History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person [Illustrated] 0231133685, 9780231133685, 9780231508476

Citation preview

History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person

Rachel Fulton Bruce W. Holsinger Editors

Columbia University Press

HISTORY IN THE COMIC MODE

history in the comic mode  medieval communities and the matter of person  E DITE D BY

Rachel Fulton Bruce W. Holsinger

columbia university press new york

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data History in the comic mode : medieval communities and the matter of person / edited by Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-10: 0-231-13368-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-231-13368-5 (cloth) / 978-0-231-50847-6 (e-book) 1. Middle Ages. 2. Civilization, Medieval. 3. Individuality—Europe—History—To 1500. 4. Identity (Psychology)—Europe—History—To 1500. To 1500.

6. Europe—Religious life and customs.

History—To 1500.

5. Community life—Europe—History— 7. Religion and sociology—Europe—

8. Body, Human—Social aspects—Europe—History—To 1500.

9. Soul—Social aspects—Europe—History—To 1500.

10. Europe—Social conditions—

To 1492. I. Fulton, Rachel. II. Holsinger, Bruce W. CB353.H575 2007 940.1—dc22

2006102676

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For our teacher Caroline Walker Bynum



CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person Bruce Holsinger and Rachel Fulton 1

part i. saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons 1. Forgetting Hathumoda: The Afterlife of the First Abbess of Gandersheim Frederick S. Paxton 15 2. “If one member glories . . .”: Community Between the Living and the Saintly Dead in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons for the Feast of All Saints Anna Harrison 25 3. The Pope’s Shrunken Head: The Apocalyptic Visions of Robert of Uzès Raymond Clemens 36 4. Thomas of Cantimpré and Female Sanctity John Coakley 45

viii contents

5. The Changing Fortunes of Angela of Foligno, Daughter, Mother, and Wife Catherine M. Mooney 56 6. “A Particular Light of Understanding”: Margaret of Cortona, the Franciscans, and a Cortonese Cleric Mary Harvey Doyno 68

part ii. community, cultus, and society 7. Fragments of Devotion: Charters and Canons in Aquitaine, 876–1050 Anna Trumbore Jones 81 8. Naming Names: The Nomenclature of Heresy in the Early Eleventh Century Thomas Head 91 9. Economic Development and Demotic Religiosity Richard Landes 101 10. Back-Biting and Self-Promotion: The Work of Merchants of the Cairo Geniza Jessica Goldberg 117 11. John of Salisbury and the Civic Utility of Religion Mark Silk 128

part iii. cognition, composition, and contagion 12. Understanding Contagion: The Contaminating Effect of Another’s Sin Susan R. Kramer 145

contents ix

13. Calvin’s Smile John Jeffries Martin 158 14. Why All the Fuss About the Mind? A Medievalist’s Perspective on Cognitive Theory Anne L. Clark 170 15. Aspects of Blood Piety in a Late-Medieval English Manuscript: London, British Library MS Additional 37049 Marlene Villalobos Hennessy 182 16. Machiavelli, Trauma, and the Scandal of The Prince: An Essay in Speculative History Alison K. Frazier 192

part iv. the matter of person 17. Low Country Ascetics and Oriental Luxury: Jacques de Vitry, Marie of Oignies, and the Treasures of Oignies Sharon Farmer 205 18. Crystalline Wombs and Pregnant Hearts: The Exuberant Bodies of the Katharinenthal Visitation Group Jacqueline E. Jung 223 19. Gluttony and the Anthropology of Pain in Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio Manuele Gragnolati 238 20. “Human Heaven”: John of Rupescissa’s Alchemy at the End of the World Leah DeVun 251

x contents

21. Magic, Bodies, University Masters, and the Invention of the Late Medieval Witch Steven P. Marrone 262 Afterword: History in the Comic Mode Rachel Fulton and Bruce Holsinger 279 Notes

293

Contributors 373 Index

377

ILLUSTRATIONS

15.1 London, British Library, MS Additional 37049, fol. 36v: blood of Christ and monk at prayer before heart. 15.2 London, British Library, MS Additional 37049, fol. 62v: crucifix with blood as nutriment. 15.3 London, British Library, MS Additional 37049, fol. 37r: crucifix with writing on hermit’s heart. 17.1 Hugh of Oignies and his atelier. Phylactery for the finger of Marie of Oignies. 17.2 Hugh of Oignies. Reliquary for the rib of Saint Peter. 17.3 Hugh of Oignies. Double traverse reliquary cross for pieces of the True Cross. 17.4 Hugh of Oignies. Reliquary for the rib of St. Peter (detail). 17.5 Hugh of Oignies. Gospel cover, back side: the Crucifixion 18.1 Workshop of Henry of Constance. Visitation Group from St. Katharinenthal. 18.2 Visitation Group from St. Katharinenthal, detail: chest cavity on figure of Elizabeth. 18.3 Henry Suso, Exemplar: Suso with Divine Wisdom. 18.4 Henry Suso, Exemplar: diagram of the soul’s journey. 18.5 Henry of Constance. Christ and St. John Group. 18.6 Gradual of St. Katharinenthal. Initial with the Virgin Mary– Ecclesia–Woman Clothed with the Sun. 18.7 Visitation Group from St. Katharinenthal, back view.

183 184 187 210 211 212 213 215 224 225 229 230 232 235 236

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W

e would first like to thank our twenty-one contributors for the speed, efficiency, and care with which they wrote, rethought, and revised their essays for this volume. A project this large and complex requires enormous amounts of coordination, and we are deeply grateful to our colleagues for their promptness in meeting our deadlines, their thoughtfulness in responding to our many queries, and their collaborative spirit in helping us put together this book over a period of nearly three years. Steven Justice and Richard Kieckhefer considered our original proposal with great insight and rigor; their many suggestions and criticisms of both the proposal and, with a third anonymous reader, the full manuscript helped us reorganize the book and articulate its purposes much more clearly than we thought we could when we originally conceived it. Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press has been a model of editorial wisdom during this process; we greatly appreciate her sensitivity to our own design for this book, as well as her foresight in insisting on the volume’s ultimate usefulness to others. The editors would also like to thank one another: Bruce thanks Rachel for her editorial brilliance, empathy, and moving vision of this book’s founding and final purpose; Rachel is grateful to Bruce for his critical perceptiveness, collegiality, and generosity, both intellectual and editorial, which made working together on this volume a genuine pleasure. The dedication of the volume reflects our greatest debt, to the teacher who showed us all the importance of community to the matter of person.

HISTORY IN THE COMIC MODE

INTRODUCTION: MEDIEVAL COMMUNITIES AND THE MATTER OF PERSON Bruce Holsinger and Rachel Fulton

S

ome of the most enduring questions inspiring the modern study of medieval European cultures have concerned the relationship between person and community. How did medieval people relate to their communities, and what shaped or determined the nature of this relationship at certain moments and in particular places? To what extent can the self in the Middle Ages be understood as an autonomous individual or subject independent of the pressures of community, institution, and locality—as a “modern” subject, as some might characterize this species of individualism? Conversely, did the pressures of collectivity and commonality in medieval culture most often disallow the emergence of such individualizing forms of self-consciousness? What exactly was an “individual” or a “self ” in the Western Middle Ages—and what, for that matter, was a “community”? Where does the self end and the community begin? It seems that each generation of medievalists has asked these questions on its own terms, and the sheer variety of the answers proposed over the last century and a half would suggest that future generations will continue to pose them. A thumbnail sketch of the relevant historiography and criticism would conventionally begin with Burckhardt and his notorious image of those corporate medieval selves whose unveiling would reveal the triumphant individualism of the Renaissance: “In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious

2 introduction

of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category.” Many of the most influential medievalists of the twentieth century felt themselves compelled to respond, whether directly or not, to Burckhardt’s infantilizing vision of medieval collectivity (and its promotion of what one of our contributors, John Jeffries Martin, has elsewhere called the “myths of Renaissance individualism”). Thus Marc Bloch, in the first volume of Feudal Society, identified as a mark of the intellectual renaissance of the second feudal age “the rehabilitation of the individual,” “the growth of a more introspective habit of mind,” and the emergence of a form of “self-consciousness” unknown to men and women of earlier centuries. Likewise, R. W. Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages attributed an “impulse towards individual expression” and “the emergence of the individual from his communal background” to a massive cultural transition “from epic to romance” discernible in numerous forms of cultural expression and social formation. The 1970s saw an explosive interest in the nature of individual identity in the Middle Ages (and particularly during the so-called twelfth-century renaissance), as historians and literary critics turned to ethical philosophy, contemplative literature, spiritual autobiography, manuals of religious instruction, vernacular romance, and other medieval writings in a large-scale effort to understand the character of premodern individualism over and against the “communal background,” in Southern’s words, from which it emerged. Yet there has never been a clear consensus, let alone unanimity, among scholars of the Middle Ages regarding the relative historical weight to be granted the individual as opposed to the collectivity as the primary organizing category for medieval selfhood. A fascinating counterpoint to this whole discussion, in fact, comes from Jacob Burckhardt’s own generation, indeed from the very European intellectual milieu that gave us Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Here, mirabile dictu, is John Stuart Mill, writing in the third chapter of On Liberty (1859), “Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being,” about what he saw as a steady decline in individualism from the premodern era to his nineteenth-century present: In ancient history, in the Middle Ages, and in a diminishing degree through the long transition from feudality to the present time, the individual was a power in himself; and if he had either great talents or a high social position, he was a considerable power. At present individuals are lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world. The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of the masses.

introduction 3

While Burckhardt envisioned the Renaissance as a cultural awakening from the communal darkness of the Middle Ages, Mill—writing just one year earlier—saw the same epoch as the hallmark of a fall from the heights of a powerful individualism shared by the classical and medieval eras. Imagine if this had become the rallying cry for twentieth-century medievalists invested in the character of premodern individualism rather than a neglected riposte to Burkhardt’s equally sweeping portrait of medieval commonality! Hamlet’s soliloquies might then be understood as a sign of the diminution rather than the triumph of the individual, and medieval studies might not have needed to spend so much time over the last century defending its historical subjects against Burckhardt’s charges of a stifling collectivity. For if we take seriously Mill’s confidence in the individual coherence of the ancient and medieval subject (and why should we take Mill’s historicism any less seriously than Burckhardt’s?), the individual “in the Middle Ages” would appear unassimilable to his or her modern counterpart. The medieval individual for Mill is just that: a medieval individual, not the progenitor of the modern, postEnlightenment subject. Neither Burckhardt’s nor Mill’s trajectory, of course, is particularly subtle, and we are not suggesting that either should be taken as a model for how to write the history of person and community. At the same time, the comic apposition of these two conflicting nineteenth-century timelines of Western individualism has much to teach us about our own habits of periodization as they bear on the relationship between individual identity and communal affiliation: habits that may cause us to cherry-pick the aspects of individualism we cherish as “modern” while neglecting the considerable pressures against individual identity that suffuse the premodern cultures we study. We might recall, for example, the often heated debates in the study of the history of sexuality during the 1980s and early 1990s over the relationship between acts and identities. When John Boswell published in 1980 what he saw as a history of “gay people” in the Middle Ages, the book was blurbed enthusiastically by Michel Foucault, whose own aphoristic pronouncement in The History of Sexuality to the effect that “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” would seem to have rendered such a history incoherent. Yet the false opposition of essentialism and constructivism has yielded in recent years to a more nuanced understanding of the historical dynamic among sexuality, individual identity, and social constructs. Central to this rethinking of the acts/identities divide (by, for example, Carolyn Dinshaw and Judith Bennett) has been a recognition of the role of communities in the shaping of the sexual person, and an unapologetic emphasis on the provisional commonalities forged between the historian and her historical subjects.

4 introduction

Yet it was also in 1980, at the end of a banner decade for the medieval individual, that Caroline Walker Bynum published an essay in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History that dissented from the long-standing conventional wisdom against Burckhardt’s view of the post-medieval origins of individualism (the “revolt of the medievalists,” as Wallace Ferguson had called it in a book cited by Bynum). The question Bynum asked here gave the essay its deliberately provocative title: “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” Bynum’s answer was a polite but firm no, a response reflecting her skepticism regarding the spate of recent scholarship finding in the twelfthcentury renaissance what often seemed to be taken as the origins of the modern individual. Rather, she suggested, the new forms of selfhood and self-consciousness discernible in the twelfth century should be seen in light of the “burgeoning throughout Europe of new forms of communities” during this period, the growth of new ways of thinking about group affiliation, spiritual models, and forms of exemplification. As she put it in this influential essay, “If the religious writing, the religious practice, and the religious orders of the twelfth century are characterized by a new concern for the ‘inner man,’ it is because of a new concern for the group, for types and examples, for the ‘outer man.’ ” Bynum’s challenge to what she saw as a reductive emphasis on individualism at the expense of community has not gone unanswered, either in history or in other medievalist disciplines. David Wallace’s Chaucerian Polity, to take a relatively recent example from literary studies, examines the “associational forms” of late medieval polity in an effort to better understand some of the same forms and models of groupification that were at issue in the twelfth century: “Medieval people, in short, experienced themselves as political subjects through the making and maintenance of associational forms. It may be that a coming to consciousness through such forms proves to be of more compelling interest . . . than an individualism that would define itself by setting itself against every such ‘general category.’ ” It is this “setting against” that of course most distinguishes what the Western tradition understands as the “modern,” post-Enlightenment individual from its premodern counterpart. What Bynum and Wallace both are suggesting is that, while certain types of individualism, subjectivity, self-consciousness, and so on are undeniably perceptible in medieval culture, just as crucial to our understanding of these types must be the processes, institutions, associations, and roles that enable their emergence. Neither scholar advocates a “return to Burckhardt,” as if such a return were desirable or even possible; rather, what they are asking us to do is to recognize and, in some way, perhaps even embrace the collective and worldly constraints on individualism inherent to medieval social formations.

introduction 5

In this spirit, the essays collected here seek to sidestep the pitfalls of individualism by taking up the category of person, and in particular what we are calling the “matter of person” in relation to community: the forms of mediation, materiality, incarnation, representation, and transcendence that go into the making of the medieval human being in all its individual and collective complexity. To put it another way, while our contributors take it as a settled question that identity, individuality, subjectivity, self-consciousness, and so on were categories not unknown to medieval people, they suspend judgment on the usefulness of these terms for a more general comprehension of the period in favor of particularist inquiries into the mutually clarifying categories of person and community. The sorts of questions we wish to pose here, then, are not so much, to take an example we have already discussed, “Did the twelfth century discover the individual?,” but rather, How and why did certain persons (Elisabeth of Schönau, Robert of Uzès) emerge as remarkable or celebrated individuals in the historical record, and why were others (here, most strikingly, Hathumoda of Gandersheim) virtually forgotten, or at least historically effaced in a way their institutional contemporaries were not? What must happen in order for a “person” to become an “individual,” and how is this transformation (if indeed it is one) a function of the scant sources that allow us to perceive it? What are the boundaries of person at particular moments, and how are these boundaries imagined and negotiated in particular circumstances? Individualism and individual identity, our contributors argue, represent only one way of looking at personhood: there are others, many of them not inevitably bound up in fractious questions about subjectivity, modernity, and so on. As we remark in our own contribution to this volume, to write a history of person and community in the “comic mode” is to write with the conviction that “the truth that we seek” about these categories is “unavoidably human, that is, shaped at once by our potential as a species and by the stories that we live and tell, more prosaically, by our bodies, minds, and spirits in interaction with the material, cognitive, social, and spiritual environments in which we dwell.” These environments are inseparable from the making of the persons that inhabit them, persons who are in part constituted by and understood in terms of the communities that grant them their existence, their identities, and, in some cases, their very survival in and as the historical record. Of course, “community,” like “person” or “individual,” is by no means a selfevident or transparent category, whether for modern historians of culture or for medieval cultures themselves. As Miri Rubin has put it, “Community is neither obvious nor natural, its boundaries are loose, and people in the present, as in the past, will use the term to describe and to construct worlds, to persuade, to include and to exclude.” The term can be so vague in its

6 introduction

usage as to be rendered nearly meaningless, and it is not unusual these days to see it employed in formulations of convenience that seem quite bizarre, if not alarming (the “nuclear weapons community,” for example). As we understand it here, the term “community” signals less a discrete or fixed form of human relationship than a multivalent collectivity of persons, whether the “imagined community” of the (pre-national) medieval Church or the brethren of a single rural abbey. Community “encompasses much more than collective action or pure volunteerism,” in Katherine French’s phrase, and yet communities themselves can possess world-making capacities that are often astonishing in their creativity and endurance. Sometimes, in fact, as Susan Kramer demonstrates in her contribution to this volume, medieval communities may become spiritually threatening for even their most trusted members, spreading the contagion of sin through the social body like a disease through a village. Communities may also serve as focal points for persons devoted to specific objects or texts, as exemplified by the many “textual communities” (to take Brian Stock’s influential phrase) organized around specific understandings of the written word shared by particular medieval groups. If, as Bynum has suggested, we human beings are ourselves “shapes with stories, always changing but also always carrying traces of what we were before” (see the afterword to this volume), these stories of person will in turn be shaped by the communities most invested in preserving and interpreting the traces they leave behind.

*** This volume, then, presents a pointillist history of person and community in the Middle Ages. All of us are writing primarily as historians of religion, art, literature, culture, or society, and our approach is through the particular and the singular rather than through the thematic or theoretical as such. And yet, such is the nature of the particular stories that we would tell about community and person that certain overarching narratives and themes necessarily emerge in these pages. Taken together, our fragments—about Elisabeth of Schönau’s visionary experience or Dante’s understanding of pain or devotional images of Christ’s Five Wounds or Thomas of Cantimpré’s ideas about female sanctity—themselves begin to tell a story of continuity and change in the development of medieval ideas about person, about the place of person in community, and about the role of the community in supporting and constraining such continuity and change. The twenty-one essays that follow are organized according to four broad themes. The six collected in part I, “Saints, Visionaries, and the Making of

introduction 7

Holy Persons,” engage most directly with the nature of the medieval relationship between individual and community, though here the individuals in question are by any measure remarkable for their distinctiveness from their surrounding communities. We open with the story of a woman who, by every standard of her day, should have become a saint but did not—though not, it should be noted, for lack of effort on her biographer’s part. What, Fred Paxton asks in his examination of Hathumoda of Gandersheim’s story, does it take to transform a person into a saint other than the loving memory of a biographer? Significantly, it is precisely failures such as these that make clear the importance not only of fact but also of fortune in the recognition and prestige that communities grant to the individuals who have lived and died in their midst. More generally, what did it mean to belong to the community of saints, that is, to the community of Christians? This is the question Anna Harrison takes up by way of a reading of Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons for the Feast of All Saints. Bernard’s answer, in short: suffering, not because the saints themselves were special in their suffering, but rather because they suffered by virtue of being human persons; sinfulness, because the saints themselves were sinners, worse even than most other Christians; and desire to enjoy the society and glory of the community of the saints as an exemplary model of transcendence. Yet the worldly religious communities of Western Europe, Ray Clemens demonstrates, could also engage in internal critiques of their own and others’ practices, often aided by the kind of densely metaphorical language found in the highly idiosyncratic writings of Robert of Uzès. Like Bernard of Clairvaux, Robert was a reformer, a thirteenth-century Dominican whose visionary energies were directed largely at addressing the failings of the contemporary papacy. In the cases of both these writers, however, the language of sanctity is inseparable from the language of community, and community in turn is unthinkable without the transformative metamorphosis of the human person into the saint. Intentionally or not on the part of their formulators, such relationships almost inevitably raise problems of priority, whether, as with Robert, of cultivating the institution at the expense of the failed individual, or, as with Thomas of Cantimpré, the subject of John Coakley’s chapter, of acknowledging the powers peculiar to the sanctity of women without suggesting that they might overlap in any way with the activities specific to priests. The tense relationships between women, their spiritual mentors, biographers, and public (i.e., clerical and lay communities) are the subject of the final three essays in part I. Coakley reads the hagiographical works of Thomas of Cantimpré for what they can tell us about the potentialities and limits that Thomas would credit to and place on the example of spiritually active women. Catherine Mooney reads the changing picture of the persona of

8 introduction

Angela of Foligno as daughter, mother, and wife through the tellings and retellings of Angela’s story from the fragments assembled in her Liber through its various medieval, early modern, and modern manuscripts, editions, and translations. Ironically, whereas Hathumoda has been almost completely forgotten by historians and Angela has become something of a cause célèbre, we in fact know more (or, at least, would seem to) about Hathumoda than we can ever know about Angela, including her name. In contrast, as Mary Harvey Doyno shows, we know almost too much about Margaret, who was (and is) the patron saint of the town of Cortona, despite the fact that she was neither an abbess, like Hathumoda, nor an ascetic, like Marie of Oignies, nor even, like Angela, a wife. Rather, Margaret of Cortona, the unmarried mother of an illegitimate son, had lived for nine years as a nobleman’s concubine, coming to Cortona only after her lover’s death had left her without support and protection. Doyno concentrates on Margaret’s efforts first to affiliate herself with the Franciscan community of Cortona and then to distance herself therefrom by moving to a new residence under the spiritual direction of the secular clergy of San Basilio high atop a hill of the city. At stake was not only Margaret’s status as a spiritual leader of her community, but also the question of Margaret’s transition from her former life of sin. Margaret, it seems, was both too pretty and too outspoken in her devotions to make it easy for the Franciscans to accept her as one of their own. Part II of our volume, “Community, Cultus, and Society,” opens with similar scenes of outspoken devotion, bound up in this case with complex claims for personal identity. As Anna Trumbore Jones shows, individuals and families made great efforts to ensure the relative spiritual status of the religious communities to which they made their bequests: if even the holiest of persons, like Hathumoda, could quickly be forgotten by the communities that they had served, how were donors to such communities to ensure that they themselves were not forgotten in the prayers of these communities, not to mention that the prayers would have the intended effect (the salvation of the donors’ souls)? Perhaps monks did not always provide the best insurance; canons, or so many of the donors in tenth-century Aquitaine seem to have assumed, might do the work just as well. The intimacy here between the performative reality of personal names and the lived reality of communal change can also be discerned in medieval understandings and practices of heresy. Thomas Head suggests that the naming of heretical sects by the Church, far from a simple practice of identification, became a powerfully ideological instrument for bishops and other ecclesiastical officials. “Naming names” in this way buttressed the Church’s own institutional self-confidence while affording its bureaucrats a particularly blunt way of consigning its perceived enemies to a past that was securely closed off from

introduction 9

the present. There simply are “no Manichees in Châlons,” Wazo of Liège confidently avowed. But what if the very model of society on which such communal foundations were built was at stake? Richard Landes argues that just such a rupture in thinking and, therefore, in economic as well as political and intellectual activity occurred over the course of the eleventh century. Commoners and vowed religious alike began to read the promises of the Scriptures to their communities and to themselves from a “demotic” rather than a hierarchical perspective, a reading that both made possible and was stimulated by the enthusiasm surrounding the Peace of God. Jessica Goldberg’s article enables us to see a moment in this economic transformation from outside the boundaries of Europe, in the patterns of gossip and “back-biting” about their rivals and fellows in the letters of the Jewish merchant-community of Fustat, commercial sister-city of Cairo. Like reputations for sanctity and attention to duty among ninth- and tenth-century monks, nuns, canons, and canonesses, so reputations for effort, knowledge, honor, and dignity among the eleventh-century merchants depended as much upon the report of the community as upon the individual persons involved, arguably because it was only in this way that the prayers and other services of the religious, like the services of the merchants to each other and to their business, could be assessed. Whether such desire had a civic, as opposed to a strictly spiritual, utility is the question that Mark Silk takes up in his reading of John of Salisbury’s Policraticus. Of particular interest to Silk here is John’s attempt to distinguish between the utility of the cultus exterior for maintaining the integrity of the community as a whole and that of the cultus interior for maintaining the integrity of the soul. The third part of this volume, “Cognition, Composition, and Contagion,” begins by taking up a particularly alarming threat to the integrity of the community: sin, and the twelfth-century conviction that sin might spread from person to person throughout a community like an infectious disease. Susan Kramer demonstrates how this metaphor of contamination is best understood in the context of medieval medical theory, whereby the health of the physical person, and so likewise the health of the community, could be conceptualized as a problem of balance between a body’s humors and the elemental or social environment. This balance could be disrupted by an intemperate will as well as by an improper mixing of the physical elements, a view that posits the human person as always and everywhere a kind of existential threat to the community. In a very different vein, John Martin shows how Calvin’s rejection of the identity of the saints with their bodily relics may be best understood in the context of Andreas Vesalius’s emphasis on the composite structure of the body. Fragments were no longer enough:

10 introduction

individual bodies, like individual texts, were to be viewed with respect to their structure as well as in context; wholeness was to be sought for not in “the shared experience of those who suffer but rather in the shared faith of those who can apprehend the reality of God through the study of God’s Word.” Anne Clark takes up the question of balance from a slightly different perspective. Drawing on the Benedictine nun Elisabeth of Schönau’s account of her visions, Clark argues that current theorizing about embodiedness and cognition as applied to questions of the formation and transmission of religious experience fails to account for the full complexity of religious belief and practice. Marlene Hennessy shows how the Carthusian use of such frightening images as bleeding trees and the name of Jesus become bloody flesh enabled the very mnemonic fixation of devotion to the Incarnation that certain current cognitive theories of religiosity (such as those examined by Clark) would associate primarily with ritual; texts become visions in a Carthusian miscellany just as the bodies of the faithful may become texts inscribed by the practices of their devotion. Alison Frazier would challenge us to recognize body as instrumental in effecting not only changes in the way in which persons view their relationship to the physical world, but also in the way in which we theorize about community and society, by asking us to read Niccolò Macchiavelli’s On Principalities through the lens of his torture as a prisoner of the Medici. However much such traumatic experiences would encourage us to try, we cannot imagine ourselves as fully human without our bodies. The question is whether we are our bodies only in their wholeness (and healthiness) or also in their parts. The book’s fourth and final part, “The Matter of Person,” takes up the issue of materiality and its bearing on the making of particular kinds or “styles” of person: the ascetic, the virgin, the sinner, the martyr, the witch. Sharon Farmer pushes the question of the knowability of the past from the visionary to the material by examining the context of the gemstones used by the goldsmith Hugh of Oignies to ornament the reliquaries containing bodily fragments of his community’s heroine, Marie. As Farmer argues, these stones point not only to the purity and incorruptibility of the resurrected body Marie’s asceticism was intended to achieve, but also eastward, to the sources of the gemstones in “India.” If sin, as Susan Kramer argues in her chapter, might spread like a disease, so the gemstones of paradise—the bodies of the saints, the jewels of the East—offered promise of a cure, not only for the individual person, but also for the Christian community as a whole. Such healing had, of course, already at least once in human history been realized, or so the crystalline wombs of Mary and Elizabeth in the thirteenthcentury sculpture from the Dominican convent of Katharinenthal discussed

introduction 11

by Jacqueline Jung suggest. Here once again visibility and materiality converge in an image of the body made transparent to the effects of the soul. Dante Alighieri is, of course, one of the great masters of such imagery, as Manuele Gragnolati demonstrates in his reading of the personalized relationship in the Divine Comedy among gluttony, embodiment, and the purgatorial experience and interpretation of both physical and spiritual pain. Medical theory, material metaphors for spiritual transformations, experiences of visions, and hopes for the incorruptibility of the body at the end of time come together in Leah DeVun’s reading of John of Rupescissa’s theories of the quintessence and the postapocalyptic millennium in which the community of martyrs at the last battle would rise again to reign corporeally with Christ for one thousand years, “until the advent of Gog near the end of the world.” Finally, Steven Marrone takes up the problem of how practices hitherto taken as real only in texts (the night-flights and sabbaths of witches) came to be argued for—and prosecuted—as real in fact on the basis of an elite (i.e., university-educated) insistence on the privileging of the material in explanations of material and spiritual change. If witches or ritual magicians thought of themselves as cavorting with demons, “was it not then likely that they actually did so, and in the body, as would ultimately be required for effective action, not merely in the mind?” The final chapter in the volume, “History in the Comic Mode,” takes up some of these questions from the perspective of the authors themselves, as a manifesto and tribute to the way in which communities of scholars come together under the influence of a particular teacher—in our case, Caroline Walker Bynum. Ironically, as much as we, as modern scholars, would celebrate the matter of person in the lives of the medieval people whom we have made the subjects of our professional study, so contemporary conventions of intellectual formation would encourage us to efface the effects of particular individuals—as opposed to books or theories—on our own thinking. This we have refused to do. If we, the contributors to this volume, have had the courage to write in defense of the medieval past in the way that we have, it is, for all of us, in large part thanks to the example of our teacher. Here in this final section, we, the editors of this book, attempt to explain why.

part i  saints, visionaries, and  the making of holy persons

 FORGETTING HATHUMODA the afterlife of the first abbess of gandersheim Frederick S. Paxton

H

athumoda, first abbess of Gandersheim, could have had a glorious afterlife. Agius, a monk-priest of the nearby abbey of Corvey—her confidant and perhaps a blood relative—was with her when she died. Afterward, so he tells us, Agius consoled her bereaved sisters at Gandersheim, speaking movingly of Hathumoda’s long and painful passing and the significance of her life and death. Over the next two years he transformed those conversations into a consolatory dialogue in verse. At the same time, so that they, who could “no longer hold her or gaze at her in the flesh,” might at least “possess a kind of image of her in life and think to have her in her acts and deeds,” he composed a prose narrative that has been called “one of the most beautiful saints’ lives of the Middle Ages.” Hathumoda died and was buried at Brunshausen, a family foundation of Benedictine monks associated with the monastery of Fulda, where she and her community lived while a cloister and church were being constructed for them nearby at Gandersheim. The bones of her father, Count Liudolf of Saxony, rested there too. Her remains might have been included in the ceremonial “translation” of relics from Brunshausen to Gandersheim for the consecration of the abbey church in 881, if only secondarily to the church’s major relics. But even a separate translatio would have bathed her in some of the light of sanctity associated with such events at that time and place. Moreover, for the next thirty-eight years, Hathumoda’s younger sisters, Gerberga and Christina, along with their mother, Oda, tended her grave in the great church. Thus, within a few years of Hathumoda’s death, Agius had provided a literary record of her sanctity and a liturgical community of

16 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

aristocratic women, established and led by her own family, had dedicated themselves to her memory. And that is not all, for both Hathumoda’s family and her institution had brilliant futures before them. When her oldest brother, Brun, died in 880, nobly fighting the Danes, their brother Otto succeeded to the title of duke of Saxony. Otto’s son Henry became king of the East Franks in 919, the year his aunt Christina died at Gandersheim. Henry’s son, Otto “the Great,” was crowned emperor in 962, a title that passed to both his son Otto II and his grandson Otto III. Henry’s wife, Mathilda, who died in 969, was recognized as a saint almost immediately after her death; and Otto’s wife, Adelheid (d. 999), was canonized in the eleventh century. Moreover, as a Familienkloster of the Ottonian house and its Liudolfing ancestors, Gandersheim became one of the central institutions of the German empire. In the second half of the tenth century, its school produced the famous poet, dramatist, and historian Hrotsvit, the most accomplished writer of the age; and its abbesses minted coins, held court, supplied troops to the emperor, and had a vote in the imperial diet. Hathumoda’s successors at Gandersheim and her royal relatives had good reasons to invest in her memory, and in the memory of her sanctity. In spite of all this, though, Hathumoda did not become a saint. She had no feast day. No prayers to her survive. Her name appears in no liturgical calendars or litanies; no altar was ever dedicated to her; and no miracles are associated with her tomb. Most of what we know of her comes from Agius, and we would not know even that if Andreas Lang, abbot of St. Michael’s on the Mountain in Bamberg (1483–1502), had not copied the Vita and Dialogus from an earlier manuscript, which is now lost. No others survive. The preservation of the second most important source on her, a poem on the origins of Gandersheim by Hrotsvit, is just as fortuitous. In 1531 another monk, Heinrich Bodo, borrowed a manuscript from Gandersheim that looked, in his words, as if it “had been gathering dust for over six centuries.” After copying Hrotsvit’s “On the Origins of Gandersheim Abbey,” Bodo apparently never returned the manuscript, and it too disappeared. Hrotsvit must have read Agius. Nevertheless, Hathumoda plays only a minor role in her story of Gandersheim’s beginnings and the poet gives no indication that she, or anyone else, regarded her as a saint. Furthermore, while the Gandersheim necrology preserved Hathumoda’s memory until the suppression of the house in 1810, and her name appears here and there in sources from a few nearby foundations, she seems to have been otherwise forgotten. Before the death of Henry I, her name was added to the Confraternity Book of St. Gall, along with those of the rest of her family. Less than a century later, it had disappeared from the memorials of the Otton-

forgetting hathumoda 17

ians. The accession of Hathumoda’s nephew to the German throne and her grandnephew Otto’s coronation as emperor, along with the fame of Corvey and Gandersheim (not to mention the products of their scriptoria), could have catapulted her into the ranks of medieval Christian saints. In spite of Agius’s best efforts, though, and even among her father’s descendants and her own spiritual kin, there apparently became little room for, or any point in, promoting the memory of the first abbess of Gandersheim. What happened? Why did Hathumoda’s familial and spiritual descendants all but forget her? Why did the combined effect of Agius’ claims for her sanctity and the stunning careers of her family and foundation fail to guarantee that she would live on, if not as one’s of God’s chosen, dispensing his power to comfort the living and the dead, then at least as an important figure in Ottonian family history? My answers to these questions will be provisional, given the nature of the evidence, but thanks to the antiquarian interests of a couple of early modern monks, it is possible to track Hathumoda’s afterlife, in the memories of her descendants, for more than a century after her death. Memory and sanctity are fluid. Because they are artifacts of imagination as much as of social life, they are peculiarly open to reinterpretation and reconstruction, especially at times of crisis or of familial, institutional, and social change. As such they can be crafted and recrafted to fit the changing needs of those who do the remembering. In Hathumoda’s case, the key to how she was represented and remembered, and why, ultimately, she was virtually forgotten, appears to lie in the complex interplay between her two families—spiritual and sanguineal—as their fortunes rose and fell over the course of the tenth century. From its inception Gandersheim was part of a web of interests that grew and thickened over time. It owed its existence to the Liudolfings, of course, and the family expected that debt to be paid. But, as a religious institution, it was also drawn into the orbit of local monastic familiae, like the monks of Corvey and of Fulda, who both had long-standing ties to the Liudolfings. Then there were the bishops of Hildesheim, in whose diocese Gandersheim lay. Moreover, as the family of the founders grew and changed, so did its relationship to the house. For the male descendants of Liudolf not only acquired more and more power, they also acquired wives, who brought new kin into the family and produced new bloodlines. They also established new Familienklöster, putting pressure on older foundations to keep up with the times, and presenting new candidates for sanctity. Still, things could have gone either way. Agius’s claims for Hathumoda could have been used to support any number of these competing interests, and sometimes they were. But somehow they did not survive the process. We will return to all of these

18 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

issues, but for the moment let’s look more closely at what Agius had to say about the sanctity of the first abbess of Gandersheim.

444 Even as a child, according to Agius, Hathumoda had refused the wealth and comfort due someone from a family as illustrious as her own. At six, she took the veil at Herford, a Benedictine convent that may have been presided over by her maternal grandmother, Adala, and was closely affiliated with Corvey. At the age of twelve, Hathumoda’s parents made her the spiritual mother of a community she would lead for the next twenty-two years. As abbess, Hathumoda made her rule strict. No one ate with relatives or guests, or even spoke to them without permission. They could not go out (as many cloistered women did) to visit family or the convent’s properties. They slept together, prayed together at the canonical hours, and left together to do whatever work had to be done. They were not allowed to have servants or private cells outside the cloister. They were so separated from men that not even priests entered their cloister unless illness required it. Just as St. Benedict had counseled, Abbess Hathumoda sought to be loved rather than feared, teaching by example rather than through discipline and compulsion. Just like St. Martin of Tours, she was never angry or upset, and never laughed indecorously or too much. She was also a diligent student and teacher of scripture, whose caution, good sense, and intellect were almost second to none. In the months before her death, many of the girls and women were sick. At that point in his narrative, Agius protests that he cannot describe “with how much care she stood by them, with how much solicitude she hurried from one bed to another, and what wonderful and diverse things she tried to alleviate their bodily suffering”; it was, he says, as if this “holy woman, loved by God,” sensed that her own time on earth was short. The other women may have sensed it too. Several of the older ones dreamed of the church bell falling, others that the reliquary of saints Anastasius and Innocent had collapsed and disintegrated. Hathumoda herself dreamed that she and her sisters were bound to the spokes of an enormous millwheel. Although she was thrown onto the riverbank instead of into the water rushing beneath it, she awoke trembling all over. Another time it seemed that she was taken up into the air and could see all the buildings of the monastery with their roofs off. The sight of a large cleft in the earth inside the church troubled her, but she was calmed when a voice told her that it was to be her future home. She then heard a multitude chanting a psalm,

forgetting hathumoda 19

and when they came to the verse “This is my rest for ever and ever, here I will live, because I chose it,” she awoke, with the words still in her mouth. Hathumoda eventually fell ill herself. But even then she kept looking after the others, until finally, collapsing into bed, she experienced another dream vision. She saw a large field of flowers, which she took to be the youngest of her virgins. While she was admiring their beauty, a fire broke out, threatening to consume them. She called out to St. Martin for aid. Without delay the saint appeared, stilling the flames and saving the girls. Later, as Agius specifically attests, Martin visited her while she was awake. No one else could see him, but they watched her eyes follow the saint’s movements around the room. As the fevers came and went, Hathumoda had more and more visions, difficult for those present to understand, but clearly of future events, even of Judgment Day. Many were joyous, but not all, and sometimes she trembled with fear and wondered whether even the saints could help her. As the end drew near, she commended herself into Agius’ hands, and to all the saints whose relics rested in his monastery. She also prophesied (rightly, as he would later learn) that Agius’ brothers at Corvey would be upset with him for being away so long that day. The bishop of Hildesheim performed the last rites. The dying woman held a crucifix to her lips while doing her best to murmur a few words of the psalms being chanted around her. During the penultimate verse of psalm 40, “thou hast received me because of my innocence, and established me in thy presence for ever,” she breathed her last. Agius reports with wonder that, when Hathumoda’s body was placed in the room where it was to be washed and prepared for burial, her eyes opened and her lips moved as if to speak to the attendants. During the public funeral, Hathumoda’s mother, Oda, kept her composure, but she wept bitterly when alone. But there was no reason to weep, wrote Agius, since Hathumoda lived on, in spirit, in her holy life, in her irrepressible conversation, in her exceptional habits, and in her perfect example. Nor ought the women to worry about the length and difficulty of her death, for that only purged whatever stain of sin might have been upon her, so that now she could be counted among the 144,000 elect before the throne of God. So the Life. In the Dialogue, Agius addresses the grief of Hathumoda’s sisters at Gandersheim at more length and intensifies his claims for Hathumoda’s sanctity. His consolations, in fact, depend on them. At the very outset of the poem, he refers to her as sancta abbatissa. When the women complain that she died too young, Agius argues first that everyone, even the saints, must die, cataloguing a long list of biblical figures, male and female, from both the Old and New Testaments, as examples. Then he asserts that, rather than dying prematurely, Hathumoda was at the perfect age. Just

20 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

like Christ, she had completed her thirty-third year of life—the age that everyone will be in paradise. The women respond that they still cannot overcome their sense of loss and abandonment. Do not worry, writes Agius, Hathumoda’s mother, Oda, is still alive, and her sister is married to the king, so they have earthly support. Most importantly, though, Hathumoda has joined God in heaven, from where she will watch over them. This finally convinces the women to end their grieving. They turn to Hathumoda for help, praying, “You have already rejoiced over the conquered enemy with the Lord. . . . Aid us, dear one, through your worthy merits,” and then bid Agius adieu. In his closing response, Agius promises first to pray for them and then urges them to pray for all of the family’s dead, in particular Liudolf, the father of them all. Agius tells them of a dream Liudolf had before he died, attesting the good Hathumoda’s merits had brought him. After asking the women to pray for himself, too, Agius narrates a final dream vision, in which Hathumoda came to him and authorized the transfer of her rule to her sister Gerberga. The poem ends with an exhortation to Gerberga to model herself in every way after Hathumoda, and to the rest to accept Gerberga as their new abbess.

444 Agius was explicit about why he wrote these two texts. The Life was meant to create a memorable representation of Hathumoda in words, so that the sisters at Gandersheim would not feel that they had lost her completely, and the Dialogue was to console them in their grief over her passing. But he also had a number of implicit purposes. He certainly meant to help the women obtain a charter of immunity from the king of the East Franks. The references he makes, in both texts, to his expectation that it will happen soon suggest as much. He also clearly meant to bind Gandersheim to the Benedictine movement and the monastic family of Corvey. The imago of Hathumoda that he wanted to impress upon the community was of a model Benedictine abbess. Agius, and presumably his brothers and superiors at Corvey, did not want Gandersheim to go the way of other communities of sanctimoniales, who were canonesses rather than nuns. Agius may also have hoped to establish a literary tradition linking Corvey to Corbie, its motherhouse in Picardy, for he modeled his texts on an earlier work by Paschasius Radbertus, the Life of St. Adalhard, abbot of Corbie and cofounder of Corvey, to which Radbertus added a poetic dialogue in which allegorical representations of the two monasteries share their grief and try to console one another at his passing. Success at establishing Hathumoda’s sanctity

forgetting hathumoda 21

would further all his purposes, explicit or implicit. Because of the quality of her life on earth, and the timing and manner of her death, Hathumoda was among the blessed in paradise, from where she would intercede forever with God, on behalf of her family and the women of Gandersheim and even perhaps on behalf of Agius’s literary reputation. What was at stake here? The future of the community, first of all, at least in the eyes of Agius. Abbeys nearly always tried to gain as much independence and as much protection as possible. A royal charter would put the house directly under the protection of the king, freeing it from outside interference by local lords, and by the bishops of Hildesheim, who, like most bishops, regarded all religious institutions in their diocese as being under their immediate jurisdiction. As to Gandersheim’s religious character, reformed Benedictines like the monks of Corvey wanted cloistered women to be nuns, who had broken all ties to the outside world. The Saxon aristocratic families, on the other hand, wanted them to be canonesses, whose lack of permanent vows meant that they could participate fully in family affairs, often leaving the community to be married and returning as widows, taking their property with them. Finally, although Agius probably did not realize it, the quality of sanctity itself, in particular female sanctity, was also at stake, at least in the Saxon lands. As Agius portrays her, Hathumoda is a learned, independent abbess who adhered strictly to the Benedictine Rule and lived a life of prayer and service. Her sanctity is evident in the visions granted her by God during her long demise, and the fact that she remained, after her death, a living presence, appearing in dreams and interceding for the living and the dead. In line with a tendency that began at Corvey and Herford, however, she is not presented as a miracle worker. To what extent did Agius achieve his purposes? Although he failed to create a literary tradition—the pairing of a prose life with a formal poem of consolation had no further literary progeny—he certainly created a vivid monument to Hathumoda’s life and death. He may well have also achieved his consolatory object, by successfully redirecting the grief of her sisters at Gandersheim toward the hope that Hathumoda might intercede for them before the very throne of God. It is also very likely that he helped the house obtain a charter from the king, for shortly after Agius completed writing, Louis the Younger granted Gandersheim independence from all secular and spiritual authority, and guaranteed the position of abbess to women of the family, so long as a suitable candidate presented herself. Agius did not, however, succeed in winning the house to Corvey or the Benedictine movement. The family politics of the Liudolfings and Ottonians saw to it that the women would be canonesses, a condition that had become permanent long

22 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

before 973, by which time Abbess Gerberga II had turned another community in Gandersheim, St. Mary’s, into a convent for Benedictine nuns. Finally, as we have seen, Agius did not succeed in making Hathumoda a saint. There are a number of possible reasons for this. The first has to do with, in Julia Smith’s felicitous phrasing, “the problem of female sanctity” in post-Carolingian Saxony. Agius’s decision to solve the problem the way he did, by basing Hathumoda’s sanctity on the quality of her life, the visions she experienced before her death, and his vision of her afterward, and not on miracles, may in fact have undermined his case. The hagiographical tradition that miracles were not necessary to sanctity spread from Saxony to the Ottonian realm in general in the second half of the tenth century, where it merged with similar notions stemming from Cluny. But however successful it was in literary terms, it was not very productive of cult activity. In the long run, devotion to saints depends on miracles for its lifeblood. Without miracles to remind the living of Hathumoda’s continued presence and power of a saint, she was more likely to be forgotten than celebrated. The intimacy of a Saxon Familienkloster may also have played a role. On the one hand, Agius’ focus, in both the Vita and the Dialogus, barely wavers from Hathumoda and her two families, spiritual and worldly. Neither he nor she shows much concern for anything besides their welfare. On the other hand, by breaking so radically from hagiographic convention, and recording the anxieties of Hathumoda over her ultimate salvation, and those of the women of Gandersheim over the manner and the meaning of her death, Agius may have made Hathumoda seem more human, and thus less saintly. She may not have been the spoiled aristocrat that my friend Drew Jones thinks she was, but she does come off as a bit of a brat at times, especially in her petulant refusal to share some of her visions with her sister and mother. Contrary to its explicit aims, Agius’s Life, with its ambiguous presentation of Hathumoda’s faith in the face of death, its lack of miracles confirming her sanctity, and even its hints that she could be a bit of a pain in the neck, may have dampened devotion to her among her immediate successors at Gandersheim, who had known her in life, as well as those who came later. In the end, though, the afterlife of Hathumoda seems to have been most dependent on the changing fortunes of her house, and her family. As the descendants of Liudolf became kings, the center of the family’s power moved eastward, toward the Elbe frontier, and the family expanded through marriage. When Henry I died in 936, his wife Mathilda founded her own house of canonesses at Quedlinburg, and Gandersheim lost its central place in the Saxon realm. Moreover, in spite of the charter of 877, the bishops of Hildesheim had their own claims on the house. After Abbess Christina died,

forgetting hathumoda 23

they treated the abbey more or less as their personal possession. Things only began looking up when Otto I took Gandersheim under his wing, in the 940s, granting new charters to the house and getting the popes to do the same. The deaths of Mathilda in 968 and Otto in 972, however, began another period of uncertainty for Gandersheim as Otto II took the throne with his Byzantine wife, Theophanu. The first Life of Queen Mathilda may not have been written to protest the new king’s grant to his queen of royal lands belonging to Nordhausen, another house founded by Mathilda (in 960), but its two major points—Nordhausen’s rights to royal support and Mathilda’s sanctity—did nothing to advance the cause of Gandersheim, or Hathumoda. This was the climate in which Hrotsvit composed her poem on the origins of Gandersheim. Hrotsvit gave Hathumoda a minor role there, preferring to make her mother, Oda, and Oda’s mother, Adala, the true visionaries and central characters of her story. Hathumoda is led by a vision of a dove to the site of a quarry with stone suitable to use in the construction of the abbey church, but that is all. Otherwise, Hrotsvit simply notes her passing with the following words: “the happy virgin of Christ, having cared for her flock for twenty-two years, died in Christ and swiftly passed to heaven.” Hrotsvit’s purpose was not to celebrate Hathumoda, but to link the house securely to the Liudolfing family, especially the maternal line through Oda, and to reassert Gandersheim’s independence from the bishops of Hildesheim, who are conspicuously absent from her account in spite of their active role in the origins of the house.

444 Around 932–936 the names of Liudolf and Oda, their sons Brun and Otto, and their daughters Hathumoda, Gerberga, and Christina were entered in the Confraternity book of the monastery of St. Gall, so that they might benefit from the prayers of the monks there. Around a century later, in 1016, a similar list of names of deceased members of the Ottonian royal house was entered into the necrology of Merseburg. Liudolf is on the list, along with Otto and Brun, his grandson Henry, Henry’s wife, Mathilda, and Mathilda’s sister. Absent, however, are Oda, Hathumoda, Gerberga, and Christina. For some reason the imperial family had stopped remembering the dead on the female side in the generations before Henry. Why? The most likely source is Henry I’s wife, Mathilda. As mistress of the family memorials and patroness of Quedlinburg and Nordhausen, Mathilda may have seen no point in promoting the memory of the women of Gandersheim, even if they

24 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

were her husband’s relatives. The Life of Queen Mathilda reports that, on her deathbed, Mathilda handed over the family memorials to her granddaughter, Mathilda, the future abbess of Quedlinburg, commissioning her to maintain them. It would be no surprise if Mathilda had already excised from it the names of Oda and her daughters, as competitors to herself and her own descendents. If so, Hrotsvit’s focus on them in her poem on the origins of Gandersheim may have been meant to save the memory of all the Liudolfing women, in effect countering that move and answering the challenge made by the hagiographers of the old queen. But it is impossible to be sure. Whatever the exact causes, the case for Hathumoda’s sanctity did not survive the changing character of her family, and the changing place of Gandersheim in the politics of the Reich. Slowly but surely she faded from importance, and from memory. What remained was no more than an imago, as Agius put it: an image more than a real person, living on only in dusty manuscripts in Gandersheim’s library, waiting for the likes of Andreas Lang and Heinrich Bodo. Nevertheless, in spite of his failure to achieve for her much of an afterlife in medieval Saxony, or a place in the Christian cult of the saints, Agius did succeed in preserving Hathumoda’s memory long enough for us to consider, over twelve hundred years later, what her story reveals about families, power, and sanctity in early medieval Saxony. And for that we can be grateful.

 “IF ONE MEMBER GLORIES . . .” community between the living and the saintly dead in bernard of clairvaux’s sermons for the feast of all saints Anna Harrison

B

athed in the bliss of eternity, the dead commune with the living. So Bernard proclaims in his five Sermons for the Feast of All Saints. For Bernard, commonality of experience establishes a sense of community between the happy dead and those who labor on pilgrimage. Our common experience of suffering and of sinfulness fuels our confidence in the saints and engenders sympathy for us in them. Furthermore, desire for God is common to the living and the dead; desire transports the longing soul to heaven to share—however partially—in the experience of saved souls, which is boundless desire for God.

 In the twelfth century, as today, one of the Gospel readings for the Mass for the Feast of All Saints was the Sermon on the Mount, and the bulk of Bernard’s First Sermon is a commentary on the beatitudes, the ladder by which “the whole band of saints whom we venerate today have climbed to glory.” Here Bernard focuses on the footprints of the saints. Only one saint, Paul, is mentioned more than cursorily, however, and Bernard offers meager information about the Apostle’s life, about how his footprints may have differed from those of other saints. Indeed, what Bernard identifies here as the footprints of the saints is strikingly similar to the steps of humility that lead to truth, steps that concern the empathetic response to another’s joys and sorrows, and which he describes as the basis for the monastic life in The Steps of Humility. Furthermore, we learn in this First Sermon at least as much about the transgressions associated with particular sinners as we

26 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

do about the virtues or miracles associated with specific saints. Thus, for example, Bernard writes about Lucifer, the first in a chain of inverted- or antimodels that includes Adam and Eve and the rich man who denied Lazarus the crumbs from his table, and he narrates in greater detail the sins of these than he does the life of Paul. In his Second Sermon, Bernard provides a backdrop against which he unfurls his description of heaven by telling us something about the earthly life of saints. Once again, the sole saint whom Bernard identifies specifically is Paul, a holy combatant who struggles to wrench himself from temptation, to keep from sin, and to gain salvation, and whose battle plan is the Sermon on the Mount. In his Third, Fourth, and Fifth Sermons, Bernard conveys little more about the saints’ strife-filled advance toward heaven. A dearth of information about the lives of particular saints, a conflating of the life of the saint with that of the good monk, an emphasis on anti-models rather than on saintly models: no clear picture of the saint as a particular, distinctive person emerges. Bernard wishes his monks to cultivate a connection with saved souls in heaven, but with whom among this undifferentiated are they to establish a relationship, and how? Emulation of individual saints is not a primary connection between earth and heaven. Does intercession by the saints for Bernard’s monks or appeals by the monks to the saints link the living and the dead? Bernard tells his reader that among the three fruits he expects he and his monks will receive from his Second Sermon is a more vehement yearning to seek the patronage of the saints: With God’s favor, there shall be a threefold usefulness of this sermon, so that by the recognition (at least in some part) of the happy recompense of the saints, we may then be animated with more abundant care to inhere in their very footsteps, and to sigh with more fervent desire for their companionship, [and] also to commend ourselves with weightier devotion to their patronage. Since it is a “faithful saying and worthy in every sense” (1 Tim 1:15) that we ought truly to follow the conduct of those same ones whom we honor with solemn veneration, we ought with all eagerness to take heed of the blessedness of those whom we proclaim most blessed, [and] we ought to be encouraged by the patronage of those in whose praises we delight.

Following the sequence he has outlined above, Bernard devotes his First Sermon to discussing the footprints of the saints and his Second Sermon to discussing their bliss. But no sermon is addressed to the companionship that we may enjoy with the saintly dead or to their intercession. In his Second Sermon Bernard acknowledges that his monks devoted the whole of the previous night to invoking the intercession of the saints, and he leaves it at

“if one member glories . . .” 27

that. He nowhere elaborates on the way in which the saints might respond to specific requests for comfort, encouragement, information, or guidance. There is scant indication of individual monks or the monastic community as a whole establishing a familiarity with individual saints. A glance at some other medieval writings, from a variety of periods and genres, places in relief the kind of interaction between the living and the saintly dead that Bernard does not highlight. The saints do not travel from heaven to earth to converse with the living, winding together in a specific way and for a specific cause the lives of particular living and dead people, such behavior as is characteristic of the dead who populate the pages of On Miracles, by Peter the Venerable (d. 1156), and Dialogue on Miracles, by Caesarius of Heisterbach (d. ca. 1240). Nor are longed-for friends or relatives pulled from the afterlife by the plaintive prayers of the living, succoring mourners and liberating them from their raw obsession with dead loved ones. It is true that ghostly apparitions frequently frighten, or worse, those to whom they appear: in the Otia imperialia of the early-thirteenth-century secular cleric Gervais de Tilbury, for example, a dead man returns to kill his wife upon learning she has broken her promise to him not to remarry. While it would be difficult to construe such appearances as a means of forging community between the dead and the living, they are buoyed by the conviction that at least some of the claims established in this life are not rent by death, that aspects of a lifelike relationship exist between the living and dead, and that reciprocal relationships between the living and the dead endure. It is also the case that monastic sermons were not usually laden with accounts of ghosts, although exempla collections to be used by preachers contain such stories. The absence of these sorts of appearances may therefore indicate that, to Bernard, visiting back and forth between this life and the afterlife is not a means of connecting the living and the dead. If we want to know about the nature of the relationship between the living and the dead, we have to look elsewhere.

 In his First and Second Sermons, Bernard explores that experience which pertains equally to all saintly souls while they are alive, the ladder each of them climbs, the Sermon on the Mount. This emphasis on common experience is carried over into his Fifth Sermon. Here Bernard underscores that which the saints and his readers have in common, a topic Bernard considers in other of his writings as well. In a sermon for the Feast of St. Andrew, Bernard recalls the jubilant words the martyr voiced upon seeing the cross that had been set up for him:

28 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

O cross . . . so long desired and now prepared for the longing soul! I come to you secure and joyful, and so, exulting, look upon me, the disciple of him who was suspended on you, because I have always been your lover and have desired to be embraced by you.

Bernard comments: I ask you, brothers, is this a human being speaking? Or is this not a human being but an angel or some new creature? He is a human being completely like us, capable of suffering [Homo plane similis nobis, passibilis] (James 5:17).

To say that a human being is passibilis is to say that she or he is capable of bodily suffering. It is not passibilitas alone that characterizes the hurtful aspect of our physicality, however. Bernard uses the term infirmitas, “weakness,” to evoke a variety of hardships and temptations related to embodiment: infirmitas is the sleep that overcomes us during vigils; it is the body harassed by illness and aches; it is the fear that grips us as we face our own death. Although Bernard does say that suffering is merited by human beings for their transgressions against God, he does not regard passibilitas or infirmitas as in themselves sinful: after all, in assuming our humanity, Christ became capable of enduring the full scope of our suffering. Bernard thus draws attention to the humanity of the saints: even the holiest human beings are subject to the suffering associated with embodiment; their lives are shot through with burdens and temptations familiar to us from our own. In his sermons on individual saints, as in his Sermons for the Feast for All Saints, Bernard avows that we can count on the patronage of the saints and seek to emulate them because each saint was a human being, capable of suffering. The saints have sympathy (misereri) for our suffering. In some of his writings Bernard expresses confidence in receiving aid and encouragement from Christ, and in the possibility of imitating him. It is Christ’s participation in the nastiness of human life—in its weariness, confusion, and desolation—that emboldens us to approach him. In a gloss on the verse preceding the beatitudes—“And seeing the crowd, he went up into the mountain, and when he sat down he was joined by his disciples”—Bernard writes: He sat down so that to him—whom, while he was standing, not even the angels could touch—the publicans and the sinners might approach, Mary Magdalene might approach, and the thief from the cross might approach. And when he had sat down, his disciples approached him. They approached

“if one member glories . . .” 29

not so much through the walking of feet [as] through the attraction of the heart and by the imitation of virtue.

Elsewhere Bernard explains that human beings dared not (or could not) draw near to the impassible divinity, but when in his incarnation and passion Christ submerged himself in our weaknesses and in our wretchedness, we were attracted to him, sure that he longed to heal our hurt. In a sermon on Peter and Paul, however, it is not Christ’s nearness but rather his distance from us that dazzles Bernard. The vast sea of sin separating creature from Creator renders it necessary that Bernard turn to the saints: I ought to be afraid . . . if I presume to come close or to adhere to him, who is divided from me by such a difference as separates good and evil. It is for this reason that God gave me these men, who were men, and sinners, and the greatest sinners, who . . . have discerned that they ought to have pity.

The saints are sinners like us. Or, rather, the saints are worse than we are. Bernard insists: greater than those of Peter and Paul the sins of his readers cannot be. The message of the Sermons for the Feast of All Saints is that the saints will pardon us not simply because they empathize with our wretchedness (as does Christ), but because they empathize with our sinfulness. The saints are good neighbors. Having recognized their own sinfulness, they look upon others with the merciful forgiveness enjoined in the fifth beatitude. In his sermons on Peter and Paul, Bernard stresses the details of the saints’ sins—and the fact that they triumphed over sin. He contrasts their victory over sin with our bondage to sin. It is the stark and awesome contrast, Bernard is fond of repeating, of the saints’ lives with our own that fills us with confusion: There are . . . three things, that on the festivals of the saints we must consider with vigilance: the help of the saint, his example, [and] our confusion. . . . We ought to consider our confusion with greater diligence because that human being was capable of suffering like us (James 5:17), and he was formed out of the same mud from which we were formed.

An accent on sin emerges in Bernard’s Fifth Sermon for the Feast of All Saints as he distinguishes the holiness characteristic of saintly souls from that of angels. What we honor in the angels is their resistance to the temptation that hurled Lucifer from heaven. We praise the saints, however, for their victory over, not their freedom from, sin; we venerate them not for

30 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

their resistance to temptation but for their penitence and penance. “Surely,” Bernard writes, Another kind of sanctity is in these, and they ought to be honored in their own way, those who came out of great tribulation and whitened their gowns in the blood of the Lamb (Apoc. 7:14), who after many contests now at last are triumphing, crowned in heaven because they strove lawfully (2 Tim 2:5).

Nonetheless, Bernard focuses in this sermon more on the need engendered by sin than on sin itself. And he draws greater attention to the washing of their gowns in the blood of the Lamb than to what precipitated such cleansing. The saints are indeed exemplary sinners both because of the enormity of their sins and because of the enormousness of their penitence. It is the common pool of our wretchedness that constitutes the experience common to all saints (indeed to all the living) and that is also shared by Christ. It is this commonality that allows us to walk in the footsteps of the saints and of Christ and shores up our trust in their care for us. Bernard’s Fifth Sermon adds a layer of meaning to this common experience. It is the saints’ vulnerability—to suffering, temptation, and sin—that distinguishes the saved from the angels, which prompts Bernard to assert that the holy souls in heaven share in common with him the same human nature, and which causes Bernard to have greater confidence in saved souls than in angels, sure that the former will extend to him, “ ‘bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh’ ” (Gen. 2:23), tender compassion. What thus surfaces in these sermons is a concept of community based on common experience of suffering—and of sinfulness. In a sense, the recognition of this commonality of experience is community. For the living this experience is actual and continuing; for the saintly dead it is remembered experience. Having considered Bernard’s Fifth Sermon for the Feast of All Saints in the light of some of his other works, I turn anew to the material that seemed at first to militate against a notion of community. Bernard’s conception of community as commonality suggests two reasons for his weighting his commentary on the beatitudes in favor of anti-models. First, if we place side by side Bernard’s First Sermon (laden with anti-models) and his Second Sermon (on the battles waged by the saints), we see that Bernard has laid two contrasting models before his readers and has thus heightened the readers’ awareness of their own responsibility to choose which they will follow. Second, the generic character of the saints’ ascent on the ladder of the beatitudes (the fact that the climb is the same for all the saints, the fact that Bernard considers it necessary to illustrate the climb with reference only to Paul), as well as the close similarity between the footprints of the saints and the monk’s steps of humility, implies that the path the saints follow is neither

“if one member glories . . .” 31

esoteric nor impossible without divine intervention. The battle of the saints is arduous, but if they have persevered, so can we; we can be like the saints because they were as woeful and rotten as are we. Thus our awareness that we are part of a community of suffering sinners is humbling, demanding, and hopeful. It is humbling to recognize how contemptible one is, how liable to sin. The fact that the saints were sinners who trod a well-marked path to salvation is demanding because it disallows us from claiming that we are unable to climb the ladder that they—sped by grace—have traveled to heaven. It is hopeful because it promises that we may look with expectation to a day when we, too, may be fully integrated into the heavenly community. Although not calculated to soothe, it is an optimistic message and one that is meant to hold the reader tight against despair. What, then, can hinder us from mounting the rungs of that mystical ladder? To a great extent, the decision is ours to make. But our upward climb is possible only if we are moved by desire.

 Bernard devotes the opening passages of his First Sermon to precisely this emotion: desire. Here he labors to excite his monastic readers’ desire for heaven and not for the saints per se. Bernard describes himself and his monks as “beggars . . . lying before the door of a very rich king.” Like hungry Lazarus, who pleaded with the rich man for the scraps from his table, Bernard and his monks long to be sustained by the crumbs that fall from the table of the holy souls in heaven. These crumbs are the words and the works of Christ. In the early church, the eucharist was a symbol of the victory of the church, and it is the saints’ triumphal, celebratory feast of which Bernard urges his monastic reader to partake. God himself (not the saints) gives this food directly to Bernard, and it is through Bernard’s sermon that his monks eat of these longed-for crumbs of Christ, tasting heaven by eating with their ears the words of Bernard’s sermon. This is the very food the saints consume. Desire has carried the soul to heaven, where, at a banquet with all souls, the monk feasts on Christ. By joining the soul in a common repast with the saints, desire has created community. Much of Bernard’s Fifth Sermon is also given over to stimulating his reader’s hunger for heaven. Bernard stresses here fellowship with the saints, consortio itself, and not the shared feast. After explaining that we venerate the saints not for their benefit but for our own, Bernard continues: It is a common saying that what the eye does not see the heart does not suffer. My eye is my remembrance [memoria], and to think of the saints is in some

32 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

sense to see them. Just so, of course, is “our portion in the land of the living” (Ps 141:6), not, to be sure, a humble portion, if—as is proper—it is accompanied with the remembrance [memoria] of feeling.

“Seeing” the saints fills Bernard with a three-fold desire: to enjoy the society of the saints; to enjoy their glory; and to rise on the dawn of that day when “our head shall appear in glory and the glorified members shall shine with him.” Bernard uses a number of terms in these sermons—including consortium, consortio fratrum, and communio—that seem to intimate a longing for the saints themselves, for some sort of interaction with them. Nowhere in these five sermons is this expressed more fully than in Bernard’s Fifth Sermon: To be sure, the remembrance of a single [one of the orders of the saints], is as if a single spark, no rather, a fiercely blazing torch, inflaming devout souls, so that they thirst for a sight of them and for their embrace to such a degree that very often they think themselves—with all eagerness and with vehement hearts vibrating—to be among them, now all [the saints], now these or those.

What, writes Bernard, “shall be sweeter, more delightful, more blissful,” than that companionship of brothers (consortio fratrum)? Acknowledging the insecurity and agitation with which the common life on earth is riddled, the distrust and discord in which it is awash, Bernard nevertheless asserts the value of companionship. And yet, although he cries out to be embraced by the saints, the image of the person fantasizing her- or himself within the consortium and trembling with desire is one that evokes the corporeality of joy experienced by the individual, more than it does joy’s reciprocity. Even when he talks about yearning to be among the saints themselves, Bernard’s preoccupation is with the desire that is lodged in the self and not desire’s play among souls. When he is considering the celestial regions, Bernard’s gaze lingers on others fleetingly, only to stray back to the self. Desire thus connects the living with the saintly dead in two different ways. First, our desire for heavenly food facilitates our eating that food on which the saints feast. This is what Bernard means by enjoying the glory of the saints. Second, our desire to enjoy the company of the saints “delights [jaculari] our devout souls” into their midst, where we continue to throb with desire that is stimulated by the saints, but may not remain directed toward them. Desire is at the heart of the Feast for All Saints. We commemorate this feast so that we may say that our desire is in heaven.

“if one member glories . . .” 33

There is, however, a limit to the capacity of soul embodied in earthly flesh to savor the heavenly feast and to participate in the communion of saints. Now, in this corruptible body, our longing outweighs our satisfaction; we strain toward heaven, only just grazing the firmament with our desire. Now, desire for heaven can be only partially and momentarily appeased. But it is not just the satisfaction of desire that finally eludes us while on earth, and desire not only draws us to heaven. Our earthly experience of heaven, however incomplete, is desire. Desire is a privilege, and desire itself is here but a faint reflection of what it shall be in heaven. Desire for heaven begins in this corruptible body, when this body is humbled and made subservient to the soul within the monastic community; but the longing is feeble, for the palate of the heart is weak and the soul is sluggish. The soul’s desire for God increases in heaven before the resurrection and is wholly unfettered and wholly fulfilled when the separated soul is joined to the incorruptible resurrection body on that last grand festival day. In heaven, desire will mount for all eternity, and will ever more continue to seek the God whom the soul has already found. This is a desire that is not quelled for being satisfied, a joy whose consummation is “oil poured on the flames.” Thus, desire pulls us toward heaven, allowing us to taste heaven by joining—in hopeful longing—in the feast of the saints and in their companionship. Our very experience of desire, moreover, joins us to the saints, whose experience of heaven is boundless desire. A desire for heavenly feast and the foretaste of it—fantasizing about enjoying the fellowship of the saints. This material celebrates and fosters a relationship between the individual monk and the “communion of saints.” But what Bernard tends to emphasize in these sermons is the experience of desire for heaven and for God common to the saints and the living more than the desire for interaction between them. And, if we think about community as communality, we see that the experience of desire—like the experience of suffering and of sin—forges the community between the living and the saintly dead. Bernard closes his Fifth Sermon with the clearest statement in these several sermons that the community between the living and the dead is the solidarity born of the common experience of suffering and of joy—joy that, as we have seen, is experienced by both the living and the saintly dead as desire: The person who said, “If one member glories, all members rejoice with [the member],” nevertheless said this too, that “if one member suffers, all members suffer with [the member]” (1 Cor 12:26). This, therefore, is our and their connection [cohaerentia]: we congratulate them, [and] they themselves suffer with us; we reign with them by means of devout meditation, [and] they themselves fight in us and for us through pious intervention.

34 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

Throughout his writings Bernard identifies suffering—which he speaks about both in terms of the experience of the individual and in terms of Christ’s passion—and longing for heaven as the twin poles governing the life of soul and of the church. Suffering is the ground of the soul’s assurance; and her longing for heaven constitutes her hope. Thus, Bernard’s understanding of the community between the living and the dead, anchored as it is in desire for heaven and on suffering, reflects two crucial characteristics of his thought: desire for heaven and devotion to the humanity of Christ. Lassitude, fear, and the hurt that curls in on itself in unmet need; desire that balloons into further desire and whose increase is its satisfaction: this is the stuff of our humanity, Bernard tells us. Though the particular selves that they were on earth elude us, we remain wed to the dead. When we recognize our common humanity, we acknowledge the community in which both those who are alive and those who have died enjoy full membership. It is our participation in a community that includes the triumphal dead that fills those of us on pilgrimage with the expectation that we shall overcome and allows us a foretaste of what we hope our future holds. Community is redemptive.

addendum: the dead are still among us But does such community dull the pain that death inflicts? When he turns his attention to the more familiar dead, it appears that, for Bernard, it may not. In a sermon on the death of his brother, Gerard, Bernard does not extol the commonality between the living and the dead but bemoans their difference from each other, a difference that is situational and perspectival. For while it is true that for Gerard—now at rest in heaven—death has opened up new life, it is equally true that death is, for his brother, the enemy of all that is sweet. Gerard is absorbed in that ocean of eternal happiness, Bernard’s eyes rain tears, and the sadness of one diminishes not at all the joy of the other, nor does the joy still the sorrow. Bernard mourns not simply the separation, however. He grieves that he grieves alone. Bernard does not embrace empathy as a palliative. Gerard is incapable of suffering, and this insults. Taken together, Bernard’s sermon on Gerard and those on the Feast of All Saints thus hint at a paradox that lays hold of us still: that our full humanity consists both in what we hold in common with one another and in that which separates us from one another. Gerard’s death is a punishment God has inflicted on Bernard, and Bernard’s tears are reflective of his—of humanity’s—fallen condition. Yet, to the (rhetorical) charge that his anguish is carnal, Bernard insists that to grieve is human—and necessary.

“if one member glories . . .” 35

As Bernard reminds his readers: when he came before the tomb in which Lazarus lay, four days dead, even “ ‘Jesus wept’ ” (John 11:35).

 Almost nine hundred years separate us from Bernard. The dead are with us still. They live on in our memory, as they did for Bernard. Sometimes our dreams resurrect them. What are we to them? Fed by frank curiosity, sorrow, and rage, the question may be as old as human death. Read together, Bernard’s sermon on Gerard and his Sermons for the Feast of All Saints express a twin yearning that echoes into the present: to remember and to be remembered by the dead. We continue to declare our allegiance to the dead, to recall their struggles, and sometimes to seek inspiration from their example. Dotting cemeteries, small flags are tucked beside those “silent tents of green” that cloak long-departed and newly fallen soldiers, whose combat we may regard as less noble than Bernard esteemed that of his holy warriors but for whom, we may hope, someone cries as did Bernard for his brother. Then as now, a need to be remembered by the dead asserts itself: as when the longing to be seen as well as to see prompts us to crowd the open casket with photographs; and in the whispered promise of the well-intentioned— “she’s looking down on you.” But then as now, large as the dead loom in our memory, even those who harbor the hope that we are on their minds may suspect they do not share our grief. However much Bernard longed to be remembered by the dead, it is we, the living, who are bequeathed his writings. We cannot grasp his distant sorrow; we may have no need of him to give us leave to weep; his struggles were other than ours are, and the desire and hope that moved him may not mirror our own. Yet his yearning for communion with the dead remains familiar.

 THE POPE’S SHRUNKEN HEAD the apocalyptic visions of robert of uzès Raymond Clemens

R

obert of Uzès (d. 1296) had decidedly unusual tastes for a Dominican at the end of the thirteenth century, and his Book of Visions (Liber visionum) is a unique, largely unstudied, collection of thirty-seven visions produced during a period of great religious anxiety and instability—the long vacancy after the death of Pope Nicholas IV, the odd selection of the saintly-hermit Peter Marrone as successor, his resignation, and the subsequent election of Boniface VIII. The visions are preserved in two manuscripts, both of which also contain Robert’s only other known work, The Book of the Words of the Lord (Liber sermonum Domini), an allegorical reading of the Cain and Abel legend in which Cain (Boniface VIII) slays his angelic brother Abel (Celestine V). The Liber sermonum is an admixture of Robert’s own study and the divine voice that guides him. The chapters appear to be based on sermons that Robert preached. In sharp contrast to the disjointed nightmarishness that characterizes the visions of the Liber visionum, the Liber sermonum is written as a single unit incorporating disparate elements into a narrative whole. Sermons, visions, exegesis, even autobiographical material, are tightly woven into a complex narrative. Each element contributes a necessary part: the authority of the divine voice, the learning of the exegesis, and the witnessing to the Christian body through preaching. What separates the two works more than anything else, as the title indicates, is that the revelations in the Liber sermonum are verbal while they are visual in the Liber visionum. Robert’s visions, however, do not employ any of Robert’s own thoughts or learning; he relates only what he sees and what the divine voice tells him about what he sees. Because the divine voice is strangely reticent, at most

the pope’s shrunken head 37"

identifying the meaning of individual symbols, but never interpreting the entire vision, the vision’s meaning is never fixed; rather, it is left to resonate within the reader’s imagination. While Robert utilized stock apocalyptic symbols, his visions were unique in several respects. First, Robert’s visions cannot be grouped into a coherent linear narrative. Each vision is a discrete narrative unit and the meanings of the symbols employed in one vision cannot be assumed to carry over into another. Second, unlike other apocalyptic texts such as the Apocalypse of John or the Scivias of Hildegard of Bingen, symbolic meaning is rarely revealed through visionary exegesis; the divine voice that explicates some of Robert’s visions speaks at most a few words to identify a single figure or to provide a tag that, like a rubric, summarizes the action of the whole. Linking the visions into a single collection are Robert’s conviction that the visions were all divinely sent and certain pervasive themes, such as the corruption of the papacy. Third, Robert employed a vibrant vocabulary to convey his symbols. However, because the visions do not employ any overarching narrative structure, the effect is not only to communicate some central ideas about corruption and reform, but also to evoke in the reader Robert’s own sense of disgust, panic, and dread. If, as Ricoeur argues, symbols give rise to thought, in Robert’s visions symbols also give rise to emotional and intellectual states; we share Robert’s horror at the state of the Church, his fear for the coming tribulations, and his faith that the Church will not be entirely overcome by the forces of darkness. This complex reaction to Robert’s visions is induced by his use of intense adjectival descriptions to convey vivid, dreamlike apparitions that overwhelm the senses of both the seer and the reader. Fourth, Robert demonstrated a rare appreciation, for a Dominican, of the role of the Franciscans in reforming the Church. In many ways his spirituality would fit what contemporary historians would see as Franciscan, with a great emphasis on both personal and institutional poverty as a means to reform the Church. His writings speak to often-overlooked similarities between the two orders, an appreciation of the other’s mission, and recognition of a common enemy both in a papacy unsympathetic to mendicancy as a spiritual ideal and in new mendicant orders that threatened to eclipse the more established ones. A sympathetic reading of Robert’s visions gives a more complex but perhaps more accurate view of the mendicant orders and their complex and contested place in the reform of the late medieval Church. If Robert’s Liber visionum can be said to have a central theme, it is hypocrisy: the open hypocrisy of the papacy that claimed to be the representative of Christ on earth but was instead concerned only with worldly wealth and

38" saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

power, and the hidden hypocrisy of a new mendicant order, the Friars of the Sack, that threatened to taint the spiritual ideal of poverty through a life proclaimed but not practiced. In his visions Robert employed two orders of symbols to convey papal corruption: buildings and bodies. Both are obviously ancient symbols for the Church and the papacy, but in his visions each allowed Robert to convey his apprehension and anxiety in ways that differ from earlier authors. His visions built on, but did not entirely incorporate, earlier symbols. In one of Robert’s first visions, dated to 1291, he was transported to Rome, where he saw a wooden chair, old and empty, and he was led through the Vatican in the order in which a new pope would be installed. Rather than a festive celebration surrounding the installation of the pontiff, Robert saw that everything was dark, quiet, and covered with dust—“not one living thing could be seen.” Before the sancta sanctorum Robert saw a huge snake, identified as the antichrist, wrapped around a large beam, and on the floor surrounding the beam were all manner of armaments. The empty chair, the neglected relics covered in dust, gave the opportunity for the antichrist to inhabit the sacred space and defend it with arms against those who might oppose it. Robert often represented the Roman pontiff as absent, which was true both physically (the long interregnum after Nicholas IV before the election of Celestine V) and spiritually (the neglect of worship). Beyond concern over the long vacancy, as disturbing as that might have been, the vision revealed a more sinister event: that the antichrist had taken residence within the very center of the Church as a direct result of the interregnum, and that he had fortified himself with earthly weapons to fight what must be an earthly war for possession of the Church. Regardless of the eventual election of a new pontiff, the damage had been done to the Church, and this may help to explain why even a holy man such as Celestine V was unable to prevail against the evil forces within the Church. Later, when Robert had grown even more pessimistic about reforming the papacy, he had a vision in which darkness covered the Church. In vision 35, Robert saw a church built from white stones on a stone mountain with a tall tower ornamented with saffron-colored apples. A black mist flowed out of the church and mixed with water to the north and then submerged the church almost entirely. The Church as a tower was a common trope. As found in The Shepherd of Hermas, the stones represented the various souls that make up the Church; some fit together well without mortar, symbolizing the close relationship among the ministers of the Church, apostles, bishops, deacons, and teachers who agreed with one another in peace; other stones had to be hammered and chiseled until they could be useful—these were those souls who had faith, but also possessed riches. The riches had to

the pope’s shrunken head 39"

be cut away before the stone could be used. Some stones, however, could never be used in the tower and thus had to be discarded. The meaning of the stones and the tower was not self evident, but explained by an angel. Hildegard, as Barbara Newman has shown, was deeply influenced by The Shepherd of Hermas, and most of her third book was based on a metaphoric building program in which she described a spiritual edifice of salvation, which became Jacob’s ladder conveying souls back and forth to heaven. Like The Shepherd, Hildegard’s symbols were explicated for her and her readers by a divine voice. Robert’s tower carried a darker meaning and no explication: evil emanated from the tower, indicating that corruption originated from within the Church, mixed with more evil in the north, which then covered the Church almost entirely in darkness: During the week of Easter, after I said Compline, I was seeing in the spirit of God and behold, there was a church before me made from white stones, above which stood a tall column in which there seemed to be apples the color of saffron. It was built on a stone mountain, having a tall and wide door on the west, which was cloudy and black, as were the windows. And the darkness flowed out from the church through the door just as a river, up to the north, and the waters mixed with the mist and flowed over the church, so that those within had to wait, but they were not able to ascend, although part of the column could be seen.

Robert’s vision recalls that of the Visio Wettini, written by Hatto, abbot of Richenau, sometime before 806, in which the tower purified the monks who rose within it, but beyond the obvious meanings of “darkness” and the “tower” and the cardinal direction north (from which evil comes), the type of evil was not specified, nor who was inside the tower and had to wait to ascend, nor even what that symbolic ascent meant. The vision’s effect is first to frighten then to reassure, but not to inform. The second significant order of symbols of corruption Robert uses is corporeal. Like the human statue in Daniel in which the ages of the world empires were recorded, Robert employed bodies to represent historically disparate events within the same institution as well as to relate the different parts of the body with different functions. The first symbolic use of the body occurs in a vision in which he saw St. Peter dressed in traditional red vestments and wearing the papal tiara. Peter appeared rough, disheveled, and angry. He held the iron keys in his left hand, and Robert observed that Peter’s right arm was “black, dry, and arid.” The spirit explained to Robert that the right part of the figure represented the Church, which had become

40" saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

black, dry and arid, but that the Church still possessed the power of the keys. Although Robert was careful to attribute the dryness to the Church (ecclesia) rather than to its head, it is clear that he was speaking of the one who commanded the power of the keys, the see of St. Peter. In a later vision he was not so circumspect. Robert saw in the air before him the body of the pope, dressed in white, standing with his back to the east, raising his hands to the west, “just as priests are accustomed to doing when they celebrate the secret solemn mass,” but Robert could not determine whether the body had a head. At length and after much effort he saw the head, but it was “dry (aridum), atrophied, as if made of wood.” The spirit told him that this represented the present state of the Roman Church. Like the earlier vision of St. Peter, this body was still able to perform its religious functions—celebrating mass—even if crucial parts of the body had lost their ability to function as a result of their spiritual state. As with Hildegard and many other spiritual writers, aridity was a spiritual quality symbolically manifest and displayed in the body. Robert was criticizing the present state of the Church; he was not questioning the pope’s ordained powers, which continued to function despite the lack of spiritual vigor of the men who held the office. Because of this crucial distinction, it was possible, even necessary, for the office to be reformed. For Robert this could clearly happen only in one way: the Church had to be humbled through the symbolic humiliation of the pontiff. If Robert found the long vacancy a particularly dangerous time, he found the scandalous politics surrounding the abdication of Celestine V and election of Boniface VIII even more troubling for the future of the Church. His symbols for the Church changed to reflect this new situation, going from decay (dust) and putrefaction (vile apples) to blood and water, both cleansing and annihilating. After the election of Benedict Gaetani on December 24, 1294, Robert had a vision in which the light in the pope’s eyes turned to blood. Later, the pope removed his splendid white vestments, revealing old and cheap clothes and a cap, full of sweat, on his head. The pope ordered Robert to sit on his left on a basket or box, but Robert refused, sitting instead before the pope’s eyes, on a low (basso) chair made from flax and the hair of animals lacerated by the teeth of a dog. Robert’s visions often conveyed hypocrisy through images in which what was on the outside masked the true nature of what was on the inside. Here, the tattered clothing beneath the white vestments did not represent the humiliation of the Church, but the uncleanliness of the man who held the office. But Robert did not see evil completely overtaking the world; instead there would be an “angelic pope” who would lead a humble life and, through his humiliation, renew the Church. Unusual among Dominicans, Robert be-

the pope’s shrunken head 41"

lieved that reformation required the adoption of Franciscan poverty, which must be voluntarily embraced by its head. Poverty was symbolically represented in Robert’s vision as a small bed with dirty bedding that the pope must lie in. Robert’s clearest articulation of the angelic pope (although never so-named) occurs in vision 13. Like many of Robert’s visions, vision 13 begins in media res—Robert found himself walking with his eldest brother and youngest sister when they come to a door. A voice told them that if they wished to see the pope, they should enter. On seeing the pope, they began kissing his naked feet, a sign of his great humility. Amazed that the pope sat on the ground and had a small, narrow bed covered with cheap bedding, Robert asked, “How is it, Father, that you have such a poor bed: the most poor of the poorest bishops of the world would not keep it.” The pope responded, “It is fitting for us to be humbled.” Without transition, Robert and the pope were going down a mountain when Robert saw the pope in the habit of a Franciscan friar. Robert fell onto his face and again kissed the pope’s naked feet. He then supported the pope on his right side as they began to climb back up the mountain. As they climbed, Robert changed to the pope’s left side while a secular priest supported his right side; Robert noted that the pope had a severe limp and would not have been able to climb the mountain without their assistance. At the summit they found an abandoned hut with pots and pans, but the fire was extinguished. Robert then saw some women looking at the pope as he raised his hand to bless them. The vision ended there without explication by a divine voice. Historians have seen the Franciscan pope in this vision either as homage to the recently deceased Nicholas IV or as a reference to the hermit pope, Celestine V, but while both men may have provided inspiration for Robert’s vision, clearly Robert believed that this vision depicted a future, unknown pope whose life would be a model of evangelical poverty. The trek back up the mountain with the assistance of the friar and the secular priest may have symbolized the reform of the Church, returning to the height of apostolic poverty through the combined efforts of and reconciliation between the mendicants and the secular clergy. But the abandoned hut with everything at the ready except the fire recalls the emptiness found in the Lateran during the interregnum seen in Robert’s vision above. And what do we make of the women? As a visual image, they recall the women at the crypt who saw the resurrected Jesus, and so perhaps this is the “resurrected” papacy, but other than a visual similarity, there seems little else to support this supposition. Interestingly for a Dominican, Robert’s vision presented the future angelic pope in a Franciscan habit and valorized the pope’s poverty rather than his preaching, but we see in another vision that it was through both poverty and preaching that the Church would be saved. These paired characteristics

42" saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

were joined in a vision in which Robert saw a silver cross with twelve vile apples on it. The divine voice explained that the cross represented the future Church, “lucid through the poverty of its life and sonorous through its clear voice preaching truth.” The vile apples, on the other hand, signified the future humiliation of the Church. While the papacy’s wretched behavior was obvious to all (according to Robert), there were other dissemblers, whose lives and words seemed holy but were not. This threat to orthodoxy (and to the established mendicant orders) was a newly founded and extremely popular mendicant movement, the Friars of the Sack, which borrowed the most attractive aspects of the lives of both the Dominicans and the Franciscans, but posed a particular threat to the Dominicans. With the exception of the papacy, the order was the most frequently mentioned institution in Robert’s visions, and they were always reviled. Founded sometime before 1251 by two laymen who, the chronicler Salimbene de Adam claimed, were refused entrance to the Franciscan order after hearing the preaching of the Joachimite Hugh of Digne, the Friars of the Sack were the most successful of the many mendicant orders that sprung up after the founding of the Dominicans and Franciscans in the early thirteenth century. The order was approved by Innocent IV, who ordered the bishops of Marseilles and Toulon to grant them an order. Their formal name was Friars of the Penitence of Jesus Christ, but they were called Friars of the Sack, or saccati, likely referring to their rough clothing. Before their dissolution in 1274 at the second Council of Lyon, there were at least 111 houses in Italy, England, France, Spain, and the Middle East. The order was dissolved in part at the request of the Dominican Master General Humbert of Romans, who feared that the multiplication of mendicant orders would diminish the support of the previously existing orders. But Humbert was also aware that the secular clergy, who had fought the mendicant orders since their inception, might use the Friars of the Sack as an example of the dangers of mendicancy as a spiritual ideal, given its founding by men influenced by Spiritual Franciscans and its great popularity among the laity. Like the better-known mendicant orders, the Friars of the Sack had houses in the great university cities of Paris, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bologna, Cambridge, and Oxford. It is easy to understand Dominican opposition to the popular Friars of the Sack. They were founded in the same region as the Dominicans; they had adopted almost verbatim the Rule of St. Augustine (the same document on which the Dominicans’ Rule was based), and they engaged in a ministry almost identical to that of the Dominicans—preaching and begging, although their lifestyle (very strict poverty in imitation of Christ) seems to have been closer to the Franciscans than the Dominicans. In short, they combined the

the pope’s shrunken head 43"

most popular aspects of both orders, and this may account for the order’s popularity among secular patrons, including Louis IX. The Dominicans were only too happy to see the order suppressed and announced their intention to bar unqualified Friars of the Sack from joining the Dominican order, despite the Council’s encouragement of the established orders to accept them. But the order was slow to dissolve and many houses still existed at the end of the thirteenth and even into the fourteenth century. The house in Avignon, where Robert was based, was not closed until 1323. For Robert, writing between 1291 and 1296, the order’s continued existence must have appeared to defy the pope’s pronouncement. In Robert’s visions, the reviled order that could not be disbanded by men would be destroyed by God. In vision 21, which took place while Robert was in Avignon in 1291, he saw a great multitude of men and women. Suddenly their number was reduced to three, and then they disappeared altogether. Robert’s divine voice explained: “The sect called the Friars of the Sack will be reduced to nothing.” Robert’s next vision of the order was more fantastic and more violent. He saw a snake crowned with a human head, whose head was cut off, causing a great effusion of blood. The snake’s body was saffron-colored and had two feet and two wings joined to its body. It had the tail of a viper and its face was white. The divine voice explained the slaying of the snake presaged the abolition of the order. While the first vision was relatively benign (the crowd was at least human, and they disappeared over time), the second vision portrayed the order as a monstrous amalgam of evil, part animal and part human; its white, human face belied its monstrous body, and it would be destroyed by an act of extreme violence. In his final vision concerning the Friars of the Sack, significantly dated the day Robert took the habit of the Dominicans, Robert saw a “leaden colored snake full of gold snares, just as one is accustomed to see with musical instruments.” His divine voice explained that the snake represented the Friars of the Sack, which had many snares under the appearance of charity. Obviously the true orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, provided an alternative not just for Robert, but for the Church, which needed them if it was to be reformed. For a Church that was deeply troubled by a long interregnum and the stunning election and abdication of Celestine V and his replacement by Boniface VIII (“one of the least spiritual men to hold the papal office,” in the words of Bernard McGinn), Robert’s visions presented the horror of the present condition, but also offered the hope of reformation. Evil, perhaps ascendant, would never be triumphant, and however terrifying Robert’s visions, they functioned to goad a reluctant institution into reform, not to foretell the ultimate destruction of the Church or to remove from the papacy its ordained powers.

44" saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

Although similar to the Joachites in his criticism of the papacy and the need for the Church to embrace a radical form of poverty, in his visions Robert provided a distinct alternative to the Joachite condemnation of the pope as the antichrist. For this very Franciscan Dominican, his visions, radical in imagery, conservative in message, suggest a much closer relationship between the Franciscans and the Dominicans in this moment of crisis and greater similarity in their spirituality than has been suggested by the focus on the more radical elements within the Franciscan order. Like Humbert of Romans, Robert clearly saw the Franciscans as allies rather than adversaries in the war against papal corruption and in the battle against the new mendicant orders.

 THOMAS OF CANTIMPRÉ AND FEMALE SANCTITY John Coakley

T

he new religious currents of the thirteenth century produced a remarkable literature of female sanctity. Hagiographers, especially in the Low Countries and Italy, wrote vivid accounts of the new female saints, not only of their asceticism and devotion but also of their powers. Those powers typically took the form of intercessions and revelations for the spiritual benefit of persons living and dead, consistently with what was supposed at the time to be a female predisposition toward visions and contact with the other world. Among the most prolific of the hagiographers of such women was Thomas of Cantimpré (1200/01–ca. 1270), a regular canon turned Dominican friar, who produced four hagiographical works about women. A question addressed by these works, as indeed by most other hagiography about women at the time, is the question of the relationship of the women’s powers to the powers of priests, especially as these were exercised by preachers who, motivated by the prevailing ideals of the vita apostolica, themselves shared the women’s zeal for the salvation of souls: what did the women’s informal or charismatic authority have to do with the official authority of the priest? Thomas can be seen considering this question, and doing so, moreover, in the context of the work of another author on the subject with whom he was familiar. That author was the preacher, historian, and hagiographer James of Vitry (1160/70–1240), who wrote the famous account of the early Beguine Mary of Oignies (1177–1213), the Vita Mariae Oigniacensis (VMO). Thomas acknowledged an indebtedness to James, and there is a close relationship between his hagiographical work and James’s, as will be seen. But whereas in the VMO James could be said to be fascinated precisely with the overlap

46 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

between the powers of these holy women and those of priests—the ways in which they functioned for similar ends within the same time and space— Thomas avoided suggesting such an overlap, even in his most mature work, the vita of Lutgard of Aywières, where the scale and scope of his portrait are in other respects very similar to those of the VMO. His was a cautious approach that suggests something of both the promise and the danger of holy women from a clerical, finally a Dominican, point of view. A word is in order first about my approach to Thomas. Recent historians have made productive use of his writings—including not only the hagiographical texts but also his two encyclopedic works De natura rerum and Bonum universale de apibus—for their witness to the social and religious life of his place and time: the works are full of narratives that illuminate a wide variety of phenomena, such as the much-discussed “somatic” character of female devotion, the rise and practice of sacramental confession, the shape of lay piety and its relation to that of clerics, the interactions between Jews and Christians, the practice of the judicial ordeal, and the incidence of private feuds. These topics, rich as they are, do not concern me directly here. Rather, as a church historian interested especially in themes that stretch over long periods in the history of Christianity, I take as my subject not Thomas’s social world but rather the man himself, in his role as, in effect, a theologian concerned with the perennial question of the nature and limits of the authority of the Church, a question that was becoming particularly pressing in the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Still it is precisely the narrative character of his work, with its abundant descriptions of events within his social world, that gives his theological reflection its characteristic nuance and interest, by causing his ideas to appear in the context of the practical significance he attached to them. Thomas’s first attempt to portray a holy woman was his Supplement to James of Vitry’s vita of Mary of Oignies (VMO). He wrote it late in the period of his life spent as a regular canon at Cantimpré near Cambrai (ca. 1216–ca. 1232), completing it in 1231. James had written the VMO itself, the earliest and still the most famous account of the life of a Beguine, sometime between Mary’s death in 1213 and his own departure from Europe for the Holy Land as bishop of Acre in 1216. James’s avowed purpose had been to present the image of the pious, ascetical, and orthodox Mary as an antidote to such heresy as had driven his addressee, the bishop Fulk of Toulouse, from his diocese; he probably wished as well to advocate for the controversial Beguines, who lived without vows in the midst of urban society. Thomas undertook the Supplement some fifteen years later to aid the evidently growing cult of Mary, at the request of members of the community of regular canons of Oignies (to which James had once been belonged), by

thomas of cantimpré and female sanctit y 47

collecting, as he says, some of the many stories about Mary that James had not told. Thomas does tell new stories about Mary in the Supplement, but, remarkably, these hardly touch on one particular theme that had been central for James, namely that of Mary’s efforts for the welfare of souls. For in the VMO Mary appears preeminently as someone who, being intimate with God through a rich inner life, applies her inner visions and clairvoyances to the benefit of others. The Mary of the VMO received revelations from persons in the afterlife appealing to her for her prayers, and other revelations about the spiritual state of those still living, for instance that of her kinsman Ywain of Zoania, on the basis of which (as James describes at length) she closely supervised his conversion to penitence. She received still other revelations about the activities of demons, which alerted her to protect or rescue their intended victims, such as a certain canon who was being seduced into error by a “noontide demon” who seems to have taken the guise of a persuasive heretic. The new stories Thomas tells of Mary have little to say, however, about this matter of the pastoral utility of her visions and intercessions. His concern is to establish the fact of her supernatural favor and power itself rather than to explore her pastoral aims, and accordingly he is mainly interested in asserting the accuracy of her clairvoyances and prophecies, and the power of her miracles. He does include an extended story about her aid to an unnamed merchant whom she considered her “spiritual son,” but the point is not how she used her revelations to monitor his spiritual condition, as in James’s story of Ywain of Zoania: here her power of revelation serves only to confirm the merchant’s virtue, and then the narrative turns to miracles in which the merchant and his son were healed by contact with Mary’s hair. Thomas’s emphasis on the efficacy of her powers in their own right is, at any rate, consistent with the apparent purpose of the work, to promote the cult around her relics at Oignies. Thus in the Supplement Thomas does not explore the pastoral dimension of a holy woman’s powers. But he does write of James of Vitry’s relationship to Mary, about which, in fact, he has some reservations; accordingly, though obliquely, the topic of the woman’s encounters with priests makes an appearance. James had an influence on Thomas, a fact that is clear from Thomas’s several references to the great preacher, in his other writings as well as this one. In the Supplement Thomas acknowledges directly his deep admiration for James, in a passage addressed to him at the very end of the work: “I was not yet fifteen years old,” he says, “when I heard you preach in Lorraine, before you were a bishop, and I loved you with such reverence, that even to hear your name made me happy; and my love of you has persevered ever since. Nor is this surprising, since what we learn as children takes root in

48 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

us.” The function of this protestation of love in its immediate context here, however, is to mollify a harsh and lengthy complaint that Thomas has just made against James. For after having resided once again in the diocese of Liège, doing pastoral work there after his return from the Holy Land in 1225, James had been called to Rome in 1229 by the pope, who then or earlier had made him a cardinal. Thomas accuses him of pride and self-will, criticizing him at length for being drawn by the siren song of Rome to abandon once more the region where he had known Mary. This criticism, moreover, is not unrelated to James’s interactions with Mary, as Thomas perceives these: for earlier in the Supplement he has described Mary making a posthumous appearance to James and taking him to task for his pride: “ ‘You, a man of your own will, have never wanted to acquiesce to my counsels or those of others who love you spiritually, and you always have walked by your own rather than others’ judgments.’ ” Years later, in the vita of Lutgard, written after James’s death, Thomas will describe how Lutgard had prayed for James at a time when he had been attentive to a “certain religious woman languishing in bed” (apparently not Mary), to the extent of neglecting his duties, and that his persistence in these inordinate attentions required particularly arduous intercession from Lutgard: another instance of James’s willfulness. Already in the Supplement, at any rate, there is a critical edge to Thomas’s view of James, specifically in his relationship to Mary. In his next work of female hagiography, written not long after the Supplement, Thomas once again displays James’s influence without following him all the way into the pastoral territory of the VMO. This work is the vita of Christine the Astonishing (VC), which Thomas finished in 1232, shortly after he had left the canons of Cantimpré and entered the Dominican order in Louvain. Christine was a lay penitent whom James himself had mentioned in the prologue to the VMO as one of the illustrious women of Liège whom, had it not been for Mary’s preeminence, he might have written about instead: a woman who died and then came back to life, in order to suffer for the sake of souls in purgatory and to convert others by her example. That example, in Thomas’s estimation, consisted of a constant penitence like that of the wise virgins of the Biblical parable to which he makes reference in the vita’s conclusion, a penitence that, as Robert Sweetman has pointed out, itself stands as a species of preaching because of Christine’s aim of converting those who observed her. Thomas pictures her exposing herself to hot ovens and boiling water, attaching herself to a rack, and hanging herself between thieves on a gallows. She also appears ministering directly to people, for instance begging alms from sinners so as to stimulate their merciful instincts, foretelling the salvation of a man who has charitably given her a drink of water, and, upon receiving revelations of the spiritual condition of

thomas of cantimpré and female sanctit y 49

certain people who were near death, exhorting them to penitence. According to Thomas, she confronted people with their private sins, of which she had clairvoyant knowledge, and he describes at length how she took on the salvation of her admirer Count Louis of Looz as her special project, giving him spiritual advice during his lifetime and assuming half his purgatorial pains after his death. Thomas’s extended account of her service to Louis recalls Mary’s to Ywain, and overall the descriptions of Christine’s use of her supernatural gifts for the benefit of others breathe strongly of the spirit of the VMO. Unsurprisingly, Thomas says that he would not have written the VC were it not for James’s “testimony” to Christine. Yet for all its reminiscence of the VMO, the VC stops well short of developing the theme of the relationship of the woman’s work to the work of priests, which had been an important theme in the VMO. James, indeed, had been at pains to make Mary’s work appear as a complement, even a necessary complement, to the activities of priests. In the VMO her powers of intuition and revelation give her precisely an ability that priests themselves lacked, namely to use direct interventions to bring souls to penitence or protect them from harm, as when she kept clairvoyant tabs on her protégé Ywain, or when she used her prayers to stimulate a flood of tears in a priest who had criticized her for excessive weeping, or when she discerned the needs of certain souls in purgatory, or when she summoned and expelled demons whom her special powers enabled her to perceive at work in this person or that, bringing each to confession of sins. The Holy Spirit worked in her directly, and gave her immediate knowledge, as James says, of things that others knew only through preachers, and one might therefore easily imagine her overstepping into their territory—except that James makes it very clear that Mary was in no sense the competitor of preachers but rather their great admirer, who used to kiss their feet after they had finished their sermons. Thus her powers conflicted in no way with those of priests; rather she stood in partnership with them—a rich theme for James. But in contrast, in the VC Thomas broaches the theme of the woman’s relationship to priests only in one suggestive passage in which he says that although she miraculously acquired knowledge of Latin and became very learned, nonetheless in matters of learning she deferred to clerics, whom indeed she “venerated,” even though she had suffered at their hands and often had to “admonish” them. The passage has an intriguing two-sidedness that recalls the VMO in both conveying her respect for priests and at the same time suggesting that, since she had her own conduit to the divine, in some sense she generally knew better than they. But the comment is a passing one; in the vita as a whole, her relationship with priests does not constitute a major theme. Thomas’s next attempt at hagiography about a woman does show him

50 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

exploring, and in considerable detail, his subject’s relationship to a priest— but now that he does so, he gives the topic a decidedly different slant from what we find in the VMO. The work is the vita of Margaret of Ypres (VMY), which Thomas wrote in 1240. Margaret was a lay penitent woman, precociously pious from childhood, who lived in the home of her parents until her death at the age of twenty-one in 1237. Thomas heard about her from her confessor, a Dominican friar named Siger of Lille, whom he visited in Ypres on his way back to Louvain in 1240 at the end of his period of study (which had begun in 1237) at the Dominican studium generale in Paris. Thomas’s insertion of a gratuitous scholastic quaestio into his narrative witnesses to his erudition at this moment in his life; more fundamentally, as Simone Roisin has suggested, the VMY appears to signal a shift in Thomas’s “hagiographical method,” when compared to the earlier works, a shift characterized by increased emphasis on the interior life of his subject and a more affective rhetoric, and possibly reflecting not only his own maturation but also a Cistercian influence. Thomas also shows himself more attentive now to the personal dynamics of the relation between the woman and a priest, in this case her confessor. He wrote the vita, as he says in the prologue, from his notes on what Siger told him, and Siger accordingly occupies a large place in the story. Margaret was apparently already a young woman by the time Siger came to Ypres, and Thomas relates early in his narrative that Siger lost no time picking her out from his other hearers as a “vessel of election.” For the remainder of the work Thomas refers to him as her “spiritual father” and depicts him directing Margaret. For instance, when she sensed God abandoning her after she had sent a broken goblet to a former suitor for repair, Siger explained to her that the cause was her unwitting encouragement of the young man’s attentions; it is Siger, not Margaret, who is shown interpreting the event. When her mother complained that Margaret was not communicative enough at home because of her discipline of silence, Siger gave her an order to talk for a prescribed period daily, which she obeyed to the letter. Similarly, when her sisters perceived her asceticism to be excessive, it was to Siger that they complained. When she was on her deathbed it was he who directed her not to desire any more suffering. Margaret, for her part, obeyed him in everything, and eventually demonstrated her obedience (as Siger observed to Thomas) after her death as well, when she performed a healing at her tomb at his bidding. In the VMY, therefore, Thomas has lost his reticence regarding the subject of the holy woman’s relation to priests. But unlike James in the VMO, Thomas here stresses Margaret’s separation from the world around her, and that separation implies much less of an emphasis upon revelations or other pastorally oriented actions on the part of the woman. He does picture her

thomas of cantimpré and female sanctit y 51

receiving some revelations for the benefit of other people, specifically one revelation assuring her sister of safety in childbirth and another informing her that her prayers for a wealthy woman commended to her by Siger are of no avail because the woman unrepentantly oppressed the poor. But as Thomas notes in two separate passages, she will only tell her revelations to Siger: apparently it is he who decides the use to be made of them. By contrast, James had pictured Mary’s work as overlapping with the work of priests in the social world she shared with them, as someone moving freely about in secular society; when, for instance, Mary saw clairvoyantly from her own cell a crowd of demons congregating at the deathbed of a woman of the town, she herself rushed to the scene to minister to her. James even suggested, in one remarkable passage, that Mary might serve as the effective cause of the very actions of a priest: God, he says, granted her a close relationship to a certain priest—apparently James himself—to “compensate” for the fact that she could not exercise the priestly office on her own behalf. But Margaret’s connection with Siger specifically signifies a choice over against an active role in the world around her. Thomas writes, for instance, that soon after her conversion under Siger’s influence she encountered her former suitor and, distressed at sensing the return of her old feelings for him, hurried to church and made a vow of virginity to Christ, who responded by relieving her once and for all of the troubling emotions she had just experienced. Siger, for his part, rejoiced when she told him this news. As Karen Glente has astutely remarked, in this particular incident he seems less like a spiritual director of a penitent woman than like “a husband who is older and more experienced, who rejoices in having been able to awaken the love of his young innocent bride”: in encouraging her to transfer her attentions from others to God, he in fact receives them himself, ostensibly as God’s representative. She could not bear the sight of other men, and she made her mother dismiss a twelveyear-old male servant so that she would not have to see him; when Siger was not present, she could find no consolation from anyone except Christ. The exclusivity of her relationship with Siger—which, when she worried about it, Christ assured her was quite proper—signifies her stark separation from the world as though by an invisible cloister wall. In the fourth and last of his works about women, then, namely the vita of Lutgard of Aywières (VL), whom he had known since his days at Cantimpré, Thomas makes crucial use of the theme of the woman’s separation from the world that he first developed in the VMY. The VL stands as his fullest treatment of the relation of a woman’s supernatural powers to the powers of priests; only here does he bring together all the elements of that topic that we find in the VMO. He completed the VL sometime between Lutgard’s death in 1246 and the death, in 1248, of the abbess Hadewijch of Aywières,

52 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

to whom he addressed it. He himself was by then subprior of the Louvain Dominicans. This is Thomas’s one vita in which, having known the saint personally, he makes reference to himself in relation to her. He does so at several points in the narrative, either as eyewitness guarantor of its truth or else as participant in some of the events described; Thomas’s authorial selfinclusion, like that of James in the VMO, effectively condenses his treatment of the relationship of the woman to priests into a few significant personal interactions. But there is a marked difference in the way the relationship is pictured in the two works. Key to the difference is precisely the theme of the woman’s separation from her immediate environment, which now appears in conjunction with the full range of revelatory powers employed by Lutgard for the good of souls. Those are powers that did not figure largely in the VMY. By contrast, in the VL Lutgard exercises them to an extent that makes her comparable to Mary—yet her separation from the world serves precisely as a sign of renunciation of a priestlike role such as Mary had had, so that her otherwise comparable work appears only auxiliary, and not also analogous, to the priest’s work. Lutgard’s powers of revelation and intercession dominate the vita. As Thomas tells the story, she escaped an attempted rape in her youth, then entered a Benedictine convent at St. Trond, where she acquired a reputation for sanctity (book I), and at the age of twenty-four transferred to the Cistercian monastery of Aywières, where she spent the rest of her life (books II and III). In his account of her years at St. Trond Thomas is mostly concerned to establish her own holiness of life and favor with God, by internal signs such as an exchange of hearts with Christ and external ones such as the appearance of oil that dripped from her fingers; but, these being firmly established, in his treatment of her Aywières years, which accounts for about two-thirds of the vita, he turns his attention principally to her revelations for the benefit of others. For example we see her praying for the soul of the deceased Cistercian abbot of Foigny, who then appears to her several times after his release from purgatory. Innocent III himself appeared to her from purgatory, enlisting her prayers. She liberated other nuns from demons by prayer. She had visions of the souls of persons who had benefited by her intercessions while alive. Her prayers released various people from temptation and secured the conversion of a disgraced knight, who became her “spiritual son.” By revelation she identified the relics of a saint (Osmana of Scotland), predicted an apostate friar’s return to his order, warned the duchess of Brabant of her impending death and later observed her in purgatory, discerned a female recluse’s temptations without being told, and, by strenuous prayers, procured “consolation” for a man who had confessed his sins without a sense of relief.

thomas of cantimpré and female sanctit y 53

Thomas presents Lutgard as a figure of supernatural powers for the benefit of souls, very much on the order of Mary of Oignies in the VMO, but she appears in a different context, markedly separated from the persons around her. Of course, the fact alone that she was a cloistered nun and not a Beguine would account for a certain separation from society in contrast to Mary; not living in the midst of the town as Mary did, she did not perform her pastoral acts in the same urban space in which priests performed theirs. Thomas certainly underlines Lutgard’s choice of the religious life as a choice of Christ over a human suitor, a choice similar to that of Margaret (and again unlike Mary, who, though chaste, remained married): thus, before she entered the monastery, it was when she was being wooed by a young man that Christ appeared to her to present himself as an alternative. But Thomas takes steps to push the sense of separation further, even within the cloister, cordoning off as far as possible a space for her that is unique to herself and her visions—steps that have no counterpart in, for instance, the roughly contemporary vita by the Cistercian Goswin of Bossut of another Cistercian nun, Ida of Nivelles, which is otherwise very similar in its account of the pastorally useful visions of a cloistered woman. Thus Thomas pictures Lutgard levitating in the monastery at St. Trond, her body following her spirit as it “stepped into heaven” and thus, by implication, away from her sisters; and when her powers of healing were attracting attention, she prayed to lose those powers so as to be able to be alone with Christ. The move to Aywières is then particularly crucial for Thomas in developing this theme of separation. When she was made prioress of the monastery of St. Trond, he says, “she considered this fact a grave injury to herself ” and began to think of leaving. Though she initially balked when a holy man suggested that she go to the French-speaking Cistercian monastery of Aywières, where she would not understand the language, she went at Christ’s insistence and, once there, discovering that her fame had followed her and other Frenchspeaking monastic communities in neighboring areas wanted her as abbess, she herself prevailed upon the Blessed Virgin to make her unable ever to learn French. As a consequence she was safe from election and, being removed from normal communication with others, was “left to the sleep of contemplation,” without responsibility for anyone but herself: “no one either roused her up or made her stay alert to pastoral concerns unless she wished it herself, which never happened.” As Glente has commented, Thomas thus carefully presents Lutgard as “someone independent of influence from her surroundings.” This strict sense of separation had implications, finally, for Thomas’s own interactions with Lutgard, as he reports them. She appears as his astute adviser and effective intercessor, as Mary functioned for James according

54 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

to the VMO, yet Thomas’s and Lutgard’s roles appear as notably more discrete than James’s and Mary’s. In the VMO, James does not picture himself approaching Mary for the advice and intercession he receives from her, as though he had needed to enlist her for the purpose. Her advice instead comes in the form of a dream of him (in which a hirsute James appeared with a prostitute, signifying his pridefulness) that appears to have been suggested by her own ongoing observation of his ministry, in which, as his supporter, she was personally involved—and it is she who approaches him in this case, not the other way around. As for Mary’s intercession for James (that is, for “her” priest): she prays not so much for him as with him, simultaneously with his sermons; indeed her prayers constitute (such is James’s conceit) the very soul of his preaching. Mary stands, as it were, within the sphere of James’s ministry. But Lutgard stands definitely outside the sphere of Thomas’s. When Thomas reports on the advice she gave him, he presents it as the service of an outside consultant: he says that in his years as a canon he had been vulnerable to temptations in his hearing of confessions, apparently as a result of the things he heard people confess, and accordingly went to Lutgard to express his anguish about this, in response to which she prayed on his behalf, then assured him that Christ would protect him from such temptations, which he never again experienced. She gave him a sort of technical advice, on the basis of her own revelations, that when saying the Te Deum he should bow in praise of the Blessed Virgin at the point when her womb is mentioned (“a practice that I commend to all readers”), and rather than picture himself in a partnership with her, he should regard her instead as a source of examples for his preaching, an object, as it were, of his own research. Thomas, to be sure, appears to admire Lutgard as much as James had admired Mary, but her place is not as a participant in his ministry but rather as a valued specialist to whom he has had recourse for help. Thus in the vita of Lutgard, Thomas presents a thoroughly developed view of the relationship between holy woman and priest. Here the woman, through her revelations and intercessions, works as actively and with as much marvelous success for the salvation of souls as Mary of Oignies had done; yet she does so from an isolation chamber—in the sense that she is not only cloistered and therefore removed from society, but, more importantly, removed from other relationships as well, even within the cloister, except those that pertain narrowly to the exercise of the powers that emerge from her privileged rapport with Christ. She appears, in this sense, almost exclusively as an expert in the exercise of her powers, and the priest encounters her as such, seeking her out for those powers but not otherwise sharing his field of action with her. In this sense she is not at all like Mary, who, in James’s account, moved in the same urban space as priests such as himself,

thomas of cantimpré and female sanctit y 55

and there, like them (though without becoming their competitor, as he was careful to maintain), busied herself with the care of souls. Thomas instead portrays the woman in a way that carefully cordons her off from the world of the priest, except when she is called for. What then was at stake for Thomas in developing a perspective on holy women that stands in some contrast to that of his mentor James? Like James he sees holy women as, in effect, marking a boundary of priestly authority by displaying powers that lie beyond the priest’s grasp. But he is more cautious about his affirmation of these powers. Not irrelevant here is Thomas’s longstanding awareness of what he saw as James’s moral shortcomings, which the latter abetted, Thomas seems to have thought, by excessive encounters with holy women, and which therefore could be guarded against by a careful quarantine of such women. Such suspicion of contact with women, as is well known, was deeply rooted in monastic tradition, and the mendicant friars gave it ample expression. That Thomas would do so as well is not surprising. Yet the friars also, by their very calling to minister to others within secular society, necessarily preached to women, with much success, and the fervor of their female converts for a form of the Christian life that made conversion a central concern was not to be ignored; for this reason the women’s charismatic powers, expressing that fervor, were also to be affirmed, and this in turn implied acknowledgment of the limits of priestly powers to which they pointed. In Thomas’s mature view, then, the female saint was to be, at once, both carefully contained and evangelically zealous. That is the model of sanctity he presented in his vita of Lutgard, even though Lutgard herself was cloistered, unlike the many lay penitent women who, conforming basically to the same ideal in the hands of their hagiographers, would soon dominate the field of female sanctity under mendicant sponsorship.

 THE CHANGING FORTUNES OF ANGELA OF FOLIGNO, DAUGHTER, MOTHER, AND WIFE Catherine M. Mooney

In spite of the fact that [Angela] was a wife and mother she allowed herself to be led into the crime of adultery, not once but innumerable times. Lower and lower she fell until she became positively shameless. One lover succeeded another; one after another all were thrown aside as soon as they had succumbed to her wiles. —hugh francis blunt (1928) 

We know that [Angela] . . . was daughter, wife, mother; that at a former time she was quite given to worldly ideas and desires, without however ever violating the threefold duty of her circumstances. —michele faloci pulignani (1932) 

About this time God hearkened to the earnest desire of the penitent: her mother died, then her husband, and soon afterwards all her children. These tragic events were very painful to her; but she made the sacrifice with resignation to the will of God. —marion alphonse habig (1959) 

Angela of Foligno [is among women who] are mistreated by their husbands; they thank God and rejoice when death takes both husband and children from them. —david herlihy (1985) 

angel a of foligno !57#

A

ngela of Foligno as daughter, mother, and wife has a chameleonlike character, to judge by the opinions of her many editors and commentators. She is variously adulterous spouse or mistreated wife, tender or detached mother, daughter overly devoted to her mother or one eager to break free. These multiple representations of Angela are striking because each is based on evidence from a single source, known as the Liber. The text lavishly describes Angela’s interior mystical journey along a path of penitence, poverty, and suffering, yet is virtually bereft of the sort of biographical details required to reconstruct her family life. Indeed, it is in part the very fragmentary nature of the evidence that has allowed, even invited, historians to fill in the gaps as they attempt to give body to this enigmatic figure. Like the bits of glass caught between the mirrors of a kaleidoscope, the fragments of Angela’s life assemble and reassemble in a series of images, conveyed to us in the disparate stories of scholars from widely differing cultures and chronological periods. This essay is the tale of how their stories evolved. In line with previous research, I explore how saints are culturally constructed and, specifically, how medieval men tell women’s stories and thereby forge idealized notions of female sanctity. I additionally consider here not only medieval texts, but also modern and contemporary accounts that shape our view of Angela. Taking as my starting point the few medieval passages that tell us about Angela’s family, I next consider how this story evolves in subsequent manuscripts, Latin editions, and translations. Readers of these texts add another layer of interpretation, as a sampling of scholarly and popular works on Angela demonstrates. I am certainly no exception to this rule and, after telling the story of the manuscripts, their editions, translations, and scholarly and popular works, I will add to the story of Angela as daughter, mother, and especially wife by proposing a new reading of a key passage about her family.

the liber Virtually everything we know about Angela derives from the Latin text known as the Liber. While the force of repetition has virtually transformed the speculative chronology of Angela’s life suggested by Martin-Jean Ferré in 1925 into established fact in much scholarship, secure dates and information about Angela are meager. She was born sometime in the thirteenth century, married, had an unspecified number of children of unknown sex, and at some point adopted the life of a lay Franciscan penitent, thus joining the massive poverty movement known as the vita apostolica. By the time she died in 1309, a circle of devotees, including Franciscan friars and probably laypeople as well, had coalesced around her. These are among the scant details known regarding Angela’s outer life.

!58# saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

Angela’s Liber, or “Book,” is a collection of discrete texts, divided by recent scholarship into two parts, the Memorial and the Instructions. The Memorial, some three thousand lines of Latin text, purports to be Angela’s account of her own spiritual journey dictated to a Franciscan identified just once in the text as “Brother A.” Born in Foligno and at one point residing in Assisi, Brother A. was Angela’s relative, sometime confessor, and ardent devotee. Beyond a brief mention in the Instructions, and what can be gleaned about him from his work as scribe and co-author of the Memorial, nothing else is known. The somewhat lengthier Instructions include a series of thirty-six texts, or “Instructions,” a brief notice about Angela’s death, and an epilogue, recorded by a variety of anonymous writers, many or perhaps even all having been composed after Angela’s death. The more convoluted and complex redactional history of the Instructions has led most recent scholars to focus their attention on the Memorial, the text most securely attached to Angela. This is not to say that the Memorial has an easy, straightforward redactional history. It exists in two redactions, a longer maior redaction that itself evolved over time as Brother A. compiled, rearranged, and expanded his notes, and a later abbreviated minor redaction. The text represents multiple voices: the voice of Angela, the voice of God as quoted by Angela, and the voice of Brother A., who reports Angela’s words and regularly interrupts her account to add his own commentary. Although authorship has traditionally been assigned to Angela, the text is minimally a co-authored text. Considering that Brother A. chose how to express in Latin what Angela dictated in Umbrian, when to omit or elaborate her comments, and how to organize them, one could cogently argue that he is the sole author of the Memorial. Paralleling the anonymity of Brother A., known to us only through the Liber, is Angela herself. There is no archival evidence of her life in Foligno. Ubertino of Casale mentioned Angela in 1305, while she was still alive, but says not a word about any text associated with her. She is identified just once within the Memorial as “L.”—possibly for “Lelle,” a shortened form of Angela—and only as “a. de f.” in the notice of her death in the earliest manuscript of the Liber. She becomes “Angela” only in later manuscripts and in “Instructions” composed after her death. So little do we know about this woman outside of the Liber that it has even been asked, somewhat facetiously, whether she ever existed all.

the memorial: evidence regarding angela’s family The only explicit evidence regarding Angela as human daughter, mother, and wife in the Memorial occurs in two passages. It is the oft-quoted first passage that has elicited so many discordant comments about Angela and

angel a of foligno !59#

that will also be the focus of this chapter. It appears in chapter one, where Brother A. briefly summarizes the first nineteen steps of Angela’s spiritual journey. My translation, based on Thier and Calufetti’s critical edition, sacrifices elegance to preserve a more literal rendering of the Latin: Ninth, I was given to seek the way of the cross, so that I would be able to stand at the foot of the cross where all sinners take refuge. And I was instructed and enlightened and shown the way of the cross in this manner: namely, I was inspired that if I wanted to go unto the cross, I would strip myself in order to be lighter, and I would go naked unto the cross, and I would forgive all who had offended me, and I would strip myself of all earthly things and of all men and women and of all friends and relatives and of all others and of my property and even of my own self, and I would give my heart to Christ, who had granted me the aforesaid graces, and I would go by the thorny path, that is, the way of tribulation. And then I began to give up my best clothes, foods, and headdresses. But this was still rather shameful and painful for me to do because I still did not feel love. And I was with my husband, therefore it was bitter for me when insult was said to me or injury done to me, however, I bore it as patiently as I could. And then it happened, God willing, that in that period my mother, who was a great impediment to me, died. And shortly thereafter my husband and all my children died. Since I had begun on the aforesaid way and had prayed to God that they die, their deaths greatly consoled me. And I thought that right after these things which God had done for me that my heart would always be in the heart of God and that the heart of God would always be in my heart. [Nono, dabatur mihi quaerere quae esset via crucis, ut possem stare ad pedem crucis ubi refugiunt omnes peccatores. Et fuit mihi instructa et illuminata et demonstrata via crucis isto modo, scilicet quia inspiratum est mihi quod si volebam ire ad crucem expoliarem me ut essem magis levis, et nuda irem ad crucem, scilicet quod parcerem omnibus qui me offendissent et expoliarem me de omnibus terrenis et de omnibus hominibus et feminis et de omnibus amicis et parentibus et de omnibus aliis et de possessione mea et de meipsa, et cor meum darem Christo qui mihi praedicta beneficia fecerat, et irem per viam spinosam scilicet tribulationis. Et tunc incoepi dimittere pannos meliores et de cibariis et de pannis capitis. Sed erat adhuc mihi satis verecundum et poenosum quia non sentiebam adhuc de amore. Et eram cum viro meo, unde et amarum erat mihi quando dicebatur mihi iniuria vel quando fiebat mihi iniuria, tamen sustinebam patienter sicut poteram. Et factum est, volente Deo, quod illo tempore mortua fuit mater mea, quae erat mihi magnum impedimentum. Et postea mortuus

!60# saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

est vir meus et omnes filii in brevi tempore. Et quia incoeperam viam praedictam et rogaveram Deum quod morerentur, magnam consolationem inde habui scilicet de morte eorum. Et cogitabam quod deinceps postquam Deus fecerat mihi praedicta, quod cor meum semper esset in corde Dei et cor Dei semper esset in corde meo.]

The second passage about Angela’s family appears later, in chapter three. Angela is describing the aftermath of an intense encounter with God: And after I returned home, I felt a peaceful sweetness so extreme that I do not know how to express it, and I had a great desire to die. That peaceful, quiet, delectable sweetness made it so painful for me to live that I cannot describe it: it was because I wanted to achieve that feeling, and not lose it, that I wanted to die from this world. And living became more painful to me than the sorrow of my mother’s and children’s death and any sorrow which I was able to imagine. I lay in this intense consolation and languor for eight days, and my soul cried out: Lord, take pity on me and do not let me remain in this world any longer.

Anyone familiar with medieval religious life will understand what prompted Angela’s prayer that her family die. Married women in late medieval Italy were beginning to gain recognition as holy women, but only after they had somehow severed their ties with children and especially husbands. An active sexual life and the pursuit of perfection were simply incompatible. Other themes interwoven throughout the Memorial reveal that Angela’s spiritual fecundity flowers especially after her family’s death. Freed from these earthly ties, she becomes daughter and spouse to God, and spiritual mother to a circle of devotees. Her sacrifice furthermore likened her to Christ, who also lost family and friends, and innocently suffered criticism and injury. These central religious motifs, however, have not kept scholars from speculating further about Angela’s relationship to her family.

the acta sanctorum and early manuscripts Jesuit John Bollandus published his influential Latin edition of Angela’s Liber in 1643 in the Acta sanctorum [AASS], a massive, multivolume project that has made saints’ lives readily available to scholars. Bollandus’s text is derived from a sixteenth-century edition of a fifteenth-century manuscript that selectively reports and radically reorders passages clearly delineated as the Memorial and the Instructions in Thier and Calufetti’s critical edition. This thematic arrangement emphasizes Angela’s sex and sexuality in ways

angel a of foligno !61#

that distinguish this “vita” (or “life”), as he calls it, from later editions of the Liber more faithful to the earliest manuscript tradition. First, the vita pointedly notes Angela’s familial obligation to her husband and children in its very opening sentence. The rest of the Prologue foregrounds Angela’s sex through an extended contrast that pits the wisdom of Angela, a weak, ignorant laywoman, against the this-worldly speculations of blind men. Repeated allusions to her as woman [mulier], female [femina], and mother [mater] bluntly make the point that Angela’s membership in the “female sex” [ femineum sexum] matters. The AASS and the texts it follows accomplish this, notably, by moving to the Prologue passages contained only in the Epilogue to the Instructions in many early manuscripts and not at all in others, most notably the fourteenth-century manuscript Assisi 342, which some scholars date as early as 1310–1312 and consider to be closest to the lost exemplar. Second, after a brief summary of Angela’s earliest steps in chapter one, the second chapter of the vita focuses extensively on Angela’s preconversion sinfulness by intermingling and moving forward various passages that Thier and Calufetti’s edition places toward the end of the Memorial and in an “Instruction” written probably after Angela’s death by someone other than Brother A. Like the Epilogue, this “Instruction” does not even appear in Assisi 342. In it Angela accuses herself of a superabundance of malicious vices, including gluttony, drunkenness, deception, hypocrisy, and murdering souls. Passages moved forward from within the Memorial have Angela accusing herself of sexual sin, saying she burned so much in her shameful parts that she used to apply material fire to extinguish her concupiscence until her confessor stopped her. Here too the discrepancy with Assisi 342 is noteworthy, for there Angela (or the scribe) pointedly observes that the places she burned were not her shameful parts, and there is no mention whatsoever of concupiscence. Elsewhere, the AASS text more subtly intensifies Angela’s sexual sin. Such adaptations show that Angela’s post-death journey parallels the dual trajectory of other female saints. Her preconversion life over the course of time becomes increasingly sinful and lascivious, as illustrated both by comparing the Memorial with the later Instructions and by comparing how these medieval texts are rendered in early modern editions such as the AASS. Angela’s postconversion life, on the other hand, moves in the opposite direction, portraying her as increasingly holy and conventionally female. Step 9, quoted above, graphically illustrates this point. In the early manuscripts and best editions Angela prays for her family’s death and is consoled when they die. Slight variations in the AASS text, however, radically reframe the passage. First, step 9 contains more explicitly religious language than it does in Assisi 342 and other early manuscripts. Angela’s struggle to give things up is

!62# saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

due not just to her lack of love, but to her lack of love for God. Her mother is not just an “impediment,” but an “impediment in the way of God.” Second, while reliable manuscripts have Angela say straight out that she prayed for her family’s death, the AASS Angela prayed only that God “free her from them.” This softens her desire and shifts the responsibility for their deaths firmly into God’s arena. Finally, the AASS version radically alters step 9 by having Angela say also that her family’s death caused her to suffer some pain. The notion was obviously lifted from the second and later passage to temper Angela’s unqualified expression of consolation in the early manuscript versions. Some scholars using the AASS version or others derived from it further embellish by noting Angela’s devotion to her mother. Given the Acta sanctorum’s wide availability to scholars, Bollandus’s influence in establishing a certain image of Angela can hardly be overstated. Indeed, important monograph editions of the Latin text and numerous vernacular translations that brought Angela to the attention of a wider public were based principally upon the AASS version and subsequent Latin editions based on it. Particularly noteworthy is Ernest Hello’s widely popular free French translation, published repeatedly since 1868, most recently in 1991. Scholars following this version or others based on it often note Angela’s struggles against sexual temptations and marital infidelity.

twentieth- century editions In the early twentieth century, three influential Latin editions of the Liber, each with accompanying translation, began to displace the AASS text and its descendants. Doncoeur (1925; trans. 1926) and Ferré (1927) each published critical editions based on relatively few manuscripts, and Faloci Pulignani (1932) published a single manuscript that seemed to him very complete. Doncoeur’s and Ferré’s texts, and to a lesser extent Faloci Pulignani’s, follow the general structure of the Memorial presented in Thier and Calufetti’s edition. In sharp contrast to the AASS text, the lustful Angela is largely relegated to the Instructions, where she belongs. All three editors recognize that these were composed by diverse authors after Brother A’s Memorial. None of these editions tempers Angela’s prayer for her family’s death by moving her later comment about feeling sorrow forward into the text of step 9. Nevertheless, these and other editors and translators of the Liber, evincing a modern concern about how this passage reflected upon Angela as daughter, mother, and wife, insert preemptive notes at step 9 apprising readers of the later passage, sometimes also qualifying Angela’s simply-stated “sorrow” [dolorem] as “profound” or “very great,” as do many other editors, translators, and scholars. Since all three editions render the two Latin pas-

angel a of foligno !63#

sages regarding Angela’s family similarly, I will discuss only Ferré’s, which is based principally on Assisi 342. As editor, Ferré naturally had to supplement the Latin manuscript’s spare use of capital letters and puncti, or points, marking pauses, with numerous capitals, commas, periods, and other punctuation in order for the text to make sense to modern readers. These editorial decisions necessarily entail interpretation. Note, for example, how Ferré’s punctuation differently renders the phrase “I was with my husband” as compared to Thier and Calufetti’s edition:

thier and calufetti And then I began to give up my best clothes, foods, and headdresses. But this was still rather shameful and painful for me to do because I still did not feel love. And I was with my husband, therefore it was bitter for me when insult was said to me or injury done to me, however, I bore it as patiently as I could.

ferré And then I began to give up my best clothes, foods, and headdresses. But this was still rather shameful and painful for me to do because I still did not feel love and I was with my husband. Therefore it was bitter for me when they insulted me or when injury was done to me, however, I bore it as patiently as I could.

Both versions are open to interpretation, but Ferré’s more closely associates Angela’s shame and pain at giving up fine clothes and food with her relationship to her husband, which appears also to obstruct her love for God. Angela’s spare and ambiguous remarks leave room for speculation, and commentators have been prolific in rendering verdicts about the unspoken details behind these lines and about Angela’s following prayer that her family die. In a pseudonymously authored biography of Angela, Ferré remarks that her husband’s and mother’s “scrutinizing eyes” made it difficult for her to give up her finery. She had to contend with her husband’s annoyance and desires (probably regarding sex, which she had renounced in step 8), fellow villagers’ gossip and criticism, and her mother’s tears, whose striking opposition to God’s plan justified, Ferré seems to imply, the fact that she died first. Only Angela’s children escape unscathed. Since it is hard to find any fault with children who die, it is not surprising that their characterization

!64# saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

throughout history has been far more static and scant than that of Angela, her mother, or husband. Even her children, however, reflect evolving scholarly styles. Ferré is typical of his generation in calling Angela’s children [ filii] little “boys,” while recent scholars increasingly employ the obviously more accurate translation “children,” acknowledging that Angela’s offspring could have included girls. With Ferré’s chronology now receiving greater scrutiny, it is also anyone’s guess whether Angela’s children were “little.” Thier and Calufetti’s punctuation of this same passage subtly creates another impression. After Angela had, with pain and shame, begun to give up her fine food and clothes, she states: “I was with my husband, therefore it was bitter for me when insult was said to me or injury done to me, however, I bore it as patiently as I could.” Although Thier and Calufetti’s frequent footnotes almost always regard their Latin text, here they comment on the late-fourteenth- or early-fifteenth-century Italian version included on facing pages, which differs notably from the Latin: And I was with my husband, whence it was bitter for me when I was told that I did him injury, and yet as much as I was able, I patiently bore it. [E sì stava con el mio marito, onde amaro m’era, quando m’era dito ch’io li fazeva inzuria, e pur como poteva, sosteneva pazientemente.]

They believe this captures better the sentiment of Folignese society and the text’s original meaning. By choosing poverty, and perhaps chastity as well, Angela harmed her husband. Although Thier and Calufetti privilege the Italian text, they acknowledge that the Latin text could have a very different interpretation. Indeed, they formulate a striking paraphrase of the Latin: “And I was with my husband and it was bitter for me when he injured [ingiuriava] me for my way of life.” In essence, they suggest the Latin and Italian versions each capture the truth as perceived from different perspectives, hers (Latin) and that of her husband and others (Italian). Reflecting an increasing trend, moreover, they recognize that Angela’s scandalous past has been exaggerated.

the feminist turn Just as earlier scholars reflected the assumptions of their eras in telling Angela’s story, so do recent scholars often evince contemporary cultural sensitivities regarding women’s subordination and oppression. First and simply, they have named the elephant in the room ignored by previous scholars, who appended notes to the passage where Angela prayed for her family’s death

angel a of foligno !65#

in order to point out her later expression of sorrow, but failed to observe that her sorrow concerned the loss of her mother and children; she said not a word about her husband. Even if her relationship—and relations—with an earthly husband impugned her status as the spouse of Christ in a way that her earthly roles as daughter and mother did not undermine her identity as God’s daughter and her spiritual motherhood, the omission is noteworthy, or, more precisely, is noteworthy today. Second, scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum judiciously suggest that Angela might well have welcomed “escape from the burden of both husband and children.” Finally, other commentators venture further, remarking that Angela’s husband showed her little affection or even mistreated her, as David Herlihy asserted in one of the quotations opening this essay. Lacking explicit evidence about her husband anywhere in the Memorial or Instructions beyond step 9, however, we must consider such claims too speculative. I offer a structural analysis of step 9, however, that lends some credence to the notion that Angela’s husband might have harmed her. In the first paragraph of step 9, she enumerates four tasks required to follow the way of the cross. Each task is structurally mirrored in the second paragraph, where Angela recounts how she began, however incompletely, to respond to those tasks. Such parallelism is a device found elsewhere in the text as well. As the Latin cited above shows, each task and each response is introduced by either the connector scilicet [namely] or et [and]. To highlight the parallelism of these paragraphs, I interweave them, setting phrases from the first paragraph in roman type and those from the second paragraph in italics. Ninth, I was given to seek the way of the cross, so that I would be able to stand at the foot of the cross where all sinners take refuge. And I was instructed and enlightened and shown the way of the cross in this manner: [1] namely, I was inspired that if I wanted to go unto the cross, I would strip myself in order to be lighter, and I would go naked unto the cross, And then I began to give up my best clothes, foods, and headdresses. But this was still rather shameful and painful for me to do because I still did not feel love. [2] and I would forgive all who had offended me And I was with my husband, therefore it was bitter for me when insult was said to me or injury done to me, however, I bore it as patiently as I could. [3] and I would strip myself of all earthly things and of all men and women and of all friends and relatives and of all others and of my property and even of my own self, And then it happened, God willing, that in that period my mother, who was a great impediment to me, died. And shortly thereafter my husband and all

!66# saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

my children died. Since I had begun on the aforesaid way and had prayed to God that they die, their deaths greatly consoled me. [4] and I would give my heart to Christ, who had granted me the aforesaid graces, and I would go by the thorny path, that is, the way of tribulation. And I thought that right after these things which God had done for me that my heart would always be in the heart of God and that the heart of God would always be in my heart.

Several features of the second task and Angela’s response merit closer scrutiny. First, what does Angela mean when she says people had “offended” [offendissent] her? Elsewhere in the Memorial, the verb suggests unspecified wrongdoing, wrong actions, and notably, in one passage, even physical damage. Second, regarding the insult she suffered—literally, the “injury spoken to her”—one must note a discrepancy between Thier and Calufetti’s text, cited above, “it was bitter for me when insult was said to me,” and Doncoeur’s and Ferré’s versions, which use the plural, “when they insulted me [emphasis mine],” which Ferré uses to assert that Angela’s fellow villagers (perhaps also her husband?) criticized her behavior. Thier and Calufetti’s passive construction (a construction common throughout the Memorial), alternatively, leaves unclear whether one person alone (her husband?) or more than one person verbally injured her. All three editions agree, however, in employing the passive construction for the next phrase, “when injury was done to me,” leaving open the possibility that one person alone (her husband?) or more than one person injured her. Third, although these editors punctuate their texts differently, they order their phrases similarly: Angela’s “I was with my husband”—followed by a period in Ferré, but by only a comma in Thier and Calufetti—immediately precedes “therefore [unde] it was bitter for me when [I]” was insulted and injured. The adverbial connecter unde, “whence” or “therefore,” suggests that being with her husband, or her husband himself, is somehow the cause or explanation of her bitterness when insulted and injured. Angela could perhaps mean that it was bitter, when she was with her husband, to be injured (and perhaps insulted as well) by him. Finally, what specifically does Angela mean when she says she was “injured,” literally, that “injury was done to [her]” [ fiebat mihi iniuria]? She perhaps does not mean mere verbal injuries, as some have suggested, because she joins this phrase to the preceding phrase about “injury being said” to her with the conjunction “or” [vel], and although she and the scribe sometimes so join phrases to express the same thing in two different ways, they use this construction more often to refer to two related but different things. Injury “done” to Angela could suggest an injurious action, but whether she was

angel a of foligno !67#

referring to actual physical injury, injurious deeds, or simply harm “done” in the sense of being “caused” or “accomplished” is impossible to know. Where Angela (though, interestingly, never Brother A.) elsewhere uses the term iniuria in the Memorial, she never unambiguously means physical injury. Once she uses the term to describe spiritual pain, twice to discuss Christ’s suffering in the passion, which for her included physical, verbal, and emotional abuse, and twice to describe how union with God transforms one’s pain.

conclusion Ultimately, we are left to wonder. One might argue that it is enough for us to rest content with a theological reading of this medieval religious text. That, after all, is the treatise’s explicit raison d’être. Seeking the way of the cross, Angela had to sacrifice her loved ones, especially her husband, who blocked her path to becoming Christ’s spouse. Wondering about the details of her family relationships, about what might have “really happened,” is one of those questions academics disdainfully deflect with a “But that’s the wrong question.” But that’s the wrong objection because, as this essay shows, editors, copyists, translators, and scholars have always wondered about Angela as daughter, mother, and wife. To that end they have rearranged and conflated passages, altered texts, inserted notes, punctuated Latin, and speculated, sometimes at surprising length, about relationships within Angela’s immediate family. Did Angela’s husband mistreat her? Is this why, when she expressed sorrow at her mother’s and children’s death, she failed to mention him? We can never know—not only because neither she nor Brother A. tells us in the written text that provides our only evidence, but also because we, in humility, must acknowledge our particular, partial, and circumscribed perspectives. As Caroline Bynum points out, our readings “change because we change, both as individuals and as a culture.” Describing history in the “comic mode,” she notes that “comedy tells many stories, achieves a conclusion only by coincidence and wild improbability, and undergirds our sense of human limitation, even our cynicism about our motives and self-awareness. . . . In comedy there is resolution for only a moment.” And so, these stories above—including my own—are history in the comic mode. “In comedy, the happy ending is contrived. Thus, a comic stance toward doing history is aware of contrivance, of risk. It always admits it may be wrong. A comic stance knows there is, in actuality, no ending (happy or otherwise)—that doing history is, for the historian, telling a story that could be told another way.”

 “A PARTICULAR LIGHT OF UNDERSTANDING” margaret of cortona, the franciscans, and a cortonese cleric Mary Harvey Doyno

cortona’s saint In the late 1280s a boy suffering from demonic possession begged his family to make the journey from Borgo San Sepolcro to the neighboring city of Cortona. There was, he told them, a woman in that city whose “prayers and good works” would help loosen the devil’s hold on him. According to a contemporary account, as the boy and his family made their pilgrimage up the steep hill to Cortona, “the devil could not endure the wall thrown up by [her] prayers, and with great agitations, as if he were tearing the boy apart, released him.” The fortification of prayer that upset the devil and protected Cortona, as well as those drawn to the city by Margaret of Cortona’s reputation as a font of spiritual and physical healing, identifies the physical geography of Margaret’s piety. Margaret was and still is Cortona’s saint. Margaret was not a biblical figure, an early Christian martyr, or a pious person from the distant past, however. Rather, she was an unmarried laywoman with an illegitimate son, who, after having lived for nine years as the concubine of a nobleman in the nearby town of Montepulciano, had come to Cortona seeking protection and forgiveness after the death of her lover had left her homeless. The Legenda de vita et miraculis beatae Margaritae de Cortona, compiled by Fra Giunta Bevegnati, one of her Franciscan confessors, describes Margaret’s spiritual development through a series of conversations between Margaret and Christ. While the text includes the accounts of several companions who witnessed Margaret’s visions (and questioned her about them afterward), the dominant voices are those of her Franciscan confessors and

margaret of cortona 69

guardians. Margaret joined the Franciscan third, or lay, order a few years after her arrival in Cortona, and as her reputation for visions and miracles grew, her mendicant supervisors began to record their interactions with Margaret. Within ten years of her death, the Legenda was completed with the hope that it would argue not only for Margaret’s sanctity but also for her particularly Franciscan sanctity. Modern scholars have examined the Franciscans’ interest in the details and nature of Margaret’s devotional life for examples of the asceticism, Eucharistic spirituality, and visionary behavior that were characteristic of lay, women’s, and mendicant spirituality in the later Middle Ages. As the story of the possessed boy from Borgo San Sepolcro makes clear, Margaret’s contemporaries linked her spiritual power and sanctity to her presence within Cortona; the boy longed to make a pilgrimage to the city to be healed by the famous Cortonese holy woman, and the devil was finally defeated by the wall of prayer Margaret used to protect Cortona. To understand Margaret’s career as Cortona’s holy woman during her life and as a patron saint after her death, it is necessary to place her within the phenomenon of lay civic patrons in the Italian communes. During the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the independent communes of northern and central Italy began to venerate recently deceased pious laymen and laywomen as civic patrons. While most of these lay saints were never officially canonized by the Roman church, the support they and their cults received from civic and religious authorities, as well as from the larger urban population, afforded them a place within a pantheon of civic protectors and patrons. Margaret was no exception; within a generation of her death, the city’s first statutes as an independent commune, written in 1325, outlined the civic festivities required for the proper celebration of her feast day, thus securing for her the role of civic patron of the city that had once offered her refuge. This chapter will explore the possible motivations for and consequences of Margaret’s decision, nine years before her death, to distance herself both physically and spiritually from her Franciscan guardians. In May of 1288 Margaret left the cell where she had been living in the heart of Cortona’s civic and religious center to move to a new cell, attached to the dilapidated church of San Basilio, perched high above the city. For her first two years at San Basilio, Margaret had only sporadic contact with her Franciscan confessor, Giunta. By 1290 Giunta had stopped visiting Margaret. In his place Margaret took on a secular cleric, Ser Badia, as her main confessor. Ser Badia not only served as Margaret’s primary spiritual companion, but also as rector of San Basilio and the community of lay penitents that followed Margaret to her new cell. During much of her time at San Basilio, Badia contributed

70 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

accounts of Margaret’s visions to Fra Giunta to be included in the Legenda. Badia’s accounts emphasize the similarities between his own journey as a penitent and Margaret’s journey and contrast with the hierarchical and often skeptical tone with which the Cortonese Franciscans often addressed Margaret. Testaments and episcopal charters referring to the community that gathered around Margaret at San Basilio make it clear that Margaret was not the only lay penitent looking for distance from the Franciscans. By studying Margaret’s decision to leave her Franciscan guardians, I shall consider the implications that both the relationship she found with a secular cleric at San Basilio and the community that formed around her there had for the development of her identity as Cortona’s saint.

the penitential life When the penitent Margaret arrived in Cortona, she and her son found refuge with two noblewomen who had also devoted their lives to penance and were most likely connected to what scholars have called the lay penitential movement, which was sweeping across northern and central Italy at this time. Margaret’s life as a penitent coincided with the period in which the papacy and the mendicant orders began to institutionalize and regularize what had been largely independent associations for much of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In Cortona Margaret had joined a group of penitents that had only loose associations with the Cortonese Franciscans. By the time of her death in 1297, however, those same penitents were clearly identified as members of the burgeoning Franciscan third order. Pope Nicholas IV’s 1289 bull Supra montem had outlined a strict set of requirements for laymen and laywomen living the penitential life that required lay penitents not only to adopt and stick to a particular penitential program but also to affiliate themselves with the Franciscan order, whose friars would act as spiritual directors. Supra montem paved the way for the institutional growth of the mendicant lay orders and put an end to the independence of lay penitential communities in Italian cities. The Legenda makes it clear that not long after her arrival, Margaret developed a reputation for the severity of her penitential routine and quickly distinguished herself from the other Cortonese penitents. As all lay penitents did, she wore a drab striped habit, which both identified her religious commitment and reminded her of the pleasure she had once taken in wearing the ornate clothes, golden barrettes, and makeup that marked her status as a kept woman. Margaret used a rigorous routine of fasting, prayer, and self-mutilation to purge herself of the memories and effects of her former

margaret of cortona 71

life. Each of Margaret’s penitential acts became an opportunity for her to increase her religious commitment and her connection to Christ. One of Margaret’s first objectives after having adopted a life of penance was to affiliate herself with the Cortonese Franciscans. The Friars Minor had a strong presence in late-thirteenth-century Cortona. The church of San Francesco, one of the first Franciscan churches in Italy, stood a few meters away from the Palazzo del Comune, the city’s political and economic center. Margaret, like many other lay penitents, was a devotee of Francis of Assisi, and undoubtedly saw an alliance with his order as a mark of prestige and institutional support for her life as a civic penitent. Margaret’s relationship with the Cortonese Franciscans did not begin smoothly, however. The Legenda reports that the Cortonese Franciscans, finding her at first too pretty and too young to be suitable for the order, had their doubts about Margaret. Margaret argued that she was worthy to join the Franciscans, reminding the doubting friars that they had seen her flee “the world to join a community of religious people.” Margaret contended, “You have seen me change my life for the better through the grace given to me by Christ. Why are you afraid? Why do you delay my entry?” Finally realizing that she was “united inseparably to Christ,” the friars acquiesced and allowed Margaret in 1277 to take the habit of their third order. Margaret’s comments make clear that the connection she sought, and won, to the Franciscans was not the beginning of her religious life. As she had insisted, she was already living removed from “this world” in the company of other “religious people.” The Legenda offers some sense of who those people were: the widows Marinaria and Raniera first offered Margaret shelter; the wealthy noblewoman Diabella donated her home so Margaret could found a “hospital of Mercy”; and Lady Gila saw Margaret faint after receiving the Host. That Margaret could choose to join the Franciscans speaks to the undefined religious and institutional status lay penitents had at this time. While the Franciscans held a substantial amount of influence over Cortona’s penitents as the most prominent new religious order within the city, the Friars Minor did not have any formal authority over civic penitents until after Pope Nicholas IV’s 1289 bull.

margaret’s move and the writing of the legenda The year before Nicholas issued Supra montem, in 1288, Margaret moved away from her Franciscan patrons. She left the cell where she had been living near the church of San Francesco and made the steep climb, half a mile above the city center, to San Basilio. Margaret stayed at San Basilio

72 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

until her death in 1297, and her body remains there today. After news of the miracles performed at Margaret’s tomb spread, San Basilio became a popular pilgrimage site. And within a generation of Margaret’s death, this once-ruined church had been rebuilt to honor the city’s newest patron. The Legenda presents Margaret’s move as an attempt to flee both the general distractions of city life and the specific attention she was receiving from the Cortonese as her reputation as a holy woman spread. As the Legenda makes clear, the baptisms, healings, and exorcisms that the Cortonese asked Margaret to perform did not leave her much time for her own private devotion. Margaret begged Christ to let her live as the Magdalene had. But Christ reminded Margaret that he “did not intend” her “to live in the desert” since, as he tells her, “deserts are not appropriate these days. You can remain solitary in your own land, as if you were in a vast desert.” Margaret seems to have struggled with this advice, trying on repeated occasions to stop speaking to her fellow Cortonese. Eventually Christ relented and encouraged Margaret’s move, but was careful to assuage any concerns the Franciscans might have had. He assures Margaret that her Franciscan guardians need not worry about where she will be buried since she promised her body to the order when she first took their habit of penance. The friars’ anxiety over the eventual location of Margaret’s tomb might seem a bit premature here; after all, in 1288, when she moved to San Basilio, Margaret was still just one of many members of the order’s growing lay wing. The circumstances and chronology of the construction of the Legenda offer a fuller understanding of the origins of these concerns. The text, divided into chapters describing Margaret’s virtues, includes commentary from her confessors as well as others who witnessed her visions. These brief bits of commentary are woven between Margaret’s conversations with Christ. The text gives no indication of the chronology of either the conversations or commentary, and each chapter contains episodes from throughout Margaret’s life in Cortona. Giunta recounts that he began the Legenda at the request of the Franciscan inquisitor, Giovanni di Castiglione, who had served as Margaret’s primary confessor before Giunta. Scholars have noted that Giovanni’s request was in effect the beginning of an effort to check Margaret’s visions for signs of heresy and demonic possession. That effort seems most likely to have begun when Margaret moved to San Basilio. While the Legenda was begun as an attempt to assess Margaret’s orthodoxy, it was finished with the aim of having Margaret canonized. At the time of Margaret’s death, as word of the numerous miracles performed at her tomb spread and her role as civic saint solidified, the Friars Minor began a campaign to reclaim not only their right to Margaret’s body but also their right to act as the primary protectors and patrons of her growing cult.

margaret of cortona 73

The Legenda, which was still being complied in 1297, thus took on a new agenda. By the time of Cardinal legate Napoleone Orsini’s authentication in 1308, the finished text had become a key weapon in the fight to establish Margaret’s Franciscan sanctity. Christ’s assurance that the Franciscans would retain control of Margaret’s body thus makes more sense as an addition made to the text after Margaret’s death. In 1288, however, the Franciscans were still suspicious of Margaret. As her difficult entry into the Franciscan order demonstrates, both her past and present behavior complicated her transition from lay penitent to civic holy woman. Her penitential commitment and public devotions earned her as many supporters as skeptics. The Legenda alternates between celebrating Margaret’s spiritual abilities and reporting the doubts those same devotional activities raised in the minds of both the Cortonese and the Franciscans, revealing the text’s split agenda. Margaret was not only too attractive to be allowed an easy entry into the Franciscan third order, but often too rigorous and public in her devotions and visions to escape the critical attention of her patrons. Margaret seems to have regularly stolen the limelight from her Franciscan guardians. The Legenda reports that on one Sunday Margaret stood up in the middle of San Francesco, interrupting Giunta’s sermon, and began to scream, demanding to be told where “the crucified Lord” had been taken. Her outburst was so potent that the entire congregation burst into tears. Giunta managed to regain control of his audience when, without interrupting his sermon, he assured Margaret “in a loud voice” that Christ would make his presence known to all soon. Margaret quickly submitted to her superior’s commands, and “sat back down in front of everyone, looking half-dead.” The decision to include episodes that focus more attention on Margaret’s outbursts than on the substantive moments of her spiritual development reveals the high level of scrutiny the friars were applying to their charge. Margaret was aware that she was being watched, and complained to both Giunta and Christ that she knew some of the friars doubted the veracity of her visions, and that they had accused her of being both delusional and a fraud. With this often-contentious relationship in mind, it is tempting to see Margaret’s decision to move to San Basilio as an attempt to escape her Franciscan superiors rather than simply a wish for a break from the bustle of city life. After all, Margaret did not find the quiet she supposedly sought at San Basilio, having been followed by a community of lay penitents that came to live alongside her, attend to her needs, and ultimately to remain at the church to manage her tomb and cult after her death. During her first two years at San Basilio, Giunta was among those climbing the hill to be near Margaret. But in 1290 the Franciscans decided to limit their contact with

74 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

Margaret. In that year the Franciscan provincial authorities, uneasy about the amount of time Giunta was spending with Margaret, first limited his visits to once every eight days, and then ordered that he return to his convent in Siena. Giunta did not to return to Cortona, or to Margaret, until shortly before the saint’s death in 1297. Between 1290 and 1297, therefore, Ser Badia, a local cleric, took over as Margaret’s confessor and contributed accounts of his meetings with Margaret for Giunta to include in the Legenda. As Giunta himself notes, his work aims at bringing together some of the events and wonders of Margaret’s life, but lacks a coherent structure or polish. The cross-purposes of the text’s inception and completion perhaps offer an explanation. Giunta urged his readers to help him organize the material, complaining that he had been too busy to arrange properly each part of Margaret’s story. Giunta’s failure to organize the text, however, is the reader’s gain. The rough quality of the text allows the work to remain a compendium of voices. While the most distinct voices are those of Margaret’s Franciscan guardians, the voice of Badia can also be heard.

margaret and ser badia In the conversations that we must assume took place after 1290 since they include mentions of Badia as a witness, and not Giunta, and which we can also safely assume were drawn from the reports Badia gave to Giunta to include in the Legenda, the questioning and doubting of Margaret’s devotional experiences have disappeared. Unlike her Franciscan guardians, Badia is not presented in the Legenda as concerned about the nature and validity of Margaret’s visions. Instead Margaret and Badia seem to share a similar spiritual history and devotional attitude. As Margaret has had to flee her evil worldly past, so has Badia. As Margaret fears abandonment, so does Badia. And when Margaret prostrates herself in front of the cross, begging for forgiveness, Badia joins her. In each episode that includes mention of Badia, Margaret relays the additional advice Christ has given to her to pass on to her confessor. For example, as Margaret meditates on the passion, Christ tells her that Badia once strove to offend Him and that she should find comfort in the hands of this priest precisely because he has reformed from his past shame; Badia, like Margaret, has clearly had a conversion experience. Throughout the Legenda Badia is not portrayed as concerned with maintaining a distinction or distance between confessor and penitent. In one of several occasions when Margaret experiences a vision of Christ after receiving the Host from Badia, Christ instructs Margaret to tell Badia to recite the Pater noster prayer several times and to be full of shame and sorrow as he strives to open his heart to remember the Passion. The exchange of roles

margaret of cortona 75

here is striking: Margaret gives her confessor some of the same tasks she has so often performed herself. Christ also tells Badia through his instructions to Margaret that the priest should not separate himself from Margaret out of fear, shame, or tribulation, because Badia’s ministry has been infused with “a particular light of understanding.” Christ goes on to warn Margaret that there will be moments when even Badia will distrust her. It is the explanation for Badia’s doubts, however, which stands out. Christ tells Margaret that Badia will doubt her in moments when Badia himself is “afraid that he has been abandoned.” Throughout the text, Margaret fears that Christ will abandon her, a common theme in visionary literature. In this passage, however, the reader learns that Badia also fears abandonment. During his time with Margaret, Badia himself seems to be experiencing a sense of mystical fullness, or presence, which he fears losing. In this same episode, confessor and penitent again exchange roles. Having accidentally blessed Badia in a moment of fervor, Margaret seeks Christ’s forgiveness. Christ forgives Margaret’s transgression, but goes on to tell her that her accident has provided Badia with a special grace. Margaret’s offense thus not only serves as fodder for her own spiritual development, but also aids her confessor’s devotional progress; they give Badia a “special grace” and “particular light of understanding,” and distinguish him from his Franciscan counterparts. Badia joins in on the spiritual journey of his charge instead of using his position as her confessor to question the nature and validity of her devotion. It would be misleading to paint too stark a contrast here. Giunta, as well as other Franciscans, celebrates Margaret’s visionary powers and penitential commitment throughout the text. The Legenda repeatedly exults Margaret as a mirror and example for the laity. In addition, Badia’s interactions with Margaret come to us through a text compiled by Giunta. Nevertheless, Badia is portrayed throughout the text as having treated Margaret quite differently from how the Franciscans treated her. While Giunta and his Franciscan brothers garner graces through their interactions with Margaret, these graces have a corporate significance; they refer not to individual spiritual development, but instead to the glory Margaret’s visions shine on Francis’ order. The sharp contrast between the moments of praise and doubt that distinguish the friars’ interaction with Margaret perhaps speaks to an equally sharp divide the Franciscans saw between themselves and Margaret. The distinction between confessor and penitent, religious and secular, friar and laywoman, stood at the heart of the development of the third orders. The Franciscans’ connection to Margaret, as well as to all of their lay penitents, depended upon these hierarchies. As a secular cleric Badia was outside of

76 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

the Franciscan chain of command. While he had sacramental rights that distinguished him from Margaret, he was also the local alternative to an increasingly international Franciscan order. His time as her confessor reveals a likeness and dependence between visionary and confessor that seems to have transcended their distinct religious identities. Unfortunately we know little about Badia himself. He is among those listed who saw the Legenda before it was approved by Cardinal Orsini in 1308. His name also appears in three wills written between 1290 and 1300, for which he served as executor. These wills identify Badia as the rector of San Basilio and charge him with the responsibility for seeing that the testator’s goods and money be distributed to the appropriate pious organizations. What we know about the community of devoti that gathered around Margaret at San Basilio and remained to manage her tomb and cult tells us a bit more about the environment Badia provided for Margaret as her confessor and as rector of San Basilio. In November of 1392, nearly a century after her death, the commune of Cortona, which owned the land on which San Basilio stood, finally granted control of the church, its adjacent houses, and Margaret’s shrine to the Observant Franciscans. This marked the end of nearly one hundred years of management by a community of Third Order Franciscans who were the descendants of the group of lay penitents who had followed Margaret up the hill. Often referred to as mantellati or continenti, this community of penitents included laymen and laywomen as well as clerics. A number of wills and episcopal charters tell us that the lay penitents and clerics living in houses surrounding San Basilio were responsible for maintaining the church, Margaret’s tomb, a hospital that catered to the pilgrims, and a domus misericordia dedicated to providing charity for the people of Cortona. While these penitents are clearly identified in the extant sources as members of the Franciscan third order, the efforts of the Friars Minor throughout the fourteenth century to take control of Margaret’s body make it clear that the two wings of the order were deeply divided. As Daniel Bornstein has well documented, the Cortonese themselves were aware of the distinction between the Franciscans at San Francesco and those at San Basilio and divided their pious bequests accordingly. Moreover, the striped habit Margaret is depicted wearing in the earliest pictorial representations of her is that of an independent lay penitent and not a Franciscan tertiary. This was not the first time that Cortona had seen such a split between its Franciscan citizens. In the mid-thirteenth century, a few decades before Margaret came to the city, Elias of Cortona moved himself and all of the friars he could convince to join him out of the hermitage, known as the Celle, which had been founded by Francis and was located just outside Cortona,

margaret of cortona 77

and into the newly built church of San Francesco within the walls of the city. A number of friars refused to make the move with Elias. By the early fourteenth century, those still living at the Celle were condemned as Spirituals and forced to abandon their suburban retreat. Although there is no direct evidence linking either Margaret or the community she founded at San Basilio to the Spiritual sympathizers at the Celle, Margaret’s decision to move to San Basilio, as well as the community that formed around her there, makes it clear that the Cortonese lay penitents experienced their own period of estrangement from their parent order. Thus Badia not only provided Margaret with the sympathy and compassion she was unable to find in her interactions with the Cortonese Franciscans, but also, with the support of the commune and bishop, led the foundation of a community of independent lay penitents dedicated to her veneration.

conclusion André Vauchez has noted that associations between the laity and the local clergy stood behind the beginnings of several cults of lay saints in the Italian communes. Vitae were often begun to record the miracles performed at a layperson’s tomb by precisely the individuals who were charged with the responsibility of maintaining those tombs. By the end of the thirteenth century, however, the institutionalization of the mendicant third orders left little room for the secular clergy to continue as the first proponents of their saintly fellow citizens. After 1289, laymen and laywomen who had devoted their lives to penance under the direction of Franciscan friars no longer had the same freedom to shape their religious lives; to devote oneself to a life of penance meant becoming a member of the Franciscan third order. Margaret’s decision to leave her cell near San Francesco and the community that was willing to follow her there suggest that some lay penitents struggled to resist the rules and regulations called for in Pope Nicholas IV’s bull. But Cortona’s lay penitents were not the only ones struggling to adjust to this new arrangement. The inquisitorial origins of the Legenda suggest that the Cortonese Franciscans had their own reservations about formally linking themselves with a penitent like Margaret. The ability Margaret had to garner devotion from her fellow Cortonese as well as those living near the city ultimately eased the Franciscans’ concerns. As more and more pilgrims arrived at San Basilio looking for relief from their physical and spiritual distress, Margaret’s sanctity became incontrovertible and the Franciscans had reason to argue for their role as primary patrons of Cortona’s new saint. For reasons that remain unclear, the Franciscans never transformed the Legenda into a seamless account of the development of Margaret’s Franciscan

78 saints, visionaries, and the making of holy persons

sanctity. Embedded in the text are passages that highlight the ambivalent relationship between Margaret and the friars and allow the reader to see aspects of Margaret’s life and spiritual development that were distinct from her Franciscan connections. The possessed boy’s knowledge that his cure could be found with Margaret, the spiritual symbiosis Margaret found with Badia, and the community and religious institutions that formed around Margaret at San Basilio all argue for a vision of Margaret’s sanctity that was separate from her professed religious affiliation. As the possessed boy, Badia, and the lay penitents who followed Margaret out of the city center all knew, the path to the divine lay with this charismatic holy woman and within the walls of her adopted city. The mendicants have often been seen as the central focus of any study of lay penitents and lay saints in medieval Italian cities, and their importance in the growth of lay saints’ cults and in the patronage of lay spirituality should not be questioned. But the circumstances and results of Margaret’s move up the hill in 1288 suggest that the Friars Minor did not always have as direct or as seamless a role in the development of the cults of contemporary civic saints in late medieval Italy as has been assumed. The joint community of secular clerics and lay penitents that congregated at San Basilio, and managed with the help of the communal government to retain control of Margaret’s tomb, suggests that the lay penitents under Badia’s protection were actively seeking to maintain an independent and varied religious life that was quickly disappearing. Margaret’s move away from her Franciscan guardians helped her to find the “particular light of understanding” a secular cleric could offer and created a space for those Cortonese who first venerated and served her cult. Away from the doubting friars and among a growing community of penitents, a laywoman with a storied past became Cortona’s saint.

part ii  community, cultus,  and society

 FRAGMENTS OF DEVOTION charters and canons in aquitaine, 876– 1050 Anna Trumbore Jones

D

iscussions of religious reform, or of different forms of religious life, are rare in Aquitanian sources from the tenth and early eleventh centuries. It is particularly striking, therefore, when the chronicler Ademar of Chabannes records that Bishop Hilduin of Limoges (990–1014) reversed the policy of his elder brother and predecessor, Hildegar (ca. 976– 990), toward the house of Eymoutiers: “Bishop Hilduin,” Ademar wrote, “with the devil urging him, three years before he died, destroyed the monastery of Saint-Étienne at Eymoutiers, which Hildegar had elegantly arranged with a great crowd of monks, and [Hilduin] returned canons there.” This is not the only moment in Ademar’s text—or indeed in other chronicles of the region—where we find the change of a house from the hands of canons to that of monks described as a positive measure, while the reverse is seen as a regrettable slide from discipline (or, more dramatically, an act of the devil). One of the few debates about religious life that Aquitanian chroniclers seem moved to comment upon, therefore, concerned the relative merits of the canonical and monastic life. The opinion of Ademar and other monastic authors on this subject fits well within a long-standing scholarly model of religious life in France in this period: that Benedictine monasticism was seen as the most eminent form of pious life from the Carolingian era until ca. 1050, when a so-called crisis of cenobitism resulted in the appearance of new religious groups. The status of houses of canons in Aquitaine is not understood well enough to support this model, however, due to a lack of both primary sources and scholarly literature on canons in France in the period between

82 communit y, cultus, and societ y

the ninth-century Carolingian councils at Aix-la-Chapelle, which attempted to differentiate between the lifestyles of monks and canons, and the rise of the Augustinian order in the twelfth century. All we have are comments by monastic writers such as Ademar and the terse and at times opaque witness of charters; we might conclude, therefore, that it is not surprising that scholarly literature on tenth-century canons is remarkably thin on the ground. Yet despite these limitations, the situation is not as grave as it may seem. Several houses of canons in Aquitaine have substantial quantities of charters surviving from the late ninth to early eleventh centuries. Documentary sources have long been mined to study movement of property and the development of temporal power—one need only think of Georges Duby’s masterful use of the charters of Cluny and the many regional studies that followed his lead. I would argue that we can go further, however, and look at language used in charters to describe the brothers, and at the donors’ stated justifications for gifts, to begin to understand the status of these communities in the eyes of contemporaries. In this essay, I shall present a case study of selected documents from Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand, one of the most eminent Aquitanian houses of canons, and specifically of the charters recording donations to the house from roughly 876 to 1050—the period between the fall of effective Carolingian power and the rise of the Gregorian reform. I will use these charters to make two related arguments. First, I will suggest that we can read donation charters for information about donors’ intentions. While it is true that the texts of the charters are not uncomplicated reflections of the sentiments of their donors, I contend that through careful analysis we can learn much about the piety of lay and ecclesiastical patrons in this period. I will then use the fruits of this method to argue that Ademar’s assessment of the relative status of monasteries and houses of canons would not have been embraced by many of his contemporaries. This use of the charters faces challenges of interpretation, but it also offers important implications for broader issues, such as the place of different religious institutions and orders in tenth-century society. We have too often studied the tenth century and its religious communities from the standpoint of later reforms, either by searching for signs of future developments or by chronicling abuses awaiting correction. This is not a helpful way to approach either period; we need to understand both the ideals and the realities of religious life in the tenth century more fully if we wish to comprehend and contextualize the changes that came after 1050. Furthermore, this use of charters will help us to understand better why tenth-century men and women gave to religious houses. This in turn gives new insight into how donors reconciled the demands of their daily lives with their religious im-

fr agments of devotion 83

pulses—how lay people felt they might lead lives of deeper religious meaning without leaving the world.

reading donation charters The seventy-three charters of Saint-Hilaire surviving from 876 to 1050 fall into four categories: royal and ducal privileges, exchanges of land, grants from the house, and—most important for our purposes—donations to the house. Donors to Saint-Hilaire ranged from untitled men and women to individuals from the highest levels of Aquitanian society, including members of the ducal family. The majority of the donors were laymen, but clerics also appeared, including members of the community itself. Gifts made to the house encompassed a variety of assets: estates, serfs, fishing privileges, rights over churches and incomes, and so on, most of which came from the private holdings of the donor. Most of the properties centered around the city of Poitiers, although a few were more far-flung. Donations were governed by a range of conditions: In certain cases, Saint-Hilaire would take full possession of the asset immediately. At other times, the actual turnover of the assets was delayed through arrangements laid out in the charter. For example, the donor might continue to hold usufruct in the land for his lifetime in exchange for a yearly payment, or pass the land to an heir before it moved to the sole possession of the community. What reasons did these donors give in their charters for making gifts to the community of canons? In 976 Bishop Ebles of Limoges issued a donation charter to the canons of Saint-Hilaire. It began with a meditation on his reasons for giving the gift: It behooves each person, while he dwells in the body and enjoys the present life, to pay attention with an anxious mind to the redemption of his soul and to think often in all ways and with all zeal about the prize of eternal reward. The Lord reminds us about these things in the Gospel, saying “Work while it is day, for the hour comes in which no one will be able to work”; “work” means good things, which every person must do for himself while he lives, so that, when sudden death comes, it does not find him unprepared.

Do passages such as this reflect the sentiments of the donors? Can we use charters to study not only the mechanics of such transactions but also the motivations behind them? For scholars interested in how medieval men and women thought about their relations with religious houses and the fate of their souls, donation charters hold both great promise and many problems. Scholars have been

84 communit y, cultus, and societ y

wary of attributing the sentiments expressed in the prologues of donation charters to the donor, citing two reasons. First, in many cases it was not the donor but a scribe who composed the documents. Second, charters often employed formulaic language, and indeed they were often copied either from existing documents at the same house or from collections of exemplars. Consequently, studies based on charters have often confined themselves to using the more substantive information found therein, such as the names in the witness lists, the descriptions of the properties exchanged, and so on. Despite these reservations, the sheer number of the charters and their sometimes lengthy ruminations on the reasons for their gifts have prompted a reexamination of these texts with different questions in mind. Recent work has asserted, for example, that it is possible to track certain trends in spirituality from documentary evidence. The debate about how accurately the charters represent the sentiments of specific donors, however, continues on two fronts. First, diplomatists interested in lay spirituality now affirm that certain noble laymen, as well as their clerical counterparts, had the ability and the inclination to participate in the creation of important documents. They argue, therefore, that lay donation charters may be read for evidence of lay spirituality. Aquitanian men and women in the early Middle Ages, even if they were not themselves literate, understood the importance of written records, which would survive as testaments to their generosity and proof of their rights after their deaths. In the text of a sale charter from 1017, for example, a canon named Salomon expressed the importance of written documents in keeping records and ensuring the preservation of agreements by future generations; it seems likely that early medieval laymen would also have wished their charters to reflect their own intentions, and thus that they might have been involved in their composition. Conversely, all documentary evidence can be suspected of being formulaic—not composed by or for the donor, but rather copied from set forms— and therefore not representative of the opinions of a particular individual. The sentiments expressed by Ebles in the charter above were certainly not unusual for the period; were they, perhaps, not even his own? There are two ways to address this problem. First, there are certain donation charters that contain prologues that seem to be original to the document, which may have been composed by the donor, at his request, or with his participation. We can attempt to establish with greater certitude that these passages were indeed original through careful comparisons with other charters from the same house, as well as with collections of model documents used at the time. On the other hand, can we truly learn nothing about the donor’s own opinions from charters that copied one or more formulas from earlier docu-

fr agments of devotion 85

ments or from formulary collections? This conclusion seems hasty: there were, after all, a variety of formulas to choose from in creating a document, and there is no reason to think that the sentiments therein were not genuine, albeit expressed in formulaic language. Given their understanding of the permanence and importance of documents, it seems unlikely that Aquitanian men and women of this period would have wished these documents to contain sentiments not in accord with their own or those of their peers.

thinking about monks and canons: gifts by ebles of limoges As an example of how we might read donation charters in a new way, and of how they might be used to deepen our understanding of tenth-century canons and their benefactors, I want to focus on two charters given by Bishop Ebles of Limoges. The first is the donation quoted above, which he made to Saint-Hilaire in 976; the second was given in 965/6 to the monastery of Saint-Maixent in the Poitou. Ebles is a compelling figure: a bishop for over thirty years (944–ca. 976), he participated so actively in the political agenda of his brother and nephew—Dukes William Tow-Head and William IronArm of Aquitaine—that he saw his foster son and chosen successor murdered by a political rival. Ebles maintained strong ties, through family and office, to both of the Poitevin houses that he patronized. He served as treasurer of Saint-Hilaire (where his brother and nephew served as lay abbots) and as abbot of Saint-Maixent, and his family gave numerous donations to both communities. These two charters given by Ebles discuss at length the reasons for his donations. They provide, therefore, an opportunity to compare his considerations in giving to canons and to monks. It is striking that both documents describe similar concerns: fear for his own soul and those of his loved ones, desire for the aid of the patron saint of the house, and worry over the consequences of his actions and wealth in this world. The gift to Saint-Maixent was made expressly for the salvation of Ebles’ own soul and the liberation of the soul of his recently deceased brother, Duke William Tow-Head, as well as to allay the grief of his nephew, William Iron-Arm, over the death of his father. In return for both gifts, Ebles asked that the monks and canons remember him in their prayers for all time. In the charter for Saint-Hilaire, Ebles even made a provision so that the aid for his soul would continue if the land that he gave were to be resold. In requesting succor for his soul, Ebles seemed particularly concerned with the future consequences of his actions in this world, including his possession of wealth. He opened both of his donation charters with musings on

86 communit y, cultus, and societ y

the fragile and fleeting nature of this life and its comforts, and he emphasized the importance of good works for achieving the kingdom of heaven. In the Saint-Maixent charter, he explained his donation as follows: I gave those things for this reason: so that the above-mentioned confessor, having acted as helper, might give aid to me at a future time, in order that whatever I have acquired in this life through the guilt of my own iniquity, with the devil beguiling me, the inexpressible mercy of God should wipe away; absolved by whose clemency, I may be able to arrive safe at the eternal dwelling place.

Ebles was concerned about the consequences of the riches he had acquired, and he reasoned that by his doing good work—in this case by giving his land to religious houses—God would show him mercy and wipe away the sins arising from his worldly wealth. In his charters Ebles acknowledged this special power of monks and canons: their communal life and continuous prayer gave them the ability to help the souls of others. Ebles believed that this power could be accessed through generosity to religious houses, as his interpretation of Galatians 6:10, which he quoted in his gift to the canons of Saint-Hilaire, illustrates. Paul wrote, “Therefore, while we have time, let us work good to all men, but especially to those who are the servants of faith [domesticos fidei].” Ebles interpreted domestici fidei to mean clergy living in a community and performing communal prayer, as he explained in the Saint-Hilaire document: “ ‘Servants of faith’ certainly means those who are devoted to the saints of God with constant prayers, and who intercede for the living and are attentive to the dead with continuous zeal for prayers.” In the tradition of commentaries on Galatians, domestici fidei was rarely given an interpretation so closely tied to monks and canons and their communal prayer. Ebles further stressed the importance of the continuous prayer of the canons in this charter by making his donation directly to “the clerics of that church serving God day and night there” in the hopes that through their prayers, the merits of the saints would be marshaled on his behalf. In so doing, Ebles echoed a sentiment common in charters issued across this period. In 1027 Bishop Jordan of Limoges (1023/4–1050/1) articulated the desire of those outside of a regular religious community to receive the benefits of membership in that community. In a gift made to the monastery of Saint-Martial, Jordan and his mother insisted that after their deaths, “such obsequies would be celebrated by the brothers in the monastery of Saint-Martial for [Jordan’s] soul as are customarily performed for any abbot of that place, [and] for the souls of his father and mother just as [would be

fr agments of devotion 87

performed] for the soul of a dead monk of that place.” In her study of the development of monastic prayer for the dead and the desire of noble families to have that prayer provided for them, Megan McLaughlin emphasizes, as did Jordan and Ebles, that prayer by a community “served to draw a liturgical line around the person prayed for, making them ‘present’ within a community delineated by prayer.” Ebles’ donations to religious houses, therefore, made him and his family part of the community; they would benefit not just from communal prayer, but from the particularly powerful prayer reserved for members. Strikingly, Ebles did not distinguish one type of house as superior in its effectiveness in aiding the soul of the donor, which places him in opposition to the apparent opinion of monastic writers such as Ademar of Chabannes. We must return, however, to the problem of whether the prologues to Ebles’ two charters were formulaic and, if so, the significance of that determination. Is it possible to determine whether these preambles were copied from other documents or composed for this occasion? A question presents itself immediately: do Ebles’ preambles appear in other charters of SaintHilaire and Saint-Maixent, from the earliest surviving documents to the end of our period? The earlier of these two charters is Ebles’ gift to SaintMaixent, which the editor dates to 965/6. The form of this entire document is repeated in three other charters at Saint-Maixent, and one at Saint-Hilaire. The preamble or other sections of the charter, meanwhile, are found in four other Saint-Maixent documents. Of these eight partial or whole copies, six are dated after Ebles’ charter, while one can be dated only to the tenth century and thus could fall before or after Ebles’ donation. Therefore, these seven documents may well have been copied from his exemplar. The final gift is dated to ca. 959 and thus presents more of a problem, although its significance is not entirely clear. Ebles’ charter for Saint-Hilaire presents a simpler picture: his gift to the canons (ca. 976) is reproduced in only one other donation to the house, from around 1001. Besides the fact that all but one (or possibly two) of these charters were written later than Ebles’, three further arguments support the theory that they were composed by Ebles or his scribe and later copied by others. First, the donation charter to Saint-Maixent was copied not just at that monastery, but at Saint-Hilaire as well, in a donation made around 970 by Ebles’ nephew, William Iron-Arm. The form of the two charters is almost identical. It seems possible that William (or his scribe) turned to Ebles, his uncle and advisor, for a charter format to use; it is also possible that they shared a family scribe. Second, Ebles’ donations to Saint-Hilaire and Saint-Maixent cite and discuss three biblical passages (Galatians 6:8 and 6:10; John 9:4) that were not cited in other charters at either house up to 1050, except in

88 communit y, cultus, and societ y

the documents that, I argue, were copied from Ebles’. Finally, it has been speculated that donors were more likely to be involved in the composition of charters that had personal significance to them, and Ebles’ charters fit well with this conception. These arguments suggest that the prologues to Ebles’ charters were original to those documents; it is tantalizing to think that in them we can identify thoughts expressed by the bishop at these important moments. It nonetheless remains possible that Ebles or his scribe copied these formulas from another source, and that the later charters were copied from this common exemplar, rather than from Ebles’ documents. We need to be careful that the attempt to establish the originality of some preambles does not imply that others, copied in part or in full from exemplars, are less informative or useful. Sections of charters that are more prone to use formulas do not have intrinsically less value to the historian than those that seem more specific to the situation at hand; the mere fact that a formula had become conventional does not mean that it was thus devoid of meaning for either the donors or the recipient house. If we thus assume that the prologues of Ebles’ donation charters contain sentiments that were at least approved of by him, certain observations are possible concerning the nature of his piety. Ebles expressed a desire to save his own soul and those of his family, which were threatened by the activities and wealth of this world. He stated that gifts to religious houses would further this effort, and particularly that the communal prayer of monks and canons, if marshaled to their aid, would help them escape future punishment. What is striking is that Ebles made these gifts and appealed for these prayers from monks and canons alike. The fact that Ebles did not seem to differentiate between the two groups—in both cases, he praised their lifestyle and hoped to be made part of their communities of prayer— indicates that this distinction, made by chroniclers such as Ademar, was not fully embraced by the rest of the population. The chroniclers in question were, after all, monks. These charters suggest that certain donors in this period did not necessarily consider monastic life to be a worthier form of religious life than that carried out in collegiate churches, but rather found the fact of communal life and prayer more important than the aegis under which it was conducted. Indeed, for Ebles the question of the relative merits of monks versus canons may have been irrelevant. His choosing to give to Saint-Hilaire and Saint-Maixent probably had less to do with the lifestyle of their residents than with his family’s many ties to those communities. Thus, while Ebles’ charters indicate that not all donors thought of monks as superior to canons, they also show that this question may not have been central to their considerations.

fr agments of devotion 89

We find many of the same concerns expressed by Ebles among the wider group of donors to the canons of Saint-Hilaire in this period, who gave land and other assets, including incomes, serfs, and churches, to the saint and the community in various types of arrangements, from outright gifts to leases in exchange for usufruct. They did so, according to their charters, out of fear that their worldly goods threatened the health of their souls and those of their loved ones, and out of hope that the power of the communal prayer of the canons and the influence of the saint might be wielded on their behalf. Like Ebles, they felt confident in the benefits that would accrue to their souls from gifts to canons, and they were more concerned with being remembered by clerics engaged in continuous prayer, and being protected by the saint whom those clerics served, than the particular rule those clerics followed. This lack of distinction between monks and canons is reflected in the language used to describe Saint-Hilaire and other communities of canons in the early Middle Ages, which suggests that they were often not distinguished from monks at all: the word monasterium was used for both types of communities, for example, and the word canonicus had many different meanings. It may be that for most donors, as for Ebles, the choice of a house to benefit, and the expectation of the rewards they would receive, depended less on the rule followed at that house or particular ideas about reform than on other factors, such as proximity, past family involvement, the reputation of the community, and so on. The dichotomy presented by Ademar in his description of Eymoutiers—of reform and corruption, monks and canons— may serve as a kind of double red herring, not just implying that monks were seen as superior to canons, but giving the impression that such a question would be foremost in the minds of donors.

777 In this essay I have attempted to make two arguments. First, I asserted that donation charters should be read in new ways for evidence of the piety of those who gave to religious houses. The charters of Saint-Hilaire are quintessential fragmentary evidence, single sheets of parchment offering snapshots of transactions that took place a millennium ago. Determining what can be learned from them is challenging: uncertainty is built into the exercise, since we can never (or, at best, rarely) be absolutely sure about the circumstances of a charter’s creation. We should not let such uncertainty paralyze us, however, or limit unnecessarily our use of this evidence. If we posit that both charters created for a given moment that represent the thoughts of a

90 communit y, cultus, and societ y

particular donor and those pieced together from formulas are valuable, we can begin to use charters to understand better the piety that drove tenthcentury men and women to give to religious houses. My second argument focused on broader questions concerning tenthcentury religious institutions and their benefactors. Although certain monastic chroniclers may have asserted that the life of a monk, and in particular a Benedictine monk, was superior to that of canons, many donors to the collegiate house of Saint-Hilaire seem not to have held this view. For these donors, what was crucial was not the rule followed at a community but rather its communal prayer and the access that prayer provided to the beneficent attention of the saint. In light of this, it seems more problematic to argue that before 1050 the ideal religious life, and therefore the goal of religious reform, was necessarily the imposition of the Benedictine Rule. For Ebles and other donors, the choice of a house to patronize often seems to have depended more on family and administrative ties than on the lifestyle followed. Scholarly thinking about religious reform in France around the year 1000 has been dominated by work on monastic movements centered at Cluny and Fleury, with their attempts to create a unified ideal of religious life. It is also of interest, however, to consider what models of religious life and reform existed in regions where these movements were not prevalent, and furthermore to ask whether donors were necessarily interested in such questions. Charters, fragmentary though they may be, can give us valuable insight into both the status of different religious houses and the considerations of the men and women who entrusted their souls to them.

 NAMING NAMES the nomenclature of heresy in the early eleventh century Thomas Head

W

illiam v of Aquitaine, in charters issued on August 3, 1015, declared, “I, William, duke of Aquitaine and one mortal among others, have seen the power of many evil deeds not only among the people but also in the holy church, deeds which sprout from the root of the Arian heresy and of which we have never heard before my time.” Writing about the trial of heretics at Orléans in 1022, Ademar of Chabbanes stated in his Chronicle, “At that time, ten of the canons of Sainte-Croix, who had seemed to be more religious than the others, were proven to be Manichees.” And in correspondence between Bishop Roger II of Châlons-sur-Marne and Bishop Wazo of Liège, conducted in the 1040s and preserved in the Deeds of the Bishops of Liège, Roger asked for advice in dealing with Manichees in his diocese, while Wazo replied with reference to Arians. Both these terms refer to groups who opposed the doctrines of orthodox Christianity in the early period. The followers of Mani (d. 276) preached a form of radical dualism in which the physical world and its creator were considered evil. The disciples of Arius (d. 336) denied the full divinity of Christ, asserting that he had been created by the Father. The first half of the eleventh century was, according to its clerical chroniclers, a time of virulent heresy. Modern historians have debated with contentious vigor the sources of these heresies. I think, however, that most could agree on two general statements. First, heresy was not simply a matter of specific beliefs and practices opposed to those of the orthodox church. Rather it was in large part socially constructed by those clerics who made or recorded the accusations of heresy. At the same time, the alleged heresies were not simply phantoms of clerical imagination. There were groups of

92! communit y, cultus, and societ y

clerics and laypeople who challenged orthodoxy in manners that the western Christian church had not experienced for several centuries. In the mid-twentieth century many historians took the accusations relatively literally. The Manichees opposed by Ademar of Chabannes, for example, were the early avatars of a dualist Christianity that spread from the east and finally blossomed in the west during the twelfth century. Such historians proposed the Bogomils of Bulgaria as intermediaries between the heresies known to the patristic period and those of the eleventh century. Slowly a reaction emerged. Scholars came to stress the manner in which orthodox clerics manipulated their accusations of heresy for the aggrandizement of their own power. Their opponents were not followers of variants of ancient heresies. Rather their beliefs were motivated by factors as varied as anticlericalism, apocalypticism, dissent from a theocratic social order, and an early form of the vita apostolica. I will refer to the former school of interpretation as the “realists” and the latter as the “nominalists.” During the last decade some scholars have revived a nuanced version of the realist interpretation. Both groups have been interested in the nomenclature of heresy. For realists the use of names such as “Manichee” and “Arian” by eleventh-century clerics was “justified” (to use the term of Claire Taylor). Nominalists, on the other hand, do not think that these terms retained their original meaning, but rather that they belonged to, in the words of Guy Lobrichon, “the commonplaces of ecclesiastical catalogues of heresies.” In this essay I wish to reexamine that nomenclature. In the names they used for heresy, the self-proclaimed orthodox revealed much about their preconceptions and purposes.

+++ William V issued three charters on August 3, 1015, in favor of Saint-Hilaire and its canons. Two contain the phrase Arriane heresis de radice pullulantia quoted above. Scholars have given very different interpretations of the term “Arian” here. Claire Taylor, for example, describes “a charter in favor of the abbey of Saint-Hilaire at Poitiers in 1016 [sic], which refers to Arians in the duchy.” The assumption that the term implies the existence of real Arians in Aquitaine is clearly a realist argument. Cécile Treffort provides a nominalist analysis. For her, the objects of this attack—like those accused of heresy by Ademar and the episcopal synod at Orléans—were adherents of a type of the vita apostolica. Treffort cites the charters of 1015 as evidence of clerical involvement in this movement. Richard Landes and Georges Pon more neutrally adduce the charters as evidence that corroborates the

naming names 93!

accounts of Ademar of Chabannes regarding heresy in Aquitaine, although they go on to assert—erroneously—that other charters from Saint-Hilaire mention Manichees. The three charters formed an ensemble, issued at the same place, on the same day, with roughly the same set of witnesses. All three served to protect the properties of Saint-Hilaire against alienation or other misuse. The acts were issued on the authority of Duke William, who also happened to be lay abbot of Saint-Hilaire, and were backed by Bishop Gilbert of Poitiers’ threat of excommunication. These documents were steeped in the concerns and language of the Peace of God as it had developed in Aquitaine over the course of some twenty-five years. The meeting at which these charters were issued was of obvious importance: the witnesses included Duke William V and two sons, Count William Taillefer of Angoulême and his son, Bishop Gilbert of Poitiers, and his eventual successor, Isembert, and various viscounts and knights. It was not, however, simply a summer meeting of the ducal entourage: these charters were issued at a Peace council, albeit a hitherto unrecognized one. The Peace movement had developed in Aquitaine through three episcopal synods: at Charroux in 989, at Limoges in 994, and at Poitiers in 1000. (The acts of the synods of Charroux and Poitiers have survived.) The bishops first enforced their edicts through the threat of episcopal excommunication, but later turned to the principes of Aquitaine, and specifically to Duke William V, for help in enforcing the Peace. As the bishops declared in the acts of the council of Poitiers: The duke and other princes established a restoration of peace and justice through [the provision of ] securities and [the threat of ] excommunication. They decreed that whatever property had—during the previous five years— or would—in the future following the present council—be seized in a dispute occurring within the counties of those princes there present, if one party of those contending over the property called the other to justice, then they would come before the prince of that region or before another judge of that county and stand trial for that property.

In this passage we also find mention of what had become a five-year cycle of Peace councils in Aquitaine. That cycle continued, although the meetings were eventually confined to Poitiers itself. Chronicles and charters record councils on March 10, 1010/11; March 6, 1024/25; and December 10, 1029/30. The 1015 charters from Saint-Hilaire fit comfortably within this matrix. William V and Bishop Gilbert were providing protection to the property of Saint-Hilaire at a council convoked to renew the Peace in Aquitaine.

94! communit y, cultus, and societ y

But how does the goal of enforcing the Peace help to explain the references to Arianism? The answer lies in the person of Hilary, fourth-century bishop of Poitiers, who was a formidable theologian and opponent of Arianism. Hilary was the patron of Saint-Hilaire. Thus Duke William V, Bishop Gilbert, and the canons of Saint-Hilaire were defending property that belonged to St. Hilary himself against the saint’s enemies. This interest in Hilary was not an innovation of 1015. The acts of the synod of Poitiers held in 1000 began with a direct quotation from one of Hilary’s anti-Arian works: “Splendid indeed is the name of peace, and beautiful as well is undivided belief.” The bishops of the Aquitaine knew Hilary and how his antiheretical works could benefit their cause. The nomenclature used in the charter slowly falls into place. First, the scribe of a charter issued on the same day and under the same circumstances (and quite possibly the same scribe) did not take recourse to the term “Arian.” Second, the words of these charters did not accuse any contemporaries of heresy, only of multa mala opera. Third, those deeds were not derived from some ancient heresy, because they represented recent tendencies (ante mea tempora inaudita). The opponents decried in these charter were thus the collection of knights and unreformed clerics usually denounced in Peace councils. The reason the scribe would sometimes (but sometimes did not) describe them as “sprouting from the root of the Arian heresy” (Arriane heresis de radice pullulantia) was that they were opponents of St. Hilary, the great nemesis of the Arians and patristic denominator of “peace” in Aquitaine. In short, the use of the term “Arian heresy” did not refer to “Arianism in the duchy” (Taylor) nor to some version of the vita apostolica (Treffort), nor even to the same heretics Ademar of Chabannes would a few years later brand as Manichees (Landes and Pon). Rather the term referred to the historical background for attacks on ecclesiastical order in Aquitaine.

+++ But what of Ademar of Chabannes’ Manichees in Orléans and Aquitaine? The accusation and trial of heretics at Orléans in 1022 was a watershed event in the orthodox reaction to heresy. The accused were brought before a synod of bishops who judged them guilty; King Robert the Pious then ordered their execution. This was the first time Christian authorities had punished heresy with execution since the case of Priscillian of Avila in 383. The trial received great notoriety: no less than eight different records survive that were written within a century of the trial. The accused numbered between ten and sixteen, and included canons of the cathedral chapter, laymen, a prominent

naming names 95!

schoolmaster, and the former chaplain of Queen Constance. They had carried on secret meetings for some years and believed themselves to possess esoteric knowledge that came directly from the Holy Spirit. This knowledge led them to skepticism about many orthodox doctrines, such as the passion of Christ, and active opposition to certain orthodox practices, such as the sacraments. These accusations of heresy were made in the midst of heated political quarrels. For almost a decade the see of Orléans was disputed between two claimants: Theodoric, supported by King Robert and monastic reformers such as the monks of Fleury; and Odolric, supported by the local nobility, Bishop Fulbert of Chartres, and Count Odo of Blois. The controversy came to a head at the very same time the charges of heresy were made, that is winter of 1021/22. Theodoric set out for Rome to seek support from the papal curia, but died on the journey. Odolric was a member of the synod that judged the heretics. Historians long accepted as largely definitive the account of the trial written by Paul, a monk of Saint-Père of Chartres. Most also linked this account to Ademar’s use of the term “Manichee.” Thus historians—not just those of a realist bent, such as Arno Borst, but even nominalists such as R. I. Moore— described a group of dualist-minded clerics as being the core of the group that was tried and executed. In 1975 Robert-Henri Bautier overturned decades of scholarly consensus, pointing out in part that Paul’s account was the latest and perhaps least reliable. He set the accusations against the heretics within the context of the disputed episcopal election. Dismissing Ademar’s nomenclature, Bautier argued that “political intrigue” and not dualism lay at the heart of the matter, a claim accepted almost unanimously since. What is truly remarkable about Ademar’s nomenclature, however, is how radically it differed from that employed by every other cleric who described the heretics of Orléans. Writing in 1023 with firsthand knowledge of the events, John of Ripoll, a Catalan monk resident at Fleury, called the beliefs of the executed quite simply a heresia. Writing a couple of decades later, but also presumably with firsthand knowledge, Andrew of Fleury likewise eschewed patristic terminology and expanded John’s term no further than nefandissima heresis. Rodulfus Glaber judged that no patristic term would do, because the beliefs of the accused, while “seductive,” were “more stupid and miserable than any of the ancient heresies” (omnium antiquarum stultissima ac miserrima, nempe sui decepticis heresis). Two authors from the region of Sens concurred (one copying the other): the trial had uncovered a magna heresis, nova et inaudita. Writing at the greatest temporal distance from the events, Paul of Saint-Père remained unwilling to use any more precise label than variants on heresis.

96! communit y, cultus, and societ y

All rejected the patristic nomenclature of heresy and most emphasized the novelty of their opponents. They did not do so because they were ignorant of patristic nomenclature: Fleury, for example, possessed an excellent library, and the community also produced one of the great minds of the monastic reform movement, Abbo, who served as abbot from 988 to 1004. Abbo consistently mined his library to provide collections of sources that he copied down in libelli, such as his extant Collection of Canons, to be used to buttress his arguments in such public debates as the councils of Saint-Basle (991) and Saint-Denis (994). One of Abbo’s favored sources survives from the library of Fleury: a pair of manuscripts containing most of the Registrum of Gregory the Great. These manuscripts contain numerous marginal notations made by its readers (presumably including Abbo) during the decades around the year 1000. Many of the topics they noted were the staples of monastic reform: the election of bishops, monastic privileges and property, simony, and excommunication. It is, however, quite striking how many of the marginalia dealt with heretics. The monks of Fleury gleaned information from Gregory on Arians, Agnoetae, Manichees, Monophysites, Nestorians, Pelagians, and many others. They knew the basic beliefs of different sects and the councils at which they had been condemned. Using Gregory, they had produced a virtual encyclopedia of heresy that would have been known to both John of Ripoll and Andrew of Fleury. Rodulfus Glaber also knew patristic nomenclature from similarly annotated manuscripts of Gregory’s Registrum at Auxerre and Cluny. These authors did not reject the patristic terms for heresy out of ignorance; they knew ancient heresy, but the contemporary heretics of Orléans did not fit such a description. Ademar himself was also plausibly well versed in the works of Gregory the Great. A copy of the Registrum was available to him in the library of Saint-Martial. In addition, Ademar copied Abbo’s Collection of Canons, a work steeped in the Gregorian tradition. Ademar thus judged the heretics of Orléans to be Manichees when other knowledgeable observers consciously chose not to use that term. Moreover, he had copied, in the same manuscript as Abbo’s canonical collection, a version of Augustine of Hippo’s De heresibus ad Quodvultum. But according to Michael Frassetto, Ademar significantly amended Augustine’s text to reflect better his own views on dualist heresy. It was not only in reference to the heretics of Orléans that Ademar used the term “Manichee.” Writing about events in Aquitaine around the year 1017, Ademar described how “Manichees streamed through Aquitaine, leading the lower classes (plebs) astray, denying holy baptism and the power of the cross, and whatever sound doctrine was, while abstaining from meat in the manner of monks and feigning chastity.” Shortly thereafter he iden-

naming names 97!

tified the cathedral canons of Orléans as Manichees, as discussed above. Finally, in the last paragraphs of his Chronicle, Ademar discussed a council of bishops that had been convoked at the abbey of Charroux: “In these days [presumably 1028] Duke William [V] gathered a council of bishops and abbots at holy Charroux for the purpose of wiping out the heresies that were spread among the commoners [vulgus] by Manichees. All the princes of Aquitaine were present, whom he ordered to affirm peace and venerate the Catholic Church of God.” Ademar went on to discuss Manichees in the sermons and other materials he wrote after the completion of his Chronicle in 1028, during his campaign for the “apostolic” cult of St. Martial. Unfortunately these works remain largely unpublished, and historians are dependent on articles written by the editors, Daniel Callahan and Michael Frassetto, for reports. It is clear, however, that Ademar frequently used the term “Manichee” in these works. The references in these works lacked any link to specific contemporary groups. To be sure, Ademar provided much more detailed descriptions of the beliefs of those he named Manichees. According to a sermon De Eucharistia, for example, they rejected the sign of the cross, the eucharist, and other physical manifestations of Christ’s presence. Taken together, Ademar’s references seem to suggest the spread of a heretical movement into and through Aquitaine for more than a decade, which corrupted some clerics but proved even more dangerous for the plebs or vulgus. The movement remained a dangerous threat at the very moment Ademar was completing his Chronicle and preoccupied him thereafter. Realists once accepted this account as evidence for a well-developed and proselytizing dualist sect in Aquitaine. Nominalists have discovered social dissidents practicing the apostolic life lurking under these descriptions. They have bolstered their case with reference to the so-called Letter of Héribert, an attack on a “new heresy [nova heresis] born in our days” that involved “pseudo-apostles” and was found in Périgord. Here was a novel heresy in Aquitaine, described by an author from Auxerre, one of the library centers that possessed a heavily annotated copy of Gregory’s Registrum. And not just any heresy, for some nominalists have found in Héribert’s opponents social dissidents advocating the apostolic life who were misunderstood as heretics. The neo-realists have since reinterpreted the work as corroboration of Ademar and further proof for Bogomil-like dualism in Aquitaine. Historians, however, do not have to find a substitute such as social dissidents to take the place of Ademar’s Manichees. Rather, his account disintegrates under careful consideration of his language and references. First, Ademar saw Manichees where many other clerics did not. Numerous other authors who were demonstrably familiar with the patristic nomenclature of heresy through available and annotated copies of Gregory’s Registrum chose

98! communit y, cultus, and societ y

words like nova and inaudita to describe the same opponents. Second, Ademar was, as Richard Landes has convincingly documented, an inveterate forger. He invented synodal acts and sermons for five Peace councils allegedly held in Limoges and Bourges between 1028 and 1033. All were figments of Ademar’s imagination. So, too, I think, was the 1028 council at Charroux where William V allegedly condemned Manichees. Ademar’s reference is the sole evidence for this council: unlike for those held on the five-year cycle discussed above, no charters document its effects. Peace councils denounced attacks on church property, not heresy, and it is unlikely that Duke William condemned Manichees, either at Charroux or any other place. Third, the many (and mostly unpublished) references to Manichees in the works composed after 1028 date to a period during which Ademar’s mind was coming unhinged. Finally, only one other cleric is recorded as making reference to contemporary Manichees in the first half of the eleventh century. That cleric was Bishop Roger II of Châlons-sur-Marne in a letter sent to Bishop Wazo of Liège, whose reply is also extant. The correspondence occurred between 1043 and 1048 and was reported approximately a decade later by Anselm of Liège. Roger requested Wazo’s advice in dealing with heretics in his diocese. This was not the first time clerics had encountered heretics there: Rodulfus Glaber had described “an emissary of Satan” named Leutard who gathered followers in that region, and the “Bishop R.” attacked by Bishop Gerard of Cambrai for having improperly released heretics in 1025 appears to have been Roger’s predecessor as bishop of Châlons. Roger queried Wazo in some detail (and Anselm of Liège was at pains to suggest that he recorded Roger’s own words): In a certain region of his diocese there were some country folk who eagerly followed the evil teachings of the Manichees and frequented their secret conventicles, in which they engaged in I know not what filthy acts, shameful to mention, in a certain religious rite. And they lyingly asserted that the Holy Spirit is given by a sacrilegious imposition of hands; to buttress their faith in this error, they most falsely proclaimed Him to have been sent by God only in their heresiarch Mani, as though Mani were none other than the Holy Spirit. By this they fell into that blasphemy which, according to the Voice of Truth, can be forgiven neither here nor in the hereafter.

Roger considered these “country folk” to be Manichees and provided a very precise description and genealogy. The passage, however, is problematic. First, Roger described these heretics as “country folk,” that is, illiterate. In this characterization he was consistent with the earlier descriptions of heresy in this region, neither of which

naming names 99!

employed the term “Manichee.” Second, it seems highly unlikely that illiterates would invoke the name of a third-century “heresiarch.” Third, the passage echoes Ademar’s description of Manichees in Aquitaine, although such similarities probably can be explained by common sources. Finally, and perhaps most important, Wazo of Liège paid no attention to the name “Manichee” in his reply. Wazo was careful to state that “the fathers of old” had confuted the errors of their heretical contemporaries. Otherwise he steered clear of any specific patristic nomenclature for his contemporaries, any reference to Mani or other heresiarchs, and any specific reference to dualism. Mostly Wazo was pastoral in his advice. He urged Roger to confront these alleged heretics, but in order to teach them the correct beliefs of the Catholic faith. Roger might resort to excommunication, but not to execution. Wazo condemned the capital punishment outright; Anselm of Liège added that the bishop had been inspired by the example of Martin of Tours’ opposition to the execution of Priscillian. Both knew of contemporary executions of heretics and of their fourth-century avatar. They held both in contempt. In his plea for mercy toward heretics, Wazo cited the ancient Church’s treatment of Arians: Although Christian piety despises these tenets and although it condemns the sacrilege of the Arian heresy, nevertheless, in emulation of our Savior, who, mild and humble of heart, did not come to wrangle or contend but rather to suffer abuse, shameful treatment, blows, and finally death on the Cross, we are commanded for a time to bear with such things [heresy] in some measure.

Roger used the patristic nomenclature, specifically the term “Manichee,” to describe his contemporary opponents and their beliefs. Wazo ignored this usage and instead employed the term “Arian” to counsel a moderate course for his episcopal colleague. His use of the term “Arian” must, in context, be taken as an implicit rejection of Roger’s recourse to “Manichee.” For Wazo, the heresies of the past were dead, extirpated by the fathers of the church. There were no Manichees in Châlons. What was needed from contemporary bishops was patient teaching to ensure that none of their flocks deviated from orthodoxy through ignorance. Similar thoughts about ancient heresies were expressed by a colleague of Wazo and Anselm, Adelman, who was a schoolmaster in Liège during the episcopate of Wazo. In his youth he had been a fellow student of Berengar of Tours under the tutelage of Fulbert of Chartres. In the late 1040s Berengar was caught up in a controversy over his teachings about the Eucharist, which led to charges of heresy. Berengar sent a letter to Adelman seeking his support. Adelman wrote

100! communit y, cultus, and societ y

back in cautious terms. He was clearly troubled by some of what Berengar had written. But on one issue he was certain: the heresies of the patristic world were dead, killed by the heroic fathers of the church: “[Heretics] were all confuted and found wanting. Where there were Manichees, where there were Arians, thence all citizens fled from the faction of perdition, so that even their memory rotted away. And Ambrose, and Augustine, and Jerome, and many other oppressors of such beasts live on with praise.” In the middle of the eleventh century, Manichee and Arian were firmly linked as defeated opponents of the church fathers in the minds of learned clerics such as Wazo and Adelman. That same pair of terms was to be revived as a powerful discourse in the attacks on Catharism in the next century. But in the first half of the eleventh century, the only clerics who made reference to this patristic nomenclature were those quoted here. It seems that in this period only Ademar of Chabannes and Roger of Châlons used the term “Manichee” in reference to contemporary heretics and no one used the term “Arian” except as a historical reference point. In the context of the abundant knowledge of patristic nomenclature other clerics had, and chose not to use, the occasional use of the term “Manichee” tells us much more about the febrile imaginations of Ademar of Chabannes and Roger of Châlons than about the opponents whom they tarred with that name.

 ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND DEMOTIC RELIGIOSITY Richard Landes

on not assuming economic growth Historians have difficulty understanding economic growth in the Middle Ages largely because we take it for granted. When it’s not there, as in the early Middle Ages, we either find reasons why it didn’t happen or imagine that, contrary to impressions, it did happen. But generally we assume that economic growth is natural, and that as soon as conditions permit, it appears. This is the basic view of the great economic historian Henri Pirenne, who postulated that in the newly peaceful conditions of the eleventh century, the dusty-footed merchants naturally began to ply their trade and markets sprang up. More recently, Michael McCormick, having located an unexpected number of mentions of markets and exchanges in earlier centuries, has presented us with an already thriving economy in periods of the earlier Middle Ages. Yet burgeoning economic activity, even if it is natural to some people— Pirenne’s pieds poudreux—is not “natural” to some societies, which circumscribe just how rich commoners can get; and when merchants and other entrepreneurs sail against these heavy cultural headwinds, growth is minimal despite their heroic efforts. Indeed, economic historians studying today’s world, where both the technology and the example of economic growth exist in far more abundance than they did in the eleventh century, have discovered not only the existence of “cultures of poverty” or, I would suggest, “cultures of impoverishment,” but that far more cultures follow this pattern than anyone expected. As I will suggest, the cultural conditions for economic growth, at least in Western Europe, have a great deal to do with religious

102 communit y, cultus, and societ y

transformations. The key lies in the psychological dimensions of “zero-sum thinking” and the structures of what I’d like to call “prime divider societies.” According to zero-sum thinking, I win, you lose; or, you win, I lose. In modern society these interactions are played out in sports. When played out in economic life, however, zero-sum assumes a fixed set of resources (no economic growth), and that, therefore, whatever has worked to the advantage of the other has diminished the self. In its harshest forms, zero-sum holds that not only does one person win and the other lose, but in order for one to win, the other must lose. This logic produces in turn what I would like to call “prime divider societies.” These are cultures in which a small elite uses its power to dominate the rest of the population on the presumption that if they don’t dominate, someone else will. In such societies—which have constituted the vast majority of “civilized” cultures since the advent of agriculture (Neolithic revolution, ca. 10,000 b.c.e.), of metal weapons, and of writing (ca. 3000 b.c.e.)—we find a characteristic social organization in which a small dominating elite monopolizes most of the technology of power (writing and weapons), creating a vast divide between their own culture and those of the mass of peasants, who live more or less at subsistence levels. In prime divider societies, the dominant form of wealth accumulation is through politics: you take, not make. One of the most critical dimensions of the prime divider, one might even argue its fault line, is the stigmatization of manual labor. Elites (the takers) have contempt for manual labor and the vast majority of mankind forced to engage in it (the makers). Makers, that is stigmatized manual laborers, have a thick ceiling above which they cannot, dare not rise—the prime divider. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that the aristocracy of most prime divider societies prefers to kill the goose that lays the golden egg rather than have him become a player. That is, they would rather have a poor and subject commoner population than a rich and competitive one. Or, as Adam Smith noted so tellingly, slavery is extremely inefficient, but people so like dominion over others that they are willing to pay the price. Nor is it merely a matter of libido dominandi as pure pleasure. It is also a matter of fear of losing face. When geese become people and throw off the yoke of the aristocrat’s dominion, they threaten the very existence of the elite—victory for commoners is defeat for elites. As Walter Map admitted quite candidly in explaining his hostility to the Waldensians: “They are making their first moves now in the humblest manner because they cannot launch an attack. If we admit them, we shall be driven out [of the Church].” The lord who loses face is a dead man, as Aidan saw so clearly in the true Christian behavior of Oswin, whose readiness to admit fault and to beg

economic development and demotic religiosit y 103

forgiveness marked him for elimination in struggles among the warlords in Anglo-Saxon England. The historian who does not understand these issues also does not understand how astonishing a development it was, in the eleventh century, that the aristocracy gave so many franchises to economically productive commoners that these commoners eventually—by century’s end—had become competitors with the aristocracy. Those who “made” began to assert autonomy when they should have been subject to those who “take.” Adding to our astonishment comes the reaction of the king of France, who favored these commoner rebellions. Any Roman emperor would have gone in and massacred the population. In a nutshell, I wish to argue that the new conditions that become notable in the course of the eleventh century are quite extraordinary, and need to be explained, not merely described and taken for granted. To use a different image: elites work hard to keep the oxygen supplies low for the population below the prime divider. They prefer a depressed and meagerly productive labor force that is subservient and submissive to one that has energy and autonomy. The estate manager in the fabliau about the feast the count of Champagne held for his peasants, who feels rage at the sight of peasants eating to their fill, illustrates the humiliation that zero-sum people feel when the losers win, no matter how temporary their happiness. In fifteenth-century Germany the aristocracy advanced the argument that private war is good for public peace because when lords fought, they massacred each others’ peasants and burned their fields, thereby pruning them back and keeping them from taking over the garden. They saw these as “returning the peasants to their place,” and urged that every fifty years there be a widespread attack on peasants in honor of the Jubilee, a year when each man returns to his own place. The Germans refer to the sense of joy one feels at the suffering of another as Schadenfreude, an emotion that flourishes in a world where the other’s damage is your advantage. In cultures where elites thrive on the Schadenfreude of keeping peasants wretched, the oxygen supply is low. Peasants suffer what they must. They must learn that they do not have agency. As Madame de Sévigné put it, “The humbling of inferiors is necessary to the maintenance of social order.” Nor do prime divider societies exist only because the elite insist on it, when necessary with ruthless violence. The commoners play their share in sustaining the zero-sum rules. Here we move from terrain well covered by subaltern studies—how elites dominate commoners—to terrain somewhat less well explored, what we might call the subaltern subfield of ressentiment studies. For Nietzsche, the man of ressentiment was the loser who wished he

104 communit y, cultus, and societ y

were a winner so he could do precisely to others what others were doing to him. Such subalterns are distrustful, untrustworthy, resentful, envious. We can see the zero-sum logic—the rationality—of the peasant who, when offered anything he wanted but his neighbor would get double, chose to lose an eye. Were his neighbor to get twice what he got, the neighbor would become twice as powerful, and would surely use this to get the upper hand on him. But this “rationality” also has a profound emotional component. Like the estate manager in the fabliau, it eats away at him to see his neighbor thrive. His neighbor’s gain was his loss, despite whatever he might have “won.” What counts here is not what Adam Smith and our economists focus on: “real” or “concrete” gain; the critical matter comes down to invidious comparisons. In this sense, prime divider societies enforce poverty for the masses from both above and below the prime divider. While all elites take most of the wealth produced in the territories they control, some encourage initiative from below—to use my metaphor, they will occasionally increase the oxygen supply to the commoners. But they all have, by our modern standards, very low levels of tolerance for such growth, and move fairly rapidly to expropriate—to take—the wealth that the productive classes produce. As historians have noted about the fate of the Jews in European culture, kings and lords used them as sponges, dipping them into the community and, when they had generated sufficient wealth, wringing out the wealth into their own coffers. A similar crisis affected the growth of the cities of Western Europe at the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth century, when growth previously encouraged by aristocrats (bishops, counts) reached a critical point and the urban populations began to chafe under their lords’ tutelage. Think of it as the trip-switch, the point at which the aristocratic elites—who do not work—choose to kill the commoner that lays the golden eggs lest he become too influential, too autonomous.

eleventh- century economic growth When we realize the kinds of cultural and psychological headwinds into which economic growth sails, we can begin to appreciate just how extraordinary was the period of sustained and cumulative economic development that went on from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, some three hundred years of unprecedented economic activity. It transformed Western Europe from a third-world economy that exported primary goods, including people, to one of the most dynamic economies in the world. The nature of economic activity in the period before 1000, even when it went though moments of substantial growth (eighth century, for example),

economic development and demotic religiosit y 105

never really challenged some relatively low thresholds of commoner success. For 859 we have stark evidence that the warrior aristocracy ruthlessly put down any sign of autonomy among the commoners. However, between 1000 and 1300—and really right up to the present day—we find the emergence of exceptional economic behavior resulting in periods during which cultural trip-switches were repeatedly turned into tipping points, and Malthusian ceilings were repeatedly elevated with new technology, most of which came from below the prime divider. This is the period that many medievalists have characterized as revolutionary—agricultural, commercial, technological, literate, urban, legal, religious, etc. Typically we assume that increased population brings on increased production, a version of “necessity is the mother of invention.” On the contrary, population growth often leads to overpopulation and immiseration (as we see in so many places around the world today, and as, some have argued, one sees in the later Carolingian period). It takes a good deal of social creativity to handle increased populations, a creativity that Western Europe shows in profusion in the period in question. And the most exceptional of these were the communes, both rural and urban. What distinguished the technological revolution of the eleventh century, according to Lynn White, was its widespread, bottom-up, cumulative nature. In particular, the introduction of the heavy plow led to a wide range of small complementary inventions that enhanced the power unleashed by this major one. Not only do many of these innovations come from below, from manual laborers, even peasants at work in the fields, but they demand a high level of social collaboration and mutual trust, indeed a major overhaul of lifestyles—from relatively isolated hamlets in a symbiotic relationship with the surrounding forest, to nucleated villages, redistributed property (the famous strips), and collectively owned means of production (the team of oxen). To imagine that these changes could take place top-down, that it was at the initiative of the lords, is to make the same mistake that the Stalinists made when they imagined they could force the collectivization of farms in Ukraine. What distinguishes Western technology from all others, including Chinese, is how diffused throughout the culture it became. What most cultures keep “above” the prime divider—time pieces, gunpowder, book production—in the West spreads to, and helps create, a middle class. Weber pointed out long ago that the towns of the eleventh and twelfth centuries differed from most towns historically in that they were relatively small, scattered throughout the landscape, unusually independent of a central political administration, and lived in a symbiotic relationship with the surrounding and productive countryside. Unlike the administrative capitals that lived, as Marx would say, in a state of permanent war with the

106 communit y, cultus, and societ y

countryside that they systematically taxed, Western European towns produced goods which they exchanged for the produce of the countryside. The center of this unusual relationship between town and country was the market, and in order for this relationship to have been sustained as long as it was, these markets needed a heavy dose of positive-sum behavior. Evidence for the vigor of the interactions between town and country comes from the international fairs that sprang up in the course of the twelfth century, especially in Champagne, where a combination of good location and fair-minded lords produced an extraordinary cycle of yearly fairs to which people came from all over Europe. These testaments to the strength of international trade show an economic expansion far ahead of the institutional structures to contain it. As Patricia Crone has pointed out, in most cultures commoners stay away from aristocrats. In other words, the prime divider isolates one side from the other. What marks the peculiarity of the West is the high degree to which commoners and elites collaborated, engaging in productive and mutually beneficial—positive-sum—projects. Rob Bartlett locates some of the earliest evidence for this behavior in the twelfth-century aristocracy. Here we find a trade-off—one to which we have become accustomed, but which we must learn to appreciate as quite rare—in which the lords gave up rights of dominion, granting franchises to commoners, in exchange for greater wealth. Autonomous commoners produce more; aristocrats willing to increase oxygen supplies to the commoners get more. If they are not yet making, at least they are exchanging, rather than simply taking. This is precisely what Adam Smith meant when he described the medieval nobility as selling their birthright (dominion) for a mess of baubles (personal wealth). This may make sense to us today, but, I wish to argue, from the perspective of about ten millennia of prime divider societies, not to most people. Freedom, as Eric Fromm might put it, is an acquired taste.

demotic religiosity and economic growth In order to get the kind of economic and social activity that marks these centuries, you need a heavy injection of what I would call a culture of positivesum: a culture that emphasizes good will toward one’s neighbor, that urges people to trust each other and be trustworthy in playing by the same rules without resorting to violence, that considers manual labor dignified, and that grants to manual laborers moral agency and autonomy. Only then do you get markets that thrive, technology that comes from below, and the ability to reorganize and restructure social relations to deploy new technology (heavy plow) and to accommodate increased population (cities). This, were

economic development and demotic religiosit y 107

it to occur, would represent something of a cultural revolution. And that is precisely what I think happened during the eleventh century. In order to understand what happened and why, let me introduce the notion of demotic religiosity. While both demotic and popular forms of religiosity are aimed at and adopted by the people, demotic elevates while popular condescends. The most obvious example of the difference lies in attitudes toward scripture. Elites the world over tend to keep a monopoly on the sacred texts, limiting access and controlling exegesis. In the Middle Ages, this manifested itself in a clerical class that tried—sometimes quite brutally—to keep the Bible only in Latin (itself a translation), and for the masses, whom it assumed were too stupid to learn to read, it had the “Bible of the illiterates,” or the picture Bible. The tales that the clerics told, based on these images, and the kinds of religious responses of the lay commoners to whom they told them are manifestations of popular religiosity. Demotic religiosity, on the other hand, seeks to empower commoners in general, and in this case to educate them so they can have as direct access to the texts as possible. Hence it favors translations (as had early Christians in translating the Hebrew and Greek into the then-living Latin), and encourages hearing and even reading the text. Thus the history of Bible translations and their diffusion among the commoner population, as well as the kinds of responses such diffusion produced, are manifestations of demotic religiosity, which seems to take shape around a constellation of four basic traits: • • • •

Equality before the law Dignity of manual labor Direct access to texts and to God Iconoclasm

I include iconoclasm in my general theory because while there are many examples from non-monotheist cultures, in the West, iconoclasm unquestionably represents, if not an immediately obvious, nonetheless an exceptionally consistent trait of demotic religiosity. Let us turn to a particular form of demotic religiosity that the commoners of Western Europe were clearly exposed to and also, at least in some commoner circles, clearly enthusiastic about. Biblical monotheism is not necessarily demotic—in fact most of us, introduced to it via our own historiography, tend to think of monotheism as quite hierarchical (rule of the priests— literally hierarchy), as the “opiate of the masses.” But there is a particular exegesis of the biblical text that emphasizes the demotic dimension, that seizes upon iconoclasm or the hostility to monarchy, rather than explaining

108 communit y, cultus, and societ y

them away. I call this the commoner’s bible, and I would argue that at times when the biblical text, in vernacular translation, diffuses among commoners, it produces both a demotic exegesis and attendant religious manifestations that I call demotic religiosity. From at least the twelfth century on we find that translations of the Bible lead to peasant revolts that invoke some version of the famous ditty “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” The formula encapsulates the first two principles while illustrating the third: when Adam and Eve were manual laborers (dignity of manual labor), there was not aristocracy (no legal inequality). And how do we know this? Because the Bible, to which we lay Christian commoners now have autonomous access, tells us so. Such a reading represents a close reconfiguration of the law of the Sabbath laid out in the text: “Six days you shall work and do all your labor, and on the seventh day it shall be a day of rest to the Lord your God, for you, your family, your servants, your beasts of burden, the stranger in your midst. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth and on the seventh he rested.” Here again we have the two key elements: dignity of manual labor—everyone is to do it for six days, as did God, whose first actions were labor; and equality before the law—everyone has the privilege to rest. Such readings then accord with the demotic messianism so prominent in the Hebrew prophets, and whose resonance Jesus’ ethical teachings pick up and intensify. For they shall beat their swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, Nation will not lift up sword against nation, nor study war anymore. For each one shall sit under his fig and vine and none shall make them afraid.

The aristocracy takes the very weapons with which they frighten and dispossess the peasants of their labor’s produce, and turn them into tools of manual labor. The messianic kingdom on earth is one of honest laborers eating to their fill from the sweat of their own brow. All these themes—egalitarianism, dignity of manual labor, messianic community—come together in the early medieval tradition that God and his angels sent letters from heaven promising that when everyone observes the Sabbath, a perfect peace will descend upon Christendom. Such readings are not necessitated by the text; one can read them differently, hierarchically. And this is the reading most modern, secular readers

economic development and demotic religiosit y 109

think of when they consider the biblical text, a trend still more pronounced among medievalists, whose major literary sources have an institutional dedication to hierarchy. This hierarchical tradition continued long after the printing press had given powerful voice to demotic readings, for example in Robert Filmore’s Patriarcha. But by then such hierarchical readings only triggered still more articulate demotic readings of the Bible, like John Locke’s First Treatise on Government, a particularly influential example of both demotic monotheism and of its contribution to a modern, tolerant, productive culture. My argument is not that the text causes change, but rather that change comes from the way that people read the text, and how those around them respond to that reading. Those who read the text demotically are likely to engage in the kinds of economic activity we find so common in the period in question. Take the technological changes, so notable for their constant, cumulative, and bottom-up character. When manual labor is seen as a divine command for all men, then intelligent people engage in it, and when intelligent people engage in manual labor, they will find shortcuts (technology), and when they see new technology, they adopt and adapt it. The extraordinary depictions of God as an architect that we find, for example at Chartres—itself a monument to the cumulative technological development of the period in question—illustrate precisely this close association of manual labor and the divine. Similarly, it is in the twelfth century that we begin to get the kinds of millennial speculations that will, in the early modern period, produce the notion that if only man could regain the knowledge lost at the expulsion, he could perfect the world. The moral world of the commoner’s Bible was full of advice for the autonomous moral agent in addition to the instruction to work while others worked and allow others to rest when he did. Above all, it treats commoners as agents who make decisions voluntarily, and as such fosters “voluntary organizations.” It demanded a host of positive-sum commitments that seem designed to make an isonomic system of justice work: to keep fair weights and measures; not to bear false witness; not to bear grudges or take vengeance; to judge fairly, favoring neither the powerful nor the weak; not to oppress the poor, the orphan, the widow, the stranger; to treat manual labor fairly, paying them on time, not keeping pledges overnight; to help one’s neighbor, even when one hated him; to leave the corners of the field and the unharvested hay as gleaning for those who had no property. Indeed, one might sum up a good deal of the demotic message of the Bible as replacing the dominating imperative—rule or be ruled—with the empathic imperative: do not do onto others what you do not want done to

110 communit y, cultus, and societ y

you. The biblical language is quite explicit: “Do not oppress others, because you know what it is like to be oppressed.” Similarly, “Love your neighbor/ stranger as yourself,” demands, at the very least, that you consider him as you consider yourself. Now the paranoid imperative does that much, but then projects evil intent onto the other and treats him or her accordingly. Here the injunction calls for the opposite: feel the same positive feelings for your neighbor as you do for yourself. Indeed it extends to the (powerless) stranger in your midst, whom one loves why? Because you know the heart of the stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt. Empathy, or sympathy, is the key, not hostile projection. People committed to emphasizing such values, however short of perfection they might fall, contribute to thriving economies. They work; they buy and sell fairly; they keep their word; they cooperate with others well; they respond to critical feedback constructively rather than violently; they work hard to avoid envy and Schadenfreude. These are the people who set in motion a bottom-up transformation of the economy, according to Weber’s famous (and often misunderstood) argument. In a sense, then, the “High Middle Ages” of 1000–1350 started not in Paris, Padua, and Rome, but in the open fields of Aquitaine and Burgundy, where the Peace movement activated a demotic religiosity previously unparalleled in its vigor and creativity. Demotic religiosity treats commoners as autonomous moral agents, capable of making commitments and keeping them. In doing so it treats them as worthy to take collective oaths. This attitude differs markedly from the more common aristocratic one that views any collective oaths by commoners as something dangerous. We cannot understand the sudden and widespread rise of voluntary societies, especially of the urban and rural communes, without appreciating how dramatically attitudes toward commoner agency had to change—from both above and below the prime divider—in order for them to occur so frequently and so successfully. And many of these new organizations adopted an egalitarian law code for those who joined: as Southern put it so nicely in his Making of the Middle Ages, “the outline of liberty was traced by the bewildering variety of law which slowly emerged during our period [eleventh–twelfth centuries].” The extraordinary social creativity of the period in question, when so many voluntary associations formed, some clerical, some lay, all religious, helps explain how Western Europe could have moved the Malthusian ceiling upward for so long. And at the heart of many of these new associations lay a particular relationship to the religious texts which Brian Stock dubbed “textual communities.” Social creativity made embracing new technology possible. The adoption of the heavy plow demanded immense social reorganization, with its large team of collectively owned oxen, and its reorga-

economic development and demotic religiosit y 111

nization of landed property into strips. And such social creativity accommodated a much higher population density both rural and urban. Sustained production, thriving markets, technological invention and diffusion come easiest when the labor force is treated as autonomous moral agents rather than as dumb oxen to be whipped into line.

demotic religiosity and the economic takeoff of the eleventh century In the mid-1020s, shortly after King Robert II (the “Pious”) had burned some dozen “heretics” at Orléans (December 28, 1022), the bishop of Arras questioned some rustics from his diocese about their beliefs. What we know comes to us from the bishop’s scriptorium, translated into Latin by ecclesiastical scribes who considered these beliefs heretical. But even across that hostile divide we can perceive the attitudes of a community of believers who are trying to live an apostolic life of mutual love. Anyone who chooses to examine carefully our law and doctrine, which we have learned from our master, sees it to be contrary neither to evangelical principles nor to apostolic sanctions. For it is of this sort: to abandon the world, to restrain our carnal longings, to earn our bread by the sweat of our hands, to wish harm to none, to show loving-kindness to all who are gripped by zeal for our way of life.

In this model of demotic religiosity, the community’s “law and doctrine” is egalitarian, so much so that it seems that, like the apostles, they shared all in common. They are all expected to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow—an obvious reproach to the good bishop interrogating them and his suite. And their community of literate and nonliterate believers takes shape around a demotic reading of a collectively embraced text—the Bible. To further specify Stock’s term, this is a demotic textual community. The origins of this community of believers are obscure. The peasants themselves say they hold it from a certain Gundulf, an Italian. Some historians have taken this remark as confirmation of the thesis that these heresies came from the East (via Italy) and represented the first wave of dualistic heresy that would eventually spread and provoke the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars in the early thirteenth century. Whether or not there is a firm “doctrine” and, further, whether that doctrine comes from the East seem less relevant to the historian of the West than the fundamental question of why Western peasants, really for the first time, show such autonomous and enthusiastic interest in Christianity.

112 communit y, cultus, and societ y

Certainly up until this point most of the expressions we find of commoner Christianity correspond to “popular” religiosity—thaumaturgic, communal, ritualist. If anything, at its origins Christianity provoked hostility from commoners. With the exception of the throngs that gathered around thaumaturgic saints’ relics and millennial movements gathered around charismatic and megalomanic personalities, we find limited expression of popular enthusiasm for Christianity up to this point. And then in the early eleventh century we have over a dozen documents attesting to the presence of “heresies” among the commoners primarily in what is today France—more independent documentation than the previous five centuries had produced. Rather than looking at this phenomenon as a matter of doctrine and tracing those doctrines back in books and high culture, let us consider it a matter of religiosity, and trace that religiosity back to a demotic reading of the unquestioned authority of those days, the Bible. Here we can more clearly distinguish between demotic and popular Christianity. Popular Christianity, or that Christianity addressed to the commoners by the hierarchical Church, tended to reinforce hierarchy. Hence the role of relics and the saints’ cults, which ecclesiastical communities could possess and control, public liturgies like rogations, images—all characteristics of a peasant religiosity that prefers material representations, “concrete and tangible.” The new, demotic Christians of the early eleventh century rejected all of these traits with such rigor that modern intellectuals have been tempted to see them as intellectuals. Indeed heretics in areas as far-flung as Champagne, Burgundy, Aquitaine, and Perigord share what one historian called “the great refusal.” They dismissed not just the fancy elaborations of ritual and liturgy, but the very rites and liturgies as vanity; they rejected the worship of images, works of the hands of men; they mocked those who bowed down to crucifixes. Until now much of the historical discussion of their rejection of the Church’s hierarchy has focused on how such beliefs triggered accusations of heresy. But a moment’s consideration will also reveal how remarkably autonomous and self-confident such communities had to be in order to feel that they could do without such an imposing and venerable institution of salvation as the Church. In a revealing remark, the monk Héribert, writing of the “heretics” of Périgord, noted that “indeed, no one (no matter how rustic) adheres to their sect who does not become, within eight days, wise in letters, writing and action, so much so that no one can overcome him in any way.” Commoner idiots, taught demotic religiosity, can hold their own against clerics in debates over the meaning of the Bible . . . assuming, of course, that such debates are held in public before the people. Whether or not this demotic religiosity came from the East, the key issue then concerns why the West proved such fertile soil for it, and why it took

economic development and demotic religiosit y 113

such deep root that from then on religious creativity, in both social and intellectual forms, continued to flourish, even under the hostile impact of the Inquisition. The answer I would like to offer is more existential than textual. These powerful strains of demotic religiosity come from one of the most remarkable religious movements in recorded history, the Peace of God. Medieval historians have tended to hide the Pax Dei under a bushel. For reasons that I have neither the time nor the inclination to explore here, one important current of medieval historiography has dismissed the Peace as scarcely original and of little long-range influence, belittling the movement at the cost of ignoring its most original components and emphasizing whatever could be found precedent for. But what makes this movement so astonishing is precisely that for which we have no precedent—vast and enthusiastic crowds attending church councils that legislated a consensual peace confirmed by oaths. Of course individual councils differed, some with, some without oaths, and our documentation is so sparse and (in the case of the most prolific writer about the Peace of God, Ademar of Chabannes) so unreliable that it is difficult to speak with much precision. In terms of the “demotic” religiosity, however, the evidence from the councils offers abundant testimony. • Presence and participation of commoners: Nowhere in the annals of the Church do we hear of ecclesiastical assemblies in which lay commoners, including women, even attended, much less played a role. And yet one of the characteristics of the Peace assemblies was their massive presence at openair councils where relics coming from all around were assembled for days on end. Moreover, the key validation of the councils’ deliberations and decisions came from the miracles that abounded at these assemblies, miracles that, both in their protagonists (mostly commoners) and in the enthusiasm they unleashed, gave these councils their peculiar character. • This enthusiasm seems closely linked to a demotic religiosity that sought to resolve disputes with discourse, by mobilizing sentiments of remorse and the renunciation of violence in order to lead to repentance and forgiveness. In some cases we actually have claims that the councils declared an absolute peace and absolution for all who had killed (hence the end of blood feuds). • The legislation that aimed at getting the aristocracy to disarm was also aimed, more modestly, at protecting commoners and constraining the arbitrary use of force against them by the aristocracy. It would be hard to argue that these councils legislated an egalitarian law code, and indeed some have hypothesized (correctly) that the long-range implications of the Peace legislation was to subject peasants to their lord’s “justice” even as it protected

114 communit y, cultus, and societ y

them from the violence of other lords. And yet allusions to a “total peace,” in which vendetta and the use of force was put to an end, suggest an even more ambitious program. • Such legislation, even momentary, has a messianic quality to it—as does the very name Pax Dei—and the documentation from the period of the Peace’s most enthusiastic councils suggests precisely that. Ademar abounds in messianic imagery, including the most famous demotic passage: “Swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks,” an image taken up by Fulbert of Chartres at precisely the same time. Glaber’s account of the wave of councils of 1033, confirmed on many points by Gerard of Cambrai’s account and other material, suggests a wave of concrete messianic expectations and measures taken throughout major areas of what is today France, led by bishops! At the height of the wave that crested in 1033—the millennium of the Passion, according to Rodulfus Glaber—the participants believed they were making a collective and public covenant with God. Hagiographers regularly compared the people flocking to the councils in great numbers to the ancient Hebrews who, having left Egypt, were heading for the promised land. • Part of the messianic hopes expressed in the Peace revolve around the prominent role given to voluntarism in the Peace legislation. Unlike any previous effort to “organize” society, the early (sanctified) Peace legislation tried to assure compliance with its demands by voluntary oaths and the threat of divine intervention. It was precisely this “lack of teeth” in the legislation that led to its eventual collapse and the emergence from it of the Truce of God (enforced by “public” armies) and the King’s Peace. But in the brief period of its success, the Peace counted on a combination of public opinion (largely defined by the general populace), oath-taking, and fear of God—God’s kingdom—to shape social relations. As both contemporaries and modern medievalists point out, the movement did not last. But, like all millennial movements, “failure” does not mean “without consequence.” On the contrary, the most important impact of millennial movements lies in their unintended consequences precisely because they always fail to achieve their intended goal—the messianic age. In the case of the Peace of God movement, which came in two waves, first in the 990s, again in the 1020s (peaking in 1033, the millennium of the Passion of Christ), the impact seems to have been widespread and powerful, but precisely in those strata of society least documented and hence least visible to the modern historian. A close look at perhaps the single most messianic and corroborated passage on the Peace of God—Glaber’s account of the wave of councils in 1033— suggests precisely the connection I have been drawing here. After describ-

economic development and demotic religiosit y 115

ing the apocalyptic famine of the preceding years (“it seems that the order of things had collapsed and everything were falling into its original chaos”), Glaber tells us of the glorious sunshine that shown in 1033 (“as if the heavens were smiling upon the earth”), and the vast wave of assemblies that swept though Aquitaine, Burgundy, and northward “to the farthest reaches of Francia” (Flanders). The legislation called for an absolute peace, and provided for broad dietary discipline that clearly targeted the aristocracy (no meat on Saturday). The enthusiasm aroused by these councils was so great that the assembled masses raised their palms to heaven and shouted in unison, Pax! Pax! Pax! “They believed,” Glaber comments in one of the rare passages in medieval literature to tell us what commoners thought, “they were making a perpetual covenant with God.” Like the covenant at Sinai, which also involved the whole people, this voluntary accord marked the birth of a new people, a New Israel; and like the old Israel, to whose literary descendents we owe one of the most demotic religious texts on record, we can suspect that these folk also prized the demotic dimensions of the religion and the direct relationship with God it afforded. Not satisfied with describing the councils, Glaber went on to describe the consequences: In the same year there was such a great abundance of corn and wine and other foods that the like could not be hoped to be attained in the following five years. All food was cheap except meat and rare spices: truly it was like the great Mosaic jubilee of ancient times. For the following three years food was no less plentiful.

Like similar passages in Fulbert and Ademar, this passage emphasizes the link between peace and prosperity, and shows a concern for the availability of food to commoners. Just as provided for in the biblical text that Glaber invokes here, peasants were eating to their fill. Of course, these blissful days did not last. Glaber continues: But alas! how painful! the human race, ever forgetful of the beneficence of God, prone to evil like a dog returning to its vomit, or a sow wallowing in the stye, repeatedly violated its own marriage covenant [pactum sponsionis], as it is written: “You grew thick, you grew sleek and you kicked” (Deut. 32:15). The leaders of the clerical and temporal orders alike fell into avarice, and they resorted, even more than had formerly been their wont, to robbery to satisfy their lusts. Middling and lesser people followed their example and plunged into monstrous sin.

116 communit y, cultus, and societ y

On one level it is easy to dismiss this passage as so much clerical moralizing. But it actually goes against the current of ecclesiastical historiography in the later Carolingian period. For Glaber here may wring his hands over the failure of the Peace’s messianic hopes briefly realized, but he clearly blames the aristocracy for the failure, starting with the clergy. For Glaber here, the corruption starts at the top, and those at the bottom are led astray by their leaders. We may have one of the first volleys in the Church Reform that will culminate in the “Papal” “Reform” of the later eleventh and early twelfth century. Here we may also have an interesting contribution to the literature on corruption and economic development. According to most modern commentators, generally working with Weberian models of rationalization, a meritocratic economic culture cannot emerge without the breakdown of family loyalties (e.g., nepotism). This movement of demotic religiosity sought to replace self-help justice with mediation—later known as peace courts— and inspired the whole populace to consider itself to be making a collective covenant with God. In this we may see the beginnings of precisely that drive toward transcending clan and even class loyalties, toward considering the entire people one people—even manual laborers—and toward adopting the kinds of civic relations and fair practices (same weights and measures for all) that make for the cultural foundation of economic development. It clearly did not work at the messianic scale its participants hoped for, but again, wrong does not mean inconsequential. When we look at the extraordinary cultural ferment of the eleventh century, with its sweeping economic and social changes, its exceptional degree of collaboration between elites and commoners, its widespread use of contractual relations to both create productive communities and to engage in commercial activity, it may just be that the enormous injection of demotic religiosity that the Peace of God provided to European culture, starting in France, set Europe on a different course. At the turn of the millennium, then, we see the first lineaments of that exceptionalism which will, in less than a millennium, take the West from the most primitive economy to one that has no precedent for power and productivity.

   BACK BITING AND SELF PROMOTION the work of merchants of the cairo geniza Jessica Goldberg

I

n a group of eleventh-century commercial letters from the eastern Mediterranean, we find the following comments:

1. The young man is not fit for anything and cannot do anything . . . Iqbāl will tell you about him . . . he will reach you and tell some of his miserable doings. 2. Please don’t stop writing to him so you can give him a nudge and push him to buy quickly. Otherwise, he’s going to keep his lids glued together and not open his eyes. 3. The noble Avraham bar Ya‘qov was a busy boy this summer, selling what I had with him—stuff that had sold for a dinar he’s selling for two-thirds. He’s selling our remaining goods this year, and we are the envy of both Jews and Muslims, for he sells what’s worth a dinar for two-thirds and then buys dinars, a dinar for a dinar and a third. 4. Our men have arrived and have spoken well of him and of what he did this year, and described him as he really is. 5. As for Khallūf ibn Zakār, he said to me, “Among what did he to me was that he cursed me, took away my honor, and threatened me.”

Khallūf ibn Zakār was not the only one with something to complain about. The writers of these lines were masters of direct and indirect character assassination. In the midst of reporting on or requesting the innumerable business transactions that took up a medieval merchant’s time—purchasing goods; arranging to have them processed, packed, and loaded into conveyances; accompanying them en route; selling them; collecting payment; and

!118# communit y, cultus, and societ y

writing up daily and summary accounts—these businessmen devoted a sizeable amount of space to talking about their colleagues, often with an unkind eye. Merchants not only talked about each other in letters, as the examples show, they also reported on such talk and promised more of it. These comments initially read as unusually candid statements of personal experience, a direct record of feelings about colleagues. The form of the letters heightens this impression: they look unstructured and careless in composition, in striking contrast to the highly stereotyped documents that make up the vast majority of extant material from this period. But while the merchants who made these comments may well have been expressing real emotions, we should be wary of reading these parts of letters ingenuously. The frequency with which the comments appear, and their presence in letters that had important economic functions, rouses suspicions that they too served an important functional role. Recent work on the role of talk in medieval European society has emphasized the possible number and importance of these functions. Sociologists and anthropologists have long discussed the informal role that interpersonal talk can play in inculcating group norms, negotiating status relationships, and patrolling group boundaries. In medieval society talk had an even broader role. As Thelma Fenster and Daniel Smail discuss in their book Fama, when few formal institutions existed, talk “did many of those things that in modern society are handled officially.” Scholars have thus uncovered the important role of talk, for instance, not only in managing reputations and group identity in medieval Europe, but in medieval legal systems. Indeed, Fenster and Smail note that the dismissal of this talk as mere “gossip” is a historical phenomenon associated precisely with the rise of institutions and officials. In this chapter I examine a corpus of commercial correspondence in which this interpersonal commentary appears in order to discover the role of this talk in the structure of business. Words recorded in letters are naturally not speech, but I choose the term talk advisedly: I believe the comments recorded in these letters can be analyzed most usefully in the context of the studies of talk cited above; equally, as I argue below, these comments are meant very much to participate in the physical conversations occurring in the scattered markets of these traders’ world. In the category of talk, I include examples like the epigraphs at the beginning of this chapter, which I would define as third-party innuendo, but also discussions of oneself, one’s correspondent, or one’s associates that appear to have a judgment or emotion attached. Expressions of anxiety, praise, complaint, self-promotion, and reassurance all enter into my analysis. Sifting through this talk, and looking at the patterns and rhetoric within it, reveals how structured it is, making

back-biting and self-promotion !119#

its inclusion in these letters anything but careless or offhand. Writing about members of the community was a central business task; denigrating another merchant was one in a series of techniques that kept business going, as important as properly labeling a bale of flax or issuing a power of attorney against a delinquent partner. My analysis is based on the eleventh-century commercial letters of the Jewish merchants of Fustat. This group left extensive documentation of its trading activities in the eastern Mediterranean in the business records its members discarded in the Cairo Geniza. More than a thousand of these documents—primarily letters, but also contracts, accounts, and other ephemera—were left by hundreds of merchants over several generations, most connected to one another through business partnerships, family ties, and shared activity in the religious community. These merchants were traders in most of the goods of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade; they arranged both large shipments of enormous value crossing from Egypt to Sicily and Tunisia, and smaller local purchases, manufactures, and sales of goods in the Egyptian countryside. Acting in partnership or association with one another, they were able to manage multiple strands of business in international and local markets. With rare exceptions, letters from the Geniza are the originals that traveled from the sender to the addressee. They are often written in the sender’s own hand; when they are not, the scribe is often another merchant. As such, they represent an unusually unmediated source on the talk and reputation rhetoric of this business community. They are also an unusually fragmentary source: a geniza is by definition a place to discard rather than preserve documents. The documents found are thus numerous, but random and partial, the tattered fragments of ordered business lives. Looking at what people throw away, we might hope to gain access to a different reality, unfiltered by the impulse to shape and control the past that the creation of an archive and its documents implies. In the trash, we imagine we will unearth a hidden world. Geniza letters sustain this desire; one’s first impression of reading these letters is often that of looking behind the curtain of rhetoric into the unedited record of people’s thoughts. Geniza documents do provide different access to the medieval world, yet reconstructing the world of these traders comes not from knowing their private thoughts, but from analyzing their different rhetoric. Consisting of hundreds of fragments written by individuals with quite distinct personalities, these letters nonetheless emerge as a corporate text, typified by patterns in devoting space to particular topics, and in ways of talking about people, events, and transactions. Rhetoric, they remind us, can be a veil between what people think and what they write, but it is equally a way of patterning

!120# communit y, cultus, and societ y

thoughts that defines a culture. In these scattered remains, it is ironically these very patterns that allow us to understand the nature of business, and rhetoric that keeps this business world connected. I thus analyze the letters as a corpus, looking first for patterns in the content distribution of letters, and then at the language merchants use. In the breakdown of content, the element of human management is unexpected in its ubiquity. When opening and closing pleasantries of letters are left aside, managing business associates takes up more than twenty percent of the contents of the letters, making it second only to managing transactions in importance. Two-thirds of the letters contain various types of writing that involves personnel management, including reports or comments about the person or behavior of individuals, requests for interpersonal intervention and oversight, and reports on the results of such interventions. Like the epigraphs that open this chapter, the most common form of writing is comments about third parties, associates who are neither the writer nor the recipient of the letter in question. Nearly half of the letters include sections on third-party behavior, and these sections account for more than half of all management material. Negative innuendo is the most common tool employed: more than three-quarters of third-party comments cast aspersions on the associate mentioned, who may be impugned either personally or in his actions. The fact that self-defense makes up the next largest chunk of material suggests that negative comments got back to their targets, either through circulation of the contents of letters or through the direct intervention of letter recipients. In the beginning of the eleventh century, a letter from Samh,ūn ibn Da’ūd, a merchant living in Qayrawan, shows this process at work. As a result of a dispute, his partner in Fustat had refused to pay some of Samh,ūn’s creditors, who blamed Samh,ūn. “Their letters of reproach have now come to everyone here; and it’s open season on disgracing my honor,” he complains. Multiple letters had traveled half the length of the Mediterranean and reached their target through the mouths of his fellow residents. Indeed, letters contain a fair amount of anticipatory self-defense, as merchants attempted to avoid such an outcome. They write to explain in advance why they were unable to accomplish requested tasks, and praise their own exertions in the face of insuperable obstacles (the line between self-defense and self-promotion could be thin). Merchants preferred to express their dissatisfaction to and through third parties; direct complaints and claims of mismanagement occur in less than ten percent of letters. The intensity of negative talk should not obscure the significant role of praise in letters. The most common form of praise in letters is self-praise or selfpromotion. But, as I will discuss below, we also find numerous instances of

back-biting and self-promotion !121#

praise or anticipatory praise bestowed directly on letter recipients, as well as some positive reporting on the excellence of third parties. These patterns of writing about associates owe little to formal Islamic epistolatory practice, although the opening and closing pleasantries in letters abide by many parts of the formal model. Contemporary manuals of letter-writing as an aspect of statecraft do devote attention to proper writing of direct censures and apologies, but not to the arts of praising or denigrating associates. The Geniza writers themselves, however, invoke and participate much more in the world of speech than written culture when talking about associates in their letters. This is apparent even in my set of epigraphs. In the first example, the writer promises speech: Iqbal “will reach you and tell some of his miserable doings,” while examples 4 and 5 report on it: “Our men have arrived and spoken well of him,” one recounts, while the other records Khallūf ibn Zakār’s direct words to the writer. Even example 3 invokes the gossip of the trading world, as the merchant tells his associate that the actions of Avraham bar Ya‘qov have made the partners “the envy of both Jews and Muslims.” The connection letter writers make between their talk and public talk evokes recent study of the relationships between talk and reputation in medieval society. There are certain difficulties in this comparison. Historians of medieval Europe can invoke a tight relationship between public talk and reputation, bound together by the word fama, which in medieval Latin usage combined both meanings. No word in Arabic, the language of my documents, so neatly ties these concepts together. Moreover, much of the analysis of the role of talk in medieval history involves talk as a public act, as part of public performance that created social position. Thus, if talk in these letters can be understood by turning to the concepts explicated by social scientists and historians, the public nature of letters within the merchant community must be considered. The relationship between talk about people and reputation also needs to be explored in the language merchants use. Geniza commercial letters had somewhat uncertain levels of publicity, making them unlike most medieval letters. The physical state of the surviving letters shows that they were folded but not sealed. The address was written on the outer side, which was left blank. Letters could therefore be delivered without being read, but nothing prevented carriers or forwarders of letters from perusing their contents. But we also find letters in which writers express satisfaction that an indiscreet letter has been burned, indicating that letters could be sent with an expectation of initial privacy. At the same time, letters could be used as probative documents, and many letter writers report on reading letters. In one instance, Isma‘īl ibn Ya‘qūb al-Andalusī questions the motivations of merchants who publicized a letter: “Let us not

!122# communit y, cultus, and societ y

regard those who read the letter to us as wicked people who stir up a son against his father.” Some letters were meant to be public; writers shared the expectation that all letters could become so. These qualities make them an almost ideal vehicle for gossip as sociologists have conceived it: statements made more freely because they occur at the edges of the public space and then make their way to the center. This talk thus refers to and participates in the public sphere, but is not the more explicitly public talk that is the subject of recent research on medieval Europe. The way that merchants talk about each other points to two different discourses about people. Both these conversations involve reputation and meanings of reputation, but they are distinct in both form and purpose. When merchants evaluate or denigrate the worth of their fellows, the great majority of the time they focus on effort, knowledge, and ability in getting work done. The positive words that rule this discussion, and appear repeatedly, are terms for knowledge and effort. Over and over again merchants are urged to display effort, diligence, exertion, and care, or are praised for their knowledge of markets, or simply “knowing what needs to be done.” The most common abuse is for negligence, inattention, or insufficient activity, followed by complaints of incompetence. The epigraphs display these typical complaints: the first merchant is incompetent, the second is slow and inattentive, the third busy in the wrong direction. On the positive side, other letters contain admonitions to work “with your known diligence and effort” and reports of heard praise: “[he] arrived and told me much about you, my lord, about your exertions for your friends . . . all of which, of course, I knew before.” We see the functioning of this praise in a letter of Barhūn ibn Mūsā al-Tāhertī, a major eleventh-century merchant. He mentored Nahray ibn Nissīm, a Fustat merchant who figures in a large number of Geniza documents, at the beginning of his career. In a letter from Sicily, he reports to a more mature Nahray on the progress of another young merchant. ‘Ayyāsh ibn S,adaqa, he is happy to note, is “making a great effort and trying hard to please.” In these lines, the merchants don’t mention a word for reputation, but a reputation dynamic seems nevertheless to be at work. In the first of the quotations above, the word known alerts us to a common strategy of these letters, in which merchants are directly reminded to sustain a character already formed, or to confirm that they are the right “kind” of merchant. One of the most common refrains in letters is “You are not the kind of man whom one instructs” when giving an order for business, or “A man like you is not the kind one instructs.” These examples appear to emphasize knowledge as a primary value; other letters stress the link between knowledge and

back-biting and self-promotion !123#

diligence: “If you neglect this it is your loss, but a man like you is not the kind one instructs.” This reputation by categorization strategy also crops up in self-descriptions, as when merchants write in letters of self-defense “I am not the kind of man whom one instructs.” It can even appear in negative assessments. In a letter written by Nahray directly to ‘Ayyāsh, then working more independently acquiring flax in the Egyptian countryside, Nahray has to put his young associate in his place: “You had little to do in Fustat last year, whereas this year you are inundated from all sides. Much less work would suffice for someone like you.” The word reputation or, rather, different words that partly mean reputation make rather rare appearances, and in two different contexts. The more frequent discourse invokes the word jāh, whose primary semantic range includes rank, standing, and prestige. In the larger social world revealed by the Geniza documents, it means one’s social place or standing. When it appears in commercial letters, the context shows that jāh for merchants consisted in the breadth and strength of a merchant’s associate network, and the possibility this provided of getting work done for himself and others. A quite bald statement of this meaning comes from a request from Zakariyya ibn Ya‘qūb, one of Nahray’s principal associates in Tripoli, that Nahray take care of some new associates of his while they are visiting Fustat: “assist them,” he urges, “. . . even if you have to abandon your own affairs for a day or two in order to do this . . . I would like them to come back here grateful to you, having accomplished their purpose to their satisfaction . . . I would like you, thereby, to strengthen my reputation.” Zakariyya’s reputation is enhanced by his power to get Nahray to abandon personal work for unprofitable work at his behest, an indication of his importance to Nahray, at this point one of Fustat’s more substantial merchants. In another letter, a merchant requests that his associate “strengthen my reputation” by doing a favor for a fellow merchant regarding payment of a draft. Sometimes it is the extension of relationships that is at stake: “I told him I was a favorite of yours,” a merchant writes. “Please strengthen my reputation and your own by extending your connections to his friend through me.” A second discourse of reputation occurs when merchants use the word ‘ird,, whose semantic field includes honor and dignity. Merchants invoke this vocabulary when they accuse associates of misconduct that breaches rules of mercantile trade, or defend themselves against such accusations, as was the case with Samh,ūn ibn Da’ūd, whose ‘ird, was disgraced above. They often use the term in conjunction with words for piety and impiety, adding a sense of religious transgression to the breaking of commercial rules. Such usage characterizes the complaint of Khallūf ibn Zakār found in the fifth

!124# communit y, cultus, and societ y

epigraph above. When he says that another merchant cursed him and took away his honor, the word used for “curse” also means blaspheme. The words jāh and ‘ird, do not appear in conjunction, indicating that the two meanings were separate. ‘Ird, appears very infrequently, less than one-fourth as often as jāh, in only about 1 of the letters. The content of most talk in the letters, and the first meaning of reputation, points to the narrow focus of this talk around issues of work and labor. Reputation seems less an assessment of overall personal worth than an evaluation of one’s ability to accomplish work: to responsibly carry out tasks oneself or, better, to be able to get others to do so. In the rare cases where reputation is bound to honor, it is business honor. This singularity of interest is a bit surprising in that merchants were members of a small, closeknit community bound by multiple social ties, and other Geniza documents show that they could have cast many other stones at each other, whether about the mistresses some of them kept, their neglect of their duties for the religious community, their espousal of unorthodox religious beliefs, or a number of other scandals. Comments about effort and efficacy form the chief part of business gossip because the way Geniza merchants conducted business made these issues a pressing and constant concern. In particular, merchants’ unusual labor arrangements created a great need for talk among the merchant group. Any medieval merchant required long-distance agents to work on his behalf, unless he intended to limit himself to single ventures in which he personally bought, transported, and sold his own goods—an extremely risky and nondiversified strategy. In the medieval Islamic world, however, merchants could not hire employees to do this work, as any form of paid employment was deemed degrading. In every economic sphere, records show that people edged around this problem through various forms of partnership contracts. While Geniza merchants too made use of contracts, they preferred to make use of a more flexible and convenient method: an informal reciprocal service regime. Merchants in this system did wholly unremunerated work for their associates, handling any or all parts of the business process, in exchange not for any percentage on the goods handled, but for the implicit promise that such services would be done for them in return. Reciprocal services were an elegant and efficient way to get business done at a distance. A merchant with connections in a distant town could arrange to have merchandise purchased or sold there, items packed and shipped, and money remitted, without traveling himself, risking disagreement with a partner about the best choices for his capital, or having to pay a percentage of his capital or profits in labor costs. Each of these orders could be made

back-biting and self-promotion !125#

through letters, the instructions of which could be as specific or general as the writer preferred. Of course, he would have to perform these services for others as well. Nahray succinctly explains to young ‘Ayyāsh the way of business: In your letter you also mentioned that you were good enough to stay on in order to oversee the packing of the bales. You surely know, my friend, that the main reason I’m staying here is on behalf of your business. If all of us were to leave the city, our business in Fustat would come to a standstill since there would be no one here to take delivery of a bale of flax, no one to settle accounts, and no one to do any selling. . . . This is exactly why one wants associates. You pack for me and I pack for you, and thus we both succeed.

Such a system seems to depend to an unusual and dangerous degree on the upright character and often selfless behavior of this group of merchants, as associates must be trusted and willing to undertake tasks involving huge sums of money and great amounts of labor. Impressed by the success of these merchants, the first scholar to study these informal arrangements, S. D. Goitein, optimistically concluded, “Mediterranean trade . . . was largely based, not upon cash benefits or legal guarantees, but on the human qualities of mutual trust and friendship.” A. L. Udovitch, looking in detail at how merchants developed these relationships, stressed that ties between merchants were dyadic, based upon personal knowledge and the establishment of a “personal guarantee” for each merchant. In his model, each merchant created a reputation in his youth—based upon both his own behavior and the ties he brought into the system—which then served him throughout his career. Avner Greif considered the system from another point of view. Questioning Goitein’s model of trust and friendship, he analyzed how such a system could ensure commitment: what kept an agent entrusted with money from running off with it? In his view, reputation was a mechanism to ensure honesty. He believed merchants acted as a coalition; misconduct would be reported through letters, and loss of reputation meant expulsion (temporary or permanent) from the coalition, with an attendant reduction in income resulting from the loss of the labor services the coalition provided. These analyses all have elements of truth, but do not suffice to account for the larger universe of reputation talk in letters. Greif ’s model explains very well the material I discussed on ‘ird,, which is invoked precisely when misconduct is alleged. Merchants who complain that their reputation (‘ird,) is being ruined will indeed sometimes cite consequent loss of business with other merchants. But this material is a tiny drop in the sea of merchant

!126# communit y, cultus, and societ y

talk. Udovitch captures a much greater role of talk in establishing reputation as an aspect of forming ties, but does not examine in detail the content of reputation for Geniza merchants, or the role of talk in maintaining and managing relationships, which looms even larger than creating them in ensuring the day-to-day success of business. The vast majority of talk in letters is in fact practical and instrumental in maintaining rather than establishing service relationships. The primary reason merchants talked about each other was in the service of labor negotiations and labor management, tasks that were crucial in a system where labor was not directly remunerated, where the worker was absent, and where a lack of hierarchy made most merchants mutually employer and employee. Work, in most cases, could not be directly assessed by the employer. The variety of reporting talk in letters seems to indicate both real assessments of colleagues, and rhetorical attempts to make claims about one’s value as a worker and amounts of work done and thus owed. A second set of discussions attempt to stimulate merchants directly to produce their best efforts and make a particular associate’s work a priority, as well as to induce fellow merchants to undertake the tasks of overseeing work. Sometimes oversight is directly requested, supported by reminders of one’s labor reputation at stake; sometimes merchants manipulate another trader’s anxiety, giving him a self-interested motive for oversight. Merchants recognized variations in the value of different merchants’ labor, based upon each individual’s personal knowledge and diligence, and also upon the size and importance of his network of connections. This assessment might be considered a “reputation capital,” capital that merchants were constantly using and replenishing. When letter comments are reread in the light of these issues, both the content of comments and the terms of gossip are explained. The focus on effort and diligence and the complaints of neglect occur because personal talk is less often about enforcement and trust than it is about labor claims and compensation. The dynamics of reputation and labor negotiation in particular can be shown through a heightened example of self-promotion. Several letters written on a single long business trip by the same traveling merchant, Nissīm ibn Khalafūn, to his associate at home, the ubiquitous Nahray ibn Nissīm, show Nissīm promoting the value of his work in different ways. In one letter Nissīm informs Nahray of his value through his connections: Nissīm writes that he succeeded in selling Nahray’s lac in some villages. The customers did not want the lac; they bought only because they valued Nissīm’s friendship. In another letter, he says he took a small amount of Nahray’s indigo to sell even though he didn’t want to (“only out of my love for you”), promoting a common service into a special favor. He also praises himself for his

back-biting and self-promotion !127#

immediate attention to Nahray’s requests, for undertaking risky business as a favor, for giving up a business opportunity so as not to disappoint a colleague. After many of these instances, Nissīm makes references to the mutuality of service. The unusual attention he gives to his own efforts, and to bolstering their value rhetorically, is explained by the unusual demands he needs to make on Nahray back in Fustat, demands he himself recognizes as unreasonable. “By God,” he writes, “I do not wish to burden you with tasks from which I know you could easily excuse yourself were it not for the pressing need which renders this necessary. I know that you will spare no effort . . .” He writes similarly in another, “I know that I am imposing on you more than you are able to do, but I rely on your friendship.”

=== The merchants of medieval Fustat had no institutional structure of management, and no formal hierarchy within the merchant community. Like their counterparts in medieval Europe, they used talk to fill functions we organize bureaucratically, making pejorative and promoting talk not a secondary, covert part of business, but rather the heart of maintaining a complex business system. Manipulating complex layers of talk, they created a web of administration connecting the great basin of the eastern Mediterranean. We can still see the structure of this web through the evidence of the few strands that survive.

   JOHN OF SALISBURY AND THE CIVIC UTILITY OF RELIGION Mark Silk

I

n a recent examination of the history of the idea of civil religion, I called attention to a passage in the Policraticus where John of Salisbury uses his twelfth-century understanding of spiritual interiority to demonstrate the civic utility of even non-Christian religions. Here I want to expand that discussion to look more closely at the sources John relied on, and to consider how his novel argument, which may or may not have registered on subsequent thinkers, ought to be considered within the larger history of religious ideas. The passage occurs in book 5, chapter 3, at the beginning of John’s account of the Institutio Traiani—the phantom treatise that, according to him, was written by Plutarch to instruct the Emperor Trajan. The scholarly consensus today is that John made up the story of the Institutio out of whole cloth. It was, in Janet Martin’s view, a characteristic jeu d’esprit: John wrote in part to gain the admiration of other men of letters. While deceiving the majority of his readers, he meant his cleverness to be manifest to a select few, including his friends in the archbishop’s curia and elsewhere. . . . For John and his friends one of the important uses of the classical tradition, particularly the pseudo-classical inventions and other shared jokes, was precisely the reinforcement of their sense of being a learned elite.

Without disputing this assessment, I want to suggest that John’s rejection of the standard Augustinian critique of ancient Roman religion may have given him a substantive reason for hiding behind a classical scrim. What John claims to be his paraphrase of the Institutio is best known for

john of salisbury 129

its elaborate version of the so-called organic analogy: the prince as the head of the commonwealth, the senate as the heart, royal attendants as the sides, provincial governors and judges as the eyes, ears, and tongue, soldiers and court officials as the hands, peasants and artisans as the feet, and—in what is certainly John speaking in the comic mode—treasury officials as stomach and intestines. (O the danger to the body politic should they become too retentive!) More than half a century ago, it was shown by Hans Liebeschütz that in spinning out the analogy John was following a schema laid down in the theological textbook of Robert Pullen, his professor at Paris and later a cardinal at the papal court when he was working there as a chancery clerk. This is compelling evidence that the Institutio Traiani is in fact one of those figmenta that John, in the prologue of the Policraticus, asks his reader to indulge him in—“if they serve public utility.” Before addressing himself to the commonwealth’s corporeal members, John (addressing himself to the first of the virtues “Plutarch” claims a ruler should cultivate: reverence for the divine) takes up its spiritual faculty. Those things that institute and implant in us the practice of religion [cultum religionis] and transmit the ceremonies of God—I should not say, following Plutarch, “of the gods”—take the place of the soul in the body of the commonwealth. And therefore it is necessary to look up to and venerate those who preside over the practice of religion [religionis cultui] as the soul of the body.

Just as the soul has rulership over the whole body, so those whom Plutarch calls the “prefects of religion” preside over the whole body (of the commonwealth); it was in order to free himself from the power of the pontiffs that Augustus Caesar had himself made a pontiff of Vesta and then, while still alive, promoted to the gods (ad deos). Evidently, John means for us to understand that Christianity is not the only religion capable of providing the commonwealth with its soul. But how does such a soul function? To answer that question, John considers not only the functionaries of religion but also—and in the first instance—the nature of religion itself. He begins with the claim that there is a difference between the direct love of God and cultus exterior, physical religious practices. Only through the medium of this kind of cultus can God be diligently worshiped, since God has never been seen and is not easily knowable. Then comes another ancient example: Wherefore we read that Numa Pompilius introduced among the Romans certain ceremonies and sacrifices, to the end that under the pretence of the

130 communit y, cultus, and societ y

immortal gods he might the more easily induce them to cultivate piety, religion, good faith, and the other things which he wished to make known to them.

This is not the place to rehearse in detail how Numa figures in earlier discussions of the role of religion in society. Suffice it to say that, from at least the time of Cicero, Rome’s mythical second king was widely credited with having instituted Rome’s distinctive religious practices in order to transform the first Romans from thuggish warriors into well-behaved citizens. Livy gives the most important biographical account, central to which is a divine nymph named Egeria, whose pillow talk Numa claimed to invoke so as to persuade the populace that he had supernatural authority (“under the pretence of the immortal gods”) for his innovations. Augustus, after his accession, modeled himself in part on the ancient king, and Numa subsequently became the exemplar of the pious emperor, the personification of Roman religion at its civic best. Recognizing this, early Latin Christian authors habitually denigrated him as the emblem of the paganism they were anxious to supplant. The culmination of this tradition is to be found in Augustine’s City of God, which treats Numa at length as a mediocre ruler and demon-worshiper in the course of its massive assault on theologia civilis—the traditional religious practices of Roman society and state. In Latin letters, “civil theology” had long been distinguished from “mythic theology” (poetic and theatrical accounts of the gods) and “natural theology” (philosophical speculation) in a tripartite formula that was coined by the pontifex maximus Q. Mucius Scaevola (d. 82 b.c.e.). We know about the formula from the polymath M. Terentius Varro, whose great encyclopedia of Roman religion, the Antiquitates divinae, Augustine relied upon in assembling his critique. Amidst the elaborate fun he makes of the minor functional deities of Roman life, Augustine does not omit addressing Varro’s rationales for civil theology. In book 3, chapter 4, he calls attention to Varro’s argument that it is a good thing for cities when strong men believe themselves to be descended from the gods, because that increases their ability to get things done: “We see thereby that where lies even about the Gods themselves have been thought to be beneficial to citizens, very many sacred and quasi-religious matters may have been fabricated.” Then, in book 4, chapter 31, he quotes Varro saying “openly with respect to religious ceremonies that there are many truths which it is not useful for the general public to know, and, further, many falsehoods that it is expedient for the people to believe true, and that this is why the Greeks kept their initiation rites veiled in silence and enclosed within walls. He puts forward the whole policy of the so-called

john of salisbury 131

wise ones, through whom cities and peoples were to be governed.” This complete subordination of civil theology to socio-political purposes was, for Augustine, the key to what was wrong with it: It had nothing whatever to do with life eternal. For our purposes, the most important criticism of Roman civil theology in the City of God is Augustine’s statement, in book 4, chapter 32, that by teaching ordinary people as true what they knew to be false about religion, the leaders of ancient society were, like demons keeping men in thrall, concerned only with “binding them more tightly (as it were) to civil society” (civili societati velut aptius alligantes). John of Salisbury, to the contrary, sees such pious fraud as the opposite of demonic. Numa’s religious innovations were designed, he writes, “to curb the barbarism of the people, restrain them from wrong-doing, cause them to keep a holiday from arms, cultivate justice, and to impart civil affection to each other” (et ciuilem sibi invuicem impertirent affectum). John knew the City of God well, referring to it dozens of times in the course of the Policraticus. He professes only the highest regard for its author, rarely invoking him by name without the adjective magnus. “No one can be mindful enough of that doctor of the church,” he declares—and there can be no doubt that when it came to Roman religion, John was mindful of taking issue with the bishop of Hippo. Most of what he has to say about Numa was borrowed from the historian Jordanes, but not the testimonial quoted above, which is his own. What Augustine considered bonds of subjugation imposed on the people by the powers-that-be, John saw as a laudable means of creating what we might call the beloved community. Nor is this a minor dissent on John’s part. The immediate aim of the City of God was—in the light of the sack of Rome in 410—to call into question the civic utility of the fraudulent religious system that Numa personified. John, as we have seen, believed in using fictions to serve the public weal. À la Martin, it was a nice donnish joke to embed a tribute to Numa’s fictive religious undertaking in a fictive Institutio of his own. Equally, however, it was prudent for him to leave the impression that this appreciation of pagan religion came not so much as a freestanding argument of his own but by way of discussing an author who, he takes pains to make clear, believed not in God but in “the gods.” If John was going to disagree with the great Augustine, he would do so obliquely. John is, so far as I know, the first Latin Christian author to praise Numa as a religious leader, and it is easy enough to surmise what might have led him to do so. England had just come through the rule of King Stephen, about which John has only the harshest assessment to make, not least regarding the treatment of the English church. One way, indeed, to understand John’s elaborate organic analogy is as an image of the complete resurrection—body

132 communit y, cultus, and societ y

part by body part, and body with soul—of the English res publica under Henry II. To be sure, Henry was not living up to John’s initial hopes. Though an early supporter of Henry’s, John had himself been exiled by the king from the curial service of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury in 1156–57, apparently for diplomatic missteps at the papal court. In 1159, the year the Policraticus was published, Thomas Becket was working to restore domestic law and order as Henry’s principal administrator. Relations between regnum and ecclesia remained delicate. Becket was the book’s dedicatee; he and John were old friends, having worked together for Theobald before Becket’s elevation to royal service. Why not use Numa, the exemplary Roman king, to call the English monarchy’s attention to the social benefits religion could bring to the realm? Numa, however, was not John’s only case in point. Hinting that some might object to his use of this most pagan of models, John pretends to apologize—and proceeds to analogize Numa’s religious project to Moses’: “But why should I put forward the example of Numa when the fathers of our own faith likewise assert that the sacrifices and ceremonies of the old law were instituted lest the people, becoming captivated by the worship of demons, should unlearn the practice of the true religion, burning their sacrifices to demons after the manner of the gentiles, and not to God?” Cultus exterior, in other words, secures the integrity of the community at large, spiritual and moral. While John did not proceed to offer a Christian example, there can be no doubt that he meant for his own cultus religionis to be understood in similar terms. And, for John, Christianity’s external expression included a mission civilatrice as well as a mission spirituelle. Later in the Policraticus he makes an argument for civilitas, civilized behavior, by citing the passage in Luke where Jesus advises those invited to weddings to take the lowest place at table (“because everyone that exalteth himself shall be humbled and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted” [14:9–11]). John explains: “Although this may seem to be an edict of religion rather than of civilitas, I do not separate the form of religion [ formam religionis] from civilitas, since there is nothing more civilized than to insist upon the cultivation of virtue.” For John, the civic virtues—including those bonds of civil affection—are no less a function of the Christian form of religion than of any other. As he puts it in a letter he wrote for Theobald to send to Henry II in 1160: “By [God’s] grace we have found such peaceful unity [concordiae unitatem] among your subjects, that it is established by the surest and most manifest signs that their faith is securely founded on the rock of the Church.” It is hardly surprising that John should have been the first postclassical author to recover pagan antiquity’s appreciation of the social utility of religion. If anyone imbibed the spirit of Ciceronian civic humanism in the high

john of salisbury 133

Middle Ages, he did. More remarkable, and of greater significance in the history of Western thought, is the way he enlists the new spirituality of his time in making the case for this anti-Augustinian point of view. After identifying the communal benefits of the Mosaic Law, John returns to the distinction between exterior and interior worship: “God is worshiped, therefore, either by mental affect [affectu mentis] or by behavioral display [exhibitione operis].” There follows an extended poetic exposition of affective spirituality, complete with an elaborate metaphor comparing the differential effects of God’s love on rational creatures to the effects of the sun’s rays on a range of precious stones. (“Truly, Christian love [caritas] never passes away, wherewith if a man clings to God, he is united to Him and becomes one spirit with Him; and he who is thus united to Him so as to become one in spirit, becomes a servant of His household, and can in no wise be kept from obedience to Him, which is a thing of the spirit.”) Then, to conclude the chapter, John comes back briefly to the subject at hand: In order, however, that the weakness of our lowliness [humilitatis] may in some way ascend to His throne, and have some ground [materiam] for merit, He who provided senses has wished to be worshiped with the senses [sensualiter]; and He who will glorify both soul and flesh desires the faithful service of both. He has also wished to be honored with the body [corporaliter honorari] so that any tardiness of infidelity or negligence has no excuse.

John’s contention, then, is that although interior worship touches God directly, cultus exterior supplies both secular benefits to society (civilized behavior, embrace of justice, civic affection) and spiritual remedies for human weakness (lowliness, infidelity, and negligence). Implicit in this proposition is the analogical claim that just as the body is inferior to the soul, so is cultus exterior inferior to the direct love of God. Pagan as well as Mosaic and Christian religious forms can be acknowledged as beneficial to humanity precisely because the soul of religion is interior worship. That is religious activity at its most profound. John could be confident that such privileging of interior spirituality would command the assent of his intellectual peers even as it undermined the Augustinian critique of civil theology. In the early Middle Ages religious commitment was conceived more in terms of behavior and doctrine than as the expression of an inner self; indeed, religio came to mean life under a monastic rule. But during what Giles Constable has called the “Reformation” of the twelfth century, those in search of God began to distinguish their interior spiritual lives from corporate religious practices and ceremonial. As Constable puts it, “For many of the new monks prayer and spiritual devotions were a matter of direct communication of the inner self with God rather

134 communit y, cultus, and societ y

than of participation in community worship and psalmody, which for them came from the lips rather than the heart.” Ecclesiastical bureaucrat and devotee of ancient letters that he was, John nevertheless maintained an active interest in the twelfth century’s spiritual frontier. Its greatest pioneer, Bernard of Clairvaux, had used his influence to get him a job in the archbishop of Canterbury’s curia. In the Historia Pontificalis, which includes a shrewd assessment of Bernard, John presents himself as an aficionado of the future saint’s spiritual writings, going so far as to say that his exposition of the Song of Songs (“subtillissima et utilissima”) had beyond doubt been dictated by the Holy Spirit. In April of 1157, four years after Bernard’s death, John wrote to his good friend, the Benedictine abbot Peter of Celle, asking for copies of Bernard’s letters and for a florilegium that included passages from his other works. Several months later, John wrote again, thanking Peter for the letters but pressing him again to send along a collection of the best Bernardine passages he could assemble. Coming at a time when he was presumably composing the Policraticus, these requests strongly suggest that John wanted to make use of Bernard’s writings in his own work. In the Policraticus he refers to the De consideratione directly and indirectly a number of times, as well as to several other works of Bernard. And as we will see, the influence of Bernard can also be detected in the passage at hand. That distinguishing between interior and exterior religion might advance a discussion of the role of religion in the social order very likely occurred to John as a result of perusing the same source that inspired his elaboration of the organic analogy: Robert Pullen’s eight books of Sentences. In book 7, four chapters before analogizing the body politic to the body human, Robert discusses religious discipline (disciplina) as either interior or exterior. Interior discipline has to do with the mental state of anxiety or distress, undertaken consciously; exterior discipline involves fasting and other kinds of bodily mortification. Fasting is, in Robert’s view, exterior discipline par excellence, demonstrated by the examples of both the Hebrew prophets and of New Testament saints. “Truly,” he writes, “moderation in eating and drinking is rightly and properly esteemed in all places and among peoples everywhere [ubivis gentiles]. And if it is observed repeatedly and continuously, it especially subjects and unites the exterior to the interior man.” This recognition that all peoples subject themselves to a kind of exterior spiritual discipline seems to lie behind John’s more thoroughgoing appreciation of the benefits of gentile religion. What John needed, however, was a term for religious practice that included more than self-discipline. In the spiritual lexicon of the twelfth century, cultus was often coupled with the adjectives exterior and/or interior,

john of salisbury 135

and as such used by monastic authors in its sense of “raiment” or “attire” to relate a person’s outward dress to his or her inward cultivation. Sometimes, indeed, it is unclear whether the term refers to clothing or to worship—or to comportment generally. Thus, in one of his letters, Peter Damian writes, “For what the mind is, let it be apprehended from the raiment, and according to exteriorem cultum let the species of intention be judged.” Elsewhere Peter points out, “Exterior cultus should also express the form of perfect penitence that principally burns in the hidden bitterness of the heart.” To take another example, the Cistercian Hermannus de Runa noted in the midtwelfth century that “external deportment [exterior gestus] is indicative of inner attire [cultu interiori].” Such passages seek to assure that cultus exterior faithfully mirror what is going on inside the person. But there was also the sense—and this is more strongly expressed in the sources that we know John had at hand—that cultus exterior is likely to be at odds with the inner self. Writing encouragement to a well-born nun who had recently experienced an inner conversion, Bernard declares, “But behold! Under the leadership of Christ the old things have now passed away and all are begun to be made new, since you are changing exterior attire for interior [cultum exteriorem interiore commutas], and seek to adorn your life rather than your dress.” More abstractly, in the twenty-fifth of his sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard writes, “It is with good reason then that the entire concern of the saints—the ornate raiment of the exterior man, which is certainly corruptible, having been spurned as superfluous—is to fix their whole attention on cultivating [excolendo] and adorning the inward self, which is renewed from day to day in the image of God.” A more secular version of the dissonance between external appearance and internal process can be found in the Glosses on Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy by the great grammarian William of Conches, with whom John studied from 1138 to 1141. Commenting on book 4, meter 2, William explains how Philosophy shows that the wicked are unable to fulfill their desires because even when they wish to dominate others, they have their own cruel masters inside themselves: “Which anyone can see if he considers them without the exterior appearance [sine exteriore cultu], if he looks inside at those vices to which they are subjected.” Especially in the passages from Bernard, the twelfth-century sense of interior cultus conveys a sense of interiority far more dynamic than the static contrast between exterior and interior contained in traditional biblical portrayals of hypocrisy (e.g., Matthew 23:27: “for ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness”).

136 communit y, cultus, and societ y

As a good medieval churchman, John cannot be accused of wishing to undermine external forms of worship. On the contrary, it is clear that he saw the direct love of God linked via cultus exterior to forms of piety that extended through the entire social organism. Thus, his next chapter (5.4) begins by turning from the claim that God wishes to be honored corporeally to more mundane objects of veneration: “Therefore the reverence [reverentia] that is paid corporeally relates either to persons or things.” The rationale for revering persons comes from nature (by which all peoples venerate parents, children, and all relatives joined by flesh), as well as from office, character, rank, and fortune. Reverence is owed to public officers according to their eminence, but above all to ecclesiastical officials—those who minister in the sphere of divine law. As for the reverence “that consists in the veneration of things,” this is owed both to physical manifestations (res corporales) of religion—shrines, holy places, objects for pious use, and “sacrifices that are visibly executed,” as well as to incorporeal entities like the laws that relate to sacred matters. John’s discussion, which includes some elaborate shadow play in extenuation of “Plutarch” ’s paganism, makes plain how essential he considered “corporeal reverence” to be for all societies, beginning with cultus exterior. That the term possessed a certain negative valence in the best spiritual literature of the time only underscores Christopher Brooke’s observation that John “loves to play with complex irony on the two sides of an issue or a person.” In the present case, however, he can also be seen as offering a subtle commentary on an important issue in contemporary sacramental theology. This had to do with the metaphysical significance of the Eucharist—Christianity’s own visibly executed sacrifice. In the early twelfth century a number of theologians associated with the school of Laon followed by Hugh of St. Victor advanced a conception of the Eucharist that emphasized the mystical connection that the sacrament established between the communicant and Christ. In line with this emphasis on the individual’s interior transformation, these thinkers embraced the idea of spiritual communion, holding that the effect of the sacrament, the res sacramenti, could be obtained without actually partaking of the material sacrament itself, solely by the love and desire of the individual for God. But, as Gary Macy has shown, their approach was challenged—and in the latter part of the century largely superseded—by an “ecclesiastical” interpretation, which held that the sacrament was a corporate exercise designed to secure the salvation of the church as a whole. A number of the leading theologians who took this view were John’s teachers: Gilbert de la Porrée, Robert of Melun, Robert Pullen. While their views were not identical, they stressed, against Laon-Victorine “mystical union,” that individuals did not

john of salisbury 137

become one with Christ through the Eucharist but rather that the sacrament forged them into a community of the saved. As Arnold, abbot of Bonneval, put it in a work dedicated to Pope Adrian IV (and therefore written sometime between 1154 and 1159), Holy Communion does not merge the persons of man and God but rather “associates the affections [affectus] and conjoins the wills. Thus the church, effected as the body of Christ, accommodates itself to its head.” John, a close associate of the English pope, could well have known Arnold’s work; his account of the direct love of God and cultus exterior suggests that he was in any event responding to such a discussion even as he leaned toward the other side in the debate. His belief that the direct love of God is accessible to all rational creatures, and that it makes the individual “one in spirit” with God, associates him with the advocates of mystical union, including those who saw the possibility of salvation without physical consumption of the sacrament. At the same time, he makes use of the ecclesiastical school’s corporate understanding of the Eucharist by focusing attention on the thisworldly functions of cultus exterior in general. Without directly addressing the question of whether the Eucharist served to weld the members of the church into the body of the saved, he emphasized analogously how cultus exterior created a communion of the body politic. The commitment to peace and justice as well as the “civil affection” that Numa’s religious institutions implanted in the early Romans amounted to nothing less than the binding together of their affections and wills. In John’s presentation of it, cultus exterior was the necessary religious raiment of whole societies. Inserting a tribute to Numa in a discussion of interior and external worship, he did not so much rehabilitate Roman civil theology as call attention to the new opportunity that had opened up within western Christianity for acknowledging the social benefits of religion apart from considerations of its truth. This was a brilliant démarche from the Augustinian line. But did it register on later political writers? The Policraticus, we know, enjoyed a wide readership in the later Middle Ages. Yet the carefully nuanced discussion in 5.3 seems to have left few traces—certainly by comparison with John’s famous, if elusive, doctrine of tyrannicide. In this regard, it is instructive that Cary Nederman omits the discussion entirely from his abridgement of the work for the Cambridge University Press’s current series of classic texts of Western political thought. An echo of John’s praise of Numa may perhaps be discerned in Albert the Great’s commentary on the De anima of Aristotle. In Book 1, chapter 3, Aristotle had criticized Pythagorean mythology for suggesting that any soul can be clothed in any body. Using some of the same words that John used to describe Numa, Albert writes that it was because Pythagoras wanted “to

138 communit y, cultus, and societ y

make citizens cultivate piety and justice” that he “made up the story that the souls of bad citizens would depart from one body into another of a worse condition, i.e. that the soul of a man would migrate into the body of a lion or an ass.” The passage in the Policraticus might have occurred to him because of a traditional association between Numa and Pythagoras. Significantly, however, the idea that the pre-Socratic philosopher devised metempsychosis as an instrument of social control came not from John but from Averroes, who in his Great Commentary on the De anima of Aristotle asserts that Pythagoras had posited the idea “in order to correct citizens’ souls.” Averroes set out his views on the social utility of religion at greater length in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, building on a remark in book 12 that much of religion was invented to persuade the multitude and for legal and other useful ends. Albert, drawing on the commentary in an extended discussion of the issue in his own commentary on the Metaphysics, writes that civilitas (the Policraticus again?) does not require that people have a pure understanding of truth, but rather that they “cultivate piety and serve justice and uphold the state.” As a result, “legislators seek not the principles of truth but hand down precepts of piety, and things that more easily by hope of rewards and fear of punishments promote the governing and maintenance of the state. And therefore many gods, cults, and religions have been made.” This elaborated Aristotelian perspective on pagan religion became standard scholastic teaching. As Aquinas (borrowing from Averroes) puts it in Summa theologiae 1–2 q.99 a.3, “[D]ivine law is principally instituted to command people with respect to God, human law principally to command people with respect to each other. And therefore human laws have not been concerned to institute anything regarding divine worship unless it is for the common good of people; and because of this as well they made up much concerning things divine, as seemed expedient to them for forming peoples’ mores; just as is apparent in gentile religion.” Yet while Thomas, like Albert, was prepared to grant that pagan religion was designed with worthy social ends in view, neither would go so far as even to imply that true religion could be seen in comparable terms. That step was taken in the 1320s by the radical antipapal theorist Marsilius of Padua. In discourse 1 of his Defensor Pacis, Marsilius contends that most religions claim that God will punish evildoers and reward those who do good in the next world. But besides that proposition—which, he says, cannot be proved—ancient philosophers noted another “quasi-necessary” reason for instituting religion: “to ensure the goodness of human acts both individual and civil, on which depend almost completely the quiet or tranquility of communities.” That Marsilius considered the latter to apply to

john of salisbury 139

Christianity becomes clear in discourse 2, where he offers separate accounts of thisworldly and otherworldly uses of the “evangelical law.” While Marsilius may well have known the Policraticus, I can find no evidence that it influenced his discussion of the civic utility of religion. In scholastic thought it was rather Greek philosophy as mediated by Averroes that did the most to put this idea into circulation. In the world beyond the schools, Petrarch was familiar with the section of the Policraticus that concerns us, quoting several times from the account of the Institutio Traiani. He was, moreover, a particular admirer of Numa’s. In the laudatory biographical sketch of him in the De viris illustribus, and elsewhere in his writings, he has only praise for the ancient king’s use of religion to civilize his barbarous subjects. Petrarch even made a pilgrimage to the cave near Lake Nemi, in the Alban hills southeast of Rome, where Numa was thought to have gone to meditate. But the poet adopted his portrayal, and praise, of Numa directly from Livy, not from John of Salisbury; nor can I find in his works any indication that he was influenced by John’s account of exterior and interior worship. That account may lie behind Summa theologiae 2–2 q.94 a.3, where Aquinas differentiates between exterior and interior religion but explicitly rejects the idea of engaging in idolatrous rites while keeping the faith “interiorly.” John makes no such suggestion, but it is easy to see how this could have arisen from what he did have to say. In the middle of the fifteenth century Nicholas of Cusa famously wrote that “all diversity” of religious traditions (including that of ancient Rome) was “located more in rites than in the cultivation [cultura] of the one God, whom everyone in every culture has from the beginning presupposed and worshiped”—a conclusion that could be seen as taking John’s argument in a new direction. Altogether, a comprehensive exploration of John’s late medieval and early modern readers might enable us to establish a line of influence, and I hope to undertake such a project at some future date. But for the present let me skip forward to Spinoza, who in chapter 5 of the Tractatus theologico-politicus contends that all external rites, externi culti, do nothing more than undergird the social order. As for Christian rites like Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, festivals, public prayers, and any others that are, and always have been, common to the whole of Christendom . . . they were instituted only as outward symbols [externa signa] of a universal church, and not as things which make any contribution to blessedness or have any intrinsic sanctity. Thus although these rites were not established for a political end, their sole purpose was the preservation of a united society; so that the man who lives by himself is not bound by them

140 communit y, cultus, and societ y

at all. Indeed, the man who lives in a state where the Christian religion is forbidden is bound to abstain from these rites, and will still be able to live a blessed life. For example, the Christian religion is forbidden in the kingdom of Japan, and the Dutch who live there are bound by order of the East India Company to abstain from all outward forms of Christian worship [ab omni externo cultu].

Later, in the Tractatus politicus, he pushes the point further, contending that the inconsequential nature of external worship justifies a state’s maintaining an established religion simply for the sake of law and order: “As for outward rites [externos cultus], we may take it as certain that they cannot help or hinder a man at all in reaching true knowledge of God, and the love of him which is its necessary consequence; hence they are not to be esteemed of such importance as to justify a breach of the public peace and quiet.” A century after Spinoza, Rousseau began his famous chapter on civil religion at the end of the Social Contract (1762) similarly, by differentiating a “religion of man” and a “religion of the citizen.” The former, which entails “the purely interior worship of God,” is, according to him, primitive Christianity: “the pure and simple religion of the Gospel.” Its usefulness to the state is nil because it is a “wholly spiritual religion” whose “Fatherland is not of this world.” For that reason a “Christian Republic” is a contradiction in terms. A high Enlightenment version of this religion of man can be found in the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” in Emile, which appeared the same year as the Social Contact: Let us not confuse the ceremony of religion with religion itself. The worship God asks for is that of the heart. And that worship, when it is sincere, is always uniform. One must be possessed of a mad vanity indeed to imagine that God takes so great an interest in the form of the priest’s costume, in the order of the words he pronounces, in the gestures he makes at the altar, and in all his genuflections. Ah, my friend, remain upright! You will always be near enough to the earth. God wants to be revered in spirit and in truth. This is the duty of all religions, all countries. As to the external worship [culte extérieur], if it must be uniform for the sake of good order, that is purely a question of public policy; no revelation is needed for that.

Connecting religion to the maintenance of good order in society by emphasizing that real religion is private and interior, Spinoza and Rousseau appear to be following John of Salisbury’s lead. Were they aware of doing so? So far as I know, neither cites the Policraticus in his writings; in the absence of stronger textual evidence, it cannot be concluded that John played

john of salisbury 141

a direct role in their thinking. I would propose instead that what they had to say simply reflects the privileging of interior spirituality over external worship that was the legacy of the twelfth-century Reformation. So engrained had this become in the Western worldview that, by the early modern period, discussions of the social utility of religion presupposed a dichotomy between inward and outward worship. If so, what should we make of John’s contribution to the question? Involuted, masquerading in Plutarchian garb, his account of interior and exterior cultus may well have had no impact on subsequent thinkers. Yet in the history of ideas a new argument need not be influential to be important. It can serve to articulate the moral architecture of its time, and call attention to the conceptual possibilities that shifting values open up. Registering the impact of the new spirituality, book 5, chapter 3 of the Policraticus recognizes for the first time that an emphasis on religious interiority not only provides for a more transcendent conception of the self but also makes room for a more secularized understanding of the role of religion in the social order. As well, however, the twelfth century’s reconceptualization of religion heightened the tension between the public expression of religion and its private pursuit, thereby creating a new longing to integrate the two. Rousseau himself was capable of imagining how this might happen. In his best-selling epistolary novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), his eponymous heroine describes to her former tutor and lover her experience being married to the older man her father has picked out for her. When I reached the Church, I felt as I entered a sort of emotion I had never before experienced. I know not what terror seized hold of my soul in that simple and august place, filled through with the majesty of the one who is served therein. . . . I thought I saw the instrument of providence and heard the voice of God in the minister’s grave recitation of the holy liturgy. The purity, the dignity, the holiness of marriage, so vividly set forth in the words of Scripture, those chaste and sublime duties so important to happiness, to order, to peace, to the survival of mankind, so sweet to fulfill for their own sake; all made such an impression on me that I seemed to experience within me a sudden revolution.

Later in the same letter she reflects, “I had never been completely wanting in religion; but perhaps it would be better to have none at all than to have one that is only external and affected [extérieure et manierée], which without touching the heart assuages the conscience.” But in the end, the spiritually reborn Julie can no more transcend the love of her life than could the original Heloise—who, as Rousseau was well aware, had made herself into

142 communit y, cultus, and societ y

a personification of the gap between inward and outward religion. Julie’s reflection may, indeed, be taken as a comment on Heloise’s second letter to Abelard, in which she throws in his face her lack of inner commitment to the cloistered life that she has been leading with such apparent piety: “I am judged religious at a time when just a small part of religion is not hypocrisy, when the highest praise is reserved for the one who does not offend human judgment.” Yet Heloise goes on to hint, in pointed contrast to Abelard’s pure ethics of intention, that external religious behavior may have some merit of its own. And perhaps this does in some way somehow seem praiseworthy and acceptable to God: if someone with whatever intention is not in fact a scandal to the Church by the example of her outward behavior [exterioris operis exemplo], and if the name of God itself is not blasphemed among unbelievers, and if the Order of her profession is not brought into disrepute among the worldly.

Emphasizing that it was his command, not God’s love, that “dragged her to the monastic habit [ad religionis habitum],” she nonetheless asks that Abelard cease praising her, adding with a double entendre, “No one skilled in medicine diagnoses an internal malady [interiorem morbum] from an examination of the external condition [ex exterioris habitus inspectione].” More than Heloise, John of Salisbury felt compelled to argue that the external expression of religion was indeed praiseworthy and acceptable to God. For him, the wellbeing of society depended on cultus exterior. That’s why those responsible for its maintenance were the soul of the commonwealth.

part iii  cognition, composition,  and contagion

   UNDERSTANDING CONTAGION the contaminating effect of another’s sin Susan R. Kramer

A

t the end of the twelfth century the Paris master and theologian Peter the Chanter devoted a chapter of his handbook on ethics to the contaminating effects of sin. Discussing the impact of contact with sinners, Peter raises the specter of collective guilt and damnation by recalling the erring Israeli tribes, who had dared to build an altar in honor of a pagan god, with a warning from the Book of Joshua: “Because you erected an altar against God’s great and sacred word, tomorrow his anger will rage against all the people.” Peter’s own more prosaic words show that the threat of sin’s contagion remained a real one in the twelfth century: “The sin of a community contaminates individuals just as the sins and offenses of individuals affect the whole group.” Peter’s admonition on the contaminating effect of another’s sin relies not only on Old Testament teachings but on the Pauline letters as well. Quoting the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Peter compares a sinner’s impact on a community to the polluting effect of old leaven on new dough: “ ‘A small amount of yeast spoils the whole batch.’ ” The Chanter’s use of this image was not unique; the Corinthian tag was frequently employed by his contemporaries to describe the effect of sin. Thus Pope Innocent III uses the image in a warning to the Catholic Poor, a community of converted Waldensians under his protection, urging them to avoid association with those outside the unity of the church, since “whoever touches something unclean is made unclean . . . a small amount of yeast spoils the whole batch.” The verse is also cited in medieval canon law collections to support excommunication of unrepentant sinners: “A small amount of yeast spoils the whole batch and

146 cognition, composition, and contagion

one rotten member stains [inficit] the whole body. For that reason a plague [ pestis] so pernicious must be expelled by the roots from the body of the church.” Like fermentation, disease served as a popular image for sin in the twelfth century. R. I. Moore cites Pope Alexander III, for example, who describes heresy as “spread[ing] like a cancer,” and the chronicler William of Newburgh, who depicts the heretical Publicani as “infected by a plague.” Henry of Marcy, in urging Alexander III to take action against the heresy “infecting Gaul,” warns the pope that the “pestilence of the flocks creeps out of the shepherds’ very touch [contagione].” The myriad unsightly diseases encompassed by the term “leprosy” in the twelfth century provided a particularly evocative metaphor for sin and its potential to contaminate a community. Pope Innocent III appears to invoke just such an association with the injunction that anyone “sprinkled with the stain of spiritual leprosy” be “put outside the camp lest the Lord’s flock be stained by his contagion [contagio].” In these twelfth- and thirteenth-century passages, sin spreads, infects, stains, and contaminates. The comparison to a process, like fermentation or disease, suggests that sin runs spontaneously and uncontrollably through a community as if it has a life of its own. But if sin does spread in a manner best described by a spontaneous process, doesn’t this negate any role for individual will? To describe sin as corruption capable of polluting a whole community does not seem out of place in the ancient Mediterranean world of the Apostle Paul. In the clerical culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, the issue of volition in sin was a heated topic. Scholars at the cathedral school at Laon had been analyzing sin in terms of the role of the will since the end of the eleventh century, while Abelard’s Ethics taught that it is intention which determines the moral quality of an action. Heresy, a sin frequently described in terms of disease and contamination metaphors, was by definition a sin of conscience, entailing as it did the choice to embrace beliefs and/or practices not endorsed by the church. Indeed, a new emphasis on individual intention and conscience is one of the most frequently cited characteristics of twelfth-century culture. Is it possible to reconcile a definition of sin that turns on individual intention with a description that compares it to a process, spreading its contamination irresistibly through a community? Some recent scholarship suggests that the revived focus on intention and conscience in the high and later Middle Ages actually masked a continuing need to maintain old pollution taboos. Concerns over bodily impurity were repressed but not eradicated, reappearing in new forms in accordance with a changed intellectual environment. Dyan Elliott argues that the Old Tes-

understanding contagion 147

tament taboo against menstruating women, broken by Jesus in the Gospel when he allowed a woman with flux to touch his robe, resurfaced in the guise of the eleventh-century campaign against priests’ wives. Arguing in a similar vein, Peggy McCracken maintains that, while the purity concerns raised by contact with women’s blood seem to diminish over the course of the Middle Ages, the old taboos were actually transmuted into medical and scientific prohibitions. Fears rooted in ritual were recast as rational. For R. I. Moore the twelfth-century use of disease imagery is a sign of anxiety over social change. The rhetoric used to describe heretics and other social undesirables was part of a language of contamination consciously constructed by the new clerical elite in order to bolster its social standing. The association of certain groups—heretics, Jews, the undeserving poor—with illnesses feared because both horrible and contagious “provided a powerful and adaptable metaphor of social exclusion, and of the danger represented by a potentially disaffected population, as the language used of the disease and its symptoms made clear. . . . [Leprosy] both arose from and threatened to extend the breach of established social boundaries, and could be controlled only by entrenching and enforcing those boundaries with constant vigilance.” Suppression and persecution were justified by appeals to a general contagion-fear. The necessity of volition for culpability was negated as whole groups were shunned on the basis of status alone. This chapter will explore another avenue to understanding contamination metaphors. As historians of medicine have pointed out, words such as contagio and infectus had very different connotations in the past than they do for us today. Living with fears of pandemic flu and the potential threat of biological warfare, we read into these Latin cognates our own conceptions of contagion and modern germ theory. Presumably twelfth-century lepers and other social undesirables were excluded from the community for the same reason we isolate potential disease carriers—because they were thought to harm others through mere contact. But the twelfth century had no conceptual equivalent to our germ theory, nor any mechanism for explaining the spontaneous spread of disease or rot between individuals. In looking at how illness, health, and fermentation were conceptualized in the twelfth century, this chapter will determine what mechanisms for change were implied to a contemporary audience by these contamination metaphors and whether there was a role for volition. Accordingly, a principal source for this chapter will be the medical theory current in the twelfth century. Medical literature does not provide the only context for looking at contamination language, however. Many of these contamination metaphors originated in scripture. Twelfth-and early-thirteenth-century biblical exegesis, a common literary genre of the period, offers another resource for understanding the

148 cognition, composition, and contagion

mutual impact of individual and group and how the sin of one could pollute a whole community.

the language of contagion? Sin and Disease A connection between sin and disease is not new to the twelfth century. Like slavery, war, and government, illness is viewed as an evil imposed on humankind as a result of Adam’s sin. Nor is the link between disease and divine retribution a strictly Christian teaching: the Hebrew Bible gives several examples of God punishing sinners by afflicting them with disease. When Miriam criticizes her brother Moses, for example, her skin turns shining white with lepra. Despite Moses’ prayer that her condition, usually translated as leprosy, be healed, God requires her to be expelled from the Hebrew camp: “If her father had but spit in her face, would she not bear her shame for seven days? Let her be shut out of the camp for seven days.” The purity laws in Leviticus also mandate separation for those afflicted with leprosy, but unlike the account of Miriam, no connection is made between leprosy and moral fault. Both Jewish and Christian Biblical commentaries do, however, link with sinfulness the Levitican requirement that lepers be separated. In patristic exegesis, disease is often evoked to symbolize or characterize sin. Augustine calls the sin of pride a disease of the soul. Gregory the Great employs a sustained analogy to compare the sin of heresy with leprosy: “For in leprosy a portion of the skin is brought to a bright hue, and a portion remains a healthy color. Lepers therefore are a figure of heretics, for in that they blend evil with good, they cover the complexion of health with spots.” Isidore of Seville’s equation of leprosy and heresy similarly stresses the physical appearance of the disease: “Lepers are not absurdly understood as heretics. Lacking the unity of true faith they put forth various errors of doctrine and mix the true with the false, just as leprosy stains human bodies by variegating them with true and false places.” What distinguishes the twelfth-century use of disease images from earlier examples is their focus on disease as a metaphor for change. Cancer spreads, leprosy contaminates, and communities are infected with plague. But what mechanism for change is implied by these metaphors? The medical texts that became newly available in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries introduced a conception of disease as a process rather than a mere collection of symptoms, and the “entire set of events whereby . . . [disease] was engendered” became the subject of study.

understanding contagion 149

The Medieval Etiology of Disease Until the nineteenth century the Western conception of health and disease was essentially that inherited from Hippocrates and Galen. Disease was thought to result either from a loss of harmony between the body and its environment or from an imbalance among either the various substances (bile, phlegm, blood, and water) or states (hot, cold, wet, dry) that make up the body. Health was restored by returning the body to a state of equilibrium, by adjusting externals, like temperature or humidity, or by purging the body of any excess material, like undigested food or an overabundance of blood. Thus phlebotomy (blood-letting) was employed not only to eliminate humors corrupted by improper diet or extremes in climate, but also to purge otherwise healthy blood that might “become tainted” through its abundance, for, “[w]hen any humor exceeds its measure,” health is “put in danger.” While the elimination of excess matter was a critical principle for treating disease, the extraneous material itself was not considered foreign to the body or inherently dangerous. It was rather the resulting imbalance that threatened the body’s health. Disease per se had no separate ontological status. Modern germ theory, in contrast, maintains that disease is caused by hostile micro-organisms invading the body. A conception of disease as caused by some foreign agent does not require a belief in the existence of germs, however. As Dale Martin has shown in his study of First Corinthians, disease in the New Testament is usually attributed to invasion, but by unclean spirits rather than germs. Restoring health requires expelling the bad spirit. Although both the balance theory of disease and the invasion theory depend on some type of expulsion for restoring health, it is only in the latter that the expelled agent is viewed as intrinsically hostile to the body rather than part of its nature. The primary concern under the balance etiology is to preserve the body’s natural harmony, while the method for guarding health in an invasion etiology is protecting the body against potential contaminants. The humoral balance theory was the predominant etiology of disease in medieval Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A small number of Hippocratic and Galenic works were available in Latin as early as the midsixth century. Although the Greek learning thus accessible was both simplistic and truncated, works such as Isidore of Seville’s popular Etymologies show a conceptualization of health as an exercise in preserving harmony: “All diseases arise from the four humors, that is, from blood and yellow bile, from black bile and phlegm. . . . When any of the humors increase beyond the limit set by nature, they cause illnesses.”

150 cognition, composition, and contagion

More thorough and sophisticated treatments of health and disease were transmitted to the West via translation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The most important translations of medical works were those from the Arabic by the Tunisian monk Constantine the African. His encyclopedic Pantegni includes expositions on Galenic medical theory as well as practice. The Isagoge of Iohannicus, which would be studied at Chartres as well as Salerno, provides a concise, systematic introduction to Galenic principles and causality. Essential terms are defined and the human body, comprised of the four fundamental elements of earth, air, water, and fire, is grounded in the physical world. Health and disease result from the interplay of the body’s own constituents with environmental factors like air and food (the so-called nonnaturals). The causes which have a relation to health and sickness are six in number, and of these the first is the air which surrounds the body. Then follow food and drink, exercise and rest, sleep and waking, fasting and fullness, and finally affections of the mind. All these, if in moderation as to quantity, quality, time, function, and order, tend to preserve health. But if in excess in one of these matters they tend to produce sickness and to maintain it.

Twelfth-century familiarity with the etiology of disease was not limited to the world of the schools. Peter the Venerable shows the pragmatic interest of an educated patient as he worries that postponing blood-letting will induce a fever because of a surplus of blood and phlegm. The medical writings of the abbess Hildegard of Bingen likewise reflect an interest in both the theory and the practice of treatment. Her Causae et curae elaborates classical humoral theory while integrating it with Christian theology. If the humors preserve their right order and just measure in man, then his body will be tranquil and healthy; if however they repulse one another they will weaken him and make him ill. . . . Had man remained in paradise, he would not have had the flegmata within his body, from which many evils proceed, but his flesh would have been whole and without dark humor. However, because he consented to evil and relinquished good, he was made into a likeness of the earth, which produces good and useful herbs, as well as bad and useless ones, and which has in itself both good and evil moistures.

Twelfth-century references to the humoral theory are also found outside a strictly medical context. As Danielle Jacquart points out, the lack of compartmentalization that characterized the medieval approach to learning meant that medicine “permeated the rest of culture as a whole.” The Phi-

understanding contagion 151

losophia mundi of William of Conches follows physiological models found in Constantine’s Isagoge and Pantegni while Hugh of St. Victor makes use of the Isagoge in his classification of the arts. For the abbot Wolbero of Cologne (fl. 1147) the body’s endurance of bad humors provides a useful metaphor for elaborating the Gospel’s parable of the tares and the inevitable existence of evil people within the Church: “For since tares are always mixed in with the wheat, [the Church] incorporates the good to itself like sweet food, tolerating the evil just as evil humors [are tolerated] in the body.” The Song of Songs commentary by Bernard of Clairvaux invokes the humors to describe knowledge acquired without good purpose. Like undigested food, which produces bad humors, such knowledge corrupts rather than nourishes the body. John of Salisbury uses a similar image when he compares indiscriminate reading to consumption of harmful foods that turn into harsh humors. Even the canons of Lateran IV rely on the four humors to justify preventing marriage within four degrees of consanguinity: “The number four agrees well with the prohibition concerning bodily union . . . for there are four humours in the body, which is composed of the four elements.” The humoral balance theory of health and disease was part of general, educated discourse, comprising what we would call “common knowledge.” Educated people accepted that health is harmony of the four humors and disease the result of imbalance just as we take for granted the existence of germs or the earth’s daily rotation.

Infection, Contagion, and Imbalance The humoral theory of disease is not compatible with modern notions of infection and contagion. A critical aspect of the modern sense of infection is penetration of the body by some foreign material, a pathogen, which causes disease through self-replication. Contagion—the direct or indirect transmission of a pathogen from a sick person to a healthy one—is thus a form of infection. Twelfth-century discussions of disease, like the Greek theorists on which they drew, do not conceptualize disease in terms of hostile agents or pathogens, but as an imbalance. Behind this imbalance lies a failure in individual regimen rather than a failure to protect the body from invasion. Hildegard of Bingen admonishes that restraint in eating and drinking yields “good blood and a healthy body” while gluttony and drunkenness make the limbs “twisted and leprous.” Failure to control one’s anger or lust is also dangerous to the body. People with angry dispositions become leprous when their blood, agitated by anger, “falls around the liver,” where it “mixes with hard matter.” If the resulting mixture is not eliminated, it “is diffused through the whole body, . . . irritating the flesh and skin.” Lust also

152 cognition, composition, and contagion

stirs up the blood and weakens the flesh: “Like a pot put on a fire which neither wholly burns nor cools, [the blood] retains filth within itself,” eventually corrupting the flesh and turning the skin to ulcers. For Constantine the African poor habits are likewise behind disease: bad digestion or faulty elimination leads to a buildup of melancholia, which, if not remedied, comes to dominate the whole humoral system. Eventually the surplus melancholia corrupts the blood, the other humors, and even the sperm. How should the Latin terms commonly translated as “contagion” and “infection” be understood? The word usually translated as “infect” comes from the Latin verb inficere. The primary sense of the term is “to insert,” but as a technical term in the dyeing trade it referred to the process of infusing a piece of cloth with color. In classical literature this literal sense carried over into figurative uses of the term. Thus Seneca contrasts steeping the soul with virtue, infecting it, to merely shading it. Although eventually infectio came to refer to the dye stuff itself, in twelfth-century usage there is no notion of a self-propagating, disease-inducing material. Danielle Gourevitch suggests translating the infinitive as to imbue, to dye, or to stain. Contagio, commonly translated as contagion, comes from the prefix con, meaning “union,” and tango, “touch or affect.” Contagio implies change through the contact or association of two entities. In twelfth-century usage it generally implies a negative change, as when Bernard of Clairvaux writes that Christ conquered sin in his own person “when he took on human nature without any contagion.” Innocent III’s admonition above refers to negative change through association: a whole flock may be affected via the contagion of one person’s spiritual leprosy. Examining Innocent’s metaphor within the context of medieval medical literature shows that the process of contamination does not imply transmission of a diseased state, spiritual or otherwise. The Galenic principles embraced by medieval medical theory maintain that external factors do contribute to producing humoral imbalance. Constantine the African cites six causes in the Isagoge that “have a relation to health and sickness,” including rotten food, water, and air. The most important of these “nonnaturals” was air quality. Air could be made “pestilential” through such factors as extreme temperatures, rotten vegetation, and decaying corpses. Even sick people could affect the air by giving off an “evil vapor . . . [which] is breathed in by the healthy,” and medieval medici, like their ancient counterparts, recognized the dangers of proximity to sick people. But, while association with an ill person is seen as an element in producing disease, there is no concept that the offending vapor is itself disease; there is no abstract separation between the sickness and the sick body, or between the corruption and the corrupted air. Bad air, even that emitted by a sick person, is simply an environmental factor like rotten food or water. Further-

understanding contagion 153

more, the danger posed by unhealthy air or bad vapor is determined by the individual’s own humoral state. While external factors were important, they were not deemed sufficient to cause disease. The insufficiency of external factors to cause illness was made evident by the fact that when an epidemic swept through a community, not everyone became sick. Constantine the African explains that disease is called epidemic if “it is sudden and of various strains, attacking many people with one and the same temperament.” The “nonnatural” usually identified with epidemics is pestilential air, but “the corrupted air is not the only cause of mortality.” Only those people “who have been neglectful in guarding their health and keeping it cleansed of evil humors” assimilate the pestilential air and become ill. Those who have protected their health by preserving a good balance of the humors stay healthy, even in a plague. Citing Galen’s On Fevers, Constantine points out that “a body does not suffer corruption unless the substance of the body has been prepared beforehand and is in some way subject to the corrupting cause.” While polluted air or bad vapors might precipitate disease, the most important determinant to well-being is the patient’s own nature and behavior. Lust, anger, gluttony, bodily predisposition, and failure to preserve the right balance of the humors bring on sickness. Returning to Innocent’s example, the contagion of the spiritual leper can only stain the flock if the flock is itself subject to corruption. The contaminating effect of disease, and analogously, sin, is not an irresistible force. Only those who neglect their health and wellbeing will suffer from exposure to the physically or spiritually diseased. The transmission of corruption is not a passive process. Medieval biblical exegesis confirms that the sick and contaminated play an active role in perpetrating their own corruption.

contamination, community, and volition Leprosy, Sin, and the Role of the Will In his exegesis of Leviticus, Isidore of Seville identifies the six types of leprosy found in man with various heretical teachings. Those who display leprosy in their beards, for example, signify heretics who hold perverse opinions of the apostles, for “just as a beard ornaments a man, thus the holy apostles and doctors manifest the ornament of the body of Christ.” Isidore’s equation of strains of leprosy with different heretical doctrines was included in the Carolingian biblical commentaries and also entered the biblical Glossa ordinaria compiled at Laon in the early twelfth century, ensuring the durability of the association between sin and leprosy. But while the twelfth-century

154 cognition, composition, and contagion

compilers included such older sententiae, they also developed the disease analogy along more sophisticated lines. The Glossa ordinaria correlates the various manifestations of leprosy to the steps or stages in formulating a serious sin. Some leprosy is very . . . hard to see, not yet boiling over with passio, which requires deliberation [deliberatio]. Some leprosy is very clear and palpable, the recognition of which is obvious.

The terms passio and deliberatio come from the “stages of sin” theory developed by Anselm of Laon and his followers. Sin was conceptualized as an ethical process beginning with a suggestion. The suggestion might arise from one’s own flesh or from some outside stimulus, another person, say, or the devil. The suggestion, if not resisted, evokes a propassio, a motion of the soul toward pleasure. As long as there is no deliberation this propassio remains a minor sin. If the pleasure is accompanied by deliberation, however, passio arises, “a motion of the soul toward pleasure with deliberation.” Such passio is as great a sin as committing the contemplated act itself. Leprosy that is in an initial phase and still difficult to diagnose corresponds to the early stage of sin, before there has been any deliberation. Full-blown leprosy, on the other hand, is easy to diagnose. It signifies deliberate sins that are public and known to all. Leprosy denotes a willed sin. The contaminating impact of this sin on others also implicates the will. In twelfth-century biblical exegesis, the leper signifies the public sinner who contaminates others through his bad example. “Public sin is compared to leprosy because it corrupts others and becomes known to all. . . . Those who sin publicly ought to do penance publicly so that whoever contaminates others by an example of sin invites the same people to repent by repenting publicly.” Thus, just as someone becomes leprous primarily through his or her own irresponsibility rather than through mere proximity to the diseased, so the contaminating effect of sin requires the complicity of the contaminated. Neither the contamination of disease nor the contamination of sin is passively transmitted between individuals or through a community. Only those disposed to such corruption are corrupted.

“A Small Amount of Yeast . . .” Paul’s comparison of sin to leaven takes its significance from the Jewish feast of the unleavened bread, when the previous year’s leaven was cleaned out of the house and destroyed. As a symbol of irresistible corruption it was an

understanding contagion 155

apt metaphor for Paul, who perceived sin variously as a formal violation of the law and as an “insidious corruption that threaten[ed] to pollute the integrity” of the whole Christian community. Paul invokes the fermentation metaphor in both his first letter to the Corinthians and in his letter to the Galatians. In the latter the leaven symbolizes those preaching the need for circumcision to the new Christian community while in the former the polluting person is a fornicator, a man who is sleeping with his stepmother. How, according to Paul, do sinners contaminate a community? In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, the contaminating sinners are those trying to persuade others within the church to follow false doctrine. Their contamination consists of their attempt to lead others away from the true faith to seek justification under the old law. But the corrupting impact of the Corinthian fornicator is more subtle. As Paul himself maintains, only wrongdoers who are members of the community, participants in Christ’s mystical body, are to be feared as potential pollutants. “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral persons—not at all meaning the immoral of this world . . . since you would then need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral.” Contact with wrongdoers or nonbelievers is not the risk then, since Paul does not require withdrawal from the world or avoidance of all outsiders. The issue for Paul is a true invasion of the body of Christ, a permeation of community boundaries by one claiming to be a brother or sister. It is this infiltration that Paul likens to a mixing together of bad yeast and clean flour to yield a fermented, acidic dough. A permeation of community boundaries via the toleration of a single sinner has the power to contaminate the whole social group. When boundaries have been breached by such a mixing, “the only remedy is violent expulsion of the polluting agent, which will result in the return of the body to a clean, healthy state.” For Paul the continuing presence of a sinner within the community is sufficient to pollute the whole. Patristic and medieval exegesis of Paul place more emphasis on the community’s role in its own corruption. The latefourth-century commentary of Pseudo-Ambrose, so-called Ambrosiater, explicitly calls attention to the community’s role in perpetuating sin and spreading contamination. Explaining Paul’s outrage that the fornicator is still within the Corinthian community, the commentator maintains that not only the sinner is guilty but also those choosing to remain near him. “For they were themselves participants when they allowed the one guilty of such a heinous act to meet with the uncorrupted. . . . ‘Don’t you know that a small amount of leaven corrupts the whole batch?’ Thus even the sin of one person which is known but not charged contaminates many people; indeed all

156 cognition, composition, and contagion

who know [about the sin] but do not shun [the sinner], or who can charge him and dissemble, [are contaminated]. If someone is neither corrected nor shunned he seems to himself not to have sinned.” Twelfth-century exegesis of the Pauline passage puts particular stress on the role of volition in the contaminating effect of sin. Peter Lombard not only includes Ambrosiater’s language on the need to correct others, but explains the contaminating impact of a “small amount of leaven” as “consent to sin.” The fornicator corrupts by leading others to sin through his bad example, and the community is contaminated by consenting to his presence rather than shunning him. As Peter explains, Paul “convicted that fornicator who had his father’s wife and those who tolerated him [emphasis added].” For Herveus of Bourg-Dieu the source of the fornicator’s pollution is likewise the community’s consent: “You were proud when you ought rather to have mourned for your sinning brother and expelled him from you, lest those consenting are polluted by his influence [ne illi consentientes, pollueremini ejus contagione].” The old leaven “which is the fornicator . . . corrupts the whole multitude of people consenting to him.” If indulgence is offered to the sinner then others in the community may be infected—stained—by perpetrating similar crimes. The indulgence of a sinner implicates a whole community in its own corruption. A community is polluted either by imitating a sinner’s bad example or by failing in its duty to expel the sinner who has permeated its boundaries and violated its mores. As Peter the Chanter explains, even those living in religious communities are at risk for such contamination. “When [m]any in the chapter assent to any small misdeed, all others are seen to have sinned in this since to consent is not to refute when one can. The sin of a community is sprinkled onto individuals and the sin of one flows back on many, whence the Apostle says a small amount of yeast corrupts the whole batch.” No one can wash his hands of responsibility for others. A failure to speak against sin is consent to sin itself.

777 There is no doubt that a fear of sin’s contaminating influence is expressed in many twelfth-century texts. But the comparison of this contamination to disease or fermentation does not imply an abnegation of individual responsibility. Neither sickness nor fermentation was conceptualized as a spontaneous, irresistible process. Protecting health and bodily harmony was conceived as a moral responsibility. Fermentation entailed an active mixing of leaven and flour, a permeation of boundaries. Like the spread of disease or the action

understanding contagion 157

of fermentation, the impact of another’s sin entailed active participation. An individual is contaminated by following the sinful example set by another or by not speaking out against sin. The collective guilt that Peter the Chanter appears to invoke does not flow from the actions of one member; it stems rather from the community’s failure to correct its own. The community is responsible for its own corruption. The mutual influence of individual and community, explored by Caroline Bynum more than twenty years ago, has negative aspects as well as positive. This potential for negative change, like that for positive, is realized through choice.

   CALVIN’S SMILE John Jeffries Martin

E

ver the most sober of reformers, Calvin nevertheless smiled when he thought about relics. He did not laugh—it is Luther who would have laughed—but we can infer at the very least that he smiled as he wrote his Traité des reliques, a satirical polemic he published in 1543 against traditional Catholic devotions to the saints, Mary, and Christ. This is not to say that Calvin’s humor was particularly effective. What we can rather say is that Calvin intended his treatise to be funny or, perhaps more precisely, drôle. He took pleasure, and a certain degree of wry humor must have been involved, in pointing out that during the iconoclastic riots that had taken place in Geneva in the mid-1530s what was believed to have been the arm of St. Anthony proved, on closer inspection, to have been a stag’s penis—a scandalous discovery, even more so than the fact that the brain of St. Peter turned out, upon analysis, to be a pumice stone. Calvin manifested a similar fascination with the sacred foreskin of Christ: “The Abbey of Charroux in the diocese of Poitiers,” he wrote, “boasts that it has the foreskin, that is, the piece of skin that was cut off in his circumcision. But, please, how did the monks there come to have this?” And perhaps Calvin smiled again when he pointed out that the same relic of the body of Christ was, so it was claimed, on display in the Church of St. John the Lateran in Rome as well as in Germany, at Hildesheim. Thus Calvin’s humor drew unexpectedly on allusions to what the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has called “the lower bodily stratum,” sexual organs, usually hidden from view but which provided the material for much of the laughter in medieval and Renaissance culture.

calvin’s smile 159

But the humor in the treatise lay above all in Calvin’s decision to structure it as a catalogue or inventory—a strategy several other reformers, especially in England, had used earlier in the century. This structure enabled him to point to the absurdity of multiple foundations and churches claiming to possess the very same holy relic. Thus he constructed his inventory “from ten or twelve cities, such as Paris, Toulouse, Rheims, Poitiers” in order to demonstrate how deeply fraudulent the relic trade had become. For in such a catalogue “it would be made manifest,” he argued, “that each Apostle would have more than four bodies, and each Saint two or three.” His primary focus was on the relics associated with Christ and the Virgin Mary, and clearly Calvin took pleasure in providing a list of the most improbable relics from Jesus: not only his foreskin but also his teeth, cuttings of his hair, drops of his blood, water pots from the marriage at Cana, fragments of the True Cross, nails, pieces of the crown of thorns, and even footprints left in various places throughout Europe! Calvin—and there were echoes of Erasmus here—made fun of the large quantity of pieces of the cross, noting that “if one wished to gather tsogether all the pieces that had been found, it would make up the cargo of a very large ship.” And he made a similar quip about Mary’s milk, observing “there is so much that had the holy Virgin been a cow and been a nurse her entire life, she would have barely been able to produce such a quantity.” But in the end Calvin took particular interest in what he viewed as the absurd multiplications of bodies and parts of bodies. There could only be one head of St. John the Baptist, even though religious institutions at Amiens, Malta, Nevers, Besancon, Noyon, Lucca, and elsewhere claimed to possess the head or at least part of the head. Nor could there be two bodies of St. Denis, one outside Paris and the other in Ratisbon—or four bodies of St. Sebastian, one at Rome with others in Soissons, Brittany, and Narbonne. Despite the shortcomings of the treatise, it must have struck a chord. Some twenty editions appeared between 1543, when it was first published, and the early part of the seventeenth century.

$$$ The body—and not just the bodies of saints—played a central role in thinking about identities in the Renaissance and Reformation. In many respects, as I have recently argued in Myths of Renaissance Individualism, it was the body that enabled men and women in the sixteenth century to think about the self, though not because it served to demarcate one person from another

160 cognition, composition, and contagion

(in fact, this distinction was often dissolved) but rather because it was by reflecting on the body that Renaissance men and women were able to consider the various ways in which their interior longings, thoughts, dreams, and desires were related to their speech and actions in the exterior world. By contrast, after Descartes, but especially after Freud, when scholars and psychologists thought about identity, they tended to focus on its most unembodied aspects. The mind—whether conceived as a res cogitans or as an unconscious id—elbowed the body to the side. The self was a mental, a metaphysical thing. Yet recently we have begun once again to recognize the importance of the body’s role in the construction of identity. In the wake of revolutionary discoveries in genetics, in psychopharmacology, and even in the development of surgeries through which organs can be replaced, the body has begun to figure again powerfully in our thinking about who we are. In this sense we have more in common with medieval and Renaissance Europeans at the beginning of the twenty-first century than we might have at first thought. Our neurotransmitters seem to be little more than modern versions of theories of the four humors—so widely held from antiquity to the seventeenth century—in which melancholy or depression was viewed not as a mental illness but as a physical one, the result of an excess of black bile (meleina cholé) in one’s system. On this front at least, we now might even have more in common with Renaissance men and women than did Europeans from the Enlightenment to the Age of Prozac. Like medieval and Renaissance people, we too see the self as embodied. Like them, we too are preoccupied with body parts and with bodily fragments, whether we are seeking a new hip, a new heart, or a new face. At the same time, we confront a radical difference between ourselves and those who lived in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We live under the illusion that we can control what happens to our bodies. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, by contrast, the body, while an intrinsic part of identity, was not within the realm of human control. Perhaps it was for this reason that the cult of relics was so widespread. Unable to control the fates of their own bodies or parts of bodies, medieval Christians looked to the bodies and the fragments of bodies of saints as a source of solace. At least in the sphere of religious experience, men and women were able to believe in the possibility of wholeness, of bodily integrity, of the resurrection, and of redemption. As Caroline Bynum has shown in The Resurrection of the Body, such fragments, no matter how small, were believed to contain the saint’s power in its entirety. The fragments, moreover, served as material reminders of an eventual resurrection of the body, of a gathering together of fragments into something whole and perfect. But what forces could possibly have altered

calvin’s smile 161

this worldview? How did bodily fragments begin to lose their meaning for many early modern Christians, especially Protestants? Of course, by the time Calvin wrote his treatise there was nothing new about attacks on relics. To the contrary, throughout the Middle Ages a tradition of critiques of the cult of relics can be traced back to St. Augustine and Charlemagne, both of whom worried about fraudulent bones. In the twelfth century Guibert, the abbot of Nogent, devoted an entire treatise—his De pignoribus sanctorum—to the problem of the authenticity of relics. While he no more rejected the cult of saints and the veneration of relics than had Augustine or Charlemagne, he insisted on the importance of their authenticity and that of the “saint” as well. “Before one asks for the intercession of such a person,” Guibert wrote, “it is necessary that one asks about the truth of that person’s sanctity.” And Guibert pointed to the absurdity of several popular beliefs: the claim by the canons of the cathedral of Laon that they possessed a piece of bread chewed by Christ, or, perhaps most famously in a foreshadowing of Calvin, the patently absurd claim by several religious foundations to possess the head of St. John the Baptist. Eventually, especially in the late Middle Ages, relic critiques took on an increasingly satirical tone. Boccaccio had taken aim at the probable falsity of many saints and relics in his Decameron, and Chaucer did the same in the Canterbury Tales. But doubts about the authenticity of relics were not always expressed satirically. In the fifteenth century pilgrims like the Spanish knight Pero Tafur and the German Dominican Felix Faber were disillusioned with the frauds they uncovered during their travels, and their accounts of their discoveries contributed significantly to the sorts of popular attacks on relics that developed among Protestant reformers. Nonetheless the polemical works by Calvin and others aimed at discrediting the cult of relics represented a radical departure from earlier traditions, so radical that they amounted to an epistemic earthquake, a revolution in the anthropology of Christianity. Calvin, after all, rejected not only Guibert’s view that relics could be efficacious if they were authentic but also Boccaccio’s view that it was not the authenticity of the relic or the saint that mattered but rather the faith of the believer. For, as Boccaccio assured his readers in the very first story of the Decameron, in an effort to resolve the problem of the false or fraudulent saint, God “looks not to our error but to the purity of our faith.” To Calvin, by contrast, neither the intentions of the believer nor the authenticity of the relic could lead to salvation. To think otherwise was a form of idolatry. Moreover, the attack on relics in Calvin and other reformers was not purely a theoretical issue. In the early sixteenth century it spilt over into the streets, and artisans and other townspeople in the Swiss cities of

162 cognition, composition, and contagion

Zürich, Basel, Bern, Neuchâtel, and Geneva smashed the images of saints and destroyed the valuable reliquaries in local churches. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Huguenots in France had followed suit, destroying and defiling holy images and relics; in this same period Calvinists in the Netherlands did much the same; and the Puritans carried out sweeping attacks on holy objects in seventeenth-century England. While there had been many shifts of emphasis in the medieval period within the general framework of the cult of saints and the veneration of relics, the Reformation constituted a profound shift, in which the preexisting paradigm of sanctity was rejected. The material remains of saints or of objects associated with saints (their clothing and other possessions) were no longer seen as sacred or powerful. To the contrary, relics were redefined as idols—false objects of devotion. And Protestants—especially those in the Reformed tradition—believed it was their religious duty to destroy them. That they often carried out their attacks on what earlier Christians had believed to be sacred symbols with an odd combination of violence and humor is evidence that this shift in the understanding of the sacred drew on deep emotions. In trying to account for this sudden hostility toward relics, historians have generally approached the causes from the perspectives of social and intellectual history, though not necessarily with a clear sense about how these two spheres of experience were interrelated. Among the social historians, Natalie Zemon Davis, for example, has offered a compelling description of the different ways in which sixteenth-century Catholics and Protestants imagined the locus of the holy in the urban landscape of sixteenth-century Lyon. It seems probable, for example, that the popular attacks on relics and shrines was part of an effort by townspeople throughout much of Europe to reclaim the holy—which had come to be perceived as increasingly under the control of the clergy—for themselves. And intellectual historians have weighed in as well, focusing on the theological foundations of iconoclasm. In the Reformed tradition and in the writings of Calvin especially, they argue, God was no longer present in the material world of the Christian. Calvin banished all but a most spiritualized God from the Eucharistic host (or communion wafer), where Catholics believed in his Real Presence. In a similar fashion, Calvin came to view the Incarnation not as an ongoing reality of God’s participation in human flesh but rather as a historical event that had occurred long before—an event that could be commemorated but not repeated. It was only consistent, therefore, for Calvin to reject the notion that God was present in the bodies of the holy dead. Such a belief, Calvin argued, was idolatrous, a violation of the Biblical injunction from God that “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,

calvin’s smile 163

or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath. . . . Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (Exodus 20:4–9). In the end, Calvin’s God was a majestic Other, removed from the everyday material experience of Christians. As Calvin insisted, “finitum non est capax infiniti”—there was no way for any material object to contain the divine. Each of these explanations illuminates a facet of the Reformation’s attack on relics, but it is difficult to know how the two developments were related. Perhaps by turning to shifting attitudes toward the body we can show how the attack on relics was not so much a matter of social or intellectual forces per se as it was the expression of new notions of the body and the self as they had developed in the Renaissance. For on a fundamental level—as Bynum’s work suggests—the cult of relics was a discourse about the body and identity. In medieval culture the cult of relics had enabled the body to be divided and scattered and yet—as the case of the saints or the fragments of saints promised—retain its full personhood. In the sixteenth century, by contrast, bodily fragments no longer—at least to Calvin and many others—appear to have been invested with religious significance. But how did this happen? Why was the sacred no longer in the fragments of the bodies of the holy dead?

$$$ In 1543, the same year that Calvin published the first edition of his Traité des reliques, the Flemish humanist Andreas Vesalius, professor of anatomy at the University of Padua, published his De corporis humani fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), the celebrated work that has come to epitomize the anatomical revolution of the Renaissance. While there is no direct connection between these two works, their authors belonged to a similar cultural setting, in which new religious and scientific ideas nourished one another. First, as a student in Paris, Calvin had been close friends with Nicholas Cop, whose father, Guillaume, was a famous professor of medicine at the university. At the same time Vesalius was himself conscious of many of the developments within the Reformation. As a young man in the Netherlands and then in Paris (where he may have even crossed paths with Calvin at the university, where both were studying, albeit in different faculties), Vesalius would have been exposed to many of the new (Lutheran) religious ideas of the sixteenth century that were circulating with special intensity in just these places. And while there is no evidence that Vesalius ever personally strayed from the Catholic faith—indeed he died while returning from a

164 cognition, composition, and contagion

pilgrimage to Jerusalem—his ideas on anatomy did exercise considerable influence on several Protestant reformers, most notably Philip Melanchthon, who both made it a priority to ensure that anatomy would be an important part of the curriculum at the University of Wittenberg and saw in Vesalian anatomy further proof of divinity, since, in Melanchthon’s view, something so complex as the human body had to be the handiwork of God. Vesalius’s positive views of the body, as is well known, stemmed largely from the Renaissance recovery of the Vitruvian tradition that had defined the human body as a microcosm of a greater, divinely created whole. In his prefatory letter to Emperor Charles V, in which he introduced his treatise on the human body, Vesalius expressed his hope that the emperor, given his interest in other sciences, “would also perhaps delight in a consideration of the most perfectly constructed of all the creatures and would take pleasure in considering the lodging and instrument of the immortal soul as a dwelling that in many of its aspects corresponds to the universe and for that reason was called a microcosm [Microcosmus nuncupabatur] by the ancients.” And, on a fundamental level, for Vesalius detached parts of the body came to be seen not as independent entities, each with its own symbolic meaning, but rather as fragments to be woven into a whole, into a divinely shaped embodied person. The key word in Vesalius’s title—Fabrica—underlines this structural notion. The body was a structure, not merely a collection of fragments. Curiously, Calvin shared this view. As Calvin wrote in his Institutes, after citing Galen’s De usu partium on the connection of the body’s parts to one another, “all men acknowledge that the human body bears on its face such proofs of ingenuous contrivance as are sufficient to proclaim the admirable wisdom of its Maker.” And Calvin adds, “Certain philosophers, accordingly, long ago not ineptly called man a microcosm because he is a rare example of God’s power, goodness, and wisdom, and contains within himself enough miracles to occupy our minds.” Both these thinkers, that is, located the religious significance of the body not in its fragments but rather in its exquisite structure. Yet Calvin’s view of the body was far darker than Vesalius’s. To be sure, Calvin had a positive view of the body of Adam—that is, the body before the Fall, which represented God’s glory. It was in this context that he wrote in his Institutes that the “primary seat of the divine image was in the mind and heart, or in the soul and its powers, yet there was no part of man, not even the body itself, in which some sparks did not glow.” His underlying view of the “fallen” (post-Adamic) body, however, was negative. For him, this prison house was, as William James Bouwsma has pointed out, “the primary source of human wickedness.” Medieval theology had viewed the body itself as part of the sacred, had seen flesh as symbolic of a divine order, and

calvin’s smile 165

had found even in bodily fragments the presence of the holy. For Calvin, by contrast, the body points to God not because of particular parts or organs, but rather because of the complexity and beauty of its structure. Furthermore, despite this difference in the ways in which they valued the body—with Vesalius celebrating it as temple and Calvin viewing it as prison house—both viewed the fragments of the dead—bones taken from ossuaries, bodies snatched from graves, criminals brought directly from the gallows—as remains whose meaning would only come into sight once reassembled and then grasped as part of a greater, divinely ordered corporeal whole. Calvin, that is, shared Vesalius’s view that the material remains of the bodies were, taken as fragments, merely that: material objects with no religious significance. In short, while Vesalius and Calvin ultimately differed on the meaning of reassemblage, both rejected the notion that the meaning of a fragment could be grasped independently of the larger corporeal structure of which it was a part. As a result, bodily remains—even of men and women alleged to have been particularly holy—were desacralized. For both Vesalius and Calvin, the fragments of the body came to be seen not as independent entities, each with its own symbolic meaning, but rather as fragments woven into a whole, into a divinely shaped embodied person. This shared emphasis on the importance of bodily integrity is evident above all in the methods that Calvin deploys in his Traité and Vesalius in his Fabrica. In Vesalius’s case, the move is both from the parts to the whole and from the corpse to the integral parts. The second analytical gesture—that of the Vesalian anatomist dissecting and disassembling the body, removing its skin, its muscles, and its ligaments, and displaying its organs and the parts of its organs—is the more familiar, but it is important to remember that Vesalius actually devotes the first part of his treatise to osteology and concludes it with a chapter explicating how the bones are to be made into one structure ( fabrica). The skeleton, in short, became the foundation of the body as a whole. In Calvin’s Traité, by contrast, the analytical move is exclusively from the parts to the whole. His is a work of ironic assemblage. And, as he brings together various human and other animal remains that many had believed to be holy relics, he creates an impossible anatomy of the human body. One simply cannot imagine Jesus with three foreskins or St. John with four heads—or, at the very least, to imagine Jesus or St. John in such odd ways is to imagine “monsters,” not at all in keeping with the human body as the handiwork of God. There are other levels in which Calvin appears to share Vesalius’s fascination with anatomy; it is possible, for example, to see Calvin’s desire to open the reliquary as the religious equivalent to Vesalius’s insistence on opening the body itself. That is, just as Vesalius privileges the body over the text—it

166 cognition, composition, and contagion

is now the sector, the anatomist who cuts and dismembers the body, who reads its structure and parts as authoritative in order to determine what is true about the body—so Calvin insists that the breaking open of a reliquary and looking within required a similar method of looking at the thing itself, of privileging the object rather than the encasement in which it was displayed. Iconoclasm, in this instance, was a form of religious anatomy. Superstitious practices, Calvin argued, had been a consequence of a nearly deliberate blindness, for “many, when looking at a reliquary, close their eyes out of superstition, . . . that is, they do not dare to cast an observant eye to give careful consideration to what it is they are seeing.” But Calvin is most explicitly anatomical in his discussion of the soul, particularly in his Commentary on the Psalms. In this work, published in 1557, Calvin writes, “I am wont to call this book, not without cause, ‘The Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul,’ ” for not an affection will a man find in himself, an image of which is not reflected in this mirror. Nay, all the griefs, sorrows, fears, misgivings, hopes, cares, anxieties, in short, all the troublesome emotions with which the minds of men tend to be agitated, the Holy Spirit has here offered a vivid picture. The other scriptures contain the commands which God enjoined His servants to bear to us. But here are prophets themselves talking with God, because they lay bare all their inmost thoughts, invite or hale every one of us to examine himself in particular, lest any of the many infirmities to which we are liable, or of the many vices with which we are beset should remain hidden. A rare and surpassing benefit when, every lurking place having been explored, the heart is brought into the light cleansed from hypocrisy, that most noisome pest.

The movement here in Calvin’s writings is striking. The anatomical dimension of his analysis leads him to reject the traditional medieval interpretation of the material body—the mystical or symbolic nature of bodily fragments—altogether in a way that suggests that Calvin, just as much as his contemporary Vesalius, was playing an important role in reshaping Western views about the body and its relation to the self. How then did it happen that Calvin and Vesalius came to view the isolated bodily fragment in this new way? Often scholars have approached this question by arguing that such a view represented a shift from a view of the bodily fragments as sacred to a more scientific view of the body, and they have related this shift from sacred to scientific anatomies to a variety of new practices, including burial practices, notions of honor, and even a religious fascination with the body. Perhaps such a shift even helps explain the eerie

calvin’s smile 167

graveyard scene in Hamlet, when the gravediggers bandy about in an uncanny but offhand way with the remains of Yorick and the other courtiers they uncovered. A related explanation lies in the development of new textual practices within humanism—practices that would have played a central role in the educations of both Calvin and Vesalius. For in the newer methodologies of textual scholarship that developed in the latter part of the fifteenth century, especially in the work of Angelo Poliziano, humanists ceased to place confidence in learned commentaries on particular words, often ripped from their historical context, and came increasingly to see that meaning derived above all from the particular context (linguistic and historical) in which the word had appeared. Thus, returning to the Vesalian trope of the anatomized body as text, whose parts could now be read only in relation to the whole and no longer had meaning in isolation from each other, the analogy to humanist philology is clear—both humanism and anatomy paid close attention to structure and context. Finally, as I have already suggested, it seems equally likely that what was at work was an increasingly “individualist” model of the self in this period—a model that we see both in the Vesalian celebration of Vitruvian man and in Calvin’s emphasis on personal identity as that of a single soul embodied in a particular body. For what we find in the Renaissance, at least in the Renaissance of the mid-sixteenth century, as we see in the works of both Vesalius and Calvin, is the emergence of more bounded notions of the self. This is not to claim that there was only one Renaissance model of the self. To the contrary, there were many, but it is possible to locate in the intellectual and cultural history of the sixteenth century a more emphatic representation of the self—even the individual—as a single unity of body and soul. To be sure, medieval authors too had posited a comparable unity as essential to identity, but as Bynum’s researches have shown, despite the profound materialism of medieval notions of embodiment, the unity that most medieval mystics and theologians envisioned for the affirmation of self was eschatological—a unity based on a desire for wholeness and embodiment that was expressed most forcefully within the framework of theological anthropology. This is not to say that medieval people did not view themselves as embodied, only that embodiment in medieval culture was especially labile, as such phenomena as possession, exorcism, and metempsychosis show. In the Renaissance and especially the sixteenth century, by contrast, the unity was no longer a dream to be achieved in the afterlife, but rather an expression of identity within the created world. And in such a world there were fundamentally two options: the Vesalian option of recognizing the human body, not in its fragmented state but rather in its organic unity, as the handiwork of God; or the Calvinist option of recognizing an original

168 cognition, composition, and contagion

unity that shared in the glory of God, but which, in the wake of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, had been transformed into something imperfect, with the body becoming the soul’s prison and the soul itself becoming something broken and fragmented, unable to save itself and entirely dependent on the grace of God. Fragments resulted in this new language not from the action of torturers who tore the martyr’s body apart or thieves or merchants who trafficked in body parts, but rather from the Fall. It was now the fragmented soul—not the fragmented body—that became the object of pastoral attention, of faith, and of care of self. The soul, in short, was confused, divided against itself, and uncertain of the possibility of recovering its own unity. Thus, while personal identity was now more bounded by body than it had been in the Middle Ages, it is crucial to stress that the identity that emerged was hardly harmonious. What we find instead is something fragile, pulled in many different directions. As the literary critic Douglas Biow has written, the importance of the Renaissance stems from the idea of it not as “a bright moment, when . . . individualism found wide-spread nascent expression but as the far darker moment when the modern fragmented self . . . [was] painstakingly born.” Or, as Montaigne put it in his Essays, “We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.” Calvin’s turn to the soul and its multiple dimensions (its bits or fragments) was thus by no means unique—and, as the example of Montaigne suggests, not uniquely Protestant. Calvin was in fact drawing in his image of the soul on a centuries-old tradition of psychological introspection which writers as diverse as St. Augustine and St. Bernard had elaborated. Yet it was Calvin above all who shifted the attention of his contemporaries and many who came after him first away from the parts of the body and to the whole, and then toward the complex interior space of the ordinary Christian. Faith was no longer tied to material reality. The Christian no longer handles the fragments of the holy dead or consumes the body of Christ. Rather faith becomes a matter of the Christian’s beliefs and, even more, the sincerity of those beliefs. In such an anthropology the preservation of bodily fragments as sacred objects in and of themselves becomes absurd. Rather there is a new logic of reassemblage. It is the anatomizing of the soul that matters. To Calvin, therefore, the self was to be one in which the body lost its spiritual importance (at least until the resurrection) and in which it was one’s interior state that mattered. But the internal self—or soul—was now itself anatomized. This was the new burden of Calvinism. The self became a subject of intense scrutiny. And what was found within was not whole but broken. Moreover, the complexity of the soul not only rivaled that of

calvin’s smile 169

the Vesalian body, but even eclipsed it in importance. In his attack on those philosophers who questioned the immortality of the soul and made its existence dependent upon the body, Calvin wrote, “The powers of the soul are far from being confined to functions that serve the body.” The soul is itself complex. It was not only filled with different passions, as Calvin had made clear in his Commentary on the Psalms, it was also filled with different faculties: sight, a sense of history, memory, imagination, invention, judgment, intelligence. To anatomize the soul, therefore, was not only to discover the work of God but also to discover the state of one’s own spiritual journey and the chances of one’s salvation. Such self-examination was undoubtedly a source of intense anxiety. It was in the gathering together of the fragments of the soul rather than in the gathering together of fragments of the body that Protestant Christians now placed their hope for wholeness and for union with God. And, on this journey, the human being could do very little on his or her own. It was only divine Providence that could knit together the fragments of the soul—the internal self that Calvin, in so many of his texts—anatomized. This does not mean that Calvin gives up on wholeness or the resurrection. What it means is that wholeness is now to be found not in the shared experience of those who suffer but rather in the shared faith of those who can apprehend the reality of God through the study of God’s Word. Paradoxically, it was in Calvin above all that Christianity both embraced the body in its wholeness as a divinely created microcosm and simultaneously turned its back on the human body and the profound metaphysics of suffering that reflection on the body—even the handling of fragments of the bodies of the dead—had made possible. In short, in the Reformation we are witnesses to the migration of the fragmentary. In medieval Catholic culture it is the suffering, tortured, dismembered body that God knits together. And it is in metaphors of the material reconstitution of the body that medieval people explored many of their deepest anxieties about self and identity. In Reformed theology, by contrast, what is fragmented is the soul. To know oneself was, inevitably, to know division and fragmentation; it was to know that desires conflicted; and it was to know that the bits and pieces of identity in one’s soul were infinite. Yet it was precisely because of this complexity that not even the most sober of individuals could repress a smile. In this sense, the Traité des reliques might itself be read as the expression of some aspect of Calvin that Calvin himself rarely acknowledged—an aspect in which humor had its place among the soul’s passions, an aspect that renders Calvin delightfully human.

   WHY ALL THE FUSS ABOUT THE MIND? a medievalist’s perspective on cognitive theory Anne L. Clark

S

cholarship on medieval culture and religion has been greatly enriched by attention to the body. Among other insights, this scholarship illuminates medieval perspectives on connections between body and soul and the thinking part of the person that we call the “mind.” Theorists today also highlight connections between thinking and embodiedness, and questions about how this embodied mind works are being approached in various disciplines—psychology, computer sciences, neurobiology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology—loosely connected by the term cognitive science. Some cognitive paradigms have been developed in or applied to the study of religion. This relatively new use of cognitive theory to explain religion has led to general theories of religion, ritual, and belief, reviews of salient literature, and general critiques. The critiques may be summarized as either “saying too much” or “saying too little.” “Saying too much” condemns the scientific enterprise for accounting for all aspects of religion within an organic model that leaves no room for the workings of God or the gods. “Saying too little” chastizes the scientific indifference to the meaning of religion, the traditional focus of much scholarship in the field of religious studies. While most historians do not share the theological concern to grant divine causation in their constructions of the past, the indifference to meaning is more troubling. The assertion that humans have evolved so as to have particular kinds of memory that make particular kinds of beliefs or rituals not only possible but inevitable can sound trite when cognitivists reduce extraordinarily diverse religious beliefs and practices to simple patterns. If the task of the cognitivists is “looking behind cultural diversity to find species-

why all the fuss about the mind? 171!

level design mechanisms, and showing how those psychologically adaptive features select for certain kinds of behaviours and environmental arrangements,” historians already unlikely to adopt mechanistic theories of human action might happily ignore this theorizing. With their healthy respect for the otherness of medieval culture, the complexity of its religious symbols and their webs of meaning, the push of its institutional forces and the resilience of individual ambitions, many medievalists may not be inclined to turn for insight to Pleistocene hunter-gatherer practices or to American four-year-olds’ beliefs about ghosts. And yet, as we now recognize the “bodiliness” of history, the “mindedness” of history remains to be explored. We are adept at interpreting the products of minds—texts and objects—and our recent advances are grounded in crucial insights about representation. Does the cognitivists’ concern for understanding the formation and transmission of mental representations allow another dimension of cultural artifacts to be understood? And does analysis of medieval religious artifacts help refine the understanding of how the mind works? These questions correspond to a recent call for greater collaboration between historians and social and natural scientists, one that could consolidate the conceptual basis for theorizing the relationship between the past and the present, an issue that haunts all our efforts even if we rarely address it. With the cognitivists’ claim that the mind they observe is the same mind that inhabited the world so recently past as the Middle Ages, cognitive theory may indeed offer a bridge to that past. How are the minds of medieval people brought into greater focus by considering the insights of cognitive theory? I am acutely aware that the medieval mind I know best still holds its mysteries for me. How did Elisabeth of Schönau think? From the age of twenty-three until her death thirteen years later, Elisabeth claimed to see heavenly visions that were divinely intended to be shared as revelation with the whole Christian world. How did she, a nun living in a Benedictine monastery in the Rhineland in the mid-twelfth century, come to articulate her belief that she was blessed with extraordinary visions? “Articulate her belief ” raises a basic issue in cognitive theory of religion: the transmission of religious ideas. Elisabeth offers an intriguing case for examining the transmission of belief because the surviving records of her visions are unusually detailed about mental process while also testifying to the typical rhythms of monastic prayer and meditation. One influential cognitivist perspective on this problem of religious transmission is the naturalist approach. As Dan Sperber poses the problem, given the infinite number of possible mental representations, and the countless ones that actually have existed—whether in people’s minds or publicly communicated—how can we account for the appeal or salience of some of these

172! cognition, composition, and contagion

ideas such that they are articulated and transmitted beyond an individual, sometimes over wide populations and over centuries? Cognitive theorists of religion respond with the insistence that “much of what is typically called ‘religion’ may be understood as the natural product of aggregated ordinary cognitive processes,” thus their emphasis on the “naturalness” of religion. For Pascal Boyer, each of the cognitive features underlying religious belief is linked to a particular mental system that evolved to negotiate problems that are not religious. Different mental systems are at work (i.e., the mind is not a single computational process machine), and the survival of beliefs suggests that they satisfy various adaptive criteria. For example, the human tendencies to posit intentional agency and to react emotionally when encountering something unexpected derive at least in part from the predatory experiences of hunting and being prey. The highly adaptive capacity of the mind to attribute, in emotionally charged ways, intentional agency to unseen forces provides fertile ground for the reception of religious beliefs that satisfy other adaptive features. If these beliefs include counterintuitive assertions that minimally contradict the basic domain-level categories of living thing (person or animal), manufactured thing, or natural thing, they will be highly memorable. For example, bread is a manufactured object, made of wheat by the process of baking; it can be broken into pieces and it has solidity. Yet, as affirmed in some miracle stories about the Eucharist, it can also bleed. It is a manufactured object yet its capacity to bleed is a borrowed trait from the living-thing domain. This makes Eucharistic belief conform to a template for a highly salient belief that would be likely to enjoy widespread acceptance. Other basic characteristics of religious belief—divine omniscience, ethical concerns, divine responsibility for misfortune—are all grounded in evolved capacities for social interaction. Thus for Boyer the success of religious beliefs cannot be attributed simply to processes of cultural transmission (e.g., preaching, reading, ritual). Many different things are imagined and even communicated, but only certain beliefs activate these particular mental capacities of the evolved human being, allowing those beliefs to be memorable and to enable the generation of many other inferential beliefs on the basis of the mental capacities stimulated. This other inferential belief comes “for free” without the cost of cultural indoctrination. For example, that God is grasped as an intentional agent allows the transfer of all traits typical of an intentional agent (e.g., hearing and understanding) without the necessity for these aspects of God to be catechized. Boyer acknowledges that in many religious traditions literate guilds try to propagate sophisticated doctrinal systems that go beyond the “cognitive optimum” of religious belief resonating with specific evolved mental capacities. However, as Justin Barrett has illustrated, in normal, spontaneous,

why all the fuss about the mind? 173!

unreflective, or “on-line,” expression, people express their beliefs in terms consistent with cognitive templates rather than with doctrinal systems that they may know and even affirm. Furthermore, people will always and necessarily elaborate, recreate, possibly even diverge from or distort the doctrine they are taught. This is due to the nature of cognition: a message is heard; it produces inferences in the hearer. Inferences that complete what is by nature fragmentary in the original message become the basis for nonstandard beliefs and practices. Even a belief that looks like “tradition,” i.e., that has been transmitted over time, remains culturally relevant “because, without perceptibly modifying its public form, it lends itself to different interpretations according to the agent, the circumstances, and the state in the life cycle.” This naturalist model of cognition and belief can help us understand the mental experience of Elisabeth in several ways. It offers the evidence of specific mental processes for understanding how belief in a God who died or in bread that bleeds could be highly memorable and full of rich inferential possibilities for any individual who was told of these phenomena. And it emphasizes the mental activity that lies behind the holding of any such belief. But unlike psychologists and anthropologists, who can analyze the spontaneous, unreflective expressions of their subjects, medievalists have little access to ephemeral expressions of “online” belief because of, among other things, the mechanics and economics of medieval textual production. Even with the unusual circumstances that led to the textualization of some version of some of Elisabeth’s thoughts, we still must grant yet more mental processing behind the thoughts that she was able to articulate. It is in this silence—the silence behind the texts for the literate or completely untextualized for the illiterate—that cognitive models can be helpful by accounting for the simultaneous stability of religious belief and the profusion of individual representations of belief. And if we do get a glimpse of direct expression of belief not reshaped by deliberate reflection—such as Elisabeth’s fear of being hit in the teeth by a terrifying shoe-wielding phantom—we can see it not as the oddity its rarity suggests, but as testimony to the vast mental activity—not passivity—of individuals within what may appear to be a “shared” religious culture. But of course Elisabeth’s mental machinery with its cognitive templates was dramatically shaped by cultural stimulation, allowing the possibilities of ideas beyond those naturally suited to the evolved human mind. She lived in a Benedictine monastery from the age of twelve. She was thoroughly immersed in the ritual life of the Divine Office, and she was educated to meet the ritual demands of literacy and performance. The words of authoritative revelation, learned through reading and ritual, formed the idiom of her

174! cognition, composition, and contagion

expression. This aspect of her life is evident throughout the visionary texts and is recognizable as the style of monastic writing so vividly characterized by Jean Leclercq. This type of rich cultural shaping of natural mental processes has also been considered in cognitivist theorizing about religious transmission. Harvey Whitehouse cites medieval Christian monasteries in his model of religious transmission that posits a cognitive basis for the social organization of religious communities. Whitehouse describes two modes of religiosity created by the dominant type of ritual within the particular tradition. The “imagistic mode” is marked by the rare occurrence of dramatic rituals that evoke strong emotional response. These often violent and terrifying rituals are typified by male initiation rites. The participants experience a “flashbulb,” or episodic, memory that imprints the ritual details in their explicit memory and serves as the basis for spontaneous, personal exegesis of the ritual that is often experienced as revelation. In the absence of a rationalized body of official teaching communicated by an authoritative teacher, the meaning of the ritual is instead generated by the participants, who reflect upon it over the course of a lifetime. The emotional intensity of the experience creates strong bonding among participants, and this emotional, ritually created bond is the basis for the social community. The community is thus co-terminous with the ritual group of initiators and initiates. In contrast, the “doctrinal mode” of religiosity, exemplified by medieval monasticism, is marked by the frequent occurrence of rituals with low emotional arousal. Without the dramatic sensory pageantry of the imagistic mode, rituals in the doctrinal mode rely on verbal expression to communicate revelation. With authoritative preaching and frequent verbal repetition, much explicit and conceptually complex religious teaching is registered in semantic memory. Unlike episodic or flashbulb memory, which fixes a dramatic moment of personal experience, semantic memory stores general knowledge not linked to specific episodes of personal experience. The high frequency/low arousal combination could lead to what Whitehouse terms the tedium effect, “a state of low morale arising from overfamiliarity with religious formulae and routine,” which is usually staved off by effective oratory and supernatural sanctions and incentives. Doctrinal revelation is portable, and the religious community extends beyond the face-to-face community of ritual copractitioners. Doctrinal religiosity fosters the emergence of dynamic religious leaders such as preachers and missionaries whose authority is based on their possession of revelation, which they teach through ritual repetition and whose orthodoxy they enforce in hierarchical, centralized, potentially anonymous communities. Elisabeth’s life conforms to many aspects of the doctrinal mode. The ritu-

why all the fuss about the mind? 175!

als she participated in were highly routinized, and verbal expression dominated: orthodox revelation codified in scripture, prayer, sequences, and antiphons was repeated in weekly and yearly cycles. Taedium is a recognized failure of monastic life in general, and she declared it as part of her own experience. Her individual community was hierarchically arranged and part of a larger network of “anonymous” fellow Christians beyond the walls of the cloister. There were teachers of doctrine and standards of orthodoxy. Thus her world ostensibly fits the modes prediction: frequent, low-arousal ritual that verbally transmits a body of orthodox doctrine was coupled with a hierarchical, expanded community. This cultural fit encourages further consideration here of Whitehouse’s cognitive framework. Whitehouse supports his picture of the doctrinal mode with a model of how knowledge is stored in memory. Doctrinal ritual involves two types of knowledge: knowledge of how to perform the ritual and knowledge about the verbally expressed doctrine. The embodied skills and habits learned in the performance of ritual constitute procedural knowledge that becomes unconscious or implicit and even walled off from conscious input. This is the behavioral mastery commonly referred to as doing something “on autopilot.” The encapsulated aspect of procedural knowledge is evident in our common experiences of the difficulty of consciously modifying autopilot procedures. Although this procedural knowledge is usually activated without conscious attention, it can also become available for the formation of more explicit representations, and ultimately can be susceptible to verbal description and intellectual manipulation. For example, after sufficiently mastering sequences of notes, a pianist can manipulate those sequences and draw on that procedural knowledge to inform and reshape his or her explicit knowledge of music theory. When discussing repeated religious ritual, however, Whitehouse emphasizes the wall between the implicit knowledge created by behavioral mastery and the domain of explicit, exegetical knowledge. Although it is possible for procedural knowledge to be redescribed and available to consciousness, that is, for the ritual participants to reflect on the meaning of the rituals in which they engage, Whitehouse instead stresses that routinization discourages individual reflection on the meaning of the ritual and creates a vacuum of meaning to be filled by verbal delivery by authoritative preachers. But given the cognitive model that allows procedural knowledge to become part of the mind’s conscious repertoire of representations available for reflection and exegesis, why grant such a limited possibility for internally generated meaning when it comes to routinized ritual? And what if there is much more procedural knowledge to monastic ritual than what is

176! cognition, composition, and contagion

easily recognized as bodily gestures of kneeling or bowing at appropriate moments? Perhaps the domains of procedural and exegetical knowledge, and the nature of routinized ritual, can look rather different when viewed in the context of medieval monastic life. Mary Carruthers has characterized medieval monasticism as an orthopraxis in which patterns of oral formulae and ritualized behavior, not normative dogma, are utilized to prepare for an experience of God. (Note the distinction between routinized words and ritual, on the one hand, and normative dogma on the other, distinctions that are collapsed in the modes theory.) An orthopraxis is, fundamentally, “a craft ‘knowledge’ which is learned, and indeed can only be learned by the painstaking practical imitation and complete familiarization of exemplary masters’ techniques and experiences.” This craft, to which one apprentices, is the process of making prayer continuously, the constant emotive, imaginative recollection of God. Like any craft, the craft of making thought requires tools, in this case “some mental tool or machine, and that ‘machine’ lives in the intricate networks of [the] memory.” The memoria that the apprentice (the monk or nun) shaped to forge thought or prayer was not simply a storehouse for information received but a means for invention. The mental representations (to use Sperber’s term, or the phantasiae, to use Augustine’s) created for the inventory were emotionally coded images, and this emotional coloring meant that no knowledge was nonemotional; emotion itself was not distinct from “data.” The mind full of mental representations, or the inventory full of emotionally charged pictures, was the tool with which the monk or nun invented new ideas. The inventory full of emotionally charged pictures with which the apprentice came to the Divine Office to invent—to inventory and create—ideas of God might at first look like the semantic memory, the site of explicit religious knowledge in the modes theory. But that would make monastic memoria only a storehouse of knowledge rather than a tool to create new things in a process that is being slowly learned over a lifetime. In the modes theory the infrequent, elaborate, sensorily rich, emotionally fraught rituals of the imagistic mode require a level of conscious planning and implementation on the part of initiators. This conscious, explicit, procedural knowledge of the ritual supports a reflexivity on the part of the ritual initiators that allows them to generate meaning from their ritual experience. This type of personal, internally generated exegesis or meaning-making (which Whitehouse denies to the doctrinal mode ritual) can also be seen in the doctrinal setting of monastic ritual, if the creation of phantasiae is itself seen as part of the ritual procedure. The modes theory recognizes only bodily comportment as ritual proce-

why all the fuss about the mind? 177!

dure, but the emotionally charged, image-making process itself, the memoria, is at work in the Divine Office. The manipulation of mental representations is part of procedure, and that procedural knowledge is available for meaning-making on the part of the apprentice/ritual participant/monk/ nun. What look to the outsider to be mere words, orthodox doctrine communicated verbally, are stimulants—themselves emotionally coded through the modes of the chant—to the inferential process of building or inventing prayer, of elaborating images for triggering an emotional, sensory experience. Thus the outcome of monastic ritual is not doctrinal orthodoxy reinforced by the absorption of announced dogma, but further impetus to individual creativity (without the added modern assumptions of uniqueness or originality), using the tools of the trade to advance one’s ability to dwell in a particular cognitive/emotional state not otherwise available. The ritual experience of Elisabeth of Schönau reveals elements of both Whitehouse’s modes theory and Carruthers’ picture of monastic prayer. Ekbert of Schönau, who wrote introductions to several collections of Elisabeth’s visions, offered a general characterization of the onset of her visions: “Frequently and indeed as if by habit, on Sundays and other feast days, around the hours in which the devotion of the faithful was especially inflamed, a certain affliction of the heart came over her and she was violently disturbed.” He thus describes a particular emotional character of the ritual, a burning devotion that he presumed to be communally shared, despite the fact that this community gathered for highly routinized rituals. Is this just “cognitive dissonance,” the inability of a participant in a boring ritual to admit that it is boring? Or is it merely an authoritative teacher trying to reinforce the rightness of the ritual? The modes theory offers both suggestions as ways to dismiss Ekbert’s words. But before dismissing them, we should consider the cognitive clues they offer. Ekbert notes that this emotional setting is also a point of intense physical disturbance. Throughout the visionary works, Elisabeth makes many references to her physical condition. There is ample evidence in these texts to conclude that Elisabeth spent much of her life in a physically weakened state, suffering periods of severe illness, that she embraced the ascetic lifestyle of her monastery, and that she mortified her body in ways that probably further undermined her health. She engaged in practices of fasting, vigils, and mortification in order to elicit the experiences that she understood as divine visions. She also knew that thinking about certain things had discrete physical effects and that these thoughts and sensations could be channeled. Elisabeth’s immersion in pain—“the bodily mortification that I had often practiced upon myself,” the “sacrifice of voluntary affliction added to every pain of the wounds” afflicted by God, the bodily affliction and jabbing of

178! cognition, composition, and contagion

compunction created by reading, the anxiety that Elisabeth so often described as her mental state—has often been seen as evidence of her immaturity. Yet Carruthers has shown how anxiety—even grief and fear—was understood to be the necessary condition for invention, for meditation, for prayer. This religiously grounded edginess enabled composition, drove vision. Elisabeth seems to have had an intuitive knowledge of the connection between pain and the creation of meaning, a connection that Whitehouse affirms in the imagistic mode but does not see in the doctrinal mode of religiosity. So Elisabeth came to the oratory, to join a group of emotionally “heated up” monks and nuns, to sing the haunting words of the Psalms, whose words were not to be heard as things learned and remembered, but as invented by the self when seen in the nature of reality and experienced with all the feelings originally experienced by the Psalmist. She came with her mind full of emotionally charged images (mental representations, phantasiae, visiones) inventoried from previous study and previous ritual, ready to invent new visiones. But what did she invent, discover, see? In the narratives portraying her earliest visions—and these texts bear the least evidence of being influenced or editorially reshaped by Ekbert—Elisabeth usually articulated a vision with little if any explicit doctrinal content. Here is a typical one: Afterwards, on Saturday, when the Mass of our Lady the blessed Virgin had begun, I sunk into ecstasy and my heart was opened, and I saw above our atmosphere a wheel of great light like the full moon, but almost twice as large. And I looked through the center of that wheel and I saw the likeness of a regal woman standing on high, dressed in the whitest garments and wrapped in a purple mantle. I immediately understood that this woman was the exalted Queen of Heaven, mother of our Savior, whom I had long desired to see. While I looked at her with longing, she prostrated herself three times, worshipping in the presence of the divine light before her. . . . And when she arose, she turned her face to me and came forward towards me, into the lower atmosphere a little. . . . Standing there, my Lady marked me with the sign of the cross and implanted—I don’t know how—these words in my mind, “Do not fear, because these things will not harm you at all.” In truth, I did not hear the sound of her voice; rather I only clearly saw the movement of her lips.

Elisabeth asserted that her vision of Mary was one that she had long desired, and the longing continues in the experience itself. Elisabeth experienced her encounter with this object of her longing as one that somehow—she is not

why all the fuss about the mind? 179!

sure how—comforts her in a time of great anxiety and torment. Yearning and comfort, not transmission of doctrine, are the primary aspects of this vision. Several years later, during Christmas Eve Mass, Elisabeth declared that she saw a beautiful crowned virgin sitting in the middle of the sun, with a golden cup in her right hand. The splendor of the sun illuminated the world, but then was repeatedly blocked by a dark cloud, causing the virgin to weep copiously. Elisabeth said that on Christmas Day she had another vision in which she learned the meaning of this vision, and she proceeded to offer an allegorized interpretation. The virgin represents “the sacred humanity of the Lord Jesus” and the sun is “the divinity that possesses and illuminates the whole humanity of the Savior.” The dark cloud is the sin of the world obstructing God’s kindness provided through the humanity of Christ, and the lamentation of the virgin is the anger and bitterness of the Lord at the arrogant human trampling of the benefits gained by the Incarnation. When Elisabeth announced this interpretation of her vision, it met with some resistance or incomprehension, and she was advised to learn in another vision “why the humanity of the Lord Savior was shown to me in the form of a virgin and not in a masculine form.” Another vision yielded an additional level of interpretation: the vision was presented in this way so that “it could so much more easily be adapted to also signify the Lord’s blessed mother.” The Virgin Mary was fully illuminated by the majesty of God and through her the divinity of God (the sun) descended to earth. Her lamentation is her constant appeal to her Son not to destroy the world in his righteous anger at human sin, and it is only her constant, weeping prayer that saves the world from destruction. For the modes theory, it is striking that Elisabeth’s ritually stimulated vision produced unorthodox knowledge: a feminine representation of Christ. Even when questioned, Elisabeth retained the initial interpretation, adding another to it, allowing the symbol to hold multiple meanings pointing to a subtle theological insight: the shared physicality of Mary and Jesus and thus the femaleness of his humanity. This vision is also noteworthy for what it reveals in comparison to the first vision quoted. Both are images of regal women identified as the Virgin Mary. But the moon has become the sun, perhaps reflecting Elisabeth’s identification of Mary with “the woman clothed with the sun” (Rev 12:1), an ancient exegetical theme that had only recently entered the devotional mainstream. And perhaps this shift from moon to sun also reflects Elisabeth’s ongoing preoccupation with the effects of the sun used as metaphor in so many visions: an adolescent is compared to a lily “that is closed before the rising of the sun, and then, when the sun shines in its strength, opens itself

180! cognition, composition, and contagion

and is delighted by the warmth of the sun”; a previously stained altar cloth looks like fresh laundry with the sun shining on it; a bright light is like “the splendor of gold struck by the sun.” These are homely images but they suggest some of the mental representations inventoried for seeing new things. Not only has the moon been transformed to the sun; the later virgin in the sun visions are much more elaborate visually (many more graphic details), theologically (reflecting on the divine and human nature of Christ, on the relationship between sinful humanity and wrathful deity), and socially (the message is for the world and at least part of the world questions it). All of this elaboration of an initial dramatic, personal experience in a time of personal turmoil looks like the fruit of personal exegesis of a flashbulb memory. The torment and anxiety that defined the context of the first vision are still present in the later vision in the threat of divine vengeance and the fear of facing judgment. The saving intervention of the Virgin Mary has been expanded from the personal consolation of Elisabeth to the salvation of the whole world. And the drama of personal experience has been given enough meaning to be textualized for the edification of others. It is only through this textualization that we can know anything of Elisabeth’s mental processes. The fact of textualization might suggest the unusualness of Elisabeth’s claims about her visionary experience. Yet her visionary experience was thoroughly grounded in conventional monastic prayer and reading practices; one could say that her visionary experience was exactly the outcome that the monastic life was organized to produce. The textualization of Elisabeth’s visions also reveals how personal reflection on ritual experience can become part of the cultural machinery for doctrinal transmission. Elisabeth had another vision that allowed her to affirm a contested belief of her day: the bodily resurrection of the Virgin Mary. She feared the textualization and transmission of this particular vision, but Ekbert published it despite her resistance. A moment of inventio—triggered by a ritual commemoration of the Virgin Mary and drawing on an emotionally charged inventory of pictures about Mary as her personal protector who alone shared flesh with Christ—became a theological assertion that ultimately became an official teaching of the Church.

999 The modes theory asserts that repetitive ritual suppresses personal mental processing, creating a vacuum for authoritatively pronounced doctrine to be received. I have suggested a different view of repetitive ritual by expanding the realm of procedural memory to include the craft of inventing picture

why all the fuss about the mind? 181!

tools, and by looking at how one monastic came to her routinized rituals and invented meaning from them. This analysis in turn calls into question the model of religious transmission offered by the modes theory. It suggests that there may be a conflation of external, ritual behavior, in this case extensive verbal delivery or recitation, with internal knowledge production. The modes theory assumes that the acquisition and transmission of knowledge is a process to be understood primarily in terms of the spread of a stable canon of orthodox belief, but the visions of Elisabeth of Schönau show a participant in routinized ritual inventing as she goes, and they show how the personal inventions of one person can become the inventoried images of another, to be reshaped by his or her emotional memory tools. What, finally, can be said about using cognitive theory for analyzing medieval religion? While no grand generalizations are in order here, I will suggest a modest appraisal. Cognitive theory offers a concrete reminder of powerful aspects of human existence that historians cannot directly see. I do not believe that as yet we can use cognitive theory to fill in the blanks of the historical record, to say, e.g., that the illiterate multitudes of medieval Christians held beliefs that simply mirrored the cognitive optimum or the preaching they heard in routinized ritual. Boyer’s and Sperber’s works can help us understand the power of certain kinds of beliefs, and the vast undocumented mental activity that took place behind what we characterize as medieval Christian belief. Whitehouse’s modes theory alerts us to the various kinds of memory activated in religious ritual and highlights ritual processes as powerful means for the production of religious knowledge, even if this theory obscures the possibilities of invention in medieval monastic ritual. Cognitive theory pushes historians to recognize the unseen work of the mind as part of the past, something more easily assented to in the abstract than incorporated into the analysis. And there is a payoff : Elisabeth’s mental life, once sealed off for me by the assertion that I can’t know what actually happened in her visionary experience, becomes not fully comprehensible but certainly more illuminated. Cognitive theories of religion generate universalistic models about how the mind works and cognitive theorists strive for simplicity, formulating what they consider the most basic blueprints of mental processing. And this approach offers genuine insight when it contributes to, rather than substitutes for, a complex picture of the human striving to create meaning.

   ASPECTS OF BLOOD PIETY IN A LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLISH MANUSCRIPT: LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY ADDITIONAL  Marlene Villalobos Hennessy

O

ne of the most intense imaginings of the blood of Christ appears in an English Carthusian manuscript of ca. 1460–1470, London, British Library, MS Additional 37049, on fol. 36v (fig. 15.1). In a time when Passion imagery was virtually everywhere in England and on the continent, this manuscript illustration stands apart for its unusual and perhaps unprecedented iconography, which accompanies a text by the mystic Richard Rolle (d. 1349). Not only does this picture highlight a whole range of beliefs and behaviors connected to the heart, wounds, blood, and Holy Name of Christ, providing particularly lucid evidence of what has been called “the distinctly somatic turn of late medieval spirituality,” but it also raises important questions about the relations between words and pictures, reading and seeing, and mimesis and memory. My aim in this essay is to unravel some of these networks of association by focusing particularly on the illustration’s dramatic blood piety. I hope to show that this intricate, complex image is well suited for discussing an inherently paradoxical topic: the widespread veneration of the blood of Christ. The illustration shows a Carthusian monk in prayer before a red heart, which is cut through by a scroll inscribed with the words “est amor meus.” The body of the crucified Christ grows from the heart to form the letter H as part of a Holy Name (IHC) monogram. The absence of Christ’s name in the heart’s scroll encourages the reader to focus on the crucifixion image in order to complete the phrase as “Ihesus est amor meus.” These words were reportedly inscribed on rings owned by Margery Kempe and Mary Champney, nun of Syon, as well as on beads left to Archbishop Arundel by William of Wykeham and on a belt bequeathed by Lady Margaret Vava-

aspects of blood piet y $183& Image only available in print edition

figure 15.1 London, British Library, MS Additional 37049, fol. 36v: blood of Christ and monk at prayer before heart. by permission of the british library.

sour. The popular motto is also the first line in a vernacular translation of a poem in Richard Rolle’s Incendium amoris, and it appears in several other anonymous poems, elsewhere in this manuscript, and in other manuscripts of Carthusian provenance. Ritual, incantatory repetition of this phrase was believed to spur the devout to greater and greater heights of union with Christ (in a way similar to the function of a Buddhist mantra, in which sound awakens a flame of devotion within the body). The phrase was believed to become an anchor for upward ascent, and in this illustration it may be assumed to have produced the Holy Name tree-image that grows from the heart. Set in a green landscape, the tree of life is flecked with blood, and in an unusual expression of blood piety, drops of blood rain down from above like dew, which suggests that Christ’s blood waters or irrigates this tree in the heart of the reader, accenting the fecundity or productivity of Christ’s

$184& cognition, composition, and contagion Image only available in print edition

figure 15.2 London, British Library, MS Additional 37049, fol. 62v: Christ’s blood as nutriment. by permission of the british library.

Passion. This image can be juxtaposed with a line from a votive office in honor of the relic of the Holy Blood at Weingarten, which states that through the dew of Christ’s blood, “hearts so long parched have been made green again.” Blood here is what makes the tree-heart verdant, fructifying, and florid, budding seven rosettes in each of whose centers lies the word “luf ” (love). This devotional flowering is echoed later in the manuscript on fol. 62v (fig. 15.2) in an illustration that depicts the blood from Christ’s wounded side as a kind of verdurous nutriment for the contemplative heart. The language of flowers and vegetation often figures in depictions of paradise, and it also appears in commentaries on the Song of Songs, such as the one written by the twelfth-century writer Honorius Augustodunensis, in which the whole church is a field of different flowers: martyrs are roses, virgins are lilies, confessors are violets, and Christ himself is the most beautiful flower of all, made humble when he was encrimsoned with his own blood. Additional 37049’s illustrations evoke this textual tradition, but they

aspects of blood piet y $185&

also give a special emphasis to blood’s universal associations with fertility. It is perhaps not insignificant that “in the later Middle Ages, the [Holy] blood was sometime[s] carried in procession around newly sown fields to protect crops and increase fertility.” As Caroline Walker Bynum remarks, blood is “dew, seed, and fertility.” Simply put, blood greens. The entire image on fol. 36v (fig. 15.1) asserts blood’s transformative properties even as it manages to refract and distill some of the antinomies of the Passion. The killing place of Calvary, with its darksome associations of sterility, torture, and death, has become something green, an efflorescent place of beauty and hopefulness. Although Christ’s blood liberally accents the image as a whole, it strikes not a note of pain and suffering, but one of lyrical transcendence. The grief of the crucifixion has been transfigured into consolation; violent sacrifice has become flowering regeneration. Blood, I would like to suggest, is the agent of this metamorphosis. In late medieval literature and art, Christ’s wounds are often depicted as roses, and his blood is described as “cruor roseus,” or roseate blood. Entire scenes from the life of Christ sometimes take place inside a single flower. In an echo of Ecclesiasticus 24:18, Mary was also known as the rosa sine spina, or “the rose without thorn,” and she was sometimes depicted holding a rosebush in her hands. In a further development of this theme, on fol. 36v both Mary and John, dressed in blood-colored robes, are attached to the tree as flowers, standing atop rosebuds that stem from the central heart. Christ is often figured as the fruit or flower of the Virgin, but here we have an interesting variation. This novel depiction, in my view, has some roots in medieval arts of memory, and perhaps even in the rosary. John and Mary become literal florilegia: the human flowers of memory and meditation. Their representation here signals their roles as spectators of the Passion and their importance in forming a memorial image of the crucifixion. The illustration depicts memory techniques for mentally picturing the Passion that depend upon visualization. This readerly activity has been called “the practice of the devotional present,” and it involved a kind of highly focused “biblical day-dreaming.” Related devotional texts instruct a reader to envision that he or she is physically present at various events in the life of Christ. For example, they ask a reader to take his or her place alongside Christ and his disciples at the Last Supper, or with him on the road to Calvary, or next to him as he is nailed to the cross. Meditators are frequently encouraged to see themselves as firsthand witnesses or participants at the crucifixion, often kneeling beside Mary and John, just as the figure of the Carthusian monk in the illustration views the scene above. This imaginative strategy placed readers at the center of salvation history, removing barriers of place and time, with the aim of making the memory of Christ’s Passion fresh, immediate, and alive.

$186& cognition, composition, and contagion

The illustration on fol. 36v visually depicts how this meditative method might be put into practice through an elaborate choreography of reading that is basically mimetic: the monastic reader gazes at the page and sees a picture of the spiritual exercise he is to perform. Just as the artist has converted the phrase “Ihesus est amor meus” into a visual image, turning words into pictures, a similar transformation is to occur in the imagination of the reader, for whom the whole crucifixion scene is enlivened as a blood-flecked inflorescence. Hence we can see the devotional habits of reading shaped by this particular manuscript, as if the reading process itself could be depicted and materialized in slow motion, or in a still photograph. The illustration brings us closer to what Andrew Taylor has called, in a different context, “the lived experience of the medieval book.” A central aspect of the visual strategy of this illustration is the fusion of the body of Christ with a text, the sacred monogram. The image captures one of the most paradoxical moments of the Incarnation: word becoming flesh. Text intertwines and intersects with image, becoming image. This striking literalization is typical of the highly textualized spirituality prevalent during the period. The image moves between different registers of word and flesh, spirit and matter, the spiritual and the carnal—and even of the interior and exterior sense of language and of Christ himself. We see here what I would call a hermeneutics of embodiment, spiritual encounter taking on physical, written form. This idea is also made explicit in the facing-page illustration (fol. 37r; Fig. 15.3), which shows a hermit, seated with a book in his lap, whose chest is inscribed with the sacred monogram “IHC,” a parallel fusion of word and flesh. Richard Rolle, whose text is extracted here and whose portrait appears elsewhere in Additional 37049 in a strikingly similar illustration, reportedly “wrote” the Holy Name on his forehead and chest on a daily basis, and the depiction here may reflect that practice. The somatic metaphor on the hermit’s heart is a kind of love letter to the divine, an apparently literal incarnation of the phrase “Ihesus est amor meus.” The artist has not only echoed the visual themes of the previous folio, but he has developed them further, showing another stage in the movement toward union with Christ. The illustration on fol. 37r shows what it means to be or to become a text, an unapologetically corporeal mode of sacred reading and enactment reinscribed through the book in the hermit’s lap. Reading, therefore, is a kind of embodiment, a mimetic transformation that can be connected to some of the wider currents of religious devotion and popular piety prevalent in late medieval England. In her influential work on late medieval drama, Gail McMurray Gibson identified what she termed the fifteenth century’s “incarnational aesthetic,”

aspects of blood piet y $187& Image only available in print edition

figure 15.3 London, British Library, MS Additional 37049, fol. 37r: crucifix with writing on hermit’s heart. by permission of the british library.

its fascination with the personal, concrete, and corporeal—in her words, “[the] intense focus on the fleshly reality of the Incarnation, of that same nearly hallucinatory concreteness we see in Margery Kempe’s visions.” The literature of the period abounds in references to this material emphasis and finds one of its finest expressions in an anonymous fourteenth-century lyric in John of Grimestone’s Commonplace Book: “I wolde ben clad in cristes skyn / þat ran so longe on blode, / & gon t’is herte & taken myn In.” Union with Christ is described as a kind of enfleshment: first wearing his bloody skin and then entering his heart, where the two hearts can be joined. The hybrid of word and picture on fol. 36v (fig. 15.1) not only exemplifies this same incarnational focus, but also is designed as a conjuration to make Christ present in the heart of the reader. Through a kind of ardent image magic, the illustration is endowed with indwelling personality, as if Christ himself could actually inhabit this text-image of the Holy Name, accentuating

$188& cognition, composition, and contagion

its incantatory and wonder-working associations. The reading process becomes a nearly alchemical transformation of spirit into flesh, as words and images are invested with life. The curling, blue-tinted banderoles that form the Holy Name monogram resemble bleeding parchment scrolls: bloody flesh and letters, crossed by spear and sponge, which are also stylus and corrector. Many medieval texts focused intently on Longinus’ lance; some even expressed the desire to be or to become the spear that pierced through to Christ’s heart. The spear was often represented as a writing instrument; in an inventive variation on the same motif, the English Franciscan poet William Herebert (ca. 1330) compared Christ’s side wound to an inkhorn. In a similar manner, the illustration on fol. 36v turns the crucifixion into a textual event, a scribal act that reflects the making of books and the tools and materials of scribal culture. This word-picture shows that as the Middle Ages progressed, with increasing intensity the book took on life: it was flesh and blood, palpable, immediate, alive, a living organism. In its most supreme, epiphanic form, it was Christ himself. The notion of Christ’s body as a book, document, or other textual object, which Ernst Robert Curtius termed the “religious metaphorics of the book,” was widespread by the late Middle Ages. The Monk of Farne’s Meditations on the Passion of Christ describes Christ’s body as “a book, open for your perusal,” an object that is further articulated through an alphabet of desire: the five wounds are the vowels and the smaller wounds are consonants. In “Mary at the Foot of the Cross,” Christ’s body is a book fashioned by pain: “The body was bored and on borde bete, / In bright blode oure boke gan schyne . . .Wryten it was full wonder woo, / Rede woundes and strokes bloo: / Your boke was bounde in blode.” Blood gives the book its luminosity, while providing the viscous unguent that binds together the bruised and wounded pages. In a similar vein, Rolle memorably likened Christ’s wounded body to “a boke written al with rede ynke.” The double metamorphosis of Christ into written word and flesh on fol. 36v can be connected with another important aspect of blood piety, namely, the representation of Christ’s blood as ink, which has an extensive earlier history in the learned textual tradition of the Middle Ages. Red or purple ink was often compared to the blood of the Passion or of martyrdom. For example, the work of Helinand of Froidmont (d. 1212) contains a passage in a sermon on the Ascension that describes Christ as a letter or missive written into the virgin with blood as ink: The virgin’s womb provided the parchment for making these letters for us, and the Holy Spirit prepared the parchment she provided, and then the Son

aspects of blood piet y $189&

of the Most High One inscribed the already-prepared parchment, writing from the earth of his body with golden letters the works of human redemption with the finger of God and the stylus and pen of wisdom. He rubricated these same letters with the precious red ink of his rosy blood, by which virginal cheeks are adorned, according to the saying of Agnes, Bride of the Lamb: “And his blood adorned my cheeks.”

The language in the passage employs the tropes of the making of books and the tools and materials of scribal culture. The virgin’s womb is compared to the membrane manuscripts were written on. Like the illustration on fol. 36v, this passage turns a biblical event into a textual event that reflects the collaborative effort and physical labor involved in book production. Christ embodies a scribal aesthetic whose indices are mediated by the tools and implements of literacy and literary composition. The Incarnation is a scribal act, a transcription of sorts, in which Christ is the founding, originary document fashioned for us in several stages. The virgin is the parchmener, the first stage in this divine dissemination, followed by the masculine calligraphy inscribed upon the primed surface, which is then decorated with blood. The Latin verb rubricare, which means “to redden” but also “to rubricate with red ink,” often appears in sanguinary contexts, and here it used to celebrate the ability of Christ’s blood to ornament the parchment, just as in a medieval manuscript red ink would be used to inscribe a text, adorn an initial, or decorate the page. These bloody graphemes are emblems of the breakdown of Christ’s body into a text that the passage describes. As flesh and blood, his body has become an idealized scene of writing. Blood’s inscriptional possibilities move easily from interior to exterior, rubifying virginal womb and virginal cheeks. But how can we connect this text, which was written hundreds of years earlier, to the illustration in Additional 37049? First, I think it shows us one way that bookish culture in Latin gets “Englished.” Tropes that ultimately derive from Latin sources take on new life in the vernacular. Second, both Helinand’s text and the image on fol. 36v affirm the reader’s right to perform an exegesis of Christ’s body in exquisite detail as a text “open for your perusal.” This hermeneutic effect may be juxtaposed with a passage from the “Fifteen Oes” that asks Christ, “for the mynde of this passion, wryte al thy woundes in myn herte wyth thy precyous blode that I may bothe rede in theym thy drede and thy love.” These bloody scripts and their books and wounds of love are the kind of religious envoi Rolle incised in his flesh when he “wrote” the Holy Name on his body: a hybrid of the carnal and the spiritual that is memorialized in the illustration on fol. 37r (fig. 15.3). Third, we can see that the roots of late medieval England’s incarnational aesthetic—its

$190& cognition, composition, and contagion

predilection for what I called the hermeneutics of embodiment, in which books and images are invested with indwelling personality—lie in Latinate culture. As an important symbol and corollary of written, documentary culture, the notion of Christ’s blood as ink points to the way that literacy came to permeate discourses about the holy blood. An overtly somatic, material trope, Christ’s blood as ink circulates in the interstices of textual relations. This role is made clear, in a different way, in the extract from Rolle’s Ego dormio that accompanies the illustration on fol. 36v. The lyric combines devotion to the Holy Name with devotion to Christ’s heart, wounds, and blood. Perhaps most significant, blood, that primary fundament, fastens or glues Christ to the reader: Þe luf of god who so will lere, In his hert þe name of Ihesu he bere. For it puts oute þe fende & makes hym flee, And fils a man with charyte. Þerfore to purche þe ioy þat euer sal last, Deuoutely in Ihesu your herte 3e kast. Ihesu recyfe my hert & to þi luf me bryng. . . . Nakyd is his whyte breste, And rede his blody syde. Wan was his fayr hewe, His woundes depe & wyde. In fyfe stedes of his flesche þe blode gan downe glyde, As streme dos of þe strande, þis payne is noght to hyde . . . Now Ihesu þat with þi blode me boght, þat from hert gon ryn, þow make me clere of al my syn, And fest þi luf in-to my thoght, So þat we neuer more twyn. Amen.

Christ’s blood is given a range of imaginative powers here; his body is a landscape of contrasts: white flesh and bleeding side wound, five rivulets of blood breaking on the wooden shores of the cross. The effect of this spiritual topography is not only to heighten the reader-viewer’s visual experience of the crucifixion, but also to stress the blood’s redemptive agency and its purgative powers. Blood binds the reader to Christ (“fest þi luf in-to my

aspects of blood piet y $191&

þoght”), evoking the image of the love-knot, which appears in many late medieval English mystical writings. In addition, the imagery recalls the metaphors sketched in “Mary at the Foot of the Cross”: “Your boke was bounde in blode.” In Rolle’s text, blood is what forms and fashions the knot, fastening Christ’s heart to the reader’s mind—an image of inscription in which blood penetrates the mind and memory as writing and, therefore, as ink. The poem’s opening directives (“Þe luf of god who so will lere, / In his hert þe name of Ihesu he bere”) suggest that the reader imprint the Holy Name inside the heart, an action that is mirrored in the illustrations on fols. 36v and 37r. The bloody flesh and letters, parchment and ink, are the tools and materials for this transcription. In the text and in the illustrations, the Holy Name has been depicted as an exemplary inscription for the human heart, a locus of transmutation where flesh can become spirit and spirit can even become flesh. The blood of Christ is the very special liquid at the center of these metamorphoses, the prima materia of inscription and reinscription, wounding and writing. Rather than being seen as separate, competing, or even contradictory, image and text achieve a simultaneous register here; not only are they thoroughly integrated (and, in the illustration, literally enmeshed), but they also share equally in a degree of divine authority. The scribe-artist insists that both are in fact necessary and inseparable in his devotional practice, which engages a full range of the senses in a complex, intricate manner. Just as the subject of the illustration on fol. 36v is word becoming flesh, a paradox that defies all the laws of sensory perception, here we see words and pictures in the process of transmutation into one another—a conversion of spirit into matter that lies at the very heart of blood piety.

   MACHIAVELLI, TRAUMA, AND THE SCANDAL OF THE PRINCE an essay in speculative history Alison K. Frazier

There hung from the vaulted ceiling a chain that above ran into a roll. At its bottom end it bore a heavy, broadly curved iron hook. I was led to this instrument. The hook gripped into the shackle that held my hands together behind my back. Then I was raised with the chain until I hung about a metre above the floor. In such a position, or rather, when hanging this way, with your hands behind your back, for a short time you can hold at a half-oblique through muscular force. During these few minutes, when you are already expending your utmost strength, when sweat has already appeared on your forehead and lips, and you are breathing in gasps, you will not answer any questions. Accomplices? Addresses? Meeting places? You hardly hear it. All your life is gathered in a single, limited area of the body, the shoulder joints, and it does not react; for it exhausts itself completely in the expenditure of energy. But this cannot last long, even with people who have a strong physical constitution. As for me, I had to give up rather quickly. And now there was a cracking and splintering in my shoulders that my body has not forgotten to this hour. The balls sprang from their sockets. My own body weight caused luxation; I fell into a void and now hung by my dislocated arms which had been torn high from behind and were now twisted over my head. Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What a visual instruction in etymology! —jean améry (d. 1978) 

From late February to early March 1513, after Piero Soderini’s republican government had bowed to the consequences of military defeat at Prato and a foreign power had returned the Medici to Florence as more than first

machiavelli, tr auma, and scandal 193

citizens, Niccolò Machiavelli spent three weeks as their political prisoner. Then, on March 11, Cardinal Giovanni de’Medici became Pope Leo X. Florence celebrated with an amnesty, and Machiavelli, liberated to territorial confinement, spent the late spring and summer writing On Principalities (De principatibus). Although he would write many other things before his death in 1527, including works that gave him some literary standing among contemporaries, Machiavelli never recovered the professional stature he had once held in the Florentine bureaucracy. The treatise on principalities, however, went on to centuries of success as Il principe, the title assigned by the first, posthumous printing (Rome, 1532). One continuing field of triumph for The Prince, to judge from the run of new teaching editions (Wootton 1995, Sonnino 1996, Codevilla 1997, Bondanella 1998, Skinner 1998, Mansfield 1998, Rebhorn 2003, Connell 2004), is the United States, where Machiavelli’s discourse of power has global implications of which students may be apologetically or defensively aware. As they learn about The Prince, students often read Machiavelli’s letter of December 10, 1513, to his friend and former colleague, Francesco Vettori. This letter—the first notice that De principatibus has come into existence—is a giornata, a literary improvisation retailing the activities of a single day. Scholars have long recognized that Machiavelli’s self-presentation in this letter is hardly straightforward. The activities that structure his time after prison are futile ones; the personae he adopts to relate them range from the energetic breadwinner, rustic prankster, and pastoral romantic to the hyper-allusive self-mocker, frustrated jobseeker, and privileged insider turned pathetic outsider. At the end of his rural day, yet another simulacrum appears: When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; and on the threshold I take off those everyday clothes, full of mud and dirt, and put on royal and curial robes. And re-clothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food which alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their humanity, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all troubles, I do not fear poverty, death does not terrify me. Completely, I translate myself into them.

This moving description is proferred—I do it myself—as a celebration of Renaissance classical scholarship, a sign of the author’s genius in overcoming his fate, and an explanation of the origins of The Prince. Celebration, sign, and explanation the description may be, but perhaps

194 cognition, composition, and contagion

something else as well. The familiar interpretive strategies that bend both the giornata and The Prince to our understanding may also divert us from a more troubling significance. This essay broaches the possibility that De principatibus is marked by torture. The treatise, I suggest, bears the imprint of trauma resulting from pain, loss of bodily integrity, the threat of death, total subjection to another’s will, and the experience of surviving when others did not. Trauma here refers to a “breach in a protective covering” of the fictionally whole self, a tearing “of such severity” that “foreknowledge is useless.” Because the breach “cannot be coped with by the usual mechanisms,” it manifests itself indirectly and repetitively in the subject’s speech and affect. Just so, a specific historical trauma may be registered in the content, structure, and discourse of The Prince. That historical trauma takes a doubled form, as a “crisis of death” oscillates in the survivor’s memory with a “correlative crisis of life.” Machiavelli faced death in a socially symbolic form on November 7, 1512, when, probably at the behest of Cardinal Giovanni de’Medici (later Leo X), he was “dismiss[ed], deprive[d], and totally remove[d] . . . from, and out of, the office of Second Chancellor.” He faced it in actuality later, over the course of his imprisonment and torture. Perceiving the prison as a slaughterhouse, and himself as a helpless, chained animal smelling death, Machiavelli awaited interrogation amid the cries of the tortured, aware of ongoing executions and recognizing that he, too, was “on the verge of losing [his] life” (sono stato per perdere la vita). The “correlative crisis of life” began at his release. Unlike others whom he knew, Machiavelli was not executed. But neither was the former secretary reintegrated into the political life of the city. Thus the Medici ensured, intentionally or not, that he would continue to meditate on both his humiliation and his survival. It is relatively uncontroversial to observe that The Prince is devious and protean because the victim speaks to his persecutors, his executioners manqués. But this essay proposes a more pervasive and intractible discourse of trauma: Machiavelli’s most famous text is triumphant and servile, bleak and comic, exhilarating and tedious, because The Prince is a symptomatic—that is to say, an unintentional—bodying-forth of the author’s oscillating crises of death and life. The Prince wells up with such brilliant pathologies of speech (iterations, tautologies, silences, contradictions, labyrinthine clauses, dead ends, aggressive inside jokes, number games, obsessive binaries) as characterize the freedom of speech granted the martyr, the condemned, and the insane, whether or not the expelled bureaucrat wrote to exorcise the cost of survival or to represent it all too plainly to his dedicatees, first Giuliano de’Medici, then Giuliano’s nephew, Lorenzo. In this reading, the “conversations with the ancients” paragraph of the giornata is not, or not primarily, a

machiavelli, tr auma, and scandal 195

paean to humanist techniques of reading, a supreme example of the Renaissance vernacular at the height of intertextual refinement. It is, like several other letters that Machiavelli sent in response to Vettori’s uneven promptings over the summer and fall of 1513, a “post-traumatic” acting out. The hypothesis offered here is not arbitrary. It rests on a comparison of The Prince to another well-known text that issued from the Medici’s 1513 interrogation of suspicious republicans. In fact, some contemporaries, including Machiavelli himself, might have considered the two texts in uneasy juxtaposition. Although there is not space for a full-fledged comparison, perhaps even sceptics will find this partial one worthwhile. I am grateful, nonetheless, to take refuge in the comic mode of this volume, for its embrace of the incomplete and the fragmentary authorizes an initial exploration of the trauma hypothesis. In return, however, the questions raised by the hypothesis must be submitted for our common conversation. First: the reception history of The Prince may be unaffected by a reinterpretation of immediate context. Even so, how might our evaluation of the “magisterial” quality of the work or its “canonicity” be modulated by the possibility that it is, at base, a symptom, a work in which the author is blind to or deluded about his own mimetic processes? Second, a corollary: what might it mean for our interpretation or even experience of modernity, to propose that one of its defining texts is an objectification of the tortured subject’s radical loss of autonomy at the hands of the state? And third: a reflection on our ethical responsibility as historians to the precise context of composition. What have we wrought by imposing Machiavelli’s trauma, even unwittingly, on an unsuspecting public, including our undergraduates? For if the hypothesis sketched here is even partially acceptable, it will be difficult to go on presenting The Prince as a transparently political or literary text—no matter how complex the politics or how dazzling the rhetoric. Machiavelli may propose an amoral science, as Ernst Cassirer puts it, or an immoral philosophy, as Leo Strauss infers. The Prince may be what Sheldon Wolin describes, “the product of a technician’s admiration for efficient means” and for “the state as an aggregate of power.” Perhaps rhetoric is its message, whether of word or violence. Or it might enact neither an “audacious strategy of deception” fitted to a dense historical context, nor the “discovery of its authentic goal” in the “improvisatory, groundless, metamorphic, fictive” world of literature, but rather the deconstructionists’ “hollow at the center of human thought.” Our choice will hardly matter. For how will we draw up the arguments required to defend any of these irreconcileable positions without suspecting that we are reproducing the author’s trauma, mimicking one of his voices? The scandal of The Prince, in short,

196 cognition, composition, and contagion

surpasses both the efficient cruelty of power politics and the nihilism of a world reduced to textual indeterminacy. The scandal consists in the accusation that the author’s torture lodges against our interpretive traditions.

555 quando intexi voi essere preso. . . . iudicai che sanza errore o causa havessi havere tortura, chome è riuscito. When I heard you to be taken. . . . I judged that you, without wrongdoing or reason, would have to be tortured, as happened. —francesco vettori to niccolò machiavelli, march 13, 1513 

Scholars do not question the fact of Machiavelli’s torture, although next to nothing is known about how he got to prison or his experience once there. It appears that his was the seventh name on a list of eighteen to twenty republican sympathizers drawn up by the conspirators Agostino Capponi and Pier Pagolo Boscoli. According to Francesco Vettori’s Sommario (Summary) of 1523, this careless note, found at the home of a member of the Soderini family, was delivered to Cardinal Giovanni de’Medici. And so the die was cast. When officials did not find Machiavelli at home, the new Medici government—barely six months in power—issued an official proclamation, or grida: anyone who knew of his whereabouts and yet failed to convey them was as culpable as he. Evidently, at that point he turned himself in. But was he guilty? Scholars today do not suspect that Machiavelli participated in the Boscoli conspiracy. In fact they do not think that the conspirators meant to overthrow the new regime. What contemporaries thought is another matter. Vettori’s Sommario identifies three classes of guilt for the unfortunates on the list: those of colpa notabile (clear guilt); those of malissimo animo verso i Medici (strong enmity toward the Medici); and those who were absoluti (absolved or freed). Machiavelli, as one of the detained but not the executed, fell into the second group. He was guilty of wishing the Medici ill. When he first entered prison Machiavelli knew what to expect. Like a dozen or so others from the list, he was subjected to the fune or corda, the rope. The former head of the Second Chancery had his arms tied behind his back. He was hoisted into the air and allowed to “settle.” Then he was dropped and caught back suddenly, before he touched ground, so that his shoulders, already in “luxation,” were further dislocated. Jean Améry’s recollection transmits the quality of the experience even before the calculated

machiavelli, tr auma, and scandal 197

series of drops began. In such a way, Agostino Capponi (two drops) and Pier Pagolo Boscoli (eight drops) were induced to confess their admiration for republican government, if not precisely a plot to kill three members of the Medici family. But even after six drops, Machiavelli did not talk. Or, rather, as the enigmatic “thrushes” sonnet suggests, he talked a great deal, big mouthfuls, de’buoni bocconi. Machiavelli came out of prison alive. Subsequent events do not suggest that Giuliano de’Medici had intervened on his behalf or that Francesco Vettori had been instrumental in his release. He could thank fortuna or Iddio that the torture of others did not further incriminate him and that this Medici pope meant his release rather than his execution. The younger men, Agostino Capponi and Pier Pagolo Boscoli, abandoned by fortune if not God, were beheaded. Though it took the executioner two strokes to complete the job, Capponi died a Christian, accepting this end as just punishment for his mortal culpability, if not for his part in any conspiracy. Boscoli had a more efficient beheading, but for the eight hours preceding it he was in an agony of conscience. His efforts to make a good death were witnessed by a close friend, the humanist and Savonarolan Luca della Robbia. Della Robbia stayed close by precisely to guide and to record. Knowing Boscoli, he suspected that the passage, il passo, would be grave, beautiful, and exemplary. Such, at any rate, is the message of della Robbia’s preface to his descriptions of Boscoli’s last hours, which also guarantees the unembellished honesty of the report by appealing to the author’s piety. There is no reason to question della Robbia’s sincerity, and scholars have mostly taken him at his word. But we must question whether, even with the best intentions, he could manage his emotional text. In the body of his narrative, the scene in the prison mixes chaotic, mordant, almost Machiavellian farce, with wrenching depictions of suffering. Throughout, della Robbia’s persistent interventions reveal that the humanist Boscoli—caught by the image of Brutus, distracted by indigestion, prey to disassociative blanks, and unequipped with the most basic devotional tools of the ars moriendi (art of dying)—needed considerable help to make the passage merely as an orthodox Christian, much less as an exemplary one. The Prince, in short, was not the only highly charged and unstable text to issue from this episode of imprisonment, torture, and execution. It has always had a counterpart in Luca della Robbia’s Recitazione del caso di Pietro Pagolo Boscoli, the Narration of the Case [or: Fate] of Pierpaolo Boscoli. To propose a comparison between the two writings is not to confuse their metahistorical value. The Prince is unmistakably a canonical work, a text to “think with,” whereas the Recitazione is a document to “think about.”

198 cognition, composition, and contagion

Their points of overlap, however, promise much material to think through. Both works resulted from firsthand experience of Medici nervousness at the restoration; they were written more or less simultaneously, within months of Boscoli’s execution and Machiavelli’s release. Insofar as both are handbooks offering models for action, they represent the ethics of exemplarity at the very moment of its late medieval/early modern turn. Both open with exceptionally self-conscious prose introductions, even for the self-regarding Renaissance. In these introductions, as in the bodies of their texts, both authors take up unaccustomed and risky roles. Machiavelli’s play on “high” and “low” in the dedicatory letter to Lorenzo is a familiar example of this enactment; equally telling is della Robbia’s aggressive deployment of Savonarola’s late voice. The risks were real. Machiavelli gambled that disconcertingly frank evaluations of a restricted set of political questions would demonstrate, rather than undermine, his honesty and reliability in all other matters; della Robbia, that describing a traitor’s execution in hagiographic terms would not lead to his own death. Both authors explicitly acknowledge the risk by anchoring their texts in familiar modes of authority. Machiavelli depends on chancery experience and historical exempla; della Robbia, on the persona of the special friend and eyewitness. Despite that irreproachable anchoring, both texts threaten to escape the authors’ control as the “vortex beneath the story” flashes up in bitter humor. And both texts conclude with rhetorically immoderate postscripts that may have been added later, postscripts that aim to erase the fractured ventriloquism of what has preceded by enunciating a brave, novel, and (viewed historically) hopeless idealism. Striking differences between the texts may be fairly read as complements. De principatibus teaches political survival; the Recitazione, dying well. Machiavelli sets out a traditionally Christian topic in provocatively secular terms; della Robbia depicts a familiar “pagan” intellectual type, the anticlerical humanist, as a saint. The Prince bears witness to the thorough recalibration of Machiavelli’s relationship to language; the Recitazione may represent a lesser but comparable linguistic dislocation (della Robbia as vernacular narrator of the Recitazione speaks quite differently from the Latin persona who introduces his classical editions, but the terms of the comparison are obviously uneven). Most important, while della Robbia writes as an empathetic observer offering witness, the victim Machiavelli, lacking such an observer, must constitute his own witness before his dedicatee.

555

machiavelli, tr auma, and scandal 199

—Dolorem existimo maximum malorum omnium. —Etiamne maius quam dedecus? —I consider pain the greatest of all evils. —Greater even than disgrace? —cicero, tusculan disputations, ii.5, 14 

“Feel and touch,” palpi e tocchi, and you shall know the truth: so Machiavelli promises, echoing in his own way Christ’s invitation to St. Thomas. Generations of readers, however, have found the attempt to grasp The Prince frustrating. The difficulties, which range from individual word to overall structure, are well known. At the level of content, The Prince overwhelms readers with unmanageable detail (presented at once as offhand and indispensable), while leaving crippling gaps in narrative and logic. Readers, good interrogators, seize on these inconsistencies to assign meaning. In response to forced questioning, however, the victim talks impossibly, too much and never enough: the subject performs a virtuoso evacuation of self in the form of language. Critics note that such a multiplicity of voices inhabits Machiavelli’s text, and with such paratactic evasiveness that ostensibly simple arguments can barely be grasped. Casi, or examples, such as that of Cesare Borgia, set out to disclose the mechanisms of princely success, only to conclude with failure or confusion. Exemplars purporting to teach complementary lessons, such as Agathocles and Oliverotto, require metanarrative feats of scholarship to account for the pairings. At the same time, Machiavelli’s discourse ranges from an almost scholastic division and subdivision of topic, to extravagant gestures of rhetoric—from legalisms evoking the interrogators’ format, to rhetorical flights mimicking the victim’s surrender. Fortune is a woman indeed. And yet palpable signs abound. Readers easily grasp the formality of Latin title and chapter headings, the archaizing evocation of medieval treatises on kingship, the officiousness of the bureaucrat’s analytic discourse, and the knowing fictions of the humanist’s exempla. Whole interpretations, including opposing ones, are affixed to such phenomena. To get a job with a prince, we explain, Machiavelli thus exhibits his proficiency. Or: to undermine that same prince, he thus exhibits his irony. That these broad strokes, broadly signaled, accommodate incompatible readings so elegantly suggests that the author’s cold pragmatism or hot malevolence provides a less comprehensive explanation than his mythology. How, though, can we draw near to that mythology, to what trauma theorists sometimes call the “speaking wound”? Here lies the value of the trauma

200 cognition, composition, and contagion

hypothesis, despite its obvious failings. Positing the wound’s centrality, trauma theory allows the possibility that “the work of patent genius [is] riddled with disabling contradictions,” accepting the corollary that Machiavelli is not fully in control of his text. But lack of control does not signal incompetence. Neither does it license the reader’s despair before an irrational text, or permit the manufacture of meaning ad libitum. Rather, trauma theory recognizes the author deploying phenomenal resources to organize a too-late defense against an intolerable rending of the self: The Prince enacts the psychic demands of “an understanding at once urgent and inaccessible.” The reader’s job is to understand not only those resources (which after all have been mostly catalogued by scholars at this point), but also the significance of their deployments. The exegetical tasks posed by the trauma hypothesis are daunting, but must begin with the structuring role of martyrological tropes in late medieval European consciousness. The Recitazione thus offers a compelling point of entry. No doubt della Robbia aimed to represent Boscoli’s experience truthfully, but he had intentions, chiefly Savonarolan, that were not Boscoli’s. Even a casual reader can see that della Robbia needs Boscoli to be a certain kind of victim, and that his fellow-victim, Capponi, serves as a foil to that end. At the least, Boscoli is represented as a convert on the model of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the young humanist who, just before his death in 1494, came under Savonarola’s influence, and so abandoned eclectic philosophy and divinatory astrology for the “mortification of his own individuality” in orthodoxy. At the most Boscoli is offered as a republican martyr on the model of Savonarola himself. Della Robbia represents Boscoli’s confessor making the martyrological point explicitly, in confused excitement: “I believe that he was a martyr, without any doubt” (credo che lui sia stato martire senza dubbio alcuno). Behind that exemplar lay the late medieval tradition of casting the condemned in the image of Christ, through whose voluntary suffering the imperfectly just city was redeemed. Recovering the simultaneity of The Prince and the Recitazione thus brings into view a powerful binary dependent on the more obvious distinction between survival and death. If Boscoli is a martyr, or even a Christ, what role remains for the Machiavelli, the survivor? Boscoli’s death acquires meaning, enters the realm of the exemplary, thanks to a central paradox of Christianity, that death is life. In the face of this superior claim (which was culturally present to Machiavelli, whether or not he read the Recitazione), the author of The Prince enacts the alternative resurrection of the eternally compromised survivor: life is death. In mimetic terms, The Prince competes with the Recitazione to represent the more compelling μάρτυς, witness. And Machiavelli wins the competition—remark-

machiavelli, tr auma, and scandal 201

ably, infamously, unintentionally. He does so by casting the art of survival as a secular martyrdom that must be suffered by both ruler and author. For his part the ruler may hope to retain power, but only if he relinquishes his language, his ethics, and his humanity. According to this dialectic, Machiavelli empties the prince of traditional virtues, to just the extent that such virtues accrue to the Christian martyr, Boscoli. As for the author, his martyrdom is more exquisitely painful; in the terms of trauma theory, it is an agony. Della Robbia’s Recitazione transmutes treachery, death, and failed republican politics into honor, eternal life, and triumphant civic religion. Machiavelli too is a mimic and a martyr, but his rivalry and suffering, like St. Peter’s crucifixion, is upside down. His ideal prince is at once a persecutor (purveyor and withholder of glorious death), and a martyr par excellence, sacrificing all for the res publica Christiana, the Christian republic. But that prince, The Prince, is also Machiavelli’s witness, his objectified body offering itself to, and then projected through, the gaze of his tormentor. Precisely this dissociation appears in Améry’s description, which traces the victim’s own experience (“I was led . . . I was raised . . . I had to give up . . . I fell . . .”) only to conclude with the uncanny emergence of “a visual instruction.” The survivor, who cannot afford to be identified with the conspirators’ failures, becomes the purposeful gaze and hence the will of the tyrant. Thus Machiavelli si trasferisce, translates himself, and enacts that translation, in quite a different way than we sometimes propose when we wink and say, as though it were an insight, “but of course he wants to be the prince himself.” Thanks to this translation, the textual body of The Prince witnesses not only Machiavelli’s physical pain, his initial humiliation at the hands of the torturer, but also a second humiliation, the disgrace that ensured survival, his identification with the persecutor. The trauma hypothesis is difficult, and not just in its opportunistic facility with paradox. Any evidence for it must be indirect, but, in a way maddening to sceptics, indirection, and for that matter silence, serves the hypothesis. Thus the vocabulary of negative consequences in The Prince includes “fear,” “punishment,” and “murder,” but not “torture.” Machiavelli does not advise on the utility of diplomacy; The Prince also neglects interrogation. The treatise is short on somatic indicators, especially for a work aligned here with martyrdom: in comparison to the spectacularly mangled bodies of Dante’s Inferno, The Prince offers only Remirro de Orco “in two pieces.” What it features instead are besieged fortresses, flooding rivers, razed cities, and territorial limbs that are extensible, divisible, and then, in a projection both nostalgic and utopian, unitable. But the crowning objection to identifying trauma in The Prince is the weight of an exceptionally authoritative scholarly tradition. Most of the relevant evidence—rhetorical excess,

202 cognition, composition, and contagion

protean simulation, multivocal ambiguity—has been interpreted for centuries as proof either of the author’s singular evil, or of his playful virtuosity. Must we readers, in the first instance, relinquish the pleasures of righteousness? Must we, in the second, forego these typically Renaissance forms of authorial delight? Answer carefully: the consequences of even partially accepting the trauma hypothesis in the case of De principatibus are serious. They exceed the bounds of Machiavelli scholarship. After all, torture was common in the premodern world, its presence potentially formative even for those without direct experience. Its ubiquity may thus have had an effect on the organization of subjectivity, on the “narrative self,” which is to say, on our reading of the Renaissance individual. Under the sign of trauma, this individual emerges neither as a coherent “classical” subject nor as a Burckhardtian configuration of the Nietzschean “superman.” Rather we glimpse a restless and fragmented subject, compulsively seeking unity (but never finding it) in flights of abjection and aggression. Significantly, this improvisational brinksmanship marks even the logorrheic humanist, clutching his fantasy of a wholly recoverable discursive past. For such widespread identification, imprisonment, and torture, not to say execution, of “republican” culprits as occurred in the long fifteenth century (whether justly or unjustly) was new. It may have been largely a function of changes in the organization of the territorial state, but its distinctive character stemmed from the success of the studia humanitatis as the preeminently verbal stimulus to political self-consciousness. Now, reading Aristotle’s Politics, discussing Cicero’s proscription, commenting on Livy’s records of conspiracy and patriotic selfsacrifice, enunciating a domestic spirituality drawn from the Cappadocian fathers, or even falling, as a defenseless child, into a humanist schoolteacher’s cult of personality, might be grounds for the tyrant’s suspicion. Torture is a necessary explanation for the phenomenon of The Prince, but not a sufficient one. Trauma, the shattering of that particular person in those particular circumstances, may be both necessary and sufficient.

part iv  the matter of person 

   LOW COUNTRY ASCETICS AND ORIENTAL LUXURY jacques de vitry, marie of oignies, and the treasures of oignies Sharon Farmer

A

s historians we turn to those fragments of the past that speak to our own experience and concerns. I first became interested in the thirteenth-century mystic and ascetic Marie of Oignies, and in the writings of her biographer Jacques de Vitry, because I wanted to know more about the lived experiences and constructed genders of medieval women. Since 9/11/01, however, my scholarly priorities have been transformed; I wish to explore not only gender relations but also relations between the predominantly Christian West and the predominantly non-Christian East. And because propagandists both then and now justify armed conflict by highlighting differences, I seek those places where apparent opposites turn out to be quite similar, where hidden desires blur the boundaries separating “us” from “them.” And so I turn again to Marie of Oignies and Jacques de Vitry in an effort to explore a place in which East met West: the space that contained the sepulcher of Marie of Oignies.

 Sometime in the last decade of the twelfth century, Giles, a chaplain at the castle of Walcourt, which was located in the Ardennes region of what is now southern Belgium, decided to leave his position as a secular priest in order to lead a more formal religious life, following the rule of St. Augustine. Accompanied by his mother and three natal brothers, Giles left Walcourt, which was about fifteen miles southwest of the town of Namur, and settled in a rural area on the Sambre River, about ten miles west of Namur. After

206 the matter of person

Giles and his brothers had been joined by several other men, their community of regular canons, which came to be known as St. Nicolas of Oignies, chose Giles as its prior. The women in Giles’ entourage settled alongside the men’s community, in huts between the men’s priory and the Sambre River. Despite the fact that it remained, throughout its history, an extremely modest priory of between twelve and twenty men, Oignies came to possess two of the medieval southern Low Countries’ greatest claims to fame: the female mystic and ascetic Marie of Oignies, and the artistic productions of Giles’ brother and fellow canon, the goldsmith Hugh of Oignies. Marie’s ascetic and mystical practices became both a model of and a model for the semireligious women of Northern Europe who came to be known as beguines. Hugh’s artistic productions have come to be recognized as some of the most important exemplars of medieval Gothic metalwork, and largely because of Hugh’s work, the treasures of Oignies are listed in guidebooks as one of “twenty-seven things not to miss” in Belgium. Most medieval historians know something about Marie of Oignies, and most medieval art historians know something about the works of Hugh of Oignies. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the extreme asceticism of the one and the sumptuous luxury of the other were deeply intertwined, we tend to study them as separate fragments embedded within the historiographies of different disciplines. Similarly, those of us who are interested in Western Christian preaching and spirituality have mined only some of the fragments of the life and works of Marie’s biographer Jacques de Vitry, leaving a large part of his life and works for historians of the Crusades. In this paper I attempt to dislodge these embedded fragments and to rearrange them, just as one rearranges fragments of colored glass by turning the wheel of a kaleidoscope, thereby creating a new design. I argue that through the metalworks of Hugh of Oignies, which were created to enhance the space in which Marie of Oignies’ holy body was honored and memorialized, precious gemstones from the East were deliberately associated with Marie’s holiness. The writings of Jacques de Vitry, the written traditions to which those writings belong, Jacques’ gifts to Oignies, and his lifelong relationship with the priory provide important keys to understanding this meeting of East and West. Marie of Oignies began her religious vocation sometime after 1191, when she convinced her new husband that they should pursue a religious life by working with lepers in the leprosarium of Willambroux. Over the next decade or so her charitable service, and, even more important, her personal self-denial, earned her an international reputation. At some point in the first decade of the thirteenth century Marie decided to leave both her husband and the lepers of Willambroux to pursue a more inward spiritual vocation

low country ascetics and oriental luxury 207

among the women living next to the priory of Oignies. Not long after that, Marie was joined at Oignies by Jacques de Vitry, a Parisian cleric whose personal devotion to her would insure both the fame of the woman and the material comfort of the community of men at Oignies. Marie’s extreme self-denial, most especially her long periods of fasting, resulted in her death in 1213; but before she died she convinced Jacques de Vitry to become a priest and to pursue a career as a preacher. That career led him first to battle heresy in southern France, and then, between 1216 and 1226, to the bishopric of Acre in the Holy Land, where he both propagandized and participated in the fifth crusade. Ultimately his fame as a preacher earned him the honor of Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum. But Jacques’ first loyalty remained Oignies: he joined its community of regular canons before Marie’s death and he returned there sometime between 1226 and 1229 to consecrate the community’s new church and to move Marie’s body from the priory’s cemetery to a sepulcher that was placed near one of the church’s altars, where it became a center of pilgrimage. Finally, before his death in 1240 Jacques indicated that he wanted to be buried at Oignies, near Marie, and he endowed the community with 1,500 silver pounds, silk textiles from the Orient, his personal ecclesiastical ornaments, relics of saints, and a large number of books. There is good reason to believe as well that Jacques was the source of the precious gemstones that became a part of the wealth of the community and were incorporated into the metalwork of Hugh of Oignies. Jacques bestowed gifts to Oignies because of his devotion to Marie. And those gifts provided both the occasion and the material means for the making of the “treasures of Oignies” by Hugh of Oignies and his workshop. Indeed, the ceremony of rededicating the church in 1226/1229, over which Jacques presided, seems to have provided the occasion for the “unveiling” of Hugh’s artistic talent: none of his works are known to have been created before that date. The treasures of Oignies owe their claim to fame to Hugh’s enormous talent, especially his skill with metal filigree, and his application of the techniques of niello and metal engraving to create images of elegantly draped human figures that have been favorably compared to the Gothic sketches of Villard de Honnecourt. Nevertheless, without Jacques de Vitry’s devotion to and promotion of the extreme asceticism of Marie and the sanctity of her body there would be no such treasures. Jacques’ writings about Marie, the Orient, and gemstones help to explain why the canons of Oignies drew upon luxurious works of precious metals and gems from the east in their efforts to honor and remember a woman whose extreme acts of personal poverty resulted in her saintly death.

208 the matter of person

Caroline Bynum has written about one reason Jacques de Vitry and his contemporaries associated ascetics like Marie with precious metals and gems: saintly ascetics were associated with the resurrected body, which was often described as being like precious gemstones and metals. I revisit Bynum’s discussion here because these ideas about the resurrected body influenced Hugh of Oignies’ work. However, I also argue that there were several other reasons why Jacques de Vitry, the canons of Oignies, and others who were responsible for promoting Marie’s cult, such as her second hagiographer, Thomas of Cantimpré, thought that it was more than reasonable to honor and commemorate Marie with precious metals, gems, and treasures from the Orient. Those reasons had a lot to do with the way that Westerners thought about “the East.” In her book The Resurrection of the Body, Bynum has demonstrated that as early as the fourth century Christian theologians began to draw on the image of precious stones and metals to represent the change that would occur in the bodies of believers at the time of the final resurrection of the blessed at the end of time. Precious metals and gems worked well in the development of these metaphors because they were beautiful and they were not subject to corruption, decomposition, and change. Theologians argued, moreover, that the bodies of living and dead saints already demonstrated some of the characteristics of the resurrected body. Through their asceticism, saints overcame the need for food and sex—the life processes that are central to individual and collective survival precisely because mortal bodies are subject to decomposition, death, and change. After their deaths, moreover, the bodies of the saints demonstrated certain powers, and those powers, theologians asserted, pointed to the truth in their claims about bodily resurrection. In Jacques de Vitry’s own time defenders of orthodoxy perceived that dualist heretics posed a vital threat to the Church’s doctrines and authority. Those heretics had begun to challenge Catholic claims about the body. They denied the “real” presence of Christ’s body and blood in the elements of the eucharist, they denied the power of the relics of saints, and they did not believe in bodily resurrection. Jacques constructed the Life of Mary of Oignies in such a way that her spirituality and miraculous powers served as living proof that the heretics were wrong in denying the spiritual importance of the human body. Marie was extremely devoted to the eucharist—in which the body of Christ was made present in the bread and wine of the mass—and she experienced visions demonstrating Christ’s real presence in those elements. Similarly, she was devoted to saintly relics, and in her visions she could authenticate relics, even to the point of learning the name of a saint whose bones had hitherto remained anonymous. Moreover, Marie’s

low country ascetics and oriental luxury 209

asceticism—her extreme fasting, her tendency to go weeks at a time without eating anything but the eucharist—transformed her living body into a resurrection body. She became indifferent to cold and welcomed pain; and Jacques continually described her as a “precious pearl,” a “jewel,” and gold that had been purified in a furnace. After her death, moreover, he heard of someone who had a dream in which Marie’s body appeared “as if transformed into a precious stone.” Jacques himself wore a silver neck amulet containing the bones of one of Marie’s fingers. He claimed that the relic saved one of his pack mules from drowning, and Thomas of Cantimpré wrote that it delivered Jacques from danger at sea. Jacques later gave the relics and amulet to the man who would become Pope Gregory IX. After Marie was exhumed around 1226, another of her fingers was placed in a phylactery that was created by Hugh of Oignies and remained at Oignies until 1817 (see fig. 17.1). Marie’s devotion to relics and the ways in which her own relic-body were treated point to new developments in the cult of relics that developed around the year 1200, and that found expression in the metalwork of Hugh of Oignies and his workshop. First, as Bynum and Michael Lauwers have argued, it was around this time that the fashion for dividing the bodies of saints—for separating their fingers, feet, teeth, hair, and skulls from the rest of their bodies, and then depositing those body parts either in churches or in personal and ecclesiastical jewelry—first took hold. Two new kinds of reliquaries—body part reliquaries and jewelry reliquaries—grew out of this fashion, and we find both among the treasures of Oignies that were created by Hugh and other goldsmiths in the workshop of Oignies. Among the body part reliquaries were two “foot” reliquaries for the relics of the feet of Saint James Major and Saint Blaise. Another reliquary, created by Hugh himself for a relic of the rib of Saint Peter that may have been given to the priory by Jacques de Vitry, consisted of a large crescent mounted on a central stem and surmounted by a cylinder of transparent rock crystal containing the relics (see fig. 17.2). The crescent shape was reminiscent of the body part that the cylinder contained. Hugh and his workshop created six phylacteries—large pieces of ecclesiastical jewelry with small boxes designed to hold relics. One of those, made by Hugh himself with the assistance of his workshop, was the phylactery for Marie’s finger that was created soon after her body was exhumed around 1226 (see fig 17.1). Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century works of art, such as the paintings of Simone Martini and the Van Eyck brothers, give us a clear idea of how pieces of ecclesiastical jewelry resembling these phylacteries were worn by clerics during liturgical ceremonies. The second new development in the cult of relics, which we find in the

210 the matter of person Image only available in print edition

figure 17.1 Hugh of Oignies and his atelier. Phylactery for the finger of Marie of Oignies, between 1226 and 1230. Brussels, Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire. Gilded copper over wood core, colored glass, rock crystal, enameled copper. The hinged enamel door opens to reveal the relics within. Around the border of the square surrounding the door are the words identifying the relics, “hic est iunctura beate marie de oignies.” Caption descriptions adapted from: Robert Didier and Jacques Toussaint, “Trésor des Soeurs de Notre-Dame à Namur. Catalogue critique,” in Autour de Hugo d’Oignies, Catalogue of exhibition directed by Robert Didier and Jacques Toussaint (Namur, 2003); Didier and Toussaint, “Oeuvres dispersées du Trésor d’Oignies,” in Autour de Hugo d’Oignies; and Ferdinand Courtoy, “Le trésor du prieuré d’Oignies aux Soeurs de Notre-Dame à Namur et l’Oeuvre du Frère Hugo,” Bulletin de la Commission Royale des Monuments et des Sites 3 (Brussels, 1952).

photo courtesy of musées royaux d’art et d’histoire, brussels.

devotion of Marie and the works of Hugh and his workshop, entailed what Hans Belting has called a “need to see,” and what Suzannah Biernoff has called the desire for “ocular communion.” Marie’s desire for eucharistic union was so intense, Jacques tells us, and her longing in its absence so great, that she would substitute visual communion for ingestion, begging, after mass had been performed, that she be allowed “to look for a long time

low country ascetics and oriental luxury 211 Image only available in print edition

figure 17.2 Hugh of Oignies. Reliquary for the rib of Saint Peter, 1238. Treasures of the Sisters of Notre-Dame of Namur. Gilded copper and silver, gemstones, rock crystal, niello. The reliquary consists of a crescent mounted on a stand and surmounted by a transparent rock crystal cylinder lined with silk and held in place by four slender columns. The crescent shape, which evokes the shape of the relic, is decorated on this side with two nielloed plates, metal filigree, pearl, ruby, garnet, sapphire, topaz, and amethyst. The inscription on the nielloed plates reads, “in hoc vase habetur / costa petri app.” photo courtesy of irpa- kik. © irpa- kik.

into the empty chalice on the altar.” One of Marie’s visions was sparked by her practice of gazing upon the consecrated host, which was displayed in a pyx. Another took place when she gazed upon the relics of the True Cross. Marie claimed that the host in the pyx had a light brighter than the sun and that the relics of the True Cross shone with “heavenly light.” All of the reliquaries from Hugh of Oignies’ workshop responded to this new practice of intense visual devotion, which placed a premium on seeing the object of devotion. The six phylacteries and the two foot reliquaries contained small doors that could be opened to reveal the contents within (see

212 the matter of person Image only available in print edition

figure 17.3 Hugh of Oignies. Double traverse reliquary cross for pieces of the True Cross, ca. 1228–1230. Brussels, Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire. Wood core, gilded silver, rock crystal, gemstones. The cross is decorated with filigree, niello, amethyst, garnet, sapphire, cornelian, an ancient intaglio, and fragments of millefiori. Six medallions of rock crystal reveal authenticating parchments for various relics. At the lower traversal a small door containing a medallion of transparent rock crystal covers the relics of the true cross, which are identified by an inscription, “de ligno domini.” photo courtesy of musées royaux d’art et d’histoire—brussels.

fig. 17.1). One double traverse cross that Hugh and his workshop made for pieces of the True Cross included cavities for displaying the relics. A similar cross by Hugh himself held the relics under a small door of transparent rock crystal (see fig. 17.3). Finally, both the reliquary for the rib of Saint Peter and one created by Hugh for relics of Saint Nicolas housed the relics in cylinders of clear rock crystal, thus enabling the observer to view both the contents and the container simultaneously (see fig. 17.2). Two other reliquaries that were made at Oignies around this time employed vases of carved rock crystal from Fatimid Egypt to house the relics. These contain-

low country ascetics and oriental luxury 213 Image only available in print edition

figure 17.4 Detail of fig. 17.2. Hugh of Oignies. Reliquary for the rib of Saint Peter, 1238. Treasures of the Sisters of Notre-Dame of Namur . Detail showing large topaz surrounded by two amethysts, two pearls, and filigree work depicting grapes and grape leaves. Below the topaz is a small relic custodial—a later addition—with authenticating parchment. photo courtesy of irpa- kik. © irpa- kik.

ers, which may have come to the priory as containers for some of the relics from the Orient that were given by Jacques de Vitry, were not as transparent as the smooth cylinders of the Saint Peter and Saint Nicolas reliquaries, but the beauty of these items, and the fact that they were from the Orient, nevertheless enhanced the experience of gazing upon the relics within. In and of themselves, inert bones can speak neither to their own identity nor to the claims that they have miraculous powers because they already participate in the glory of resurrected flesh. Written authentifications were essential to clarifying the identity of a relic, and in the reliquaries of Hugh of Oignies we find that these, like the relics themselves, were often incorporated into the reliquary in a way that responded to the need to see: several of the phylacteries from Hugh’s workshop and one of the cross-reliquaries for pieces of the True Cross included domes or windows of rock crystal that revealed pieces of authenticating parchment (see fig. 17.3). The reliquary for the rib of Saint Peter had a later addition of a small custodial holding relics and a visible piece of authenticating parchment (see fig. 17.4). But authenticating pieces of parchment could convey only the message that particular bones belonged to particular saints; they could not communicate the message that those saints and their bones had had glorified flesh that performed

214 the matter of person

miracles. That message had to be invoked by the packaging, and like many masters of Gothic metalwork, Hugh of Oignies communicated that message by creating dazzling frames of precious metal, colored glass, and precious gemstones. While Hugh of Oignies employed precious materials in all of his reliquaries, he reserved the precious and semiprecious gemstones at his disposal for a subcategory of reliquaries and liturgical objects: those that had a close relationship with the most important suffering and resurrected body of all— that of Jesus. The reliquary that he created for the rib of Saint Peter—the prince of Jesus’s apostles—contained pearls, garnet, beryl, ruby, sapphire, topaz, amethyst, and an ancient intaglio made of plasma (green chalcedony) (see figs. 17.2 and 17.4). A set of Gospel covers that Hugh actually signed included pearls, carbuncle, sapphire, garnets, agates, rubies, aquamarine, an ancient intaglio carved in chalcedony, two intaglios carved in nicolo (blue on black onyx), and an ancient cameo carved from mother of pearl (see fig. 17.5). A cross reliquary attributed to Hugh, which was made as a “frame” for pieces of the True Cross, contained ruby, garnet, emerald, topaz, chrysoprase, beryl, turquoise, zircon, pearls, and an ancient intaglio carved in cornelian. A second cross reliquary (mentioned above), made by Hugh himself and containing pieces of the True Cross, was decorated with garnet, amethyst, sapphire, cornelian, and an ancient intaglio (see fig. 17.3). Both of these crosses evoked the East not only with gemstones but also with their double-traverse style, which had been introduced into the West by pilgrims and crusaders returning from the Holy Land and Byzantium. There is a pattern here pointing to the first way in which gemstones created an association with the “Orient.” Hugh limited his use of gemstones to objects associated with Jesus’ life in the Holy Land: the gospels, the True Cross, and the relics of Saint Peter. Hugh’s choice of gemstones worked in another way to establish links between Oignies and the Holy Land because they included ten of the twelve gemstones mentioned in the book of Revelation as adornments on the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem. These gemstones, as well as those worn by the high priest Aaron in the book of Exodus, were the subject of an allegorizing tradition reaching back to late antiquity. The association between gemstones and the Orient was also underscored by the tradition of “scientific” works concerning minerals and gemstones, which had undergone a profound change in the late eleventh century, as a result of new contacts between northwestern Europe and southern Italy that grew out of the colonizing activities of the Normans. Before the late eleventh century the minerological tradition of the ancient world was known in the West largely through the works of Pliny the Elder and of Isidore of Seville, a seventh-century Iberian who drew primarily on the work of Pliny.

low country ascetics and oriental luxury 215 Image only available in print edition

figure 17.5 Hugh of Oignies. Gospel cover (back side, depicting the Crucifixion), ca. 1229–1230. Treasures of the Sisters of Notre-Dame of Namur. Wood core, silver, gilded silver, gemstones. To the right and left of Jesus’ head are a carbuncle and pearl depicting the sun and the moon. The gemstone under his feet is a sapphire, the most valued of medieval gemstones. In the border, directly over Jesus’ head, is an ancient intaglio of chalcedony, which originally depicted a gorgon, but was probably intended to represent an angel in this context (there are tiny wings on each side of the head). The ancient cameo directly under Jesus’ feet, made with mother-of-pearl and depicting two wrestlers, was probably intended to invoke Jesus’ triumph over the forces of evil. The border is also decorated with ruby, garnet, agate, emerald, aquamarine, amethyst, pearl, and two additional ancient intaglios carved in nicolo. photo courtesy of irpa- kik. © irpa- kik.

216 the matter of person

Both Isidore and Pliny described what gemstones looked like and where they came from—generally from the East: Egypt, Arabia, Persia, and “India,” as it was broadly conceived. Sometime before the late eleventh century, however, monks working in southern Italy, most notably Constantine the African, translated and incorporated into Latin texts magical lapidaries from Hellenistic Alexandria and from the Arabic tradition. Then in the late eleventh century, Marbode of Rennes, who was active in western Francia, created a versified lapidary that combined the writings of Isidore and these magical texts. The success of Marbode’s lapidary was enormous. There are more than one hundred fifty manuscripts of the original Latin text, as well as numerous manuscripts of French, Italian, English, German, Danish, Irish, and Hebrew translations. In many ways the magical powers of gemstones, as described by Marbode, overlapped with the magical powers of relics of the saints. However, Marbode made no attempt to explain the powers of gemstones theologically. Indeed, the best way to read his lapidary—and the manuscript evidence supports this—is to see it as a medical text. Thus the lapidary was often copied with herbals and other medical works. Nevertheless, late-twelfth- and early-thirteenth-century theologians did begin to interpret Marbode’s lapidary tradition in theological ways—especially in two contexts: in works on “the wonders of the East”; and in encyclopedic works “on the nature of things.” The two authors of the Lives of Marie of Oignies participated in this transformation: Jacques de Vitry included a section on gemstones—based loosely on Marbode—in a discussion of “the wonders of the East” in his History of the Orient; and Thomas of Cantimpré discussed gemstones in his work On the Nature of Things. Both Jacques and Thomas made it clear that the powers of gemstones came from God, and indeed that they served as proofs of God’s omnipotence. At the beginning of his discussion of the “wonders of the East” Jacques thus claimed that “God marvelously worked many things in those parts of the world,” and that those marvelous things had the effect of converting “good and prudent men” to the “praise and glory of God,” while causing “trivial and curious men” to return to their preoccupation with vanities. At the end of his brief discussion of gemstones Jacques declared that there were other kinds of gems in the East but the ones he had discussed were sufficient “for the praise of divine omnipotence.” Thomas stated in On the Nature of Things that “Many exceptional and favorable miracles of healings are experienced in gemstones. . . . The reason for these miracles is the will of the omnipotent God, who preaches to men through the marvels of things.” Once the magic of stones had been “blessed,” so to speak, by this new theological reading, it was natural to see their magic as complementing the

low country ascetics and oriental luxury 217

powers of relics. According to Jacques de Vitry, emerald, sapphire, and topaz helped to preserve chastity and cool lust. Emeralds, chalcedony, and beryl, he claimed, were good for sore and infected eyes. Emerald could counteract falling sickness, sapphire was good for pregnant women, topaz could cure hemorrhoids, agate could serve as an antidote for poisons, jacinth (or zircon) provided comfort for those troubled by sadness or groundless suspicions, chalcedony could help the insane and fight noxious humors, and amethyst counteracted drunkenness. The powers of these stones—all of which were included in the works of Hugh of Oignies for the treasures of Oignies—resembled those of relics associated with Marie of Oignies. Like sapphires, Marie’s clothing, which was kept at Oignies, assisted women in labor. Like jacinth, her finger calmed the troubled mind of the future Pope Gregory IX. Gemstones, then, helped to symbolize the transformed nature of resurrected bodies in part because they themselves could transform broken bodies back to wholeness, thereby overcoming aspects of mortality. But the lapidary tradition, which was so important to the thinking of Marie’s two biographers, created associations between gemstones and the East on several levels. First, Marbode’s poem purported to be a letter from Evax, the king of Arabia, to the emperor Nero. Hence it perpetuated the idea that knowledge about gemstones and their powers came from the East. Moreover, Marbode and Isidore claimed (correctly, I might add) that the most desirable and best-quality stones came from the East, especially from “India.” Both Jacques de Vitry and Thomas of Cantimpré repeated and elaborated this idea. Thomas even claimed that stones from the East had the most magical power. Aristocratic records from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries indicate that lay consumers continued to seek out, and value, gemstones and pearls with Eastern origins. Thomas’s claim concerning the magical powers of Eastern gemstones leads us to a third set of associations between gemstones and the East, providing yet another reason for honoring saints like Marie with gemstones: the East—all of it—was construed, in the imagined geographies of Jacques de Vitry, Thomas of Cantimpré, and others, as holy. This was of course true of the Holy Land itself, most of which became unreachable to Latin Christians after Jerusalem fell to Saladin in 1187. And it was also true of “India” (meaning, roughly, the entire Indian subcontinent, Malamar, and Ethiopia). Thomas of Cantimpré told a story about a virtuous churchman that illustrates the spiritual respect that people rendered to all items coming from the Orient: although that churchman was in the habit of turning down all gifts, he made one exception, for a gift of some nutmeg, because “it was the fruit of the Orient.”

218 the matter of person

For Jacques de Vitry, “India” was populated by large numbers of mysterious Christians, and by pagans whose holy way of life was nearly Christian, and much like the way of life of Marie of Oignies. As far as Jacques was concerned, the presence of Christians in the Far East had strategic importance for winning back the Holy Land from the Muslims and convincing Westerners to come fight in the Fifth Crusade. In fact, he believed that there were more Nestorians and Jacobites in the East than there were Latin or Greek Christians in the West and in the former Byzantine empire. Moreover, Jacques’ belief in the existence of holy men and women in India who were ignorant of Christian teaching suggested that India was not only a space that was close to paradise (as evidenced by the long tradition in Biblical commentaries that the Ganges was one of the four rivers flowing out of Eden), but also a space that did not seem to know the consequences of the fall of Adam and Eve. In order to understand how “Indian” Christians fit into Jacques’ strategic hopes for the recovery of the Holy Land, we need to back up and take a look at his broader discussions of the Oriental Christians whom he encountered when he assumed his position as bishop of the port city of Acre in the Holy Land in 1216. Jacques’ second letter home described Syrian Christians, Jacobites, Armenians, Maronites, and Nestorians, whose sect, he believed, included the legendary Prester John—a powerful Christian king living somewhere in India. In his descriptions of these Christian sects, which he developed further in his History of the Orient, Jacques expressed an extremely low level of tolerance for religious difference. Some of the differences that he encountered—like the doctrines of the Nestorians concerning the nature of Christ—touched on fundamental issues that had divided Christian communities since the fourth century. These were understandably irreconcilable as far as Jacques was concerned. Other differences, however, were more a matter of religious practice or lifestyle. Concerning the Jacobites, Jacques received mixed reports as to whether or not their beliefs about the nature of Christ resembled those that had been condemned at the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century. He was certain, however, that members of this sect did not make confessions to priests. His discussion of this practice suggested that it was nearly as offensive as differences on the nature of Christ—despite the fact that in the West the requirement of annual confessions to priests had only been instituted a few years earlier, at the Fourth Lateran Council. Jacques apparently abhorred the Syrian Christians, who “looked” to him too much like the Muslims. Not only did they speak Arabic, but they also wore beards and their women wore veils, like Muslim women. According to Jacques, the Syrian Christians “mingled” with the Muslims and usually

low country ascetics and oriental luxury 219

imitated “their crooked ways.” Most of them, he claimed, were untrustworthy, duplicitous, conniving, liars, traitors, easily won over by bribes, and thieves. Worse still, and this was apparently a sign of their servitude to and corruption by the Muslims, they were “utterly unwarlike, and, like women, useless in battles.” Jacques’ discussion of the Syrian Christians served as a warning for Latin Christians who had settled in the Holy Land and had become, according to Jacques, “soft” and “effeminate.” The Armenians irritated Jacques because, despite their profession of obedience to the Catholic Church in 1198, they stuck to their own ways, including the use of communion wine that was not mixed with water. Jacques offered a long historical discussion about how the Jews in Jesus’ time mixed wine with water, and a symbolic discussion of how water signified that which is fleeting, thus symbolizing mortal people who were joined to Jesus, the wine. Thus he harbored no doubts that the “Armenians in the Sacrament of the altar neither imitate the Lord nor perceive the mystery [of humanity joined to Christ].” Still, Jacques saw reason for hope in the existence of these Oriental sects. He was convinced that with sound preaching (which he himself attempted with these groups) the “errors” of these Christians would be corrected. Indeed, the conversion of Maronites to Western Catholicism in the twelfth century (their leaders even attended the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215) offered an example of one such success. And if we are to believe Jacques, the orthodoxy of the Maronites affected their prowess. Thus, he assures his audience that in battle the Maronites, unlike the Syrian Christians and Armenians, “are skilful and ready with bows and arrows.” Better yet, they were numerous. By the time he wrote the History of the Orient, sometime after 1221, Jacques had begun to place his hopes on two additional groups of Eastern Christians—the Georgians of the Caucasus region and a certain “King David” of India. The Georgians had been impressing Latin Christians with their military prowess since the time of the Third Crusade, when they first formed an alliance with the Latins against the Muslims. Latin Christians were aware, moreover, of the accomplishments of the Georgian king David the Constructor, who in the years between 1089 and 1125 defeated the Turks in his region and conquered a large territory between the Caspian and Black Seas. In 1211 Pope Innocent III reached out to King George IV of Georgia, asking for his help in the Crusader States. In 1220 George IV informed the Crusaders of his intentions to attack the Muslims in north Syria, but he was never able to carry out that plan, due to the fact that his own kingdom was attacked by the Mongols. According the Jacques, who was apparently unaware of the Georgians’

220 the matter of person

defeat by the Mongols, the Georgians were “very warlike, valiant in battle, strong in body and powerful in the countless number of their warriors.” We know in fact that in the time of David the Constructor their armies could reach as many as 300,000. The Muslims, Jacques went on, feared the Georgians, even going so far as to allow them to visit Jerusalem without paying any tribute, and allowing them to display their Christian banners when they crossed Muslim territory. Indeed, the Georgians were so fierce, Jacques asserted, that even their women were accomplished in battle. He goes into no details about the “errors” of the Georgians’ Christian practices, mentioning only that they read the scriptures in Greek and administered the sacraments according to Greek custom. And while the length of the Georgian men’s hair—about a cubit long, he tells us—would have aroused a long discourse had the Syrian Christians worn such hair, Jacques only described the practice, without comment. Better to remain silent about differences with men whose valor could prove crucial in any pan-Christian effort to win back Jerusalem for Christendom. Additionally tantalizing to Jacques and his contemporaries was an account about a certain King David of India that reached Damietta, Egypt, in 1221, not long after the participants in the Fifth Crusade, accompanied by Jacques, took it from the Muslims. The “Account of the Deeds of King David,” which was apparently written by an Oriental Christian, purported to relate the military accomplishments of a Christian king of India who was the descendent of a certain King Bulgaboga. We know, in fact, that there really was a Christian king named Bulgaboga, who flourished toward the middle of the twelfth century as king of the Naiman Turks. But the text about this King David does not describe the accomplishments of the Naiman Turks. Rather, it is the earliest surviving account of the rise of Genghis Khan, who actually conquered the Naiman Turks. Within a few years Latin Christians would learn that Genghis Khan was no Christian, and their descriptions of him would turn from hope to horror. In 1221, though, Jacques de Vitry thought that he had learned a true story, which affirmed his belief that the Muslim world was both surrounded and outnumbered by Christians who would ultimately defeat them. Significantly, the leader upon whom he hung his hopes, like the legendary Prester John (whom Jacques had mentioned in his earlier letters), was thought to reside in India. Jacques’ India was populated not only by these legendary Christian rulers, but also by pagan holy men, such as Brahmans and Gymnosophists. His accounts of these holy men were borrowed from legends about Alexander the Great that had been circulating in the West since late antiquity and had gained wide popularity during the age of the Crusades. Accord-

low country ascetics and oriental luxury 221

ing to Jacques and his sources, the Gymnosophists, or “nude wise ones,” resided in caves, living lives of poverty and humility and despising the vain and transitory things of the world. When Alexander the Great asked them what they wanted, their only response was “Give us immortal life.” Jacques’ Brahmans were quite similar: they resided in caves, ate the fruit of the land without working it, were indifferent to cold, so never built fires, and never gave themselves over to lust. Moreover, they coveted nothing, placed all of their desire in the afterlife, and believed in a god who was “the word,” which “created all things” and through which “all things live.” India, then, was not only a place where legendary Christian kings were indomitable in their military accomplishments, it was also a place in which unconverted ascetic pagans already seemed to “know” the Christian truth even before they heard it. These ascetic pagans, with their innate, prelapsarian, goodness, stood in stark contrast to most Western Christians—whose avarice, adultery, and deceit helped to explain, in Jacques’ opinion, why God had allowed them to lose Jerusalem. Moreover, the natural goodness of the Indian ascetics looked a lot like the asceticism of Marie of Oignies. Like the Brahmans, Marie was indifferent to cold, coveted nothing, and refrained from sex. Like them, Marie ate unprepared products of the land.

 For Jacques de Vitry and other literate Latin Christians of the early thirteenth century, gemstones not only symbolized the transformed nature of the resurrected body, they also connected the West to the East. Precious gemstones were thus appropriate for commemorating Marie of Oignies not only because they resonated with the transformed body that she had already begun to exhibit during her lifetime and that her relics continued to exhibit after her death, but also because they reinforced links between Marie, Jesus, the Holy Land, the Far East, and the Brahmans; and they brought the special favor that God had always poured on the East to Marie’s resting place. Moreover, gemstones might serve as reminders, to those who were less holy than Marie, that in the East there were pagans who lived more virtuous lives than theirs, and there were Christian rulers whose wealth, power, and military might far exceeded that of Western rulers, perhaps because they too led more virtuous lives than men and women in the West. Jacques de Vitry had every reason to pay honor to the woman who had played such a central role in his own spiritual and professional growth, and he did so in a way that made sense to him and to his contemporaries on several levels. On the surface, this bringing together of East and West through

222 the matter of person

luxurious objects from the East played no role in reconciling Christianity with Islam, for which Jacques and most of his Western contemporaries maintained great contempt. Nevertheless, despite Jacques’ critique of the avarice and luxurious lifestyle of Mohammed, Muslims, Oriental Christians, and Westerners who assimilated in the Middle East, Jacques, like other Westerners, both desired and consumed the treasures of the East, many of which came their way through Muslim intermediaries. Desire and the consumption of luxurious goods were acceptable, in Jacques’ system of values, if they were turned to religious ends. His secular contemporaries, however, were not always so religious in their reasons for bringing home, or demanding, Oriental goods. Indeed, even the canons of Oignies probably had more material reasons for honoring Marie’s burial place with dazzling luxurious objects: after all, the greater Marie’s prestige, the greater the profits from pilgrims to her place of burial. While there was no paradox, for Jacques de Vitry and his contemporaries, in the way in which the luxuries of the East met the ascetic West in the burial place of Marie of Oignies, there was a paradox in the distribution of the wealth that came to Oignies because of Marie. Unlike the canons of Oignies, the women who shared Marie’s informal religious life—in huts just outside the priory—did not benefit from the presence of her relics, nor did they benefit from Jacques de Vitry’s generous gifts to the priory. The property records of Oignies make it very clear that gifts to the women were rare and extremely modest. In fact the community of women lasted as long as it did—which wasn’t very long—because they passed their huts and personal possessions on from one woman to another. By the middle of the thirteenth century the Church at large had grown relatively intolerant of informal women’s communities, and of the proximity of women’s communities to men’s. The women of Oignies—the real heiresses to Marie’s way of life—were forced, around 1250, to move further away from the priory. And in the first decades of the fourteenth century their community disappeared altogether. Locally, then, Marie had come to be valued as a saintly relic, but not as a role model for other women to follow.

   CRYSTALLINE WOMBS AND PREGNANT HEARTS the exuberant bodies of the katharinenthal visitation group Jacqueline E. Jung

O

f the many splendid objects to survive from medieval convents, one of the most enchanting is a small sculpture of the Virgin Mary and St. Elizabeth from the Swiss Dominican foundation of St. Katharinenthal, currently housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 18.1). Made during the first decade of the fourteenth century by the workshop of Henry of Constance, the “Visitation Group” will doubtless be familiar to this volume’s readers as one of the many late medieval devotional images that, in Caroline Bynum’s words, “reflect[ed] and sanctif[ied] women’s domestic and biological experience.” Citing Jeffrey Hamburger’s now-seminal study of monastic visual practices, Bynum linked the sculpture to a vision experienced by the thirteenth-century mystic Gertrude of Helfta, who once witnessed the immaculate womb of the glorious virgin, as transparent as the purest crystal, through which her internal organs, penetrated and filled with divinity, shone brightly, just as gold, wrapped in silk of various colors, shines through a crystal. Indeed, one saw the little blossoming boy, the only Son of the highest Father, nurse avidly in delight at the heart of His virgin mother.

The vision’s fusion of pregnancy motifs with the theme of seeing through solid bodies makes it an appropriate counterpart to the sculpted figures, with their luminous crystal stones. Yet significant differences persist. Gertrude’s vision posits a continuity between the Virgin’s inner body and its external surface, asserting an organic unity of parts that may reveal itself, however

224 the matter of person Image only available in print edition

figure 18.1 Workshop of Henry of Constance. Visitation Group from St. Katharinenthal bei Diessenhofen, ca. 1310. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.724). photo courtesy of the metropolitan museum of art.

briefly, to the sensitive beholder. The crystals on the Visitation figures, by contrast, assert themselves radically as fragments. Set exceedingly high on the chests and framed from below by the figures’ interlocked right hands, they press forward between the viewer and the bodies’ interiors, suggesting but ultimately refusing to show what lies beneath. Like the brooches often affixed to the collars of sculpted saints, the crystals surprise and delight; as references to human anatomy, they are incongruous and strange. Taking these gleaming fragments as emblematic of the “comic mode,” my paper interweaves strands of scientific, visionary, and visual discourses to expand the range of meanings the Visitation Group may have held for the women of Katharinenthal. Keeping in mind the role of devotional images in sparking empathy and identification with characters of sacred history, I seek to understand what this depiction of two expectant mothers could have meant to viewers whose social identity was largely predicated upon

crystalline wombs and pregnant hearts 225 Image only available in print edition

figure 18.2 Visitation Group from St. Katharinenthal, detail: chest cavity on figure of Elizabeth. photo courtesy of the metropolitan museum of art.

their rejection of physical pregnancy. The obverse of this question concerns the object’s material and formal qualities: namely, how the distinctive medium and eccentric positioning of the “wombs” may have imbued the biblical episode with particular relevance to the nuns, making it into a mirror and model of their own spiritual exercises. From the outset it must be acknowledged that the stones we see today, affixed to metal clasps with solid backings, may not be original to the sculpture. However, given the predilection for crystal embellishments in devotional and liturgical objects at this time, and the frequency with which Christian writers likened the bodies of the blessed to precious stones, there is no reason to doubt that these figures always bore a similar stone or glass piece. Each crystal nestles in a smoothly carved cavity more than one-half inch deep, within the torso (fig. 18.2). Although no traces of figural painting survive on the cavities’ red-painted surfaces, the presence there of more pinholes—and even several tiny metal pegs—suggests that these once

226 the matter of person

formed some kind of miniature exhibition space, whose erstwhile contents must remain a mystery. Whether the original stones provided direct visual access to the bodies’ interiors or, as today, were displayed in settings that obscured them, their solidity and transparency would have called attention to the viewing process itself, the ability (or inability) of optical rays to meet and pass through certain physical obstructions. The familiar trope of the Virgin’s womb as a glass that remained intact while admitting light allowed each act of looking at and through these stones to recall the moment of Christ’s conception. In medieval natural-philosophical exegesis, precious stones possessed many features—such as hardness, malleability, beautiful colors, luminosity, and healing temperatures—that made them appropriate symbols for all manner of virtues. Rock crystals, believed to originate as water slowly frozen into permanent ice, embodied the very paradoxes often ascribed to the glorified bodies of the blessed—solidity and transparency, hardness and fluidity—and were a favorite metaphor of purity, especially that of the Virgin Mary. The promise of crystalline rivers in the Heavenly Jerusalem (Rev 22:1) reinforced commentators’ beliefs that these stones, despite their firmness, retained a close connection to their liquid origins, to which they might always return. This idea underlies the prescription of crystal-based remedies to sufferers of chronic thirst or stomach ailments, as well as to women who had difficulties nursing: the drinking of crystal-steeped water or honey was thought to stimulate the flow of liquids within dry breasts. This underlying conception of the human body as a vessel subject to continual replenishment was doubtless encouraged by the long-standing use of figural sculptures as receptacles for holy objects, from reliquaries that encased shreds of flesh and bone to anthropomorphic tabernacles that housed liturgical paraphernalia. Although it left behind no physical remains, Mary’s body offered image-makers a special opportunity to depict this aspect of the human form, for example in the shrine-Madonnas that contained figures of the Trinity. Luke’s account of the Visitation (1:39–56), which describes Jesus and John communicating from within their mothers’ wombs, also provided room for artists to demonstrate the connection between interior life and external appearances. In most later medieval depictions of this scene, the wombs, in the form of tiny mandorlas, were transplanted to the surface of the women’s clothing, just over their swelling abdomens. Less frequently, as in the Katharinenthal figures, they appeared at chest-level. The association of crystals with lactation gave this high placement special significance; by replacing the figures’ breasts, the stones call attention not only to the women’s role as vessels bearing something within themselves but also to

crystalline wombs and pregnant hearts 227

their power to nurture beings outside themselves. In the Visitation Group, each crystal thus elides the successive views of the maternal body offered by the shrine-Madonnas: the introverted body that shelters and the extroverted body that feeds. The crystals’ evocation of both wombs and breasts was enriched by the ancient association of the chest area with the heart, itself conceived as a person’s vital center and the dwelling place of her or his soul. The literary trope of a favored friend or idea being “inscribed on the heart” was often pictured as an image of the beloved subject affixed in a roundel to the center of a larger figure’s chest. In this respect the high placement of the Visitation figures’ crystal-wombs elevates their pregnancy both literally and figuratively: in contrast to ordinary mothers, these women bear their progeny in their hearts. This conflation of organs, also present in Gertrude’s vision, departed from contemporary understandings of pregnancy. Whereas Gertrude beheld the baby nursing pure blood directly from his mother’s heart, ordinary children were thought to be nourished by a low substance, menstrual blood, both in utero and, transformed into milk through the filters of their mothers’ breasts, post partum. The conceptual conflation of hearts and wombs meant that conventual people, though vowed to celibacy, were not prevented from experiencing in their bodies the fullness of new life. As Bynum and others have shown, physical pregnancy offered a model through which many monastics, both male and female, conceived of union with God. In light of the growing attention to Christ’s childhood in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it is understandable that experiences described as “spiritual pregnancy” were also widespread in those years. Many conventual women and their male advisors enjoyed all the swelling and sweetness involved in physically containing the divine—but with none of the mess and pain that married women endured. So pervasive was such imagery that the Flemish beguine Hadewijch could use the stages of fetal development as an extended metaphor for the nurturing of Love in a devout person’s soul. And for most writers, both secular and religious, such conception took place upon the entrance of a beloved into the lover’s heart. This idea found expression in the devotional pictures made by a nun of St. Walburga in Eichstätt, in which the heart of the crucified Christ and that of the loving subject appear as enclosures both containing and revealing the embrace of person and God. Such images correspond beautifully with other religious women’s understandings of their bodies’ capacity to hold the divine. The sister-book of Katharinenthal, which chronicles the extraordinary virtues of the convent’s inhabitants from its establishment in 1242 until

228 the matter of person

around 1422, describes Anne von Ramschwag being “lifted up in a divine light” during one Christmas Mass, whereupon it seemed to her that her body split open so that she could look into herself. There she saw two beautiful babies embracing each other sweetly and lovingly. . . . [S]he recognized that one child was our Lord and the other her soul, and that she and God were united. Then her body closed together again.

Although this splitting may more readily recall sculpted shrine-Madonnas than the Visitation Group, the reception of divine light into the nun’s body nonetheless associates her with the latter figures, from whose torsos light spills. More often, Anne’s contemporaries peered into their hearts or souls through chests turned temporarily transparent. A formative incident in the life of the German Dominican Henry Suso exemplifies this phenomenon with special vividness. During one meditation Suso looked inside [himself ] and saw that over his heart his body was as clear as a crystal, and he saw in the middle of his heart eternal Wisdom sitting quietly with a pleasing appearance. Nearby the soul of the servant [Suso] was sitting and longing for heaven. It was inclined in love at God’s side, embraced by his arms, and pressed to his divine heart.

The resulting image evokes something like a series of nested dolls: Suso peers into his own heart to find his soul pressed against the heart of God. In the corresponding illustration, the frontally seated author pulls aside his garment to reveal a small embracing couple (fig. 18.3). The figures’ ambiguous placement—seated just above the dark area between Suso’s spread knees and circumscribed, against his chest, by the edges of his open cloak—invites us to understand them as both encased within the heart and contained in (or emerging from) a kind of womb. Although this illustration does not suggest the mechanics of selfperception—offering a view of the mystic’s heart to beholders, but not to the seated Suso—the text stresses that only by peering through his own suddenly transparent, though still intact, flesh could Suso behold his soul embraced by Wisdom. The chest as locus of a person’s spiritual core is highlighted in Suso’s well-known diagram of the soul’s journey “from its origins in the Trinity . . . to its ultimate destination, reunion with the Godhead” (fig. 18.4). Here, a roundel in the center of each human figure’s chest indicates the linkage between person and divine, whereas God the Father, who bears the human soul before and after its incarnation, displays on his torso a bustlength image of the person. At the upper left-hand corner of the page, the

crystalline wombs and pregnant hearts 229 Image only available in print edition

figure 18.3 Henry Suso with Divine Wisdom, from Suso, Exemplar, ca. 1370. Strasbourg, Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire, MS 2929, fol. 8v. photo courtesy of the bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, strasbourg.

end of the journey is marked by a shiny roundel that reflected the reader’s visage back to her or his own eyes, thereby transforming the page into a counterpart of God’s body. Such images, and the labile concepts of the body-soul relationship they visualize, enable us to imagine the nuns seeing in the gleaming chests of their Visitation figures not only miraculously pregnant wombs but also grace-filled hearts or souls, reflecting back on one another as the women touch. The conflation of glorified hearts with precious stones also appears in the famous episode in which Suso carved the initials IHS into his chest with a stylus. Despite the proclaimed spiritual motivation behind this act, Suso’s concern with its materiality in his written account is striking; he informs us that, although the bloody wounds eventually healed, the scars remained, “as thick as a flattened blade of grass and as long as a section of the little finger,” and “as often as his heart beat, the name moved.” Dozing in his chair one night, Suso sensed “some kind of light flood[ing] out of his heart”; upon inspection, he discovered there “a golden cross into which many precious jewels had been skillfully inlaid.” Not wishing to call attention to his state, Suso

230 the matter of person Image only available in print edition

figure 18.4 Diagram of the soul’s journey from and to the Godhead, from Suso, Exemplar, ca. 1370. Strasbourg, Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire, MS 2929, fol. 82r. photo courtesy of the bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, strasbourg.

covered his chest with a blanket—but still “the light flooding forth glowed so brilliantly that nothing could diminish its powerful beauty.” Suso presents his glorified heart here as solid, sculptural matter that, once re-formed through his own devotional exertions, transforms his chest into a window or conduit for divine light. In this he was hardly alone; when examined after death, the hearts of many saintly women likewise revealed themselves to resemble—if not actually to be—artfully shaped stones. Like these, and the heart of the Virgin Mary, which one thirteenth-century poet compared to “a pure altar embellished with gold and precious stones,” Christ’s heart was also imagined to possess the attributes of finely crafted metalwork. Contemplating the gifts God had lavished on her and his formal confirmation of them, Gertrude of Helfta once admonished the Lord for “not having sealed this pact in the customary way, by clasping hands.” Rather than offering his right hand for the expected dextrarum iunctio—the gesture also performed by the Visitation figures—Christ surprised Gertrude by

crystalline wombs and pregnant hearts 231

opening with both hands the wound of [his] deified heart, . . . and commanding me to stretch forth my right hand. Then, contracting the aperture of the wound in which my right hand was enclosed, [he] said, “See, I promise to keep intact the gifts which I have given you. . . .” After these words of sweetest love, which I withdrew my hand, there appeared on it seven circles of gold, like seven rings.

On another occasion, as Gertrude lay sick in bed, Christ appeared at her side and showed her, issuing from his left side as though from the innermost depths of his blessed heart, a stream of flowing water as pure as crystal and as solid [cf. Rev 22.1]. It proceeded to cover his adorable chest like a jewel. I saw that it was transparent, colored in hues of gold and rose, alternating in various ways.

Christ explained that the streams represented the “sanctifying” power of Gertrude’s illness, and elucidated the other elements with reference to their visual and material properties: “[J]ust as the gold and rose colors gleam through the purity of the crystal and are enhanced by it, so will your intentions be pleasing, seen through the cooperation of the gold of my divinity and the perfecting power of the patience of the rose of my humanity.” Here, Christ’s crystalline breast assumes the characteristics of the Virgin’s womb as Gertrude had beheld it in her vision of the nursing child. The similarity of the two visions—the marvelous transparency of the solid body that draws the gaze in, the presence within the body of gleaming gold that radiates light back out—is striking. It points to concerns beyond (though certainly including) the interest in biological experience, concerns about materiality, vision, and the relation between the outer body and the soul brimming over with grace. The Katharinenthal sister-book furnishes ample evidence that extraordinary writers such as Gertrude and Suso were not exceptional in their fascination with bodies that were at once solid, transparent, and radiant. Like many conventual women of the time, the sisters of Katharinenthal often revealed states of spiritual grace by turning transparent before the eyes of their friends. A large sculpture of Christ embracing St. John in the nuns’ choir, produced in the same decade and by the same masters as the Visitation, was especially effective in sparking this and other marvelous corporeal displays (fig. 18.5); while praying before this image, Anne von Ramschwag was observed to become “as clear as a crystal,” and “a glow of light emerged from within her.” When Mechthild von Eschenz left the choir during Mass

232 the matter of person Image only available in print edition

figure 18.5 Henry of Constance. Christ and St. John Group from St. Katharinenthal, ca. 1305–1310. Antwerp, Meyer van den Bergh Museum. photo © collectiebeleid .

to proceed to the kitchen at the prioress’s request, she became “as clear as a crystal, so that [a companion] saw straight through her.” Asked “what she was thinking as she left the choir,” Mechthild explained, “I was thinking that obedience is better than doing whatever I should like to do.” Here transparency is connected with the preeminent monastic quality, obedience—a leitmotif in the sister-book. It is important to note the continued solidity of the respective bodies in these visions: the person does not turn invisible, but rather, “like a crystal,” she becomes transparent despite her material presence. A vision experienced by Berta von Herten thematizes this paradox while also demonstrating the fluidity of visual images within the nuns’ imaginations. Troubled by a desire to leave Katharinenthal and dwell with a local recluse called Guta, Berta beheld the Lord “sitting high up in the refectory, his face glowing like the sun, and waving to her with his hand.” When she approached him and

crystalline wombs and pregnant hearts 233

flung herself at his feet, Christ “took her up and lay her head upon his lap, and treated her all sweetly and lovingly.” Suddenly Berta noticed that the refectory wall had changed “as if to glass,” and she saw a person peering into it from outside “as if her heart would break, so gladly would she pass through the wall to meet our Lord.” Identifying this person as Guta, Christ assured Berta that her own situation within the convent, subject to rules of obedience and the suppression of individual desires, allowed her intimate access to him that a recluse could never enjoy. Although depictions of Christ and St. John clearly provided a starting point for this vision, the account proceeded to use the experience of looking through a crystalline surface to probe notions of interiority and exclusion, yearning and satisfaction. Cradled in Christ’s arms while watching Guta look on, Berta assumes the role of the souls enjoying God’s company in the spacious hearts of the Eichstätt drawings or embraced by Divine Wisdom in Suso’s lap: contented figures who look out of the picture at others—us!—who watch them from outside. This consideration of standpoint has important implications for our understanding of ocular vision within late medieval religious practice. On the one hand, Guta’s gaze confirms the dynamic role ascribed to vision in contemporary texts and pictures; the text posits her as a model viewer, intensely focused on a subject visible through a transparent medium. Yet her gaze is problematic. For whereas Berta’s experience of union is physical—conveyed first in Christ’s gestural language inviting her to join him, then in his tender manipulations of her body—Guta’s strictly visual contact places her in a site of desire always unfulfilled. Like the grids used by fifteenth-century painters to define illusionistic spaces, the wall of glass admits sight but holds the viewer far from the object of her gaze. This, the tale implies, is a loss; the goal of the soul’s desire is to efface that distance and become part of the picture, to find oneself embraced by God within the crystalline enclosure. The relegation of the gaze to secondary status in this account, inferior to touch, points to the importance of the material aspects of “visual culture” in late medieval convents. It demonstrates how pictorial motifs (in this case, the embrace of two figures) could conjoin with the physical medium (the tangible but transparent object) to shape and guide imaginative devotions. This merging recurs in one “good person’s” vision of Adelhait Pfefferhartin. Curious about Adelhait’s spiritual status, the visionary prayed to Mary and “the beloved Saint John, thinking about the loving repose he took on the sweet heart of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . , that she come to learn in what degree of nobility this blessed sister stood before God.” Having begun her meditation by envisioning Christ’s embrace of his Beloved—before whose

234 the matter of person

sculptural depiction Adelheit was once seen to levitate—the seer’s mind swiftly moved to another image, as she beheld this sister enveloped in as clear a light, exploding out of her in streams of vivid radiance, as when the morning sun rises and its clear brilliance spills across the earth. Inside and outside, this sister was so vividly illuminated and gleaming that [the seer] had never seen anything resembling her in clarity and beauty, and she marveled greatly. . . . Then it was said to her: “You should know that [Adelheit] is a thousand times more beautiful and clearer before God than you could ever perceive.”

It is important to note that, despite the continuity posited here between interior virtue and exterior illumination, this body does not admit ocular penetration or reveal anything hidden beneath its surfaces. Like those of the Visitation figures, it is an exuberant body, thrusting the evidence of its virtues outward toward beholders and rendering them visible through the body’s materiality rather than through any internal motifs. Such a body was also pictured—twice—in the sisters’ magnificent illuminated gradual of 1312 (fig. 18.6). A conflation of the Virgin Mary, the Apocalyptic Woman, and the triumphal Ecclesia, this aristocratic female figure stands on a human-faced moon and displays on her chest a large yellow roundel inscribed with the ray-emitting face of the sun. On fol. 158av (extracted from the manuscript in the nineteenth century), the beginning of the sequence in honor of John the Evangelist, she occupies a middle zone between a Christ- John group above and a series of Apocalyptic visions below. On fol. 258v (reproduced here), she moves from an eschatological future to a dialogical present; occupying the large initial A of “Ave Maria” in the sequence for the feast of the Annunciation, she becomes the subject and recipient of the vocalized text. Two model viewers accompany her: a standing St. John, who fixes his eyes on the roundel upon her chest, and a tiny nun who kneels at her feet with uplifted gaze. Only the Woman faces outward, soliciting and anchoring beholders’ attention. Set against a gold ground bursting with stars, she occupies an otherworldly realm that viewers, like the recluse Guta, may gaze at with longing—yet a realm that, as the presence of the donor and St. John demonstrates, is nonetheless accessible. The Woman’s frontal gaze and extraction from any narrative context made her an active participant in the dialogue initiated by the nuns’ song. In a less literal way than in Suso’s diagram, the vellum thus became a kind of mirror for these beholders; looking at the golden initial as they sang the Virgin’s praises, the sisters beheld a figure—elegant and beautiful, with light exploding from her chest—who embodied and

crystalline wombs and pregnant hearts 235 Image only available in print edition

figure 18.6 Initial with the Virgin Mary–Ecclesia–Woman Clothed with the Sun, from the Gradual of St. Katharinenthal, ca. 1312. Zurich, Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, LM 26117, fol. 258v. photo reproduced with kind permission of the schweizerisches landesmuseum, zurich.

made permanent the fleeting visions they had of themselves and one another in states of grace. This kind of relationship, I suggest, is what the Katharinenthal Visitation Group portrays. One remarkable, though often overlooked, facet of this sculpture is the strong physical resemblance between the women. In contrast to most depictions of the scene, in the Katharinenthal sculpture no sign of age or status distinguishes one from the other: both wear luxurious garments, display youthful faces and bodies, and exhibit glistening heart-wombs. The sliver of space between the women, bridged only by two slender forearms, accentuates their mirrorlike disposition (fig. 18.7). This figural composition, and the kind of relationship it engenders, differs meaningfully from that of the sculpted Christ-John Group (see fig. 18.5), where John’s passive body melts, in a series of sensuously curving lines, into a larger, more stable form. The partnership between the women in the Visitation Group neither entailed nor allowed such relinquishment of individual identity. Just as the heroines of the Katharinenthal sister-book retained their own names and social roles even as they were extolled as exemplars, so Mary and Elizabeth preserve their bodily integrity and stand, hands clasped, on equal ground. With hearts fecund and gleaming, the fig-

236 the matter of person Image only available in print edition

figure 18.7 Visitation Group from St. Katharinenthal: view from back. photo courtesy of the metropolitan museum of art.

ures beam their grace-filled states toward one another, effacing physical difference as they touch. The Katharinenthal sculpture thus depicts the kind of reflective likeness that the Woman in the gradual invites—a dialogical relationship between one exuberant figure and a companion (in the manuscript, the viewer herself ), which leads to the assumption in the latter of the qualities of the former. The sisters of Katharinenthal could not, of course, emulate Mary and Elizabeth in the physical aspects of their pregnancy. But they could—and, as their visions affirm, did—reproduce in themselves the effects of that pregnancy, bearing in their hearts the spiritual grace that allowed them to shine as clearly as if they were made of crystal. Whereas the sculpted figures’ heart-wombs evoked such biological experiences, their mirrorlike arrangement and physical identicality made them enact what the sister-book repeatedly enjoined its readers to do: to teach one another by example and take one another as models—in the book’s own terms, as Bilder (pictures) or Spiegel (mirrors)—of virtue.

crystalline wombs and pregnant hearts 237

If Gertrude’s vision of the solitary Virgin with the transparent womb illuminates the biological interest at the heart of each Visitation figure, the meditation by Gertrude’s companion Mechthild of Magdeburg on the meeting of th e loving soul with the Bridegroom evokes most aptly this state of reflective union. “There”—in the heavenly mansion, where person and God become one— eye gleams into eye, and there spirit flows into spirit, and there hand grasps hand, and there mouth speaks to mouth, and there heart greets heart.

   GLUTTONY AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF PAIN IN DANTE’S INFERNO AND PURGATORIO Manuele Gragnolati

O

ne of the reasons Dante’s magnum opus is called a “comedy” is its use of a comic register as the leading one. This choice forms the basis of the poem’s capability to encompass reality in all its spectra and to combine, for instance, myth with fragments of everyday life and chronicle, theoretical speculation with personal issues and political tirades, sublime love poetry with debased language, mystical ardor with spiteful irony. Like life or history, Dante’s Comedy assembles many disparate and diverse parts; as centuries of scholarship have shown, it is often by attempting to find new combinations of these many parts that another facet of the work’s meaning is revealed. In this paper I propose to explore one of these potential combinations by focusing on Dante’s representation of the gluttons in hell and purgatory. While these passages have been examined mainly in isolation from each other and investigated with regard to, respectively, their political and poetologic significance, I am interested in discovering what a joint reading of them can reveal about Dante’s understanding of the body and its relationship to the soul. Gluttony, in fact, seems to be a privileged locus for such an investigation, given that, in addition to having a major significance in medieval Europe—where food and eating were primary concerns for most people—it is the sin most closely related to the body: the way in which one eats has the most immediate and visible consequences on the body, and in medieval culture was also thought to have direct effects on the person as a whole. While therefore gluttony indicates a tightly woven connection of body and soul, I will show how its different treatment in hell and pur-

gluttony and the anthropology of pain 239

gatory—being punished in the former and corrected in the latter—entails subtle but significant differences in the way the relationship between body and soul operates in the two eschatological realms.

 In his article “Dante and the Body” Robin Kirkpatrick indicates that there are two possible ways he relation between body and soul can ultimately be understood, namely a “dualistic view,” which considers them as two separate entities, and a “hylomorphic view,” which considers them as deeply connected with one another. Recent scholarship on medieval understanding of the human body, however, shows that to settle for either position over the other is difficult, and that both models are potentially problematic. Esther Cohen, for instance, underlines the danger of separating body from soul. She acknowledges that much research on the body in the Middle Ages has been fostered by the ground-breaking publication of Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, but laments that a good part of this research has “chosen to re-divorce the body from the soul,” presenting the body as though “it were an inanimate object, separate from the rest of human experience and identity.” Cohen’s aim is to reconnect body and soul, exploring medieval understandings of the body within the cultural constructs of the time. Medieval thought, she argues, considered the senses, and physical pain in particular, to originate with the body but to be experienced by the soul, often meaningfully and beneficially. For this model of physical and psychical experience, she coins the useful phrase “animated pain of the body.” While Cohen highlights the necessity in medieval studies of uniting body and soul and reintegrating body into human identity and experience, too strong an emphasis on the connection between soul and body also raises a range of difficulties. For instance, Bynum has also shown that medieval culture struggled to maintain materialistic conceptions of survival and was uncomfortable with theories of identity linking body and soul very tightly. Bynum argues that such theories seem to “dissolve body into language” by having the body fully depend on the soul, thereby jeopardizing the commonsense understanding of body as stuff and matter that is crucial to an embodied concept of identity. Paradoxically, although they seem opposite, both positions on the body— as an entity either totally separate from the soul or totally bound to it—are problematic and risk dismissing the body by either retreating into dualism or

240 the matter of person

threatening beliefs about the body’s individuality and materiality. To explore further some of the intricacies of this tension, I will now move to consider Dante’s representation of pain in hell and purgatory, focusing in particular on the pain experienced as a result of the sin of gluttony. Although Dante’s Comedy describes an otherworldly journey taking place in the eschatological time before the Last Judgment—that is, when the soul is separated from its body—pain constitutes a significant part of the soul’s identity and experience in the afterlife he conceives. Like most of the theologians contemporary to him, Dante imagines that the soul’s suffering in hell and purgatory consists not only of separation from God and the absence of beatific vision (poena damni), but also of material torment (poena sensus). The majority of Scholastic theologians agreed that the fire of hell and purgatory is not metaphorical but corporeal, and the skeptical objection that the separated soul cannot be tormented by material fire was one of the propositions condemned in Paris in 1277. Theologians therefore needed to explain how the separated soul could be tormented by physical punishment. In Purgatorio 25 Dante addresses the same question. The contrapasso in the terrace of gluttony consists of the souls’ continual thinning, and the pilgrim is so shocked by the gluttons’ physical pain that he wants to know more about suffering in the afterlife. In particular, he asks how a soul can get thinner if it does not need food: “Come si può far magro / là dove l’uopo di nodrir non tocca?” (Purg. 25.20–21). The answer is provided by Statius, who first explains the origin of the human soul in the fetus and then indicates that, albeit in a different fashion, the soul continues to be embodied even after physical death. Statius’s speech negotiates in a very complex and technical way among different embryological theories discussed by late-thirteenth-century Scholastics, but ends up being closest to Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of unicity of form, according to which the human soul is one single form possessing all the faculties. This doctrine connects the human soul and body very tightly and considers the rational soul to contain also vegetative and sensitive powers and to be the only form of person, including the body. Like the soul presented by the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas, the separated soul described in the Comedy works as the full carrier of the self, keeping, as Dante says, both what is human (the formative virtue and vegetative-sensitive powers) and what is divine (the intellectual faculties): Quando Làchesis non ha più del lino, solvesi da la carne, e in virtute ne porta seco e l’umano e ’l divino:

gluttony and the anthropology of pain 241

l’altre potenze tutte quante mute; memoria, intelligenza e volontade in atto molto più che prima agute. And when Lachesis has no more thread, the soul is loosed from the flesh and carries with it as faculties both the human and the divine; the other faculties all of them mute, but memory, intellect, and will far more acute in action than before. (purg. 25.79– 84)

While Aquinas assumes that the soul will reactivate its sensitive faculties only when it reunites with its resurrection body at the end of time, in Dante’s eschatological world the soul reactivates the human part of the person right after physical death. Statius explains that as soon as the separated soul arrives in the otherworld, the formative virtue contained in the soul radiates forth as it did with respect to the earthly living limbs, and creates a body of air (Purg. 25.88–99). The union of soul and its aerial body forms what Dante calls an “ombra,” a “shade” that has shape and can express sensitive faculties. This is why souls in hell and purgatory can experience physical pain: Però che quindi ha poscia sua paruta, è chiamata ombra; e quindi organa poi ciascun sentire infino a la veduta. Quindi parliamo e quindi ridiam noi; quindi facciam le lagrime e ’sospiri che per lo monte aver sentiti puoi. Inasmuch as therefrom it has its semblance, it is called a shade, and therefrom it forms the organs of every sense, even to the sight. By this we speak and by this we laugh, by this we make the tears and sighs which you may have heard about the mountain. (purg. 25.100– 105)

Dante’s concept of the “shade” links the body to the soul very tightly and would seem to provide a good model for Cohen’s concept of animated pain, which originates with the body but is experienced by the soul. At the same time, Dante’s Comedy distinguishes the soul’s aerial body from the fleshly body and explains how experience increases when the soul reunites to its resurrection body. Moreover—and this is my main concern in the following analysis of Dante’s treatment of gluttony—there are subtle differences in the

242 the matter of person

ways in which the aerial body works in hell and purgatory: while hell reveals the problems of too tight a unity between body and soul, purgatory offers a productive model in which body and soul are at once closely united and yet distinguished from one another.

 Placed after the melancholy of Limbo (the privileged space where the damned experience only the poena damni) and the seductive refinement of Francesca among the lustful, Dante’s depiction of gluttony for the first time unveils the reality of hell in all its harshness: the gluttons are submerged in mud and incessantly tormented by a shower of filthy rain while Cerberus tears apart their limbs. Dante’s account places emphasis on the physicality of the gluttons’ punishment, which involves all the senses: Io sono al terzo cerchio, de la piova etterna, maladetta, fredda e greve; regola e qualità mai non l’è nova. Grandine grossa, acqua tinta e neve per l’aere tenebroso si riversa; pute la terra che questo riceve. Cerbero, fiera crudele e diversa, con tre gole caninamente latra sova la gente che quivi è sommersa. Li occhi ha vermigli, la barba unta e atra, e ’l ventre largo, e unghiate le mani; graffiia li spirti ed iscoia ed isquatra. Urlar li fa la pioggia come cani; de l’un de’ lati fanno a l’altro schermo; volgonsi spesso i miseri profani. I am in the third circle of the eternal, accursed, cold and heavy rain; its measure and its quality are never new; huge hail, foul water, and snow pour down through the murky air; the ground that receives it stinks. Cerberus, monstrous beast and cruel, with three throats barks dog-like over the people who are here submerged. His eyes are red, his beard greasy and black, his belly wide and his hands taloned; he claws the spirits, flays and quarters them. The rain makes them howl like dogs; the profane wretches often turn themselves, making of one side a screen for the other. (inf. 6.7– 21)

gluttony and the anthropology of pain 243

Commentators agree that Dante’s partly human and partly canine reinterpretation of the Virgilian Cerberus, whose name was interpreted to mean “carnem vorans,” is a metaphor for the vice of gluttony. All of Cerberus’s characteristics in the Comedy—his three throats, red eyes, greasy beard, large belly, and long nails—point to the excessive voracity and greedy desire typical of gluttony, which the canine creature acts out by attacking and devouring the damned shades. If Cerberus embodies the characteristics typical of the gluttons and can be considered a sort of Ur-glutton, then the shades at his mercy are now the victims of the sin for which they were damned. At the same time the text suggests that the damned in the third circle of hell not merely are the object of gluttony, but also express the essence of their gluttony. Line 19—“Urlar li fa la pioggia come cani”—indicates that the gluttons themselves are debased to a beastly level approaching that of Cerberus. Moreover, the encounter between the pilgrim and Ciacco—whose porcine name is an unambiguous reference to the beastly debasement that gluttony triggers in human beings—makes explicit the connection between the pain of the damned and their gluttony. As Gino Casagrande has pointed out, a long tradition of Christian authors, from Tertullian to Alan of Lille, had maintained that since the human body is formed of earth, excessive drinking and eating (i.e., gluttony) transforms the body into mud. When Ciacco, not recognized by the pilgrim and asked about his identity, explains that “per la dannosa colpa de la gola, / come tu vedi, a la pioggia mi fiacco” (Inf. 6.53–54), he indicates that because of gluttony his body has been softened by the rain and become mud. Thus the gluttons’ aerial bodies in hell, which continues to absorb filthy liquids, is affected by the same negative consequences that the vice of gluttony brings forth for human bodies on earth. Ultimately, the gluttons’ shades in hell become one with the mud, creating the “sozza mistura / de l’ombre e de la pioggia”—the disgusting mixture of shades and rain—that graphically demonstrates the filth of gluttony. If the pilgrim cannot recognize Ciacco in hell, it is not only because, as he states, Ciacco’s features are altered by his agony: “L’angoscia che tu hai / forse ti tira fuor de la mia mente, / sì che par ch’i’ ti vedessi mai” (Inf. 6.43–45). It is also because, as Virgil explains after the encounter with Ciacco, the gluttons will get their original shape back only at the end of time, when their souls will reunite to their real flesh: “ciascun rivederà sua trista tomba, / ripiglierà sua carne e sua figura” (97–98). While the reference to the souls’ recovery of their flesh at the end of time is true for all separated souls, the reference to the recovery of one’s shape applies specifically to the gluttons and highlights that the aerial bodies that they radiate in the afterlife do not keep their original, human features.

244 the matter of person

The incontinent behavior of the gluttons gives them shapeless bodies that end up being just mud without being shaped by the soul; in other words, the soul of a glutton is so corrupted by sin (gluttony) that it cannot give shape to anything—in particular, it cannot unfold an aerial body in the shape of the original body. The physically tormented body of the glutton is thus a direct consequence of its sinful soul. Suffering in hell is in fact both a manifestation of the sin still contaminating the soul and a fitting punishment for it. For the soul in hell, pain consists of revealing what the soul is, its own essence. In a sense, the damned soul experiences its own state, and this is why conceptually contrapasso in hell is structured by analogy with the sin that is punished. Like the body’s senses, pain in hell is indeed very tightly bound to the soul. Infernal pain is full and physical, and while punishment is usually imposed from outside (as for instance in the case of the rain), it can also be understood as an expression of the sinful soul itself, as a manifestation of its corrupted being. The encounter between the pilgrim and Capaneus among the blasphemers confirms the equivalence between infernal pain and sin, and shows that the harshness of this pain consists of its interminable and useless character. On earth Capaneus was struck by Jupiter with thunder when in his arrogance and pride at conquering Thebes he dared to curse the father of the gods and challenge his power. In hell he lies supine and is tormented by a fiery rain (Inf. 14.22). When the pilgrim sees him, he wonders who could be so spiteful that he is not “ripened” by his punishment—where the verb “maturi” refers to the sterility of Capaneus’s pain, which does not change him—“chi è quel grande che non par che curi / lo ’ncendio e giace dispettoso e torto, / sì che la pioggia non par che ’l maturi?” (“Who is that great one who seems not to heed the fire, and lies disdainful and scowling, so that the rain seems not to ripen him?” [Inf. 14.46–48]). Capaneus proudly declares that in hell he has not changed with respect to earth: “Qual io fui vivo, tal son morto” (“What I was living, that I am dead” [14.51]). He confirms this statement by continuing to formulate the same curses and challenges to Jupiter that damned him to hell in the first place. As Virgil explains, Capaneus’s sin of blasphemy is his own punishment, which is made harsher precisely by the fact that it does not help him change or renounce his arrogance: “O Capaneo, in ciò che non s’ammorza / la tua superbia, se’ tu più punito; / nullo martiro, fuor che la tua rabbia, / sarebbe al tuo furor dolor compito” (“O Capaneus! in that your pride remains unquenched you are punished the more: no torment save your own raging would be pain to match your fury” [Inf. 14.63–66]). When Capaneus prides himself for not being defeated by God despite the torment inflicted upon him, he does not understand that the fiery rain corresponds to his blasphemous anger against God and, as Marc Cogan points

gluttony and the anthropology of pain 245

out, that it is “an exact replica of his sin itself ”: the fire and heat tormenting most of the sinners in the seventh circle of hell reflect the passionate anger and gratuitous irascibility that characterize the sins of violence and blasphemy in particular. In other words, Capaneus’s attempt to dissociate from his body only leads to another sterile identity of corrupted soul and suffering body. Capaneus’s statement about his absolute lack of change can be considered as the very blueprint of hell, where the souls’ pain consists of being stuck in the eternal perpetuation of the same sin that was responsible for their damnation. “Pianti” are “vani” (Inf. 21.5) in “la valle ove mai non si scolpa” (Purg. 24.84): tears are ineffective in the stasis of hell, the valley where it is impossible to get rid of the guilt of sin. Dante’s concept of the shade makes it possible for the sinner to experience a fully animated pain of the (aerial) body, but in hell pain does not valorize the body or the experience it provides. The aerial body in hell is a mere reflection of the soul, and the pain is mechanical, uninterpretable by the soul, and useless. Using an expression defining infernal pain in the city of Dis, where the heretics are punished, one can say that pain and punishment are evil (Inf. 9.110: “duolo e . . . tormento rio”) in all of hell, in the sense that, as the Ottimo commentary explains, they do not produce any purgation or transformation. Conversely, the pains of hell are useless because they are ultimately a direct manifestation of the soul’s corruption.

 Unlike the useless tears of hell, those of purgatory are “ripening,” as the pilgrim’s words to Adrian V in the terrace of avarice make explicit: “Spirto in cui pianger matura / quel sanza ’l quale a Dio tornar non possi, / sosta un poco per me tua maggior cura” (Purg. 19.91–93). While hell is the realm of eternal sin and sterile suffering, purgatory provides the separated souls with an opportunity for improvement and transformation in the afterlife: in the seven terraces of purgatory, which are devoted to the expiation of the seven capital vices, the shades not only complete the process of expiation for the sins committed on earth, but also undergo a beneficial process of change that prepares them for heaven. For the process through which the soul changes in purgatory, physical pain is essential, but, as the pain of hell has shown, it is not sufficient. In order for pain to be productive, the soul must also experience and interpret it in the right way. The very structure that Dante imagines for the eschatological realm of purification reflects and emphasizes this double prerequisite for

246 the matter of person

the process of purgation, which also implies doubling hell’s identity of soul and aerial body, and allowing the aerial body to be distinguished from the purging soul. In the Comedy, the seven terraces of purgatory proper are situated in the central part of a mountain between Ante-Purgatory (at the bottom) and Eden (on top). Dante highlights the necessity of physical pain through his invention of Ante-Purgatory, which is the place where the souls of those who have delayed repentance until the end of their life must wait before being allowed to undergo the therapeutic process of purgatory proper. As long as they stay in Ante-Purgatory, the souls experience the poena damni—which manifests itself as frustrated desire to be close to God—but no poena sensus, and do not undergo any significant evolution with respect to what they were on earth at the moment of physical death. It is only the additional experience of physical pain in the seven terraces of purgatory that finally allows for a process of real transformation. This process occurs through an intricate arrangement operating both on the soul—its understanding and desires—and on the aerial body emanating from the soul. Dante structures the process of purgatory according to a ritualized pattern that is constant in each terrace. At the center of this pattern is the poena sensus, which the shades bear willingly while singing hymns and psalms. This physical and spiritual exercise is framed by two sets of examples, the first one showing the virtue opposed to the sin that is purged, and the second one showing cases in which people have been punished for the sin that is purged. Finally, each time a soul moves from one terrace to the next, the angel at the threshold of the new circle sings a beatitude from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. As Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi has argued, the beatitudes sung at the end of each terrace show that the ultimate exemplar of purgatory is Christ in the Gospels and that the moral structure of purgatory is based not on the classical concept of justice (as it is in hell), but on the ideal of gratuitous love, which does not calculate or measure but gives much more than is due or just. While the beatitudes define conformity with Christ as the goal of purgation, the positive and negative exempla surrounding the punishments provide the souls with a better and more concrete understanding of how this goal has been realized and contradicted in individual human cases. Here, among the exempla surrounding the souls in all the terraces of purgatory proper, the paradigm for emulation is established by Mary, who is chosen for her likeness to Christ and always represents the first exemplum of virtue to be attained. The process of change from aim (Mary’s similarity to Christ) to result (the soul’s conformity with Christ) occurs through physical pain, which, in the

gluttony and the anthropology of pain 247

case of the gluttons, consists of excruciating hunger and thirst. As Forese Donati explains, the physical pain is induced by the trees and streams that God’s intervention has placed in the terrace of gluttony: De l’etterno consiglio cade vertù ne l’acqua e ne la pianta rimasa dietro, ond’io sì m’ assottiglio. Tutta esta gente che piangendo canta per seguitar la gola oltra misura, in fame e ’n sete qui si rifà santa. From the eternal counsel virtue descends into the water and into the tree left behind, whereby I waste away thus. All these people who weeping sing, sanctify themselves again in hunger and thirst, for having followed appetite to excess. (purg. 23.61– 66)

Unlike the gluttons’ pain in hell, which is a manifestation of their corrupted souls and is structured by analogy with their sin, the gluttons’ pain in purgatory does not consist of the continuation of gluttony, but proceeds, as is often the case in purgatory, in direct contrast with the vice to be purged. The passage preceding Forese’s explanation stresses the intensity of the gluttons’ physical pain, and also offers some hints as to how it helps them in approaching conformity with Christ as the exempla teach and the beatitudes confirm: Ne li occhi era ciascuna oscura e cava, palida ne la faccia, e tanto scema che da l’ossa la pelle s’informava. Non credo che così a buccia strema Erisittone fosse fatto secco, per digiunar, quando più n’ebbe tema. Io dicea fra me stesso pensando: “Ecco la gente che perdé Ierusalemme, quando Maria nel figlio diè di becco!”. Parean l’occhiaie anella sanza gemme: chi nel viso de li uomini legge “omo” ben avria quivi conosciuta l’emme. Each was dark and hollow in the eyes, pallid in the face and so wasted that the skin took its shape from the bones. I do not believe that Erysichthon

248 the matter of person

became thus withered to the utter rind by hunger when he had most fear of it. I said to myself in thought, “Behold the people who lost Jerusalem, when Mary struck her beak into her son!” The sockets of their eyes seemed rings without gems: he who reads OMO in the face of man would there surely have recognized the M. [my emphasis] (purg. 23.22– 33)

In addition to comparing the gluttons’ emaciation to two horrible cases of starvation taken from Ovid and Flavius Josephus, the text also indicates an association with Christ. The “omo” that the pilgrim reads on the shades’ faces recalls—implicitly and yet unmistakably—the passage in John’s Gospel where, during his Passion, the flagellated Christ is crowned with thorns and presented by Pilate to the Jews with the expression “Ecce homo”: “Ecce homo” sounds very similar to the Dantesque “legge omo,” and “Ecco” and “omo” are rhyme words distant only three lines from each other. In contrast with those from hell, the aerial bodies unfolded by souls in purgatory are always fully human and never liable to metamorphosis or parodic deformation. The distortion of their features is not a manifestation of sin but rather the sign that, and the means by which, the souls experience their pain in a productive way—thereby coming into conformity with the suffering Christ. The significance of pain as an opportunity for the soul’s improvement in purgatory is related to the emergence of the new, positive attitude toward physical suffering that Cohen has named “philopassianism”—the love of pain that develops in the later Middle Ages. An important element—at once sign and factor—in this development is a shift in Christian spirituality from a concentration on Christ’s divinity to a strong focus on his humanity and suffering during his Passion and especially on the Cross. Pain was experienced as a way to unite with Christ, and imitation of Christ’s physical suffering became more and more literal. In particular, as Bynum has shown, starvation was one of the most common practices that mystic women especially but not exclusively imposed upon themselves in the later Middle Ages in order to identify with the suffering Christ. Dante transposes the philopassianism of his time into his concept of purgatory, where Christ functions as a model not only of virtue, but also of productive suffering. The affinity between the suffering gluttons and the suffering Christ that is suggested in the “omo” passage is confirmed soon after by Forese, who explains that the shades in purgatory endorse their punishment with the same will with which Christ endorsed the sacrifice on the Cross: E non pur una volta, questo spazzo girando, si rinfresca nostra pena:

gluttony and the anthropology of pain 249

io dico pena, e dovria dir sollazzo, ché quella voglia a li alberi ci mena che menò Cristo lieto a dire “Elì,” quando ne liberò con la sua vena. And not once only, as we circle this road, is our pain renewed—I say pain and ought to say solace: for that will leads us to the trees which led glad Christ to say “Elì,” when He delivered us with His blood. (purg. 23.70– 75)

Statius has already explained that although the souls’ experience of pain contrasts with their desire to move to God, they are nonetheless eager to submit themselves to it (Purg. 21.58–66). Here Forese specifies the Christological paradigm of this voluntary suffering: as Christ in the most tragic moment of his Passion was nonetheless “lieto,” glad, so the incredible pain of purgatory is willingly endorsed by the souls and, in a paradoxical way that does not mask the intensity of suffering, is embraced—through the identification with Christ—as a source of joy. While the infernal souls continue to curse divine justice, and their suffering bodies are mechanic manifestations of their sinful souls, the process of change in purgatory requires not only enduring but also embracing the physical torment of punishment. The torment is perceived as something external to the soul that can be freely endorsed and channeled as a positive experience acting back on the soul. Rather than being a mere expression of the soul, the aerial body therefore seems to be treated like a separate entity that can change independently from the soul and through its alterity induce a change in the soul. While souls cannot reach conformity with Christ directly on a spiritual level through internal grief, the teachings of the Gospels, or the examples of Mary and others, they identify with Christ on the level of the suffering body. Such an identification transforms the souls and prepares them for heaven.

 Different models for the body and its relation to the soul transpire from Dante’s treatment of gluttony. While Dante’s concept of the aerial body seems to pack the self into the soul and conceives of the soul as the full carrier of identity, including the body, the Comedy also challenges this model. First, Dante’s poem continually indicates that the aerial body is merely a surrogate for a fullness and a perfection that are possible only at the resurrection, when the soul reunites with its fleshly body and the person is

250 the matter of person

reconstituted in its corporeal wholeness. In Inferno 6—the canto dedicated to Ciacco and the gluttons’ pain in hell—for instance, Virgil explains that the more perfect a thing is, the more it can feel joy and pain; therefore, when body and soul are together again after the resurrection, the pain of the damned will be greater. The soul thus has sensitive faculties, but when it is united to its true body made of flesh, pain increases. Second, as my analysis has shown, the aerial body operates differently in hell and in purgatory. In hell soul and body are so tightly connected that the aerial body and the experience of pain that it provides are a meaningless manifestation of the soul’s corruption. This identity between the soul’s sin and pain is one way to understand the persistent, unchanging suffering in hell. At the same time, however, Dante’s concept of pain in purgatory affirms a productive understanding of pain and body that points to a more complex relationship with the soul. Dante’s Comedy settles for neither a fully “dualistic” nor a fully “hylomorphic” view of the body: it is precisely by endorsing the potential of the tension between these two views that his Comedy succeeds in expressing a sense of the body as being tightly connected to the soul without being reducible to it.

   “HUMAN HEAVEN” john of rupescissa’s alchemy at the end of the world Leah DeVun

T

he vivid and complex imagery of alchemical texts has long interfered with scholars’ ability to understand alchemy and its significance to medieval society. Enigmatic code names such as “green lion,” “sun,” “moon,” and the crucified “Christ” are omnipresent in alchemical literature, even as such texts purport to reveal secret operations to readers. Earlytwentieth-century scholars such as E. O. von Lippmann and Julius Ruska were among the first to study such code names (Decknamen in German); their research, continued today by historians such as William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, attempts to decipher code names, in part by identifying them with chemical substances and practices. Such scholarship has great value because it identifies the operative elements of medieval alchemy and establishes the continuity of alchemical traditions from the medieval to the early modern era. But the coded language in alchemical texts can give us more information about alchemy itself, not just its chemical practices. Scholars have often assumed that the presence of coded religious imagery in alchemical literature is simply the product of a culture in which all aspects of life were steeped in religion. Historians who study alchemical Decknamen thus have tended to place little weight on which religious images appear in alchemical texts, and they have not attempted any sustained analysis of such images. William R. Newman, for instance, has described soteriological language in alchemy as a superfluous “mystical flavor” that was not especially significant to medieval alchemy, which he argues was focused primarily on material processes rather than spirituality. But can we really dismiss the spiritual imagery that is so obtrusive, so pervasive, and so characteristic a part of late medieval alchemy? Interpreting such language as a mere code

252 the matter of person

for chemical practice (like interpreting it as being only the expression of an esoteric spirituality) misses the play and multiplicity of meaning that is at the heart of alchemical literature. If we pause for a moment to consider the specific images, tropes, and metaphors that appear in alchemical texts, we can learn a great deal about authors’ (and readers’) assumptions about the human body and its place in the narrative of Christian history. I would suggest that a pluralistic reading of such soteriological language—in all its complexity and obscurity—can build upon the work of historians of science and offer a richer understanding of the many stories that medieval authors tell through their texts. In other words, religious language in alchemy should be not so much an obstacle for the reader as an opportunity. I shall take as my example the fourteenth-century alchemist and apocalyptic prophet John of Rupescissa (ca. 1310–ca. 1364), whose alchemical writings were widely read in the late Middle Ages. Scholars have credited Rupescissa with combining alchemical technology and medical therapeutics, a contribution that proved to be highly significant to the development of “iatrochemistry” in the early modern period. The most influential aspect of Rupescissa’s thought was his alcohol-based medicine, the “quintessence,” a substance that supposedly healed illness and prolonged life, and which Rupescissa referred to in his writings as “our heaven” (caelum nostrum) or “human heaven” (caelum humanum). Rupescissa’s two alchemical treatises—the Liber lucis (The Book of Light, ca. 1350) and the Liber de consideratione quinte essentie omnium rerum (The Book on the Consideration of the Quintessence of All Things, 1351–1352)—are, like many late medieval alchemical texts, rife with mystical references to God, heaven, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. By the time of Rupescissa’s career in the mid-fourteenth century, many alchemists considered their work incomprehensible by means of normal intellectual inquiry; instead, knowledge of alchemy required divine revelation. Texts by Rupescissa— as well as those attributed to Raymond Llull, Petrus Bonus, and Arnald of Vilanova—endowed alchemy with a supernatural element and, as a result, used soteriological terms to describe its operations. While it is true that medieval alchemists were chiefly concerned with chemical practices and material goals, one need not draw a sharp contrast between materialism and spirituality in the realm of alchemy. John of Rupescissa’s alchemy was above all material and operative, but it was nevertheless aimed at the solution of spiritual problems. As I shall argue, Rupescissa’s overarching concerns included the arrival of the Antichrist and the collective salvation of the Christian community. The religious language in his work moreover shows how he built his theory of the quintessence upon spiritual concepts. I would therefore suggest that, for Rupescissa, religious

“human heaven”: john of rupescissa 253

terms were more than mere flavor. They were an integral, organic part of his alchemy: they indicate its theoretical underpinnings, and they link it to the eschatological narrative of medieval prophecy.

rupescissa and the millennium John of Rupescissa (also called Jean de Roquetaillade or Rochetaillade) was born into a noble family around 1310 near Aurillac, in the region of southern France known as the Auvergne. In 1327 he began studies at the University of Toulouse and there joined the Franciscan Order in 1332, at a time of continuing controversy over poverty and apocalypticism within the southern French wing of the order. At Toulouse Rupescissa became obsessed with apocalyptic crisis: he experienced visions that suggested that the Antichrist had already been born and would soon come to power. Around 1335 or 1336 he began to share his apocalyptic insights with his companions; later, he publicly proclaimed his visions of the Antichrist at a Franciscan general chapter meeting. In 1337, after ten years of study at Toulouse, Rupescissa returned to Aurillac, where he remained at the Franciscan cloister until his arrest in 1344. During his imprisonment, he committed his eschatological visions to parchment, producing at least five major treatises of apocalyptic prophecy. Rupescissa’s understanding of last things derived chiefly from the writings of the biblical exegete Joachim of Fiore (and his later Franciscan followers). Born in Calabria around 1135, Joachim became famous during his lifetime for his predictions, and his writings continued to find a large readership in the centuries after his death. Joachim left behind three major treatises—the Expositio in Apocalypsim, the Liber de concordia novi ac veteris testamenti, and the Liber psalterii decem chordarum—in which he claimed to understand the events of the past, present, and future through typological and historical “concordances” (concordiae) in scripture. Concordances were symbols or events in the Old and New Testaments that pointed to each other and ahead to John’s Apocalypse, in which Joachim believed the whole history of the Church was encapsulated. By noting these concordances, Joachim was able to establish patterns of twos, threes, and sevens that organized history into sequential and overlapping periods. Perhaps most important, Joachim divided all of history into three trinitarian “states” (status): the states of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Joachim predicted that during the third and final state, two new religious orders of “spiritual men” would form. Humans would undergo an apocalyptic clash with the Antichrist, after which they would receive divine illumination and widespread understanding of scriptural truth. They would consequently establish a peaceful and blissful society—a heaven of sorts on earth—that would last until the eschaton.

254 the matter of person

Rupescissa was a firm believer in the Joachite model of last things. He predicted that a number of apocalyptic disasters—including floods, plagues, famines, and wars—would reach Western Europe in the 1360s, less than a decade away. Through these hardships, he wrote, “the greatest part of the present perverse generation will be killed, so that the world will be renovated and the arrogant hardened [Christians] removed from it, so that the truth be brought back.” He identified Joachim’s spiritual men (whom he called “evangelical men”) with contemporary Franciscan radicals, and he predicted that they would be the chief opponents of the Antichrist. Rupescissa moreover expanded Joachim’s eschatological schema to enhance the importance of the millennium, the wondrous reign of Christ and the saints on earth (based on a reading of Apocalypse 20:4). He boldly argued—in defiance of the Church Fathers—that the millennium would last for a literal one thousand years, a period that he identified with the Joachite “third state” of perfection and peace. Humans who survived the Antichrist’s assaults would become the inhabitants of the new millennial society. In addition, martyrs who died in battle, Rupescissa wrote, “[would] live resurrected in their bodies and reign corporeally with Christ for one thousand years, which [would] be from the time of the death of the Antichrist until the advent of Gog near the end of the world.” This idea of the paradisiacal “third state” was crucial to Rupescissa’s thought and, consequently, to the structure of his alchemy. First, Rupescissa’s belief in the impending apocalyptic disasters prompted his alchemical study: he urged readers to use alchemical remedies to heal their wounds and fortify their strength against the Antichrist. Second, eschatological thought offered a particularly useful set of images with which to characterize alchemy and its effects. I shall examine just one of them—“human heaven”—for the remainder of this article. This term is of tremendous importance to Rupescissa’s work: it reveals his alchemy’s theoretical basis—the eschatological model that he used to understand chemical and biological processes—and it points to the genealogy of his quintessence theory.

quintessence as astronomical heaven Rupescissa devoted a lengthy manual, the Liber de consideratione quinte essentie omnium rerum (hereafter, De Quinta essentia), to the quintessence, a remedy that supposedly restored youth and prolonged life indefinitely. According to Rupescissa’s recipe, the quintessence was actually alcohol produced by multiple distillations of wine, a process that Rupescissa believed capable of removing the four earthly elements from the substance. In the alchemical text De quinta essentia, Rupescissa commonly refers to the quintessence as “human heaven.” He explains the expression:

“human heaven”: john of rupescissa 255

[Quintessence] confers incorruptibility and preserves from corruptibility, since if any bird or piece of flesh or fish is immersed in it, it will not be corrupted while it remains in it. Therefore, how much more will it preserve the animated and living flesh of our body from all corruption? This quintessence is the human heaven [caelum humanum] which the Highest created for the preservation of the four qualities of the human body, just as heaven is for the preservation of the whole universe. And I know for certain that Philosophers and medical doctors of our day do not know at all this quintessence and its truth and power. But with the help of God, I shall reveal to you below its magistery and I [shall] teach you this secret thing, the quintessence: it is the human heaven.

It is significant that Rupescissa uses the word caelum, because in doing so he draws together two important aspects of the quintessence, as embodied in caelum’s dual meaning. Caelum refers to heaven in two different senses: first, the heaven or sky that contains the incorruptible bodies of the superlunary world and, second, the heaven of theological import, the place or state of blessedness after mortal life. The first definition indicates Rupescissa’s understanding of the quintessence with regard to the four elements, the origin of its ability to prolong life. According to Rupescissa, the quintessence was equivalent to the “fifth element” of the celestial sphere, the substance that generated circular motion and perpetuated the existence of the superlunary world: [The quintessence] is situated with respect to the four qualities of which our body is made up just as heaven is situated with respect to the four elements. Philosophers have called heaven the fifth element with respect to the four elements because heaven is in itself incorruptible and immutable and does not receive alien impressions unless it is done by the command of God. Thus, this thing which we seek is [the same] with respect to the four qualities of our body: quintessence is made incorruptible in itself, not hot and dry like fire, nor wet and cold like water, nor hot and wet like air, nor cold and dry like earth. Instead, it is a fifth element, strong against all opposing things, and incorruptible like heaven, which when it is necessary, sometimes pours in a wet quality, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, and sometimes dry.

According to Aristotle’s cosmology in De caelo and Meteorologica, the heavens are composed of a substance that he called the “fifth body” or “ether,” and which later became known as the fifth element. Aristotle described the fifth element as being free from change or external influence; by generating circular motion, it sustained the celestial sphere’s eternality. The fifth element differed radically from materials composed of the four elements,

256 the matter of person

which were naturally subject to “generation” and “corruption”—the coming into being and passing away that constituted change. The fifth element supposedly maintained incorruptibility and immutability with respect to the four elements (earth, air, water, and fire), and it corrected cosmic imbalances by supplying a measure of any needed element. According to Rupescissa, the quintessence similarly preserved the human body by balancing its “complexion.” According to medieval medical theory, complexion was the combination of qualities (hot, wet, cold, and dry) that resulted from the mixture of the four elements in the body. Complexionary theory, popularized by the late antique physician Galen, held that most illness occurred because of an imbalance of qualities in the body: for instance, if a sick person suffered from excessive coldness, he or she needed an infusion of qualitative heat in order to restore balance. All corporeal things, including minerals, plants, and animals, had their own particular complexions and could be used therapeutically to correct imbalances in humans. A physician determined which quality was out of balance and to what degree, and then prescribed a substance of the opposite quality in the corresponding degree. A patient with a cold complexion therefore might be given a medicine made from an herb or mineral with a hot complexion. A sustained bodily equilibrium—an “equal” complexion, as it was called—was the goal, but physicians thought it to be virtually unattainable. The quintessence, as Rupescissa understood it, worked to correct qualitative imbalances because “when it is necessary, [the quintessence] sometimes pours in a wet quality, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, and sometimes dry.” The quintessence thus maintained the body’s equilibrium of qualities, counteracting both disease and the natural aging process. Although Rupescissa’s claims for the quintessence at first appear consistent with Aristotelian natural philosophy and Galenic medicine, they are actually quite revolutionary. Aristotle drew a sharp contrast between the realms of heaven and earth: according to his theory, earth is made from the four elements and thus subject to constant generation and corruption; the heavens are made from the fifth element and thus immortal and immutable. Like all terrestrial things, Aristotle argued, humans must inevitably pass away through aging and death. Following Aristotle, Galen likewise distinguished between celestial immortality and terrestrial mortality. He wrote that the deterioration of the body was inescapable; it could be slowed but not stopped. Although Aristotle and Galen dismissed the possibility of perpetual youth and health among humans, Rupescissa nevertheless used their theories in support of his quintessence. His genius was to interpret Aristotle and Galen in such a way that his conclusions flew in the face of received wisdom about the body and the cosmos. Rupescissa’s quintessence relied upon Galenic

“human heaven”: john of rupescissa 257

medicine, but it eschewed the traditional view of the body as composed of constantly fluctuating qualities that strove for—but never attained—perpetual balance. Instead, the quintessence promoted stasis in the body: it slowed or even stopped the natural aging process, the bodily cycles of generation and corruption, and the movements of the four humors. Similarly, according to Rupescissa’s analysis, the Aristotelian fifth element—and its drastic separation from the terrestrial world—no longer undermined the search for prolonged life and health, but actually furnished it with its theoretical basis. Like Aristotle’s fifth element, the quintessence—which was not composed of any of the four terrestrial elements—was naturally incorruptible and could spread its incorruptibility to anything that came into contact with it, including human bodies. According to this model, the quintessence transcended the imperfect processes of the terrestrial world by relying on the perfect processes of the celestial world. It allowed a piece of the immortal celestial sphere—a piece of perfected nature—to enter the mortal terrestrial sphere and confer its perfection onto humans. This medicine overturned Aristotelian-Galenic assumptions of the necessity of generation and corruption on earth by giving to humans a bit of the perfection and immortality of the superlunary sphere. Rupescissa appears to have been the first thinker to identify distilled alcohol with the Aristotelian fifth element, an equation that proved influential, judging from the body of distillation and quintessence literature that emerged over the next two centuries. Although earlier medical writers such as Arnald of Vilanova, Vitalis of Furno, and Taddeo Alderotti discussed medicinal alcohol, they did not identify it with a perfected, otherworldly element. For them, alcohol was merely aqua vite (water of life) or aqua ardens (burning water). Rupescissa’s connection of the quintessence to the fifth element is new and, as I shall argue, his use of the Deckname “heaven” to describe it is extremely important.

quintessence as theological heaven Scholars who have analyzed Rupescissa’s “heaven” have generally recognized it as a reference to Aristotle’s superlunary heaven and its role in cosmic balance. But they have not probed Rupescissa’s belief that the celestial world could penetrate the terrestrial world and fill it with immutable, quasiimmortal bodies. Why did Rupescissa think that the elements of two such incompatible realms could be combined? I would suggest that Rupescissa’s choice of the code name “human heaven” provides an answer. First, it is important to note that Rupescissa’s alchemy was not distinct

258 the matter of person

from his prophetic thought. Rupescissa begins his first alchemical text, the Liber lucis, by warning of the imminent arrival of the Antichrist and by asserting the usefulness of alchemy for combating apocalyptic disasters. His second alchemical work, De quinta essentia, is directed to “evangelical men” (viri evangelici), the same Franciscans whom he identifies in his prophetic tracts as the main opposition to the Antichrist. Rupescissa also makes reference to literal millennialism in his prologue to De quinta essentia, noting that there are “undoubtedly more than one thousand years to come before the end of time.” Such remarks make clear that millennial apocalypticism and the plight of the Christian community are central elements of Rupescissa’s alchemical project. Moreover, Rupescissa’s repeated references to quintessence as “heaven” reveal a link between, on the one hand, the medicinal benefits of quintessence in the present world and, on the other hand, the final incorruptibility that theologians thought happened only after death and resurrection. Through the quintessence, humans could attain an absolute balance of qualities, which would lead to the physical perfection normally associated with immortal, post-resurrection bodies. The evangelical men, the manufacturers of the quintessence, would thus gain the strength and health necessary to withstand apocalyptic tribulations. A stark contrast appears if we consider Rupescissa’s description of those who would not survive the apocalyptic crisis, the sinful humans for whom he predicted a particularly gory demise. According to Rupescissa’s account, the bodies of sinners would be assaulted by plagues, sliced into pieces by swords, and even eaten by apocalyptic attackers. In contrast, Rupescissa’s evangelical men would be completely untroubled by any threat of corruption, digestion, or bodily change during their preternaturally long lives. Rupescissa appeared to indicate that during the apocalyptic crisis, the rewards and punishments of the next world would occur here on earth and within time. The sinful would experience the bodily fragmentation of hell, while the evangelical men would be the picture of bodily integrity and incorruptibility, making an easy transition from this era into the earthly paradise of the third state. Did Rupescissa think that the body balanced by quintessence was the same as the resurrection body? We cannot be certain since he does not address the question explicitly. But it seems more than coincidence that Rupescissa devotes such attention to a substance that imparts incorruptibility and quasi-immortality to bodies at the same time that he predicts the millennium, the one-thousand-year-long reign of the saints on earth. For the natural philosopher and alchemist Roger Bacon (1214–1292), whose ideas influenced Rupescissa, images of the rejuvenated and quasi-immortal body were intrinsically connected to the resurrection of the flesh. Bacon argued

“human heaven”: john of rupescissa 259

in his Opus maius that the equal complexion achieved through alchemy was the same as the principle of immortality in the post-resurrection body: For this condition will exist in our bodies after the resurrection. For an equality of elements in those bodies excludes corruption forever. For this equality is the ultimate end of the natural matter in mixed bodies, because it is the noblest state, and therefore in it the appetite of matter would cease, and would desire nothing beyond.

Bacon here makes a startling claim for alchemy: through alchemical therapeutics, humans could obtain the state of equality, which was also the harmony and incorruptibility of the post-resurrection body, on earth and before the end of time. It is thus telling that Rupescissa chose to name the quintessence “heaven,” which denotes not just the Aristotelian fifth element but also the quintessence’s power to bring a key benefit of heaven—the perfect and immutable body—to human beings on earth before their death and resurrection. Quintessence, or “human heaven,” was the fifth element, but it was also heaven—the state of eternity, immutability, and complete fulfillment; generation and corruption have no place in such a state. In this code name we can see Rupescissa’s intent to join two seemingly incongruous and perhaps even oppositional models of heaven: the Aristotelian natural philosophical model and the Christian theological model. Rupescissa’s claims for the quintessence are understandable in the light of his adherence to the Joachite apocalyptic program. The Joachite model predicted that during the final state of history, the natural world of humanity and the supernatural world of divinity would meet: humans would live in an age of the Holy Spirit, an earthly paradise in which all would experience divine illumination and fully understand the mysteries of holy scripture. Rupescissa believed that this final age was near: he argued that a Joachite paradise would soon follow the apocalyptic disasters of the 1360s. Rupescissa’s alchemy thus parallels the apocalyptic third state, in which distinctions between the heavenly and the earthly worlds collapsed. According to Rupescissa, the alchemical knowledge needed to secure “human heaven”—quasiimmortal, seemingly post-resurrection bodies on earth—would be achieved in the context of the last days, as humans entered the third state of history and became filled with the Holy Spirit—also a “human heaven” on earth. “Human heaven” points to the bridge that Rupescissa imagined between the static perfection of the celestial world and the mutable corruption of the terrestrial world. According to Rupescissa, quintessence was found in nature, but it was not composed of any of the four natural elements; it was instead a piece of the divine, analogous in property and function to

260 the matter of person

heaven. It is also important to note that quintessence was not only “heaven” according to Rupescissa, it was “our” or “human” heaven. This use of the possessive reveals the critical role of humans in securing perfected bodies through alchemy. As evangelical men were expected to participate in the establishment of the third state, so alchemists were required to prepare and refine the quintessence in order to receive its benefits. Caelum humanum emphasizes the dichotomous nature of the quintessence, which brought together two seemingly distinct, and even incompatible, concepts—humanity and heaven—into one phrase. It denotes the quintessence’s creation by the paired force of humanity and divinity, and it reveals the quintessence’s power to draw together the perfect superlunary world and the imperfect sublunary world. The quintessence functions as a channel between the two, allowing aspects of heaven to enter earth. Rupescissa’s use of “heaven” as a code name is thus clearly more than a simple case of “mystical flavor.” Such language actually tells us a great deal about the formation of quintessence theory, and it indicates a deep interrelation of Rupescissa’s prophetic and scientific endeavors. The image of heaven in his writings suggests that he constructed his alchemy from the same eschatological narrative that underlies his prophecy. “Heaven” points to his hope to hasten the benefits normally experienced by humans after death, judgment, and even resurrection so that they could be experienced within time and on earth. Through the alchemical agent, a timeless, otherworldly perfection digested and purified the corruptible materials of the sublunary world. This heaven was strikingly similar to the heaven of the third state, which arose from the corrupt pre-apocalyptic age after a similar cleansing and purging, and which delivered the promise of heaven to humans before the general resurrection and the end of time. As I noted above, historians of science have in recent years tended to emphasize the practical, or “exoteric,” dimension of alchemy over its spiritual, or “esoteric,” function. This is a healthy response to claims by occult scholars (such as Mary Anne Atwood and Ethan Allen Hitchcock) and psychologists (such as Carl Jung) that alchemical images refer either to the spiritual journey of the practitioner or to the workings of an ahistorical “collective unconscious.” Such a correction is clearly necessary: Rupescissa gives every indication that he intends his readers to engage in actual chemical practices rather than in mere contemplation. Yet Rupescissa’s chief aim in creating the quintessence was doubtless spiritual. In his works the operative, material function of alchemy takes on a religious weight: alchemy provides for the physical needs of a Church on the brink of an unprecedented spiritual crisis. In the light of this, it is possible to emphasize the operative, practical nature

“human heaven”: john of rupescissa 261

of Rupescissa’s alchemy without losing sight of its foundation in religious concerns. Such a foundation suggests that medieval alchemy had a cultural and religious function that went beyond its role in metal transmutation and medical therapeutics. It provided an understanding of nature and the human body that both complemented and supported an eschatological reading of human history. This association probably worked to alchemy’s advantage as well: apocalyptic rhetoric imbued Rupescissa’s naturalist program with the weighty significance of last things—the culmination of all of human history. The dependence of Rupescissa’s alchemy upon apocalyptic ideas suggests that eschatology provided an important basis for medieval scientific notions of the human body and the natural world. Rupescissa’s apocalyptic alchemy also points to the need to take seriously the language that alchemical authors used to describe their subjects. Rather than dismissing religious language as being without particular meaning except inasmuch as Christian authors expressed themselves in Christian terms, scholars should consider such imagery more carefully. The coupling of ideas that prompted Rupescissa to imagine the quintessence as a “human heaven” had enormous consequences for the development of alchemical medicine, which became increasingly concerned with distillation technology and quintessence remedies in the centuries that followed Rupescissa’s career. It is thus important to examine the images and terms in his work, and to understand what role they played in the formation and development of his alchemical ideas. Rupescissa’s analogies give us insight into the multiple meanings that medieval authors—and modern historians—attach to theological and cosmological terms. Moreover, Rupescissa’s example shows those of us who study medieval naturalism the importance of analyzing different ways of telling within our subjects’ work. When we can better understand how medieval communities imagined the structure of their bodies and the universe around them, we can better see how the human imagination derives from the hopes and expectations of the societies in which they—and we—live.

   MAGIC, BODIES, UNIVERSITY MASTERS, AND THE INVENTION OF THE LATE MEDIEVAL WITCH Steven P. Marrone

T

he tale of women riding the skies at night in the train of a huntress or warrior queen reaches far back in the folk history of Europe. One of the earliest medieval references to it occurs in a collection of canons compiled in the early tenth century by Abbot Regino of Prüm, from which source it was quoted and cited until it achieved classic status in the version included by Master Gratian of Bologna in his twelfth-century Concordia discordantium canonum, or Decretum, as causa 26, question 5, canon 12, the notorious Canon Episcopi. A compilation of two texts, both probably originating in the ninth-century Carolingian world, Episcopi deals first with common sorcery and then with the story of the night-riders. About the latter it has the most to say: It is also not to be omitted that some wicked women, who have given themselves back to Satan and been seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess that, in the hours of night, they ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the goddess of pagans, and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of the night traverse great spaces of earth, and obey her commands as of their lady, and are summoned to her service on certain nights.

As an educated member of the clerical caste, the author (or perhaps authors) of this description of a surely familiar old-wives’ tale registers his revulsion at the perversity of such ideas but also his sober refusal to take the story at face value. Belief in the night-flights is, he explains, an ignorant acceptance of illusion, damnable in its implication of a divinelike power available to the demons who engender the misconception in the first place and

magic, bodies, universit y masters 263

dangerous for the contagion of impiety it invariably unleashes among simple folk: For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe this to be true, and so believing, wander from the right faith and return to the error of the pagans when they think that there is anything of divinity or power except the one God.

The truth is that no such night-rides occur, but instead demons raise a picture of them in the sleeping minds of their victims, who gullibly mistake image for reality. In the author’s words, “While the spirit alone endures this, the faithless mind thinks these things happen not in the spirit but in the body.” Moreover, since ignorance and misapprehension lie at the root of the error, exhortation and teaching provide the proper remedy. The priests in all their churches should preach with all insistence to the people that they may know this to be in every way false and that such phantasms are imposed on the minds of infidels and not by the divine but by the malignant spirit.

From the ninth century up through at least the twelfth, the learned attitude seen here in Episcopi persists unchanged. Although the stories of night-flight were apparently ineradicable among the populace, the clerical elite agreed that they were illusory. In his Policraticus, written in the mid1150s, the polymath John of Salisbury dredged up the same folk legends and interpreted them according to the same hermeneutics as had the author of Regino’s earlier text. The evil spirit, with God’s permission, inflicts the excesses of his malice on certain people in such a way that they suffer in the spirit things which they erroneously and wretchedly believe they experience in the flesh. It is in this sense that they claim that a noctiluca or Herodias or a lady-ruler of the night convokes nocturnal assemblies at which they feast and riot and carry out other rites.

He likewise put his finger upon precisely the same cause for persistence of the error: ignorance and gullibility. Who could be so blind as not to see in all this a pure manifestation of wickedness created by sporting demons? Indeed, this is obvious from the fact that it is only poor old women and the simpleminded kinds of men who enter into these beliefs.

264 the matter of person

Within three hundred years of John’s writing, however, the attitude of the educated elite in Western Europe had reversed. Stories of night-flight, previously held to be delusions imposed by demons upon the minds of unlettered commoners, now became believable. What were formerly taken by the learned as imaginary phenomena transpiring on a purely spiritual level came to be regarded as authentically material, involving bodies in real locomotion in a solidly corporeal world. A token of the change can be found in the claim, dropped almost as an aside by the inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Springer in their celebrated and papally endorsed treatise of 1487, the Malleus maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, that the “most powerful class of witches,” who among other acts of malefice kill and devour human children, also “can transport themselves from place to place through the air, either in body or in imagination.” As Norman Cohn pointed out in his pathbreaking Europe’s Inner Demons, the unqualified acceptance of folk accounts of transportation through the air at night had first appeared in educated circles in connection with trials of purported “Waldensian heretics” in the Alpine border regions of France and Switzerland. In a series of court procedures from the 1420s onward, testimony emerges, often under torture, of men but more often women flying through the night, just like the legendary followers of Diana but now at the instigation of the devil, frequently to attend meetings that he convoked. Yet in these instances, in contrast to those earlier occurrences associated with Regino, Gratian, or John of Salisbury, the testimony is regarded as literally true. The fifteenth-century clerical and judicial authorities are prepared to acknowledge the existence of a “Devil-worshipping, orgiastic, infanticidal sect” whose extraordinary activities of evildoing are made possible by bodily nocturnal flight. In Cohn’s words: “In earlier centuries that fantasy had been rejected by the educated, but it was a different matter now.” Cohn’s work has taught us to make much of this ideological revolution. In his opinion the shift was critical to the emergence of the complete and classical European stereotype of the witch and hence to the outbreak of the pan-European witch-hunt of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Again in Cohn’s words, “Before the great witch-hunt could begin, the idea of witchcraft had to undergo a . . . transformation: intellectuals had to persuade themselves that witches could fly.” To be more exact, Cohn held that the crucial transformation leading to the full-blown witch stereotype had two aspects, of which one was belief in bodily night-flight and the other was acceptance of the existence of collective allegiance to the devil and ministry to him in periodic convocations, both of which ideological ingredients completely crystallized only at the beginning of the fifteenth century. As he put it: “The fully developed stereotype of the witch, as someone who flew by

magic, bodies, universit y masters 265

night and attended sabbats, was first officially sanctioned by the Church not in the early fourteenth century but a full century later.” It is Cohn’s primary claim to historiographical novelty that he located the principal cause for the emergence of elite belief in the existence of witches’ convocations or sabbats in the dramatic expansion, particularly during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, of learned knowledge about and practice of ritual or ceremonial magic. Again according to Cohn: “One can observe how, over a period of generations, ritual magic and the struggle against ritual magic helped to produce the fantastic stereotype of the witch.” I am convinced by Cohn’s arguments that the appearance of and widespread recourse to ritual magic among Europe’s learned, often clerical elite served mightily to catalyze consolidation of the classic stereotype of the witch in the final centuries of the Middle Ages. My own work with philosophical texts of the thirteenth century has given me independent reason to believe that the increasing prominence of magic among the learned disciplines had a profound effect on attitudes about nature as well as “scientific” investigation in the scholastic period. It should not be surprising that new conceptions of “the natural” and “the scientific” would be attended by novel constructions of “the unnatural” and “the unscientific” or “counterfeit,” perhaps even productive of an exceptional paradigm of “witchcraft.” And recent episodes in American culture, as for example memory retrieval and scandals of child abuse, have taught me how easily intellectual fads among the erudite can be put to use in fomenting broader, often more sinister phenomena of social trauma and upheaval. But having followed Cohn thus far, I further suspect that there is a way the two ingredients of the ideological transformation to which he has pointed (belief in night-flight and acceptance of witches’ sabbats)—of which Cohn leaves the reversal of attitudes concerning night-flight virtually unexplained—can be understood as part of a single and quite general conceptual drift gathering momentum among the educated classes over the later Middle Ages and the early modern period. This larger intellectual development involves ideas about the interplay between body and spirit and about the boundaries between bodily and spiritual in happenings in the natural world. It is a phenomenon that almost begs to be explained in philosophical terms, though it has to do with deep-seated attitudes about body and spirit that do not require formulation in precise theoretical language. To Cohn’s credit, it is a conceptual development that almost certainly is connected to, if not driven by, the increased fascination on a more practical level with ritual magic. In order to demonstrate a tie between changing attitudes among the elite about body and spirit and the ideological transformations underpinning the

266 the matter of person

early modern witch craze, it is useful to take a historical glance at the principle parts of the classic stereotype of witchcraft that were in place by the early fifteenth century. For present purposes they can be reduced to four: the salience of magic and sorcery, the sizable role reserved for demons, the phenomenon of demon worship, and the reality of night-flight, often to sabbats. What we need to do is examine each of these conceptual components from the perspective of the European elite over the course of several centuries, looking specifically for indications of change that might help explain the successful coalescence of the full-blown stereotype itself. Of the four stereotype ingredients, demon worship, especially by a collective, has for some time attracted the greatest attention among professional historians. The paradigm notion of a group of social deviants worshiping an evil superhuman being, often in lascivious convocations, dates back at least to Roman antiquity. Early on it was applied by the Roman establishment in defaming emergent Christianity, but by the third and fourth centuries it had been taken up by mainstream Christians to denigrate the rites of those they deemed heretics, where the object of worship took standard form in the guise of the prince of demons, increasingly given the title of “devil.” Having lain dormant for centuries in the early Middle Ages, the paradigm was revived when the phenomenon of popular religious dissent, or heresy, reappeared on the European scene in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. It was a commonplace of twentieth-century historiography to say that this reburnishing of the notion of a devil-worshiping sect for employment as a weapon against widespread heresy marked the key step toward the witchhunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Without denying the importance of this episode in high-medieval religious history, Cohn made his singular contribution by insisting that the struggle of establishment against heretics did not feed directly into the witch-craze or immediately yield the full stereotype of the witch. Instead—and here lies the historiographical novelty Cohn has laid claim to—he argued with great persuasiveness that it was the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century ideological combat over ritual magic and the degree of danger it presented that ultimately staked out the stereotype’s foundations, most especially by positing the existence of a devil-worshiping cult, at first only ambiguously related to heresy but inherently linked, or at least linkable, to the witchcraft stereotype’s other main parts. There is no reason to rehearse Cohn’s argument here or reexamine his evidence. Both have been so well received as to constitute a fixture of current understanding of the rise of the witch-craze. Nor need we go over the trajectory of elite attitudes toward the reality of night-flight as represented in folk tales and common gossip. The point has already been made that these

magic, bodies, universit y masters 267

attitudes changed from skepticism to credulity between the twelfth and early fifteenth centuries. Already noted as well is the fact that Cohn leaves this transformation unexplained. I propose that the explanation be sought in the ideological history of the other two parts. The first to examine is the prominent role of demons. Demonic activity was taken for granted by both populace and elite in the antique world as well as in Europe of the Middle Ages. There should thus be no surprise that it was also a commonplace to associate demons with magical operations and with malefice as performed by witches under almost any construction of that protean term. Reference to the activity of demons is so pervasive in the written sources as to make the choice of historical evidence almost arbitrary. An early example of an educated cleric’s confidence in the power of demons, their nearly ubiquitous presence, and their penchant for evildoing comes in an anonymous seventh-century life of the great missionary to the Swiss-Germans, St. Gall. Some time after, in the silence of the night, Gall, the elect of God, was laying nets in the water, and lo! he heard the demon of the mountain top calling to his fellow who dwelt in the depths of the lake. The demon of the lake answered, “I am here”; he of the mountain returned, “Arise, come to my aid! Behold the aliens come, and thrust me from my temple. Come, come! help me to drive them from our lands.” The demon of the lake answered: “One of them is upon the lake, whom I could never harm. For I wished to break his nets, but see, I am vanquished and mourn. The sign of his prayer protects him always, and sleep never overcomes him.”

Six centuries later, the context has altered but the fundamental attitude toward demons and their position in the world has suffered little change. In his Dialogue of Miracles from the first half of the thirteenth century, the Cistercian prior Caesarius of Heisterbach recounts a story intended to exemplify the fearsome power, and reality, of demonic beings. The tale involves a doubting knight named Henry, a conjuring cleric called Philip, and the devil himself. One day at noon . . . Philip took the knight to a cross road, drew a circle round him with a sword, placed him within it . . . and then said: “If you put forth any of your limbs outside this circle before I come back, you will die, because you will immediately be dragged forth by the demons and torn in pieces”. . . . While [Henry] sat alone within the circle, lo! he saw coming against him floods of waters, . . . the howling of wind, and many other similar phantasms, with which the demons sought to terrify him. . . . Last of all, he

268 the matter of person

saw . . . a figure like a horrible human shadow higher than the tops of the trees, hastening towards him; and he felt at once that this was the devil, as indeed it was. . . . [A]t last [the devil] stretched out his arm towards the knight, as if intending to drag him out and carry him off, and so terrified him, that he fell backwards and cried out. Hearing his voice, Philip ran up, and at his coming the phantom immediately disappeared.

Demons, threats of evil deeds, the power of the adept to withstand demonic force, all seem to have remained relatively stable in the elite imagination over a long period of otherwise appreciable social evolution. Admittedly, a closer look at stories about demons would reveal modulations in the six hundred years spanned by the examples just produced. Yet for the purposes of the present inquiry such differences can be safely set aside. The reality of demons—whether spiritual or material is neither precisely clear nor even important for this particular component of the witchcraft stereotype—and their ever-imminent propensity to intervene to damaging effect was stock-in-trade of the elite ideological inventory and would remain so for at least another four centuries. On this score, there was no conceptual movement that would help account for the consolidation of the full-fledged stereotype or explain the descent toward the societal turbulence, even chaos, of the impending witch-craze. It remains, therefore, to scrutinize the record of the last of the four ingredients introduced above: magic and sorcery as imagined by the educated elite. Given what we have found so far among the other three components, any change discovered in this arena would naturally constitute a prime candidate for a causal role in the emergence of the stereotype of the witch. Since we are dealing with conceptual paradigms, it is not practice or active engagement so much as simply the attitude of educated Europeans toward magic and sorcery that is of interest. As will soon be clear, it makes sense on this occasion to divide our subject in two: the elite view of popular magic and sorcery—that attributed to or engaged in by the common people—and the elite view of magic and sorcery as practiced by the elite itself. To begin with, the learned view of magic and sorcery among the people. As a bench mark against which to measure change, there is no better source than the already mentioned Canon Episcopi. The first and shorter part of Episcopi, drawing as noted upon a different text of origin from that of the second and longer section quoted at the outset of this essay, deals precisely with popular magic. It reads as follows: Bishops and the officials and clergy of bishops must labor with all their strength so that the pernicious art of divining [ars sortilega] and sorcery

magic, bodies, universit y masters 269

[ars malefica], which was invented by the devil, is eradicated from their districts, and if they find a man or woman follower of this wicked sect to eject them foully disgraced from their parishes. . . . Those who have been subverted and are held captive by the devil [diabolus], leaving their creator, seek the aid of the devil. And so Holy Church must be cleansed of this pest.

Quite plainly the author takes popular magic seriously, believes that it exists and is practiced, feels that it is at least inspired by the devil, and holds it to be a problem soluble not by persuasion—as was the case with Episcopi’s second concern, stories of night-flight—but by banishment from the community. Nearly six hundred years later, Pope Innocent VIII, in his infamous bull Summis desiderantes of 1484, has little different to say about exactly the same topic. It has recently come to our ears, not without great pain to us, that . . . many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the catholic faith, give themselves over to devils [daemones] male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings, and by other abominable superstitions [superstitia] and sortileges [sortilegia], offences, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, the foals of animals, the products of the earth . . . as well as men and women, cattle and flocks and herds and animals of every kind . . . ; that they afflict and torture with dire pains and anguish, both internal and external, these men, women, cattle, flocks, herds, and animals.

Except for greater specificity on the subject matter, the fear of popular magic, the belief in its widespread practice, and the attribution of it to the instigation of devils or demons remain essentially unchanged. Indeed, the specific crimes Innocent lists—mostly having to do with failure of fertility or the advent of mental torments and disease—are just those traditionally associated with the “evildoing” that Latin phrases like ars sortilega or ars malefica had long been meant to evoke, what we would call in plain English “sorcery” and was perhaps best expressed in Innocent’s day by the term maleficium. Over all this time, therefore, the elite had scarcely modified its opinion of what the magic of the people was or how it came about. Even the exact role of demons—as cause, or instrument, or both—persisted, so far as can be inferred from the language alone, in ambiguity. All that was certain is that demons were somehow involved. A dramatically different picture emerges when we concern ourselves with the elite’s idea of magic and sorcery as present in its own culture, itself both learned and elite. Here the term to focus on is “magic” proper (ars magica,

270 the matter of person

magia), broader than preceding signifiers such as “divining,” “sorcery,” and especially “evildoing.” The fact is that most of what the elite would have identified as “magic” prevalent among the educated of the high and late Middle Ages was introduced into learned culture with the virtual rediscovery of the notion of “science” or scientific knowledge in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Much of this “rediscovery” was due to increased curiosity about and a surge in Latin translations of “scientific” texts from the Arabic and Hebrew traditions. It can be argued that this dependence on Arabic and Hebrew sources was nowhere greater than in fields of the new learning dealing with occult or magical lore. And in this literate, even erudite milieu, magic was often uncoupled from the negative connotations it carried as implicated in popular culture and given the value of more normative “scientific” disciplines as a gateway to knowledge of the workings of nature: the regular operations by which things happened, short of divine miracle, in the real world. Indeed, sometimes magic, in this elite-oriented sense, was raised to the apex of knowledge, considered the highest and most valuable of all the sciences. Daniel of Morley, an Englishman of the first half of the twelfth century who traveled to Spain in search of the wisdom of the Arabs, returning to England to disseminate his findings in Latin treatises, offers a perfect example of the latter frame of mind. In his Book on the Natures of Things Here Below and Up Above, Daniel not only defends “astrology,” for instance, but also proclaims its indispensability for the advancement of human arts. Those who deny the power and efficacy of the motions of the stars have the impudent folly to deprecate the teachings of a science before they have undertaken its study. Thus, some people hold astrology [astronomia] as hateful solely on the basis of its name. But if they were to look to its great dignity and utility, they would not belittle it, except perhaps out of envy.

That under the rubric of “astronomia” Daniel included most of what would be considered the learned “magical arts” is clear from what follows: The dignity of the [aforesaid] science indicates, as the wise [sapientes] have told us, that it consists of eight parts: the science of judgments [which is what we would think of as properly “astrology”], the science of medicine, the science of necromancy in accordance with physics, the science of agriculture, the science of illusions, the science of alchemy . . . , the science of images . . . , [and] the science of mirrors.

Not only was there nothing shameful or worrisome in all these fields of learning subsumable under “magic” as the term was commonly understood among the elite of Morley’s day, but they also all dealt with powers and op-

magic, bodies, universit y masters 271

erations as natural and impersonal as those investigated by an obviously benign science like physics, in no way implicating demons or any other evil forces or spirits. Even those in Daniel’s time who found learned magic alarming or dangerous did not doubt that, for all its power to undermine morality and lead people to fall prey to demonic seductions, it did not in every case involve recourse to causal mechanisms and practical operations that must be construed as dependent on demonic activity. Hugh of Saint Victor’s Didascalicon, written about 1120 as a guide to what would readily have been accepted among the literate elite as the “scientific” disciplines, devotes a short chapter at the end to what he designates explicitly as “magic” [magica]. Much like Daniel with “astrology,” Hugh lists magic’s parts. As generally accepted, [magic] embraces five sorts of evildoings [maleficia]: divination [mantice], vain mathematics [what we might associate generally with “astrology”], soothsaying [sortilegia], sorcery [malificia, this time more properly than before] and illusion [praestigia].

For the first two categories he details further subdivisions. Divination includes necromancy, geomancy, hydromancy, aeromancy, and pyromancy. Vain mathematics comprises entrails-reading [aruspicina], reading the flight of birds [which he calls augurium], and horoscopy, our “astrology” proper and which Hugh associates with the “magi” of old. Soothsaying he simply explains as the casting of lots. By “sorcery” he means the casting of spells, whose perpetrators he designates by the term malefici—by the fifteenth century the standard word for “witch”—and which he clearly believes require the cooperation of demons. Illusion is, as the name implies, delusion of the human senses by fantasy. All of these arts Hugh condemns. They are the source of every iniquity and malice and, as noted before, the corrupters of morals, for they draw people away from true religion, inclining them to follow demons. They impel their practitioners toward every sort of evil deed. Yet what characterizes them intrinsically or formally is not any particular connection to demonic agency—most of divination and vain mathematics can be accomplished without appeal to demons at all—but rather their perverse aversion to telling the truth. Indeed, what makes these arts most seductively alluring is their false pretense to advancing knowledge, their unworthy demand to be included under the rubric of philosophy. The primal sin of magic is a matter of cognition, strictly speaking an epistemological fault. Following upon this dissemination of falsehood among the truths of science, and thus only secondarily in play, are all the immoral and antireligious consequences entailing fellowship with demons.

272 the matter of person

By the early thirteenth century this view of the magic ensconced among the disciplines and practices of the elite as being to a great extent cognitive, erudite, and concerned with explaining the ways of the world was firmly entrenched in the nascent universities. An individual so adamantly opposed to evil instances of magical art—those entailing sorcery and consultation with demons—as the scholar, theologian, and eventual bishop of Paris, William of Auvergne, accepted as fact that a good deal of magic had to do with the innocent and often enormously utilitarian explanation of the operations of nature. According to William, the natural world contained as part of its regular constitution various “occult powers and forces.” Moreover, despite the fact that humans often feared the intrusion of these forces and associated them with demonic activity, they were in themselves entirely benign, inserted into things by the providence of the Creator. Knowledge of such forces and of the ways to tap into them to produce wondrous effects should technically be known as “natural magic” [magia naturalis, magica naturalis], which William took as “the eleventh subfield of natural science.” For William, the forces investigated in natural magic were as morally neutral as the propensity of heavy bodies to fall or the desire of human beings to learn. Ignorance alone led those who feared such a science to see in its operations “not the work of nature . . . but rather the power of some commanding spirit [natura quaepiam imperans]”—presumably a demon or the devil. And that conceptual mistake calumniously reconfigured a natural process and the natural science by which it was explained into a supernatural action of an intruding being submissive to a supernatural art. It was just this misapprehension in most Christian cultural circles that made it customary for accomplishments of natural magic to be denounced as evil [mala] and their practitioners labeled evildoers [malefici]. The well informed realized the error of such designations. “Natural magic” had nothing to do, for instance, with “necromancy,” an indubitably nefarious art. Those who practiced natural magic were, far from evildoers or malefici, rather the wisest of the wise, worthy of the honorable title “magus” in the noblest sense of the word. Yet as the thirteenth century progressed, so benevolent a view of at least part of magic came increasingly under attack. With it receded from the learned ideological mainstream the corresponding understanding of the operations of nature. The Franciscan master Roger Bacon spoke for the beleaguered, ultimately vanquished side among academicians in the 1260s. In his Opus maius, written to influence the opinion of Pope Clement IV, Bacon sang the praises of several learned disciplines that would have been considered by most of his educated contemporaries as magical, even though Bacon himself cautiously refrained from labeling them with that growingly

magic, bodies, universit y masters 273

suspect term. To his eyes, the most valuable among them were alchemy, the science of images (also seen above with Daniel of Morley), and what he called “experimental science.” The science of images is most relevant to our current concerns. Bacon’s résumé of the procedures of the user of images leaves no doubt about this field’s traditionally magical character: Since the primary business of the rational soul is the efficacious use of words fashioned with a [specific] intention, the astrologer [astronomus] can form words at chosen times that will possess an ineffable power.

What he has in mind are the spells and incantations of erudite practitioners of much of what fell under Cohn’s rubric of ritual magic, a field whose reach we know was expanding among university scholars in Bacon’s day. For Bacon, such verbal formulae, when rightly employed, were not only wonderfully effective and honorable but also operative in exactly the way an educated person should expect in view of the laws of nature. On this basis arose among the wise the use of characters [characteres] and incantations [carmina]. For characters are like images, and incantations are words produced by intention from the rational soul, receiving the power of the heavens at the very moment of their pronunciation.

Roger had as well an entirely naturalistic explanation for how the whole operation worked: Where the intention, desire, and potency of the rational soul, which is worthier than the stars, coincide with the power of the heavens, there is necessarily produced a word or other artifact [opus] with a miraculous power of altering the things of this world.

Incantations can have effects even in the concrete, bodily world by means of the same ambivalent forces, neither plainly spiritual nor plainly material, that William of Auvergne was happy to characterize as “occult.” Like William, Bacon insisted that despite the efforts of some to paint the “enchanters” he had in mind as evildoers, they were nothing of the sort. They constituted instead, as William had also believed, the wisest of the wise. Because such operations [by means of images] appear to the majority of scholars to lie above human intellect—since the throng, along with its teachers, is not given to works of wisdom—therefore hardly anyone dares to speak

274 the matter of person

of them in public. And those who know [how to do] these operations are immediately decried as magicians [magici], when in fact they are the wisest people of all [sapientissimi].

By Bacon’s time, we are beginning to appreciate with greater clarity, louder voices among the university-trained elite were not only challenging his praise of such “sciences” and those who put them into practice but also undermining the understanding of nature that allowed them so easily to be seen as benign. The Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas composed his Summa contra gentiles only slightly before Bacon turned out the Opus maius. His views there on magic, and especially on magic of the sort Bacon associated with images and incantations, were unrelentingly pejorative. Moreover he grounded his disparagement in a direct attack on the philosophical presuppositions that for over a century had led intellectuals like Bacon to think that something like his science of images was both possible and in itself morally neutral. To Aquinas, the beneficent vision of magic, especially incantatory magic, depended on a notion of the workings of the natural world he associated with what we would characterize as Arabic Neoplatonism, represented to his eyes most spectacularly by the eleventh-century thinker Ibn Sina, or Avicenna. It was Avicenna’s position that with regard to the production of effects, matter obeys the separate substances [such as angels or demons or planetary souls] more readily than any alternative natural agent. Hence he held that an effect among things here below often followed their [mere] apprehension by such a substance . . . without any bodily agent intervening. . . . For he thought that all substantial forms flow into things here below from a separate substance.

Thomas was convinced that Aristotle had long before shown how such a conception of nature was wrong: But what Avicenna held is not true, as Aristotle’s teaching [makes clear]. For Aristotle proves that the forms in matter do not come from separate forms [located, for instance, in the separate substances] but rather from forms that are [already] resident in matter.

According to Thomas’s understanding of natural phenomena, change among material things in the world here below arose not from some spiritual or im-

magic, bodies, universit y masters 275

material operation but only from a precedent material cause, or at least by means of a material instrument: Therefore a created spiritual substance [like an angel or demon or celestial soul] cannot on its own induce any form in bodily matter, as if the matter itself were obedient to it . . . , but only by means of the local motion of another body.

Practically speaking, the physics Thomas accepted as valid rendered absolutely impossible the type of action at a distance by means of words and celestial influences, but not via material or bodily agency, that Bacon touted. Aquinas was moreover entirely aware that this was the upshot of what he was setting forth: There have been those who say that the sort of works, marvelous to our eyes, that are done through the magical arts are not accomplished by spiritual substances [such as angels or demons] but [simply] by the power of the heavenly bodies.

Thomas would tolerate nothing of the kind. Indeed, he directly targeted the variety of science of images that Bacon endorsed, where words and celestial conditions themselves produced a material or bodily effect. Words are properly an act of a rational nature. Moreover, in the operations [of the sort associated with ritual magic] the perpetrators appear to be talking to other people and using rational arguments.

Thomas’s conclusion: “Thus it is not true that such [magical] effects are caused solely by means of the power of celestial bodies.” And since ritual magicians obviously performed their works without calling upon other human agents who would somehow have surreptitiously to produce the effects they evoked, then it must be invisible, spiritual beings to whom they appealed. Such beings, undetectable by sight, could easily execute the bodily manipulations required for the resultant incantatory productions. And because most of these works were either bad or harmful, the beings appealed to must be evil, or, in other words, demons. In the end, then, Thomas rejected the claims of the natural magicians because, to him, in the world of mainly bodily objects here below effects were either the result of the inanimate action of one body on another or caused by an operation typical of human acts, where a spirit—the human soul—

276 the matter of person

worked through its own obedient body or communicated to another spirit that could similarly intervene. Since incantatory magic bypassed the route of mechanical, inanimate bodily action, it had therefore to involve another animate operator, like a human spirit, in addition to the magician. Given the fact that magicians produced works no normal human could pretend to do, that operator must have been a higher agent, working by analogy to human acts. Demons filled the bill. Even more powerful than humans, they could deploy material instruments without themselves being seen. It is my view, hardly unique among historians, that the physics of Aquinas were symptomatic of an understanding of nature on its way to dominating the mainstream of science in his day. His attitudes toward magic were, of course, likewise in the ascendant. They were part of the dramatic reaction to ritual magic that Cohn, and now many others, has so vividly described. Both represented a significant change in the typical response of the elite to magic as practiced within its own ranks. I want to suggest that, in the long run, the same kind of physics could also have encouraged, or proved conducive to, acceptance of stories of night-flight as authentically material. A Thomas-like view of reality suggested that in the natural world most operations or transformations were accomplished by material objects moving in local motion so as to impinge directly upon one another, either mechanically or by virtue of their inherent form. All remaining operations were purely spiritual—or, we might say, mental—remaining within the sphere of the mind, except in cases where the spirit in question—most notably a human soul, an angel, or a demon—had the power to activate a body that could then be manipulated as an instrument of change. Such a vision seriously compromised the conception of nature previously regnant among the educated elite. It effectively canceled out an older view, still vivid in William of Auvergne, that accepted body but privileged immaterial act, done by means of occult and invisible forces operating at a distance outside the world of mind—that is, plainly among bodies—but without contact or any bodily intermediary. If such a proto-materialism was now the rule with regard to most activity in nature, then would it not make sense to endow significant events, phenomena of importance, with a material or bodily authenticity as well? The argument might historically have proceeded along the following lines. Magic required demonic intervention; therefore, all magicians and spellcasters had recourse to demons. So much had been argued by Thomas himself. If these magicians, or people like them, thought of themselves as cavorting with demons in the middle of the night, was it not then likely that they actually did so, and in the body, as would ultimately be required for ef-

magic, bodies, universit y masters 277

fective action, not merely in the mind? Acceptance of this conclusion was increasingly evident among the educated over the course of the fourteenth century. Finally, if such displays of demonic solidarity were said to occur in faraway places with dozens of attendees from all over the countryside, was it not reasonable to believe the testimony of participants who claimed to be transported bodily to them through the air at night? At a time when fear of witches was reaching fever pitch, was it not irresistible to translate the “moral reality” of spell-casting and demon worship into the “material reality” of night-flight to sabbats? I propose that in the end—by the fifteenth century—it was, given the ever more concrete, spatial, and materialist physics of late medieval university learning. Here then is anotherideological factor to be added to the mix when contemplating the historical evolution of the classic stereotype of the witch. It is interesting to note that a conceptual shift of the same sort does not seem to have taken place within the culture of the people. The somatization—more precisely a materialization or concretalization—increasingly adopted by the elite in explaining natural operations apparently did not affect opinion on the street. It is hard to say what the European peasantry of the tenth century made of the stories of night-flight singled out for condemnation by Regino of Prüm, except that they probably paid them great attention, as of course did Regino himself. But there is some evidence for what their counterparts in the sixteenth century made of corresponding tales of flying among witches in their own day. Carlo Ginzburg’s justly acclaimed Night Battles tells of inquisitorial confessions from Friuli in the 1570s where self-proclaimed benandanti went forth at night to engage in struggles ensuring agricultural fertility against the threat of witches. As a certain Moduco claimed, “I go with others to fight four times a year . . . at night; I go invisibly in spirit and the body remains behind . . . ; we [and the witches] fight each other.” Ginzburg makes it clear that the fact that the uneducated benandanti believed themselves to engage in their antiwitchery only in spirit did not mean that they took their activities to be any less real than what they did in the body by day. Their understanding of nature persisted in the sort of equality of spirit and body, even privileging of immaterial act, characteristic of the philosophy of nature among the literate elite before the transformations of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Causality could not for them be unambiguously divided between spiritual for the world of the mind and bodily for the rest of nature. And certainly reality or moral importance could not be tied more to one realm of instantiation than the other. In this respect, the “physics” of the sixteenth-century populace was remarkably different from,

278 the matter of person

maybe more archaic than, that of the elite. For the latter, as Ginzburg puts it, “dreams and fantasies” and “real events” now stood in ideological opposition. But this new ideology, which we can readily associate with our modern, secular common sense, was not yet embraced among the ordinary folk.

Afterword HISTORY IN THE COMIC MODE Rachel Fulton and Bruce Holsinger

W

hen peter the Venerable’s mother died in 1135, her son consoled himself with metaphor: the body of his mother was not, in truth, dead matter or flesh, but rather a living seed. As Peter explained in a letter to his grieving brothers, the body can revivify at the end of time only if it has already putrefied in death; like those of their mother’s, he assured them, “the seeds of [our] bodies” (cf. 1 Cor 15:37) would sprout and grow anew at the resurrection, their burials, like hers, having accomplished a veritable sowing of immortality. Peter had turned to the same biblical image much earlier in his career on the occasion of another change: the translation of the relics of St. Marcellus, possibly to a new reliquary or, more momentously, on the anniversary of their arrival at Cluny. In this instance, Peter warned his audience against the careless handling of the relics that might result from a misunderstanding of their nature as seeds of divine change: “You ought not to feel contempt for the bones of the present martyrs as if they were dry bones but should honor them now full of life as if they were in their future incorruption. . . . Flesh flowers from dryness and youth is remade from old age.” If only we can teach ourselves to see them as they truly are, Peter avowed, dry bones and withered skin will appear moist with the potential of renewal, and things which appear to our eyes dead or inert—withered remnants of a past seemingly gone forever—will come to life again in new combinations, giving us new stories to tell about both the past in which they once lived and the future to which their very existence aspires. There is consolation here for others than those who grieve. Dry bones are more than just bones; the sources—texts, images, artifacts, all the various

280 afterword: history in the comic mode

material remnants of the once-living world, including the physical relics of our human, animal, and vegetable predecessors in time—that we historians hope will tell us about the past are more than just fragments of corporeal presence. Viewed aright, they are promises of a past that may come to life again as stories, but only, as every generation must learn to its own pleasure and frustration, for those who are willing to open themselves to their potential as seeds by supplying them with the ground (attention) and the nutrients (efforts at understanding) that they need in order to grow. When Peter imagined fragments of dead bodies as they survive on earth—pieces of his mother’s already rotting corpse, the “equal parts” of Marcellus in his reliquary—he saw these fragments as the promise of a reassembled whole that he could comprehend in this lifetime only in parts. Inasmuch as we attempt to reconstruct the stories of which the all-toofragmentary textual, artistic, architectural, material, and bodily remains at our disposal were once a part, those of us who study past cultures work in the light of much the same promise. As for Peter and his brothers, so for us as historians and medievalists, the question that these fragmentary remains pose is a poignant one: how much of the original story or experience or, indeed, persons can be regenerated from the remnants of these past lives? Moreover, how can we be sure that the stories we tell reconstruct—if not accurately, then at the very least sympathetically—the historical unfolding of their lives as the dead themselves once experienced them? How can we be sure that the stories we tell are true; that it is our mother, our saint who has come to life again in the glorified flesh of the resurrection? Tragically speaking, we can’t. There is nothing in our methodological repertoire of source criticism, linguistic and statistical analysis, paleography, chronology, or prosopography to guarantee that anything we learn from our sources about the past is at best more than provisionally accurate even according to such “objective” criteria as names and dates. All of our arguments about motivation, coherence, and cause and effect, not to mention significance, are of necessity always hypotheses subject to continuous rethinking. If it is hard (as many of our contemporaries have recently suggested) to claim heroes anymore from the past, it is even harder to convince ourselves that the stories we have told are complete—the whole body of the past resurrected in glorified prose or image-rich poetry—never mind true in the sense of identical with their original unfoldings. In the face of this loss of confidence in the grandeur of their enterprise, many historians working in the past thirty years or so (medievalists among them) have taken to consoling themselves with various “turns.” And so, in roughly chronological but often overlapping order, the profession has taken its “quantitative” turn, its

afterword: history in the comic mode 281

“cultural” or “anthropological” turn, its “feminist” turn, its “linguistic” turn, its “postmodern” turn, its “postcolonial” turn, its second “cultural” turn. Reviewing the state of medieval historiography in North America toward the end of the twentieth century, Paul Freedman and Gabrielle Spiegel described this second cultural turn as in fact a “return to the grotesque” coincident upon a growing disillusion in American intellectual culture more generally with Enlightenment paradigms of modernity. In their view, the then-current interest in the alterity and irreducibility of the Middle Ages to modern categories of analysis (rationality, self-knowledge, state formation, contemporary relevance, optimism) was but one symptom of a greater cultural “desire for history and the recognition of its irreparable loss,” with the implication that this desire was somehow a bad thing, dependent as it must be on, in Eric Santer’s words, “the shattered fantasy of the (always already) lost organic society that has haunted the Western imagination.” And yet, the editors and authors of the present volume would contend, there is a more hopeful way to view this methodological and topical fragmentation of our profession: not as tragic, but as comic, and precisely because it is perspectival and partial. Rather than lamenting our limitations as scholars, we might allow ourselves instead to revel in the compromises, coincidences, and wild improbabilities of the past that we can in fact see, if all too provisionally, through our sources, while at the same enjoying the contingency and plurality of the approaches we bring to our understanding of the past. This is what we, following our teacher, Caroline Walker Bynum, call “history in the comic mode.” In her words, “a comic stance toward doing history is aware of contrivance, of risk. It always admits that we may be wrong.” By “telling a story that could be told in another way,” a comic approach to historical understanding—as opposed to the tragic mode, with its heroes, its cogent narratives, its inexorable unfoldings and conclusions—has as its goal “the pluralistic, not the total. It embraces the partial as partial.” The history of the fragment (or the seed) is not, then, a synecdochical history, for synecdoche implies that the part of itself may be taken for the whole with the whole as the desired end; nor is it fetishistic, for fetishism demands an all-consuming investment in a single fragment that results in blindness to other, integrally related fragments. The comic mode, by contrast, takes fragments qua fragments as its raison d’être, its motivating inspiration, and its methodological limit. As one of Bynum’s most comically poignant aphorisms has it, “Historians, like the fishes of the sea, regurgitate fragments.” These regurgitated fragments may or may not be particularly palatable: “the comic is not necessarily the pleasant, or at least it is the pleasant snatched from the horrible by artifice and with acute self-consciousness and

282 afterword: history in the comic mode

humility. In comedy, the happy ending is contrived.” Nor may these fragments, of themselves, seem at first to have relevance as answers to presentday concerns, whether within the academy or in the intellectual community at large. The key is to recognize even this opacity and artifice as part of the play in which we as historians engage, reading our sources as themselves contrivances, looking for the questions that they were intended by their makers to answer. If (to generalize wildly) the “new cultural history” of the 1980s and 1990s was taken up primarily with questions of representation and discourse and the “new cultural studies” of the 1990s with questions of domination or power, the question now might seem to be, what kinds of issues and questions should govern the practice of “history in the comic mode”? But this, in itself, would be a contrivance: questions through their very articulation suggest the form that their answers should take, as every scholastic master of the quaestio knew all too well. History in the comic mode challenges us as scholars (and storytellers) to recognize not only our endings, that is, our answers—carefully articulated on the basis of a proper weighting of the evidence in context, balanced against all the slippages and silences of the sources themselves—as constructions, but also our beginnings; the punch line is only funny, the answer is only satisfying, if we accept the premise of the joke. Again, this is not an insight peculiar to any one generation; comedy relies on audience as much as on the tellers for its intended effect, and nothing dates itself more quickly than the setup for our jokes. Embracing a comic mode of telling history involves of necessity more than simply an acknowledgment of the transience and inaccessibility of the past; it requires us to acknowledge our own transience, our mortality, as conveyers of that past. We, too, will become dry bones, our own stories seeds for the contrived retellings of the future. This, above all, is what “history in the comic mode” demands of its tellers: the recognition not only of the pastness of the past by which modern writers of history define their stance toward the past as scholars, but, moreover, the recurring contingency of our own stakes in the materials of our study. Again, this is not news, but it compels reiteration lest we lose sight of the reasons that the questions our generation has been asking matter so much to us to ask. It is hard not to think of the 1990s-style stand-up comic at this point, back to the brick wall, exposing the sources of his or her own narrative so as to make visible the very real stakes we all have in the stories we tell. Much as in observational comedy, there are, accordingly, no topics or subject matter peculiarly appropriate to “history in the comic mode.” Rather, there is an openness to speculation about both our motivations in taking up the questions that we have and the perspectives and methods we have chosen to answer them, always with the recognition that any stance we take

afterword: history in the comic mode 283

is necessarily of the moment and contrived. As with all comedy, such an openness involves risks—we cannot be sure of our audience’s response any more than we can of our answers—and yet, we would insist, to refuse to take these risks out of otherwise commendable concerns for objectivity or methodological applicability, never mind contemporary political urgency, is less a mark of serious scholarly rigor than it is a tragic refusal to join in the fun. The essays in this volume have taken advantage of this openness, asking their questions about the past not according to a set program of disciplinary perspectives (e.g., social, political, economic, cultural, doctrinal) or currently fashionable themes (e.g. memory, body, women, emotion, heresy, persecution, literacy), but rather with a consciousness of the inconsistencies and ironies embedded in even the purportedly most transparent of sources and concerns. The answers, appropriately, range widely across a spectrum of interests: from cognitive models for visionary experience to ideas of contamination through sin, from apocalyptic visions of a transformative future to longings for the perdurable treasures of Paradise, from figures of the body in growth and in pain to the psychology of economic growth underpinning the transformation of European society during the first three centuries of the “modern” period, from visions of community experienced by the saints in heaven to the back-biting gossip of Mediterranean-based merchants. What binds them together is their shared courage in the face of the fragmentary. Rather than lamenting that history as practiced at the beginning of the new millennium has no core—no coherent, guiding narrative; no consistent, “objective” perspective—these essays embrace diversity not as grotesque, but as potential. Much as Peter the Venerable reassured his brothers, they have been presented here in the conviction that although the stories of the past have died, it is not prurience or nostalgia that compels us to reconstruct them, but hope, if not for bodily resurrection per se, then, in Bynum’s words, for “the human determination to assert wholeness in the face of inevitable decay and fragmentation.” But what does it mean to write in hope rather than nostalgia or prurience? What does it mean to write “history in the comic mode”? In part, it is a willingness to acknowledge not only our contingency as storytellers, but also our models, not to mention acknowledging that we have had living models and not just a choice of methodological perspectives. It is in this spirit that we have brought together the essays in the present volume, our festschrift that, in this age without heroines or heroes (except, of course, for theoreticians), cannot speak its name. For all of us, it has long been impossible to distinguish between the effect that our teacher’s scholarship has had on our field and the effect that it has had on our own work. Indeed, for many of us

284 afterword: history in the comic mode

(as, we suspect, with many of our colleagues who were never directly her students), ever since we first identified ourselves as medievalists, “being a medievalist” has meant “being like Caroline.” There is, to be sure, not a small share of hubris in this identification, but if medieval Christians could be so bold as to strive to imitate Christ and his saints, surely it is permitted for students to want to imitate their teacher. The problem is, how? What exactly about Bynum’s work is it that we have wanted to imitate? As with all the best teachers, Bynum does not make imitation easy. Statements of methodology are few and far between in her work; it can often be very difficult to read between the lines to discern “how she did it” (and, yes, all of us have tried). Her clearest statement of method, perhaps, occurs in the introduction to Resurrection of the Body: “I assume, as I have done elsewhere in my work, that close analysis of specific images in the context of other images, of theological doctrine, and of religious and social practice, can guide us to the unspoken assumptions, especially the unspoken inconsistencies and conflicts, at the heart of people’s experience of the world.” As her students, we all remember what this means in practical terms: start with the text—or the image, or the statue, or the piece of music. As you study to interpret it, pay attention above all to the things that surprise you and then see how they compare with the things that you expect. Read while being conscious of the questions that first brought you to the source you are examining, but read openly enough that you allow the texts or images in question to surprise you, too. Watch for your own assumptions about what the artifact “should” say and test them always against what the artifact actually does say. In this way, you will come, slowly but surely, to a deeper understanding both of yourself and of the source, and so of your own ability to write about the source. All straightforward, one might say; no methodological surprises here. Except that this is not what medievalists who have not studied with Bynum directly tend typically to take from her work. We all know the list. Caroline Walker Bynum’s work has contributed, above all, to the history of women, particularly women’s religiosity and ascetic practices; it has helped to invent the so-called history of the body and shape our understanding of body “as central to religious expression and meaning.” It has taught us to think about bodies as symbols not only of difference, but also identity, and to see in body some of the power inherent in the late medieval devotion to Christ in his humanity. It has taught us (or so we have often been told) to take gender and body as primary lenses for understanding the strangeness and otherness of late medieval spirituality. Gender, women, bodies, death: it would seem from the historiographical surveys and conference presentations on her work that it is these themes above all that Bynum has taught us to think

afterword: history in the comic mode 285

harder about—not texts and our own presuppositions about texts, never mind the way in which our readings of these texts implicate us in a mutually reflexive process of understanding, the end of which can only ever be more questions about why we wanted to read the texts in the first place. Why the disparity? Have we, who have been her students, gotten it so terribly wrong when we insist that what our teacher taught us was not what topics were important and worthy of attention but rather (and far less sexy) how to think about questions and sources? What was it that attracted so many of us to her work to such an extent that we decided to become medievalists ourselves? Clearly, there was something compelling about her style or, as she herself has put it in the introduction to Fragmentation and Redemption, her “mode.” But, again, other than inviting us, as fellow medievalists, to come join in the methodological, polemical fun of contemporary historiographical debate, even here she gave us no agenda for future historical work, no list of “musts” or “hot topics” or “regrettable lacunae in previous work” or “new interpretive perspectives” for us to engage so as to be able to answer the questions troubling our age. Indeed, as the comically caustic title to one of her review essays hints, she has often been steadfastly resistant to crediting, let alone examining, her own considerable role as a “trend setter” across a number of disciplines in the humanities. Neither, however, does she anywhere suggest that it is our role as students of history to step outside our age so as to achieve some universally objective or even theoretical truth. Our questions, as much as our answers, are shaped by our own “unspoken assumptions . . . inconsistencies and conflicts” as much as were the images, doctrines, and practices of the people whose experiences we study. If bodies or identities or communities concern us, then we will ask questions about them and wonder what other people have thought about and done with their bodies, identities, and communities, whether or (more likely) not they would phrase their questions in precisely our terms. The point is that, whatever questions we ask, we can no more assume they are peculiarly ours (because we are “modern” or “secular” or “Western”) than we can expect past answers to make sense with respect to the querying categories most urgent to our day (e.g., “individuality,” “misogyny,” “dualism,” “gender-, class-, or race-consciousness,” “medieval”). And yet, or so those of us attempting along with Bynum to write “history in the comic mode” would insist, there is such thing as truth. Not universal, not unconditional, but neither simply conventional or relative; rather, as with the “seeds of our bodies,” the truth that we seek is unavoidably human, that is, shaped at once by our potential as a species and by the stories that we live and tell, more prosaically, by our bodies, minds, and spirits in interaction with the material, cognitive, social, and spiritual environments in which

286 afterword: history in the comic mode

we dwell. Again, perhaps no surprises here, except for the fact that this is not what historians working toward the turn of the present millennium have tended to expect themselves to do, i.e., to discover human, as opposed to culturally contingent and identity-specific, truths. Medievalists, particularly North American medievalists, have in this particularizing and boundarydrawing moment more often than not found themselves in something of a bind, studying a culture that is at once “us” (European, Judeo-Christian, urbanized, textually based, bureaucratically centralized, highly militarized) and “other” (European, Judeo-Christian, localized, image-based or orally driven, “feudal” or based on ties of personal loyalty, highly militarized). The irony in the parenthetical lists is unavoidable given our current historiographical position: are we “medievals” or “moderns”? Should we delight in medieval continuities with the modern world (universities and the intellectual traditions of scholasticism and logic; national identities and the development of the centralized state; ideas of natural law and citizenship, capitalism and commercial expansion; vernacular literatures and the production of print) or lament them (ideals of universal truth, justice, Church and Empire; apocalyptic narratives of judgment and vengeance; fundamental natural and moral lessons encoded in traditional canons of texts; enthusiasm and popular appeal as the basis for spiritual and political leadership)? Have we even drawn our boundary lines (medieval/modern; spiritual/secular; individualistic/community-oriented; body/mind; human/divine) in the right places? To all of which agonizing, those of us working in the comic mode would reply: so what if we have gotten our categories and questions right—or wrong? Surely this is part of the fun. The only real mistake is to imagine that, as scholars who study the past, we can ever fully, if indeed at all, abstract ourselves from the fray, either by virtue of the sobriety of our analytical take on our material or the seriousness with which we engage the injustices, contrivances, and inevitable blind spots of our own day. What this means metaphorically is that we are all part of the game; there is no space in which to stand from which it is safe to judge either ourselves or the follies and triumphs of the past, and yet nevertheless we must judge, because judgment too is part of the game. What this means historiographically is that we are all part of the story, even the parts that we do not like or wish we could find better explanations for or which, as scholars, we have agreed to bracket as incapable of explanation within the limits of our professional craft. For example, religion. Did medieval Christians really believe that their bodies, once buried in the earth and subject (with the significant exceptions of the Virgin Mary and certain of the saints) to the natural laws of decay, would return again to life one day reclothed in the very physical stuff in which they had lived on earth? To which question many historians, includ-

afterword: history in the comic mode 287

ing most historians of religion, would doubtless reply: it is not our business to ask questions about people’s interior beliefs; we can know only the outcome of their actions, e.g., in writing such-and-such a text or endowing such-and-such a chantry for the recitation of Masses and prayers for the dead. From this perspective, belief, except insofar as it issues in exterior expressions of word or deed, is irrelevant. For those who would still attempt to write about people’s interior convictions, assumptions, and conflicts without compromising their observational (i.e., secularized, scholarly, scientific) integrity, the standard tactic at this point is to take refuge in irony: write about people’s beliefs (say, in the resurrection of the dead or the incarnation of the Son of God) as if they actually held these beliefs, possibly for good or, at least, plausible reasons, but with the tacit assumption that we, the scholarly audience, do not, for if we did, we would no longer be a scholarly audience but rather a community of the faithful. From a comic perspective, such irony simply will not do, unless it is our purpose to make our historical subjects themselves figures of fun. Part of the reason we, her students, admire Bynum’s work so much and have taken it as our model is precisely her refusal of irony in her approach to the sources (which is not to say that the texts themselves do not contain their own ironies such that sometimes they may reveal things other than their authors would intend). Unlike many contemporary historians guided by the hermeneutics of suspicion to be inherently wary of the surface content or literal meaning of historical texts, Bynum has always refused to smirk at the past or to wink at the reader as if to say, “But we know this can’t really be true.” Instead, she has taught us to recognize at least implicitly (and, we would claim, more rigorously) that a hermeneutics of suspicion must always go hand-in-hand with what Paul Ricoeur has called a hermeneutics of the sacred: a fundamental trust and investment in what’s actually there, staring us in the eye, as an inextricable part of meaning and significance. Insofar as Bynum smiles when she reads, she does so with wonder, delighting in the differences among human beings that we cannot but help see when we look out on the world from our particular point of view, willing to be “shocked by the singularity of events” and thereby stimulated to search out an explanation for such events in all their astonishing particularity. It is herein—in wonder, amazement, puzzlement, and the yearning for understanding that all such confusion portends—that our hope for discerning truth ultimately lies. In her own words: “Every view of things that is not wonderful is false.” Scholarly irony about the things that make us smile is out of place here. It is not possible to wonder ironically, as if our response were somehow distinct from the objects to which we respond. This is a stance that has sometimes troubled readers of Bynum’s work,

288 afterword: history in the comic mode

particularly regarding her use of the pronoun “we” so as to collapse the rhetorical distance between herself and her audience as well as the sources to which her analysis is addressed. But who are “we” when we, the modern audience, read a medieval text? Who are “we” when we, historians and students, read our colleagues’ and teachers’ scholarly texts? Who are “we” as living human beings confronted by the promise made in many of the texts that we study as historians of the presence and overwhelming sweetness of God’s love? Surely, as one critical reader of Bynum’s work has contended, to take such a rhetorical position is to collapse irredeemably the “subject addressed” (e.g., medieval women in their devotion to the Eucharist) into the “addressing subject” (the historian as observer of particular past instances of devotion), such that it is no longer possible for the reader to distinguish between the “we” invoked by the medieval text (all human beings insofar as they identify themselves as Christian) and the “we” of the historian’s voice (ideally, critical and suspicious of all such claims to spiritual identification). But this is precisely Bynum’s point: the past may be absent or other—as Constantin Fasolt has recently put it in The Limits of History—but it is also ourselves. There is no past except insofar as we are alive to think about it. This for us (her students) is what always has seemed at root the stake for Bynum in beginning so many of her studies with a shock—Catherine of Siena cleansing an ulcerous wound by drinking the pus and comparing the taste to the sweetness of Christ’s own blood which she drank from his side; Augustine asserting the certainty of resurrection against not only digestion and excretion, but even cannibalism—and then bringing us (her readers) round step-by-careful-step to a realization of the enduring, because humanly vital, anxieties and desires at the core of beliefs and practices we might initially (want to) find shocking, if not actually condemn. Bynum has done this for us (and herself ) because she believes history matters: not because if we study history we may thereby assure ourselves that we are free of it (no longer “condemned to repeat it”), but because the more carefully we study both our sources and our own assumptions about those sources, the more clearly we see that our lives are ultimately not “other” from the past. The past is still very much with us, even as it shocks or comforts us to see that so much has changed. The point of writing history is not, therefore, somehow to cleanse ourselves, as it were, of the taint of the past—the humanist/Reformation/Enlightenment project of exposing the past as past and cordoning it off behind the fence of anachronism. Rather, it is to allow ourselves still to be touched by the past or, because we inevitably are, to recognize our entanglement with the past, its treasures, passions, mistakes, and ideals, as a part of what we already are. Bynum herself has put it best: “We are shapes with stories, always changing but always carrying traces of what we were before.”

afterword: history in the comic mode 289

Accordingly, our work as historians will never be finished or complete. There is “no There there” to be fully described once and for all, no symbols to be fully decoded such that we now “know” what medieval people believed, for example, about the body or women or food. We cannot write our histories and then let them rest. The questions we ask will always generate other questions. Comfort in understanding can and should generate discomfort, the only solution to which is to seek further comfort in study. This discomfort, again, should not be equated with the hermeneutic indeterminacy so beloved of 1990s postmodern criticism. Rather, it implies a sense of potency and growth—of paradox, ambiguity, and inconsistency as seeds of deeper understanding. Perhaps most important of all, and most pragmatically, we have learned from Bynum how to apply these ways of thinking about humanity, its stories, and its past, to the one category of historical analysis that most contemporary historians would prefer to cordon off as inaccessible to modern (i.e., secular, this-worldly, objective, social scientific) standards of explanation: religion. Bynum’s primary scholarly purpose—and the challenge her work has put to all of us—has been to seek out religiously grounded answers to religious questions, intellectually grounded answers to intellectual questions. This is not an easy stance to maintain while at the same time refusing irony and rhetorical distance from the past. More than simply an effort to empathize with the past, it is, as we have suggested, expressive of a willingness to allow the past in all its wonder to force questions upon us that we— post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment, postmodern, secular historians and scholars all—would like to think we have already answered and, therefore, can leave to the dead. Many of her students and auditors will recall hearing Bynum answer questions about her own work in this regard. Colleagues try to draw her into giving answers from the perspective of social, economic, or political institutions and circumstances, and she invariably responds, “Yes, context is important here—but it is not everything.” Social, economic, or political contexts in and of themselves cannot answer questions of religious and intellectual understanding and/or belief. Then what can? Stories, images, ambiguities, even contradictions. As Bynum has shown us over and over again, the best place to look for hints at answers to such questions will often be in the stories and images that we take for granted (food, body, death) and in the ones that we find troubling or repulsive (food, body, death). What is it that we can learn from these commonplace yet shocking stories and images? Wonderfully, we don’t always know until we ask them. Bynum in her more recent work has been particularly interested in what these images and stories can tell us about identity and change—how identity is even possible in the face of change, how change becomes part of our identity through story—but this is simply one moment in her own changing but

290 afterword: history in the comic mode

consistent story of paying careful attention to the sources. Questions that we ask are themselves grounded in our own inconsistencies and conflicts, the contradictory beliefs that we carry with us every day about our selves and our place in the world. Even our choice of topics to study carries with it this tension between what it is we want to know (say, about women’s devotion to the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages) and why we want to know it. Most historians recognize this reflexivity. But few, we avow, have been as courageous as Bynum in allowing themselves to believe simultaneously in the truth of their questions and the truth of the past in which they have turned for their answers. It helps here if we think not only of images and ideas, but also of stories. In Bynum’s own words: “Stories don’t give definitions. That is not how they work.” What they give us, rather, is possibility, seeds for further thought. This helps explain common reactions to reading or hearing Bynum’s work: not, “Oh, there is the answer,” but, “Oh, what happens next?!” And yet, we don’t and can’t know, because we ourselves are still in the story. And so we smile when we read and reread Bynum’s work—for we are never finished reading. Every time we read her books, as with a good story, we find things in them that we had not noticed before, images and questions that strike us anew. What first captivated many of us, both in medieval studies and in the scholarly community more generally, in Bynum’s work was her reading of the lives and writings of medieval women in Holy Feast and Holy Fast, in particular the way in which she showed them using their very exclusion from priestly authority as a path to self-definition as authorities. If, being women, they could not consecrate the host, they could by way of their very physical humanity claim authority even over the priests because it was they who as recipients of the host were able to detect whether the host had been consecrated appropriately. We find this a marvelous metaphor for the effect that Bynum’s deep thinking about the past has had on our own work: seeing through to a reality of transformation (or vice versa) when the exterior seems unchanged. Throughout her work, Bynum has taken images that we thought we knew and shown us how much they still concealed. And yet she has done this so well that in the end we, her readers, often feel that we should have been able to see the transformation (or its absence) all along because, clearly, it was already there. Or could we? Medieval communicants sometimes had the benefit of miracle (taste or vision) to reassure them that they had in fact received Christ’s body and blood from the hands of the priest. We as scholars must fall back on words: have we, in our ability to tell our own stories, been sufficiently transformed by our encounter with Bynum’s work to be able to speak in the comic mode

afterword: history in the comic mode 291

to which we would aspire? Only our readers can judge. Again, we may take courage from the comic: even if we feel we have only fragments at our disposal, nothing that would give us a comprehensive or transparent view on the past, we may still wonder at the potentialities for further storytelling such fragments contain, whether to frighten or delight or disgust. Our greatest hope, however, is that in our own storytelling we may occasionally make our teacher, our master storyteller, smile and so offer some return through our own work for the joy that she has given us through hers. Bones, gemstones, charters, saints’ lives, visions, statues, apocalyptic hopes and fears: such are the fragments on which the essays in this volume have depended in their admittedly partial, but hopefully comic retelling of the story of medieval person and the matter of community. Like good comedians, we are anxious to hear how our audience will respond. What kinds of seeds will these essays plant? Will our observations on the texts, images, objects, and events of five or eight hundred or a thousand years ago succeed in sparking recollections from our readers’ own study or experience such that the stories that we tell begin to take on life, if not on their own (for stories do not live without their tellers or audience), then by virtue of their connectedness to the stories and experiences that have come before and that now have the potential to follow because these stories have been told? Will our fragments—assembled from the accident of our own interests and our studies with Bynum yet united by their shared interest in person and community—reveal something greater than their sum as parts, either in the potential for new narratives of the events that we study or in the variety of perspectives that they would challenge us to explore? Will our readers be tempted to smile, whether at the wonder of new understanding or the stab of shared grief? The dead are gone, but they are also with us. This is the promise—and the agony—held out by the continuing presence of their bones. It is our burden as scholars of the past, but also as living human beings, to decide how to respond. Do we lament the fact that we have only fragments of potential loved ones or rejoice that we have even so much upon which to anchor our memories? More important, what kinds of stories do we hope such fragments can help us tell? Do we seek reassurance that not all has been lost or relief that we no longer need burden ourselves with others’ expectations for our own lives? Is our cause one of justice or empathy? Whose side are we on? Perhaps, after all, what our fragments reveal is not the inevitable or even desirable diversity of our human experience but its crushing commonality in the face of the dead. Do we find this commonality tragic or reassuring, mournful or comic? How do we know whether to laugh or to cry? Many of our medieval authors would suggest we do both: mourn both on our own

292 afterword: history in the comic mode

account and that of others for the suffering that it seems it is our human lot to endure, but smile in the recognition that we are not alone in the stories—joys and sorrows—that we bear. The bodily relics of the saints, as John Calvin would have it, may be nothing but meaningless parts once the living structure of the past has decayed, or, as Hugh of Oignies insisted by way of his artistic craft, they may be gemlike amalgamations of what has already been with what may still come to pass. The very materiality of their continuing existence encourages us in this process of imagination; if death does not wipe out even our bodies utterly, perhaps then some part of our storied identities will endure. To whom are we telling our stories? Manifestly, to the living and to those we hope will listen even after we are dead. But are we not, in part, like Peter the Venerable, writing also for the dead—our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on—in the hopes that just possibly they also may hear? This is perhaps the greatest agony, as Bernard of Clairvaux realized in preaching on the glory of the saintly, impassible dead (and as Anna Harrison reminds us in her essay): how can we be sure that their desire for our company is as great as our desire for theirs? To be alive is to be able to feel pain. This alone is cause for us to smile.

NOTES

introduction: medieval communities and the matter of person 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 98. See John Jeffries Martin, The Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, vol. 1: The Growth of Ties of Dependence, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 106. R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 221. A useful overview of this scholarship and a list of the most influential contributions to the topic may be found in the introduction to Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 1–3 and notes. The issue of identity still burns brightly as a theme in medieval studies; see, for example, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 1999), p. 112. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Foucault’s blurb appears on the dust jacket. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 43. For a subtle consideration of the relationship between Boswell and Foucault on acts and identities, see Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 28–34. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, esp. pp. 1–54; Judith Bennett, “ ‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (2000): 1–24. Wallace Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, cited in Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” chap. 3 of Jesus as Mother:

294! notes

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 82. Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” p. 85. Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” p. 85. David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. xiv–xv. Miri Rubin, “Small Groups: Identity and Solidarity in the Middle Ages,” in Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Jennifer Kermode (Wolfeboro Falls, N.H.: Sutton, 1991), p. 134; cited in Diane Watt, introduction to Medieval Women in Their Communities (Cardiff : University of Wales Press, 1997), p. 2. On the literary complexity of communities in relation to individual identity during the Ricardian and Lancastrian eras in England, see David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360–1430 (London: Routledge, 1988). Katherine L. French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 21. See Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

1. forgetting hathumoda: the afterlife of the first abbess of gandersheim 1.

2.

On November 29, 874; she was thirty-four years old. Agius’s connections to Corvey are well established, but those to Hathumoda’s family are still open to question; he has been identified variously as either her brother or her uncle. See Franz Brunhölzl, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, vol. 1: Von Cassiodor bis zum Ausklang der karolingischen Erneuerung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1975), p. 386; and Wilhelm Wattenbach and Wilhelm Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, Vorzeit und Karolinger, vol. 6: Die Karolinger vom Vertrag von Verdun bis zum Herrschaftsantritt der Herrscher aus dem sächsischen Hause, ed. Heinz Löwe (Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1990), pp. 872–873. Agius of Corvey, Vita et obitus Hathumodae and Dialogus, ed. G. H. Pertz (MGH Scriptores [SS], 4) (Hannover: Hahn, 1841), chap. 1, p. 166, ll. 39–40: “eam corporaliter intueri et habere non potestis, in vita quandam eius imaginem teneatis, et in exemplis et actibus eius ipsam vos habere putetis.” Ludwig Traube reedited the Dialogus in MGH Poetae latini aevi Carolini, vol. 3 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1896), pp. 369–388. The date of composition is from Wattenbach and Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, pp. 873–874. The glowing praise for the Vita is from Brunhölzl, Geschichte, p. 387; cf. Karl Strecker, “Agius von Korvey,” Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters, Verfasserlexikon, 1st ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1933), pp. 18–23, for some less positive assessments by a previous generation of scholars. The title Pertz chose acknowledges the fact that, while every saint’s life has a death scene, Agius devoted almost twothirds of his account to Hathumoda’s death. The best discussions of the Vita are by Peter von Moos, Consolatio: Studien zur mittellateinischen Trostliteratur über den tod und zum Problem der christlichen Trauer, 4 vols. (Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften 3) (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971–1972), 3:147–149; Walter Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter, vol. 3: Karolingische Biographie, 750–920 n. Chr. (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1991), pp. 351–356; Julia M. H. Smith, “The Problem of Female Sanctity in Carolingian Europe, c. 780–920,” Past and Present 146 (February 1995): 3–37; Carolyn Edwards, “Dynastic Sanctity in Two Early Medieval Women’s

notes 295!

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Lives,” in Medieval Family Roles, ed. Cathy Jorgensen Itnyre (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 2–19; Suzanne F. Wemple, “Late Ninth-Century Saints Hathumoda and Liutberga,” in The Joy of Learning and the Love of God: Essays in Honor of Jean Leclercq, ed. E. Rozanne Elder (Cistercian Studies Series 160) (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1995), pp. 33–47, although it contains a number of errors. There are a couple of nineteenth-century German translations of the life, but the dialogue still awaits translation into any modern language, as far as I know. Although scholars usually consider them separately, Strecker (“Agius,” p. 21) long ago pointed out that they comprise a single literary work. I am preparing translations of both, along with the contemporary Vita Liutbirgae, for the Catholic University of America Press series “Medieval Texts in Translation.” Hans Goetting (“Die Anfänge der Reichstifts Gandersheim,” Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch 31 [1950]: 5–52) was the first to realize that the community had resided at Brunshausen for the first twenty-nine years of its existence (852–881). See now also Maria Keibel-Maier, “Bemerkungen zur Baugeschichte der ehemaligen Klosterkirche in Brunshausen,” Niedersächsische Denkmalpflege 12 (1987): 79–97. Goetting went on to write definitive volumes on Gandersheim and its related foundations: Das reichsunmittelbare Kanonissenstift Gandersheim (Germania Sacra, n.s. 7, Das Bistum Hildesheim 1) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973), and Das Benediktiner(innen)kloster Brunshausen, etc. (Germania Sacra, n.s. 8, Das Bistum Hildesheim 2) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974). Liudolf and his wife, Oda, had acquired relics of the pope-saints Anastasius and Innocent for just this purpose in 844–847. On the dedication of the church, see Goetting, Reichsunmittelbare Kanonissenstift, pp. 20, 84; and Goetting, “Die Anfänge des Bistums Hildesheim und Bernwards Vorgänger,” in Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter der Ottonen, ed. Michael Brandt and Anne Eggebrecht, 2 vols. (Hildesheim: Bernward Verlag, 1993), 1:265. Karl Leyser, in Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 4, called relic translations “the most dynamic element in the Christian cult of the day.” The central role of cloistered aristocratic women in the commemoration of the dead and the construction of sanctity in tenth-century Saxony was one of the distinguishing features of the age, especially at family foundations (Familienklöster) like Gandersheim—and Liudolfing women led the community for the first sixty-seven years of its existence. Hathumoda was abbess from 852 to 874; Gerberga until her death in 896; Christina until hers in 919. Oda joined the community sometime after Hathumoda’s death and died in 912. On women, sanctity, and the dead in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, see Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 72–73; Gerd Althoff, Adels- und Königsfamilien im Spiegel ihrer Memorialüberlieferung: Studien zum Totengedenken der Billunger und Ottonen, (Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften 47) (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1984), pp. 166–179; Patrick Corbet, Les saints ottoniens: Sainteté dynastique, sainteté royale et sainteté féminine autour de l’an Mil (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1986); Gerd Althoff, “Gandersheim und Quedlinburg: Ottonische Frauenklöster als Herrschafts und Überlieferungszentren,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 25 (1991): 123–144; and Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 48–80. On the two queen-saints, see also Sean Gilsdorf, Queenship and Sanctity: The Lives of Mathilda and the Epitaph of Adelheid (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004).

296! notes 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

See, besides Goetting, Reichsunmittelbare Kanonissenstift, Lina Eckenstein, Woman Under Monasticism: Chapters on Saint-Lore and Convent Life Between a.d. 500 and a.d. 1500 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), pp. 143–183; Anne Lyon Haight, ed., Hroswitha of Gandersheim: Her Life, Times, and Works, and a Comprehensive Bibliography (New York: Hroswitha Club, 1965); and Katharine Wilson, ed., Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Rara Avis in Saxonia? (Medieval and Renaissance Monograph 7) (Ann Arbor: MARC, 1987). Thirteen of the eighteen saints in Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, ed. and trans. Jo Ann McNamara and John E. Halborg with E. Gordon Whatley (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), were abbesses. See, in particular, the case of the Pippinid abbess Gertrude of Nivelles, whose sanctity played a significant role in the rise of the Carolingians (pp. 220–234). A fact noted by Corbet (Saints ottoniens, p. 45). Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek Msc. Hist. 141 (olim E.III.9); see Friedrich Leitschuh, Katalog der Handschriften der königlichen Bibliothek zu Bamberg 1.2 (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1966), pp. 231–234. Because Hathumoda’s death fell at the end of November, Agius’s works are not in the completed volumes of the Acta Sanctorum. Pertz’s edition (above, note 2) is based directly on Lang’s Bamberg manuscript, which does not give a title, introducing the text with a simple “Sancta Hathumoda,” but includes an illustration of her on fol. 228v. The edition in Migne, Patrologia latina 137:1170–1196, is a reprint of an eighteenth-century edition based on a seventeenth-century copy of the Bamberg ms. Meta Harrsen, “Lost Manuscripts,” in Haight, Hroswitha of Gandersheim, p. 54. Lost with it was the only known copy of Hrotsvit’s poem on the translation of the relics of Anastasius and Innocent, which Bodo noted but did not transcribe (ibid.). Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, “Primordia coenobii Gandesheimensis,” in Hrotsvithae opera, ed. Helene Homeyer (Munich: Verlag Friedrich Schöningh, 1970), pp. 439–472; trans. Mary Bernadine Bregman, in Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology, ed. Thomas Head (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 237–254. See also Corbet, Saints ottoniens, p. 46, and below. Goetting (Reichsunmittelbare Kanonissenstift, p. 290) notes that a late Gandersheim necrology lists her anniversary, incorrectly, as November 28. He does not think that the necrology of Möllenbeck commemorates her. The necrology of St. Emmeram in Regensburg, which lists a “Hadamot abb(atiss)a” under October 29, however, may; see Das Martyrolog-Necrolog von St. Emmeram zu Regensburg, ed. Eckhard Friese, Dieter Geuenich, and Joachim Wollasch (MGH Libri memoriales et necrologia, n.s., 3) (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1986). Hathumoda gets brief mentions in the chronicle of the Bishops of Hildesheim (MGH SS 7.851) and in the lives of bishops Bernward (993–1022; MGH SS 4.763) and Godehard (1022–1038; MGH SS 11.180). See Gerd Althoff, “Unerkannte Zeugnisse vom Totengedenken der Liudolfinger,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 32 (1976): 370–404; Althoff, Adelsund Königsfamilien, p. 159; and below. On Corvey and Herford, see Josef Semmler, “Corvey und Herford in der benediktinischen Reformbewegung des 9. Jahrhunderts,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 4 (1970): 289–319. Vita, chap. 5, p. 168. The question of whether the women were nuns or canonesses has been hotly debated. Semmler (“Corvey and Herford,” pp. 314–315, 319) argued vigorously that they were Benedictine nuns, and Agius certainly wanted to present them as such, but Goetting (Reichsunmittelbare Kanonissenstift, p. 147) argued that they were canonesses from the start and, more recently, Thomas Schilp (Norm und Wirklichkeit

notes 297!

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

religiöser Frauengemeinschaften im Frühmittelalter: Die Institutio sanctimonialium Aquisgranensis des Jahres 816 und die Problematik der Verfassung von Frauenkommunitäten [Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 137; Studien zur Germania Sacra 21] [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1998]), that there was no clear distinction between the two forms of women’s communities in the ninth century. Vita, chap. 6. p. 168. Agius quotes directly from the Regula Benedicti four times in this passage, in what is a striking case of the direct use of the RB to describe a medieval abbess; see my forthcoming translation (above, note 2). Vita, chap. 7, p. 169: “Nemo eam iratam, nemo turbulentam, nemo multum et inhoneste redentem vidit.” Cf. Sulpice Sévère, Vie de Saint Martin, ed. Jacques Fontaine, 3 vols. (Sources Chrétiennes 133–135) (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1967), 1:314 (ch. 27): “Nemo umquam illum uidit iratum, nemo commotum, nemo maerentem, nemo ridentem.” Vita, chap. 10, p. 170, ll. 9–13: “quanta eis cura astiterit, quanta sollicitudine inter singularum lectos discurrerit, quanta suavitate singulas allocuta fuerit, quam miris et diversis obsequiis molestiam earum corporalem levigare temptaverit. . . . acsi iam sancta et Deo dilecta femina sciret, quantocius se ex hoc seculo esse migraturam.” The cause was an epidemic that, according to the Annals of Fulda, trans. Timothy Reuter (Manchester Medieval Sources) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 75, “raged through the whole of Gaul and Germany” that year. Foreknowledge of one’s own death is a hagiographical topos of great antiquity; see Pierre Boglioni, “La scène de la mort dans les premières hagiographies latines,” Essais sur la mort: Travaux d’un séminaire de recherche sur la mort, Faculté de théologie, Université de Montréal, ed. Guy Couturier, André Charron, and Guy Durand (Montreal: Fides, 1985), pp. 269–297. Vita, chap. 10, p. 170, ll. 16–17; and see above, note 4. She was apparently viewing the construction site at Gandersheim from the air. See above, note 3. Vita, chap. 12, p. 170, ll. 45–49; it was psalm 131, although the text identifies it as psalm 140, presumably because of a scribal error (cxxxx instead of cxxxi) at some point in the early transmission of the text. Lang’s Ms., fol. 231r (above, note 11) and the editions that reproduce it have “psalmum centesimum quadragesimum.” Vita, chaps. 13–14, p. 171. On Hathumoda and Martin, see Smith, “Problem of Female Sanctity,” pp. 14–16, and Walter Berschin, “Die Schönheit des Heiligen,” in Schöne Frauen, schöne Männer: Literarische Schönheitsbeschreibungen, ed. Theo Stemmler (Mannheim: Forschungsstelle für europäische Lyrik des Mittelalters an der Universität Mannheim, 1998), pp. 69–76. Vita, chaps. 17–23, pp. 172–174. Vita, chap. 24, p. 174. Vita, chaps. 25–28, pp. 174–175. The best discussion of the dialogue is by Peter von Moos (Consolatio 3:149–184). Dialogus, l. 2. Dialogus, ll. 187–366. Louis the Younger, son of Louis the German, grandson of Louis the Pious, and greatgrandson of Charlemagne, granted the house a royal charter in early 877. Dialogus, ll. 437–440. Dialogus, ll. 475–514; quotation from lines 485 and 514: “Tu iam cum Domino devicto hoste triumphas. . . . Nos[que] tuis dignis, cara, iuva meritis.” Dialogus, ll. 581–590 and 607–628.

298! notes 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

Dialogus, ll. 652–674. Dialogus, ll. 677–718. See above, note 1. The dialogue has sometimes been regarded as a lamentation (epicedium, Totenklang), but von Moos has placed it squarely within a long and venerable tradition of consolatory writing. Because the deceased Hathumoda is so central to the poem, von Moos concludes that it sits on the border between the Carolingian and Ottonian periods; Consolatio 3.185. Berschin (Biographie und Epochenstil 3:356) makes an even stronger claim for the Vita, saying that it constituted “a new page in the history of biography.” Vita, chap. 11, p. 170, l. 14; Dialogus, ll. 433–434. On this, cf. Semmler, “Corvey und Herford,” and Schilp, Norm und Wirklichkeit, pp. 146–147. Vita sancti Adalhardi and Ecloga, trans. Allen Cabaniss, in Charlemagne’s Cousins: Contemporary Lives of Adalard and Wala (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1967), pp. 25–82. Schilp (Norm und Wirklichkeit, pp. 213–216) concluded that the canons of 816 were left deliberately ambiguous as a compromise between the wishes of the aristocracy and those of the religious reformers. Corvey was not the only Benedictine house that hoped to ally itself with Gandersheim. Brunshausen was affiliated, through Hathumoda’s family, with Fulda, not Corvey, and Abbot Rudolf of Fulda dedicated a version of his life of Abbess Leoba, a close associate of St. Boniface, to Hathumoda. Rudolf clearly hoped to influence Hathumoda, but, given her time at Herford, with its connections to her mother’s family, she probably favored Corvey. See Vita Leobae, ed. G. Waitz (MGH SS 15.118–131); trans. C. H. Talbot, in Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Tom Head (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 255–277; see also Marta Cristiani, “La sainteté feminine du haut moyen âge: Biographie et valeurs,” in Les fonctions des saints dans le monde occidental (iii e–xiii e siècle) (Collection de l’École française de Rome 149) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1991), pp. 432–433. On Rudolf ’s dedication to Hathumoda, see Goetting, Reichsunmittelbare Kanonissenstift, pp. 289–290. Smith, “Problem of Female Sanctity.” David Appleby, in “Spiritual Progress in Carolingian Saxony: A Case from NinthCentury Corvey,” Catholic Historical Review 82 (1996): 600–613, sees this as a sign of the maturation of Saxon Christianity, but that depends on the meaning of “mature.” The argument of Hedwig Röckelein, in “Miracle Collections of Carolingian Saxony: Literary Tradition Versus Original Creation,” Hagiographica 3 (1996): 267–275, that “Saxon hagiography did not follow the Irish-British tradition which is characterised by a renouncement of miracles” (p. 273), misrepresents both insular and Saxon hagiography, especially texts, like those by Agius, associated with Corvey or Herford. In January 877. See Goetting, Reichsunmittelbare Kanonissenstift, pp. 83, 217, and “Gandersheim,” Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastique, vol. 19 (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1981), col. 1068. This charter is another example of how such agreements always involved trade-offs between the various parties; cf. note 42 above. Goetting, Benediktiner(innen)kloster Brunshausen, pp. 102–103. Smith, “Problem of Female Sanctity.” Corbet, Saints ottoniens, pp. 142–145; Julia Barone, “Une hagiographie sans miracles: Observations en marge de quelques vies de x e siècle,” in Les fonctions des saints, pp. 445–446. Here I disagree with Edwards (“Dynastic Sanctity,” pp. 6–8), who claims that Agius

notes 299!

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

was not interested in Hathumoda’s worldly family, an argument that takes no account of the Dialogus and ignores counterevidence from the Vita. Vita, chaps. 16–17, p. 172. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Christopher A. (Drew) Jones for his help correcting my translation of Agius’ Vita, which I completed while we were both in residence at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in early 1999; I would also like to thank the Institute and the School for their support during the initial stages of this project. Goetting, Reichsunmittelbare Kanonissenstift, pp. 216–218, and “Gandersheim,” cols. 1068–1069. Otto appointed his niece, Gerberga, abbess in 959. See Gilsdorf, Queenship and Sanctity, pp. 15–17. Corbet, Saints ottoniens, pp. 114–119. Hrotsvit, “Primordia,” pp. 459–460, ll. 241–279. Hrotsvit, “Primordia,” p. 462, ll. 315–317: “Interea Christi virgo felix Hathumoda, cum gregis undenos curam bis gesserat annos, ocius in Christo moriens transivit ad astra.” See Hans Goettting, “Das Überlieferungsschicksal von Hrotsvits Primordia,” in Festschrift für Hermann Heimpel zum 70. Geburtstag (Veröffentlichungen des MaxPlanck-Instituts für Geschichte 36), vol. 3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1972), pp. 61–107; and Thomas Head, “Hrotsvit’s Primordia and the Historical Traditions of Monastic Communities,” Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Rara Avis in Saxonia?, pp. 143–164. I wonder if, by connecting Gandersheim through Hathumoda’s maternal grandmother to a man named Billung (Hrotsvit, “Primordia,” p. 451, l. 23), she wasn’t also matching Mathilde’s claim to be a descendant of Widukind, the great Saxon leader of Charlemagne’s time, with one of her own; cf. Althoff, Adels- und Königsfamilien, pp. 64–104. Althoff, “Unerkannte Zeugnisse,” pp. 400–404. Ibid.; and Althoff, Adels- und Königsfamilien, pp. 156–163. Gilsdorf, Queenship and Sanctity, pp. 86, 125. See also the critical comments on Althoff ’s argument by Johannes Fried, “Zur Methode der Nekrologauswertung: Bemerkungen zu einem neuen Buch,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 135 (1987): 87–99, to the effect that the entry in the Merseburg necrology did not reflect Ottonian family practice but only the private memorials of the old queen.Mathilda may have made some other excisions as well. Her daughter Gerberga’s two husbands, Duke Giselbert of Lotharingia and the Carolingian king Louis IV, as well as the husband of her other daughter, Hadwig, Duke Hugh of France, the father of Hugh Capet, all of whom came into conflict with Otto I, are also missing from the Merseburg necrology; Althoff, Adels- und Königsfamilien, pp. 159–163. Ironically, they were no more successful than Agius had been at garnering their heroine a permanent cult, probably for similar reasons. As Corbet (Saints ottoniens, pp. 249–250) notes, her sanctity did not survive the passing of power to the Salian dynasty in 1024.

2. “if one member glories . . .”: communit y bet ween the living and the saintly dead 1.

Bernard of Clairvaux, sermo primus, sermo secundus, sermo tertius, sermo quartus, sermo quintus, in festivitate omnium sanctorum, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, 8 vols. in 9, ed. Jean Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–1977) (hereafter OS in SBO). Abbreviations for the works of Bernard of Clairvaux are taken from Cistercian Studies Quarterly Style Sheet, 3rd ed., Marsha L.

300! notes

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

Dutton and M. John-Baptist Porter (Vina, Cal.: Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux, 1994). OS 2.1.2–8 in SBO 5:343. Liber de gradibus humilitatis et superbiae, in SBO 3:13–59 (hereafter Hum in SBO); compare OS 1.14.6–9 in SBO 5:340. OS 1.8.20–22 in SBO 5:333–334 and OS 1.9.21–22 in SBO 5:334–335. OS 2.2–3 in SBO 5:342–345. Bernard may refrain from entering into specifics about the earthly lives of individual saints because he is casting a wide net: the occasion is, after all, the Feast of All Saints. But if we look at his sermons on Peter and Paul, for example, we see that Bernard moves quickly from picturing in broad strokes the lives of these apostles to a general account of holiness; Sermo in sollemnitate apostolorum Petri et Pauli, in SBO 5:188– 201 (hereafter PP in SBO). OS 2.1.9–13 in SBO 5:342. OS 1.2–8 in SBO 5:343. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Les revenants: Les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale (Bibliothèque des histoires) (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994), pp. 71–76. Gervais de Tilbury, Otia imperialia 3.99, in Schmitt, Les revenants, p. 107. Thomas Frederick Cranne, “Introduction,” The Exempla; or, Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry (New York: Burt Franklin, 1890; repr., New York: Lenox Hill, 1971), pp. lii–cxvi. Sermo in natali sancti Andreae 2.3.22–25, in SBO 5:435 (hereafter And in SBO). And 2.3.25–3.2 in SBO 5:435–436. OS 4.6 in SBO 5:359–360. And 2.4.11–12 in SBO 5:436. In obitu Domini Humberti 3.6–9, in SBO 5:443 (hereafter Humb in SBO); And 2.3.16– 19 in SBO 5:435; Sermo super cantica canticorum 26.6.9.19–20, in SBO 1:177 (hereafter SC in SBO). Hum 3.12 in SBO 3:25 and Hum 3.8 in SBO 3:22. Liber de diligendo Deo 12–13 and 23, in SBO 3:129–130 and 138 (hereafter Dil in SBO). OS 1.1.3 in SBO 5:328. PP 1.15–17 in SBO 5:188. Sermo in transitu sancti Malachiae episcopi 7.6–7, in SBO 5:422. Sermo in dedicatione ecclesiae 5.18–20, in SBO 5:394. OS 1.6.7–15 in SBO 5:331. Hum 3.9.20–21 in SBO 3:23. And see: Sermo in Quadragesima 2.1, in SBO 4:360 (hereafter Quad in SBO); Sermo in natali sancti Victoris 1.2, in SBO 6:1:31 (hereafter Vict in SBO); Sermo in nativitate Domini 1.2, in SBO 4:245–246 (hereafter Nat in SBO). And see Giles Constable, “The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ,” Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 189–190. Sermo in feria iv hebdomadae sanctae 10.20–22, in SBO 5:63; Hum 3.9.1–5 in SBO 3:23. And see: Hum 3.12 in SBO 3:25; Quad 2.1.2 in SBO 4:360; Nat 1.1–2 in SBO 4:245–246. Sermo in vigilia apostolorum Petri et Pauli, in SBO 5:185–187 (hereafter VPP in SBO). PP 1.13–17 in SBO 5:188. PP 3.4.12–13 in SBO 5:200. And see PP 3.1–2 in SBO 5:197–198. It is not surprising that this insistence on the sinfulness of saints should appear in Bernard’s sermons on Peter and Paul, who are, after Mary Magdalene, the preeminent sinner-saints. Bernard does not focus to the same degree on the sinfulness of other saints for whom he wrote

notes 301!

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

individual sermons, although there are instances in which he does allude to their status as sinners (for example, Sermo in festivitate sancti Martini episcopi 9.1–2, in SBO 5:405). Preoccupied with proclaiming their sanctity in an age he regards as lacking in holy people (The Life of St. Malachy, in The Life and Death of St. Malachy the Irishman, trans. Robert T. Meyer [Kalamazoo, Mich: Cistercian Publications, 1978], p. 11), Bernard refers even less to the sinfulness of the more recently dead among the saints; when he does do so, it is often to highlight their movement toward salvation (for example, Humb 4 in SBO 5:443–444). Even in his writings on saints from the distant past, Bernard sometimes emphasizes their dissimilarity from us (Vict 1.1–5 in SBO 6:1:29–37). OS 1.12 in SBO 5:337–338 and PP 1.1 in SBO 5:188–189. VPP 1–2.1–17 in SBO 5:185–186. And see Sermo in natali sancti Clementis 3.9–14, in SBO 5:414, and Sermo in natali sancti Benedicti 2–3, in SBO 5:1–2. OS 5.1.21–22 in SBO 5:361–362. OS 2.3–5 in SBO 5:362. OS 5.10.5–9 in SBO 5:369. Bernard seems also to have favored inverted models of imitation in his First Sermon for a reason similar to that which he gives in The Steps of Humility for writing about the steps of pride: through the recognition of pride in oneself, one will easily find the steps of humility (Hum 27.24–25 in SBO 3:37 and ibid., 3:58–59). Hum 2.1–2 in SBO 5:17. The insistence that one recognize both one’s dignity and one’s sinfulness—and fall into neither despair nor pernicious security—is typical of Bernard. See Étienne Gilson, Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1940), p. 35. On the optimism of the twelfth century, see: Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 161–162; Robert Javelet, Image et ressemblance au 12 e siècle, de saint Anselme à Alain de Lille (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1967), pp. ix–xiv; M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). OS 1.8.1 in SBO 5:327. OS 1.2.16–17 in SBO 5:328. OS 1.3 in SBO 5:329. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 33. OS 5.5.22–25 in SBO 5:364. OS 5.5.3 in SBO 5:365; OS 5.7.1–2 in SBO 5:365–366; OS 5.9.15–17 in SBO 5:368. OS 2.1.12 in SBO 5:342; OS 4.1.1 in SBO 5:356; OS 5.5.6 in SBO 5:365. OS 5.6.7–10 in SBO 5:365. OS 5.6.21–26 in SBO 5:365. For the focus on the salvation of the individual even in the most “affective” and “effective” neighbor-oriented literature of the twelfth century, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Cistercian Conception of Community,” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 71–72. OS 5.6.13 in SBO 5:365. For the cultivation of desire for heaven in medieval monastic life, see: Jean Leclercq, Études sur le vocabulaire monastique du moyen âge (Rome: Herder, 1961), pp. 117–121; idem, Otia monastica: Études sur le vocabulaire de la contemplation au moyen âge

302! notes

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

(Rome: Herder, 1963), pp. 122–128; idem, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961), pp. 53–70; Michael Casey, Athirst for God: Spiritual Desire in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs (Cistercian Studies 77) (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1988), pp. 208–231. OS 1.11.12 in SBO 5:336. Sermones de diversis 19.7.1–3, in SBO 6.1:165. And see: Dil 32–33 in SBO 3:146–147; OS 1.11.15–17 in SBO 5:336. SC 84.9–18 in SBO 2:303. De praecepto et dispensatione 59, in SBO 3:291–292. OS 5.11.21–23 in SBO 5:369. Dil 10 in SBO 3:126–127 and Dil 12 in SBO 3:129. Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism, vol. 2: The Presence of God: A History of Western Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1994), pp. 174–177; R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), pp. 231–334. SC 26.8.14 in SBO 1:176. SC 26.5.10 in SBO 1:173 and SC 26.8.17–19 in SBO 1:176. SC 26.9–10 in SBO 1:178. SC 26.10 in SBO 1:178; SC 26.13 in SBO 1:178. SC 26.9–10 in SBO 1:177–178. SC 26.12.5 in SBO 1:180. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Decoration Day,” line 21.

3. the pope’s shrunken head: the apocalyptic visions of robert of uzès 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Both manuscripts (Toledo, Library of the Cathedral, cod. 6–26, ff. 15–25 and Paris B.N. Lat. 2592, ff. 53–72) have been edited by J. Bignami-Odier, “Les Visions de Robert d’Uzès O. P. (†1296),” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 25 (1955): 258–310 (hereafter Bignami-Odier). The first printed edition of Robert’s visions was Lefevre d’Étaples’ Liber trium virorum et trium virginum (Paris, 1513), which placed Robert’s visions with The Shepherd of Hermas, the Visio Wettini, the Scivias of Hildegard of Bingen, and the visions of Elizabeth of Schönau and Mechtilde of Hackeborn. His edition seems to have been based on the Paris manuscript or one very close to it. This doesn’t mean that Robert’s visions are entirely visual, but when the divine voice speaks in them, it is to explicate the vision before Robert. Both manuscripts have rubrics that identify the content of the visions, but they are most likely a later addition to Robert’s text. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 237. Marjorie Reeves has an outstanding chapter on Dominican visionaries, including Robert, in The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 161–174. Bignami-Odier, p. 287. Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 216–218. Bignami-Odier, p. 287. See her interpretation of Robert’s vision, p. 287, n. 55. Bignami-Odier, p. 286. The visions ends at this point, with no divine voice to explain why the pope removed his clothes or wanted Robert to sit on his left. Obviously Robert was not the only one to represent Boniface as a hypocrite. The popular Vaticinia de summis pontifibus, written several years after Robert’s death,

notes 303!

11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

represents Boniface as “the epitome of hypocrisy.” See Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 189. Robert’s vision offers an accommodation between the mendicant orders and the secular clergy, who had been in conflict since the founding of the mendicant orders. This vision has been translated by McGinn in Visions of the End, p. 193. A similar portrait of the future pope is found in vision 18, in which the pope wore gray vestments sitting on a broken chair next to a small bed with vile bedding. Robert was told that the vision signified the future humiliation of the Church; Bignami-Odier, pp. 281–282. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], p. 99) notes that “[t]he whole vision conveys a sense of poverty, emptiness and struggle which is more than the sum of its confused parts.” Bignami-Odier, p. 278. A. G. Little dismisses them, with the comment, “The history of the Friars of the Penance of Jesus Christ, or Friars of the Sack, has attracted, as it deserves, little attention” (Little, “The Friars of the Sack,” English Historical Review 9 [1894]: 121). This is unfair, given the order’s great popularity and diffusion throughout Western Europe and because its very existence as an alternative to the better-established mendicant orders speaks to the desire for a religious life not met by those two great orders. For a more sympathetic reading, see Richard Emory, “The Friars of the Sack,” Speculum 18 (1943): 323–334. For a detailed list of the houses and when they were closed, see Richard Emory, “A Note on the Friars of the Sack,” Speculum 35 (1960): 591–595. For the dissolution of the order at the request of the Dominicans at the Council of Lyon, see Emory, “The Second Council of Lyon and the Mendicant Orders,” Catholic Historical Review 39 (1953–1954): 259–260. For Humbert’s letter warning his order to avoid provoking the secular clergy, see B. M. Reichert, Monumenta Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum 5 (Rome, 1900), no. 7, pp. 21– 24. For the famous letters written by John of Parma, master general of the Franciscans, and Humbert of Roman describing the common mission of the Dominicans and Franciscans, see Reichert, Monumenta, no. 8, pp. 25–38. Emory, “Note,” p. 591. Their constitutions outlined specific courses of study, how many students were to be sent from each province, and how books were to be disposed. In fact, the Franciscans may have seen the Friars of the Sack as a particular threat. Thomas of Eccleston records a Franciscan who thought God had sent this new order to stimulate his own order (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores [MGH SS] 28.568); from Paul Amargier, “Les Frères du Sac,” Provence historique 15 (1965): 160, n. 7. For an edition of the constitutions from British Library MS Cotton Nero A.xii and a history of the order’s foundation and dissolution, see Gabriele M. Giacomozzi, L’Ordine della Penitenza di Gesù Cristo: Contributo alla storia della spiritualità del sec. XIII (Scrinium historiale 2) (Rome, 1962). For the most significant differences between the Friars’ constitutions and the Dominicans’, see Little, “Friars of the Sack.” Emory, “Second Council,” p. 262, citing C. Douais, Acta capitulorum provincialium Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum (Toulouse, 1894), p. 187. Emory, “Note,” p. 592. Bignami-Odier, p. 282. Bignami-Odier, p. 284. McGinn, Visions of the End, p. 188.

304! notes

4. thomas of cantimpré and female sanctit y 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

André Vauchez, Saints, prophètes et visionnaires: Le pouvoir surnaturel au Moyen Age (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), pp. 54–55; Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 31–78; Dyan Elliott, “The Physiology of Rapture and Female Spirituality,” in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 1997), pp. 141–173; John Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 7–24. In addition to his works about women, to be introduced below, Thomas wrote: a vita of the founder of his canonical house, which he had substantially completed by 1228, but polished in the last years of his life (Robert Godding, “Une oeuvre inedite de Thomas de Cantimpré: La Vita Joannis Cantimpratensis” [text], Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 76 [1981]: 241–316, and idem, “Vie apostolique et société urbaine à l’aube du XIIe siècle,” Nouvelle revue théologique 104 [1982]: 692–721), and the large works De natura rerum, completed by 1240 (ed. Helmut Boese [Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973]), and Bonum universale de apibus, completed in 1262 or 1263 (ed. G. Colvenius [Douai, 1627]). See Robert Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching in the Southern Low Countries, 1240–1260: Materiae Praedicabiles in the Liber de natura rerum and Bonum universale de apibus of Thomas of Cantimpré” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1988). André Vauchez, “Les pouvoirs informels dans l’église aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge: Visionnaires, prophètes et mystiques,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome— moyen age, temps modernes 96 (1984): 281–293; Vauchez, Saints, prophètes et visionnaires, pp. 221–229. See note 2. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), passim; Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1991), pp. 226, 388 nn. 130–131; Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 216–225. Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 49–58; Alexander Murray, “Confession as a Historical Source in the Thirteenth Century,” in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to R. W. Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 286–305; Godding, “Vie apostolique”; Barbara Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century,” Speculum 73 (1998): 732–770. Henri Platelle, “Le receuil de miracles de Thomas de Cantimpré et la vie religieuse dans les Pays-Bas et le nord de la France au XIIIe siécle,” in Actes du 97 e Congrès National des sociétés savantes, section de philologie et histoire jusqu’à 1610, Nantes, 1972 (Paris, 1979), pp. 469–498; Robert Sweetman, “Thomas of Cantimpré: Performative Reading and Pastoral Care,” in Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality, ed. Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), pp. 133–167; idem, “Thomas of Cantimpré, Mulieres religiosae, and Purgatorial Piety: Hagiographical Vitae and the Beguine ‘Voice,’ ” in A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., ed. Jacqueline Brown and William P. Stoneman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp. 606–628; idem, “Visions of Purgatory and Their Role in the Bonum Universale de Apibus of Thomas of Cantimpré,” Ons geestelijk erf 67 (1993): 20–33.

notes 305! 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

Henri Platelle, “L’image des Juifs dans Thomas de Cantimpré,” in Mélanges à la mémoire de Marcel-Henri Prévost: Droit biblique, interprétation rabbinique, communautés et société (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1982), pp. 283–306; idem, “Vengeance privée et reconciliation dans l’oeuvre de Thomas de Cantimpré,” Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis/Revue d’histoire du droit/Legal History Review 42 (1974): 269–281; idem, “L’appel au tribunal de Dieu contre un juge unique dans les Exempla de Thomas de Cantimpré,” Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis/Revue d’histoire du droit/Legal History Review 66 (1998): 289–298; idem, “Scènes de la vie rurale à travers Le livre des abeilles de Thomas de Cantimpré,” Revue du nord—Histoire: Nord de la France, Belgique, Pays-Bas 79 (1998): 771–784. Alfred Deboutte, “Thomas van Cantimpré als auditor van Albertus Magnus,” Ons geestelijk erf 58 (1984): 196; on Cambrai as the probable setting for Thomas’s early education, see idem, “Thomas van Cantimpré, zijn opleiding te Kamerijk,” Ons geestelijk erf 56 (1982): 283–299. Vita Mariae Oigniacensis (hereafter VMO) prol. 9, in Acta sanctorum [hereafter AA SS] June, vol. 4 (Antwerp, 1707), p. 638; André Vauchez, “Prosélitisme et action antihérétique en milieu féminin au XIIIe s.: La vie de Marie d’Oignies (+1213),” in Problèmes d’histoire du christianisme 17: Propagande et contrepropagande religieuses, ed. J. Marx (Brussels: Éditions de l’université, 1987), pp. 95–110; Iris Geyer, Maria von Oignies (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 151–224; Michel Lauwers, “Expérience béguinale et récit hagiographique: À propos de la Vita Mariae Oigniacensis de Jacques de Vitry (vers 1215),” Journal des savants (1989): 61–103; idem, “Entre Béguinisme et mysticisme: La vie de Marie d’Oignies (+1213) de Jacques de Vitry ou la définition d’une sainteté féminine,” Ons geestelijk erf 66 (1992): 46–70; Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, pp. 68–88. Supplement prol. 1, in AA SS June, vol. 4 (Antwerp, 1707), p. 666. VMO 2.47, p. 649; Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, pp. 71–78. James at points considers her mystical flights and devotion apart from benefit to others (e.g., VMO 1.2, p. 636; 1.35, p. 645), but attempts no sustained or systematic account of spiritual progress or mystical ascent. VMO 1.27, p. 643; 2.52, p. 650 (souls in afterlife); 2.58–60, p. 652 (Ywain); 1.30, p. 643, cf. 1.31–32, p. 644; 2.50–51, p. 650; 2.61, pp. 653–653 (demons). Supplement 9, p. 670 (miraculous river-crossing); 10, p. 670 (accurate clairvoyance); 13–14, pp. 671–672 (accurate prophecies); 16–21, pp. 672–674 (posthumous miracles and appearances). Supplement 4–8, pp. 668–670. E.g., Vita Christinae (hereafter VC), prol. 1, 3, in AA SS July, vol. 5 (Antwerp, 1727), p. 650; Vita Margarete de Ypris (hereafter VMY) chap. 17, in Gilles Meersseman, “Les Frères Prêcheurs et le mouvement dévôt en Flandre au XIIIe siècle,” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 17 (1947): 115; Vita Lutgardis (hereafter VL) 2.3, in AA SS June, vol. 3 (Antwerp, 1701), p. 244; also 3.5, p. 257, 3.12, p. 259; Bonum Universale de Apibus, ed. G. Colvenius (Douai, 1627), 1.19 sec. 8; 1.22 sec. 2; 2.18; 2.31 sec. 3. Supplement 27, p. 676. Phillip Funk, Jakob von Vitry, Leben und Werke (Leipzig: Teubner, 1909), pp. 58–63; Jean Longère, “Jacques de Vitry: La vie et les oeuvres,” in James of Vitry, Histoire Occidentale, trans. Gaston Duchet-Suchaux (Paris: Cerf, 1997), pp. 14–17. Supplement 21, p. 674. See Ursula Peters, Religiöse Erfahrung als literarisches Faktum: Zur Vorgeschichte und Genese frauenmystischer Texte des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1988), pp. 112–113. VL 2.3, p. 244. According to Thomas, James appeared posthumously to Lutgard to tell her that he had been briefly in purgatory; VL 3.5, p. 257.

306! notes 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

VMO 8–9, p. 638; cf. VC prol. 1, 3, p. 650. VC 7, 11, p. 652. Barbara Newman has hypothesized that the historical Christine, suffering the effects of brain damage from a coma and perhaps even considered by some to be a demoniac, underwent tutoring by a cleric to consider her sufferings a good work for the souls of others; Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit,” pp. 763–770. VC 55–56, p. 659. Robert Sweetman, “Christine of Saint-Trond’s Preaching Apostolate: Thomas of Cantimpré’s Hagiographical Method Revisited,” Vox Benedictina 9 (1992): 67–97. VC 11–13, p. 652. VC 22, 23, 26, pp. 654–655. VC 29, p. 655; 41–44, p. 657. VC prol. 3, p. 650. E.g., VMO 2.58–60, p. 652 (Ywain); 1.17, p. 640 (priest and tears); 1.27, p. 643 (purgatory); 2.30–32, pp. 643–644 (demons). VMO 2.71, p. 655 (immediate knowledge); 2.68, p. 654 (priests). VC 40, p. 657. There are also incidental references to priests at 5, p. 651; 10, p. 652; 12, p. 652; 41, p. 657. VMY prol., pp. 106–107. VMY 34, pp. 122–123. Simone Roisin, “La méthode hagiographique de Thomas de Cantimpré,” in Miscellanea historica in honorem Alberti de Meyer (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1946), 1:546–557. She also sees a shift from a chronological to a conceptual ordering of material, which however is apparent only later, in the VL. See also Thomas Grzebien, “Penance, Purgatory, Mysticism, and Miracles: The Life, Hagiography, and Spirituality of Thomas of Cantimpré (1200–1270)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1989), pp. 374–378. VMY 6, p. 109. VMY 10, pp. 110–111. VMY 18–19, pp. 115–116. VMY 13, pp. 112–113 (talk); 42, p. 125 (suffering); 53, pp. 128–129 (posthumous healing). VMY 27, 29, pp. 119–120. VMY 27, pp. 119–120; 36, p. 123. VMO 2.50–51, p. 650. VMO 2.69, pp. 654–655. VMY 7–8, pp. 109–110. Karen Glente, “Mystikerinnenviten aus männlicher und weiblicher Sicht: Ein Vergleich zwischen Thomas von Cantimpré und Katherina von Unterlinden,’ ” in Religiöse Frauenbewegung und mystische Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1988), p. 254. VMY 24, pp. 118–119. VMY 25, p. 119. Guido Hendrix, “Primitive Versions of Thomas of Cantimpré’s Vita Lutgardis,” Cîteaux 29 (1978): 153. For an overview of the work, with an emphasis on Lutgard’s spirituality, see Alfred Deboutte, “The Vita Lutgardis of Thomas of Cantimpré,” in Hidden Springs: Cistercian Monastic Women, ed. John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank (n.p.: Cistercian Publications, 1995), pp. 255–281. VL 1.12, p. 239; 1.16, p. 240. Thomas formally divides the work according to a three-fold scheme concerning the progress of her soul (VL prol., p. 234; 2.43, p. 253; see Hendrix, “Primitive Versions,”

notes 307!

49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

p. 154), but, as Margot King has observed, he does not in fact chart such progress overall: King, “The Dove at the Window: The Ascent of the Soul in Thomas de Cantimpré’s Life of Lutgard of Aywières,” in Nichols and Shank, eds., Hidden Springs, pp. 225–253. VL 2.4, p. 244 (abbot); 2.7, p. 245 (Innocent III); 2.10–11, pp. 245–246 (nuns); 2.12–13, p. 246 (souls); 2.24, p. 249 (knight); 2.34–36, p. 251 (relics, apostate, duchess); 3.15, p. 260 (consolation). VL 1.2, p. 237. Text in Quinque prudentes virgines, ed. Chrysostom Henriquez (Antwerp, 1630), pp. 199–297; trans. Martinus Cawley (drawing on a broader base of manuscript witnesses than Henriquez), in Cawley, ed., Send Me God (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 29–99. VL 1.10, pp. 238–239; Glente, “Mystikerinnenviten,” p. 261. VL 1.12, p. 239. VL 1.20, p. 241. VL 1.22–2.1, pp. 241–243. VL 2.1, p. 243. On Lutgard’s silence as alienation from others, see also Alexandra Barratt, “Language and the Body in Thomas of Cantimpré’s Life of Lutgard of Aywières,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 30 (1995): 339–347. Glente, “Mystikerinnenviten,” p. 258. VMO 2.79, p. 657 (dream); 2.69, pp. 654–655 (intercession). VL 2.38, pp. 251–252. VL 2.32, p. 250 (Te Deum); 1.18, pp. 240–241 (preaching). Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 89–137. See Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner, Worldly Saints: Social Interaction of Dominican Penitent Women in Italy, 1200–1500 (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1999), pp. 166–174.

5. the changing fortunes of angel a of foligno I wish to thank Francine Cardman for her helpful comments on this essay. 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

Hugh Francis Blunt, The Great Magdalens (1928; repr., Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), p. 128; see also J.-K. Huysmans, En route (Paris: Tresse et Stock, 1895), on whom Blunt may depend. Angela of Foligno and Brother A., L’autobiografia e gli scritti della beata Angela da Foligno, Latin ed. Michele Faloci Pulignani, Ital. trans. Maria Castiglione Humani (Città di Castello: Il Solco, 1932), p. ix. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Marion Alphonse Habig, The Franciscan Book of Saints (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1959; rev. 1979), p. 16. David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 114–115. Il libro della Beata Angela da Foligno (Edizione critica), ed. Ludger Thier and Abele Calufetti, 2d ed. (Grottaferrata [Rome]: Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1985) (hereafter Il libro). Despite flawed arguments in its introduction and footnotes, this is the best edition available, since it is based on a comprehensive study of twentyeight manuscripts and provides a critical apparatus of variants. Martin-Jean Ferré, “Les principales dates de la vie d’Angèle de Foligno,” Revue d’histoire

308! notes

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

franciscaine 2 (1925): 21–33; critiqued by Jacques Dalarun, “Angèle de Foligno a-t-elle existé?,” in “Alla signorina”: Mélanges offerts à Noëlle de la Blanchardière (Rome: École française de Rome, 1995), pp. 60–66. On Angela, see Vita e spiritualità della beata Angela da Foligno, ed. Clément Schmitt (Perugia: Serafica Provincia de San Francesco, 1987); Angela da Foligno, terziaria francescana, ed. Enrico Menestò (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1992); Angèle de Foligno: Le dossier, ed. Giulia Barone and Jacques Dalarun (Rome: École française de Rome, 1999) (hereafter Dossier). Three early-twentieth-century editions employed a three-part division, parts 2 and 3 comprehending the Instructions: Le livre de la bienheureuse Angèle de Foligno: Texte latin (Paris: Librairie de l’art catholique, 1925), ed. Paul Doncoeur (hereafter Texte latin); Le livre de l’expérience des vrais fidèles (Paris: E. Droz, 1927), ed. and trans. Martin-Jean Ferré; and L’autobiografia, ed. Faloci Pulignani. “Instruction” 26. Emore Paoli, “Le due redazioni del Liber: Il perché di una riscrittura,” in Dossier, pp. 29–70; this revises Thier and Calufetti’s theory, Il libro, pp. 51–73. Catherine M. Mooney, “The Authorial Role of Brother A. in the Composition of Angela of Foligno’s Revelations,” in Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, ed. E. Ann Matter and John Coakley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 34–63. Alfonso Marini, “Ubertino e Angela: L’Arbor vitae e il Liber,” in Dossier, pp. 319–344. For other medieval references, see Dalarun, “Angèle de Foligno,” p. 74; Dalarun, “Introduction,” in Dossier, p. 3. Dalarun, “Angèle de Foligno,” pp. 72–74. See Dalarun, note 6 above. Il libro, pp. 136–138. Il libro, p. 186. Il libro, p. 290. Il libro, pp. 234, 304. AASS, January, vol. 1 (Antwerp, 1643; Paris, 1863), pp. 186–234: Angela de Fulginio. Bollandus reproduces, with minor improvements, Angela de Fulginio, in quo ostenditur nobis vera via qua possumus sequi vestigia nostri redemptoris, a 1598 edition published in Paris by Guillaume Chaudière. It appears to be based on the fifteenth-century manuscript Paris BN 5620; see Doncoeur, Texte latin, p. xi and esp. pp. xviii–xix; Thier and Calufetti, Il libro, pp. 65, 79 (but cf. 77, where they contrarily suggest the 1505 Toledo ms.); Paolo Mariani, “Liber e contesto: Codici miscellanei a confronto,” in Dossier, pp. 117–118. Thier and Calufetti (Il libro, pp. 63–67) discuss the family of manuscripts related to Paris BN 5620, and, without offering evidence, speculatively date the earliest of these to the late fourteenth century. More illuminating is Romana Guarnieri’s discussion of these manuscripts: “Santa Angela? Angela, Ubertino e lo spiritualismo francescano: Prime ipotesi sulla Peroratio,” in Dossier, pp. 223–226. Attilio Bartoli Langeli, “Il codice di Assisi, ovvero il Liber sororis Lelle,” in Dossier; Emanuela Sesti, “I manoscritti italiani del Duecento e del Trecento,” in I libri miniati del XIII e del XIV secolo, ed. Marco Assirelli and Emanuela Sesti (Assisi: Casa editrice francescana, 1990), p. 202; Dalarun, “Angèle de Foligno,” pp. 70–71. Compare AASS, January, vol. 1 (Paris, 1863), chap. 2, pars. 35–40, pp. 190–192, with Il libro, chap. 8, Supplementary Step 6, pp. 336–352, and with “Instruction” 1, pp. 404– 408, 408 n. 1. AASS, chap. 2, par. 38, p. 191. Le livre, ed. Ferré, p. 196, par. 99, and see note 1; see also Doncoeur, Texte latin, p. xxxvii.

notes 309! 24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

E.g.: AASS, chap. 6, par. 107, p. 203, adds “lascivious” to the way Angela tossed her neck in “anger and pride”; cf. the edition of Assisi 342, Le livre, ed. Ferré, chap. 16, par. 183, p. 430; and the 1985 critical edition, Il libro, p. 522. The Book of Divine Consolation of the Blessed Angela of Foligno (1909; New York: Cooper Square, 1966), trans. Mary G. Steegmann, based on a 1510 edition, shares many similarities with the AASS text regarding Angela’s sin. Paul Guérin, Les petits Bollandistes: Vies des saints . . . d’après le P. Giry, 7th ed., vol. 1 (Paris, 1882), p. 124; Butler’s Lives of the Saints, ed. Herbert Thurston, vol. 1 (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1926), p. 64. Noted also by Guarnieri, “Santa Angela?,” pp. 224–225. Latin editions: B. Angelae Fulginatis vita, et opuscula cum duplici prologo, V. F. Arnaldi Ord. Minorum, ed. Giovanni Battista Boccolini (1714). Translations: Vie de sainte Angèle de Foligno . . . , trans. René Pieau (1841; 1850; 1863); Il libro delle mirabili visioni e consolazioni, trans. Luigi Fallacara (Florence: Libreria editrice fiorentina, 1922; 1926; 1991; 1999); Il libro della beata Angela da Foligno, trans. idem (Florence: Salani,1946); Visioni e consolazioni, trans. Alfonso Pisaneschi (Sancasciano Val di Pesa: Soc. ed. Toscana, 1925). Johannes H. Lammertz, using a 1601 Cologne reprint of the 1598 edition used by Bollandus, published his own Latin edition, differing from Bollandus’s in minor respects, Beatae Angelae de Fulginio: Visionum et instructionum Liber (1849; 1851). Translations based on Lammertz include his own translation, Der heiligen Angela von Foligno Gesichte und Unterweisungen (1851); and The Book of the Visions and Instructions of Blessed Angela of Foligno, as taken down . . . secular priest, trans. [Alexander P. J. Cruikshank] (1872; 1888; 1903). Le livre des visions et instructions de la bienheureuse Angèle de Foligno (Paris: Seuil, 1991). On Hello’s use of the AASS text, see Doncoeur, Texte latin, p. ix; Doncoeur’s French translation, Le livre de la bienheureuse soeur Angèle de Foligno du Tiers Ordre de S. François (Paris: Librairie de l’art catholique, 1926), p. 6; and Pierre Péano, “L’oeuvre d’Ernest Hello dans sa version française du livre de la B. Angèle,” in Vita e spiritualità, pp. 117–127. Guérin, Vies des saints, vol. 1, pp. 121–130, esp. 127; Anonymous, “La bienheureuse Angèle de Foligno, du Tiers-Ordre,” L’année franciscaine (1868), p. 303; Anonymous, Vita della Beata Angela da Foligno vedova terziaria professa nel terz’ordine (1870), pp. 99–101, Butler’s Lives, ed. Thurston, vol. 1, p. 67; Arrigo Levasti, ed., Mistici del duecento e del trecento (Milan: Rizzoli, 1935), p. 990. Ivan Gobry, although relying on Ferré’s edition of Assisi 342, similarly presumes Angela was probably adulterous; see Angèle de Foligno: Docteur de la vie mystique (Paris: F.-X. de Guibert, 1998), pp. 13–14. See notes 2, 8, and 29 above. For a table comparing Thier and Calufetti, Doncoeur, and Ferré, see Giovanni Pozzi, ed., Il libro dell’esperienza (Milan: Adelphi, 1992), pp. 262–263. Le livre de la bienheureuse soeur Angèle, trans. Doncoeur, p. 36 n. 1 (cette perte . . . très douloureuse); Le livre, ed. and trans. Ferré, p. 10 n. 1 (une très grande douleur); L’autobiografia, ed. Faloci Pulignani, p. 13 n. 1; Il libro, ed. Thier and Calufetti, p. 139 n. 11 (profondo dolore). Translations: Il libro della Beata Angela de Foligno, trans. M. Castiglione Humani (Rome: Signorelli, 1950), pp. 8, 263 n. 7; L’esperienza di Dio amore: Il “Libro,” trans. Salvatore Aliquò (Rome: Città Nuova Editrice, 1973), p. 37; Angela of Foligno: Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance (New York: Paulist, 1993), p. 367 n. 11, and Romana Guarnieri’s Preface, pp. 7–8. Secondary sources: Giorgio Petrocchi, Ascesi e mistica trecentesca (Florence: Le Monnier, 1957), pp. 16–17; Pasquale Valugani, L’esperienza mistica della Beata Angela da Foligno nel racconto de Frate Arnaldo (Milan: Biblioteca francescana provinciale, 1964), pp. 54–55, 54 n. 1;

310! notes

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

and see Luciano Radi, Angela da Foligno e l’Umbria mistica del secolo XIII (Padua: EMP, 1996), p. 35. Compare, for example, the first page of Assisi 342 (Langeli, “Il codice di Assisi,” Foto 1) with Ferré, pp. 2–6. [Pseud. Louis Leclève], Sainte Angèle de Foligno: Sa vie, ses oeuvres (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1936), pp. 12–13. Il libro, p. 139, and see n. 10. Il libro, pp. 27, 28 n. 11. Scholars noting the husband’s absence include for example, Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 106; Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 395 n. 11; Lachance, Angela of Foligno, p. 370 n. 32. Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1991), p. 197. On holy women’s desires to be free of children and husbands, see Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 76–96; on Angela, pp. 88–89, 91, 93–94. See also José de Vinck, Revelations of Women Mystics: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times (New York: Alba House, 1985), p. 41; cf. Blunt, Great Magdalens, pp. 127–128. I first broached this topic in a paper, “Dutiful Wives and Mothers: The Editorial Recreations of Angela of Foligno and Margaret of Cortona,” presented at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Vassar College, June 1993. E.g., Il libro, p. 206, ll. 71–81; pp. 222–224, ll. 267–277. Il libro, p. 136, ll. 50, 53; p. 212, l. 152; p. 294, l. 73; p. 348, ll. 148, 149 (twice); p. 382, l. 335. The substantive offensio also denotes unspecified sins and vices: p. 236, l. 84 (twice), p. 348, l. 150, p. 350, l. 153, p. 352, l. 190; and a sin of omission, p. 146, l. 180. Il libro, p. 246, l. 191, p. 248, l. 194, p. 294, l. 72; twice the actions seem tied to sexual activity: p. 136, l. 70, p. 222, l. 254. Il libro, p. 234, l. 59 (twice)”. For Latin, see above. Le livre, p. 10: “Unde et amarum erat michi quando dicebant michi injuriam vel quando fiebat michi injuria, tamen sustinebam patienter sicut poteram.” See also Doncoeur, Texte latin, p. 10. Ferré, Le livre, p. 10; Doncoeur, Texte latin, p. 10: “fiebat michi iniuria.” Based on my examination of some forty occurrences of vel in chaps. 1–3. Il libro, p. 350, l. 161. Il libro, p. 292, l. 45; p. 304, ll. 195–197. Il libro, p. 320, l. 369; p. 394, l. 467. The adjective “injurious” [iniuriosa] occurs once and is used to describe “words,” p. 234, l. 50. Caroline Walker Bynum, “In Praise of Fragments: History in the Comic Mode,” in Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 23, 24, 25.

6. “a particul ar light of understanding”: margaret of cortona, the fr anciscans, and a cortonese cleric 1.

Iunctae Bevegnatis, Legenda de vita et miraculis beatae Margaritae de Cortona, ed. Fortunato Iozzelli (Bibliotheca Franciscana ascetica Medii Aevi 13) (Rome: Grottaferrata, 1997), pp. 220–221. I would like to thank Thomas Renna, who shared an early draft of his translation of the Legenda with me (forthcoming from Franciscan Institute

notes 311!

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Publications). While I have benefited greatly from his work, the translations in this paper are my own. On Margaret’s role as patron of Cortona, see Daniel Bornstein, “The Uses of the Body: The Church and the Cult of Santa Margherita da Cortona,” Church History 62 (1993): 163–177; Joanna Cannon and André Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti: Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy Woman in Medieval Tuscany (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 29–32 and passim; and Mario Sensi, “Margherita da Cortona nel contesto storico-sociale cortonese,” Collectanea franciscana 69 (1999): 223–262. For the history of Cortona in the Middle Ages, see Girolamo Mancini, Cortona nel Medio Evo (Florence, 1897; repr., Cortona, 1992). For recent work on Margaret, see Jérôme Poulenc, “Presenza dei movimenti spirituali nella ‘Leggenda’ di Santa Margherita da Cortona,” in Celestino V e i suoi tempi: Realtà spirituale e realtà politica, ed. Walter Capezzali (L’Aquila: Centro Celestiniano, 1990), pp. 97–106; Franco Cardini, “Agiografia e politica: Margherita da Cortona e le vicende di una città inquieta,” Studi Francescani 76 (1979): 127–136; Bornstein, “Uses of the Body”; Anna Benvenuti Papi, “In castro poenitentiae”: Santità e società femminile nel’Italia medievale (Italia sacra 45) (Rome: Herder, 1990), pp. 141–168; Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 252 and 280; Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 140–149 and passim; and Alfonso M. Pompei, “Concetto e pratica della penitenza in Margherita da Cortona e Angela da Foligno,” in La “Supra montem” di Niccolo IV (1289): Genesi e diffusione di una regola, ed. R. Pazzelli and L. Temperini (Rome: Analecta T.O.R., 1988), pp. 381–424. On the general phenomenon of lay civic sanctity see André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 183–187. Other contemporary lay patrons of Italian communes include: Omobono of Cremona (d. 1197), Luchesio of Poggibonsi (d. 1250), Rose of Viterbo (d. 1251), Zita of Lucca (d. 1278), and Enrico of Bolzano (d. 1315), among many others. For a thorough introduction to lay patrons, see Augustine Thompson, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), pp. 179–216. Florence, Archivio di Stato, “Statuti comunità soggette,” 279, ff. 95, 123, 140v–141v; these statutes, which mention Margaret’s feast day, have been transcribed by Vauchez in Margherita of Cortona, pp. 227–230. Margaret was not officially canonized until 1728. Legenda, p. 183. On the lay penitential movement, see Gilles Gérard Meersseman, Dossier de l’order de la pénitence au XIII e siècle (Spicilegium Friburgense 7) (Fribourg, 1961); Alfonso Pompei, “Il movimento penitenziale nei secoli XII–XIII,” in L’Ordine della penitenza di San Francesco d’Assisi nel secolo XIII, ed. O. Schmucki (Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 1973), pp. 9–40; Giovanna Casagrande, Religiosità penitenziale e città al tempo dei comuni (Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 1995); and Thompson, Cities of God, pp. 69–102. See R. Pazzelli and L. Temperini, eds., La “Supra montem” di Niccolo IV. Legenda, p. 204. Legenda, pp. 185–186. Giuseppina Inga, “Gli insediamenti mendicanti a Cortona,” Storia della città: Rivista internazionale di storia urbana e territoriale 9 (1978): 44–58. Mancini, Cortona nel Medio Evo, pp. 45–55.

312! notes 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

Legenda, p. 184. Ibid. Legenda, pp. 183, 187, and 194. See Iozzelli, “Introduzione,” in Legenda, p. 80; for the history of the church of San Basilio, see Domenico Mirri, Cronaca dei lavori edilizi della nuova chiesa di S. Margherita in Cortona, rev. Edoardo Mori (Cortona: Calosci, 1989). Legenda, p. 211. Legenda, p. 199. Legenda, p. 477. Iozzelli, “Introduzione,” in Legenda, p. 9; and Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 98–113. See Bornstein, “The Uses of the Body.” A final chapter of miracle stories had been added by 1311; see Iozzelli, “I miracoli nella ‘legenda’ di Santa Margherita da Cortona,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 86 (1993): 217–276. Caciola, Discerning Spirits, pp. 98–113; Dyan Elliot has recently explored the relationship between confession and inquisition in Proving Women: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Caciola, Discerning Spirits, pp. 101–104. Legenda, p. 246. Ibid. Legenda, pp. 249 and 376. Roberto Rusconi, “Margherita da Cortona: Peccatrice redenta e patrona cittadina,” in Umbria: Sacra e civile (Turin: Nuova ERI Edizioni Rai, 1989), pp. 89–104; and Caciola, Discerning Spirits, p. 108. Legenda, pp. 249 and 376. Legenda, p. 179. Ibid. Caciola has noted that in the midst of these voices one can find examples of Margaret’s direct speech; see Discerning Spirits, p. 102. Legenda, pp. 284 and 347. Legenda, p. 382. Legenda, p. 403: “Et Dominus ad eam respondit: Dicas sacerdoti B. quod nec propter timorem, seu verecundiam, aut tribulationem aliquam separetur a ministerio tuo, et ego infundam ei lumen cognitionis.” Legenda, p. 345. Ibid. Legenda, pp. 344–345. Ibid.: “Timens autem Christi famula Margarita ne benedictionem quam in feruore spiritus suo dederat capellano B. presumptio mentis reputaretur, dixit Dominus, quod inspirauerat ei ut sic ageret et cum illa benedictione eidem largitus fuerat gratiam specialem.” For a full consideration of the relationship the Legenda portrays between Margaret and Giunta, see John Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Late Medieval Holy Women and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); also see his “Gender and the Authority of Friars: The Significance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans,” Church History 60 (1991): 445–460.

notes 313! 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

Florence, Archivio di Stato, “Unione di vari luoghi pii di Cortona,” September 27, 1290; March 18, 1298; July 13, 1300. Florence, Archivio di Stato, “Unione,” November 25, 1392; this charter has been transcribed by Lodovico Da Pelago, Antica leggenda, vol. 2 (Lucca, 1793), pp. 175–178. Da Pelago, Sommario della storia della chiesa e convento di Santa Margherita da Cortona, compilato e disposto per ordine cronologico dal P. Fra Lodovico da Pelago, unpublished manuscript, Archivio conventuale di Santa Magherita, Cortona, 1290 and 1298. Da Pelago, Sommario, 1298, 1304, 1308; also see Florence, Archivio di Stato, “Unione,” March 18, 1298; August 15, 1304; June 1, 1308; June 21, 1308. Bornstein, “Uses of the Body,” pp. 168–169. Canon and Vauchez, Margherita of Cortona, pp. 164–165, nn. 34 and 35; and Caciola, Discerning Spirits, pp. 110–111. Le Celle di Cortona, eremo francescano del 1211 (Cortona: Calosci, 1977). Sensi, “Margherita da Cortona”; and David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Francis (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), pp. 325–334. Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 240–241.

7. fr agments of devotion: charters and canons in aquitane, 876– 1050 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

For the purposes of this paper, “Aquitaine” refers to the southwest of France—the dioceses of Angoulême, Bordeaux, Limoges, Périgueux, Poitiers, and Saintes. Ademar of Chabannes, Ademari Cabannensis Chronicon, ed. Pascale Bourgain, Richard Landes and Georges Pon (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis 129) (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 3.35 (p. 157): “Alduinus autem episcopus monasterium Sancti Stephani Agentense, quod Hildegarius ornate disposuerat in magna caterva monachorum, per triennium antequam moreretur, suadente diabolo, dextruxit, et ibi canonicos restituit. Hac de noxa Lemovicam intra urbem monacos in ecclesia Sancti Martini regulae subditos adgregare curavit.” This assessment is echoed in the Historia Monasterii Usercensis (J.-B. Champeval, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye d’Uzerche [Paris and Tulle: A. Picard et fils, 1901], pp. 22–23). For a reconsideration of this model and a survey of the bibliography on this question, see John Van Engen, “The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–1150,” Speculum 61 (1986): 269–304. For an overview of discussions about ideal forms of religious life after 1050 and the scholarship about them, see Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For Aquitaine in this period, for example, there survive no chronicles written by canons, no Carolingian-style legislation on canons, no discussions of the nature of the canonical calling, and no treatises equivalent to the twelfth-century Libellus de diversis ordinibus, which ponders the relative merits of the canonical and monastic lifestyles. See Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus qui sunt in ecclesia, ed. and trans. G. Constable and B. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). For a consideration of twelfth-century treatises of spiritual advice written by and for canons, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Docere verbo et exemplo: An Aspect of Twelfth-Century Spirituality (Harvard Theological Studies 31) (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1979), esp. part 1. For a history of canons, the starting place remains Charles Dereine, “Chanoines (des origines au XIIIe siècle),” Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques

314! notes

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

12 (1953): cols. 353–405. Cathedral canons of the tenth century occasionally have attracted the attention of scholars of certain particularly well documented regions, such as Catalonia (see, for example, J. J. Bauer, “Die vita canonica der katalanischen Kathedralkapitel vom 9. bis zum 11. Jahrhundert,” in Homenaje a Johannes Vincke [Madrid, 1962], 1:81–112; Odilo Engels, “Episkopat und Kanonie im mittelalterlichen Katalonien,” in Reconquista und Landesherrschaft: Studien zur Rechts- und Verfassungsgeschichte Spaniens im Mittelalter, ed. Odilo Engels [Rechts- und Staatswissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen der Görres-Gesellschaft, Neue Folge, 53] [Paderborn: Schöningh, 1989], pp. 149–201; Paul Freedman, The Diocese of Vic: Tradition and Regeneration in Medieval Catalonia [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983], especially chap. 2). Little attention has been dedicated to tenth-century Aquitanian canons in either cathedrals or collegiate churches. The work of Jean Becquet, collected in La vie canoniale en France aux X e–XII e siècles (London: Variorum Reprints, 1985), focuses on the Limousin and often on the period after 1050. Georges Duby, La société aux XI e et XII e siècles dans la region mâconnaise (Paris: A. Colin, 1953). Many regional studies have followed in Duby’s footsteps; for Aquitaine, the following are useful: André Debord, La société laïque dans les pays de la Charente, X e–XII e siècles (Paris: Picard, 1984); George Beech, A Rural Society in Medieval France: The Gâtine of Poitou in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964). Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand was founded before 507, in honor of Hilary, the city’s first bishop. Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison (Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, vol. 1, part 1) (Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1937–1951), p. 86; L. H. Cottineau, Répertoire topo-bibliographique des abbayes et prieurés (Mâcon: Protat frères, 1937), 2:2310. The first charters from Saint-Hilaire are from the Carolingian era: Louis Rédet, ed., Documents pour l’histoire de l’église de Saint-Hilaire-de-Poitiers (Mémoires de la Société des antiquaires de l’Ouest 14) (1847) (hereafter Saint-Hilaire). It is not always possible to determine whether a gift was from a private holding, because some grants do not specify the origin of the gifts. See, for example, Saint-Hilaire 69 (p. 77). Saint-Hilaire 49 (pp. 57–58) and 57 (p. 66). Saint-Hilaire 37 (p. 42) and 49 (pp. 57–58). Saint-Hilaire 8 (pp. 11–12) and 24 (p. 29). Saint-Hilaire 43 (pp. 49–50): “Oportet unicuique, dum in corpore versatur et praesenti vita fruitur, pro redemptione animae suae sollicita mente invigilare et de praemio aeternae retributionis omnibus modis omnique studio recogitare. Ammonet namque nos Domnus pro talibus factis in Evangelio, dicens: Operamini dum dies est: venit hora in qua nemo poterit operari; opera videlicet significans bona, quae quisque dum vivit pro se agat, ne, cum mors venerit repentina, imparatum eum inveniat.” The Gospel quotation is an adaptation of John 9:4. Excellent examples of such scholarship include the work of Duby (see above, note 6); Barbara Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–1049 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). For recent work on charters, see Adam J. Kosto and Anders Winroth, eds., Charters, Cartularies, and Archives: The Preservation and Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2002); Karl Heidecker, ed., Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society (Utrecht Studies of Medieval Literacy 5) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000); Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle, and Michel Parisse, eds., Les cartulaires: Actes de la table ronde organisée par l’École na-

notes 315!

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

tionale des chartes et le GDR 121 du CNRS (Paris, 5–7 décembre 1991) (Mémoires et documents de l’École des chartes 39) (Paris: École des chartes, 1993). On the structure of charters, see Olivier Guyotjeannin, Jacques Pycke, and BenoîtMichel Tock, Diplomatique médiévale (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), chap. 3, esp. pp. 76– 79 on preambles; Heinrich Fichtenau, Arenga: Spätantike und Mittelalter im Spiegel von Urkundenformeln (Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 18) (Graz-Cologne: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus, 1957). On trends in spirituality that can be traced in charter preambles, see Joseph Avril, “La fonction épiscopale dans le vocabulaire des chartes (Xe–XIIe siècles),” in Horizons marins, itineraires spirituels (V e–XVIII e siècles), ed. Henri Dubois, Jean-Claude Hocquet, and André Vauchez (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1987), 1:125–126; idem, “Observance monastique et spiritualité dans les préambules des actes (Xème–XIIIème siècles),” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 85 (1990): 5; Michel Zimmermann, “Protocoles et préambules dans les documents catalans du Xe au XIIe siècle,” Mélanges de la casa de Velazquez 10 (1974): 41–76; 11 (1975): 51–77. Michel Parisse, “Une enquête à mener: La spiritualité des nobles au miroir des préambules de leurs actes,” in Georges Duby: L’écriture de l’histoire, ed. Claudie DuhamelAmado and Guy Lobrichon (Brussels: De Boeck, 1996), pp. 307–316. Conversely, Stephen D. White is more skeptical about the idea that charters accurately reflect lay attitudes to donations: Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints: The Laudatio Parentum in Western France, 1050–1150 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 11–12. Saint-Hilaire 73 (pp. 82–83). This sentiment is not uncommon in Aquitanian documents. For statements of the importance of making and keeping written documentation of gifts and settlements, see Pierre de Monsabert, ed., Chartes de l’abbaye de Nouaillé de 678 à 1200 (Archives historiques du Poitou 49) (1936), 34 (pp. 61–62) and 104 (pp. 172–174); L. Rédet, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint-Cyprien de Poitiers (Archives historiques du Poitou 3) (1874), 184 (pp. 118–119). This assertion of the importance of texts by people who were (we assume) not literate fits well with the concept of textuality proposed by Brian Stock in The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 7. For lay use of writing and charters in the early Middle Ages, see Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Adam Kosto, “Laymen, Clerics, and Documentary Practices in the Early Middle Ages: The Example of Catalonia,” Speculum 80 (2005): 44–74; Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Walter Ullmann, “On the Heuristic Value of Medieval Chancery Products,” Annali della fondazione italiana per la storia amministrativa 1 (1964): 117–134, esp. pp. 121– 125; reprinted in The Church and the Law in the Earlier Middle Ages (London: Variorum Reprints, 1975), no. 19. Laurent Morelle, “Un ‘grégorien’ au miroir de ses chartes: Geoffroy, évêque d’Amiens (1104–1115),” in À propos des actes d’évêques: Hommage à Lucie Fossier, ed. Michel Parisse (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1991), pp. 177–218 (esp. pp. 187–205). Alfred Richard, ed., Chartes et documents pour servir à l’histoire de l’abbaye de SaintMaixent (Archives historiques du Poitou 16) (1886), 33 (pp. 48–50) (hereafter SaintMaixent); Saint-Hilaire 43 (pp. 49–50). Saint-Maixent 33 (pp. 48–50). Saint-Hilaire 43 (pp. 49–50).

316! notes 21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

The question arises whether this concern with the transitory nature of life was particularly strong in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries because of millennial fears. This is certainly possible, although a few observations are called for. First, in the SaintHilaire charters (and Aquitanian charters more widely), I have not seen a major increase in concern with these issues around the year 1000—several earlier Saint-Hilaire charters discuss the fleeting nature of life and impending judgment (see Saint-Hilaire 7 [pp. 10–11] from 876; 8 [pp. 11–12] from 878; 17 [p. 21] from 940, for example). Explicit mentions of the end of the world are quite rare in Aquitanian charters; examples are found in the documents of Saint-Jouin des Marnes: Charles de Grandmaison, ed., Chartularium Sancti Jovini (Société de statistique du département des Deux-Sèvres 17), vol. 2 (1854), esp. charters from 1038 (pp. 1–3) and 998 (pp. 11–12). Second, as Claude Carozzi has pointed out and is confirmed in the Aquitanian documents, the use of the anno domini system of dating is rare in French charters from this period (“De l’année mille à l’an un,” in Année mille an mil, ed. Claude Carozzi and Huguette Taviani-Carozzi [Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’université de Provence, 2002], pp. 119–122). Does this lack of use indicate that people in this time and place were perhaps not aware of or not concerned with the millennium? The question remains open for debate. Saint-Maixent 33 (p. 49): “Jam dictum vero alodum cum omnibus adjacentiis suis totum et ad integrum, cultum et incultum, ea ratione trado, ut jam dictus confessor prebeat mihi auxilium in futuro seculo factus adjutor, quatinus quicquid in hoc seculo proprie iniquitatis reatu, fallente diabolo, contraxi, totum ineffabilis misericordia Dei debeat et abstergat; cuiusque clementia absolutus, ad eternam patriam pervenire valeam inlesus.” Saint-Hilaire 43 (pp. 49–50): “Apostolus quoque similiter hortatur, inquiens: ‘Dum tempus habemus operemur bonum ad omnes, maxime autem ad domesticos fidei’; domesticos pro certo fidei demonstrans eos qui assiduis obsequiis sanctis Dei inserviunt, qui et pro vivis deprecentur et pro defunctis continuis orationum invigilent studiis.” There seem to be two main traditions among Latin Christian authors in interpreting Paul’s domestici fidei. First, the domestici fidei are described simply as the Christian faithful, in works such as that of Marius Victorinus (In epistolam Pauli ad Galatas [Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 83.2] [Turnhout: Brepols, 1986], p. 169) and certain works of Augustine, such as his commentary on Galatians (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 84 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1971], p. 137). A definition closer to Ebles’ is found in a sermon attributed to Augustine (sermon 307: Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina [hereafter PL] [Paris, 1844–1864], vol. 39, col. 2335). A sentiment close to Ebles’ is also expressed in a charter for the house of Saint-Bertin in 648 (PL 88: 1155), which uses domestici fidei as one metaphor for monks, although it does not define domestici fidei as explicitly as Ebles does. The passage in Ebles’ charter may thus represent his own interpretation of that phrase. For scholarship on attempts by donors to build relationships between themselves, their families, and the patron saints of the religious house to which they gave, and on the importance of communal prayer to donors in this period, see Megan McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Frederick Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter; White, Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints. For another example, from the early part of this period, see the charter issued in ca. 940 by Turpio of Limoges (898–944): Jean Becquet, Actes des évêques de Limoges des

notes 317!

27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

origines à 1197 (Documents, études et répertoires publiés par l’Institut de recherche et d’histoire des texts 56) (Paris: CNRS, 1999), no. 6 (pp. 27–29). Becquet, Actes des évêques, no. 14 (p. 43): “Est etiam missum in hac convenientia ut post morte domni Jordani episcopi tale obsequio caelebretur a fratribus in monasterio beati Marcialis pro anima eiusdem quale solitum est peragi pro quolibet ipsius loci abbate, pro animabus vero patris et matris suae veluti pro unius monachi anima praedicti loci defuncto.” McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints, p. 248. In her final chapter McLaughlin uses charters among other sources to discuss how nontheologians viewed prayer for the dead in the early Middle Ages. For her discussion of the origins of the opinions heard in charter preambles, see pp. 179–180. For more on the importance of kin groups in donations to religious houses, see White, Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints, chap. 5. Saint-Maixent 63 (pp. 80–82), 82 (pp. 100–101), 93 (pp. 113–114); Saint-Hilaire 39 (pp. 44–45). Saint-Maixent 21 (pp. 34–35), 43 (pp. 59–60), 73 (p. 90), 109 (pp. 136–137). In at least one case it appears that the preamble was omitted when the document was recopied by Dom Fonteneau, the early-modern scholar on whose copies we depend for most of the charters of Saint-Maixent (see 73 [p. 90 n. 2]). Saint-Maixent 63 (p. 80 n. 2). Indeed, the editor concludes that this must have been the case for one of them: SaintMaixent 82 (p. 100 n. 1). Saint-Maixent 21 (pp. 34–35). The text of this charter survives only in two copies made by the early-modern scholar Dom Fonteneau, one from the original document and one from the twelfth-century cartulary. The copy from the original contained many lacunae, so the modern editor conflated the two copies by Fonteneau to create the printed version (p. 34 n. 1; see also introduction, pp. xiii–xxii). The charters open with similar phrases: all that survives in the 959 document is: “. . . Maneat omnibus hominibus . . .” Ebles’ preamble (Saint-Maixent 33 [p. 48]) begins, “Cum certa mors maneat omnes homines . . .” Other portions of the 959 charter resemble Ebles’ donation; many of these shared sections were found in Fonteneau’s copy from the twelfth-century cartulary rather than from the original. The prologue, however, could not be reconstructed in the 959 charter, and so we cannot tell if the whole prologue resembled Ebles’ charter. We must also consider the fact that the date given by the editor is not certain—it is dated only to ca. 959. What seems clear is that the 959 charter is, according to the editor, the earliest surviving document that resembles the form of Ebles’ gift to Saint-Maixent; it is possible that Ebles copied this charter, including the lost preamble, for his own donation. On the other hand, the editor’s date may be wrong, or both charters may have been copied from an earlier exemplar. Ebles’ donation charter is Saint-Hilaire 43 (pp. 49–50); the copy is Saint-Hilaire 69 (p. 77). Both of these charters survive in the original: Archives Départementales de la Vienne, carton 3, no. 34 (Saint-Hilaire 43; in the original and a copy [perhaps eleventh century]) and no. 54 (Saint-Hilaire 69; original). An examination of these originals provides another possible piece of evidence that Saint-Hilaire 69 was copied from Ebles’ charter. The original charter of Ebles’ gift includes a striking and complicated three-line symbol at the beginning of the text (the later copy of this charter reproduces the symbol but with less detail). This symbol is reproduced in carton 3, no. 54 (Saint-Hilaire 69); it does not appear elsewhere in Saint-Hilaire charters. It seems likely that in copying Ebles’ charter, the scribe of Saint-Hilaire 69 reproduced the symbol as well. Saint-Hilaire 39 (pp. 44–45).

318! notes 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

Parisse, “Un enquête,” pp. 312–315. A survey of the formulary collections used in this period, however, did not produce exemplars for Ebles’ three documents, although there were charters that expressed similar sentiments; see Karl Zeumer, ed., Formulae Merovingici et Karolini Aevi (MGH Legum sectio V) (Hannover: Hansche Buchhandlung, 1963). Considerable further work with manuscripts of formulae would be required to be more certain about whether Ebles’ documents were copied from known exemplars; even then, however, we could not be entirely sure about the composition process. This is an expansion and adaptation of the argument made by Jeffrey Bowman in “Do Neo-Romans Curse? Law, Land, and Ritual in the Midi (900–1100),” Viator 28 (1997): 19–20. As mentioned above, both William Tow-Head and William Iron-Arm were lay abbots of Saint-Hilaire. William Iron-Arm also made donations to Saint-Hilaire (Saint-Hilaire 39 [pp. 44–45]; 47 [pp. 54–56]; 49 [pp. 57–58]). Both Williams are seen in the charters acting as abbots on behalf of the monastery, often with the advice of Ebles. See, for example, Saint-Hilaire 23 (pp. 27–28); 25 (pp. 29–30); 26 (pp. 30–32); 32 (pp. 36–38); 36 (pp. 40–41); 38 (pp. 42–43); 50 (pp. 59–60). William Iron-Arm even borrowed his uncle’s language in the Saint-Maixent charter to give a gift to Saint-Hilaire (SaintHilaire 39 [pp. 44–45]). Constable, Reformation of the Twelfth Century, pp. 11–13. Among Saint-Hilaire charters, see, for example, Saint-Hilaire 12 (p. 16); 37 (p. 42); 46 (pp. 53–54); 48 (pp. 56–57).

8. naming names: the nomencl ature of heresy 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

Documents pour l’histoire de l’église de Saint-Hilaire de Poitiers, ed. Louis Rédet, 2 vols. (Poitiers, 1847–1852), no. 72 (1:80–82). Ademar of Chabannes, Ademari Cabannensis Chronicon, ed. Pascal Bourgain, Richard Landes, and Georges Pon (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis 129) (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 3.59 (p. 180). Anselm of Liège, Gesta episcoporum Leodiensium 2.62–64, in MGH SS 8.226–228. See, for example, Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947); Antoine Dondaine, “L’origine de l’hérésie médiévale: À propos d’un livre récent,” Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia 6 (1952): 47–78; and Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, La mutation féodale: X e–XII e siècles (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1980), pp. 389–427. The most influential Anglophone work has been R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (London: Blackwell, 1987). His influence is reflected in the contributions, particularly those of Richard Landes and Guy Lobrichon, to Thomas Head and Richard Landes, eds., The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France Around the Year 1000 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Scholars outside the Anglophone world were also developing this point of view; see particularly such works of Giovanni Cracco as “Gli eretici nella ‘societas christiana’ dei secoli XI e XII,” in La cristianità dei secoli XI e XII in Occidente: Coscienza e strutture di una società (Milan: Vita e pensiera, 1982), pp. 339–373. See particularly Michael Frassetto, “Heretics, Antichrists, and the Year 1000: Apocalyptic Expectations in the Writings of Ademar of Chabannes,” in The Year 1000: Religious and Social Response to the Turning of the First Millennium, ed. Michael Frasseto (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 73–84; and Claire Taylor, “The Letter of Héribert of Périgord as a Source for Dualist Heresy in the Society of Early EleventhCentury Aquitaine,” Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000): 313–340.

notes 319! 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

Taylor, “Letter,” pp. 317–318. Guy Lobrichon, “The Chiaroscuro of Heresy: Early Eleventh-Century Aquitaine as Seen from Auxerre,” in Head and Landes, Peace of God, p. 100. The title of my essay plays on the importance of names such as “communist” in more recent conflicts over orthodoxy, specifically those conducted before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. I give my apologies and thanks to Victor Navasky, tireless editor and publisher of the Nation and author of Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980). Medievalists have long explored the significance of nomenclature. In such matters I have found the work of my former teacher Caroline Bynum to be exemplary see particularly Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), chaps. 3 and 4. Documents de Saint-Hilaire 71–72 (1:78–82). According to the editor, Louis Rédet, a third charter (which I will call no. 72bis) largely replicates no. 72. He convincingly suggests that it was issued at the same time and place. His date, however, is a mistaken application of the assumption that these charters employed a system of dating that took Easter as the beginning of the year: both nos. 71 and 72 state peractis mille xv annis ab Incarnatione Domini nostri, and Easter never occurs after August 3. Taylor, “Letter,” p. 316. Cécile Treffort, “Le comte de Poitiers, duc d’Aquitaine, et l’Église aux alentours de l’an mil (970–1030),” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 43 (2000): 438–439. Landes and Pon, in their notes to Ademar’s Chronicon, p. 303 (ad 3.49, 59). Their reference to charter “no. 74, pp. 74–75, fin du Xe siècle” is garbled. There is no mention of Manichees in any charter of Saint-Hilaire. See my discussion in “The Development of the Peace of God in Aquitaine (970–1005),” Speculum 74 (1999): 656–686. Both texts are generally cited from the editions in Giovanni Domenico Mansi, ed., Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio (Florence and Venice, 1759–1798; repr., Graz, 1961–present), 19.89–90 and 265–268, respectively. These editions are far from satisfactory and provide no information about the sources of the language of the synodal acts. I am in the process of preparing critical editions of the two texts based on the sole surviving medieval copies (Vatican, Reg. Lat., 1127, ff. 161v and 161r, respectively) in a forthcoming article on the acts of the Peace councils in Aquitaine. The double dates provided for each council result from the uncertainties caused by the Easter dating system. For 1010/11, see Jean Verdon, ed., La chronique de SaintMaixent (751–1140) (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1979), pp. 106–109; and Alfred Richard, ed., Chartes et documents pour servir à l’histoire de l’abbaye de Saint-Maixent, 2 vols. (Poitiers, 1886), 74 (1:91–92). For 1024/25, see Pierre de Monsabert, ed., Chartes de l’abbaye de Nouaillé de 678 à 1200 (Poitiers, 1936), 104 (pp. 172–174). For 1029/30, see La chronique de Saint-Maixent, pp. 114–116; and Chartes de Saint-Maixent 91 (1:109–111). Quoting the opening words of Hilary of Poitiers, Contra Arianos, vel Auxentium Mediolanensem in Jacques-Paul Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus: Series latina, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844–1864) [hereafter PL] 10:609. John of Ripoll, Letter to Abbot Oliba in Andrew of Fleury, Vie de Gauzlin, abbé de Fleury/Vita Gauzlini abbatis Floriacensis monasterii, ed. and trans. Robert-Henri Bautier and Gillette Labory (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1969), pp. 180–183 (composed in 1023); Ademar of Chabannes, Chronicon 3.59 (p. 180) (composed in its final form around 1028); Andrew of Fleury, Vita Gauzlini, chap. 56 in Vie de Gauzlin, pp. 96–103 (composed around 1042); Andrew of Fleury, Miracula Sancti Benedicti 6.20, in Les miracles de Saint Benoît, écrits par Adrevald, Aimoin, André, Raoul Tortaire et Hugues de Sainte Marie, moines de Fleury, ed. Eugène

320! notes

19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

de Certain (Paris, 1858), pp. 246–248 (composed between 1041 and 1043, but after the Vita Gauzlini); Rodulfus Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque, ed. John France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 3.8.26–31 (pp. 138–151) (composed between 1046 and 1049); Paul of Saint-Père, Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint-Père de Chartres, ed. M. Guérard, 2 vols. (Paris, 1840), 6.2 (1:108–115) (composed after 1078); Vita Sancti Theodorici, chap. 4 in Luc d’Achéry and Jean Mabillon, eds., Acta Sanctorum ordinis Sancti Benedicti, 1st ed., 9 vols. (Paris, 1668–1701), 6.1:195–196 (composed in the mid-eleventh century); Chronique de Saint-Pierre-le-Vif de Sens, dite de Clarius, ed. and trans. Robert-Henri Bautier and Monique Gilles (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1979), pp. 114–115 (this section composed ca. 1110). On these conflicts, see Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 255–270. See, for example, Arno Borst, Die Katharer (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1953), pp. 67–69; R. I. Moore, “The Origins of Medieval Heresy,” History 55 (1970): 25–28; Malcolm D. Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus, 1st ed. (London: E. Arnold, 1977), pp. 24–36. Robert-Henri Bautier, “L’hérésie d’Orléans et le mouvement intellectuel au début du XIe siècle: Documents et hypothèses,” in Enseignement et vie intellectuelle (IX e– XVI e siecle). Actes du 95 e Congrès national des sociétés savantes, Section de philologie et d’histoire jusqu’à 1610, Reims, 1970, tome I (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1975), pp. 63–88. For example, Malcolm D. Lambert (Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 2d ed. [Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992], p. 13) and Moore (Formation of a Persecuting Society, pp. 15–16) substantially agree with Bautier’s analysis, altering their earlier views (see note 20 above). John of Ripoll, Letter to Oliba, p. 180. Andrew of Fleury, Vita Gauzlini, chap. 56 (p. 96) and Miracula Sancti Benedicti 6.20 (p. 246). Rodulfus Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque 3.8.27 (p. 140). Vita Sancti Theodorici, p. 195 and (probably repeating) Chronique de Saint-Pierre-leVif, p. 114. See, for example, heretica pravitas and heresis in Paul of Saint-Père, Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint-Père de Chartres, p. 109. Head, Hagiography, pp. 245–251. Paris B.N. Lat. 11674 and 2278. On the manuscripts and marginalia, see Marco Mostert, The Library of Fleury: A Provisional List of Manuscripts (Hilversum: Verloren, 1989), pp. 202 and 229; and The Political Theology of Abbo of Fleury: A Study of the Ideas About Society and Law of the Tenth-Century Monastic Reform Movement (Hilversum: Verloren, 1987), pp. 58 and 71–75. The notations on heretics include Paris B.N. Lat. 11674, ff. 126v (ad Registrum 4.23), 132v (ad 4.35), 140r (ad 5.7); and BN lat. 2278, ff. 29v (ad 9.136), 47r (ad 9.216), 48v (ad 9.219), 54v (ad 9.229), 62r (ad 10.14), 65v and 66r (ad 10.21), 92r and 92v (ad 11.52). Auxerre: Paris B.N. Lat. 2280, see particularly ff. 4, 5, 34, 40–41v, 47v, 52v, 53v, 73v, 91v, etc., on heresy. Cluny: Paris B.N. Lat. 1452, see particularly pp. 27, 107, 129, and 271 on heresy, although it should be noted that many of the marginalia were lost in the process of trimming this manuscript for modern binding. Paris B.N. Lat. 2279, which contains few marginal notations. See also Bruno Judic, “Lire Grégoire le Grand à Saint-Martial de Limoges,” Studia Patristica 36 (2001): 126–133. Paris B.N. Lat. 2400, ff. 154–162, an autograph of Ademar, is the only surviving copy of

notes 321!

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

Abbo’s Collection. See Richard Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 364. Landes, Relics, p. 363. Michael Frassetto, “The Manichaeans in the Writings of Ademar of Chabannes and the Origins of Medieval Heresy” has yet to appear in Revue des études Augustiniennes. I rely on a summary of its draft provided by Taylor in “Letter,” pp. 316–318. Ademar of Chabannes, Chronicon 3.49 (p. 170). For the date, see the editors’ note. Ademar, Chronicon 3.59 (p. 180). Ademar, Chronicon 3.69 (p. 189). Frassetto, “Heretics,” pp. 75–77, and “Reaction and Reform: Reception of Heresy in Arras and Aquitaine in the Early Eleventh Century,” Catholic Historical Review 83 (1997): 388–392. This sermon is partially edited by Richard Landes and Jean-Pierre Poly in Michel Zimmermann, ed., Les sociétés méridionales autour de l’an mil: Répertoire des sources et documents commentés (Paris: CNRS, 1992), pp. 455–457, and discussed in some detail by Frassetto in “Reaction,” pp. 395–399, and “Heretics,” pp. 77–78. Guy Lobrichon published the text in three manuscript versions, the earliest dating to the early eleventh century, in Head and Landes, Peace of God, pp. 347–350. For details, see his “The Chiascuro of History” in the same volume. On the copy of the Registrum from Auxerre, see note 31 above. See, for example, Landes, Relics, pp. 38–39, and R. I. Moore, “Property, Marriage, and the Eleventh-Century Revolution: A Context for Early Medieval Communism,” in Michael Frassetto, ed., Medieval Purity and Piety: Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform (New York: Garland Publishers, 1998), pp. 180–182. Taylor, “Letter,” and Michael Frassetto, “The Sermons of Adémar of Chabannes and the Letter of Héribert: New Sources Concerning the Origins of Medieval Heresy,” Revue Bénédictine 109 (1999): 324–340. Landes, Relics, passim. Anselm of Liège, Gesta episcoporum Leodiensium 2.62–64 (in MGH SS: 8. 226–228). The translation in Heresies of the High Middle Ages, ed. and trans. Walter Wakefield and Austin Evans (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 89–93, is followed here. Wakefield and Evans discuss the date of the text in their introduction. Rodulfus Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque 2.9.22 (pp. 88–91) and the prefatory letter to the Acta synodi Atrebatenis in PL 72.1269–1272. Some commentators prefer to identify “R.” as Bishop Reginard of Liège. Moore, Origins, p. 40. For an overview, see G. R. Evans, “Berengar, Roscelin, and Peter Damian,” in The Medieval Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Medieval Period, ed. G. R. Evans (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 86–87. Adelman of Liège, “Letter to Berengar,” in R. B.C. Huygens, “Textes latins du XIe au XIIIe siècle,” Studi Medievali, 3rd ser., 8 (1967): 478–479. See, for example, Yves Congar, “ ‘Arriana haeresis’ comme désignation du néomanichéisme au XIIe siècle,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 43 (1959): 449–461.

9. economic development and demotic religiosit y 1.

Henri Pirenne, A History of Europe: From the Invasions to the XVI Century (New York: University Books, 1956), book 5; this view is taken up in a whole range of books on

322! notes

2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

European economic growth in the Middle Ages. For a recent example of this, see François Crouzet, Histoire de l’économie européene, 1000–2000 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000), pp. 19–70. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, a.d. 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 2–12. David Landes, Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1998); Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (New York: Basic Books, 2000); see critique of Richard Schweder, “Moral Maps, ‘First World’ Conceits, and the New Evangelists,” ibid., pp. 158–177. For a useful discussion of the dynamics involved, see John Hall, Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West (New York: Penguin Books, 1985); and John Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997). Kautsky, Aristocratic Empires, pp. 177–187. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), book III, chap. 2, p. 412. Walter Map, De nugis curialium = Courtiers’ trifles, ed. and trans. M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), chap. 81. Bede, History of the English Church and People (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 3:14, pp. 163–166. See Jacques Le Goff, Histoire de la France urbaine, vol. 5: La ville médiévale, des Carolingiens à la Renaissance (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980). For example, Louis VII and the revolt of the commune of Laon, in Guibert of Nogent, Autobiography, trans. C. C. Swinton Bland (London: Routledge, 1925), pp. 153–154, 159–164. See the responses of the imperial authorities to tax revolts in the empire in Ramsay MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest, and Alienation in the Empire (London: Routledge, 1992). “The Peasant and the Buffet” (Le villain au buffet) in Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIII e et XIV e siècles, ed. Anatole de Montaigion and Gaston Raynaud (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1878), III, pp. 199–208. Gadi Algazi, “Pruning Peasants: Private War and Maintaining the Lords’ Peace in Late Medieval Germany,” in Medieval Transformations: Texts, Power, and Gifts in Context, ed. Esther Cohen and Mayke de Jong (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 245–274. Cited in James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 45. For an excellent film about both the court culture based on such sentiments and its role in preventing any serious economic reform, see the movie Ridicule (1996), directed by Patrice Leconte. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), II.17. Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), pp. 57–76. See W. G. Runciman, Relative Depravation and Social Justice: A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequity in Twentieth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). “The Jew increasingly served as the ‘royal usurer,’ whose main function consisted in sucking up the wealth of other classes through high rates of interest, and being in turn squeezed dry by the royal treasury” (S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 4 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1957], pp. 87–88).

notes 323! 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

See below, note 29, on communes. See below, note 45. Georges Duby, L’économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’occident médiéval (Paris: Editions Montaigne, 1962), pp. 311–373. Robert Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Lynn White, Machina ex Deo: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); idem, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Brian Stock, Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Henri Pirenne, Early Democracies in the Low Countries: Urban Society and Political Conflict in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, trans. J. V. Saunders (New York: Norton, 1963). Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (London: Blackwell, 1987). Duby, L’économie rurale, pp. 65–71; McCormick, despite covering the period in question, does not address the issue: Origins of the European Economy, pp. 10ff.; for a discussion of the dramatic difference between the famine-riddled Carolingian period and the relatively famine-free eleventh century, especially after 1033, see Pierre Bonnassie, “Peasants in the French Kingdom at the Time of Hugh Capet and Robert the Pious,” in From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Les libertés urbaines et rurales du XI e au XIV e siècles (Colloque International, Spa, 1966); see also below, note 45. Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies (London: Blackwell, 1989). Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), chap. 5. Smith, Wealth of Nations, book 3, chap. 4, p. 439. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Rinehart, 1941). For a more extensive discussion of this theme, see Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 59–63. Micah 4:3–4. David Van Meter, “The Peace of Amiens-Corbie and Gerard of Cambrai’s Oration on the Three Functional Orders: The Date, the Contexts, the Rhetoric,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 74 (1996): 646–650. Cf. Buc, L’ambiguïté du Livre: Prince, pouvoir, et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au Moyen Age (Paris: Beauchesne, 1994), pp. 246–311; Peter Blickle, The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants’ War from a New Perspective, trans. Thomas A. Brady (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). Robert Filmer, “Patriarcha; or, the Natural Power of Kings,” in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Somerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). John Locke, First Treatise on Government in Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). See C. Edson Armi, The “Headmaster” of Chartres and the Origin of “Gothic” Sculpture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). David Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Knopf, 1997).

324! notes 42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57.

See Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, pp. 204–235, esp. the treatment of Piers Plowman. This was the response of Hillel (ca. 50 b.c.e.) in his famous encounter with the Roman who challenged him to reveal the essence of the Torah (five books of Moses) while standing on one leg (Talmud, Mas. Shabbath 31a). For an example, see Max Weber on Franklin, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalburg (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 2002), part I, chap. 2. See the discussion of the 859 coniuratio of commoners wiped out by the Frankish aristocracy for having the nerve to defend themselves against the invading Vikings. “But, because they had imprudently undertaken their collective oath, they were easily massacred [ facile interficiuntur] by our more powerful ones [potentioribus nostris]” (Annales sancti Bertiniani ad an. 859; trans. Janet Nelson, The Annals of Saint Bertin [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991]). For the most recent discussion, see Claire Taylor, “The Year 1000 and Those Who Labored,” in The Year 1000: Religious and Social Response to the Turning of the First Millennium, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 197. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Taylor, “Year 1000,” pp. 214–219. R. W. Southern, Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 107–110. Stock (Implications of Literacy) calls them “laboratories of social organization” (p. 88). Latin text in PL 142: cols. 1269–1312; trans. Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 84. See also a contemporary description of a group that held that “alms are worthless, for since there should be no property . . .” (Héribert’s letter from Périgord: Paris BN. Lat. 1745, fol. 31r; copied first third of eleventh century; analysis, Latin text, and English translation in Guy Lobrichon, “The Chiaruscuro of Heresy: Early Eleventh-Century Aquitaine as Seen from Auxerre,” in The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France Around the Year 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 80–103, 347–348 (Latin text). For the best single treatment of the larger paradox of apostolic religiosity and economic growth, see Lester Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). Bernard Hamilton, “Wisdom from the East: The Reception by the Cathars of Eastern Dualist Texts,” in Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530, ed. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 39–41. Cf. Michael Frassetto, “Heretics, Antichrists, and the Year 1000: Apocalyptic Expectations in the Writings of Ademar of Chabannes” in The Year 1000, pp. 73–84. See, for instance, Bede, Life of Cuthbert 3; in The Lives of the Saints, trans. J. F. Webb (New York: Penguin Classics, 1981), pp. 75–76. Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. János M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap. 2: “Peasants and Saints,” esp. pp. 58–77. See above on demotic religiosity. Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, p. 11. “It is safe to say that Leutard could hardly have come up with this heresy ‘on his own,’ and if the heresy was borrowed from others, they were likely Bogomils” (Heinrich Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages, 1000–1200, trans. Denise A. Kaiser [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998], p. 18). See the case of Leutard and the bees in Rodulfus Glaber, Les cinq livres de ses histo-

notes 325!

58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

ries 2.11, cited in Wakefield and Evans, pp. 72–73; the letter of Héribert (see below); Ademar of Chabannes on “Manichees,” Chronique 3.49, cited in Wakefield and Evans, pp. 73–74; Gerard (see above, note 36). For a discussion of the crucifix and its relationship to apocalyptic expectation, see Richard Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034 (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 285–308. See above, note 50. On the historiography of the Peace movement, see Fred Paxton, “History, Historians, and the Peace of God,” in Landes and Head, Peace of God, pp. 21–40. Since then Dominique Barthélemy has published his L’an mil et la Paix de Dieu: La France chrétienne et féodale, 980–1060 (Paris: Fayard, 1999). For an excellent and generally ignored essay on the Peace see Adriaan Bredero, “The Bishop’s Peace of God: A Turning Point in Medieval Society,” in Christendom and Christianity in the Middle Ages: The Relations Between Religion, Church, and Society, trans. Reinder Bruinsma (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 105–129; and Thomas Gergen’s assessment of the issues of popular participation in La pratique juridique de la Paix et trêve de Dieu à partir du concile de Charroux (989–1250) (Rechtshistorische Reihe 285) (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 26–33. On the problems with Ademar the “mythomane,” see Landes, Relics, pp. 269–281. This is one of the aspects of the Peace that its denigrators either ignore or deny despite the abundant evidence (see Barthelemy, L’an mil et la Paix de Dieu). Taylor finds such an idea inconceivable: “Do we really picture, at all these councils, the rural poor having left their fields to attend in defiance of their new lords? Or, do we picture the freemen, struggling against the regime that already ties their neighbors to the land” (“The Year 1000,” p. 212). Yes, this is precisely what makes the Peace so exceptional. The best analysis of this “revivalist” atmosphere comes from another such “Peace movement” some two centuries later, the Great Allelulia of 1233, for which see Augustine Thompson, Revival Preachers and Politics in Thirteenth-Century Italy: The Great Devotion of 1233 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). See on 1033 below, note 66. Christian Lauranson-Rosaz, “Peace from the Mountains: The Auvergnat Origins of the Peace of God,” in Landes and Head, Peace of God, pp. 104–134; R. I. Moore, “Postscript: The Peace of God and the Social Revolution,” ibid., pp. 308–326. Glaber on 1033, Historiarum libri quinque 1.5.26, ed. and trans. J. France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Gerard of Cambrai’s account, Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensium 3.52 (normally dated to 1024, redated to 1033 by Van Meter in “The Peace of Amiens-Corbie, pp. 634–644). Ademar, Paris BN Lat. 2469, fol. 88v; Fulbert, “The Joy of Peace” (1027), in The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres, trans. Frederick Behrends (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Fulbert’s Chartres was not in Peace of God territory, but his poem suggests that the ideology and spirit spread far and wide. No other poem before this invoked Isaiah’s messianic imagery as being fulfilled. See discussion in Van Meter, “The Peace of Amiens-Corbie.” See Chartes et documents pour servir à l’histoire de l’abbaye de Charroux, ed. Pierre Monsabert (Archives historiques du Poitou 39) (1910), pp. 36, 51. See general discussion in H. E. J. Cowdrey, “The Peace and the Truce of God in the Eleventh Century,” Past and Present 46 (1970): 42–67; specifically on the “King’s Peace,” see Arieh Graboïs, “De la trève de Dieu à la paix du roi: Étude sur les transformations du mouvement de la paix au XIIe siècle,” Mélanges offerts à René Crozet (Poitiers: Société d’études médiévales, 1966), I, p. 585–596.

326! notes 71.

72. 73. 74.

75.

76.

77. 78.

Note the ecstatic form of prayer implied in “palms skyward.” For those engaged in such a gesture, the operative relationship here is their collective covenant with God, not with the bishop. Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque 4.5.21. Deuteronomy 8:10: “And you will eat and you will be satisfied and you will bless the Lord your God.” I am speaking here not about the self-criticism of the clergy, specifically in times of trouble (Malcolm Godden, “Apocalypse and Invasion in Late Anglo-Saxon England,” in From Anglo-Saxon to Early Middle English: Studies Presented to E. G. Stanley, ed. Malcolm Godden, Douglas Gray, and Terry Hoad [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], pp. 130–162), but about the historiographical analysis of class relations. For the relationship of the Peace movement to the Reform, see Michael Frassetto, Medieval Purity and Piety: Essays on Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform (New York: Garland Publishers, 1998). Seymour Martin Lipset and Gabriel Lenz, “Corruption, Culture, and Markets,” in Culture Matters, ed. L. Harrison and S. P. Huntington (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 112–124, extensive references, pp. 313–314. See the most recent discussion in Gergen, Pratique juridique de la Paix, pp. 133–174. See Ernest Gellner’s description of nationalism in Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).

10. back- biting and self- promotion: the work of merchants of the cairo geniz a 1.

TS 12.227/K193v 4–7. Translated in Norman A. Stillman, “East-West Relations in the Islamic Mediterranean in the Early Eleventh Century: A Study of the Geniza Correspondence of the House of Ibn ‘Awkal” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1970), p. 365. A note on the documents and translations: Geniza documents are usually referenced by the shelfmarks of the various libraries in which they are contained. In recent years, however, Moshe Gil has undertaken the project of editing large numbers of these documents, to which he then refers using a system of document numbers. As I have generally used his editions in writing this article, I have chosen to cite shelfmarks in the first reference to a document, followed by a boldfaced number that indicates a document number, followed by line numbers on the recto side (v indicates a quotation from the verso side). The number is preceded by a K to indicate a document number in Moshe Gil, Be-Malkhut Yishmael Bi-Tekufat Ha-Geonim (Tel-Aviv: Mosad Byalik, 1997) or a P to indicate a numbered document in Moshe Gil, Erets-Yisra’el Ba-Tekufah Ha-Muslemit Ha-Rishonah (634–1099) (Tel-Aviv: Universitat Tel-Aviv, 1983). (Gil has adopted similar usages beginning in his 2002 article “References to Silk in Geniza Documents of the Eleventh Century a.d.,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 61 (2002): 31–38.) Subsequent citations will use only the boldfaced reference to Gil’s edition. I have consulted a number of translations in writing this article, and cite available English translations for each document. I have translated each quotation, however, so as to consistently follow the vocabulary of the sources; thus all translations, and any errors they may contain, are my own.

2.

ULC Or 1080 J 167/K488 5–7. Translated in S. D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 154–158; Shlomo Simonsohn, The Jews in Sicily I (Leiden: Brill, 1997), doc. 99

notes 327! 3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

ENA 2805.12/K308 3–5. The name is given in Hebrew form. TS 20.127/K573 48–49. This may appear complimentary, but a likely opposite intention is concealed in the words “as he really is.” The comment occurs in a long passage that catalogues the subject’s shortcomings. Translated in Simonsohn, Jews in Sicily, doc. 51. TS 10J 17.21/K568, right margin: È·Ò ‡ÓÓ ‰Ó Èψ ȯ‚ ‡Ó ÈÏ Ï˜ ¯‡ÎÊ Ô· ÛÂÏÎ ‡Ó‡Â È„„‰Â Ȉ¯ˆ „·Â. The reading of Zakār is problematic, as two letters are broken in the margin. The reading of the next words is also difficult; I read ÈÏ Ï˜ in the original rather than ÏÈϘ as given by Gil. An alternate reading leads to: “As for Khallūf ibn Zakār, a little of what he did to me was what he did to curse me, take away my honor, and threaten me.” The classic discussion begins with Max Gluckman, “Gossip and Scandal,” Current Anthropology 4 3 (1963), pp. 307–316, and continues in Donald J. Black, Toward a General Theory of Social Control, 2 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1984); R. Paine, “What Is Gossip About: Alternative Hypothesis,” Man 2 (1967), pp. 278–285; P. J. Wilson, “Filcher of Good Names: Enquiry Into Anthropology and Gossip,” Man 9 (1974), pp 93–102. A more recent formulation in R. I. M. Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), suggests that gossip is the central glue of social bonds, replacing grooming among primates. Recent scholarship is summarized in R. F. Baumeister, L. Q. Zhang, and K. D. Vohs, “Gossip as Cultural Learning,” Review of General Psychology 8 (2004), 111–121. Thelma S. Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 9. See the articles in Fenster and Smail, eds., Fama, and the bibliography cited there. Ibid., pp. 9–10, citing Melanie Tebbutt, Women’s Talk?: A Social History of “Gossip” in Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960 (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1995), pp. 19–22, on the change in meaning of the term gossip. Fustat was the commercial sister-city of medieval Cairo. Cairo was founded by the Fatimids, who located their royal enclosure a convenient two miles from what was then the thriving capital of Egypt. Geniza is a general term for a place in which used religious texts are deposited for future burial. “The Geniza” or “the Cairo Geniza” refers to the documents from one specific geniza, that of the synagogue of the Palestinian congregation of Fustat. For a description of the Cairo Geniza, the custom of Geniza among Jews, and the extant documents, see Mark R. Cohen, “The Cairo Geniza: A Window on Jewish and Muslim Life in the Middle Ages” (in press); Mark R. Cohen and Yedida K. Stillman, “The Cairo Geniza and the Custom of Geniza Among Oriental Jewry: An Historical and Ethnographic Study” [in Hebrew], Pe’amim 24 (1985), 3–35; Stefan C. Reif, A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University’s Genizah Collection (Culture and Civilisation in the Middle East) (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000). For an overview of the trade of these merchants, see Goitein, Letters, pp. 3–22. See S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, vol. 1: Economic Foundations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 161–162, on personal writing and the employment of clerks. He emphasizes this employment, but draws his examples from the greatest merchant houses. For the merchants whose correspondence forms the majority of our sources, we see a much greater proportion of merchantwritten documents. See the prosopographic analyses in Gil, Be-Malkhut Yishmael, passim. To complete a content analysis of mercantile correspondence, I created a sample subset of letters, using one-fifth of the edited correspondence. This subset is statistically representative of the correspondence as a whole, mapping the geographic dispersion

328! notes

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

of the letters, the amount of correspondence for different generations of the merchant community, and the identities of writers and recipients. This subset was digitized, and I coded content according to categories I saw recurring. For a full description of this project see my dissertation, Jessica Goldberg, “The Geographies of Trade and Traders in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1000–1150: A Geniza Study” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2005), pp. 52–55. Fifty-two percent of contents of the corpus (considered by overall length) involve transactions ordered, completed, delayed, or canceled, whether for the writer, the recipient, or third parties. The remaining space is taken up by business news (12), management of correspondence itself (7), accounts of travels (5), personal and communal news (3). For a more complete breakdown and discussion of this analysis, see Goldberg, “Geographies of Trade and Traders,” pp. 60–110. Such management does not exhaust the ways in which associates and relationships appear in the letters. Merchants also maintain relationships with associates by sending greetings to third parties in letters, by requesting and promising letters, and by expressing anxiety and condolence at hearing bad news about business relations. For a discussion of these elements of the letters in their aspect of relationship maintenance, see Goldberg, “Geographies of Trade and Traders,” pp. 60–110. K221 28: ÑÁ‡·Ó Ȉ¯ˆ ¯‡ˆÂ „Á‡ ÏÎÏ ‰ÓȇÏχ· ̉·˙Î ˙‡‚Ù. The meaning of honor here is discussed below. Translated in Goitein, Letters, p. 31; Stillman, “East-West Relations,” p. 270. A fact that will surprise few people working in today’s business world. Some variations on this practice in the records of one Geniza merchant are analyzed in Karin Almbladh, “The Letters of the Jewish Merchant Abu L-Surur Farah B. Isma’il Al-Qabisi,” Orientalia Suecana 53 (2004), pp. 15–35. I analyze more general patterns in the corpus as a whole in Goldberg, “Geographies of Trade,” pp. 60–79. An example of a near-contemporary manual is Samir Mahmud Durubi and Ahmad ibn Yahya Ibn Fadl Allah al-’Umari, “A Critical Edition of and Study on Ibn Fadl Allah’s Manual of Secretaryship ‘Al-Ta’rif Bi’l-Mustalah Al-Sharif ’ ” (Ph.D. diss., Mu’tah University, 1992). The genre is quite similar to the ars dictaminis that developed in the following century in Europe. On the ars dictaminis, see Martin Camargo, Ars Dictaminis, Ars Dictandi (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991). On this point, see especially Chris Wickham, “Fama and the Law in Twelfth-Century Tuscany,” in Fenster and Smail, eds., Fama, p. 19. On the public nature of most letters in the medieval European context, see Giles Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976). There were several different systems in operation for delivering letters, some involving fellow merchants, and others professional letter carriers. For an overview of the systems used, see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, pp. 281–294. In TS 12.371/K775 5–6, for example, a merchant in the midst of a dispute requests that his correspondent get Nahray ibn Nissīm to act as a mediator: “Please give it to my master Rav Nahray to read. I know that he does not answer queries, but read it to him anyway.” I explore the value of letters as probative documents in Goldberg, “Geographies of Trade,” pp. 216–224. TS 20.127/K573 31–32. TS 10J 15.14/K264 14: Í„‡‰˙‚‡Â Í˙¯Á ÔÓ Û¯Ú‡ ‡ÓÎ. Translated in Simonsohn, Jews in Sicily, doc. 70. TS 10J 16.19. Translated in Goitein, Letters, p. 256. Nahray ibn Nissīm is ubiquitous in the Geniza correspondence, reflecting both his innumerable connections in the merchant community and the fact that an enormous file of his received correspondence was deposited in the Geniza. For convenience, I

notes 329!

29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

have made him the focus of the examples I chose, but the reader should know that such examples are not unique to his correspondence. ENA NS 18.24/K344v 8–10: .‰˙Ó„ . . . ÈÙ ıȯÁ „‰˙‚Ó Â‰Â. Translated in Simonsohn, Jews in Sicily, doc. 97. All emphases in the preceding lines are mine. TS Misc 25.19/K245, margin: .‡ˆÂ˙ ÔÓÓ ˙‡ ‡ÓÂ. Of course, it is often the case that we find such praise precisely when the merchant in question is giving particularly detailed instructions, implying that he does not trust his associate to know what to do. These statements can be seen then as a hint to the recipient as to what he should be. TS NS J 12/K328 14–15: .‡ˆÂÈ ÔÓ ÔÓ ÍÏ˙Ó ‡ÓÂ. Translated in Simonsohn, Jews in Sicily, doc. 64. Occasionally these two forms are combined and we see, “A man like you is not the sort of man who needs to be instructed” (ENA NS 22.13/K578 11–12). TS 10J 5.24/K578 11: .‡ˆÂÈ ÔÓÓ ÍÏ˙Ó ‡Ó ‰È„χ ‡‰ÈÙ ÍÈÏÚ Ú‡ˆ ‡Ó·¯ È‡Â˙χÂ. TS 12.793, K640v 3: ‡ˆÂÈ ÔÓÓ ‡‡ ‡ÓÂ. Bodl Ms Heb d66.41/K262v 3–5: Ë·ÏÓ ˙‡ ‰ÚÒχ ¯ˆÓ· Ï˘ ÍÏ Ô‡Î ‡Ó χ Ì‡Ú ˙‡ .‰È‡ÙÎ ÍÏ˙ÓÏ ‡„‰ ÔÓ Ï˜‡Â ‰‚ ÏÎ ÔÓ. The harshness in the direct assessment reminds the young man that he is not yet capable of all he is trying to take on. Gil dates this letter as written perhaps two years after the letter from Barhūn ibn Mūsā. Hans Wehr and J. Milton Cowan, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, 3rd ed. (Ithaca: Spoken Language Services, 1976), p. 132. Goitein discusses the meanings of this word in A Mediterranean Society, vol. 5: The Individual, pp. 254–261. He identifies the sense of jāh as “connections” in one merchant letter, but doesn’t distinguish the way merchants use this term from usage in other contexts. The capital of modern-day Libya, not the city on the Levantine coast. TS 8J 19.24/K667 18–23: ÌÂÈ ÍÏ‚˘ ͯ˙˙ Ô‡ ÂÏ . . . ‰Ú‡¯Óχ ÈÙ ÍχÂÒ ÈÂÏ‡Ò „Ï ‡˘ Ô‡ ‰ÈÏÚ ¯Î˘ ‡Ó ÏÚÙ˙ ȉ‡‚ ÌȘ˙ ·ÁÙ . . . ·‚È ÛÈΠ̉˜Á ‡ˆ˜Â ȯ·˘ ̉ψ ÎÁÙ . . . ÔÈ˙‡Â ..‰Ïχ. TS Misc 28.235/K520 17–18. Translated in Simonsohn, Jews in Sicily, doc. 164. Bodl Ms Heb c28.63/K641 5–7: ˙‡Â ȉ‡‚ ÌȘ˙ Ô‡ ·Á‡ ‡‡Â ÍÈÏÚ ·ÂÒÁÓ È‡ ‰Ï ˙Ϙ٠ÈÓ ‰·Á‡ˆ ÈÙ ‰Ú‡Ù˘Ï‡· Ó˜‡. Wehr and Cowan, Dictionary, p. 706. ,È„„‰Â Ȉ¯Ú „· È·Ò ‰Ó ÈÏÚ È¯‚ ‡Ó ÈÏ Ï˜ ¯‡ÎÊ Ô· ÛÂÏÎ ‡Ó‡Â, as quoted above in epigraph 5. In ULC Or 1080 J42, a merchant accused of misconduct says the accusation shamed both him and his accuser, and showed a lack of intelligence and piety. Translated in Goitein, Letters, p. 93. The aesthetic preference of Arabic writers of emphasizing their meaning by pairing synonymous words makes this significant. In Samh,ūn’s letter, where both terms appear, the usage in fact emphasizes the different discourses. Samh,ūn, who has been accused of misconduct, mentions that he is only in business with the recipient because he hopes to make use of his jāh in order to make money. When he turns to his correspondent’s behavior, he complains that the recipient did not pay his debts to his creditors, leading to the letters that have ruined his ‘ird,. He hopes that the recipient’s own ‘ird, and piety will force him to recognize the sender’s claims and behave well toward him. K221, passim. It is thus lower than the rate of accusations of serious misconduct, something in itself quite rare, appearing in about 5 of letters. These issues are documented in personal and communal letters, in court records, and by first-party reference in some commercial correspondence. The preference in the medieval Islamic world for business partnerships, and the avoidance of wage labor and employment, is discussed in Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, pp. 161–164. They often masked employment through arrangements where one partner provided

330! notes

47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55.

56.

57. 58. 59.

capital and the other work, with specific ratios of profit assigned each party. On the well-developed system and forms of partnership in Islamic law, and the practice of partnership as evidenced in the Geniza records, see the work of Udovitch, including A. L. Udovitch, Labor Partnerships in Early Islamic Law (Princeton: Program in Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, 1968); A. L. Udovitch, Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam (Princeton Studies on the Near East) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); A. L. Udovitch, “Theory and Practice of Islamic Law: Some Evidence from the Geniza,” Studia Islamica 32 (1970), pp. 289–303. Goitein was the first to note the existence of this system of mutual labor, which he termed formal friendship, in addition to formal partnership; see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, pp. 164–169. But it was Udovitch who pointed out the tendency for informal services to outweigh partnership arrangements. See A. L. Udovitch, “Formalism and Informalism in the Social and Economic Institutions of the Medieval Islamic World,” in Individualism and Conformity in Classical Islam, ed. Amin Banani and Speros Vryonis (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1977), pp. 72–74. My research on this question is still incomplete, but I believe the distribution of business through partnership versus labor service arrangements to have been established on the basis of the type of merchandise. Merchants appear to have used partnership more often in investments in bulk commodities like flax, which required a great deal of management to get to market, and was marketed almost universally. It was a commodity that required a lot of labor, but involved a standard business strategy. For investments that were more decision-intensive—i.e., small-scale commodities with great quality disparities and limited and volatile markets—merchants often preferred individual investment and use of services. I explore the nature of labor under the mutual service regime, the limits of labor obligations, and the distribution of labor tasks in greater detail in Goldberg, “Geographies of Trade,” pp. 152–187. K262 8–11. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, p. 169. Udovitch, “Formalism and Informalism,” pp. 72–81. As Goitein noted, running off was perfectly possible in the Mediterranean. Numerous Geniza documents attest to men abandoning their families by crossing the sea, whereas one seeks in vain for merchants absconding with partners’ money. On family abandonment, see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol 3: The Family, pp. 195–205. Avner Greif, “Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The Maghribi Traders Coalition,” American Economic Review 83 (1993), p. 529. Avner Greif, “The Organization of Long-Distance Trade: Reputation and Coalitions in the Geniza Documents and Genoa During the Eleventh and the Twelfth Centuries” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1989), pp. 143–244. He cites Samh,ūn ibn Da’ūd’s letter as one of his principal examples. In unpublished material, Udovitch comments on Nissīm’s correspondence, and notes too the unusual amount of material on the nature of mutual obligations and references to mutual services. An important resin broadly exported through the Fustat market, used for lacquer shellac, a red pigment dye-stuff, and in medicine. In this market it would have been used for pigment. On the uses of lac, see Stillman, “East-West Relations,” pp. 94–95, and the works cited there. TS 12.243/K594 16–19. TS 13J 25.14/K583 6–8. He also complains about the difficulty of the trip. TS 8J 39.12/K593 2.

notes 331! 60. 61. 62.

K593 mar 3–4. TS 10J 20.16/K587 6–7. TS 12.243/K594.

11. john of salisbury and the civic utilit y of religion 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

Mark Silk, “Numa Pompilius and the Idea of Civil Religion in the West,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72 (2004): 863–896. The first and still convincing argument for John’s fabrication of the existence of the Institutio was made by Hans Liebeschütz in his Medieval Humanism in the Life and Writings of John of Salisbury (London: Warburg Institute, 1950; repr., Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus), pp. 23–26. For a comprehensive review of the subsequent discussion, see Max Kerner, “Die Institutio Traiani—spätantike Lehrschrift oder hochmittelalterliche Fiktion?,” Fälschungen im Mittelalter: internationaler Kongress der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, München 1986 (Hannover: Hahnsche, 1988), pp. 715–738. Janet Martin, “John of Salisbury as Classical Scholar,” in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 196. Liebeschütz, Medieval Humanism, pp. 23–24. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. C. C. J. Webb, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Minerva, 1965 [1909]), 2:30. Here as elsewhere in this article, I have made use of the Dickinson and Pike translations of the Policraticus, substituting my own renderings of the Latin as seemed appropriate for clarity. John of Salisbury, Policraticus 1:282. John of Salisbury, Policraticus 1:285. See instead Silk, “Numa Pompilius,” pp. 863–872. The Antiquitates divinae is itself known to us almost entirely from the City of God. Augustine, City of God, 7 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957– 1972), 1:278. Augustine, City of God 2:118. Although the last sentence is clear enough, it makes more sense if we read “through which” ( per quod) in place of “through whom” (per quos)—as, for example, Montesquieu did in his Dissertation sur la politique des Romans dans la religion, in his Oeuvres complètes 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 86. Augustine, City of God 2:123. John of Salisbury, Policraticus 1:286. John of Salisbury, Policraticus 2:128. Jordanes, Romana, ed. T. Mommsen (Monumenta Germaniae historica) (Berlin, 1882), p. 11. To be sure, John does not claim that the Institutio offers Numa (much less Moses) as an example, introducing his discussion of Numa with the words, “Whence we have read . . .” Phillippe Buc has recently argued that, when it came to understanding the social utility of religion, Augustine was an “intermediary between Livy and Durkheim, between Roman conceptions of social order and early social anthropology” (Buc, The Dangers of Ritual [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], p. 147). This glosses over the fundamental difference between Augustine’s critical stance toward utilitarian religion and the approbation of Livy and Durkheim—not to mention John of Salisbury. By all but ignoring the period from 1100 to the Reformation, Buc misses the critical intermediary role of scholastic philosophers and Renaissance humanists, as is sketched below. Jordanes, a sixth-century Christian Goth, offers nothing in the way of a negative assessment in reprising the story of Numa as the religious founder of Rome. His practice

332! notes

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

is to omit editorial evaluation positive or negative, whereas John introduces Numa in order to exemplify princely reverence. See James J. O’Donnell, “The Aims of Jordanes,” Historia 31 (1982): 225. John of Salisbury, Policraticus 1:286. John of Salisbury, Policraticus 2:280. W. J. Millor and H. E. Butler, eds., The Letters of John of Salisbury, vol. 1 (London: Thomas Nelson, 1955), p. 216. John of Salisbury, Policraticus 1:286. John of Salisbury, Policraticus 1:289. Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 272. John of Salisbury, Historia Pontificalis, trans. Marjorie Chibnall (London: Thomas Nelson, 1956), p. 25. Millor and Butler, Letters, p. 51. Millor and Butler, Letters, p. 54. Robert Pullen, Sententiarum libri octo, Patrologia Latina 186:915A. Peter Damian, “Letter 165,” in Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, ed. Kurt Reindel, 4 vols. (Munich: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1993), 4:196. Peter Damian, “Letter 138,” in Die Briefe, p. 476. Hermannus de Runa, “Sermo 95,” in his Sermones Festivales, ed. E. Mikkers (Turnhold: Brepols, 1986), p. 446. Bernard of Clairvaux, “Letter 114,” in his Opera VII, ed. J. Leclercq and H. Rochais (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1974), p. 293. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super cantica canticorum, Opera I, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957), p. 167. William of Conches, Glosae super Boetium, ed. L. Nauta (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), p. 321. Boethius himself uses cultus in this sense in the glossed passage: “Detrahat si quis superbis vani tegmina cultus / Iam videbit intus artas dominos ferre catenas” (“If a man strip from those proud kings the cloak of their empty splendour / At once he will see these lords within bear close-bound chains”) (Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. S. J. Tester [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973], pp. 330–331). John of Salisbury, Policraticus 1:289. John of Salisbury, Policraticus 1:296. John concludes his discussion of the commonwealth’s “soul” (in 5.5) with some special pleading on behalf of ecclesiastical privileges and immunities. This includes the pointed reminder that “the statutes of princes on this point are of broad and generous application, embodying reverence and approval of the Christian faith, and confirming in their entirety the privileges of churches, priests, and all sacred places” (ibid.). Among such statutes John calls attention to the Roman law mandate that clergy not be tried in civil courts—insistence upon which will get Becket assassinated by Henry II’s henchmen a few years later. Christopher Brooke, “John of Salisbury and His World,” in Wilks, ed., World of John of Salisbury, p. 2. See Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 94–95. I am grateful to Martha Newman for calling my attention to this discussion. Macy, Theologies, p. 211 nn. 175–176. See W. Ullman, “The Influence of John of Salisbury on Medieval Italian Jurists,” English Historical Review 59 (1944): 384–392; and Max Kerner, “Johannes von Salisbury im späteren Mittelalter,” in Das Publikum politischer Theorie im 14. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Miethke (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992), pp. 25–47.

notes 333! 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

See Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, “John of Salisbury and the Doctrine of Tyrannicide,” Speculum 42 (1967): 693–709. Albert the Great, Opera omnia, ed. A. Borgnet, 38 vols. (Paris: Vivès, 1890–1899), 5:160. It was widely believed that Numa owed his learning to Pythagoras—so widely in fact that Cicero and Livy are both at considerable pains to point out that this was impossible because Pythagoras took up residence in a different part of Italy, spoke a different language, and lived more than a century after Numa. Nevertheless, Numa continued to be associated with Pythagoras, for example by Ovid in the Metamorphoses and Augustine in the City of God. Averroes, Commentarium magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, ed. F. Stuart Crawford (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1953), p. 74. Averroes, Aristotelis opera cum Averrois commentariis, repr. of 1562 ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1962), 341K and 334B. Albert the Great, Opera omnia, 6:129. For a brief but excellent overview of scholastic thought on this matter, see Alan Gewirth’s discussion in the introductory essay to his translation of the Defensor pacis: Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of the Peace, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 1:83–84. Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis, ed. Richard Scholz, 2 vols. (Hannover: Hahn, 1932), 1:26. Marsilius, Defensor pacis 2:232–233. Silk, “Numa Pompilius,” p. 877. Nicholas of Cusa, De pace fidei, ed. R. Klibansky and H. Bascour (London: Warburg Institute, 1956), p. 62. Benedict de Spinoza, The Political Works, ed. and trans. A. G. Wernham (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), pp. 98, 99. Spinoza, Political Works, pp. 292, 293. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 142–151. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 296. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie; or, the New Heloise, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997), pp. 291–292, 294. On Rousseau’s familiarity with the letters of Abelard and Heloise, see his Oeuvres II (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1964), pp. 1336–1338. J. T. Muckle, “The Personal Letters Between Abelard and Heloise,” Mediaeval Studies 15 (1953): 81. By substituting “is” for “seems” (videtur), Radice’s translation interprets the second sentence quoted above as a straightforward assertion of God’s likely approval (Betty Radice, trans., The Letters of Abelard and Heloise [London: Penguin, 1974], p. 134). But a literal translation, taken in the context of the entire passage and recognizing the transcendent importance attached to intention in Abelardian ethics, leaves a greater sense of ambiguity. Muckle, “Personal Letters,” pp. 81–82.

12. understanding contagion 1.

Manuscripts of Peter’s Verbum abbreviatum fall into two main categories: those containing a short version of the text and those containing a long version. There are several variants of both forms. Until very recently the only published editions were a short version edited by Georges Galopin in 1639 and printed in the Patrologia Latina,

334! notes

2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

ed. J. P. Migne, 221 volumes (Paris, 1844–1864) [hereafter PL] in volume 205: cols. 23–370, and additional material from a long version printed in the PL 205: cols. 527– 554, and called by Galopin the textus alter. Monique Boutry has now published a new edition, Petri Cantoris Parisiensis Verbum adbreviatum: textus conflatus (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004). Boutry argues that the earliest version of the text is that represented by the short version while the textus alter represents a slightly later intermediate form which incorporates marginal notations into the short form. Her edition, the textus conflatus, was produced by including additional material into the textus alter. For a different opinion see John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), appendix II, pp. 2:246–265. For the material cited above see PL 205: col. 217 and col. 535D. Compare Boutry, Textus conflatus, p. 472. Reg. 12:69 = PL 216: col. 75. Ivo of Chartres, Decretum, part 14, chap. 77 (PL 161: col. 846); Burchard of Worms, Decretum, book 1, chap. 4 (PL 140: col. 859). R. I. Moore, “Heresy as Disease,” in The Concept of Heresy in the Middle Ages (11th– 13th c.): Proceedings of the international conference Louvain, May 13–16, 1973, ed. W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1976), pp. 1–11; idem, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950– 1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 63. Henry of Marcy, Abbot of Clairvaux, Epistola 11 (PL 204: col. 224D). Reg. 5:166 (168) in Die Register Innocenz’ III, ed. Othmar Hageneder et al. (Vienna, 1964– ), vol. 6 (1993), p. 276–6 (PL 215: col. 184C). See Dale Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Jerome H. Neyrey, Paul, in Other Words: A Cultural Reading of His Letters (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), pp. 148–151; Kenneth Hein, Eucharist and Excommunication: A Study in Early Christian Doctrine and Discipline (European University Papers, series 23: Theology, vol. 19) (Bern and Frankfurt: Herbert and Peter Lang, 1973), chaps. 1–2. See Robert Blomme, La doctrine du péché dans les écoles théologiques de la première moitié du XII e siècle (Louvain: Publications universitaires de Louvain, 1958), pp. 27–53; John Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 253–257. See, for example, John Benton, “Consciousness of Self and Perceptions of Individuality,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 263–295. See Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Peggy McCracken, The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). Compare Charles du Miramon, in “La fin d’un tabou? L’interdiction de communier pour le femme menstruée au moyen âge: Le cas du XIIe siècle,” in Le sang au Moyen Âge (Montpellier: Université Paul-Valéry, 1999), pp. 163–181, who takes the position that such rationalization is evidence that the old fears and taboos have been rejected, preserved only out of respect for ancient authority. R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 176. Compare Saul Nathaniel Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 107, who maintains that the moral stigma goes back to pre-Biblical times. Vivian Nutton, “Did the Greeks Have a Word for It? Contagion and Contagion Theory in Classical Antiquity,” in Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-modern Societies, ed.

notes 335!

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

Lawrence I. Conrad and Darrel Wujastyk (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000) (hereafter Contagion), pp. 137–162; Danielle Gourevitch, “Les faux-amis dans les textes médicaux Grecs et Latins,” in Médecins et médecine dans l’Antiquité, ed. G. Sabbah (Mémoires [Centre Jean Palerne] 3) (Saint Étienne: L’Universitaire de Saint-Étienne, 1982), pp. 189–191; Mirko D. Grmek, “Les vicissitudes dans notions d’infection, de contagion et de germe dans la médicine antique,” in Textes médicaux latins antiques, ed. G. Sabbah (Mémoires [Centre Jean Palerne] 5) (Saint Étienne: L’Universitaire de SaintÉtienne, 1984), pp. 53–70. François-Olivier Touati, “Contagion and Leprosy: Myth, Ideas, and Evolution in Medieval Minds and Societies,” in Contagion, pp. 179–201; Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). See Jole Agrimi and Chiara Criscani, “Charity and Aid in Medieval Christian Civilization,” in Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Mirko D. Grmek, Bernardino Fatini, and Antony Shuggar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998) (hereafter Western Medical Thought), pp. 170–196, 195, who note the failure of even fourteenth-century disease etiology to explain the impact of the plague. M. Grmek, “The Concept of Disease,” in Western Medical Thought, pp. 241–258; Darrel W. Amundsen, Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 187ff. Numbers 12.2. Lepra, from the Greek lepros, probably referred to a panoply of skin conditions such as eczema or psoriasis, rather than to true leprosy. See Elinor Lieber, “Old Testament ‘Leprosy,’ Contagion, and Sin,” in Contagion, pp. 99–136. Brody, Disease of the Soul, pp. 110–146. For a discussion on whether the purity laws in Leviticus mandated separation because the disease was viewed as contagious, see Lieber, “Old Testament,” pp. 118–136. Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos: In Psalmum 18, Enarratio 2 (Sermo ad Plebem) (PL 136: col. 163); Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job (Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church 18) (Oxford, 1844), book 5, chap. 11.28 (pp. 262–263) (PL 75: col. 694), as cited in Brody, Disease of the Soul, p. 125. Isidore of Seville, Quaestiones in Vetus Testamentum: In Leviticum 11 (PL 83: col. 327). Grmek, “The Concept of Disease,” p. 251. Hildegardis Causae et curae, ed. Paul Kaiser (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903; repr., Basel, 1980), p. 89. Siraisi, Renaissance Medicine, p. 187. Martin, Corinthian Body, pp. 164–167. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, book 4, chap. 5 (PL 82: col.184); trans. William D. Sharpe in A Source Book in Medieval Science, ed. Edward Grant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 700–704, 701. See also Danielle Jacquart, “Medical Scholasticism,” in Western Medical Thought, pp. 197–240. On Constantine, see the papers collected in Constantine the African and ‘Aliā ibn ‘Abbaās al-Mag uāsiā: The Pantegni and Related Texts, ed. Charles Burnett and Danielle Jacquart (Leiden: Brill, 1994); see also Gotthard Strohmaier, “Reception and Tradition: Medicine in the Byzantine and Arab World,” in Western Medical Thought, pp. 135–169; F. Micheau, “Great Figures in Arabic Medicine According to Ibn alQiftiā,” in Health, Disease, and Healing in Medieval Culture, ed. Shelia Campbell, Bert Hall, and David Klausner (New York: Macmillan, 1992) (hereafter Health), pp. 169–195. From Constantine’s Isagoge, trans. H. P. Cholmeley in Grant, Source Book, pp. 705– 715, 711. Peter the Venerable, The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. Giles Constable, 2 vols.

336! notes

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press., 1971), letter 158a, 1:379–382, discussed and quoted in Siraisi, Renaissance Medicine, pp. 115–118. Florence Eliza Glaze, “Medical Writer: ‘Behold the Human Creature,’ ” in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara Newman, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 125–148, esp. 129–131; Vivian Nutton, “Medicine in Medieval Western Europe, 1100–1500,” in The Western Medical Tradition, 800 b.c. to a.d. 1800, ed. Lawrence I. Conrad, M. Neve, Vivian Nutton, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 139–143. Kaiser, Hildegardis, pp. 36, 57. Translation of the second passage is from Glaze, “Medical Writer,” p. 136. D. Jacquart, “The Introduction of Arabic Medicine Into the West: The Question of Etiology,” in Health, pp. 186–195. Wolbero of Cologne, Commentaria super Canticum canticorum Salomonis, book 3, chap. 7, verse 4 (PL 195: col. 1232). Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica canticorum, sermon 36.3.4, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais, 8 vols. (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–1977) (hereafter Opera), vol. 2, p. 6 (PL 183: col. 969). John of Salisbury, Policraticus, book 7, chap. 10, in Ioannis Saresberiensis episcopi Carnotensis Policratici, sive De nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum, 2 vols., ed. Clemens Webb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), vol. 2, p. 132. Lateran IV, canon 50, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols., ed. Norman P. Tanner (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 257–258. V. Nutton, “The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance,” Medical History 27 (1983): 1–34. Kaiser, Hildegardis, pp. 18 and 161. For translations from the Causae et curae, see Margret Berger, Hildegard of Bingen, On Natural Philosophy and Medicine: Selections from Cause and Cure (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999). Pantegni, Theorica, book 8, chap. 15, fol. 39 in Omnia Opera Yssac (Lyons, 1515). My thanks to the New York Academy of Medicine for generous use of their library. Gourevitch, “Les faux-amis”; eadem, “Peut-on employer le mot d’infection dans les traductions françaises de textes latins?” in Textes médicaux latins antiques; Grmek, “Les vicissitudes”; A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnairé etymologique de la langue latine (Paris: Klincksieck, 1967), p. 212. Bernard of Clairvaux, In Nativitate domini, sermo I, in Opera, vol. 4, p. 247. Theorica, book 5, chap. 11, fol. 20. On Galenic causality see Nutton, “Seeds of Disease”; Grmek, “Les vicissitudes,” p. 62. Nutton notes that even in veterinary medicine, proximity to a sick animal was only a factor in causing disease. Theorica, book 5, chap. 11, fol. 20. See also Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, book 4, chap. 6 (PL 82: col. 187): “Pestilence is contagium because when it apprehends one, it quickly goes over to many. It is born out of the corruption of the air and by penetrating into the viscera it is supported. Although this mostly happens through the power of the air, nevertheless it would not happen at all without the will of God.” Ibid. On Galenic causality, see Nutton, “Seeds of Disease.” Isidore of Seville, Quaestiones in Vetus Testamentum: In Leviticum 11 (PL 83: col. 328A). Glossa ordinaria, Liber Leviticus, chap. 13 (PL 113: col. 333A). See note 8. Anonymous sententia from the School of Laon in Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XII e et XIII e siècles, 6 vols. (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1948–1959), vol. 5: Problèmes d’histoire littéraire. L’école d’Anselme de Laon et de Guillaume de Champeaux, no.

notes 337!

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

450 at p. 303. For discussion of this passage and the implications of interiorizing sin, see 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 (Münster: LIT, 2002), pp. 57–85. Geoffrey of Babion, In coena domini, sermo primus (PL 171: col. 505). In Migne this sermon is mistakenly attributed to Hildebert of Lavardin. See Jean-Paul Bonnes, “Un des plus grandes prédicateurs du XIIe siècle, Geoffrey du Loroux dit Geoffroy Babion,” Revue bénedictine 51 (1945): 174–200. Neyrey, Paul, p. 151. 1 Cor 5.10. Martin, Corinthian Body, p. 170. Commentaria in XIII epistolas Beati Pauli, In epistolam B. Pauli ad Corinthos primam, chap. 5 (PL 17: col. 207). Collectanea in omnes Pauli apostoli epistolas, in Epistolam I ad Corinthos, chap. 5, verse 6–8 (PL 191: col. 1573). Commentaria in Epistolas divi Pauli, in Epistolam I ad Corinthos, chap. 5 (PL 181: col. 859D–860B). Verbum abbreviatum (PL 205: col. 535).

13. calvin’s smile 1.

2. 3.

The full title of the treatise is Traité des reliques; ou, Advertissement très utile du grand profit qui reviendroit à la Chrestienté s’il se faisoit inventaire de tous les corps saints et reliques, qui sont tant en Italie, qu’en France, Allemaigne, Hespaigne et autres royaumes et pays in the Corpus Reformatorum, Ioannis Calvini, Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. W. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss, 59 vols. (Brunswick: C. A. Schwetshcke, 1863–1900), 6:405–452. The first edition was printed in Geneva by Jean Girard. While most modern historians reject the Bolsec myth (Bolsec, Vie de Calvin, 1555) of an entirely humorless Calvin, see nonetheless the following assessment from a recent biography: “It is probably fair to suggest that Calvin was not a particularly attractive person, lacking in wit, humour and warmth” (Alistair E. McGrath: A Life of Calvin: A Study in the Shaping of Western Culture [Oxford: Blackwell, 1990], p. 17). Yet even McGrath’s judgment is too stern. As Carlos Eire comments in his analysis of the Traité: “Unlike Erasmus, who seems to have delighted in the mere act of ridiculing folly or absurdity, Calvin joked in the most serious manner. The comic face of the Inventory [the Traité] is not graced with an ironic smirk, but rather with the frozen smile of victory, of triumph over an opponent” [Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 229]. And Calvin himself accepted laughter, as he himself put it, “provided it not be too lavish” (cited in M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross [Boulder: Westview, 1999), p. 45]. Finally, on wit in the writings of the Protestant reformers, see Barbara C. Bowen, “A Neglected Renaissance Art of Joking,” Rhetorica 21 (2003): 137–148. Indeed, the recent research of Colin Jones on the history of the smile would tend to reinforce both Eire’s and Screech’s portrayal of Calvin’s smile as restrained (“frozen” or “not too lavish”); see his “Pulling Teeth in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Past and Present 166 (2000): 100–145. My own study of the Traité is especially indebted to Eire’s path-breaking work. Calvin, Traité des reliques, p. 413. Calvin, Traité des reliques, p. 415.

338! notes 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

Traité des reliques, p. 415 and p. 552. Calvin observes of Jesus’s foreskin, “il est certain que iamais il n’y en eu qu’un” (415). Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 368–436; but see also p. 350 where Bakhtin, who elsewhere stresses Calvin’s opposition to Rabelais and his humor, writes, “even the agelast Calvin wrote a pamphlet about relics with a certain comic overtone.” Eamon Duff y, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 384–385 and 414–415. Calvin, Traité des reliques, p. 414. Toward the end of the treatise, Calvin observes that he has included even more examples than he at first suggested: “Ie n’ay nommé d’Allemaigne qu’environ demy douzeine de villes. Ie n’en ay nommé d’Hespaigne que trois, que ie sache; d’Italie, enviorn une quinzaine; de France, de trente à quarante” (450). Calvin, Traité des reliques, p. 414. Calvin, Traité des reliques, p. 420 Calvin, Traité des reliques, p. 431. According to Eire, “between 1543 and 1622, the Traité des reliques appeared in at least twenty different editions, including seven French, one Latin, six German, two English and four Dutch” (Eire, War Against the Idols, p. 229 n. 56). John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Palgrave, 2004). On genetics and identity, see the influential work of Samuel H. Barondes, Mood Genes: Hunting for the Origins of Mania and Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); on selfhood and psychopharmacology, the literature is rich, but Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind (New York: Vintage, 1995), and Peter Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York: Penguin, 1993), offer compelling accounts of the identity-altering effects of lithium and prozac, respectively. Renée C. Fox and Judith P. Swazey, in Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in American Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), address issues of identity that derive from transplant surgeries. Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200– 1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Guibert of Nogent’s De pignoribus is available in the PL [(Patrologiae cursus completus: series latina, ed. J. P. Migne, 228 vols (Paris, 1841–1864)], vol. 156, cols. 607–680, but is now best examined in the new edition: De sanctis et eorum pigneribus in Opera varia, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio mediaevalis 127) (Turnholt: Brepols, 1993), pp. 79–109. Guibert of Nogent, De sanctis et eorum pigneribus, pp. 98 and 102–103. I have used the translation of book 1 of this treatise by Thomas Head published in his Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New York: Garland Press, 1988), pp. 405–427. There is a growing body of literature on Guibert. For an excellent orientation see John Benton’s introduction to Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent, Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 15 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), pp. 7–33. On Guibert’s critic of the cult of saints, see especially Caroline Walker Bynum, “Bodily Miracles and the Resurrection of the Body in the High Middle Ages” in Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion, ed. Thomas Kselman (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1991), pp. 77–78, as well as Jay Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 124–130.

notes 339! 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. C. Segre (Milan: Mursia, 1977), 6:10, the story of Frate Cipolla; Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales [The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)], the Prologue, with attention to the Pardoner. Margaret Aston, The Fifteenth Century: The Prospect of Europe (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), pp. 97–99. “Non al nostro errore, ma alla purità della fede” (Boccaccio, Decameron, p. 56). Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 59 (1973): 51–91; “The Sacred and the Body Social in Lyon,” Past and Present 90 (1980): 40–70. Zemon Davis, “Rites of Violence” and “The Sacred and the Body Social”; for an additional account of shifting notions of the locus of the sacred, see John Jeffries Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; 2d ed., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 165–173. Brian A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), and Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Eire, War Against the Idols, p. 197. For an important investigation of relics to themes of identity, see Robert H. Sharf, “On the Allure of Buddhist Relics,” Representations 66 (1999): 75–99. Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Oporinus, 1543). I have consulted the copy in the special collections of the Trinity University Library. McGrath, A Life of John Calvin, p. 60. Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 216–236, and Vivian Nutton, “Wittenberg Anatomy,” in Medicine and the Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grelle and Andrew Cunningham (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 11–26. There was no direct correlation, however, between the Vesalian revolution and attitudes toward the parts of bodies. In Catholic culture relics remained important in popular devotion. For an interesting interpretation of this topic, see Philip Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 75. Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, praefatio, n.p. The Aristotelian notion of “man” as a microcosm was especially influential in late medieval and Renaissance thought, but medieval writers nonetheless did show an appreciation of the structural beauty of the body—though the beauty remained charged with an unknowable mystery; see, for example, the discussion of St. Augustine’s “musical autopsy” in Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 78–83. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1:54. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1:188. William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 80; for more general discussion of Calvin’s view of the body, see Margaret R. Miles, “Theology, Anthropology, and the Human Body in Calvin’s In-

340! notes

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

stitutes,” Harvard Theological Review 74 (1981): 303–323, and David Tripp, “The Image of the Body in the Formative Phases of the Protestant Reformation,” in Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 131–153. Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, book 1, chap. 39. Calvin, Traité des reliques, p. 413. Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms, trans. Arthur Golding, rev. and ed. T. H. L. Parker (London: James Clarke, 1965), p. 16 (Ioannis Calvini in librum Psalmorum commentarius [1557] in vol. 29 of Calvini; Opera, cols. 16 and 17). Katharine Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 1–33. On humanism in Calvin’s education and thought, see Quirinius Breen, John Calvin: A Study in French Humanism (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1968); on Vesalius’s early education, see C. D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), pp. 29–34. Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Texts: The Traditions of Scholarship in the Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 47–75. I develop the concept of the porous self in Myths of Renaissance Individualism, pp. 83–102. On these themes and especially on metempsychosis, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), pp. 79–97. Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and the Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 202. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), p. 244. Montaigne’s original expression for what is translated here as “we are all patchwork” is “nous sommes tous des lopins.” Calvin also uses the term lopin to refer to the foreskin of Christ. And Vesalius makes frequent use of the term reliquiae in a purely anatomical sense in his Fabrica. One can only wonder what a history of this early modern vocabulary would reveal. Sawday, Body Emblazoned On the theme of sincerity in Calvin’s thought, see John Jeffries Martin, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1308–1342. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1:56–57. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1:57. On these anxieties, see Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 2001).

14. why all the fuss about the mind? 1.

2.

3.

Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Pascal Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Justin L. Barrett, “Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (2000): 29–34; Brian E. Malley, “The Emerging Cognitive Psychology of Religion: A Review Article,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion [hereafter MTSR] 8 (1996): 109–141; Luther Martin, “Religion and Cognition,” in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. John Hinnells (New York: Routledge, 2005). Michael Levine, “A Cognitive Approach to Ritual: New Method or No Method at

notes 341!

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

All?,” MTSR 10 (1998): 30–60; Kelly Bulkeley, review of Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer and How Religion Works by Ilkka Pyysiäinen, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71 (2003): 671–674. William E. Paden, “Comparative Religion in the State of Nature,” in Religion as a Human Capacity: A Festschrift in Honor of E. Thomas Lawson, ed. Timothy Light and Brian C. Wilson (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 121. But cf. Charles M. Radding, A World Made by Men: Cognition and Society, 400–1200 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Mary Poovey, “For What It’s Worth . . . ,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 429–433. For Elisabeth’s career, see Anne L. Clark, Elisabeth of Schönau: A Twelfth-Century Visionary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 77–97. Barrett, “Exploring,” p. 29. Pascal Boyer, “Why Do Gods and Spirits Matter at All?,” in Current Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion, ed. Ilkka Pyysiäinen and Veikko Anttonen (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 68–92, and idem, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Boyer, Religion Explained, pp. 87–89; Justin Barrett, “Theological Correctness: Cognitive Constraints and the Study of Religion,” MTSR 11 (1999): 325–339; idem, “Dumb Gods, Petitionary Prayer, and the Cognitive Science of Religion,” in Pyysiäinen and Anttonen, eds., Current Approaches, pp. 93–109. Boyer, Religion Explained, pp. 281–283. Sperber, Explaining Culture, p. 116. Die Visionen der hl. Elisabeth und die Schriften der Aebte Ekbert und Emecho von Schönau, ed. F. W. E. Roth (Brünn: Verlag der Studien aus dem Benedictiner- und Cistercienser Orden, 1884) [Hereafter Visionen], p. 5. Against the notion of a shared, immaterial culture, see Boyer, Religion Explained, pp. 40–45, and Sperber, Explaining Culture, pp. 9–31. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961), pp. 87–109. Harvey Whitehouse, Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); idem, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2004). For critique of the modes theory, see Richard K. Payne, “Cognitive Theories of Ritual and Buddhist Practice: An Examination of Ilkka Pyysiäinen’s Theory,” Pacific World, 3d ser., 4 (2002): 75–90; William Paden, “Comparative Religion and the Whitehouse Project: Connections and Compatibilities?,” MTSR 16 (2004): 256–265. Visionen, p. 4; cf. John Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum et de octo principalium vitiorum remediis, lib. 10, cap. 1, ed. Michael Petschenig (Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 17) (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1888), p. 173. Whitehouse, Modes, pp. 89–97, and idem, “Implicit and Explicit Knowledge in the Domain of Ritual,” in Pyysiäinen and Anttonen, eds., Current Approaches, pp. 133–152. Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–2. The monastic idiom of making ideas, not having ideas, recalls Sperber’s and Boyer’s emphases on the mental activity that takes place in cultural acquisition: people activate cognitive resources that make other people’s utterances or gestures or artifacts relevant in the sense of producing inferences.

342! notes 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Carruthers, Craft, pp. 14–16. On the relationship between verbal and visual, see Carruthers, Craft, pp. 76–77, 132. Visionen, pp. 1–2. Cf. Whitehouse, Modes, pp. 98–99. E.g., Visionen, p. 18. Visionen, p. 37. Visionen, p. 264. Carruthers, Craft, pp. 101–115. Carruthers, Craft, pp. 62, 113, 174–175. On the interconnection of pain and the imagination shaping major developments in medieval devotion, see Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 466. For this discipline of prayer from Cassian’s Conferences, see Thalia A. Pandiri, “Autobiography or Autohagiography? Decoding the Subtext in the Visions of Elisabeth of Schönau,” in Medieval Women Writing Latin, ed. Laurie J. Churchill, Phyllis R. Brown, and Jane E. Jeffrey (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 209 n. 23. Visionen, p. 5–6. Visionen, pp. 60–62. Fulton, From Judgment, p. 410. Visionen, pp. 53–55. Cf. Anne L. Clark, “The Cult of the Virgin Mary and Technologies of Christian Formation in the Later Middle Ages,” in Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities, ed. John Van Engen (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004).

15. aspects of blood piet y in a l ate medieval english manuscript I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Claudia Rattazzi Papka Memorial Fund at Columbia University and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, in the research and writing of this essay. 1.

2.

For a description of the manuscript and its contents, see Falconer Madan et al., eds., Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum, 1900–1905 (London, 1907), pp. 324–332. The illustrations have been reproduced in James Hogg, ed., An Illustrated Yorkshire Carthusian Religious Miscellany: London, British Library Additional MS. 37049, vol. 3: The Illustrations (Analecta Cartusiana 95) (Salzburg, 1981). On provenance, see Ian Doyle, “English Carthusian Books Not Yet Linked with a Charterhouse,” in “A Miracle of Learning”: Studies in Manuscripts and Irish Learning. Essays in Honour of William O’Sullivan, ed. Toby Barnard et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 122–136; and Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, 2 vols. (Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 6) (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 2:193. For information on the Carthusian order in England, see E. Margaret Thompson, The Carthusian Order in England (London: SPCK, 1930). Many of the manuscript’s texts and images are discussed in Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); and Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval Religious Lyric (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). See Woolf, English Religious Lyric; Gray, Themes and Images; J. A. W. Bennett, Poetry of the Passion: Studies in Twelve Centuries of English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon

notes 343!

3.

4.

5.

Press, 1982); Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); and Vincent Gillespie, “Strange Images of Death: The Passion in Later Medieval English Devotional and Mystical Writing,” Analecta Cartusiana 117 (1987): 111–159. For the European context in the visual arts, see James H. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk: Van Ghemmert, 1979); and Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Much of the text is extracted from Rolle’s Ego dormio; printed in Richard Rolle, English Writings of Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, ed. Hope Emily Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), pp. 61–72, esp. pp. 66–69. Karl Josef Höltgen, “Arbor, Scala, und Fons vitae: Vorformen devotionaler Embleme in einer mittelenglischen Handschrift (B.M. Add. 37049),” in Chaucer und seine Zeit: Symposion für Walter F. Schirmer, ed. Arno Esch (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1968), pp. 362–364, contains an edition and commentary on the version of this text in Additional 37049, and I follow his transcription; he also notes that the devotional imagery on this folio is wholly original and perhaps unparalleled. This manuscript is a very important witness to the reception of Rolle’s writings and the popularity of his cult a century after his death. His writings are combined, in some cases rewritten, and interspersed throughout the manuscript; see Hope Emily Allen, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, and Materials for his Biography (New York: D.C. Heath and Co., 1927), pp. 306–311. The English Carthusians played a key role in the copying and dissemination of Rolle’s writings, and there may even have been a “Carthusian effort to produce acceptable versions of Rolle’s works” (from Michael G. Sargent, “The Transmission by the English Carthusians of Some Late Medieval Spiritual Writings,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27 [1976]: 232); see also A. I. Doyle, “Carthusian Participation in the Movement of Works of Richard Rolle Between England and Other Parts of Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Kartäusermystik und Mystiker 2 (Analecta Cartusiana 55) (Salzburg, 1981): 109–120. In general, Carthusians were strongly devoted to the blood, heart, and wounds of Christ. Ludolph of Saxony (d. 1378), Dominic of Treves (d. 1461), Lanspergius of Cologne (d. 1539), and Denis the Carthusian (d. 1471) are just a few of the writers whose works promoted these devotions. See Joseph A. Gribbin, Aspects of Carthusian Liturgical Practice in Later Medieval England (Analecta Cartusiana 99, no. 33) (Salzburg, 1995), p. 48. There is also evidence that the charterhouse at Coventry had a large wall painting of the Crucifixion “in which angels collect blood from Christ’s feet into chalices”; see Clifford Davidson, “Sacred Blood and the Late Medieval Stage,” Comparative Drama 31 (1997): 446. The cult of the Holy Name was initially a personal, private devotion that gradually moved into the public sphere of liturgical commemoration; it became an official feast in York in 1489. From at least the mid-fourteenth century onward, the cult of the Holy Name had a liturgical dimension in England, especially as a votive mass; see Richard W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) pp. 62, 74, 77–79; and P. R. Biasiotto, History of the Development of Devotion to the Holy Name, with a Supplement (New York: St. Bonaventure, 1943). The Carthusian order may have played a special role in promoting Holy Name devotions, and in Additional 37049 the IHC or IHS monogram appears five times as a meditational and decorative emblem, and there are dozens of textual references to it; see Denis Renevey, “The Name Poured Out: Margins, Illuminations, and Miniatures

344! notes

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

as Evidence for the Practice of Devotions to the Name of Jesus in Late Medieval England,” in The Mystical Tradition and the Carthusians, vol. 9, ed. James Hogg (Analecta Cartusiana 130) (Salzburg, 1996), pp. 127–148, and Gribbin, Aspects, pp. 48–49. The phrase is from Dyan Elliott, “True Presence/False Christ: The Antinomies of Embodiment in Medieval Spirituality,” Mediaeval Studies 64 (2002): 241. An unusually close relation between text and image (and therefore, reading and seeing) is one of the manuscript’s most distinctive and intriguing features. See, for example: Thomas W. Ross, “Five Fifteenth-Century ‘Emblem’ Verses from Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 37049,” Speculum 32 (1957): 274–282; Francis Wormald, “Some Popular Miniatures and Their Rich Relations,” in Miscellanea Pro Arte. Hermann Schnitzler zur Vollendung des 60. Lebensjahres am 13. Januar 1965, ed. Francesco Ehrle (Düsseldorf: L. Schwann, 1965), pp. 279–285; Höltgen, “Arbor, Scala, und Fons vitae,” pp. 355– 391; Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 109, 123; and Marlene Villalobos Hennessy, “The Remains of the Royal Dead in an English Carthusian Manuscript, London, British Library, MS Additional 37049,” Viator 33 (2002): 310–354. Here I echo an observation of Caroline Walker Bynum: “It is this quality of paradox that characterizes the blood cult at the center of late medieval piety. . . . The cult of the wounds, the blood, the heart of Christ expresses not solution or resolution but the simultaneity of opposites: life and death, glory and agony, salvation and sin. . . . Paradox is the core” (“Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety,” German Historical Institute Bulletin 30 [2002]: 21, 23). See also her definitive essay on the subject, “The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” Church History 71 (2002): 685–714. For the English context, see John C. Hirsh, “Christ’s Blood,” in The Boundaries of Faith: The Development and Transmission of Medieval Spirituality (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), pp. 91–110. Illustrations of the sacred heart are especially profuse in Additional 37049, and, according to Nigel Morgan, “it includes more images of the Heart of Christ in a variety of iconographic contexts than any other surviving work of English art” (Nigel Morgan, “Longinus and the Wounded Heart,” Weiner Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 46/47 [1993–1994]: 515). The “IHC” is a sacred monogram for the first three letters of the Greek word for Jesus (IHCOYC). For an excellent discussion of Holy Name imagery in Additional 37049 and related manuscripts, see John Block Friedman, Northern English Books, Owners, and Makers in the Late Middle Ages (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), pp. 186–202, esp. p. 193, which contains an excellent analysis of the iconography on fol. 36v: “The subject of both verb and motto, the crucified Christ himself, makes up the ascender with the cross stroke of the H.” See Jonathan Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1988), p. 268; Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. S. B. Meech and Hope Emily Allen (Early English Text Society 212) (London, 1940), p. 84; and Ann M. Hutchison, “Mary Champney: A Bridgettine Nun Under the Rule of Queen Elizabeth I,” Birgittiana 13 (2002): 63. Friedman (Northern English Books, p. 193) notes that “Ihesus est amor meus” is also the first line of an “ownership poem” in Cambridge, Cambridge University Library MS Kk.3.5, fol. 147. In Additional 37049, the phrase also appears on fols. 24r and 37r. In a manuscript of the Carthusian Richard Methley’s Scola amoris languidi (Cambridge, Trinity College MS 0.2.56, fol. 22r) the words est and amor are decorated with interlocking hearts. Reproduced in James Hogg, Mount Grace Charterhouse and Late Medieval English

notes 345!

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

Spirituality, vol. 2: The Trinity College Cambridge MS.0.2.56 (Analecta Cartusiana 64) (Salzburg, 1978), p. 43. For example, according to Richard Rolle, intense focus and concentration on the Holy Name to the exclusion of all else and its sustained repetition could lead one to ecstasy, “and the physical sensations that it inspired, which he regarded as an apprehension of Christ’s love” (Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, pp. 90, 228). Quoted and translated in Mark Daniel Holtz, “Cults of the Precious Blood in the Medieval Latin West” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1997), p. 125. The illustration on fol. 62v accompanies a (probably Carthusian) text known as The Desert of Religion, which develops the theme of spiritual inflorescence: “In virteus suld al men floresche / And froyt bryng forth as þai war trees” (fol. 47r). On this text and its authorship, see Anne McGovern-Mouron, “The Desert of Religion in British Library Cotton Faustina B VI, pars II,” in Hogg, ed., Mystical Tradition, pp. 149–162. Richard Rolle articulates a similar model when he writes: “Also, swet Jhesu, þe sterres ben cause of euche þynge þat is grene, or groweth, or bereth fruyt. Now, swet Jhesu, mak me grene in my beleve, growynge in grace, berynge fruyt of good workes” (Rolle, English Writings, p. 35). Höltgen (“Arbor, Scala, und Fons vitae,” p. 365) connects the tree and fruit imagery on fol. 36v with another illustrated text on fols. 69v–70r in this manuscript, “The Apple of Solace.” “Flos campi proprie est flos parvulus, nimis rubicundus, et est Christus humilis factus proprio sanguine rubricatus” (Honorius Augustodunensis, Expositio in Cantica canticorum [Patrologia Latina 172 : col. 382c]). For the Song of Songs commentary tradition and for Honorius, see Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), passim and pp. 247–288, 297–298, 316, 376–378. Bynum, “The Blood of Christ,” p. 706 n. 71. For a fascinating discussion of links between Christ’s blood and wounds and agriculture and fertility in a slightly different context, see Salvador Ryan, “ ‘Reign of blood’: Aspects of Devotion to the Wounds of Christ in Late Medieval Gaelic Ireland,” in Irish History: A Research Yearbook 1, ed. Joost Augusteijn and Mary Ann Lyons (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), pp. 137–149. Bynum, “The Blood of Christ,” p. 702. Woolf, English Religious Lyric, p. 233. See Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, pp. 63–66, figs. 45–46, 51. M. D. Anderson, History and Imagery in British Churches (London: Murray, 1971), fig. 48. See also Woolf, English Religious Lyric, pp. 287–289. On flowers as symbols of the Virgin Mary and the connection between flowers and praying, flowers and flesh, see Rachel Fulton, “The Virgin in the Garden, or Why Flowers Make Better Prayers,” Spiritus 4 (2004): 1–23. “The isolated rose inevitably recalls for us, as it would have for most viewers of the later Middle Ages, the rosary, itself an instrument of memory, in which each bead stood for a single blossom and enumerated a prayer evoking an event in the history of salvation” (Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, pp. 68–69; cf. pp. 63–100 and 242 n. 21). See also Anne Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 13–30. On mentally picturing the Passion, see Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, pp. 101–136; Chiara Frugoni, “Female Mystics, Visions, and Iconography,” trans. Margery J. Schneider, in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 130–164; and Marlene Villalobos Hennessy, “Passion Devotion, Penitential Reading, and the Manuscript

346! notes

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

Page: ‘The Hours of the Cross’ in London, British Library Additional 37049,” Mediaeval Studies 66 (2004): 213–252, esp. pp. 213–217. See J. T. Rhodes, “Syon Abbey and Its Religious Publications in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44 (1993): 23; and Bestul, Texts of the Passion, pp. 40–43. The phrase is from Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “A Liber Precum in Sélestat and the Development of the Illustrated Prayerbook in Germany,” Art Bulletin 73 (1991): 232. See Elizabeth Salter, Nicholas Love’s “Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ” (Analecta Cartusiana 10) (Salzburg, 1974), p. 156. One of the best discussions of this meditative process is Andrew Taylor, “Into His Secret Chamber: Reading and Privacy in Late Medieval England,” in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 46: “Readers who followed such injunctions would meticulously visualize familiar places, people them with those they knew, and then return to these places again and again as participants in what might now be thought of as an almost cinematographic mental drama.” On other “visualizing memory techniques,” see Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), p. 120. The broader tradition of medieval mnemotechnique has been richly detailed in Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). The Carthusian community of readers who produced, compiled, and read this manuscript included numerous portraits of themselves as firsthand witnesses to the Passion; see fols. 24r (with Christ showing his wounds); 29v (with Virgin and Child); 36v (discussed below); 43v (with Christ in his glory); 62v (with Man of Sorrows); 67v and 91r (with Christ crucified). Fulton (“The Virgin in the Garden,” p. 14) discusses the rose as an evocative metaphor for the experience of prayer and “the work of the imagination.” On converting words into pictures and medieval mnemotechnique, see Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 226; cf. pp. 74–77. Taylor, “Into His Secret Chamber,” p. 48. On the Incarnation as a linguistic event, see Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, pp. xv, 338, 340, 443, 467–468. Höltgen (“Arbor, Scala, und Fons vitae,” p. 366) notes that the arresting juxtaposition of text and image on fol. 36v may be related to techniques of illustration used for decorating initials in illuminated manuscripts. Rolle’s portrait appears on fol. 52v; this drawing is described in Renevey, “The Name Poured Out,” p. 145. On Rolle’s devotion to the Holy Name, see Allen, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, pp. 72–77, and Biasiotto, History, pp. 35–59. Henry Suso (d. 1366) took this one step further and carved the Holy Name into his flesh with a stylus. This episode is discussed in Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, pp. 178–180; and Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 97–102. Cf. Hamburger’s discussion of Suso: “If at the Incarnation the Word became flesh, in Suso’s writings, the flesh, his own included, patterns itself on the Word. As text becomes image, Suso’s body becomes a text, a reciprocity expressed in ideal form by the sacred monogram itself ” (Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, p. 180). On the trope of the heart as a love letter to Christ, see Jager, Book of the Heart, pp. 66– 67, 91, 108–113. The text on fol. 37r also echoes some of the poetic material on fol. 36v.

notes 347! 35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

Cf. Renevey, “The Name Poured Out,” p. 143: “The hermit presents the reader a book to read.” Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 16, and see pp. 6–7. Douglas Gray, “The Five Wounds of Our Lord,” Notes and Queries 208 (1963): 129; also discussed in Bynum, “Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety,” pp. 13–14. Bob Scribner (“Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late-Medieval and Reformation Germany,” Journal of Religious History 15 [1989]: 457) discusses how “indwelling personality” is a characteristic feature of images in late medieval piety. Flora Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response,” in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (London: British Library, 1996), p. 215. See also Rose Jeffrey Peebles, The Legend of Longinus in Ecclesiastical Tradition and in English Literature, and Its Connection with the Grail (Baltimore: Bryn Mawr Monographs, 1911). M. C. Spalding, The Middle English Charters of Christ (Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr Monographs, 1914), p. lix. In late medieval England much of the literary and spiritual energy of the period was devoted to articulating the motif of Christ’s body as a charter signed with the blood of his ink. This textual formulation can be traced (with some variation) from the Ancrene Wisse to the Digby Play of Christ’s Burial, and it appears everywhere, from “Chaucer’s ABC” to the Fasciculus Morum, a fourteenth-century preacher’s manual, whose symbols include ink-blood, parchment-skin, and quill-nails. The most comprehensive, graphic treatment is found in the Charter of Christ, a fourteenth-century poem that survives in dozens of manuscripts (including Additional 37049), in which pens double for scourges, letters for wounds, and both ink (red and black) and sealing wax for blood. See Spalding, Middle English Charters of Christ and now Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 311. Vincent Gillespie, “Lukynge in haly bukes: Lectio in Some Late Medieval Spiritual Miscellanies,” in Spätmittelalterliche geistliche Literatur in der Nationalsprache, ed. James Hogg (Analecta Cartusiana 106, no. 2) (Salzburg, 1984), p. 10. Karen Saupe, ed., Middle English Marian Lyrics (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1998), p. 102. Rolle, English Writings, p. 36. See D. Richter, “Die Allegorie der Pergamentbearbeitung: Beziehungen zwischen handwerklichen Vorgängen und der geistlichen Bildersprache des Mittelalters,” in Fachliteratur des Mittelalters: Festschrift für Gerhard Eis, ed. G. Keil et al. (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche, 1968), pp. 83–92. “Ad has litteras pro nobis faciendas membranum ministravit virginalis uterus, ministratam paravit Spiritus sanctus, paratam inscripsit Altissimi Filius, litteris aureis scribens de terra corporis sui digito Dei, et stylo vel calamo sapientiae, opera redemptionis humanae. Rubricavit autem has easdem litteras pretioso minio cruoris rosei, quo genae virginalis ornantur, iuxta illud Agnetis sponsae Agni: ‘Et sanguis eius ornavit genas meas’ ” (Helinand of Froidmont, “Sermo de ascensione domini” [Patrologia Latina 212, col. 607B] [my translation]). The passage is echoed by the encyclopedist Pierre Bersuire over a century later [ca. 1340]: “Christ is a sort of book written by the Virgin . . . spoken by the Father . . . punctuated in the imprint of the wounds . . . illustrated by the outpouring of blood” (as quoted and translated in Jesse M. Gellrich, The

348! notes

47.

48.

49. 50.

Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language, Theory, Mythology, and Fiction [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985], p. 17). Rebecca Krug, “The Fifteen Oes,” in Cultures of Piety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas H. Bestul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 215. Devotion to Christ’s blood is the subject of several of Rolle’s lyrics and meditations; in one he recounts how he called upon the blood of Christ to save him from an early temptation of the flesh by uttering, “Jesus, how precious is thy blood”; see Allen, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, pp. 75, 468. Transcribed and edited in Höltgen, “Arbor, Scala, und Fons vitae,” pp. 362–363. For a discussion of metaphors of binding the heart to Christ, see William F. Pollard, “Mystical Elements in a Fifteenth-Century Prayer Sequence: The Festis and the Passion of Oure Lord Ihesu Crist,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), pp. 47–61.

16. machiavelli, tr auma, and the scandal of the prince I thank Marco Gentile and Tracie Matysik for bibliographical guidance; David Lines and Marcello Simonetta for insightful objections; and above all, Douglas Biow, Peter Jelavich, Louis Arthur Rigler, and Dolora Wojciehowski for generous help with many drafts. 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

Jean Améry, “Torture,” in At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. S. Rosenfeld and S. P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 32. Roberto Ridolfi, The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli, trans. C. Grayson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), chaps. 12–13. Niccolò Machiavelli, De principatibus, ed. Giorgio Inglese (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1994) [hereafter De principatibus]. English: William Connell, ed. and trans., The Prince (New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004) [hereafter Connell]. Context: John Najemy, Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli–Vettori Letters of 1513–1515 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 177–214. This territorial confinement was actually Machiavelli’s second (note 11 below). Recent editions of Niccolò Machiaevelli’s The Prince include those by David Wootton, ed., trans., and introduction (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995); Paul Sonnino, ed., trans., and introduction (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996); Angelo Codevilla et al., eds., trans., and introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Peter Bondanella, ed., trans., and introduction (1988; rpt., New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 and 2005); Quentin Skinner and Russell Price, eds. (1988; rpt., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Harvey Mansfield, ed., trans., and introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Wayne Rebhorn, ed., trans., and introduction (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003); and William J. Connell, ed., trans., and annotated (Boston: Bedford, 2004). The three key texts are Connell’s, Rebhorn’s, and Mansfield’s. Niccolò Machiavelli, Lettere, ed. Franco Gaeta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961) [hereafter Lettere], pp. 301–306 (Connell, pp. 136–140). Stella Larosa, “Autobiografia e tradizione letteraria nella ‘Giornata’ di Niccolò Machiavelli,” Interpres 22 (2003): 223–275. Machiavelli responds mimetically and competitively to Vettori’s giornata (Lettere, pp. 297–300, with an odd reading list).

notes 349! 7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

Connell, pp. 138–139, adapted; I render trasferisce as “translate” after Peter Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 257–258. John Najemy, “Machiavelli and Geta: Men of Letters,” in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, ed. A. R. Ascoli and V. Kahn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), notes the “mythology” of “this threshold moment” (pp. 59–60 and n. 14). Juliet Mitchell, “Trauma, Recognition, and the Place of Language,” Diacritics 28 (1998): 121. On the distinction between historical and structural, e.g., oedipal, trauma: Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 696–727, and idem, “Reflections on Trauma, Absence, Loss,” in Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, ed. Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 178–204. Structural trauma may also surface in The Prince: Najemy (Between Friends, pp. 211–214) identifies the surprising role of “limitless love.” Medieval “courtly” love has evidently found an ironic Renaissance apotheosis: cf. L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 1–78. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 7. Godman, From Poliziano, p. 235, quoting Florence, Archivio di Stato, Signori e Collegi, Deliberazioni fatte in forza di ordinaria autorità 114, fol. 117v. Three days later, November 10, 1512, Machiavelli was sentenced to prison, but two relatives and Francesco Vettori pledged the remarkable sum of 1,000 florins, and he was instead confined to the territory: Ridolfi, Life, p. 133; Rosemary Devonshire Jones, Francesco Vettori, Florentine Citizen and Medici Servant (London: Athlone, 1972), pp. 102–104. Description: Machiavelli’s first “prison sonnet,” as annotated in Machiavelli Opere, ed. L. Blasucci (Turin: UTET, 1989), 4:423–424. Quotation: Machiavelli to his nephew (June 26, 1513), Lettere, pp. 262–263. Antonio Segni, also tortured in the wake of the Medici return, did die of the effects. On the symbolic systems informing Machiavelli’s body once he entered the realm of “justice,” see Andrea Zorzi, “Rituali di violenza, cerimoniali penali, rappresentazioni della giustizia nelle città italiane centro-settentrionali (secoli XIII–XV),” in Le forme della propaganda politica nel due e nel trecento, ed. P. Cammarosano (Rome: École française de Rome, 1994), pp. 395–425, esp. pp. 400– 402 for associations with animals. Cf. problems noted by Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958/1978), pp. 54–84. On the “thrushes sonnet” to Giuliano, and the prose letter to Lorenzo: Hugo Jaeckel, “I ‘Tordi’ e il ‘Principe Nuovo’: Note sulle dediche del ‘Principe’ di Machiavelli a Giuliano e a Lorenzo de’Medici,” Archivio storico italiano 156 (1998): 73–92. Texts: Blasucci, Opere, pp. 423–424; De principatibus, pp. 181–183 (Connell pp. 141 and 39–40). Uneven promptings: Vettori, also compromised, wrote from Rome in Medici employ. Was he assigned a penitential and inquisitorial campaign of correspondence? Did Machiavelli, rightly or wrongly, make that assumption? Did Vettori realize that he would? And so on. Acting out: see note 59 below on “translation.” Mimesis: Mikkel Borch-Jakobson, The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1992), and René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). Conceptually opposed, these studies confirm the centrality of mimesis for the trauma hypothesis. Objectification: Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the

350! notes

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

World (New York: Oxford, 1985), esp. part 2. Torture and modernity: Mario Sbriccoli, “Tormentum idest torquere mentem: Processo inquisitorio e interrogatorio per tortura nell’Italia comunale,” in La parola all’accusato, ed. J.-C. Maire Vigueur and A. Paravicini Bagliani (Palermo: Sellerio, 1991), pp. 17–32. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), pp. 221, 223. Wayne Rebhorn, Foxes and Lions: Machiavelli’s Confidence Men (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 116. Stephen M. Fallon, “Hunting the Fox: Equivocation and Duplicity in The Prince,” PMLA 107 (1992): 1193; Thomas Greene, “The End of Discourse in Machiavelli’s Prince,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. P. Parker and D. Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 76, 77; Michael McCanles, The Discourse of Il Principe (Malibu: Undena, 1983), p. 28. Lettere, p. 233. Francesco Vettori, Sommario della istoria d’Italia [hereafter Sommario], in Enrico Niccolini, ed., Francesco Vettori: Scritti storici e politici (Bari: Laterza, 1972), p. 147. Ridolfi, Life, pp. 133, 135–136. E.g., Ridolfi, Life, p. 290 n. 14; Najemy, Between Friends, p. 94. Sommario, p. 147. Giovanni Folchi’s interrogation shows that, after Boscoli, the subject of most interest to interrogators was Machiavelli: J. N. Stephens and H. C. Butters, “New Light on Machiavelli,” English Historical Review 97, no. 382 (January 1982): 67. Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 36 and facing. Machiavelli’s grandson noted four drops; Machiavelli’s prison sonnet alleges six. Between a late family apologist and the demands of meter, the point must be that we do not know the extent of Machiavelli’s torture. Boscoli concluded from his own eight tratti di fune that “they wanted to finish [him] off ”: F. Polidori, ed., “Luca della Robbia: Recitazione del caso di Pietro Paolo Boscoli e di Agostino Capponi” Archivio storico italiano 1 (1842): 278–312 [hereafter Recitazione], at 292. Savonarola supposedly confessed after seven drops: Luigi Lazzerini, Nessuno è innocente: Le tre morti di Piero Pagolo Boscoli (Florence: Olschki, 2002), 57 and n. 1. Note 14 above. See especially David Wootton, ed. and trans., The Prince (1995), p. xxv; his remarks must be the distant origin of this essay. But cf. Jaeckel, “I ‘Tordi,’ ” p. 81. In the giornata letter, Machiavelli depicts himself as a tormenter of small birds after his torture, his hunt yielding due or sei birds (Lettere, p. 302; Connell, p. 137). Further on thrushes and somatic experience: Najemy, Between Friends, p. 187 n. 19. Trauma theory does not allow for a range of experience, but clinical research suggests that Machiavelli survived with a good prognosis: Peter Vesti and Marianne Kastrup, “Treatment of Torture Survivors: Psychosocial and Somatic Aspects,” in Traumatic Stress: From Theory to Practice, ed. J. R. Freedy and S. E. Hobfoll (New York: Plenum, 1995). Recitazione, p. 299. On della Robbia: Gigliola Fragnito, Dizionario biografico degli italiani 37 (1989): 291a–293b; Lazzerini, Nessuno, pp. 147–156. On Savonarola and followers: Stefano Dall’Aglio, Savonarola e Savonarolismo (Bari: Cacucci, 2005), with bibliography. Recitazione, pp. 284–285. Della Robbia himself had been interrogated under the republic, in April 1498, following Savonarola’s execution: Pasquale Villari, La storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de’suoi tempi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1930), 2: ccxxxix–ccxlii. But cf. Donald Weinstein, “The Art of Dying Well and Popular Piety in the Preaching and Thought of Girolamo Savonarola,” in Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Flor-

notes 351!

35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

ence, ed. M. Tetel, R. G. Witt, and R. Goffen (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 88–104; and Kathleen Falvey, “Early Italian Dramatic Traditions and Comforting Rituals,” in Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities, ed. K. Eisenbichler (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute, 1991), pp. 33–55. English translation of the Recitazione: https://webspace.wtexas.edu/akf7035/index .htm. Dominick LaCapra, “Canons, Texts, and Contexts” in Learning History in America, ed. L. Kramer, D. Reid, and W. L. Barney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994), pp. 123–124. Not least because Machiavelli and Boscoli seem to have known each other: Oreste Tommasini, La vita e gli scritti di Niccolo Machiavelli (Rome, 1883–1911; repr. Naples, 1994–2003), 1:369. E.g., Patricia J. Osmond, “The Conspiracy of 1522 Against Cardinal Giulio de’Medici: Machiavelli and ‘gli esempli delli antiqui,’ ” in The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Kenneth Gouwens and Sheryl E. Reiss (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 55–72, although strongly intentionalist. De principatibus, p. 182, ll. 17–25; Recitazione, pp. 295, 296, etc. Juliet Mitchell, “The Vortex Beneath the Story,” in Brooks and Woloch, eds., Whose Freud?, pp. 47–50. Recitazione, pp. 308–309. De principatibus, chap. 26. Najemy, Between Friends, esp. p. 135; idem, “Language and The Prince” in Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Martin Coyle (Manchester and New York: Manchester University and St. Martin’s, 1995), pp. 89–114. Trauma theory privileges witness—e.g., Dominick LaCapra, “Holocaust Testimonies: Attending to the Victim’s Voice,” in Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, ed. M. Postone and E. Santner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 209–231. Luca della Robbia edited the Tusculans (Florence: Giunta, 1508), with a dedication to the neoplatonic poet and Savonarolan Girolamo Benivieni. In Tusculans I, Cicero demonstrates that death is not an evil; della Robbia may allude to that demonstration at Recitazione, p. 301, when he depicts Boscoli refusing his confessor’s advice on dying bravely (a questo mi bastono i filosofici). Quotation: the “thrushes sonnet” (note 14 above), perhaps referring to an Aesop-like fable recorded by Poggio Bracciolini. Page Dubois, Torture and Truth (New York: Routledge, 1991); Sbriccoli, “Tormentum.” De principatibus, chap. 7. Cf. McCanles, Discourse, p. 73, and J. H. Whitfield, Discourses on ‘The Prince’ (Cambridge: Heffer, 1969), p. at 38. E.g., Victoria Kahn, “Virtù and the Example of Agathocles in Machiavelli’s Prince,” in Ascoli and Kahn, Machiavelli, pp. 195–218—so brilliantly complex as to suggest the value of trauma theory as Ockham’s razor. Neither Maria J. Falco, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), nor Hanna F. Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), address trauma, but if Machiavelli experienced torture as emasculating, then the gender reversals of the plays, at least, deserve further thought. A comprehensive critique: Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Roger Seamon, letter to the editor, PMLA 108 (1993): 544–545.

352! notes 52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

Max Hernandez, “Winnicott’s ‘Fear of Breakdown’: On and Beyond Trauma,” Diacritics 28 (1998): 135–136, potentially helpful on the subject of time in The Prince. On Pico, who was not a piagnone and did not become a Dominican: Gian Carlo Garfagnini, “Pico e Savonarola,” in Pico, Poliziano e l’Umanesimo di fine Quattrocento, ed. P. Viti (Florence: Olschki, 1994), pp. 149–157, esp. pp. 152–153, 155–156. Recitazione, p. 309. E.g., Esther Cohen, “To Die a Martyr for the Public Good: The Execution Ritual in Late Medieval Paris,” in Law, Custom, and the Social Fabric in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honor of Bryce Lyon, ed. B. S. Bachrach and D. Nicholas (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1990), pp. 285–304. Marco Gentile suggests one answer to this question in Jorge Luis Borges, “Tres versiones de Judas,” from Ficciones (Buenos Aires: EMECÉ 1956/1963), pp. 169–176. Does the incoherent text, in a martyrological trope, “bite off its tongue” to spit in the face of Machiavelli’s bureaucratic rival? See Godman, From Poliziano, on this rival. On mimeticism and professional rivalry: Mikkel Borch-Jakobson, The Freudian Subject, trans. C. Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), and Girard, Things Hidden. McCanles, Discourse, pp. 105–106. Martyrdom entails sacrifice, but Girard, Things Hidden, would posit “murder,” in line with his nonsacrificial reading of Christianity. Girard’s interpretation suits Machiavelli’s oddly pacific representation of Christianity: Marcia Colish, “Republicanism, Religion, and Machiavelli’s Savonarolan Moment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (1999): pp. 601–602. See the giornata letter (above, notes 4, 5, and 6): Machiavelli “questions” the ancients about their “motives” and receives “answers” “out of their humanity” for “four hours at a time.” Fredi Chiappelli, Studi sul linguaggio del Machiavelli (Florence: Le Monnier, 1952), and idem, Nuovi studi sul linguaggio del Machiavelli (Florence: Le Monnier, 1969), ad indicem. McCanles (Discourse, pp. 97–98) argues that free indirect discourse in The Prince mimics ambassadorial reportage. It may simultaneously mimic the victim’s perception of speech given under duress. Remirro de Orco: De principatibus, pp. 212–213 (Connell, pp. 61–62). Dante’s tortured bodies are numerous, but see especially the interpretational difficulties posed by the barrattieri in cantos 21–22, whose crime touches Dante’s biography. E.g., Najemy (Between Friends) identifies survivor’s guilt in Vettori; see also Marcello Simonetta, “Francesco Vettori, Francesco Guicciardini, and Cosimo I: The Prince After Machiavelli,” in The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’Medici, ed. K. Eisenbichler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 1–8. Lynn Hunt, “Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Historical Thought,” in A Companion to Western Historical Thought, ed. L. Kramer and S. Maza (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 178–204, without reference to torture. The formulation is Peter Jelavich’s; cf. John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Palgrave, 2004), addressing the effect of the sixteenth-century Inquisition. Edward Peters (“Destruction of the Flesh—Salvation of the Spirit: The Paradoxes of Torture in Medieval Christian Society,” in The Devil, Heresy, and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell, ed. A. Ferreiro [Leiden: Brill, 1998], pp. 145–147) describes an eleventh- to thirteenth-century emergence of “new uses of coercion” (146) and widening experience of them that may play into medieval “individualism”; while Lucy Grig, building on Garth Fowden’s concept of “judicial savagery,” posits similar developments in Late Antiquity (“Torture and Truth in Late Antique Martyrology,” Early Medieval Europe 11 [2002]: 321–336).

notes 353!

17. low country ascetics and oriental luxury 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

The story of Giles’ conversion is told in somewhat legendary form in the anonymous “Historia fundationis venerabilis ecclesiae beati Nicolai Oigniacensis ac ancillae Christi Mariae Oigniacensis,” in Veterum scriptorum et monumentorum historicorum, dogmaticorum, moralium, amplissima collectio, ed. Edmond Martène and Ursin Durand (Paris: Montalant, 1724; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 6: cols. 327–330; translation used here is from Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement to The Life of Marie d’Oignies and Anonymous History of the Foundation of the Venerable Church of Blessed Nicholas of Oignies and the Handmaid of Christ Marie d’Oignies, trans. Hugh Feiss (Saskatoon: Peregrina, 1987) [hereafter trans. Feiss], pp. 37–41. The basic outlines of the foundation legend are corroborated by documentary sources linking Giles to Walcourt and by Thomas of Cantimpré, who mentions that Giles’ mother was one of the women at Oignies: Edouard Poncelet, Chartes du prieuré d’Oignies de l’Ordre de Saint-Augustin (Namur: Wesmael-Charlier, 1913), pp. i–vi; Thomas of Cantimpré, Supplementum vitae Mariae Oigniacensis [hereafter Thomas of Cantimpré, Supplementum] 2.10 (published in Acta sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, ed. Bollandists, vols. 1– [Paris: V. Palmé, 1863–1940] [hereafter Acta sanctorum, ed. Bollandists], Iunii:5:576; trans. Feiss, p. 15). Poncelet points out that the date given on the earliest document from Oignies, 1192, is apparently a scribal error, since the bishop who approved the act was not consecrated until 1196. Poncelet, Chartes du prieuré, p. lxi. As Walter Simons has stressed (Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001], pp. 35–36), the beguine movement of the Low Countries emerged in a variety of institutional settings. The situation at Oignies gives us one of those settings; the beginning of Marie of Oignies’ religious life at a leprosarium gives us another (see text at note 6). The “History of the Foundation of Oignies” identifies Hugh as Giles’ brother: “Historia fundationis,” col. 327 (trans. Feiss, p. 37). The best introduction to Hugh’s work is the beautifully illustrated catalogue of a recent exhibition of his work: Autour de Hugo d’Oignies, catalogue of an exhibition directed by Robert Didier and Jacques Toussaint (Namur: Société archéologique de Namur, 2003). On the modesty of Oignies’ possessions see Poncelet, Chartes du prieuré. In Martin Dunford and Phil Lee, The Rough Guide to Belgium and Luxembourg, 3d ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2002), p. xix, the treasures of Oignies are ranked number thirteen. The most complete modern biography of Jacques de Vitry is by Philipp Funk: Jakob von Vitry: Leben und Werke (Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, Herausgegeben von Walter Goetz, Heft 3) (Leipzig: Druck, 1909; repr., Hildesheim: H. A. Gerstenberg, 1973). See also M. Coens, “Jacques de Vitry,” Biographie nationale, Supplement, Académie Royale des sciences, des lettres et des beauxarts de Belgique, vols. 1– (Brussels: Bruylant, 1956–), vol. 31, supp. 3, cols. 465–474. Jacques de Vitry, Vita Mariae Oigniacensis [hereafter Jacques de Vitry, Vita] 1.1.14 (published in Acta sanctorum, ed. Bollandists, Iunii:5:550; translation used is from Margot H. King, trans., The Life of Marie d’Oignies [Saskatoon: Peregrina, 1987], p. 16 [hereafter trans. King]). On the lack of clarity for the chronology of Marie’s life, see Funk, Jakob von Vitry, pp. 23–24. The date of 1191 is based on Jacques’ assertion that Marie was fourteen when she was married, and about thirty-six when she died in 1213: Jacques de Vitry, Vita 1.1.12; 2.12.109 (Acta sanctorum Iunii:5:550, 572; trans. King, pp. 14, 103). Thomas of Cantimpré, Supplementum 1 (Acta sanctorum, ed. Bollandists, Iunii:5:573; trans. Feiss, p. 5).

354! notes 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

Ibid. Funk, Jakob von Vitry; Coens, “Jacques de Vitry.” On Jacques joining the priory: Poncelet, Chartes du prieuré, p. 101. On possible dates for the consecration: ibid., p. vii; U. Berlière, “Les évêques auxiliaires de Liège,” Revue bénédictine 29 (1912): 72; Eduardo Formigoni, “Jacques de Vitry et le prieuré d’Oignies,” in Autour de Hugo d’Oignies, p. 41; Jean-Baptiste Lefèvre, “Le cadre religieux,” in Autour de Hugo d’Oignies, p. 33. Poncelet, Chartes du prieuré, pp. vii, 101–103; Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden: Brill, 1960), ep. 6, p. 133. Several items still among the treasures of Oignies—a portable altar, two bishop’s miters, a maniple, part of an ivory cross, and two episcopal rings with sapphires—are thought to have been Jacques de Vitry’s ecclesiastical ornaments: Robert Didier and Jacques Toussaint, “Trésors des Soeurs de Notre Dame à Namur: Catalogue critique,” in Autour de Hugo d’Oignies, pp. 267–269, 272–280. Jacques was the most generous patron of the priory and has long been credited with all of the Oriental goods that entered its treasures around his time—hence the logic of associating him with its gemstones from the East. Robert Didier, “Hugo d’Oignies: Prolégomènes,” in Autour de Hugo d’Oignies, p. 61. Pierre Kurman, “Hugo d’Oignies et Villard de Honnecourt,” in Autour de Hugo d’Oignies, pp. 83–88. Photographs of Hugh’s engravings are in Didier and Toussaint, “Trésors des Soeurs,” pp. 230, 233–235; photographs of his niello work, pp. 193, 201, 202, 213, 214, 229. Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 41, 113, 200–201, 209–211. Bynum, Resurrection, pp. 8, 107, 120, 162, 210. Bynum, Resurrection, pp. 58–114, 200–201. Bynum, Resurrection, pp. 214–220. Jacques de Vitry, Vita 2.9.86; 2.8.91 (Acta sanctorum Iunii:5:566, 567; trans. King, pp. 82, 87). On the topic of women’s eucharistic devotion see Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Jacques de Vitry, Vita 2.10.91 (Acta sanctorum Iunii:5:567–568; trans. King, p. 87). Bynum, Resurrection, pp. 220–222; Jacques de Vitry, Vita, prologue, par. 9; 1.1.15; 1.3.29; 1.3.37; 1.3.40; 2.8.73–74; 2.12.109 (Acta sanctorum Iunii:5:549, 550, 553, 555, 556, 563, 572; trans. King, pp. 9, 17, 29, 38, 41, 70–72, 103). Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, ep. 1, ed. Huygens., p. 72; Thomas of Cantimpré, Supplementum 3.16 (Acta sanctorum, ed. Bollandists, Iunii:5:578; trans. Feiss, p. 23); Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Lutgardis 3.19 (Acta sanctorum, ed. Bollandists, Iunii:4:209; trans. Margot H. King, The Life of Lutgard of Aywières [Saskatoon: Peregrina, 1987], p. 98). Didier and Toussaint, “Trésors des Soeurs,” p. 295. See Bynum, Resurrection, pp. 201–202, and Michel Lauwers, La mémoire des ancêtres, le souci des morts: Morts, rites et société au Moyen Age: Diocèse de Liège, XI e–XIII e siècles (Paris: Beauchesne, 1997), pp. 410–413. Lauwers’ analysis of the causes of the new phenomenon stresses the effects of the new money economy. On body part reliquaries see Bynum, Resurrection, pp. 201–202, pls. 19, 20; on jewelry reliquaries, Ronald R. Lightbrown, Medieval European Jewellery, with a Catalogue of the Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1992), pp. 125, 139, 168–169, 181, 202–204, 223, 226, 232; pls. 127, 128, 131, 133, 134; catalogue nos. 33, 35, 36, 39, 50, 50, 53. Didier and Toussaint, “Trésors des Soeurs,” pp. 245–248. These reliquaries date from around 1250 and 1260 and thus postdate the works of Hugo, which were all created between 1228 and 1240 (Didier, “Hugo d’Oignies,” p. 61).

notes 355! 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

Robert Didier and Jacques Toussaint, “Oeuvres dispersées du Trésor d’Oignies,” in Autour de Hugo d’Oignies, pp. 295–296. Of Simone Martini’s works see especially “Saint Louis of Toulouse,” the Pisa “Altar of St. Catherine,” and “Saint Augustine” in the triptych at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge: Gianfranco Contini, L’opera completa di Simone Martini (Milan: Rizzoli, 1970), pls. 5, 11, 15. Of the Van Eycks’ works, see, in the Ghent altarpiece, the central figure of God, the angel of the Annunciation, bishops, popes, and confessors: Alfons Lieven Dierick, The Ghent Altarpiece: Van Eyck’s Masterpiece Revisited in Color and Lifesize, trans. Herman Brondeel (Ghent: the author, 1996), pls. 5, 14, 19, 20, 29, 34. See also: Laura Weigert, Weaving Sacred Stories: French Choir Tapestries and the Performance of Clerical Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), fig. 16. Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. M. Bartusis and R. Mayer (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Caratzas, 1990), p. 80; Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), pp. 140–141. Biernoff argues persuasively that the emergence of this new desire was closely related to the emergence of the practice of the elevation of the consecrated host and to the regulation of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that restricted lay people’s participation in communion to one time per year. “Calicem nudum super altare diu posset inspicere,” Jacques de Vitry, Vita 2.10.92 (Acta sanctorum Iunii:5:568; trans. King, p. 88). “Coelestis claritatis,” Jacques de Vitry, Vita 2.10.91 (Acta sanctorum Iunii:5:567; trans. King, p. 87). Didier and Toussaint, “Trésors des Soeurs,” pp. 220–235, 245–248; “Oeuvres dispersées,” pp. 295–296. Didier and Toussaint, “Trésors des Soeurs,” pp. 211–212; “Oeuvres dispersées,” pp. 297–299. Didier and Toussaint, “Trésors des Soeurs,” pp. 204–210, 217–219. See also pp. 250– 267 on three additional monstrance reliquaries with clear crystal cylinders, which were made at Oignies ca. 1260–1270. Didier and Toussaint, “Trésors des Soeurs,” pp. 238–241. Didier and Toussaint, “Trésors des Soeurs,” pp. 220, 227; “Oeuvres dispersées,” pp. 297–299. The phylacteries were decorated with rock crystal and colored glass: Ferdinand Courtoy, “Le trésor du prieuré d’Oignies aux Soeurs de Notre-Dame à Namur et l’oeuvre du Frère Hugo,” Bulletin de la Commission Royale des Monuments et des Sites 3 (1951– 1952): 165, 167, 170, 171, 173, 239. Didier and Toussaint, “Trésors des Soeurs,” pp. 205–207; Laurent Wilmet, “Les intailles et le camée des orfèvreries du Trésor d’Oignies,” in Autour de Hugo d’Oignies, p. 160. For the identity of the gemstones I have followed Courtoy, “Le trésor du prieuré,” pp. 151–152. Didier and Toussaint, “Trésors des Soeurs,” pp. 192–199; Wilmet, “Les intailles,” pp. 155–159; Courtoy, “Le trésor du prieuré,” p. 138. Didier and Toussaint, “Trésors des Soeurs,” pp. 211–216; Wilmet, “Les intailles,” p. 161; Courtoy, “Le trésor du prieuré,” p. 155. Didier and Toussaint, “Oeuvres dispersées,” pp. 297–299; Courtoy, “Le trésor du prieuré,” p. 242. A third cross containing pieces of the True Cross was not made at Oignies: “Trésors des Soeurs,” pp. 260–266. Joseph Braun, Die Reliquiare des christlichen Kultes und ihre Entwicklung (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder & Co., 1940), pp. 474–475. At Oignies: sapphire, agate, emerald, cornelian, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth [zircon], amethyst, onyx. In Rev 21:18–21 but not at Oignies: jasper, chrysolite. For a

356! notes

44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

discussion of medieval allegorical commentaries on the gemstones in Revelation 21 and in Exodus 28 (the gemstones of the high priest Aaron’s breastplate), see Christel Meier, Gemma spiritalis: Methode und Gebrauch der Edelsteinallegorese vom frühen Christentum bis ins 18. Jahrhundert (Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften, Bd. 34) (Munich: W. Fink, 1977–), pp. 87–89; Joan Evans, Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Particularly in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1976), pp. 29–30, 72–79. Evans, Magical Jewels, pp. 30–37, 51–72; Paul Studer and Joan Evans, Anglo-Norman Lapidaries (Paris: É. Champion, 1924), pp. x–xiii; Isidorus Hispalensis episcopus, Etymologiarum sive originum libri xx, book 16: “De lapidibus et metallis,” ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957, 1962), vol. 2 (unpaginated). Robert Halleux, “Damigéron, Evax et Marbode: L’heritage alexandrin dans les lapidaires médiévaux,” Studi médiévali, 3d ser., 15 (1974): 328–347; John M. Riddle, Marbode of Rennes’ (1035–1123) De Lapidibus Considered as a Medical Treatise with Text, Commentary, and C. W. King’s Translation, Together with Text and Translation of Marbode’s Minor Works on Stones (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1977), p. 2. Studer and Evans, Anglo-Norman Lapidaries, pp. xv–xvi; Léopold Charles Augustin Pannier, Les lapidaires français du moyen âge des XII e, XIII e et XIV e siècles: Réunis, classés et pub., accompagnés de préfaces, de tables et d’un glossaire (repr., Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973), pp. 16, 20–28; Riddle, Marbode, p. ix. Studer and Evans, Anglo-Norman Lapidaries, pp. xiv–xv. Riddle, Marbode, pp. x, 6–8, 132. For a list of encyclopedic works with lapidaries, see Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), app. B, pp. 268–271. Iacobus de Vitriaco, Libri duo quorum prior orientalis, sive Hierosolymitanae: alter occidentalis historiae nomine inscribitur, 91 (Douai: Balthazar Bellerus, 1597) [henceforth Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis], pp. 194–198; Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum, ed. H. Boese (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973), pp. 355–374 [hereafter Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum]. Parts of Jacques de Vitry’s Historia orientalis have been translated into English, but not the section on the wonders of the East: Jacques de Vitry, The History of Jerusalem, trans. Aubrey Stewart (London: Palestine Pilgrims Text Society, 1896). “Multa enim in partibus illis mirabiliter operatus est Dominus, que sicut iusti et bene affecti et prudentes homines ad laudem Dei convertunt et gloriam . . . ita leves et curiosi homines ad vanitatem retorquent,” Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 83 (pp. 164–165). “Sunt insuper alie gemmarum species in partibus orientis. Ad commendationem autem divine potentie, ut confiteantur Domino opera eius, haec praedicta de lapidibus pretiosis sufficiant,” Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 91 (p. 198). “Excepta autem gratia sanitatum miracula multa et magna experiuntur in gemmis. . . . Horum igitur miraculorum ratio est omnipotentis dei voluntas, qui in rebus humanis mirabilis predicatur,” Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum, pp. 355–356. Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 91 (pp. 195–198). “Historia fundationis,” col. 329; trans. Feiss, p. 40. Thomas of Cantimpré, Supplementum 3.15–17 (Acta sanctorum Iunii:5:377–378; trans. Feiss, pp. 21–24). Marbode, De lapidibus, ed. Riddle, Marbode, p. 34. Isidorus, Etymologiarum . . . libri, book xvi, chap. vii, viii, ix, xiii, xiv; Marbode, De lapidibus, ed. Riddle, Marbode, pp. 36, 38, 47, 50, 53, 54, 58, 76, 79, 84, 85. On the geo-

notes 357!

59. 60.

61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

76.

graphical origins of precious gems in the Middle Ages see: W. Heyd, Histoire du commerce du Levant au moyen âge, trans. Furcy Raynaud, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1936), 2:648–658. Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum, p. 355. Examples include: “Mandement de Robert, comte d’Artois [February 1, 1299],” ed. M. le Chanoine Dehaisnes, Documents et extraits divers concernant l’histoire de l’art dans la Flandre, l’Artois et le Hainaut avant le xv e siècle, part 1 (Lille: L. Quarré, LibraireÉditeur, 1886), p. 105 [“grosses perles fines d’Orient,”]; “Inventaire et vente des biens de la reine Clémence de Hongrie [1358],” ed. by L. Douët-d’Arcq, Nouveau recueil de comptes de l’argenterie des rois de France (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1874), pp. 38–41 [“rubis d’Alixandre; “rubiz d’Oriant”; “un saphir d’Oriant”]. For a general discussion of the spiritual qualities associated with the East see Meier, Gemma spiritalis, pp. 340–341. Charles F. Beckingham, “The Achievements of Prester John,” in Prester John, the Mongols, and the Ten Lost Tribes, ed. Charles F. Beckingham and Bernard Hamilton (Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1996), p. 15. Thomas, Supplementum 3.15 (Acta sanctorum, ed. Bollandists, Iunii:5:577; trans. Feiss, p. 21). Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 77 (p. 149; trans. Stewart, History of Jerusalem, p. 77). See also Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, ep. 2, ed. Huygens, p. 95, where Jacques asserts that there are more Christians living among the Saracens than there are Saracens. Bernard Hamilton, “Prester John and the Kings of Cologne,” in Prester John, p. 171. Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, ep. 2, ed. Huygens, pp. 83–85, 96–97. Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 77 (pp. 148–150; trans. Stewart, History of Jerusalem, pp. 77–78). Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 76 (pp. 144–148, trans. Stewart, History of Jerusalem, pp. 73–76). “Commixti sunt enim inter eos,” “mores perversos ex parte magna imitantur,” Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 75 (p. 138; trans. Stewart, History of Jerusalem, p. 67). Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 75 (p. 137; trans. Stewart, History of Jerusalem, p. 67). “Prorsus imbellis, et praeliis velut mulieres inutiles,” Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 75 (p. 137). “Molles et effeminati,” Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 73 (p. 133; trans. Stewart, History of Jerusalem, p. 64). “Unde praedicti Armeni in altaris sacramento nec Dominum imitantur, nec observant mysterium,” Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 79 (pp. 153–155, quotation on p. 155; trans. Stewart, History of Jerusalem, pp. 81–83, quotation on p. 82). For background information on the Armenians at this time see C. Cannuyer, “Les armeniens dans l’Historia orientalis de Jacques de Vitry,” Revue des études armeniennes 17 (1983): 197–199. “Arcubus et sagittis in preliis edocti et expediti,” Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 78 (p. 151). C. Cannuyer, “Les géorgiens dans l’Historia Hierosolimitani de Jacques de Vitry,” Bedi Kartlisa 41 (1983): 175–187; Bernard Hamilton, “Continental Drift: Prester John’s Progress Through the Indies,” in Prester John, pp. 242, 243, 245. Jacques does not mention, in his favorable discussion of the Georgians, that they were defeated by the Mongols. “Bellicosus valde, et in praeliis strenuus, fortis robore, et potens innumera pugnatorum multitudine,” Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 80 (p. 156, trans. Stewart, History of Jerusalem, p. 83)

358! notes 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90.

91.

Cannuyer, “Les géorgiens,” p. 181. Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 80 (p. 156; trans. Stewart, History of Jerusalem, pp. 83–84). Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 80 (p. 157; trans. Stewart, History of Jerusalem, p. 84). Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, ep. 7, ed. Huygens, pp. 141–153. Jean Richard, “The Relatio de Davide as a Source for Mongol History and the Legend of Prester John,” in Prester John, pp. 139–158. Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, ep. 7, ed. Huygens, p. 141. Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 92 (pp. 199–213). Jacques’ account is taken almost verbatim from the Historia de preliis 90, 98–102, ed. Oswald Zingerle, Die Quellen zum Alexander des Rudolf von Ems (Breslau: W. Koebner, 1885; repr. New York: Olms, 1977), pp. 214–216, 220–236. However, Jacques leaves out, in the correspondence between Alexander and Dindimus, king of the Brahmans, Alexander’s responses. For an introduction to medieval Alexander legends, see: George Cary, The Medieval Alexander, ed. D. J. A. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956); and The Medieval French Alexander, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). For an introduction to the theme of the noble savage in accounts of Eastern monstrous races see John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 163–171. Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 92 (pp. 199–200). “Da nobis immortalitatem,” Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 92 (p. 199). “Deus verbum est, et verbum istud mundum creavit, et per hoc verbum vivunt omnia,” Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis 92 (p. 207). See Friedman, Monstrous Races, pp. 166–167, on the prelapsarian nature of Brahmans and Gymnosophists. For Jacques de Vitry’s discussion of sins of Westerners see Historia orientalis 83 (pp. 162–163). Jacques de Vitry, Vita 1.4.37; 2.5.46 (Acta sanctorum Iunii:5:554, 558; trans. King, pp. 38, 47). Jacques de Vitry, Vita 2.5.44 (Acta sanctorum Iunii:5:557; trans. King, p. 46). Poncelet, Chartes du prieuré, pp. lx–lxiii (but Poncelet erroneously blames the women for the growing restrictions on their contact with the canons); Camille Tihon, “Le testament d’une béguine d’Oignies en 1275,” Namurcum: Chronique de la Société archaeologique de Namur 14 (1937): 40–44. Poncelet, Chartes du prieuré, pp. lxii–lxiii.

18. crystalline wombs and pregnant hearts Throughout this essay’s many permutations since its inception over ten years ago as a Master’s thesis for the Art History Department at Columbia University—including versions read at Middlebury College, Barnard College, Princeton University, and the Kunstgeschichtliche Gesellschaft in Berlin—it has benefited from the critical comments of many individuals. To the advisors, students, and friends who shared their insights—most recently, Rachel Fulton, who helped give the paper its present shape—I offer my sincere thanks. Professor Bynum’s influence will be apparent throughout; she generously read my thesis when I began studying with her in 1995, and has encouraged my work on Katharinenthal ever since. It is an honor to present this essay to her now, with heartfelt gratitude and admiration.

notes 359! 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

See Albert Knoepfli, Die Kunstdenkmäler des Kantons Thurgau, vol. 4: Das Kloster Katharinenthal (Basel: Wiese, 1989), pp. 236–238, with full bibliography; and Robert Suckale’s entry in Krone und Schleier: Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern (Munich: Hirmer, 2005), pp. 414–415, which appeared as this paper neared completion. Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,”, in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1992), pp. 181–238. Bynum, “Female Body,” p. 198; translation by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions,” in The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone, 1998), pp. 117–118. See Hamburger, Visual and Visionary, p. 124; F. O. Büttner, Imitatio pietatis: Motive der christlichen Ikonographie als Modelle zur Verähnlichung (Berlin: Mann, 1983); David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Knoepfli (Kunstdenkmäler, p. 236) states that they were added in the nineteenth century, though Charles Little, curator of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum, has argued convincingly for their authenticity (personal communication, Feb. 15, 2006). I am grateful to Dr. Little for sharing his observations on the work’s material condition in numerous conversations. See Christof L. Diedrichs, Vom Glauben zum Sehen: Die Sichtbarkeit der Reliquie im Reliquiar: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sehens (Berlin: Weissensee, 2001). The abdominal aperture of one Maria gravida figure from the Cistercian convent of St. Marienstern (eastern Saxony) contains slots for a glass or crystal piece; see Zeit und Ewigkeit: 128 Tage in St. Marienstern, ed. Judith Oexle, Markus Bauer, and Marius Zinzeler (Halle an der Saale: Stekovics, 1998), p. 89; for slightly later figures, see pp. 90–91. On the relation of precious stones to blessed bodies, see Ellert Dahl, “Heavenly Images: The Statue of St. Foy of Conques and the Signification of the Medieval ‘Cult-Image’ in the West,” Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia 8 (1979): 175–192; Ulrich Henze, “Edelsteinallegorese im Lichte mittelalterlicher Bildund Reliquienverehrung,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 54 (1991): 428–451. Knoepfli (Kunstdenkmäler, p. 236) suggests (without substantiation) that “die Leibesfrucht . . . ursprünglich hinter Glas als kleines Figürchen sichtbar [war].” See Susannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and the essays in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Clarissa W. Atkinson, “Precious Basalm in a Fragile Glass: The Ideology of Virginity in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Family History 8 (summer 1983): 131–143. For an explicit likening of Christ’s conception to the visual process, see Leo Steinberg and Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., “ ‘How Shall This Be?’ Reflections on Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation in London,” Artibus et historiae 16 (1987): 25–53. Christel Meier, Gemma spiritalis: Methode und Gebrauch der Edelsteinallegorese vom frühen Christentum bis ins 18. Jahrhundert, vol. 1 (Munich: Fink, 1977), with extensive bibliography. Meier, Gemma spiritalis, pp. 237–239. On glorified bodies, see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 235, 252–254, with further bibliography. Meier, Gemma spiritalis, pp. 307–309. On interpretations of stones as animate things,

360! notes

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

see J. C. Plumpe, “Vivum saxum, vivi lapides: The Concept of ‘Living Stone’ in Classical and Christian Antiquity,” Traditio 1 (1943): 1–14; Karl Möseneder, “Lapides vivi: Über die Kreuzkapelle der Burg Karlstein,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 34 (1981): 39–69. On lactation, see Meier, Gemma spiritalis, pp. 403 n. 1366, 409 n. 1401; on thirst, p. 423 n. 1482; on stomach ailments, p. 400 n. 1354. See the essays on body-part reliquaries edited by Caroline Walker Bynum and Paula Gerson in Gesta 36 (1997). On the early use of sculptures as reliquaries, see Signe Horn Fuglesang, “Christian Reliquaries and Pagan Idols,” in Images of Cult and Devotion: Function and Reception of Christian Images in Medieval and Post-Medieval Europe, ed. Søren Kaspersen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004), pp. 7–31. For anthropomorphic tabernacles, see Kerstin Hengevoss-Dürkop, Skulptur und Frauenkloster: Studien zu Bildwerken der Zeit um 1300 aus Frauenklöstern des ehemaligen Fürstentums Lüneberg (Berlin: Akademie, 1994), pp. 144–145. Renate Kroos, “ ‘Gotes tabernackel’: Zur Funktion und Interpretation von Schreinmadonnen,” Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 43 (1986): 58–64; Bynum, “Female Body,” pp. 212, 217. Gregor Martin Lechner, O.S.B., Maria Gravida: Zum Schwangerschaftsmotiv in der bildenden Kunst (Munich: Schnell und Steiner, 1981); Hildegard Urner-Astholz, “Die beiden ungeborenen Kinder auf Darstellungen der Visitatio,” Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 38 (1981): 29–58. See Urner-Astholz, “Ungeborenen Kinder,” figs. 3, 10, 11, 13. See Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Jacques LeGoff, “Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body Part Three, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone, 1989), pp. 12–27. Jager, Book of the Heart, pp. 69–71. Bynum, “Female Body,” pp. 214–215. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 256–257; Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 351–363. See Bynum, Holy Feast, pp. 257, 268–269, 278; Clarissa W. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 162–164; Rosemary Hale, “Imitatio Mariae: Motherhood Motifs in Devotional Memoirs,” Mystics Quarterly 16 (1990): 193–203. Hadewijch, The Complete Works, trans. Mother Columba Hart, O.S.B. (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 345–350. Friedrich Ohly, “Cor amantis non angustum: Vom Wohnen im Herzen,” in Gedenkschrift für Willial Foerste, ed. Dietrich Hofmann and Willy Sanders (Niederdeutsche Schriften 18) (Cologne: Böhlau, 1970), pp. 457–459; Jager, Book of the Heart, pp. 65–86. Jeffrey H. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 137–175. Ruth Meyer, Das “St. Katharinenthaler Schwesternbuch”: Untersuchung, Edition, Kommentar (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995) [hereafter KS]. On the convent’s history, see Knoepfli, Kunstdenkmäler, pp. 15–23. On this genre, see Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By Women, for Women, About Women: The Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996). KS, p. 131, ll. 80–85.

notes 361! 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

Cf. Lewis, By Women, p. 111, and Meyer’s commentary to KS, pp. 264–265. On Suso’s devotional practices and engagement with visual images, see Hamburger, Visual and Visionary, pp. 197–278. Henry Suso, The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons, trans. Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), p. 73. Cf. Hamburger, Visual and Visionary, p. 202. Hamburger, Visual and Visionary, pp. 200–202; and idem, St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 198–201. Hamburger, St. John, p. 201. The following account comes from Suso, Exemplar, pp. 70–71. Cf. Jager, Book of the Heart, pp. 99–100; Hamburger, Visual and Visionary, p. 263. Bynum, “Female Body,” pp. 187, 197. Ulrich Engelen, “Die Edelsteine im Rheinischen Marienlob,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 7 (1973): 356. Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, trans. and ed. Margaret Winkworth (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), p. 124. Gertrude of Helfta, Herald, pp. 124–125. Gertrude of Helfta, Herald, p. 108. See Arnold Angenendt, “ ‘Der Leib ist klar, klar wie Kristall,’ ” in Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter: Politisch-soziale Kontexte, visuelle Praxis, körperliche Ausdrucksform, ed. Klaus Schreiner (Munich: Fink, 2002), pp. 387–398; on Katharinenthal, see pp. 396–397. On this sculpture, now in Antwerp, see Knoepfli, Kunstdenkmäler, pp. 227, 231– 234, with bibliography; and the entry by Robert Suckale in Krone und Schleier, pp. 409–412. KS, p. 130, ll. 42–44. KS, p. 101. In this respect they anticipate Resurrection bodies; see Bynum, Resurrection, p. 254. KS, p. 102, ll. 4–17. For critiques of the static, monocular view required in the pictorial perspective of the Renaissance, see Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), pp. 3–23. Medieval art history is lately experiencing heightened interest in “visuality” and “visual culture”; along with the works of Hamburger and those cited in note 9 above, see the very different studies by Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); and Madeline Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Although these approaches have energized our field, the dominance accorded vision frequently comes at the expense of other aspects of sensory experience, above all, touch. Cf. Joanna E. Ziegler, Sculpture of Compassion: The Pietà and the Beguines in the Southern Low Countries, c. 1300–c. 1600 (Brussels: Institut historique belge de Rome, 1992); Gordon Rudy, The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2002); and Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). KS, p. 152, ll. 61–73 KS, p. 152, ll. 52–54. Zurich, Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, LM 26117; Das Graduale von St. Katharinenthal um 1312 (Lucerne: Faksimile-Verlag, 1983). On these miniatures, see Ellen J. Beer, “Die Buchkunst des Graduale von St. Katharinenthal,” in the facsimile’s com-

362! notes

52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60.

mentary volume, pp. 166–169 (fol. 258v), pp. 176–177 (fol. 158av); Knoepfli, Kunstdenkmäler, pp. 170–179; and Krone und Schleier, pp. 406–408. Cf. Ewald Vetter, “Mulier amicta sole und Mater salvatoris,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 3, nos. 9–10 (1958–1959): 32–71. See Hamburger, St. John, pl. 17. Cf. Andreas Bräm, “Imitatio sanctorum: Überlegungen zur Stifterdarstellung im Graduale von St. Katharinenthal,” Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 49 (1992): 103–112. Also noted by Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 416. Cf. Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1971), 1:55–56 and pls. 130–135; Urner-Astholz, “Ungeborenen Kinder.” Cf. Helga Sciurie, “Die Frauenfrage und der Stil der deutschen Plastik zwischen 1270 und 1350,” in Stil und Gesellschaft: Ein Problemaufriss, ed. Friedrich Möbius (Dresden: VEB, 1984), pp. 170–172. Cf. the accounts of Adelhait Pfefferhartin (KS, p. 151, ll. 8–9, 16–17), Diemut von Lindow (KS, p. 116, l. 3), and Elsbeth Hainburgin (KS, p. 125, ll. 1–4). On Mechthild’s tenure at Helfta, see Bynum, “Women Mystics,” pp. 228–234. My translation, based on Margo Schmidt, “die spilende minnevlüt: Der Eros als Sein und Wirkkraft in der Trinität bei Mechthild von Magdeburg,” in Eine Höhe, über die nichts geht: Spezielle Glaubenserfahrung in der Frauenmystik?, ed. Margo Schmidt and Dieter R. Bauer (Stuttgart: frommann-holzboog, 1986), pp. 106–107, differs slightly from that in Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist, 1998), book IV, chap. 14, pp. 157–158.

19. gluttony and the anthropology of pain in dante’s inferno and purgatorio I wish to thank Christoph Holzhey, Elena Lombardi, and Monika Otter for their comments on previous versions of this paper. 1.

2.

See Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali: Storia dei peccati nel Medioevo (Torino: Einaudi, 2000), pp. 124–128; Terence Scully, The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1995), pp. 40–65; Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony (New York: George Braziller, 1976), pp. 103–123. Robin Kirkpatrick, “Dante and the Body,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 236–253, esp. p. 239. Among the studies in the last two decades that have addressed the issue of the body in the Divine Comedy, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Faith Imagining the Self: Somatomorphic Soul and Resurrection Body in Dante’s Divine Comedy,” in Faithful Imagining: Essays in Honor of Richard R. Niebuhr, ed. Sang Hyun Lee, Wayne Proudfoot, and Albert Blackwell (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), pp. 81–104; Michael Camille, “The Pose of the Queer: Dante’s Gaze, Brunetto Latini’s Body,” in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 57–86; Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, “ ‘Le bianche stole’: Il tema della resurrezione nel Paradiso,” in Dante e la Bibbia. Atti del Convegno Internazionale promosso da “Biblia”: Firenze, 26–27–28 settembre 1986, ed. Giovanni Barblan (Florence: Olschki, 1988), pp. 249–271; Rachel Jacoff, “Dante and the Legend(s) of

notes 363!

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

St. John,” Dante Studies 117 (1999): 45–57, and “ ‘Our Bodies, Our Selves’: The Body in the Commedia,” in Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and Its Afterlife, ed. Dana E. Stewart and Alison Cornish (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 119–137; Marianne Shapiro, Dante and the Knot of Body and Soul (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Jeffery Schnapp, “Injured by the Light: Violence and Paideia in Dante’s Purgatorio,” Dante Studies 111 (1993): 107–118; and the essays contained in Dante and the Human Body, ed. John Barnes (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, forthcoming). Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Esther Cohen, “The Animated Pain of the Body,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 41. Agreeing with Cohen’s scholarship, Mitchell Merback has argued that unlike today, in the past pain could be culturally constructed and performed (The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999]). In particular, Merback wants to show that pain in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was thought to be—with the famous formulation by Elaine Scarry (The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985])—both “world destroying” and “world making.” The same enterprise is endorsed, from a different perspective, in Ariel Gluklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200– 1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Caroline Walker Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22 (1995): 21. Citations from the Comedy are from the edition “La Commedia” secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi (Milano: Mondadori, 1966–1967). Translations are, with occasional changes, from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–1975; repr., 1977). See Manuele Gragnolati, “From Plurality to (Near) Unicity of Forms: Embryology in Purgatorio 25,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), pp. 192–210; for the extensive scholarship on Statius’s embryological account, which is one of the most debated passages of Dante criticism, see especially the sources cited therein on pp. 193 and 206. See Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 37–43. For a discussion of Ciacco’s (nick)name, see Eugenio Ragni, “Ciacco,” in Enciclopedia dantesca (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970), 1:982–986. Gino Casagrande, “ ‘Per la dannosa colpa della gola’ (Note sul contrapasso di Inferno VI,” Studi danteschi 62 (1990): 39–53. See Casagrande, “ ‘Per la dannosa colpa della gola,’ ” p. 48. Two other cases of shades fully losing their human shape in hell are represented by the suicides (who are turned into bushes) and the thieves (who are turned into snakes). On the idea that the pains of hell are more a manifestation of the damned souls’ corruption than an antithetical retribution for their sin, see Kenneth Gross, “Infernal Metamorphoses: An Interpretation of Dante’s ‘Counterpass,’ ” Modern Language Notes 100 (1985): 42–69; Anthony Cassel, Dante’s Fearful Art of Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), pp. 3–14; and Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 137–170.

364! notes 16. 17.

18.

See Marc Cogan, The Design in the Wax: The Structure of the Divine Comedy and Its Meaning (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), pp. 36–43. Against the manuscript tradition—which reads “maturi”—Petrocchi reads “marturi” in the sense that Capaneus would not seem to be tormented by the fiery rain. Against Petrocchi, I agree with the majority of commentators (including Charles Singleton, Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, and Robert Hollander), who prefer the traditional reading: “maturi” refers to the sinner’s psychological condition, which is described in the following lines. “Se Giove stanchi ’l suo fabbro da cui / crucciato prese la folgore aguta / one l’ultimo dì percosso fui; / o s’elli stanchi li altri a muta a muta / in Mongibello a la focina negra, / chiamando ‘Buon Vulcano, aiuta, aiuta!’, / sì com’ el fece a la pugna di Flegra, / e me saetti con tutta sua forza: / non ne potrebbe aver vendetta allegra.” Though Jove weary out his smith, from whom in anger he took the sharp bolt by which on my last day I was smitten; and though he weary out the others, turn by turn, in Mongibello at the black forge, crying, “Good Vulcan, help, help!: even as he did at the fight of Phlegra, and hurl at me with all his might, he would not have thereby glad vengeance. (inf. 14.52– 60)

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

Design in the Wax, pp. 53–58; quotation on p. 58. “L’Autore . . . descrive il luogo dove sono puniti li eretici, e descrive sotto generali parole loro dolorosa contenenza, e loro forte tormento: il quale, in quanto si considera per rispetto della divina giustizia, si può dire buono; se per rispetto a colui che ’l sostiene, . . . si può dire reo, però che non è a purgazione, ma è pena” (L’Ottimo commento della Divina Commedia: Testo inedito di un contemporaneo di Dante, ed. Alessandro Torri [Bologna: Forni, 1995], p. 106). “Spirit in whom weeping matures that without which there is no returning to God, suspend a little for me your greater care.” The same image of ripening tears is repeated by Adrian V in lines 139–141 of the same canto: “Vattene omai: non vó che più t’arresti; / ché la tua stanza mio pianger disagia, / col qual maturo ciò che tu dicesti” (Go your way now: I would not have you stop longer, for your story hinders my weeping, whereby I ripen that which you have spoken of ). It contrasts with both the “pianti vani” of Inferno 21.5 and, if the reading of “maturi” instead of “marturi” is correct, with Capaneus’s lack of ripening (Inf. 14.48). Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, “Le beatitudini e la struttura poetica del Purgatorio,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 161 (1984): 1–29. For a detailed analysis of the Christological paradigm of Dante’s concept of purgatory, see Manuele Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2005), pp. 89–137. On the description of the gluttons in purgatory, see William Stephany, “Erysichthon and the Poetics of the Spirit,” in The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s Commedia, ed. Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 173–180. Esther Cohen, “Towards a History of European Physical Sensibility: Pain in the Later Middle Ages,” Science in Context 8 (1995): 47–74. Several scholars have explored this shift in Christian spirituality and devotion; see most recently Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). See Giles Constable, “The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ,” in Giles Constable, Three

notes 365!

28. 29.

30.

Studies in Medieval Religion and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 145–248, esp. pp. 218–248. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, especially pp. 245–276. For a reading of this passage drawing on psychoanalytic notions of narcissism and masochism, see Manuele Gragnolati and Christoph Holzhey, “Dolore come gioia: Trasformarsi nel Purgatorio di Dante,” Psiche 2 (2003): 111–126. “Ritorna a tua scïenza, / che vuol, quanto la cosa è più perfetta, / più senta il bene, e così la doglienza. / Tutto che questa gente maladetta / in vera perfezion già mai non vada, / di là più che di qua essere aspetta.” Return to your science, which has it that the more a thing is perfect, the more it feels the good, and so the pain. Although this accursed folk can never come to true perfection, yet they look to be nearer it than them now. (inf. 6.106– 110)

31.

This is also true for beatitude in heaven. For the significance of the doctrine of resurrection throughout Dante’s Comedy, see Chiavacci Leonardi, “ ‘Le bianche stole,’ ”; Bynum, “Faith Imagining the Self ”; Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife, pp. 139–178.

20. “human heaven”: john of rupescissa’s alchemy at the end of the world 1.

2.

3.

For an introduction to Decknamen, see Robert Halleux, Les textes alchimiques (Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental 32) (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979), pp. 34– 35, 114–119; “Problèmes de lexicographie alchimiste,” in La lexicographie du latin médiéval et ses rapports avec les recherches actuelles sur la civilisation du Moyen Âge (Paris: CNRS, 1981), pp. 355–365; and see also William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, “Introduction: The Problematic Status of Astrology and Alchemy in Premodern Europe,” and Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” both in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 1–37, 385–431. Several scholars have usefully examined the problem of alchemical imagery from art historical, literary, and theological viewpoints. See, for instance, Barbara Obrist, Les débuts de l’imagerie alchimique (XIV e– XV e siècles) (Paris: Sycomore, 1982); Lee Patterson, “Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self,” in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993): 25–57; Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 234–243. See, for instance, William R. Newman’s otherwise excellent reading of the fourteenthcentury Testamentum, attributed to Raymond Llull, in Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 98–99; see also pp. 115–116. Lawrence Principe offers a similar analysis in his The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest, Including Boyle’s “Lost” Dialogue on the Transmutation of Metals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 188–190. Rupescissa’s ideas were adopted in the sixteenth-century alchemical and distillation writings of Hieronymous Brunschwygk, Philipp Ulstad, and Paracelsus, among others. See Robert P. Multhauf, “John of Rupescissa and the Origin of Medical Chemistry,” Isis 45 (1954): 359–367; Robert Halleux, “Les ouvrages alchimiques de Jean de Roquetaillade,” Histoire littéraire de la France 41 (1981): 241–284. See also Udo Benzenhöfer,

366! notes

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

Johannes’ de Rupescissa “Liber de consideratione quintae essentiae omnium rerum”: deutsch: Studien zur Alchemia medica des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts mit kritischer Edition des Textes (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1989), pp. 55–82. Barbara Obrist, “Les rapports d’analogie entre philosophie et alchimie médiévales,” in Alchimie et philosophie à la renaissance, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin and Sylvain Matton (Paris: J.Vrin, 1993), pp. 54–64. Obrist links this new reliance on religious faith to the ambiguity of alchemy’s ability to transmute metals. Chiara Crisciani makes a similar argument in her “The Conception of Alchemy as Expressed in the Pretiosa margarita novella of Petrus Bonus of Ferrara,” Ambix 20 (1973): 170. The standard study of Rupescissa is Jeanne Bignami-Odier’s Études sur Jean de Roquetaillade (Johannes de Rupescissa) (Paris: J. Vrin, 1952), based on Bignami-Odier’s École des Chartes thesis of 1925. It appears in a revised form (with slightly updated bibliography and some abridgement of the original text) as “Jean de Roquetaillade (de Rupescissa), théologien, polémiste, alchimiste,” in Histoire littéraire de la France 41 (1981): 75–240. Robert E. Lerner expands upon Bignami-Odier’s work in his “Historical Introduction” to the Liber secretorum eventuum, ed. Robert E. Lerner and Christine Morerod-Fattebert (Fribourg, Switzerland: Editions Universitaires, 1994), pp. 13–85. Lerner, “Historical Introduction,” pp. 15–25. There is a large body of work on Joachim of Fiore’s prophecy and legacy. For an overview, see Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future: A Medieval Study in Historical Thinking (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999 [first pub. London: S.P.C.K., 1976]); Marjorie Reeves and Beatrice Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Bernard McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1985). For a survey of Joachim’s influence among the Franciscan friars, see David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). It is not clear whether Rupescissa was familiar with the genuine writings of Joachim of Fiore; he may have encountered Joachite ideas through spurious texts or through the writings of Joachim’s Franciscan followers. John of Rupescissa, Vade mecum in tribulatione, Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS Lat. III, 39, fol. 5v (int. 5): “fames gravissime supra mundum pestilentiales et mortalitates et gutturum sanguinatione et alie apostematice passiones quibus plagis interficietur maxima pars prave generationis presentis ut renovetur orbis et superbi indurati deleantur de mundo ad veritatem reducendum.” (All translations in the main text are mine.) A somewhat unsatisfactory early modern edition of the Vade mecum appears in Appendix ad fasciculum rerum expetendarum et fugiendarum, ed. Edward Brown (London: Richard Chiswell, 1690), 2:496–508.

10.

11.

John of Rupescissa, Liber secretorum eventuum, p. 179: “Evidens enim est quod ibi loquitur de martiribus temporis Antichristi cum dicit: Et qui non adoraverunt bestiam et imaginem eius et cet. Isti ergo vixerunt corporaliter resuscitati et regnaverunt corporaliter cum Christo mille annis qui futuri sunt a die mortis Antichristi usque ad adventum Gog et prope finem mundi” (italics indicate Rupescissa’s use of biblical quotations). John of Rupescissa, Liber de consideratione quinte essentie omnium rerum (Basel, 1561) [hereafter DQE], p. 21: “Quod autem incorruptibilitati conferrat, et a corruptibilitate

notes 367!

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

praeservet, demonstrabo ex experientia assumpta: quoniam si quaecunque avis, aut carnis frustum, aut piscis infundatur in ea, non corrumpetur quandiu permanebit in ea: quanto magis ergo carnem animatam et vivam corporis nostri ab omni corruptione servabit? Haec quinta Essentia est caelum humanum, quod creavit Altissimus ad conservationem quatuor qualitatum corporis humani, sicut caelum ad conservationem totius universi. Et scito pro certo quod Philosophi hodierni et medici ignorant omnino hanc quintam Essentiam et veritatem et virtutem eius: sed ego, auxilio Dei, infereus revelabo tibi magisterium eius: et huiusque docui te rem secretam, quintam Essentiam, id est caelum humanum.” DQE, p. 19: “se habeat respectu quatuor qualitatum, quibus compositum est corpus nostrum, sicut se habet caelum respectu quatuor elementorum: Philosophi autem vocaverunt caelum quintam Essentiam, respectu quatuor elementorum, quia in se caelum, est incorruptibile et immutabile et non recipiens peregrenas impressiones, nisi fieret iussu Dei. Sic et res quam quaerimus est respectu quatuor qualitatum corporis nostri: quinta Essentia, in se incorruptibilis sic facta, non calida sicca cum igne, nec humida frigida cum aqua, nec calida humida cum aere, nec frigida sicca cum terra: sed est Essentia quinta, valens ad contraria, sicut caelum incorruptibile: quod, quando necesse est, influit qualitatem humidam, aliquando calidam aliquando frigidam, aliquando siccam.” Gerald J. Gruman, A History of Ideas About the Prolongation of Life: The Evolution of Prolongevity Hypotheses to 1800 (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 56.9) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1966), p. 16; Robert P. Multhauf, “The Science of Matter,” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 370. For Aristotle on cosmic permanence and the fifth body, see De caelo 1.1.269a30–270b32; Meteorologica 1.339a11–339b26; and the Pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo 392a5–b4. For the transience of matter, see De anima 3.434a23–27. For the theory of complexion and its application to medieval medicine, see PerGunnar Ottosson, Scholastic Medicine and Philosophy: A Study of Commentaries on Galen’s Tegni (ca. 1300–1450) (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1984), pp. 129–166; Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 101–106; Owsei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), p. 17. Rupescissa clarifies that the quintessence maintains youth and health only until the time of individual death predetermined by God, which humans cannot avoid by any means. See DQE, pp. 20, 34. Gruman, Prolongation of Life, pp. 15–17. Multhauf, “Origin of Medical Chemistry,” p. 366; Halleux, “Ouvrages,” pp. 274–276. Multhauf, “Origin of Medical Chemistry,” p. 364; Halleux, “Ouvrages,” p. 252. As in Multhauf ’s and Frank Sherwood Taylor’s accounts of Rupescissa’s quintessence. See Taylor, “The Idea of Quintessence,” in Science, Medicine, and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice Written in Honour of Charles Singer, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 258–259. John of Rupescissa, Liber lucis, in Il libro della luce, ed. Andrea Aromatico (Marsilio: Editori, 1997), fols. 19r and 25r–v. DQE, p. 13: “Et sic ex tempore expenso in Philosophia cum multa vanitate, mihi non cessabunt nova merita pervenire, non solum decem annis in Philosophia pertransitis, sed plusquam mille annis ante finem seculi sine dubio defluxuris.”

368! notes 22.

23.

24.

On the nature of the resurrected body, see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). On the body in heaven, see Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 166–181, 199–203; Eileen Gardiner, Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante (New York: Italica Press, 1989). Roger Bacon, The “Opus Majus” of Roger Bacon, ed. John Henry Bridges, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 2.212: “Nam sic erit in corporibus post resurrectionem. Aequalitas enim elementorum in corporibus illis excludit corruptionem in aeternum. Nam haec aequalitas est ultimus finis materiae naturalis in corporibus mixtis, quia nobilissimum est, et ideo in eo quiesceret appetitus materiae, et non desideraret aliquid ultra.” For Bacon and the prolongation of life, see Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani, “Rajeunir au moyen âge: Roger Bacon et le mythe de la prolongation de la vie,” Revue médicale de la Suisse Romande 106 (1986): 9–23; “Storia della scienza e storia della mentalità: Ruggero Bacone, Bonifacio VIII e la teoria della ‘prolongatio vitae,’ ” in Aspetti della letteratura latina nel secolo XIII, ed. C. Leonardi and G. Orlandi (Florence: “La Nuova Italia,” 1985), pp. 243–280; Gruman, Prolongation of Life, p. 66.

21. magic, bodies, universit y masters, and the invention of the l ate medieval witch 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

See Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn: Carl Georgi, 1901), p. 39. The text is quoted here in the translation revised by Edward Peters in Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 62. Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen, p. 39, quoted from Kors and Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, p. 62. Ibid. Ibid. John of Salisbury, Policraticus 2.17, ed. K .S. B. Keats-Rohan (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 118) (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), p. 105. The passage is again quoted from a translation by Edward Peters in Kors and Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, p. 77. I have introduced one change, indicated by bold-faced type. Politicraticus, ed. Keats-Rohan, p. 106, quoted (once more with changes in bold) from Kors and Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, p. 78. Quoted from the translation by Montague Summers as presented in Kors and Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, p. 190. See Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 202–204. Cohn, Inner Demons, pp. 205–206. Cohn, Inner Demons, p. 143. Cohn, Inner Demons, p. 202. Cohn, Inner Demons, p. 102. Cohn traces this line of thinking back to George L. Burr, whose “The Literature of Witchcraft,” published in his Selected Writings, ed. L. O. Gibbons, pp. 166–189 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1943), dates to 1889. See Cohn, Inner Demons, p. 112, and p. 250 n. 211. See most importantly Cohn, Inner Demons, p. 102. The greatest advances in recent scholarship have come in filling out the little actu-

notes 369!

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

ally known about medieval ritual magic when Cohn first proposed his interpretation. Richard Kieckhefer led the way with his publication of the Latin text and an extensive analysis of a fifteenth-century conjurer’s manual: Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). But Claire Fanger has followed close on his heels. See her Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), especially the pieces by Juris Lidaka, “The Book of Angels, Rings, Characters, and Images of the Planets: Attributed to Osbern Bokenham,” pp. 32–44; Robert Mathiesen, “A Thirteenth-Century Ritual to Attain the Beatific Vision from the Sworn Book of Honorius of Thebes,” pp. 143–162; Fanger’s own “Plundering the Egyptian Treasure: John the Monk’s Book of Visions and Its Relation to the Ars Notoria of Solomon,” pp. 216–249; and Richard Kieckhefer, “The Devil’s Contemplatives: The Liber Iuratus, the Liber Visionum, and Christian Appropriation of Jewish Occultism,” pp. 250–265. Taken from Edward Peters, ed., Monks, Bishops, and Pagans: Christian Culture in Gaul and Italy, 500–700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), p. 116, where Peters quotes the translation of the Life of St. Gall by J. H. Robinson in Readings in European History (Boston: Ginn, 1904), 1:91. Taken from the first edition of Kors and Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), pp. 40–43, as quoted from H. Scott’s and C. C. Swinton Bland’s translation of Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles (London: Routledge, 1929), 1:314–317. The reader interested in exploring an intensification of the focus on demonic activity in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries should look at Alain Boureau’s Satan hérétique: Naissance de la démonologie dans l’Occident médiéval (1280–1330) (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004). Still the best introduction to popular magic and learned opinions about it, though admittedly relying on material more from early-modern Europe than the Middle Ages, is Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971), esp. pp. 177–279 and 435–468. Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen, p. 38, quoted here again from Kors and Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, pp. 61–62. I have emended the parts of the text indicated in bold type. Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen, p. 25, quoted from Kors and Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, p. 178, with emendation in bold. A sense of this dependence is easily gleaned by even a glance at some of the remarkable work being done now in France on learned magic in the high and late Middle Ages. Consult the magisterial Les “images astrologiques” au moyen âge et à la Renaissance: Spéculations intellectuelles et pratiques magiques (XII e–XV e siècle) by Nicolas Weill-Parot (Paris: Champion, 2002); as well as his “Causalité astrale et ‘science des images’ au Moyen Age: Eléments de réflexion,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 52 (1999): 207–240; and “Astral Magic and Intellectual Changes (Twelfth–Fifteenth Centuries),” in The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, ed. J. N. Bremmer and J. R. Veenstra (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), pp. 167–187; and also the work of Jean-Patrice Boudet, such as his “Magie théurgique, angélique et vision béatifique dans le Liber sacratus sive juratus attribué à Honorius de Thèbes,” in Les anges et la magie au moyen âge, ed. J.-P. Boudet, H. Bresc, and B. Grévin (Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome, Moyen âge 114, fasc. 2 [2002]), pp. 851–890. See, for a start, the remarks in Steven P. Marrone, “The Philosophy of Nature in the Early Thirteenth Century,” in Albertus Magnus und die Anfänge der Aristoteles-

370! notes

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Rezeption im lateinischen Mittelalter, ed. L. Honnefelder et al. (Münster: Aschendorff, 2005), pp. 120–121 and 145–148. Daniel of Morley, Liber de naturis inferiorum et superiorum, ed. Karl Sudhoff, in Archiv für die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik 8 (1917): 34. Morley’s handling of the term “astronomia” makes plain that he intends to include what we today would call “astrology.” Most likely he did not differentiate between “astrology” and “astronomy” in our sense. Ibid. Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon de studio legendi 6.16, ed. Charles H. Buttimer (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1939), p. 132. Hugh, Didascalicon 6.15 (ed. Buttimer, pp. 132–133). See the list of bad consequences of magic in Hugh, Didascalicon 6.15 (ed. Buttimer, p. 132). I focus on the only one designating an intrinsic property: that magic is “de vero mentiens.” Ibid.: “Magica in philosophiam non recipitur, sed est extrinsecus falsa professione.” On William’s attitude in general toward all the types of magic, see my “William of Auvergne on Magic in Natural Philosophy and Theology,” in Was ist Philosophie im Mittelalter, ed. J. A. Aertsen and A. Speer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 741–748. William of Auvergne, De universo 2.3.21, in Opera omnia I, 1058bH (Orleans/Paris, 1674; repr., Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1963): “Harum igitur naturarum vires, et potentias occultas, qui noverunt, multa mirifica faciunt.” William of Auvergne, De legibus 24 (Opera omnia I, 69bD): “Haec igitur mirifica homines ignari scientiae istius, quae natura operabatur virtutibus sibi a creatore inditis, credebant daemones operari, et propter hoc non solum potentiam magnam, et mirificam eisdem attribuerunt; sed etiam omnipotentiam: et hoc in duplicem injuriam creatoris.” William of Auvergne, De legibus 24 (Opera omnia I, 69bD); and De universo 1.1.43 (Opera omnia I, 648aG). William of Auvergne, De legibus 24 (Opera omnia I, 69bD). William of Auvergne, De legibus 24 (Opera omnia I, 70aE). William of Auvergne, De legibus 24 (Opera omnia I, 69bD). William of Auvergne, De universo 2.3.21 (Opera omnia I, 1058bH): “[P]ropter quod et magi hujusmodi homines vocati sunt, quasi magna agentes, licet quidam male interpretati fuerint magos, quasi malos, seu male agentes.” On the latter in particular, see my “Metaphysics and Science in the Thirteenth Century,” in Medieval Philosophy, ed. John Marenbon (Routledge History of Philosophy 3) (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 219–221. Roger Bacon, Opus maius 4, ed. John H. Bridges (London: Williams and Norgate, 1900), p. 395. Ibid. Ibid. Bacon, Opus maius 4 (ed. Bridges, p. 394). Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles 3.103 (Turin: Marietti, 1935), pp. 344a–b. Thomas Aquinas, Contra gentiles 3.103 (Marietti ed.), p. 344b. Thomas Aquinas, Contra gentiles 3.103 (Marietti ed.), pp. 344b–345a. Thomas Aquinas, Contra gentiles 3.104 (Marietti ed.), p. 345b. Ibid. Ibid. See Contra gentiles 3.105–106 (Marietti ed.), pp. 347a–349b. There is almost certainly another important factor to be counted in that Cohn

notes 371!

51.

52. 53.

54.

overlooked. Fascinating work is now being done on a mounting effort, also usually among medieval scholastics (of course, all male), to demonize women’s spirituality and the expression of their unmediated religious experiences in these centuries, late thirteenth through early fifteenth. See especially Nancy Caciola’s recent Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Dyan Elliott’s Proving Women: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). This new line of research offers the most promising avenue for bringing back to scholarship on the stereotype of the witch in early modern Europe the one facet that Cohn, like so many late-twentieth-century historians, left out: an unambiguous prejudice against women and “the feminine.” Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 4. See Ginzburg, Night Battles, p. 16. Caciola, in Discerning Spirits, quite nicely reveals how a similar somatization of nature, and spiritualization of supra-natural realms like the authentically religious or the divine—parallel to what we have observed with regard to elite ideas of magic—was occurring in late scholastic efforts to come to terms with women’s spirituality. In her words, “The incorporative religious idiom preferred by laywomen since the thirteenth century was rejected, as sanctity increasingly was defined in nonmateralist, strictly metaphysical terms” (Discerning Spirits, p. 314). Night Battles, pp. 21–22.

afterword 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Peter the Venerable, letter 53, in The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. Giles Constable (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:153–173, 2:132–135; cited in Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 177. Peter the Venerable, “Sermo in honore sancti illius cuius reliquiae sunt in presenti,” edited in Giles Constable, “Petri Venerabilis Sermones Tres,” Revue bénédictine 64 (1954): 265–272; trans. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, pp. 178–179. Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” American Historical Review 103.3 (1998): 677–704. See Henri Bergson’s remarks in “The Meanings of Comedy,” in Comedy: An Essay on Comedy by George Meredith and Laughter by Henri Bergson, ed. Wylie Sypher (New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 193–258, esp. p. 255. Caroline Walker Bynum, “In Praise of Fragments: History in the Comic Mode,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 24–25. Bynum, “In Praise of Fragments,” p. 14. Bynum, “In Praise of Fragments,” p. 25. Bynum, “In Praise of Fragments,” p. 26. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, p. 7. John Van Engen, “The Future of Medieval Church History,” Church History 71.3 (2002): 499. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About the Body?: A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22 (1995): 1–33.

372! notes 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

On the “hermeneutics of the sacred,” see especially Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. D. Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). Caroline Walker Bynum, “Wonder,” American Historical Review 102.1 (1997): 1–26, at pp. 3, 25–26. Kathleen Biddick, “Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible,” in The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 140. Cf. Nicholas Watson, “Desire for the Past,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 59–97. Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 5. Cf. Carolyn Dinshaw’s reflections on “the touch of the past” in Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 1–54. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Shape and Story,” in Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 188. Bynum, “Shape and Story,” p. 180. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

CONTRIBUTORS

anne l. clark is associate professor of religion at the University of Vermont. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1989 and has published Elisabeth of Schonau: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 2000) and Elisabeth of Schonau: A Twelfth-Century Visionary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), as well as articles on Elisabeth, Hildegard of Bingen, Gertrude of Helfta, Julian of Norwich, and the cult of the Virgin Mary. Her current research is on medieval women’s convents and their sacred objects. raymond clemens is associate professor of history at Illinois State University. Before working at Illinois State he was acting director of the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies. He is the coauthor (with Timothy Graham) of Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). john w. coakley is Feakes Professor of Church History at New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New Jersey and the author of Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). leah devun is assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University. She is currently a Solmsen Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of WisconsinMadison. Her work focuses on the history of the body in medieval and early modern Europe. mary harvey doyno is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Columbia University, where she is completing her dissertation, “Making Cities Holy: Italian Lay Saints and Their Cults in Northern and Central Italian Communes, 1150–1400.” sharon farmer is professor of medieval history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of two books, Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) and Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). She is currently working on a monograph that examines the impact of Western medieval colonization on the ethnic composition and material culture of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Paris.

374 contributors alison frazier is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and has received fellowships from Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti and from the Guggenheim Foundation. Her book, Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), won the 2006 Phyllis Gordon Prize from the Renaissance Society of America. rachel fulton is associate professor of history at the University of Chicago. She is the author of From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Her current project involves the intellectual and experiential making of prayer in the monastic culture of the medieval West, with special emphasis on the practices that developed from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries for prayer to the Virgin Mother of God. jessica goldberg completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2005 and was a postdoctoral fellow in the humanities at Stanford University during the 2005–2006 academic year. She is currently assistant professor of medieval history at the University of Pennsylvania and studies the economic, legal, and cultural history of the medieval Mediterranean. Her current project involves the reconstruction of the geographies of eleventhand twelfth-century trade networks using sources from both North Africa and northern Italy. manuele gragnolati is fellow and tutor in Italian at Somerville College, Oxford. He has written Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), coedited an issue of Comunicazioni sociali on the suffering body in the Middle Ages (Il corpo passionato, 2003; with Carla Bino), and published articles on medieval literature and culture as well as on Italian poetry from its origins to the twentieth century. He is currently collaborating with Teodolinda Barolini on an edition of Dante’s Rime and working on Dante’s lyric poetry and Petrarch. anna harrison is an assistant professor in the department of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University. Her current research explores notions of community among the nuns at the thirteenth-century convent at Helfta in Saxony. She is the author of “Community Among the Saintly Dead: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons for the Feast of All Saints,” in Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), and coauthor with Caroline Walker Bynum of “Gertrude, Gender, and the Composition of the Herald of Divine Love,” in Freiheit des Herzens: Mystik bei Gertrud von Helfta, ed. Michael Banger (Münster: LIT, 2004). thomas head is professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written widely on medieval hagiography, including the book Hagiography and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and articles in journals such as Speculum and Analecta Bollandiana. He has also edited several volumes of essays and of translated texts, most recent Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 2000). marlene villalobos hennessy received her Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University in 2001. In 2003–2004 she was an Andrew W. Mellon post-doctoral fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto. She is currently assistant professor in the department of English, Hunter College, CUNY. bruce holsinger is professor of English and music at the University of Virginia. His books include Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chau-

contributors 375 cer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) and The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). With the support of a Guggenheim fellowship, he is currently engaged in a long-term project on liturgical culture and vernacular writing in England from the Anglo-Saxon period through the Reformation. anna trumbore jones is assistant professor of history at Lake Forest College. She is the author of “Pitying the Desolation of Such a Place: Rebuilding Religious Houses and Constructing Memory in Aquitaine in the Wake of the Norman Incursions,” forthcoming in Viator 37 (2006). She is coeditor, with John S. Ott, of a collection of essays entitled The Bishop Reformed: Studies in Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, forthcoming 2007). She is currently working on a study of bishops in southwestern France in the period 876–1050. jacqueline jung, a specialist in later medieval German sculpture, is assistant professor of art history at Yale University. She is presently revising for publication her 2002 Columbia University dissertation on the west choir screen at Naumburg Cathedral and, as a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in spring 2006, is beginning a new project on emotion and bodily expression in German Gothic art. Her articles have appeared in Art Bulletin, Gesta, and numerous anthologies, including Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). susan r. kramer received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2002. She has taught courses at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College and is currently completing a book on aspects of twelfth-century interiority. richard landes was trained as a medievalist at Princeton and teaches at Boston University. His early work—including The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious response in France Around the Year 1000, edited with Thomas Head (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), and Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995)—focused on the year 1000 and its apocalyptic significance for contemporaries, in particular the Peace of God, which he considers a demotic religious movement. His subsequent work, such as the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements (New York: Routledge, 2000) and the forthcoming Heaven on Earth, has focused on millennial movements, in particular the demotic ones that have contributed significantly to the creation of modern civil societies. steven marrone is professor of history at Tufts University. His most recent book is entitled The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century (Boston: Brill, 2001). He is currently engaged in a project on science, magic, witchcraft, and social order in late medieval and early modern Europe. john jeffries martin, professor and chair of history at Trinity University, is the author of Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Palgrave, 2004). He is currently working on a book on the history of sincerity, an exploration of the ethics of self-disclosure from antiquity to the present. catherine m. mooney is associate professor of church history at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the editor of Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) and the author of Philippine Duchesne: A Woman with the Poor (New York: Paulist

376 contributors Press, 1990), and essays on Francis of Assisi, Clare of Assisi, Angela of Foligno, Umiltà of Faenza, and other medieval saints. fred paxton is Brigida Pacchiani Ardenghi Professor of History at Connecticut College. He received his M.A. from the University of Washington in 1980 and a Ph.D. from the University of California in 1985. Since then he has taught, lectured, and written on sickness, death, and dying in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages and on such topics as the Peace of God, canon law, codicology, and the cult of saints. mark silk is director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life and associate professor of religion in public life at Trinity College in Hartford. He is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988) and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), and editor of the journal Religion in the News.

INDEX

Abbo, 96 Abelard, 142, 146 “Account of the Deeds of King David,” 220 Acta sanctorum (Bollandus), 60–62 acts/identities divide, 3 Adala of Gandersheim, 18, 23 Adam, body of, 164 Additional 37049, 182–91, 183, 187 Adelhait Pfefferhartin, 233–34 Adelheid, St., 16 Adelman, 99–100 Ademar of Chabannes, 81, 87, 91–94, 96–98, 100, 113–14 aerial body, concept of, 241–42, 245–46, 249–50 affective spirituality, 133 Agius, 15–24, 296n18 Albert the Great, 137–38 Albigensian Crusade, 111 alchemical texts: cosmology in, 256–57; Decknamen (code names), 251, 257, 260; medical therapeutics in, 252, 258–59; millennialism in, 251–52, 258; reader expected to practice alchemy, 260–61; scholarship, 251–52, 261; trinitarian states, 253–54 Alexander III, 146 Alexander the Great, 220–21 allegorizing tradition, 177–79, 214 Ambrosiater (Pseudo-Ambrose), 155 Améry, Jean, 192, 201

Andrew, St., 27–28 Andrew of Fleury, 95 Angela of Foligno, 7–8; deaths of family members, 58–62; likened to Christ, 60; multiple representations of, 56–58; preconversion life, 60–61; scholarship on, 56–60; sex and sexuality of, 60–62; spiritual journey, steps in, 59. See also Liber Anselm of Laon, 154 Anselm of Liège, 98 Ante-Purgatory, 246 Anthony, St., false relics of, 158 antichrist, 38, 253, 258 Antiquitates divinae (Varro), 130 Apocalyptic Woman, 234 Aquinas, Thomas, 274–75; doctrine of unicity of form, 240–41; Summa theologiae, 138, 139 Aquitaine, 81–90; Peace of God councils, 93–94 Arabic Neoplatonism, 274 Arian heresy, 91, 94, 99 aridity, symbolism of, 39–40 Aristotle, 274; De anima, 137–38; De caelo, 256–57; Metaphysics, 138; Meteorologica, 256–57 Armenians, 219 Arnold, abbot of Bonneval, 137 Arras, bishop of, 111 Arundel, Archbishop, 182

378 index Assisi 342, 61 Augustine, Rule of, 42 Augustine, St., 96, 133, 161, 168, 288; City of God, 130–31; De heresibus ad Quodvultum, 96; disease metaphor for sin, 148 Augustus Caesar, 129–30 Auxerre, library of, 97 Averroes, 138, 139 Aywières, Cistercian monastery of, 52–53 ‘Ayya¯sh ibn S,adaqa, 122–23, 125 Bacon, Roger, 258–59, 272–74 Badia, Ser, 69, 74–78 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 158 Barhu¯n ibn Mu¯sa¯ al-Ta¯hertı¯, 122 Barrett, Justin, 172–73 Bartlett, Rob, 106 Bautier, Robert-Henri, 95 beatitudes, 25–26, 30, 246 Becket, Thomas, 132 Beguines, 45–47 beguines, 206 beliefs, 171–73 benandanti, 277 Benedict, St., 18 Benedict Gaetani. See Boniface VIII Benedictine monasticism, 15, 20–21, 81 Bennett, Judith, 3 Berengar of Tours, 99–100 Bernard of Clairvaux, 7, 25–35, 152, 168, 292, 300–301n28; De consideratione, 134; Fifth Sermon, 27–32; First Sermon, 25, 30; Gerard, sermon on, 34–35; Historia Pontificalis, 134; Second Sermon, 25, 30; Sermons for Feast of All Saints, 25, 27–28; sermons on Peter and Paul, 29; sermons on Sermon on the Mount, 25, 27–29; sermons on Song of Songs, 134, 135, 151; The Steps of Humility, 25 Berta von Herten, 232–33 Bible, commoner’s, 107–109 biblical exegesis, 147–48, 153 biblical references: Apocalypse, 254; Corinthians I, 145–46, 149; Ecclesiasticus, 185; Galatians, 155; Leviticus, 148; Luke, 226; Revelation, 214 Biow, Douglas, 168 Blaise, St., 209 blasphemy, sin of, 244–45 Bloch, Marc, 2

blood of Christ, 182–91; Christ’s wounds, 185, 188; compared to red ink, 189, 190; as cruor roseus, 185; flowers and vegetation imagery, 184–85; Holy Name (IHC) monogram, 182–83, 186, 189, 191, 343n5, 344n10; as nutriment, 184, 184; tree of life imagery, 183–84. See also Christ blood piety, 182–91; jewelry, 182–83 Boccaccio, 161 Bodo, Heinrich, 16 body: aerial, as link with soul, 241–42, 245–46, 249–50; animated pain of, 239, 241, 245; aridity as spiritual quality of, 39–40; chest and heart associated, 227–28; desire for heaven and, 33; dualistic vs. hylomorphic views, 239, 250; as focus for thinking about self, 159–60; as formed of earth, 243; fragmented, 160–61, 164–65, 167–68; hermeneutics of embodiment, 186; history of, 284; link between interior and exterior worlds, 223, 226, 231, 233–34; of magician, 276–77; medieval understandings of, 239–40; as microcosm, 164, 339n31; mortification of, 177–78; organic unity of, 167–68; power of after death, 208; as prison house, 165, 168; privileged over text, 165–67; role in construction of identity, 159–60; soul and, 249–50, 265; as structure, 164–65; as symbol of corruption, 39–40; as temple, 165; thinking and, 170; transparency despite materiality, 230–33; as vessel, 226–27. See also embodiment; pain; relics; resurrected body; suffering body politic, 129, 131–32, 134, 137 Bogomils of Bulgaria, 92 Bollandus, John, 60–62 Boniface VIII, 36, 40, 43, 302–303n10 Bonum universale de apibus (Thomas of Cantimpré), 46 Book of the Words of the Lord, The (Liber sermonum Domini) (Robert of Uzès), 36 Book on the Natures of Things Here Below and Up Above (Daniel of Morley), 270–71, 273 Bornstein, Daniel, 76 Borst, Arno, 95 Boscoli, Pier Pagolo, 196–98, 200–201 Boswell, John, 3

index 379 Bouwsma, William James, 164 Boyer, Pascal, 172, 181 Brahmans, 220–21 Brooke, Christopher, 136 Brother A, 58 Buc, Phillippe, 331n17 Bulgaboga, King, 220 Burkhardt, Jacob, 1–3 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 4, 11, 65, 67, 209, 283–86; on blood cult, 185, 344n8; on devotional images, 223; history in comic mode, 281–82; influence on scholarship, 283–85; mode of, 285; primary scholarly purpose, 289; on women’s relationship to food, 239, 248; Works: Fragmentation and Redemption, 285; Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, 239, 290; The Resurrection of the Body, 160, 208, 284 caelum, as term, 254 caelum humanum. See human heaven Caesarius of Heisterbach, 267–68 Cairo Geniza, 119 Callahan, Daniel, 97 Calufetti, Abele, 59, 60–61, 63, 66, 307n5 Calvin, John, 158–69, 292, 337n1; Commentary on the Psalms, 166, 169; Institutes, 164; Traité des reliques, 158, 159, 163, 169, 337n1 Calvinists, 162 Canon Episcopi (Concordia discordantium canonum) (Gratian), 262–63, 268–69 canonesses, 20–22 canons, 8; in Aquitaine, 81–82; of Oignies, 46–47; spiritual power of, 86–87. See also charters Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 161 Capponi, Agostino, 196, 197, 200 Carolingian councils, 82 Carruthers, Mary, 176, 178 Carthusians, 343nn. 3, 4, 5 Casagrande, Gino, 243 Cassirer, Ernst, 195 Castiglione, Giovanni di, 72 Cathars, 111 Catherine of Siena, 288 Catholic Poor, 145 Causae et curae (Hildegard of Bingen), 150 celestial sphere, fifth element of, 255–57

Celestine V, 36, 38, 41, 43 Celle, 76–77 cenobitism, crisis of, 81 Cerberus, 242–43 Champney, Mary, 182 chant, 177 Charles V, 164 Charroux: abbey of, 97; council at (1028), 98 Charroux synod, 93 charters, 82–91, 316n21; biblical passages cited in, 87–88; categories of, 83; donor choice of houses, 89–90; of Ebles of Limoges, 83–89, 317nn. 33, 34; formulaic language of, 84–85, 87; heresies documented in, 92–93; lack of distinction between monks and canons in, 86–90; lay participation in, 84; scribes, 94. See also donors Chaucer, Geoffrey, 161 Chaucerian Polity (Wallace), 4 Chiavacci Leonardi, Anna Maria, 246 Christ: Angela of Foligno likened to, 60; body of as book, 188; childhood of, 227; commonality with people, 30; as exemplar of purgatory, 246, 248–49; heart of, 230–32; humanity of, 28–29, 34, 248, 284; indwelling personality of, 187–88; Margaret of Cortona’s conversations with, 68, 72, 74–75; Mary’s likeness to, 246; Passion of, 248; reader’s union with, 187–88. See also blood of Christ Christ embracing St. John (sculpture), 231, 232, 234, 235 Christian sects, 218–21 Christina of Gandersheim, 15, 22, 295n6 Christine the Astonishing, 45–48 Chronicle (Ademar of Chabannes), 96–97 Church: authority, nature and limits of, 46; commoners reject hierarchy, 112; Eucharist as symbol of victory, 31; intolerance toward women’s communities, 221; joy and suffering as twin poles of, 34; naming as ideological instrument, 8–9; reform, twelfth century, 2, 4, 116, 133, 141; reformation symbolism, 40–42; symbolism for, 38–39 Cicero, 199 Cistercian monasteries, 52–53 City of God (Augustine), 130–31

380 index civic utility: civic affection, 132, 137, 138; civic virtues, 132; of non-Christian religions, 128–30; subordination of religion to political purposes, 130–31 Clark, Anne, 10 Clemens, Ray, 7 Clement IV, 272 clergy, secular, 42, 76–78 Coakley, John, 7 code names (Decknamen), 251, 257, 260 Cogan, Marc, 244–45 cognitive theory, 170–81; of memory, 170– 71, 173, 174; naturalist approach, 171–72; textualization of mental processes, 180. See also modes theory Cohen, Esther, 239, 241, 248 Cohn, Norman, 264–67, 276 Comedy (Dante), 11; Capaneus, 244–45; Cerberus, 242–43; Ciacco, 243, 250; Forese Donati, 247–49; “omo” passage, 247–49; Purgatory, 240–41; Statius, 241 comic mode, 5, 67, 129, 195, 224, 238; history in, 279–92 Commentary on the Psalms (Calvin), 166, 169 commercial correspondence: human management in, 120, 126–27, 328n16; knowledge as value in, 122–23; level of publicity, 121–22; praise in, 120–21; selfdefense in, 120, 123; structure of, 118–19; third-party innuendo, 118, 120. See also Cairo Geniza documents; Jewish merchants of Fustat; merchants commonality, as community, 30–31 commoners, 107–109; as autonomous moral agents, 109–10; hostility toward religion, 112; at Peace of God councils, 113–15; rejection of Church hierarchy, 112 Commonplace Book (John of Grimestone), 187 communes, 105, 110 communicants, 290 community: book production, 189; as category, 5–6; civic utility of non-Christian religions, 128–30; collective salvation, 251–52; collective worship of demons, 265–66, 268; commonality of experi-

ence as, 30–31; consortio (fellowship), 31–32; contaminated by individual, 145, 152, 154–56; between dead and living, 25–35; dedicated to Hathumoda of Gandersheim, 15–16; desire and, 31–34; doctrinal mode and, 174–77; emotion shared by, 176–78; Eucharist as corporate exercise, 136–37, 172; fictions used to preserve, 130–31; imagistic mode and, 174, 176; individual, relationship with, 6–7; Italian communes, 77; Margaret of Cortona and, 68–69, 72–73, 76–78; millennium and, 108, 253–54; need for independence and protection, 21; person, relationship with, 1, 9; prayers, power of, 86–90; as redemptive, 34; of saints, 7; of scholars, 11; soul of, 129; textual, 6, 110–11; tolerance of sinners as corruption of, 155–57; twelfth-century forms of, 4 concordances, 253 confessions, 218 confessors: of holy women, 68–70, 74–78; holy women in role of, 74–75 Confraternity Book of St. Gall, 16, 23 conscience, heresy as sin of, 146 consortio (fellowship), 31–32 Constable, Giles, 133–34 Constantine the African, 150–53, 216 contagion, as term, 152 contagion/contamination, 9; air quality, 152–53, 336n40; of community by individual, 145, 152, 154–56; disease caused by individual, 152–54; excommunication and, 145–46; language of, 147, 148–53; medical understanding of, 147–48; medieval etiology of disease, 149–51; medieval theories of, 151–53; as metaphor for change, 148; modern theories of, 151; nonnaturals, 150, 152–53; Pauline reference to, 145–46 Cop, Guillaume, 162 Cop, Nicholas, 162 corruption: body as symbol of, 39–40; economic growth and, 116; tolerance of sinners as, 155–57 Cortona, 68–78 Corvey, abbey of, 15, 17, 20 cosmology, 256–57

index 381 Council of Chalcedon, 218 Crone, Patricia, 106 Crusades, 111, 218–20 cultural artifacts, cognitive theories of, 170–71 cultural transmission, 171–72 cultus exterior (exterior worship), 129–42; Aquinas’s view, 138, 139; comportment, 135; direct love of God and, 136, 137; Eucharist and, 135–37; raiment metaphor, 134–35; Rousseau on, 139 cultus interior (interior worship), 9, 128, 133–42, 141; Eucharist and, 135–37 Damian, Peter, 135 Daniel of Morley, 270–71, 273 Dante, 6, 11, 201, 238–50. See also Comedy “Dante and the Body” (Kirkpatrick), 239 David, King (of India), 219, 220 David the Constructor, 219–20 Davis, Natali Zemon, 162 De anima (Aristotle), 137–38 De caelo (Aristotle), 256–57 Decameron (Boccaccio), 161 Decknamen (code names), 251, 257, 260 De consideratione (Bernard of Clairvaux), 134 De corporis humani fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) (Vesalius), 163–65 Deeds of the Bishops of Liège, 91 De Eucharistia (Ademar of Chabannes), 96–97 Defensor Pacis (Marsilius of Padua), 138–39 della Mirandola, Giovanni Pico, 200 della Robbia, Luca, 197–201, 351n44 demons, 263; appeal to by magicians, 275–77; as cause of witchcraft dreams, 263; collective worship of, 265–68, 266; increased belief in, 267–68 demotic religiosity, 106–11; economic takeoff of eleventh century and, 111–16; Peace of God and, 113; traits of, 107 De natura rerum (Thomas of Cantimpré), 46 De pignoribus sanctorum (Guibert of Nogent), 161 De principatibus (On Principalities) (Machiavelli), 10, 193–202; authoritative scholarly tradition, 201–202; context of composition, 195; giornata, 193–95;

irony in, 199; lack of somatic indicators in, 201; multiplicity of voice in, 194, 199; pathologies of speech in, 194–95; postscripts, 198; reception of, 195, 199; responsibility of historians, 195–96; witnesses in, 198, 200. See also trauma hypothesis De Quinta essentia (Liber de consideratione quinte essentie omnium rerum) (John of Rupiscessa), 252, 254–57 desire, 25; community and, 31–34; as joy, 32–34; located in self, 32–33; for saints, 26, 31–32 De usu partium (Galen), 164 devotional images, 223–25; Christ embracing St. John, 231, 232, 234, 235. See also Visitation Group of Katharinenthal DeVun, Leah, 11 dextrarum iunctio, 230 Dialogue on Miracles (Caesarius of Heisterbach), 27, 267–68 Dialogus (Agius), 15–24 Didascalicon (Hugh of Saint Victor), 271 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 3 discipline, religious, 134 disease. See contagion/contamination Divine Office, memoria and, 176–77 doctrinal mode of religiosity, 174–77; memory and, 174–75 Dominicans, 37, 42–44, 46, 52 donors, 8, 82–83. See also charters Doyno, Mary Harvey, 8 dualism, radical, 91–92, 95 dualistic heresy, 111 dualistic view of body, 239, 250 Duby, Georges, 82 East Franks, 20 Ebles of Limoges, 83–89, 317nn. 33, 34 Ecclesia, 234 economic growth, Middle Ages, 101–16; bottom-up changes, 109–10; cultural conditions for, 101–102; demotic religiosity and, 106–11; eleventhcentury, 104–106; empathy and, 109–10; overpopulation and, 105; positive-sum, culture of, 106–107, 109; poverty, enforcement of, 103–104; prime divider societies and, 102–105; takeoff of related

382 index economic growth, Middle Ages (continued) to demotic religiosity, 111–16; towns and, 105–106 Ego dormio (Rolle), 190–91 Eire, Carlos, 337n1 Ekbert of Schönau, 177 elements, 255–57 Elias of Cortona, 76–77 Elisabeth of Schönau, 5, 6, 10, 171; cultural milieu, 173–74; mode theory applied to, 174–75, 177; physical condition, 177–78; visions of, 177–78 elites: magic and sorcery as imagined by, 265–66, 268–70; in prime divider societies, 102–105 Elliott, Dyan, 146–47 embodiment, 9–10, 28; hermeneutics of, 186, 189–90; of soul after death, 240. See also body Emile (Rousseau), 140 emotion, community and, 176–78 empathy, 25, 33; economic growth and, 109–10 England, 131–32 equality, state of, 258–59 Ethics (Abelard), 146 Etymologies (Isidore of Seville), 149 Eucharist: as community exercise, 136–37, 172; Manichees reject, 96, 97; Marie of Oignies’ devotion to, 208, 210–11; as mystical union, 136–37; Protestant view of, 162; as symbol of Church’s victory, 31; visual communion, 210–11 Europe’s Inner Demons (Cohn), 264–67 evangelical men, 254, 258 Evax, king of Arabia, 217 exegetical knowledge, 175–76 exempla collections, 27 exemplarity, ethics of, 197–98 Eymoutiers, house of, 81 Faber, Felix, 161 Faloci Pulignany, Michele, 56, 62 fama, 121 Familienklöster, 17, 22, 295n6 Farne, Monk of, 188 Fasolt, Constantin, 288 Feast of All Saints, 7, 25, 32 Feast of St. Andrew, 27–28

fellowship (consortio), 31–32 Fenster, Thelma, 118 Ferguson, Wallace, 4 fermentation metaphor, 146, 154–56 Ferré, Martin-Jean, 57, 62–64 Feudal Society (Bloch), 2 fifth element, 255–57 Filmore, Robert, 109 First Treatise on Government (Locke), 109 Fleury, library of, 96 form, doctrine of unicity of, 240–41 Foucault, Michel, 3 Fourth Lateran Council, 219 fragmentation: of body, 160–61, 164–65, 167–68; in scholarship, 281–82; of soul, 168–69 Fragmentation and Redemption (Bynum), 285 Franciscans, 37, 41–44, 57; Cortonese, 68– 71; hierarchies of, 75–76; lay penitents affiliated with, 70; Margaret of Cortona and, 68–70, 72–73; Observant, 75–76; splits within order, 75–77, 253, 303n20; Third Order, 75–76 Francis of Assisi, 71 Frassetto, Michael, 97 Frazier, Alison, 10 Freedman, Paul, 281 French, Katherine, 6 Friars of the Penitence of Jesus Christ. See Friars of the Sack Friars of the Sack, 38, 42–44, 303n20 Fulbert of Chartres, 95, 99 Fulda, monastery of, 15, 17 Fulk of Toulouse, 46 Fustat, 9, 327n10. See also Jewish merchants of Fustat Galen, 153, 164 Gall, St., 267 Gandersheim, 15–24, 296n18, 298n42; family politics and, 21–22; local monastic familiae and, 17; loss of centrality, 22–23; religious character of, 21–22 Ganges, 218 gems, 206, 212–13; Eastern as holy, 217–18; in frame for True Cross relics, 211, 212, 213, 214; in Gospel covers, 214; magic of, 216–17; relics in jewelry, 209; resur-

index 383 rected bodies associated with, 208, 217; rock crystal, 212–13, 226; theological readings of, 216–17. See also Orient Geneva, iconoclastic riots, 158 Genghis Khan, 220 geniza, defined, 119, 327n11 Geniza documents, 326n1; as corporate texts, 119–20; readers of, 121–22. See also commercial correspondence; Jewish merchants of Fustat geography of piety, 68, 78. See also Margaret of Cortona George IV of Georgia, 219 Georgians, 219–20, 357n75 Gerard of Cambrai, 98, 114 Gerard of Clairvaux, 34 Gerberga II of Gandersheim, 22 Gerberga of Gandersheim, 15, 20, 295n6 Gertrude of Helfta, 223–24 Gervais de Tilbury, 27 Gibson, Gail McMurray, 186–87, 230–31 Gilbert de la Porrée, 136 Gilbert of Poitiers, 93 Giles of Oignies, 205–206 Ginzburg, Carlo, 277–78 Giunta Bevegnati, Fra, 68–69, 72–74 Glaber, Rodulfus, 95, 98, 114–16 Glente, Karen, 51, 53 Glossa ordinaria (Laon school), 153–54 Glosses on Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (William of Conches), 135 gluttons: body and soul connected in, 238–40, 244, 250; in hell, 238, 242–45; in purgatory, 238, 242–43, 245–49 God: desire for, 25; direct love of, 107, 133, 136–37; as intentional agent, 172; no longer present in material world, 162–63; pregnancy as model for union with, 227–28, 230–33 Goitein, S. D., 125, 327n13, 330n47 Gospel covers, 214, 215 Gosswin of Bossut, 53 Gourevitch, Danielle, 152 Gragnolati, Manuele, 11 Gratian of Bologna, 262–63 Great Commentary (Averroes), 138 Gregory IX, 209, 217 Gregory the Great, 96–97, 148 Greif, Avner, 125

Guibert, abbot of Nogent, 161 Gundulf, 111 Guta (recluse), 232–33, 234 Gymnosophists, 220–21 Habig, Marion Alphonse, 56 Hadewijch, 227 Hadewijch of Aywières, 51–55 hagiographic conventions, 22, 298n44 Hamburger, Jeffrey, 223 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 166–67 Harrison, Anna, 7, 292 Hathumoda of Gandersheim, 5, 7, 15–24, 295n6; as abbess, 18, 20; community dedicated to, 15–16; death of, 19–20; dreams of, 18–19; family of, 15–17; sanctity of, 15–16, 18, 22 Hatto, abbot of Richenau, 39 Head, Thomas, 8–9 heart imagery, 227–28, 230–32 heaven: astronomical, 254–57; desire for, 33; human (caelum humanum), 252, 254–60; theological, 257–61 Helinand of Froidmont, 188, 189 hell, 240; uselessness of pain in, 244–45, 250. See also purgatory Heloise, 141–42 Hennessy, Marlene, 10 Henry I (East Franks), 16, 22 Henry II (East Franks), 132 Henry of Constance, 223, 224, 232 Henry of Marcy, 146 Herebert, William, 188 heresy, 8–9; Arian, 91, 94; challenges to claims about body, 208; disease imagery of, 146; dualistic, 111; eleventh-century views on, 91–92, 99–100, 266; leprosy as metaphor for, 146, 147, 153–56; Manichees, 91, 96–97, 99; nomenclature of, 91–100; of Orléans, 91, 94–95, 111; of Périgord, 112; as sin of conscience, 146; as socially constructed, 91–92; stages of, 153–54; twentieth-century historians of, 92; Waldensians, 145, 264 Héribert, 112 Herlihy, David, 56, 65 Hermannus de Runa, 135 Herveus of Bourg-Dieu, 156 Hilary, St., 94

384 index Hildegard of Bingen, 37, 39; medical writings, 150, 151–52 Hildegar of Limoges, 81 Hildesheim, bishops of, 17, 21, 22 Hilduin of Limoges, 81 Historia Pontificalis (Bernard of Clairvaux), 134 history: bodiliness of, 170–71; of body, 284; in comic mode, 279–92; reasons for studying, 288; three trinitarian states, 253–54. See also scholarship History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 3 History of the Orient (Jacques de Vitry), 218 Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Bynum), 239, 290 Holy Land, 214, 217–18 Holy Name (IHC) monogram, 182–83, 186, 189, 191, 343n5, 344n10 holy women: in confessor role, 74–75; confessors of, 68–70, 74–78; intercessions and revelations for spiritual benefit of others, 45, 47–49, 52–54; powers of, 47, 49; priests: deference to, 50–51; intercession for, 52, 54; partnership with, 49, 51, 54–55; relationship to, 45–46, 50–51; separation from world, 50–51, 53–55. See also female sanctity Honorius Augustodunensis, 184 Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, 16, 23 Hugh of Digne, 42 Hugh of Oignies, 10, 206, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 292 Hugh of St. Victor, 136, 151, 271 Huguenots, 162 human heaven (caelum humanum), 252, 254–57; as bridge between celestial and terrestrial worlds, 259–60 humanism: reading techniques, 194–95; textual practices within, 166–67 Humbert of Romans, 42, 44 humility, steps of, 25 humoral balance theory, 149–51, 160; in alchemical texts, 256–57; disease causation, 152–53. See also contagion/contamination; medical theory Ibn Sina (Avicenna), 274 iconoclasm, 107, 162, 166

iconography, 182 Ida of Nivelles, 53 identity: body’s role in construction of, 159–60; embodied concept of, 239–40. See also self IHC. see Holy Name monogram “Ihesus est amor meus” motto, 182–83 Il principe. See De Principatibus images: science of, 273; Suso’s diagrams, 228, 229, 230, 234 imagistic mode of religiosity, 174, 176 incantations, 273–76 Incarnation, 10, 162, 186, 189 incarnational aesthetic, 186–87, 189–90 Incendium amoris (Rolle), 183 “India” (Indian subcontinent), 218 individual, 167; community, relationship with, 6–7; contamination of community by, 145, 152, 154–56; disease as caused by, 152–54; medieval, 3–4. See also person; self individualism, Renaissance, 1–4 infection, as term, 152 infirmitas (weakness), 28 Innocent III, 42, 145, 146, 152, 219 Innocent IV, 42 Innocent VIII, 269 Institutio Traiani (John of Salisbury), 128–29, 139 interior worship. See cultus interior interpretive traditions, 194–96 invention, 176–77, 341n22; mental state and, 177–78; procedural memory and, 180–81 ‘ird, (reputation), 123–25, 329n42 Isagoge of Iohannicus (Constantine the African), 150–52 Isembert of Poitiers, 93 Isidore of Seville, 148, 149, 153; gemstones, writings on, 214–16, 217 Isma’il ibn Ya’qu¯b al-Andalusi, 121–22 Italian communes, 77 Jacobites, 218 Jacquart, Danielle, 150 Jacques de Vitry (James of Vitry), 45–46, 205–207; as bishop of Acre, 46, 207, 218; as Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum, 207; on Christian sects, 218–21; as Crusader,

index 385 207; devotion to Marie of Oignies, 207; gemstones, writings on, 216; as intercessor, 53–54; Marie, interactions with, 47–48; partnership of holy women and priests as theme in, 49, 51, 54–55; as source of gemstones, 207; Thomas of Cantimpré, influence on, 45–48; Thomas of Cantimpré’s view of, 48, 55; Vita Mariae Oigniacensis, 45–46, 49, 208, 216 Ja¯h (reputation), 123, 329nn. 35, 42 James Major, St., 209 Jerusalem, 217 jewelry, blood piety and, 182–83, 209 Jewish merchants of Fustat, 117–27; business honor, 123–24; partnership contracts, 124–25, 330n47; reciprocal services, 124–27; reputation, 117–18, 121–22, 328n35, 329n42; self-promotion, 118; talk and structure of business, 118–19. See also commercial correspondence Jews, 104, 219, 322n18 Joachim of Fiore, 253–54 Joachites, 42, 44, 253–54 John of Grimestone, 187 John of Ripoll, 95 John of Rupescissa, 11, 251–61; human heaven (caelum humanum), 252, 254– 57; imprisonment of, 253; as Joachite, 253–54; Liber de consideratione quinte essentie omnium rerum, 252; Liber lucis, 252, 258; millennialism of, 253–54, 258, 260–61; salvation, concern with, 251–52 John of Salisbury, 9, 128–42, 263, 332n36; Institutio Traiani, 128–29, 139; Policraticus, 9, 128–29, 137–39, 263, 332n36 John the Baptist: Christ embracing St. John (sculpture), 231, 232, 234, 235; head of, 161 Jones, Anne Trumbore, 8 Jones, Drew, 22 Jordanes, 131 Jordan of Limoges, 86–87 Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 4 joy: suffering as source of, 248–49; at suffering of another, 104 Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (Rousseau), 141

Katharinenthal, women of, 10–11, 224–25; gradual of 1312, 234–35, 235; sister-book, 227–28, 231, 235 Kempe, Margery, 182, 187 Khallu¯f ibn Zaka¯r, 123–24 King’s Peace, 114 Kirkpatrick, Robin, 239 knowledge: emotion and, 176; exegetical, 175–76; humoral theory and, 151; implicit, 175–76; as primary value, 122–23; procedural, 175–77, 180–81; unorthodox, 178–79 Kramer, Heinrich, 264 Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, Die (Burckhardt), 1–3 lactation, crystal as metaphor for, 226–27 Landes, Richard, 92–93, 94, 98 Lang, Andreas, 16 Laon, school of, 136, 153–54, 161 lapidaries, 216–17 Lateran IV canons, 151 Latin, vernacularization of, 189 Lauwers, Michael, 209 laws, human vs. divine, 138–39 lay penitents, 57, 69–70, 76 Lazarus, 31 learning, medieval approach to, 150–51 Leclercq, Jean, 174 Legenda de vita et miraculis beatae Margaritae de Cortona (Giunta Bevegnati), 68–69; inquisitorial origins of, 72–73, 77; lack of coherence in, 77–78 Leo X, 193, 194, 196 leprosy: as metaphor for heresy, 148, 153–56; as metaphor for sin, 146, 147, 153; types of, 153–54 Letter of Héribert, 97 Leutard, 98 Liber de consideratione quinte essentie omnium rerum. See De Quinta esssentia Liber (life of Angela of Foligno): Acta sanctorum version, 60–62; Assisi 342 manuscript, 61; feminist interpretations, 64–67; Ferré edition, 57, 62–64; Instructions, 58, 61, 65; Italian text, 64; Memorial, 58–66; multiple voices in, 58; parallelism in, 65; Thier and Calufetti edition, 59, 60–61, 63, 66; twentieth-

386 index Liber (life of Angela of Foligno) (continued) century editions, 62–64. See also Angela of Foligno Liber lucis (Book of Light) (John of Rupescissa), 252 Liber visionum (Book of Visions) (Robert of Uzès), 36–44 Liebeschütz, Hans, 129 Liège, illustrious women of, 48 Life of Marie of Oignies (Thomas of Cantimpré), 216 Life of Queen Mathilda, 23–24 Life of St. Adalhard (Paschasius of Radbertus), 20 Limbo, 242 Limits of History, The (Fasolt), 288 Limoges synod, 93 Lippmann, E. O. von, 251 Liudolfings, 15–17, 21, 23–24 Liudolf of Saxony, 15, 20 Livy, 130, 139 Lobrichon, Guy, 92 Locke, John, 109 Louis of Looz, 49 Louis the Younger, 21 love-knot image, 191 Lutgard of Aywières, 48, 51–55; separation from world, 53–55 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 10, 192–202; imprisonment and torture of, 192, 194, 196–97, 349n12, 349n13, 350n28; removed from office, 194; as secular martyr, 200–201; self-presentation in giornata, 193–95 Macy, Gary, 136 magic. See ritual magic Making of the Middle Ages, The (Southern), 2, 110 malefici, as term for witch, 271 male initiation rites, 174 Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) (Kramer and Springer), 264 Mani, 91, 99 Manichees, 91–92; as term, 96–97, 99 mantellati (lay penitents), 76 manual labor, dignity of, 107 Map, Walter, 102 Marbode of Rennes, 216, 217

Marcellus, St., 279 Margaret of Cortona, 8, 68–78; Christ, conversations with, 68, 72, 74–75; community of, 68–69, 72–73, 76–78; in confessor role, 74–75; Franciscan confessors, 68–70, 74–78; Franciscans and, 68–70, 72–73; miracles performed at tomb of, 72, 77; penitential life of, 70–74; at San Basilio, 69–70; spiritual development of, 68–69 Margaret of Ypres, 49–51 Marie of Oignies, 10, 205–22; clothing of, 217; efforts for welfare of souls, 47; Eucharist, devotion to, 208, 210–11; finger of, 210, 217; James of Vitry’s vita of, 45–46, 49, 208, 216; power of after death, 208–209; powers of, 47, 49, 53; relics, devotion to, 209–10; resurrected body of, 221; self-denial of, 206–207; sepulcher of, 205, 207; Thomas of Cantimprés Life of, 216 Maronites, 219 Marrone, Peter. See Celestine V Marrone, Steven, 11 Marsilius of Padua, 138–39 Martial, St., cult of, 97 Martin, Dale, 149 Martin, Janet, 128 Martin, John Jeffries, 2, 9–10, 159 Martin of Tours, St., 18, 99 martyrological tropes, 200–201 Marx, Karl, 105 Mary: Elisabeth of Schönau’s vision of, 178–79; heart of, 230; likeness to Christ, 246; parchment metaphor for womb of, 188–89; as rosa sine spina, 185; in Visitation Group, 223; womb of: as crystal, 10, 223, 226; parchment metaphor for, 188–89 “Mary at the Foot of the Cross,” 191 materiality, 5; ritual and, 274–75; styles of person and, 10–11; survival and, 239; transparency despite, 230–33; of visual culture, 233–34 Mathilda, St., 16, 22, 23–24, 299n60 Mathilda of Quedlinburg, 24 McCormick, Michael, 101 McCracken, Peggy, 147 McGinn, Bernard, 43

index 387 McLaughlin, Megan, 87 meaning, ritual and, 175–76, 180–81 mechanistic theories, 170–71 Mechthild von Eschenz, 231–32, 237 medical theory, 9, 11, 216; anatomical revolution of Renaissance, 163–64; Arabic works, 150; contagion, medieval theories of, 151–53; contamination, understanding of, 147–48; Galenic, 149, 150, 152, 153, 256–57; iatrochemistry, 252; medieval, 149–51; modern, 149, 151; physics, early, 271, 276. See also humoral balance theory Medici, 192–95 Medici, Giovanni de’ (Leo X), 193, 194, 196 Medici, Giuliano de’, 194, 197 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 194 Meditations on the Passion of Christ (Monk of Farne), 188 Melancthon, Philip, 164 memoria, 176–77 memory: cognitive theories of, 170–71, 173, 174; of dead, 35; doctrinal ritual and, 174–75; flashbulb, 174, 180; fluidity of, 17; procedural, 175–77, 180–81; visualization techniques, 185–86 men, telling of women’s stories, 57–58 mendicant orders, 37–38, 42–44, 70 merchants. See Jewish merchants of Fustat Metaphysics (Aristotle), 138 Meteorologica (Aristotle), 256–57 microcosm, body as, 164, 339n31 middle class, 105 Mill, John Stuart, 2, 3 millennium, 11; apocalyptic symbolism, 37; community and, 108, 253–54; evangelical men, 254, 258; millennial movements, 109, 114 mimesis, reading as, 186 miracles, 22, 290; at Margaret of Cortona’s tomb, 72, 77; at Peace of God councils, 113 modes theory, 174–81; doctrinal mode, 174–77; imagistic mode of religiosity, 174, 176. See also cognitive theory monastic life: cognitive basis for social organization of, 174–75; empathic response as basis for, 25, 33; interior worship and, 133–34

monastic reform movement, 96 monastic writing, 174 Mooney, Catherine, 7–8 Moore, R. I., 95, 146, 147 Mosaic Law, 133 mythic theology, 130 Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Martin), 159 Naiman Turks, 220 natural theology, 130 nature: magic and, 272–76; material things and change, 274–75; somatization of, 277, 371n53 Nederman, Cary, 137 Nero, 217 Nestorians, 218 Newman, Barbara, 39, 306n22 Newman, William R., 251 Nicholas IV, 36, 38, 41, 70, 71, 77 Nicholas of Cusa, 139 Nicholas of Oignies, St., 206 Nicolas, St., relics of, 212 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 103–104 Night Battles (Ginzburg), 277–78 Nissı¯m ibn Khalafu¯n, 126 nomenclature of heresy, 8–9, 91–100 nominalists, 92, 95, 97 non-Christian religions, civic utility of, 128–30 nonnaturals, 150, 152–53 Nordhausen, 23 Normans, 214 Numa Pompilius, 129–32, 137 nuns, 20–22 oaths, collective, 110, 324n45 obedience, 232–33 Oda of Gandersheim, 15, 19–20, 23, 295n6 Odolric, 95 Odo of Blois, 95 Oignies: canons of, 46–47; Holy Land, links with, 214; women of, 221. See also Marie of Oignies On Fevers (Galen), 153 On Liberty (Mill), 2, 3 On Miracles (Peter the Venerable), 27 On Principalities (Machiavelli). See De principatibus

388 index On the Nature of Things (Thomas of Cantimpré), 216 “On the Origins of Gandersheim Abbey” (Hrotsvit), 16 Opus maius (Bacon), 258–59, 272–74 Orco, Remirro de, 201 organic analogy, 129, 131–32, 134 Orient, 208; Christian sects in, 218–21; as holy, 217–18. See also gems Orléans, heretics of, 91, 94–95, 111 Orsini, Cardinal, 76 Osmana of Scotland, 52 Oswin, 102–103 Otia imperialia, 27 Otto I (duke of Saxony), 16, 23 Otto III, 16 Otto II “the Great,” 16, 23 Ottonians, 16, 21, 23, 299n60 pagan religions, 138, 221 pain, 240–42; love of, 248; poena damni, 242; productive vs. unproductive, 244–50. See also suffering Pantegni (Constantine the African), 150, 151 paradise imagery, 184–85 passio, 154 Passion imagery, 182 Patriarcha (Filmore), 109 patristic period, 92, 95–96, 100 Paul, St., 86; Bernard’s mention of, 25–26; Corinthians I, 145–46, 149; Galatians, 155 Paul of St.-Père, 95 Peace of God councils, 93–94, 98, 110, 113–14; councils of 1033, 114–16 peasant revolts, 108 person: category of, 5; community, relationship with, 1, 9–10. See also self; individual Peter, St., relics of, 158, 209, 211, 213 Peter Lombard, 156 Peter of Celle, 134 Peter the Chanter, 145, 156–57, 333–34n1 Peter the Venerable, 27, 150, 279–80, 283, 292 Petrarch, 139 philopassianism, 248 Philosophia mundi (William of Conches), 150–51 phylacteries, 209

Pirenne, Henri, 101 Pliny the Elder, 214–16 Plutarch, 128 poena damni, 240, 242, 246 poena sensus, 240, 246 Poitiers synod, 93 Policraticus (John of Salisbury), 9, 128–29, 263, 332n36; readership, 137–39 Poliziano, Angelo, 167 Pon, Georges, 92–93, 94 popes: Alexander III, 146; Boniface VIII, 36, 40, 43, 302–303n10; Celestine V, 36, 38, 41, 43; Clement IV, 272; Gregory IX, 209, 217; Innocent III, 42, 145, 146, 152, 219; Innocent IV, 42; Innocent VIII, 269; Leo X, 193, 194, 196; Nicholas IV, 36, 38, 41, 70, 71, 77 positive-sum, culture of, 106–107, 109 poverty, 41 power: of bodies after death, 208; of communal prayers, 86–90; female as complement to priest’s, 49; of holy women, 45, 47, 49; of monks and canons, 86–87; pastoral dimension of, 47; of priests, 45, 49; in relics, 160–61 pregnancy, 223; as model for union with God, 227–28, 230–33; spiritual, 227, 236 Prester John, 218, 220 priests: holy women in partnership with, 49, 51, 54–55; holy women’s relationship to, 45–46, 50–51; intercession for by holy women, 52, 54; powers of, 45, 49; separation of holy women from the world and, 53–55. See also canons; monastic life prime divider societies, 102–105 Principe, Lawrence M., 251 Priscillian of Avila, 94, 99 procedural knowledge, 175–77, 180–81 propassio, 154 psychological introspection, tradition of, 168 Publicani, 146 Pullen, Robert, 129, 134, 136 purgatory, 240; Christ as exemplar of, 246, 248–49; exempla in, 246–48; gluttons in, 238, 242–43, 245–49; moral structure of, 246; productivity of pain in, 245–49, 250. See also hell

index 389 Puritans, 162 purity metaphor, 226 Pythagoras, 137–38 quintessence, 252–53, 257–61; as incorruptible, 255–57 Radbertus, Paschasius, 20 raiment metaphor, 134–35 Ramschwag, Anne von, 228 reader: at center of salvation history, 185–86; of De principatibus, 195, 199; of Geniza documents, 121–22; images of body-soul relationship and, 228–29, 233; of Policraticus, 137–39; practice of alchemy and, 260–61; responsibility of, 30–31; union with Christ, 187–88; visions, reaction to, 37 reading: as embodiment, 186; humanist techniques of, 194–95; as mimetic, 186 realists, 92, 95, 97 Recitazione del caso di Pietro Pagolo Boscoli (della Robbia), 197–201 reflexivity, 290 reformation, symbolism of, 40–42 Regino of Prüm, 262–63 Registrum (Gregory the Great), 96–97 relics: Calvin’s view, 158, 159, 163, 169; destruction of, 161–62; magic of gemstones and, 216–17; Marie of Oignies and, 209– 10; at Peace of God councils, 113; power in, 160–61; reformers’ critiques of, 158, 161–63; as seeds of divine change, 279; as source of solace, 160–61; of True Cross, 211, 212, 213, 214. See also reliquaries religion: doctrinal mode of religiosity, 174–77; nature of, 129; social utility of, 128–42. See also demotic religiosity reliquaries, 209, 226; communication of authenticity, 213–14. See also relics Renaissance individualism, 1–4 representation, 171, 175–77 reputation, 121–22; by categorization strategy, 122–23; ‘ird, 123–25, 329n42; ja¯h, 123, 329nn. 35, 42; knowledge dynamics in, 122–23; relationship management and, 120, 126–27, 328n16 res publica, 132 res sacramenti, 136

ressentiment studies, 103–104 resurrected body: ascetics associated with, 208; available through alchemy during life, 258–59; gems associated with, 208, 217; as incorruptible, 258–59 Resurrection of the Body, The (Bynum), 160, 208, 284 rhetoric, 119–20 Ricoeur, Paul, 37, 287 ritual: doctrinal mode of religiosity and, 174–77; meaning and, 175–76, 180–81 ritual magic, 268–70, 368–69n15; appeal to demons, 275–77; elite interest in, 265–66; incantations, 273–76; material things and, 274–75; nature and, 272–76; parts of, 271; as scientific discipline, 270–71 Robert II the Pious, 94–95, 111 Robert of Melun, 136 Robert of Uzès, 5, 7, 36–44 Roger II of Châlons-sur-Marne, 91, 98– 100 Roisin, Simone, 50 Rolle, Richard, 182–83, 186, 343n3, 345nn. 13, 15; Ego dormio, 190–91; IHC (Holy Name) monogram, 182–83, 186; Incendium amoris, 183 rosary, 185 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 140–42 Rubin, Miri, 5 rubricare, 189 Ruska, Julius, 251 Sabbath, law of, 108 sacred, hermeneutics of, 287 Sainte-Croix, canons of, 91 Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand, charters, 82–90; of William V, 91–100 Saint-Maixent charters, 85–86 Saint-Martial, monastery of, 86 saints: bodily relics, 9–10; community of, 7; conversion of sinners as goal of, 48; cultural construction of, 57; dependence on miracles, 22; desire for, 26, 31–32; humanity of, 28–29; lay civic patrons, 69–70; as sinners, 26, 29–30. See also female sanctity; holy women Salimbene de Adam, 42 Samh,u¯n ibn Da’u¯d, 120

390 index San Basilio, 69–72 sanctity, 6–7, 17, 22. See also holy women San Francesco, Church of, 71 Santer, Eric, 281 Savonarola, 197–98, 200 Scaevola, Q. Mucius, 130 Schadenfreude, 103 scholarship: bias in study of alchemical texts, 251–52, 261; communities, 11; context of, 289; continuities between medieval and modern world, 285–86, 288; fragmented, 281–82; irony out of place in, 286–87, 289; new cultural history, 282; responsibility of historians, 195–96; risks taken, 282–83; seed metaphor, 279–80, 282, 291; textual, 166–67; “turns” in, 280–81. See also history Scivias (Hildegard of Bingen), 37 scribes, 94 sculptures, 226; Christ embracing St. John, 231, 232, 234, 235. See also reliquaries secular clergy, 42, 76–78 seed metaphor, 279–80, 282, 291 self: body as focus for thinking about, 159–60; corporate medieval, 1–2; desire located in, 32–33; individualist model of, 167; interior worship and, 141; separated soul as carrier of, 240–41. See also identity; person; individual Seneca, 152 Sentences (Pullen), 134 Sermon on the Mount, 25, 27–29, 246 Sermons for Feast of All Saints (Bernard of Clairvaux), 25, 27–28 Sévigné, Madame de, 103 sexuality, history of, 3 sexual organs, 158 shades, 241–42 Shakespeare, William, 166–67 Shepherd of Hermas, The, 38–39 shrine-Madonnas, 226–27 Siger of Lille, 50–51 Silk, Mark, 9 sin, 7; of Adam, 148; of anti-models, 26; of blasphemy, 244–45; as contagious, 9–10, 145–46, 148; fermentation metaphor, 154–56; leprosy as metaphor for, 146, 147, 153; of saints, 26, 29–30; will and, 146–47. See also gluttons

sister-book of Katharinenthal, 227–28, 231, 235 Smail, Daniel, 118 Smith, Adam, 102, 104, 106 snakes, symbolism of, 38, 43 Social Contract (Rousseau), 140 social creativity, 110–11 social historians, 162 social organization, cognitive basis for, 174–75 Soderini, Piero, 192–93 somatic turn, 182 Sommario (Summary) (Vettori), 196 Song of Songs commentaries: Bernard of Clairvaux, 134, 135, 151; flower and vegetation imagery, 183 sorcery. See ritual magic soul, 239–40; aerial body as link with, 241–42, 245–46, 249–50; body, relationship to, 249–50, 265; chest as locus of spiritual core, 228–30; of community, 129; complexity of, 168–69; fragmentation of, 168–69; link between interior and exterior worlds, 223, 226, 231, 233–34; physical pain experienced after death, 240–41 Southern, R. W., 2, 110 Sperber, Dan, 171–72, 176, 181 Spiegel, Gabrielle, 281 Spinoza, Baruch, 139–40 spirituality, textualized, 186 spiritual pregnancy, 227, 236 Springer, Jacob, 264 Stephen, King, 131 Stock, Brian, 6, 110 stones, symbolism of, 38–39 Strauss, Leo, 195 subaltern studies, 103–104 subjectivity, 4, 202 suffering, 7; community of living and dead and, 33–34; grieving, 34–35; infirmitas, 28; as source of joy, 248–49. See also pain Summa contra gentiles (Aquinas), 274 Summa theologiae (Aquinas), 138, 139 Summis desiderantes (Innocent VIII), 269 sun, as metaphor, 179–80 Supplement (Thomas of Cantimpré), 46–47 Supra montem (Nicholas IV), 70–71

index 391 Suso, Henry, 228, 229, 230, 234, 346n32 suspicion, hermeneutics of, 287 Sweetman, Robert, 48 Syrian Christians, 218–19 taedium, 174–75 Tafur, Pero, 161 talk, 118, 121–22 Taylor, Andrew, 186 Taylor, Claire, 92, 94 technology, 105, 109 text: body privileged over, 165–67; Christ’s body as, 188–89; indwelling personality of, 187–91; intersection with visual image, 186–88; lapidaries, 216–17; visualization and, 190–91 textual communities, 6, 110–11 textual scholarship, 166–67 Theobald of Canterbury, 132 Theodoric, 95 theologia civilis (civil theology), 130–31 Theophanu, 23 Thier, Ludger, 59, 60–61, 63, 66, 307n5 Thomas of Cantimpré, 6, 7, 45–55, 209; authorial self-inclusion, 52; avoids topic of female relationship with priests, 47, 49; Cistercian influence on, 50; erudition of, 50; gemstones, view of, 217–18; influence of James of Vitry on, 45–48; inner lives of holy women, focus on, 50–52; as intercessor, 53–54; James of Vitry, view of, 48, 55; as subprior of Louvain Dominicans, 52; Works: Bonum universale de apibus, 46; De natura rerum, 46; Life of Marie of Oignies, 216; On the Nature of Things, 216; Supplement, 46–47; vita of Christine the Astonishing, 45–48; vita of Lutgard, 48, 51–55; vita of Margaret of Ypres, 49–51 Thomas of Eccleston, 303n20 towns, 105–106 Tractatus theologico-politicus (Spinoza), 139–40 tragic mode, 281 Traité des reliques (Calvin), 158, 159, 163, 169, 337n1 Trajan, Emperor, 128 trauma hypothesis, 201–202; humanist techniques of reading and, 194–95;

responsibility of historians, 195–96; speaking wound, 199–200. See also De principatibus tree of life imagery, 183–84 Treffort, Cécile, 92, 94 Truce of God, 114 True Cross, relics of, 211, 212, 213, 214 Tusculan Disputations (Cicero), 199 Ubertino of Casale, 58 Udovitch, A. L., 125–26 University of Padua, 163 University of Wittenberg, 164 Varro, M. Terentius, 130–31 Vauchez, André, 77 Vavasour, Margaret, 182–83 Vesalius, Andreas, 9–10, 163–66 Vettori, Francesco, 193, 195, 196–97, 349nn. 12, 16 Virgil (Comedy), 244 visions, 18–19, 36–37; allegorized interpretations, 177–79; emotional nature of, 177–78; of Margaret of Cortona, 68, 72, 74–75; sun as metaphor in, 179–80; symbols in, 37–38, 43, 179–80 Visio Wettini (Hatto, abbot of Richenau), 39 Visitation, Luke’s account, 226 Visitation Group of Katharinenthal, 224, 225, 236; bodily integrity in, 235–36; link between interior and exterior worlds, 223, 226, 231, 233–34; physical resemblance between women, 235–36; placement of stones, 224–27. See also Katharinenthal, women of visual devotion, 210–13 visualization, 185–88, 346n26; text and, 190–91 visual practices, 223, 226; ocular role in, 233–34 Vita (Agius), 15–24 vita apostolica, 57, 92 Vita Mariae Oigniacensis (VMO) (James of Vitry), 45–46, 49; as challenge to heretics, 208, 216 Vitruvian tradition, 164 volition. See will voluntary societies, 109, 110, 114

392 index Waldensians, 145, 264 Wallace, David, 4 Wazo of Liège, 9, 91, 98–100 Whitehouse, Harvey, 174–75, 176, 181 will: leprosy metaphor and, 153–54; sin and, 146–47; tolerance of sinners in community, 155–57 William Iron-Arm, 85, 87 William of Auvergne, 272–73, 276 William of Conches, 135, 150–51 William of Newburgh, 146 William of Wykeham, 182 William Taillefer of Angoulême, 93 William Tow-Head, 85 William V of Aquitaine, 91, 92, 97–98 witchcraft beliefs, 11; collective allegiance to devil, 265–66; collective demon worship, 266–68; by common people,

268; components of stereotype, 266–67; demons as cause of dreams, 263; development of stereotype, 264–66, 272–74, 277; elite interest in ritual magic, 265–70; night-flight, 263, 265–66, 276 witch-hunts, 264, 266 Wolbero of Cologne, 151 Wolin, Sheldon, 195 womb, conflated with heart, 227–28, 236. See also Mary, womb of worship: civilizing mission of, 131–32; exterior distinguished from interior, 133–35. See also cultus exterior; cultus interior Ywain of Zoania, 47 Zakariyya ibn Ya’qu¯b, 123 zero-sum thinking, 102–104