Dignamini Sclavos incompositos in via morum et vitae rationibus informare . . . ut inculta barbaries vestris moralitatibus excolatur, ut homines inhumani vestra eruditione mitescant sub iugo dominico mansuescant.” 89. Ibid.: “[U]terque sylvas et lapides id est sylvestres et lapideos homines lyrae cantibus delinivit legemque pati coegit, quanto magis nos speramus quod ­gentes efferas et immanes sacer abbas Christo conciliet.” 90.  Ibid.: “Gens . . . Ruthenica multitudine innumerabili ceu syderibus adaequata. . . . Dignamini . . . pie pater qui caeteras illustratis nostras etiam tenebras illustrare. . . . Dignamini gelidum axem vestri presentia visitare ut in adventu nostri abbatis frigus horridum aquilonis austri gratia et Mulciberi flamine temperetur.” 91. Gładysz, Zapomniani, pp. 70–97; Eric Christiansen, Northern Crusades: The Baltic and the Catholic Frontier, 1100–1525 (Minneapolis, 1980), pp. 48–57; Morris, Papal Monarchy, p. 268. 92.  Górecki, “The Henryków Book,” pp. 78–9. 93.  Piotr Górecki, “Ad Controversiam Reprimendam: Family Groups and Dispute Prevention in Medieval Poland, ca. 1200,” Law and History Review 14 (1996), pp. 213–43, at pp. 226–31. 94.  Bieniak, “Polska elita polityczna (Część III.A),” pp. 36–48. 95. Gładysz, Zapomniani, pp. 66–9. 96.  Note Janusz Bieniak’s reference to persons of this kind as “arbiters of the dukes” (arbitrzy książąt), in Bieniak, “Polska elita polityczna (Część III.A),” and “Polska elita polityczna XII w. (Część III.B: Arbitrzy książąt—trudne początki)” [The Polish Political Élite of the Twelfth Century: Part 3b—Arbiters of the Dukes; Difficult Beginnings], in Kuczyński, Społeczeństwo (Warsaw, 1996), vol. 7, pp. 11– 44, at pp. 23–4. For a position “near” (apud ) the duke as an expression and a source of power in one regional context, later in the Middle Ages, see Piotr Górecki, “An Interpreter of Law and Power in a Region of Medieval Poland: Abbot Peter of ­Henryków and his Book,” in Building Legitimacy: Political Discourses and Forms of Legitimation in Medieval Societies, ed. Isabel Alfonso, Hugh Kennedy, and Julio Escalona (Leiden, 2004), pp. 263–89, at p. 266. 97.  Górecki, “Ad Controversiam,” pp. 218–23; Górecki, “Words,” pp. 118– 21; Górecki, “The Henryków Book,” pp. 58, 66, 68–9. 98. Bartlett, Making of Europe, pp. 5–18. 99.  For the meanings of a “culture of fidelity” (drawn in a very different part of medieval Europe), see Fredric L. Cheyette, “Some Reflections on Violence, Reconciliation, and the ‘Feudal Revolution,’” in Brown and Górecki, Conflict, pp. 243–64.

nine

Lords, Markets, and Communities The Urban Revolution of the Twelfth Century D avid N ic h o l a s

During the “long twelfth century,” between roughly 1050 and 1200, the scope and nature of European urbanization changed fundamentally. After this period, as before it, the cities and towns were cult centers and military strongholds, but after 1200 they were also economic and generally demographic central places for their regions and in some cases regional political capitals. I shall concentrate in this essay on four areas in which the changes of the twelfth century were so profound as to constitute a true revolution, when the contours of the modern urban network were created. The Physical Expansion of Existing Cities

The number of towns grew exponentially during the long twelfth century, but quantifying the expansion is difficult. Not only are figures few and unreliable, but much depends on how far down the demographic scale one defines “town.” It seems clear that total population at least doubled between 950 and 1200, while the urban sector quadrupled or quintupled. The inhabited area of most cities expanded tremendously. By 1100, many cities had walled the first suburbs around the nucleus, and by 1200, all large places on the continent had defenses. Although most of the first city walls had evidently been undertaken at the initiative of the lords, some city governments were taking responsibility for their own defenses by the twelfth century, and this became the norm in the thirteenth. While 229

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Lords, Markets, and Communities  231

the king financed the left bank wall at Paris, the city paid for enclosing the more populous right bank. In 1106, the burgesses of Cologne built a fortification that was strong enough to withstand a three-week siege by the emperor. In 1180, they built a new and final wall that enclosed suburbs that were still mainly agricultural.1 It was not uncommon for the area enclosed by the circuit of the walls to quadruple in the twelfth century, although this can be an indication not only of population growth but also of how small the initial wall had been.2 Settlements merged that previously had been discrete entities. The multiplication and merging of parishes is another indicator of expanding population.3 Most city walls of the eleventh century in the empire were in the episcopal cities of the Rhineland, Burgundy, the German northwest, and the Low Countries. Other cities were walled in the early twelfth century on the Rhine and in Flanders.4 Except in the northwest, most French cities only built walls beyond the primitive city in the twelfth century and particularly the thirteenth.5 Fortification usually followed substantial settlement by at least a generation, and accordingly some walls linking city and suburb were quite late.6 The new walls had differing effects on city plans. Some walls bisected parishes, particularly in Italy, disrupting neighborhood solidarity. Topographical expansion led to a multiplication of market squares. Most cities began with a single market, often the corrupted remains of the Roman forum. Multiple markets became common when the suburbs, which often had their own markets, were incorporated into the main fortification.7 Except in England and the larger continental cities, the main market of the mature city was the first “expansion” market, often at the gate or outer extremity of the city wall where it joined the suburb.8 Urban social geography becomes much clearer in the twelfth century. The richest inhabitants lived either in the government quarters of the old city or in the closest suburbs. The growth of urban industry in the twelfth century led to the development of occupational quarters. Many streets took the name of the crafts that dominated them at some point,9 although this did not mean that other tradespeople did not live there.10 Trades requiring water or posing environmental problems, notably dyers, butchers, fullers, potters, and smiths were especially likely to be segregated.11 While in the north such occupational specialization of neighborhoods was a matter of convenience, in some Mediterranean cities it was enforced by the authorities, including craft organizations, which could control their members more easily when most lived in the same quarter or street.12 Although

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most public buildings in the cities postdate 1200, some cities were already centering major commercial transactions, especially those involving food and exports, in halls or central markets, where they could be taxed and checked for quality.13 The Foundation of New Towns

During the long twelfth century, lords were founding new places and endowing existing villages on their domains with charters of liberties. Virtually all “founded” cities were preceded by some settlement on the site or were simply grants of town law to previously existing communities, and many had markets before receiving charters. Few town plantations in the former Roman west became genuine cities except in Spain, where fueros were given to frontier settlements that were founded as outposts against the Muslims. Trade developed after the military settlement. Jaca, the leading city of Old Aragon, had a royal­ castle, a monastery, and a commercial and agricultural center west of the castle. Each nucleus had a discernible street plan and developed separately before a single charter was given to Jaca in 1076. The frontier towns between Tagus and Duero and along the Ebro—Salamanca, Avila, Segovia, Cuenca, and Guadalajara—were more military than those of northern Spain, many of whose charters limited the military service that the prince could exact. These towns were typically polynuclear, reflecting the ethnic or regional origin of their citizens. They actively repopulated lands under their control, established new settlements, and controlled routes and moun­tain passes.14 Most town foundations in England that evolved into cities were founded before 1170.15 Neither Italy nor Flanders, the most densely urbanized parts of Europe, experienced the proliferation of “new towns” that France and Germany did, perhaps because the older cities were large enough to satisfy the need for urban services. The counts of Flanders planted several towns, but only Lille, Ypres, and the North Sea ports became substantial. The subordination of the contado to the older cities in Italy stifled the development of new places until the large cities themselves began founding them in the thirteenth century. Germany east of the Elbe had a large number of plantations that became major cities. Most benefited from the revival of Baltic trade.16 Frederick Barbarossa chartered sev-

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eral eventual cities,17 but the most famous founder of towns in Germany was his rival Henry the Lion. Henry’s most famous “foundations” are Munich and Lübeck.18 Thus urban expansion in the Middle Ages came more from the growth of established places than the foundation of new cities except in Iberia and eastern Germany. The twelfth century does represent a transition, however, in that although numerous “towns” were still being founded after 1200, they failed to thrive: except for Salisbury, La Rochelle, and particularly the towns of the Baltic east, no major city resulted from a plantation after 1200. As cities became more economic than cult and governmental entities, the number of places that could develop was restricted by the need for merchants’ services and the demand for craftsmen’s products. The urban map of medieval Europe was essentially fixed by 1220. This topic is linked to the debate over “proto-urbanization,” admittedly more in connection with the “dwarf towns” of the late Middle Ages than with the twelfth century. The numerous small places that received charters of liberties, or had a legally recognized market, or developed some industrialization are certainly not purely farm villages, but a place that was strictly agricultural without an exchange apparatus is no more likely than its converse ever to have existed. While one may debate what distinguishes town from village at one extreme and town from city at the other, a definition of “urban” that encompasses both Cologne and Graben in Schwaben lacks even the precision that medieval sources permit.19 The Functional Transition from Seigniorial to Economic Urbanization

The twelfth century saw a change from a demand market for luxuries to a regional market for a wide range of consumer goods.20 The earliest cities had been primarily residences of princes, nobles, wealthy churchmen, and their personnel, with enough craftspeople and particularly merchants to supply the lords of the fortification with the goods and services that they needed or desired. This description still held in the eleventh century. As governments became more sophisticated, princes spent more time in their chief cities. Favored residences continued to grow through demand from court personnel.21 Conversely, withdrawal of the court was a catastrophe for some prominent cities of the early Middle Ages. Examples are Aachen, Charlemagne’s capital, which atrophied in the eleventh century; Speyer, a favorite residence of the Salian emperors, which received

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three new walls between the tenth century and 1180 but thereafter stagnated; and most spectacularly Winchester, the virtual capital of Norman England: the Angevin kings after 1154 favored Westminster. Winchester’s population of over eight thousand in 1148 was its medieval apogee.22 Town lords both bought merchants’ goods and gave privileges that created jobs and brought capital to the towns. A precondition of the development of towns into cities was the favor of a local prince, most often a grant requiring transients or residents of the immediate environs to bring their goods to the town market. The early English borough charters gave the central places monopolies within their shires.23 This is not to minimize the turbulence of rural lords within the city: conflicts between rival lords in the city, bishop and count or bishop and abbot or bishop and cathedral chapter, continued to be divisive, particularly when each controlled a clearly defined part of town.24 In addition to generating demand for goods and services, princely courts attracted investment. Most eleventh-century cities that would become centers of long-distance trade had settlements of Jews who loaned money to the town lords and may have provided capital for industries that were developing in the suburbs. The twelfth century was the high point of Jewish involvement in capital formation and concentration in the cities. Thereafter a combination of princely persecution, the rise of Christian moneylenders, and the development of more sophisticated commercial techniques, which allowed Christians to skirt the church’s usury prohibitions, meant a fundamental change. Most major cities of Italy, including Rome itself, and southern France had Jewish communities of several hundred persons. The Jewish quarters in northern Europe were usually in the old fortified city but near its edge, and some “Jew Streets” were near the new industrial quarters. The English cities also had Jewish communities, with the largest at London, Lincoln, Norwich, and Canterbury. The Jews were very important at Paris until Philip Augustus began persecuting them in 1182 and demolished their quarter.25 The twelfth-century city became the vehicle for the development of commercial capitalism in Europe. Most cities did not develop substantial exportable industry until the thirteenth century, and some not even then; many cities, such as Metz, remained overgrown farm markets. In commercial capitalism, “fixed capital” such as land and buildings was less im­ portant than liquid capital, since (except for mining) most industrial technology was simple and did not require substantial capital investment. Investors tended to put their money into goods and services for themselves, thereby generating local demand.

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Thus the development and distribution of cities were created by the diversification of demand. With inflation and more coin, consumer goods could be afforded by persons other than the aristocrats. There was also demand for labor and food. Cities could not develop until the rural economy could feed a large number of persons who, instead of growing their own food, bought the farmers’ surplus crops and later manufactured items that the more prosperous peasants desired. The cities had large enough populations even by 1100 to make famine a real threat, and controlling the large cities’ food supplies became a major element of the wealth of their elites.26 As urban industry became more important, demand for raw materials increased, mainly for wool and dyes. Commercial demand was a precondition for widespread industrial development, for no one is going to make a large quantity of goods unless he can be reasonably sure that someone will buy them. Thus a market infrastructure had to be in place before it was feasible to export manufactured goods. During the twelfth century, the major towns ceased being primarily local markets for luxuries demanded by their lords and evolved into regional economic centers whose markets were more diversified as towns developed commerce, and late in the twelfth century some developed industrial specialties that were desirable enough to generate demand in distant locales. All cities transferred goods from producers to consumers, and the most successful of them were located on economic frontiers, at the intersection of supply and demand of essential goods, services, or personnel. In addition to their political and defensive functions, they were central places for their rural environs, transmitting their products to more distant markets. The market function of the city, as opposed to the town, was to link regional economies that were concentrated on a small market area into interregional trade. Whereas cities drew their population base mainly from their immediate environs, their capital base came from long-distance trade, which provided money that generated local demand and jobs. Until the development of substantial exportable industry in the cities in the late twelfth century, the capital base “came almost entirely from importing goods for sale to those who had money from extra-urban sources.”27 Thus, while urban luxury manufacturing had previously been directed mainly toward princely courts, after 1200 it was increasingly toward the urban well-to-do. Demand from the towns themselves thus was also affecting currents of trade. Diversification of demand was accompanied by the transition to an arithmetically based economy. In the early Middle Ages coin had been

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used mainly for long-distance luxury trade and wholesale local trade; the purchasing power of the penny, the smallest coin minted, was so great that it was unfeasible for smaller retail transactions, which were still handled by barter. The rudimentary exchange apparatus meant that the main sources of wealth remained provisioning the city with necessities and renting property to new residents. But by the early thirteenth century, money or values of labor or goods that could be converted to monetary terms was involved in virtually all transactions.28 At the same time, industry was becoming increasingly centered in the towns, which had a large labor supply. Changes in clothmaking technology tended to make weaving a male profession and centered it in the cities, where the trade could be regulated. The fairs also made it profitable to market medium grades of cloth. The greatest interregional fairs were the six held in the county of Champagne. The establishment of the fairs quickened ties between Italy and the North but did not create them.29 Roughly equidistant between the Low Countries and northern Italy and accessible only overland, the fairs stimulated the bipolar urban axis centered on these two regions and also the growth of local fairs, which were scheduled so that merchants could establish an inventory locally, then visit the Champagne emporia. Precisely when the supply of money was increasing rapidly, Italians began visiting the fairs, and Flemish and northern French cloth began its conquest of the luxury market. Thus the twelfth century really crosses economic periods, with the change coming around 1175–80.30 The development of exportable industrial goods and a greater demand for goods for the local market led to a proliferation of crafts and scattered evidence of craft organizations. Although the English kings generally favored merchant guilds, they were more hostile to craft organizations than were most continental princes. Although in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries they licensed craft organizations in several cities and gave the members the exclusive right to practice locally, the English crafts declined quickly in the late twelfth century.31 In northern Europe, craft guilds were exceptional in most places until the late thirteenth century, as merchants, but not artisans, muscled their way toward political power. Provence shows few artisan organizations before 1200,32 but they were more precocious in Languedoc.33 Paris was unusual in having both a merchant guild and strong craft organizations, fostered by the royal government as a way to control quality and collect taxes.34 The earliest craft statutes in northern France are for the smiths of Caen before 1180, but only the last two clauses address professional concerns; the rest are charitable.35 Evidence of craft guilds in Germany is scat-

Lords, Markets, and Communities  237

tered before 1200.36 Craft guilds were most highly developed in Italy. Religious brotherhoods provided a model for the occupational guilds, as in southern France; farther north, most fraternities postdated the appearance of the crafts with which they were associated.37 Evidence of group consciousness among merchants becomes much stronger in the twelfth century, as merchant guilds assumed important social functions in some cities. If one looks only at the composition of the city councils, a sudden change occurs in the three decades after 1190, as merchants and their organizations came to share power with the earlier elite. But in fact, they gained considerably during the twelfth century, and the breakthrough to council membership was only the final stage. As with the craftsmen, most early merchant organizations were more devotional than occupational. Some groups with a corporate existence were based on landowning but gradually evolved toward purely merchant associations. Examples are the “hereditary men” of the Flemish cities, the English guilds of thegns, and the Scandinavian kundsgilden.38 Some English guildhalls became city halls in the twelfth century.39 The statutes of the merchant guild of Southampton show that it was a social and chari­ table club and a peace association, but membership was hereditary in the male line and conferred monopolies on certain occupations and strategic raw materials, notably grain.40 On the continent, Cologne had a merchant guild by 1070, Arras and Ghent in the late eleventh century, Bruges in 1113. They were protective groups, binding merchants from the same town to mutual assistance in necessary travel outside the home city. They were not established to regulate market or employment conditions, nor do they betray a high level of class consciousness against the urban elites. Merchants of Cologne intermarried with noble and ministerial lineages, as well as with other merchant families.41 The numerous places in Germany whose merchants received trading privileges probably had merchant guilds, for their rights presuppose an organization.42 The earliest surviving statutes of a merchant guild are those of the “Charity” of Valenciennes, given just after 1066 with supplements around 1120. It was principally a charitable and peace association of merchants, although it could exercise coercive justice in some actions between guildmen. Guild brothers swore to leave the city armed, stay together in case of need, and contribute to fines levied on a brother in foreign territory.43 Slightly later statutes survive from the merchant guild of Saint-Omer. It fostered “common utility” by maintaining the streets, gates, and town wall, providing poor relief, and keeping order. The guild helped members

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on their travels and gave them the right to preempt sales on the market of Saint-Omer. Yet knights and clerks could also be admitted, and most clauses concern devotion and charity. The fact that the city council met in the merchants’ hall and the guild had peacekeeping and administrative functions creates a presumption that the city government of Saint-Omer evolved from the guild. The major distinction with England is that the French and Flemish charters never give a monopoly of trade in the city either to the burgesses as a whole or to the merchant guild and usually give less comprehensive immunity from toll than do the English charters.44 Evidence for merchant guilds in the rest of France is limited to Paris and Rouen. Artisan guilds precede merchant guilds in Italy, perhaps because, except for the port cities, the urban economies were so regionally based until the twelfth century, when the opening of trade routes to the Champagne fairs and with the east gave them a market for the luxuries that were coming from the east.45 It is also likely that the absence of merchant guilds in Italy and in such unlikely northern cities as London is because the merchants were so numerous and powerful that they did not feel the need to form their own organizations.46 Italy had nominally “artisan” guilds that included merchants. There are a few references to merchant organizations with their own officials to judge commercial infractions. Milan had “consuls of the merchants” by 1159, and they were in town government by 1177. The “association of the merchants” had a tribunal by the early thirteenth century. Was the increasing wealth of the merchants translated into movement among the social or political elite? The elites of the eleventh-century cities still consisted of their lords, their officials, and others who owned and rented land inside the city or the adjacent suburbs. But by this time, they were a privileged group within a much larger resident population. Lending and exchanging money were important, for they developed through the lord’s mint. This interpretation is a truism of scholarship on the Italian cities,47 but studies of Arras, Metz, Rheims, and Ghent have shown it essentially accurate for northern urbanization. Most persons of substance in the early municipal elites were not newly rich wanderers; rather, their roots go back far into the community.48 Much of the population base of the cities was composed of tenants of the elite. Arras is our strongest case showing the origins of a merchant urban aristocracy on a monastery’s domain. The abbey of St. Vaast at Arras had a problem in the early twelfth century with free merchants living in the city trying to prove that they were serfs so that they could claim the ab-

Lords, Markets, and Communities  239

bey’s toll exemption.49 Corroboration is provided by Poitiers and several German cities, where the elites had some persons who owed groundrent to the town lord, but more powerful among them were ministerials (“serf knights”).50 The earliest urban elites in England were also landowners, moneylenders, and rentiers.51 Even in the Flemish cities, which are often portrayed as prototypes of medieval commercial and industrial urbanization, landownership was the basis of social rank. The charter of SaintOmer of 1127 mentions that two “landed men” could attest the validity of a transaction. This terminology had spread to Ghent by 1168. The landed men were the first patricians, descendants of landowners in the original portus of the town. The aristocrats who ruled Ghent in the thirteenth century were thus defined by their landowning and had probably originated as a group by the tenth century.52 The older urban elites in both north and south were domain officials or landholders, whose descendants would be called “lineages” in late medieval sources, and whose money came from landholding and rents, which became extremely profitable as immigrants streamed into the cities. They were joined in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries by a newer elite, ancestors of the “honorable persons” of late medieval sources. They gained wealth in commerce but then invested their earnings in land to gain social respectability. This change came rapidly at the turn of the thirteenth century through control of rotating conciliar regimes; and it was a power-sharing arrangement with the landholding elite of lineages, rarely a question of displacing them. In Italy the nobles of the contado (surrounding countryside) had property or family branches in the major cities from the onset of urbanization. The first aristocrats of Venice were landowners who had property on the mainland. From the eleventh century, the “old houses” (case vecchie), consisting of landowners who had turned to commerce, were already dis­ tinguishing themselves from the purely commercial “new houses” (case nuove).53 Bishops were town lords as in northern Europe, but lay nobles were much more powerful in the Italian cities and thus they, rather than merchants, led resistance to the bishops, most famously at Milan. They were also disorderly, extending their feuds into the cities. Florence contained 150 noble towers by the early thirteenth century.54 To counter the towers, “popular” military companies called “tower societies” developed, based on the city gates. Thus many city governments began forcing nobles of the environs to submit their lands to the commune, make war or peace at their own expense at its behest, give hospitality twice a year to the city’s officials, live in the city for part of the year, and pay a fine or post bond to

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guarantee their good behavior. Others simply conquered a contado, generally starting with the city’s own diocese. The process began by the early twelfth century and often took many years. Florence is unusual among the Tuscan cities in having so little influence in its contado before the midtwelfth century, but it expanded rapidly thereafter. The Revolution in Law and Government

The very notion of “urban” law is a medieval innovation. The Romans did not have it, in the sense of laws of individual communities, and the early medieval cities were governed as parts of larger territorial units.55 A distinct urban law was developed between the late eleventh and early thirteenth centuries, mainly by local custom and practice. Although details vary, the general principles of the early urban laws are similar. Compared to rural or territorial law, urban practice facilitates both acquisition and alienation. Land law was separated from the law of movable property, and possession of movable property was distinguished from ownership. Oral agreements created binding contracts, but in the twelfth century, canon law was giving priority to transactions that could be documented in writing. First in Italy and after 1200 increasingly in northern Europe, commercial documents were facilitating credit and capital accumulation and were being enforced in urban courts. These techniques would be transformed into so-called abstract contracts, in which the document was not merely evidence of an underlying contract but was itself the contract and could be litigated independently. Partnerships developed as legal corporations with assets and obligations that survived the death of one partner. Liability was generally limited to the amount of the investment. The early codes generally involve securing debts on immovable property. Negotiable credit instruments were unknown to the Romans and to early Germanic law, but they were part of merchant practice by 1200. Chattel mortgage was also new. The need to provide legal structures for the towns literally revolutionized western jurisprudence.56 The laws of individual communities were summarized in codes that sometimes became “families” of law. The spread of the code of CuencaTeruel of 1177–8 in Iberia and the eleventh-century laws of Breteuil in England and Ireland are conspicuous examples. The Flemish towns were granted “little charters” in 1127, including aldermen as judges, security of debt, separation of the “landowners” as an elite, recording of transactions,

Lords, Markets, and Communities  241

a guild, and freedom of the burgesses from arbitrary taxes and the head tax. Between 1163 and 1177, the count gave virtually identical charters to the seven great cities of Flanders, going into considerable detail on criminal procedure. Shortly after these codes, smaller communities in Flanders were ordered to refer doubtful legal questions to the towns whose law they enjoyed.57 The most widespread French town law families were those of Lorris and Beaumont-en-Argonne for the small centers, while the liberties of Soissons were the most common for cities.58 In Germany, the laws of Magdeburg were used in eighty cities, those of Lübeck in forty-three. They established a close filial relationship between mother and daughter cities, including hearing judicial appeals. The law of a mother town could produce granddaughters, as when Magdeburg’s law was given to Halle, which in its turn became the basis for urban laws in Silesia.59 In England, the charter of London of 1130 and Henry II’s charter for York, and in particular John’s charter to Ipswich in 1200, were widely used.60 Comprehensive codes did not happen in Italy, where the towns adapted Roman customary law into their indigenous practice. In the Italian cities, the earliest codes consisted of rules that the consuls swore to obey when they assumed office and oaths sworn as responses by the population. In a second stage, the oaths were summarized and put into chapter headings in the period of the podestàs, who also swore to observe local laws. There followed codification of the decrees of the city council, which made laws for the commune. They were sometimes called statute, sometimes leges. Some cities distinguished between customary law and decrees of the council, and in those cases separate courts were maintained for actions held under each law.61 To whom did the early charters apply? Most towns in northern Europe had a rudimentary law code before they can be shown to have had a functioning government. Virtually all urban corporations developed territorial characteristics during the twelfth century, after the liberties had been given initially to a group of persons. Contrary to myth, the towns discouraged immigration of serfs.62 Most twelfth-century towns required citizens to own real estate within the town, which was a deterrent to immigration. Some charters confined themselves to personal liberties for the inhabitants: the princes guaranteed security of property, gave procedural safeguards, and renounced violence and extortion. Most charters guaranteed citizens the right to trial in the home city except in cases involving their property outside its corporate limits. Punishments were specified, and the peace of the town applied to merchants going to or from its fair or market.

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The head tax was abolished in many, and most charters fixed groundrents in perpetuity, at least those owed to the town lord and often to all landowners. The citizen’s free disposal over his land and house was a cardinal point of burgess tenure, which in England even in the late eleventh century was equated with paying groundrent to the king.63 The urban charters place the cities in the forefront of the legal changes that were engulfing Europe in the twelfth century and are often associated more with the consolidation of territorial governments. The notion of a Europe divided into areas of “written” and “customary” law is nonsense; at precisely the time when the written Body of the Civil Law was coming into use in southern Europe, local customs were being put into writing in the north. Cities had charters of liberties before kingdoms had law codes. Urban law was secular. A rational trial procedure was a benefit of citizenship, including proof by inquest rather than the judgment of God. The charters contain guarantees against arbitrary imprisonment or seizure for debt, the right to bear arms, and in general, offer life under a rule of law. Civil liberties of the inhabitants were specified, some of which restrained the arbitrary power of the princes. Fully enfranchised citizens had some rights of political participation, with the implied corollary that the citizens were the fount of legitimate authority, however little this may have been the case in practice.64 How were the legal principles that ruled the cities translated into governmental practice? Early charters regulated matters between town and lord but were not specific about who ruled the town or how. Later charters are more detailed. As a rough rule, some cities began in the eleventh century to develop institutions distinct from those of their lords’ territorial governments. This continued in essentially the same patterns in the twelfth century, but there is more evidence of it. Councils that rotated frequently, and with merchants appearing alongside the older elite, often in a second council, appeared between 1190 and 1220. The first municipal governments were courts, but they quickly either acquired administrative functions or were joined by other bodies that did. Some English cities had governments under “lawmen,” “portmen,” or “burhmen” before the Norman Conquest. Canterbury had extensive selfgovernment and a custom that goes back at least to the time of Henry I.65 On the continent, although many cities had magistrates by the eleventh century and virtually all got them in the twelfth, most north of the Loire were initially courts staffed by dependents of the town lord called scabini.66 These officials were judges and assessors, but not at this stage a city council with legislative power. Most cities of the southern Low Countries had

Lords, Markets, and Communities  243

scabini before 1133. South of the Seine and in Italy, “good men” or “upright men” or in the extreme south “noble men” or “noble laymen” instead of scabini formed the town court. In Flanders and some cities of northern France the scabini became the city council. Elsewhere in France a separate group of jurés (sworn men), who represented the sworn association, assumed control in the late twelfth century, usually functioning alongside the earlier scabini. In Germany this group was designated the Rat (council). In many cities the jurés became a council, but usually they shared functions with the town lord’s existing court, the scabini, rather than absorbing it. The scabini initially held life appointments. Arras and Tournai were the only large cities of the ­Flanders-Artois region to receive annually appointed scabini before 1200, but the practice became general in the early thirteenth century.67 Particularly in northern France and Italy the movement to establish “communes” has often been seen as the genesis of the quasi-independent medieval city, but in fact the self-governing city cannot be equated with the commune. Urban government preceded the communal movement, which touched only a score of towns between the Rhine and Loire before the mid-twelfth century. Some of France’s largest cities were not communes.68 Although many and perhaps most communes were peaceful, communes have been associated with uprisings against town lords.69 Much of the confusion is terminological, which is complicated by the famous castigation of communes by Guibert of Nogent.70 The only characteristic that seems generally valid is that the commune was a sworn association of inhabitants. Most communes called themselves “peace associations” or “friendships,” suggesting solidarity of the members against outsiders. They exacted severe penalties for injuring fellow members of the commune and required mutual help for members as “brothers,” enforced by penalties against recusants.71 The most famous French commune is that of Laon in 1112, described colorfully in the memoirs of Guibert of Nogent. Intermittent fighting continued until 1128, when a charter was issued, the “Institution of Peace.”72 Some communal charters, particularly those from the late twelfth century and those given to cities that were already large, gave the lord or a municipal aristocracy more rights than they had previously.73 We have more information from the empire, where many lords initially governed their cities through deputies, usually called advocates, bail­ iffs, or burgraves, who controlled the mint, oversaw defense, and handled blood justice.74 A charter did not necessarily make a city independent. Most lords were still owed heavy payments and kept control of the cities’ foreign policy. They owned public buildings and frequently walls, gates,

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and bridges.75 Most German cities took decades to buy out such rights. The German kings had initially tried to control the cities by extending the privileges of the bishops who were their lords. By the twelfth century, however, church and monarchy were political opponents, and the kings encouraged revolutionary movements in the bishops’ cities. The people with whom they were dealing bore various group names, some of them suggesting a government.76 During the thirteenth century, the cities of northern Europe gained more rights of self-determination, but none became completely independent even in fact, much less in law. In France and particularly England, municipal liberties were curtailed by the power of the kings and other lords. In Flanders the cities were more independent. Although the landowners who had controlled the cities in the twelfth century gradually yielded some share of power to wealthy merchants and in a few cases to craftsmen, most annually rotating city councils, far from being an expression of urban autonomy, were actually established by the town lord as a means of breaking the older oligarchy. Virtually all cities thus moved in the early thirteenth century to government by a rotating council, but this did not mean a radical change in the elite, which was still dominated by landowners. With the necessity of rotation, it did mean that more of the social elite served in city governments in the thirteenth century than in the twelfth. Italian urban government affords many contrasts with its northern counterpart. The communal movement in Italy is associated with the movement of church reform, with the popes often siding with local reformers against their bishops but particularly against the emperors. Although the church always wielded immense patronage, the older Italian cities had secular governments long before there is evidence of them in the north. While the earliest constitutional documents for the northern cities were given personally to members of a sworn association, those for Italy were territorial associations formed to limit their lords’ power and establish governments. The earliest of these was granted to the “faithful persons and inhabitants of the city of Genoa” in 958 by King Berengar. Most of the earliest sworn associations in Italy, however, were not city-wide but rather joined specific elements of the population, most often knights or valvassors. The connections between commune, sworn association, and the magistracy of the consulate are clearest in Genoa. By 1130, each of seven military companies based on geographical districts of the city was led by two “consuls of pleas.” All able-bodied males of the district between ages six-

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teen and seventy had to enter a company. The Genoese companies had the same role that the sworn association of citizens had in the north, handling militia, courts, and finance. This is similar to the role of the Cologne ward associations within the overall sworn association of the city.77 Virtually all Italian towns were divided into geographical sectors for purposes of administration. At a time when membership on most city councils in northern Europe was based on lineage or affiliation with a ­merchant guild, the consuls of the Italian cities and later the councils that limited the podestà were apportioned by districts. They were initially units for raising the city militia, but some became confounded with the trades whose practitioners resided in them. Many districts were centered on a prominent feature, particularly a tower. Venice, Bologna, Siena, and Genoa provide examples of military-administrative districts. The regions (rioni) of Rome chose a Senate, which fought the popes for power, most famously in the “commune” led by Arnold of Brescia. In 1155, Pope Clement III and the city agreed that the pope would be the secular lord, but the city government could declare war and received subsidies from him for the maintenance of the walls. In the late twelfth century, a single senator was made chief executive.78 The general assembly of all citizens was initially the chief legislative body, but this was unwieldy, and administration was delegated to “good men” or “upright men” in the eleventh century. They were ad hoc committees without specific government functions. But during the twelfth century, virtually all Italian cities developed governments with “consuls,” who came from the same social group as the “good men,” but represent a later stage, when the aristocracy had institutionalized its control. They are first mentioned at Pisa in 1081, and most cities of northern Italy had them before the mid-twelfth century.79 Appointment of officials reflected the factional as well as the geographical divisions of the cities. There was no Italian equivalent of the merchant guilds that chose the city councils in England and Flanders. ­Nobles and their clienteles were disliked, and the consuls, as their officials in the cities, were resented. Nobles and commoners named an equal number of consuls at Orvieto. Consuls were chosen by gate-based districts at Milan in 1158 and 1175. The first consuls of Florence, mentioned in 1138, represented the parishes and neighborhood associations. They were joined after 1150 by consuls representing professional associations, beginning with the consuls of the knights, then of the merchants.80 Although at Pisa and Genoa the consular aristocracies of the twelfth century included both military and merchant families, who were often related,

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­ obles dominated most early Italian consulates.81 From the 1150s, some n city governments appointed a podestà, usually an outsider who could be impartial between the feuding lineages. He took over the executive, military, and administrative functions of the consuls, who were involved in the factional strife. The podestà was a transitional figure; the joint system of podestà and consuls declined in the early thirteenth century in favor of multiple councils with different functions, though the podestà’s position was not abolished. A bewildering network of councils thus ruled most Italian cities in the early thirteenth century. Their membership was rotated more frequently than those in the north, and most of them were so large that they could handle administrative business only through subcommittees. While most northern councils ranged in size from a dozen to one hundred members, some Italian cities had several hundred councilors and administrative officials.82 Thus, although Italy pioneered government by consuls in the twelfth century, they did not evolve there into councils with fixed numbers and terms of office. After about 1190, the Italian and northern cities took divergent routes. While conciliar regimes became the norm in the north, in Italy the podestà took over the functions previously exercised by the consuls. The Italian cities only developed councils, and, under arrangements much more complex and overlapping than was normal in the north, after the civic conflicts of the thirteenth century had limited the ­podestà’s power in favor of that of the popolo.83 The earliest references to consuls in France are in the lower Rhône ­valley, beginning with Avignon in 1129, about three decades after they ­became common in Italy and perhaps in imitation of Italian models. Consulates continued to expand westward.84 The overwhelming majority of consuls in all the southern French towns of whom more is known than their names were knights. In some places the nobles had a fixed number of consuls. This suggests that the consulates arose during factional struggles within the aristocracy rather than from a movement for citizen emancipation from the town lord. The twelfth-century consuls were judges, more like the scabini than the jurés of the northern cities. They were not representatives of a sworn association of persons, but rather were a territorial government, called “consuls of the city.”85 —  Previous symposia comparable to the 2006 conference at the Uni­ versity of Notre Dame have produced excellent studies, but these have shown little comprehension of the critical role that cities played in the revo­

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lutionary changes that engulfed Europe in the twelfth century. The earliest symposium contains the best paper from an urbanologist’s perspective. Yet the author considers the towns only from the standpoint of their commercial function.86 The editors’ introduction to the volume notes the economic revival but, writing under the influence of C. H. Haskins’ Renaissance of the Twelfth-Century model, somewhat patronizingly say only that “the merchants and artisans in their guilds . . . became the bourgeoisie, the middle class, and organized town governments. Here was the beginning of our modern city institutions and civic life. With the growth of cities and need for educated men for business, law and justice, and government, learning itself moved from monasteries to cathedral schools and universities,” and the focus reverts to theology and literature.87 More recent volumes have shown even less comprehension of the changes that occurred during the twelfth century urban revolution.88 This attitude is not limited to collections resulting from conference presentations.89 May we not admit that the benefits of the rule of law, institutional government, broader participation in civic affairs, and rational delivery of goods and services, all of them practical concomitants of twelfth-century urbanization, are as important to the human experience as the abstract mental construct? Notes 1.  Paul Strait, Cologne in the Twelfth Century (Gainesville, 1974), pp. 30–3; Edith Ennen, “Erzbischof und Stadtgemeinde in Köln bis zur Schlacht von Wörringen (1288),” in Bischofs- und Kathedralstädte des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Franz Petri (Cologne, 1976), pp. 40–1. 2. Derek Keene, “Towns and the Growth of Trade,” in NCMH, vol. 4.1, p. 51. 3.  Maurits Gysseling, Gent’s Vroegste Geschiedenis in de Spiegel van zijn plaats­ namen (Antwerp, 1954), pp. 33–4; Philippe Dollinger, “Der Aufschwung der oberrheinische Bischofsstädte in salischer Zeit (1025–1125),” in Beiträge zum hoch­ mittelalterlichen Städtewesen, ed. Bernard Diestelkamp (Cologne, 1982), p. 136; Francesca Bocchi, Attraverso le città italiane nel medioevo (Casalecchio di Reno, 1987), p. 10. The converse can also be true. Parishes multiplied rapidly in the English cities between 1000 and the Norman Conquest, then declined sharply, suggesting, as do other indices, that the Normans stunted English urbanization. Colin Platt, “The Evolution of Towns: Natural Growth,” in The Plans and Topography of Medieval Towns in England and Wales, ed. M. W. Barley (London, 1976), p. 55; William Urry, Canterbury under the Angevin Kings (London, 1967), pp. 208–9; John Schofield, The Building of London from the Conquest to the Great Fire (London, 1984), p. 32; Christopher Brooke and Gillian Keir, London 800–1216: The Shaping of a City (Berkeley, 1975), p. 126; Christopher N. L. Brooke, “The Medieval Town

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as an Ecclesiastical Centre: General Survey,” in European Towns: Their Archaeology and Early History, ed. M. W. Barley (London, 1977), p. 468; Martin Biddle, Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday (Oxford, 1976), pp. 498–9; Michael Aston and James Bond, The Landscape of Towns (Gloucester, 1987), p. 10. 4. Edith Ennen, Frühgeschichte der europäischen Stadt (Bonn, 1953), pp. 160–3; André Chédeville, “De la Cité à la ville,” in Histoire de la France urbaine, vol. 2, La ville médiévale, ed. Georges Duby (Paris, 1980), p. 101; Philippe Wolff, ed., Histoire de Toulouse (Toulouse, 1974), p. 71. 5.  New twelfth-century walls linking suburb and cité include those at Troyes, Toulouse, Amiens, Metz, Dijon, Rouen, Poitiers, and Angers. Chédeville, “De la Cité à la ville,” p. 101; Pierre Lavedan and Jeanne Hugueney, L’Urbanisme au Moyen Âge (Geneva, 1974), pp. 22–4. 6. Bordeaux and Paris are conspicuous examples. Bordeaux continued to have separate walls for the city and the Bourg-Saint-Eloi until the early fourteenth century. During the reign of Philip Augustus (1180–1223), who spent much more time at Paris than his predecessors, Paris received its first comprehensive wall, and it enclosed considerable vacant area, particularly on the left bank, where more expansion was foreseen. Jacques Boussard, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris: De la fin du siège de 885–886 à la mort de Philippe Auguste (Paris, 1976), pp. 99, 130, 151–2, 159, 169–73, 194, 283–5, 319–22, 326–7, 380. 7.  R. H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500, 2nd ed. (Manchester, 1996), p. 86. 8.  Examples include Cologne, where the market in the “Rhine suburb” was surrounded by buildings before 989, and Erfurt. Several Iberian cities have this feature, including Barcelona, Salamanca, Oviedo, Zamora, and Segovia. Edith Ennen, “Europäische Züge der mittelalterlichen Kölner Stadtgeschichte,” in Köln, das Reich und Europa: Abhandlungen über weiträumige Verflechtungen der Stadt Köln in Politik, Recht, und Wirtschaft im Mittelalter (Cologne, 1971), p. 13; Walter Schlesinger, “Städtische Frühformen zwischen Rhein und Elbe,” in Studien zu den Anfängen des europäischen Städtewesens (Constance, 1958), pp. 313–31; T. N. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History (Oxford, 1986), pp. 77–8; Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton, 1979), p. 117. 9. This happened at Winchester even in the tenth century. Biddle, Winchester, pp. 427–8. 10.  Heiko Steuer, “Urban Archaeology in Germany and the Study of Topographic, Functional, and Social Structures,” in Urban Historical Geography: Recent Progress in Britain and Germany, ed. Dietrich Genecke and Gareth Shaw (Cambridge, 1988), p. 88. 11.  André Guillerme, The Age of Water: The Urban Environment in the North of France, A.D. 300–1800 (College Station, Tex., 1988), pp. 52–6, 61–2; Derek Keene, “Suburban Growth,” in Plans and Topography, ed. Barley, vol. 1, p. 81. 12.  The practice was most rigid at Montpellier, where streets and squares were named for linen bleachers, ringmakers, moneychangers, carpenters, drapers, and leatherworkers during the mid-twelfth century and for the vegetable dealers by 1205. Gunnar Mickwitz, Die Kartellfunktionen der Zünfte und ihre Bedeutung bei

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der Entstehung des Zunftwesens: Eine Studie in spätantiker und mittelalterlicher Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Helsinki, 1936), p. 23; André Gouron, La Réglementation des métiers en Languedoc au Moyen Âge (Geneva, 1958), pp. 69–70. Ghislaine Faber and Thierry Lochard, Montpellier: La ville médiévale (Paris, 1992), pp. 94–5, argue against Gouron that the efforts of the authorities at Montpellier to centralize trades were not completely successful. Even leather and cloth trades, which by their nature tended to congregate, had some artisans living away from the main concentration. 13.  For example, virtually every city had at least one municipal butchery, and some had several, segregated by animal and sometimes procedure. Gouron, Le Réglementation Métiers en Languedoc, pp. 118–24. 14.  James F. Powers, “The Creative Interaction between Portuguese and Leonese Municipal Military Law, 1055 to 1279,” Spec 62 (1987), pp. 53–80; Lynn H. Nelson, “The Foundation of Jaca (1076): Urban Growth in Early Aragon,” Spec 53 (1978), pp. 696, 700, 705–6; Angus MacKay, Spain in the Middle Age: From Frontier to Empire, 1000–1500 (London, 1977), pp. 53–4; Miguel Angel Ladero Quesnada, “Les Fortifications urbaines en Castille aux 11e–15e siècles: problématique, financement, aspects sociaux,” in Fortifications, portes de villes, places publiques dans le monde méditerranéen, ed. Jacques Heers (Paris, 1985), pp. 149–55. 15.  The most successful was Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in an area devoid of large cities and well positioned to benefit from the growth of the coal trade. Rye, Ludlow, Boston, and Lynn were important secondary centers. R. H. Hilton, English and French Towns in Feudal Society: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, 1992), p. 40; Lawrence Butler, “The Evolution of Towns: Planted Towns after 1066,” in Plans and Topography of Medieval Towns in England and Wales, ed. M. W. Barley (London, 1976), pp. 38–46. See, in general, Maurice Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages, Town Plantation in England, Wales, and Gascony (New York, 1967), esp. pp. 241–2, 272, 319–38. 16.  Hilmar C. Krueger, “Economic Aspects of Expanding Europe,” in TwelfthCentury Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society: Proceedings of a Symposium Sponsored by the Division of Humanities of the University of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, November 12–14, 1957, ed. Marshall Clagett, Gaines Post, and Robert Reynolds (Madison, 1961), pp. 63–9. 17. Ulm and Kaiserslautern, which were favored royal residences; Chemnitz, Zwickau, and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in the east, and Rothenburg and Schwäbisch Gmund. Wolfgang Braunfels, Urban Design in Western Europe: Regime and Architecture, 900–1900 (Chicago, 1988), pp. 33–5; Hektor Ammann, “Vom Städtewesen Spaniens und Westfrankreichs in Mittelalter,” in Studien zu den Anfängen des europäischen Städtewesens, p. 148; Horst Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1986), p. 166; Erich Maschke, Städte und Menschen: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Stadt, der Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 1959–1977 (Wiesbaden, 1980), pp. 44–5. 18.  Henry established Munich in 1158 by moving the Isar river bridge there, which entailed diverting the main salt route from upper Bavaria. Lübeck shows how “planned” towns actually developed on previously inhabited sites. The Slavic settlement of Old Lübeck goes back at least to 817. By 1100, it had a fortification on the left bank of the Trave near its intersection with the Wakenitz, with artisan suburbs and a merchant settlement on opposite sides of the river. This settlement was

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­ estroyed in 1138, refounded in 1143, and burned again in 1157. It finally fell in d 1159 to Henry the Lion, who hoped to divert the Gotland trade there and thereby control the route to Russia and Sweden. Henry centered the refounded town on a new marketplace intersected by rectangular streets. As in most German towns that were superimposed on Slavic centers, Lübeck’s grid plan was more uniform in architectural type than the older cities of the Rhineland. For an immense literature, see Günter Fehring, “The Archaeology of Early Lübeck: The Relation between the Slavic and German Settlement Sites,” in The Comparative History of Urban Origins in Non-Roman Europe: Ireland, Wales, Denmark, Germany, Poland, and Russia from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Century, ed. H. B. Clarke and Anngret Simms (Oxford, 1985), pp. 269–77, 279–82; Wilhelm Ebel, “Lübisches Recht im Ostseeraum,” in Die Stadt des Mittelalters, ed. Carl Haase (Darmstadt, 1984), p. 261; Heiko Steuer, “Urban Archaeology in Germany and the Study of Topographic, Functional, and Social Structures,” in Urban Historical Geography: Recent Progress in Britain and Germany, ed. Dietrich Genecke and Gareth Shaw (Cambridge, 1988), p. 91; Hans Planitz, Die Deutsche Stadt im Mittelalter, Von der Römerzeit bis zu den Zunftkämpfen, 2nd ed. (Cologne, 1965), pp. 96–7; Thomas Hall, Mittelalterliche Stadtgrund­ risse: Versuch einer Übersicht der Entwicklung in Deutschland und Frankreich (Stockholm, 1978), pp. 110–21. 19.  Harold Carter, An Introduction to Urban Historical Geography (London, 1983), pp. 40–50. 20.  For this transition, see David Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City: From Late Antiquity to the Early Fourteenth Century (London, 1997), pp. 87–140. 21.  Local as well as royal courts contributed to the prosperity of some cities, notably Toulouse, Arles, Angers, Orléans, Mainz, and particularly Vienna. The fact that Troyes and Provins were residences of the counts of Champagne contributed more to their growth as cities than did the transients who visited their fairs. Chéde­ ville, “De la Cité à la ville,” p. 144; Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (Ithaca, 1974), p. 235; Elizabeth Chapin, Les villes de foires Champagne des origines au début du 14e siècle (Paris, 1937), pp. 15–20, 141. 22. Ferdinand Opll, Stadt und Reich im 12. Jahrhundert 1125–1190 (Cologne, 1986), pp. 26–32; Philippe Dollinger, “Der Aufschwung der oberrheinischen Bischofsstädte,” p. 135; Biddle, Winchester, pp. 290–6, 387–92, 493–4; Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 1200–1540 (Oxford, 1989), p. 13. 23.  Henry I forbade transferring ship and wagon cargoes in Cambridgeshire except at the borough of Cambridge, where toll would be taken. The burgesses of Cambridge also got the right to hold a fair at Reach, ten miles upriver. The city elite made its fortune by exporting the raw materials of Cambridgeshire and importing luxuries, especially wine. Henry II ordered foreign merchants in Lincolnshire to trade only in Lincoln. Such provisions centralized commerce in the early cities and gave them jobs and patronage, although these monopolies did not last permanently. Adolphus Ballard, ed., British Borough Charters, 1042–1216 (Cambridge, 1913), p. lxvi; M. D. Lobel, ed., The Atlas of Historic Towns (Baltimore, 1975), vol. 2, pp. 4, 6. 24. Particularly in Germany, the towns remained jurisdictionally heterogeneous. The bishop of Marseille was lord of the new quarters, while the viscount

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held the hilltop. Conflicts at Narbonne only ended in 1112, when the viscount did homage to the archbishop. Similar divisions occurred at Nîmes, Arles, Aix-enProvence, Avignon, Cahors, and Agen. Each lord within these places fortified his quarters, which accentuated their military character and evidently stunted their commercial development. Chédeville, “De la Cité à la ville,” p. 151; Heinrich ­Büttner, “Studien zum frühmittelalterliches Städtewesen in Frankreich, vornehmlich im Loire- und Rhonegebiet,” in Studien zu den Anfängen des europäischen Städtewesens, p. 185. 25.  Marcus Nathan Adler, ed., The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (New York, 1907), pp. 2–8; Boussard, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris, pp. 147–51; Urry, Canterbury, pp. 109–11; M. D. Lobel, The British Atlas of Historic Towns (New York, 1969), p. 10. 26. Diestelkamp, Beiträge, p. 1; Britnell, Commercialisation of English Society, p. 86; Ludwig Falck, Geschichte der Stadt Mainz (Mitte 5. Jahrhundert bis 1244) (Düsseldorf, 1972), p. 161. Even in enormous London, the food markets had a primary importance in the evolution of the city plan. Densest settlement was not in the south and east toward the continent, nor south and west toward the government suburb of Westminster, but rather north and west, toward the food source. The city was centered on the two Cheaps, East and West. The Saxon bridge of London, which served the city until 1209, crossed the Thames at the site of the meat market on a line separating two wards. Schofield, Building of London, p. 33; Brooke and Keir, London, pp. 171–7, 159. See discussion in David Nicholas, Urban Europe, 1100–1700 (Houndmills, 2003), pp. 38–9, based on the notions of Johann Heinrich von Thunen, Isolated State, trans. Carla M. Wartenburg (Oxford, N.Y., 1966), anticipating the arguments of Bruce M. S. Campbell and others, A Medieval Capital and Its Grain Supply: Agrarian Production and Distribution in the London Region ca. 1300 (London, 1993). 27. Nicholas, Urban Europe, p. 64. 28.  The means by which more bullion entered the economy transcends our topic, but a revealing statistic is that the value of coin in circulation in England in 1180 was less than ₤125,000, but it rose to ₤300,000 by 1218, an increase of 140 percent in 38 years. The increase became even stronger thereafter, although not proportionally. While between 1180 and 1218 the annual rate of increase was 3.68 percent, the amount of increase between 1218 and 1311 was ₤800,000 in 93 years, or 166.67 percent over the entire period, or 1.8 percent annually. Thus the end of the twelfth century saw a rate of increase of money in circulation in England, probably due to its trade surplus—coming mainly from wool—that was twice the rate of the rest of the thirteenth century. Britnell, Commercialisation of English Society, pp. 102–3. 29.  Keene, “Towns and the Growth of Trade,” p. 68. 30.  Gunther Hirschfelder, Die Kölner Handelsbeziehungen im Spätmittelalter (Cologne, 1994), p. 31; Chapin, Villes de foires, pp. 227, 113, 120–3, 60–3. 31.  Nineteen illegal guilds in London were fined in 1179. All had their own aldermen, and seven were identified only by the alderman’s name. Guilds were declared illegal in several other towns at this time, but the nature of their organization is not stated. Urry, Canterbury, p. 132; H. E. Salter, Medieval Oxford (Oxford,

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1936), pp. 31–2; Ballard, British Borough Charters, p. lxx; Lobel, Atlas, vol. 1, p. 3; Hilton, English and French Towns, pp. 69–70, 132. 32. Gouron, Réglementation des métiers, pp. 37–9; Georges Lesage, Marseille angevine: Recherches sur son évolution administrative, économique et urbaine, de la victoire de Charles d’Anjou et l’arrivée de Jeanne Ire (1264–1348) (Paris, 1950), pp. 39–40. 33. The statutes of Toulouse show a minute attention to regulating trades, especially the foodmongers. The earliest guilds mentioned were the cordwainers of Toulouse (1158); the moneychangers of Saint-Gilles (statutes from 1176); the dyers of Montpellier; the masons, carpenters, fishmongers, butchers, and wood dealers of Toulouse (1181); and the masons of Nîmes (1187), who received privileges in return for work on the city walls. By the early thirteenth century, seventy-two craft guilds, some burgesses, and the advocates and notaries rotated responsibility for each day’s defense of the gates of Montpellier. But the craftsmen were rarely on city councils this early except at Montpellier, where the moneychangers and drapers each chose two of the twelve consuls after 1204. Nine other guilds, one of them the “laborers,” also had political rights. Gouron, Réglementation des métiers, pp. 39, 47, 52–8. 34.  The victualling trades were the earliest organized crafts, beginning with the butchers in 1146 and the fishmongers in 1154; evidence of other crafts at Paris is after 1200. Boussard, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris, pp. 162–4, 168, 301. 35. Mickwitz, Kartellfunktionen, pp. 77, 80, 91; Chédeville, “De la Cité à la ville,” p. 119. 36.  The fishmongers of Worms were the first attested craft guild in an episcopal city of the upper Rhine. In 1106, the bishop gave twenty-three named fishermen the hereditary right to practice their profession and included a monopoly on the resale of fish within the town area. The burgrave of Strasbourg had justice over eleven trades and chose their masters. Nothing is known of their organization or monopolies. Craft guilds are only attested later at Speyer and Basel. Farther north, the cushion weavers of Cologne received statutes in 1149 and the turners in 1180. Mainz had a religious fraternity of weavers by 1175, by which time craftsmen occupied some lower city offices. The minters were already an important guild, often ministerials of the archbishop. The minters of Worms were given their own court for civil cases in 1165 and were freed of the obligation to serve in other municipal offices. Dollinger, “Der Aufschwung der oberrheinische Bischofsstädte,” p. 142; Strait, Cologne, pp. 62, 70–1; Falck, Geschicte der Stadt Mainz, p. 161; Ferdinand Opll, Stadt und Reich, p. 175. 37.  The statutes of the cobblers of Ferrara in 1112 expressly used those of religious brotherhoods as models. Craft organizations are also found at Ravenna, Rome, Venice, Piacenza, and Verona, although in some of these cases the context suggests labor requirements for the town lord. Mickwitz, Kartellfunktionen, pp. 18–22, 28–9, 36–8; Hilton, English and French Towns, p. 74; Ennen, Frühgeschichte, pp. 235–7. 38. Urry, Canterbury, p. 124; Tore Nyberg, “Gilden, Kalande, Brüderschaften: der skandinavische Einfluss,” in Gilde und Korporation in den nordeuropäischen Städte des späten Mittelalters, ed. Klaus Friedland (Cologne, 1984), pp. 29–40.

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39. The ties of the guilds of thegns to guilds of merchants and to the city governments explain why merchant guilds gained political influence in some larger English cities in the late eleventh or twelfth century, earlier than on the continent. Brooke and Keir, London, pp. 35–6; Urry, Canterbury, pp. 125–9; Biddle, Winchester, pp. 498, 427, 463; Hilton, English and French Towns, pp. 94–5. The volume of evidence is compelling. By 1200, merchant guilds are found in six seigniorial and twenty-three royal boroughs. The list includes virtually all cities and some smaller towns. Many of them evidently go back to the early Norman period. The merchant guild of Oxford contained fewer than half the city’s residents, and some of its members were nonresidents. In 1200, the corporate seal of Gloucester read “seal of the burgesses of the guild of merchants.” Gloucester also received the liberties given to Winchester in 1190, in which guild membership was the prerequisite of citizenship. Thus in England, in contrast to France, the merchant guild did not consist only of wholesalers but also retailers who sold the goods that they made. Lobel, Atlas, vol. 1, pp. 4–5; Jack Simmons, Leicester, Past and Present, vol. 1, Ancient Borough to 1860 (London, 1974), pp. 26–7. 40.  Colin Platt, Medieval Southampton: The Port and the Trading Community, A.D. 1000–1600 (London, 1973), pp. 17–19. 41.  Although most twelfth-century patricians of Cologne founded no lasting dynasty, at least eight prominent families of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had origins in the twelfth. Many of the Cologne elite of the twelfth century were ministerials whose money came from rents and land speculation. Of four elite ­families that did not hold public office until the early thirteenth century, only two came from a mainly merchant background, and even they owned some land, including rural property. Discussion based on Strait, Cologne, pp. 14–21, 27–8, 81–5, 90–1, 100–3, 112–3, 118–9, 121–7. For a similar analysis of Arras and how the elite passed from landholding and rents into moneylending, see Jean Lestocquoy, Patriciens du Moyen-Âge: Les Dynasties bourgeoises d’Arras du 11e au 15e siècle (Arras, 1945), pp. 14–80. 42.  For example, the merchants of Duisburg had “elders” in 1155. In 1105, the bishop of Halberstadt gave judicial power to the town merchants for “themselves or those whom they wanted to represent them.” Merchant guilds can also be confirmed before 1200 in Soest, Schleswig, Bremen, Magdeburg, Dortmund, Goslar, Naumburg, and Minden. Planitz, Deutsche Stadt, pp. 76–7; Karl Fröhlich, “Kaufmannsgilden und Stadtverfassung im Mittelalter,” in Haase, Stadt des Mittelalters, pp. 18–19. 43.  Henri Platelle, Histoire de Valenciennes (Lille, 1982), pp. 26–7. 44.  Alain Derville, Histoire de Saint-Omer (Lille, 1981), p. 45; Chédeville, “De la Cité à la ville,” p. 131; Raymond Monier, Les Institutions judiciaires des villes de Flandre des origines à la rédaction des Coutumes (Lille, 1924), pp. 82–4; Raymond Van Uytven, “Stadsgeschiedenis in het Noorden en Zuiden” [Urban History in North and South], in Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 2 (Utrecht, 1982), p. 217; Carlos Wyffels, “Hanse, grands marchands et patriciens de Saint-Omer,” Société Académique des Antiquaires de la Morinie: Mémoires 38 (1962), p. 4; Ballard, British Borough Charters, p. cxv. 45.  Maria Serena Mazzi, “Milano dei secoli 9–12 in contribute dell’ ultimo trentennio,” Archivio Storico Italiano 132 (1974), pp. 399–400, 408–9.

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46.  Keene, “Towns and the Growth of Trade,” p. 80. 47.  Frank Kolb, Die Stadt im Altertum (Munich, 1984), p. 262. 48.  Chédeville, “De la Cité à la ville,” pp. 134–9; Hilton, English and French Towns, pp. 88–9. 49.  Dietrich Claude, Topographie und Verfassung der Städte Bourges und Poitiers bis in das 11. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 1960), p. 145; David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (London, 1992), p. 105; Franz Petri, “Die Anfänge des mittelalterlichen Städtewesens in der Nederlanden und das angrenzenden Frankreich,” in Studien zun den Anfängen des europäishen Städtewesens, ed. F. Petri (Constance, 1965), p. 273. 50.  The best case for this analysis is made by Knut Schulz, Die Freiheit des Bürgers. Städtische Gesellschaft im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter (Darmstadt, 2008), pp. 17–220. See also Renate Brandl-Ziegert, “Die Sozialstruktur der bayerischen Bischofs- und Residenzstädte Passau, Freising, Landshut, und Ingolstadt: Die Entwicklung des Bürgertums vom 9. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert,” in Die mittelalterliche Stadt in Bayern, ed. Karl Bosl (Munich, 1974), pp. 19–31, 64–71; Karl Bosl, “Die Sozialstruktur der mittelalterlichen Residenz- und Fernhandelsstadt Regensburg. Die Entwicklung ihres Bürgertums vom 9.–14. Jahrhundert,” in Untersuchungen zur gesellschaftlichen Struktur der mittelalterlichen Städte in Europa (Constance, 1966), pp. 121–34; Karl Bosl, Die wirtschaftliche und gesellschaftliche Entwicklung des Augsburger Bürgertums vom 10. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1969), pp. 13–14. 51. Hilton, English and French Towns, pp. 91–2; Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 36–8. 52. Frans Blockmans, Het Gentsche Stadspatriciaat tot omstreeks 1302 [The City Patriciate of Ghent until about 1302] (Antwerp, 1938), pp. 64–97. 53.  Yves Barel, La Ville médiévale: Système sociale, système urbain (Grenoble, 1977), p. 26; Gina Fasoli, Raoul Manselli, and Giovanni Tabacco, “La struttura sociale delle città italiane,” in Untersuchungen zur gesellschaftlichen Struktur der mittelalterlichen Städte in Europa, p. 312. 54. Gina Fasoli, ‘Città e feudalità,’ in Structures féodales et féodalisme dans l’Occident méditerranéen (10e–13e siècles): Bilan et perspectives de recherches (Rome, 1980), pp. 365–6. 55.  Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution, vol. 1, The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1983) pp. 340–1, 357–8. 56.  Characteristics based on Berman, Law and Revolution, pp. 349–50. Some of these read back from later evidence, but as a whole, his argument is compelling. 57. Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, pp. 120–1, after R. C. Van Caenegem and Ludo Milis, “Kritische Uitgave van de ‘Grote Keure’ van Filips van de Elzas, graaf van Vlaanderen, voor Gent en Brugge (1165–1177),” [Critical Edition of the Great Constitution of Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders, for Ghent and Bruges (1165– 1177)], Bulletin de la Commission Royale d’Histoire 143 (1977), pp. 207–57. 58.  Philippe Dollinger, Histoire de l’Alsace (Toulouse, 1970), p. 113; John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1986), p. 61.

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59.  Robert Bartlett, Making of Europe, pp. 172–7; Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 376. 60. Berman, Law and Revolution, pp. 380–6. 61.  Ibid., pp. 390–6. 62.  From the twelfth century, most German town laws, building on Iberian models, granted citizenship for any serf who could live unchallenged in the town for a year and a day, but this was so difficult that in practice most serfs in the towns were there with their lords’ consent. 63.  Chédeville, “De la Cité à la ville,” p. 163; van Uytven, “Stadsgeschiedenis,” p. 206. 64. Berman, Law and Revolution, pp. 394–7. 65.  Examples are Exeter, Cambridge, Lincoln, York, Chester, and London. Brooke and Keir, London, pp. xix–xx, 29, 36–41; Urry, Canterbury, pp. 80–2. 66. Fr. échevins, Germ. Schöffen, Fl. scepenen. 67. Strait, Cologne, p, 12; Chédeville, “De la Cité à la ville,” pp. 155–6; Ballard, British Borough Charters, p. lxxxviii; van Uytven, “Stadsgeschiedenis,” pp. 214, 224–7; Monier, Institutions judiciares, p. 26. 68.  Charles Petit-Dutaillis, The French Communes in the Middle Ages (Amsterdam, 1978), pp. 9–62; Chédeville, “De la Cité à la ville,” pp. 166–7; Claude, Topo­ graphie und Verfassung, pp. 146–9. 69.  The most famous is a series of disturbances at Cambrai, beginning in the tenth century and only ending when the emperor in 1182 restored the city government that the bishop had quashed, but he pointedly avoided calling Cambrai a commune. Van Uytven, “Stadsgeschiedenis,” pp. 214–5; Opll, Stadt und Reich, pp. 55–62. 70.  “‘Commune’ is a new and evil name for an arrangement for them all to pay the customary head tax, which they owe their lords as a servile due, in a lump sum once a year, and if anyone commits a crime, he shall pay a fine set by law, and all other financial exactions which are customarily imposed on serfs are completely abolished”; Guibert of Nogent, Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent (1064?–ca. 1125), ed. John F. Benton (New York, 1970), p. 167. 71.  For example, the Charter of Peace that Count Baldwin of Hainault sold to Valenciennes in 1114 was a sworn association of most inhabitants over age fifteen, excluding foreigners, those such as serfs and clerks who did not have control over their own persons, and residents of several private jurisdictions inside the city. His échevins were limited to civil cases, while jurés representing the community were instituted for criminal cases, thus dealing with those who would disturb the peace association. The jurés were also given broad authority to handle problems not mentioned in the charter. The city hall itself was called the “house of peace.” Monier, Institutions judiciares, pp. 76–9; van Uytven, “Stadsgeschiedenis,” p. 215; Henri Platelle, Histoire de Valenciennes (Lille, 1982), pp. 28–32, 41–3; Chédeville, “De la Cité à la ville,” pp.167, 176. 72.  This document, versions of which were given to other French communities, presupposed that the inhabitants would choose a mayor and jurés who governed a territory. The magistrates were to seize the property of persons convicted of

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misdeeds against a member of the commune or who refused to appear for judgment. Fighting was not permitted inside the town area. Servile exactions except the head tax and tallage were ended. Far from being a haven to serfs, the commune promised that “no alien from among those subject to a poll-tax owed to any church or knight of the state shall be received into this institution of the peace unless his lord agrees.” Petit-Dutaillis, French Communes, pp. 53–6; Guibert of Nogent, Self and Society, pp. 157–82, esp. 166–7; Michel Bur, ed., Histoire de Laon et du Laonnais (Toulouse, 1987), pp. 66–71. 73.  The “Establishments” of Rouen, for example, became the model for other communal charters in Normandy and areas south of the Loire where the Angevins ruled. The first twenty-nine clauses were probably given in the 1160s, the rest after 1204. They provided a tightly controlled regime, with minute regulations on everything from choosing magistrates to gossiping. All city officials were drawn from one hundred “peers,” a hereditary aristocracy of persons who were probably in the king’s favor and not really representatives of the commune. The peers chose twelve éche­ vins and twelve jurés from their number to handle middle and low justice and civil cases, while the king’s officers kept high justice. The peers met bi-weekly, the jurés weekly, the échevins twice a week. The prince named the mayor annually from three persons nominated by the peers. He chaired all meetings, received incomes, kept keys to the gates, and controlled the militia. Michel Mollat, Histoire de Rouen (Toulouse, 1979), pp. 61–3; Petit-Dutaillis, French Communes, pp. 63–6. 74. Opll, Stadt und Reich, pp. 42–5, 160–3; Dollinger, “Der Aufschwung der oberrheinische Bischofsstädte,” pp. 138–40. 75.  Payments to use mills persisted, as did monopolies on strategic goods. The advocate of the bishop of Erfurt collected groundrent in the city, held blood justice, and until 1235 controlled the gate through which the main street entered the city. Augsburg’s charter of 1156 confirmed the bishop’s right to appoint the advocate, burgrave, and mintmaster, but he was to consider the “petition” of ministerials, “urbanites,” and the entire people. The advocate had high justice, while the burgrave dealt with ordinary affairs, including economic regulation. Van Uytven, “Stads­geschiedenis,” p. 206; Opll, Stadt und Reich, pp. 33–8, 141, 173; Walter Schlesinger, Städtische Frühformen zwischen Rhein und Elbe,” in Studien zu den Anfängen des europäischen Städtewesens, pp. 332–3. 76.  The bishop of Speyer had to appoint an “urban tribune” in 1084 to handle actions between “citizens.” A “common council” and a “law of the citizens” in apposition to those of the cathedral immunity are mentioned in 1101. Citizens of Speyer were exempt from the court of the royal bailiff outside the walls, and no one could be forced to go outside the city to finish a lawsuit begun inside. At Worms the charter of 1106 for the fishmongers’ guild mentions “the common council of the townspeople.” A movement against the bishop began at Metz in 1097 led by butchers and supported by the cathedral canons. By the 1120s, the cathedral and the burgesses were allied against the bishop and the suburban abbeys. The townspeople were represented by deans, then by 1130 by “ministers” who in 1130 became the three mayors of the city. Strait, Cologne, p. 37; Gerhard Köbler, “Mittel­ europäisches Städtewesen in salischer Zeit: Die Ausgliederung exemter Rechtsbezirke

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in Mittel- und Niederrheinischen Städte,” in Beiträge zum hochmittelalterlichen Städtewesen, ed. Diestelkamp, p. 12; Jean Schneider, La Ville de Metz aux 13e et 14e siècles (Nancy, 1950), pp. 73–82. 77. Ennen, Frühgeschichte, pp. 238–41; Opll, Stadt und Reich, p. 376; Gina Fasoli, Raoul Manselli, and Giovanni Tabacco, “La struttura sociale,” p. 303. 78.  Diane Owen Hughes, “Urban Growth and Family Structure in Medieval Genoa,” P&P 66 (1970), pp. 3–28; Jacques Heers, Espaces publics, espaces privés dans la ville: Le Liber Terminorum de Bologne (1294) (Paris, 1984), pp. 60–1; Frederick C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore, 1973), p. 98; Dennis Romano, Patricians and Popolani. The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 15–18; Barel, Ville médiévale, p. 26; Étienne Hubert, Espace urbain et habitat à Rome du 10e siècle à la fin du 13e siècle (Rome, 1990), pp. 75–93, 130–6; Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City (Princeton, 1980), pp. 152–6. 79.  Although the consuls were “good men” in most cities, at Pistoia they were the bishop’s officials and were thus similar to the scabini of the northern cities. The connection between consuls and good men could be very close: in negotiations with Rome, Siena used twelve good men in 1124 and consuls in 1125. “Consuls of the commune” were distinguished from “consuls of pleas” at Genoa from 1133. Como and Cremona had “consuls of the commune” and “consuls of justice.” Verona had “consuls of justice” and “consuls of the merchants” in the 1170s. Opll, Stadt und Reich, pp. 239–40, 257–8, 269, 398, 368–9, 471; Ennen, Frühgeschichte, pp. 270–1. 80.  Daniel Waley, Medieval Orvieto. The Political History of an Italian CityState, 1157–1334 (Cambridge, 1952), p. 10; Pierre Racine, “De la Porte, élément de defense, division administrative: L’exemple de Plaisance,” in Fortifications, portes de villes, places publiques dans le monde méditerranéen, ed. Jacques Heers (Paris, 1985), pp. 180–2. 81.  Giovanni Tabacco, The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy: Structures of Political Rule (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 185–8; Ennen, Frühgeschichte, pp. 273–6; André Gouron, “Diffusion des consulats méridionaux et expansion du droit romain au 12e et 13e siècles,” in Le Science du droit dans le Midi de la France au Moyen Âge, ed. André Gouron, (London, 1984), pp. 30–1; Carol Lansing, The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune (Paris, 1991), pp. 9–10. 82. Barel, Ville médiévale, pp. 120–1; Heers, Espaces publics, pp. 58–9; J. K. Hyde, Padua in the Age of Dante (Manchester, 1966), p. 210. 83. Opll, Stadt und Reich, p. 20. 84.  Toulouse had capitularii in 1152; because the city councilors were later called capitouls, the smaller towns of the region used that name. Consulates only developed in northern and central Provence after 1220. Faber and Lochard, Montpellier, pp. 84–5; Gouron, “Diffusion des consulats,” pp. 32–7; Ennen, Frühgeschichte, p. 276. 85.  Chédeville, “De la Cité à la ville,” pp. 178–9; Tabacco, Struggle for Power, pp. 185–8. 86.  Krueger, “Economic Aspects of Expanding Europe,” pp. 59–76. 87.  Clagett, Post, and Reynolds, Twelfth-Century Europe, p. vii.

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88.  Benson and Constable, eds., Renaissance & Renewal. The urban article also takes a cultural approach: John H. Mundy, “Urban Society and Culture: Toulouse and Its Region,” pp. 229–47; Thomas N. Bisson, ed., Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia, 1995). While “cultures of power” as a theme suggests focus on the aristocracy, surely no one would argue that there were no power relationships in the twelfth-century towns. There is some urban material in R. C. Van Caenegem, “Law and Power in Twelfth-Century Flanders,” (pp. 149–71) and John W. Williams, “León: The Iconography of a Capital,” (pp. 231–58). 89.  The two volumes of The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4, contain forty-two articles, three of them in two parts with different authors. The towns merit a single article, accounting for 2.6 percent of the space.

ten

Peasants, the Seigneurial Regime, and Serfdom in the Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries Pau l F r e e d m an

The present volume and the conference that preceded it were not ex­ plicitly designed to update the 1977 Harvard meeting on the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century held on the fiftieth anniversary of Charles Homer Haskins’ classic publication.1 Nevertheless, there are some interesting points of comparison, especially the degree of attention paid to social historical topics. In 1977, the themes of Haskins’ The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century were revisited, so that the topics and discussion were again about culture—subjects such as translations, theology, law, science, and Latinity. Some effort was made, however, to consider the social conditions of the Twelfth Century Renaissance, especially a short communication from Georges Duby on courtly culture and a contribution by John Mundy on Toulouse (and so, by implication, medieval cities generally).2 Given this book’s scope and set of topics, I would like to look at social change in rural society during the twelfth and neighboring centuries and offer an overview of questions that have influenced historical approaches to the agrarian history of the high Middle Ages. I am particularly interested in how historical understanding of the medieval aristocracy and its imposition of a seigneurial regime of exploitation have affected estimations of the condition of the peasantry. In the second section of this article, I will discuss more carefully one aspect of that condition: the in­ stitution of serfdom and how our understanding of its significance has fluctuated and been revised in recent years. The degree to which historians 259

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have considered serfdom as important has been affected by the historiography of feudalism, seigneurial extraction, and peasant resistance. Understanding the situation of the peasantry, the vast majority of the medieval population, is conditioned by how historians have looked at social change during the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. The Seigneurial Regime within Medieval Social History

Although the Harvard conference on the Twelfth Century Renaissance was, as just noted, devoted to intellectual developments, the year 1977 is a convenient date to mark the apogee of a certain kind of medieval rural history. In terms of prestige within the medieval field, agrarian studies in 1977 were more widely noticed and considered more exciting than would be the case at any subsequent moment. By the early 1980s, the attention of medievalists was turning in other directions. In his provocative book of 2001, L’avenir d’un passé incertain, Alain Guerreau laments the decline of agrarian history within the overall range of medieval subjects. According to Guerreau, expansion of the twentiethcentury study of medieval history was set in motion by progress in understanding the medieval countryside. The impact of the Annales school was most clearly demonstrated in the advances in describing how geography shapes regions, how agricultural changes underlie the more dramatic commercial revolutions, and how the lives and outlook of the ninety percent of the population who were peasants affected the medieval economy and medieval civilization. The very notion of the longue durée is based on an appreciation of the tectonic movements of an agricultural society. Guerreau laments that the fundamental work of scholars such as Marc Bloch, M. M. Postan, Georges Duby, and Pierre Toubert was abandoned in the 1980s just when its possibilities might have been developed. How could this “tragedy” have happened, he asks?3 The cause of the alleged tragedy is the orientation towards the mentalités side of the original Annales mission. Nutrition, demography, archaeology, and agriculture dominated the journal in the middle of the twentieth century, but they were eclipsed by studies of piety, gender, ritual, and patterns of thought in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The holy greyhound proved more attractive than beech forests or chalky soil; the study of material culture came to focus on shopping for luxuries rather than specifications for plowing equipment; diet and alimentation gave way to cuisine and cookbooks. Above all, the quantitative methodology, which had been

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expected to dominate the future of the historical “sciences,” began a precipitous decline beginning just at the end of the 1970s. The triumph of mentalités was not total: in the early 1990s, the Annales turned back to social science, but by this time the journal also had lost its status as the global center of the historical enterprise. Guerreau is too alarmist about the supposed collapse of rural history, especially when applied to France. That country has a tradition of combining social and cultural history (evident in the work of Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt) and still has many scholars who study the documents and material conditions of feudal society. The recent progress of medieval archaeology in France is especially impressive in contrast to the supposed golden age of the 1950s and 1960s when the French government would not even fund the excavation of sites dating from after 800.4 Much has happened in recent decades to improve our understanding of peasants, lords, and the exploitation of the medieval countryside. Some of this progress is a continuation of the projects launched by earlier generations of great French scholars. To the classics of French regional histories such as Duby’s book on the Mâconnais or Fossier’s study of Picardy, there have been added recently accounts of areas outside of France executed in the orthodox histoire totale fashion: Laurent Feller’s study of the Abruzzi, Jean-Pierre Delumeau’s work on Arezzo and its surroundings, François Menant on eastern Lombardy, or Juan José Larrea on Navarre.5 The series of conferences held annually at the abbey of Flaran has produced recent volumes on topics such as credit, the dispersed habitat, village customs, tools, and rural elites.6 Knowledge about Catalonia has been immensely expanded by Lluís To Figueras, who has written about family and inheritance of rural property, Mercè Aventín on feudal society in the region of the Vallès Oriental, and Pere Benito on land and seigneurie in the surrounding territorium of Barcelona.7 Francesco Panero has carefully delineated the legal as well as practical differences among slaves, serfs, and villani in Italy.8 The French historian Monique Bourin, the British scholar Chris Wickham, and Pascual Martínez Sopena from Spain organized a series of conferences and workshops around the theme of prélèvement seigneurial, and recent volumes resulting from these meetings survey various parts of Europe with regard to the seigneurial regime, the peasant land market, and serfdom.9 Isabel Alfonso in Madrid recently put together a conference and collection of articles on the historiography of medieval rural societies in France, England, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Poland.10

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Progress has been particularly notable in England. I offer just a few examples: Judith Bennett’s accounts of women in the medieval countryside and economy; work on the peasant land market supervised by P. D. A. Harvey; Christopher Dyer’s studies of peasant tenancy and standards of living; and Philip Schofield’s general book on peasants, lordship, and community.11 All of these accomplishments notwithstanding, there is a certain lack of focus or sense of purpose in how to think about the grand questions and chronological evolutions or revolutions in agrarian history, something that has affected many other fields of medieval cultural and social history. The controversy over whether or not there was a feudal revolution around the year 1000 is just one aspect of attempts to account for the domination of the aristocracy over the countryside in relation to those who actually performed the work for them. The recent book by Thomas Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century, goes a long way towards understanding the rise of a military aristocracy in terms of its impact on the lower orders of society and shows how seigneurial violence was mobilized to coerce the peasantry.12 It should be obvious that the medieval economy and the society it supported depended on peasants being forced to give labor, produce, or money to lords. As Chris Wickham cogently puts it: “Peasants were the primary producers of the rural society of the feudal mode of production, and lords (including churches and kings) could only exist because they took rents, dues, and services from peasants.”13 How much this seigneurial extraction amounted to varied greatly over time and space, but some form of transfer was pretty much universal. There is still much that we do not understand on a quite basic level about how the lords actually managed to exploit their tenants.14 To what extent did lords simply profit from a general expansion of the agrarian population and economy, or were they themselves the organizers of assarts, new settlements, and more efficient methods and consequently higher yields? Was the undoubted growth of the rural economy the result of new opportunities (as evidenced by franchise charters, for example) or was it the effect of the rise of more efficient methods of extraction based on seigneurial domination of the countryside? There is a consensus that seigneurial exploitation of peasant tenants has much to do with the initial growth of the medieval economy, but lords were also agile enough to reap benefits from the more market-oriented world of the high Middle Ages. At the same time, the degree of coercion or the manner of negotiations between peasants and lords (the mechanism by which lords acquired much of the surplus production of peasants) remains less than clear.

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Theories of Society and Chronologies of Change

As is well-known, Georges Duby advanced Marc Bloch’s analysis of feudal society by answering Bloch’s call for a regional approach to the history of the countryside. Duby examined the Mâconnais in terms of the growth of the seigneurie and the decline of public authority in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.15 In doing so, Duby not only launched an effort to distinguish the experiences of different historical regions, but altered Bloch’s periodization of change in the feudal regime.16 Bloch had posited two feudal ages, the first politically disorganized and marked by upheaval and social transformation, the second characterized by a process of creating ties between lords and followers that in turn was the basis for stable social structures and the eventual reemergence of state authority. Bloch’s periodization of two eras of feudal society was further perfected and elaborated in 1968 with the publication of Robert Boutruche’s two-volume synthesis, Seigneurie et féodalité.17 According to Duby, especially in his later work, there was only one era of feudalism, and its advent came dramatically at the beginning of the eleventh century when lords arrogated to themselves the powers formerly possessed by kings and counts. This placed the beginnings of feudal society later than the breakup of the Carolingian polity that had been important to Bloch, who had also underscored the impact of the last great invasions, those of the Vikings, Magyars, and “Saracens.” For Duby, the invasions were irrelevant, and state authority survived the Carolingian debacle until sometime around the beginning of the new millennium. The tendency to situate the transformation of society and the domination of the seigneurie around the year 1000 was implicit in Duby’s early studies of the peasantry and rural society but more decisively stated in Guerriers et paysans and Les trois ordres.18 The assertion of a military class against royal and princely authority, against the properties of the church, and against the liberties of the peasants would become the central fact of medieval political organization. In contrast to Bloch, Duby’s feudalism was not a purely destructive force but rather the cause of a rapid rise in agricultural productivity that led to the accelerated expansion of the medieval economy. Imposition of the seigneurial regime by the military elite may have been unjust and oppressive, but it organized peasants in a way that increased labor and crop yields and led to a more efficient exploitation of previously unplowed or lightly occupied land. Instead of standing against economic progress, the aristocratic domination of the countryside was the catalyst for growth and expansion.19

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Duby, therefore, emphasized a radical intensification of what lords could demand as a result of their usurpation of public authority. As established by Duby, the French school distinguished between economic control of land (seigneurie foncière) and powers of command normally exercised by states (seigneurie banale), but in the aftermath of the social transformation created by feudalism, the lords exercised and merged both forms of power. The seigneurie banale includes forms of political sway, such as the administration of justice or military aids, but it also encompassed the crucial power to levy other arbitrary exactions, monopolies on milling, baking, and the like, or taxes on sales and inheritance of land.20 This is a different picture from that provided by Bloch, who believed that the powers of lords in the eleventh century were not new but already in place during the post-Carolingian era, so that the collapse of state authority was both earlier and not as important to Bloch as it was to Duby. The importance of the revolutionary changes around the year 1000 was underlined by Pierre Bonnassie’s studies of Catalonia. In this case, the clear persistence of public authority by the counts of Barcelona during the tenth century made its sudden eclipse after 1020 all the more dramatic as a consequence not of internal decay but of the feudal uprising.21 Bonnassie was more concerned than Duby with the simultaneous shift from slavery to serfdom. More generally, he was preoccupied with the end of a prolonged era of late antiquity (up to 1000) and its replacement by a radically different, although still oppressive, mode of production. The momentous shift from an antique society based on slavery, public authority, and office holding to a feudal order founded on the military aristocracy and its power to command (the seigneurie banale) was then historiographically replicated in studies of the French provinces (Provence, Picardy, Berry) and to some extent outside the borders of France.22 The means of aristocratic control might vary. Pierre Toubert’s work on Latium introduced to a wider audience the practice of incastellamento whereby previously dispersed peasants were grouped together by lords into fortified concentrated villages, not so much for their protection as for their more efficient exploitation, and many histories of Mediterranean regions proposed a similar pattern.23 The main fact, however, was that a seigneurial regime was imposed by a feudal elite according to a widely replicated pattern. Anything that did not fit the model, such as Elisabeth MagnouNortier’s research on eastern Languedoc with her radical emphasis on the continuity of Roman institutions, tended to be ignored.24 By 1977, at the time of the Harvard conference, the French model was established and authoritative. As a reigning orthodoxy, its extent was

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geographically limited but nonetheless powerful given the central importance of France as the classic land of feudalism. The model didn’t work all that well for England where state power was strong from the Anglo-Saxon era through the Plantagenets, so that the sway lords held over their tenants was a result of the weakness of peasants from a legal point of view, not from baronial usurpation of royal rights. It did not really apply to Germany where lordship was seen in terms of rent and the withdrawal of lords from direct estate supervision and the advent of Grundherrschaft in tandem with political rights.25 The devolution of imperial authority to regional lords tended to draw attention away from the analysis of lordship. The French structure was modified for Italy where seigneurial control came from both power over land or rent on the one hand and political usurpation on the other. Yet the feudal revolution would be enshrined for Europe as a whole in syntheses such as Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel’s La mutation féodale, first published in 1980, and the year 1000 would be further fixed as the great turning point between antiquity and feudalism in the work of Guy Bois.26 A second edition of Poly and Bournazel provided Dominique Barthélemy with an occasion in 1992 to question the entire idea of a feudal revolution.27 Among other points Barthélemy noted that exalting the year 1000 as the moment when aristocratic domination began, or as the border between ancient and medieval forms of social organization, compresses all change into one chronological moment and presents preceding and succeeding centuries as merely anticipations or the unwinding of consequences. The assertion that slavery was suddenly replaced by the seigneurie banale in the eleventh century has the effect of ignoring the weakness of slavery in the tenth century and the changes in the social order of the countryside that took place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in particular the imposition of serfdom. As Barthélemy pointed out, the focus on the seigneurie banale has contributed to the obscuring of the importance of serfdom.28 If the French school assumed that the seigneurie banale was strong enough so that all peasants were more or less within its grasp, the historians of English rural society were always more attuned to differentiation among the peasantry. Indeed, it is the hallmark of the Toronto school of English rural studies that the distinctions between village elites and those below them were equally or more important than the impact of the lord’s demands on the manor.29 The villages were run by these elites (jurors, aletasters) and not by the usually absentee lords. Unlike in France, however, there has not been a single orthodoxy for England, and estimates of the

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a­ ctual condition of the peasantry range wildly, from Rodney Hilton’s accounts of the oppression leading to the Rising of 1381 to Alan Macfarlane’s denial that the term peasant can even be used for medieval England as those who tilled the land were essentially precapitalist free agents.30 An important English variant on the feudal revolution is R. I. Moore’s sweeping synthesis, The First European Revolution, in which there are some elements of Bloch’s two ages, notably the shift from an economy of predation to an economy of exploitation. Moore’s revolution unfolds over two and a half centuries, but he posits an eleventh-century turning point in the creation of elites, administrative structures, and lordship. This is not limited to England for its terrain of analysis, but indeed takes a considerable amount of the “Eurasian landmass” as its subject and setting.31 Each modern European nation has particular historiographic preoccupations, so that, for example, the origins and imposition of feudalism remains a live issue in Spain but is pretty much dead in Britain. The seigneurie banale and its distinction from the seigneurie foncière remains a particularly French issue (with some echoes in Spain and Italy). The imposition of serfdom in the late Middle Ages and whether this constitutes a “second” or restored serfdom or something new is important to Eastern European agrarian historians. The process of organizing previously free peasants through incastellamento has been extended from Italy to parts of the western Mediterranean. The impact of legal teachings and institutions has great significance for England and Catalonia. The profits of lordship from demesne versus rent are questions in England and in Germany. Despite this variation, a few generalizations about what happened in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and what was of lasting importance may be ventured. In different ways in different places, this is the era in which the seigneurial regime was consolidated as methods of administration and extraction were developed and extended. This took place through the elaboration of legal systems that governed relations between tenants and lords and that limited the rights of royal intervention. As part of the development of law and institutions, legal condition (free and unfree) was more firmly defined. This was not just an abstraction of academically trained jurists but an institutional reality. Everywhere the actual administrative apparatus was perfected, including the practices of record-keeping with regard to status, rent, and inheritance. Simultaneously, however, there were forces that tended to relax the grip of this increasingly well-articulated regime. Among these mitigating factors was the settlement of new lands, both on frontiers and within lightly populated but central regions. Franchise charters designed to at-

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tract colonists defined certain exemptions and liberties, but also were compatible with the impetus to create a codified and enforceable set of seigneurial custom and regulation. A second factor relaxing the rigor of seigneurial impositions was the commutation of tenant obligations of labor or payment in kind into money rent. The lords’ desire for financial liquidity gave them motives to expend less energy on multiplying conditions and obligations as long as they were guaranteed payment.32 A third ameliorating development was the growth of cities that tended to create, at the very least, new categories of tenancy. Without buying into old assumptions about the freedom brought about by access to cities, we can certainly see that the cities expanded not because of internal growth but through rural migration, and that the urban peripheries, such as the so-called territorium of Barcelona, were cultivated by means of different kinds of lease arrangements such as emphyteusis, subleasing, bourgeois succession to titles of lordship, and other innovative, but for that reason nonstandard, methods of getting labor and produce from the inhabitants of the land.33 Finally, the nature of the market and the interaction of lordship with family formation and succession are of great significance, although they can be interpreted as either strengthening or weakening seigneurial control. Was the velocity of small transactions in land that continued throughout the period a sign of petty entrepreneurship and consolidation, or of the desperate situation of small cultivators and their discouragement before the impress of seigneurial and later commercial power? To what extent was the land market itself a reflection of changes in family size and wealth, providing agriculturalists with motives either to sell or to buy land depending on these factors?34 Are developments such as tighter inheritance practices demanded by lords to benefit their administrative continuity, or are they the result of the peasants’ own shifting attitudes towards land and offspring?35 Although these issues have been actively discussed since the revival of interest in the 1925 work of A. V. Chayanov on the peasant family economy, the initiatives of lords and peasants in changing patterns of inheritance, family formation, and the buying or leasing of land remain to be explored.36 Serfdom

One of the ways in which lords were able to structure and to some extent justify their demands was the institution of serfdom: the imposition of servile status on a category of peasants, placing them in a closer degree of

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­ ependence and supervision with regard to their lords. The problem of d medieval serfdom, specifically how widespread and how effective it was as an agent of seigneurial exploitation, shows some of the difficulties in understanding the social condition of the peasantry. As with the understanding of medieval social change generally, the historiography of serfdom is greatly affected by problems of chronology as well as geography: when and where was serfdom important, waning, or gaining in strength? What do such developments imply about the medieval economy and the configuration of power within society? All serfs were peasants, but not all peasants were serfs. We are considering a population that was a minority of the European-wide peasant population, but a significant one and in many regions a majority. Peasants are those who farm individual holdings as a family and who provide rent to a lord holding both economic and extra-economic (often jurisdictional) power.37 Serfs, a subset of the medieval peasantry, were legally unfree although, unlike slaves, they formed recognized marriages and usually could not be bought or sold independently of the land they occupied. They belonged, in some sense, to the lord and could not break this bond except upon payment of a manumission fine. As tokens of their status, serfs were subject to controls over marriage and inheritance, and these payments symbolized their unfree condition and could serve as legal indices to prove it. That the lords claimed rights to seize property at will or levy tributes in connection with marriage, death, or even adultery provided revenue but also dramatized the unfree and dependent status of tenants defined as owing such obligations.38 If all that mattered was that lords were able to control the peasantry and obscure the previously clear distinction between slave and free, then all peasants could be considered equally subject to seigneurial control regardless of legal condition. According to this point of view, therefore, there was little internal differentiation among the peasantry. Legal freedom or the lack of freedom was regarded by historians as irrelevant when compared to the fact of lordship and seigneurial extraction. If the older, juridical historiography of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century had overestimated the degree to which the medieval peasant was inevitably a serf, the French orthodoxy of the 1970s to 1990s was inclined to under­ estimate the importance of servitude, subsuming it into a general oppression of the peasantry of a sort that Duby outlined in his most widely diffused works such as Les trois ordres.39 Pierre Bonnassie was something of an exception to this tendency to ignore serfdom because he was interested in the transition from ancient

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slavery to medieval serfdom (considering both as crucial to the different systems of production), and because he studied Catalonia, where it is hard to ignore servile conditions in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. But Bonnassie, too, focused his attention increasingly on 1000 or shortly after as the pivotal moment of social change, ignoring, in my opinion, the gradual development of Catalan serfdom especially in the years around 1200.40 The twelfth century was a period of consolidation and definition of lordship, but it offers a tremendous variety in the specific means of organizing rural society. Such a statement is not, perhaps, very helpful. Having called into question the grand periodization of feudalism, it is not really satisfying to leave it that things were different in different regions. The eclipse of the notion of a sudden passage from antiquity to feudalism does free us, however, to look at what really happened in various places and to come up with patterns based on a wider comparative framework. Here, I focus on peasant serfdom as a way of understanding the organization and impress of the seigneurial regime that dominated medieval agrarian society. Serfdom can be discussed coherently without saying it was universally waning, or growing, or merely an abstract legal definition and hence insignificant. In considering the nature and diffusion of serfdom we are aided by the relatively recent publication of two collections of essays on peasant servitude, one on Mediterranean lands and the other on northern and central Europe.41 Certainly there was change over time as well as geographical variation. As long ago as 1953, Georges Duby pointed out that variations in place as well as time matter in discussing servitude.42 There are areas such as the west of France that had little or no defined condition of serfdom, although even here some regions, such as Normandy, put into place limitations on the freedom of tenants that borrowed from and resembled what were elsewhere more explicitly forms of serfdom.43 In other places such as Hungary and eastern Germany, serfdom arrived in the late Middle Ages after a period of frontier liberties and lasted well into modernity.44 In Catalonia, servitude grew in strength throughout the twelfth to fifteenth centuries and would only be thrown off by a peasant rebellion.45 Serfdom was widespread in medieval Europe, but its effects varied as did its permanence. The language, culture, and social evolution of Lan­ guedoc and Catalonia have much in common, but servitude passed into near desuetude in thirteenth-century Languedoc while greatly strengthening in Catalonia.46 In Aragon, serfdom evaporated by the late thirteenth century, while it was strengthening in Navarre, and it became more

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e­ntrenched without becoming as constraining as in Catalonia. Within Cata­lonia itself, there was a clear difference between the original northern counties of “Old Catalonia,” where serfdom was firmly rooted, and the lands conquered in the twelfth century, the territories of “New Catalonia,” characterized by franchise charters that exempted the inhabitants from the servile indices. In Germany, there were several different regimes, and, while serfdom was being imposed in the east, it was strongly resisted in the southwest and not much of an issue in Westphalia, the Rhineland, or the northwestern coast.47 The Swiss Confederation and its adjoining territories constitute a mini-example of the geographical complexities of serfdom, with peasant republics adjoining lands of harsh and effective seigneurial subjugation.48 In Denmark, serfdom was introduced in Sealand where it lasted well into the early-modern centuries, but Jutland remained relatively free of servitude, while Dithmarschen in western Schleswig-Holstein was ruled by its community of peasants until the sixteenth century.49 With some reluctance, we have to reject much of what used to be the standard principle for discussing the evolution of serfdom: the notion of two stages of servitude, an earlier condition that might be either a vestige of ancient slavery or the result of the aristocratic assertion of the eleventh century, followed by a period of expansion of liberties that succumbed to a “second serfdom” in the wake of the demographic and economic crisis after the Black Death, when lords attempted to restore their arbitrary rights in order to squeeze more from a now rebellious peasantry. Only for England does this pattern really work. There a seigneurial reaction to the Black Death did indeed try to reestablish an earlier, more rigorous tenurial regime, but this effort did not succeed, and serfdom waned into insignificance by the late fifteenth century.50 Poland and some other parts of Eastern Europe had different forms of peasant serfdom at different times, but transformations in land-holding and settlement were more important than a seigneurial reaction as such, so that the relation between a supposed “first” and “second” serfdom is tenuous.51 Otherwise territories never had many serfs, or never experienced a reimposition after the Black Death (Languedoc), or only imposed serfdom in the late Middle Ages (Hungary), or didn’t have any interruption in the high Middle Ages (Catalonia). In some territories, serfdom tended to weaken, in others, to strengthen, and some territories fluctuated more than others. Insofar as we can draw together some common traits, the institutionalization of servile status occurs around the year 1200. This is very clear in England, where the legal framework for the status of villeinage took shape

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through the development of law and the power of the state.52 It is equally clear for lightly governed Gascony, where servile status was defined in the late twelfth century and continued unchallenged until the era of the Hundred Years’ War.53 The arrival of serfdom in much of Italy was earlier. It begins in Catalonia between 1120 and 1160 but only around 1200 is it defined and generalized within certain geographical limits. As Chris Wickham noted, in the process of discussing the development of servitude in the region of Lucca, jurists did not create or impose new legal or personal degradation, but the elaboration of law and the growth of administrative demands to define status certainly contributed to the common institutionalization of serfdom around 1200.54 This scheme, however, does not apply to countries that did not have servile institutions at all in 1200, especially those in Eastern Europe. Here, where servitude became common towards the end of the Middle Ages, there were weak states such as Hungary, and powerful states such as ­Muscovy/Russia. Definitions of servile status might have been borrowed from Western Europe, but local and regional practices were so varied and complex that it will not suffice to describe Eastern Europe as a kind of backward or delayed version of French or German rural organization. Unfree people, even slaves, were common on Polish estates of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but many of these were also specialized artisans. By the fifteenth century, Roman law helped define Polish serfdom, but it was applied to a society of large estates and international agricultural exports dominated by virtually independent noble proprietors.55 In Hungary, Poland, and Bohemia, servitude was strengthening in the late Middle Ages at the same time as it was weakening in much of Western Europe, especially England and Catalonia. This simultaneous contradictory movement in the intensity and extent of servitude characterizes European medieval history. Duby’s observation for the Forez, that geographical differences are more important than overall chronological development, is valid for all of Europe.56 It is also the case that no single model can be applied to Europe even with allowances or triangulations for a grand theory allowing for differing zones or rates of evolution. Lordship, a mixture of political and economic power, and the presence of a subordinated peasantry are common elements, but not according to a single pattern. There can be no doubt that servitude was significant in medieval Europe, despite its variations and flexibility. That it was more than a merely legalistic rationale for normal landlord-tenant relations is demonstrated by the lengths to which serfs were willing to go to obtain an exit from servile

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condition. These efforts include insurrections, willingness to settle new territories in exchange for greater freedom, and the obtaining of individual and collective acts of freedom, often at considerable financial cost. Lords and serfs negotiated aspects of their relationship reflected in documents such as the German village customs (Weistümer), but these negotiations were not carried out on an equal footing.57 In practice, lords had to limit their demands in order to keep productive tenants, and they also could not control everything that happened on lands where their actual presence was at best intermittent. That peasants have generally possessed considerable resourcefulness in mounting indirect resistance does not mean that they were content in the medieval period to ignore the ­nature of their official relationship to their landlords, and this is especially the case with regard to serfdom. There was a common understanding of the essence of servitude as deprivation of liberty and consequent subju­ gation to the arbitrary will of the lord. On the one hand, lords presented their domination according to a language of mutuality, but with regard to serfs in particular, they found it in their interest to emphasize the right to mistreat those subject to forced levies, controls over marriage and inheritance, and even what were frequently referred to as “bad customs” or rights to unjust treatment.58 The indignity of serfdom was not merely abstract nor was it without economic consequence. The Shifting Pace of Continuity and Change

Positing a pivotal point of social change around the year 1000 has the advantage of elegance and imposes coherence on what can seem otherwise to be disparate and hard-to-grasp phenomena. The fall and reconfiguration of state authority, the domination of a military aristocracy, the building of castles and consequent remaking of the landscape, and the more efficient exploitation of the peasantry are tied together according to this model. The actual progress of social change, however, was more varied and inconsistent than is allowed for by the assumption of a generalized feudal revolution. This complicates matters in both good and bad ways: good in that local particularity and variety can be adequately appreciated, bad in that the picture tends to become confusing. Much of the problem, as I have tried to argue, is related to chronology and periodization. The history of serfdom provides an example of the variations of aristocratic power over the rural population and economy, variations in intensity of control, chronology, institutional forms, and geography. The twelfth century seems

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particularly important throughout Europe as the era in which the practices of the seigneurial regime were elaborated: a period of definition of laws, state power, and peasant obligations (servile or not).59 Some of its importance is because of the development and expansion of written records, accounts, and archives.60 To the degree that there was a feudal revolution in the eleventh century (or in those places in which the nobles most clearly asserted their power at that time), the succeeding century can be seen as one of consolidation. But even for places such as England or Castile, where the eleventh-century feudal revolution model doesn’t work, the twelfth century witnessed a clearly identifiable development of law and institutions affecting the rural population encompassing jurisdiction, courts, processes, rights, and personal status. In Eastern Europe the definitions of relationships often came later, in the thirteenth century, and were subject to great changes in the late Middle Ages as new forms of servitude were introduced. In the West, there would also be radical shifts with population growth in the thirteenth century and the demographic and economic crises of the fourteenth century. The disparate experience of serfdom shows the bewildering variety of social history of different European regions, but acknowledging this does not require abandoning the effort to grasp the overall changes that affected the medieval countryside in the era of accelerated economic and population growth from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.

Notes 1.  I am grateful to Adam Kosto for his very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2.  Georges Duby, “The Culture of the Knightly Class: Audience and Patronage,” in Renaissance & Renewal, pp. 248–62; John Hine Mundy, “Urban Society and Culture: Toulouse and Its Region,” in the same collection, pp. 229–47. 3.  Alain Guerreau, L’avenir d’un passé incertain: Quelle histoire du Moyen Age au 21e siècle? (Paris, 2001), pp. 68–70. 4.  As noted by Jacques Le Goff, A la recherche du Moyen Âge (Paris, 2003), pp. 28–9. 5.  Laurent Feller, Les Abruzzes médiévales: Territoire, économie et société en Italie centrale du 9e au 12e siècle (Paris, 1998); Jean-Pierre Delumeau, Arezzo, espace et sociétés, 715–1230: Recherches sur Arezzo et son contado du 8e au début du 13e siècle (Rome, 1996); François Menant, Campagnes lombardes du Moyen Age: L’économie et la société rurales dans la région de Bergame, de Crémone, et de Brescia du 10e au 13e siècle (Rome, 1993); Juan José Larrea, Navarre du 4e au 12e siècle: Peuplement et société (Paris and Brussels, 1998).

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6.  Journées d’Histoire de Flaran, volumes for the sixteenth through twentyseventh conferences (Toulouse, 1994–2005). 7.  Lluís To Figueras, Família i hereu a la Catalunya nord-oriental (segles 10– 12) (Montserrat, 1997); Mercè Aventín i Puig, La societat rural a Catalunya en temps feudals (Barcelona, 1996); Pere Benito, Senyoria de la terra i tinença pagesa al comtat de Barcelona (segles 11–13) (Barcelona, 2003). 8. Francesco Panereo, Schiavi, servi e villani nell’Italia medievale (Turin, 1999). 9.  Monique Bourin and Pascual Martínez Sopena, eds., Pour une anthropologie du prélèvement seigneurial dans les campagnes médiévales (11e–14e siècles): Réalités et représentations paysannes (Paris, 2004) (henceforth Prélèvement seigneurial 1); Monique Bourin and Pascual Martínez Sopena, eds., Pour une anthropologie du prélèvement seigneurial dans les campagnes médiévales (11e–14e siècles): Les mots, les temps, les lieux (Paris, 2007) (henceforth Prélèvement seigneurial 2); Laurent Feller and Chris Wickham, eds. La marché de la terre (Rome, 2005); Laurent Feller, Agnès Gramain, and Florence Weber, La fortune de Karol: marché de la terre et liens personnels dans les Abruzzes au haut moyen âge (Rome, 2005); a series of articles collected under the rubric “La servitude dans les pays de la Méditerranée occidentale chrétienne au 12e siècle et au-delà: Déclinante ou renouvelée?,” in Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome, Moyen Âge 112 (2000), pp. 633–1085 (henceforth “La servitude”); Paul Freedman and Monique Bourin, eds., Forms of Servitude in Northern and Central Europe: Decline, Resistance, and Expansion, (Turnhout, 2005) (henceforth Forms of Servitude). 10.  Published in Historia agraria 31 (December 2003), pp. 11–83 and vol. 33 (August 2004), pp. 13–103. The essays were slightly revised and translated into English in Isabel Alfonso, ed., The Rural History of Medieval European Societies: Trends and Perspectives (Turnhout, 2007). 11.  Judith M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague (New York, 1987); P. D. A. Harvey, The Peasant Land Market in Medieval England (Oxford, 1984); Christopher Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680– 1540 (Cambridge, 1980), and Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, ca. 1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989); Philip R. Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England, 1200–1500 (Basingstoke and New York, 2003). 12.  Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton, 2009). 13.  Chris Wickham, “Conclusions, Perspectives,” in Prélèvement seigneurial 2, p. 498. 14. P. D. A. Harvey, “How did English Lords Profit from their Tenants, 1050–1150?” in Prélèvement seigneurial 2, pp. 393–8. The question can be posed more broadly for all of medieval Europe. 15.  Georges Duby, La société aux 11e et 12e siècles dans la région mâconnais, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1971). See also F. L. Cheyette, “Georges Duby’s Mâconnais After Fifty Years: Reading it Now and Then,” JMH 28 (2002), pp. 291–317; François Bougard, “Genèse et réception du Mâconnais de Georges Duby,” in Studi sulle soci-

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età e le culture del medioevo per Girolamo Arnaldi, ed. Ludovico Gatto and Paola Supino Martini (Florence, 2002), pp. 33–56. 16.  Paul Freedman, “Georges Duby and the Medieval Peasantry,” Medieval History Journal 4 (2001), pp. 259–71. 17.  Robert Boutruche, Seigneurie et féodalité, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968). 18.  Georges Duby, Guerriers et paysans, 7e–12e siècle: Premier essor de l’économie européenne (Paris, 1973), and Les trois ordres, ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris, 1978). 19. Argued most explicitly in Georges Duby, “La révolution agricole mé­ diévale,” Revue de géographie de Lyon 29 (1954), pp. 361–6. 20.  On the two kinds of seigneurie, see Chris Wickham, “Defining the Seigneurie since the War,” in Prélèvement seigneurial 1, pp. 43–6. 21.  Pierre Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du 10e à la fin du 11e siècle: Croissance et mutations d’une société, 2 vols. (Toulouse, 1975–76). Most of Bonnassie’s works on slavery and servitude are in a translation of his articles, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1991). 22.  On this program see Thomas N. Bisson, “La terre et les hommes: A Programme Fulfilled?” French History 14 (2000), 322–45. 23.  Pierre Toubert, Les structures du Latium médiéval: Le Latium méridional et la Sabine du 9e siècle à la fin du 12e siècle, 2 vols. (Rome, 1973); Miquel Barceló and Pierre Toubert, eds., L’incastellamento: Actes des rencontres de Gérone (26–27 ­no­vembre 1992) et de Rome (5–7 mai 1994) (Rome, 1998); Étienne Hubert, L’incastellamneto en Italie centrale: Pouvoirs, territoire et peuplement dans la Vallée du Turano au Moyen Âge (Rome, 2002); Fabrizio Benente, ed., L’incastellamento in Liguria, 10–12 secolo: Bilancio e destini di un tema storiografico (Bordighera, 2000); Alessandro Clementi, L’incastellamento negli Abruzzi: problematica ed esempi (Colledara, 1996). 24.  Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier, La société laïque et l’Église dans la province de Narbonne (zone cispyrénéenne) de la fin du 8e à la fin du 11e siècle (Toulouse, 1974), and “La terre, la rente, et le pouvoir dans le pays de Languedoc pendant le Haut Moyen Age,” Francia 9 (1981), pp. 79–115; 10 (1982), pp. 21–66; 13 (1984), pp. 53–118. Also her article “Les lois féodales et la société d’après Montesquieu et Marc Bloch ou la seigneurie banale reconsidérée,” Revue historique 288 (1993), pp. 321–60. 25. Timothy Reuter in “Feudal Revolution” debate, P&P 155 (1997), pp. 177–95. 26.  Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, La mutation féodale: 10e–12e siècle (Paris, 1980; repr.1991 and 2004); Guy Bois, La mutation de l’an mil: Lournand, ville mâconnais de l’anqituité au féodalisme (Paris, 1989). 27.  Dominique Barthélemy, “La mutation féodale a-t-elle eu lieu?” Annales E. S. C. 47 (1992), pp. 767–75. Expanded in La mutation de l’an mil, a-t-elle eu lieu? Servage et chevalerie dans la France des 10e et 11e siècles (Paris, 1997). 28.  “Qu’est-ce que le servage, en France au 11 siècle,” Revue historique 287 (1992), pp. 239–40, 267–8; “Le statut servile au ‘premier âge féodal’: Réflexions et questions,” in Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome, Moyen Âge 112 (2000), pp. 535–49 (henceforth “Esclavages et servages”).

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29.  Keith Wrightson, “Medieval Villagers in Perspective,” Peasant Studies 7 (1978), pp. 203–7; Zvi Razi, “The Toronto School’s Reconstitution of Medieval Peasant Society: A Critical View,” P&P 85 (1979), pp. 141–57. On village elites see also François Menant and Jean-Pierre Jessenne, eds., Les Élites rurales dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne, Journées d’Histoire de Flaran 27 (Toulouse, 2007). 30.  R. H. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London, 1973), and The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England (London, 1969); Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (Cambridge, 1979). 31.  R. I. Moore, European Revolution. See also his “The Transformation of Europe as a Eurasian Phenomenon,” Medieval Encounters 10 (2004), pp. 82–6. But compare also Moore’s earlier observations about the eleventh century in a review article entitled “Duby’s Eleventh Century,” History 69 (1984), pp. 36–49. 32. See, for example, William Chester Jordan, From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Sénonais in the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1986). 33. Benito, Senyoria de la terra. 34. Feller and Wickham, Le marché de la terre, and Feller, Gramain, and Weber La fortune de Karol. 35. See, for example, the works by To Figueras and Aventín cited above, note 7. 36.  A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of the Peasant Economy, ed. Daniel Thorner et al., trans. Christel Lane and R. E. F. Smith (Homewood, Ill., 1966; repr. Madison, 1986; orig. pub. Moscow, 1925). 37. See the classic works on peasants by Eric Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966) and Theodor Shanin, Defining Peasants: Essays Concerning Rural Societies, Expolary Economics, and Learning from Them in the Contemporary World (Oxford, 1990). 38.  On serfdom in relation to slavery, see M. L. Bush, ed., Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage (Harlow, Essex, 1996); and the papers delivered at the 1997 Nanterre conference on “Les formes de la servitude: Esclavages et servages de la fin de l’antiquité au monde moderne,” collected in “Esclavages et servages,” pp. 493–631. Marc Bloch wrestled with the difficulties of defining serfdom in various papers collected in his posthumous Mélanges historiques vol. 1 (Paris, 1963). 39. Duby, Les trois ordres, pp. 327–86. 40.  Pierre Bonnassie, “Survie et extinction du régime esclavagiste dans l’Oc­ cident du haut moyen âge (4e–9e s.),” Cahiers du civilization médieval 28 (1985), pp. 307–43 (trans. in his From Slavery to Feudalism, pp. 1–59). 41.  “La servitude” and Forms of Servitude. 42.  George Duby, “Géographie ou chronologie du servage? Notes sur les servi en Forez et en Mâconnais du 10e au 12e siècle,” in Hommage à Lucien Febvre, vol. 1 (Paris, 1953), pp. 147–53. 43.  Denise Angers, “La Normandie à la fin du Moyen Âge: Des servitudes sans servage,” in Forms of Servitude, pp. 179–94; Mathieu Arnoux, “Rustici et homines liberi: Où sont passés les serfs normands?” in “Esclavages et servages,” pp. 563–77. 44.  László Makkai, “Neo-Serfdom: Its Origins and Nature in East Central Europe,” Slavic Review 34 (1975), pp. 225–38; J. M. Bak, “Servitude in the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary (A Sketchy Outline),” in Forms of Servitude, pp. 387–

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400; Heide Wunder, “Serfdom in Later Medieval and Early Modern Germany,” in Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton, ed. T. H. Aston et al. (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 249–72; William Hagen, “Village Life in East-Elbian Germany and Poland, 1400–1800,” in The Peasantries of Europe from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Tom Scott (London, 1998), pp. 145–90. 45.  Paul Freedman, The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (Cambridge, 1991). 46.  Monique Bourin, “Les homines de mansata en Bas-Languedoc (milieu du 12e–milieu du 14e siècle): Théorie, pratiques, et résistances,” in La servitude, pp. 883–917; Lluís To Figueras, “Servitude et mobilité paysanne: Les origines de la ‘Remença’ catalane (11e–13e siècle),” in La servitude, pp. 827–65. 47.  Wunder, “Serfdom”; Werner Rösener, “Die Leibeigenschaft als Problem in den Bauernaufständen des Spätmittelalters im südwestdeutschen Raum,” in Forms of Servitude, pp. 289–312. On how serfdom was defined and perceived in Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe, see Rolf Köhn, “Wahrnehmung und Bezeichnung von Leibeigenschaft in Mittel- und Westeuropa vor dem 14. Jahrhundert,” in Sozialer Wandel im Mittelalter: Wahrnehmungsformen, Erklärungsmuster, Regelungsmechanismen, ed. Jürgen Miethke and Klaus Schreiner (Sigmaringen, 1994), pp. 301–34. 48.  Guy P. Marchal, “Die Antwort der Bauern: Elemente und Schichtungen des eidgenössischen Geschichtsbewusstseins am Ausgang des Mittelalters,” in Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewusstsein im Spätmittelalter, ed. Han Patze (Sigmaringen, 1987), pp. 757–90; Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Turning Swiss: Cities and Empire, 1450–1550 (Cambridge, 1985); Roger Sablonier, “Leibherrschaft unter ‘freien Schweizern’: Eigenleute des Klosters Einsiedeln in Eidgenössischen Territorialen,” in Forms of Servitude, pp. 229–55. 49.  Jeppe Büchert Netterstrøm, “Feud, Protection, and Serfdom in Late Medieval and Early Modern Denmark (ca. 1400–1600),” in Forms of Servitude, pp. 369–84; William L. Urban, Dithmarschen: A Medieval Peasant Republic (Lewiston, NY, 1991). 50.  Christopher Dyer, “Villeins, Bondsmen, Neifs, and Serfs: New Serfdom in England, ca. 1200–1600,” in Forms of Servitude, pp. 419–35. 51.  Piotr Górecki, Economy, Society, and Lordship in Medieval Poland, 1100– 1250 (New York and London, 1992); Marian Dygo, “Zur Genese der sogenannten ‘zweiten Leibeigenschaft’ in Polen (15.–16. Jahrhundert),” in Forms of Servitude, pp. 403–18. 52. Dygo, “Zur Genese,” pp. 420–4; Paul Hyams, King, Lords, and Peasants in Medieval England: The Common Law of Villeinage in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1980). 53.  Benoît Cursente, “De la queste à la questalité: L’avènement d’un servage institutionalisé en Gascogne (12e–13e siècles),” Mélanges, pp. 941–60. 54.  Chris Wickham, “Manentes e diritti signorili durante il 12 secoloi: Il caso della Luchesia,” in Società, istituzioni e spiritualità: Studi in onore di Cinzio Violante, vol. 2 (Spoleto, 1994), pp. 1067–80. 55.  Dygo, “Zur Genese,” pp. 403–7. 56.  Monique Bourin and Paul Freedman, “Introduction,” in “La servitude,” pp. 633–41, and “Introduction,” in Forms of Servitude, pp. 1–16.

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57.  Gadi Algazi, Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im späten Mittelalter: Herrschaft, Gegenseitigkeit und Sprachgebrauch (Frankfurt, 1996). 58.  On the interplay between a discourse of mutuality and the language of oppression, see the contributions by Christopher Dyer, Monique Bourin, Ghislain Brunel, and Sandro Carocci on the vocabulary of seigneurial extraction in Prélèvement seigneurial 2, and also Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, 1999), pp. 15–39 and 239–47. 59. Bisson, Crisis of the Twelfth Century. 60.  In addition to the classic work of Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1993) see François Menant, “Les transformations de l’écrit documentaire entre le 12e et le 13e siècle,” in Écrire, compter, mesurer: Vers une histoire des rationalités pratiques, ed. Natacha Coquery et al. (Paris, 2006), pp. 33–50.

eleven

Clothing, Iron, and Timber The Growth of Christian Anxiety about Islam in the Long Twelfth Century O l ivia R e m i e C o n s ta b l e

In the final canons of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, Pope Innocent III turned his attention from issues internal to the Christian church to address matters pertaining to non-Christians, both Muslims and Jews, and their relations with Christians.1 The pragmatic bent of the pope’s remarks is noteworthy here, as Innocent concentrated on practical matters arising from Christian contact with Muslims, and on the economic and organizational issues of pursuing a new crusade while hindering Muslim shipping and commerce in the Mediterranean. These were issues that had come to the forefront of papal concern by the end of the long twelfth century, and their inclusion in the proceedings of the Fourth Lateran Council reflected the coalescence of broader western Christian anxieties about Islam and religious identity in this period. These concerns were evident in all regions of the Mediterranean world in which Muslims and Christians came into contact, but they appear to have been most pressing in the Crusader States, where the later twelfth century saw a shift of fortunes after the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187. Three decades later, in 1215, Innocent’s comments arose within the context of preparations for a new crusade (after the diverted campaign of 1204) and out of concerns about interfaith relations in the Frankish Levant and elsewhere. Innocent III singled out two matters for special attention in terms of Christian-Muslim relations. Towards the end of the records of the council, in canon 68, the pope noted that in some Christian regions “a difference 279

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of dress distinguishes Jews or Saracens from Christians, but in certain others such confusion has developed that they are indistinguishable.” He therefore decreed that all Muslims and Jews, “of either sex in every Christian province and at all times shall be distinguished from other people by the character of their dress in public.” He went on to explain that not only should non-Christians avoid rich and elegant clothing, or anything that might appear to set them above Christians, but that wearing distinctive clothing would avoid the possibility of any confusion of religious identity during daily interaction or—more critically—any confusion that might lead to forbidden sexual contact. Because of similarity of dress, Innocent warned, “it sometimes happens that by mistake Christians unite with Jewish or Saracen women, and Jews or Saracens with Christians.”2 His words reflected anxieties about confusion of appearance, mistaken identity, and the possibility of sexual mixing that had become common in western medieval thinking by the thirteenth century. Later, at the end of the text of the council, canon 71, Innocent spoke at length about preparations for a new crusade, scheduled to begin in June 1217. In contrast to some earlier calls for crusade, the pope did not spend time rationalizing the need for military action or listing Muslim atrocities against eastern Christians, but merely stated his “ardent aspiration to liberate the Holy Land from infidel hands.” Most of his subsequent comments were aimed at organizing Christian participants, but the pope also briefly turned his attention to the sanctions against anybody who might hinder the crusading effort. These included pirates and corsairs who plundered Christian ships going back and forth to the Near East, as well as Christian cities and merchants who provided military materials to Muslims or aided their war effort. The pope promised excommunication and anathema to any “false and impious Christians who, affronting Christ himself and Christian people, carry arms and iron and timber for galleys to the Saracens. Those too who sell them galleys or ships . . . or give them any advice or help with [war] machines.”3 These restrictions on Muslim and Jewish clothing, on sexual interaction between Christians and non-Christians, and on shipping war materials to Muslim ports would become standard and familiar elements in later European religious and secular legislation. They were frequently reiterated throughout the thirteenth century and after, appearing in papal decrees and church councils, in royal law codes, in diplomatic documents, and in urban regulations, especially from cities in Spain, Italy, and southern France.4 The broad and persistent dissemination of these rulings suggests that they must have touched a nerve in European thinking, even while

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their reiteration indicates that laws of this sort were difficult to enforce. Although clothing, iron, and wood might seem rather mundane from one point of view, they were deeply significant from another. In context, these items were directly linked to issues of personal and religious identity, sexuality and the fear of inappropriate sexual mixing, war and religion, trade and profit, and loyalty to one’s faith and community. Evidently, these issues had become of critical concern to Pope Innocent III by 1215. But why had these issues of clothing, iron, and timber come to such prominence by the early thirteenth century? What circumstances in the earlier Christian-Muslim relationship during the eleventh and twelfth centuries had brought these particular concerns to the forefront of Christian anxieties about Islam by the time of the Fourth Lateran Council? In considering answers to these questions, my focus will be on the European relationship with Muslims and Islam. Although Innocent included both Jews and Muslims in his strictures on non-Christian dress, the Jewish situation in medieval Europe has been much more studied, including the impact of regulations on usury and distinctive clothing both in the Middle Ages and later.5 In contrast, we know less about Christian attitudes towards Muslim dress and appearance, although the problem of access to war materials has received scholarly attention.6 Also, whereas Jews had lived under Christian Latin rule for many centuries and were never a military threat, the direct encounter with Muslims and Islamic armies was still a relatively new phenomenon for western Christians in the twelfth and early thirteenth cen­ turies. Thus, many theological and practical aspects of the relationship between medieval Christians and Muslims remained in flux during this period. The Christian anxieties that had emerged by 1215—about how to distinguish Christians from non-Christians, and how to ensure that Christians did not do anything that would give non-Christians a military ­advantage—were the product of circumstances established in the course of the long twelfth century. Meanwhile, there were also other contemporary issues unconnected with Islam, notably the rise of the Cathar movement, that may help to explain why anxieties over appearance and religious identity had come to such prominence by 1215. Innocent III’s decrees articulated and codified concerns that had been developing during a century and a half of increasing contact between Christian Europe and the Muslim world. These concerns about identity, sexuality, war materials, and relations with Islamic peoples had been fostered in European society as Christians and Muslims came into ever increasing proximity in the wake of commercial contact, territorial conquest, and crusade during the long twelfth century. Although aspects of these

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a­ nxieties had been evident earlier, new circumstances had appeared by the end of the eleventh century. There were now Muslim communities living under Christian rule in Norman Sicily by the 1070s, in Spain after the fall of Toledo in 1085, and in the Crusader States from the later 1090s. At the same time, increasing numbers of European Christians began traveling to Islamic lands, where they encountered local Muslims as hostile military adversaries or more friendly partners for commerce, sex, or other activities. The regions where Christians and Muslims shared physical territory— Spain, Sicily, and the Crusader States—provided critical early testing grounds for addressing Christian concerns arising from contact. These eleventh- and twelfth-century encounters would lay the groundwork for the rulings of the Fourth Lateran Council and the shifting Christian-­ Muslim relations in the later Middle Ages. It has become common for modern scholars to think and write in terms of “the other” and “otherness” when describing the encounter between medieval Christianity and Islam. Certainly, medieval Christian and Muslim writers and artists routinely portrayed members of other religious groups as alien, hostile, and different. And yet the context and structure of this otherness was not the same in all periods, nor were the links between otherness and anxiety. Instead, these issues were being constantly tested and renegotiated during the long twelfth century, gradually becoming more standardized over time. Meanwhile, perceptions and stereotypes were being set in place that would persist during later periods, whether or not they reflected contemporary reality. For example, white clean-shaven Christians and darker bearded Muslims continued to appear in medieval artistic and written sources, even when other data (including Innocent III’s rulings on clothing) suggest that easy visual differentiation may not always have been so clear. Although the distinction between the actual appearance of Christians and Muslims in some regions may have become more difficult by the early thirteenth century, at the same time a codified imagery of otherness was emerging in the Christian imagination. Thus, thirteenth-century illustrations of beardless Christians and bearded Muslims, for example from the Libro de Ajedrez of Alfonso X (Castile, 1280s) and from Matthew Paris’ Chronica Majora (England, 1250s), reflected what had become standard visual tropes for depicting the outward appearance of religious identity (figures 1 and 2). It seems likely that the anxieties articulated at the Fourth Lateran Council about Christians and Muslims dressing in similar styles and about Christians trading arms and ships to Muslim buyers came from a

Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.

Figure 1.  Christian and Muslim playing chess. Alfonso X, Libro de Ajedrez, Castile, Late thirteenth century. Escorial Codex T.1.6, folio 64r. Photograph courtesy of the Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid.

Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title. Figure 2. Treaty between the Count of Brittany and al-Nazir, lord of Krak. Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, England, 1250s. Corpus Christi College, Cam­bridge, MS 16, folio 138v. Photograph courtesy of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

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tendency, over time, to relax distinctive markers of otherness in regions of interreligious contact. By 1200, many more Christians and Muslims were encountering each other as living realities than had been the case a century and a half earlier. Conquest, crusade, and commerce all worked to bring people of different religions into regular and closer contact, in ways that had been uncommon before the later eleventh century. These were exactly the same circumstances that allowed for the translation of texts and the transmission of ideas during the twelfth century. It is not surprising, therefore, that worries about daily interactions and dominance had come to the fore by the early thirteenth century, voicing growing Christian concerns about the status of the Muslim other. These anxieties seem to have been more strongly felt in Sicily and the eastern Mediterranean, where northern Europeans and Muslims had more recently come into contact, than in the Iberian Peninsula, where Christians and Muslims had long lived in close proximity.7 Recent territorial losses in the Crusader States presumably intensified the level of concern. Innocent’s influential rulings at the Fourth Lateran Council would set the model for regulating subsequent Christian interaction with Muslims. Later Christian legislation on proper dress for Muslims and Jews and prohibitions on traffic in war materials tended to closely follow the papal vision codified in 1215, whereas earlier legislation had been much more diverse. Evidently, these rules were still under negotiation during the course of the long twelfth century, whereas by the early thirteenth century some of the practical problems of contact and otherness had been identified and addressed in the solutions proposed by Innocent III. Yet Christian anxieties about identity, sexuality, and faith did not go away in the later Middle Ages, despite more unified regulations. Indeed, awareness of the potential dangers of interfaith contact and the failure of legislative measures to remove these perceived risks seems to have intensified Christian apprehensions during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, leading to inquisition and, ultimately, to the expulsion of non-Christian populations from European lands. Weapons, Iron, and Wood

When Innocent III promised dire penalties to any Christian merchants selling to Muslim markets, he specified traffic in weapons, iron, timber for ship building, and ships themselves. Christians, likewise, were not to aid Muslims with technical or other military advice. These prohibitions on

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trading war materials to Muslim ports highlight the intimate links between commerce, crusade, and shipping in this period. It is no coincidence that the growth of Christian commercial activity in the Mediterranean world in the eleventh century coincided with Christian military expansion in Spain, Sicily, and Syria. The concurrent growth of southern European cities, population, trade, consumerism, and shipping, together with expansionist yet defensive military and religious thinking, were all phenomena that supported each other. This would profoundly change the balance of political, religious, and economic power in the Mediterranean over the course of the next two centuries, with emerging Christian commercial hegemony and political dominance over most of the western, northern, and eastern shores of the sea. Even the eventual loss of the Crusader States in the late thirteenth century would not fundamentally challenge Christian control of the sea, although the rise of Ottoman naval power would later create a new balance in early modern maritime a­ ffairs. A prohibition on trading war materials to the enemy might appear self-evident in any era of warfare, and thus one might expect to find similar restrictions articulated throughout history. Certainly, laws relating to sales of weapons to Muslims do appear in Christian legislation from as early as the tenth century, but bans on trade in timber and weapons only began to be strongly and stridently articulated during the later twelfth century.8 Innocent III himself had already voiced similar strictures in 1213, and earlier in an exchange with Venice in 1198. Although Innocent’s letter to Venice strictly prohibited any traffic in “iron, flax, pitch, pointed stakes, ropes, arms, helmets, ships, and boards, or unfinished wood,” Venetian merchants were permitted to continue transporting other nonmilitary goods to Egypt.9 Several decades before that, Pope Alexander III had imposed a ban on trade in arms, iron, and timber both at a synod in Montpellier in 1162 and later at the Third Lateran Council in 1179.10 These papal strictures all responded to conditions that had been taking shape in the Muslim Mediterranean during the 1160s and 1170s, which shifted the balance of military power and converted the issue of trafficking in war materials into a newly pressing concern. Western Christian anxieties were fueled by the rise of new political players and the revival of Muslim military strength in the later twelfth century, with not only the rise of the Almohads in the western Mediterranean, but more especially the appearance of the Ayyubids under the leadership of Saladin in Egypt and Syria. The context of Innocent III’s strictures on trafficking in war materials, embedded within a long chapter detailing plans for a new crusade, makes clear that he was mainly concerned with the situation in the

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eastern Mediterranean. Here, during the last decades of the twelfth century, Saladin’s new galleys had provided critical naval support for attacks on Acre and other coastal cities held by the crusaders. Muslim warriors evidently valued European weapons and armor, but there were plenty of other ways to obtain these besides trade, including booty, ransom, and gifts. Acquisition may have been most common through the spoils of war, and William of Tyre described Egyptian forces outside of Jaffa, at the turn of the twelfth century, “assuming the weapons, breastplates, and shields of the fallen foe.”11 Ibn al-Athīr (d. 1233) described a similar redistribution after a victory over crusaders in 1103, when a Muslim leader “took the weapons of the Franks, and their banners, and he clothed his men in their clothes.”12 In 1135, the Syrian nobleman Usama b. Munqidh also owned a suit of European armor, which “had a Frankish coat of mail extending to its hem, with another above it . . . [and] both had all the linings, felt pads, and rabbit fur.” When he showed this to his commander, the latter was apparently so impressed that he gave Usama the gift of an excellent horse, remarking that the animal befitted the mail.13 Meanwhile, in Spain, a Christian knight taken captive in Córdoba was ransomed in return for horses and weapons in the 1130s.14 Later, in 1189, Saladin is said to have received a gift from the Byzantine emperor, Isaac II Angelos, of “four hundred breastplates, four thousand iron lances and five hundred swords, which he [the emperor] had from the king of Sicily.”15 All of these twelfth-century data suggest that the quality and utility of these military items were generally more important than their origins and religious identity. In contrast to smaller items that could be acquired as booty or gifts, bulky naval supplies such as timber, iron, and pitch were mainly obtained through trade.16 Starting in the late 1160s, Saladin had begun to rebuild and strengthen the Egyptian navy; he raised the pay for sailors and ordered the construction of a new Egyptian fleet in the 1170s. In doing this, however, he encountered logistical difficulties, since by this period it had become hard to obtain adequate naval materials in Egypt. Some Mediterranean regions were already experiencing deforestation, but the military conquest of timber growing territories presented much more important constrictions on the supply of wood. Since the later eleventh century, Christian seizure of Muslim-held territories in southern Portugal, eastern Spain, Sicily, and coastal Syria cut off Muslim access to some of the most fertile forested regions in the Mediterranean. For example, the Muslim geographer Idrīsī, writing in the 1150s, reported that the forests around Tortosa, in eastern Spain, produced excellent timber, which was used to “con-

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struct large ships” and which was “transported to all regions of the world, near and far.”17 The capture of Tortosa by Ramon Berenguer, Count of Barcelona, in 1148 must have created new conditions for access to these ships and timber, and raised questions as to whether they could continue to be sold to Muslim buyers. Meanwhile, Muslim shipbuilding continued in some regions of North Africa (as in Bougie, where Idrīsī described a shipyard in which “they build large vessels, both sailing ships and galleys,” using local resources of timber, pitch, and iron), but these areas were mainly controlled by the Almohads.18 With coastal Syria in Christian hands, Lebanese forests were also unavailable. Without access to oldgrowth forests, Ayyubid shipyards in Egypt found it difficult to obtain the timber and other resources that were needed to construct naval and mercantile fleets. The easiest way for Saladin to obtain these critical products for constructing his new navy, and for the war effort generally, was through trade. At exactly the same time as Christian armies were taking over the best timber and iron producing regions, southern European merchants were becoming active in the Mediterranean sphere. This process had begun in the eleventh century, and, by the later twelfth century, Christian fleets dominated the northern maritime routes, carrying commercial goods and merchants, soldiers, and pilgrims (Muslims as well as Christians) between east and west. Despite religious sanctions, Christian merchants from Genoa, Venice, Pisa, Marseille, Catalonia, and elsewhere emerged in the twelfth century as the main suppliers of timber, arms, iron, and even whole ships to Muslim buyers, especially in Egypt. European merchants had easy access to these products, not only in recently conquered territories, but also from the forests and mines of central Italy, Spain, and other European regions.19 In most cases, it was the Fātimid or Ayyubid government, rather than private individuals, that purchased these critical materials and controlled their distribution.20 A chancery report to the Fātimid caliph al-Āmir (ruled 1101– 30) noted the recent arrival of five “Rūm merchants,” including two from Amalfi and one from Genoa, who brought a cargo of timber to Egypt.21 During the later twelfth century, there began to be wider concern in Europe about trading military materials to Muslims. Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) recounted the cautionary tale of French merchants who intended to ship weapons to Muslims despite both the disapproval of their fellow citizens and an excommunication by three bishops who witnessed their departure. According to Peter, the merchants received a proper retribution when their vessel sank shortly after its departure from Marseille

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and all on board were drowned.22 More mundane economic sanctions also became common in secular legislation by the second half of the century. In Spain, especially, a number of local law codes prohibited the sale of weapons to Muslims, and imposed stiff fines on any person who transferred arms, food, or military information to the enemy. Strictures against the sale of weapons had appeared in Toledo as early as 1118, and they were renewed in 1176.23 Similar prohibitions were also listed in the Usatges of Barcelona (commissioned between 1131 and 1162) as well as in urban charters from the final decades of the twelfth century, including the Fuero of Teruel (1176), the Code of Cuenca (after 1177), and the Fuero of Placencia (1189).24 Some of these Iberian decrees may have been motivated by economic protectionism as much as military prudence, with local administrations seeking to regulate and thus profit from any sales of arms to Muslims. However, both the specific prohibition of military materials in contrast to other goods and the surge in regulations during the second half of the twelfth century point to Iberian Christian fears about the recent rise of the Almohads and their appearance in Spain, as well as Muslim military advances elsewhere. Restrictions on traffic in weapons and naval supplies seem to have been harder to enforce in Italy, and often had little effect. In 1151, Genoa issued a ban on some shipments of arms, oars, and naval timber to Muslim ports, but these restraints were to be waived if the merchants had special permission from Genoese authorities.25 At the same time, Pisans continued shipping timber to Egypt in the 1150s, to the point that, in 1156, King Baldwin III of Jerusalem refused to extend privileges to any Pisan engaged in this traffic.26 With the reconstruction of the Ayyubid navy, the incentives for this illicit trade increased, and Italian merchants competed to supply timber, metals, and weapons to the sultan. In 1173, a treaty between Saladin and Pisa promised trading rights to the Italians and encouraged them to import iron, wood, and pitch to Egypt.27 Likewise, a Venetian notarial contract from the same year arranged for shipments of timber to Alexandria.28 A couple of years later, in 1175, Saladin addressed a letter to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, justifying his concessions to Genoese, Pisan, and Venetian merchants on the grounds that they provided weapons and other vital goods.29 The shields described as “Genoese” (janawīya) that appear in Arabic texts from Egypt during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries may have been brought by this trade.30 With imported naval supplies at hand, Saladin was able to pursue his campaign for a newly invigorated Egyptian navy. He launched sea campaigns against the Crusader States from the later 1170s into the early

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1190s, with devastating effect. This new Ayyubid naval offensive soon triggered a reaction in Europe, initiating the renewed restrictions on traffic in arms and timber articulated at the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils and in other contemporary religious and secular legislation. These may have met with intermittent success—for example, western commercial shipping to Egypt largely ceased between 1187 and 1192—but the repeated reiteration of restrictions on trade implies that they were almost impossible to enforce. Some Italian merchants continued to traffic with Egypt or with other Muslim ports when trade to the eastern Mediterranean became too difficult. In 1201, for example, an Arabic letter written by a Muslim merchant in Tunis to a merchant partner in Pisa referred to debts for smuggled shipments of steel.31 Likewise, a Jewish merchant letter from the Cairo Geniza, written in Alexandria circa 1200, mentioned “the arrival of two Venetian ships with timber.”32 Innocent III’s prohibitions on trade stated at the Fourth Lateran Council repeated strictures that had been muttered for the past century, and which had been growing stronger and more strident during the past four decades. They addressed a problem that had been created by the conditions of the long twelfth century, which combined the dual Christian impulses for crusade and commercial expansion. These two forces were not necessarily at odds until the end of this period, when shifts within the Muslim sphere, especially the rise of the Ayyubids in Egypt and their newly successful military and naval response, brought the aspirations of crusade and commerce into direct conflict. The calls for an end to traffic in war materials became immediately louder, until they were codified in the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils. These rulings provided strictures voiced by the highest possible authority, which would be repeated in subsequent religious and secular texts throughout the later Middle Ages. Although these laws were intermittently effective, it is evident that illicit traffic persisted. Clothing, Beards, and the Distinctive Appearance of Muslims and Christians

Like the ban on weapons, the rulings on dress for Muslims and Jews ar­ ticu­lated by Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council were the result of circumstances that had evolved from increasing interfaith contacts during the twelfth century. Concerns over identity and differentiation between Muslims and Christians had long been discussed within the Muslim

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world, but they had only recently come to prominence on the roster of European Christian anxieties. Latin writers in the twelfth century and earlier had said relatively little about the appearance and dress of non-­ Christians, but Christian concerns about Muslim and Jewish dress intensified by the early thirteenth century, and vestimentary regulations became common during the later Middle Ages.33 This increased interest in correct dress suggests the emergence of new anxieties about social differentiation and status between Christians and non-Christians, and reflects the concurrent rise of sumptuary legislation throughout later medieval ­Europe.34 The prohibitions that Innocent III placed on trade in war materials grew out of military and religious opposition, but his restrictions on nonChristian appearance arose from more complicated cross-cultural conditions. In this case, it was coexistence (what Spanish medievalists often call convivencia) as well as confrontation that created the context for concern. In the Islamic world, dress regulations can be found from the earliest Muslim period, when the so-called Pact of ‘Umar, said to date from the seventh or eighth century, established rules for the dress and behavior of Christians and Jews living under Islamic rule.35 In contrast, western Christians had no cause for anxiety about Muslim dress and appearance until the later eleventh and twelfth centuries, when military confrontations and territorial conquest created new concerns about identity, as Muslims began living under Christian rule in Spain, Sicily, and the Crusader States. At this point, European Christian legislation, like earlier Muslim regulations, began to be concerned with dress codes for subject populations. Regulations on dress and appearance stemmed from a complex array of intentions and anxieties concerning social and religious identity, class, economic status, and sexuality. These tangled strands of apprehension arising from cross-cultural contact and confusion are impossible for the modern historian to disentangle because they were not separated in the medieval mind. It is very noticeable, both in the Fourth Lateran canons and in many other medieval sources, that references to sumptuary legislation were often closely associated with concerns about sexual transgression, conversion, and other inappropriate behavior.36 Confusion of identity, based on lack of easy visual distinction between Muslims and Christians, fueled interconnected fears about seduction and sexual mixing, moral corruption, inappropriate social climbing, and apostasy. Repressive rules about minority clothing also tended to emphasize the dominance of the ruling group, promoting distinction, segregation, and humiliation.37 Their imposition often became more stringent when the ruling group (which may, in fact, have represented a numerical minority) felt in some way threatened.

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Confusion of identity, whether intentional or inadvertent, could be dangerous. Later medieval anecdotes in both Arabic and Latin sources— such as a scam in which a Muslim woman sold herself in the guise of a Christian slave in order to blackmail her buyer (also a Muslim), or a Christian prostitute who claimed she had no idea that her client was Muslim until his clothes were off and she saw that he was circumcised (by which point it was too late to avoid a prohibited sexual encounter)—emphasized the hazards thought to be posed by people who dressed inappropriately or indistinguishably.38 Likewise, the frequently reiterated concerns that interfaith friendships, sexual relationships, and marriages might lead to religious conversion and destabilization of family and social structures were not without support in historical reality.39 Even when the conversion was to Christianity, differences in sexual and marital traditions could still present vexing problems to Christian religious leaders. In a letter to the bishop of Tiberias in 1201, Innocent III expressed concerns about consanguineous marriage, polygamy, and divorce among converts in the Latin East.40 It is very striking, however, that the anxieties about acculturation that had emerged so prominently by the early thirteenth century are difficult to find in the twelfth century. For example, Fulcher of Chartres wrote approvingly in the early 1100s about the degree to which “Occidentals have now become Orientals,” including intermarriage with converted Muslim women and the creation of family ties between east and west.41 The same is true of the issue of Christian and Muslim appearance, since confusion of identity does not seem to have presented much of a problem during the twelfth century. Despite a few early references to the redistribution of clothing and armor (as in the citation from Ibn al-Athīr, noted above), almost all of the evidence from before 1200, both written and visual, suggests that Muslims and western Christians generally looked quite different and had no difficulty in recognizing each other. Several anecdotes bear out this ease of identification to unpleasant effect, as when William of Tyre ­reported that in the early crusader period “any Christian who walked along the highway without taking due precautions was liable to be killed by the Saracens.”42 Later, in Sicily, Hugo Falcandus noted that during riots in Palermo, in the early 1160s, many ordinary Muslims who were “unwisely going around outside their houses” were easily recognized and killed by Christians. Some Sicilian Muslims escaped this slaughter by secret flight or “by assuming the guise of Christians.”43 During at least the first century of contact, it appears that most Muslims and western Christians continued to follow their own distinct “vestimentary systems,” together with individual religious traditions concerning

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facial hair and other features.44 These outward signs, together with language, were the most commonly cited means for immediate religious identification. For example, William of Tyre reports that in Shayzar, in 1138, the crusaders showed no mercy to the local people “except in the case of those who by word or dress or by some other sign indicated that they would follow the Christian faith.”45 Later in Tripoli, in the early 1150s, “the people flew to arms and without discrimination put to the sword all those who were found to differ in either language or dress from the Latins.”46 Only over time, as people lived in contact over extended periods, did their norms of dress, hair, manners, and language tend to become similar. This slow process can be observed both in regions where Christians lived under Muslim rule and in areas where Muslims lived under Christian rule. Examples from twelfth-century art confirm the perception of distinctions in Christian and Muslim appearance. In Sicily, the late twelfth-­ century Liber ad honorem Augusti, by Peter of Eboli, contains numerous images of the contemporary inhabitants of the island. In a depiction of notaries at the Norman court (figure 3), the Greek notaries sitting on the far left are shown with full dark beards, the Muslims (second from the left) have short beards and turbans, while the Latin notaries (second from the right) have shorter hair and at least one is clean shaven, though with a moustache. Elsewhere in the same manuscript, a Muslim doctor and astrologer, with dark pointed beards and turbans, are distinguished from their clean-shaven or lightly bearded Norman Christian clients (figure 4).

Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title. Figure 3.  Greek, Muslim, and Latin notaries. Peter of Eboli, Liber ad honorem Augusti, Palermo, late twelfth century. Burgerbibliothek Bern, Codex 120.II, folio 101r. Photograph courtesy of the Burgerbibliothek, Bern.

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Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.

Figure 4.  Muslim doctor and astrologer with Latin clients. Peter of Eboli, Liber ad honorem Augusti, Palermo, late twelfth century. Burgerbibliothek Bern, Codex 120.II, folio 97r. Photograph courtesy of the Burgerbibliothek, Bern.

Another illustrated Sicilian manuscript, the Greek chronicle of Ioannes Skylitzes, also contains images of Muslims and Christians. Although this text was probably made in Messina in the second half of the twelfth century, it depicts earlier events that took place in Byzantium and the eastern Islamic world (figures 5 and 6).47 Again, the Muslims are easily distinguished by their turbans, beards, and distinctive costume. By the twelfth century, turbans and beards had become potent symbols of Muslim—or more generally “pagan”—identity in western Christian imagination and representation. Another late twelfth-century image, on an enameled box from Limoges (ca. 1175), shows a man wearing a turban (but not a beard) and wielding a sword with which he is about to execute the early Christian martyr, St. Valerie (figure 7). Both Cynthia Hahn and Debra Strickland have noted the transposition in this image of a Muslim figure, representing the new threat to Christian faith, in place of the original Roman executioner.48 Although Islamic figural representations are much less common than Christian ones, at least one image from the Muslim perspective confirms that the perception of difference in appearance was bilateral. A twelfth-century Egyptian illustration of Muslim and Christian warriors battling before the walls of a town depicts a Muslim with a full dark beard, moustache, and turban, while his Christian adversary appears bareheaded with only a moustache (figure 8).49

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Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title. Figure 5. Emperor Theophilos sends Byzantine envoys to the ruler of Syria. Ioannes Skylitzes, Chronicle, Sicily (probably Messina), second half of twelfth century. Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. Codex Vitr. 26-2, folio 47r. Photograph courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title. Figure 6.  Emperor Romanos I gives gifts to a group of Arabs. Ioannes Skylitzes, Chronicle, Sicily (probably Messina), second half of twelfth century. Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. Codex Vitr. 26-2, folio 148v. Photograph courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

Since it appears that Muslims and Christians were not normally confused with each other in the first century of their encounter, one must ask why concerns about identification began to emerge by the early thirteenth century. Basically, there seem to have been two chronological circumstances during cross-cultural encounters that tended to provoke anxiety about differentiation and identity. The first can be found shortly after two populations initially came into contact, when each was still unfamiliar with the other and seeking to define the relationship and to protect its

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Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title. Figure 7.  The martyrdom of St. Valerie. Reliquary basket, Limoges, ca. 1175. Hermitage Museum, F-175. Photograph courtesy of the State Hermitage Mu­ seum, St. Petersburg.

Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title. Figure 8.  Muslim warrior (left) and Christian warrior (right) fighting outside a town. Islamic, twelfth century. British Museum OR 1938-3-12-01. Photograph courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, London.

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own identity. Early concerns of this nature are reflected in crusader legislation from the Council of Nablus, held in 1120. These canons included brief laws dealing with sexual contact, both rape and consensual sex, between Christians and Muslims in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It is worth noting that equally harsh penalties were imposed on offenders of both ­religions.50 But immediately following these prohibitions against sexual mixing, there is a brief statement penalizing “any Saracen man or woman who dresses according to Frankish custom (francigeno more).”51 Benjamin Kedar has attributed this highly unusual legislation to the difficulties that the newly established crusader kingdom was experiencing in the early twelfth century.52 In general, however, such laws were not deemed necessary during the twelfth century, and I know of no similar rulings on the subject of Muslim dress until the statements made by Innocent III in 1215.53 The second, and more common circumstance for anxiety, arose over time from familiarity and convivencia, as two groups began to share tastes and a common culture, often leading to conversions, and thereby creating concern among men of religion and others who would prefer to preserve segregation and distinction. This phenomenon has been studied by Richard Bulliet, who linked periods of rapid conversion to Islam, usually after a century or more of Muslim rule, with episodes of social and political unrest.54 Anxieties might be further stirred up by times of crisis or military setbacks. The timing of the Fourth Lateran Council after over a century of contact in the Levant, with its expression of western Christian anxieties about Islam in the wake of the Third and Fourth Crusades, fits well with this latter scenario. Vestimentary systems tended to coalesce in places where different groups had long been in contact, in spite of efforts to impose distinctions. Within the Muslim world, both in al-Andalus and the Near East, it appears that Muslims, Christians, and Jews normally dressed in similar fashions for most of the medieval period. If nothing else, the repeated injunctions regulating dhimmi clothing suggest that these traditional rules were generally ignored.55 This was certainly true in Muslim Spain by the twelfth century. The early twelfth-century Sevillian market inspector, Ibn ‘Abdūn, reiterated the regulation that Christians and Jews should dress differently from Muslims, but he also remarked that one ought not to sell used clothes that had belonged to a Christian or Jew without clearly informing the buyer about their origins.56 In Córdoba, another early twelfth-century jurist, Ibn Rushd (d. 1126; the grandfather of Averroës), answered a query about whether it was necessary to wash clothes that had belonged to a Christian before wearing them for Muslim prayer. His answer turned on

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the issue of whether or not the Muslim wearer knew that the clothes had previously been worn by a Christian.57 Both of these cases suggest that in al-Andalus, at least, there were no obvious differences between clothing worn by Muslims and local Christians (Mozarabs) in this period. But clothing was not the only visual marker for identity. As well as regulating dhimmi dress, Islamic tradition also urged Muslim men to wear beards in order to distinguish themselves from non-Muslims. Indeed, the presence or absence of facial hair is more frequently cited than clothing by medieval authors describing the differential appearance of Muslims and Christians. Hadīth traditions recorded in the ninth century reported the prophet Muhammad’s injunction that Muslim men should allow their beards to grow, while keeping their moustaches trimmed, because this was “the opposite of what the pagans (or polytheists) do.”58 In the same century, when the Muslim prisoner Harūn b. Yahyā was taken to Rome in 886, he observed that the men of that city “young and old shave off their beards entirely. Not leaving a single hair in place. I asked them as to the cause of their shaving off their beards . . . [and] they answered: ‘Whoever does not shave his beard is not a true Christian.’”59 Harūn b. Yahyā was probably talking to a churchman; although medieval western fashions for secular facial hair varied according to time and place, Latin clergy were routinely clean-shaven.60 The situation was different for eastern Christians. Religious men in the eastern church were expected to wear beards, and both artistic and written sources suggest that most lay Christian men living within the dār al-Islām would have been similarly bearded. An illustration for William of Tyre’s History of Outremer, painted in Acre in the 1260s, shows Tancred accepting homage from the people of Cilicia in the early twelfth century (figure 9). Although the supplicants are Christian, they have long beards and are dressed in robes and turbans that were similar to those worn by Muslims. The clean-shaven Tancred, in contrast, “demonstrates the characteristic imagery for a crusader prince.”61 As in the case of regulations on dhimmi clothing, the wearing of beards was not actually an effective tool for differentiating between Muslims and non-Muslims within the Islamic world. This fact sometimes caused confusion for newly arrived western Christians. Guibert of Nogent remarked in his early twelfth-century account of the siege of Antioch that the early crusaders could not always tell the difference between “the native pagans and those of our own faith.” Likewise, it was sometimes hard to identify fellow crusaders “by their clothing or beards” because many “had stopped shaving their beards in the Frankish manner.”62 William of Tyre

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reported the same phenomenon, noting that when Muslim spies infiltrated the crusader camp at Antioch in 1098, it was not “difficult for men of this sort to pass unknown among our troops, for they possessed much facility in various languages. Some pretended to be Greeks, some Syrians, and others Armenians, and all could easily assume the characteristics of such nations in idioms, manners, and dress.63 A similar confusion apparently arose in the 1130s, when Usama ibn Munqidh was praying in the alAqsa mosque in Jerusalem (then held by the Templars as a church) and was harassed by a newly arrived Frank, who insisted that Usama was praying in the wrong direction. This was a man “of rough character” who had “never before seen anyone who did not pray towards the east.” Since the dispute involved only the direction of prayer, not religion more generally, it seems likely that the recent arrival had mistaken Usama for an eastern Christian on the basis of appearance and the assumption that anybody using this Templar space must share their beliefs.64 Latin pilgrims and other western visitors to Syria noted the characteristics of the various eastern Christian communities, both in terms of their religious practice and their appearance. They frequently remarked on the fact that eastern Christian men were bearded like Muslims and thus distinct from their western Latin coreligionists. James of Vitry, bishop of Acre from 1216 to 1228, noted that the beards of Syrian Christians, “like those of the Greeks, Muslims, and all other people of the East, were unshaved.”65 In contrast, western Christians—like Tancred in figure 9—were generally clean-shaven, creating a clear differentiation. An anonymous pilgrim visiting the Holy Land in the late twelfth century likewise reported on “divers races of Christians” including the “Franks, who are more properly called Latins. They are warlike men, practiced in arms, are bareheaded, and are the only one of all these races who shave the beard,” while Syrians “do not let their beards grow like Greeks, but trim them somewhat,” and Georgians “let their hair and beard grow long.”66 After his comment on the difficulty of distinguishing Muslims from local Christians at the siege of Antioch (cited above), Guibert of Nogent added that in order to make sure that Latins looked different from locals, the western troops were “ordered to shave often, and to hang on their necks crosses made of silver or some other material so that no one, mistaken for a foreigner, would be struck down by a comrade.”67 Eastern observers during the crusader period also noted that western Christians, both clerical and lay, were easily distinguishable by their dress and lack of beards. In the late twelfth century, Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād, Saladin’s biographer, remarked that a young Frankish nobleman was “a

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Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title. Figure 9.  Tancred accepting homage from the people of Cilicia. William of Tyre, History of Outremer, Acre, ca. 1290. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Manuscrits occidentaux, français 9084, folio 42r. Photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

handsome youth, although he was clean shaven, as is their fashion.”68 Likewise, the Byzantine chronicler, Nicetas Choniates (d. 1213), described a Venetian in Constantinople in 1205 who wore distinctively Italian clothing and whose “beard was shaved smoother than if it had been removed by a depilatory.”69 The late twelfth-century Greek author Eustathius of Thessalonica also commented on the Latin custom by which they “torture their beard by constant close shaving.”70 An Arabic account of the visit of a young Melkite physician to Damascus in the late 1180s also draws attention both to the differences between Latin and eastern dress and to the adoption of new vestimentary traditions by the later twelfth century. The young doctor apparently arrived in Damascus from Jerusalem wearing the garb of a Frankish physician, described as comprising a head shawl, small turban, and a collared, blue upper coat. Immediately, an older colleague advised him to take these off and to dress more appropriately in the full-sleeved robe and proper turban worn by local Syrian doctors.71 This anecdote is fascinating not only for the clarity of differentiation between the proper modes of professional dress for eastern and western physicians, but for the fact that the young eastern Christian doctor was seen as having adopted Frankish costume. One must presume that this was a professional advantage for his practice

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in crusader territories. Even more interesting, however, is the suggestion that Latin doctors in the Levant had themselves borrowed elements of eastern dress—the scarf and turban—and appropriated them as their own by this period. In northern Europe, far from any actual contact with Islam, the Christian imagination also conceived a difference between Christian and Muslim appearance, especially in terms of hair and beards. In the early twelfth century, longer hair was apparently fashionable in the north, although this style did not meet with universal approval. Orderic Vitalis recounted that in 1105, the bishop of Seéz in Normandy upbraided king Henry I and his courtiers for their long hair and beards, which he saw as signs of effeminacy and sinful behavior. In his opinion, “long beards give [men] the look of he-goats, whose filthy viciousness is shamefully imitated by the degradations of fornicators and sodomites . . . by growing their hair long they make themselves seem like imitators of women and by womanly softness they lose their manly strength and are led to sin . . . [and, finally] in their hairiness [they] make themselves more like Saracens than Christians.”72 Even at this early date, the direct link here between sin, sexuality, and the similarity of Muslim and Christian appearance is reminiscent of the fears later expressed by Innocent III in 1215. Because beards came in many varieties, and a man’s beard might vary according to place, status, age, and personal preference, it is impossible to issue any overarching statement about western Christian facial hair. The fashion for longer hair in northern Europe, at precisely the same time that western crusaders in Syria were careful to shave, suggests that many different considerations may have guided styles in regions shared by Christians and Muslims. Further complications are added by the multiple positive meanings associated with beards, which were often seen as signs of male honor, beauty, and virility in both Muslim and Christian cultures (the counter-image of their connections with shame, sin, and effeminacy). Even though most sources indicate that western European men tended to be clean-shaven in Spain, Sicily, and the Crusader States during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, some Latin Christians in these regions did wear beards. Perhaps the most famous medieval beard of all was the one grown by Rodrigo Díaz of Vivar, also known as the Cid, in the late eleventh century. The symbolism of this beard is characteristically Iberian in its explicitly multicultural message. The twelfth-century poem celebrating Rodrigo’s exile and exploits described how “his beard was growing long and full, for the Cid had said: ‘For the love I bear King Alfonso [VI of Castile], who has banished me, no shears shall touch it and not a hair shall be

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cut. Let this be common talk among the Moors and Christians alike.”73 The final line is especially telling in the expectation that the preservation of the Cid’s long beard would be understood by both Muslims and Christians. The Cid himself was a complex product of the Iberian frontier and its fluctuating allegiances, fighting for the Castilian king against Muslims, yet also making his own Muslim allies, and earlier serving as a mercenary for a Muslim king against the Christian Count of Barcelona. By the end of the poem, the Cid’s flowing beard has become a symbol of his power over Muslims and Christians alike (“no woman’s son has ever plucked it and no one, Moor or Christian, ever tore it”),74 of his triumph over adversity, and even his superiority to his own king. In Sicily, Roger II (ruled 1130–54) may also have chosen to wear a beard in order to address the multiple audiences among his Latin, Greek, Muslim, and Jewish subjects. In artistic depictions, the king was usually shown bearded, whether as a Christ-like figure in mosaics at Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio in Palermo, as king of Sicily on coins, in scenes from his life in the manuscript of Peter of Eboli (figure 10), and possibly even as the Islamic-type royal figure depicted on the ceiling of the Palatine Chapel.75 In only one instance was Roger depicted as clean-shaven.76 In the Levant, although most Latins were clean-shaven, William of Tyre described several crusader kings with beards, presumably a symbol of their authority and maturity.77 When Baldwin II, the former count of Edessa, became king of Jerusalem in 1118, his “beard, though thin, reached to his breast,” and it already had a history of its own.78 Apparently Baldwin had grown this “oriental-style beard” (more orientalium barbam, according to James of Vitry) when he married an eastern Christian wife.79 William of Tyre also reported a story in which Baldwin extracted money from his father-in-law, Gabriel, by pretending to have pledged his beard in return for a debt. William explained that Gabriel, on hearing of this promise, “began to pant and boil with excessive rage. For Orientals, both Greeks and other nationalities, cherish the beard with earnest care, and if perchance even one hair be pulled from it, this insult is regarded as the highest dishonor and ignominy.” Gabriel gave Baldwin the money he needed, but made him swear never again to make such a pledge.80 Gabriel’s reaction not only sheds light on the contemporary vow made by the Cid in Spain, but also on the different status accorded to beards by eastern and western Christians in the Crusader States. As in this individual case of Baldwin’s beard, the tendency for western Christians and Muslims to distinguish themselves through appearance is highlighted when people did not conform to their own traditions of dress

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Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.

Figure 10.  Scenes from the life of King Roger II. Peter of Eboli, Liber ad honorem Augusti, Palermo, late twelfth century. Burgerbibliothek Bern, Codex 120.II, folio 96r. Photograph courtesy of the Burgerbibliothek, Bern.

or facial hair, but instead assimilated with local fashions. This is also evident in the shock of his professional colleague when the young Melkite physician from Jerusalem arrived in Damascus wearing Frankish garb, as noted above. Likewise, when the Muslim pilgrim Ibn Jubayr arrived in Sicily in 1183, he was dismayed to find that some Norman women in Palermo dressed like Muslims. They “follow the fashion of Muslim women,

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are fluent of speech, wrap their cloaks about them, and are veiled. [At Christmas], they go forth dressed in robes of gold-embroidered silk, wrapped in elegant cloaks, concealed by colored veils, and shod with gilded slippers . . . [and] bearing all the adornments of Muslim women, including jewelry, henna on the fingers, and perfumes.”81 Three decades later in the Crusader States, James of Vitry remarked with great distaste that Syrian Christian women were veiled like Muslim women and that Latin Christian women learned “innumerable bad habits and abominations from Syrian and Saracen women.”82 These accounts describe societies that had been in contact for slightly more than a century, a period long enough to foster the cross-cultural adoption and adaption of styles and habits of dress. Each also reveals shock and aversion on the part of an outside observer encountering this situation. It was always a concern that ease of interaction and assimilation could be dangerous, leading to conversion or sexual transgressions, but these ­anxieties appear to have gained more currency after extended contact. James of Vitry was appalled by the irreligious and immoral behavior that he encountered among the acculturated Latin Christians (Pullani) in early ­thirteenth-century Acre.83 In the 1180s, Ibn Jubayr had reported a rumor that Muslim slave women at the Norman court worked to convert other women, and thus “the Frankish Christian women who came to [the] palace became Muslims, converted by these handmaidens. All this they kept secret from the king.”84 Perhaps these were the same women whom Ibn Jubayr had described as dressing like Muslims. His story is lent credibility by another anecdote, reported a few years later by Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shad­ dād, that some of the serving women who came from Sicily to the Levant in 1191, as attendants to Richard I’s sister Joanna, were secret Muslims. These women had pretended to be Christian until they found an opportunity of escaping to Muslim territory.85 This kind of story of acculturation, secret conversion, and unclear identity was deeply troubling to Christian religious leaders.86 Another concern was disguise for military purposes, as in the case of the Muslim spies who had infiltrated the Christian camp at Antioch during the first crusade. A century later, Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād recounted that during the Christian siege of Acre in 1190, a group of Muslims from Beirut disguised themselves as Christians and managed to provision the city from the sea. They embarked by ship with supplies of food, and “they dressed up as Franks, even shaving their beards. They also placed pigs on the deck, so that they could be seen from a distance, and flew [flags with] crosses.” The list seems almost comic in its catalogue of stereotypical

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Christian traits.87 Yet a similar story, probably another account of the same event, appears in a Latin description of the siege of Acre. In this version, the Muslim ship also pretended to be European, but was not disguised. “A ship appeared in the distance this side of Sidon toward Beirut, full of Saracens . . . [who] had been sent by Saladin to aid the besieged in Acre. . . . The king [Richard I] noticed the ship, and calling one of his sailors . . . he commanded him to row quickly and ask who was in charge of the ship. The reply came back that it belonged to the king of France. The king approached it in burning haste, but he found that there was no sign of the French language, nor any Christian symbol or flag to give him confidence in their reply. . . . [T]he king sent others to seek more definite information. They now altered their story and replied that they were Genoese.”88 In the Arabic story, the ruse was successful and the disguised ship fulfilled its mission; in the Latin version, the ship was recognized and destroyed. Anxiety and Identity

These stories of a Muslim ship trying to pass itself off as a Christian vessel during the Third Crusade encapsulate the dual anxieties later expressed by Innocent III in 1215. By the end of the twelfth century, Saladin had been able to rebuild the Ayyubid navy with the help of timber and other materials supplied by European merchants, and Muslims and Christians had become acculturated to each others’ customs, language, and appearance. Although the strategies of shaving beards and putting pigs on deck were likely exaggerated here to make a good story, the possibility of Muslims passing as Christians, while Christians in Sicily and Syria looked, acted, and spoke like Muslims, had become very real by the later twelfth century. Over time, it seems likely that contact and convenience, and perhaps issues of social and physical comfort, had eroded the earlier tendency toward distinctive dress, manners, language, and appearance. Innocent III’s anxieties expressed at the Fourth Lateran Council surely echoed and codified sentiments that had become common by 1215, in both lay and clerical circles. But while the ban on timber and iron had a clear connection to contemporary fears about Muslim military and naval resurgence, it is difficult to identify a specific catalyst for intensified Christian concerns about appearance, religious identity, sexual mixing, and conversion at the turn of the thirteenth century. One important factor was surely the increasing acculturation of Muslims and Christians in Sicily and the Crusader States that was witnessed by churchmen like James of Vitry

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and William of Tyre. Recent crusading failures were surely also an issue, as Innocent mustered his forces to launch a new campaign aimed at Egypt. Meanwhile, concerns about security, heresy, and identity closer to home in Europe must also have played a role, especially in the wake of the Albigensian crusade. In the Crusader States, the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin, despite the launching of a third and fourth crusade, had shifted the tenor of ­Christian-Muslim relations in recent decades. After a century of holding territory in the Near East, the future of the European crusading effort now appeared less secure than it had in the middle of the twelfth century. Latin families (pullani) who had lived in the Levant for several generations may now have faced the loss of land, and even considered the possibility of a return to Europe, but the prospect was complicated by a century of acculturation, mixed marriages or sexual relationships, and perhaps children with roots in two traditions. Suddenly, issues of identity began to take on a newly problematic and more pressing aspect. In Europe also, issues of identity and faith had recently come to the fore with the appearance of the Cathars, and the emerging idea of crusade against heretical Christians. Questions of identity became more murky within Christian society, eventually giving rise to the need for inquisition and a closer examination of ideas and practices because external visual markers were not sufficient. It is surely no accident that concerns about the outward identification of Jews and Muslims came to the forefront at the same time as identification between Christians was becoming a critical question. The rise of heresy gave new impetus to clarifying the community of true Christians and protecting these men and women from physical and spiritual contamination.89 Other concerns also preyed on European Christians’ sense of security in the early thirteenth century. Not only the apparently ongoing strength of the Ayyubids and the Almohads, but even recent Christian conquests— such as the victory at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212—brought new doubts about subject Muslim populations in Christian lands. With greater numbers of Muslims living under Christian rule, these non-Christian subjects were increasingly perceived as a potentially dangerous fifth column. These fears were already strong in Sicily, where there had been riots and Muslim revolts during the later twelfth century. In the 1220s, Frederick II quelled Sicilian Christian fears of insurrection and conversion by resettling most of the Sicilian Muslim population as an isolated community in the mainland Italian city of Lucera. Frederick was the first Christian ruler to expel Muslims from some of his lands, but others would follow his example later in the thirteenth

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century and after. By the early sixteenth century, no Muslim populations remained under Christian rule. In hindsight, canons 68 and 71 of the Fourth Lateran Council appear as merely stopgap measures in evolving Christian attempts to control and dominate their encounter with the Islamic world. These interim solutions were ultimately deemed insufficient. But the fact that Innocent’s regulations remained so influential, even if eventually impracticable, is testimony to the fact the medieval MuslimChristian encounter was never static. Attitudes and solutions changed over time, and there was no single medieval Christian or Muslim approach to the “other.” The rulings of the Fourth Lateran Council regarding Muslims would not have been promulgated in the form that they were, which reflected particular anxieties of the Latin Christian world at the turn of the thirteenth century, had it not been for prior developments in the MuslimChristian relationship during the long twelfth century. Notes 1. Three canons of the council (numbers 67, 68, and 71) dealt with issues relating to non-Christian peoples. Canon 67 concerned usury, and will not be discussed below since this matter pertained solely to Jews. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner (London, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 266–7, 269–70; translation from English Historical Documents 3 (1189–1327), ed. Harry Rothwell (London, 1975), pp. 672–3, 675–6. 2.  English Historical Documents 3, p. 672. 3.  English Historical Documents 3, pp. 675–6. 4. Later medieval statutes include Les statuts municipaux de Marseille, ed. R. Pernoud (Paris, 1949), p. 171, and Las Siete Partidas 7, title 24, law 11, trans. S. P. Scott, ed. R. I. Burns (Philadelphia, 2001), vol. 5, p. 1437. 5.  Nicholas Vincent, “Two Papal Letters on Wearing the Jewish Badge, 1221 and 1229,” Jewish Historical Studies 34 (1994–96), pp. 209–24; William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews (Philadelphia, 1989), pp. 149, 161, 163, 167, 172, 187, 230, 240. 6.  David Jacoby, “The Supply of War Materials to Egypt in the Crusader Period,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 25 (2001), pp. 102–32; W. Heyd, Histoire du commerce du Levant (Leipzig, 1885), vol. 1, pp. 386–8; José Trenchs Odena, “Les ‘Alexandrini’ ou la désobéissance aux embargos conciliares ou pontificaux contre les Musulmans,” in Islam et chrétiens du Midi (12e–14e s.), ed. Edouard Privat (Toulouse, 1983), pp. 169–93; Robert I. Burns, “Renegades, Adventurers, and Sharp Businessmen: The Thirteenth-Century Spaniard in the Cause of Islam,” Catholic Historical Review 58 (1972), pp. 358–66. 7.  In the western Mediterranean, ethnic differences in the Muslim population, which included Berbers and black Africans, added a new dimension to visual identity. This is especially apparent in Christian art by the thirteenth century, in-

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cluding images of black Muslims in Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa María and in a mosaic from the Church of St. Thomas in Formis in Rome (ca. 1210), showing Christ holding two chained captives, one white and one black, in his hands (Yvonne Friedman, Encounter between Enemies: Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem [Leiden, 2002], pp. 190–1 and plate 7). 8.  In 971, negotiations between Byzantium and Venice included restrictions on traffic in arms, iron, and timber to Muslims (Donald Nicol, Byzantium and Venice [Cambridge, 1988], p. 37). Earlier Carolingian legislation may also have included bans on sales to Muslims (Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy [Cambridge, 2001], p. 732). 9.  J. P. Migne, ed., PL 216:820C and PL 214:493A–D, trans. in A Sourcebook for Medieval Economic History, ed. R. Cave and H. Coulson (New York, 1965), p. 104–5. 10.  G. D. Mansi, ed., Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio (Paris, 1901–27), vol. 21, p. 1159, and vol. 22, p. 230, canon 24. Also Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, p. 223. 11.  William of Tyre, Chronicon, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, CCCM 63 (Turnhout, 1986), p. 474; trans. as A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, Emily A. Babcock (New York, 1943), vol. 1, p. 441. 12.  Ibn al-Athīr, Al-Kāmil fī al-ta’rīkh (Beirut, 1965–7; repr. 1979), vol. 10, p. 375. 13. Usama ibn Munqidh, Kitāb al-I‘tibār, ed. P. K. Hitti (Princeton, 1930), pp. 99–100. I am indebted to Paul M. Cobb for allowing me to consult his new translation of Usama’s text, The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades (London, 2008) before its publication. 14.  Noted in the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris; passage trans. in The World of El Cid, ed. Simon Barton and Richard Fletcher (New York, 2000), p. 212. 15.  Chronicon Magni Presbyteri, ed. W. Wattenbach, MGH SS 17 (Hanover, 1861), p. 512; see also Anthony Cutler, “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Invisible Muslim and Christian Self-Fashioning in the Culture of Outremer,” in France and the Holy Land: Frankish Culture at the End of the Crusades, ed. Daniel Weiss and Lisa Mahony (Baltimore, 2004), p. 258. It is possible that this description reflects a European perception of Muslim desire for Western arms (and Byzantine willingness to supply them) rather than an actual gift. 16.  As opposed to naval supplies, whole ships were often acquired through capture. 17. Al-Idrīsī, Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-’āfāq (Naples and Rome, 1970– 84), p. 555; French translation, Description de l’Afrique et de l’Espagne, ed. R. Dozy and M.J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1866), p. 231. Other sources suggest that exported Andalusī timber and ships may have been found as far away as Egypt (Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain [Cambridge, 1994], pp. 196–7). 18. Al-Idrīsī, Nuzhat, p. 260; Description, p. 105. 19.  This traffic is evident in a variety of sources, including notarial contracts, Jewish merchant letters, and Arabic materials. As early as the 1060s, iron appears as a commodity in Geniza letters, but references to traffic in metals and timber increase in the twelfth century, and especially in the second half of the century (Jacoby, “Supply of War Materials,” p. 103).

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20. Hassanein Rabie, The Financial System of Egypt, A.H. 564–741, A.D. 1169–1341 (London, 1972), p. 92. 21.  S. M. Stern, “An Original Document from the Fātimid Chancery concerning Italian Merchants,” in Studi orientalistici in onore di Georgio Levi Della Vida (Rome, 1956), vol. 2, pp. 532–3. 22. Peter the Chanter, Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis, ed. Jean-­ Albert Dugauquier (Louvain, 1963), vol. 3, pp. 2a, 204; also John Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and his Circle (Princeton, 1970), vol. 1, p. 267. Baldwin and others have noted the influence of Peter the Chanter’s ideas on Innocent III (Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants, vol. 1, p. 343; P. D. Clarke, “Peter the Chanter, Innocent III, and Theological Views on Collective Guilt and Punishment,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52 [2001], pp. 1–20). 23.  Tomás Muñoz y Romero, ed., Colección de fueros municipales y cartas pueblas (Madrid, 1847; repr. Madrid, 1978), pp. 366, 382. 24.  Usatges de Barcelona: El codi a mitjan segle 12, ed. Joan Bastardas (Barcelona, 1984), p. 136 (also Usatges of Barcelona, trans. Donald Kagay [Philadelphia, 1994], p. 90); Fuero of Teruel, ed. Max Gorosch (Stockholm, 1950), p. 308; Fuero de Cuenca, ed. Rafael de Ureña y Smenjaud (Madrid, 1935), p. 356–7 (also Code of Cuenca, trans. James Powers [Philadelphia, 2000], p. 92, c. 4); Fuero de Plasencia, ed. Jesus Majada Neila (Salamanca, 1986), pp. 46–7. An official list of prohibited trade items (cosas vedadas) was established by Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1207 (Joseph O’Callaghan, The Cortes of Castile-León [Philadelphia, 1989], p. 189). 25.  “Liber iurium reipublicae genuensis,” ed. M. E. Ricotti, in Historiae patriae monumenta 7.1 (Turin, 1854), p. 158. 26.  Jacoby, “Supply of War Materials to Egypt,” p. 106. The Assizes of Jerusalem, a thirteenth-century text that contained much earlier material, also ruled against “bad Christians” who sold arms to Muslims (Les Livres des Assises et des Usages dou Reaume de Jerusalem, ed. E. H. Kausler [Stuttgart, 1839], pp. 79–80). 27.  Michele Amari, I diplomi arabi del R. Archivio Fiorentino (Florence, 1863), p. 260. 28.  Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World (Cambridge, 2003), p. 115. 29.  Ibid., p. 114. 30. Claude Cahen, Orient et occident au temps des Croisades (Paris, 1983), pp. 133, 176. 31. Amari, Diplomi arabi, pp. 50–2; trans. in R. S. Lopez and I. W. Raymond, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (New York, 1955), p. 385. 32. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley, 1967) vol. 1, p. 301. 33.  On vestimentary regulations for Muslims in the thirteenth century and later, see Joseph O’Callaghan, “The Mudejars of Castile and Portugal in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Muslims under Latin Rule, 1100–1300, ed. James Powell (Princeton, 1990), pp. 30–1; Brian Catlos, The Victors and the Vanquished (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 300–1; F. Fernández y González, Estado social y político de los Mudejares de Castilla (Madrid, 1866), p. 130; Nora Berend, “Medieval Patterns

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of Social Exclusion and Integration: The Regulation of Non-Christian Clothing in Thirteenth-Century Hungary,” Revue Mabillon, n.s. 8 (1997), pp 155–76. 34.  See Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (New York, 1996). 35.  A. S. Tritton, The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim Subjects (Oxford, 1930), pp. 115–26. 36.  Medieval sumptuary legislation often related to issues of sexuality and social differentation, even within Christian society; see James Brundage, “Sumptuary Laws and Prostitution in Late Medieval Italy,” JMH 13 (1987), pp. 343–55. 37.  Allan Cutler argues that Innocent’s main motive in regulating minority dress was to degrade Muslims and Jews living in Christian society (“Innocent III and the Distinctive Clothing of Jews and Muslims,” Studies in Medieval Culture 3 [1970], pp. 92–116). 38. Constable, Trade and Traders, p. 207; David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996), p. 147. The contexts of these two cases of mistaken identity were fundamentally different: the first was due to conscious disguise and deception while the second was the result of acculturation and a genuine similarity of appearance. 39.  Yvonne Friedman cites a number of cases of sexual mixing and conversion as the result of captivity (Encounter between Enemies, pp. 142, 144, 168, 175, 182, 228, 230). 40.  Benjamin Kedar, “Multidirectional Conversion in the Frankish Levant,” in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Muldoon (Gainesville, 1997), p. 193. 41.  Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Hierosolymitana (Heidelberg, 1913), vol. 3, pp. xxxvii, 748; trans. Frances Rita Ryan, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, 1095–1127 (Knoxville, 1969), p. 271. 42.  William of Tyre, Chronicon, p. 445; History of Deeds, vol. 1, p. 408. 43.  Hugo Falcandus, The History of the Tyrants of Sicily, trans. Graham Loud and Thomas Wiedemann (Manchester, 1988), pp. 109–10, 122; see also Alex Metcalfe, Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily (London, 2003), pp. 96–8. 44.  Yedida Stillman cites Roland Barthes’ phrase “un systéme vestimentaire” (“The Medieval Islamic Vestimentary System: Evolution and Consolidation,” in Kommunikation zwischen Orient und Okzident: Alltag und Sachkultur [Vienna, 1994], p. 269). 45.  William of Tyre, Chronicon, p. 675; History of Deeds, vol. 2, p. 96. 46.  William of Tyre, Chronicon, p. 787; History of Deeds, vol. 2, p. 214. Other references also indicate the perception of language as an important identifying trait, even if this could be misleading. Ibn al-Athīr recounted the anecdote of a Muslim ship tricked into capture in 1111 by a crusader vessel with Muslims on board who “spoke to them in Arabic and they did not doubt them” (Al-Kāmil fī al-ta’rīkh, vol. 10, p. 489). In Sicily, Geoffrey Malaterra likewise told of a Muslim ship in Syracuse harbor that was duped by Arabic-speaking Christians in 1085 (Geoffrey Malaterra, De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae Comitis, ed. Gaufredo Pontieri [Bologna, 1928], 4.2, p. 86). 47.  See Vasiliki Tsamakda, The Illustrated Chronicle of Ioannes Skylitzes (Leiden, 2002), pp. 5, 16–19, 397, on provenance and dating.

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48. State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, inventory no. F-175. See C. Hahn, “Interpictoriality in the Limoges Chasses of Stephen, Martial, and Valerie,” in Image and Belief, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, 1979), p. 114; D. Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2003), p. 174. Later, early modern Europeans would become fascinated with the exotic oriental associations of the turban (Nabil Matar, “Renaissance England and the Turban,” in Images of the Other: Europe and the Muslim World before 1700, ed. David Blanks [Cairo, 1997], pp. 39–54). 49.  My thanks to David Nicolle for his advice on this image. 50.  In contrast, most later legislation on sexual mixing, such as the thirteenthcentury rulings in the Siete Partidas (7, title 25, law 10), proposed much harsher penalties for the Muslim partner (Siete Partidas, vol. 5, pp. 1441–2). 51.  Benjamin Kedar, “On the Origins of the Earliest Laws of Frankish Jerusalem: The Canons of the Council of Nablus, 1120,” Spec 74 (1999), p. 334. Elsewhere, Kedar points out that “this first dress regulation for Infidels in the Latin world differs from later legislation, in that it does not forbid specific items of clothing or prescribe a certain type of haircut,” and he draws from this that “by 1120, Frankish and Muslim dress in the Holy Land were so different that the mere prohibition of dressing ‘according to Frankish custom,’ was deemed sufficient”; B. Kedar, “The Subjected Muslims of the Frankish Levant,” in Muslims under Latin Rule, ed. Powell, p. 166. Also on the Council of Nablus, see Hans Meyer, “The Concordat of Nablus,” JEH 33 (1982), pp. 531–43. 52.  Kedar, “Subjected Muslims,” p. 166. 53.  It is hard to know what to make of a list of constitutions for the Order of Arrouaise, ca. 1135, that prohibited anyone, cleric or lay, from wearing a Turkish style cap (pilleum Turcorum). There was no local Muslim population in this region near Cambrai, but the fact that the next two entries relate to conversi shaving their beards and fornicating indicates some degree of anxiety, real or hypothetical, over the religious identity, sexuality, and appearance either of converts to the Order or possibly converts from Islam (Constitutiones canonicorum regularium Ordinis Arroasiensis, ed. L. Miles, CCCM 20 [Turnhout, 1970], p. 213; see also Katharine Scarfe Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World [Cambridge, 2003], pp. 191–2). 54. Richard Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (Harvard, 1979). This kind of anxiety about loss of culture and language may also explain the curious phenomenon of the so-called martyrs of Córdoba in al-Andalus in the ­middle of the ninth-century, nearly one hundred and fifty years after the Muslim arrival in Spain. See Jessica Coope, The Martyrs of Córdoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion (Lincoln, 1995). 55.  Later medieval hisba texts reiterated traditional rules that dhimmis should wear distinctive clothing or badges. See, for example, al-Jarsīfī (al-Andalus, late thirteenth century), ed. E. Lévi-Provençal, in Documents arabes inédits sur la vie sociale et économique en occident musulman au moyen âge: Trois traités hispaniques de hisba (Cairo, 1955), p. 122; al-Shayzarī (Syria, d. 1193), The Book of the Islamic Market Inspector, trans. and ed. R. P. Buckley (Oxford, 1999), pp. 121–2; al-‘Uqbānī (Tlemcen, d. 1467), “Un Traité de Hisba,” ed. Ali Chenoufi, Bulletin d’études orientales 19 (1965–66), p. 151.

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56. Ibn ‘Abdūn, ed. E. Lévi-Provençal, in Documents arabes inédits 50–51 (cc. 164 and 169). The same was true for clothing that had belonged to a leper. 57.  Ibn Rushd, Fatāwā Ibn Rushd, ed. Al-Mukhtar ibn al-Tāhir al-Talīlī (Beirut, 1987), vol. 3, no. 634, p. 1618. 58. Bukhārī, Sahīh, 7, book 72, no. 780. Other versions of this hadīth urge Muslims to do this in order to act “against the polytheists” or “against the fire-­ worshipers.” See, for example, Muslim, Sahīh, 2, nos. 498–501. It is easiest to search references to beards in the hadīth literature online at http://www.usc.edu /schools/college/crcc/engagement/resources/texts/muslim/search.html. 59. Quoted by Ibn Rustah (d. 910), Kitāb al-A‘lāq al-nafīsa, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1892), pp. 129–30; translation in Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York, 1982), p. 280. 60.  See Giles Constable, introduction to the Apologia de Barbis, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, CCCM 62 (Turnhout, 1985), pp. 45–150; also Robert Bartlett, “Symbolic Meaning of Hair in the Middle Ages,” TRHS, 6th ser., 4 (1994), pp. 43–60. 61.  Jaroslav Folda, “The Figural Arts in Crusader Syria and Palestine, 1187– 1291: Some New Realities,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004), p. 327. 62.  Guibert of Nogent, Gesta Dei per Francos, ed. Migne, PL 156, 752D–53B; trans. as The Deeds of God through the Franks, Robert Levine (Woodbridge, 1997), p. 93. 63.  William of Tyre, Chronicon, p. 265; History of Deeds, vol 1, p. 221. 64. Usama ibn Munqidh, Kitāb al-I‘tibār, pp. 134–5. The translation is Paul Cobb’s. See also Hans Meyer, “Latins, Muslims, and Greeks in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” History 63 (1978), p. 186. In contrast to the situation in the crusader states, identification was never such a problem in the western Mediterranean, where northern Christians, Mozarabs, and Andalusi Muslims had a much longer history of familiarity and contact. 65. James of Vitry, Libri duo, quorum prior orientalis sive Hierosolymitanae alter occidentalis historiae nomine inscribitur (Doaui, 1597; repr. Farnborough, 1971), p. 138. 66.  Palestine Pilgrims Text Society, trans. Aubrey Stewart, 6 (London, 1894), pp. 27–9. 67. Guibert of Nogent, Gesta Dei per Francos, 752D–53B; Deeds of God through the Franks, p. 93. 68. Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād, Al-nawādir al-sultānīyya wa al-mahāsin alyūsufīyya (Cairo, 1964), p. 182; trans. as The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, D. S. Richards (Aldershot, 2002), p. 173. Although Franks in the Levant may have shaved their faces, Usama b. Munqidh observed that they dressed less modestly in the bath house than Muslims and did not shave their body hair (Usama ibn Mun­ qidh, Kitāb al-I‘tibār, p. 136). 69.  O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates, trans. Harry Margoulias (Detroit, 1984), pp. 341–2. 70. Constable, Apologia de Barbis, p. 97. 71.  Etan Kohlberg and Benjamin Kedar, “A Melkite Physician in Frankish Jerusalem and Ayyubid Damascus: Muwaffaq al-Dīn Ya‘qūb b. Siqlāb,” Asian and African Studies 22 (1988), pp. 118–9. Also noted in B. Kedar, “Latins and Oriental Christians in the Frankish Levant, 1099–1291,” in Sharing the Sacred: Religious

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Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land, ed. A. Kofsky and G. Strousma (Jerusalem, 1998), p. 219. 72.  The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 65–7. This anecdote is cited in the context of tracking shifting European fashions for beards by both Giles Constable (Apologia de Barbis, p. 96) and Robert Bartlett (“Symbolic Meanings of Hair,” pp. 50–1). 73.  The Poem of the Cid, text and trans. Rita Hamilton (Harmondsworth, 1984), pp. 88–9. 74.  Poem of the Cid, p. 193. Plucking or tearing another man’s beard was a serious offense; see Constable, Apologia de Barbis, pp. 62–3. 75.  Hubert Houben, Roger II of Sicily: A Ruler between East and West (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 113–27. In Peter of Eboli’s illustration, Roger’s full, dark beard contrasts with the clean-shaven face of his son-in-law, Henry VI (Liber ad honorem Augusti, Bern Bergerbibliotek, Codex 120.II, fol. 96r); see figure 10. 76.  G. Constable, Apologia de Barbis, p. 98, n. 246. 77.  William of Tyre reports that Godfrey had a “beard and hair of a medium blond” (Chronicon, p. 427; History of Deeds, vol. 1, p. 387); Baldwin I, “dark-brown hair and beard”(Chronicon, p. 454; History of Deeds, vol. 1, p. 416); Baldwin III, “a rather full beard on cheeks and chin” (Chronicon, p. 715; History of Deeds, vol. 2, p. 137); and that Amaury I was “comely and a full beard covered his cheeks and chin”(Chronicon, p. 867; History of Deeds, vol. 2, p. 298). 78.  William of Tyre, Chronicon, p. 551; History of Deeds, vol. 1, p. 521. 79.  James of Vitry, Historia orientalis, p. 138. 80. William of Tyre, Chronicon, pp. 510–2; History of Deeds, vol. 1, pp. 479–81. James of Vitry likewise commented that eastern Muslims and Christians considered beards a sign of male honor and strength, and looked down on unbearded men in the same way that Latins viewed eunuchs, as shameful, effeminate, and without honor (Historia orientalis, p. 138). 81.  Ibn Jubayr, Rihla, ed. William Wright and M. J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1907), p. 333; translation from The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, R. J. C. Broadhurst (London, 1952) pp. 349–50. He concludes this passage by invoking God’s “protection for this description, which enters the gates of absurdity and leads to the vanities of indulgence.” 82.  James of Vitry, Lettres de Jacques de Vitry: Edition critique, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden, 1960), pp. 84–5; Historia orientalis, p. 135. There is evidence from the Cairo Geniza and other sources that dhimmi women, both Jewish and Christian, were often veiled (Sharon Guthrie, Arab Women in the Middle Ages [London, 2001], pp. 122–3). 83.  James of Vitry, Lettres, p. 86; Historia orientalis, pp. 133–6. 84.  Ibn Jubayr, Rihla, pp. 326–7; Travels, p. 341. 85. Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād, Al-nawādir al-sultānīyya, p. 164; History of Saladin, p. 154. 86.  In some cases, however, adoption of a more local appearance was seen as positive and pragmatic. A letter written in 1226 from Pope Honorius III to Franciscans and Dominicans in Morocco allowed these preachers to grow beards and change their costume in order to more freely visit Christians in jail and other places

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(Louis de Mas Latrie, Traités de paix et de commerce et documents divers concernant les relations des chrétiens avec les arabes de l’Afrique septentrionale au moyen âge [Paris, 1865], p. 9). 87. Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād, Al-nawādir al-sultānīyya, p. 135; History of Saladin, p. 124. 88.  Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi, in Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I, ed. William Stubbs (London, 1864), vol. 1, pp. 204–9; trans. as The Chronicle of the Third Crusade, Helen J. Nicholson (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 196–9. 89.  Kedar, “Subjected Muslims,” p. 192.

t w elve

Continuity and Change in Twelfth-Century Christian-Jewish Relations A nna Sapir A b u l afia

My way into this vast topic will be the remarkable story of Herbert of Bosham. As an administrator, Herbert joined John of Salisbury in the household of Thomas Becket after having served King Henry II. He and John stood at the center of the clash between king and archbishop about temporal and spiritual jurisdictions in the Christian republic (respublica Christiana).1 As a scholar, Herbert showed particular interest in biblical exegesis. He meticulously edited and improved his teacher Peter Lombard’s commentaries on the Gallican Psalter and the Pauline Epistles, but his real interest did not lie in allegorical or spiritual interpretations of the Bible. His preference was for the literal level, and he proceeded to write a commentary on the historical sense of the Psalms. The version he used was the Hebraica, Jerome’s translation of the Psalter from the original Hebrew. No other Christian exegete had engaged in a literal interpretation of the Psalms before. Commenting on the Hebraica rather than the Gallican or Roman Psalter was equally novel. What is even more startling is the extensive use Herbert made of Rashi, the late eleventh-century Jewish exegete of the Bible and Talmud, who had promoted the study of the Bible’s plain meaning, in part, in response to Christian Christological interpretations of the Old Testament.2 Finally, as a human being, Herbert has left us an account of religious questioning. In his Life of Becket he recorded how Thomas conducted rapid masses so as to avoid idle thoughts. Herbert gives us an impression of what those idle thoughts might have been by wondering whether God would blame the church if it had mistakenly believed that the Lord had assumed flesh when he, in fact, had not yet done so. He cites 314

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“erring Synagogue” as claiming not only that the Messiah had not yet come, but also that when he would, he would be solely man and not Godman incarnate. On balance, Herbert thinks God would not assign blame. He hastens to impress upon the reader the validity of Catholic belief in the incarnation and the Eucharist, stressing how much better this offering is than the bloody sacrifices of the synagogue. He is also at pains to assure everyone of his own credentials as a believer in the sacrament by recounting the dream he had the night after he had had these unsettling thoughts. He had seen the Eucharist swirling around in the chalice. Archbishop Thomas, whom he consulted, told him the swirling represented his febrile brain, and Herbert’s faith in the sacrament became stronger than ever.3 The example of Herbert of Bosham brings out some of the basic questions we need to ask in our attempt to evaluate the changes and continuities in Christian-Jewish relations in the twelfth century. The first concerns the impact on Christian-Jewish relations of clashes between regnum and sacerdotium. The second relates to the importance of Christian knowledge of contemporary developments in Jewish scholarship. The third has to do with the interplay between developments in Christian theology and ecclesiology and Christian awareness of the continuing rejection by Jews of Christian doctrines. “Change” and “continuity” are terms that say more about our modern obsession with novelty than twelfth-century concerns about seeking legitimacy for one’s thinking by assimilating authorities of the past. Change and continuity do not, in fact, have to be mutually exclusive, nor does one necessarily follow the other. The adaptation of earlier patterns to new circumstances can constitute continuity and change; the adaptations of one period can herald the changes of another. It is for this reason that I propose to discuss my topic through the image of an imaginary triptych. The center panel of my triptych covers the long twelfth century, running from circa 1050 to circa 1215. The panel on the left covers the early Middle Ages until circa 1050 and includes the Augustinian witness theory, Gregory the Great’s Sicut Iudeis, and Carolingian Jewry privileges. The panel on the right includes so-called chamber serfdom and the expulsion of the Jews from England and France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The back panels of my imaginary triptych bring out well the position of Jews within medieval Christian society, because the circumstances of their existence were supposed to refer to events in the past (left panel) and in the future (right panel) rather than in the present (center panel). Augustine had grudgingly assigned to the Jews the role of passive book carriers of the Hebrew Bible; their dispersion and subservience to Christians served

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as the visible proof and reminder of the divine punishment meted out to them for killing Jesus Christ in the past and epitomized Christian supersession of Judaism. Did not Psalm 58/9:12 clearly state: “Slay them not, lest at any time my people forget?”4 On the other hand, preservation of Jews was a prerequisite for the future culmination of salvific history. As Paul had prophesized, the final conversion of the Jews would herald the second coming. Although these theological maxims allowed Jews to live in Christian society in the present, they were not a component part of the respublica Christiana, which was deemed to be coterminous with ecclesia or the body of Christ, in which, according to the Gelasian model, temporal affairs were managed by regnum and spiritual concerns by sacerdotium. Their existence depended entirely on the use either temporal authority or priesthood could make of their service for worldly or spiritual gain.5 Jews were preserved in Christian society to serve Christians. The details of that service and how that might impinge on daily contacts between Christians and Jews depended on the particular circumstances of time and place and needed to be embodied in special ecclesiastical rulings and temporal privileges. As far as the papacy was concerned, Gregory the Great’s letter of June 598 to the bishop of Palermo, written in response to the lobbying efforts of the Jews of Rome on behalf of the Jews of Palermo, contained the standard formula “sicut Iudeis,” which spelled out the underlying agreement about Jewish presence in Christian society. Gregory stated that “just as the Jews should not have license in their synagogues to arrogate anything beyond that permitted by law, so too in those things granted them they should experience no infringement of their rights.”6 In other words, as long as Jews stuck to their subservient role, they would be allowed to practice their religion.7 Forced conversion and the murder of Jews were not ­allowed. Much of this echoed the regulations concerning Jews in the Roman law codes of Theodosius and Justinian.8 As far as the day-to-day practicalities of Jews and Christians living side by side were concerned, numerous church councils and synods tried to make sure Jews did not slip out of their subservient role by enjoying the privileges given to them by princes and by integrating into Christian society. Archbishop Agobard of Lyons (d. 840), for example, was appalled that Louis the Pious’ Jewry privileges allowed Jews to employ free Christians and protected their ownership of non-Christian slaves. His successor Amulo carried on the struggle during the reign of Charles the Bald. Both accused Jews of harboring blasphemous post-biblical material.9 Seventh-century Visigothic canons were particularly harsh. Backsliding of Jewish converts to Christianity, for

Continuity and Change in Christian-Jewish Relations  317

example, carried the harsh penalty of legal enslavement to Christian masters (canon 8, 694).10 John Gilchrist has demonstrated that Burchard of Worms had already brought together a significant number of canons that aimed at keeping Christians, especially Christian converts from Judaism, as far away from Jews as possible in his Decretum of circa 1012.11 From all of this, we can conclude that princes granting Jews privileges and churchmen insisting that the principle of Jewish subservience be adhered to were certainly not an innovation of the long twelfth century. But for all the continuities, we do notice changes that are connected to a number of intimately interrelated issues that include the rising immigration of Jews to the developing polities of northwestern Europe, the intellectual concerns of the schools of Paris and Bologna, the ideology of ecclesiastical reform, and the effect of recruiting crusaders to fight the enemies of Christendom. Or to put it more succinctly: changes occurred in the long twelfth century because princes and prelates were caught in a vise. On the one hand, they were forced to work out how to adapt a theory, which disparaged the role Jews played in society in the present in order to reflect the past and to allude to the future, to the reality of growing numbers of economically and intellectually active flesh-and-blood Jews who were anything but passive Augustinian book carriers. On the other hand, they were working within an ideological climate that actively promoted ideas of universal Christendom and the Christianization of society. The risks Christian knights, who had been recruited to fight so-called infidels, posed to Jews were already apparent in Spain when northerners began to help Christian kings expand their frontiers into Muslim territory. Pope Alexander II’s words to the bishops of Spain in 1063 neatly sum­ marized ecclesiastical theory behind the presence of Jews in society. He praised the bishops’ efforts to protect the Jews from attack by stating that, unlike Muslims, Jews “are prepared to serve” (parati sunt servire). His description of how Jews were dispersed throughout the world, living “in ever­lasting penitence, damned by the guilt of their ancestors for spilling the blood of the Savior,” made plain just how subservient Jews were meant to be.12 But many Spanish Christian kings had different views about the usefulness of Jews in their kingdoms. In his usual robust way, Gregory VII castigated Alfonso VI of Léon-Castile in 1081 for engaging Jewish officials. This tied in with one of the many reforming chapters listed at the Autumn Synod of Rome in 1078. Gregory told Alfonso that “to place Christians below Jews and to subject them to their judgement” is in effect “to oppress the church of God and to exalt the synagogue of Satan.” Alfonso was cautioned to think twice before dishonoring Christ in this way

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when Christ had given him dominion over thousands of people.13 But the realities of establishing viable Christian polities in Iberia could do little with papal theories like these. Christian kings seemed perfectly happy to avail themselves of the expertise of numerous Jews seeking refuge from the pogroms in Granada of 1066 and the fundamentalist practices of the Almohads in the second half of the twelfth century. Numerous examples exist of privileges given to individual Jews to reward them for the part they took in royal administration in Aragon. The fuero, or municipal code, of Teruel, which was adapted by Cuenca in Castile in 1190 and later by many other cities in Aragon and Castile, gives us an idea of the flavor of Jewish royal service in a more general sense. David Abulafia, who has brought renewed attention to the importance of the fueros for understanding the concept of Jewish service, has argued convincingly that the many later copies of the Teruel fuero accurately reflect the words of the statute conferred to the city by Alfonso II of Aragon in 1177. The Jews are described as “servants of the king and always allotted to the royal fisc” (servi Regis, et semper fisco regio deputati). What is striking is this early new use of the term servi in a temporal setting. (We shall return to this point in due course.) Jews fell under and were protected by royal jurisdiction. If a Jew was killed, the payable fine went to the king. Sexual liaisons between Christians and Jews were outlawed; mixed use of bath houses was to be avoided. But the details of the statutes do not draw a picture of Jews being preserved as relics of the past or portents for the future. On the contrary, the statutes were clearly intended to allow Jews to live profitable lives within the cities concerned.14 The meticulous research by Michael Toch allows us to speak with considerable confidence about Jewish settlement and economic activity in Germany in the long twelfth century. In 1096, there were thirteen Jewish settlements in German lands; eight of these had been established since 1050, including Trier, Cologne, and Speyer. Mainz, Magdeburg, Merseburg, Worms, and Regensburg had housed Jewish communities before 1000. The first part of the 1100s was largely a time of rebuilding after the loss of life in 1096; more than twice as many settlements (eleven) were founded after 1150 than in the first half of the century. The number of new Jewish settlements sharply increased after 1200, peaking between 1300 and 1350. Jewish migration in our period focused on the politically and economically important archiepiscopal, episcopal, and royal cities along the Rhine and along the trade routes to southeastern and northeastern Europe. The Hebrew Responsa analyzed by Toch make it plain that the economic life of these Jewish communities was dominated by trade in

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wine, spices, dyes, salted fish, cloth, and precious metals. Jewish artisans, like bakers and smiths, serviced their own communities. “Upper class” Jews interacted with Christian prelates, nobles, and affluent burghers; some lower class Christians were employed by Jewish merchants and viniculturists. Before 1100, moneylending among Jews and between Jews and Christians usually featured as a spin-off from trade. In the twelfth century, moneylending and trade became equally important Jewish economic activities. Moneylending became increasingly important after 1200.15 How did Henry IV and his twelfth-century successors relate to these Jewish settle­ments? Although Henry’s privileges to Speyer and Worms of 1090 closely resembled earlier Carolingian privileges, they de facto concerned all of the Jews settled in these cities rather than a handful of named merchants and their partners. There is continuity and change here. Henry’s charter for the Jews of Speyer ratified and expanded the provisions Bishop Rüdiger had made in 1084 for the Jews he had invited to settle in his town. Henry granted the Jews security over their moveable and immoveable goods, exemption from tolls in his kingdom, and the right to engage in trade; stolen goods gained lawfully by a Jew had to be redeemed for the price the Jew had paid for it; Jewish children were protected against forced baptism; Jews seeking baptism had a moratorium of three days imposed on them to make sure of their resolve; converts from Judaism lost their property; pagan slaves owned by Jews were not to be baptized with a view to freeing them; Jews might engage Christian servants, but not on Sundays and feast days; contraventions against the charter were punished with fines payable to the king or bishop. Henry’s 1090 charter to Worms added the provision that the Jews there “pertain to our chamber” (ad cameram nostram attineant).16 To my mind, it is reasonable to follow in the spirit of Baron in reading in this statement Henry’s desire to spell out that it was up to him and not the church to work out how to deal with “his” Jews. After all, Henry was bound to know that many of his charters’ provisions were at odds with what the institutional church deemed to be ap­propriate. It cannot be for nothing that Henry took the precaution in the Worms charter to admonish bishops and priests not to interfere with the provision that permitted Jews to hire Christian servant girls and wet nurses. Making Jewish converts forfeit their inheritance was hardly conducive to the conversion of Jews so firmly desired by the church. Another vital factor was, of course, the fact that, unlike the bishop of Speyer, the bishop of Worms was not a loyal supporter of Henry. But Henry went further than that. In 1097, he allowed Jews who had been forcibly baptized to return to Judaism. This

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was against the wishes of Anti-Pope Clement III who had crowned Henry emperor in 1084.17 A few moments’ reflection on the whereabouts of the Jewish communities we have been talking about makes one realize how deliberate Henry must have been in his decisions concerning Jews. Speyer was, after all, the city where the Salians built their imperial church. Conrad II had laid the foundation stone; the church was consecrated in 1061. Remodeling took place from circa 1080 to 1111. The cathedral had a crypt especially designed to receive the remains of the Salians and their wives. The cathedral was very important to Henry, representing as it did the protection of its patron saint, the Virgin Mary, for himself and his dynasty and embodying the imperial status to which he laid claim. Henry lavished gifts on the cathedral throughout his adult life.18 Although Rüdiger started off by settling Jews north of the city’s center, Jews were already living in the city center in an area less than two hundred meters from the ­cathedral before 1096. By 1104, a new synagogue was consecrated in the city center, where Jews had continued to settle; the ritual bath next to it dates from around the same time. The magnificent structure of the mikveh, which survives intact, shows clear affinities with masonry found in the cathedral. The Jewish communities of the three cathedral cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz were closely linked to each other, and by around 1200 they had formed a legal federation that became famous for its culture and expertise in Jewish law.19 Jews were not an abstract notion from the past for Henry and his successors. They were very real. What were equally real were these kings’ imperial pretensions. The Rhineland pogroms of 1096 have in the past been heralded as a watershed in Jewish medieval history. Few would do so today. But that is not to say that they do not represent significant changes. From a Christian point of view, the attacks revealed how dangerous evocative language recruiting soldiers for Christ (milites Christi) could be when its effects were not carefully monitored from above. It is not for nothing that the outrages occurred at the hands of the least well regulated armies, not the official papal armies. The results of Toch’s research militate against assuming that Jewish moneylending lay at the root of crusader enmity against the Rhineland Jews; moneylending seems not to have played a major role in ­Christian-Jewish relations at this point in Germany.20 But that does not mean that hunger for Jewish wealth was not a factor, nor, as Riley-Smith always emphasizes, should we underestimate the mundane need troops have to secure provisions.21 But I would argue that, in fact, the Hebrew sources of the First Crusade tell us pretty much what we need to know. As far as the Jewish communities were concerned, they were primarily at-

Continuity and Change in Christian-Jewish Relations  321

tacked because the crusaders branded them as Christ-killers. These highly evocative texts, which emerged within fifty years after the crusade, commemorate and celebrate Jewish loss of life as an idealized form of Jewish martyrdom in honor of God and Jewish heroism in opposition to Christian oppression. But at the same time, the sources reveal how intimately the Jews in the Rhineland were connected to their host communities. Not only did they seek out the help of their neighbors and bishops; the imagery of the texts frequently displays similarities to Christian ideas of the ­period. Reading between the lines, it would seem clear that more Jews succumbed to baptism than the authors of the texts would have us believe.22 In order to prevent a recurrence of similar attacks, Henry added the Jews in his Imperial Land Peace of January 1103 to institutions and groups in need of special protection like the church, monks, lay clergy, merchants, and women. The ecclesiastical princes of his realm “confirmed” the Peace and the lay princes swore to uphold it “until Whitsun and thereafter for four years” at the council in Mainz at which Henry had declared his intention to go to Jerusalem. For the first time in Germany, all Jews of the empire were included in one instrument of protection.23 It took the papacy longer to react to the new realities of the possibility of increased violence against Jews. Around 1120, Calixtus II promulgated a bull, which became known as Sicut Iudeis because it incorporated Gregory the Great’s eponymous formula, in protection of all of the Jews of Christendom. The text of Calixtus’ bull was reissued by five popes in the twelfth century, including Alexander III (ca. 1165) and Innocent III (1199), and repeatedly in the thirteenth, in response to Jewish petitioning for protection. Promulgating bulls offering all Jews of Christendom protection was only one part of the papal agenda to influence lay society and attempt to make its ideal of universal Christendom a concrete reality. Another was to call universal councils with the aim to reform all aspects of Christian religious life. Both Alexander III’s Third Lateran Council of 1179 and Innocent III’s Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 contributed greatly to the church’s program of reform, which included strong views on the appropriate relationship between Christians and Jews. Lateran III forbade Jews from having Christian domestics and wet nurses and demanded that Jewish converts not forfeit their property. In 1157, Frederick Barbarossa had confirmed Henry IV’s Worms Jewry privilege of 1090, which contravened ecclesiastical ideas on these matters. Jewish employment of wet nurses was a particularly sensitive issue. When Innocent III heard that French Jews were forcing their wet nurses to throw the milk they produced after receiving the Eucharist at Easter into the latrine, he was outraged at what he saw as Jews grossly

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overstepping their assigned role in society. His response was the Bull Etsi Iudeos of 1205 in which he used a new phrase to describe the correct parameters of Jewish service. He called it “perpetual servitude,” which was intended to reflect the guilt Jews carried for Christ’s crucifixion. Lateran IV’s canons concerning Jews systematized and added up-to-date details to previous material, as for example the rulings concerning Jewish moneylending. It seems to have been novel to introduce legislation requiring Jews (and Saracens) to wear distinguishing dress to prevent miscegenation with Christians. These rulings were to be included in Gregory IX’s Decretals of 1234, which fine-tuned and supplemented the material in Gratian’s Decretum (mid-twelfth century), which in turn had reflected canonical material collected by Burchard of Worms and also Ivo of Chartres (d. 1115).24 Analysis of the papal, conciliar, and canonistic material shows continuity and change in the twelfth century (the central panel of our imaginary triptych), both of which would greatly affect Christian-Jewish relations in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (the right-hand panel of the triptych). Highly significant is that by Innocent III’s time, an addition to Sicut Iudeis stipulated in no uncertain terms that Jews were only protected if they did not undermine Christian society.25 Words like these were, of course, open to a myriad of interpretations that could be highly detrimental to Jews. The concerted and sustained collection, systematization, and dissemination of ecclesiastical rulings concerning Jews in conjunction with the presumption of the church that it could and, indeed, should legislate on the basic principles of how Jews should serve those who protected them mark significant changes that harbored important developments for the future. What was at stake with regard to Jewish service was not the question whether Jews were in any legal sense slaves or serfs. In my view, this question has become something of a red herring in the discussion of so-called chamber serfdom in the thirteenth century.26 We have seen how Jews were already described as servi in the Spanish fueros, and that Henry described the Jews of Worms as belonging to his chamber. In his land peace of 1179, Frederick Barbarossa described the Jews as belonging to the imperial fisc. In his privilege for the Jews of Regensburg of 1182, he proclaimed that all the Jews of Germany belonged to the imperial chamber, but only after he explicitly stated that “it is the duty of our imperial majesty and the equity of justice and reason exhorts us to preserve by fair consideration for everyone of our faithful, not only to worshippers of the Christian religion, but also to those who are opposed to our faith and live according to the rite of their ancestral tradition, what is his and

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provide constancy to their customs and peace to their persons as well as to their possessions.” Legal servitude was not in question here, nor was it in the thirteenth-century charters of Frederick II, which owed a great deal to Frederick Barbarossa’s and Henry IV’s charters, and in which Jews were called servants (not serfs) of our chamber (servi camere nostre).27 What was in question was how princes sought suitable terminology to define the position of Jews in their Christian body politic, which by definition could not contain Jews. What was also not at stake was the question of whom Jews were serving. Ecclesiastical material explicitly referred to the lords of Jews; indeed more often than not, they were telling those lords how to deal with “their” Jews. Rupert of Deutz, for example, who was an ardent supporter of church reform and for whose exegesis the supersession of Judaism by Christianity was an immensely important factor, was perfectly happy for Jews to serve Christian princes. But he felt that these princes should make Jewish service as unpleasant as possible so Jews might be lured to conversion.28 And that points to the crux of the matter. The crucial question was the nature and quality of Jewish service. Was it to be regarded as respectable or even honorable, or was it supposed to be miser­ able and dishonorable? (After all, service can be honorable; both Christians and Jews are taught by their religion to be respectively servi or avadim of the Lord. The pope himself is the servus servorum Dei.)29 What we have seen so far in Spain and Germany is that twelfth-century princes seemed to have a considerably more positive view of Jewish service than the church. But twelfth-century ecclesiastical interference with temporal rulers in this matter did not let up in the thirteenth. The effect of theological pressure upon princes on the one hand to be ever more Christian and the use princes themselves could make of Christian ideology to strengthen their positions in their own bodies politic on the other created a volatile situation that made Jews ever more dependent on the whims of the lords to whom they had to look for protection. Just how crucial the twelfth century was in this dynamic process can best be seen in England and Capetian France, where twelfth-century princes began to accrue more direct control over “their” Jews and where the issue of Jewish moneylending was an important new factor in the twelfth century. The newness of the Jewish community in England is beyond dispute. Norman Jews came to the island with William the Conqueror. More Jewish immigrants arrived after 1154 from Capetian and Angevin France. Robert Stacey has argued persuasively that although moneylending had from the start been an important occupation for Jews in England, it only became really substantial in the period between 1159 and 1194. This was

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after Henry II had put an end to the activities of Anglo-Saxon minters, who had predominantly provided small loans, and confiscated the estate of William Cade, to whom the high and mighty had turned to borrow money. Jewish moneylenders, who by then were settled outside London, stepped into the breach and created an extensive credit network with its main centers in Norwich, London, and Lincoln. By around 1175, Henry II was in a position to claim effective control over the Jews of England and their possessions. But Henry did more than that. In 1186, he confiscated the vast estate of Aaron of Lincoln, and he and Richard I after him proceeded to call in the debts owed to the estate by knights, magnates, and religious houses, especially from northern England. Stacey has connected the ill feeling provoked by these measures to the massacres in York in 1190, arguing that economic enmity on account of Jewish moneylending lay at the heart of the persecution of the Jews following Richard I’s coronation in 1189.30 The Augustinian canon William of Newburgh (d. 1198), who wrote extensively on the violence perpetrated against the Jews, was plainly concerned about Jewish usury. (It is important to make it plain that any interest taken beyond the principle was deemed to be usurious.)31 He calls the Jews the king’s usurers and says explicitly that the instigators of the outrages in York owed a great deal of money to the Jews. William’s assessment of the underlying meaning of the anti-Jewish riots is most illuminating. He deplored the violence against the Jews because it contravened the biblical maxim “slay them not” (Psalm 58/9:12). In addition, he was convinced that it was perpetrated out of greed and envy and not religious zeal. But although it had been wrong, it did serve a purpose. The Jews of England had been too favored by Henry II and had become too rich; they had lorded over Christians. Josce and Benedict of York, for example, had built themselves houses that were so grand that they looked like royal palaces; they behaved like princes among their people and acted like tyrants over Christians who owed them money. This, according to William, was an inversion of the reason Jews were allowed to live among Christians: “To be sure, the perfidious Jew, the crucifier of the Lord Christ, is allowed to live among Christians for the same reason of Christian utility as also the form of the cross of the Lord is painted in the church of Christ, that is to say continuously to keep alive the most salutary memory of the Lord’s passion among all believers. However, while we abhor the wicked deed in the Jew, we in truth worship the divine dignity in that sacred form with fitting devotion: and so Jews must live among Christians for our utility, but must serve on account of their guilt.”32

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The profits kings gained from Jewish moneylending continued to draw unwelcome attention from ecclesiastics. Thomas of Chobham, who was a pupil of Peter the Chanter in Paris, heavily criticized the manner in which princes benefited from Jewish usury in his widely disseminated Summa confessorum (a practical manual for priests) of about 1215. Robert Grosseteste pursued the issue vigorously in the 1230s. The combination of fierce royal protection combined with increasingly punitive royal fines and taxation became the leitmotiv of the Jewish existence in thirteenth-century England. In 1275, Edward I forbade Jewish usury altogether. By the time Jews were expelled in 1290, their service to the king had become unbearable for them and unprofitable for him.33 It was in twelfth-century England that the first Latin collections of the Marian miracles stories were produced. Older tales were collected, adapted, and augmented by newer ones. Jennifer Shea has recently studied the dissemination of the anti-Jewish material contained in the collections. She has pointed to the significance of the adaptation of the collection by the Anglo-Norman poet William Adgar into a vernacular version around 1165. Through his and other vernacular versions, like the one by Gautier de Coincy of circa 1240, images of Jewish treachery against the Virgin and Christendom were disseminated in noble courts.34 John McCulloh’s work has demonstrated that the idea that Jews ritually murdered little boys seems to have crystallized in England after the body was found of a child called William in Norwich in 1144. The idea, which interestingly bears ­remarkable similarities to some of the anti-Jewish episodes contained in Marian miracle stories, disseminated rapidly to the Continent. Although an extensive life of William of Norwich was composed by Thomas of Mon­mouth (the bulk of which seems to have been written between 1154 and 1155), the Jews of Norwich were not persecuted on account of the libel. But the events in Würzburg in 1147, where Jews were killed by crusaders after the mutilated body of a Christian had been found, and at Blois in 1171, where more than thirty Jews were burnt at the stake on the trumped-up charge of killing a child, show how dangerous this new perception of Jews conspiring to commit acts of violence against Christians could be for Jewish communities. The dangers were exacerbated in the following centuries when Jews were also accused of desecrating the consecrated host.35 William Chester Jordan’s research has demonstrated how the changing relationship between the Capetian kings and the Jews developed in connection with the consolidation and expansion of Capetian jurisdiction over what we now call France. Philip Augustus’ reign (1180–1223) was

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crucially important both in Capetian history as well as in the history of the Jews of France. Compared to the Midi, there were few Jews in the royal domain; Champagne too counted more Jews. Of the royal Jews, many had established themselves in Paris, and of those, many lived on the Ile de la Cité, close to the royal palace and at a stone’s throw from the budding schools of Paris. Some one thousand Jews may have lived there, which would have constituted twenty percent of the population of the island, a much higher concentration than anywhere else in Paris.36 Many of these Jews were relative newcomers. What had attracted them to Paris was the rapidly growing economy of the city. Many, but certainly not all, were engaged in moneylending due to increasing restrictions on Jewish activities in the areas of viniculture, the meat trade, or artisanship. Royal Jews must have been prosperous because, on the eve of their expulsion, the king demanded a large payment in exchange for the goods he had seized from them after raiding their synagogues. Philip also cancelled their debts, claiming one fifth of the capital for himself. This sum must presumably have been part of the sum he demanded from the Jews.37 Why did Philip act against the Jews in this way, and why did he take the novel decision to expel the Jews from the Ile de France in 1182? Jordan has argued that the youthful king seems to have thought that acting against the Jews was the best way to establish his Christian princely credentials at the start of his reign. Philip’s biographer Rigord (d. 1207–9?) bewails the fact that Jews housed Christian servants and belabors Jewish involvement in moneylending. He shows particular concern for the precious ecclesiastical objects that had been deposited as pawns with Jewish lenders. Rigord mentions how Philip had discussed the evils of usury with one of his advisers, the hermit Bernard of Vincennes. The young king’s decision may also have been influenced by the fact that he seems to have believed that Jews were implicated in ritual murder. Rigord speaks of his knowledge of the story that Richard of Pontoise had allegedly died at the hands of Jews. There was a shrine for Richard in Paris in the Church of the Holy Innocents in the Fields.38 In 1192, Philip had scores of Jews killed in Brie in retaliation for the killing of a Christian who had been found guilty of murdering a Jew. Philip was the nephew of the countess dowager of Brie, and the Christian seems to have been one of his men.39 In 1198, Philip readmitted Jews into his domain. Economic potential seems to have outweighed any religious scruples he might have had at this stage of his reign. Knowledge of the benefit that accrued to rival princes from Jewish moneylending must have been a contributory factor. His relationship with “his” Jews was marked from then on by meticulous legis-

Continuity and Change in Christian-Jewish Relations  327

lation regulating Jewish moneylending along with an attempt to somehow balance royal profits from Jewish usury with the interests of Christian debtors to Jews and ecclesiastical demands. Innocent III’s complaints about French Jews having church goods in their possession and employing Christians demonstrate some of the pressure points. From a Jewish point of view, the last quarter of the twelfth century introduced the new factor of official violence. This is of huge importance. Until then, Jews had looked to their lords for protection against attack. Whether that protection was effective or not, the principle of princely protection was unchanged. But in Blois in 1171, it was the count who had committed judicial murder; by a couple of decades later the king had seized Jewish property, expelled Jews, and killed them. The resulting uncertainty of Jewish existence in northern France should not be underestimated. This is particularly important because Philip Augustus and his successors expanded royal jurisdiction over large areas of France.40 Louis IX’s concerted efforts to limit the freedom of Jews to move from one lordship to another and his sustained attempt to eradicate Jewish moneylending affected many Jews in the south who until recently had benefited from temporal rule, which had followed the lighter touch of Spanish princes.41 His positive response to Pope Gregory IX’s request to investigate the Talmud for blasphemy reverberated throughout the Jewish world. Philip IV’s expulsion of the Jews of France in 1306 affected the Jews of an extensive royal domain and the principalities of France.42 It is time we turn our gaze to the schools of Paris. New in the twelfth century was the circle of Peter the Chanter (d. 1197), which endeavored to put the program of theological reform into practice. As we have seen, Jews were part of this agenda. In his Summa Abel, a collection of distinctiones, Peter opened his discussion of Jews with explanations why Jews should be preserved (servantur). The usual terms of Jewish theological service followed, but as Dahan has shown, the points throughout the discussion were put harshly, and great care was taken to emphasize the importance of keeping Jews and Christians from each others’ company. Peter’s linkage between the preservation of Jews and the service they perform is a clearcut statement that Jews are preserved in Christian society because they serve Christians by witnessing to past events and embodying the expectation of future conversion. This actually puts into mind the third-century observation of the jurist Florentinus that “servi are so-called because generals have a custom of selling their prisoners and thereby preserving (servare) rather than killing them.”43 Augustine refers to this false derivation in The City of God.44 Peter’s comment on Psalm 58/9:12, “Slay them not” made it

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plain what he thought about the status of Jewish service. As Christian book carriers, and witnesses to Christ’s Passion, they must clean the streets of Christendom rather than be rich, and they must be publici servi ecclesie, that is, perform public service to Christian society. Thomas of Chobham’s view was that Jews should be assigned society’s dirty work so that they could not elevate themselves over Christians. In other words, Jewish service was to be miserable and dishonorable.45 Thomas of Chobham was joined in his condemnation of usury by Fulk of Neuilly, who preached against moneylending between 1195 and circa 1200 in northern France. In the early thirteenth century, Robert of Courson was an active and, indeed, often intemperate preacher against usury.46 Anxiety about both Christian and Jewish usury and concern about the benefits Christian princes derived from Jewish moneylending were new features of the long twelfth century that went hand in hand with the rapid economic developments of the period. Bernard of Clairvaux identified usury so much with Jews that he used the term judaisare to denote the practice of usury. He did this in a letter of 1146 in which he preached the Second Crusade while at the same time admonishing Christians not to attack Jews. Attacking Jews went against Augustinian principles and the Pauline prophecy of their future conversion; it would additionally result, according to Bernard, in Christians judaising even more, in other words, becoming more heavily involved in moneylending. “Baptized Jews” is the term Bernard used for Christian usurers. It would seem that Bernard was extrapolating from his French experience in this instance. For it is noteworthy that he did not refer to Jewish usury when he addressed the Archbishop of Mainz in a letter condemning the monk Ralph’s preaching of violence against Jews. And although he went out on a limb to contain violence against the Jews, his view of Jewish service was bleak. According to him, Jews were serving harsh captivity under Christian princes.47 In his work De Consideratione for Pope Eugenius III he noted: “There is no servitude more repulsive or oppressive than that of the Jews, which they drag after them wherever they go. They offend their masters everywhere.”48 Peter the Chanter and Peter Lombard (d. 1160) before him were interested in working out the precise nature of Jewish guilt for the crucifixion.49 This corresponds to material in the Glossa ordinaria, an exciting project of the long twelfth century that collected, adapted, and augmented Patristic and Carolingian exegetical material for its marginal and inter­ linear glosses of the Bible. Striking is how the Glossa ordinaria of the New Testament belabored the theme of deliberate Jewish disbelief in Jesus and his teaching. Pride, envy, hatred, and malice were commonly cited as the

Continuity and Change in Christian-Jewish Relations  329

causes for this. Bede’s (d. 735) commentary on Jesus’ parable of the vineyard (Mark 12:1–8, [cf. Matthew 21:33–9, Luke 20:9–15]) was used in the Glossa ordinaria to accuse the Jews in so many words of deliberate deicide. Marked interest in the relationship between Judaism and Christianity is proved by the exponential growth of Christian-Jewish disputations in the twelfth century and the large amount of exegetical work on the subject. Most of the work seems to have been written as part of the general program of Christian scholars to explore and develop the understanding of their own Christian faith. Continued Jewish rejection of Christianity seems to have made it more important than ever for Christians to find answers to any doubts they might have. New was the attention paid to reason (ratio) stimulated by renewed interest in classical studies. New too was detailed information about the Talmud. This had a great deal to do with the work of Peter Alfonsi (fl. 1106–26), the Spanish Jewish convert to Christianity who settled in England and France and whose work was very widely disseminated. As we have seen, accusations against the Talmud gathered force in the thirteenth century.50 But equally important was the growing Christian awareness of and interest in the recent flourishing of Jewish exegesis in northern France. Once again, continuity and change are in evidence here. Well-known biblical passages were studied and given new meaning. But new was the fact that Christian scholars were forced to come to terms with the reality that Jews were not the biblical pastiches Augustinian theology had meant them to be. New too was the use of philosophical arguments to shed doubt on the capacity of Jews to employ their human faculties of reason. But at the same time, we see the continuity of fundamental Christian ambiguity towards Judaism. For all its negativity, there could be no question that Christianity needed Jews to validate its historical credentials and ensure the achievement of its salvific goals in the future. Herbert of Bosham and John of Salisbury bring out this ambiguity beautifully. Both men were associates in the household of Thomas Becket. Both supported the archbishop’s ecclesiastical claims against Henry II. Herbert was a biblical scholar who was intrigued by the Hebrew original of the Old Testament. He shared this interest with the exegetical school at Saint-Victor, but he was even more energetic than Andrew of Saint-Victor (d. 1175) in acquiring knowledge of Hebrew and getting to grips with the commentaries of Rashi. Herbert was sharply critical of Rashi when he denied the messianic interpretation of Christological Psalms like Psalm 2 and 21(2). But it is astonishing and, indeed, novel how much of Rashi Herbert was willing to include in his own literal exposition of the Psalms.51

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What about John? For all John’s concern for the role of sacerdotium in Christian society, John produced the first comprehensive medieval exposé on political thought in his Policraticus, which he completed in 1159. He made intelligent use of Cicero and Seneca in the process, and he had a well-considered view of the crucial position of the prince as imago Dei in the Christian body politic.52 How did John deal with Jews? The Jews John included in the Policraticus were the Jews who denied Jesus Christ and who, according to John, richly deserved to be vanquished by Vespasian and Titus.53 Biblical Jews featured in his scriptural excursions. The tone is pejorative. At one point, for example, John made the withering remark that Jews of the Old Testament were so bad that they needed to be governed by tyrants.54 In his letters, he used Jews as a negative metaphor to castigate the opponents of Becket.55 His great enemy, Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, was made out to be archisinagogus.56 Herbert’s references to Jews in his Life of Thomas tended to be much more neutral.57 What this shows us is the gap between the theory and reality governing twelfth-century Christian-Jewish relations. In theory, Jews were not part of the respublica Christiana; in reality, they lived next door to Christians in many cities. In theory, Jewish service was supposed to be demeaning and miserable; in reality, this view was ill-suited to the contingencies of Jewish service in the temporal setting. After all, Jewish service was meant to profit princes. Princes could hardly be expected to preserve Jews simply to satisfy the theoretical needs of sacerdotium. From a prince’s point of view, expulsion of Jews sometimes suited temporal contingencies better than holding on to them for the sake of Testimonium veritatis. Finally, I have used the image of an imaginary triptych to bring out graphically how pivotal the long twelfth century was in the history of medieval Christian-Jewish relations. For all the continuities from the early Middle Ages, new ideas developed about the kind of role Jews should play in Christian society. As we have seen, many of these ideas would go on to play a crucial role in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Notes 1.  Beryl Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools: A Study of Intellectuals in Politics (Oxford, 1973), pp. 59–86. 2.  Deborah Goodwin, “Take Hold of the Robe of a Jew”: Herbert of Bosham’s Christian Hebraism (Leiden, 2006); Eva de Visscher, “The Jewish-Christian Dia­ logue,” in Twelfth-Century Western Europe: The Hebrew and Latin Sources of Herbert of Bosham’s Commentary on the Psalms (Ph.D. thesis, Leeds, 2003).

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3. Herbert, Vita Sancti Thomae 3.13, ed. J. C. Robertson, Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, RS 67 (London, 1877), vol. 3, pp. 211–5; Smalley, Becket Conflict, pp. 75–6; Goodwin, Herbert, pp. 132–3. 4. Biblical translations are taken from the Douay Rheims version of the Bible. Old Testament references refer to the order of the Vulgate and the Hebrew Bible. 5.  Manfred Kniewasser, “Bischof Agobard von Lyon und der Platz der Juden in einer sakral verfassten Einheitsgesellschaft,” Kairos 19 (1977), pp. 203–27, at pp. 203–4. For the use of triptychs to discuss the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, see Johan Chydenius, Medieval Institutions and the Old Testament (Helsinki, 1965), pp. 122–6. For details on the Augustinian witness theory, see Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, 1999), pp. 23–65. 6. Gregory, Ep. 8.25, in S. Gregorii Magni Registrum epistularum libri 8–14, appendix, ed. Dag Norberg, CCSL 140A, pp. 546–7; translation taken from Cohen, Living Letters, p. 76; see also Heinz Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-­JudaeosTexte 1, 4th rev. ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), p. 431. 7.  Kenneth Stow, “The Church and the Jews,” in NCMH 5, ed. D. Abulafia, pp. 204–19, at p. 205. 8. Amnon Linder, ed., The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit, 1987). 9.  Kniewasser, “Bischof Agobard,” pp. 214–57; Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos Texte 1, pp. 488–99, 502–6; Amnon Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages (Detroit, 1997), pp. 333–43; Bat-Sheva Albert, “Adversus Iudaeos in the Carolingian Empire,” in Contra Iudaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics between Christians and Jews, ed. Ora Limor and Guy G. Stroumsa (Tübingen, 1996), pp. 119–142, at pp. 135–42. 10. Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos Texte, 1, pp. 461–3; see also the new study by Alexander Pierre Bronisch, Die Judengesetzgebung im katho­ lischen Westgotenreich von Toledo, Forschungen zur Geschichte der Juden (Hannover, 2005). 11.  John Gilchrist, “The Perception of Jews in the Canon Law in the Period of the First Two Crusades,” Jewish History 3 (1988), pp. 9–24. 12.  Translation from Robert Chazan, Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages (New York, 1980) pp. 99–100; Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: Documents, 492–1404, PIMS: Studies and Texts 94 (Toronto, 1988), pp. 35–6; Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: History, PIMS: Studies and Texts 109 (Toronto, 1991), pp. 12–13. Gratian included the text in his Decretum as “Dispar nimirum est,” C.23 q.8 c.11. Kenneth Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 243. 13.  H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085: An English Translation (Oxford, 2002), pp. 281–5; 399–401 (cf. Revelations 2:9, 3:9). 14.  David Abulafia, “Nam Iudei servi regis sunt, et semper fisco regio deputati: The Jews in the Municipal Fuero of Teruel (1176–7),” in Jews, Muslims, and Christians in and around the Crown of Aragon. Essays in Honour of Professor Elena Lourie, ed. H. J. Hames (Leiden 2004), pp. 97–123; pp. 120–1 give examples of privileges to individual Jews in Catalonia-Aragon of 1144, 1170, 1176, and 1180.

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15.  Michael Toch, “The Formation of a Diaspora: The Settlement of Jews in the Medieval German Reich,” Aschkenas 7 (1997), pp. 55–78, and “Wirtschaft und Verfolgung: Die Bedeutung der Ökonomie für die Kreuzzugspogrome des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts: Mit einem Anhang zum Sklavenhandel der Juden,” in Juden und Christen zur Zeit der Kreuzzüge, ed. A. Haverkamp (Sigmaringen, 1999), pp. 253–85, at pp. 253–72. In the second article, Toch argues vociferously against the idea that Jews were involved in the slave trade. 16. Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos-Texte, 2, 2nd rev. ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), pp. 40–9; Guido Kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany: A Study of their Legal and Social Status, 2nd ed. (New York, 1970) pp. 135–9, see especially note 27 on pp. 425–6 on the scope of Louis the Pious’ privilege to Jewish merchants in Lyons.; cf. Stow, Alienated Minority, p. 59; Friedrich Lotter, “Geltungsbereich und Wirksamkeit des Rechts der kaiserlichen Judenprivilegien im Hochmittelater,” Aschkenas 1 (1991), pp. 23–64, at p. 28 wonders whether the pares mentioned in the privilege relate to a corporation of merchants or the Jewish community of Lyons; Alexander Patschovsky, “Das Rechtsverhältnis der Juden zum deutschen König (9.–14. Jahrhundert). Ein europäischer Vergleich,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte Germanistische Abteilung 110 (1993), pp. 331–71, at p. 340, n. 24, thinks along similar lines; Friedrich Lotter, “The Scope and Effectiveness of Imperial Jewry Law in the High Middle Ages,” Jewish History 4 (1989), pp. 31–49, at pp. 31–8; Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages, pp. 391–402. Henry’s charter for Worms is known only through its confirmation by Frederick Barbarossa in 1157. Patschovsky, “Das Rechtsverhältnis,” p. 361, argues that the phrase ad cameram nostram attineant was an interpo­ lation by Frederick and was not part of Henry’s original charter. Lotter, “Geltungsbereich,” p. 31, and others diasagree. 17. Salo Wittmayer Baron, “‘Plenitude of Apostolic Powers’ and Medieval ‘Jewish Serfdom,’” in Ancient and Medieval Jewish History, ed. Salo Wittmayer Baron (Rutgers, 1972), pp. 284–307, at pp. 296–7; Lotter, “Scope,” p. 32; Lotter, “Geltungsbereich,” p. 25; I. S. Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 1056–1106 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 275. It is interesting that the Bishop of Speyer had allowed the Jews to employ Christians, including wet nurses; Lotter, “Scope,” pp. 48–9. 18. Robinson, Henry IV, pp. 86, 202–3, 257–8, 308, 329; Werner Transier, “Speyer: The Jewish Community in the Middle Ages,” in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries): Proceedings of the International Symposium held at Speyer, 20–25 October 2002, ed. Christoph Cluse (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 435–45, at p. 439. 19.  Monika Porsche, “Speyer: The Medieval Synagogue”; Transier, “Speyer: The Jewish Community”; Rainer Barzen, “Jewish Regional Organization in the Rhineland: The Kehillot Shum around 1300,” all in The Jews of Europe, ed. Cluse, pp. 421–34, 435–45, and 233–43, at pp. 422–3, 435–41, 233–4. 20.  Toch, “Wirtschaft und Verfolgung,” pp. 271–2. 21. Jonathan Riley-Smith, “The First Crusade and the Persecution of the Jews,” in Persecution and Toleration, ed. W. J. Sheils, Studies in Church History 21 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 51–72, at pp. 57–8; Robert C. Stacey argues that already during the First Crusade, crusaders expected Jews to fund them because they felt that Jews had to make up for dishonoring Christ. This is how he interprets demands by

Continuity and Change in Christian-Jewish Relations  333

Peter the Hermit and Godfrey of Bouillon for money from the Jews in exchange for protection. But I wonder whether this is not more a feature of the Second Crusade with, for example, Peter the Venerable saying this in so many words. “Crusades, Martyrdoms, and the Jews of Norman England, 1096–1190,” in Juden und Christen, ed. Haverkamp, pp. 233–51, at p. 239. 22.  For the vast literature on this, see the bibliography in the definitive edition of the sources: Hebräische Berichte über die Judenverfolgungen während des Ersten Kreuzzugs, ed. Eva Haverkamp, MGH, Hebräische Texte aus dem Mittelalterlichen Deutschland 1 (Hannover, 2005), pp. xx–l. 23. Kisch, The Jews, pp. 139–43; Robinson, Henry IV, p. 318; Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages, pp. 251–2. 24.  John A Watt, “Jews and Christians in the Gregorian Decretals,” in Christianity and Judaism, ed. Diana Wood, Studies in Church History 29 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 93–105; Baron, “Plenitude of Apostolic Powers,” pp. 288–91; Stow, Alienated Minority, pp. 242–51 and “The Church and the Jews,” pp. 204–19; ­Simonsohn, History, pp. 16–21, 44–5; Solomon Grayzel, “Popes, Jews, and Inquisition: From ‘Sicut’ to ‘Turbato,’” reprinted in Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century 2, 1254–1314, ed. Kenneth. R. Stow (New York, 1989), pp. 3–45, at pp. 4–6; Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-JudaeosTexte 3 (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), pp. 120–3; see also Lotter, “Geltungsbereich,” pp. 40–64; Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages, pp. 353–8. On the vital role that Burchard played in this process, see Gilchrist, “The Perception of Jews,” pp. 9–24, and his “The Canonistic Treatment of Jews in the Latin West in the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte Kanonistische Abteilung 106 (1989), pp. 70–106. Gilchrist argues that Ivo’s widely disseminated Panormia had much more influence on Gratian’s Jewry canons than his Decretum, which was much less well known. He also points to the importance of the so-called Collection in Seventy-Four Titles from ca. 1073– 75. As far as Lateran IV’s dress code for Jews is concerned, James Powell points to a possible precedent in the Parisian synodal canon of 1208, which has been interpreted as having demanded that Jews wear a wheel-shaped badge on their clothing. See James M. Powell, “The Papacy and the Muslim Frontier,” in Muslims under Latin Rule, 1100–1300, ed. James M. Powell (Princeton, 1990), pp. 175–203, at p. 191. Grayzel, however, asserts that the Parisian synod of 1208 did not refer to the badge. See his The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century: A Study of Their Relations during the Years 1198–1254, based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period, rev. ed. (New York, 1966), p. 301. 25. Simonsohn, History, p. 44. 26.  For example, Kisch, The Jews, pp. 145–68, 331–64; Baron, “Plenitude of Apostolic Powers,” pp. 284–307, and “Medieval Nationalism and Jewish Serfdom,” in Baron, Ancient and Medieval Jewish History, (Rutgers, 1972), pp. 308–37, at pp. 311–22, and more recently, Patschovsky, “Das Rechtsverhältnis,” pp. 331–71, and “The Relationship between the Jews of Germany and the King (Eleventh– Fourteenth Centuries): A European Comparison,” in England and Germany in the High Middle Ages, ed. Alfred. Haverkamp and Hanna Vollrath (London, 1996), pp. 193–218.

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27.  Baron, “Plenitude of Apostolic Powers,” pp. 298–305; Lotter, “Scope,” pp. 33–7, 48–9; Kisch, The Jews, pp. 142–53; Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages, pp. 361–5, 403–4. Neither Lotter nor Linder include the vital preamble to Frederick’s ruling for Regensburg; MGH, Diplomata, 10.4: Fri­ derici I. Diplomata, 43–4. See also Abulafia, “Nam Iudei Servi,” pp. 102–8. 28.  In Genesim 9, 4, in Ruperti Tuitiensis de sacra Trinitatis et operibus eius, ed. Hrabanus Haacke, CCCM 21 (Turnhout, 1971), p. 536; see also my “The Ideology of Reform and the Jews,” in my Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational Literature and the Rise of Anti-Judaism in the West (ca. 1000–1150) (Aldershot, 1998), pp. xv, 50. See David Ernest Timmer, “The Religious Significance of Ju­ daism for Twelfth-Century Monastic Exegesis: A Study in the Thought of Rupert of Deutz, ca. 1070–1129” (Ph.D. thesis, Notre Dame, 1983) and his ensuing article “Biblical Exegesis and the Jewish-Christian Controversy in the Early Twelfth Century,” Church History 58 (1989), pp. 309–21, for the impact of the Christian-Jewish debate on Rupert’s exegesis. 29.  On the ambiguity of the concept of service, see David Abulafia, “The King and the Jews—The Jews in the Ruler’s Service,” in The Jews of Europe, ed. Cluse, pp. 43–54. 30.  Robert C. Stacey, “Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century England: Some Dynamics of a Changing Relationship,” in Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen (Notre Dame, 2001), pp. 340– 54; idem “Crusades,” pp. 243–54. See also H. G. Richardson, The English Jewry under Angevin Kings (London, 1960). 31.  J.T. Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 17–20. 32.  The Chronicle of William of Newburgh, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. R. Howlett, RS 82 (London, 1884), vol. 1, pp. 280, 294, 297–9, 310, 312–3, 316–7, 322. For a recent discussion on William of Newburgh and the Jews, see M. J. Kennedy, “‘Faith in the One God Flowed over You from the Jews, the Sons of the Patriarchs, and the Prophets’: William of Newburgh’s Writings on Anti-Jewish Violence,” ANS 25 (2003), pp. 139–52. 33.  John A. Watt, “The Jews, the Law, and the Church: the Concept of Jewish Serfdom in Thirteenth-Century England,” in The Church and Sovereignty ca. 590– 1918: Essays in Honour of Michael Wilks, ed. Diana Wood, Studies in Church History, subsidia 9 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 153–72, at pp. 159–60, 164–7, and “Grosseteste and the Jews: A Commentary on Letter 5,” in Robert Grosseteste and the Beginnings of a British Theological Tradition: Papers Delivered at the Grosseteste Colloquium Held at Greyfriars, Oxford on 3rd July 2002, ed. M. O’Carroll (Rome, 2003), pp. 201–16; John W Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle 1 (Princeton, 1970) pp. 34–6; Thomas of Chobham, Summa Confessorum 7.6, 11 4, ed. Frederick Broomfield. Analecta Me­ diaevalia Namurcensia 25 (Louvain, 1968), p. 510. On English Jewry see also Robin R. Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290 (Cambridge, 1998). 34.  Jennifer A. Shea, “Adgar’s Gracial and Christian Images of Jews in TwelfthCentury Vernacular Literature,” JMH 33 (2007), pp. 181–96, and “The Influence

Continuity and Change in Christian-Jewish Relations  335

of the Cult of the Virgin Mary on Christian Perceptions of Jews, with Particular Reference to the Role of Marian Miracle Stories in England and France, ca. 1050– ca. 1300” (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 2004). See also William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989), pp. 45–6, and his “Marian Devotion and the Talmud Trial of 1240,” in Religionsgespräche im Mittelalter, ed. Friedrich Niewöhner, Wolfenbütteler Mittel­ ­alter-Studien 4 (Wiesbaden, 1992), pp. 61–76, at pp. 69–76. 35.  John M. McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the Early Disseminations of the Myth,” Sp 72 (1997), pp. 698– 740; Stacey, “Crusades,” p. 236; Shea, “The Influence of the Cult of the Virgin Mary on Christian Perceptions of Jews,” ch. 4, and “Adgar’s Gracial and Christian Images of Jews.” See also Israel Jacob Yuval, “‘They Tell Lies: You Ate the Man’: Jewish Reactions to Ritual Murder Accusations,” in Religious Violence between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives, ed. Anna Sapir Abulafia (London, 2002), pp.86–106, at pp. 89–93, where Yuval argues convincingly that ritual murder accusations of the twelfth century already assumed that Jews used the blood of their victims and that this was not a new feature introduced by the Fulda blood libel of 1235. For the vast literature on ritual murder see the references in the above works. 36. Jordan, French Monarchy, pp. 6–10, 114. 37.  Ibid., pp. 9, 26–7, 30–1. 38.  Ibid., pp. 9–10, 18–20, 26, 30–3, and “Princely Identity and the Jews in Medieval France,” in From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. J. Cohen (Wiesbaden, 1996), pp. 257–64; John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 34, 49; Rigord, Histoire de Philippe Auguste, ed. and trans. Élisabeth Carpentier, Georges Pon, and Yves Chauvin, Sources d’Histoire Médiévale 33 (Paris, 2006), pp. 130–3 and 144–55; Chazan, Church, pp. 288–9. See also the very recent book by Kenneth Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and its Interpreters (Stanford, 2006), pp. 75–118, which came to my attention after I had finished researching and writing this chapter. 39. Jordan, French Monarchy, pp. 35–7, 271, and notes on pp. 78–83. To my mind, Jordan argues convincingly that this episode took place in Brie-Comte-­ Robert and not in Bray-sur-Seine, which was in Champagne, as others have done, but the new edition favors Bray-sur-Seine, p. 310, n. 508. 40.  Ibid., pp. 18–19 and passim. 41.  See legislation in Chazan, Church, pp. 205–20. Jordan, French Monarchy, pp. 88–90, argues that oppression under Louis VIII and IX was preferable to the uncertainties of Philip’s lordship. It would seem, however, that the Talmud trial militates against this view. Also, the Jews could not know at the time that Louis VIII and IX would not treat them like Philip had done. 42.  Jordan, “Princely Identity,” pp. 268–9; French Monarchy, pp. 239–51. The Jews were recalled in 1315, expelled again in 1322, recalled in 1359, and expelled for the final time in 1394. Some Jews continued to live in areas of southeastern France, which remained outside of royal dominion till 1501; they were never expelled from papal lands in France (Stow, Alienated Minority, p. 295).

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43.  Digest 1.5.4 (cf. Institutes, I.iii.3), ed. Theodor Mommsen and Paul Krueger, trans. Alan Watson, 1 (Philadelphia, 1985), p. 15: “Servi ex eo appellati sunt, quod imperatores captivos uendere ac per hoc seruare nec occidere solent.” 44. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 19.15, ed. Bernhard Dombart and Alfons Kalb, CCSL 48: 682: “Origo autem uocabuli seruorum in Latina lingua inde ­creditor ducta, quod hi, qui iure belli possent occidi, a uictoribus cum seruabantur serui fiebant, a seruando appellati.” 45.  Gilbert Dahan, “L’Article Iudei de la Summa Abel de Pierre le Chantre,” Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes 27 (1981), pp. 105–26; edition of text of Psalm commentary on p. 126: “Ipsi enim sunt capsarii nostri et baiuli codicum nostrorum et testes dominice passionis, mundatores platearum. Debent esse non diuites, et publici serui Ecclesie, et hoc prefiguratum fuit in Chain, in quo posuit Dominus signum tremoris, ne occideretur”; J. Watt, “Parisian Theologians and the Jews: Peter Lombard and Peter Cantor,” in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life; Essays in Honour of Gorden Leff, ed. P. Biller and B. Dobson (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 55–76, at pp. 72–4; Watt, “Grosseteste,” pp. 210–11; Thomas of Chobham, Summa Confessorum, Art. 7.4.6.11, ed. Broomfield, p. 434. 46. Jordan, French Monarchy, p. 73, Baldwin, Masters, pp. 296–301. 47.  Letter 363 (preaching the crusade) and letter 365 (condemning Ralph’s preaching) in Sancti Bernardi opera 8, ed. Jean Leclercq and Henri Rochais (Rome, 1977), pp. 311–17 and 320–2. 48.  De Consideratione 1, 3.4, in Sancti Bernardi opera 3, p. 398, translation taken from, Five Books on Consideration, trans. John D. Anderson and Elizabeth T. Kennan, Cistercian Fathers Series 27 (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1976), p. 30. Much has been written on Bernard and the Jews; see for example David Berger, “The Attitude of St. Bernard of Clairvaux toward the Jews,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 40 (1972), pp. 89–108, and Jeremy Cohen, “‘Witnesses of our Redemption’: The Jews in the Crusading Theology of Bernard of Clairvaux,” in Medieval Studies in Honour of Avrom Saltman, ed. Bat-Sheva Albert, Yvonne Friedman, and Simon Schwarzfuchs (Ramat Gan, 1995), pp. 67–81. 49.  Watt, “Parisian Theologians,” pp. 55–76. 50.  There is a vast literature on the twelfth-century Christian-Jewish debate, including Amos Funkenstein, “Basic Types of Christian Anti-Jewish Polemics,” Via 2 (1971), pp. 373–82; Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the TwelfthCentury Renaissance (London, 1995) and Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational Literature and the Rise of Anti-Judaism in the West (ca. 1000–1150) (Aldershot, 1998); Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity, (Berkeley, 1999); Robert Chazan, Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom (Cambridge, 2004); Gilbert Dahan, Les Intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au moyen âge (Paris, 1990) and L’Exégèse chrétienne de la Bible en Occident médiévale, 12e–14e siècle (Paris, 1999). For examples of the theme of deliberate Jewish disbelief in the Glossa ordinaria see Biblia Latina cum Glossa ordinaria: Facsimile Reprint of the ‘Editio Princeps,’ Adolph Rusch of Strasburg, 1480–91, introduction by Karlfried Froehlich and Margaret T. Gibson, 4 (Turnhout, 1992), Matthew 27:16– 25 (p. 84); Luke 23:21 (p. 217); Luke 15:28 (p. 197); John 12:37–41 (pp. 254–5); Acts 7:51–3 (p. 471); Romans 11:8 (p. 297); 1 Thess. 2:14–16 (p. 396). On deliberate deicide see Jeremy Cohen, “The Jews as the Killers of Christ in the Latin Tra-

Continuity and Change in Christian-Jewish Relations  337

dition, from Augustine to the Friars,” Trad 39 (1983), pp. 1–27, where he discusses the Bedan source of the glosses on Jesus’ parable on the vineyard in the Glossa ordinaria (pp. 67–8, 120–1, 208–9). Anselm of Laon also used Bede to this effect in his Enarrationes in Matthaem, c. 21, PL 162:1433. See also the Glossa ordinaria on the words of Jesus on the cross in Luke 23:34 (p. 218). See also my article “The Bible in Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible, forthcoming. 51. Goodwin, Herbert; E. de Visscher, “The Jewish-Christian Dialogue.” Goodwin (pp. 196–201, 223–6) argues that Herbert goes so far as to accept Jewish messianic thought. I agree with Eva de Visscher that this seems an over-­interpretation of what Herbert does. 52. My research student Irene O’Daly has recently completed a thesis on “Roman philosophy in the political thought of John of Salisbury.” 53.  Policraticus, 2.4–9, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, CCCM 118:77–88; trans. Joseph B. Pike (Minneapolis, 1938), pp. 60–71. John is making heavy use of Eusebius in Rufinus’ reworking for these passages. 54.  Policraticus, 8.20, ed. Clement C. J. Webb (Oxford, 1909), vol. 2, p. 374; trans. John Dickinson (New York, 1927), p. 368: “And I will be readily persuaded that tyrants instead of legitimate princes were rightly deserved by a stiff-necked and stubborn people who always resisted the Holy Spirit, and by their gentile abominations provoked to wrath not Moyses only, the servant of the law, but God Himself, the Lord of the law.” 55.  For example, letter 163, 175, 244, 246, 250, in The Letters of John of Salisbury 2: The Later Letters [1163–1180], ed. and trans. W. J. Millor and Harold E. Butler, rev. Christopher N. L. Brooke (Oxford, 1979), vol. 2, pp. 84–5, 158–9, 482–5, 494–5, 504–7. 56.  Ibid., letters 174, 187, pp. 142–5, 230–1, 242–3. 57.  For example, neutral (mostly biblical) references in Herbert of Bosham, Vita Sancti Thomae, 2.9; 3.15; 4.1, 10, 11, 19, ed. Robertson, RS 67, vol. 3, pp. 173, 230, 321, 342, 344, 402. In 4.13 (p. 360), Herbert does not automatically identify all Jews with the killers of Christ: “the wide mandate of the loving and merciful Lord extends . . . to heretics, to Jews, to pagans, even to crucifiers of Christ themselves.” In 4.27 (pp. 435–6), Herbert used Augustine’s reworking of John 11:48, which said that the Jews killed Jesus so as not to lose their land but that they lost their land precisely because they had killed him, to emphasize that people often do not get the results they aim for; see Enarrationes in Psalmos 40.11–12, ed. Eligius Dekkers and I. Fraipont, CCSL 38:457 (cf. Watt, “Parisian theologians,” p. 69). John uses that image in letter 244 (ed. and trans. Millor and Butler, pp. 482–5) and letter 300 (p. 704–5). Herbert’s handling of the image seems less negative than John’s. John adds words to emphasize Jewish treachery, hard-heartedness, and lack of penitence. Herbert’s most negative references to Jews come in his rambling Liber Melorum which he tacked on to the Life of Becket. There, the Jews as Christ-killers or opponents of Christ are used as a metaphor for Becket’s opponents (1.6; 1.17; PL 190:1295D, 1296D). Elsewhere in the Book of Songs, he mentions Jewish together with pagan and philosophical disbelief of Christian doctrine which he laboriously tries to explain, e.g., PL 190:1379C, 1383D.

thirteen

The Legal Revolution of the Twelfth Century A nd e r s W inr o t h

In 1927, the Harvard medievalist Charles Homer Haskins provoked his renaissance colleagues when he published a book called The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.1 He argued that the twelfth century saw a revival of letters that might rival the Renaissance of the fifteenth century, and that modernity therefore began in the high Middle Ages. His argument has continued to delight and encourage medievalists ever since. The rediscovery and revival of law in the twelfth century was a centerpiece among the several rebirths that Haskins treated, devoting a full chapter to legal developments. When Haskins’s book was fifty years old, some of the giants of medieval studies came together at Harvard to discuss “Renaissance and Renewal,” adding depth and breadth to what Haskins had said while essentially accepting his general argument. In the field of law Stephan Kut­t­ ner discussed “The Revival of Jurisprudence,” while Knut Wolfgang Nörr contributed a paper on the “Institutional Foundations of the New Jurisprudence.” Haskins, Kuttner, and Nörr approached their subject in very similar terms, focusing on jurisprudence, books and the masters who wrote or read them. They treated the institutions that came out of the twelfth-century study of law: law schools, the papal curia, and so forth. They framed their story in the same way Haskins had, as a triumphalist success story. It was the long twelfth century that discovered and made sense of Justinian’s great codifications and organized the discipline of canon law. The jurists involved laid the foundations for law schools and thus for legal modernity. In this chapter, written some eighty years after Haskins’s book, I wish to revisit the success story told by Haskins, Kuttner, and Nörr. I will at338

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tempt to do two things. One is to survey recent research in twelfth-­century legal history. There have been some new discoveries, but nothing to change the main thrust of their story. Second, I will attempt to address our understanding of the legal renaissance of the twelfth century. Haskins especially thought that the resurgence of law was simply a good thing. I would like to invite the reader to think about some of its ambiguities. This essay looks at the twelfth century from the point of view of legal procedure, a perspective notably missing from the story told by Haskins, Kuttner, and Nörr. I begin with a comparison of two procedural treatises, one from just after the end of the century and one from its beginning. This will illustrate, I hope, how much law developed in the twelfth century. This was the consequence of the interaction of two legal systems: the newly discovered Roman law of Justinian and a newly reinvigorated canon law. I examine the development of those laws before showing that these new legal principles were not only the lofty constructs of academics but in fact also applied in courts. Finally, I will evaluate some of the social consequences of this legal revolution. Alger and Tancred

First, then, let us compare two procedural works, one from each end of the twelfth century: the De misericordia et iustitia (“On Mercy and Justice”) of Alger and the Ordo iudiciarius of Tancred of Bologna. Alger was a canon, perhaps even the chancellor of the church at Liège.2 His book is not, strictly speaking, a procedural treatise, but is a book that aspires to help judges in their work. He wrote it in the first decade of the twelfth century. Already the title reveals an approach far from the technical legalese of later times. Alger’s is definitely a canon law book; there are no allegations of or allusions to Roman law. His treatment is thoroughly imbued with theology, a theology in which God is the dispenser of mercy as well as justice, and mercy should come before justice. Alger’s chapter headings reveal his way of thinking: “Mercy rather than severity should be observed in discipline,” he says above a long quotation from St. Ambrose.3 The next heading is “The spirit of love and improvement is always to be applied both in forgiving and in punishing the wicked.”4 Alger supports this with a quotation from St. Augustine. Alger’s advice to those who are to judge Christians conforms to the old Christian image of a just judge, derived from the king-judges of the Old Testament and ultimately from God himself, especially in his role as judge of human action on the Day of Judgment.

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Technical terminology is utterly lacking from Alger’s work; there are no plaintiffs and defendants, no actions and exceptions, no citations to court and no adjournments. One enters a different world when reading Tancred’s Ordo iudici­ arius.5 It was written in 1215 or shortly afterward and represents the culmination of twelfth-century procedural thinking. Tancred outlines what is now known as the Romano-canonical procedure in its classical form. His book was much used for the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond, as evinced by its many early-modern printings. In it Roman law reigns supreme, quoted on almost every other line and overshadowing his use of canon law. Words like “love” and “mercy” do not exist in Tancred’s vocabulary, which on the other hand is full of technical terminology. He starts out the work by outlining the proper course of a process: “First, one [that is, the plaintiff ] approaches a competent judge, and the defendant is summoned in writing or by a messenger, the written accusation is given to the defendant when arriving, and, if he so wishes, he is given a dilatory adjournment, and the suit is contested, and at length the oath of calumny is given.”6 It goes on, for this is a lengthy sentence in Tancred’s work, but this quotation sufficiently illustrates my point. For Tancred, one achieves justice by a sequence of clearly defined steps. He devotes pages to each of these steps, teaching us in great detail how they work and which Roman or canon laws provide even more detail. For instance, he tells us about six different kinds of adjournments, when they are to be applied, and what laws support them. In comparison with Alger’s, Tancred’s world is a new world. How did that happen? Two developments were pivotal in bringing about Tancred’s brave, new world: the rediscovery of Emperor Justinian’s Roman law and the rise of canon law. The Rediscovery of Roman Law

Three books make up Justinian’s corpus of Roman law: the Digest, Code, and Institutes (to which the Novellae were added later). Their rediscovery was a centerpiece in Haskins’s treatment of the legal renaissance of the twelfth century. Justinian’s voluminous and sophisticated body of law had been composed in the early sixth century but had soon fallen out of use. It was too complicated for the Latin West, which had more immediate problems to handle, and it was too incomprehensible for the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire. The long twelfth century rediscovered it, reconstituting its constituent works and making sense of it all. A complex and still

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poorly understood process led to Roman law entering and dominating the mainstream of European legal thinking for the rest of the Middle Ages and far into modern times. If we follow Haskins in arguing for the significance of the twelfth century in European history, this is surely one of his best ­arguments. The largest and most revered part of Justinian’s corpus is the Digest, which contains over a million words. This is also the work in the collection for which most clearly a period of neglect is followed by rediscovery. After being mentioned in a letter from 603 by Pope Gregory I, the Digest cannot be traced in any documents until a Tuscan court case of 1076.7 By the end of the twelfth century, at the latest, Western European jurists had mastered many of the difficulties this work offered. Exactly how this process of discovery happened has been the subject of much controversy ever since the Middle Ages. As early as the late twelfth century, chroniclers proposed conjectures from which later jurists and historians picked and chose and further elaborated. What may be established with certainty is that the Digest’s most important manuscript, a complete transcription made in Constantinople probably while Justinian was still alive, existed in Pisa at the middle of the twelfth century.8 The armies of Florence carried it off in triumph in 1406, and it resides today in the Bibliotheca Laurenziana as one of its greatest treasures. It is uncertain whether the text of the Digest that Tancred and other twelfth-century scholars read derived from this manuscript or from a second ancient manuscript postulated by the editor Theodore Mommsen in 1870.9 If there was a second manuscript, did it contain all of the Digest or only parts of it? Some small steps toward a solution have been taken, but much still needs to be done, and could be done by carefully comparing the manuscripts.10 What is most needed to achieve greater clarity is more philological attention to the early manuscripts of the Digest, something that has not happened since the early nineteenth century. When Mommsen put out his edition in 1868–70, he relied mainly on collations that had been made then by Eduard Schrader and other scholars. The situation is similar for the other works in Justinian’s corpus, the Code and the Institutes. They clearly resurfaced earlier than the Digest, but the details are murky. In a recent book, Charles Radding and Antonio Ciaralli devote considerable paleographical and textual attention to the early manuscripts of Justinian’s law books.11 Such intense attention to the manuscripts was long overdue, and while solving old problems the book raises new questions for legal historians. I will mention only two important lessons.

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First, the dates that Mommsen and Paul Krüger gave for the early manuscripts of Roman law texts in their editions are mostly wrong.12 This is not surprising because they derive from dates set by Schrader and his collaborators in the early nineteenth century, long before the creation of the modern discipline of paleography made such an enterprise in any strict sense possible. No one has attempted to examine the dates of these manuscripts systematically for almost two hundred years. For the Code and the Institutes, Radding’s and Ciaralli’s results are ground-breaking. They show that almost all the oldest surviving manuscripts are from the eleventh century and not earlier. Radding and Ciaralli also examine the evidence for scholarly work with Justinianic Roman law before 1100. Again, their results change the standard story. They disqualify almost all supposed evidence about the use of Roman law before 1000, with one exception. Roman law experienced a brief renaissance in Italy during the third quarter of the ninth century, when a few canon law collections and papal letters quoted the Institutes and the Code, but not the Digest. Fragments of two ninth-century manuscripts of the Institutes survive.13 The Code and the Institutes are otherwise mentioned only in the second quarter of the eleventh century. Emperor Henry III, for instance, quoted the Code in a letter from 1047.14 This is the earliest entirely secure date for its rediscovery, although Radding and Ciaralli cite persuasive evidence for its use a couple decades earlier. The Institutes were in use at a similar date, while there is no secure evidence for use of the Digest before 1076. All three works were thus rediscovered in the eleventh century and not earlier, as was previously the commonly accepted opinion. Who discovered them and how were they first used? In the middle of the twelfth century, teachers and students at the law school in Bologna studied Roman law intensely. It was through their efforts that Roman law reentered the mainstream of European law. We are less certain about the contexts in which these books were studied a hundred or even fifty years earlier. Ever since Paul Fournier in 1917 published an interpretation of this history of rediscovery, most scholars agree that the impetus came from church reform circles and was carried out by canonists.15 Gregory VII and his colleagues needed to find out about law in order to reform the church. When canonists set out to explore accessible library holdings, they inadvertently discovered Justinian’s books. Charles Radding questioned this view in his controversial 1988 book, The Origins of Medieval Jurisprudence.16 He argued that Lombard jurists rather than canonists rediscovered

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Justinian’s works, and they did some of the basic work required to assimilate them into jurisprudence and legal practice. Radding restates this argument with greater precision in The Corpus iuris civilis in the Middle Ages. Central to his argument here are the glosses in the eleventh-century manuscripts of Roman law and those in contemporary manuscripts of Lombard law. I find this reasoning persuasive, even though I think one should be careful not to make too much of the distinction between Lombard jurists and canon lawyers. If we thus know more about who first used Roman law in the eleventh century, the more important question for my present purposes is: when was it first taught in an academic setting? This question is important because only an academic setting would produce the kind of fundamental changes that took place between Alger and Tancred. In his 1988 book, Radding argued that the interpretations of Lombard jurists in the eleventh century provide the necessary background for the work of early twelfthcentury jurists, especially the famous and supposedly extremely learned teacher Irnerius. In 2000, I argued that the received image of Irnerius is an exaggeration, based partially on myths that were in circulation in the thirteenth century and before, and partially on misinterpreted sources.17 I suggested that Irnerius was simply one of many jurists at the time who were interested in Roman law, while the evidence for formal teaching appears only later. Radding’s and my interpretations fit rather well together, especially if one considers that Irnerius participated as a judge in several court cases from the two first decades of the twelfth century.18 The law that was applied in those court cases was not Roman law, but local law, that is, Lombard law. Irnerius was a Lombard lawyer before he became a Roman lawyer, if he indeed ever was one. There is, furthermore, no evidence that he taught Roman law. The earliest evidence that exists for the formal teaching of Roman law comes from around the middle of the twelfth century, when a group of ­jurists known as the Four Doctors were active.19 Oldest among them seems to have been Bulgarus, who had started his career at least in the 1130s. We get an unusually intimate image of Bulgarus as a teacher through the so-called Stemma Bulgaricum, the moot court exercises that he gave his students.20 He let two students, or two groups of students, argue for the plaintiff and for the defendant, while Bulgarus himself took on the role of judge. On this evidence, I do not think there can be any doubt that Bulgarus was a teacher, and probably a good one. Also, the Stemma would train his students in skills directly transferable to post-graduate life

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when they were expected to search law books for arguments and then argue them in front of judges. Thus with Bulgarus we have evidence for the academic teaching of Roman law.21 Canon Law

The evidence for the academic teaching of canon law comes at about the same time. A contemporary of Bulgarus known as Gratian established the formal teaching of canon law, probably in the 1130s.22 Since no canon law book suitable for teaching existed, he had to write his own textbook. He called the book the Concord of Discordant Canons but already in the twelfth century it was commonly referred to as the Decretum. The book that Gratian originally produced at some point soon after 1139 was a sizable book containing 1,860 chapters and covering most subjects in canon law. It was deemed inadequate by the 1140s so that by 1150 an expanded version came into existence of approximately double the size.23 This version of the Decretum would have an enormously successful history. More than six hundred medieval manuscripts and hundreds of printed editions preserve its text, which was valid law in Catholic church courts until 1917. Gratian was a pivotal figure in many respects. Not only did he compose the basic textbook of canon law, he instituted the field as an academic discipline. The Decretum summarized a millennium of ecclesiastical legal thinking, a tradition that later jurists only exceptionally would revisit. They would get their basic canon law from Gratian, so the way he presented the subject and his decisions of what to emphasize matters greatly. As a jurist, Gratian was very much a canon lawyer. He had read Alger of Liège as well as many others, including Bishop Ivo of Chartres and the important procedural thinker Pseudo-Isidore, and he had learnt much from them. Like Alger and Ivo, Gratian presented a version of law that is firmly founded in theological as well as in legal thinking, and that took account of mercy as well as justice. Gratian’s understanding of law would have a humanizing effect on medieval legal developments, certainly in confronting the stricter Roman law of Justinian. Gratian introduced into the mainstream of European legal thinking an idea of great consequence: that there is a kind of law that is unchangeable. Popes and emperors may change their own positive law, but they are unable to change the natural law that God himself instituted. Gratian emphasized the importance of this by putting the distinction at the very beginning of his work: “The human race is ruled by two (means), namely by

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natural law and by usages.”24 Gratian’s concept of natural law is the basis on which later medieval jurists constructed the idea of fundamental and inalienable human rights, notably within procedural law. These ideas still survive today and are cornerstones of most legal systems. Procedural Law

Let us return to Tancred, whose work shows that medieval litigants, like modern litigants, have rights that their judge may not simply overrule. Certain formalities have to be observed even when dealing with those who are guilty of crimes: they must be properly summoned, they must have access to the accusation in writing, they must be allowed to file for adjournments, and so forth. Even though many of the details and technicalities of Tancred’s work come from Justinian’s law books, these rights do not. In Roman law, the powers of the judge were an extension of the coercive powers of government.25 Hence litigants, and particularly defendants, had few rights. Medieval jurists awarded litigants more rights than did their Roman predecessors. In doing so they were inspired by canon law, which since the ninth century had developed ideas about the rights of litigants in general and defendants in particular. The vast literature on legal procedure in the twelfth century stands behind many of the basic legal rights that we take for granted today. There is even what one may call a minor cottage industry of legal historians writing articles demonstrating the medieval origins of one or another supposedly modern idea. Ken Pennington has, for instance, shown that an old chestnut such as the maxim “innocent until proven guilty” was first expressed in that form (in Latin) by the early-fourteenth-century canonist and cardinal Jean Lemoyne, who was drawing on traditions from Tancred and others.26 Richard Helmholz has made clear how the Fifth Amendment to the American Constitution, giving a defendant the right to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination, derives from ideas developed in medieval legal works, including commentaries on Gratian’s Decretum and procedural handbooks from the twelfth century.27 Another idea that traces its origins to the twelfth century is everyone’s right to a public trial, as stated, for example, in Article 11 of the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights. I would like to follow this idea in some small detail because it illustrates the influence of canon law on procedural law.28 The idea may be traced back to perhaps the earliest Bolognese canon law teacher after Gratian, Paucapalea, who in the 1150s, while lecturing

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on Gratian’s Decretum, pointed out that legal procedure began in Paradise.29 When Adam had eaten of the apple and God interrogated him about the crime of disobedience, Adam defended himself, pointing out that “the woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Paucapalea points out that Adam created due process by defending himself and arguing entrapment. One of his successors, Stephen of Tournai, filled in the proper terminology, pointing out that Adam not only filed a formal objection to God’s original action or plea but also filed a counter-plea when he argued that it was all God’s fault, or at least Eve’s.30 In doing so, Stephen outlined the proper sequence of events to be observed in courts, a sequence that then reappears in most procedural handbooks far into the thirteenth century, as well as in Tancred’s work.31 Paucapalea’s and Stephen’s stories about Adam and God make subtle arguments about the rights of litigants, especially defendants. If God himself cannot judge his own creation without first calling him to trial— “Adam, where are you?”—then how could any human judge presume to judge someone without hearing him first? If one may raise objections against God, then surely one may raise objections against anyone else. Paucapalea’s and Stephen’s ideas became generally accepted, as when for example Pope Innocent III in 1202 stated in passing, as something taken for granted, that legal proceedings could not be carried out unless both parties had been summoned to trial.32 Legal Practice

All this is well and good. People in the august halls of Bologna University and of the papal curia accepted these elevated ideas of rights, but did what they thought actually matter on the ground, that is, in the courts of Europe? The answer is yes, as Chris Wickham has shown in his investigation of legal practice in twelfth-century Tuscany.33 Among his most interesting findings is that some features of Romano-canonical procedure began to be applied in the communal courts of Pisa in August of 1159, when plaintiffs suddenly showed up with proper Roman actions. This was just a couple of years before the promulgation of the Pisan law codes in 1161, through which Pisa opted to apply Roman law alongside its local customs.34 Few cities introduced Roman law in its legal system as determinedly and early as Pisa did. Most of them seem, however, to have reformed their laws substantially during the twelfth century. This is a process that is closely con-

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nected both to the growth of communal government and with developments in the law schools. More evidence for legal practice may be gathered from the court of the archbishop of Canterbury, from which substantial thirteenth-century records survive.35 Those records demonstrate clearly that litigants and judges in practice followed the rules that Tancred had outlined, including the rule that the business of the court was conducted in writing. We may take the dispute between Master Robert de Picheford and Thomas Nevill about the church of Houghton as an example. Both of them claimed to be the lawful rector of the church. They had been presented to the rectorate in 1266 by two different patrons, who in turn disputed about who was the real patron. The case was complex and was argued for several years in several different courts. In 1268, the case was in the court of the Dean of Arches, who as the archbishop’s official handled all of his jurisdiction. Thomas held the church at the time. At some point during the fall of 1268, Robert petitioned the Dean of Arches to be restored to his possession of the church of Houghton; Thomas had despoiled him of this possession. According to Gratian’s Decretum, such a petition (exceptio spolii) must be dealt with before the principal case could proceed. It was a dilatory exception in Tancred’s terminology. The court proceeded to consider the petition. The incompletely preserved docu­ments about only this detail in the proceedings fill sixty-one densely printed pages in the modern edition. We can read a list of the questions each litigant wanted to put to the other one’s witnesses, what the witnesses said, and also the exceptions Thomas raised against Robert’s witnesses. We can also read the depositions made by the witnesses whom Thomas had called to prove his exceptions. Thomas wanted to ask the witnesses, among many other things, if Robert had taken possession of the church of Houghton and, if so, how they knew this to be the case. Godfrey Samson testified (as did several other witnesses) that he had seen the vicar of Houghton give Robert the church “by means of the ring on the door, the custody of the books and the vestments, and of the bells by means of the ropes.” Thomas objected to Godfrey’s testimony on the grounds that he was a serf and a villein. Thomas’s witness Henry de Billesdon testified that he had known Godfrey for a long time and that it was common knowledge that he is unfree. Serfs are not allowed to testify in a court, which is the reason why this was a valid exception, if proven. The documents of the case go on in this manner at great length. The litigants debate details such as whether Robert should have been served his

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summons to court in person, whether Thomas had removed lambs belonging to the church while its assets were sequestered, and whether one of Robert’s witnesses was a known enemy of Thomas de Nevill. Robert de Pich­ford finally won the case in July 1271, after more than four years of litigation. His costs were £100, a sizable sum, which Thomas had to pay and which should be compared to the 1254 assessment of the disputed rectorate, which was £12. The case demonstrates the level of complexity and sophistication that legal procedure had reached in the thirteenth century, but also that the litigants got a fair trial in which their procedural rights were scrupulously observed. The documents use much legalese and many set formulas, and the litigants debate minor points at length and spend a lot of money on lawyer’s fees. It all has a very modern feel. Every legal detail in the case may be traced back to some passage in Justinian’s Roman law, in Gratian’s Decretum, in the new papal decretal law, or even in the scriptural story of Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Generations of jurists had identified those details and worked out a system of procedural law that is at the root of current procedural law in Europe and the Americas. Kuttner and Nörr mention legal practice only in passing, and Haskins not at all. This is surprising since its development is easy to fit into the grand narrative of the twelfth century as the first modernizing century. It was the century that saw old procedure, supposedly irrational and superstitious, give way to what is thought of as modern and rational. The ordeal with its cauldrons of boiling water and white hot iron was replaced by presumably more civilized procedures with witnesses and juries, with actions and exceptions, with educated lawyers and judges. The twelfth century is often characterized in this way, for example in a widely used text book in legal history from 1988.36 One of its chapters is headed “An Age without Jurists” and discusses how might made right through the ordeal, particularly in trial by combat. Later chapters outline, with a sigh of relief I think, how order was introduced thanks to the heroic efforts of twelfth-century jurists like Irnerius and Gratian. They recreated the science of law, and the creation of proper legal procedure led to the ordeal being outlawed by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.37 This view of medieval legal history oversimplifies. The centuries before the twelfth were not as primitive as they are made out to be, nor did the introduction of Justinianic law and the more active engagement with canon law mean that perfect justice ruled after the twelfth century. To start with the ordeal, it now stands clear that it was used only very seldomly. Robert Bartlett has argued that people in the early Middle Ages used the

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ordeal to settle the most difficult, intractable cases when there were no ­witnesses—almost the equivalent of a coin toss.38 It was certainly not the normal way to settle disputes in an age before the professional jurist was created. On the contrary, people in the eleventh century and before normally had few problems working out resolutions to their conflicts that left most parties feeling at least somewhat satisfied that justice had been served. There has been much research into early medieval dispute resolution. Such research is less interested in the statements of lawbooks about how things should work and more interested in the evidence from documents revealing how things in fact did work. They devote attention to collections of placita, diplomas, and charters, which “provide an exceptionally rich source of information.”39 The picture of the functioning of law in and around the twelfth century that comes out of these is in many ways surprising when seen against the background of contemporary normative sources. For starters, the practice of early medieval conflict resolution is much less arbitrary and irrational than a focus on the ordeal might suggest. Most disputes were resolved by suitably constituted courts that operated according to generally accepted procedural rules, although much simpler than those outlined by Tancred. The judges (who usually appeared several together in panels) may not have been professional jurists, but the justice they meted out was not capricious; their decisions were lawful, which means that they adhered to a commonly accepted body of norms. That body constantly evolved, adapting to new circumstances, but it was always (at least in the areas formerly belonging to the Roman Empire) acutely aware of the Roman background. Justice before the appearance of professional jurists was still justice, and it was justice in the hands of local communities, not justice handed down from on high. Another reason not to subscribe to the old triumphalist depiction of the development of legal process in the twelfth century is what happened next. Difficult cases for which there were no witnesses continued to be intractable, however sophisticated the legal procedures introduced. Robert de Picheford was able to produce men who had with their own eyes seen him hold with his hand the ring on the door and the bell-ropes of the church in Houghton. When a murder or a burglary had happened at night without witnesses, it did not matter how detailed Tancred’s handbook was or how many exceptions your lawyer could list in his sleep. In 1299, a silk store in Bologna was robbed. There were rumors about that a man called Mengho was the culprit, but the crime could not be pinned on him through witness testimony. When his house was searched, four skeins of silk were found. Had Mengho stolen the silk?40

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If such a case could not be determined by the ordeal, how was it to be decided?41 In some regions of Europe, juries replaced the ordeal. Elsewhere, investigating judges who found only circumstantial evidence could have the main suspect tortured in order to elicit a confession, at least if he was a “vile and base person,” as Emperor Frederick II expressed it.42 Thus, Mengho was tortured. Jurists could find a rationale for this in Roman law, which allowed torture, especially of slaves but also, at least in certain cases, of freemen.43 As the preamble to the thirteenth-century Spanish lawbook Siete partidas has it: “the wise men of ancient times held it good to torture men to know from them the truth.”44 The magistrates of Bologna apparently found out the truth. Mengho confessed under torture to stealing the silk. He repeated his confession in open court later in the day, in accordance with the procedural rules, and Mengho was condemned to be hanged. The introduction of judicial torture was a direct consequence of the legal revolution of the twelfth century.45 The discovery of a justification for the practice in Justinian’s books was not as important as the new legal procedure that twelfth-century jurists created. Works like Tancred’s procedural treatise imposed a straitjacket on legal procedure by introducing strict and mechanical rules for evidence. There had to be two witnesses to a crime for the guilt of the accused to be fully established. Lacking witnesses, only a confession amounted to full proof, and full proof was required for a guilty verdict. If the putative culprit refused to confess, then he had to be forced. Like torture, the old ordeal was painful but it was at least over and done with quickly. With the ordeal, the accused seems to have had more than a fifty-percent chance of being freed, judging from the several hundred known cases;46 with judicial torture, the cards were stacked against the accused. The Impact of Roman and Canon Law

In the history of law, the twelfth century was pivotal because it created an entirely new legal system. Jurists from Alger to Tancred created the ius commune, the European Common Law. This legal system is still with us, not so much in the letter of the law as in its spirit. Many of its legal principles continue to be living realities. We have the right to remain silent if accused and to rebut our accusers in open court. These rights came out of the melding of the principles of Roman and canon law in the twelfth century. The creation of a place for torture in legal procedure points to some

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of the ambiguities of that century. Following Haskins, we like to think of the twelfth century as a period when rationality and order replaced chaos and arbitrariness. We enjoy the perfect systematization of procedure that we find in Tancred’s work, complete with references to Roman and canon law, while we deplore the superstition of the ordeal, the imperfections and pure amateurishness of early medieval courts. But where Haskins saw progress, rationality, and light, others have seen a closing of the mind, the drawing-up of sharp divisions between “us” and “them,” and the formation of a persecuting society. In systematizing legal procedure, the twelfth century removed control of the law from local communities and gave it to professional, educated judges who represented the disciplinary interests of both church and state. If we think that all of this belongs to modernity, then Haskins was right: modernity began in the twelfth century. Notes 1.  Charles Homer Haskins, Renaissance. 2.  Robert Kretzschmar, Alger von Lüttichs Traktat ”De misericordia et iustitia”: Ein kanonistischer Konkordanzversuch aus der Zeit des Investiturstreits: Untersuchungen und Edition (Sigmaringen, 1985). 3.  Alger of Liège, De misericordia et iustitia, 2.3, ed. Robert Kretzschmar (Sigmaringen, 1985), p. 258. 4.  Ibid., 2.4, p. 259. 5.  Linda Fowler-Magerl, Ordo iudiciorum vel ordo iudiciarius: Begriff und Literaturgattung, Repertorien zur Frühzeit der gelehrten Rechte = Ius commune: Sonderhefte 19 (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), pp. 128–30. 6.  Tancred of Bologna, Ordo iudiciarius, proemium, ed. Friedrich Christian Bergmann (Göttingen 1842), p. 91. 7.  Gregory I, Registrum epistularum, 13.49, ed. Dag Norberg, CCSL 140A (Turnhout, 1982), pp. 1058–64. Cesare Manaresi, ed., I placiti del “Regnum Italiae,” Fonti per la storia d’Italia 97 (Rome, 1977), pp. 333–5. 8.  A new facsimile edition is A. Corbino and B. Santalucia, eds., Justiniani Augusti Pandectarum Codex Florentinus (Florence, 1988). 9.  Theodor Mommsen, with the assistance of Paul Krüger, Digesta Iustiniani Augusti (Berlin, 1868–70). 10.  Wolfgang P. Müller, “The Recovery of Justinian’s Digest in the Middle Ages,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, n.s. 20 (1990), pp. 1–29. 11.  Charles M. Radding and Antonio Ciaralli, The Corpus iuris civilis in the Middle Ages: Manuscripts and Transmission from the Sixth Century to the Juristic Revival (Leiden, 2007). 12.  Paul Krüger, Codex Iustinianus (Berlin, 1877). 13.  Guiscardo Moschetti, Frammenti veronesi del secolo 9 delle Istituzioni di Giustinano (Rome, 2006).

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14. MGH, Diplomata 5 (Berlin, 1931), pp. 239–42, no. 191. Radding and Ciaralli also throw new light on the vexed question of the role played by the Epitome Codicis in the textual history of the Code. 15.  Paul Fournier, “Un tournant de l’histoire du droit 1060–1140,” Nouvelle Revue historique de droit français et étranger 41 (1917), pp. 129–80, reprinted in Paul Fournier, Mélanges de droit canonique, ed. Theo Kölzer (Aalen, 1983), pp. 373–424. 16. Charles M. Radding, The Origins of Medieval Jurisprudence: Pavia and Bologna, 850–1150 (New Haven, 1988). 17.  Anders Winroth, The Making of Gratian’s Decretum (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 162–8. 18.  Enrico Spagnesi, Wernerius Bononiensis iudex: La figura storica d’Irnerio, Accademia Toscana di scienze e lettere “La Columbaria,” Studi 16 (Florence, 1969). 19. Hermann Lange, Römisches Recht in Mittelalter, vol. 1, Die Glossatoren (Munich, 1997), pp. 162–89. 20.  A Gaudenzi, ed., Bibliotheca iuridica medii aevi, 2 (Bologna, 1892), pp. 195–209; Hermann Kantorowicz with the collaboration of W. W. Buckland, Studies in the Glossators of the Roman Law: Newly Discovered Writings of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 81–5 and 246–63; Annalisa Belloni, Le questioni civilistiche del secolo 12: Da Bulgaro a Pillio da Medicina e Azzone (Frankfurt am Main, 1989). 21.  Anders Winroth, “The Teaching of Law in the Twelfth Century,” in Law and Learning in the Middle Ages, ed. Helle Vogt and Mia Münster-Swendsen (Copenhagen, 2006), pp. 41–62. 22. Winroth, Making of Gratian’s Decretum. For the controversies about the date of the first recension and about other early versions of the Decretum, see Anders Winroth, “Recent Work on the Making of Gratian’s Decretum,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law n.s. 26 (2004–2006), pp. 1–29. 23.  For the existence of the second recension by 1150, see Paolo Nardi, “Fonti canoniche in una sentenza senese del 1150,” in Life, Law, and Letters: Historical Studies in Honour of Antonio García y García, ed. Peter Linehan, Studia Gratiana 29 (Rome, 1998), pp. 661–70. 24.  Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625, Emory University Studies in Law and Religion 5 (Atlanta, 1997), p. 58. 25.  Kenneth C. Pennington, The Prince and the Law, 1200–1600: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 142–3. 26. Pennington, “Innocent until Proven Guilty: The Origins of a Legal Maxim,” The Jurist 63 (2003), pp. 106–24, also available at http://faculty.cua.edu /pennington/Law508/InnocentGuilty.htm. 27.  Richard H. Helmholz, “Origins of the Privilege against Self-­Incrimination: The Role of the European ius commune,” New York University Law Review 65 (1990), pp. 962–90. 28. Pennington, The Prince and the Law, pp. 142–3, and “Due Process, Community, and the Prince in the Evolution of the Ordo iudiciarius,” Rivista internazionale di diritto commune 9 (1998), pp. 9–47.

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29. Paucapalea, Summa, Prologue, ed. Johann Friedrich von Schulte (Giessen, 1890), p. 1. 30.  Stephen of Tournai, Summa, Prologue, ed. Johann Friedrich von Schulte (Giessen, 1891), p. 2; H Kalb, Studien zur Summa Stephans von Tournai (Innsbruck, 1983), pp. 114–5. 31. Pennington, The Prince and the Law, p. 144. 32. Gratian, Decretum, X 1.6.34, ed. Emil Friedberg (Leipzig, 1891), col. 79–82; partial translation in Brian Tierney, Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300: With Selected Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964), pp. 133–4. 33.  Chris Wickham, Courts and Conflicts in Twelfth-century Tuscany (Oxford, 2003). 34.  Ibid., p. 118, cf. pp. 54–5. Wickham casts new light on how the standard edition of the Pisan statutes contains the text as it appeared in 1233 (p. 115). Many Roman components had been added over previous centuries, so he warns against taking the edition as the text entering into force in 1161. An earlier version (from 1186 or shortly afterwards) is discernable in the manuscript New Haven, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 415. 35.  Norma Adams and Charles Donahue, Jr., Select Cases from the Ecclesiastical Courts of the Province of Canterbury c. 1200–1301, Publications of the Selden Society 95 (London, 1981). The documents in Picheford c. Neville are edited on pp. 265–336. 36.  Manlio Bellomo, L’Europa del diritto commune (Rome, 1988), published in English as The Common Legal Past of Europe, 1000–1800, trans. by Lydia G. Coch­ rane (Washington, D.C., 1995). A German translation appeared in Munich in 2005. 37.  Concilium Lateranum 4, c. 18, ed. and trans. Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London and Washington, D.C., 1990), p. 244. 38.  Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford, 1986). 39.  Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre, eds., The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1986), p. ix. 40.  Hermann U. Kantorowicz, Albertus Gandinus und das Strafrecht der Skolastik (Berlin, 1907–26), 1.203–18. Kenneth C. Pennington, “Torture and Fear: Enemies of Justice,” Rivista internazionale di diritto commune 19 (2008), also available at http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/PenningtonTortureEssay.htm. 41. Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water. 42.  Quoted in ibid., p. 142. 43.  Edward Peters, Torture (Oxford, 1985), pp. 18–39. 44.  Quoted in Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water, p. 140. 45. Piero Fiorelli, La tortura giudiziaria nel diritto commune, Ius nostrum, Studie e Testi pubblicati dall’Istituto di Storia del Diritto Italiano dell’Università di Roma (Rome, 1953–54); Peters, Torture, pp. 40–73. 46. Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water, p. 161.

fourteen

Liminalities Literate Women in the Long Twelfth Century Bar b ara N e w m an

When I entered graduate school in 1976, the twelfth century boasted only three women writers: Heloise, whose letters had just been reascribed to Abelard as part of an exemplary fiction;1 Marie de France, a mysterious name without a biography; and Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote long, inscrutable Latin tomes that only Germans would read. In the last thirty years, feminist historiography has altered this picture so much that it would be easier to say how the world shifted between 1976 and 2010 than how it changed between 1100 and 1200. By synthesizing this new scholarship, I hope to weave a tapestry more finely textured than the one I encountered as a student. But I also want to broach the central question of this volume: What changed in the twelfth century from the standpoint of women as readers, writers, and participants in literate culture? I will propose three interrelated answers. First, the twelfth century saw the emergence of the anchoress as a figure of idealized interiority, and thus an ideal reader. Second, twelfth-century reform fostered new styles of relationship between religious men and women, together with novel literary genres to express them. Finally, the monastic humanism of the age enabled the fullest flowering of women’s Latinate culture, but this yielded by century’s end to a very different model of the female writer—the vernacular mystic and prophet. In all these contexts, women are not so much marginal as liminal figures, their presence drawing attention to flashpoints where established religious institutions and ideologies confronted forces of innovation and reform. 354

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Liminality—“standing on the threshold”—is a rich metaphor in part because enclosure, the marking and sealing of boundaries, was such a vital symbolic practice in religious life, where most literate women could be found. Crossing the threshold of enclosure, texts often passed where bodies could not. Religious men wrote at astonishing length for enclosed women, while a few women figuratively broke cloister with their books. So in the first part of this essay, I will consider the small but highly visible demographic of anchoresses, who often bridged the divides between monastic and secular, litterata and laica, Latin and vernacular. In the second place, liminality denotes an affective space, an emotional boundary zone between alternative ways of constructing self and community. One central problem of the twelfth century was its search for ways to reconcile passionate mortal love with divine love, to find a middle way between the ascetic demand to renounce all creatures and the calm, Aristotelian acceptance of the secular as an independent realm, which lay still in the future. A favorite proving ground for this effort was the encounter between hagiography and romance—an encounter that was at once ­affective, linguistic, and generic. If we take “romance” in all its senses, meaning not only the new, quintessential twelfth-century narrative genre, but also the affective realm of ennobling love and the linguistic terrain of French and its Anglo-Norman dialect, “hagiographic romance” proves to be an especially fruitful realm for teasing out the subjectivity of women. Finally, shifting the center of gravity from France and England to the empire, I consider the transition from humanism to mysticism in twelfthcentury women’s texts. These works can be positioned on a spectrum whose poles represent contrasting versions of Christianity, one anchored in a rhetorical and encyclopedic conception of culture dating from the Carolingian era, the other fervently inward-looking and pregnant with things to come. In Heloise, we see the brilliant culmination of a culture of epistolary friendship, developing into a concern with liturgical and institutional reform that can also be found in the writings of Hildegard and Herrad of Hohenbourg. But this humanistic Latin culture, common to nuns and monks, was already on the wane at the time of its greatest flourishing. Hildegard also holds first place in a long series of visionary, prophetic women who wrote on the basis of divine revelation, denying the role of human learning even when they possessed it. It is this prophetic aspect of her career that was best remembered by posterity; and in the works of her protégée, Elisabeth of Schönau, we see the revelatory mode unencumbered by the older woman’s encyclopedic culture. In my final section,

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then, I consider Hildegard as a liminal figure on the threshold between the monastic humanism of the past and the prophetic mysticism of the future. Anchoresses, Literacy, and the Frontiers of Language

In these days of mass marketing and economies of scale, it beggars imagination to think how much care and parchment medieval authors lavished on anchoresses—on books written, in principle, for an audience of one. At the dawn of the long twelfth century we find Goscelin of St.-Bertin (ca. 1040–1114), a Flemish monk, writing to his protégée Eve (ca. 1058– ca. 1120), first a nun at Wilton, later a recluse at Angers. Around 1082, Goscelin wrote a Book of Encouragement (Liber confortatorius) for Eve, who had for reasons unknown left Wiltshire and crossed the Channel without taking leave of him, her intimate friend and tutor, while he was in political exile. At the outset of his book, which fills more than a hundred printed pages, Goscelin begs the unauthorized reader to read no more: “If, by chance, this pilgrim letter, which I give to the fickle winds but commend to God, falls into the hands of others, I entreat that it should be returned to her to whom alone it stands destined, and let no one snatch away in advance what is not made for them. It is a private document of two people, sealed with Christ as intermediary.”2 On the other side of the century, forming a bookend with Goscelin’s work, stands the celebrated Ancrene Wisse (ca. 1220)—less relentless in its exclusions, yet composed in the first place for only three sisters sharing an anchorhold.3 Midway between the two we find Ailred of Rievaulx’s Rule of Life for a Recluse (ca. 1162), again addressed to a single woman, the author’s sister. An English recluse named Rainild, otherwise unknown, was honored with Godwin of Salisbury’s still-unedited commentary on the Beatitudes.4 Yet another recluse, Christina of Markyate—later a nun—was the privileged owner of what has been called “one of the most spectacular illuminated manuscripts of twelfth-century England,” a personalized psalter donated by her beloved Geoffrey, abbot of St Albans (d. 1146).5 Of course anchoritic texts were in reality public documents, like virtually all medieval writings. Ailred’s treatise eventually reached the Ancrene Wisse author, who was neither a woman nor a recluse; and his text in turn circulated in several versions, including Latin and Anglo-Norman. Goscelin on the other hand may have had his wish. His book survives in a single twelfth-century manuscript; we do not even know if it ever reached Eve. But my point concerns not so much the actual readership of anchoritic

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texts as their implied readers—or, to put it another way, the mystique of the anchoress herself as an ideal reader.6 Anchoresses were in many ways liminal women. Like male hermits, they commonly dwelt in churchyards or along physical boundaries such as roads and rivers. In twelfth-century England, there is some evidence that they mediated between the Saxon populace and their new Norman overlords.7 Enclosed in a solemn rite that combined elements of wedding and funeral, inclusae were symbolically married to Christ and dead to the world, a status to which nuns also aspired; but the anchoress’s greater austerity made her an even more potent symbol of otherworldliness.8 Paradoxically, however, some urban and village anchoresses were more ac­ cessible to lay visitors than were cloistered nuns, prompting the stern admonitions to solitude voiced by Ailred and the Ancrene Wisse. Although many recluses like Eve belonged to what Anneke Mulder-Bakker has called “the ‘honors class’ of monks and nuns,” the majority were enclosed as laywomen.9 According to Ann Warren, anchoresses in twelfth-century England outnumbered male recluses by a ratio of about five to three.10 Much like their brother hermits, they might choose the reclusive life because ­established institutions could not satisfy their yearning for a rigorous spiritual discipline. But over the course of time, such intense free spirits attracted disciples. Thus a great many of the twelfth century’s new religious houses began life as hermitages or anchoritic cells.11 Eve left Wilton not to be “alone with the Alone” but to join a small community of recluses at a church in Angers, which was itself dependent on the nunnery of Le Ronceray.12 Anselm of Canterbury corresponded around 1105 with a com­ munity of six anchoritic women living under the direction of a certain Robert.13 Hildegard of Bingen’s Benedictine monastery grew out of the anchorhold at Disibodenberg where she and Jutta of Sponheim had been enclosed in 1112,14 and Christina’s reclusive cell evolved into the priory of Markyate. As for the three sisters of Ancrene Wisse, by the time the author completed his last recension, their community numbered twenty or more, probably living in a far-flung network of cells linked by letters and messengers.15 In reality, therefore, anchoresses straddled the line between solitude and community, as well as the boundary between secular women and nuns. It was often a wealthy lay woman’s decision to become a recluse that led in time to the birth of a nunnery. Most anchoresses had at least one companion or servant, and an urban recluse might live in the heart of a city, in close contact with family members, clerical friends, fellow anchoresses, schoolchildren, and clients who sought her out for guidance and gossip. Some even had guest rooms. By

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the mid-thirteenth century, Juliana of Cornillon was able to visit her friend, the anchoress Eve of Saint-Martin in Liège, for days on end.16 Ailred’s satirical critique of the “public” anchoress is so vivid that his portrait must have been easily recognized.17 In Germany, the chronicler of ­Petershausen (ca. 1156) attacked the ministry of recluses, male or female, who “wish to be seen as teachers and prophets,” “attract crowds to themselves,” and spend entire days in conversation with clients.18 Nevertheless, the anchoress still came closer than almost anyone else in the Middle Ages to having “a room of one’s own,” in Virginia Woolf ’s formulation; and it was this mystique of holy solitude that made her an ideal reader. An anchoress walled into a cell was, in the most literal sense, a captive audience. Most recluses, if they were even marginally literate, had some rule of prayer or used a simplified version of the Divine Office; but, since their lives lacked the structure of a monastic community, they had more time and leisure to read. Like all women, they were thought to need male guidance, and in their case the threat of ennui must have been real enough to make guidebooks more than welcome. What an anchoritic text lacked in breadth of audience, it gained in depth: its theoretical audience of one would read it not once, but often over the course of a lifetime. Urging his spiritual daughters to read in the Ancrene Wisse every day, its writer adds that if they do not, “I have badly wasted my long hours. God knows, I would rather set out for Rome than start it over again!”19 The authors of anchoritic books loved to imagine the solitude of their readers, sometimes with wistful envy. What could be more enticing, more intimate, than to speak heart to heart with a woman who lived alone with God and one’s own words? The peculiar intimacy of reading gained immeasurable force from this fantasy of female solitude, which inspired the projection of writers’ most cherished ideals. Goscelin imagined Eve as a heroic spiritual warrior; Ailred saw in his sister a passionate bride of Christ; for Geoffrey of St Albans, Christina was a prophet and peerless ­intercessor. Like every monastic author, these men expected prayers in return for their literary offerings. But they also found deep satisfaction in the thought of their own textual presence in the lives of their readers. In an almost Yeatsian moment Goscelin pictures Eve, twenty-four at the time of writing, remembering him in his grey-haired age: “if ever the thought returns to you and asks thus ‘what is he, who was once dear, doing now?’ this page will always respond with this one verb in the active rather than the passive voice: he sighs. And whenever you seek him, you will find him here; you will either see him or hear him whispering with you here.”20

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However Eve may have felt about Goscelin’s sighs, at Angers she formed an even closer friendship with Hervé, a monk of Vendôme, with whom she cohabited chastely. In France she inspired at least two more men to write for and about her. Geoffrey, the abbot of Vendôme, approved of chaste partnership, and around 1102 he wrote a joint letter of encouragement to “the servant and handmaid of God, the recluses Hervé and Eve.”21 After Eve’s death around 1125, her glowing verse epitaph—almost a mini-vita—was composed by Abelard’s student Hilary of Orléans. Hilary makes no mention of Goscelin, stating only that Eve left England to escape her growing reputation for sanctity. But he warmly commends the “wonderful love” of Eve and Hervé, warning readers not to be suspicious of it: There Eve lived for a long while with her companion Hervé. I sense that you are disturbed at this word, you who hear these things! Flee suspicion, brother; let there be no mistrust here. This love was not in the world but in Christ. He used to serve her as his lady, and Eve in turn served him like a handmaid. Wonderful was the love of such a man and such a woman, which was tested and found to be without any crime.22 From the dossier of sources surrounding Eve, we can catch tantalizing glimpses of an early twelfth-century friendship network, comprised of earnest, well-educated women and men who craved solitude with God yet welcomed like-minded companionship, living on the boundary between established monastic institutions such as Wilton, St Albans, and Le Ronceray and newer ones that emerged from their experiments with anchoritic life. Other sources show that recluses had spiritual sons as well as fathers— and, we might add, mothers and daughters. Before she took refuge with the hermit Roger, Christina of Markyate first spent two years in the cell of the anchoress Alfwen at Flamstead.23 Another Englishwoman, Matilda, learned the eremitic life from St. Wulfric, an anchorite at Haselbury (d. 1154), and taught it in turn to her handmaid and successor, Gertrude.24 Hildegard wrote of her mentor, the fiercely ascetic anchoress Jutta, that “God poured out his grace in this woman like a river of many waters, so that she granted her body no respite” before her early death.25 The final boundary bridged by anchoresses and nuns linked Latin with the emergent vernaculars. As always, we face a frustrating gap between rates of survival for men’s and women’s writings. Thus Goscelin

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notes that Eve held up her end of a Latin correspondence,26 but her letters are lost. Another woman of Angers, the poet Muriel, wrote verse admired by such esteemed poets as Hildebert of Lavardin and Baudri of Bourgueil, but none of it is extant, at least not under her name. Muriel was one of several literary nuns at Le Ronceray who exchanged verses with male poets of the “school of Angers,” where the distinguished Marbod of Rennes headed the cathedral school from 1077 to 1096.27 If Eve’s literary interests were as strong as Goscelin suggests, the presence of this poetic and epistolary circle could have been one motive prompting her move to Angers. Two generations later, Ailred’s sister in England must have had enough Latin to understand his exhortations and carry out the reading program he recommends. It is likely that the occasional messenger to Rievaulx carried letters from her. The fate of women’s Latinity marks one of the more uneven and perplexing transitions of the twelfth century.28 In England and France, it seems that religious women’s ability to write Latin and comprehend difficult texts was still normative in 1100, markedly declining by 1200, and rare by 1300. Yet women continued to perform the Divine Office in Latin throughout the Middle Ages, so they would have had at least a passive understanding, and even the least literate recluses and lay sisters could recite the Pater noster, the Ave Maria, and perhaps a few psalms.29 The Psalter of Christina of Markyate contains both Latin and Anglo-Norman texts. As a daughter of the old Saxon nobility, Christina received some Latin education at home and probably acquired more during her anchoritic life, without ever becoming fully proficient. The Ancrene Wisse, one of the earliest sophisticated texts in Middle English, contains a good deal of Latin— some glossed, some translated, some neither—suggesting a range of educational levels among its readers.30 As Jocelyn Wogan-Browne points out, even when Latinity ceased to be normative among nuns, “Latin micro­ literacies and networks” survived here and there. For some women who did know Latin, the decision to write in the vernacular was thus a deliberate choice. This was true of the nun Clemence of Barking, author of an ­Anglo-Norman Life of St. Catherine in the twelfth century,31 as well as the highly educated beguine Hadewijch, who wrote Dutch prose and verse in the early thirteenth.32 Many religious women in the later Middle Ages must have been like medievalists today, able to read Latin more or less fluently but inexperienced in writing it. So far as we know, no Latin texts by anchoresses survive, but we possess an early and fascinating anchoritic work in Middle High German. The recluse Ava of Melk (d. 1127) was a laywoman of whom we know al-

Liminalities: Literate Women in the Long Twelfth Century  361

most nothing except that she was enclosed after the death of her husband and one of two sons. Yet her biblical epic on John the Baptist, the life of Christ, and the Last Judgment was still being copied and even illustrated as late as the fourteenth century.33 Drawing on the liturgy and the New Testament, as well as the “meaning” (sin) she claims to have learned from her sons, Ava composed in rhyming couplets, making her not only the first known woman to write in German but the first epic poet in that tongue. One of the most intriguing questions about her oeuvre is, for whom did she write it? Given its language and style, a lay audience seems likely. Although Ava addresses her closing prayer to readers (swer dize buoch lese),34 she could also have had listeners. Since later narratives in couplets were meant for performance, should we envisage minstrels memorizing Ava’s verses as pious court entertainments? Could she herself have recited them for visitors to her anchorhold? All this is speculation, yet it is likely that Ava’s purpose in composing was as much pastoral as aesthetic. By translating the Gospel story from Latin into an attractive, easily remembered vernacular form, she functioned as a kind of lay catechist.35 Mulder-Bakker has audaciously but shrewdly compared the work of an anchoress to that of a parish priest, not removed from the people like monks or cathedral clerics, but available for pastoral care and teaching.36 Ava may be the first identifiable woman to assume that role. Living in the linguistic borderlands, she transformed the Gospel lessons of Mass and Office, which she heard the monks of Melk recite every day in Latin, into a coherent German story that begins at “the time when the Old Law passed away” and ends with the passing of the world itself. Ennobling Love and Saintly Romance

Of all twelfth-century transitions, none has been more debated than the erotic revolution formerly known as courtly love. I will adopt instead Stephen Jaeger’s term, “ennobling love,” because I believe Jaeger has given us the best account yet of what changed during the long twelfth century. As he argues, the profound novelty of fin’ amor lay not in the idea that refined love could ennoble the spirit, but in the explosive entrance of women into a discourse that had hitherto been the exclusive preserve of upper-class men in early medieval courts, schools, and cloisters: This was the Big Bang of amatory ideals among the European nobility. Admit women to the gentlemen’s club of love-as-a-public-­phenomenon,

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love-as-a-source-of-virtue, love-as-an-exalting-and-prestige-givingforce, and the smooth surface of innocent erotic discourse shattered. It was invaded by irony, double entendre, ambiguity, and shame. Its magic cloak of invulnerability lost its powers, and gentlemen in love with women had to ward off dishonor and suspicion in the ordinary ways, something they were spared when their only object of desire was some quintessence of male virtue.37 “Ennobling love” in a religious context becomes the dynamic of a new kind of triangle, binding a man and a woman in God in precarious caritas. Such triangles could be Trinitarian, energized by the mutually reinforcing circulation of desire; or they could be tragic, vitiated by the “irony, ambiguity, and shame” that so often attends efforts to reconcile purity of heart with pleasure of the flesh. The twelfth-century evidence points to two models. One is chaste, if not necessarily stable, such as we see in Eve and her lovers, Hildegard and her collaborators, and Christina and her friends. The other is teasingly similar yet unabashedly erotic; its great exemplars are Heloise and Abelard. To interpret twelfth-century love, we must reject the anachronistic premise that a sexual relationship must be more intense than a “mere” friendship, let alone a spiritual friendship. Few medieval religious would have agreed. Sexual passion was seen to be fleeting, and sexual liaisons likewise—with the exception of marriage, which was entered for pragmatic rather than amorous reasons. Amicitia, on the other hand, was a form of caritas that could endure forever. Romances of friendship such as Amis et Amile, popular in many languages throughout the Middle Ages, took as their theme the nobility of male friendship, triumphant over the competing claims of erotic dalliance, marriage, and family.38 While such texts are clearly homoerotic, any hint of homosexuality is so utterly suppressed as to force a confrontation between what the texts explicitly say and what today’s reader might think they mean. But in cross-gender friendship, sexual tension is more overt. When a monk and a nun practice ennobling love, the dynamic of sublimation that Freud posited as unconscious is embraced as a fully conscious discipline. To cite Jaeger once more, “richness of experience, affirmation of humanity, and ambiguity result when chastity intensifies love, longing, passion. ‘I am chaste; therefore I do not love’ is something very different from ‘I love, but chastely.’ The greater the affirmation of Eros, . . . the greater the act of self-mastery.”39 Hence, too, the greater the skepticism surrounding it and the need for protestations of purity.

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Goscelin’s address to Eve, hedged with a disinvitation to the wrong sort of reader—to “hissing calumny, the wicked eye, the artful finger, the impure gossip-monger and cackler”—belongs to the Latin culture of friendship documented by Jaeger, Constant Mews, and Gerald Bond.40 The writer’s punning yet heartfelt salutation reminds us of Heloise and Abelard in its self-conscious play: “To one shut in, from one shut out (incluse exclusus); to one solitary from the world, from one solitary in the world, who prays that Christ and love may know him; to a singular soul.”41 After this invocation of Eve’s solitude, Goscelin modulates into an affecting performance of his “wounded love,” asking Christ’s bride to imagine him seated beside her at Wilton as he recites the history of their friendship, from their first meeting to her incomprehensible departure. It was on her wedding day that he first fell in love: [W]hen indeed among fourteen maidens, with candles shining like stars and the heavenly torches, you approached your marriage with God nervously and second to last, and with a thronging crowd waiting with solemn expectancy, you put on the pledge of divine faith with your holy clothes, I was struck more deeply in my heart by your humble habit, your trembling approach, your face, blushing as if from the fiery throne of God sitting above the cherubim, wisely anxious, along with this wedding song of admirable grace: “I am betrothed to the one whom the angels serve, and he has taken me as a bride with his ring.” I was touched by heavenly drops and I wept with an overflowing of fervor.42 What Goscelin does not say is that Eve was seven years old at the time. If we see irony in his fervent tears of love, evoked by the spectacle of fourteen small girls marrying Christ with the vow of St. Agnes, there was as­ suredly none in the bereft monk’s recollections. It was precisely the girl’s innocence that had aroused his desire, just as it was the grown woman’s devotion that made her leaving all the more painful. In his multifaceted appeal to Eve, Goscelin assumes in quick succession the roles of an orphaned brother, a birthing mother, an injured friend, a father, a comforter, and a client, himself in need of comfort. He presents himself as Jerome to Eve’s Eustochium, but also as a wayward Augustine to her steadfast Monica. This cascade of exemplars and role reversals, so characteristic of medieval religious language, evinces both rhetorical play and genuine self-­expression. If Goscelin’s desire was heightened by Eve’s sexual difference, his playfulness was enabled only by the premise of vowed chastity and the conviction

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of charity. He and Eve shared a belief that human love is by nature liminal, seeking its fulfillment beyond itself in heaven. As Goscelin puts it, “only that love that is in Christ is true. That can be changed by neither place, nor time, nor status, nor sex, nor age, nor beauty.”43 Hence age, sex, and status can become reversible counters in the evocation of love, for their stakes are not ultimate. But how did Eve respond to this plea? If Goscelin’s messenger reached her, she might have been delighted to renew their old correspondence, as Heloise did with Abelard. Or she might have been unnerved by the monk’s too-ardent pursuit, thanking God that she had kept her mind and body chaste by escaping to France. Perhaps Hervé had already replaced Goscelin in her affections, or perhaps she continued to cherish both as spiritual friends. Amid these uncertainties, the nearest thing to a certainty is that what silenced Eve was the chance of history, not her own reticence. It is by default, then, that the last word belongs to Goscelin. His love ennobled him to the point that he could end his “book of comfort”—his own more than Eve’s, it may be—with this poignant prayer: have pity for the bereavement of Goscelin, whom you have loved as the home of your soul in Christ, but whom by your departure you have shaken completely from his foundations, and whom you have overturned from comfort in this present life; and, lest I stain the light of joys held out before us with the mist of a greater complaint, beg for me, I beseech you, the mercy of the Lord that is ready to be appeased for eternity, and forgiveness for my sins, so that although you are very far removed from my unworthiness, I may have the happiness of seeing you in your highest happiness, in the blessed light. So may you have all the desires of your soul.44 Looking back at Goscelin and Eve from the standpoint of 1200, we can see in their friendship not only passionate chastity, but another trait that would become increasingly rare. Goscelin loves and misses Eve; he ­admires and admonishes her; but he neither adores nor patronizes her. He ascribes to his protégée spiritual virtues, not supernatural powers. Despite their difference in age and gender, they are fundamentally equals—­ colleagues in a shared intellectual and spiritual pursuit. We can still see glimmers of such collegiality in the friendships of Christina of Markyate and Hildegard of Bingen, but they are progressively overshadowed by perceptions of otherness. As priestly, clerical power increased, so too did the aura of charismatic authority around mulieres sanctae, while the friendship

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of equals—however erotically charged—yielded to a new kind of friendship based on gender complementarity and unequal gifts. Ennobling love could accompany what Jo Ann McNamara calls syneisactism, adopting an ancient term for the gender-neutral ideal of early Christian ascetics.45 But that ideal was giving way before the rapid clericalization of the church, which in the course of the twelfth century transformed male religious from monks-who-might-happen-to-be-ordained into priests-who-mighthappen-to-be-in-religious-orders, while leaving nuns stranded in the ranks of the laity.46 No longer equals, women lagged behind in status and, increasingly, in learning. Imbued with the ideology of the Gregorian reform, priest-monks grew suspicious of old-fashioned “spiritual friendship” as a source of moral corruption and a precursor to illicit sex.47 As if to compensate, a new type of holy woman emerged, no longer endowed with the same virtues as holy men but characterized by a distinctive visionary spirituality, prophetic powers, and a highly somatic, performative style of piety.48 In place of the old fellowship of equals, tinged at times by amorous yearnings, we begin to see highly charged relationships in which a cleric offers a holy woman material support while investing her with sacred awe.49 In this respect, few texts are more instructive than Hildegard’s exchanges with her collaborators, Volmar of Disibodenberg and Guibert of Gembloux. She and her lifelong friend Volmar were contemporaries. The first male confidant of her visions, he had been her tutor and later served as both personal secretary and provost. He may well have been her confessor too, but if so, neither ever mentions it. The magistra preferred to call the priest her “beloved son,” not her spiritual father. Her vita gives him the honorific title of symmista, “fellow initiate in God’s mysteries”—a term Volmar uses of Hildegard herself in his sole surviving letter, written around 1170 when her death seemed imminent.50 The letter takes the form of a precocious funeral lament in fulsome hagiographic style. After summarizing her gifts and works, Volmar contrasts the “approved confidante of God” with the scholastics of his day, who come off badly in comparison: Why do so many undertake difficult journeys into remote parts of the world to seek out the teachings of various men—and all in vain? Why, when afflicted with thirst, hunger, and cold, do they sweat over the profundity, or rather, the enigma, of sententiae? . . . [T]hey cannot grasp the commandment of the Spirit of God—nay, rather, they extinguish the spark of God’s Spirit. . . . The result is that to the embarrassment of modern scholastics who abuse the knowledge given them

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from above, the Spirit of prophecy and vision, revitalized in a fragile vessel and without help of secular learning, brings forth things that they cannot comprehend in any way.51 Volmar’s words echo Hildegard’s self-perception, including her claim that by endowing a woman with the prophetic Spirit, God had “chosen what is foolish and weak in this world to confound the wise and the strong” (1 Cor 1:27).52 The old monk presents himself emphatically as Hildegard’s disciple, not her equal, and certainly not her master. Far different was her friendship with Guibert, a brief acquaintance that produced a lengthy correspondence. The Walloon monk first wrote to the abbess in 1175, when he was about fifty and she was seventy-seven. Given her age, we should not expect to find the heroically sublimated eroti­cism of Goscelin’s writing for Eve. Yet Guibert’s first three letters, written before he ever laid eyes on the abbess, glow with adoration and wonder. Like a romance hero who falls in love with the distant heroine through the fame of her beauty, Guibert has only heard from afar of Hildegard’s wisdom. He celebrates her for “gifts scarcely heard of through all the ages” and bombards her with questions about her visionary experience. On receiving her answer, the monk could scarcely contain his joy, but had Hildegard’s letter publicly recited, copied, translated into French for laymen, and enthusiastically discussed by a wide circle of friends.53 Among his auditors were the monks of Villers, at the forefront of current spiritual trends, who responded by sending Hildegard a list of scriptural problemata much like the ones Heloise and her nuns had sent Abelard forty years earlier.54 But now the polarity is reversed. The nuns of the Paraclete had turned to Abelard as their magister, certain that his learning and theological insight would exceed theirs, whereas the monks approached Hildegard for oracles straight from the mouth of God, believing with Volmar that her wisdom surpassed that of “modern scholastics.” The abbess seems to have been flattered and annoyed in equal measure. As for Guibert, two years as the elderly, feeble Hildegard’s secretary would dampen his enthusiasm. Moreover, the criticism of his fellow monks, who resented his prolonged absence, led him to abandon his project of composing her vita. In a prolix epistle to Villers, he waxed defensive about the cura mulierum, not only defending his chastity but protesting disingenuously that he had first visited Hildegard as a skeptic, wishing only to test the authenticity of her claims. He even maintained that she and her nuns, bereft of Volmar, had detained him at the Rupertsberg against his will.55 Both Guibert’s original, starry-eyed veneration and his

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later defensiveness foreshadow thirteenth-century trends. On the one hand, he salutes Hildegard as second only to the Blessed Virgin: “Hail, therefore, lady full of grace, after Mary, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women and blessed the speech of your mouth.”56 On the other hand, he tempers his adulation with caution, reminding the seer that: Sometimes holy prophets, when they are consulted, offer things out of their own spirit merely from the habit of prophesying, although they are thought to speak from the spirit of prophecy—as St. Gregory himself testifies. This, above all, you must beware of, lest when you are strong with the great grace of the Spirit, you have too little discernment of spirits, and whatever you see in your spirit, you immediately impute to the Holy Spirit.57 Both Guibert’s awestruck wonder and his appeal for discernment will be echoed in later women’s vitae. His ambivalence, unlike Goscelin’s, stems not from erotic tension but from the complex feelings aroused by Hildegard’s exceptional gifts, as well as the general ambivalence of twelfth-­ century monks about the cura monialium. Christina of Markyate (ca. 1096–ca. 1160), born only two years before Hildegard, had much in common with her more famous contemporary. She too was of noble birth, took a childhood vow of virginity, moved from anchoritic into monastic life, exercised forceful leadership, earned a reputation for visions and prophecy, and formed close relationships with her male collaborators. Further, she had a similarly difficult, imperious personality that evoked intense reactions from others, both admiring and hostile.58 Both women inspired hagiographers to begin writing their vitae while they were still alive and thus collaborated in the formation of their saintly personas. Through a series of happy accidents, Hildegard’s vita incorporates her first-person memoir, bracketed by the editorial remarks of her biographers.59 Although Christina too granted interviews to her biographer, it is impossible to tell how closely his point of view mirrored hers. As a monk of St Albans, he worked at the behest of Abbot Geoffrey. From an institutional perspective, therefore, the Life represents the interests of St Albans rather than Christina’s female priory at Markyate. In this respect, it differs sharply from Hildegard’s vita, commissioned by her nuns, with its strong vested interest in the rights and privileges of the Rupertsberg over against the Disibodenberg monks. Since the last third of Christina’s Life centers exclusively on her relationship with Geoffrey, it is easy to believe she loved him to the point of

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obsession—though this may mean simply that her other friendships held less interest for her biographer.60 Nevertheless, her vita manages the extraordinary feat of describing Christina’s erotic relations with a whole series of men, at the same time representing her hagiographically as a virgin martyr. Jaeger is right to describe “the Life of Christina [as] a kind of summa of erotic-spiritual love; it might be justly called scala amoris or de gradibus amoris.”61 Like the saints of old, the virgin heroically disobeys her parents and resists a forced marriage to the hapless Burthred. Playing the role of “pagan torturer,” the Norman bishop Ranulf Flambard attempts to seduce the apprentice saint, but she outwits him and escapes with God’s help.62 At this point, she ought to be tortured, and so she is—not in the arena by wild beasts, but in the cell of the hermit Roger, where she is forced to live in hiding for more than four years until she succeeds in having her marriage annulled. Christina and Roger share a strange intimacy. By day, she crouches on a stone in a tiny cell, walled off from Roger’s room and bolted with a log, but when the holy senex returns, he takes her into his chapel where the two “burn” together in prayer and shed “tears of celestial desire.” Thus, “made to be of one heart and one soul in charity and chastity in Christ,” Christina and Roger enhance their heavenly rewards through holy cohabitation.63 After Roger’s death, however, the virgin goes to stay with an unnamed cleric and falls prey to the peril that writers always warned against: their “chaste and spiritual love” degenerates into fiery lust.64 Although Christina resists with fasts, vigils, and scourging, her ardor cools only after the Christ Child comes visibly and tangibly to spend a day with her. Even so, she wonders afterwards if, despite her intact hymen, she has fallen from sublime virginity through desire. Another vision is required to reassure her of her virgin grace.65 Having played the roles of persecuted virgin, holy disciple, and tempted ascetic saint, with Abbot Geoffrey, Christina enters into maturity. The vita is clear about the element of quid pro quo: Geoffrey gives her material support in return for her spiritual direction and prayers. She intercedes for him, knows his dreams by clairvoyance, appears in visions, reproves his sins, and most importantly, advises him on his decisions as abbot. Much of Christina’s advice seems to have been financial; she persuaded the abbot to spend less on building projects at St Albans and more on support for hermits, recluses, and her own priory—a policy that embittered some of his monks and led to factional infighting after his death.66 Christina became Geoffrey’s spiritual mother and prophet in residence, just as Hildegard was for Volmar; but the two were also bound by ties of

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erotic friendship like those that joined Goscelin and Eve, spurring the usual rumors of scandal. In a strikingly ambiguous episode in 1136, the newly elected King Stephen sends Geoffrey on an embassy to Rome to secure the pope’s confirmation of his crown. Dreading this politically sensitive mission, Geoffrey comes in tears to Christina, asking not just prayers but “two undergarments” (interulas)—“not for pleasure but to relieve the sweat of his labor.”67 The phrase non ad voluptatem is one of those telltale protestations of innocence that betray the lack of it. In the end, Christ tells Christina to give these garments to the poor. But at the same time, she sees the first of several visions in which God holds Geoffrey trapped in the enclosure of her love. While praying she sees “a wall in which her beloved was as if cemented alive”—symbolizing divine protection and preventing his departure.68 In 1139, the king again summoned the abbot to Rome, but Christina, determined to prevent this journey also, had another vision. Geoffrey now appears shut up in a round, transparent cloister without doors or windows, “happy enough” as the text says—and she too is happy, since her beloved cannot escape; the cell has “no doorkeeper but God.” Sure enough, Geoffrey is recalled by the papal legate because Christina, “who knew how to love victoriously, had conquered.”69 Finally, with king and pope at loggerheads and fearing yet another embassy to Rome, the abbot begs his “sweet remedy” to help him. At this point Christina has her culminating vision: While she was praying at length as usual she was rapt in ecstasy. She saw herself standing in the Savior’s presence, with him who was more intimate to her than all others encircled by her arms and strained to her breast. But as she feared lest perchance he could somehow shake himself loose from her, since a man is stronger than a woman, she saw Jesus, the helper of those who will be saved, tightening her grasp with a loving hand. Her own hands were not joined with intertwined fingers but laid one on top of the other, so that she might have the strength to retain her beloved less by the joining of her hands than by the strength of her arms. When she had perceived this, she rejoiced not a little and gave abundant thanks because she knew her friend was freed from care, but especially because she had seen the presence of both her bridegroom and her lord.70 It is understandable that Geoffrey wants to avoid the trip to Rome. The roads are dangerous, his health is poor, and the king has threatened to

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confiscate his property if he goes. But Christina’s concerns are different. Her imagery suggests a jealous wife who fears that her beloved will “somehow shake himself loose from her” by that time-honored male method, the open road. When she imagined Geoffrey cemented into a wall or shut in a doorless, windowless cloister, she may have been remembering her years of imprisonment in the hermit’s cell. On another level, these images anticipate the Lais of Marie de France, in particular Guigemar and Yonec, written perhaps two decades later. In these tales, it is jealous husbands who imprison their wives in closely watched towers, ostensibly for love, in fact for total control.71 Although Geoffrey’s imprisonment is only virtual, Christina guarantees by keeping him safe from king, pope, and highway robbers that nothing will deter him from satisfying her own needs. In her last vision, the enclosure that holds her beloved fast is none other than Jesus himself, helping Christina tighten her grasp because “a man is stronger than a woman.” The final sentence even leaves some doubt as to whether “her bridegroom and her lord” (et sponsi dominique sui) refer to the same person. Although Christina is a bride of Christ, standing in his very presence, it is Geoffrey who is called suum pre cunctis familiarissimum. This language is of course the hagiographer’s, not hers. But the visual imagery must have come from Christina, whose imagination found it hard to distinguish between protection and entrapment, the embrace of spiritual friendship and the stranglehold of possessive love. I have argued that the saintly romance of Christina’s Life partakes of both the chaste eroticism we have seen in Eve’s friendships and the mesmerizing, commanding force that Hildegard exercised over her male colleagues. The literary affinities of this text can be extended in other directions as well. Critics have often observed a resemblance between Christina’s life and the one vernacular text we can be certain she knew: the legend of St. Alexis, which the monks of St Albans had copied into her customized prayer book. According to the version in her Psalter, Alexis leaves his bride on his wedding night to become an ascetic, though not without giving her gifts to signify his loyalty. His abandoned bride mourns him for years like a faithful dove, but ultimately finds her peace with Christ, the “living Bridegroom of Truth” (spus vif de veritét), while looking forward to a reunion with Alexis in heaven.72 Christina also knew the saintly romance of Cecilia, who persuaded her husband to accept a virginal union culminating in the happy martyrdom of both. It was this story that she told Burthred on their wedding night, albeit with a less harmonious outcome.73 Hagiographic romance drew on early Christian sources, but it was essentially a twelfth-century invention, a sturdy hybrid genre that flourished

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in France and Anglo-Norman England.74 In fact, the first usage of the term fin amur in England occurs in a saint’s life composed around 1164 by a nun of Barking—a rich, ancient abbey whose personnel came from the same aristocratic milieu as Wilton.75 The nun, possibly the same Clemence who wrote St. Catherine’s vita, uses fin amur to describe both the love of God and the virginal marriage of St. Edward the Confessor.76 “En­ nobling love” in hagiography can take the form of either highly sublimated erotic friendship, including chaste marriage, or the love of Christ himself as fin amant. In the latter sense, the hagiographic romance of the twelfth century is a precursor to the mystique courtoise of the thirteenth.77 But few writers maintained in all seriousness that God smiled on sexual desire itself, even if consummated outside of marriage. I can think of only two: Heloise and Marie de France. For both of these radical thinkers, the factor that determines whether sexual love is ennobling or degrading is neither marital status nor intensity of passion, but the degree to which the love proves itself generous and disinterested.78 Eros can indeed become caritas, albeit rarely and with great effort. In the last of Marie’s Lais, this transformation does occur, casting a utopian light on real-life scenarios of saintly romance. Eliduc is a lai of Channel crossings whose dubious hero, like Marie herself, belongs to two worlds.79 Sailing between Brittany and Britain, the knight Eliduc becomes the vassal of two lords and the lover of two ladies, a wife and a mistress. Without intending to be treacherous, he follows the path of least resistance until he ends by betraying both women and at least one lord. When his amie discovers that her lover is married, she faints from grief and is left for dead. But Eliduc’s wife Guildeluëc discovers his secret and, with heroic generosity, revives the mistress and voluntarily releases her husband so the lovers can marry. Granted some land as Eliduc’s parting gift, Guildeluëc moves to a forest hermitage, builds a church, and founds a nunnery there. By process of time, her altruism morally transforms the second couple until, after many years of happiness, they too turn to God. Marie describes the love of Eliduc and his second wife Guilliadun as parfite amur—interestingly, the same term that the Vie de Saint Alexis uses for his virginal marriage, as if perfect conjugal love inevitably led to chaste partings.80 Eliduc’s second wife enters the convent of the first, while he becomes a monk and all live happily ever after. Thus Marie, who has explored every possible permutation of the love triangle in her twelve Lais, ends by resolving the unstable triangle into a stable quaternity. God, the universal lover, accepts all three partners, holding them as one in the embrace of selfless friendship.

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It has been suggested that Marie, writing for the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, based the plot of Eliduc on the queen’s family history.81 Eleanor’s grandfather, the infamous womanizer and troubadour Guilhem IX of Aquitaine, had taken Ermengarde of Anjou as his first wife, but divorced her to marry Philippa of Toulouse. When Guilhem tired of Philippa and took a third woman, Dangereuse, as his mistress, Philippa took the veil at Fontevrault—where her old rival Ermengarde was a frequent guest.82 Though the raunchy duke of Aquitaine had no wish to become a monk, the resemblance to Eliduc’s story is suggestive. Needless to say, Marie’s version is idealized, for one may doubt that all the principals in the real-life scenario of marital politics “took great pains to love God in good faith.”83 Queen Eleanor herself was the apex of one of history’s most famous love triangles and spent years under virtual house arrest at Fontevrault, where she ultimately died. If Marie de France ended her own career as an abbess—an old speculation that no one has been able to prove or ­disprove—the conclusion of the Lais would have even more resonance.84 Speculations aside, however, the resolution of a love triangle through the founding of a monastery is not a fantastic deus ex machina ending, but a realistic twelfth-century solution to a twelfth-century problem. Similarly, the monastic conversion of Abelard and Heloise signaled not just the tragic ending of their love affair, but the beginning of its painful transformation into something new. The end of Eliduc resonates with their story as well, for Heloise, forced to leave first Abelard and then Argenteuil, moved to a decaying chapel on land donated by her former husband, where she founded the church and convent of the Paraclete. One of the most dramatic and contested figures in medieval history, Heloise has always tested the intellectual limits of her interpreters. Born around 1095 of noble but uncertain parentage, she received a superb education at Argenteuil under teachers, presumably female, whose names elude us.85 Her training concentrated on rhetoric and ethics. Well versed in both pagan and patristic authors, she excelled in the ars dictaminis then in vogue, an art of formal letter-writing that favored rhythmic prose cadences (cursus), richly punning salutations, intricate allusions, and rare, ­felicitous turns of phrase.86 As a convent pupil, Heloise might have sharpened her skills by corresponding with male mentors, exchanging a mix of compliments, playful banter, and lofty sentiments in deliciously self-­ conscious Latin. Such late eleventh- and early twelfth-century collections as the Tegernsee letters and the Regensburg Songs, though sometimes deni­grated as “mere school exercises,” illustrate the supercharged rhetoric of this elite subculture, which was enamored of amor as both pedagogical

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technique and literary subject. The Ovidian poet Baudri, abbot of Bourgueil (ca. 1078–1107), directed his playful verse epistles to fellow monks and schoolboys as well as nuns, including Muriel and Constance of Le Ronceray. Balancing expressions of hyperbolic desire with protestations of chastity, suggestive allusions with exhortations to virtue, Baudri writes in one letter to Constance: What this letter speaks of is love and love poetry, And yet no venom lies hidden in the letter’s touch. . . . You are a girl, I a man: I am young, you are younger. I swear by all that is: I do not want to be your husband. I do not want to be your husband, nor you to be my wife: Let mouth and heart confirm our friendship.87 Tu uirgo, uir ego: Gerald Bond’s translation is one possible rendering, but a uirgo is more than a puella; a few lines earlier, Baudri lauded Constance’s vow of virginity. Vir ego also plays on uirago, a patristic epithet of praise for the uirgo who has transcended her sex through religious profession. Accordingly, nolo uir esse tibi means “I do not want to be your husband,” but also “I do not want to be a man in your eyes—nor you to be a woman in mine.” The safety of their shared vow renders gender innocuous so that amor and amicicia can remain innocent, albeit with much special pleading. Constance replies with her own verse epistle expressing what Peter Dronke has aptly called “rarefied friendship, blended with coquetry.”88 Ovid’s Heroides provide models for her mercurial display of feeling, a rainbow of affect ranging from amorous or mock-amorous longing to religious rationalization (“the bride of God should love God’s servants”). Baudri and Constance’s high-minded flirtation, superficially much like the relationship of Eve and Goscelin or Christina and Geoffrey, differed in one key respect. Neither of these correspondents was striving for sainthood: while respecting the letter of their vows, they clearly took the religious life with a grain of salt. Its stability and privilege afforded them an ideal location to delight in the secular joys of friendship, Latinity, and textual/sexual play—what Baudri called the iocus amoris or “play of desire.”89 It was in this spirit that Abelard, musing retrospectively on his choice of Heloise as mistress, recalled how he had looked forward to just such a correspondence. Because of the girl’s literary skill, he anticipated that “even when separated we could enjoy each other’s presence by exchange of written messages in which we could write many things more ­audaciously than we could say them.”90 The fragmentary correspondence

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that Constant Mews has christened “the lost love letters of Heloise and Abelard” would seem to fulfill this promise.91 Though these expurgated letters survive in a single manuscript copied at Clairvaux in the late fifteenth century, they have been convincingly dated to Paris in the early twelfth century—no more than twenty years after the exchange between Baudri and Constance. The writer designated M[ulier] is not a nun, yet she displays an expertise in rhetoric and Scripture that could only have been acquired in a convent, while her correspondent V[ir] is a famous philosopher, teaching in the Ile-de-France but not born there.92 Both lovers exchange lyrics as well as prose, extolling one another’s gifts as lovers will, but their letters are distinguished by a mutual, philosophical obsession with the nature of love. The man is inclined to use Ovidian conceits alongside the technical vocabulary of dialectic, while the woman expresses a unique fusion of passionate desire, tropes of divine love adapted from the liturgy, and Ciceronian friendship, with its ideal of pure, disinterested generosity. Love for her is both dilectio and amor; it is grounded in virtue (sola excellentissima virtus, M 49) and approved by God.93 Despite the adoration she expresses for her teacher and lover, she addresses him as an equal ( par pari, M 18; amans amanti, M 48 and 84; dilecta dilecto, M 62; fidelis fideli, M 100). Unlike the man, she voices neither guilt nor shame over their physical relationship, but favors a Pauline understanding of love as reciprocal debt (Rom 13:8).94 Although she shares Constance’s delight in verbal play, her affect is not playful but utterly serious, in fact, prone to Heloisan hyperbole: “in all Latinity, no word has been found that may plainly tell how intent my spirit is upon you, for, as God is my witness, I love you with a sublime and exceptional love. Hence there neither is nor shall be any force nor fate that may separate me from your love, save death alone.”95 It is fair to say that she makes a religion of love, addressing the most potent mystical rhetoric to her lover: You alone pleased me above every creature of God, and you alone did I love. Loving you, I sought you; seeking you, I found you; finding you, I desired you; desiring you, I chose you; choosing you, I set you above all else in my heart, and you alone I elected from thousands that I might make a covenant with you. (M 84)96 Most tellingly, the “lost love letters” reveal the same discrepancy between the male and female correspondents that we find in the monastic letters of Heloise and Abelard. In the Historia calamitatum, Abelard represents himself as an Ovidian seducer plotting a campaign against Heloise’s virtue, though he acknowledges the mutuality of their consummated love.

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In subsequent letters, he expresses remorse, shame, and even gratitude for his castration, which he had come to perceive as a just punishment. Unlike Heloise’s, his letters express no nostalgia whatsoever for past joys. In the “lost letters” as well, the man begins his courtship with an Ovidian love poem (V 113)97 and continues to address his beloved as his singular joy, his guiding star, his precious jewel, his unfading lily, half of his soul, and so forth. After a point, however, cries of remorse are heard: “I am guilty, I who compelled you to sin” (V 59); “forget all the wrongs which I, stupidly and thoughtlessly . . . inflicted on my most beloved without any consideration” (V 74). The woman of the lost letters, like Heloise in the monastic letters, is never remorseful but often angry, at one point even threatening to end the relationship (M 60). As a result, two contrasting psychological patterns emerge: rhapsodic declarations of love oscillate with dramas of guilt and repentance on the man’s part, wrath and forgiveness on the woman’s. In other words Abelard (for so I will call him) assumes the role of a penitent sinner, Heloise that of the long-suffering, frequently offended, yet eternally gracious God. It is no wonder that one of the man’s letters ends, “Vale martyr mea” (V 96). Not surprisingly, several scholars have discerned Heloise’s influence in Abelard’s conception of divine love. “Given that Abelard writes so much about the loving-kindness of God” after the end of the affair, Mews writes, “he may be projecting his idealization of Heloise as ultimate goodness onto his image of God.”98 Until recently, any attempt to consider Heloise’s career as a whole has been dwarfed by the centuries-old “authenticity debate”—now transmogrified into a new debate over the lost letters. Yet Heloise the abbess has attracted her own share of attention. Her last letter testifies to her reflections on monastic reform, the Problemata Heloissae to her scriptural studies, and several Paraclete sources to her work as a liturgist.99 None of these, however, can account for the reputation she enjoyed as a brilliant Latinist.100 The monastic letters were apparently unknown until Jean de Meun found and translated them in the late thirteenth century, and the lost letters leave no trace before Johannes de Vepria copied them around 1471. But, for scholars who accept their authenticity, the discovery of previously unknown poems by both lovers has spurred a search for further lyrical works. Abelard has long been suspected as the author of several Carmina burana lyrics; other poems are currently being laid at Heloise’s door.101 The Paraclete Easter sequence Epithalamica, once attributed to Abelard, now seems more likely to be hers, given the resemblance between its Songs of Songs rhetoric (in the mouth of Mary Magdalene) and the “lost letter” 84, cited above.

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Iam video quod optaveram, Now I see what I had longed for, iam teneo quod amaveram, now I embrace what I had desired, iam rideo quae sic fleveram, now I laugh, I who had wept so much, plus gaudeo quam dolueram: I rejoice even more than I had grieved. Risi mane, flevi nocte; I laughed in the morning and wept at night, in the morning I laughed, by night I mane risi, nocte flevi.102 wept. Intriguingly, the Epithalamica is echoed in a pair of unusual Easter dramas, the first Western plays to feature the dead Christ as Bridegroom, which are known with their music from a twelfth-century manuscript at Vic in Catalunya.103 On metrical, musicological, and paleographic grounds too complex to summarize here, David Wulstan has made a case for these early Sponsus plays as successive drafts by Heloise.104 The plays, whose influence was widely diffused, stand at the beginning of a tradition that eroti­cized Mary Magdalene’s role as first witness to the Resurrection and introduced the scene of Mary purchasing myrrh from a spice merchant.105 In this, the playwright may have been influenced by a Byzantine tradition, hitherto unnoticed, which is suggestive in the light of Heloise’s interest in Greek studies.106 In the Greek liturgy, the “Bridegroom Matins” sung on Tuesday evening of Holy Week culminates in a celebrated hymn by Kassiane, a ninth-century abbess and liturgical composer who, like Heloise, is surrounded by romantic legends. Kassiane’s hymn with its expressive melody is voiced by the “sinful woman” who anoints Christ’s feet with myrrh as she sings, “I shall kiss your immaculate feet, / wipe them again with the hair of my head, / those feet at whose sound Eve in Paradise hid for fear.”107 To this day in Greece, the Bridegroom Matins is especially popular with prostitutes. The Vic playwright’s interest in the Magdalene as lover of Christ (rather than simply a repentant sinner) was still fairly novel in the 1130s. But this new devotion is consistent with Abelard’s emphasis on the Magdalene as apostola apostolorum, Heloise’s request that he compose new hymns for women who were neither virgins nor martyrs, and her decision (following Robert of Arbrissel) to dedicate the Paraclete’s first daughter house to the Magdalene.108 If Heloise was in fact the author of the Epithalamica and the Sponsus plays, these could represent her effort to obey Abelard’s counsel in the fifth monastic letter, namely, that she overcome her

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erotic fixation on him by cultivating bridal devotion toward Christ: “In your mind be always present at his tomb, weep and wail with the faithful women. . . . Prepare with them the perfumes for his burial. . . . This mourning, sister, should be yours and also the wailing, for you were joined to this bridegroom in blissful matrimony.”109 The monastic tradition’s preference for virgin brides of Christ was potent enough that Heloise, the archetypal woman with a past, could hardly adopt the bridal role that Abelard scripted for her without using Mary Magdalene as an alternative model. Moreover, it would not have been exceptional for an abbess to compose liturgical drama. Although the surviving evidence is spotty, there is nonetheless a long history of plays by named female religious authors, ranging from the virgin martyr plays of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (960s) to Hildegard’s Ordo virtutum (ca. 1152) to the Latin Easter play of Katherine de Sutton, abbess of Barking (1363–76), to the convent dramas of the Florentine Antonia Pulci (1452–1501).110 A revitalized history of medieval drama has yet to take the role of women’s religious houses into account. In fairness, the centuries have seen too many nouvelles Héloïses come and go to let us place rash confidence in such recent speculations. The jury will be out for some time on the full scope of Heloise’s writings. Never­ theless, the theories of Constant Mews and David Wulstan seem plausible, in part, because they fit the twelfth-century context so well. As my other examples have shown, the era’s experiments in love intertwined so profoundly with its experiments in religious life that we cannot separate the founding of new institutions from the renewed emphasis on syneisactism and spiritual friendship. We have long known this from the masculine side, from the activities of such reformers as Abelard, Robert of Arbrissel, and Gilbert of Sempringham. But when we explore these links from the distaff side, we catch glimpses of the liminality and flexibility that characterized women’s religious lives. At different stages in their history they might pass from marriage into nunneries or anchorholds, from recluses’ cells into monasteries or vice versa, or even from monasteries back into the world.111 Despite the warnings of clerics such as Ailred and the Ancrene Wisse author, women’s entry into religion sometimes followed and often initiated intimate relationships with men, ranging from Christina’s coha­ bitation in Roger’s stifling quarters to her almost equally stifling love for Geoffrey; from Eve’s epistolary friendship with Goscelin and Baudri’s with Constance, to Heloise’s lifelong partnership with Abelard, to Hildegard’s prophetic collaborations with Volmar and Guibert. Perhaps because the

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process of shedding worldly entanglements was always harder for women, the sources that tell of their lives often preserve a fuller picture of the affective context undergirding their choices and constraints. As they founded new institutions, reformed existing ones, and experimented with new literary forms, literate women of the twelfth century also mapped new ­emotional terrain, giving flesh to the bridal spirituality commended by male writers but at the same time forging newly intense and expressive human loves. From Polymaths to Prophets

Although the twelfth century produced few women writers in comparison with the thirteenth and fourteenth, the ones we do know are remarkable for the extent of their learning. In the empire, nuns retained their hold on active Latinity longer than they did in France and England—and with it, their collegiality with monks. One reason for this still underexplored regional difference was surely the wealth, prestige, and aristocratic pedigree of the great nunneries and Stifte, or canoness foundations, such as Essen, Gandersheim, Hohenbourg, and Quedlinburg.112 Dual-sex monasteries such as Hildegard’s Disibodenberg, Ekbert and Elisabeth’s Schönau, and the Bavarian house of Admont flourished longer in the German lands than elsewhere, allowing even enclosed religious women more opportunities to share the intellectual life of their male peers. Since the first university in the empire was not founded until 1348 at Prague, German monasteries also remained key centers of religious learning longer than they did in France and England, where the powerful allure of Paris and Oxford drew intellectual talent away from monastic houses.113 Thus, while women created outstanding vernacular works in many tongues, nowhere but in the empire did they produce Latin writings on the scale of Hrotsvit’s plays and epics, Hildegard’s opera omnia, Elisabeth of Schönau’s prophetic books, Herrad of Hohenbourg’s Hortus deliciarum, or the Admont sermon ­collection114—all but the first from the twelfth century.115 These extraordinary women represent facets of what might be called the monastic humanism of the age. When R. W. Southern characterized “medieval humanism” in 1970, he defined its core tenets as the nobility of human nature, the dignity of nature itself, and the rationality of the universe, memorably remarking that “the greatest triumph of medieval humanism was to make God seem human. . . . The next triumph was to

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make the universe itself friendly, familiar, and intelligible.”116 More concretely, the monastic humanism of the twelfth century entailed an interest in classical rhetoric and ethics (“humanism” in the traditional sense); the Ciceronian cult of friendship (“nobility of human nature”); a penchant for encyclopedic learning (“rationality of the universe”); and the flourishing of liturgical drama (“making God human”). If Heloise represents the apex of rhetorical and ethical humanism, its more encyclopedic side is epitomized by Hildegard and Herrad, who sought to make the natural world and the course of history supremely intelligible as revelations of the divine will. For them as for many other twelfth-century monastics, these humanistic tendencies were linked with a strong reformist drive, an effort to revitalize Christianity through a zealous return to sources—chiefly the Gospels but also the primitive liturgy, the lives of the desert fathers, and the Benedictine and Augustinian rules. By “reform” I mean less the program of papal centralization emanating from Rome than the widespread evangelical impulse to make Christendom more Christian, imitating Jesus and practicing what he preached. Since the idealized portrait of the primitive church in Acts includes women (1:14, 2:17–18, 9:36–41), many reformist monks saw the col­ laboration of both sexes as indispensable to the vita apostolica.117 Despite sexual anxieties, therefore, the period between 1080 and 1150 proved to be especially fruitful for the founding of double monasteries, both Benedictine and Augustinian. It has been estimated that in 1100, there were about one hundred fifty women’s religious houses in the empire; by 1250, there were five hundred, containing somewhere between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand nuns and canonesses.118 The most important Benedictine reform center was Hirsau, with its family of loosely affiliated houses including Admont, Disibodenberg, Petershausen, and Zwiefalten, while the Augustinian reform movement was spearheaded by the canon Richard of Springiersbach and his sister, magistra Tenxwind of Andernach. Tenxwind was the reformer who famously sparred with Hildegard of Bingen over women’s religious life; the canoness favored austere attire and an egalitarian admissions policy, while Hildegard defended class distinctions and symbolic splendor.119 As we have seen, women’s monasteries frequently developed out of small communities of recluses, often attached to male houses. In many cases, the foundation or reform of a male abbey entailed the establishment of a sister house, but a generation or two later, we find the women being relocated further from the men—a move that took place at Andernach in

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1128, Zwiefalten in 1138, Rolduc in 1140, and Marbach in 1150.120 These moves are usually ascribed to male fears of excessive intimacy, strengthened by a decree of the Second Lateran Council (1139) that banned concelebration of the monastic liturgy by male and female choirs. Sometimes, however, the initiative sprang from the women. One welldocumented case is Hildegard’s migration from Disibodenberg to her new foundation at the Rupertsberg (ca. 1150), undertaken against her abbot’s will in a desire for greater autonomy. Even when it was men who initiated a move, physical separation did not necessarily mean a severance of intellectual and affective ties. The evangelical preacher John of Cantimpré (ca. 1155–ca. 1210), who founded a house of canons near Liège in 1183, quickly decided to build a separate monastery for his female companions at Prémy. According to John’s vita, the sisters were initially “afraid, as women usually are, to live so far away from men . . . because in those days, malicious bandits used to prowl around the country, robbing and murdering people.”121 Assured of safety by their abbot’s prayer, they had no choice but to move. Yet ties between the two houses remained so strong that John himself died and was buried at Prémy, attended by the prioress. Throughout the twelfth century, the persistence of close spiritual bonds between male and female religious, coupled with increasing demands for physical distance, gave rise to the problem (and opportunity) of the cura monialium. Reform-minded monks and clerics took responsibility for supplying women’s pastoral needs, including their need for defense against equally reform-minded monks and clerics whose ideal of purity was a woman-free space.122 But “supplying pastoral needs” meant more than singing Mass and hearing the nuns’ confessions. It involved sharing a whole intellectual culture through preaching, teaching, lending manuscripts, and writing works of spiritual guidance. Nor should we imagine the women as solely disciples and receivers in these exchanges. Many women’s foundations, including Admont, Rupertsberg, and Hohenbourg, had active scriptoria. One important signed manuscript, the “Guta-Sintram Codex” (1154), was written by the nun Guta of Schwartzenthann and illustrated by the canon Sintram of Marbach, whose portraits appear on either side of the Virgin. To justify their collaboration with women, the canons of Marbach used one of Abelard’s sermons on the cura monialium.123 The nuns of Admont not only copied the exegetical works of their abbot Irimbert (1172–76), but participated in composing them, as well as writing and preaching sermons for feast days. One manuscript from Admont includes a miniature of a nun preaching. Despite strict claustration, these learned women’s correspondents included bishops and

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the renowned theologian Gerhoch of Reichersberg.124 We know all this because of a highly unusual circumstance: Admont’s twelfth-century library has come down to us intact. Centuries of wars, fires, and forced secularization have destroyed most monastic libraries, and history has been even less kind to female communities, so it is difficult to know how exceptional the nuns of Admont were. Considering that at least twenty-five abbesses corresponded with Hildegard, however, it would be fair to say that Latinity, biblical literacy, and competence in the ars dictaminis remained normative for elite German nuns throughout the century.125 The range and variety of educational programs for religious women can be illustrated by three ambitious works spanning a half-century: the Speculum virginum by Conrad of Hirsau (ca. 1140), Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias (1141–51), and Herrad of Hohenbourg’s Hortus deliciarum (ca. 1175–91). Recent scholarship has tended to confirm Trithemius of Sponheim’s attribution of the anonymous Speculum to Conrad, a prolific author at Hirsau who wrote under the pen name Peregrinus. The Speculum is the longest and most sophisticated of numerous twelfth-century works on virginity.126 Composed as a dialogue between Peregrinus and the nun Theodora, it expounds the glories of the virginal life in an elegant humanistic Latin, drawing amply from the Song of Songs. Rich in exegetical commentary on the entire Bible, the Speculum instructs nuns and recluses on such topics as humility, virtues and vices, true nobility, the conflict of flesh and spirit, the necessity of enclosure, pagan and Christian heroines, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and a high sapiential Mariology.127 Though Peregrinus makes longer speeches, Theodora is an intelligent questioner, always eager for mystical interpretations of Scripture. The work possesses considerable originality and charm. For example, in lieu of the familiar ­allegory of the unicorn as an untamed beast (Christ) that can only be trapped by a virgin (Mary), Conrad of Hirsau offers the following: Understand this virgin as a type of divine Wisdom, and recognize in the beast the image of worldly princes. For what patriarch, what prophetic sermon could vanquish the rabid cruelty of such princes, or who could tame them, until the Wisdom of God appeared incarnate on the broad plain of this world and in the wild forest of the nations? Who could bend or conquer the savage ferocity of the Roman ­Empire—the unicorn—until Christ, symbolized by this beautiful virgin, laid the snares and nets of apostolic doctrine before this madly raging beast?128

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Despite its ostensibly female audience, most of the Latin manuscripts of the Speculum stem from male communities, chiefly Cistercians and regu­lar canons. (One key exception is an early copy from Andernach, the house of Augustinian canonesses where Tenxwind was magistra. A later copy belonged to Birgitta of Sweden.) In view of this evidence, Morgan Powell has proposed that the dialogue’s immediate audience consisted of monks and canons who served as spiritual directors for nuns.129 This hypothesis is strengthened by the dialogue’s stern warnings against sexual misconduct, directed more at pastors than at nuns. In Powell’s view, the spiritual director would have played the role of Peregrinus and read the dialogue aloud to his female charges, perhaps using a mixture of Latin and vernacular paraphrase. Essential to this educational program is a set of twelve highly standardized illustrations, representing one of the earliest pictorial cycles created for a nonbiblical text. These images are hardly “books for the illiterate,” since they are full of Latin inscriptions and glosses, but they help the user by encapsulating the work’s teaching in concise, easily memorized form.130 The Speculum, then, is an instructional manual produced at one major reform center and circulated to others that practiced and championed the cura monialium. It offered women a highly gendered but intellectually sophisticated model of spiritual development. Although both its dialogic form and its early distribution presuppose cleri­cal mediation, in the late Middle Ages the Speculum virginum was translated into several vernaculars—Middle Dutch, Swedish, and various dialects of German.131 Unlike the Latin text, these vernacular copies belonged almost exclusively to women’s houses. Interestingly, very few of the translations include the images,132 as their scribes evidently felt that women’s direct ownership of a more accessible text precluded the need for them. Hildegard of Bingen completed her Scivias in 1151, a few years after the Speculum virginum. Although she wrote most of it at Disibodenberg, a reformed house of the Hirsau family, her vision of religious life was more aesthetic and opulent than Conrad’s, and more open to the world beyond the cloister.133 Imbued with an older Benedictine spirituality, the Scivias (short for Scito vias Domini) is less a speculum virginum than a speculum ecclesiae. Just as Conrad of Hirsau chose to instruct nuns through the mediation of priests, Hildegard addressed priests directly and her nuns secondarily. In her first vision, God tells her to “cry out and speak” for the benefit of those who, “though they see the inmost contents of the Scriptures, do not wish to tell them or preach them, because they are lukewarm and sluggish in serving God’s justice.” To shame these lazy and timid

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priests, God promises to make Hildegard “overflow with mystical knowledge” in spite of men “who now think you contemptible because of Eve’s transgression.”134 Thus she stakes her claim as an exegete, evading the Pauline ban on women teachers by speaking prophetically through the Holy Spirit. Like the Speculum virginum, the Scivias contains many passages of biblical commentary, but in structure the work resembles an early theo­ logical summa, similar in content if not in method to Hugh of St. Victor’s De sacramentis (ca. 1134). In three visionary books, Hildegard addresses the grand themes of creation, redemption, and sanctification. Book 1 deals with the symbolism of the cosmos, the fall of angels and humans, the relationship of soul and body, the heavenly choirs, and the synagogue as a precursor of “true” salvation. The second book treats the Trinity, the work of Christ, the church, and the sacraments, while book 3 offers an allegory of salvation history as a building constructed by the Virtues, followed by predictions about the Antichrist and the end-times. This miniature apocalypse proved to be by far the most popular section of the book. Although the Scivias is a work of dogmatic theology, Margot Fassler notes that it can also be read as an educational program for the Rupertsberg nuns.135 Again like the Speculum virginum, the text was designed for extensive illustrations that may have been sketched in the first place by the author herself, although they were not standardized in the same way as the Speculum cycle.136 While the Speculum images are diagrammatic, enabling the reader or listener to grasp abstract teaching in schematic form, the lavish Scivias illuminations with their vivid colors, set off by gold and silver leaf, are meant to convey the brilliance of Hildegard’s celestial visions. Both works also conclude with liturgical music, a feature they share with the Hortus deliciarum. The Epithalamium that ends Conrad of Hirsau’s work celebrates the dialogue’s bridal spirituality with a setting from the Song of Songs in a liturgical office for Lauds.137 Hildegard’s Scivias closes with fourteen songs in praise of the Virgin and the saints, followed by a sketch of her liturgical drama, the Ordo virtutum. Fittingly, the introspective dialogue on virginity ends by invoking the virgin’s union with her ­divine Bridegroom, while Hildegard’s mirror of the church salutes the Ecclesia triumphans, then returns in its final moments to the Ecclesia militans. Each nun is encouraged to identify with the heroine Anima as she falls, rises, and rejoins the choir of Virtues, played by her sisters, to do victorious battle against the devil—played no doubt by the convent priest. Herrad of Hohenbourg (d. after 1196), a younger contemporary of Hildegard, enjoyed a freedom the more famous woman would have envied. As magistra of the Rupertsberg, Hildegard remained canonically

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s­ ubject to the abbot of Disibodenberg, the monastery on which her nuns relied for pastoral care. Given her strong will and unshakable convictions, the relationship was often a stormy one, pitting Hildegard’s prophetic fire against the juridical authority of the abbot. Herrad, however, was abbess of an independent Augustinian monastery, so she did not need to seek autonomy by breaking away as Hildegard had done. Instead, she founded two new houses of regular canons, St. Gorgon and Truttenhausen, whose provosts would be subject to her authority—mirroring the rule Robert of Arbrissel had established for Fontevrault. In this way, pastoral care could be viewed as a service offered by the canons to the women, rather than an assertion of power over them. Fiona Griffiths correlates this degree of autonomy with Herrad’s ambition and confidence as a teacher of religious women.138 Never does she adopt the mask of a “poor little female” like Hildegard nor echo misogynist ideas as even Heloise sometimes did.139 Although she enjoyed good working relationships with several male communities, Herrad did not rely exclusively on priests for the education of her women, but made sure they also had internal resources for their intellectual formation. During her abbacy, Herrad compiled the magnificently illustrated Hortus deliciarum, a luxury manuscript meant to serve as a theological textbook and encyclopedia for her community. Interwoven with its 340 illuminations were more than eleven hundred carefully arranged extracts from religious writers, some patristic, but the bulk of them recent or contemporary. The abbess drew heavily on Benedictine authors of the early twelfth century, such as Honorius Augustodunensis and Rupert of Deutz, who also figured among Hildegard’s sources. More surprisingly, though, Herrad had access to a range of current theological works rarely found in nuns’ libraries. In compiling the Hortus she made use of scholastic texts hot off the press from Paris, including Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica and Peter Lombard’s Sentences—a work studied by the women of Hohenbourg fifty years before it became a required theological text at the University of Paris.140 But Herrad wrote little in her own voice; just as Hildegard escaped the ban on female teachers through prophecy, Herrad circumvented it by writing as compilatrix rather than auctrix. Nevertheless, the erudition and programmatic construction of her work are clear. Much like the Scivias, it was organized around the scheme of salvation history, moving from the Trinity, the fall of Lucifer, and the Old Testament narratives through the life of Christ, virtues and vices, the church and its liturgy, and the Last Things, including Antichrist. Many of its illustrations were diagrammatic, like those of the Speculum virginum, while others developed

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novel iconography, such as an image inspired by Honorius in which God captures Leviathan with a fishhook (Job 41:1)—the fishing line composed of patriarchs and prophets, the hook baited with the humanity of Christ.141 Like the resplendent Rupertsberg Scivias, lost in the fire-bombing of Dresden, the Hortus manuscript fell victim to the wars of modernity, perishing in the siege of Strasbourg in 1870. But fortunately, neither work vanished without a trace. Hildegard’s nuns had prepared a handwritten, ­illuminated facsimile of the original Scivias in 1927–33, while nineteenthcentury scholars copied enough of the Hortus text and illustrations to enable the work’s painstaking (though not complete) reconstruction by the Warburg Institute in 1979.142 Thus it remains possible to compare these great monuments of twelfth-century women’s learning. Interestingly, the Speculum virginum, written by a monk to be transmitted by priests, presents the most thoroughly gendered view of religious life. Although the nun must strive to attain the same virtues as her brethren, her spiritual identity is wholly subsumed in the roles of virgo and sponsa Christi. On the other end of the spectrum, the Hortus deliciarum, composed by a woman for exclusively female readers, offers the least gendered monastic vision. Aside from Herrad’s prologue and the penultimate folios, which display portraits of the abbess, her precursor, and all fifty-eight named canonesses, nothing about the manuscript’s theological program bespeaks “feminine spirituality.” Its inclusion of recent school texts even challenges the timehonored divide between monastic and scholastic theology proposed half a century ago by Jean Leclercq.143 Finally, the Scivias occupies a complex intermediate position. On the one hand, it addresses a clerical audience concerned with pressing issues of ecclesiology and reform: the church and its sacraments, purity and corruption in the priesthood, the tribulations of the end-times. On the other hand, it is decidedly feminine in two respects. First, Hildegard’s compelling figure of Mater Ecclesia rises to a level of mythic grandeur rarely seen elsewhere, and both text and images elaborate the feminine Virtues well beyond standard allegorical conventions. Thus the work evinces the characteristic “theology of the feminine” that would become a hallmark of all Hildegard’s writings.144 More important, the Scivias is set apart by her own persona as prophet—a frail, untaught, yet divinely illuminated female who speaks directly from the mouth of God. An encounter with the Scivias differs radically from the experience of reading the Speculum or the Hortus because of the work’s visionary form and its constant, jarring oscillation between third-person exposition and first-­ person divine locutions.

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It remains to inquire how each of these massive works by or for women embodies twelfth-century humanism. The Speculum virginum is humanistic in its dialogic form and its rhetorically sophisticated Latin, but also in its author’s inclusion of arguments and exempla from pagan as well as biblical and Christian history. In this, Conrad resembles Abelard and Heloise, with their penchant for pressing classical authors into Christian service. Herrad too respected pagan learning. In a classic miniature, the Hortus depicts Philosophia at the center of a rosette surrounded by a circular arcade, its seven arches framing allegorical maidens who personify the liberal arts.145 Seven streams of life-giving water gush from her breast. Above her head, three smaller faces represent ethica, logica, and physica, the Stoic branches of philosophy, while beneath her throne Socrates and Plato pore over their writing desks. Unlike Honorius and Rupert of Deutz, for whom the seven pillars of wisdom (Prv 9:1) were the gifts of the Holy Spirit, Herrad follows the pedagogical tradition of Alcuin, defining them as the arts of the trivium and quadrivium. Her image even includes an inscription declaring, “the Holy Spirit is the inventor of the seven liberal arts.”146 Despite her openness to the new scholastic currents, which would ultimately fracture the syntheses of twelfth-century humanism, Herrad can still enfold all knowledge within a single aesthetic whole, conflating the secular Philosophia with the biblical Sapientia and the Holy Spirit. For Hildegard, an even more exceptional polymath, the divine Spirit was not Philosophia but the “supreme and fiery force” (summa et ignea vis) that bestows vitality on the cosmos—a concept akin to both the Stoic life-force and the Platonic (or Abelardian) world soul.147 Deeply convinced of the harmony of macrocosm and microcosm, she worked out an elaborate system of correspondences in her masterpiece, the Liber divinorum operum, a visionary text more ambitious and difficult than the Scivias. That work reveals Hildegard’s deep immersion not only in exegesis and theology, but also in medicine and natural science, a knowledge all the more impressive for its rarity. To return to our starting point, what changed with the passing of the twelfth century? Brilliant works such as the Scivias, the Liber divinorum operum, and the Hortus deliciarum represent the consummation of one era, not the beginning of the next. The Hortus was never copied (nor was meant to be), and the later Middle Ages can offer nothing to compare with it. As for Hildegard, her late medieval reception is a telling index of change. Only ten complete manuscripts of the Scivias and six of the Liber divinorum operum survive, and the copying of both works ended in the early thirteenth century.148 The bulk of her oeuvre was almost entirely forgot-

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ten. From late medieval testimonies, one would never guess that Hildegard had written a word about the Trinity or the Incarnation, sacraments or ethics, cosmology or sexuality, let alone composed music and drama. What did survive—in hundreds of manuscripts—is a collection of apocalyptic prophecies, focused on the Antichrist and the disendowment of corrupt clergy by secular princes. Augmented by a dossier of even more radical pseudo-Hildegardiana, these prophecies enjoyed a long and checkered afterlife in antimendicant satire, Wycliffite treatises, and still later, Reformation polemics.149 In this way, the late medieval and early modern eras forged the prophetic Hildegard they needed, while Hildegard the twelfthcentury humanist languished in oblivion until the twentieth century. A truly liminal figure, the “sibyl of the Rhine” can be read either contextually as a slightly archaic thinker in her own age, or retrospectively as the harbinger of a radical shift in women’s authorship. Her prophetic persona, at once self-effacing and domineering—the paupercula feminea forma overpowered by an irresistible vox de celo—would become the wave of the future. In her lifetime, the visionary Elisabeth of Schönau (1129– 65) sought Hildegard’s counsel as she began to proclaim her own revelations. With the help of her brother Ekbert, who left a promising career to become his sister’s editor and publicist at the double monastery of Schö­ nau, Elisabeth produced a series of Latin prophetic books, including a set of model sermons to persons of different stations (Liber viarum Dei), a tract on the Assumption of the Virgin, and a tremendously popular set of “oracles to order” concerning the eleven thousand virgins of Cologne, whose supposed relics were being avidly collected at the time.150 Elisabeth shared Hildegard’s passion for reform and antiheretical preaching, but she was neither a learned nor a deeply original author. Unlike Hildegard, she received her revelations not from imposing allegorical figures, but from an angel and saints who appeared to her on their feast days, as if to validate the community’s liturgical life. More important, though, neither woman spoke on her own authority but presumed to teach and write only on the basis of a divine, prophetic mandate. This revelatory mode sustained a host of female mystics and prophets for centuries to come. The majority of them wrote with the help of male scribes and confessors who, like Guibert of Gembloux and Ekbert of Schönau, simultaneously revered their female companions and attempted to guide them, more or less forcefully, with their superior learning and linguistic skill. Of all the texts discussed thus far, it was the Speculum virginum—in its vernacular translations—that remained most representative of the guidance given to female religious. One other vernacular text from the 1160s

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proved a harbinger of things to come. This is the mystical work known as Ein lêre der minneclichen gotes erkennüsse, or A Teaching of the Loving Knowledge of God, sometimes called the St. Trudperter Hohelied—the first vernacular commentary on the Song of Songs.151 The text probably stems from Admont, where a monastic priest much like Conrad of Hirsau wrote it for the guidance and inspiration of the nuns. Drawing on the Latin Song commentaries of such writers as Rupert, Honorius, and Bernard of Clairvaux, the Hohelied interweaves all three prevailing interpretations of the Bride as the church, the Virgin, and the devout soul. Like the Speculum virginum, it emphasizes the eternal predestination of Mary, for whose love God willed to have mercy on sinners: “your beauty was perceived by the wisdom of the Eternal Father: then you stood as advocate for your ancestors, Adam and Eve. God gazed on your beautiful countenance when you lay among other children in Adam’s loins and Eve’s womb. There you moved the holy goodness to mercy, . . . there atonement was made for the sake of your beauty.”152 The bridal spirituality of the Hohelied recalls the Speculum, while foreshadowing later mystical themes such as the dissolution of the perfected soul in God’s love. Written in artful, elevated prose that slips in and out of lyric, the Hohelied anticipates the style as well as the substance of an important thirteenth-century mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg. —  At the dawn of the twelfth century, we find literate women as a­ nchoresses, model readers, spiritual partners of monks and clerics, and playful or serious participants in a Latin rhetorical culture of epistolary friendship. In France and England, this culture peaked in the first half of the twelfth century, finding its consummate expression in Heloise. In Germany, the flowering came later and rather differently with the works of Hildegard and Herrad, representing the fruits of monastic humanism as well as an earnest zeal for reform. But after 1200, we find no prodigiously learned women to equal these until the fifteenth century, the next great age of European humanism. What takes their place is a chorus of women imparting revelations, prophecies, and mystical theology in Latin, German, Dutch, French, Italian, English, and other vernaculars, greeted with varying proportions of mistrust and awe, but never with the same presumption of equality and collegiality that characterized twelfth-century syneisactism. Much of this later mystical writing was inflected by an erotic spirituality that, in the twelfth century, was promulgated largely by men, among them Abelard, Bernard, Ailred, Conrad of Hirsau, and the authors of the St.

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Trudperter Hohelied and the Ancrene Wisse. Insofar as women made this paradigm their own, they entered a world in which gender difference increasingly trumped religious commonality, and the affective charge we can already sense in the relationships of Goscelin and Eve, Christina of Markyate and Geoffrey of St Albans, Hildegard and Guibert, would become ever more intense and electric, making women the lightning rods of adulation and persecution alike. Notes 1.  John F. Benton, “Fraud, Fiction and Borrowing in the Correspondence of Abelard and Heloise,” in Pierre Abélard—Pierre le Vénérable: Les courants philoso­ phiques, littéraires et artistiques en Occident au milieu du 12e siècle, ed. René Louis and Jean Jolivet (Paris, 1975), pp. 469–506. 2.  “Si forte in alienas manus oberrauerit hec peregrina epistola incertis uentis dimissa, sed Deo commendata, precamur ut ei reddatur cui soli constat destinata, nec preripiat quisquam non sibi parata. Archanum duorum est Christo medio signatum.” Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Liber confortatorius, Prologus, ed. C. H. Talbot, Analecta Monastica, ser. 3, 37 (Rome, 1955), p. 26; trans. W. R. Barnes and Rebecca Hayward, in Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s “Legend of Edith” and “Liber confortatorius,” ed. Stephanie Hollis (Turnhout, 2004), p. 99. There is another trans­ lation by Monika Otter, Goscelin of St. Bertin: The Book of Encouragement and Consolation (Woodbridge, 2004). 3.  The three sisters are described in a passage found only in the earliest version of the text (British Library, Cotton Nero A.xiv). Anchoritic Spirituality: “Ancrene Wisse” and Associated Works, trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (New York, 1991), p. 12. 4.  Meditaciones Godwini cantoris Salesberie ad Rainilvam reclusam, MS Oxford, Bodleian Digby 96, fols. 8r–68r; Giles Constable, Reformation, p. 66; Teresa Webber, Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral, ca. 1075–ca. 1125 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 123–9. 5.  Jane Geddes, “The St Albans Psalter: The Abbot and the Anchoress,” in Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Holy Woman, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (London and New York, 2005), p. 197. 6.  Cf. Ann Warren: “It is clear that all of the major works were expected to reach a larger audience than the lone anchorites . . . to whom they were addressed. Nonetheless, [these texts] were created for specific women with whom the writers had previous relationships, and the writings carry the meanings of those relationships forward. The tone of these works is personal, individual, and often loving”; Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, 1985), p. 103. 7.  Christopher Holdsworth, “Hermits and the Powers of the Frontier,” Reading Medieval Studies 16 (1990): pp. 55–76. 8.  On the “romance of virgin enclosure” see Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture: Virginity and Its Authorizations (Oxford, 2001), pp. 24–32.

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9.  Anneke Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe, trans. Myra Scholz (Philadelphia, 2005), p. 14; Warren, Anchorites, pp. 22–6. 10. Warren, Anchorites, p. 19. 11.  Julie Hotchin, “Female Religious Life and the Cura Monialium in Hirsau Monasticism, 1080 to 1150,” in Listen, Daughter: The “Speculum Virginum” and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Constant Mews (New York, 2001), pp. 59–83; Henrietta Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism: A Study of Religious Communities in Western Europe, 1000–1150 (London, 1984). For a list of male communities with eremitic origins, see Leyser, pp. 113–8. 12.  Stephanie Hollis, “Goscelin’s Writings and the Wilton Women,” in Writing the Wilton Women, p. 229. 13.  Anselm of Canterbury, Epistolae 230 and 414, in Opera omnia, ed. Franciscus Schmitt, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1946–61), vol. 4, pp. 134–5, vol. 5, pp. 359–62. 14.  Volmar of St. Disibod (?), Life of Jutta, ch. 3, trans. Anna Silvas, in Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical Sources (Turnhout, 1998), p. 69. This date would make Hildegard fourteen at the time, rather than eight as specified in her own vita (1.1, p. 139). 15.  Ancrene Wisse, part 4, in Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 141. See also pp. 13 and 381–2, n. 91, for a discussion of this debated passage. 16. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, pp. 125, 135–6; Warren, Anchorites, p. 32. 17.  Aelred of Rievaulx, De institutione inclusarum 2–4, in Aelredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia, ed. Anselm Hoste and C. H. Talbot, CCCM 1 (Turnhout, 1971), pp. 637–41. 18.  “[S]tatim ut includuntur, doctores et prophete videri volunt, futura fallaciter predicunt, turbas ad se attrahunt, raro orationi vel silentio student, cuncta que aguntur apud seculares dinosci volunt, tota die cum aliis et aliis sermocinantur.” Die Chronik des Klosters Petershausen [Casus monasterii Petrishusensis], ed. and trans. Otto Feger, pref. 21 (Lindau and Constance, 1956), p. 34. 19.  Ancrene Wisse, trans. Savage and Watson, part 8, p. 207. 20.  “Si quando autem reuersa ad te cogitatio ita interrogauerit, ‘ille quondam carus quid nunc facit?,’ hec semper pagina hoc uno uerbo actiuo pro passiuo respondebit: Suspirat. Vbicumque illum queres, hic inuenies, hic tecum susurrantem uel uidebis uel audies.” Liber confortatorius 1, p. 45; trans. Barnes and Hayward, p. 122. 21.  Geoffrey of Vendôme, Epistolae 48, PL 157:184–6. On Eve’s career, see also Sharon Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth-Century England (Chapel Hill, 1988), pp. 21–7. 22.  “Ibi vixit Eua diu cum Herueo socio. / Qui hec audis, ad hanc uocem te turbari sencio. / Fuge, frater, suspicari, non sit hic suspicio: / Non in mundo sed in Christo fuit hec dilectio. / . . . / Ille sibi serviebat tanquam sue domine / Et uicissim Eua sibi sub ancille nomine. / Mirus amor uiri talis atque talis femine / Qui probatus est repertus omni sine crimine.” N. M. Häring, ed., “Die Gedichte und Mysterienspiele des Hilarius von Orléans,” Studi Medievali, 3rd ser., 17 (1976), pp. 925–30, at p. 928. See also André Wilmart, “Ève et Goscelin,” Revue Bénédictine 46

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(1934), pp. 414–38, and Revue Bénédictine 50 (1938), pp. 42–83; Hollis, “Goscelin’s Writings,” pp. 229–30; Dyan Elliott, “Alternative Intimacies: Men, Women, and Spiritual Direction in the Twelfth Century,” in Fanous and Leyser, Christina, pp. 167–8; Constant Mews, “Women Readers in the Age of Heloise,” in Die lesende Frau (Wolfenbüttel, 2009), pp. 92–8. 23.  The Life of Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Recluse, ed. and trans. C. H. Talbot (1959; reprinted Toronto, 1998), pp. 92–100. 24.  John of Ford, Vita B. Wulfrici 2.56–8, Wulfric of Haselbury, ed. Maurice Bell (London, 1933), pp. 81–8; Elkins, Holy Women, pp. 38–9. 25.  “Eidem femine Deus per gratiam suam quasi riuulum ex multis aquis infudit, ita quod corpori suo . . . quietem non tribuit.” Vita Sanctae Hildegardis 2.2, ed. Monika Klaes, CCCM 126 (Turnhout, 1993), p. 23; trans. Silvas, Jutta and Hildegard, p. 159. 26.  “Afferebant tibi Christum frequentes membrane et scedule nostre, nec tue uacabant castissime littere.” Liber confortatorius 1, p. 29; trans. Barnes and Hayward, p. 104. 27.  J. S. P. Tatlock, “Muriel: The Earliest English Poetess,” PMLA 48 (1933), pp. 317–21; Gabriela Signori, “Muriel and the Others . . . or Poems as Pledges of Friendship,” in Friendship in Medieval Europe ed. Julian Haseldine (Stroud, 1999), pp. 199–212. Signori denies that Muriel was English or had any link with Wilton. Herman of Tournai, who claimed around 1143 that the still-famous poet (inclyta versificatrix) was buried at Wilton Abbey, also placed the Venerable Bede’s tomb there—though its actual location is Durham. See Herman’s De miraculis, PL 156:983A. 28.  Gopa Roy, “‘Sharpen Your Mind with the Whetstone of Books’: The Female Recluse as Reader in Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius, Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum and the Ancrene Wisse,” in Women, the Book, and the Godly, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 113–22; Linda Olson, “Did Medieval English Women Read Augustine’s Confessiones? Constructing Feminine Interiority and Literacy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, ed. Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 69–96; D. H. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 30–42. 29.  Ailred of Rievaulx mentions that an anchoress who cannot read (quae litteras non intelligit) should substitute manual labor for study and the Lord’s Prayer for the Divine Office, varying it with any psalms she happens to know (si quos psalmos nouerit interserens). De institutione inclusarum 9, ed. Hoste and Talbot, pp. 645–6. On the varying degrees of liturgical literacy see Katherine Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2008), pp. 114–49. 30.  Bella Millett, “Women in No Man’s Land: English Recluses and the Development of Vernacular Literature in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed. Carol Meale (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 94–5. 31. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “Women’s Formal and Informal Traditions of Biblical Knowledge in Anglo-Norman England,” in Saints, Scholars, and Politicians:

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Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies; Festschrift in Honour of Anneke Mulder-Bakker, ed. Mathilde van Dijk and Renée Nip (Turnhout, 2005), p. 103. 32.  Sara Poor points out that in the thirteenth century and later, even women who could not write Latin might find scribes or confessors to record their revelations in that tongue. Hence, she regards as deliberate the choice of the vernacular not only by Hadewijch, who knew Latin, but also by Mechthild of Magdeburg, who did not. Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority (Philadelphia, 2004), pp. 22–8. 33.  James Rushing, Jr., ed. and trans., Ava’s New Testament Narratives: “When the Old Law Passed Away,” bilingual edition (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2003), pp. 17–18. 34.  Ava, “Das Jüngste Gericht,” in ibid., p. 228. 35.  Ernst Ralf Hintz, “Persuasion and Pedagogy in the Works of Frau Ava,” in Learning and Persuasion in the German Middle Ages (New York, 1997), pp. 103–37. 36. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, pp. 13–14. Cf. Otmar Doerr, Das Institut der Inclusen in Süddeutschland (Münster, 1934), pp. 66–7. 37.  C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia, 1999), p. 157. 38.  Louis Moland and Charles d’Héricault, eds., Amis et Amile, in Nouvelles françoises en prose du 13e siècle (Paris, 1856), pp. 35–82; MacEdward Leach, ed., Amis and Amiloun, EETS o.s. 203 (London, 1937); Gédéon Huet, “Ami et Amile: Les origines de la légende,” Moyen Âge 30 (1919), pp. 162–86; Ojars Kratins, “The Middle English Amis and Amiloun: Chivalric Romance or Secular Hagiography?” PMLA 81 (1966), pp. 347–54; John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1980), pp. 239–40. 39. Jaeger, Ennobling Love, p. 117. 40.  Gerald Bond, The Loving Subject: Desire, Eloquence, and Power in Romanesque France (Philadelphia, 1995); Constant J. Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France (New York, 1999). The quotation is from Goscelin, Liber confortatorius, Prologus, p. 26; trans. Barnes and Hayward, p. 99. 41.  “Incluse exclusus, solitarie a mundo solitarius in mundo, quem Christus et caritas nouerit, unice anime scribit.” Liber confortatorius, Prologus, p. 26; trans. Barnes and Hayward, p. 99. 42.  “Vbi uero inter quattuordecim uirgines, coruscantibus cereis tanquam syderibus et lampadibus supernis, ad dominicas nuptias trepida et penultima accessisti ac, populosa caterua sollemniter expectante, pignus fidei diuine cum sacrata ueste induisti, ille humilis habitus, ille tremebundus accessus, ille suffusus uultus, tanquam ab igneo throno Dei sedentis super cherubim, sapienter metuentis, altius uiscera me percussere cum hoc epithalamico carmine admirabilis gratie: Ipsi sum desponsata, cui angeli seruiunt, et annulo suo subarrauit me. Tactus sum rore celesti et feruore irriguo fleui.” Liber confortatorius 1, p. 28; trans. Barnes and Hayward, pp. 102–3. 43.  “Sola illa que in Christo est dilectio uera est. Illa non loco, non tempore, non persona, non sexu, non etate, non forma mutatur, neque copia neque inopia minuitur.” Liber confortatorius 1, p. 40; trans. Barnes and Hayward, p. 116.

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44.  “[M]iserere orbitatis Goscelini, quem ut anime tue domicilium in Christo dilexisti, sed recessu totum a fundamento concussisti, et a solatio presentis uite euertisti; ac, ne maioris querele nebula pretentum gaudiorum iubar inficiam, ora michi, queso, placabilem in eternum Domini clementiam, ac peccatorum ueniam, ut te, licet longius a mea indignitate remotam, letus merear uidere in beata luce letissimam. Sic habeas anime cuncta cupita tue.” Liber confortatorius 4, p. 117; trans. Barnes and Hayward, pp. 206–7. 45.  Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), pp. 5–6 and passim. 46.  Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West (Oxford, 2008), pp. 96–105. 47. Elkins, Holy Women, pp. 150–60; McNamara, Sisters in Arms, pp. 246–8; Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia, 1995), pp. 40–3. 48.  Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, ed., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York, 1986); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987); and other works too numerous to cite. See also the important critique by Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, 1995), pp. 27–39. 49.  Catherine M. Mooney, ed., Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia, 1999); John Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York, 2006). See also Coakley’s influential articles, “Friars as Confidants of Holy Women in Medieval Dominican Hagiography,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate BlumenfeldKosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, 1991), pp. 222–46, and “Gender and the Authority of Friars: The Significance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans,” Church History 60 (1991), pp. 445–60. 50.  Vita S. Hildegardis 2.1, ed. Klaes, p. 20; Volmar to Hildegard, Ep. 195 in Hildegardis Bingensis Epistolarium, 3 vols, ed. Lieven Van Acker, CCCM 91a (Turnhout, 1993), vol. 2, p. 443. In the event, Volmar died in 1173, while Hildegard lived until 1179. Death foiled his likely intent to write her vita, as suggested by this letter and by her autobiographical memoir, which I believe she drafted for her hagiographer’s use. See the works cited in note 59 below. 51. “Quare plurimi per difficultates uiarum in longinquis partibus mundi doctrinas diuersorum inaniter pretemptant? Quare siti, inedia, algore afflicti per litigiosam declamationem disputationum, per uigilias nocturnalium horarum profunditati, immo enigmatibus sententiarum insudant? Certe, certe scimus quod . . . parum aut nihil proficiendo minime propositum comprehendunt, immo scintillam Spiritus Dei in ipsis . . . prorsus exstinguunt, ita quod ad erubescentiam modernorum scholasticorum scientia desuper sibi data abutentium, Spiritus prophetie et uisionis in organo masse fragilioris absque adminiculo instrumenti exterioris resuscitatus, talia proferat que nulla possint capere ratione.” Volmar, Ep. 195, Epistolarium 2.444, in The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, trans. Joseph Baird and Radd Ehrman, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1994–2004), vol. 2, p. 168. 52.  Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 34–41, 254–7.

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53. Guibert of Gembloux, Epistolae 16–18, ed. Albert Derolez, 2 vols., CCCM 66–66a (Turnhout, 1988–9), vol. 1, pp. 216–34; Letters 102–4 in Baird and Ehrman, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 16–33. 54.  Peter Abelard, Problemata Heloissae, PL 178:677–730; Constant J. Mews, Abelard and Heloise (Oxford, 2005), pp. 200–2; Anne Clark Bartlett, “Commentary, Polemic, and Prophecy in Hildegard of Bingen’s Solutiones Triginta Octo Quaestionum,” Viator 23 (1992), pp. 153–65. 55.  Guibert to Ralph of Villers, Epistolae 26, ed. Derolez, vol. 2, pp. 270–94; Coakley, Women, Men, pp. 58–60. Coakley’s view of Guibert differs from that presented here. 56.  “Aue ergo, post Mariam gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus sermo oris tui.” Guibert and the monks of Villers to Hildegard, Epistolae 22, ed. Derolez, vol. 1, p. 249; Letter 108 in Baird and Ehrman, Letters, vol. 2, p. 44. 57.  “Quia uero, sicut beatus testatur Gregorius, aliquando prophete sancti, dum consuluntur, ex magno usu prophetandi quedam ex suo spiritu proferunt et se hec ex prophetie spiritu dicere suspicantur, summopere tibi cauendum est, ne, dum magna polles gratia Spiritus, parua utaris discretione spirituum, et quicquid spiritui tuo uisum fuerit, id statim imputes Spiritui Sancto.” Guibert to Hildegard, Epistolae 19, ed. Derolez, vol. 1, p. 237; Letter 105 in Baird and Ehrman, Letters, vol. 2, p. 35. Cf. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam 1.1, ed. Marcus Adriaen, CCSL 142 (Turnhout, 1971), p. 13. 58.  Rachel Koopmans, “Dining at Markyate with Lady Christina,” in Fanous and Leyser, Christina, pp. 146–7. 59. Barbara Newman, “Three-Part Invention: The Vita S. Hildegardis and Mystical Hagiography,” in Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of Her Thought and Art, ed. Charles Burnett and Peter Dronke (London, 1998), pp. 189–210, and “Hildegard and Her Hagiographers: The Remaking of Female Sainthood,” in Mooney, Gendered Voices, pp. 16–34. On Guibert of Gembloux’s incomplete Vita Hildegardis, see Coakley, Women, Men, pp. 48–55. 60.  Koopmans, “Dining at Markyate,” pp. 148–50. 61.  C. Stephen Jaeger, “The Loves of Christina of Markyate,” in Fanous and Leyser, Christina, p. 111. 62. On the vita’s hagiographic models, see Samuel Fanous, “Christina of Markyate and the Double Crown,” in Fanous and Leyser, Christina, pp. 53–78. On the seduction episode, see R. I. Moore, “Ranulf Flambard and Christina of Markyate,” in idem, pp. 138–42. 63.  Life of Christina, ed. Talbot, pp. 98–106; translation mine. 64.  Elliott, “Alternative Intimacies,” p. 169. 65.  Life of Christina, pp. 114–8, 126–8. 66. Rachel Koopmans, “The Conclusion of Christina of Markyate’s Vita,” JEH 51 (2000), pp. 663–98. 67.  “Interulas ab ea duas expetit. non ad voluptatem sed ad laboris relevandum sudorem.” Life of Christina, p. 160. Jaeger suggests that Geoffrey sought the garments as both love tokens and relics of a saint; “Loves of Christina,” pp. 109–11. 68.  “Viditque maceriam. in qua dilectus suus ac si vivus incementatus est.” Life of Christina, p. 160.

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69.  “Vicit que victoriosius diligere novit.” Life of Christina, p. 164. 70.  “Interea dum oracionis fieret protencio sicut solebat in exstasi rapta. vidit se salvatoris assistere presencie. illumque suum pre cunctis familiarissimum intra brachiorum suorum girum pectori suo constrictum inclusisse. Sed dum timeret ne forte sicut vir muliere robustior [est] de se quoquomodo posset excutere: videt salvandorum subventorem Ihesum manu pia suas manus non consertis digitis. sed aliis aliis superpositis iunctas constringere ne minus in manuum iunccione quam in lacertorum fortitudine ad retinendum dilectum robur sentiretur. His ita perceptis non modico gestiens gaudio uberes reddit gracias. et quod amici curam noverit exemptam. maxime tamen quod et sponsi dominique sui viderit presenciam.” Life of Christina, p. 168. 71.  Marie de France, Guigemar and Yonec, in Les Lais de Marie de France, ed. Jean Rychner (Paris, 1973). For a further “romance” connection between Yonec and Christina’s story see Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives, p. 131. 72.  Geddes, “St Albans Psalter,” pp. 208–9; Tony Hunt, “The Life of St Alexis, 475–1125,” in Fanous and Leyser, Christina, p. 223. 73.  Life of Christina, p. 50. 74. The most perceptive study of female hagiographic romance is WoganBrowne, Saints’ Lives. See especially the provocative tables on pp. 98–9, comparing standard plot outlines of the virgin martyr passio and twentieth-century popular romance. 75.  In addition to “writing the Wilton women,” Eve and St. Edith, Goscelin wrote vitae of three royal abbesses of Barking: Saints Ethelburga, Hildelitha, and Wulfhilda. See also Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, The Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely, ed. and trans. Rosalind Love (Oxford, 2004). 76.  Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Glyn Burgess, trans., Virgin Lives and Holy Deaths: Two Exemplary Biographies for Anglo-Norman Women (London, 1996), pp. xxiii–xxiv, xxxi; William MacBain, “Some Religious and Secular Uses of the Vocabulary of Fin’Amor in the Early Decades of the Northern French Narrative Poem,” French Forum 13 (1988), pp. 261–76, and “Courtliness in Some Religious Texts of the Twelfth Century,” in L’imaginaire courtois et son double, ed. Giovanna Angeli and Luciano Formisano (Naples, 1991), pp. 371–86. 77.  Barbara Newman, “La mystique courtoise: Thirteenth-Century Beguines and the Art of Love,” in From Virile Woman, pp. 137–67. 78.  A still-useful study of Heloise’s ethics is Étienne Gilson, Heloise and Abelard, trans. L. K. Shook (Chicago, 1951). For a range of recent views, see Bonnie Wheeler, ed., Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman (New York, 2000). 79. R. Howard Bloch, The Anonymous Marie de France (Chicago, 2003), pp. 85–7. 80.  Marie de France, Eliduc, l.1150, in Lais, p. 190; Gaston Paris, ed., La Vie de saint Alexis: Poème du 11e siècle, 7th ed., vol. l, p. 68 (Paris, 1933); McBain, “Religious and Secular Uses,” p. 264. See also Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, 1993), pp. 174–6. 81. Bloch, Anonymous, p. 88, citing Margaret Pappano (unpublished). Cf. Pappano, “Marie de France, Aliénor d’Aquitaine, and the Alien Queen,” in Eleanor

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of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons (New York, 2003), pp. 337–67. 82.  J. C. Payen, Le Prince d’Aquitaine: Essai sur Guillaume IX, son oeuvre et son érotique (Paris, 1980), p. 60. 83.  “[M]ut se pena . . . / de Deu amer par bone fei.” Marie de France, Eliduc, ll. 1178–9, in Lais, p. 191. 84.  J. C. Fox, “Mary, Abbess of Shaftesbury,” EHR 26 (1911), pp. 317–26; Ezio Levi, “Maria di Francia e le abbazie d’Inghilterra,” Archivum Romanicum 5 (1921), pp. 472–93. 85.  Heloise’s mother has recently been identified as Hersende de Champigné, the first prioress and co-founder of Fontevrault: Werner Robl, Heloisas Herkunft: Hersindis Mater (Munich, 2001); Constant J. Mews, “Negotiating the Boundaries of Gender in Religious Life: Robert of Arbrissel and Hersende, Abelard and Heloise,” Viator 37 (2006), pp. 113–48. Hersende’s only known husband, William of Montsoreau, died in 1087, too early to have been Heloise’s father—although there is no evidence for the traditional dating of her birth in 1100 (Mews, Abelard and Heloise, p. 59). A long scholarly tradition holds her to have been illegitimate, and Robl speculates (Heloisas Herkunft, pp. 181–6) that her father could have been Robert of Arbrissel himself, who was dogged by charges of sexual irregularity. Mews suggests that Hersende could have remarried between 1087 and 1100, when she was enclosed at Fontevrault—perhaps to a husband who was killed on the First Crusade; “Negotiating,” pp. 126–7. 86.  See Martin Camargo, Ars dictaminis, ars dictandi (Turnhout, 1991). 87.  “Quod sonat iste breuis, amor est et carmen amoris / Inque breuis tactu nulla uenena latent. / . . . / Tu uirgo, uir ego; iuuenis sum, iunior es tu. / Iuro per omne, quod est: nolo uir esse tibi. / Nolo uir esse tibi neque tu sis femina nobis; / Os et cor nostram firmet amiciciam”; (ll. 7–8, 41–4). Text and translation in Bond, Loving Subject, pp. 170–81. 88.  Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (d. 203) to Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) (Cambridge, 1984), p. 87. 89. See Bond, Loving Subject, pp. 42–69, 142–3; Dronke, Women Writers, pp. 86–91; Jaeger, Ennobling Love, pp. 94–101; Mews, Lost Love Letters, pp. 98– 101; Mews, “Women Readers,” pp. 100–5. Later in his career, Baudri wrote the first vita of Robert of Arbrissel at the request of Petronilla, abbess of Fontevrault. See PL 162:1043–58, and Baudri of Dol, First Life of Robert of Arbrissel, in Robert of Arbrissel: A Medieval Religious Life, ed. and trans. Bruce Venarde (Washington, 2003), pp. 1–21. 90.  “Tanto autem facilius hanc michi puellam consensuram credidi, quanto amplius eam litterarum scientiam et habere et diligere noveram; nosque etiam absentes scriptis internuntiis invicem liceret presentare et pleraque audacius scribere quam colloqui.” Peter Abelard, Historia calamitatum, in La vie et les epistres Pierres Abaelart et Heloys sa fame: Traduction du 13e siècle attribuée à Jean de Meun, ed. Eric Hicks (Paris, 1991), Latin/French edition, p. 10; The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice, rev. M. T. Clanchy (London, 2003), p. 10. There is a newer translation by William Levitan et al., Abelard and Heloise: The Letters and Other Writings (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 2007).

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91.  This attribution was broached tentatively by the manuscript’s first editor, Ewald Könsgen, Epistolae duorum amantium: Briefe Abaelards und Heloises? (Leiden, 1974); rejected by Dronke, Women Writers, pp. 92–7; emphatically supported by Mews, Lost Love Letters, passim, and Abelard and Heloise, pp. 62–80; independently argued by Jaeger, Ennobling Love, pp. 160–4; cautiously endorsed by Clanchy in his new introduction to Radice, Letters, pp. lxxv–lxxxi; and embraced by David Wulstan in the works cited below. For a debate between Jaeger and Giles Constable, who rejects the ascription, see Jaeger, “Epistolae duorum amantium and the Ascription to Heloise and Abelard”; Constable, “The Authorship of the Epistolae duorum amantium: A Reconsideration”; and Jaeger, “A Reply to Giles Constable,” all in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame, 2005), pp. 125–86. For a detailed treatment of the letters as those of Heloise and Abelard, see John O. Ward and Neville Chiavaroli, “The Young Heloise and Latin Rhetoric: Some Preliminary Comments on the ‘Lost’ Love Letters and Their Significance,” in Wheeler, Listening to Heloise, pp. 53–119. The rhetorical study of Peter von Moos reaches opposed but indecisive conclusions: “Die Epistolae duorum amantium und die ‘säkulare Religion der Liebe’: Methodenkritische Vorüberlegungen zu einem einmaligen Werk mittellateinischer Briefliteratur,” Studi Medievali 44 (2003), pp. 1–115. Jan Ziolkowski argues against the ascription on the basis of stylistic analysis: “Lost and Not Yet Found: Heloise, Abelard, and the Epistolae duorum amantium,” Journal of Medieval Latin 14 (2004), pp. 171–202. William Levitan is also skeptical: Abelard and Heloise, p. 315. Sylvain Piron persuasively refutes objections and demonstrates close ties between Heloise’s “heroic ethics” of love and those of the anonymous mulier in “Heloise’s Literary Self-fashioning and the Epistolae duorum amantium,” in Strategies of Remembrance: From Pindar to Hölderlin, ed. Lucie Doležalová (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009), pp. 103–62. For Mews’s most recent contributions, see “Women Readers” and the second edition of Lost Love Letters (2008), which has an additional chapter on “New discoveries and insights 1999–2006.” 92.  The woman addresses him as “magistro inquam tanto, magistro virtutibus, magistro moribus, cui iure cedit francigena cervicositas, et simul assurgit tocius mundi superciliositas.” M 49, Lost Love Letters, p. 228. This is a key passage because it refers to “French pigheadedness” yielding before the skill of a presumably foreign master (Abelard was born in Brittany, then an independent territory). 93. “Deum enim testem habeo, quod vera et sincera dilectione te diligo.” M 55, p. 236. 94.  Cf. M 25, p. 210: “tunc veri amoris officia bene persolvuntur quando sine intermissione debentur . . . Hoc ergo vere dilectionis debitum persolvere studebo, sed pro dolor ad plenum nequeo.” Compare the language of debt in Heloise’s first monastic letter, ed. Hicks, p. 48: “quanto erga me te obligaveris debito pensa, ut quod devotis communiter debes feminis, unice tue devotius solvas.” Cf. Radice, p. 50: “consider the close tie by which you have bound yourself to me, and repay the debt you owe a whole community of devoted women by discharging it the more dutifully to her who is yours alone.” 95.  “Ergo in omni latinitate non est sermo inventus qui aperte loquatur erga te quam sit animus meus intentus, quia deo teste cum sublimi et precipua dilectione

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te diligo. Unde non est nec erit res vel sors que tuo amore me separet nisi sola mors.” M 53, p. 234; translation mine. 96.  “Tu solus michi placebas supra omnem dei creaturam, teque solum dilexi, diligendo quesivi, querendo inveni, inveniendo amavi, amando optavi, opt­ ando omnibus in corde meo preposui, teque solum elegi ex milibus, ut facerem tecum pignus.” M 84, p. 262. This single sentence quotes Ovid, Ars Amatoria 1.42, Cant. 3:1–4, and Cant. 5:10, and more distantly echoes the rhetoric of Augustine’s Confessions. 97.  As I previously argued in a review of Lost Love Letters (The Medieval Review, online, posted Dec. 1999), there seems to have been some confusion in Johannes de Vepria’s exemplar. I believe that its first page had become detached and was replaced loosely at the end of the manuscript. Thus I take Mews’s V 113 (the man’s Ovidian poem) to be not the last but the first letter in the sequence, and M 112 to be the woman’s exultant but formal response to his attempt at literary seduction. Pace Mews, I find these two letters inexplicable as the imagined end of the correspondence. Piron makes a similar point in “Literary Self-fashioning,” p. 157. 98. Mews, Abelard and Heloise, p. 118. Cf. Étienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, trans. A. H. C. Downes (New York, 1940), pp. 158–66, and M. T. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life (Oxford, 1997), pp. 277–80. 99. Abelard, Problemata; Peter Dronke, “Heloise’s Problemata and Letters: Some Questions of Form and Content,” in Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe (Rome, 1992), pp. 295–322; Chrysogonus Waddell, ed., The Old French Paraclete Ordinary and the Paraclete Breviary, 5 vols., Cistercian Liturgy Series (hereafter CLS) 3–7 (Trappist, Ky., 1983–5), Hymn Collections from the Paraclete, 2 vols., CLS 8–9 (Trappist, Ky., 1987–9), and The Paraclete Statutes: Institutiones Nostrae, CLS 20 (Trappist, Ky., 1987). 100.  Giles Constable, ed., The Letters of Peter the Venerable, no. 115 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), vol. 1, pp. 303–4; trans. Radice, Letters, pp. 217–8; Constant Mews, “Hugh Metel, Heloise, and Peter Abelard: The Letters of an Augustinian Canon and the Challenge of Innovation in Twelfth-Century Lorraine,” Viator 32 (2001), pp. 59–91. 101. Mews, Lost Love Letters, pp. 163–9; Juanita Feros Ruys, “Hearing Me­ diaeval Voices: Heloise and Carmina Burana 126,” in The Poetic and Musical Legacy of Heloise and Abelard, ed. Marc Stewart and David Wulstan (Ottawa, 2003), pp. 91–9. I do not find either of these especially persuasive. 102.  Chrysogonus Waddell, “Epithalamica: An Easter Sequence by Peter Abelard,” Musical Quarterly 72 (1986), pp. 239–71, at p. 251; translation mine. For the attribution to Heloise see Mews, Lost Love Letters, pp. 171–2. 103. Peter Dronke, ed. and trans., Nine Medieval Latin Plays (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 83–109. 104. David Wulstan, “Novi modulaminis melos: The Music of Heloise and Abelard,” Plainsong and Medieval Music 11 (2002), pp. 1–23, and “Heloise at Argenteuil and the Paraclete,” in Stewart and Wulstan, Legacy, pp. 67–90. 105.  In the passion play from the Carmina Burana (ca. 1180), the Vic scene is echoed and doubled: Mary Magdalene as a prostitute first approaches the merchant to buy cosmetics, later returning for ointment to anoint Christ’s feet. Dronke, Nine Plays, pp. 87–8, 202–13.

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106.  Abelard hyperbolically praises Heloise’s linguistic skills in a letter to the Paraclete nuns: “Magisterium habetis in matre quod ad omnia uobis sufficere . . . potest, que non solum Latine, uerum eciam tam Ebraice quam Grece non expers litterature, sola hoc tempore illam trium linguarum adepta periciam uidetur.” Ep. 9 in Peter Abelard, Letters 9–14, ed. Edmé Smits (Groningen, 1983), p. 233. On twelfth-century contacts between eastern and western monastics, see Constable, Reformation, pp. 306–9, and the works cited there. 107.  Egon Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1961), pp. 353–4; Eva Catafygiotu Topping, “Kassiane the Nun and the Sinful Woman,” in Holy Mothers of Orthodoxy (Minneapolis, 1987), pp. 30–8. 108.  Constant Mews, “Heloise, the Paraclete Liturgy, and Mary Magdalene,” in Stewart and Wulstan, Legacy, pp. 100–12, at p. 106. 109.  “[S]epulcro ejus mente semper assiste, et cum fidelibus feminis lamentare et luge. . . . Para cum illis sepulture ejus unguenta . . . Hic tuus, soror, planctus; hic tuus sit ululatus, que te huic sponso felici copulasti matrimonio.” Abelard, Letter 5, ed. Hicks, pp. 83–4; trans. Radice, pp. 85–6. 110.  Luigi Banfi, ed., Sacre rappresentazioni del Quattrocento (Turin, 1963); Antonia Pulci, Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays, ed. and trans. James Wyatt Cook and Barbara Collier Cook (Chicago, 1996). 111. Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives, pp. 48–50. 112.  For the ethos and the brilliant material culture of these foundations, see the exhibition catalogue Krone und Schleier: Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern (Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, and Rurhlandmuseum, Essen, 2005). The essays and a small number of the images are available in an English version: Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti (New York, 2008). 113.  Alison Beach, Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 132–3. 114. On these sermons, collectively authored by the monks and nuns of ­Admont, see Beach, Women as Scribes, ch. 3, and “Listening for the Voices of ­Admont’s Twelfth-Century Nuns,” in Olson and Kerby-Fulton, Voices in Dialogue, pp. 187–98. 115.  This Latinate tradition continued into the thirteenth century with the revelations of Gertrude of Helfta and Mechthild of Hackeborn, and even the early fourteenth with the Unterlinden Schwesternbuch. 116.  R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism (New York, 1970), p. 37. 117.  Hotchin, “Female Religious Life,” pp. 61–2. 118. Constable, Reformation, p. 65. 119. Hildegard, Epistolarium 52–52r, ed. Van Acker, vol. 1, pp. 125–30; trans. Baird and Ehrman, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 127–30; Alfred Haverkamp, “Tenxwind von Andernach und Hildegard von Bingen: Zwei ‘Weltanschauungen’ in der Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Institutionen, Kultur und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Josef Fleckenstein, ed. Lutz Fenske et al. (Sigmaringen, 1984), pp. 515–48. 120.  Hotchin, “Female Religious Life,” pp. 65, 70–1. 121.  “[S]orores, feminarum more, tam longe remoueri ab hominum uicinio trepidarent, nec mirum, cum in eo tempore latronum malicia cedibus et spoliis per

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patriam grassaretur.” Thomas of Cantimpré, “Vita Ioannis Cantipratensis” 2.3, ed. Robert Godding, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 76 (1981), p. 279; trans. Barbara Newman, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives (Turnhout, 2008), p. 82. 122.  “Reform” could have a wide variety of meanings, some of them mutually exclusive—hence the current debate as to whether the twelfth-century reform movement as such was good or bad for women. On the misogynistic aspects of ­reform see McNamara, Sisters in Arms, pp. 289–304; Macy, Hidden History, pp. 89–127; and Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 81–106. 123.  Fiona Griffiths, “Brides and Dominae: Abelard’s Cura monialium at the Augustinian Monastery of Marbach,” Viator 34 (2003), pp. 57–88. 124. Beach, Women as Scribes, pp. 72–7. 125.  Cf. John Van Engen, “The Voices of Women in Twelfth-Century Europe,” in Olson and Kerby-Fulton, Voices in Dialogue, p. 205. 126.  Speculum virginum, ed. Jutta Seyfarth, CCCM 5 (Turnhout, 1990); Cheryl Goggin, “The Illuminations of the Clairvaux Speculum virginum (Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 252)” (Ph.D. thesis, Indiana University, 1982). On twelfth-century formative literature see Barbara Newman, “Flaws in the Golden Bowl: Gender and Spiritual Formation in the Twelfth Century,” in From Virile Woman, pp. 19–45, and Elisabeth Bos, “The Literature of Spiritual Formation for Women in France and England, 1080 to 1180,” in Mews, Listen, Daughter, pp. 201–20. 127.  Kim Power, “From Ecclesiology to Mariology: Patristic Traces and Innovation in the Speculum virginum,” in Mews, Listen, Daughter, pp. 85–110. Power neglects the liturgical and exegetical backgrounds of this Marian piety; see also Rachel Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion, Marian Exegesis, and the Historical Sense of the Song of Songs,” Viator 27 (1996), pp. 85–116, and From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York, 2002), pt. 2; and Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2003), pp. 190–206. 128.  “Virginem istam tipum esse divine sapientie intellige, bestiam uero formam habere principum mundi cognosce. Quis autem patriarcha, quis sermo pro­ phetalis rabiosam eorundem principum crudelitatem uincere, quis mitigare preualuit, donec dei sapientia in latitudine mundani campi uel in siluis gentium incarnata apparuit? Quis Romani regni quasi rinocerotis ferocitatem indomabilem flectere, quis uincere potuit, donec Christus, hac decora uirgine tipicatus laqueos uel retia apostolice doctrine huic insane bestie tetendit?” Speculum virginum 9, ed. Seyfarth, p. 273; trans. Barbara Newman, in Mews, Listen, Daughter, p. 294. 129.  Morgan Powell, “The Speculum virginum and the Audio-Visual Poetics of Women’s Religious Instruction,” in Mews, Listen, Daughter, pp. 111–35. See also Jutta Seyfarth, “The Speculum virginum: The Testimony of the Manuscripts,” in Mews, Listen, Daughter, pp. 41–57. 130.  On mnemonic diagrams see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 242–57. 131. Urban Küsters, “The Second Blossoming of a Text: The Spieghel der Maedchen and the Modern Devotion,” in Mews, Listen, Daughter, pp. 245–61; Powell, “Audio-Visual Poetics,” p. 129, n. 12.

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132.  Powell, “Audio-Visual Poetics,” p. 135, n. 51. 133.  Constant Mews, “Hildegard, the Speculum Virginum and Religious Reform in the Twelfth Century,” in Hildegard von Bingen in ihrem historischen Umfeld, ed. Alfred Haverkamp (Mainz, 2000), pp. 237–67. 134.  “[C]lama et dic . . . quatenus hi erudiantur qui medullam litterarum uidentes eam nec dicere nec praedicare uolunt, quia tepidi et hebetes ad conseruandam iustitiam Dei sunt . . . Ergo in fontem abundantiae ita dilatare et ita in mystica eruditione efflue, ut illi ab effusione irrigationis tuae concutiantur qui te propter praeuaricationem Euae uolunt contemptibilem esse.” Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias 1.1, prologue, ed. Adelgundis Führkötter and Angela Carlevaris, CCCM 43–43a (Turnhout, 1978), p. 8; trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop, Scivias (New York, 1990), p. 67. 135.  Margot Fassler, “Composer and Dramatist: ‘Melodious Singing and the Freshness of Remorse,’” in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara Newman (Berkeley, 1998), pp. 157–9. 136.  On Hildegard as designer, see Madeline Caviness, “Artist: ‘To See, Hear, and Know All at Once,’” in Newman, Voice of the Living Light, pp. 110–24. Only two of the ten Scivias manuscripts are illustrated, and their pictorial cycles are independent. 137.  Catherine Jeffreys, “‘Listen, Daughters of Light’: The Epithalamium and Musical Innovation in Twelfth-Century Germany,” in Mews, Listen, Daughter, pp. 137–57. 138. Fiona Griffiths, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia, 2007), pp. 43, 222. 139.  Heloise, Letter 4, ed. Hicks, p. 65; trans. Radice, Letters, pp. 66–7. 140. Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 73. 141.  Hortus deliciarum, fol. 84r; Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 67 and plate 8. 142.  Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus deliciarum, ed. Rosalie Green, Michael Evans, Christine Bischoff, and Michael Curschmann, 2 vols. (London, 1979). 143.  Jean Leclercq, L’Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu: Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du moyen âge (Paris, 1957). 144.  See Newman, Sister of Wisdom. 145.  Hortus deliciarum, fol. 32r; Griffiths, Garden of Delights, pp. 148–53 and plate 9. 146.  “Spiritus sanctus inventor est septem liberalium artium que sunt grammatica, rethorica, dialetica, musica, arithmetica, geometria, astronomia.” Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 308, nn. 75, 77. 147.  Hildegard of Bingen, Liber divinorum operum 1, 1.2, ed. Albert Derolez and Peter Dronke, CCCM 92 (Turnhout, 1996), p. 47. 148.  Albert Derolez, “The Manuscript Transmission of Hildegard of Bingen’s Writings: The State of the Problem,” in Burnett and Dronke, Hildegard of Bingen, p. 28. Only three manuscripts date after the early thirteenth century: a Scivias from Weingarten (1331) and two late fifteenth-century mss. 149. Hans-Joachim Schmidt, “Geschichte und Prophetie: Rezeption der Texte Hildegards von Bingen im 13. Jahrhundert,” in Haverkamp, Hildegard von Bingen, pp. 489–517; Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Hildegard and the Male Reader: A

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Study in Insular Reception,” in Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England, ed. Rosalynn Voaden (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1–18, and Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, 2006), pp. 188–204. 150.  F. W. E. Roth, ed., Die Visionen der hl. Elisabeth und die Schriften der Äbte Ekbert und Emecho von Schönau (Brünn, 1884); Elisabeth of Schönau, The Complete Works, trans. Anne L. Clark (New York, 2000); Anne L. Clark, Elisabeth of Schönau: A Twelfth-Century Visionary (Philadelphia, 1992). 151.  Friedrich Ohly, ed., Das St. Trudperter Hohelied: Eine Lehre der liebenden Gotteserkenntnis (Frankfurt, 1998); Urban Küsters, Der verschlossene Garten: Volks­ sprachliche Hohelied-Auslegung und monastische Lebensform im 12. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf, 1985), pp. 88–99; Irene Berkenbusch, “Mystik und Askese: ‘Sankt Trudperter Hohes Lied’ und ‘Speculum Virginum’ im Vergleich,” in “Minnichlichiu gotes erkennusse”: Studien zur frühen abendländischen Mystiktradition, ed. Dietrich Schmidtke (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1990), pp. 43–60; Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the Twelfth Century (New York, 1994), pp. 347–52. 152.  Dîn schoene wart gesehen von deme wîstuome des êwigen vater. dô wegetest dû dînen vorderen Âdâme unde Êven. dô sach got dîn schoene antlütze, dâ dû laege under anderen kinden in Âdâmes lanken unde in Êven wambe. dâ erbarmtest dû die heilige güete, . . . dâ wart durch dîne schoene diu süene geschaffen. St. Trudperter Hohelied, p. 126.

fifteen

Philosophy and Theology J o h n Mar e n b o n

“Philosophy and Theology” (in the long twelfth century) reads more like the title of a book—or a series of books—than of a twenty-page chapter. I have tailored my material to such a compass by making four decisions: three of them restrict the scope of what is included in this title; the fourth concerns the method of treatment. First, I am a historian of philosophy, not theology, and this chapter ­reflects this perspective. The “theology” in the title is not, however, by any means completely out of place. Much of the best twelfth-century philosophy took place in the course of theological writing—Abelard’s Theo­ logia in its different versions or his biblical exegesis, Gilbert of Poitiers’s commentary on Boethius’s Opuscula sacra—and so the following pages will have plenty to say about theological works. But there are many types of twelfth-century theology (for instance, that which is more mystically or spiritually inclined; pastoral theology; nonphilosophical biblical exegesis) that will not be treated here, although some, at least, are considered in other chapters in this volume. Second, the geographical area considered is limited to Latin Christian Europe. This constraint might seem to need no excuse. Although the twelfth century was indeed a time of serious contact between Latin scholars and philosophy written in Arabic by Muslims and Jews, the intellectual influence of this newly translated material hardly penetrated the mainstream schools until the thirteenth century.1 Yet the Islamic and Jewish traditions stem from the same ancient and late antique heritage as the philosophy of Latin Christendom, and so there is a certain artificiality in focusing on developments in just one of these geographical areas. The earliest inquirers into medieval philosophy—philosophers like Leibniz and 403

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historians such as Brucker—were well aware that the same Neoplatonic ancestry and a similar cargo of Aristotelian texts vivified Islamic and Jewish as well as Christian thought, and they devoted considerable attention to the non-Christian thinkers in their own right. The nineteenth-century neoscholastic movement, with its emphasis on Aquinas, led to a tendency for historians (specialist Jewish and Islamic scholars aside) to consider philosophy in Arabic only in so far as it influenced Christian thinkers through Latin translations, and so twelfth-century Arabic or Jewish philosophers, such as Averroes and Maimonides, are usually studied in conjunction with the thirteenth-century Latin scholastics. But perhaps the most important recent development in the approach to medieval philosophy in general has been the rejection of this model, a return to the openness of the earliest historians, and the growing acceptance that medieval Greek Christian, Latin Christian, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy should be studied together as intertwining branches of the same tradition.2 Given both the orientation of this volume and the constraints of space, I shall confine myself to Latin texts, but this limitation is somewhat artificial and should be kept in mind. Third, in keeping with recent thinking about the period, the present book as a whole focuses not on the hundred years from 1100 to 1200, but on a long twelfth century stretching back into the decades before and after. But it might seem that, in the history of philosophy, the twelfth century itself really does form a distinct unit—and certainly it is usually treated this way, with chapters and even books devoted to this period of a hundred years.3 The neat chronological limits of the period are symbolized by the fact that it was in the year 1100, or very near, when Abelard first came to Paris; and that a charter of Philip Augustus from the year 1200 can be taken as the first evidence of the existence of an embryonic university in Paris. These events point to the peculiarity of the years between 1100 and 1200 on the institutional level: Paris became a center for philosophi­ cal and theological schools—in a way that no medieval city had been ­previously—but they were not yet organized into the distinctive structures of the medieval university. With regard, however, to what was studied, and how, the chronological divisions may be less neat. The works at the center of twelfth-century philosophy—Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation, Porphyry’s Isagoge, the logical and other works of Boethius, and Plato’s Timaeus—had all been studied for more than a century by 1100, and in most cases since the Carolingian period. Although there is no proper logical commentary on Aristotle, Porphyry, or Boethius that can be confidently dated to much before 1100, the earliest layers of the tradition seem

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to go back to the mid-eleventh century or even earlier. And Anselm of Canterbury’s work from the 1080s onwards belongs to the same intellectual universe as, for instance, Abelard’s (from the 1100s to the 1130s), even if Anselm’s special genius and unscholastic way of writing make it seem more distant.4 At the other end of the century, the dissemination of Aristotle’s nonlogical works from 1200 onwards seems to mark a more definite break, since it spelled the end of the predominantly logical and linguistic preoccupations of the twelfth-century thinkers. But the chronology of intellectual life in the years from circa 1175 to circa 1225 is still uncertain in many ways, and it is likely that change was not abrupt and may not have been completed until some years or decades into the thirteenth century. In short, the idea of a long twelfth century might be applied very fruitfully to philosophy, but doing so would break new ground and require research. This chapter tamely confines itself to the chronological boundaries of the century. Finally, and more drastically, I shall not be trying to give a summary of twelfth-century philosophy and theology. It is not just that, even with these three restrictions, such a sketch would have to be unhelpfully condensed. It would be particularly inappropriate for me to try to give a survey, since I have recently published one, with more space than I have here.5 And because that work has faults, I would be likely merely to repeat them if I tried to cover the same ground again here. Rather, in keeping with the aim of this volume to continue the process—begun twenty-five years ago by Constable and Benson’s Renaissance and Renewal—of looking back, reflectively and critically, at Haskins’ famous book, I shall follow a historiographical route, with the aim of indicating what is most distinctive about twelfth-century philosophy and how it can be grasped. I shall ask what was Haskins’ own conception of twelfth-century philosophy and theology, and how did he reach it; what were the main changes in how historians of philosophy regarded the period by the time Renaissance and Renewal ­appeared; how do today’s approaches to and understanding of twelfth-­ century philosophy and theology differ from those of twenty-five years ago; and what future developments are desirable. Although this approach may be indirect, it has an important advantage: it makes it clear that understanding the philosophy of this or any period is not a matter of bringing a passive, blank faculty of comprehension to a fixed object. It is only from the perspective of a certain set of contemporary interests and with the aid of particular methods that the philosophy of any period of the past can be grasped as philosophy. The distinctive character of twelfth-century philosophy, I shall argue, is just now becoming evident, thanks to the way

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in which contemporary philosophical interests and methods are inter­ acting with the medieval material; but the difficulties presented by the unfamiliar literary form of many of the texts threaten to block progress in understanding them. From The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century to Renaissance and Renewal

Haskins was a historian of institutions, including the universities, and he was a pioneering historian of medieval science. But he was not a specialist in the history of philosophy. True, the dividing line between medieval science (natural philosophy) and what we consider medieval philosophy proper is indistinct; and true too that in his Studies in the History of Me­ diaeval Science Haskins sometimes turned to consider philosophical texts such as Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics.6 He remained, however, always outside the content of any philosophy (and, indeed, any natural science), preferring to talk about external data, such as manuscripts and translations. For his chapter on “The Revival of Philosophy” in The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, he turned to the scholars he recognized as experts in ­philosophy—Maurice de Wulf, Étienne Gilson, Clemens Baeumker, Martin Grabmann, and even Barthélémy Hauréau, who had published the last edition of his Histoire de la philosophie scolastique half a century previously.7 Haskins begins the chapter by looking at Platonic idealism, and then the reception of Aristotle’s nonlogical works and their importance in the thirteenth century. He moves on to short discussions of Anselm, Roscelin, Hugh of St. Victor, and Abelard, followed by some paragraphs on systematic theology and a brief one on political theory. The final section of the chapter is a rather generalized discussion about intellectual liberty in medieval philosophy. Unlike the writers in French and German on whom he drew, Haskins did not feel himself required to give more than the most sweeping indication of the content of any philosophical text. It is enough, he felt, to characterize Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches, and Gilbert de la Porrée (of Poitiers) as Platonists and to warn the reader that this Platonism is closely linked to the Timaeus (pp. 344–5). He describes the “question of universals” as “the central though not the unique theme of scholastic philosophy,” but proceeds to sketch it (pp. 351–2) in just six lines. Nominalists asserted that “general terms or conceptions” are “mere names and

Philosophy and Theology  407

nothing more,” whereas realists maintained that they are “realities . . . having an existence quite independent of and apart from the particular individuals in which they may be for the moment objectified.” The description is not just brief, but obviously confused—no one held that “terms or conceptions” were realities—and what Haskins was trying to say, that the realists thought universals to be separate from individuals, is very misleading, in a way that even a glance at Hauréau should have put right.8 Haskins would probably not have been much disturbed by these criticisms because his purpose was to give an elegant presentation of his thesis about a twelfth-century renaissance for a general audience interested in history, literature, and art, rather than to write for specialists in philosophy. Moreover, in English-speaking countries, though not in continental Europe, most presentations of medieval thought were, at this time, not much more philosophical.9 But times have changed. It is Haskins’ unselfconsciously unphilosophical approach that most sharply differentiates his chapter from the two on philosophy in Constable and Benson’s volume. One of them is by Norman Kretzmann on “The Culmination of the Old Logic in Peter Abelard,” the other by Stephen Gersh on “Platonism— Neoplatonism—Aristotelianism: A Twelfth-Century Metaphysical System and its Sources.” Unlike Haskins, both Kretzmann and Gersh spend most of their chapters discussing in detail extracts from particular texts: Kretz­ mann looks at extracts from Abelard’s Dialectica and his commentary on Aristotle’s On Interpretation, Gersh at texts attributed to Thierry of Chartres. Neither writer is much concerned with external matters such as the lives of the writers, or questions about chronology or attribution; they are content to take on trust the views of the scholarly experts. Both see themselves clearly as specialized historians of philosophy. The turn towards specialization is, of course, a general characteristic of Renaissance and Renewal as compared to The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, the result of substituting for a single author nearly thirty different experts in various areas. But the contrast is more striking in philosophy than in most of the other areas of institutional and intellectual history covered in the earlier book; in discussing books and libraries and translators, for instance, or Latin poetry or historical writing, Haskins was engaged in the same sort of task, though with less information to handle and more concern for the general reader, as the twenty-first-century specialist. But his way of treating philosophy—though it may still have a few exponents in history departments—is thought inadequate by most well-informed Anglophone specialists.

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Gersh and Kretzmann represent different alternative newer approaches. As Gersh’s title suggests, he was engaged in a sort of archaeological classification of his medieval texts. Gersh is an expert on the different forms of Platonism in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and their various relations with Aristotelian thought.10 His analysis reveals different stages of Platonism in the texts attributed to Thierry and disentangles them. By contrast, Kretzmann’s concern is not with the relation of Abelard’s arguments to the past but with trying to understand and present them with the sort of clarity found in analytic philosophy and, implicitly, with their links to thinking today. A central aspect of Kretzmann’s discussion is the idea that Abelard moves from a three-piece analysis of predication (subject—­ copula—predicate) to a two-piece analysis (subject—copula + predicate). Kretzmann left eloquently unsaid what is immediately obvious to his philo­sophically trained readers: that Frege’s account of predication, on which contemporary logic is based, also broke from traditional models by adopting a two-piece, as against a three-piece, analysis.11 In the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, published in the same year as Renaissance and Renewal, Kretzmann stated the intention “to help end the era during which [medieval philosophy] has been studied in a philosophical ghetto” and “make the activity of contemporary philosophy intellectually continuous with medieval philosophy to the extent to which it already is so with ancient philosophy.”12 When he wrote this, some work of an analytical kind had already been done on thirteenth and fourteenth century philosophers, but his chapter was one of the first to apply these methods to a twelfth-century author.13 Twelfth-Century Philosophy Today: The Analytical Method

Kretzmann’s analytic way of approaching texts from the past signals what was to be, and remains, the most important development in the study of twelfth-century philosophy. So, at least, I would urge. My judgment, though, is qualitative and controversial. Quantitatively, by far the greatest mass of work since 1982, where not editorial, has been of an external, scholarly, and historical sort, akin in style to that of Haskins in his specialized studies, or else it has been in a variety of nonanalytic styles of philosophy. For instance, French, Italian, and some German, Dutch, and Danish scholars have tended to use the already well-established method of explication de texte, presenting the medieval authors’ discussions in terms far nearer to the original ones than in the discussions that are more em-

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phatically linked to contemporary analytical philosophy.14 Their work is immensely valuable in itself, and is all too often neglected by Anglophone scholars, all the more inexcusably given that some of it is in fact analytically acute, though not in the idiom of contemporary philosophy. Moreover, those trained in this tradition are usually well qualified to deal with manuscript sources and to tackle the difficult literary and historical questions they pose. Nonetheless, the analytical approach has brought about two results of immense importance. First, it has made comprehensible large areas of twelfth-century writing, especially logic, that were previously obscure. Second, it has succeeded, if tentatively, in making the contact ­between contemporary thinking and medieval philosophy hoped for by Kretzmann, and so allowing some twelfth-century thought to be philosophically interesting to us. Let us consider these two results in turn. Logic was at the center of twelfth-century studies and, although it differed from contemporary logic in many features—most strikingly, the fact that it uses natural language rather than a symbolic language with explicitly defined rules—there are enough areas of interest in common to let historians who are also expert in today’s logic recognize and explain previously hidden problems, conflicts, and innovations in the medieval texts. A striking example is Chris Martin’s insight that hundreds of pages in Abelard’s Dialectica are devoted to a profound study of a question that still fascinates logicians: under what conditions does one proposition follow from another.15 His reconstruction in this context of the debate between Abelard and his leading opponent, Alberic of Paris, illustrates strikingly how the skills of an analytical philosopher can draw out meaning from what would appear to an untutored reader as little better than nonsense: And it can be shown that one proposition entails its contradictory in this way. If Socrates is a human and he is not an animal, Socrates is not an animal, and if Socrates is not an animal, Socrates is not a human. If Socrates is not a human, it is not the case that Socrates is a human and not an animal, and so if he is a human and he is not an animal, he is not a human and not an animal.16 The point of all this, as Martin shows, is the following. Abelard wanted to sort out which of the types of conditionals classified in Boethius’ On Topical Differentiae should be accepted. He eliminated many of them by showing how unacceptable conclusions could be derived from them, but it was fundamental to his thinking that a conditional of the form “If something is a S, then something is a G,” where S names a species and G names

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its genus, is true. An example of such a conditional is “If Socrates is a human, then Socrates is an animal.” What Alberic showed in the argument summarized here is that, from this conditional, by a series of operations accepted in Abelard’s logic, a proposition of the form “If p, then not-p” could be ­derived—and Abelard considered such propositions unacceptable.17 Alberic thereby showed a flaw in the whole structure of Abelard’s logic. Another area of twelfth-century thought that has been brought to light by historians who have been able to make the links with contemporary discussions is modality: what does it mean to say that something is possible or necessary? Here the case has been powerfully made, from a reading of fleeting suggestions in his text, that Gilbert of Poitiers is a precursor of Duns Scotus, Leibniz, and, ultimately, of contemporary ­possible-worlds semantics, whilst Abelard’s stance has remained a matter of dispute.18 In all these cases, modern scholars have succeeded, not just in arriving at an interpretation of passages that had been disregarded, but in making the twelfth-century texts interesting to readers now, not just from an antiquarian point of view, as an example of certain intellectual positions, but philosophically. A text from the past is philosophically interesting in so far as philosophers or historians today can engage with it as a piece of philosophical reasoning, exploring its argumentative and conceptual structure, and thinking of the counter-arguments against and the benefits and costs of accepting it. This philosophical appropriation of past thinking is sometimes conducted by scholars whose concern is predominantly with philosophy today—they are interested in ways in which, directly or obliquely, the medieval discussions can fructify contemporary debates. But it can also be conducted for mainly historical aims, where scholars are not trying to solve contemporary problems but are aware of the need to build a bridge between our ways of thinking and those of the past. It would be wrong, of course, to draw a stark contrast between the analytical approach and every other sort, but in these two areas at least the tools and questions of contemporary philosophy have illuminated what had been obscure. And other aspects of twelfth-century thought that were already being discussed, but all too often merely in a scholarly, antiquarian type of way, have been more fully restored to the history of philosophy by analytical ­investigation—Abelard’s metaphysics, semantics, and philosophy of mind for example.19 Even an aspect of Abelard’s thought that might be thought most irrecoverably theological, his attempt to explain how God is three and one through an account of types of difference, has been linked to contemporary mereological concerns.20

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Twelfth-century Philosophy Today: The Material and How to Handle It

I have been concentrating on developments in how modern writers treat twelfth-century philosophical texts, but what of the material itself? How much about our knowledge of it changed since the days of Haskins? In order to be answered properly, this question should be split into four parts: (1) Are there newly discovered thinkers? (2) Are there newly available texts? (3) Are there new ways of ordering the material? (4) Are there new ways of approaching the literary form of the material? Newly Discovered Thinkers?

The first question alone has a mostly negative answer. Indeed, the list of figures discussed in accounts of twelfth-century philosophy shows a remarkable continuity from well before the days of Haskins. Already, in Heinrich Ritter’s Geschichte der Philosophie, published in 1844, there was discussion of Roscelin, William of Champeaux, Abelard, William of Conches, Gilbert of Poitiers, Adelard of Bath, Bernard of Chartres, Walter of Mortagne, Joscelin of Soissons, Peter Lombard, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, the Cistercian authors Isaac of Stella and Alcher of Clairvaux, Alan of Lille, and John of Salisbury. The list is almost the same in Hauréau’s Histoire published in 1872, except that he adds Thierry of Chartres— an author whose works he himself had sought out in the manuscripts. And there is little change in Maurice de Wulf ’s History, written at the turn of the twentieth century and frequently revised, except for the addition of Bernard Silvestris and Clarembald of Arras. Taking a look at the latest general survey of the period—my own—we see still surprisingly little change.21 To Roscelin and William of Champeaux there is one addition, Garlandus, whose Dialectica was not known until De Rijk edited it nearly fifty years ago. Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers receive fairly long sections; Adelard of Bath, Bernard of Chartres, William of Conches, Peter Lombard and some other systematic theologians, and Alan of Lille are all discussed, with some brief comments on the Victorines and the Cistercians. Hardly anything new then for more than a century! Certainly, there are some names that do not crop up in the older, or many of the more recent, accounts: the logicians Adam of Balsham and Alberic of Paris, for instance; the scientist and Arabist Hermann of Carinthia, and William of Lucca, who wrote a vast commentary on pseudo-Dionysius ­between 1169 and 1179; and the fascinating Everardus of Ypres, a follower of Gilbert of Poitiers who added an extra layer of complexity to

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a­ spects of his master’s already highly sophisticated thought. But these are all very much figures on the sidelines. Newly Available Material

Manuscript material can become newly available in two main ways. Previously unpublished works can be edited, or catalogues (or other studies) can reveal previously hidden or hard-to-find manuscript sources. In both these ways, in the time since Haskins, and even that since Renaissance and Renewal, there have been important new developments. One of the reasons why writers of Haskins’ era tended to speak about twelfth-century figures in vague, general terms, based often on the contemporary summaries provided by Abelard in his autobiographical Story of My Disasters and by John of Salisbury in his Metalogicon, was the lack of published texts of their works. So far as full texts went, they were limited among the major thinkers to some of Abelard’s works—but little of his logic; Gilbert of Poitiers’ commentary on Boethius’ Opuscula sacra (his major work); and some works by William of Conches, but not his commentaries. By the time of Renaissance and Renewal, scholars also had at their disposal editions of all of Abelard’s known, surviving logical commentaries and his Dialectica; William of Conches’ commentary on Plato’s Timaeus; commentaries on Boethius’ Short Theological Treatises attributed to Thierry of Chartres; and a variety of mostly anonymous logical treatises from the second half of the century. In the last twenty-five years, there have been editions of William of Conches’ commentary on Boethius’ ­Consolation of Philosophy, of a Timaeus commentary attributed (probably wrongly) to Bernard of Chartres, and of more anonymous logical ma­ terial.22 The most important development in the last decades, though, has been the increase in knowledge about the tradition of commentaries, on logical but also grammatical and more generally philosophical works.23 Although these discoveries have not yet produced many large new editions, researchers now know where to look in the manuscript sources. Old and New Ways of Ordering the Material

I have not yet mentioned a phrase that, for most historians over the last century, has marked out part—and often what they considered the most important part—of twelfth-century philosophy: the Platonism (or the humanism) of the School of Chartres. In 1895, Alexandre Clerval, an enthu-

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siastic local historian of Chartres, published a book that inaugurated the idea of the School of Chartres as more than one among the many French cathedral schools of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He identified a series of eminent figures (most of whom were among those generally considered by historians of twelfth-century thought) as belonging to the School of Chartres and who were marked by their Platonism: Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, Gilbert of Poitiers, the poet and allegorist Bernard Silvestris, William of Conches, and Clarembald of Arras, a pupil of Thierry’s.24 Most writers followed Clerval’s lead and, although Haskins was very restrained in giving this topic just two pages, “The School of Chartres” (or “The ­Platonism/Humanism of the School of Chartres”) became a central theme in accounts of the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century—almost a tag to sum up what was most remarkable about it from the point of view of philosophy.25 In the mid-1960s, however, Richard Southern launched a twofronted attack on the notion of Chartrian humanism, which he d ­ escribed as a “Romantic misconception.”26 He argued, on the first front, that, as a geographical entity, the School of Chartres was not the g­ athering-place of great thinkers that Clerval had so enthusiastically depicted. Of the four outstanding teachers supposed to have been at the School of Chartres— Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches, and Gilbert of Poitiers—only in the case of Bernard was there good evidence that he actually taught at Chartres. The others, he suggested, taught at Paris—and it was Paris, as he argued at length in his contribution to Renaissance and Renewal, that was the real outstanding center for intellectual life in twelfthcentury Northern Europe. On the second front, Southern contended that Bernard and Thierry of Chartres and William of Conches, so far from representing (to use Peter Dronke’s eloquent description) “what is freshest in thought, richest and most adventurous in learning” at the time,27 were indeed humanists, scientific humanists, but of a narrow sort, the last in a tradition of masters who worked with old, well-known materials before an influx of new materials, mainly via Arabic, removed the limitations of the older worldview. All these arguments have been challenged.28 The ones directed against the intellectual eminence of the masters do not stand scrutiny. Southern was probably righter than he knew in raising doubts as to whether Chartres was at the forefront of scientific innovation.29 But by seeing Bernard, William, and Thierry (wisely he excepts Gilbert of Poitiers) as no more than organizers of scientific knowledge, he clearly fails to give these in­ dividual figures the room they need for their ideas to be understood.

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Southern’s geographical arguments are more convincing. Although there seems to be good evidence that, at least on occasion, Thierry and Gilbert (and perhaps William) taught at Chartres, it is hard to resist Southern’s main geographical contention, that Paris rather than Chartres was the outstanding intellectual center of Northern Europe. The general scholarly response to Southern’s thesis and the controversy that followed is strange (or rather, the more cynical may say, characteristic of scholars’ fondness for illogical compromises). Most would admit, if pressed, that the idea of the School of Chartres current since Clerval must be given up, and yet they still talk of the School of Chartres, and group William of Conches, Thierry, Bernard, Gilbert of Poitiers, and even Bernard Silvestris as “Chartrian” thinkers, sometimes suggesting that the label “Chartres” designates more a manner of thought than a place where the Chartrian thinkers actually taught.30 I once suggested that the grouping together of these figures, though certainly not the label of “Chartres,” could be justified in a negative way: they were all thinkers who avoided the standard Parisian blueprint for a master’s career, beginning with logic and then moving on to study and teach theology, which took the form of Sentence collections and biblical exegesis.31 This description is not false, but I wonder now whether it is useful. Would it not be better for specialists ­simply to acknowledge, as some of the younger ones are beginning to do, that as a label, the “School of Chartres” owes its current usage just to unreflective habit, and twelfth-century thought would be understood better if this phrase were confined to its straightforward meaning, to designate a particular cathedral school and its activities?32 By contrast, a valuable new way of organizing our understanding of later twelfth-century philosophy has been developed over the last fifteen years, although it is based on the earlier pioneering work of De Rijk. In this time, the masters of logic and theology and their students divided themselves self-consciously into schools, each with its own set of main theses (often expressed in a deliberately provocative manner—for instance, “Nothing increases”).33 Most of the schools were named after the distinguished masters of the earlier or mid-century from whom they ­originated— such as the Porretani (from Gilbert of Poitiers or Porretanus), the Parvipontani (from Adam of Balsham or the Petit Pont), and the Melidunenses (from Robert of Melun)—although there were also the Montani (so called after the Mont Ste. Geneviève, where they taught), the reales and the nomi­ nales (though this name almost certainly designated the posthumous school of Peter Abelard).34

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Anonymous Texts and Literary Form: New and Old Approaches

Another area in which there has been apparent progress in recent decades has been in matching together anonymous texts and known authors. The twelfth century abounds in writers we know of by name, especially through John of Salisbury’s lists in his Metalogicon and Abelard’s comments in the Story of My Disasters. Often, even in manuscript, no or few works survive that bear a definite attribution to these thinkers. But there is a large stock of anonymous material—logical commentaries and treatises, theological sententiae, commentaries on ancient and late antique philosophical texts.35 What we need, it might be argued, is to find the works by these names. Scholars have certainly not been idle in this task. In the 1950s and 1960s, Nikolaus Häring edited and argued for the attribution to Thierry of Chartres of a whole set of commentaries on Boethius’ Opuscula sacra, which appeared in 1971 collected together as Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and His School.36 Bernard of Chartres was known by reputation only, and a few brief quotations in the Monologion, as the foremost Platonist of his day, until in 1991 Paul Dutton published what he considered to be his commentary on the Timaeus, which he had “uncovered” in a 1984 article.37 Dutton’s efforts with Bernard are, however, limited in their scope compared to the industry exerted on William of Champeaux by Yukio Iwakuma. Besides editing a couple of introductions to logic, plau­ sibly ascribed to William, but lacking any trace of his hallmark realism, Iwakuma has been vigorous in attributing to William of Champeaux a prolific oeuvre as a logical commentator by seeing the signs of his authorship in various of the anonymous commentaries preserved in twelfth-­ century manuscripts. William, he believes, was constantly revising his commentaries, so that we can see his views in evolution as he responded to the attacks of his former pupil, Abelard.38 Although Dutton’s and Iwakuma’s attributions were at first accepted by most scholars, they are now questioned or rejected by many. Dutton’s arguments may well show that passages in the commentary he edits are related to Bernard’s teaching, but it is wrong to treat the commentary as if it were an integrated work, the product of a single hand. It is almost certainly layered, like most twelfth-century commentaries: different strata will reflect the work of different masters. Bernard’s part in the version of the commentary that circulated may not have been a major one.39 The case for the attributions to William is also weak. Although the views of

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William, a celebrated teacher of logic, are doubtless reflected in many commentaries of the time, there is no reason to take any of them as purely his work: they are evidence, not about a single master but about a whole milieu of logical teaching and enquiry.40 Häring’s attribution of a whole set of commentaries to Thierry of Chartres has hardly been questioned, but it ought to be.41 Häring maintains that five of the commentaries he edited, three on the first treatise, the On the Trinity (he calls them the Commentum, Lectiones, and the Glosa), one fragment on Treatise Three (Fragmentum admuntense), and one on Treatise Five (Fragmentum londiniense) are by Thierry.42 The attribution of the two fragments depends on the attribution of the three On the Trinity commentaries, which, Häring argues, “have so much in common from a doctrinal and literary point of view that they must be the work of one scholar unless one or rather two of the commentaries are the product of a plagiarist,” and since Häring considers none is the work of a plagiarist they “stand or fall together.”43 His main argument that it is Thierry who is the single author of the three (and the fragments) is as follows. In his commentary on On the Trinity, Clarembald of Arras says that he studied Boethius’ work with Hugh of St. Victor and Thierry of Chartres and that he is imitating them.44 Häring infers from this comment that, since Hugh wrote no commentary on Boethius, if there are parallel passages between Clarembald’s commentary and any others, then these commentaries must be by Thierry. He finds parallel passages in the Commentum, Lectiones, and Glosa. And so, he concludes, Thierry is the author of all these works. But this conclusion goes well beyond the evidence. Suppose that Clarembald had said he was following Thierry alone (instead of the much vaguer “imi­ tating” both Thierry and Hugh): even then the most we could conclude about a commentary in which there are passages parallel with Clarembald’s would be that it too drew, in these passages at least, on Thierry’s teaching, directly or indirectly. Given what Clarembald actually says, however, parallels with his commentary on their own offer no firm evidence of any link with Thierry. Moreover, Häring’s talk of “plagiarism” suggests that he has an anachronistic conception of anonymous school commentaries as independent literary works, to the ideas in which someone (who just happens not to be named) lays claim as intellectual property. And, worse still for Häring’s argument, often the three commentaries in On the Trinity propose different theories on the basis of the same passage in Boethius.45 Even attributions that have been accepted from long before Haskins’ time are now being put into question. A set of commentaries on Porphy-

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ry’s Isagoge, Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation, and Boethius’ On Division have been attributed to Peter Abelard since the time of Victor Cousin, but a recent reexamination of the evidence throws his authorship of them into doubt.46 We are left, then, as we began, with masters without works and works without masters named as their authors. But this failure to link the lonely works and masters into happy couples is not a weakness of scholarship. Rather, it reflects the character of twelfth-century intellectual life. Although there were famous individual masters, their teaching often did not issue in their own, individual works. It is only in exceptional cases such as Abelard’s commentaries on logic and Gilbert of Poitiers on Boethius’ Opuscula sacra that commentaries are attributed to a definite author and can be taken as expressing his opinions. Often, rather, masters would use existing commentaries on a standard textbook, embellishing them as they saw fit; and their own embellished commentaries would be further adapted by others. The best way of finding their particular views is by looking within commentaries, where often a particular view or argument is attributed to a named master (or an initialed master—Master W. or Master G. or Master P.). But it is also valuable to study the texts in the anonymous state in which they were issued. Individual works, especially commentaries, need to be placed within the school tradition and seen as complex, layered texts. Their purpose and genre need to be carefully assessed. Are they introductory commentaries, textbooks for beginners, or the records of more advanced lectures? To what extent is the writer simply repeating and explaining an authoritative text (for instance, in a logical commentary, the relevant commentary by Boethius), or the ideas of his teachers, or is there a real attempt to say something new? The Challenge of Twelfth-Century Philosophy

In the twelfth century, something very special happens in philosophy, partly by accident. As the sections above have indicated, the leading thinkers in this period spent much of their time studying Aristotelian logic. ­Aristotle’s natural science, metaphysics, and ethics were not yet available, nor was the more or less Neoplatonic body of commentary in which this material came wrapped—often via Arabic intermediaries—when it was ­assimilated in the next century. Twelfth-century writers did have access to Neoplatonism through late ancient texts such as Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and Macrobius’ Commentary on The Dream of Scipio, and

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i­ndirectly through Christian sources, especially Augustine and pseudo-­ Dionysius. But the masters who concentrated on this material were not part of the mainstream. The mainstream, as John of Salisbury makes so clear in his Metalogicon, was dedicated to logic and to an examination of theological questions that reflected this formation. Although the tradition of twelfth-century logical commentary rested on the commentaries of ­Boethius—themselves based on the Neoplatonic tradition, and especially on Porphyry—for both Porphyry and his follower, Boethius, Aristotelian logic was a subject to be studied very largely on its own terms, without the explicit intrusion of Neoplatonic metaphysics or theology. They made this separation because they considered logic a preliminary subject, in which students learned truths about the world as it appears to the senses; in the more advanced stages of the course, the students would move on to read Plato, understood in the Neoplatonic manner, and so learn about the true, intelligible world.47 The twelfth-century philosophers, however, knew nothing of these higher stages of the Neoplatonic curriculum. For them, the study of Aristotelian logic in its own terms was the foundation of all philosophy, and so they pursued philosophy in a down-to-earth, analytical spirit, paying great attention, as in Anglophone philosophy today, to the logical form of arguments and with an appreciation of the interrelations between linguistic and logical form that perhaps—because they had only a partly formalized, nonsymbolic logical system—surpasses that of logicians today. And, when it came to moral philosophy, the twelfth-century philosophers turned not to Plato, nor even to Aristotle, but to the two main ethical philosophers in the Latin tradition, Cicero and Seneca, both of whom were Stoics.48 Like all medieval philosophy, then, twelfth-century Latin philosophy derives mainly from the ancient heritage as cultivated in the Neoplatonic schools of late antiquity. But it draws on a very different selection of the material from that which is at the basis of the eleventh and twelfth-century philosophers in Islam, or the thirteenth and fourteenth-century thinkers at the universities of Paris and Oxford. The twelfth century was neither, as it was once depicted in histories of philosophy, a time of beginnings, which would come to fruition only in the next century, nor an interlude of Platonically tinged, humanistic belles lettres, before serious thinking began with the full recovery of Aristotle. It had its distinct manner of philosophy, a sober and precise style that fits well with the way that contemporary analytical philosophers go about their work. Twelfth-century thought seems, then, especially well suited to twentyfirst-century philosophers, but there is one unfortunate element of incompatibility. The fact that the analytical books and articles on twelfth-century

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authors cited above are overwhelmingly concerned with Abelard, and just occasionally with Gilbert of Poitiers, is no accident. Very little analytical attention has been directed anywhere else. The reason for this narrowness may be that, usually, those skilled in philosophical analysis do not like to venture too far into areas of textual uncertainty and scholarly controversy. They want to have clean, well-edited, and if possible, neatly attributed texts, so that the historical side of matters is already taken care of, and they can concentrate on the philosophy. Beyond Abelard and Gilbert, the twelfth-century philosophical texts in modern editions with apparently firm attributions are those of writers such as William of Conches and Thierry of Chartres, whose thinking, although interesting in many ways, does not (or at least has not yet been shown to) stand up to analytical scrutiny. The analytical students therefore turn back to Abelard and, rarely, Gilbert of Poitiers (who, though he is clearly a writer who repays their investigations, has an idiosyncratic way of thinking and writes in very difficult Latin—articles on him, my own included, rarely dare to translate more than individual phrases). What they usually neglect—because the material is not presented in the easily approachable form they demand—is the mass of edited and unedited logical commentaries and treatises, which in the subjects they cover go far beyond logic and semantics, as well as a wide variety of theological material that engages in highly sophisticated discussions of logical and philosophical problems. To be properly understood in its full range and complexity, twelfthcentury philosophy needs analytically able, philologically and historically trained scholars to bring it to life. Yet, until recently, it has been exceptional for one and the same scholar to have a background in all three areas. There are happy signs, though, that some younger specialists from continental Europe are adding to their thorough philological grounding an enthusiasm for philosophical analysis and a growing expertise in it. Perhaps, when another review of the twelfth century is compiled twenty-five years from now, its philosophy will no longer be an alluring but, aside from its most prominent landmarks, unexplored continent. Notes 1.  See Charles Burnett, “Arabic into Latin: The Reception of Arabic Philosophy into Western Europe,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard Taylor (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 370–404. 2.  My fairly recent book, Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (New York, 2007), is among other things a polemic in favor of this ­approach.

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3.  For example, P. Dronke, ed., A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988). 4.  In the “Synthesis” on logic I have contributed to Arts du langage et théologie aux confins des 11e–12e siècle: Textes, maîtres, débats, ed. I. Rosier-Catach, Studia artistarum 26 (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 181–217, I give some reasons to think that some of the discussions and ways of thought usually linked to the period from 1100 may go back rather earlier. 5.  Medieval Philosophy, pp. 131–71. I have taken advantage of the fact that a full basic bibliography is provided there in order to use the footnotes here mainly to cite more specialized studies, writings of historiographical interest and some very recent studies, published since my general book. 6.  Charles Homer Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1927). 7.  Renaissance, pp. 341–67. 8. Cf. Barthélémy Hauréau, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique 1 (Paris, 1872), pp. 320–44. 9.  See, for instance, R. L. Poole’s scholarly, but philosophically vacant, Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning (New York, 1920), cited by Haskins, Renaissance, p. 366. 10.  He would go on to produce his monumental Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism: The Latin Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind., 1986). 11.  It is worth adding that he is almost certainly wrong in this argument— partly because the account of the chronology of different texts that he took on trust is now not generally accepted. See John Marenbon, “Abélard, le verbe ‘être’ et la prédication,” in Langage, Sciences, Philosophie au 12e siècle, ed. Joël Biard (Paris, 1999), pp. 199–215. 12.  Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, eds., The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1982), p. 3. 13.  Ernest Moody (1903–75) was one of the pioneers (see his Truth and Consequence in Mediaeval Logic [Amsterdam, 1953]), while both Kretzmann himself and Paul Spade had been working in this way in the years before the Cambridge History. One important analytical study of Abelard written before Kretzmann’s is M. M. Tweedale, Abailard on Universals (Dordrecht, 1976). D. P. Henry had been studying Anselm from the point of view of formal logic (though using an unusual logical system) since the 1960s (e.g., The Logic of Saint Anselm [Oxford, 1967]). 14.  Among the more senior distinguished exponents of this approach who have worked on the twelfth century are Jean Jolivet (e.g., La théologie d’Abélard [Paris, 1997]), L. M. De Rijk (e.g., “Semantics and Metaphysics in Gilbert of Poitiers,” Vivarium 26–27 [1988–9], pp. 73–112 and 1–35), and Edouard Jeauneau (see his more recent essays collected in “Tendenda Vela”: Excursions littéraires et digressions philosophiques à travers le moyen âge, Instrumenta patristica et mediaevalia [Turnhout, 2007]), all of whom had been working in this style since the 1960s or 1970s. Leading practitioners of it today, with twelfth-century interests, include Sten Ebbesen, Onno Kneepkens, Irène Rosier-Catach, and Luisa Valente. Alain de Libera (e.g., L’Art des généralités: Théories de l’abstraction [Paris, 1999]) is eclectic in method, combining explication de texte, an archaeological approach more sophisti-

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cated than Gersh’s, openness to the leading Continental twentieth-century thinkers, and an interest in Anglophone analytic philosophy. Many Dutch and Danish scholars distinguish their approach from that of French scholars, emphasizing their concentration on logic and semantics, and their strong interest in argumentation—all of which bring them closer to the Anglophone analysts (cf. Sten Ebbesen, “Doing Philosophy the Sophismatic Way: The Copenhagen School, with notes on the Dutch School,” in Gli Studi di filosofia medievale fra otto e novecento, ed. Ruedi Imbach and Alfonso Maierù, Storia e letteratura—Studi e testi 179 [Rome, 1991], pp. 331–59). But, in their wish to keep close to the contours of the texts they study, they are nearer to French than English-speaking philosophically trained scholars. 15. See Christopher J. Martin, “Embarrassing Arguments and Surprising Conclusions in the Development of Theories of the Conditional in the Twelfth Century,” in Gilbert de Poitiers et ses contemporains, ed. J. Jolivet and A. De Libera, History of Logic 5 (Naples, 1987), pp. 377–400. Martin summarizes his views in “Logic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, ed. J. Brower and K. Guilfoy (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 158–99 at pp. 166–92. A very fine analytical presentation of Abelard’s theory of conditionals and argumentation, drawing on and developing the insights of Martin, has just been published by Ian Wilks, “Peter Abelard and his Contemporaries,” in Handbook of the History of Logic, vol. 2, Mediaeval and Renaissance Logic, ed. Dov M. Gabbay and John Woods (Amsterdam, 2008), pp. 83–156. 16.  Introduction montane minores, in L. M. De Rijk, ed., Logica Modernorum 2.2 (Assen, 1967), pp. 65:35–66:4, and cited by Martin, “Embarrassing Arguments,” p. 394, n. 35. 17. In “Embarrassing Arguments,” pp. 394–95, Martin analyses the argument (taking “Socrates is a human” as p, and “Socrates is an animal” as q) as follows: 1. p → q 2. p & ~q → ~q [simplification] 3. ~q → ~p [1, contraposition] 4. p & ~q → ~p [2, 3, transitivity of entailment] 5. p & ~q → p [simplification] 6. ~p → ~ (p & ~q) [5, contraposition] 7. p & ~q → ~ (p & ~q) [4, 6, transitivity of entailment]. I have spelled out the stages a little more fully than Martin and corrected a typographical error. 18.  See Simo Knuuttila, Modalities in Medieval Philosophy (New York, 1993), pp. 75–82; for Gilbert, and for the debate on Abelard, see H. Weidemann, “Zur Semantik der Modalbegriffe bei Peter Abaelard,” Medioevo 7 (1981), pp. 1–40; ­Knuuttila, Modalities, pp. 82–96; Christopher J. Martin, “Abaelard on Modality: Some Possibilities and Some Puzzles,” in Potentialität und Possibilität: Modalaussagen in der Geschichte der Metaphysik, ed. T. Buchheim, C. H. Kneepkens, and K. Lorenz (Stuttgart, 2001), pp. 97–124. Other analytical rediscoverers of areas of twelfth-century thought that had remained hidden through their apparent obscurity include Klaus Jacobi on both Abelard and especially Gilbert of Poitiers, “Natürliches Sprechen—Theoriesprache—Theologische Rede: Die Wissenschaftslehre des Gilbert von Poitiers (ca. 1085–1154),” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 49 (1995), pp. 511–28; “Einzelnes—Individuum—Person: Gilbert von Poitiers Philosophie des Individuelle,” in Individuum und Individualität im Mittelalter, ed. Jan Aertesen and Andreas Speer, Miscellanea Mediaevalia 23 (New York, 1996), pp. 3–21, and later twelfth-century logic in general “Logic (2): The Later Twelfth Century,” in Dronke, History, pp. 227–51, and Ian Wilks, “Peter Abelard

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and His Contemporaries.” Some contemporary specialists are not, however, convinced that such close parallels can be drawn between medieval discussions and ­today’s possible worlds semantics. 19.  For the metaphysics, see Peter King, “Metaphysics,” in Cambridge Companion, ed. Brower and Guilfoy, pp. 65–125, and Andrew Arlig, “Abelard’s Assaults on Everyday Objects,” American Catholic Philosophy Quarterly 81 (2007), pp. 209– 28. For the philosophy of language, see Klaus Jacobi, “Philosophy of Language,” in Cambridge Companion, ed. Brower and Guilfoy, pp. 126–57; and Martin Lenz, “Peculiar Perfection: Peter Abelard on Propositional Attitudes,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 43 (2005), pp. 377–86, and “Are Thoughts and Sentences Compositional? A Controversy between Abelard and a Pupil of Alberic on the Reconciliation of Ancient Theses on Mind and Language,” Vivarium 45 (2007), pp. 169–88. For the philosophy of mind, see Peter King, “Abelard on Mental Language,” and Margaret Cameron, “Abelard (and Heloise?) on Intention,” both in American Catholic Philosophy Quarterly 81 (2007), pp. 169–87 and 323–38. 20.  See Jorge Gracia, Introduction to the Problem of Individuation in the Early Middle Ages (Washington, D.C., 1984), pp. 196–235; Ian Wilks, “Peter Abelard and the Metaphysics of Essential Predication,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 36 (1998), pp. 356–85; King, “Metaphysics,” pp. 85–92; Jeffrey Brower, “Trinity,” in Cambridge Companion, ed. Brower and Guilfoy, pp. 223–57; A. Arlig, A Study in Early Medieval Mereology: Boethius, Abelard and Pseudo-Joscelin, (Ph.D. thesis, Ohio State, 2005) available at http://etd.ohiolink.edu/send-pdf.cgi?osu1110209537, pp. 165–97. 21. Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy, pp. 131–71. 22.  A bibliography of the primary texts and the important secondary works is found in Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy, pp. 364–9. The most important anonymous works published in the period between Haskins and Renaissance & Renewal are those in L. M. De Rijk, Logica modernorum (Assen, 1962/1967), vols. 1 and 2; and since 1980, the most important are the many edited by Sten Ebbesen (whose work stretches back into the 1970s), commentaries on the Sophistical Refutations, mainly from the twelfth century (see his catalogue of these commentaries: “Medieval Latin Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts, ed. Charles Burnett, Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts 23 [London, 1993], pp. 129–77) and other logical commentaries (e.g., “Anonymus D’Orvillensis’ Commentary on Aristotle’s Categories,” Cahiers de l’Institut du moyen âge grec et latin 70 [1999], pp. 229–43; “A Porretanean Commentary on Aristotle’s Categories,” Cahiers de l’Institut du moyen âge grec et latin 72 [2001], pp. 35–88) and treatises (e.g., S. Ebbesen, K. M. Fredborg, and L. O. Nielsen, “Compendium logicae Porretanum ex codice Oxoniensi Collegii Corporis Christ 250: A Manual of Porretan Doctrine by a Pupil of Gilberts,” Cahiers de l’Institut du moyen âge grec et latin 44 [1983], pp. iii–xvii, 1–113). Yukio Iwakuma’s “‘Vocales’, or Early Nominalists’, Trad 47 (1992), p. 37–111, contains an appendix of editions, and his edition of an im­ portant anonymous commentary on the Isagoge, attributed by him to William of Champeaux, has just been published: “Pseudo-Rabanus super Porphyrium (P3),” Archives d’his­toire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 75 (2008), pp. 43–196. Iwakuma has unpublished versions of many of the anonymous commentaries, which

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he has been generously willing to share with others working in the field. Note also the edition by a pupil of Ebbesen’s: Heine Hansen, “An Early Commentary on Boethius’ De Topicis Differentiis,” Cahiers de l’Institut du moyen âge grec et latin 76 (2005), pp. 45–130. 23.  In logic, these advances are due especially to De Rijk, Logica Modernorum, and “Some New Evidence on Twelfth-Century Logic,” Vivarium 4 (1966), pp. 1–57); Niels Green-Pedersen, The Tradition of the Topics in the Middle Ages (Munich, 1984); and, more recently, Yukio Iwakuma, “Vocales” and “Pierre Abélard et Guillaume de Champeaux dans les premières années du 12e siècle: une étude préliminaire,” in Langage, sciences, philosophie au 12e siècle, ed. Joël Biard (Paris, 1999), pp. 92–123, “William of Champeaux on Aristotle’s Categories,” in La tradition médiévale des Catégories (12e–15e siècles), ed. Joël Biard and Irène Rosier-Catach, pp. 313–28, and “Vocales Revisited,” in The Word in Medieval Logic, Theology and Psychology, ed. Charles Burnett (Turnhout, 2009), pp. 81–171. Some of the results of this work are brought together in John Marenbon, “Medieval Latin Commentaries and Glosses on Aristotelian Logical Texts, before ca. 1150 AD” as republished and revised with “Supplement to the Working Catalogue and Supplementary Bibliography,” in John Marenbon, Aristotelian Logic, Platonism, and the Context of Early Medieval Philosophy in the West, Variorum Collected Studies Series 696 (Burlington, Vt., 2000). Irène Rosier-Catach has been working on the relationship between the unpublished grammatical sources and their chronology, as well as coordinating their publication: a good summary of this side of her work is given in her “The Glosulae in Priscianum and its Tradition,” in Papers in Memory of Vivien Law, ed. Nicola McLelland and Andrew Linn (Münster, 2004) pp. 81–99, and now in I. Rosier-Catach and A. Grondeux, “Les Glosulae super Priscianum et leur tradition” in Rosier-Catach, Arts du langage et théologie, pp. 107–79; see also RosierCatach’s website for a full list of her writings: http://htl.linguist.univ-paris-diderot .fr/irosier. Many of the results of her research and that of her collaborators and colleagues on the whole area of grammar, logic, and rhetoric in the years around 1100 are published in Rosier-Catach, Arts du langage et théologie. On unpublished commentaries and glosses on Macrobius, see I. Caiazzo, Lectures médiévales de Macrobe, Études de philosophie médiévale 83 (Paris, 2002) (also with editions of the text). 24.  Alexandre Clerval, Les Écoles de Chartres au Moyen Âge du 5e au 16e siècles (Chartres, 1895). Cf. Édouard Jeauneau and Pierre Bizeau, Bibliographie du Chanoine Alexandre Clerval (1859–1918) (Chartres, 1965). 25.  For example, in the still popular book by David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (London, 1962), the School of Chartres (along with John of Salisbury) receives a chapter to itself (pp. 131–40) and its masters are also discussed (pp. 113–5) as Platonists in the chapter on the problem of universals. In the history of medieval philosophy in the West written by Jean Jolivet for the Encyclopédie de la Pléïade (Paris, 1969), more space is given to the writers placed in this school than to any other group of twelfth-century philosophers. 26.  Southern launched his attack in an essay he called “Humanism and the School of Chartres,” in his Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford, 1970), pp. 61–85, extended it in Platonism, Scholastic Method and the School of Chartres, The Stenton Lecture (Reading, 1979), and then in “The Schools of Paris and the School of Chartres,” in Renaissance & Renewal, pp. 113–37. The first and third of

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these pieces are reprinted with small changes (and some replies to criticism) in Southern’s Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. 1, Foundation (Oxford, 1995), pp. 58–101 (“Chartrian Humanism: A Romantic Misconception”) and 198–233 (“The Scholastic Metropolis of Northern Europe”). 27.  Peter Dronke, “New Approaches to the School of Chartres,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 7 (1969), pp. 117–40, reprinted in Peter Dronke, Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe, Storia e letteratura 183 (Rome, 1992), pp. 15–40. 28. Besides Dronke, “New Approaches,” see Nikolaus Häring, “New Approaches to the School of Chartres,” in Essays in Honor of Anton Charles Pegis, ed. J. R. O’Donnell (Toronto, 1974), pp. 117–40; Karin Margareta Fredborg, ed., The Latin Rhetorical Commentaries by Thierry of Chartres, PIMS, Studies and Texts 84 (Toronto, 1988), pp. 4–7 (a good survey of the pieces of evidence gathered by the pro-Chartrian party after Southern’s attack). 29.  Several specialized studies given at the CNRS conference “Guillaume de Conches et les sciences au XIIe siècle,” which took place in Paris in 2007, suggest this view. The Proceedings of this conference have still to appear in print. 30.  This line of argument was developed especially by Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton, 1972). Southern, Scholastic Humanism, pp. 93–100, makes some pertinent criticisms. 31.  John Marenbon, “Humanism, Scholasticism and the School of Chartres,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 6 (2000), pp. 569–77, a review article on Southern, Scholastic Humanism. 32.  There is an excellent, balanced, but rightly skeptical account by Thomas Ricklin, “Chartres, École de,” in the Dictionnaire du Moyen Âge, ed. C. Guavard, A. de Libera, and M. Zink (Paris, 2002), pp. 269–71. 33.  The papers in Vivarium 30 (1992) are mostly dedicated to exploring these schools. The most important for this purpose is Yukio Iwakuma and Sten Ebbesen, “Logico-Theological Schools from the Second Half of the Twelfth Century: A List of Sources,” pp. 173–210. On the lists of theses for each school, see Sten Ebbesen, “What Must One Have an Opinion About,” pp. 62–79, and for an edition of the Positio nominalium, a set of theses put forward by the nominales, Sten Ebbesen, “Two Nominalist Texts,” Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Âge grec et latin 69 (1991), pp. 429–40. 34.  Although this claim has been queried, the papers in Vivarium 30, as a whole, make it hard now not to accept it. 35.  See n. 23 above. 36.  Nikolaus Häring, Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and his School, PIMS, Studies and Texts 20 (Toronto, 1971). 37.  Paul Dutton, “The Uncovering of the Glosae super Platonem of Bernard of Chartres,” MS 46 (1984), pp. 192–221. 38.  See the articles cited in n. 23 above. Iwakuma maintains his attributions to William of Champeaux, although he is willing to allow that different texts may show revisions by others rather than by William himself. 39.  Peter Dronke, History, pp. 14–17, was remarkably prescient in suspecting from the beginning that the commentary edited by Dutton is a layered work, and

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his pages on it have valuable points of method for considering twelfth-century commentaries more generally. 40.  See Klaus Jacobi, “William of Champeaux: Remarks on the Tradition in the Manuscripts,” in Rosier-Catach, Arts du langage et théologie, p. 261–71, for a balanced assessment, and Margaret Cameron, “What’s in a Name? Students of William of Champeaux on the vox significativa,” Bochumer Philosophisches Jahrbuch 9 (2004), pp. 93–114. 41.  I intend to give my arguments against Häring’s attributions in more detail elsewhere. Häring makes his argument in the introduction to Commentaries on Boethius (pp. 19–23) by referring, as if they were established, to views he had expressed in his edition of Clarembald of Arras (Life and Works of Clarembald of Arras: A Twelfth-Century Schoolmaster of the School of Chartres, PIMS, Studies and Texts 10 [Toronto, 1965], pp. 27–38) and in the introductions to his earlier, separate editions of the commentaries he attributes to Thierry: “A Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate by Thierry of Chartres (Anonymus Berolinensis),” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 23 (1956), pp. 257–325; “Lectiones in Boethii librum de Trinitate,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 25 (1958), pp. 113–226; “Two Commentaries on Boethius (De Trinitate and De Hebdomadibus) by Thierry of Chartres,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 27 (1960), pp. 65–136. 42.  He more tentatively attributes another commentary (Glosa victorina) to Thierry, and considers another to be an abbreviation of Thierry’s work (Abbreviatio monacensis). 43.  Häring, “Two Commentaries,” p. 67. 44.  Commentary on “On the Trinity” §3 (Häring, Life and Works, p. 64): “non quo mei viribus ingenii confiderim, sed ut doctorum Theodorici Brittonis et Hugonis de Sancto Victore, apud quos in hoc opere vehementem operam dedi, lectiones imitarer.” 45.  See John Marenbon, “The Twelfth Century,” in Medieval Philosophy, ed. John Marenbon, The Routledge History of Philosophy 3 (New York, 1998), pp. 150–87, at pp. 173–4, for an example. 46.  The commentaries first appeared as Abelard’s in Cousin’s Ouvrages inédits d’Abélard (Paris, 1836) and most recently in Pietro Abelard: Scritti di logica, ed. Mario dal Pra, 2nd ed. (Florence, 1969). The attribution is discussed and arguments for its rejection made in Margaret Cameron, “Abelard’s Early Glosses: Some Questions,” and Christopher Martin, “A Note on the Attribution of the Literal Glosses in Paris BN lat 13,368 to Peter Abaelard,” both in Rosier-Catach, Arts du langage et théologie, p. 647–62 and 605–46. 47.  See John Marenbon, Boethius (New York, 2003), pp. 17–42. 48.  See especially Calvin Normore, “Abelard’s Stoicism and its Consequences,” in Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations, ed. Stephen Strange and Jack Zupko (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 132–47.

sixteen

Semiotic Anthropology The Twelfth-Century Approach Bri g itt e Miria m B e d o s - R e z ak

“You are a marvelous swimmer . . . You must have an aquatic ancestry of some kind.” She laughs. “You make me sound like a seal.” Martin Corrick, By Chance

“Semiotic anthropology,” an expression coined by Milton Singer at the University of Chicago in the mid-1970s, became a methodological program actively taught and pursued there.1 Although this particular form of anthropology arose from a philosophical analysis of language and cognition, building upon the insights of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), it does not reduce culture to the single model of a linguistic code.2 Semiotic anthropologists ponder the processes by which artifacts or material features of the sensible world (for example, color, stone, and bone) are made to perform as signs, as vehicles of signification. Semiotic anthropologists consider the various ideological systems that stipulate modes of interpretation and suggest the manner in which the signs themselves signal the way they are to be interpreted. Embedded in both social action and theoretical discourse, the ideologies of signification are themselves considered to be cultural phenomena subject to textual forms, pragmatic rules, and signifying processes. Signification is 426

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thus always dialogic, at once representative and interpretive of the practices and conventions of a culture. Semiotic anthropology insists that signs are historical since their actualization and their performance are both matters of contextual appropriateness. Stated this way, semiotic anthropology appears to be a modern science, one that provides contemporary analysts who choose to use it with a specific epistemology for the analysis of pragmatic meaning. In Western Europe of the mid-1050s, the diffusion of material means of representation, such as seals, badges, and heraldic emblems, occurred progressively within a culture where linguistics, signs, images, and related issues of signification were receiving a degree of attention not bestowed upon them since Patristic times—notwithstanding Carolingian efforts. Such interest in signification is, I contend, different from the symbolic mentalité traditionally ascribed to the twelfth century, wherein the interpretation of material signs was axiomatically channeled through a belief in transcendent meaning, making the universe transparent to the spiritual force responsible for its ordering.3 That the twelfth century was symbolic in this sense is not being questioned here, but a refocusing is proposed so as to enable a consideration of contemporary alternative semiotic processes. Of primary import therefore, is the twelfth century’s engagement with material (and not only linguistic) signs, with their use and their referential modes, and with the technology upon which some of these modes relied, particularly engraving, imaging, imprinting, and sealing. Indeed, it was this technology that stimulated the metaphorical associations that schoolmen used to explore communicative structures and to speculate upon the nature of reality. These medieval scholars’ investigation of the dynamic that links specific sign-comprehension, the use of particular signs to refer both to the world and to other signs, and sign theory appears to share some of the considerations of modern semiotic anthropologists. Both engage the semiotics of social life and strive to understand the nature of signs anchored in spatiotemporal contexts and experienced at the level of actuality.4 To express the question in twelfth-century terms: are actual signs “replicas” of Plato’s ideal forms, which are the only true realities stipu­lating the linkage of signs to meaning; or are such historically situated signs themselves real, and if so, how? Yet another question concerns the ability of singular occurrences of contextually anchored signs (a social action, for instance) to induce repeated and ultimately customary performance. Thus decontextualized, such signs become law-like, affirmed by convention and affirming a systematic linkage between form and meaning, even without sharing the Platonic definition of idea.

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These parallels between twelfth-century thought and modern anthropology are worrisome. The modern method is supposed to uncover those medieval tools that were themselves hermeneutical parameters for the production of recognizable social action. There arises therefore the danger that tools of historical investigation might impose their paradigm on the material to which they are applied.5 My task here will be to identify the nature and implications of a twelfth-century semiotic anthropology, without allowing this very act of analysis to erase the complexities, ambiguities, and indeterminacies of medieval cultural meanings.6 The long twelfth century (1050–1200) saw an extension of semiotic considerations beyond scriptural exegesis and the liberal arts, leading scholars to consider the objectification of meaning both in artifacts and in the natural world.7 Though Carolingian intellectuals had shown a similar concern, primarily in the doctrinal field of images and of Eucharistic theology, postmillennial schoolmen embarked on sustained efforts to assign matter a formal role in cognition. The material world was harnessed to yield meaning, a meaning that could mediate between worldly components as well as between the terrestrial and the divine.8 The visible and the physical assumed a capacity to signify even those realities conceived as essentially immaterial, that is perceived only through mental images,9 such as the divine, but also such human conditions as commitment, accountability, law, and kin. Meaning thus came to inhabit the material sign in such a way that a sign could yield knowledge and embody the intelligi­ bility of its referent. Signs conceived to be evidential could, and did, play an increased role in sociocultural exchanges. Materiality, the tangible, the concrete, and artifacts themselves entered into new relationships with the imaginary and the ideal; so did the fleshy, corporeal, and physical with the spiritual. In the long twelfth century, the semiotic realization of the ­actual took many new palpable forms: the transubstantiated Eucharist, ­natura as a locus of renewed interest, craftsmanship revalorized, ecclesia increasingly petrified, images and objects of devotion, the body as a site of inscription, the written word, heraldry and other emblems of status, signs of infamy, pilgrim signs, and those ultimate signs of identity, seals. As such technological extensions of a person came to circulate through society, people came to think about themselves and their identities increasingly through the medium of things. The overall argument presented here focuses on the performance of signs in physical traces of holy intervention, in the discourses of incarnational theology and theological anthropology, in notions of personhood, and in social strategies of personal representation.10 Such signs, however

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diverse in their spheres of application, all involved aspects of the seal and its mechanism of imprinting. It is my contention that the “imprint” played a particularly important role in the twelfth century as gesture, object, image, and concept, capable of articulating metaphorically and actually the paradigmatic shift from transcendent to immanent reality. The time has come to account for the ways in which, during the long twelfth century as never before, the imprint reached beyond its immediate utilitarian context to become a primary grid for acts of interpretation whereby reality was conceived as inhering in, albeit to variable degrees, both the sign and its thing (its referent, whether object or person). —  No discussion of twelfth-century intellectual elites can begin without a review of St. Augustine, within whose worldview these elites ­situated themselves and whose thought framed their reflections. Schoolmen were well aware that the property or concept of reality was assigned exclusively to an invisible, independent, immaterial, and transcendental locus, God: the God who, according to the book of Genesis, created heaven and earth and created people in his own image and likeness; a God who, as per Christian doctrine, himself assumed human shape in the person of Christ, his Son. Though revealed through creation, scripture, and incarnation, this invisible God alone was veritas. He alone was the ob­ jective truth concerning reality that, were it known, would render reality, and God, wholly intelligible. Yet God was unknowable, and so, therefore, was reality. In positing the real as ideal, that is, something neither actual nor ­visible, Christianity set itself the enduring task of defining the ontological status of being. In the West, Augustine took up this challenge, declaring that “if a thing is, then it is not by virtue of its own being, but simply because it participates in True Being, which is God.”11 This appears to be straightforward Platonism, but Augustine was unable to adopt Plato’s position entirely. It is important here to consider succinctly the substantial differences between the Augustinian and Platonic cosmologies, particularly in light of the frequently cited influence of Plato upon Augustine and, through him, on twelfth-century Christian thought in general. In Plato’s theory (expounded in the Timaeus) reality consisted of two tiers or two levels: the material world of Nature or Cosmos, and the transcendent domain of Forms. The powers and properties of these Forms were embedded in Nature and explained the reality of Nature as an ordered whole. ­Reality was intelligible and accessible to reason because such intelligible

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Forms, which constituted the objective essence of material things, could be discovered by human beings. For Plato, therefore, the distinction between Matter and Form existed within reality. It was with respect to such a distinction that Christian cosmology parted with Plato. Where Plato had relied upon the hermeneutics of rationality, Christianity instituted a logic of incarnation. The distinctive feature of this logic is that there is not a ­rational connection between the universal form and the incarnate body. God was seen as the only and absolute mediator, and his designs were inscrutable. As a result, a single order of reality was presumed, that of God. Some appreciation of this order of reality was accessible through revelation, but God’s essence, reality itself, was unknowable. Universals, that is, divine Ideas, what Plato would have called Forms, were necessarily to be considered in a finite and contingent world that had no common measure with them, so that the relationship between form and matter, between the divine and the Cosmos, remained opaque and imperfectly comprehensible.12 When Augustine asserted that we are—and that we are what we are— by participation in God, he was laboring under somewhat conflicted purposes. First, he was trying to elucidate both the principle of the world as God’s creation and the notion that man was explicitly made in the image and likeness of God. On the other hand, he attempted to explain any resemblance between man and God in the light of his own belief that those created cannot be fully of the form or nature of God. Thus third, in order to make sense of the likeness held by scripture to exist between the creator and his creature, Augustine asserted that likeness meant participation, invoking the Platonic doctrine of participation as emanation, that is, the conception of Primal Reality as the source of all lesser levels of reality. Augustine’s strict creational view, however, considered that Platonic emanationist metaphysics did not fully make the necessary distinction between God and his creation. For Augustine, and for Judeo-Christian doctrine, the world had been created ex nihilo, through a deliberate conscious Will by a wholly transcendent, independent, and creative God. The existence of the world was not generated out of the essence of God, could not s­ imply be the product of so passive a process as the one implied by Plato’s notion of emanation, a notion devoid of divine authorship. So when Augustine theorized the participation of man in God as an act of God’s will, he postulated the bestowal of real essence yet insisted that man had this essence without actually being of the essence.13 As Augustine wrote in his Confessions: “created things are, because they are from God; they are not, because true being is immutable being, and that is God himself.”14 Creation, that

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which has been created, exists but is not real. The radical distinction between creation and essence, between existence and reality, between sign and thing, stems from Augustine’s unwillingness, or inability, to present a systematic theory of participation. Early medieval culture drew extensively upon this dualistic Augustine and his corresponding sign theory, which held that signs could refer by convention.15 In that latter case, the conventional reference, an ox or hyssop to take some Augustinian examples,16 has become a figurative sign, its meaning “divinely instituted,” its true object hidden in the transcendental world.17 Whether conventional or figurative, linguistic or material, Augustinian signs were radically distinguished from their things, the eternal realities to which they pointed. Signification was thus removed from its sensory and physical basis, and physical objects disappeared behind those transcendental truths they were assumed to symbolize.18 This axiomatic dualism became increasingly dominant to the point where, by the eleventh century, Augustinianism bore little resemblance to the vast body of ideas and taxonomies produced originally, though not without confusions and contradictions, by the bishop of Hippo. If there is a principal sense in which the twelfth century deserves its title of Renaissance, it is perhaps for the return that eleventh- and twelfth-century schoolmen made to the full, manifold, and, yes, often confusing and contradictory, texts of Augustine in contrast to the sclerotic corpus of his ­oeuvre that had been compacted and ossified by an incessant focus on a limited selection of passages throughout the early Middle Ages.19 —  Approaches to and knowledge of Augustinian semiotics broadened significantly in the mid-eleventh century, stimulated by Berengar of Tours’ (d. 1088) rekindling of the debate that had already flared up in Carolingian times on the nature of the Eucharist. In order better to appreciate postmillennial departures in the use of Augustine’s texts, it is necessary to review here briefly the Augustinian template with which Carolingian scholars pursued their own analysis of the Eucharistic sign. Pascasius Radbertus argued for a carnally present Christ in the Eucharist, and for an identity between the Eucharist as Jesus’ actual, historical body and the Eucharist as a representation (figura) of Christ’s flesh and blood.20 The notion that figura, and that Eucharist as figura, was referential and not identical with its referent came straight from Augustine’s discussion of signs in the De Doctrina Christiana.21 Faced with the contra­ dictions of Augustine’s dyadic semiotics, Pascasius introduced the term

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character to support his contention that a figura does not systematically connote shadow or untruth.22 Since Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, in which Christ was described as the character of God’s substance,23 the Christic character had been a rhetorical tool deployed against the Gnostics and the Arians in defense of the incarnation of the divine in Christ.24 Ambrose (d. 397) in particular, in his own fight against Arianism, had used the Pauline expression to argue the consubstantiality of Christ with the Father, a point that was more difficult to make by means of the notions of imago and figura, whose mimetic referentiality focused attention primarily on visible forms.25 The inclusion of character—an incarnational term reconciling the outwardly sensible and inwardly transcendental truth—in treatises where Pascasius argues precisely that such is the operation at work in the Eucharist, displays a subtle command of patristic sources. However, Pascasius deemphasized the logic of character as marked substance, comparing characters to letters of the alphabet, which render meaning visible and readable: For as our feeble-mindedness progressively reaches, at first, textual reading by means of the characters or figures of the letters, and then the scriptures’ spiritual sense and meaning, so are we able to arrive at the divinity of the Father from the humanity of Christ who, thus, is rightly called the figure and character of His substance. What else are the figures of letters than their characters, through which, by the process of the spirit, strength and power is set before the eyes. And thus the Word is made flesh, so that through flesh our feeble-mindedness may be nourished to the point that it understands the divinity.26 With such a comparison, Pascasius returned to the logocentric world of Augustine and to one of Augustine’s greatest paradoxes: on the one hand, the truth signified by words, by figura, is a merely imitative shadow of reality; on the other, the Word (Logos) is made flesh (letter, character, Christ), whereby the sign is reified, conflated with its referent. This reification had two consequences: the end of signification (which Pascasius’ opponent Ratramnus understood, as we shall see), and a notion of truth as an entity of self-identical presence, which can be understood by physical assimilation (of the Christic body) rather than by means of interpretation. Pascasius’ character has thus gravitated toward Augustine’s troubled semiotics, and reinscribed its two-tiered system: wor(l)dly signs and their inability to express the essence of perfect sameness (truth, reality), versus divine things, the Word made flesh (a self-referential presence).27 Christ,

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not a figura nor a character, had been nailed to the cross, but Eucharistic bread and wine commemorated and enacted the shedding of his blood and the piercing of his flesh. For all his insistence on the sensible presence of the historical body of Christ in the Eucharist, Pascasius still located the Eucharist’s meaning and truth in a figural interpretation of its physical manifestation as bread and wine. Pascasius’ argument that the Eucharist was at one and the same time truth and figure rested upon an uneasy conflation of physical presence with figural representation, making unavoidably clear the limited explanatory power of Augustine’s concepts of sign, reality, and truth. These might work axiomatically, but not in the heuristic fashion Pascasius had undertaken. It was indeed semiotic explanatory power that turned out to be a main bone of contention in the Carolingian eucharistic controversy. Ratramnus in particular argued that for the bread and wine to be truly the body of Christ, Christ’s flesh and blood had to be experienced by the senses.28 Accordingly, for a material object to be considered truly present, it must ­possess qualities and features that belong to it; it must present itself unmediated.29 Since the Eucharist was sensually apprehended as bread and wine, these could only be symbols of Christ’s flesh and blood, the latter not truly present. Ratramnus thus reaffirmed Augustine’s clear distinction between figura and veritas, situating the Eucharist among figurative signs, insisting that the Eucharist retained its representational quality as figura and designated a separate reality.30 Thus, as he denied historical and physical presence, Ratramnus acknowledged real presence, but located its reality within the spiritual significance of the bread and wine as symbols of flesh and blood, of divine and otherworldly substances.31 Significantly, Ratramnus had no use for the term character in his argument.32 He did not, as Pascasius had done with the simile of the characteres, anchor eucharistic signification within Christ’s dual nature and its incarnation of the Logos. In opposition to Pascasius’ uneasy physical realism Ratramnus pointed out that “if the bread and wine are not received figuratively but as self-­ referential truth, faith could not operate, for there would be no room for symbolic meaning since all had been received in the flesh.”33 Ratramnus appears to show an awareness of the implications of Augustine’s reification of signs, of the fact that self-referentiality is the end of interpretation. He thus explicitly adopts the dualistic Augustine who had clearly distinguished between signs and things, between sacraments and the res of the sacraments. Rather than discussing the Eucharist as a self-identical entity, Ratramnus places it within the semantic range of imago.34 He emphasized that the bread and wine signified through likeness to the body and blood

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in the manner of an image.35 An image, however, is different from the thing it represents. Both sides of the Carolingian eucharistic controversy drew heavily upon Augustinian sign theory, considering “the phenomenal aspect of reality”36 as they pondered the implications of sensual experience with respect to the Eucharist. For Pascasius, material reality could be independent of physical apprehension and thus be a hidden, albeit present, truth; this led him to see the spiritual in the physical. For Ratramnus, material reality inhered in entities endowed with their proper qualities, and thus truth was hidden within symbolism; this led him to posit a difference between sensual perception and mental understanding. In both cases, material reality was seen as representative and secondary to the true reality it represents. Berengar of Tours’ eucharistic thinking also drew upon Augustine’s sign theory, but his reliance extended crucially to an unprecedented consideration of Augustine’s treatment of the sacraments. Ratramnus and Pascasius had largely ignored Augustine’s sacramental definitions in favor of Isidore of Seville’s (d. 636) explanation that the sacrament was a sacrum secretum, a spiritual reality signified by a physical token. One enduring contribution of Berengar to sacramental theology is his irreversible promotion of the Augustinian definition of the Eucharist and of sacraments as signs, sacra signa.37 Berengar thus fundamentally reversed the Isidorian tradition that had held sway in the early Middle Ages when he moved the sacrament from the position of thing to that of sign,38 contending that after consecration the bread and wine were transformed into signs (sacraments) of the true Christic body. Berengar argued that since a consideration of bread and wine as signs postulates the reality of that which they signify, a real though not physical presence of Christ is affirmed and available to mental perception. If, on the other hand, bread and wine were actually to become Christ’s flesh and blood, they would be canceled as signs.39 For Berengar reality was a matter of interpretation since, following Augustine, signs are by definition both sensible and distinct from that which they intelligibly signify. It was precisely this distinction between sign and signified that Berengar’s opponents, the partisans of real presence, vigorously opposed with respect to the Eucharistic sign. For them the bread and the wine retained only the appearance of bread and wine: they were the body and the blood of Christ really, ontologically, and substantially, so that the Eucharist was a sign of itself, a self-signifying sign.40 The Augustinian corpus was once again heavily cited in support of the fact that Christ existed in the Eucharist in veritate vel in figura, but also in an attempt to challenge Berengar’s own manifest reliance upon Augustine. The controversial nature of

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the Augustinian legacy becomes palpable when Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129), having entered the controversy in his exchanges with Alger of Liège, denounced in the Commentaria in Evangelium S. Joannis those who held a symbolic view of the eucharistic bread and wine as Platonicians and careless adulators of Augustine.41 The challenge of negotiating the Augustinian dichotomy between sensible and intelligible, between sign and signifed, between appearance and reality, fell to the camp of Berengar’s opponents. Lanfranc of Bec (d. 1089), to name a premier spokesman for this opposition,42 understood that the theory of real presence negated the Eucharist’s claim as a sign. He did not wish reality to eliminate all elements of signification in the Eucharist, for he agreed that the bread and wine symbolized Christ’s sacrifice.43 Yet he was unable to reconcile figura (signification) with (self-signifying) veritas using semiotic reasoning. In considering Berengar’s association of Augustine’s definitions of sign (in De Doctrina Christina) and of sacrament as sign (in De civitate Dei), Lanfranc transposed the semiotic argument to the realms of typology and ritual. First Lanfranc insisted that Berengar’s citations of Augustine’s passage in De civitate Dei on sacraments as signs were grossly removed from their original contexts. Indeed, Augustine was not dealing with the neotestamentary Eucharist but with the sacrifices offered by biblical Jews, sacrifices the bishop of Hippo held to be the visible offerings, that is, the sacred signs, of the invisible sacrifice.44 With this argument, Lanfranc placed the discussion on the plane of figurative exegesis and segued into a consideration by Berengar of Augustine’s letter to Bishop Boniface. In this letter Augustine had famously stated that if sacraments did not bear some resemblance to the things of which they were the sacraments they would not be sacraments. Augustine then added that this resemblance was the reason why sacraments receive the names of the things of which they are sacraments. Thus, the sacrament of Christ’s body is called Christ’s body, and similarly the sacrament of Christ’s blood is called Christ’s blood.45 Augustine here was blurring his own definition of words as conventional signs, making words act more like natural signs that bring something to the mind as a consequence of themselves.46 One could argue that Lanfranc and the realists were closer in their Eucharistic reasoning to the Augustinian semiotics of the natural sign that, like smoke or a footprint, entertains a consequential, causal, or iconic relationship to its thing—a signifying process, incidentally, that Augustine claimed not to wish to consider.47 So, in confronting Berengar’s citation of and reliance upon Augustine’s letter to Boniface, Lanfranc distinguished between Augustine’s statement about resemblance and his linguistic ­analysis.

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Like Berengar, Lanfranc read Augustine’s argument of similitude as distinguishing sign from thing. To do away with this difference, however, he conjured up a new meaning for sacramentum, iusiurandum, thus moving the Eucharist away from the world of signs and toward that of ritual. As iusiurandum the sacrament is realized through the sanction of ritual.48 In addressing the linguistic part of the argument, on the other hand, Lanfranc totally endorsed, indeed furthered, Augustine’s natural semiotics, noting with Aristotelian undertones that Christ’s flesh and blood are called “flesh and blood,” not only because they are essentially the same—even as they differ immensely in qualities—but also because in speech the signifying element is called by the name of that which it signifies.49 The example he adduced to support the sameness of things designated by the same word enabled Lanfranc to move seamlessly toward an ideology of immanence within the signifier whereby a thing can be itself and simultaneously be a figure of that which it is. Thus Lanfranc wrote that after his resurrection Christ appeared to two disciples, representing to them that he had a longer way to go, by which he meant that in a few days he would ascend to heaven. Since such a journey would be foreign to human experience, it had to be communicated figuratively to the disciples. Christ is therefore the sign of himself. Whether he pretends to have a longer trip to make or ascends to heaven, he is truly both man and God. No one would be so foolish as to believe that the Christ of earthly travel was not the true Christ on the grounds that the fiction of a terrestrial trip meant that it would be only the true Christ, another than himself, who would be ascending to heaven.50 As a linguistic effort such neotestamentary typology only exemplified the conflation of sign and thing, for only the Wordmade-flesh and the Eucharist could enact such identity. Lanfranc’s reasoning in the case of the traveling Christ is not unlike other linguistic discussions found in his De corpore et sanguine. Quoting Augustine who defined “ice” as snow hardened and dried by centuries of being, even though snow is in fact fluid and humid, Lanfranc illustrates the human habit of giving to one thing the name of another from which it is made, even if the produced thing has been transformed, changed from its original thing.51 Once again, Lanfranc accepted Augustine’s natural semiotics with the result, for the twelfth century at least, that the conception of the material sign in such naturalistic terms expanded its signifying role in day-to-day life. As this latter argument shows, Lanfranc also relied upon ontology, which he may have derived from Aristotle’s Categories. Lanfranc was able to speak of essence and qualities, of primary and secondary substances. Since Aristotle had established categories to deal with things in the world, Lanfranc’s use

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of the category of substance to describe the change in the Eucharist implied that this change had to occur in actuality.52 The notions of real presence and transubstantiation, which were ultimately upheld as proper doctrine, brought into clear focus both modes of signification and the status of appearance and reality, thus creating a specific problem with respect to representation in general.53 When defending himself against his opponents, Berengar had riled them by remonstrating that those who believed in real presence must also accept that man was made in God’s image according to his bodily features, and that God had made himself into three parts.54 Indeed by being, rather than merely symbolizing, the real presence of Christ’s body and blood, the Eucharist was making yet another doctrinal point, the irrelevance of visible appearance. It was thus a defining moment when, in 1059, Berengar, condemned for emphasizing a nonliteral understanding of the Eucharistic sacrament on the altar, was made to swear an oath confessing a belief in real presence in which he asserted that after consecration the bread and wine were the true body and blood of the Lord, available to be broken by priests’ hands or crushed by the teeth of the faithful sensualiter, in the realm of the physical senses.55 The sense cited to “prove” real presence was touch, contact. Vision could not be invoked since the identicality of the eucharistic sign with its reality challenged the presumptive mimetic efficacy of visual representation.56 As William of St. Thierry put it, following Augustine: “for something to be an image it is necessary that it deviate from its model, for if it were not so, it would be identitas and not imago.”57 Imago, as William reminds us, belongs to the physical world of signs, identitas, to the metaphysical world of reality. Thus as the eucharistic host acquired identity and reality, the representational status of imago seemed to come into question. The situation was both crucial and ironic: Eucharist and incarnation were in conflict even as they both rested upon the primacy of an incarnate God. In eucharistic terms, real presence meant Christic invisibility, whereas in incarnational theology, Christ was the image of God who had taken human figure in the person of his Son. —  The question became how to distinguish imago from identitas and vice versa, without compromising the boundary between physics and metaphysics. Identitas, identity, involved reflections on the absolute sameness of substance between God and Christ. As with real presence in the Eucharist, this identity of substance between God and the Son endangered the possibility of image and problematized the logic of incarnation.

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Schoolmen were very clear, as their trinitarian debates amply demonstrate, that there was a danger in saying that the Son was the visible image of God, for such a statement would make the Son appear to be different from God, who was not an image. They clarified the rapport between identity and image through the metaphor of the seal.58 In the seal’s matrix there is the substance, that is, the gold or the bronze onto which is engraved a figure. In terms of the metaphor, the substance is God; the figure engraved into this substance and therefore consubstantial with it, is the Son. In his Commentaria in Evangelium Sancti Johannis, Rupert of Deutz expanded the Pauline formula from Hebrews 1:3 in those terms: To quote the Apostle, the image of God, the figure of His substance, is the Word, that is, the divine Son engendered of God, called figure by virtue of resemblance. The Father is one God with the Word as the gold or the bronze, and the royal image in it, are recognized to be one seal.59 In his commentaries on the Psalms, Gerhoch of Reichersberg (d. ca. 1170) also explicated the Pauline epistle by means of the seal. However, whereas Rupert had concerned himself only with the divine persons, and thus confined his metaphor to the seal die, Gerhoch stretched the trope to consider the divine seal in action, as it imprints itself on humankind: You are like the substance of gold, and your Son, the splendor of your glory and the figure of your substance, appears in the purest gold, like a royal or papal image, imprinting itself as an incorruptible seal on every one of his servants so as to conform them to him. You, Father, you accomplish this act of sealing by, with and in the Son, when you configure your servants to him.60 This engraved image, this figure of substance, was also called the perfect seal of God by Hugh Eterianus (d. 1180), in the treatise he wrote against the Byzantine theology of the Holy Spirit.61 The true seal of God is the Word in that it represents the Father in himself . . . It is obvious that the Son (the Word) exists as the most perfect seal of God, fully coterminous with the Father. . . . Thus, the Son is the seal that matches with absolute authenticity; he is the character and full representation of the graven Father, not because he is the image of God, in the sense that God would be an image similar to Christ, but because he is the same as the inner depths of God’s

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wisdom. He is excellence in the bosom of the Father, that is, he participates of God’s universals which he co-produces with him, and reveals. He is thus wholly the only engendered heir of the Father, the sign of his full inner being. An effigy must express the nature of its model. It would not be appropriate for a statue of Socrates to resemble the sculptor; indeed, if the statue fails to show Socrates’ calf, flat nose, and bulging eyes, it would not be considered a statue of him. . . . The doctors of the Church distinguish between image and character. . . . When I see a ship, I immediately understand that it had been the work of an artisan, and that the ship is the glorious image of his art, but does not represent the character of the artisan. No more than the ship encompasses the figure of the artisan, which is human. Similarly, they say that man is the glory and the image of God who made him; he is not the character of the person of the Creator but only an index of his will and activity. They are right in their belief that only the Son is the character of the Father. The Son himself said: “Who sees me, sees the Father, not the Father himself, but what the Father is.”62 Eterianus’ text is striking in its attempt at distinguishing between several modes and effects of representation. The agency of the engraved figure allowed expression of essence and revelation of character. It was because the Son was an engraved figure of substance, a perfect seal, that Eterianus could conclude his demonstration with Christ’s statement that “who sees the Son sees the Father, not the Father himself but that which the Father is.” The meaning of character was no longer that which it had been for ­Pascasius: the form of a letter, a faithful conduit of meaning. In the twelfth century, character denoted the immediacy existing between substance and figure, as if the form referred to by character and figura was visible only from the inner viewpoint of the substance it characterized. Character was the inherent principle that informed the talent of the artisan and willed the visual expression of his design. Imago was the revelation of t­ alent through the imprinting of the design. The imprinted form, as Alanus of Lille put it, makes its thing appear better: Sicut enim forma rei impressa facit rem magis apparere.63 This imago was thus different from that other image, the simulacrum, which bears a resemblance to its model but not to the artist responsible for its manufacture.64 Only Christ is character, figura, and imago, at once seal matrix (divine) and seal impression (human). Pure substance, pure reality cannot be wholly grasped by a human mind. Yet, the engraved figure of Christ animates reality, brings it within the sphere, if not of the fully knowable, at least of the conceivable.65 But until the seal

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is impressed, as in the creation of man and in the incarnation, the figure engraved within it remains invisible and principally characterized by the identity of its substance. Thus, the seal metaphor articulates how an image may have identity, be consubstantial rather than representational, be intrinsic and not readily visible, and yet remain an image. Through the metaphor of the seal, the Son is understood as the invisible image of God (identical in substance) and as the image of the invisible God (a figuration of His substance). The currency of the seal metaphor during the twelfth century renders the attacks on Abelard’s own use of the analogy particularly noteworthy. Abelard (d. 1142), an enthusiastic proponent of the seal metaphor, applied its explanatory power to the relationship between the three persons of the Trinity. The first instance of such a usage appeared in his Sententiae Florianenses (early 1130s), which analogizes the Trinity to a bronze seal.66 In the slightly later Sententiae Petri Abaelardi, the seal metaphor was further expanded in the context of defining identity and difference with respect to the persons of the Trinity.67 First comes the gold, which receives the sculpted form and becomes a seal; then, it is imprinted to the wax and becomes a sealing device. Thus, gold, seal, and sealing are identical because they are one in number and of the same essence, but they are three with respect to properties: it is one thing to be gold, another to be a seal, yet another to be the sealing capacity. By juxtaposition with this trinity among created things, it is easily possible to infer the Trinity in the divine substance.68 These sententiae were not personally composed by Abelard. They may have been dictated by him or resulted from a compilation of notes taken by students during the master’s lectures. Whatever their precise provenance, these sententiae were subsequently used by Abelard to complete his Theologia scholarium (ca. 1132–7), where the seal metaphor was even more fully developed.69 Abelard’s seal metaphor was vigorously opposed by William of St. ­Thierry, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas of Morigny. The list of accu­ sations prepared against Abelard was headed by a chapter entitled: The horrific comparison with the bronze seal, and use of “genus” and “species” to discuss the Trinity.70 Yet, the “similitudo” was orthodox, simply highlighting the fact that a thing, the seal, might have three different properties while remaining singular. The seal is at once made of brass, is engraved with an image that endows it with the capacity to seal (sigillum ad sigillan-

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das litteras), and is an imprinting device (cere imprimatur). Abelard was asserting that it was legitimate to consider the modulation of property within the divine. He argued further that the relationships between such properties could be similar to that between genus and species, so that the bronze can exist without the image, but not vice versa. There is the bronze, a natural substance in which the craftsman works and engraves the form of the royal image, thus making the seal. The seal is, when needed, impressed to the wax to seal letters. Thus, in the seal the substance is the bronze of which it is made, and the figure is the form of the royal image, and the seal itself is made and shaped by these two—the substance and the form; by their convergence in itself, the seal is put together and completed. Yet the seal is nothing but shaped bronze. In essence, the bronze which is the substance of the bronze seal, and the seal whose substance it is, are the same thing, but bronze and seal are distinct in their properties so that one is particular to the bronze, the other to the bronze seal. Although bronze and seal are identical in essence, the bronze seal comes from the bronze, but the bronze does not come from the bronze seal, and the bronze is the substance of the seal, but the seal is not the substance of the bronze.71 Finally the seal metaphor enabled Abelard to formulate his dissatisfaction with aspects of Augustine’s Trinitarian imagery regarding the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Whereas Augustine had insisted upon a transcendental definition of the Spirit as the mutual love existing between God and Christ, Abelard wished to stress the Spirit’s immanent dimension as the ­divine love gifted to creation. For the Spirit affects man in the same way that a seal stamps its mark on wax.72 Abelard’s opponents were perhaps concerned that his evocation of genus and species to discuss the Trinity was too directly contrary to Augustine’s explicit prohibition against using such concepts with reference to the relationship between persons of the Trinity.73 They may also have feared that Abelard was introducing dangerous distinctions within the Trinity. It is nevertheless the case that Abelard’s chief antagonist, Bernard of Clairvaux, was himself partial to the seal metaphor. In his second sermon on the nativity (ca. 1140), Bernard described the creation of man as a union of earth and soul, and the human soul as the seat of the human senses. He explicitly referred to the act of creation as being a manual gesture of imprinting that united human and divine qualities. He then lamented that in man, though divinely sealed, for he had been created in

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God’s image and resemblance, the imprint, while still warm, had been broken and the resemblance thus dissolved. A bandit came who promised the ignorant a better seal and who thereby broke the seal imprinted by the divine hand, thus severing man from his affinity to justice and to truth. In Bernard’s vision, however, God offered to make a new mixture and to seal it with a new, much stronger seal, a seal that is not in his image but is his very image, the splendor and glory of his substance, not made but engendered. This seal would not break, and the new mixture would be triune, so as to evoke the Trinity, and would be composed of the Son, who had always been in God and was God, of the soul, and of the body.74 In this ­simile, the strong seal unites indissolubly the three elements that compose the Christic person. Bernard’s seal metaphor differs from Abelard’s in that its focuses on Christ’s dual nature and his salvific impact on humankind. It appears, therefore, that the seal metaphor was acceptable when deployed to explicate anthropological matters, that is, the filiation between the Godhead and Christ and between Christ and the human creature. As we shall see, the twelfth-century metaphor was frequently associated with commentaries on the creation of man in the image of God (Gn 1:27). —  Schoolmen’s purposeful reliance upon the seal metaphor to probe the dialectics of substance and form, immanence and transcendence, at work in the incarnational logic of Christian thought is particularly significant with respect to several developments in twelfth-century culture and behavior: the representation of the Holy Face, that is, of the visage of Christ; an obsessive concern about the ontological status of man; an awareness of the malleability of the human fabric; and the diffusion of signs endowed with the capacity both to verify personal commitment and to embody personhood. (We call such signs, signs of identity, but, given the medieval semantics of identity, such wording is potentially confusing). In the course of the twelfth century, there arose in the West a cult for a specific type of acheiropoietic image (one not made by human hands), a cloth imprinted with the features of Christ.75 This cloth, known as the Veronica or the vera icon, was kept in St. Peter’s in Rome, where its presence is documented with some certainty from the mid-twelfth century onward.76 The motley of legends that surrounded the origin of the cloth progressively converged to form the standardized western story in which a pious woman of Jerusalem, Veronica, accompanied Christ to Calvary, offering him a towel on which he left an imprint of his features as he dried his face. This compassionate gesture of Veronica is first recorded in a late

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twelfth-century chivalric epic by Robert de Borron, Légende de Joseph d’Arimathie (ca. 1185–1215).77 Of significance in the making of the story is the evolution during the twelfth century that transformed the cloth into an imprinted image. First, the nature of the Veronica was recorded not as an image but as a textile, a sudarium.78 In the Ordo of Canon Benedict of 1143, the cloth was said to be the sudarium Christi quod vocatur Veronica.79 A contemporary mention by Peter the Deacon in his Liber de locis sanctis (ca. 1140) was slightly more explicit, describing the sudarium at St. Peter’s as the handkerchief with which Christ wiped his face.80 In Petrus Mallius’ mid-twelfth-century description, given in the Descriptio Basilicae Vaticanae he wrote for Pope Alexander III, the sudarium was presented as the cloth “with which, according to tradition, Christ dried his Holy Face before the Passion, when his sweat became like drops of blood falling down to the earth.”81 These earliest Western appreciations of the sudarium convey sensi­ tivity to its status as a contact relic. The sudarium was an object. It was not until the end of the twelfth century that an English chronicler, Roger of Howden, who had accompanied the French King Philip Augustus on crusade, introduced a visual element to the description of the sudarium. Howden reports that on his way back from outremer (1191) Philip Augustus stopped in Rome where he was received with great honor by Pope Celestine III: And Pope Celestine showed to the king of France and to his companions the heads of the Apostles Peter and Paul and the Veronica, that is, a linen cloth which Jesus Christ impressed on his face; in this linen, the imprint is still so clear that the Face of Christ seems to be right there.82 The Veronica had become an iconic cloth, an imprint on which the impression of the face of Christ appeared as if it were present. Writing about 1200, Gervase of Tilbury described the Veronica at St. Peter’s as the linen cloth imprinted with Christ’s likeness (lintheo impressam habuisse dominici vultus effigiem), although he was relying upon legends that saw in Veronica a woman who had painted a portrait of Christ out of gratitude for his healing of her condition.83 Thus Gervase transformed the painting into an imprint. Gervase’s English compatriot and contemporary, Gerald of Wales, described Veronica as a woman who had so intensely desired and prayed to see Christ that when he saw her, he lifted the hem of her robe and printed his face there.84 By the late twelfth century, descriptions of the sudarium at St. Peter’s and the legends of St. Veronica had progressively culminated in an understanding of the Veronica as an acheiropoietic image

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generated by impression and preserved as an imprint. That the imprinted image came to be conceived as embodying the presence of its Christic model and thus as immanently transformative of the material upon which it was impressed is attested by Matthew Paris, who reported that during a procession the Veronica had miraculously moved. This miraculous sign of life allegedly prompted Innocent III (in ca. 1216) to compose a prayer in which he established a mimetic parallel between the memento imprinted by Christ of his face on Veronica’s handkerchief, and those affected by this memento, the praying faithful, also signed, in the words of the Psalmist (Psalm 4), by the light of the Lord’s face: “God, to us who are signed with the light of your Face, you have wished to bequeath in your memory the image imprinted on the linen at the request of Veronica.”85 From the late twelfth century onward, the portrait-of-Christ-as-animprint entered the Western European panoply of sacred images.86 As a paradigm of revelation, the imprinted face of Christ fostered a strong devotion to the Holy Face and to the promise of its glorious vision. Bernard of Clairvaux played a decisive role in promoting devotion to the Holy Face. Significantly, however, when Bernard spoke of contemplation and of revelation in his own Sermons, he did so not in optical terms but within a typology of contact.87 In his sermon about Isaiah’s vision, Bernard urged the faithful desirous to see God to place him as a seal on their hearts.88 When he considered the divine knowledge acquired by such a great saint as Paul, Bernard asked: “What is revelation, but a kiss; or rather the kiss of a kiss, since a kiss from the mouth would involve reaching the glorious Face, and such a face-to-face kiss might be exchanged only between the Godhead and his son.”89 Bernard also invoked Christ’s divinely imprinted kiss to account for the rational soul and its capacity for knowledge and the love of truth; these qualities are like two lips that God’s virtue and wisdom imprinted upon the soul, so that the soul too has two lips, reason and will, with which she can kiss her Christic spouse.90 In another sermon, Bernard praised the soul upon which Christ had implanted both of his feet. Such a soul would be recognizable by two signs or footprints referring to the divine vestiges of fear and hope, both of which are themselves images of judgment and mercy. Kissing these footprints would endow one with a balanced attitude, at once fearful and hopeful, in contemplating his peccant life.91 A few further points are noteworthy in considering the growing cult of the Veronica and Bernard’s dialectic of touch and vision. First, the imprint of the Christic face on a piece of cloth is at once an image that depicts, a trace and a physical object recording a touch, and a contact proving

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the reality of the body. Thus, the imprint enables a metamorphosis: a contact is rendered visual, a phenomenon that, as we have seen, the Eucharistic sign could not accomplish. Second, such contact mediated and organized a phenomenology of presence, to quote Roger of Howden,92 making personal presence at the same time historically situated and extratemporal. An imprint, for example the Veronica, was an image validated as an ongoing receptacle of God. Third, this conception of the imprint insisted that the true original of the image is Christ himself, the engraved figure of divine substance who thereby reveals his Face, who becomes v­ isible and performative, by imprinting himself of his own volition. Such an image is acheiropoietic, not made by human hand; such an image is alive, and in fact may subsequently form other real images by imprinting itself. The most important of the real images imprinted by Christ was man, who was thereby granted the likeness and resemblance that he is biblically held to have with God. Twelfth-century intellectuals devoted more commentaries to the iconic status of man than did other medieval thinkers. They linked this iconic status directly to the formative imprint of the divine seal upon the pliable human matter: soul, reason, heart, even body.93 Very explicitly, man was an image, but not an image of substance, as Christ was. As image, man was an image of an image, that is, an imprint of resemblance, as Hervé de Bourg-Dieu (d. 1150) wrote: Man should not cover his head, that is, he ought not have a sign of servitude or of power above him, but a sign of liberty, for he has nothing above him but God. Because he is God’s image and glory. Image, that is, the imprint of resemblance and God’s glory is visible in man, because one God created one man.94 Honorius Augustodunensis, in his commentary on Song of Songs (bef. 1132), also emphasized the imprinted nature of man as icon, expanding on its implications for human life. As an imprint of the divine seal, the inner man was made in God’s image and resemblance. For Honorius, an image is visible and similar to its model. Thus, Honorius proposed that man’s very iconic status offered him the ability both to contemplate the Trinitarian God imprinted within him and to ponder the dual nature of Christ whom he resembles. Moreover, these activities kept the man-image in good shape. In fact, belief in the unification of the divine and of the human in Christ resulted in an ongoing Christic imprinting upon the ­believer. In stressing the reiterative link between the seal and the imprint, between Christ and the faithful, Honorius appears to suggest that human

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creation and divine incarnation were recurrent and mutually supportive events, predicated upon the power of the imprint to instigate replication and reflection. The image engraved into the seal delivers the image to the imprinted wax. The seal is Christ’s humanity, and the image engraved in the seal is Christ’s divinity; the wax, however is the human soul, made in the image of God. Christ, as it is written (Coloss. I, 15), is the image of the invisible God, because he is equal to the Father. God imprinted this image to man when he created the inner man in the image and resemblance of God. In the image, the Trinity is perceived; in the resemblance, the equality. He who considers Christ as equal to the Father shapes the image of Christ in his heart. Christ imprints his image to him who believes in a human nature coexistent with a divine one.95 In speaking of man as an imprint, Honorius and other schoolmen conveyed the sense that the divine seal produced an image of formal but not substantial likeness.96 However, when scholars at Laon, and Rupert of Deutz, Abelard, Gilbert of Holland, Peter Lombard, Peter of Blois, and the canons Hugh and Richard of St. Victor analogized the creation of man to an act of godly imprinting, they tended to deemphasize this ontological distinction by stressing that the impression of the seal upon its receptacle was generated through contact, and that consequently the seal deposited a mark (impressio, vestigium), which remained as the constitutive marker of an original divine presence. These schoolmen considered that the imprinted image was not simply a copy of an exemplar, but an actual transplant. Rupert of Deutz is particularly clear in differentiating the impressed iconic mark from the mode of its resemblance to its ma(r)ker: the mark made directly by God on man’s soul is indelible, but resemblance to God, which is to be maintained by man’s will, may subsequently lose its shape. The rational creature can fail to retain that which is made in the likeness of God; but she cannot lose that which was created in the image of God. Why? Because the imitation of divine goodness, by means of which resemblance to God is retained, requires the creature’s will. Whereas reason, which is sculpted by the impression of God’s image upon the human soul, emanates from the sole art of the Creator.97 Whatever the fate of its formal resemblance, the mark of the divine remains present within the human fabric. The western twelfth-century seal

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metaphor did not simply express the transcendental relationship between form and substance, type and copy, sign and thing. Rather, predicated upon the very process of imprinting, the metaphor produced a semiotic of immanence whereby the image, in resulting from gradations of contact and presence, ontologically participated in its model. It seems that, in the hands of twelfth-century scholars, the seal metaphor clarified the doctrine of participation that, left untheorized by Augustine, had led him to posit that God’s creature existed but had no reality. The key contribution of the seal metaphor therefore was to provide a scenario whereby reality is the mark of existence, as an originating and indelible contact endowed with concrete procedures for the activation and actualization of personhood. The imprint and its logic of immanence empowered ontological concepts of man with the belief that there was a real basis for human nature. The basis resided within a person’s spiritual, though not bodiless, makeup. The imprint and its logic of molding, in implying a notion of human malleability, fostered a three-fold set of self-perceptions. In one, individuals became acutely aware of their plasticity as embodied beings. Walter Map, writing in the second half of the twelfth century, related the story of a French potentate who afflicted his neighbors with fierce violence. He had a generous wife who abhorred his tyranny and seized every opportunity to undo his abuses. When her husband was finally arrested for his crimes and condemned to the gallows, the good wife, who was pregnant and near delivery, threw herself at the feet of the judge and begged for mercy. The criminal’s death sentence was annulled, but lest his wickedness should seem to be passed over without rebuke, his right ear was cut off. Within four days, a son was born to the couple, lacking his right ear. Map concluded that this birth revealed the extent of the wife’s sympathetic nature.98 The effectiveness of his tale, which Map wrote “might not un­ reasonably be thought credible,” rested on the assumption that sensory cognition and generation were cognate faculties whose physiological operations were similar and reciprocal so that pregnant mothers might imprint their fetuses with the forms of objects they saw or imagined.99 In the second set of self-perceptions, individuals conceived that they were susceptible to change, by replicating models and welcoming their ­impact upon themselves. When Hugh of St. Victor urged men to reform themselves, that is, to restore God’s image within themselves, he suggested that they allow the imprint of models of the godly life offered by good men.100 In the third set of self-perceptions, individuals realized that the boundaries of their selves were porous and that they were receptive, open, and

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indeed perhaps vulnerable to encounters that would become part of them, emotionally and physically. Anselm of Bec experienced friendship as a force issuing from an inner marking: “He who is imprinted on my heart like a seal on wax, how could he be removed from my memory?”101 Francis of Assisi is often said to have been the first stigmatic (1224); he may have been the first person to have borne marks resembling Christ’s wounds that were not self-inflicted but were actually experienced as imprinted; he is the first saint whose wounds were officially recognized by the church as Christ’s.102 Francis, however, was not the first person to display marks of suffering that were considered to resemble Christ’s wounds. A biography by Peter Damian and an obituary sermon by Bernard of Clairvaux mention that Dominic Loricatus and Humbert of Igny (both d. 1148) bore the stigmata of Jesus upon their bodies. Similarly the biographer of Stephen of Obazine (d. 1154) remarked on the presence of stigmata on his body.103 Impressionability came to characterize the human body which might thus receive and display the textural effects of imprinting. Experience of the imprint produced the possibility, and the actual occurrence, of resemblance in the flesh, in matter. Reality was no longer to be seen as immaterial, and in consequence there emerged the possibility of an affinity between God and his creation, that is, between thing and sign. Hugh of St. Victor, for instance, concluded that there was a double relationship ­between creator and creature. One, predicated upon transcendence, was existential, that is, the creature owed its existence to God. The other, predi­cated upon participation, was essential, that is, God was parent to the world, imminent by virtue of impression (in the case of man) and vestigial (in the case of the rest of the creation).104 On the basis of such a kinship between the world and divine reality, Hugh imputed to worldly objects a capacity to lead to a knowledge of the real. As he put it: cognita, cognata— that is, known things are kin.105 The concept of the imprinted image legitimated an experientially based knowledge of the real. Hugh of St. Victor in his Didascalicon, uniquely in the Middle Ages, classified the mechanical arts as a third division of philosophy. He was not alone, however, in granting the mechanical arts a significant place in the total scheme of knowledge. In the 1110s, Honorius Augustodunensis, Rupert of Deutz, and Theophilus (in his De diversis artibus) had defended the dignity of the mechanical arts.106 All four argued that the manufacture of artifacts offered Christians a way of coping with the natural world and of gaining moral knowledge, and that the mechanical arts thus were valuable in the Christian project of restoring man’s likeness to God.107 Abbot Suger spoke and acted no differently when, in his De Administratione, and in the abbey

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church of St. Denis that he caused to be built, he described and enacted a process of attaining truth through artistic production.108 Matter had acquired meaning and real being. Reality had now entered the visible world of the senses. Reality was to be understood not as a different order of being but as part of a continuum of being of which only the most exalted element remains invisible. The imprint provided a rhetorical and hermeneutical device for the articulation of this shift from transcendence to immanence. As object, the imprint acted as a locus of agency, bringing the implications of immanence within actual human experience, modifying the boundaries of the real, thereby bringing reality to representation. The cases already examined of the Veronica and of the stigmata had involved the representation of Christ. Use of the imprint for representational purposes also extended to men and women. In situations requiring proof of commitment, persons were now represented, and the results of their deeds were confirmed by impressed images. Seals testified to written agreements;109 artifacts worn by pilgrims proved that their pilgrimage had been accomplished.110 This recourse to the imprint as a personal sign hinged upon several modes of reference. The authorship and authority of the seal inhered in its contact with the seal user. With an imprint, representation was legitimated because imprinting could be staged as an act that proceeded through contact with and from an origin. The personal participation of the seal owner was often rendered more tangible by the incorporation of bodily marks within the actual wax of the seal.111 Thus, the imprint also secured continuing presence of the sealer who was not simply represented but was understood as a presence representing itself. Finally, sealers described their seals as being their imago. They conceived of a resemblance between their seals and themselves. Yet seal iconography was stereotypical. Bishops were all depicted in episcopal vestments and could not be individually identified by the image engraved on their seals; the same may be said of royal, papal, abbatial, and lordly seals. The resemblance was intrinsic, inhering in the nature of the sealer and of his or her seal: both were imprinted images, retaining a trace of their origins. The twelfth-century seal was very much an ontological image, an iconic sign incorporating properties of the object of its reference. —  Twelfth-century schoolmen substantially revised the traditional concept of transcendental reality. The trope of the imprint seems to have ­permitted them both to address the issue of the locus of reality and to experiment with cognitive modes that realigned definitions of and conditions

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for the intelligibility of the real. In conclusion, I would like very briefly to suggest the extent of the conceptual power of the imprint and of the meanings of its deployment in twelfth-century culture. Schoolmen reconfigured reality along lines of immanence, but they did not abandon the hierarchical axis of transcendentalism, for this they could not have done without jeopardizing the central tenets of Christian thought and tradition. The paradigm of the imprint afforded them a means of considering the dialectics of immanence and transcendence; the rapport between the optical and the tactile, contact and absence, the physi­ cal and the metaphysical. Predicated upon a physical apposition to its referent, the imprint enables the transformation of the tactile into the visual and forces the thought that there is a fundamental unity between the ­visible and the tangible, thereby insisting on sense both as meaning and as sensory perception. The imprinted seal is an undoubted product, the legacy of a contact, that of the die upon the wax. But for the imprint to be actualized, the die must be lifted up; it has, one might say, to disappear. This makes possible an insistence upon the necessity of contact with the originator, on the authenticity of presence, while also accounting for the later apparent absence of that originator. As such, the imprint could be, and was, harnessed to participate in the logic of incarnation, in the economy of real presence, in the strategy of representation, all of which in fact entailed an undeniable absence. The imprint could thus impart a graded knowledge of reality even while its ultimate principle remained hidden. Amazingly, the metaphor selected to interpret the fundamental act of creation involved a movement from matter (the die) to matter (the stuff receiving the imprint), rather than from idea to matter. What the use of the imprint metaphor reveals to us is a willingness on the part of twelfth-­ century thought to be experimental rather than axiomatic. Although the notion of imprint engaged and interpreted abstract relations, it belonged firmly to a science of the concrete. The imprint did not dematerialize the sign; to the contrary, it imbued images with a decided corporeality. In so doing, the imprint effectively introduced the matter of the significance of matter as a locus of reality. Notes 1.  A critical survey of the field is available in Elizabeth Mertz, “Semiotic Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (2007), pp. 337–53. 2.  Richard J. Parmentier, trained at Chicago by Michael Silverstein, and himself a leading practitioner and eloquent theoretician of semiotic anthropology, has

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recently presented a remarkably thorough and comprehensive analysis of “The Pragmatic Semiotics of Culture,” Semiotica 116 (1997), pp. 1–115. Parmentier’s essay, with its historiographical and theoretical concerns, and its specific examples illustrating the applications of semiotics as a methodological tool for sociocultural research, holds a special interest for historians in general, and utility for medievalists in particular. 3.  See Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P., “The Symbolist Mentality,” in Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West (Chicago and London, 1968), pp. 99–161, at pp. 134–5, 139–40, and “The Platonisms of the Twelfth Century,” pp. 49–98; Michel Pastoureau, Histoire symbolique du Moyen Age occidental (Paris, 2004). Focusing on twelfth-century philology as it pertains to scripture, and relying upon statements by Hugh of St. Victor, Peter of Poitiers, and Alain of Lille, Friedrich Ohly distinguishes two levels of signification: one in which the relationship between the word (vox, e.g., stone) and the thing (res) is exhausted by the literal meaning of the thing as known from nature, and the other in which the thing itself points to something higher; see his “On the Spiritual Sense of the Word in the Middle Ages, ‘Sensus Spiritualis,’” in Sensus Spiritualis: Studies in Medieval Significs (Chicago, 2005), pp. 1–30. 4.  On the methodological itinerary that led me to semiotic anthropology, see Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, “Medieval Identity: A Sign and a Concept,” American Historical Review 105 (2000), pp. 1489–533, at pp. 1511–21, and When Ego Was Imago: Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2011), pp.55–65. See a review of my approach in Richard Parmentier, “Representing Semiotics in the New Millenium,” Semiotica 142:1–4 (2002), pp. 291–314, at pp. 305–7. Semiotic approaches to the study of medieval semiotics have mostly focused on poetics, lin­ guistics, literature, grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy; Semiotica Mediaevalia, ed. Jonathan D. Evans, Semiotica 63:1–2 (1987), pp. 1–239. 5.  See a useful caveat in Jonathan D. Evans, “Medieval Studies and Semiotics: Perspectives on Research,” in Semiotica Mediaevalia, pp. 13–32 at p. 26. 6. See another useful caveat in Parmentier, “Representing Semiotics,” at p. 294. 7.  In patristic hermeneutics, knowledge of sensible, created things had been a necessary prerequisite for accessing their figurative meaning, but under the Augustinian impulse, things and artifacts became secondary to the transcendental realties they symbolized. The twelfth-century exegetical renewal, which sought to move from parataxis into the formulation of a coherent interpretive sequence, was first tested by physical renderings of biblical edifices. Walter Kahn, “Architecture and Exegesis: Richard of St. Victor’s Ezekiel’s Commentary and its Illustrations,” The Art Bulletin 76 (1994), pp. 53–68; Ohly, “Hugh of Folieto’s ‘Dove Miniature,’” in Sensus Spiritualis, pp. 80–2, where he discusses Adam Scotus, formerly trained as an artist, and his book on the appearance of the Tabernacle; also on Adam Scotus, see Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, Ind., 1964), pp. 180–1; Mary Carruthers, “Moving Images in the Mind’s Eye,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Medieval West, ed. Jeffrey Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton, 2006), pp. 287–305, at pp. 292–4, analyzes the ways in which Hugh of St. Victor was constructing and not merely describing ­Noah’s ark in his moral commentary Libellus de formatione arche.

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8.  It bears emphasis that such considerations differed from the patristic assumption, later reintroduced by Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, that the earthly world bore God’s “signatures.” On “signatures,” see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1973), pp. 17–45; Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca, 1982), p. 32; Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 251–255. I wish to thank Richard Oosterhoff for bringing this work to my attention after he heard this paper at the Conference on “European Transformations, 950–1200” (University of Notre Dame, October 2006). Whereas the theory of signatures posited an analogical resemblance between external forms and ontological essence, twelfth-century semiotics worked out explanatory scenarios for actual relationships involving but not limited to resemblance between model and image and between sign and object. 9.  I use here Jean-Claude Schmitt’s important readjustment of the notion of the “invisible.” Schmitt perceptively remarks that that which is made visible is not the invisible itself but the visual (or imaginal), that is, those mental images that are used to articulate invisibilia. Mental images, however, are different from the invisibilia that, in Schmitt’s opinion, remain radically beyond expression. Hence, he suggests, a more useful polarization would be between the visible world and the mental image, and attention should be given to the process whereby mental images are given material visibility. Schmitt, “Analytical Postscript,” in Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Giselle de Nie, Karl F. Morrison, and Marco Mostert (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 528–32, at p. 530. Interestingly, Schmitt’s caveat espouses Augustine’s distinction between three kinds of vision: through the eyes (objects actually seen); through the spirit (by which a mental image of the absent object is seen); through vision (by which things that have no image, e.g., love, are understood). Augustine made this point in De genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, 12. 6; translation in Thomas F. X. Noble, “The Vocabulary of Vision and Worship in the Early Carolingian Period,” in Seeing the Invisible, pp. 213–37, at p. 219. 10.  For the purpose of this essay, I have limited my examination of seal metaphors and seal usage to the domains of Christic and human ontology, to iconic and bodily representation, and to documentary practices. I have considered the fate of signs of identity at death in Bedos-Rezak, “L’au-delà du soi: Métamorphoses sigillaires en Europe médiévale,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 49 (2006), pp. 337– 58. I am at work on a book, tentatively entitled Marked Matter: The Imprint and the Logic of Signs in Medieval Europe (1150–1350), in which I propose to explore the ways in which the imprint operated as an explanatory, and at times destabilizing mode for the understanding of causality and of reality. 11.  Quoted by David N. Bell, The Image and Likeness: The Augustinian Spirituality of William of Saint-Thierry (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1984), p. 23. 12.  Ernesto Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity,” in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York, 1995), pp. 93– 110, at pp. 95–6; Milton K. Munitz, The Question of Reality (Princeton, 1990), pp. 25–44, 123–7. 13.  In the words of J. F. Anderson, St Augustine and Being (The Hague, 1965), p. 58; quoted by Bell, Image and Likeness, p. 24. On Augustine’s commentaries on creation, see Robert W. Hanning, “‘Ut enim faber . . . sic creator’: Divine Creation

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as Context for Human Creativity in the Twelfth Century,” in Word, Picture, and Spectacle, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1984), pp. 95–149, at pp. 99–102. 14.  Saint Augustine, Opera: Confessionum Libri 13, ed. Luc Verheijen (Turnhout, 1981), 7.11 (17): “esse quidem, quoniam abs te sunt, non esse autem, quoniam id quod es non sunt: id enim vere est quod incommutabiliter manet”; Bell, Image and Likeness, p. 30. 15. Augustine’s theory of signs is primarily expounded in the De Doctrina Christiana Libri 4, ed. Joseph Martin (Turnhout, 1962), bk. 1, 2.2, pp. 7–8; bk. 2, 1.4, 1–5, pp. 32–4; bk. 3, 6.10, 10–14, pp. 83–6. English translation: Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford, 1995). Augustine clearly differentiated natural from conventional signs, giving his full attention to the latter, particularly words, by which men communicate their thoughts to others. Augustine was emphatically not concerned with natural signs, that is, signs (such as smoke, footprints, countenance) that embody aspects of their referents, whereas twelfth-century scholars considered the extent to which signs could signify their causal principles. Of the large bibliography available on Augustinian sign theory, the following studies were particularly helpful: Clifford Ando, “Augustine on Language,” Revue des études augustiniennes 40 (1994), pp. 45–78; Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge, rev. ed. (Lincoln, Neb., 1983) pp. 7–54; De Doctrina Christiana: A Classic of Western Culture, ed. Duane W. H. Arnold and Pamela Bright (Notre Dame, Ind., 1995); J. Engels, “La doctrine du signe chez Saint Augustin,” Studia Patristica 6 (1962), pp. 366–73; Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses. The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany, 1982); B. Darrell Jackson, “The Theory of Signs in St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana,” Revue des études augustiniennes 15 (1969), pp. 9–49; Alfonso Maierù, “‘Signum’ dans la culture médiévale,” Miscellanea Mediaevalia 13 (1981), pp. 51–72, at pp. 55–7; Giovanni Manetti, Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1993), pp. 157–68; R. A. Markus, “St. Augustine on Signs,” Phronesis 2 (1957), pp. 60–83, and “‘Imago’ and ‘Similitudo’ in Augustine,” Revue des études augustiniennes 10 (1964), pp. 125–43, both reprinted in Sacred: Studies on Augustine and Latin Christianity, nos 14 and 16 (Aldershot, 1994); Harrison, The Bible, pp. 28–33. 16. In the example of the ox, Augustine makes it clear that the figurative meaning of “ox” is provided by scripture. On Christian Doctrine, bk. 2, 10.15: “Signs are either proper or figurative. They are called proper when they are used to point out the objects they were designed to point out, as we say bos when we mean an ox, because all men who with us use the Latin tongue call it by this name. Signs are figurative when the things themselves which we indicate by the proper names are used to signify something else, as we say bos, and understand by that syllable the ox, which is ordinarily called by that name; but then further by that ox understand a preacher of the gospel, as Scripture signifies, according to the apostle’s explanation, when it says: “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn.’” On the Augustinian importance of knowing the properties of things, see Harrison, The Bible, pp. 26, 31–2: the author gives a clear account of Augustine’s semiotics but uses the expression “natural signs” to refer to material signs, thus introducing a potential confusion with Augustine’s own natural signs, which are un-

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intentional material signs (e.g., smoke). Ohly, “On the Spiritual Sense of the Word,” passim: the author considers the overall medieval attitude toward the spiritual sense of the word, leaving aside the inflections brought to the allegorical method throughout the period, notably from the twelfth century onward. 17.  “Now he is in bondage to a sign who uses, or pays homage to any significant object without knowing what it signifies: he, on the other hand, who either uses or honors a useful sign divinely appointed, whose force and significance he understands, does not honor the sign which is seen and temporal, but that to which all such signs refer.” On Christian Doctrine, bk. 3, 9.13. 18.  In several places in On Christian Doctrine, Augustine warns against a mere consideration of physical objects and their literal (conventional or proper, as opposed to figurative) meaning, bk. 3, 5.9. Augustine recognized that one needed to know the property of material things to be able to access their figurative meaning, but by positing that true meaning belonged exclusively to the realm of the divine, he in effect deemphasized the import and cognitive instrumentality of created things. Thus, on the qualities of the eagle or the pelican, Augustine advises the reader (in Enarratio Psalmum, 101, s. 1.7–8, and 100, s. 2) not to be preoccupied by the accuracy of the account but to consider their symbolic significance. Harrison, The Bible, 31. Particularly revealing is De Doctrina Christiana, bk. 2, 30.47, entitled “What the mechanical arts contribute to exegetics:” “Now of these arts a very superficial and cursory knowledge is to be acquired, not with a view to practicing them (unless some duty compel us, a matter on which I do not touch at present), but with a view to forming a judgment about them, that we may not be wholly ignorant of what Scripture means to convey when it employs figures of speech derived from these arts.” 19.  See below on Berengar’s unprecedented reliance upon Augustine’s definition of the sacraments, and at note 26 on the twelfth-century “discovery” of Augustine’s use of the term character when discussing baptism and ordination. Discussions of confusing aspects of Augustinian theories can be found in M. B. Pranger, “Augustine and the Return of the Senses,” in Seeing the Invisible, pp. 53–7; BedosRezak, “Medieval Identity,” pp. 1498–9; Thomas S. Maloney, “Is the Doctrina the Source for Bacon’s Semiotics?” in Reading and Wisdom: The “De Doctrina Christiana” of Augustine in the Middle Ages, ed. Edward D. English (Notre Dame, Ind., 1995), pp. 126–42, at p. 133. Instances where Augustine’s reasoning destroys his own distinction between signs and things are examined by Eileen C. Sweeney, “Hugh of St. Victor: The Augustinian Tradition of Sacred and Secular Reading Revised,” in Reading and Wisdom, pp. 61–83, at p. 73. 20.  Pascasius laid out his argument in four texts: two versions of the De corpore et sanguine Domini (831–3, 843–4), and the Epistula ad Fredugardum and the Expositio in Matheo, both of which were written shortly before Pascasius’ death in ca. 859; Celia Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 210–2. See Pascasius Radbertus, De corpore et sanguine domini cum appendice epistola ad Fredugardum, ed. Beda Paulus (Turnhout, 1969), and Expositio in Matheo Libri 12, ed. Paulus (Turnhout, 1984). 21.  On the influence of Augustine’s theory of signs upon Pascasius, see Chazelle, “Figure, Character, and the Glorified Body in the Carolingian Eucharistic Controversy,” Trad 47 (1992), pp. 1–35, at pp. 14–15, where the author empha-

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sizes that Augustine never suggested that a figura contained its referent beneath its physical features; Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983), pp. 258–9. 22. Non enim omnis figura umbra vel falsitas. Pascasius, De corpore, 4, pp. 28–9, and note 26 below. Charakter (Greek) was translated into Latin as figura so that the Greek “charakter tes hupostaseos autou [theou]” became “figura substantiae ejus [dei].” On character, see Nicholas M. Häring, “St. Augustine’s Use of the Word Character,” MS 14 (1952), pp. 79–97; Häring, “Character, Signum und Signaculum: Die Entwicklung bis nach der karolingischen Renaissance,” Scholastik 30 (1955), pp. 481–512; Häring, “Character, Signum und Signaculum: Der Weg von Petrus Damiani bis zur eigentlichen Aufnahme in die Sakramentenlehre im 12. Jahrhundert,” Scholastik 31 (1956), pp. 41–69; and Häring, “Character, Signum und Signaculum: Die Einführung in die Sakramententheologie des 12. Jahrhunderts,” Scholastik 31 (1956), pp. 182–212. 23.  See Hebrews 1:3. 24.  According to his commentators, Irenaeus of Lyon (d. ca. 200), while engaged in controversy with the Gnostics and the Arians, had expanded the expression by adding that Christ was the character and figure of God’s substance. Apparatus ad Opera Sancti Irenaei Episcopi Lugdunensis, ed. Adolphus Stieren, (Leipzig, 1853), pp. 15, 291–3 (in Dissertatio 3 de Irenaei doctrina). See also Patrologia Graeca 7a, 373. 25.  The term character was often deployed by Ambrose, and always to denote Christ’s consubstantial relationship to the Godhead. See for instance: “Sed omnia accepisse a Patre Filium, et omnis gloriae paternae Filium splendorem esse cognoscas, et ejus characterem substantiae: qui ita expressit Patrem, ut in eo totus sit Pater, sicut in Patre totus est Filius.” Enarrationes in Psalmos Davidicos, PL 14:1153B. See too his De Fide ad Gratianum Augustum Libri Quinque: “Alibi quoque Apostolus asseruit quod ipsum posuit haeredem omnium, per quem fecit et saecula, qui est splendor gloriae, et character substantiae ejus” (Heb. 1:2). “Imaginem Apostolus dicit, et Arius dicit esse dissimilem: cur imago, si similitudinem non habet? Imago docet non esse dissimilem, character expressum esse significat, splendor signat aeternum. Imago utique non vultus est corporalis, non fucis composita, non ceris: sed simplex de Deo, egressa de Patre, expressa de fonte” (Lib. 1.7, PL 14:539C–40A). Also Lib. 2, prologus, PL 14:561B. On the role of Ambrose in providing Pascasius with an argument for the Eucharist’s self-referential mode of signification, see Chazelle, “Figure, Character” pp. 1–35, and The Crucified God, pp. 220–1. 26.  “Quia sicut per caracteres vel figuras litterarum infantia nostra prius pertingit gradatim ad lectionem, deinde ad spiritales scripturarum sensus et intelligentiam, sic ex humanitate Christi ad divinitatem Patris pervenitur et ideo jure figura vel caracter substantiae illius vocatur. Quid enim aliud sunt figurae litterarum quam caracteres earumdem, ut per eas vis et potestas, ac spiritus prolatione oculis demonstretur? Sic itaque formatur. Verbum caro, ut per carnem nostra infantia ad divinitatis intelligentiam nutriatur.” Pascasius, De corpore, 4, pp. 29–30 (PL 120:1279A). Although I profited from and share Chazelle’s analyses of Pascasius’ position, I must depart from her notion that Pascasius understood character “to be a sign or mark comparable to the impression made by a brand, stamp, or seal”; Chazelle, The

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Crucified God, p. 221, and “Figure, Character,” p. 18. I could not find any instance in Pascasius’ texts where he analogizes a character with a seal. In fact, there is much evidence that Pascasius used character systematically to mean letters of the alphabet. Chazelle herself recognizes that for Carolingians characteres were mostly associated with letters, monograms, and written words; “Figure, Character,” p. 19. My reservations about Chazelle’s interpretation of character were developed independently of Rachel Fulton’s reading, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary (New York, 2002), pp. 50–3. Other texts in which Pascasius analogized characteres with letters include Expositio in Matheum Evangelium Libri 12 (9–12), ed. Bedae Paulus (Turnhout, 1984), 12.27, 45, p. 1377; Expositio in Lamentationes Hieremiae Libri Quinque, ed. B. Paulus (Turnhout, 1988), 1.22, pp. 71–2, about the letter Tau and the cross, with virtually verbatim quotations from Augustine, PL 120:1101A–C; Vita Sancti Adhalardi, PL 120:1541C; Epistola ad Fredugardum, pp. 92–102, 148. Augustine also used the term character to designate letters, in particular the name of the Trinity imprinted by the divine commander-in-chief, Christ, on his soldiers when through baptism he enlists them in his Christian army even as a Roman military commander has his soldiers’ bodies branded with his own char­ acter. Augustine’s simile and his utilization of the term character in this sense of imprinted sign remained unused until the end of the eleventh century except for two mentions found respectively in Isidore, De ecclesiasticis officiis, 2.25, 10, and in the Carolingian Leidrad of Lyon, Liber de sacri baptismi, 6; see Häring, “St. Augustine’s Use of the Word Character,” pp. 79–97. 27.  Insightful remarks on Augustine’s semiotics and reification of signs are found in Handelman, The Slayers of Moses, pp. 89–90, 114–20, and Margaret W. Ferguson, “St Augustine’s Region of Unlikeness: The Crossing of Exile and Language,” Georgia Review 29 (1975), pp. 842–64. 28. Stock, Implications of Literacy, pp. 268–70. Ratramnus, De corpore et sanguine Domini, ed. J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam, 1974), also available in PL 121:125D–70C. 29.  “Veritas vero est rei manifesta demonstratio, nullis umbrarum imaginibus obvelatae, sed puris et apertis, utque planius eloquamur, naturalibus significationibus insinuatae; ut pote cum dicitur Christus natus de Virgine, passus, crucifixus, mortuus et sepultus. Nihil enim hic figuris obvelantibus adumbratur; verum rei veritas naturalium significationibus verborum ostenditur; neque aliud hic licet ­intelligi quam dicitur. At in superioribus non ita. Nam substantialiter, nec panis Christus, nec vitis Christus, nec palmites apostoli. Quapropter hic figura, superius vero veritas in narratione monstratur, id est nuda et aperta significatio.” PL 121:130B–C. Stock, Implications of Literacy, p. 269; Chazelle, “Figure, Character,” p. 22. 30. Stock, Implications of Literacy, p. 268–70. 31.  Chazelle, “Figure, Character,” p. 24. 32.  De corpore et sanguine Domini, PL 121:125D–70C; a fact also noted in Chazelle, “Figure, Character,” p. 27, but with different implications. 33.  De corpore et sanguine, PL 121: 131C–32A. 34.  Ibid., PL 121:160C–61A: “Exterius igitur quod apparet non est ipsa res, sed imago rei; mente vero quod sentitur et intelligitur, veritas rei.”

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35. Ibid., PL 121:163A–64A: “Qua de re et corpus Christi et sanguis est quod Ecclesia celebrat, sed tanquam pignus, tanquam imago. Veritas vero erit cum iam nec pignus nec imago sed ipsius rei veritas apparebit.” 36. The expression is Stock’s, Implications of Literacy, p. 271, and the paragraph here summarizing the Carolingian eucahristic controversy draws heavily upon his insights. 37.  Berengarius in purgatorio epistola contra Almannum, ed. Jean de Montclos, in Lanfranc et Bérenger: La controverse eucharistique du 11e siècle (Louvain, 1971), p. 531; Stock, Implications of Literacy, p. 275. H. Chadwick particularly discusses Augustine’s influence on Berengar in “Symbol and Reality: Berengar and the Appeal to the Fathers,” in Auctoritas und Ratio: Studien zu Berengar von Tours, ed. Peter Ganz, R. B. C. Huygens, and Friedrich Niehwöhner (Wiesbaden, 1990), pp. 25– 45, at pp. 35–9. 38.  For Augustine, sacraments were special signs that signify mimetically and operate instrumentally, whereas linguistic signs merely and conventionally point to things. Damien van den Eynde, Les définitions des sacrements pendant la première période de la théologie scholastique (1050–1240) (Rome, 1950), p. 4; P. Th. Camelot, “Réalisme et symbolisme dans la doctrine eucharistique de S. Augustin,” in Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 31 (1947), pp. 394–410, at p. 400–3. For a detailed discussion of Berengar’s writings and of his avid citation of Augustine’s definitions of sacraments as signs, see van den Eynde, Les définitions, p. 5–6, and Irène Rosier-Catach, La parole efficace: Signe, ritual, sacré (Paris, 2004), pp. 36–44, who lucidly traces the reversal from signified to sign. 39.  Lanfranco contro Berengario nel “Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini,” ed. and trans. Concetto Martello (Catania, 2001), pp. 141–2 (PL 150:436A). Charles Radding, Theology, Rhetoric, and Politics in the Eucharistic Controversy, 1078–1079: Alberic of Monte Cassino against Berengar of Tours (Columbia, 2003), p. 13; Toivo J. Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology in the Eleventh Century (Leiden, 1996), p. 58. 40.  A. J. MacDonald, Berengar and the Reform of Sacramental Doctrine (London, 1930; repr. Merrick, N.Y., 1977); H. Chadwick, “Ego Berengarius,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 40 (1989), pp. 414–45; Joseph Geiselmann, Die Eucharistielehere der Vorscholastik (Paderborn, 1926); L. Hödl, “Die confessio Berengarii von 1059, eine Arbeit zum frühscholastischen Eucharistietraktat,” Scholastik 37 (1962), pp. 370–94; G. Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period (Oxford, 1984), pp. 35–53; Colish, Mirror of Language, pp. 65, 72–4; Stock, Implications of Literacy, pp. 252–315; Rosier-Catach, Parole efficace, pp. 41–2. 41.  Ruperti Tuitiensis, Commentaria in evangelium sancti Johannis, ed. Rhabanus Haacke (Turnhout, 1969), Lib. 6.32, pp. 333, 334, 341 (PL 169:463A, D, 469B); Chadwick, “Ego Berengarius,” p. 437. 42. Lanfranc wrote the De corpore et sanguine Domini (between 1063 and 1068) to refute point by point the attack Berengar made in the Opusculum (also cited as Scriptum contra synodum), now lost, known exclusively through Lanfranc’s engagement with it in his De corpore. Berengar wrote the Opusculum against the 1059 council of Rome, where he had been condemned to recite the confession of faith drawn up by Humbert of Silva Candida (see below at note 55). On earlier ­opponents to Berengar, see Stock, Implications of Literacy, pp. 281–94.

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43.  “Quorum alterum quidem dum frangitur et in populi salutem dividitur; alterum vero effusum de calice ab ore fidelium sumitur, mors eius in cruce, et sanguinis eius de latere emanatio figuratur.” De corpore et sanguine, p. 123 (PL 150:424A). 44.  “Verum tamen beatus Augustinus in libro de civitate dei (Lib. 10, c. 5, tom. 5) non ita abrupte, ut tu dicis, sacramentum sacrum signum esse definivit. . . . Quid vero visibile, quid invisibile, sacrificium vocaverit, post aliqua his verbis esponit. ‘Non vult ergo deus sacrificium trucidati pecoris, sed vult sacrificium contriti cordis.’ Et paulo post: ‘Porro autem misericordia verum sacrificium est.’” De corpore et sanguine, pp. 121–2 (PL 150:422C–D). 45.  Epistola 98, Augustinus ad Bonifacium (the letter bears primarily on baptism): “Si enim sacramenta quamdam similitudinem earum rerum quarum sacramenta sunt, non haberent, omnino sacramenta non essent. Ex hac autem similitudine plerumque etiam ipsarum rerum nomina accipiunt.” PL 33:363–64. 46.  De Doctrina Christiana, bk. 2, 1.2, pp. 32–3. 47. Ibid. 48.  “Dicitur namque sacramentum etiam iusiurandum, non quod rei cuiuspiam similitudinem habeat, sed quia supra res sacras alicuius rei confirmatio vel abnegatio fiat.” De corpore et sanguine, p. 122 (PL 150:423B). 49.  “Caro ergo et sanguis, quibus ad impetrandam pro peccatis nostris Dei misericordiam cotidie alimur, Christi corpus ac sanguis vocantur, non solum quia essentialiter idem sunt qualitatibus plurimum discrepantes, verum etiam eo locutionis modo quo res significans significatae rei solet vocabulo nuncupari.” De corpore et sanguine, p. 124 (PL 150:424B). 50.  “Cum ipse Dominus Jesus post resurrectionem suam sui ipsius diversa temporum ratione tipum gesserit et figuram.” De corpore et sanguine, p. 124 (PL 150:424C–D). Berengar revisited this very point in his Rescriptum contra Lanfrannum, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Turnhout, 1988), 2.1895–1905, pp. 152–3. 51.  De corpore et sanguine, p. 111–2 (PL 150:416A–B). Berengar returned to this point, Rescriptum, 1.1244–85, pp. 70–1. 52.  The term substantia had first been used in the Eucharistic controversy by Durandus of Troan to express a concrete reality. Chadwick argued in “Ego Berengarius,” pp. 421, 426–7, 429, 433, that in Lanfranc’s De corpus et sanguine, the use of substantia has a stronger Aristotelian flavor. For views arguing that neither Lanfranc nor his student Guitmund built their arguments against Berengar based on a knowledge of Aristotelian logic, see Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology, pp. 46, 67–76, and Radding, Theology, Rhetoric, and Politics, pp. 23, 28. In his riposte to Lanfranc in the Rescriptum contra Lanfrannum, 2.1383–95, p. 139, Berengar was dismissive of the ontological argument, arguing that accidents cannot exist in the absence of the substance of which they are the accidents; Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology, pp. 80–3. 53.  Berengar’s argument made a significant place for the senses and for visi­ bility. He argued that, if there was a piece of flesh on the altar that had the color of bread, the colored piece of flesh could not be invisible. In sensorial perception, one does not see the color but the object, since seeing the color depends upon seeing the colored objects, Rescriptum, 2.1893–5, p. 152; Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology, pp. 90–5.

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54. Rescriptum, 1. 235–40, p. 42; Stock, Implications of Literacy, p. 281. 55.  The confession that Berengar made under oath at the council of Rome in 1059, and in which he reluctantly registered belief in physical change in the Eucharist, is fully quoted by Lanfranc in his De corpore et sanguine, p. 104 (PL 150:410D– 11A); the Latin version of the text and an English translation are given in Radding, Theology, Rhetoric, and Politics, pp. 19–20. The text then entered canon law, first in the collections of Yvo of Chartres and then in Gratian’s Decretum (pars 3, distinctio 2, causa 42), H. Chadwick, “Ego Berengarius,” pp. 415, 423–5. On reactions to the oath of 1059 down to Protestant times, see Chadwick, “Symbol and Reality,” pp. 29–30. The sensual ingestion of the whole body of Christ present substantialiter in the host, the importance of touch and contact, is further emphasized by one of Lanfranc’s pupils, Guitmund, who took up the Eucharistic debate against Berengar in his treatise on De corporis et sanguinis Christi veritate in eucharistia libri tres, (PL 149:1430A, 1431D–32C). 56.  Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practising New Historicism (Chicago, 2000), pp. 107ff. Augustine had affirmed that sacraments had to have some resemblance to, and hence to be different from, the things of which they are sacraments in order to be sacraments; see above at note 45. A century after Berengar, Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) stated that the body of Christ was visible under the bread and wine like a hand under a glove, Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis 1, ed. J. A. Dugauquier (Louvain, 1954), p. 138; Rosier-Catach, La parole efficace, p. 46. 57.  Guillelmi a Sancto Theodorico Opera Omnia: De natura corporis et animae libri duo, ed. Paul Verdeyen Turnhout, 2006), 72, p. 128 (PL 180: 713D–14B); Bell, Image and Likeness, p. 100. 58.  The fundamental work on the theological and ontological implications of image and resemblance in twelfth-century culture is by R. Javelet, Image et ressemblance au 12e siècle, de saint Anselme à Alain de Lille, 2 vols. (Paris, 1967). See also, Bell, Image and Likeness, and G. B. Ladner, Ad Imaginem Dei: The Image of Man in Medieval Art (Latrobe, 1965) and Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages (Rome, 1983); J. E. Sullivan, The Image of God: The Doctrine of St. Augustine and Its Influence (Dubuque, Iowa, 1963). The seal metaphor precedes Christian discourse. On its occurrence in Ancient Near Eastern texts, see Elena Cassin, “Le sceau: Un fait de civilisation dans la Mésopotamie ancienne,” Annales E. S. C. 15 (1960), pp. 742–51. For late ancient philosophy: Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition (Leyden, 1978), p. 236; Manetti, Theories of the Sign, p. 6, gives the example of the seal as a Mesopotamian divinatory sign: “If a man dreams that someone gives him a seal, he will have a son.” The trope is found in Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, serving as a model for the process of making and storing memorial phantasms; see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 16–32 passim, and pp. 33, 49, 62, 72, 291, n. 5; and Manetti, Theories of the Sign, p. 54. The seal metaphor appears in both the Old and the New Testaments, and in patristic texts where it principally concerns the baptismal rite: Jean Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy (Notre Dame, Ind., 1956), ch. 3 at pp. 54–69 is entirely devoted to “Sphragis” (seal); G. W. H. Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit: A Study in the Doctrine of Baptism and Confirmation in the New Testament and

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the Fathers, 2nd ed. (London, 1967). On the seal metaphor in Christian culture, see André Pézard, “Le sceau d’or: Dante, Abélard, Saint Augustin,” Studi danteschi 45 (1968), pp. 29–93, at pp. 33–40, 54–65; Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, pp. 254–65, where the author engages the significance of the metaphor as used by Honorius in his Sigillum sanctae Mariae. For studies that explicitly connect the diffusion of sealing practices, debates on sign theory, and ontological considerations involving seal metaphors, see above at note 4 and Bedos-Rezak, “Une image ontologique: Sceau et ressemblance en France préscolastique (1000–1200),” in Etudes d’histoire de l’art offertes à Jacques Thirion: Des premiers temps chrétiens au 20e siècle, ed. Alain Erlande-Brandenburg and Jean-Michel Leniaud (Paris, 2001), pp. 39–50, and “Replica: Images of Identity and the Identity of Images,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Medieval West, ed. Jeffrey Hamburger and AnneMarie Bouché (Princeton, 2006), p. 46–64. For a discussion of the relationship between seal and coin metaphor, William J. Courtenay, “The King and the Leaden Coin: The Economic Background of Sine qua non Causality,” Trad 28 (1972), pp. 185–209, reprinted in Covenant and Causality in Medieval Thought: Studies in Philosophy, Theology, and Economic Practice (London, 1984), no. 6. 59.  “Imago autem Dei, splendorque, ut ait apostolus, et figura substantiae eius est hoc Verbum, hic Filius de Deo Deus, figura videlicet per similitudinem dictus. Quia Pater cum hoc Verbo sic unus est Deus, sicut aurum vel ebur, et imago regis in eo, sigillum unum esse dignoscitur,” translation mine; Ruperti Tuitiensis Commentaria in Evangelium Sancti Johannis, ed. Rhabanus Maurus Hacke, CCCM 9 (Turnhout, 1969), 1.3c–4, p. 14. Seal metaphors appear in other parts of Rupert’s works; Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, p. 313. 60.  “Tu es quasi aurea substantia, et Filius tuus cum sit splendor gloriae et figura substantia tuae, tanquam regalis aut pontificalis imago in auro purissimo exhibet se ipsum pro incorruptibili sigillo cuilibet servo suo sibi conformando se imprimens. Tuque, Pater, hoc ipsum sigillationis opus per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso perficis in servis tuis eidem filio configurandis,” translation mine; Gerhoch, Commentarius in Psalmos, 2.30, PL 193:1306D–7. On the Pauline formulation, see Hebrews 1:3. The dialectic of imprinted and imprinting is also invoked by Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173) in his De Trinitate, Lib. 6.18. See a translation in Richard de Saint-Victor: La Trinité, ed. and trans. Gaston Salet (Paris, 1999), pp. 430–1. 61.  Hugh Eterianus was a Hellenist scholar from Pisa who went to Constantinople where he wrote a treatise, De haeresibus Graecorum, against the dualist heresies he considered to be part of the Orthdox doctrine as expressed in the rejection of the filioque clause by the Orthodox church. Throughout the treatise, Hugh was eager to demonstrate the resemblance and equality of Father and Son so as to prove their necessary joint role in the procession of the Spirit. Javelet, Image et ressemblance, 1, pp. 96–101. A copy of the treatise was sent to Pope Alexander III in 1177, who approved of its content. See Kenneth M. Setton, “Byzantium and the Italian Renaissance,” Proceedings of The American Philosophical Society 100 (1956), pp. 1–76, at pp. 26–8. 62.  “Signaculum existit verum Dei Verbum in se repraesentando Patrem. . . . Hinc igitur manifestum, cum perfectissimum signaculum omnem ad Patrem servans in conferentiam existet Filius. . . . Itaque Filius aequipollens signaculum est absque omni fallacia, character et imitamen effigiati Patris indiminutum, quia non

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est imago Patris, superficie tenus, ad Christi similitudinem imaginis, sed interiorum atque omnium profundorum sapientiam Dei, et virtus in sinu Patris, . . . id est, commanens universorum quae Patris sunt productrix exstat, et enucleatrix: propterea unigenitus quidem Dei haeres Patris plenissimus est, omnia interiora ejus insigniens. Effigies enim naturam rei debet effigiare. Nec ad artificem aliter conformare pertinet, quod ad imaginem Socratis sculpitur simulacrum: nisi enim calvum, simum, prominentiamque oculorum ostendat Socratis, nequaquam ejus esse dicetur effigies. . . . Attendendum vero non idem imaginem et characterem ab Ecclesiae doctoribus autumari, alterum enim ab altero sic distinguunt. . . . Navem quoque si videam, confestim intelligo esse opus artificis illam construentis, quod quidem opus imago et gloria illius artis existent. Nequaquam vero character personae operatoris. Non enim figuram personae artificis quae humana est, . . . navis complectitur. Eodem quoque modo dicunt hominem, Dei qui plasmavit illum, gloriam esse ac imaginem, non characterem personae Conditoris, sed solummodo voluntatis sive actionis indicium. Filium vero solum characterem Patris esse, vere credunt. Ipse enim dicit: Qui videt me, videt et Patrem: non ipsum Patrem, sed talem qualis est Pater.” All translations from the De haeresibus Graecorum are mine; PL 202:278A– B; 350C; 385C–D; 387B–D. 63.  Theologicae Regulae, reg. 91, PL 210:669C. 64.  Schoolmen often extolled the actualizing and heuristic power of the imprinted image, even as they denigrated the painted image, which, they said, expressed resemblance only through lines and colors. Javelet, Image et ressemblance, 1, p. 98. I might say here parenthetically that schoolmen often compared the representative capacity of various sorts of images: paintings, mirror, sculpture. I am still in the process of examining the range and meaning of such comparisons, but the texts already gathered all point to a critically negative stance of such scholars toward these media of representation. Bedos-Rezak, “Replica,” p. 53. 65.  Jean-Claude Bonne, “Entre l’image et la matière,” in Les images dans les sociétés médiévales: Pour une histoire comparée (Brussel-Rome, 1999), pp. 77–111, for comparative material, p. 108. 66.  C. Mews, “The Sententiae of Peter Abelard,” in Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 53 (1986), pp. 130–84, at pp. 157, 161. In his earlier theological writings, such as the Theologia “Summi boni” (ca. 1117–21) and the Theologia Christiana (1122–25), Abelard had discussed the generation of the second person of the Trinity in terms of a waxen image, not specifically described as a seal: Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica 3, Theologia “Summi boni,” ed. E. M. Buytaert and C. J. Mews (Turnhoult, 1987), c. 3, 2.54–6, 59, pp. 180–2: “ad illum scilicet modum quo dicimus ceream imaginem esse ex cera, cum tamen idem sit in essentia cera ipsa et cerea imago”; Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica 2, Theologia Christiana, ed. E. M. Buytaert (Turnhout, 1969), 3.140–1, pp. 247–8; 4.86, p. 306. In these cases, the context for the analogy of the wax image was distinctly Aristotelian, as transmitted by Boethius and Porphyry. 67.  Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica 6, Sententiae magistri Petri Abaelardi, ed. David Luscombe (Turnhout, 2006), 128–9, pp. 61–2 (PL 178:1720B–C). In another section of the Sententiae, 102, pp. 49–50 (PL 178:1715A, C), a golden signetring, reminiscent of the Augustinian usage, was invoked in considering, in a rather non-Augustinian manner, the nature of an object made of gold and the fact that the

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gold and the ring are of one substance yet are diverse by definition. Some paragraphs later (106, p. 51), the engraved and imprinting golden seal is used to explicate how one essence can include three different properties (see next note). 68.  “Est igitur prius aurum quod acceptum sculpitur et fit sigillum, postea imprimitur cere et fit sigillans. Sic igitur cum idem sint numero quia una et eadem essentia, tamen tria sunt proprietate diversa, quia aliud est esse hoc aurum et aliud esse hoc sigillum et aliud hoc sigillabile. Iuxta igitur hanc trinitatem in creaturis trinitatem in divina substantia coniectare facile potuerunt,” translation mine; Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica 6, Sententiae magistri Petri Abaelardi, ed. Luscombe, 106, p. 51 (PL 178:171). This particular reference to the seal metaphor was further described by Abelard as “a common example”: “Trinum itidem a creatura eum cognoverunt. Ut igitur quod dicimus promptius in commune liqueat, circa vulgatum superius materie versemur exemplum.” 69.  On the significance of the differing versions of the sententiae attributed to Abelard, see Mews, “The Sententiae of Peter Abelard,” and Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica 6, Sententie magistri Petri Abaelardi, pp. 7–14, 64–75. 70.  Horrenda similitudo de sigillo aerea, de specie et genere ad Trinitatem. Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica 2, Capitula Haeresum Petri Abaelardi, ed. E. M. Buytaert (Turnhout, 1969), p. 455–80, at p. 473. Constant Mews, “The List of Heresies Imputed to Peter Abelard,” Revue Bénédictine 95 (1985), p. 73–111, at p. 82. Mews highlighted Thomas of Morigny’s role in elaborating the accusations against Abelard, which Bernard of Clairvaux publicized. See also John Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 28–9. Mews returned to a discussion of the heresies imputed to Abelard in his “The Sententiae of Peter Abelard,” pp. 168–71, 176–7. On the place of seals in Abelard’s discourse and on the opposition to this discourse, see Bedos-Rezak, “L’individu, c’est l’autre: Signes d’identité et principes d’altérité au 12e siècle,” in L’Individu au Moyen Age: Indi­ viduation et individualisation avant la modernité, ed. Bedos-Rezak and Dominique Iogna-Prat (Paris, 2005), pp. 43–57, 311–6, at pp. 48–52. 71.  “Es quoddem est inter creaturas, in quo artifex operans, et imaginis regie formam exprimens regium facit sigillum, quod scilicet ad sigillandas litteras, cum opus fuerit, cere imprimatur. Est igitur in sigillo illo ipsum es materia, ex quo factum est, figura vero illa imaginis regie forma eius, ipsum vero sigillum ex his duobus materiatum atque formatum dicitur, quibus videlicet sibi convenientibus ipsum est compositum atque perfectum. Nihil quippe est aliud sigillum ipsum quam es ita formatum. Idem itaque essentialiter est ipsum es quod est materia erei sigilli et sigillum ipsum cuius est materia, cum tamen in suis proprietatibus ita sint disiuncta ut aliud sit proprium eris, aliud erei sigilli. Et quamvis idem sint essentialiter, sigillum tamen ereum est ex ere, non es ex ereo sigillo, et es est materia sigilli, non sigillum eris,” translation mine; Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica 3, Theologia “scholarium,” ed. E. M. Buytaert and C. J. Mews (Turnhout, 1987), 2.111–2, pp. 462–3 (PL 178:1068D–69A). Thus for Abelard, a seal matrix is an object in which three distinct yet intertwined properties share a singular essence, hence its applicability in Abelard’s mind to the Trinity. See Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, pp. 150–61. 72.  I have summarized here the excellent analysis given in the Introduction of Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica 3, Theologia “scholarium,” pp. 2074–209, 2220,

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where the novelty of Abelard’s analogy is contrasted to Augustine’s traditional commentary on Ps. 4:7 that man is imprinted with the divine image as a coin is stamped with the image of a king, and to Boethius’ and Porphyry’s references to bronze statues in their discussions of categories. 73.  Sancti Aurelii Augustini: De Trinitate Libri 15 (Libri 1–12), ed. W. J. Mountain (Turnhout, 1968), 7.6, 11, pp. 262–5. 74.  Sancti Bernardi Opera, Sermones 1, ed. J. Leclercq and H. Rochais (Rome, 1966), Sermones ad annum: De Nativitate 2.2–4, pp. 252–4 (PL 183:120C–21B). 75.  The comprehensive history, which includes the edition of relevant sources, of acheiropoietic portraits of Christ is Ernst von Dobschütz, Christusbilder (Leipzig, 1899). See suggestive comments by Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the End of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park, Pa., 2005), pp. 188–94. 76. For the doubtful possibility of an earlier presence of the Veronica in Rome, see Christoph Egger, “Papst Innocenz III. und die Veronica: Geschichte, Theologie, Liturgie und Seelsorge,” in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, ed. H. L. Kessler and G. Wolf (Bologne, 1998), pp. 181–203, at pp. 192–3. For evidence of the presence of the Veronica in St. Peter, Stefano Pedica, Il Volto Santo: Nei Documenti della Chiesa (Turin, 1960), p. 168–72. For the history of the Roman relic known as the Veronica and its legend, see Dobschütz, Christusbilder, pp. 197–262; G. Wolf, “La Veronica e la tradizione romana di icone,” Il ritratto e la memoria: Materiali, 2, ed. A. Gentili et al. (Rome, 1993), pp. 9–35. On the legends of St. Veronica and her acquisition of the Holy Face, which appeared in the midtwelfth century, see Jeffrey Hamburger, “‘Frequentant Memoriam Visionis Faciei Meae’: Image and Imitation in the Devotion to the Veronica Attributed to Gertrude of Helfta,” in The Holy Face, ed. Kessler and Wolf, pp. 229–46, at p. 242, and Eva Kuryluk, Veronica and her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image (Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford, 1991), pp. 122–3. 77.  Robert de Boron, Joseph d’Arimathie: A Critical Edition of the Verse and Prose Versions, ed. Richard O’Gorman (Toronto, 1995), pp. 164–89, 436–7, at pp. 174–5 for the specific episode of Veronica’s pious gesture. An episode of the chanson de geste, Destruction de Jerusalem (ca. 1180), reports that Veronica, suffering from leprosy, did not dare approach the Cross, but Mary seized Veronica’s veil and applied it to her son’s face. The veil received the imprint of Christ’s face as Veronica was cured from leprosy. Jean-Augustin Robilliard, “Face (Dévotion à la sainteFace),” Dictionnaire de Spiritualité 5 (Paris, 1964), pp. 26–33, at p. 27. 78. Kuryluk, Veronica and her Cloth, pp. 4–5, 115. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence (Chicago, 1994), pp. 218, 220, 541, n. 37b. Belting, in dating the description of the Veronica as an image to ca. 1210, does not take into consideration the earlier such description by Roger of Howden; see below at note 82. 79. “Liber Politicus di Benedetto canonico,” in Codice topografico della cità di Roma, ed. Roberto Valentini and Giuseppe Zucchetti (Rome, 1946), vol. 3, pp. 210–70, at p. 210; Benedictus canonicus, Ordo Romanus in Liber Censum, ed. P. Fabre and L. Duchesne (Paris, 1910), 2, pp. 141–64, at p. 143; PL 78:1029B; Gerhard Wolf, “From Mandylion to Veronica: Picturing the ‘Disembodied’ Face and Disseminating the True Image of Christ in the Latin West,” in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, ed. Kessler and Wolf, pp. 153–79 at p. 167.

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80.  Petri diaconi Liber de locis sanctis, ed. R. Weber, in Itineraria et alia Geographica (Turnhout, 1965), pp. 93–103, at p. 96 (PL 173:1121C): “Sudarium vero, cum quo Christus faciem suam extersit, quod ab aliis Veronyca dicitur, tempore Tyberii Caesaris Rome delatum est.” Peter’s Liber borrowed heavily, at times verbatim, from Bede’s Liber de locis. The passage on the sudarium, however, was not part of Bede’s text. 81.  Petrus Mallius, Descriptio basilicae Vaticanae, c. 27, Codice topografico della cità di Roma, vol. 3, pp. 375–442, at p. 420; Pedica, Il Volto Santo, p. 163; Egger, “Papst Innocenz III. und die Veronica,” p. 193. A partial translation of the text is given in Belting, Likeness and Presence, p. 541, n. 37a. Petrus wrote in support of the basilica of the Vatican, whose claim to primacy was bitterly contested by the basilica of the Lateran. The Lateran possessed the Savior Icon, yet another miraculous portrait of Christ that, believed to have been initially sketched by Luke, was considered to have completed itself “without the work of man.” 82.  “Et [Coelestinus papa] ostendit regi Franciae et suis capita apostolorum Petri et Pauli, et Veronicam, id est, pannum quendam linteum quem Jesus Christus vultui Suo impressit; in quo pressura illa ita manifeste apparet usque in hodiernum ac si vultus Jesus Christi ibi esset; et dicitur veronica qui mulier cuius pannus erat dicebatur Veronica,” translation mine; The Chronicle of the Reigns of Henry II and Richard I, A.D. 1169–1192, ed. William Stubbs (London, 1867), pp. 228–9. 83.  Gervase identified the linen as belonging to Veronica, the grateful woman whose bleeding was relieved by touching the hem of Christ’s garment and who was known to own a likeness of Christ imprinted on a linen cloth. Gervase further reports that the cloth healed Emperor Tiberius. Gervase of Tilbury, “Otia imperialia”: Recreation for an Emperor, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binnes (New York, 2002), pp. 605–7; Belting, Image and Likeness, pp. 541–2, n. 37b. 84.  Giraldi Cambrensis opera, vol. 4, Speculum ecclesiae, ed. J. S. Brewer, RS (London, 1873), c. 6, pp. 278–9: “Quem cum intuita fuisset, ipse peplum eius accipiens impressit vultu suo, et reliquit in eo expressam imaginem suam. . . . Dicunt autem quidam vocabulo alludentes, Veronicam dici, quasi veram iconam, id est, imaginem veram.” 85.  “Deus qui nobis signatis lumine vultus Tui memoriale tuum ad instantiam Veronicae sudario impressam imaginem relinquere voluisti,” translation mine; Matthaei Parisiensis, Chronica Majora, vol. 3, AD 1216–39, ed. Henry Richards Luard (London, 1876); English translation in Belting, Likeness and Presence, p. 543, n. 37e. The miracle and the prayer are reported by Matthew Paris in an insertion that has no connection with the history of Roger of Wendover that Matthew was transcribing; Luard, Chronica Majora, vol. 3, p. x. 86.  Though not bearing particularly on the twelfth century, the remarks by Georges Didi-Huberman on the Holy Face as an imprint are suggestive: “Face, proche, lointaine: l’empreinte du visage et le lieu pour apparaître,” in The Holy Face, ed. Kessler and Wolf, pp. 95–108. 87.  Georges Didi-Huberman, ed., L’empreinte (Paris, 1997), p. 58. 88.  “Ipsum ponamus signaculum super cor, signaculum brachium nostrum” (Cant 8:6). Sermones ad annum: Dominica in Kalendis Novembris, Sermo Primus, De visio Isaiae, Sancti Bernardi Opera, vol. 5, ed. J. Leclercq and H. Rochais (Rome, 1968), p. 305 (PL 183:345D).

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89.  Sancti Bernardi Opera, vol. 1, Sermones super cantica canticorum 1–35, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais (Rome, 1957), Sermo 8.7–8, pp. 40–1. 90.  “Ex huius osculi impressione suscipit anima rationalis ab ipso Sponso suo Verbo Dei cognitionem et amorem virtutis, quae duo quasi labia imprimit ei ipsa Dei virtus et Dei sapientia.” Sancti Bernardi Opera, vol. 6, 1: Sermones 3, ed. J. Leclercq, H. Rochais (Rome, 1970), Sermo 89, p. 336. 91.  Sancti Bernardi Opera, vol. 1, Sermones super cantica canticorum, Sermo 6.8, pp. 29–30. 92.  See above, note 82. 93.  Bedos-Rezak, “Replica,” pp. 51–2; Javelet analyses the extent to which twelfth-century schoolmen thought of the soul as being both incorporeal and corporeal, “Image de Dieu et nature au 12e siècle,” in La filosofia della natura nel medioevo (Milan, 1966), pp. 286–96, at pp. 290–4. Alan of Lille denounced the “anthropomorphonite” who believed that the resemblance between God and man was corporal: “Sequitur: ‘mentibus defecatis ab ymaginibus’ [quote from the Ps. John Scotus], id est ab imaginationibus purgatis. Cum enim contemplamur Deum, ut testatur summus Boetius in libro de Trinitate, non oportet nos ad ymaginationes deduci, ut antropomorphonite (sic) deducti sunt, qui Deum corporalibus lineamentis distentum esse crediderunt”; Exposition pr. de angelis, in Alain de Lille, Textes inédits, M.-Th. d’Alverny (Paris, 1965), pp. 205–6. 94.  “Vir quidem non debet velare caput suum, id est non debet habere signum servitutis vel potestatis super se, sed libertatis, quia non habet aliquid super se nisi Deum. Quoniam imago et gloria est Dei. Imago, id est similitudinis impressio, et gloria Dei cernitur in viro, quia unus Deus unum fecit hominem”; Commentaria in Epistolas divi Pauli, In epistolam 1 ad Cor., c. 11, PL 181:926B. 95.  “Sigillo est imago insculpta, quae cerae impressae imaginem reddit. Sigillum est Christi humanitas, cui imago insculpta est Christi divinitas, cera vero humana anima, ad imaginem Dei formata. Christus quippe, ut scribitur, est imago Dei invisibilis (Coloss. 1, 15), quia Patri aequalis. Quam imaginem Deus homini impressit, quando interiorem hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem Dei creavit. In imagine Trinitas, in similitudine notatur aequalitas, imaginem Christi in corde suo format qui eum Patri aequalem cogitat. Huic suam imaginem imprimit, qui humanam naturam deitati unitam credit,” translation mine; Expositio in cantica canticorum, PL 172:479B–C. 96.  Bedos-Rezak, “Medieval Identity,” p. 1525. See Alan’s construct, where man is analogized to imago as imitago, the imprinted image in wax that may lose its initial resemblance once it has been imprinted because this resemblance is simply one of form rather than substance: “Sed Filius est sigillum Patris secundum uni­ tatem essentie, angelus vero signaculum imitationis ratione. Homo vero dicitur ymago Dei quasi imitago, qui non ita similis est expresse Deo sicut angelus. Quelibet vero creatura dicitur signum Dei, qui sui essentia, sui ordinatione, sui pulcritudine predicat Deum”; Alan of Lille, In die S. Michaelis, ed. d’Alverny, p. 250; Javelet, Image et ressemblance, 1, pp. 162–3, and 2, pp. 129–33; Bedos-Rezak, “Replica,” pp. 2, 63. 97.  “Potuit autem creatura rationalis amittere id quod ad similitudinem Dei facta est; non potuit vero eo carere quod ad imaginem Dei condita est. Quare? Quia

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videlicet divinae bonitatis imitatio, per quam Dei similitudo retinetur, creaturae quoque voluntatem exigit. Rationalitas autem quae impressione imaginis Dei humanae animae insculpta est, a sola Creatoris arte processit,” translation mine; Ruperti Tuitiensis: Liber de divinis officiis, ed. Hraban Haacke (Turnhout, 1967), 7.4, p. 228 (PL 184B–C); Bedos-Rezak, “L’individu, c’est l’autre,” p. 52. 98.  Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. M. R. James et al. (Oxford, 1983), pp. 442–7. 99.  Katharine Park, “Impressed Images: Reproducing Wonders,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York, 1998), pp. 254–71, at p. 262; the author deals primarily with thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury natural philosophers. The belief that sense-impressions received at the time of conception had an informative impact was held in antiquity by, among others, Pliny, Hippocrates, and Quintilian. The manipulation carried out by Jacob with Laban’s sheep, in Genesis 30:34–43 also derived from the belief that, at the time of coitus, the sheep had looked at spotted rods and gave birth to spotted offspring. Rupert of Deutz commented on Genesis 30:34–43, even mentioning Quintilian, in his Commentarium in Genesim, 7.38–9, Ruperti Tuitiensis De Sancta Trinitate et Operibus eius, vol. 1, ed. Raban Haacke (Turnhout, 1971), pp. 474–5 (PL 167:480C–81A): “Nec mirum hanc in conceptu feminarum esse naturam, ut quales perspexerint sive mente conceperint, in extremo voluptatis aestu quo concipiunt talem sobolem procreent.” John A. Alford, “The Scriptural Self,” The Bible in the Middle Ages: Its Influence on Literature and Art, ed. Bernard S. Levy (Binghamton, N.Y., 1992), pp. 1–21, at p. 12. 100.  L’œuvre de Hugues de Saint-Victor 1 (Brepols, 1997); De institutione novitiorum, pp. 18–114, at c. 7, pp. 40–3 (PL 176:925B–C, 932D–33A). See Caroline Walker Bynum’s pioneering analysis of Hugh’s seal metaphor addressing the education of novices in her Jesus as Mother (Berkeley, 1982), pp. 97–8. Further remarks on Hugh’s pedagogical use of the metaphor can be found in Bedos-Rezak, “Medieval Identity,” p. 1526; C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 258–9; Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 71 and Giles Constable, “Renewal and Reform in Religious Life,” in Renaissance & Renewal, pp. 37–68, at p. 46, n. 119. According to his biographer Eadmer, Anselm of Bec also used the seal metaphor for moral education. Eadmer, Life of Saint Anselm, ed. and trans. R. Southern (London, 1962), pp. 20–1. In his De similitudinibus (PL 159:695B– C), Anselm stated that youth is like a piece of wax that must be the right consistency, between hardness and softness, in order to receive a perfect impression: “De similitudine cerae. Videas hominem in vanitate ab infantia usque ad profundam senectutem conversatum, sola terrena sapientem, et in his penitus obduratum. Cum hoc age de spiritualibus, huic de subtilitate divinae contemplationis loquere, hunc secreta rimari coelestia doce, et prospicies eum nequaquam posse haec videre. Nec mirum, indurata est cera, in istis aetatem nutrivit, aliena ab istis sequi didicit. Et contra consideres puerum aetate et scientia tenerum, nec bonum, nec malum discernere valentem, nec te quidem intelligere de huiusmodi disserentem. Nec quidem mirum. Mollis enim est cera, et quasi liquens, nec imaginem sigilli quoquomodo recipiens. Medius horum adolescens et iuvenis est, ex teneritudine atque duritia quasi ex senectute et pueritia congrue temperatus. Si ergo hunc instruxeris, ad

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quemcunque utilitatis profectum voles, sive honentatis [sic], apte informare ­valebis.” 101. John Boswell, Christianity, Sexual Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980), p. 218; Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 98, n. 36. 102.  The bibliography on Francis’ stigmata is huge. Relevant within the scope of this essay were Arnold Davidson, “Miracles of Bodily Transformation,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Jones and Galison, pp. 101–24, and Stigmates, ed. Dominique de Courcelles (Paris, 2001). 103.  Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 202, 214–5. 104. Javelet, Image et ressemblance, 1, pp. 138, 142–4, and 2, pp. 114, 117–8, basing his interpretatation upon Hugh’s Commentariorum in Hierarchiam coelestem S. Dionysii Areopagitae secundum interpretationem Joannis Scoti, PL 175:931C–32C, 936B–37B, 1008A. 105.  “Quia humanus animus non potest de invisibilibus erudiri, nisi per visibilia et cognita, ac cognata sibi.” Commentariorum in Hierarchiam coelestem S. Dionysii Areopagitae secundum interpretationem Joannis Scoti, PL 175:956A; Javelet, Image et ressemblance, 1, p. 138, on the notion of the world’s kinship with God. 106.  John Van Engen, “Theophilus and Rupert of Deutz: The Manual Arts and Benedictine Theology in the Early Twelfth Century,” Viator 11 (1980), pp. 147–63, at pp. 151, 155. 107.  Donnalee Dox, “De Tragoediis and the Redemption of Classical Theater,” Viator 33 (2002), pp. 43–53, at p. 50; Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text (Chicago, 1996), p. 35, n. 20; Hanning, “‘Ut enim faber,’” pp. 108–10, 114–5. 108. Sarah Spence, Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996), p. 52. 109.  I have argued elsewhere that the practice of sealing documents spread within society from prescholastic milieus where schoolmen launched this experiment in documentary signing as part of the new immanent semiotics we have been reviewing. Suffice it to say that the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a novel and dramatic use of nonroyal sealed charters; Bedos-Rezak, When Ego Was Imago, pp. 95–107, 132–41. That the seal was conceived primarily as an imprinted image may be inferred from the final clauses of the charters’ texts, which record that “their contents have been reinforced with the imprint of their authors’ images [seals].” For an analysis of eleventh- and twelfth-century final clauses in charters, see BedosRezak, “In Search of a Semiotic Paradigm: The Matter of Sealing in Medieval Thought and Praxis (1050–1400),” in Good Impressions: Image and Authority in Medieval Seals, ed. John Cherry and James Robinson (London, 2008), pp. 1–7. 110.  Esther Cohen, “In Haec Signa: Pilgrim-Badge Trade in Southern France,” Journal of Medieval History 2 (1976), pp. 193–214. By the thirteenth century, signs were no longer proof; they were too often faked. 111. The seal impression was appreciated as a relic commemorative of the sealer’s physical contact and participation. On eleventh- and twelfth-century charters in which kings and magnates added thin sheets of wax onto which they imprinted the sign of the cross, leaving as signs for posterity bits of hair and beard also inserted into the wax. Bedos-Rezak, “In Search of a Semiotic Paradigm.”

seventeen

Three-in-One Making God in Twelfth-Century Liturgy, Theology, and Devotion R ac h e l F u lt o n Br o wn

The purpose of this chapter is to question certain assumptions historians have tended to make about the dominant character of religious thought, that is, thought having to do with worship, in the period beginning, roughly, with Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) and ending with the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Insofar as the twelfth century experienced a transformation in its devotional culture, it is suggested here that, for the better part of a century or more, scholars including the present writer have gotten the emphasis of this transformation wrong. The correct emphasis, alluded to in the title, is by definition simple: God apprehended, experienced, and worshiped not only as Incarnate but ultimately, and more importantly, as Three-in-One. Rather more complicated is why this twelfth-century emphasis has been hitherto so difficult to see.1 Accordingly, the argument is cast as something of a puzzle, the answer coming as a series of revelations or, perhaps more accurately, recollections, with full disclosure coming, like God in history, only at the end. A hint as to the shape our answer will take. Our failure, it is suggested, has been as much methodological as interpretive. If we have been blind to the actual contours of the age, it is not because we did not have the evidence we needed, but rather because we, that is, historians, have persisted in seeing one aspect of this culture (“devotion”) as something necessarily separate from another (“theology”), and a third (“liturgy”), other than the celebration of the Mass, as somehow only incidentally involved in the 468

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­ evotional and theological concerns of the day.2 To be sure, the greater d part of our evidence for the period comes not from the “people” (i.e., the laity), but rather from the overlapping intellectual and institutional milieus of the monasteries and the schools; and yet it is largely on the basis of the lives and works of the men and women of these communities that our h ­ abitual narrative has thus far been written. Surely, therefore, it is all the more curious that we have persisted in our compartmentalization of themes, leaving “theology” (rational, systematic, masculine, elite) to one side when we talk about “devotion,” and “devotion” (affective, imagistic, feminine, popular) to one side when we talk about the inner life of God, when the authors of our sources, both women and men, would hardly have made this distinction, certainly not to our purposes. Theirs was not a culture in which thinking about God was expected to be, or idealized as, easy; nor was it a culture in which God was intellectualized as impossibly remote. Mystery and proximity, complexity and immediacy were not, as they have apparently become for many modern Christians, irreconcilable opposites but rather the very definition of the divine. To appreciate the power of the older vision we must, for the moment, suspend our own and go back to a period before doctrine was considered as a barrier to love and theology as irrelevant to devotion.3 Having done so, however, it should be noted that we may find ourselves forced to revise not only our narrative about the religious climate of the twelfth century but also our definition of religion as such. For the better part of almost two hundred years, thanks above all to the Romantics, European and North American scholars alike have privileged the interior experience of religion, most typically under the rubric of “spirituality,” over its exterior “petrified” or “mechanized” liturgical and theological forms.4 This is not a view that would have made much sense to the men and women of the twelfth century, for whom, as we shall see, religion (religio) was concerned first and foremost with worship (cultus), and worship with the participation in the liturgy of the Church, not, pace Durkheim, for the constitution of the community as such (society as God) but rather because it was considered to be right and proper for the community and, likewise, the individual to worship God.5 Theology mattered to both liturgy and devotion for the very simple reason that it mattered not only how but whom Christians worshiped, thus, I would argue, the ferocity of many contemporary debates among Christians, Muslims, and Jews.6 At stake here was far more than “spiritual fulfillment” or “self-realization,” those grails of the modern age; rather, it was a matter of how best to serve God (the root meaning of “liturgy”), as all those who considered themselves “religious”

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agreed. To understand their religion, therefore, we must understand their God; significantly, it is here, I would argue, where we have gone furthest astray. —  Ask anyone—G. L. Prestige, R. W. Southern, Giles Constable, Caroline Walker Bynum, or me, for example. Devotionally speaking, the single most important development of the “long” twelfth century, perhaps even of the high Middle Ages as a whole, was an increased emphasis on Christ in his humanity with its corresponding focus, liturgically, on the body and blood of the Mass, and, meditatively, on the compassionate imitation of the sufferings of Mary and her Son.7 It would be idle, surely, to ask why we believe that it was in fact so; all the evidence points to it: Anselm of Canterbury’s prayer to be mindful of Christ’s passion and his meditation on why God became man;8 Bernard of Clairvaux’s (d. 1153) sermons on the beginnings of love through contemplation of the Word made flesh;9 Lanfranc’s (d. 1089) and Berengar’s (d. 1088) quarrels over the real presence in the Eucharist and the continuing discussions about sacrament, substance, and accident in the schools;10 contemporary polemics against the Jews and the Cathars on the problem of the Incarnation;11 the practice, for example, of monks like Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129), of embracing and kissing images of Christ on the cross;12 the reformers’ com­ parison of the ideal life of the monk or canon to the earthly life of Christ as described in the gospels;13 Peter Abelard’s (d. 1142) insistence that Heloise (d. 1162) turn from her love for him to love for her true husband, Christ, “who for you and for all mankind, in his innocence was seized by the hands of impious men, dragged along and scourged, blindfolded, mocked at, buffeted, spat upon, crowned with thorns, finally hanged between thieves on the Cross . . . to die a horrible and accursed form of death”;14 the Crusades.15 It is hard to tell how much more proof we would need to be certain that this was a period, in active as well as contemplative terms, given over almost wholly to the understanding and experience of God as God-man, to the imagining of his earthly life and of the ways in which his Incarnation made possible identification with and love for him through his flesh. Indeed, on the face of things, it seems inconceivable that we should tell the story in any other way. And yet, if we were asked to consider the great theological and philosophical debates of the day, for example, for a history of scholasticism, it is surely startling how different a picture would emerge.16 Here questions of language and logic, proofs by reason and revelation, and arguments about

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the relative authority of conflicting texts would come to the fore. Devotional concerns, or so critics of this new style of thinking, like Bernard and his friend William of St. Thierry (d. 1148) would have us believe, would be swallowed up in quaestiones about the nature and attributes of God, the distinctions between the persons and the properties of the Trinity, and the appropriateness of human categories and analogies for expressing the mysteries of the divine.17 Arcane, if at times overheated, quarrels with the Greeks over the procession of the Holy Spirit;18 abstruse, if not necessarily heretical, efforts to distinguish grammatically the concrete individuality of God (Deus, id quod ) from the abstract quality of his divinity (divinitas, id quo, the “‘divine stuff ’ ‘by which’ God is whatever he is”);19 clever and yet potentially distracting analogies (the sun, the Nile, the human mind, bronze seals) for the one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity confessed in the Athanasian Creed20—all, or so the story has typically been told, belong more to the narrative of intellectual rebirth and institutional development associated with the rise of the schools and the origins of systematic theology than they do to the history of medieval spirituality and devotion.21 Bernard himself would encourage us in this division, ironically, by insisting that such scrutiny as that which theologians like Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers (d. 1154) notoriously attempted to apply to God is not only rash but, even more damningly, by the by. As Bernard would have it, all the faithful need to do to find God is believe and know that Christ dwells in their hearts, whether or, more likely, not they are able to grasp the mysteries of the eternal and blessed Trinity with their minds.22 But what if, pace Bernard, not to mention the greater part of the historiography on our period, what we have here is not two stories—one about devotion and the other about something else (reason, logic, theology, the differences between the goals of the monasteries and the schools)— but only one? Notice how, as soon as we ask this question, suddenly, unsettlingly, the ground of our habitual narrative begins to shift. We remember that Anselm wrote not only prayers to Christ and meditations on the incarnation of the Word (itself a Trinitarian problem), but also two important meditations on the divine essence directly inspired by his reading of Augustine’s De trinitate, as well as a treatise De processione Spiritus sancti contra Graecos in answer to questions certain Greek bishops had raised in 1098 in a council at Bari.23 We recall that Abelard originally dedicated his oratory on the banks of the Ardusson to the Holy Trinity and that it was here he began work on a revised version of his De trinitate (alias Theologia “Summi boni” ) already condemned at Bernard’s urging at Soissons.24 We remark that in his debate with Rupert of Deutz, the young

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Jew, Judah ben David ha-Levi of Cologne, latterly Herman of Scheda, was particularly troubled by a certain “monstrous idol” he had seen while in Münster in which he “discerned one and the same man abased and exalted, despised and lifted up, ignominious and glorious,” below, hanging “wretchedly on a cross,” but above, “enthroned, handsome enough to seem to have been deified,” and we begin to recognize in Herman’s description an early example of the Trinitarian Gnadenstuhl.25 Noting further that the earliest extant exemplars of this iconography appear in contexts that would associate them particularly with the Mass—in liturgical manuscripts at the Te igitur of the canon, on portable altars and patens—we then recall the great Romano-Frankish prayer recommended by reformers such as Bernold of Constance (d. 1100) and William of Hirsau (d. 1091) as the exclusive offertory for the Mass: “Suscipe, sancta Trinitas, hanc oblationem,” and we begin to wonder if Josef Jungmann might not have been right, if not with the same valence, in his observation that “in religious writings of the high Middle Ages, Trinitarian principles assumed an almost disproportionately great importance.”26 Jungmann’s cautionary modifier is telling: “disproportionately great” —for whom? Perhaps for modern scholars of religion accustomed since the nineteenth century to focus more on the human-centered elements of the Christian faith than on the inner being of the divine (Schleiermacher is often invoked at this point), but hardly for Bonaventure (d. 1274), Peter Lombard (d. 1160), or Peter Abelard, never mind Alcuin (d. 804) or Augustine (d. 430).27 If nothing else, the first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council should give us pause as a summary of the “long” twelfth-century’s most pressing theological and liturgical concerns.28 Not the transubstantiation of the bread and wine at the Mass (whatever that might mean before Trent), but rather, to judge solely from the amount of textual space given over to it, “the Holy Trinity, undivided according to its common essence but distinct according to the properties of its persons,” is the principal ontological object here.29 Likewise noteworthy, salvifically speaking, particularly in the context of the on-going schism with the Greeks and against the anticreational challenge of the Cathars, is the attention given to baptism, the sacrament of entry into the “one universal church of the faithful, outside of which nobody at all is saved,” “[which is] consecrated in water at the invocation of the undivided Trinity—namely, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and brings salvation to both children and adults when it is correctly carried out by anyone,” in other words, not just priests, “in the form laid down by the church.”30

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Nor should we, in our this-worldly eagerness to get to canon three and the measures to be taken against heretics, gloss over canon two and the procedurally anomalous defense of Peter Lombard’s Trinitarianism against the accusations of Joachim of Fiore (d. 1201/2): “We, with the ­approval of this sacred and universal council, believe and confess with Peter [Lombard] that there exists a certain supreme reality, incomprehensible and ineffable, which truly is the Father and the Son and the holy Spirit, the three persons together and each one of them separately,” not, as Joachim claimed Peter’s works suggested, “three persons and a common essence (quaedam summa res), as if this were a fourth.”31 As Fiona Robb has demonstrated, at issue here were not so much differences in the terminology used to speak about the Trinity, although there were those, as differences in the prevailing modes of thought, the Paris-educated theologians like Peter relying more on concepts like the quaedam summa res to express their understanding of orthodox doctrine, with monks like Anselm, Abelard, and Joachim tending to favor more analogical descriptions of God.32 It would be easy to dismiss this confrontation as yet another instance of the long-running contest between monastic and scholastic theological styles, beyond the understanding of the majority even of the monks and the students, not to mention of lay Christians as a whole. And yet, as Bernard of Clairvaux pointed out in one of the many letters he wrote some seventy years earlier urging Pope Innocent II (d. 1143) and his cardinals to act against the teaching of Peter Abelard, such questions mattered beyond the walls of the monasteries and the schools. Abelard was dangerous, Bernard insisted, because he approached the darkness of God not alone, like Moses, but with a great crowd of students, recklessly disputing “the catholic faith, the childbearing of the Virgin, the sacrament of the altar, and the incomprehensible mystery of the Holy Trinity” “per vicos et plateas, through the streets and the squares” (cf. Song of Songs 3:2).33 Perhaps Bernard and the theologians at the 1215 council were mistaken in their estimation of Abelard’s and Joachim’s relative contumacy in attempting to describe the Trinity in the way that they did, but we should not for all that assume that the self-appointed champions of ­orthodoxy were mistaken in the seriousness of their cause. To question or, worse, deny the Trinity, as did, for example, the Jews, was an even greater threat against Christianity than to question, as even some clergy did, the manner of the real presence in the Mass. To deny the Trinity was, after all, to deny, with Arius, that Christ, the Second Person, was God, or to suggest, as it seemed to many in the early twelfth century, Roscelin of

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­ ompiègne (d. ca. 1125) had done, that there was in fact not one God, C but three, or, conversely, to identify the persons so closely as to conflate them entirely, along with Sabellius.34 At stake in such debates was far more than simply a question of philosophical certainty, however much Abelard’s attempt to convince his contemporaries that the pagan philosophers had had access, if only imperfectly, to the mystery might make it thus seem. It was, as Abelard himself pointed out, above all a question of liturgy or, rather, more properly, religion, having to do not only with the knowledge of God but, even more importantly, with his worship. “Thus,” Abelard explained (or, rather, hoped), “this definition (distinctio) of the Trinity” under the three names given by Christ—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and confessed as “the divine Power, generating (generantem); the divine Wisdom, begotten (genitam); and the divine Goodness, proceeding (procedentem), . . . not only describes the perfection of the highest good; it is also a means of persuading men very strongly to the piety (religio) of divine worship (divini cultus).”35 Indeed, Abelard contended, it is the known piety of the pagans, “the fact that they look to God’s right direction in all things and offer prayer to him and assign to him the source of their supplications for guidance,” that demonstrates most clearly their access to true Trinitarian belief.36 Again, according to Abelard, that even the Brahmins of India participated in this belief may be shown from a letter that Dindimus, their king, sent to Alexander the Great, attesting to the form of their worship: “We hold,” Dindimus ­asserted, “among other tenets of our religion or faith, that God does not accept bloody sacrifices; he loves bloodless worship; he abhors mournful libations and is propitiated by the word of those praying, because it is through prayer alone that he is with man and takes pleasure from his likeness. For the Word is God and created this world, ruling and cherishing everything in it. We venerate this Word, love it, and from it draw our breath.”37 Much as Bernard would have liked to believe it, Abelard himself was no cold-blooded philosopher, more interested in proving himself right than in loving God.38 If nothing else, the passion with which Abelard wrote to Heloise both before—if the “lost love letters” are genuine—and after their taking monastic vows should convince us of that.39 Indeed, or so Constant Mews has recently argued, it was with much the same passion that Abelard defended his claim in his De trinitate that “by the name of Holy Spirit the disposition of benignity or love is expressed.”40 Just as Abelard encouraged Heloise to transmute her love for him into love of Christ, so, Mews has suggested, Abelard transmuted his love for Heloise into de-

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votion to the Trinity, specifically to the Paraclete, alias the loving-kindness of God. In short, “the energy [Abelard] once invested on Heloise, he now devoted to the Holy Spirit.”41 This, we may be tempted to assume, was simply as it should be, given that Heloise was now a nun and Abelard a monk. But Abelard was not just any kind of monk; rather, like Anselm, he was a Benedictine, and—­ although it is not often remarked—Benedictines, both in England and on the continent, had long had a special place for the Trinity in their liturgy and devotions.42 According to the tenth-century Regularis concordia intended to regularize the liturgical practice of the monasteries of England, the morning Mass on Sundays for which there was no other feast was to be celebrated de Trinitate.43 Similar Trinitarian provisions appear in the early eleventh-century sacramentary of Robert of Jumièges copied at Winchester, likewise among the blessings for ordinary Sundays in the contemporary benedictional of Archbishop Robert used at Canterbury.44 This trinitarian emphasis on Sunday went back as far as Alcuin, whose own Liber sacramentorum designated Sundays as particular to the Trinity within a weekly cycle of votive masses.45 Even more telling for the prominence of the Trinity in Benedictine thought, Alcuin’s successor in the role of royal advisor, Witiza, latterly Benedict of Aniane (d. 821), not only dedicated his abbey church to the Holy Trinity but also, lest anyone miss the significance of this dedication, set three small altars near the main altar “so that by them the persons of the Trinity may be figuratively indicated.”46 Over the course of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, other Benedictine communities followed suit: Caen (Abbaye-aux-Dames, founded 1059–65), Lessay (founded 1056), Fécamp (refounded 1001), Vendôme, Tiron, Souxillanges, Saint-Germer-de-Fly, Poitiers, all were home to monastic churches or houses dedicated to the Trinity.47 At Winchester, both the Old and the New Minster (the latter Benedictine from 964) included the Trinity in their dedications.48 And then there was the feast of the Trinity kept by many Benedictine communities on the Sunday of what should have been the octave of Pentecost, if, that is, Pentecost, the close of the Easter season, could have an octave.49 This was a feast dating back by Bernard and Abelard’s day some two hundred years, specifically to the episcopate of Stephen of Liège (d. 920), who composed the first set of chants for the cathedral office.50 From Liège, the feast had spread by the mid-tenth century to monasteries and churches as far north as Durham and York, via Leofric of Exeter, and, by the mid-eleventh, as far south as Farfa, via Cluny.51 Berno, abbot of Reichenau (d. 1048), was one of its most enthusiastic promoters. Of the

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monastic antiphoners edited by René-Jean Hesbert, all, including the late tenth-century antiphoner of Hartker of St. Gall and the eleventh-century antiphoner of Silos, have chants for an office of the Trinity, albeit only those from Rheinau (thirteenth century), Saint-Denis (mid-twelfth century), and Silos give the feast its expected post-Pentecostal place. For reasons that are not yet clear to me, the feast falls earlier in the calendar at St. Gall, after Epiphany, and later at both Saint-Loup of Benevento and St. Maur-les-Fossés, after the feasts of St. Andrew (November 30) and the Nativity of the Virgin (September 8), respectively.52 The texts for the chants, however, show a somewhat greater conformity, harking back to the secular office originally authored by Stephen but adapted for monastic use by the necessary addition of at least three new antiphons and four new responsories (three for the additional lessons at Matins, one for Lauds). Even more impressively, at Saint-Denis, where Abelard first took profession as a monk, the twelfth-century office for the feast was given particular embellishment with a series of twelve new tones for the Gloria Patri sung in response to the twelve psalms at Matins, an arrangement, we may note, unique to this feast among the chants of the abbey.53 Again, it is tempting to assume that this was simply as it should be. This is, after all, the way the story has usually been told by historians of the liturgy: once the feast of the Trinity had been taken up by such Benedictine giants as Cluny and Saint-Denis, it was only a matter of time—­ actually, some hundred or more years—before the Cistercians would accept the feast into their calendars (1230), and then, a hundred years later again, that the Roman church would approve its universal celebration, under Pope John XXII in 1334.54 Certainly it is possible to read the “learned abbot” Rupert of Deutz’s comments on the institution of the feast in this way: “Having celebrated the solemnity of the coming of the Holy Spirit [i.e. Pentecost], at once, on the Sunday next following, we sing the glory of the Holy Trinity; and”—Rupert would insist—“rightly is this arrangement ordained, for, immediately after the coming of the same Holy Spirit, the faith in, and confession of, the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit began to be preached, and believed, and celebrated in baptism.”55 Nevertheless, as in the thirteenth century with the newly instituted feast of Corpus Christi—not coincidentally, we should begin to suspect, kept on the first Thursday during the octave of the Trinity and likewise a product of Liège—not every one of Rupert’s contemporaries, including Pope Alexander II (1061–73), was necessarily convinced. As Bernold of Constance reported in his commentary on the liturgical calendar only some twenty years before Rupert began his, Alexander himself had

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categorically insisted that, “according to the Roman ordo, no day ought specially to be ascribed to a solemnity of the Holy Trinity, anymore than to the holy unity, especially since on every Sunday, indeed everyday, the memory of both is celebrated.”56 Over a hundred years later, both Johannes Beleth and Sicardus of Cremona reiterated this caution, noting that while some communities observed the Trinitarian feast, others kept the octave of Pentecost, while still others began the “hystoriam Deus omnium” (the first of the offices for the Sundays after Pentecost), “because this,” as Beleth put it, “is what the Roman church observes.”57 As with Abelard’s devotion to the Paraclete, so with Rupert’s almost laconic insistence on the importance of Trinity Sunday, rather more is going on here than most historians either of the liturgy or of theology would have us suppose. Rupert was not, after all, anything like a “learned abbot” (in Abbot Guéranger’s words) at the time that he was working on his De divinis officiis, nor was he hailed by his immediate contemporaries as “a doctor in liturgical science”—quite the reverse!58 Rather, as everyone who has read John Van Engen’s exemplary biography of Rupert knows, not only was the De divinis officiis one of Rupert’s earliest works, begun in his early thirties within a year or so after his ordination, but it was also one of his most controversial, exciting not one, but two distinct accusations of heresy. The first was leveled by canon Alger of Liège (d. 1131) against Rupert’s description of the mystery of Christ’s bodily presence in the bread and wine of the Mass; the second and arguably the more troubling, at least for Rupert’s sense of his role as an exegete, by Norbert of Xanten (d. 1134) against Rupert’s description of the impregnation of the Virgin Mary by the action of the Holy Spirit.59 In the first instance, Rupert found himself forced to undergo a public trial, at which he was saved, “miraculously,” in Rupert’s words, by the intervention of Abbot Cuno of Siegburg (d. 1132).60 In the second, however, some eight or so years later, wrenchingly, albeit at his friend Abbot, now Archbishop, Cuno’s urging, he was convinced at long last to reveal the source of his overriding compulsion— and authority—to write.61 Most recent scholars, myself included, commenting on the series of visions that Rupert recounted in his commentary on Matthew as the inspiration for his exegetical and theological work have tended to concentrate on the first, eighth, and last of the nine, in which Rupert experienced himself kissing, tasting, embracing, and, wax-like, impressed by the crucified Son of Man.62 I would suggest now that we should pay closer ­attention to the third, sixth, and seventh of these visions: the third, in which Rupert had a vision of the Trinity as three persons, two aged and

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white-haired, one young and handsome, who together lifted him up onto the altar of the church, placed him on a book that was open there, and promised him that he would be greater (melior) than even the golden reliquaries now beside him on the altar; the sixth, in which Rupert first dispelled an army of evil spirits coming to get him by calling on the name of the Holy Spirit and then beheld an old man, gesturing to him with a wand and calling to him, “Godson, godson” (filiole, filiole), after which Rupert found himself able to drive off the loathsome hosts by calling on the Spirit as if upon his godfather, whom he saw subsequently both as a “very bright fire” and as a shadow made as if by two wings extended for flight; and the seventh, in which Rupert experienced himself as if impregnated by a luminous substance, sweeter than honey, heavier than gold.63 Reflecting on this seventh vision, Bernard McGinn has observed, “This experience seems to be a kind of spiritual pregnancy, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, perhaps a typologically daring claim to be a new Mary who gives birth to the golden reality of the christological meaning of the biblical text.”64 We may see now why it was Norbert’s challenge, rather than Alger’s, that seems to have struck most directly at Rupert’s heart. Not the God-man as such, but, rather, God-Three-in-One was Rupert’s great love. How better to explain Rupert’s great ambition, following his work on the offices of the liturgical year, to compose a commentary on the whole of Scripture for the purposes of contemplating, as in a mirror, the glory of the Trinity through the work in salvation-history proper (proprium) to each of the three Persons, than as itself a labor of love?65 Rupert invited his readers in the prologue to his great work, “Therefore seeking to adore the glory of the Holy Trinity in this exile, let us direct our senses to the mirror of its works, so that although we are not able owing to our mortal condition to fix our eyes on the splendor of its majesty, we may nevertheless walk by the light of its works to some degree without error.”66 We live, Rupert explained to his monastic brothers, in the third age of God’s working, the Age of the Spirit, which began with the overshadowing of the Virgin Mary at the Incarnation and will conclude with the Last Judgment; more specifically, we live in the age of piety (pietas), the penultimate of the Spirit’s seven gifts. And piety, Rupert took pains to point out, citing Augustine, is that “true religion and the worship of God” (uera religio et cultus Dei) by which human beings, to the extent that they may be called pious, imitate God, “who alone is truly pious” (qui uere et solus pius est).67 Appropriately, Rupert’s own response to the sixth of his visions, his recognition by the Holy Spirit as a child of baptism, was to compose a “prayer or, rather, a hymn” (oratio sive hymnus) meditating on baptism—

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the object, we should recall, according to Rupert, of the feast of the ­Trinity—as a burial in water replicating the triduum that Christ spent in the grave through the triple immersion in the font, “that the dead be buried and the one rising again come forth.”68 Rupert’s response to the seventh of his visions, his spiritual impregnation three days later on the night of Ash Wednesday, was, even more appropriately, to compose a whole book of hymns in praise of the Holy Spirit, by the office of whose love he, Rupert, was now wed to his bride, Holy Wisdom.69 “Truly,” Rupert commented on the “game” (ludus) of creation, of God’s work in the world as celebrated in the office of the Trinity, “to rejoice at such things, to see all these things with hilarity in greatness of heart, is the Love of Wisdom— a zealous love, a holy love—which, we said earlier, is the Holy Spirit.”70 Thus moved by Love to embrace Wisdom, Rupert soon after experienced his arguably most sensuous vision ever of the crucified yet living Lord (the eighth in the series of visions recounted in his commentary on Matthew), after which, at long last, he accepted ordination as a priest. Rupert was not alone in assuming theological authority from his experience with the liturgy or in being inspired thereby to contemplation of the Trinity. Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) did the same. Sometime in 1163–4, on his way from the imperial court, Bishop Eberhard of Bamberg wrote to Abbess Hildegard asking her to expound for him the following theme, on which, according to Constant Mews, Hildegard herself had been speaking at court: In Patre manet eternitas, in Filio equalitas, in Spiritu Sancto eternitatis equalitatisque connexio.71 Eberhard himself was caught up in debates with Gerhoch of Reichersberg (d. 1169) over Peter Lombard’s position on Christ and hoped, it would seem, that Hildegard’s insight into the persons of the Trinity might help him resolve the issue. Mews argues that, like Thierry of Chartres in his commentary on Boethius, Hildegard would seem to draw for her description of the Trinity on a single sentence from Augustine, from the first book of his De doctrina christiana: In Patre unitas, in Filio aequalitas, in Spiritu sancto unitatis aequalitatisque concordia; and, further, that it was Hildegard herself who suggested the substitution of eternitas for unitas so as to focus in her meditation on the Father “more on life than on abstract unity, divorced from matter.”72 In fact, what she was doing was quoting directly from the liturgy, more specifically, one of the antiphons from the office for the feast of the Trinity, typically sung either at Vespers or in the second nocturn at Matins. The text itself was taken up for the liturgy from the De fide Sanctae Trinitatis of Alcuin, which in certain communities also supplied the lessons for the office.73

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“In Patre manet eternitas.” “What is eternity?” Hildegard asked Eberhard in her reply. “It is God. For eternity is not eternity except in Perfect Life. Therefore, God lives in eternity. . . . For eternity is itself alive, and is not without the ability to produce life (floriditate).”74 Thus, Hildegard exclaimed in one of her own antiphons for the Trinity, “Praise be to the ­Trinity, for it is sound and life and creator (creatrix) of all beings in their life; it is the praise of the angelic host and the wondrous splendor of secrets unknown to humankind; it is the life in everything.”75 And in her commentary on the Athanasian Creed, a text itself recited as a canticle every Sunday, including Trinity Sunday, at Prime, she explained: “For every root has viridity in itself, from which fruit proceeds. . . . Why, therefore, should there not be a Trinity of persons in the Creator of everything? The person of the Father may be understood through the root; the person of the Son through the fruit; and the person of the Holy Spirit through the viridity.”76 Through the liturgy, indeed, or so suggests the commentary on the first of the visions recorded in Hildegard’s De operatione Dei (alias, Liber divinorum operum, begun in 1163, the same year that Eberhard asked his question), one could, theologically speaking, hear the voice of God: “I am life,” the heavenly voice told the abbess, “that remains ever the same, without beginning and without end. For this life is God, who is always in motion and constantly in action, and yet this life is manifest in a threefold power. For eternity is called the ‘Father,’ the Word is called the ‘Son,’ and the breath that binds both of them together is called the ‘Holy Spirit.’”77 “The Holy Spirit,” Hildegard told Eberhard, “reveals eternity and enkindles equality, joining them into one. The Holy Spirit is fire and life in eternity and equality, because God lives.”78 Quia Deus vivit: this, not to put too fine a point on it, was the crux of the matter, as much for Abelard, Rupert, and Hildegard as for Bernard or William of St. Thierry (the latter, like Rupert, born in Liège, the birthplace of the feast of the Trinity). God, as William insisted in his Enigma fidei, was not a logic problem to be solved through “tormenting questions, insidious sophistry, and noisy arguments,” but rather a mystery to be sought, remembered, and understood with love.79 Abelard would agree, if not about the arguments, most certainly about the necessity of love, more specifically, love expressed through the religio of worship. We may remember in this context that Abelard, in addition to being a champion of philosophy, was also an author of hymns. As he reminded Heloise in the preface to the second of three hymn-books that he composed for the nuns at the Paraclete, “The task of divine worship at the Offices is threefold. [Thus] the teacher of the peoples gave instruction in the Epistle to the

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Ephesians, saying: ‘And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit; speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord’ [cf. Ephesians 5:18–19].”80 And indeed, every office at the Paraclete began with an invocation to the Holy Spirit, the great Carolingian hymn for Pentecost, Veni Creator Spiritus, “sung on special feasts, but said plain on other days.”81 We may hear echoes of this same text in Rupert’s, Hildegard’s and William’s own responses to the Spirit and, thus, to the Trinity: O come, Creator Spirit, visit our minds; and with thy heavenly grace fill the hearts that were made by thee. Thou art called the Paraclete, the Gift of the most high God, the living Fountain, Fire, Love, and spiritual Unction. ... Enkindle thy light in our senses; infuse thy love into our hearts; and strengthen the weakness of our flesh by thine unfailing power. ... Grant that through thee, we may know the Father and the Son; and that we may evermore confess thee the Spirit of them both!82 Most twenty-first-century Christians, if asked to name the principal feasts of the liturgical year, would, one suspects, albeit with certain significant Evangelical exceptions, stop at the feasts of the Incarnation, that is, Christmas and Easter.83 Far fewer, if any, twelfth-century Christians, certainly none of the ones whose thoughts on the matter we have been considering, would have seen things in quite this way. Pentecost—and, likewise, its Trinitarian octave—was not simply a coda to the great events of

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the birth, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of the Second Person; rather, it was their reason for having happened in the first place. Honorius Augustodunensis (fl. 1100–1125) put it perhaps most succinctly in his sermon for the Spirit’s feast day: “Through the Son, man (homo) redeemed has been liberated from death; through the Holy Spirit in baptism he has been brought forth (regeneratur) again to life.” And again: “Through the Son, God the Father will create a new heaven and new earth, but the Holy Spirit will restore (renovabit) the universe to a better state.”84 Rupert was, characteristically, somewhat more prolix: Therefore, in proportion to the dignity of the Person coming and the reason for his advent, the solemnity of the advent of the Holy Spirit is as glorious, bright, venerable, and sweet to the house of holy church as that most sacred feast of the resurrection of the Lord, because just as it would have benefited us nothing to have been born without being redeemed, so it would have benefited us nothing to have been redeemed without being illuminated by the Holy Spirit and receiving remission of our sins.85 Wonderful—and terrible—things might happen on Pentecost. Joa­ chim of Fiore was saying the psalms in honor of the Holy Spirit one Pentecost Sunday when, suddenly, he was struck with doubt concerning the faith of the Trinity, both how all persons could be one God and how one God could be all persons. “When this happened,” he recounted, I prayed as hard as I could. Terrified, I was moved to call upon the Holy Spirit whose holy solemnity it was to deign to show to me the holy mystery of the Trinity, in which has been promised us by the Lord every conception of truth. Saying this, I began to sing the psalms up to the assigned number. Without delay, there appeared in my mind the shape of a ten-stringed psaltery in which the mystery of the Trinity appeared so brightly and clearly that I was compelled to cry out: “What God is as great as our God?”86 Elisabeth of Schönau’s (d. 1164/5) experience was similar, if extended over a somewhat greater period of time. One year at Pentecost (May 18, 1152), Elisabeth missed taking communion with her sisters, and thus, she recalled, “the celebration of that day did not gladden me as it usually did.” All the week following, the Adversary “flooded [her] with all his force,”

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raising doubts about her faith and the truth of the things written about the Redeemer, so powerfully that she was even tempted to take her own life.87 Like Rupert and Joachim, however, Elisabeth did not die but rather began, over the course of the next ten or more years, to experience a series of visions, typically in the context of particular moments in the liturgy, often in answer to specific theological questions. One such vision concerned the Trinity. “I saw,” Elisabeth reported, “an image of a marble column extending from the abyss up to the height of heaven, and it was triangular in shape. One angle was white as snow, while another was red, and the third had the appearance of marble.” The angel who was with Elisabeth in this vision explained: “The column that you see descends from the throne of God into the abyss, and its three ­angles signify the holy Trinity. . . . The white color represents the humanity of Christ; the red, the Holy Spirit; and the marble refers to the ­divinity of the Father.” At which explanation, Elisabeth exclaimed, in the words of Psalm 35:10, “Lord, with you is the fountain of life, and in your light we will see the light.”88 Hildegard herself had had a similar vision, which perhaps Elisabeth knew.89 What is significant for our purposes is when Elisabeth experienced her version of this vision: at the beginning of the fourth year of her visitations, on the vigil of Pentecost (May 14, 1155). My conclusion, as promised, is a simple one: Rupert of Deutz and Joachim of Fiore were not the only ones in the twelfth century convinced that they were living in the Age of the Third Person of the Trinity, nor was their conviction simply a matter, as certain older studies have tended—if inadvertently—to suggest, of a greater concentration on the significance of history or time.90 The mystery of the Trinity was a matter not only for logic, but, first and foremost, for worship and, likewise, although we have been disinclined to see it in our modern concentration on Christ, of devotion. God—the God of the Trinity—lives: this was Hildegard’s confession to Eberhard in her explanation of the antiphon for the Trinitarian feast. It was, likewise, Abelard’s confession to Heloise: I adore Christ who sits on the right hand of the Father. I embrace in the arms of faith him who acts divinely in the glorious flesh of the virgin which he assumed from the Paraclete. . . . I believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; the true God who is one in nature; who comprises the Trinity of persons in such a way as always to preserve Unity in substance. . . . This is the faith on which I rest, from which I draw my strength in hope.91

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If the twelfth century was a period of increasing attention to the mystery of the Incarnation and of devotion to the humanity of Christ, it is comprehensible as such, I would now argue, only in the context of an equally powerful conviction that God as Trinity was alive and well and in love with his creation, in which love his creatures might participate through the continuing presence of the Spirit, celebrated each year at Pentecost, hymned as the day on which the Spirit came to rest on the altar of human hearts.92 M.-D. Chenu wrote of this period as one of evangelical awakening.93 We might, in this context, recall Honorius Augustodunensis’ advice at the outset of his Speculum ecclesiae, that those who would preach to the people should first make the sign of the cross over their mouths and their breasts and then invoke the grace of the Holy Spirit through the antiphon Veni, Sancte Spiritus, and a verse of the hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus. Only after that should they invoke the Word of God through the gospel: “In principio erat Verbum” (John 1:1).94 Unsurprisingly, Rupert set his hymn-prayer to the Holy Spirit to the very same tune: My God and Lord, you are, O holy Spirit, my arms and my shield; come to my aid. ... You drew God down from heaven into the womb of a woman. You are love, through whom our flesh was joined to God. ... O God, we have heard with our ears, our fathers have announced to us the work which you did when you came down in tongues of fire from the throne of God that earth might be made heaven, that men might become gods.

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... O sign of faith, advocate of the faithful, light of fire and fountain of light, hear me calling and come. ... Make clean my prayers, enkindle my incense that the burning odor of its aroma might ascend to God. ... With you leading, the face of the Father and the Son may be seen, even as you flow forth from both, fountain of life, river of peace. Praise and thanks be to you, pious God, pious Lord, with the Father and with the Son. Amen.95 It was the Spirit of the Trinity that was the spirit of the age, not just the Father or the Son. —  Some sixty or so years ago, four years after the end of one of the greatest wars humankind had yet experienced, novelist, lay theologian, and translator Dorothy Sayers (d. 1957) warned modern Christians that they were involved in a war of cosmic proportions, not of economics or power politics but of dogma, that is, “about the nature of God and the nature of man and the ultimate nature of the universe.”96 “It is fatal,” she insisted, “to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism.”97

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“Simple” Christianity, without doctrine or creeds, was not the answer to the spiritual and ethical crisis in which Europe then found itself, nor was “religion without theology” the answer to the declining participation of even nominal Christians, whether lay or clerical, in the church. Rather, Sayers contended, it was dogma, and dogma alone, that would provide the answers to the questions posed by the man in the street about peace, freedom, justice and mercy, law, society, and work. Likewise, it was dogma, “not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death,” that would excite Christians and draw them in, because it was dogma—“the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death”—in which the real drama of religion and, therefore, worship lay.98 Her countryman and fellow Anglican C. S. Lewis (d. 1963) made much the same argument in the series of radio addresses that he gave in 1942 through 1944: “Theology is, in a sense, an experimental science. It is simple religions that are the made-up ones.” Moreover, Lewis averred, theology is to the spontaneous experience of “tremendous mystery” that one might have, for example, as a soldier in the desert, like a map of the ocean is to a walk on the beach: “Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God—experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very ele­ mentary and very confused.”99 Both Lewis and Sayers took pains to point out that Christians were in no way better off left to themselves, theologyfree as it were, to come up with their own ideas about God, if for no better reason than that, left to their own devices, they would more or less inevitably find themselves reinventing the mistakes of the past, a.k.a. heresies. And no wonder: “heresy,” as Sayers brilliantly explained, “is largely the expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point where they begin to interfere with his daily life and thought.”100 Where does history end and theology begin? Sayers and Lewis were speaking to the Christians and aspiring Christians of their own day. And yet it is difficult not to read their concerns as a comment on the direction that scholarship on the history of Christianity had already, well before their own lifetimes, begun to take: towards the celebration of “alternative” Christianities, those at odds with the orthodox faith, and away from the recognition of the necessity of theology to Christian life.101 This is not a mistake that Honorius or Rupert or Bernard or Abelard or Heloise or Hil-

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degard or Elisabeth or Joachim would have made. That theology as such was likewise a concern of later medieval Christians, both clergy and laity alike, may arguably be seen from the great popularity of the friars, charged with the responsibility, as one thirteenth-century manual put it, of preaching not only the virtues, vices, and Ten Commandments, but, first and foremost, the “symbol of faith [i.e. the Creed], containing the twelve articles of faith; the Lord’s Prayer, with its seven petitions; [and] the general and special gifts of God, especially the seven gifts of the Spirit which Isaiah enumerates in c. 39 [sic for Isa. 11].”102 Whereas for many modern Christians, as Sayers trenchantly points out, it is enough to believe that Jesus Christ “was a good man—so good as to be called the Son of God” (albeit with “no sense of humor”), medieval Christians were clear that it was God, not just a good man, who suffered on the cross.103 To imitate his suffering, as so many, like St. Francis of Assisi (d. 1226), attempted in their devotions, was to aspire to participation in the experience of God, Three-inOne, as the images of the Gnadenstuhl, the Father and Spirit participating in the crucifixion of the Son, sought to make clear.104 Indeed, it is arguable whether devotion to Christ as God-man is sustainable in any climate other than one of high Trinitarian devotion. “What would Jesus do?” is a human question, not a theological one.105 It was the nineteenth century, not the twelfth, that was obsessed with the quest for the historical Jesus.106 We historians of the twenty-first century are the heirs to this nineteenth-century concern, along with its emphasis on imitating Christ in his virtuous humanity; thus arguably our ­desire, in celebrating the twelfth century, to discover the roots of this obsession then.107 Christians of the twelfth century, in contrast, were fascinated by the Trinity; it was this fascination that drove monks, nuns, scholars, and lay people not only to the development of theology as a discipline but also to arguments ending, tragically, in persecution and crusade. Theology, in other words, was something worth fighting for. Contemplating the Trinity drove monks like Rupert and Bernard to new heights of scriptural exegesis and scholars like Abelard and Gilbert to the construction of new theories of language and signification; it inspired nuns like Hildegard and Elisabeth to new modes of representing theological understanding, through imagery and visions, and monks like Rupert and Joachim to new conceptions of history and time. It likewise inspired both townspeople and knights, if, that is, Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. ca. 1155) is to be believed. According to Geoffrey, King Arthur held a great feast in the City of Legions on Pentecost, summoning to his court “all the leaders who owed him homage, so that he could celebrate Whitsun [Pentecoste] with greater

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reverence and renew the closest possible pacts of peace with his chieftains.” High mass having been celebrated with appropriate pomp, there followed three days of games, the knights competing in an “imitation battle” (simulachrum prelii) and the ladies looking on from the city walls.108 We may recognize here a literary description of the tournaments that were all the fashion in twelfth-century Europe; less often remarked is the fact that it was on the Monday after Pentecost that the tourneying season typically began.109 That God became incarnate was, indeed, a great mystery; even more wondrous, or so twelfth-century Christians like Anselm, Rupert, Abelard, Peter Lombard, and Hildegard believed, was how in becoming incarnate he revealed himself as Three-in-One. As Hildegard explained in her great revelatory summa, Scivias: “The Blessed and Ineffable Trinity showed itself to the world when the Father sent into the world his Only-Begotten, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin, so that humans, born so diversely and bound by so many sins, should be brought back by Him to the way of truth.”110 Modern Christians—and scholars—may find this a difficult concept to grasp. For medieval Christians like Hildegard and her contemporaries, it was a revelation laying open the very interior of love.111 As Dorothy Sayers put it, the dogma was the drama—and, therefore, the stimulus for devotion. It is time for historians of medieval Christianity to develop a methodology that takes account of this insight.112 Notes 1.  Although beyond the scope of the present article to resolve definitively, my guess is that our blindness goes back at the very least to Hegel. For the problem in modern theology of the Trinity generally, see Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2005). 2.  For an important corrective to this view, see Margot Fassler, Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris (Cambridge, 1993). 3.  For an analogous appeal with respect to the modern Catholic liturgy, see Aidan Nichols, O.P., Looking at the Liturgy: A Critical View of its Contemporary Form (San Francisco, 1996). Nichols traces the present crisis in the post–Vatican II liturgy as far back as the radical Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, with its insistence that the liturgy be, above all, simple, intelligible, and communitycentered rather than, as was the medieval liturgy, prolix, awe-inspiring, and Goddirected. Ironically, as Nichols points out, the greater the sense of immediate accessibility in a liturgical rite, the more it denies to its participants the possibility

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of “taking off Godward by a leap of religious imagination” (p. 65), a criticism historians would do well to bear in mind in their assessments of the premodern liturgy as more or less “relevant” to its nonclerical participants. 4.  For the conviction that “real” religion is independent of its liturgical and theological forms, see Friedrich Heiler, Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion (Oxford, 1932), pp. xv–xxiv. On the power of this view of religion in American culture, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco, 2005). For the contribution of the Romantics to this conviction, see Terry Tastard, “Theology and Spirituality in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Companion Encyclopedia of Theology, ed. Peter Byrne and Leslie Houlden (London, 1995), pp. 594–619. 5.  Cf. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco, 2000), p. 18: “Ultimately, it is the very life of man, man himself as living righteously, that is the true worship of God, but life only becomes real life when it receives its form from looking toward God. Cult exists in order to communicate this vision and to give life in such a way that glory is given to God.” 6.  Cf. Anna Sapir Abulafia’s article in the present volume. 7.  Most recent discussions of this transformation in English go back to R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1953), pp. 231–8. Cf. Caro­ line Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982), pp. 16–19, 129–35; Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200, Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 19 (Toronto, 1987), pp. 139–44; Ewert Cousins, “The Humanity and the Passion of Christ,” in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed. Jill Raitt, Bernard McGinn, and John Meyendorff (New York, 1987), pp. 375–91; Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought: The Interpretation of Mary and Martha; The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ; The Orders of Society (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 181–93, 201–16; Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia, 1996), pp. 35–43; and Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York, 2002). For an earlier discussion, see G. L. Prestige, Fathers and Heretics: Six Studies in Dogmatic Faith, Bampton Lectures for 1940 (London, 1940), pp. 180–207. 8.  Anselm of Canterbury, Oratio 2, in S. Anselmi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi opera omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1946–61), vol. 3, pp. 6–9; The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, with the Proslogion, trans. Benedicta Ward (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 93–9; and Cur Deus homo, S. Anselmi opera, 2.39– 133; ed. Schmitt, trans. Janet Fairweather, as “Why God Became Man,” in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford, 1998), pp. 260–356. 9. Bernard, Sermons 20 and 43, in Sermones super Cantica canticorum, in S. Ber­nardi opera omnia, ed. Jean Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais, 8 vols. (Rome, 1957–77), vol. 1, pp. 114–21, vol. 2, pp. 41–4; trans. Kilian J. Walsh and Irene M. Edmonds, as On the Song of Songs 1–4, Cistercian Fathers Series 4, 7, 31, and 40 (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1981, 1983, 1979, and 1980), vol. 1, pp.147–55, vol. 2, pp. 220–4.

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10.  On these debates, see Margaret T. Gibson, Lanfranc of Bec (Oxford, 1978), pp. 78–91; Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983), pp. 272–325; Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period: A Study of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament According to the Theologians, ca. 1080–ca. 1220 (Oxford, 1984); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 48–69; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 14– 35; Peter Cramer, Baptism and Change in the Early Middle Ages, ca. 200–ca. 1150 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 243–54; Michal Kobialka, This is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor, 1999), pp. 101–95; and Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, pp. 118–41. 11.  For the polemics against the Cathars, see Ekbert of Schönau, Sermones adversus pestiferous foedissimosque Catharorum, PL 195:11–98; and Alan of Lille, De fide catholica contra haereticos sui temporis, praesertim Albigenses, PL 210:305–430. For the polemics against the Jews, see Gilbert Crispin, Disputatio Iudei et Christiani, in The Works of Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminster, ed. Anna Sapir Abulafia and G. R. Evans, Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi 8 (London, 1986), pp. 8–53; Guibert of Nogent, Tractatus de incarnatione contra Judaeos, PL 156:489–527; and Rupert of Deutz, “Anulus sive Dialogus inter Christianum et Iudaeum,” ed. Rhabanus Haacke, in Maria Lodovica Arduini, Ruperto di Deutz e la controversia tra Cristiani ed Ebrei nel secolo 12, Studii Storici 119–21 (Rome, 1979), pp. 183–242. 12. Rupert, De gloria et honore filii hominis super Mattheum, bk. 12, ed. Rhabanus Haacke, CCCM 29 (Turnhout, 1979), p. 369. 13.  Giles Constable, Reformation, pp. 279–85. 14. Abelard, Epistola 4, ed. J. T. Muckle, “The Personal Letters between Abelard and Héloïse,” MS 15 (1953), pp. 47–94, at p. 91; trans. Betty Radice, as The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 151. 15.  Bernard McGinn, “Iter Sancti Sepulchri: The Piety of the First Crusaders,” in The Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures: Essays on Medieval Civilization, ed. Bede K. Lackner and Kenneth R. Philp (Austin, Tex., 1978), pp. 33–71; William J. Purkis, “Stigmata on the First Crusade,” in Signs, Wonders and Miracles: Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church, ed. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, Studies in Church History 41 (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 99–108; William J. Purkis, “Elite and Popular Perceptions of the Imitatio Christi in Twelfth-Century Crusade Spirituality,” in Elite and Popular Religion, ed. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, Studies in Church History 42 (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 54–64; and C. Matthew Phillips, “O Magnum Crucis Misterium: Devotion to the Cross, Crusading, and the Imitation of the Crucified Christ in the High Middle Ages, ca. 1050–ca.1215” (Ph.D. thesis, St. Louis University, 2006). 16. For developments in twelfth-century theology generally, see M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago, 1968); G. R. Evans, Old Arts and New Theology: The Beginnings of Theology as an Academic Discipline (Oxford, 1980); Lauge Olaf Nielsen, Theology and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Gilbert Porreta’s Thinking and the Theological Expositions of the Doctrine of the Incarnation During the Period 1130–1180,

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Acta Theologica Danica 15 (Leiden, 1982); Jean Leclercq, “The Renewal of The­ ology,” in Renaissance & Renewal, ed. Robert R. Benson and Giles Constable, pp. 68–87; R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1994); Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400 (New Haven, 1997), pp. 277–88; R. N. Swanson, The TwelfthCentury Renaissance (Manchester, 1999), pp. 115–38; and Eileen Sweeney, Logic, Theology and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things (New York, 2006). 17.  On these efforts generally, see Edmund J. Fortman, The Triune God: A Historical Study of the Doctrine of the Trinity (Philadelphia, 1972), pp. 173–201; Fiona Robb, “The Function of Repetition in Scholastic Theology of the Trinity,” Vivarium 34 (1996), pp. 41–75; Marcia Colish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 91–154, 227–63; and Southern, Scholastic Humanism, vol. 2, pp. 95–104. 18. Anselm, De processione Spiritus sancti contra Graecos, ed. Schmitt, S. Anselmi opera omnia, vol. 2, pp. 175–219; trans. Richard Regan, in Major Works, ed. Davies and Evans, pp. 390–434. 19.  G. R. Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux (New York, 2000), p. 123 (on Gilbert of Poitiers); and Constant Mews, Abelard and Heloise (New York, 2005), p. 229. Cf. Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici I imperatoris, trans. C. C. Mierow, as The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies 49 (New York, 1953), pp. 88–94; and Bernard, Sermon 80, ed. Leclercq, Talbot, and Rochais, in S. Bernardi opera omnia, vol 2, pp. 277–83; trans. Walsh and Edmonds, On the Song of Songs, vol. 4, pp. 145–56. 20.  Sun, see Boethius, Trinitas unus deus ac non tres dii, ed. and trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, in Theological Tractates, Loeb Classical Library 74 (Cambridge, 1973), p. 15; human mind, see Augustine, De trinitate libri 15, ed. W. J. Mountain and F. Glorie, CCSL 50 (Turnhout, 1968), trans. Edmund Hill, O.P., as The Trinity (Hyde Park, N.Y., 1991); Nile, see Anselm, Epistola de incarnatione verbi, c. 13, ed. Schmitt, S. Anselmi opera omnia, vol. 2, pp. 31–2, trans. Richard Regan, in The Major Works, ed. Davies and Evans, pp. 255–57; bronze seal, see Abelard, Theologia “Scholarium,” bk. 2.112–3, ed. E. M. Buytaert and C. J. Mews, in Petri Abaelardi opera theologica 3, CCCM 13 (Turnhout, 1987), pp. 462–4. 21.  Cf. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi, 3rd ed. (New York, 1982), for the classic statement of this division. On the difficulties with this distinction with respect to the contents of monastic libraries, see Constant Mews, “Scholastic Theology in a Monastic Milieu in the Twelfth Century: The Case of Admont,” in Manuscripts and Monastic Culture: Reform and Renewal in Twelfth-Century Germany, ed. Alison I. Beach, Medieval Church Studies 13 (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 217–39. On the difficulties with Leclercq’s paradigm in general, see Thomas Head, “‘Monastic’ and ‘Scholastic’ Theology: A Change of Paradigm?” in Paradigms in Medieval Thought Applications in Medieval Disciplines: A Symposium, ed. Nancy van Deusen and Alvin E. Ford, Mediaeval Studies 3 (Lewiston, N.Y., 1990), pp. 127–41. 22.  Bernard, Sermon 76, ed. Leclercq, Talbot, and Rochais, S. Bernardi opera omnia, vol. 3, pp. 482–3; trans. Walsh and Edmonds, On the Song of Songs, vol. 4, p. 115; and De consideratione ad Eugenium Papam, bk. 5, 8.18, ed. Leclercq, Talbot,

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and Rochais, S. Bernardi opera omnia, vol. 3, pp. 482–3; trans. John D. Anderson and Elizabeth T. Kennan, as Five Books on Consideration: Advice to a Pope, Cistercian Fathers Series 37 (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1976), p. 163. 23. Anselm, Monologion, ed. Schmitt, S. Anselmi opera omnia, vol. 2, pp. 5–87; trans. Simon Harrison, in The Major Works, ed. Davies and Evans, pp. 3–81; Proslogion, ed. Schmitt, S. Anselmi opera omnia, vol. 2, pp. 93–122; trans. M. J. Charlesworth, in The Major Works, ed. Davies and Evans, pp. 82–104; and De processione Spiritus sancti contra Graecos, ed. Schmitt, S. Anselmi opera omnia, vol. 2, pp. 175– 219; trans. Regan, in The Major Works, ed. Davies and Evans, pp. 390–434. 24. Mews, Abelard and Heloise, pp. 126, 131. 25.  For Herman-Judah’s encounter with the “idol,” see Karl Morrison, Conversion and Text: The Cases of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and Constantine Tsatsos (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), pp. 80–5; and Herbert L. Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art, Rethinking the Middle Ages 1 (Peterborough, Ont., 2004), pp. 165–6. For the iconography of the Gnadenstuhl, see Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, 5 vols. (Gütersloh, 1966–1980), vol. 2, pp. 133–5, figs. 409, 411, 413, 414 and 425; and Wolfgang Braunfels, Die Heilige Dreifaltigkeit (Düsseldorf, 1954), pp. xxxv–xliii, figs. 36–47. 26.  On the association of images of the Trinity with the liturgy of the Mass, see François Boespflug and Yolanta Zaluska, “Le dogme trinitaire et l’essor de son iconographie en Occident de l’époque carolingienne au 4e Concile du Latran (1215),” Cahiers de civilization médiévale, 10e–12e siècles 37 (1994), pp. 181–240, at pp. 203–4. On the Trinitarian emphases in the prayers of the Mass, see Josef A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origin and Development, trans. Francis A. Brunner, 2 vols. (New York, 1951–55), vol. 2, pp. 48–9; and Joanne M. Pierce, “Early Medieval Prayers Addressed to the Trinity in the Ordo Missae of Sigebert of Minden,” Trad 51 (1996), pp. 179–200. For these emphases as “disproportionately great,” see Josef A. Jungmann, Pastoral Liturgy (New York, 1962), pp. 34–8. 27.  For the difficulties with the Trinity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian theology, see Colin Gunton, “The Trinity in Modern Theology,” in Companion Encyclopedia of Theology, ed. Byrne and Houlden, pp. 937–57. 28.  Decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council, canon 1, ed. and trans. Norman P. Tanner et al., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1990), vol. 1, pp. 230–1; repr. in Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, Creeds and Con­ fessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 4 vols. (New Haven, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 741–2. 29.  On the doctrine of transubstantiation as a product of Trent, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fifteenth Century,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theology in the Middle Ages, ed. AnneMarie Bouché and Jeffrey Hamburger (Princeton, 2005), pp. 208–40, at p. 209. 30.  For discussion of the theology of baptism during this period, see Bryan D. Spinks, Early and Medieval Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From the New Testament to the Council of Trent (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 134–43; and Colish, Peter Lombard, vol. 2, pp. 532–48; for the Cathar concerns about baptism, see Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York, 1991), passim.

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31.  Decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council, canon 2, ed. and trans. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, pp. 231–2. 32.  Robb, “The Fourth Lateran Council’s Definition of Trinitarian Orthodoxy,” JEH 48 (1997), pp. 22–43. 33.  Epistola 332, ed. Leclercq, Talbot, and Rochais, S. Bernardi opera omnia, vol. 8, pp. 271–2; PL 182:537. 34. Fortman, Triune God, p. 177; Colish, Peter Lombard, vol. 1, p. 125; Mews, Abelard and Heloise, p. 119. 35.  Theologia Christiana, bk. 1, PL 178:1125–6; trans. J. Ramsay McCallum as Christian Theology (Oxford, 1948), p. 46, with changes. Cf. ed. E. M. Buytaert, in Petri Abaelardi opera theologica 2, CCCM 12 (Turnhout, 1969), pp. 73–4. On the various redactions of Abelard’s theology, see E. M. Buytaert, “Abelard’s Trini­ tarian Doctrine,” in Peter Abelard: Proceedings of the International Conference, Louvain, May 10–12, 1971, ed. E. M. Buytaert (Leuven, 1974), pp. 127–52. 36.  Theologia Christiana, bk. 2, PL 178:1177; trans. McCallum, p. 62; cf. ed. Buytaert, CCCM 12, p. 147. 37.  Theologia Christiana, bk. 1, PL 178:1164, my translation; cf. trans. Mc Callum, p. 56; cf. ed. Buytaert, CCCM 12, p. 128. 38.  Epistola 190.1, ed. Leclercq, Talbot, and Rochais, S. Bernardi opera omnia, vol. 8, pp. 17–18; cited by Mews, Abelard and Heloise, p. 10. 39.  For the letters, see Constant Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France (New York, 1999). For discussion as to their probable authenticity, see Barbara Newman’s article in the present volume. 40.  Theologia “Summi boni,” bk. 1, c. 5.17, ed. Buytaert and Mews, CCCM 13, p. 92; trans. Mews, Abelard and Heloise, p. 104. 41. Mews, Abelard and Heloise, p. 126; cf. ibid., p. 118. 42.  Wanda Cizewski, “A Theological Feast: The Commentary by Rupert of Deutz on Trinity Sunday,” Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale 55 (1988), pp. 41–52, at p. 41. 43.  Regularis Concordia Anglicae nationis monachorum sanctimonialiumque, c. 1.23, ed. and trans. Thomas Symons, as The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation (London, 1953), p. 19; cf. PL 137:483. 44. Barbara Raw, Trinity and Incarnation in Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought (Cambridge, 1997), p. 11. 45. Alcuin, Liber sacramentorum, PL 101:445–6; cf. Bernold of Constance, Micrologus de ecclesiasticis observationibus, c. 60, PL 151:1020. 46.  Ardo, “Life of St. Benedict,” trans. Allen Cabaniss, in Thomas F. X. Noble and Thomas Head, Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (University Park, Pa., 1995), p. 228. 47.  Peter Browe, S.J., “Zur Geschichte des Dreifaltigkeitsfestes,” Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 1 (1950), pp. 65–81, at p. 67. 48.  Alison Binns, Dedications of Monastic Houses in England and Wales, 1066– 1216, Studies in the History of Medieval Religion 1 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1989), p. 90. 49.  Consuetudines Cluniacensium Antiquiores cum redactionibus derivatis, ed. Kassius Halliger, O.S.B., Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum 7, 2 (Siegburg,

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1983), p. 107. Cf. Ulrich of Zell (Udalrich of Cluny) (d. 1093), Antiquiores consuetudines Cluniacensis monasterii, c. 25, PL 149:672–3. On Pentecost as a feast without a dies octava, see Francis X. Weiser, Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs: The Year of the Lord in Liturgy and Folklore (New York, 1952), p. 250. 50.  Antoine Auda, L’école musicale liégoise au 10e siècle: Étienne de Liège, Aca démie royale de Belgique, Classe des Beaux-arts, Collection in 8 t. 2. f., fasc. 1 (Bruxelles, 1923), pp. 67–121; Gunilla Björkvall and Andreas Haug, “Text und Musik im Trinitätsoffizium Stephans von Lüttich: Beobachtungen und Überlegungen aus mittellateinischer und musikhistorischer Sicht,” in Die Offizien des Mittel­ alters: Dichtung und Musik, ed. Walter Berschin and David Hiley, Regensburger Studien zur Musikgeschichte 1 (Tutzing, 1999), pp. 1–24. 51. Raw, Trinity and Incarnation, pp. 10–11; Susan Boynton, Shaping a Mo nastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–1125 (Ithaca, 2006), pp. 70–80, 116. For Durham, see René-Jean Hesbert, Corpus Antiphonalium Officii [hereafter CAO], 6 vols., Rerum Ecclesiasticarum Documenta, Series Maior, Fontes 7–12 (Rome, 1963–79), vol. 1, p. 232. 52. Hesbert, CAO, vol. 2, nos. 43(2), 97, 127(3), and 120(3). 53.  Anne Walters Robertson, The Service-Books of the Royal Abbey of Saint Denis: Images of Ritual and Music in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1991), pp. 128–33, 245. 54.  Dom Prosper Guéranger [and Lucien Fromage], The Liturgical Year, trans. Dom Laurence Shepherd, 15 vols. (Powers Lake, N.Dak., 1983; first published 1867–90), vol. 10, pp. 92–3; Dom F. Cabrol, “Le Culte de la Trinité dans la liturgie et l’institution de la fête de la Trinité,” Ephemerides liturgicae 45 (1931), pp. 270–8. 55. Rupert, Liber de divinis officiis, bk. 11, c. 1, ed. Rhabanus Haacke, CCCM 7 (Turnhout, 1967), p. 369; trans. in Guéranger, Liturgical Year, vol. 10, p. 93, with changes. 56. Bernold, Micrologus, c. 60, PL 151:1020. For the history of the adoption of Corpus Christi, see Barbara R. Walters, Vincent Corrigan, and Peter T. Ricketts, The Feast of Corpus Christi (University Park, Pa., 2006), pp. 3–54. 57.  Johannes Beleth, Summa de ecclesiasticis officiis, 134, ed. H. Douteil, 2 vols., CCCM 41–41A (Turnhout, 1976), vol. 2, p. 258; cf. Sicardus, Mitrale sive Summa de ecclesiasticis officiis, bk. 8, c. 1, PL 213:385–6. 58. Guéranger, Liturgical Year, vol. 10, p. 92. Although published under Guéranger’s name, this is in fact one of the volumes written by Lucien Fromage. 59.  John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley, 1983), pp. 135–42; 336–41. 60.  Ibid., pp. 158–68. 61.  Ibid., pp. 349–51. 62.  Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991), p. 86; Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, N.C., 1998), p. 43; Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, pp. 309–13, 336–40; Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London, 2005), p. 177. 63. Rupert, De gloria et honore filii hominis super Mattheum, bk. 12, ed. Haacke, CCCM 29, pp. 371–3, 376–9. On these visions, see Rhabanus Haacke, “Die mystischen Visionen Ruperts von Deutz,” in “Sapientiae Doctrina”: Mélanges de théologie et de littératures médiévales offerts à Dom Hildebrand Bascour O.S.B.,

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Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, Numéro special 1 (Leuven, 1980), pp. 68–90; and François Boespflug, “La vision-en-rêve de la Trinité de Rupert de Deutz (v. 1100): Liturgie, spiritualité et histoire de l’art,” Revue des sciences religieuses 71 (1997), pp. 205–29. 64. McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great Through the Twelfth Century (New York, 1994), p. 332. 65.  Van Engen, Rupert, p. 78; cf. G. R. Evans, Anselm and a New Generation (Oxford, 1980), pp. 18–20. 66. Rupert, De sancta Trinitate et operibus eius libri 42, Prologus, ed. Rhabanus Haacke, 4 vols., CCCM 21–24 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971–72), vol. 1, p. 126. Van Engen, Rupert, p. 91, notes Rupert’s originality in this work: “Apart from polemics on the filioque, Rupert’s was in fact the first such separate treatment of the Holy Spirit in the West, and thus represented an important early witness to a new form of piety singling out the Spirit’s work in Christian life, comparable to the new cult of Christ’s humanity.” 67. Rupert, De sancta Trinitate: De operibus Spiritus sancti, bk. 8, ed. Haacke, CCCM 24, p. 2075. 68. Rupert, De gloria et honore filii hominis super Mattheum, bk. 12, ed. Haacke, CCCM 29, p. 377. 69.  Ibid., p. 380. 70. Rupert, De divinis officiis, bk. 11, c. 8, ed. Haacke, CCCM 7, p. 379; trans. Cizewski, “A Theological Feast,” p. 45. 71.  Letter 31 (Eberhard to Hildegard), ed. L. Van Acker, Epistolarium, 3 vols., CCCM 91 (Turnhout, 1991), vol 1, p. 82; trans. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman, The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, 3 vols. (New York, 1994–2004), vol. 1, p. 94: “eternity is an attribute of the Father, equality an attribute of the Son, with the Holy Spirit being the connection between the two.” 72.  Constant J. Mews, “Hildegard and the Schools,” in Hildegard of Bingen and the Context of Her Thought and Art, ed. Charles S. F. Burnett and Peter Dronke (London, 1998), pp. 89–110, at pp. 105–6. 73.  For the text of the office, see Barbara C. Raw, “The Office of the Trinity in the Crowland Psalter (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 296),”Anglo-Saxon England 28 (1999), pp. 185–200. 74.  Letter 31r (Hildegard to Eberhard), ed. Van Acker, CCCM 91, vol. 1, p. 83; trans. Baird and Ehrman, Letters, vol. 1, p. 95. 75. Hildegard, Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, no. 26, ed. and trans. Barbara Newman, as Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations (Ithaca, 1998), pp. 142–3, with changes. 76. Hildegard, Explanatio symboli S. Athanasii ad congregationem sororum suarum, PL 197:1074. For the Athanasian Creed, see Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions, vol. 1, pp. 673–7. 77. Hildegard, Liber divinorum operum 1, 1.2, ed. Albert Derolez and Peter Dronke, CCCM 92 (Turnhout, 1996), p. 49; trans. Matthew Fox, as Book of Divine Works (Santa Fe, N.Mex., 1987), p. 11. 78.  Letter 31r (Hildegard to Eberhard), ed. Van Acker, CCCM 91, vol. 1, p. 86; trans. Baird and Ehrman, Letters, vol. 1, p. 97.

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79. William, Enigma fidei, 24, trans. John D. Anderson, as The Enigma of Faith, Cistercian Fathers Series 9 (Washington, D.C., 1973), p. 56. 80.  The Paraclete Hymnal, Preface to Book 1, trans. Constant J. Mews, “Lit urgy and Identity at the Paraclete: Heloise, Abelard, and the Evolution of Cistercian Reform,” in The Poetic and Musical Legacy of Heloise and Abelard: An Anthology of Essays by Various Authors, ed. Marc Stewart and David Wulstan, Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen 78/Musicological Studies 78 (Ottawa and Westhumble, Surrey, 2003), p. 32. 81.  Institutiones nostrae [“The Institutions of the Paraclete”], c. 11a, trans. Constant J. Mews, “Heloise, the Paraclete Liturgy, and Mary Magdalen,” in Poetic and Musical Legacy, ed. Stewart and Wulstan, p. 110. For the hymns sung at Pentecost and to the Holy Trinity at the Paraclete, see Chrysogonus Waddell, O.C.S.O, Hymn Collections from the Paraclete, 2 vols. (Trappist, Ky., 1989), vol. 1, pp. 108–9; vol. 2, pp. 238–42. 82.  Trans. Guéranger, Liturgical Year, vol. 9, pp. 296–7, with changes. 83.  As Robert Jenson asked in his Systematic Theology 1: The Triune God (Ox ford, 1997), p. 146: “Is Pentecost a peer of Easter or does it merely display a meaning that Easter would in any case have?” For reflection on Jenson’s question, see Robert Louis Wilken, “Is Pentecost a Peer of Easter? Scripture, Liturgy, and the Proprium of the Holy Spirit,” in Trinity, Time, and Church: A Response to the The­ ology of Robert W. Jenson, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2000), pp. 158–77. 84. Honorius, Speculum ecclesiae, “In Pentecosten,” PL 172:959. 85. Rupert, De divinis officiis, bk. 10, ed. Haacke, CCCM 7, pp. 330–1. 86. Joachim, Psalterium decem cordarum in quo de summa Trinitate eiusque distinctione par pulchre indagatur, de numero psalmorum et eorum archanis ac mysticis sensibus, de psalmodia, de modo et vsu psallendi simul et psallentium (Venice, 1527; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1965), prologus, fol. 227r–v. On Joachim’s vision, see also Bernard McGinn, “Theologians as Trinitarian Iconographers,” in The Mind’s Eye, ed. Bouché and Hamburger, pp. 186–207, at p. 193. 87. Elisabeth, Libri visionum, bk. 1, c. 2, ed. F. W. E. Roth, in Die Visionen und Briefe der hl. Elisabeth sowie die Schriften der Äbte Ekbert und Emecho von Schönau, 2nd ed. (Brünn, 1886), p. 4; trans. Anne L. Clark, as Elisabeth of Schönau: The Complete Works (New York, 2000), pp. 44–5. 88. Elisabeth, Libri visionum, bk. 2, cc. 3–4, ed. Roth, pp. 41–2; trans. Clark, pp. 98–9. 89. Hildegard, Scivias 3, vision 7, ed. Adelgundis Führkötter and Angela Car levaris, O.S.B., CCCM 43 (Turnhout, 1978), pp. 462–76; trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York, 1990), pp. 411–21. For Elisabeth’s familiarity with Hildegard, see Anne L. Clark, Elisabeth of Schönau: A Twelfth-Century Visionary (Philadelphia, 1992), pp. 4–5, 14–5, and 21–5. On Hildegard’s trinitarian visions, see McGinn, “Theologians as Trinitarian Iconographers,” pp. 186–207. 90.  For example, Peter Classen, “Res gestae, Universal History, Apocalypse: Vi sions of Past and Future,” in Renaissance & Renewal, pp. 387–417. 91. Abelard, Confessio fidei ad Heloisam, ed. Charles S. F. Burnett, “Confessio fidei ad Heloisam,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 21 (1986), pp. 147–55; trans. Ra-

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dice, Letters, pp. 270–1; cited by Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions, vol. 1, pp. 735–8. 92. Abelard, In festo Pentecostes 52: In I nocturno et ad vesperas, PL 178:1798; cf. Waddell, Hymn Collections, vol. 2, pp. 75–6: “Adventu sancti Spiritus, / Nostri cordis altaria / Ornans Deus virtutibus, / Tu tibi templa dedica / Illa septemformi, quam habet, gratia.” 93. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, pp. 239–69. 94. Honorius, Speculum ecclesiae, “Instructio loquendi,” PL 172:815–6. 95. Rupert, Hymnus sive oratio Ruperti ad sanctum Spiritum, ed. Haacke, CCCM 29, pp. 422–4. 96. Sayers, Creed or Chaos? (Manchester, N.H., 1974; orig. pub. New York, 1949), p. 28. 97.  Ibid., p. 31. 98.  Ibid., p. 25. 99. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, 2001; orig. pub. 1952), pp. 153–5, 164. 100. Sayers, Creed or Chaos? p. 40. Cf. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 155: “If you do not listen to theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones—bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected.” 101.  For the now classic celebration of heresy in medieval Christianity as “the spirit which not only declines to accept as a matter of course the opinions prescribed by established authority, but holds that it is entitled, even obliged, not to do so,” see R. I. Moore, The Origins of European Dissent, Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 30 (Toronto, 1994), p. ix. 102.  Richard Wetheringsett, Summa “Qui bene presunt,” cited by D. L. d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 83–4. On the theological education of the laity generally in the later Middle Ages, see R. N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, ca. 1215–ca. 1515 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 52–71, albeit Swanson is skeptical about the significance of this education for the laity’s devotional life. 103.  Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (New York, 1997), pp. 5–6. 104.  As, for example, in one illustrated Anglo-Norman tract on how to conduct oneself at Mass (Ceo qe vous deuez fere e penser a chascon point de la Messe; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 13342, fols. 45–48v), where the final vision of the lay communicants is of the Gnadenstuhl (fol. 48v). See J.-C. Schmitt, La Raison des gestes dans l’occident médiévale (Paris, 1990), pls. 29–40; and Paul Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300 (New Haven, 2004), pp. 198–201, figs. 129, 161–2. I thank Aden Kumler for bringing this manuscript to my attention. 105.  The phrase goes back to Charles M. Sheldon’s socially progressive novel, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (New York, 1896). 106.  Best-selling efforts along these lines included Ernst Renan’s La Vie de Jésus (1864) and Albert Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der

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Leben-Jesu-Forschung (1906), better-known in English as The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1910). For context, see Charlotte Allen, The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus (New York, 1998). 107.  For the persistence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concerns into the twentieth century generally, see Veronica Ortenberg, In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages (London, 2006); and Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, 2007). 108. Geoffrey, Historia Regum Britanniae, 9.12–14, ed. Acton Griscom (London, 1929), pp. 451–8; trans. Lewis Thorpe, as The History of the Kings of Britain (Harmondsworth, 1966), pp. 225–30. 109.  On the tournament season and the courts held at Pentecost, see David Crouch, Tournament (London, 2005), pp. 34, 59, and 112. Crouch notes (p. 71) that the tournament day typically began at first light with a mass of the Holy Spirit. 110. Hildegard, Scivias 1, vision 4, c. 8, ed. Führkotter and Carlevaris, CCCM 43, p. 72; trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 116. 111.  Richard of St. Victor, De Trinitate, bk. 3, c. 13, ed. Jean Ribaillier, Textes philosophiques du Moyen Age 6 (Paris, 1958), p. 149; trans. Grover A. Zinn, in The Twelve Patriarchs: The Mystical Ark; Book Three of the Trinity (New York, 1979), p. 387, with changes: “In order for love (caritas) to be true (vera), it demands a plurality of persons; in order for love to be perfected (consummata), it requires a Trinity of persons.” Cf. Lewis, Mere Christianity, pp. 174–5. 112.  For an analogous appeal in modern theology, see Sarah Coakley, “Living into the Mystery of the Holy Trinity: Trinity, Prayer, and Sexuality,” Anglican Theological Review 80 (1998), p. 223–32. I thank Gene Rogers for this reference.

eighteen

John of Salisbury, a Philosopher of the Long Eleventh Century C . St e p h e n J a e g e r

Modern historians of twelfth-century culture agree that many phenomena that are new in that age begin early in the preceding century. It is also now fairly common to talk about “the long twelfth century,” which may extend as far back as 1029 (the range of the New Cambridge Medieval History, 1029–1199) and as far forward as the mid-thirteenth century. It is common to judge eleventh-century figures as forerunners of an age yet to come.1 But since the intellectual roots of poets like Marbod, Baudri, and Hildebert are deep in the eleventh century, the judgment of them as twelfth-century poets arrived early on the scene, or at least the idea of them as poets foreshadowing developments yet to reach fruition, needs to be tempered by some knowledge of the traditions they both cultivated and moved gradually away from. Marbod was born circa 1035, Baudri in 1046, and Hildebert in 1056. They lived on into the twelfth century (d. respectively 1123, 1130, and 1133). While their poetry may look in both directions, modern scholarship has credited only the forward glance. The history of philosophy represents eleventh-century monks who wrote about dialectic as transmitters of the ninth and preparers of the twelfth century. The Latin poem Ruodlieb becomes a “proto-romance” popped like a mushroom out of ground that hasn’t yet set in beneath its stem. Meinhard of Bamberg, schoolmaster in the second half of the eleventh century, writes a strikingly pure Ciceronian style and so anticipates the “rediscovery” of the Latin classics in the twelfth century. And so on. The tenth and eleventh centuries are regularly invaded by their more powerful neighbors, like some small principality set between two ambitious royal kingdoms. The shrouded glories of that culture play little role 499

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in current assessments of the twelfth century. They live the life of a conquered folk. This study aims at partially reclaiming John of Salisbury, one of the best-known figures of the twelfth century, for the age that is his real intellectual context. Engaged up to his eyeballs in the affairs and conflicts of his own time, he thought, felt, and wrote in modes that were outdated and passing from the scene. He swam against the tide of the age he lived in, pulling hard to drag it back into the age of his intellectual origins. Admittedly the term “the long twelfth-century” is a useful one. The eucharistic controversy and the figure of Berengar of Tours in the previous century and the scholasticism of the following are single examples of the roots and branches of a twelfth-century flowering. Since historical developments do not accommodate themselves to the calendar, the stretched century insists that the calendar accommodate itself to the developments. But the hegemony of concepts needs as careful minding as the spillage of events over time boundaries. The “long twelfth century” and the “twelfthcentury renaissance” have discouraged questions of continuities and have marked off persons, events, and modes of thought still hanging on in the twelfth century that, like John of Salisbury, represent not the rising twelfth century but survival of the eleventh.2 This is especially evident in the milieu of cathedral schools and the independent schools of Paris. To quote from one of my earlier articles: Alongside all that is new in the twelfth century an older culture was in a state of decline and collapse. It is the confluence of the dying and the rising cultures and the tensions and conflicts which that confluence spawned that account for the peculiar energy and creativity of the age. But what culture? What was it that John of Salisbury saw ending in his day? The historical study of the twelfth century has had no eyes for the humanism (and the educational structures and ideas supporting it) that began in the mid-tenth and came to an end in the course of the twelfth century. Indeed, most medievalists would be hard pressed to say anything at all about the secular culture of Europe in the years 950–1100. . . . Hildebert, Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, Otto of Freising, Walter of Châtillon, Alan of Lille, thought of themselves as late representatives of a culture that was coming to an end. The passing culture is hidden to our view partly because of the nature of its documentation, partly because of the concepts which structure our thinking.3

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It seems sensible to propose a “long eleventh century” to accommodate the conservative resistance to the main trends of twelfth-century school life in Paris. While John’s conservatism has not gone unnoticed, his splendid Latinity and vast reading of the classics have tended to make him into a representative of the “classical revival of the twelfth century.”4 His humanism and its sources are the subject for another study, but here I want to look at his conception of philosophy. The first problem I have to deal with is his Metalogicon (1159), which presents itself as a “defense of logic.” That title beams the claim that this is a progressive work, plugged into the mainstream of his time, and pushing forward at the cutting edge of twelfth-century thought. But the title is misleading. John starts out with a definition of logic that embraces all the language arts: “Logic in its broadest sense is the science of verbal expression and argumentative reasoning.”5 While John recurs regularly to the narrower definition of logic—the art of shaping arguments that admit no refutation—this broader framing clearly serves his intention of insisting on the indivisible unity of the trivium.6 The passage just quoted continues: “Sometimes ‘logic’ is used with more restricted extension, and limited to rules of reasoning.”7 He recognizes and accepts the common equating of logic and dialectic. But the predominant position of dialectic in the schools of Paris suggests that this art needs no defense. John studied in Paris during the period of the high flourishing of dialectical studies. His objection is to the hypertrophy of that discipline, which has severed the study of dialectic from its broader context in language studies generally. What is necessary in John’s view is the reestablishing of the broader definition: logic is the art of eloquent speech; it cannot be mastered unless the three arts of the trivium combine to educate to eloquence. It is the embattled arts of grammar and rhetoric that John is rescuing from neglect and trying to reestablish in their proper position in the course of studies. Dialectic flourishes but in a form so trivial as to represent in itself an argument against its separation from grammar and rhetoric. The crumbling position of rhetoric and grammar in the arts of language is what requires shoring. For the purposes of his polemic in the first two books, the broader definition serves him better than the narrower: “For the present let us concede to logic its widest meaning, which includes all instruction relative to words.”8 John posits an enemy of grammar—necessary after all, if he is to ­defend it—and gives him the name Cornificius. Many identifications of

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Cornificius have been proposed, but none has found consensus.9 It is probably best to see in this figure a fiction created by John to encompass a variety of positions that can be represented as opposed to “logic,” understood as “the science of verbal expression and argumentative reasoning.”10 There were indeed foes of logic in the narrower sense. Abelard had po­ lemicized against them. They seem to be theological purists who want to banish human reasoning from the understanding of the faith.11 John’s ­defense of logic against its attackers remains strictly within the realm of the trivium and has no particular interest in epistemology and theology. While he claims to be defending logic, he is really defending the position of grammar and rhetoric in the disciplines of studies. There is a captiousness and coyness about the title Metalogicon that I find pretty commonly in John’s writings. He is a slippery rhetorician,12 a polemicist who hurls sharp barbs at opponents and wards off counter­ attack with rhetoric. In the Policraticus he assures readers of this vehement polemic against the frivolities of court life that none of them is his target. He has only one target: himself and men like him. Of course, anyone whom the shoe fits should wear it: “mutato nomine, de se fabula narratur.”13 He dedicated the Policraticus to Chancellor Thomas Becket. His explanation: since he wishes to give no offense to anyone, he dedicates his book on the frivolities of courtiers to the one man in England above any suspicion of frivolity, Becket. Then he proceeds to skewer those very courtier vices for which Becket himself had become famous and notorious. Our publishers of academic books have a useful term, “the hook of the book.” Where is its hook? What is in it that will lure anyone to buy and read it? The hook of John’s book is big and sharp. A large part of the Metalogicon is specifically a defense of Aristotle against the dialecticians who misuse and misunderstand him. This intentio operis should have guaranteed him interested readers. It promises engaged and combative polemics. The title and its explanation call on buzzwords and refer to popular trends in the schools. But once into the book, the reader sees that what is being defended is a humanistic education that subordinates dialectic to the other language arts, and that this education is being forced out of the Paris schools. An analogy to current trends in academic thought in America suggests itself. Conservative colleagues, especially in the fields of classics and medieval studies, have tended to resist the trends in critical theory that recently thrived in English and foreign language departments, in the U.S. anyway. They see young scholars besotted by highfalutin’ French theorizing full of beguiling verbiage, grown indifferent to literature itself, in­

John of Salisbury, a Philosopher of the Long Eleventh Century  503

terested only in theory of representation. They complain that students nowadays don’t need to read the classics; they only need to read Derrida and Foucault. If any such conservative attempted to reroute the mainstream by writing an intricate and learned treatise on Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger entitled, say, Meta-Anarchitektikon, “A Defense of Deconstruction,” or “A Defense of Postmodern Critical Theory,” with fulsome po­ lemics against Jacques Derrida and his followers—all of which are prefaced with praise—he would be very much in the position of John of Salisbury “defending” logic. By placing himself among the defenders of logic, he placed himself in the majority, but, in fact, he has infiltrated that majority as the representative of a minority position, namely, that logic tends to nonsense when separated from grammar and rhetoric. If we look at the personalities he discusses who represent the practice of dialectics, we get a clearer view of his object. He begins his review of his studies in Paris in Metalogicon 2.10 with Peter Abelard, one of two teachers for whom John has only praise (the other is Gilbert de la Porée). Then he moves on to Master Alberic, “who among others shone forth as a most highly celebrated dialectician.”14 Then after two years, he had as instructors in dialectic “Alberic and Master Robert of Melun.” The formulation is a little misleading. It seems to indicate two Alberics, neither identified by a cognomen. But most likely the two are the same. He retained Master ­Alberic and took on Robert. This Alberic, now identified as Alberic of Paris, is certainly to be distinguished from Alberic of Rheims, mentioned by John in Metalogicon 1.5 as an object of attack of the Cornificians. Having mentioned his glowing reputation, John moves on to ambiguous praise. Alberic can find problems where you would least suspect them: “For him, not even a plain surface that was polished smooth could be entirely free from objectionable roughness. According to the saying, for him ‘the very bulrush would not be free of nodes.’ For even in the bulrush, he would be sure to discover knots in need of untying.”15 After praising Robert of Melun as “penetrating, concise, and to-the-point in his replies,” John observes that the qualities of the two combined in a single person would have produced a superb disputant. Both “had keen minds and were diligent scholars” (ambo acuti erant ingenii, et studii pervicacis—“keen minds, diligent students” or “persistent in their efforts”)—faint praise, muted further by the comment that they would have been great scholars “had they but possessed a broad foundation of literary learning, and kept to the footsteps of their predecessors as much as they took delight in their own inventions.”16 Alberic, John’s narrative continues, later went to Bologna, where he “unlearned” what he had formerly taught. Then returned to

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“unteach” it (dedicit quod docuerat . . . et reversus dedocuit). And so, John’s recollection of Alberic moves from praise at first apparent, then questionable, then faint, to end with ridicule. Along the way he drops suggestions of vanity (suis applaudebant inventis), lack of thorough learning, and isolation in dialectic.17 Robert of Melun comes off somewhat better, possibly because he moved to theological studies. His judgment of the studies with Alberic and Robert of Melun on the Mt. Ste. Geneviève registers clearly in the report of his own development as dialectician. Through the teachings of those two, he mastered the basics of the subject so well that he knew “the topics, rules and other elementary principles” like the back of his hand. The result: I had learned the subject so thoroughly that, with childish levity, I unduly exaggerated my own knowledge. I took myself to be a young sage, inasmuch as I knew the answers to what I had been taught.18 John is constructing a cautionary tale out of his own career. His studies in dialectic made him think himself an expert in the discipline. His head swelled with self-satisfaction. These are the dangers of dialectical studies practiced in isolation from other disciplines. As in good cautionary tales, there is a conversion. He sobers up: “However, I recovered my senses, and took stock of my powers. I then transferred, after deliberation and consultation, and with the approval of my instructors, to the grammarian of Conches.”19 His escape and refuge from the dangerous pride of dialectical studies is grammar. He studied grammar for the next three years with William of Conches. Then he moved on to quadrivial studies, rhetoric, and finally theology. This narrative of the author losing himself in dialectic and rescuing himself in broader studies resonates with his earlier report of the path that his most prominent teachers had followed, Gilbert of Poitiers, Thierry and Bernard of Chartres, William of Conches, and Abelard. All had struggled against the foolishness of the “Cornificians,” and they “became insane themselves in combating insanity, and for quite a time floundered in error while trying to correct it. The fog, however, was soon dispelled. . . . The arts regained their own and were reinstalled in their earlier seat of honor.”20 In setting his own development within this pattern, John has shaped a story of metanoia and conversion. He has made himself embody the dangers of excessive dialectical studies and the escape from them to the refuge of grammar, quadrivial studies, and theology. The narrative has exemplary

John of Salisbury, a Philosopher of the Long Eleventh Century  505

quality, and he expressly invests it with a moral lesson. While he eluded the pride that excessive dialectic breeds, it claimed his colleagues and teachers at the Mont. When he returned to the Mt. Ste. Geneviève twelve years later, he found that they had succumbed to the dangers he avoided: I found them just as and where they were when I had left them. They did not seem to have progressed as much as a hand’s span. Not a single tiny [new] proposition had they added toward the solution of the old problems.21 The one bit of change he can register is a moral decline: “they had unlearned moderation; they no longer knew restraint.” And from the experience he draws the lesson that “just as dialectic expedites other studies, so, if left alone by itself, it lies powerless and sterile.”22 I am not suggesting that the account of his move from dialectic to grammar, because moralized, is also fictionalized. But it does smack of the rhetorical posture he takes in the Policraticus (he has much criticism of courtiers, but claims no one should take offense because the courtier who embodies all the vices of the court is he himself, as discussed above). In the Metalogicon also, his personal experience is fashioned into a paradigm of the trap of dialectic and redemption through “the broader foundation of liberal studies.” We should look closely at his praise of another teacher of dialectic, Adam of the Little Bridge, Adam of Balsham.23 John had a curious relationship with this master of dialectic. While John taught the rudiments of logic to beginning students in Paris in that period of his studies in grammar, the quadrivium, and theology, the two men became close friends.24 He brought Adam questions from his students and received help from the senior master. John stresses that he was not Adam’s student. Adam helped him because of their familiarity, even though Adam had a reputation for jealousy. He praises Adam as a man of “very keen intellect and also of very wide learning,” but adds the comment, “whatever others may think” and so tips off the reader that another shoe will drop.25 Later the mask of praise falls, the bonds of intimacy reveal their weakness, and John charges his former friend with the worst faults of excessive dialecticians: Those who follow Aristotle in a confusing Babel of names and verbs and subtle intricacies blunt the mental faculties of others in their effort to show off their own intellectual capacity and, to me, seem to have

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chosen the worse part. It is my belief that our own English Adam, especially, fell into this vice, in the book which he entitled The Art of Reasoning. Would that he had expressed well the good things that he has said! Although his friends and followers attribute his obscurity to subtlety, many have judged that it stems from the folly or envy of vanity. For Adam has presented Aristotle in such involved language that a judicious listener may well comment, “Is not this as frothy, with thick and puffed up bark, as the shriveled old branch of a superannuated cork tree?” John—generously—cites Adam’s friends defending him (his obscurity comes from subtlety) and—ungenerously—that of his enemies (it comes from folly or envy of a vain man). John seems to throw fuel on the critics’ flames with high-color abuse quoted from the satirist Persius (Saturae 1.96-7): “frothy, thick, puffed up, the shriveled old branch of an old cork tree.” May all the powers that be protect us from this kind of appraisal in our student evaluations! Or from friends who invent “sober auditors” and quote their withering comments with such relish! John ends this passage with a gesture of anemic diplomacy: “Nevertheless we should be grateful to the authors, for their works are a fountain from which we may drink.”26 We can get another perspective on John’s relation to logic as practiced and taught in Paris by considering his own teaching. John says that he “took as pupils the children of nobles, who in return provided for my material necessities” (mihi . . . alimenta praestabant), which does not suggest he was well paid, although other teachers became wealthy from student fees. He relied on Master Adam to help with the questions of his students, a statement that on the one hand puts forward his credentials for a close and trusting alliance with a senior master, on the other projects a junior position for John. Try to imagine Peter Abelard, Gilbert de la Porée, or William of Champeaux admitting that they turned to a more advanced dialectician for help in teaching the rudiments to beginning students. In her essay on John of Salisbury and twelfth-century education, Keats-­ Rohan looks closely at the circumstances of John as teacher.27 He probably took students after his “conversion” from dialectic during the period of his studies with William of Conches and Richard Bishop. That would explain his statement that “I was frequently obliged to recall what I had earlier learned” and that he must lean on a current master of logic, Adam, for help in dealing with questions about dialectic. Clearly the students were not asking him questions related to grammar and theology, which presum-

John of Salisbury, a Philosopher of the Long Eleventh Century  507

ably occupied him at the time he took students. He evidently did not teach happily, but out of necessity: “nobilium liberos . . . instruendos susceperam, ex necessitate officii et instantia iuvenum.”28 Keats-Rohan sees an unwilling teacher revealed in the phrase “ex necessitate officii” (“officium with its onerous implication of duty rather than vocation”). He mentions only one student by name, that is a certain William of Soissons, and what we learn about him is that he later devised a logic machine, evidently designed to construct fallacies, or paradoxical or impossible or imponderable conclusions, and to deconstruct the opinions of the ancients. Its purpose was to conquer old-fashioned logic. In other words, the one student John felt impelled to mention by name was the inventor of a mechanical logician.29 Is this a joke? Is it really a logic-machine? With a crank, a barrel, and independently revolving registers on tumblers that form paradoxical utterances every time their revolutions cease? Modern opinions vary. Here is the difficult passage: “Interim Willelmum Suessionensem, qui ad expugnandam, ut aiunt sui, logicae vetustatem et con­ sequentias inopinabiles construendas et antiquorum sententias diruendas machinam postmodum fecit, prima logices docui elementa.” There is wide disagreement on the meaning of machina in the modern English translations I have consulted.30 Some hold to machina = machine in the literal sense. Others read it as metaphor (“device to lay siege”) or abstractly (“a system of false logic”). The latter position seems to me less persuasive than the literal reading. McGarry hedges his bets with “device,” but glides over into the camp of abstractionists in a footnote.31 And Kneales likewise covers both possibilities with “engine,” but then comes down solidly on the side of the abstractionists: “almost certainly his invention was some novel pattern of argument which his friends likened to a siege engine, much as a general method of intellectual attack might be called in our time a bulldozer.” Christopher Martin has come closest to identifying the element of logic referred to here. He places William’s machine in “theory of entailment,” inference-drawing from conditional statements. He also confirms the machine-ness of William’s invention by reference to the logic machine of Stanley Jevons (with reference to the Kneales). Most likely, says Martin, William’s machine operated on a principle learned from his teacher Adam du Petit Pont, “that anything follows from an impossibility and a necessity follows from anything.”32 The machine functions within the common practice in dialectical instruction of proposing fallacious arguments to students and insisting on exposure of the fallacy (a significant element of the art of discrimen veri et

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falsi). Consequentiae inopinabiles are untestable claims that defy any empirical knowledge, for instance “the sky is eight times larger than the earth.”33 But the exact nature of William’s machine is less important here than John’s take on it. The clues are in the phrase “ad expugnandam . . . logicae vetustatem . . . et antiquorum sententias diruendas.” There can be little doubt what John would make of an invention, be it machine or system, devised to attack “the antiquity of logic” and undermine the opinions of the ancients. He follows the description of the machine with a decided refutation of the premise on which it is based with reference to Aristotle’s rejection of the same premise. Keats-Rohan senses irony, not a teacher’s pride, in John’s comments, and I believe she is right. William of Soissons comes across as, if not a crackpot, then a clever man whose genius has run off the tracks. We might formulate John’s subtext: “That’s all the schools need, a mechanical logician cranking out fallacious arguments to destroy ancient authority.” John’s depiction of William of Soissons calls to mind William Butler Yeats’ nightmare vision of his countryman George Bernard Shaw. The loquacious Shaw appeared to the sleeping poet Yeats in the form of a sewing machine, unstoppably clicking and smiling. We can say with some assurance that John of Salisbury did not have a distinguished career as a teacher.34 What he knew was not what students wanted. The same applied to some of his teachers. William of Conches and Richard Bishop, who had taught in the manner of Bernard of Chartres, both “quit” or “retired” (cesserunt) when they were “conquered by the onslaught of the ignorant mob” (impetu multitudinis imperitae victi), students content to seem rather than to be philosophers, John says, content with the appearance of truth, demanding the entire arts course in two to three years. Parisian masters who teach in the manner of Bernard of Chartres are in danger from the early twelfth century on. The fate of William of Champeaux and his two successors in the chair of Notre Dame, Paris, fits this model. Though they were not students of Bernard of Chartres, they tried their hand at dialectic and were no match for their nemesis, Abelard. If Abelard’s account is reliable, they also “retired” when their lectures fell into disregard and Abelard’s were in demand. It seems likely that John’s own career followed this pattern. He never indicates that he lacked students, but how much enthusiasm could he rouse for the task of teaching men like William of Soissons? Nederman suggests also that the prosecution of Abelard (1140) and Gilbert (1147 and 1148) may have been a factor in his quitting the schools.35

John of Salisbury, a Philosopher of the Long Eleventh Century  509

We should also stress that he departed from Paris of necessity, not because a brighter future beckoned elsewhere. His next stop after Paris was probably some form of temporary employment with his friend Peter of Celle, more a shelter than a firm post. He finally found gainful employment and work suited to his talents at Canterbury on the staff of Archbishop Theobald, either in late 1147 or early 1148. So the Metalogicon is, indeed, a “defense of logic” but in a special sense: it defends the discipline when joined to the other language arts. He defends dialectic by putting it in its place, at the beginning of studies: “By itself, logic is practically useless. Only when it is associated with other studies does logic shine.”36 In particular, his defense defends the discipline against virtually everyone who practices it in Paris, at least those who make it into the single central discipline. The trend towards dialectical studies separated from the other arts and completable in a short time, is in danger of overwhelming the schools. The same trend had possibly also overwhelmed John of Salisbury himself. He is himself attempting to stem a flood tide, or trying to turn back the flood that has already—in his ­opinion—devastated learning as he knew and valued it. Now it is true that John had extensive knowledge of Aristotle and Aristotelian logic, that is, what was available up to the earlier twelfth century. He had studied it for years with excellent teachers, first with Peter Abelard, then with Master Alberic, Robert of Melun, and Gilbert of Poitiers, and after an interlude of grammar, rhetoric, and theology, returned to teach logic with refresher sessions provided by Adam of the Little Bridge. But even in his presentation of Aristotle, he both defends the ancient master against the abuses of the moderns and cites him in order to chasten the immoderate indulgences of his contemporaries. We cannot fault John as an expert in dialectic. He knows what he’s talking about, and if he stresses that his teaching reached no further than what is appropriate for beginners, it is because the entire subject is the entry into studies for beginners. Still, his mastery of Aristotle is far from qualifying him as a progressive thinker or as a reformer, a term Cary Nederman applies to him in his recent book on John.37 John’s praise of logic and Aristotle recurs to a fading norm. He was defending the logic that William of Soissons’ logic machine sought to destroy. In the practice of the Paris schools, the predominant moving forces are, in John’s terms, shallowness, venality, immodesty, arrogance contemptuous of tradition, and what he calls insanity. His harsh views often register only in irony or indirectness in the Metalogicon or masked by the unidentifiable “Cornificius.” In other works he speaks more bluntly: “Consider the leading teachers of philosophy of our own day,

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those who are most loudly acclaimed, surrounded by a noisy throng of disciples. Mark them carefully; you will find them dwelling on one rule, or on two or three words . . . on which to exercise their talents and waste their life. . . . The points of dispute of our modern Proteus . . . are as useless as they are trivial.”38 And in the long poem called Entheticus he depicts himself as a young student seduced by the trends in the schools to believe that one can “read little to learn much” and that dialectic is the only discipline that counts: “He [i.e., this misguided student] praises Aristotle alone; he scorns Cicero. . . . He spits upon laws, physics comes to seem worthless, all literature filthy, logic alone pleases, but not to the point where learning it costs work. If they think you’re a logician, that’s enough. This is not philosophy; it’s insanity.”39 So John’s defense of logic cannot stand, I believe, as a progressive work of educational reform. If intended as such, it was a sad failure. It was very little read. Keats-Rohan, collaborator on the Corpus Christianorum edition, notes only four reliable manuscripts, and contrasts that reception with the abundant copies of the Policraticus.40 The work was overtaken by the influx of new translations of Aristotle. But it also died of its own conservatism. The preceding was prologue to my main argument. My point has been to confirm the opinion of John as a humanist resisting contemporary trends. What I offered was not a new interpretation of the Metalogicon, but a detailed reading that fixes more closely than heretofore on the irony of his title and that puts his criticism of his contemporary masters and fellow students, barely concealed by a gloss of praise, in clearer highlight. Now I can turn to the roots of John’s humanism in the previous centuries. Many aspects of his indebtedness to an earlier system of education, now (ca. 1159) fading fast, register in the Metalogicon. While his praise of Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers show his indebtedness to progressive masters of the previous generation, his heart clearly is with the old-style humanists. This is clear in his praise of Bernard of Chartres (Metalogicon 1.24). Bernard was a grammarian of the previous generation, a specialist in literature who stressed reading of the classics and composition in verse and prose, the poets being, John states, the cradle of philosophy—and grammar its foundation. He was also in John’s opinion the greatest Platonist of the age (Metalogicon 4.35). We have already noted that his own teachers William and Richard followed Bernard’s methods and quit the schools, “when popular opinion veered away from the truth,” which presumably is what, in John’s opinion, Bernard and they taught, or at least sought. We do not know when Bernard was born. The first mention of him is in a land

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grant issued by Ivo of Chartres in 1108, of which one of the signers is “Bernardus subdiaconus.”41 His date of death is given in two necrologies of Chartres as June 2, between 1124 and 1130. Dutton conjectures that he will have died not long after 1124. Let us imagine that he died in 1127 as an old man—John refers to him as “Carnotensis senex Bernardus,” “the old man of Chartres.” His date of birth then must have fallen between circa 1050 and circa 1070. In any case, the greater part of his life was lived in the period prior to Abelard’s besieging of Paris. John’s description of his teaching indicates clearly that he is an old-fashioned master of literature and Platonic philosophy.42 The main thread I would like to follow that leads from John of Salisbury backwards into the eleventh and late tenth century is his conception of philosophy. He has a broad, widely shared understanding of philosophy: philosophy embraces all studies. Hence the Cornificians are trying to banish eloquence from “philosophical studies” (Metalogicon 1.1). He regularly assigns poetry and grammar originating roles in the quest for wisdom, the essence of philosophy. Once, “poetry is the cradle of philosophy” (1.22), another time, “grammar is the cradle of philosophy” (1.13). He insists throughout on the necessary connection between philosophy and ethics: “Any profession of philosophy is useless and false which does not open up into the cultivation of virtue and the shaping of an exemplary life.”43 And “The preeminent part of philosophy I call ethics, without which philosophy does not deserve the name. In its combined grace and beauty it excels all other [parts of philosophy.] Open Virgil or Lucan, and there, no matter what field of philosophy you profess, you will find its sweetest savor.”44 He connects philosophical inquiry with the “practice and cultivation of virtue.” Reading, learning, and meditation, the main aids to philosophical inquiry, must precede the cultivation of virtue.45 The calling of philosopher requires preparation by those three aids (reading, learning, and meditation), and by “the performance of good works” (1.24.3ff., p. 51). And in the Entheticus: “Philosophy . . . brings forth and nourishes virtues and, like a stepmother, drives out vice and allows no place for error.”46 He also insists on the connection between philosophy and religion: “If the true God is the true wisdom of mankind, then Philosophy is love of the true God.” (Entheticus, ll. 305ff.) The theme recurs throughout book 4 of the Metalogicon. Apart from the connections between grace, God, and faith, John’s language and concept of philosophy are basically stoic and Ciceronian, though he also owes formulations to Boethius. I want to take a quick look back to Cicero as the major source of a concept of philosophy tied to

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e­ thics.47 Cicero made the formation of life through discipline the highest activity of philosophy, which “promotes a good and happy life” (bene beateque vivendum). Its end is virtue. Philosophy is “the knowledge of things both human and divine.” Philosophy is either “the method of obtaining virtue and constancy, or there is none”; it is the “discipline of virtue.”48 The Tusculan Disputations begins, the system and method of instruction in all the arts which have a bearing upon the right conduct of life (ad rectam vivendi viam pertinerent) are contained in the study of wisdom which goes by the name of philosophy . . . (1.1). As to philosophy, mother of all the arts, what else is it except . . . the gift or the discovery of the gods. . . . It instructed us first in the worship of the gods, then in the justice of mankind . . . and next taught us the lessons of temperance and greatness of soul.” (1.26.64) Philosophy is the magistra vitae and “teacher of manners and of discipline”: “O vitae philosophia dux, o virtutis indagatrix expultrixque vitiorum! . . . tu magistra morum et disciplinae fuisti.” (5.5)49 Ciceronian ideas and formulations passed to the Middle Ages by the well-known routes.50 Isidore of Seville defines philosophy as “the knowledge of things human and divine joined to the study of living well” (cum studio bene vivendi).51 Alcuin echoes this: Philosophy is the investigation of natures, the knowledge of things human and divine. . . . Philosophy is also proper conduct of life, the study of living well (honestas vitae, studium bene vivendi), the meditation of death, contempt of the world.52 Hrabanus Maurus repeats Alcuin’s definition and swells it to encyclopedic length.53 The late tenth and eleventh centuries received Ciceronian notions of philosophy abundantly. These ideas loomed large in a new curriculum of cathedral school education based on the double instruction of “letters and manners,” reading the ancients, studying composition in prose and poetry, and the disciplining of behavior which went by the name of “cultivation of virtue” (cultus virtutum).54 In a passage that has become central to defining the “imperial church system,” Otto the Great addressed his brother, Bruno of Cologne, explaining why he needs his brother’s diplomatic skills in a time of crisis: “I see [in

John of Salisbury, a Philosopher of the Long Eleventh Century  513

you] a royal priesthood sent by the grace of God Almighty to the aid of our empire. For you combine in your person the religion of a priest and the strength of a king. . . . And I have long noted that the mother of all noble arts and the virtue of true Philosophy is yours, and it is she who has educated you to modesty and greatness of soul.”55 Gerbert of Aurillac replied to a letter of Otto III in which the emperor invited the famous scholar—and advisor to both his father and ­grandfather—to his court in order to “banish his Saxon rusticity.” Gerbert praises his future pupil for his earlier study of mathematics and moral philosophy: “Unless you embraced the gravity of moral philosophy,” Gerbert writes, “humility, guardian of all virtues, would not thus be impressed upon your words.”56 Again, humility is connected with the education of a public man, in this case a prince, and again, philosophy is portrayed as the discipline of moderation. The Ciceronian connection is prominent in Gerbert generally. In a letter to Abbot Ecbert of Tours, he asserts a fundamental Ciceronianism that has guided his entire life: “I am not one to separate the Good from the Useful, as does Panaetius, but rather, with ­Cicero, I seek to mix the Good with the Useful. . . . And since Philosophy does not distinguish between the rules of speaking and the rules of conduct, I have always joined the study of eloquence to the study of living well. . . . For us who are caught up in the affairs of state, both are ne­ cessary.”57 A cleric of Worms wrote a letter to his bishop around 1030 commending him for translating philosophy into acts of public administration: “The schoolmistress of all virtues (magistra virtutum = philosophia) has taken up her abode in you, so that in all your undertakings you may follow in her footsteps.”58 The formulation evokes two models of Lady Philosophy: that of Cicero (magistra virtutum) and that of Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy. In his complaint to Lady Philosophy, Boethius had reviewed their longstanding relationship and showed philosophy guiding his investigations of the heavens and shaping his mores according to the pattern of celestial harmony; she taught him Plato’s dictum that the happy state would be governed by students of wisdom, and roused in him the urge “to practice that by public administration which I had learnt of thee in private conference.”59 Still in the mid-twelfth century Wibald of Stablo can invoke this ­Ciceronian/Boethian model of philosophy as magistra morum. He wrote a letter to a cleric at Liège, excusing himself from important peace negotiations by referring to the greater philosophical training of the recipient: “That teacher and liege-lady of yours, Philosophia, the magistra and

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i­nstructor of things human and divine, has not shaped and informed our manners as she has yours.”60 The practical governance of life in the context of state service figures here as a prominent element of philosophy, and we can extend this to the thinking in cathedral schools in the eleventh century broadly. This ideal of conduct joined to the study of eloquence is both a way of life for the public man and a program of studies. Philosophy makes the statesman, and the statesman is a kind of philosopher.61 The dominant voice from antiquity is that of Cicero, though it joins with that of Boethius. Philosophy for these and many other writers is Stoic, practical, hard to distinguish from ethics. Meinhard, schoolmaster at Bamberg from around 1065 to 1085, wrote to a former student commending the Tusculan Disputations as the most important work of Latin philosophy, whose father is Cicero.62 The letter collections from the period of Henry IV edited by Erdmann and Fickermann contain over one hundred and fifty direct quotations of Cicero, ninety-nine of them from the Tusculan Disputations. The interesting collection of letters from circles of imperial courtiers/clerics, the so-called Regensburg Rhetorical letters (ca. 1090), often appear as a cento of quotations from the Tusculan Disputations. An educational ideal based on ancient notions of philosophy crystallized at cathedral schools and may well have found its way there from the higher instance of the imperial court. An ideal of service to the state by ministers trained to humility and greatness of soul must have been useful to the emperors in whose administration the church played such a central role. There can be no doubt that it is this conception of philosophy that John is defending in the Metalogicon. The passages quoted earlier make evident his obligation to the Ciceronian ideals, but also to a notion of philosophy as a doctrine that guides the active life of the statesman according to an ideal called “virtue.” The program of philosophy and the system of education that John defended was not an invention of the twelfth century. It was an old program, at least two hundred years old by the time he wrote, and while the sources seem to indicate its prominence in the tenth and eleventh centuries, it is present in earlier periods. Indeed, it seems plausible to postulate its survival in a line that is only occasionally broken since Roman antiquity. By the twelfth century, it had outlived its day. The fact that a great work of civic philosophy like the Policraticus, decked out in a stunning array of classical references, could still arise from it and have a grand future is a testimony to John’s skill as a writer but not to the vitality

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of the system in which he had been educated. John’s two great works are, along with a few other works of poetic philosophy from the twelfth century, final resting places of the humanism of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Notes 1.  See C. Stephen Jaeger, “The Status of the Learned Poet in the Eleventh Century,” in Norm und Krise von Kommunikation: Inszenierungen literarischer und sozialer Interaktion im Mittelalter; Für Peter von Moos, ed. Alois Hahn, Gert Melville, and Werner Röcke (Tübingen, 2006), pp. 417–38. 2.  See Rodney Thomson, “The Place of Germany in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” in Manuscripts and Monastic Culture: Reform and Renewal in TwelfthCentury Germany, ed. Alison I. Beach, Medieval Church Studies 13 (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 19–42. Thomson argues cultural continuity in Germany in contrast to transformation in France. Thomson’s essay and others in the same volume show the vitality and energy of intellectual life in twelfth-century Germany. But the imposition of “renewal” and “renaissance” on the period as a whole binds Thomson to defensive and uncompelling arguments that the complexion of Germany was not “more backward-looking and conservative than in the rest of Europe” (p. 41). 3. “Pessimism in the Twelfth-Century ‘Renaissance,’” Spec 78 (2003), pp. 1151–83, at pp. 1181–2. 4.  Charles Homer Haskins, Renaissance, p. 100: John its “highest representative.” 5. Ioannis Saresberiensis, Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall with K. S. B. Keats-­ Rohan, CCCM 98 (Turnhout, 1991), p. 28 (bk. 1, c. 10, ll. 8–9, henceforth cited in the form 1.10.8–9): “Est itaque logica ut nominis significatio latissime pateat, loquendi vel disserendi ratio.” English translations are from The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, trans. Daniel D. McGarry (Berkeley, 1962), here p. 32. 6.  The same spectrum of meaning in “logic” is maintained by John’s teacher Abelard. See Mary M. McLaughlin, “Abelard’s Conceptions of the Liberal Arts and Philosophy,” in Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge, Actes du quatrième congrès international de philosophie médiévale, (Montreal and Paris, 1968), pp. 523–30, esp. pp. 526–7. 7. “Contrahitur enim interdum, et dumtaxat circa disserendi rationes, vis nominis coartatur”; Metalogicon 1.10.9–11. 8.  Metalogicon 1.10.15–17, “ut quam latissime protendatur significatio, ei [i.e., to logic] ad praesens sermonum omnium magisterium tribuatur.” 9.  Master Gualo of Paris is one candidate, see L. M. De Rijk in Vivarium 4 (1966), pp. 4–8. Reginald the Monk another; Carl Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande (1855; repr. Graz, 1955), 2.230. Recent literature on “Cornificius” cited in Cary J. Nederman, John of Salisbury, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 288 (Tempe, Ariz., 2005), p. 66, n. 3. Nederman adds to the list of possible identifications Arnulf of Lisieux and Bernard of Clairvaux.

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10.  Cf. Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and their Critics, 1100–1215 (Stanford, 1985), pp. 141–3. 11.  See Abelard’s letter nr. 13 (“To an Ignoramus in the Field of Dialectics”). 12.  See Jaeger, “Irony and Role-Playing in John of Salisbury and the Becket Circle,” in Culture politique des Plantagenêt (1154–1224), ed. Martin Aurell (Poitiers, 2003), pp. 319–31. Christopher Brooke observed this aspect of John’s judgments of his contemporaries: “In his writings he loves to play with complex irony on the two sides of an issue or a person. . . . He enjoyed . . . cutting everybody down to size, while preserving a reasonable respect and sympathy for almost all the men he describes”; “John of Salisbury and his World,” in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford, 1984), p. 2. 13. John of Salisbury, Policraticus 1, prologue, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, CCCM 118 (Turnhout, 1993), p. 23, ll. 79–80. The same claim at the end of the work: Ioannis Saresberiensis Episcopi Carnotensis Policratici sive De Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum Libri 8, 8.25, ed. Clemens Webb (Oxford, 1909), vol. 2, p. 425, ll. 7ff. See the discussion in Jaeger, “Irony and Role-Playing,” pp. 323–4. 14.  Metalogicon 2.10.9–10, “adhaesi magistro Alberico qui inter ceteros opinatissimus dialecticus enitebat.” Trans. McGarry, p. 95: “who had a very high reputation as the best of the other dialecticians.” “Inter caeteros” hangs there oddly. Are the “ceteri” those who celebrate Alberic? Or are they other dialecticians rated less than him? 15.  Metalogicon 2.10.16ff.,“quamvis polita planities offendiculo non careret, et ut aiunt ei scirpus non esset enodis. Nam et ibi monstrabat quod oporteat enodari,” p. 71. McGarry, p. 96, offers an explanatory note: “That is, difficulties would be conjured up where they did not actually exist.” 16.  Metalogicon 2.10.27ff, “magni praeclarique viri in philosophicis studiis enituissent, si de magno litterarum niterentur fundamento, si tantum institissent vestigiis maiorum, quantum suis applaudebant inventis,” p. 71. 17.  L. M. De Rijk, who published much material relating to Alberic and his school, gives a generous reading of John’s view of this master: “Alberic was a master very skilful in raising quite a number of subtle questions. . . . he formed an ideal pair with his fellow teacher Robert of Melun”; “Some New Evidence on Twelfthcentury Logic: Alberic and the School of Mont Ste. Geneviève,” Vivarium 4 (1966), pp. 1–57 at p. 20. And on Alberic’s studies in Bologna: “John of Salisbury tells us that Alberic spent some time in Bologna, where he learned much that was new to him. . . . Later,” he says, “Alberic . . . returned to Paris after some time, where he taught quite differently from before”; Logica Modernorum: A Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic (Assen, 1962), vol. 1, p. 85. John’s double gesture of strong praise gradually weakened is effective here in masking the negative. 18.  Trans. McGarry, p. 97, minor liberties taken; Metalogicon 2.10.39ff: “Hoc enim plane didiceram, ut iuvenili levitate pluris facerem scientiam meam quam erat. Videbar mihi sciolus, eo quod in his quae audieram promptus eram,” p. 71. 19.  Metalogicon 2.10.42ff., “Deinde reversus in me et metiens vires meas, bona praeceptorum meorum gratia consulto me ad grammaticum de Conchis transtuli,” p. 71. 20.  Trans. McGarry, p. 22; Metalogicon 2.5.1ff., “se omnes opposuerunt errori, sed nec universi insanientibus resistere potuerunt. Insipientes itaque facti sunt

John of Salisbury, a Philosopher of the Long Eleventh Century  517

dum insipientiae resistebant, et erronei diutius habiti dum obviare nitebantur errori. Verumtamen fumus ille cito evanuit, et praedictorum opera magistrorum et diligentia redierunt artes, et . . . honorem pristinum nactae sunt,” pp. 20–1. 21.  Trans. McGarry, p. 100; Metalogicon 2.10.87ff, “Inventi sunt qui fuerant et ubi. Neque enim ad palmum visi sunt processisse. Ad quaestiones pristinas dirimendas, nec propositiunculam unam adiecerant,” p. 73. 22. Trans. McGarry, p. 100; Metalogicon 2.10.91ff., “Profecerunt in uno dumtaxat, dedidicerant modum, modestiam nesciebant … Expertus itaque sum quod liquido colligi potest, quia sicut dialectica alias expedit disciplinas, sic si sola fuerit iacet exanguis et sterilis,” p. 73. 23.  See the article on Adam in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph Strayer (New York, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 51–2. 24.  Metalogicon 2.10.16, “familiaritatem contraxi ulteriorem,” p. 72; McGarry, trans, p. 98: “with whom I became very intimate.” 25.  Metalogicon 2.10.59ff., p. 72; trans. McGarry, p. 98. 26.  Metalogicon 4.3.11–23, “Unde qui Aristotilem sequuntur in turbatione nominum et verborum, et intricata subtilitate ut suum venditent, aliorum obtundunt ingenia, partem pessimam mihi praeelegisse videntur. Quo quidem vitio Anglicus noster Adam mihi prae ceteris visus est laborasse, in libro quem artem disserendi inscripsit. Et utinam bene dixisset, bona quae dixit. Et licet familiares eius et fautores hoc subtilitati ascribant, plurimi tamen hoc ex desipientia vel in­ videntia vani ut aiunt hominis, contigisse interpretati sunt. Adeo enim expressit Aristotilem intricatione verborum, ut sobrius auditor recte subiungat: nonne hoc spumosum et cortice pingui, ut ramale vetus praegrandi subere coctum? Habenda est tamen auctoribus gratia, quia de fonte eorum haurientes, labore ditamur alieno,” p. 142; trans. McGarry, pp. 206–7. 27. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, “John of Salisbury and Education in Twelfth-­ Century Paris from the Account of his Metalogicon,” History of Universities 6 (1986), pp. 1–45. 28.  Metalogicon 2.10.55ff., p. 72. 29.  Opinions vary on William of Soissons. See C. C. J. Webb, John of Salisbury (London, 1932), p. 9: “a paradoxical innovator in logical theory.” Jan Van Laarhoven, John of Salisbury’s Entheticus Maior and Minor (Leiden, 1987), vol. 1, p. 4: “William . . . the later ‘destroyer’ of logic”; Keats-Rohan, “John of Salisbury and Education,” p. 16: “Perhaps John’s pupil was that William of Soissons whom William of Tyre later found expounding Euclid in Bologna, and of whom he observes that he was ‘impeditioris lingue virum, sed acute mentis et ingenii subtilioris ­hominem’—a man of rather unclear speech, but with a penetrating and quite subtle intelligence.” William of Tyre, Chronique: Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, 19.12, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, CCCM 63A (Turnhout, 1986), p. 879, ll 44–8. 30.  Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages, Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies 38 (New York, 1949), p. 13: “Meanwhile William of Soissons—who later made an engine to lay siege, as his adherents say, to oldfashioned logic and reach unexpected consequences and destroy the opinions of the ancients—was teaching [sic] the first elements of logic,” Metalogicon 2. 10; trans.

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McGarry, p. 98: “Meanwhile I taught the first principles of logic to William of Soissons. William later, according to his followers, invented a device to revolutionize the old logic by constructing unacceptable conclusions and demolishing the authoritative opinions of the ancients.” William Kneale and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1962), p. 201: “William of Soissons . . . later produced an engine for capturing, as his friends say, the citadel of the old logic, building up unexpected links of argument, and demolishing the opinions of the ancients.” ­Keats-Rohan, “John of Salisbury and Education,” p. 16 (commentary, not direct translation): “William was a disappointment who afterwards devised a system of false logic, machina.” Klaus Guth, Johannes von Salisbury: Studien zur Kirchen-, ­Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte Westeuropas im 12. Jahrhundert (St. Ottilien, 1978), p. 37: “er hat, wie seine Schüler sagen, bald darauf eine Maschine (System) konstruiert, um die alte Logik zu erobern, unwahrscheinliche Folgerungen zusammenzustellen, und dadurch logische Sätze der Alten zu vernichten.” Christopher Martin, “William’s Machine,” Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986), pp. 654–72, at p. 655: “He invented a machine for the purpose of subduing by force the old established principles of logic, for constructing unbelievable consequences, and destroying the theories of the ancients.” R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, (Oxford, 1995), vol.1, p. 216: “William of Soissons, who had constructed a kind of logical machine for teaching the elements of argument.” Carl Scharschmidt quotes the entire passage on John’s time in Paris, including the mention of his student William, but omits the lines about the logic machine: Johannes Saresberiensis nach Leben und Studien, Schriften und Philosophie (Leipzig, 1862), p. 12. 31. McGarry, The Metalogicon, p. 98, n. 183: “machinam, an artificial method of argumentation or reasoning, called a ‘machine’ because it was devised to construct and to demolish . . . a device, system, or [reasoning] process.” 32.  Martin, “William’s Machine,” p. 571. 33. The collection of logical texts published by L. M. De Rijk as “Summe Mettenses” lists “inopinabiles” as one of five categories of fallacious conclusions: “Inopinabile est quod est extra opinionem plurium, ut celum octies esse maius terra. Ad quam metam ducitur aliquis cum cogitur concedere quod est extra opinionem suam.” Logica Modernorum, p. 473. 34. Nederman, John of Salisbury, p. 12, agrees, but puts the best face on it: “John may not have been a very popular teacher because he demanded too much from his students.” 35. Ibid. 36.  Metalogicon 4.28.4–6, p. 164; trans. McGarry, p. 244. 37. Nederman, John of Salisbury, p. 63: “The Metalogicon is the work of a sympathetic reformer, who is accepting of the general outlines of scholastic learning, while still critical of some of the more extreme or invidious conceptions of advanced education on display in his time.” A sharper focus in Nederman’s comment, “John’s was a style of philosophy that was largely out of vogue in the schools of his time,” p. 74. 38.  Policraticus 7.9, ed. Webb, vol. 2, p. 123. English cited from Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers, trans. Joseph B. Pike (New York, 1972; repr. of 1938 ed.), p. 244.

John of Salisbury, a Philosopher of the Long Eleventh Century  519

39.  Entheticus Maior, ed. van Laarhoven, ll. 111–7, vol. 1, p. 112: Haec c ubi persuasit aliis error puerilis, / ut iuvenis discat plurima, pauca legat, / laudat Aristotelem solum, sperni Ciceronem / . . . / Conspuit in leges, vilescit phisica, quaevis / litera sordescit, logica sola placet. / Non tamen ista placet, ut eam quis scire laboret: / si quis credatur logicus, hoc satis est. / Insanire putes potius quam philosophari!” The poem as a whole is dated generally ca. 1157, though the satire on the schools may derive from John’s student days (van Laarhoven: 1141–45; Nederman: between 1141 and 1147). 40.  Hall’s edition of the Metalogicon lists eight manuscripts, of which only three are accurate or complete enough to weigh heavily in the edition. Ed. Hall, pp. vii–ix. Keats-Rohan, “John and Education.” 41.  See Bernard of Chartres, Glosae super Platonem, ed. P. E. Dutton, Studies and Texts 107 (Toronto, 1991), p. 239. 42.  See the discussion in Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 128–31. 43.  Metalogicon Prol. 76–8, “Est quaelibet professio philosophandi inutilis et falsa, quae se ipsam in cultu virtutis et vitae exhibitione non aperit”; translation mine. 44.  Metalogicon 1.24.41–5, “Illa quae ceteris philosophiae partibus praeminet ethicam dico, sine qua nec philosophi subsistit nomen, collati decoris gratia, omnes alias antecedit. Excute Virgilium, aut Lucanum, et ibi cuiuscumque philosophiae professor sis, eiusdem invenies condituram,” p. 52; trans. McGarry, p. 67. 45.  Metalogicon 1.23.15ff., “Ceterum operationem cultumque virtutis scientia naturaliter praecedit,” p. 50. 46.  Entheticus, ll. 245ff., ed. Van Laarhoven, vol. 1, p. 120: “Muneribus cunctis praecellit Philosophia, / . . . / virtutes parit et nutrit, vitiumque noverca / pellit, et errori non sinit esse locum.” See Entheticus, ll. 235–310, ed. Van Laarhoven, vol. 1, pp. 120–5, for a full discussion of philosophy. 47.  See Jaeger, “Philosophy, ca. 950–ca. 1050,” Via 40 (2009), pp. 17–40. 48. Cicero, De officiis 2.5–6, trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library (hereafter LCL) 21, (Cambridge Mass., 1975), pp. 172–3. Cf. In Pisonem 71, Cicero, Orations, trans. N. H. Watts, LCL 252 (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), p. 224: “Philosophia, ut fertur, virtutis continet et officii et bene vivendi disciplinam.” On Cicero’s idea of philosophy, see Josef Mancal, Zum Begriff der Philosophie bei M. Tullius Cicero, Humanistische Bibliothek 1.39 (Munich, 1982). 49.  Cicero, Tusculan Disputation, trans. J. E. King, LCL 141 (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 3, 74, 428. Also worth noting in this context is Seneca’s virtual identification of philosophy and ethics: “Philosophy … . . molds and constructs the soul, it orders our life, guides our conduct, shows us what we should do and what we should leave undone”; Seneca, Epist. 16.3, Epistles, trans. Richard M. Gummere, LCL 75–7 (Cambridge, Mass.m, 1917–25), LCL 75, p. 104; Epist. 89.8, LCL 76, p. 382: “Nec philosophia sine virtute est nec sine philosophia virtus. Philosophia studium virtutis est.” 50.  On the idea of philosophy in the earlier Middle Ages, see Jaeger, “Philosophy”; Jean Leclercq, Etudes sur le vocabulaire monastique du moyen âge, Studia Anselmiana Philosophica Theologica 48 (Rome, 1961), pp 39–79, and “Pour l’histoire de l’expression ‘philosophie chrétienne,’” Mélanges de Science Religieuse 9

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(1952), pp. 221–6, and The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York, 2003; repr. of 1961 ed.), pp. 100–1. E. R. Curtius, “Zur Geschichte des Wortes Philosophia im Mittelalter,” Romanische Forschungen 57 (1943), pp. 304ff; Peter von Moos, Hildebert von ­Lavardin, 1056–1133: Humanitas an der Schwelle des höfischen Zeitalters, Pariser Historische Studien 3 (Stuttgart, 1965), pp. 103–5. 51. Isidore, Etymologiae 2.24.1, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911) (unpaginated). 52. Alcuin, De dialectica, c. 1, PL 101:952A. Cf. De grammatica PL 101:849C, 852D. 53.  Hrabanus Maurus, De Universo, 15.1, PL 111:413. 54. Jaeger, Envy of Angels, passim. 55. Ruotger, Vita Brunonis, c. 20, in Lebensbeschreibungen einiger Bischöfe des 10.–12. Jahrhunderts, trans. Hatto Kallfelz (Darmstadt, 1973), p. 206: “video per Dei omnipotentis gratiam nostro imperio regale sacerdotium accessisse. In te namque et sacerdotalis religio et regia pollet fortitudo. . . . Nec abesse tibi iam dudum perpendi ipsam ingenuarum arcium matrem et vere virtutem philosophie, que te ad hanc modestiam magnitudinemque animi erudivit.” 56.  Die Briefsammlung Gerberts von Reims, ed. Fritz Weigle, MGH, Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 2 (Weimar, 1966), p. 224, epist. 187: “Nisi moralis philosophie gravitatem amplecteremini, non ita verbis vestris custos omnium virtutum impressa esset humilitas.” 57.  Gerbert, epist. 44, ed. Weigle, p. 73: “Non is sum, qui cum Panetio interdum ab utili seiungam honestum, sed potius cum Tullio omni utili admisceam. . . . Cumque ratio morum dicendique ratio a philosophia non separentur, cum studio bene vivendi semper coniuncxi studium bene dicendi, quamvis solum bene vivere praestantius sit eo, quod est bene dicere, curisque regiminis absoluto, alterum satis sit sine altero. At nobis in re publica occupatis utraque necessaria.” 58.  Die ältere Wormser Briefsammlung, epist. 52, ed. Walther Bulst, MGH, Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 3 (Weimar, 1949), p. 89. 59. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, bk. 1, prose 4.15ff., trans. H. F. Stewart, LCL 74 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 142–5. 60.  Wibald of Stablo, Wibaldi Epistolae, epist. 331, ed. Ph. Jaffé, Bibliotheca rerum Germanicarum 1, Monumenta Corbeiensia (1864; repr. Aalen, 1964), p. 462. 61.  Sigebert of Gembloux alludes to Plato’s idea of the philosopher-king in referring to the wise men serving Otto I: Brun, Dietrich of Metz, and others of Brun’s students; Vita Deoderici, c. 7, ll. 38ff, MGH, SS 4, p. 467. 62.  See Jaeger, “Philosophy,” p. 36ff.

Contributors

Anna Sapir Abulafia is college lecturer and director of Studies in History at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, UK. She specializes in intellectual history with a particular interest in Christian-Jewish relations. Her ­Christian-Jewish Relations 1000–1300: Jews in the Service of Medieval Christendom appeared in 2011. Sverre Bagge is professor of history at University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway. As his numerous publications testify, his interests have centered on kingship, political thought, and state formation. His last book is From Viking Stronghold to Christian Kingdom: State Formation in Norway, ca. 900– 1350 (2010). Dominique Barthélemy is professor of medieval history at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. His scholarly focus has emphasized political and social dynamics in France from the tenth to the thirteenth century. His most recent book is The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian (2009). Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak is professor of history at New York University. Her interests have ranged from theoretical approaches to historical study to the highly technical field of sigillography. Her most recent book is When Ego was Imago: Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (2011). Olivia Remie Constable is professor of medieval history and the Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame. Her work has focused on medieval Iberia and on the Mediterranean world. Her current project looks at Muslim communities living under Christian rule in Iberia and the western Mediterranean. Paul Freedman is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale University. His early work focused on Catalonia, but with his prize-winning Images of the Medieval Peasant (1999) he began exploring broader topics. His most recent book is Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (2008). 521

522  Contributors

Rachel Fulton Brown is associate professor of medieval history at the University of Chicago. Her research turns around questions of spiritual and intellectual history. Her first book, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (2002) won several prizes. She is currently working on the discipline of prayer in the Middle Ages. John Gillingham is emeritus professor of medieval history at the London School of Economics and a Fellow of the British Academy. His large scholarly oeuvre centers on medieval English history and its continental con­ nections. Piotr Górecki is professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. His research stresses social, legal, and economic relations in eastern Europe. He has written two books on medieval Poland as well as many articles and editions of texts. C. Stephen Jaeger is emeritus professor of German and medieval studies at University of Illinois. After critical monographs on medieval German authors, Jaeger turned to courtly culture in a series of well-received books. His most recent book is Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music (2010). Adam J. Kosto is associate professor of history at Columbia University. An institutional historian, he published Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000–1200 in 2001. He is currently writing a book about hostages. John Marenbon is senior research fellow of Trinity College and professor of medieval philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He has published numerous books on topics ranging from the sixth century to the fourteenth. He has recently published the Cambridge Companion to Abelard (2004). Maureen C. Miller is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. The author of two prize-winning books, her work has emphasized the political, ecclesiastical, and social history of Italy between 900 and 1200. She is especially interested in ideas of reform. Barbara Newman is professor of English, religious studies, and classics, and the John Evans Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Northwestern University. An exceptionally wide-ranging scholar across the fields of religion and literature, Newman is author, most recently, of Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints Lives (2008).

Contributors  523 David Nicholas is professor emeritus of history at Clemson University. He is an acknowledged authority on medieval urban history and on the history of Flanders. His most recent book is The Northern Lands: Germanic Europe, ca. 1270–1500 (2009). Thomas F. X. Noble is professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. His work has concentrated on the Carolingian world, Rome, and the papacy. His Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians (2009) won the Gründler Prize of the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University. He is writing a book on Rome in the Medieval Imagination. John Van Engen is the Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. After completing his prize-winning Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (2008) he has returned his research interests to the twelfth century. Hanna Vollrath is emerita professor of history at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany. Well known for her work on English synods and on Thomas Becket, her last book is Der Weg in eine weitere Welt: Kommunikation und “Aussenpolitik” im 12. Jahrhundert (2008). Anders Winroth is professor of history at Yale University. His Making of Gratian’s Decretum (2000) won several prizes, and in 2003 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He continues to work on the religious and legal history of Europe in the high Middle Ages.

Index

Aachen, withdrawal of the court from, 233 Aaron of Lincoln, 324 ‘Abd Allāh (king of Granada), 95 ‘Abd al-Malik, 99 ‘Abd al-Rahmān III, 99 Abelard, Peter analytical investigation of, 410, 419 autobiography, 412 availability of works, 412 commentaries attributed to, 416–17 correspondence with Heloise, 373–74 —on Heloise loving Christ, 470, 474 on creation of man as act of godly imprinting, 446 critical spirit of, 28 devotion —to the Paraclete, 475, 477 —and theology, 471 in disputationes, 86 influence of Heloise on conception of divine love, 375 interpretations of scripture, 33, 34–35 John of Salisbury student of, 509 against logic in narrower sense, 502 on love, 480 Metalogicon on, 503, 504 modern veneration of Heloise and, 17 on monks, 26–27 prosecution of, 508 and seal metaphor, 440–41 in surveys of twelfth century, 411 Theologia, 35 and Trinity, 472, 483 —pagan philosophers and Trinitarian belief, 474

Abelard of Bath, 27 Abulafia, Anna Sapir, 12, 37 Abulafia, David, 318 acheiropoietic image, cult for a, 442–44 Adalbert of Prague, Saint, 203, 217 Adam of Balsham, 411, 414, 507 John of Salisbury and, 509–10 John of Salisbury on, 505–6 Adam of the Little Bridge. See Adam of Balsham Adam of the Petit Pont. See Adam of Balsham Adelard of Bath, 59, 411 administration castles and, in Scandinavia, 181, 184 of cities, 243, 245 institutionalized church and, 36 in Italy, 119 Jews in royal, 318 in Norway, 181–82 seigniorial regime of, 266 Admont monastery, 378, 379, 380, 388 Adrian IV (Pope), 125 advocates, 243 Agobard of Lyons, 316 Ailred of Rievaulx on barbarity of Celts, 63 critique of “public” anchoress, 358 on David of Scotland, 62 Rule of Life for a Recluse, 356 Alain of Lille on “anthropomorphonite,” 465n93 on metaphor of the seal, 439 Ohly and, 451n3 in surveys of twelfth century, 411 524

Index  525

Alberic of Paris debate with Abelard, 409 John of Salisbury student of, 509 and logic, 410 Metalogicon on, 503, 504 in surveys of the twelfth century, 411 Alberic of Rheims, 503 Albigensian crusade, 305 Alcher of Clairvaux, 411 Alcuin De fide Sanctae Trinitatis, 479 definition of philosophy, 512 influence on Herrad, 386 and Trinity, 472 Alexander II (Pope) Cremona and, 124 and liturgical calendar, 477–78 on position of Jews in society, 317 Alexander III (Pope) approval of De haeresibus Graecorum, 460n61 ban on trade in war supplies, 285 as law-giver, 29 and military alliances, 123 Petrus Mallius and, 443 support of Lombard Leagues, 121, 125 Alfonso, Isabel, 261 Alfonso VI of Aragon, 98–99 Alfonso VIII of Castile, 97 Alfonso X of Castile, 93 Libro de Ajedrez, 282, 283 Alfonso V of León, 99 Alfonso IX of León, 97 Alfonso VI of León-Castile, 99, 102 Jewish officials of, 317–18 Alfonso VII of León-Castile, 99 Alfwen, 359 Alger of Liège accusing Rupert of Deutz of heresy, 477 in Eucharist controversy, 435 Gratian and, 344 on law, 339–40 Almohads, 97, 285, 287, 305 Almoravids, 97 Ambrose, Saint, 339, 432, 455n25

amicitia, 362 Amiens, walls of, 248n5 Āmir, al-, 287 Amis et Amile, 362 Amulo, 316 Anacletus II (Pope), 122 Anagni, peace of (1176), 125 anchoresses, 356–61 emergence of, 354 as ideal readers, 357 Ancrene Wisse anchoritic text, 356, 357, 358 Latin in, 360 Andernach monastery, relocation of, 379–80 Andrew of Saint-Victor, 329 Angers, walls of, 248n5 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 45–46 Annales school, 260–61 Annals of Flodoard, 80 Annals of Saint-Bertin, 84 Anselm of Canterbury (Anselm of Bec) ban on priests having wives, 68n55 on Christ in his humanity, 470 correspondence with anchorite women, 357 devotion and theology of, 471 on friendship issuing an inner marking, 448 letters of, 21 successor to Lanfranc, 157 works of, 405, 471 Antonia Pulci, 377 appearance distinction during early contacts of Muslims and Christians, 291–92 as marker of religion, 289–304 use of disguise, 303–4 See also beards; dress Aragon Jews in royal administration in, 318 serfdom in, 269 architecture in England, 57–58 —use of stone in, 58, 69n76 Romanesque, 20 Aribert, Archbishop of Milan, 136

526  Index

aristocracy danger of strong, 183–84 domination of the countryside as catalyst for growth and expansion, 263 economic control of the land versus powers of command, 264 exploitation of tenants, 261 foundation of new towns by, 232 new lineages in Italy, 120, 199 profits from demesne versus rent, 266 rise of military, 262 See also knights; seignieurial regime Aristotle dissemination of nonlogical works, 405 John of Salisbury and —defense in Metalogicon, 502 —knowledge of, 509–10 See also Categories (Aristotle); On Interpretation (Aristotle) armor, European, valued by Muslims, 286 Arnason, Johann P., 6–7 Arnau Mir de Tost, 98 Arnold of Brescia, 245 Arnulf excommunication by Gregory VII, 124 on people rising up against the clergy, 32–33 Arras elite in, 238–39 government of, 243 heretics in, 31 merchant guild in, 237 ars dictaminis German nuns and, 381 Heloise and, 372 Arts du langage et théologie (RosierCatach), 423n23 “Ascent of Latin Europe, The” (Leyser), 4 Astronomer, the, 84 Athanasian Creed, Hildegard’s commentary on, 480 Ætheflæd, 50 Athelstan, 50 Ató of Vic, 103

Augsburg, 256n75 Augustine on creation ex nihilo, 430–31 Eucharist definition, 434 on Jews, 315–16, 327 letter to Bishop Boniface, 435 quoted by Alger, 339 on reality assigned to God, 429 on sacraments versus linguistic signs, 457n38, 459n56 and term character, 456n26 theory of signs, 453n15 transmission of Neoplatonism, 418 and Trinity, 472 used by Gratian, 28 Augustinians, 56, 379, 431 authors in England, 59–60 Autumn Synod (Rome, 1078), 317–18 Ava of Melk, 360–61 Avenir d’un passé incertain, L’ (Guerreau), 260 Aventín, Mercè, 261 Avignon city government, 246 Ayyubids, 285, 305 navy of, 288, 304 purchase of war materials, 287 Baeumker, Clemens, 406 Bagge, Sverre Hakon, 10, 11–12 Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād, 298–99, 303 on disguise of Muslims during siege of Acre, 303–4 bailiffs, 243 Baldwin, John, 106 Baldwin II of Jerusalem, 301 Baldwin III of Jerusalem, 288 Baldwin of Hainault, 255n71 Baltic Sea, independent kingdoms on, 172 baptism rejection of infant baptism, 30–31 Trinity and, 472 Barbastro campaign (1064), 96 Barlow, Frank, 53 Baron, Salo Wittmayer, 319 Barthélemy, Dominique, 10–11 questioning the feudal revolution, 265

Index  527

Bartlett, Robert, 7 on conversion —and institutional framework, 202 —as process and pattern of activity, 203 on diffusion of culture, 197–98 Europeanization of Europe, 19, 45 on Italy, 117, 128n1 on Latin Christendom —emergence, 126 —expansion, 172 on ordeal, 348–49 Basel, craft guilds in, 252n36 Baudri of Bourgueil, 373, 377, 499 beards of crusader kings, 301 meanings associated with, 300, 312n80 in Muslim world, 297 of Syrian Christians, 298 Beaumont-en-Argonne, law of, 241 Bede, the Venerable on Cadwalla, 52 use in Glossa ordinaria, 329 Bedos-Rezak, Brigitte, 13 Benedict VIII (Pope), 138 Benedict IX (Pope), 138, 139 Benedict Biscop, 47 Benedictine Rule, new monks reading of, 34 Benedictines Abelard as, 475 and child oblation, 46 in England, 56 and reform movement, 379 and Trinity, 475, 476–77 Benedict of York, 324 benefit of the clergy, 55 Benevento, 119, 120 Benito, Pere, 261 Bennett, Judith, 262 Benson, Robert L., 3 on dates of twelfth century, 4, 5 on Twelfth-century Renaissance as Francophone phenomenon, 102 Berend, Nora, 198 Berengar, King, 244

Berengar of Tours confession at council of Rome, 459n55 in debate on nature of the Eucharist, 431, 434, 437, 457n42, 458n53, 470 on De civitate Dei, 435 Bergen, 191 Bernard degli Uberti, Bishop of Parma, 125 Bernard of Chartres commentary on the Timaeus attributed to, 415 John of Salisbury on, 504, 510–11 and School of Chartres, 413 Southern on, 413 in surveys of twelfth century, 411 Bernard of Clairvaux on Christ in his humanity, 470 on Cistercians —on literalness of, 34 —on observance of rule by, 40n23 De consideratione, 36 and devotion to the Holy Face, 444 on Jews, 328 letter of Matthew, bishop of Kraków, to, 204, 209–11, 213–14 letters of, 21 new edition of works of, 39n6 opposition to Abelard, 440, 462n70, 473 scriptural interpretation, 33 and seal metaphor, 441–42 on stigmata, 448 on theological debates, 471 Bernard of Vincennes, 326 Bernard Silvestris, 411, 413, 414 Bernardus Compostellanus, 106 Berno, abbot of Reichenau, 475 Bernold of Constance and liturgical calendar, 477–78 Romano-Frankish prayer, 472 Berthold, 150 bestowal of arms, 84, 85 Bible, glossed books of the, 49 Birgitta of Vadstena, Saint, 187 bishops cities and, 256n75, 256n76 —urban resistance, 239

528  Index

bishops (cont.) Norwegian in Iceland, 178 payments to, 256n75 Polish Anonymous on, 203 royal appointments of, 155–56 Bisson, Thomas, 3 on fusion of ducal and seigniorial attributes, 223n27 on Piast ducal succession, 206 on Polish Anonymous, 200, 218 on rise of military aristocracy, 262 Black Death and Norway, 183 Bloch, Marc definition of serfdom, 276n38 influence on Duby, 18 periodization of feudalism, 76 on power of the lords, 264 on regional approach, 263 Blois events of 1171, 325, 327 Boethius, 404, 511 Boethius (Danish student), 187 Bohemia conversion to Christianity, 175 —influence on Poland, 216 historiography in, 188 as independent kingdom, 172, 175 ruling dynasty in, 201 serfdom in, 271 Bolesław III the Wrymouth (Poland), 197, 206–7 Bolesław II the Bold (the Generous) (Poland), 196–97 Bolesław IV the Curly (Poland), 217 Bolesław Chrobry, 8 Bolesław the Brave (Poland), 202 compared to Bolesław IV the Curly, 217 hagiographic tradition and, 203 and succession to Mieszko I, 204–5 Thietmar on, 204–5 Bologna, administration of, 245 Bolton, Brenda, 3 Bonaventure, 472 Bond, Gerald, 363, 373 Bonizo, bishop of Sutri on excommunication of Henry IV, 133, 134, 148

Schieffer on meaning of Romanus orbis, 160n6 Bonizo of Sutri, 124 Bonnassie, Pierre, 264, 268–69 Book of Encouragement (Liber confortatorius) (Goscelin), 356 Book on the Saxon War (Brun of Merseburg), 149–50 Bordeaux, walls of, 248n6 Borgolte, Michael, 198 bourgeoisie emergence of, 87 Bourin, Monique, 261 Bournazel, Eric, 265 Bousma, William J., 13n3 Boutruche, Robert, 263 Breteuil, laws of, 240 Břetíslav I, Duke of Bohemia, 207–8 Bridegroom Matins, 376 Brooke, Christopher, 18 Brown, Rachel Fulton, 13–14 Bruges, merchant guild in, 237 Brunet, A., 2 Brun of Merseburg, 149–50, 168n99 Bruno of Cologne, 512–13 Bruno of Querfurt, 196 Buc, Philippe, 195 Bulgarus, 343–44 Bulliet, Richard, 107, 296 Burchard of Worms, 317, 322 Burckhardt, Jacob, 17 bureaucratization church and, 178 —influence on organized government, 180, 186 rise of professional bureaucrats, 184 in Scandinavia, 183 Burman, Thomas, 103 Burnett, Charles, 103 Bury St. Edmunds, 48 Byzantine Empire’s claims to southern Italy, 121 Cade, William, 324 Cadwalla, 52 Calixtus II (Pope), 321 Cambrai, disturbances in, 255n69 Cambridge, 49, 250n23

Index  529

Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Kretzmann, Kenny, and Pinborg, eds.), 408 canonists and rediscovery of Roman law, 342 canon law, 13, 54 academic teaching of, 344–45 Iberian canonists, 106 influence of, 350–51 —on procedural law, 345 —in Scandinavia, 183 interaction with Roman law, 339 in Scandinavia, 187 Canossa, penance of Henry IV at, 132– 35, 145–55 Canossa 1077: Die Erschütterung der Welt (Canossa 1077: The Shaking of the World) (exhibition, 2006), 132 Canterbury government of, 242 legal procedure of court of archbishop, 347–48 Cantigas de Santa Maria (Alfonso X), 307n7 capitularii, 257n84 Capua, 120 Carmina burana lyrics by Abelard, 375 Carolingians allegiance of vassals, 79 bestowal of arms, 84 continuity of noble families to feudal France, 75 as end of Late Antiquity, 5 and Eucharist —Eucharistic controversy, 433–34 —interest in images and theology of, 428 Haskins on, 38n1 Jewry privileges, 315 Piast duchy and, 199 twelfth century and culture of, 21 Carthusians, 56 Casimir I (Poland), 206 castles in England, 57 finances of castle administration, 184 fortified centers in Poland, 201

in Italy, 120 in Scandinavia, 181 Castro, Pedro Fernández de, 96 Catalonia servitude in, 269–71 studies by Bonnassie, 264 suppliers of naval materials to Muslims, 287 Categories (Aristotle) commentary attributed to Abelard, 417 importance for twelfth-century philosophy, 404 Lanfranc and, 436 Cathars, 30–31, 305 cathedral schools Ciceronian notion of philosophy at, 512 educational ideal, 514 in England, 49 in Spain, 103–4 Cecilia, saintly romance of, 370 Celestine III (Pope), 97, 443 celibacy, clerical. See clergy: celibacy of Celts English view of, 63 and urbanization, 64 centers of learning, in England, 64. See also cathedral schools; universities chamber serfdom, 315, 322. See also servitude of Jews character, notion of, 432, 433, 439, 454n19 Ambrose and, 455n25 Augustine and, 456n26 Charles the Bald, 316 Charles the Good, 88 Charter of Peace (Valenciennes, 1114), 255n71 charters as evidence of Italian visits to German court, 136 in Normandy and south of the Loire, 256n73 chastity, passionate, 364 chattel mortgage, 240 Chayanov, A. V., 267

530  Index

Chenu, M.-D., 484 child oblation, 35, 57 chivalry, 10–11, 75–92 appearance of, 83 as civilizing process, 76–77 compared to Frankish Germanity, 79 contemporary scholarship on, 77–78 subsidized by English wealth, 89 tournaments, 77, 87 training in weaponry and horse-riding, 85 See also knights Christendom, Latin Bartlett on, 126, 172 clerical elite culture transmitted to Scandinavia, 186–87 coherence of, 134 effect of First Crusade on, 156 Gregory’s wish for leadership of, 171 territorial principality as political organization, 176 Christianity compared to pagan religion, 178 and logic of Incarnation, 430 material cost of, 178–79 sanctions of in European society, 24 Christianity, conversion to of Bohemia, 175 —influence on Poland, 216 in East Central Europe, 209–15, 216–17 —reversion of, 203 forced conversion of Jews, 316 —return to Judaism, 319–20 of Hungary, 175 of Poland, 199, 202–3 as process and pattern of activity, 203 and state formation, 8, 11–12 Christian-Jewish relations, 314–37 knowledge of, 281 Christian-Muslim relations, 279–313 development of regular and closer contact, 284 Innocent III on, 279–80 knowledge of, 281

Christians difference in appearance of eastern and western, 298–99 dress regulations in Muslim countries, 290 in Spain —alliances with Muslims, 96, 98 —payment of tributes to caliphs, 99 Christina of Markyate, 356, 367–70 Alfwen and, 359 cohabitation with Roger, 368, 377 and ennobling love, 362 Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris, 99 Chronica Majora (Matthew Paris), 282, 283 Chronicle (Ionannes Skylitzes), 293, 294 Chronicle of Alfonso III, 94 Chronicle of Poland (Vincent), 202 chronology of East Central Europe versus core Europe, 197 history of serfdom and, 268 church assuming responsibility for Latin Christendom, 134 bureaucratization and, 178 clericalization of, and gender equality, 365 hierarchy in, 178 influence on administration, 36 reform, 23–25 —communal movement and, 244 —in England, 157–58 —in France, 156 —influence on social and political changes in Italy, 117 —Lateran Councils and, 321 —monastic humanism and, 379 —orthodox reformers, 31 —and rediscovery of Roman law, 342 —Robert of Arbrissel and, 377 —women and, 13, 355, 375 in Scandinavia —conflicts with kings, 185–86 —ecclesiastical organization, 177–78 —as landowner, 182

Index  531

secular control in England, 53–54 wealth of, 179 churches in England building of, 58–59 collegiate, 56 Church of St. Thomas in Formis (Rome), 306n7 Ciaralli, Antonio, 341–42 Cicero John of Salisbury and, 511 on Lady Philosophy, 513 moral philosophy and, 418 as source of philosophy tied to ethics, 511–12 Cid, the (Rodrigo Díaz), 96, 98–99 beard of, 300–301 fluctuating allegiances, 301 Cistercians Bernard of Clairvaux on observance of rule by, 40n23 and feast of the Trinity, 476 foundation of, 56 —William of Malmesbury on, 47 new type of organization, 34 opposed to child oblates, 57 in Poland, 215 and the poor, 69n70 Stephen of Lexington on Irish houses, 74n120 surveys of the twelfth century on, 411 cities bishops and, 239, 256n75, 256n76 church and monarchy political opponents in, 244 elites in, 231, 238–39, 253n41 food supplies, 235, 251n26 government of, 50, 242–46 independence of, 243–44 jurisdictionally heterogeneous, 250n24 laws of, 240 —secular, 242 —town law families, 241 market squares, 231 municipal self-government in England, 50 in northern Italy, 117-119

plans —effect of walls on, 231 —food markets in, 251n26 as regional economic centers, 235 and Roman law, 346–47 walls, 229, 231, 248n5, 248n6 See also communes; urbanization City of God, The (Augustine), 327, 435 Civitate, battle of (1053), 122 Clarembald of Arras commentary on On the Trinity, 416 and School of Chartres, 413 surveys of the twelfth century on, 411 Clemence of Barking, 360 Clement III (imperial anti-pope), 320 agreement with city of Rome, 245 See also Wibert, archbishop of Ravenna clergy benefit of, 55 celibacy of, 23, 53, 68n55 marriage of, 23, 146 standard of living, 179 Clerval, Alexandre, 412–13 clothing. See dress Cluniacs Cistercians compared to, 34 rejection of customs by new monks, 32 Cluny, feast of the Trinity at, 476 Cnut, King, 52 Cnut the Great, 174 Code (Justinian), 340, 341 coin, 235–36 in England, 251n28 Collectio Caesaragustana, 105 Collection in Seventy-Four Titles, 333n24 Cologne elites in, 253n41 government in, 245 guilds in —craft guilds, 252n36 —merchant guild, 237 Jews in, 318 market, 248n8 walls, 231 Commentaria in Evangelium S. Joannis (Rupert of Deutz), 435, 438

532  Index

Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and His School (Häring, ed.), 415 Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (Macrobius), 417 communes charters of, 243, 256n73 definition of, 243 establishment of, 243 Guibert of Nogent on, 255n70 in Italy, 119, 120 papal support for development of, 130n27 communications, problems of, 132–70 information about Canossa, 149 sharing of news by travelers, 160n9 slowness of news travel, 141 Como, government of, 257n79 Concordia (Martin of León), 105 Concord of Discordant Canons (Gratian). See Decretum (Gratian) Confessions (Augustine), 430–31 Conquest of Lisbon, The, 63 Conrad II (Holy Roman emperor) election of, 136 Parma revolt against, 125 Speyer cathedral and, 320 consent and ethical act, 35 Consolation of Philosophy, The (Boethius), 417 on Lady Philosophy, 513 William of Conches’ commentary on, 412 Constable, Giles, 3, 9, 19 commentary on William of Malmesbury, 47 on dates of twelfth century, 4, 5 on Twelfth-century Renaissance as Francophone phenomenon, 102 Constable, Olivia Remie, 12 Constance, Peace of (1183), 120, 125–26 Constance cathedral library, 150 Constance of Le Ronceray, 373 Constitutum Constantini, 121 consuls, 245, 246, 257n79 contact relic, Veronica as, 443

Contest of Christian and Muslim Spain, 1031–57, The (Reilly), 94 Conventum Hugonis, 81 Conversation of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian (Abelard), 26–27 convivencia, 296 coronation, 183 Corpus Christi, feast of, 477 Corpus iuris civilis in the Middle Ages, The (Radding), 343 councils in city government, 242, 243, 244 Count of Poitiers, 81 courtly love, 361 courts, legal in city government, 242 ecclesiastical in England, 54, 55 in Scandinavia —ecclesiastical, 180 —royal, 183 courts, princely, impact on cities, 233–34, 250n21 Cousin, Victor, 417 Covadonga, battle of, 94 craft organizations in England, 236 in Germany, 252n36 religious brotherhood as model for, 252n37 statutes and, 252n33 victualling trades and, 249n13, 252n34 credit instruments, negotiable, 240 Cremona emergence of commune of, 119, 124 government of, 257n79 Crisis of the Twelfth Century, The (Bisson), 3 on rise of military aristocracy, 262 crusader legislation, 296 Crusader States anxiety about religious identity, 279 increasing acculturation of Muslims and Christians, 304–5 Muslims in, 282, 290 Saladin and —capture of Jerusalem, 304 —sea campaigns, 288–89

Index  533

crusades First Crusade —Hebrew sources on, 320–21 —initiated by Pope, 156 —violence unleashed by, 39n13 —William of Malmesbury on leaders of, 46 and Jewish funding, 332n21 murder of Jews by crusaders, 325 Muslim ship disguised as Christian vessel, 304 sanctions for hindering crusading effort, 279–80 Cuenca, Code of, 288 Cuenca-Teruel, Code of, 240. See also Fuero of Teruel “Culmination of the Old Logic in Peter Abelard, The” (Kretzmann), 407 culture diffusion of, 197–98, 216 mode of transmission to Central Eastern Europe, 216 parallel development of East Central Europe and core Europe, 198, 216 in Scandinavia, 186–90 twelfth-century and Carolingian, 21 cura monialium, 380 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 4 custom, 17–44 authentication of, 29 concessions to, 29 condemnation of Irish, 61, 62 definitions, 27–28 embedded in society, 25–26 indirect legitimizing of, 37 integration into law, 27 papacy and —fight against, 145 —law of 1234, 30 prescriptive law and, 37 reason and, 27, 37 truth and, 27 yielding to written law, 28 Cyprian, 28 Dagome iudex, 204–5 Dahan, Gilbert, 327

Damian. See Peter Damian David I (Scotland), 62 David the Scot report on Henry V, 158 use of report in Kaiserchronik, 169n104 William of Malmesbury’s identification of, 159 Davies, Rees, 47 De Administratione (Suger), 448–49 death, bad, as sign of punishing justice, 168n99 De civitate Dei (Augustine), 327, 435 De consideratione (Bernard), 36 De consideratione (Eugenius III), 328 De corpore et sanguine (Lanfranc), 436 on Berengar’s confession, 459n55 De corpore et sanguine Domini (Lanfranc), 457n42 De corporis et sanguinis Christi veritate in eucharistia libri tres (Guitmund), 459n55 Decretum (Burchard of Worms), 317 Decretum (Gratian) on custom, 27–28 on distinguishing dress for Jews, 322 layers in making of, 37–38 as teaching book, 344 unresolved matters in, 25 Decretum (Ivo), 333n24 De diversis artibus (Theophilus), 448 De divinis officiis (Rupert of Deutz), 477 De doctrina christiana (Augustine), 431, 435, 454n18, 479 De fide Sanctae Trinitatis (Alcuin), 479 De Gestis Pontificum Anglorum (William of Malmesbury), 143 De haeresibus Graecorum (Hugh Eterianus), 460n61 Delumeau, Jean-Pierre, 261 De misericordia et iustitia (Alger), 339–40 De moribus (Dudo of Saint-Quentin), 81 Denmark castles in, 181 church in —ecclesiastical organization, 177 —influence of clerical elite culture, 187

534  Index

Denmark (cont.) Danish Law of Jutland, 183 formation of, 173–74 —influenced by pressure from Germany, 175 historiography in, 188 kings of —conflicts with aristocracy, 184, 185 —and Norway, 174 —rivalry between sons of King Svend, 171 Latin as literary language, 187 military in, 180–81, 193n16 serfdom in, 270 De operatione Dei (Hildegard of Bingen). See Liber divinorum operum (Hildegard of Bingen) De processione mundi (Gundisalvus of Toledo), 105 De processione Spiritus sancti contra Graecos (Anselm), 471 De Rijk, L. M. on Alberic of Paris, 516n17 editor of Garlandus’ Dialectica, 411 Logica Modernorum, 422n22 “Summe Mettenses,” 518n33 De Sacramentis (Hugh of St. Victor), 383 Descriptio Basilicae Vaticanae (Petrus qurius), 443 despotism, checked by papal intervention, 127 Destruction de Jerusalem, 463n77 De trinitate (Abelard). See Theologia “Summi boni” (Abelard) devotion of Abelard, 471, 474–75, 477 emphasis on Christ in his humanity, 470 to the Holy Face, 444 increased emphasis on Christ in his humanity, 483 as integrated with theology and liturgy, 468–69 to the Trinity, 13–14, 468–98, 474–75, 483 Dialectica (Abelard) Kretzmann on, 407 Martin’s analytical study of, 409

Dialectica (Garlandus), 411 Didascalicon (Hugh of St. Victor), 448 Diego García de Campos, 105 Digest (Justinian) definition of custom, 27 rediscovery of, 340, 341 Dijon, walls of, 248n5 Dionysius of Piacenza, 127 Disibodenberg monastery, 378, 379 begun as anchorhold, 357 disputationes, 86 Christian-Jewish, 329 dispute resolution, research on, 349 dissenters as innovators, 19 division, territorial, 171 dogma, Sayers on importance of, 486, 488 Domesday Book on assets of churches, 69n65 evidence of slave system, 50 Dominic Loricatus, stigmata of, 448 donations, imperial, 121 dress Christian regulations for Jews and Muslims, 279–80, 284, 289, 296, 322, 333n24 as marker of religion, 279–80, 296 Muslim regulations for Christians and Jews, 290 professional of physicians, 299–300 of women in Sicily, 302–3 Dronke, Peter, 102, 373, 413, 424n39 dualism, axiomatic, 431 dubbing, ritual, 83–84 Dubravka, princess, 204 Duby, Georges definition of society, 188 on gangs of young knights, 77 at Harvard meeting in 1977, 259 and longue durée, 260 on the Mâconnais, 261, 263 on oppression of peasantry, 268 on servitude, 269, 271 theory of feudalism, 263–64 Dudo of Saint-Quentin on civilizing effect of baptism, 79–80 De moribus, 81 on Richard I, 81, 83

Index  535

Duisburg, merchant guild in, 253n42 Duno, abbot of Siegburg, 477 Durandus of Troan, 458n52 Dutton, Paul, 415, 511 Dyer, Christopher, 262 Eadmer (monk), 157 Eadmer of Canterbury hostility to French rule, 65n5 on Norman Conquest, 46 East Central Europe, 194–228 defined, 8, 196 distance to civilization of rest of Europe, 196, 203, 209 end of raiding expeditions and formation of kingdoms, 176 fragmentary knowledge of, 195–96 as preferred term, 219n1 ruling dynasties in, 201 Easter dramas (attr. to Heloise), 376 Eastern Europe, serfdom in, 271 Ebbesen, Sten, 420n14, 422n22, 424n33 Eberhard of Bamberg, 479, 483 Ecbert of Tours, 513 economy arithmetically based, 235–36 effect of princely courts on, 233–34, 250n21 Jewish involvement in capital formation, 234 peasant exploitation and growth of, 261 revival in Italy, 117 Edgar the Atheling, 52 education in England, 49 studying abroad —Hispani in Bologna, 106 —Scandinavians in European universities, 187 urbanization and, 49–50 See also cathedral schools; universities Edward I (England), 325 Edward the Elder, 50 Egbert of Wessex, 52–53 Eggehard, 150 Ekbert of Schönau, 378, 387

Eleanor of Aquitaine, 372 Eliduc (Marie de France), 371–72 Elisabeth of Schönau Hildegard and, 355, 387 Latin writing, 378 and Pentecost, 482–83 prophetic books, 355, 378, 387 visions, 483 encellulement of lands, 76 encyclopedic learning in monastic humanism, 379 England bilingualism in, 59 church —after 1066, 53 —and lay investiture, 155, 157–58 —reform, 157–58 Danish rule in, 71n94 feudalism, 265 —and warfare, 82 Frenchification of society, 60 guilds —craft organizations, 236 —guildhalls, 237 —merchant guilds, 253n39 Jews in, 234, 323–25 lack of knowledge of German history, 143, 144–45 law-giving and law-practice in, 29 peasants —differentiation among, 265 —serfdom, 270–71 religious —anchoresses, 357 —Latinity of nuns, 360, 378, 388 revolt of 1061/2, 164n56 studies of rural society in, 262 transformation during twelfth century, 45–74 urbanization in —city governments, 242 —elites in, 239 —municipal liberties curtailed by power of kings, 244 —Normans and, 247n3 —town foundations, 232 —town laws, 241

536  Index

English as members of European community, 60 referred to as barbarians, 61 Enigma fidei (William of St. Thierry), 480 ennobling love, 361–78 Entheticus (John of Salisbury), 510, 511 epic, biblical, by Ava of Melk, 361 Epithalamica, attributation of, 375–76 Epithalamium (music), 383 equality effect of clericalization of church on gender, 365 in Latin culture of friendship, 364–65 Erdmann, Carl, 514 Erfurt, 256n75 Erikskrönikan, 190 Ermengarde of Anjou, 372 Etsi Iudeos (bull, Innocent III), 321–22 Eucharist controversy, 431, 433–37, 470 use of term substantia, 458n52 Eudes, King, 79 Eugenius III (Pope), 328 Eurasian Transformations (Arnason and Wittrock), 6–9 Europe city governments in, 242 formation of state system, 176 simultaneous Christianization and rise of kingdoms, 177 Europe, northern city government, 244 craft guilds, 236 Jews in, 234 Europeanization of Europe, 7–8 development of cultural unity and territorial division, 171 England and, 45 Scandinavia and, 171–93 European Science Foundation, 9 Eustathius of Thessalonica, 299 Eve (recluse), 364, 377 and ennobling love, 362 friendship with Hervé, 359 Goscelin of St. Bertin and, 356, 357, 358–59

Eve of Saint-Martin, 358 Everardus of Ypres, 411–12 Exceptiones Petri, 105 excommunications by Gregory VII of Arnulf, 124 of Henry IV, 132–33, 147–48 —Bonizo on, 133, 134, 148 —indifference of other kings, 154 exegesis, biblical of Abelard, 403 Christian interest in Jewish, 329 of Herbert of Bosham, 314 explication de texte, method of, 408 fairs, Champagne, 236 Fassler, Margot, 383 Feller, Laurent, 261 Ferguson, Wallace K., 2 Fernando I of Castile, 95 Fernie, Eric, 58 Ferrara alliance of papacy with commune of, 123 craft guilds, 252n37 feudalism according to Duby, 263 in England, 265 French model, 264–65 in Germany, 265 in Italy, 265 legal systems of, 266 two ages according to Bloch, 263 and warfare, 78, 80 —mercenaries in, 87 —ransom and, 85, 88, 286 —sparing of enemies, 82 Figueras, Lluís To, 261 figura, notion of, 431, 433 fin’ amor, 361 fin amur, 371 First European Revolution, The (Moore), 3, 19 on Italy, 117, 128n1 periodization in, 266 revolution defined, 172

Index  537

Flanders cities —government, 243, 246, 257n79, 257n84 —independence of, 244 —walls, 231 towns —foundations, 232 —“little charters,” 240–41 urban elites in, 238–39 Flavigny-sur-Ozerain, monastery of, 151 Florence appointment of officials, 245 elites in, 239 Florentinus, 327 Fontevrault, 384 food, cities and, 234, 235 food markets in London city plan, 251n26 Fossier, Robert, 261 Four Doctors, 343–44 Fournier, Paul, 342 France chivalry, 75–92 church —lay investiture, 155 —reform, 156 cities —government of, 246 —municipal liberties curtailed by power of kings, 244 influence on conversion of Poland, 216 Jews in, 234, 325–27 —expulsion, 315, 327 Latinity of nuns in, 360, 378, 388 northern —city government in, 243 —communes in, 243 —craft statutes, 236 —uncertainty of Jewish existence in, 327 reaction to Henry III’s deposition of popes, 143 reaction to Henry V’s attack on pope, 156–57

social and cultural history in, 261 town law families in, 241 franchise charters, 266–67 Francis, rule of, 34 Francis of Assisi imitation of suffering of Christ, 487 stigmata of, 448 Frederick Barbarossa (emperor) confirmation of charter of Worms, 332n16 Jewry privileges, 321, 322–23 Lombard resistance to, supported by papacy, 125 and Peace of Constance, 120 town charters, 232–33 Frederick II (Germany) charters on Jews, 323 resettling of Sicilian Muslims, 305 Freedman, Paul, 12 freedom of choice in lifestyle, 57 Fresnay-le-Vicomte, 88 Freund, Stefan, 161n19 friendship cult of, in monastic humanism, 359, 363–64, 379 epistolary, 355 Latin culture of friendship, 363–65 romances of, 362 spiritual, 377 “fringeness,” notion of, 220n7 Fuero of Placencia, 288 Fuero of Teruel on Jewish service, 318 laws against sale of weapons to Muslims, 288 fueros (charter of customs granted to towns), 105 importance for concept of Jewish service, 318 on Jews, 322 Fulcher of Chartres, 291 Fulda blood libel (1235), 335n35 Fulk of Neuilly, 328 Gaeta, 119 Galbert of Bruges, 88

538  Index

Galluccio, battle of (1139), 122 Gallus. See Polish Anonymous García, 99 Garlandus, 411 Gascony, serfdom in, 271 Gautier de Coincy, 325 Genoa government of, 244–45, 257n79 —appointment of officials, 245–46 justice in, 119 suppliers of naval materials to Muslims, 287, 288 Geoffrey, abbot of St. Albans on Christina of Markyate, 358 Christina of Markyate and, 356, 367–70 Geoffrey, abbot of Vendôme, 359 Geoffrey Gaimar, 46 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 487–88 Gerald de Barri on barbarian customs, 61–62 book launching party at Oxford, 49 on the Irish, 62 —customs, 74n120 —learning from the English, 48 Gerald of Wales, 443 Geraldo Sem Pavor, 96 Gerard of Cremona, 101 Gerbert of Aurillac, 4 and Cicero, 513 study in Spain, 102, 103 Gerhoch of Reichersberg, 381, 438, 479 German Empire church and monarchy as political opponents, 244 cities —government, 243–44 —walls, 231 craft guilds in, 236–37, 252n36 feudalism in, 265 influence on conversion of Poland, 216 and Italy —chancery for Italy, 137, 141, 163n46 —claims to southern Italy, 121 Jews in, 318–19 —in service to princes, 323

knowledge about Henry’s penance in, 149 religious —anchoresses, 358 —dual-sex monasteries, 378 —and Latinity of nuns, 378, 381, 388 rise of and formation of Scandinavian kingdoms, 175 serfdom in, 270 towns —foundations, 232 —laws, 241 German kings Italian delegation to, 136 perambulations of, 135 Germírez, Diego, 104 Gersh, Stephen, 407, 408 Gertrude of Helfta, 399n115 Gervase of Canterbury, 59 Gervase of Tilbury, 443 Geschichte der Philosophie (Ritter), 411 Gesta (Polish Anonymous), 200, 202 Gesta Chuonradi (Wipo), 136 Gesta Danorum (Saxo Grammaticus), 188 Gesta Regum Anglorum (William of Malmesbury), 46–47, 143, 144 French history in, 60 on Godfrey, prior of Winchester, 49 Gesta Stephani, 48 Ghent elites in, 238–39 merchant guild, 237 gifts exchange in Viking age, 175 of weapons and armors to Saladin, 286 Gilbert de la Porrée. See Gilbert of Poitiers Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, 330 Gilbertines, 56, 57 Gilbert of Holland, 446 Gilbert of Poitiers analytical investigation of, 419 availability of works, 412 commentary on Boethius’s Opuscula sacra, 403 Haskins on, 406 John of Salisbury student of, 509

Index  539

Metalogicon on, 503, 504 as precursor of possible-worlds semantics, 410 prosecution of, 508 and School of Chartres, 413 in surveys of the twelfth century, 411, 412 Gilbert of Sempringham, 377 Gilbert Porretanus. See Gilbert of Poitiers Gilchrist, John, 317 Gillingham, John, 10, 77 Gilson, Étienne, 406 Glaber, Radulf, 138 Glick, Thomas F., 108n7 Glossa ordinaria, 328–29 Gloucester, merchant guild in, 253n39 Gnadenstuhl, 472, 487 Godfrey, prior of Winchester, 49 Godfrey of Bouillon, 46, 333n21 Godfrey of Jumièges, 48 Godwin of Salisbury, 356 Goetz, Hans-Werner, 167n84 Goffredo Malaterra on acts of chivalry, 84 on Tancred of Hauteville, 86 “good men,” 257n79 Gorecki, Piotr, 10, 11–12 Goscelin of St.-Bertin on Eve, 358, 359–60 and Latin culture of friendship, 363–64 writing for Eve, 356 Grabman, Martin, 406 grammar, study of, 501, 504 Gratian critical spirit of, 28 on custom, 27–28 formal teaching of canon law by, 344 Jewry canons of, 333n24 on reason and truth, 34 See also Decretum (Gratian) Gregory I the Great (Pope), 315 letter to bishop of Palermo, 316 mention of Justinian’s Digest, 341 Gregory VI (Pope), 138

Gregory VII (Pope), 25 Bolesław II the Bold (the Generous) and, 196–97 condemnation of Irish mores, 61 and Cremona, 124 critical spirit of, 28 on determination of canon, 34 excommunications by (See excommunications by Gregory VII) and Germany —abdication requested by German king and bishops, 147 —conflict with Henry IV in Milan, 146 —encouragement of princely opposition to Henry IV, 126 —Henry IV’s penance before, 132, 133, 149 on Jewish officials of Alfonso VI, 317–18 letter to King Olav of Norway, 171 on married clergy, 23 on superior authority of papacy, 121 Gregory IX (Pope) Decretals of 1234, 322 and investigation of Talmud for blasphemy, 327 Griffiths, Fiona, 384 groundrents, 242 Grundherrschaft, 265 Guerreau, Alain, 260, 261 Guerriers et paysans (Duby), 263 Guibert of Gembloux, 365, 366–67, 387 Guibert of Nogent on communes, 243, 255n70 on difficulty of differentiating Muslims from Christians, 297 on identification of crusaders, 298 new reading of minor prophets, 33 Guigemar (Marie de France), 370 Guilhelm IX of Aquitaine, 372 “Guillaume de Conches et les sciences au XIIe siècle” (CNRS conference, 2007), 424n29 Guillaume of Moulins-la-Marche, 85–86 Guitmund, 459n55

540  Index

Gundisalvus of Toledo, 105 Gunhild, 144 Guta of Schwartzenthann, 380 “Guta-Sintram Codex,” 380 Guy of Imola, 127 Hadewijch (beguine), 360, 392n32 hagiography of Hildegard and Christina, 367 material from East Central Europe, 203 romance and, 355, 370–71 Hahn, Cynthia, 293 Håkon Håkonsson, saga of, 190 Halberstadt, merchant guild in, 253n42 Halecki, Oskar, 8 Harald Bluetooth, 173 Harald Finehair, 174 Harding, Stephen, 47 Häring, Nikolaus, 415 Hartker of St. Gall, 476 Harūn b. Yahyā, 297 Harvard Conference (1977). See “Renaissance and Renewal” (Harvard ­conference, 1977) Harvey, P. D. A., 262 Haskins, Charles Homer, 2, 17 on Carolingian precedents, 38n1 on cultural revival, 172 on dates of twelfth century, 4, 5 on historiography, 187–88 influence of, 19 on Spain, 93, 101–2 Twelfth-century Renaissance as French phenomenon, 101 Hauréau, Barthélémy, 406, 411 Heer, Friedrich, 18 Heimskringla (Snorri Sturluson), 189 Helmholz, Richard, 345 Heloise concern with liturgical and institutional reform, 355, 375 correspondence with Abelard, 373–74 culture of epistolary friendship, 355 and ennobling love, 362 —sexual, 371, 374 founding of the Paraclete convent, 372 influence on Abelard, 375

modern veneration of Abelard and, 17 parents of, 396n85 Henry, D. P., 420n13 Henry I (England) and Anselm of Bec, 157–58 appearance criticized by Orderic Vitalis, 300 and Cambridge, 250n23 dissolution of marriages by, 55 hunting lodge at Woodstock, 58 Henry II (England) and Anglo-Saxon minters, 324 and commerce in Lincoln, 250n23 confiscation of estate of Aaron of Lincoln, 324 Henry I (France), 84, 139 Henry II (Germany), 161n19 Henry III (Germany) harangue against simony, 138 imperial coronation, 138 papacy and —deposition of three popes, 139–40 —lack of information on, 140–41 quoting the Code, 342 Henry IV (Germany) appointments at Reichenau, 150 deposition of pope in Worms, 146 excommunication, 132–33, 134, 147–48 —effect of, 148 —indifference of other kings, 154 on Jews of Worms, 322 penance before Gregory VII, 132, 133, 149 privileges to Jews in Speyer and Worms, 319, 332n16 Henry V (Germany) appointment of bishops, 155–56 conflict with Paschal II, 155–56 William of Malmesbury on, 158 Henry of Huntingdon, 46, 52 Henry the Lion as founder of towns, 233 Herbert Losinga, bishop of Norwich, 48 Herbert of Bosham, 314–15 Christian ambiguity towards Judaism, 329 on Jews, 330, 337n57

Index  541

heresy concerns about, 305 Gratian on, 25 Peter Lombard on, 25 Rupert of Deutz and accusations of, 477 Sayers on, 486 and validity of sacramental grace, 25 See also Cathars Hermann of Carinthia, 101, 411 Herman of Scheda, 472 hermeneutics, patristic, 451n7 hermits, competitions between, 86 Heroides (Ovid), 373 Herrad of Hohenbourg, 383–85 concern with liturgical and institutional reform, 355 encyclopedic learning, 379 independence of, 384 Latin writing, 378 Hersende de Champigné, 396n85 Hersfeld, 150 Hervé (monk of Vendôme), 359, 364 Hervé de Bourg-Dieu, 445 Hesbert, René-Jean, 476 Hilary of Orléans, 359 Hildebert of Lavardin (Hildebert of Le Mans) intellectual roots in the eleventh century, 499 “Par tibi Roma nihil,” 47 work acquired by Bury St Edmunds, 48 Hildegard of Bingen, 13, 354, 365–67, 373, 388 antiphons for the Trinity, 480, 483 concern with liturgical and institutional reform, 355 counsel to Elisabeth of Schönau, 387 death of, 393n50 on divine Spirit, 386 encyclopedic learning, 379 and ennobling love, 362 Guibert of Gembloux and, 365, 366–67 Jutta and, 359 late medieval reception of, 386–87 Latin writing, 378

letters of, 21 relationship with abbot of Disibodenberg, 383–84 relocating from Disibodenberg to Rupertsberg, 380 Tenxwind and, 379 theology of the feminine, 385 on Trinity, 479–80 Van Engen on, 10 as visionary woman, 355 vita of, 367 Volmar of Disibodenberg and, 365–66 on womanish times, 22–23 Hilton, Rodney, 266 Hirsau as center of Benedictine reform, 379 Histoire de la philosophie scolastique (Hauréau), 406, 411 Historia calamitatum (Abelard), 374–75 Historiae (Richer), 79 Historia ecclesiastica (Orderic Vitalis), 77–78 on ritual dubbing, 83 Historia novorum in Anglia (Eadmer of Canterbury), 46 Historia Regum (William of Malmesbury) on Henry V of Germany, 158 Historia scholastica (Peter Comestor), 384 historiography abstract concepts in, 154 approaches to medieval Italy, 118 East Central Europe in general medieval history, 197–98 rise of vernacular, 187–88 in Scandinavia, 188–89 History (de Wulf ), 411 History of Outremer (William of Tyre), 297, 299 Hohenbourg monastery, 380 Holy Spirit, doctrine of, 441 honor and royal social relationships, 136 Honorius Augustodunensis on imprinted nature of man as icon, 445–46 on mechanical arts, 448 on Pentecost, 482 on seven pillars of wisdom, 386

542  Index

Honorius Augustodunensis (cont.) source for Herrad, 384 Speculum ecclesiae, 484 Honorius III (Pope), 312n86 Hortus deliciarum (Herrad of Hohenbourg), 378, 381, 384–85 gender and monastic vision in, 385 respect for pagan learning in, 386 Hospitallers, 56 Houben, Hubert, 121 Houts, Elizabeth van, 45–46 Hrabanus Maurus, 512 Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, 377, 378 Hugh Capet, 79, 80–81, 82 Hugh Chiliarchus, 81 Hugh Eterianus De haeresibus Graecorum, 460n61 on metaphor of the seal, 438–39 Hugh of Cluny, 138, 151 Hugh of Die, 156 Hugh of Flavigny, 150–51 Hugh of Lyon, 151 Hugh of St. Victor on creation of man as act of godly imprinting, 446 De sacramentis, 383 in English libraries, 49 and imprinted image, 447, 448 Ohly and, 451n3 in surveys of twelfth century, 411 teacher of Clarembald of Arras, 416 Hugo Falcandus, 291 humanism as historical paradigm, 18 of John of Salisbury, 510 monastic, 18, 354, 378–79 —School of Chartres and, 413 —Southern and, 13 Humbert of Igny, stigmata of, 448 Hungary conversion to Christianity, 175 as independent kingdom, 172, 175 ruling dynasty in, 201 serfdom in, 271 Hyams, Paul, 29, 70n87

Iberia, 93–116 integration of history into European context, 100 studies of nobility, 112n51 Ibn ‘Abdūn, 296 Ibn al-Athīr on European weapons and armor as spoils of war, 286 on language as identifying trait, 309n46 Ibn ‘Ammār, 96, 100 Ibn Bassām, 100 Ibn Gāniya, 99 Ibn ‘Idhārī, 95 Ibn Jubayr, 302–3 Ibn Rushd (d. 1126), 296 Ibrahim ibn-Ya’qub, 201 Iceland church —influence of clerical elite culture in, 187 —Norwegian bishops in, 178 literature in, 193n23 —familys sagas, 189–90 —in the vernacular, 187 identitas, 437–38 identity, 8–9, 12 causes of increased concerns about appearance, 304–5 confusion of, 290–91 religious, 279 ideologies of signification, 426 Idrīsī, 286 imago, 437 immanence, 450 Imola, 126–27 Imperial Land Peace (1103), 321 imprint, 447 actualizing and heuristic power of, 461n64 and dialectics of immanence and transcendence, 450 as rhetorical and hermeneutical device, 449 Incarnation Christianity and logic of, 430

Index  543

mystery of, 484 polemics on problem of the, 470 incastellamento, 264, 266 industry, urban commercial demand and, 235 and occupational quarters, 231, 248n12 infant baptism rejection, 30–31 Innocent II (Pope) letters of Bernard of Clairvaux to, 473 and military alliances, 123 Roger II and, 122 Innocent III (Pope) and Jews —Etsi Iudeos, 322 —on French Jews, 327 —protection of Jews, 12 on law and custom, 29–30 as law-giver, 29 letter to bishop of Tiberias about converts, 291 mention of legal procedure, 346 on non-Christians —relations of Christians with, 279 —rulings on dress of, 289 prohibition of trade in war materials, 12, 284, 285 and Veronica, 444 innovation, intellectual, 7 Institutes (Justinian), 340, 341 “Institutional Foundations of the New Jurisprudence” (Nörr), 338 Institution of Peace (Laon), 243, 255n72 Ioannes Garsias Hispanus, 106 Ioannes Skylitzes, 293, 294 Irenaeus of Lyon, 455n24 Irimbert, 380 Irnerius, 343 Isaac II Angelos, 286 Isaac of Stella, 411 Isagoge (Porphyry) commentary attributed to Abelard, 416–17 importance in twelfth-century philosophy, 404

Isidore of Seville definition of custom, 27–28 definition of philosophy, 512 on sacrament, 434 Islam. See Muslims Islamo-Christian civilization, 107 Italy, 117–31 cities, 11 —communes, 243, 244 —elites in, 239 —government of, 244, 245–46 —town foundations, 232 —urban law, 241 collapse of state power, 119 craft guilds, 237, 238, 252n37 feudalism, 265 German kings and —Henry IV, 132–33, 146 —problem of distance, 135–36 historiography on —geographical division of, 118 —segregated from medieval Europe, 118 Jews in, 234 papal intervention in northern, 123–25 restriction on traffic in weapons and naval supplies, 288 rural society —Panero on, 261 —serfdom, 271 Italy, southern endurance of public institutions and administration in, 119 lack of knowledge on, 118 papal estates in, 130n19 See also Norman monarchy in southern Italy ius commune (European Common Law), 350–51 Ius patronatus, 36 Ivo of Chartres on distinctive dress for Jews, 322 on English as barbarians, 61 Gratian and, 344 mention of Bernard of Chartres, 511 Iwakuma, Yukio, 424n33 on William of Champeaux, 415

544  Index

Jaca (Spain), 232 Jacobi, Klaus, 421n18 Jaeger, Stephen, 14, 19–20 on Christina of Markyate, 368 on Latin culture of friendship, 363 and term ennobling love, 361 Jaksa, 211–12 James of Vitry on acculturation —behavior of Latin Christians in Acre, 303 —of Muslims and Christians, 304–5 on beards —of Baldwin II, 301 —meaning of, 312n80 —of Syrian Christians, 298 Jaume I of Aragon, 93 Jean de Meun, 375 Jelling stone, 173 Jevons, Stanley, 507 Jews expulsion from —England, 315, 325 —France, 315, 327 —Ile de la Cité in Paris, 326 forced conversion, 316 —return to Judaism, 319–20 Herbert of Bosham on, 330 increasing population, 12 integration into European history, 19 Jewry privileges, 315, 316, 321 John of Salisbury on, 330 moneylending —in England, 323–25 —in France, 327 —in Germany, 319 —to town lords, 234 murder, 316 new readings of the Talmud, 33 position within medieval Christian society, 315 preservation and protection, 12, 316, 321 —Augustinian witness theory, 315 —Peter the Chanter on, 327 rejection of Christian doctrines, 315, 328–29

rules of dress in Christian states, 279–80, 284, 322 servitude of, 12, 316, 328 —fueros and concept of Jewish service, 318 as unreasonable, 37 See also Christian-Jewish relations Joachim of Fiore accusation of Peter Lombard, 473 on Pentecost, 482 Joceus of York, 324 Johannes Beleth, 477 Johannes de Vepria, 375, 398n97 John Gratianus, 138. See also Gregory VI (Pope) John of Cantimpré, 380 John of England, 99 John of Salisbury, 499–520 and Christian ambiguity towards Judaism, 329 in household of Thomas Becket, 314 Jaeger on, 14 on Jews, 330, 337n57 letters of, 21 on milita regni, 89 in surveys of twelfth century, 411 on Welsh, 61 See also Metalogicon (John of Salisbury) John of Seville, 101 John of Worcester on Canossa, 153 copy of Marianus’s chronicle, 152 on Paschall II and Henry V, 158 John of Wrocław, 203 John XIX (Pope), 138 John XXII (Pope), 477 Jones, W. R., 63 Jordan, William Chester, 325–26 Jordan of Poznań, 202 Joscelin of Soissons, 411 Judah ben David ha-Levi, 472 Judith, 208 Juliana of Cornillon, 358 Jungmann, Josef, 472 jurés, 243 jurisdiction heterogeneous in some cities, 250n24

Index  545

inhibition of emergent states by papal intervention, 127 principle of separate spiritual and temporal, 54–55 justice in Scandinavia, 180, 183 Justinian, regulations concerning Jews, 316. See also Digest (Justinian) Jutland Bluetooth dynasty in, 173 Danish Law of, 183 Jutta of Sponheim, 357, 359 Kadeloh, death of, 141 replacements of, 163n36 Kaeuper, Richard, 89 Kaiserchronik (anon.), 168n104 Kassiane, 376 Katherine de Sutton, abbess of Barking, 377 Keats-Rohan, K. S. B. on John of Salisbury, 506, 508 on Policratus, 510 Kedar, Benjamin, 296 Keen, Maurice, 76 kingship. See rulers; theology, royal King’s Mirror, The, 178 Klaniczay, Gábor, 8 Kłoczowski, Jerzy, 197 Kneale, William and Martha, 507 Kneepkens, Onno, 420n14 knights moral and social solidarity among, 87 as risk to Jews, 317 ritual dubbing, 83–84 See also chivalry Knowles, D., 56 Koht, Halvdan, 180 Kosto, Adam, 11 Kretzmann, Norman, 407, 408, 420n13 Kuttner, Stephan, 338, 348 labor, cities’ demand for, 235, 236 Lais (Marie de France), 370 Lampert of Hersfeld, 149 landowners as urban elites, 238–39 landscape transformation in England, 57 Landulf, bishop of Ferrara, 123

Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury (Lanfranc of Bec) on appointment of archdeacons, 55 condemnation of Irish mores, 61 on English as barbarians, 61 in Eucharist controversy, 435–37, 457n42, 470 reform-minded, 153 successor of, 157 Languedoc craft organizations in, 236 Roman institutions in, 264 servitude in, 269 Laon as commune, 243 Institution of Peace, 243, 255n72 scholars at, 446 Larrea, Juan José, 261 Las Navas de Tolosa, battle of (1212), 96 Late Antiquity, 1, 5 Lateran Council, Third (1179) church reform, 321 restrictions on trade in war supplies, 289 Lateran Council, Fourth (1215) canon one, 472 canon two, 473 church reform, 321 on Holy Trinity, 472 on Jews, 322 —dress code, 333n24 outlawing of the ordeal, 348 on relations of Christians and nonChristians, 279 restrictions on traffic in arms and timber, 289 rulings as model, 284 Latin as language of the church and scholarship, 59 literature —in England, 48 —in Scandinavia, 187 nuns’ knowledge of, 360, 378, 381, 388 of women in German, 381 Latium, incastellamento in, 264 Latouche, Robert, 81

546  Index

Laurentius Hispanus, 106 law, 12–13, 338–53 contracts, 240 custom and, 27, 29 ecclesiastical in England, 54 giving informed by practice, 29 Gratian on natural law, 344–45 legal studies in Italy, 117 liability, 240 “modern” ideas derived from Middle Ages, 345 on movable property, 240 partnerships, 240 procedural, 345–46 in Scandinavia, 180 in Spain, 105–6 See also canon law; Roman law Lawrence of Durham, 51 Leclercq, Jean, 18, 385 legal practice, 346–50 Légende de Joseph d’Arimathé (Robert de Borron), 443 legend of St. Alexis, 370 Leges Henrici Primi, 51 Le Goff, Jacques, 261 Lemoyne, Jean, 345 Leo IX (Pope) attack on ecclesiastical abuses, 53 and Norman conquerors in Italy, 122 Lêre der minneclichen gotes erkennüsse, Ein, 388 Le Ronceray (convent), 360, 373 letters of Heloise and Abelard —lost love letters, 374, 375 —monastic letters, 374–75 on obligation of travelers to share news, 160n9 quotations of Cicero in, 514 as written public communication, 21 Lewis, C. S., 486 Leyser, Karl, 4, 134 Libera, Alain de, 420n14 Liber ad honorem Augusti (Peter of Eboli) on distinctive appearance based on religion, 292, 292, 293 illustrations of Roger II, 302

Liber de locis sanctis (Peter the Deacon), 443 Liber divinorum operum (Hildegard of Bingen), 386, 480 Liber mahameleth, 105 Liber Pontificalis (William of Malmesbury), 145 Liber sacramentorum (Alciun), 475 libraries in England, 48–49 Libro de Ajedrez (Alfonso X), 282 Life of Becket (Herbert of Bosham), 314–15 Life of Christina of Markyate, 367, 368 Life of Gerald of Aurillac (Odo of Cluny), 82 Life of Louis VI (Suger), 156 Life of St. Catherine (Clemence of Barking), 360 Life of Thomas (Herbert of Bosham), 330 liminality, as symbolic practice in religious life, 355 Lincoln commerce in, 250n23 self-government, 50 literacy of women, 13, 354–402 literature chivalric introduced in Scandinavia, 190 in Iceland, 193n23 —familys sagas, 189–90 —in the vernacular, 187 in Latin —in England, 48 —in Scandinavia, 187 religious in Old Norse translation, 187 Spain and, 102 See also hagiography litigation church courts and matrimonial, 55 rights of litigants in medieval procedure, 345, 346 See also trials liturgical drama, 379 liturgy ban on concelebration by male and female choirs, 380 Heloise and, 375

Index  547

as integrated with devotion and theology, 468–69 Trinity in, 468–98, 483 Lobo of Murcia (Ibn Mardanish), king, 99 logic analytical approach to texts of, 409 Aristotelian, 417 —as foundation of all philosophy, 418 —John of Salisbury and, 509–10 John of Salisbury and, 506 Logica Modernorum (De Rijk), 422n22 logic machine, 507–8 London food markets in city plan, 251n26 self-government of, 50 longue durée, notion of, 260 Lorris, law of, 241 Louis I the Pious (France), 316 Louis VI (France), 84, 88 Louis IX (France), 327 Lübeck foundation of, 233, 249n18 laws of, 241 Luchaire, Achille, 76 Macfarlane, Alan, 266 Magdeburg Jews in, 318 laws of, 241 magistri and documentary attestations about cathedral schools, 104 Magnou-Nortier, Elisabeth, 264 Magnus, count of Wrocław, 207, 208 Mainz craft guilds in, 252n36 Jews in, 318, 320 Maitland, F. W., 52 Making of Europe, The: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change (Bartlett), 7 on expansion of Western Christendom, 172 on Italy, 117, 128n1 Making of the Middle Ages, The (Southern), 5 Malmesbury, library at, 48

man creation as act of godly imprinting, 446 as imprinted by Christ, 445 Mansūr, al-, 97, 99 Marbach monastery, 380 Marbod of Rennes head of cathedral school in Angers, 360 intellectual roots in the eleventh century, 499 work collected by Bury St Edmunds, 48 Marenbon, John, 13, 423n23 Marian miracles collections, 325 Marianus Scotus chronicle of, 145 —copies in England, 152–53 —oral information integrated in, 151–52 mistakes of, 167n90 Marie de France, 13 Eliduc, 371–72 on ennobling sexual love, 371 missing biography, 354 Markyate, priory of, 357 marriage consent as basis for, 35 Lanfranc’s decree on, 55 law of —ecclesiastical, 68n64 —in England, 55–56 Marseille jurisdictionally heterogeneous, 250n24 suppliers of naval materials to Muslims, 287 Martin, Christopher on Abelard’s Dialectica, 409 on logic machine of William of Soissons, 507 Martin, metropolitan of Gniezno, 203 Martín Arias, 106 Martin of León, 105 Martinus, 187 Mary Magdalene Abelard and, 376 Heloise and, 376–77 Matilda (anchoress), 359 Matilda, Countess, 123, 124, 159

548  Index

Matthew, bishop of Kraków compared to Saint Adalbert of Prague, 217 letter to Bernard of Clairvaux, 204, 209–11, 213–14 Matthew Paris, 282, 283, 444 Maurus of Kraków, 203 McCulloh, John, 325 McGarry, Daniel D., 507 McGinn, Bernard, 478 McNamara, Jo Ann, 365 mechanical arts, 448 Mechthild of Hackeborn, 399n115 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 392n32 Medieval Reformation, The (Bolton), 3 Meinhard of Bamberg, 499, 514 Melendus, 106 Melfi, Council of (1059), 122 Melidunenses, 414 Menant, François, 120, 261 mentalités and Annales school, 260–61 mercenaries in feudal warfare, 87 in Iberia, 97 merchant guilds, 237, 238, 253n39, 253n42 merchants in urban elites, 239 Merseburg, Jews in, 318 Metalogicon (John of Salisbury), 509–10 on dedication of mainstream to logic, 418 lists in, 415 presented as a defense of logic, 501–2 summaries on contemporaries, 412 methodology, quantitative, 260–61 Metz movement against bishop in, 256n76 walls of, 248n5 Mews, Constant on Abelard, 375, 474 on Hildegard, 479 on Latin culture of friendship, 363 on lost letters of Heloise and Abelard, 374 on mother of Heloise, 396n85 on writings of Heloise, 377 Miecław, 206–7

Mieszko (son of Bolesław the Bold), 206 Mieszko I (Poland), 199, 202 Ibrahim ibn-Ya’qub on, 201 marriages of, 204 Mieszko II (Poland), 202 castration of, 206 succession to Casimir I, 207 migration, rural, 267 Milan appointment of officials in, 245 guilds in, 238 Henry IV and conflict in, 132–33, 146 miles replacing term vassus, 80 military, in Scandinavia, 183 effect on peasants, 182 European influence on, 180 See also warfare militia regni, 79, 89 Miller, Maureen, 11 Mir Geribert, 98 Mommsen, Theodore, 341 Monachus, patriarch of Jerusalem, 204, 209, 210, 211–12 monasteries. See also religious development —creation of new orders, 56–57 —in England, 56 dual-sex, 378, 379 foundation as resolution of a love triangle, 372 origin of women’s, 379 monastic humanism. See humanism: monastic moneylending by Jews in England, 323–24, 325 in France, 327 in Germany, 319 to town lords, 234 money rents, 267 monks. See religious Montani, 414 Montpellier guilds and defenses of, 252n33 occupational quarters in, 248n12 Mont Saint-Quentin monastery, 139 Moody, Ernest, 420n13

Index  549

Moore, Robert I., 3 dates of twelfth century, 4, 5 on dissenters as innovators, 18–19 First European Revolution defined, 172 on Italy, 117, 128n1 on periodization, 266 on professional bureaucrats, 184 moral philosophy, 418 Mt. Ste. Geneviève John of Salisbury’s return to, 505 John of Salisbury’s studies on, 504 Mulder-Bakker, Anneke, 357, 361 Mundhir (emir of Zaragoza), 98 Mundy, John, 102, 259 Munich, 233, 249n18 Muriel, 360 Muriel of Le Ronceray, 373 music, liturgical, 383 Muslims Christian anxiety about, 279–313 under Christian rule, 282 Christian tributes to rulers, 99 ethnic differences among, 305n7 expulsions from Christian lands, 305–6 governments as buyers of naval materials, 287 revival of military strength, 285 rules of dress in Christian states, 279–80, 284, 296 shipbuilding, 287 in Spain —alliance with Christians, 98 —serving Christians, 96 See also Christian-Muslim relations Muslim world beards in, 297 concerns over identity and differentiation in, 289–90 dress regulations, 290 images of Muslims and Christians in illustrations, 293, 295 similar dress of all people, 296 Mutation féodale, La (Poly and Bournazel), 265 mysticism emergence in women’s texts, 355 erotic spirituality and, 388

Nablus, Council of (1120), 296 Navarre, serfdom in, 269 Nederman, Cary J., 508, 509 neighbors, perception of, 132–70 Neo-Gothicism, 95 Neoplatonism, 417, 418 New Cambridge Medieval History, The (Luscombe and Riley-Smith, eds.), 4 Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 249n15 Newman, Barbara, 13 Nicetas Choniates, 299 Nicholas, David, 12 Nicholas II (Pope) investiture of Robert Guiscard, 120, 122 on superior authority of papacy, 121 Nichols, Aidan, 488n3 nicolaitism, 145, 146 Nirenberg, David, 198 Noble, Tom, 126 nominales, 414 Norbert of Xanten, 477, 478 Norman Conquest Europeanization of England and, 45 historians on, 46 transplanting of rule of feudal warfare to England, 82 Norman kings, perambulations of, 135 Norman monarchy in southern Italy emergence, 120 legitimization, 121–23 —through alliance with the papacy, 122–23 —through marriage, 121, 122 Nörr, Knut Wolfgang, 338, 348 Norway administration of, 181–82 aristocracy in, 184–85 castles in, 181 church in —ecclesiastical organization, 177 —influence of clerical elite culture, 187 establishment of kingdom of, 174 historiography in, 188 military in, 181 National Law, 183 rules of royal succession, 185

550  Index

Norway (cont.) vernacular literary language, 187 William of Sabina on, 190–91 Novellae (Justinian), 340 nuns. See religious Oda, 204 Odo of Cluny, 82 Odylen, 205 Ohly, Friedrich, 451n3 Olav (king of Norway), 171 Olav Haraldsson, King, 189 On Division (Boethius), 417 On Interpretation (Aristotle) commentary attributed to Abelard, 417 —Kretzmann on, 407 importance for twelfth-century philosophy, 404 ontology, Lanfranc and, 436 On Topical Differentiae (Boethius), 409–10 Opuscula sacra (Boethius) commentaries attributed to Thierry of Chartres, 415 commentary by Gilbert of Poitiers, 403, 412 ordeal, 348–50 Orderic Vitalis on acts of chivalry, 84 criticism of Guillaume of Moulins-laMarche, 85–86 on French influence in England, 60 on his treatment in Normandy, 61 on long hair and beards, 300 on raids, 51 on religious improvement after Norman conquest, 53 as source for Strickland, 77–78 Ordo iudiciarius (Tancred of Bologna), 339, 340 Ordo (Canon Benedict), 443 Ordo virtutum (Hildegard), 377, 383 Origins of Medieval Jurisprudence, The (Radding), 342–43 Orvieto, appointment of officials in, 245 otherness, 282 Otto I the Great (Holy Roman emperor), 175, 512–13

Otto II (Holy Roman emperor), 80–81, 82 Otto III (Holy Roman emperor) Gerbert of Aurillac and, 513 meeting with Polish ruler, 8 Owain of Gwynedd, 61 Oxford as center of learning, 49 merchant guild, 253n39 Pact of ‘Umar, 290 Palencia cathedral school, 104 Panero, Francesco, 261 Panofsky, Erwin, 2–3 papacy alliances of —with Normans, 122–23 —in northern Italy, 123–25 contacts —with Poland, 196–97 —with Scandinavia, 177–78 emergence of monarchical papacy, 118 increasing importance of, 11 intervention in local affairs, 146 as law-giver, 29 local appellants to, 126–27 local power before reform popes, 137 opposition to royal appointment of bishops, 155 primacy of, 121 and protection of Jews, 12, 321 and reform, 25, 31, 137–38, 145 spiritual prestige of, 126, 137 Paracelsus, 451n8 Paraclete, Abelard’s devotion to, 475, 477 Paré, G., 2 Paris craft organizations in, 236 Jews in Ile de la Cité, 326 merchant guild in, 236 schools in, 327, 404, 414 —John of Salisbury on, 509 —John of Salisbury’s studies at, 501 walls, 231, 248n6 Parisian synodal canon (1208), 333n24 Parma, papacy and, 125 Parmentier, Richard J., 450n2 Parnormia (Ivo), 333n24

Index  551

“Par tibi Roma nihil” (Hildebert of Lavardin), 47 Parvipontani, 414 Pascasius Radbertus in debate on the nature of the Eucharist, 431–34 text of the nature of the Eucharist, 454n20 Paschal II (Pope), 25 Bernard degli Uberti legate of in Parma, 125 conflict with Henry V, 155, 158 on English as barbarians, 61 and military alliances, 123 William of Malmesbury on, 158 pastoral economy and barbarous sexual customs, 73n112 Paucapalea, 345–46 Paul of Poznań, 203 Peace of God, 76 peasantry dependence of medieval economy on, 262 in England, 265–66 Freedman on, 12 and military in Scandinavia, 182 See also serfs and serfdom Peirce, Charles Sanders, 426 Pelayo, 94 Pelayo Gaytán, 106 Pelayo of León, 104 Pennington, Ken, 345 Pentecost, importance of, 481–82 Pere de Cardona, 106 periodization schemes for the Middle Ages, 1, 263 Perron, Anthony, 220n7 “Peter Abelard and his Contemporaries” (Wilks), 421n15 Peter Alfonsi, 329 Peter Comestor, 49, 384 Peter Damian letters of, 21, 40n23 on stigmata, 448 Peter Lombard on creation of man as act of godly imprinting, 446

in English libraries, 49 on Jewish guilt for the crucifixion, 328 matters unresolved, 25 as source for Herra of Hohenbourg, 384 in surveys of the twelfth century, 411 teacher of Herbert of Bosham, 314 and Trinity, 472, 473 Peter of Blois, 446 Peter of Celle, 509 Peter of Eboli, 292 on distinctive appearance based on religion, 292, 293 Peter of Poitiers, 451n3 Peter of Poland, 205 Petershausen, chronicler of, 358 Petershausen monastery, 379 Peter the Chanter in English libraries, 49 on Eucharist, 459n56 on Jewish guilt for the crucifixion, 328 program of theological reform, 327 on selling war materials to Muslims, 287–88 Peter the Deacon, 443 Peter the Hermit, 333n21 Peter the Venerable on cathedral school of Toledo, 104 on Jewish funding of crusades, 333n21 on Jews, 37 on rejection of infant baptism, 31 Petrus Hispanus, 102, 106 Petrus Mallius, 443 Pezybywój, 205 Philip Augustus (France) and Jews, 325–27 and the Veronica, 443 Philip IV (France), 327 Philippa of Toulouse, 372 philosophy, 403–25 analytical analysis of, 408, 409 anonymous texts, 415–17 Ciceronian/Boethian model, 513–14 debates in, 470–71 difference between Dutch and Danish scholars and French scholars, 421n14 existing material, 411–17

552  Index

philosophy (cont.) John of Salisbury’s conception of, 511 mechanical arts in, 448 Piacenza appeal to Rome, 127 craft guilds in, 252n37 Piast duchies, 199 contestation of power, 202, 204–9, 216, 217–18 network of fortified centers, 201 piety, Rupert of Deutz on, 478 Pisa government of, 245–46 Romano-canonical procedure in, 346 statutes, 346, 353n34 suppliers of naval materials to Muslims, 287, 288 treaty with Saladin, 288 Pistoia, government of, 257n79 Planeta (Diego García de Campos), 105 Platonism, Augustine and, 429 “Platonism—Neoplatonism— Aristotelianism: A Twelfth-Century Metaphysical System and its Sources” (Gersh), 407 plays by female religious authors, 377 podestà, 246 Poitiers elites in, 239 walls of, 248n5 Poland Christianity in —Cistercians, 215 —conversion to, 175, 216 —donations to churches and monasteries, 212, 217 historiography in, 188 as independent kingdom, 172, 175 lordship of dukes, 200–203 serfdom in, 270, 271 Policraticus (John of Salisbury), 330, 502, 505, 510, 514–15 Polish Anonymous Bisson on, 200 on Bolesław III the Wrymouth, 197 on contestation of ducal power, 204, 205–6

on control of fortified centers by dukes, 201 on Miecław, 217 on Polish bishops, 203 on Sieciech, 217 Poly, Jean-Pierre, 265 Poor, Sara, 392n32 Poppo of Kraków, 203 population growth effect on urbanization, 134, 229 increased communication, 134 in Scandinavia, 175, 182 Porphyry, 404 Porretani, 414 portrait-of-Christ-as-an-imprint, 444 Postan, M. M., 260 Powell, James, 333n24 Powell, Morgan, 382 “Pragmatic Semiotics of Culture, The” (Parmentier), 450n2 prélèvement seigneurial, 261 Premonstratensians, 56 presence, notion of real, 437 Prestwich, John, 63 Problemata Heloissae (Heloise), 375 Provence, craft organizations in, 236 Psalter of Christina of Markyate, 356, 360 Pseudo-Dionysius, 418 Pseudo-Isidore, 344 Radding, Charles, 341–43 Radulf, 161n22 Radzim, archbishop of Gniezno, 203 Rainild, 356 Ralph de Diceto, 63 Ramon IV, count of Pallars Jussà, 98 Ramon Berenguer I, Count of Barcelona, 98 Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona, 287 Ramon Borrell, Count of Barcelona, 98 Ramón de Peñafort, 106 ransom in feudal warfare, 85, 88, 286 Ranulf Flambard, 59, 368 Raoul of Cambrai, 80

Index  553

Rashi Herbert of Bosham’s use of, 314, 329 new reading of the Talmud, 33 Ratramnus, 432–34 Ravenna, craft guilds in, 252n37 reales, 414 reality in Augustine, 429 in Plato, 429–30 transcendental, concept of, 449–50 reasonableness invoked in relation to custom, 27 as mark of authenticity or truth, 37 Reconquista, 93 debates about, 94 as medieval historical construct, 95 reform, papal support for local movements of, 124–25. See also church: reform; papacy: and reform Reformation of the Twelfth Century, The (Constable), 3, 18 regalia, meaning of, 168n102 Regensburg, Jews in, 318 Regensburg Songs, 372 regnum, 7 versus sacerdotium, 315 Regularis concordia, on Trinity, 475 Reichenau monastery, 150 Reims, council at (1049), 53 Reinbert of Kołobrzeg, 203 religion embedded in society, 24 improvement after Norman Conquest, 53 John of Salisbury on connection with philosophy, 511 occupational organizations and, 237 renewal as key to human and cultural flourishing, 18 religion, pagan Christianity compared to, 178 cult buildings, 193n13 religious houses begun as hermitages or anchoritic cells, 357 monks —as reformers, 22

—as twelfth-century movers, 18 new, 31–32 —reading of Benedictine rule, 34 nuns’ knowledge of Latin, 360, 378, 381, 388 relations between men and women, 354, 380 See also monasteries reliquary illustrating martyrdom of St. Valerie, 293, 295 “Renaissance and Renewal” (Harvard conference, 1977), 259, 338 book based on, 3–4 Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Benson and Constable), 5–6 compared to The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, 407 content, 3–4 philosophical works available at time, 412 on philosophy, 407 on Spain, 102 Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, The (Haskins) content, 2 Harvard meeting on fiftieth anniversary of, 259 philosophical works available at time, 412 on philosophy, 406 on revival of legal studies in Italy, 117 on revival of letters, 338 Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, The (Paré, Brunet, and Tremblay), 2 Renascence, coinage of, 3 respublica Christiana, 316 “Revival of Jurisprudence, The” (Kuttner), 338 revolution, feudal controversies over, 262 dating of, 75 revolution of the twelfth century as antifeudal, 75–76 Scandinavia and, 177–86 Reynolds, Susan, 28–29, 80 rhetoric, study of, 501 Rhine, walled cities along, 231 Rhineland pogroms (1096), 320–21

554  Index

Richard Bishop John of Salisbury’s studies with, 506 teaching in the manner of Bernard of Chartres, 508, 510 Richard I (England), 324 Richard II (England), 83 Richard of Hexham, 51, 63 Richard of Pontoise, 326 Richard of Springiersbach, 379 Richard of St. Victor, 411, 446 Richer of Reims, 78, 80–81 on appeal for mercenaries, 87 on militia regni, 79 on Rodulf, 82–83 Rigord, 326 Riley-Smith, Jonathan, 320 Rimbert, 174 Ritter, Heinrich, 411 Robb, Fiona, 473 Robert de Borron, 443 Robert de Picheford, 347–48, 349 Robert Grosseteste, 325 Robert Guiscard, 120, 122 Robert of Arbrissel as possible father of Heloise, 396n85 as reformer, 377 rule for Fontevrault, 384 Robert of Chester, 101 Robert of Courson, 328 Robert of Gloucester, 46, 59 Robert of Hereford, 152 Robert of Jumièges, 475 Robert of Melun John of Salisbury student of, 509 Metalogicon on, 503, 504 Robert Pullen, 59 Robl, Werner, 396n85 Rodrigo Díaz of Vivan. See Cid, the (Rodrigo Díaz) Rodrigo González, Count, 99 Rodulf, 82–83 Rodulfus Tortarius, 92n42 Roger (hermit), 368, 377 Roger II of Sicily unification of Sicily and southern Italy, 122 wearing of beard, 301, 302

Roger of Howden, 443, 445 Roger of Sicily, 122 Rolduc monastery, 380 romance, hagiographic, 355, 370–71 Roman law influence of, 350–51 —in Scandinavia, 183 interaction with canon law, 339 Justinian’s corpus of, 340 —dating of manuscripts, 342 rediscovery of, 340–44 in Tancred’s Ordo iudiciarius, 340 teaching of, 343 Romano-canonical procedure, 340 Rome administration of, 245 craft guilds in, 252n37 Rome, Council of (1059), 459n55 Roscelin of Compiègne, 411, 473–74 Rosier-Catach, Irène, 420n14, 423n23 Rouen “Establishments” of, 256n73 walls of, 248n5 Rucquoi, Adeline, 104 Rüdiger, Bishop of Speyer, 319, 320 Rufinus, 37, 38 Rule of Life for a Recluse (Ailred of Rievaulx), 356 rulers perambulations of, 135, 147 power in Piast Poland, 199 in Scandinavia, 183 self-centered perception of the world, 142 Ruodlieb, 499 Rupert of Deutz accused of heresy, 477, 478 on creation of man as act of godly imprinting, 446 debate with Judah ben David ha-Levi, 471–72 in Eucharist controversy, 435 hymn-prayer to the Holy Spirit, 484–85 and images of Christ on the cross, 470 on mechanical arts, 448

Index  555

on Pentecost, 482 scriptural interpretations by, 33 on service of Jews, 323 on seven pillars of wisdom, 386 as source for Herrad, 384 on Trinity, 477–79 visions of, 477–78 Rupertsberg monastery, 380 rural society, change in, 259–78 Rus’ Bernard and conversion of, 213 ruling dynasty in, 201 Sabellius, 474 sacerdotium, 7 John of Salisbury on role of, 330 versus regnum, 315 sagas Icelandic family sagas, 189–90 Old Norse, 188–89 Saint-Denis, music for feast of the Trinity at, 476 Saint-Omer elites in, 238–39 merchant guild in, 237–38 Saint-Victor, exegetical school at, 329 Saladin rebuilding of Egyptian navy, 285–86 sea campaigns against Crusader States, 288–89 treaty with Pisa, 288 Salerno, 120 Sancho Garcés, Count, 98 Sancho II, 99 Sancho VII of Navarre, 97 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 426 Saxo Grammaticus, 188 Saxony Henry IV and, 146–47 knowledge about Henry’s penance in, 149 revolt of princes against Henry IV, 132, 147 Sayers, Dorothy, 485–86, 488 scabini, 242–43 Scandinavian kingdoms, 177–86 church provinces in, 177

compared to East Central Europe, 8 development on Baltic Sea, 172 formation of, 172–77 —traditional view, 172–73 historiography in, 188 inter-Nordic struggles, 174 surveys of history of, 192n6 Schieffer, Rudolf, 160n6 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 261, 452n9 Schofield, Philip, 262 Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe (Southern), 7 scholasticism of twelfth century as historical paradigm, 18 Schönau monastery, 378 schoolmen new scripture readings by, 33–34 reliance on seal metaphor, 442 School of Angers, 360 School of Chartres, 412–13 scholars on, 414 Schrader, Eduard, 341, 342 Scivias (Hildegard of Bingen), 381, 382–83 gender in, 385 on Trinity, 488 script, evolution, 20 scriptoria of women’s monasteries, 380 scriptures Christian knowledge of Jewish scholarship, 315 first vernacular commentary of Song of Songs, 388 glossed books of the Bible, 49 Jewish/Christian contest on meaning of, 12 new readings of, 32–33 use of Hebraica by Herbert of Bosham, 314 seal metaphor, 13, 36, 438–42 Abelard and, 440–41 Alain of Lille on, 439 Bernard of Clairvaux and, 441–42 Gerhoch of Reichersberg on, 438 Hugh Eterianus on, 438–39 seals, 449, 467n109

556  Index

seigneurial regime, 76, 260–62 as methods of administration and extraction, 266 seigneurie banale, 264, 265, 266 Seigneurie et féodalité (Boutruche), 263 seigneurie foncière, 264, 266 semiotic anthropology, 426–67 Seneca, 418 Sentences (Peter Lombard), 384 Sententiae Florianenses (Abelard), 440 Sententiae Petri Abaelardi, 440 serfs and serfdom, 267–72 definition, 268 imposition of, 265, 266, 270–71 rejection of notion of two stages of servitude, 270 towns and, 241 servitude of Jews, 12, 316, 328. See also chamber serfdom fueros and concept of Jewish service, 318 settlement of new lands as mitigation factor of seigneurial regime, 266–67 sexuality ennobling love and, 362 restricted between Christians and nonChristians, 279–80, 296 Shea, Jennifer, 325 Short, Ian, 60 Sicardus of Cremona, 477 Sic et Non (Abelard), 34–35 Sicily, Norman increasing acculturation of Muslims and Christians, 304–5 Muslims in, 282, 290 Sicut Iudeis (bull) addition by Innocent III, 322 Calixtus II and, 321 Sicut Iudeis (Gregory the Great), 315 Sieciech, 207, 208 Siegfried, 151–52, 167n92 Siena, government of, 245, 257n79 Siete partidas, 350 Sigebert of Gembloux, 23 signatures, theory of, 452n8 signification end of, 432

levels of, 451n3 twelfth-century interest in, 427 Silos, 476 Silverstein, Michael, 450n2 Silvester Hispanus, 106 Simon of Płock, 203 simony, 145 definition, 139, 146 ecclesiastical status of simoniacs, 24 Gratian on, 25 Henry III harangue against, 138, 161n22 Peter Lombard on, 25 Singer, Milton, 426 Sintram of Marbach, 380 Sisnándo, Count, 95 Sisnándo Davídiz, 96 slavery, 265 end of in England, 50, 51 shift to serfdom, 264 Snorri Sturluson, 189 social science, Annales school and, 260–61 Soissons, liberties of, 241 Sopena, Pascual Martínez, 261 Southern, Richard, 7 attack on notion of Chartrian humanism, 413 on dates of twelfth century, 4, 5 on England as part of Europe, 70n87 on medieval humanism, 378–79 on monastic humanism, 13 on Norman Conquest, 45 on reform driving creative energies, 18 on term Renaissance, 3 Spade, Paul, 420n13 Spain foreigners studying at cathedral schools, 104 Jews under royal jurisdiction, 317–18 service to princes, 323 knight ransomed for horses and weapons, 286 local prohibitions of sale of weapons to Muslims, 288 Muslims under Christian rule in, 282, 290

Index  557

relevance to Twelfth-century Renaissance, 102 town plantations, 232 See also Aragon; Iberia; translation movement Spain, Muslim, dress in, 296 Speculum ecclesiae (Honorius Augustodunensis), 484 Speculum virginum (Conrad of Hirsau), 381–82 ending with liturgical music, 383 gendered view of religious life, 385 humanism and, 386 Speyer bishop in, 256n76 craft guilds in, 252n36 imperial church in, 320 Jews in, 318, 319, 320 —employing Christians, 332n17 withdrawal of court from, 233–34 Stacey, Robert C. on funding of crusades by Jews, 332n21 on Jewish moneylending in England, 323–24 St. Alban (Mainz), monastery of, 151–52 state formation Arnason and Wittrock on, 7 Christianization and, 8, 11–12 state power, limited by papal intervention, 127 status of being, defining the ontological, 429 Statute of Alsnö (Sweden), 181 Stemma Bulgaricum, 343–44 Stephen, King, 369 Stephen of Autun, 26, 69n69 Stephen of Lexington, 74n120 Stephen of Liège, 475 Stephen of Obazine, stigmata of, 448 Stephen of Tournai, 346 stereotypes, 12, 282, 283 in Ionannes Skylitzes’ Chronicle, 293, 294 in Liber ad honorem Augusti (Peter of Eboli), 292, 293 of Muslims in northern Europe, 300

St. Gorgon, 384 Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury, 53, 145 stigmata, 448 Stock, Brian, 32 Story of My Disasters (Abelard), 412, 415 Strasbourg, craft guilds, 252n36 Strickland, Debra, 293 Strickland, Matthew, 77, 88 St. Trudperter Hohelied, 388 Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science (Haskins), 406 studium, 7 St. Vaast abbey, 238–39 St. Vanne in Verdun, monastery, 150 substantia, term, 458n52 succession to office Piast Dukes and, 202, 204–9 rules of royal succession in Norway, 185 Suger, Abbot on French chivalry and English wealth, 88–89 on Louis VI, 84 on mechanical arts, 448–49 Sulaymān al-Mustain‘īn, 98 Summa Abel (Peter the Chanter), 327 Summa confessorum (Thomas of Chobham), 325 sumptuary legislation, 290, 309n36 Sutri, 135–45 Sverris Saga, 189 Swanson, Robert, 4, 5 Sweden castles in, 181 church in, 177 —influence of clerical elite culture, 187 conflicts between king and aristocracy, 184, 185 establishment of, 174 Latin as literary language, 187 military in, 181 National Law, 183 Swiss Confederation, serfdom in, 270 Sylvester III (Pope), 138, 139 syneisactism, 365, 377 Szücs, Jenö, 8

558  Index

Tabacco, Giovanni, 124 Tacitus, 79 on Germanic bestowal of arms, 84, 85 taifas, 97 Talmud information about, 329 investigation for blasphemy, 327 new readings of, 33 Tancred of Bologna, 339, 340, 345 Tancred of Hauteville illustration in History of Outremer, 297, 299 as knight, 86 sons of, in Italy, 122 William of Malmesbury on, 46 Teaching of the Loving Knowledge of God, A, 388 technology and signs, 427 Tegernsee letters, 372 Templars, 56 Tenxwind of Andernach, 379 Tertullian, 28 testaments, Church jurisdiction over, 54 texts, anonymous, 415–17 questioning of attributions of, 416–17 texts, sanctity of, 32 Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, 509 Theodosius, 316 Theologia (Abelard), 35, 403 Theologia scholarium (Abelard), 440 Theologia “Summi boni” (Abelard), 471, 474 theology, 403–25 versus commentary tradition, 13 debates in, 470–71 of the feminine, 385 integrated with devotion and liturgy, 468–69 monastic, 13, 18 Scivias as dogmatic, 383 Trinity in, 468–98 theology, royal of kings of France, 156 in Scandinavia, 183 Theophilus, 448 Thierry of Chartres commentaries attributed to, 415, 416 Gersh on, 407

Haskins on, 406 Metalogicon on, 504 and School of Chartres, 413 Southern on, 413 in surveys of twelfth century, 411 teacher of Clarembald of Arras, 416 Thietmar of Merseburg on church institutional framework, 202–3 on contestation of ducal power, 204–5 use of fidelity as criterion in comparing dukes, 218 Thomas Becket on benefit of the clergy, 55 Policraticus dedicated to, 502 scholars in household of, 314 Thomas Nevill, 347–48 Thomas of Chobham on princes benefitting from Jewish usury, 325 on service of Jews, 328 Thomas of Monmouth, 325 Thomas of Morigny accusation against Abelard, 462n70 opposed to Abelard’s seal metaphor, 440 Thomson, R. M., 48, 49 Timaeus (Plato), 404, 412 Toch, Michael, 318, 320 Toledo, laws against sale of weapons to Muslims, 288 Topographia Hibernica (Gerald de Barri), 62 Toronto school of English rural studies, 265 torture, judicial, 350 Toubert, Pierre, 260, 264 Toulouse government of, 257n84 trades regulation in, 252n33 walls of, 248n5 Tournai, government of, 243 tournaments, 77, 87 towns content of laws of, 241–42 foundations of, 50, 232–33 See also cities; communes

Index  559

tractates appearing first as letters, 21 Tractatus Garsiae, 102, 105 trade Christian in the Mediterranean world, 285 between Christians and Muslims, 279–80 commercial documents, 240 interregional, 235 Jews and, in Germany, 318–19 in war supplies with Muslims, 279–80, 284–89 —evidence of, 307n19 —restrictions in Lateran Councils, 289 transcendentalism, 450 transformation, 9–10 “Transformation of the Roman World, The” (European Science Foundation), 9–10 translation movement, 103 Benson and Constable on, 102 Haskins on, 101 transubstantiation, 437 travelers Christian to Islamic lands, 282 sharing of news by, 160n9 Tremblay, P., 2 trials regulation by urban law, 241, 242 rights to a public, 345–46 See also litigation Trier, Jews in, 318 Trinity, 468–98 Abelard and —devotion to, 474–75 —use of seal metaphor in explaining, 440 antiphons for, 480 Augustine and, 441 chants for office of the, 476 in dedication of Benedictine communities, 475 devotion to, 13–14, 468–98, 474–75, 483 differences between Paris-educated theologians and monks, 473 fascination with, 487

feast of, 475, 476–77 iconography of, 472 in logic, liturgy and devotion, 483 Rupert of Deutz and, 477–78 terminology about, 473 visions of —of Elisabeth of Schönau, 483 —of Hildegard of Bingen, 483 —Rupert of Deutz, 477–78 Trithemius of Sponheim, 381 Trois Ordres, Les (Duby), 263, 268 Troyes, walls of, 248n5 truth invoked in relation to custom, 25, 27 Truttenhausen, 384 Tuscany, law and legal practice in, 29, 346 Tusculan Disputations (Cicero), 512, 514 Tusculum, counts of, 138 twelfth century, the long length of, 4–5, 17 terms applied to, 2–3 usefulness of term, 500 unction, 183 Unger of Poznań, 203 United Nations, papal intervention as precedent for, 127 unity, cultural, 171 universities, 13 emergence in England, 49 in Scandinavia, 187 in Spain, 103 Unterlinden Schwesternbuch, 399n115 Urban II (Pope) condemnation of lay investiture, 157 military alliances of, 123 urbanization, 12, 229–58 Arnason and Wittrock on, 7 of Celtic realms, 64 and development of commercial capitalism, 234 expansion of existing cities, 229–32, 233 foundation of new towns, 232–33 governmental practice, 242–46 impact on law, 240–42 Jews and, 234 local princes and, 234

560  Index

urbanization (cont.) map, 230 as mitigation factor of seigneurial regime, 267 related to civilized lifestyle, 62 and rise of schools in England, 49–50 social geography, 231–32 transition from seigneurial to economic, 233–40 See also cities Usama b. Munqidh armor of, 286 on Franks, 311n68 Usama ibn Munqidh, 298 Usatges of Barcelona laws against sale of weapons to Muslims, 288 Roman law and, 105 usury. See moneylending by Jews Valenciennes Charter of Peace, 255n71 merchant guild statutes, 237 Valente, Luisa, 420n14 Van Engen, John, 10, 477 Venice administration of, 245 craft guilds in, 252n37 elites in, 239 traffic in naval supplies, 287, 288 Venice, Truce of (1177), 125 Veni Creator Spiritus (hymn), 481 veritas, notion of, 433 Vermudo II of León, 97, 99 vernacular first vernacular commentary of Song of Songs, 388 in historiography, 187–88 literature in Scandinavia, 187, 188 Renaissance and Renewal on culture, 5 women’s decision to write in the, 360, 392n32 Verona, craft guilds in, 252n37 Veronica (vera icon), 442–44 cult of, 444–45 vetula as figuring outer limits of good sense, 37

Vexin defense against William II Rufus, 84, 88 Orderic Vitalis on knights of the, 85 Vic, cathedral school of (Spain), 103–4 Vicentius Hispanus, 106 Victorines, 411 Viking expeditions, 175–76 Villers, monks of, 366 Vincent, bishop of Kraków (Kadłubek), 202, 209 violence against dissenters, 18–19 against Jews, 325, 328 unleashed by First Crusade, 39n13 virginity, 381 Visigothic canons on Jews, 316–17 visions of Elisabeth of Schönau, 483 of Hildegard, 480, 483 of Rupert of Deutz, 477–78 vita apostolica, collaboration of both sexes to, 379 Vollrath, Hanna, 11 Volmar of Disibodenberg, 365, 393n50 Waddell, Chrysogonus, 47 Walter Map, 447 Walter of Mortagne, 411 Waltham Abbey, 48–49 Warburg Institute, 385 warfare changes in England, 51–52 feudal, 78, 80 —mercenaries in, 87 —ransom in, 85, 88 —sparing of enemies, 82 intracultural, 80 Warren, Ann, 357 weapons, European, valued by Muslims, 286 Werner, Karl Ferdinand, 75 Western Christendom. See Christendom, Latin Westminster, council of (1102), 50 Westminster Abbey, 57 wet nurses, Jewish employment of, 321–22

Index  561

White, Stephen, 75 Wibald of Stablo, 513–14 Wibert, Archbishop of Ravenna, 123 Wickham, Chris on development of servitude, 271 on law and legal practice in Tuscany, 29, 346 on role of peasants in economy, 261, 262 Wido, Archbishop of Milan, 124 Wilks, Ian, 421n15 William Adgar, 325 William de Alderie, 52 William I (England) builder of towers of London and Colchester, 57 enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline, 68n60 monastic development under, 56 reform-minded, 153 treatment of Edgar the Atheling, 52 William of Malmesbury on, 52 William II (England) appointment of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 157 builder of Westminster Hall, 57 hanging of William de Alderie, 52 Louis VI and, 84, 88 monastic development under, 56 William of Champeaux, 411, 415, 508 William of Conches availability of works, 412 Haskins on, 406 John of Salisbury student of, 504 Metalogicon on, 504 and School of Chartres, 413 Southern on, 413 in surveys of twelfth century, 411 teaching in the manner of Bernard of Chartres, 508, 510 William of Hirsau, 472 William of Lucca, 411 William of Malmesbury on buildings and architecture, 59 on Cistercians, 57 and continental history, 143–44 copy of Marianus’s chronicle, 152

on English —as barbarians, 61 —drinking habits and battle, 71n91 on founders of new towns, 50 on Franks, 72n101 Gillingham on, 10 on Henry IV, 153 —on deaths of his enemies, 168n99 on new things in England, 46–47 against received usages, 22–23 on religious improvement after Norman conquest, 53 on revival of letters, 49 on slave trade, 50–51 Van Engen on, 10 William of Newburgh on barbarity of Celts, 63 on Jewish usury, 324 William of Norwich, 325 William of Poitiers on barbarous sexual customs in pastoral economy, 73n112 on English as barbarians, 61 on William the Conqueror, 84 William of Sabina, Cardinal, 190–91 William of Soissons, 507–8 William of St. Thierry on God as mystery, 480 on imago, 437 opposed to Abelard’s seal metaphor, 440 on theological debates, 471 William of Tyre on crusader kings with beards, 301 on difficulty of differentiating Muslims from Christians, 291, 297–98 on distinctive appearance based on religion, 292 on European weapons and armor as spoils of war, 286 illustration of Tancred in History of Outremer, 297, 299 on increased acculturation of Muslims and Christians, 305 William Rufus. See William II (England) William the Conqueror. See William I (England)

562  Index

Winchester, synod of (1070), 145 Winchester, withdrawal of the court from, 234 Windsor, council of (1070), 55 Winroth, Anders on Gratian’s Decretum, 37–38 on law, 12–13 Wipert, 164n43 Wipo, 136 Witiza (Benedict of Aniane), 475 Wittrock, Björn, 6–7 Władysław Hermann Sieciech and, 207, 208–9 transfer of power from, 206 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, 360 women emergence of visionary spirituality, 365 integration into history, 19 literacy of, 13, 354–402 religious —and intimate relationships with men, 377 —knowledge of Latin, 359–60 —preaching at Admont, 380

Worms craft guilds in, 252n36 Jews in, 318, 319, 320 Worms, council of (1076), 146, 166n70 writing introduction by church in Scandinavia, 180 written evidence about East Central Europe, 195 Wulf, Maurice de, 406, 411 Wulfric, Saint, 359 Wulfstan, archbishop of York (d. 1023), 55 Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester (d. 1095), 50 Wulstan, David, 376, 377 Würzburg, murder of Jews by crusaders in, 325 Yonec (Marie de France), 370 York, massacres in 1190, 324 Zbigniew, 206, 208 Zwiefalten monastery, 379, 380 Żyrosław of Wrocław, 203

NOTRE DAME CONFERENCES IN MEDIEVAL STUDIES “The long twelfth century whose many transformations are explored in this energetic volume is no longer exclusively that of the lettered and devotional elites that dominate and define most previous accounts of the period. Its subject is a geographically larger and vastly more diversified Europe, a Europe that developed a far greater number of distinctive institutional features and forms of communication than earlier surveys have usually allowed for. Learning, letters, and devotion are certainly here, but they are situated in a dense world of princely courts and cities, competing social orders and interests, men and (at last!) women, and a sharper and harsher recognition of the non-Christian, in which the past and custom confront a sharp and legal-minded present, not always in conflict. The twelfth century, both short and long, has merited and occasioned great scholarship. This audacious volume easily takes pride of place within it.” —edward peters, university of pennsylvania “In European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen have assembled an impressive array of distinguished medievalists to explore geographical regions and a variety of themes to expose the best current thinking about what was and what was not distinctive about the twelfth century. Their collective efforts will be much cited for the innovative and well-argued contributions in this volume.” —paul hyams, cornell university

CONTRIBUTORS: Anna Sapir Abulafia, Sverre Bagge, Dominique Barthélemy, Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, Olivia Remie Constable, Paul Freedman, Rachel Fulton Brown, John Gillingham, Piotr Górecki, C. Stephen Jaeger, Adam J. Kosto, John Marenbon, Maureen C. Miller, Barbara Newman, David Nicholas, Thomas F. X. Noble, John Van Engen, Hanna Vollrath, Anders Winroth. THOMAS F. X. NOBLE IS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME. JOHN VAN ENGEN IS THE ANDREW V. TACKES PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME.

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, IN 46556 undpress.nd.edu

EUROPEAN TRANSFORMATIONS THE LONG TWELFTH CENTURY

EDITED BY

THOMAS F. X. NOBLE AND JOHN VAN ENGEN