Resonances: Historical Essays on Continuity and Change (RITUS ET ARTES) 2503534937, 9782503534930

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Resonances

RITUS ET ARTES Traditions and Transformations Series Board

Nils Holger Petersen Eyolf Østrem Mette B. Bruun Danish National Research Foundation: Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals University of Copenhagen Richard Utz Western Michigan University Gunilla Iversen Stockholm University Nicolas Bell British Library

Volume 5

Resonances Historical Essays on Continuity and Change Edited by

Nils Holger Petersen, Eyolf Østrem, and Andreas Bücker

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Resonances : historical essays on continuity and change. – (Ritus et artes ; v. 5) 1. Change. 2. Continuity. 3. Change – Religious aspects. 4. Ritual – History. 5. Christian art and symbolism – History. 6. Arts – History. I. Series II. Bucker, Andreas. III. Ostrem, Eyolf. IV. Petersen, Nils Holger. 306'.09-dc22 ISBN-13: 9782503534930

© 2011, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. d/2011/0095/25 isbn: 978-2-503-53493-0 Typeset with LATEX 2ε . Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper.

Contents List of Figures

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Introduction Nils Holger Petersen

Continuity Martyrdom in the West: Vengeance, Purge, Salvation, and History Philippe Buc

23

From ‘Theotokos’ to ‘Mater Dolorosa’: Continuity and Change in the Images of Mary Miri Rubin

59

Altering the Sacred Face Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen

81

Change Historical Discourse in Renaissance Italy Peter Burke

113

Reproducing the Mona Lisa in Nineteenth-Century France Stephen Bann

127

Kneeling before God — Kneeling before the Emperor: The Transformation of a Ritual during the Confessional Conflict in Germany Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger ‘Un autre Saint Bernard’: Representing Bernard of Clairvaux in the Age of Louis XIV Mette B. Bruun

149

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Permanence ‘Quod infixum manet’: Perseverance in Augustine and Heinrich von Kleist M. B. Pranger Blowing Bubbles in the Postmodern Era Rob C. Wegman

201 217

History and Humour: ‘Spartacus’ and the Existence of the Past Eyolf Østrem

233

Index

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List of Figures Figure 1, p. 78. Polyptyque: La Vierge et l’Enfant et des scènes de l’Enfance du Christ: Annonciation, Visitation, Naissance du Christ, Adoration des Rois mages, Présentation au Temple. Figure 2, p. 85. The Volto Santo in Lucca stripped of its ornaments. Figure 3, p. 89. Sant Kümernus. Woodcut by Hans Burgkmair, c. 1507. Figure 4, p. 90. An Ex Voto plaque dedicated to St Kümmernis, dated 1687. Figure 5, p. 91. St Julia on the cross. Etching from the third edition of Alban Butler’s The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints, published 1779–80. Figure 6, p. 97. Pygmalion caressing his creation and serenading his statue with music after it has come to life. French illuminations from the roman de la Rose, MS Douce 195, c. 1400. Figure 7, p. 98. Amplexus Christi. Woodcut, Jerg Haspel, late fourteenth century. Figure 8, p. 107. A single leaf woodcut, printed in Augsburg 1650. Figure 9, p. 108. St Helper or Kümmernis painted in the small village church of Farstorp in Scania, Sweden. Mural executed around 1500. Photo by the author. Figure 10, p. 134. Hyacinthe Aubry-Lecomte, Monna Lisa: Moglie di Francesco del Giocondo, after Leonardo da Vinci (1824). Figure 11, p. 135. Luigi Calamatta, La Joconde, after Leonardo da Vinci (1857). Figure 12, p. 250. Blemmy and panotto from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493).

Colour Plates Plate 1, p. 71. Egyptian representation of Mary as a mother feeding her son at the breast, in a manner reminiscent of statues of the goddess Isis. Plate 2, p. 72. Golden Madonna, Essen, c. 1000. Plate 3, p. 73. Madonna and Child. 1370s, Paolo di Giovanni Fei. Plate 4, p. 74. Pitié de Notre Seigneur, dit ‘la grande Piétà ronde’, Malouel Jean (attr.), after 1397.

Acknowledgements

T

he editors of this volume wish to express their gratitude to the Danish National Research Foundation who has sponsored the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals since 2002, and thus also the fourth international conference of the centre, during which ideas and presentations were given which have led to this publication, also by scholars not represented in this volume, including many prominent guests as well as members of the centre staff. We are indebted to Gunilla Iversen (Stockholm) who is not only an internationally renowned specialist in medieval liturgical poetry but also an accomplished artist. Gunilla Iversen most generously allowed us to use one of her paintings as a cover illustration! We thank the language consultants for this book, Fran Hopenwasser, Leif Stubbe Teglbjærg, and David Seton. We thank the anonymous peer reviewer of the book for constructive criticism as well as Nicolas Bell, who at a late stage in the preparation of the book has given many helpful comments to improve the text. Finally, but not least, our thanks go to Brepols Publishers and Dr Simon Forde for a fruitful collaboration concerning the book series Ritus et Artes, Traditions and Transformations.

Introduction Nils Holger Petersen

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his book offers a multidisciplinary collection of historiographical case studies which in various ways explore the question of the modes of interrelation between ‘change’ and ‘continuity’ in historical narratives in Western cultural history. It represents the results of a project instigated by the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation, at the Theological Faculty, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The overarching problematic concerning the relationship between large-scale historical narratives and points of transition and change in Western cultural history was addressed and discussed at the fourth international conference of the Centre, The Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals IV: Transformations of Discourse at the Centre in the summer of 2007 with leading international specialists in historical scholarship from various disciplines. In the present volume we present a number of studies which in spite of their different approaches, different materials, and different time periods are all ultimately concerned with one fundamental and recurring problem in relation to the interpretation of historical material: how to balance an emphasis on continuity, which is necessary to perceive the historical account as a narrative, with a focus on the changes which provide that account with impetus or drive. Whereas this problem theoretically belongs to the realm of the philosophy of history and historical narratives, which in recent times has been prominently — and differently — dealt I thank Eyolf Østrem and Andreas Bücker for important inputs and help in writing this introduction.

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with by Paul Ricœur, Hans Blumenberg, Hayden White, and Jan Assmann,1 among others, this volume, while drawing on this theoretical background, attempts to embody the theoretical consciousness through historical narratives ‘in practice’, discussing particular historical topics within the particular disciplines of history, literature, the visual arts, musicology, archaeology, philosophy, and theology. In order to mediate between notions of change, innovation, rupture, or discontinuity in historical events on the one hand and ideas of continuity, tradition, constancy, consistency, and identity on the other, such notions as ‘transformation’ and ‘re-contextualization’ have proved to be important in scholarship. During the aforementioned conference in the summer of 2007, the contributors to this book and other scholars discussed the historiographical problematic under the general notion of ‘transformation of discourse’. ‘Discourse’ was here understood in a broad sense: as a heterogeneous interpretative framework or context that provides the basic conditions for ascribing meaning to historical materials (including texts, practices, and other types of source ‘materials’). By speaking of ‘transformation of discourse’ the focus was also extended to webs of possible connections between these frameworks across subjects and epochs. Thus the overall intention of the present volume is captured in the use of the term ‘Resonances’ in the title: connotations of past meanings which resonate through time, in a new context, assuming new meanings without necessarily surrendering the old. In particular, each essay focuses on a particular topos or motif, which generally refers to clusters of historical material which have been recognized within a certain discourse as a coherent unit, for example the image of Mary in Miri Rubin’s contribution, or the perceptions of Mona Lisa in Stephen Bann’s. The essays analyse how the meaning of these motifs and topoi is constructed at a particular stage in their individual history. Further, and most importantly, questions of perceived transformations in the meanings of these topics across different discourses are explored. In this, the essays are concerned sometimes with synchronic transformations — i.e., interactions and exchanges between different institutions, genres, ideas, and symbolic systems within an approximately defined contemporaneity — and sometimes with diachronic transformations — i.e., long-term changes in practices and traditions from the early Middle Ages until the present. 1

Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, 3 vols (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984–88; orig. Temps et Récit, 1981–85); Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966); Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (München: C. H. Beck, 1992).

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This is the overarching framework within which the essays meet each other. Given the diversity of disciplines, no one single methodological approach has been chosen. Rather, a multiplicity of approaches within the set framework of the overall question is presented by the authors, correlating creatively with the multiplicity of the topics. Two of the studies deal with historical narratives concerning artistic resonances of medieval liturgical or ritual practices; here the medieval subject matter traditionally belongs to the realm of historians, theologians, or anthropologists, whereas the artistic resurfacings belong to the realm of the modern arts (Miri Rubin and Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen); altogether the book will shed light on this particular focus of the Ritus et Artes series by way of its theoretical perspectives. The result is a multifaceted book, providing thought-provoking historiographical practice in essays which all deal with the same fundamental historiographical problem. By way of introduction, I shall briefly discuss two particular examples of long-term historical narratives for which the notion of a transformation of discourse seems relevant. First I shall consider some of the important changes to which notions concerning the Eucharistic elements in the West were subject through theological debates and the introduction of new devotional practices, and how the question of whether to emphasize continuity or change in this historical narrative remains a matter of historiographical contention. Secondly I shall touch upon the possible historical narratives concerning the beginnings of the so-called liturgical drama as studied and discussed by scholars since the midnineteenth century. In both cases, the point is not to present a new historical narrative to correct traditional accounts, but rather to point to the difficulties of the narratives in question, and to argue how it is possible — responsibly — to emphasize continuity and/or change in varying degrees.

The Body of Christ: Continuity, Transformation, and Transubstantiation In the ninth century, as traditionally construed in church history, two Benedictine monks of the monastery of Corbie in Northern France expressed contrasting views on the nature of the Eucharistic elements, which through almost four hundred years of theological, philosophical, and institutional debates and struggles led to the famous codification in 1215 of the doctrine of the transubstantiation. It may seem strange — with the enormous output of theological treatises since early Christianity — that such a seemingly fundamental question for the Church had not been resolved long before. However, already the question about the nature of the Eucharistic elements may itself be an example of how discourses change over time. The need to understand concepts, notions, or the

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‘nature of things’ must be seen as inherent to transformations of philosophical and historical discourses which make it necessary to define or ‘understand’ the same concepts, notions, or items. For the same reason, the historical answers will not often be meaningful without a profound engagement with the questions demanding and ultimately producing the answers. Hans Blumenberg’s idea of ‘reoccupied positions’ in history takes up the problem that questions may have historical resonance after the traditional answers to them have long been abandoned.2 Tracing discourses in the West relating to the Eucharistic elements involves centuries of philosophico-theological discussions as well as a variety of cultural practices connected with changes in the perceptions of those elements over time, not only in the actual practices of Communion in the Latin medieval Church and in different Western Christian denominations after the reformations of the sixteenth century, but also in other devotional practices within the medieval and later Catholic church. These are comprised not only of the establishing of the Feast of Corpus Christi with its special liturgical and later dramatic features, but also from the sixteenth century of the so-called Devotion of the Forty Hours and the sacramental litanies which in modern times are perhaps best known through two large compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.3 The history of theories and practices connected to the Eucharist may be perceived as the cultural memory of the last supper of Jesus, using the notion of cultural memory as recently discussed by Jan and Aleida Assmann,4 a memory which to a high extent has been determined over time by the authority of eccle2

See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. by Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), translator’s introduction, p. xx. 3 Concerning the Feast of Corpus Christi and the development of its cultural practices in the late Middle Ages, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), where the conceptual discussions of the nature of the Eucharistic elements form the point of departure for an exploration of transformations of cultural practices over the next centuries. For the Devotion of the Forty Hours and its visual representations, see Joseph Imorde, Präsenz und Repräsentanz oder: Die Kunst Jesu Leib auszustellen (Emsdetten: Edition Imorde, 1997); for the musical practices connected with it, see Eyolf Østrem and Nils Holger Petersen, Medieval Ritual and Early Modern Music: The Devotional Practice of Lauda Singing in Late-Renaissance Italy, Ritus et Artes, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), esp. pp. 154–62. Concerning sacramental litanies, see Joachim Roth, Die mehrstimmigen lateinischen Litaneikompositionen des 16. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg: Bosse, 1959) and Karl August Rosenthal and Arthur Mendel, ‘Mozart’s Sacramental Litanies and Their Forerunners’, The Musical Quarterly, 27 (1941), 433–55. 4 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis; Jan Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis (München: C. H. Beck, 2000); Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (München: C. H. Beck, 1999).

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siastical institutions and preserved by cultural traditions established in times of ecclesiastical institutional power. As will be evident, this cultural memory was highly influenced by individual interpretations but also strongly modified by institutional appropriations. Beginning with the treatises of Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus (both treatises transmitted under the title of De corpore et sanguine Domini) and contributions by others of their contemporaries, huge amounts of intellectual energy was invested in interpreting and coming to terms with the difficulties of combining a traditional Augustinian understanding of sacraments as signs with the equally traditional understanding of the Eucharist as a ritual event in which Christ was efficaciously present. Important contributions to this discussion were the complex intellectual and ecclesiastical discussions around Berengar of Tours in the second half of the eleventh century, the theological deliberations by ‘systematic’ theologians of the twelfth century onward and even after the definitive codification of the by then long since generally held dogma of the transubstantiation at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. It is crucial to understand that in spite of the interpretative differences concerning the way in which Christ was present, none of the agents, including Berengar of Tours, in any way rejected the sacredness or efficacy of the ritual event. Nor, apparently, did they have any problem in using the very same ritual formulations in the Eucharistic liturgy, which at least in terms of the textual parts for the mass were very stable indeed during the whole period in question. The canon of the mass did not change substantially between c. 800 (and probably not even in a long period before then), considering the texts preserved in the Gregorian sacramentary sent to Charlemagne in the late eighth century, and the Missale Romanum of 1570 (the latter even basically remaining in force in the Catholic Church all the way up to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s).5 The problem was how to reconcile accepted (but not well-defined) beliefs in the reality of divine presence in the material Eucharistic elements with an intellectual understanding of the event character of the Eucharistic ritual.6 In Jan 5

Le Sacramentaire grégorien: Ses principales formes d’après les plus anciens manuscrits, ed. by Jean Deshusses, Spicilegium Friburgense, 16 (Fribourg: Éditions universitaires, 1971), pp. 86– 92 and Missale Romanum: Editio Princeps (1570): Facsimile with Introduction and Appendices, ed. by Manlio Sodi and Achille Maria Triacca (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1998), pp. 281–89. 6 The literature on the history of Eucharistic understanding is huge. I refer to the rich and complex systematically orientated but also historically concise treatise, Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, trans. from the 2nd edn (1949) by Gemma Simmonds with Richard Price and Christopher Stephens (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006; originally written 1938–39, first publ. 1944). Fur-

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Assmann’s terms it could be described as a historical ambivalence in the cultural memory of the Eucharist: whether to put priority on the ritual or the textual coherence.7 The concept of sacrament was understood as part of sign theory by Augustine as discussed for instance in his De doctrina Christiana and elucidated very clearly in an often quoted statement from his Epistle 98: Did Christ not only sacrifice himself once? And nevertheless he is sacrificed sacramentally not only at all Paschal holidays but every day for the people, so that a person who will have responded to a question that he [Christ] is being sacrificed does not lie? Indeed, if sacraments did not have some likeness to the things of which they are sacraments, they would not be sacraments altogether. Because of this likeness they mostly receive the names of those things. In the same way as the sacrament of the body of Christ in a certain way is the body of Christ, and the sacrament of the blood of Christ is the blood of Christ, thus the sacrament of the faith is the faith. Moreover, to believe is nothing else than to have faith.8

The concept, however, was gradually reconsidered. In Hugh of St Victor’s De sacramentis Christianae fidei (c. 1134) the title refers to the mysteries of the Christian faith, a usage, in other words, in accordance with the general — Augustinian — meaning of the word sacrament, as is obvious from the overall contents of the work. This broad meaning, however, became subject to an important and influential rethinking in the following passage concerned with the sacraments, in an understanding much closer to what soon after became a standard way of unther, I refer to Charles M. Radding and Francis Newton, Theology, Rhetoric, and Politics in the Eucharistic Controversy 1078–1079 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); as well as to the brief discussion in Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Biblical Reception, Representational Ritual, and the Question of “Liturgical Drama”’, in Sapientia et eloquentia, ed. by Gunilla Iversen and Nicolas Bell, Disputatio, 11 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), pp. 163–201. See also recent treatments in Elizabeth Saxon, The Eucharist in Romanesque France: Iconography and Theology (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006) and Pratiques de l’eucharistie dans les Églises d’Orient et d’Occident (Antiquité et Moyen Âge), ed. by Nicole Bériou and others, 2 vols (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2009), especially the contributions by Gilbert Dahan, Dominique Iogna-Prat, and Gunilla Iversen. 7 Cf. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 18. 8 Augustinus Hipponensis, Epistulae LVI–C, ed. by Klaus-D. Daur, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 31 a (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), ep. xcviii, 23: ‘Nonne semel immolatus est Christus in se ipso, et tamen in sacramento non solum per omnes paschae sollemnitates, sed omni die populis immolatur, nec utique mentitur qui interrogatus eum responderit immolari? Si enim sacramenta quandam similitudinem rerum earum quarum sacramenta sunt non haberent, omnino sacramenta non essent. Ex hac autem similitudine plerumque iam ipsarum rerum nomina accipiunt. Sicut ergo secundum quendam modum sacramentum corporis Christi corpus Christi est, sacramentum sanguinis Christi sanguis Christi est, ita sacramentum fidei fides est. Nihil est autem aliud credere quam fidem habere.’

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derstanding the notion, not least by way of the restriction of the concept to the seven sacraments of the late medieval and later Catholic Church, to be found shortly after Hugh, most importantly in Book iv of Peter Lombard’s Sententiae,9 but not yet part of Hugh’s understanding: The doctors have designated with a brief description what a sacrament is: ‘A sacrament is the sign of a sacred thing.’ [. . .] But since not every sign of a sacred thing can properly be called the sacrament of the same (because the letters of sacred expressions and statues or pictures are signs of sacred things, of which, however, they cannot reasonably be called the sacraments), on this account the description mentioned above should be referred, it seems, to the interpretation or expression of the word rather than to a definition. Now if anyone wishes to define more fully and more perfectly what a sacrament is, he can say: ‘A sacrament is a corporeal or material element set before the senses outwardly, representing by similitude and signifying by institution and containing by sanctification some invisible and spiritual grace.’ This definition is recognized as so fitting and perfect that it is found to befit every sacrament and a sacrament alone.10

The point of Hugo’s revision of the concept of sacrament does not seem to be to keep the concept tied strictly to a specific selection of authorized sacraments, but rather to embed sacraments institutionally, so that they are offered and controlled by the institutional Church, as part of the means of grace of the Church, by way of (mainly) biblical institution and institutional consecration, understood as effectuation. As has been pointed out by Radding and Newton concerning the changes in attitude to the Eucharist, a marked turn towards ecclesiastical control seems to have been at work especially from the eleventh century onwards, as can be 9

See Petri Lombardi Libri IV sententiarum, ed. by the Collegium S. Bonaventura, 2 vols (Florence: Ad Claras Aquas, 1916), ii, pp. 747–48 (Book iv, distinctio 1, cap. 5). See also Philipp W. Rosemann, Peter Lombard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 145–46. 10 Hugo de S. Victore, De Sacramentis Christiane fidei, i. 9. 2, Patrologia Latina, ed. by J.-P. Migne, 176, cols 317–18: ‘Quid sit sacramentum, doctores brevi descriptione designaverunt: “Sacramentum est sacrae rei signum.” [. . .] Sed, quia non omne signum rei sacrae sacramentum ejusdem convenienter dici potest (quoniam et litterae sacrorum sensuum et formae sive picturae sacrarum rerum signa sunt, quarum tamen sacramenta rationabiliter dici non possunt) idcirco supra memorata descriptio ad interpretationem sive expressionem vocis magis quam ad diffinitionem referenda videtur. Si quis autem plenius et perfectius quid sit sacramentum diffinire voluerit, diffinire potest quod “sacramentum est corporale vel materiate elementum foris sensibiliter propositum ex similitudine repraesentans, et ex institutione significans, et ex sanctificatione continens aliquam invisibilem et spiritalem gratiam.” Haec diffinitio ita propria ac perfecta agnoscitur, ut omni sacramento solique convenire inveniatur.’ English translation slightly modified from Hugh of St Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith (De sacramentis), trans. by Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1951), pp. 154–55.

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perceived in the Berengarian controversy. Before this began in the mid-eleventh century, the Eucharistic discussions seem to have been primarily a matter for theological debate, scholars trying to come to terms with a tradition which seemed difficult to reconcile with logical thinking. The numerous councils to which Berengar was summoned and the final process in Rome (1078–79) — apparently asked for by Berengar in order to vindicate himself — which finally ended the matter at least at an official level, show how the questions had become a matter of ecclesiastical ruling, no longer primarily of intellectual debate. The interest in Hugh’s De sacramentis for the proper institution of a sacrament and concerning the sacrament as a part of a salvation economy, and inserted precisely at the point in his overall account of the Christian religion where the means for salvation become logically necessary, shows how ecclesiastical control was an important theological point for him as for many others, although he maintained that God can save without the use of the sacraments.11 However, man can feel safe only through the Church’s use of the sacraments. The use of sacraments as means of salvation is stressed from then on, also by Peter Lombard, in many ways the most influential theologian of the Middle Ages. The Church took control over the notion of sacred presence. The statement of the constitutions of the Fourth Lateran Council is telling: There is indeed one universal church of the faithful, outside of which nobody at all is saved, in which Jesus Christ is both priest and sacrifice. His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood, so that in order to achieve this mystery of unity we receive from God what he received from us. Nobody can effect this sacrament except a priest who has been properly ordained according to the church’s keys, which Jesus Christ himself gave to the apostles and their successors.12

Especially the last sentence of the quotation speaks of the interest of the papacy and the Church to further the authority and power of priests. One consequence of this was that each church now possessed the ultimate relic, the body and 11

Hugo of S. Victor, De Sacramentis, col. 324. The constitutions of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215. Text and translation: Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), i, p. 230: ‘Una vero est fidelium universalis eclesia, extra quam nullus omnino salvatur, in qua idem ipse sacerdos et sacrificium Iesus Christus, cuius corpus et sanguis in sacramento altaris sub speciebus panis et vini veraciter continentur, transsubstantiatis pane in corpus et vino in sanguninem potestate divinam, ut ad perficiendum mysterium unitatis accipiamus ipsi de suo, quod accepit ipse de nostro. Et hoc utique sacramentum nemo potest conficere, nisi sacerdos, qui fuerit rite ordinatus secundum claves ecclesiae, quas ipse concessit apostolis et eorum successoribus Iesus Christus.’ 12

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blood of Christ. Cultural corollaries were the feast of Corpus Christi with public displays of the host, and new processional and dramatic representations of sacredness and popular cultic practices, as Miri Rubin and others have described. In the context of Reform Catholicism and the reformations of the sixteenth century, a new devotional ceremony appeared (beginning in Milan in 1527), the Devotion of the Forty Hours, the so-called Quarant’ore. Here, the Eucharist was publicly displayed for forty hours, while processions were held, appropriate prayers said, devotions of various kinds carried out at an altar, a representation of a sepulchre (which especially in the seventeenth century often was lavishly decorated), at which the host was exposed and guarded. In some respects, the practice resembles the medieval ceremonies of representing the burial of Christ, the so-called depositio hostiae or depositio crucis, although its theological contents are fundamentally different. The devotion commemorates the Eucharist rather than the Passion and death of Christ. No transformation of the Eucharistic elements takes place, yet the devotion presupposes transubstantiation: what is exposed has already been consecrated. The Forty Hours Devotion very soon became widespread and received Papal approval in 1539; in the early 1550s it was introduced in Rome by St Philip Neri, the founder of the Congregazione dell’Oratorio, and the Jesuits. In 1592 Pope Clement VIII made a formal declaration to organize such a practice for Roman churches as a prayer for peace and for the upholding of the Catholic Church against heresy and the Turks, instituting the Forty Hours Devotion to be carried out so that the churches of Rome would continuously take over from each other: at any time the devotion would be held in some Roman church. A similar practice had been carried out in Milan in 1537.13 Joseph Imorde has discussed the Forty Hours Devotion in the context of the Catholic reform movement of the sixteenth century. He emphasizes the counter-reformation context with its struggle against what was perceived as protestant heresies, and not least its polemic both against reformed theologies of the Eucharist which reject a straight-forward notion of real presence, and against Luther’s rejection of Eucharistic devotion outside of the actual celebration of the Eucharist in mass, in spite of his adherence to a doctrine of real presence. What may have started as a non-polemical pious devotion, in the eyes of Imorde became a valuable tool for a practical devotional strengthening of the doctrines expressed at the Council of Trent (directed against the Protestant reformers) which emphasized that the Eucharistic elements were indeed to be honoured also outside of mass. Briefly summarized: that the transubstantiation 13

Østrem and Petersen, Medieval Ritual and Early Modern Music, pp. 154–58. See also Imorde, Präsenz und Repräsentanz.

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effected at the consecration of the elements during the mass canon did indeed transform the elements in such a way that they could be exposed for public veneration.14 The Catholic theology of the Eucharist should, of course, not only be seen as polemic directed against the Protestants. It can be seen as a completely logical development from the ecclesiastical discourse that had won the day in the Eucharistic debate of the eleventh century. Eucharistic litanies preserved from the same time when the Forty Hours Devotion was strongly promoted by Pope Clement VIII (in his 1592 constitution as mentioned above) may contribute to the understanding of this development. Polyphonic settings of litanies are known from the sixteenth century in numerous forms, including Marian litanies, All Saints litanies, litanies to the name of Jesus, and of particular interest in this context, litanies of the venerable sacrament, litaniae de venerabili altaris sacramento, sometimes also under such names as litaniae corporis Christi or litaniae sanctissimae eucharistiae, or as Palestrina called his two preserved works in this genre, litaniae sacrosanctae eucharistiae. Very little has been written about these pieces. The main contribution seems to be the German musicologist Joachim Roth’s doctoral dissertation from 1959 which discusses polyphonic litanies (of all kinds) from the sixteenth century, and presents a survey of preserved items.15 Only the eighteenth-century Salzburg tradition has been given special attention, mainly as a context for the discussion of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s two settings from the 1770s for the Cathedral of Salzburg where the Forty Hours Devotion took place every year beginning on Palm Sunday and included such a Eucharistic litany towards the end of each day.16 Even in Mozart’s case, much remains obscure about the liturgical context of the litanies. For the sixteenth century, Joachim Roth only speculates about the origin of the text which, on his account, must be reconstructed by putting together the somewhat different textual elements from the preserved compositions. One main reason for the 14

Imorde, Präsenz und Repräsentanz, esp. pp. 11–43. Roth, Die mehrstimmigen lateinischen Litaneikompositionen. 16 See Manfred Hermann Schmid, Mozart in Salzburg: Ein Ort für sein Talent, unter Mitarbeit von Petrus Eder OSB (Salzburg: Pustet, 2006), pp. 73–76. See also Karl August Rosenthal and Arthur Mendel, ‘Mozart’s Sacramental Litanies and Their Forerunners’, The Musical Quarterly, 27 (1941), 433–55. See also the introductions and scores to W. A. Mozart’s and Leopold Mozart’s sacramental litanies in the Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1955– ), Serie I, Werkgruppe 2. 1: Litaneien, ed. by Hellmut Federhofer and Renate Federhofer-Königs (1969); and Leopold Mozart, Sakramentslitanei in D, ed. by Walter Senn in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, Serie X, Supplement, Werkgruppe 28. 3–5, vol. 1 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1973). 15

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obscurity seems to be that the Eucharistic litanies never obtained an official liturgical position in the Catholic Church. Apparently, they were only used on local authorization and — probably for that reason — in many different textual versions which overlap but rarely coincide completely. The large-scale sacramental litanies composed by Wolfgang’s father, Leopold Mozart, his colleague, Johann Michael Haydn, and Wolfgang himself all seem to employ the same text.17 Nothing, however, substantiates the idea of an original text from which composers chose — or were commissioned — to set parts of the text. It seems more likely that the litanies developed by transmission and appropriation. Apparently, over time many variants and more or less similar texts occurred. In any case, it is intriguing to speculate about their place in the devotional activities of the Catholic Church. Litanies seem to have belonged to the Forty Hours, as for instance specified in Archbishop Carlo Borromeo’s decree of 1577 for the Quarant’ore in Milan.18 The two preserved settings of sacramental litanies by Palestrina, the most famous sixteenth-century composer to have set such litanies, have the same beginnings but are otherwise completely disjoint. (Both texts, however, are part of the textual tradition in late-eighteenth-century Salzburg.) Both texts clearly emphasize notions of contemporary Catholic Eucharistic theology with remarkably blatant expressions of the points which were most confrontational to Protestant Eucharistic thought, containing formulations which not only strongly underline the real presence, but the divine vivacity of the consecrated host itself. This is, of course, already underlined in the form of the litany where prayers are addressed directly to the host. To note but two examples: in Palestrina’s Litany 9 the host is at one point addressed in the following way: ‘O bread of life, who has come down from heaven, have mercy upon us’ (cf. John 6. 51).19 Another formulation, now from Litany 8: Means to immortality, have mercy upon us. Terrifying and life-giving sacrament, have mercy upon us. Bread made flesh through the omnipotence of the Word, have mercy upon us.20

It seems to be a reasonable hypothesis that the Sitz-im-Leben of the Eucharistic litanies would have been the Forty Hours Devotion, which, of course, does 17

I have consulted two large-scale sacramental litanies by Johann Michael Haydn at the St Peter Musikarchiv in Salzburg in February 2010. 18 See quotation in Østrem and Petersen, Medieval Ritual and Early Modern Music, p. 155. 19 Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Le Opere complete (Roma: Edizione Scalera, 1955), xx, pp. 154–60 (p. 156): ‘Panis vivus, qui de coelo descendisti, miserere nobis.’ 20 Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Le Opere complete, xx, pp. 144–53 (pp. 151–53): ‘Pharmacum mortalitatis, miserere nobis. Tremendum ac vivificum sacramentum, miserere nobis. Panis omnipotentia verbi caro factus, miserere nobis.’

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not rule out that they can have been used in many other contexts as well. Very different, but unsurprisingly so, from the later eighteenth-century Salzburg tradition and especially W. A. Mozart’s settings, Palestrina’s settings do not seem to respond to the textual content, but mainly to the structure of the litany with its constantly repeated formulas miserere nobis etc. Conversely, the afore-mentioned large-scale sacramental litanies by Leopold Mozart, Michael Haydn, and W. A. Mozart structure the text in accordance with the contemporary church style in larger groupings of movements and emphasize the emotional content of the individual parts of the text. Notably, for instance, W. A. Mozart’s later setting in E flat major, K. 243 (1776), adds an emotional intensity of awe to the movement containing the expression Tremendum ac vivificum sacramentum.21 The changes of discourse could hardly be greater than the described transformations as they occurred over the approximately 950 years from the Carolingian discussions of how to come to grips with the divinity and materiality of the host up to the rendering of the very same ideas in the sixteenth-century litany texts and further to the musical representation of the very same features in Mozart’s music of the 1770s. An ecclesiastical decree about the Forty Hours Devotion from the Salzburg court issued during Archbishop Colloredo’s time seems further to confirm the contemporary concern for a framework emphasizing the emotional impact of the holy ceremony: Where the Church publicly, with heart and mouth, confesses the continuous adoration of the sacrament of the altar through the presence of the Son of God under the visible forms of bread, where man publicly invokes his Creator as the giver of all good things, and brings Him thanks for the already received benefits, and publicly implores Him for a further favour of divine assistance, there it is of the highest necessity that the mark of majesty, shivering quietness, pious humbleness, uniform ordering, genuine devotion, true zeal must be the decisive seal of such a most holy ceremony.22 21

W. A. Mozart, Litaniae de venerabili altaris Sacramento KV 243. Score. Urtext der Neuen Mozart Ausgabe (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1969), pp. 54–67. See also Magda Marx-Weber, ‘Litaneien’, in Mozarts Kirchenmusik, Lieder und Chormusik: Das Handbuch, ed. by Thomas Hochradner and Günther Massenkeil (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2006), pp. 201–20 (esp. 212– 13). 22 Ordinariatsvorschrift welche in feyerlicher Begebung des 40. stündigen und zum Theil auch 7. stündigen Gebethes bey allen sowohl Säkular- als Regularkirchen des hohen Erzstiftes von nun an genau zu beobachten ist. Diözesanarchiv Salzburg, shelfmark 22/52. Print containing four pages; the text is given from the Princely Consistory of Salzburg 1 January 1784, ‘Gegeben Salzburg aus dem Hochfürstl. Consistorium den 1. Jenner 1784. Joseph Graf von Starhemberg, Präsident. Franz Xaver Hochbichler, Direktor. Anton Medard Krenner, Kanzler.’ (p. 4). The quotation is found on p. 1: ‘Da, wo die Kirche die ununterbrochene Anbethung des Altarssakrament durch die Gegenwart des Gottes Sohn unter den sichtbaren Brodesgestal-

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But, as much as there is change, there is continuity. The basic claims of the importance and efficacy of the Eucharist, of its intimate connection with the atonement through Christ’s crucifixion has been preserved all along the way. Even this, however, seemingly changed in nineteenth-century poetic appropriations of the Eucharist, notably with Richard Wagner’s use of texts appropriating medieval Eucharistic liturgy at the end of Act One for the ceremony of the Holy Grail in his opera or (as he himself called it) ‘Bühnenweihfestspiel’ Parsifal (1882). Although Nietzsche felt it to be a relapse into Christianity, it should probably rather be interpreted as an example of nineteenth-century Kunstreligion.23

The Scholarship of the So-Called Liturgical Drama During a troubled history of scholarship certain Latin dialogical texts connected to the devotions of the medieval Church have come to be subsumed under the heading liturgical drama. The ‘liturgical drama’ features enactments of mainly biblical key narratives, above all the Birth, Passion, and Resurrection narratives of Christ. The difficulties in delimiting the ritual or liturgical from the aesthetic aspects have been demonstrated clearly in the history of scholarship dealing with these texts, making them particularly relevant for questions concerning genre and transformations of discourse. The earliest enactments to have been included by scholars under the heading of liturgical drama are sung representations of the Resurrection narrative found in tenth-century liturgical books for ceremonies during Easter night and morning (various versions of the visitatio sepulchri).24 ten mit Herz und Mund öffentlich bekennet, wo der Mensch seinen Schöpfer als den Geber alles Guten öffentlich anrufet, ihm für die schon empfangene Wohlthaten öffentlichen Dank bringet, und um fernere Gedeihung des göttlichen Beystandes öffentlich flehet, da soll und muss auszeichnende Majestät, schaudernde Stille, fromme Eingezogenheit, gleichförmige Ordnung, unverfälschte Andacht, wahrer Eifer das entscheidende Siegel einer so heiligsten Handlung seyn.’ 23 See Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagners Musikdramen, 2nd rev. edn (Zürich: Füssli, 1985), pp. 141–54 (esp. 142). 24 For modern accounts of the history of the scholarship of the liturgical drama, see C. Clifford Flanigan, ‘Comparative Literature and the Study of Medieval Drama’ in Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 35 (1986), 56–104; and C. Clifford Flanigan, ‘Medieval Latin Music-Drama’, in The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama, ed. by Eckehard Simon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 21–41; Michal Kobialka, This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Liturgical Drama: New Approaches’, in Bilan et Perspectives des Études Médiévales (1993–1998), ed. by Jacqueline Hamesse (Turn-

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A historical narrative of ‘from liturgy to drama’, traditionally applied to the notion of liturgical drama or medieval religious drama since the late nineteenth century has been challenged during the last thirty to forty years.25 The term ‘liturgical drama’ was influentially proposed and defined by Edmond de Coussemaker and defined in his introduction to the first large-scale edition of such ‘liturgical dramas’.26 Coussemaker made it quite clear how what he called liturgical drama deviated from a modern concept of drama. Within half a century, however, liturgical drama had become part of a historiographical construction taking its point of departure in the disappearance of a theatre ‘at the break-up of the Roman world’, as presented by K. E. Chambers.27 Chambers found ‘dramatic tendencies’ in Christian worship, and for him the Quem quaeritis dialogue representing the encounter of the women at the empty tomb on Easter Day with the angelic message of Christ’s Resurrection became the occasion at which ‘liturgical drama was born’.28 Based on much more rigorous textual editions and studies, Karl Young, in his magisterial The Drama of the Medieval Church gave much the same overall narrative, although with much more regard for liturgy.29 This narrative was prevalent in the liturgical drama scholarship at least up to O. B. Hardison’s Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (1965). hout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 625–44; Nils Holger Petersen, ‘The Concept of Liturgical Drama: Coussemaker and Modern Scholarship’, in Ars musica septentrionalis, ed. by Frédéric Billiet and Barbara Haggh (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, forthcoming); Nils Holger Petersen, ‘The Concept of Liturgical Drama: Charles-Edmond de Coussemaker and Charles Magnin’ in Études Grégoriennes, 36 (2009), (= ‘Lingua mea calamus scribæ’: Mélanges offerts à madame Marie-Noël Colette, ed. by Daniel Saulnier, Katarina Livljanic and Christelle Cazaux-Kowalski), 305–14. 25 Since O. B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965) in numerous publications by C. Clifford Flanigan, Johann Drumbl, Michal Kobialka, and Nils Holger Petersen. See the publications listed in n. 24, as well as Petersen, ‘Biblical Reception’ (see n. 6 above). 26 Edmond de Coussemaker, ‘Introduction’, in Drames liturgiques du Moyen Âge (texte et musique), ed. by E. de Coussemaker (Rennes: Vatar, 1860); see also the review by Charles Magnin, ‘Drames liturgiques du moyen âge (texte et musique) par M. E. de Coussemaker’, Premier article in Journal des Savants, May 1860, 309–19 (esp. p. 312). Magnin was critical of Coussemaker’s definition of the concept. See Petersen, ‘The Concept of Liturgical Drama: . . . Magnin’. 27 K. E. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols bound as one (Mineola: Dover, 1996; reprinted from the original two volumes London, 1903), vol. ii, Book iii, p. 2. 28 See Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, vol. ii, Book iii, pp. 3, 6, 10, and 2. 29 Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols (London: Clarendon Press, 1933). See further Petersen, ‘The Concept of Liturgical Drama: . . . Modern Scholarship’; Petersen, ‘The Concept of Liturgical Drama: . . . Magnin’, and Petersen, ‘Biblical Reception’.

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Interestingly, one of the earliest scholars of medieval drama did not subscribe to such a historiography, even less than Coussemaker who, as mentioned, was himself rather cautious in describing a historical development. For Magnin, what was important was not the birth of modern drama, but rather what he posited as continuity within the history of dramaticity, if not of ‘drama’. The following quotation, published in his Les Origines du Théatre Moderne (1838), was part of his opening lecture for a course given at the Sorbonne in 1834–35 about drama from early Christianity to modernity: One believes too generally that the dramatic spirit was awakened in the thirteenth or fourteenth century after seven or eight hundred years of sleep, on a particular day, here sooner, there later. Every nation seeks childishly to attribute the priority of this pretended awakening to itself. Every historian makes efforts to find the time where this revolution in the human faculties took place. It is not a similar enterprise that I want to renew. Do not expect a plea from me in favour of this or that more or less dubious date. I do not believe in the awakening nor in the sleep of the human faculties; I believe in their continuity, in their transformations, and especially in their perfectibility and their progress. I hope to establish by incontestable proofs, that is by monuments and texts, that the dramatic faculty has never ceased to exist or to reproduce itself. No, gentlemen, during the long time span of social decomposition and re-composition which one must call the Middle Ages until one knows it well enough to find a less vague name, during that long period, the dramatic spirit never failed humanity: the only and great difficulty for scholarship is to know how to become aware of it under the new appearances in which it is couched and under the heavy layer of barbarism covering and disguising it.30 30

Charles Magnin, Les Origines du Théatre Moderne ou Histoire du Génie dramatique depuis le I er jusq’au XVI e siècle précédée d’une introduction contenant des études sur les origines du théatre antique, Tome premier (Leipzig: Chez Brockhaus et Avenarius, 1838), pp. iii–iv: ‘On crois trop généralement que le génie dramatique, après sept ou huit cents ans de sommeil, s’est réveillé au xiiie ou xive siècle, un certain jour, ici plus tôt, là plus tard. Chaque nation cherche puérilement à s’attribuer la priorité de ce prétendu réveil. Chaque historien s’épuise en efforts pour fixer l’heure où cette révolution dans les facultés humaines s’est opérée. Ce n’est pas une semblable enterprise que je vais renouveler. N’attendez pas de moi un plaidoyer en faveur de telle ou telle date plus ou moins douteuse. Je ne crois ni au réveil ni au sommeil des facultés humaines; je crois à leur continuité, à leurs transformations, surtout à leur perfectibilité et à leurs progrès. J’espère établir par des preuves irréfragables, c’est-à-dire par des monuments et par des textes, que la faculté dramatique n’a jamais cessé d’exister et de se produire. Non, Messieurs, pendant tout ce long intervalle de décomposition et de recomposition sociale, qu’il faut bien appeler le moyen âge, jusq’à ce qu’on le connaisse assez bien pour lui donner un nom moins vague, pendant tout ce long espace, le génie dramatique n’a pas manqué à l’humanité: la seule, la grande difficulté pour le critique est de savoir le discerner sous les nouvelles apparences qu’il revêt, et sous la couche épaisse de barbarie qui le recouvre et le déguise.’ See also the discussion in Petersen, ‘The Concept of Liturgical Drama: CharlesEdmond de Coussemaker and Charles Magnin’.

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What remains clear is that the radical differences in the various mentioned constructions of an outline of a history of drama or ‘liturgical drama’ do not primarily depend on what has been found in terms of ‘incontestable proofs’. Since the mid-nineteenth century many manuscripts and many previously unknown texts have been found, described and interpreted.31 But very rarely have new findings in themselves been the reason for changing the historical narratives in this area. Fundamentally, it has been the gaze of the scholar that determined the way in which materials were arranged to support a historical narrative. In other words, when asking for continuity or change, we are back at the questions posed at the outset of this introduction. Both are necessary ingredients in a historical narrative. In general, what will be emphasized is a matter of dialectic negotiation between the overall ideas of the historian and the potential resistance of the materials to these ideas. And above all, it is a question of which narrative the scholar wants to tell.32 The point of departure for a historical account may often be an idea of presenting a known or unknown historical narrative in a particular light, for instance to shed new light on what appears to be a well-known historical account. What I mean by the potential resistance of materials under investigation is that careful readings may work as a restraining influence on interpretation, keeping the ‘responsible historian’ from arranging his materials in unsupported ways, thus limiting the free inventiveness of the scholar, without preventing the testing of new ideas.33 Such a dialectic, sometimes even involving what might be called a negative counterpoint to creative historical ideas seems important, because it does not limit historical experimentation with new ideas, nor prevent new as well as old ideas from being put to the test. I also believe that an awareness of the potential of such dialectic emphasizes a useful sensitivity to overall historiographical construction as well as acute attention to historical detail: that neither can be dispensed with without serious consequences. Several narratives are usually possible with a given material, and what makes a narrative convincing may seem to be less a matter of solid criteria for the correctness of the presentation alone than a question of how the historian’s negotiations with the materials are presented and why he or she is interested in presenting a narrative based on them. Liturgical drama is an example of how both sides can easily be privileged, and — in some measure — an example of 31

The text editions in Lateinische Osterfeiern und Osterspiele, ed. by Walther Lipphardt, 9 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975–90) demonstrate this. Many texts have been found also since Lipphardt’s volumes were published. See Petersen, ‘Liturgical Drama: New Approaches’. 32 Cf. White, Tropics of Discourse. 33 For the notion of responsible writing of historiography, see Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997; repr. 2000).

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how several narratives may be necessary to supplement each other in order to come to terms with the materials studied. Whereas the historical narratives of Chambers and Young no longer appear convincing for texts of the tenth century because of the anachronisms of the drama concepts used by these authors, their narratives preserve one important feature of the materials which is lost if one focuses exclusively on the ‘ritual’ dimension of these early ceremonies: the unmistakeable continuity to which one can also point convincingly when looking at the texts of these dramas from the tenth century over for instance the English mystery cycles of the late Middle Ages and across the English Reformation to the early modern theatre.34

Individual Contributions The articles, which all in some way deal with questions of historical continuity and change, have been organized in three groups: Part One, Continuity, primarily discussing long-term historical continuities and changes (Buc, Rubin, Wangsgaard Jørgensen); Part Two, Change, which mainly focuses on specific moments of historical change (Burke, Stollberg-Rilinger, Bann, and Bruun); and Part Three, Permanence, where historical understanding itself — in very different ways — is problematized (Pranger, Wegman, and Østrem). Continuity Through three case studies, the hanging of the militant abolitionist John Brown (1859), the trial and execution of Nikolai Bukharin under Stalin (1938), and deaths on the first crusade (1096–1110) as understood in the Chronicle of Raymond d’Aguilers (ca. 1110), spanning a period of almost 850 years, Philippe Buc demonstrates the continuing vitality of a theology and ideology of martyrdom, thought to be able to move History forward and provoke God’s transformative violence, and sometimes correlated to the idea of purge — purge of the foreknown but also purgation of the elect. Miri Rubin, who recently published a History of the Virgin Mary, here focuses especially on three stages of the long and complex transformation pro34

Cf. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama, pp. 284–92. See also Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Representation in European Devotional Rituals: The Question of the Origin of Medieval Drama in Medieval Liturgy’, in The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama, ed. by Eric Csapo and Margaret C. Miller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007; paperback edn, 2009), pp. 329–60, esp. p. 331.

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cesses of the global image of the Virgin Mary during the Middle Ages. First she shows how this image was reconstructed within discourses of imperial authority and incarnational theology, as Mary became Theotokos within a Greek intellectual milieu coexisting with Egyptian, Jewish, and Syriac local cultures. Mary was also radically re-contextualized around the first millennium when hegemonic monastic cultures transformed the content of Mary and the modes of expression — liturgical, poetical, homiletic, visual — appropriate for her. The vernacular turn of the thirteenth century worked yet another transformation, and produced a Mary of home and hearth as well as a Holy Family. Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen discusses the relic of the so-called Volto santo (The sacred face) placed in San Martino in Lucca. According to legend, the biblical Nicodemus had received instructions to carve the sculpture. Sculptures carved to imitate the sacred relic gradually spread into churches in Southern Europe, reaching Great Britain and Northern Europe in the late Middle Ages. The original meaning of the motif, however, underwent a rather spectacular change. The essay takes up the question of what was needed to identify a figure and how the historical changes of meaning to which a particular representation has been subjected may be understood. Change Peter Burke is concerned with the writing of history in Renaissance Italy and in particular the representation in texts rendering the spoken word, especially formal speeches (orazioni or discorsi), which may be regarded as a kind of ‘ritual (or ritualized) language’. The contribution emphasizes two moments of change or ‘rupture’, c. 1400 and c. 1600. At the first moment, formal speeches were introduced into written histories, while at the second they were generally abandoned. Peter Burke encourages a kind of dialogue between Renaissance texts and twentieth-century literary theories, in particular those of Bakhtin, Barthes, and Foucault. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger discusses to what extent a central confessional conflict, the War of Schmalkalden in 1546/47, gave rise to intensified mistrust of long-held rituals, focusing on a crucial moment in German Reformation history. Could external conformity in religious practice be reconciled with inner adherence to one’s own true religious convictions? How far was confessional dissimulatio allowed to go as part of inner reservatio mentalis? Stephen Bann discusses the dramatic rise of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa from obscurity to iconic status through the long sequence of nineteenth-century prints after the original work, arguing that the various media involved — as lithography and photography — did not simply compete with one another in aiming at

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greater fidelity to the original. They were all involved in a complex process of aesthetic and cultural validation, which continued to operate even as Leonardo’s work was being transformed from a portrait painting into a myth. Mette B. Bruun tracks the representation of Bernard of Clairvaux in three texts: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s Panégyrique de Saint Bernard which was preached on the 500th anniversary of Bernard’s death (1653), the Cistercian reformer Armand-Jean de Rancé’s treatise on monastic life De la sainteté et des devoirs monastiques (1683), and Pierre le Nain’s hagiographical Vie de ArmandJean de Rancé (1715). The study addresses a diachronic aspect of the depiction of ‘Bernard 500 years after Bernard’. But it is above all concerned, synchronically, with the ways in which the Bernardine figure is modulated according to the genre, aim, and structure of each of the three texts. Permanence Burcht Pranger juxtaposes the Latin Church Father Augustine (354–430) and the German writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) in his article, studying how the theme of the transformation of discourse in the discourses of both these authors manifests itself through the ‘guise of immobility.’ In Pranger’s analysis, the emphasis on fixity and perseverance serves to highlight the unbreakable iron embrace in which ‘unrest and permanence hold each other.’ Rob C. Wegman takes up the problems and difficulties of writing long-term history, in particular music history. In historical musicology, as in other disciplines, there has been a tendency for scholars to operate within the relative security of short-term history (where it is easier to hide behind the facts), and to avoid more sweeping narratives on the apparent assumption that these are correspondingly more liable to interpretive error, prejudice, or distortion. The result is that outworn models and narratives, some of them dating back to the nineteenth century, continue to frame our historical understanding by default. Eyolf Østrem presents an outline of a model in which the historian’s task is seen as allowing the readers, through narratives, to extend their ‘Present’ — the totality of that which is present to the individual, as processed through language and the traces of previous nows in memory — by incorporating history in the form of ‘as if ’-memories. For this model, the feature film Spartacus (1960) functions as a heuristic tool, emphasizing the continuity between various historical narratives as that which makes historical writing meaningful and saves it from being ridiculous.

I Continuity

Martyrdom in the West: Vengeance, Purge, Salvation, and History Philippe Buc

Pour Claude Gauvard

T

he deep structures of Christian theology make agents operating within Western political cultures likely to link together ideas of external war, of purification of the self and of society (or the church), and of liberty. This linkage, or, more cautiously put, this likelihood of a correlation in certain epochs, is itself enabled by a certain notion of History in which vengeance and retribution play a pivotal role.1 It is as yet another element in this semi-system The wider research agenda of which this article is a part was generously funded by an ACLS grant. My thanks to the Danish Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals (Copenhagen), in particular to its director, Professor Nils Holger Petersen, and to Dr Mette Birkedal Bruun, who invited me to deliver the maiden version of this paper. Gratitude to Jochen Hellbeck, who allowed me to read after my Danish talk a then forthcoming article, now published as ‘With Hegel to Salvation: Bukharin’s Other Trial’, Representations, 107 (2009), 56–90. I want to thank as well my research assistants Kiersten Cray Jakobsen (Stanford) and Katharina Hausmann (Cologne), respectively for Bolshevik Russian and for exegesis of Hegel. And finally for gentle and caustic readings Keith Baker, Alain Boureau, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Claudia Brosseder, Luc Ferrier, Amir Weiner (who guided me into the world of Stalin), and Caroline Winterer. My work has also benefited from comments from audiences in Rotterdam, Paris, and Utrecht. 1 As argued in Philippe Buc, ‘Some Thoughts on the Theology of Violence, Medieval and Modern, from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution’, Rivista di storia del Cristianesimo, 5 (2008), 9–28.

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that these pages will consider martyrdom. Of course, like so many actions with a symbolic charge, martyrdom has a strong bend towards formal re-iteration. As such, it has sometimes been considered, heuristically, as a ‘ritual’ — as patterned symbolic action par excellence — or examined, more earnestly, through this conceptual lens.2 Its ‘ritual’ nature might explain indeed its long-lastingness as a form of religious and post-religious violence in European and American culture.3 Notwithstanding the seductiveness of the approach, the present article shall instead insist on the importance of theology and ideology — so of ‘emic’ or ‘native’ understandings of this practice.4 A few popular conceptions concerning martyrdom must first be evacuated. First, that it represents a polar opposite to persecution, and should be filed in the same drawer as pacifism or even tolerance.5 Second, that martyrs in the premodern era were uninterested in social or political change, that their ideals were at best reformist, never revolutionary, and that it was God, not Man, who would 2 An example for the former, Philippe Buc, ‘Martyre et ritualité dans l’Antiquité tardive: Horizons de l’écriture médiévale des rituels’, Annales, 48 (1997), 63–92, reworked in Buc, Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Chapter 4. An example for the latter: Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 3rd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 3 By ‘post-religious’ is meant not the absence of religion or religiosity but a zone in which, while religious institutions and beliefs no longer seem to organize culture, the inheritance of these institutions and beliefs still shape culture substantially. It is built on the analogous pair ‘post-modernity’ and ‘modernity’. 4 A forthcoming book-length essay, tentatively entitled ‘Genealogies of Religious Violence: Martyrdom, Holy War and Terror in the West, c. 70 c e–c. 2001 c e’, will explore in more detail the relationship between terror, holy war, and martyrdom in Christianity and postChristian cultures. 5 For the early martyrs doling spiritual death — the death that matters if one is a true Christian believer, and prioritizes the soul over the body — see Buc, Dangers, pp. 137–38. ‘Tolerance’, in contrast to its modern usage, is itself a notion that initially was not purely eirenic; see Klaus Schreiner, ‘Toleranz’, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. by Otto Brunner and others, 8 vols (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1972–97), vi (1990), pp. 445–605. There is evidently an eirenic component to martyrdom, just as there is always an ideal of ‘peace’ in Christian ‘war’, a component which had the potential to manifest itself as a pure strand without its eiristic counterpart — see, e.g., the pacifist wing of Hussitism represented by Petr Chelˇcický († 1460), and its Anabaptist equivalent, on which James M. Stayer, Anabaptists and the Sword, 2nd edn (Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1976). But to highlight the configurations it wants to highlight, this paper will leave them aside. My thanks to Alain Boureau for having forced me to this precision.

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effect transformations.6 Third, and relatedly, that like all premodern religious action, martyrdom was orientated to the past, not to the future. Such commonplaces become problematic once one takes into account a Christian view of History orientated by, and towards, retribution (a view that persisted in the political religion of Marxism, which we shall approach here with reference to the trial of Nikolai Bukharin). History was shaped by God’s vengeance, including vengeance for the blood shed by His very own — the martyrs. Admittedly, on a first level, the harsh vindictive dispensation of the Old Testament and its Law had been replaced through Christ’s priestly sacrifice on the Cross by an age of mercy. On a second level, though, humankind had been propelled by vengeance into this New Testament age, and this age would end in the vengeful retribution announced by John’s Revelation. For, first, Christ’s martyrdom was an act of injustice that called for justice — iustitia, vindicta or (more often in the lexicon of Roman judicial processes) vindicatio. The Cross and the first apostles’ persecution brought about the so-called ‘vengeance of the Lord’, which annihilated Jerusalem’s temple, and with it the Jewish priesthood and kingship. As in Roman conceptions, for which the development of institutions was sometimes the product of vindicationes, retributions for judi6 See Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), pp. 43–45, 52–54, 68, 78–79, 82, for a critique of the commonplace contrast between premodern men and women, who waited for God to act, and their modern counterparts. In his terms, the opposition between ‘God is the subject of History’ (Christianity) and ‘Man is the subject of History’ (Marxism) is vastly overdrawn. If God acts through man, and especially if he wants to give man a salvific chance to act in his stead, is man also not an actor? See the anonymous 1099 sermon bookending a version of Raymond d’Aguilers description of the conquest of Jerusalem, Paris BNF Latin 5132, fol. 20v : ‘I speak to you o knights, nay, flower of the military, who avenged your king, Who suffered for you and was humbled for your exaltation, to the point that even though He could have manifested to avenge Himself more than twelve legions of angels, decided to accomplish through you what he refused to accomplish through them. Rejoice and render thanks’ (‘Vos inquam milites . ymo militum flores . qui uindicastis regem uestrorum pro uobis passum . et pro uestra exaltatione humiliatum . eo usque ut cum posset exibere ad se ulciscendum plusquam duodecim legionem angelorum . per uos impleuerit . quod per eas noluit . gaudete et gratias agite’), nicely edited by John France, ‘The Text of the Account of the Capture of Jerusalem in the Ripoll Manuscript, Bibliothèque Nationale (Latin) 5132’, English Historical Review, 103 (1988), 640–57 (p. 653) (I owe the reference to this manuscript to Jay Rubenstein). The same notion, that man can actively fight for God, is present in the edited branch of Raymond d’Aguilers’s Liber, ed. by John Hugh Hill and Laurita L. Hill, in Le Liber de Raymond d’Aguilers, Documents relatifs à l’histoire des croisades, 9 (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1969): ‘We wanted Him [God] to be our defender in our cause and us to be His helpers in His cause’ (‘in nostra parte defensorem et in sua adiutorem illi esse voluimus’), p. 157.

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cial abuses,7 in this first layer of Christian theology, martyrdom moved History forward, through retribution. And, second, prophesized by countless Old Testament vaticinations, rich in portrayals of violently purged cities and massacres, the battles at the End of times reintroduced warfare and vengeance in the merciful Christian era, especially when groups of believers convinced themselves that the very last struggle was at hand.8 Martyrs joined their brethren to cry out to God: ‘How long, o Lord, shall You not judge and revenge our blood on those men who dwell on the earth’ (Revelation 6. 10)? This clamour was an interrogation about time and the course of History. For the holy dead would have to wait until their number was full, when all those foreordained to be killed would have joined their ranks. Then the End would begin. The following pages thus aim, first, at considering the permanence of this theology of retribution, well into the American nineteenth century and beyond. It is certainly not an agenda historical agents would always have been in sympathy with. Would a radical Protestant have been comfortable with an insistence on his or her cultural debt to the Catholic Middle Ages? How far would even a sophisticated Bolshevik intellectual have agreed that religious forms still moulded her or his being? The issue may also seem puzzling to scholars devoted to the present and the near past. Indeed, in the scholarly dimension, it is very much a medievalist’s agenda. When considering the more recent Western cultures of violence, the historian of the European Middle Ages can still recognize within them vast ideological slabs that have travelled towards us from his or her period of professional expertise. Hence the choice to order this exposé with a beginning in modernity and an end in the Middle Ages. A second agenda is to highlight the notion, embedded in this theology of retribution, that martyrdom moves History forwards.9 A third is to explore the relationship between 7

Cf. Marie-Theres Fögen, Römische Rechtsgeschichten: Über Ursprung und Evolution eines sozialen Systems, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, 172 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2002), pp. 21–22. Most famous is the case of Verginia. Her father was forced to kill her to preserve her chastity, vowing with her blood the wicked magistrate to the infernal gods. Verginia’s sacrifice led to the second plebeian secession and the legislation of constitutional powers for the plebs (Livy, Ab urbe condita, iii. 44–55). 8 For this argument, see Philippe Buc, ‘La vengeance de Dieu: De l’exégèse patristique à la Réforme ecclésiastique et à la première croisade’, in La Vengeance, 400–1200, ed. by Dominique Barthélemy and others, Collection de l’École française de Rome, 357 (Rome: École française de Rome, 2006), pp. 451–86 (pp. 453–55). See the useful discussion in G[uy] G[edaliahu] Stroumsa, ‘Early Christianity as Radical Religion: Context and Implications’, Israel Oriental Studies, 14 (1994), 173–93. I owe this reference to Brett Whalen. 9 See Wilhelm Kamlah, Christentum und Geschichtlichkeit: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des Christentums und zu Augustins ‘Bürgerschaft Gottes’, 2nd rev. edn (Stuttgart: Kohlham-

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martyrdom and purge — purge of the wicked by the elect but also purgation of the elect themselves (either definitive, through elimination, when black sheep are hidden among the seemingly uniformingly clean vanguard, or purgative of lingering sins within those predestined crusaders). Selected with a view to bridging medieval and modern and to problematizing the nature of the caesura when it comes to violence,10 three dossiers form the main documentary basis for this reflection: that of John Brown, hanged in 1859; that of Nikolai Bukharin, shot in 1938 as the leading victim in the so-called ‘Moscow show trials’; and a set of figures in a chronicle of the First Crusade (1095–1100), the Liber composed by Raymond d’Aguilers. One could multiply the case-studies. They would, of course, open up other dimensions in the relation between martyrdom and a sacralized history driven by violence. They would not, however, it should be hoped, invalidate the insights produced by this tripolar comparison.

John Brown On 16 October 1859, a small band of men, nineteen strong, led by a selfproclaimed Captain, John Brown, sneaked into Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the meeting place of two rivers and the site of an armoury and an arsenal. Brown quickly secured the two buildings. His aim was to begin a large-scale slave rebellion,11 and arm the blacks with Harpers Ferry’s military supplies as well as with weapons three other men were guarding a little distance from the town. Yet not only did the slaves not rise up and join him, but Brown soon found himself besieged by federal troops. In the final assault that led to his capture, he was severely wounded. Two of his sons lay dead next to him, along with eight other raiders. He and four other captured men were quickly tried by the State of Virginia. On 2 December, Brown hung from the gallows. Between his capture, 18 October 1859, and his execution, the raid at Harpers Ferry inflamed public opinmer, 1951), e.g., p. 76 on the ‘eschatologically necessary’ role of persecution: without it ‘the community of the saints cannot quite be thought of.’ 10 Important reflections on this divide in terms of martyrdom and violence are Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Einleitung’, in Der politische Totenkult: Kriegerdenkmäler in der Moderne, ed. by Koselleck and Michael Jeismann (Munich: Fink, 1994), pp. 9–20, and Arthur P. Mendel, Vision and Violence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). 11 Although he denied this at his trial. See the journalistic report in John Brown, ed. by Richard Warch and Jonathan F. Fanton (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1973), p. 75; from The Life, Trial and Execution of Captain John Brown (New York: R. M. de Witt, 1859; repr. Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969), p. 48.

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ion.12 Historians, including those in the majority who consider John Brown to be unrepresentative of abolitionism, agree that the raid and Brown’s hanging further polarized the North and the South, so contributing to the American Civil War.13 In a sense, Brown’s own belief that martyrdom moved History forwards was not erroneous. His abolitionist audience understood his death on the gallows as a call to action, and what often with them had been mere inflammatory words became much more ready to transform itself into fiery deeds. Belief in causation made for causation. John Brown’s last days, at least as he envisaged them, proceeded along a classic martyr narrative plotline. We have the confrontation with the magistrate, in clipped dialogic form. We have the friendly gaoler, who should be among the enemy but whose kindness betrays the truth of the martyr’s position and hints at his and others’ conversion. We have communications with the outside world, allowing the martyr to define his or her position, publicize it, and interpret his or her fate. We have, next to the martyr’s verbal engagement with the opponent, his or her refusal to compromise and a ringing denunciation of heresy. Historians have underscored the place of public opinion and interpretation in the making of a martyr.14 They are not wrong. Brown’s enemies and partisans vied with one another to locate him out of, or within martyrdom. Sympathizers coloured him in sometimes divergent hues, depending on how much they considered his violent action might impact the cause of abolitionism or the Republican party, so close to the 1860 presidential elections. There exists many an example of the total construction of a martyr, even to the point of inventing fully the person. This was more the rule than exception in the early Middle Ages, when religious institutions needed to put an identity and a story 12 For an attempt to read the Harpers Ferry raid as a ‘social drama’ à la Victor Turner, see Charles Joyner, ‘“Guilty of Holiest Crime”: The Passion of John Brown’, in His Soul goes Marching on: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, ed. by Paul Finkelman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), pp. 296–334. For the impact and afterlife of Brown’s execution, see Franny Nudelman, John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 13 For the place of religion in the Civil War and its coming, see most recently Harry Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006), and Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), with its discussion of historiography, notably pp. 9–14, 17–27. 14 See recently Nudelman, John Brown’s Body. For an earlier era, Philippe Buc, ‘Martyre et ritualité dans l’Antiquité Tardive: Horizons de l’écriture médiévale des rituels’, Annales, 48 (1997), 63–92 (or Buc, Dangers, Ch. 4).

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onto miracle-working human remains.15 Closer to us is the case of Horst Wessel (1900–30), the victim of a criminal revenge killing who was more at home in the demi-monde of pimps and prostitutes than under the rising Third Reich’s glorious sun, but transmogrified by Goebbels into the ultimate heroic Nazi German youth.16 We shall return to this construction by an ‘audience’ of Captain Brown’s last months at these points where, being consistent with Brown’s own ‘self-shaping’ as a martyr, it illuminates the theology that inspired him to action and that underlay his own pronouncements.17 Indeed, Captain Brown plotted actively his course towards martyrdom. Selfimmolation for the God-willed cause of freedom stood on a continuum with his earlier deeds and thoughts.18 Obviously, it is risky to mine Brown’s statements after his capture with a view to unearthing pre-existent motivations for the raid. But one cannot say that Brown decided on martyrdom only after having been captured — as an ex post evento rationalization of his forcible passive position as prisoner. In other words, Brown the ‘terrorist’ (if it may be allowed to call him so) is of one piece with Brown the martyr; his willingness to die consistent with his willingness to kill.19 The issue will be explored elsewhere, but the conviction that one is in the right against the legal order, to the point of seizing arms for redress, is at the heart of the Western right of and duty of resistance, 15

The classic study is František Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger: Studien zur Hagiographie der Merowingerreich (Prag: Nakladatelství ˇ Ceskoslovenské ákademie v˘ed, 1965). See as well the always stimulating, if functionalist, essay by Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981). 16 Eugene Weiner and Anita Weiner, The Martyr’s Conviction: A Sociological Analysis (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1990), pp. 94–125. 17 I use ‘self-shaping’ rhetorically, with full awareness of Brad Gregory’s rejection of the notion of ‘self-fashioning’ for an understanding of martyrdom (it is God and God-given exemplar that shape the martyr, not the martyr who makes himself or herself ). See Gregory, Martyrdom at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 132–33. In Gregory’s sense, Brown understood himself to be the object of God’s choices, not an autonomous, self-willed agent. 18 See in particular the 8 April 1858 letter to Sanborn, below n. 44; and Brown and others, ‘A declaration of liberty by the representatives of the slave population of the United States of America’ (1859; repr. in Warch and Fanton, John Brown, p. 48); from Richard J. Hinton, John Brown and His Men: With Some Account of the Roads They Traveled to Reach Harper’s Ferry (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1894), p. 643: ‘Indeed; I tremble for my Country, when I reflect; that God is Just; and that his Justice; will not sleep forever &c. &c. Nature is mo[u]rning for its murdered, and afflicted Children. Hung be the Heavens in Scarlet’. 19 As underlined for the sixteenth century’s confessional cultures (with the exception of most Anabaptists), by Gregory, Martyrdom at Stake.

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and has always put terrorists on a difficult continuum with the resistors whom this political tradition so much admires.20 Brown considered that the righteous minority that he represented could take up arms against any institution, including the State, which did not uphold justice. In fact, for his apologists, given the existence of the Supreme Judge, ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ were both relative and absolute concepts. To cite Wendell Phillips: ‘In God’s world there are no majorities, no minorities; one [man], on God’s side is a majority’. According to Brown’s friend, such was ‘the ground of morals’.21 Brown was a militant abolitionist, raised in a strict Congregationalist family in which the Puritan sense of sinfulness, election, and punitive justice was strong.22 In jail, Brown was uncompromising. He refused the spiritual succor of Southern clergymen. ‘My knees will not bend in prayer with them,’ he explained, ‘while their hands are stained with the blood of souls’.23 To him, they were not ministers of the Gospel, only fakes who either owned slaves or advocated slavery.24 Even words of Christian meekness were of one piece with vengeful brimstone. Brown pardoned the Virginians for hanging him, paraphrasing Christ at his Crucifixion (Luke 23. 34): ‘I forgive them, and may God forgive them, for 20 See John Dugard, ‘International Terrorism and the Just War’, in David C. Rapoport and Yonah Alexander, The Morality of Terrorism: Religious and Secular Justifications (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 77–98. 21 Wendell Phillips, ‘The Lesson of the Hour’, 1 November 1859, from James Redpath, Echoes of Harper’s Ferry (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), p. 51. See also the letter to Brown by N. S., dated New York, 25 November, in Echoes, p. 408: ‘Our good father is on your side, and this places you in the majority’. Compare the related French Revolutionary understanding of a ‘general will’ borne by a de facto minority. See Maximilien Robespierre, ‘Second discours sur le jugement de Louis Capet’ (28 December 1792), in Œuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, ed. by Marc Bouloiseau and others, 10 vols (Paris: Société des Études robespierristes, 1912–67), ix (1958), pp. 198–99 (my thanks for this reference to Keith Baker). 22 For my purposes, the best recent biography is Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., ‘Fire from the Midst of You’: A Religious Life of John Brown (New York: New York University Press, 2002). 23 John Brown, p. 96, to Reverend McFarland, 23 November 1859; from Frederick B. Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia, 2nd edn (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891), p. 598. 24 Brown did allow one exceptionally eager Southern Episcopalian priest to come to him, but with a caveat: ‘Let him come, and I will pray for him, but he cannot pray for me’. Cited by DeCaro, Religious Life, p. 274. These false brothers played in the economy of Brown’s death the same role as traditores, apostates and heretics in pre-Constantinian martyrdom narratives.

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they know not what they do’.25 But what kind of a forgiveness was this? Did Brown anticipate that God would forgive? Puritan mercy was ultimately grim. It called for one to love, and not hate sinners — not hate, that is, until the other world had come and the sinners roasted in Hell. Then, as St Jerome had taught, and as Jonathan Edwards reiterated in 1758, it would be fine to hate.26 At least in the passage here alluded to, Edwards rejected this worldly violent activism. But others could draw a different conclusion. When one felt either that the very End of times was at hand or that one lived an epoch that was a type of the End, one could lapse into the role of God’s executioners.27 ‘May God forgive them, for they know not what they do’: for medieval interpreters, the Jews do not know that they are slaying their own Messiah, and in so doing, condemn Jerusalem, along with the Jewish kingdom and priesthood, to annihilation at the hands of the Romans in ad 70. John Wesley, like his Catholic forebears, spoke of the ‘suspension of vengeance even for the impenitent’ lasting forty years be25 Brown to Reverend McFarland, 23 November 1859, in John Brown, p. 96; from Sanborn, John Brown, pp. 588–89. Another version in a note to Mary Brown: ‘And I can say the words of our blessed Saviour: “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do”’, cited by DeCaro, Religious Life, p. 277. 26 ‘Blank Bible’, fols 895 and 898, on Revelation 18. 20: ‘The saints in heaven may and will hate the damned; they may therefore delight in seeking just revenge for their injuries to them. Desire of revenge is a principle of human nature. Self-love necessarily implies such a principle. [. . .] The reason why we ought not to desire revenge on our fellow creatures here is because we ought not to hate them, but love them, not because there ought not to be such a principle in our nature as a desire of just revenge for injuries, but because in the circumstances we are under, and mankind is under here, love ought to prevail above it. But when these reasons of love cease, and our enemies become the proper objects of our hatred, then we may delight to see just revenge executed upon them. [. . .] But those grounds of love hereafter will cease’; texts (partially) cited and explained by Stephen J. Stein, ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Cultures of Biblical Violence’, in Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth, ed. by Harry S. Stout and others (Lanham: University Press of America, 2005), pp. 54–64, (p. 62), here amplified from Stein’s own edition, in the Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), xxiv:2, p. 1237. Relate this to the text n. 41. 27 Notwithstanding the author’s naive positive reading of the sources, the first scheme has been well known since at least Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957; rev. edn Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), e.g., p. 75. I discuss the second in ‘La vengeance de Dieu’, and more fully in ‘Some Thoughts on the Theology of Violence’, 15–19. Cf. the critique in Robert Lerner, ‘Medieval Millenarianism and Violence’, in Pace e guerra nell basso Medioevo (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2004), pp. 37–52.

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tween the crucifixion and the destruction of the Second Temple.28 The Geneva Study Bible, discussing the immediately following episode, Luke 23. 39 (the two robbers), which was traditionally linked to this prayer, commented that Christ expressed there ‘that He hath both the power of life to save the believers and [the power] of death to [take] revenge [on] the rebellious’.29 The prayer for forgiveness was a call for the crucifiers to choose the right camp, or be damned like the bad thief.30 As in medieval exegesis, in the Protestant tradition brought to New England, mercy did not mean the absence of retribution. Well into the nineteenth century, then, there survived the medieval notions that peace was not non-violence, and that figures who were defined — or who defined themselves — as figures of peace could approve and even foster the righteous use of weapons. We see this when we juxtapose with Brown’s own statements certain positive reactions to his raid. William Lloyd Garrison, the pacifist abolitionist, applauded Brown’s raids. Use of material arms for liberty represented a progression from use of arms for despotism to the ideal endpoint of pure pacifism. Here Garrison was in the ideological position of a medieval cleric, who, forbidden by his orders to bear arms, would still have exhorted a crusader to his killing labours.31 His understanding dovetailed with that of a Rhodes 28 John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, 3rd American edn, 2 vols (New York: Daniel Hitt and Thomas Ware, 1812), i, p. 211. 29 The New Testament of our Lord (London, 1607), fol. 42r(b) , facsimile in The Geneva Bible, ed. by Gerald T. Sheppard (New York: Pilgrim, 1989). Admittedly, given the nineteenthcentury Protestant primacy of ‘scripture sole’, Brown is less likely to have been influenced in his use of scripture by a biblical commentary than would have been a medieval cleric or even layman. See Nathan O. Hatch, ‘Sola scriptura and novus ordo sec[u]lorum’, in Hatch and Mark A. Noll, The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 59–78, esp. pp. 64–76. 30 For Matthew Henry, An Exposition of the Old and New Testaments, 3 vols (New York: H. C. Sleight, 1833), iii, p. 435b, Christ meant a conditional mercy: ‘“Father, forgive them, not only these but all who shall repent, and believe in the Gospels;” and He did not intend that these should be forgiven upon any other terms.’ Fully eirenic interpretations also circulated, see, e.g., the contemporary compilation by Reverend Thomas Scott, The comprehensive commentary on the Holy Bible; containing [. . .] Matthew Henry’s Commentary, condensed, but retaining the most useful thoughts; the practical observations of Rev. Thomas Scott, D. D. with extensive [. . .] notes selected from Scott, Doddridge, Gill, Adam Clarke, Patrick, Poole, Lowth, Burder, Harmer, Calmet, Stuart, Robinson, Bush, Rosenmueller, Bloomfield, and many other writers on the Scriptures [. . .] , 5 vols (Brattleboro, MA: Fessenden, 1838), iv, p. 587. 31 He was not the only one. Stewart, Holy Warriors, pp. 155–56, cites Stephen Symonds Foster: ‘Everyman should act on his own convictions, whether he believes in using moral or physical force’, his own usage of the former consisting in exhorting others to employ the latter.

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Island Quaker lady who exchanged two letters with the imprisoned Brown. While the Friends refused weapons, they could still see Brown as a ‘deliverer’, legitimated by God’s own destruction in the Red Sea of Pharaoh’s Egyptians as they pursued the runaway enslaved Hebrews. Brown answered in terms that his Quaker correspondent would probably have rejected, yet whose elements she would have understood: He reminded her that Christ himself had armed Peter. So had he, Brown, been providentially vested with a sword. But he went on to state that God had now taken this weapon from him, and that he was now wielding in each hand the ‘sword of the spirit’.32 Such a conception spanned the two roles, that of the holy warrior, girded with a material sword in God’s service, and that of the martyr with his spiritual sword who consecrated his mission by preaching on his way to the gallows. Said Brown in another letter: Christ, the great captain of liberty as well as of salvation [. . .] saw fit to take from me a sword of steel [. . .] but He has put another [sword] in my hand (‘the sword of the Spirit’), and I pray God to make me a faithful soldier, wherever He may send me, no less on the scaffold than when surrounded by my warmest sympathizers’.33

God had used him as his instrument on the battlefield, and now intended to use him in another way — as a witness to the truth of abolitionism, as a martyr.34 Next to sermons and speeches, Brown’s captivity generated an outpour of letters from sympathizers. A number of these correspondents volunteered their understanding of the impending hanging. One finds there a large spectrum of related conceptions of martyrdom, from the straightforward and unabashed call for immediate divine retribution on the sinful South to the hope that martyrdom would bloodlessly convert the South to slave liberation — but sometimes with the expressed fear that it would not happen in a peaceful way and that God’s rectifying violence lurked right around the corner.35 32

John Brown, p. 90 (1 November), from Sanborn, Life and Letters of John Brown, p. 582. The Quaker from Newport, RI, dated her letter 27 October 1859. 33 15 November 1859, to Rev. H. L. Vaill, in John Brown, p. 93, from Sanborn, Life and Letters of John Brown, p. 590. For the medieval pericope of the swords, see Gerard Caspary, Politics and Exegesis: Origen and the Two Swords (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 34 John Brown, pp. 97–98, to Reverend Dr Heman Humphrey, 25 November 1859, from Sanborn, Life and Letters of John Brown, p. 604. 35 E.g., Reverend E. H. Sears, in his Sermon at Concord, 2 December 1859, in Echoes, p. 438. The preacher wished for God’s anger not to express itself in war but in the bloodless conversion of the South: ‘Let the blood of all Thy martyrs for liberty [. . .] cry to Thee from the ground till the slave rises from his thralldom into the full glory of manhood. And when that day shall come, let it not be through the chaos of revolutions, nor by staining this fair

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These letters show how alive, even in the mid-nineteenth century, medieval conceptions were. And how these putatively archaic premodern oddities can shed light on the place of violence in American political culture. At least two letter writers sought from Brown a lock of his hair — a form of Protestant relic.36 Many asked him for the privilege of a written answer, only a few words even, which evidently would also serve as a memento.37 One writer, a self-styled Covenanter from New Alexandria, Pennsylvania, saw in the trial an occasion for the ‘guilty nation’ to repent. Brown’s profession of faith in abolition would, it was hoped, ‘purge’ the United States.38 For the letter’s author, the trial constituted also a ‘warfare’, sent by God. Moving to the register of spiritual battles materialized, he referred to the Old Testament exemplar of death-doling martyrdom, Samson: ‘What matter if it be from a scaffold, Samson-like you will slay more Philistines in your death, than you ever did or could by a long life; and I pray God that in your dying agony, you may have the gratification of feeling the pillars of Dagon’s Temple crumbling in your grasp’.39 In this reference to Judges 16. 28–31 (a model Brown also alluded to, earth with the blood of brothers, but let Thy spirit descend, and change the heart of the master, and melt off the fetters of the slave’. 36 Echoes, p. 397 (a friend in Syracuse, NY, 26 November). 37 Echoes, pp. 399–400 (from an Ohio Clergyman, B. K. M., Cincinnati, 26 November); pp. 408–09 (E. T., from New York, 26 November); p. 417 (from Lamont, Ottawa County, Michigan, 23 November); p. 423 (from Hudson, Ohio, 28 November). 38 23 November, 1859 letter ‘from a Scottish Covenanter’ (New Alexandria, PA, 23 November), in Echoes, p. 396: ‘You have been called before judges and governors, and “it has been given you what to say and how to speak”, and I pray that when you are called to witness a good confession before many witnesses, that there will be given you living words that will scathe and burn in the heart of this great and guilty nation, until their oppression of men and treason against God shall be clean purged out’. 39 Ibidem. A former Protestant missionary to Micronesia also referred to Dagon’s temple: ‘Should a lock of your hair fall into my lap before the execution shall help you shake the pillars of the idol’s temple, it would be valued’ (28 November, New Haven, CT), in Echoes, p. 405. Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament, 3 vols (Bristol: William Pine, 1765; reprint Salem, OH: Schmul), ii, p. 861: The Judge Samson ‘was by his office obliged to seek the destruction of these enemies and blasphemers of God, and oppressors of his people; which in these circumstances he could not effect without his own death’. He was ‘a type of Christ, Who by voluntarily undergoing death, destroyed the enemies of God, and of His people’. Cf. the very similar ideas in Matthew Henry, who seasons Old Testament vengeance with New Testament mercy while leaving the former valid, Exposition of the Old and New Testaments, i, p. 616b: ‘That it was not from a principle of passion or personal revenge, but from a holy zeal for the glory of God and Israel, that he desired to do this, appears from God’s accepting and answering the prayer. Samson died praying, so did our blessed Saviour; but Samson prayed for vengeance, Christ for forgiveness’. That Samson was also a type of

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both before and after Harpers Ferry),40 the letter’s author may have meant to stay within pure spiritual warfare, without suggesting material bloodshed. One cannot quite tell. But at the very least, the Covenanter expected that martyrdom would impulse an irresistible direction to History. Another well-wisher also developed notions of spiritual warfare in relation to the providential course of History. This self-described ‘Old School Presbyterian’ expressed his agreement with the Quakers’ belief that ‘Christ’s kingdom will be peace’. Going on, he contraposed to this peaceful future the bellicose nature of the present age: but now Christ told His disciples, ‘He that hath a sword, let him take it’. Therefore, I cannot say I think you exceeded your commission, and I rejoice that a man has been found worthy to suffer for Christ.

The Gospel pericope was followed by a reference to Revelation 6. 10. Martyred, Brown would be led straight to Christ, and ‘join the souls under the altar, crying, How long before your blood be avenged on the earth?’41 Brown agreed with his well-wishers. He too knew that in his martyrdom would inhere the vengeance characteristic of holy war. In a letter dated 8 November 1859, Brown informed his wife and children that he was ready to ‘seal my testimony for God and humanity with my blood’. He added that he was, ‘besides, quite cheerful, having (as I trust) “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding” [Philippians 4. 7] to rule in my heart’.42 Peace, but not the pacifist’s peace, one should underline. Commenting these Pauline words on peace, Christ (p. 617a) points to the classic if paradoxical theological co-inherence of vengeance and mercy. 40 Brown to Reverend L. H. Vaill, 15 November 1859, John Brown, p. 94; from Sanborn, John Brown, pp. 590–91. See also the letter to Sanborn, 8 April 1858, cited below, note 44. 41 Redpath, Echoes, p. 391 (no name or date; italics in original). The Protestant biblical commentaries on this biblical passage did not evacuate the theme of vengeance, see Matthew Henry, An Exposition, iii, p. 1263b: ‘Even the spirits of just men made perfect retain a proper resentment of the wrong they have sustained by their cruel enemies; and though they die in charity, praying as Christ did that God would forgive them, yet they are desirous that, for the honour of God, and Christ, and the Gospel, and for the terror and conviction of others, God will take a just revenge upon the sin of persecution, even while He pardons and saves their persecutors’. Cf. Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, ii, p. 338: ‘Thou Holy and true — Both the holiness and the truth of God require Him to execute judgment and vengeance, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood? — there is not impure affection in heaven. Therefore this desire of theirs is pure and suitable to the will of God.’ 42 Sanborn, Life and Letters of John Brown, p. 586. ‘Cheerful’ points to the ‘cheerful countenance’ of Proverbs 15. 13, characteristic of the elect. The expression recurs in the correspondence between Brown and his well-wishers.

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the non-conformist exegete Matthew Henry (1662–1714) placed it as had Paul, in the context of the imminent coming of judgment: God ‘will take vengeance on your enemies, and reward your patience’.43 Brown indeed felt close to the End, and this feeling allowed him to conjoin vengeance and martyrdom. He had rejoiced a year before Harpers Ferry that he had allowed himself a little bit more life on this earth in order to be a ‘reaper in the great harvest’.44 In Henry’s Philippians 4. 7–9, ‘Peace’ was synonymous with reconciliation with God, entailed hope for Paradise, and had as its sine qua non the performance of one’s ‘duty’.45 Brown pushed the apocalyptic note away from eirenism. His ‘duty’ consisted in God’s ‘cause’ of abolition; his ‘peace’, far from excluding violence, called for grim reaping.46 On his way to the gallows, Brown passed on to his followers a last, now famous note: ‘I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood’. America, like the biblical Holy Land, and so many other holy lands throughout the course of European History, needed God’s ineffable violence.47 And the tandem of martyrdom and vengeful justice would move History forwards. For Brown and some others, then, his death would bring retribution. The erstwhile non-resister leader William Garrison exclaimed: Whether the weapons used in the struggle against despotism have been spiritual or carnal, the verdict has been this: Glory to those who die in Freedom’s cause! [. . .] manglers of martyrs’ earthly frame [. . .] Vengeance is behind, and Justice is to come!48 43

Henry, An Exposition, iii, p. 1041b. Letter to F. B. Sanborn, 8 April 1858, in Sanborn, Life and Letters of John Brown, p. 445 (re-ed. in John Brown, p. 38): ‘I expect to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson. I felt for a number of years, in earlier life, a steady, strong desire to die; but since I saw any prospect of becoming a “reaper” in the great harvest, I have not only felt quite willing to live, but have enjoyed life much; and am now rather anxious to live for a few years more.’ 45 An Exposition, iii, p. 1042: ‘This is the way to have the God of peace with us — to keep close to our duty to him.’ 46 Henry, on the other hand, called for patience vis-à-vis seeming ‘tares’ in the Lord’s field. See in Matthew 13. 24–30, An Exposition, iii, pp. 104–05, esp. §§ 6–7. He would have judged Brown ‘over-hasty and inconsiderate’. 47 Sanborn, Life and Letters, p. 620. The note gave its title to a useful narrative, Stephen B. Oates, To Purge this Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown, 2nd edn (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984). See also Nudelman, John Brown’s Body, p. 35. 48 William Garrison, speech of 2 December 1859 in The Liberator, 16 December 1859, in William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator, ed. by William E. Cain (Boston: Bedford, 1995), p. 157. John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: 44

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God — but also History — would judge. Brown’s partisan Wendell Phillips ‘appeal[ed] [. . .] to the American people fifty years hence’ after progress would have done its work. The current position of the abolitionist vanguard, ‘a small band’, would by then have been embraced by the majority.49 Wendel Phillips ended his speech on his belief that Brown’s death moved ‘the future’. I cite him: VERSE: Hope! There is hope everywhere. It is only the universal history: Right forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne But that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.50

The God of justice and vengeance, judge at the End of History, points to the divinized historical process of the twentieth century so eloquently denounced by Albert Camus, and to another trial and perhaps martyrdom, that of Nikolai Bukharin.51

Bukharin During the night of 15 March 1938, Nikolai Bukharin, along with seventeen other Bolsheviks, was shot. These men (and three others who were spared capital punishment) had been on public trial since 2 March 1938, and in prison since 1937. Bukharin was allegedly the leader of the plot now prosecuted, which conjoined a Trotskyite left wing to his own right wing within the Communist Party. In alliance with nationalists and foreign — especially fascist — powers, he had Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 30–31, explains well how some radical abolitionists were willing to try a ‘merciful removal’ of slavery, but expected that they would have to accept ‘violence’. In quotation marks, Gerrit Smith’s words, mustering the traditional theological antithesis between mercy and justice, for which see Philippe Buc, ‘Pouvoir royal et commentaires de la Bible’, Annales E.S.C., 44 (1989), 691–709 (pp. 696–99), and for the providential and eschatological dimensions, idem, ‘La vengeance de Dieu’, pp. 453–59, and ‘Some Thoughts on the Theology of Violence’, 13–14, building on Caspary, Politics and Exegesis. 49 ‘I appeal [. . .] to the American people fifty years hence, when the light of civilization has had more time to penetrate, when self-interest has been rebuked by the world rising and giving its verdict on these great questions, when it is not a small band of Abolitionists, but the civilization of the twentieth century, in all its varied forms, interests, and elements, which undertakes to enter the arena, and discuss this last great reform. When that day comes, what will be thought of these first martyrs, who teach us how to live and how to die?’ 50 Wendell Phillips on Civil Rights and Freedom, ed. by Louis Filler, 2nd edn (Lanham: University Press of America, 1982), p. 113; from Redpath, Echoes, p. 66. 51 Albert Camus, L’homme révolté (1951; ed. Paris: Gallimard, 1958).

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long plotted against the Revolution, and even considered assassinating Lenin, then Stalin.52 The executions formed the crestline of a wave of purges that aimed first and foremost at the ruling Communist Party. On the one hand the purges had been engineered by Stalin to get rid of the old Bolshevik guard, those veterans of 1917 and companions of Lenin whose prestige could still challenge his own. On the other hand, they fed on almost two decades of a Bolshevik culture of purification — the purification of the party but also of the individual self.53 The trials concluded on the final pronouncements of the accused. Immediately after the executions, the proceedings were publicized and printed in many languages, complete with these ‘Last Words’.54 Among them, the eloquent final speech of Bukharin, delivered on 12 March, soon fascinated Western intelligentsias. Most of the twenty-one men, while fully recognizing their crimes, had pleaded not to be executed, often asking for a chance to cleanse themselves of their ‘sins’ or ‘dirt’ through work for the Soviet Union.55 At least in the official English translation of the proceedings, the lexicon of penance jumps to the eyes: ‘to expiate’, ‘to atone’, ‘to redeem’. One among the accused, Vladimir Ivanovich Ivanov, expressed most vividly why he still wanted to live despite his incommensurable guilt: ‘I shall accept the most severe sentence, but I find it inexpressibly hard to die when I have [not] at last cleared myself of this filth, of this abomination’. Consequently, to have time for this purgative labour, he asked for mercy.56 Not so Bukharin, at least not before the tribunal. Bukharin 52

Narrative in Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, rev. edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 327–83. 53 See Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Hellbeck’s article, ‘With Hegel’, brings together masterfully this culture and Bukharin’s trial. 54 In English, People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, Report of court proceedings in the case of the anti-Soviet ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’ [. . .] Moscow, March 2–13, 1938 [. . .] (Moscow: People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, 1938), available as well in a (slightly abridged) re-edition with commentary by Robert C. Tucker and Stephen Cohen, The Great Purge Trials (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965). Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 381– 83, discusses coercion, blackmail, and torture in the genesis of these confessions, opposed the line represented by Cohen, and considers that unlike others Bukharin was not physically broken but merely blackmailed. I found useful the discussion by Stefan Reinecke, ‘Das letzte Wort des Angeklagten Bucharin’, in Das letzte Wort (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1996), pp. 39–78. 55 For these metaphors, see Amir Weiner, ‘Introduction’ to Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework, ed. by Weiner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 1–18. 56 Report, p. 730.

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refuted many individual charges, such as plots to kill Lenin or Stalin, or the existence of an actual conspiracy of left and right in which he would have been the hinge. But he accepted the accusation in its broad strokes. He had indeed betrayed the Soviet Union. Yet he now realized, he said, that he had been on the wrong side of History’s march forward. In prison, he had meditated on his own past, and wondered, ‘If you die, what are you dying for?’ The need to die for something explained his repentance; the something he would die for — that is, the Revolution — explained his willingness to accept a death verdict. Others tried in March 1938 shared the fear of a vacuum in death.57 Grigori Fedorovich Grinko’s only wish was to ‘die not as an enemy taken prisoner by the Soviet Government, but as a citizen of the U.S.S.R.’ Repentance, he hoped, brought him back into the ‘fatherland’ he had gravely betrayed.58 Similarly, Akmal Ikramov did not want to die ‘as an enemy of the people’. He hoped that it would be known that ‘even if in the last hour of his life [. . .] he abandoned the position [of treachery and enmity] and died an honest citizen’.59 They were eager to be 57

Chernov: ‘By my honest work in the future I shall try to make up if even for a very small particle of these terrible crimes against the fatherland, against the great Soviet country’ (Report, p. 725); Krestinsky also would accept a capital sentence, but pleaded that ‘during these nine months I have undergone a radical change, and by sparing my life [. . .][my judges can] give me the opportunity to expiate my crimes in any way, even if only partially’ (p. 736); Zubarov: ‘if my life were preserved, I would, in practical work, justify not only in words, but also in deeds, the confidence of the Court’ (p. 737); Khodjayev asked for any way that might allow him ‘to obliterate at least some particle of my crimes and my profound guilt’ and be of service to the country (p. 748); similarly Rakovsky: ‘I repent deeply and sincerely, and I ask you to give me the opportunity to redeem even if an insignificant part of my guilt, even by the most modest work, no matter under what circumstances’ (p. 764); Levin: ‘expiating at least a part of my crimes by honest work’ (p. 781); Bulanov asked for mercy because, simply, the trials are the successful ‘apotheosis of the counter-revolution’ and so there is no need to kill (p. 787); Pletnev would devote himself to ‘my Soviet country’ (p. 788); Kazakov would accept the decision but also was willing to ‘atone’ by scientific labour for the USSR (p. 790); Maximov-Dikovsky: ‘I am no longer an enemy. [. . .] I am not incorrigible’ (p. 791). Rykov (Report, p. 741) called on still secret conspirers to come forward, sole way for them ‘to secure any sort of relief and disencumber themselves of the monstrous burden which has been revealed by the present trial’; Bessonov accepted death; so did Sharangovich and Zelensky. 58 Report, p. 721: ‘I will accept the most severe verdict — the supreme penalty — as deserved. I have only one wish: I wish to live through my last days or hours, no matter how few they may be, I wish to live through [them] and die not as an enemy taken prisoner by the Soviet government, but as a citizen of the U.S.S.R. who has committed the gravest treachery to the fatherland, whom the fatherland has gravely punished for this, but who repented.’ 59 Report, pp. 757–58: ‘I do not want to die, still less do I want to die an enemy of the people, [. . .] I would like anywhere, in any place, to atone for the grave crimes which I have committed in company with these people.’

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reincorporated through purgation and if necessary in and through death. They wanted to participate in the positive forward march of History. Bukharin shared in this desire, even if his wish was challenged by the prosecution and by some of his fellow accused. Zelinsky bitterly shoved him back into the wretched ranks of the damned: ‘You, Bukharin, want to come out of it unblemished. But you will not succeed. You will go down in History with us, branded with the shameful stigma that marks the forehead of all of us’.60 ‘In reality everything is clear. World History is a World Court of judgement’.61 Uttered towards the end of Bukharin’s ‘Last Words’, this since 1938 famous sentence quoted Hegel’s Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht. Economically, it alluded to a complex vision of History shared by many Marxists. The individual mattered not. His or her political choices, innocent or not, were validated or invalidated by the direction of historical developments.62 Bukharin had genuinely chosen, and genuinely been proven wrong.63 In arguing for his sincerity while at the same time recognizing Soviet achievements under Stalin’s new course, he preserved both his authenticity as a revolutionary and the revolutionary rightness of the Communist Party. Two of the most interesting minds of the mid-century, Ernst Bloch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, powerfully argued for the sincerity of Bukharin’s speech. Bukharin, wrote Bloch, had fought against, but in the end come to see the success of Stalin’s political line. The confession had not been extirpated by force or drugs; it was a genuine revolutionary position. Bukharin — as he himself stated — had come to realize that his was a divided self, torn between criminal instincts and praise for socialist realization.64 Ernst Bloch understood Bukharin’s confession to be the end of his metaphysical isolation: 60

Report, pp. 751–52. My translation based on the official German translation. See the official English translation in Report, p. 778: ‘As a matter of fact, everything is clear. World History is a world court of judgement.’ 62 For this idea again the intellectual, Bukharin, was in lockstep with his fellow conspirators, who also often attributed the sudden revelation of their errors to their awareness of communist successes. 63 Surrender on the ground of Soviet success under Stalin was a shared disposition, most bluntly expressed by Chernov, Report, p. 724: ‘The realization of this might of the Soviet power and Soviet state led me to down arms immediately after my arrest and give sincere and truthful testimony.’ 64 Ernst Bloch, ‘Bucharins Schlusswort’, Die neue Weltbühne, 5 Mai 1938, repr. in Viele Kammern im Welthaus, ed. by Friedrich Dieckmann and Jürgen Teller (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994), p. 363: ‘His consciousness was receptive to contrition and the recognition of what was right, it saw collectivization’s successes, it noticed the powerful progress of socialist construc61

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It is along with the death that follows — and Bukharin has not begged for his life — the return (Rückkehr, a word suggestive of conversion, Bekehrung) in the Soviet Union. ‘What are you dying for?’ — for the Soviet Union, and for a last profession of faith to it. Seen from the endpoint of an individual life, the Soviet Union is the otherworld of communist atheists. Bukharin has made this clear [. . .] to all those who still understand believers.65

Merleau-Ponty also zoomed in on the paradoxical authenticity of the situation: ‘The Moscow trials only make sense between revolutionaries, that is to say between men who are convinced that they are making history and who consequently already see the present as past and see those who hesitate as traitors’.66 The forward march of History cast an unforgiving light on past choices, but winners and losers understood it; not so bourgeois posterity. Were Bloch and Merleau-Ponty in any sense right in believing in the sincerity of Bukharin’s statements on the grounds of its ideological consistency? Was in fact Bukharin of a single mind, and did he speak to the revolutionary future with a steady voice? In the late 1980s Bukharin’s political ‘Testament’ was published. He had dictated it on the eve of his arrest, at the very beginning of March 1937, to his second wife and soon to be widow, Anna Larina, making her carefully learn it by heart.67 Anya, as he called her, committed it deeper to her memory through periodic rewritings. This document, entitled ‘To a future generation of leaders of the [Communist] Party’, reinforced existing doubts concerning the trustworthiness of the published ‘Last Words’. In the open also arrived Bukharin’s 1937 letter to Stalin (dated 10 December 1937), an anguished and fawning plea whose verbal meanderings, and even more its abject prayer to be spared the firing squad’s painful bullets, the public humiliation of a trial, and perhaps even the death penalty, sat uneasily with the stoic, self-sacrificing voice tion after initial setbacks, it grasped the proof of Stalin’s conception on the basis of the most authentic Marxist criterion: that of Praxis.’ 65 Bloch, ‘Bucharins Schlusswort’, pp. 363–64. Amazingly, Bloch compares Bukharin’s confession to Gilles de Rais, the medieval direction being suggested by the former’s reference to ‘principles of medieval jurisprudence’. Critics had adduced medieval comparisons of their own — like Ivan the Terrible — Bloch suggested that they should look for ‘surer parallels in faith, conversion, and reconversion (Rückkehr)’. 66 I cite from the English tr., Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem (Boston: Beacon, 1969), p. 29. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur: Essai sur le problème communiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Emphasis Merleau-Ponty. 67 Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 365.

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of 12 March 1938.68 Had a weakling’s feeble will been broken, and Bukharin been forced to recite in public a prepared script right before his death? An immediate interpretation suggested itself: The ‘Last Words’ were a facade; the true political Bukharin spoke in the Political Testament (and the man Bukharin in the humiliating letter to Stalin). Since March 1938 already, observers had intimated that the trial should be read between the lines. In 1965, introducing a new edition of the official Soviet proceedings, Robert Tucker could explain that Bukharin had accepted to go on trial in the hope that it would convict Stalin. He wanted ‘to dramatize by his own self-immolation in the show trial what Stalin was doing to Bolshevism,’ and to ‘transform the trial into an anti-trial’.69 Following this line of interpretation, the ‘Last Words’ were a message to future generations. Bukharin’s quip, ‘the confession of the accused is a principle of medieval jurisprudence’ (and so unnecessary here) seemed to gesture towards the medieval Inquisition, an institution present to the mind of observers of Russia owing to the figure of the Great Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.70 The Hegelian sentence, Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, could be read as an appeal to the further course of History against the trial itself.71 And indeed this was a classic move for medieval and early modern martyrs, which we have seen still operative with John Brown in the American nineteenth century: an appeal to the God Who governs History and Who at the End of History would judge each and all. After all, the ‘Testament’ trumpeted that time would rectify Bukharin’s reputation: ‘I am certain’, he dictated to Anna, ‘that sooner or later the filter of history will inevitably wash the filth from my head’. The Party would one day ‘vindicate’ him and ‘reinstate’ him into its ranks.72 68

J. Arch Getty, Oleg V. Naumov and Benjamin Sher, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 556–60. 69 Robert C. Tucker, ‘Stalin, Bukharin, and History as Conspiracy’, preface to Tucker and Cohen, Great Purge Trials, p. xlvii. In the same vein Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 373. 70 Bukharin’s ‘Last Words’ referred to Dostoyevsky as well. And the ‘Political Testament’ speaks of the new NKVD use of ‘medieval methods’. Here as elsewhere I am in agreement with Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 454–67, of course as long as the formula ‘in agreement’ does not obfuscate that Walicki anticipated my own musings. Cf. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 374. 71 Tucker, ‘Stalin, Bukharin’, p. xlvi. 72 Translated in Anna Larina, This I cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow, trans. by Gary Kern (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 345; another translation in Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 366–67.

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But Stalin could have censored easily this and other suspicious phrases. Editing could also have denied Bukharin his tragic grandeur: We now know from recently discovered archival documents that the Soviet dictator and the prosecuting team did tamper with the publication of Bukharin’s ‘Last Words’.73 It is striking how little they saw fit to edit out or in. Bukharin’s message was acceptable to both the victim and the perpetrator of the purge. Did Stalin, then, consider with Bukharin that Bukharin was redeemable in death? If the Soviet dictator did not think so personally, he expected Soviet public opinion to accept this idea.74 We should not expect absolute consistency in Bukharin. He himself diagnosed that he laboured under split consciousness. This diagnosis came easily to Bolsheviks,75 among the accused or among the general population, as we now know from personal diaries, so well explored by Jochen Hellbeck.76 The coexistence of the Testament, letter to Stalin, and Last Words indicate the range of his all too human hesitations.77 Like others among the accused, he explained his ‘double-dealing’. His co-defendants had accounted for ‘duplicity’ and ‘phariseeism’ (Ikramov’s expressions) through partial blindness, the fear of being exposed (Ivanov), the ‘inertia of many years of stubborn and underground struggle against the Soviet government’ (Bessonov), or full blindness and libido domi73

‘“Ave, communisme, Morituri te salutant!”: Nikolai Bucharins “Letzte Wort”’, in UTOPIE kreativ, 89 (1998), 63–82. The author of the edition is ‘Die Redaktion [of UTOPIE kreativ]’. 74 Hellbeck, ‘With Hegel’, suggests that Vyshinsky sought during the trial to deny the accused’s claim to ‘humanity and thus to invalidate their claim to have rediscovered a place in its history’. 75 More even, it formed the koiné of Bolshevik self-shaping; see for example Zinaida Denizevskaia, cited by Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, p. 152, confronting the lack of plausibility of some elements in the accusations levied against associates: ‘I am forcing myself to overlook petty details. One must not confuse the particulars with the general.’ 76 Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind. Ivanov, Report, pp. 728–29, explained that ‘like duplicity, defeatism literally became part and parcel of the psychology of everyone of us’, that ‘there were many moments when my heart was torn by repentance, and the thought throbbed insistently in my mind to go and tell about the organization of the Rights, but I did not do so’, and finally (Report, p. 730) that he ‘now experience[d] a dual feeling with regard to the sentence’. 77 And indeed, on 13 March 1938, right after his Last Words he penned a letter to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, that has recently been discovered, pleading for his life — Revelations from the Russian Archives, ed. by Diane P. Koenker and Ronald D. Bachman (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1997), pp. 109–10. Here Bukharin sounded very much like Ikramov. He promised to work for the Soviet Union and proclaimed himself a new man.

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nandi (Rakovsky).78 This blindness, explained one of the accused, Rakovsky, in a statement worthy of a medieval heretic’s recantation, had allowed them to delude themselves that they belonged to a vanguard of elects: ‘We considered ourselves to be people sent by providence, we consoled ourselves with the thought that we would be summoned, that we were needed’, and failed to see ‘the entire development of the Soviet Union’, social, economic, and cultural.79 Duplicity went hand in hand with the inner struggles of a split consciousness. Ivanov told of his tortured experience in October 1917 combining ‘both joy and fear: joy, together with the victorious masses, and fear at the menace of exposure’. ‘As time went on’, he pursued, ‘I came more and more to resemble a man who had been flung into the water with a weight tied to his feet, a man who passionately desires to reach the shore, while the weight steadily drags him to the bottom.’80 The Apostle Paul would have said two laws struggled within the man Ivanov (cf. Romans 7. 21–23). Like his co-accused, Bukharin had been taught by the Bolshevik culture of confession before the Party and of journal-keeping to interrogate the self and monitor inner struggles between the ‘old’ (bourgeois or reactionary) and the ‘new’.81 He probably oscillated between hatred for Stalin and acceptance of a History in which Stalin rode the horse of Providence, a History that called for his, Bukharin’s, death.82 But the ‘Last Words’ and the ‘Political Testament’ agreed on two remarkable points. They both considered that there was such a thing as martyrdom for the right course of History. The ‘Testament’ ended on a neo-martyr image, red-coloured: ‘Know, comrades, that the banner you bear in a triumphant march towards communism contains a drop of my blood, too!’83 And both texts accepted the idea of proletarian terror. The NKVD, the Soviet Political Police, was bankrupt; but not the ideas of coercion, terrorism, and purge that animated it and had animated its predecessor, the Cheka. To cite the ‘Testament’: I am leaving life. I bow my head, but not before the proletarian scythe, which is properly merciless but also chaste. I am helpless, instead, before an infernal machine that seems to use medieval methods, yet possesses gigantic power, fabricates organized slander, acts boldly and confidently. 78

Rakovsky, Report, p. 763, attributed his failings to counter-revolutionary ideology plus being ‘blinded by that passion, by that ambition for power’. 79 Report, p. 763. This Satanic misunderstanding and blindness is what defines heretical, false churches since at least Tertullian and Augustine. 80 Report, p. 726. 81 Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind ; idem, ‘With Hegel’. 82 A point well made by Walicki, Marxism, p. 463. 83 Larina, This I cannot Forget, p. 345.

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Dzerzhinsky is no more; the wonderful traditions of the Cheka have gradually receded into the past, those traditions by which the revolutionary idea governed all its actions, justified cruelty towards enemies, safeguarded the state against any counter-revolution.84

Bukharin, then, did not have any problem with the ‘proletarian scythe’ as it had been wielded in the first decade of the Russian Revolution. ‘Mercilessness’ or ‘cruelty’ were not a problem as long as they were clean — a notion that may have echoed Robespierre’s famous formula pairing terror and virtue.85 In the Testament, Bukharin avowed that he would have been willing to ‘bow his head’ before the blade of a pure institution of proletarian purgation. In his ‘Last Words’, he resigned himself to die killed by an institution that was not yet pure. Odd as it may be, Bukharin’s positions illuminate the medieval past of martyrdom. In 1937–38, the old Bolshevik must have at some point — a point of equilibrium between resistance to Stalin and utter self-sacrifice for the Party — imagined himself as both sinful and yet soon to be redeemed, as a martyr in the making in need of being cleansed. We now turn to the third dossier, from the First Crusade. The tragedy of 1937–38 highlights a strikingly analogous configuration among the eleventh-century ‘soldiers of Christ’, who were both God’s reapers at the End of times and themselves the object of a purge.

Martyr Figures and Figures of the Purge in Raymond d’Aguilers Raymond d’Aguilers is arguably the most interesting chronicler of the First Crusade.86 In his interpretation of the expedition, composed in or very shortly after 1100, the crusaders’ travails allowed both martyrdom and purge. Jean Flori has counted within Raymond’s Liber eight mentions of casualties of the crusade acquiring martyrdom or direct entry into paradise. There seems to have existed a 84

Translated in Larina, This I cannot Forget, pp. 343–44, cf. the Medvedev translation, Let History Judge, p. 366. 85 Maximilien Robespierre, ‘Rapport sur les principes de morale qui doivent guider la Convention nationale [. . .]’ (5 February 1794), in Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, x, p. 357. See most recently Dan Edelstein, ‘War and Terror: The Law of Nations from Grotius to the French Revolution’, French Historical Studies, 31 (2008), 229–62. 86 Cf. Luc Ferrier, ‘La couronne refusée de Godefroy de Bouillon: Eschatologie et humiliation de la majesté aux premiers temps du royaume latin de Jérusalem’, Le Concile de Clermont de 1095 et l’appel à la croisade: Actes du Colloque [. . .] de Clermont-Ferrand (23–25 juin 1995) (Collection de l’École française de Rome, p. 236; Rome: École française de Rome, 1997), pp. 245–65. For a narrative, see John France, Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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generalized if hazy understanding that even people who died by drowning or of hunger were or could be martyrs, exciting God’s vengeance.87 Along with the saints already reigning in Heaven, these sanctified dead joined the living on the battlefield at critical junctures.88 Let us mention here in passing how an indicator of the charge attached to righteous dying and killing is the disposition of the sublime in the narrative. Raymond writes rarely in the register of beauty, perhaps only thrice. The first two instances depict dying Turks, in the one case falling to their death from a cliff while fleeing on horses; in the other cadavers twirling in a river. In the last, a splendid ghost appears to a visionary, who asks what is the source of this apparition’s great beauty. It is, he is answered, martyrdom.89 The evil dead are a beautiful spectacle; so are the holy dead. Killing and dying for the right cause are thus both bathed in the splendour of God’s sublime justice. As we shall see, the papal legate Adhémar, Bishop of Le Puy, deceased shortly after the key battle fought outside Antioch (1 August 1098; the battle was fought 28 June), was assimilated to those warriors who fell arms in hand, and like them was believed by some to labour as a ghost or saint for the expedition’s success.90 Next to this interpenetration of Heaven and earth in battle, which is common to all chronicles of the 1096–1100 expedition, Raymond’s Liber is characterized by a ferocious, levelling theology, conjoined to a sense that the crusade is the holy war that will end all wars — the last act in Sacred History.91 The poor and 87 So the anonymous Gesta Francorum, The deeds of the Franks and the other pilgrims to Jerusalem, ed. by Rosalind Hill (London: T. Nelson, 1962), p. 17. 88 Liber, p. 45 (knight in shining armour); p. 133 (St George ‘the standard bearer of this army’); p. 70 (cited below, note 95); p. 78 (all the deceased fight before Antioch); p. 82 (idem); trans. by Hill and Hill, Raymond d’Aguilers: Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 71 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1968), pp. 28, 112, 53, 60, 63. A common belief among narrators of the First Crusade, see, e.g., Gesta Francorum (The Deeds of the Franks, p. 69), and the letter of the Syrian patriarch of Jerusalem, Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088–1100, ed. by Heinrich Hagenmeyer, (Innsbruck: Wagner’sche Universitäts Buchhandlung, 1901), p. 14 (‘[sanctis diversibus] militibus Christi nos vere comitantibus’). 89 Liber, p. 65 (‘iocundum spectaculum [. . .] satis nobis iocundum ac delectabile’); ibidem, p. 109; p. 125 (‘ad videndum satis delectabile’). 90 Jean Flori, ‘Mort et martyre des guerriers vers 1100: L’exemple de la première croisade’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 35 (1991), 121–39. See as well Colin Morris, ‘Martyrs on the Field of Battle before and during the First Crusade’, in Martyrs and martyrologies, ed. by Diana Wood (= Studies in Church History, 30 (1993)), 93–104. 91 See Ferrier, ‘La couronne refusée’; Sylvia Schein, Gateway to the Heavenly City: Crusader Jerusalem and the Catholic West, 1099–1187 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), and earlier her ‘Die Kreuzzüge als volkstümlich-messianistische Bewegungen’, Deutches Archiv, 47 (1991), 119–38.

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a handful of lesser clergy are at the vanguard of the army of Christ. They obtain visions that instruct the crusaders how to gain God’s grace, and that edict liturgies, often penitential, meant to secure from God victory in battle against the Muslims. These visions also criticize the institutional leadership of lay princes and upper clergy (including Bishop Adhémar).92 The poor ‘children of God’ push the expedition forward, forcing the princes to abandon the fortresses and cities seized on the march, because occupying them and squabbling over them delays the arrival into Jerusalem. They even threaten to elect their own leader. The prince who comes closest, despite his failings, to siding with these radicals and their prophets, the Provençal Raymond of Saint-Gilles, exhibits very odd behaviour. He refuses to be considered a candidate to kingship in Jerusalem, following the clerical position that ‘it is wrong to elect a king where the Lord suffered and was crowned’, because the king might become corrupt, and because Daniel’s prophecy announces that ‘when the Holy of holies shall have come, unction will cease’.93 On the one hand, the crusaders are the purest of the pure. But, on the other hand, they are most in need of purgation. St Andrew, in a vision, tells the crusaders: Don’t you know why God led you here? And how much He loves you, and how He elected you particularly? He made you come here to avenge His spurning and that of His people. He loves you so much that the saints already placed in the repose [of Paradise], knowing in advance the grace [allotted to you] by divine disposition, want to be in the flesh and fight alongside you. God elected you among all nations as [farmhands] separate the good grain from the chaff [cf. Matthew 13], for in merits and grace you are ahead of all those who came before you and shall come after you, just as gold’s price is ahead of silver’s.94 Chiliast conceptions must be read between the lines of the document, as Ferrier, Flori, and Rubenstein show. Jay Rubenstein, ‘How, or How Much, to Reevaluate Peter the Hermit’, in The Medieval Crusade, ed. by Susan J. Ridyard (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), pp. 53–70, argues subtly for the presence of apocalyptic sentiments in Northern France and Lotharingia during the earlier 1090s through an analysis of Guibert of Nogent, who is likely to have frowned upon them at the time of the Clermont call for the crusade. 92 See below, pp. 52–54. See most recently John France, ‘Two Types of Vision on the First Crusade: Stephen of Valence and Peter Bartholomew’, Crusades, 5 (2006), 1–20. 93 See Ferrier, ‘La couronne refusée’, a position accepted by Jean Flori, L’Islam et la fin des temps: interprétation prophétique des invasions musulmanes dans la chrétienté médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 2007), p. 271 and passim. Raymond, Liber, p. 143 (clergy’s position), & p. 152 (Count Raymond’s refusal); trans. by Hill & Hill, p. 121, & p. 129. 94 Raymond, Liber, p. 70 (my translation; cf. Hill & Hill, p. 53): ‘Et dixit michi [beatus Andreas]: necisne cur Deus huc vos adduxit? et quantum vos diligit, et quomodo vos precipue elegit? Pro contemptu sui et suorum vindicta vos hic venire fecit. Diligit vos adeo ut

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However all the crusaders are not among the elect. The army is in need of a purge. There are among it ‘unrighteous men’, destined to ‘return to him who refused to hold on to justice [Satan]’.95 One learns more about those objective traitors in another vision, triggered by Peter Bartholomew’s wish to see Christ as the Crucified (He had heretofore appeared only as a standing man). The Lord complied, transforming Himself accordingly, then explained the meaning of His five, blood-saturated wounds.96 They represent participants in His Passion as well as five kinds of crusaders. The first kind, akin to Christ, do not fear weapons; they are the active fighters in the army. Explicitly, they can become martyrs: ‘When such men die, they are taken together to God’s right hand, where I sat after My resurrection and My ascent to Heaven’. The second, akin to the apostles, are reserve forces. The third supplies the fighters, and is compared to those who complained of the injustice meted out to Christ. The fourth stay neutral in war; they are like the crucifiers. The fifth run away and dissuade others from fighting, like the Jews and Pilate. Christ then offered to reveal the identity of the ‘traitors’ (proditores), ‘doubters’ or ‘unbelievers’ (increduli, like the hated Jews) — the last two ranks — through a miracle. Once the army was arrayed for combat and the hallowed battle cry ‘God help us’ shouted thrice, the Lord would make visible the five groups. Further interrogated about what was to be done with the doubters, Christ answered chillingly: ‘Show no mercy; sancti iam in requie positi divine dispositionis gratiam prenoscentes in carne esse et concertare vobiscum [var: nobiscum] vellent. Elegit vos Deus ex omnibus gentibus sicut triticae spicae de avenaria colligunt, etenim meritis et gratia precedetis omnes qui ante et post vos venient, sicut aurum precio precedit argentum.’ On this passage and its biblical echoes, see Buc, ‘Vengeance’, pp. 484–85. Cf. Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France, in Selected Works, 2 vols (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1950), i, p. 193, cit. by Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Engl. trans., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 315: ‘The present generation resembles the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It must not only conquer a new world, it must also perish in order to make room for the people who will be equal to a new world’. And cf. La conquête de Jérusalem, ed. by Célestin Hippeau (repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1969), vii. 31, v. 7243, p. 285: ‘Tex chevaliers ne fu, ne jamais ne sera’ (referring to Godfrey of Bouillon). 95 Liber, pp. 86–87; trans. by Hill & Hill (here modified), p. 68, continuing: ‘[. . .] and it shall be seen in what manner God will save them. Truly, upon them shall be the same curse of God and His Mother as was placed on the falling Lucifer’. Justice entails a public declaration of wealth and a proportional assistance to the poor. If they do not, ‘let the Count and the children of God’ punish them (ibidem, p. 69). 96 For the theology of the Passion seen from the Blickwinkel of Animal Anthropology, see Igor Gorevich, O Kritike Antropologii Zhivotnikh, 3 vols (Kabul-Kishinev: Svinia, 1987), i: Prichasheniye i Shashlik, Ch. 3: ‘Corpus porcorum et porcus corporum’. I thank Charlotte Visborg Andreasen for this reference.

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kill them; they are My betrayers, brothers of Judas Iscariot. Give their worldly goods to the first rank proportionately to their need; and by this act you will find the right way [to Jerusalem] which you so far have circumvented’.97 This sanguinary command to purge could be borne only by a vision of Christ in His aspect as the bloody Crucified, an image calling for vengeance.98 For Raymond d’Aguilers, purge accompanied martyrdom and God’s war. Was this radical voice idiosyncratic? Not so, or not fully so. Those monastic chroniclers who redacted the crusade story at about a decade in temporal distance from the 1099 capture of Jerusalem are unlikely to have preserved extreme opinions like those Raymond conveys.99 The German Ekkehard of Aura, present in the Holy Land in 1101 — where he consulted a little book (libellus) on the events he had not lived through — struck, though, a note in tune with Raymond’s melody.100 Ekkehard began his narrative by detailing the numerous miracles that mobilized every status in society. Yet with success came a Satanic reaction: By these and other similar portents, the whole creation was inflamed to [join into] the army of the Creator. And so the Enemy [. . .] did not delay to sow his cockle over this good seed, to raise up false prophets, and to mix into the armies of the Lord false brethren and loose women under the guise of religion. Thus Christ’s flocks were so sullied by the hypocrisy and the lies of others, and by others’ 97

Liber, pp. 113–15; trans. by Hill & Hill, pp. 94–95. Interestingly, Christ went on, among other orders, to command extreme caution towards enemies who converted to Christianity, and towards crusaders who had apostasized and then returned to the fold. Raymond’s Lord was not a Lord of mercy. See as well Raymond’s understanding of the army of Christ’s march through Slavonia (Dalmatia): it afforded the local pagans the radical choice between conversion or God’s Doom, Liber, p. 37: ‘[. . .] ut agrestes homines qui Deum ignorabant, cognita virtute et pacientia militum eius, aut aliquando a feritate resipiscant, aut inexcusabiles Dei iudicio adducantur (so that rustic men ignorant of God, having come to learn the strength and willingness to suffer of His knights, would either recover at some point from their ferocity or be led to God’s Judgment and lack [there] any pardon)’. 98 As did mutilated crucifixes, see Wipo, Gesta Chuonradi, cap. 33, ed. by H. Bresslau, SS rer. Germ., 61 (Hanover: Hahn, 1915, repr. 1977), p. 53, with Buc, ‘Vengeance de Dieu’, pp. 466–67. 99 See on this point Jay Rubenstein, ‘Peter the Hermit’, and Jean Flori, L’Islam et la fin des temps, pp. 272–80. 100 Ekkehard, Chronicon, recensio prima, an. 1099, in Frutolfs und Ekkehards Chroniken und die anonyme Kaiserchronik, ed. Franz-Josef Schmale and Irene Schmale-Ott, Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters, 14 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), p. 148.

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The ‘leaders of the true army of God’ (vere dominicae militiae duces), that is, Godfrey and other princes, managed to reach Jerusalem. On the way, the winnowing had ‘thrown out the chaff from the threshing-floor of the Lord’, and so ‘the good grains (grana triticea) [did] perdure owing to their natural heaviness and solidity’ [cf. Matthew 3. 12].102 Like Raymond, Ekkehard wrote within an eschatological framework.103 The epoch at the End of times that produced martyrdom also necessitated a purge. The association of purge, crusade, and martyrdom was transported across the centuries by at least two media. One was the various romanced versions of the biblical story of the Maccabees. The illustrators of the manuscripts seem to have been especially fond of representing Matthatias killing an idolatrous Jew at the altar.104 And the narrative itself presented next to warrior-martyrs’ death for God’s name the same zealous heroes’ slaughter of lukewarm Jews and Hellenized pagans. The other medium consisted in sermons on the cross and the crusade. They allied a discourse on the rewards of bellicose martyrdom to social criticism. One of the earliest such sermons stemmed from the pen of Jacques de Vitry, a member of the reformist galaxy associated with the Paris schools of the turn of the thirteenth century. Jacques took as his theme verses from Revelation, which 101

Ekkehard, Chronicon, recensio prima, an. 1099, p. 144. Ekkehard echoes a concern of Raymond d’Aguilers, insofar as he moves immediately to advise that one should query the seducers about the details of their participation in the crusade, and force them to penance. The prophecy of Matthew 24. 24 is also featured in the Pseudo-Methodius apocalyptic prophecy, Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen: Pseudo-Methodius, Adso, und die tiburtinische Sibylle, ed. by Ernst Sackur (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1898), pp. 94–95: ‘Et in his eius [Antichristi] mendacibus signis et deceptionibus prodigia [sic] seducit, si potest fieri, etiam electus [sic], sicuti Dominus explanavit (And through his lying miracles, tricks and prodigies, Antichrist will deceive even the elect, if it can be done, just as the Lord made plain)’. 102 Ekkehard, Chronicon, recensio prima, an. 1099, p. 148: ‘Paleis tamen ex area dominica huiusmodi ventilabro decussis vidimus grana triticea naturalis soliditatis gravitate perdurantia’. 103 Ekkehard, Chronicon, recensio prima, an. 1099, p. 132: ‘In the days of Henry IV Roman [king] and of Alexius prince of Constantinople according to the Gospel prophecy there rose everywhere nation against nation and kingdom against kingdom [Matthew 24. 7; Luke 21. 10; Mark 18. 8], and there were throughout many places great earthquakes and plagues, famines and fears inspired by the sky and great portents [Apoc. 13. 13], and since already (iam) the Gospel’s trumpet sounded the advent of the Just Judge, behold! the whole Church scrutinized the whole world all around, which pointed to the prophesized portents’. 104 See Robert Leon McGrath, ‘The Romance of the Maccabees in Medieval Art and Literature’ (Ph.D. diss., Art and Archaeology, Princeton, 1963); Buc, ‘Vengeance’, pp. 468–73.

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led him to comment on a passage in Ezekiel (9. 4–6) announcing the angelic mass massacre of all those who were not marked with God’s sign:105 They were told to begin at the sanctuary, which means with the priests, because, as the Book of Wisdom says, the mighty are mightily tormented and on the highly placed the harshest judgement falls.

For Jacques de Vitry, those who did not side with Christ were de facto against Christ: The dragon swept the third part of the stars [Revelation 12. 4]. The first part defends the faith with the word like the doctors against the heretics; the second part defends the faith with the sword like the soldiers of Christ; the third part defends neither with the word nor with the sword and they are the Devil’s part.106

And indeed over the next hundred years or so, two popular crusades — the so-called Shepherds’ Crusades of 1251 and 1320–21 — turned revolutionary, attacking nobles, royal representatives, and the clergy, turning even — forsooth — against university professors.107 ‘To begin at the sanctuary’: all the way into the modern era, there existed the idea that purge was to start with the elect — elect status groups or elect nation, for instance England or France.108 In the words 105

Christoph T. Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology: Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 86–87, translation slightly modified. For crusades and sermons, see as well Penny J. Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1095–1270 (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1991); Jessalyn Bird, ‘Crusade and Conversion after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): Oliver of Paderborn’s and Jacques de Vitry’s Missions to Muslims Reconsidered’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 21 (2005), 23–47; eadem, ‘Paris Masters and the Justification of the Albigensian Crusade’, Crusades, 6 (2007), 117–55. 106 Maier, Crusade Propaganda, pp. 90–91. 107 For the former, see William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 113–17, with the sources conveniently translated and gathered in Peter Jackson, The Seventh Crusade, 1244–1254: Sources and Documents (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Malcolm Barber, ‘The Pastoureaux of 1320’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 32 (1981), 143–66, with Chapters 2–3 in David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 43–92. 108 For a similar combination of election and purge, and based on the same scriptural images, see the Fifth Monarchist Christofer Syms, The Swords apology and necessity in the act of Reformation (London: Tho[mas] Warren, 1644), p. 10, expanding the citation in B. S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1971), p. 37: ‘Must not judgement begin at the house of God ? If this British Northern nation bee [sic] the people chosen of God to accomplish the last wonders of the world, to clens [sic] the church of heresy, schism, atheism, and hypocrisy, [. . .] was it not necessary the nation itself be first purged?’ I discuss the analogy between the French Revolution and the First Crusade, considered as the external war dimension of the

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of a seventeenth-century radical, ‘The Church is God’s furnace’, in which its rightful rulers ‘should [. . .] be [. . .] thoroughly purged and refined from their drosse and tyn’.109 But to return to the First Crusade, the Manichaean notion of the radical purge was compensated by a strange mechanism. We mean to explore here the odd case of the papal legate Bishop Adhémar of Le Puy. This member of the expedition’s leadership had doubted the veracity of the visions received by the prophetic group of poor crusaders and lesser clergy.110 In particular, Adhémar had considered fraudulent the revelations that had led to the discovery of a powerful relic, the Holy Lance. Neither the messenger nor the object seemed authentic to this prelate.111 Being a victory-bringing object that worked battlefield miracles, the Holy Lance was the symbolic keystone of the whole bundle of messages — radical and egalitarian in tenor — that the group conveyed to the army and its leadership. Soon after the elevation of this relic, the crusaders won a great triumph before Antioch, and Adhémar, ‘a man beloved of God and men’, died, ‘dear in every way to all’.112 But this general appreciation was not quite justified. Adhémar soon appeared to Peter Bartholomew, the peasant visionary, to tell him that while he was finally in one of the saints’ choirs, he had had to complete a tour in purgative fire.113 The bishop confessed that half of his hair and beard had been burnt because of ‘First European Revolution’, in ‘Some Thoughts on the Theology of Violence’. The conceptualization of the eleventh-century radical reforms as a ‘revolution’, so to be compared with others, is owed to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Europäischen Revolutionen: Volkscharaktere und Staatenbildung (Jena: Diederich, 1931). 109 William Aspinwall († 1662), A brief description of the fifth monarchy or kingdome that shortly is to come into the world (London: M. Simmons, 1653), pp. 4, 6. Cited in ibidem, p. 64. 110 On Adhémar, see James Brundage, ‘Adhémar of Puy: The Bishop and his Critics’, Speculum, 34 (1959), 201–12; Colin Morris, ‘Policy and Visions: The Case of the Holy Lance at Antioch’, in John Gillingham and J. C. Holt, War and Government in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of J. O. Prestwich (Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1984), pp. 33–45. Interestingly, the Gesta Francorum present Adhémar as a ‘helper of the poor’ who preached some redistribution to the richer crusaders (The Deeds of the Franks, p. 74). This may have enabled the radicals to whom the Liber gives a voice to trust in visions announcing his positive transit through purgative fire. 111 Liber, p. 72; trans. by Hill & Hill, p. 54. Ibidem, p. 127; trans. by Hill & Hill, p. 107: Adhémar was rumored to have been a doubter in the Lance and accordingly punished, so was not a reliable ghostly vector of revelations. 112 Liber, p. 84 (my translation); cf. trans. by Hill & Hill, p. 66. 113 Liber, pp. 84–85; trans. by Hill & Hill, pp. 66–67.

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his doubts concerning the lance.114 He was now, belatedly since in the grave, no longer a doubter; facial hair and honour were growing back; still, he would be able to see God clearly only once the capillary restoration was completed fully. Adhémar also announced that, like the martyrs of the crusade, he would contribute to the march towards Jerusalem: ‘I shall be far more useful in death than in life if they [the crusaders] are willing to keep the laws of God. I and all my departed brothers shall live with them, and I shall appear and offer better counsel than I did in life’.115 He did indeed, exhorting a priest who was sick because he was a doubter, and when the army marched towards Jerusalem, dictating the proper victory-bringing penance.116 Not only this, but he was seen in Jerusalem when it was stormed, leading ‘the way over the walls [and] urging the knights and people to follow him’.117 Adhémar of Le Puy was, literally, the first man to enter the Promised Land. The strange case of Bishop Adhémar, flawed yet perfected saint, companion of the fighting saints and glorified dead, inspires two comments. It has struck some observers that the West did not commemorate as martyr any dead among the first crusaders, even if contemporary chroniclers spoke of martyrs and identified some by name.118 The doubts that Raymond d’Aguilers reveals about the inner worth of leaders and followers in the expedition, Ekkehard’s sense that Satan blurred the purity of the ranks, and their shared sense that death on the crusade could be part of a winnowing or threshing, constitute a partial explanation for this fact. Who was ultimately to say what a death in the Holy Land meant before 114

As explained in another vision, Liber, pp. 116–17; trans. by Hill & Hill, pp. 96–97. This is also why Peter Bartholomew was partly burnt in the ordeal that he underwent to prove the Lance’s authenticity, Liber, p. 123 (my translation): ‘I delayed in the fire, he explained, because the Lord came to me in the middle of the flames and taking me by the hand said to me: Because you harbored doubts concerning the Lance’s inventio even though blessed Andrew showed it to you, you will not go through the fire totally unharmed, but you will never see hell’. 115 Liber, p. 85; trans. by Hill & Hill, pp. 66–67. 116 Liber, pp. 119, 145; trans. by Hill & Hill, pp. 99, 121–22. Paris BNF lat. 5132 contains this vision, but diverges from this point onwards from the tradition represented in the Hill edition. See France, ‘The Text of the Account’, p. 640. Again, my thanks to Jay Rubenstein for his guidance on this. 117 Liber, p. 151; trans. by Hill & Hill, p. 128. This detail is absent from the Paris BNF lat. 5132 version. 118 Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 (rev. edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 72–74; more discussion in Housley, Contesting the Crusades (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 41; see Flori, ‘Mort et martyre’.

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God?119 But, second, the winnowing and threshing did not mean necessarily the rejection of the lukewarm. Contrary to this historian’s expectations, even the black-and-white Manichean scheme of the First Crusade made room for religious grey. There were human beings who stood between betrayal and holiness, and whom death and repentance could purge back into the ranks of the elect.120 Adhémar the bishop converted in purgatorial fire — a privilege probably denied to the Muslim dead. And so Adhémar, posthumously, worked towards the great day — the ‘new day’ proclaimed with the conquest of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099, the ‘day’ that ‘emptied out all paganism’.121 Here too Bukharin, in his trust that ‘the banner you bear in a triumphant march towards communism contains a drop of my blood’, was the heir of the medieval culture of martyrdom. * * * The following thoughts do not constitute a conclusion so much as a set of reflections. The parallels between three episodes are striking. They testify to the force, beyond medieval Catholicism, and even in a post-Christian culture, of connections between notions of history, purity, violence, elite vanguard, martyrdom, and vengeance. To this complex of likely cultural fellow-travellers we should add liberty and universalism.122 To make for the longue-durée permanence of this form, confrontational martyrdom, a number of forces must have been at play. To discuss them would take 119

So Riley-Smith, loc. cit. The mechanism had been revealed by Peter Bartholomew, Liber, p. 96: ‘Sic cadunt omnes qui in incredulitate vel transgressione mandatorum Dei sunt. Sed si peniteat eos [sic] de malefactis suis et ad Deum clament erigit eos Dominus [. . .] et [. . .] peccata ad se clamantium tollit Deus et aufert (This is the way in which all those who stand in disbelief vis-à-vis God’s commandments or transgress them. But if they do penance concerning their misdeeds, and clamour to God, the Lord will put them back on their feet [. . .] and [. . .] God will take away and remove the sins of those who clamour to Him)’. 121 Liber, p. 151: ‘Dies haec inquam tocius paganitatis exinanicio, christianitatis confirmatio, et fidei nostrae renovatio.’ Cf. Peter Bartholomew’s words before Antioch, Liber, p. 78: ‘Scitote profecto quod advenerunt dies illi quod promisit Dominus Beatae Mariae et apostolis suis quod elevaret regnum christianorum, deiecto et conculcato paganorum regno (Know for sure that those days have come, which the Lord promised to blessed Mary and His apostles, saying that he would raise up the reign of the Christians, and throw down and trample the reign of the pagans)’. 122 Is one dealing here with the permanence over time, across ‘secularization’, of a European cultural ‘substance’? or rather with renewed answers to old questions that, once posed within a culture, have to be answered by each successive era? The latter is Hans Blumenberg’s position, see The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. by Michael Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 120

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a big, fat book. Obviously, there worked in the favour of continuity a first belief — widely shared in western European cultures and in those ensembles deeply influenced by it, and broadly transmitted by narratives, art, and monuments — of the potency of this manner of death. Martyrdom constituted the ideal way for an individual to die for a cause, and it was believed to move God to action, and to propel History forward. But it takes two to tango. As Brad Gregory recently demonstrated, martyrdom was also maintained by the willingness of elites to prosecute dissent publicly and through the channels of law (as opposed to simply repressing dissent swiftly or quietly).123 For after all, the would-be martyrs’ adversaries usually knew only too well that in doling death they were dealing a potent card to the other side. Still, they often had to dole and deal. In the western legal tradition, normatively, a criminal could be destroyed only after a trial fairly conducted. This second belief, in the primacy of the law and due process, meant that even though prosecuting magistrates tended to realize that public judicial debate afforded a would-be martyr a chance to publicize his or her oppositional belief, and so open the door to further troubles, they — more often than not — took the risk of open trials.124 Continuities are striking, but so are differences. They are visible on the background of the first Christian centuries’ martyrdoms, to which Raymond d’Aguilers is closer than Brown or Bukharin. Early Christian martyrs found death at the hands of opponents who were full outsiders: the pagan magistrates and their pagan minions. Thus, these willing victims stood against, and different from, what can literally be called an out-group.125 Sometimes, as in the Passion of Polycarp or the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, they announced the destruction, spiritual or physical, of their persecutors.126 On the other hand, Bukharin was condemned by his own Bolsheviks, and claimed membership in the Party, em123

I owe this question, which had to be raised, to Mette Birkedal Bruun, and its answer to Gregory’s book, Martyrdom. 124 For Brown, see Nudelman, John Brown’s Body, pp. 4, 9, 27–28. See as well Gregory, Martyrdom. 125 See Charles F. Altman, ‘Two Types of Opposition and the Structure of Latin Saints’ Lives’, Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 6 (1975), 1–11, (pp. 2 and 8). 126 Buc, Dangers, pp. 137–38 (or ‘Martyre et ritualité’, pp. 75–76). Such is indeed the conclusion of Tertullian’s De Spectaculis, Ch. 30; Patrologia Latina, 1, cols 660–62. See also Passio sanctorum Mariani et Iacobi, 12, ed. & trans. by Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 210–11, where ‘now filled with the spirit of prophecy, with courage and confidence [Marian] foretold that the blood of the just would soon be avenged, and as though he were speaking already from heaven’s heights he threatened various temporal scourges, such as epidemics, enslavement, famine, earthquakes, and the torment of poisonous flies’.

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bracing it and its mission. Martyrs were privy to God’s will and the course of Sacred History, and in deference to this knowledge accepted to die. They did not, however, usually confess to major lapses against the Church, unlike Bukharin against the Party. John Brown was executed at the order of fellow Americans. He denied, vociferously, this fellowship in citizenship, yet still affirmed it sub specie aeternitatis. Brown engaged his Southern opponents in dialogue, leaving open the door of their conversion to anti-slavery. He was confident that the historical horizon would see the triumph of his abolitionist faith throughout America — if only after violent, bloody travails. While Brown and his friends rejected the legitimacy of a state that defended slavery (as is well known, a position embraced by many abolitionists who were ready to break up the Union rather than allow slave power’s extension), they still hoped for its reform as a global entity. Bukharin believed in the Party and the State, the USSR, that tried him; if there had been an alienation, it was his, owing to double-consciousness. The last sentence of his ‘Testament’ proclaimed the hope that he still contributed to the march of History, and a poignant desire to belong. By contrast, there is not much of an indication in the authentic martyr acts composed before emperor Constantine embraced Christianity during the fourth century’s first half that the victims or their hagiographers expected Rome’s conversion, in whole or in substantial part.127 Some martyrs protested that they did not have to sacrifice to the idols because they prayed for the empire or the emperor.128 But a common answer to the imperial magistrate’s demand that the accused identify themselves, ‘I am a Christian’, proclaimed alienation vis-à-vis Roman citizenship.129 The fourth-century poet and hagiographer, Prudentius, will illustrate a new configuration, made more likely after Constantine, in relation to the martyr’s alterity. His hymn on the passion of St Lawrence begins with these words: The age-old mother of pagan shrines, Rome, now consecrated to Christ, conquers with Lawrence’s guidance, and triumphs over barbarian rites.130 127 We do get individual conversions: see, e.g., the soldier Pudens in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, Ch. 21. 1 and 21. 4, ed. by Musurillo, pp. 128 and 130. And some strands of Christianity saw in the empire and its peace a providential, if heathen, matrix for the spread of the religion. See, inter alia, W. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965). 128 E.g., The Martyrdom of Apollonius, cap. 7–9, ed. by Musurillo, p. 92. 129 See e.g., the Martyrdom of Saint Carpus, ed. by Musurillo, pp. 23–24; the ‘Martyrs of Lyons’, ibidem, p. 68:7. 130 Prudentius, ‘Martyrdom of Lawrence’, in Le livre des couronnes (= Oeuvres, vol. 4), ed. Maurice Lavarenne (Paris: Belles-Lettres, 1963), p. 32: ‘Antiqua fanorum parens | iam Roma

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Converted by the martyrs’ ‘not bloodless struggles’, Rome, which has submitted all nations, now will yoke also the ‘monstrous idols’. Lawrence, tortured on the grill, announces Constantine’s conversion, and in the midst of his pain, prays for the conversion of Rome, ‘the city of Romulus’. The imperial capital will become itself the agent of the orb’s Christianization. Thus, Lawrence, at the moment of his death radically different from his Roman tormentors, is still sub specie futuri a Roman: his martyrdom is sacramentally both cause and prophecy of Rome’s Christianity and universal Christian mission. Still, we are not dealing with a straight line from Prudentius to Bukharin, and perhaps not with a line at all. Raymond d’Aguilers gives little sense of an interest in the conversion or redemption of an identifiable totality. Perhaps he was thinking of ‘the Franks’ or ‘Christendom’, but we hear hardly anything about the latter as a widely embracing ensemble. He mistrusted apostates from Islam to Christianity and Christian apostates who wanted to return to their original faith.131 He thought that the Dalmatians would either convert at the realization of the strength of Christ’s army, or be the objects of God’s Doom. He welcomed back a lightly toasted bishop Adhémar into the ranks of the pure, but did not look forward to an open human totality. For Raymond, if there was a totality, it was the totality of Christ and in Christ, now, on this day that had ‘emptied out all paganism’ with the bloody purge of the Holy City.132 His was not an optimistic, open universality comprising all or most or even many human beings. Such was not his concern.133 In the culture of the Christian and post-Christian West, when it came to martyrdom, there coexisted, thus, two ideal-typical configurations. The one was inclusive and universalistic; the other exclusive and sectarian. The former was more easily reconciled with nationalism and various forms of manifest destiny; the latter could dovetail with terroristic identities. Ideal-types, of course, for sectarian elitism could merge with the ideology of the vanguard and so rejoin universalism.

Christo dedita, | Laurentio victrix duce | ritum triumphans barbarum’. Constantine’s conversion is prophesied at vv. 473–84 (p. 46): ‘Video futurum principem [. . .]’. See as well the prayer for the urbs Romula, vv. 413–87. (pp. 44–46.). Thus this Vita verifies the second, inclusive or ‘gradational’ pattern described by Altman, ‘Two Types’, pp. 8–9. 131 See above, n. 97. 132 Benjamin Z. Kedar has convincingly argued, against recent scholarship, that the bloodshed at the July 1099 storming of the Muslim city was immense. See his ‘The Jerusalem Massacre of July 1099 in the Western Historiography of the Crusades,’ Crusades, 3 (2004), pp. 15–75. As I argued with reference to Biblical exegesis in ‘La vengeance de Dieu’, the understanding of the bloodbath was eschatological. 133 My thanks to Luc Ferrier for having articulated during the Paris discussion Raymond’s non-universalistic outlook.

From ‘Theotokos’ to ‘Mater Dolorosa’: Continuity and Change in the Images of Mary Miri Rubin

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e we students of music or images, of texts or architecture, we explore meanings that shaped lives. These were learnt habits — of mind or of body — which shaped experiences of individuals and communities in the past, of nations and even of continents. We conduct our historical explorations in a scholarly world that has absorbed the linguistic turn, the visual turn, and I hope we are now on our way to making the pre-modern world — so often silent — resonate with sound. The cultural turn was grounded in a strong interdisciplinary thrust, informed as it is by the questions and procedures of anthropology and ethnography, by the search for structure, and the awareness of the fragility of meaning. Cultural historians struggle with a propensity towards synchronic, horizontal, analysis — of ritual, of text, of kinship, of identity — and have traditionally been less adept at identifying and exploring change. I wish to share in a few sentences my own experience of attempting to understand change. One of the areas in European culture taken to be most immutable and persistent, hence one which is often treated a-historically, is that of attitudes to Jews, often anti-Judaism. Working on the Eucharist in the late-1980s I often came across exempla, visual imagery and historical accounts of confrontations — often bloody ones — that involved the accusation that Jews had abused the consecrated host. Hitherto such cases, if studied at all, had been treated — together with ritual murder accusations, and vituperation against Jewish usury — as part of a prevalent, ancient anti-Judaism which was as old as the relationship between Christians and Jews itself. For many scholars, students and readers, there was simply no explanandum — as if the essence of Christian-Jewish relations was one of conflict, and its various manifestations were as ancient as they were immutable. Yet a new type of narrative was being told about Jews in Europe from

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the later thirteenth century, one which was not known to Europeans of earlier generations. Here was a moment of inception, a cultural process to be observed closely by the historian; it embodied change yet soon became a new familiar reality, enacted in tens of cases of accusations and in hundreds of enunciations in sermons, imagery, and in the liturgies of Blutkapellen that memorialized the alleged abuse. Ritual, miracles, liturgy so often proclaim their venerable antiquity, their essential longevity. Historians have often shied away from exploring the messy and often obscure beginning, births. The host desecration accusation offered sufficient material to allow me to attempt a study of beginning, continuity and transformation through a single narrative prevalent in pre-modern Europe.1 Considering transformation is as challenging as is the study of elusive origins. When and how do we recognize the transformation of A into B? At what point has change dissolved the subject of inquiry beyond recognition in either linguistic-symbolic or social-functional terms. I shall attend to issues of change in the figure of the Virgin Mary. While cultural historians and historians of images enjoy iconographic analysis I shall explore unfolding transformation. Are the Syriac Mary and the Lady of Guadalupe meaningfully members of the same set? if so why and if not, why not? When is it useful to emphasize the family resemblance between them, and when their difference? Can both be done without collapse into confusion? * * * In what follows we shall examine a number of phases in the representation of the Virgin Mary, and seek to understand the relation between the cultural role — meaning — and its relation to visual form. The scriptural stories of Mary, of Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Taking Refuge in Egypt, are told in some degrees of variation by the synoptic gospels. But these accounts, recorded by the followers of Jesus, based on some eye-witnesses, have little to say about Mary.2 Yet Mary inspired questions and these were answered; by the early second century written accounts, preserved in papyri, offer the earliest versions of a gospel-like account of Mary’s life. This 1 Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 2 For an interesting theological discussion of Mary in the gospels see Cleo McNelly Kearns, The Virgin Mary, Monotheism, and Sacrifice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); for a thematic analysis of the biblical texts see Mary Foskett, Virgin Conceived: Mary and Classical Representations of Virginity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

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came to be known in the sixteenth century as the Protogospel of James.3 It provided Mary with a life fitting for the mother of a God, with respectable parents of high social standing. Yet Joachim and Anne had no children, and suffered pain and derision for this lack, until the day of an annunciation, which heralded the forthcoming birth of a remarkable daughter.4 Mary’s infancy was carefully guarded and she was nurtured as someone pure and unique.5 At the age of three Mary was offered to the Temple, and this was her first foray into the world. Delightful and gracious she expressed her elevated spirit in a dance on the steps leading up to the Temple, where she lived until the onset of puberty. The high priest Zachariah was directed by a vision to entrust Mary to the care of the elderly Joseph. The author(s) of the Protogospel of James strove above all to endow Mary with a respectable lineage, a pure physical and spiritual beginning; to make her fit for the mission of her adulthood, when she bore the God incarnate. There is little mention of Mary from the times before the Roman Empire — with its Greek and Latin parts — first acknowledged and then adopted and encouraged Christian ideas and practices. She was sometimes mentioned in polemical exchanges between Jews and Christians, and was inserted into a growing tradition of parodic treatment by Jewish writers. Most creative attention emerged early from the large communities of Syriac Christians, whose members were in many cases of Jewish origins, from the cities of Mesopotamia. In this tradition Mary was considered pure and ethereal, close to the workings of the Holy Spirit that ‘overshadowed’ her. This spirituality produced a powerful poetry which made ethereal, sublimated the more carnal aspects of Mary’s experience as mother. Some of the finest in this tradition are the poems of Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306–73). He infused into thinking about Mary the power of contradiction: Mary was above all the antithesis to Eve. Since Eve’s destiny was to bear children in pain, Mary bore her own son without suffering: Your womb escaped the pangs of the curse. By means of the serpent came the pains of the female; Shamed be the Foul one, on seeing that his pangs Are not found in your womb!6 3

New Testament Apocrypha, ed. by Wilhelm Schneemelcher and trans. by R. McL. Wilson, 2 vols (Cambridge: James Clarke; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991–92), i, pp. 421–39. On date and origins see Émile de Strycker, La Forme la plus ancienne du Protévangile de Jacques (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1961), pp. 419–23. 4 New Testament Apocrypha, Protogospel of James, 4. 1–2, pp. 427–28. 5 New Testament Apocrypha, Protogospel of James, 4. 2–8. 1, pp. 428–29. 6 Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns, trans. by Kathleen McVey (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1989), Hymn 24, pp. 366–68 (p. 368).

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At the same time within the Imperial sphere emanating from Constantinople Once Christianity was adopted by the imperial family — Constantine and as importantly his mother Helena — Mary was situated within the official formulations of Christian faith. The Council of Nicaea 325 appended to its circular letter to bishops: For He is the express image, not of the will or of anything else, but of His Father’s very substance. This Son, the divine Logos, having been born in flesh from Mary the Mother of God and made incarnate, having suffered and died, rose again from the dead and was taken up into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Majesty most high, and will come to judge the living and the dead.7

This seminal formulation of the essence of Christian faith refers to Mary in whom God was made incarnate. Helena, Constantine’s mother, made this recognition of Mary’s role into something more tangible. Embarking on the founding expedition of Christian archaeology, she sought to identify in the Holy Land the places and remains which bore witness to Christian History. She had basilicas built in Nazareth, the site of the Annunciation to Mary, in Bethlehem, where Mary bore her son, and on the site of Golgotha, where Mary’s son died on the Cross.8 She also identified the Cross itself, the focus of intense fascination to Europeans throughout the medieval centuries to come. In other parts of the Empire thinkers and community leaders such as Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria (c. 293–373) and Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan (c. 337–90) developed the figure of Mary into a figure of example and guidance. In Egypt and in Italy both saw the potential of a figure of maternal purity and virtue, as they sought to guide the women under their care, some only recent converts, towards a fulfilling Christian life. We have no visual traces from this period to indicate the way in which Mary was imagined as yet, but the language used was one of holy bridehood, using the legacy of the Song of Songs, available for Christian use thanks to the work of Origen (c. 185–254) a century earlier. Coptic writers elaborated the early stories of Mary’s life from the Protogospel of James for their audience: She was pure in her body and her soul, she never put her face outside the door of the Temple, she never looked at a strange man, and she never moved herself to gaze upon the face of a young man.9 7

J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1960), p. 210. J. W. Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross (Leiden: Brill, 1992), pp. 56–57, 63–67, 70–71. 9 Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (London: Faber, 1989), p. 273; Miscellaneous Coptic Texts in the Dialect of Upper Egypt, ed. by E. A. W. Budge (London: British Museum, 1915), p. 655. 8

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The earliest surviving images of Mary, from the sixth century, reflect the form inspired by imperial dignity: Mary was the Mother of a God, described in the language of majesty. The earliest surviving visual representations depict her just so: formal, facing forward, adorned with courtly garb, unwavering. Mary was often seated with her son in her lap, and this relationship was one which had prompted debate and polemic in fifth-century Constantinople. The question that had arisen around the usages of the city’s preachers was whether Mary was rightly called Mother of God (θεοτόκος, theotokos), or not, in which case she was properly Mother of Man (ανθροποτόκος, anthropotokos). Nestor, Patriarch of Constantinople, suggested ‘Christotokos’ — she who bore Christ — a solution which was acceptable to many. But when a preacher promoted by Nestor (381–451) opined with less subtlety: ‘Let no one call Mary theotokos. For Mary was human and it is impossible for God to be born of a human’,10 the capital was torn by conflict. Proclus, a priest of Constantinople, who was closely associated with the emperor’s sisters, captured the emergent sense of Mary’s exaltation in his sermons which set a new standard for Mary’s abundant praise. On the Festival of the Virgin in 430, Proclus’s words were emphatic: Mary had contained Christ’s two natures, or more, and these were produced within her body: She who has called us here today is the Holy Mary; the untarnished vessel of virginity; the spiritual paradise of the second Adam; the workshop of the union of natures; the market-place of the contract of salvation; the bridal chamber in which the Word took the flesh in marriage; the living bush of human nature, which the fire of a divine birth-pang did not consume.11

The polemic over the appropriate honour and appellation due to Mary was so deep that it prompted Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria to involve Pope Celestine of Rome, and ultimately led to the summoning of a council. Theodosius II called the imperial clergy to the ancient city of Ephesus at Pentecost 431. The difference was above all between the eastern, Syrian bishops, who — like Nestor — preferred modest emphasis on Mary’s involvement, and the position which favoured the involvement of Mary in all aspects of Christ’s dual nature. The Syrian bishops were delayed on their way to the council, and when they 10

T. E. Gregory, Vox populi: Popular Opinion and Violence in the Religious Controversies of the Fifth Century (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), pp. 88–89. 11 Nicholas Constas, Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: Homilies 1–5, Texts and Translations (Brill: Leiden, 2003), Homily 1, pp. 137–56 (p. 137, lines 15–20). The Festival of the Virgin had been recently established in Constantinople in conjunction with the Nativity, see ibid, pp. 56–57.

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arrived they found a city under ‘Egyptian’ domination. Alexandrine bishops embroidered the figure of Mary with rhetorical skill: Mary the Theotokos, the holy ornament of all the universe, the unquenchable lamp, the crown of virginity, the sceptre, the container of the uncontainable, mother and virgin.12

Cyril of Alexandria did all he could to secure the resolution made at Ephesus in the practices of the imperial court and the sympathies of the imperial family. Once, following Nestor’s demise, Proclus became Patriarch of Constantinople, the capital’s churches resounded with homilies in praise of Mary. Theotokos had become part of state religion and the rituals related to it; it also appealed to the virtuous femininity of the imperial women: Pulcheria, Eudoxia, and Arcadia. Yet throughout the Empire there was still disagreement over the appropriate manner of understanding Christ’s nature(s) and the related question of the debt he owed to his human mother. In 451 at the council which met at Chalcedon, near Constantinople, Latin and Greek representatives finally resolved that Christ was of two natures, but that these were never separate. And so the official statement of faith articulated Mary’s role in Incarnation, too: our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational souls and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity; like us in all respects except for sin; begotten before the ages from the Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days the same for us and for our salvation from Mary, the virgin God-bearer, as regards his humanity.13

The churches of Constantinople housed some of Mary’s physical remains — her robe, her girdle; they also came to house the artefacts through which was defined the prevalent mode of depicting Mary — the icon.14 One of the best known is an icon probably made in Constantinople for the monastery of St Katherine in the Sinai desert: in it Mary is enthroned, with the Christ child on her lap, and flanked by St George and St Theodore in sumptuous court dress with two angels hovering above. Mary is dark-eyed, her features as strongly drawn. This type of representation affected the work of Syriac artists too, as on the title page of the 12

Gregory, Vox populi, p. 105. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols (London: Sheed and Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), i, p. *86; on the debate see also Henry Chadwick, East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church, from Apostolic Times until the Council of Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 40–49. 14 L. Brubaker, ‘Introduction: The sacred image’, in The Sacred Image East and West, ed. by R. Ousterhout and L. Brubaker, Illinois Byzantine Studies, 4 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 1–24 (esp. p. 9). 13

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Book of Proverbs in a sixth-century Syriac Bible, where Mary stands between Solomon to her right and a personification of the Church: a woman dressed in white and cloaked in red, carrying a book and cross.15 Her dress is sumptuous court attire, with red shoes, and cloak, her head-gear resembling that of Mary of the Sinai icon. But she is also carrying her raison d’être, for all to see: her son in her open womb. Egyptian Christians favoured Mary as the breast-feeding mother, not unlike the figure of Isis which had been so widely favoured in the Mediterranean from the second century bce. This legacy seems to have facilitated the reception of Mary’s motherhood, and to inspire in Egyptian Christians a desire to see the mother nurturing her son at the breast. In the monastic complex at Bawit several images show Mary suckling her son (see Plate 1, p. 71).16 The fragile remains of a papyrus from Antinoe capture a gentle image of mother feeding son. The figures are drawn in dark ink: Mary and child each have a halo on which traces of gold colouring can be identified. The position is frontal: Mary holds the child in her left and places her breast in its mouth.17 In the Temple of Derr (some 200 km south of Aswan) a church was created between the temple columns; it was dedicated to the Theotokos, as the Coptic inscription on a stone makes clear: ‘I am Moses, servant of the Holy Theotokos Mary. May those who read these lines, be so good and pray for me.’18 Mary’s image was one of majestic authority and unrivalled purity. She was thus a fitting subject for monastic devotion and around her developed elaborate liturgies of praise. Her presence in Constantinople grew in meaning and power 15

Paris BNF Cod. Syr. 341, fol. 118r ; on it see Die syrische Bibel von Paris: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, syr. 341: eine frühchristliche Bilderhandschrift aus dem 6. Jahrhundert, ed. R. Sörries (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1991), fig. 8 and H. Belting and G. Cavallo, Die Bibel des Niketas: ein Werk der höfischen Buchkunst in Byzanz und sein antikes Vorbild (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1979), p. 36. 16 P. P. V. van Moorsel, ‘Die stillende Gottesmutter und die Monophysiten’, in Kunst und Geschichte Nubiens in christlicher Zeit: Ergebnisse und Probleme auf Grund der jüngsten Ausgrabungen, ed. by E. Dinkler (Recklinghausen: Bongers, 1970), pp. 281–90; and P. M. du Bourget, Coptic Art, trans. by Caryll Hay-Shaw (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 53; see image no. 285 facing p. 281 and room 30, pl. xliii. 17 V. Bartoletti, ‘La Madonna con il bambino in un papiro copto di Antinoe’, Studi in onore di Luisa Banti (Rome: ‘L’Erma’ di Bretschneider, 1953), pp. 29–31; A. Pesarino, ‘Contributo allo sudio del tipo della Virgo lactans: il papiro PSI XV 1574 dell’Istituto Papirologico G. Vitelli di Firenze’, Latomus, 59 (2000), 640–46. Professor Bastianini, Director of the Istituto Papirologico G. Vitelli in Florence, kindly provided me with advice and literature about this papyrus. 18 P. P. P. van Moorsel, ‘Die stillende Gottesmutter und die Monophysiten’; and P. M. du Bourget, Coptic Art, p. 53.

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as she proved her willingness and ability to defend the city against its many enemies. During the Avar siege of Constantinople in 626 an image of Mary was raised by Patriarch Sergius on the city walls; and the city was saved. Strings of prayers were offered to Mary by cohorts of vigilant monks, who literally prayed all night long in the imperial church of the Blachernae. The akathistos tradition was thus born, a unique hymnody of praise and thanks led by disciplined holy men and attended by lay folk: To you, our leader in battle and defender, O Theotokos, I, your city, delivered from sufferings, Ascribe hymns of victory and thanksgiving. Since you are invincible in power, Free me from all kinds of dangers, That I may cry to you: ‘Hail, bride unwedded’. 19

The image of Mary radiated from the eastern Mediterranean where the Theotokos received attention in liturgy, theology, hymnody, and devotional images. The western emperors moved their capital to Milan and then to Ravenna, and on this new terrain a religious-political order was created. They did not lead, but clearly absorbed themes of imperial dignity from the east. The main thrust of Ravennan piety was directed towards its very own martyr — Vitalis — alongside other martyrs like Vincent of Saragossa and Stephen the first martyr. In the late fifth century Mary was noted too, now Theotokos, in a chapel adjacent to the great church of Santa Croce. Mary’s part in the imperial building of Ravenna was small, and this held true throughout the western empire, throughout the area we now call Europe: early medieval devotional experience centred on martyrs and their remains, in the cemeteries of suburban churches, outside city walls. There the remains of martyrs, once cherished in furtive and dangerous worship, now formed the foundations for churches and chapels, some official and others built by pious and prosperous Christians. In Rome, the Empire’s second capital, Mary was accorded similar imperial dignity. The first church in Mary’s honour was built just around the time of the council of Ephesus. Pope Sixtus III (432–40) completed the work of his predecessor in the building and ornamentation of Santa Maria Maggiore.20 The Temple of the Pantheon was rededicated as the church of St Mary and All Saints in 609. Mary’s worship flourished in Rome in new and exciting ways around themes of protection offered by miraculous images of Mary. One of the walls of Santa 19

Leena Mari Peltomaa, The Image of the Virgin Mary in the Akathistos Hymn (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 3. 20 Gerhard Wolf, Salus Populi Romani: Die Geschichte römischer Kultbilder im Mittelalter (Weinheim: VCH Acta Humaniora, 1990), pp. 161–70.

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Maria Antiqua is covered with layers of paint applied by artists between the sixth and eighth centuries, and these create a highly ornate and majestic Mary and child, attended by angels and servers. One of three representations of Mary in this church shows her enthroned, dressed like a Byzantine princess, seated with her son.21 By the later eighth century the title Maria Regina was given to this type of presentation. Rome continued to foster the visual representation of Mary even during those decades of the seventh and eighth centuries when the Byzantine devotional policy had turned against such images. These years also saw the composition of the responsory Gaude Maria — Mary, Rejoice — for the office of the Annunciation. Its words invoke Mary as the enemy of heretics and protector of the true faith: Rejoice, Mary the Virgin, You have destroyed all heresies When you believed in the words said by Gabriel When you bore God and man And remained after birth an inviolate Virgin.

To which the versicle answers: We believe that the archangel Gabriel was sent to you divinely. We believe that your womb was impregnated by the Holy Spirit. May the unhappy Jew blush, who says that Christ Was born of Joseph’s seed.22

Rome was sending its missionaries west and north — to Kent, Northumbria, Frisia, where there were pagans to be converted. Ivories and fabrics, coins and pilgrim badges, mosaics and wooden icons all represented the figure of Mary as solemn, usually enthroned, always majestic, dressed in dignified finery. Further north in the kingdoms which developed in parts of the erstwhile empire, knowledge of Mary was mediated through these eastern artefacts. The European Christianity which was developing there was above all a cult of warriors and heroes, among martyrs, holy men, and courageous virgins. The pilgrims, ambassadors, merchants, and marriage retinues that travelled between East and West in the early medieval centuries bore testimony to the height and solem21

Liz James, Empresses and Power in Early Byzantium (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), p. 143. 22 ‘R.Gaude Maria Virgo, Cunctas haereses sola intermisti Quae Gabrielis archangeli dictis credidisti; Dum Virgo Deum et hominem genuisti, Et post partum Virgo inviolata permansisti. V. Gabrielem archangelum credimus divinitus tibi esse affatum, Uterum tuum de Spiritu Sancto credimus impregnatum. Erubescat Judaeus infelix, qui dicit Christum Ex Joseph semine esse natum.’ For the text and analysis see Louis Brou, ‘Marie “Destructrice de toutes les heresies” et la belle légende du répons Gaude maria virgo’, Ephemerides liturgicae, 62 (1948), 321–53; cited from pp. 321–22.

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nity of worship accorded to Mary, not least in the stories and images which recounted Mary’s end. By the year 500 there were tens of versions in several languages, of the story of Mary’s end, not a death, but a falling asleep (dormitio, koimisis), followed by an assumption to heaven.23 The narratives of Mary’s death were occasions for singing her praises; it was her unique virtue, after all, that won her a place alongside her son, in heaven. Imagining Mary in heaven led Christians to appreciate her power to intercede on their behalf, and encouraged a continuing elaboration of Mary’s majesty and dignity, in keeping with the existing traditions of depiction.

Mary in Europe around the Millennium Within the centres of European cultural production — religious houses of many orders and rules — Europeans were developing their own ways of approaching Mary. They were greatly influenced by the examples of Byzantine words and artefacts, and were also aware of the flimsy origins of the much cherished stories of her life. The canoness Hrotsvit is a good example, for she found the library of her own religious house at Gandersheim around 935 to contain sufficient materials for the composition of a Life of Mary from her birth to the flight to Egypt. Hrotsvit was a highly privileged woman; she was cousin of Emperor Otto I, himself an enthusiast for Mary. She re-worked the history of Mary’s early life in the Protogospel of James into a joyous poem. The ceremony at which Mary was named, eight days after her birth, as an occasion for delight in the birth of a daughter: Joachim pouring forth prayers to God said: ‘Thou, King of heaven, Who alone dost name the stars, deign to indicate in a heavenly manner by some brilliant sign the name of this tender babe.’ When he had said this, a mighty voice sounded suddenly from on high, commanding that the name Mary be bestowed upon the chosen child. ‘Stella Maris’ as our Latin tongue has it! Fittingly was this name upon the holy child.24 23

Stephen J. Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 24 ‘Quis Ioachim preculas fudit presentibus istas: ‘Rex caeli, stellis solus qui nomina ponis, Istius tenere nomen dignare puelle Caelitus indiciis per te monstrare coruscis’ Dixerat, et subito sonuit vox ab alto Mandans egregiam Mariam vocitare puellam, “Stella maris” lingua quod consonat ergo latina; Hoc nomen merito sortitur sancta puella.’ Hrotsvit, Opera omnia, ed. by Walter Berschin, Bibliotheca Tuebneriana (Munich and Leipzig: Suar, 2001), p. 13, lines 270–77. Translation from Gonsalva Wiegand, ‘The Non-Dramatic Works of Hrosvitha: Text, Translation, and Commentary’ (PhD dissertation, Saint Louis University, 1936), pp. 28–29.

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The aristocratic Hrotsvit imagined the pride Mary brought to her family; she thus maintained Mary’s dignity, but humanized it too. She embroidered Mary’s life into a delightful narrative of aristocratic and privileged youth. Alongside the joy in Mary’s early life there was solemn consideration of her end, in keeping with the image of the Dormition disseminated so widely from the East. The idea of Mary’s movement from earth to heaven was particularly attractive as an occasion for reflecting on the order of the Christian cosmos. She passed from humans to heaven, through ranks of angels, and linked the two. The Assumption was a reassuring moment, and it was often painted in the illuminated books of great religious houses of the Holy Roman Empire. In the Reichenau book of tropes, of c. 1001, heaven and earth were linked at the scene of the Dormition, by the Assumption of Mary’s soul — portrayed by a bust of the Virgin within a medallion — lifted by angels towards God’s awaiting hand.25 In that house’s book of collects of c. 1010–30 the Dormition and Assumption are portrayed on facing folios; at the Dormition Christ lifts the soul towards the angels, while gazing at his mother lovingly; on the right Mary is assumed to heaven within a medallion carried by angels and drawn up by God’s own hand.26 The Crucifixion scene of Bishop Bernward’s Gospel Book of c. 1015 has Mary and John: tears run down her cheeks, presaging the intense interest in Mary’s suffering at the foot of the cross, which was to develop in the following centuries.27 Around the year 1000 the women’s monastery of Essen commissioned a most sumptuous Mary, of a new kind: a gilt statue of Mary — seated with her son on her lap — Mary in the round, holding an orb, or is it an apple? In this prestigious and rich religious house, which was home to women of the imperial household — granddaughters of Henry II, and the Byzantine princess Theophanu (960–91), wife of Otto II — Mary was realized as patron, but also as intimate companion. Just as Theotokos had been born through the effort of imperial women, so was this shimmering Golden Mary — the Goldene Madonna (see Plate 2, p. 72). This shimmering statue was unique, but it foretold the transformation of Mary which was under way. As Mary became a central preoccupation of those who lived the monastic life, so she came to be explored as a nurturing mother and sympathetic friend. The liturgy and art, prayer and miracle tales of the monastic world, disseminated the concerns of monks and nuns far beyond the 25 Henry Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination: An Historical Study, 2 vols (London: Harvey Miller, 1999), i, colour plate xxii. 26 Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination, colour plates xix–xv. 27 Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination, figure 57, p. 103.

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monastery walls. These houses lived in proximity to aristocartic donors, they educated people, men who then went into the world; they produced the art and literature by which lay people — usually people of privilege and note — lived some parts of their lives. Monastic movements which emphasized contemplation and personal prayer dedicated a great deal of thought to Mary, and thus made her anew. By the year 1200 Mary was deemed by some Europeans to be immaculate in her purity and born without sin, while others saw in Mary’s purity the touchstone for good membership in the Christian body. Mary was the object of enhanced liturgical attention and intense prayer. Her intimacy with Jesus was imagined as a powerful bond of mother and son. Being of a shared physical substance, they enjoyed incomparable closeness, and so the son could refuse his mother nothing. A late-eleventh-century rhymed prayer from the region of Beauvais in northern France claimed this confidently: Whatever you wish Your only son will give you. For whomever you seek You will have pardon and glory.28

This quality elevated Mary above other saints and rendered her uniquely effective. Composers of prayers imagined sinners expressing their sense of revulsion and horror, as in this popular prayer, known from a Psalter of Moissac abbey, of 1075: O blessed and most saintly Mary, always Virgin, I am thus afflicted in the face of your goodness, I am greatly confused by the abominations of my sins which have made me deformed and horrible in the yes of angels and all saints.29

The world of monastic liturgy, penance, and prayer was accompanied in the eleventh century also by innovative reflection on the Incarnation. Probably the most influential thinker was Anselm (c. 1033–1109), monk, theologian, and at the end of his life Archbishop of Canterbury. Partly answer to Jewish objection, partly a contribution to a scholarly debate in the schools, Anselm argued in his Cur Deus Homo (c. 1094–98) for the ‘necessity’ of the Incarnation, God made 28

‘Quod voles, unigenitus, | Donabit tibi Filius; | Pro quibus uoles ueniam | Impetrabis et gloriam.’ Anima mea: Prières privées et textes de dévotion du Moyen Âge latin: Autour des Prières ou méditations attribuées à saint Anselme de Cantorbéry (XI e –XII e siècle), ed. Jean-François Cottier (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), p. 144, lines 13–16. 29 ‘O beatissima et sanctissima Virgo semper Maria, ecce asto maerens ante faciem pietatis tuae, et confundor nimis pro abominationibus peccatorum [sic] meorum quibus deformis factus sum et horribilis angelis et omnibus sanctis.’ Anima mea, p. 230, lines 1–3.

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Plate 1 Egyptian representation of Mary as a mother feeding her son at the breast,

in a manner reminiscent of statues of the goddess Isis. (Antinoe Papyrus, PSI XV 1574; 10 × 10.5 cm. © Istituto Papirologico G. Vitelli, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy, Trismegistis no. 68875).

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Plate 2 Golden Madonna made for the aristocratic women attached to Essen

cathedral around the year 1000. (Essen, Domstift; 74 cm high, on a pedestal 27 cm high. © Ullsteinbild/Topfoto).

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Plate 3 Madonna and Child. 1370s, Paolo di Giovanni Fei, Tempera on wood,

gold ground, Overall, with engaged frame, 34 1/4 × 23 1/4 in. (87 × 59.1 cm); painted surface 27 × 16 7/ 8 in. (68.6 × 42.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of George Blumenthal, 1941 (41. 190. 13). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Plate 4 Pitié de Notre Seigneur, dit ‘la grande Piétà ronde’ MI692, Malouel Jean

(connu à partir de 1397–1415) (attribué à), Paris, Musée du Louvre, © RMN/Jean-Gilles Berizzi.

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Flesh, in order to redeem humanity.30 Mary was a necessary part of that necessary Incarnation. Anselm had earlier in life already contemplated Mary in his prayers, and had reflected on her Immaculate Conception, which made her fitting for the task of bearing Christ.31 In Anselm were combined the ecclesiological and theological emphasis, which had characterized the early formulations on Mary in councils of the church, with an affective engagement with her in prayer, in penance, and in meditation. Monks, nuns, and scholars in cathedrals learned about Mary from the routines of liturgical celebration, and this was a time of great creativity and of abundant new writing. Fulbert of Chartres (952/62–1028/9) was a scholar and bishop who ruled a cathedral where an important relic of Mary — her tunic — was the centre of cult and pilgrimage.32 Fulbert explored the Incarnation — the God made flesh — through enthusiastic attention to Mary. He poured theological insight into his liturgical compositions, and thus enlivened Mary’s place in the cathedral’s life. He deemed the feast of Mary’s Nativity — 8 September — to be a reason to do so and composed for it tropes inspired by the liturgy for the Assumption. In his responsory Stirps Jesse (the root, or stock of Jesse), he elaborated for Mary a genealogy, based on Isaiah’s prophecy (11. 1–2): Responsory

The stock of Jesse produced a rod, and the rod a flower, and upon that flower rests the nourishing spirit.

Versicle The rod is the virgin mother, the flower her son. And upon this flower rests the nourishing spirit.33

This responsory quickly spread through Europe and influenced new compositions. Mary was being amplified in European religious houses and churches as a mother within a family, as an intercessor, and as a human who ratified the divine. The closeness to Jesus meant for some thinkers a likeness that required Mary to be different from other humans. Mary was imagined as being ‘immac30

Richard W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 197–211. 31 Rachel Fulton, ‘Praying with Anselm at Admont: A Meditation on Practice’, Speculum, 81 (2006), 700–33; and eadem, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 218–43; Southern, Saint Anselm, pp. 106–09. 32 E. Jane Burns, ‘Saracen Silk and the Virgin’s Chemise: Cultural Crossings in Cloth’, Speculum, 81 (2006), 365–97 (esp. p. 366). 33 ‘R. Stirps Jesse virgam produxit, uirgaque florem, Et super hunc florem requiescit spiritus almus. V. Virgo dei genitrix virga est, flos filius eius. Et super hunc florem requescit spiritus almus. Margot Fassler, ‘Mary’s Nativity, Fulbert of Chartres, and the Stirps Jesse: Liturgical Innovation circa 1000 and its Afterlife’, Speculum, 75 (2000), 389–434 (p. 421).

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ulately’ born, that is without the stain of original sin at her conception. The theological debate moved between the belief that she had never been touched by sin to an assertion that she has been cleared of such a taint through a special gift of grace. While some English cathedrals — Winchester and Canterbury — chose to celebrate a feast of Mary’s Conception, many — among them Bernard of Clairvaux — opposed this position, arguing instead for Mary’s common humanity, in virtue and faith. In 1139 he wrote to the Cathedral of Lyon, where a celebration of the Feast of the Conception had been instituted; his criticism of the novelty is matched by his exultation of Mary: The Virgin has many true titles to honour, many real marks of dignity, and does not need any that are false. Let us honour her for the purity of her body and the holiness of her life. Let us marvel at her fruitful virginity, and venerate her divine Son.34

As Europeans reflected on the nature of that humanity, Mary was emerging as a body marked by the birth and nurture of her son. The visionary, theologian, and composer Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) created liturgical poetry which imagined the Incarnation passionately and which embraced Mary’s body as no other poet had done. The incarnation was like a symphony played in Mary’s womb, as in the hymn, Ave generosa: For your womb held joy, when all the celestial harmony resounded from you, for, virgin, you bore the Son of God when your chastity grew radiant in God. [. . .] Now let the whole Church flush with joy and resound in harmony for the sake of the most tender Virgin and praiseworthy Mary, the bearer of God. Amen.35 34

The Letters of Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. by Bruno Scott-James, new edn (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), letter no. 215, pp. 289–93 (p. 290). 35 ‘Venter enim tuus gaudium havuit, | cum omnis celestis symphonia de te sonuit, | quia, Virgo, Filium Dei portasti, | ubi castitas tua in Deo claruit. [. . .] Nunc omnis Ecclesia in gaudio rutilet | ac in symphonia sonet | propter dulcissima Virginem | et laudabilem Mariam, dei Genitricem. Amen.’ Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia: A Critical Edition of the Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum, ed. by Barbara Newman, 2nd edn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 122–23, see also p. 275.

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Mary’s womb resounded in her body like a musical instrument which Hildegard celebrated in song.36 The new order of Cistercian monks emphasized simplicity of living, purity of purpose and long meditative spells. Within it developed a particular attachment to Mary as protector of sinners, often imagined as a mother protecting sinners under her cloak. The encouragement in the course of the thirteenth century of a vigorous pastoral programme which was aimed at all Europeans and was delivered in thousands of urban and rural parishes in the vernacular entailed the introduction of new registers of meaning to the image of Mary. The details of Mary’s relationship with her son were conveyed in colour and wood, in sculpture or in the words of a sermon. Mary gave her son life, and like all parents and offspring they shared a substance, the body and its many dispositions. The closeness and the increasing sense of parity between Jesus and Mary depended greatly on their bodily intimacy, on imagined lulling and endearments, which trip off the mother’s tongue. Matthew Paris (1200–59) offered as illustration to his Greater Chronicle (Chronica Majora) a page depicting three versions of Christ’s head: above, Mary and Christ as Child; below left, the suffering face of the crucified Christ with closed eyes; and on the bottom right, a frontal and serene resurrected Christ.37 Mother and Son all but merge into one in each of the scenes, made of same flesh tones, adorned by similarly jewelled collars, very close and very involved with each other. This is the result of the transformation which we have been exploring: the imaginative leap towards the figure of Mary and her Child. Mary emerges in the twelfth-century monasteries as an austere companion and protector, and in the thirteenth, as full of affective energy.38 Artists of the thirteenth century experimented with the many ways in which mother and son might be represented in contact, and they did so by exploring movement, posture, and play. Mary and her son are no longer static and majestic; they touched and smiled and gestured towards each other. In northern France and thence England classical ideas about bodily form and facial beauty were combined to produce the epitome 36

On these themes see Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture, 1150–1400: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 105–13, and musical example 1. 37 Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora, California Studies in the History of Art, 21 (Aldershot: Scolar Press in collaboration with Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 1987), frontispiece. 38 See Miri Rubin, Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Cultures (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009), Chapter 3.

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Figure 1 Polyptyque: La Vierge et l’Enfant et des scènes de l’Enfance du Christ:

Annonciation, Visitation, Naissance du Christ, Adoration des Rois mages, Présentation au Temple. 2e quart du 14e siècle. Paris. Musée du Louvre. © RMN/Daniel Arnaudet

of Gothic grace — the S-shaped Mary and Child (see Figure 1). The influence of this model was widespread; it first reached England and northern Europe, and ultimately affected the style of Italian — especially Sienese, and Bohemian art too. In these groups drapery enveloped Mary’s body which hinted at her fecundity, emphasized the volume and life of her parts, celebrated her youth and beauty, and hinted at something beyond.

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The breast encompasses all sense experiences, and so much that humans learn is approached at the breast. In his Life of Mary (Marienleben), the poet Werner the Swiss imagined some of Jesus’s feelings at Mary’s breasts: Two noble dates, little apples, sweet and fair: God saw them and came thither in search of sustenance took them at once in his mouth with joy: Thus his love was set on fire. I mean, if I may praise it, your noble breast, full of grace, beautiful . . . for it was his desire to kiss it, he nestled against it, suckled it with joy and entered your womb: Wherefore your praise will always be great!39

Other poets expressed fantasies of love which are tantamount to union with the mother. Frauenlob’s (c. 1250–1318) Song of Songs has the lovers in the cellar, sharing the wine of bliss, together with sweet milk: Tell no lie, never try, to deny: You alone were meeting With the king In his cellar — You knew his greeting You felt his touch. How much, Fair maid, did you dally? We do not envy the wine of bliss You drank there with sweet, sweet milk.40 39

‘Zwen edel dattil, apfel klain, | Suss und clar: | Der got nam war | Und kam aldar | Durch libes nar, | Nam sú zestund | Insinen munt | Mit froden funt: | Da von sin minne wart erzunt. | Ich main, ob ich es prisen sol, | Din edeln brúst gnade vol [. . .] Wan in gelust | Das er si kust. | Sich dar an smog, | Mit luste sog, | Und leite sich indine schoss: | Da von din lop ist iemer gross!’ Translation from Timothy R. Jackson, ‘Erotic Imagery in Medieval Spiritual Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Metaphor’, in Metaphor and Rational Discourse (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997), pp. 113–24 (p. 121, n. 20). 40 ‘Nu lougen nicht durch icht der schicht, daz dich | sunderlich | der künig in sinen keler furt. | durch rurte | sin grüzen. | wie nu, ver meit, hat ir iuch wol versunnen? | wir gunnen | der wunnen | iu wol, daz ir den win habt getrunken | mit der milch so süzen.’

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Such word pictures and related visual representations situated mother and child at the centre of much devotional practice and personal experience. Images of the child at his mother’s breast were clear manifestations of the Incarnation, of God made flesh, become like other infants. Indeed, the Madonna of Humility type, with Mary and her child seated on the ground, presented the Incarnation as an act of self-offering, through the humble stance of both mother and son.41 Here too was an occasion for the mobilization of human experience into religious experience. Here was an invitation to exploration of emotions and affinities of kinship. Mary, with the son at her breast, was like every mother. Some artists strove to make the family resemblance clear (see Plate 3, p. 73). If we can identify anxiety in some images of Mary and her son, this is because his end had been foretold. Alongside the image of Mary as loving mother to an infant, the images of the mother at the foot of the cross, or the mother mourning over her son — the Pietà (see Plate 4, p. 74). A parity developed between the suffering of Christ and Mary’s dolorous witness; the two were often situated side by side, equal in size and dignity. Mary’s feelings were explored in the later medieval centuries with more detail and imagination than ever before. For many believers Mary’s grief offered a focus for rich devotional lives. Confraternities in many European cities developed modes of enactment of Mary’s laments at the foot of the cross, of her exchanges with the Jews or with her son.42 The images of the early motherhood with a lively child at her breast only served to make the older Mary, of the Passion, more deeply moving. A transformation has clearly occurred over a thousand years, from the poised and possessed Mary, to Mary overcome.

Frauenlob’s Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and his Masterpiece, trans. by Barbara Newman (University Park: Penn State Press, 2007), no. 4, pp. 8–9. 41 See the authoritative and well-presented arguments in Beth Williamson, The Madonna of Humility, Development, Dissemination and Reception, c. 1340–1400 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009). 42 On the roots of the music and drama of confraternities see Eyolf Østrem and Nils Holger Petersen, Medieval Ritual and Early Modern Music: The Devotional Practice of Lauda Singing in Late-Renaissance Italy, Ritus et artes, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), esp. Chapters 1 and 2; see also Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 249–55.

Altering the Sacred Face Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen

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hrough most of the Middle Ages new centres of pilgrimage rose in popularity while others slowly declined. Some of the most renowned sites such as Santiago de Compostela and many of the shrines in Rome remained popular throughout the period; amongst these major pilgrimage sites we find the Italian city of Lucca in Tuscany, where the so-called Il Volto Santo — the Holy Face — was kept. This crucifix, which according to legend was partially carved by the hands of angels, became the focal point of devotional attention from the eleventh century onwards with the feast known as the Luminara on 13 September as the yearly high point of the cult.1 In fact the popularity of the site led to the fabrication of numerous replicas of the sacred sculpture and the cult of the Volto Santo spread through large parts of Europe. The crucifix found its way into Dante’s Commedia where demons cry ‘The Holy Face is not here for thee’ (‘Qui non ha luogo il Santo Volto’) to a sinner from Lucca in Inferno.2 Shrines dedicated to the Tuscan relic could even be found as far away as small Danish village churches in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. But the story of the Volto Santo had further implications. During the spread of the devotional cult of the crucifix from the south to the north of Europe, its legend was fused with an enigmatic female saint. The name of this saint has varied greatly, but today she is usually recognized under such names as St Virgo fortis, St Wilgefortis, and St Ontkommer in the Netherlands, as St Uncumber 1

For a recent description of medieval Lucca, see M. E. Bratchel, Medieval Lucca and the Evolution of the Renaissance State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 2 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, xxi. 48; trans. by John D. Sinclair in The Divine Comedy: 1: Inferno, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 262–63.

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in England, in post-medieval Spain as St Liberata, and in Germany as St Kümmernis, the latter name being the one used in this article. in North Germany and Scandinavia, the Volto Santo figure became known under yet another name: St Helper.3 In its own right the cult of St Kümmernis became very popular in the late Middle Ages, in some areas even extending its popularity far into the eighteenth century. The fusion of the Italian crucifix and the saint meant that the interpretation of the Volto Santo copies appears to have changed from perceiving it as an archaic depiction of Christ on the cross to a holy woman granted a beard by the divine intervention of Christ. But at the same time copies of the Tuscan crucifix were still produced and venerated in their original form. Thus two cults existed side by side, using images and sculptures that could hardly be told apart but with drastically different interpretations of the basically same iconography. This radical change in meaning has of course been the subject of extensive research over the years from both folklorists and art historians. The seminal work on the subject is still Gustav Schnürer and Joseph M. Ritz’s Sankt Kümmernis und Volto Santo: Studien und Bilder from 1934.4 In this volume the authors not only tried to trace the development from the crucifix in Lucca to the northern European saint but also aimed at presenting as many Volto Santo and Kümmernis images as possible. Schnürer and Ritz worked mainly from a folkloristic perspective, but several articles dealing with the stylistic origins of the Volto Santo and especially the age of the sculpture had already been published or followed soon after. A great deal has been written on that subject since the 1930s but not much has been done on the art historical context after Reiner Hausherr published what almost seems like the final words on the subject of the Volto Santo in Zeitschrift für Kunstwissenschaft and Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie.5 In fact a more comprehensive interest in the Volto Santo/Kümmernis iconography 3

No specific survey has been made on the subject of the Volto Santo reception in medieval Denmark or Scandinavia but descriptions and pictures of the relevant crucifixes in the churches of Risby, Nustrup, and Östra Vram in Scania (part of medieval Denmark) can be found in Danmarks Kirker: Præstø Amt (Copenhagen: Gad, 1933–35), pp. 643–45; Danmarks Kirker: Haderslev Amt (Copenhagen: Gad, 1954), pp. 662–63; and Lena Liepe, Den medeltida träskulpturen i Skåne: En bilddokumentation (Lund: Lund University Press, 1995), pp. 385–86. For a description of the chapel dedicated to St Helper, see Danmarks Kirker: Åbenrå Amt (Copenhagen: Gad, 1959), pp. 1973–74. 4 Gustav Schnürer and Joseph M. Ritz, Sankt Kümmernis und Volto Santo: Studien und Bilder (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1934). 5 Reiner Hausherr, ‘Das Imerwardkreutz und der Volto-Santo typ’, Zeitschrift für Kunstwissenschaft, 16 (1962), 129–67; Reiner Hausherr, ‘Volto Santo’, Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie, ed. E. Kirschbaum (Freiburg: Herder, 1972), cols 471–72.

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appeared only in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Here scholars such as Regine Schweizer-Vüllers and Ilse E. Friesen turned renewed attention to the field, not so much from an art-historical angle as by using St Kümmernis as a basis for an analysis of late medieval devotional culture. Especially Ilse E. Friesen presented the material in a new light with her book The Female Crucifix from 2001, heavily influenced by a feminist perspective on devotion and popular piety.6 Most of the research done on this subject has aimed at solving very specific problems, asking such questions as, if there really was a connection between St Kümmernis and the Volto Santo, what the beard of the female saint meant to her beholders or what the true age of the Volto Santo is; as a consequence some general aspects of the developments of the late medieval cult of saints seem to have been overlooked. The transformation of Christ on the cross into a female saint not only appears to shed new light on some of the ways in which the iconography of saints was constructed; it also raises the interesting question of whether this change is unique. The apparent difference or singularity of the St Kümmernis legend compared with other saints’ lives has been one of the main inspirations in previous research done on the subject. The legend has been firmly placed in the context of popular piety, a position corroborated by the inclusion of a St Kümmernis story as a simple fairy tale in the first edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen by the brothers Grimm from 1812.7 This very much set the tone for the view on the legend, which was not regarded as truly having anything to do with the Catholic Church institution, as is apparent in the work of Schnürer and Ritz. By foregrounding this transformation from Christ into a saint, we can make some important points concerning the flexibility of medieval representations of saints in general as well as the nature of the interaction between saint and image or sculpture. Taking a point of departure in this exchange between a case study and some overall principles, this paper seeks to show how the apparently confusing developments surrounding the crucifix from Lucca and the figure of St Kümmernis can be used as a window into the late medieval cult of saints, demonstrating how this process of change was firmly embedded in late medieval religion.8 Somewhat contrary to previous research done in this field I 6

Ilse E. Friesen, The Female Crucifix: Images of Wilgefortis Since the Middle Ages (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001). 7 The legend was included under the title ‘Die heilige Frau Kummernis’, but was deleted from the following editions of the fairy tales together with a lot of other stories deemed to be improper entertainment for children. 8 Regine Schweizer-Vüllers and Ilse E. Friesen have a similar aim, but place the cult of St Kümmernis in a feminist discourse, interpreting the female bearded saint as an expression of female Imitatio Christi. In this narrow scope the uniqueness or extraordinariness of the saint’s cult and iconography is stressed, but the actual generic nature of the legend is overlooked

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seek to show the very generic and contemporary qualities of the Kümmernis legend with the aim of demonstrating how this extraordinary metamorphosis can serve as inspiration for further research into the field of saintly iconography and hagiography. I shall first give a brief summary of the historical and legendary context of the Volto Santo and St Kümmernis.

The Volto Santo and Kümmernis Legends According to the legend, after having helped taking down Christ from the cross, Nicodemus was urged by divine inspiration to create an image of the crucified Christ. He undertook this work but fell asleep when he was nearly finished. While sleeping Nicodemus dreamed that angels descended from heaven and took up the work where he had left off. When he awoke, the sculpture was finished and not only was the face of Christ carved in the sculpture as he had looked when alive, but — stressing the miraculous incident further — this had not been done by human hands. Nicodemus, afraid that the sacred crucifix might fall into the wrong hands, hid the sculpture in a secret cave. Here it lay unknown to all for centuries. In an alternative version of the legend the sculpture is carved on the basis of an impression of Christ’s face left on the shroud which covered his dead body. One night many centuries later a certain Italian Bishop Gualfredus received a vision of the hidden crucifix while sleeping. Following the instructions from his dream the bishop travelled with his entourage to the Holy Land and here uncovered the hidden relic together with other sacred treasures. As proof of the sanctity of the newly discovered crucifix, a series of miracles took place on the journey back to Italy. At this point Gualfredus disappears from the legend and is replaced by Bishop John of Lucca who takes the cross with him back to his cathedral, supposedly in 742.9 Here the popularity of the cross turned the Tuscan city Lucca into a major point of pilgrimage with an abundance of attested miracles ascribed to the cross. One particular feature of the myth surrounding the Volto Santo was to have a special influence on the imitations and depictions of the crucifix north of the Alps. As the most common version of this legend goes, a fiddler travelled to Lucca on a pilgrimage but the man was so poor that for the sake of the somewhat narrow gender perspective. See Regine Schweizer-Vüllers, Die Heilige am Kreuz: Studien zum Weiblichen Gottesbild im späten Mittelalter und der Barockzeit (Bern-Vienna: Lang, 1997); Ilse E. Friesen, The Female Crucifix. 9 The legend in all its versions can be found in Schnürer and Ritz, Sankt Kümmernis, pp. 117–59.

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Figure 2 The Volto Santo in Lucca stripped of its ornaments. After Schnürer and

Ritz, Sankt Kümmernis.

when he finally arrived in front of the venerated Volto Santo, he had nothing to offer the crucifix but his music. Thus the fiddler sat down in front of the sculpture and played. While he played, a miracle took place. Suddenly the figure of Christ moved, looked down towards the musician and let one of his golden slippers fall off his foot as a gift. Several versions of the legend exist, but in most the fiddler is accused of having stolen the slipper then proved innocent through another miracle. Exactly when this addition to the legend of the Volto Santo was made is uncertain, but the written sources seem to point towards the second half of the twelfth century.10 So much for the legendary background of the Volto Santo. What we face today is a large twelfth century crucifix probably carved on the basis of an older 10

See Schnürer and Ritz, Sankt Kümmernis, pp. 159–78; Peter Spranger, Der Geiger von Gmünd: Justinus Kerner und die Geschichte einer Legende (Schwäbisch Gmünd: Stadtarchiv Gmünd, 1980).

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model of uncertain age (Figure 2). The fully clad body of Christ is shown extended on the cross with wide open eyes, outstretched hands and the legs apart, indicating that each foot was nailed separately to the cross. The sculpture belongs to or is a copy of a group of early Byzantine clothed depictions of the crucified Christ. In this tradition Christ is rendered in a full-length robe or tunic and sometimes even with a priestly stole.11 As the popularity of the Volto Santo grew, its decoration on feast days was elaborated through the inclusion of golden slippers and sleeves, and a crown was added, completing the already inherent rex et sacerdos symbolism.12 Somewhat uncommon for the type of Byzantine crucifixes the Volto Santo imitates is the fact that it is carved with a bowed head instead of the usual stern, frontal directness. This might be due to the fact that the Volto Santo first and foremost is a later imitation of the early Byzantine depictions. With the enormous popularity of the Volto Santo cult, copies of the crucifix as well as images of the sculpture spread from Lucca throughout large parts of Europe. Some of these representations retained a strong resemblance to the Tuscan original while most copies were more or less free interpretations of the core motif — a fully clothed, crowned Christ on the cross, crucified by four, not three, nails. Furthermore the cross itself was often elaborated by a large curving arch overreaching the top of the crucifix and ending in ornamental lilies, as it is found on the original from Lucca.13 Furthermore, at least from the first part of the fourteenth century, depictions of the famous crucifix could also include a small fiddler usually crouching to the left of the cross with the thrown-off shoe lying in front of him. The Volto Santo was thus spread in two forms; through actual imitations of the crucifix carved in the round, and through painted images that retold the miraculous story of the shoe wonder. In the Netherlands, some of these images apparently fused with the legend of a St Kümmernis which per11

Reiner Hausherr, ‘Das Imerwardkreutz’. For a thorough discussion of crucifixes with attributes of royal dignity and the rex et sacerdos iconography see Martin Blindheim, ‘Skandinaviske krusifiks med verdighedtstegn’, in Ikonografiska studier framlagda vid det nordiska symposiet för ikonografiskt studium på Julita slott 1970, ed. by Sten Karling, Antikvariska serien, 26 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1972), pp. 74–105. 13 Interestingly there seem to be close similarities between the arch on the Volto Santo cross and the little group of preserved so-called arcade and ring crucifixes, characterized by their very elaborate crosses and their strong allusion to Christ triumphing or conquering death. See Jörn Barfod, ‘Das Arkadenkreuz: Ein bislang wenig beachteter Triumphkreuztyp in Schleswig und Jütland’, Nordelbingen, 54 (1985), 11–27; Ebbe Nyborg, ‘Korbue, krucifiks og bueretabel: Om de ældste vestjyske triumfkrucifikser, deres udformning og anbringelse’, Hikuin, 14 (1988), 133–52. 12

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haps existed already, perhaps developed in association with the images of Volto Santo. The basic legend of St Kümmernis begins when a young Christian virgin princess, daughter to the pagan king of Portugal, is promised to the pagan king of Sicily. The girl is of course devastated by her father’s decision and refuses to marry the king. As a punishment the girl is locked up in a chamber until the arrival of the groom-to-be. Meanwhile a miracle takes place behind the locked door. While praying to Christ for a way to avoid the marriage, the pious virgin suddenly receives a vision of the Lord who grants her a full facial beard. With such an appearance no suitor would ever want the maiden and she can retain her vow of virginity. Now the princess’s father and the king of Sicily unlock the door to the chamber and witness what has happened to the girl. Shocked and furious the suitor leaves while the angered father orders his bearded girl to be crucified like her beloved Christ. For some unspecified reason the dead virgin is later buried near a church or place called Stouberg in the Netherlands. In death the maiden was told by God that from now on she should be known under the name of Ontkommern — the Flemish name for what later became Kümmernis in German. This part of the legend is found in its oldest form around 1400 in the Netherlands, but it is highly uncertain at which point the following extension was added. Soon after her death and burial miracles began to occur at the grave of the princess. Pilgrims began to visit her shrine, and one day a fiddler found his way to the site. He was poor and played his music in front of the figure of St Kümmernis instead of giving alms and this paved the way for a miracle identical to the one in Lucca.14 Unlike most medieval saints it appears as if St Kümmernis did not have any specific area or field of trouble that she could unburden. Rather, as her name indicates, she was available for all kinds of problems. St Ontkommer or Uncumber in English is understood as ‘entkümmern’ — to remove worries. The initial research done by Gustav Schnürer and Joseph M. Ritz still constitutes the basis for our understanding of the legend surrounding this saint. As it appears from the written as well as the pictorial evidence, the cult of St Kümmernis blossomed in the late fourteenth century in the Netherlands. Schnürer and Ritz even advocated the idea that the birthplace of the legend could be located to the town of Steenbergen in northern Brabant, where, they argued, a crucifix of the Volto Santo type must have existed and been misinterpreted around this 14 The legend in its different forms can be found in Schnürer and Ritz, Sankt Kümmernis, pp. 11–53. It must be noted that younger versions of the fiddler’s part in the legend describes how he arrived when the princess was hanging, dying on the cross.

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time.15 More recent research has questioned this categorical fixation as a determination of the legend’s origin, but there is little doubt that it was in this part of Europe that the initial cult belonged.16 The earliest depictions of the female bearded saint are found in the first part of the fifteenth century and the number of images seems to increase steadily through the century. The usual way of depicting the female saint is as a more or less feminine bearded figure either hanging on or carrying a cross. She is regularly shown wearing a crown, but the different components vary from image to image. In general the saint is usually rendered after features very close to the Volto Santo, and if no written evidence exists it can indeed be hard to distinguish the iconography of the two. Just how closely entwined the images of the two are can be illustrated by a woodcut by Hans Burgkmair from c. 1507 (Fig. 3). Here we see a traditional late medieval image of the Volto Santo, and a small sign inserted into the space between the kneeling fiddler and the crucifix even reads ‘die bildnvs zv lvca’, but the heading of the woodcut reads ‘Sant kümernus’ and the accompanying text retells the legend of the virgin martyr. The cult of St Kümmernis spread from the Netherlands to most of Europe, but the saint became especially widely venerated in the Alpine regions and South Germany. It was also in these parts that the cult of the saint survived the longest, flourishing extensively in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Fig. 4).17 In the descriptions of her from this period she was known as a saint of health, good harvest, peace, protector of farm animals and so forth, no doubt echoing her medieval status.18

The Scope of the Story, its Uniqueness and Parallels Apart from the appearance of the fiddler in both stories the legends of the Volto Santo and St Kümmernis are very different from one another, but studied on its own each reveals a highly traditional hagiographic content. Especially the Volto Santo story is almost exclusively composed of stock motifs, and it is closely patterned along the lines of other stories of great discoveries, be they relics in the 15

Schnürer and Ritz, Sankt Kümmernis, pp. 19–22. See for example Friesen, The Female Crucifix, pp. 48–49. 17 See Ilse E. Friesen, Frau am Kreuz: Die heilige Kümmernis in Tirol: Austellungskatalog Museum Stift Stams (Telfs: Hörtenbergdruck, 1998); Ilse E. Friesen, ‘Die Heilige Kümmernis in Tirol’, in Am Kreuz — Eine Frau, ed. by Sigrid Glockzin-Bever and Martin Kraatz (Münster: Lit, 2003), pp. 36–54. 18 Friesen, The Female Crucifix, pp. 91–109. 16

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Figure 3 Sant Kümernus. Woodcut by Hans Burgkmair, c. 1507.

form of martyr graves or artefacts such as the True Cross. This commonplace character is probably the reason why the legend as such is usually passed over fairly quickly, and indeed there do not seem to be that many surprises to uncover in the narrative. The vita of St Kümmernis, on the other hand, has been scrutinized minutely by scholars and will also be discussed here, especially in the light of the more recently published works on the subject. As an accumulation of components the Kümmernis story might on some level be considered a unique hagiographical account, but all elements of the story can be found in similar, but not identical, legends. This is not an attempt to trace the genealogy of the motif but merely a matter of pointing out how all the key narrative elements appear in other legends as well. Crucifixions are

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Figure 4 An Ex Voto plaque dedicated to St Kümmernis, dated 1687. Now in the

Tiroler Volkskunst-Museum, Innsbruck, Austria.

not uncommon in saints’ lives and although female martyrs in general seem to have avoided this fate, at least two apart from St Kümmernis were nailed to the cross. One was St Julia (Fig. 5). Of her it is told that she was of noble birth but after Carthage, where she lived, was captured in 439 she was sold as a slave. Luckily the buyer was a merchant who respected Julia’s pious Christian faith so much that he even brought her along on a voyage to Corsica, where the pagan governor fell in love with her and offered Julia freedom if she would become his. The saint declined and preferred to live in slavery over marrying a pagan. Enraged, the governor ordered that she should have all her hair torn off and then be nailed to a cross.19 The other crucified female saint is the Spanish St Liberata whose martyrdom has a lot in common with the legend of St Kümmernis. That 19

Paraphrased from Alban Butler, The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints Compiled From Original Monuments, and Other Authentick Records, 4 vols (London, 1756–59) ii, pp. 439–41.

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Figure 5 St Julia on the cross. Etching from the third edition of Alban Butler’s

The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints, published 1779–80. Note the mourning merchant at the foot of the cross, clearly referring to the traditional posture of Mary found beneath the crucified Christ. In the feminist interpretation of the St Kümmernis legend the relation between saint and fiddler is stressed as a similar gender reversal.

is probably also why the pre-Bollandist hagiographer John Molanus joined the two martyrs into one in his compilation of saints’ lives in 1568, and in fact it took the work of Schnürer and Ritz to disentangle the two figures and show that they had nothing at all to do with each other.20 20

John Molanus writes in his work Usuardi Matyrologium, quo Romana ecclesia ac permultae aliae utuntur from 1568: ‘Item sanctae Wilgefortis virginis et martyris filiae regis Portugaliae [. . .] quam nonnulli latine Liberatam, Teutonice autem Ontcommeram agnominant.’ See Schnürer and Ritz, Sankt Kümmernis, pp. 66–67.

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The other central happening in the Kümmernis legend is of course the miraculous beard that the virgin grows. As exotic as this may seem, there are in fact several parallel examples. First one could point to the account of the virgin from Antioch, found in the Legenda aurea. Here we learn that a noble Christian knight swaps identities with the poor innocent virgin who is incarcerated in a brothel. By exchanging clothes, they fool her persecutors and the virgin is safe for a while.21 The topos of a woman masquerading as a man, especially to enter a monastery, is found in several versions, such as the legend of St Theodora who takes on the identity of the monk Theodore and enters a monastery to do lifelong penance for her unfaithfulness to her husband.22 Genuine growth of a beard is also known elsewhere. In the legend of St Galla, told by Gregory the Great, the pious girl is blessed with a beard for the very same reason as St Kümmernis. To evade a sexual relationship she grows a beard and thus avoids her suitor, but instead of being punished by death like St Kümmernis, St Galla uses her new attribute to enter a monastery and live among monks.23 Bodily changes or transformations, such as the miracle of the beard, are not that common in medieval hagiographies and when we encounter them, it is usually in connection with female saints. Torture and mutilation was something shared by male as well as female martyrs but actual bodily miracles were almost exclusively reserved for women, with the significant exception of the Stigmata of St Francis as something very rare. Caroline Walker Bynum has demonstrated this in her essay ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages’ from 1989, pointing out how fiery devotion and spiritual ecstasy in the Late Middle Ages were closely linked to women’s religiousness.24 The legend of St Kümmernis fits nicely into this and from the examples from other saints’ lives listed here it should be clear that the miraculous story of St Kümmernis contains nothing spectacular or radical. Both Schweizer-Vüllers and Friesen seem to miss this point in their enthusiastic account of the beard as a special and heavily charged symbol. A comparison of the basic elements of the legend with contemporary hagiography shows how it is comprised of stock 21

Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. by William Granger Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) i, pp. 250–54. 22 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, i, pp. 365–68. 23 Grégoire le Grand: Dialogues, ed. and trans. by Adalbert de Vogüé and Paul Antin, Sources Chrétiennes, 251, 260, and 265, 3 vols (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1980), iii, pp. 54–59. 24 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages’, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 186–95. In her book The Female Crucifix, Ilse E. Friesen uses the same essay of Walker Bynum as a point of departure in her analysis of the bearded female saint.

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motifs in a late medieval taste. The concept of becoming like Christ is indeed strong in the story, but to take the implications of the crucifixion and the beard further than as a miraculous blessing seems doubtful. We have no indication that the beard as such was the prime attribute and to interpret it as part of a specific strategy to establish a Christological image more accessible to women might work in theory, but we lack the sources to make this assumption. On the basis of the published source material it seems to make more sense to pursue the hypothesis that St Kümmernis was modelled very closely on the cults of Mary and Anne. Both of these figures had several aspects or roles and were not narrowly limited to being helpers of one specific problem. Especially Mary took on the role of the consoler of all troubles. Thus we here find a much greater match with St Kümmernis in terms of breadth and inclusiveness than in the attempts to establish the saint as a female Christ.25 The miraculous story of the poor fiddler, included in both the legends of the Volto Santo and St Kümmernis, is also a well-known motif throughout the later Middle Ages. We find musicians and entertainers honouring the depictions of saints with their music in several literary sources and especially in relation to female saints. Perhaps the best known examples are the legendary accounts of sculptures of Mary which are brought to life by music. An example could be the poor jongleur from the medieval story known as Del Tumbeor Nostre Dame, who is only able to honour and declare his love to the Virgin through his performance. The performer gets into trouble for this but is saved by the direct intervention of Mary.26 The legend of the fiddler belongs to a specific tradition of miracle accounts. The role of the musician is probably to convey the message that even the lowest in society can be heard by the saints as long as they come with a pure heart and give what they can; as pointed out by both Koraljka Kos and Peter Spranger.27 Given the fact that legends such as this are usually related to female saints it is interesting that it became successfully attached to the Volto Santo. On the other hand it fits remarkably well with the later reinterpretation of Volto Santo images as depictions of St Kümmernis. 25

On the cult of Mary and to some extent Anne in the Late Middle Ages, see Walter Delius, Geschichte der Marienverehrung (München-Basel: Reinhardt, 1963). 26 Vierge et merveille: Les Miracles de Notre-Dame narratifs au moyen âge, ed. and trans. by Pierre Kunstmann (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1981), pp. 142–77. 27 See Spranger, Der Geiger von Gmünd ; and Koraljka Kos, ‘St. Kümmernis and Her Fiddler (An Approach to Iconology of Pictorial Folk Art)’, Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 19 (1977), 51–266.

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Sculptures Coming to Life In much of the research done on both the Volto Santo and the St Kümmernis legend, the role of the fiddler is somehow pushed aside as a popular addition of secondary importance. In fact it is only Peter Spranger who has dealt extensively with this motif, dedicating an entire book to the subject.28 Spranger himself does not really attempt to explain how the legend came to be connected with the Volto Santo crucifix, but in some ways his chapters on the origins of the story echo the pioneering work of Schnürer and Ritz, who sought a rational explanation, suggesting that perhaps a shoe simply fell off the foot of the Tuscan crucifix while a fiddler or pilgrim was praying in front of it.29 Donat de Chapeaurouge published an entirely different view in 1960, when he argued that the joining of the Volto Santo and the fiddler might be inspired by late Antique depictions of Perseus and Andromeda.30 This viewpoint has not had any impact on later research and although de Chapeaurouge’s late Antique examples do indeed look similar to the usual renderings of the crouching fiddler at the foot of the cross, the article ultimately fails to establish a convincing link. However, one point seems to have evaded the attention of the scholars concerned with the relationship between the crucified figures and the fiddler, namely the fact that both legends in their original form concern neither Christ nor St Kümmernis in flesh and blood, but sculptures of them. Thus it is important to point out that all images of the Volto Santo and almost all images of St Kümmernis with the fiddler are depictions of a scene revolving around the miraculous interaction between the musician and a sculpture. In other words we are looking at a depiction of a miraculous image. This is certainly nothing unique. Take the depictions of St Veronica displaying her veil with the image of Christ for example or to some extent the iconic representations of Christ showing his wounds on the altar in the Mass of St Gregory. Both of these motifs were images that conveyed an almost tangible contact with a past miraculous event, enabling the beholder to take part in the scene again and again through meditation or commemoration. While the nature of the Volto Santo and St Kümmernis are very different from these examples, the juxtaposition of sacred and profane — Christ or saint and the fiddler — created a concrete example of a successful direct contact between the spheres of a divine image/sculpture and the terrestrial. Im28

Spranger, Der Geiger von Gmünd. See Schnürer and Ritz, Sankt Kümmernis, pp. 159–78. 30 Donat de Chapeaurouge, ‘Die Geigerlegende des Volto Santo und ihre antike Herkunft’, Das Werk des Künstlers: Studien zur Ikonographie und Formgeschichte, ed. by Hans Fegers (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), pp. 126–33. 29

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ages of the Volto Santo tradition or St Kümmernis even seem to suggest that something similarly miraculous might happen again to anyone praying in front of one of these depictions which possibly made the images even more attractive. The fact that the shoe wonder takes place in front of a statue, be it the crucifix in Lucca or any depiction of the bearded saint, seems to be an important detail that perhaps gave the entire scene a credibility that might easily be overlooked. That is to say that especially the fact that the miraculous event took place in front of a sculpture gave the story credibility. On the basis of the following it will be argued that the inclusion of the fiddler in the mythology surrounding the Volto Santo/Kümmernis can be seen as one of the driving factors behind the popularity of the image; something that very clearly demonstrated how the laity could expect miracles to intervene in their everyday life and local parish church. The importance of this is rooted in the medieval perception of threedimensional sculpture. Hagiographic accounts are filled to the brim with descriptions of martyrs forced to make a choice between worshipping idols and facing a death penalty. And indeed, as Edwyn Bevan and Michael Camille point out, the very idea of idolatry was closely linked to sculptures.31 The root of the problem was the question whether images could be tolerated or not, and if so how to distinguish a useful Christian icon from the abundance of pagan sculptures surviving from Antiquity. The Eastern and Western Church initially clearly parted ways on this question, but although the Latin Church retained a positive view of imagery, the question was never truly settled and lived on through the Reformation in Northern Europe. Somehow this ambivalence in the West seems to have surrounded images, but first and foremost sculptures, with an atmosphere pregnant with a sense of danger or perhaps what one might call presence. The very fact that sculptures were man-made imitations of nature made them suspect, and in the legends of the saints statues were often inhabited by demons and evil spirits.32 But this only went for idols, because there was a great difference between these and legitimate Christian sculptures, although the difference might at best seem blurry. In his study of idolatry Michael Camille has demonstrated clearly that there is a great difference in medieval art between the representations of Christian sculptures or icons and pagan idols. While the latter were often small, ugly devils, the biblical figures and saints took the shape 31

Edwyn Bevan, Holy Images: An Inquiry into Idolatry and Image-Worship in Ancient Paganism and in Christianity (London: Allen & Unwin, 1940), pp. 84–86; Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 18. 32 The account of the life St Bartholomew and his encounter with the demon Astaroth is illustrative for the topos. See Voragine, The Golden Legend, ii, pp. 109–16.

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of beautiful human beings of flesh and blood, thus ironically bringing them very close to the Antique statues that were the problem in the first place.33 In medieval drawings of sculptures, statues — small or large — are shown as live figures without any allusion to their artificiality except perhaps in their size. Several preserved images demonstrate the general perception that sculptors were able to imitate life rather exactly. For example we find hints of this in depictions of workshop scenes which show the carver’s model and product as identical. Seen from a somewhat different angle the same aspect reverberates in the medieval fable of an unlucky priest who is interrupted during a visit to his mistress, the wife of a sculptor or carpenter. Desperately seeking a place to hide as the husband returns, the priest crawls up on an unfinished cross and hides among the sculptures in the workshop. On entering, the husband notes some strange material sticking out from the Christ on the cross and thus removes what he thinks is excess material, but in fact castrating the priest. Of course the fable is a joke with a moral and warning, but the very core of the story is that the priest was able to pose as a statue.34 The medieval faith in the lifelike appearance of sculpture, apparently far overshadowing the two-dimensional representation of paintings, seems to have its best parallel in more recent history, in the initial enthusiasm for photography or film as the closest thing to real life. The medieval view gained further momentum in the Renaissance, and is illustratively reflected in a quotation ascribed by the artist Armenini to Michelangelo, allegedly as an answer to a man who wished to learn the difference between good and bad painting: This must be kept in mind, that the closer you see paintings approach good sculpture, the better they will be; and the more sculptures will approach paintings, the worse you will hold them to be. Whence it is to be understood that good paintings consist essentially of much relief accompanied by a good style. Let it be understood also that sculptures and reliefs, which perfect paintings must resemble, are of course not only those of marble or bronze, but even more, living sculptures, like a handsome man, a beautiful woman, a fine horse, and other similar things, and because the most true paintings are expressed with these, one sees then how wrong are those simpletons of whom the world is full, who would rather look at a green, a red, or some other high colours than at figures which show spirit and movement.35 33

Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol, pp. 197–220. See Anatole de Montaiglon and Gaston Raynaud, Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIII e et XIV e siècles, 6 vols (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1872–90), i, pp. 195–97. 35 Quoted and trans. by Robert J. Clements after Giovanni Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura (Ravenna, 1586). See Robert J. Clements, Michelangelo’s Theory of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1961), pp. 311–12. 34

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Figure 6 Pygmalion caressing his creation and serenading his statue with music

after it has come to life. French illuminations from the roman de la Rose, MS Douce 195, c. 1400.

With such a strong presence the only thing sculptures lacked was actual life. The almost blasphemous aspect of the artist somehow mocking or mimicking God’s creation of man was never far off. Stories and legends of sculptures that come to life was a wide-spread medieval topos, stretching from the retelling of Ovid’s Pygmalion to narratives recalling the Jewish myth of the Golem — a creature created from earth, coming to life through cabbalistic magic — and the motif was still relevant when William Shakespeare wrote A Winter’s Tale, concluding the play by letting the hidden statue of Hermione come to life (Fig. 6). Especially depictions of Mary, most often in the shape of sculptures, were prone to come alive in front of their beholders. In Caesarius von Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum this happens in several instances, and in the Legenda aurea’s account of the miracles of St Agnes, we read of a sculpture of the saint granting a priest her ring as a sign of their spiritual marriage, very much along the same lines as the shoe wonder related to the Volto Santo or St Kümmernis legend.36 Indeed even regular crucifixes were reported to come alive, most famously known through one of the miracles related to St Bernard. Here the crucified Christ freed himself from the cross and embraced the kneeling saint in what later has grown into an entire genre of miraculous scenes commonly referred to as Amplexus Christi (Fig. 7).37 36

Voragine, The Golden Legend, i, pp. 101–04. The idea of a miraculous embrace of Christ is perhaps a literal interpretation of some of the imagery found in the Song of Songs, 2. 6: ‘His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me’. For a full account of the miracle see Konrad von Eberbach, Exordium Magnum Cisterciense, Dist. 2, cap. 7, in Patrologia Latina, 185, cols 419–20. I thank my colleagues Dr Mette B. Bruun and Dr Sven Rune Havsteen for these fruitful references. 37

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Figure 7 Amplexus Christi. Woodcut by Jerg Haspel, late fourteenth century.

It looks as if it was regarded as a very common thing for saints to interact with or manifest themselves to the living through dreams, but medieval legends and hagiographies are also full of saintly sculptures coming to life, the Volto Santo or Kümmernis stories being no exception.38 If saints were to appear before their wide-awake devotees, sculptures were the preferred method, almost as if the saints or even Christ and Mary somehow needed a vessel for their manifestation. This may be considered a divine or saintly counterpart to the demons and devils who made their home in pagan sculptures, as described by Michael 38

The Legenda Aurea is full of references to saints, Mary, and Christ appearing in dream visions. For an extensive discussion of dreams and dreaming in the Middle Ages see Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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Camille in The Gothic Idol. One of the miracles related to St Nicholas shows how closely image and saint were associated. In this miraculous story we learn that a Jew in possession of a statue depicting the saint whipped the sculpture when he became dissatisfied with him. This beating of his statue provoked the saint to actively appear and put an end to the Jew’s torture.39 Interestingly Camille argues that a true Christian icon among other things was distinguished from a pagan idol by the fact that it did not come to life.40 This seems very much in opposition to the accounts of moving sculptures we know from the Middle Ages and have touched upon here. On the other hand it stresses the fact that according to most Western medieval theologians the sculpture or image of a saint was not in itself holy but served as a physical representation of the object of devotion.41 When manifesting themselves in sculptures the saints blurred this sharp distinction, making Camille’s point correct in theory but not in what might be called the experienced everyday theology where accredited miracles again and again defied the known world order.

From Crucified Christ to Female Saint The literature covering the Volto Santo and St Kümmernis, affords little space to discussion of the actual transformation from Christ to female saint. The most extensive discussion of the subject is found in the work of Schnürer and Ritz. Just as they attempted to find a rational explanation of the shoe miracle in Lucca, they argued that a crucifix, perhaps related to the circle of Volto Santo copies, formed the basis of the St Kümmernis legend. Their explanation was simply that a local depiction of a robed Christ was misunderstood and resulted in the invention of the legend of the female saint.42 This straightforward explanation 39

Voragine, The Golden Legend, i, pp. 21–27. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol, p. 133. 41 To quote Thomas Aquinas: ‘Nos autem adoramus adoratione latriæ imaginem Christi, qui est verus Deus, non propter ipsam imaginem, sed propter rem cujus imago est’ (‘We, on the contrary, pay divine worship to the image of Christ, who is true God, not by reason of the image itself, but because of the person it represents’), Summa Theologiæ, 50. 3a. 25. 3; ed. and trans. by Colman E. O’Neill, (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), pp. 194–95. 42 This is how Schnürer and Ritz imagined the conception of the St Kümmernis legend: ‘In der Kirche von Steenbergen befand sich neben dem in herkömmlicher Weise den Erlöser tragenden Kruzifix ein Bild, Wahrscheinlich ein Schnitzbild, das eine bekleidete, bärtige, gekrönte Figur am Kreuze darstellte. Was die Figur bedeuten sollte, war nicht ohne weiteres den Betern klar. Obgleich die Kranke schon ein halbes Jahr in Steenbergen war und 40

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has more or less been repeated since then with little renewed interest in the problem.43 This seems rather surprising given the great interest, apparent in more recent publications, in understanding the function or idea of the bearded saint. The very thought that the meaning of a certain type of crucifix could fall into oblivion seems intriguing but difficult. Crucifixes were among the most common images — if not the most common image — inside as well as outside churches. The medieval viewer must in one way or the other have been confronted with such depictions almost every day and although the way Christ was shown hanging on the cross changed gradually through the Middle Ages, the basic idea of the motif — a more or less naked man nailed to a cross — remained the same. In the general development of Christological iconography the fully clothed Christ as found in Lucca certainly belongs to a very distinct group of images and sculptures. But apparently the motif disappears at the end of the twelfth century.44 In practice this made the imitations of the Volto Santo the sole representatives of a rendering of Christ on the cross which was archaic already in the twelfth century. Keeping in mind the relatively few copies of the crucifix from Lucca as well as a surely limited number of surviving Romanesque examples of this tradition in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries where the legend or legends of St Kümmernis began to flourish, the idea of a misinterpretation sounds reasonable indeed. In consequence, it would in fact only take one misunderstanding of the Volto Santo to create the myth of St Kümmernis. This would then almost seem like a prime example of Erwin Panofsky’s ‘principle of disjunction’ which basically was concerned with the reinterpretation of motifs, exemplified by him through the recurrence of Antique motifs in a medieval Christian understanding.45 In our case, the principle of disjunction would interestingly be a reinterpretation of an early medieval motif in a late medieval context. In order for such a reinterpretation to take place — in what may be considered a case of iconographic breakdown and reconstruction — the viewer had to gewiss allseits nach Hilfe ausgeschaut hatte, auch oft in der Kirche gebetet hatte, war es ihr unbekannt geblieben, wen die Figur darstellte. Sie selbst konnte sich darüber keine Rechenschaft geben, und doch hatte sich das seltsame Bild so tief ihrem Gedächtnis eingeprägt’, Schnürer and Ritz, Sankt Kümmernis, p. 21. 43 In the anthology Am Kreuz — Eine Frau from 2003 the subject is touched upon in several cases, some of the contributions proposing slight adjustments. 44 Reiner Hausherr, ‘Das Imerwardkreutz’. 45 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renaissances in Western Art (London: Granada, 1970), pp. 84–87.

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fail to recognize the clothed figure on the cross as Christ. This would indeed seem like a possibility if the uncommon features of open eyes, the long robe, the arch above the cross and perhaps the four rather than three nails used were enough to alienate the viewer from what should be one of the most easily recognizable Christian images of all, even when taking into account the differences in the depiction of pain and posture from the early to the late Middle Ages. In other words a misinterpretation would imply that unless otherwise specified a crucifix of the Volto Santo tradition was too far removed from the way a late medieval beholder was trained to recognize a depiction of Christ on the cross. Since most images in churches showed saints or holy persons, the task for the beholder would then be to break down the apparently equivocal image into its single components and analyse the material for hints of recognizable traits from the legends of the saints or the Bible. The idea of interpreting the clothed, crucified man as a saint and constructing a legend surrounding these attributes would then be in full accordance with the traditional way of reading depictions of martyrs and holy persons. Thus a new legend could easily be put together and if a legend already existed, the elements of the sculpture could be assimilated to the pattern of the story without great difficulty. The iconography or recognizability of saints had more or less found its final form in early Romanesque art, only to become better defined and more distinct through the Middle Ages. When depicting saints, a characteristic element from their vita was presented or their entire legend was shown in a kind of shorthand version. These presentations, or attributes, were often more or less instantly recognizable symbols, usually recalling the way in which the saint was martyred or the prime miracle he or she had evoked. In larger depictions or when there was room for it, the name of the saint might also be indicated in writing, often at the foot of the image or inscribed in the halo surrounding the saint’s head. Only a handful of saints, when shown posing with their attributes, were usually elaborated beyond a simple gesture. St Sebastian penetrated by arrows or the huge St Christopher with the child Jesus on his shoulder are examples of a more elaborate iconography invested with a scenic sense. But saints such as these were a minority. The major part of the saintly men and women portrayed in medieval art were series of more or less anonymous figures identified only through text or attribute. One might say that the depicted saintly human forms were nothing but carriers of attributes. Although great effort was put into showing the beauty of the saint, ultimately the portrayal would be in vain without an attribute attached to it. One has only to look at the huge number of unidentifiable sculptures of bishop saints found in the medieval art collections of most major art museums. The figure of a saint was nothing without his or her attribute and in this way curiously testified to the common theological idea that the image or sculpture

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as such had nothing to do with the actual appearance of the saint.46 But it is also clear that the anonymity and the sheer number of saintly depictions produced had little effect on the popular perception of the images as true and in a sense unique representations of the saints. Edwyn Bevan cites how Italian villages would fight for their local Madonna, each claiming theirs to be the ‘true’ likeness of the virgin.47 The often quoted passage of William of Auvergne from the 1230s seems to illustrate the same point by stressing how hard it apparently was to separate the actual saint from the image: Perchance there are many simple folk also in our day who make no distinction in their prayers between the images of saints and the saints themselves; nay those prayers which they should make to the saints they make to the images themselves.48

In an article from 1999 the Norwegian art historian Henrik v. Achen pointed out how we must be aware of stylistic conventions existing within the medieval workshops, conventions that somehow influenced the workshops’ use and interpretation of the graphic models available.49 In his article Henrik v. Achen analyses three Danish sculptures of St Lawrence and suggests that these very similar figures were carved not on the basis of one graphic source but on the basis of one general understanding of what St Lawrence should look like — that is, as a young man in a deacon’s robe leaning on his attribute, the grill.50 This 46 William Durandus writes in 1286: ‘But we worship not images, nor account them to be gods, nor put any hope of salvation in them: for that were idolatry. Yet we adore them for memory and remembrance of things done long agone’, trans. by John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb in The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments (London: Gibbings, 1906), pp. 39–40; ‘Sed nos illas non adoramus, nec deos appellamus, nec spem salutis in eis ponimus quia hoc ydolatrare, sed ad memoriam et recordationem rerum olim gestarum eas uenerarum’: Guillelmi Duranti Rationale divinorum officiorum, ed. by A. Davril and T. M. Thibodeau, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, 140 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), p. 35. 47 Bevan, Holy Images, pp. 20–22. 48 William of Auvergne, De legibus, xxiii, trans. by C. G. Coulton in Art and the Reformation, 2 vols (New York: Harper, 1958), ii: The fate of medieval art in the Renaissance and the Reformation, p. 374; ‘adeò enim quidem incircunspecti erant, adeoque inconsiderati, ut inter ista non distinguerent: sicut et forsitan multi simplices hodie sunt, qui inter imagines sanctorum, et ipsos sanctos in suis orationibus non distinguunt, immò orationes quas ad sanctos facere deberent, ad ipsas imagines faciunt’: Guilielmi Alverni episcopi Parisiensis Opera, ed. by Robert Scott (London, 1774), i, p. 66. 49 Henrik v. Achen, ‘To senmiddelalderlige relieffer og deres grafiske forelegg: Stilkritiske refleksjoner omkring Mariafremstillingerne i Eksingedalskapet og Rollagtavlen — eller: En mulig virus i operativsystemet’, Hikuin, 26 (1999), 7–28. 50 v. Achen, ‘To senmiddelalderlige relieffer’, p. 18.

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would then have been thought of as the proper or reasonable way to portray the saint in a late medieval North German or Danish context. The idea of such conventions resonates well with the idea that an actual misinterpretation of a robed Christ on the cross could indeed have taken place. Given the fact that such a crucifix would have had very few similarities with the conventional way of depicting Christ crucified in the later Middle Ages, interpreting the figure as something or someone else might not be so far off as it may seem to modern eyes. The problem with this hypothesis is, however, that depictions of a robed Christ were very common. In the usual understanding of the events of the Passion, Christ was stripped just before the flagellation, meaning that in all scenes leading up to this point he would be clad in a foot-length robe. Crucifixion scenes or Christ hanging on the cross would of course be the parts of the Passion most often encountered, but representations of the earlier parts of the narrative were not rare. The same argument could be made for the crown. We know of several scenes where Christ could be shown wearing a crown, but only in exceptional cases did he wear one while hanging on the cross. All of this puts the idea of conventions in an interesting light, because it raises the question of how much or how little would actually have to be present in order for the medieval beholder to recognize Christ on the cross. What furthermore seems intriguing in this context is whether a copy of the Volto Santo crucifix found in the Netherlands in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century could be identified as a depiction of Christ at all. In order to get a clearer idea of the dynamics that led to the transformation from Christ to female saint, it might be useful to approach the problem from a different angle. A change such as the one described here would require a formal or willing acceptance from the church on at least a local level. A misunderstanding of an old crucifix appears as a possibility but the very idea that the proper meaning behind a crucifix as remarkable as the Volto Santo sculpture should simply fall into oblivion is highly unlikely. It seems much more fruitful to interpret this change not as a misinterpretation but as a conscious reinterpretation of the sculpture or image. The reason for this is not to be found in the stylistic nature of the Volto Santo as Schnürer and Ritz would have it, but in the character of late medieval devotion.

St Kümmernis in the Light of Late Medieval Piety Whether or not we accept the idea that the fusion of the Volto Santo narrative and St Kümmernis took place due to a simple misunderstanding, at some point there evidently had to be an authoritative support for this new interpretation. This willingness to reinterpret old iconography or meaning might seem

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problematic, and it probably was to some, but the medieval sources are full of surprising accounts of theologians more or less enthusiastically embracing new concepts based on on folkloristic or popular accounts. Especially terms and names were a rich source for the creation of new saintly powers. Well established saints like Veronica, with reference to her vera icon, or the martyred St Sophia with her three daughters Spes, Fides, and Caritas to some extent showed the way for such constructions based on words, and marked the legitimacy of making them.51 Thus shrines for never-canonized saints with names such as the French St Languit, St Vivra, and St Mort could flourish and play important roles as protectors against illness as well as a sudden death, and similar figures can be found all over Europe.52 Other questionable saints such as St Spiritus, St Alleluja, St Osanna, and even a St Paternostre grew out of the vocabulary of the liturgy and into legendary figures of flesh and blood, to become part of local cults.53 The list of saintly figures like these is very long and some were clearly invented as puns, but all of the saints listed here were figures of popular devotion and saints of local importance.54 A word, a place name, or a term from the daily liturgy was apparently enough to evoke a saintly personification and in this context it is clear that the many names the Volto Santo crucifixes received throughout Northern Europe could lay the foundation for at least one new saint. Looking at the broader picture one gets the impression that the cult of saints was driven by constant innovations both locally and within the church in its entirety throughout the Middle Ages, especially in the later part. New saints kept appearing, replacing older ones or just pushing them into the background while others re-emerged as popular figures. To use the word fashion in connection with the devotion to saints seems slightly out of place but the willingness to exchange older patrons for younger saints as sources of divine help was certainly very strong. We get a glimpse of this in Jacobus de Voragine’s account of the miracles surrounding St Peter Martyr who was killed in 1252, just a few years before the Legenda Aurea was finished. In this martyr’s vita it is told that a Genovese ship was in distress, not unlike the famous legend of St Nicholas, but here it is stressed by one of the sailors that just recently St Peter Martyr had been killed by pagans and thus was the one they should put their hopes and faith 51

For a description of St Sophia, see Voragine, The Golden Legend, i, pp. 185–86. Henri Gaidoz, ‘L’etymologie populaire et le folklore’, Mélusine, 4 (1888–89), col. 513. 53 Jacob Grimm, Reinhart Fuchs (Berlin: Reimer, 1834), p. xcv. 54 For examples of saints or figures invented in a humorous spirit see Anne Riising, ‘Comic Relief in Medieval Sermons’, Medieval Spirituality in Scandinavia and Europe: A Collection of Essays in Honour of Tore Nyberg, ed. by Lars Bisgaard and others (Gylling: Odense University Press, 2001), pp. 225–31. 52

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into.55 The highly popular idea of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, a group of saints of varying fame compiled into one singular unit of spiritual help reinvented in the middle of the thirteenth century, was another way of reinforcing the power of the saints and renewing their influence.56 We get a sense of how one saint replaces the other in the case of St Sebastian who was the prime protector against plague throughout the Middle Ages until he was swept from that position at the end of the fifteenth century by St Roch, whose relics became objects of pilgrimage.57 Similar changes can be recorded in the rise and fall of pilgrimage shrines throughout Europe. In a time in many ways suspicious of novelties there seems to have been a constant craving for still stronger saintly remedies against adversities of all kinds. The constant hunt for the new was clearly one of the driving factors behind a cult of saints. This preoccupation with the new seems to be a fruitful framework for a reconsideration of the emergence of St Kümmernis and the replacement of the old Volto Santo cult with a younger, new cult. Older depictions of the Volto Santo tradition could probably freely and without problem be renamed St Kümmernis or any other of the names attributed to the saint. The key to this versatility lies in the ambivalence of the medieval approach to images. The saint was portrayed through attributes or some scenic framing of the figure, but the actual significance and meaning of the image were only upheld as long as there was a devotional use of the image. This openness to interpretation is documented at first hand in the already mentioned woodcut of Hans Burgkmair from c. 1507 (Fig. 3, p. 89). Here we have the Volto Santo and St Kümmernis compiled in one piece. The text recounts the legend of the female saint while the image shows the fiddler playing in front of the Volto Santo in Lucca. As such the viewer could interpret the woodcut as it pleased him or her; both legendary elements were found side by side. There can be little doubt that the St Kümmernis interpretation won in the long run, but the idea that the image could also refer to Christ on the cross was extant into the eighteenth century. This inclusiveness of iconography seems to have existed throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when the popular veneration of St Kümmernis 55

Voragine, The Golden Legend, i, pp. 254–66. The fourteen Holy Helpers were already known in the ninth century but their identities and fields of expertise were first defined later. The heyday of the cult was in the fifteenth century. See Joseph Braun, Tracht und Attribute der Heiligen in der Deutschen Kunst (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1943), pp. 562–66; Hiltgart L. Keller, Reclams Lexikon der Heiligen und der biblischen Gestalten: Legende und Darstellung in der bildende Kunst, 8th edn (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), pp. 450–52. 57 Braun, Tracht und Attribute der Heiligen, pp. 631–34, 642–50; Keller, Reclams Lexikon der Heiligen, pp. 494–95, 507–08. 56

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retained its high status in the Netherlands and the south of Germany. But interestingly it is possible to note a shift in it. Most researchers who have been working with the Volto Santo/Kümmernis tradition have noted how sometimes the female saint is tied with rope instead of being nailed to the cross. No great importance has been assigned to this, but when we compare published Volto Santo and Kümmernis images it becomes clear that although there are medieval depictions of the saints tied with rope, it seems that this trait does not become regular before 1650. The cult of St Kümmernis was still flourishing and extremely popular in southern Germany and the Alpine region in the seventeenth century and at that point the saint had something of a renaissance in the popular devotion. At the same time the Catholic Church was very openly and directly trying to eliminate whatever remained of folkloristic, fantastic, and uncertified legendary elements in the cult of saints. No doubt this put the devotion of the bearded saint under pressure, and Friesen lists several written sources criticizing her cult as pure superstition.58 This is without a doubt part of the background for the gradual change in the images of St Kümmernis. First the saint appeared tied with rope and thereby divested of what could easily be perceived as a reference to Christ’s crucifixion, and then the primarily male figure was gradually transformed into a purely female form with only slight hints of a beard if any at all. At the same time a general trend of harmonizing the depictions of saints took place inside the Catholic Church, which also influenced the changes in the St Kümmernis depictions. One might say that the change from nails to rope modernized the iconography drastically and separated the motif from the duality that had apparently existed within the motif since its conception. It must be said, though, that this change took place very gradually and by no means in any consistent way: the surprising extent to which Christological and saintly iconography was still strong by the middle of the seventeenth century is exemplified by a woodcut published in Augsburg in 1650 (Fig. 8). But ultimately this diversity of elements was purged from the images of the saint, leaving only the figure of a young girl in a flowered dress tied to a cross, free of all pain and engaged in what could almost be seen as a flirtatious contact with the playing fiddler kneeling beneath her (Fig. 9). The foundation for the great popularity and longevity of the female saint is probably to be found in her non-specific nature. Although her legend contains some of the more dramatic or spectacular elements found in medieval hagiography, it actually seems as if the name was the driving force behind the popularity of the saint. In the role of a remover of worries or general helper she embodied 58

See Friesen, The Female Crucifix, for several accounts of hostility towards the cult of St Kümmernis.

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Figure 8 A single leaf woodcut, printed in Augsburg 1650, noteworthy of its late

but very strong blending of legend and Christological iconography.

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Figure 9 St Helper or Kümmernis painted in the small village church of Farstorp

in Scania, Sweden. Mural executed around 1500. Photo by the author.

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the activities of all of the Fourteen Holy Helpers in one. The very nature of St Kümmernis was thus a construction of elements found all over the late medieval cult of saints, not in female piety exclusively.

A Many-Faced Saint or a Many-Faced Cult? On the surface the gradual transformation of crucifixes of the Volto Santo tradition into depictions of a bearded female saint seems bizarre as well as puzzling, and obviously both elements have had a strong appeal to scholars of various fields. The pioneering work on especially St Kümmernis was done by researchers primarily interested in the folkloristic aspects of the story, and the work done by Gustav Schnürer and Joseph M. Ritz firmly isolated the St Kümmernis figure outside its late medieval devotional context, analysing the saint as belonging to a purely popular folktale culture. The influential and widely read Germanische Götter und Helden in christlicher Zeit by Erich Jung of 1939 only furthered this development by trying to trace the roots of the St Kümmernis legend within a context of pre-Christian Germanic mythology and folklore.59 Thus the female saint became a stable element in published works on late medieval popular culture, not as a saint but as a pious construction of the uneducated laity. In consequence, the research done on St Kümmernis was separated from the Volto Santo tradition, which came to serve only as a reference in passing. The Volto Santo in Lucca became a subject in its own right, studied by art historians such as Erwin Panofsky and Reiner Hausherr, who left the complicated relation to the female saint to folklorists.60 Only the last few decades have seen serious attempts to understand the relation between the popular and the pious aspects of the saint’s cult. Ilse E. Friesen has been a leading figure in this, placing St Kümmernis in a feminist discourse very much inspired by the work of Caroline Walker Bynum. But the actual process of change and positioning of this process within a broader framework has not really been pursued by any of the scholars working in this area. By breaking down the phenomenon of the St Kümmernis into its basic contents, as has been done here, it is to be hoped that it has been demonstrated how what might initially be conceived as a strange popular tale at its core ba59 Erich Jung, Germanische Götter und Helden in christlicher Zeit, 2nd edn (MünchenBerlin: Lehmann, 1939), pp. 22, 164, 269. 60 For Erwin Panofsky’s contribution to this field of study, see Erwin Panofsky, ‘Das Braunschweiger Domkruzifix und das “Volto Santo” zu Lucca’, Festschrift für Adolph Goldschmidt (Leipzig: Seeman, 1923), pp. 37–44.

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sically marks out some general trends in the religion of the Late Middle Ages. But given the non-specific or generic nature of St Kümmernis, with her lack of personality or specific expertise, it seems reasonable to ask whether we are facing one process of transformation, or if the plethora of different names related to the bearded saint all over Europe do not indeed represent continuous reinterpretations of some undefined religious raw material that apparently had its source in the Netherlands in the late fourteenth century. At least it is clear that a cornerstone in the success of St Kümmernis was her inclusiveness or ability to fit into whatever context she was placed in. We do not have the slightest clue as to whether or not the St Ontkommer or Wilgefortis from the Netherlands was exactly the same as the St Helper found in Northern Germany and Scandinavia, but we do know that the two saints’ names were somehow related. But then again this echoes the structure of the entire cult of saints, where saintly figures such as St Nicholas, St Michael, or St Clement were used or interpreted slightly differently in the various parts of church. Thus, when, as has been done here for the purpose of clarity, we establish the figure of St Kümmernis as one singular entity, we construct a conglomerate of trends that perhaps never existed as clearly as defined here. At least we should be very careful about pinning down any distinct nature of St Kümmernis, because her fleeting appearance does not allow for that and we thereby risk distorting her very function in medieval society.

II Change

Historical Discourse in Renaissance Italy Peter Burke

T

his paper is concerned with the writing of history in Renaissance Italy and in particular with the representation in printed texts of the spoken word, especially formal speeches (orazioni or discorsi), which may be regarded as a kind of ‘ritual (or ritualized) language’, communications which follow a recurrent sequence.1 In other words, I am offering you a discourse on discourse, a kind of pun but one that leads to conclusions that I hope readers will find illuminating. So far as rupture and transformation, central themes in this volume, are concerned, this essay will discuss both continuities and discontinuities between historical writing in the Renaissance, more or less the period 1400–1600, and the periods before and after it. It is arranged like a series of Chinese boxes, moving from historical discourse to Renaissance examples, Italian examples, and finally to the speeches in Francesco Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia. * 1. Given the variety of meanings of the term ‘discourse’, in English as in other languages, it may be useful to begin by saying something about it. The organizers of this volume have opted for a broad, inclusive definition that emphasizes ‘interpretative frameworks’. Other scholars, including myself, tend to work with a narrower concept of discourse. The concept, used widely in the humanities — not to say in the discourse of the humanities — in the last generation, has been shaped by different theorists from different disciplines. Among them 1

To Speak in Pairs: Essays on the Ritual Languages of Eastern Indonesia, ed. by James J. Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Ritual Language Behaviour, ed. by Marcel Bax (= Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 4 (2003)).

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are specialists in literature such as Mikhail Bakhtin (whose term was slovo) and Roland Barthes (discussed below); philosophers, notably Michel Foucault; and linguists, especially socio-linguists such as John Gumperz and Deborah Tannen. These scholars have worked in different contexts and with different purposes.2 It is clear that distinctions between discourses are in order. Distinctions between disciplinary discourses, for instance — legal, medical, and so on — despite Foucault (who showed very clearly what different disciplinary discourses had in common in a given period).3 It is also useful to make distinctions such as official, revolutionary, colonial, anti-colonial, and so on. A discourse is often recognizable by a tendency to jargon, but it reveals something more important that might be described in terms of attitudes, values, or mentalities. Besides the problem of ambiguities, we need to confront the problem of controversies. A common objection to discourse analysis in its various forms is its displacement of emphasis away from authors, or in its extreme form the denial of authorship. Another objection concerns the rejection of context by some students of discourse, famously by Roland Barthes in a once notorious controversy over Racine with Raymond Picard.4 As a result, in intellectual history, for instance, Quentin Skinner is — or at any rate was — an enemy of the concept for this reason. On the other hand, his older colleague John Pocock has described the history of discourse as ‘the best terminology so far found’ to describe a major shift in intellectual history — a description that fits Pocock’s concern with the ‘languages’ of political thought).5 Let us see whether it is possible to work with the concept of discourse while retaining a sense of context and some place for individual authors. * 2. Let us take the case of historical discourse.6 So far as theory is concerned, I shall focus on Roland Barthes, the first to write about this topic in an essay on 2 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981; orig. publ. 1975), pp. 259–422; Roland Barthes, ‘Le Discours de l’histoire’ (1967), English trans. in Structuralism: A Reader, ed. by Michael Lane (New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 145–55; Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); John Gumperz, Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 3 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 4 Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1963). 5 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Languages and their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought’, in his Politics, Language and Time (London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 3–41. 6 Besides Barthes, see Geschichtsdiskurs, ed. by Wolfgang Küttler and others (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997).

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‘Le Discours de l’histoire’ first published in 1967, with examples ranging from Herodotus and Joinville to Machiavelli and Michelet. Faithful to the model of linguistics in general and the linguistics of Louis Hjelmslev in particular, as in the case of his analyses of meals, fashion, and so on, Barthes emphasized unchanging structures and rules of substitution and transformation, listing subjects such as dynasties, princes, generals, soldiers and peoples and verbs such as ‘dévaster, asservir, allier, faire une expedition, régner, user d’un stratagème, consulter l’oracle etc.’. Reading this essay soon after its publication, at a time when I was working on the history of historical writing in the Renaissance, I found this focus on ‘invariants’ to be an opening of new doors, a challenge to the historiographical assumptions on which I had been trained. All the same, the essay on historical discourse was not completely satisfying. In this chapter I shall try to think both with and against Barthes, comparing and contrasting his invariants with what the French classicist François Hartog describes as different ‘regimes of historicity’.7 In this way it may be possible to encourage a kind of dialogue between Renaissance texts and twentieth-century literary theories. My strategy is to juxtapose and counterpose Barthes’s concept of discours to the Renaissance idea of discorsi, best known from Machiavelli’s famous discourses on Livy, but a common term at the time, used for instance in the title of the sixteenth-century translation of Montaigne’s Essais into Italian. ‘Discourses’ were reflections, presented in a conversational rather than an academic way, and usually written in the vernacular rather than in the language of the university, Latin. The term discorsi was also used of speeches, which at some periods have been considered a legitimate and even a necessary part of historical discourse while at other times they have been either neglected (as in the Middle Ages) or rejected (as they were in the nineteenth century). Barthes missed this point, despite his discussion of Machiavelli, so that an analysis of speeches offers some useful counter-examples to his theory. In what follows I shall focus on the speeches that formed an important part of humanist historical writing as of the ancient historians whom the humanists imitated and emulated. From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, speeches in works of history were an embarrassment to scholars. The ancient historian Jacqueline Romilly and the historian of humanism Nancy Struever were unusual in taking 7

François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité (Paris: Seuil, 2003).

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this topic seriously in 1956 and 1970 respectively.8 Today, however, when historians, like their colleagues in both literature and the social sciences, have become more interested in the fluid boundaries between fact and fiction, they are coming to give the topic more attention, in the case of the Renaissansce as in that of classical antiquity.9 Discorsi are examples of the representation of speech and more especially of speeches. Since they may well seem alien to many readers, it may be useful to bring a sociolinguist, Deborah Tannen, and her book on conversation analysis into the discussion. Tannen describes ‘reported speech’ in conversation as ‘constructed speech’, in other words as creative, interpretative, and transformative.10 The invented speeches to be found in the texts that we are about to examine may therefore be regarded as elaborated written versions or transformations of an everyday oral practice. The main questions with which this essay is concerned are the following. Why were speeches introduced into histories? What were their functions in the text and their uses for readers? On what grounds were they criticized at the time? Why were they eventually abandoned? * 3. In the ancient world, composing speeches formed an important part of education, just as delivering speeches formed an important part of political life, in ancient Athens and Rome in particular. This was the case for obvious political reasons, but we should also remember that speech-making was only one part of a lively oral culture that also included, for instance, the reading aloud of works of poetry and prose, by their authors, to an invited audience. A belief in the persuasive power of spoken words was commonplace, made explicit in treatises on the art of rhetoric. The speeches to be found in ancient historians should be replaced in this context. Thucydides, for instance, included in his account of the Peloponnesian war not only the famous funeral speech of Pericles but also a number of ‘antilo8

Jacqueline Romilly, Histoire et raison chez Thucydide (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1956), pp. 180–239; Nancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). 9 Marc Cogan, The Human Thing: The Speeches and Principles of Thucydides’ History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Charles W. Fornara, The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 142–68; Anthony Grafton, What was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Sverre Bagge, ‘Actors and Structures in Machiavelli’s Istorie Fiorentine’, Quaderni d’Italianistica, 28 (2007), 45–88, esp. 54, 60–62. 10 Deborah Tannen, Talking Voices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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gies’ or pairs of opposed speeches. These pairs made a major contribution to historical analysis because they allowed readers to weigh the arguments for and against particular decisions. Indeed, as has been noted recently, the ‘multiple perspective’ of these speeches makes readers aware of ‘diverse points of view’.11 Turning to Rome, one thinks in particular of Livy, Sallust (who included some dramatic antilogies, like the debate between Caesar and Cato in his Conspiracy of Catiline) and of Quintus Curtius, whose life of Alexander the Great may be almost forgotten now but was much appreciated in the Renaissance and even later.12 It is worth noting the importance in a number of ancient historians of one particular type of speech, the address [allocutio] to the troops made by a military leader on the eve of battle. Speeches might be criticized (as Polybius criticized the ones in the history written by Timaeus) because they did not represent the gist of what was actually said.13 All the same, it was virtually taken for granted in the ancient world that there should be speeches in a written history and also that the exact words would have to be invented by the historian. By contrast, the representation of formal speeches is much rarer in medieval chronicles or histories. There are of course exceptions to this rule such as Henry of Huntingdon, whose chronicle gives a speech to the bishop of Orkney before the Battle of the Standard, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, who gives speeches to King Arthur, King Hoel, and others.14 In late medieval historians such as Geoffroi de Villehardouin, Giovanni Villani, Jean Froissart, or the Portuguese chronicler Fernão Lopes, what the reader is likely to find is direct speech of a relatively informal kind.15 For example, there are fifteen short passages in direct speech in Villehardouin’s chronicle, including some by himself and others by the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo. 16 Dino Compagni’s chronicle also contains vivid but short passages in direct speech.17 11

Romilly, pp. 180–239, esp. pp. 180, 222; on perspective, James V. Morrison, Reading Thucydides (Columbus, OH: University of Ohio Press, 2006), pp. 29–39. 12 N. P. Miller, ‘Dramatic Speech in the Roman Historians’, Greece and Rome, 22 (1975), 45–57. 13 Fornara, p. 157. 14 Beryl Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974). 15 Joan Argenter, ‘Responsibility in Discourse’, Language in Society, 35 (2006), 1–26. 16 Jean Frappier, ‘Les Discours dans la chronique de Villehardouin’, in his Histoire, Mythes et Symboles: Études de litterature française (Geneva: Ambilly-Annemasse, 1976; first publ. 1946), pp. 55–71. 17 For example, Dino Compagni, Cronica, ed. by Gino Luzzatto (Torino: Einaudi, 1968), pp. 22, 35, 37, 63, 67.

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Froissart too includes some lively passages of direct discourse, some of them put into the mouth of King Edward III. As in the case of Villehardouin, these passages are not set speeches, but relatively short and informal. Unusually, he includes passages in what has been called ‘collective direct speech’.18 As for Fernão Lopes, he occasionally writes a speech that lasts for a couple of paragraphs, but his normal practice, like that of the other chroniclers mentioned here, is to produce short passages of direct speech.19 For us, at least, the informality gives more of the effect or illusion of reality, although informal conversations may actually be as much inventions as formal speeches. The passages of direct speech add to the reality effect, but unlike the orations that appear in classical and Renaissance historians, they do not do very much explanatory work. To employ the useful distinction drawn by Mark Phillips, in the Middle Ages speeches were used as a means of ‘representation’, but in antiquity and in the Renaissance as a means of ‘argument’.20 * 4. It is time to turn to a case-study of Renaissance humanism, emphasizing two moments of discontinuity, change, or ‘rupture’, c. 1400 and c. 1600. At the first moment, the moment of a ‘rhetorical turn’ in the age of Leonardo Bruni, formal speeches were introduced into written histories. At the second moment, the moment of an anti-rhetorical turn, the age of Paolo Sarpi, speeches were generally abandoned. In other words, for two centuries they formed a normal though not a universal element of historical writing, or historical discourse. It may not be coincidence that the Renaissance was a time when the drama flourished, including historical drama. Shakespeare’s history plays, for instance, are full of speeches, including antilogies in the ancient manner. Indeed, Richard II begins with a series of paired speeches, a debate between Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray. Focussing on Italy, note the importance of speeches in a series of humanist historians: notably Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Lorenzo Valla, Paolo Giovio, and of course Machiavelli and Guicciardini. Bruni, for instance, gives paired 18 Jean Froissart, Chroniques, ed. by G. T. Diller, 3 vols (Geneva: Droz, 1991–92), i, pp. 175– 76; ii, pp. 201, 305–06; iii, pp. 225–28. Cf. Stephen G. Nichols Jr, ‘Discourse in Froissart’s Chroniques’, Speculum, 39 (1964), 279–87; and on collective speech, Peter F. Ainsworth, Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth and Fiction in the Chroniques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 270–71. 19 Fernão Lopes, Crónica de El-Rei D. João I, ed. by José H. Saraiva (Lisboa: Publicações Europa-América, 1977), pp. 137–38 (a longer speech), 130, 132, 134, 149, 150–51, etc. 20 Mark Phillips, ‘Representation and Argument in Renaissance Historiography’, Storia della storiografia/Histoire de l’historiographie, 10 (1986), 48–63.

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speeches to Guelfs and Ghibellines and to Perugians and Florentines. He does not claim to transcribe the actual words, but uses formulae such as ‘it is said that he spoke in this way’ (in hunc modum traditur allocutus).21 Whose discourse, who speaks? Speeches in written histories were employed for the purposes of the historian, not the original speaker — although historians sometimes comment on their efficacy at the moment that they were delivered. ‘The speech affected the attitudes of the listeners’ (Movit oratio mentes), Bruni commented on the appeal for help by the envoys from Arezzo to Florence.22 The humanist pope Pius II went further in his Commentaries, citing his own speech to the Diet of Regensburg, on a mission from the emperor to argue in favour of war with the Turks. ‘He spoke for almost two hours’ (like Julius Caesar, Pius wrote of himself in the third person), ‘and was heard with such absorbed attention that not once did anyone clear his throat or take his eyes from the face of the speaker’.23 Speeches by generals before battles, known by ancient Romans as allocutiones, were often described as reviving the morale of the soldiers (in this way resembling the ‘pep talk’ that football coaches still give their players before the match). In early modern times they were sometimes represented in art, most famously by Giulio Romano in his ‘Speech of Constantine’ in the Vatican, by Titian in his ‘Speech of Alfonso d’Avalos’ (represented quelling a mutiny in 1532), and by Rubens in his ‘Speech of Decius Mus’.24 These ‘speech acts’ may be regarded as performatives that helped rulers, assemblies or councils take decisions as well as encouraging soldiers to fight. Lorenzo Valla defended invented speeches in his history of the ruler of Naples, Ferdinandus, on the grounds that they teach both eloquence and wisdom. In similar vein the insertion of speeches was generally recommended in the treatises on the art of history that began to be written around the year 1500 and proliferated in the later sixteenth century. The Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano saw them as an adornment, provided they fitted the place and time. The Italians Viperano, Foglietta, and Sardi, the Spaniard Fox Morcillo, and the Frenchman La Popelinière agreed.25 Indeed, the Spanish scholar Antonio 21

Struever, pp. 127–32 (on Bruni) and pp. 173–77 (on Poggio). Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, ed. and trans. by James Hankins, 3 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001–07), i, p. 318. 23 Pius II, Commentaries, ed. and trans. by Florence A. Gragg and Leona C. Gabel (Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1937), p. 72. 24 Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (London: Phaidon, 1969), pp. 74–77. 25 Quoted in Grafton, pp. 36–38, 41–45. 22

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Agustín criticized the history written by his fellow-countryman Jerónimo Zurita precisely because Zurita’s text lacked speeches.26 The speeches usually run to a general pattern, so that we might say that they represent collective rather than individual discourse. Some of these speeches were stolen from earlier historians. For example, the speech that Henry of Huntingdon gave to the bishop of Orkney echoed Sallust. Again, the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana, author of a well-known history of his own country, lifted an entire speech from Livy, transferring it from ancient Rome to fifteenth-century Spain with only the slightest of alterations.27 This is an extreme case of a more general phenomenon: the generic similarity of speeches that are represented as delivered in recurrent situations: before a battle, to a ruler, at a council, and so on. The function of the speeches in the stories in which they occurred was partly ornamental, ornament being an important part of rhetoric. However, as in the case of Thucydides and other ancient historians, speeches also carried part of the burden of explanation, especially the paired speeches or antilogies, offering arguments pro and contra, or, in the case of pre-battle speeches, suggesting in turn that each side was in the right. As Struever suggests, ‘The core of the antilogic method is to consider the same events from different points of view’.28 These paired speeches gave written histories a dialogic element. We might also speak of a dialogue between the speech-writers (that is, the historians), and their models, especially classical models. The reader needs to be aware of quotations and allusions, as well as of simple plagiarism. As in the case of ancient Athens and Rome, the interest in speeches should be linked to the place of oratory in Renaissance culture and to assumptions about the power of words. The Florentine ringhiera was constructed in 1323 as a place for ‘harangues’: that is how it received its name.29 Making speeches was a kind of ritual, and they were composed in a special form of discourse, a formal or ritualized language (as was noted earlier), with a pre-existing structure or sequence, rather like a series of boxes into which, on each occasion, some specific information could be placed.30 26

Grafton, p. 232. G. Cirot, Juan de Mariana, historien (Bordeaux and Paris: Feret, 1905), pp. 346ff. 28 Struever, pp. 129–30. 29 Stephen Milner, ‘Citing the Ringhiera: The Politics of Place and Public Address in Trecento Florence’, Italian Studies, 55 (2000), 53–82. 30 Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, ed. by Maurice Bloch (New York: Academic Press, 1975). 27

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Speeches were also virtuoso displays of rhetoric that might reasonably be compared with a later Italian enthusiasm, arias in an opera. They took the same general form, but there were also opportunities for individual historians to show off their rhetorical skills and gain the applause of connoisseurs. The Bolognese humanist Achille Bocchi praised Guicciardini in this respect, while Agustín, praised both Guicciardini and Giovio. On a few occasions there were serious divergences from the model. The most famous comes from Machiavelli’s History of Florence, in which an important speech is given to a man of low status, a participant the fourteenth-century revolt of the Ciompi, the unskilled workers in the Florentine woollen cloth industry.31 A rare example of an imitator of Machiavelli in this respect is the seventeenth-century historian and rhetorician Agostino Mascardi, who was criticized for giving an important speech to a ‘base person’ in his account of the Fieschi conspiracy. * 5. It is time to focus more sharply on Guicciardini: a case-study within the case-study, considering the function of speeches within his historical discourse. The existence of these speeches has often been noted, but they have rarely been discussed in any detail.32 Unlike many ancient historians, Guicciardini has no particular liking for speeches on the eve of battle: in the cases of Fornovo, Cerignola, and Agnadello, the arguments on both sides are summarized in indirect speech (Book ii, Chapter 8; Book v, Chapter 15; Book viii, Chapter 3). However, the French leader Gaston de Foix is allowed to make a speech at the battle of Ravenna (Book x, Chapter 13). The Storia d’Italia includes twenty-four speeches, including six pairs (there is also a space left blank in the manuscript for another one in Book xviii, Chapter 10). One famous pair is represented in the debate on the Florentine constitution and attributed to Paoloantonio Soderini (in favour of governo popolare) and Guidantonio Vespucci, ‘in contrario’, for the rule of a few (Book ii, Chapter 2), offering a classic example of arguments pro and contra. Again, in the 31 Nicolò Machiavelli, Istorie Fiorentine, ed. by Eugenio Garin (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990), iii. 13. 32 Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 274; Mark S. Phillips, Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian’s Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), p. 180; Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 304; Robert Finlay, ‘The Myth of Venice in Guicciardini’s History of Italy: Senate Orations on Princes and the Republic’, in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, ed. by E. Kittell and T. Madden (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 294–326.

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Venetian senate in 1523, Andrea Gritti is represented speaking in favour of the alliance with France, while Giorgio Cornaro supports a new alliance with the emperor (Book xv, Chapter 2). Yet again, the bishop of Osma and the duke of Alba, in the presence of the emperor, offer conflicting advice on what should be done with the King of France after his capture at the battle of Pavia (Book xvi, Chapter 5). The speeches allow readers to participate in the hopes, fears, and dilemmas of the protagonists of the History. Guicciardini admitted that he invented speeches, which are generally introduced with a formula warning his audience that they are not going to hear or read the actual words of the speakers: ‘parlò, secondo si dice, in questa sentenza’ (Book i, Chapter 4); ‘Queste cose, dette in sostanza dal cardinale’ (Book i, Chapter 9); ‘parlò, secondo si dice, così’ (Book ii, Chapter 2).33 The language of these speeches is much like Guicciardini’s own historical discourse, full of maxims and references to interest as well as honour. All the same, the speeches are not pure ventriloquism. Guicciardini does make some effort to imitate playwrights and suit the speech to the speaker. The bishop of Osuna, for instance, uses arguments that might be expected from a churchman. Like Mariana later, Guicciardini sometimes stole from Livy. The speech of the Venetian ambassador Antonio Giustinian to the emperor Maximilian, suing for peace after the Venetian defeat at the battle of Agnadello, was — as some contemporaries were not slow to point out — suspiciously similar to Hannibal’s speech to Scipio before the battle of Zama, repeating phrases such as ‘perhaps we are worthy to assess our own reparations’. On the other hand, Guicciardini did follow a manuscript source, so one cannot dismiss the possibility that the thief was Giustinian himself rather than the historian.34 * 6. As evidence of the Renaissance reader’s attitude to this aspect of historical discourse, it is worth noting that the one-volume epitome of Guicciardini’s long history, edited by Francesco Sansovino and still being reprinted in the 1630s, contains almost all the speeches. A Spanish manuscript in the Bibliothèque Na33 Francesco Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, ed. by Silvana Seidel Menchi, 3 vols (Torino: Einaudi, 1971). Given the number of editions of this text, as in the case of ancient historians, references will be given to books and Chapters, not to pages. 34 Guicciardini, viii. 6, cf. Livy, xxx. 30; the similarity was noted by Dirk (Theodore) Graswinckel, Libertas Veneta (Leiden: Commelin, 1634), p. 366.

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tionale de France transcribes the speeches, perhaps for publication in translation.35 Anthologies of speeches from ancient and modern historians may also be cited. For example, the German professor Nicolas Frischlin compiled his Selectae orations (1588) for his students at Braunschweig. Two volumes of speeches from historians ancient and modern appeared in Italian in 1557 and 1561, edited by the Dominican Remigio Nannini, who was active as a translator. An amplified version of Nannini appeared in one volume in French in 1572, edited by another prolific writer, François de Belleforest. The organization of these anthologies gives some idea of how they were used by their readers, or at least how the printers expected them to be used. Nannini and Belleforest each produced a separate section of military speeches, while Nannini also edited a volume of ‘civil and criminal’ orations. The arrangement of one anthology followed traditional rhetorical categories such as praise versus blame and persuasion versus dissuasion.36 Speeches by characters in histories did not please all readers. There had already been critics of the practice in the ancient world such as Polybius and Trogus. In the Renaissance, Francesco Patrizzi criticized speeches in his ten dialogues on history, published in 1560.37 In his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566), Jean Bodin was critical of Giovio for inventing speeches ‘in the manner of a scholastic disputation’ (conciones vel potius declamationes scholasticorum in modum finxit). Bodin also quoted Jacques Gohorry’s comparison of Giovio’s history to the romance of Amadis de Gaule.38 In the case of Guicciardini, the Venetians objected to speeches that they considered ‘no less false than full of hatred and poison’. Paolo Paruta, a Venetian historian, described one speech of Guicciardini’s as not only false but not even ‘plausible’ [verosimile].39 However, the reaction against speeches went further at the time of the antirhetorical turn of a group of historians working in the early seventeenth cen35

Vincent Luciani, Francesco Guicciardini and his European Reputation (New York: Karl Otto, 1936), p. 306. 36 Orationi militari, ed. by Remigio Nannini (Venice: Giolito, 1557); Orationi in materia ciuile, e criminale, ed. by Remigio Nannini (Venice: Giolito, 1561); Harengues militaires et concions de princes, capitaines, embassadeurs et autres, maniant tant la guerre que les affaires d’estat, ed. by François de Belleforest (Paris: N. Chesneau, 1573). 37 Quoted in Grafton, p. 39. 38 Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. by Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), pp. 60–61; cf. Grafton, p. 46. 39 Luciani, p. 99.

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tury, among them the Venetian Paolo Sarpi, the Frenchman Jacques-Auguste de Thou, or Thuanus, and the Englishman William Camden.40 ‘I have thrust in no orations’, wrote Camden, in the preface to his Annals of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, ‘but such as were truly spoken; or those reduced to fewer words; much less have I feigned any’.41 In similar fashion Paolo Sarpi excluded orations from his History of the Council of Trent — a decision all the more remarkable given that speech-making was, after all, one of the major activities of the Council. He summarized the speeches in oratio obliqua, rather than attempting to reproduce or represent them in oratio recta. One might think that this was a move away from historical realism, but it was a move prompted at once by Sarpi’s awareness of the problems of evidence of what was actually spoken and by his desire to have nothing to do with what have been described as ‘Clio’s cosmetics’.42 Like Camden and Thuanus, Sarpi preferred to insert documents rather than speeches into his narrative. One might view these documents, recording voices other than that of the historian, as transformations of the speech. The attitude of these three ‘pragmatic’ historians, as one might call them, who wrote to be useful rather than to display their rhetorical skills, was not shared by all their colleagues. Agostino Mascardi, for instance, who was a professor of rhetoric as well as a historian, continued the Renaissance tradition of the oration in his book on the conspiracy of the Fieschi, and so did the Cardinal de Retz in his adaptation of Mascardi’s book.43 At the end of the seventeenth century, the Dutch scholar Gerard Jan Vos still advocated the insertion of speeches into histories.44 It was only gradually that the tide turned. Leopold von Ranke was not breaking new ground when he criticized the practice, taking Guicciardini as his example of what not to do in his famous Kritik Neuerer Geschichtschreiber (1824). A few years later Thomas Macaulay — no mean speech-maker himself — declared 40 Peter Burke, ‘The Rhetoric and Anti-Rhetoric of History in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in Anamorphosen der Rhetorik: Die Wahrheitspiel der Renaissance, ed. by Gerhard Schröder and others (Munich: Fink, 1997), pp. 71–79. 41 William Camden, Annals, trans. by Robert Norton, 3rd edn (London: Benjamin Fisher, 1635), preface. 42 Timothy P. Wiseman, Clio’s Cosmetics: Three Studies in Greco-Roman Literature (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979). 43 Agostino Mascardi, La congivra del conte Gio. Lvigi de’ Fieschi (Milan: Lantoni, 1629); Jean François Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, La conjuration du comte Jean-Louis de Fiesque (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1665). 44 Gerardus Johannes Vossius, Ars historica (Leiden: Maire, 1623). Cf. Nicholas Wickenden, G. J. Vossius and the Humanist Concept of History (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1993), pp. 211–12.

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the invention of speeches by Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and others to be an ‘absurd practice’. Even at this time, however, some readers still appreciated the speeches, among them the English essayist William Hazlitt, who declared that ‘I should like to read the speeches in Thucydides, and Guicciardini’s History of Florence [. . .] in the original’.45 * 7. The example of the place of speeches in historical discourse illustrates very clearly the zigzag rather than linear development of historiography. It was not sufficient to criticize speeches because they were invented, while pretending to come from the protagonists. Historians who rejected this generic convention needed and still need to find a functional equivalent for speeches. Macaulay, for instance, recommended what he called the ‘declamatory disquisition’ as a substitute for orations, and his History of England abounds with examples of reported speech.46 In Chapter 9, for instance, William of Orange bade farewell to the States of Holland. ‘He thanked them [. . .] he entreated them’ and so on. In Chapter 18, it is James II who ‘had in vain insisted [. . .] had in vain addressed’, etc. The free indirect style may be regarded as a substitute, practised more or less self-consciously from Guicciardini (in the case of battles, as we have seen) to our own day.47 A number of historians are taking an increasing interest in the representation of multiple viewpoints within their narratives, and so, returning to the example of Thucydides, we might suggest that an equivalent for his speeches was never so much needed as it is today.48 In this essay I have tried to work with some structuralist ideas and attempted to reconcile the opposite insights of Bakhtin and Jakobson. Bakhtin memorably described language as a collective creation in which individuals simply appropriate, re-employ or quote words that have often been heard in the mouths of others. As Julia Kristeva, paraphrasing Bakhtin, put it, ‘any text is constructed 45 Leopold von Ranke, ‘About Guicciardini’s Speeches’, in his The Secret of World History, ed. and trans. by Roger Wines (New York: Fordham University Press, 1981), pp. 73–98; William Hazlitt, ‘On Reading Old Books’, in his Plain Speaker (1826), ed. by Duncan Wu (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), pp. 206–14 (p. 214). 46 Macaulay’s unpublished diary, 10 December 1850, quoted in George O. Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 2 vols (London: Longmans, 1877), ii, p. 21. 47 Frappier, p. 70; cf. Nichols, passim. 48 Peter Burke, ‘History of Events and the Revival of Narrative’, in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. by Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 233–48.

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as a mosaic of quotations’.49 Jakobson made the complementary yet opposite point in an essay on quotation, suggesting that whenever we quote, for our own purposes and in our own situation, we necessarily make the quoted words our own.50 It would be good to see a ‘dialogic’ history of historical writing that presented historians as interacting with their predecessors, whether following them or diverging from them.

49

Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialog and Novel’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. by Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 34–61 (p. 37). 50 Roman Jakobson, ‘Language in Operation’, Lingua, 21 (1964), 269–81.

Reproducing the Mona Lisa in Nineteenth-Century France Stephen Bann

T

here was a time when the Mona Lisa was not the most famous painting in the world. There was also a time when the Mona Lisa had not ever been reproduced. This essay is about the interval of eighty years or so between the time when the painting was first reproduced, and the stage by which it had acquired its world-wide celebrity. I am of course cheating a bit if I take the date for the explosion of interest for granted. However Donald Sassoon’s helpful rag-bag of a book, Becoming Mona Lisa, narrows it down confidently to the first years of the twentieth century, when the lady took her unscheduled holiday from the Louvre and returned briefly to Italy in the embrace of an Italian workman.1 I am happy to fall in with this judgement, since nothing in my argument depends on it. For the other date — the date of the Mona Lisa’s first reproduction — I will need to be more careful. I am however asserting that the noted French art historian Henri Focillon was not by any means justified when, in an essay originally published in 1911, he claimed that the date of the first reproduction was not before 1800, and then pinpointed the only date beyond dispute as being 1824.2 The latter should certainly not be taken as a firm date for the first reproduction of all. Focillon himself concedes that a clumsy litho1 See Donald Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon (New York and London: Harcourt, 2001). 2 See Henri Focillon, ‘Les Graveurs de la Joconde’, Revue de l’art ancien et moderne, 30 (1911), 366–78. The article was later included in Henri Focillon, Technique et sentiment: Études sur l’art moderne (Paris: Laurens, 1919; re-edited Paris: Société de propagation des livres d’art, 1938). All quotations are from the 1938 edition.

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graph showing only the Mona Lisa’s head may well predate it. More significantly, he also omits a burin engraving by Jean-Baptiste-Raphael-Urbain Massard for the Musée français that was published in 1806.3 Yet this omission by Focillon turns out to be a revealing one in relation to the argument that I am going to pursue. For Focillon’s fascinating essay is not just a simple roster of the various reproductions of the Mona Lisa. It is a vigorous, and highly tendentious, piece about the competing techniques of reproduction that persisted throughout in the nineteenth century, also involving the relationship between the distinctive properties of the different graphic techniques, and the ways in which they could be held to have governed the reception of great works of visual art. Focillon puts the matter decisively after a brief summary of the different techniques of engraving that held the field in Europe from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century. ‘It is Romanticism and it is lithography that popularized Da Vinci’s masterpiece’.4 In respect of the role of ‘Romanticism’, I shall offer reasons for remaining rather sceptical, unless we extend that term to the Romantic movement’s further prolongation into the mid-nineteenth century. The Mona Lisa, Focillon says with regard to the ‘Romantics’, was ‘the object of their meditations and their commentaries’. But here he is foreshortening the period in a rather cavalier way. It was in the pages of L’Artiste, and no earlier than 12 April 1857, that Théophile Gautier memorably apostrophized the Florentine lady as the ‘Sphinx of beauty who smiles so mysteriously in the frame of Leonardo da Vinci’5 — a tribute repeated verbatim in his popular guide to the Louvre ten years later, and that becomes the prototype for Walter Pater’s hardly less fulsome evocation of the Lady Lisa, ‘older than the rocks on which she sits’, 3

For Massard, see Henri Beraldi, Les Graveurs du XIX e siècle, new edn, 12 vols (Nogentle-Roi: LAME, 1981), ix, p. 241, where the print of ‘La Joconde’ is mentioned together with other contribution to this important visual repertoire of reproductive prints after works in the collection of the Louvre. As noted by Beraldi, the print is relatively small, in Octavo format, and after a reproductive drawing by Pierre Bouillon. I am indebted to George McKee for the information that it was issued in the thirty-seventh livraison of the Musée français, recorded in the March edition of the Journal général de la littérature de France, 1806. 4 Focillon, p. 85. 5 The article in L’Artiste (12 April 1857) bears the title ‘Les Caricatures de Léonard de Vinci’. The passage on the Mona Lisa is quoted directly in Théophile Gautier’s much republished Guide de l’amateur du Musée du Louvre, 1st edn (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1867), pp. 26–27. It is interesting to note, à propos of the ‘Sphinx’ reference, that Ingres’s first version of Oepidus and the Sphinx (1808) had recently been shown at the Exposition universelle of 1855, thus undergoing what Henri Delaborde would later term ‘the test of a vast publicity’. See Henri Delaborde, Ingres, sa vie, ses travaux, sa doctrine (Paris: Plon, 1870), p. 211.

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which was published in The Renaissance in 1873, and still reechoed in the early twentieth century thanks to such avatars as W. B. Yeats, Fernando Pessoa, and Sigmund Freud.6 This accumulating tradition of the Mona Lisa as a literary reference, fascinating though it may be, has to be distinguished from the issue of the painting’s reception at an earlier date. In Focillon’s text, the assumption is reasonably made that this reception goes hand in hand with an argument about print technique. He stresses the importance of the new technique of lithography in reinforcing the impact of the Mona Lisa on a public that is becoming specially attuned to its elusive charms. In order to convey my own, contrasting views about the argument from technique, I need to sketch out first of all the general conditions that appear to have governed the Mona Lisa’s reception. I should begin by saying that Focillon is not trying to deny the fact that many other paintings by Leonardo had been reproduced in the form of engravings before 1824. He is also well aware that the traditional techniques of burin work and etching had resulted in some signal failures. It is hard to counter his comments on the ‘execrable print’ engraved in Florence by Giovacchino Cantini, under the direction of Raphael Morghen, after Leonardo’s Virgin and Saint Anne, which does indeed manifest what he calls the ‘cold, gauche, and faded’ burin work of the school of the most celebrated of early nineteenth-century Italian engravers.7 But this mention of a second major painting by Leonardo, also in the collection of the Louvre, raises an issue that Focillon much too rapidly elides. That it was a lithographer who first reproduced the Mona Lisa in an adequate rendering, I am willing to grant for the sake of argument. That lithography ‘popularized’ the Mona Lisa begs the question precisely of the work’s popularity. As implied by the literary commentaries of Gautier and Pater, we need to progress into the second half of the nineteenth century before we can discover unequivocal evidence that the painting had achieved the exceptional measure of notoriety that would launch it on its world-beating career. Thus there are two main issues that need to be considered here, albeit briefly, before I look more closely at the argument over technique. The first is a very general one. France did indeed have its iconic female figures in the Louvre in the first decades of the nineteenth century. However these were not paintings but antique sculptures. Only the inglorious demise of the Napoleonic Empire prevented the Medici Venus from being enshrined a room specially designed for her by Percier and Fontaine, the designs for which were published in 1812. And when this Venus was repatriated to Florence after 1815, she left a gap that would 6 For these abundant literary and cultural references, which are not my main concern in this essay, see Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa, especially pp. 133–70. 7 Focillon, p. 84.

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be filled only by the providential discovery on an Aegean island of the Venus de Milo, an adroit form of compensation that was celebrated in those terms by the popular Magasin universel in January 1834.8 It would take a long time to track the process through which, over the next century, the status of the most favoured artwork in the Louvre — and the emblem of iconic femininity — was gradually shifted from a Greek Venus to a Florentine matron of the Renaissance. But since with the new illustrated ‘magazines’ of the 1830s, we are entering the zone of a truly popular press — with sales calculated at around 100,000 per issue — it is worth devoting a little attention to the development of Leonardo’s reputation, and the Mona Lisa’s role in that development, over the period up to and including the early nineteenth century. Of Leonardo’s exceptional prestige in France from the Renaissance onwards, there can be no doubt. The great artist had, after all, paid the ultimate compliment to the French nation by (allegedly) dying in the arms of Francis I: an event given scenic corroboration in a painting by Ingres dating from 1818, and shown at the 1824 Salon.9 But it could be argued that Leonardo’s distinctive status was oddly unsupported by any broad knowledge of his actual works. It was a commonplace that his masterpiece, The Last Supper fresco in Milan, had deteriorated beyond repair, and so remained accessible only through the medium of reproductive engraving. A fairly extensive account of Leonardo’s life and work published in the Magasin pittoresque in 1834 repeated this topos, and included a wood engraving by Jackson after the ‘destroyed fresco’. This biography also drew attention to the prominence of the Virgin and St Anne in the collection of the Louvre, but did not comment on the Mona Lisa.10 There can be little doubt that the publication of the first French translation of Vasari in 1841–42 must have increased the number of serious students of Leonardo’s work, also allowing them to read Vasari’s lyrical passage on the Mona Lisa in the vernacular.11 Also by 1841, the Parisian public would have been able to view the spectacle of the 8 See Magasin universel, 1834, p. 101: ‘the Venus de Medici returned to Florence [. . .] French artists were despairing of ever repairing the immense loss suffered by our museum, when fourteen years ago the French embassy at Constantinople learnt the existence of an admirable statue of Venus recently discovered in Greece.’ 9 See L’Opera completa di Ingres (Milan: Rizzoli, 1968), p. 98. 10 See Magasin pittoresque, 2 (1834), pp. 243–46. 11 See Vies des peintres, sculpteurs et architectes par Giorgio Vasari, trans. by Léopold Leclanché, with commentaries by Jeanron and Léopold Leclanché (Paris: Just Tessier, 1841–42). The effect of this publication can be gauged already in the appearance of a popularizing history of modern painting like F. Valentin’s Les Peintres célèbres (Tours: Mame, 1844), where the translation of Vasari’s comment that the Mona Lisa shows ‘to what degree art can rise and imitate nature’ is repeated almost verbatim (p. 48).

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venerable Leonardo beckoning to the youthful Raphael in the great sequence of ‘Artists of all ages’, painted around the Hémicycle of the École des Beaux-Arts by Paul Delaroche (and given even wider currency by Louis Henriquel-Dupont’s subsequent engraving of 1853).12 But it is clear nonetheless that the popular illustrated magazines of the period up to 1850, which not infrequently mentioned Leonardo, did not focus on the Mona Lisa as a prime example of Leonardo’s work. There was an argument hotly debated in the Magasin pittoresque in 1847 as to whether Leonardo could be claimed as the author of a portrait in the Louvre of Francis I’s predecessor, Louis XII.13 There was an article in the same magazine in 1849 that speculated on whether a small picture from the former royal collection, by that time in the possession of the Museum of Nancy, and entitled Le Sauveur du monde, should indeed be attributed to him.14 This habit of drawing highly implausible works of art into the magic circle of Leonardo’s authorship — often in connection with matters of national or regional prestige — seems to have continued into the 1860s when Charles Blanc published an etching of yet another unlikely recruit in the guise of a Saint Sebastian.15 All of these debates were of course quite unrelated to the role of Leonardo as the author of the Mona Lisa. In sum, I suggest that we should remain doubtful about Focillon’s claim that ‘Romanticism popularized’ the Mona Lisa. It is likely that we could draw a line from Jeanron’s Vasari translation of 1841, to Gautier’s purple passage in its successive publications, and indeed beyond, as I shall show. But this ekphrastic celebration of the painting is a mid-century affair, and bears little or no connection to the earlier development of lithography as a reproductive medium. In other words, it is more realistic to look at the lithographic and other print media through which the Mona Lisa was reproduced in this period under the assumption that this was a work that history had temporarily forgotten. Originally hung in the cabinet doré of the palace of Fontainebleau, it had been transferred by Louis XIV to his new palace of Versailles with a host of other paintings from the royal collection. It was observed there around 1700, in the Petite Galerie of the Royal Apartments, by Félibien: recorded as hanging next to the ‘Belle Ferronnière, Mistress of François Ier, by de Vinci [was] the portrait de Lise, wife 12 See Stephen Bann, ‘Paul Delaroche à l’hémicycle des Beaux-Arts: L’histoire de l’art et l’autorité de la peinture’, Revue de l’art, 146 (2004), pp. 28–31. 13 Magasin pittoresque, 15 (1847), p. 313. 14 Magasin pittoresque, 17 (1849), p. 288. 15 Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1861. 2, pp. 66–67. The etching was by Léopold Flameng.

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of a Florentine named Gioconde’.16 One might ask if much had changed in the attention paid to this portrait of an obscure Florentine lady was regarded, when the 1841 catalogue of the Louvre listed it prosaically as: ‘Portrait of Monna Lisa, famous for her beauty, and wife of Francesco de Giocondo, a gentleman of Florence.’17 So my doubt as to whether Romanticism really ‘popularized’ the Mona Lisa is propelled by the underlying issue of whether, or by what stage, the picture could indeed be said to be truly famous: not just as Leonardo’s well documented portrait of a beautiful Florentine woman, but as a polysemic art work that necessitated nothing less than a gear-change in the rhetoric of criticism, as would be the case with Gautier, and later with Pater. Moreover the point about lithography popularizing the Mona Lisa, which Focillon bundles in with the Romantic connection, is a different, but equally debatable issue. There is more than a hint of tautology in the way Focillon puts his case. How do we know that the Mona Lisa was popular? Obviously it was so because it was reproduced (and indeed pirated) by lithographers. But Focillon’s thesis is really more significant, and a good deal more polemical, than that. On the one hand, he is saying that the happy coincidence between the plastic values of Leonardo’s work and the intrinsic qualities of the lithographic technique made it possible for the painting to be adequately reproduced for the first time. On the other hand, he is tacitly supporting the view that lithography had overhauled, and was indeed beginning to render obsolescent, the traditional reproductive medium of burin engraving. For Focillon, the invention of lithography was the first nail in the coffin of burin engraving. The second — and the one that finally sealed the coffin shut — was reproductive etching. It is no coincidence that this was the medium practised by the printmaker Victor Focillon, his father. Focillon himself was reputedly prevented only by his poor eyesight from following in his father’s footsteps.18 The printmaker upon whom Focillon’s case rests certainly deserves close study when we follow the development of French lithography in its first flowering. Nowadays the early history of the technique, which took root in France shortly after the Fall of the Empire in 1815, has been selectively weeded out. The lithograph’s currency as a vehicle for social comment and caricature under the July Monarchy claims most of the attention, though the achievement of indi16

Quoted in Pierre de Nolhac, Histoire du Château de Versailles (Paris: Emile-Paul, 1911), ii, p. 184. 17 See Notice sur les tableaux exposés dans le Musée royal (Paris: Ballard, 1841). 18 For this aspect of Focillon’s heritage, see the excellent section ‘L’héritage familial: le goût de l’estampe’ in La vie des formes: Henri Focillon et les arts, exh. cat. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon (Ghent: Snoeck, 2004), pp. 41–97.

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vidual artists like Géricault and Delacroix in this domain is admitted as notable graphic work on the side. What is sometimes neglected is the fact that virtually all the major French academic painters of the period after 1815 rushed to experiment with the new technique, which had the almost magical property of reproducing an artist’s style of draughtsmanship without involving the intermediate stages of translation that retarded the process of engraving. These artists included Antoine-Jean Gros, Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, Carle Vernet and, most germane for Focillon’s thesis, Pierre Prud’hon and Anne-Louis Girodet, whose use of vaporous sfumato could indeed be viewed as having a special affinity with the soft tonalities of lithography. Focillon is right to dismiss the attempt of contemporary burin engravers like Étienne Beisson to reproduce Prud’hon through the linear schemata of burin technique. Prud’hon’s own paintings, such as the Enlèvement de Psyche (1808), have suffered from the blackening of pigment, and now give little idea of the qualities that needed to be reproduced. But a few lithographs that he himself authored, not long before his death in 1823, betoken his delight in the soft grey harmonies available through the new medium. The younger painter Girodet was more successful in perpetuating the effects of his painterly chiaroscuro. But the authoritative critic Henri Beraldi insists that the finest prints attributed to him, and after his paintings, were in fact from the hand of one of his pupils, Hyacinthe-Louis-Victor-Jean-Baptiste Aubry-Lecomte.19 This artist had launched his exceptional career as a lithographer in the 1820s and ’30s by making reproductions precisely after the work of his master Girodet and after Prud’hon. It was Aubry-Lecomte who published on 24 April 1824 — just in time for the opening of the Salon — his lithographic reproduction of the Mona Lisa (Figure 10). The Salon of 1824 was certainly a very significant one, from the lithographers’ point of view, since it was the first in which lithography was classed as a separate technical category in the official catalogue, instead of being lumped in with other forms of engraving.20 A number of younger artists took advantage of this administrative measure, including Richard Bonington and several other members of the enterprising group of young artists who were providing 19

See Beraldi, vii, p. 162 for the lithographs after Girodet, and Beraldi, i, pp. 67–72, for Aubry-Lecomte. Born in Nice in 1797, Aubry-Lecomte worked as a clerk after leaving the lycée and settled in Paris in 1816, where he also began to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, and obtained two medals before passing into Girodet’s studio. He died in Paris in 1858. 20 The Paris Salon, held annually or biennally under the auspices of the Académie des Beaux-Arts since the early eighteenth century, was still the most prestigious art exhibition in Europe a century later. In the three Salons that followed the introduction of the new medium into France (1817, 1819, and 1822), lithography was classed under the general category of engraving.

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Figure 10 Hyacinthe-Louis-Victor-Jean-Baptiste Aubry-Lecomte, Monna Lisa: Mo-

glie di Francesco del Giocondo, after Leonardo da Vinci (1824). Lithograph. Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC. 30.5 × 20.3 cm.

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Figure 11 Luigi Calamatta, La Joconde, after Leonardo da Vinci (1857). Engraving.

Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris: Département des Estampes. 37.5 × 27.5 cm.

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topographical illustrations for the Normandy volume of the Voyages pittoresques. Aubry-Lecomte however favoured a different genre. It is worth noting that the six items for which his editor Constans made a declaration to the Dépôt légal at this date included three other portraits: of Charles I, King of England, and Mary II, Queen of England, by Auguste Foucaud, and the Duc d’Orléans by Auguste Leclerc. The Florentine lady, described on the print, as ‘Monna Lisa, Moglie di Francesco del Giocondo’, must have been quite at home in this company. Yet Aubry-Lecomte was certainly not an artist who confined himself to runof-the-mill portraiture. Though a pupil of Girodet, he had only definitively abandoned his post as a clerk at the Ministry of Finance in 1823. But he was showing one of the largest individual groups of lithography in the Salon. His list of fifteen prints included several ambitious reproductions of works by contemporary painters, such as L’Enlèvement de Psyché by the recently deceased Prud’hon, two major history paintings from the 1822 Salon by the academician and former Director of the French Academy at Rome, Guillaume Lethière, and his fellow pupil François-Louis Dejuinne’s Interior of the House of Tasso, a work also shown the 1824 Salon. Once again, the Mona Lisa would have fitted well into this collection of works which foregrounded Aubry-Lecomte’s academic and Italian affiliations, though one may suppose that the print itself, measuring only 30.5 × 20.3 cm, would not have been particularly prominent in this prestigious company. The fact that Aubry-Lecomte shows the lady reversed left to right, indicating that there has been no correction for the printing process, is surely interesting, especially in view of the fact that Focillon’s illustration of the print — however we may interpret it — proceeds to rectify the anomaly! One reasonable deduction is that the original work was not by any means well-known — certainly not so well-known as to make its reversal an issue of possible complaint. In other, subsequent reproductive lithographs after old masters, Aubry-Lecomte did correct for the effect of reversal, and produce a properly orientated image: for example, in his print after a detail of the waking Christ child, taken from Raphael’s Madonna of the Diadem in the Louvre. But whether or not he calculated that a reversed image would pass in the case of a relatively little-known Leonardo, though it would not be tolerated for a detail from Raphael, Aubry-Lecomte’s lithograph certainly lends support to Focillon’s argument about the coincidence between the plastic qualities of the Mona Lisa, and the intrinsic potentiality of the new technique. Focillon takes this effective synergy as a marker in what he terms the ‘history of sensibility’. Anticipating the concept which we now call the ‘period eye’, he writes eloquently about the general significance of such reproductive exercises. They enable us to ‘determine to what extent the soul and mind of the interpreters are in accord at once with the epoch of which they are

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part, with the conditions of the métier to which they are subject, and with the master whom they are charged with explaining to us’.21 This justification for studying the history of reproductive printmaking is one with which I would wholeheartedly agree. But there remains a problem about the equation which Focillon advances with such conviction. The difficulty is that this argument is being employed to justify the elevation of one specific printmaking technique at the expense of the others, whether it be lithography at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or etching towards the end of it. Yet the number of lithographers who committed themselves to reproduction over their whole career is very small. Aubry-Lecomte is in fact the exception that proves the rule. But there is little to show that he attached any special significance to his choice of this particular work by Leonardo. Clearly he focused his efforts initially on reproducing the works of his master Girodet, and probably it was Girodet who pointed him in the direction of the Mona Lisa in the first place. But there is no sign that he confined himself to painters specializing in the effects of chiaroscuro. When, in 1827, he attempted a marketing exercise possibly unprecedented in lithography by advertising a limited edition of proofs avant la lettre on China paper with a sliding scale of charges, his chosen subjects were Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and the notable contemporary painting after Mme de Staël’s novel, Corinne au Cap Misène by the neo-classicist and pupil of David, Baron Gérard. This was probably Aubry-Lecomte’s finest hour, and his rendering of Gérard’s work, in particular, gained him very positive notices in the press. In other words, there is nothing to suggest that a printmaker so well attuned to the market as Aubry-Lecomte had promoted his Mona Lisa as anything special, or as a work specially representative of a plastic treatment that would favour his métier as a lithographer, and beguile his public.22 However, the strongest objection to Focillon’s thesis is not that he exaggerated the significance of Aubry-Lecomte’s 1824 lithograph, when set in the context of that printmaker’s career, and the public impact of the new printmaking technique. It is that he so categorically dismissed the traditional technique that was still, throughout the major part of the nineteenth century, the predominant vehicle for the reproduction of paintings: that is to say, burin engraving. Here I should introduce for the first time the central core of this essay, which is the 21

Focillon, p. 79. Focillon provides only two proofs of the ‘real success’ of Aubry-Lecomte’s lithograph. It was photographed after 1850 for a collection edited by the Bisson brothers, and it was ‘copied, or rather crudely pastiched by Mendoze in the very year of its publication’ (ibid., p. 87). The first example simply emphasizes my own point that the notoriety of the painting dates from the second half of the century. The second does not appear entirely convincing as a proof of contemporary popularity. 22

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remarkable story of the engraving after the Mona Lisa by Luigi Calamatta (see Figure 11, p. 135 above), whose publication Focillon unaccountably dates to 1838, though in fact it was first previewed at the Exposition universelle in 1855, seventeen years later. Focillon dismisses it as the ‘error of a considerable artist, still prisoner of bad habits in technique and faithful to an ideal of the métier which his knowledge and merit far surpassed’.23 This dismissive judgement is surely ripe for revision. Fortunately Calamatta himself happens to have left behind documentation that allows us to reconstruct the successive stages of his ongoing engagement with the reproduction of the Mona Lisa, which extended over more than thirty years in all. It is an absorbing account that brings alive the successive stages necessitated by so serious and sustained an undertaking. It convinces us to take a much more open-ended view of the parallelism of printmaking techniques that Focillon misrepresents as a Darwinian struggle for the survival of the fittest. Whereas the significance attached to Aubry-Lecomte’s lithograph of 1824 by his contemporaries — and by the artist itself — remains (as far as I can see) a matter of speculation, the personal investment of Calamatta in his engraving project is a matter of precise, and frequently, fascinating record. This young and highly gifted engraver, originally trained in Rome by Professor Giangiacomo, had been brought to Paris by André Taurel, Grand Prix de Rome in 1818, and was lodged in Taurel’s house in the Rue Du Bac.24 His first letter from Paris to his fellow Roman engraver, Paolo Mercuri, dates from August 1824, and he had been installed there for around eighteen months when, on 12 January 1826, he wrote to his friend in the following terms: The day before yesterday I finished a drawing representing ‘La Gioconda’, a rather lively portrait, considering that it is Leonardo’s masterpiece. Obtaining a promise to have the picture at my disposal, I wanted to dedicate myself to it with pleasure, to this so beautiful work; now again, if I would want to sell it, it would be very difficult. People that have seen it have told me [not?] to sell it because then I can engrave it, when I have time. They have told me that I have made an exact copy of the most difficult work to be copied, and that this drawing is superior to many others. Then they told me so many things that make you want to erase it when they say them to you.25 23

Ibid., p. 88. For a general account of Calamatta’s career and that of his friend and fellowcountryman Paolo Mercuri, see Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 127–68. 25 Letter from Luigi Calamatta to Paolo Mercuri, 12 January 1826: original text translated from Italian to Romanian on www.paolomercuri.ro/HTML/Scris05.htm [Accessed 9 December 2010]. This website is at present the only traceable source for the correspondence 24

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A number of issues and observations arise in relation to this document. The young Italian regards the work as ‘Leonardo’s masterpiece’. But who has told him this, and who are the ‘people’ who have praised the drawing, and given him advice on the subject, though the advice appears to have been perplexing? Would they not be the very same people who arranged for the work itself to be placed ‘at [Calamatta’s] disposal’? Luckily, we can answer these questions without difficulty, and again using Calamatta’s own words, though in this case it is his unpublished memoirs in the Fonds George Sand of the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris that provide the contextual clues: I obtained through M. Ingres the permission to have the painting by Leonardo in a special room of the Louvre to make a drawing from it. So precious a work is impossible to copy in the Gallery; already when I had it at my disposal I could only see a large part of its finesses at certain hours of the day and when the weather was fine.26

The valuable information that Ingres — a close friend of his patron Taurel — has arranged his access to the Mona Lisa also indicates the reasons for its attraction to Calamatta. Even so simple a clue explains why Calamatta has a very different vision of Leonardo’s painting from that of the ‘period eye’ that Focillon detected and associated with the technical properties of the medium of lithography. For him, it is not at all a question of simulating the lights and shades of sfumato, but (as he puts it) of communicating ‘that incomprehensible transparency that one only appreciates after having much observed and admired the Gioconda’.27 To achieve this end, he had needed complete seclusion in the company of the work, although light conditions did not always prove favourable in the winter months of 1825/26. The particular metaphor that Calamatta applies to his object of study — as shown in these memoirs — could not, in effect, be more antipathetic to the softly traced lines and textures associated with lithography: I took note when I had this diamond beneath my eyes of the extreme difficulty of copying it: discouraged, unable to satisfy myself, I took advice from my friend Taurel (an engraver of great talent) and he said to me: what you are aiming for is impossible and you can be content with what you have done; there is a certain magic in this painting that the pencil will never render. I went back to the job with more determination and more patience than ever; I cried when looking at the drawing and I laughed when contemplating the original which ended by becoming animated beneath my fixed and acute gaze. Through little improvements at the with Mercuri. I am grateful to William Shine for having translated the Romanian texts, the Italian originals being unavailable. 26 Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris, Fonds George Sand, J. 36, fol. 29. 27 Ibid.

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end of two months of assiduous work I ended by being content with my drawing and great was my surprise when I observed the admiration of the artists I admired most like Ingres and Taurel.28

Calamatta’s description of the Mona Lisa as a ‘diamond’ may possibly echo the trope that Vasari used to convey the striking visual effect of her gaze: Jeanron’s edition refers memorably to ‘the brilliant and humid crystal of [the Mona Lisa’s] eye’.29 But the emphasis on the process of drawing is also doubtless a pointer to the young Italian’s adhesion not to the circle of Girodet (as was the case with Aubry-Lecomte), but to that of Ingres and Taurel, staunch defenders of the sovereign status of ‘disegno’ (le dessin), who have told him that ‘[his] drawing is superior to many others’, and also emphasised the role of fine draughtsmanship as a necessary prelude to the process of reproductive engraving. Among the superlative portrait studies of Ingres we find drawings both of Taurel — whose thick glasses perhaps testify to the strain of close burin work even during his stay in Rome — and of Calamatta himself, who was transplanted to Paris because of his superior engraving skills, and later became the acclaimed engraver of some of the master’s most noteworthy paintings. Indeed, not long after he had pleased these exacting judges with his drawing after Leonardo, the young Calamatta pulled off a remarkable coup. He convinced Ingres to let him engrave the major work of the painter’s career to date, and the vehicle for his major success at the 1824 Salon, the Voeu de Louis XIII. Once again, the memoirs fill in the details, which are further confirmed by the contemporary correspondence with Mercuri. Calamatta had been thrown into Ingres’s company while preserving a certain moral advantage, since he had relinquished his own room in Taurel’s house to make space for the indigent artist, and himself slept in the kitchen. He first gained Ingres’s permission to work for three months on a drawing after just one section of the massive work. The results were so convincing that Ingres’s patron, Marcotte, was persuaded to finance the project of an engraving. By August 1827, this was under way, though it would only be completed a decade later and shown at the Paris Salon of 1837, to Ingres’s great pleasure and with public acclamation.30 But that is another story. What is so striking about Calamatta’s reproduction of the Mona Lisa is that the work gains a new lease of life in the form of a 28

Ibid. Vies des peintres, iv, p. 16. 30 In a letter to Paolo Mercuri, dated 13 August 1827, Calamatta states that he is now engraving after ‘a very pleasing drawing which I made after the painting of Ingres [the Voeu de Louis XIII]’. Further contextual material about this project is provided in Bann, Parallel Lines, pp. 145–47. 29

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drawing for a large part of the considerable time that it took him to complete the final engraving. As far as I know, this drawing is lost. But we can appreciate its vivid contemporary impact through the nostalgic evocation that Charles Blanc, Editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, gave of his early years as a trainee in the engraving studio established in Paris by Calamatta and Mercuri in the 1830s: ‘The first object that struck the visitor’s attention was precisely the drawing of the Mona Lisa, placed between the two easels of Calamatta and Mercuri, opposite the door. No one could enter the studio without being attracted by this fine drawing which seemed to exercise, like Leonardo’s painting, a kind of fascination’.31 Calamatta had communed with the Mona Lisa, alone and uninterrupted, during the winter months of 1825/26. Unlike the case of the young Greek man who (according to Pliny) spent the night with Praxiteles’s Knidian Aphrodite, what survived from the encounter was not a stain but a pencil drawing, initially seen and approved by Ingres and Taurel, but made visible in the 1830s to the wide circle of artistic and literary figures who crowded into the busy engraving studio in the Rue d’Amsterdam (as Blanc attests). Yet this drawing was never intended to be an end product. Already in 1829, during a summer spent in Italy, Calamatta had begun to incise the copper plate which would be completed a quarter of a century later. His memoirs attest that he envisaged this longdrawn-out process almost as a trial by ordeal of the practice and philosophy of reproductive engraving as it had been handed down to him: The mechanical part of art must however be discreet in order not to disturb the majesty of form, not hiding it through drawing too much attention to itself. That has always been my greatest preoccupation since it seems to me that few engravers know how to find the golden mean (le juste milieu). I am persuaded, to return to the picture, that Leonardo wished to bring together around this charming head and this incomparable hand such a number of minute and fine details both in the background and in the folds so as to give a broadness and grandeur which would not have existed otherwise. This sublime genius succeeded in bringing together science and spontaneity.32

Leonardo’s painting thus provided the perfect allegory for the uningratiating process that Calamatta pursued over so many years, trusting that, in the words of the Old Testament, ‘out of the strong’ would come ‘sweetness’: out of the deep incisions scoured by the sharp tip of the burin, would emerge an overall effect corresponding to the subtle suavity of the painter’s achievement. Again, to quote from Calamatta’s memoirs: 31 32

Quoted ibid., p. 1. Fonds George Sand, J. 36, fols 30–31.

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Stephen Bann This painting passes for being the masterpiece of Leonardo in spite of the bad state it has been reduced to by the millions of cracks [and] colour becoming green above all in the face and the left hand. Damp climates are the enemies of art. In this portrait Leonardo managed to bring together the majestic and solid modelling of planes with finish and with a subtlety of form without equal in painting. There is life in this Gioconda and everyone copies it differently from the next person, something that occurs precisely when one is drawing from nature. The great difficulty of engraving is to be able to obtain an object which is of the same material and substance as light effects, half-tints, and shadows: that is what I sought for with much effort through the combination of cuts and points.33

Of course it was precisely this ‘combination of cuts and points’ that Focillon condemned as the nemesis of Calamatta’s method, as indeed of any other such undertaking by the traditional reproductive engravers of the period. Calamatta had insistently stressed the ‘life’ in Leonardo’s work, but his method of conveying that life could only be by means of this network of precisely incised lines, enlivened here and there by a deft flick of the sharp instrument, yet still nurturing the hope that the viewer would be tempted to exclaim — in the words of Balzac’s Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, ‘il y a une femme là-dessus’ — ‘there is a woman under there!’ For Focillon, that moment of revelation never came; indeed in describing Calamatta’s engraving, he almost seems to have hallucinated the face of a Medusa: ‘Long black snakes [. . .] regularly across the surface of the face, hiding its qualities of feeling and materiality. We would like to remove these overbearing cuts, to surprise behind them a little life and truth’.34 Charles Blanc, for his part, had already conceded in 1859 that the project of retrieving a living woman from the evidence of the image in its contemporary state was no more than a fantasy of the moment. Consequently, Calamatta’s achievement was in effect quite different from the impossible goal that he claimed to have set for himself. Blanc was writing just two years after Gautier had suggested in his inimitable prose that the Mona Lisa was a ‘Sphinx of beauty’, and not a lady of Renaissance Florence. Blanc’s judgement may indeed be implicitly acknowledging that decisive contribution to the modern understanding of Leonardo’s painting. But he is also implying the more general point that the finest achievement of the reproductive engraver cannot avert the inevitable historicization of this (and every) great work of art: Undoubtedly, we may suppose that at the time when Mona Lisa was alive, in the very time when Vasari so carefully described the portrait of this amiable woman, Leonardo’s picture did not have the character of reverie which, in our eyes, now lends it so much charm. But it would have been very unwise, I believe, to remove, 33 34

Ibid., fols 29–30. Focillon, p. 88.

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even only in thought, the varnish of centuries that covers the Mona Lisa, and give it back to us with the presumed freshness of its coming into the world. For our own part, we have no regrets in finding, in the version of the engraver, these alterations that are so harmonious, which have, from a temporal point of view, withdrawn Leonardo’s painting, and allow to be seen nowadays only across the transparency of the blinds of poetry.35

Told in the way that it has been so far, this story of the reproduction of the Mona Lisa in nineteenth-century France seems not unlike the parable of the hare and the tortoise, with Aubry-Lecomte making his rapid dash for the finishing line in the 1820s, whilst Calamatta stayed in for the long haul and eventual victory — though on Charles Blanc’s terms. But I would not wish to reinforce this black and white picture. Without doubt, Calamatta himself was wracked with doubt about the lasting validity of the traditional medium to which he sacrificed so much time and energy. In a revealing letter dating from December 1844, he wrote about the tribulations attendant on finishing his print after Ingres’s portrait of the Duc d’Orléans. This was a print eagerly expected by the painter, and many others, since the young heir to the throne had perished in an accident shortly after the original portrait was completed. Calamatta complained: I am working on the Duc d’Orléans [. . .] this plate is enormous and full of very fine detail. I had promised myself not to do any more hurried work, and here I am again in the same tiresome situation that I was in with the Molé; one always hopes to go more quickly, one makes promises in good faith, and then one displeases people, apart from the embarrassment that these delays make for you. Life goes past in small and large vexations.36

The last sentence could well be applied to Calamatta’s experience in 1857, when the finished copper plate of the Mona Lisa was the first to be submitted to the new electrolytic process of ‘aciérage’ — being coated with steel in order to ensure its longevity. Beraldi has left a long account of the doubts and fears of those in attendance as the precious plate, ‘the fruit of ten years’ work’, was plunged into the ‘electric bath’, initially with disconcerting results.37 Nevertheless, as Charles Blanc’s timely appreciation demonstrates, Calamatta had picked the right time to publish his Mona Lisa. According to my argument, we cannot endorse Focillon’s view that ‘Romanticism and lithography popularized the Mona Lisa’. But we can be confident that Calamatta’s print was published at a time when the popular investment in Leonardo’s haunting image had become immeasurably 35 Charles Blanc, ‘Calamatta 1802–1870’, in Les Artistes de mon temps (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1876), pp. 101–28. 36 Letter from Luigi Calamatta to an unknown correspondent, 30 December 1844. Bibliothèque Doucet, Paris: Autographes C34 — Graveurs, 15537. 37 Beraldi, iv, pp. 57–58.

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more profound. Such a pondered interpretation of the original could well have helped to awaken the deeper currents of fantasy that were evoked in Gautier’s description.38 I can foresee another question forming, as we have now reached the 1850s. When was the Mona Lisa first photographed? When was her image captured by the process that narrowed the temporal gap between an object and its reproduction to virtual, if not actual, instantaneity? While Calamatta was spending those long hours alone with the Mona Lisa in the specially reserved room at the Louvre in the winter of 1825/26, Nicéphore Niépce was exchanging letters with Louis Daguerre and the engraver Augustin Lemaître, while experimenting with the fixing of his own images derived from an apparatus later known colloquially as the camera. Several of his first successful prints derived from carefully varnished engravings sent by Lemaître from Paris.39 The project of using photography to represent not only images of the world in general, but also that particular class of objects already existing as representations, was inscribed in its mission right from the start. It was only a matter of time before the painting that promised to be the most celebrated artwork in the world was photographed in its turn. Yet again the question of timing is crucial. It was only around 1850 that the collodion wet-plate process began to provide adequate technical preconditions for the photographic record of oil paintings, and towards the end of that decade before that process had been refined enough to secure recognition from artists and critics of photography alike.40 If one claims, then, that a sepia photograph by Gustave Le Gray from the early 1850s is the first photograph of the Mona Lisa, there is probably no fear of contradiction. But it is more than a quibble to question straight away the proposition that this is indeed a photograph of the Mona Lisa. The photograph is reproduced in what is to date the most extensive and reliable study of reproductive photography in Britain. But it is described there as reproducing an ‘Oil copy, signed and dated 1848, by M. F. Millet after the Mona Lisa by Leonardo’.41 In fact, the medium of the copy can be detected in the easily visible inscription 38

Another, even more direct reason for associating the publication of Calamatta’s print with the growing reputation of the Mona Lisa is the fact that it provoked the appearance of a lengthy encomium of the painting in the Revue des deux mondes by the novelist George Sand, who was in fact Calamatta’s mother-in-law. It was noted many years afterwards that this article had been read ‘the day after, by the whole of artistic Paris’. See the editorial article, ‘George Sand, critique d’art’, in L’Art, 5 (1876), p. 283. 39 See Bann, Parallel Lines, pp. 94–95. 40 See ibid., pp. 117–22. 41 The photograph is illustrated in Anthony J. Hamber, ‘A Higher Branch of the Art’: Photographing the Fine Arts in England, 1839–1880 (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach,

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to the left of the figure: ‘[Leo]nard de Vinci pinxit / F. Millet del.’ In other words, what Le Gray has reproduced photographically is a reproductive drawing by the artist in question, done presumably in the presence of the painting, though no doubt in less favourable circumstances than Calamatta had enjoyed twenty years before. There is however a slight problem to be resolved here. Inspection of the salon catalogues for the late 1840s reveals a series of exhibits by the miniaturist Frédéric Millet (1786–1859). It also shows that his son, Aimé Millet (1819–91), exhibited reproductive drawings in the same salons, including ‘La Joconde; dessin d’après Léonard de Vinci’ in 1849. The strong likelihood, therefore, is that Le Gray actually photographed the drawing by Aimé Millet, and the inscription somehow confused the name of the artist with that of his father. This reproductive drawing, indeed, appears to have been the result of a special state commission. Among the extensive lists of works commissioned under the authority of Charles Blanc, during the brief republican interval that followed the fall of the Orleanist dynasty in July 1848, is an entry dated 27 September 1849 that records Aimé Millet’s being awarded 1500 francs for a drawing after La Joconde.42 By this date, one assumes, he had already exhibited the drawing in the 1849 Salon, since (as previously mentioned) it features in the catalogue. This curious conjunction of Millet and Le Gray, under the aegis of Charles Blanc, still leaves a number of questions unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable. Did Charles Blanc, who would so fulsomely reminisce in 1859 about Calamatta’s ‘fascinating’ drawing of the Mona Lisa that hung in the studio in the 1830s, offer state patronage to the young artist in the reasonable expectation that his drawing would be engraved — and so pip Calamatta’s long delayed work to the post? The preparation of such elaborate drawings after paintings in the period was a serious matter, as the substantial payment attests, and they were frequently put on display in the salon as a first stage. But it was well recognized that their ultimate role was to facilitate reproductive engravings. Was it Blanc himself who recognized that a drawing fit for reproduction in this way could also be reproduced by the new technique of glass-plate photography of which Le Gray was a pioneer? This particular aspect of Le Gray’s work still remains relatively unknown, though I have located one other interesting case of a photographic reproduction of a work of art that dates from a few years after 1850.43 At any 1996), p. 241. The print reproduced is from the collection of the Musée Français de la Photographie at Bièvres (Essonne), France. 42 See Chantal Georgel, 1848: La République et l’art vivant (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1998), p. 186. 43 See Bann, Parallel Lines, pp. 25–26, 117.

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rate, there is no doubt that Le Gray’s early years of training in the studio of Paul Delaroche would have familiarized him with the world of contemporary French painting, and precisely with the artistic and literary milieu that circulated around Calamatta’s engraving studio. The main significance of this example is surely clear. We still remain, to some extent, prisoners of what I originally termed the ‘Darwinian’ view of reproductive techniques across the nineteenth century. This ideology is represented concisely by Walter Benjamin’s comment that lithography held the field as a new progressive medium until it was ‘surpassed’ — Benjamin actually writes ‘flown over’ (‘überflügelt’) — by photography.44 And yet, in the case of Le Gray’s photograph of the Mona Lisa, photography consents to take its place within the traditional protocols of reproductive engraving. It assumes, and does not attempt to bypass, the process by which the hallowed technique of ‘disegno’ is held to effect a transfer, not just of the outline but of the essence of the original work. Moreover, if it is opportune to recognize that the technical limitations of photography in this period resulted in a much smaller image than the engraving of Calamatta, it is also worth noting that reproductive engraving itself takes a new turn from the late 1850s with Charles Blanc’s editorship of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. The Gazette provided, as a matter of deliberate policy, a forum for high-quality engravings and etchings after past and contemporary masters in a format that approximated closely to the photographic prints of the period. So we might conclude that the process of adjustment taking place in the world of engraving as a result of the rise of photography was, at least in its early years, one of subtle comparison and adjustment between the properties of the different media. It was not the fight to the finish that is sometimes assumed to have taken place. This is clearly shown in the career of an engraver like Ferdinand Gaillard, who — from Focillon’s point of view — provided a ‘dreadful example’, but for the great etcher Félix Bracquemond offered a signal case of the enduring validity of reproductive engraving.45 Gaillard had won the Grand Prix de Rome for engraving in 1856, and in 1863 he was relegated with Manet and Bracquemond to the Salon des Réfusés for his delicate print after a portrait by Giovanni Bellini. Three years later, he published another print, after a Bellini Virgin, in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Here the work of the burin has become 44

The quotation is from his famous essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 213. 45 See Focillon, p. 145, and Félix Bracquemond, Écrits sur l’art (Dijon: L’Échelle de Jacob, 2002), pp. 188–89, where Gaillard is termed ‘a continuer and a renovator of the burin engraving’. See also Stephen Bann, ‘Photography by other Means? The Engravings of Ferdinand Gaillard’, Art Bulletin, 88 (2006), 121–40.

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almost perceptible to the naked eye, resulting in an effect of transparency that is the polar opposite of the deep cuts of the burin over which Calamatta had been agonizing for decades. Around this time, Gaillard was also drawing the Mona Lisa. A brief biography of the talented but anguished young man in the catalogue of the Département des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale recounts that his ‘only pleasure’ was ‘working in the Louvre on Mondays’.46 This again implies a more restrictive control, by this stage of the century, of the facilities granted for copying in the increasingly crowded national museum. The drawing has not been traced, but it was used as the basis for one of the stranger reproductions of the Mona Lisa noted by Focillon: a wood engraving by Laurent Hotelin from 1867. No doubt this was done for publication in one of the popular magazines that were still using wood-block illustrations at the time. This is no place to expatiate on the extraordinary career of Ferdinand Gaillard. Yet his unfinished engraving after the Mona Lisa is the appropriate example to conclude this essay. This was by no means the last burin engraving after Leonardo’s work to appear in the nineteenth century. That distinction should probably be reserved for a Prix de Rome student coming twenty years after Gaillard, Léon Boisson, who contributed a fine but small-scale rendering on china paper to the series ‘Musées et Salons’ in 1893.47 The last engraving of all, employing both burin and etching, was to come finally in 1926, when the Chalcographie of the Louvre gave a commission to Antoine-François Dezarrois.48 But Gaillard’s project turned out to be an altogether less conventional affair. In 1886 (the year before his death), Gaillard was given an official commission by the Chalcographie to engrave Leonardo’s Last Supper and his Mona Lisa. The intention was, no doubt, to bring together under the aegis of the most distinguished French burin engraver of his day the long regretted, almost obliterated masterpiece and the newly celebrated claimant to equality in the legacy of Leonardo. The Last Supper, conceived on a large scale (150 × 75 cm), was hardly even begun by Gaillard, despite the fifty drawings that he completed in front of the fresco.49 The Mona Lisa itself only proceeded as far as the preliminary workings in etching. But such was the overwhelming demand for Gaillard’s work, 46

Jean Adhémar and Jacques Lethève, Inventaire du Fonds français après 1800 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1930– ), viii (1954), p. 131. 47 Léon Boisson (1854–1941) was a pupil of the long-lived engraver and academician Louis Henriquel-Dupont (1797–1892), and hence one of the last to be trained in the tradition of reproductive engraving. 48 See Mémoires du visible, exhibition catalogue, Musée du Louvre (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2003), pp. 124–25. 49 Adhémar and Lethève, Inventaire, ibid.

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in its multitudinous early states as well as its final versions avec la lettre, that the unfinished plate was published in a limited edition of 125 copies, clearly labelled ‘State of the plate at the death of the artist’.50 This was a radically defective Mona Lisa, but perhaps one whose very lack of finish — like the Venus de Milo devoid of her arms — seems to have provoked an intense form of empathy. With the arrival of the twentieth century, there were gruesome episodes in store for the Mona Lisa: her enforced absence from the Louvre on a long vacation with an Italian workman, her being disfigured with a moustache by Marcel Duchamp, and so on into the present. In the mean time, Gaillard’s originally limited posthumous print has been reissued, and remains on sale at the Louvre to this day. In its original nineteenth-century context, it perhaps marked the stage at which Leonardo’s painting had definitively metamorphosed (in Jan Mukarovsky’s terms) from a ‘work/thing’ to ‘an object laid down in the collective consciousness’.51 Gaillard’s print had proved able to assimilate, through a kind of negative capability, both the myth of the contemporary prodigy who died in his prime, and the enduring fame of the veteran artist of the Renaissance who launched the Florentine lady on her travels.

50 51

Illustrated ibid., p. 124. See Jan Mukarovsky, ‘Art as Semiological Fact’, 20th Century Studies, 15/16 (1976), 11.

Kneeling before God — Kneeling before the Emperor: The Transformation of a Ritual during the Confessional Conflict in Germany Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger

G

enuflection or kneeling is a symbolic gesture of self-abasement, generally with the intention of obtaining mercy — in the act of penance before God, in the act of submission, deditio, before a temporal ruler. It is clear that a close structural affinity exists between the political ritual of apology upon one’s bended knee and the Christian ritual of remorse, repentance, and absolution, even that both rituals occasionally formed an inseparable unity.1 This has meanwhile been very precisely described and interpreted for the This paper is an English version of my article ‘Knien vor Gott — Knien vor dem Kaiser: Zum Ritualwandel im Konfessionskonflikt’, in Zeichen — Rituale — Werte, ed. by Gerd Althoff (Münster: Rhema, 2005). 1 Gerd Althoff, ‘Das Privileg der deditio: Formen gütlicher Konfliktbeendigung in der mittelalterlichen Adelsgesellschaft’; ‘Huld: Überlegungen zu einem Zentralbegriff der mittelalterlichen Herrschaftsordnung’; and ‘Demonstration und Inszenierung’, in Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), pp. 99–125, 199–228, and 229–57; idem, ‘Compositio’, in Verletzte Ehre: Ehrkonflikte in Gesellschaften des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Klaus Schreiner and Gerd Schwerhoff (Weimar: Böhlau, 1995), pp. 63–76; and finally idem, ‘Fußfälle: Realität und Fiktionalität einer rituellen Kommunikationsform’, in Eine Epoche im Umbruch: Volkssprachliche Literalität 1200–1300, ed. by Christopher Young and Christa Bertelsmeier-Kierst (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002) pp. 1–12; Klaus Schreiner, ‘“Nudis pedibus”: Barfüßigkeit als religiöses und politisches Ritual’, in Formen und Funktionen öffentlicher Kommunikation im Mittelalter, ed. by Gerd Althoff (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2001), pp. 53–123 (esp. pp. 74–79, 99–102, 111–17); idem, ‘Verletzte Ehre: Ritualisierte Formen

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Middle Ages; and I can limit myself to a brief summary of the results before moving on to my present concern. The ritual of deditio concluded a conflict with the demonstrative ‘unconditional’ submission of one party (‘auf Gnade und Ungnade’), which, however, had to be answered by the mercy of the other. The ritual complied with a specific formal language which could be applied in a variety of ways, but not arbitrarily or simply at will. Various degrees of symbolic self-abasement were allowed as well as a certain range of demonstrations of mercy. The ritual of apology upon one’s knees was not just one symbolic gesture, but rather a complex symbolic event that followed a specific communicative logic. Examined more closely, it appears that it was a matter of a gestural dialogue in accordance with fixed social rules: kneeling demanded a specific reaction. By unconditionally submitting to the ruler’s omnipotence, the subordinate placed him under pressure in turn to adhere to the ruler’s virtues of mercy, clemency, sozialer, politischer und rechtlicher Entehrung im späteren Mittelalter und in der beginnenden Neuzeit’, in Die Entstehung des öffentlichen Strafrechts: Bestandsaufnahme eines europäischen Forschungsproblems, ed. by Dietmar Willoweit (Weimar: Böhlau, 1999), pp. 263– 320, especially pp. 281–94; Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Timothy Reuter, ‘Unruhestiftung, Fehde, Rebellion, Widerstand: Gewalt und Frieden in der Politik der Salierzeit’, in Die Salier und das Reich, ed. by Stefan Weinfurter, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1992), iii, pp. 297–325. On the significance of kneeling, compare Rudolf Suntrup, Die Bedeutung der liturgischen Gebärden und Bewegungen in lateinischen und deutschen Auslegungen des 9. bis 13. Jahrhunderts (Münster: Fink, 1978), pp. 153–66. According to Suntrup, from the third century ad genuflection was appropriated into the Christian liturgy from the ceremonial of Roman rulership. On the sacrament of penance in general, see Arnold Angenendt, Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), pp. 626–58; on public ecclesiastic penance, see Mary C. Mansfield, The Humilation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), especially pp. 248–50; on the political instrumentalization of the ritual of penance, Jean-Marie Moeglin, ‘Pénitence publique et amende honorable en Moyen Âge’, Revue Historique, 298 (1997), 225–69; Friederike Neumann, ‘Die ‘introductio poenitentium’ als rituelle Ausdrucksform bischöflicher Absolutions- und Jurisdiktionsgewalt im 15. Jahrhundert’, in Bilder, Texte, Rituale, ed. by Klaus Schreiner and Gabriela Signori (= Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, suppl. 24), (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000), pp. 69– 86. On apology upon one’s knees (increasingly officially stiplulated) to render satisfaction in conflicts of honour among nobles, see Claudia Garnier, ‘Injurien und Satisfaktion: Zum Stellenwert rituellen Handelns in Ehrkonflikten des spätmittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Adels’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 29 (2002), 525–60. Among medievalists, in the meantime, the understandable wish has been expressed in reviews not to enumerate further individual genuflections. On this phenomenon in the Early Modern Period, however, much remains to be explained.

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and magnanimity.2 The social logic of these procedures followed not least from the analogy of penance before God and absolution from sins.3 Here as there, the amount of self-debasement on the one side increased the amount of mercy on the other; the amount of mercy, in turn, demonstrated the omnipotence of the benefactor.4 What has been particularly emphasized is the fact that, as a rule, such submission rituals followed a plan that had been previously arranged by negotiators and was consciously staged. This means that the voluntary, spontaneous, and unconditional nature of the submission and the openness of its conclusion were in fact a fiction. Nonetheless, for the participants this did not reduce the ritual’s entire significance to ‘mere play-acting’. From a modern perspective, this seems strange and hard to comprehend. But in the pre-modern relations, based essentially on face-to-face communication, publicly visible performances such as these were of greater significance than they are today. For as performative acts these rituals specifically had the power to bring about what they symbolically represented: they bound all of the participants to the reciprocal relations that were symbolically staged before the entire public. It seems to me especially significant that the staged character of the entire procedure did not at all call into question the sincerity of one’s repentance. As long as the ritual was executed perfectly and correctly — including the expression of appropriate emotions, signs 2

On the apparently universal symbolic language of self-abasement, compare William Ian Miller, Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 162–70 with examples from other cultural groups: ‘This ritual functions, in effect, by threatening to shame’—namely for those at whom the apology is directed. The necessary effect of the ritual is also emphasized, for example, in Althoff, ‘Huld’, p. 214; Schreiner, ‘Nudis pedibus’, p. 112; Mansfield, pp. 263–64; Garnier. 3 The close relationship between the political and religious content of the ritual is emphasized, for example, by Schreiner, ‘Nudis pedibus’, pp. 77, 99–100, 102; Althoff, ‘Compositio’, pp. 74–75 and cf. Althoff ’s summary of newer research: ‘Ecclesiastical penance stood as a model for designing submissions and mercy’ (‘Die Kirchenbuße stand Modell für die Gestaltung von Unterwerfungen und von Gnade’) (ibid., p. 69, note 2). 4 According to Reuter, the price that the ruler had to pay for the public recognition of his authority and the public humiliation of his opponent was a general renunciation of punishment (‘der Preis, den der Herrscher für die öffentliche Anerkennung seiner Autorität und die öffentliche Demütigung seines Gegners zu zahlen hatte, [war] ein weitgehender Verzicht auf Strafen’; p. 320). The pardon and the renunciation of punitive measures, however, do not seem to have placed the sacred authority of the ruler in question but rather to have strengthened it. This is also suggested by the newer research; compare, for example, Peter Schuster, Eine Stadt vor Gericht: Recht und Alltag im spätmittelalterlichen Konstanz (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999).

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of despondency and repentance5 — the problem of inner sincerity did not even arise for contemporaries. Rather, the ritual’s effect of creating obligation was achieved without reference to the inner conviction of the one who performed it. What mattered were the outer signs of remorse. This can also be demonstrated ex negativo: in cases when the obligations taken up in the ritual were later violated. In these cases, the chroniclers know to write retrospectively that already during the execution of the ritual, signs of scorn and mockery had supposedly been expressed instead of signs of repentance, that is, that the outer performance had not been correct.6 The question I would now like to pose is: what was the fate of this ritual of apology upon one’s knees in the early modern period, especially in German Reformation history?7 How did the confessional conflict affect this particular ritual and, above all, the discourse on ritual in general? Conversely, what is revealed by the change in the ritual across the periods? For ultimately, the division into different confessions changed many of the preconditions that seem necessary for the ritual to function: 5

Gerd Althoff, ‘Empörung, Tränen, Zerknirschung: “Emotionen” in der öffentlichen Kommunikation des Mittelalters’, in Spielregeln, pp. 258–81. On the binding force of the demonstative expression, compare also Klaus van Eickels, ‘Kuß und Kinngriff, Umarmung und verschränkte Hände: Zeichen personaler Bindung und ihre Funktion in der symbolischen Kommunikation des Mittelalters’ (paper presented in Münster, 4 February 2002). 6 For example in the case of Archbishop Hunfried of Ravenna in 1049, who, after kneeling before Pope Leo IX, stood up with a mocking expression on his face, compare Ernst Steindorff, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Heinrich III., 2 vols (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1881), ii, p. 138; more recently Gerd Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003). This was similar also in the famous case of Philip of Hesse. A New Testament model for the demonstratively mocking falsa genuflexio was the mocking of Christ in the Passion according to Matthew (Matthew 27. 29). 7 As far as I know there has not been a systematic investigation of this. Compare Schreiner’s assumption in ‘Nudis pedibus’, pp. 114–15: as a means of conflict resolution between king and nobles, the deditio is supposed to have fallen into disuse already in the late twelfth century and to have survived primarily in dealings between the ruler and the cities. The deditio by the cities, above all the Flemish cities in relation to the Hapsburgs, is scarcely documented beyond the fifteenth century. Compare, for example, Mansfield, pp. 265–66; Moeglin, pp. 246–47; Schreiner, Verletzte Ehre, pp. 291–92; on the case of Ghent, see below, note 20. A phenomenon that must be differentiated from the political act of deditio, and which is not considered here, is the individual and public act of religious penitence, which, in the Early Modern Period, developed into an instrument of social discipline and which assumed more the character of a punishment by public humiliation than that of a reconciliation; compare Michael Muster, ‘Das Ende der Kirchenbuße: Dargestellt an der Verordnung über die Aufhebung der Kirchenbuße in den Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttelschen Landen vom 6. März 1775’ (dissertation, Kiel, Hannover, 1983).

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• the relationship between the emperor and the princes of the Holy Roman Empire was redefined over the course of the Reformation; • the Reformation transformed the language of religious gesture (not least the ritual of penitence);8 and above all • on the level of the Empire, spiritual and temporal order became irreversibly distinct. The ritual of apology on bended knee before the ruler, I would like to show, is a subject that allows all of these processes to be observed bundled together as in a focus. I will focus on a key historical moment: the end of the Schmalkaldic war between Emperor Charles V and the Schmalkaldic League of Protestant princes and cities in 1546–47 and the imperial diet of Augsburg in 1548 — a dramatic culmination and turning point in Reformation history as well as in the political history of the empire, and simultaneously, as I would like to show, a culmination and turning point in the history of the ritual of genuflection. It is not by chance that this historical moment was characterized by a virtual torrent of kneeling before the emperor, neither is it by chance that something like this never took place again subsequently. In what follows I will, first, give a draft of this series of genuflections on the Augsburg diet. Secondly, I will single out one particular case to show how far the ritual had changed and how it was valued by the submissed. Thirdly, I will put this particular case into a wider context referring to the changing relationship between outer gesture and inner faith. Finally, I will have a short look at the subsequent development of the ritual in the Holy Roman Empire and the reasons for its decline. * 1. The military conflict referred to as the Schmalkaldic War was waged over competing interpretations of imperial law and religious freedom. Charles V palmed off the war as the execution of the imperial ban against the violators of the peace Philip of Hesse and John Frederick of Saxony.9 From the perspective of the Schmalkaldic League, on the other hand, it was a matter of legitimate 8

Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Modern Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 165–70. 9 It was important to the emperor to underplay the religious-political dimension of his campaign, since he was dependent on the support of the Protestant princes. Generally and recently, cf. Albrecht P. Luttenberger, ‘Die Religionspolitik Karls V. im Reich’, in Karl V. 1500–1558: Neue Perspektiven seiner Herrschaft in Europa und Übersee, ed. by Alfred Kohler and others (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaftliche, 2002), pp. 293–344; Heinz Schilling, ‘Charles V and Religion: The Struggle for the Integrity and

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resistance against unjust sovereign power, a resistance that was given the unprecedented new dimension of serving as the ‘assertion of the true word of God in the world’.10 After Charles’s swift military successes, several of the southern German cities entered into surrender negotiations as early as November of 1546. The surrender of the rich and powerful city of Ulm played a key role in this, and I will refer to it here as a paradigmatic case. The city council of Ulm was nevertheless determined to make its submission conditional upon guaranteeing its citizens the free practice of their religion. But as far as the emperor was concerned, it was precisely this that could by no means be included in the surrender, but, if at all, only be set down in a secret ‘extra letter’. ‘For,’ in the words of Chancellor Granvella, ‘your majesty does not want it to be said that they started the war for this reason [i.e., because of religion].’11 Outwardly, Charles insisted upon unconditional surrender (which it actually was not). The Ulm envoys reported home that they had been told in a confidential manner by the Emperor’s chancellor that if they submitted without conditions and terms, absolutely and freely, and Unity of Christendom’, in Charles V 1500–1558 and his Time, ed. by Hugo Soly (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1999), pp. 285–363 (pp. 355–56). 10 The two warring parties’ competing approaches to legitimation have traditionally been extensively explained in the historiography; cf., for example, Leopold von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, ed. by Willy Andreas, 2 vols (Wiesbaden: Vollmer, 1957), ii, pp. 349 ff. The Schmalkadians’ understanding of their part as resistance has been convincingly and precisely interpreted by Gabriele Haug-Moritz, Widerstand als ‘Gegenwehr’, as being pre-confessional, late-medieval, and juristic in its justification (without, however, taking into account the discussion immediately preceding the war of 1546–47). The Schmalkaldic conception of ‘resistance’ and of the ‘war of resistance’ of 1542 can be found in Widerstandsrecht in der frühen Neuzeit: Erträge und Perspektiven der Forschung im deutsch-britischen Vergleich, ed. by Robert von Friedeburg (= Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, suppl. 26, (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001)), pp. 141–61; as well as Gabriele Haug-Moritz, Der Schmalkaldische Bund 1530–1541/42 (Leinfelden-Echterdingen: DRW-Verlag, 2002), pp. 87– 98; and more recently, idem, ‘Zur Konstruktion von Kriegsniederlagen in frühneuzeitlichen Massenmedien: Das Beispiel des Schmalkaldischen Krieges (1547–1552)’, in Kriegsniederlagen: Erfahrungen und Erinnerungen, ed. by Horst Carl and others (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004), pp. 345–74; cf. furthermore Diethelm Böttcher, Ungehorsam oder Widerstand? Zum Fortleben des mittelalterlichen Widerstandsrechts in der Reformationszeit (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991); and briefly Robert von Friedeburg, Widerstandsrecht und Konfessionskonflikt: Notwehr und Gemeiner Mann im deutsch-britischen Vergleich 1530–1669 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999), pp. 62–63. 11 Quoted in Franz Rommel, Die Reichsstadt Ulm in der Katastrophe des Schmalkaldischen Bundes (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1922), p. 74. According to Rommel, however, the ‘extra letter’ was never written.

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trusted his imperial majesty in this, then the city would obtain greater mercy.12 The agreed-upon instrument of surrender stipulated not only the payment of 100,000 gulden, the handing over of thirteen cannons and the acceptance of imperial occupation, but also — and this in the very first article — the performance of the apology on bended knee. Of the Emperor’s concessions concerning religion there was no mention at all. The surrender had to appear unconditional. The Ulm envoys thus on 23 December 1546 were the first to begin a long series of identically produced submissions. In black ‘garb of lamentation’ they knelt before the emperor ‘a half hour long without looking up’ and finally, in tears, pled for forgiveness of their great sins, for which they were ‘deeply sorry’.13 In the prepared written apology, they appealed to the mercy of the emperor as the ‘image of the almighty’, for whom no sin was so great that it could not obtain mercy and forgiveness. Vice-chancellor Seld responded in the name of the emperor that ‘because they willingly and of their own accord have acknowledged and judged that they have acted evilly’, the emperor is moved to grant them mercy.14 After Ulm — the centre of the reformation movement in southern Germany — had surrendered in this manner, the other Southwest German cities followed more or less reluctantly in swift succession.15 And not only the cities: despite 12

The report of the Ulm envoys can be found in Gottlob Egelhaaf, Archivalische Beiträge zur Geschichte des schmalkaldischen Kriegs, Programm des Karls-Gymnasiums Stuttgart zum Schlusse des Schuljahrs 1895–96, 40 (Stuttgart: Liebich, 1896), pp. 42–44; in slightly varied wording in Des Viglius van Zwichem Tagebuch des Schmalkaldischen Donaukriegs, ed. by August von Druffel (Munich: Rieger, 1877), commentary, pp. 226–27, who had the same envoys’ letter about the reconciliation of Ulm in an exemplar from the Fugger estate. 13 This is according to the surveys of sources by Druffel (see note 12), pp. 212 ff. and above all by Luis Avila y Zuniga, Commentariorum de bello Germanico a Carolo V. [. . .] libri duo, German translation: Wahrhafftige beschreibung des Teutschen Kriegs [. . .] wider die Schmalkaldische Bundsverwandten [. . .] , (Wolfenbüttel, 1552), reprinted as Der Römischen Keyser- und Königlichen Majestete Auch deß heiligen Röm. Reichs [. . .] Handlungen und Ausschreiben [. . .], ed. by Friedrich Hortleder (Frankfurt a.M., 1618), Book iii, Ch. 81, pp. 469–523 (p. 501). Cf. Rommel, pp. 78–79; Ranke, ii, pp. 364–65. 14 The wording of the ritual speeches and responses according to Avila y Zuniga, Wahrhafftige beschreibung, p. 501. 15 Cf., for example, already Ranke, ii, p. 371: ‘From all sides princes and lords and the envoys of so many cities came in order to humiliate themselves before him. One saw them kneel, “the honorable, extremely learned, circumspect, and wise”, as they are called in the sources, who had so often opposed him, in the middle of the assembled court, one behind the other in a long row, with downcast eyes, until then one of them began to speak and implored his imperial majesty for the sake of almighty God and the sake of mercy, to drop the penalty decided against them, which had been nevertheless well deserved.’ (‘Von allen Seiten

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a serious illness, even Duke Ulrich of Württemberg, who found himself at the time under imperial ban for the third time, had to prepare to kneel in person before Charles in apology.16 The most sensational and probably most familiar case in the long series of submissions before Charles is the kneeling of the second Schmalkaldic League leader Philip of Hesse after the defeat of the other leader, John Frederick of Saxony. After Philip’s surrender and genuflection in June of 1547, resistance to the emperor gradually collapsed. This resulted in an entire series of ritual genuflections all following the same pattern, by the Bohemian cities, by the northern German cities, and by individual nobles.17 These genuflections subsequently became the object of diverse multimedia publication: broadsheets reported on them in detail. The series of engravings by Dirk Volkertszoon Coornhert (based on drawings by Maarten van Heemskerck) are only the most famous of the published images.18 Genuflection served essentially as a cipher of victory and retrospectively drew Charles’s various triumphs kamen Fürsten und Herren und die Gesandten so vieler Städte, um sich vor ihm zu demütigen. Man sah sie knien, “die ehrenfesten, hochgelahrten, fürsichtigen und weisen”, wie die Urkunden sie nennen, die ihm so oft Widerpart gehalten, in der Mitte des versammelten Hofes, einen hinter dem anderen in langer Reihe, mit niedergeschlagenen Augen, bis dann einer von ihnen das Wort nahm und seine Kaiserliche Majestät um Gottes des Allmächtigen und seiner Barmherzigkeit willen anflehte, die gegen sie gefaßte, allerdings wohlverdiente Ungnade fallen zu lassen.’) 16 Avila y Zuniga, Wahrhafftige beschreibung, p. 506; also reprinted in Alfred Kohler, Quellen zur Geschichte Karls V., FSGA, 15 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990), no. 92, pp. 357–58. The wording of the apology is published in the pamphlet ‘Römischer Keyserlicher Maiestat aufforderungs brieffe, an Hertzog Ulrichen von Wirtemberg, unnd gemeyne Landschafft lauttend. Item, gedachts Hertzog Ulrichs an die Kayserliche Maistat beschehen gnedigst ansuchung und verzeihung, sampt darauff ervolgten begnadigung etc’, Pamphlet collection of Gustav Freytag, 2054 ([n.p]: [n. pub.], 1547). Compare Wahrhafftige beschreibung, iii. 56 (pp. 391–93) (on the capitulation in January, 1547) and iii. 61 (pp. 407– 09) (on the kneeling apology of the councillors). Compare also Venetianische Depeschen vom Kaiserhofe, ed. by Gustav Turba, 2 vols (Vienna: Tempsky, 1889–92), ii, no. 80, pp. 186–87. 17 Haug-Moritz, ‘Kriegsniederlagen’ (see note 10). 18 The entire series of engravings is reproduced in Katalog Kaiser Karl V. (1500–1558): Macht und Ohnmacht Europas (Bonn: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 2000), pp. 354–56, no. 423–34; cf. Bart Rosier, ‘The Victories of Charles V: A Series of Prints by Maarten van Heemskerck, 1555–1556’, Simiolus, 20 (1990–91), 24–38; Lisa M. van Hijum, ‘Charles V and his Ideal: One Emperor, One Empire’, in The Propagation of Power in the Medieval West, ed. by Martin Gosman and others (Groningen: Forsten, 1997), pp. 129– 42. The series, first published by Hieronymus Cock in 1556, comprises twelve engravings in total, which represent Charles’s victories over the pope, the French king, the Turkish sultan, the Indians, the princes of Saxon, Hesse, and Cleves, as well as the Protestant German cities. It was dedicated to Philip II as Charles’s successor in the Netherlands and appeared in no

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together into a compelling series. For not only the genuflections of the Schmalkaldic cities and Philip of Hesse, but also that of the Duke of Cleve following upon Guelders’s war of succession four years earlier (1543) are included in the series. In fact even the representation of Charles’s meeting with the captured elector of Saxony after the Battle of Mühlberg suggests a genuflection, although it was not actually one. For the elector had in fact not surrendered; he was defeated and had neither requested nor obtained mercy. And the city of Bremen as well, whose coat of arms designates one of the councillors (not legible here),19 had by no means surrendered on bended knee, as will be seen. At first glance all of these genuflections stand firmly in the medieval ritual tradition. All the rules of the deditio, which for the Middle Ages have to be laboriously reconstructed from slim and fragmentary remains, can be found described in the sources here in the most desirable clarity: The genuflection always had to be performed personally by the princes, or by the cities through their highest officer. The event was marked out by means of a lavishly prepared stage and elevated above the everyday life of the court as an act of rulership through the bare unsheathed sword of the Reichserbmarschall (imperial hereditary marshal). The degree to which the ceremony was public increased or decreased the extent of the humiliation.20 The beginning and end of the ritual were marked out by the emperor’s gestures: the taking of his seat on fewer than seven editions between 1555 and 1640. In the opinion of Rosier, the series does not follow a Netherlandish iconographical tradition. 19 On a version of this representation as a wood relief, one of the city representatives is identified as the representative of Bremen by his coat of arms. On the eight wood reliefs of around 1570–80, probably executed in Nuremberg, cf. Katalog Kaiser Karl V. (see note 18), pp. 355–58, no. 435–42. Whereas the identities of the various city representatives cannot be assigned in the engravings, on the corresponding reliefs they have coats of arms on their shields, namely from Augsburg, Ulm, Strasbourg, Minden, and Bremen, despite the fact that Bremen had not performed a genuflection and was reconciled with the emperor only in 1554. 20 Although this never reached the degree of symbolic humilation against the repeatedly rebellious Ghent in 1443 and 1540, in which hundreds of lay judges and leading citizens were forced to beg for forgiveness, dressed in black, with bare heads and barefoot, and with the hangman’s noose around their necks. Contemporaries in 1547–48 must still have remembered above all the sensational act of humiliation in Ghent in 1540. Compare Peter Arnade, ‘Crowds, Banners, and the Marketplace: Symbols of Defiance and Defeat During the Ghent War of 1452–1453’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994), 471–97; Marc Boone, ‘Destroying and Reconstructing the City: The Inculcation and Arrogation of Princely Power in the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands, 14.-16. Centuries’, in The Propagation of Power in the Medieval West, ed. by Martin Gosman and others (Groningen: Forsten, 1997), pp. 1–34; Wim Blockmans and Esther Donckers, ‘Self-Representation of Court and City in Flanders and Brabant in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in Showing Status:

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the throne chair, his look,21 the sign he made with his hand, and the extension of his hand to be kissed, even possibly by means of a few non-formalized words of condescension at the end that documented the regaining of his favour. The supplicants would be expressly instructed in all the ritual details: they had to appear dressed in mourning,22 lay down their weapons, and bow their uncovered heads with downcast gaze. The content of their reciprocal performative speeches, which were both read aloud by a councillor, was formalized and stereotyped. All of this had been pre-arranged,23 and the terms were set in writing in the instrument of surrender.24 Charles V was always the uncontested lord of the ritual procedure.25 * 2. In all of this, the ritual does not seem to have differed significantly from the medieval tradition. So once again the question arises: has nothing changed? From the emperor’s perspective, hardly. For him it was a matter of the complete restoration of imperial authority, particularly in its spiritual dimension — Representation of Social Positions in the Middle Ages, ed. by Wim Blockmans and Atheun Janse (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 81–111. 21 The emperor’s looks played an important role. It was specifically noted, for example, that the emperor at first did not condescend to look at the kneeling Duke of Württemberg or that through his look he did not encourage Philip of Hesse to stand up (cf. the German version of this article cited above, p. 149). 22 Cf. the report by the Braunschweig envoy Pauli, Bericht, wie sich die sachen allenthalben zugetragen [. . .] anno 1548, Stadtarchiv Braunschweig, b iii 5, 23, fols 151r –168v : ‘and they all four had on black clothing, ordered to all appear as one’ (‘und haben darzu all vier schwartz roecke, einerlei gestalt anzuziehen geheißen’). 23 Ibid., fol. 166r : ‘and the apology took place in the way and manner that had been handed to us’ (‘auch geschah die abbit auf die maß und form, wie uns ubergeben). 24 As a rule, the contractual conditions were also: favour or mercy, reconciliation, and the reinstatement of privileges for payment of a specific penalty, relinquishment of a specific number of pieces of artillery, and the opening of the city to imperial troops. 25 Only those who had already fully accepted the terms of the instrument of surrender could count on imperial mercy, but then all the more certainly. Charles saw this as a precept of his imperial honour: after their genuflection, Charles is supposed to have said to the envoys from Göttingen: ‘Da ihr von Göttingen euch recht und wohl halten und gehorsam sein wollt, so will ich euer gnädiger Kaiser sein oder die Krone nicht mit Ehren tragen’ (Since you of Göttingen conduct yourselves correctly and properly and wish to be obedient, so will I be your merciful emperor or not wear the crown with honour). Compare G. Schmidt, ‘Die Aussöhnung der Stadt Göttingen mit dem Kaiser Karl V. nach dem Schmalkaldischen Kriege 1548’, in Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte, Bd.15, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck 1875, pp. 551–65 (p. 562).

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even if he had not wanted openly to define the conflict as a religious one. For him it was about the absolute obedience of the imperial estates ‘pour le sainct service de Dieu’, as he wrote to his brother.26 For at stake was nothing less than the unity of the temporal and spiritual order; the unity of the religious and political language of forms in the ritual of genuflection corresponds to this. And precisely this made the act into a question of conscience for the Protestant estates. Exactly this marks the point in which these genuflections differed in principle from the medieval tradition: conscience now entered the game. For this reason the meaning of the ritual now fundamentally diverged for the participants.27 In what follows I would like to show how to understand this. The changed view of things is revealed in a source, which, exceptionally, not only gives an account of the external course of events of such a genuflection, but also describes the inner viewpoint of the genuflecting actor himself. This is the extensive diary — interspersed with spiritual reflections — of the pious and highly erudite Count Wolrad of Waldeck on his visit to the Augsburg imperial diet in 1548.28 26

See Correspondenz des Kaisers Karl V., ed. by Karl Lanz, 3 vols (Gießen, 1844; Reprint Frankfurt a.M., 1966), ii, no. 566, p. 525: ‘Or puisquil a pleu a dieu me donner ceste prosperite, dont je lui rend graces, et desirant user dicelle mesmes pour son sainct service, signamment en ce que concerne le remede de la religion en ceste Germanie, rememorant les causes et fondemens pour lequels, comme bien scauez, je suis este constraint entrer en ceste guerre.’ On the evaluation in general cf. Alfred Kohler, Karl V. 1500–1558: Eine Biographie (Munich: Beck, 1999), pp. 23–25; and Luttenberger (see note 9), pp. 293–96. Horst Rabe, Reichsbund und Interim: Die Verfassungs- und Religionspolitik Karls V. und der Reichstag von Augsburg 1547/1548 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1971), p. 456, speaks of a ‘high estimation of the authority of his imperial office that went so far as to be completely out of touch with reality’ (‘bis zur Wirklichkeitsfremdheit gehende Hochschätzung der Autorität seines kaiserlichen Amtes’). 27 According to a remark by Klaus Schreiner, ‘gestures are universally binding when he who carries them out and he who perceives them and to whom they are aimed, ascribe the same meaning to them’ (‘Gesten [haben] Bestand, wenn derjenige, der sie vollzieht, und derjenige, der sie wahrnimmt und dem sie gelten, dieselben Bedeutungszuschreibungen vornehmen’; ‘Nudis pedibus’, p. 123). But this is only true within limits: In other contexts what a ritual achieves may be precisely the production of a fiction of consent and the temporary concealment of the different meanings assigned to it by the actors. It is thus necessary to look carefully and to differentiate whether, before the background of a general need for consent, the ritual obscures real dissent in individual cases or whether the dissent is so fundamental that the ritual no longer functions for any length of time. 28 Tagebuch des Grafen Wolrad von Waldeck: Reise zum Augsburger Reichstag 1548, trans. by Gerhard Kappe, historical treatment by Ursula Machoczek, intr. Gerhard Müller (Kassel: Verl. Evang. Medienverb., 1998); cf. Victor Schultze, Waldeckische Reformationsgeschichte (Leipzig: Deichert, 1903). Wolrad II, Count of Waldeck (1509–78), was originally intended

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Wolrad and his two brothers had not taken part in the Schmalkaldic War personally, but had supported their feudal lord Philip of Hesse with troops. Charles V ordered them to Augsburg at the beginning of March in order to call them to account personally for their rebellion.29 Once there, they were left in excruciating uncertainty as to their fate for two months. They spent half of their precious time in futile pursuit of an audience with the courtly ‘demi-gods’ in order to present his petition before the emperor, the other half in Protestant preaching and spiritual discussion. During this entire time Wolrad agonized about whether his efforts to obtain mercy ‘from the leaders of this world’ did not ‘do dishonour to the name of God’ and would thereby be detrimental to his own blessedness.30 His moral dilemma increased when on 15 May, in a great ceremony, the emperor announced the so-called Augsburg Interim, a regulation which, to a large extent, imposed upon the Protestants a return to the old divine service.31 At the same time Wolrad heard it preached almost daily in the Augsburg main for the clergy and thus had enjoyed a thorough education, so that he was able to compose his diary, which he dedicated to the reformer Johann Brenz, in fluent Latin. In 1539 he assumed rule over a part of the Waldeck count’s territory, which he had to share with his two step-brothers Philipp and Johann. In 1545, upon the wish of Philip of Hesse he took part as an Auditor in the Regensburg religious colloquy. As regent, he was very and lastingly committed to the Reformation, took his role as ruler of the church in his territory very seriously and introduced a Lutheran church order in 1556. 29 The dukes’ defense strategy — that as his vassals, they were included in Philip of Hesse’s surrender — was an ambivalent one even for them, for the imperial councillors countered this with their status as imperial dukes and held out to them the prospect that their personal submission would cement their imperial freedom and place it beyond doubt; cf. Waldeck, Tagebuch, pp. 50–51, 59–60, 156, 166–67. On the long and unsuccessful seeking of an audience, see, for example, ibid, 94, 110, 129, 138, etc. This concerned not only responsibility because of the rebellion, but also a conflict between Waldeck and Kurköln, the negotiation of which should have taken place in Augsburg, but which was repeatedly delayed. 30 For example, Waldeck, Tagebuch, pp. 91, 180–81; cf. also the questions of conscience aroused by participation in a ceremony of the old (Catholic) service, or the condemnation of those Protestants who ‘return to Egypt and worship the favour of the mighty’ (‘zurückkehren nach Ägypten und die Gunst der Mächtigen anbeten’), ibid, pp. 101, 104, 113, 136, 139, 146, 172–73, 177, etc. 31 Rabe, Reichsbund und Interim, pp. 441–43. In the presence of the emperor himself, King Ferdinand, and Archduke Maximilian, the Interim was presented to the assembled estates in a solemn proposition and, after a brief consultation, accepted by the archchancellor of Mainz.

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church that the Christian’s obligation to obey did not extend to idolatry and the misuse of the sacraments.32 Finally in June Wolrad was forced to have the terms of surrender dictated by the very same emperor whom he had referred to in his diary as ‘the Egyptian’, ‘Jupiter’, and even ‘the beast’.33 To the very last he nurtured the hope that it would be possible to avoid a genuflection. But this was a mistake. On 19 June 1548, Wolrad signed and sealed the instrument of surrender and had it brought by his councillor Liborius to the imperial councillors. ‘But now Liborius attempted,’ Wolrad wrote, ‘to eliminate the genuflection before the emperor if possible. But the bishop [of Arras] laughed and he said that exactly this must take place.’34 Wolrad commented upon this in his journal with the fervent prayer, ‘Lord Jesus, to whom upon the order of your everlasting father all knees — in heaven, on the earth, and beneath the earth — are deservedly and justly bent, grant that in obeying the highest power on earth I might not offend against your honour.’35 And as Liborius returned from the imperial councillors, informed him of the procedure for the genuflection, and promised him ‘that very few would be present’ when he made the genuflection before the emperor, Wolrad wrote in his journal: ‘Grant, Lord God, that I might humble myself before your omnipotence, and might regard men as nothing other than mor32

Waldeck, Tagebuch, pp. 144–48, 152–53, 156, 157–64; cf. the sermon on Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8–10, ibid., pp. 213–14; on the theological debate over the duty of obedience cf. Eike Wolgast, Die Religionsfrage als Problem des Widerstandsrechts im 16. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Winter, 1980); Hans-Joachim Gänßler, Evangelium und weltliches Schwert: Hintergrund, Entstehungsgeschichte und Anlass von Luthers Scheidung zweier Reiche oder Regimenter (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1983); and further the literature on the understanding of resistance in the Schmalkaldic League cited above in note 10. 33 ‘Jupiter’: Waldeck, Tagebuch, p. 177; ‘Ägypter’: ibid., p. 181; ‘römische Bestie C. und F.’: ibid., p. 286. Negotiations: ibid., pp. 177, 187, 197, 227 (18 June: ‘There is still doubt concerning the genuflection before the emperor’ (‘Über den Fußfall vor dem Kaiser besteht noch Zweifel’)). On the type of the ‘Egyptian’ for the tyrannical ruler already in the Middle Ages, cf. Thomas Scharff, ‘Die Rückkehr nach Ägypten: Prolegomena zu einer Geschichte des Ägyptenbildes im westlichen Mittelalter’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 35 (2001), 431–53. In the Middle Ages the Egyptian of the Book of Exodus was considered in Christian exegesis a cipher for pagan oppression, darkness, and remoteness from God. In the conflict with the pope, Frederick II was referred to as pharaoh and as homo Aegyptius, for example, although this did not yet include the accusation of the ruler’s pagan self-deification. 34 Waldeck, Tagebuch, p. 231; the imperial council Viglius van Zwichem vaguely held out the prospect that possibly not all three Waldeck counts had to kneel personally. And in fact Wolrad’s nephew Samuel had the apology performed before Charles V by a representative in 1549 in Brussels; cf. Schultze, Waldeckische Reformationsgeschichte , p. 183. 35 Waldeck, Tagebuch, p. 231.

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tals. It has returned — oh, what sorrow! — it has returned, the worship of the Egyptians.’36 Three days later, Wolrad was suddenly and unexpectedly called before the emperor finally to perform the genuflection and receive absolution. In the hall before the imperial chamber he was once again made to wait and he became a witness to the general bustling activity that prevailed in the preparations for the ritual. Wolrad was forced to bury his hope that the ritual would take place in a small, intimate winter chamber before the eyes of only a few spectators. Courtiers lurked around Wolrad and his councillors and cast at him sidelong and gloating looks — or so it seemed to him. The Imperial hereditary marshal Pappenheim ordered him to lay down his sword and explained to him and his councillors with which ceremonial they had to carry out the genuflection: ‘He instructed me to hold my face looking downwards until the emperor himself should instruct me to approach his majesty.’37 The entire ceremony then proceeded just as has come down to us in countless other reports, and Wolrad was able to leave Augsburg soon thereafter. The journal clearly indicates that something essential had changed, even if the ritual forms had remained unchanged. Out of the medieval ritual between two adversaries, in which sacral and political authority coincided indistinguishably,38 there was now a suspenseful ménage à trois — literally: an adultery, adulterium39 — between the one who knelt, the temporal ruler, and God. The sup36

Ibid., p. 232. Ibid, p. 240. 38 Compare Schreiner, ‘Nudis pedibus’, p. 102. In rituals that had a binding force, God was always implicitly taken into consideration as well, as an addressee or as a third party in the alliance, and guaranteed that the agreement would be kept. Compare André Holenstein, ‘Seelenheil und Untertanenpflicht: Zur gesellschaftlichen Funktion und theoretischen Begründung des Eides in der ständischen Gesellschaft’, in Der Fluch und der Eid, ed. by Peter Blickle, ZHF, suppl. 15 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993), pp. 11–63. Cf. also Gerd Schwerhoff, Gott und die Welt herausfordern: Theologische Konstruktion, rechtliche Bekämpfung und soziale Praxis der Blasphemie vom 13. bis zu Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts (Habilitationsschrift Bielefeld, 1996; corrected and shortened edn available on http://bieson.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/ volltexte/2004/617/pdf/Zentraldokument.pdf [Accessed 20 November 2010]), who shows how much God was always present for contemporaries as an ‘Interaktionspartner’, even in day-to-day conflicts. 39 John Calvin compared the fraud committed against God through worshipping idols with adultery, adulterium; see his Institutiones, ii. 8. 16; the Augsburg Interim called it Interim adultero-germanicum. Cf. Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 80; Carlos M. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 216. 37

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plicant himself was now torn: he paid outward obeisance to the emperor but at the same time he violated his obligation of obedience to God. In contrast to what the formula of the apology suggested, honour to God and honour to the temporal ruler no longer coincided. The genuflection now appeared to the kneeling supplicant like the Egyptian deification of rulers, like idolatry. He thus had to distance himself inwardly from his outward gesture, by means of a reservatio mentalis, in the hope that God ‘looked into the heart’.40 Penitence before the ruler was no longer the same as penitence before God, but stood in direct opposition to it. This meant that external gesture and the inner conviction of the one upon his knees were also necessarily opposed to one another. * 3. Wolrad of Waldeck’s story is situated on a broader horizon that I would like to sketch out in what follows in order to make clear what connotions were connected to the ritual of genuflection and how these connotations changed in the run of the sixteenth century. It is well known that the tension between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ was a fundamental theme in Reformation discourse; it was central to Protestant theology and formed the core of the Lutheran doctrine of the freedom of the Christian and the basis of his doctrine of submission to temporal authority. The reformulation of the relations between the inner events of faith and outward ceremony revolutionized the understanding of the sacraments.41 In the case of the confession sacrament this had the consequence that it was not only through absolution by a priest — a ritual of performative verbal magic — that a sinner was freed of sin, but rather the sinner’s sincere remorse, his contrition, alone sufficed. Remorse lost its ritual character, but was changed into a basic tenor of the believers.42 40

Compare Waldeck, Tagebuch, pp. 213–14, with reflections on a sermon on Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8–10, which deals with the question of the permissible degree of dissimulation (see also note 32 above). 41 Compare Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997), on penitence, see pp. 92–94; Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 155–57; and Eire, War Against the Idols. 42 On the transformation of the sacrament of penitence in theology, cf. Gustav Adolf Benrath, ‘Buße V’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1977– ) i, pp. 452–73; also the articles ‘Buße’, ‘Bußriten’, and ‘Bußsakrament’ in the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 3rd edn (Freiburg: Herder, 1994), ii, cols 824–34, 840–45, and 845–56, respectively; Angenendt, Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter; Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); recently Ilse Tobias, Die Beichte in den Flugschriften der frühen Reformationszeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang,

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The way the language of religious symbols was perceived and valued changed profoundly.43 Of kneeling, Luther said, for example, ‘It is not of any great importance whether one stands, kneels, or prostrates oneself, for bodily ways are neither despised nor commanded as necessary.’44 Inner and outer were no longer two corresponding parts of a whole, but might potentially become set in opposition against each other. ‘The gesture in itself has lost its effectiveness. What matters is only the intention of its use.’45 But that was only one side of the issue. On the other hand, kneeling — or even more so, not kneeling — served as a symbolic demonstration already early on during the course of pre-Reformation conflicts in the empire. In refusing to kneel before the pope, one could refer to the passage in the Acts of the Apostles where Peter says to the Roman centurion Cornelius, who had fallen to his knees before him, ‘Stand up; I too am a man’ (Acts 10. 25–26). Philip of Hesse, a master of provocative symbolic gestures,46 had already caused a sensation at the Augsburg diet in 1530 by failing to kneel during the blessing by Cardinal Legate 2002). Mansfield, The Humilation of Sinners, pp. 292–94, emphasizes the continuation of the collective character of penitence in the sense of a reconciliation with the community not only after the Fourth Lateran Council, but also after the Reformation; John Bossy does so as well, in ‘The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (1975), 21–38. Compare also the fundamental Alois Hahn, ‘Schuld und Fehltritt, Geheimhaltung und Diskretion’, in Der Fehltritt, ed. by Peter v. Moos (Kiel: Böhlau, 2001), pp. 177–202. 43 Martin Luther, ‘Sermon von dem Sakrament der Buße’ (1519), in Gesamtausgabe seiner Werke (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883– ; reprint 1966–2007) (in the following abbreviated WA), ii, pp. 709–23; and ‘De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium’ (1520), in WA, vi, pp. 484– 573. 44 Luther, ‘Wochenpredigten über Joh. 16–20’ (1528/9), in WA, xxviii (1903), pp. 74–75. 45 Thomnas Lentes, ‘“Andacht” und “Gebärde”: Zum Wandel des religiösen Ausdrucksverhaltens’, in Kulturelle Reformation: Sinnformationen im Umbruch 1400–1600, ed. by Bernhard Jussen and Craig Koslowsky (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1999), pp. 29–67 (p. 62) (‘Die Gebärde aus sich selbst heraus hat ihre Wirkung verloren. Einzig auf die Intention ihres Gebrauchs kommt es an’). Compare also Jörg Jochen Berns, ‘Luthers Papstkritik als Zeremoniellkritik’, in Zeremoniell als höfische Ästhetik in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. by Jörg Jochen Berns and Thomas Rahn (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), pp. 157–73. 46 On Philip’s symbolic provocation upon entering the Augsburg Reichstag in 1530 wearing the motto ‘Verbum Dei Manet In Eternum’ on his sleeve, cf. Briefe und Acten zu der Geschichte des Religionsgespräches zu Marburg 1529 und des Reichstags zu Augsburg 1530 nach der Handschrift des Joh. Aurifaber, ed. by Friedrich Wilhelm Schirrmacher (Gotha: Perthes, 1876), p. 74. On the demonstrative refusal to participate in the Corpus Christi procession, see Valentin von Tetleben, Protokoll des Augsburger Reichstags 1530, ed. and introd. by Herbert Grundmann (Göttingen: Bertelsmann, 1958), pp. 65–66.

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Campeggio on the occasion of the ceremonious reception of the emperor.47 Just how quickly kneeling or not-kneeling could become a distinguishing sign can also be seen in reports such as that of the protestant travellor Bartholomäus Sastrow, who witnessed a Corpus Christi procession in 1540 in Rome and saw ‘that all the people who were there, of whom there were many thousand, [fell] upon their knees [before the pope]. I remained standing, the others around me looked at me, hey! they thought I must be crazy not also to have fallen to my knees.’48 Especially gestures such as genuflection were bound to become signals of inclusion or exclusion during the confessional conflict — even if theologians sought to classify them as insignificant formalities and warned that one should remember ‘the Christian’s freedom’ in ‘ceremonies and customs in external things’, so-called adiaphora, ‘so that we are not in turn effected in our conscience by the laws of men.’49 But nevertheless, especially because of their simple and clear visibility, gestures such as genuflection almost necessarily suggested themselves as signs of confessional distinction. Even kneeling during Mass as a sign of personal devotion and humility was frowned upon for a long time by Protestant authorities and eventually even expressly forbidden.50 One could pointedly say: what external gestures lost in terms of their sacral power during the Reformation, they conversely won in terms of their meaning as signs of distinction. But what is the significance of all this when faced with the question of whether or not one is permitted to betray his convictions by means of a ges47

The legate blessed the princes who had kneeled to receive it, but not Philip of Hesse and Johann of Saxony, upon which the margrave of Brandenburg also stood up once again; Philip ‘smiled and squeezed himself behind a large candelabrum at the altar’ (‘lechelt und truckt sich hinder eynen grossen leuchter am Altar’). The anonymous source is quoted by Herbert Grundmann, ‘Landgraf Philipp von Hessen auf dem Augsburger Reichstag 1530’, in Aus den Reichstagen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts: Festgabe dargebracht der Bayer. Histor. Kommission zur Feier ihres 100jährigen Bestehens (Göttingen: Bertelsmann, 1958), p. 367, note 47. 48 See Bartholomaeus Sastrow, Geburt, Herkommen und Lauff eines gantzen Lebens, 3 vols (Greifswald: Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1823–24), i, p. 356. 49 Compare the Saxon Church Ordinance of 1580, and similar statements in the ordinances for Saxe-Coburg (already in 1524), Colditz (1529), and Deisnig (1529), in Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Emil Sehling (Leipzig: Scientia-Verlag, 1902), section 1, pp. 430, 542, 545, and 605, respectively. Even the Celle Church Ordinance of 1545 recommended kneeling as appropriate to silent prayer (ibid., p. 300). 50 As for example in Brandenburg: Martin Füssel, Ceremoniae Christianae (Frankfurt a.O.: [n. pub.], 1616). On this, cf. Bodo Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 137–39. And in general, cf. more recently Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual.

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ture of submission to a godless ruler?51 Is one permitted to lie to the ruler with one’s body while speaking the truth to God with one’s heart? A whole series of biblical exempla existed for these questions as well as a wide-ranging patristic discussion from Augustine and Jerome to Thomas Aquinas.52 During the confessional conflict, this tradition was now explicitly revisited. The theme held sway over contemporaries: the biblical exempla were not only commented upon in sermons and discussed in scholarly treatises, but also staged in plays. It is no coincidence that the Book of Esther was among the best-loved and most frequently staged biblical material for Protestants in the sixteenth century.53 For it is a genuflection before a temporal ruler that is at the centre of what happens. The central conflict is triggered by the Jew Mordecai refusing to perform a genuflection before the king’s protégé Haman, eventually resulting in the order for the extermination of the Jewish people. Mordecai justifies his disobedience by stating that he cannot put the honour of a man above the 51 I have found no evidence that in the sixteenth century the subtle distinction of high medieval liturgists was still known, by which only one knee should be bent before a worldly ruler, whereas the bending of both knees should be reserved for God alone. Cf. Suntrup, pp. 159–60. Cf. also Berthold of Regensburg, Predigten, ed. by Franz Pfeiffer and Joseph Strobl, 2 vols (Vienna, 1862–80), 1, p. 348: ‘you owe the higher lord much greater obedience than the lower lord. You have to kneel before the higher lord with two knees and with one knee before the lower’ (‘Dû bist gehorsame vil mere schuldic dem obern herren danne dem nidern. Dû muost mit zwein knien vor dem obern herren knien unde mit eime knie vor dem nidern’), with the revealing consequence: ‘this means that you belong to the higher lord with love and with soul and to the lower lord only with love’ (‘Daz bediutet, daz dû des obern herren bist mit lîbe unde mit sêle unde des niedern niwan mit dem lîbe’). 52 The problem of lying and dissimulation in general is discussed in patristic literature especially on the basis of Galatians 2. 11–14, which deals with the dissimulating following of the Jewish food laws by the Jewish Christians. The author most frequently quoted on this question in the sixteenth century was Thomas Aquinas, who conceded that, under certain circumstances ‘licet tamen occultare prudenter sub aliqua dissimulatione’. A further example was provided by 2 Kings 5. 17–19, in which the the Syrian Naaman vows no longer to offer sacrifices to any God other than Yahweh, but reserves the right to accompany his lord to the pagan sacrifice and there to kneel down before the altar. Nicholas of Lyra discusses this story at length and teaches that not just idoloatry, but the bare simulation of idolatry was a sin, but explains the possible exception arising from obligation towards a worldly lord. Compare the extensive discussion by Zagorin, Ways of Lying, pp. 28–40. 53 I owe the knowledge of these plays to Wolfram Washof, Die Bibel auf der Bühne: Exempelfiguren und protestantische Theologie im lateinischen und deutschen Bibeldrama der Reformationszeit (Münster: Rhema, 2007). Cf. also Rudolf Schwartz, Esther im deutschen und neulateinischen Drama des Reformationszeitalters (Oldenburg: Schulze, 1894); Wolfgang F. Michael, Das deutsche Drama der Reformationszeit (Bern: Lang, 1984), pp. 81–83, 95–96, 122, 168–70.

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honour of God: ‘I will kneel down before no one but you, my Lord’ (Esther 4. 17). It is no wonder that this scene was emphasized in the Protestant Esther plays — for example in the work of the Waldeck subject Andreas Pfeilschmidt of 1555, in which it encompasses around 150 verses and in which Mordecai is given extensive opportunity to justify himself: Ich find in meinem Gesetz stahn Knie beugen und auch beten an Gehört allein dem höchsten Got der Israel errettet hat Esther, vv. 1385–88

Refusing to genuflect before the ruling power can be seen as a virtual cipher for the doctrine of the limits of submissive obedience and the obligation to passive resistance: Sonst will ich sein gern underthan Mit leib und gut womit ich kann. Wenn nicht ist wider meinen Gott Der mich hieher geschaffen hat.54 Esther, vv. 1356–59

This expresses precisely what had preoccupied Wolrad of Waldeck in his diary on the occasion of his own genuflection — and it is probably no coincidence that it was his wife, Anastasia of Schwarzburg, to whom the playwright dedicated this play in 1555. In the Esther play it was exactly the external gesture of kneeling that constituted idolatry and thus marked the limit of the Lutheran commandment of obedience. As mentioned above, during his stay in Augsburg, Wolrad of Waldeck heard almost daily the sermons in the main church, which in May and June of 1548 revolved around exactly the theme of the limits of obedience to authority and participation in idolatry. On the one hand, it was certain that one was obliged to flee from that which was ‘against the honour of Christ, the holy doctrine and the use of the sacraments’, he wrote in his diary.55 On the other hand, one owed obedience to the authorities in all external matters. The question was: where exactly did the sin of idolatry begin? And this question arose equally for genuflection as for participation in the Catholic sacraments, which was now imposed by the Emperor’s command, the so-called Interim. The situation forced the Protestants into an intense reflection upon the relationship between gesture and conscience, in other words: on the permissibility 54

Andreas Pfeilschmidt, Esther (1555), ed. by Barbara Könneker and Wolfgang F. Michael (Bern: Lang, 1986). 55 Waldeck, Tagebuch, p. 153.

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of dissimulatio,56 of misrepresentation in outward ceremonies in order to defend true faith ‘in the heart’. In this situation the preachers in Augsburg cited Paul, who in Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8–10 teaches that for the sake of the gospel, one had to misrepresent oneself under certain circumstances and conform to the practices (in this case the dietary laws) of the pagans and Jews, the lawful as well as the unlawful: ‘To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews, to those under the law I became as one under the law [. . .] that I might win those under the law [. . .] To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak.’57 As Luther preached, following Paul, no place, no day, no food, no external thing whatsoever, is unclean in itself, but becomes so only through mistaken faith — and vice versa: what is done in the right faith cannot be a sin. As many preachers concluded in light of the Interim, no one should be judged for following outward ceremonies.58 That should be left to God, ‘to whom what is hidden in our hearts stands open, [who] will easily pass sentence on everything, by revealing with what faith individuals have done which particular things,’ as Wolrad reflected upon the debate in his diary.59 This position must have had unforeseeable consequences for the traditional culture of the ritual. For — and this is my crucial point — the confidence in the binding power of a ritual based on a performance that was public, visible to everyone, and outwardly formally correct, was thus fundamentally shaken. Two opposing positions confronted one another as Charles V forced the Protestants to genuflect and to accept the Interim: either one submitted to polit56

Compare the seminal Zagorin, Ways of Lying. The problem of dissimulatio does not arise first in the confessional conflict, but had already been similarly raised in connection with the Waldensians, the Moriscos, and the Marranos. On the other side of religious problem it has been treated as a political problem, for example in Tacitism or as a moral problem in ‘Hofmannsliteratur’, which will not be discussed here. 57 1 Corinthians 9. 20. Compare Arnold Angenendt, ‘Die Epikie: Im Sinne des Gesetzgebers vom Gesetz abweichen’, in Der Fehltritt, pp. 363–76 (pp. 369–70), on Paul’s ‘interest in moral indifferents’ (‘Interesse am moralisch Indifferenten’). 58 The conformist dissimulation in outward gesture for the sake of peace was already justified by the Strasburg spiritualist Otto Brunfels in a treatise of 1528 (cf. Zagorin, Ways of Lying, pp. 69–70); incidentally also by Wolrad’s friend Johannes Brenz, to whom he dedicated his diary, and by the Erasmian and neo-stoic Dirck Volkertszoon Cornhert, the very same Haarlem council secretary, scholar, and artist who had engraved in copper the series of genuflections before Charles V. Compare Olga Rinck-Wagner, Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert 1522–1572 mit besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner politischen Tätigkeit (Berlin: Ebering, 1919), pp. 29–31; Hendrik Bonger, Leven en Werk van D. V. Coornhert (Amsterdam: van Oorschot, 1978); and further Eire, War Against the Idols, pp. 239, 243, 249. 59 Waldeck, Tagebuch, pp. 213–14.

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ical necessity and performed the required ritual acts — with the reservatio mentalis of intending something different in one’s heart and before God. The ritual would thus have to be downgraded to a purely external, indifferent ceremonial, to an Adiaphoron, of no great importance, to the laws of men, which one could treat with Christian freedom. This was a position that could be taken both in the spirit of an anti-ritualistic inwardness as well as in the spirit of a politically clever and Erasmian love of peace — in any case a position concerning the ritual which was quite compatible with the spirit of the Reformation understanding of the sacraments as well as with the Lutheran doctrine of obedience; and thus an obvious one for Protestants. But it was also a position that opened up an insurmountable gulf between inner and outer and fundamentally deprived a ritual of its peformative power. But from another position, this behaviour was rejected as Dissimulatio and lie, and it was categorically demanded that outward gesture and inner conviction must be brought into agreement. This position, which it was no coincidence was taken by none other than John Calvin in the work De vitandis superstitionibus of 1549, consisted — now as earlier — in the unity of temporal and spiritual power, on agreement between the forum externum and the forum internum. A dissociation of these two agencies — that is to say, also a dissociation between gesture and faith, between body and heart — was irreconcilable with the concept of a Christian community as both a spiritual and temporal order. From this perspective, the inner sincerity of the outward gesture was indispensable. And no wonder: urban church organizers such as Calvin, Bullinger, or the Augsburg preacher Musculus were all too aware of the fact that a Christian community could not dispense with public sacral rituals that helped to establish community.60 From the perspective of the authorities it was not acceptable for the outward obedience of the subjects towards the authorities to stand in opposition to their inner obedience to God. In this respect Calvin stood much closer to Charles V than he did to those who shared his Protestant faith — but who gradually began to see the separation of religion and political rule as the only way out of the dilemma.61 * 60 The fact that among the upper German and Swiss reformers public church penitence was revived as a means of social discipline in the ensuing time period belongs to the same context. 61 Cf., for example, Rabe, Reichsbund und Interim, p. 420, on the consultations in the estates committee of the imperial diet in 1548, in which the separation gradually began to emerge as a possible solution.

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4. Finally, I would like to return very briefly to the history of the apology on bended knee, which I have not yet told to the very end. The culmination and outright excessive use of the ritual marked at the same time a historical turning point. As is known, Charles’s triumph did not last long. Protestant princes joined forces once again, this time under the leadership of Moritz of Saxony, and compelled by force of arms the complete revision of the political situation, which led to Ferdinand’s conceding in the Treaty of Passau of 1552 and to the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 and ultimately contributed to Charles’s resignation. Even the Waldeck counts took part in the revolt with their troops — despite the apology that had been performed and the ritual promise never again to disobey his imperial majesty.62 Two cities had at the time not yet given up their resistance: Bremen and Magdeburg. Both had successfully refused for years to accept the same terms of surrender as the other cities had done.63 The reconciliation treaty with Bremen, which was finally signed on 15 September 1554, no longer included a genuflection. Even more spectacular was the case of Magdeburg,64 which, since 1548, had become the centre of the public media battle against the Interim and was for this reason besieged for half a year. During the surrender negotiations the city council stubbornly refused to accept the condition of the apology on bended knee, and in the end prevailed. When, after years of delay, Magdeburg was finally officially granted absolution from the imperial ban in 1562, the new emperor Ferdinand significantly dropped the demand for a ritual genuflection. The spectacular chain of public acts of submission after the end of rhe Schmalkaldic War was the climax but also the turning-point in the history of this ritual. While it would be too risky to claim that the ritual of deditio by princes before the emperor subsequently no longer took place at all, I have at 62

Waldeck, Tagebuch, p. 241; Schultze, Waldeckische Reformationsgeschichte, p. 193. The wood relief after Heemskerck of 1570–80 (see above, note 18), in which the genuflection scene of the imperial cities also includes the Bremen coat of arms, therefore restrospectively placing the reconciliation within the series of submissions of 1547–48, thus represents a historical falsification. 64 Compare Hortleder (see note 13 above), Book iv. 17 and 18. F. A. Wolter, Geschichte der Stadt Magdeburg: Von ihrem Ursprung bis auf die Gegenwart (Magdeburg: Faber, 1907), pp. 120–22; Helmut Asmus and Manfred Wille, 1200 Jahre Magdeburg: Von der Kaiserpfalz zur Landeshauptstadt (Magdeburg: Scriptum, 2000), i, pp. 481–98. In the words of Wolter, Magdeburg, p. 128: ‘The emperor wanted to forego neither the razing of the fortifications nor the apology upon bended knee, and it was really Ferdinand I who allowed these two points to fall’ (‘Von der Schleifung der Festungswerke [. . .] sowie von der fußfälligen Abbitte wollte der Kaiser gleichfalls nicht abstehen, und wirklich ließ erst [. . .] Ferdinand I. diese beiden Punkte fallen’). 63

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least not found any more examples of it. Only kneeling by city councils is documented occasionally up to the eighteenth century;65 and it is more and more seen as a curiosity then. But as a central act in ending a conflict between the emperor and the imperial estates, public genuflection no longer takes place; a series like that of 1547–48 never recurred in the history of the Holy Roman Empire.66 This cannot be attributed only to the fact that increasing literacy and bureaucratization within the government relegated the meaning of public rituals to the background generally — an explanation that in any case cannot be applied universally. Rather, the end of the genuflections appears not least to be an externally visible consequence of the process of separation of faith from law taking place on the level of the empire (but only on this level). For what made the genuflection so valuable, even indispensable, for Charles V, and simultaneously such a great burden for many Protestants, was the ritual’s sacral implications, which under the existing conditions no viewer could ignore. In genuflecting, one did not perform a purely legal-political act, but demonstratively acknowledged the emperor’s universal, sacrally legitimized authority. And precisely this made genuflection for the Protestants either into an unforgivable act of idola65

Hamburg is described in the Europäische Fama, part 248 (Leipzig, 1721), 672–78 as a ‘peculiar’ case and a curiosity. Hamburg’s mayor was required to perform an apology in person on bended knee before the emperor in July 1721 for the destruction of the Catholic legation chapel by a crowd of people during a tumult, which was interpreted as ‘crimen laesae majestatis’. The Viennese were of the opinion that the public injury to the imperial majesty had to be ‘appeased in such a sensitive and harsh manner [. . .] so that this would be similarly displayed for the whole world’ (‘auf solche empfindliche, scharfe Art vidiciret werden [. . .], damit dieses gleichfalls der ganzen Welt eclatire’). The carrying out of the ritual was long delayed; negotiations were made, among other things, about the extent to which the ritual would be public and about the ritual details. Delays were also caused by the emperor’s refusal to accept the city councillors who had been dispatched, and rather insisted upon ‘the absolutely necessary presence of the ruling mayor at the apology’ (‘die Gegenwart des regierenden Bürgermeisters bey der Deprecation unumgänglich’). Otherwise the ritual followed the form it had had during the time of Charles V. On the circumstances of the case, cf. Rainer Ramcke, Die Beziehungen zwischen Hamburg und Österreich im 18. Jahrhundert: Kaiserlich-reichsstädtisches Verhältnis im Zeichen von Handels- und Finanzinteressen (Hamburg: Christians, 1969), pp. 73–76. (I am grateful to Johannes Arndt, Münster, for this information.) 66 On the external form with which the freeing from the imperial ban normally proceeded there is, however, no information in the literature; apparently it is assumed that it took a written form (for example the public reading of the document by an imperial herald). Cf., for example, Matthias Weber, ‘Zur Bedeutung der Reichsacht in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Neue Studien zur frühneuzeitlichen Reichsgeschichte (ZHF, suppl. 19), ed. by Johannes Kunisch (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997), pp. 55–90; Christoph Kampmann, Reichsrebellion und Kaiserliche Acht (Münster: Aschendorff, 1992).

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try — or forced them, conversely, to downgrade it to an insignificant adiaphoron, a bare external formality, from which one could confidently distance oneself in one’s heart and before God. But where, under the pressure of authorities with a different faith, external gesture and inner conviction diverged, where one had to take refuge in outward dissimulatio with inner reservatio mentalis, sacral ritual acts were fundamentally invalidated. Mistrust of the ritual, the constantly lurking suspicion of misrepresentation, threatened its legally binding effect to its core and made it seem advisable to rely upon other, more neutral — that is to say, written — forms of guarantee between the members of different confessional parties. When Ferdinand realized that it was impossible to compel the Protestants to submit to imperial rule and to the Catholic truth, he thus acted resolutely, by dispensing with the genuflection. In the long run, the only solution of the problem was to sharply differentiate between ritual as religious service and ritual as political commitment, that is to say, between religion and politics.

‘Un autre Saint Bernard’: Representing Bernard of Clairvaux in the Age of Louis XIV Mette B. Bruun

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hat does a medieval saint look like in the early modern period? This essay explores the portraits of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) in Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s Panégyrique de Saint Bernard (1653) and Pierre le Nain’s La vie du reverend pere Dom Armand Jean le Boutillier de Rancé (1715). The main interest lies with the position of these representations within a framework of internal textual dynamics, obligations imposed by genre, and contemporary factors as well as with their approach to the past. Methodologically, the essay owes much to hermeneutical perspectives related to reception and the exchange between the universality of topoi and genres and the specificities of time and place,1 and draws in some measure on analyses of the employment of signs and media in representation.2 As a backdrop for the reading of the two texts we ought first to consider the spectrum of genres which, at the time, accommodated historical discourses. The later half of seventeenth-century French culture teems with interest in the past and with forms in which to handle it. Mémoires abound; prominent people keep 1

See for this period specifically Jauss’s introduction to Charles Perrault’s Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences, ed. by H. R. Jauss and M. Imdahl (Munich: Eidos, 1964); see also Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). The exchange between topoi and here and now has been identified in for instance Robert Darnton, ‘Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose’, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Random House, 1984), pp. 9–74. 2 See Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981); and Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992).

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journals of their lives, feats, and encounters.3 Novels and plays with a historical subject matter are in vogue.4 Historiography flourishes. Histories of France,5 grand-scale histories, such as Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s Discours du histoire universelle (1681), and not least contemporary history revolving around Louis XIV.6 Jean-Baptiste Colbert diligently revitalizes the institution of royal historiography. The minister also takes care that other aspects of the royal memory industry are institutionalized, most notably in the Académie des Inscriptions et Médailles (later Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres), founded in 1663, which supplements the written representation with graphic media.7 In Furetière’s 1690 definition, Histoire is ‘Description, narration of things as they are, or of actions as 3

In ‘Savoir s’il est permis d’écrire et de lire l’histoire singulièrement celle de son temps’, the preface to his Mémoires (1691–1723), Saint-Simon characterizes the experiences penned in memories as part of the ‘histoire particulière du temps et du pays où on vit’ and thus particularly useful for the instruction in mores and conduct which is taught better by history than any other genre; Saint-Simon: Mémoires, ed. by Yves Coirault, 8 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1983–88), i (1983), pp. 3–17 (p. 9); for the genre more generally, see Jack M. G. Blakiston, Reminiscing in the 17th Century (Winchester: Winchester College, 1985), pp. 5–23. 4 Not only works such as Racine’s tragedies on Greek mythology (Andromache, 1667; Iphigénie, 1674; Phèdre, 1677) or history (Alexandre le Grand, 1665), but also Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette’s anonymous La princesse de Clèves (1678), staged in the mid-sixteenth-century court of Henri II, which explores issues of conduct through a play on the temporal proximity with, yet distance from, its readers. In a letter to J. M. de Lescheraine, La Fayette calls the book ‘une parfaite imitation du monde de la cour’, and identifies it as mémoires rather than a roman; Madame de La Fayette: Œuvres complètes, ed. by Roger Duchêne (Paris: Éditions François Bourin, 1990), Letter 152, p. 622. 5 According to Chartier, after 1670 history was less popular than religious books, but more popular than literature; Roger Chartier, ‘Historiography in the Age of Absolutism’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. by Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 345–50 (p. 347). 6 According to Voss, the historiographical demands of Absolutism shifted the character of historiography from the science historique of the previous century to a more rhetorically flavoured art historique; Jürgen Voss, Das Mittelalter im Historischen Denken Frankreichs (Munich: Fink, 1972), p. 138. 7 Royal historiography had existed since 1437 but proliferated in the period; from 1661 to 1666, Louis XIV appointed seven royal historiographers, two historiographers of France, and one of buildings, paintings, and sculpture; Chartier, ‘Historiography in the Age of Absolutism’, p. 346; see also Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, pp. 49–59; Blandine Barret-Kriegel, Les Historiens et la Monarchie, 4 vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), iii: Les Académies de l’histoire, pp. 171–220; and Orest Ranum, Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth-Century France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

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they have happened, or as they could have happened’.8 History is considered a topic fit and helpful for the honnête homme 9 and the sage counsellor of princes;10 the study of history is held up as a study of the motives, opinions, and passions of human beings.11 The assessment of ancient texts and historical documents, which is separated from the narrative discipline of history,12 receives new scholarly attention, with employment of the novel conception of critique.13 Richard Simon publishes critical examinations of the Bible,14 causing thereby his own expulsion from the Oratory; and a somewhat less controversial deployment appears in the editorial endeavours of the Maurists, epitomized in Jean Mabillon’s identification of a set of methodological tools for the assessment of authenticity in ancient documents.15 8 ‘Description, narration des choses comme elles sont, ou des actions comme elles se sont passées, ou comme elle se pouvoient passer’: Antoine Furetière, Le Dictionnaire universel (The Hague and Rotterdam: Arnout & Reinier Leers, 1690; photographic reprint, ed. by A. Rey, Paris: SNL, 1978), ‘histoire’. Translations are mine unless otherwise specified. 9 Because history is less grave than the fields of theology, philosophy, mathematics, law, and medicine and thus more suitable for conversation, according to Ménestrier’s L’Étude d’un honnête homme (1658); Jean-Marc Chatelain, La bibliothèque de l’honnête homme (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2003), p. 70. 10 For instance Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, ‘Oraison funèbre de Henriette-Anne d’Angleterre’ and Discours sur l’histoire universelle, in Bossuet: Œuvres, ed. by B. Velat and Y. Champallier (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 87 and 665. 11 Jean Mabillon, Traité des études monastiques (Paris: Charles Robustel, 1691), ii. 8 (p. 233). 12 Significantly, Furetière describes an historian as a collector: ‘Celuy qui a recueilli les Histoires, les actions des siecles passez’: Furetière, Le Dictionnaire universel, ‘historien’. 13 Critique: from the adjective κριτικός, ‘discerning, judging’. Critique has partly an aesthetic function associated with the appraisal of a work of art according to its fulfilment of particular rules or its ability to please; Furetière, Le Dictionnaire universel, ‘critique’; JeanPierre Dens, L’honnête homme et la critique du goût: Esthétique et societé au XVII e siècle (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1981), esp. pp. 59–93, partly a scholarly function related to the examination of ancient texts; Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Arnold, 1969), pp. 50–69. 14 Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678/85) and Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament (1689). 15 Seminally displayed in De re diplomatica (1681). However, Mabillon’s critical approach did meet with opposition from fellow Maurists; Blandine Barret-Kriegel, ‘Brièves réflections sur quelques règles de l’histoire’, in Pratiques et concepts de l’histoire en Europe XVI e –XVIII e siècles, ed. by C. Grell and J.-M. Dufays (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1990), pp. 85–96 (pp. 85–87). For the gallican implications of the editorial programme, see Jean D. Mellot, ‘Les Mauristes et l’édition érudite: Un gallicanisme éditorial’, in L’Érudition et commerce épistolaire: Jean Mabillon et la tradition monastique, ed. by Daniel-Odon Hurel (Paris: Vrin, 2003), pp. 73–88 and Bruno Neveu, ‘Mabillon et l’historiographie gallicane’,

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In secular historiography, the power over history is important; in religious historiography it is vital. In a post-Tridentine religious culture, which holds tradition as a doctrinal power on a par with Scripture, the identification of the past and the formulation of its contemporary reverberations and reappropriations are heavily charged. This urge resurfaces in the theological discussions of the conception and normative role of tradition which proliferate in the aftermath of the Reformation and the Council of Trent and still resound in debates of the age in focus.16 It is also present in the reform-movements which sweep over several monastic Orders around 1600 and equally continue to mark the religious landscape far into the seventeenth century.17 Guised as return, much religious reform bears a strong aspect of modernization: an endeavour to adapt to current requirements considered — and legitimized — as a revitalization of past ideals.18 The high tide of reforms is complemented by a general ecclesiastical idealization of Christian antiquity, a learned nostalgia, which, as Neveu demonstrates, characterizes the ascetic, scholarly, and doctrinal aspirations of the age.19 Questions of heritage loom large in several of the areas mentioned, nowhere more than in two particularly influential conflicts. One is the Jansenist struggle over the Augustinian legacy.20 The conflict engages with key doctrinal themes such as sacraments, predestination, and the relation between divine grace and in Historische Forschung im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. by Karl Hammer and Jürgen Voss (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1976), pp. 27–81. 16 Georges Tavard, La Tradition au XVII e siècle (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969), pp. 19–53. 17 Around 1600, reforms took place among Benedictines, Cistercians, and Premonstratensians; Louis J. Lekai, The Rise of the Cistercian Strict Observance in Seventeenth Century France (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968), pp. 3–8; Peter King, Western Monasticism (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1999), pp. 286–309. 18 Engendering a work such as the 1653 treatise Du premier esprit de l’ordre de Cisteaux ou sont traitees plusieurs choses necessaires pour la connoissance & le rétablissement du gouvernement & des mœurs des Instituteurs de cét Ordre, 2nd edn (Paris: Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy, 1670), written by Julien Paris, a propagator of the Abstinent faction of the Cistercians with the aim of showing the concordance of Abstinent views with original Cistercian monasticism. 19 Bruno Neveu, Érudition et religion aux XVII e et XVIII e siècles (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), pp. 333–63. 20 After Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), whose Augustinus was published posthumously in 1640. Jansen’s teaching was papally condemned several times 1643–56, and the movement was dissolved in 1661. In 1710 Port-Royal was demolished, in itself a kind of historiography, this involved disinterring the remains of 3000 people from its cemetery; Henry Phillips, Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; first published 1997), pp. 204–05; William Doyle, Jansenism: Catholic Resistance to Authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), p. 43.

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human will, but ideas from the stronghold of Port-Royal also make their way into other areas, through for instance prominent Jansenist figures such as Pascal and Racine. Another hereditary crisis is the querelle des anciens et des modernes which rages in the academies. Cultural figureheads debate whether to return to the ideals of the golden age of Antiquity or to consider history as an evolution with the age of Louis XIV as the peak so far. The querelle elicits a wave of texts, which are remarkably diverse yet each of them typical of its age and of the different approaches to matters of time and history. The moderne Charles Perrault (1628–1703) may serve as a representative example. Apart from a slender volume of fashionable mémoires, Perrault pens the four volume Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (1688–97) which, in the form of a dialogue, presents arguments from both sides of the querelle, ensuring that reason rests mainly with his moderne protagonist. He also writes Les Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant le XVII. siecle (1696/1700), a collection of eulogistic portraits, aimed at substantiating the claim that his own age has produced as much human grandeur as Antiquity. Finally, his collection of fairy tales addresses aspects of history and heritage. In the preface to Histoires ou Contes du temps passé (1697), Perrault presents the subject matter of the contes as a morally sound, Christian, French legacy in stark contrast to the immoral, pagan, and outlandish character of the Ancient fables.21 This is merely a rapid sketch. The aim is not to analyse conceptions of the past in the cultural landscape of late seventeenth-century France, but to point to the broad spectrum of texts and genres which, across all their individual features, confront, appropriate, or investigate the past in ways which imply partly a quest for the meaning of the past for the present and the grounding of the present in the past, partly a solicitude about the means and the institutions, the authority and the power to define and appropriate a particular legacy. Bossuet’s and le Nain’s reverberations of the past add yet other genres to this range of texts, namely the central religious hagiographical genres of sermon for a saint’s feast and vita. They both seek to depict a figure of the past, but in two different forms. These two forms are illustratively pinned down by Antoine Godeau (1605–72), bishop of Vence and Grasse, who in the preface to his vie of Charles Borromeo distinguishes l’Histoire d’un Saint, & son Panegyrique in a way which may serve as a point of departure for an identification of the two genres at hand. According to Godeau, the history (vie) can sometimes be blamed for its dryness (secheresse), while the panegyric (sermon) may flow over into an abondance, which must be checked ‘if turning into commonplaces, as these 21

Charles Perrault, ‘Préface’, in Contes de Perrault, ed. by G. Rouger (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1974), pp. 4–5.

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interrupt the narrative thread and choke the things it aims to tell’.22 In short, each of the two genres draws in its own direction, and, while sharing their saintly object, operates as it were in two different generic climates. Bossuet’s Panégyrique de Saint Bernard is written for the liturgical feast for Bernard and has its place within the repetitive commemorative structure of the liturgical year. As such, it is generically related to centuries of Christian sermons for saints’ feasts. But it is also a text with a distinct contemporary slant that relates it to panegyrics of its age; on the one hand the secular eulogies proliferating at the court of Louis XIV,23 on the other hand, the religious: partly those of more or less ancient saints, partly those which flourish in the shape of oraisons funèbres for the prominent deceased, some ofthe most famed of which were Bossuet’s.24 Furetière links the religious and the mundane panegyric in one article, stating that a panegyric is ‘A speech by an orator made in praise of a person of extraordinary virtue, or one whom one wishes to pass as such. [. . .] From the pulpit, panegyrics of saints are pronounced on their feast days.’25 The panegyric of a saint shares the overall rhetorical conventions of seventeenth-century panegyric, but it also stands out partly because of its object, partly and not least because it has its place within a comprehensive liturgical, theological, and ecclesiastical tradition. This double generic association with a religious tradition as well as a contemporary taste also applies to the other text in focus. Le Nain’s vie of Rancé is steeped in the tradition of hagiography. This chord is struck in the preface, where le Nain couches the humility with which he has approached his task in a two-page quotation from Geoffrey of Auxerre, who was a monk of Clairvaux, 22

Antoine Godeau, La vie de S. Charles Borromee (Paris: André Pralard, 1684), unpaginated preface (‘quand elle degenere en lieux communs. Ils interrompent le fil de la narration; & étouffent les choses qu’elle doit raconter’). The distinction harks back to ancient historiography; for example, Polybius differentiates between the ‘summary and somewhat exaggerated account’ of the encomium and the impartiality of the history; Polybius: The Histories, x. 21; trans. by W. R. Paton, 6 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1976–80; first published 1922–27), iv (1976), pp. 152–54 (quotation in trans. p. 155). 23 From 1671, the French Academy held an annual competition for the best royal panegyric; Burke, The Fabrication, p. 51. 24 Bossuet is probably on the horizon of Furetière’s statement: ‘Les Predicateurs polis & à la mode sont presque tous Panegyristes’: Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, ‘panegyriste’. Perrault lists Bossuet’s oraison funèbre of Henrietta of England as one of three modern pieces of eloquence, which match panegyrics of Thucydides, Pliny, and others; Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, ii, pp. 313–19; edition, pp. 258–59. 25 Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, ‘panegyrique’ (‘Discours d’un Orateur fait à la loüange d’une personne, ou d’une vertu extraordinaire, ou qu’on veut faire passer pour telle. [. . .] On fait dans les chaises les Panegyriques des Saints le jour de leur Feste’).

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secretary to Bernard, and one of three authors of the medieval abbot’s vita. Le Nain thus casts Rancé as the Bernard to his own Geoffrey. But in its execution, le Nain’s vie comes closer to contemporary, indeed secular, history writing than to its miracle-flavoured antecedents. Pierre le Nain, sub-prior at the Cistercian monastery of La Trappe, and brother of the notable Jansenist historian Sébastien Tillemont le Nain, entertained historiographical aspirations. These were fleshed out in a nine-volume work on the history of the Cistercian Order, composed of vies of illustrious Cistercians.26 This formidable œuvre is worth a detour because it throws light on the generic requirements by which his vie of Rancé also abides. In his preface to his history of the Order, le Nain assures his readers — and perhaps his abbot — that his intention has not been to write un ouvrage d’érudition, for which he has neither the time nor the capacity, mais seulement de piété.27 Nonetheless, he has made some ‘reflexions’ and this contributes to the edification of his work as an historical construction. In order that ‘these reflections should not interrupt the narrative thread too much’, they have been collected at the end of each volume.28 It is significant that history is considered a rhetorical discipline to such an extent that what to a modern eye resembles scholarly corroboration is thought of as disturbing, not only to the pious content but to the very narrative thread of the history. As to the fibre of this thread, le Nain states: ‘The order that we will follow will be that of time’.29 The structure of the vie follows the strategy laid out in le Nain’s history of the Cistercian order. Almost 26 Essai de l’histoire de l’Ordre de Citeaux: Tirée des Annales de l’Ordre, & de divers autres Historiens, 9 vols (Paris: François Muguet, 1696). Le Nain’s abbot Rancé, to whom we shall return later, abhorred the idea of monastic studies but was so anxious about the standard of his sub-prior’s undertaking that he sought the counsel of Jean Gerbais, a doctor of canon law, as to whether it would be worthy of publication and would not disgrace La Trappe (letter of 8 October 1693; see Abbé de Rancé: Correspondance, ed. by Alban J. Krailsheimer, 4 vols (Paris: Éditions du Cerf; Cîteaux: Commentarii Cistercienses, 1993), iv, p. 278); see also Rancé’s profession of his shame that le Nain has sought Gerbais’s advice, 26 August 1693, and his deferential thanks to the doctor, 23 December 1693; Correspondance, iv, pp. 267–68 and 290. 27 Le Nain, Essai de l’histoire, iii, preface [n. pag.]. 28 ‘ces réfléxions n’interrompissent trop le fil de la narration’: le Nain, Essai, iii, preface [n. pag.]. Inserting documents at the end is recommended by Mabillon in the undated ‘Avis pour ceux qui travaillent aux histoires des Monasteres’, in Ouvrages posthumes de Jean Mabillon et de Thierri Ruinart Benedictins de la Congregation de Saint Maur, ed. by Vincent Thuillier, 3 vols (Paris: François Babuty et al., 1724), ii, p. 93. 29 ‘L’ordre que l’on suivra sera celui des tems’: le Nain, Essai, iii, preface [n. pag.]. This statement is put in perspective by Mabillon’s advice that the history of a monastery may be structured chronologically (if the monastery is small) or thematically (if it is large), Mabillon, ‘Avis’, pp. 92–93.

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all chapters begin with a statement concerning the overall storyline of Rancé’s life, frequently with a temporal marker,30 and only after an introductory passage, often towards the end of the chapter, does le Nain bring in the quotations from letters and records which serve as documentation for his narrative. The most explicit indication of this format appears in the following chapter introduction: ‘In order not to disrupt the course of this narration, we have here passed over some noteworthy circumstances; it is proper to report them now’.31 The difficulty in writing history that adheres to a clear fil de narration seems to be a general historiographical challenge at the time.32 It is attested to for instance in a speech given by Racine in 1685 at the reception of Messieurs de Corneille and de Bergeret in the French Academy. While showering the king with the kind of praise he is paid to produce, the royal historiographer laments the tedious character of much modern history where the reader who came in search of action finds nothing but speeches and feels his attention dying with each step and loses sight of the thread of events. The history of the king is all life and motion, everything is in action. We only have to follow him, if we can, and observe him well. It is a continuous chain of marvellous deeds, which he himself initiates and concludes.33

Both Bossuet and le Nain have a narrative thread at hand. They model their depiction of Bernard on the biographical plot laid out in the medieval Vita prima produced by William of Saint-Thierry, Ernal of Bonneval, and Geoffrey of Auxerre and revised by the last in 1163–65.34 30

For example the beginning of Book i, Chapter 16: ‘Such was the state of affairs until 30 January 1665’ (‘Tel fut l’état des choses jusqu’au 30. Janvier 1665’): le Nain, La vie, i, p. 147. 31 le Nain, La vie, i, p. 170 (‘Comme pour ne pas interrompre le cours de cette narration, on y a passé quelques circonstances remarquables, il est juste de les raporter maintenant’). 32 This challenge reflects the rhetorical demands on the narratio; see e.g., Cicero, De inventione, i. 19. 27–21. 31 and the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium, i. 8. 13–9. 16; see further Rüdiger Landfester, Historia magistra vitae: Untersuchungen zur humanistischen Geschichtstheorie des 14. bis 16. Jahrhunderts (Geneva: Droz, 1972), pp. 84–89. 33 Racine, ‘Discours prononcé a l’Académie Française a la réception de MM. de Corneille et de Bergeret’, in Racine: Oeuvres complètes, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1966–69), ii, pp. 344– 50 (p. 350) (‘où le lecteur, qui cherchait des faits ne trouvant que des paroles, sent mourir à chaque pas son attention, et perd de vue le fil des événements. Dans l’histoire du Roi, tout vit, tout marche, tout est en action. Il ne faut que le suivre, si l’on peut, et le bien étudier lui seul. C’est un enchaînement continuel de faits merveilleux que lui-même commence, que lui-même achève’). 34 Adriaan H. Bredero, ‘La vie et la Vita prima’, in Bernard de Clairvaux: Histoire, mentalités, spiritualité, ed. by D. Bertrand and G. Lobrichon, Sources Chrétiennes, 380 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1992), pp. 53–82 (p. 53).

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These two Bernard-portraits constitute at once reception and representation. Each partakes in the century-long veneration of the saint, one within the framework of liturgical celebration, the other in the continuously reiterated monastic pedigree, established for the sake of edification as well as legitimacy. Bossuet and le Nain are receivers of a legacy handed down through the ages. But the two texts also re-present the medieval abbot, that is, they cast him anew. In the words of Marin: ‘What is re-presenting, if not presenting anew (in the modality of time) or in the place of (in the modality of space)?’35 In Marin, the representation implies the power of overcoming absence, but there is also an enhancement of power associated with the interaction between the representation and its institutional framework: To ‘re-present’, then, is to show, to intensify, to duplicate a presence. [. . .] The prefix re- no longer introduces into the terms a substitution value but, rather, an intensity or frequency.36

In order for the Bernard reception to work, the representation must retain, explicitly, the split quality implied in representation. It thereby manifests the medieval abbot as a figure who belongs firmly to the past and nevertheless has some kind of pertinence to life in the present. The authors chose two different strategies to bring across such a split representation and tackle the question of intensified reduplication. We shall now turn to the texts.

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704) was one of the most prominent preachers of his time; he became tutor of the Dauphin (from 1670) and bishop of Meaux (1681–1704), but we meet him early in his career in a sermon that he preached at Metz on the feast of St Bernard, 20 August 1653, for the five hundredth anniversary of the saint’s death. From 1652 to 1659, Bossuet was an inhabitant of Metz; he was archdeacon of the nearby Sarrebourg from 1652, and in 1654 became 35

Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. by Martha M. Houle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988), p. 5; ‘Qu’est-ce que re-présenter, sinon présenter à nouveau (dans la modalité du temps) ou à la place de. . . (dans celle de l’espace)’: Marin, Le Portrait du roi, p. 9. 36 Marin, Portrait, p. 5; ‘Représenter est alors montrer, intensifier, redoubler une présence. [. . .] Le préfixe re- importe dans le terme non plus, comme il y a un instant, une valeur de substitution mais celle d’une intensité, d’une fréquentativité’: Marin, Le Portrait du Roi, p. 10.

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grand archdeacon at the cathedral of Metz.37 A master of the oraison funèbre, Bossuet was to become an expert on absence.38 Already in his panegyric of St Bernard and its evocation of a saint long dead he deploys the subtle play of presence and absence as he calls to mind Bernard of Clairvaux and links him to the contemporary life and cares of Metz. In chiming with what Lockwood has defined as Bossuet’s metadiscourse on what it is to preach and listen to sermons,39 Bossuet begins by addressing the communicative situation: ‘Last century, our churches in France introduced a pious custom: to begin sermons by invoking divine assistance through the intercession of the blessed Mary.’40 No sermon, he continues, is more likely to be assisted by Mary than one on Bernard, ‘this most faithful and chaste of your children; he of all mankind who honoured your glorious motherhood the most, who best imitated your angelic purity’.41 The representation of Bernard is wrapped in the overall texture of the sermon; theologically Bossuet may evoke Mary through Bernard, but rhetorically, he reaches for Bernard through Mary. His primary point of orientation, however, lies with Christ: with the incarnational union of divine reason and human form in the divine Word and its converting force. ‘As Jesus is the Word of the Father made flesh, all his actions speak, and all his works instruct.’42 Step by step Bossuet approaches his saintly protagonist, proceeding along an argumentative course which shifts from the instruction implied in Christ’s human life to that of the cross: Jesus was the book in which God wrote our instruction; but it is on the cross that this great book is most fully open, by his extended arms, by his cruel wounds, and by his flesh pierced from all sides; for after such a lesson, what else need we learn?43 37

Jacques Le Brun, La spiritualité de Bossuet (Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1972), p. 57. Lockwood has pointed out the tension between absence and presence as a rhetorical driving force in Bossuet. Richard Lockwood, The Reader’s Figure: Epideictic Rhetoric in Plato, Aristotle, Bossuet, Racine and Pascal (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1996), pp. 219–66. 39 Lockwood, The Reader’s Figure, p. 222. 40 Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique de Saint Bernard’, in Bossuet: Œuvres, ed. by B. Velat and Y. Champallier (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), p. 259 (‘Nos Églises de France ont introduit dans le dernier siècle une pieuse coutume, de commencer les prédications en invoquant l’assistance divine par les intercessions de la bienheureuse Marie’). 41 Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 260 (‘le plus fidèle et le plus chaste de vos enfants; celui de tous les hommes qui a le plus honoré votre maternité glorieuse, qui a le mieux imité votre pureté angélique’). 42 Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 262 (‘Comme il est la Parole substantielle du Père, toutes ses actions parlent et toutes ses œuvres instruisent’). 43 Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 264 (‘Jésus était le livre où Dieu a écrit notre instruction; mais c’est à la croix que ce grand livre s’est le mieux ouvert, par ses bras étendus, et par ses cruelles 38

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The imagery is suggestive in its corporeality but checks the bodily violence within the master metaphors of book and preaching: Jesus crucified exhibits the truths written on his torn body, Bossuet concludes, and thus the cross becomes the pulpit of a master (la chaire d’un maître).44 This book, Christ crucified, is well known to Bernard: Ah! How deep was the admirable Bernard in this wisdom! He was always at the foot of the cross, reading and contemplating and studying this great book. [. . .] He said, with the apostle Paul: Let the sages of this world glory; some in their knowledge of the stars, others in that of the elements; those in ancient and modern history, these in politics; let them, to their heart’s content, pride themselves on their useless curiosities: to me, if God permits me to know Jesus crucified, my knowledge will be perfect and my desires complete. This is all that Bernard knew; and as one preaches nothing but what one knows, he, who knew nothing but the cross, preached nothing but the cross.45

In this passage Bossuet metamorphoses Bernard from the ideal listener, who scrutinizes the cross and absorbs its teaching, via the ideal sage who knows only the cross, to the ideal preacher who only preaches the cross. He begins by placing Bernard before his audience as the paragon of receptive attention, and in the end reveals the abbot as preacher, Bossuet himself seemingly evaporating behind his own formidable model. But then he resumes his grip: Bernard’s apostolic life, grounded in the knowledge of the crucified one, is the topic of the sermon. ‘It is simple, I grant you that, but I shall bless this simplicity, if, in the cross of Jesus, I can show you the root of the admirable qualities of the pious Bernard.’46 Divested of ‘Christ’ and ‘Saint’ respectively, Jesus and Bernard are now Bossuet’s protagonists; the instruction may begin. The topos, originally medieval, of Bernard at the foot of the cross may be considered an emblematic blessures, et par sa chair percée de toutes parts; car, après une si belle leçon, que nous reste-t-il à apprendre?’). 44 Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 264. 45 Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, pp. 264–65 (‘Ha! que l’admirable Bernard s’était avancé dans cette sagesse! Il était toujours au pied de la croix, lisant, et contemplant et étudiant ce grand livre. [. . .] Il disait avec l’apôtre saint Paul: Que les sages du monde se glorifient, les uns de la connaissance des astres, et les autres des éléments; ceux-là de l’histoire ancienne et moderne, et ceux-ci de la politique; qu’ils se vantent, tant qu’il leur plaira, de leurs inutiles curiosités: pour moi, si Dieu permet que je sache Jésus crucifié, ma science sera parfaite, et mes désirs seront accomplis. C’est tout ce que savait saint Bernard; et comme l’on ne prêche que ce que l’on sait, lui, qui ne savait que la croix, ne prêchait aussi que la croix’). 46 Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 265 (‘Il est simple, je vous l’avoue; mais je bénirai cette simplicité, si, dans la croix de Jésus je puis vous montrer l’origine des admirables qualités du pieux Bernard’).

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allusion to the Christological focus of Bernardine spirituality.47 But it may also mainly be a homiletic device, which evokes the saint before the inner eye of the audience; Bossuet’s interest lies not primarily with the saint’s ideas but with his actions, partly his exemplary life, partly his apostolic example. Bernard is singled out by his very vocation; his noble background, all the wealth he renounced, but above all his age. He was twenty-two when he withdrew from the world. Had he been younger, his passions would not yet have been born; had he been older, he would have begun to get into certain habits, ‘but at twenty-two’, the twenty-five-year-old preacher states, What ardour, what impatience, what impetuosity of desires [. . .] this green youth, in which there is still nothing stable or decided, is violently agitated by all the passions, exactly because it has no passion which prevails over the others. At that age, the wild passions, the luxury, the ambition, and the vain desire to be noticed seem to exercise their sway without resistance.48

Moreover, youth has everything at hand, ‘it also thinks of nothing but the present’ (‘elle ne songe aussi qu’au présent’).49 At the age the least capable of submission to rule, solitude, and discipline, Bernard submitted himself to all of these. According to Bossuet, Bernard was directed by an epiphany resembling that of Paul; to Bernard, however, Christ seems to have spoken in distinctly seventeenth-century vein: ‘Bernard, Bernard, he said, this green youth will not last forever [. . .] Death, that fatal enemy, will take with it all our pleasures and all our honours into oblivion and into nothingness.’50 So Bernard turned to the cross of Jesus, ‘he quenched his thirst with his blood and with this divine liquor imbibed contempt for the world’,51 and withdrew to Cîteaux. 47

For the medieval representation, see the article by Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen in this volume. 48 ‘Quelle ardeur, quelle impatience, quelle impétuosité de désirs? [. . .] cette verte jeunesse n’ayant rien encore de fixe ni d’arrêté, en cela même qu’elle n’a point de passion dominante par-dessus les autres, elle est agitée de toutes les passions, avec violence. Là les folles amours; là le luxe, l’ambition et le vain désir de paraître exercent leur empire sans résistance’: Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 267. 49 Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 267. 50 ‘Bernard, Bernard, disait-il, cette verte jeunesse ne durera pas toujours [. . .] La mort, cette fatale ennemie, entraînera avec elle tous nos plaisirs et tous nos honneurs dans l’oubli et dans le néant’: Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, pp. 269–70. 51 ‘il se rassasiait de son sang, et avec cette divine liqueur il humait le mépris du monde’: Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 270.

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The preacher announces that he will ‘make a depiction of his penitence, drawn from his words and his writings’.52 Attention lies with Bernard’s asceticism, his fasts, vigils, and lack of sense and inclination for anything earthly, a continuous penitential exercise, which concludes with a return to the cross: ‘Which man has ever been able to say, with more just reason, that which the apostle St Paul said: the world has crucified me, and I am crucified to the world?’53 Death, according to Bossuet, played an important part in Bernard’s conversion, and continued to do so in his monastic life. O terrible logic for the rest of us, lax and effeminate, who are Christians only in name! But the great St Bernard had engraved it deep in his heart. For that which makes us live in the world is the inclination for the world; that which makes the world live for us, is that certain glitter in tangible possessions which dazzles us. Death extinguishes the inclinations; death tarnishes the lustre of everything. Look at the most handsome person in the world. As soon as the soul has departed, even if the lineaments are almost the same, the flower of its beauty fades and all that is amiable vanishes. Thus since the world no longer holds charms for Bernard, and Bernard no longer has any feeling for the world, the world is dead to him, and he is dead to the world.54 52

‘je vous ferai un tableau de sa pénitence, tiré de ses paroles et de ses écrits’: Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 271. This statement is somewhat in contrast to Truchet’s reliable claim that the medieval Vita prima is the only source for Bossuet’s panegyric of Bernard; Jacques Truchet, Bossuet panégyriste (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1962), p. 74. Frequent quotations in Bossuet’s later sermons attest to his acquaintance with the abbot’s oeuvre; Truchet, Bossuet panégyriste, p. 90; Le Brun, La spiritualité, pp. 243–46. Le Brun points to a book in Bossuet’s library as a possible source: Amoris divini emblemata (1615) by Otto van Veen, the emblems of which were accompanied by extracts from the Bible, the Patristic fathers, Bernard of Clairvaux, and others; Le Brun, La spiritualité, pp. 74–75, and to the translation of Bernard’s De diligendo Deo which in 1667 was approved by Bossuet in his capacity of doctor in theology; Le Brun, La spiritualité, p. 77. But it is difficult to say how much knowledge of the Bernardine oeuvre the young archdeacon had already acquired when he wrote the saint’s panegyric. 53 ‘Quel homme a jamais pu dire avec plus juste raison ce que disait l’apôtre saint Paul: Le monde m’est crucifié, et moi je suis cruicifié au monde?’: Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 272, with a reference to Galatians 6. 14. 54 ‘O terrible raisonnement pour nous autres lâches et efféminés, et qui ne sommes chrétiens que de nom! Mais le grand saint Bernard l’avait fortement gravé en son cœur. Car ce qui nous fait vivre au monde, c’est l’inclination pour le monde; ce qui fait vivre le monde pour nous, c’est un certain éclat qui nous charme dans les biens sensibles. La mort éteint les inclinations; la mort ternit le lustre de toutes choses. Voyez le plus beau corps du monde: sitôt que l’âme s’est retirée, bien que les linéaments soient presque les mêmes, cette fleur de beauté s’efface et cette bonne grace s’évanouit. Ainsi le monde n’ayant plus d’appas pour Bernard, et Bernard n’ayant plus aucun sentiment pour le monde, le monde est mort pour lui, et lui, il est mort au monde’: Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, pp. 272–73.

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Past and present conflate, and Bossuet’s audience becomes third party in the conversation between Jesus and Bernard. In an age fascinated with beauty and bonne grâce as well as with death and the transience of terrestrial life, this passage seems to be composed for the sole purpose of making the listeners shudder. Bossuet is saying to his audience: ‘this green youth does not endure’ — as Jesus allegedly called out to Bernard. Bernard’s mortification is part of the abbot’s ongoing exchange with Christ, ‘What could he offer which would be more agreeable to the Saviour Jesus, than a soul disgusted by anything other than Jesus himself ’.55 The source must be kept in sight: ‘In fact, faithful ones, since the good works have no merit apart from in the extent to which they come from Jesus Christ, they drop in price as soon as we attribute them to ourselves. They must be assigned to him who gives them, and that is exactly what the humble Bernard learned at the foot of the cross.’56 Having laid out the exemplary life which attests to Bernard’s having listened to Christ, Bossuet now turns to the apostolic zeal with which he preaches him, denoted by the term prêcher la croix, tracing the narrative thread of Bernard’s vita. First he preached the cross to his family, and several pages are spent on the scrutiny of each of the monastic professions thus brought about. Then he preached the cross in his monastery, thereby causing his monks to dream of dying rather than living.57 But God wrung him from his monastery. Bossuet rephrases what Bernard himself described as his chimerical betrayal of the monastic stabilitas loci58 as the abbot’s truly apostolic mark: What pain for this man of God when he had to leave his children, whom he loved ‘in the bowels of Jesus Christ’ [cf. Philippians 1. 8]! But God, who already from his mother’s womb had set him aside in order to renew the spirit and the preaching of the apostles in his time, drew him from his solitude for the salvation of the souls whom he wished to save through his ministry. It was here, it was here, Christians, that he really showed himself an apostle. The apostles went all over the world, 55

‘Que peut-il présenter de plus agréable au Sauveur Jésus, qu’une âme dégoûtée de toute autre chose que de Jésus même’: Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 273. 56 ‘Et en effet, Fidèles, comme les bonnes œuvres n’ont de mérite qu’en tant qu’elles viennent de Jésus-Christ, elles perdent leur prix, sitôt que nous nous les attribuons à nous-mêmes. Il les faut rendre à celui qui les donne, et c’est encore ce que l’humble Bernard avait appris aux pieds de la croix’: Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 273. 57 Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 278, with a reference to William of Saint-Thierry, the first author of Vita prima. 58 See Bernard of Clairvaux’s Epistola 250. 4.

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carrying the gospel of Jesus Christ to the most remote nations: and which part of the world has not been illuminated by Bernard’s preaching?59

At a time when missionaries were busy in China and the Americas, this is an intriguing statement about someone whose preaching extended only as far as Germany and Italy. Bossuet stresses the abbot’s Catholic endeavours: The Apostle counts among the functions of the apostolate the care of all Churches; and was the pious Bernard not steward of almost all the churches by his life-giving counsels, which were solicited from all parts of the world? It was as if God did not want to associate him with one church in particular, in order that he might be the common father of all.60

One senses that Bossuet is heading somewhere in particular. First he takes a brief detour around the miracles, which confirmed Bernard’s preaching and his apostolic love for his audience;61 then he reaches the climax of his sermon: A good example for the reformers of recent times! If their all too visible arrogance had allowed them to treat things with equal moderation, they would have censured evil mores without disrupting the communion, and suppressed the vices without violating legitimate authority.62 59 ‘Quelle douleur à cet homme de Dieu, quand il lui fallait quitter ses enfants, qu’il aimait si tendrement dans les entrailles de Jésus-Christ! Mais Dieu, qui l’avait séparé dès le ventre de sa mère pour renouveler en son temps l’esprit et la prédication des apôtres, le tirait de sa solitude pour le salut des âmes qu’il voulait sauver par son ministère. C’est ici, c’est ici, Chrétiens, où il paraissait véritablement un apôtre. Les apôtres allaient par toute la terre, portant l’Evangile de Jésus-Christ jusque dans les nations les plus reculées: et quelle partie du monde n’a pas été éclairée de la prédication de Bernard?’: Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 278. 60 ‘L’Apôtre compte parmi les fonctions de l’apostolat le soin de toutes les Églises; et le pieux Bernard ne régissait-il pas presque toutes les Églises, par les salutaires conseils, que l’on lui demandait de toutes les parties de la terre? Il semblait que Dieu ne voulait pas l’attacher à aucune Église en particulier, afin qu’il fût le père commun de toutes’: Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 278, with a reference to 2 Corinthians 11. 28. 61 Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 279. Bossuet mentions that when Bernard preached in Germany, the audience was moved by his sermons although they did not understand his tongue. This rather pragmatic miracle is typical of Bossuet’s cautious attitude, which is in contrast to his medieval sources, but in keeping with his homiletic aim to present Bernard as a moral model rather than a saintly wonder. 62 ‘Bel exemple pour les réformateurs de ces derniers siècles! Si leur arrogance trop visible leur eût permis de traiter les choses avec une pareille modération, ils auraient blâmé les mauvaises mœurs sans rompre la communion, et réprimé les vices sans violer l’autorité légitime’: Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 280.

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The panegyrist turns polemicist: owing to the reformers’ fierceness and contempt ‘they have created a schism rather than brought reformation. What was needed for such a design to succeed was the courage and humility of Bernard.’63 Towards the end of the sermon, Bossuet brings Bernard a good deal closer to home, bridging the temporal gap between his medieval protagonist and his fellow citizens of Metz. He calls to mind how the archbishop of nearby Trier engaged Bernard as peacemaker in a local struggle between the Messins and neighbouring dukes.64 The locale offers the point of orientation for a blending of past and present; just as Bernard once helped Metz through his physical presence, Bossuet now calls upon him to help the city through his intercession: The Christians, who ought to be children of peace, have become wolves insatiable for blood. The Christian brotherhood has been broken; [. . .] Pray to God that he will give us peace, that he will give rest to this town that you have so cherished at other times; or that, if it is written in the book of his eternal decrees, that we are not to see peace in this world, that he will eventually grant us peace in heaven, through our saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.65 63

‘de là vient qu’ils ont fait le schisme, et n’ont pas apporté la réformation. Il fallait, pour un tel dessein, le courage et l’humilité de Bernard’: Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, p. 280. Polemics against Protestants were to form an important part of Bossuet’s activity and oeuvre, from the theological debates with the prominent local Protestant minister Paul Ferry, which materialized in his Refutation du Catechisme du Sieur Paul Ferry (1655), to the irenic dialogues with Leibniz in the 1690s. This topic lies outside the scope of this essay, but it is noteworthy that Bossuet’s main work against the Protestants was to reiterate the topos of Bernard’s true reform spirit, explicit in the fact that, unlike the reformers, he did not centre on the errors of the church but on its lax discipline; Histoire des variations des églises protestantes, 2 vols (Paris: Sebastien Marbre-Cramoisy, 1688), i, pp. 5–6. 64 Patrologia Latina, 185, cols 351–55. Vita prima states that in February 1153 more than twothousand died during one hour’s battle; Patrologia Latina, 185, col. 352. According to Miskin, at the time of Bossuet’s sermon, only five years after Metz was ceded to France at the peace of Westphalia, the conflicts between Protestants (who by 1633 counted c. 7500 people, that is, one third of the Messins) and Catholics were rather less gory; in the first half of the 1650s the confessional disputes in Metz apparently mainly concerned estate; Patricia B. Miskin, One King, One Law, Three Faiths: Religion and the Rise of Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century Metz (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), pp. 68–72. 65 ‘Les chrétiens, qui devraient être des enfants de paix, sont devenus des loups insatiables de sang. La fraternité chrétienne est rompue; [. . .] Priez Dieu qu’il nous donne la paix, qu’il donne le repos à cette ville que vous avez autrefois tant chérie; ou que, s’il est écrit dans le livre de ses décrets eternels que nous ne puissions voir la paix en ce monde, qu’il nous la donne à la fin dans le ciel, par Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. Amen’: Bossuet, ‘Panégyrique’, pp. 282–83.

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Here we have, in embryonic form, the driving force of Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681), which he wrote for his young pupil, the Dauphin;66 a grand history in Augustinian vein, demonstrating the providential coherence of the history of the Church as opposed to the fluctuation of profane history. Thematically, the sermon has come full circle: from one tormented body to another, from a first book to a second. Bossuet takes his point of departure in the lacerated body of Christ, the book where the divine secrets are inscribed: his conclusion is with the confessionally torn body of Messins and the divine book of eternal decrees. He has also guided his audience along a rhetorical route from the visualization of Bernard devoutly contemplating the cross, through Bernard busy with the various offices of apostolic life at God’s command, to a politically energetic abbot, who throws himself into local affairs. Bossuet begins by bringing his audience to the object of the liturgical feast, that is, to Bernard at the foot of the cross. He concludes by bringing Bernard to his audience in Metz, attaching to the abbot an ad hoc role as patron saint of that town. In this deft and conscious rhetorical handling of his topic as well as his audience, Bossuet appears quite the heir to the medieval protagonist of his sermon. Bossuet moves within the Erwartungshorizont associated with the sermon on a saint; the exposition of Scripture, the exhortation to piety, and the lessons of penitence and piety elicited from the different stages of the model’s life. He rehearses the homiletic topos of actualization by couching his discourse on abstinence within the contemporary predilection for vanitas motives, but above all seems to direct the hic et nunc level of his sermon towards the rift brought about by the Reformation and the confessional conflicts, locally as well as on a wider scale. Bossuet’s representation of Bernard of Clairvaux revives the saint and, with Metz as the point of orientation, establishes a connection between the medieval and the contemporary situation, with the humble Bernardine approach to ecclesiastical affairs as the device which exposes the perverse approach of the reformers. The figure of the cross and Bernard’s dialogue with Christ are used to create thematic cohesion, but Bossuet has his own need of the saint, whose life offers the narrative thread of his discourse. He is a model, but even more a figure who may be evoked and called upon. Bossuet’s representation of Bernard is not so much a resonance of a past glory as an attempt to strike again the chord of abstention, humility, conciliation, and Catholicism associated with the medieval abbot. 66 The theme of providence is also treated in two sermons, respectively on judgement (1656) and the secret plan of divine rule in the world (1662); Bossuet: Œuvres, ed. by B. Velat and Y. Champallier (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 1039–57 and 1059–72.

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Pierre le Nain With Pierre le Nain’s (1640–1713) portrait of Bernard of Clairvaux we move to a representation which is just as purposeful as that of Bossuet, but with a different aim. In Bossuet, Bernard is a saintly and exemplary figure, who, while grounded in Cîteaux, is available to the entire Church and to all Christians through his example and his preaching. In le Nain, he is above all the authoritative Cistercian, enveloped in monastic life. Pierre le Nain’s representation appears in his La vie du reverend pere Dom Armand Jean le Boutillier de Rancé, which was published posthumously in 1715.67 Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626–1700) was the abbot of the Cistercian monastery of La Trappe in northwestern France where he issued a reform. The particulars of this reform are not our concern; suffice it to say that it was marked by austerity and centred on penance, caused a good deal of suspicion and opposition, and was accused of threatening the uniformity of the Order.68 Although secondary in our context, Rancé plays a vital role in le Nain’s shaping of Bernard, and must therefore be taken into account. One of the purposes of the portrait is to show Rancé as a self-made saint, probably in part as an answer to those who had criticized Rancé’s lack of familiarity with Cistercian monasticism. In short, from childhood, Armand-Jean de Rancé, the godson of Richelieu, was commendatory abbot of five monasteries of different observance, one of them being La Trappe. In accordance with commendatory abbots’ frequent lack of interest in the practical, let alone the spiritual affairs of their monasteries, Rancé spent a good deal of his life, until his mid-thirties, in the Paris salons. From 1656 to 1660 he was the chaplain to Louis XIII’s brother Gaston d’Orléans. Following his conversion, allegedly caused by, among other things, the untimely death of his mistress, he decided to sell his title as commendatory abbot of La Trappe. With that intention he visited the monastery for the first time in 1658, was appalled by its material and spiritual decay, and eventually decided to stay there and reform it. He embarked on a noviciate at the nearby Perseigne, which was, however, broken off owing to ill health. This was Rancé’s first encounter with the Cistercian ways and spirit. After his noviciate he became abbot proper of La Trappe, and after two years in Rome in the 67

According to David Bell, le Nain’s work was prompted by no other than Bossuet; Bell, Understanding Rancé: The Spirituality of the Abbot of La Trappe in Context (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2005), pp. 7–8. 68 Concerning Rancé and his reform, see Alban J. Krailsheimer, Armand-Jean de Rancé: Abbot of La Trappe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); Chrysogonus Waddell, ‘The Cistercian Dimension of the Reform of La Trappe’, in Cistercians in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by E. Rozanne Elder (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981), pp. 102–61; and Bell, Understanding Rancé.

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business of his Order, returned and launched his severe reform. Le Nain was sub-prior of La Trappe and secretary to Rancé. The main intention of his biography is to show that Rancé is cast in genuine Cistercian mould, and the aim of his portrait of Bernard is to establish the premise for his propagation partly of the proper ethos of the reform, partly of Rancé as ‘ce second Bernard’, ‘un noveau saint Bernard’, and ‘un autre saint Bernard’.69 The correlation between Bernard and Rancé is indicated in the preface with le Nain’s association of himself and Bernard’s biographer Geoffrey, but only towards the end of the work does he present a fully-fledged juxtaposition of the medieval and the seventeenth-century abbot. The first challenge is to bring the two Cistercians onto the same level despite their widely different experiences. Rancé’s luxurious background in the Parisian salons may be the making of hagiography, and is exploited as such in the very beginning of le Nain’s biography; but it is not easily reconciled with the largely other-worldly persona of Bernard of Clairvaux laid out in his medieval vita. In order to overcome this dichotomy, le Nain argues that despite their differences, Rancé had so many traits in common with Bernard that it was with great justice that one could call him another St Bernard and say that by a marvellous metempsychosis, the spirit of this great saint passed over into that of the Abbot of La Trappe.70

Not otherwise much of a mystic, the biographer thereby provides himself with a short cut to biographical parallelization, before proceeding in a more conventional vein. He is above all interested in some basic monastic themes, organized chronologically according to the two abbots’ lives. The formula adhered to seems to be: an introduction of a particular issue, a juxtaposition of the two abbots, and a comparison of their merits. Given the genre and aim of the text, it is unsurprising that this comparison is generally to Rancé’s advantage. But while le Nain wants to laud his protagonist, it is not in his interest to decry the medieval abbot whose pious renown and saintly legitimacy is one of the principal instruments of his commendation. His solution to this quandary is a typological construction, which hinges on the conception of Rancé as un autre Bernard. This autre seems to imply partly a redoubling of the medieval Cistercian in an 69

Pierre le Nain, La vie du reverend pere Dom Armand Jean le Boutillier de Rancé, 3 vols ([n.p.]: [n. pub.], 1715), ii, p. 387; iii, pp. 213–14. Bell ascribes the publisher’s anonymity to the Jansenist leanings of the book and identifies the place of publication as Rouen; Bell, Understanding Rancé, pp. 7 and 328. 70 ‘[. . .] que c’est avec beaucoup de justice qu’on peut le nommer un autre saint Bernard, & dire que par une merveilleuse métempsicose, l’esprit de ce grand Saint est passé dans celui de l’Abbé de la Trappe’: le Nain, La vie, iii, pp. 213–14.

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imitatio Bernardi, partly a subtle indication of progression. It is not that Rancé is better than Bernard, but the fact remains he has fought harder. In an age where conversion, sincerity, and personal conviction are of great significance, these are traits that turn Rancé into a modern saint, an updated Bernard. The heavily charged topos of the wilderness makes a useful point of departure; it has a fundamental Cistercian ring and readily lends itself to a sketch of the abbots’ monastic vocations: One was chosen to found in his glory a new Temple in a place of horror, which had until then been a retreat for robbers [. . .]; the other was chosen by God to re-establish his Temple which had become a place of horror and which served as a den for monks who deserved the name of robbers, not only because of the disorderly and scandalous life they led, but also because there were indeed some among them who robbed those who passed through the woods of La Trappe.71

Apart from the detail that only Rancé is described explicitly as chosen by God, assonance marks this passage. Both abbots arrived at a wilderness and (re)established God’s Temple there. This passage makes Rancé appear truly Bernardine and characterizes him as a genuine Cistercian founder whose spiritual and material reform of the medieval La Trappe is at one with the multifaceted Cistercian desert mythology.72 The second theme in focus is that of saintly ideals. Le Nain turns the abbot’s conversion from a rather worldly past into a sign of penitential ardour, claiming that whereas Bernard’s monastic life was founded on innocence, Rancé had 71

‘L’un est choisi pour fonder à sa gloire un nouveau Temple dans un lieu d’horreur, qui avoit été jusqu’alors une retraite de voleurs [. . .]; l’autre est choisi de Dieu pour rétablir son Temple devenu un lieu d’horreur, & qui servoit de retraite à des Religieux dignes du nom de voleurs, non seulement à cause de la vie déreglée & scandaleuse qu’ils menoient, mais encore parce qu’effectivement il y en avoit parmi eux, qui voloient ceux qui passoient par les bois de la Trappe’: le Nain, La vie, iii, pp. 216–17, echoing the expression locum horroris (Deuteronomy 32. 10) of the twelfth-century foundation narrative Exordium Cistercii. A visitation report from 1686 states that when Rancé arrived, the forest surrounding La Trappe was full of vagabonds, criminals, and assassins, but says nothing about thieving monks; Dominique Georges, ‘Proces Verbal de l’état spirituel & temporel de l’Abbaïe de la Trappe’, in Pierre Maupeou, La vie du très-reverend père dom Armand Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé (Paris: L. d’Houry, 1709), Book vi, pp. 251–71 (pp. 264–67). A case from 1649 in which a monk returned to the abbey after having killed a local peasant seems to indicate that neither the report nor le Nain were entirely off the mark; Waddell, ‘The Cistercian Dimension’, p. 108. 72 See Bruun, ‘The Cistercian Rethinking of the Desert’, Cîteaux: Commentarii Cistercienses, 53 (2002), 233–52; ‘The Wilderness as lieu de mémoire: Literary Deserts of Cîteaux and La Trappe’, in Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages, ed. by Mette B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser, Ritus et artes, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 21–42; and Parables: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Mapping of Spiritual Topography (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 72–80.

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‘violated the sacred seal of his Baptism’ (‘violé le sacré sceau de son Baptême’); therefore the latter ‘engaged in the great austerities with much greater justice than St Bernard’.73 For while Rancé had the weight of his sins (‘la grandeur de ses pechez’) to combat, Bernard built the edifice of his penitential life on the foundation of preserved innocence (‘innocence conservée’).74 Furthermore, Rancé’s rather late and abrupt arrival in the Order becomes a token of ascetic fortitude; whereas Bossuet employed Bernard’s youth at the time of profession to his advantage, le Nain uses Rancé’s greater experience for the same purposes, translating Rancé’s apparent deficit into a mark of distinction which Bernard cannot match. The state of La Trappe is also deployed to the same effect. Le Nain states that Bernard had nothing but models of an eminent saintliness who could prompt and guide him in his establishment of so fine and admirable regularity in his monastery. But the abbot of La Trappe had neither model, nor master, or guide in his religious life; neither help, nor assistance from his fellow man. He had before his eyes nothing but examples of irregularities, violated rules, and transgressions of the ancient statutes.75

The decay at La Trappe before the reform becomes the main foil in the description of Rancé’s saintly autonomy, and both the spiritual guidance he received during his six-year conversion process and his noviciate at Perseigne recede into the background. Both abbots went to Rome.76 Whereas Bernard succeeded in every papal undertaking — apart from the second crusade, le Nain admits — Rancé drew no fruit from all his labour and effort. But this was divinely ordered and only served to humble the reformer.77 However, even Bernard met with adversity. The Congregation of Cluny decried him because he attracted Cluniac monks, just as Rancé was to be persecuted by the other Orders who were jealous of the 73 ‘engagé avec beaucoup plus de justice que saint Bernard a de grandes austeritez’: le Nain, La vie, iii, p. 216. 74 le Nain, La vie, iii, pp. 215–16. 75 ‘les exemples d’une sainteté éminente qui pouvoient l’animer & lui servir de lumiere pour établir en son Monastere une régularité si belle & si admirable. Mais l’Abbé de la Trappe n’eût ni modéle, ni maître, ni guide dans la vie Religieuse, ni secours, ni assistance de la part des hommes. Il n’avoit devant les yeux que des exemples d’irrégularité, des violemens de régles, des transgressions des anciens Statuts’: le Nain, La vie, iii, p. 219. 76 Rancé served as a delegate of the Abstinent faction of the Cistercians, when the conflict between the strict and the common observance was taken to Rome in 1664–66; see Waddell, ‘The Cistercian Dimension’, pp. 119–22. 77 le Nain, La vie, iii, p. 222.

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appeal of his reform.78 The contemporary criticism of Rancé for poaching is turned into a sign of Bernardine congeniality; as the one met with envy, so does the other. The issue of asceticism is crucial. Rancé’s reform was renowned and notorious for its austerity, which was suspected of having cost several monks their lives.79 Le Nain states that Bernard’s asceticism almost killed him; only the express commands of his superiors, a bishop, and the General Chapter made him ease his self-imposed penitence. Needless to say, Rancé is described as filled with the same spirit of austerity and penitence, only in his case it takes the accumulated prayers of his brothers as well as the commands of more General Chapters and popes to move him into a penitential regime which is not fatal.80 Rancé’s asceticism is simply the same, but more so. Bernard, le Nain states, preferred to stay in his monastery. But because God wanted him to be the light of the world, he struck him with an infirmity, which prevented him from exhorting his monks and partaking in the manual labour in the monastery, thereby necessitating the amplification of his spoken words by written works. ‘It was in this way that God’s direction began to draw back the great saint from the obscurity in which he lived in his monastery and to transfer him from the shadows of the forests into the light of the world’.81 With this significantly reversed depiction of Bernard’s withdrawal from monastic withdrawal into the light of the world, le Nain paves the way for his description of how Rancé’s infirmity countered the abbot’s desire to commit himself to his own and his brothers’ sanctification and 78

Regula Benedicti, Chapter 61 recommends that monks from elsewhere are welcomed, but warns against accepting monks from known monasteries without the recommendation of their abbot. That this was an issue for medieval Cistercians is attested in e.g., Bernard’s letters 65–68. La Trappe came to accommodate a variety of monastic observances: of the hundred choir monks professed 1662–90 at least twenty-five came from other orders, fifteen came from other Cistercian houses; Krailsheimer, Armand-Jean de Rancé, p. 103; the Generals of the Celestines, Maurists, Feuillants, and Premonstratensians all sought to prevent their monks, through legal action, from joining La Trappe; The Letters of Armand-Jean de Rancé, ed. and trans. by A. J. Krailsheimer, 2 vols (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984), i, p. xvii. 79 The death of twelve monks during 1674–76 spurred criticism; for comparison in 1676 the population of La Trappe counted twenty-seven monks, six novices, and twelve lay brothers; Krailsheimer, Armand-Jean de Rancé, pp. 37, 102. 80 le Nain, La vie, iii, pp. 226–27. 81 ‘Ce fut de cette sorte que la conduite de Dieu commença à retirer ce grand Saint de l’obscurité où il vivoit dans son Cloître, & à le faire passer de l’ombre des forêts à la lumiere du monde’: le Nain, La vie, iii, p. 233.

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prompted his works, letters, and visitations.82 But the biographer is above all aiming towards an exposé of the styles of the two abbots. Bernard was esteemed for his way of writing by the most learned men in the Church. They marvelled that this man who, since he left school, has had no other company than the solitude, the oaks, and the beeches, and no other studies than those he could pursue in the middle of the forest, and the most rude rural labour, nonetheless had such a clear spirit, such a pure expression, a way of expressing himself so full of divine unction and with nothing of the austerity of the wilderness.83

Again, praise of Bernard is above all the springboard for the passage lavished on Rancé and his ability to impress those whose taste was finer (‘dont le goût est plus fin’), even though he lived in isolation for some thirty years without rhetorical training. Le Nain concludes in style: ‘In short, without study, without effort, without even wanting to, he became one of the finest pens of his age.’84 The biographer is balancing on a knife edge here. Rancé’s eloquence was apparently a noted characteristic already when he was in the world; that he retained it in the monastery was for the benefit of his monks and hence at no point hagiographically problematic.85 The question of studies and research makes the complex more dangerous since Rancé harboured strong views on monastic studies and, in 1683–93, went through a fierce dispute with Jean Mabillon on this topic, arguing that studies were incompatible with the monastic goal and would lead only to curiosity and pride.86 On the one hand, le Nain must show that 82

Infirmity forced Rancé to retire as abbot in 1695, five years before his death. ‘que cet homme qui depuis qu’il est sorti des écoles, n’a point eu d’autre compagnie que la solitude, les Chênes & les Hêtres, ni d’autres études que celle qu’il a pû faire au milieu des forêts, & des travaux les plus rudes de la campagne, ait cependant l’esprit si net, l’expression si pure, un genre de s’exprimer plein d’une onction toute divine, & qui ne tient rien de l’austerité du desert’: le Nain, La vie, iii, p. 235. 84 ‘En un mot, que sans étude, sans recherche, sans le vouloir, il devient une des plus belles plumes du siécle’: le Nain, La vie, iii, pp. 235–36 (p. 236). 85 In his account of his visit at La Trappe, Félibien des Avaux praises the abbot’s rhetorical skills when speaking about the blessings of the afterlife and reminds his recipient, the duchess de Liancour, of his former eloquence when he spoke about the things of the world; ‘Description de l’Abbaye de La Trappe’, in Reglemens de l’Abbaye de Nôtre-Dame de La Trappe (Paris: Delaulne, 1718), p. 72. The later vie of Rancé by Dubois features a dialogue where the young commendatory abbot presents his plans for the day: ‘This morning preach like an angel; this afternoon hunt like a devil’; ‘Ce matin, prêcher comme un ange; ce soir, chasser comme un diable!’: Louis Dubois, Histoire de l’abbé de Rancé et de sa réforme, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Paris: Poussielgue, 1869), i, p. 51. See also Bell, Understanding Rancé, pp. 31–32. 86 Giving rise, on Rancé’s part, to the treatise Réponse au Traité des études monastiques (1692). Rancé’s pre-monastic scholarly interest lay above all with Greek literature. Contemporary satire was attentive to this aspect, remarking, with ostensible puzzlement, upon the abbot’s 83

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Rancé had entirely left his earthly life behind, hence his emphasis on isolation and abstinence from studies in what he presents as Rancé’s eloquence despite himself. On the other, the hagiographer cannot forgo a trait which is apparently generally known and will so greatly commend the abbot to his contemporaries and their taste for linguistic refinement. Le Nain concludes his double-portrait with a list of examples of the grace that Rancé has received and the good he has done for the honour of the church, the edification of the world, the defence of truth, and the re-establishment of monastic discipline, always conforming to Bernard.87 The two abbots resemble each other in, for example, their loyalty to Louis VII and XIV respectively, despite slanderous suggestions to the contrary, the abundance of afflictions which inspired a Job-like humility and patience in both, and their shared veneration for the Virgin. There is a marked difference, in le Nain’s description, between Bernard who ‘embraces the hard and horrid life of Cîteaux because he believes that he is in need of all the rigour of the Rule’,88 and Rancé who offers himself to Christ ‘on the strength of his vows, with a heart shot through by the sharpest pain that the spirit of penitence may inspire’.89 Bernard hovers somewhere between legitimizing founding father and exemplary model of humility, penitence, and eloquence. He exhibits the mixture of success and adversity which allows the biographer to dress up the opposition to Rancé as ordeals that make him either imitate or surpass his ideal, but care is taken that the medieval abbot does not outshine the Trappist. Rancé’s biographer revives Bernard but makes sure that he does not become too overwhelmingly alive. While the chronological gap is not a theme in itself, no attempts are made to bridge it; le Nain needs to maintain a historical distance alongside an exemplary presence in the medieval abbot, precise recollection of Aristophanes; see the detailed presentation of Les Véritables motifs de la Conversion de l’Abbé de la Trappe written by the Protestant Daniel de Larroque (1685) in Bell, Understanding Rancé, pp. 147–66 (p. 159). Larroque may have had a point; on 4 October 1691 Rancé thanked Claude Nicaise for his book Dissertation sur les Sirènes: ‘mais je vous avoue que je n’ai osé entrer avant dans la matière. Toutes les espèces fabuleuses se sont réveillées, et j’ai reconnu que je n’étais pas encore autant mort que je le devrais être’: Correspondance, iv, p. 127; ‘I confess that I didn’t dare do more than glance. All the fabled forms and figures of the past awoke, and I realized that I wasn’t really as dead as I ought to be’: translation from Waddell, ‘The Cistercian Dimension’, p. 149. 87 ‘toûjours par conformité à saint Bernard’: le Nain, La vie, ii, pp. 237–38 (p. 238). 88 ‘embrasse la vie dure & affreuse de Cîteaux, parce qu’il croit avoir besoin de toute la rigueur de la Régle’: le Nain, La vie, iii, p. 215. 89 ‘par les engagemens de ses Vœux, avec un cœur pénetré de la plus vive douleur, que puisse inspirer l’esprit de pénitence’: le Nain, La vie, iii, p. 215.

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as a device in his hagiographical construction of Rancé as an up-to-date Cistercian bent on conversional zeal and whole-hearted penitence. While concession must be made to the biographer’s need to abide by some given constants of the Bernardine Vita prima and Rancé’s career respectively, we may summarize the fil narratif woven in his juxtaposition of the two abbots as one which represents Bernard as a medieval saint through-and-through and Rancé as a reformer who does not return to medieval standards or evoke a golden past, but embodies the Bernardine virtues in his own way. In this interest in progression rather than return, le Nain appears as quite a moderne.90 * * * To conclude, Bossuet’s panégyrique and le Nain’s vie throw light on diachronic dynamics of the recontextualization of the past. Two features seem specifically significant. On the one hand, the reception and representation of the Bernard of Vita prima offers a sample of the saint, which privileges his life and discards his ideas. Apart from Bossuet’s allusions to Bernard’s dialogue with Christ, there is no indication of the central role of the contemplation of Christ in Bernard. Neither of the texts carries any trace of his doctrine of grace and free will, their references to humility are orientated towards penitence and good works, not the great lapsarian complex in which Bernard situates it; nor is there any trace of the subtle intricacies of Bernard’s central work, the eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs. On the other hand, both portraits are concerned with the ways in which, in Bernard, the past may be brought to bear on the present. In Bossuet, the Marinian power of representation is effectuated through Bernard’s actions in Metz and their potential reduplication in the present. In le Nain, there is a noteworthy development. Whereas the power of overcoming absence applies, to some extent, to the biographer’s depiction of Bernard, the lion’s share of the enhanced power of the reduplication is transferred to Rancé in his capacity of un autre Bernard. With their generic differences, the two presentations moreover illuminate some synchronic aspects of the recontextualization of the past. The portraits traverse the same topoi in the Bernardine figura: his vocation, withdrawal, mortification, humility, care for the brothers, and work in the world; they both touch briefly upon the mariological aspect and are equally at one in their disregard of the miraculous tenor of their medieval source. But in both cases, the narrative thread of Vita prima is interwoven with generic requirements and au90

Comparable with Perrault’s reflections on the ability and disability respectively of any age to appropriate the mores of others; for example Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, iii, pp. 47–50; edition, pp. 295–96.

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thorial intention in a way which separates the two texts significantly. Bossuet rehearses, in balanced measures, the rhetorical abundance that Godeau warned against, in his revitalization of the saint for the sake of the exhortation of his audience, when he introduces the image of Bernard at the foot of the cross as an imaginative device and recalls with verve both the passion subdued, the terror of the ephemeral nature of life, and the lamentable state of affairs created by the Reformation. Loyal to the genre of the liturgical sermon for a saint’s feast, Bernard is called upon to intercede, and loyal to the causes close to Bossuet’s heart, he is used as a homiletic tool, a key to the providential plan in history, and as a polemical remedy against the Protestants. Le Nain’s representation is less vivid. The rhetorical economy pertains to the historical hagiography, and once again we may call to mind Godeau and his caution as to the risk of dryness in this genre. But it is also the result of le Nain’s authorial intention. Bernard is a model, yet he remains but a model; the vividness and intensity go to his protagonist Rancé. His choice to draw specific attention to the life-threatening austerity and stylistic proficiency of the abbot are directed as much by the criticism thrown at Rancé as by features inherent in the seventeenth-century idea of Bernard of Clairvaux. In both texts Bernard is held up as a beacon of unwavering sanctity in a more or less tumultuous discourse of confessional conflict and monastic upheaval. But on a closer inspection it turns out that in the Spannungsfeld between the appropriation of the medieval source, the generic requirements, the aim of each of the two authors as well as their individual authorial voices, ‘Bernard of Clairvaux’, or rather the Bernard of Vita prima, comes across as a repository of connotations and semantic potential rather than a stable figure. The connotations may be prioritized in various ways, the representation may be couched in different forms and vocabularies, and the pious profile of the abbot modulated and recoded, without any damage done to the pretension to an unbroken continuity surrounding the legitimacy, interceding efficacy, and air of saintliness associated with the emblem of Bernard of Clairvaux. Formulated in more general terms, in these two texts a topos of the past is represented for the sake of the present. The topos itself is formed and delineated, as Bernard of Clairvaux is condensed into a set of biographical connotations; the representation is manufactured according to conditions shaped equally by tradition and Sitz im Leben, just as the present concerns which direct each of these two processes are moulded through this representation. Along the lines of the musical vocabulary indicated by the title of this volume it may be suggested that Vita Prima is chosen as the key in which the medieval saint resonates and that each of the two authors then use this resonance as the organ point over which they play out the dissonances and harmonies which make their composite portraits of an actualized Bernard and Rancé as un autre Bernard respectively.

III Permanence

‘Quod infixum manet’: Perseverance in Augustine and Heinrich von Kleist M. B. Pranger

I

n this article I intend to wage an experiment by discussing the theme of the transformation of discourse as it manifests itself, contrariwise, in the guise of immobility. My two protagonists, Augustine and Heinrich von Kleist, share a common feature — and that is why I bring them together — in inserting into their discourse an element of fixity and immobility which is clearly at the source of the dynamics of restlessness so characteristic of their writings but whose elusive presence as yet awaits assessment. As for Augustine, there are many layers in the way he has transformed his discourse during his long journey from sinner to bishop. I do not intend to deal with each and every one of those transformations in this article, but, by way of introduction, I summarize them briefly. First, we have the philosophical, Neoplatonic discourse which has continued to pervade Augustine’s thought throughout his career while slowly being filled up with a more biblical vocabulary. Next, there is his transformation from pagan to Christian as it materialized, discourse-wise, in the famous tolle lege of his conversion. Third, there is a transformation of discourse from the richness of philosophico-biblical language (De civitate dei, De trinitate, De doctrina Christiana) into the barrenness of polemical language with regard to the problem of predestination. Now it is this last transformation of restless and dynamic discourse resulting in the immobility of predestination and its anthropological sequel, perseverance, on which I want to concentrate. This problem would concern me little if we were faced here with nothing more than a chronological development from young, philosophical Augustine, through the maturity of the bishop, to a grumpy old man. What is much more alarming is the fact that the presence of the immovability of divine authority (da quod iube, iube quod vis) has been

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present all along. If that is true, analysing the Confessions, for instance, becomes a much more complex undertaking, prevented as we are from reading it exclusively as the testimony of a quasi-modern (Petrarchan), restless soul. What we do have to account for is the iron embrace in which both unrest and permanence hold each other. In that case, we are no longer free to take the mobility of conversion (including pre- and après-conversion) at face value, just as, in my view, a post-modern, Lyotard-like emphasis on uncertainty and undecidability does not suffice. Without going too much into (historical) detail, I want to state the assumption on which I am acting — and that is the speculative conviction that Augustine has become entangled in a problem he himself appears to be incapable of solving. That being so, the sustained presence of ‘perseverance’ in his thought and writings becomes all the more intriguing. As for Kleist, I bring him in for the following reason. Puzzled by the fact that, after the tour de force of the Confessions, someone so conscious of the transformational aspects of discourse and life as Augustine proved to be unable to find an adequate, literary expression for the fixity underlying his every thought and action, and by implication, any transformational aspect of his discourse, I turn to an author who has succeeded in achieving precisely that. Before giving the impression that in proceeding in this way I claim any success, I want to point out that the net result of this experiment highlights, to a greater degree than before, the impossibility of grasping, in terms of discourse, the immobility — or is it flow? — of permanence and perseverance. Like Augustine, Kleist is no stranger to the dark side of life. Penetrating a bit more into the heart of darkness is, I think, as far as we can get.

The Integrity of Grace Regardless of its shape predestination ‘breaks the air’. Unlike the caring wings of divine providence spreading into time and history, it brings home the gift of bliss and damnation, decreed and spoken, once and for all, through a timeless word. No wonder, then, that throughout the ages its unique status has lent it a touch of solitude and isolation. Whereas providence could always be found in the company of time and history, predestination was doomed to leave the stage once it had delivered its message. Inevitably, measures were taken to make it feel more at home. Originating in the complexities of Augustine’s phrasing of grace as the gift of God and of its being withheld as the well deserved fate of the massa peccati, predestination went on either to be toned down or to be radicalized even further. Not surprisingly, Church doctrine opted in favour of the first alternative in what was to become known as semi-Pelagianism. By granting man his share in the

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process of salvation whilst maintaining the sovereignty of divine grace it took the sting out of the problem of uncontrollability. In either case, whether linked to the human will or taken out of the human realm altogether, the ‘homeliness’ of predestination was enhanced. For even in the radicalized version predestination gained in pervasiveness making up for what it had seemed to lose in distancing itself. Occasionally, a rare individual took to the radical interpretation. In the Carolingian era the monk Gottschalk, for instance, came up with the doctrine of gemina praedestinatio (ad vitam et ad mortem).1 For all its inaccessibility and its being spoken eternally, predestination had been taken by Augustine to be about man’s destiny in time. How could it be otherwise since man was created in time? Gottschalk, however, transferred man’s destiny in its entirety to the supratemporal (supralapsarian) knowledge of God. In his view this supra-temporal impulse bestowed on man was very well summed up in the words of Christ himself: ‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.’ Here we see the divine dove descend by ascending, taking under its (eternal) wings both the welcoming heart of the faithful and the hardening heart of Pharaoh: uncontrollability restored. Admittedly, Gottschalk’s being condemned, persecuted, and exiled for his views on the issue of double predestination has produced fine poetry, as in the famous Ut quid iubes, pusiole: ‘O cur iubes canere?’ — ‘Oh, why do you ask me to sing?’2 Just as the people of Israel hung their harps on the willows because of their sorrowful state of captivity, so Gottschalk refuses to give in to the request to sing a carmen dulce. Yet his sung refusal lends voice to a life lived under the bittersweet auspices of a double predestination.3 The beauty of Gottschalk’s poetry notwithstanding, predestination was not destined to trigger the creative impulse. The fact that in Gottschalk’s case it did can be explained by the concept of gemina praedestinatio which was to remain an exception to the rule. In a sense double predestination displays some analogy to the concept of fate in that it was precisely the paradox of fate (in tragedy) to be at once overwhelmingly present as the ‘gift’ of either fortune or providence and to represent the absence of any understanding of their workings or even any human say in its coming about other than its execution. Another great Christian poet, Boethius, is a case in point. In his Consolation of Philosophy Boethius resorts to poetry thereby transcending the constraints of philosophical prose in1

Gottschalk of Orbais, Confessio, Patrologia Latina, 121, col. 347 d. Peter Dronke, The Medieval Lyric (London: Hutchinson, 1968), p. 35. 3 Cf. Peter Dronke, The Medieval Lyric: ‘Such a refusal is of course a topos, an oldestablished literary mannerism. It can never be wholly serious, because it belies itself: in the moment of denying his song, the poet sings’ (p. 35). 2

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cluding his own. Thus both men can be seen writing poetry in an attempt to cope with their captivity, Boethius from his prison in Padua, Gottschalk living in exile on the island of Reichenau. Somehow double predestination can be seen as a harsher version of fortune and providence. Boethius succeeded in tracing back his cruel and undeserved fate to divine providence and justice, admitting to his initial error of judgement in lamenting the injustice of his captivity. Gottschalk’s trust in God is more unconditional. For him there was not even an opportunity for initial error with regard to the rights or wrongs, or, for that matter, the visibility or invisibility, of the course of divine justice. From the beginning to the end mercy and damnation were both hidden in God’s eternal decree. Of course, the combination of eternity on the one hand and a beginning and an end on the other is nothing but a sheer paradox. Yet, as in tragedy, one could imagine the doom of the cruel gods or the bliss of grace, in their very absence, pervading the histories of Boethius and Gottschalk. In other words, life can be lived under the aegis of fate or, even, double predestination. Things become much more complex, however, when one tries to account for predestination as touching down on the human will, marking it, so to speak, as both the gift of destiny and the burden of responsibility. And even though the simultaneity of fate and responsibility seems to be precisely the stuff of fate and gemina praedestinatio, the doctrine of predestination as coined by Augustine speaks differently. The very fact that, in Augustine’s view, Adam before the fall was in the possession of the posse peccare — as the guarantee of free will — while needing the adiutorium sine quo non to prevent himself from succumbing to the temptation of sin, seems to blow a big hole in the integrity of grace.4 In terms of fate and double predestination it would look like man retrospectively being offered a way out of his pitiful state in such a way, however, that his prehistory would spoil the fullness of the later redemption by grace or, for that matter, rejection. The reason for this incongruity lies in the fact that the beginning (of the posse peccare) would not connect to the end (the non posse peccare), unless one introduces different sorts of grace, the one of minor stature at the beginning and the other of major stature at the end, the one guaranteeing the possibility of free will (that is, the power not to sin), the other representing the overpowering presence of grace (the incapacity to sin). Human nature has lost minor immortality — the posse non mori — through free will; it will receive major immortality — non posse mori — through grace, which 4

De correptione et gratia, Ch. xi. 31–xii. 36, esp. Ch. xii. 33–34 (Patrologia Latina, 44, cols 935–38).

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it would have acquired by merit if it had not sinned, although even then any possibility of merit without grace would have been out of the question.5

Quite understandably, Adolph von Harnack, Lutheran to the bone, has detected a Pelagian strand in the very core of Augustine’s doctrine. A grace that was supposed to be at once a mere condition guaranteeing the use of free will and effective (eine gratia die wirklich sein soll) seems to be self-contradictory. ‘For if a grace exists at all that produces only the posse non peccare, does not all grace have only this meaning? And if that is correct, are not the Pelagians right? For they are the ones who hold that grace is but a condition! Augustine’s doctrine of grace in man’s original state (the adiutorium) is Pelagian and it is inconsistent with his overall doctrine of grace. Here we have clear evidence that, from the viewpoint of predestination, no history can be construed.’6 How, Harnack wonders, is this grace with a beginning to be squared with the gratia irresistibilis that manifests itself most poignantly in the concept of perseverance? Or, to put the question in Augustine’s very own words: ‘How is it that Adam has sinned by not persevering; he, who has not received perseverance?’ It would indeed be difficult to explain Adam’s deflecting from grace at the beginning of his career when we see him saved by grace — thanks to the gift of perseverance — at the end of it.7 Do we have business with one and the same grace, or has it changed face in the process? If grace is as integral as the notions of perseverance and irresistibility suggest, has that golden bowl been damaged somewhere and sometime? Harnack may have a point in saying that no history can be construed from a bowl with a crack since the transition from one state of grace to another cannot be accounted for. On the other hand, the succession of heterogeneous events is exactly the stuff history seems to be made on. Besides, suppose that grace would be as homogeneous as Harnack wished it to be — perseverance and gratia irresistibilis all the way — the making of history would be an even more questionable affair. So much is clear, the question of the integrity of grace is tied up with the question of time — and eternity — as much as it is with plot (at least, if, for the time being, we take plot to be the narrative version of history). That means that, if grace is to be proclaimed as being overpowering and all-pervasive, it cannot be excluded from the scene of initial deflection and sin. In one way or another, 5

Enchiridion, 106, as quoted by Adolph von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 3 vols (Tübingen: Mohr, 1932), ii, p. 216. 6 Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, ii, p. 216. 7 For a recent assessment of this problem, see James Wetzel, ‘Predestination, Pelagianism, and Foreknowledge’, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. by E. Stump and N. Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 49–59.

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man’s past has to be accounted for in adequate terms. Is that possible at all? Is it possible to tell the story of the beginning without either smuggling in a freedom that is on bad terms with perseverance or resort to the resigned beauty of double predestination? And what about history? Is it possible to look back at ‘how we were’ from a position in which ‘we will never be again as we were’? Grace and redemption may be splendid as long as they are viewed as manifestations of eternity. But what effect do they have on and in time, not only at the end — which as a happy ending, or for that matter, as an utter failure, can be easily confused with eternity — but also at the beginning? Schleiermacher, for one, has shown himself aware of the mysteries of temporality when facing, in his second Rede, the human desire for immortality. For the individual to be immortal it has to give itself up and die (in favour of the Schleiermacherian Universum). But if, admittedly, people turn out to be primarily concerned with their private afterlives as an improved version of the present one (better bones, better minds), why, Schleiermacher asks, ‘don’t they worry so feverishly about what they have been as they do about what they will be? And how does progress help them when they are incapable of going backwards?’8 Of course, the context in which Schleiermacher makes his point is quite different from Augustine’s. As for Schleiermacher, his criticism is levelled at the silly wish of the individual to extend his narrow, physical and mental life into the width of eternity. Yet ‘going backwards’ is the problem for both Augustine and Schleiermacher. Can we ever state adequately ‘how we were’ without the help of grace abounding or, in Schleiermacherian terms, the incisive presence — established through the Anschauung — of the Universum?

Sooner or Later In the light of the integrity of Augustinian grace as outlined above, its Nachleben abounds with irony, as does indeed the Augustinian Nachleben as such. Within the sacramental unity of the visible Church — a notion as un-Augustinian as there ever was — a proliferation of grace can be seen to develop, from gratia gratis data to gratia gratum faciens. In the process all kind of strings became attached to a gift that once upon a time had been characterized by unconditional generosity so as to cause it to be ill at ease with the original ‘da quod iubes, iube quod vis’ (‘give what you command, command what you want’). Whilst 8

Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, ed. by R. Otto (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967), p. 98 (p. 132 in the Urtext of 1799).

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medieval grace thus proliferated into the various stages of grace as measured by as many merit points earned along the way, Harnack’s verdict as to the impossibility of construing history on the basis of Augustinian grace was ignored in favour of the story of man’s life as the account of his pilgrimage towards redemption. Meanwhile Augustinian notions of exile as expressed in the regio dissimilitudinis and the distentio animi conflated with a more general ‘Catholic’ view of the earthly existence as a sorrowful preparation for the celestial one. As a result, the integrity of grace and its anthropological counterpart, perseverance, as simultaneously comprising focus (attentio) and disintegration, became disconnected from life in the regio dissimilitudinis, turning into supplements to be administered to the faithful like pennies from heaven. Yet although, in view of Harnack’s highlighting of the crack in the concept of grace, such distortions of the Augustinian view would seem to be inevitable, the resulting aporia makes a proper assessment of Augustine’s position all the more urgent. Now it would be quite wrong to approach Augustine’s concept of predestination and perseverance from a static point of view as if there had been no development in his thinking about this issue. On the other hand, it can be argued that, regardless of its outlook, the very issue of stability, permanence, and continence versus the flux of time, uncontrollability, and sin has been a pervasive presence throughout Augustine’s career. In that respect the Confessions is quite telling. Although written before the Pelagian controversy, the work is in fact about the gift of continence — and its elusiveness, that is, about that the unfathomable workings of an unfathomable God, appropriately expressed in the four-times-repeated da quod iubes, iube quod vis. It was this very phrase that gave so much offence to Pelagius and thus became the starting point of that hideous quarrel. But what exactly is the content of the da quod iubes, iube quod vis? In terms of the Confessions it is continence, so much is clear, the ‘putting on of Jesus Christ’ (the text from Romans brought to Augustine’s attention by the tolle lege) which is not so much different from what later on was to be coined as perseverance (the gift of grace) based on the inscrutable judgements of God. That being so one might wonder why Augustine, in the Confessions, seems to make so much of his reluctance and hesitancy to take the final step as if the implementation of the gift of grace and continence depended on it, as if, in fact, rejecting that gift was a real option (quod non). Of course, one explanation offers itself: it is sin and more generally, life in the regio dissimilutidinis, that introduces protraction, delay, postponement and unsustainability. ‘How long. O Lord? How long, Lord, will you be angry to the uttermost? Do not be mindful of our old iniquities’. For I felt my past to have a grip on me. It uttered

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wretched cries: ‘How long, how long is it to be?’ ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow.’ ‘Why not now? Why not an end to my impure life in this very hour?’9

Similar cries of despair with regard to disintegration of time into a succession of momentary delays are all over the narrative part of the Confessions culminating into its incantational repetition in Book viii. ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’10 I supposed that the reason for my postponing from day to day (differre de die in diem) the moment when I would despise worldly ambition and follow you was that I had not seen any certainty by which to direct my course. But the day had now come when I stood naked to myself, and my conscience complained against me: ‘Where is your tongue?’11

In the selfsame Book viii this tantalizing process of deferral is contrasted with a number of examples of instant conversions by those who turned out to be more capable than Augustine of seizing the moment and saying the word. Among those champions of conversion the Ur-example of Antony stands out for its immediacy. For I had heard how Antony happened to be present at the gospel reading and took it as an admonition addressed to himself when the words were read: ‘Go, sell all you have, give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’ By such an inspired utterance he was immediately ‘converted to you’ (Psalm 50. 15).12

This immediacy, in its turn, was preceded at the beginning of Book viii by sudden, Antony-like decisions of contemporaries of Augustine whose determination, highlighting his own hesitancy, put him to shame. But how to measure hesitancy or, for that matter, instant conversion or decision making? How exactly do notions such as post and ante, long and short, durée and brevity function? Are they the markers of psychological development, of a protracted struggle of the mind as they, in fact, suggest they are when we take the text at face value? Admittedly, with the full weight of centuries of conversion psychology as triggered by the Confessions upon us, it is hard not to read this text as a straightforward account of inner turmoil being lifted by the moment of resolution and relief. Yet, in my view, this text can only be read in this ‘traditional’ way on the condition that one fails to account for the da quod 9

Confessiones, viii. 12. 28; trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 152. 10 Confessiones, viii. 7. 17; Chadwick, p. 145. 11 Confessiones, viii. 7. 18; Chadwick, p. 145. 12 Confessiones, viii. 12. 29; Chadwick, p. 153.

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iubes, iube quod vis, for the gift of grace, for the power of perseverance, or, to put it differently, for the way the Confessions are structured with regard to both their form and their content. Central to both and, as a result, to the position inside the Confessions of the gift of grace and perseverance (the da quod iubes) as a structuring principle is the vocabulary of temporality. So what in fact awaits accounting for is the status of post and ante, a long and a short time or moment — in short, the measurement of time. ‘Sero te amavi, sero te amavi’ (‘Late have I loved you, late have I loved you’),13 that is how Augustine has ultimately characterized his conversion story in terms of temporality. But what does this languid outcry evoke: the markers of psychological development, or the undivided and indivisible gift of beauty and grace? Let us for a moment replace Augustine’s conversion story with a poem — say Ambrose’s Deus creator omnium, or a canticum, a psalm to be recited. We all know how, in Book xi of the Confessions, Augustine has traced the way we measure time. In the case of Ambrose’s hymn, length and brevity are established by measuring the long syllables by the short ones- which is easier said than done since when one syllable sounds after another, the short first, the long after it, how shall I keep my hold on the short [. . .] the long does not begin to sound unless the short has ceased to sound. But how to grasp sound? Having sounded the syllables ‘have flown away; they belong to the past? They do not now exist.’ ‘I can do this [measuring] only because they are past and gone. Therefore it is not the syllables which I am measuring, but something in my memory which stays fixed there (quod infixum manet). So it is in you, my mind, that I measure periods of time. Do not distract me; that is, do not allow yourself to be distracted by the hubbub of impressions being made upon you [. . .] that present consciousness is what I am measuring’.14

If we now link this concept of temporality whose fluctuations into prior and posterior are held together by quod infixum manet inside memory to the hesitancy and the general delay of the conversion story representing the so-called inner turmoil of the Augustinian soul, the implications are quite considerable. Since it is no longer possible to trace the sequence of inner movements and psychological development from a beginning to an end, or, for that matter, to measure their length and status, without taking into account the fixity of that which memory holds, Augustine’s report on his Werdegang from sinner to believer changes colours. Of course, the quod infixum manet inside memory is not per se identical with grace or perseverance. However, from a structural point of view, it is not alien to it either. The phrase ‘so it is in you, my mind, that I mea13 14

Confessiones, x. 27. 38; Chadwick, p. 201. Confessiones, xi. 35. 36; Chadwick, pp. 241–42.

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sure the periods of time’ is unique in the Confessions in that it is the only time that the confessio, which is uninterruptedly addressed to the source of grace, perseverance, and fixity — God — is now made to the human mind: self-confession at the moment the mind touches upon the possibility of its own identity and integrity. In my view, we catch here a glimpse of what predestination could have been for Augustine had he been able to lend it the literary dynamics he had succeeded in granting, in his Confessions, to the moments of unfathomable fixity, eternity and time. As for the story of delay and hesitancy and the excruciating staging and phasing of the pangs of conversion, the markers of temporality such as non modo (‘not now, not yet,’ ‘how long, o Lord’) still stand. But just as the structure of temporality as based on and contained by memory has deprived the regio dissimilitudinis of its independent (Catholic) status without turning it into a realm of bliss or, in terms of mentality, into optimism tout court, so the story of delay and inner struggle is no longer supported by a psychological or, for that matter, a narrative infrastructure. How could it be otherwise? How could Augustine’s narrative method of addressing himself, from the beginning to the end, to his unfathomable God, ever support the linearity of psychological development and storytelling? And so we are back at Harnack’s remark that no story can be construed on the basis of integral grace, gratia irresistibilis. ‘Late have I loved you, late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new.’ ‘Sooner’ and ‘later’, ‘prior’ and ‘posterior’ are here in the service of integral lateness, integral time. Read back into the conversion story that integrity eliminates neither the markers of temporality nor the markers of human moods, efforts, and faculties. Instead, embracing them all, it keeps them in suspense and introduces the magic of a perseverance in the reverse; in other words, a perseverance that is not the result of human strive but, rather, its conditio sine qua non. The end of history and narrative? Yes, if denouement is all that counts. But does it?

Nicht versöhnt Heinrich von Kleist’s longest short story Michael Kohlhaas (1810) is based on, and has the shape of, a sixteenth-century chronicle. So, for narrative structure, there is no doubt that we have a story before us with a proper beginning and ending. Yet right at the very beginning a note of disturbance sounds: the story is about law, more precisely about the failure to uphold law. Thus an element of discomfort, undecidability, and unfathomability is introduced whose unsettling presence does not fail to affect the narrative from the outset; a process we have become quite familiar with ever since Dickens’s Bleak House and Kafka’s Der Prozess. Not unlike Dickens’s ominous mentioning of the dragging on — on the

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brink of timelessness — of the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case, Kleist’s very first line spells boundless trouble: In the middle of the sixteenth century there was a horse trader living on the banks of the river Havel, the son of a school teacher, one of the most righteous and yet one of the most terrifying people of his time [Living in peace and quiet with his work, his wife and children] his memory would have been blessed had he not gone astray in one particular virtue. But his sense of justice made him into a robber and murderer.15

The subtle transition from ‘gone astray in virtue’ to utter brutality in the next sentence, both connected and opposed by the ambiguous ‘but’ (aber), is reminiscent of Augustine’s markers of temporality. Here we are at once confronted with Kleist’s feverish, proleptic style that tends to absorb the quiet distinctions between events and qualifications into the overall theme of the story: injustice. Whilst from a literal viewpoint ‘but’ contrasts the ultimate loss of reputation with what it could have been had the horse trader stuck to his guns, the phrase in einer Tugend ausgeschweift simultaneously hints at a non-opposition, a permanence, a perseverance, indeed at a sublime way of sticking to virtue that transcends all markers of time and morality. Before going further into details, let us turn to the story proper which, roughly, runs as follows. One day when Kohlhaas, together with his servant and two of his horses, passes through Tronkenburg, the country estate of Tronka, the squire’s men stop him. They require him to show a permit and levy him. All this is done against the law which allows for free passage through the estate. Since Kohlhaas cannot show his permit — quite unsurprisingly because he did not need one — his horses are taken in pledge and his servant taken into custody at the castle. During his stay the servant is beaten up and the horses are neglected. When justice is denied to Kohlhaas and his wife dies from the wounds inflicted upon her while trying to present a request to the count on behalf of her husband, events spin out of control. What initially had looked like a minor case of arbitrary injustice triggers a sequence of events all of which result from Kohlhaas’s demand for justice and his taking vengeance after justice has been denied to him, and the squire’s refusal to give in. Kohlhaas turns into a self-styled revolutionary, setting his own laws, burning down Tronkenburg, and successfully calling people from all over Saxony to arms. Like another Thomas Münzer he becomes the leader of a people’s army that practises a scorched-earth policy. Things turn so nasty that the Kohlhaas army sets up camp before the gates of the Saxon capital of 15

Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Erzählungen und andere Prosa (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), p. 3.

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Dresden. At that point Martin Luther intervenes by sending a letter in which he condemns Kohlhaas’s outrageous behaviour. Kohlhaas, for his part, does not let go; he manages to sneak into Luther’s study and confronts the great man, who is somewhat taken aback, with his case. A heated conversation between the two men follows in which Luther fails to convince Kohlhaas of the fact that incidental injustice is subordinated to the rule of divinely ordered authorities. In vain Luther also appeals to the Christian notion of forgiveness. Yet he shows himself willing to get in touch with the prince elector of Saxony and to arrange safe conduct for Kohlhaas in order to enable him to travel to Dresden and resume his ‘legal’ quest for justice. The long and short of the rest of the story only concerns us here insofar as Kohlhaas, regardless of attempts by the elector of Brandenburg to have justice follow its course after the promise of safe conduct has been broken by the elector of Saxony, does not deflect from his insistence on justice being done in his particular case (the permit, the horses, and the servant). When, ultimately, justice is being done to him but Kohlhaas himself is sentenced to death for his trespassing the law with his violent behaviour, he remains unbroken and unrepentant. Neither does he, in his final moments in prison, accept the holy communion sent to him by Luther through a messenger. That forgiveness is not an option becomes crystal clear when, in a final act of defiance, Kohlhaas swallows the note which could have saved his opponent, the elector of Saxony, from disaster, causing his nemesis to drop dead on the spot. There is no lack of perseverance in Michael Kohlhaas, so much is sure. Countless stories may be told about people who don’t give up, but here we are faced with more than ‘not giving up’ and more than sheer stubbornness, and certainly with something completely different from the perseverance of the tragic hero blinded by hate or love as we know him from Orestes through to Balzac’s père Goriot and onward. Somehow we realize we are on quite different territory here, although it is not so easy to articulate exactly what makes Kleist’s view of perseverance so unique. In order to get some grip on it let us remember the unfathomability of Augustine’s God which made his movements of delay and hesitancy almost ghostlike, depriving them as it did from sustainability in time and narration. Once reduced to memory (the link to divine presence), measurement of progress and delay became a more-dimensional matter and much less measurable than the moment of conversion would seem to suggest. As for Kleist, measurement is an issue of the utmost importance, and, at the same time, as enigmatic as Augustine’s ‘sooner’ and ‘later’. Perhaps some light can be shed on this problem if we look at the story from the viewpoint of proportion (as a subdivision of measurement). Without doubt, then, the general impression on the reader will be that Kohlhaas’s behaviour is out of proportion. If anything, this story looks like being governed by the overreaction of its main protagonist.

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Yet characterizing Kleist’s novella in this way would miss the point although, admittedly, to put it like this is to raise the question whether there is a point at all. For the sake of brevity let us focus on the meeting between Kohlhaas and Luther. At first sight the argument between the two men is concerned with the size of the conflict. For Luther, who at first mistakenly thought that Kohlhaas’s case was so private that the authorities did not know about it, it is still not serious enough to justify the violation of the social order and disobedience visà-vis the secular authorities. That Luther’s own theological stance should allow for quite a different view of the matter is a different question. Ironically, one of Luther’s own basic tenets, the simul iustus ac peccator has a Kohlhaasian/Kleistian ring to it (compare the opening sentence: ‘one of the most righteous and yet one of the most terrifying people of his time’), but is no part of Kleist’s story. Luther’s role is restricted to representing social order and the god-given power of the authorities. This is not so much a missed opportunity on the part of Kleist as a matter of the primarily political nature of Luther’s reputation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However that may be, Kohlhaas’s focus on the force of law is somehow reminiscent of the way efforts to express religious problems in legal terms have dealt with the issue of proportion. When Anselm of Canterbury, in his Cur deus homo, discusses the nature of sin, he and his partner in the dialogue, Boso, look into its scope. Suppose one has transgressed against God in one respect, a sin of modest proportion, sicuti est unus aspectus contra voluntatem dei. Is it not reasonable to assume in that particular case that a single act of compunction would suffice and give satisfaction? No, Anselm replies, if you argue along those lines, ‘you have not yet considered the weight of sin.’16 The legal requirement of aut satisfactio aut poena means that the most minute offence against God violates the entire, divine order and requires full satisfaction. In a similar manner the withholding of justice in a particular case of modest proportion turns Kohlhaas into an outcast, to a life outside the law as a consequence of which the affair takes on universal dimensions: ‘The war I conduct with the help of the society of the people is a crime were it not the case that I, as you have assured me, have been expelled from society. ‘Expelled!’, Luther cried, looking at him. ‘Have you gone mad? Who would have expelled you from the society in which you are living? How can it be that someone, whoever it may be, as long as states exist, would be expelled from it? ‘Expelled’, Kohlhaas replied, pressing his hand; ‘that is what I call him who is deprived of the protection of the law! For I needed that protection for the well-being of my peaceful business. 16

Cur deus homo, i. 21; ‘nondum considerasti, quanti ponderis peccatum’: S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera omnia, ed. by F. S Schmitt, 6 vols (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann, 1968), ii, p. 88.

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M. B. Pranger Yes, because of that protection I fled, taking my possessions with me, into this community [of lawless people]. And whosoever denies me that protection, sends me away to the wild men of the desert.’17

For Luther all this comes down to sheer overreaction. But, ironically, the fact of the matter is that Kohlhaas gets under Luther’s skin by sticking to the facts and asking no more than a proportionate satisfaction for the ills inflicted on him: bringing back the horses to their original state (‘Wiederherstellung der Pferde in den vorigen Stand’) and damages.18 Luther is stupefied. ‘Damages’, he cries. ‘Does Kohlhaas mean to claim back the large sums he has borrowed and the property he has pawned in order to fund his violent campaign?’ he asks sarcastically. ‘No’, Kohlhaas wryly replies, ‘I don’t claim back my house and farm, nor the costs I have made for the funeral of my wife.’ There is something tragicomic in this passage. Luther does not seem to get the point. But which point exactly? Here he faces someone who appears to have extended a particular case of injustice into a universal problem materialized in the setting up of a campaign of brute violence. In that respect Kohlhaas is indeed ausgeschweift into despicable social behaviour which Luther justifiably feels his duty to condemn. Yet at the same time Kohlhaas cannot univocally be said to have ausgeschweift into vice — Kleist’s condensation is in place here: ausgeschweift in einer Tugend. Throughout his extended quest for justice Kohlhaas’s focus has not changed for one single moment: Wiederherstellung der Pferde. That legally justified demand is in a sense not affected by the fact that he has meanwhile turned into a robber and a murderer since that extension into the status of outcast had been forced upon him as a result of the withholding of justice. This minute sticking to the facts creates a paradox in the novella, which boils down to the impossibility of squaring this display of perseverance with Kohlhaas’s so-called ‘overreaction’. So much is clear that, as in all other stories by Kleist, so here the narrative is governed by a ‘fact’ that is overwhelmingly present and as elusive and unfathomable as Augustine’s God. Narratively speaking, we can at least somehow deduce how Kleist proceeds with his ‘one of the most righteous and yet one of the most terrifying men of his time,’ conflating the viewpoint of the author with the enigma created by his pen while writing a chronicle, of a type of behaviour — perseverance — that not so much transcends the succession of time and narration as, rather, pervades them and turns them into something exceedingly light and mysterious, and yet represents the facts and nothing but the facts. At the same time, it is those very facts, however 17 18

Kleist, Sämtliche Erzählungen, p. 46. Kleist, Sämtliche Erzählungen, p. 47.

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minute and mysterious, that do not allow for any evasion, delay, excuse, or extension regardless of the events and actions that very much look just like that. All those Kleistian elements converge in the moment Luther changes his tone of chagrin and starts playing the religious card by appealing to the weakest spot in Kohlhaas’s edifice of a sustained demand for justice: the possibility of forgiving his opponent: ‘But, all things considered, would you not have followed a better course if you had forgiven the squire for the sake of your Redeemer, taken the horses by hand, wearied and scrawny though they were, left that place and driven them to your stable in Kohlhaasenbrück in order to fatten them up?’ Kohlhaas replied: ‘Maybe’, while walking to the window, ‘maybe, maybe not [kann sein, auch nicht!]. Had I known that I would have had to bring them back on their feet with the blood of my wife, maybe I would have done what you say, my Lord, and not denied the horses a shovel of oat. Yet, since I have paid so dearly for them, I think things should follow their course. Let the sentence to which I am entitled speak and let the squire fatten the horses for me.’19

This appeal to justice is at the same time an appeal to the human side of Kohlhaas, to the soft spot in this ‘violent’ man. And, on the surface level, Kohlhaas seems to have his moment of doubt: ‘maybe, maybe not.’ Yet it would be quite un-Kleistian to end up with keeping the possibility alive that there are two sides to the matter. To make things even more complex, it would be even more un-Kleistian to deprive the ‘maybe, maybe not’ of its authentic meaning as if the taking into consideration of two alternatives would be for the sake of appearances only. Things are far more drastic than that. In terms of logic, what we have here is the fact that for Kohlhaas the law of the excluded middle does not apply. As a result the ‘maybe, maybe not’ is not the summing up of possibility a or b. It rather reminds one of the ‘alas, alas’ of tragedy, the difference with tragedy being that the ‘alas’ is about the sustainability of justice against reality rather than the acceptance of its downfall. The split second Kohlhaas seems to waver thinking of the suffering inflicted on him by the death of his wife, derives not from a neutral and open availability of choosing between alternatives, but rather, straight from the law itself. In that respect it is a final display of superiority in the face of Luther — superiority not as a way of making oneself bigger, but as a way of shrinking and returning to the real size of the real problem without losing the human touch. And so we are back with the issue of size, proportion, and measurement. As for size, the ‘maybe, maybe not’ represents the unfathomability of the law, the fact, and of perseverance. That is what the Kleistian — and Augustinian — sense of proportion is about. That being said, the implications of that stance in terms 19

Kleist, Sämtliche Erzählungen, p. 48.

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of narration and psychology are far-reaching. In Luther’s desperate effort to convince Kohlhaas by appealing to his sense of reality, his sense of the human and the religious, the unrelenting verticality of Kleist’s perseverance comes to the fore. Its radical nature lies in the fact that it operates like a razor cutting off any effort to approach this story from the outside, that is, outside its spine: the law, incarnated in the persevering person of Kohlhaas. There is just no point — and that is exactly what is being highlighted by Luther’s failed intervention — in trying to appeal, externally, to human reason, religion, motives, sense of reality or the lack of it. But even putting things this way still sounds too external. Kohlhaas’ actions not being a matter of mood or inclination and, least of all, of stubbornness and overreaction, not only eliminates a psychological or motivational explanation. Poetically, it also prevents the opening line of the novella, ‘one of the most righteous and yet one of the most terrifying men of his time’, from extending and, as a consequence, stops the story from overflowing into events that demand an assessment in terms of succession, causality, and linear time. In short, there being no moment when this integral line does not sound, the reader is not allowed to break through the image of the single person of Kohlhaas as presented in the beginning. That is what perseverance is about and that is why Kohlhaas dies unrepentantly, nicht versöhnt. No peripeteia, conversion, or, for that matter, transformation of discourse here of any kind, but the sustainability — quod infixum manet — of a personal union, ‘so far from brilliant’ yet forever indivisible, between law and man.

Blowing Bubbles in the Postmodern Era Rob C. Wegman

For Margaret Bent

Always Historicize

A

dozen or so years ago, not long after I had finished my doctoral dissertation at the University of Amsterdam, I compiled for myself a list of required reading in an effort to catch up with what was going on in the more glamorous and theoretically sophisticated world of literary criticism. One of the items I put on my list was The Political Unconscious by Fredric Jameson.1 With some effort I managed to work my way through it, cover to cover, though I’m afraid I don’t recall much now of what it said. Yet it would be hard to forget the book’s provocative opening line: ‘Always Historicize’. Talk about a great way to begin a book. What I remember especially is the significance of this imperative to the school of thought to which Jameson could be said to subscribe, which I took to be a generously diluted form of Marxism. ‘Always Historicize’ is a different way of saying: if only you make the effort, you’ll find that there is nothing that cannot To retain the playful spirit in which this paper was delivered, I have chosen to keep editorial changes to a minimum. 1 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).

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be historicized, nothing that cannot be shown to be conditioned by the peculiar time and place in which it happens to find itself. Everything is the product of historical change, and everything must ultimately succumb to the unrelenting forces of historical change. In human history, we are not constrained to accept anything as naturally given, as the way things must necessarily always be. The significance of this for a Marxist scholar, or indeed any scholar with a progressive agenda, is that it allows unlimited scope for political action. If we are unhappy about societal conditions we see around us, it helps to view them as mere accidents of history. That way we can start envisaging a future that might break with the way things have always been. So the imperative of ‘Always Historicize’ is also a different way of saying: whatever the political status quo may happen to be, it can never be justified by an appeal to historical necessity or inevitability. When someone like Jameson calls upon us to ‘always historicize’, it is worth asking: to historicize instead of doing what? What is it that we are urged to do not even once in our lives? The answer, I suppose, must be: to look for something that is universal, that is transcendent, something that must be equally valid and true for every culture and historical period, that is beyond all difference, somewhat like a law of history. This is not just because laws of history, if we accept them as real, tend to discourage political action — given that it is clearly pointless to oppose that which is immutable. There is also our problematic Western legacy vis-à-vis other cultures, historical periods, minorities, and the underprivileged. This is a legacy of knowing what’s best for them, of knowing their true nature and their real interests better than they do themselves, and of writing their history from a position of such comfortable certitude. Given that legacy, as we keep reminding ourselves, it would be at best foolish, at worst breathtakingly arrogant and patronizing, to continue to presume that we can establish what is valid and true, and has been, for all humans at all times and places. Those historians before us who had that presumption, it is now agreed, were merely projecting their own values — the values of white, male, bourgeois university professors — onto people whose lives they could not begin to understand. Since we, too, may still lapse into that error, we, too, need to appreciate that our values are specific to our culture. If we do not appreciate that, or so the reasoning goes, we are bound to project them unthinkingly, no matter how well-intentioned we may be. So it is our own values that need to be examined more urgently than anything else. How do we do that? Of course: by following the imperative of ‘Always Historicize’ to the letter. Take any aspect of our society that is invested with value, historicize it, and it will turn out, again and again, that even our most casual assumptions and perceptions are narrowly contingent on the culture we inhabit. In recent years we’ve had cultural histories of smell, of

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death, of the breast, of food, of physical beauty, and many, many other things — and, in my own beloved field of medieval musicology, of musical sound and of music listening. The search has been on, to paraphrase Baxandall, for the period ear.2 I have to confess that I find these studies absolutely fascinating, and cannot resist buying more and more of them. I devour them all. I must confess also that, to my mind, there is something truly impressive about so earnest an effort, not just to recover the materials and facts of history, but to understand how people felt about their world and experienced it. At the same time, all this is bound to have far-reaching consequences for what we take history to be. Consider this. The moon and the stars we see today are the same as they were five hundred years ago, odours and smells have the same chemical composition as they had back then, the breast or any other part of the human anatomy has not undergone evolutionary change, and the sounds of organs and lutes still have the same composite frequencies of sound. We live in the same material universe, we share the same DNA. How do we reconcile that with the imperative to always historicize? Isn’t there something perverse about that imperative, as if we are at pains to deny a common-sense truth that is staring us in the face? There is only one way that we can ‘Always Historicize’ in spite of that truth. It is by making a distinction between things and events in the real world — heavenly bodies, odours and smells, parts of the anatomy, or musical sounds — and the human experience of them, the way they are perceived, the values ascribed to them. Things and events in themselves are historically meaningless so long as we don’t know who is experiencing them. For the historian, they cannot even be said to exist in any meaningful sense, except as perceived from some particular viewpoint — a viewpoint that is necessarily historically contingent. Only God can know things as they really are. So there is really no history, or at least no history we can hope to know, outside of human consciousness. And there is no human consciousness or it works with what we now like to call constructions. For example, there is the objective, physical reality of cigarettes in the real world, and there is the construction of cigarettes in our minds — a construction that may not even be the same now as it was ten years ago. For some of us, cigarettes may conjure up the image of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, or of French intellectuals pontificating about existentialism at 3 a.m. in a Parisian jazz café. For others they may now suggest: bunch of to2

Michael Baxandall, Painting And Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

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tal losers sheltering somewhere in the pouring rain outside a public space, and coming back breathing and smelling horrible.3 Where do we find the evidence for these constructions? First and foremost in language, in texts, in ways of speaking about things, in words and phrases. But by extension we can also read other types of materials as texts — not because they are, but because even paintings, musical works, or household objects, are susceptible to close reading, and may prove to have much to reveal about the values of those who fashioned them. In the last resort, everything made or left by humankind can be read as discourse — at least if we define discourse as that which is open to reading. So, to take one example, although the breast, as a physical object in the real world, may not have undergone evolutionary change in thousands of years, the constructions by which it has acquired significance in the minds of historical actors have differed widely. And it is the history of those differing constructions that we call the cultural history of the breast.4

Ruptures It is typical of cultural histories of smell, or food, or death, that they are episodic. They do not present continuous narratives of slowly evolving perceptions, but rather tend to offer snapshots, based on selections of evidence that are sometimes surprisingly narrow. One reason for this is that we have lost the taste for comprehensive master narratives, for universal histories. Another, probably, is that we no longer see the particular virtue of exhaustiveness. To capture the texture of life, the flavour of feeling, in another historical period, you don’t need a statistically significant sampling of the evidence. One isolated piece of evidence might be all you need. If scrutinized patiently and imaginatively, it could reveal a universe of conceptual meaning. Indeed, one of the favourite narrative strategies in our time is to begin an essay with a seemingly random piece of evidence, usually presented in the form of an engaging story, to proceed by subjecting it to tenacious critical questioning (all the while bringing other evidence into the picture), and thereby to end up problematizing and defamiliarizing the whole thing — to the point where readers must abandon everything they might previously have taken for granted, and are ready to join the author on a fresh enquiry. When you deal with the past, or so the moral of the tale seems to be, nothing is ever quite what it seems. 3 4

Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).

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Always historicize, always defamiliarize. Now, if you can accomplish that much with a single piece of evidence, then who could possibly need exhaustive documentation? Yet I think there is also another reason why cultural histories tend to be episodic. The imperative of ‘Always Historicize’ implies that we cannot ever assume common ground with people in other historical periods, no common basis on which to compare and evaluate. Whatever we believe we might have in common will turn out, after proper historicizing (such as we must always do), to be merely the projection of our modern values. The past is a foreign country, and the people who inhabit it are strangers. They are the Other with a capital O. And nothing could be as dangerous as to delude ourselves into thinking that we’re really like them, and they’re really like us. Self and Other, both written with capitals, truly are the proverbial apples and oranges that cannot be compared. So it is as if we are inhabiting a little bubble: a bubble that’s floating in nothingness, a sealed and self-contained conceptual world called the twentyfirst-century West. Trapped within that bubble, we are trying to imagine the one thing we cannot possibly know: what it is like to live in another bubble. And what is true for us must be true for other historical periods as well: they are foreign countries not only to us, but also, necessarily, to each other — more bubbles floating, as so many islands of time and space, in the void. This is what history has become. The imperative of ‘Always Historicize’ means that although different communities in history may inhabit the same material world, they are also inescapably trapped each in their own, self-enclosed conceptual worlds. Naturally it is impossible for us to imagine the sight of our own bubble floating amidst others, since that would presuppose that we could momentarily step outside of it, and thus escape the prison of historical contingency. That would be like imagining, say, what the Big Bang looked like from the outside, when in fact there was no space, no time, no matter, and hence no conceivable vantage point, outside the exploding universe. Only God can have such a view of history. We are marooned within our bubble, and we have lost not just the taste for master narratives — that’s really God’s job — but the very possibility of writing them. For how are we to write a continuous narrative of history, if different periods are like foreign countries to each other, and all of them are like foreign countries to us? If we are to do justice to each of those periods on its own historical terms, if we are to always historicize, then what are we to do about the fact that they follow one another in time, and cannot help sharing material artefacts and customs? Surely there must be some kind of transition between them, some kind of continuity? Surely we need a model to define and explain the kinds of transitions and continuities that might have existed?

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This brings us to the perennial problem of historical change — what it is, how it occurs, and how we explain it. Cultural histories avoid that problem by being episodic, by taking big leaps between distant points in time, so that we really don’t know when or how, in between those leaps, we’d gone from one period into another. But most of the time the problem is avoided in a different way. Consider once again the bubbles floating in the void. If historical periods relate to one another as self-contained bubbles, then of course they cannot evolve smoothly one into the other. There can only be radical breaks between them. And that, nowadays, has become our preferred model of historical change. As historians we have become extraordinarily interested precisely in those historical moments that are like the fault lines between shifting tectonic plates — chasms between worlds that are not only different but incompatible. The preferred term for such moments is ruptures. Foucault postulated such ruptures between what he called epistèmes, deep core axioms that provide stability and coherence to thought systems over long periods of time. But the idea of the rupture has only truly become influential with the concept of the paradigm shift, as worked out by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. Ruptures are not historical events taking place in the real world. You cannot see one happening, like a meteor hitting the earth and wiping out the dinosaurs. It is more like the Philosophy Master breaking the news to Monsieur Jourdain that he has been speaking prose all his life. I now quote from Molière’s Bourgeois gentilhomme: Monsieur Jourdain But now, I must confide in you. I’m in love with a lady of great quality, and I wish that you would help me write something to her in a little note that I will let fall at her feet. Philosophy Master Very well. Monsieur Jourdain

That will be gallant, yes?

Philosophy Master Without doubt. Is it verse that you wish to write her? Monsieur Jourdain

No, no. No verse.

Philosophy Master Do you want only prose? Monsieur Jourdain

No, I don’t want either prose or verse.

Philosophy Master It must be one or the other. Monsieur Jourdain

Why?

Philosophy Master Because, sir, there is no other way to express oneself than with prose or verse. Monsieur Jourdain

There is nothing but prose or verse?

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Philosophy Master No, sir, everything that is not prose is verse, and everything that is not verse is prose. Monsieur Jourdain

And when one speaks, what is that then?

Philosophy Master Prose. Monsieur Jourdain

What! When I say, ‘Nicole, bring me my slippers, and give me my nightcap,’ that’s prose?

Philosophy Master

Yes, Sir.

Monsieur Jourdain

By my faith! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing anything about it, and I am much obliged to you for having taught me that.5

Here’s a rupture happening before our very eyes. The world is not materially different, Monsieur Jourdain’s speech is still the same, but the tools by which he brings it to consciousness have changed, changed forever, irreversibly. All this makes sense. If we tend to locate historical reality primarily in human consciousness, rather than in things and events in the real world, it follows that truly significant historical change must happen in human consciousness also. As historians we are fascinated by ruptures, and we’ve started looking for them everywhere. We’re not all that interested in what lies between them. In fact, in order for ruptures to be the truly ground-breaking cracks in the surface of time that we imagine them to be, we have a certain stake in representing the periods in between as fundamentally stable. After all, how dramatic can a rupture be if the ground had already been crumbling for most of the preceding period? Our favourite metaphor for that stability is not period, but system — not unlike like the operating system on a computer. An operating system may be patched up almost indefinitely (and must be if it’s Windows), but ultimately its limitations can only be overcome by the full and irreversible installation of a new operating system — one that completely erases the computer’s history up to that point. After that, we might occasionally find traces of old files and programs on the hard drive, and may recover them patiently, but we’ll never be able to make them work in the new operating system. We can only preserve them, as decontextualized material artefacts, in the museum of our computer’s history. So history ends up looking a bit like the earth’s crust. Placed in historical sequence, the bubbles have become massive tectonic plates rubbing against one another, without any kind of smooth transition. Humankind, in its path through history, moves from one plate to the next, but can only do so by leaping across 5 Molière [Jean-Baptiste Poquelin], Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, ii. 6; trans. by Philip Dwight Jones in The Middle-Class Gentleman (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004).

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ruptures. It’s a bit of a bumpy ride, certainly when we compare it with the triumphant march of evolutionary progress that we were once thought to have embarked on. But then it’s all a matter of consciousness, of things happening in the mind — unlike the tangible milestones in the real world by which we once measured human progress. Still, none of this really answers the problem of historical change. Nor does it answer another, equally thorny problem: that of historical stability, of permanence. What is it that guarantees the stability which is thought to prevail between two ruptures? Is it sheer inertia — like choosing not to replace Windows by Linux because it’s too much hassle? Or is there a persistent effort at work, an effort to keep things as they are. Some things will indeed change if you leave them alone. Medieval Latin was a living language, and was bound to keep transforming over time. By contrast, Humanist Latin, especially of the pure Ciceronian kind, has become a dead language, and it takes a special effort to keep it pure over time. (A similar development can be witnessed with Palestrinian counterpoint, soon after it was redefined in opposition to the seconda prattica.) So what is the nature of the effort here? Are forms of discourse, are thought systems, ways of viewing the world, inherently self-preserving and self-perpetuating — a bit like the selfish gene travelling from one generation to the next? Or are we talking about power, political power, discursive power, complete with its instruments of propaganda, repression, and censorship? Are discourses defined, and held in place, by the things they exclude, things whose very existence or possibility they must deny, because they are too threatening even to contemplate? Recall, for example, the endless battles that have been fought to keep dissonance out of Western music, or at least to keep dissonances in their place. Such deep-seated anxiety at the root of a seemingly stable musical system. I spoke earlier of avoidance, and larger issues like these are indeed easily avoided when there is still so much close reading for us to do. Yet I think that there are also more compelling reasons why we’re perhaps not especially eager to theorize on the level of long-term history, on the level where we can survey entire centuries in one panoramic vision. The main reason is that it runs counter to the imperative of ‘Always Historicize’. If we start theorizing about long-term history, if we start devising models that encompass several historical periods in one go, aren’t we homogenizing rather than historicizing, aren’t we creating theoretical sameness rather than historical particularity? Doesn’t all this smack of the grand master narratives of old, the kinds of universal histories that we are trying to move away from? It’s not hard to understand some of the criticisms that have been leveled against the imperative to ‘Always Historicize’. A history that is located largely if not wholly within human consciousness, a consciousness under which every illusion of historical reality must be subsumed as well, runs the risk of lapsing

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into the solipsistic fallacy, the fallacy of denying any kind of meaningful reality outside of our perceptions, or those of others. The consequence is that no discourse can be subjected to verification or falsification, since the evidence that might prove it right or wrong is also necessarily the creation of that discourse. So we really are trapped in circularity — another fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. Perhaps musicologists feel this even more acutely than our brethren and sisters in neighbouring disciplines, since we cannot bring music to life, not even in our minds, without making assumptions as to how it should sound, assumptions that will inevitably, and circularly, find their way into our conclusions as to how, in fact, it did sound. The biggest casualty in all of this is the pursuit of truth — as opposed to relevance, or meaning, or significance, which have become the hard currency of historical inquiry nowadays. Even to mention truth as a casualty must seem hopelessly naïve. Indeed how could it be otherwise, if any truth we might hope to find must immediately be historicized — always, always historicized — after which it will inevitably prove to be merely a discursive practice, relevant only within the bubble that we are condemned to live in. And yet, if we are so irredeemably trapped within our discursive universe, then how could we possibly harm distant historical periods just by generating knowledge about them? Is there any way that we could ever not harm them, except by generating no knowledge at all? And doesn’t even this idea, that we are doomed never fully to understand the people inside another bubble, presuppose some notion of truth? After all, by what other criterion than their truth can our projections be exposed as the distortions we confess them to be? And if we are able to invoke that criterion, doesn’t it mean that we’ve somehow broken free from circularity after all? Isn’t there something vaguely essentialist about all of this? This brings us to another well-known criticism: in an effort to do away with metaphysics, postmodern scholars are merely allowing it to crop up in other places. In fact, a sure sign that something is stealthily assuming the place of truth, and beginning to serve as a kind of transcendental signifier, is when we start writing words with a capital, and take away the article — the Other, Patriarchy, Voice, Difference, the Body. If we are to always historicize, shouldn’t we be asking: whose voice? whose body? other than what? difference between what? Or indeed, which particular male chauvinist pig? A certain philosopher whose writings I also included on my reading list, but which I remember rather better, once said that you cannot attack metaphysics without having it slip in some other place. We simply do not have the power to kick it out the front door, unless we allow it to enter in a different guise through the bathroom window, where no-one will see it.

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The Crisis Up to this point in my paper you could say that I’ve tried to apply the imperative to ‘Always Historicize’ to what’s been going in historical enquiry today. I have done so in an effort to obtain reflexive distance from my own involvement in all of this. If my analysis strikes you as a bit one-sided, and lacking in nuance, then that is probably due to the stake I have had in these issues. It would probably be fair to say that I’m writing now as a lapsed postmodernist, for I’ve had a sense of unease about the way things are going for several years now. It’s time to come clean. Recently, I published a monograph entitled The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe.6 In it, I argued that there was a major turning point in the history of music that took place some time in the 1470s. I didn’t call that turning point a rupture, though to my mind it certainly was, and I did in fact use the term ‘paradigm shift’. This turning point, I argued, marked a thorough reconceptualization of what music is, what it does, what it is worth, how you should listen to it, and what place you should (or shouldn’t) accord it in your life. What the turning point did not mark, at least not immediately, not until the mid-1480s, was a perceptible change in musical style, one that we might be able to demonstrate in concrete musical works. For the change really took place in the realm of mentalities, sensibilities, and attitudes — not unlike the way our attitudes towards cigarettes have changed in the last thirty years, even though a cigarette is still a cigarette. So the subject of the book really was discourse, discursive practices. There is not a single musical example in the whole monograph, yet there is a wide selection of textual materials — poems, decrees, letters, diaries, chronicles, polemic writings — in which people of varying stations articulated their attitudes towards music. This is probably where I owe the greatest debt to the ‘Always Historicize’ school of thought. I might not have so persistently searched for texts like these, and scrutinized them so patiently, if I had not been inspired, some ten years ago, to radically historicize music listening in the late-medieval and early modern periods, and to organize a conference about it at Princeton.7 The preferred approach in my book was close reading, and my readings were aimed especially at recovering the semantic fields of certain recurring key6

Rob C. Wegman, The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470–1530 (New York: Routledge, 2005; paperback repr., 2007). 7 The proceedings of this conference were published under the title ‘Music As Heard: Listeners and Listening in Late-Medieval & Early Modern Europe’ = double issue (3–4) of The Musical Quarterly 82, (1998), 427–691.

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words and metaphors — particularly the persistent and revealing slogan that polyphony is ‘empty’, which implies that music is some kind of container. And predictably enough, the book started with a little story, of a seemingly minor incident that occurred in a town in Eastern Germany in 1489 — an incident that seemed to me to encapsulate all the issues at stake. As for the book’s main thesis, certainly it was paradoxical, not to say provocative, to propose a turning point around 1470. For actually that is four decades into a major period in music history, the Renaissance in Music, which in college textbooks is still thought to run from the 1430s to 1590s. According to those textbooks, nothing especially earth-shattering was happening in the 1470s, except perhaps the death of Dufay. Needless to say, the discrepancy here is due to different assumptions as to what music history really is. The Renaissance in music has traditionally been defined in terms of concrete, tangible changes in musical style: the so-called contenance angloise in the 1430s and the invention of monody in the 1590s. For me, on the other hand, discourse came first, musical style second — because to my mind, if we don’t understand the contemporary discourse, we wouldn’t actually know what to look for in fifteenth-century music — and so by default we would end up looking for the things we’re familiar with in later repertoires. That would represent an obvious failure to historicize. So you really have two brands of music history, so different in their basic premises that they cannot even invalidate each other. One is a history of musical style and compositional technique, of tangible works that are made, and of the great men who made them. The other is a history of sensibilities, of thoughts and feelings. And it was the latter kind of history that I had sought to write. So why, you may ask, the unease? You’ve been a good boy, you’ve made all the right noises as a postmodernist, and no-one can level that most humiliating of all criticisms at the book — that it is theoretically naive. Well, the unease really has to do with one nagging doubt. Wasn’t the argument of my book in a sense a foregone conclusion? Didn’t the picture I sketched owe more to the models I applied than to the realities of musical life in the fifteenth century? This is why I devoted the first half of the present paper to theory, to show that there appears to be an independent theoretical necessity for our preferred models — especially the concept of rupture — to be the way they are, irrespective of what time in history they are subsequently applied to. They are, in that sense, ahistorical, and paradoxically violate the very imperative to ‘Always Historicize’. Given the attraction of these models, wasn’t I bound to seize upon a moment of rapid discursive change, wasn’t I bound to think of it in terms of a paradigm shift, and to make a claim for its historic significance on those terms? Is all long-term history now to be funnelled through this one model of historical change?

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During the writing of the book, I found myself responding to these concerns in a number of predictable ways. As if to overcome my own doubts, I began to aim for exhaustiveness in documentation, and indeed found a certain pleasure in the symptoms of that old-school disease known as TBC, Total Bibliographical Control. Suddenly I felt an affinity with German historians of the nineteenth century, whose commentaries to classical and medieval texts are still unsurpassed — as if I had discovered the tradition that I truly felt I belonged to. My bubble, at last! Although The Crisis of Music began as an article, and wasn’t originally even planned to be a particularly long one, it grew and it grew. By the time I passed the 40,000-word mark, I realized that I’d better start looking for a publisher. The exhaustiveness — persuasion by quantity rather than interpretive ingenuity per se — was at bottom an attempt to break free from circularity: the historian in me was not satisfied, at least not until I finished the fourth chapter, that the change was as widespread and ground-breaking as I thought it to be. A standard of historical truth began to creep in, a truth presumed to be beyond my own discourse as well as that of the period in question, transcending both bubbles, as it were.

The Truth And yet, as we say in therapy, I felt kinda conflicted. The postmodernist in me was bound to dismiss such a standard of truth as an illusion, a mere projection, a failure to historicize. But then that same postmodernist has left a number of pressing questions unanswered. To take just one question, what does it take to prove something wrong regardless of the discourse it belongs to? Is there even such a thing as ‘wrong’? For example, when the President of Harvard University makes a statement about the intellectual abilities of women as compared to those of men, and invokes empirical research in his support,8 is the resulting debate a clash of two discourses, and is he expected to resign (apart from other reasons) because one of the discourses happens to be more influential than the other? Or is he wrong in a more objective sense, in having perhaps misread or misinterpreted the empirical data he invoked? I suspect it’s the former. For as far as I can see, the issue here is 8

Lawrence H. Summers, Remarks at the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce, Cambridge, Mass., January 14, 2005. Published by the Office of the President of Harvard University on the website http: //www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/summers_2005/nber.php [Accessed 20 November 2010].

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not whether empirical evidence can or should settle the question at hand, but rather that the very question is offensive in the first place, and ought not to be submitted to such a test, no matter what the outcome might prove to be. This is how discourses work: there are questions that make no sense, thoughts that are unthinkable, things too offensive to even dignify with empirical enquiry. So our Harvard President is neither wrong nor right, you might say, he has just blundered into the wrong discourse. Within the confines of that discourse he may well be right, but since it’s not a discourse whose premises we share, that’s not something to lose any sleep over. Just because you can raise a question doesn’t mean that there is any point to answering it. At the same time, the question might no longer seem quite so offensive if we set out to find, along with the Grateful Dead, that the women are smarter. Within discourse, truth is contingent. I must confess that for me there is something deeply unsatisfactory about this. As a scholar I do not need to know ‘the truth’, I don’t need to be God, I don’t need to be superior to anyone — all I need is to know when I’m in error, without a discourse to protect me or to hide behind. Otherwise, what is discourse but a conglomeration of interests and investments, and at the root of it all, fears? Without some working definition of truth, what will unbridled proliferation of meaning, unchecked by verification, do for us, except make us indifferent to meaning altogether? This is the first question that the postmodernist in me cannot answer. Yet there is also another question. What is there to stop these bubbles from shrinking ever further, all the way to Euclid’s indivisible point? From within our modern bubble, as said before, we can never fully know what it was like to live in the fifteenth century. But as a scholar, I also cannot claim to know what it’s like to be a woman, I cannot speak for African Americans, I’m bound to misunderstand gay sensibilities, in Britain I can forever claim allowance for the fact that I’m a foreigner, which is a nice way of saying that I’ll never understand what it’s like to be a Brit. There is a postulated core of truth inside each of these mini-bubbles that represents, at once, a standard that outsiders are guaranteed not to meet, and yet is beyond any kind of verification outside the bubble. For all I know, that core of truth doesn’t even exist, it might as well be a projection along with everything else. Presumably I, too, might be able to claim that noone will ever understand what’s it like to be me, depending on what mini-bubble I choose to claim for myself. If you historicize forever, there is just no end to the ways that you and I can be strangers to one another. There may be one material world, one reality for physicists to explore, but on the level of consciousness the world is exploding into an infinite number of particularized realities and contingent truths.

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Theorizing is interesting only after the event: it’s a way of bringing to consciousness what you’ve been doing. Not that the event itself, that is, historical enquiry, is necessarily unreflexive or pre-theoretical. But the activity does rely heavily on intuition, and in my experience, theorizing stops you from hearing the voice of intuition, just as the encounter with source materials kindles that voice. However, by the time I had finished writing The Crisis of Music, I had strayed so far from the postmodernist path that I didn’t want to theorize even after the fact, and decided to publish it without an introduction. In hindsight that was probably a bad idea, because reviewers don’t have the time to figure out what you’ve been up to, unless you offer a convincing interpretation of your own book. Then again, didn’t Lyotard define the postmodern condition as the distrust of meta-narratives, as the realization that narrative-as-performed carries its own authority?9 (Great! So now I have a metanarrative to justify not having a metanarrative.) And do postmodernist historians not commonly regard scholarly enquiry as a kind of performance — to be distinguished from pure theory, which is not nearly as entertaining as the telling of history? I would say yes. And that brings me to the crux of the issue. I would claim that there is nothing so entertaining about the telling of history as the truth that’s being proposed, as the idea that maybe this is how it really was — however illusory that may seem from other perspectives. We can tell the most wonderful narratives, the most richly satisfying stories, but let people know that the truth of the matter was almost certainly quite different, and they don’t want to hear them anymore. Romantic fictions, once exposed, are rejected out of hand. We want performances of Bach or Mozart to be authentic, the way they sounded at the time: it’s not just the quality of the performance per se, it is the thought that maybe this is what people really heard in the eighteenth century. This attitude is not necessarily uncritical, on the contrary: it is hypersensitive to falsification. When I watched the HBO television series Rome, there was something so seductively realistic about the way it was produced, that I wanted to know precisely what was and was not backed up by evidence. In some cases I wanted to read the evidence for myself. Why? Precisely because I did not want to buy into patent falsehoods, because that would diminish my enjoyment. Whenever I found that historians had criticized this or that aspect as contrary to the historical record, I felt disappointed at the makers of the series, and felt like saying to them: couldn’t you have just tried to get that right, so as not to spoil the whole thing for us? 9

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

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As a lapsed postmodernist I don’t know what label to put on myself, except perhaps that of a performer or entertainer. In that case, the entertainment value must reside in what I can establish, with reasonable plausibility, about medieval musical life, both material and conceptual. Like musical performers I tend to rely on intuition, which so far has never failed me. It told me to compile that reading list, twelve years ago, and now it tells me that there is lots of fun to be had with the things I was trained to do as a student. With great pleasure, I will go on research trips to find watermarks, with a view to dating the layers of Burgundian choirbooks with new precision, and perhaps shedding new light on methodological issues in watermark research. I will be happy. But I can already hear some of the colleagues in my discipline say: watermarks is positivistic, datings is positivistic, documents is positivistic. Sure. But that’s where the performer in me will have a job to do: to write about these things in a way that interested readers will find entertaining and enlightening — prodesse et delectare, as Horace said. (For terminal ennui in scholars, or boredom as a coping mechanism, there is of course no cure, except anti-depressant medication.) To that end, it will help a lot that today I have tried to figure out why, as a medievalist in a remote millennium, I feel that this is how I can be of most use to others. I’m not offering this as a polemic or an attack. It’s not that I want to avoid debate, but I also don’t want to speak for anyone other than myself. Frankly, and speaking only of my own discipline, I am tired of people telling the rest of us what we should be doing. In most cases what they’re really telling us is how uncertain they are if they should be doing it — especially if no-one were to join them. I wouldn’t want that implication to be read in this contribution. This is a personal statement, if you like — maybe you could even say it’s the introduction I never wrote, and wisely never printed. You’re welcome to take issue with it. Perhaps I will change my mind about some of these things, and perhaps I’ll find that the postmodern project is more inspiring that I gave it credit for. But there it is: my two cents today.

History and Humour: ‘Spartacus’ and the Existence of the Past Eyolf Østrem

Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone. Rolling Stones, Ruby Tuesday

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mong the many definitions of humour, one in particular lends itself to a comparison with historical understanding: the so-called incongruity theory, most famously elaborated by Arthur Koestler. According to Koestler, humour arises ‘from the bisociation (double association) of an item in respect of two different and incompatible reference frames or interpretive matrices at once’.1 With the emphasis on the different and incompatible reference frames, we seem to be close to the fundamental problem of all historiography: that within one ‘interpretive matrix’ — the modern academic world — it treats material that had its original meaning within a different such matrix. Both humour and historiography presuppose two distinct discourses and some element, motif, or historical object that can meaningfully be perceived within both. If the two contexts are incompatible and the shift between them is surprising, the outcome will, according to the incongruity theory, be comical. What distinguishes the historian from the comedian, then, is his ability to provide compatibility and predictability — to establish association rather than bisociation. 1

The Act of Creation (1964), p. 45.

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The question is — and this will be the main theme of this article: but association between what? And by what means? When do we accept a historical narrative, and on what grounds, especially if we agree with Hayden White that historiography is a narrative genre, different in no fundamental sense from literary fiction? Is it just literary fiction, or is there something on the other side to associate with?

Spartacus and the Parodic Presentness of the Past Kirk Douglas’s and Stanley Kubrick’s film Spartacus from 1960 is a grand, epic drama about grand, epic themes: love, death, freedom, and power. These themes are treated very seriously by the young director Stanley Kubrick, the screenwright Dalton Trumbo, and the protagonist Kirk Douglas.2 And yet, watching the film today, several of the scenes look more comical than grave. In the following, I will emphasize the film’s relation to history and to its historicity as the main cause of amusement and also the point where an understanding of this aspect of film reception may be helpful in understanding other kinds of reception. I will then take this reaction as a point of departure for a consideration of some elements of historical understanding. There are a number of preconditions and premises that have dictated the following presentation of the film and its humorous appearance. First, the description is deliberately and emphatically personal: it is based on my own reaction to the film, and I do not expect every other viewer to share this premise; in fact, I expect many, perhaps most people who have seen the film, to have radically different opinions about it. However, I do surmise that some of the principles that underlie my description are generalizable and applicable to a wider range of cases, regardless of one’s own opinion about this or any other comparable cultural product. Secondly, I regard the film as a historical narrative and disregard the artistic ambitions of the makers, or any other elements not directly related to the narrative function of the film. This is not to say that I consider it accurate or judge it on the basis of how well the makers have succeeded in presenting a faithful and credible image of Roman antiquity, but that I regard it as a look at the past. This perspective is of course given some support by the choice of a historical plot for 2

It is not trivial to determine the ‘ownership’ of Spartacus. The young Kubrick was called in after conflicts between Douglas and the original director over what for all intents and purposes was Douglas’s project. Spartacus was one of Kubrick’s first full-length efforts, and the only film he ever directed where he was not fully in charge. He has later more or less disavowed the film.

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the film, as well as by a certain interest in historical accuracy on the part of the makers, but the main reason for choosing this perspective — or rather: the main reason why this is the perspective that has been unavoidable for me — is that it is not only a narrative of a remote past; it is also a narrative that itself belongs to history. It is this double pastness which, among other things, invites the analogy with humour. Thirdly, I disregard whatever special characteristics the medium itself may have. I treat Spartacus as a narrative like any other, with the possible qualification that a cinema film is particularly apt for this particular kind of presentation because of its evidentia, its ability to present something as if it were real. We know it is not, but we willingly let ourselves be fooled. Lastly, when I point out comical features in Spartacus, I do so not in order to ridicule the film itself or to claim that it is a flawed achievement. Rather, it is intended as a starting-point for the discussion about historical understanding which is the main theme of the article. What’s so Funny About Spartacus? The plot of Spartacus is in itself not essential to my argument, but a short summary may still be in order. In the beginning of the film, we are presented with the misery of the Roman slaves and the cruelty with which they are treated. We meet the lifelong but strong, righteous, and noble slave Spartacus, who despite his unfavourable conditions is a remarkably healthy man with perfect teeth and a cheeky haircut. After a fight, he is sold to Lentulus Batiatus, a gladiator trainer. He thus escapes the slow death in the Libyan mines only to face a quick and violent one in the ring. The Roman senator Crassus comes to the training camp and wants to be entertained by a fight to death, which Spartacus survives after having been defeated but spared by Draba, the silent Ethiopian gladiator. Crassus buys Spartacus’s true love, the slave girl Varinia, and Spartacus starts a riot, first among the gladiators, eventually gathering slaves from all over southern Italy. The Romans send army upon army to stop him, but he remains victorious until the ruthless but brilliant Crassus, supported by Pompey and Lucullus, finally defeats him in a bloodbath. In an emotional scene on the night before the final battle, we see Spartacus wandering among his slave soldiers, where he sees nothing but signs of true humanity: loving geriatrics in a tight embrace, smiling children, and semi-savages who are all courtesy and civil grace now that they have won their freedom. After the battle, the 6,000 surviving slaves are brought in chains to Rome and crucified along the last miles of the Via Appia. Varinia, who gives birth to Spartacus’s child during the battle, is again brought to Rome by Crassus. He tries to win her, but his power and luxury cannot conquer her love for Spartacus and for freedom, and she despises and pities him for it. With unexpected help from the cunning and mischievous senator Gracchus, who takes every opportunity to

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oppose Crassus, she escapes with her baby. On the way out of the city, she passes the cross where Spartacus is dying.

Here are some of the scenes and features that I find comical in Spartacus: • The doomsday tale of the misery of the slaves and the cruelty of the guards, told in the prologue in a gloomy narrator’s voice, preaching about the disease of slavery that plagued the otherwise glorious Roman empire; and Spartacus dreaming about its abolition, a dream not to be be fulfilled until 2,000 years later. • Kirk ‘Spartacus’ Douglas’s perfect skin when we first meet him, toiling in the Libyan mines. • Gladiators in nappies. • The more-than-obvious employment of the ‘black man dies, white man lives’ cliche when the Nubian gladiator Draba gives up his own life by sparing Spartacus (whom he has in fact conquered). • Gracchus’s character: his postures, his looks, and his figure, which, incidentally, has been lucidly recaptured by Uderzo in the Asterix comic book La Serpe d’or, in the image of a namesake: Gracchus Pleindastus (plein d’astuces, full of guile, a fitting description of Gracchus in the film). • The film music (by six-time Oscar winner Alex North), especially when it explores the boundaries of historical correctness or plausibility, by putting a whole arsenal of ethnic instruments to work;3 and during the more dramatic scenes, where the pompous, modernist Leitmotif style which was in vogue in Hollywood at the time is most prominent. • Crassus’s map of southern Italy, which is not only remarkably exact for an ancient Roman map, but also has the names of the cities written in medieval-style blackletter calligraphy. • The portentous and touching scene after the final battle, when slave after slave claims ‘I’m Spartacus!’ — a scene I can only see through the filter of Monty Python’s parody in Life of Brian: ‘I’m Brian and so is my wife’. • Crassus’s pathos-laden desire to crush even the legend of Spartacus (expressed in a film precisely about that legend). • The Hollywood haircuts and the makeup, which create a glaring inconsistency between the doomsday perspective on the misery of the poor slaves, and the health and true humanity they radiate whenever they are presented as free. • The battle scenes, which seem hopelessly outdated compared to modern films in the same genre — which they are, of course. 3 The score includes a long list of ethnic and/or historical instruments: Israeli recorder, Chinese oboe, lute, mandolin, Yugoslav flute, kythara, dulcimer, and bagpipes.

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If these scenes are comical, they are so not in themselves, but because of the way I, as a historian and a cinema-goer in the early twenty-first century, watch and perceive them, from my particular vantage point. The comical effect comes out of two sets of bisociations: on the one hand between what I see in the film and what I expect films of this kind to be like, involving the way to present historical facts; and on the other between my own (mental) images of the ancient world and the film’s visual images, involving the gaze at the past, as it shines through inadvertently, revealed by the choice of motifs and narrator’s perspective. On both these levels, there is room for amusement, for which Spartacus and its makers are not to blame. Most immediately noticeable are the cinematographic details. A lot has happened in fifty years in special effects and stunts; audiences have, for better or for worse, become accustomed to an entirely different level of accuracy and explicitness in the presentation of blood and gore, spectacular death scenes and mutilations, entertaining cruelty and pain. Since explicit fighting is a central theme in Spartacus, it will almost by necessity come out as a feeble and lame attempt compared with today’s block-busters. Also in areas such as costume design and stage sets, Spartacus is dwarfed by its presentday colleagues, despite the fact that when it was produced, it was one of the most expensive films ever, with a great deal of attention given to the accuracy of stage sets and costumes, and it received its most prestigious award — the Oscar — precisely for costumes and design. But also the way the story is told brings an unintended smile. The motifs that are predominant — heroism, nobleness, love against odds, and the struggle for freedom — are not unknown in today’s film world, but the way they are presented is different.4 The scenes where the still captive Spartacus meets his wifeto-be, the slave girl Varinia, are a case in point. The courtesy and chastity with which Spartacus, a life-long slave, treats her, a slave girl in a society where sex had nothing to do with civility or shame and sex with slaves was not adulterous — these are unimaginable without the intervening Middle Ages and its courtly love, and the late-Victorian, post-war puritanism which had shaped Hollywood and thus American popular culture (and every other culture influenced by it). Needless to say, I don’t know any better than Kubrick/Douglas what it was really like to be a Roman slave (and the knowledge that I as a historian can draw on does not change this fundamental ignorance), but that is beside the point: there is no way on earth I can watch those scenes and imagine that I’m witness4

Cf. for example Ridley Scott’s Gladiator from 2000, which treats the same topic within the same tradition, even using some of the same motifs (such as the gladiator motif itself, and the presence of a character called Gracchus), but in a radically different language.

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ing two people two thousand years ago about to overcome the odds against their budding love; all I see is a typically Hollywood-chaste love scene. Likewise, the pathos in the delivery of the weightier scenes stands in the way of identification, not because of the contents in themselves, but because that theatrical tradition is foreign to someone who has been socialized into the world of the cinema in an age which favoured a more direct, realistic idiom. Thus, my attitude to pathos is the same as Monty Python’s: it is a sitting duck for parody — not a means to emphasize a message. Slightly more complex is the case of the most explicitly expressed motif of the film: the struggle against slavery, as it is spelled out for instance in the introductory scenes, where we see Spartacus toiling in the mines and dreaming about the abolition of slavery. The way this is emphasized in the film makes it not only a typically American topic, but also a soapbox for the screenwriter, who was on the McCarthy blacklist because of his leftist orientation and who used the story of Spartacus to make a statement about the struggle against system-immanent oppression.5 Likewise, Kirk Douglas was personally involved in the story of Spartacus, which he identified with his own and his family’s. Thus, there is a degree of conscious ‘anachronism’ in the film, where the illusion that we are watching an ancient drama is broken and the film-makers temporarily look straight at us and tell a story in the present. But most of the time the illusion is upheld, for example through the interplay between fiction and factual historical figures and events, through which the story is tied to schoolbook-knowledge, and thus achieves a double goal: giving the film credibility by association with what we already ‘know’, and giving the dry facts of the schoolbook knowledge a face, a wider context, a deeper understanding of the internal events in Rome and in the empire at large. The introduction of a young and not yet all-powerful Caesar as a supporting role is a prime example. This, together with the attention to historical detail in the costumes and the stage sets, more than anything else gives the impression of a direct, immediate, and internalized access to the story: we already have one foot on the inside. This is a likely reason for telling the story of a modern family’s struggles — if that is what Douglas has wanted — by way of a historical narrative: it gains in persuasive force thanks to this illusion. The conscious involvement with history thus makes the other — fictitious — elements of the historical material more recognizable and accessible, but it is also a double-edged sword: it makes the uneasiness greater with the passages where 5

Spartacus was the first film to include a blacklisted writer in the credits, and was thus instrumental in ending that period in American history.

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the immediacy is broken. If these are in majority, as is the case when I watch Spartacus, the conflict, the bisociation, is strengthened and the direct access is blocked. Transparency and Opacity: Watching the I of the Beholder As the classic Hollywood break-up line goes: ‘it’s not you — it’s me.’ What causes the comical effect is not primarily that our predecessors in the backwardslooking trade were wrong and we are right (for example about how Roman maps looked), or that they were less skilled than us at making historical films, with less of a flair for authentic costumes, convincing ‘old’ film music, correct historical accents, and authentically uncomfortable stockings. More decisive is the mixing up of the roles of past and present in the twostep look at the past when I, now, watch Spartacus. Within its own frame of reference, as a film made in 1960 for a 1960s audience, it is the present’s look at its own past. For me, however, everything about the film is screaming ‘1960’. It is a film which itself belongs to the past — my past — looking at another past even further back, a past which we share, but which I also have my own views on. But instead of being enhanced by the film, the view is blocked by the immensity of the ‘1960’-character. Thus, on the very first level — the level which should have been the most transparent, the envelope in which the message is delivered — the modern viewer is already alienated. The presentness which in 1960 was obvious, transparent, today appears as a mock-present, an illusory Now, trespassing on our territory, appropriating our history by boasting its own gaze at our past (and I speak now on behalf of the society to which I belong). In this meeting with the past’s perception of its own past, as it comes to explicit expression in a historical film, it becomes apparent that it can never work as an extension of our present, but only as a distortion of it, because its implicit insistence on its own presentness becomes a barrier, a distancing for us, instead of the transparency of familiarity it originally had. What we see is not what is before the eyes of the beholder in such a way that we can pretend we have taken his place; we see the eyes of the beholder. Thus, when I place the main responsibility for Spartacus’s comical appearance upon myself, it is not because of any mistake on my part — some missing ability to view it ‘correctly’ and see through the layers of unfamiliarity. Transparency is an illusion. It may be an illusion we are aware of, but even so, we let ourselves be fooled. With Spartacus, so much distance is generated that the illusion cannot be upheld anymore.

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What Is the Past? A qualification of the viewer’s and the filmmakers’ shared lack of responsibility for the bisociative misfire when I watch Spartacus today is that it is only by regarding the film as a historical narrative that it jumps in the eye as a comical story. The opacity that ‘1960’ causes not only adds the extra step between ourselves and the past we look at, as discussed above — it actually forces the historical perspective on the viewer by drawing attention to the film’s position in time and thereby highlighting the historical way of watching the film, at the cost of other modes which may have been more important for the film-makers. By pointing to its own presentness, the film becomes a historical narrative. It does not necessarily have to be watched this way, but once the step from narrative to history is taken there is no turning back: we’re in the land of bitter struggle between Rankean positivists and Whitean narrativists, the former claiming, in one form or another, the objective status of historical facts, the latter the narrative character of historiography and hence the uncertain status of the historical fact. The difference between the two standpoints is not whether different images of for example the Roman Empire can be constructed, but whether the Roman Empire can at all be anything other than a construction which must be appropriated — thus: does there exist a Past which is immune to changes and constructions? Is it still possible to save history and the historical object from narrativists and postmodern relativists? Is there a tertia via between simplistic essentialism and solipsistic relativism? Augustine on Time One would have thought that the status of the historical object was easily dealt with: that nobody in their right mind would hold that the past exists. That matter has been settled once and for all by Augustine in his discussion of the whereabouts (and ‘whenabouts’) of time in the eleventh Book of the Confessions. Augustine’s main concern is eternity and the creation of the universe, but his argument is most valid also concerning what historians do. After having demonstrated that neither present nor past exist (‘How can there be future or past when the past is no longer, and the future is not yet?’),6 he goes on to question that conclusion temporarily: 6 Augustine, Confessionum libri XIII, ed. by Lucas Verheijen, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), xi. 14: ‘duo ergo illa tempora, praeteritum et futurum, quomodo sunt, quando et praeteritum iam non est et futurum nondum est?’

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Where have they seen what they sing about, those who have sung about the future, if it does not yet exist? For that can not be seen which does not exist, and those who tell stories about the past could not have told it as if it was true if they had not seen it in their minds: for if it were nothing, it could not be seen. Therefore both future and past do exist.7

But he refutes this conclusion (‘In you, my soul, do I measure time. Don’t you try to convince me that it exists!’8 ), and locates the historical object in the only place where it can possibly be: in the present: I know that wherever they [i.e. future and past times] are, they are not there as future or past, but as present. For if they are there as future, they are not yet there, if as past, they are not there any more.9

We may elaborate further on Augustine’s concise summary: if the stream of Nows, the immediate, unprocessed sensual stimuli in moments in time that have no extension and cease to exist once the moment has passed, is inaccessible — even for the person who experiences it — because it exists only as it vanishes,10 the past is doubly out of reach: it is made up of a mass of events that we can only assume have taken place and which have been the inaccessible Nows for people in the past — Nows that are now gone. Augustine’s discussion may not be the final word on the concept of time and history — his main focus on creation and eternity keeps him from following through some of the lines of thought that would have been interesting specifically for the historian — but his notion of the contemporaneity of past, present, 7

Augustine, Confessionum, xi. 17: ‘nam ubi ea uiderunt qui futura cecinerunt, si nondum sunt? neque enim potest uideri id quod non est, et qui narrant praeterita, non utique uera narrarent, si animo illa non cernerent: quae si nulla essent, cerni omnino non possent. sunt ergo et futura et praeterita.’ 8 Augustine, Confessionum, xi. 27: ‘in te, anime meus, tempora metior. noli mihi obstrepere, quod est.’ 9 Augustine, Confessionum, xi. 18: ‘scio tamen, ubicumque sunt, non ibi ea futura esse aut praeterita, sed praesentia. nam si et ibi futura sunt, nondum ibi sunt, si et ibi praeterita sunt, iam non ibi sunt. ubicumque ergo sunt, quaecumque sunt, non sunt nisi praesentia.’ 10 Augustine, Confessionum, xi. 14: ‘If, then, time present — if it be time — comes into existence only because it passes into time past, how can we say that even this is, since the cause of its being is that it will cease to be? Thus can we not truly say that time is only as it tends toward non-being?’ Cf. Wittgenstein’s argument concerning the possibility of a ‘Private language’ (see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §§ 243–71, especially from § 251), which has a different point of departure, but leads to the same conclusion: that even one’s own experiences are accessible only as mediated through memory and language, and hence through the collective of language users.

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and future, corresponding not to different time-objects but to a grid of timefunctions, is remarkably modern and apropos: Perhaps is it more correct to say that there are three times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things. For these three do exist some way or another in the soul, and I can’t see where else. The present of past things is memory, the present of present things is perception, and the present of future things expectation.11

What Is There Between the Past and Now? Transferred to a historiographical discourse, Augustine’s text calls for further elaboration along two lines. First, every individual who belongs to our story will have been bound to the same grid of functions — memory, perception, and expectation — but the same events will fulfil different functions for different people. One person’s expectations will belong to another person’s memory. Secondly, what happens when we step out of the individual’s time-frame, where ‘memory’ and ‘expectations’ are no longer concrete human capabilities or states of mind, but become metaphors applied to a whole society? How do we for example tie the expectations of someone a thousand years ago together with our own memories, either individually or collectively, i.e. metaphorically? We might say that the main reason to be interested in historical events is that they are the antecedents of our own time. But at any particular moment in (past) time, their role as antecedents is not yet realized, not even relevant to the people who did have shares in the moment. To study history, in other words, is to study antecedents without consequences. Seen in relation to Augustine’s time-functions it is not obvious how it is valuable to know what happened a long time ago. Instead, the historian’s task will have to be seen as, not (only) disclosing the inaccessible past, but as tying two inaccessibles together, through some element or method which enables or effects the transition from one to the other — to form a meaningful connection between events no living person today has experienced and traces of experiences left in a mind to which no one else has access. 11

Augustine, Confessionum, xi. 20: ‘sed fortasse proprie diceretur, “tempora sunt tria, praesens de praeteritis, praesens de praesentibus, praesens de futuris.” sunt enim haec in anima tria quaedam et alibi ea non video, praesens de praeteritis memoria, praesens de praesentibus contuitus, praesens de futuris expectatio.’

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The ‘Now’ ? The ‘Past’

In the following, I will briefly summarize some of the attempts to forge such a connection under the headings ‘objectivity’ and ‘universality’. In the last part of the article, I suggest a different model, based on memory and language. Objectivity: The Extrinsic Constant The function of essentialism, whether in Platonic or Kantian terms, is to provide constancy through a common reference to essential properties of things in the external world. If historical objects exist objectively, outside of time, that might justify claims of their relevance for historical understanding. The historian’s task would then be to brush off these remains, establish facts, and complete the puzzle by reconstructing the missing pieces, so that the outcome in the end is a correct, authentic picture of the past — or, should we still not have found all the pieces, at least the theoretical possibility of getting there. Few historians today would accept this crude description of their discipline. Not many would dispute that history is a construction; that the form of the narrative influences what is being said; that although historical remains certainly exist, they exist now, not in the past; and that history is not immune to the scholar’s own values and interest, no matter how meticulous he is with his details. And yet, the notion of truth and objective, tangible reality seems to be a difficult one to give up. This seems to be the case even for authors who are otherwise favourable towards relativism in other respects. To the extent that someone like Thomas Kuhn is at all interested in the kind of knowledge that the humanities provide, the focus is on secure, objective knowledge of the same kind as that produced by the sciences (and his notion of paradigm shift is firmly grounded in processes of change in those disciplines).12 And Frederick A. Olafsson, who is not opposed to narrative historiography per se, insists that ‘It is not, I think, 12

Cf. for example his emphasis on lexical taxonomies, defined not as a set of beliefs but as the mental module that is a prerequisite for having such beliefs in the first place, and the supposition that one such ‘taxonomic module’ ‘developed from a still more fundamental mechanism which enabled living organisms to reidentify other substances by tracing their spacio-temporal trajectories,’ Thomas S. Kuhn, ‘The Road since Structure’, Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 2 (1990), 3–13 (p. 5).

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really possible to give up all truth claims for historical interpretations.’13 Roger Chartier, Hayden White’s most vociferous opponent, expresses it in strongly dogmatic terms: Against that dissolution of the status of history as a specific knowledge (a stance often taken as a figure of postmodernism), one must insist forcefully that history is commanded by an intention and a principle of truth, that the past history has taken as its object is a reality external to discourse, and that knowledge of it can be verified.14

A more theoretically argued presentation of this doctrine is given by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob in their highly influential neoobjectivist manifesto Telling the Truth About History. In the chapter on ‘Truth and Objectivity’, they claim: We have redefined historical objectivity as an interactive relationship between an inquiring subject and an external object. Validation in this definition comes from persuasion more than proof, but without proof there is no historical writing of any worth.15

When they specifically base their version of objectivity on what they call an interactive relationship, they do so in an attempt to make room for both the constructive imagination of the historian and the controlling, validating power of ‘an external object’, in this case, the historical fact. They base this notion on Hilary Putnam’s pragmatic realism, but as Elizabeth Ann Clark has shown, they have misrepresented some of the fundamental principles of Putnam’s thought. He does accept a notion of truth and objectivity, but only within a community of users who share a conceptual scheme that governs how signs apply in particular ways. [. . .] Yet for internal realism, things are not knowable outside their conceptualized form; correspondence theories in their classical sense are precisely what internal realism rules out. Likewise, when Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob redefine historical objectivity as ‘An interactive relationship between an inquiring subject and an external object,’ they seem to lapse into the metaphysical realism that Putnam rejected, covertly invoking a correspondence theory of verification.16 13

Frederick A. Olafsson, ‘Hermeneutics, “Analytical” and “Dialectical”’, History and Theory, Beiheft (1986), 28–42 (p. 41). 14 Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, Practices, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 8. 15 Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: Norton, 1994), p. 251. 16 Elizabeth Ann Clarke, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn, pp. 39 and 41.

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Putnam’s pragmatism, then, does not make it easier to be an objective historian — on the contrary. Only the community in which an historical fact has been accepted as true, and not the historical fact itself, can offer any validation. One further problem for a historiography based on Putnam’s pragmatism is worth pointing out: granted that something can count as objectively true within a system, how far does that system extend? How can we tell which ‘inaccessibles’ belong to the same system we get our objective truths from? Does Aristotle count? Augustine? Mozart? Or are the differences between the societies which gave them their truths and ours too big? What about our grandparents, or our neighbours across the street? The farther back in time we go for examples, the easier it is to find differences which make it obvious that we belong to different systems, but there is no point where we can draw a line and say ‘From here on, we are on safe ground.’ Universals: The Intrinsic Constant Another possible basis for drawing connections between the present and the past is the appeal to universals: not to an external reality, independent of context, but to the shared physical nature of human beings — the intrinsic constant. Most allusions in this direction are held at a loosely argued, commonsensical level, in the vein of Ecclesiastes 1. 9: ‘There is nothing new under the sun,’ but on the philosophical side we may refer for example to Wittgenstein’s observation: ‘Remarkable coincidence, that all those whose skull one has opened, have had a brain.’17 A more subtle variety of the universalist stance is the notion of a dialogue with the past. Again, this is mostly an untheorized position, and most writers probably treat it as a metaphor, implying that the past in some way or another has something to tell us, and that we in some way or another respond to this ‘something’ and take it as a corrective, either to our response (which is what hermeneutics is all about) or to the way we act in general (according to the stock phrase ‘We can learn from history’). But it is not always purely metaphorical: Appleby, Hunt, and Jacobs’s definition of historical objectivity as ‘an interactive relationship’ is in effect a dialogical theory. The appeal to universals can be useful as a heuristic shortcut concerning interpretations of historical materials. Why should we not assume that certain experiences are shared by most or all members of a culture, even by all mankind for as long as it has existed, especially those experiences that stem from the phys17

‘Seltsamer Zufall, daß alle die Menschen, deren Schädel man geöffnet hat, ein Gehirn hatten!’, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), §71.

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icality of human beings, which, as the paleontologists tell us, has not changed in at least 40,000 years — long enough to encompass all written and most fossil evidence of human behaviour? If we recognize something as an expression of a familiar emotion, why should we not be justified in following that inkling and letting the possibility of a common ground relieve the resistance towards interpretation that Nils Holger Petersen discusses in the introduction to this volume instead of casting it aside as probably an anachronism?18 We may at least toy with the question — with or without reference to Spartacus — whether the joy of lying in the arms of the one you love is the same now as 2,000 years ago; whether the fear of dying is stronger today, when death seems more remote from everyday life, or if it was stronger then, when death made its presence felt more strongly. But universality is a weak player, which can hardly fulfil (sufficient) conditions for the soundness of a historical narrative. Not only is there a certain danger of circularity, where what we recognize is our own prefigured image of the past; but physicality is one thing (the adrenaline rush in the face of danger), and acting on that physical starting point (running, or writing a fugue imitating the sentiment) is something else. Yesterday’s truths about the past tend to be comical. This is embarrassingly true for example regarding the Early Music movement, where the quest for authenticity and historical accuracy has been a guiding light from the start, but precisely for this reason, the pioneering recordings in this tradition are mostly unbearable to listen to. The involuntary humour as it appears, whether on the music scene or on the silver screen, is a reminder of how fundamentally conditioned by and dependent on the present any view on the past is: seeing facts or universals through any other eye than the viewer’s present makes them appear parodic.

Fact and Memory If essentialism and universality fail to provide the desired connection between Now and the Past, what remains that will let events and ideas transcend their transience and exert an influence even after they have vanished in time, not only because we choose to take them into account as the postmodernist would have it, but with some kind of necessity? 18

See p. 16.

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Is There a Difference Between Fact and Fiction? Narrative historiography has been a major challenge to any notion of objectivity ever since Hayden White’s Metahistory from 1973. Is there a difference between history and fiction, other than in institutional framework and genre? Is history a branch of knowledge of its own? Does it matter if things actually happened, and that they happened the way the historian narrates it? In its most radical version, narrative historiography would have to answer these questions negatively: a historical account is just a story, and the historian a storyteller. The story may be of a special kind, with rules that differ from those of the epic poet or the novelist, but the difference is one of rule systems and not of relation to fact. Its truth claims would be no more or less objectively acceptable than they are for fairy-tales. That it takes its subject-matter from things that are thought to have actually happened does not privilege it in any way. ‘Fact’ is not a criterion for infusing the historical narrative with a special ontological status, but a literary element in a story. Most narrative historians formulate their position less emphatically, but one may wonder if that has more to do with the political implications that emerged around the question of Nazi revisionism and Holocaust denial than with the actual theoretical foundation. For if the advocates of historical objectivity have had problems justifying their position theoretically, this is also the point where their narrativist colleagues have given their least convincing answers. There is for example — as Chartier has pointed out in his ‘Four Questions to Hayden White’, the fourth of which concerns precisely the Nazi issue — a peculiar discrepancy between White’s endorsement, on the one hand, of Barthes’s tenet ‘Le fait n’a jamais qu’une existence linguistique’ and his insistence on the equal truth value of literary and historical texts, and on the other his seemingly undisturbed acceptance of ‘fidelity to factual record’ as a decisive criterion for judging an account.19 Concerning the comparison between historical and literary narratives, White asks rhetorically if works of the South American novelists ‘do not teach about real history because they are fictions? [. . .] Are their novels less true for being 19 ‘Obviously, considered as accounts of events already established as facts, “competing narratives” can be assessed, criticized, and ranked on the basis of their fidelity to the factual record, their comprehensiveness, and the coherence of whatever arguments they may contain’ (emphasis mine), Hayden White, ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Representation’, in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 27–42 (p. 28). Cf. Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff, p. 37.

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fictional?’ I would be tempted to answer ‘yes!’, no matter how highly I think of Donoso and Cortázar. The function of literary fiction is not to be true. Concerning the quotation from Barthes, White’s elaboration of the implications of it in a recent interview illustrates what seems to be the main problem not with narrative historiography per se, but with a definition of facts as a purely linguistic phenomenon: Well, a fact — and here I follow Barthes — is a linguistic phenomenon pure and simple. It is a statement, a predication, that so-and-so happened or so-and-so was or so-and-so did x at time, place, line z. The fact therefore is a result of a reflection on something that you can designate as an ‘event.’ The event comes self-designated in the documents as a battle that occurred. But that designation itself is a construction. So the document is already a construction of what will constitute the event. And then the fact is that which is a result of critical reflection on the adequacy of the documentary account. So for me there is no raw data.20

White’s reason for making this distinction is laudable: to make it clear that the historical sources we have, even the most ‘objective’ ones, are all reflections on events, not ‘raw data’, no matter how objective they appear. The report is not the event.21 But it is clear from this and other quotations that White is not the die-hard relativist he is accused of being. He does not problematize the ontological status of the ‘event’ — on the contrary, he takes it for granted. Thus, the question about the difference between historial and literary narratives has merely been pushed one step forward, not resolved. What White is saying is rather something like: ‘Perhaps the event has existence (in which case I’m a crypto-essentialist), perhaps not, but it doesn’t really matter: historians don’t deal with events — they 20 ‘A Discussion with Hayden White’, interview by Richard J. Muphy in the blog Teoría contemporánea de la historia, http://elnarrativista.blogspot.com/2007/01/ discussion-with-hayden-white.html [Accessed 20 November 2010]. It is probably not a coincidence that White uses a literary example — a character in Stendahl’s The Charterhouse of Parmaitter and the discrepancy between this character’s experience of the event and the official record — to illustrate his argument. 21 Cf., in addition to his ‘A Rejoinder: A Response to Professor Chartier’s Four Questions’, Storia della Storiografia, 27 (1995), 63–70, the following excerpt from the same interview, where White comments upon the debate with Chartier: ‘All relativism does, as I envision it at least, is say that the kinds of questions you ask of a text or of history or of social reality, are context-specific. [. . .] These questions are not universal questions, they’re not something that are found in all cultures. And then the criteria for determining what constitutes an adequate answer or solution to those questions are also context-specific in the same way that, for example, a national language allows you to ask certain questions that you couldn’t ask in some other language, right?’

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are gone — we deal with facts, and they are contextual, interpreted, emplotted, etc.’ I have nothing against this definition of ‘fact’ in itself. It works to accentuate that the things we are wont to perceive as raw evidence in the sources are in fact bound to the text that transmits them. I see two problems with it, however: the distinction goes against common sense and everyday language, and it is too crude and imprecise. Both objections are serious enough to warrant further consideration. When Is an Account Not Acceptable? The problem is most easily illustrated in the negative way, by asking: why is it that we react against White’s proclamation that there is no difference between fact and fiction; that there is no fact outside the text; that history is just literature; and that ‘fact’ denotes the reports about things that have happened, not the things themselves? I doubt that it is because people — in general, but also including objective historians — have a problem accepting that everything must be interpreted in order to make sense. A more reasonable explanation is that it goes against our spontaneous reaction to reports about events we have taken part in: ‘I was there! That’s how it was!’ or ‘No, that’s not the way it happened.’ We might say that there are two different kinds of reports: the external ones, and the internal — memories. This does not solve the problem of objectivity. Memories are certainly not closer to the ‘raw data’. ‘I was there’ is not a warrant for credibility or truthfulness — for anyone but the person who has the memories, in any case. There may be a huge difference between the official report from others and the film that runs in our own heads. We are usually aware that they are both constructions — memories are not static, and two people can remember the same event differently. But when we say ‘it’s a fact that . . .’ about something we have experienced, we don’t just mean ‘it has been reported that . . .’. We are likely to consider our own narrative in memory as a different kind of story than the ones we read in the newspaper or in medieval archival sources. The same kind of negative question can be asked about historical narratives: when is a historical narrative not acceptable, and why? Common sense would say: when it goes against facts. The objectivist school would translate this: ‘when it fails to correspond with the referent in the objective reality’; Hayden White would read it: ‘when it fails to fulfil the culture- and context-specific criteria for emplotment’.

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A third way, which fills the gap between non-existent historical reality and mere literary construction — White’s ‘event’ and ‘fact’ — but which neither depends on any of the constants outlined above nor abandons the historical event in favour of pure narrativity, would be to say: When we accept something as a historical fact, we do so with the same kind of authority as with our own experiences. ‘Yes, that’s how it was’ or ‘No, not like that.’ We accept as a fact a report which resonates with our own world of experiences: in real life, with the way we remember things; in the case of history, with the stories we have already incorporated, but also with the narrative and conceptual patterns that govern how we relate to our own memories. This is precisely where the example of Spartacus proves useful. I am forced, by the perceived distance between its eye and mine, to view it as a historical account, but once established as such, it defies its own historicity because it fails to resonate with my world of experiences — direct (memories) and acquired (history) alike — and comic bisociation ensues. Another fitting example is provided by Umberto Eco’s novel Baudolino. It is a ‘realistic’ story based on a number of sources that we today will not accept as factual. In the course of the novel, the protagonist, Baudolino, travels deeper and deeper into the lands inhabited by skiapods (creatures with a single, huge foot), satyrs, blemmyes (with no head but eyes and mouth on their chest); panotti (with huge ears), and a host of others, mythical and historical side by side.

Figure 12 Blemmy and panotto from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493).

Baudolino makes no secret about being a notorious liar, but the narrative strategy on which the novel’s historiographical message is based is that it does not appear from the narrative when he is lying and when not. The emplotment strategy is the same throughout the book, whether Eco incorporates fable beasts from Pliny’s Naturalis historiae or ‘raw facts’ from chronicles and annals. Still, we have no difficulty distinguishing between factual and fictional; or more precisely,

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between those ‘facts’ that ring true, because they resonate with our own world of experiences, and those that don’t.22 Extending Memory — What History Does White fails to take into account the difference between the two kinds of reports, and therefore has to operate with a counter-intuitive concept of fact and a muddy relationship with essentialism. If instead we let the connection between Now (our inaccessible world of sensory impressions) and the Past (White’s ‘event’ and Chartier’s ‘reality external to discourse’) go through an intermediary pair of stages, we may be able to avoid the problems with the mentioned approaches. The ‘Now’ → The Present 

The ‘Past’ →

History

The Present represents the totality of that which is present to the individual, i.e. the ‘now’ as processed through language and the traces of previous nows in memory. It differs from the ‘Now’ both in being tied to language — and thus to the social world in which one speaks — and to memory as the mediator between material from the senses and non-experienced, conceptually transmitted experience. History, on the other hand, represents the story which is unrelated to the ‘now’, the story about that of which one does not oneself have direct experience. Conversely, it could be described as that aspect of the past through which it has a presence in the ‘now’ — but only mediated by the Present. The arrows indicate that the Now may provide material for the present in the same way as the past does to History, but the only interaction that takes place is that between the Present and History. 22 Eco has taken this one step further in his latest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005), where the same mixture of fact and fiction is explored, but this time within the author’s own history and memory.

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Continuity and Cultural Memory The main theoretical foundation for this approach is found in the recent work of Jan Assmann. Based on a re-evaluation of the writings of Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s, Assmann has developed a theoretical framework concerning cultural memory.23 Assmann distinguishes between two modi memorandi which are central to how cultures remember and how they administer their historiography. He uses the term ‘communicative memory’ to denote ‘memories which relate to the recent past [. . .] memories which a person shares with his contemporaries’. It ‘comes into being in time, and it passes away with it, or more precisely: with its bearers. When the bearers who embodied it are dead, it cedes to new memories’.24 Communicative memory is based on individual memory but as the name indicates it is extended with the shared memories of those within one’s sphere of communication: typically the closest generations, a rough timespan of up to eighty years. The other modus memorandi he calls ‘cultural memory’, and it covers all those recollections which in some way or another are taken out of the cycle of experience, direct communication, and forgetting. Evidence from oral cultures suggests that after the eighty-year threshold of living memory — which corresponds well with the proverbial number of biblical generations — events are either forgotten or take on a mythological character.25 Written culture forms a special case in that its records are not dependent on memory but can be stored by external means.26 This peculiarity of written culture, which historically speaking is an anomaly, places our historical sources in a special position: as snapshots which at the time they were recorded most often belonged in the sphere of communicative memory, but which have come to us as items of cultural memory, separated from their original context. The invention of writing may perhaps blur the distinction between communicative and cultural memory, but it does not tear it down. Writing, Assmann emphatically points out, does not in itself create continuity. On the contrary, it holds the risk, alien to oral transmission, of forgetting and disappearance, becoming obsolete and dusty. [. . .] 23

Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis; Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 50. 25 Cf. also Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982). 26 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 96–101. 24

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Textual coherence means the establishing of a horizon of relationship to bridge the inherent rupture of writing.27

We may describe memory as the narrativization or historicization of experience, where the steady flow of sensual perceptions of the Now is formed, shaped, weighed, measured, selected, and placed in various narrative categories. This goes both for the Now of people on the historical side of the great divide — those who deliver the reports that we base our narratives on — and for the historian’s Now. On both sides it takes a narrative connection for the event to pass from the inaccessible to the meaningful. Incorporation of Other People’s Memories — the ‘As If ’ Reading historical sources, then, entails not so much entering into a dialogue with the past as eavesdropping on someone else’s conversations, trying to make sense of them — once again — in a communicative context despite the loss of a common communicative memory. Historical data must be re-entered into our communicative memory sphere. I would suggest that resonance with one’s own stories and categories in memory is the reason why the stories we learn can be accepted, recognized, taken for true. Memory is not a fixed text; there is always room for new stories, even external ones, as long as they comply with the ‘genre norms’ of one’s memory. A historical narrative — a narrative about something of which we don’t have memories of our own — can be incorporated into the historicization of our own experiences in memory — as if they were actually based in our own experiences. This ‘as if ’ character of historical understanding is what decides whether a narrative is acceptable: it works if it fits in with what is there already. The strength of the ensuing ‘as if ’ will depend on a combination of factors such as the coherence of the interpretation, its correspondence with other narratives, and the density of connections between them. The ‘as if ’ understanding is the conscious equivalent to the unmediated, unnoticed incorporation of a story that I have referred to as ‘transparency’ in the discussion of Spartacus above. They are both illusions — metaphors for our ability to incorporate narratives in the stories of our lives. In Spartacus, the original communicatory situation is lost, and that which might have eased the transition from memory to history by providing an ‘as if ’ of transparent familiarity, instead creates an alienating distance. 27

Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 101.

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The comical effect is sharpened by the fact that Spartacus does not just belong to history but also has a foot in the Present, either directly, in one’s own memory, or — as with a viewer like myself who wasn’t born in 1960 — indirectly through its place within communicative memory. Since the film is thus presumably a thing of the Present, the initial mode of reception is that of transparency: the inclination to incorporate what one sees directly. The many conflicts with what can pass as Present forces the consciousness about the distance upon the viewer, along with the shift to a conscious ‘as if ’ reception. Presenting something that doesn’t exist as if it did, which is what the historian does, is not in itself comical. What Spartacus does is to present something which doesn’t exist as if it did, without doing so against a recognizable narrativememorial backdrop. What makes it comical is the bisociation between what it is presented as — Roman antiquity — and what it is seen as — life in Hollywood in the early 1960s.

The Historian’s Task Rephrased How far the appropriation of the memories of others can go through a conscious process of interpretation, such as the historian’s metier, is an open question. One may perhaps compare with glasses: up to a certain point of nearsightedness, the eyes can adjust and try to focus, but in the long run, the strain causes headaches — the situation in Spartacus. If one’s eyesight grows weaker still, one will have to wear glasses — perform some kind of interpretation, in the awareness of the distance — which will improve one’s vision, on the whole, at the price of having to wear glasses.28 Why does it matter? Or, to relate the question more directly to the issues that have been brought up in connection with narrative historiography: how can a historical understanding based on Assmann’s distinction between communicative and cultural memory save the Shoah from being ‘just’ an element in a story? And why does it matter if it is or not? Crudely stated: what’s in it for me? Why should the truth value of something that happened a long time ago, far away, and/or to people with whom I have nothing to do be of any importance to me? Louis Mink defends the distinction between the different truth-claims of fiction and history by invoking a parallel distinction between history and myth: If the distinction were to disappear, fiction and history would both collapse back into myth and be indistinguishable from it as from each other. And though myth 28

Following up on this last image, it might be said that the past as it looks through Spartacus is equivalent to the distorted images in a house of mirrors.

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serves as both fiction and history for those who have not learned to discriminate, we cannot forget what we have learned.29

There is little point in arguing at length over conclusions based on concepts that are as unclear as ‘myth’, ‘fact’ or ‘history’, but one might still ask: What are these functions of ‘fiction’ and ‘history’ that myth fulfills in Mink’s view? And how do they differ? what is it exacty that we have learned that others have not, and what is it that we cannot forget? And ‘cannot’ as in ‘should not’ or ‘are unable to’?30 It is worth comparing Mink’s assessment of myth with that of Assmann: Here [i.e., concerning cultural memory], the difference between myth and history breaks down. For cultural memory, it is not the actual but the remembered history that counts. One could also say that in cultural memory, actual history is transformed into remembered history, and thus into myth. [. . .] Through memory history becomes myth. That does not make it unreal — on the contrary: only then does it become real, in the sense of a lasting normative and formative force.31

This should probably be read as a prescriptive definition (‘We consider as myths those stories that are taken out of the flow of time and given a normative and formative force in the present’) and not as a description (‘all those things that go by the name of myths have this power’). But if we follow Assmann’s thought through to the end, we have to regard history as a form of mythology rather than a form of literature. That is the main difference between fact and fiction: myth — and hence history — has a formative force, and that is its raison d’être; literature, on the other hand, may certainly also have an influence on society and on thinking, but not in this fundamental sense. Does this not leave the field open to whoever wants to change the current mythology? No. Myths don’t change easily, and for a reason: they are formed out of remembrance, events that for some reason pass from someone’s personal memory into their communicative memory, and from there to a collective, cultural memory. All the steps in the chain are crucial. An event one doesn’t share or act upon, is of no historical significance. Nor is a story that stays within the 29

Louis Mink, ‘Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument’, in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. by Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 30 Cf. Assmann’s observation that writing is not a warrant for constancy. 31 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 52: ‘Der Unterschied zwischen Mythos und Geschichte wird hier hinfällig. Für das kulturelle Gedächtnis zählt nicht faktische, sondern nur erinnerte Geschichte. Man könnte auch sagen, daß im kulturellen Gedächtnis faktische Geschichte in erinnerte und damit in Mythos transformiert wird. [. . .] Durch erinnerung wird Geschichte zum Mythos. Dadurch wird sie nicht unwirklich, sondern im Gegenteil erst Wirklichkeit im Sinne einer fortdauernden normativen und formativen Kraft.’

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family, no matter how true it is. But once it passes from that layer to the next and becomes part of cultural memory, things are different. Ideas don’t live their own life once they are born and either wander through the ages on their own account or are transmitted wholesale from one age to another. Instead, they are, at every point in time, in every one of those conversations which have eventually brought them to our notice, being taken up from those recipients’ past, incorporated, remodeled, and finally used in new texts, which in their turn have been taken up by the next reader, and so on, in a chain of interlocutors. Once in this chain, the control of the story has passed from the individuals who pass it on, to the larger collective who administer it, either through its stories or through the concepts of language. The web of connections, between historically formed concepts, stories, ‘facts’, myths, from which language is formed, is in principle unlimited, and it is not up to us, as individuals, to decide where in the web a breach is important and where it is not, where a twist is just rhetorical spice and where it is an offense to mankind. Hence the validity of a statement about Holocaust is important, not because of whether or not it conforms with what actually happened, but because to introduce a breach in the web of narratives — by consciously or unwittingly suppressing established facts — would be to distort the relationships between the stories, hence to distort the possibility of making sense of concepts which have been formed, perhaps, under the influence of the events we are suppressing. The ultimate consequence is that we distort our own ability to make sense of ourselves, since that is something we use language for.32 The historian’s task can be rephrased: not to find an inaccessible (the Past) or to join two inaccessibles (Now and the Past), but to tell the stories that enable us to tie History to the Present. Like the storyteller in oral cultures, the historian creates a world for us and extends the one we have, by providing us with hooks where we can connect old with new, our own experiences with those of others. In our modern western culture, the ‘historical narrative’ happens to have a certain privileged status as a source for legitimization and self-realization, which may be why the impossibility of reaching a true historical account is such a thorn in the eye. But perhaps the defeatist tone in the question ‘Is the historian just a storyteller?’ is based on false premises: being a story-teller is probably all 32

A less laden but no less illustrative example than the Shoah is the story that Stephen Bann tells in his article in this volume, of how the developments of engraving techniques, and even the administrative decisions about which art forms to include as separate disciplines in the catalogue of the Paris Salon in 1824, were important elements in the Mona Lisa’s rise to fame, and have thus been decisive factors in shaping the visual world I live in. I would never have thought so.

history and humour

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the historian can aspire to, but if we accept the similarity between myth and history, it turns out to be a high aspiration.

Index

abolitionism, 28, 30, 32–34, 36, 37, 56, 236, 238 Achen, Henrik v., 102 Adam, 204, 205 Adhémar of Le Puy, 46, 47, 52–54, 57, 147 Agnadello, battle of, 121, 122 Agnes, St, 97 Agustín, Antonio, 120, 121 Alexander the Great, 117 allocutio, 117, 119 Ambrose, 62, 209 Anastasia of Schwarzburg, 167 Andrew, St, 47, 53 Anne, 61, 93 Anselm of Canterbury, 70, 75, 213 anti-Judaism, 59 antilogies, 116–118, 120 Antony, 208 Appleby, Joyce, 244, 246 Aristophanes, 196 Aristotle, 245 Armenini, Giovanni Battista, 96 Arthur (king), 117

Assmann, Aleida, 4 Assmann, Jan, 2, 4, 5, 252–255 Athanasius (Archbishop of Alexandria), 62 Aubry-Lecomte, Hyacinthe, 133, 134, 136–138, 140, 143 Augustine, 5, 6, 19, 44, 166, 176, 189, 201–212, 214, 215, 240, 245 Confessions, 202, 207–210, 240–242 Avaux, Félibien des, 195 Bacall, Lauren, 219 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 230 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 18, 114, 125 Balzac, Honoré de, 142, 212 Bann, Stephen, 18, 256 Barfod, Jörn, 86 Barthes, Roland, 18, 114, 115, 247, 248 Baxandall, Michael, 219 Beisson, Étienne, 133 Bell, David, 190 Belleforest, François de, 123 Bellini, Giovanni, 146 Belting, Hans, 65

260 Benjamin, Walter, 146 Beraldi, Henri, 133, 143 Berengar of Tours, 5, 8 Bernard of Clairvaux, 19, 76, 97, 173, 178–198 Bessonov, S., 39, 43 Bevan, Edwyn, 95, 102 bisociation, 233, 237, 239, 250, 254 Blanc, Charles, 131, 141–143, 145, 146 blemmy, 250 Blindheim, Martin, 86 Bloch, Ernst, 40, 41 Blumenberg, Hans, 2, 4, 54 Blutkapellen, 60 Bocchi, Achille, 121 Bodin, Jean, 123 Boethius, 203, 204 Bogart, Humphrey, 219 Boisson, Léon, 147 Bolingbroke, Henry, 118 Bonington, Richard, 133 Borromeo, Carlo, 11 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 19, 173, 174, 177, 178, 180–190, 193, 197, 198 Bracciolini, Poggio, 118 Bracquemond, Félix, 146 Braun, Joseph, 105 Brown, John, 17, 27–37, 42, 55, 56 Bruni, Leonardo, 118, 119 Bruun, Mette B., 17, 19 Buc, Philippe, 17, 23, 24, 26, 28, 37, 48–50, 55 Bukharin, Nikolai, 17, 25, 27, 37, 38, 40–45, 54–57 Bullinger, Heinrich, 169 Burgkmair, Hans, 88, 105 burin technique, 129, 132, 133, 137, 140, 141, 146, 147 Burke, Peter, 17, 18 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 92, 109

Index Caesar, 117, 119 Caesarius von Heisterbach, 97 Calamatta, Luigi, 135, 138–147 Calvin, John, 162, 169 Camden, William, 124 Camille, Michael, 95, 99 Campeggio, Lorenzo, 165 Camus, Albert, 37 Cantini, Giovacchino, 129 Cato, 117 Celestine I, 63 Cerignola, battle of, 121 Chambers, K. E., 14, 17 Chapeaurouge, Donat de, 94 Charlemagne, 5 Charles V (emperor), 153–162, 168–171 Chartier, Roger, 174, 244, 247, 248 Chelˇcický, Petr, 24 Christ, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 25, 30, 32, 33, 35, 45, 47–49, 51, 56, 57, 63, 64, 67, 69, 75, 77, 80, 82–87, 91, 93, 94, 96–101, 103, 105, 106, 136, 182–184, 186–189, 196, 197, 203, 207 Civil War, American, 28 Clark, Elizabeth Ann, 244, 245 Clement VIII, 9, 10 Clement, St, 110 Cluny (monastery), 193 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 174 comedy, 233, 234, 237 Compagni, Dino, 117 Congregazione dell’Oratorio, 9 Constantine the Great, 56, 57, 62 Coornhert, Dirk Volkertszoon, 156 Cornaro, Giorgio, 122 Corneille, Pierre, 180 Cornelius (centurion), 164 Cortázar, Julio, 248 Council of Trent, 9, 176 Coussemaker, Edmond de, 14, 15

261

Index Cross, the, 25, 62, 82–84, 86, 88–91, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101, 103, 105, 106, 182–186, 189, 198 Curtius, Quintus, 117 Cyril of Alexandria, 63, 64 Daguerre, Louis, 144 Dahlhaus, Carl, 13 Dandolo, Enrico (doge), 117 Dante, 81 de Staël, Anne Louise Germaine, 137 deditio, 149, 150, 157, 170 Dejuinne, François-Louis, 136 Delacroix, Eugène, 132 Delaroche, Paul, 131, 146 Delius, Walter, 93 Dezarrois, Antoine-François, 147 dialogue, 150, 177, 189, 195, 197 narrative, 120 with the past, 18, 115, 245, 253 Dickens, Charles, 210 discourse, 2–4, 10, 12, 13, 18, 19, 113– 115, 118–122, 125, 152, 163, 173, 182, 189, 198, 201, 202, 216, 220, 224– 229, 233, 242, 244, 251 feminist, 83, 109 discourse analysis, 114 Donoso, José, 248 Dostoyevsky, Feodor, 42 Douglas, Kirk, 234, 236–238 Eco, Umberto, 251 Baudolino, 250 Edward III, 118 Edwards, Jonathan, 31 Ekkehard of Aura, 49, 50, 53 Ephrem the Syrian, 61 Ernal of Bonneval, 180 essentialism, 243, 251 Eucharist, 4, 5, 9, 10, 59 Euclid, 229

Eve, 61 Félibien, André, 131 Ferdinand I (emperor), 170, 172 Ferrier, Luc, 45 Feyerabend, Paul, 222 Flanigan, C. Clifford, 13 Flori, Jean, 45–47, 49, 53 Focillon, Henri, 127–129, 131–133, 136– 139, 142, 143, 146, 147 Focillon, Victor, 132 Fögen, Marie-Theres, 26 Foglietta, Uberto, 119 Fontaine, Pierre François Léonard, 129 Fornovo, battle of, 121 Foskett, Mary, 60 Foucault, Michel, 18, 114, 222 Francis I, 130, 131 Francis of Assissi, 92 Frauenlob, 79 Freud, Sigmund, 129 Friesen, Ilse E., 83, 84, 88, 92, 106, 109 Frischlin, Nicolas, 123 Froissart, Jean, 117 Fulbert of Chartres, 75 Furetière, Antoine, 174, 175, 178 Gaidoz, Henri, 104 Gaillard, Ferdinand, 146–148 Galla, St, 92 Garrison, William Lloyd, 32, 36 Gaston d’Orléans, 190 Gaston de Foix, 121 Gautier, Théophile, 128, 129, 131, 132, 142, 144 genuflection, 150, 153, 156, 157, 159, 161– 163, 165–167, 170–172 Geoffrey of Auxerre, 178, 180 George, St, 64 Gérard, Baron, 137 Géricault, Théodore, 132

262 Gesta Francorum, 46, 52 Giovio, Paolo, 118, 121, 123 Girodet, Anne-Louis, 133, 136, 137, 140 Giulio Romano, 119 Giustinian, Antonio, 122 Godeau, Antoine, 177, 198 Godfrey of Bouillon, 50 Gohorry, Jacques, 123 Gottschalk, 203, 204 Granvella, Nicolas Perrenot de (chancellor), 154 Grateful Dead, 229 Gregory the Great, 92 Gregory, Brad, 55 Grimm brothers, 83 Grimm, Jacob, 104 Grinko, Grigori Fedorovich, 39 Gritti, Andrea, 122 Gros, Antoine-Jean, 133 Gualfredus, 84 Guérin, Pierre-Narcisse, 133 Guicciardini, Francesco, 113, 118, 121– 125 Gumperz, John, 114 Halbwachs, Maurice, 252 Halfin, Igal, 25 Haman, 166 Hannibal, 122 Hardison, O. B., 14 Harnack, Adolph von, 205, 207, 210 Hartog, François, 115 Hausherr, Reiner, 82, 86, 100, 109 Hazlitt, William, 125 Hegel, G. W. F., 40 Helena (mother of Constantine), 62 Hellbeck, Jochen, 23, 38, 43, 44 Henriquel-Dupont, Louis, 131 Henry II (emperor), 69 Henry of Huntingdon, 117, 120 Henry, Matthew, 36

Index Herodotus, 115 Hildegard of Bingen, 76 historiography, 16, 125, 174, 176, 233, 252 ancient, 178 narrative, 234, 240, 244, 247, 248, 254 pragmatic, 245 royal, 174 Hjelmslev, Louis, 115 Hoel (king), 117 Holocaust denial, 247 Horace, 231 Hotelin, Laurent, 147 Hrotsvit, 68, 69 Hugh of St Victor, 6–8 humour, theories of, 233 Hunt, Lynn, 244, 246 Ikramov, Akmal, 39, 43 Imorde, Joseph, 9 Ingres, Jean, 130, 139–141, 143 Ivanov, Vladimir Ivanovich, 38, 43, 44 Jacob, Margaret, 244, 246 Jacques de Vitry, 50 Jakobson, Roman, 125, 126 James II, 125 Jameson, Fredric, 217, 218 Jansenist struggle, 176 Jauss, Hans Robert, 173 Jeanron, Philippe-Auguste, 131 Jerome, 31, 166 Joachim, 61, 68 John (disciple), 69 John Frederick of Saxony, 153, 156, 165 John of Lucca, 84 Joseph, 61, 67 Judas Iscariot, 49 Juergensmeyer, Mark, 24 Julia, St, 90, 91

Index Jung, Erich, 109 Kafka, Franz, 210 Kamlah, Wilhelm, 26 Kearns, Cleo McNelly, 60 Kedar, Benjamin Z., 57 Kleist, Heinrich von, 19, 201, 202, 210– 216 Koestler, Arthur, 233 Konrad von Eberbach, 97 Kos, Koraljka, 93 Koselleck, Reinhart, 27 Krailsheimer, Alban, 190 Kristeva, Julia, 125 Kubrick, Stanley, 234, 237 Kuhn, Thomas S., 222, 243, 244 Kümmernis, St, 82–84, 86–95, 97–100, 103, 105, 106, 109, 110 La Popelinière, 119 La Trappe, 179, 190–195 Lady of Guadalupe, 60 Lawrence, St, 56, 57, 102 Le Gray, Gustave, 144–146 le Nain, Pierre, 173, 177–181, 190–198 le Nain, Sébastien Tillemont, 179 Leitmotif technique, 236 Lemaître, Augustin, 144 Lenin, 38, 39 Leonardo da Vinci, 18, 128, 129, 131, 134, 135, 145 Lethière, Guillaume, 136 Liberata, St, 82, 90 linguistics, 59, 114–116, 248 lithography, 128, 129, 131–133, 136, 137, 139, 143, 146 Livy, 115, 117, 120, 122 Lockwood, Richard, 182 Lopes, Fernão, 117, 118 Louis VII, 196 Louis XII, 131

263 Louis XIII, 190 Louis XIV, 131, 174, 177, 178, 196 Luther, Martin, 9, 164, 205, 212–216 Lyotard, Jean-François, 202, 230 Mabillon, Jean, 175, 195 Macaulay, Thomas, 124, 125 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 115, 118, 121, 125 Manet, Édouard, 146 Marcotte, Charles, 140 Mariana, Juan de, 120, 122 Marin, Louis, 181, 197 martyrdom, 17, 24–29, 33–37, 44–46, 49, 50, 53–57, 66, 88–90, 104 Marxism, 25, 217, 218 Mary, 2, 17, 18, 54, 59–80, 91, 93, 97, 98, 182 Mascardi, Agostino, 121, 124 Massard, Jean-Baptiste-Raphael-Urbain, 128 Matthatias (Book of the Maccabees), 50 Matthew Paris, 77 Maximilian (emperor), 122 McCarthy, Joseph, 238 mémoires, 173, 177 Mendel, Arthur, 4, 10 Mercuri, Paolo, 138, 140, 141 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 40, 41 Michael, St, 110 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 96 Millet, Aimé, 145 Millet, Frédéric, 144, 145 Mink, Louis, 255 Molanus, John, 91 Molière, 222 Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 117 Montaigne, Michel de, 115 Morcillo, Sebastian Fox, 119 Mordecai, 166, 167 Morghen, Raphael, 129

264 Moritz of Saxony, 170 Moses, 48, 65 Mowbray, Thomas, 118 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 4, 10, 12, 230, 245 Mukarovsky, Jan, 148 multiple viewpoints, 125 Münzer, Thomas, 211 Musculus, Wolfgang, 169 Nannini, Remigio, 123 narrative, 124, 125, 175, 178–180, 186, 189, 197, 220, 221 historical, 234 Neri, Philip, 9 Nestor (Patriarch of Constantinople), 63, 64 Newton, Francis, 6, 7 Niépce, Nicéphore, 144 Nicholas, St, 104, 110 Nicodemus, 18, 84 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 13 North, Alex, 236 Nyborg, Ebbe, 86 Olafsson, Frederick A., 244 Ong, Walter, 252 Ontkommer, St, 81, 87, 110 Orestes, 212 Origen, 62 Østrem, Eyolf, 4, 11, 17, 19, 80 Otto II, 69 Ovid, 97 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 10– 12, 224 panegyric, 177, 178, 182, 185, 188 Panofsky, Erwin, 100, 109, 119 panotto, 250 Pappenheim, Gottfried Heinrich, 162 Paruta, Paolo, 123 Pascal, Blaise, 177

Index Paschasius Radbertus, 5 Pater, Walter, 128, 129, 132 Patrizzi, Francesco, 123 Paul (apostle), 36, 44, 168, 183–185 Pelagianism, 202, 205, 207 Percier, Charles, 129 performatives, 119, 151, 158, 163 Pericles, 116 Perrault, Charles, 173, 177, 178, 197 Pessoa, Fernando, 129 Peter (disciple), 33, 104, 164 Peter Bartholomew, 48, 52–54 Peter Lombard, 7, 8 Petersen, Nils Holger, 4, 6, 11, 80, 246 Petrarch, 202 Pfeilschmidt, Andreas, 167 Philip of Hesse, 153, 156–158, 160, 164, 165 Phillips, Mark, 118, 121 Phillips, Wendell, 30, 37 Picard, Raymond, 114 Pilate, Pontius, 48 Pius II, 119 Pliny, 251 Pocock, John, 114 Polybius, 117, 123 Pontano, Giovanni, 119 pragmatic realism, 244, 245 Pranger, Burcht, 19 Proclus of Constantinople, 63, 64 Prud’hon, Pierre, 133, 136 Prudentius, 56 Putnam, Hilary, 244, 245 Quarant’ore, 9 querelle des anciens et des modernes, 177 Racine, Jean, 114, 174, 177, 180 Radding, Charles M., 6, 7 Rakovsky, C., 44 Rancé, Armand-Jean de, 19, 173, 178– 180, 190–198

265

Index Ranke, Leopold von, 124, 240 Raphael, 130, 136, 137 Ratramnus, 5 Raymond d’Aguilers, 17, 25, 27, 45– 53, 55, 57 Raymond of Saint-Gilles, 47 Reformation, 4, 9, 95, 163–165, 169, 176, 189, 198 English, 17 German, 18, 152, 153, 155, 160 relativism, 243 representation, 113, 116–118, 125 Retz, Cardinal de, 124 Richelieu, 190 Ricœur, Paul, 2 Riising, Anne, 104 ritual, 24 ritual language, 113 Ritz, Joseph M., 82, 83, 87, 91, 94, 99, 103, 109 Robespierre, Maximilien, 45 Roch, St, 105 Romanticism, 128, 131, 132, 143 Romilly, Jacqueline, 115 Rosenthal, Karl August, 4, 10 Roth, Joachim, 4, 10 Rubens, Peter Paul, 119 Rubin, Miri, 2, 4, 9, 17, 60, 77, 80 Sallust, 117, 120 Samson, 34 Sansovino, Francesco, 122 Sardi, Alessandro, 119 Sarpi, Paolo, 118, 124 Sassoon, Donald, 127 Sastrow, Bartholomäus, 165 satyr, 250 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 206 Schmalkaldic League, 153, 156, 157, 161 Schmalkaldic War, 18, 153, 160, 170

Schnürer, Gustav, 82, 83, 87, 91, 94, 99, 103, 109 Schreiner, Klaus, 24 Schweizer-Vüllers, Regine, 83, 84, 92 Scipio, 122 Sebastian, St, 101, 105 Sergius (patriarch), 66 sermon, 177, 178, 181–183, 189, 198 Shakespeare, William, 97, 118 Simon, Richard, 175 Sixtus III, 66 skiapod, 250 Skinner, Quentin, 114 slave rebellion, 27 slavery, 30, 33, 37, 56, 236–238 Soderini, Paoloantonio, 121 Solomon, 65 Spartacus (film), 234–239 speeches, 113–125 Spranger, Peter, 93, 94 Stalin, 17, 38–45 Stayer, James M., 24 Stephen, St, 66 Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara, 17, 18 structuralism, 125 Struever, Nancy, 115, 120 Strycker, Émile de, 61 submission, 149–151, 154–156, 160, 163, 166, 170 Summers, Lawrence H., 228 Tannen, Deborah, 114, 116 Taurel, André, 138–141 TBC, 228 Tertullian, 44 Theodora, St, 92 Theodore (monk), 92 Theodore, St, 64 Theodosius II, 63 Theophanu, 69 Thomas Aquinas, 99, 166

266 Thou, Jacques-Auguste de, 124 Thucydides, 116, 120, 125 Timaeus, 117 Titian, 119 transparency (in history), 239 Trogus, 123 Trumbo, Dalton, 234 Tucker, Robert C., 42 Ulrich of Württemberg, 156 Uncumber, St, 81, 87 Valla, Lorenzo, 118, 119 van Heemskerck, Maarten, 156 Vasari, Giorgio, 130, 131, 140, 142 Vernet, Carle, 133 Veronica, St, 94 Vespucci, Guidantonio, 121 Villani, Giovanni, 117 Villehardouin, Geoffroi de, 117, 118 Vincent of Saragossa, 66 Viperano, Giovanni Antonio, 119 Virgo fortis, St, 81 Vitalis, St, 66 Voragine, Jacobus de, 92, 95, 97, 99, 104, 105

Index Vos, Gerard Jan, 124 Voss, Jürgen, 174 Wagner, Richard, 13 Walicki, Andrzej, 42, 44 Wangsgaard Jørgensen, Martin, 3, 17, 18 Wegman, Rob C., 19, 226, 227 Werner the Swiss, 79 Wesley, John, 31 Wessel, Horst, 29 White, Hayden, 2, 234, 240, 244, 247– 251 Metahistory, 247 Wilgefortis, St, 81, 91, 110 William of Auvergne, 102 William of Orange, 125 William of Saint-Thierry, 180, 186 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 241, 245 Wolrad of Waldeck, 159–163, 167, 168 Yeats, W. B., 129 Young, Karl, 14, 17 Zachariah, 61 Zurita, Jerónimo, 120