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English Pages 161 Year 2015
The Books and the Life of Judith of Flanders
To Michael, as we share our books and our lives
The Books and the Life of Judith of Flanders
Mary Dockray-Miller Lesley University, USA
First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2015 Mary Dockray-Miller Mary Dockray-Miller has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Dockray-Miller, Mary, 1965– The books and the life of Judith of Flanders / by Mary Dockray-Miller. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-6835-6 (hardcover: alkaline paper) 1. Judith, Countess of Flanders, 1032–1094. 2. Women benefactors—Europe—Biography. 3. Gifts—Religious aspects— Christianity. 4. Art objects, Medieval. 5. Religious articles—Europe. 6. Manuscripts, Medieval—History. 7. Libraries—Gifts, legacies—History—To 1500. 8. Monasteries— History. 9. Durham Cathedral. Priory. 10. Benediktinerabtei Weingarten—History. 11. Church history—Middle Ages, 600–1500. I. Title. CB354.3.D63 2015 909.07—dc23 2014026177 ISBN 9781409468356 (hbk)
Contents List of Illustrations and Tables Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: Before Northumbria
vii xi xiii 1
1
Lady of Northumbria, 1055–1065
13
2
The English Books
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3
Frontispiece Portraits and Exile
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4
Collecting Treasure as Lady of Ravensburg
73
5
The Relic of the Holy Blood
91
Appendix 1: Chapters 6 and 7 of the Vita Oswini in Modern English
107
Appendix 2: Grants and Stipulations of Welf and Judith to Weingarten Abbey in Modern English
111
Appendix 3: Texts Related to the Weingarten Relic of the Holy Blood in Modern English Bibliography Index
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123 141
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List of Illustrations and Tables Color Plates 1
Treasure Cover. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.708. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1926. Photo credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York 2 Treasure Cover. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.709. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1926. Photo credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York 3a Capital Q. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.709 f.78r, detail. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1926. Photo credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York 3b Capital Q. Oxford, The Bodleian Library, MS Douce 296, fol. 40v, detail. By permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford 4a and 4b Matthew Portrait and Incipit. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.709, fols 2v–3r. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1926. Photo credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York 5 Mark Portrait, with calf in error for lion. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.709, fol. 48v. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1926. Photo credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York 6 Luke Portrait, with lion in error for calf. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.709, fol. 77v. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1926. Photo credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York John Portrait. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS 7 M.709, fol. 122v. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1926. Photo credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. 8 Frontispiece with donor portrait. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.709, fol.1v. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867– 1943) in 1926. Photo credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York 9a and 9b Matthew Portrait and Incipit. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.708, fols 2v–3r. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1926. Photo credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
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10a and 10b Mark Portrait and Incipit. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.708, fols 26v–27r. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1926. Photo credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York 11 Luke Portrait. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.708, fol. 42v. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1926. Photo credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York 12 John Portrait. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.708, fol. 66v. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1926. Photo credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York 13 Matthew Portrait and Incipit. Montecassino, Archivio dell’Abbazia, cod. Casin. 437, fols 2v–3r. By permission of the Archivio di Montecassino 14 Mark Portrait and Incipit. Montecassino, Archivio dell’Abbazia, cod. Casin. 437, fols 102v–103r. By permission of the Archivio di Montecassino 15 Luke Portrait and Incipit. Montecassino, Archivio dell’Abbazia, cod. Casin. 437, fols 126v–127r. By permission of the Archivio di Montecassino 16 John Portrait and Incipit. Montecassino, Archivio dell’Abbazia, cod. Casin. 437, fols 166v–167r. By permission of the Archivio di Montecassino 17a, 17b, 17c, 17d Details, correction inscriptions on Mark and Luke Evangelist symbols. Montecassino, Archivio dell’Abbazia, cod. Casin. 437, fols 103r and 127r. By permission of the Archivio di Montecassino 18 Christ in Majesty, with donor portraits of Emperor Conrad and Empress Gisela. Madrid, El Escorial, Real Biblioteca, Cod. Vitrinas 17, fol. 2v. © Patrimonio Nacional 19 The Virgin Enthroned, with donor portraits of Emperor Henry III and the Empress Agnes. Madrid, El Escorial, Real Biblioteca, Cod. Vitrinas 17, fol. 3r. © Patrimonio Nacional 20a and 20b Mark Portrait and detail with zooanthropomorphic Evangelist symbol. Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.10.4, fol. 59v. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge 21a and 21b Luke Portrait and detail with zooanthropomorphic Evangelist symbol. Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.10.4, fol. 89v. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge 22 Frontispiece with donor portrait. Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Aa.21, fol. 2v. By permission of the Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek Fulda
List of Illustrations and Tables
ix
23
Textile page. Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Aa.21, fol. 3r. By permission of the Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek Fulda 24a and 24b Gold lettering on purple background. Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Aa.21, fols 3v and 4r. By permission of the Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek Fulda 25 Annunciation. Paris, Bibliotheque National, MS Lat. 819, fol. 78v. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, département de la Reproduction 26 Early eighteenth-century fresco depicting Welf and Judith, Weingarten Abbey. Photo: author Black and White Figures I.1 The family tree of Judith of Flanders 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 Details of zoo-anthropomorphic evangelist symbols from Brussels, Cathedral of St Michel and St Gudule, Reliquary Cross. Used by permission of the Medieval North Atlantic On-Line Archive. Courtesy of Christopher R. Fee, James Rutkowski, and Gettysburg College 4.1 The family tree of Welf IV
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41 75
Tables 2.1
Scribe and artist detail, Judith of Flanders Gospels
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Acknowledgments I am indebted to scholars and librarians from around the world for sharing their assistance and expertise throughout the process of researching and writing this book. They include: Don Faustino Avagliano, George T. Beech, Michelle Brown, Charles Cawley, Lisa Fagin Davis, David Defries, Susanne Deis, Valerie Eads, Christopher Fee, Martin Foys, Paul Anthony Hayward, Elisabeth van Houts, Deirdre Jackson, Kriszta Kotsis, Stephen J Harris, Gerda Lobe-Roeder, Brigitte Meijns, Daniel O’Donnell, Gale Owen-Crocker, Sandy Paul, Clara Ronderos, M.K. Spike, Steven Vanderputten, Nina Verbanaz, William Voelkle, Ann Williams, and John Zaleski. The staff at Lesley University Libraries provides crucial support for all my work; I must especially thank Elizabeth Allen, Dianne Brown, Robyn Ferrero, Aura Fluet, Marilyn Geller, Jamie Glass, Kathy Holmes, Abigail Mancini, Michael Mercurio, Stephanie Nelson, Linda Roscoe, Karen Storz, Lee Sullivan, Kate Thornhill, and Constance Vrattos. Also at Lesley University, Selase Williams, Mary Coleman, and Christine Evans have been consistently supportive of my research; I received invaluable tech support and administrative help from my undergraduate research assistants, Jerimiah Bergstrom, Maria Bonfiglio, Chelsea Johnston, and Kaitlin Nardi. I would also like to thank the editors and the anonymous readers at Ashgate Publishing for their suggestions and assistance throughout this project. Any errors that remain in the text are entirely my own. Finally, I need to thank Michael, Cordelia, and Bryn, who allowed Judith into our family these past few years.
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List of Abbreviations ASC
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, eds David Dumville and Simon Keynes (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1983–). Electronic edition also available open access at http://asc.jebbo.co.uk dMGH The digital version of Monumenta Germaniae Historica open access at http://www.dmgh.de MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica, now largely superseded by dMGH PL Patrologia Latina, available by subscription through http://pld.chadwyck.com
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Introduction
Before Northumbria On the Friday after the Feast of the Ascension, the Abbey and community in Weingarten, Germany, celebrate the Blutritt, a ceremony dedicated to Weingarten’s relic of the Holy Blood of Christ. Thousands of people line the streets to watch and then join a procession on horseback led by the der heilige Blutritter, who carries the relic in front of him on a route through the city and the surrounding countryside. Now, of course, those not in Weingarten can see the procession on YouTube.1 Weingarten tradition states that the Weingarten relic of the Holy Blood was given to the abbey in 1094 as part of a bequest from Judith of Flanders and her husband, Welf IV, a German lord whose main residence was three miles from the abbey he had founded in 1056. Since the bequest dates to the year of her death (he lived until 1101), and since she is said to have brought the relic into Bavaria when she married Welf in 1070, the relic is much more strongly associated with Judith than with Welf, and she is given equal or more attention than her husband in most accounts of the abbey’s acquisition of the relic. Every summer, a local teenage girl dresses as Judith to lead the parade during Weingarten’s Welfenfest; a side street in downtown Weingarten is the Judithaweg; Judith even features briefly in an amateurish video game wherein the initial goal is to save a prince from the Welf dungeon.2 Despite these modern re-enactments in parades and online gaming, Judith of Flanders (c.1032–1094) was in some ways an unremarkable eleventh-century female European aristocrat. Her two marriages were political alliances intended to advance the interests of her family. While her first marriage was childless (or at least produced no children noted in the historical record), the two sons from her second marriage inherited their share of their patrimony and enjoyed wealth and status at least equal to their father’s. Not so typically, however, Judith is discussed in historiography and commemorated in modern culture primarily as a patron of art, literature, and the church rather than as an aristocratic wife and mother.3 During her marriage to Tostig Godwinson, Earl of Northumbria, she commissioned at least four magnificent Gospel Books that are still extant;4 sources describe numerous other treasures and objects that she gave to English churches as part of her devotional practices. Her religious patronage continued after her second marriage, to Welf of Bavaria in 1070. Documents from the archives of Weingarten Abbey list multiple treasures she donated over the course of her life; those documents also credit her for the posthumous gift of the relic of the Holy Blood in 1094.
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Two of the most tumultuous political events of the eleventh century helped shape Judith’s adult life: the Norman Conquest and the Investiture Controversy. Through her marriages, she had deeply invested interests in both conflicts. In both, she seems to have ended on the losing side, but her literary and artistic patronage allowed her to overcome any implications of defeat. Even at her politically lowest point—as an exile and then a widow in the late 1060s—Judith used what little wealth she had left to exercise the power of patronage and proclaim status. As patron, she successfully defined herself as pious, wealthy, sophisticated, and educated—largely the way she is remembered today both in religious and community practices at Weingarten and in historical scholarship. Some of her books and art objects survive; we have descriptions of others. Analysis of these works provides insight into Judith’s life. Further information comes from the unusually high number of contemporary or near-contemporary English and continental documents that include reference to her. A glance at her family tree reveals that she was related by blood and/or marriage to the major figures in northern European politics during the period (see Figure I.1). All of this material provides the basis for this “patronage biography,” a semi-narrative version of Judith’s life told largely through analysis of the works of art she commissioned and the historical documents describing those works. That analysis ultimately shows that Judith consciously and successfully deployed artistic patronage as a cultural strategy in her political and marital maneuvers in the eleventh-century European political theater. For aspiring biographers of medieval women, Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingston have most recently discussed issues around lack of sources, especially those that might provide some access to the interior life of the biographical subject.5 As do biographers Kimberly LoPrete and Lois Huneycutt, Goldy and Livingston acknowledge the inherent problematics of constructing biography of only “exceptional” women, those who managed to exert agency and wield power in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society. These “exceptional” subjects tend to include queens or abbesses like Eleanor of Aquitaine or Hildegard of Bingen, medieval women whose names still resonate, if only barely, in mainstream contemporary culture. Judith of Flanders has left a much fainter trace in the historical record than these exceptional subjects—or even than LoPrete’s Adela of Blois or Huneycutt’s Matilda,6 but she is worthy of historiographical interest because of her status as a middling but ambitious aristocrat.7 Much of the biographical work done on medieval women has focused, by necessity, on women who operated at the highest levels of society. Queens, abbesses, countesses, and duchesses who controlled vast amounts of land and other wealth left clearly identifiable marks in the historical record. While Judith probably aspired to such status—each of her husbands had at least a slight chance to become a king—she never achieved it. The narrative of her life thus informs our understanding of the ways that female middle-tier aristocrats could work to raise their own status and that of their husbands and children.
Figure I.1
The Family Tree of Judith of Flanders. In the interest of clarity, some people are not included (for example, Emma’s sons with Cnut).
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Almost all biographies of individual medieval women address the biographical subject’s patronage, usually of religious foundations. Erin Jordan’s dual biography of the sisters Jeanne and Marguerite, successive countesses of Flanders and Hainaut in the thirteenth century, is even titled Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages.8 Historians examining medieval patronage practices (of men as well as women) routinely conclude (as Jordan puts it) that “Patronage of monastic communities was both public and political, intended to be witnessed and acknowledged by as many people as possible.”9 Religious patronage by secular aristocrats guaranteed burial places, intercessory prayers, and masses for the patrons and their relatives;10 on more secular terms, it solidified alliance with powerful church officials and provided an opportunity for the aristocrat to display generosity and wealth. Judith’s patronage practices differed significantly from those of the higheststatus female patrons, however. Most importantly, she had no direct access to land (in contrast, Jordan exclusively discusses the countesses’ grants of land to various religious institutions in the Low Countries) so she did not found, re-found, endow, or enlarge any monastic houses for men or women. Her gifts were entirely movable goods: relics, books, and liturgical objects. As such, it is possible to glean a sense of Judith’s aesthetic and religious preferences through her selection of gifts to her designated institutions as well as through objects, most especially the extant Gospel books, that she commissioned for herself and her household. Two of the books even include portraits of Judith in their frontispieces, providing a record of how she wished to be portrayed and perceived. As biographical sources, all these movable goods are much more informative about the individual sensibilities of the patron than would be estates or rights granted through charter evidence. In fact, charter evidence figures hardly at all in this patronage biography. In addition to the four extant manuscripts, sources for Judith’s life include a variety of historical and hagiographical materials from England, Scandinavia, Normandy, and Germany. These source texts tend to focus on events to which Judith was largely peripheral, but at which she was present (or which directly affected the course of her life in some way); only a few focus on her directly, or include episodes in which she is a primary character. Chronicle texts like the anonymous AngloSaxon Chronicle, the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, or the Swabian Chronicles of Bernold of St. Blasien and Bertold of Reichenau are standard historical sources in any study; hagiography and encomia are less reputable and therefore require some methodological contextualization. Historians have rightly viewed hagiography as historically suspect, especially since the primary goal of the hagiographer is to emphasize the similarities of the saintly subject to the lives of Christ and other saints. In his discussion of this historiographical suspicion, Sean Gilsdorf has referred to the “pejorative connotations which ‘hagiography’ and ‘hagiographic’ (in the sense of ‘credulous’ or ‘uncritical’) have acquired in modern parlance.”11 However, Gilsdorf argues for the careful use of hagiographic texts for historical information, especially in reference to the cults of local saints who led largely secular lives before embracing the religious life (Gilsdorf’s subjects are
Introduction
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Ottonian queens who were culted as local saints soon after their deaths). Similarly, Lois Huneycutt argues for the legitimacy of the Life of St. Margaret as a historical source of information about the future queen Matilda (Margaret’s daughter), since “there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the incidental details about the domestic life of the family.”12 This study follows Gilsdorf and Huneycutt in its use of hagiographical texts, especially their inclusion of seemingly minor quotidian detail about local, secular historical figures, as methodologically legitimate. For example, the author of The Life of King Edward Who Rests at Westminster probably knew Judith; he definitely knew Judith’s husband, Tostig, and her sister-in-law, Queen Edith. The author of the Vita Oswini knew local stories, and possibly actual local people who had interacted with Tostig and Judith. While the miracles narrated in these texts are indeed historically suspect, the texts’ local detail provides insight into the activities and personalities of the historical figures. The strengths and weaknesses of the individual sources are discussed in detail in the chapters that follow. As a married female aristocrat, Judith had some limited access to both power and authority. Erin Jordan has built upon Michelle Rosaldo’s distinctions between those two terms in an understanding of medieval women; according to Jordan, authority is “the legitimate right to act,” while power relies on “personal effectiveness” in convincing or forcing others to assist in achievement of one’s goals. The “two terms referred to two very distinct forms of action in the Middle Ages” for both men and women: legal authority did not necessarily ensure power or vice versa. Jordan uses the example of the King of France’s authority over the Count of Flanders in the late twelfth century, although the Count wielded much more power than the King.13 During her adult life, Judith could not claim any authority of her own, relying instead on her role as an extension of her husband’s lordly authority, especially in his absence; her patronage practices reveal that she had enough power to control the wealth needed for those commissions and gifts. In a symbiotic relationship, her patronage practices also enhanced her power and reinforced her authority throughout her adult life as she solidified and attempted to improve her position in the aristocratic hierarchy of northern Europe. Prologue: Before Northumbria, c.1032–1055 Judith’s parentage was the object of substantial scholarly discussion throughout the twentieth century, although there is now a consensus that her father was Count Baldwin IV of Flanders and her mother was a daughter of Richard II, Duke of Normandy. Her mother’s name may have been Eleanor, and for the sake of clarity I will refer to Judith’s mother as Eleanor throughout.14 Baldwin IV’s first wife was Otgiva of Luxembourg, who died in 1030; she was the mother of his son Baldwin (eventually Count Baldwin V), born c.1012. Baldwin IV married Eleanor as part of his defense against an uprising led by his son. As David Nicholas puts it, when the younger Baldwin married Adele of
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France in 1028, “the royal marriage went to the youth’s head, and he led a party of nobles in rebellion” against his father.15 With his first wife, Otgiva, dead, Baldwin IV was free to marry a daughter of the Duke of Normandy and secure an alliance with the Normans; Baldwin IV’s new father-in-law, Richard II, mediated the peace between father and son in 1030 at Oudenaarde.16 Since Baldwin IV died in 1035, we can date Judith’s birth with some confidence to 1031–1036.17 When their father died in 1035, her half-brother, roughly 20 years her senior, became Count Baldwin V. We have no evidence of Judith’s life until 1051, the year of her first marriage; she must have spent the years from 1035 to 1051 under the formal care of her half-brother. George Beech has argued that Eleanor left Flanders soon after Baldwin IV’s death to enter a second marriage with a member of the Aquitanian nobility as part of her father’s strategy “to dissociate his rule and his duchy from its unruly, pagan Scandinavian past and to legitimise his authority through alliances with neighbouring Frankish princes.”18 If Beech is correct, Judith and her niece Matilda (who was practically the same age as Judith) were probably raised together, either at the comital court in Bruges or at a women’s monastic house nearby. Since Eleanor was no longer in Flanders, Adele of France, Matilda’s mother and Countess of Flanders, would have been nominally in charge of the girls. In her analysis of Matilda’s life, Laura Gathagan states that “The Flanders of Mathilda’s childhood was politically cohesive, economically advanced, spiritually vibrant, and a sophisticated center for trade.”19 Both girls thus grew up in a dynamic and enriching environment; whether jointly or not, the girls were also educated, as both were known for their literacy and literary patronage in adulthood. Elisabeth van Houts has noted “tentative evidence for high status women, originating from Flanders, who had some degree of schooling and literacy.”20 Drawing on van Houts’s work, Elizabeth Tyler similarly notes that “Matilda is an example of how the Flemish comital family began to attend to the education of its daughters over the course of the eleventh century.”21 Judith had some degree of Latinity; she was probably fluent in French, Flemish, and English, and possibly Danish as well. Her multilingualism (to borrow Tyler’s term) and her literacy would serve her well in the European marriage market. In 1957, Hansmartin Decker-Hauff proposed a somewhat outlandish chronology of Judith’s life that included Duke Richard III of Normandy as her father, Adele of France as her mother, and Count Baldwin V of Flanders as her stepfather.22 While Decker-Hauff’s timeline is notably implausible, he does very plausibly place Baldwin V in a paternal role in Judith’s life. Her half-brother acted in the role of an aristocratic father when he arranged her first marriage, in 1051, as part of his strategy of dynastic and political alliances. The Counts of Flanders ruled a turbulent political environment. Flanders was situated between the Holy Roman Empire and the increasingly powerful Duchy of Normandy; it was only a short channel crossing from England. Flanders was consistently opposed to the English King Edward (r.1042–1066), managing rather than solving the unsettled political and military relationship between England and Flanders. In 1037, soon after Judith’s father’s death, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Introduction
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mentions the first in a series of aristocratic refugees from England who found asylum in Bruges: Emma of Normandy, who had been married to two Kings of England, Æthelred and Cnut. Throughout the 1040s, Baldwin welcomed to Bruges not only Emma but also her son Harthacanute (in 1040); the twice-widowed sister of King Cnut, Gunnhild (in 1045); Swein Godwinson (in 1046, 1047, and 1049); and the wife of Osgod Clapa (in 1049).23 Also in 1049, the Chronicle informs us, Edward of England allied with Henry the Emperor against Baldwin in a military action;24 the Chronicle does not mention that Henry had been married to Edward’s half-sister, Gunnhild (daughter of Emma and Cnut), so there was dynastic as well as political basis for their alliance.25 Baldwin was thus obviously sympathetic to those who found themselves in a precarious political position in England. In 1051, when she was between 16 and 20 years old, Judith’s half-brother solidified this political stance even further. He arranged her marriage to Tostig, one of the middle sons of Earl Godwin of Wessex, thus forging an alliance between Flanders and the powerful Godwins, who both supported and coveted the throne of Baldwin’s adversary Edward the Confessor. While no evidence exists to make any judgments about Judith’s relationship with her half-brother, his wife, or his children, it is safe to assume that she was not considered a dynastically important member of Baldwin’s comital family; she was only a much younger half-sibling, a child of an alliance originally formed to resist Baldwin V’s ambitions. Judith’s first marriage should be understood as something of a low-risk investment for Baldwin: should the Godwins succeed in their maneuvers to secure the English throne, Baldwin would have a blood relative in the family; if they failed, having an alliance with the troublesome Godwins certainly would not make his relationship with Edward any worse. Unfortunately, no records survive (if any ever existed) with any information about the marriage agreement, dowry, or other property that may have changed hands as part of the process. As one of Earl Godwin’s middle sons, the bridegroom, Tostig, must have seemed an acceptable but not too important a match to Baldwin, who had just completed negotiations for his own daughter Matilda’s much more politically prominent marriage to William Duke of Normandy, which occurred in 1050 or 1051.26 Despite Judith’s middling status within the Godwin family, however, the family itself was enormously powerful. Her new father-in-law was also the father-in-law of Edward the Confessor, and (after the king) the richest and most powerful man in England. Robin Fleming has argued persuasively that the Godwins, as a group, were actually much wealthier than Edward, thus exacerbating the tensions between the King and his most powerful subject.27 Earl Godwin had risen from the minor aristocracy under King Cnut in the 1020s and 1030s to become the Earl of Wessex, even marrying into Cnut’s extended family to seal his loyalty to the Danish King of England. After Cnut’s death, Godwin was something of a king-maker, and Edward needed Godwin’s support as he solidified his kingship in 1042 and afterwards. Godwin had been at least partly responsible for the murder of Edward’s brother Alfred in 1036, however, so the relationship was always fraught with tension and suspicion on both sides. In 1045, Edward married Godwin’s daughter Edith;
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also by 1045, Godwin’s oldest son Swein was Earl of the Southwest Midlands, his son Harold was Earl of East Anglia, and his nephew Beorn was Earl of the Southeast Midlands. King Edward was thus surrounded, geographically, socially, and politically, by his powerful in-laws when Judith married into the Godwin family in the spring or summer of 1051.28 Adam of Bremen, writing some 30 years later, remarked that “Godwin’s sons held England in their power, for Edward was contented with life alone and the empty title of king.”29 The dating of Judith and Tostig’s marriage turns on the events of the “Crisis of 1051,” a power struggle between King Edward and Earl Godwin. While both pro- and anti-Godwin versions of the Crisis narrative exist,30 it is clear that both Earl Godwin and King Edward saw the aftermath of an armed skirmish in Dover as a referendum on power and legitimacy in Edward’s kingdom. The Godwins seemed to lose that referendum in August of 1051, when forces of the King and other earls mustered against Godwin; Queen Edith was sent to a nunnery; and much of the family retreated to Bruges (as noted above, the preferred destination for exiles from England in the years leading up to the Norman Conquest). Some historians state that Tostig and Judith were married before the Crisis; others claim that the marriage took place during the exile in Bruges (Frank Barlow even mentions both scenarios, probably because the precise dating of the marriage is not integral to his analysis of the events).31 Consideration of Flemish (rather than English) political strategies, however, makes it clear that the marriage must have taken place before the Crisis of 1051. One of the important primary sources for the events of Judith’s first marriage is the Vita Ædwardi, a text commissioned by Edith, who was one of Godwin’s daughters, Edward’s queen, and Judith’s sister-in-law. Barlow has argued that the Vita is more of an encomium to the Godwins than a work of hagiography about Edward—the first part is a “historical essay” (Barlow’s term) that presents a pro-Godwin narrative of English history from the early eleventh century to the Conquest, while the second book conforms more closely to the conventions of hagiography.32 Barlow notes that the author of the Vita Ædwardi was a Fleming who knew Edith and Tostig quite well; the author seems to prefer Tostig over Harold, perhaps because that was also Edith’s preference.33 Because of the Vita author’s first-hand knowledge of the Godwin family, the text is a reliable source for family details, if not for its historical objectivity or accuracy. For example, the Vita quite clearly terms Judith the sister (sororem) of Baldwin V rather than his daughter, stepdaughter, or more generic “kin.”34 The Vita Ædwardi states that the skirmish at Dover which precipitated the Crisis of 1051 occurred “during the very marriage celebrations of [Godwin’s] son, Earl Tostig, when he took Judith as wife.”35 Therefore, we can postulate that after a ceremony and (presumably) celebrations in Bruges, the Godwins had returned and were celebrating the marriage in England when Eustace of Boulogne attacked (or was attacked by) the Dover townsmen. As noted above, a marriage into the powerful and wealthy Godwin family before the Crisis of 1051 would
Introduction
9
have appealed to Baldwin V as something of an insurance policy in his rocky relationship with England; during that crisis, it is doubtful that he would have married his half-sister to a middle son of a currently dispossessed exile.36 Baldwin cannot have been pleased, then, when Judith and many of her in-laws reappeared in Flanders as refugees so soon after the marriage/alliance was formalized. Having cast his lot with the Godwins, however, Baldwin welcomed them to Bruges for the winter of 1051/1052 and allowed Godwin to collect a fleet and an armed troop for the planned (and ultimately successful) return to England. Judith and the other women in the family presumably remained in Bruges until the Godwins had made peace with Edward in mid-August of 1052.37 She remained, however, the wife of a middle son, even after the reinstatement of Godwin lands and titles in 1052. Two deaths helped to improve her position: her father-in-law died in 1053 and Earl Siward of Northumbria died in 1055. In 1055, Tostig became Earl of Northumbria in the subsequent reshuffling of lands and titles.38 Her husband’s promotion thus solidified Judith’s place as one of the most prominent ladies in the country after the queen, her sister-in-law (Tostig’s older brother Harold was not formally married, although he had a common-law or hand-fast wife named Edith, about whom very little is known). As a member of the aristocracy, Tostig must have controlled income-generating lands before 1055, but the earldom brought with it much more substantial income as well as a formal title. In one of King Edward’s charters of 1049, for example, Tostig is termed only nobilis in the witness list, while his father and older brother Harold are termed dux (S 1019); by 1061, Tostig has become dux (S 1034) and also eorl (S 1426).39 It is after 1055, then, that Judith begins to have the political and financial ability to patronize religious institutions and to commission works of art for churches and for herself—to use literacy and patronage as a way to define and assert her status in the years leading up to the Norman Conquest. Notes 1 A YouTube search of “Blutfreitag” or “Blutritt Weingarten” yields many hits, including: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlzYnK7crMY&feature=related (accessed 31 March 2014). 2 The game and a number of other family history items are linked through http://www. welfen.de/Spiel/Welfenspiel.html (accessed 15 February 2012). 3 For a discussion of the gender issues in the use of the word “patron,” see Corine Schlief, “Seeking Patronage: Patrons and Matrons in Language, Art, and Historiography,” in Patronage: Power and Agency in Medieval Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, 2013), 206–32. This study uses “patron” throughout. 4 These are: New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.708; New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.709; Monte Cassino, Archivio della Badia, Cod. 437; Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Aa.21. 5 See their introduction to Writing Medieval Women’s Lives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
The Books and the Life of Judith of Flanders
10
Kimberly A. Loprete, Adela of Blois: Countess and Lord (c.1067–1137) (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007); Lois L. Huneycutt, Matilda of Scotland: A Study in Medieval Queenship (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2003). 7 A number of secondary sources, including the Pierpont Morgan Library’s online catalog, incorrectly refer to Judith as Countess of Flanders. She was a daughter, not a wife, of a Count of Flanders and thus never a Countess. 8 Erin Jordan, Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 9 Ibid., 12. 10 Hedwig Röckelein, “Founders, donors, and saints: patrons of nuns’ convents,” in Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 207. 11 Sean Gilsdorf, Queenship and Sanctity the Lives of Mathilda and the Epitaph of Adelheid (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 30. 12 Huneycutt, Matilda of Scotland, 13. 13 E. Jordan, Women, Power, and Religious Patronage, 22–3. 14 The Gesta Normannorum, in its list of the children of Richard II, Duke of Normandy, includes Totidemque filias, quarum una nomine Adeliz Rainaldo Burgundionum comiti nupsit, ex qua Willelmum atque Widonem procreauit, altera Balduino Flandrensi, tercia iam adulta obiit virgo (And as many [3] daughters [as sons], of whom Adeliza was married to Reginald, Count of the Burgundians, and gave birth to William and Guy; another was married to Baldwin of Flanders, and a third died already grown up as a virgin). Text and translation from Elisabeth van Houts, ed. and trans., The Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1992), vol. 2, 28–9. Houts’s note remarks that “William of Jumieges is the only authority to mention the marriage of Count Baldwin IV of Flanders (988–1035) to an unknown daughter of Duke Richard II” (29, n.5). The Leiden version of the twelfth-century Genealogia Comitum Flandriae Bertiniana states that Baldwin IV “married Otgiva, daughter of Count Giselbert, and afterwards married a daughter of Richard the Second, Duke of Normandy (duxit Ogivam filiam Gisalberti comitis, et postea filiam secundi Ricardi ducis Normannorum); the note to this sentence is the one word “Alienoram,” with no explanation of where the name came from (MGH SS IX, 307). See as well the discussion in Patrick McGurk and Jane Rosenthal, “The Anglo-Saxon gospelbooks of Judith, countess of Flanders: their text, make-up and function,” Anglo-Saxon England 24 (1994): 251–308, at 251, n.1. 15 David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (London and New York: Longman, 1992), 48. 16 Ibid, 49. 17 Scholarly acceptance of Baldwin IV and Eleanor of Normandy as Judith’s parents has reached the point where Kathleen Thompson presents it as undisputed fact in “Being the Ducal Sister” in Normandy and Its Neighbours 900–1250: Essays for David Bates, ed. David Crouch and Kathleen Thompson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 65; similarly, Karine Ugé includes without comment “Eleonor” as Judith’s mother in the family tree of the Counts of Flanders in Creating the Monastic Past in Medieval Flanders (York, UK: York Medieval Press; Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2005, xiii). Nor does Elisabeth van Houts’s Dictionary of National Biography entry for Judith acknowledge any uncertainty about Judith’s parentage. 18 George Beech, “The Participation of the Aquitanians in the Conquest of England 1066–1100,” Anglo-Norman Studies 9 (1986): 14. 6
Introduction
11
Laura L. Gathagan, “Embodying Power: Gender and Authority in the Queenship of Mathilda of Flanders” (Ph.D. Diss., City University of New York, 2002), 32. 20 Elisabeth van Houts, “Contrasts and Interaction: Neighbours of Nascent Dutch Writing: The English, Normans and Flemish (c.1000–c.1200),” Queeste: Tijdschrift over middeleeuwse letterkunde in de Nederlanden 13 (2006): 7. 21 Elizabeth M. Tyler, “Crossing Conquests: Polyglot Royal Women and Literary Culture in Eleventh-Century England,” in Conceptualizing Multilingualism in England, c.800–c.1250, ed. Elizabeth M. Tyler (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 194. 22 Hansmartin Decker-Hauff, “Judith Von Der Normandie,” Schwabische Lebensbilder 6 (1957): 16–27. For a thorough refutation of Decker-Hauff’s analysis, see Eduard Hlawitschka and Hartwig Cleve, “Zur Herkunft Der Herzogin Judith Von Bayern,” in Festschrift Für Andreas Kraus Zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Pankraz Fried and Walter Ziegler, Münchener Historische Studien Abteilung Bayerische Geschichte (Kallmünz, Opf.: Lassleben, 1982), 15–82. 23 See the volumes of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, ed. David Dumville, Simon Keynes, and Simon Taylor (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1983–), hereafter referred to as ASC. For an excellent electronic edition, see http://asc.jebbo.co.uk (accessed 23 September 2014). 24 ASC for 1049. 25 Tyler, “Crossing Conquests,” 180. 26 Elisabeth van Houts, “Matilda [Matilda of Flanders] (D.1083), Queen of England, Consort of William I,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); www.oxforddnb.com (accessed 4 June 2012). 27 Robin Fleming, Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991, paperback repr. 2004), 71. 28 Fleming, Kings and Lords, as well as “Domesday Estates of the King and the Godwins,” Speculum 58.4 (1983): 987–1007; see also Frank Barlow, The Godwins: The Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2002), especially Chapter 3. For excellent maps of the earldoms under Edward the Confessor, see Richard Mortimer, “Edward the Confessor: the Man and the Legend,” in Edward the Confessor: The Man and the Legend, ed. Richard Mortimer (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2009). 29 Book 3, Chapter 14 in Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of HamburgBremen, ed. Timothy Reuter, trans. Francis J. Tschan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959, repr.2002), 125; et tenuerunt Angliam in ditione sua, Eduardo tantum vita et inani regis nomine contento. For the full Latin text, see http://hbar.phys.msu.ru/gorm/ chrons/bremen.htm or Adam von Bremen, Hamburgische Kirchengeschichte, ed. B. Schmeidler (Hanover and Leipzig, 1917); note that the chapters are numbered differently in the Latin texts and the translation. Throughout this book, textual quotation will be provided in Modern English translation with original text in the notes. 30 See the various versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entries for 1051 and 1052; Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe has demonstrated the anti-Godwin bias of MS C in her edition, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition: Vol. 5, Ms C (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2001), xc–xci. The Vita Ædwardi is wholly biased towards the Godwins; see Frank Barlow, ed. and trans., The Life of King Edward Who Rests at Westminster, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 28–39. For analysis of the various versions of the events, see Barlow, The Godwins, especially 56–65. For an economically focused analysis, see Sally Harvey, “Eustace II of Boulogne, the Crises of 19
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1051–2 and the English Coinage,” in The English and Their Legacy, 900–1200: Essays in Honour of Ann Williams, ed. David Roffe (Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2012), 149–58. 31 Barlow, The Godwins, 42–3. 32 Barlow, ed. and trans., The Life of King Edward, xix. For a recent analysis of Edith’s patronage of this text, see Catherine A.M. Clarke, Writing Power in Anglo-Saxon England: Texts, Hierarchies, Economies (Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 135–43. 33 Barlow, The Life of King Edward, xlv and lxv. 34 Ibid., 38–9. 35 Ibid; in ipsis nuptiis filii sui ducis Tostini, quando sortitus est uxorem Iudittham. 36 Some historians have asserted that the marriage took place during the exile; see, for example, Heather J. Tanner, Families, Friends, and Allies: Boulogne and Politics in Northern France and England, c.879–1160 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 93. I draw here upon Philip Grierson’s argument in “The Relations between England and Flanders before the Norman Conquest,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series 23 (1941): 100. 37 As noted in MS C of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1052, Þæt wæs on þone Monandæg æfter Sancta Marian mæasse þæt Godwine mid his scipum to Suðgeweorce becom (that was on the Monday after St Mary’s mass that Godwin came with his ships to Southwark); the feast of St Mary’s assumption was celebrated on 15 August. I am indebted to John W. Briggs for informing me that feast of the Assumption fell on a Saturday in 1052, while the feast of the Nativity of Mary, 8 September, fell on a Tuesday. It seems more likely that the Chronicle is referring to the Monday after the Saturday feast (in August) rather than the Monday after the Tuesday feast (in September). 38 Siward’s death and Tostig’s acquisition of the earldom are noted in MSs D and E of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the 1055 entry. MS C notes Siward’s death but does not include any reference to Tostig. 39 Simon Keynes et al., eds, The Electronic Sawyer: Online Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Charters, Sawyer charters 1019, 1034, and 1426, http://www.esawyer.org.uk/ (accessed 6 March 2014).
Chapter 1
Lady of Northumbria, 1055–1065 One of the primary duties of an aristocratic wife was to provide legitimate heirs, but it is not entirely clear whether Judith fulfilled this duty in her first marriage. Any children Judith had with Tostig appear only briefly, if at all, in the historical record. Sources are clear that Tostig fathered at least two sons who grew to adulthood, but Judith was probably not their mother. It is most likely that she bore girls, or sons who did not live to adulthood, sometime in the second half of the 15-year marriage. Tostig’s two sons, Skuli and Ketel, are relatively well documented in Scandinavian rather than English sources. Frank Barlow discusses them as if they were Judith’s sons as well, but they were old enough to fight in Tostig’s army at the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1065 (discussed in detail in Chapter 3). Even if Judith had managed to bear two healthy sons in the 20 months immediately after the wedding, they would still have been only 12 and 13 at Stamford Bridge.1 It is much more likely that Skuli and Ketel were the sons of another, previous relationship, probably one that resembled Tostig’s brother Harold’s “hand-fast” relationship with Edith Swan-Neck. Emma Mason and other scholars have suggested that their Scandinavian names show that they were born to an Anglo-Danish woman who did not have enough power to assert her own or her sons’ claims to any Godwinson patrimony between 1051 and 1066 (the years of Judith and Tostig’s marriage).2 It is likely that Tostig fostered the boys in Norway in the late 1040s or early 1050s, as Skuli was later known as “koningsfostri,” foster-kin to the king.3 The Vita Ædwardi, the only text to mention children of Tostig and Judith, states that Tostig went to Flanders in 1065 “with his wife and nursing children.”4 Barlow’s note states that “If Tostig and Judith were married in 1051, there seems some exaggeration here,” and it does seem likely that the author intended that the audience’s sympathy go to Tostig. However, the Vita tends to be accurate about specific, seemingly non-essential details like these (as noted in the Introduction during the discussion of the date of their marriage), so there is no reason to doubt that they had very young children in 1065. Judith was in her early thirties; child mortality rates were certainly substantial enough for her to have been pregnant almost every year and not have any children over the age of five in 1065.5 Sally Crawford states, “There can be no question of the high level of infant and child mortality in Anglo-Saxon England from the fifth to the eleventh centuries,” although she does not venture to provide any specific numbers about those rates.6 Whether or not Judith and Tostig had children with them in 1065, we are certain that no child of theirs lived to be distinctively mentioned in the historical record. Perhaps the lactentibus liberis were girls who later entered religious houses or
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marriages with no record; perhaps they were boys or girls who died before reaching adulthood; perhaps they were boys who were unable to distinguish themselves. If she had children in her marriage to Tostig, Judith would probably not have been involved in their daily care. As an aristocrat, she had cooks, nurses, and staff to perform the various daily tasks required for childcare; she had other responsibilities as well, although we have no way of knowing how actively she was involved in life at Edward’s court, or in managing the estates that Tostig held. The only definite knowledge we have of Judith’s character and activities is her piety. Her religious devotion is her primary identifying characteristic in the relatively numerous contemporary and near-contemporary texts that mention her. These texts include both history and hagiography, and they uniformly praise Judith’s piety and generosity during her tenure as Lady of Northumbria. Symeon of Durham calls her honesta ac religiosa; the author of the Life of St Oswin says she is a mulier devota; the author of the Vita Ædwardi terms her Tostig’s religiose conjugis. With an unusual number of textual appearances for a woman who is not a queen or an abbess, Judith is mentioned as well in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which refers to her twice as “Tostig’s wife,” first in reference to the Crisis of 1051 and then to note that she accompanied her husband and the Archbishop of York to Rome in 1061. Since she was not on a royal or ecclesiastical mission, her main purpose in Rome must have been pilgrimage, a suggestion entirely in keeping with other descriptions of her piety. In their landmark essay “Court and Piety in Late Anglo-Saxon England,” Mary Frances Smith, Robin Fleming, and Patricia Halpin demonstrate that much secular support for the church in the eleventh century came in the form of objects rather than land; the lack of explicit charter evidence for grants of land to religious establishments has created the erroneous impression that the late Anglo-Saxon aristocracy did not demonstrate piety through gifts to the church. Judith is a prime example in their argument that many gifts, especially those from women, were valuable and prominent even though no longer extant. Such gifts indicate “the importance of conspicuous and public expenditure … [as aristocrats] focused on cramming the churches they endowed full of gaudy, outsized, priceless objects.”7 Judith may have been somewhat typical, then, in that she expressed her piety through display rather than (or in addition to) contemplation; her patronage defined her belief both for herself and for her beneficiaries. Judith is remembered as pious because she was a generous patron, not because she led a holy life or spent hours in prayer. Her first major act of religious patronage in England for which we have firm textual evidence is a donation to Durham Cathedral, described in Book 3 of Symeon of Durham’s Libellus de Exordio; it shows her taste for ostentatious display and also provides some brief hints about her character.8 Durham was the site of the shrine of St. Cuthbert, the most important local saint throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. The Libellus includes this episode immediately after a reference to Æthelwine’s installment as Bishop of Durham, which occurred in 1056, so it is reasonable, if not definitive, to date the episode to the early part of
Lady of Northumbria, 1055–1065
15
Tostig’s tenure as Earl of Northumbria. One of the new Earl’s first stops in his inaugural tour of his new holdings must have been the home of the internationally revered saint, and precious gifts and donations would have been a sensible way to start his relationship with this important power base. That seems to have been their strategy, since Symeon begins the episode’s narrative by separately crediting Tostig and Judith with impressive largesse to the church of St. Cuthbert. Tostig “held the church of St Cuthbert always in veneration, and embellished it with several gifts, which it still has today,” while Judith, who “loved St Cuthbert even more than did her husband, also gave various ornaments to the saint’s church.”9 Judith’s devotion to the saint is somewhat overzealous, however, and Symeon’s language makes clear Judith’s understanding of the transactional relationship between devotion and donation. Cuthbert’s shrine (indeed, the entire cathedral domain) was forbidden to women, but Judith “promised to give more still, together with many landed possessions, if she were allowed to enter his church and to adore him at his tomb.”10 The verb promiserat is definitively singular—not only is Tostig not involved in this offer, but Judith seems sure of her access to wealth to use for donations. Perhaps Symeon intended Judith’s desire to reflect on her positively, to show her zeal and generosity, but the language seems to critique her explicit connection of spiritual access with financial generosity. Symeon presents Judith as both imperious and somewhat conniving as the narration continues. He remains silent about the bishop’s or the monks’ responses to Judith’s request/offer, but proceeds directly to Judith’s plan to enter the shrine: “Since she did not dare to attempt such a thing herself, she devised the plan of sending one of her servants ahead of her, so that if she [the servant] were able to do this with impunity, the mistress would follow after her and would dare to enter the church with more confidence of her safety.”11 While Symeon’s portrayal could be ascribed to basic monastic misogyny, he clearly displays Judith as a coward (per se non ausa temptare) who is willing to endanger others but not herself to satisfy her desires. The obedient puella dies, faced with the impossible choice between defying her mistress (domina) or the dictates of St. Cuthbert: “As she was about to place her foot inside the cemetery, she was suddenly repelled by a violent force as of the wind, her strength failed, and stricken with a grave infirmity, she was scarcely able to return to the hospice, where falling on her bed, she was racked with terrible torment until at length she was deprived of both the pain and her life.”12 Cuthbert’s power blasts the maid before she can even get onto sacred ground, let alone anywhere near the shrine itself (Bishop Hugh le Puiset built Durham’s Galilee Chapel between 1170 and 1175 on the west end of the later, Romanesque cathedral complex expressly for female worshippers).13 Judith’s reaction to these events is fear, not remorse or guilt: “The countess was absolutely terrified at what had happened and began to tremble all over.”14 She and Tostig are interested in “making amends”15—not for the death of the maidservant, who seems completely unimportant to both Judith and Symeon, but for the offense to Cuthbert’s shrine. Her solution is patronage.
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Symeon describes their gift of a group of crucifixion sculptures: “she and her husband ordered to be made and clad in gold and silver an image of the crucified Christ … and also an image of St. Mary, the mother of God, and John the Evangelist, and they also gave to the church many other things for its adornment.”16 Since the figures were “clad with gold and silver,” they were probably fashioned with a wooden core that was then plated or gilded.17 During this period, sculptures given to other institutions by other aristocrats were large, even life-sized, so it is safe to assume that these were similar—that part of their appeal was their grandiosity and ostentation. Dodwell describes sculpted figures that wore jewelry and crowns originally made for people; he points out that Judith and Tostig’s gifts must have been massive because “when the Durham clergy were escaping with the cathedral treasures from the Normans who were harrying the north, they had to leave the crucifix behind. Though probably the most costly of their artistic possessions, it was simply too large and cumbersome to carry.”18 Smith, Fleming, and Halpin connect these figures to a variety of late Anglo-Saxon artifacts (many no longer extant) that represented the “high-status benefaction” of the secular nobility to the church.19 Judith and Tostig’s generosity, while perhaps spurred by an unusual episode, was not unusual in the context of the patronage gifts typical of the secular aristocrats of their time. That episode, with its ultimately unflattering presentation of Judith, includes hagiographical accretion, but its core events show an institutional memory of Tostig and Judith’s general unpopularity in their earldom. Whether or not Judith’s maid was actually blasted out of Durham Cathedral close by supernatural force, the Libellus episode attests to the richness of their gifts (which were despoiled by the Normans after the Conquest)20 and to the entitled imperiousness with which Judith approached the Durham monks. Oddly enough, this episode in Symeon’s Libellus also demonstrates a substantial amount of overlap with another miraculous story about another high-status woman at a northern religious establishment, Queen Margaret of Scotland at Laurencekirk. The similarities between the two narratives suggest not only a possible analogous relationship between the texts but also an ecclesiastical sensibility that easily connects high-status women, exclusion, and treasure donation.21 While Judith’s donation of the statues to Durham probably occurred in the mid- to late 1050s, Symeon composed his text in the first decade of the twelfth century. In the intervening 50 years, Queen Margaret’s experience was recorded in Goscelin’s Vita Laurentii sometime around 1093.22 Like Judith, Margaret (later St. Margaret) was forbidden to enter the all-male precinct of the church: the canons “begged her earnestly not to transgress the holy law and custom, lest she should incur the wrath of the patron ruling there.” Like Judith, however, Margaret “wanted to honour and exalt this sacred place, and pressed ahead.” Unlike Judith, Margaret takes the risk on her own, and is then (like Judith’s puella) “seized by severe pains in her whole body” as she begins to enter the church enclosure. Margaret survives this reminder of the power of the saint; with the efficacy of the canons’ prayers,
Lady of Northumbria, 1055–1065
17
she is restored to health and then able to donate “a great silver cross and a beautiful chalice” to Laurencekirk.23 MacQuarrie argues that there is “no doubt” that Goscelin used a now-lost Scottish source for the Scottish episodes in the Vita; a version of the Margaret episode, occurring so close in time to Goscelin’s text’s composition, may have been transmitted to Goscelin either textually or orally.24 There is little overlap in vocabulary between Goscelin’s and Symeon’s narratives, but the overlap in content is striking enough to legitimate the possibility that Symeon knew Goscelin’s text or his Scottish sources (oral or textual) and drew on the Margaret story as a model to generically substantiate his own very similar narrative about a high-status, secular woman attempting to enter a forbidden male ecclesiastical space.25 Both women overstep the boundaries allowed them by the religious establishment; modern medicine might even diagnose Margaret’s “severe pains” and Judith’s trembling as psychosomatic reactions caused by anxiety around defiance of church regulation (the puella’s death is not so easily explained, unfortunately). Both women try to assuage this anxiety with ostentatious donation of treasure objects to the respective churches. In both narratives, the aristocratic women’s behavior is presented in such a way that they remain the suppliants in the episodes; rather than show the church as the indebted recipient of a secular woman’s largesse, Symeon and Goscelin both construe the events so that the women remain appropriately humble and grateful. A thematically and narratively similar episode about Judith and Tostig in Northumbria appears in the texts composed for the cult of St. Oswine in the twelfth century at Tynemouth (see Appendix 1 for translation of the relevant chapters).26 The Vita Oswini states that since Judith was not at the invention of St. Oswine’s relics (dated in the Vita to March 1065 at Tynemouth), she asked Æthelwine, Bishop of Durham, for a part of the relics. When he brought some hairs from Oswine’s head to her, she submitted them to a trial by fire to test their authenticity. The hairs, of course, did not burn, and, awed and frightened by the power of the saint, Judith then presented Tynemouth with gifts to further Oswine’s glory. Paul Anthony Hayward has definitively shown that the eleventh-century “events” in the cult’s textual traditions are fictions: “it is much more likely that the abbey’s hagiographers fabricated the discovery” of Oswine’s body and many of the miracles that followed the supposed inventio as part of their strategy to claim the rights to Tynemouth over the more powerful church at Durham, which already claimed Cuthbert as its most powerful and important protector.27 Hayward argues that Judith’s “alleged” test of the hair in a trial by fire is merely an adaptation/ conflation of two episodes in Durham texts: “The hagiographers’ most striking strategy is their fabrication of miracles in an attempt to show that Oswine was as worthy in the eyes of God as Cuthbert. The ordeal miracle is clearly a product of this approach.”28 The “forger,” as Hayward terms the author, has combined details of a similar miracle involving Cuthbert’s hair with the details of the episode of Judith’s forbidden entry to Cuthbert’s shrine (both episodes are in Symeon’s Libellus).29
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While Hayward’s focus is the later conflict between St. Alban’s and Durham, he has effectively proven that the episode of the “ordeal” miracle was composed (he would say “fabricated”) very early in the twelfth century, probably as early as 1110.30 As such, his argument prominently highlights the very delicate nature of using hagiography as a historical source: as a complete fiction, the events narrated in the text do not have any historical authenticity. Judith did not try to burn some of Oswine’s hair and then present a new shrine to Tynemouth in 1065 (or at any other time). However, the characterization of Judith and Tostig in the episode must have seemed at least somewhat plausible to the Vita’s audience; otherwise, the forgery would be too evident as forgery. The Vita was definitely made within living memory of Tostig’s tenure in the earldom; an elderly monk in 1110 would have had childhood memories of the years 1055–1065 and the effects of Tostig’s rule and Judith’s religious zeal in Northumbria. A more literary than historical analysis of the Vita Oswini episode can analyze Tostig and Judith as characters in a text, and thus discover a historically accurate representation of the way they were perceived in Northumbria as part of the forger’s goal of believability. As in Symeon’s account, Judith is effusively praised for her religious faith even as she is characterized as both overbearing and generous. The Vita Oswini author first identifies Judith, unsurprisingly, as the wife of “Count” Tostig, and he refers to her throughout the text as comitissa.31 Like Symeon, the forger also includes her name during this first appearance (Judith nomine), perhaps to add an air of authenticity through detail to his text. The author assures his audience that she is devout (twice using forms of devota to describe her). However, the main verb of her first appearance is mandaret—when we first see Judith, she is making requests of or giving orders to the Bishop, behavior that seems more imperious towards than respectful of church hierarchy. Furthermore, the forger overemphasizes Judith’s pious motives for testing the relics, supposedly affirming her faith: “not that she had any doubt concerning the hair, but so that on account of this test she might more widely extol the merits of the martyr all about.”32 The use of apophasis in this phrase calls into question the previous declarations of devotion; by stating that she did not doubt, the author actually introduces questions about doubt and overzealous testing into the narrative. One effect of the trial by fire is that Judith is knocked over by some sort of supernatural force, just as her maid was in the Durham text (although Judith’s divine blow, like Margaret’s, is not fatal). The verbs describing Judith at the end of the chapter are in the passive voice, so she is “cast down” and then “raised upright” without any clarity of the agent of the action.33 While her companions or servants could certainly have helped her up from her prostrate position, it is unclear why she falls down; perhaps it is because of overwhelming emotion at witnessing the miracle, perhaps because of the wrath of God or the saint at her presumptuous actions. The text implies that she deserved the terror that was visited upon her through a comparison of her emotions before and after the trial. When Judith first receives the hairs, she sheds an innumerable amount of tears because of her great joy.34 After the trial, her tears are instead caused by terror and they arrive
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19
in gasps.35 The shrine in which she encloses the unburned hairs is something of a penalty or penance for her temerity; its appearance in the chapter’s last sentence does not fully dissipate the episode’s mood of disapproval at her impertinence. Hayward has shown that the trial by fire episode is a forgery, but its characterization of Judith accords with Symeon’s presentation of her, making the forgery seem that much more plausible to its initial audience. Hayward notes as well that the forgery of the ordeal episode shows that “It is not strange, therefore, that Oswine’s cult does not figure among those which Judith is known to have encouraged in Flanders and later Bavaria.”36 Bavarian texts (discussed further in Chapter 4) show that she gave relics of St. Oswald to Weingarten Abbey late in the eleventh century. Oswald’s head was buried in Cuthbert’s tomb at Durham, and her later gifts show her devotion to that Northumbrian saint as well as to the more prominent Cuthbert.37 Although she never actually gave a jewel-encrusted shrine to Tynemouth for Oswine’s relics, the forger knew the episode would fit with Judith’s reputation for imperious assurance and piety expressed through ostentatious patronage. The Vita Oswini provides a similarly unsavory presentation of Tostig’s character. Although he appears only briefly in Chapters 6 and 7, he shows bad judgment and he seems to tacitly approve (although not indulge in) inappropriate sexual behavior. A chaplain, one of Tostig’s close advisors and probably his confessor as well, is quartered “under the tower of the church” at Tynemouth during one of Tostig’s visits there. The chaplain returns to the church late at night after a lavish banquet at the nearby manor house serving as Tostig’s court; drunk with wine, he has sex with a prostitute inside the church. The wrath of the saint shakes the walls of the church almost to ruin; the destruction halts only when another priest, who has been praying by the saint’s tomb, castigates the chaplain and throws the prostitute out of the church. The forger closes the chapter by celebrating the power, mercy, and justice of St. Oswine demonstrated in this episode; readers are left to wonder why Tostig has chosen as his advisor and confessor a man who consorts with prostitutes and why he suggested or agreed that part of his escort should be quartered on holy ground. Neither decision indicates good judgment of character; the episode implies that Tostig does not know how to manage the relationship between the secular aristocracy and the religious hierarchy. One almost inevitable conclusion is that a confessor who hires prostitutes will likely be lenient to confessants committing similar sins. The Vita Ædwardi praises Tostig’s chastity, stating that “He renounced desire for all women except his wife of royal stock, and chastely, with restraint, and wisely he governed the use of his body and tongue.”38 The Vita Oswini, in contrast, states that one of Tostig’s chaplains was unchaste, implying a laxness of sexual morality in his court, if not in his person. As in the episode of the trial by fire, the events of this chapter are forgeries, but the presentation of the characters had to seem authentic in order to make the invented events believable. The moral laxness of Tostig’s court must have seemed as accurate as Judith’s patronage in atonement for her imperious temerity.
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Even in forgery, then, Judith was commemorated as a lavish patron. She further developed her understanding of the role of patronage in devotional practice during her pilgrimage to Rome in 1061. Manuscript D of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle includes her in its brief mention of the journey: “In this year, Bishop Ealdred travelled to Rome for his pallium, and he received it from Pope Nicholas, and the Earl Tostig and his wife also travelled to Rome, and the bishop and the earl endured great difficulty when they travelled homeward.”39 The journey is mentioned as well in William of Malmesbury’s Vita Wulfstani and Gesta Pontificum.40 The Vita Ædwardi, unsurprisingly, provides the greatest detail about this journey; it refers to Judith as fausta in the episode’s introduction, perhaps to emphasize her good fortune in traveling to Rome on pilgrimage.41 The Vita initially states that the party was comprised of Tostig, Judith, and Tostig’s younger brother Gyrth; the narrator later names as members of the party Ealdred, Bishop of York; Gospatric, a Northumbrian nobleman; and Giso and Walter, two priests who were Normans but in the service of King Edward (these last two are mentioned as primary members of the party in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Pontificum42). Taking an unusual route for travelers from England, they “travelled to Rome through Saxony and the upper reaches of the Rhine.”43 Veronica Ortenberg states that by the tenth century, the “standard” route led through France: Having landed at the mouth of the Seine or the Canche, near Etaples, the AngloSaxon pilgrim went through various monasteries and hospices in France, some of which had been founded specifically for pilgrims from England … From there, he went on … across the Jougne Pass to Lausanne … then across Lombardy, Tuscany and central Italy to Rome.44
Known as the Via Francigena, this route relied on established Roman roads.45 Tostig and Judith probably deviated from this standard route to allow them a brief stay in Bruges with Judith’s half-brother Baldwin V, Count of Flanders. She may not have seen her blood relatives in the 10 years since the Crisis of 1051; the 1061 visit may have renewed Baldwin’s relationship with his half-sister and reaffirmed his alliance with the Godwins (distinct from his diplomatic relationship with King Edward). Because the Vita is explicit about their travels through Saxony to reach the Rhine, it is most likely that they traveled overland from Bruges through Ghent or Antwerp, meeting the Rhine somewhere near Dusseldorf or Cologne. In keeping with the Vita’s reiteration of Tostig’s religious faith, the author asks, “what tongue or what words could properly tell with what devotion and generosity he worshipped on the outward and return journey each saint’s shrine?”46 Since this section of the Vita is dedicated to providing contrasting character sketches of Tostig and his older brother Harold, Judith receives no credit for these devotional stops, but we can assume that she shared his enthusiasm for both the devotion (deuotione) and the generous patronage (munificentia) demonstrated at these shrines. We know that the party arrived in Rome before 15 April because the Vita informs us that Pope Nicholas included Tostig in the Easter Synod of 1061.47 While her
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husband and the archbishop met with the Pope, Judith probably visited prominent churches in Rome to pray at their saints’ shrines and to see their treasures. In her work on English pilgrims in Rome, Ortenberg has argued that there was something of a standard list of destinations for those staying in the schola anglorum, the English hospice in Rome.48 W.J. Moore has described the schola anglorum to be the section of the city (rather than simply one building or institution) centered on S Spirito in Sassonia; pilgrims would stay in the schola each night and venture out to different destinations during the day, just as modern tourists do.49 As noble companions to an (arch)bishop, Judith and Tostig would have commanded the best lodgings available at the schola and had priority access to the most prized relics and shrines throughout the city. A near-contemporary drawing of the eleventhcentury basilica of St. Peter’s appears in an Italian manuscript now housed at Eton College; it shows one of the places Judith and Tostig definitely visited. Eton’s catalog states that in this image, “The facade of the old Basilica of S. Peter’s is very accurately represented, with the bronze peacocks on the outer corners, and the original mosaics, of the Lamb, the Four Beasts, and the Twenty-four Elders.”50 This monochromatic line drawing conveys the grandeur and ornamentation of St. Peter’s; the peacocks even look a bit like some of the subsidiary birds in the border of one of the manuscript images discussed in Chapter 2. Other churches and shrines that she visited (if Sigeric’s itinerary is even a rough approximation of hers) also cultivated Judith’s sense of the ways that luxury objects proclaimed wealth and sophistication as well as religious devotion. Textual references to the journey are not focused on Judith’s cultural and religious experiences, of course; the textual record concentrates on the party’s “official” business in Rome and on the assault on the party at their initial departure from Rome. Most prominently, Ealdred had come to claim his pallium for the archbishopric of York, but he did not want to give up the lucrative and powerful bishopric of Worcester that he already held. Barlow suggests that Ealdred, in a separate matter, was as well seeking papal privileges for King Edward’s new project at Westminster. The Pope initially denied Ealdred’s request for the pallium, stating he could not hold both York and Worcester simultaneously. In addition to providing military protection and secular prestige to the group, Tostig may have been delivering to the Pope the English tribute known as “Peter’s Pence.”51 The Vita Wulfstani states that when Pope Nicholas first denied Ealdred’s request, Tostig was “breathing dire threats that for this there should be no further annual payments from England to the Roman pope.”52 As Earl of Northumbria, of course, Tostig had a vested interest in having his ally Ealdred confirmed as Archbishop of York; his threat to the Pope recorded by William of Malmesbury seems not to accord with the portrait of the deeply religious and respectful Tostig provided in the Vita Ædwardi. Judith had already separated from the main group before the Pope’s initial decision to deny Ealdred the pallium of York. The Vita author states, “We forgot to say before that, as the earl’s stay in Rome was protracted owing to Bishop Ealdred’s case, he had sent his wife and her royal escort on ahead, together with
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most of his own men; and these had a successful journey.”53 She thus was not present during the assault and robbery that occurred right outside Rome after Tostig and Ealdred’s initial departure; Tostig’s party was “stripped of everything to the last penny” (according to the Gesta Pontificum) by a group led by Count Gerard of Galeria as part of Gerard’s ongoing local political dispute with the Pope.54 When they returned to Rome after the assault, the Pope (full of “sorrowful compassion,” according to the Vita Ædwardi) reversed his decision and granted the pallium of York to Ealdred; Pope Nicholas also “soothed the earl [Tostig] with loving words and, especially, with great gifts taken from the bounty of St Peter.”55 Even after the robbery, then, Tostig may have come home with more treasure than he had initially taken on the journey. The Gesta Pontificum provides Tostig’s script that inspired the Pope’s “sorrowful compassion” and gifts: Tostig, for his part, after using sharp words to the Pope, brought him round to a favourable view. He told Nicholas that his excommunication could hold no terror for distant peoples, considering that local footpads [like Gerard] made light of it. Powerless to deal with rebels, the pope was taking out his bad temper on suppliants. Either Nicholas must use his authority to get Tostig his property back, or it would be obvious to all that it was his lack of good faith that had caused the loss. When the king of the English heard the story, he would withdraw the tribute he paid to St Peter—all thanks to Nicholas; and Tostig would not fail to play his part by putting the facts of the case in the worst light possible.56
Tostig’s speech here, even in the indirect form provided by William of Malmesbury, demonstrates an impressive ability to bring strong diplomatic and political pressures to negotiations. His overt and covert threats must have seemed legitimate to the Pope and his advisors, even from a man who had just been “stripped” of everything by bandits. They also show that the piety ascribed to him in the Vita Ædwardi did not extend to the Pope when his own political and financial interests were at stake. Judith’s separate homeward journey from Rome, then, is an enigma in all details but its success. Did she retrace the party’s original steps through the Rhine Valley? Did she return on the “standard” route, the Via Francigena? Could she have traveled on the Via Carolingia, stopping in Rouen to visit with Duchess Matilda of Normandy, her niece, who was almost the same age? The latter is a distinct possibility: both William of Malmesbury and the Vita Ædwardi state that two Normans were in the original party; the group would have been assured of safety and hospitality throughout the duchy. While Bishop Ealdred of Worcester (very soon to be Archbishop Ealdred of York) was no longer with this part of the group, Ealdred would crown Matilda as Queen of England just seven years later, indicating a link that may have come, at least partly, through Matilda and Judith’s family connections. A stop in Normandy would have made diplomatic as well as familial sense for Judith. In Normandy, she would have seen Matilda’s growing power as Duchess: Matilda routinely witnessed charters, granted lands to religious houses
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and loyal followers, and acted in her husband’s place when he was on military campaigns.57 In 1061, Matilda’s situation (whether observed first-hand or reported by others) probably acted as something of a model for Judith’s aspirations as Lady of Northumbria. While she thus may have stopped in Normandy on her return journey without her husband, we are sure only that she arrived safely back in England with an updated sensibility of devotional fashions in church and reliquary ornamentation. Tostig brought papal treasures back with him as well as political success in Ealdred’s mission; Judith was thus poised both financially and devotionally to continue her religious patronage program with even more energy than before. One possible part of that patronage program is a porphyry and silver portable altar, now in the Musée de Cluny in Paris. Art historians have associated the altar with Judith because of the stylistic similarities of its engravings to miniatures in Judith’s gospel books, the most famous of her patronage projects (discussed in Chapters 2 and 3).58 It certainly would have been an appropriate object for religious use and display for a wealthy, pious noblewoman. If it was indeed Judith’s, it is likely that she commissioned the altar and the books at about the same time, probably in the year or so immediately following her Roman pilgrimage. The altar provides a thematic introduction to all of Judith’s devotional focuses: the Virgin Mary, Christ and the Crucifixion, relics, and luxurious display. The altar itself is made from prestige materials.59 The engraved silver gilt frame, with images and a devotional inscription, encloses the slab of porphyry. Both C.J. Lynn and Jennifer O’Reilly suggest that the altar probably also functioned as a reliquary; limited evidence from continental portable altars of roughly the same period implies that the precious porphyry protected an even more precious relic.60 Lynn shows that porphyry, a form of copper ore, was brought in relatively small quantities to England and Ireland from Rome during the early medieval period, probably as a form of pilgrimage souvenir; by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was imported in larger quantities to be used as floor tile or in shrines. Lynn notes that “It seems certain that the imperial connections of the use of porphyry in the Roman period were understood in medieval times and that the material was used deliberately for this reason, as well as for its durability and attractive appearance.”61 It is tempting to hypothesize that Judith commissioned the altar after her 1061 journey, during which she could certainly have acquired the porphyry slab, and perhaps the relic it enclosed, in just the way Lynn describes. The figures on the altar certainly overlap with the devotional interests indicated in Judith’s gospel books. O’Reilly has detailed the numerous stylistic similarities between the altar’s figures and those in Judith’s gospel books—these include the presentation of the dead Christ on the Tau cross, the unusual placement of the beasts in relationship to Christ and each other, and atypical iconographic details of the beast-figures.62 She also ties the altar’s figural program to adoratio crucis as an important part of early medieval devotion in general.63 The altar was made for a patron who collected relics and was devoted to the worship and contemplation of the cross through the words and symbols of the Evangelists; that patron also
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expressed devotion through deluxe commissions of objects made from precious materials that expressed aesthetic sophistication and extreme wealth as well as religious veneration. That sophistication is evident in the altar’s inscriptions as well. The two legible lines, engraved on the long sides of the altar, identify the winged figures through hexameters with bisyllabic leonine rhyme. Along the left side:64 [Hic ge]netrix meret Gabriel cui sanctus adheret (Here the mother mourns him to whom the holy Gabriel cleaves)
While along the right: Discipulus plorat Raphael quem semper adorat (the disciple weeps over him whom Raphael always worships)
These verses thus identify the winged figures as the archangels Gabriel and Raphael; they also use a newly popular Latin verse form. Michael Lapidge dates broad medieval usage of bisyllabic leonine rhyme to the second half of the eleventh century, noting that earlier use “seems to have been almost incidental … as if by chance.”65 More widespread on the continent than in England, bisyllabic leonine rhyme was just beginning to be favored when the altar was made. Teviotdale, who calls the verses “pedestrian,” makes the interesting point that a viewer of the altar would have needed to handle it, to turn the object over and around to read the verse inscriptions;66 such a relationship would be available only to a select few, those privileged enough to have permission to hold the altar and thus the relic it encased. The hexameters, then, are multifunctional: the poetic content identifies the winged figures while the poetic form and visual presentation signify the fashionable taste and the exclusive access of the altar’s patron. O’Reilly cautions against assuming a connection between Judith and the altar, especially given the lack of extant similar, contemporary work; she does note, however, that “A little portable reliquary altar in precious materials would have been an appropriate gift or commission for a pious royal lady and inclusion among Judith’s liturgical collection would conveniently explain how the Cluny altar escaped the Norman conquerors.”67 If Judith did indeed commission the altar, she did so at the same time that she engaged a team of scribes and artists to create what is now the largest group of extant manuscripts made in Anglo-Saxon England for an individual patron. Notes 1 Since the wedding took place in the summer of 1051, the very earliest a child could have been born is March of 1052; that child would have been 13 years, 6 months old in September of 1065. 2 Emma Mason, The House of Godwine: The History of a Dynasty (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), 103.
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English translations of Morkinskinna and Heimskringla erroneously translate this term as “King’s foster-father,” so some scholars have doubted Tostig’s paternity of Skuli, since with the incorrect translation Skuli seems to be a generation older than King Olaf (and thus the same age/generation as Tostig). Alison Finlay’s 2003 translation of Fagrskinna notes, however, that the fostri in koningsfostri is much more general than “father” and merely shows that Skuli was considered foster-kin to the King. Since both Olaf and Skuli were probably in their late teens in 1066, it is probably more accurate to see them as foster brothers. See Alison Finlay, trans., Fargrskinna, a Catalogue of the Kings of Norway (Boston: Brill, 2004), 236, n.692. 4 Frank Barlow, ed. and trans., The Life of King Edward Who Rests at Westminster, 2nd ed. Oxford University Texts. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992), 83; cum conjuge et lactentibus liberis. 5 Nicholas Orme shows that roughly a third of the children born to English kings from 1150 to 1500 died before the end of their first year, and less than half lived to their twenties, “despite the better standards of living and medical care available to children of such status,” in his Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 113. 6 Sally Crawford, Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1999), 92. 7 Mary Frances Smith, Robin Fleming, and Patricia Halpin, “Court and Piety in Late Anglo-Saxon England,” The Catholic Historical Review 87.4 (2001): 600. 8 All references to Symeon of Durham’s work are to D.W. Rollason’s edition and translation: Libellus De Exordio Atque Procursu Istius, Hoc Est Dunhelmensis, Ecclesie: Tract on the Origins and Progress of This the Church of Durham, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000). 9 Ibid., 174–5; Tostig in ueneratione semper ecclesiamsancti Cuthberti habuit, et donariis non paucis que inibi adhuc habentur ornauit; Judith multo plus sanctum Cuthbertum diligens, diversa illius ecclesie ornamenta contulerat. 10 Ibid., 176–7; et adhuc plura cum multis terrarum possessionibus se donaturam promiserat, si eius ecclesiam intrare, et ad ipsus sepulchrum sibi licet adorare. 11 Ibid.; Sed tantam rem per se non ausa temptare, unam de pedissequis suis cogitauerat premittere, ut si hoc ipsa impune facere posset, domina post sequens securior ingredi auderet. 12 Ibid., 176; Iam pedem intra cimiterium erat positura, cum subito ueluti uentorum uiolentia repelli cepit et viribus deficere, et grauiter infirmata uix ad hospitium ualuit redire, decidensque in lectem, grui torquebatur cruciatu, tandem dolore cum uita caruit. 13 “Durham Cathedral, Galilee Chapel,” in Durham: Echoes of Power, British Library Online Gallery Exhibition, 2009, http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/durham/ powerchurch/ (accessed 1 April 2014). 14 Symeon, Libellus, 177; Hoc facto comitissa uehementer exterrita contremuit. 15 atque humiliter satisfaciendo; Rollason’s translation does not follow his punctuation of the Latin text at this point (Libellus, 176–7). 16 Ibid.; imaginem crucifixi … imaginem quoque sancte Dei geitricis Marie et Iohannis Euangeliste ipsa et eius coniunx fieri iusserunt et auro argentoque uestierunt, aliaque perplura ad decorem ecclesie obtulerunt. 17 C.R. Dodwell suggests that the crucifix was made of wood in Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 119; the supplementary figures probably were wooden as well. 18 Ibid., 213. 3
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Smith, Fleming, and Halpin,”Court and Piety in Late Anglo-Saxon England,” 587. Symeon, Libellus iii.15, 186–87. 21 Rollason does not note this analogue in his edition of the Libellus. Catherine Keene discusses the episode briefly in her Saint Margaret, Queen of the Scots: A Life in Perspective (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 80. In addition to the Judith connection, Keene also notes an almost identical miracle at Cuthbert’s tomb in the first half of the twelfth century, when Margaret’s daughter-in-law Matilda (Maud) of Huntingdon (d.1130/31), wife of King David of Scotland (d.1153), sent a female servant to try to enter Durham; the miracle is recorded in Chapter 74 of Reginald of Durham’s Libellus de admirandis beati Cuthberti quae novelis patratae sunt temporibus, ed. James Raine (London: J.B. Nichols and Son, 1835), 151–53. 22 An edition of Goscelin’s Vita Laurentii has not been published, although Wynzen de Vries’ 1990 doctoral thesis from the University of Groningen edits the texts with full collation of the two extant manuscripts. Alan MacQuarrie includes a text and translation of the Margaret episode in “An Eleventh-Century Account of the Foundation Legend of Laurencekirk, and of Queen Margaret’s Pilgrimage there,” Innes Review 47.2 (1996): 95– 109; all textual quotations are from MacQuarrie’s edition and translation. 23 The canons orant instanter ne transgrediatur legem sacrosancti instituti, ne incurrat offensam ibi presidentis patroni. At illa respondens se potius sacrum locum honorare et exaltare uelle, urget propositum; Margaret is cum subito diris totius corporis stimulata cruciatibus but then gives the church cruce argentea pregrandi et calice precipuo. Latin from MacQuarrie, “Eleventh-Century,” 106–7; English from 109. 24 Ibid., 99. 25 Paul Anthony Hayward disagees with MacQuarrie’s c.1093 date for Goscelin’s text, and suggests that the influence may flow from Symeon to Goscelin rather than in the other direction; more study is needed about the relationships between these two authors and texts. Either way, both texts demonstrate the era’s male ecclesiastical anxiety over the presence of wealthy women on church grounds (Hayward, personal communication, 16 April 2014). 26 The textual tradition of the Vita Oswini is detailed in the appendix of Paul Anthony Hayward’s essay “Sanctity and Lordship in Twelfth-Century England: Saint Albans, Durham, and the Cult of Saint Oswine, King and Martyr,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 30 (1999): 105–44. The two manuscripts are London, BL Cotton Julius A.x, fols. 2–43 (edited by Raine in Miscellanea Biographica for the Surtees Society in 1838) and Oxford, Corpus Christi College 134. Hayward’s notes indicate that he is working on an edition of the Oswine texts that will include a translation as well as variants from both manuscripts. 27 Hayward, “Sanctity and Lordship,” 111. 28 Ibid., 130. 29 Ibid., 131. 30 Ibid., 144. 31 For Modern English translation of Chapters 6 and 7 of the Vita Oswini, see Appendix 1. 32 … non ut in aliquo de ipsis dubitaret, sed ut Martyris meritum circumcirca per hoc latius extolleret, Chapter 6, Vita Oswini. 33 prosternitur and erigitur, respectively. 34 quantumque lacrimarum mulier devota prae gaudio fuderit. 35 Comitissa quoque rei magnitudine perterrita, solo prosternitur; lacrimosisque singultibus Deum Sanctumque Martyrem diutius exorans, quandoque tremens erigitur. 19 20
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Hayward, “Sanctity and Lordship,” 131, n.251. See further Dagmar O’Riain-Raedel, “Edith, Judith, Matilda: The Role of Royal Ladies in the Propagation of the Continental Cult,” in Oswald: Northumbrian King to European Saint, ed. Clare Stancliffe and Eric Cambridge (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1996), 210–29. 38 Barlow, The Life of King Edward, 51; preter eandem regie stirpis uxorem suam omnium abdicans uoluptatem, celebs modermoderatius corporis et oris sui prudenter regere consuetudinem. 39 Her for Ealdred biscop to Rome æfter his pallium, ond he hine underfeng æt þam papan Nicolæ, ond se eorl Tostig ond his wif eac foran to Rome, ond se bisceop ond se eorl gebidan mycele earfoðnysse þa hi hamward foran. Text from G.P. Cubbin, ed., The AngloSaxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 6, MS D, 76; translation is my own. 40 William of Malmesbury’s Vita Wulfstani has been edited and translated most recently by Michael Winterbottom and Rodney M. Thomson in Saints’ Lives: Lives of SS. Wulfstan, Dunstan, Patrick, Benignus and Indract, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); for an English translation only, see Michael Swanton, Three Lives of the Last Englishmen, Garland Library of Medieval Literature (New York: Garland, 1984). The journey to Rome is narrated in i.10.1–2 of the Vita. For facing-page edition and translation of the Gesta Pontificum, see William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, the History of the English Bishops, eds. and trans. Michael Winterbottom and Rodney M. Thomson, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). 41 Barlow, The Life of King Edward, i.5, 53ff. 42 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, iii.115.13. 43 Barlow, The Life of King Edward, 53; per Saxoniam et superiores Rheni fines Romam tetendit. 44 Veronica Ortenberg, “Archbishop Sigeric’s Journey to Rome in 990,” Anglo-Saxon England 19 (1990): 204. Ortenberg also provides a map of this route at 230. 45 See discussion of the Via Francigena under “Pilgrimage Routes” in the Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage, ed. Larissa J. Taylor et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 560–61. 46 Barlow, The Life of King Edward, 53; Et que lingua uel quis semo digne explicabit, quanta deuotione et munificentia singula sanctorum loca in eundo uel redeundo ueneratus sit? 47 Ibid., 52, n.129. 48 Veronica Ortenberg, The English Church and the Continent in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Cultural, Spiritual, and Artistic Exchanges (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 132; see also her “Archbishop Sigeric’s Journey,” 204. 49 W.J. Moore, The Saxon Pilgrims to Rome and the Schola Saxonum (Freiburg: The Society of St. Paul, 1937), Chapter 3. 50 The image appears on f.122r of Eton College, MS 124; see M.R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Eton College (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1895), 56. Reproduction available in a variety of online sites, including http://www.learn.columbia.edu/ma/htm/kd/ma_kd_image_oldsp017.htm (accessed 23 September 2014). 51 See Barlow, The Life of King Edward, 52–57, especially notes 128–39. Barlow synthesizes the information provided in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Pontifium (iii.115.13–17) as well as the Vita Wulfstani (i.10.1–2), both of which are focused on the dispute over the archbishopric. 36 37
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Translation from Michael Swanton, Three Lives, 103. Winterbottom and Thomson’s translation presents Tostig as somewhat ridiculous, “huffing and puffing with threats” (Vita Wulfstani, i.10.1); Tostino comite qui cum eo uenerat magnas efflante minas quod nummi quos Anglia quotannis Romano papae pensitat hac occasione ulterius non inferrentur. 53 Barlow, The Life of King Edward, 57; Quodque supra intermisimus, cum causa Aldredi episcopi dux in Roma perhendinaret diutius, uxorem suam et omnem regie dignitatis sue comitatum premiserat cum suis maioris numeri hominibus, et hi precesserant prospere. 54 Both the Vita Ædwardi and the Vita Wulfstani have thorough discussions of the political and religious nuances of this incident in their notes. 55 Barlow, The Life of King Edward, 57; ducem autem consolatus est caritatiua allocutione, ablatis insuper magnis xeniis ex beati Petri largitate. 56 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, iii.115.15–16; Tostinus quoque, gruibus uerborum contumeliis Apostolicum aggressus, in sententiam sibi placitam reduxit. Parum metuendam a longinquis gentibus eius excommunicationem, quam propinqui latrunculi deriderent. In suplices eum furere, in rebelles parum ualere. Aut sue sibi per eius auctoritatem reddenda, aut per eius fraudulentiam constaret amissa. Futurum ut haec rex anglorum audiens tributum sancti Petri merito Nicholai subtraheret; se non defuturum rerum ueritati exaggerandae. 57 See Gathagan, “Embodying Power,” especially Chapters 1 and 3. 58 Autel portatif: tablette de porphyre rouge, N° d’inventaire :CL11459. Paris, Musée National du Moyen Âge—Thermes de Cluny (searchable through http://www.photo.rmn. fr/cf/htm/); see as well Elizabeth Okasha and Jennifer O’Reilly, “An Anglo-Saxon Portable Altar: Inscription and Iconography,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984): 32–51. 59 See Okasha and O’Reilly, “Anglo-Saxon Portable Altar,” for a full description of the object. 60 Ibid., 36; C.J. Lynn, “ Some Fragments of Exotic Porphyry Found in Ireland,” Journal of Irish Archaeology 11 (1984): 25. 61 Lynn, “Some Fragments,” 24. 62 Okasha and O’Reilly, “Anglo-Saxon Portable Altar,” 37–42. 63 Ibid., 46. 64 Text and translation from E.C. Teviotdale, “Latin Verse Inscriptions in Anglo-Saxon Art,” Gesta 35.2 (1996): 99–110. Teviotdale’s version differs slightly from that provided by Okasha and O’Reilly, most notably in Teviotdale’s inclusion of Hic in the left-side verse. 65 Lapidge does not discuss the porphyry altar; see “Some Latin Poems as Evidence for the Reign of Athelstan,” Anglo-Saxon England 9 (1981): 67–8. Okasha and O’Reilly note the same point from F.J.E. Raby, A History of Christian Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 27 and 209. 66 Teviotdale, “Latin Verse Inscriptions,” 103. 67 Okasha and O’Reilly, “Anglo-Saxon Portable Altar,” 51. 52
Chapter 2
The English Books The commissioning of the four Gospel books shows that Judith wanted beautiful religious objects for herself as well as for the institutions she patronized.1 In this, she may have been typical, but because of the huge loss of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts through the later medieval period and the English Reformation, she seems unique: we have no other “set” of personally commissioned books from the period, whether for a man or a woman. Goda, sister of King Edward the Confessor, gave at least one book to Rochester in the mid-eleventh century, but it is much less ornate than Judith’s Gospel books.2 Margaret of Scotland (c.1045–1093), queen and saint, is described in her Vita as a generous patron of books, but only one of her manuscripts has been identified. That book, also an extensively decorated mid-eleventh-century Gospel book, is somewhat analogous to Judith’s in that it was owned by a high-status secular woman. While much more luxurious than Goda’s book, it is not as visually spectacular as Judith’s books, however, and has been described as “modest” and “unpretentious.”3 Margaret probably acquired the book in the late 1050s or early 1060s while she was a student at Wilton Abbey and still identified as the sister of Edgar the Ætheling rather than the Queen of Scotland (she married Malcolm of Scotland in 1069/1070);4 she and Judith may have met at Edward’s court. Queen Edith, Judith’s sister-in-law, was also educated at Wilton Abbey and is thus another potential contemporary English female book patron, but nothing survives of her personal library, if it ever existed. Judith’s books now stand alone as the stellar examples of secular female patronage in late Anglo-Saxon England. Two of the books are now in New York at the Pierpont Morgan Library; the others are in Italy and Germany. All four are deluxe productions that would have displayed Judith’s wealth, piety, and good taste in the chapel of her household. The books now at the Morgan Library still have their original treasure covers, made of metal and encrusted with jewels (see Plates 1 and 2).5 Morgan M.709’s cover presents a full-length Christ in majesty, surrounded by the Evangelical beasts, while the M.708 cover is divided into two registers, with Christ in majesty and angels in the upper and Christ on the cross with Mary and John in the lower register. While the “jewels” are now largely modern replacements, they indicate the original placement of the medieval gems.6 The Fulda and Monte Cassino books originally had deluxe metal covers as well, although they have long since vanished.7 Most unusually, the books do not have the standard canon tables or calendars conventionally provided as preliminary material in Gospel books; they begin immediately with Gospel text and illustration. All four of the books use extensive quantities of gold in both the illustration and the lettering; the full-page
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miniatures use a wide variety of colors. As a group, they are beautiful, sumptuous, and distinctive. If Judith sought to make a definitive statement about her wealth and piety through this commission, she succeeded. In their landmark analysis of the group of manuscripts, Jane Rosenthal and Patrick McGurk demonstrate that one main scribe worked on all four of these Gospel books; they postulate that he was probably something of a director for the project as a whole.8 Table 2.1 shows the level of involvement of that scribe— scribe one—with each book. He wrote some of Morgan M.708, but much of that manuscript was probably written by the artist (whose work does not appear in any of the other three books). Scribe one wrote almost all of Morgan M.709, which was illustrated by an artist who was not the artist of M.708. Scribe one also wrote most of the text in the Fulda book; it was finished by a Flemish scribe who was probably also the artist. Finally, scribe one wrote all of the Monte Cassino book, and he was probably also the artist. I would postulate as well that scribe one was someone very close to Judith, perhaps her confessor as well as her main clerk, whom she trusted with the details of this deluxe and expensive group of commissions. Table 2.1
Scribe and artist detail, Judith of Flanders Gospels
Shelfmark Scribe
Morgan M.709 Almost all scribe one
Contents
Full Gospel texts
Artist
Same artist as Crowland Psalter (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 296)
Morgan M.708 Some scribe one, mostly scribe two All of Matthew and John; parts of Mark and Luke; full rubrics and titles Scribe two was probably the artist
Monte Cassino 437 All scribe one
Fulda Aa.21 Almost all scribe one
Brief parts of Matthew and John, large parts of Mark and Luke omitted; full rubrics and titles Scribe one was probably the artist
Parts of each Gospel omitted
Flemish artists did the illustrations post-1065
No evidence exists to indicate how much control he had over the aesthetic and theological choices made about the individual books; the possibilities range on a continuum from total control (with Judith merely approving expenses and accepting the finished items at the end) to very little (with Judith making all decisions about texts, design, colors, composition, and presentation on the page). Whenever possible, the analysis that follows uses an “and/or” construction to indicate that Judith, scribe one, or both of them made decisions about the books’ contents and presentation. It seems most likely that the more idiosyncratic features of the books would have required more input or approval from Judith than would
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the more standard presentations. Any employee knows that managerial approval is important for an atypical decision, and many of the books’ features are indeed very distinctive. Dating and Origin/Provenance Rosenthal and McGurk argue convincingly that the books were all made in the early to mid-1060s. Earlier art historians wanted to date the manuscripts, because of the illustrations, to an earlier part of the eleventh century. Art historical analysis aside, evidence from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Vita Ædwardi, and the Chronicle of John of Worcester points to 1063–1065 as well. Judith had access to the wealth of the earldom of Northumbria after 1055; she and Tostig were gone for most of the year in 1061 when they went to Rome; they then left England in 1065 after Tostig lost his earldom in the Northern Rebellion. That uprising became irreconcilably violent in October of 1065, when the Northumbrians attacked and plundered Tostig’s stronghold in York, killing more than 200 of his men and ransacking his treasury (the political events of 1065 are discussed in more detail in Chapter 3).9 Rosenthal and McGurk tentatively suggest that before that departure, the team of scribes and artists worked in Judith’s household in York. They delineate the extensive textual overlaps among the books, including the idiosyncratic omissions of much of the conventional prefatory material to the Gospels: “Alone among surviving Latin gospelbooks, the four Judith books confine their introductory texts to the prefaces for Mark, Luke, and John.”10 In addition, the books’ display capitals do not conform to those used at any known monastic scriptorium of the period.11 They note that “A patron of Judith’s wealth, ambitions, and connections would have been able to support” a workshop capable of producing the four books, so that “York might very hesitantly be put forward as the place where the four gospelbooks were made during Judith’s last few months in England.”12 Judith’s piety and patronage would certainly not have been out of place in York, which was traditionally the seat of the Earls of Northumbria; the AngloSaxon Chronicle tells us that Tostig’s predecessor, Siward, was buried in 1055 in the church he founded at Galmanho, the Church of St Olave.13 The ruins of the later medieval St. Mary’s Abbey dominate the site now, but in the eleventh century the area was called “Earlsburh” and encompassed the earl’s residence as well as his private church, devoted to his favorite saint. Judith and Tostig probably stayed at Earlsburh when they came to York. There has been no archaeological work done at the current St. Olave’s church, since there has been a working church on the site since its founding in the early 1050s; all of the archaeological work in the area has focused on the later medieval abbey church.14 Two side streets nearby are still called “Galmanho Lane” and “Earlsburgh Terrace,” however, indicating the pre-Conquest usage of the site. Harald Lindkvist has suggested that the earl’s residence was probably on the higher ground near the church;15 although such
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higher ground would be more defensible, it was evidently not defensible enough during the northern uprising in 1065. Rosenthal and McGurk’s placement of Judith’s scriptorium workshop at her household in York is thus unlikely. Their arguments for suggesting Judith’s household rather than a monastic or cathedral scriptorium are sound, but that household could not have been at York, as it was simply too dangerous. One of the Northumbrians’ complaints about Tostig was that he was an outsider, a southern absentee landlord who rarely came to his earldom; in a vicious cycle, the more he stayed away, the more unpopular he became. Judith was certainly in York at various times throughout her marriage (see Chapter 1); however, the violence and severity of the attack on Tostig’s court make it clear that the in-process Gospel manuscripts, with their jeweled covers and gold decoration, would have been destroyed or taken if they had been there. Judith’s in-house scriptorium must have been elsewhere. That “elsewhere” could include any of Tostig’s sizable holdings in the south. As its earl, Tostig held substantial estates in Northumbria, but he also controlled extensive lands in the south-central counties of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, and Hampshire (as well as numerous smaller holdings in other southern counties).16 Robin Fleming has argued convincingly that Domesday land holdings should be tallied by “comital family” rather than by individual; she calculates that the Godwins, as a group, generated about 2,500 pounds more revenue each year than the king.17 This financial advantage, according to Fleming, demonstrates the inherent weakness of Edward’s kingship, since “the Godwines’ land and wealth had outstripped the king’s. If the Confessor approved of the family’s rapid aggrandizement, he was a fool; if he acquiesced, he cannot have been in full control of his kingdom.”18 Peter Clarke similarly counts all Godwin-held lands as one unit, since the family’s control of an estate was more important politically and economically than the name of the individual family member who technically held the land (Clarke notes, for example, that Earl Godwin himself is listed in the Domesday Book as holding a number of estates, despite his death 13 years before the Conquest).19 Within the Godwin family lands, Clarke tallies those held by Tostig to be valued at 492 pounds, noting that this total is “probably an underestimate.”20 Those individually noted estates, however, indicate possible locations where Tostig and Judith could reasonably have claimed some sort of personal residence, even as those estates should also be counted as part of the family’s overall wealth.21 In each of the five counties listed above, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, and Hampshire, Tostig held estates substantial enough to support an aristocratic hall or manor on the premises.22 Two properties in Hampshire even include specific reference to a “hall” on the estate.23 Any of these large, wealthy estates—Potton in Bedfordshire, Bayford in Hertfordshire, Haddenham in Buckinghamshire, Holdenhurst in Hampshire, or Bloxham-andAdderbury in Oxfordshire—could have been Tostig and Judith’s main southern
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residence when they were not with the court. Any of them could also have been the location for Judith’s in-house scriptorium that housed the Gospel book project. This information about Tostig’s premier southern land-holdings is especially interesting in light of the one relatively sure localization we have relevant to this group of four manuscripts, the connection between the Morgan M.709 artist and the artist of the Crowland Psalter (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 296). While Barbara Raw and others have noted the striking similarities between the illustrations of the two books,24 the Morgan Library’s file on M.709 contains a handwritten note from Francis Wormald, dated October 1951, stating that Douce 296 and Morgan M.709 were illustrated by the same artist.25 The connection is most immediately apparent in comparing the two capital Qs on f.78r of Morgan M.709 and f.40v of the Crowland Psalter (Plates 3a and 3b). Since we know Douce 296 was made at Crowland, or perhaps at nearby Peterborough for Crowland,26 that connection provides some potential for hypothesizing the provenance of Morgan M.709 and possibly the rest of the group as well. If Judith’s Gospel project was housed at one of Tostig’s estates relatively near Peterborough, that artist could more easily have been hired for the job of illustrating the most deluxe (and also the most conventional) of the books. Of the premier manors listed above, Potton is the closest (only 40 miles from Peterborough), with Bayford a more distant 70 miles. The analyses that follow do not depend on the project’s execution near Peterborough in the early to mid-1060s, but will proceed with such an origin as the most likely scenario. The Evangelists and Their Symbols The two books in New York are the most elaborate of the set as well as the only two artifacts associated with Judith archived in the English-speaking world; the Morgan manuscripts have therefore received the overwhelming majority of the scholarly attention paid to the group. Of the four books, Monte Cassino certainly boasts the most unusual miniatures, but because of the Abbey’s low-tech library and relatively inaccessible location, they are not as well known in Anglo-Saxon studies as the Morgan illustrations. The Fulda book as well is not as recognized in English scholarship as its Morgan sisters, largely because its illustrations are continental rather than English (although it has received substantial attention from German scholars since twelfth- or early thirteenth-century documents relevant to the holy blood relic have been copied onto its end-leaves). The resonances among the English books’ miniatures are stylistic and compositional as well as thematic. Rosenthal and McGurk see the Evangelist miniatures as a group to have been “designed to express in pictorial terms some of the well-known relationships and distinctions among the four authors and their texts expounded in the exegetical literature on the Gospels.”27 They envision the images to have prompted or informed meditation upon the Life of Christ and/or the Gospel texts. The Evangelists’ relationships include those of the three synoptic Gospels
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vis-à-vis the Gospel of John as well as the thematically contrasting relationship between the Evangelist-disciples Matthew (who focused on Christ’s humanity) and John (on Christ’s divinity). While Rosenthal and McGurk’s thematic analysis focuses specifically on the illustrated figures of the Evangelists at the beginning of each Gospel, the investigation here concentrates on other compositional details in order to draw conclusions about practical as well as conceptual relationships among the books. Rosenthal and McGurk argue that all four books were originally intended for use in Judith’s household and private chapel, since the unusual selection of contents indicates that they were not “originally meant as gifts to established [monastic] houses or to Judith’s friends.”28 They posit that Morgan M.709 was intended as the deluxe Gospel for Judith’s household chapel, with its jeweled cover that proclaims its value even before it is opened.29 The illustration program of Morgan M.709 is the most traditional of the group (see Plates 4a–7; Plate 4b is included as a sample incipit page). Rosenthal and McGurk term M.709 “conventionally adorned,” with borders in “an eleventh-century version of the traditional Winchester frame,” initials “of the type customarily employed with Winchester frames in liturgical books” and portraits that “represent a wellestablished type.”30 The frontispiece is the heavily discussed crucifixion image that includes an early donor portrait showing Judith herself, prostrate at the foot of the cross (see Plate 8, as well as Chapter 3, for a discussion of this image and its connections to the donor portrait in the Fulda book). The most elaborate of the illustration sequences, it is also the most conventional and the least exciting, excepting the frontispiece. In contrast, Morgan M.708 is both less traditional and more visually interesting. Rosenthal and McGurk suggest that it was also a display book for the chapel that could have acted as a liturgical backup to Morgan M.709 (see Plates 9a–12).31 The borders around the miniatures are not traditional Winchester acanthus, but plain rectangles (Matthew and Luke) or architectural frames (Mark and John); Rosenthal and McGurk note that the undecorated capitals use “variations in the size of the components, unusual juxtapositions, and a different arrangement [on the page]” to provide “unique character” to these illustrations.32 The third wholly English book, now in the library at Monte Cassino, was probably made for Judith as a private devotional manual. Rosenthal and McGurk analyze the book’s contents to show that the selected texts “could be regarded as appropriate for a female patron” who wanted to engage in private devotional reading focused on the life and teachings of Christ.33 The book contains the full texts of Matthew and John (which provide contrasting emphases on the humanity and the divinity of Christ) as well as “texts chosen deliberately for their suitability for personal reading,” including “three sections devoted to women.” Furthermore, “care was taken that the chosen passages followed each other easily and readably, providing a seamless, coherent narrative which bears no evidence of the divisions between passages of the gaps of several chapters or more which intervene in the original text.” The Monte Cassino book is also the most finished of the four books
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in the sense that it includes all the headings and titles that Judith would have needed to use it. All these factors point to the conclusion that it was Judith’s personal book that she could have used in the chapel and elsewhere as well (see Plates 13–16). Rosenthal and McGurk refer to its “complex and idiosyncratic” decoration, most especially placement and presentation of the zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbols on the page facing the Evangelist portraits (the symbolic beasts are usually on the same page as the Evangelist figure).34 Temple notes the exceptional nature of the symbols in her description of the illustration program: “The placing of the evangelist symbols over the initial pages is most unusual … The anthropomorphic representations of the lion and the ox … have few parallels in Anglo-Saxon illumination.”35 Judith’s personal book, then, was the most distinctive and unusual of the four. Although I discuss the Monte Cassino Evangelist symbols in detail below, other components of the Monte Cassino illustration program demonstrate links among the three manuscripts. Taken as a group, the three sets of Evangelist miniatures executed in England show the three artists working closely together, aware of the others’ productions. They influenced each other’s decorative motifs, compositions, iconographical choices, and errors. Most obviously, the borders of the Evangelist portrait pages of Morgan M.708 and the Monte Cassino Book exhibit substantial stylistic overlap (as noted above, the frames of the Morgan M.709 Evangelist folios are executed in a very traditional “Winchester” style).36 While the Matthew and Luke borders of Morgan M.708 are simple gold rectangular frames, the Mark and John borders of Morgan M.708 use architectural and floral motifs very similar to those of the Monte Cassino Gospel. Temple refers to these as “arch and column” frames and notes that the Morgan M.708 frames have “plant scrolls in the spandrels.”37 In both books, the columns have botanical motifs in the capitals and bases38 which harmonize with other ornamentation on the page. The plants in the spandrels seem to be growing out of the columns; those in Morgan M.708 seem restrained when compared to those of the Monte Cassino Gospel, which include not simply plants but also human figures, lions, and an eagle. There is no obvious pattern to the inclusion of the border figures on the various folios of the Monte Cassino book. Two human figures climb in the foliage on the Matthew opening, perhaps since Matthew’s symbol is a man, but then there are no beasts at all in the Mark opening, while an eagle and a lion both climb above the figure of Luke, two lions balance above the Luke incipit, and two lions rest above the figure of John. All of these various figures are Evangelist symbols, so they certainly could have inspired meditation for the reader. Their inclusion and presentation seem somewhat haphazard, but they are also amusingly flamboyant and aesthetically pleasing. The Winchester-style borders of Morgan M.709 seem especially pedestrian when compared to the entertaining visual irregularities of the Monte Cassino borders. With their more reserved arches and foliage, the Morgan M.708 borders act as something of a stylistic bridge between the two extremes of the Morgan M.709 and Monte Cassino frames.
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A direct connection between Morgan M.709 and Monte Cassino comes from their seemingly unrelated Evangelist symbols. As noted above, the Monte Cassino Evangelist symbols are in an unusual place (the facing page), and the Monte Cassino calf and lion are zoo-anthropomorphic. In contrast, the Morgan M.709 symbols are conventionally presented to descend from the sky on the same page as the Evangelist portraits. However, both artists mistakenly switched the symbols for Mark and Luke; the Monte Cassino miniatures were corrected while the errors remain in Morgan M.709. This shared mistake re-confirms the artists’ working relationship. The uncorrected error in Morgan M.709 presents a calf bringing a scroll at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark and a lion at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke. Temple and Ohlgren objectively record these details without calling them errors or trying to explain them.39 Rosenthal and McGurk state that “there appear to be no known grounds for assigning the calf to Mark” and discuss the possibility that the current Mark/calf miniature was created on a singleton and inserted incorrectly after its completion. They do note, however, that “why the error was not corrected rather than compounded by assigning the lion to Luke remains a question.”40 I suggest that the “visiting artist” from Peterborough must have returned to his monastic scriptorium before the error was discovered; the identical error in the Monte Cassino book, however, was corrected. Close examination of the Evangelist symbols in Monte Cassino 437 shows that the lion and the calf were initially switched in this manuscript as well. Faint marks of one of the calf’s horns are visible above the now-lion’s left ear; it would have been relatively easy to paint over the horns and add a mane to the beast’s head, which looks more like a bear’s than a lion’s or a calf’s. Similarly, the now-calf’s head looks more like a pig’s than a calf’s or a lion’s; its neck could easily have sported a mane, thus explaining the very strange shape of the neckline of the now-calf’s upper garment. More crucially, however, a tiny, corrective inscription appears just below each of these beast-symbols (see Plates 17a–17d). Under the lion, a very small but clear hand provides the direction Fac’ Leon’ Vox Clamantis in deserto (face leonem, vox clamantis in deserto), “make a lion, the voice of one crying in the desert”; the implication is that the original figure was not a lion and needed correction. Similarly, under the calf, a less-legible, small inscription reads Fac’ Vit’ propter sacerdotiu~ (face vitulum, propter sacerdotium), “make a calf, on account of the priesthood.” The figure was thus not originally a calf and needed modification. The first phrase comes from Mark 1.3 but is also used in Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum, which is also the source of the second phrase. In his rebuttal of Jovinian’s heresies, Jerome invoked the symbolism of the Evangelists’ beasts precisely as referenced in the Monte Cassino correction inscriptions.41 The Adversus Jovinianum was widely enough known in Anglo-Saxon England to be cited by Bede, Aldhelm, and AElfric; it is extant in three eleventh- or twelfth-century manuscripts made in England.42 The corrector knew Jerome’s text well enough to use it in directional
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notes. It is unclear from the script whether the corrector was the project director, one of the other artists, the other scribe, or someone else entirely. Either the Monte Cassino artist (who was also the project director) was referring to the already-completed Morgan M.709 as he illustrated his Gospel, or vice versa. While it is unclear which manuscript contained the error first, we do know that the director was available to correct his mistake while the M.709 artist was not. If the M.709 artist was indeed a visiting artist from Peterborough or Crowland (as suggested above), it seems likely that he had returned there before the error was detected; Judith and the project director simply had to accept the manuscript with the erroneously assigned Evangelist symbols. Rosenthal and McGurk note that Morgan M.709 does not show signs of extensive use,43 so the error would not have caused undue consternation either in Judith’s household (where, presumably, she would have used the Monte Cassino book, her private devotional Gospel) or at Weingarten Abbey, which received the book as part of her last bequest to that house. The Monte Cassino book’s miniatures provide other visual connections among the books as well. For example, in both the Morgan M.708 and Monte Cassino portraits of John, a bird perches somewhat comically on John’s head. Rosenthal and McGurk, Temple, and Ohlgren all identify the bird in M.708 as John’s eagle (see Plate 12).44 Identification of the bird on John’s head in Monte Cassino is problematized by the eagle in the palladium arch on the facing incipit page (see Plate 16), obviously John’s Evangelist symbol. Ohlgren simply identifies both of the birds as John’s eagles.45 Temple makes a cautious identification of the bird on John’s head as “The Holy Dove(?)” before she notes that the bird is “apparently dictating his text (a composition paralleled in … Morgan M.708), and probably inspired by a common exemplar.”46 Rosenthal and McGurk refer to the Boulogne Gospels (which includes both an eagle and the holy dove on the same page as the figure of John the Evangelist) as part of their argument that the bird on John’s head in the Monte Cassino portrait is definitely the dove of the Holy Spirit.47 The differentiation between the “dove” and the “eagle” must be entirely metaphorical, as the three birds (two on the Monte Cassino John opening and one on the Morgan M.708 John portrait) are remarkably similar. The wings are gold in the upper coverts and pink in the primary and secondary flight feathers. All three birds have tail feathers which form a relatively even line across the bottom edge of the tail (most evident in the eagle in the arch in Monte Cassino); all three have u-shaped lines throughout their chests to represent layered feathers. The bird in the Monte Cassino arch has a definitively raptor-like beak, as does the Morgan M.708 bird; the beak of the bird on John’s head in Monte Cassino is partially hidden by his hair and thus hard to distinguish. Since Judith was the primary first user of the Monte Cassino book, she either understood the metaphorical differences between the two birds on the John opening that distinguished them as John’s eagle and the dove of the Holy Spirit, or she saw them merely as two versions of John’s eagle. Because the two birds look so much alike (and so much like the bird in Morgan M.708, which is obviously John’s eagle), I hesitate to discount the latter possibility
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entirely, as Rosenthal and McGurk do. We must allow the possibility that the two birds of the John opening of the Monte Cassino Gospel were simply intended as two versions of the same figure, the eagle that represents the transcendent nature of his Gospel. The Zoo-Anthropomorphs The illustration program of the Monte Cassino Gospel was unusual, not only in its placement of the Evangelist symbols on the incipit pages but also in the zooanthropomorphic representations of two of those symbols (which were originally confused, as noted above). Much more common were the winged beast symbols exemplified in the Morgan Gospel books and innumerable other books and media; even in Rome, the Evangelist symbols Judith would have seen were the more traditional depictions of the beasts floating among the clouds, as in the fifthcentury mosaic from Sancta Maria Maggiore, still in situ.48 The more unusual zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbols were not unheard of in earlier Insular art. The Barberini Gospels, the Maeseyck Gospels, and the Book of Kells, all early Insular manuscripts, feature zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbols in their canon tables, but these images are very unlike those in Monte Cassino 437.49 Like the earlier Insular images, a tradition of zooanthropomorphic Evangelists from Landevennec and other Celtic scriptoria seems stylistically unrelated to the zoo-anthropomorphs of the Monte Cassino Gospel.50 The Speyer Evangeliary’s folio 2v and the Goslar Evangeliary’s folio 3v provide potential continental analogues to the Monte Cassino zoo-anthropomorphs (see Plates 18 and 19).51 The Speyer Evangeliary, now Madrid, El Escorial, Real Biblioteca, Cod. Vitrinas 17 (sometimes called the Golden Gospels of Henry III or the Codex Aureus of Speyer), was probably made at Echternach in the early 1040s and then given by Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor, to Speyer Cathedral in 1046 at the dedication of the new high altar there.52 The Goslar book (now Uppsala, University Library, cod. C93) was also made at Echternach c.1050, commissioned by the emperor for the Collegiate Church of Simon and Jude near the royal palace at Goslar. Both of these books include zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbols in medallions around an image of Christ in Majesty, adored by the emperor and empress (see Plate 18 for relevant images from the Speyer book; the Goslar images are not reproduced here). Of the two books, it is more likely that Judith saw the Speyer Golden Gospels. As noted in Chapter 1, the Vita Ædwardi states that when Judith and Tostig went to Rome in 1061, their route took them “through Saxony and the upper reaches of the Rhine.”53 The Rhine runs right through the city of Speyer, and since the Vita claims that they stopped at “each saint’s shrine” along their journey, it is likely they stopped at the state-of-the-art Romanesque cathedral there.54 The imperial palace complex at Goslar, in contrast, was much too far east for a stop on the road to Rome.
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At Speyer, construction began in the 1030s and was almost fully complete by 1061, although the church had been in use for some time.55 Stephen Wagner suggests that the Speyer Evangeliary, like other manuscripts commissioned by Henry III, was intended “to be placed on an altar and displayed during the church service,”56 thus increasing the likelihood that Judith would have seen it, either during a service or during a private showing for a high-status visitor. Like the Judith Gospels, the Speyer Evangeliary proclaims the wealth and piety of its patron; unlike Judith’s books, it includes canon tables and extensive prefatory matter as well as illustrations of episodes in the life of Christ. Speyer’s portraits of Emperor Conrad and Empress Gisela on folio 2v are discussed further in Chapter 3 below, but the border medallions on that folio may inform discussion of the zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbols in Monte Cassino 437. The medallions frame the main image of Christ in Majesty adored by the emperor and empress. The eagle is at the top of the page, the man at the bottom, the lion left and the calf right. The eagle, the lion, and the calf all hold their scrolls with human hands. As in the Monte Cassino figures, the animal heads in the Speyer medallions are in profile while the body is frontal; each figure wears a lighter undergarment with a darker cloak over the left shoulder. Because the Speyer figures are in round medallions, their hand positions are markedly different from those of the Monte Cassino figures in their more horizontal arches. The differences between the presentations are substantial enough that the Speyer figures cannot be considered a source for those of the the Monte Cassino; however, since Judith may have seen the book in 1061, the figures can be accepted as analogous. The Goslar Gospel book has very similar zoo-anthropomorphic figures in medallions on its Christ in Majesty page; indeed, zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbols seem to have been something of an Echternach specialty, as they appear in numerous manuscripts produced there in the mid-eleventh century.57 Two sets of specifically English zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbols from the earlier part of the eleventh century present themselves as possible sources or analogues for the zoo-anthropomorphic figures in the Monte Cassino Gospel. One group of strikingly similar figures is in the early eleventh-century Trinity Gospels;58 the other is on the object now known as the Brussels Cross.59 Both are high-status luxury items that can be tangentially connected to Judith through her place in the royal and aristocratic circles of late Anglo-Saxon England. The Trinity Gospels have both visual and textual connections with Judith’s Monte Cassino book. The Evangelist symbols in the Trinity Gospels share considerable stylistic and compositional similarities with those in the Monte Cassino Gospels, even as some details differ. In the Trinity Gospels, the lion, the calf, and the eagle are all presented on the Evangelist portrait pages, thus following compositional convention (see Plates 20a–21b; the John portrait page is badly damaged and so is not reproduced here). The figures are unconventionally zoo-anthropomorphic, however; like the Monte Cassino figures, the half-length frontal figures stand with their animal heads in half to full profile, holding their Gospel scrolls in human hands. The zoo-anthropomorphic figures from both books wear two articles of
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clothing: a lighter-colored under-tunic with a contrasting, darker cloak over the left shoulder. The gestures and faces differ significantly (the Trinity “calf” looks more like a man with horns than an animal), but the overall correlation between the two sets of figures, created more than 40 years apart, is substantial. H.H. Glunz argued in 1933 that the Trinity Gospels were made in 1008 at Winchester, while Dodwell and Ohlgren both follow Temple, who states that the Trinity Gospels were probably made at Canterbury.60 Heslop has provocatively and persuasively argued for a later date, associating the Trinity Gospels with Cnut and Emma’s patronage program of the 1020s. Heslop sees Trinity B.10.4 as part of a group of deluxe Gospel books from the early eleventh century that demonstrate “a deliberate policy of royal largesse.”61 Heslop’s connection of the Trinity Gospels to Emma and Cnut indicates a royal pedigree for the manuscript in its making and probably then in the forms of its usage as well; Heslop postulates that Trinity B.10.4 was a gift from the royal couple to an institution or an individual that would have then displayed the book in order to proclaim that royal connection to the public. As an integral part of Edward and Edith’s court, Judith and Tostig certainly attended royal ceremonies and observances that could have provided the opportunity for Judith to see, perhaps closely, the book we now call the Trinity Gospels. Interestingly enough, Rosenthal and McGurk have argued for a textual relationship (although probably not an immediate one) between the Trinity Gospels (written by the copyist designated “Scribe B” by Alan Bishop) and all four of the Judith Gospels, noting that “the closeness of the Judith and Scribe B books can be seen in many readings.”62 Rosenthal and McGurk thus hypothesize for the Judith books “a single exemplar which belonged to a textual recension found in the books of Scribe B.”63 These visual and textual connections between the Monte Cassino and Trinity Gospels strongly suggest that the Trinity Gospels were used in a mid– eleventh-century aristocratic/religious setting in such a way that Judith and/or her scribe had some sort of access to Trinity B.10.4, its illustration program, and its textual exemplars. Similarly, a second set of zoo-anthropomorphic figures suggests a potential royal/aristocratic connection between Judith and one of the premier relics of the Holy Cross in pre-Conquest England, which was encased in what we now call the Brussels Cross but what was probably during Judith’s time in England an important property of Westminster Abbey.64 This Anglo-Saxon reliquary cross, now in the Brussels Cathedral treasury, has zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbols on its back. The once-jeweled front has been looted, but the metalwork on the back still clearly shows five medallions.65 The agnus dei claims the center, with John’s eagle at the top, the man and the lion at the left and right ends of the horizontal shaft, and the calf about halfway down the lower vertical post. The lion, the calf, and the eagle are all zoo-anthropomorphic; they all have human hands to hold their Gospel texts (see Figures 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3). As in the Monte Cassino, Speyer, and Trinity Gospels, the human bodies of the figures on the Brussels Cross are frontal while the animal heads are in profile. The differences are largely in the details: on the Brussels Cross, only one human hand
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Figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 Details of zoo-anthropomorphic evangelist symbols from Brussels, Cathedral of St Michel and St Gudule, Reliquary Cross
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is visible in each medallion; the tilted angles of the animals’ heads on the Brussels Cross are more congruent with those of the Monte Cassino than the Trinity figures; the figures on the cross seem to be seated rather than standing. In their basic presentations, the similarities between the Monte Cassino and Brussels figures are sufficient to suggest that Judith and/or her project director were familiar with the Brussels relic’s style of zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbol and tried to recreate that presentation in Judith’s personal devotional Gospel. During the mid-eleventh century, the reliquary was probably a supremely important item in the Westminster Abbey treasury. Judith and Tostig spent substantial amounts of time at Edward’s court, and Westminster Abbey was Edward’s primary religious patronage project at the end of his life,66 exactly the time when Judith’s Gospel books were made. Judith and Tostig had to have been familiar with—and perhaps were deeply aware of—Westminster’s building project, relics, and feast days; it is thus quite likely that Judith knew the figures on Westminster’s reliquary cross. Rosenthal and McGurk have alluded to the ways in which the Monte Cassino zoo-anthropomorphs, in their human/animal duality, represent the dual nature of Christ as both human and divine. Through their similarity to the figures on the back of the Brussels Cross reliquary, the Monte Cassino zoo-anthropomorphs also confirm Judith’s devotion to Christ and the relics of the cross, a devotion represented more obviously in the frontispiece of Morgan M.709 (discussed in Chapter 3). In a myriad of ways, these beast figures provided visual cues to assist in her devotion to Christ and the cross. They also demonstrated her familiarity and affinity with the sumptuousness and display of royal patronage programs, the contemporary one at Westminster as well as (perhaps) Cnut and Emma’s manuscript patronage program of the previous generation and that of the Emperor Henry III and the Empress Agnes at Speyer. As a member of the royal court but not royalty herself, Judith may have viewed her commission as a way to emulate her social superiors and, in some way, to join them in aesthetic and religious presentation. The similarities between these royal patronage projects and the Monte Cassino book may have in some way been aspirational, indicative of Judith’s desires to move into the highest level of aristocratic culture and society. In addition, the zoo-anthropomorphs in the Monte Cassino book indicate a sense of her personal preferences; whether she or the project director originally suggested the unusual zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbols, placed extraordinarily on the recto page, Judith approved and paid for those images, and used the unconventional book in her private devotions. Through their distinctive illustration programs and deluxe workmanship, the three Gospel books made entirely in England announced Judith’s wealth and social status as well as her piety. The Monte Cassino book’s jeweled cover is now missing,67 but Judith’s personal Gospel book originally had a treasure cover like those still on the Morgan books. The gold used in the capital letters and in the illustration programs of all the volumes marks them as precious display objects. There can be no doubt that Judith was genuinely pious, and the books represent that faith; in their material splendor, they also represent her more secular desire to proclaim her elite status as literate, sophisticated, and affluent.
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Such symbolic meanings were crucial as Judith left England in November of 1065. The books and other treasures that she took with her as she returned to Flanders declared that she was an important figure in the mid–eleventh-century political theater of northern Europe, despite possible interpretation of her position as that of simply a refugee with a disempowered husband. Opulent and luxurious in their display of piety, the three Gospel books completed in England were an important part of her assertion of status and power as the Northern Rebellion forced Judith to manage substantial change in her position and fortune. Notes 1 The four manuscripts are: New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.708; New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.709; Monte Cassino, Archivio della Badia, Cod. 437; Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Aa.21. 2 An inscription at the bottom of folio 9 of BL Royal 1 D iii could suggest such a set of books owned by a woman: Mark Jonathan Faulkner has noted that “Textus de ecclesia Roffensi per Godam comitissam. III” could mean that Goda had given three books rather than just the one to Rochester. See Faulkner’s “The Uses of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, c.1066– 1200” (Ph.D. diss., St. John’s College, Oxford, 2008), available online via http://ora.ox.ac. uk/objects/uuid:b98cb64f-c896-4402-8aa1-9bd317675c12 (accessed 18 September 2014). 3 Rebecca Rushforth, St. Margaret’s Gospel-Book: The Favourite Book of an EleventhCentury Queen of Scots, Treasures from the Bodleian Library (Oxford, UK: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford 2007), 55. Like Judith’s books, Margaret’s is “selective” in its inclusion of Gospel texts (see McGurk and Rosenthal, “Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks,” 270.) Rushforth’s work largely supersedes that of Richard Gameson, “The Gospels of Margaret of Scotland and the Literacy of an Eleventh-Century Queen,” in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H.M. Taylor (London: The British Library/University of Toronto Press, 1996), 149–71. 4 For a thorough discussion of the political implications of the marriage, see Keene, Saint Margaret, 41–50; also Rushforth, St. Margaret’s Gospel-Book, 27 and 63. 5 For many years, both covers were assumed to be continental rather than English, although largely contemporary with the making of the manuscripts. For a brief discussion of the covers, see McGurk and Rosenthal, “Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks,” 277; for a focus on Morgan MS M.708, see Marvin Chauncey Ross, “An Eleventh-Century English Bookcover,” Art Bulletin 22.2 (1940): 83–5. C.R. Dodwell argues that both are northern continental in Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 311, n.136). 6 Personal communication with William Voelkle, curator of medieval manuscripts at the Pierpont Morgan Library, February 2010. 7 McGurk and Rosenthal, “Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks,” 277. 8 Ibid., 257. 9 John of Worcester, The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. and trans. Reginald R. Darlington and Patrick McGurk, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995), entry for 1065. 10 Rosenthal and McGurk, “Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks,” 256. 11 Ibid., 286.
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Ibid., 287. Manuscript D of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives the most detailed account of Siward’s death; see Cubbin, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ms D, 74. 14 “Church History,” St. Olave York, http://www.stolave.org.uk/history.html (accessed 1 April 2014). 15 Harald Lindkvist, “A Study on Early Medieval York,” Anglia 50 (1926): 355. 16 Full property descriptions and indices available in Ann Williams and G.H. Martin, eds. and trans., Domesday Book: A Complete Translation (London: Penguin, 2002). For properties sorted and valued by owner, see Appendix 1 of Peter A. Clarke, The English Nobility under Edward the Confessor, Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 191–94. 17 Fleming, Kings and Lords in Conquest England, 71. 18 Fleming, “Domesday Estates,” 1007. 19 Clarke, English Nobility, 24–5. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., Appendix 1. 22 These premier holdings of Tostig’s seem to have been plum prizes for the Normans after the Conquest. At Holdenhurst in Hampshire, Bayford in Hertfordshire, and at Bloxhamand-Adderbury in Oxfordshire, William kept the manors and their lands for himself. In Buckinghamshire, Archbishop Lanfranc held Haddenham, while William’s niece Judith held Potton and its associated lands in Bedfordshire (this Judith is often confused with Judith of Flanders in historiography, but Judith of Flanders is not named in Domesday as having held any land). See Williams and Martin, Domesday, as well as K.S.B. Keats-Rohan and David E. Thornton, Domesday Names: An Index of Latin Personal and Place Names in Domesday Book (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1997). 23 The manors of Holdenhurst and Winkton are listed in Williams and Martin, Domesday, 92 and 116. 24 Barbara Raw, “The Office of the Trinity in the Crowland Psalter (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 296),” Anglo-Saxon England 28 (2000): 186. 25 Letter from Francis Wormald to Meta Harrsen (Keeper of Manuscripts at the Morgan Library), Morgan Library in-house file on M.709. 26 Raw, “Office of the Trinity,” 85, n.1. 27 Patrick McGurk and Jane Rosenthal, “Author, Symbol, and Word: The Inspired Evangelists in Judith of Flanders’s Anglo-Saxon Gospel Books,” in Tributes to Jonathan J.G. Alexander: The Making and Meaning of Illuminated Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts, Art and Architecture, eds. J.J.G. Alexander, Susan L’Engle, and Gerald B. Guest (London: Harvey Miller, 2006), 186. 28 McGurk and Rosenthal, “Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks,” 274. 29 Ibid. 30 McGurk and Rosenthal, “Author, Symbol, and Word,” 186. 31 McGurk and Rosenthal, “Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks,” 274. 32 McGurk and Rosenthal, “Author, Symbol, and Word,” 186. 33 All quotation in this paragraph from McGurk and Rosenthal, “Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks,” 273. For an argument that the “Hereford Gospels,” Cambridge, Pembroke College MS. 302, is also a private devotional manual rather than a liturgical book, see Elizabeth C. Teviotdale, “Pembroke College, 302: Abbreviated Gospel Book or Gospel Lectionary?” in The Study of Medieval Manuscripts of England: Festschrift in Honor 12 13
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of Richard W. Pfaff, ed. G.H. Brown and L.E. Voigts (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS; Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 69–100. 34 McGurk and Rosenthal, “Author, Symbol, and Word,” 187. 35 Elçzbieta Temple, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, 900–1066, Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, vol. 2 (London: Harvey Miller, 1976), 112. 36 As Temple describes them in ibid., 109: “full or half ‘Winchester’ frames of two burnished gold bands supporting pink and blue to green foliage on black ground; they have large corner rosettes and median medallions containing various ornamental motifs.” 37 Ibid., 110. 38 Morgan M.708’s John does not have any decoration at the base of the border columns. 39 Temple, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, 109; Thomas H. Ohlgren, Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustration: Photographs of Sixteen Manuscripts with Descriptions and Index (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1992), 70. 40 McGurk and Rosenthal, “Author, Symbol, and Word,” 189. 41 Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum 1 (PL 23: 0248A); for a translation, see http://www. ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.vi.vi.I.html (accessed 18 September 2014). I am indebted to Stephen J. Harris for his advice and assistance concerning the Latin texts. 42 Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 313. 43 McGurk and Rosenthal, “Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks,” 280. 44 Temple, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, 110; Ohlgren, Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustration, 72; McGurk and Rosenthal, “Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks,” 299, as well as “Author, Symbol, and Word,” 187. 45 Ohlgren, Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustration, 73. 46 Temple, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, 112. 47 McGurk and Rosenthal, “Author, Symbol, and Word,” 190–92. For a recent, detailed discussion of Boulogne, Bibliotheque Municipale MS 11, see Catherine Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2011), 198–202. 48 For high quality-color reproductions of these mosaics, see Joachim Poeschke, Italian Mosaics (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2010). 49 See Michelle Brown, The Book of Cerne: Prayer, Patronage, and Power in NinthCentury England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), Chapter 4, which includes a comprehensive catalog of Insular Evangelist images (88–103) that provides full descriptions of the Evangelist symbols in the Barberini Gospels (Vatican, Biblioteca Apotolica Vaticana, MS Barb. lat. 570; Brown #12), The Books of Kells (Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 58; Brown #27), and the Maeseyck Gospels (Maeseyck, Church of St. Catherine, Treasury, s.n., fols.1r–5v; Brown #7). BL Add. MS 40618, a late eighth-century book with tenthcentury additions, also includes a zoo-anthropomorphic calf that is not stylistically related to the Monte Cassino figures. 50 See C.R. Morey et al., “The Gospel-Book of Landevennec (the Harkness Gospels) in the New York Public Library,” Art Studies (1931): 223–86. Bodleian MS Auct D.2.16 is another Gospel book from Landevennec with zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelists; images are available through http://image.ox.ac.uk (accessed 18 September 2014). Folio 71v is especially representative of the lack of stylistic relationship between these manuscripts and Monte Cassino 437. 51 Both books are available in facsimile with extensive commentary: Carl Adam Johan Nordenfalk, ed., Codex Caesareus Upsaliensis: An Echternach Gospel-Book of
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the Eleventh Century (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1971); Johannes Rathofer, ed., Codex Aureus: El Escorial, Real Biblioteca, Cod. Vitrinas 17 (Madrid: Testimonio, 1995). For the commentary volume, see Rathofer, El Evangeliario Imperial Sálico: volumen complementario e la edición facsímil (Madrid: Testimonio Compania Editorial), 2002. 52 Matilde López Serrano, El Códice Aureo: Los Cuatros Evangelios Siglo XI (Madrid: Editorial Patrimonio Nacional, 1974), 24–33. 53 Barlow, The Life of King Edward, 53. 54 Speyer is noted on the map of the Roman pilgrimage route through Germany provided by Debra J. Birch in Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages: Continuity and Change (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1998), 42. 55 Speyer Cathedral is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. See http://www.speyer. de (accessed 18 September 2014). 56 Stephen Wagner, “Establishing a Connection to Illuminated Manuscripts Made at Echternach in the Eighth and Eleventh Centuries and Issues of Patronage, Monastic Reform and Splendor,” Peregrinations 3.1 (2010): 54. 57 See the array of Evangelist figures and symbols presented in the commentary of the Goslar book’s facsimile in Nordenfalk, Codex Caesareus Upsaliensis, vol. 2, 124–25. 58 Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.10.4. 59 Brussels, Cathedral of S Michel and S Gudule, Reliquary Cross. Description and discussion in Janet Backhouse, D.H. Turner, and Leslie Webster, The Golden Age of AngloSaxon Art, 966–1066 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 90–92. Much recent work on the Brussels Cross has focused on its inscription, which is textually related to both The Dream of the Rood and the Ruthwell Cross Crucifixion Poem. See discussion in Eamonn O’Carragain, Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005) as well as Chapter 5 of Karkov, Anglo-Saxon Art, and Seeta Chaganti, “Vestigial Signs: Inscription, Performance, and the Dream of the Rood,” PMLA 125 (2010): 48–72. Another zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbol in the corpus of Anglo-Saxon metalwork is the eagle-headed figure on the object known as the Brandon Plaque, which is an early–ninthcentury engraved and inlaid square of gold. The differences between the Brandon eagle figure and those in Trinity, Monte Cassino, and Brussels, however, are substantial enough to discount it in this discussion of zoo-anthropomoprhic Evangelist symbols. Note, for example, the Brandon Plaque figure’s lack of wings, its pen and books (rather than scroll), and the style of the garments. For more information about the Brandon Plaque, consult the British Museum website, http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_ objects/pe_mla/b/brandon_plaque.aspx (accessed 18 September 2014). 60 H.H. Glunz, History of the Vulgate in England from Alcuin to Roger Bacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933, repr. 2011), xvi, states that B.10.4 has “definite characteristics” of the Winchester school. Elçzbieta Temple, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, 83–4; Ohlgren, Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustration, 5; C.R. Dodwell, The Canterbury School of Illumination, 1066–1200 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 10. 61 T.A. Heslop, “The Production of De Luxe Manuscripts and the Patronage of King Cnut and Queen Emma,” Anglo-Saxon England 19 (1990): 156. 62 McGurk and Rosenthal, “Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks,” 261. 63 Ibid., 268. 64 S.T.R.O. d’Ardenne, “The Old English Inscription on the Brussels Cross,” English Studies 21 (1939): 160.
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A similar, but later continental cross provides an indication of the possible sumptuousness of the lost Brussels front. Like Brussels, the early twelfth-century cross has metalworked zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbols surrounding the agnus dei on its back; it has jewels, pearls, crystal, and gold filigree on the front. The object is Berlin, Staatliche Museum, Inv.Nr.1888, 635, reproduced as item #510 in Christoph Stiegemann and Matthias Wemhoff, Canossa 1077: Erschütterung der Welt: Geschichte, Kunst und Kultur am Aufgang der Romanik, 2 vols (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2006), vol. 2, 423–5. 66 Barlow, The Life of King Edward, 110–15. 67 The loss is discussed in Chapter 7, “Books Presented to the Abbey,” of Francis Newton’s The Scriptorium and Library at Monte Cassino, 1058–1105, Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 240. 65
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Chapter 3
Frontispiece Portraits and Exile Those changes in the fall of 1065 probably did not come as a complete surprise. Judith and Tostig’s departure was caused by political crisis; Tostig lost his earldom during what is sometimes called the Northern Rebellion, which had been brewing for at least a year, probably more. The events are straightforward: the Northumbrian thegns revolted against Tostig’s rule in early October of 1065; Harold, as the King’s deputy, was unable to make peace between Tostig and the Northumbrian nobles; Tostig and Judith departed for Flanders in November as exiles. Contemporary and near-contemporary sources provide a wide range of interpretations of these events, however. The version most in Tostig’s favor is, unsurprisingly, the Vita Ædwardi, which depicts violent Northumbrian outlaws resisting Tostig’s assertive and fair rule.1 The Vita does not accuse him of absentee leadership but lauds him for his “love of the king” and his dedication to “palace business,” which kept him at court and out of Northumbria. The Northumbrian lords are guilty of “savage rashness,” a “mad conspiracy,” and “wickedness.” As the villains of the narrative, they killed Tostig’s followers before they “with fire and sword laid waste all his possessions.” The Vita author credits Tostig with having established peace and justice throughout the previously lawless earldom and the rebels as resisting his fair and righteous governance. The Vita author does acknowledge that “Not a few charged that glorious earl with being too cruel; and he was accused of punishing disturbers more for desire of their property which would be confiscated than for love of justice.”2 While the Vita dismisses these charges (as well as the more insidious argument that Harold supported the rebellion against his brother),3 they resonate with other accounts of the rebellion that focus on Tostig’s unnecessarily heavy taxes and legal injustices. Tostig’s general unpopularity—and that of his extended family—in the north is indicated by their treatment in the Durham Liber Vitae, which lists (among other things) the names of those for whom the community should pray. Some scholars have erroneously stated that Judith of Flanders is listed in the Durham Liber Vitae, but the “Judiths” there are all post-Conquest entries that refer to different women of the same name. Tostig and his father were both listed on folio 15 verso, but their names were erased at some point in the second half of the eleventh century, indicating that the monks no longer desired or felt obligated to pray for them.4 The erasing monk may have felt substantial satisfaction as he ensured that Tostig and Godwin would not get to heaven on the strength of any Durham prayers. That animosity is also apparent in the events of the Northern Rebellion as related in the Chronicle of John of Worcester, which provides much more detail (presumably locally acquired) than any of the versions of the Anglo-Saxon
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Chronicle. John’s Chronicle ends in 1140, and was compiled and composed c.1120–1140.5 An extended quotation demonstrates the intensity of the hatred against Tostig at the local level in Northumbria; on the third of October: The Northumbrian thegns Gamelbearn, Dunstan, son of Æthelnoth, and Glonieorn, son of Heardwulf, came with 200 soldiers to York, and on account of the disgraceful death of the noble Northumbrian thegns Gospatric (whom Queen Edith, on account of her brother Tostig, had ordered to be killed in the king’s court on the fourth night of Christmas by treachery), Gamel, son of Orm, and Ulf, son of Dolfin (whose murders Earl Tostig had treacherously ordered the preceding year at York in his own chamber, under cover of a peace treaty), and also of the huge tribute which Tostig had unjustly levied on the whole of Northumbria, they, on that same day, slew first his Danish housecarls, Amund and Ravenswart, hauled back from flight beyond the city walls, and on the following day more than 200 men from his court, on the north side of the River Humber. They also broke open his treasury, and, having taken away all his goods, they withdrew.6
Similarly, William of Malmesbury sides with the rebels, accusing Tostig of “habitual ferocity” and allowing the northerners to declare their status to be “born and bred as free man … [so that] freedom or death was their tradition.”7 One version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle remarks that during these events, “Tosti was then at Britford with the king,”8 so at this crucial moment he was in Wiltshire, 250 miles from York. He seems not to have attended Harold’s negotiations with the rebels at Oxford and Northampton—none of the sources, at least, directly mentions his presence there. He and Judith probably stayed with his sister and the King, and then left England without returning to the north at all. Logistically, this itinerary confirms Judith’s manuscript workshop to have been in the south, as they must have collected as much movable wealth as possible from their various estates and strongholds before they traveled to Flanders. That departure was hastily but perhaps thoroughly organized, ensuring that Judith’s treasures were secure for the crossing. Included in her baggage were the four manuscripts, three completed and one as yet unillustrated, as well as perhaps the porphyry altar (discussed in Chapter 1), a shrine of St. Oswald (discussed in Chapter 4), and a variety of now lost objects. The Gospel Book now archived in the Fulda Landesbibliothek was completed by a Flemish artist soon after Judith’s arrival in Bruges. Like the more famous Morgan M.709, the Fulda book includes a donor portrait of Judith in the frontispiece; both portraits present Judith as a wealthy, literate, sophisticated, and pious woman (see Plates 8 and 22).9 As such, the portraits function as both religious and sociopolitical assertions of power at a period in her life when Judith’s actual political and social status was tenuous at best. While her patronage indicates her continued aspiration to be regarded as a patron operating at the very highest levels, her husband’s political and military maneuvers between 1065 and 1066 actually lowered her social status. The only extant Anglo-Saxon images even partially comparable to the Judith donor portraits are the two portraits of Judith’s great-aunt, Emma of Normandy
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(see Figure I.1, the family tree of Judith of Flanders).10 The earlier is the muchdiscussed frontispiece to the New Minster Liber Vitae, which depicts Emma and Cnut presenting a jeweled crucifix to New Minster (c.1031); the later is the frontispiece of the earliest extant copy of the Encomium Emmae Reginae (composed c.1041).11 Both portraits emphasize similarities between Emma and the Virgin Mary; as Catherine Karkov says, “at the heart of both portraits of Emma/ Ælfgifu is the conventional image of the queen as faithful wife and virtuous mother.”12 Both portraits also, like Judith’s, emphasize Emma/Ælfgyfu’s wealth, power, and prestige. The New Minster portrait depicts a “basic equality” between Emma and her second husband, Cnut, during the presentation of the crucifix.13 Karkov addresses the seemingly incongruous placement of Emma to the right of Christ (rather than the more usual composition in which the King is on Christ’s right) by noting the visual and thematic equivalences between Emma and the Virgin Mary (traditionally at Christ’s right hand).14 Similarly, the composition of the Encomium portrait explicitly references the traditional iconography of the Adoration of the Magi, with the book in the space usually filled by the Christ child.15 Both portraits declare Emma as a prominent and powerful member of the overlapping ecclesiastical, political, and literary cultures in England in the 1030s and 1040s. Judith may actually have seen these portraits of her great-aunt, although we cannot prove that she ever did. As an active and notably pious member of Edward’s court, Judith certainly could have accompanied her husband and the rest of the court to the New Minster on a feast day when the Liber Vitae would have been in use and thus on display in Winchester. Similarly, the whereabouts of the original manuscript of the Encomium are unknown after Emma’s death in 1052, although it is likely that her library and most of her remaining worldly goods, as well as her body, went to the church in Winchester.16 Whether or not Judith ever saw these portraits, her own portraits in her own books certainly echoed Emma’s portraits, especially in their presentation of Judith as pious, elite, and sophisticated. During her time in England, however, Judith never commanded status equivalent to Emma’s; she did not control land, witnessed no charters, and of course was never queen consort or queen dowager.17 Judith’s deluxe patronage projects could be understood to indicate an aspiration to the highest status, but especially in 1065–1066 her position was extremely insecure. Another crucial difference between the two sets of images is that Emma’s portraits both depict historical events (the donation of the crucifix and the presentation of the Encomium), while Judith’s portraits show her in spiritual/devotional contexts that have no historical basis. One possible explanation for these unusual portrait settings is that Judith could not claim participation in patronage projects of the highest level, like Emma and Cnut’s work at New Minster. The multiple reasons for the portraits’ composition and presentation choices—Judith’s and/or her scribe’s—remain opaque; those religious, devotional, cultural, and secular choices, however, produced two highly unusual and striking images.
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Morgan M.709’s frontispiece is the much-discussed crucifixion image that includes the first of the two donor portraits of Judith; she is prostrate at the foot of the cross. While previous art historians thought this might be an image of Mary Magdalene, or perhaps a leaf added onto a book made earlier in the eleventh century, McGurk and Rosenthal and have proved that the frontispiece is an integral and original part of the manuscript.18 A potential source or analogue for the composition and presentation of the Morgan M.709 portrait is the now-lost alb made by St. Edith of Wilton (d.984), who was a daughter of King Edgar and the patron saint of Wilton Abbey, the royal nunnery that educated Judith’s sister-in-law Queen Edith, as well as other members of the high aristocracy.19 The description of the alb in Goscelin’s Vita Edithe emphasizes its richness and deluxe materials, which Judith would certainly have admired and appreciated (indeed, C.R. Dodwell refers to the alb as evidence for his argument for an overall preference in Anglo-Saxon art for gold and ornament).20 Goscelin states that: There are also other relics of her kindly love. Among these there is an alb which she made out of the whitest cotton, a symbol of her innocence, very striking with its gold, gems, pearls, and little English pearls, woven around the yoke in keeping with her golden faith and gem-like sincerity; around the feet, the golden images of the Apostles surrounding the Lord, the Lord sitting in the midst, and Edith herself prostrated in the place of Mary the supplicant, kissing the Lord’s footprints. Her virginal hands worked this valuable piece with such mystical faith that it should give pleasure for its holiness as much as for its rich embellishment.21
Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg has noted the literal and thematic connections between the Wilton alb and the Morgan frontispiece; in her discussion of the alb, Schulenburg states that Edith, “rather than simply interjecting herself as a donor figure witnessing the event from a proper distance, from the outside … boldly replaced the traditional supplicant, Mary Magdalene, with a portrait of herself.”22 There are some crucial differences between the scene described by Goscelin and the Morgan portrait—on the alb, Edith presents herself in the tableau instead of (rather than in addition to) the female biblical figure, and Christ is teaching among the apostles rather than on the cross. However, the alb’s overall presentation of a female worshipper inserted into an episode from the life of Christ resonates with the composition of the Morgan frontispiece.23 Rosenthal has provided an in-depth religious analysis of this image that focuses on the ways that it proclaims Judith’s piety, especially her devotion to the cross and her identification with the Virgin Mary.24 Jennifer O’Reilly’s analysis of the image is similarly theological, but explicitly connects the figure of Judith to the figure of St. John as well as that of Mary.25 Rosenthal’s explication notes that Judith is, appropriately, much smaller than Christ, the Virgin, and John the Evangelist; she is literally as well as spiritually sheltered by the cross and Mary’s outstretched arm. Dress connects the two women as well. Mary and Judith
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are dressed in similarly styled gowns; in the height of mid–eleventh-century continental fashion, both women’s dresses have exaggeratedly elongated sleeves with elaborate gold-embroidered borders.26 Rosenthal relies on Gale OwenCrocker’s work on Anglo-Saxon clothing for her analysis of the sumptuousness of the dresses; Owen-Crocker notes further that such aristocratic dresses would probably have been made out of silk rather than the more usual wool or linen: “Most of the evidence for the existence of these [deluxe] textiles concerns their use as religious vestments, but there is every reason to believe that royal and wealthy seculars also possessed such magnificent apparel.”27 In her more global analysis of fabric use in the Middle Ages, Anna Muthesius makes largely the same point when she states that “similar patterns of selection were at work in the acquisition of silks by secular and ecclesiastical bodies.”28 It seems that we have more survivals and more textual evidence for the use of silk in religious garments, but that silk was also an important secular status fabric. Dodwell notes that “Like their contemporaries in the rest of Christendom, the Anglo-Saxons held imported silks in great esteem.”29 Despite this esteem, artists tended not to indicate these fabrics in figure illustration; Owen-Crocker also states that “Anglo-Saxon artists rarely suggest opulent fabrics, particularly for garments … Pattern on the skirts of a gown is found only occasionally.”30 The Morgan M.709 frontispiece is an exception to this artistic convention, however, as Judith’s and Mary’s dresses do indeed have elaborate, delicate patterning (which is very difficult to see in a reproduction).31 The Speyer Evangeliary was discussed in Chapter 2 as a possible analogue to Monte Cassino 437’s zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbols; Judith may have seen it during her pilgrimage to Rome in 1061. Like the Morgan frontispiece, this deluxe Gospel also presents a female donor and the Virgin Mary wearing similar attire (see Plates 18 and 19). On f.2v, the Empress Gisela kneels with her husband, the Emperor Conrad, before Christ in Majesty; on f.3r, the Emperor Henry III and his wife, the Empress Agnes, kneel before the Virgin Mary. Nina Verbanaz has discussed these images as part of her argument about the ways that the Salian dynasty used Marian imagery to promote their political, religious, and cultural status.32 While Gisela and Mary are not on the same folio, they are connected across the full opening by their similar dresses and head-coverings. Indeed, their dresses are the most immediately noticeable items in the composition because of their very dark blue color among the more muted tones throughout the rest of the illustrations (a narrow piece of the same fabric shows on Christ on f.2v). As Verbanaz has noted, Mary is traditionally presented in blue, and the blue of Gisela’s dress emphasizes her connection to the Virgin. The two female figures also wear similar white headdresses. The Speyer artist provided Gisela with a much more luxurious dress than the Virgin’s—Gisela’s has fashionable elongated sleeves like those of Judith and the Virgin in the Morgan portrait (the Speyer Mary’s dress has much more conventional sleeves) as well as elaborate gold trim on the cuffs and hem (Mary’s are plain). A red underskirt, similar to Agnes’s on the facing page, is exposed behind Gisela’s shoes. The Speyer artist presents Mary
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in more of a timeless, traditional manner in the Speyer image, while the Morgan artist places her in the immediate context of the mid-eleventh century with her fashionable, aristocratic dress made of patterned silk.33 The patterning in the silk in the Morgan image is only one of the details in this image that point to its social and aristocratic functions. Rosenthal’s analysis focuses on the religious meanings of the frontispiece, but the image has numerous secular, social, and cultural meanings as well. It proclaims Judith as a pious woman devoted to the cross and to the Virgin Mary; it also declares her wealth and status as the Lady of Northumbria. The gold cuffs, silk fabric, and high style of Judith’s dress create a feminine display akin to those of a First Lady at an inaugural ball or a movie star at the Academy Awards. Judith and the Virgin Mary both wear wide gold bracelets (Judith on the right wrist, Mary on the left); in addition, Judith wears a wide gold belt that cinches her waist.34 These items of jewelry imply no piety, but they certainly do imply great wealth and great fashion sense. Judith is not only represented in the frontispiece, but she is also the patron and owner of the display book. Books are prominent in the image, although Judith does not have one. Both the Virgin and the Evangelist hold books; while John traditionally holds a book at the Crucifixion (in which he writes his Gospel), it is much more unusual for Mary to have a book, especially in Anglo-Saxon images of the Crucifixion. Barbara Raw notes that Mary’s book is “a detail which seems to be quite new in Crucifixion iconography” (Raw’s focus is the tenth and eleventh centuries); Mary’s book at the Crucifixion is an included detail in only two ivories and two manuscripts from the late Anglo-Saxon period.35 In her analysis of the Morgan M.709 frontispiece, Rosenthal has established numerous visual parallels between Judith and the Virgin. To Rosenthal’s list, I would like to add the more subtle parallel of books: the Virgin holds one in the image, while Judith commissions the one that presents the image. When the historical Judith herself looked at the image proclaiming her piety, her fashion sense, and the size of her treasury, she was also imitating the Virgin by holding a book. The Virgin’s literacy is a well-established trope (she is often portrayed reading Isaiah at the moment of the Annunciation); Judith’s commission of the Gospel Book is thus also a form of imitation of the Virgin, announcing Judith’s literacy and textual knowledge in a subtle but definitive manner. As such, the Morgan portrait appropriately shows the wealth and sophistication of the pious and generous Lady of Northumbria, a world traveler who was related to the English king by blood and by marriage, and to much of the continental aristocracy as well. As the events of the Northern Rebellion indicate, however, Judith’s position as Lady of Northumbria was not as secure as the portrait implies. When she arrived in Flanders, her position was even more precarious. She came to her half-brother as a refugee late in 1065. John of Worcester explicitly states that the northerners “outlawed” Tostig and any of his supporters and then “drove Tostig out of England.”36 The Vita Ædwardi presents a somewhat rosy picture of Tostig and Judith’s arrival in Flanders; rather than treating them
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as disempowered refugees, Baldwin welcomes them as honored guests. The Vita celebrates Baldwin’s largesse: He received the husband of his sister honourably and graciously, as was his wont, and bade him dwell and rest from his labors in a town which is named after the famous St Omer who lies honourably within … he gave him there both a house and an estate, and put in his hands the revenues of the town for his maintenance; and he ordered all the knights who were attached to that place to be at the service of Tostig, his deputy commander.37
We must remember that the author of the Vita was providing a definitively proGodwin version of events in order to please his patron, Tostig’s sister, Queen Edith. While Baldwin’s welcome of and grants to Tostig were indeed noble and generous, he was also simply providing money and a home to his semi-destitute brother-in-law (and that home was, notably, 115 kilometers away from Baldwin’s court in Bruges). Since leaving England, Tostig and Judith had had no income, no title, and no money other than what they had managed to bring with them (which was a substantial but still finite supply); on arrival in Flanders, Tostig thus had no means to support himself and his household, let alone lay plans for a return to England. Baldwin’s designation of Tostig as castellan of St. Omer provided an income and allowed him to begin to lay those plans from a position of respectability. The castellan, always a nobleman, was responsible for defending his post as part of Baldwin’s territory; he also collected taxes and maintained the designated hall or fortified buildings.38 Tostig’s probably unexpected appearance in Flanders may also have solved an internal problem for Baldwin, since it is likely he was having trouble with his appointed castellan in St. Omer. Tostig’s appointment at castellan fit handily with Baldwin’s opposition to Count Eustace of Boulogne (the Godwins’ opponent in the skirmish at Dover that set off the Crisis of 1051); Renée Nip points out that “In the light of this power struggle between the count of Flanders and Eustace II of Boulogne and his allies, it is also understandable that Baldwin V, given the change in 1065, should have put in charge Tostig as his deputy commander in Saint Omer,” since later events make it clear that the castellan Wulfric sided with Boulogne against Flanders.39 Tostig was a refugee in Flanders in both 1051 and 1065; he thus owed his brother-in-law substantial favors that he was probably more than willing to repay in a way that helped his own purposes as well. While Tostig’s initial goal on arrival in Flanders probably was return and reinstatement, once Edward had died (5 January 1066) and Harold almost immediately crowned king, Tostig’s plans most likely expanded to include the crown. Like Harold, he was the brother-in-law of the former queen, a son of the legendary Earl Godwin, and a veteran of numerous campaigns in Edward’s service. Harold’s coronation effectively dismissed as unimportant any concerns about keeping the crown in the much-diminished royal line.40 Tostig must have seen himself as an equally valid candidate to the throne—with the important caveat that he was out of the country, having been declared an outlaw.
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We have no evidence regarding Judith’s opinions about Tostig’s plans, although some speculation is fruitful. I would like to suggest the likelihood that she largely supported his ambition for the crown. Other women in Judith’s extended family had attained regal or quasi-regal status, and she probably saw no reason that she should not do so as well. Adela, princess of France and Countess of Flanders, was at least something of a mother figure for Judith and a role model for her regarding royal privilege and patronage. Adela was also the founder of Messen Abbey in Flanders, and she patronized many other establishments with her husband, Judith’s half-brother Baldwin V.41 Whether or not Judith stopped in Normandy on her way back to England from Rome in 1061 (see Chapter 1), Judith must also have known of her niece Matilda’s power and patronage as Duchess of Normandy, including Matilda’s founding of the women’s monastic house of La Trinité at Caen. (The process of establishing La Trinité began in 1059; Matilda continued to patronize the house until her death in 1083, when she was buried there.)42 Judith’s commissions of books and treasure objects must have seemed relatively insubstantial in comparison to the wealth at the disposal of upper-echelon women like Adela and Matilda, who were both Judith’s relatives but not her social peers; she probably aspired to some sort of social parity with them and similar women. Anecdotal evidence from Symeon of Durham and the Vita Oswini presents Judith as an imperious aristocrat used to getting her way. The objects and books she commissioned for herself and for churches were elaborate and luxurious, indicating fine and expensive taste. Judith was accustomed to a relative degree of wealth and power, and the queenship would guarantee both in much more substantial amounts (an attractive prospect to a woman in her mid-thirties currently living on her halfbrother’s good graces). A number of German texts related to her second marriage actually refer to her as regina Anglie, perhaps hinting (as Elisabeth van Houts has argued)43 that Judith did nothing to dispel possible continental confusion about which of the Godwin brothers she had originally married. As the spring of 1066 began, Tostig left St. Omer to begin his campaign, both diplomatic and military. Because of the tensions between the hereditary St. Omer castellans and the Count, Judith probably went to Baldwin’s court in Bruges if she had not already established herself and any children there at the beginning of the winter (leaving Tostig in a quasi-militarized zone without her). While the events of the summer of 1066 have been described and analyzed in great detail in the historiography of the past 950 years, a brief summary is useful here; the series of events largely follows that laid out in the Chronicle of John of Worcester, who seems to have had access to various versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as well as to independent information specific to Yorkshire (just as he did for the events of the Northern Rebellion, discussed above).44 Initially, Tostig tested the level of his support throughout the southern parts of England, ultimately realizing that he would need to seek foreign aid if he wanted to succeed in regaining any power. What began as a quest to gain a military and political toehold in England quickly became merely a series of raids on the southeast English coast. Through the course of the spring and early summer of 1066, Tostig
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managed to alienate a wide variety of potential English allies and peacemakers, as well as eliminate any popular English support he may once have claimed: John of Worcester’s Chronicle notes that Tostig “forced islanders [of Wight] to pay tribute and maintenance … raided the coast as far as the Port of Sandwich … [and] steered his course towards Lindsey, where he burnt many townships and did to death many men.”45 William of Malmesbury references the events in Lindsey when he notes that Tostig had extended his pillaging into the north and “despoiled everything near the mouth of the river [Humber] with piratical raids.”46 When Morcar, the new Earl of Northumbria, and his brother Edwin, Earl of Mercia, moved their forces towards him, he retreated further north into Scotland. Orderic Vitalis’s Ecclesiastical History is a relatively late source with “no independent value” for the events of 1066 (according to its most recent editor), but it is the only text that relates a diplomatic visit from Tostig to William of Normandy early in 1066. Orderic’s decisively pro-William and anti-Harold position is clear as he states that: [Tostig] hurried to Normandy, boldly rebuked Duke William for allowing his perjured vassal [Harold] to rule, and swore that he would faithfully secure the crown for him if he would cross to England with a Norman army. For some time they had been close friends and by marrying two sisters had strengthened the bonds between them.47
William’s reaction to this offer, according to Orderic, is to call a conference of the Norman nobles to discuss it, thus providing Orderic with an opportunity to catalog the mid–eleventh-century Norman aristocracy. Orderic then relates how Tostig attempted to get to England from Normandy on William’s behalf but was thwarted by weather, with the wind pushing him to Norway to ally instead with Harald of Norway. Orderic’s reliance on the relationship between Tostig’s and William’s wives makes the suggestion of this initial diplomatic visit somewhat plausible: although they were aunt and niece rather than sisters, they were very close in age and had been raised as sisters. It is completely implausible to claim that Tostig and William were “close friends,” although Tostig could easily have traveled to William’s court at Rouen from St. Omer. It is much more likely that Tostig traveled to Norway in the summer of 1066 to bargain directly with Harald. The English sources either do not mention a pre-invasion meeting at all (MS C of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, John of Worcester) or state that the meeting took place in Scotland (MSs D and E of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). While Walker says that such a visit to Norway is “unlikely,” the detail provided in the Scandinavian sources adds substance to the claim.48 Whether the meeting took place in Scotland or Norway, Tostig and Harald certainly met to plan the invasion; at that meeting, Tostig swore an oath of loyalty to Harald.49 Even if Tostig negotiated the terms of his agreement with Harald in Norway, he certainly spent at least part of the summer in Scotland with his erstwhile ally Malcolm, whose own political and military troubles prevented him from assisting Tostig beyond providing a summer base.50 Like John of Worcester, William of
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Malmesbury states that Tostig went to Scotland after retreating from the initial skirmish with Morcar and Edwin. Manuscripts D and E of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provide the specific information that Tostig’s force of 60 ships departed from Scotland to meet Harald of Norway and his 300 ships at the mouth of the Tyne so they could proceed to York together to attack.51 Because of the oath Tostig had sworn at the meeting before their fleets joined at the mouth of the Tyne on 18 September 1066, Tostig was “very much the subordinate” in their alliance.52 Not only did Tostig contribute less than 20 percent of the force, but the oath meant that Tostig had agreed that Harald would rule England after the invasion’s success. Tostig’s goal of the English throne seems to have been ceded to that of simply bringing down his brother’s kingship by any possible means. Perhaps Tostig thought he could simply pay off Harald once they had defeated Harold; perhaps he thought Harald would be an English king in absentia while Tostig stayed in England as the actual ruler. In any case, the alliance made military but not political sense for Tostig: he had secured a strong ally with a fierce reputation, but he had given up any chance he may have had to a quasilegitimate claim to the throne. The Norwegian alliance was initially successful, as Harald and Tostig defeated the forces of Edwin and Morcar outside York at Fulford on 20 September. York surrendered to them, and Tostig perhaps helped select the hostages that they took, along with provisions and plunder.53 The period from 20–24 September was the high point of Tostig’s campaign to claim the English throne, or at least some semblance of it. He and his foreign ally had won a battle and taken a major city; they were theoretically prepared to move south and continue the invasion. However, Tostig’s brother Harold, King of England, marched to Yorkshire at an incredible pace from the south and arrived to surprise the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge on 25 September.54 Historians often discuss the Battle of Stamford Bridge primarily as the event that exhausted Harold’s army and ruined his careful planning for William’s invasion, which we now call the Norman Conquest. It also ended Tostig’s campaign and his life. Only the Scandinavian sources provide detail about the battle from the Norwegian point of view: they state that the day was very hot, that the Norwegians had left their armor and a third of their force with their ships, and that they chose to engage rather than to bargain, even in their relatively unarmed and diminished state. Much of this detail is probably heroic accretion in a thirteenth-century source. Similarly, the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provides a possibly apocryphal anecdote (repeated by William of Malmesbury, who embellishes it) about a single Norwegian who defended the bridge before the battle was fully engaged.55 Harald of Norway and Tostig were both killed during the fierce fighting that lasted throughout the battle. Orderic Vitalis adds the element that “Travellers cannot fail to recognize the field, for a great mountain of dead men’s bones still lies there and bears witness to the terrible slaughter on both sides.”56 Only The
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Carmen De Hastingae Proelio provides the gruesome detail that Harold killed and beheaded his brother: For the wicked king Harold was preparing his treacherous weapons for the destruction of his brother in the remotest reaches of the realm. This brother, having occupied no small part of the land, was setting houses on fire and putting people to the sword; and Harold, hastening with an army to meet the foe, did not shrink from delivering his brother’s limbs to death. Each waged against the other a worse than civil war. But the victor, alas, was Harold. This envious Cain cut off his brother’s head with his sword and then buried head and trunk in the earth.57
While the Carmen is, of course, pro-Norman and viciously anti-Harold, its early date makes it a somewhat legitimate source. The Carmen’s earlier editors advise a metaphorical reading of the accusation that Harold beheaded and buried his brother (Barlow, the most recent editor, does not mention the supposed decapitation at all).58 William of Malmesbury states more elliptically that Tostig’s body was identified on the battlefield only “by the evidence of a wart between the shoulder blades,” upon which he “received the honour of burial at York.”59 The implication is that Tostig’s head was indeed missing or that it had been so completely mutilated as to be unrecognizable. The Scandinavian sources, focused on Harald, do not state who killed Tostig or how he died. We cannot know Judith’s reaction to this sequence of events: failed attempts at alliance, pillaging along the southern and eastern coasts, negotiations and bad decisions that would have prevented Tostig from claiming the crown even if he and Harald had been triumphant at Stamford and (presumably) Hastings soon after. Not only had she lost any chance to become the Queen of England, but she was in her mid-thirties, widowed after a 15-year marriage that had produced for her no children of historical note, no political power, no title, and no claim to any land. She had the treasure that she and Tostig had brought from England almost a year before; he must have used some, if not most, of it to equip his ships, finance his journeys, and reward his troops and allies.60 She probably traveled to Bruges from St. Omer to attend her half-brother’s court, if she was not there already. At some point between 1065 and 1070, she proceeded with her initial patronage plan and made the completion of the fourth book (now in Fulda) an economic priority. Because of the Gospel texts selected for inclusion in the Fulda book, McGurk and Rosenthal postulate that it was intended to be used largely at Christmas and Easter.61 I suggest as well that it was used to affirm Judith’s wealth and status— to declare that despite the Battle of Stamford Bridge, Judith would proceed with her lavish patronage projects and continue to try to move to a higher level socially, economically, and politically. As a pious widow in 1066/1067, Judith was perfectly positioned to become a nun if she had desired to do so. She could have used the remnants of her treasure to establish herself in any of the women’s houses associated with the Flemish counts or even the Norman dukes. Instead, she chose to remain in the secular world as a conspicuous patron and potential marriage partner; that choice is represented by the deluxe completion of the Fulda book.
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To finish the last of the four books in the set, a Flemish artist/scribe produced all of the deluxe folios (a very small portion of its texts and all of its illustrations) in the mid- to late 1060s. The English scribe had left blank pages throughout for the Evangelist portraits and incipits, as well as blanks at the beginning for the frontispiece and other decorative components.62 Following the Matthew opening, the Fulda book includes gold lettering on a purple background (see Plates 24a and 24b), a feature unique among the Judith Gospels. This extremely expensive and flamboyant textual presentation was used in the mid–eighth-century English Gospel book now known as the Stockholm Codex Aureus, but seems not to occur in any extant eleventh-century English manuscripts.63 Gold-on-purple lettering occurs in a number of later continental manuscripts, however, including a tenth-century Gospel Lectionary, now in the New York Public Library, and the fragments of the early eleventh-century Beauvais Sacramentary in the Getty Museum, as well as many of the mid–eleventh-century Echternach manuscripts.64 Most crucially, similar gold-on-purple lettering occurs in the illustrated Life of St. Omer, a manuscript executed at the same time and place. R.A. Svoboda argues that this Life, the decorative elements in Judith’s Gospel book, and a number of other northern European manuscripts were produced in and around Bruges in the 1060s by an itinerant group of secular artisans originally from Liege.65 The striking similarities between the Life’s decorative elements and those of Judith’s Gospel book underscore the stylistic relationship between the manuscripts. Not only the gold-on-purple lettering but the colors in the borders around them, the border motifs, and the decorated initials all show connections and overlaps between the decorative programs.66 The illustrations and the texts in both manuscripts use surprisingly little of the folio space, so that they both have unusually wide, bare margins. As such, the Gospel book’s decorative elements place it firmly in Judith’s new religious and cultural community. The presentation choices for this final work in Judith’s Gospel project were very sensibly guided by continental rather than English tastes, indicating her embrace of continental fashion and styles after her departure from England. It is impossible to know if Judith’s original plan for what became this Christmas/Easter Gospel book included a donor portrait (or gold-onpurple lettering), but the portrait as executed makes religious, cultural, and social statements very similar to those of the Morgan portrait. Like the Morgan frontispiece, the Fulda book’s lavish initial opening (folios 2v and 3r) presents Judith as a pious, sophisticated noblewoman with cosmopolitan, cultivated tastes (see Plates 22 and 23). On the right, folio 3r displays seven rows of four beasts in a pattern reminiscent of eastern and Mediterranean silk textiles.67 Like the carpet pages of the early Insular Gospel books, this page indicates the beginning of a new (in this case, the first) section of the book. Stephen Wagner’s analysis of similar textile-inspired pages made at Echternach in the mid-eleventh century provides some explanation for the inclusion of this page in Judith’s book (it is worth noting that the Life of St. Omer, discussed above, does not include any textile pages). Wagner connects those textile pages to western European desire for eastern silks as luxury fabrics for both religious and secular display. He states
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that “the artists of Echternach utilized silk design to divide Gospel text … Their artistry also symbolically protected the divine word, much the way that silk was used to protect relics in the Early Middle Ages.”68 Wagner’s discussion of a page in the Echternach Golden Gospels, very similar to Judith’s textile page, notes that the artist “filled the squares with golden lions, a heraldic motif popular in woven silk.”69 The Speyer Evangeliary, already noted twice as an analogue to motifs in Judith’s books, also has gold-on-purple “silk” pages with lions and medallions at its beginning (folios 1v–2r); similar gold-on-purple pages, with eagles, geometric patterns, and floral motifs, mark the end of the prefatory matter and the beginning of the Gospel texts proper (folios 20v–21r).70 Three other folios in the Speyer Evangeliary also use textile motifs in combination with other decorative strategies (frames, background, geometric borders) to present its deluxe series of texts and images (folios 3v–4r, 9r). The Goslar Gospel book, now the Codex Caesareus Upsaliensis, also uses extensive “simulated textile ornaments” throughout, even decorating the borders of the donor-portrait opening and the John opening with textile-like patterns of gold on purple.71 Each of these exemplifies Wagner’s point about the status associations of the silk motifs. Similarly, Muthesius has analyzed a number of extant “lion silks” (the fabric, not the illustrated images) and their exchange within patronage networks in eleventh-century Germany. She associates the lion silk most specifically with Emperor Henry III (1028–1056), showing that the Emperor probably used some of the fabric as part of a donation to Anno, the Archbishop of Cologne.72 Judith’s beasts do not all seem to be lions (only some of them have manes), but they are certainly executed in gold and surrounded by a lavish foliated and gold border. The background of the page was originally purple (now faded to a variety of shades of purplish-brown); Muthesius notes that purple silk, dyed with murex (a type of warm-water sea snail), was especially indicative of imperial and aristocratic authority.73 The beast-textile page of Judith’s Fulda Gospel thus exemplifies Muthesius’s argument that “The Latin West not only sought after Byzantine silks but it gloried in the images of power, authority, piety, and splendor that Byzantine silks afforded.”74 The inclusion of such a textile page in Judith’s book showed her to be au courant in the worlds of fashion and fabric as well as manuscript decoration.75 The focus on fabric is apparent as well on the left of the initial opening (folio 2v, Plate 22), the later of the two donor portraits; one of the most immediately apparent details is the similarity in the ornate gold trims of Judith’s and Christ’s clothing. Rosenthal’s description of this image states that “Christ stands on the right and holds a book in each hand. Judith stands on the left, having presumably just presented Christ with the book held in his right hand.”76 While the Morgan portrait drew visual and thematic parallels between Judith and the Virgin Mary, the Fulda portrait focuses on and celebrates Judith’s relationship with Christ. The composition of the image, its figures, and its details emphasize Judith’s intimacy with Christ. His figure is larger than hers, but the size disparity is not nearly as dramatic as that in the Morgan portrait; indeed, if the historical Judith had a relatively small physique, the size differential between them might even
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be termed realistic. Their heads incline towards each other, with hers tilted at a sharper angle than his. While her eyes are appropriately lowered, he is looking at her. His right hand, holding the green and gray book, is extended towards her; her left hand is presumably under her gold-bordered red mantle, but very close to his. According to Piponnier and Mane, in the eleventh century red was “the colour then considered most prestigious” for clothing,77 so it is fitting that the prominent red and pink of Judith’s mantle matches the red and pink of Christ’s tunic. Similarly, the light blue of her dress and headdress complement the darker blue of his cloak. As noted earlier, all of their articles of clothing are trimmed with the same elaborate gold border. These details together point to a warm and close relationship between the figures, so that the image is a portrait, not just of Judith but also of her devotion to a remarkably accessible and familiar deity. The accessibility of Christ in this image is especially striking when contrasted with the presentation of Christ in roughly contemporary continental donor/patron portraits of both men and women, lay and religious. Much more typical is a composition of Christ in majesty, enthroned and monumental, with the donor(s) portrayed in a much smaller scale at the bottom of the image (for example, see the dedication miniatures in the Speyer Evangeliary, Plates 18 and 19). Another atypical feature of both of the Judith portraits is her solo appearance, even though she is a married woman; while Tostig may have been dead by the time the Fulda portrait was executed, he was definitely alive when the Morgan portrait was made in England. Married woman most usually appear as co-donors with their husbands; roughly contemporary examples include not just the Speyer Evangeliary donor portraits but those of Emma and Cnut (Emma was widowed at the time of her solo portrait in the Encomium), the Empress Zoe with her husband, Constantine, or Empress Theophano with her husband, Otto II.78 Women alone in donor portraits tend to be widows (like Emma, the dowager queen) or abbesses (like Abbess Uta in the dedication page of the early eleventh-century German Uta-Evangeliary).79 Judith and/or her scribe made the unusual decision to portray a married woman without her husband, perhaps emphasizing the individual nature of her devotion and also her patronage. The portraits definitively state that these are her books, not their books. The artist of Judith’s Fulda Gospel was also the artist of Bibliotheque National, MS Lat. 819, a richly illustrated mid–eleventh-century sacramentary.80 The most obvious visual connection between the Judith portrait and the sacramentary illustrations is the composition of the sacramentary’s annunciation miniature (see Plate 25). Judith’s gesture in the portrait precisely parallels Mary’s in the annunciation; Christ’s stance is very similar to the angel Gabriel’s. Other details show the connection between the images as well: the tilting of the heads, the physical overlap of the figures in the center of the image, and some of the details in the clothing (the shape of the cloak draped at Christ’s and Gabriel’s right shoulders, for example). Judith’s face does not look like Mary’s, or like any of the women’s faces from BN Lat.819. Judith’s nose seems to have been drawn differently from the noses of the Lat.819 women; while Judith’s nose is slightly worn or damaged
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in the image, it seems to be longer and straighter than those of the various women in the sacramentary. In addition, the women of Lat.819 have wide foreheads and narrow chins, while Judith’s face is uniformly narrow from forehead to chin. This seeming difference may be a result of the more elaborate headdress that Judith wears, since the women’s headdresses in Lat.819 have smooth edges, rather than the undulating curves made by the extra fabric in Judith’s appropriately modest but luxuriously voluminous headgear. The fabric in her headdress is one of the resonances between Judith’s and Christ’s clothing; the Fulda portrait proclaims, as well, a literary aspect to Judith’s affinity with Christ, as they share an interest in books. The book in Christ’s left hand is elaborately decorated with gold and red, perhaps suggesting the jeweled cover that the Fulda Gospel once had and that the Morgan books still do. The book he has just received from Judith is plain (the light green of its binding is the same as the light green in Christ’s halo). Both books seem to be similarly constructed, despite their difference in outward decoration; Judith’s presentation of the book to Christ implies that she dedicates her patronage, her reading, and her devotion to him. On at least one level, the plain book in the illustration represents the actual book containing the illustration: by commissioning and using the (actual) book, Judith (actually) presents her devotion to Christ, enacting in historical time the event illustrated metaphorically on folio 2v. Like the Morgan portrait, the Fulda portrait displays Judith’s social status and cultural sophistication as well as her piety and religious devotion. It also demonstrates her substantial wealth, simply in its value as a material object. Not only did the Fulda book originally have a deluxe metal cover, but the use of gold throughout the book is especially lavish—the entire background of the frontispiece portrait is gold, as are the backgrounds of each of the Evangelist portraits. All of the miniatures are enclosed by foliated frames, also with gold accents, and two further rows of gold. Like Judith and Christ, the Evangelists wear robes trimmed with wide gold embroidery. The portrait itself depicts Judith in expensive clothing, standing on an almost equal footing with Christ. As in the Morgan portrait, she presents herself as sophisticated, wealthy, literate, and pious. The irony is that when she commissioned this portrait, Judith was living on the good graces of her half-brother, either recently widowed or still married to a recently deposed earl. While John of Worcester takes pains to note that Tostig and Judith took as much of their treasury with them as possible when they left England in 1065, it is striking that Judith chose to use a substantial sum from that treasury to complete the Gospel book (rather than to equip troops or buy more ships). It seems like an impractical purchase, but should actually be ascribed to her positioning herself within the body politic—Judith certainly didn’t need another Gospel book in order to perform her devotions or attend services, but having the book finished in Flanders indicated to the community at large (which included the English aristocracy, sure to be in contact with the Flemish court) that Judith was not cowed by the events in Northumbria in 1065 and 1066. The Fulda book, especially its donor portrait, proclaimed that she did not intend to allow the
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Northern Rebellion or the Battle of Stamford Bridge to affect her pious, literate, and cultured position in the nobility. If it was completed after Tostig’s death, it also declared her continued activity in the secular world and thus, perhaps, her intentions to remarry and even improve her status. Judith’s patronage of display books and objects formed a critical part of her strategies to proclaim her social, cultural, and political prominence throughout northern Europe. The four Gospel books survived in European collections when potential equivalent artifacts from England did not survive the Norman Conquest and the English Reformation—so we have evidence of Judith’s patronage, evidence that probably existed but is now largely missing for the patronage practices of other secular noblewomen (in contrast, there is substantial evidence for the literary patronage practices of nuns).81 For example, Judith’s mother-in-law, Gytha, and her sister-in-law Gunnhild both bequeathed manuscripts to European monasteries,82 but records of these gifts too are extant because they are continental rather than English. Goda, sister of Edward the Confessor, supposedly gave at least one Gospel Book to Rochester in the mid-eleventh century.83 The Margaret of Scotland Gospel book, discussed in Chapter 2 above, was correctly identified only in the late nineteenth century, and the rest of Queen Margaret’s library is now lost or unidentified.84 We have hints and references like these, but very little other remaining evidence of what was probably a vibrant culture of wealthy laywomen in Anglo-Saxon England, as well as on the continent, commissioning deluxe books and objects to proclaim their own and their families’ cultural and social status. As Judith returned to the marriage market after Tostig’s death, she succeeded in her desire not to let the events in England affect her social position, her ability to proclaim herself as a patron, or her ambition to improve her position in the aristocratic hierarchy. Notes 1 Quotation in this paragraph and the next from Frank Barlow, ed. and trans., The Life of King Edward Who Rests at Westminster, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 77–9; the Latin texts: … cum eo eius detentus amore et iussis in disponendis regalis palatii negotiis … postremo omnia que eius erant igne et ferro in devastationem redigunt. Vtque effere temeritatis haberent auctoritatem, caput sibi et dominum faciunt ducis Algrai filium iuniorem, eiusque fratrem natu maiorem ad hanc socetatem dementie sue inuitant … paucorum nobilium malitia. 2 Ibid., 78; Culpabant nonnulli eundem gloriosum ducem nimie feritatis, et magis quam amore iustitie inquietos punisse arguebatur cupiditate inuadende eorum facultatis. 3 Kelly DeVries makes the interesting point that Harold had nothing to gain from Tostig losing the earldom; indeed, he would have benefited in his plans to become king with a brother controlling the northern part of the kingdom. See DeVries, The Norwegian Invasion of England in 1066 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1999), 183. Henry Summerson has recently published previously unknown early modern translations of parts of the Vita and proved that the early modern translator(s) had access to a text different from the only one now extant. In Summerson’s text two, the translator has omitted the sentences denying
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Tostig’s guilt and Harold’s duplicity. See Summerson, “Tudor Antiquaries and the Vita Ædwardi Regis,” Anglo-Saxon England 38 (2009): 175. 4 D.W. Rollason et al., eds, The Durham Liber vitae: London, British Library, MS Cotton Domitian A. VII: Edition and Digital Facsimile with Introduction, Codicological, Prosopographical and Linguistic Commentary, and Indexes (London: British Library, 2007). 5 For details about the Chronicle’s creation, including modern scholars’ original attribution of the Chronicle to Florence rather than John of Worcester, see the introduction to The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. and trans. Reginald R. Darlington and Patrick McGurk (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995). 6 Ibid., vol. 2, 596–99; Dein post festiuitatem sancti Michaelis archangeli .v. non. Octobris. feria.ii, Northymbrenses ministri Gamelbearn, Dunstanus, filius Athelnethes, Glonieorn, filius Heardulfi, cum .cc. militibus Eboracum uenerunt, et pro execranda nece nobilium Northymbrensium ministrorum Gospatrici , quem regina Edgitha, germani sui Tostii causa, in curia regis .iii. nocte dominice Natiuitatis per insidias occidi iussit, et Gamelis, filii Orm, ac Vlfi, filii Dolfini, quos anno precedenti Eboraci in camera sua sub pacis federe per insidias comes Tostius occidere precepit, necnon pro immensitate tributi quod de tota Northymbria iniuste acceperat, eodem die primitus illius Danicos huscarlas Amundum et Reuensuartum de fuga retractos extra ciuitatis muros ac die sequenti plusquam .cc. uiros ex curialibus illius in boreali parte Humbre fluminisn peremerunt. Erarium quoque ipsius fregerunt ac omnibus que illius fuerant ablatis, recesserunt. 7 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. R.A.B. Mynors, R.M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998), vol. 1, ii.200; asperitatemorum Northanimbros in rebellionem excitauit … se homines libere natos … a maioribus didicisse aut libertatem aut mortem. 8 MS C for 1065, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 5, MS C (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2001), 118; Tostig wæs þa æt Brytfordan mid þam kinge. 9 These images are not quite “donor portraits,” as Judith did not intend the books’ initial destinations to be religious institutions (so she was not “donating” them the way Henry III donated deluxe Gospel books to Speyer or Goslar). Nevertheless, I will retain the term as its conventions (of a portrayal of a secular, historical patron who commissioned the image and the book) apply. 10 Reproductions of both images are available in a variety of places, including plates 17 and 21 of Catherine Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2004). 11 London, BL Stowe 944, fol. 6r and Add. 33241, fol. 1v, respectively. Karkov agrees with Keynes and Campbell, who state that this Encomium manuscript may have been Emma’s own presentation copy. See Karkov, Ruler Portraits, 154, as well as Alistair Campbell and Simon Keynes, eds, Encomium Emmae Reginae, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), introduction, xciv. A late fourteenth-century copy of the Encomium, with some textual variants but not illustrated, was discovered at Powderham Castle in Devon and sold at Sotheby’s in 2008; see Timothy Bolton, “A newly emergent mediaeval manuscript containing Encomium Emmae reginae with the only known complete text of the recension prepared for King Edward the Confessor,” Mediaeval Scandinavia 19 (2009): 205–21. 12 Karkov, Ruler Portraits, 120. 13 The phrase is Karkov’s, although the idea is something of a commonplace.
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Karkov, Ruler Portraits, 130–31. Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2011), 270, with more extended discussion in Ruler Portraits, 146ff. For a recent analysis of the text of the Encomium with emphasis on the ways that Emma used her patronage of the text to assert political and cultural power, see Catherine A.M. Clarke, Writing Power in AngloSaxon England: Texts, Hierarchies, Economies (Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 124–34. Clarke’s brief discussion of the frontispiece is on p. 127. 16 The C-text of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle includes the information that Emma was buried in Winchester with Cnut (O’Keeffe, ed., Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 112). 17 For definitions of these terms and their applicability to early medieval states, see Theresa Earenfight, Queenship and Medieval History (New York: MacMillan, 2013). 18 Patrick McGurk and Jane Rosenthal, “The Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks of Judith, Countess of Flanders: Their Text, Make-Up and Function,” Anglo-Saxon England 24 (1994): 282–3. The curator of the Morgan has also assured me that the collation of the manuscript indicates the impossibility of that scenario (personal communication, William M. Voelkle, curator of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at the Pierpont Morgan Library, February 2010). I am enormously grateful to Mr. Voelkle for his insights and assistance. 19 For an overview of the relationship between Wilton Abbey and the royal house, see Mary Dockray-Miller, “Introduction,” in Saints Edith and Æthelthryth: Princesses, Miracle Workers, and Their Late Medieval Audience (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); for a specific analysis of Wilton Abbey’s relationship with the Godwins, see Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, “Leaving Wilton: Gunnhild and the Phantoms of Agency,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106.2 (2007): 203–33. 20 C.R. Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 57. 21 Translation from Michael Wright and Kathleen Loncar, “The Vita of Edith,” in Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius, ed. Stephanie Hollis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 48. This description is included only in Cardiff, Public Library, MS I.381; it is not in the base text of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS C938. The Latin text, from A. Wilmart, ed., “La Legende De Ste Edithe En Prose Et Vers Par Le Moine Goscelin,” Analecta Bollandiana 56 (1938): 79: Sunt et aliae benignae caritatis eius reliquiae. Inter quae fecerat ibi ex bisso candidisso albam, exemplar innocentie suae, praestantissimam auro, gemmis, margaritis ac perulis Angligenis a summo contextam, secundum fidem suam auream et sinceritatem gemmeam, circa pedes aureas apostolorum ymagines Dominum circumstantes, Dominum medium assidentem, se uice suplicis Mariae affusam, dominica uestigia exosculantem. Hoc opus adeo multo pretio parauerant manus uirgineae cum mistica fide, ut tam placeret sanctitate quam ditioso decore. 22 Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, “Holy Women and the Needle Arts: Piety, Devotion, and Stitching the Sacred, Ca. 500–1150,” in Negotiating community and difference in medieval Europe: gender, power, patronage, and the authority of religion in Latin Christendom, ed. Katherine Allen Smith and Scott Wells (Leiden: Brill, 2009): 103, n.77. 23 For an example of a much more typical presentation of a donor at a scene from biblical history, see the lectionary of the Regensburg Convent of the Holy Cross, now Oxford, Keble College, Inv.-Nr. MS 49, f.7r, which depicts the very small donors completely outside the border of the main image of the Crucifixion; it is reproduced in the exhibition catalog Krone Und Schleier: Kunst Aus Mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern, ed. Jeffrey E. Hamburger and Robert Suckale (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2005), item 301. 14 15
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Jane Rosenthal, “An Unprecedented Image of Love and Devotion: The Crucifixion in Judith of Flanders’s Gospel Book,” in Tributes to Lucy Freeman Sandler: Studies in Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. Kathryn A. Smith and Carole Krinsky (London: Harvey Miller, 2007), 21–36. 25 Jennifer O’Reilly, “St. John the Evangelist: Between Two Worlds,” in Insular & Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought in the Early Medieval Period, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, Dept. of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 2011), 216. 26 Rosenthal, “Unprecedented Image,” 25–6; Rosenthal refers to Gale Owen-Crocker’s discussion of Judith’s dress in Dress in Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd ed. (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1986, 2004), 215; Owen-Crocker notes there that Emma wears a dress with similar but not quite such elongated sleeves in the frontispiece portrait of the Encomium Emmae. 27 Owen-Crocker, Dress, 228. 28 Anna Muthesius, Studies in Byzantine and Islamic Silk Weaving (London: Pindar, 1995), i. 29 Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, 145. 30 Owen-Crocker, Dress, 228–9. 31 I am indebted to William M. Voelkle for allowing me to examine the manuscript closely enough to see this patterning; he has informed me that the Morgan has long-term plans to make high-resolution images of the Judith Gospels available online. 32 Nina Verbanaz, “Salian Women Constructing Authority through the Crowned Virgin Mary” (paper presented at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, University of the South, Sewanee, TN, March 2012). 33 An early twelfth-century portrait of Judith’s daughter-in-law, Matilda of Tuscany, presents Matilda in a similarly fashionable gown with elongated sleeves and patterned cloth, although the miniature is not nearly as deluxe as the Morgan or Speyer images. I am indebted to Valerie Eads for information about this image. See Admont, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex Admontensis 289 f.1v, available at http://cdm.csbsju.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ HMMLClrMicr/id/11618 (accessed 23 September 2014). 34 Owen-Crocker notes that “a tight belt is visible at the front of her gown, cinching the fabric to show off her waist, but it does not seem to continue round the back” (Dress in Anglo-Saxon England, 217). Michelle Brown has recently stated that the “golden rectangle at her [Judith’s] waist may be a belt, or might it be a Gospelbook peeping from her pocket?” in The Book and the Transformation of Britain c. 550–1050: A Study in Written and Visual Literacy and Orality (London: British Library, 2011), 147. Brown’s suggestion makes more metaphorical than visual or logical sense, however, not least because Anglo-Saxon clothing did not include pockets (Owen-Crocker, personal communication, 1 May 2012). 35 Barbara Raw, Anglo-Saxon Crucifixion Iconography and the Art of the Monastic Revival (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 105. 36 Darlington and McGurk, eds, The Chronicle of John of Worcester, under the year 1065, vol. 2, 598–9; the phrases are exlegauerunt and de Anglia Tostium expulerunt. 37 Barlow, ed., The Life of King Edward, 83; Susceptum ergo sororis sue maritum honorifice et gratanter more suo, iussit morari et quiescere a tot laboribus in castro quod ex nomine beati Audomari inibi principaliter quiescentis nuncupatur, Brittanieque occeanum permensis primum occurrat. Hic ergo ei et domum et mansionem dedit, redditus eiusdem castri ad uictus necessaria ei in manus posuit, suoque loco et uice presidentis seruituti quosque militares eidem oppido adiacentes adesse precepit. 24
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See the introduction to Volume 1 of E. Warlop, The Flemish Nobility before 1300, 2 vols (Kortrijk: G. Desmet-Huysman, 1975) for an overview of the position of the castellan; for specific information about the first Flemish castellans of St. Omer, see Warlop’s discussion of the tensions between the St. Omer castellans and the Counts of Flanders (wherein Warlop does not mention Tostig at all), Flemish Nobility, 117–18. Similarly, A. Giry does not clarify the break in his narrative from the end of the castellanship of Lambert (1063) and the beginning of that of Wulfricus Kabel (1072) in Les Chatelains De SaintOmer (1042–1386) (Paris: Impr. de Gouverneur, 1875), 10. 39 Renée Nip, “Political Relations between England and Flanders (1066–1128),” Anglo-Norman Studies 21 (1999): 150. 40 For a very pro-Harold discussion of the arguments for and against the various potential claimants to the throne at Edward’s death, see Ian W. Walker, Harold: The Last Anglo-Saxon King (Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 1997), 115–17. 41 See Nicolas Huyghebaert, “Les Femmes Laiques Dans La Vie Religieuse Des XIe & XIIe Siecles Dans La Province Ecclesiastique De Reims,” in I Laici Nella “Societas Christiana” Dei Secoli XI E XII, ed. Guiseppe Lazzati (Milan: Miscellanea del Centro di studi medioevali, 1968), 374–6. 42 Laura L. Gathagan, ”Embodying Power: Gender and Authority in the Queenship of Mathilda of Flanders,” Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2002, 186–202. 43 Elisabeth van Houts, “The Norman Conquest through European Eyes,” The English Historical Review 110 (Sept. 1995): 838–9. See similarly Emma Mason, The House of Godwine: The History of a Dynasty (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), 184. 44 For a thorough analysis of the battles of Fulford and Stamford Bridge, see DeVries, The Norwegian Invasion; DeVries includes detailed descriptions of tactics, weapons, and topography of the sites. E.A. Freeman’s The History of the Norman Conquest of England, Its Causes and Its Results (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1870) is considered the classic study, although it is marred by Freeman’s pro-English bias and his Victorian sensibility and editorializing. Among the vast literature available on the Conquest more generally, see most recently Richard Huscroft, The Norman Conquest: A New Introduction (New York: Pearson, 2009), with excellent maps, genealogical charts, and suggestions for further reading. The important primary source texts are the various versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The Chronicle of John of Worcester, and William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, all noted above, as well as Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. Marjorie Chibnall, Oxford Medieval Texts, (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1969). 45 Darlinton and McGurk, eds, The Chronicle of John of Worcester, under the year 1066, vol. 2, 600–601; insulanos sibi tributum et stipendium soluere coegerat … circa ripas maris donec ad Sandicum portum ueniret, predas exercuit … et cursum ad Lindesegiam direxit, in qua uillas quamplures incendit, multosque homines neci tradidit; 46 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ii.228.9; Eodem anno Tostinus, a Flandria in Humbram nauigio sexaginta nauium delatus, ea quae circa oram fluminis erant piraticis excursionibus infestabat. 47 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, 141; Deinde festinus Normanniam adiit, et Willelmum ducem cur periurum suum regnare sineret fortiter redarguit, seque fideliter si ipse cum Normannicis uiribus in Angliam transfretaret regni decus optenturum illi spopondit.Ipsi nempe iamdudum se inuicem multum anuerant, duasque sorores per quas amicicia saepe recalescebat in coniugio habebant. 48 Walker, Harold, 154. 38
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Manuscripts E and D state that Tostig him to beah; Fagrskinna and Morkinskinna also are very clear that Tostig submitted himself to Harald. See Theodore Murdock Andersson and Kari Ellen Gade, ed. and trans., Morkinskinna: The Earliest Icelandic Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings (1030–1157) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 262; Alison Finlay, ed. and trans., Fagrskinna, a Catalogue of the Kings of Norway (Boston: Brill, 2004), 219. 50 Malcolm of Scotland was not yet married to Margaret, referenced above as another female book owner and patron; their marriage took place in 1070. 51 See Susan Irvine, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol.7, Manuscript E (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 86, and similarly G.P. Cubbin, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS D, 79–80; þa wile com Tostig eorl into Humbran mid sixtigum scipum…hine gemette þær Harold cyng of Norwegon mid þreom hund scypum. 52 Walker, Harold, 155. 53 Walker suggests that Tostig probably chose the hostages (Ibid., 158); Tostig’s knowledge of York and its inhabitants was probably very useful in this stage of the campaign. For a detailed discussion of the tactics used at Fulford, see DeVries, Norwegian Invasion, 255–59. 54 See Walker, Harold, 158–61, for a discussion of the logistics of Harold’s arrival in Yorkshire. 55 DeVries accepts the core historical authenticity of the episode of the Norwegian defending the bridge; DeVries argues that this one man gave Harald and Tostig the time they needed to form a circular shield-wall with which to meet Harold’s advance (Norwegian Invasion, 280). For the primary texts, see Andersson and Gade, Morkinskinna; Finlay, Fagrskinna; O’Keeffe, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS C, 122; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, ii.228.11 (William incorrectly calls Harald Hardrada “Fairhair” throughout his narrative). 56 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, 169; Locus etiam belli pertranseuntibus euidenter patet, ubi magna congeries ossuum mortuorum usque hodie iacet et indicium ruinae multiplicis utriusque gentis exhibet. 57 Wido (Guy), Bishop of Amiens, The Carmen De Hastingae Proelio of Guy, Bishop of Amiens, ed. and trans. Frank Barlow, 2nd ed., Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1999), 8–11, lines 129–38: Rex Heraldus enim sceleratus ad ultima terre / Fratris ad exicium perfida tela parat; / Non modicam regni partem nam frater adeptus, / Tecta dabat flammis et gladiis populum. / Marte sub opposito currens Heraldus in hostes, / Non timuit fratris tradere membra neci. / Alter in alterutrum plus quam ciuile peregit / Bellum, set uictor (proh dolor!) ipse fuit. / Inuidus ille Cain fratris caput amputat ense, / Et caput et corpus sic sepeliuit humo. 58 Wido (Guy), Bishop of Amiens, Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy, Bishop of Amiens, eds and trans. Catherine Morton and Hope Muntz, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1972), 11, n.5. 59 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, iii.252.2; Cadauer eius, inditio uerrucae inter duas scapulas agnitum, sepulturam Eboraci meruit. 60 All of the contemporary sources note that Tostig took men to serve on his ships “whether they wished to go or not,” as John of Worcester puts it (de butsecarlis quosdam uolentes quosdam nolentes secum assumens recessit) (601). 61 McGurk and Rosenthal, “Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks,” 274. 62 See description of the manuscript in ibid., 289–93. 49
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For an overview of the Stockholm Codex Aureus (Stockholm, Royal Library, MS A.135), see Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England, 186–9. I am indebted to Prof. Michelle Brown for her insights about the use of gold lettering on purple background throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. Two of the folios of the New Minster charter, produced in 966 at Winchester, have gold lettering on a blue background (BL Cotton Vespasian A. viii, folios 3r and 3v). 64 New York, New York Public Library MA 001; J. Paul Getty Museum, MS Ludwig V 1. Images of both manuscripts readily available online. The group of Echternach manuscripts is discussed in the commentary volume of Carl Adam Johan Nordenfalk, ed., Codex Caesareus Upsaliensis: An Echternach Gospel-Book of the Eleventh Century, 2 vols (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1971), vol. 2. 65 Rosemary Argent Svoboda, “The Illustrations of the Life of Saint Omer (SaintOmer, Bibliotheque Municipale, MS. 698)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1983), 30–33. 66 For a complete facsimile of the illustrated Life of St. Omer (Saint-Omer, Bibliotheque Municipale MS 698), see http://www.purl.org/yoolib/bmsaintomer/656 (accessed 23 September 2014). The online facsimile uses page rather than folio numbers; excellent comparisons with Judith’s book are pages 8, 12, 13, and 36. 67 I am indebted to Zan Kocher, Kriszta Kotsis, and the medfem-l electronic discussion list for direction regarding the image’s connections with eastern textiles. 68 Stephen Wagner, “Establishing a Connection to Illuminated Manuscripts Made at Echternach in the Eighth and Eleventh Centuries and Issues of Patronage, Monastic Reform and Splendor,” Peregrinations 3.1 (2010): 49–82, at 55. http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu (accessed 23 September 2014). Wagner provides many high-quality color plates. 69 Ibid., 69. The reference is to folios 75v and76r of the Golden Gospels. Wagner provides a color reproduction of the full opening; for a complete facsimile and discussion of the manuscript, see Peter Metz, The Golden Gospels of Echternach, Codex Aureus Epternacensis (New York: Praeger, 1957). 70 See discussion of the zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbols in Chapter 2, as well as of the donor portrait of Empress Gisela above in Chapter 3. Stephen Wagner discusses these pages in his “Establishing a Connection” essay, pp. 63–4. 71 Nordenfalk, Codex Caesareus, 97–102. 72 Anna Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving AD 400 to AD 1200 (Vienna: Verlag Fassbaender, 1997), 34. 73 Muthesius, Studies in Byzantine and Islamic Silk Weaving, 117. 74 Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving, 126. 75 Christine Sciacca has discussed the related phenomenon of pieces of actual silk sewn into manuscripts to protect miniatures, especially those with gold or silver illumination. Morgan 709 includes two such small silk curtains, but they were added in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century at Weingarten (personal communication, William Voelkle, 8 February 2010). See Christine Sciacca, “Raising the Curtain on the Use of Textiles in Manuscripts,” in Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and Their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn M. Rudy and Barbara Baert (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 169, n.12. 76 McGurk and Rosenthal, “Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks,” 291. 77 Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 57. 63
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For an image of Zoe and Constantine, see the mid–eleventh-century portrait in Sinai, Monastery of St. Catherine, cod. 364, fol. 3r, available at http://www.ime.gr/chronos/09/ en/gallery/main/people/p19dp1m.html (accessed 23 September 2014); for Theophano and Otto, see the late tenth-century ivory book cover now in Paris, Musée National du Moyen Âge, Cl 392, available through wikimedia commons. I am indebted to Kriszta Kotsis for these references. 79 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 13601, f.2r, reproduced as plate 1 in Hamburger and Suckale, eds, Krone Und Schleier. 80 McGurk and Rosenthal, “Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks,” 281–3; for a description of the manuscript, see http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ead.html (accessed 23 September 2014); for reproductions of the miniatures, see http://images.bnf.fr/jsp/index.jsp (accessed 23 September 2014). 81 Studies of medieval women’s literacy and patronage—especially those of religious women—have proliferated in recent years. For a solid overview with further bibliography, see Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds, Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). 82 Philip Grierson, ”The Relations between England and Flanders before the Norman Conquest,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series 23 (1941): 109, as well as a reference in Frank Barlow, The Godwins: The Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2002), 167. 83 The book, now missing its medieval cover and binding, is London, British Library MS Royal 1 D iii; Mark Jonathan Faulkner calls it “rather wretched” in his discussion of Rochester’s ownership of the manuscript in “The Uses of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, c.1066–1200” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 2008), 65. It certainly has no elaborate illustration or gold lettering; aside from its textual contents, it is simply not in the same category as Judith’s books. 84 See Rebecca Rushforth, St. Margaret’s Gospel-Book: The Favourite Book of an Eleventh-Century Queen of Scots, Treasures from the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2007). 78
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Chapter 4
Collecting Treasure as Lady of Ravensburg Judith was in her early to mid thirties when she became a widow. She probably had small children, now fatherless and among the last survivors of the Godwin line.1 It is possible, but unlikely, that she kept a residence at St. Omer, the site of Tostig’s castellanship in 1065; she probably would have preferred to be near her kin at the comital court in Bruges, both to distance herself from any association with the defeated Godwins and to stay current with continental political and social news. Her former mother-in-law, Gytha, set up something of a diaspora court in St. Omer in 1067; MS D of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that “in this year Gytha, Harold’s mother, went out, and the wives of many good men with her, into Flatholm, and there they lived for some time, and thence traveled over the sea to St. Omer.”2 Initially, Gytha probably found the island of Flatholm in the Severn Estuary something of a haven from William the Conqueror,3 but she ultimately decided to leave England entirely. Whether as a focal point for Anglo-Saxon resistance to William or as a mark of her devotion to the monastic church there (or both), Gytha’s presence at St. Omer in 1067 and after makes Judith an even less likely resident of St. Omer. With no English land holdings and no husband, Judith would have had no incentive to cast her lot with Gytha and probably would not have wanted to be identified as part of Gytha’s group of Anglo-Saxon widows in socially and politically precarious positions. Also in 1067, Judith’s half-brother Baldwin V died after a long and largely successful career. (David Nicholas notes that “Baldwin V’s prestige was immense. He was called ‘prince of the fatherland’ in Flemish texts”.)4 Baldwin’s death is of especial importance to Judith’s later patronage of Weingarten Abbey, as she is said to have received her relic of the Holy Blood of Christ from him just before he died. Some modern historians are very skeptical about the accuracy of the narratives surrounding the “history” of the Holy Blood relic, and those reservations are addressed in Chapter 5. More immediately, Judith’s prospects for a second marriage were entwined with the mid–eleventh-century regional politics of the Holy Roman Empire, especially Baldwin V’s tense relationship with Emperors Henry III and Henry IV. Baldwin and Henry III had been at odds since the beginning of Henry’s reign. In 1046, the year of Henry’s imperial coronation, Baldwin and his ally Godfrey, Duke of Lorraine (known as “the Bearded”), attacked and partially destroyed Henry’s palace at Nijmegen. Sigebert of Gembloux, a pro-imperial author working in a Benedictine abbey in what is now Belgium, blames Godfrey for the motivation but gives credit for the action to Baldwin: “at the instigation of Godfrey, Count Baldwin of Flanders revolted against the emperor.”5 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
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provides background information (although it neglects to mention Godfrey) and records Henry’s alliance with Edward the Confessor against Baldwin in 1049: In this year the Emperor gathered an innumerable force against Baldwin of Bruges since he had destroyed the palace at Nijmegen and also because of many other offensive things he had done. The army which the Emperor had mustered was enormous; it included Leo, the Pope of Rome and many more men of noble fellowship. Henry also sent to King Edward and asked Edward for a naval force so that Edward might not permit that Baldwin elude Henry on water. Then Edward travelled to Sandwich and waited there with a great fleet of ships until the Emperor had from Baldwin everything that he wanted.6
Since Baldwin routinely sheltered exiles from England at his court in Bruges (see discussion in the introduction), Edward’s assist to the Emperor made sense for both of them. Godfrey and Baldwin attacked Henry again in 1054; Godfrey and Baldwin were reconciled to the empire late in 1056, after the death of Henry III and during the regency of his widow, Agnes, for their son, Henry IV.7 Baldwin’s uneasy relationship with the empire was thus often antagonistic and never a full alliance.8 Flanders’s association with the empire also affected Baldwin’s goals for his half-sister’s second marriage: no matter whom she married, the new alliance would have to strengthen Baldwin’s position in some way. Baldwin V died before that marriage took place; his death after a reign of almost 40 years left something of a power vacuum in the comital court. His eldest son, Baldwin VI, died only three years later, in July of 1070 (see Figure I.1, Judith’s family tree); Baldwin V’s second son, known as Robert the Frisian, then proceeded to usurp and kill his nephew the following February. As Nicholas puts it, Baldwin VI’s “son Arnulf III … rule[d] only a few months before his uncle Robert the Frisian over threw him in a revolution that struck even contemporaries as peculiarly callous.”9 Judith’s second marriage was then sanctioned and possibly arranged by her nephew Baldwin VI or by her grandnephew Arnulf III, rather than by her half-brother. When the marriage was negotiated, Welf IV controlled extensive lands in southern Germany and was about to be named Duke of Bavaria; he was thus a substantial but not royal ally for the Flemish counts. In this respect, Judith’s marriage to Welf was somewhat like her marriage to Tostig: it provided a possible opportunity for increased wealth and power but not their guarantee. Like Tostig, Welf spent much of his adult life jockeying for power in the secondary aristocratic tier, working towards but not quite achieving the very highest status. Judith and her relatives must have seen the second marriage as a vast improvement over unendowed widowhood; with the ducal title and lands, Welf had the potential to be as powerful as Judith’s nephew by marriage, William, Duke of Normandy. Judith married Welf IV in 1070, probably in the later part of the year. Welf’s first marriage was to Ethelinde, the daughter of Otto of Northeim, Duke of Bavaria, as part of a ducal alliance designed to limit the power of the emperor. In the early part of 1070, Welf allied himself with Emperor Henry IV against Otto of Northeim, repudiated Ethelinde, and (in August) devastated some of Otto’s lands.
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As a reward, Henry made Welf Duke of Bavaria at his Christmas celebrations that year.10 The marriage must have taken place after Welf’s defeat of Otto in August; it is likely that the celebration was combined with the conferral of the duchy at Christmas. While Judith was then Duchess of Bavaria at the time of her marriage, I will use the term “Lady of Ravensburg” to describe her during her second marriage, as that title applies to her consistently from 1070 to her death in 1094. The Welf family castle and lands were concentrated in the Ravensburg/ Weingarten area, and throughout the religious and political conflicts of the end of the eleventh century, Welf never lost control of this part of his power base. A late thirteenth-century Weingarten text known editorially as Ea Tempestate provides a detailed narrative of Welf’s and Judith’s marriage negotiations (see Appendix 3 for a translation). Unfortunately, this document contains numerous errors and cannot be considered reliable. For example, Ea Tempestate credits Welf IV’s mother, Chuniza, rather than his grandmother, Imiza, with the contestation of the will of Welf III (see Figure 4.1, the family tree of Welf IV). Ea Tempestate also states that Welf IV’s departure for the Holy Land occurs while Judith is still alive, even though she died in 1094 and he departed for the Holy Land in 1101.11 Two details about the marriage negotiations are interesting, however: first, the messengers (the text calls them paranimphis, “groomsmen”) from Welf went directly to Judith rather than to the Count; second, she traveled to Germany to marry him rather than formalizing the marriage before leaving her family. (Presumably, she was accompanied by the “groomsmen” and enough of an armed guard to protect her goods.) Both points suggest a woman who was to some extent in control of her own life. Perhaps her treasure (Robinson refers to Judith as “fabulously wealthy”12) allowed her a measure of independence. Perhaps she found Baldwin VI (who was about the same age) and Arnulf III (who was much younger) easily compliant with her wishes. Ea Tempestate is emphatic about the grandeur of the treasure she brought with her to Germany, stating that “she made haste to the marriage chamber with all her treasure from both her royal English marriage and her father’s legacy.”13
Figure 4.1
The family tree of Welf IV
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Ea Tempestate also alleges two proposals of marriage from Welf; Judith turned down the first but accepted the second after “she ascertained his reputation, integrity, and the nobility of his family.”14 It is also possible that by late 1070 Judith had a sense of the coming clash between Robert the Frisian and the young Arnulf; a marriage far from Flanders would keep her from having to take sides in that conflict. By the end of 1070, then, Judith was Duchess of Bavaria, married to one of the most powerful lords in Germany. She became the mistress of Ravenburg castle, the dynastic seat of the Welfs, and began to patronize Weingarten Abbey, only five kilometers away. At that moment, she seemed to have succeeded in her goals of social and financial security and status. Like England in the 1060s, however, Germany in the 1070s and 1080s was in a state of perpetual conflict, both secular and religious. The ongoing Investiture Controversy and the Saxon War (and the intersections between those two conflicts) meant that Judith never experienced an extended period of peace. Like Baldwin V’s, Welf’s relationship with the Emperor was never a firm alliance. Judith had been raised in a court where the emperor was considered an enemy, and that position may have been occasionally dampened, but was never extinguished throughout her marriage. Welf’s ultimate loyalty was solely to himself, and throughout the last quarter of the eleventh century his alliances frequently shifted with the active advances or declines in the fortunes of the Emperor, the German lords, the popes (and anti-popes), and a variety of bishops. As noted above, Welf initially sided with the Emperor against Otto of Northeim and some of the other dukes in the Saxon War, sometimes called the “Saxon rebellion.”15 The Emperor deposed Welf from the Bavarian duchy only seven years later, however, as Welf had joined with other dukes, led by Rudolf of Swabia, in an attempt to overthrow Henry when he was weakened in the Investiture Controversy. The Investiture Controversy—the disagreement between the Pope and the Emperor over the right to “invest” bishops—has spawned a voluminous historiography.16 Pope Gregory VII insisted on his prerogative to name bishops, stating that a bishop could not take an oath of loyalty to the Emperor. Emperor Henry IV insisted on his prerogative to award lands to the bishops (without which their titles were meaningless) and to demand an oath from them on this investiture. The Pope and the Emperor each wanted to insure the bishops’ loyalty for himself. The secular German lords—Welf IV among them—largely backed the Pope for both religious reasons (Gregory excommunicated Henry a number of times, thus threatening the spiritual state of all Henry’s followers as well) and political reasons (conflict between the Emperor and the Pope strengthened the dukes’ positions). Until his loss of the duchy in 1077, Welf tried to remain on relatively good terms with the Emperor, the German dukes, and the papal party. As such, he could be viewed as either a benevolent peacekeeper or as a calculating opportunist. The Dowager Empress Agnes, who had acted as regent during part of the minority of her son Henry IV, was active in trying to make peace among the factions. She had lived in a monastic house in Rome from 1065, but traveled back
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to Germany numerous times on diplomatic missions.17 Pope Gregory VII’s register includes a 1074 letter to Agnes thanking her for some of these efforts towards peace between the Pope and the Emperor; he recognizes that she is “labouring much for the peace and concord of the universal church.”18 Agnes and Judith may have met at Henry’s Christmas court of 1070, when Welf formally received the duchy of Bavaria; another opportunity for a meeting between Agnes and Judith occurred at the July 1072 council at Worms, when Agnes helped to facilitate a peace agreement between Rudolf, Duke of Swabia, and Henry IV. We know that Agnes and Judith must have met at least once, because Judith gave one of her deluxe English Gospel books to Agnes, who then presented the book to Monte Cassino during her extended visit there that lasted from September or October of 1072 to March or April of 1073.19 The book in question is now Monte Cassino MS 437, the most “personal” book of the group of four discussed in Chapter 2 (see Plates 13–16). Francis Newton’s analysis of the donor records and the added marginalia shows that Agnes had the book with her in late 1072 when she arrived at Monte Cassino. While it is certainly possible that Judith presented Agnes with the gift at an unrecorded meeting, it is most likely that the transfer occurred in July of 1072. At Worms, Agnes was working for peace between her son Henry IV and her sonin-law Rudolf of Swabia (although her daughter Matilda, Rudolf’s first wife, was long dead by 1072).20 Welf IV, Judith’s husband, also had ties to both sides: he was one of Rudolf’s crucial supporters, but Henry had made Welf the Duke of Bavaria only 18 months previously. H.E.J. Cowdrey states that the Worms meeting achieved Agnes’s objectives: “Indeed, relations between the king and Rudolf of Swabia, in particular, had become surprisingly close after a meeting of the court at Worms in July 1072 at which Henry reached a compromise with the princes about ecclesiastical reform.”21 The July 1072 meeting at Worms thus ended well for Welf: he was still Duke of Bavaria (even though Welf’s former father-in-law and the former Duke of Bavaria, Otto of Northeim, was working his way back into Henry’s favor), yet he still had close ties to Rudolf’s faction. The diplomacy recorded in the annals for July 1072 was probably supplemented by the gift of the Gospel book from Judith to Agnes. It is likely Judith had seen one of two of the deluxe Gospel books that Agnes and Henry III had given to the churches at Speyer and Goslar;22 she knew that Agnes would appreciate the Monte Cassino book’s zoo-anthropomorphic Evangelist symbols and its overall deluxe presentation. As a gift, the book made a statement about Judith and Welf’s extravagant wealth: especially if Judith gave Agnes the book in some sort of public venue, all of the witnesses to the exchange would know that the Duchess of Bavaria was wealthy enough to commission such a deluxe book (which still had its treasure cover, now missing). A striking act of cultural transmission between aristocratic women, Judith’s gift underscored the women’s connections through religious faith, luxury display, aesthetic preference, and political affinity; it publicly affirmed a political and spiritual bond between the Welfs and the Empress.
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Welf’s balancing act between his alliances with Henry and Rudolf became more difficult throughout the 1070s as the peace of 1072 in Worms deteriorated quickly. Rudolf built up his relationship with the Pope in opposition to the King, and Welf ultimately followed him, losing the Bavarian dukedom in 1077. Robinson references the Annales of Berthold of Reichenau to illustrate the 1073 political rupture between the dukes and the King: “Duke Rudolf of Swabia, Duke Berthold of Carinthia, and Duke Welf of Bavaria deserted the king because new advisors had appeared.”23 Later in 1073 (the first year of his papacy), Gregory invited Rudolf to Rome to consult with him, Empress Agnes, Countess Beatrice (of Tuscany, widow of Baldwin V’s erstwhile ally Godfrey of Lorraine), and others about imperialpapal relations. While the letter is full of references to the peace and concord Gregory feels towards Henry, he seems to allude to the possibility (which became a reality in 1077) that imperial-papal relations would be better served if Rudolf, rather than Henry, had responsibility for the imperial side of that relationship.24 The volatile nature of Welf’s relationships with Henry and Rudolf is exemplified by Welf’s return to the King’s camp in 1074, when he attended Henry’s court in November and seems to have valued his relationship with the King over that with Rudolf.25 However, he ultimately cast his lot with the Pope and the dukes. It may be that Judith’s famed piety influenced the religious impetus behind this choice. Gregory had advocated for clerical reform even before his ascent to the papacy. When he became Pope in 1073, he insisted upon eliminating clerical marriage and simony (the purchase of ecclesiastical office from a secular official, usually the king) from the Roman Church. This second goal is a crucial part of the Investiture Controversy, as Henry (like his imperial predecessors) saw no problem in appointing to bishoprics his chosen men, who had paid him for the privilege.26 The right to invest bishops became one of the flashpoints in the southern German dukes’ alliance against Henry. In January 1075, Gregory wrote to Rudolf and Berthold of Carinthia, encouraging them to “take urgent steps against simony and clerical unchastity”; Cowdrey notes that “There is evidence that this letter was also sent to the third South German duke, Welf IV of Bavaria.”27 The content of this letter, while religious in nature, also provided the dukes with rationale to defy Henry’s regal and imperial claims and aspirations in Germany and beyond. Gregory says that Christianity is in “an extremity,” faced with “great evil” because of simoniacs and fornicating priests who “cast aside divine laws of which they are well aware.” In accordance with these instructions—and with their own political goals—the dukes, including Welf, met in Ulm in August 1076 to plan their alliance as the papal/reform party against Henry.28 Judith left no trace in the textual record of her reactions to this turmoil. She may have been disappointed when the dukes elected Rudolf, rather than Welf, as anti-king at their meeting in Forcheim in March 1077; as with Tostig’s disastrous maneuvers in 1066, a viable chance for her to become queen had evaporated. Judith’s social status received a further blow when Welf’s participation at Forcheim led to Henry deposing him as Duke of Bavaria that June.29 By 1078, Welf may have been regretting his decision to align with the dukes: the only
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extant letter directly to Welf from Gregory implies that Welf is vacillating in his commitment to the cause of the papacy (unsurprising, given his previous and frequent reversals in positions and alliances). Gregory writes that Welf should “act … not by murmuring against ourself but by returning thanks to blessed Peter.”30 Perhaps Welf, who now had two small sons and thus a good chance to ensure his line and his legacy, was focused more on his secular future than on any moral or spiritual strength he might accrue from an alliance with the papacy. Closer to Ravensburg and not on the international stage, Weingarten Abbey was reformed according to Gregory’s dicta by 1088 under direction from Hirsau Abbey.31 Abbot William of Hirsau, the principal actor of the Hirsau reforms, demonstrated his affinity with the anti-kings Rudolf and, later, Hermann, through his enforcement of clerical discipline in the manner advocated by Gregory VII.32 Weinfurter notes the political and religious convergence of the dukes’ anti-imperial goals with the impetus of monastic reform: “supporters and promoters of clerical and monastic reforms … found fertile ground among the ranks of the nobility … [which] soon led to a close alliance between the princely opposition and the church reformers.”33 The reform at Weingarten Abbey, which had been founded by the Welfs and housed their tombs, accorded neatly with Judith’s piety; it also demonstrated Welf and Judith’s religious and political commitments to the cause of the Pope as well as their political commitment to the dukes against Henry’s imperial ambitions.34 Ironically, Weingarten’s reform may have physically excluded Judith from the abbey’s precincts, as firm establishment of male monastic space as “womanless” (to use Jo Ann McNamara’s term) was part of the reform agenda.35 While much recent scholarship focuses on the effects of reform on religious women, very little has concentrated on its effects on lay women, including their relationships with the churches they patronized.36 Such exclusion would have hearkened back to Judith’s experience with exclusion from St. Cuthbert’s shrine and Durham Cathedral, but it is also unclear whether the monks at Weingarten would have been willing to deny admittance to their founder’s generous and pious wife, even if their newly reformed rule ostensibly required them to do so. Judith may also have been pleased both politically and spiritually when Welf moved to the forefront of the ducal alliance with the Pope on the death of Rudolf the anti-king in October of 1080. Any doubts Gregory may have had about Welf’s commitment to the papal cause seem to have disappeared by March 1081, when he writes to his supporters Bishop Altmann of Passau and Abbot William of Hirsau and encourages them to “call upon” Welf when Henry is out of the country (Henry was in Verona by April of 1081). Gregory again uses purposefully ambiguous language when he states that he desires “to set him [Welf] entirely in the bosom of the blessed Peter and to arouse him especially to his service.”37 Valerie Eads has interpreted this language to mean that “After Rudolph’s death, Welf IV would have been the pope’s choice to replace him as king.”38 The letter even includes a sample oath that the new king could take; the oath begins, “From this hour and henceforth I will be faithful by true faith to blessed Peter the apostle and to his vicar Pope Gregory.”39 If Judith aspired to become a queen, the early spring of
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1081 was the moment when her husband was most likely to become a king with this somewhat indirect support of the Pope and other leading reform churchmen. Judith may have seen herself to be somewhat like her niece Matilda in Normandy, entering a marriage as a duchess and then being crowned queen after her husband’s victory. In 1081, however, Count Hermann of Salm was elected king, and Welf’s possible royal ambitions were put to rest.40 The 1080s then marked a series of skirmishes between Welf’s and Henry’s forces; none of them was decisive in either direction.41 In 1089, the Welfs allied with another powerful, pious woman: to solidify commitments between the northern Italian counties and the southern German duchies, Judith and Welf’s 17-year-old son, Welf (unattractively known as “the Fat”), married Countess Matilda of Tuscany, who was in her early forties. Matilda was closer in age to her new in-laws than to her husband; she and Judith probably never met, although their personalities, beliefs, and statures would undoubtedly have produced interesting exchanges. Her religious zeal probably accorded with Judith’s, as both women were known for their piety and their generosity to the church. After a series of debilitating and largely inconclusive military maneuvers against the army of Henry IV in northern Italy (including the ignominious surrender of Mantua by Welf V in April of 1091),42 the marriage between Welf the Fat and Countess Matilda failed in 1095, having never been consummated. Judith did not live to see the breakdown of this religious and political alliance; she died in 1094. In 1096, Henry IV re-declared Welf Duke of Bavaria, too late for Judith to enjoy any satisfaction from her husband’s reassumption of the ducal title he had held at their marriage 25 years before. During all of these internecine and international conflicts, Judith was probably ensconced in the castle at Ravensburg. She is not mentioned in any of the textual records as having accompanied her husband in any of his travels, probably because travel was enormously dangerous during the Investiture Controversy and the concomitant civil wars. It was a situation completely different from 1061, when she and Tostig traveled to Rome together with Bishop Ealdred in their party. Unlike much of Germany, Ravensburg was secure. Karl Jordan notes that even as Henry deposed Welf from the Duchy of Bavaria in 1077, he was “unable to shake the position of the Welfs in their local stronghold.”43 Informational signs at the castle site on the hill above Ravensburg credit Welf IV with the building of the medieval castle, although the hill’s “militarily strategic position” had ensured its human use since Neolithic times.44 Welf and Judith’s sons, Welf and Henry, were born early in the 1070s (Jordan notes their birth years to be c.1073 and 107445), so Judith was either pregnant or postpartum for much of the early part of the marriage. At this point, she was in her late thirties or early forties, a potentially dangerous age for childbirth; it is a testimony to her overall health that she survived the births and lived another 20 years. While she would have had a chapel in the castle, Judith also began to strengthen her bond with Weingarten Abbey, the burial place of the Welf dynasty and important recipient of their largesse. Two texts list gifts of land and treasure
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made to Weingarten by Judith and Welf; one I have editorially titled “Ownership of Treasures and Estates” (translated as the second text in Appendix 2);46 the other is Ea Tempestate, referred to above for its narrative of the courtship and marriage of Welf and Judith (it is translated here as the third text in Appendix 3). Both texts enumerate the many treasure objects given by Welf and Judith to Weingarten, but their differences in phrasing and detail indicate somewhat separate textual traditions. The earlier and more trustworthy text was copied into the very last leaves of Judith’s Gospel book that is now Fulda, Landesbibliothek Aa.21, folios 89v–90r, during the first quarter of the twelfth century (the manuscript as a whole is discussed in detail in Chapter 3). The text is explicitly dated 12 March 1094, the date of Judith’s death, so the gifts are obviously to be associated more strongly with her than with Welf, although his name and the names of their sons are also in the document. In that sense, the document acts like Judith’s will: it ensured that specific properties and treasures went immediately to the abbey even though her husband and sons were still alive.47 The “treasure” listed in this document probably came from the objects she brought from England to Flanders to Germany, supplemented by objects she commissioned while living in Ravensburg. Indeed, one of the problematic questions surrounding the relic of the Holy Blood is its omission from this list (see Chapter 5 for a full discussion). The detail in the descriptions of the items implies that the list was initially made in Judith’s presence, perhaps by a clerk who noted the items as they were packed for transport to the abbey: … one greater shrine and another smaller with relics of the saints; and two other most precious shrines worked with skill in gold; three gospel-books with the one gospel text;48 three altars; and four gold-plated chalices and two gold chalices; and two gilded tablets; and two most precious crosses in gold and lapis lazuli; and three smaller crosses with others yet smaller; and three silver candelabra which are precious and also heavy; and two palls with gold-work, three without gold-work; and nine embroidered altar-cloths49 with a tenth altarcloth of very great length; and three chasubles50 which are precious with the best gold work; and two others; and five copes gold-worked and thoroughly ornamented with skill; and one and three dalmatics with gold-work;51 and two fine-spun dalmatics; and one maniple52 constructed with gold and jewels with other great adornments.
The list begins with metal objects and ends with cloth-work; all of the objects are display items of great monetary value. The inclusion of cloth-work items confirms a focus of another text copied into the end of Fulda Aa.21 (folios 88r–89r), which establishes the requirement that female benefactors of the abbey supply fabric items in their wills (see Appendix 2 for a translation of this text, which I have editorially titled “The Oaths of the Censuales”).53 The list provides an overall impression of great, even excessive, display in the treasure given to the abbey when Judith died.
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A similar list appears in the c.1200 text known as Ea Tempestate, discussed above regarding its narrative of the marriage negotiations between Welf and Judith (see Appendix 3 for a full translation). Factual errors in Ea Tempestate make it a less trustworthy text than that at the end of the Fulda Gospel book; here as well, however, Judith alone is credited with the gifts of treasure to Weingarten (Welf gives the land in a previous paragraph): And then the Lady Judith with weeping, with most abundant tears, presented a shroud woven with most pure gold which had cloth pieces with worked orphrey throughout; ivory shrines, ornamented around with gold and silver; gold crosses with relics of the saints, fully decorated with the best gems; gold chalices, gold censors and candelabras; many gospel books; a casket skillfully made, full of the relics of St Oswald; finally, in respect of the Lord she offered the holy blood of Christ and presented it as if it were incense with the odor of sanctity; she enriched this monastery with such offerings.
Much of this list seems to be a condensed, less detailed version of the earlier one. Both focus on specifically itemizing a vast amount of treasure; the texts’ authors wanted to emphasize the exorbitant wealth that came to the abbey. The tria plenaria specifically mentioned in the end-leaves of the Fulda Gospel book are usually identified with the Fulda book and the two Morgan manuscripts; the plenaria plurima mentioned in Ea Tempestate could include another Weingarten Gospel book, this one from Flanders, that has also been associated with Judith, although not as firmly as the English books. Like the English books, this eleventhcentury Flemish book originally had a treasure cover, now lost.54 Its origin in the low countries and later placement at Weingarten has led to suggestions of Judith’s ownership despite the incompleteness of its texts and illustration program. Most notable of the differences between the two texts is the explicit mention in the second one of the relic of the Holy Blood and of the relics of St. Oswald. Judith’s association with Oswald is part of a tradition of his cult in continental Europe. The ultimate source of all Oswald hagiography is Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, III.1–13; numerous scholars have noted the appeal of Oswald to royal and aristocratic devotees: he combined Christian faith with military prowess and kingly dignity.55 While Judith did not initiate the cult on the continent, she did so at Weingarten, beginning with the gift of the relics.56 In England, Judith may not have acquired any of Oswald’s bodily remains but rather a piece of something associated with the saint—a scrap of clothing, splinters of the stakes on which his head and arms were displayed by Penda of Mercia (who killed him in battle in 642), or even some of the soil from the spot of his death (known to have miracleworking properties).57 However, a fifteenth-century account of a visit to Weingarten credits her with donation of part of Oswald’s arm to the abbey, since the visitor in question was given part of that relic for his own church. John Eberhard, a Swiss priest and a devotee of Oswald, traveled to Weingarten in 1485 specifically to ask for a portion of Oswald’s relics. His account of the trip notes that the abbot:
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… ordered the worthy monks and the sacristan to show us all the treasures of the church, the relics, the books, the chalices, the monstrances, the crosses, the caskets and other ornaments, in great quantity, and of immense value, which the noble queen Judith, queen of England, who married the noble prince Welf, Duke of Swabia, brought with her from England, including the Holy Blood and a large portion of St Oswald and also relics of other worthy saints.58
It seems that the monks’ penchant for displaying and enumerating the details of Judith’s treasure had not waned in the intervening centuries; they also had promoted not only Judith to Queen of England but Welf to Duke of Swabia, both incorrectly. After this presentation to the Swiss delegation, the abbot gave Eberhard part of the Weingarten relic for his own church at Zug. Eberhard surely believed he had been given part of Oswald’s arm, whether or not such a relic was originally included in the shrine. Oswald’s arms were reportedly enshrined at Peterborough and at Bamburgh; Judith and Tostig held estates near Peterborough, and Bamburgh was in Tostig’s earldom of Northumbria, so it is certainly possible that she acquired part of an arm from one of those sites during her time in England. Judith may even have known of St. Oswald before her first marriage, as his cult was moderately active in Flanders before her 1051 departure from Flanders to England.59 Cult activity increased dramatically, however, when Drogo of Saint-Winnoc in Flanders composed three texts celebrating Oswald (and SaintWinnoc’s relics of Oswald) in the 1050s and 1060s as part of his abbey’s campaign to establish its independence from the mother house of Saint-Bertin.60 David Defries notes that in 1067, Judith’s half-brother Baldwin V issued a charter that “essentially granted Saint-Winnoc its independence from Saint-Bertin.”61 Since Judith was definitely in Flanders in 1067, it is possible that she met Drogo on this occasion and prayed at Saint-Winnoc’s shrine to Oswald.62 Three years later, she brought her own Oswald reliquary to Ravensburg. While no contemporary descriptions of the shrine or the reliquary are extant, it is likely that it was a church-shaped box or chasse rather than a container shaped like a body part.63 Two early modern images of Judith made in Weingarten when the shrine was still there show her holding a large church-shaped box, cumbersome but not so big that she could not pick it up. The older image is an early sixteenthcentury wooden bust now in the Niedersächsischen Landesgalerie Hannover; Judith is dressed as a late medieval noblewoman, wearing a crown and holding Oswald’s shrine in her left hand.64 Her right arm is missing; the later image indicates that the bust’s right hand probably held the relic of the Holy Blood. That later image is a drawing; it also shows Judith wearing a crown and holding the shrine of St. Oswald in her left hand; she carries the Holy Blood relic in her right hand.65 The drawing reproduces an original image by Gabriel Bucelin, a sixteenthcentury Weingarten monk.66 This drawing, or the series of copies it spawned, was the model for the fresco depicting Welf and Judith (painted 1718/1720 by Damian Asam) now in the baroque abbey church (see Plate 26). Judith’s gift of these relics completely reconfigured the cult focus at Weingarten, initially dedicated only to St. Martin. The Welf tomb became the “Oswaldskapelle,”
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presumably because the reliquary was kept in the chapel that also housed the family crypt (today, the remains of nine Welfs and their wives, including Welf IV and Judith, are still at Weingarten Abbey). Cult interest in Oswald eventually led to the reconsecration of the abbey to both St. Martin and St. Oswald in 1182.67 The Oswald reliquary disappeared when the abbey was dissolved in 1802 (it was refounded in 1922, dedicated only to St. Martin). Similarly, the treasures that Judith bequeathed to the abbey had long-lasting impact on its heritage. Numerous art historians have also commented on the ways that the English Gospel books influenced later manuscript art at Weingarten, most especially in the deluxe manuscripts known as the Berthold and Hainricus Sacramentaries.68 Judith and Welf are also recognized as founders and benefactors of Rottenbuch Abbey, an Augustinian house about 140 kilometers east of Ravensburg that was founded in the early 1070s and supported the Pope and the dukes in the Investiture Controversy. The only extant documentation of Rottenbuch’s founding is very late, but now-lost documents and institutional memory celebrated Welf and Judith as a couple and as individuals in the house’s history.69 Both are commemorated in Rottenbuch’s Necrologia (as Judith is in other continental documents, she is termed regina Anglie as well as, oddly enough, filia marchionis de Este).70 A fifteenthcentury inscription in the church even gave Judith a voice in the founding: Judent dicta locum struxi studiosius illum Ergo mei memores precor ut sint hic famulantes71 (Judith’s words: I built this place very devotedly. Therefore, remember me, I pray, and those serving here.)72
The first-person verbs are striking here, directly providing Judith with agency as she asks for the prayers of those who come after her. Jakob Mois actually credits Judith with much of the founding and support of Rottenbuch, since Welf and the local bishop were of necessity more focused on the events of the Investiture Controversy and the Saxon Wars than on the maintenance of a religious house.73 If nothing else, the late medieval inscription illustrates an institutional memory of Judith as a worthy and active founder and patron; the community at Rottenbuch clearly benefited from its cultural and devotional relationships with her and with Welf. The early modern sources also associate Judith and Welf with books from the Rottenbuch library, relying largely on the known evidence of Judith’s Weingarten books. More recent commentators have pointed out that only two of the books from Rottenbuch were made in the late eleventh century (the rest are later), and that there is no internal evidence from either of those two that they were made at or for Rottenbuch or that they were commissioned by Welf or Judith.74 With the rest of the Rottenbuch manuscripts, they are now in the Munich Staatsbibliothek. One is a richly illustrated Gospel book, the other a lectionary with an early thirteenth-century ivory sculpture of the Virgin on its front cover. While they are
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not stylistically related to the Weingarten books, they are similar in their deluxe presentation and expensive materials. These various endowments and documented treasure gifts were crucial segments of Judith’s multifaceted campaign to assert her own and her husband’s status and power, both locally in Ravensburg and Weingarten and more broadly in imperial and papal politics. Early in her marriage to Welf, Judith’s gift to the Empress Agnes helped to affirm Welf’s position as Duke of Bavaria and to establish Welf’s conflicting alliances with the Emperor, the Pope, and Rudolf of Rheinfelden. Later, her extended patronage of Weingarten Abbey and substantial patronage at Rottenbuch ensured that the monks prayed for her soul and her husband’s; the very public nature of that patronage also announced Judith and Welf’s wealth, status, and good taste to the community at large. Their patronage proclaimed their stability, piety, and wealth in a period when the Welfs’ status was actually unclear, as Welf worked to increase his power and status with shifting alliances in the Saxon Wars and the Investiture Controversy. He never attained the highest rank, losing a possible bid for the crown in 1081, but he and Judith lavished gifts on Weingarten in a regal manner. The documents recording Judith’s bequests provided for paupers to be fed and clothed, underscoring her generosity and charity; they also ensured deluxe fabrics and service items to be used during the celebration of the mass. Even without a crown, Judith used her patronage to confirm her own high social and aesthetic status as well as for the abbey that would commemorate her in perpetuity, eventually entwining this legacy with the relic of the Holy Blood, the focus of the next chapter. Notes 1 See Chapter 8, “The Diaspora,” in Frank Barlow, The Godwins: The Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2002). 2 her ferde Gyða ut, Haroldes modor, 7 manegra godra manna wif mid hyre, into Bradan Reolice, 7 þær wunode sume hwile, 7 swa for þanon ofer sæ to Sancte Audomare; online at http://asc.jebbo.co.uk (accessed 2 April 2014). 3 See Norman Davies, The Isles: A History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 288. 4 David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, (New York and London: Longman, 1992), 51. 5 Instinctu Godefridi comes Flandresnium Balduinus contra imperatorem rebellat; from Sigebert of Gembloux, Sigeberti Gemblacensis Chronographia, MGH SS 6, 358. 6 On þisum geare se casere gaderode unarimedlice fyrde ongean Baldewine of Brycge þurh þæt þæt he bræc þæne palant æt Neomagan 7 eac fela oðra unþanca þe he him dyde. Seo fyrd wæs unatellendlic þe he gegaderod hæfde. Ðær wæs Leo se papa of Rome 7 fela mærra manna of manegan þeodscipan. He sende eac to Eadwerde cingce 7 bæd hine scipfultumes þæt he ne geþafode þæt he him on wætere ne ætburste, 7 he for ða to Sandwic 7 þær læg mid myclan scyphere forð þæt se casere hæfde of Baldwine eall þæt he wolde. Text from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Manuscript C, http://asc.jebbo.co.uk/c/c-L.html (accessed 2 April 2014).
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For references to both Godfrey and Baldwin, see the 1046 entry of the Chronicon Wirziburgense MGH SS 6, 31; for Baldwin, see 1056 in Annales Altahenses Maiores MGH SS 24, 33–9; see also discussion in I.S. Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 1056–1106 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 31, as well as the entries for 1049–1056 in the Chronicles of Hermann of Reichenau, Berthold of Reichenau, and Bernold of Blasien (introduced and translated into English in I.S. Robinson, ed. and trans., Eleventh-Century Germany: The Swabian Chronicles, Manchester Medieval Sources Series (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008). 8 See also discussion about Baldwin V and Henry III in Chapter 5, focused on the supposed gift of the relic of the Holy Blood from Henry to Baldwin. Renée Nip refers to Flanders’s “political balancing act between England, France, and the German Empire” in “Political Relations between England and Flanders (1066–1128),” Anglo-Norman Studies 21 (1999): 145. 9 Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, 52. 10 See discussion in Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 70–71. 11 These inconsistencies are discussed in detail in Chapter 5. The correct dates are listed in the Necrologium Weingartense, MGH Necrologia 1, 224. 12 Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 70. 13 Original text available as De Inventione Et Translatione Sanguinis Domini, MGH SS 15.2, 921–3; the full translation is in Appendix 3. 14 Ibid. 15 For a detailed narrative and analysis of the Saxon conflicts, see Robinson, Henry IV, Chapter 2, “Henry IV and Saxony, 1065–1075,” 63–104; see also Bernd Schmeidmüller, “Welf IV. 1101–2001. Kreationem fürstlicher Zukunft,” in Welf IV: Schlüsselfigur Einer Wendezeit: Regionale Und Europäische Perspektiven, ed. Dieter R. Bauer (München: Beck, 2004), 1–29; Hubertus Seibert, “Vom Königlichen dux zum Herzog von Bayern: Welf IV und der Südosten des Reiches” in the same volume, 226–60; Gerd Althoff, “Der erste grosse Konflikt: Die Sachsenkriege (1073–1075),” Chapter 3 of Heinrich IV (Darmstadt: WBG, 2006), 86–155. For English translation of three of the key primary sources, see Robinson, trans., Eleventh-Century Germany: The Swabian Chronicles. 16 For an excellent overview and analysis, see Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). See more recently Benjamin Arnold, “The Provinces in the Saxon War and the War of Investitures,” in Medieval Germany, 500–1300: A Political Interpretation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 62–8. 17 Her retirement from the world is noted in 1061 in Berthold’s Chronicle (second version); see Robinson, trans., Eleventh-Century Germany: The Swabian Chronicles, 117; initially, she stayed in Germany after taking the veil. 18 Gregory’s letter 1.85, dated 15 June 1074, in H.E.J. Cowdrey, ed., The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 89. For Latin texts, see Das Register Gregors VII, MGH epp. sel. 2.1, 121–3. 19 Francis Newton, The Scriptorium and Library of Monte Cassino, 1058–1105, Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology 7 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 237. The Monte Cassino book was included as item #410 in the 2006 exhibition Canossa 1077; the exhibition catalog connects Agnes’s gift of the book to Monte Cassino with the ongoing tensions and conflicts around investiture and papal privilege: Christoph Stiegemann and Matthias Wemhoff, eds, Canossa 1077: Erschütterung 7
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der Welt: Geschichte, Kunst und Kultur am Aufgang der Romanik, 2 vols (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2006), 302–3. 20 Annales Lamperti, MGH SS rer. Germ. 38, 137; for a discussion of Rudolf’s collusion with and abduction of the princess Matilda, see Stefan Weinfurter, The Salian Century: Main Currents in an Age of Transition, trans. Barbara Bowlus, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 114. 21 H.E.J. Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 90. 22 See discussion in Chapter 2. 23 Discussion of Berthold of Reichenau, Annales for 1073, in Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 127; full translation in Robinson, trans., Eleventh-Century Germany: The Swabian Chronicles, 127. 24 Cowdrey, ed, The Register of Pope Gregory, letter 1.19, 21–2; Gregory makes the potentially loaded point that “the priestly and imperial powers should be conjoined in the unity of concord,” an odd remark to the Emperor’s tenuous ally and recent enemy. 25 Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 98. 26 See Cowdrey’s excellent overview of “Simony,” section 8.7 of his “Gregorian Ideas” appendix in Pope Gregory VII, 543–6. 27 Cowdrey, ed. and trans., The Register of Pope Gregory, letter 2.45, 135–6, n.1. 28 Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 153–4. 29 For discussion of the impacts of the Forcheim meeting, see Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 165–7, and Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, 168–71. 30 Cowdrey, trans., The Register of Pope Gregory, letter 6.14, 294–5. 31 Nigel F. Palmer provides the 1088 date for the Weingarten reform in his discussion of Hirsau’s regional influence in his introduction to Manuscripts and Monastic Culture: Reform and Renewal in Twelfth-Century Germany, ed. Alison I. Beach (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 3. 32 William’s achievements are celebrated in the Vita Willihelmi Abbatis Hirsaugiensis, MGH SS 12, 209–25. 33 Weinfurter, The Salian Century, 152. Weingarten is noted on Weinfurter’s map of monasteries reformed directly from Hirsau. This map originally appeared in Deutsche Geschichte in zwölf Bänden: Band 2, Die entfaltete Feudalgesellschaft von der Mitte des 11. bis zu den siebziger Jahren des 15. Jahrhunderts, eds. Horst Bartel and Lothar Berthold (Cologne, Germany: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1982), 53. 34 The liturgical texts in both the Hainricus and Berthold sacramentaries follow the reformed Hirsau traditions; see Felix Heinzer, “Das Berthold-Sakramentar als liturgisches Buch,” in Das Berthold Sakramentar: vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe im Originalformat von Ms. M.710 der Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, ed. Hanns Swarzenski, Felix Heinzer, and Hans Ulrich Rudolf (Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1995– 1999), vol. 2, 217–56. 35 Jo Ann McNamara, “Canossa and the Ungendering of the Public Man,” in Render Unto Caesar: The Religious Sphere in World Politics, ed. Sabrina Petra Ramet and Donald W. Treadgold (Washington, DC: American University Press, 1995), 138 and throughout. 36 For analyses of the ways that the reform increased literacy and book production among religious women, see Alison Beach, Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Fiona J. Griffiths, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
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Cowdrey, trans., The Register of Pope Gregory, letter 9.3, 401–4. Valerie Eads, “The Last Italian Expedition of Henry IV: Re-Reading the Vita Mathildis of Donizone of Canossa,” Journal of Military History 8 (2010): 28. 39 Cowdrey, trans., The Register of Pope Gregory, 403. 40 See Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 208–9 for analysis of this episode. 41 For example, Welf took Augsburg from Henry early in 1084 but lost it that August (ibid., 239); Welf defeated Henry at Pleichfield in August 1086 but failed to capitalize on that victory (ibid., 259–61). 42 For an analysis of the marriage in the context of the loss of Mantua, see Michèle K. Spike, Tuscan Countess: The Life and Extraordinary Times of Matilda of Canossa. New York: Vendome Press, 2004, 180–82; for a militarily focused analysis, see Valerie Eads, “The Last Italian Expedition of Henry IV,” 30–31 and passim. 43 Karl Jordan, Henry the Lion: A Biography, trans. P.S. Falla (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 5. 44 The hill today is called the “Veitsburg,” a name derived from the chapel to St. Veit built on the hill in the eighteenth century. Signage at the site indicates that its medieval and early modern name was the “Welfenburg.” 45 Neither the Genealogia Welforum, MGH SS 13, 733–4, nor the Historia Welforum, MGH SS 21, 454–72, record exact years in their brief genealogical narratives, which have been re-edited and then translated into German by Erich König in Historia Welforum, Schwäbische Chroniken Der Stauferzeit (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1978). See also Jordan, “Family Tree: The Later Welfs,” in Henry the Lion. 46 This text was edited simply as #245 in Wirtembergisches Urkundenbuch Band I (Stuttgart: Blum und Vogel, 1849), 302–3; Norbert Kruse titles it “Das Stiftertestament” in his “Der Weg des Heiligen Bluts von Mantua nach Altdorf-Weingarten” in 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung in Weingarten, 1094–1994, ed. Norbert Kruse and Hans Rudolf, 3 vols (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1994), vol. 1, 67–9. Kruse provides both a Latin edition and a translation into German. 47 For a similar argument about this text’s individual associations with Judith, see Sönke Lorenz, “Weingarten und die Welfen,” in Welf IV.: Schlüsselfigur Einer Wendezeit: Regionale Und Europäische Perspektiven, ed. Dieter R. Bauer (Munich: Beck, 2004), 44. 48 These three Gospel books are now in New York, Pierpont Library, MSs M 708 and 709 and Fulda, Landesbibliothek MS Aa.21. 49 dorsalia: probably an error for dossal or dossel, “An ornamental cloth, usually embroidered, hung at the back of the altar or at the sides of the chancel,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com (accessed 21 December 2012). 50 “An ecclesiastical vestment, a kind of sleeveless mantle covering the body and shoulders, worn over the alb and stole by the celebrant at Mass or the Eucharist,” ibid. 51 The text is clear that the gift includes unam et tres, rather than simply four dalmatics (vestments worn by deacons), perhaps implying that one was noticeably different from the others. 52 “In the Western Church: a strip of material suspended from the left arm near the wrist, worn as one of the Eucharistic vestments,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com (accessed 21 December 2012). 53 The nineteenth-century Latin edition titles this text only #244 in Wirtembergisches Urkundenbuch Band I. 54 For a full description of the manuscript, Stuttgart, Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek, H.B. II.46, see McGurk and Rosenthal, “The Anglo-Saxon Gospel 37
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Books of Judith, Countess of Flanders: Their Text, Make-Up and Function,” Anglo-Saxon England 24 (1994): Appendix B, 303–8. 55 See, for example, the essays collected by Clare Stancliffe and Eric Cambridge in Oswald: Northumbrian King to European Saint (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995), as well as Peter Clemoes, The Cult of St. Oswald on the Continent (Jarrow: St. Paul’s Church, 1983), repr. in Bede and His World: The Jarrow Lectures, vol. 2, 1979–1993 (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1994). 56 See Dagmar O’Riain-Raedel, “Edith, Judith, Matilda: The Role of Royal Ladies in the Propagation of the Continental Cult,” in Oswald: Northumbrian King to European Saint, ed. Clare Stancliffe and Eric Cambridge (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1996), 217, as well as Robert Folz, “Saint Oswald Roi De Northumbrie: Etude D’hagiographie Royale,” Revue Benedictine 98 (1980): 49–74, at 64. 57 See discussion of relic types specific to Oswald in David Defries, “St. Oswald’s Martyrdom: Drogo of Saint-Winnoc’s Sermo Secundus de s. Oswaldo,” The Heroic Age 9 (2006), http://www.heroicage.org/index.php (accessed 23 September 2014). 58 E.P. Baker, “St. Oswald and His Church at Zug,” Archaeologia 93 (1949): 103–23, at 111. 59 See O’Riain-Raedel, “Edith, Judith, Matilda,” 217ff. 60 These texts are: the Vita s. Oswaldi regis ac martyris, the Sermo primus de s. Oswaldo, and the Sermo Secundus de s. Oswaldo. For discussion and full citation with partial translations, see Defries, “St. Oswald’s Maryrdom.” 61 Defries, “St Oswald’s Martyrdom,” 36. For a discussion of Bergues-Saint-Winnoc in the Flemish monastic reform more generally, see Steven Vanderputten, Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), especially 118–21. Brigitte Meijns connects the Flemish cults of St. Winnoc and St. Oswald to the Godwin family more generally in “Drogo of Bergues and the Cult of English Saints in Flanders in the High Middle Ages” (paper presented at the conference East Anglia and Its North Sea World, University of East Anglia, 13–16 April 2010). 62 Rosemary Svoboda makes a similar suggestion in “The Illustrations of the Life of Saint Omer (Saint-Omer, Bibliotheque Municipale, MS. 698),” Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1983, p. 83, although she argues that Judith may have not just attended this event but also provided the relics. 63 For an introductory overview of reliquary shapes and styles, see Barbara Drake Boehm, “Relics and Reliquaries in Medieval Christianity,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–2013), http://www.metmuseum. org/toah/hd/relc/hd_relc.htm (accessed 14 January 2013). 64 The bust is reproduced in Norbert Kruse and Hans Ulrich Rudolf, eds, 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung in Weingarten, 1094–1994, 3 vols (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1994), vol. 1, 72. 65 The drawing is reproduced in ibid., 20. 66 For background information about the daVinci-like career of Bucelin, see Claudia Neesen, Gabriel Bucelin OSB (1599–1681): Leben Und Historiographisches Werk (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2003). 67 See Hans Ulrich Rudolf and Anselm Günthör, Die Benedikinerabtei Weingarten: Zwischen Gründung Und Gegenwart 1056–2006: Ein Uberblick Über 950 Jahre Klostergeschichte (Lindenberg: Kunstverlag Josef Fink, 2006), for a discussion of the cult of Oswald at Weingarten (14ff) and a reproduction of Bucelin’s drawing of the Oswaldskapelle (6).
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The book formerly known as the Berthold Missal is now usually termed the Berthold Sacramentary. The two manuscripts are in New York, Pierpont Morgan Library Ms. M.710 and 711, respectively. Both are available in facsimile with extensive introduction and commentary: Hanns Swarzenski et al., eds, Das Berthold-Sakramentar: the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, Ms. M.710 (Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1995– 1999) and Hans Ulrich Rudolf and Peter Burkhart, eds, Vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe Im Originalformat Des Hainricus Sacrista-Sakramentars: Ms. M.711 Der Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 2005). 69 A fifteenth-century copy of a founding document is recorded in Anselm Greinwald’s house history, Origines Raitenbuchae (Munich: Lindauer, 1797), 83; Welfo cum conjuge sua nomine Judita are recognized for founding and endowing the house. 70 Necrologium Raitenbuchense, MGH Necr. 3, 110. 71 Greinwald, Origines, 82; the lines are also reproduced in Jakob Mois, Das Stift Rottenbuch in der Kirchenreform des XI. XII. Jahrhunderts: ein Beitrag zur OrdensGeschichte der Augustiner-Chorherren (Munich: Verlag des Erzbischöflichen Ordinariats, 1953), 35. 72 I am grateful to Stephen J. Harris for assistance with the Latin grammar and translation of these verses. Both Greinwald and Mois provide dicta, although Harris points out that dicat would make much more sense. 73 Mois, Das Stift Rottenbuch, 38. 74 Ibid., 39–40, n.120; Franz Fuchs, “Die Anfänge Rottenbuchs,” in Welf IV.: Schlüsselfigur Einer Wendezeit: Regionale Und Europäische Perspektiven, ed. Dieter R. Bauer (München: Beck, 2004), 263; Günter Glauche, “Mittelalterliche Handschriften und frühe Drucke in der Stiftsbibliothek Rottenbuch,” in Rottenbuch: Das Augustinerchorherrenstift Im Ammergau; Beitr. Zur Geschichte, Kunst U. Kultur, ed. Hans Pörnbacher (Weissenhorn: Konrad, 1980), 107. 68
Chapter 5
The Relic of the Holy Blood The monks of Weingarten relied on Judith’s reputation as a high-status patron in their celebration of the relic of the Holy Blood, which they claimed to be Judith’s most substantial gift to the abbey in two related texts: De Inventione Sanguinis Christi and De Translatione Sanguinis Christi; the earliest extant copies are in a Vitae Sanctorum manuscript made at Weingarten c.1200.1 A third Weingarten text, known as Ea Tempestate, provides quasi-biographical information about Judith and Welf as donors of the relic (see Appendix 3 for full translations).2 Taken together, the texts associate the relic not just with Judith but with a parade of powerful figures from the mid-eleventh century. As a religious object, the Holy Blood was endowed with infinite spiritual value; as a political object, it represented the largesse, piety, and power of those who owned it.3 The narrative provided in the first text (De Inventione) largely accords with political and papal relationships in Germany and Italy in the middle of the century; contemporary chronicles and other sources problematize some of the details of De Inventione, but its narrative is largely plausible and probably mostly accurate. The second, De Translatione, is rather more problematic in its presentation of continental politics, to the extent that its version of events is ultimately unconvincing. The third, Ea Tempestate, similarly contains obvious errors in chronology that call its accuracy into question. The Weingarten monks who compiled these texts desired to present their most important possession as legitimate, precious, masculine, and aristocratic; the three texts show clear signs of the monks’ revision and manipulation of their oral and written sources to achieve these goals. These texts, then, provide a view of the afterlife of Judith’s patronage, as it were; rather than historically accurate narratives of Weingarten’s acquisition of the Holy Blood relic, the texts show the strength and endurance of Judith’s reputation as high-status patron. The texts were largely, if not entirely, products of the Weingarten scriptorium c.1200. Norbert Kruse has argued that De Inventione was composed in Mantua in the early twelfth century, but he has no evidence other than his own interpretation of the extant text. He states: “the text presents the events of the year 1048 from a Mantuan perspective and undoubtedly comes from this city.”4 Kruse ignores the Mantuan traditions (noted below) that focus on the Countess Beatrice as a primary figure in the discovery of the relic; while some of the textual details probably ultimately stem from Mantuan tradition, the text as it now stands maintains a distinctively aristocratic, imperial, and masculine focus that accords with the desires of the Weingarten monks who crafted it. In contrast, Kruse sees De Translatione primarily as a Weingarten composition roughly contemporary with the Fitzwilliam manuscript.5 It makes much more sense to see both of the
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texts, as well as Ea Tempestate, as Weingarten compilations of c.1200, perhaps not ex nihilo but crafted from other sources, some perhaps orally transmitted. The texts’ overlaps in vocabulary, grammatical structure, and rhetorical focus point to similar origins, both in presentation and in purpose. All three texts accentuate the relic’s aristocratic, masculine, and powerful devotees; the authors are eager to associate the relic with the most preeminent figures of the time, presenting Judith primarily as a plausible link who transferred the relic between two aristocratic men, Baldwin V and Welf IV. De Inventione begins with events that occurred in 1048 or 1049, and the problem of dating makes apparent one of the narrative’s main inconsistencies in its textual iterations: the presence of Pope Leo IX and/or Emperor Henry III at the inventione. Leo became Pope in 1049, so his papal presence entails a 1049 date. However, the earliest extant, and almost exactly contemporary, text to mention the discovery of the Holy Blood in Mantua is the Chronicle of Hermann of Reichenau (also known as Hermann the Lame), which dates the event to 1048, before Leo’s papacy: “During that same Lent, it is believed that the Lord’s blood was found in the city of Mantua by a certain blind man through a divine revelation and was made manifest by very many miracles.”6 This is the entirety of the episode in Hermann’s Chronicle; he provides no details at all beyond the inclusion of the blind man and the miracles. Since Hermann died in 1054, he recorded this episode within six years of its occurrence. The chronological proximity inspires confidence in the dating, even as it excludes Leo’s presence at the inventione. The 1049 date is implied (but not always stated) in versions of the narrative that specifically mention or focus on Leo’s presence at the inventione (rather than simply at the subsequent miracles). For example, the fifteenth-century chronicler Antonio Nerli dates the inventione to 1049 in his history of Mantua’s church of S. Andrea; he includes Leo (if somewhat tangentially) in his narrative.7 Like Nerli, De Inventione places Leo IX (clearly referred to as Pope rather than as the Bishop of Toul) and Emperor Henry III at the discovery of the relic, necessitating a 1049 date for the episode. Unlike Nerli, the Weingarten authors move the Emperor and the Pope from the sidelines to the center of the events. According to De Inventione, Leo, Henry, and Boniface of Tuscany had initially gathered in Bavaria (Henry’s territory) and then departed for Mantua (Boniface’s) to search for the relic of the Holy Blood. It is rather more likely that these visits and travels negotiated and affirmed their political alliance, dominated by the Emperor; relic-finding was not a primary goal. De Inventione’s diction implies the Emperor’s superiority over both the duke and the Pope by noting that they had “come to” the Emperor in Bavaria; similarly, the phrase “the emperor proclaimed his departure for Italy” implies that the Emperor was proclaiming or exerting his right to travel to and through Boniface’s lands. In 1049, then, the text implies that their alliances were strengthened by a journey to Mantua, during which a blind man named Adelbert miraculously found the relic of the Holy Blood. The tensions within the political alliance are suggested in the episodes that follow, as the Pope attempts to remove the relic from Mantua once Henry and
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Boniface have departed; heroic resistance by the Mantuans prevents him, and he withdraws from Mantua “with great damage to himself and his followers.” This failed attempt at assertion of papal power in Tuscany necessitated Leo’s return to Bavaria—he “came again into Bavaria,” probably to make amends with Henry and Boniface. The final episode in De Inventione, the rebuilding and enlargement of the church of S. Andrea (St. Andrew) at Mantua, was completed sometime between 1052 and 1054 and again reaffirms the uneasy relationship/alliance among the three figures. De Inventione credits Boniface (who was murdered in 1052) as a patron of the rebuilding program; the Breve Chronicon specifically dates the dedication and re-consecration to 1054.8 If Nerli is correct, then Boniface did not live to see the fruits of his patronage (De Inventione does not specifically state that Boniface was present at the consecration). De Inventione also indirectly affirms the close relationship between Leo and Henry by noting that Leo performed the consecration ceremony in Mantua while en route from Bavaria to Rome. All of these episodes thus connect the relic of the Holy Blood to the most powerful figures of the day. If the author of De Inventione knew Hermann’s and others’ dating of 1048, he silently omitted that date to accord his narrative with Leo IX’s papacy, which began in 1049. Beatrice, the blind man, and the other beneficiaries of the relic’s miraculous power are not the author’s primary interest; rather, De Inventione insists on the relic’s imperial milieu. The Italian texts that present the same narrative are striking in their difference of narrative focus, especially in their presentation of Beatrice, Boniface’s wife, as a primary character. The focus on Beatrice is also apparent in the sixteenth-century painting of the inventione by Rinaldo Mantovano, which is in a side chapel of S. Andrea. Beatrice is the main figure in the audience as the workers lift the relic’s box out of the hole in the ground; her husband, the Emperor, and the Pope are notable in their absence from this visual version of the Mantuan traditions. The Bishop of Mantua, wearing his mitre and colorful robes, blends in with the crowd on the right, in contrast to Beatrice’s prominence on the left.9 As in the Italian texts that provided the artist with his information, the blind man and the noblewoman are the protagonists in the narrative; the Emperor and the Pope are so unimportant as to be absent.10 The Weingarten text mentions Beatrice only minimally at its beginning (as Boniface’s wife, not as an agent in the events); the contrast emphasizes the monks’ preference for masculinity in its protagonists. All three of the Italian texts are late medieval or early modern, and thus cannot claim to be as chronologically close to the inventione as the c.1200 Weingarten text. However, Bonamente Aliprandi’s Cronaca di Mantova (1414), Nerli’s Breve Chronicon (c.1431), and Ippolito Donesmondi’s Dell’historia ecclesiastica di Mantova (1612) are geographically close to the episode; each of these authors worked with local sources that are no longer extant.11 Eugene Johnson even calls Nerli the “primary source” for the early history of the church of S. Andrea, noting that “The records he worked from are now lost to us.”12
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In dramatic contrast to De Inventione, the Italian texts include Beatrice and Adelbert as primary characters in the narrative; they relegate the Pope and the Emperor to supporting roles, with Aliprandi and Donesmondi including them only in the aftermath of the actual inventione. Donesmondi credits Boniface and Beatrice, along with the Bishop of Mantua, with the actual unearthing of the relic; in his narrative, the Pope and the Emperor arrive only after the relic has begun to exhibit its miracle-working powers.13 Chapter 112 of Aliprandi’s terza rima chronicle focuses on Beatrice and “Adelberto” the blind man as the protagonists of the inventione; while Boniface is present at the revelation, he is definitely secondary to his wife and the blind man. In Aliprandi, as in Donesmondi, the Emperor and the Pope arrive only after the discovery. Nerli is the only one of the Italian chroniclers to place the Emperor and the Pope in Mantua during the inventione; Nerli identifies them as bystanders rather than actors, as he focuses on the Mantuan Bishop, the blind man, Boniface, and Beatrice. The Italian texts’ focus on the Mantuan figures, aristocratic, ecclesiastical, and common, accords with these texts’ celebration of Mantuan history and problematizes Kruse’s identification of De Inventione as an originally Mantuan text because of its supposedly Mantuan focus. The relegation of Henry and Leo to the perimeter of the narrative in the Italian texts accentuates, by contrast, De Inventione’s focus on the Pope and the Emperor, and re-emphasizes the Weingarten texts’ insistence on the powerful royal associations of the relic.14 That political and imperial focus remains in the second Weingarten text, De Translatione Sanguinis Christi.15 The figure of “Duke” Boniface fades from the narrative, to be replaced by Judith’s half-brother, Count Baldwin V of Flanders. The introduction to the text is perhaps unintentionally amusing in its comments about the piety of the original searchers for the blood: Leo is “of pious memory” and Henry was “also pious”; Boniface’s piety then becomes conspicuous in its absence. The text does not provide any details about how Henry III managed to acquire a portion of the blood for himself, merely stating that “the emperor received a part of that same blood because of his devout petition and his imperial authority.”16 Unlike Leo in De Inventione, Henry seems to want only a portion rather than all of the relic; none of the other characters in the narrative has the power or the desire to oppose his wishes.17 The description of the reliquary he commissions is the only quasi-contemporary account we have of the object that Judith is said to have given to Weingarten in 1094: Henry’s portion was “enclosed within a skillfully worked transparent crystal, decorated with gold and gems, just as it may be viewed today.” Even under new ownership, the relic continued to be associated with imperial prestige and deluxe craftsmanship. Count Baldwin V of Flanders enters the narrative at a point where the text’s reticence about political rather than religious motivations dissolves. Unfortunately, De Translatione’s version of the alliance between Henry and Baldwin is inappropriately positive, even downright misleading. The author’s challenge is to portray both Henry and Baldwin, the pre-Judith line of custodians of the blood relic, as pious, noble, and generous. To meet this goal, the text simply ignores
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years of conflict between the two and presents a possible rapprochement in 1056 as a long-standing relationship. As noted above in Chapter 4, the tension between Henry and Baldwin pre-dates Henry’s alliance with Edward of England against Baldwin in 1049. Baldwin’s ally, then and for the rest of the Emperor’s life, was Godfrey of Lorraine, who married Boniface’s widow, Beatrice, in 1054 to establish a power base in northern Italy that complemented his holdings in Lotharingia.18 The Chronicon Wirziburgense records Henry’s attack contra Gotefridum et Baldwinum in 1049 and their attack on him in 1054. In 1055, Henry mounted an expedition to Mantua to subdue Godfrey at his power base there; by 1056, Henry’s victories ensured that Gotefridus dux ad deditionem venit (Duke Godfrey came in surrender).19 The Chronicle of Sigebert of Gembloux records a similar pattern of aggressions, with more of a focus on Baldwin than the Wurzburg Chronicle; for example, Sigebert’s Chronicle states that Henry set out only contra Balduinum in 1054, rather than against Baldwin and Godfrey.20 This context of constant, mutual aggression from the late 1040s into the mid-1050s thus renders De Translatione’s version of events entirely implausible. The Weingarten text states: At this same time [when Henry had the reliquary fashioned], the most noble Baldwin, Count of Flanders, became closely allied with the emperor and was one of the noble comrades in the emperor’s family entourage. The indefatigable count always supported the emperor in adversity and in prosperity. (See Appendix 3)
While Henry, Baldwin, and Godfrey may have negotiated some short-lived truces in the early 1050s, Baldwin never actually supported the Emperor. Despite the text’s insistence on their friendship, contemporary chronicle evidence indicates that a lack of open aggression was the most peaceful state their relationship ever achieved. After claiming this fatuous, familial-level intimacy for Baldwin and Henry, De Translatione states, “Thus it happened that, as the emperor departed from this life, the Count obtained this precious treasure of the blood, among many other royal gifts, as a reward for his friendship and loyalty.” Henry III died in October of 1056, so this exchange of gifts supposedly happened sometime in the late summer or early fall. However, there is no extant medieval source attesting to a peaceful meeting between Henry III and Baldwin V in the mid-1050s, especially in the months just before Henry’s death, when De Translatione claims the exchange happened. Such a meeting would have been the only opportunity for the exchange of such a spiritually and politically potent gift as Henry’s relic of the Holy Blood, enclosed in its precious crystal casing. The only remotely possible moment for such an exchange occurs in 1049, when Hermann of Reichenau records of Baldwin that “after his province was in large part laid waste by an army, he at last gave hostages and made a treaty with the emperor.”21 This 1049 meeting, however, defined Henry’s superiority over Baldwin (since Baldwin had to give hostages); it also followed hard upon the inventione in Mantua. Not only is
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the 1049 meeting not chronologically close to Henry’s death (as De Translatione asserts), it is a meeting of enemies grudgingly negotiating a truce, not a meeting of allies affirming their mutual interests. The constant aggression between the Emperor and the Count contrasts markedly with the peace that was achieved between Baldwin and the imperial court two months after the death of Henry III. Sigebert explicitly notes that Godfrey and Baldwin made lasting peace with Henry’s son Henry IV and his regent, the Dowager Empress Agnes, in December of 1056; Robinson sees this agreement as “the most enduring political achievement of the regency.”22 The importance of this peace agreement in December, two months after the death of Henry III, implies a distinct lack of peace beforehand, especially one during which Henry would have been inclined to give Baldwin one of the most spiritually important items from his treasury. The chronicles’ lack of contemporary corroboration for a 1056 peace treaty between Henry III and Baldwin, and their focus on the importance of the peace of December 1056, do not completely invalidate De Translatione’s narrative regarding the relic’s transfer of ownership from Henry to Baldwin. However, the narrative’s obvious untrustworthiness regarding Baldwin and Henry’s long-term relationship fuels skepticism of the text as a whole. De Translatione’s narrative becomes even more suspect as it relates the events that supposedly brought the relic from Baldwin to Judith and then to Weingarten. The first-person assertion at the end of the text claims historical accuracy even while acknowledging that the sequence of events could seem flawed: If anyone wonders according to whose narration we have arranged these matters in this order, and thus judges them to be less than truth, let him know that the Queen of England herself and her comrades have clearly taught our ancestors, and thus this chronicle has descended faithfully through every generation to us.
Elisebeth van Houts has suggested that Judith may have encouraged, or at least not discouraged, continental assumptions that she had been the queen of England before the death of her first husband (discussed above in Chapter 3),23 so that error cannot be included in the items that induce skepticism in this text. Even without including the erroneous assertion of Judith’s royal stature, however, De Translatione provides numerous incorrect or misleading statements about the events surrounding the Battle of Stamford Bridge, the Norman Conquest, and Baldwin’s death. De Translatione orders its events as if Baldwin had given Judith the relic and then died before the political and military upheavals of 1065 and 1066. According to the Weingarten text, Judith was married, then Baldwin died and left her “all his treasures and movable goods,” then Judith left England with English and Flemish treasure “because of a disagreement about the kingdom.” However, Baldwin V died in September of 1067, a full year after Tostig died at the Battle of Stamford Bridge; if Baldwin bequeathed anything to her, she would have received it during her time between marriages in Flanders (which began in 1065). It is true that women were more likely to receive movable goods than lands as inheritance, but it
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makes little sense that Baldwin would have left “all” his treasure and goods to his half-sister (who was indeed young enough to be his daughter, the relationship De Translatione asserts). At Baldwin’s death his wife, Adele of France, was still alive, as were his daughter Matilda and both of his sons (Baldwin VI and Robert “the Frisian”). It is inconceivable that he would have intended her to have his entire treasury or that her living kin would have permitted her to have it. It is certainly possible that Baldwin did have the relic in 1067 and did give it to Judith as he was dying. Even if he did not receive it from Henry in 1056, Baldwin could have received it from Godfrey of Lotharingia. Baldwin’s alliance with Godfrey endured through decades, and Godfrey ruled Mantua from his marriage to Boniface’s widow, Beatrice, in 1054 until his death in 1069. As an important gift to celebrate a friendship and alliance, the relic was much more likely to have come to Baldwin from Godfrey than from Henry (although there is no textual evidence to substantiate that suggestion). Another possibility, rather more likely, is that Baldwin received the relic from the Dowager Empress Agnes at the peace meeting in December 1056 (although there is no textual evidence to substantiate this suggestion either). The Empress was known for her piety; as discussed in Chapter 2, she was included with Henry in donor portraits of the two deluxe Gospel books he gave to churches in Goslar and Speyer. She semi-retired to a monastic house after losing the regency in 1062. She presumably had control of Henry’s more personal treasures, if not the entire treasury, immediately after his death; the Mantuan relic would have been fitting as a token of peace among the leaders who followed Boniface, Henry III, and Leo: Godfrey, Baldwin, and Agnes. As regent, Agnes was enormously unpopular among many of the German churchmen and monastic chroniclers, however;24 even one of her supporters, Berthold of Reichenau, admits that to her opponents “she came to seem totally detestable and wearisome.”25 In their desire to provide a wholly masculine genealogy for the relic’s guardians, the monks of Weingarten would have much preferred to associate their prized relic with the Emperor rather than with his detestable and wearisome widow. A final possible line of transmission eliminates Baldwin entirely, and it relies exclusively on women. We know that Judith presented Agnes with her Gospel book now in the archive at Monte Cassino, probably in 1072 (see discussion in Chapter 4); it is entirely possible that the gift-giving on that occasion was an actual exchange of holy objects rather than a one-directional transaction. Such an exchange would have eliminated the texts’ focus on high-status men from the narrative entirely, leaving Weingarten with a status object whose genealogy came from female rather than male owners (an unpalatable version of events for the Weingarten monks). No matter which of these alternate transfers seems ultimately most plausible, none is corroborated by extant evidence, textual or otherwise. However, each offers a politically more plausible scenario than that offered by De Translatione, the presentation of the relic as an intimate reward for loyalty from Henry III to Baldwin in the late summer or early fall of 1056.
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De Translatione’s final, crucial error in the timeline of events appears at its end, when the monastery receives the relic and the other treasures. After listing the many valuable items that Judith brought into Germany from Flanders (including the Holy Blood relic), the text states: Indeed, all of these ecclesiastical items were given to St Martin’s monastery at Altdorf by her husband the Lord Welf when he departed for Jerusalem, a portion while she was living, a portion when she was dead. They are still kept there now, together with the blood of the Lord. (See Appendix 3)
This statement makes very little chronological sense. Paired forms of viventi and defunct(a) seem to be a common doublet throughout the medieval Latin corpus to refer either to a specific day of death (a day on which the person in question was both alive and dead) or to activities that span a person’s life and death.26 At face value, the narrative could be stating that Welf both gave the items and departed for Jerusalem on the day that Judith died, although we know that she died in March 1094 and he departed for Jerusalem in April 1101.27 If Welf gave the items at one time (“when he departed for Jerusalem”), how could he also have given a portion when she was alive and a portion when she was dead? The text’s use of adverbial clauses actually reduces the clarity of the narrative (made even more confusing if partim is translated as “partly” rather than “a portion”). Further, a text compiled at Weingarten at almost the same time as De Translatione (c.1200) credits Judith, rather than Welf, for the gift of the relic: the Necrologium Weingartense lists Judith’s death on 5 March and states that “the Duchess Judith, Queen of England, who is buried here, gave precious treasure to the church, the blood of the Lord, with relics of the saints, ecclesiastical vestments, and Gospel-Books.”28 The same Necrologium records Welf’s death in November (of 1101) and credits him for the gifts of many of the same estates detailed in the “will” in the back of Judith’s Gospel book now in Fulda (see “Ownership of Treasures and Estates” in Appendix 2); it does not associate him with the blood relic at all.29 De Translatione, in its insistence on an aristocratic and ultimately masculine genealogy for the relic, deliberately obfuscates the chronology of the gift to focus on Welf, placing him as duke and as holy crusader in the line of relic-actors Longinus, Leo IX, Boniface of Tuscany, Henry III, and Count Baldwin V. De Translatione thus eliminates Judith’s possible agency as primary donor, demoting her to a connector who provided the relic to the final, masculine, pre-Weingarten custodian of the relic. The implication in De Translatione that Judith could have been somehow alive when Welf gave the treasures to the abbey and departed for Jerusalem becomes explicit in the third of the Weingarten texts, Ea Tempestate. While Ea Tempestate credits Judith (rather than Welf) for the gift of the Holy Blood, as well as many other treasures, the text situates the gift chronologically to occur in honor of Welf’s departure for Jerusalem and uses that departure as its narrative climax. After the episodes of Welf’s courtship of Judith and their marriage, Welf decides to go to Jerusalem; before his departure, “Publicly before all the people, he [Welf] provided lavish gifts of estates and other things to the monastery.” According to
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Ea Tempestate, Judith is obviously still very much alive, since at that point “the Lady Judith with weeping, with most abundant tears, presented” the treasures, including the relic. The text ends with Welf rather than Judith as the primary protagonist: “Having made these arrangements, Duke Welf said farewell to all, and departed for the Holy Land.” Its textual purpose fulfilled, Ea Tempestate does not provide any resolution to Judith’s life after Weingarten has the relic and Welf has departed. She fades into the background to make textual space for her husband as crusader and pilgrim. All of these specific discrepancies and inconsistencies in and among the three texts can augment more general scholarly skepticism about the traditions of the Holy Blood relic at Weingarten. Richard W. Barber and others have noted the oddity that Judith’s “will” at the end of the Fulda manuscript does not explicitly mention the Holy Blood, despite its lavish detail about the other objects. Barber gives a brief summary of De Inventione and De Translatione and then comments that “Such at least was the tradition at the end of the twelfth century; Judith’s will makes no specific mention of the relic,” later noting that “we cannot even prove for certain that the Weingarten relic did indeed come from Judith.”30 Michael Heinlen goes even further than Barber, stating outright that “The monks appear to have manipulated the history of the blood” in their efforts to promote the cult of St. Gregory along with the cult of the Holy Blood at Weingarten. Heinlen states that Judith’s bequest “allegedly included the relic of the Holy Blood” and notes that “veneration of the Holy Blood at Weingarten did not begin until late in the twelfth century, nearly one hundred years after its reported entry into the monastery.” The Necrologium’s 5 March entry for Judith is the first explicit mention of the relic in any Weingarten text.31 Heinlen sees the monks to have manipulated extant (if now lost) texts and traditions for their own ends, at the very least; he also notes that “the historical accuracy of the sources [De Inventione and De Translatione] remains open to question.”32 Heinlen’s arguments are especially compelling because the miniature which forms the focus of his essay was at one time the frontispiece to Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS. McClean 101, the c.1200 Weingarten Vitae Sanctorum that includes De Inventione and De Translatione.33 Finally, the only contemporary text to record Judith’s death does not mention the blood relic at all. Like De Translatione, Bernold of Blasien’s Chronicle credits Welf rather than Judith for the treasure gifts to the abbey, but the Holy Blood is not among them. Bernold was somewhat local to the Weingarten/Ravensburg area. He is known as Bernold of Constance as well as of Blasien, since he was educated at Constance (about 45 kilometers from Weingarten on the western shore of Lake Constance) before going to the monastery of St. Blasien (100 kilometers west of Lake Constance); he ended his life at All Saints, Schaffhausen, approximately midway between Constance and St. Blasien. He was an active member of the ecclesiastical group supporting the Reformist popes and the German dukes arrayed against Henry. Robinson states that “the central theme of the chronicle, as of all Bernold’s writings, is reverence for the authority of the pope.”34 Bernold traveled extensively on ecclesiastical business; he was “a close associate of Bishop
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Gebhard III of Constance” (who Bernold claims officiated at Judith’s funeral).35 Bernold’s death is firmly attested in September of 1100, so his chronicle entry about Judith’s death must have been composed within six years of the event.36 Bernold states that Judith was honourably buried by Bishop Gebhard of Constance in the monastery that her husband had built in honour of St Martin on his own family estate. Her husband, the duke, gave that monastery its sacred vessels, which, in gold and silver and with most precious vestments, were worth almost a thousand pounds and he added to its possessions almost one hundred hides of land. He surrendered the monastery, thus improved and freed from his jurisdiction, to St Peter under the obligation to pay tribute, so that thereafter it would be subject first and foremost to the apostolic see and under its protection and so that it might flourish by a perpetual privilege, like other free monasteries.37
Bernold obviously has detailed information about Weingarten’s rights, privileges, and obligations regarding the local lord and the pope. Perhaps because of his understanding of property law (rather than because of an explicit intention to cut Judith out of the transaction), he defines Welf as the primary agent in the gifts to Weingarten of treasure, fabric, land, and privileges. His geographic and chronological proximity to Judith’s death ensures details like the identity of the officiant at her funeral mass, which Bernold may even have attended. The silence of this contemporary text on Judith’s (or even Welf’s) gift of the relic of the Holy Blood adds further, and damning, evidence to claims of the monks’ manipulation of the relic’s history at Weingarten. The preceding political and textual analyses further substantiate the questions raised by Heinlen and others, despite Kruse’s confidence in the historical accuracy of De Inventione and De Translatione. To review, the texts’ incongruous or conflicting details include: • The lack of clarity about a 1048 or 1049 date of the inventione in Mantua; • The lack of the primary presence of Countess Beatrice at the inventione; • The presence of Leo IX and Henry III at the inventione (or their arrival afterwards); • The division of the blood relic into parts so that Henry III could claim a portion; • The presentation of Baldwin V as a close ally of Henry III and his inclusion in the list of the custodians of the blood relic; • The confused chronology of Judith’s first marriage and Baldwin’s bequest of the blood relic (and other treasure) to her; • The date of the gift and identity of the primary donor of the relic to Weingarten; • The lack of textual evidence for the relic’s presence at Weingarten for nearly one hundred years after the supposed gift.
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The number of inconsistencies is simply too great to discount. The Weingarten monks devised a version of events to accord with the abbey’s institutional needs and goals. Judith probably did not give the relic of the Holy Blood to Weingarten in 1094, but because of her renown as a religious patron in general and a patron of their abbey in particular, she was their strongest candidate for having done so. Despite their repeated affirmations of a masculine genealogy for the custodians of the blood relic, Judith’s reputation for piety and generous patronage necessitated her inclusion in that line to legitimize the relic and their claim to it. In an analysis of Judith’s patronage practices and goals, the important point about the sanguinis christi texts is not their lack of historical trustworthiness— it is the texts’ reliance on Judith’s reputation as pious, wealthy, and generous to legitimize their version of events. Like the forged Vita of St. Oswine discussed in Chapter 1, the sanguinis christi texts and the cult of the Holy Blood affirm Judith’s identity as a premier aristocratic patron of the church. The forged texts, both English and continental, testify to Judith’s success in establishing her reputation as a patron at the very highest level. Judith remains one of the most important figures in the abbey’s version of history as the donor of the Holy Blood relic. The supposed gift guaranteed her perpetual commemoration and celebration at Weingarten. The current baroque church contains at least three paintings of her,38 and the earlier, medieval church probably included such images as well. As noted in the introduction, the blutritt celebration and procession still takes place each spring on the Friday after Ascension Day, and the town celebrates the Welfenfest each summer.39 Bernold of Blasien provides no indication of this future renown in his notice of her death. Instead, he provides a fleeting glimpse of the end of Judith’s life as Lady of Ravensburg, revealing that she suffered from an extended illness. The beginning of the relevant section of the 1094 entry (quoted in part above) states: Judith, the wife of Duke Welf [IV] of Bavaria, who had been ill for a long time and who had been greatly improved by that chastisement, came to the end of her life on 4 March and was honourably buried by Bishop Gebhard of Constance in the monastery that her husband had built in honour of St Martin on his own family estate.40
It is hagiographic convention to see suffering and illness as spiritually or morally improving; whether or not Judith agreed with Bernold’s assessment of the effects of “that chastisement,” his remark lets us know that she was at least somewhat infirm for an undefined “long time” at the end of her life. She had lived long enough to know that her two sons had grown to adulthood; she was respected as Welf’s wife, the Lady of Ravensburg, in both contested and stable areas throughout the empire; she was related, by blood and/or marriage, to all of the powerful families of Europe. Probably restricted in her mobility and capacity at the end of her life, she could have turned to her deluxe books, precious crucifixes, and reliquaries to practice her devotions at home, seeking spiritual comfort in her last days.
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Those items were also representative of the successes and challenges of her life: the power and wealth of her first in-laws, the Godwinsons; her stature in England and on the continent as Lady of Northumbria; the collapse of any royal hopes she had for herself and Tostig in 1066; the second marriage, complete with a duchy and its wealth, title, and status; the loss of that duchy as she and Welf sided with the Pope against the Emperor, standing on the side of religious reform; the constant military and political skirmishes with the Emperor after Welf was not chosen as king in 1081. As both Lady of Northumbria and Lady of Ravensburg, Judith had at least a fleeting chance of becoming queen through her husbands’ ultimately unsuccessful military and diplomatic maneuvers towards a crown. Throughout, Judith’s primary defining characteristics were her noted piety and her extravagant patronage, although she never commanded the wealth and land to endow religious institutions at the levels of royal contemporaries like her niece Matilda of Flanders (Duchess of Normandy and Queen of England) or Margaret of Scotland. Even without a crown, Judith successfully defined herself throughout both the high and low points of her life as a pious and generous patron, thus demonstrating her wealth and sophistication to her community. Her achievement was so thorough that almost 1,000 years later that reputation is not only intact but much greater than it was in her lifetime. She may have given the objects listed in her “will” directly to Weingarten as she was dying in early 1094; she may have simply asked Welf to make sure that the transaction occurred, even if in his name rather than hers. She probably did not give a relic of the Holy Blood to the abbey, although the monks decided to give her credit for doing so. The four Gospel books, the only definitively identified parts of her legacy to survive the 900+ years since her death, are the sole remaining evidence for the myriad ways Judith used patronage for her own religious, cultural, and political ends, establishing herself as a commanding, wealthy, and sophisticated presence in the turmoil and disruption of eleventh-century Europe. Epilogue The particulars of Judith’s biography are shrouded in the past. The chronological distance is compounded by the general lack of attention to women in the historical records. We will probably never know the name of Judith’s mother, a daughter of the Duke of Normandy. Modern scholars have repeatedly referred to Judith as a “Countess of Flanders,” even though she was a daughter, not a wife, of the Count of Flanders and thus never a countess. Some scholars in the mid-twentieth century argued that she was Norman rather than Flemish, trying to provide her with a more substantial aristocratic pedigree. She may have had children with Tostig, children now lost to the historical record; in addition to Welf the Fat and Henry the Black, she may have had other children with Welf. Despite these gaps in the biographical record, this “patronage biography” has blended historical, literary, and art-historical methodologies to present Judith’s
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life through analysis of her brief appearances in the textual records and through the objects she commissioned. Even in the face of her husbands’ failed campaigns, Judith’s strategy of asserting her social status through artistic patronage was successful through two enormously challenging periods: the military, political, and financial losses of the Battle of Stamford Bridge and the constant civil and religious conflicts of late eleventh-century Germany. Despite this turmoil, she still died a wealthy, powerful, respected woman, remembered today almost exclusively for her patronage and contributions to eleventh-century art and culture. Notes 1 For the most recent description of the manuscript, see #68 in Nigel Morgan and Steela Panayotova, Illuminated Manuscripts in Cambridge: A Catalogue of Western Book Illumination in the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge Colleges, Part I, Volume 1 (London: Harvey Miller, 2009). 2 The earliest extant text of Ea Tempestate is in a manuscript from the last quarter of the thirteenth century: Fulda, Landesbibliothek MS Aa 48 (fols.108v–109v). A lost manuscript of Ea Tempestate was the base text for the MGH edition; see remarks in Norbert Kruse, “Die historischen Heilig-Blut-Schriften der Weingartener Klostertradition,” in 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung in Weingarten, ed. Norbert Kruse and Hans Ulrich Rudolf (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1994), vol.1, 78–9. 3 For an overview and analysis of Holy Blood relics in general, see Chapter 4 of Nicholas Vincent, The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 31–81. 4 Die Schrift…stellt die Ereignisse des jahres 1048 aus Mantuaner Perspektive dar und stammt zweifellos aus dieser Stadt, from Kruse, “Die historischen Heilig-BlutSchriften,” 82. 5 Ibid., 84. 6 Eadem quadragesima sanguis, ut creditur, Domini apud urbem Mantuam divina per quendam caecum revelatione invenitur et plurimis miraculis declaratur, from Hermann of Reichenau (also known as Hermann the Lame), Augiensis Chronicon MGH SS 5, 127; translation from I.S. Robinson, Eleventh-Century Germany: The Swabian Chronicles, Manchester Medieval Sources Series (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008), 83–4. 7 Antonio Nerli, Breve Chronicon Monasterii Mantuani Sancti Andree Ord. Bened. Di Antonio Nerli, ed. Orsini Begani, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores XXIV, Pte. XIII (Citta di Castello: Tipi della casa editrice S. Lapi, 1908). See also Cristian Bratu, “Nerli, Antonio,” in Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle (Leiden: Brill Online, 2013); http://www. encquran.brill.nl/entries/encyclopedia-of-the-medieval-chronicle/nerli-antonio-SIM_ 01912 (accessed 16 January 2013). 8 Nerli, Breve Chronicon, 5. 9 I am indebted to Prof. RaGena DeAragon for information about the distinctions between the Pope’s headdress and a bishop’s during this period. 10 Michèle Spike discusses the painting in her Tuscan Countess: The Life and Extraordinary Times of Matilda of Canossa (New York: Vendome Press, 2004), 23, although her focus is the possible inclusion of the infant Matilda in the crowd. Giannino
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Giovannoni provides more detailed analysis in his “La Rotonda Di San Lorenzo E Il Palazzo Di Matilde,” in Matilde, Mantova E I Palazzi Del Borgo: I Ritrovati Affreschi Del Palazzo Della Ragione E Del Palazzetto Dell’abate, ed. Aldo Cicinelli et al. (Mantova: Sintesi, 1995), 43–6. Giovannoni argues for the historical accuracy of Rinaldo’s composition. 11 Bonamente Aliprandi’s Cronaca di Manatova appears in the same volume as Nerli’s Breve Chronicon, note 7 above. 12 Eugene Johnson, S. Andrea in Mantua: The Building History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 98, n.18, 20. 13 Ippolito Domesmondi, Dell’historia Ecclesiastica Di Mantova 2 vols. Bologna: A. Forni, 1612, repr. 1977. 199–201. 14 Donesmondi probably had access to a version of the Weingarten De Translatione for his 1612 text, since he duplicates (in much-condensed form) the Henry-Baldwin-Judith lineage described there, with all its errors (207). Note that his errors cluster in the postMantuan section of the text. 15 Kruse, “Die historischen Heilig-Blut-Schriften,” 82–4, presents De Translatione as a c.1200 Weingarten text, unlike his claim that De Inventione was composed in Mantua in the early twelfth century. 16 Imperator vero partem aliquam eiusdem sanguinis et devota peticione et imperiali auctoritate obtinuit; this phrasing begs the questions: To whom was the petition addressed? Who had the authority (besides Henry himself) to allow the division of the relic? 17 Interestingly enough, in Donesmondi’s Dell’istoria Ecclesiastica, Leo himself divides the relic after Boniface’s death and gives a portion of it to Henry directly (204–5). 18 See Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 24–5. 19 Chronicon Wirziburgense, for 1056. Similar entries about aggressions of the Emperor against Baldwin and Godfrey (and vice versa) are in Hermann of Reichenau’s “Chronicle” for 1047, 1049, and 1054 (translated in Robinson, Eleventh-Century Germany: The Swabian Chronicles, 82, 86, 98). 20 Sigebert of Gembloux, Sigeberti Gemblacensis Chronographia, MGH SS 6: 360. 21 Hermann of Reichenau for 1049, in Robinson, trans., Eleventh Century Germany: The Swabian Chronicles, 86. 22 Sigeberti Gemblacensis Chronographia, 1057 for Dec 1056; Robinson, Henry IV, 31. 23 Elisabeth van Houts, “The Norman Conquest through European Eyes,” The English Historical Review 110 (1995): 838–9. 24 See brief discussion and full citations in “Agnes of Poitiers, Empress,” in Epistolae: Medieval Women’s Latin Letters, ed. Joan Ferrante, Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu (accessed 18 February 2013). 25 Berhtold of Reichenau, Chronicle (second version) for 1077, in Robinson, trans., Eleventh-Century Germany: The Swabian Chronicles, 193. For the original, see MGH SS 5, 264–326. 26 I am indebted to Stephen J. Harris for Latin expertise in this matter. 27 The inaugural entry in the Annales Welfici Weingartensis, MGH SS 17, 308; also in Historia Welforum. Schwäbische Chroniken Der Stauferzeit, ed. and trans. Erich König (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1978), 86. For a discussion of Welf’s activities in the Holy Land, see Marie-Louise Favreau-Lilie, “Welf IV. und der Kreuzzug von 1101,” in Welf IV.: Schlüsselfigur Einer Wendezeit: Regionale Und Europäische Perspektiven, ed. Dieter R. Bauer and Matthias Becher (München: Beck, 2004), 420–47.
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Judita dux, regina Anglie, hic sepulta, dedit preciosissimum thesaurum ecclesie, Sanguinem Domini, cum reliquis sanctorum, palliis et plenariis, from Necrologium Weingartense, 224. 29 Necrologium Weingartense, 230. 30 Richard W. Barber, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 128, 131. 31 All of these quotations and explications are from Michael Heinlen, “An Early Image of a Mass of St. Gregory and Devotion to the Holy Blood at Weingarten Abbey,” Gesta 37.1 (1998): 56. Heinlen’s main focus is a late twelfth-century miniature depicting the Mass of St. Gregory now in Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago, Buckingham Fund Purchase, 1944.704). 32 Ibid., p. 61, n.29. 33 Morgan and Panayotova, Illuminated Manuscripts, Part 1, Volume 1, item #68. 34 Robinson, Eleventh-Century Germany: The Swabian Chronicles, 54. 35 Ibid., 45. 36 Ibid., 42. 37 Bernold of Blasien, Chronicle for 1094, in ibid., 317. 38 The 1604 “Heilig-Blut-Tafel” that depicts eight narrative scenes illustrating the events of De Inventione and De Translatione (reproduced in Kruse and Rudolf, eds., 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung, vol. 1, 24–5); the eighteenth-century ceiling fresco (reproduced here in Plate 26); the nineteenth-century full-length portrait of Judith hanging in the Welf tomb (reproduced in Kruse and Rudolf, eds., 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung, vol. 1, 73). 39 YouTube searches for “Blutfreitag” and “Welfenfest” produce numerous recordings of the contemporary version of these processions and celebrations. 40 Chronicle of Bernold of Blasien, entry for 1094, in Robinson, trans., EleventhCentury Germany: The Swabian Chronicles, 317. 28
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Appendix 1
Chapters 6 and 7 of the Vita Oswini1 in Modern English All of the translations provided in the appendices are sense-for-sense rather than word-for-word. Clarity in Modern English is prioritized over Latin structure and vocabulary, although the translations attempt to retain phrasing and sentence construction when possible. Many Latin pronouns have been replaced with Modern English proper nouns or identificatory phrases; groups of Latin dependent clauses often became separate Modern English sentences with added directional phrases. Some of these changes are specifically addressed in the notes to the translations. Chapter 6: The miracles begin which were said to have been performed by him after the revelation of his holy body. In the beginning, it is recounted how his hairs were placed on the fire for the sake of testing their power; they sustained no corruption from the fire. And when through all the province of Northumbria the report spread widely of the unveiling of the holy glorious body of the King of Deira and martyr Oswine in the church of Tynemouth of the blessed holy Mary, mother of God, and when many of the faithful were hurrying to his place of rest, desiring with all prayers to take part in such a great spectacle, then Ægelwine the Bishop of Durham consulted Tostig, a son of Godwin Duke of Kent and the Count of Northumbria, about how the body might most appropriately be presented. However, it happened that the Countess Judith, wife of the previously named count, at that time privately requested that the bishop (who was hurrying to the church) should keep for her however small a part from the body for her benediction, if it should happen for him by divine gift to come upon the body of the holy martyr.2 She made this request since she was not able to be present with the others, despite her desire, and so that she might at least have something which she would be able to venerate for her love of the saint. Therefore the venerable bishop, not heedless of the petition of the devoted countess, was presumptuous with piety, and while washing the most holy body, when he reached the head, he took a few of the hairs of the saint adhering to the crown of the head. With the intention of giving them to the woman afterwards, he held onto them very devoutly until the service was finished. Therefore, after the service had been completed, after psalms and litanies giving thanks to almighty God, and after blessing the congregated people, the bishop took the hairs of the holy head, which the oil of sin had never stained, and
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he brought the hairs with the greatest joy to the Countess, who greatly desired nothing else and who for this reason was anxiously awaiting his arrival. The devout woman took the hairs with the highest devotion and necessary reverence—what mortal tongue or pen ever might be able to express with what great happiness she was delighted and what great thanks she gave to God and how many tears she shed for her joy? And according to the voice of Paul, “Faith is the substance hoped for, is the proof of things not seen.”3 The previously named woman enclosed the hairs of the saint in no shrine 4 but she arranged first to test them by the purification of fire, not that she had any doubt concerning the hair, but so that on account of this test she might more widely extol the merits of the martyr all about. For she had heard the scripture concerning such matters:5 “And the hair of your head will not perish.”6 Oh happy audacity, and audacious happiness! There was no delay. Therefore a copious fire was kindled in the atrium, and the hairs placed on a tile with fire, and prayer to God was poured from all unanimously. A wondrous thing. Certainly nothing is consumed more quickly by the heat of the fire than hair; however, the hair thus placed was not harmed by the glowing fire all around. Oh, miraculous turn of events! For the fire did not become cold through a deficiency of material, but it was blazing up more and more because of a heap of branches thrown on. Therefore what do we say—that the hair assumed a power of more durable substance, or that the fire lacked the ardor of its nature? No, not at all. But He who made the three boys in the furnace of Babylon uninjured and safe as they burned7 protected the hairs from the fire by the merit of His faithful Oswine. Also the Countess, very terrified by these great things, was cast down on the floor, with tears and gasps for a long time exhorting God and the holy martyr; afterwards, she was raised upright, trembling. And so with the fire restrained, the people who had convened returned to their own homes, proclaiming the almighty God as wondrous in his saints.8 In truth, the venerable woman put away with very worthy honor the hairs of the holy martyr, taken away from the place of fire, into a new shrine which she had prepared for that purpose, as the bishop had ordered, and she constantly exhibited the greatest veneration. Chapter 7: How a certain chaplain, who presumed in the tower of that church to lie down irreligiously, miraculously had a presentiment in that same place of his punishment for his presumption. The aforementioned Count Tostig had a certain chaplain whom he particularly esteemed even above his other trustworthy companions.9 In accordance with the custom of the province, there were sometimes well-appointed banquets at Tynemouth. For one of these, there was only an ordinary, small manor house insufficient for receiving in hospitality the many
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kinds of men who accompanied the Count. Therefore, the chaplain ordered a bed to be spread out for himself under the tower of the church in which the most reverend body of the holy king and martyr Oswine rested. Accordingly, drunken with wine when returning from the court of the count in the dark of night, he girded himself under the aforementioned tower in order to perform sexual acts obscenely with a young harlot.10 When, behold! in the church a shaking of walls was made, so that the structure of the entire church being about to fall would be terrifying to that incontinent one. However, there was at this time before the tomb of the blessed martyr a religious man keeping a vigil and praying. He ran to the chaplain, afraid that the chaplain would be crushed while sleeping by the collapse now threatening, so that the religious man might rouse him from presumed sleep. In this way he came unexpectedly upon the sexual activity with the prostitute now in process. And condemning the defilement, inflamed with the zeal of Phineas,11 the man immediately threw the young woman from the church, and with even harsher reproaches chastened the chaplain in the spirit of Daniel because he neither feared God nor respected Man. And immediately all the tempest ceased. In this so remarkable a matter, it became known how greatly just and how greatly merciful the holy king and martyr Oswine is, he who from the rigor of justice shook the whole fabric of the church as if to a ruin. But after hindering the shame of defilement from taking place, he suspended the imminent ruin because of the mildness of his mercy. However, the man of God who threw the prostitute from the church was afterwards made a monk of Durham, and was accustomed to narrate this miracle repeatedly. Notes 1 The complete Vita Oswini from BL Cotton Julius A.x, fols. 2–43 has been edited as “Vita, inventio et miracula sanctissimi et gloriossimi regis Deirorum Oswini” by James Raine in Miscellanea Biographica, Surtees Society 8 (London: J.B. Nichols and son, 1838), 1–59. Paul Anthony Hayward’s in-progress edition (with translation) includes alternates from Oxford, Corpus Christi College 134; I am indebted to Dr. Hayward for supplying a few phrases of text missing from Chapters 6 and 7 of the Raine edition. 2 The chronology of events seems confused here, as it implies that Judith does not know if Ægelwine will have access to the body, even though the body has already been discovered. 3 Hebrews 11.1. 4 This awkward construction preserves the Latin nullo loco conclusit, meaning simply that Judith decided to test the relic before she enshrined it. 5 Text missing from the Raine edition in this sentence was generously supplied by Paul Anthony Hayward. 6 Luke 21.18. 7 Daniel 3. 8 This phrase echoes a liturgical chant from the feast of Mauritius; see the Cantus database, http://cantusdatabase.org/node/314298 (accessed 20 December 2012).
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The translation eliminates a number of repetitive clauses that emphasize Tostig’s esteem of the chaplain. 10 The Latin includes the diminutive: meretricula. 11 Numbers 32. 9
Appendix 2
Grants and Stipulations of Welf and Judith to Weingarten Abbey1 in Modern English The titles are editorial; the texts are not titled in the manuscript and the nineteenthcentury German editors numbered but did not title the texts. The Oaths of the Censuales (First text, folios 88r–89r) In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: I, Welf, with my wife Judith and sons Welf and Henry, to ensure the continued strength of our church against complaints and suits, have decided to write down the oaths of the censuales,2 oaths which were irrefutably established by the first founders of the monastery, Henry3 and his son, St Conrad, the bishop of Constance.4 The censuales whom the Church now has or will have may not be granted an income or financial benefit for any reason, not by an advocate or by an abbot; these benefits cannot be changed. Therefore, if any of the censuales disregards his obligation to pay the annual assessment when it comes due, then his property will pass into the ownership of the church if he is reproached three times and does not amend the error.5 If any of the censuales dies without a wife and legitimate children, nor a brother, nor a sister, nor any near kin who could inherit, and with a legitimate division of property having been made, all those mobile and immobile goods which remain will pass into the use of the church. If any of the censuales dies legally married, without legitimate children, or if he has those who are not consorts,6 the maintenance of all the cloth should proceed either to the church’s fabric stock7 or to the church at large and will be presented to the brothers. The brothers will determine which part they wish to retain, but it is agreed that the other part will be placed in the division of remaining items. In this division, the part which comes to the church will be entirely within the jurisdiction of the church. If a female censualis dies leaving an heir, the heir will supply the more valuable clothing to the church, except that made from the pelts of wild animals. Indeed, if a married, female censualis dies without an heir, the church will receive her more cultivated clothes, along with a portion of her other property as it is granted in division of her other things. If she is not married and has no heir, then she relinquishes all property to the church. If a male or female censualis dies in the age of minority (and thus under the power of a still-living parent), the church will possess whatever that minor had been given by paternal kin or by friends, even if that minor died while still in the cradle.8
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Ownership of Treasures and Estates (Second text, folios 89v–90r) Let it be known that Duke Welf and his most noble wife Judith, for the salvation of their souls, with the agreement of their sons Welf and Henry, grant ownership of the treasures and estates listed below to the Church of St Martin which is sited at Altdorf. They give these estates: namely, the church at Berg with all its holdings; and Cheffingin and Parinriet and Oberseulegen;9 and also from the woodland which is called Forst,10 as much as is necessary for firewood and building materials and forage for pigs; and Rammingen, which a certain Frederick had legally given to Welf; and the manor of a certain Rudolf near Breitenwanch; and another manor near Malles; and a freehold which a certain Bertolfus signed over to Welf in Venusta Valle and in Lombardy;11 and they also give a commissioner named Adalberone with his estate.12 In this same manner they present this treasure: namely, one greater shrine and another smaller with relics of the saints; and two other most precious shrines worked with skill in gold; three gospel-books with the one gospel text;13 three altars; and four gold-plated chalices and two gold chalices; and two gilded tablets; and two most precious crosses in gold and lapis lazuli; and three smaller crosses with others yet smaller; and three silver candelabra which are precious and also heavy; and two palls with gold-work, three without gold-work; and nine embroidered altar-cloths14 with a tenth altar-cloth of very great length; and three chasubles15 which are precious with the best gold work; and two others; and five copes goldworked and thoroughly ornamented with skill; and one and three dalmatics with gold-work;16 and two fine-spun dalmatics; and one maniple17 constructed with gold and jewels with other great adornments. With the witnesses: Count Hartmann. Adalgozo. Arnulf. Henry and Henry. Gerald. Brunon. Ropert. Adelbert. Theodoric.18 In the year of our lord 1094, 12 March. If, however, one of my heirs might intend to remove these estates and treasures from this church of St Martin, or actually does dare to remove them, that desire will not prevail, and he must pay one thousand marks of gold to the church. In addition, this is the usual fixed allotment for twelve paupers on an annual basis, apportioned and distributed daily. For the salvation of the souls of both Welf and Judith, from the cellar of the brothers: 26 measures of grain (spelt), 40 measures of wheat flour for bread, also 10 measures of spelt for savory foods, 10 measures of legumes, four sheep, 3 pigs, 40 measures of wild oats for brewing stout beer, two pecks of salt, and 3 marks for clothes. Every year on the anniversary of her death,19 100 paupers will be fed, for which expense add: three half-pecks of spelt from the cellar of the brothers for bread, five urns of beer, a peck and a quarter of legumes. Above all, it is designated that that one daily mass be sung perpetually for the salvation of their souls; if that mass is interrupted by the necessity of celebrating another, more important one, then the daily mass should be celebrated before or after the other one.
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Notes 1 In the first quarter of the twelfth century, these texts were copied into the end-leaves of Judith’s Gospel book, now Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Aa.21, at folios 88r–90r; they are edited in Wirtembergisches Urkundenbuch Band I (Stuttgart: Blum und Vogel 1849), items #244 and #245, at 300–303; Kruse provides an edition and translates the second text (which he terms the “Stiftertestament”) into German in “Die historischen Heilig-Blut-Schriften der Weingartener Klostertradition,” in 900 Jahre Heilig-BlutVerehrung in Weingarten, ed. Norbert Kruse and Hans Ulrich Rudolf (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1994), vol. 1, 68–9. 2 Censualis (pl. censuales) has no Modern English equivalent. A censualis is defined as an “ecclesiastical tributary, one who has been taken under the protection of the patron saint of a church and who owes nothing but an annuity” in Jan Frederick Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis lexicon minus (Leiden: Brill, 2001); a searchable online version is available at http://www.linguaeterna.com/medlat/index.php (accessed 23 September 2014). For the purposes of this text, censualis describes a person who has entered into a financial obligation to the monastery with expectation of future spiritual benefits. 3 This Henry, known as “Henry with the Golden Plow” (Heinrich mit dem goldenen Pflug) or “Henry with the Golden Wagon” (Heinrich mit dem goldenen Wagen), is credited with founding the convent of Altdorf in 935. See “Welfs,” in John M. Jeep, ed., Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001), 804–5. 4 Conrad was Bishop of Constance 934–75. 5 The contract here means that the censualis will forfeit the entailed/annuitized land entirely if s/he fails to pay the annual amount due to the monastery. 6 The meaning of the text here is unclear, but it seems to imply that a woman who had some sort of quasi-permanent relationship with the censualis (whether as official wife or a more nebulous status somewhere above consortes) also had an obligation to the church. 7 opera in this sense refers specifically to Niermeyer’s definition 5, “church fabric fund” (Mediae Latinitatis lexicon minus, http://www.linguaeterna.com/medlat/index.php). 8 The last phrase, etiamsi in cunis iacuerit, is in a hand different from that of the rest of the text. 9 Cheffingin and Parinriet are medieval Latin versions of Köpfingen and Bannried, both municipalities near Ravensburg; one of the many medieval municipalities named Berg was also near Ravensburg. See Geschichtliches Ortswörterbuch Deutschlands at http:// www.koeblergerhard.de/GOLD-HP/Gold.htm (accessed 10 April 2014). Oberseulegen may be a reference to Oberstaufen, a municipality in Swabia. 10 Forst simply means “forest” in German; those involved in the transaction would presumably know which stretch of forest was intended. 11 Rammingen was near present-day Türkheim in Bavaria; Breitenwanch is probably Breitenwang in modern Austria (thus indicating the extent of the Welf holdings); Malles is the medieval Latin version of Mals in the Südtirol. Venusta Valle is the medieval Latin for Vinschgau, which is now part of the Südtirol but was considered part of Lombardy in the eleventh century. (All of this geographic information is from Geschichtliches Ortswörterbuch Deutschlands.) These estates are also listed as gifts to Weingarten from Welf in the Necrologium Weingartense in the commemoration of his death on 9 November (MGH Necr 1, 230). 12 Judith and Welf evidently interpreted their relationship with Adalberone to include their right to deed him, his services, and his land to the abbey.
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These three Gospel books are now New York, Pierpont Library, MSs. M 708 and M.709 and Fulda, Landesbibliothek MS Aa.21. 14 dorsalia: probably an error for dossal or dossel, “An ornamental cloth, usually embroidered, hung at the back of the altar or at the sides of the chancel,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com (accessed 21 December 2012). 15 “An ecclesiastical vestment, a kind of sleeveless mantle covering the body and shoulders, worn over the alb and stole by the celebrant at Mass or the Eucharist,” ibid. 16 The text is clear that the gift includes unam et tres, rather than simply four dalmatics (vestments worn by deacons), perhaps implying that one was noticeably different from the others. 17 “In the Western Church: a strip of material suspended from the left arm near the wrist, worn as one of the Eucharistic vestments,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com (accessed 21 December 2012). 18 “Count Hartmann” is probably a reference to Hartmann II, Count of Dillingen and Kyburg (who died during the first crusade, possibly with Welf); see discussion in I.S. Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 1056–1106 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 302. Hartmann was involved in the pre-crusade massacre of the Jewish community at Mainz in 1096; see Jonathan Riley-Smith, “The First Crusade and the Persecution of the Jews,” Studies in Church History 21 (1984): 51–72, at 52. The other names in the list are presumably those of Weingarten monks who also witnessed the donation; however, the name of the abbot in 1094, Walicho, does not appear in the list. For a list of the abbots of Weingarten, see Hans Ulrich Rudolf and Anselm Günthör, Die Benediktinerabtei Weingarten: Zwischen Gründung Und Gegenwart 1056–2006: Ein Uberblick Über 950 Jahre Klostergeschichte (Lindenberg: Kunstverlag Josef Fink, 2006), 97. For references to an alternate timetable of Weingarten abbots, see Sönke Lorenz, “Weingarten und die Welfen,” in Welf IV.: Schlüsselfigur Einer Wendezeit: Regionale Und Europäische Perspektiven, ed. Dieter R. Bauer (Munich: Beck, 2004), 30–55. 19 Since eius is singular, it could be translated as “his” or “her,” referring to either Welf or Judith. I have chosen “her,” since the text is ostensibly dated to 1094, the year of Judith’s death, and Welf died seven years later in Cyprus. 13
Appendix 3
Texts Related to the Weingarten Relic of the Holy Blood1 in Modern English De Inventione Sanguinis Christi 2 The finding of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ occurred near the Italian city of Mantua by a certain Adilbert, a religious man who was blind from infancy by the judgment of God. God revealed the blood to him in the time of Henry the Emperor, Leo the Lord Pope, and Boniface Duke of Lombardy.3 Boniface was the Duke married to Beatrice, the daughter of Herman, Duke of Swabia. It happened that Boniface arrived with the Lord Pope in Bavaria to come to Emperor Henry. However, by God’s will, rumor about finding the blood of our lord Jesus Christ flew through France, the Teutonic lands, Bavaria, Saxony, and Swabia; and the rumor came to France before anyone in Italy knew of it. While they were in Bavaria, the emperor said to Boniface, Duke of the Lombards, “Lo, Duke, you have a very great treasure and precious thing hidden in your land.” And immediately the Emperor proclaimed his departure for Italy; with him, the Lord Pope, 50 bishops, and a great host of noble Germans and Lombards hastened with great zeal and joy all the way to Mantua. When the emperor arrived there with the Lord Pope, the bishops, and the entire host, the afore-mentioned, venerable Adilbert—even though he was blind—seized a shovel and began to dig in that place which was revealed to him by divine grace. And when he had dug to the depth of nine feet, they found by divine grace a precious treasure more desirable than silver or gold. They found a marble coffer placed in the middle of four sculpted tablets made of white marble. The coffer was one cubit4 in length, and it encased a lead reliquary engraved with writing which indicated what was hidden in it. They also found the body of the one who carried the great treasure hither into our fatherland, namely Longinus that soldier and centurion. It is read about him that during the suffering of the Lord on the cross, he pierced Him in the side with a lance, whence flowed blood and water. When he saw that the sun became darkened and the earth shook and the fabric of the temple was torn from the highest point downwards, and when he saw the tombs to be opened and the bodies of the saints to arise, even though they had slept a long time, Longinus then acknowledged Him to be the son of God, and he proclaimed: “Truly, this one was the son of God.”5 And so Longinus retired from the army after the ascension of the Lord to the heavens; he was instructed by the holy apostles in the teachings of the Lord, according to the venerable mandates of Christ.6
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After this, on account of the brutality of the persecution of Christian believers, he traveled across the sea, came to Italy, and went to Mantua, bearing with him the precious treasure, which he protected with great honor in a stone box, just as was related before. In doing so, he bequeathed himself to posterity as an example to show that God is the author of such great events. After the suffering and death of this Longinus, caused by Octavian, the governor of Mantua, there was a time of peace, and a small church was built in honor of St Andrew the apostle. It remained in that place until the time of the King, Lord Henry, and Duke Boniface. At that time, the city of Mantua had been devastated by the onslaught of wars so that it was depopulated and reduced to the size of a small town with only a few residents living there. But now because of the merits of the holy blood of the Lord and by the prayers of the most Holy Longinus, martyr of Christ, it has become one of the most noble of Lombard cities with great crowds and throngs of people. Then Leo, the Lord Pope, with the king and the bishops and all the important citizens gave thanks to the highest God, who supplied such great gifts to humanity. When they opened the lead casket, they found the contents divided into sections. That is, in its center was what I might call a certain kind of divider, made by the skill of the craftsman, which separated the blood of the Lord from the water. Such a sweet odor came from the reliquary that they thought themselves to be in the pleasure of Paradise. The blind eyes of the venerable Adilbert, to whom the Lord had revealed this relic, were opened, as were the eyes of many others. And immediately, it is wondrous to say, a great multitude of people with a variety of illnesses came: the lame, the shriveled, the blind, the deaf, those possessed by demons, and those with other infirmities, so that they occupied two miles of space all around the outside the city. However the Pope, discerning what great work the Lord performed there, endeavored with all ingenuity to take away from Mantua the blood of the Lord, lest Mantua become a new Rome. But the Lord did not support such purposes. For the residents of the city resisted the Pope’s attempt with all their strength, although they were scattered and few, and with God’s help they were victorious when the Lord Pope engaged them in war. The Pope thought they would be easy to defeat, since there were only a few Mantuans, as was said, and since the emperor and Boniface the Duke and all the noblemen were absent, and none had stayed there until the appointed time except the Pope. Given the opportunity, the Pope thought himself to be allowed what is not allowed; he thought he would be able to take away the precious relic. However, seeing that he was not able to achieve anything, the Pope withdrew from Mantua with great damage to himself and his followers and came again into Bavaria, with the emperor having departed from Lombardy.7 Moreover, our weakness cannot with justice describe how so many great miracles were accomplished there, and so many demons expelled, and so many invalids hindered by different infirmities received their healing and returned
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home, thanking God. Because of that weakness of mine, a small book placed in that church proclaims the virtues of the blood of Christ; it includes whatever the curious reader desires to know. Then the king and the duke decided to enlarge the church of the blessed Andrew and to adorn the church complex with buildings. And this was done. For one full year, it was constructed and enriched with great gifts, as it still is at this time. Finally, as Leo the Lord Pope was returning to Rome from Bavaria, he and 52 bishops consecrated that same church at the request of Henry the Lord King and Duke Boniface, and they placed the holy blood of Christ in the crypt under the altar of St Andrew, where the gifts of our Lord Jesus Christ are received up to the present day.8 De Translatione Sanguinis Christi 9 Therefore, to review, just as is narrated in the little book about the finding of the blood: the holy blood of the Lord had been found in the city of Mantua, in the presence of Pope Leo IX of pious memory with the Emperor Henry the Great, who was also pious, and with Boniface the Duke of the Lombards. Afterwards, at a very great expense to that same emperor and duke, the church was constructed and then consecrated by that same pope. The precious treasure is thus placed in that church, under the altar of St Andrew in the crypt. In truth, the emperor received a part of that same blood because of his devout petition and his imperial authority. In accordance with his royal dignity, he ordered this portion to be enclosed within a skillfully worked transparent crystal, decorated with gold and gems, just as it may be viewed today. He took it away with him and willed that it be carried with highest reverence in his retinue, wherever he went and as long as he lived.10 At this same time, the most noble Baldwin, Count of Flanders, became closely allied with the emperor and was one of the noble comrades in the emperor’s family entourage. The indefatigable count always supported the emperor in adversity and in prosperity.11 Thus it happened that, as the emperor departed from this life,12 the Count obtained this precious treasure of the blood among many other royal gifts as a reward for his friendship and loyalty. He protected that treasure continuously to the end of his life, not with lesser veneration than the emperor had done; he wished to have it with him wherever he went. Indeed, the aforesaid Count had one daughter named Judith, whom he had connected in marriage to the king of the English.13 That Count, walking the road of all flesh, certainly bequeathed to his daughter all his treasures and movable goods by the law of his people.14 Among these goods, she possessed with great love that most-desired treasure, the blood of Christ. Finally the English King her husband, who was about to engage in battle with his brother because of a disagreement about the kingdom, is said to have
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cautioned her that she should depart from England with both the English royal treasure and her own treasure and await the end of the war on an island adjacent to the homeland of her father; in this way, if he died, she would not have to endure the loss of everything. Therefore, at her husband’s death, she was bereaved. However, by means of a certain bishop of Trier who was related by blood to our leading noble citizens, she was connected in marriage to the oldest living Welf, the son of Chuniza and Azo the Marquis of Este. She thus arrived in our land with her own chapel, with this special and incomparable treasure of gold and silver, gems, and many sorts of purple cloth, with ecclesiastical ornaments, palls, shrines, gospel-books, and chausubles. She brought copes covering precious and wondrous coffers, in which were carried the holy blood along with the relics of St Oswald and of other saints. Indeed, all of these ecclesiastical items were given to St Martin’s monastery at Altdorf by her husband the Lord Welf when he departed for Jerusalem, a portion while she was living, a portion when she was dead.15 They are still kept there now, together with the blood of the Lord. However, if anyone wonders according to whose narration we have arranged these matters in this order, and thus judges them to be less than truth, let him know that the Queen of England herself and her comrades have clearly taught our ancestors, and thus this chronicle has descended faithfully through every generation to us. Amen. Ea Tempestate 16 In what way Judith was married for the second time, this time to Welf Duke of Swabia: At that time lived the renowned Duke Welf, the second of that title, who had transferred the college of monks of the Order of St Benedict from the Monastery of St Alto of Bavaria into this monastery at Altdorf. He also gave the nuns (previously inhabiting Altdorf) a perpetual seat at the monastery of St Alto instead of the monks.17 This Welf and his wife Imiza had a son (also called Welf) and a daughter named Cuniza, whom Azzo the Marquis of Este in Italy married. Later on, this junior Welf18 was made Duke of Carinthia, surging up in a fountain of strength. This monastery in the village of Altdorf had been founded and constituted by his ancestors; afterward, he re-founded that same institution on the mountain and gave it the name of Weingarten, not inconsistently, as he decided it would be a vineyard of the Lord of Hosts, who is Christ. That Welf died without legitimate progeny in the town of Potamus, which in the vulgar tongue is called Bodman.19 He bequeathed all his patrimony to Weingarten Abbey, and instructed that he should be buried with the bones of his ancestors after his death. However, Chuniza his sister (the Marquise of Este), who was mentioned before, heard of the death of her brother and of the terms of his will. She rose up and came into Swabia, bringing her son Welf. She asserted as completely invalid
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and weak that testament that her brother had established, and she declared that the legitimate succession extended to her for this inheritance, and that she would not be passed over.20 Thus was this Welf, the son of Marquise Chuniza, made the heir of his dead uncle; he became the most noted prince through all of Germany because of his honest deeds. He then sought to join in marriage with Judith, mentioned before as the former queen of England, by sending suitors21 to her. At first, she refused him, since she had no knowledge of him. But once she ascertained his reputation, integrity, and the nobility of his family, his second proposal was delivered more pleasingly by his groomsmen. Through the advice of a certain archbishop of Trier, one of Welf’s kinsman, the queen then gave her consent to that marriage. Accompanied by messengers into the continent,22 she made haste to the marriage chamber with all her treasure from both her royal English marriage and her father’s legacy. When the marriage was complete, and Duke Welf, husband of Judith, had solemnly and honorably celebrated their nuptials as was fitting, he became a famous prince, who flourished in virtue and in arms. Also, he managed the Duchy of Bavaria by his own power and prevailed over all his enemies so powerfully that he manfully forced them, swollen with pride, to choose to turn their necks to him in submission. As well, with Judith his wife he begat Henry, who was made Duke of Saxony, and Welf, who was called The Fat.23 After glorious wars and also after many struggles for remission of his sins, a heavenly inspiration came to Welf and he devoted himself to go to the holy land with the sign of the cross. As this beneficial journey approached, with his generous wife and his aforementioned sons, with numerous soldiers and a crowd of his homeland’s nobility, he approached this monastery of Weingarten which he honored with such unique and special reverence. Publicly before all the people, he provided lavish gifts of estates and other things to the monastery of St Martin and St Oswald so that his tomb would be joined to that of his ancestors. He also had his companions swear that if he died during the journey, his bones (with the flesh dried and stripped off) would be carried back to Weingarten for burial. And then the Lady Judith with weeping, with most abundant tears, presented a shroud woven with most pure gold which had cloth pieces with worked orphrey throughout; ivory shrines, ornamented around with gold and silver; gold crosses with relics of the saints, fully decorated with the best gems; gold chalices, gold censors and candelabras; many gospel books; a casket skillfully made, full of the relics of St Oswald; finally, in respect of the Lord she offered the holy blood of Christ and presented it as if it were incense with the odor of sanctity; she enriched this monastery with such offerings. Having made these arrangements, Duke Welf said farewell to all, and departed for the Holy Land.
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Notes 1 These three texts have been edited as a group: MGH SS 15.s, 921–23, available at http://www.dmgh.de/. They have also been edited and translated into German by Norbert Kruse as part of “Die historischen Heilig-Blut-Schriften der Weingartener Klostertradition,” in 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung in Weingarten, ed. Norbert Kruse and Hans Ulrich Rudolf (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1994), vol. 1, 104–7 and 117–18. 2 Norbert Kruse states that this text was composed in Mantua in the early twelfth century (“Die Historischen Heilig-Blut-Schriften,” 82), although see Chapter 5 for an alternate analysis. The oldest extant version of this text is in a c.1200 Weingarten book created under the direction of Abbot Berthold (1200–1232), now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (McClean Collection MS 101). The book, a Vitae Sanctorum, includes both De Inventione (fols. 1v–2v) and De Translatione (f.179v). These texts are in different hands, both of which are different from the hand of the main text. See Nigel J. Morgan and Stella Panayotova, Illuminated Manuscripts in Cambridge: A Catalogue of Western Book Illumination in the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge Colleges (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2009), Part One, Volume One, no. 68. I am indebted to Dr. Deirdre Jackson of the Fitzwilliam Museum for the detail about the handwriting on f.179v. For a full account of the texts’ manuscript traditions, see Kruse, “Die historischen Heilig-Blut-Schriften,” 77–123. 3 A number of sources date this episode to 1048. If De Inventione is to be taken at face value, however, it must have taken place in or after 1049, when the Lotharingian Bishop Bruno of Toul was enthroned as Pope Leo IX with the support of Henry III (Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988], 64). See further discussion in Chapter 5. Boniface died in 1052, providing a terminus ad quem for the episode; see the entry for “Beatrice of Lorraine, duke of Tuscany,” in Epistolae: Medieval Women’s Latin Letters, ed. Joan Ferrante, http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu (accessed 2 January 2013). The emperor referred to here is Henry III, who died in 1056. 4 17 inches. 5 Matthew 27.54. 6 Vincent ties these details to the growth of the cult of Longinus: The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 59. 7 The unclear politics of this section point up the constantly shifting alliances and power struggles within and around the mid–eleventh-century Holy Roman Empire. See discussion in Chapters 4 and 5. 8 In the MGH edition, Waitz dates the consecration of the church to February of 1053, but Boniface died in May of 1052 (see further discussion in Chapter 5). S. Andrea in Mantua has been rebuilt a number of times since the eleventh century, but the Holy Blood relic is still kept in the crypt. See Eugene J. Johnson, S. Andrea in Mantua: The Building History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975). 9 This text is on f.179v of the Fitzwilliam Museum manuscript; see note 1. 10 The seeming discrepancy between Henry’s and Leo’s desires could be explained by Leo’s intention to take the entire relic away from Mantua, while Henry receives only a part. 11 The improbability of these alliances is discussed at length in Chapter 5. 12 Emperor Henry III died in October of 1056.
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This text reproduces the common error of identifying Judith as Baldwin’s daughter or stepdaughter rather than his half-sister. See discussion of Judith’s parentage in the introduction. 14 Baldwin V died on 1 September 1067; the sequence of events here is unclear and incorrect, as the text states that Judith was married to the King of England and implies that she had the relic before her departure from England (which occurred in 1065). 15 Welf died en route back from Jerusalem in 1101; Judith died in 1094. See discussion of the chronological issues around this information in Chapter 5, as well as the late twelfthcentury texts Historia Welforum and Genealogia Welforum, both in Historia Welforum, Schwäbische Chroniken Der Stauferzeit, ed. and trans. Erich König (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1978). I have translated partim here as “portion,” although it could also function as the adverb “partly.” 16 The earliest extant version of this text is in a late thirteenth-century Weingarten manuscript now Landesbibliothek Fulda Aa 48, fols.108v–109v. The first sentence (quomodo Iuditha …) is not in this manuscript but was included in the now-lost manuscript used by Waitz in his MGH edition. For complete details, see Kruse, “Die historischen Heilig-Blut-Schrifen,” 90–91. 17 This exchange of the monks and nuns was actually accomplished by Welf IV (Judith’s future husband) in 1056. See “Welfs” in John M. Jeep, ed., Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001), 804–5, as well as the thorough overview of the conflicting accounts of the monasteries’ foundings in Christine M. Sciacca, “The Gradual and Sacramentary of Hainricus Sacrista (Pierpont Morgan Library, M.711): Liturgy, devotion, and patronage at Weingarten Abbey” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2008). 18 This Welf is Welf III in the modern reckoning of the dynasty; see the Welf family tree, Figure 4.1, as well as “Welfs” in Jeep, ed., Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia, 804–5. 19 A town on the northwest end of Lake Constance (see the Ortsnamen und Gebietsnamen list at Geschichtliches Ortswörterbuch Deutschlands, http://www. koeblergerhard.de/GOLD-HP/Gold.htm (accessed 2 January 2013). 20 Despite this portrait of Cuniza (or Chuniza or Kunigunde), the 1055 will of Welf III was contested by his mother Imiza (or Irmintrud), not by his sister (who died in 1040); see Jeep, ed., Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia, 804–5, as well as the Historia Welforum). The translation preserves the interesting feminine singular pronouns in the text, which present Chuniza as initially asserting her own, rather than her son’s, right to the inheritance. 21 The translation attempts to preserve the nuptial vocabulary of the section, which refers to suitors and groomsmen/bridesmaids instead of messengers or negotiators. 22 That is, into the continental domains of the Empire, out of Flanders. 23 Judith and Welf’s second son is known as Henry the Black, although that epithet is not used here; it is interesting that the older son (who was known as pinguis) is noted second in this list. 13
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Bibliography
Manuscript/Art Object Sources Brussels, Cathedral of S Michel and S Gudule, Reliquary Cross Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.10.4 Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Aa.21 London, British Library, Harley MS 2821 London, British Museum, the Brandon Plaque, M&ME 1978, 11-1,1 Madrid, El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional, Codex Vitrinus 17 Monte Cassino, Archivio della Badia, Cod. 437 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.708 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.709 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 296 Paris, Bibliotheque National, MS Lat.819 Paris, Musée National du Moyen Âge, Autel portatif: tablette de porphyre rouge, N° d’inventaire: CL11459. Uppsala, University Library, cod. C93 Edited and Translated Primary Sources Adam von Bremen. Hamburgische Kirchengeschichte. Edited by B. Schmeidler (Hanover and Leipzig, 1917). ———. History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen. Translated by Francis Joseph Tschan and edited by Timothy Reuter. Records of Western Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959, repr. 2002. Aelred of Rievaulx. The Life of Saint Edward, King and Confessor. Edited by Jeroe Bertram. Southampton: Saint Austin Press, 1997. Aliprandi, Bonamente. “Cronaca Di Mantova.” Appendix 1 of Breve Chronicon Monasterii Mantuani Sancti Andree Ord. Bened. Di Antonio Nerli (Aa. 800– 1431). Edited by Orsini Begani. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. Città di Castello: Tipi della casa editrice S. Lapi, 1908. Andersson, Theodore Murdock, and Kari Ellen Gade, eds and trans. Morkinskinna: The Earliest Icelandic Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings (1030–1157). Islandica 51. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Annales Altahenses Maiores. MGH SS 24: 33–9. Annales Lamperti. MGH SS rer. Germ. 38: 3–304.
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Edith.” In Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius, edited by Stephanie Hollis, 23–68 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004). Hermann of Reichenau (Hermann the Lame). Augiensis Chronicon. MGH SS 5: 67–133. Historia Welforum. MGH SS 21: 454–72. Irvine, Susan. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition: Vol. 7, Ms. E. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004. Jerome. Adversus Jovinianum 1. PL 23: 0248A; for a translation, see Christian Classics Ethereal Library. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.vi.vi.I.html. John of Worcester. The Chronicle of John of Worcester. Edited and translated by Reginald R. Darlington and Patrick McGurk. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995. Keynes, Simon, ed. The Liber Vitae of the New Minster and Hyde Abbey, Winchester: British Library Stowe 944: Together with Leaves from British Library Cotton Vespasian A. VIII and British Library Cotton Titus D. XXVII. Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 26. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1996. Keynes, Simon et al., eds. The Electronic Sawyer: Online Catalogue of AngloSaxon Charters. London and Cambridge, UK: King’s College and the University of Cambridge, 2008–. http://www.esawyer.org.uk/. König, Erich, ed. and trans. Historia Welforum. Schwäbische Chroniken Der Stauferzeit. Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1978. Necrologium Raitenbuchense. MGH Necr. 3: 109–15. Necrologium Weingartense. MGH Necr 1: 221–32. Nerli, Antonio. Breve Chronicon Monasterii Mantuani Sancti Andree Ord. Bened. Di Antonio Nerli. Edited by Orsini Begani. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. Città di Castello: Tipi della casa editrice S. Lapi, 1908. Nordenfalk, Carl Adam Johan, ed. Codex Caesareus Upsaliensis: An Echternach Gospel-Book of the Eleventh Century. 2 vols. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1971. “The Oaths of the Censuales.” In Wirtembergisches Urkundenbuch Band I, item #244, 300–302. Stuttgart: Blum und Vogel, 1849. Translated into English in this volume, Appendix 2. O’Keeffe, Katherine O’Brien, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition: Vol. 5, Ms C. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2001. Ordericus Vitalis. The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis. Edited by Marjorie Chibnall. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1969. “Ownership of Treasures and Estates.” In Wirtembergisches Urkundenbuch Band I, item #245, 302–3. Stuttgart: Blum und Vogel, 1849. Translated into English in this volume, Appendix 2. Edited and translated into German as “Das Stiftertestament” in Norbert Kruse, “Der Weg des Heiligen Bluts von Mantua nach Altdorf-Weingarten,” 900 Jahre Heilig-Blut-Verehrung in Weingarten, 1094–1994, edited by Norbert Kruse and Hans Rudolf, 3 vols, vol. 1, 68–9. Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1994.
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Raine, James, ed. Vita Oswini. In Miscellanea Biographica. The Publications of the Surtees Society. London: J.B. Nichols and Son, 1838. Rathofer, Johannes, ed. Codex Aureus: El Escorial, Real Biblioteca, Cod. Vitrinas 17 (facsimile). Madrid: Testimonio, 1995. _____. El Evangeliario Imperial Sálico: volumen complementario e la edición facsímil (commentary). Madrid: Testimonio Compania Editorial, 2002. Reginald of Durham. Libellus de admirandis beati Cuthberti quae novelis patratae sunt temporibus. Edited by James Raine. London: J.B. Nichols and Son, 1835. Richard, Alfred, ed. Chartes Et Documents Pour Servir À L’histoire De L’abbaye De Saint-Maixent. Archives Historiques Du Poitou. Vols 16 & 18. Poitiers: Archives de la Vienne, 1886. Robinson, I.S., ed. and trans. Eleventh-Century Germany: The Swabian Chronicles. Manchester Medieval Sources Series. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008. Rollason, D.W. et al., eds. The Durham Liber Vitae: London, British Library, Ms Cotton Domitian A. vii: Edition and Digital Facsimile with Introduction, Codicological, Prosopographical and Linguistic Commentary, and Indexes. 3 vols. London: British Library, 2007. Rudolf, Hans Ulrich and Peter Burkhart, eds. Vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe Im Originalformat Des Hainricus Sacrista-Sakramentars: Ms. M.711 Der Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 2005. Sigebert of Gembloux. Sigeberti Gemblacensis Chronographia. MGH SS 6: 268–374. Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway. Translated by Lee Hollander. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1964. ———. King Harald’s Saga: Harald Hardradi of Norway. Edited and translated by Magnus Magnusson and Pálsson Hermann. New York: Dorset Press, 1986. South, Ted Johnson, ed. Historia De Sancto Cuthberto. Anglo-Saxon Texts. Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2002. Swarzenski, Hanns et al., eds. Das Berthold-Sakramentar: the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, Ms. M.710. Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1995–1999. Symeon of Durham. Libellus De Exordio Atque Procursu Istius, Hoc Est Dunhelmensis, Ecclesie: Tract on the Origins and Progress of This the Church of Durham. Edited and translated by D.W. Rollason. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2000. Taylor, Simon, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition: Vol. 4, Ms B. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1983. Vita Willihelmi Abbatis Hirsaugiensis. MGH SS 12: 209–25. Wido (Guy), Bishop of Amiens. The Carmen De Hastingae Proelio of Guy, Bishop of Amiens. Edited and translated by Frank Barlow. 2nd ed. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1999.
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Lorenz, Sönke. “Weingarten und die Welfen.” In Welf IV.: Schlüsselfigur Einer Wendezeit: Regionale Und Europäische Perspektiven, edited by Dieter R. Bauer, 30–55. Munich: Beck, 2004. Lynn, C.J. “Some Fragments of Exotic Porphyry Found in Ireland.” Journal of Irish Archaeology 11 (1984): 19–32. MacQuarrie, Alan. “An Eleventh-Century Account of the Foundation Legend of Laurencekirk, and of Queen Margaret’s Pilgrimage there.” Innes Review 47.2 (1996): 95–109. Marsden, Richard. “Ask What I Am Called: The Anglo-Saxons and Their Bibles.” In The Bible as Book: The Manuscript Tradition, edited by John L. Sharpe and Kimberly van Kampen, 145–76. London: British Library, 1998. Martin, Therese, ed. Reassessing the Roles of Women as “Makers” of Medieval Art and Architecture. 2 vols. Visualising the Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Mason, Emma. The House of Godwine: The History of a Dynasty. London: Hambledon and London, 2004. McGurk, Patrick and Jane Rosenthal. “The Anglo-Saxon Gospel Books of Judith, Countess of Flanders: Their Text, Make-Up and Function.” Anglo-Saxon England 24 (1994): 251–308. ———. “Author, Symbol, and Word: The Inspired Evangelists in Judith of Flanders’s Anglo-Saxon Gospel Books.” In Tributes to Jonathan J.G. Alexander: The Making and Meaning of Illuminated Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts, Art and Architecture, edited by J.J.G. Alexander, Susan L’Engle, and Gerald B. Guest, 185–202. London: Harvey Miller, 2006. McNamara, Jo Ann. “Canossa and the Ungendering of the Public Man.” In Render Unto Caesar: The Religious Sphere in World Politics, edited by Sabrina Petra Ramet and Donald W. Treadgold, 131–50. Washington, DC: American University Press, 1995. Meijns, Brigitte. “Drogo of Bergues and the Cult of English Saints in Flanders in the High Middle Ages.” Paper presented at the East Anglia and Its North Sea World Conference, University of East Anglia, 13–16 April 2010. Metz, Peter. The Golden Gospels of Echternach, Codex Aureus Epternacensis. New York: Praeger, 1957. Mois, Jakob. Das Stift Rottenbuch in der Kirchenreform des XI.–XII. Jahrhunderts: ein Beitrag zur Ordens-Geschichte der Augustiner-Chorherren. Munich: Verlag des Erzbischöflichen Ordinariats, 1953. Moore, W.J. The Saxon Pilgrims to Rome and the Schola Saxonum. Freiburg: The Society of St. Paul, 1937. Morey, C.R. “The Gospel-Book of Landevennec (the Harkness Gospels) in the New York Public Library.” Art Studies (1931): 223–86. Morgan, Nigel J. and Stella Panayotova. Illuminated Manuscripts in Cambridge: A Catalogue of Western Book Illumination in the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge Colleges. London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2009. Mortimer, Richard, ed. Edward the Confessor: The Man and the Legend. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2009.
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Muthesius, Anna. Studies in Byzantine and Islamic Silk Weaving. London: Pindar Press, 1995. ———. Byzantine Silk Weaving: AD 400 to AD 1200. Vienna: Verlag Fassbänder, 1997. Neesen, Claudia. Gabriel Bucelin OSB (1599–1681): Leben Und Historiographisches Werk. Stuttgarter Historische Studien Zur Landes- Und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2003. Nelson, Janet L. Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe. London: Hambledon, 1986. Nelson, Janet, et al., eds. The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England. 2005–. http://www.pase.ac.uk. Newton, Francis. The Scriptorium and Library at Monte Cassino, 1058–1105. Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology 7. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Nicholas, David. Medieval Flanders. New York and London: Longman, 1992. Niermeyer, Jan Frederick. Mediae Latinitatis lexicon minus. Leiden, Brill, 2001. http://www.linguaeterna.com/medlat/index.php. Nip, Renée. “Political Relations between England and Flanders (1066–1128).” Anglo-Norman Studies 21 (1999): 145–69. O’Carragain, Eamonn. Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Ohlgren, Thomas H. Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustration: Photographs of Sixteen Manuscripts with Descriptions and Index. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1992. Okasha, Elizabeth and Jennifer O’Reilly. “An Anglo-Saxon Portable Altar: Inscription and Iconography.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984): 32–51. O’Keeffe, Katherine O’Brien. “Leaving Wilton: Gunnhild and the Phantoms of Agency.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106.2 (2007): 203–23. Olson, Linda and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds. Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. O’Reilly, Jennifer. “St. John the Evangelist: Between Two Worlds.” In Insular & Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought in the Early Medieval Period, edited by Colum Hourihane, 189–218. Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, Dept. of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University, 2011. O’Riain-Raedel, Dagmar. “Edith, Judith, Matilda: The Role of Royal Ladies in the Propagation of the Continental Cult.” In Oswald: Northumbrian King to European Saint, edited by Clare Stancliffe and Eric Cambridge, 210–29. Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1996. Orme, Nicholas. Medieval Children. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Ortenberg, Veronica. “Archbishop Sigeric’s Journey to Rome in 990.” AngloSaxon England 19 (1990): 197–246.
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———. The English Church and the Continent in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Cultural, Spiritual, and Artistic Exchanges. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992. Owen-Crocker, Gail. Dress in Anglo-Saxon England. 2nd ed. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1986, 2004. Palliser, D.M. Domesday York. York: Borthwick Institute, 1990. Palmer, Nigel F. “Introduction.” In Manuscripts and Monastic Culture: Reform and Renewal in Twelfth-Century Germany, edited by Alison I. Beach, 1–18, Medieval Church Studies. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Piponnier, Françoise and Perrine Mane. Dress in the Middle Ages. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Poeschke, Joachim. Italian Mosaics. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2010. Raby, F. A History of Christian-Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages. 2nd ed. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1953. Raw, Barbara. Anglo-Saxon Crucifixion Iconography and the Art of the Monastic Revival. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 1. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ———. “The Office of the Trinity in the Crowland Psalter (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 296).” Anglo-Saxon England 28 (2000): 185–200. Rex, Peter. Hereward: The Last Englishman. Gloucestershire, UK: Tempus, 2005. Riley-Smith, Jonathan. “The First Crusade and the Persecution of the Jews.” Studies in Church History 21 (1984): 51–72. Robinson, I.S. Henry IV of Germany, 1056–1106. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Röckelein, Hedwig. “Founders, donors, and saints: patrons of nuns’ convents.” In Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti, 207–24. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Rogers, Nicholas. “The Waltham Abbey Relic-List.” In England in the Eleventh Century, edited by Carola Hicks. Harlaxton Medieval Studies. Stamford, UK: Paul Watkins, 1992. Rollason, D.W. Northumbria 500–1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Rosenthal, Jane E. “An Unprecedented Image of Love and Devotion: The Crucifixion in Judith of Flanders’s Gospel Book.” In Tributes to Lucy Freeman Sandler: Studies in Illuminated Manuscripts, edited by Kathryn A. Smith and Carol Herselle Krinsky, 21–36. London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2007. Ross, Marvin Chauncey. “An Eleventh-Century English Bookcover.” Art Bulletin 22.2 (1940): 83–5. Rudolf, Hans Ulrich and Anselm Günthör. Die Benediktinerabtei Weingarten: Zwischen Gründung Und Gegenwart 1056–2006: Ein Uberblick Über 950 Jahre Klostergeschichte. Lindenberg: Kunstverlag Josef Fink, 2006. Rushforth, Rebecca. “The Crowland Psalter and Gundrada De Warenne.” The Bodleian Library Record 21 (2008): 156–68.
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———. St. Margaret’s Gospel-Book: The Favourite Book of an Eleventh-Century Queen of Scots. Treasures from the Bodleian Library. Oxford, UK: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2007. Sawyer, P.H. Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography. Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks. London: Royal Historical Society, 1968. Schlief, Corine. “Seeking Patronage: Patrons and Matrons in Language, Art, and Historiography.” In Patronage: Power and Agency in Medieval Art, edited by Colum Hourihane, 206–32. Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, 2013. Schmeidmüller, Bernd. “Welf IV. 1101–2001. Kreationem fürstlicher Zukunft.” In Welf IV: Schlüsselfigur Einer Wendezeit: Regionale Und Europäische Perspektiven, edited by Dieter R. Bauer, 1–29. München: Beck, 2004. Schulenburg, Jane Tibbetts. “Holy Women and the Needle Arts: Piety, Devotion, and Stitching the Sacred, Ca. 500–1150.” In Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe: Gender, Power, Patronage, and the Authority of Religion in Latin Christendom, edited by Katherine Allen Smith and Scott Wells, 83–110. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Sciacca, Christine. “The Gradual and Sacramentary of Hainricus Sacrista (Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 711): Liturgy, Devotion, and Patronage at Weingarten Abbey.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2008. ———. “Raising the Curtain on the Use of Textiles in Manuscripts.” In Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and Their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Kathryn M. Rudy and Barbara Baert, 161–90. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Seibert, Hubertus. “Vom Königlichen dux zum Herzog von Bayern: Welf IV und der Südosten des Reiches.” In Welf IV: Schlüsselfigur Einer Wendezeit: Regionale Und Europäische Perspektiven, edited by Dieter R. Bauer, 226–60. München: Beck, 2004. Smith, Lesley and Jane H.M. Taylor, eds. Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Smith, Mary Frances, Robin Fleming, and Patricia Halpin. “Court and Piety in Late Anglo-Saxon England.” The Catholic Historical Review 87.4 (2001): 569–602. Spike, Michèle K. Tuscan Countess: The Life and Extraordinary Times of Matilda of Canossa. New York: Vendome Press, 2004. Stancliffe, Clare and Eric Cambridge, eds. Oswald: Northumbrian King to European Saint. Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995. Stiegemann, Christoph and Matthias Wemhoff, eds. Canossa 1077: Erschütterung der Welt: Geschichte, Kunst und Kultur am Aufgang der Romanik. 2 vols. Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2006. Stroll, Mary. Popes and Antipopes: The Politics of Eleventh Century Church Reform. Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, vol. 159. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
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Index Adam of Bremen, 8 Adela of Blois, 2 Adelbert/Adelberto/Adilbert (finder of Holy Blood relic), 92, 93, 94, 115–16 Adele of France, 5–6, 56, 97 Æthelred (King of England), 7 Æthelwine/Ægelwine (Bishop of Durham), 14, 17, 107 Agnes (Holy Roman Empress), 42, 74, 76–7, 78, 96–7 Aliprandi, Bonamente, 93–4 Altmann of Passau (Bishop), 79 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 4, 6–7, 14, 20, 31, 50, 56, 57, 58, 73 Arnulf III, 74, 75–6 Asam, Damian, 83 Baldwin IV (Count of Flanders), 5, 10n14, 10n17 Baldwin V (Count of Flanders), 5, 8–9, 20, 55, 56, 73–4, 83 and the Holy Blood relic, 92, 94–8 Baldwin VI, 74, 75, 97 Barber, Richard W., 99 Barlow, Frank, 8 Basilica of St. Peter’s, 21 Battle of Fulford, 68n44 Battle of Stamford Bridge, 13, 58–9, 64, 68n44 Beatrice (Countess of Tuscany), 78, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97 Beauvais Sacramentary, 60 Bede, 82 Beech, George, 6 Beorn (Godwinson, Earl of Southeast Midlands), 8 Bernold of Constance/Blasien, 99–100, 101 Berthold of Carinthia, 78
Berthold of Reichenau, 97 Berthold Sacramentary, 84, 90n68 Bishop, Alan, 40 Blutritt, 1, 101 Boniface of Tuscany, 92–3, 94, 104n17 and the Holy Blood relic, 97, 98 Book of Kells, 38 Brandon Plaque, 46n59 Breve Chronicon (Nerli), 93–4 Brussels Cross, 39, 40, 41ff (2.1, 2.2, 2.3), 42, 46n59 Carmen De Hastingae Proelio, 59 castellans, 55, 68n38, 73 Christ, depictions of, 16, 23, 29, 38–9, 51–3, 61–3 Chronicle (Bernold of Constance/Blasien), 4, 99–100 Chronicle (Bertold of Reichenau), 4 Chronicle (Hermann of Reichenau), 92 Chronicle (John of Worcester), 31, 49–50, 56, 57 Chronicle (Sigebert of Gembloux), 95 Chuniza (mother of Welf IV), 75, 118, 121n20 clerical reform, 78–9, 87n36. See also Investiture Controversy Cluny altar. See porphyry altar Cnut (King of England), 7, 40, 42, 51, 62, 66n16 in New Minster portrait, 51 Codex Caesareus Upsaliensis, 61 Conrad (Holy Roman Emperor), 39, 53 Constantine (Holy Roman Emperor), 62 Cowdrey, H.E.J., 77 Crisis of 1051, 8 Cronaca di Mantova (Aliprand), 93–4 crucifixes, 16, 51, 101 Cuthbert (Saint), 14–16
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De Inventione Sanguinis Christi, 91–2, 99, 100, 115–17 De Translatione Sanguinis Christi, 91–2, 94, 95–8, 99, 100, 117–18 Decker-Hauff, Hansmartin, 6 Defries, David, 83 Dell’historia ecclesiastica di Mantova (Donesmondi), 93–4 Dodwell, C.R., 40, 52, 53 Donesmondi, Ippolito, 93–4 Drogo of Saint-Winnoc, 83 Durham Cathedral, 14–16, 79 Ea Tempestate, 75–6, 81, 82, 91–2, 98–9, 118–19 Eads, Valerie, 79 Ealdred (Bishop of Worcester/Archbishop of York) 20–22 Eberhard, John, 82, 83 Ecclesiastical History (Orderic Vitalis), 4, 57 ecclesiastical vestments, 98 Edgar (King of England), 52 Edgar the Ætheling, 29 Edith (wife of Edward the Confessor), 7, 52, 55 Edith of Wilton (Saint), 52 Edith Swan-Neck, 13 Edward the Confessor (King of England), 7–8, 55, 95 Edwin (Earl of Mercia), 57, 58 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 2 Eleanor of Normandy (mother of Judith), 5, 10n17 Emma of Normandy, 7, 40, 42, 51, 62, 65n11, 66nn15–16 New Minster portrait of, 51 encomia, 4, 8 Encomium Emmae Reginae, 51, 62 English books commissioned by Judith of Flanders, 1, 4, 102 architectural frames, 33 backgrounds, 63 books, depiction of, 54 border styles, 34–5 botanical motifs, 35 corrections to zoo-anthropomorphs, 36–7 dating and origin/provenance, 31–3
the Evangelists and their symbols, 33–8 frontispiece portraits, 50–54 lettering in, 34, 60 murex dye, 61 scribe and artist detail, 30t, 30–31 uncorrected errors in, 36–7 Winchester frames, 33, 35, 45n36 zoo-anthropomorphs compared to other similar works, 38–40 See also Evangelist symbols; Fulda MS Aa.21; Monte Cassino 437; Morgan M.708; Morgan M.709; zoo-anthropomorphs Ethelinde, 74 Eustace II of Boulogne (Count), 8, 55 Evangeliaries. See Gospel books Evangelist symbols, 35–42, 53, 77. See also zoo-anthropomorphs fashion dress styles, 53–4, 61–2, 67n34 headgear, 63 jewelry, 54 See also silk; textiles Flanders, 5–7 cult of St. Oswald in, 83 English Gospel book finished in, 63 Gospel book from, 82 Judith’s stay in, 49–50, 54–6, 59, 63, 81, 96 relationship with empire, 74, 86n8 Fleming, Robin, 7, 14, 16 Fulda MS Aa.21, 29–31, 33, 34, 50, 59–63, 81–2, 88n48, 98, 99, 113n1, 121n16 Gabriel (archangel), 24 Gathagan, Laura, 6 Gebhard III of Constance (Bishop), 100 Gerard (Count of Galeria), 22 Gesta Pontificum (William of Malmesbury), 20, 22 Gilsdorf, Sean, 4 Gisela (Holy Roman Empress), 39, 53–4 Glunz, H.H., 40 Goda (sister of Edward the Confessor), 29, 64 Godfrey of Lotharingia, 97
Index Godfrey the Bearded (Duke of Lorraine), 73–4, 78, 80, 95 Godwin (Earl of Wessex), 7–8 Godwinson, Beorn (Earl of Southeast Midlands), 8 Godwinson, Gyrth, 20 Godwinson, Harold. See Harold (Godwinson, King of England) Godwinson, Swein (Earl of Southwest Midlands), 8 Godwinson, Tostig. See Tostig (Godwinson, Earl of Northumbria) Goldy, Charlotte Newman, 2 Goscelin, 16–17, 52 Gospel books Barberini Gospels, 38 Echternach Golden Gospels, 60–61 Flemish Gospel, Stuttgart, Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek, H.B. II.46, 82 Goslar Gospel book, 38, 61, 77, 97 Maeseyck Gospels, 38 Margaret of Scotland’s Gospel book, 29, 64 Rottenbuch Gospel, 84 Speyer Evangeliary, 38–9, 53, 61, 62, 77, 97 Trinity Gospels, 39–40, 49 See also English books Gregory VII (Pope and Saint), 76–9 cult of, 99 Gunnhild (daughter of Emma and Cnut), 7, 64 Gyrth (Godwinson), 20 Gytha (mother-in-law of Judith), 64, 73 hagiography, 4–5, 8, 14, 82 unreliability of, 4, 18 Hainricus Sacramentary, 84 Halpin, Patricia, 14, 16 Harald of Norway, 57–9, 69n49 Harold (Godwinson, King of England), 8, 13, 55, 58–9, 64n3 Harthacanute, 7 Hartmann II (Count), 112, 114n18 Hayward, Paul Anthony, 17–19 Heinlen, Michael, 99 Henry III (Holy Roman Emperor), 7, 42, 61, 73–4, 77
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and the Holy Blood relic, 92–3, 94–6, 97, 98, 104n17 Henry IV (Holy Roman Emperor), 73–4, 76–7, 78, 96 Henry the Black (son of Welf and Judith), 80, 102, 119, 121n23 Hermann of Reichenau (Hermann the Lame), 92, 95 Hermann of Salm (Count; anti-King), 79, 80 Heslop, T.A., 40 Hildegard of Bingen, 2 Historia Ecclesiastica (Bede), 82 Holy Blood, cult of, 99 Holy Blood relic, 73, 81, 82, 83 continuing importance of, 101 discovery of, 92 discrepancies among sources, 94–101 given to Judith by Baldwin, 96–7 given to Weingarten by Judith, 1, 73, 82–3, 85, 91, 98–102, 118–19 spiritual and political value of, 91–3 texts related to, 115–19 Huneycutt, Lois, 2, 5 Imiza/Irmintrude (grandmother of Welf IV), 75, 121n20 infant mortality, 13, 25n5 Insular art, 38, 60 Investiture Controversy, 2, 76, 84, 86n8 Jeanne (Countess of Flanders), 4 John of Worcester, 31, 49–50, 54, 56–7, 63 John the Evangelist (Saint), 16, 29, 31, 34–5, 37–40, 52–3 Johnson, Eugene, 93 Jordan, Erin, 4, 5 Jordan, Karl, 80 Judith Gospels. See English books Judith of Flanders children by Tostig, 1, 13–14, 24n1, 56, 59, 73, 102 children by Welf, 1, 102 commissioning of Gospel books, 1, 4, 29–43 death of, 99–100, 101 death of her maid, 15–16 departure from England, 31 as Duchess of Bavaria, 76
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education of, 6 exile in Flanders, 8, 54–64 family tree, 2, 3f identification with the Virgin Mary, 52–4 as lady of Northumbria, 13–24 as Lady of Ravensburg, 75–85 marriage to Tostig, 7–8 marriage to Welf IV, 74, 119 before Northumbria; early life and family history, 5–9 pilgrimage to Rome, 14, 20–23 portraits of, 4, 51–4, 60–63 references to in Vita Oswini, 107–8 sources of information about, 4–5 successes and challenges of, 102 See also Judith’s patronage Judith’s patronage, 1–2, 4, 9 alleged gifts to Tynemouth, 17–19 commissioning of books and treasure objects, 56, 84–5 ecclesiastical vestments bequeathed to Weingarten, 81, 88nn49–52, 98, 112, 114nn14–15 English books 29–43, 64 gift of crucifixion sculptures to Durham Cathedral, 14–16 gift of Holy Blood relic to Weingarten Abbey, 1, 73, 82–3, 85, 91, 98–102, 118–19 gift of Monte Cassino book to Agnes, 77, 97 gift of Oswald reliquary to Weingarten, 83–4 gifts and bequeathals to Weingarten, 1, 76, 80–82, 85, 98, 102, 111–12 porphyry altar, 23–4, 50 political and social overtones of, 77, 85 reputation of, 101–2 See also English books Karkov, Catherine, 51 Ketel (son of Tostig), 13 Kruse, Norbert, 91, 100, 120n3 La Trinité at Caen, 56 Lapidge, Michael, 24 Latin verse form, 24 Leo IX (Pope), 92–3, 94, 97, 98, 104n17
Libellus de Exordio (Symeon of Durham), 14, 16, 17 Liber Vitae (Durham), 49 Life of King Edward Who Rests at Westminster, 5 Life of St. Margaret, 5 Lindkvist, Harald, 31 Livingston, Amy, 2 Longinus, 98 LoPrete, Kimberly, 2 Luke (Saint), 31, 34–6 Lynn, C.J., 23 Malcolm (King of Scotland), 29, 57 Mane, Perrine, 62 Mantovano, Rinaldo, 93 Mantua, Italy, 92–3 Margaret of Scotland (Queen and Saint), 16–17 Gospel book of, 29, 64 Marguerite (Countess of Hainaut), 4 Mark (Saint), 31, 34–6 Mary, mother of Christ. See Virgin Mary Mary Magdalene, 52 Mason, Emma, 13 Matilda (wife of Rudolf of Swabia), 77, 80 Matilda of Flanders (Duchess of Normandy; Queen of England), 6, 22–3, 56, 97, 102 Matilda of Scotland, 2, 5, 6 Matilda of Tuscany (Judith’s daughter-inlaw), 67n33, 80 Matthew (Saint), 34–5, 60 McGurk, Patrick, 30, 31, 32, 33–5, 40, 42, 52, 59 McNamara, Jo Ann, 79 Messen Abbey (Flanders), 56 Mois, Jakob, 84 monastic reform, 79, 87n36 Monte Cassino 437, 19, 29–30, 33–40, 42, 45nn49–50, 46n59, 53, 77, 86n19, 97 frames, 35 Moore, W.J., 21 Morcar (Earl of Northumbria), 57, 58 Morgan M.708, 29–30, 33–5, 37–8, 42, 43n5, 45n38, 63, 82 Morgan M.709, 29–30, 33–8, 42, 43n5, 50, 52, 53, 54, 60–63, 70n75, 82
Index Musée de Cluny (Paris), 23 Muthesius, Anna, 53, 61 Necrologium Weingartense, 98, 99 Nerli, Antonio, 92, 93–4 Nicholas (Pope), 20, 21 Nicholas, David, 5 Nip, Renée, 55 Norman Conquest, 2, 8, 9, 58, 64, 96 Northern Rebellion, 31, 43, 49–50, 54, 56, 64 Norway, Tostig’s alliance with, 57 O’Reilly, Jennifer, 23, 52 Ohlgren, Thomas H., 40 Orderic Vitalis, 57, 58 Ortenberg, Veronica, 20–21 Osgod Clapa, 7 Oswald (Saint), 17–19, 50, 82–4, 107–9, 118–19 cult of, 17, 83–4 shrine and relics of, 50, 82–3, 118–19 Otgiva (first wife of Baldwin IV), 5–6, 10n14 Otto II (Holy Roman Emperor), 62 Otto of Northeim, 74–5, 76, 77 Owen-Crocker, Gale, 53 patronage of medieval women, 4, 71n81 power of, 2 See also Judith’s patronage Penda of Mercia, 82 Piponnier, Françoise, 62 porphyry altar, 23–4, 50 Raphael (archangel), 24 Ravensburg, 75, 79, 80, 81, 83–5, 99, 113n9 Raw, Barbara, 33, 54 reliquaries, 23, 24, 40, 41, 42, 83–4, 94, 95, 101, 115, 116. See also Brussels Cross Richard II (Duke of Normandy), 5–6, 10n14 Robert the Frisian, 74, 76, 97 Robinson, I.S., 96, 99 Rosaldo, Michelle, 5
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Rosenthal, Jane, 30, 31, 32, 33–5, 40, 42, 52, 53, 54, 59 Rottenbuch Abbey, 84 Rudolf of Swabia, 76–7, 78, 79 S. Andrea (St. Andrew) church, Mantua, 92–3 St. Blasien, 99 St. Cuthbert’s shrine, 14, 79 St. Olave’s church, 31 St. Omer, 55–7, 59, 68n38, 73 St. Peter’s (Rome), 21 Saxon Wars, 76, 84, 85 Schulenburg, Jane Tibbetts, 52 Sigebert of Gembloux, 73, 96 silk as luxury fabric, 53–4, 60–61 sewn into manuscripts, 70n75 used to protect relics, 61 See also textiles Siward (Earl of Northumbria), 31 Skuli (son of Tostig), 13, 25n3 Smith, Mary Frances, 14, 16 Speyer Cathedral, 28–9 Stockholm Codex Aureus, 60, 70n63 Svoboda, R.A., 60 Swein (Godwinson, Earl of Southwest Midlands), 7, 8 Symeon of Durham, 14, 56 textiles depiction of, 53–4, 60–63 ecclesiastical. See ecclesiastical vestments See also silk Theophano (Holy Roman Empress), 62 Tostig (Godwinson, Earl of Northumbria), 1, 7–8, 9, 13 alliance with Harald of Norway, 57–9 assaulted in Rome, 22 as castellan of St. Omer, 55–6 death of, 58–9, 96, 121n15 difficulties in Northumbria, 32 exile in Flanders, 8, 54–64 holdings in Northumbria, 32–3, 44n22 military raids by, 56–7 Tyler, Elizabeth, 6 Uta (Abbess), 62
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The Books and the Life of Judith of Flanders
van Houts, Elisabeth, 6, 56, 96 Veitsburg, 88n44 Verbanaz, Nina, 53 Virgin Mary, 16, 23, 29, 51, 52–3, 54, 61 Vita Ædwardi, 8, 13, 19, 22, 49, 54–5 Vita Edithe (Goscelin), 52 Vita Laurentii (Goscelin), 16–17, 26n22 Vita Oswini, 5, 17–19, 56, 101, 107–9 Vita Wulfstani (William of Malmesbury), 20, 21 Vitae Sanctorum, 91, 99, 120 Voelkel, William M., 66n18, 67n31 Wagner, Stephen, 60 Weinfurter, Stefan, 79 Weingarten Abbey, 56, 73, 79, 80–81 ecclesiastical vestments bequeathed by Welf and Judith, 81, 88nn49–52, 98, 112, 114nn14–15 gift of Oswald reliquary, 83–4 gifts and bequeathals from Welf and Judith, 1, 76, 80–82, 85, 98, 102, 111–12 Holy Blood relic given by Judith, 1, 73, 82–3, 85, 91, 98–102, 118–19 Welfs interred at, 84 Welf III, will contested, 38 Welf IV, 1, 74 as duke of Bavaria, 74–8 family tree, 75f as founder of Rottenbuch Abbey, 84
grants and stipulations to Weingarten, 111–12 and the Holy Blood relic, 92 political machinations of, 78–80 reinstated as duke, 80 Welf V “the Fat” (son of Welf IV and Judith), 80, 102, 119 Welfenfest, 1, 101 Westminster Abbey, 21, 40, 42 William of Hirsau (Abbot), 79 William of Malmesbury, 20, 22, 50, 57–8 William of Normandy, 7, 57 Wilton Abbey, 21, 52, 66n19 women in the Middle Ages, 2, 4 connections of, 77 denied access to sacred spaces, 15–17, 79 literacy among, 71n81, 87n36 patronage of, 4, 71n81 See also fashion; Judith’s patronage Wurtzburg Chronicle, 95 Zoe (Holy Roman Empress), 62 zoo-anthropomorphs agnus dei, 40 beasts, 61 calf, 36, 39, 40 eagle, 35, 37–8, 39, 40 holy dove, 37 lions, 35, 36, 39, 40 ox, 35